What are the contemporary definitions of materiality and culture and how do they interrelate? This expansive brief is the starting point for this publication, which draws from some of the definitions presented at the Material Worlds Conference, held at the University of Glasgow in 2005.
Following the keynote set by Professor Catherine Belsey, participants debated how it is that the real is negotiated and mediated by cultural practice. Those who contributed to this volume seek to examine how the intangible can be made real through different media and how these influence our experience of the world. Furthermore they also ask what it is about the real that resists cultural transcription. Included in these papers are analyses of attempts to inscribe the soul; the ongoing difficulty of propertizing concepts; and the material, sometimes pornographic, manifestations of capitalism and empire.
By the end of the conference a concern was expressed that even the antinomy between culture and the real was something which had largely been discursively or ideologically determined and demanded a fundamental revision. This is something which Professor Peter Hallward highlights when he seeks to outline the position of the real in modern philosophy.
