A Horse Is a Horse, Of Course, Of Course: Animality, Transitivity, and the Double Take

Somatechnics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-47
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Barker
Keyword(s):  
Animal Movement ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Slow Motion ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Running Time ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Feminist New Materialism ◽  
Work Done ◽  
Dividing Line

Lanthimos's The Lobster (2015) invites a way of looking that coincides with work done by scholars of feminist new materialism with an eye toward queering binary and static concepts of species, gender, and the relation between them. A close look at one fleeting, slow-motion image of horses racing on a track reveals a pattern of ‘diffraction,’ in the critically productive sense that Karen Barad uses the term, such that we see neither camera movement, human movement, nor animal movement proper, but movement that is ‘of’ all three bodies, but not ‘in’ any given one. The film perpetually defers the dichotomy between animal and human as it is classically conceived in order to reconfigure it.That diffractive pattern recurs throughout the film, in its use of slow motion, lateral camera movements, and the overlapping of multiple movements and rhythms. Throughout its running time, The Lobster suspends the process of becoming in motion, emphasizing the experiential aspect of this ‘-ing’ that bodies do. The film draws vision sideways, rippling and redoubling itself; in the process, it shifts attention from a human state or an animal state – states that, according to conventional logic, exist on one side or another of a dividing line, and which certain types of movement might transcend – to transitivity, or the movement of movement itself.

New Materialist Openings to Children's Literature Studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Macarena García-González ◽  
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Feminist New Materialism ◽  
Body Subject

New materialist and posthuman thinking denote a range of approaches that have in common a focus on materialities as a turn against the persistence of Cartesian dualisms (mind/body, subject/object, nature/culture, for example). In this article, we explore how the feminist new materialism of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Rosi Braidotti, among others, may provide openings to research in our field, especially when considering what is recurrently taken up as one of its central problems: the positioning of the child in a world ruled by adults. We first discuss recent approaches in children's literature studies that show interest in these theories and then use these to offer a toolbox of terms and notions – from ethico-onto-epistemology to diffraction – that may open possibilities for research in more-than-human environments.

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.

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.

The birth of motion capture: Transcribing the phenomena of bodily movement through the “graphic method”

2021 ◽  
pp. 263497952110403
Author(s):  
Mark Paterson
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Motion Capture ◽  
Animal Movement ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Industrial Research ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Graphic Method ◽  
Bodily Movement ◽  
In The Wild

How is the movement of bodies recorded, traced, captured? How is the perception of movement decomposed, analyzed, and then reconstructed through signs, lines, and diagrams? This article traces how, with the help of engineers and collaborators, Etienne-Jules Marey’s self-styled “graphic method” innovated upon existing instruments and photographic apparatuses in order to capture not just the movement of horses’ legs but something of the biomechanical essence of animal movement through the technique of “chronophotographie.” Although inspired by Edward Muybridge’s photographs of horses in motion, for Marey the photographs were not the end result. What he achieved were new ways of transcribing the phenomena of bodily motion. Unlike previous physiologists who thrived on vivisection in the laboratory, Marey took ever greater pains to examine the principles of animal movement in the wild, and built an open-air “station physiologique” in a Parisian park for this purpose. One legacy of Marey’s chronophotographic technique was in the documentation and dissection of human movement, and became acknowledged precursors of the wave of Taylorism which would sweep industrial research in the early 20th century. But another legacy is the capacity to transcribe the phenomena of movement into other forms, externalizing perception across other media.

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.

An organization’s relationship to violence

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-48
Author(s):  
Kate Lockwood Harris
Keyword(s):  
New Materialism ◽  
Material World ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The World ◽  
Feminist New Materialism

Two sets of assumptions—ones about communication and ones about agency—shape debates over the violence–organization relationship. When scholars and laypersons suggest that words are mere symbols that represent the world and correspond to things in it, communication remains a way to describe violence. Under this representationalist line of thinking, communication is split from the material world and cannot do harm. Similarly, when people assume that agency is a human’s intentional decision about how to act, the broader processes that inform action fade from view. An individual perpetrator becomes the sole violent actor. Both sets of assumptions make it difficult to conceptualize an organization’s role in violence. This chapter relies on feminist new materialism to problematize these assumptions. After providing an overview of the theory’s distinctive features, the chapter shows its resonances with existing scholarship on communication, agency, and organizations. These resonances provide a framework for understanding organizations to be more than mere sites for violence.

scholarly journals Communication and Feminist New Materialism: Methodologies to understand the continuum between matter and discourse

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2018) ◽  
pp. 55-70
Author(s):  
Beatriz Revelles-Benavente ◽  
Ana M. González Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking Sites ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Trapping Force ◽  
Communicative Process ◽  
Feminist New Materialism ◽  
The Continuum

The relationship between literature and social networking sites (SNS) is a material context in which authors and readers merge into each other to create a literary communicative process that transforms contemporary politics. The aim of this paper is to analyse the communicative process by investigating the continuum between matter and discourse from a new materialist approach. From social sites, we can understand how elements, such as readers, authors, context, novels, culture and digital platforms, “intra-act” (Barad 2007) to create an affecting/ed communicative process. We propose feminist new materialism as a theoretical terrain that helps to reconfigure politics and communication in order to build a methodological framework for contemporary feminist politics and theory related to Literature. Using a digital genealogy and the theory of new materialism, we identify communication in literature as a trapping force in which different elements intra-act with each other and become indivisible. Affecting/ed communication is a dynamic conceptualization, a literary activity in which active agents participate in creative spaces for future social changes.

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