Theory: New Materialist Feminist Theory

This essay concerns black feminist theory’s experimentation with the disciplinary discourses of chaos theory and physics to investigate the trace effects of blackness and explore the limits of conceptualization and representation in light of the particular problem that blackness’s diffuse and immeasurable conditioning power poses to thought and representation. I argue that when considering the genealogy of black feminism, it is possible to discern a black feminist poetics that anticipates recent feminist materialism’s attentiveness to the mutually-constitutive effects of discursivity and materiality. Said poetics approaches a shared worry over the problem of referentiality, not in representationalist terms, as recent materialists would suggest, but rather through a poetics attentive to the racially sexuating bases of an (anti)black sublime that conditions, exceeds, and potentially ruptures the scales of the empirical.  Privileging performativity, gesture, resonance, and metaphor over the authority and purported veridicality of Western empirical science, the poetics of black feminism investigated here is instructive for a general theory of representation.

Lucretius was the first philosopher of immanence. It is he and not Democritus or Epicurus who holds this title. If we want to understand the historical emergence of the concept of immanence, we should start by distinguishing its precursors in Greek atomism from its first complete incarnation in Lucretius. This way, we can see exactly what first defined and distinguished immanence from its past. Therefore in what follows I would like to make three, perhaps controversial, claims about the emergence of philosophical immanence. 1) Lucretius was not an atomist, 2) Greek atomism reintroduced transcendence, and 3) It is the primacy of motion in Lucretius that defines his philosophical immanence. Lucretius was not an atomist This thesis is as counterintuitive as it is straightforward. The first major difference between Lucretius and the earlier Greek atomists is precisely that—the atom. For Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus atoms are always in motion, but the atom itself remained fundamentally unchanged, indivisible, and thus internally static—even as it moved. Thus instead of positing discrete atoms as ontologically primary as both ancient Greek and later modern theories do, one of Lucretius's greatest novelties was to posit the movement or flow of matter as primary. Lucretius did not simply " translate Epicurus, " as the Greco-centric story goes; rather, he introduced the first immanent kinetic materialism in the West. For example, although the Latin word atomus (smallest particle) was available to Lucretius to use in his poem, he intentionally did not use it, nor did he use the Latin word particula or particle to describe matter. The English translations of " atom, " " particle, " and others have all been added to the text in translation based on a certain historical interpretation of it. The idea that Lucretius subscribed to a world of discrete particles called atoms is therefore both a projection of Epicureanism, who used the Greek word atomos, and a retroaction of modern scientific mechanism of the fifteenth century onto De Rerum Natura. Lucretius rejected entirely the notion that things emerged from discrete particles. To believe otherwise is to distort the original meanings of the Latin text as well as the absolutely enormous poetic apparatus he summoned to describe the flowing, swirling, folding, and weaving of the flux of matter. Although Lucretius rejected the term atomus, he remained absolutely true to one aspect of the original Greek meaning of the word, τομος (átomos, " indivisible "), from-(a-, " not ") + τέμνω (témnō, " I cut "). Being is not cut up into discrete particles, but is composed of continuous flows, folds, and weaves. Discrete " things " (rerum) are composed of corporeal flows (corpora) that move together (conflux) and fold over themselves (nexus) in a woven knot work (contextum). For Lucretius, things only emerge and have their being within and immanent to the flow and flux of matter in motion. Discreteness is an apparent product of continuous folded matter, uncut, undivided, and in motion and not the other way around.

It is now common to encounter appeals for movement beyond “the human” in diverse scholarly domains, yet the temporal and spatial connotations of this “beyond,” let alone destinations, are often underexamined. Contra the beguiling appeal of the “beyond,” I would ask: What and crucially whose conception of humanity are we moving beyond? Moreover, what is entailed in the very notion of a beyond? Calls to become “post” or move “beyond the human” too often presume that the originary locus of this call, its imprimatur, its appeal, requires no further examination or justification but mere execution of its rapidly routinizing imperative. In the brief space I have here, I want to caution that appeals to move “beyond the human” may actually reintroduce the Eurocentric transcendentalism this movement purports to disrupt, particularly with regard to the historical and ongoing distributive ordering of race —which I argue authorizes and conditions appeals to the “beyond,” maybe even overdetermining the “beyond’s” appeal.

“Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism” argues that posthumanist theory, and the interrelated field of animal studies, have been patterned by a lacuna, namely that of race. More precisely, I argue that posthumanism’s disengagement with theorizations of race and colonialism has not only undercut our understanding of the significance of posthumanism for embattled subjectivities but also undermined the stated aims of posthumanist theory itself. With the recent emergence of feminist and queer posthumanist theory attentive to race, the future direction of posthumanism and animal studies promises an exciting break with habits of racialized erasure in posthumanist thought.

Exposure then, is terribly uneven, across such simultaneously social and material categories as class, race, and the disparities between the global North and the global south. And while much of this book has emphasized the material dimensions of the
exposure, it is crucial to point out that ideological and discursive categories position bodies differently and have material effects. For feminists, LGBTQ people, people of color, persons with disabilities, and others, thinking through how corporeal processes,
desires, orientations, and harms are in accordance with or divergent from social categories, norms, and discourses is a necessary epistemological and political process. For some people this is a matter of survival.The practice of thinking from within and as part of the material world swirls together ontology, epistemology, scientific disclosures, political perspectives, posthuman ethics, and environmental activism. There is no position outside, no straight path, no belief in transparent global systems of knowledge, only modest protests and precarious pleasures, from within compromised locations shadowed by futures that will surely need repair.

This article explores the ways new materialism centers the problem of morphogenesis-and de-centers language and culture-in philosophical accounts of corporeality. Attention to organic structures gives insight into the entanglement of nature and culture obscured by tendencies to think matter as lacking agential features. I suggest, in conclusion, that new materialism may operate with a notion of "entangle-ment" or "intra-activity" that is too productive. New materialisms may require a more pliable set of distinctions to capture the relations between morphogenetic forces.

The book builds on Laruelle's project of "non-Marxism": radicalization of Marx by ridding the reception of his texts of any remainders of philosophy preventing Marxism to become the science Marx intended it to be. The "non" stands for surpassing the "principle of philosophical sufficiency" (as in Laruelle's non-philosophy for that matter) and points to a radicalization of Marx's project rather than to the erroneously opposite impression the "non-" might create. From the reviews of Ray Brassier and Francois Laruelle (followed by a brief description and TOC): 
"This is a passionately engaged work that dramatizes the radical stakes of Marx's and Laruelle's projects while drawing creatively on the work of Butler, Firestone, and Haraway along the way. It is at once the best possible introduction to Laruelle's appropriation of Marx and a Marxian radicalization of Laruelle's 'non-standard philosophy'." Ray Brassier "Katerina Kolozova delivers the first accurate and comprehensive study of my interpretation of Marx in my book Introduction to Non-Marxism, and more generally, of contemporary Marxism. ... In vigorous fashion, Kolozova re-awakens Marxism and rescues it from its torpor." Francois Laruelle Departing from the conventional readings of Karl Marx's Capital and other of his works, by way of François Laruelle's "radicalization of concepts," Katerina Kolozova identifies a theoretical kernel in Marx's thought whose critical and interpretative force can be employed without reference to its subsequent interpretations in the philosophical mainstream. The latter entails a process of abstracting a philosophical legacy - or rather, of putting it in brackets - and then codifying a history of a learned interpretation established in supposed fidelity to the theoretical project of a "master." Interpreting the master implies a mastery of doctrinal tools, which results in establishing a catechism of the Logos of the Master. And this catechism interferes, Kolozova argues, with more direct encounters with Marx's writings. As we know, Marx's rigorously descriptive language unravels the radical core of capitalist economic processes and, through that unraveling, also reveals capitalism's necessary exploitation and subjugation of human labor. Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism attempts to recuperate and emancipate the notion of metaphysics in this scenario by virtue of radicalizing thought's encounter with the Real. Kolozova argues that this metaphysical drama is at the origin of the social and economic injustices of contemporary global economic-political realities, and she illustrates this state of affairs in discussions of the problem of wage labor, automated speculation as the core of late capitalism, the post-2008 financial crisis, the status of technology in late capitalism, sexual difference and gender, and the human and non-human body's subjugation capitalist automation. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Chap. 1: Introduction - Chap. 2: The Possibility of Immanent Revolt as Theory and Political Praxis - Chap. 3: Metaphysics of the Finance Economy - Chap. 4: The Metaphysics of Capitalism and the Socialist Response - Chap. 5: Technology, the Body and the Materialist Determination in the Last Instance of the Communist Society of Cyborgs

This chapter begins by considering whether or not MCS can be understood within the frameworks of environmental justice, which were explored earlier in this book. The rest ofthe chapter develops the theoretical positions outlined in chapter r, regarding emerging models of materiality and the possibilities for trans-corporeal conceptions of the human, by exploring MCS as it is revealed and portrayed in science, cultural theory autobiography, photography, and film. Multiple chemical sensitivity may well be the quintessential example of what I m calling trans-corporeality, as those who are chemically reactive experience their selves as coextensive with the material world-an ever-emergent world of risky knowledges, mangled practices, and disturbing, potentially deviant material agencies.

