The Barad's Tale, oder: Ist Doom ein Ding? Digitale Spiele aus der Perspektive des Neuen Materialismus

MedienJournal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-36
Author(s):  
Gerrit Fröhlich
Keyword(s):  
Karen Barad

Sind digitale Spiele Dinge? Die Materialität des Digitalen wird in der Theorie insbesondere von hardware- und softwareorientierten Strömungen jeweils unterschiedlich aufgegriffen. Die umfassend aufgearbeitete Geschichte des Spiels Doom gibt dabei jedoch Hinweise darauf, dass die Frage nach seiner Dinghaftigkeit nicht allein wegen seiner multiplen Materialisierungen, sondern vor allem wegen seiner Fluidität und der nicht ziehbaren Grenzen seiner Produktions- und Rezeptionsgeschichte mit Verweis auf seine Soft- oder Hardware alleine nicht zu beantworten ist. Deshalb wird im vorliegenden Beitrag unter Berücksichtigung des Agentiellen Realismus nach Karen Barad der Vorschlag unterbreitet, die Produktion und das Spielen digitaler Spiele wie Doom als Teile eines Apparats zu verstehen. Dabei ist weder der Prozess des Schaffens digitaler Spiele noch der ihres Spielens als Interaktion digitaler Dinge mit menschlichen Akteuren zu verstehen; vielmehr gehen diese aus vielfältigen Intraaktionen in einem Möglichkeits- bzw. Unmöglichkeitsraum erst hervor und gewinnen hier ihre Differenz zueinander. Kreatives Schaffen sowie die Spielbarkeit selbst stellen Qualitäten dieser intraaktiven Beziehungen dar. Bei Spiele-Apparaten handelt es sich aus dieser Perspektive um nicht fest eingrenzbare Sets an materiell-diskursiven Verschränkungen, die sich fortwährend immer wieder in medialen Dingen niederschlagen.

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.

scholarly journals Body/Ciało/Cielesność – o materii w filmach Małgorzaty Szumowskiej

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Magdalena Podsiadło-Kwiecień
Keyword(s):  
Karen Barad

Jednym z głównych tematów powracających w twórczości Małgorzaty Szumowskiej jest ciało ujęte w sposób podmiotowy, jako konstytutywny element tożsamości, oraz przedmiotowy, jako obiekt zabiegów medycznych, fragmentaryzacji, rozkładu, autopsji. Zwrócenie przez reżyserkę uwagi na materialność ciała oraz wskazanie splotu między nim a materią, która posiada własną dynamikę i sprawczość, zachęca do przyjrzenia się jej wybranym dziełom z perspektywy nowego materializmu reprezentowanego m.in. przez Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti czy Roberta Esposita.

scholarly journals Is my body out of date? The drag of physicality in the digital age

IDEA JOURNAL ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (02) ◽  
pp. 289-325
Author(s):  
Elly Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Human Computer Interaction ◽  
Video Communications ◽  
Time Consciousness ◽  
The Third ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Temporal Coupling ◽  
Video Documentation ◽  
Ian Mcewan ◽  
Gilbert Simondon

At the 2019 Body of Knowledge Conference at Deakin University, I presented the third episode of performance-lecture series ‘Is My Body Out of Date?’ in collaboration with Melbourne-based artists Bon Mott and Sean Miles. Punctuated by quotes and phrases from a range of theorists, writers and artists including Karen Barad, Caroline Bassett, Laboria Cuboniks, Ian McEwan, Oscar Wilde, Yon Heong Tung, ETA Hoffman, Gilbert Simondon, and my drag character #Sergina, the performance (struck) poses (around) the question of whether, in a world that is increasingly managed and experienced online, our bodies, as our primary mode of interaction, may be beginning to feel out of date. Is our desire for sweaty, messy, fleshy physical co-presence out of whack with the agility, efficiency and value of our algorithms? Performed live at a laptop with Mott and Miles as physical #BackupBodies for my own body that didn’t fly from London for ecological reasons, this physical/digital screenshare performance wove in video documentation from previous #Sergina performances in order to confuse and conflate what was happening now, and what already happened, what was live and what was pre-recorded. Here we played with issues of perception, presence, liveness and the fantasy of the (ex)changeability of identity and ‘drag’ (performance) of physicality within an ever-shifting media present. What follows is a visual essay constructed out of the digital remnants of the performance: a (trans)script, a screen recording, screenshots and links to media located beyond the template of the text. The visual essay touches on key conference themes such as virtual embodiment, human/computer interaction, temporal coupling and time consciousness, knowledge-transfer and how technology affects the way we move, think and desire. Furthermore, the templates of Zoom video communications, of the laptop screen, of Chrome and the wider digital/physical conference model that hosted, directed (and dictated) the boundaries of our presentation reflect on the influence of design, layout and digit/al choreographies on the shaping and ordering of thought, knowledge and embodiment.

