TÉCNICAS PARA EL ANÁLISIS E INTERPRETACIÓN DE

Ontology, agency and politics, with:

…our existence depends from one moment to the next on myriad micro-

organisms and diverse higher species, on our own hazily understood bodily and cellular reactions and on pitiless cosmic motions, on the material artefacts and natural stuff that populate our environment, as well as socioeconomic structures that produce and reproduce the conditions of our everyday lives. (p. 1)

When van der Tuin (2009) asks ‘What does the new materialist conversation consist of?’, Karen Barad may reply that language has been given too much power and that she is not only interested in the ways in which the postmodernists theorise ‘how discourse comes to matter’ but also in the new materialist question ‘how matter comes to matter’ (2008, p. 129) and for this thesis, I am interested in how artmaking comes to matter. In 2008, Alaimo and Hekman compiled an anthology called Material Feminisms aiming to “bring the material, specifically the materiality of the body and the natural world, into the forefront of feminist theory and practice” (p. 1).

Elizabeth Grosz and Moira Gatens (Dodds, 2010) also seek to understand the ethical significance of being, perceiving and theorising the world in and through human embodiment, exploring what ‘lived bodily experience’ means for being people and how we understand our ethical responses to one another – embedding the individual in community with attention to Lived body, Lived space, Lived time and Lived relations. Alaimo (2008) positions ontology as not just about the study of being, but also about the underlying beliefs about existence that shape everyday relations to self, others and the world. It encapsulates how we “articulate the meaning of our lives both individually and collectively and how we negotiate these issues in an increasingly complex

interplay of technological changes, genetic modifications, climate change, virtual worlds, militarisation and global capital politics” (p. 239).

As van der Tuin (2009) explains, a feminist materialism framework neither refutes nor affirms the previous achievements or paradoxes that feminisms have espoused in theory or practice, connecting, in a non-dialectical relation, empiricist and postmodern feminism, and sharing characteristics with feminist standpoint theory, while being non-identical to it. So across and between, aligning but not attempting to

synthesise, feminist epistemological classes come together to form a new approach called materialist feminism (Hemmings, 2009). Rosi Braidotti (2005) has claimed that “feminist philosophers have invented a new brand of materialism, (also known as corporeal feminism) of the embodied and embedded kind” (p. 177) or a “re-setting of the agenda with micro-investigations of ‘life itself’” (p. 178). This is not the same as

materialistic feminism based on Marxist feminism, but is a series of “innovative theories that combine social construction with an understanding of the ontology and agency of the material world” (p. 5). The material and the discursive cannot be separated. “…a quest for…reconnecting life and thought…it is a joint commitment to re-thinking selfhood as an intensive, multiple and discontinuous process of interrelations” (Braidotti, 2002, p. 69).

Braidotti’s notions of figuration, or the non-unitary multilayered nomadic subject engaged in processes not concepts, prove useful to this thesis in conceiving of a nomadic artistic subject capable of thinking of as if. Together with Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), I will explore the notion of what it means to be enmeshed in the world, which will then lead to an examination of Elizabeth Grosz’s thoughts about Feminism, materialism and freedom (2010). In order to think about and research creativity diffractively, the following discussion challenges the theory of representation and the information processing model and follows the notion of entangled intra-action, considering humans as embodied brains and thinking bodies.

Making Matter Matter

Coole and Frost (2010) insist the turn to the material cannot be without

problematising the notion that matter or material experience is naively representational or naturalistic, and requires a reappraisal of “questions about the nature of matter and the place of embodied humans within a material world” (p. 3). Alaimo (2008)

recognises that there are implications of moving towards materiality and placing the body in a central position, even when researchers don’t underestimate the power of social and political forces. How can we talk about these bodies and the materiality they inhabit without reverting to biological destiny? She proposes transcorporeality which makes humans inseparable from the environment; reciprocal.

