Feminising politics: notes on material and temporal feminist modal logics in action

Feminist activism aims to work to change the inequitable structures of the world. But feminists themselves get bound up in actions and intentions that are tied to their large object of critique (the patriarchy, the planet, the media, the canon, etc), and the micropolitics of the subjects constituting and constituted by those objects can be swept up in humanistic rhetorical gestures and words. How can we teach the modalities and the genealogy of feminist actions that offer tools for everyday living and for a community practice, and which also offer some ways to engage with the affective matter of the world from a posthumanist perspective, and thereby work to shift cultural attitudes? In addition to the valuable work done by those that tirelessly figure methods of communicating social inequities, the work of research led feminist informed teaching and governance can not only excavate the histories of social, political, speciesist, and biological inequities, but also offer a critique of these positions by the terms of their epistemological construction, and provide different modalities of practice. This article focuses on the latter, discussing how we might design curriculum and engage a pedagogy of recognition for a feminist modal ethics. How modes of feminist new materialist practice take the questions of affect, and agency, to enable ethical political practices is a pressing concern for many communities concerned with generating a planetary ethics. How new materialist methodology is useful for thinking the vernacular political reality was the topic of an intensive discussion and debate that took place in November 2017 in Barcelona. Taking an example of the concrete work undertaken by Barcelona Councillor Gala Pin in relation to the neighbourhood of Ciutat Vella, the article proposes that we explore and extend the genealogy of a feminist modal logics.

Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020):  ISSN: 2604-7551 (1) Working with the modalities of feminist actions, enables us to firstly capture the patterns of feminist movements, and then secondly, explore how the type of modal frameworks of different feminist new materialist methods offer concrete ways in which to not just think through or with a political event, but offer practical tools for confronting the inequity, or predicated moment of the modal. Modal logics belong to a family of philosophical logics that assist us in thinking, narrativizing, and acting according to the conditions and situations we experience, and which determine that situation in the world. Modal logic can be purely analytical, but here I draw on metaphysical modal models (cf. Grosz, 1998;Stang, 2016),  (1) and minority groups; protectionist moves with the aims of limiting and controlling free trade and restrictions and tighter surveillances imposed on the movement of people).
The affective agency of political communications are seen in countless such examples of the processes of national governance politics in action, and feminist political theorists and philosophers were quick to note these shifts in governance as patterns of neoliberalist modes, and offer analyses of their social implications (cf. Brown, 2017;Fraser, 2016;Patel & Connelly, 2019). The ontological modal processes of hate regimes are based on populist narratives of the world; engendering hierarchically structured societies, economically biased towards barelythere majority politics that advocate 'post-truth' conditions (Jasanoff & Simmet 2017).
This legitimation of truth and of reality is indeed a crisisthat is generative of increasingly violent actions -that undermines the sense of a future as being socially cohesive and welcoming for all people, and one that endangers the abundant fecundity of the planet demonstrated by its lack of care for the natural environment (IPCC 2018). Instead, vernacular and indeed, any sense of "future societies" are expressed as "social," rather than "political" places where the State is devised as a "giant household" to maintain its sovereign citizens (Brown 2017: 118). The problem with this of course, is that it tends to be exclusionary on the basis of "not-family"; "not one-of-us" type of family; not to mention the enabling of the pathology of nationalism, generative of hatred of 'others' (cf. Braidotti, 2008;Fraser, 2016). There is such power in naming and providing inclusion in a "familial" community, and conversely, the agency of exclusion or difference (real or imagined) has terrible consequences.
