| A radically interdisciplinary theory of culture, in which sociology's traditional theorem of intersubjectivity is rejected, and in its place a labyrinthine framework for understanding human bodies as reproductive 'cells' within living cultural spaces. Stone follows Regis Debray in her development of 'mediological' terms and a materialist standpoint for investigating the sociology of culture. However, true to the concerns of feminist philosophy, her 'mediology' is unlikely to sit well with its founder: Stone refuses to overlook what she believes the 'primary' material of meaning production and communication, setting aside questions asked of technological media environments while asserting the fundamental centrality of our human bodies for media studies.;Privileging our physiology in this way, and calling on hard evidence from neuroscience and psychology, Stone introduces a 'mechanics' of cultural reproduction, in which various physiologically lodged 'organs' of the 'cultural hermaphrodite' are stimulated into interpenetrative gestation and delivery by the presence of others in interaction. This process is broken down into four 'constitutions' of self-interest: individuality, interaction, identity and ideology.;Nowhere in this text is there submission to arguments of intersubjectivity. Shared knowledge and practices, and their usual interpretation in terms of transmission of 'contents', are turned upside down with Stone's command for the postmodern condition, an assertion of discursive fields and their utterly democratic unfolding in real time. She evades the whole issue of Cartesian doubt with her feminist rejection of dichotomous thinking, propounding instead a language of tactile fluidity and becoming, true to Irigaray's 'mechanics of fluids'.;Stone concludes with a bold assertion of this theory's place within Marxist discourse, provided that such a discourse upheaves itself of some of its founding androcentric blindspots, and reinterprets its central notion of 'economy' with her new interpenetrative terms. Interpenetration, or interdependence, becomes in this sense the new 'base' material economy determining social relations, enabling cultural politics a theoretical emancipation from its traditionally posited subordination to production. In this way, Stone is able to assert the politically charged nature of the relationship between caregiver and child, and posit its exemplary status for all relations, including those of race and gender. |
