Issue No. 25 2014 — New Immaterialities Immateriality, Affectivity, Experimentation: Queer Science and Future (original) (raw)
During the nineteenth century scientists, philosophers, artists, engineers, medics and fascinated audiences were interested in phenomena and experiences which appeared to confound, disturb, disrupt and unsettle distinctions between the self and other, inside and out, natural and cultural, real and unreal, material and immaterial, subjective and collective and past and present. This included mediumship, table-tilting, rapping, hypnotic suggestion, telepathy, hallucinatory phenomena and other unusual entities and processes. These experiences have largely now become the subject and object of a particular research field within psychology and the cognitive sciences, known as the "psychology of anomalous experience." However, their mystery and puzzling and enigmatic status continue to engage our imaginations and carry longstanding reflections related to the question of what it means to be human, what it means to be embodied, and what remains inexplicable and un-representable. I will use the term immateriality in this paper to describe these processes, practices and phenomena; as in its usual definition immateriality refers to processes taken to have no material body or form (also to be unseen, invisible or ghostly). One common example related to this version of immateriality is that the mind is immaterial (related to ideation) and separate and distinct from the body as a material substance or process. The designation Immaterial also often assumes that something is of little or no relevance or consequence. These are all assumptions I wish to challenge. I am mindful that the term immaterial also has other genealogies within contemporary philosophy and media and cultural theory, which challenge this thinking. These are the subject of other papers in this special issue, and which this paper I hope can be read in dialogue with. I want to start by reflecting on what is articulated by the term, new, in New Immaterialities, the focus and title of this special issue. The prefix new suggests a turn to something overlooked, obscured, undiscovered or genuinely new in discussions of power, technology, the human and non-human, the body and subjectivity, for example. This has now become familiar terrain across the arts, humanities and social sciences, with increasing attention being paid to what are taken to be common ontologies emerging across science and the humanities. In a special issue on Affect, for example, I argued with Couze Venn that interest in the themes of immaterial and affective labour and the capitalization or economization of affect and emotion through teletechnologies and a multitude of therapies have drawn attention to affect as a phenomenon in need of fresh study. Advances in the fields of genetics, the biological sciences, mathematics, quantum physics/the physics of small particles, neurosciences and media and information theory have contributed to an epistemological shift. In its wake, there are seen to be common ontologies linking the social and the natural, the mind and body, the cognitive and affective, the material and immaterial, grounded in such concepts as assemblage, flow, turbulence,