Tài liệu New Materialism - Interviews & Cartographies Rick Dolphijn & Iris van der Tuin.New

OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

This book is the first monograph on the

theme of ‘new materialism,’ an emerging

trend in 21st century thought that has already

left its mark in such fields as philosophy,

cultural theory, feminism, science studies,

and the arts. The first part of the book con￾tains elaborate interviews with some of the

most prominent new materialist scholars

of today: Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda,

Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux. The

second part situates the new materialist tra￾dition in contemporary thought by singling

out its transversal methodology, its position

on sexual differing, and the ethical and

political consequences of new materialism.

Cover design by Katherine Gillieson · Illustration by Tammy Lu

New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies Dolphijn & van der Tuin

New Materialism:

Interviews &

Cartographies

Rick Dolphijn &

Iris van der Tuin

New Materialism:

Interviews & Cartographies

New Metaphysics

Series Editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour

The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphys￾ics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution

and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic￾continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the

continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intel￾lectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like

an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical ‘sound’

from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical

classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main inter￾est is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy.

Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin

New Materialism:

Interviews & Cartographies

An imprint of MPublishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, 2012

OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org

Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective

whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available

worldwide. Books published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at MPublishing are

produced through a unique partnership between OHP’s editorial board and the University

of Michigan Library, which provides a library-based managing and production support

infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form.

OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

First edition published by Open Humanities Press

Freely available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11515701.0001.001

Copyright © 2012 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin and the respective authors

This is an open access book, licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution Share

Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify,

distribute, and/or copy this book so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting

derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required

from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected

by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

Design by Katherine Gillieson

Cover Illustration by Tammy Lu

The cover illustration is copyright Tammy Lu 2012, used under a

Creative Commons By Attribution license (CC-BY).

ISBN-10 1-60785-281-0

ISBN-13 978-1-60785-281-0

Contents

Acknowledgements 9

Introduction: What May I Hope For? 13

I Interviews

1. Interview with Rosi Braidotti 19

2. Interview with Manuel DeLanda 38

3. Interview with Karen Barad 48

4. Interview with Quentin Meillassoux 71

II Cartographies

Introduction: A “New Tradition” in Thought 85

5. The Transversality of New Materialism 93

6. Pushing Dualism to an Extreme 115

7. Sexual Differing 137

8. The End of (Wo)Man 158

Bibliography 181

Permissions 195

Matter can receive a form, and within this form-matter

relation lies the ontogenesis.

– Gilbert Simondon

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of intense interaction between the two authors and

many others. Giving names to the particular elements that form this swarm

is an impossible but necessary undertaking, since the two names on the

cover of this book definitely do not exhaust what made the book. Most of

all, of course, the four wise and generous minds that are given a voice in

the first part of this book, and whose voices are rewritten in the second

part, should be thanked: Prof. Rosi Braidotti, Prof. Manuel DeLanda, Prof.

Karen Barad, and Prof. Quentin Meillassoux. Our long-distance interview of

Prof. Barad at the “7th European Feminist Research Conference” (Utrecht

University, June 2009) opened up the idea of the interviews. We would like

to thank Heleen Klomp for transcribing the encounter with Prof. Barad, and

we would like to thank Prof. Wolfgang Schirmacher (the European Graduate

School) for getting us in touch with Prof. Manuel DeLanda. Thank you to

Dr. Marie-Pier Boucher for translating the interview with Prof. Quentin

Meillassoux and Sterre Ras for formatting the entire book. Also, we would

like to thank the editors that run the series “New Metaphysics” at Open

Humanities Press, Prof. Graham Harman and Prof. Bruno Latour, for their

enthusiasm, their support and care, and their inspiring scholarly work that

has also been of great influence on this book.

Let us also thank our home institution, the Department of Media

and Culture Studies, Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University, and in

10

particular the Graduate Gender Programme directed by Prof. Rosemarie

Buikema, and Media Theory, run by Prof. Joost Raessens. The Research

Institute for History and Culture, previously directed by Prof. Maarten Prak

and now by Prof. Frank Kessler, and managed by Dr. Frans Ruiter should

also be mentioned. Finally, we want to thank Utrecht’s Center for the

Humanities, run by Prof. Rosi Braidotti, for being our second home and for

supporting us in organizing seminars and conferences.

The gust of fresh air that got this whole project started and kept pushing

us forward was the Contemporary Cultural Theory (CCT) seminar series

that we organized for the past four years. With its more than one hundred

seminars, it has created a tremendously rich ecology in which the book

was able to flourish. After it started as a reading group for the two of us,

it caught the interest of staff members and graduate students and others

interested from outside Utrecht University, and it received the generous

support of the Centre for the Humanities, Media and Culture Studies,

and later the Research Institute for History and Culture. It is impossible

to name all those who have shared their valuable thoughts with us in the

seminar over the past years, but several of its “usual suspects” have to be

named (in no particular order): Marianne van den Boomen, Dr. Birgit

Mara Kaiser, Dr. Kathrin Thiele, Nikos Overheul, Dr. Bram Ieven, Beatriz

Revelles Benavente, Prof. Frank Kessler, Paulina Bolek, Marietta Radomska,

Jannie Pranger, Richard van Meurs, Dr. Nanna Verhoeff, Dr. Paul Bijl,

Adinda Veltrop, Freya de Mink, Alex Hebing, Dr. Kees Vuijk, Prof. Paul

Ziche, Dr. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Prof. Ed Jonker. The seminar series

“New Materialism: The Utrecht School” featured our colleagues Prof. Rosi

Braidotti, Prof. Maaike Bleeker, Prof. Joost Raessens, Dr. Kathrin Thiele

and Dr. Birgit Mara Kaiser.

