Tingles of Matter, Tangles of Theology: Bodies of the New(ish) Materialism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Keller
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Entanglement ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Relational Ontology ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
The Universe

This chapter considers a bodily becoming neither human nor divine but entangled in both. In conversation with Karen Barad, quantum entanglement discloses the relational ontology—the “agential intra-activity”—of which every body in the universe is woven. The chapter demonstrates the proximity of Barad's to Alfred North Whitehead's responsive materiality. Here, intercarnation might have turned to intra-carnation. But then there might seem to be a single mega-body inside which all enfleshment takes place. The point, however, is that creatures, micro- or macro-, do not pre-exist their relationships. The chapter examines what kind of theology might materialize in conversation with the so-called new materialism and what sort of theology might already identify itself as a Christian materialism.

A Matter of Difference: Karen Barad, Ontology and Archaeological Bodies

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne Marshall ◽  
Benjamin Alberti
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Quantum Physics ◽  
The Body ◽  
Relational Ontology ◽  
Binary Separation ◽  
Pacific Northwest Coast ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
The Universe

This article explores the implications of adopting Karen Barad's agential realist approach in archaeology. We argue that the location of Barad's work in quantum physics and feminism means it is uniquely placed to inform the ontological turn currently gaining favour for understanding the materiality of bodies. We outline Barad's approach using a comparative reading of Sofaer's book The Body as Material Culture and Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway. To illustrate, we think through Barad's key concepts of ‘phenomenon’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘apparatus’ in relation to specific archaeological bodies; New Zealand Maori chevron amulets, Argentinean La Candelaria body-pots, Pacific Northwest Coast stone artefacts and Nuu-chah-nulth ceremonial objects. Barad's theory transforms the way we understand and think these object bodies. In particular, her relational ontology, which contrasts with a conventional binary separation of matter and meaning, produces difference in a new way; a difference which facilitates analyses conceptually unthinkable in conventional representationalist terms.

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.

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 Testing Predictions of the Quantum Landscape Multiverse 3: The Hilltop Inflationary Potential

Symmetry ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 520
Author(s):  
Eleonora Di Valentino ◽  
Laura Mersini-Houghton
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Entanglement ◽  
Lower Limit ◽  
Hubble Parameter ◽  
Susy Breaking ◽  
Weak Lensing ◽  
Planck Data ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Breaking Scale ◽  
Inflationary Models ◽  
Origin Of The Universe

Here we test the predictions of the theory of the origin of the universe from the landscape multiverse, against the 2015 Planck data, for the case of the Hilltop class of inflationary models, for p = 4 and p = 6 . By considering the quantum entanglement correction of the multiverse, we can place just a lower limit on the local ’SUSY-breaking’ scale, respectively b > 8.7 × 10 6 G e V at 95 % c.l. and b > 1.3 × 10 8 G e V at 95 % c.l. from Planck TT+lowP, so the case with multiverse correction is statistically indistinguishable from the case with an unmodified inflation. We find that the series of anomalies predicted by the quantum landscape multiverse for the allowed range of b, is consistent with Planck’s tests of the anomalies. In addition, the friction between the two cosmological probes of the Hubble parameter and with the weak lensing experiments goes away for a particular subset, the p = 6 case of Hilltop models.

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.

Oh, go to sleep, honey. If you want some chills – you got it. On affect in ASMR

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-325
Author(s):  
Joanna Łapińska
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Karen Barad

In the article, the author discusses a new cultural phenomenon known as ASMR in a posthuman perspective, especially from the perspective of new materialism (Karen Barad), studies of things (Bjørnar Olsen, Ewa Domańska) and affective studies (Jane Bennett, Sara Ahmed). The article analyzes selected ASMR videos published on the YouTube website in terms of the affectivity of the objects used in them, arguing that ASMR cultural practices encourage the production of human-non-human assemblages of subjects and objects built of “vibrating matter” (Jane Bennett).

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.

The Onto-Epistemologies of New Materialism: Implications for Applied Linguistics Pedagogies and Research

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (6) ◽  
pp. 937-956 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelleen Toohey
Keyword(s):  
Educational Research ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Applied Linguistics ◽  
Douglas Fir ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Relational Ontology ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Constant Change

Abstract The Douglas Fir Group (2016) argued that applied linguistics needed new interdisciplinary perspectives, and I suggest here that the concepts provided by new materialism might aid in gaining such perspectives. New materialism foregrounds the material nature of humans, discourses, machines, other objects, other species, and the natural environment, as well as constant change, non-binary thinking, and the porosity of boundaries; it also asks for the posing of new problems and new concepts to ‘bring forth a world distinct from what we already are’ (Colebrook and Weinstein 2017: 4). Refusing the central binaries and hierarchies of Cartesian thinking, new materialism’s relational ontology stresses becoming; people, discourses, practices, and things are continually in relation and becoming different from what they were before. New materialist conceptions of knowledge/knowing and language/languaging are also relational, processual, and entangled. I review recent new materialist educational research and present two descriptions of events in my own research to show what pedagogical and research-oriented questions might be stimulated from this perspective.

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