This 'truth' of the everyday of the early part of the twenty-first century is not the utopia that was imagined at the end of the last century; rather the 'truth' is predicated on data sets of human capital within the algorithmic condition (cf. Colman et.al, 2018;Dixon-Román, 2017). Feminist actions continually strive for representation at the  (Arendt, 1958, p.123). In the post 9/11; 2001 decades, the vernacular conditions for the flourishing of the pathologies of totalitarianism are enabled in an even more intensive way; with digital algorithms communicating the ideological dogma of politicians who are intent on restricting freedoms for an ideally homogenous people messaging the divisive rhetoric slightly faster than the printed presses' propaganda posters of the previous century. Arendt's thesis is that totalitarian rules in motion; unlike a building it is structureless, but in its 'movement' (in the literal sense of a political party's movement), modes of totalitarianism destroy old frameworks even as they create new authoritarian territories in an endless cycle of restructuring (Arendt, 1958, p.398-99 Arendt's work, to try to provide for their readers a framework for the authoritarian rhetoric that was winning the popular vote, and radically shifting the cultural and political landscape (cf. Denning, 2016;Illing, 2019). In addition to thinking of the agency of political movements upon communities of minority groups, for vulnerable groups of women, girls, and for those identifying as transgender women, the agency of neoliberalism's economic governance of and upon their lives needs to be accounted for and protected against the forces that only wish to profit from them as a 'living capital body' (Colman, 2016, p.189), but not care for them in any ethical manner (cf. Brown, 2017).
External forces, such as the movement of totalitarian forces described in Arendt, and the internal governance of bodies by neoliberal; neocapitalist forces, operate as material modalities. By this, I mean that the models of neoliberalism -including their frameworks for assembling raw capitalmanipulate sentient and non-sentient matter through a political agency that aims to produce the maximum profit through control over the production of things, information, and concepts under the rules of the marketplace, with little or no regard for the ethics of their production. Models that use material modalities refers us to the material conditions of a society. Material modal conditions thus point us toward what is the 'truth' being constructed in any given social situation, as the material includes the legal, as well as the "feasible"; "factual actuality" in terms of the technological conditions of the material (Poser 2013: 111).1 As such, the very construction of a material modality offers itself as both a recognisable pattern or paradigm, but further, and provides, through analysis of the artefacts and type of use of matter, a range of processes, methods and tools that can methods about how to do this. "We" as a group are implicated in the creation and maintenance of this situation that "we" also inherited. How should we be forming governance structures that prioritise care and compassion rather than ignorance and hatred; fear of difference, and fear of change? How do we teach in a post-truth world?
What tools we teach to deal with these conditions are incredibly important. An activism cannot just be a series of voices and disruptive actions. An ethical activism is one committed to a genuine ethics of care, the critique of unethical forms of agency of the infrastructural organisation of matter, and a desire to see diversity flourish.
A clear example of a new materialist modelling came from a discussion between politician and activist Gala Pin, and feminist curator and activist, Whitney Stark.2 Stark spoke of her work with the Reclaim our Pride movement, and the strategies around working outside of non-ethical funding models, and of how to do collective work safely in the face of extreme political affects that endanger freedom (Stark, 2017 Pin described the kinds of strategies used to 'make a different reality for women' who live in her neighbourhood, particularly around El Raval. Pin described how this area had more than 80 different types of communities living closely togethercomprised of a range of different ethnicities, practicing different cultural beliefs, and using different languages -but also making its own self-community through what she described as 'co-living.' Speaking of this recent work on neighbourhood cohesion, Pin described aspects of the education plan and further, providing a specific example of environmental planning as a feminist. Pin spoke of two kinds of education issues for her neighbourhood; the first being ensuring gender equality in schools, given the second point of the diversity issues outside of the school yard. 52% of the population is from non-Spanish backgrounds, and a majority of these include women that stay at home to work are migrant women. For the women who live in La Barceloneta, many do not speak Catalan (the local language) or Spanish (the official language).
They are mothers whose children are entered into a language education system not their own. The children go to school and come home working in the language of Barcelona, which their mothers can become more and more isolated.  (1) extending to work around issues of gender related violence, and the access of all genders, including transgender, to medical support (Pin, 2017).