As part of CCT we had the pleasure to welcome national and

international guest speakers (Dr. Marcel Cobussen, Prof. John Protevi,

Prof. Rosemarie Buikema, Prof. Gloria Wekker, Dr. Vicki Kirby) and

organize conferences. On November 19, 2010 we hosted “Intra-action

between the Humanities and the Sciences” with Prof. Rosi Braidotti, Dr.

Birgit Mara Kaiser, Jannie Pranger, Prof. Peter Galison, Dr. Fokko Jan

Dijksterhuis, Dr. Kathrin Thiele, and Dr. Bibi Straatman. On April 7,

2011 we hosted “New Materialism: Naturecultures” with Prof. Donna

Acknowledgements 11

Haraway, Dr. Cecilia Åsberg, Dr. Vicki Kirby, Prof. Rosemarie Buikema,

LeineRoebana (Heather Ware and Tim Persent, and Andrea Leine and

Harijono Roebana), Dr. Adrian MacKenzie, Dr. Jussi Parikka, Dr. Milla

Tiainen, Dr. Melanie Sehgal, and Prof. Rosi Braidotti. The first “New

Materialism” conference, organized by Dr. Jussi Parikka and Dr. Milla

Tiainen, took place in June 2010 at Anglia Ruskin University/ CoDE in

Cambridge, the UK. Our second conference was funded by the Netherlands

Organisation for Scientific Research, the Posthumanities Hub (Tema Genus,

Linköping University), the Center for the Study of Digital Games and

Play, the Graduate Gender Programme, the Center for the Humanities,

and the Research Institute for History and Culture (Utrecht University).

On November 17, 2011 we organized “Lissitzky Space: New Materialist

Experiments” at the Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven) with Dr. Jondi Keane,

Dr. Linda Boersma, Dr. Leslie Kavanaugh, Willem Jan Renders, Annie

Fletcher and Piet van de Kar.

Finally we would like to thank our loved ones.

Utrecht, December 2011

Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin

Introduction

What May I Hope For?

In academia, revolutionary and radical ideas are actualized through

an engagement with scholars and scholarly traditions of the canonized

past. Contemporary generations read, or more often reread older texts,

resulting in “new” readings that do not fit the dominant reception of

these texts. Also, academics tend to draw in scholars from an unforeseen

past, those who come from a different academic canon or who have been

somewhat forgotten. It is in the resonances between old and new readings

and re-readings that a “new metaphysics” might announce itself. A new

metaphysics is not restricted to a here and now, nor does it merely project an

image of the future for us. It announces what we may call a “new tradition,”

which simultaneously gives us a past, a present, and a future. Thus, a new

metaphysics does not add something to thought (a series of ideas that wasn’t

there, that was left out by others). It rather traverses and thereby rewrites

thinking as a whole, leaving nothing untouched, redirecting every possible

idea according to its new sense of orientation.

“New materialism” or “neo-materialism” is such a new metaphysics.

A plethora of contemporary scholars from heterogeneous backgrounds

has, since the late 1990s up until now, been producing (re-)readings that

together work towards its actualization. This book is written on the new

materialism simultaneously with its fleshing out of the new materialist

ambition. The negotiations concerning the new tradition are carried out

in the first part of this book. This part consists of four interviews with the

14 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin

most prominent new materialist scholars of today: Rosi Braidotti, Manuel

DeLanda, Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux. The second part is made

up of four chapters that situate this new tradition in contemporary scholarly

thought. The problematics shared by the interviewed scholars are the subject

matter of the chapters in Part Two, but it is new materialism that is active

everywhere and always throughout. New materialism is the metaphysics that

breathes through the entire book, infusing all of its chapters, every statement

and argument. New materialism is thus not “built up” in this book: its

chapters are not dependent upon one another for understanding their

argument. The different chapters of the book can be read independently,

although there are many different transversal relations between them.

The interviews in Part One are intra-actions rather than interactions. The

former term was introduced by Barad and is central to her new materialism.

Qualitatively shifting any atomist metaphysics, intra-action conceptualizes

that it is the action between (and not in-between) that matters. In other

words, it is not the interviewers or the interviewee or even the oeuvre of

the interviewee that deserves our special attention, but it is the sense of

orientation that the interview gave rise to (the action itself) that should

engender us. For it is in the action itself that new materialism announces

itself. We have emphasized this by making strong connections between the

individual questions and answers in Part One and the individual chapters of

Part Two. This allows the reader to go back and forth between the two parts,

in order to gain a deeper understanding of the new materialist tradition.

The interview with Rosi Braidotti revolves, firstly, around the issue of the

genealogy of new materialism, and around new materialism as genealogical.

The latter can be read either as an instance of Jean-François Lyotard’s

“rewriting” or of Gilles Deleuze’s “creation of concepts.” The genealogical

element of Braidotti’s take on new (feminist) materialism, Braidotti herself

being an (un)dutiful daughter of great Continental materialists such as

Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault and Deleuze (van der Tuin 2009),

most certainly pervades the remainder of the book. Braidotti makes clear

how it is important to draw situated cartographies of (new) materialisms,

and to traverse these maps at the same time in order to produce visionary

alternatives, that is, creative alternatives to critique. When it comes to

Braidotti’s precise take on the matter of materialism, we encounter a