Doing new materialisms: an interview with Maria Tamboukou

Including an interview as part of the issue responds to one specific question that has to do with the production of scientific knowledge. During the Training School (November 2017, Barcelona, Spain), the context in which this interview is framed, we highlighted the importance of creating inter-generational knowledges able to transverse across disciplines and the historicity of matter itself. We believed in the plurality of the voice as an intersection that allows de-centering the figure of the author as a hegemonic representation of scientific knowledge. This interview was performed in a very specific context and was opening the training school in order to find out how an onto-epistemological definition of new materialisms could affect a contemporary definition of feminist politics in order to elaborate a framework for non-hierarchical pedagogical practices. The interview that we are transcribing in this journal represents this specific moment between Beatriz Revelles-Benavente (co-editor and co-organizer of the Training School together with Ana M. González) and Maria Tamboukou, a recognized scholar on new materialist methodologies. The interview is divided into four thematic questions and we have reproduced the dialogue almost as it happened during the event:


New materialist methodologies
Beatriz Revelles Benavente (BRB): I would like to start this training school by retrieving one specific definition of new materialisms from Nick Fox and Pam Alldred (2015, p.399), "New ¿or neo?Materialism […] concerned fundamentally with the material workings of power, but focused firmly upon social production rather than social construction […] how desires, feelings and meanings also contribute to social production."This implies conceptualizations of research and research inquiries as "assemblages", "processual", "affective", and many other qualifiers that situate the kind of research that is open up by this ethic-onto-epistemological umbrella that attempts to describe how matter comes to matter.This article reflects upon a processual methodology that embeds and embodies alternatives to realist or constructionist methods, the de-centralization of human agency, the conceptualization of research-assemblage and a moving towards an assessment of the micropolitics of the social.Taking into account that our speakers here are key figures in what seems to configure methodological strategies of new materialism.I would like them to explain to us how genealogies (van der Tuin, 2015) and narrative entanglements (Tamboukou, 2016;2018) contribute to the reconfiguration of "material-discursive" practices of the world, on the one hand.And, on the other, taking into account that methodologies can be considered intra-actively working with ontologies and epistemologies in how practices matter, how these methodologies reconfigure a "new materialist" conceptualization on their own.That is to say, how can we practice methodologies engaging with the relation between acting and thinking (Tamboukou, 2016).
Maria Tamboukou (MT): In responding to this first question, I need to make an initial cartography of my theoretical and methodological approach to narratives.
1) Narrative research focuses on singularities, addressing the question of 'who one is'.At the heart of this proposition lies a philosophical tradition that focuses on difference rather than sameness and identity.In his major philosophical work, 'Difference and repetition ' Deleuze (2004) has forcefully put forward the concept of pure difference, not different from, but different per se.I have expanded elsewhere unfixed.It is not a unitary core self, but rather a system of selves grappling with multilevelled differences and taking up subject positions, not in a permanent way, but rather temporarily, as points of departure for nomadic becomings.
4) Narrative research is a site of embodied knowledge: in Spinoza's monistic philosophy, mind and body are the same reality, though expressed in different ways.
The body in its closed unity to the mind is therefore a site of auto/biographical knowledge because memory itself is embodied.In Cavarero's (2000) articulation of the narratable self, the auto/biographical exercise of memory is not about the self becoming 'intelligible'; it is rather about the experience that the self has of being narratable and therefore familiar.Each one of us knows that who we meet always has a unique story.And this is true even if we meet them for the first time without knowing their story at all.Moreover, we are all familiar with the narrative work of memory, which in a totally involuntary way, continues to tell us our own personal story (2000, p.33) 5) Narratives open up to the importance of the imaginary in what counts as research: Moira Gatens has underlined Spinoza's line of thought that without imagining that we can do something, we will actually never become able to do it (cited in James 2000, p.47).In this light, Genevieve Lloyd has further argued that Spinoza's philosophy has opened up possibilities for a reconceptualization of the imaginary and has discussed how Antonio Negri has read Spinoza's formulation of imagination as a path giving access to the realities of the social world: 'Imagination can play a constitutive role, rather than just a distorting one; in understanding its fictions, reason reflects on the real social world in all its confusion and contradictoriness' (Lloyd 1996, p.63 memory to have access to the pure past, how cultural memory works in the production and indeed narration of stories.These problematics around time and memory are further interrelated with question around spaces and places. 7) Narrative research is deployed in the whirl of the dance between power and desire: Desire in narrative is a theme much discussed and written about.As Teresa de Lauretis has put it: 'A story is always a question of desire ' (2000, p.112).However, how desire is conceptualized and used is in itself an unresolved question analogous to that of the question of narrative and obviously psychoanalysis has been the field par excellence wherein questions of desire have been discussed and debated.
