[Book Sip] Review of Mookji ‘Gyoccha’ Issue 2 Theme: ‘Life of Matter’

Some sentences encapsulate the entire content of a book in themselves, while others instantly reach the reader’s heart, creating a point of contact with the book. We excerpt and introduce such meaningful sentences from books. - Editor’s note

The second issue of the review mook ‘Gyoccha’ titled ‘The Life of Matter’ has been published. This issue focuses on the world of non-human actors beyond anthropocentrism and the agency of living, moving matter. Participants include astronomer Shin Gwangbok, philosopher Moon Gyumin, comparative cultural scholar Kim Jieun, religious studies scholar An Yeonhee, and philosopher Jo Taegu.

The author believes that the success of science is not about obtaining exclusive truth, but about obtaining ‘many truths.’ Here, the phrase ‘obtain many truths’ is a demand to obtain truths from as many realities as possible, but I also think it means obtaining as many truths as possible even from a single reality. It becomes clear that the latter is definitely the author’s demand in the passage comparing us to people touching an elephant in an invisible situation. The author mentions this analogy and says, “We must learn not to overgeneralize our own particular experiences, and also try to gather more collaborators to reach the various parts of the elephant” (p. 532). […] Therefore, the author’s active realism concludes that pluralism must be advocated to be practiced.

p. 40 · Shin Gwangbok, “Matter, Consensus, Pluralism, and Realism”

Material vitality is a force that “disperses or blocks human will and design,” and thus exists independently of humans. This independence is confirmed again in that vitality acts as a quasi-actor or force “with its own trajectory, disposition, and tendency.” Ultimately, material vitality can be said to be a force, ability, and capacity inherently real within matter. The action of matter is also the agency of matter, and material vitality is the capacity to act, that is, agency. If there is matter that acts and performs agency, then material vitality exists.

p. 51 · Moon Gyumin, “The Ecology of Material Agency: The Pulsation of Mul物”

Reconsidering the female ‘body’ made of blood, flesh, and countless nerve cells as living matter and an organism, retracing the traces of the body, imagining the image of the body in a different way than now, and further advancing alternative explanations of the body is a painstaking task, but it is essential to create subtle yet effective cracks in the male-centered power system and the knowledge system woven accordingly. This arduous work, initiated by Gross in the 1980s and blossomed in the 1990s, remains valid even about 30 years later today.

p. 81 · Kim Jieun, “Reimagining the ‘Body’ Again, but Differently”

The typewriter not only de-sanctifies writing but also de-personalizes it by replacing the unique individuality of handwriting with standardized mechanical type. The typewriter thus erases individual uniqueness into anonymity and turns sentences into combinations of separate individual letters on a material level. These characteristics differ from the era of handwriting, which was considered to express holistic thought originating from the soul, and accordingly, Kittler moves toward emphasizing the homology that both the typewriter and the brain are control systems of mechanical devices with neurophysiological functions. […] Kittler goes further than Nietzsche’s statement that “our writing tools work along with our thinking” (p. 373) by arguing that “information technology can no longer be reduced to humans […] now information technology itself creates humans” (p. 375).

pp. 152-153 · Shim Hyowon, “History of 20th Century Media / History of 21st Century Media Studies”

The Life of Matter | Shin Gwangbok et al. | ITTA | 296 pages | 20,000 KRW

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