New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies

New Materialism Generated: Depending on Disciplines

Although we want to show here that a first instantiation of transversality enacted by new materialist cultural theorists cuts across scholarly disciplines, there is a whole range of scholars working on new materialism from their respective disciplinary locations. In these specific disciplinary takes on new materialism, the potentialities of the new materialism get lost in unnecessarily narrow understandings. Introducing new materialism into a discipline entails a transcendental gesture according to which the new materialism and the discipline in question (e.g. sociology) are positioned as pre-existing or generated rather than generative, and consequently as interacting rather than intra-acting. In other words, due to the presumed schism or dualism, the transversality of new materialism is being undone rather than affirmed or put to work. To transversalize can only be done when always already “invoking a new frame of analysis,” as Jonathan Gil Harris (2003, 281) puts it. A new materialism that emerges from a discipline is an immanent gesture that we will discuss in the next section.

Momin Rahman and Anne Witz (2003, 245) in “What Really Matters? The Elusive Quality of the Material in Feminist Thought,” for instance, focus exclusively on sociologically induced feminisms, and argue that “there needs to be a recognition of both the limits of a constructionism grounded in materialism and the potential of a constructionism that deploys materiality as a more porous and flexible concept.” Rahman and Witz recognize the shift engendered by a new materialism (conceptualizing “materiality”), and claim that the conceptualization of the material employed in the early days of feminist sociology was more complex than simply economical. This cartography is in line with what we want to present here. Although new materialism has set in motion a qualitative shift in cultural theory at large, this shift is transversal, not dualist. Striking alliances between the old and the new, Rahman and Witz claim that early feminists broadened the definition of the economically determinist material to include social relations and the domestic sphere, and worked on the material as including everyday and institutional practices as well (ibid., 250). As a consequence, they read Butler’s claim about “the distinction between the material and the cultural [being] no longer a stable or viable one” (ibid., 249) as an outrage, precisely because of the fact that 1970s and 1980s feminist sociology did not necessarily work along the lines of such a distinction. In the work of Butler, they imply, a second-wave feminist materialism functions as a straw person. [9] Rahman and Witz find that good-old feminist sociological work worked along the lines of an expanded conceptualization of the material.

Simultaneously, however, they claim that the good-old feminist sociological work simply added new (relativist, they say) theoretical frameworks to the existing economically determinist materialism. They question whether, in such a context, “the distinctive materiality of materialism has any residual conceptual integrity” (ibid., 252). In other words, they stumble upon the problems of additive/quantitative epistemic approaches, especially, we would say, when the two quantified approaches are non-exhaustive oppositions. We claim that adding a so-called feminist postmodern epistemology with relativist inclinations to a modern epistemology, feminist or not, materialist or not, does not necessarily result in a qualitative shifting of either the modern or the feminist postmodern. This is why the questioning of conceptual integrity is justified in the case of the cartography of Rahman and Witz, but not in the context of new (feminist) materialism per se. The conceptualization of “materiality” that the sociologists Rahman and Witz engage with does not necessarily shift the term towards something that differs from the economical simply because of the fact that early feminist sociologists seem to have added a bodily materiality to the economical.

The materialism brought to the fore by Rahman and Witz—if compared with economical (neo-classical) materialism, the constructionist approach remains constant, as DeLanda also stressed in the interview in Part One—should in fact be labeled “new” in the teleological sense of the term, whereas we have argued that it is among other things teleology (as shared by realist/totalizing/modern and social constructivist/relativist/postmodern epistemologies) that is broken down in new materialism. Rahman and Witz themselves yearn for a breakdown of linear continuity as well, while remaining in a dualistic mode (pre-distinguishing the social and the physical), which we would interpret as an artifact of their territorial approach to new theory formation:

Rahman and Witz thus affirm dualisms throughout their article—the dualism between new materialism and sociology being the starting point, and the one between physicality and sociality being the end result. It seems as if they have wanted to rescue (good-old) feminist sociology in light of a materialism that is new in the teleological sense of the term. [10] Analyzing their article, we have shown that such an approach does not allow for the qualitative shifting of concepts that is to be found in the work of, among others, Braidotti and DeLanda. The materiality celebrated remains reduced to being the polar opposite of a sociality—that is, the material here has to be made socially effective, rather than seeing the social and the material as co-constitutive forces through, for instance, the “abstract machine.” We read this absence as an artifact of the authors buying into disciplinary territoriality. Bringing new materialism (here assumed to be a pre-existing body of work) into contact with a scholarly discipline (equally assumed to be pre-existing) has distortive effects. The presupposition that a new materialism is generated contradicts new materialism’s own anti-representationalism. New materialism, then, takes scholarship into absolute deterritorialization, and is not an epistemic class that has a clear referent. New materialism is something to be put to work. [11]

