Fictionality in New Materialism: (Re)Inventing Matter (original) (raw)

Theorising Things, Building Worlds: Why the New Materialisms Deserve Literary Imagination

Open Cultural Studies

The New Materialisms constitute a rich field of critical inquiry that does not represent a unified approach; yet there is a general tendency to theorise objects by highlighting their agency, independence, and withdrawnness from human actors. Jane Bennett speaks of “thing power” in order to invoke the activities of “nonsubjects,” and she suggests to marginalise questions of human subjectivity and focus instead on the trajectories and propensities of material entities themselves. This essay takes issue with Bennett’s and other New Materialist thought, and it also offers a critical engagement with Bruno Latour’s notion of nonhuman agency. In his recent work, Latour has been concerned with the question of how we can tell our “common geostory.” Taking up his literary example (by Mark Twain) and adding one of my own (by William Faulkner), this essay argues that our understanding of the powers of rivers and other nonhuman agents remains rather limited if we attend primarily to the mechanic...

Material Fictions: A Dialogue as Introduction

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

The co-editors of “Material Fictions” introduce the ECF special issue through a conversation about the interdisciplinary objectives that in spired the collection and the insights about materiality, interpretation, and the critical study of texts and objects that emerged from the collection. Addressing points of overlap as well as tension among the fields of art history, literary studies, and material culture studies, we consider how collaborative attention to materiality complicates hermeneutic models like “surface reading” or “form vs. context” and urges art and literary critical practice towards embodied forms of knowledge. We also discuss the etymological kinship of fictions and manufactured objects; the role of Aristotelian philosophy, thing theory, and other lines of thought across fields; and the role of pleasure in our disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices.

Narrative Inquiry and New Materialism: Stories as (Not Necessarily Benign) Agents

Qualitative Inquiry, 2018

Agential realism-the idea that it makes sense to view the world as being composed of various forms of protean nonhuman agency-has been a topic of discussion for many social science scholars in recent years. This increase of interest in agent ontologies can be attributed to the new feminist materialist movement in the philosophy of science literature. However, agent ontologies also are found in Indigenous studies literature and in Peircean pragmatism. These latter sources are also a part of the current methodological conversation about nonhuman agency. This article explores the connections between agential realist philosophy and social science research that employs narrative forms of analysis and representation. The goal is to assist narrative researchers in avoiding oversimplification by tracing out different strands in these literatures and mapping out points of connection and disconnection in detail. Intersections that hold the promise of complementary development are highlighted.

Fictions / Realities. New Forms and Interactions

2011

New Forms and Interactions is a collection of eleven articles highlighting the controversial relation between the two traditionally opposed realms. By determining the forms, conditions and consequences of interaction between fiction and reality, the texts in this book refute this opposition. They also reflect on the status of the deconstructed and reconstructed boundary that separates the two ontological realms and strive toward multiple possible applications of both terms. This volume features studies of various works of literature, film, photography, video and performance art, television, fan fiction and computer games and discusses their various interrelations and hybrid forms. The diversity of media and the plurality of approaches and academic traditions build the keystone of these discussions while opening them up to the non-canonised, formerly peripheral fields of comparative literary studies. The articles are grouped into three sections which focus on (1) forms of ‘interacting with fictions’, (2) the complexity of ‘indicating realities’ and the reality status of fiction, and (3) different methods involved in the ‘realisations of fictions’.

Introduction to the First Part of the Issue on Materiality & Storytelling

Tamara: The Journal of Critical Organization Inquiry, 2014

This special issue of TAMARA focuses on a new emerging field of storytelling informed among others by recent theoretical instigations in science studies (Barad, 2007) that matter matters . As such, the double special issue highlights in various ways on the manner by which matter comes to matter in organizational story processes. Taking storytelling and discursive practices into the material realm raises the question of the agency of matter to the extent that matter is placed as an agential-force equivalent to that of human agency. This constitutes a profound conceptual shift well worth exploring in greater depth. Drawing on various aspects of the new material feministic turn, the turn to affect, to space and to ontology the shift is not so much a turning ‘away from’, as a ‘turn towards’ the working of a different difference . A difference of meaning- mattering and material-discursiveness. A difference therefore of reworking previously constituted binaries. In short - a difference, c...

A RECENT TREND IN THE HUMANITIES: THE NEW MATERIALISMS AS PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY

Theory and Research in Social, Human and Administrative Sciences II (Cilt 2), 2020

The New Materialisms is a theory that has its origins in theoretical physics. Its aim is to create awareness about the entanglements of humans and the more-than-human worlds so that humans will act more cautiously towards the environment and will likely include ontology and ethics in their process of scientific knowledge production. This recent theoretical and sociological field of inquiry, “The New Materialisms”, has been intensely explored since 1990 and prominent scholars from various disciplines such as Karen Barad, Susan Hekman, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, David Abram, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Vicky Kirby, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost support the idea that anthropocentric exceptionalism must be abandoned since no entity, animate or inanimate, can be deemed superior to another. Agency, which has long been thought to belong only to humans, is evenly distributed to all that is made of matter, so they are ontologically independent and do not need human consciousness or interpretation to exist. The New Materialisms is against any kind of speciesism. Concordantly, the idea is to emphasize the necessity to understand the connection, the interaction, or intra-action in Barad’s words, and interdependence arising from the symbiosis in order to facilitate the continuity of the ecosystems whose destruction means the destruction of the human species along with the nonhuman environment. Within the framework of this theory, there is a “material turn” (2010: 7), as Alaimo puts it in her work; namely, there is an inclination to equalize the importance of the ontology of humans with that of nonhuman bodies (2010: 2). According to New Materialists, neither is superior in terms of agency. Therefore, the theory provides a fresh and dynamic way of interpretation to academic disciplines such as philosophy, social sciences, history, anthropology, literature and theology holding the potential to change the traditional mind-set. It facilitates the rethinking the relationship between nature and culture as nature-cultures. Moreover, New Materialisms is especially popular in literature as a medium of interpreting literary texts in terms of human and nonhuman intra-action.

Reality Remodeled: Practical Fictions for a More-than-Empirical World (Rodseth 2022)

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2022

Most ethnographers have little use for models and other formal abstractions, yet even a staunch empiricist such as Franz Boas could appreciate the "aesthetic" advantages of idealization and simplification. These advantages have been largely ignored in recent decades, as anthropologists have come to favor ever more intricate and encompassing accounts. The resulting "ethnographic involution," I suggest, has steadily diminished anthropology as a source of usable, socially shared knowledge. Much the same problem, interestingly, was confronted long ago by Max Weber, who developed the method of "ideal types" precisely as a way to grasp, represent, and investigate the complexity of historical reality. Weber converged in this regard with his contemporary at Halle, the neo-Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger (1852-1933). Since the late twentieth century, Vaihinger's "fictionalism" has attracted renewed interest within philosophy and beyond. Yet his notion of "as-if " reasoning-a via media, I would argue, between particularism and positivism-remains virtually unknown within anthropology.