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.

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.

New Materialisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liedeke Plate
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Death Of The Author ◽  
Empirical Approaches

New materialism (and new materialisms) is part of the material turn currently sweeping through the humanities and social sciences and entails a paradigm shift toward a more material(ist) understanding of social and cultural life. From new materialist thinking, new (empirical) approaches, methods, methodologies and objects of study ensue. The new materialisms emerge from feminism, philosophy, and science and technologies studies and critique the foundational binaries of modern thought, especially the nature/culture, object/subject, human/thing dualisms, whose anthropocentric biases are seen to have led to the current ecological and civilizational crisis and the incapacity to think through and adequately engage with them. Proposing to give things their due, new materialisms are interested in “the force of things” and debate “the agency of things.” The post-anthropocentric interest in the vitality of things parallels the non-dualist modes of thinking of indigenous ontologies on which some new materialisms may in fact be based, but whose influence has so far insufficiently been acknowledged. At its most radical, new materialism is posthumanist, part of the nonhuman turn. A number of scholars have sought to bring the insights and concerns of new materialism(s) into the fields of literary theory and criticism, developing “thing” or “stuff” theory and seeking to conceptualize and operationalize a new literary materialism. For this, they draw on insights from a range of disciplines, including material culture studies, book and print culture studies, and comparative textual media studies. Given the importance attached to the linguistic turn as the cultural moment and textual approach in relation to which new materialists agonistically construct the newness of their material(ist) endeavors, the publication context of Roland Barthes’s famous essay “The Death of the Author”—the multimedia magazine in a box Aspen 5+6—is highlighted as an important site for critiquing a nonmaterial approach.

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.

How Far Are We from a Hot Bath?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilah Grace Canevaro
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
Thing Theory ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The Status ◽  
Hot Bath

Chapter 1 places this book against a backdrop of New Materialisms, using the framework of Thing Theory in its various manifestations to unpack seemingly innocuous but in reality surprisingly loaded terms like ‘object’ and ‘agent’, and raising the question of boundaries: to what extent does the Materialist slogan ‘Things are us!’ apply to Homer? It explores the issue of representation and the substantial difference it makes to the status of objects and the location of agency, and tackles the productive tension between this book’s core approaches: Gender Theory and New Materialism. The historical and social ramifications of the book are addressed, and some initial dichotomies and categories begin to be drawn out, with a particular focus on memory.

scholarly journals New Materialism, Technophilia and Emancipation

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordana Jovanović
Keyword(s):  
Human Subject ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Political Emancipation

The aim of this paper is to reflect on psychological, ethical and political implications of new materialisms (Barad, Bennett, Coole, Frost) in the context of expanded and accelerated regimes of measurement as part of a technological governance of the human. As new materialists are committed to both epistemic and political emancipation, I first analyse theoretical, in particular epistemological, foundations of new materialism. The new materialism has achieved liberating epistemic effects in criticizing self-referential discursive and socio-constructionist agendas. It argued instead for a return to material and somatic realities. However, I examine whether its flat ontology, its epistemology of de-differentiation of the human and non-human, even non-living agencies and commitments into a principle of immanence, provide appropriate means to critically assess ethical and political implications of entanglements of humans with the historically- produced technologies and social worlds in general. The next question to be discussed is whether a return (nevertheless a discursive one) to material and somatic realities can in itself protect those very vulnerable realities. As horizontal ontology invokes a horizontal normativity which cannot serve as a foundation for emancipatory projects, it follows that normativity needs other sources beyond the new materialism paradigm. Thus, I argue that such a weak or insecure position of normativity within the new materialisms affects any concept of human subject, regardless of its entanglements, and any project of emancipation. I conclude these critical analyses by claiming that the new materialism’s epistemological and political emancipatory promises cannot be fulfilled by means provided by the new materialism itself.