Biology is a feminist issue: Interview with Lynda Birke

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 413-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Åsberg ◽  
Lynda Birke
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Feminist Technoscience ◽  
The One ◽  
Materialist Feminist

This is an interview with Professor Lynda Birke (University of Chester, UK), one of the key figures of feminist science studies. She is a pioneer of feminist biology and of materialist feminist thought, as well as of the new and emerging field of hum-animal studies (HAS). This interview was conducted over email in two time periods, in the spring of 2008 and 2010. The format allowed for comments on previous writings and an engagement in an open-ended dialogue. Professor Birke talks about her key arguments and outlooks on a changing field of research. The work of this English biologist is typical of a long and continuous feminist engagement with biology and ontological matters that reaches well beyond the more recently articulated ‘material turn’ of feminist theory. It touches upon feminist issues beyond the usual comfort zones of gender constructionism and human-centred research. Perhaps less recognized than for instance the names of Donna Haraway or Karen Barad, Lynda Birke’s oeuvre is part of the same long-standing and twofold critique from feminist scholars qua trained natural scientists. On the one hand, theirs is a powerful critique of biological determinism; on the other, an acutely observed contemporary critique of how merely cultural or socially reductionist approaches to the effervescently lively and biological might leave the corporeal, environmental or non-human animal critically undertheorized within feminist scholarship. In highlighting the work and arguments of Lynda Birke, it is hoped here to provide an accessible introduction to the critical questions and challenges that circumvent contemporary discussions within feminist technoscience as theory and political practice.

Doing Academia Differently: Creative Reading/Writing-With Posthuman Philosophers

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110649
Author(s):  
Vivienne Grace Bozalek
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Quantum Physics ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
Academic Practices ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Graduate Supervision ◽  
Vantage Points

This article considers how academic practices such as reading and writing might be reconfigured as creative processes through thinking-with posthuman philosophies and theorists, particularly, but not confined to the works of Karen Barad and Erin Manning. Both Erin Manning and Karen Barad are involved with creative philosophies and practices, albeit from different vantage points. Manning’s work engages with arts-based practices such as research-creation through process philosophies, whereas Barad reads queer theory through quantum physics to develop their agential realist framework and diffractive methodology. Although Manning and Barad never refer to each other’s work, this article proposes that thinking-with both of these feminist philosophers might be fruitful to consider how reading and writing as part of research projects and graduate supervision might be enacted creatively and differently.

Quantum Creativity: Afracting New Materialism in the Anthropocene

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110666
Author(s):  
jan jagodzinski
Keyword(s):  
Creative Destruction ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Quantum Level ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Karen Barad

This essay engages the vicissitudes of new materialism at the quantum level, attempting to differentiate what I take to be fundamental differences in the theoretical positions of vitalist theories as developed by Karen Barad and Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the Anthropocene. I treat matter at the quantum level to differentiate conceptions of apparatus and assemblage. It is argued that one should not treat them under the same signifiers. There is the question of creativity that runs through the essay which also raises questions concerning an “affirmative” Deleuze, the dominant position when it comes to the arts, humanities, and pedagogy. Against these particular developments, anorganic life as in|different comes to fore where issues of creative destruction must be faced.

Werewolf Wollstonecraft

2020 ◽  
pp. 253-274
Author(s):  
Chris Washington
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Feminist Critique ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
Dynamic Power ◽  
Karen Barad

The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics show. In this essay, I argue that Wollstonecraft is nonetheless the first thinker of ‘true’ werewolf out-lawry in her final novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and in her letters to Godwin. In the novel, Wollstonecraft leverages what we now call new materialism as a feminist critique of heteropatriarchal society. Wollstonecraft’s new materialist thinking also scrambles gender across even human and nonhuman distinctions. To counter microcosmic familial and macrocosmic state heteropatriarchy, Wollstonecraft theorizes what I am calling, following the example of wolves and werewolves, not a family but a ‘pack’. The pack manifests as new spacetimes through what Karen Barad terms “quantum entanglements” that produce love between subjects and subjects but that never strives to reproduce binaristic pairings that reproduce the sovereign family. A pack, as Wollstonecraft’s texts demonstrate, emerges from processes of co-creation that iterate new subjects and objects without dynamic power structures structured around stable gender identities or human and nonhuman power relations.

scholarly journals Videography as Refrain

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-137
Author(s):  
Theresa Giorza
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Inner City ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Public Park ◽  
Video Footage ◽  
Video Clips ◽  
Agential Realism ◽  
The World ◽  
Karen Barad

A public park adjacent to an inner-city preschool invites children and their teacher into new encounters with the world, literacy and themselves. The park and preschool are situated in the inner-city of Johannesburg, South Africa. In this article, the researcher performs as mutated-modest-witness of events that unfold in lively materialdiscursive encounters between children, grass, friendship, a pen, cement table, sand, sticks, the alphabet and daylight. The agential realism of Karen Barad and the nomadic thinking of Deleuze and Guattari offer ways of re-imagining ‘the child in the park’. Diffracting with repeated viewings of video clips the researcher finds that forward and reverse movement and stops in different moments throughout repeated viewings of the same video footage produces different and new ‘stories’ about the events and the children involved. Conceptions of ‘child’ as literacy learner and of researcher-as-writer mutate through this diffraction which instantiates a non-representational videography practice.

scholarly journals Girls’ Aesthetics of Existence in/With Hayao Miyazaki’s Films

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 376-383
Author(s):  
Laura Trafí-Prats
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Relational Ontology ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
And Gender

In this article, I analyze the processual aesthetic production of girl subjectivity in/with Hayao Miyazaki’s films through a feminist materialist perspective informed by the writings of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Grosz, and Affrica Taylor. I elaborate on feminist materialist concepts such as those of relational ontology, aesthetics of existence, worldmaking, mythopoesis, queer kin, and gender/sexual difference. With these concepts, I philosophically and ethnographically inquire in/with girl spectators who are interested in the experimentation with new modalities of existence that do not limit to those of success and alienation, but allow for creative possibilities of rupture, recomposition, and transversalization of girl subjectivities.

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