Notes on New Materialism

When I consider the potential meanings of participatory, it feels important to talk about feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad’s version of new materialism. I also see the influence of the new materialism ontology in almost every thinker (post 1980s) that I cite in this thesis so I feel it is important that I am straightforward and clear in outlining this theory. The new materialist ontology itself umbrellas a range of perspectives in thought, each taking a theoretical and practical “turn to matter”. It began to emerge with Gilles Deleuze in the early 80’s in response to the linguistic turn of post-structuralism, and places emphasis on the materiality of everything in the world, both social and natural. This includes human bodies, all animate organisms, material objects, spaces, places, natural and built environments, even time and gravity. (Gamble et al. 2019).

In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad takes another look at the double slit experiment conducted by Neils Bohr. This re-thinking of the experiment gave rise to her intra-active account of the “measurement problem” in quantum physics. Through this experiment, Bohr and his cohorts learned that light is not indeterminate and, more importantly, that observation affected the outcome of the experiment. This is vitally important as it proves that all experimentation is relational. If the boundaries between observer and observed are not fixed, humans cannot possibly position themselves as outside and separate observers of the universe. Barad carefully elaborates and extends this outcome of the double slit experiment as an ontological shift, where historically it has been thought of only through its epistemological problematics (Gamble et al. 2019). She argues that there is no property belonging to any thing or body (discerned through physical attributes, sound, or thought), that exists prior to, or remains unchanged by actions towards or encounters with, other things. This reality she coins “agential-realism”. It implies that matter does not have agency in and of itself. Rather, agency arises, and identity is formed, within intra-actions between matter. Therefore matter and meaning are always co-forming and co-constituting each other in a relational and generative process of becoming where agency and vitality do not exist apart from particular intra-active performances (Barad 139).

There are some key tenets of new materialism that are important to note. Firstly, there is a rejection of difference between previously accepted binaries of nature and culture, human and non-human, structure and agency, animate and inanimate, and mind and matter. New materialists regard the material world as open, uneven, contingent, relational, unpredictable, dynamic, heterogeneous, and emergent. There is an understanding that no longer privileges human action, and they argue that all matter has the capacity to affect and be affected. These affective events perpetuate a world that is continually emergent.

This allows everything to be relational and contextual rather than essential and absolute because there is no hierarchy. Everything is materially embedded and embodied in the new materialist framework. There is an emphasis on ontology (study of the nature of being) over epistemology (the study of how things can be known) (Fox, Aldred 2019). Performative new materialists such as Barad, embrace an ethico-onto-epistemology where ethics, being and knowledge are equally entangled (Gamble et al, 2019). It is through such an ethico-onto-epistemology that we might refocus away from hierarchies, systems and structures, directing our attention instead to affective and relational events. Now, I am old enough, have experienced enough, have overcome enough intra-actions, and have been transformed enough by them, that when I read Barad’s theories I think, “Yes, that makes total sense to me. I like it.”