Coole and Frost (2010) also consider whether matter itself can be conceived as lively and exhibit agency? Bio-political and bio-ethical questions around the status of life and the human arise if materialism is conceived as a complex, pluralistic, relatively open process and humans are immersed within materiality’s productive contingencies. They assert that with “New Materialism embodied humans are an active and integral part of all matter including nonhuman. Materiality is always something more than mere matter…an excess, force, vitality, relationally, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive and unpredictable” (p. 9). Bodies are now viewed as complex and ever-transforming, which exhibit active responses to change and contingency. The human is enmeshed and it is not possible to conceive of nature or the environment as a passive background for the exploits of the human or the body as a blank slate waiting

for the inscription of culture. The environment is not an inert, empty space or a resource for human use and industrial production. Humans adapt to environmental conditions but when they alter their surroundings, nature responds in ecological changes, “...reality…is agentic. It pushes back, it effects the result” (Hekman, 2008, p. 112).

Matter becomes. Expanding on de Beauvoir, Coole and Frost (2010) go on to discuss the view that Matter becomes rather than Matter is. “Cosmic forces assembling and disintegrating, objects forming and emerging within relational field, bodies

composing their environments in ways that are meaningful to them and subjectivities being constituted as an open series of capacities that emerge ambiguously within a multitude of organic and social processes” (p. 10). Such ideas are consistent with current theories of particle physics which have also changed regarding how the composition of matter is viewed. Physicists and philosophers are no longer talking about substances and predictable states but forces, energies and intensities in

complex, random processes. Coole and Frost (2010) assert that chaos and complexity theories transform ideas about how matter moves and these theories create a context for contemplating a diffractive methodology. Underlining these theories are the

assumptions that the natural environment is far more unstable, complex, fragile and interactive than once thought. It is thought that there is a relationship of acting on and becoming rather than being. There is a continuous redefining and reassembling of key elements that allow systems to continually evolve into new and unexpected forms (see also Alaimo, 2008; Barad, 2007).

Rethinking the Body (Corporeality) as Entangled Existence

To reconsider the body it is necessary to think of enmeshed embodiment and embodied experience, locating the body as a primary source of knowing the world. Where conscious and awake thinking modes have been privileged, the human body is viewed as a passive receptor and active calculator of sense data, but the role of the body has been underplayed in creativity and imagination (see Chapter 13). Barad (2007) discusses Haraway's view of optical systems and argues that all eyes are not passive but are active perceptual systems. Braidotti (2011) reconfigures the body as being actively and continually in touch with its surroundings, entangled in existence and genuinely experiencing rather than merely recording. With a unique sensitivity to its environment, the body as a sensor, is “an integrated site of information networks…a messenger from thousands of communications systems, cardiovascular, respiratory, visual, acoustic, tactile, olfactory, hormonal, psychic, emotional, erotic, etc. etc.” (p. 63). This resonates with what many of the women in this research told me about how they experienced the world and then how they engaged in artmaking – an active

participation. “…not fixed but continually emerging out of an ever changing relation to the world, sky, ocean, earth, other bodies, objects, sensory experiences and tasks” (p. 62) – tasks like artmaking.

The body is not in opposition to mind, spirit or reason (Lloyd, 1984); everything is both natural and manufactured. Spinoza’s mind as the idea of the body enables a reconceptualisation of the imaginary and the possibility of a sociability of inclusion (James, 2000). When one imagines, when one has inadequate knowledge, this isn’t just a matter of something in your head, but is actually something to do with your body. So, for example, depression is a way of knowing something; joy is a way of knowing something. These kinds of knowledge are thoroughly embodied. “To know is not simply to have something happening in your brain. It is to exist in a different way than the way you existed before you knew that thing” (James, 2000, p. 57). Living bodily sensation has to be experienced not just thought about and Kirby (2008) wants to conceive of a thinking body “…the body is thinking material” (p. 221) – an entangled existence. Agency and Entanglement: Agential Realism

But how are we entangled in existence? Barad talks about intra-actions between phenomena that are material, discursive, human, nonhuman, corporeal and technological, without privileging one over the other and brings this together to understand ways to make matter matter. This is the basis of her theory of agential realism and how she maintains we are of the world not in the world.

