Dirty Theory Research Articles

Dirty materialism: what Jennifer knew

New Materialism and the Environmental Humanities challenge assumptions about human exceptionalism by telling environmental stories from diverse points of view. Combining these tendencies in thought and practice is what I call dirty theory. Dirt is both method and subject-matter, and its transdisciplinary effects are to be found in ethnography, geography, media theory, as well as in the architectural humanities. Dirt offers a means of paying attention to mundane worldly relations, including repair, maintenance and making do, and aims to foster an overarching ethics of care. In all the above, from the vantage point of the present, Jennifer Bloomer can be re-read as a precursor to whose work an incomparable novelty might be restored. What Jennifer knew, what she intimated in her work, was both an awareness of the critical implications of textual play and the importance of thinking with admixtures of environmental and socio-political subject-matter. Across her essays, from her dirty drawings to her dirty ditties, and in such installation works as the Tabbles of Bower, dirt is discovered as a creative movement. I argue that the burgeoning interest in (feminist) New Materialism and the Environmental Humanities enables a reengagement in the legacy and after-effects of Bloomer's remarkable body of work.

Ecce Homo Sexual: Ontology and Eros in the Age of Incompleteness and Entanglement

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsJohnny GoldingJohnny Golding is a philosopher and artist. Her research covers the curious intersections of fine art, digital, media and electronic arts as thought through (i) ana-materialism and the new materialisms of space/speed/curved-time and dimensionality, (ii) dirty theory and the erotic logics of sense, (iii) the ‘Enlightenment’ filtered thorough feminism, queer studies and the wild sciences. She is the Director of CFAR and holds the Chair as Research Professor of Philosophy & Fine Art at the School of Art-BIAD (Margaret St). Her recent publications include: The 9th Technology of Otherness: A Certain kind of Debt; Ana-Materialism and the Pineal Eye; Fractal Philosophy and The Small Matter of Learning how to Listen (Attunement as the Task of Art); Conversion on the Road to Damascus: Minority Report on Art; The University Must be Defended; and Assassination of Time (or the birth of zeta-physics). Executive Editor of zētēsis: a peer-reviewed journal for contemporary art, philosophy & the wild sciences (ARTicle Press), it foregrounds research driven by curiosity, experiment, and risk. Email: johnny.golding@bcu.ac.uk

Promiscuous (use of) feminist methodologies: the dirty theory and messy practice of educational research beyond gender

This editor’s introduction narrates how we as researchers trained in qualitative and feminist methodology came to read our own work as promiscuous and interpret the terms “feminist” and “feminism” through both practice and theory. It marks the circulation of the term “promiscuous feminist methodology” and registers its salience for educational researchers who risk blundering feminist theories and methodologies in chaotic and unbridled ways. The use of the phrase “promiscuous feminist” to describe methodology is not merely an attention-seeking oxymoron, though we hope that its irony is not lost. The sexism embedded in language is what makes the notion of “feminists gone wild” tantalizing, though what we put forth is how the messy practice of inquiry transgresses any imposed boundaries or assumptions about what counts as research and feminism. Because the theories we put to work “get dirty” as they are contaminated and re-appropriated by other ways of thinking and doing through (con)texts of messy practices, promiscuous feminist methodologies are always in-the-making and already ahead of what we think they are. Set in motion by anxieties, disappointments, and frustrations of feeling out of place in the academy and in feminism, we examine our personal, academic, and political engagement with these contradictions that became the springboard for this special issue.

Researching Professional Educational Practice: The Case for “Dirty Theory”

In this essay, Ian Hardy argues that a research process involving generalizing from professional educational practice can and should inform the work of educators, including academic researchers, policymakers, and practitioners, but that these generalizations need to be derived from, and in dialogue with, the complexity and specificity of actual practice, the myriad ways such practice might be understood, and a conception of practice as historically informed. In making this case, Hardy draws upon social theorist Raewyn Connell's concept of “dirty theory,” and he uses an example of teacher professional learning in a rural community in southeast Queensland, Australia, to show how Connell's notion of dirty theory might be applied to research professional educational practice. Hardy maintains that such an approach has the benefit of making historically informed, context‐aware, and epistemologically sensitive generalizations available as resources for informing the work of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. He concludes by providing examples of such generalizations as evidence of the potential of Connell's theory.

