The Living Present as a Materialist Feminist Temporality

Abstract

Bringing together the work of Barad and Deleuze, this article develops the concept of the living present as a frame for an emerging feminist temporality. Within feminist and queer theories, there has been much discussion of the value of non-chronological time in opening up a transformative and unknown future. The author expands on this arena by discussing not only the future, but also the echoes, resonances and traces of the past—a past whose material effects continue to act as living, changing forces on the present and the future. Described as the present of retention and expectation, the living present is never a static ‘now’, but always a stretching between past and future as it contracts all past experiences and expects those yet to come. As it builds on the work of Grosz, Colebrook and others, the living present encourages non-linear, open-ended readings of past events, and therefore represents a new lens through which to approach documented and assumed histories. By opening up collaborative lines of flight between new materialism, Deleuze and feminism, the thick time of the living present reveals a past of forceful, intra-active materialities. It is a realm of possibility to which one is accountable, but not bound.

Keywords:

• feminist materialism
• temporality
• living present
• Barad
• Deleuze

Notes

¹ Winterson's use of Easter Island refers to the factual Polynesian island of the same name. Also called Rapa Nui, Easter Island is famous for its 887 stone statues, called moai, which were created by its early inhabitants. For Winterson, these ‘Stone Gods’ represent the humanist desire to master both time and nature.

² The ‘new materialist scholars’ which this article echoes include Karen Barad (2003, 2006), Rosi Braidotti (2002, 2006, 2010), Elizabeth Grosz (2004, 2005, 2010), Vicki Kirby (2011) and Iris van der Tuin (2011a, 2011b), among many others.

³ That said, it is this particular critique of post-structuralism—the claim that post-structuralists have failed to fully account for the body—that has caused the largest stir in relation to the wider reception of new feminist materialisms. A set of articles in the European Journal of Women's Studies, spanning 2008 to the present, has gone back and forth on the issue, beginning with Ahmed's challenge to Barad and others within the field. She writes: ‘the reading of Butler as anti-matter seems to be motivated, as if the moment of “rejection” is needed to authorize a new terrain’ (Ahmed 2008: 33). Ahmed argues that this enactment becomes a gesture of the ‘theorist embarking on a heroic and lonely struggle against the collective prohibitions of past feminisms’ (32). She further charges new materialisms (and Barad, in particular) as providing a ‘caricature of poststructuralism as matter-phobic’ (34), a practice which has the unintended effect of fetishizing materiality (35). Responses from van der Tuin and Davis argue that Ahmed provides only a cursory reading of the scholarship and fails to attend to the complexities of Barad's work, but, more importantly, they clarify nuances of new materialism, as Davis draws attention to the fact that new materialists are not arguing that feminist theory has been anti-biological per se, but rather that the ways in which biology has been understood and used have been reductive—it has been restricted to a dualist framework where biology remains the other to the social (Davis 2009: 70). Van der Tuin demonstrates that new materialism is deeply indebted to the contextualized historicity of feminist theory. In fact, she describes the work of new materialism as that of feminist generation, as in the multiple generations of feminist projects that have gone before and those that are yet to come—projects which always operate as a mess of entangled conditions of emergence and possibility (van der Tuin 2008: 412).

⁴ My use of ‘affect’ here and throughout the article draws more on a Deleuzian understanding of affect than its indication of an emotional or physiological force. Specifically, I use the term to refer to that which is produced when things come into contact, whether bodies, a body and a song, or a chair leg scraping along the floor. For Deleuze and Guattari, affects result in intensities beyond themselves, as they discuss affect most often in relation to art, indicating that the affective power of art is the capacity it has to create sensations, knowledges and meanings beyond the piece itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 162–3). The affective force of the material, then, is not only its emotional impact, but also its capacity to be world-making. The chair leg's scrape along the floor is an intra-active intensity. It moves us to understand the relationality of the chair and the floor in the production of a sound, a scratched floorboard or a moment of surprise.

⁵ For example, think about the North American ‘It Gets Better’ campaign, which relies on the ‘bootstrapping’ humanist narrative of the autonomous man who struggles through persecution (the requisitely painful teenage years of the queer youth) in order to reach an adulthood of wholeness, progress and freedom from constraint.

⁶ In fact, one of Winterson's editors did leave a copy of the unfinished manuscript at an underground station in south London, where a fan found it and then returned it to the publisher.

⁷ The value of a responsible feminist politics has further been developed by Peta Hinton in this special issue, where she attends to the importance of a materialist ‘politics of location’, such that, as feminist scholars, we are responsible for our modes of theoretical production as they create the very identities, positionalities and marginalities with which we engage.