It is through specific intra‐actions that a differential sense of being is enacted in the ongoing ebb and flow of agency. That is, it is through specific intra‐actions that phenomena come to matter—in both senses of the word. This ongoing flow of agency through which “part” of the world makes itself differentially intelligible to another “part” of the world and through which local causal structures,

boundaries, and properties are stabilized and destabilized does not take place in space and time but in the making of spacetime itself….Meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words…‘Humans’ are neither pure cause nor pure effect but part of the world in its open‐ended becoming’. (Barad, 2008, pp. 135-136)

“Indeed, it is through such practices that the differential boundaries between “humans” and “nonhumans,” “culture” and “nature,” the “social” and the “scientific” are constituted. Phenomena are constitutive of reality. Reality is not composed of things‐in‐ themselves or things‐behind‐phenomena but “things”‐in‐phenomena” (Alaimo &

Hekman, 2008, p. 5).

Barad (2008), like de Beauvoir, believes we are always becoming and “practices of knowing and being are not isolatable, but rather they are mutually

implicated. We do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because ‘we’ are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming (p. 147). “We are of the universe—there is no inside, no outside. There is only intra-acting from within and as part of the world in its becoming’’ (Barad, 2007, p. 396).

Agency as what we do – not something we have. Barad (2008) asks what possibilities exist for agency, for intervening in the world’s becoming, and how do the issues of responsibility and accountability remain prominent? Materiality disrupts agency as the property of a discrete, self-knowing subject and relocates it within a complex relational field because the human is acknowledged as having effects on the social, political and environmental situations and vice versa. Bodies communicate with other bodies and there is a need to acknowledge how discursive and material forms are inextricable yet irreducible (Coole & Frost, 2010). Society is simultaneously materially real and socially constructed. Material lives are always culturally mediated but they are not only cultural. Thus, Barad says the space of agency is much larger than that postulated by former theories and the concept of collective agency is reinstated and is pulsating with potential. Barad (2008) summarises her theory

…the universe is agential intra‐activity in its becoming. The primary ontological units are not ‘things’ but phenomena—dynamic topological

reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations. And the primary semantic units are not ‘words’ but material‐discursive practices through which boundaries are constituted. This dynamism is agency (p. 135)…agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or

something has…– it is ‘doing’/’being’ in its intra-activity …Particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering. (p. 144)

Questioning Representation

Vision is ubiquitous as the dominant sense of our times (Heywood & Sandywell, 1999), and “…both art and aesthetics reside in the generative tension between sight and insight” (Davey, 1999, p. 3). Predominantly, theories of art, creativity and

expression are predicated on the idea that human consciousness resides in the cranium in the brain, ignoring the body and the world the body resides within. These theories are based on a representationalist view of the world, the painter, the object and the painting, and on explaining the gaps between them – what is represented, who is doing the representation. But what if there is in fact no gap? The particular painting could not have been painted before and cannot be painted again – every meeting matters. What if it is impossible to separate the thing that thinks from the thing that is

thought about, and equally if an art work cannot be thought of as existing

independently of the artist conceiving it. As Barad (2008) has argued, both traditionally realist approaches to science (mirror of nature) and social constructivist ones (mirror of culture) pursue a correspondence theory of truth based on representationalism – a theory of reflection. “What compels the belief that we have a direct access to cultural representations and their content that we lack toward the things represented…the representationalist belief in the power of words to mirror pre-existing phenomena is the metaphysical substrate that supports social constructivist, as well as traditional realist, beliefs” (2008, p. 121).