This article examines key arguments on the relations between bodies and images developed in the context of the discursive turn to consider what light a feminist materialist approach might shed on them. Rather than set the discursive and materialist ‘turns’ in opposition to each other, the author tries to draw connections between different theories of the relations between bodies and images, and unpack how certain feminist concerns are approached from different angles in different historical and intellectual contexts. To do this, the author focuses on the prevalence of images of transformation in contemporary visual culture and analyses them in terms of how both ‘new materialist’ and feminist theories grapple with the worlds they engage with, where change and transformation are seen as key. The author takes up three specific and related points that are currently being debated in feminist materialisms: (1) the concept of representation and, more widely, representational thinking; (2) the concept of causation and an understanding of time as non-linear, intensive and inventive; and (3) the understanding of theory as immanent and inventive. Drawing on insights developed in both the discursive and materialist ‘turns’, the author focuses on how bodies and images are entangled together as material assemblages and, in Barad's terms, how theories are performative of the phenomena they seek to understand. The article concludes by suggesting that such an understanding of theory as inventive might be a way of continuing to ensure the animation of feminism's transformative nature.

This paper explores an agential, desiring and playful conception of matter, as ways of enticing affective responses from the sciences toward matter, specifically in regard to matter might be “up to.” Examining recent works in the fields of feminist materialism, cultural anthropology and the sciences and technologies studies, this piece argues that matter is at the core a mode of artistry, an active agential component that partakes in generating continuously in dis/continuity new worldly configurations. This reading of matter suggests a new to rethink and reframe the practices of sciences, whereby representationalist endeavors do not simply fail as they themselves partakes to the ongoing processes of materialization that is all matter in ways that may be ethical fraught upon, notably for the lack of accountability and responsibility that all too often fail to accompany such practices. This new conception of matter also suggests that the separations between play and rigor, between the arts and the sciences, between yearning for sensation and prospects of generating fixed images, are untenable. As an effect, this means that once that affects are always already the matter of the sciences, but also that equally, yet differently, the sciences and the arts are ontology-making projects that are bound ontologically to an ethics. Equipped with this new conception of matter, this piece explores ways of thinking and doing sciences and arts in ways that are at once more affectively connected and response-able.

It is a common opinion that humans often are the sole source of normativity in the world. This attitude encourages a bias in favor of the interests of members of the predominant species (who becomes the main subject), against those of other species, generally defined as non-human objects (such as animals, plants or microorganisms). This anthropocentric background is recurrent also in design field, where we primarily see human interests as the praxis to develop solutions, without considering the footprint the we leave on the non-human environment. Moving from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism could help us to re-establish the importance of “the other” in the web of life and to render designing products an interface for multispecies co-existence. Philosophical theories such as new materialism or the perspective of entanglement suggested by posthumanism are crucial to stimulate a mind-shift finalized to support and to embody different subjects that have been traditionally ignored in design processes.
If we start conceiving design in its overlapping with the biological realm, we can in fact develop alternative methods, not through top-down strategies, but with approaches literally emerging “from the ground”.
The paper will explore some Biodesign practices that can be used as a means to understand the complexity of human and non-human inter-actions and to open ourselves to what lies beyond rationality, cognition, knowledge and human mastery.

This essay advances a new materialist philosophy of faith. Mobilizing affect , I show that a change in the capacity to act, such as that created through belief or non-belief, is an experience that unites both secular and religious people. Belief in the superiority of secular culture over religious culture, or vice versa, are affectively similar corporeal orientations.

This essay reads Canadian writer Lisa Robertson's _The Weather_ and _Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture_ as companion stories that forward a runnel theory of poetry. The runnel emerges in Robertson's poetry in the form of rills, channels, passages, circuits -- things continuously on the move and moving others. A model for coalition and becoming-with, the runnel is a feminist ecopoetic carrier, or fold, that deconstructs the representational and consumptive framework of the Romantic, pastoral, and lyric traditions.