8) Stories however, are not just effects conditioned by relations of power, knowledge and desire.Stories do things: they produce realities.Narrative research is therefore about the constitutive power of stories in producing realities and indeed the subject.
In my own research I have theorised women's narratives as technologies of the female self (Tamboukou, 2003).I have argued that women's narratives have operated as a critical technology of their self-formation, suggesting various and often contradictory political and ethical ways of 'becoming a subject'.However, narratives work with multifaceted power effects.As I have already argued narrative research informed by Foucauldian insights is concerned with the processes, procedures and apparatuses, whereby truth and knowledge are interrelated in the production of narratives and in their effects.
These eight propositions about narrative research are by no means exhaustive or final.I would rather suggest they be taken as research trails that can always be bent into different directions.They have been offered as tools in those strands of narrative research, exploring the multiple connections that difference in narratives can generate.Having recognized the fact that narrative research is a complicated field with multi-faceted levels of analysis, this does not mean that any route chosen within the narrative approach cannot be rigorous and systematic, creating of course its own norms, rules and taxonomies that work within particular contexts, what drawing on the work of feminist theorist Karen Barad (2007), I have called 'narrative phenomena' (Tamboukou 2014).What is at the heart of Barad's theorization is the recognition that Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 155-175  ISSN: 2604-7551(1) entities can never be pre-defined, they always emerge through 'intra-actions' (Barad, 2007) within phenomena.Drawing on quantum physics, Barad has introduced the neologism of 'intra-actions' as a theoretical juxtaposition to the usual notion of interactions.In doing this she denotes a significant difference: while interactions occur between already established and separate entities, 'intra-actions' occur as relations between components.Entities-both human and non-human-actually emerge as an effect of these intra-actions, without having stable points or positions.
In this light the task of the narrative researcher is to map 'the narrative phenomena' she is working with and trace the emergence of entities, be they stories, themes, Revisiting the archive of nineteenth-century feminism with a sensitivity to the materiality of its life documents has opened up different vistas of conceptualization and understanding.In the process of my research I have allowed myself to drift along the rhythms of the documents that I have been reading, analysing and writing about.
Following Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis ( 2004), I have tried to listen to the rhythms of the documents I was reading, imagine the space/time continuum of their production, as well as the social and political conditions of their emergence.Locating for example the various addresses of the first feminist newspaper was in itself a concrete experience in the spatiality and materiality of the first feminist movement: it was from their homes that the seamstresses wrote and published, the same places where they would most probably work to make up for the meagre wages of their needlework.
When an editor withdrew, the address would also change.From a neo-materialist perspective then, the geography of the newspaper revealed an intriguing history, or maybe the history of the journal can be starkly traced in its geography: its different addresses are thus the material traces of economic and social differences in the editorship, as well as in the theoretical and political orientation of the journal.
In finally responding the last part of the question about how we can enter into methodologies engaging with the relation between acting and thinking let me first summarise that in my approach the archive is taken a) as a living organism, and thus as a process in becoming but b) it is also theorised in the light of the philosophies of 'the event'-that is my argument is that the archive is 'an event', an eruption that marks discontinuities and ruptures in our habitual modes of understanding and knowing.
What I have therefore suggested is that the materiality, temporality and sociality of the archive is crucial for the entire research process and that as researchers we should not separate the physical, social and intellectual dimensions of the archival research we carry out.are not possible for this kind of approach.How would you explain this conceptualization of causality for interdisciplinary contexts?What would be the empirical application of this nonlinear causality?And how does this affect to individual/and/or agential capacities?Your work is predicated on affirmation, on the power of the conjunction "and", in order to configure a theorization of new materialism.How can we configure this "and" (instead of a linear result) as the catalyst for political transformations in society?Could we say that this is potentially the openness of a radical future and the territorialisation of the social in New how we deal with unexpected eruptions, counter discourses and revolutionary events in the order of discourse, the status quo of social realities and ultimately the flow of history.
