New Materialisms

Question 1

Whatmore (2006) Materialist Returns

Answer 1

• connection geo (earth) and bio (life)
• resurfacing more-than-human world
• landscapes co-fabricated human and earth
• humans part non-humanity’s composition

Question 2

Braidotti (2013) Quotes

Answer 2

• “The radical thinkers of the post-1968 generation rejected Humanism both in its classical and socialist versions. The Vitruvian ideal of Man as the standard of both perfection and perfectibility was literally pulled down from his pedestal and deconstructed. This humanistic ideal constituted, in fact, the core of a liberal individualistic view of the subject, which defined perfectibility in terms of autonomy and self-determinism”
• “Posthumanism is the historical moment that marks the end of the opposition between Humanism and anti-humanism and traces a different discursive framework, looking more affirmatively towards new alternatives … towards elaborating alternative ways of conceptualising the human subject”

Question 3

Latour - Actor Network Theory

Answer 3

• Quasi-objects or hybrids - human and nature actors together - actors exist result networks (network draws things into being)
• refuses binary human/nature
• wolf = quasi-object - existence relies science studies them
• Principle symmetry - locate explanation quasi - both human and nature - eg. climate change human and biophysical
• Hybridity

Question 4

Chakrabarty (2009)

Answer 4

• Anthropogenic climate change = collapse distinction natural and human history (humans geological force)
• Anthropocene qualifies human histories modernity and globalisation
• global histories capital and species aligned (fair? capitalist west vs species everyone - anthropocene species force)
• we experience specific effects but not whole phenomenon climate crisis

Question 5

Massey - For Space (2009)

Answer 5

• 3 propositions:
• “Space is the product of interrelations; thus we must recognize space ‘as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny”.
• “Space [is] a sphere of possibility … of coexisting heterogeneity”.
• “Space [is] always under construction. Precisely because … space is a product of relations-between”.
  (Becoming and relational)

Question 6

Heidegger (1977) on Nietzsche and God as transcendent organising principle

Answer 6

• “God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the ideas has suffered the loss … then nothing more remains to which man [sic] can cling and by which he can orient himself”
• “God [for Nietzsche] is the name for realm of Ideas and ideals. This realm of the suprasensory has been considered since Plato … to be the true and genuinely real world. In contrast to it the sensory world down here, the changeable, and therefore merely apparent, unreal world”
• “The pronouncement ‘God is dead’ means: The suprasensory world is without effective power. It bestows no life. Metaphysics, [i.e. for Nietzsche Western philosophy understood since Plato] is at an end”

Question 7

Grosz (2017)

Answer 7

“[For Nietzsche] things, whether bodies or ideas, are not inert beings that simply exist in themselves … Bodies, ideas, identities of all kinds are the provisional alignment of a physics of forces … His [Nietzsche’s] challenge to thought is to conceptualise a universe now freed of identities, names, human and religious categories”

Question 8

Connolly (2011) on Deleuze (1962) Immanence

Answer 8

“By immanence I mean a philosophy of becoming in which the universe is not dependent on a higher power. It is reducible neither to mechanistic materialism, dualism, [nor[ theo-teleology”

Question 9

Anderson and Harrison (2010)

Answer 9

• New cultural geography = concerned meaning things, not things themselves
• concern with meaning = aim to reveal structures of inequality, oppression, value etc which lie behind everyday action/thought

Question 10

Foucault Order of Things 1970

Answer 10

• concept of man, which has preoccupied western thought past 250 years is coming apart - “one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”

Question 11

Anti-humanism as critique colonialism, fascism, stalinism, patriarchy
- Adorno (2003)
/
Adorna and Horkheimer (2002)

Answer 11

“[Auschwitz] is the irrefutable proof that culture has failed”
/
- “The fact that it [the Holocaust] could happen in the midst of all the traditions of philosophy, art, and the sciences with all their enlightenment, says more than just that these traditions and mind in general were unable to take hold of men [sic] and change them”
- “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly liberated earth is radiant with triumphant calamity”.

Question 12

Valades (1579)

Answer 12

The Great Chain of Being

• God, Angels, Man, Animals, Plants
• women ambiguous

Question 13

Anderson (2007) on The Savage

Answer 13

“The savage, as neither securely ‘in’ the category of human being, nor securely ‘out’ of it, was a distinct problem for the [idea] of human separateness”

“The question of the savage was, then, the question of humankind itself”

Question 14

Chambers (1844)

Answer 14

“We have already seen that various leading animal forms represent stages in the embryotic [sic] progress of the highest—the human being. Our brain goes through the various stages of a fish’s, a reptile’s, and a mammifer’s brain, and finally becomes human. There is more than this for, after completing the animal transformations, it passes through the characters in which it appears, in the Negro, Malay, American, and Mongolian nations, and finally is Caucasian.”