External and internal community politics thus cause a range of affects to be enacted upon individuals and social groups. In addition, as  (1) is always in close proximity to an historical site with heritage significance, and is a place that attracts a lot of visitors. The built environmental questions for a playground at a heritage site were: How could some of the women be able to be in a public space, yet be comfortable, be secure, at the same time as a wide range of tourists and officials would be occupying the space? The result was to build an environment in consultation with the women who would use it that itself was a physical, material enabler of different modes of engagement; offering a shield against prying eyes, but multiple vantagepoints for seeing the matter that mattered: for the carer's supervision of the children; comfort for the female perspective; and for the tourist's sight of the heritage site/s.
The material question developed through consultation became: How do you design a space that is useful for tourists and for communities? This is a material modal question in that it is concerning the relationality of the matter. Significant for educators to note, a relational modal is different to other forms of modal questions (such as contingency and necessity) (see Poser, 2013;Colman, 2019). Pin is considering the matter of the site itself as well as the human elements in order to devise a response to the intra-affects of the community politics that arisein this case-from the activities of site sharing as a community. Amongst others, these affects include fear (individual women in public), as well as desire (that of the child wishing to play; the carer wishing to partake of the community; the tourist wishing to engage in a heritage site). Pin gave this example of the design of a collaborative built environment as a way of educating on 'feminising politics.' This, as both she and Stark discussed, it is not just a matter of expressing the actions being engagedas we might with a range of political theories that name patterns of actions without either offering countermeasures, or understanding the consequences of demonisation (see Glaser, 2018 (1) 'we often discuss the form and structure but not the ethics of the occupation of the form; so that it is not co-opted' (Stark, 2017). All of these factors contribute to our understanding of the material modalities that affect the relations of infrastructures, materials, and community groups. Naming and questioning those modalities helps educate on the kinds of material conditions that organise how a community is living.
In this way Pin's focus on the material modalities of her neighbourhood, offers an ethical practice that critically negotiates a pathway through the oppressive agency of neoliberal forces.  (1) and react and reject? So that when we think about affect, it is in its specific function as a modality, as it is framing a 'what if?' proposition as well as defining a situation.

Temporal modal logics
In narrativising a particular affect in terms of its modal logic, we ascribe a temporal measure. And this temporal measure may change over time. The temporal is a measure but also a value that communities and societies use for mapping out the duration of things. How long does a political regime last? How long did the community last? How long does a relationship last?
The temporal itself is a non-material abstract concept, but it names and gives form to matter, to a block -units of matter, units of experience in a Baradian sense. The duration of things enables a comparison of matter, that's made into material agency.
And I think this is kind of a really interesting point to think about affect and agency, because one of the most significant invisible changes occurs in societies and communities, is in the ways in which the conceptualisation and then realisation of information and ideas, are given process and form.
How the temporal as an abstracted form is applied; as a measure between various relations of matter, can tell us a lot about the forms of political agency and this is one of the core factors that mobilises feminists' interaction. These are the processes that various organisations manifest, for example as media images that we see around political campaigns, in order to produce and maintain their political subjects and positions. The question is, how then do we articulate the temporality of matter as it forces itself into agential forms? There are a number of feminist thinkers that provide a genealogical framework of feminist durational concepts for consideration of how our current conditions of communication, transformational potentials, and a planetary ethical life may be reimagined, through the appropriation of agential forms (cf. Smith, 1987;Braidotti, 2002;Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018). A thinker who offers feminist actions through a temporal mode is Elizabeth Grosz, who works carefully through the Deleuzean inflected Bergsonian durational lexicon, as it might produce a more open appreciation of sexual difference (Grosz ,1994(Grosz , , p.2005 (1) In this nod to both Deleuze (who often pointed out the untimeliness of his own work), and Bergson (Grosz's point is that the 'future' that feminism / feminist theory looks to is one that is 'bound up with change' (Grosz, 2010, p.48 through finding something untimely in the patriarchal present and past' (Grosz, 2010, p.49).
