Karen Barad

Das Theater der Vorahmung wird durch die feministische Repräsentationskritik von Donna Haraway und Karen Barad beleuchtet. Der Begriff der Mimesis erhält hierdurch einen neuen Vektor. Mit Hilfe eines Begriffs von Transkulturalität lässt sich ermessen, ob ein Theater der Vorahmung als emanzipative, kulturelle Praxis das Theater der nächsten, großen Transformation sein kann.

Thinking posthumanly – from a post-Enlightenment, critical, new materialist perspective – things, including concepts, become more permeable and topological – they leak and stretch. Freed from limiting notions of agency, things behave. Rivers have established the same legal rights as humans in New Zealand  and India,  stones have been reported slithering across the desert floor in California,  an electrical power grid in the USA has revealed a unique agential dexterity  and walls have been spotted walking over mountains in the UK’s Lake District.  Thinking with a posthuman partiality, we begin to witness a democracy of objects rather than an anthropocentric dictatorship over inorganic materials. If agency is reworked into an ‘enactment’ as opposed to something that is ‘held’,  conceivably humans and other biological organisms are not necessary for agency (or life) to emerge as inorganic material agency erupts from unchoreographed assemblages of spacetimematter(ing). And if cognitive and dermatological boundaries are no longer organ-ised by an Enlightenment prescription, how might pedagogies perform differently and more equitably?
This article draws on the empirical materials from two psychogeographic walks that agitate lithic spaces with a posthuman affection. Part One examples a radical mobile classroom that I undertake regularly with university students where the use of it-narratives exposes the distributed agency of buildings. I explore what a posthuman gaze might do to/for performative pedagogies as my students attempt to interview a building. Part Two offers an example from my previous post-qualitative PhD inquiry which – by manipulating the practices of psychogeography and schizocartography – highlights how a shopping centre assemblage called Liverpool ONE diagnosed itself with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), thus reinforcing the notion of inorganic agential distribution. The pedagogic implications of this posthuman diagnosis are discussed.

Print version of PhD Thesis.

This practice-based project investigates modalities of performing eco-aesthetic assemblages across the modern nature―culture divide. Assemblages are here understood as non-hierarchical associations between bodies that are different amongst themselves. I argue that eco-aesthetic practices that work towards naturalcultural assemblages contribute to the wider field of ecological thought and cultural understanding of the nonhuman environment or nature.

The research uses a transversal practico-theoretical approach that, following posthumanist and neomaterialist elaborations of ontology and epistemology, creates a ‘material-discursive entanglement’ (Barad, 2007) of bodies and concepts. In this posthuman continuum of practice, I argue that eco-aesthetics is an ethico-political disposition of fostering relations of accountability and responsibility with the bodies implicated in performance, especially the nonhumans understood to be minorities in the current politico-economic organisation.

The research is situated within the landscape of modern biopolitics, which is understood as a set of conceptual and material strategies of appropriation of life through the ‘logic of colonisation’ (Plumwood, 1993). Situated naturalcultural performances enact a different modality of ‘intra-action’ (Barad, 2007) with the world, by creating and maintaining fields in which life is seen as a force of generative difference.

The dissertation is divided in three parts which correspond to three entangled modes of performing research. The first part is a critical ontology which individuates operative modalities of modern boundary-making techniques. This part also outlines an alternative landscape of art and philosophy which go beyond binary thinking. The second part, through a posthumanist reconfiguration of the concept of assemblage from Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, and apparatus, in the work of Michel Foucault and Karen Barad, shapes an analytics for locating possibilities of material-discursive reconfiguration of the existing power relations. The third part follows the narrative of my artistic projects that sought to create naturalcultural performances with plants, trees, molecules of carbon-dioxide, sheep, and earth. This material-discursive entanglement of critique, analytics and performance as artistic practice together shapes a posthuman ecological praxis that is oriented towards naturalcultural justice.

AVAILABLE ONLINE:
https://minoritarianecologi.es/

Two definitions of algorithm, their uses, and their implied models of computing in society, are reviewed. The first, termed the structural programming definition, aligns more with usage in computer science, and as the name suggests, the intellectual project of structured programming. The second, termed the systemic definition, is more informal and emerges from ethnographic observations of discussions of software in both professional and everyday settings. Specific examples of locating algorithms within modern codebases are shared, as well as code directly impacting social and ethical concerns. The structural distinction between algorithms and social concerns is explained as mirroring the engineering construct of algorithms and data structures. It is proposed that, rather than this separation being an attempt to enforce a professional boundary and evade social responsibility, it is a crucial technical distinction within code which makes it clearer and more transparent. The power structures reinforced by the broader, cultural interpretations of algorithm are reconsidered, along with what it would mean for software to have an inclusive design culture.

