CS A5: thoughts New Materialism(s) – Critical Posthumanism Network

One of things I have not touched on at all in the essay is New Materialism. Barad’s work comes under that heading and it seems remiss not to mention it. I’ve avoided it though as the topic I’ve covered is so vast, and my initial iterations were so rambling, I felt it was adding yet another idea into the mix which would be confusing/diluting. Since the essay is more streamlined now (I think) perhaps this is something I can address but I wonder if it would be better to add it to the appendix. As I said, I think I need to severely cut Appendix no. i anyway, maybe altogether – but perhaps I can add it there.

Then, if I do that, should I add a brief criticism of New Materialism? Zizek has stuff to say (but he sniffs a lot and thought Trump would be better than Clinton so I’ve less time for him lately …)

Things to consider..

New Materialism(s) – Critical Posthumanism Network
— Read on criticalposthumanism.net/new-materialisms/

CS: Notes on what ‘Performativity’ means in new materialism terms

From – https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/p/performativity.html

  • re Derrida and Austin’s Theory of Speech Acts, Judith Bulter develops the idea of sexuality and gender as performative
  • “Butler has put it herself: “This very concept of sex-as-matter, sex-as-instrument-of-cultural-signification […] is a discursive formation […]” (ibid., p. 50).”
  • “Haraway’s notion of the material-semiotic that thinks the material, bodily fleshiness and the discursive-linguistic together, and thus breaks through the long-standing nature/culture divide (see e.g. Haraway, 1988 and 1997) – critical re-readings and re-engagements with Butler’s notion of (gender) performativity slowly but surely came into being”
  • “For Barad, performativity is not only linked to the coming into being of the human subject and the (gendered) materialization of bodies, and the socio-political interpellation process that goes along with it (i.e. Butler’s more recent understanding of performativity as articulated in Bodies), but is about the processes of the materialization of “all bodies” and the “material-discursive practices” that engender differences between for example human and non-human bodies (Barad 2003, 810).”
  • Matter is not a passive actor – (i.e. body/camera, body/phone – see Charlotte Prodger, phone shot on phone)
  • Barad “moves away from an individualistic atomistic metaphysics, the modern Cartesian mind/body split, our strong cultural belief in representationalism, our Western tendency to thingify or basically objectify, and a mere discursive-linguistic concept of performativity”
  • “but bodies themselves “come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity – its performativity” (ibid., p. 824).” So  – intra-activity is performativity in Barad’s theory. Rovelli talks about reality being relational  – “reality is reduced to relation” “We, like waves, and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous…” Events, therefore, are performances, using Barad’s language.  (Rovelli, 115/116)
  • “Reality, according to Barad, is rather “a dynamic process of intra-activity” or “an ongoing open process of mattering through which ‘mattering’ itself acquires meaning and form in the realization of different agential possibilities” (ibid., p. 817).” So – therefore exactly what I have been unraveling and which is explained in the Hoffman book, Systems Theory, Rovelli etc. Barad applies it to the humanities and is interdisciplinary or in her words discursive and diffractive (I think?).
  • “Materiality is no longer “either given or a mere effect of human agency,” but rather “an active factor in processes of materialization” (ibid., p. 827)” See the previous point.

Susan Yi Sencindiver on the Oxford Bibliography website writes: “Important as this [constructivist] ideological vigilance has been for unearthing and denaturalizing power relations, and whose abiding urgency new materialism does not forego, the emphasis on discourse has compromised inquiry by circumscribing it to the self-contained sphere of sociocultural mediation, whereby an anthropocentric purview and nature-culture dualism, which constructivists sought to deconstruct, is inadvertently reinscribed.” (2017)  https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0016.xml

 

BOW & CS Notes/Research: Karen Barad

A phenomenon is a specific intra-action of an ‘object’; and the ‘measuring agencies’; the object and the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them.” (Barad, 2007, p. 128). From Sauzet, 2018 – https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/p/phenomena-agential-realism.html Accessed 21/10/2019

From Deborah Lupton’s Data Selves (2019) I have discovered Karen Barad who is a key figure within new materialist philosophy. Her background in quantum physics makes her significantly important to the ideas behind the work I’ve been developing. There are lots of relevant things going on in this short video but I will do some reading before doing a longer post about some of her ideas. But essentially, for her, everything starts with entanglement and in the following video, she describes how measurement is one aspect of an assemblage (entangled collection of processes) that results in a phenomenon (how does this relate to objecthood?). Things don’t exist independently of each other – they come into being due to their interaction. I feel like there will be much to gain from looking into her theories further and I may need to reword some of my lit review to be more accurate/specific and ascertain that measurement is seen as an emergent process not a fixed external object. Here are some links for now.

Ideas in here relate to DI&C work specifically A2 & A5

A2: Polar Inertia; the depletion of time, the negation of space – Assessment submission

A4/5: Film slightly reworked following feedback

One of the other collaborators from A rumour reached the village posted the following, so I had come across Barad before but her name had not stuck – although I liked the post very much when it first appeared.

All of this also ties in very much with some of the arguments I made in the DI&C essay I wrote in particular referencing Ariella Azoulay’s ideas about reconfiguring logocentric linear history.