Cultural theory being less disciplined than (feminist) sociology, the beginnings of a transversal understanding of new materialism can be found in Susan Sheridan’s “Words and Things: Some Feminist Debates on Culture and Materialism.” Sheridan (2002, 23), while not using the term new materialism herself, argues that the impact of post-structuralism on feminist cultural theory has resulted in the displacement of “the primacy of social and economic relations in analyses of women’s situation,” and in the implementation of taking into consideration the primacy of “issues of sexuality, subjectivity and textuality.” Sheridan claims that this seeming shift rests on a misinterpretation of post-structuralist theory, in which words and things got separated (all of a sudden “words” gained primacy) whereas post-structuralism, if read unpolemically, and together with recent work on matter, “demonstrates how inseparable are the symbolic and the material in examining the discursive construction of ‘objects’ of knowledge, and the material effects of that discursive power” (ibid., 25). In other words, post-structuralism and new materialism in Sheridan’s understanding should not be read as dual opposites, and together they should not be seen as theoretical moves beyond a feminist sociological materialism. This cartography is qualitatively different from the one presented by Rahman and Witz, and it finds confirmation in the work of French post-structuralist feminists such as Hélène Cixous ([1975] 1976, 879, 884), one of whose main concerns, after all, was representationalism.

Sheridan, like Braidotti, positions herself amongst post-structuralist feminists who have argued that cultural constructivist feminism “is not materialist enough” (ibid., 27), and who have attacked “reductive (essentialist) representations of the nature/culture binary divide itself” (ibid., 28). Here, a post-structuralist feminist cultural theory seems to be dualistically opposed to a “cultural constructivism.” Post-structuralist feminists are said to have critiqued cultural constructivism for working with a “de-materialised body,” whereas another critique is that they have been working with “understandings of ‘discourse’” that are “limited” when language is taken to be performative (ibid.). At the same time, post-structuralist feminist cultural theory is said to have attacked the reductive essentialism of both feminist sociology (focusing on the material) and cultural constructivism (focusing on the cultural). Traversing the non-exhaustive opposites of feminist sociology and cultural constructivism, and analyzing the reductivism effected on the basis of a reliance on either matter or discourse demonstrates transversality. In other words, Sheridan argues that the current rise in new materialist analyses in cultural theory shows that both language-oriented cultural constructivisms and sociologically induced feminisms are to be critiqued, since neither has fully employed the agential qualities of matter. Sheridan’s reading of what she calls a “new stage” (ibid.; cf. Hekman 2010, 7 on a “new settlement”) in feminist theory generates a focus not only on biological matter or on a cultural theory incorporating insights from the natural sciences, but also on the matter of the political economy, thus qualitatively shifting a concept of matter as purely physical and opposed to the social or linguistic.

The new stage’s disciplinary transversality comes to be fully delineated by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (2008, 9–10; cf. Squier and Littlefield 2004) as a new materialism (here called “material feminism”) that is to be found in the disciplines of “science studies, environmental feminisms, corporeal feminisms, queer theory, disability studies, theories of race and ethnicity, environmental justice, (post-)Marxist feminism, globalization studies, and cultural studies,” and which as an epistemic trend is involved in “integrating them into what amounts to a new paradigm for feminist thought. […] this paradigm is currently emerging and […] is a necessary and exhilarating move for contemporary feminism.” In The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures, Hekman (2010) goes so far as to demonstrate that new materialism is to be found in all scholarly disciplines, cutting across the trans-Atlantic disconnection between analytic and continental philosophy, and putting feminist theory at the forefront. For us, too, the new materialism allows for a move away from disciplines towards the meta-disciplinary, in feminist theory and in cultural theory more broadly, which is a claim that alludes to the importance of studying and engaging with the effect that this move might have on the paradigms of contemporary cultural theory. In what ways does new materialism traverse paradigms?