This article considers ontological conceptualizations of shameinterest as experienced in educational research. Shame has frequently been reported in research as a property of the autonomous individual: the shame of the participant to share with the researcher, and the shame of the researcher to reflexively eliminate. Shame-interest is re-theorized here as a generative research event, as intra-action, as one simultaneous movement in the ongoing present. We attempt an ethical shift from a reflexive stance to fluxing movements of response-ability and coconsequence in order to encourage socially responsive educational research, informed through the conceptual resources of psychologist Silvan Tomkins, and feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad. Theory is threaded through a series of personal research vignettes to illustrate our thinking through ways shame-interest materialized within research events. Shame is re/conceptualized as a contestable composite feeling entangled with interest that allows an alternate non-reductive and ethical approach to educational research. We amplify our researcher responsibility, and our shame, by placing ourselves as entangled with the research 'problem' under investigation.

In 2017, for the first time in the history of documenta, curator Adam Szymczyk made the decision to site the quinquennial in two locations: Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece. Szymczyk's intention was to "decentralize" documenta's Western European gaze, turning the exhibition into an opportunity to foreground Greco-German relations in the wake of Greece's debt crisis. This essay examines documenta 14 through the overlapping frames of education, ethno-nationalism, and wealth—three real-world currents made visible by not only the works of art chosen, but in the protracted controversy over the exhibition's budget shortfall, which reinscribed some of the very dynamics Szymczyk set out to critique with his curatorial decision to site half of documenta in Athens.

The dance form contact improvisation (CI) emphasizes attention to sensation as a first step in sourcing physical movement. As a study of physics and materiality that is conducted expressly through the body as instrument and indicator, this proposition immediately alters a practitioner’s relationship with both his or her sensory system and the immediate environment, and demonstrates how touch, and sensation, might be seen as ‘a creative rather than purely functional interaction with one’s environment’ (Dey and Sarco-Thomas 2014).  Nita Little has discussed the ways in which the attentional practice of contact improvisation serves to challenge notions of identity and also illuminates emerging concepts in theoretical physics, noting how CI as touch-based movement training offers a means by which to bring ‘attention to attention’ (2014: 120), acknowledging intra-action (Barad 2012) in a way that challenges clear divisions between my body and yours when dancing.  Taking Little’s investigation further, CI practice that values ‘sensational facts’ (Paxton in Novack 1990: 82) can similarly be applied in observation practices that attend beyond other bodies to non-human forms. Drawing on Steve Paxton’s emphasis on momentum and gravity as common anchors for sensation in CI, this paper maps out some initial territory for using CI practice as a way of extending sensation through both attention and imagination to matter in many forms.  Drawing on additional examples from Body Weather practices of Min Tanaka, and the solo performance score of Twig Dances, this thesis also proposes ways in which CI’s work with sensation might be used to rethink human interactions with the nonhuman and so critique “the materializing effects of boundary making practices by which the ‘human’ and the ‘nonhuman’ are differentially constituted” (Barad 2012: 31-32). I propose that the imaginative and sensate nature of these performance practices and the affects they produce, offer new directions for how interdisciplinarity in performance might be theorized.

As a growing and wide-spanning field of research, teaching, and collaboration, feminist materialisms are taking up increasing space in our pedagogical settings, especially in queer and feminist classrooms. Whether as a theoretical topic, as a methodological strategy for conducting research, or in developing learning tools, feminist materialisms work to foreground the complex forms of relation and accountability that mark processes of inquiry, and to re-imagine the already innovative feminist classroom experience. A strong part of this contribution of feminist materialisms is the turn to the very materialities at play in knowledge production, and as these take into account the intrinsically entangled human and more than human actors that operate in and alongside the classroom, and the bodies, spaces, practices and knowledges co-produced there. This volume of the Teaching With series assembles a collection that works to map European Feminist Materialisms across a diversity of classroo...