Reading/Writing Autopsy: A Dirty Theory of the Science of Death

The recent emergence of a sub-genre of television crime drama which centres on the work of forensic pathologists, positions the unruly iconography of the televisual autopsy in the foreground of the cultural imagination. There has been some academic interest in the commercial and televisual success of CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), its sibling shows and their British and Australian counterparts. Conventional readings suggest that these shows bring the science of forensic pathology into popular discourse and through that process reinforce the veracity of science and its ability to narrate, with a degree of moral authority, the ‘truth’ of death. This paper challenges the kind of ideological critique implicit to these analyses, and it does so through the lens of Brian Ott's recent exposition of dirty theory. Dirty theory proposes an approach to cultural analysis rooted in erotics, a perspective which enriches and supplements, rather than replaces or supersedes the hermeneutic and interpretative approaches of art, literary and ideological criticism. From the perspective of dirty theory, the televisual autopsy and related techniques of anatomical inspection provide an occasion for transgressive pleasure which undermines, albeit momentarily, (hegemonic) ideologies of science. The rather banal and nonchalant ways in which television pathologists respond to everything from severed heads to charred bones, raise a number of complex issues concerning the cultural logic of late modernity—a logic which, on the one hand, represents (dead) bodies as indifferent objects available for dispassionate, scientific analysis; and on the other, celebrates the grotesque body and its functionality as Other to perfection, rationality, order and discipline. This tension is routinely played out in the drama of televisual autopsy and the forensic investigations associated with it; a critical reading of the UK television drama series, Waking the Dead, provides, then, an important starting point for thinking about a dirty theory of the science of death.

Towards a dirty theory of narrative ethics: Prolegomenon on media, sport and commodity value

Using sport as a lens to illuminate a path for broader cultural analysis, this essay argues for a three-pronged theoretical approach to the critique of commodity value in contemporary narratives. Three elements of an analytic strategy for the critique of commodity aesthetics are considered. First, the concept of communicative dirt posed by Leach (1976) and Hartley (1984) is considered in the service of creating commodity value from the cultural logic of sport. Second, the merits of a reader-oriented approach as used in literary criticism, reliant on understandings of Fish's (1976) notion of interpretive community and the variant ways that texts work to control reading, are considered as complementary to understanding the workings of communicative dirt. Third, the value of ethical criticism in providing an overarching frame for deconstructing the manufacture of commodity value, including strategies for using communicative dirt to construct readers and control the reading act, is assessed. A case study of a television commercial banned from the 2005 Super Bowl broadcast illustrates the tripartite approach. In conclusion, the study argues for the applicability of this dirty theory of narrative ethics to postmodern concerns with media in increasingly commodified contemporary culture.

Television as Lover, Part I: Writing Dirty Theory

Treating television as a semiotic system, this article charts the various pleasure/meaning/identity configurations that are possible when audiences engage televisual texts. Reflecting on the uniquely postmodern character of television as a communication medium, it is argued that traditional hermeneutic and interpretive approaches to television such as artistic or ideological criticism should be accompanied by alternative approaches rooted in erotics. Developing the simile “television as lover,” the article theorizes a transgressive pleasure of television viewing that undermines hegemonic ideology by transforming viewers from patrons into producers. The concluding section explores how such a practice necessitates fundamentally shifting the aim of criticism from critical explication to critical pedagogy. A follow-up article models this approach to television by undertaking a sustained auto(erotic)ethnography.