Generating New Materialism: Playing with Paradigms

Demonstrating the workings of new materialism, that is, generating a new materialism rather than relying upon a new materialism already pre-generated, Braidotti (2000, 160) argues that what is to be found in postmodern cultural theory (i.e. the body of social/semiotic constructivist cultural theory considered state-of-the-art once theory formation is positioned on a global classificatory map) is a “denial of the materiality of the bodily self” in paradoxical conjunction with the fast circulation of an excessive number of theoretical discourses about, and cultural representations of, the human body. In other words, cultural theory in the postmodern era has been unable to account fully for materiality, whereas it found itself surrounded by an excessive representation (thus objectification) of (bodily and non-bodily, organic and inorganic, always already feminized) matter in popular culture as well as cultural theory. Braidotti takes postmodernist constructivism’s specific form of anti-essentialism, which affirms representationalism, to be responsible for this curious situation. Postmodernist constructivism is discovered to be a paradigm in which the space for materialism is, in Alistair Welchman’s words (2005, 390), “restricted,” and postmodern cultural theorists are simply included in the huge category of “critics who use an impoverished conception of matter inherited from non-materialist systems of thought” (ibid., 388). Postmodern cultural theory, otherwise seen as constituting and having been constituted by the Crisis of Reason, seems to have continued to work within the legacy of modernism’s foundationalism. The modernist system of thought relying on Reason (and concepts like Logos, Mind, Representation) has not been fully broken down, and this is why transcendental and humanist tendencies continue to haunt present-day cultural theory. We have already explained that a postmodernism dualistically opposing modernism cannot entail anything but a continuation of the Same (cf. Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 2–3, Hekman 2010, 48). How does new materialism succeed in qualitatively shifting the paradigm that had supposedly already left the academic stage after May ‘68? And how does it introduce a conception of matter that is not impoverished?

As already stated, Braidotti’s new materialism, which she also terms a “bodily” or “carnal” materialism (2006, 182) begins with “the enfleshed Deleuzean subject,” which is “a folding-in of external influences and a simultaneous unfolding outwards of affects.” The exterior and the interior, the subject(ive) and the object(ive), the individual, the social, and the symbolic are conceptualized as co-constitutive instead of pre-determined levels or layers. The genealogy of this Deleuzean subject is created in Continental thought; it includes “Descartes’ nightmare, Spinoza’s hope, Nietzsche’s complaint, Freud’s obsession, Lacan’s favorite fantasy, Marx’s omission” (Braidotti 2000, 159). This cartography shows that new materialism has something to say about Reason/the modernist paradigm as well as the Crisis of Reason/the postmodernist paradigm. In other words, it is a qualified cartography, which opens up for a qualitative shifting of a dual opposition. This shifting is done by rethinking matter. Affirming a radical sense of materialism, or simply radical immanence, instead of starting from Reason (whether adjectified, thus postmodernized, or not), Braidotti does not define matter as solid and stable, as self-identical. A radically immanent conceptualization of matter necessarily affirms its ongoing “metamorphosis” (Braidotti 2002a), or in the words of DeLanda (1996, 2002), its ongoing “morphogenesis” as it shows an interest in intensive material processes and the actual forms they can produce.

According to a philosophy of radical immanence informed by a Bergsonian concept of time (durée instead of linearity and progress), matter is not thought of as Matter, the photonegative of Reason or Logos or Mind or Representation, but rather by a focus on “duration [inserted] into matter” (Grosz 2005, 111). It is a focus, indeed, on metamorphosis or morphogenesis:

This boils down to matter immanently escaping every possible representation in the modernist, scientistic meaning as well as in the postmodernist, social or semiotic constructivist sense of the term according to which representation is not the scientistic “mirror of nature” but rather the equally representationalist “mirror of culture” (Barad 2007). This is to say that whereas a modernist scientific materialism allows for one, True representation of matter, and a postmodernist cultural constructivism allows for a plethora of equally true representations, it is the shared representationalism that is questioned and shifted by new materialism. Matter is a transformative force in itself, which, in its ongoing change, will not allow any representation to take root. This is also how Miguel de Beistegui (2004, 110) reads Deleuze with Heidegger, elusively concluding that: “Behind or, better said perhaps, beneath every object, every representation, every physical of metaphysical ideality lies a phenomenon, which is the flesh and blood of the world, the life that continues to live in and through being as it is represented in itself. This is being as it is lived.” [12]