Question 15

Braidotti (2010) Post-humanism

Answer 15

A “transformative ethics [which] takes on the future affirmatively”; “hope rests with an affirmative ethics” which ‘dreams forward’”

Question 16

Afrofuturism Examples

Answer 16

• BlacKkKlansman (2018) film

- Dirty Computer - an emotion picture by Janelle Monáe.

Question 17

Anderson and Harrison (2010) Agency

Answer 17

“You are late; you walk quickly into the classroom and sit down. When you walked into the classroom did you think about opening the door, or did you just open it? When you sat down did you have to remember what a seat looked like and how to use one? […] How did you know to come in through the door? How did you know that that was a seat?”

Question 18

Conciousness
- Thrift (2000)
/
- Norretranders (1988)

Answer 18

“Probably 95 percent of embodied thought is non-cognitive, yet probably 95 percent of academic thought has concentrated on the cognitive dimension of the conscious ‘I’ … [M]uch cognitive thought and knowledge may, indeed be only a kind of post-hoc rumination”

“We do not experience the world as raw data. When our consciousness experiences the world, the unconscious discarding of sensory information has long since interpreted things for us. What we experience has acquired meaning before we become conscious of it”

Question 19

Agency - Hayles (2017)

Answer 19

“The emphasis on nonconscious cognition participates in the central thrust of decentring the human, both because it recognises another agent in the addition consciousness/unconsciousness in cognitive processes, and because it provides a bridge between human, animal, and technical cognitions, locating them in a continuum rather than understanding them as qualitavley different capacities”

Question 20

Clark and Chalmers (1988)

Answer 20

• Chalmers extended mind thesis - extended mind not metaphor

Question 21

Haraway 1985/2016 Cyborg Manifesto

Answer 21

“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”
“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics”
“This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction”

Question 22

Haraway (2016) Worlds/Stories

Answer 22

“It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories”

Question 23

Rockstrom et al (2009)

Answer 23

Identify 9 biophysical processes of the Earth system and establish limits of which if crossed = changes making planet uninhabitable for species including our own

• climate change, ocean acidification, Stratospheric ozone depletion, Global freshwater use, Biodiversity loss, Interference with the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, Land use change, Chemical pollution, and Atmospheric aerosol loading.
• 3 at time writing already crossed - CC, biodiversity loss, interference nitrogen cycle - 3 nearing

Question 24

Haraway (2015) Plantationocene

Answer 24

“Plantationocene names the devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor”

Question 25

Moore (2015) as well - Saldanha (2017) capitalocene

Answer 25

“The one vector changing the composition of the atmosphere and the earth’s crust, pushing socioecological systems over the brink, fantasizing about colonising Mars, all the while mostly escaping critical scrutiny and democratic transparency, is capital”

The Capitalocene-story is normally told through the lens of Marxism, of the spread of a peculiar and highly coercive force and rationality born in Italy in the C15th, coming to fruition in northern England in the C18-19th, and extending across the globe through the barrel of gun in the search of cheap nature and labour thereafter

Question 26

Chakrabarty (2008)

Answer 26

“The problematic of globalization allows us to read climate change only as a crisis of capitalist management. While there is no denying that climate change has profoundly to do with the history of capital, a critique that is only a critique of capital is not sufficient for addressing questions relating to human history once the crisis of climate change has been acknowledged and the Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon of our present. The geologic now of the Anthropocene has become entangled with the now of human history”

Question 27

Law (2015)

Answer 27

HARD CLAIM = MULTIPLE WORLDS - no god/reality to decide what world real
“In a power-saturated set of relations stretching over 200 years, Australian Aboriginal people have been systematically excluded from the places where they lived. Genocide, disease, and policies of cultural incorporation have been central to this sorry story, but the land rights issue turns partly around the question of ownership. Did Aboriginal people own the lands over which they walked, or did they not? The English terra nullius doctrine determined that Aborigines were not settled, they did not cultivate the land, and neither did they parcel it up. Then it argued that since they did not do these kinds of things, it followed that the lands were empty.
So why did Aboriginal people not parcel up their land? The answer has been well rehearsed. It is that they saw, they see, the world very differently. In Aboriginal cosmology land is not a volume or a surface with features, or a space that can be occupied by people. Instead it is a process of creation and re-creation. The world, including people, but also what Europeans would think of as topographical features, plants, animals, ritual sites, and ancestral beings, are all necessary participants in a process of continuing creation. And if this does not happen, then the world starts to hollow itself out. It stops existing.
- “And this is the core question … Are we dealing with matters of belief ? Are we simply saying that white people believe one thing, for instance about what we code up as ‘nature’, whereas Aboriginal people believe something different? Or is something different going on?”
- disagree with way story told - european justification take aboriginal lands
- “If we are liberal then we will respect the differences and we will not try to impose our own version of the world on those who see it differently. But even so, and however nice we are, we have not abandoned our basic commitment to the idea of a single all-encompassing reality. Neither have we really stopped assuming that Aboriginal people have got it wrong. Their idea, the idea that the world is a set of differently woven, specific, and heterogeneous creating practices, is a story, but it is not the way things actually are”
- Northern trick law calls it - idea one world composed beliefs - need to not understand one reality, science not about accessing reality but debating/creating it
- what is at stake - do people believe diff things about reality or are there diff realities being done in diff practices - first right then about epistemologies - second right issues ontology