The care sector in Denmark is undergoing rapid change and facing severe challenges due to the increasing number of elders and cuts in social welfare. The political response is welfare technology aiming on efficiency and replacement of care workers. Welfare technology is presented as a quick fix to a welfare state in crisis. In these times of change it is important to obtain more knowledge about what care work consists of, and how it is changing.

Care research has mainly focused on the paradigmatic shifts in the sector and working conditions. In a movement beyond discourse this thesis approaches care work by identifying how multiple modalities, including discourse and materialism, affect and human and non-human actors intra-act in the constitutive processes of care practices. Framed by an analysis of policy documents on welfare technology, I analyse interviews with care workers. The thesis is an analytical experiment inspired by Lis Højgaard and Dorte Marie Søndergaard’s framework for analysing multimodal constitutive processes in empirical research. Further it is inspired by feminist new-materialist theory, including Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism and Sara Ahmed and Dorthe Staunæs’ insights on affect. This approach enables an analysis of how care practices are constituted in a complex intra-action of human and non-human actors, including affect, body, gender, technology, mundane technologies, time, skills, work regulations, as well as local, institutional and societal discourses.

I find that care workers apply a variety of strategies, negotiated in relation to discourses of good care, in order to target the care recipients’ needs and influence affective transformations. Needs are identified through multi-sensory hunches seeking information from available sources: voice, facial expression, furniture, life history etc. Motivation, medication and mediation through language and use of mundane technologies are some of the other strategies applied. The strategies are constantly reshaped in relation to the context, colleagues and care recipients. The demented represent an inappropriate post-human challenge to the ideal of care. In facing this challenge care workers apply a somatic and relational approach and try to restore the self of the demented. The practices are shaped by bodily, gendered and affective subjectification of the care worker related to the hazards of the demanding work, sexual harassment and violence.

I find that there is a gap between the discourses on welfare technology and the care work practices. As a reaction to cuts and technologisation the care workers struggle for recognition and a revalorisation of their skills and the importance of humane skills in conducting care.

Ein Brückenschlag zwischen Posthumanismus und Philosophischer Anthropologie Oh Voltaire! Oh Humanität! Oh Blödsinn! (Nietzsche 1999 [1886], 54) Seit ihrer umfassenden Neubestimmung in der Philosophischen Anthropolo gie der Neunzehnhunderzwanzigerjahre war die "Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos" (Scheler 2002 [1928]) selten so prekär wie heute, wo der Mensch zum Namensgeber einer geologischen Epoche avanciert ist. Im An thro po zän tobt vor dem Hintergrund ökologischer Katastrophenszenarien und radikaler technologi scher Innovationen ein neuer diskursiver Kampf um das Humane. Auf der einen Seite befinden sich die Transhumanisten. Als Verbündete Homo fabers führen sie eine intensivierte prometheische Rhetorik ins Feld und suchen das planetari sche Heil in Geoengineering und MenschMaschineFusionen. Ihnen gegenüber stehen die Kombattantinnen des Posthumanismus. Bei allen Unterschieden im Detail ist ihnen (neben der Präferenz für ein materialistischrelationales Theorie design) die mehr oder weniger radikale Zurückweisung traditioneller Menschen fassungen gemeinsam. Negiert werden die humanistische Zentralperspektive, konkrete Bestimmungen, also alle Formen positiver Anthropologien, sowie meta physisch fundierte Wertungen. Davon ausgehend könnte man fragen, inwieweit jene posthumanistischen Neu bzw. (im doppelten Wortsinn) Umschreibungen des Menschen sich tatsäch lich von problematischen humanistischanthropologischen Traditionsbeständen freigemacht haben -und um welchen Preis. Stattdessen plädieren wir für gezielte Rückgriffe, das heißt in diesem Fall einen Brückenschlag zwischen Posthuma nismus und Philosophischer Anthropologie: (1) Nach einer kurzen Geländever messung des Anthropozän arbeiten wir Kernpositionen zweier Protagonistinnen der aktuellen Debatte, Rosi Braidotti und Donna Haraway, heraus. Diese kont rastieren wir anschließend (2) mit Arbeiten des jungen Günther Anders aus dem Kontext der Philosophischen Anthropologie. In seinen frühen Schriften entwirft Anders eine an Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, Nicolai Hartmann und Martin Heidegger anknüpfende negative Anthropologie der Weltfremdheit, die er später um eine politische Philosophie der Technik erweitert. Sein Theorieprojekt erweist sich retrospektiv nicht nur als vielfach anschlussfähig an aktuelle Diskussionen. Es lässt sich im Rahmen einer kritischen Revision posthumanistischer Positio