Barad’s (2008) theory of agential realism and applying a diffractive methodology to the idea of creativity presents a direct challenge to the metaphysical underpinnings of representationalism. As representation is a key area of debate in art theory and particularly feminist art and aesthetic theory, Barad’s theory is highly salient to this project. By questioning the very nature of representation, Barad provides an innovative theory which challenges language as an adequate basis for all views of representation and moves towards what Spinoza and Braidotti are seeking in an adequate

understanding. A mediated world, which Barad argues has hindered taking account of the material world, whether via the lens of consciousness, language, culture,

technology or art – holds nature at bay in “a metaphysical quarantining of the object world” (Barad, 2007, p. 374).

Barad (2008) goes on to explain:

…there are two distinct and independent kinds of entities—representations and entities to be represented. The system of representation is sometimes explicitly theorized in terms of a tripartite arrangement. For example, in addition to knowledge (i.e., representations), on the one hand, and the known (i.e., that which is purportedly represented), on the other, the existence of a knower (i.e., someone who does the representing) is sometimes made explicit. When this happens it becomes clear that representations serve a mediating function between independently existing entities. This taken-for-granted ontological gap generates questions of the accuracy of representations. For example, does language accurately represent its referent? (p. 123)

Barad (2007) dissolves the presence of a mediator (theory, words, thoughts) between the object and the subject and in doing so removes the need to prioritise either the immediate givenness of materiality or the social constructionist

discursiveness of the world. Barad thinks diffractively; she asks readers to imagine a spectrum of difference instead of a reflection of sameness or difference by

involved in the world via intra-action between phenomena (p. 197). Barad’s theory of corporeal materialism and diffraction avoids both the essentialised subject of

empiricisim and the subject fixed within a discursive net by positing “a fluid, ever-

changing, becoming” subject with porous boundaries and “makes it possible to take the empirical world seriously once again, but this time with the understanding that the objective referent is phenomena, not the seeming ‘immediately given‐ness’ of the world” (p. 141). Thus, diffraction, not representation, forms the theoretical framework for this research.

Seeking Diffraction

Barad (2007) and van der Tuin (2011) acknowledge Donna Haraway as the first feminist thinker to propose diffraction as an alternative metaphor to the perennial metaphor of reflection employed to theorise knowledge. Whereas reflection is about mirroring and sameness, diffraction is about attending to patterns of difference and overlaps. Reflections bounce back, diffractions pass around and through and create patterns of difference – “diffraction is not merely about differences in any absolute sense, but about the entangled nature of differences that matter” (Barad, 2007, p. 36). Reflection (and representationalism) offers an illusion of an essential fixed position but diffraction offers a more subtle vision and, as discussed, it disrupts the notion that representations and the objects that they intend to represent are independent of one another. The focus is shifted from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality – mirror of nature/culture – (or in the case of ‘mad art’ mirror of the soul) – “to matters of practices or doings or actions” (p. 28).

By explaining the physical phenomena of diffraction, Barad (2007) posits a question of methodology. Diffraction is a feature of wave behaviour – water, sound and light all exhibit diffraction and when diffraction involves light there is colour, a

phenomenon that also greatly interests artists. Barad describes “the full display of its intricate patterns and reverberations with all the vibrancy, richness and vitality of this remarkable physical phenomenon” (p. 30), illustrated in everyday diffractive

occurrences: waves combine as they overlap, spread out and bend when they encounter an obstacle like a pier; a pebble is skipped across a dam; oil spilt in a puddle; the iridescence of a spider’s web. A diffractive methodology appears apt for a research project interested in artistic practice, and is also resonant with de Beauvoir’s methodology of exploring and describing everyday experiences of lived lives.

However, Barad’s methodology of diffraction is concerned with more than just human everyday experience, as it situates humans as being of the world, not in the world, and questions how time and space may operate. Diffraction, she says, holds “the key to dilemmas in quantum physics such as the wave-particle duality paradox”

(2007, p. 29). Traditional notions of physics theorised that only waves as disturbances could overlap at the same time to create diffraction patterns. Since it was believed that