The Im/Possibility of Abandonment in New Materialist Ontologies

Abstract

Organising prominent critiques of new materialism is the suggestion that it contains a gesture of abandonment. New materialism abandons the past to enable its self-promotion as a novel brand and generation of feminist intervention wedded to a particular vision of matter's transformative possibilities. Or it abandons questions of race in advancing a grand ontology, while simultaneously enacting a particular politics of perspective—one that is racialised. In this article we acknowledge the importance of these critiques as we engage them through an interrogation and opening of the nature of abandonment itself. From within a new materialist frame, we ask who or what abandons, and what assumptions about matter, race, the human and the iterative act of abandonment are at work in critiques of this field? We question how a new materialist approach enacts and recasts the positionality and privilege of ‘whiteness-as-humanness’ at the same time it is considered to elide these. Taking up with discussions from within critical race theory and approaches to human exceptionalism, we ask from this whether we can conceive of new materialism in terms of a perverse ontology that renders abandonment im/possible.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors are deeply grateful for the very helpful feedback and direction provided by the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript. We would also like to thank the editors of Australian Feminist Studies for the opportunity to publish on this topic and set of debates within this specific forum.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A brief note on terminology: the reference to new materialism remains deliberately broad in this argument—we refer to it in the singular even as we are mindful of its myriad differences in subject matter, theoretical underpinnings and methodological attentions. We do this for the sake of simplifying our argument in view of the fact that new materialism is taken as an object of critique here. But it is also a strategic gesture: referring to new materialism in the singular might provoke enough attention so that the very idea of singularity or universality of position is not only pulled into focus, its very structure is thrown into contention. There can never be a purely singular position (we think here of the way all positionality is both dislocated and contingent) and nor can universality be considered to be wholly outside of or somehow immune from forces of differentiation that involve the production of specificity.

2. Our engagement with the question of abandonment was the task we set ourselves for the World Picture Conference, ‘Abandon’ hosted by the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) Berlin, November 7–8, 2014. The authors would like to thank the conference organisers and the ICI for the opportunity to present on this research. In addition, Peta would like to acknowledge the support of the ICI Berlin towards her work on this project. Xin Liu's contribution is funded by the Finnish Gender Studies Doctoral School.

3. Our uptake of the notion of abandonment takes cues from the conference call: ‘The theme of this year’s conference is abandon, a term that encompass radical renunciation and immersive indulgence in its oscillation between abandonment of and abandonment to, between restraint and luxury, mindfulness and neglect. When we speak of abandonment we indicate a situation in which we take leave of something, or disband a collective entity, or else act in a way that suggests a disaggregation of certain protocols of behaviour or belonging (as when we ‘laugh with abandon’). Discourses and scenes of media and politics are generally highly invested in ideas of taking-leave, breaking apart or away, acting with abandon’. See https://www.ici-berlin.org/news/606/.

4. We should like to credit Jasbir Puar with the description ‘white episteme’, delivered during her 2014 public lecture at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), Berlin, and also offering inspiration for this essay.

5. We draw our examples from this text as the authors work with a range of social, political and feminist materialist philosophies to articulate an original argument regarding the methodological and political motivations and interventions of new materialism. Combining this with a series of interviews undertaken with key scholars who represent contemporary new materialist thought, this text serves as a robust survey of its field and the philosophical genealogies that help to comprise it.

6. This use of the slash between ‘im’ and ‘possible’ represents a methodological strategy borrowed from the suggestions made by Karen Barad (2012) in her discussions with the quantum vacuum. Here, Barad refers to an ontological in/determinacy, ‘where the slash between “in” and “determinacy” represents the constitutive inclusions as well as exclusions that cannot be subtracted from processes of (im)materialization’ (Hinton, forthcoming). Thus any move to ‘undo’ is a ‘doing’ at the same time, the ‘un/doings’ of matter both sediment as well as radically open the certainty of a particular identity in/as space and time. Barad focuses on the un/doings of materiality that at one and the same time account for the ‘un/doings of no/thingness’ (2012, 12). For our purposes, we take the ‘im/possibility’ of abandonment to represent the constitutive inclusions and exclusions that cannot be subtracted from processes of abandoning. What is purportedly left behind remains with, and constitutive of, our methodological meanderings.

7. Similarly, Hemming’s (2011) reading of transposition as a form of fusion or suturing necessitates the originary separation of various feminist strands of thought. Intriguingly, the identity of feminist generations—its spatial and temporal coordinates—is assumed, and one could further argue, rematerialised, in the claim of its abandonment.

8. This could be read in relation to the ‘black-boxing effect’ of intersectionality. According to Nina Lykke (2011, 210) black-boxing refers to the possibility that ‘concepts may start functioning as markers of dis/agreement in an identity political sense’.

9. Arun Saldhana is sensitive to this question, arguing that suggestions such as Paul Gilroy's to ‘de-ontologize “race”’ (2000, 43, quoted in Saldhana 2006, 13) or Vron Ware and Les Back's call to ‘abandon “race” as any kind of useful category’ in the interests of a ‘forward looking politics of social justice’ (2002, 27, quoted in Saldhana 2006, 13), ultimately miss the complexity of race's representational schema: its spatiality being already one of ‘viscosity’ or a non-essentialist phenotypical assemblage of bodies and social environments (Saldhana 2006, 10). Furthermore, the proposed need for a ‘typographical distancing’ of ‘race’ from the bodies this word is presumed to represent—the idea that accompanies Gilroy's suggestion, for example, that representations of race can somehow be separated from their material referents—raises the related question of whether alternative terms, such as ‘black’ or ‘white’ or ‘ethnicity’, should ‘invoke stable referents’ in any case (Saldhana 2006, 13). Accordingly, the kind of biological fixity (and its separation from representation) that occurs as a result of the call to de-ontologise race is not available for Saldhana (2006, 22). Rather than dispose of race as a critical and explanatory tool to approach conditions of social injustice, as Gilroy would have it, in Saldanha's hands race instead demonstrates ‘the openness of the body, the way organisms connect to their environment and establish uneven relationships among each other’. In other words, race is contextually, materially, categorically and politically active and expressive of power relations in this way.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peta Hinton

Peta Hinton completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She undertook a post-doctoral fellowship with the ICI Berlin (2013/2014), where she is an Affiliated Fellow for the 2014–2015 academic year. Her research focuses through the fields of new (feminist) materialism and sexual difference feminisms. Her recent project investigates the way death and nothingness figure in a new materialist approach to feminist futures and ethical relation.

Xin Liu

Xin Liu is a Ph.D. student in the Finnish Gender Studies Doctoral School and in Women's Studies, Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Her research interests include feminist science studies, feminist theory and critical race theory.