In recent years there has been a considerable intensification in practices of producing, analysing, visualising and utilising educational data, though we currently know little about how data practices unfold in the everyday life of schools. This thesis contributes a detailed analysis of the production and performance of educational data practices in one English secondary school and explores how they worked to reconfigure the possibilities for thinking and doing education. In this study I adopted an ethnographic perspective, using aspects of a sociomaterial agential realist approach to understand how material-discursive data practices surrounding pupil performance within a single school produced and constrained ‘education’.

This thesis argues that the thinking and doing of education was being reconfigured through data practices in three ways. First, the curriculum was reconfigured as assessment through algorithmic triage devices that created differential access to some subjects for different groups of students. As a result, the English curriculum was re-organised around a set of disaggregated, content-free skills orientated towards the demands of intensified data practices. Second, teachers’ professional knowledge and judgement were being systematically excluded to produce data as a more ‘objective’ and legitimate way of knowing, and their professionalism re-orientated towards an engagement with data. Third, data practices focused student and staff attention towards pupils’ futures. This, rather than their present, was what mattered most to the school. Three different, incompatible orientations towards data futures were produced: normative, predictive and probabilistic, catching teachers and pupils in the impossibility of reconciling them. Data practices in the school appeared to be a totalising machine, producing education as a cybernetic system that excluded everything outside it from mattering. Yet there were also moments where the production and effects of data practices were interrupted, destabilised and contradictory, suggesting potential openings for constituting education differently.

In 2009, the year aft er Japanese electronics manufacturer JVC (Japan Victor Company), creator of the VHS format (Video Home System), ceased production of the last line of stand-alone VHS video recorders (Broadcast Engineering 2008), I undertook an artist's residency at VIVO Media Arts in Vancouver, Canada-part of an eight-month stay, dwelling in the city with my partner and son-to consider the aesthetic qualities of VHS video as a dwindling feature of home-video practices. I was interested particularly in the qualities of degraded VHS image and sound with respect to the circularity of relations between the materiality of VHS technology, the engineered recordings it has potentiated, the practices these have both aff orded, and the transformative eff ects of such practices on its materiality as they are evidenced in degrading picture and sound quality. My focus was drawn to the phenomenon of video rental as a spatial practice bound up with the material particularities of home-video technology and as a context of its intensive use associated with increased 'wear and tear' . With the generous assistance of VIVO and Limelight Video, my family's neighbourhood video library, my residency developed around a single rental VHS tape with respect to this idea.

In this piece I attempt to address the ways in which Gloria Anzaldúa, in Borderlands: La Frontera (2007), negotiates the idea of the border as having both discursive and material dimensions. In creating a new mestiza consciousness from the borderland, which is the space that is affected by the borderline, Anzaldúa develops concepts and ideas that can be linked to Donna Haraway’s articulation of the cyborg and to Karen Barad’s theory of an agential realist ontology in the sense that Anzaldúa engages creatively with contradicting parts of her identity in a cyborgian fashion, and sees the enactment of borders as both limiting and empowering, as having emotional and material effects. Anzaldúa then addresses these effects and demonstrates how she applies them in the fabrication of a new consciousness, the consciousness of the new mestiza. In this work, therefore, I explore how the border makes itself physically present in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and how the discursive meets matter; and I do this by finding common threads and possible connections among the works of Anzaldúa, Haraway, and Barad.

Hiermit erkläre ich Eides statt, dass ich die vorliegende Arbeit eigenständig und ohne fremde Hilfe verfasst und entsprechend der Richtlinien redlichen wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens der Universität Wien sorgfältig überprüft habe. Ich habe andere als die angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel nicht benutzt sowie die entnommenen Stellen als solche gekennzeichnet. Diese Arbeit wurde nicht bereits in anderen Lehrveranstaltungen von mir oder anderen zur Erlangung eines Leistungsnachweises vorgelegt.