In “What is the Matter of Feminist Criticism?” Mariam Fraser affirms Braidotti’s new materialism, by working on the academic whom Claire Colebrook (2004, 293) has called the epitome of contemporary (feminist) postmodern cultural theory: Judith Butler. Representationalism or linguisticality is key to the work of Butler. [13] Fraser (2002, 613) claims that in this work, language ends up addressing only the exterior. As a corollary, the interior appears as fundamentally ungraspable as any grasping is done through language. How do Barad and Vicki Kirby, whom Fraser positions alongside Braidotti for the generation of new materialism, qualitatively shift the relation between matter/materiality and language, between the exterior and the interior of the body? The key point is the abandonment of assumptions about linguisticality, and about who does the speaking/writing. For Barad (1998, 105 in ibid., 618; original emphasis), “what is being described by our theories is not nature itself, but our participation within nature.” She theorizes the intra-action of the observer, the observed, and observing instruments, all of which are “agential.” In line with this, Kirby starts from the literacy of matter, re-reading Derrida and Saussure in order to show that a close reading of their work also uncovers their emphasis on materiality-in-change. In the work of Kirby, matter appears as something that is not only spoken about or spoken with, but rather as itself simply speaking. Nature and culture, word and flesh are “all emergent within a force field of differentiations that has no exteriority in any final sense” (Kirby 1997, 126–7 in Fraser 2002, 619; original emphasis). Both cases of transversality, signified by the “within,” entail leaving behind the primacy of either language/culture or matter/nature. In other words, a false dualism comes to be traversed. New materialism, that is, cuts across postmodernist and modernist paradigms as it shows that both epistemologies start from a distinctive pole of what Colebrook (2004, 56) has called “the representation/ materiality dichotomy.” Questioning this dichotomy involved the following:

Bodies are texts that unfold according to genetic encoding, Braidotti says, which implies traversing the material and the representational.

Key to the new materialist paradigm, then, is an emphasis on the “material-discursive” or “material-semiotic” that we know from the paradigm-shifting work of Haraway (1988, 595; original emphasis):

Such a claim is transversal when it comes to the broad (modernist and postmodernist) paradigms of cultural theory. The focus on the materialization of bodies and other so-called objects of investigation demonstrates how “duration” has in fact gotten “inserted into matter” (how DeLanda, for instance, got to focus on “matter-energy flows”), and how the “the representation/materiality dichotomy” has indeed been broken down (how Braidotti, for example, came to conceptualize the body as “a piece of meat activated by electric waves of desire, a text written by the unfolding of genetic encoding”) in new materialist cultural theory. Working with “material-semiotic agents,” as Haraway calls them, allows for a complexification of the way in which matter used to be defined. An object is no longer passive matter that has to be re-presented; meaning-making takes place on a two-way track. [14] Here it is also demonstrated how new materialism does not discard signification (cf. Ahmed 2008, 34) but rather directs it to its proper place and qualitatively shifts the linguistic turn accordingly (i.e. non-dualistically).

In the passage cited above as well as in her later work, Haraway focuses upon the ways in which bodies and systems of scholarly signification/representation materialize alongside each other. Harawayian instantiations of new materialism affirm what Barad (2007) has called an onto-epistemology, or even an ethico-onto-epistemology, according to which being and knowing (and the good) become indistinguishable. Inspired by Haraway and Barad, we lastly wish to discuss the cartographical methodology that generates and is generated by the disciplinary and paradigmatic transversalities of new materialism.