An increasing number of scholars have become familiar with critical realism, finding it a robust alternative to the poststructuralist perspectives that currently dominate gender studies and feminism. This trend has coincided with an increased interest among feminist theorists in the issues of ontology, materiality and nature, which have always been at the heart of critical realist interventions. However, despite these thematic alignments, and the fact that both critical realism and feminist theory are inherently critical-emancipatory, the critical realist approach continues to occupy a marginal role within both feminist and gender studies debates. Concurrently , the field of critical realism has remained decidedly 'masculine' in nature, both in the sense that men dominate it, and in terms of the issues with which critical realists have most commonly concerned themselves. Recent critical realist feminist work, the International Association of Critical Realism's adoption of a proactive policy to enhance the representation of women in its organs and activities, and the growing critical realist preoccupation (particularly in Bhaskar's philosophy of metaReality) with historically 'feminine' topics such as love, mark a potential shift away from these trends. The most important aim of this special issue on Critical Realism, Gender and Fem-inism is therefore to intensify and refine the conversations between critical realism and feminist theory and gender studies. Our hope is that it will encourage both further critical realist work on feminism and gender, and increased exchanges between critical realism and existing forms of feminist theory and gender studies.

This post-qualitative research analyzes the spatialized practices of young people within a working-class community and how those guided the opening and facilitating of a local community center. Seeing place-making as a social and political act, the authors were inspired by Heath's classic study and argument that children's education might be better served if educators understood and built on their community-based language practices. Writing through theories of new materialism, spatiality, and children's geog-raphies, we build an argument for spatial justice by considering the ways educational scholars and educators might understand and build on child-ren's community-based spatial practices.

This article examines the conceptualisation of materialities in feminist theory through two paradigmatic examples: (French) materialist feminism and new materialisms. What can be interpreted as an opposition between different paradigms can also be disrupted as long as we define what matters as a relation or a process rather than a substance or a lost paradise to which we should return. New materialisms indeed help to investigate aspects such as corporeality, human/non-human interaction and textures, but the role of feminist materialism is invaluable in highlighting the social structures of power relations ; more than ever, it makes a decisive contribution to the understanding of domination , such as the social relations and hierarchies implied in femosecularism conceptualised in this article. Ultimately, the tool of hybridised materialisms aims to articulate the theoretical perspective of materialist feminism with that of the new materialisms – in order to avoid the binarism between materiality and culture.

"There are no straight roads in the world; we must be prepared to follow a road that twists and turns and not try to get things on the cheap. It must not be imagined that one fine morning all the reactionaries will go down on their knees of their own accord. In a word, while the prospects are bright, the road has twists and turns. There are still many difficulties ahead that we must not overlook" (Zedung, 1945: 59–60).

In 1994, Else Marie Jakobsen completed her tapestry The Dromedaries and Textile Art. The tapestry’s central motif is the Peder Balke painting Lighthouse on the Norwegian Coast (1885). The painting is divided up into a grid, which according to Jakobsen symbolizes a reductive, analytical and «dissecting» approach to art that has been traditionally adopted by art historians. Balke is incorporated into art history, and in polemical fashion Jakobsen incorporates Emile Zola’s famous accusation «J’accuse»(I accuse), made in the context of the Dreyfus affair, and also her own initials EMJ, into the tapestry, four and five times respectively. Zola’s words are taken from his open letter to the French newspaper L’Aurore, in which the author defended the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus. In the letter, which was addressed to the French president, Zola also strongly attacked the French army and French national pride. Is this insistence, combined the accusation, a necessary tactic to bring about change in the approach taken by art historians towards women artists, and textile art? Is it something that is needed in order for the material- and craft-based art to take its place as one of the central fields of the visual arts? The towering dromedaries in the tapestry apparently represent (male) art historians – the gatekeepers who are supervising and literally trampling on the beautiful tapestries under their hooves.

Feminist communication scholars often adopt seemingly incommensurate stances to navigate tensions among agency, discourse, materiality, and history. I argue that valuing these “contradictions” is a hallmark of feminist communication research, a tradition I label feminist dilemmatic theorizing. Because feminists seek to describe and transform the world, they employ constitutive and representative understandings of communication. Rather than assert these approaches as paradoxical, I reread existing scholarship for nascent feminist new materialisms. Using sexual violence as an example, I argue that feminist communication theory develops a distinct approach to the force of communication, one in which discourse is not all-powerful. Accordingly, I suggest communication theorists draw upon existing feminist scholarship to meet critiques of social construction and develop a material turn.