We are continuously confronted with such events, take the Parisian May events in 1968, or more recently the Arab spring events and in my recent research, the emergence of the first autonomous feminist movement in France.These were all 'untimely' events to put it in Grosz's words ( 2004) and their linear causalities were constructed a posteriori in the historiographical operation or in sociological and cultural analyses of their geographies and times.To put it bluntly, it is always easy to look back at an event and discern and map linear causalities.In my work I have instead raised the question of how sociologists can study temporal and singular events in a continuous process of being modified, influenced by Whitehead's understanding of reality as process (1985).As Steven Shaviro (2012, p.17) has succinctly put it, for Whitehead 'the world is made of events, and nothing but events: happenings rather than things, verbs rather than nouns, processes rather than substances'.And here is the leap to quantum physics which has revolutionized our understanding of the deep structure of reality.Material objects have dissolved into wave functions that lack well-defined properties, interact non-locally, and collapse into particles in non-deterministic ways that are inseparable from the subjects who measure them.Barad's (2007) work has of course been influential here particularly in showing how quantum processes are not only relevant for the most microscopic level of reality; but also for explaining consciousness, and by extension, human social life.
Drawing on Whitehead I have actually problematized and questioned the notion of serendipity, arguing instead that it is our entanglement in and emergence from the world in the midst of entangled causalities and events that makes serendipity as a recurrent theme in how we frame for example our findings and understandings in the archive (see sense?Does it make any sense to maintain categories such as woman or women or feminine or gender for a feminist conceptualization of politics?If not, how do we build a feminist politics of new materialism?
MT: This is a fair question that is always being posed when we enter new materialism territories and debates and of course there have been various and contradictory responses to this question, which I believe could be answered from two entry planes of thought that are the onto-epistemological plane and ethico-political frame: 1.The onto-epistemological plane that links with the first question in this dialogue: Gender relations, femininities, masculinities, gender-based violence and so on and so forth belong to what Whitehead (1985, p.129) has configured as 'the stubborn fact' of the past.Whitehead's philosophy configures reality on both a microscopic and a macroscopic level and highlights the fact that process should be understood as both flux and permanence.On the one hand, there is the problem of following the process wherein each individual unity of experience is realized.On the other hand, there is a recognition of some actual world out there, already constituted, 'the stubborn fact which at once limits and provides' according to Whitehead (ibid.);that is, the reality of matter that stays on while passing through flows and transformations.In this light, 'the stubborn fact', which belongs to the past, inheres in the flowing present wherein actualities are being constituted.This coexistence of permanence and flux creates conditions of possibility for the future, which is anchored in the present but has not been actualized yet.Attentiveness to 'the stubborn fact' is the weak link of all modern philosophies, Whitehead has remarked.(ibid.)'Philosophers have worried themselves about remote consequences, and the inductive formulations of science.
They should confine attention to the rush of immediate transition', to the fact that 'we finish a sentence because we have begun it, we are governed by stubborn fact'. (ibid.) Put it simply, there is a world out there solidified and crystallized with phenomena and problems that we need to address, simply because we have no choice.New materialist approaches are actually enhancing our understanding of the complexities of 'the stubborn fact of the past' (Whitehead 1985, p.129).
Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 155-175 ISSN: 2604-7551( 1) Tricks (ibid).Taking into account that new materialism is an emerging framework that aims at explaining reality through processes and not static results, how do we envision our contemporary archive.What do you think is it the relation of contemporary theories of new materialism with, for instance, Hemmings' (2011) politics of citation?Do you think that there is a trend to homogenize the knowledge of new materialism under the names of few contemporary and non-contemporary philosophers?Do you consider that the diversity present in disciplines, approach to politics, and feminist traditions is widely represented for a lack of a better word?
MT: First of all I think that Clare Hemming's politics of citation ( 2011) is a very useful angle to look at how the archive of feminist theory is being constituted as we speak.
However, Hemming's approach creates its own system of classifications and taxonomies and this inevitably includes some lines of analysis and excludes others, since there is simply no system of ordering that does not work through continuous openings and closings, inclusions and exclusions.My question therefore is not about whether exclusion is at work, but rather who or what gets excluded and with what effects.