A book on the inventions of creative research cannot but address the question of the mode of invention of creative research. Creative research is a privileged site for such epistemic reflection, because it is in the nature of creative research not to hide the way it invents. Creative arts scholars are very explicit about how their objects and artistic and scholarly insights as well as their own embedded and embodied subject position come into being. The fact that this mode of invention pertains to a curious intermingling of ontology and epistemology can shed light on the fact that all research is established as such, albeit that not all researchers or disciplinary paradigms are ready to acknowledge such an insight. After all, it is a customary practice in most scholarly disciplines to cover up hiccups in the methodological procedure, and when a scholarly community is surprised by a seemingly sudden but undeniable turn on the side of the object, the new fact gets often integrated in a linear story of predictability. Epistemology is to preside over ontology. This article demonstrates how creative research is a privileged site for dismantling such a hierarchy, and for making the first steps towards a full integration of onto-epistemology in the wider academic community. The article demonstrates how onto-epistemology, a term coined by Karen Barad, is in fact customary, without us being aware of it. In order to make this case, which ultimately argues that facts are not ‘out there’ for the scholar to discover, but emerge in onto-epistemological practices, I will start by reading examples from sculpting (Étienne Souriau) and geology (Manuel DeLanda) through one another. When these two seeming extremes reveal onto-epistemological similarities, it will be demonstrated how creative research is a privileged site for making onto-epistemology precise.

Call me wolfing. I was murdered in Lancashire (now a part of Cumbria) in 1390CE, by some pre-enlightened gentlemen. It was just before the perceptual turning point from Theos to Mechanos; from a transcendent God to little ghosts in your little machines.

Jak myśleć o życiu i śmierci, o utracie i nadziei w postapokaliptycznym i posttraumatycznym świecie? Jak nie tracąc z oczu globalnych i planetarnych wyzwań „naszego dzisiaj”, móc myśleć także o materialnych, konkretnych, usytuowanych, wręcz intymnych szczegółach i związkach, w które wchodzi życie w swoich jednostkowych przejawach i formach? Jak tworzyć odpowiedzialne relacje ze światem, jak o nim opowiadać i myśleć? Jak myśleć o człowieku inaczej niż przez pryzmat autonomiczności, samowystarczalności, atomizacji czy jednostkowości? Jak pomyśleć człowieka jako „bycie ze świata”, uchwycić ruch antropo-de-centralizacji, immanentnej relacyjności, sieci współzależności? Na te pytania autorka próbuje odpowiadać współ-myśląc z tekstami współczesnych myślicielek posthumanizmu przede wszystkim Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Vinciane Despret, Natalie Jeremijenko, Erin Manning i Michaela Mardera.
Narracje naukowe, filozoficzne czy interwencje artystyczne opowiadają nam o świecie i mogą to czynić na różne sposoby. Eseje z tego zbioru są próbą wypracowania teorii, konceptualizacji, wizji, utopii czy opowieści o świecie, które rozpoznając specyfikę „naszego dzisiaj”, eksperymentują z myśleniem o „naszym jutrze” (czasem podważając sam linearny obraz czasu) i zmierzają ku praktykom zmiany codziennego etosu.

The aim of this paper is threefold and I seek to make contributions of both empirical and theoretical significance, whilst refusing a hygienic separation of ontology and epistemology: (1) I examine the claim that AN is a "biologically based, serious mental [illness] (BBMI)" (Klump et al., 2009, p. 97) and re-assemble the onto-epistemological landscape to show how this formulation is held in place and co-produced by a number of social, political and institutional interests. (2) I propose metatheoretically, and demonstrate through writing this paper, a form of critical engagement with neuroscience and genetics research on AN that does not insist on the 'reductive' effects of neuro/genocentric inquiry, but rather seeks to elaborate its inherent complexity. (3) I invoke entanglement in order to reconceptualise AN as biopsychosocial phenomena according to Barad's technical description of phenomena as the ongoing flow of agency between ontologically indeterminate entities in their differential becoming (2003, p. 818). Furthermore, I suggest empirical support for this reconceptualization can be found within the neuroscience and genetics literature itself.