New Feminist Approaches to Social Science Methodologies: An Introduction

New Feminist Approaches to Social Science Methodologies: An Introduction

The Male Consumer as Loser: Beer and Liquor Ads in Mega Sports Media Events

The Male Consumer as Loser: Beer and Liquor Ads in Mega Sports Media Events

Barthes's Punctum

Next article No AccessBarthes’s PunctumMichael FriedMichael Fried Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 31, Number 3Spring 2005 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/430984 Views: 1462Total views on this site Citations: 36Citations are reported from Crossref © 2005 by The University of Chicago.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Olivia Barry Tracing the felt image to thought: A somatic turn towards the nature of the creative process in country dance choreography, Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 14, no.22 (Dec 2022): 249–261.https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp_00083_1Andrew Osborne An Esthetic of the Meaningless: The Problem of Knausgaard’s Readability, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 63, no.55 (Dec 2020): 513–522.https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2020.1858749Larita Engelbrecht The Attempt to Be Here Now: “Storying” Time through a Virtual Audiovisual Archive, de arte 57, no.22 (Jan 2023): 4–32.https://doi.org/10.1080/00043389.2022.2145762Kristiina Eskelinen, Ulla-Maija Salo Writing and theorising with photographs taken by children, Ethnography and Education 17, no.22 (Feb 2022): 142–159.https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2022.2039258Dor Fadlon Deleuze and the Traumatic Temporalities of Digital 3-D Cinema, (Dec 2022): 149–174.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12821-9_8Natalie Farrell Sounding the “Spirit of My Silence”, Journal of Popular Music Studies 33, no.33 (Sep 2021): 104–124.https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2021.33.3.104Fatmir Haskaj (Community) garden in the city: Conspicuous labor and gentrification, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 53, no.55 (Dec 2020): 1051–1075.https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X20977872Geoffrey Alan Rhodes Waiting for the Augmented Reality ‘Killer App’: Pokémon GO 2016, (May 2019): 3–14.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15616-9_1George F. (Guy) McHendry Instagrams that wound: Punctum , visual enthymemes, and the visual argumentation of the Transportation Security Administration, Argumentation and Advocacy 53, no.44 (Sep 2017): 310–326.https://doi.org/10.1080/00028533.2017.1375758Daniel Rubinstein Failure to Engage: Art Criticism in the Age of Simulacrum, Journal of Visual Culture 16, no.11 (Apr 2017): 43–55.https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412917690970Ágnes Harasztos Photographic origins of postmemory in Tibor Fischer’s Under the Frog, Neohelicon 43, no.11 (Mar 2016): 181–200.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-016-0323-3Garnet C Butchart The communicology of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida : reflections on the sign–body experience of visual communication, Visual Communication 15, no.22 (May 2016): 199–219.https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357215624308Michael Meneghetti Anamnesis in acts: documentary performance as intercession in Italianamerican and American Boy, Studies in Documentary Film 9, no.33 (Nov 2015): 201–219.https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2015.1104139Kim Soo Hwan Photogénie as “the Other” of the semiotics of cinema: On Yuri Lotman’s concept of “the mythological”, Semiotica 2015, no.207207 (Jan 2015).https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2015-0050Jesse Hoffman ARTHUR HALLAM’S SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPH AND TENNYSON’S ELEGIAC TRACE, Victorian Literature and Culture 42, no.44 (Sep 2014): 611–636.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150314000229Maya Barzilai Reading Camera Lucida in Gaza: Ronit Matalon's Photographic Travels, Comparative Literature 65, no.22 (Jun 2013): 200–219.https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-2143172Eric S. Jenkins Another Punctum: Animation, Affect, and Ideology Eric S. Jenkins, Critical Inquiry 39, no.33 (Jul 2015): 575–591.https://doi.org/10.1086/670046Rachel Holmes, Liz Jones Limitless provocations of the ‘safe’, ‘secure’ and ‘healthy’ child, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26, no.11 (Jan 2013): 75–99.https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2011.605083Elaine Campbell Landscapes of Performance: Stalking as Choreography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30, no.33 (Jan 2012): 400–417.https://doi.org/10.1068/d13510By Adélékè Adéè̇ó From Orality to Visuality: Panegyric and Photography in Contemporary Lagos, Nigeria Adélékè Adéè̇ó, Critical Inquiry 38, no.22 (Jul 2015): 330–361.https://doi.org/10.1086/662745Elaine Campbell Reading/Writing Autopsy: A Dirty Theory of the Science of Death, Science as Culture 18, no.33 (Sep 2009): 313–331.https://doi.org/10.1080/09505430903122810Karen Beckman Nothing to Say: The War on Terror and the Mad Photography of Roland Barthes, Grey Room 34 (Jan 2009): 104–134.https://doi.org/10.1162/grey.2009.1.34.104 From Nomos to Nomad, (Jan 2009): 21–44.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-001 The Piazza, the Edicola , and the Noise of the Utterance, (Jan 2009): 45–73.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-002 Machiavelli’s Theory of Sensation and Florence’s Vita Festiva, (Jan 2009): 74–95.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-003 The Viewing Subject, (Jan 2009): 96–122.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-004 “You’re Eating Too Fast!”, (Jan 2009): 123–148.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-005 “The Photographs Tell It All”, (Jan 2009): 149–154.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-006 Notes, (Jan 2009): 155–187.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-007 Bibliography, (Jan 2009): 189–200.https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822390817-008Jan Baetens Sémiotique et photographie: 1961-2006, Recherches sémiotiques 28, no.1-21-2 (Oct 2010): 15–27.https://doi.org/10.7202/044585arMartin Donougho Must it Be Abstract? Hegel, Pippin, and Clark, Hegel Bulletin 28, no.1-21-2 (Jun 2015): 87–106.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263523200000653Joanna Lowry Putting painting in the picture (photographically), Journal of Visual Art Practice 5, no.33 (Nov 2006): 215–227.https://doi.org/10.1386/jvap.5.3.215_1Torbjörn Gustafsson Chorell F. R. Ankersmit and the historical sublime, History of the Human Sciences 19, no.44 (Jul 2016): 91–102.https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695106072868Petra Rau Beyond punctum and studium, Journal of European Studies 36, no.33 (Jul 2016): 295–325.https://doi.org/10.1177/0047244106067482George Baker Photography's Expanded Field, October 114 (Oct 2005): 120–140.https://doi.org/10.1162/016228705774889574