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Magic Science Religion
Series: - Experimental Practices, Volume: 2
Author:
Magic Science Religion explores surprising intersections among the three meaning-making and world-making practices named in the title. Through colorful examples, the book reveals circuitous ways that social, cultural and natural systems connect, enabling real kinds of magic to operate. Among the many case studies are accounts of how an eighteenth-century actor gave his audience goosebumps; how painters, poets, and pool sharks use nonlinearity in working their magics; how the first vertebrates gained consciousness; how plants fine-tuned human color vision; and the necessarily magical element of activism that builds on the conviction that "another future is possible" while working to push self-fulfilling prophecy into political action.
Ira Livingston teaches and directs Poetics Lab at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. His many books - such as the 2015 digital book Poetics as a Theory of Everything (available free online) - cultivate hybrids of cultural studies and systems theory.
Acknowledgments.
About this Book
1 Introduction
1 All or Nothing?
2 Kindness
ASIDE: The Two-Million-Dollar Comma
ASIDE: Sufficiently Magical Technologies
ASIDE: Our Gods
3 Cruelty
ASIDE: Ghostly Causality
ASIDE: Durable Cruelties
4 Beginning, Again
ASIDE: Chaos Invoked
5 The Freedom Not to Choose
ASIDE: No Atheists in Foxholes
ASIDE: Blake on Firm Perswasion
ASIDE: Metafictional Magic: The Writer’s Will
ASIDE: Shapely Sentences
ASIDE: Beckett Meets Twilight Zone, Glass-Half-Full Version
2 Complex Systems in a Nutshell
1 Horror Movie Reboot
2 Interpositivity
ASIDE: Interpositivity
3 Becoming a System
4 Creatures of Light
ASIDE: Transformative for Whom?