Physarum polycephalum (slime mould/mold) is an organism used in scientific research that is commonly found in piles of leaf litter and human composts. Intelligent yet brainless, P. polycephalum forms a fan-like network of tendrils in its quest for food. Each tendril moves almost visibly by cytoplasmic streaming – a pulsing movement of the liquid inside its cell walls. It is simultaneously beautiful and repulsive – an oozing, bright yellow, lace-like blob. This paper proposes to engage in a (s)mattering of Baradian “agential cuts” to draw out the intra-active performativity of this evocative critter. A dialogue is established between scientific and artistic ontoepistemologies, focusing on how (and why) the matter of slime mould/mold matters. Visual images from explorations which include P. polycephalum are woven through the paper, to support Karen Barad’s assertion that “meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility” [1, p.821].

This is the concluding chapter from One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash (Mapin, 2021). It makes the case for rethinking the epistemologies of modernism as a global construct using the writings of Karen Barad as a major reference for thinking. -------

One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash documents and contextualizes the work of one of the most prolific of the first generation of Indian modernists. Prakash was an architect, an urban planner, a painter, sculptor, set-designer, furniture designer, academic, theatre director, and actor, as well as an occasional poet. The first publication devoted solely to Prakash's work, the objective of this book is to introduce scholarly and general audiences the diversity of his work, to locate it in terms of its local, national, and international contexts, and to build a narrative that describes the motivations of the work. The "continuous" in the title refers both to Prakash's fascination with the possibilities of generating form using a single line, and to his search for synergy between the various disciplines. The book focuses on Prakash's efforts to re-think Le Corbusian idea through Indic forms and imperatives.

This article seeks to offer a critical assessment of the conception of ethics underlying the growing constellation of 'new materialist' social theories. It argues that such theories offer little if any purchase in understanding the contemporary transformations of relations between mind and body or human and non-human natures. Taking as exemplary the work of Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, and Karen Barad, this article asserts that a continuity between ethics and ontology is central to recent theories of 'materiality'. These theories assert the primacy of matter by calling upon a spiritual or ascetic self-transformation so that one might be 'attuned to' or 'register' materiality and, conversely, portray critique as hubristic, conceited, or resentful, blinded by its anthropocentrism. It is argued that framing the grounds for ontological speculation in these ethical terms licences the omission of analysis of social forces mediating thought's access to the world and so grants the theorist leave to sidestep any questions over the conditions of thought. In particular, the essay points to ongoing processes of the so-called primitive accumulation as constituting the relationship between mind and body, human and non-human natures.

Rozprawa stanowi próbę ukazania w jaki sposób splątane konceptualizacje i praktyki ciała przenikają się w procesie samoorganizacji materii. Tak sformułowane rozważania zostały usytuowane w obrębie dwóch współczesnych nurtów filozoficznych: posthumanizmu i nowego materializmu. Przedstawicieli i przedstawicielki tych formacji myślowych łączy potrzeba przemyślenia sposobów stawania się materii, uchwytnych w dynamice przeistaczających się ciał. Tego rodzaju ukierunkowanie rozważań umożliwia rozumienie cielesności w kategoriach procesów, relacji, zależności, a także wspólnotowości. Nieodłącznym wątkiem tak sformułowanych filozoficznych dociekań są analizy poświęcone powiązaniom ludzkich i nie-ludzkich przejawów sprawczości. W takim ujęciu myślenie i ruch, zachodzące w układach powiązanych ciał, stanowią nierozerwalne przejawy aktywności materii. W związku z tym filozoficzne spekulacje zostały połączone z analizą praktyk ciała wywodzących się z tańca, performance, sztuk wizualnych itp., aby umożliwić lepsze zrozumienie ich wzajemnego przenikania się w procesie samoorganizacji materii, a tym samym w przekształceniach współdziałających ciał. Słowa kluczowe: konceptualizacje ciała, praktyki ciała, ciało, materia, cielesność, posthumanizm, nowy materializm

This article provides an affirmative feminist reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson by reading it through the work of Karen Barad. Adopting such a diffractive reading strategy enables feminist philosophy to move beyond discarding Bergson for his apparent phallocentrism. Feminist philosophy finds itself double bound when it critiques a philosophy for being phallocentric, because the setup of a master narrative comes into being with the critique. By negating a gender-blind or sexist philosophy, feminist philosophy only reaffirms its parameters, and setting up a master narrative costs feminist philosophy its feminism. I thus propose and practice a different methodological starting point, one that capitalizes on ‘‘diffraction.’’ This article ex- periments with the affirmative phase in feminist philosophy prophesied by Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Working along the lines of the diffractive method, the article at the same time proposes a new reading of Bergson (as well as of Barad), a new, different metaphysics indeed, which can be specified as onto-epistemological or ‘‘new materialist.’’