Question 28

Thrift (2003)

Answer 28

• Space = complex part geographic discipline; space grip human lives & humans grip space & its creation
• Modern geog: space not absolute (passive), it is undergoing constant construction (relational)
• Space: Empirical Constructions – what keep spaces going (eg. Cars, trains, clothes) – devices, texts etc – everyday space – eg. Space of measurement make everyday eg. Look map, road sign, forget the achievement of these practices (required investment, standardisation discussions etc) – lot human effort to make measured space eg. Metre emerge first French Republic (Pierre Mechain & Jean-Baptiste Delambre travelled france work out the measure) – empirical construction space always leaping eg. C19th time standardisation (Greenwich meridian & time zones); C21st GIS & tech allowing us to locate everything w standards of measurement – standardization space by tech
• Flow Space - connections through which the world interacts – from movements of people in an office to travel & tourism (range scales) – flows goods, people, information & money (increasing w/ globalisation) – hard to present used done boundaries of where particular interaction occurred = blocks eg. Capitalist space, imperialist space w specific qualities and interactions – freeze dynamics situation, poor representations – need more global representations = split into scales modern times (but too similar?) – so instead boundaries, see world as flows eg. Commodity chains (see path across world) – how does this change function of space, how space inhabited, lived
• Image Space – register space around us & imagine its future through images – important world of media & screens full of images = changing notion space – thinking ab image space changing eg. Used images similar / help produce eg. Urban landscapes – images not impose easily onto space anymore w so many of them – also note now importance of mediation in producing an image – many issues = competition for attention – why do we focus more on some images than others? – how do we see the world based on images & their mediations?
• Place Space – places seen more real than space – the more human spaces = places – place has rhythms of being characterising space eg. Everyday life rhythms, place maintained – but many different rhythms of being & not always routine, many improvisations also present in everyday life – spatial awareness = place, place memories, behaviours – place involved w embodiment (not beyond body) – as think of a place through your interaction w it and what you do there – but what is body: broader, need think of as the mass of people / bodies all interacting – affect: “non-individual,an impersonal force resulting from the encounter, an ordering of the relations between bodies which results in an increase or decrease in the potential to act” p.93 – place produces affects as can change encounters compositions, changing connections made
• Fitting these 4 types space together – new models emerging (old eg. Differentiate space size little vs big – unique vs general) - need put global paths together, global links – understand space within global flows & constant change

Question 29

Descola (2013)

Answer 29

• indigenous ways worlding
• not found it necessary to naturalise the world, render it an external, passive backdrop - such a move actually very unusual in spectrum of possibilities

Question 30

Haraway (2016) chthulucene

Answer 30

• response failings modernity = sideways alternatives to narratives progress
• embrace earthbound, entangled multi-species env justice
• “the established disorder is not necessary; another world is not only urgently needed, it is possible, but not if we are ensorcelled in despair, cynicism, or optimism, and the belief/disbelief discourse of Progress”
  “What happens when human exceptionalism and the utilitarian individualism of classical political economics become unthinkable in the best sciences across the disciplines and interdisciplines? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with. … We must think!”
• need embrace materiality as humans - part nature
• draws on Margulis idea symbiosis - evolution through horizontal gene transfer - diff story to darwin - relationships between organisms
• Make kin not babies
• Staying with the trouble ends story 100s years human populations decline and enter into transformative symbiotic relationships w other species

Question 31

Sanzo (2018)

