The Head, the Hand, and Matter: New Materialism and the Politics of Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 49-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Rekret
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Do So

This article seeks to examine the political connotations of a recent ‘material turn’ in social and political theory and its implications for theorizations of political agency. ‘New materialist’ theories are premised upon transcending the limits which social constructivism places upon thought, viewed as a reification of the division of subject and object and so a hubristic anthropocentrism which places human beings at the centre of social existence. Yet new materialist theories have tended to locate the conditions of the separation of mind and world they seek to overcome upon the terrain of epistemic or ethical error. By taking the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett and Karen Barad as exemplary, this article contends that new materialist theories not only fall short of their own materialist pretensions insofar as they do not interrogate the material conditions of the separation of the mental and material, but that the failure to do so has profound repercussions for the success of their accounts of political agency. This essay seeks to offer a counter-narrative to new materialist theories by situating the hierarchy between thought and world as a structural feature of capitalist social relations.

Thinking Religion Through Things

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 365-399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Bräunlein
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

In recent years, the “material turn” has gained prominence in the humanities and social sciences, and it has also stimulated a shift toward a rediscovery of materiality in the scientific study of religion\s. The material turn aims to dissolve conventional dichotomies and, by emphasizing the concept of assemblage, insists that humans and things are fundamentally co-constitutive. This “New Materialism” addresses ontological alterity, and it radically decenters static anthropocentric arrangements and the position of the human subject as such. The insider–outsider distinction, however, as well as the emic–etic categorization, are based on fundamental dichotomies between the researcher and the researched, and between descriptive and analytical understandings of human beings. This article discusses the possibility and significance of a non-anthropocentric approach to religion, and examines to what extent it is analytically helpful to apply the insider–outsider and emic–etic distinctions while pursuing the goal of dissolving hierarchical and binary thinking. It furthermore argues that these issues can be properly answered only with reference to their methodological implications.

New Materialisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Diener
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Theory ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn

Abstract This review considers work in the field of new materialisms, bearing in mind the wide range of approaches that make up the broader ‘material turn’ in critical and cultural theory but focusing in particular on the feminist new materialist conversation that draws on the work of Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Samantha Frost, Rosi Braidotti, and others. It notes the new materialisms’ continued heterogeneity and describes a turn to method in the field, one that enables a vibrant dialogue between applied and theoretical scholarship. The pieces reviewed share an engagement with that trend. They also illustrate two important problems that the field has engaged with in 2019. The first question concerns the new materialisms’ politics of citation, and the need for a decolonial practice that engages with indigenous and non-western thought. The second is the question of a new materialist ontology: how to reconcile the tension between ‘flat’ and differentiated, subject-oriented accounts of agency, significance, and value. The new materialists this review follows seek a middle ground, one that allows them to emphasize the political stakes of human and more-than-human relations. Following the introduction, sections are: 1. New Materialist Practice, Feminist Ends; 2. Indigeneity and the New Materialisms; 3. Sensation in a Material World; 4. A Cartography of the New Materialisms; 5. Reading's Situation; 6. Exclusion and Activist New Materialism; and 7. The Things We Imagine.

scholarly journals A material turn in International Relations: the 4x4, intervention and resistance

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 855-874 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Mac Ginty
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Security Incident ◽  
Human Interface ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Do So

AbstractThis article explores how analysis of material objects offers insights into international intervention and reactions to that intervention. Building on studies that examine the 4x4 as emblematic of intervention, the article argues that the 4x4 can also be seen as an object of resistance and agency. To do so, it uses the case study of 4x4 usage in Darfur and draws on primary data including interviews and a UN security incident database. The article is mindful of the limitations of a ‘material turn’ in the study of International Relations, especially in relation to how it might encourage us to overlook agency and structural power. While finding new materialism arguments largely convincing, the case study encourages a note of caution and proposes the notion of ‘materialism+’, which allows for the further investigation of the human/non-human interface, but is circumspect about tendencies towards neophilia, dematerialism, and posthumanism.

Materialities and Identities

2020 ◽  
pp. 227-243
Author(s):  
Nancy Harding
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Organization Studies ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Made In

Concern with the limitations of discourse-focused theories to understand and explain environmental change, the refugee crisis, the lived effects of increasing inequalities and other undoubtedly material experiences have led to a ‘material turn’ in the social sciences, arts and humanities. This chapter explores the implications of this turn for identities theories in management and organization studies. Identities theorists have drawn on materialities as a discursive resource rather than as agentive actors and this chapter illuminates the value of understanding ‘non-sentient’ actors as active agents in the construction of identities. It focuses on the influential work of the theorist Karen Barad, outlining her theoretical approach and exploring how it has been taken up in management and organization studies. The chapter explores some of the mistakes that can easily be made in applying her ideas, but also the value of grasping her work’s complexities. It shows how the approach could expand upon the findings of two studies, one well-established and one recent, and concludes with a discussion of the relevance of new materialism for understanding organizations in the political, economic, social, and cultural conditions of the current epoch.

Longing for agency: New materialisms’ wrestling with despair

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Bargetz
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Opening Up

In recent years, feelings such as melancholia, paranoia, despair and political depression have been deemed distinctive political moods, also within critical theories. This, the author argues, is the affective landscape for understanding and situating new materialist endeavours. As much as new materialist approaches have been praised and even celebrated lately, they have also provoked highly controversial reactions and evoked questions, such as: Why a new materialism, why at this historical moment? And what is so attractive about this material turn? In this article, the author argues that new materialist approaches seek to oppose the contemporary affective condition of political depression, despair and hopelessness by desiring and mobilizing to achieve a different political future, one that ultimately relates to care and commonality as well as to (new) modes and modalities of political agency. However, while new materialist approaches doubtlessly provide engaged and powerful inventions and interventions within contemporary struggles for agency, the author also demonstrates the risk of depoliticization inherent in this longing for something different, which can ultimately even compromise opening up possibilities for agency. This article, thus, aims to discuss new materialist concerns within the context of contemporary political and theoretical landscapes in order to better decipher the new materialist signals of our times, but also to critically push further the possibilities for political agency within feminist theory, at times even against all odds.