Sexuality Education and Feminist New Materialisms

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louisa Allen
Keyword(s):  
Education Research ◽  
Sexuality Education ◽  
Unplanned Pregnancy ◽  
Sexual Consent ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Sexually Transmissible Infections ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Feminist New Materialisms ◽  
Feminist New Materialism

School-based sexuality education has existed in various forms since the 1800s. Sexuality education researchers have recently turned to feminist new materialist thought to rethink debates that occupy this field. These debates include whether sexuality education should be taught at school, who should teach it, and what constitutes appropriate content. While these issues have been important historically, some sexuality researchers view them as stifling other possibilities for teaching and generating knowledge in this field. Feminist new materialism emerges from a broader ontological turn within the social sciences and humanities that diverges from social constructionist accounts of the world. This work is associated with scholars such as Barad, Bennett, Haraway, and Braidotti and draws on thinking from Deleuze and Guattari. Employing theoretical tools, such as “intra-action,” “onto-epistemology,” and “agentic matter,” feminist new materialism reconceptualizes the nature of sexuality education research. These concepts highlight the anthropocentric (human-centered) nature of sexuality education research and practice. Feminist new materialisms encourage us to think about what the sexuality curriculum might look like when humans are not at its core, nor bestowed with the power to control themselves and the world. These questions have profound implications for how we teach aspects of sexuality underpinned by these assumptions, such as safer sex and sexual consent. Ultimately, feminist new materialism encourages us to question whether issues such as prevention of sexually transmissible infections and unplanned pregnancy should remain the conventional foci of this subject.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Luxon
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Moral Autonomy ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Specific Effects

Published in 1975, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish has profoundly affected how we think about power and hierarchy broadly speaking, as well as their specific effects on incarceration. If the text initially influenced debates on moral autonomy, political agency, and historicist methodologies for political theorizing, its influence has since widened. The following article (1) briefly presents the argument in Discipline and Punish, and its implications for rethinking power and hierarchy; (2) considers its reception in light of debates around agency, autonomy, and political activity; and (3) finishes by tracing Discipline’s implications for work on subjectivity and subject-formation, incarceration and poverty governance, feminist theory and intersectionality, and inquiry into colonialism and its legacies.

Experience

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Grant
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Personal Politics ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Point Of Departure

This chapter analyzes multiple conceptualizations of experience developed within Anglo-American and French feminist theory, and traces their relation to the concepts “woman,” “patriarchy,” and “personal politics.” It explores experience as epistemological ground, as a mechanism of subject formation, as a technique in consciousness raising, and as a methodology. Taking the feminist sexuality debates as a point of departure, the chapter also situates the limitations of feminist notions of experience in relation to queer theory, critical theory, poststructuralism, and the problematics of humanism. Finally, the chapter shows how feminist theoretical uses of the idea of experience parallel explorations and developments of the concept in other non-feminist critical theories. Though it has very often been ignored or considered as something of an anomaly by other critical theorists, the chapter demonstrates that feminist theory is a kind of critical theory and situates it in that broader context.

scholarly journals Thinking With New Materialism in Qualitative Case Studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 160940692097643
Author(s):  
Åsa Andersson ◽  
Peter Korp ◽  
Anne B. Reinertsen
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Study Design ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Qualitative Case Studies ◽  
Case Study Design ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
The World ◽  
Event Based

In this article, we discuss challenges and implications of thinking with new materialisms and the Deleuzian philosophy of immanence in qualitative case studies. The aim is to establish a terrain and language of “minor case studies.” Deleuze denies two-world ontologies and the ontologically status of single bodies, emphasizing instead how assemblages of human and non-human bodies together produce the world. In this terrain, cases are not objects of inquiry, but life-giving forces that create movement. This in turn changes the premises for how we can approach and explore cases. Rather than represent, comment and explain what cases are, we illustrate how a case-assemblage creates possibilities for event-based thinking regarding interesting phenomena (cases), and how these cases are twisted, stretched and pulled out of a conventional case study design. We conclude by discussing epistemological consequences of new materialist ontology.

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