Answer 31

• New materialism = coined 90s describe theoretical turn away persistent dualisms in modern/humanist traditions. Shares agenda post humanism, both seek reposition human among nonhuman actants - Q stability liberal subject, advocate materialist attention global distributed influences capitalism/CC. Turn to matter comes from discontent with linguistic turn/ social constructionism to address material realities humans/nonhumans. NM recognise social constructionism insistence power but some maintain idea discursive construction perpetuates western, liberal subjectivities and holds on to humanist binaries. Build on work linguistic turn - material and discursive productions reality eg feminist NM don’t discount social constructions gender and intersectionality but also consider how material bodies, spaces, conditions contribute to formation subjectivity
• Butler influence NM - argument against biologically material referent gender erased nature/culture divide between sex/gender - radical constructivism - emphasises physical bodies moving in world and differences in bodies also inform experience - fem theory consider material body, intersections material/social construction
• Major trends NM grouped as ontology/agency, bioethics/biopolitics and critical materialism (linked Marxism - historical materialism, capitalism, climate crisis)
• All NM embrace matter, nonhuman and human - rejection anthropocentrism aligns NM with post humanism and speculative realism - SR dissolves human centre, NM extends capacities agency to nonhuman and material
• NM Qs position human-centred ontology but often with bio political bent - Q power structures that mark material bodies as subjects of power - engage with poststructuralism

Question 32

Nietzsche (1882)

Answer 32

• madman runs market-place calling I seek God - many people there not believe God = amusement - “where is god gone?” “we have killed him” “we are all his murderers” - how have we done it, drunk up sea, wiped away horizon, loosened earth from its sun; where does it / we move now, shall we have light - “God is Dead! And we have killed him!” - who will wipe blood from us - is the magnitude of this deed too great for us? ourselves have to become Gods to be worthy of killing God - madman silences and hearers silent/surpised - three lantern ground “I came too early” - not yet right time - event still travelling not reached men’s ears. also went into churches - what are churches now if not tombs/monuments of God?

Question 33

Braidotti (2013)

Answer 33

• da vinci’s vitruvian man - humanism
• C20th atrocities like Holocaust linked rejection humanism
• De Beauvoir’s emancipatory feminism builds on humanist principle that woman is the measure of all things female and that to account for herself, the feminist philosopher needs to take into account the situation of all women. This creates on the theoretical level a productive synthesis of self and others. Politically, the Vitruvian female forged a bond of solidarity between one and the many, which in the hands of the second feminist wave in the 1960s was to grow into the Principe of political sisterhood. This posits a common grounding among women, taking being-women-in-the-world as the starting point for all critical reflection and jointly articulated political praxis.
• Irigaray 1985 pointed out the abstract ideal of man as symbol classical humanism is a male, a white, European, handsome, able-bodied, heterosexual male.
• Eurocentric, normative humanist ideal of man
• anti-humanism rejects dialectical scheme thought (othering, inferiority, valuation)
• env theory links humanistic emphasis on man and domination/exploitation nature

Question 34

Haraway (2016) Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene

Answer 34

• can’t use western philosophy / pol economy make sense world in anthropocene
• sympoiesis anthropocene vs founded, neoliberal individualism autopoiesis
• need understand our interconnectedness, dependence
• no longer put storying in box human exceptionalism - stop focusing human containers, and the human
• Gaia
• sixth mass extinction
• capitalocene
• objections anthropocene as tool, story, epoch to think with - about death, not ongoingness; species man not make history; history needs give way geo stories; anthropocene reliance tech and reliance on individualism ; sciences anthropocene constrained systems; wealthy, western academic term
• chthulucene - a needed third story, staying with the trouble, webs - multiple species stories, becoming practices, humans not only important actor

Question 35

Haraway (2016) Staying with the trouble introduction

Answer 35

• env ethics for living in anthropocene - remake human-non human relations for habitable future
• sympoiesis - systems with no spatial or temporal boundaries - ethic living dangerous times - relationally - ones existence is tied to others
• looking for ways to open up new possibilities for living with non-human others
• staying with the trouble - be present, focus now and solve - but equally not get abstract, sublime indifference
• try exterminate chthulucene

Question 36

Massey For Space (2005)

Answer 36

• Space = product interrelations, consists of interactions
• space = sphere coexisting trajectories, possibility multiple existences
• space = always under construction/ being made
• spatial = political - thinking space different ways change form political Qs + arguments + change pol imaginations (spatial/pol imaginations linked)
• Identities and how constructed through relations key politics - relational understanding world, identities change in response relations change
• space not exist w/o identities/ relations
• Space = possibility of existence of multiplicity - story world can not told west or white, hetero-male perception alone - one story among many - political thinking fuller imagination (not just west) = better understanding space + stories inhabit it
• space always being made - open future, not predicted or set - politics can only make difference if future is open to change - space open
• story = processes of change in phenomenon
• multiplicity = existence of many stories/trajectories at same time - principle uniqueness, not difference
• space needs put in challenging pol landscape
• space often seen as fixed or extremes eg black hole - Massey make distinction of space as belonging somewhere between two
• space and places within which social constructed
• heterogeneity of planet - many things occurring at once