On difference that makes a difference and how some things come to matter and others don't. Political agency and subjectivity in Karen Barad’s feminist new materialism

Abstract

The following essay is a critical investigation into the political within feminist new materialisms. Agency, identity and subjectivity are complexified in new materialist theories, although not entirely done away with. They are understood as the complex product of a material-discursive, nature-cultural web of relations from which a feminist political subjectivity might emerge in its always situated and situational instantiations. However, while feminist new materialisms offer complex insights into the transient nature of boundary drawing practices, destabilizing binary conceptualizations of subject and object, matter and discourse and the like, our focus in this article is on how such complexifications can ground a feminist politics proper, in particular concerning the work of feminist quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barad. Using the conceptual tools developed by Peta Hinton (2014) and Catherine Malabou (2011), our argumentation works through Barad’s notions of objectivity, accountability, agency and subjectivity. At the core of the article lies the question of whether Barad’s realist notion of objectivity and accountability could allow for the recognition of commonalities and common histories in cuts and marks left on bodies in order to bring forth a certain kind of feminist (potentially collective) identity that could think and work towards political change. By working through the complementarity principle developed by Niels Bohr and its further elaboration by Karen Barad, the argument points at the conceptual problems arising from the complementarity of “truth and meaning” for envisaging political subjectivity. Rather than working towards resolving or collapsing the conceptual and material problematic of complementarity, a conclusion is drawn by thinking through Barad’s grounding of agency and processes of materialization, bearing in mind Malabou’s notion of plasticity and her call for a minimal concept of female essence, with the idea being to craft material-discursive apparatuses that could enable the tracing of a politics based on embodied historicities of matter.