Cartography Rather Than Classification

New materialism is a cultural theory for the twenty-first century that attempts to show how postmodern cultural theory, even while claiming otherwise, has made use of a conceptualization of “post-” that is dualistic. Postmodern cultural theory re-confirmed modern cultural theory, thus allowing transcendental and humanist traditions to haunt cultural theory after the Crisis of Reason. New materialist cultural theory shifts (post-) modern cultural theory, and provides an immanent answer to transcendental humanism. It is a cultural theory that is non-foundationalist yet non-relativist. In conformity with the interviewees in Part One of this book, we have shown that there is much to be gained from an argument such as the latter; after all, postmodernisms and modernisms are manifold, on the one hand, and epistemologically very similar on the other. It is for this reason that new materialism continues to rewrite the history of philosophy. As already stated, the minor tradition Deleuze proposed is now widely read and commented upon, but increasingly, great minds of the past are being given the attention that their work needs. For there is no need to limit this tradition to a series of personae or even to what the History of Philosophy has labeled a particular “type” of thinking. Scholars at work within modernism such as Bergson, Whitehead, William James and Edmund Husserl, all of whom had been pushed aside or reinterpreted by dualist thinking, are in need of serious materialist re-readings, which are in fact being carried out by an increasing number of scholars today. There is not even any reason to exclude Hegel from this list. For when he stated that “Action divides [spirit] into substance and consciousness of the substance” (Hegel [1807] 1977, paragraph 444), this not only comes very close to Spinoza’s solution to the mind-body problem with which this chapter began, it also allows us to rethink Marx’s (Hegel-inspired) materialism as a (non-dualist) neo-materialism. The richness of all these philosophies had by and large been suffering from dualism-dominated modernism and postmodernism. The way in which new materialism was generated in the previous paragraph alluded to the fact that duration not only came to be inserted into matter (ontology), but also and simultaneously into theory formation (epistemology). In other words, theory formation also entails the materialization of boundaries. Starting theory formation from movement alludes to cartography rather than classification, which is the third instantiation of transversality that we intend to highlight in this chapter.

In the introduction we claimed that new materialism not only enacts a thinking about theory formation that is other than classificatory (new materialism sets in motion a non-dualistic epistemic practice), but also that it enables us to understand the way in which theory formation used to be thought (following a territorialization pattern). We claimed that classification exemplifies the territorial and is fully dualistic, and throughout this chapter we have made clear how seemingly opposite epistemic tendencies or classes are in fact non-exhaustive oppositions. New materialism criticizes not only the use of “a discipline” or “a paradigm” as pre-determined, but is also critical, along the lines of the dismantling of binary oppositions that it enacts of the pre-determination of classifications of theoretical trends. Classifying epistemic tendencies that are supposedly prevalent in cultural theory implies working along territorial lines, which is a transcendentalizing gesture along with invoking sequential negation and a narrative of progress (i.e., it is dualist). This does not allow for the (un)folding of cultural theory—the matter-energy flows of theory formation, the non-linear coding practices, the cutting across matter and signification—to be captured. New materialism de-territorializes the ways in which cultural theory has been classified, and this process we call cartographical. We referred above to Colebrook, who questioned a conceptualization of “language” as “a fixed, determining, and inhuman grid imposed upon life.” She defined new materialism as allowing us to see not only matter, but also language as a “living force.” Questioning fixity thus opens up the possibility of thinking about theory formation in a non-linear, cartographical way.

Barad’s “Re(con)figuring Space, Time, and Matter” is useful for explaining the move away from the classificatory towards the cartographical. Earlier we mentioned Barad’s neologism “intra-action,” which allowed us to demonstrate that terms such as mind and matter, or sociology and new materialism, do not exist independently before they begin to inter-act. Barad (2001, 98) explains the machinery of intra-action as follows:

Affirming onto-epistemology, Barad talks about mapping practices that draw boundaries, and she claims that the same objects/boundaries materialize in non-exhaustively opposite mapping practices (Euclidean space versus stasis in non-Euclidean space). The mapping practice, generating intra-action and generated through it, shifts both options and works along the following lines:

These genealogies, or “cartographies” in our vocabulary, are non-dualist approaches to theory formation that allow for absolute deterritorializing. Not primarily interested in representation, signification, and disciplinarity, new materialism is fascinated by affect, force, and movement as it travels in all directions. It searches not for the objectivity of things in themselves but for an objectivity of actualization and realization. It searches for how matter comes into agential realism, how matter is materialized in it. It is interested in speeds and slownesses, in how the event unfolds according to the in-between, according to intra-action. New materialism argues that we know nothing of the (social) body until we know what it can do. It agrees with studying the multiplicity of modes that travel natureculture as the perpetual flow it has always already been.

In the next chapter we will take up the question of non-dualism, and we will discuss in a detailed manner how new materialism pushes dualism into non-dualism, thus allowing for a non-reductive take on matter and language.