The first "Saturday Think" at Sawtooth. Will there be a discernable difference between weekday "thinks" and and weekend "thinks"?
More on the theme of New Materialism - two sources that illustrate (sometimes inadvertently) the fluid, even uncontained, nature of the whole thing.
- Barrett, Estelle and Barbara Bolt (eds) 2013 Carnal knowledge: towards a 'New Materialism' through the arts, IB Tauris, London & New York: A recently-published collection of essays (not all of which see the New Materialism in a positive light) coming out of an Australian/Finnish conversation - worth reading the 'Introduction' to get a picture of the field. Extremely irritating that the book has no index - but a lot of blank pages where it might have been. (This does mean you have to read the whole thing to find the bits you want!)
- Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost (eds) 2010 New materialisms: ontology, agency and politics, Duke University Press, Durham & London: Do note that the title uses 'materialisms', plural - this should be an indicator that all is not cut and dried in the New Materialism world. Inclusion of essays by Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti and Rey Chow give some idea of the critical star power - and the directions - of this collection.
Other publications hint at the pervasive interest in materiality (perhaps rather than materialism) in art making that simply needed to be identified or to be articulated as attracting an equal measure of concern as the maker and their subject. Most notable, and with an Australian context, would be Paul Carter's Material thinking. Although not directly addressing New Materialism, Carter's materials are clearly thought of in an active relationship to makers, and are partners in the animating process of artmaking. Thankfully these materials escape the fall into anthropomorphising that seems to occur when makers are held in thrall of materials and hapticity. A rather different flagging of New Materialism came about in the programming of the Seventh Australian Print Symposium (Canberra, 2010) with its theme of 'Materiality' and its range of topics: Concreteness, Corporeality, Reality, Palpability, Perceptible, Physicality, and Experience - which can be found, although sometimes differently approached, in the collections, above. The convenor, Roger Butler, aimed at a revisiting of the print as a vehicle for social commentary, referring to Materialism's beginnings in Marxism (and that ism's rather more specific take on an economically inscribed Materialism).
One recurring aspect of New Materialism, perhaps a key to how it might be understood, is the calling up of the notion of "Vitalism". I get the idea that Man Ray might have liked it ... but understanding it as a modernist practice rather than the more relational, even ecological take emerging from New Materialism would be very much open to discussion. Worth reading Jane Bennett's chapter in Coole and Frost (above) to get something of the background.
More New Materialism later ... and watch for the New Materialism session at Sawtooth later in the year!
My entry point for new materialism is perhaps one of the less obvious ones - I came to it through medievalist/medievalism theory, exemplified by the kinds of writing published by the journal _postmedieval_ (http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/index.html). One major stream within this writing is tactility - touch as not only a movement/intimacy that can reach through time but also as a moment of re-surfacing that evades heirarchies and divisions of interior/exterior. The other stream is the ways in which materialism can multiply alterity - to render visible and vocal human and non-human actants within the medieval sphere and in dialogue with the present, to bring forward strange voices echoing through time. I'm interested, therefore, in thinking about the ways in which new materialism can destabilise chronologies and periodisation.
ReplyDeleteKaren
This is an off-the-cuff response. It would seem that medievalist theory can reveal a number of modes or areas of discourse when thought through a new materialist frame. I'm really interested in both the idea of tactility -- the necessity of matter in its most widest concept is foundational -- and that of time through which matter moves. (Oh, and time as matter ... but this might be going a bit fast!) The idea of revealing also appears foundational given the phenomenological bent of much of the more recent new materialist writing (Heidegger rediscovered, yet again, but also Merleau-Ponty and others!). I am particularly interested now in finding new materialist takes of time/duration/direction that do now fall into an historicising of matter (ie an echo may be 'strange' but it will be of its moment as an echo, not as an historical voice), just as there is currently an apparent terror of anthropomorphising matter in recognising its vibrancy (ie 'matter' for many new materialists is still now considered equal to or indivisible from, humanity). I'll think more on this one!
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