Since archives of knowledge, feminist theories and new materialist approaches included, are always constituted through inclusions and exclusions, all we can do is to keep adding 'and, and, and,' instead of trying to add and frame the field, whatever the scheme we use.For example, I have found Hemming's (2011) tripartite schema of 'progress', 'loss' and 'returns' very restrictive: not only does it include, as much as it excludes, it also 'forces' citations and works within its categories.What we have tried to do within the network is to create some tools that could challenge hierarchies discourses, modes and of course narrative figures.In research, this question is explored on two interrelated planes: a) a theoretical plane wherein Foucauldian, Deleuzian and feminist lines of thought are making connections and b) a postnarratological plane where I chart how conventions of classical narratology are bent and how differentiations within various sub-genres of life writing, namely autobiographies, diaries and letters, emerge.What is central in this approach is the recognition and discussion of the fact that we are part of the storyworlds we seek to understand and therefore there can never be a clear-cut separation between 'the subject' and 'the object' of the research process.Making connections between intra-actions in scientific experiments in the field of quantum physics and narrative research in the social sciences, what I want to argue here is that 'the researcher', 'the documents of life' and the 'research strategies of narrative analysis' cannot be taken as separate and pre-existing entities that interact in the final stage of the research process, the writing of an article or a monograph.The 'research findings' and consequently the published outputs rather emerge through the multifarious entanglements-both material and discursive-between 'the researcher', 'the research object' and 'the research context'.As a matter of fact, 'the narrative researcher', 'the documents of life' and 'the research context' are not predefined entities either: they are constituted through entangled intra-actions and their particular constitution can only hold within the conditions of the research process, the experiment or rather the 'narrative phenomenon' within which they emerge.Having Doing new materialisms: an interview with Maria Tamboukou Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 155-175 ISSN: 2604-7551(1) mapped some of the complexities and intricacies of the field of narrative research, I can now retrace some of my research practices and methodological moves in the light of new materialism: Being a Foucauldian from the very beginning I always start with a problem and throughout my work this problem has been understood as the emergence of female subjectivity within particular public milieus: education, art, work and in my very recent project in science and particularly mathematics (see Tamboukou 2003, 2010, 2015b, 2018) In this context I have always worked with narratives as traces of this emergence.And since you find such narratives in archives, I have also become very interested in what it is that we do when we work in archives.There are therefore two planes of entanglement that I am interested in while working with archives and narratives: a) entanglements of discourses and practices that have left their traces in narratives and b) entanglements of discourses and practices within the archive (see Tamboukou 2016) In thus turning to the part of the question of what was reconfigured through this neomaterialist approach I will offer two examples from my work with 19th century French feminists (Tamboukou 2015b) that respond to the two levels of entanglements I have identified above: Narratives and discourses have been central in writing a feminist genealogy of women working in the garment industry.What has also emerged as a catalytic event is the question of 'how matter matters' (Barad 2007) in the excavation of the conditions of possibility for the seamstress to emerge as a labour activist, a political subject, a writer of history and a creator of culture.While doing the literature review for this research, I was indeed quite struck to realize that women workers' role in the emergence of the autonomous feminist movement in Europe has been shadowed and marginalised in the history of feminism.More specifically, the fact that the founders of the first autonomous newspaper in Europe, 'La Femme Libre' were seamstresses, was just a footnote, a biographical detail that had not played any role in feminist historians' analyses, particularly in the way they have presented different trends and differences within this movement.To put it simply, my analysis took as its Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 155-175 ISSN: 2604-7551(1) starting point the materiality of the seamstresses' work in understanding and ultimately reconfiguring the multiple becomings of feminist ideas in nineteenthcentury France and beyond.
I think is at the heart of understanding the debates and problematics around causality is the important notion of 'the event'.Early on in my work I was very much interested in what Foucault had configured as 'eventalization' (1986) in a genealogical understanding of history.Put it simply I got interested in the question of Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 155-175 ISSN: 2604-7551(1) of knowledge[and citations].Instead of creating a glossary for example, we have created an 'almanac' of notions, instead of creating a bibliography, we have instead opted for an autobibliography.The idea of the 'almanac' offers a more playful image of how archives of knowledge are crafted and recrafted.(see http://www.newmaterialism.eu/almanac)The notion of autobibliography shows how we create bibliographies through our own experiences of reading and learning, that is from specific and situated positions (see http://newmaterialism.eu/auto- Grosz, 2004ginning of the two-thousands, feminist contemporary theory (inGrosz, 2004) already warned feminism to move beyond static results because they were already part of the past.Some voices of new materialist research claim the necessity to move away from linear causalitations in research.For example, the work of Iris van der Tuin (2015) specifies two imbricated movements in order to produce knowledge.On the one hand, she encourages to think through quantum leaps that enable a reiteration of past, present and future in order to avoid claxifying feminist genealogies.On the other hand, she interpellates the unknown since since "what happens next is unknown, because every end result is always already a new point of Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 155-175 ISSN: 2604-7551(1) 2. Causality in new materialist methodologies BRBorigin."(van der Tuin, 2014, p.231)In your work, you explain knowledge as "emerg[ing] through new begnnings and unexpected connections in the web of contingent relations that constitute reality."(Tamboukou, 2015a, no page) Nevertheless, without the predictability that certain areas of social research provide to social problems, certain approaches remain vague or obscure since static results Tamboukou 2016).So to go back to your question about 'the relevance' of non-linear causalities within particular social and political contexts, I suggest that instead of linear causalities, we should be interested in 'causal efficacy', a notion in Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 155-175 ISSN: 2604-7551(1)