The “turn” (linguistic turn, critical turn, new material turn, etc.) is a prominent concept in the production of rhetoric’s intellectual history. This essay argues that academic turns are commonly figured through tropes of classical physics that portray time as linear, the field as an empirical path, and turns as discrete, progressively patterned events that can be reflected upon as determinate moments in time. This figuring of reflection reconditions a representationalist orientation to discourse even while scholars may be developing nonrepresentationalist theories of rhetoric. Simultaneously, academic turns figured through classical physics are sutured with neoclassical assumptions of neoliberalism, the prevailing political economy of the modern academy, which promotes accumulation and quantitative growth above other values. This infusion of neoliberalism in academic writing, however, can be disrupted through tropes of quantum physics, such as entanglement and indeterminacy, and can cultivate a performative orientation to discourse that attunes students of rhetoric to how history is continuously written anew. Engaging the centennial issue of Quarterly Journal of Speech as an assemblage of turns, the essay considers the ethical implications of troping rhetoric’s intellectual history through academic writing practices and concludes by attending to the way we figure rhetoric when conceptualizing what rhetorical scholars study.

¿Cómo podemos pensar la categoría de identidad de manera que no reproduzca una categoría totalitaria? Comparto con Fina Birulés su afirmación de que es necesario” hacernos con una noción de subjetividad que permitiera dar cuenta de la diferencia (la feminidad o la judeidad, por ejemplo) como algo dado sin caer en definiciones esencialistas ni negar su especifidad histórico-política” (Birulés, 2007, 240). A mi modo de ver, se pueden utilizar dos estrategias no excluyentes para analizar los conceptos que utilizamos para hablar de nuestras
identidades: por un lado, construir nuevas categorías para crear marcos conceptuales novedosos; por el otro, seguir utilizando las mismas pero destotalizadas. Ambas estrategias se han dado y siguen dándose en el seno del feminismo.

Propõe-se, no artigo presente, perscrutar o modo como uma crítica feminista materialista da arte potenciará novas – e prementes – estratégias de contacto e interpretação do objecto artístico e, em particular, da arte (incomensuravelmente plural) criada por mulheres, transformando de modo profundo as condições de produção, apresentação e recepção das obras enquanto efectiva resistência à presen- te conjuntura neoliberalista. Através de um radical convocar da materialidade da obra e do corpo no contexto da prática artística e da produção teórica sobre ela, contextualizado por um projecto feminista materialista que tomará a obra enquanto processo produtivo ele mesmo, se desvincula a interpretação do objecto artístico da servitude a uma clássica (autor)idade, importando o ensinamento barthesiano da "morte do autor". Aí se conhecerá espaço à transgressiva inscrição de uma subjectividade feminina nómada, feminista, continuamente plural, capaz de abrir a leitura da obra a emancipadoras narrativas.

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Offering materialist feminism as a base to a radical art theory – politically engaged in the transformation of the material conditions of production and reception of the artworks by women –, we intend to draw an extension of historical materialism to the recognition and analysis of those conditions of production particular to women artists and in a feminist analysis of the power and production relations. Thus defending transgressive interpretation strategies – always plural – capable of recognizing the materiality, the body and a feminist nomadic subject that defies (author)ity .

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ISSN
2183–6973

e-ISSN (em linha)
2183–6981

"Prodigies are strange ontological creatures.  A six-year-old piano wonder “wows” all by ‘mastering the rules of a domain of expertise at an adult level,’ if we follow the standard definition that was coined by giftedness scholar David Henry Feldman in 1986. This paper considers the possibility that the stir and sensation takes place on much deeper levels. Prodigies challenge the presumed privileges of  adult, human, and man-made culture. Furthermore, they express an unusual and unstable temporality. They “are” only within a specific age frame, and are sometimes retrospectively  said not to have been “real” prodigies since they did not turn into world famous superstars after all.

Prodigies often perform in artistic domains: music, dance, visual art. But hardly ever are their contributions valued as original, creative or transformative with a long-lasting impact. Feldman claims that ‘the existence of prodigies affirms that a culture is accessible to a certain degree’ without changing it. The paper explores this limited position of the prodigy in relation to the cultural domain by asking: can a prodigy performance be creative in an aesthetic sense? Shifting views in creativity research open up new directions for understanding the prodigy phenomenon. Rather than the achievement of a lone genius, creative and aesthetic performance is now more commonly described in terms of collaborative, multiple and changing forms. 

The paper picks up on two leads offered by recent prodigy studies: firstly, the idea that prodigies’ primary achievement lies the capacity to amaze; and secondly, a distinction between prodigious and creative achievement. It will be shown that prodigies gain ‘entitlement’ to the aesthetic in a new materialist ontology"