Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research

Thinking with Pathogens. Review of Posthuman Pathogenesis: Contagion in Literature, Arts, and Media, edited by Başak Ağın & Şafak Horzum

2024-04-16T11:08:58+00:00

Review of Decolonial Conversations in Posthuman and New Materialist Rhetorics edited by Jennifer Clary-Lemon and David M. Grant

2024-04-22T14:17:11+00:00

Relations of care and affirmative disruptions in academia: A conversation with Katie Strom

2024-03-19T09:58:59+00:00

This article features an intra-view with critical posthumanist Professor Kathryn (Katie) Strom and the co-editors of the intra-view section of this journal Jacky Barreiro and Magali Forte. Throughout their conversation, Strom shares her determination to co-create relations of care and affirmative disruptions in the neoliberal context of academia while giving concrete examples and explaining how her feminist praxis evolved. The three authors discuss several initiatives Strom and others have implemented, inspired by Braidotti’s (2019) notion and praxis of affirmative ethics among other feminist scholarship, to create spaces of support for graduate students and early career scholars. This piece encourages readers to view and understand feminist processes as affirmative disruptions to foster affective flows, challenge conventions, and inspire innovative scholarly pursuits.

What is the Matter with Matter? Barad, Butler, and Adorno

2024-04-03T11:53:57+00:00

This article aims to read feminist new materialisms (Barad), together with ‘postulated’ linguistic or cultural primacy of Queer Theory (Butler), to show how both are engaged in similar critical-ethical endeavours. The central argument is that the criticism of Barad and new materialisms misses Butler’s materialistic insights due to a narrow interpretation of Butler's alleged social-constructivist position. There is, therefore, a specific focus on where they both make similar ethical appeals. Moreover, the article relies on Adorno's negative dialectic to highlight an interpretation of Barad and Butler as being part of the same dialectical movement, in which materialism and idealism fluctuate in their mutual criticisms, thus continuing the procession towards 'new knowledge' and emancipation, or freedom, through their motions back and forth.

Henri Bergson and New Materialism

2024-03-19T10:08:39+00:00

Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memorypresents a panpsychist ontology. Bergson pushes the dualism of mind and matter to breaking point. Matter is reconceived as the sum of all images. Idealism and deterministic materialism are bypassed. We get an indeterministic and emancipative model of the world. The idea that matter is inherently creative and endowed with both perception and memory is highly relevant today. Materiality, far from being dead or passive, is equipped with agency. Bergson’s themes coincide with the concerns of contemporary New Materialism. Authors working in the latter school explicitly cite Bergson as a key influence. Bergson can help us understand what “newness” means in New Materialism. That being said, recent scholarship has pointed to certain unpalatable political implications of Bergson’s works, in particular the anthropological premises of Two Sources of Morality and Religion. In my article, I seek to address such critiques. In my view, by reading Bergson ontologically as a New Materialist process philosophy, some of the unfortunate cultural and ideological presuppositions Bergson did not reflect upon may be ameliorated to a great extent.

The Archive as a World-Making Apparatus in the Anthropocene

2024-04-09T09:51:58+00:00

This text aims to explore the archive as a powerful force that shapes life. Consequently, it seeks to develop an ethical framework for the archive from a feminist perspective. De-extinction can be linked to the archive as a stabilizing apparatus and a scene of responsibility (Wolfe 2018) that entails our ethical commitment to acknowledge the radical passivity of those who no longer exist in this world, both as individuals and species. This scene of responsibility is intertwined with the agency of the archive. In other words, the archive acts as a life-creating apparatus by shaping the conditions for reading, the future, and, to some extent, reality itself. By establishing the foundations for an ethics of the archive as a practice that creates life, this text aims to reframe the discourse surrounding extinction and de-extinction.