Grosz goes so far as to call upon feminism to direct itself toward change, and to 'changing itself as much as to changing to world ' (2010, p.49), in order to develop what she calls 'feminist theory' as a discipline that will be 'a movement able to adequately address the real in all its surprising complexity' (Grosz, 2010, p.49).

Articulating this real is what Grosz apologetically describes as 'what is most abstract
and useless, what is most speculative and cosmological, in order that transformation, upheaval, and change become conceivable' (Grosz, 2010, p.51). This is a question for identifying not only the framework (epistemological and metaphysical) used to describe the 'truth' of the world; its ethical reality, or its collective, community ethos, but its modality. What are the modal practices engaged to generate the methods of practicing within the framework? For example, as Stacey Alaimo reflects about the modality of one of her edited books: "Material Feminisms seek to maintain modes of incisive and necessary discursive critique while also accounting for the many material forces that may interact with the discursive." (Alaimo 2014a, p.16) There is potentially a problem of just narrativising in "real" time within the paradigms already established; thus repeating the status quo. This is what feminist education, and politics aim to avoid by attending to the affective modes in action. Grosz provides a practical, applied methodological framework to approach the empirical, to consider how this real of the present may be first of all mapped, and thus conceived and made  (1) perceivable. Articulating the modal framework is the task that new materialists often set themselves.
Grosz sets three tasks for feminist theory to embrace: First: A return to the question of materiality: 'We need to return to the question of matter, its forms, nature, and capacity, in order to address the direct objects of feminist investigation'. Secondly: A rethinking of 'biological questions' is required, in order to provide a direct -not linguistic -address of 'the material bases of the body's development (as male, as female, as raced, sexed, and historically encultured)' (Grosz, 2010, p.50 (Grosz, 2010, p.50). Grosz notes that these forces are to be found in the 'unspoken assumptions of feminist politics and struggle', but primarily, she says, through a 'direct analysis' of 'the force of temporality' (Grosz, 2010, p.51). And this third point is where I will conclude this article, directing the work of feminist new materialisms to attend to the temporal modality in their accounts of affect and agency (the forces of temporality upon matter), such as we see exemplified in the work of Gala Pin within her community.

Conclusion: feminist modal logics
Rather than just being an assumed factor, or an event in history; the empirical and conceptual investigation into the constitution of a 'material environment' is what enables the political reality to be named. Examining a temporal mode of a community gives us their artefacts for measuring their histories, but also a genealogy of their value systems; their "truth". Rather than just being an assumed factor, the empirical and conceptual investigation into the constitution of what is our material environment, is what enables the political reality to be named-within and by its temporal modality.  (Barad, 2003). Offering a critique of the epistemological narratives of practice-forming ontological 'truths' (that are used for example, to great effect in the work of Braidotti; Barad; Latour; Haraway; Alaimo, 2014b), is evidence of new materialism's deep commitment to transforming politics into a more ethical practice. New materialist strengths have been working on introducing and reintroducing discourses and practises of thinking and working with matter and its material and cognitive infrastructures, sometimes framed as empirical methodologies, or narrative research, but always concerning material modalities (eg. Alaimo & Hekman, 2008;Bennet 2010;Hayles, 1999;Livholts & Tamboukou, 2015;Iovino & Oppermann, 2014). No matter how abstracted or complex theory theoretical framework is, the new materialist theories continually serve to provoke and intervene and to remind theorist practitioners of all kinds, that all positions arrived from the material processes in the world. We need to continually ask what is matter? Why is  (1) it glorified or vilified? How do we undo the negative structures it has been put into service for that are destructive and harmful for the environment, and ask this very critical question of how matter comes to matter? The feminist activity engaging with such questions has led to very exciting possibilities, that Barad  Research for this article was supported by COST Action IS1307, supported by the EU Framework Programme Horizon 2020.