ASIDE: Plant Sorcery
5 Tornados, Whirlpools, and Fires
ASIDE: iii
ASIDE: Co-evolution
6 Leveled
ASIDE: On being born too early and dying too late
ASIDE: Up Around the Bend
7 A Personifying Universe of Stretchy Things
8 Dynamism
ASIDE: One Plus One Equals Infinity
9 Magic, but No Black Boxes
ASIDE: The T-Shirt Version
10 Wildness
ASIDE: Pet Resemblance via Social Theory
3 Magic by Example
1 Failed Magic: Modernist Heaven (and Hell)
2 Placebo Magic
ASIDE: Pregnancy via Magic
ASIDE: Following the Scent
3 Mirror Magic
4 Biting Game
5 Dog Whisperer
6 Conclusion
4 Future Perfect
1 The Gettysburg Address as a Magical Speech Act
2 Pool, Poetry, Prose, and Painting
ASIDE: Dr. Livingston’s Magical Bank-Shot Visualizer
3 Meteors, Messiahs, and Migraines
ASIDE: On This Rock I Build My Church
ASIDE: Falling Off a Log
4 Magical Militarism
5 Four Asides
ASIDE: Dr. Livingston’s Time Travel 101
ASIDE: A Somewhat Rationalizing Account of Mystical Nonviolence
ASIDE: A Somewhat Mysticizing Account of Rationalist Nonviolence
ASIDE: Four Scholars
5 What is Religion?
1 A Fuzzy Set
2 Magic, Science, and Religion Coevolve
3 Restoring the Chaos
4 Rain Dance
ASIDE: From Flow
5 Providence, via Vico
ASIDE: Systematizers Systematized
6 God 3.5B (A Nearsighted Evolutionary Panorama)
1 Salience to Sentience
2 Primordial Systemhood Membership Narratives
ASIDE: Law and Order
3 The Myth of the Acquisition-of-Consciousness Moment
4 Use of the Terms I and We
5 Cis-Systems → Trans-Systems
6 First Caveat: Characters
7 Plant and Animal Intelligence
8 Learning and Evolution from a Systems Perspective
9 Second Caveat: Plot
10 Especially Informative Postinfundibular Amphioxus Hypothalamus Neuropile
11 The Holy Grail
ASIDE: Neuro-X
12 Teamlikeness
ASIDE: Play and Teamlikeness
ASIDE: Three-Ring Circuits
13 Conclusion
7 Blake Magic
1 Famous in Heaven
ASIDE: No Success Like Failure
2 Blake Magic
3 Auguries
ASIDE: Prophecies
4 Angel Kings
5 Magic in the Current Conjuncture
6 Five Asides
ASIDE: Black Lives Matter and Judith Butler
ASIDE: An Elegant Pose
ASIDE: Ritual Retraction
ASIDE: Obscurity
ASIDE: Butterfly Tornado
References
Index
About this Book
1 Introduction
1 All or Nothing?
2 Kindness
ASIDE: The Two-Million-Dollar Comma
ASIDE: Sufficiently Magical Technologies
ASIDE: Our Gods
3 Cruelty
ASIDE: Ghostly Causality
ASIDE: Durable Cruelties
4 Beginning, Again
ASIDE: Chaos Invoked
5 The Freedom Not to Choose
ASIDE: No Atheists in Foxholes
ASIDE: Blake on Firm Perswasion
ASIDE: Metafictional Magic: The Writer’s Will
ASIDE: Shapely Sentences
ASIDE: Beckett Meets Twilight Zone, Glass-Half-Full Version
2 Complex Systems in a Nutshell
1 Horror Movie Reboot
2 Interpositivity
ASIDE: Interpositivity
3 Becoming a System
4 Creatures of Light
ASIDE: Transformative for Whom?
ASIDE: Plant Sorcery
5 Tornados, Whirlpools, and Fires
ASIDE: iii
ASIDE: Co-evolution
6 Leveled
ASIDE: On being born too early and dying too late
ASIDE: Up Around the Bend
7 A Personifying Universe of Stretchy Things
8 Dynamism
ASIDE: One Plus One Equals Infinity
9 Magic, but No Black Boxes
ASIDE: The T-Shirt Version
10 Wildness
ASIDE: Pet Resemblance via Social Theory
3 Magic by Example
1 Failed Magic: Modernist Heaven (and Hell)
2 Placebo Magic
ASIDE: Pregnancy via Magic
ASIDE: Following the Scent
3 Mirror Magic
4 Biting Game
5 Dog Whisperer
6 Conclusion
4 Future Perfect
1 The Gettysburg Address as a Magical Speech Act
2 Pool, Poetry, Prose, and Painting
ASIDE: Dr. Livingston’s Magical Bank-Shot Visualizer
3 Meteors, Messiahs, and Migraines
ASIDE: On This Rock I Build My Church
ASIDE: Falling Off a Log
4 Magical Militarism
5 Four Asides
ASIDE: Dr. Livingston’s Time Travel 101
ASIDE: A Somewhat Rationalizing Account of Mystical Nonviolence
ASIDE: A Somewhat Mysticizing Account of Rationalist Nonviolence
ASIDE: Four Scholars
5 What is Religion?
1 A Fuzzy Set
2 Magic, Science, and Religion Coevolve
3 Restoring the Chaos
4 Rain Dance
ASIDE: From Flow
5 Providence, via Vico
ASIDE: Systematizers Systematized
6 God 3.5B (A Nearsighted Evolutionary Panorama)
1 Salience to Sentience
2 Primordial Systemhood Membership Narratives
ASIDE: Law and Order
3 The Myth of the Acquisition-of-Consciousness Moment
4 Use of the Terms I and We
5 Cis-Systems → Trans-Systems
6 First Caveat: Characters
7 Plant and Animal Intelligence
8 Learning and Evolution from a Systems Perspective
9 Second Caveat: Plot
10 Especially Informative Postinfundibular Amphioxus Hypothalamus Neuropile
11 The Holy Grail
ASIDE: Neuro-X
12 Teamlikeness
ASIDE: Play and Teamlikeness
ASIDE: Three-Ring Circuits
13 Conclusion
7 Blake Magic
1 Famous in Heaven
ASIDE: No Success Like Failure
2 Blake Magic
3 Auguries
ASIDE: Prophecies
4 Angel Kings
5 Magic in the Current Conjuncture
6 Five Asides
ASIDE: Black Lives Matter and Judith Butler
ASIDE: An Elegant Pose
ASIDE: Ritual Retraction
ASIDE: Obscurity
ASIDE: Butterfly Tornado
References
Index
Likely readers include those interested in the relationships among science, religion and magic (and between science and the humanities); in complexity and systems theory, in science studies, cultural studies, cultural theory, evolutionary theory.