Thinking technology for the Anthropocene: encountering 3D printing through the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Roberts
Keyword(s):  
3D Printing ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Anthropogenic Change ◽  
Technological Processes ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Thinking ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Gilbert Simondon ◽  
Do So

The notion that the Earth has entered a new epoch characterized by the ubiquity of anthropogenic change presents the social sciences with something of a paradox, namely, that the point at which we recognize our species to be a geologic force is also the moment where our assumed metaphysical privilege becomes untenable. Cultural geography continues to navigate this paradox in conceptually innovative ways through its engagements with materialist philosophies, more-than-human thinking and experimental modes of ontological enquiry. Drawing upon the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, this article contributes to these timely debates by articulating the paradox of the Anthropocene in relation to technological processes. Simondon’s philosophy precedes the identification of the Anthropocene epoch by a number of decades, yet his insistence upon situating technology within an immanent field of material processes resonates with contemporary geographical concerns in a number of important ways. More specifically, Simondon’s conceptual vocabulary provides a means of framing our entanglements with technological processes without assuming a metaphysical distinction between human beings and the forces of nature. In this article, I show how Simondon’s concepts of individuation and transduction intersect with this technological problematic through his far-reaching critique of the ‘hylomorphic’ distinction between matter and form. Inspired by Simondon’s original account of the genesis of a clay brick, the article unfolds these conceptual challenges through two contrasting empirical encounters with 3D printing technologies. In doing so, my intention is to lend an affective consistency to Simondon’s problematic, and to do so in a way that captures the kinds of material mutations expressive of a particular technological moment.

‘The Beast within’: Race, Humanity, and Animality

10.1068/d229 ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kay Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Western Model ◽  
Specific Material ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
Sydney Australia

Recent years have seen efforts to critique the dichotomy of ‘nature’ and ‘society’ in Western thought, and to demonstrate their coconstruction under specific material conditions. As yet, however, little work has uncovered the discourses of animality that lie buried within a social field whose ontological status until recently has been securely ‘human’. In this paper, I show how Western concepts of animality have circulated across the nature border and into a politics of social relations. Concepts of savagery and vulgarity can, in particular, be found within racialised representational systems with whose historicity, I will be suggesting, we can make fresh critical engagements. In much recent work on colonial power formations, ‘othering’ practices have been implicitly conceived within a psychoanalytic frame—one in which the white self's ‘interior beasts’ are anxiously displaced onto an externalised other. Whilst not refuting the efficacy of repression I wish to historicise the workings of a peculiar western model of the Human self, ‘split’ into physical ‘animal’ and cultural ‘human’. This is done both through an extended theoretical account, followed by a microstudy of geographies of savagery and civility in Sydney, Australia.

Image in the Making

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Thomson-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Digital Art ◽  
Digital Tools ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Video Installation ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Fundamental Distinction ◽  
Net Art ◽  
Do So

Human beings have always made images, and to do so they have developed and refined an enormous range of artistic tools and materials. With the development of digital technology, the ways of making images—whether they are still or moving, 2D or 3D—have evolved at an unprecedented rate. At every stage of image making, artists now face a choice between using analog and using digital tools. Yet a digital image need not look digital; and likewise, a handmade image or traditional photograph need not look analog. If we do not see the artist’s choice between the analog and the digital, what difference can this choice make for our appreciation of images in the digital age? Image in the Making answers this question by accounting for the fundamental distinction between the analog and the digital; by explicating the technological realization of this distinction in image-making practice; and by exploring the creative possibilities that are distinctive of the digital. The case is made for a new kind of appreciation in the digital age. In appreciating the images involved in every digital art form—from digital video installation to net art to digital cinema—there is a basic truth that we cannot ignore: the nature and technology of the digital expands both what an image can be as an image and what an image can be for us.

Constitutional Rights and Social Welfare: Exploring Claims-Making Practices in Post-Apartheid South Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-48
Author(s):  
Whitney K. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Neighborhood Context ◽  
The State ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
The Law ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

When do individuals choose to advance legal claims to social welfare goods? To explore this question, I turn to the case of South Africa, where, despite the adoption of a "transformative" constitution in 1996, access to social welfare goods remains sorely lacking. Drawing on an original 551-person survey, I examine patterns of legal claims-making, focusing on beliefs individuals hold about the law, rights, and the state, and how those beliefs relate to decisions about whether and how to make claims. I find striking differences between the factors that influence when people say they should file a legal claim and when they actually do so. The way that individuals interpret their own material conditions and neighborhood context are important, yet under-acknowledged, factors for explaining claims-making.

Catholic Social Teaching

2015 ◽  
pp. 442-456
Author(s):  
David Matzko McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Catholic Social Teaching ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Social Teaching ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Mutual Cooperation ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Rerum Novarum ◽  
The Common

This essay considers the modern tradition of Catholic social teaching (CST). CST finds its roots in the biblical, patristic, and medieval periods, but was inaugurated in particular by Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) and has been sustained by a range of papal encyclicals and conciliar documents since. The documents of CST emphasize that human beings are created for mutual cooperation and a pursuit of common good in social, economic, and political life. The essay considers first CST’s developing account of how social relations may be governed by Christian charity. It then considers the nature of property within economic relations as conceived within CST. The final section considers CST’s reflections on political life, which is understood as primarily personal and dependent on relations of mutual rights and responsibilities that are directed to the common good.

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