New Materialism

• Today, it is rather common that feminist researchers position themselves as new materialists within the theory of science instead of as social constructivists or poststructuralists. Since we believe that this change happened without very much discussion, we encourage debate on the topic, in order to get a deeper understanding of new materialism and how it relates to these other positions. Our point of departure is the view of Karen Barad as presented in Meeting the Universe Half-Way. In a reaction against (oversimplified) post-structuralism, Barad attempts to reintroduce the significance and causality of matter into scientific explanations without ending up as an empiricist. Like social constructivist and poststructuralists she thinks that knowledge always depends on the subject of knowledge, situated in her social and historical context. In addition, Barad thinks that everything we observe are phenomena that depend on perceptive and technical apparati, that is, tools for investigating nature including ourselves. Since we are nature, or the ‘object’ of enquiry, strictly speaking we have no causal relation to the ‘object’. This is so because relata (that which the causal relation is a relation of) have to be two distinct entities, but the subject of knowledge is not distinct from the object of knowledge. Barad underscores this by writing that we intra-act (as opposed to interact) with nature. Because of this, she concludes that phenomena are everything that exists. This conclusion and some other entailments have not been thoroughly scrutinized.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Filosofi, etik och religion (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Philosophy, Ethics and Religion (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

new materialism

Judith Butler

Karen Barad

agential realism

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

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