As carbon surrounds the Earth's critical zone, this book takes the journey from communities in war zones through safe European hamlets to witness the material violence of current law and how communities and legal activists are creating and reviving alternative legal regimes and ethical practices that respond to the historical juncture that humanity, Earth and law currently face. This book argues that law needs to shift from its current emphasis on a discourse based on individual and property rights and into the legal recognition of relations: both material and social. From the solidity of Earth to the sovereignty of soil to the dissolution of dirt, Bronwyn Lay draws together legal histories and philosophies around the unifying concept of juris materiarum: laws that recognise the connections between humanity and its habitat. This is increasingly urgent in the age of ecocide where great violence is being committed around the world on an unprecedented scale, but the law remains silent and populations are frustrated that essential relations are being abused and destroyed. A new theory and understanding of violence needs to evolve beyond anthropocentric limits and draw from ancient and modern jurisprudences that recognise the essential truth that humanity lives within Earth, Soil and Dirt. It is law's obligation and vocation to protect these relationships from harm.

This is the proof of my contribution to the upcoming edited volume "Current Directions in Ecomusicology" (ed. Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe; cf. https://www.taylorandfrancis.com/books/details/9781138804586/). I'm currently in the process of weaving these ideas into another project, and would love to hear feedback, especially of critical slant!

Bruno Latour y Eduardo Viveiros de Castro dieron el impulso inicial para la investigación explícitamente ontológica en arqueología. Su impacto en los arqueólogos, sin embargo, ha sido muy diferente. Lo que yo llamo los "arqueólogos metafísicos" trazan su genealogía a partir de Latour, aunque ahora también influidos por el "nuevo materialismo" y el "nuevo realismo ontológico" . Ellos han introducido una ortodoxia metafísica alternativa a la arqueología. En contraste, Viveiros de Castro y sus colegas han autorizado el regreso de la gran analogía etnográfica a la arqueología, particularmente en el caso del animismo. Una segunda tendencia, bastante diferente, inspirada por estos mismos antropólogos es involucrarse con las ideas indígenas como teorías para reconfigurar conceptos y prácticas arqueológicas. Sugiero que existe un punto de convergencia entre los enfoques metafísicos y antropológicos en su foco en el concepto de alteridad.

A shorter version of this review (by half) has been published in American Ethnologist (Early View, November 2020, see above).

Some of the discussions have been expanded upon in "After the Medium: Rereading Stories on a String and the War at Canudos" and "Truth and Relations" (you will find both on my profile here on academia.edu).

TITLE: Schizophrenic Matter. About the Production of Bodies, Concepts and Subjectivitys

ABSTRACT ENG: Agential realism is a perspective situated within the new materialism and posthumanism which combines philosophical and physical issues. Karen Barad, feminist thinker and creator of agential realism mixes poststructuralism ideas (Michel Foucault) and feminist critical theories with quantum physics, in particular with Niels Bohr’s thesis, one of the founders of this field. The main purpose of this article is to show the relations between agential realism and ideas presented by Deleuze and Guattari in one of their most famous books–Anti-Oedipus. Author of the paper focuses on the presentation of a processual ontology (especially on an explanation of how bodies, concepts, and objects are produced) resulting from the engagement of both perspectives.

Abstrakt PL. Realizm sprawczy jest współczesnym stanowiskiem, mieszczącym się w obrębie nowego materializm i posthumanizmu, łączącym zagadnienia z zakresu filozofii i fizyki. Jego twórczyni, Karen Barad, feministyczna myślicielka, wiąże ze sobą rozważania z zakresu poststrukturalizmu (Michel Foucault), krytycznych teorii feministycznych z odkryciami współczesnej fizyki kwantowej, wynikającymi z twierdzeń przyjętych przez jednego z fundatorów tej dziedziny wiedzy – Nielsa Bohra. Celem artykułu jest ukazanie pokrewieństw zachodzących pomiędzy realizmem sprawczym oraz rozważaniami Deleuze'a i Guattariego, przedstawionym w Anty-Edypie. Autor skupia się na zaprezentowaniu procesualnej ontologii (objaśnieniu w jaki sposób produkowane są ciała, pojęcia i przedmioty) wynikającej z zazębiania się obydwóch stanowisk.