Materialist Practice Research Articles

Material Methodologies in Early Modern Iberian Treatises

Abstract Early modern culture was most fully expressed in events where materiality and textuality are inextricably intertwined: theatrical spectacles, royal parades, triumphal arches, processions, poetic tournaments, and jousts. At the other end of the spectrum, mainstream trends of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hispanic philology—a prism through which early modern texts have been used and read for years—are part of a genealogy of thought that privileges form over matter. As a result, the radical importance of materials is frequently overlooked in the study of early modern culture. However, if we pay attention to early modern poetic and philosophical treatises, we can clearly notice the anxiety to justify the medium in which texts themselves were produced and transmitted. This article stresses the importance of materiality in two types of treatises from early modern Iberia: three sensory treatises by Oliva Sabuco (1587), Lorenzo Ortiz (1687), and Diego Calleja (1700); and three manuals of textual production by Juan del Encina (1496), Francisco Lucas (1580), and Alonso Víctor de Paredes (1680). The article sets out an argument for a materialist practice of literary criticism, a way to read early modern texts in terms of their own material theory.

Reading Postcolonial Animals with the Animist Code: A Critique of “New” Materialist Animal Studies

This article looks at the challenges that animist materialism offers to reading strategies in new materialist animal studies scholarship. Where Rosi Braidotti’s vitalist materialism calls for a neoliteral, anti-metaphorical mode of relating to animals, Harry Garuba identifies metaphor as a primary feature of animist materialist practice in African material culture. After critiquing Rosi Braidotti’s dismissal of the “old” metaphorical ways of relating to animals, the article offers a reading of animals and the animist code in two southern African novels, Alex La Guma’s Time of the Butcherbird (1979) and Mia Couto’s The Last Flight of the Flamingo (2000), to consider the potential of animist codings of animals for resisting colonial necropolitics. Animist materialism offers the potential to raise animals and humans into ethical status by affirming the very knowledges and worldviews that Cartesian, colonial humanism wrote off as nonsense and as a marker of inhumanity.

3New Materialisms

Abstract This review considers work in the field of new materialisms, bearing in mind the wide range of approaches that make up the broader ‘material turn’ in critical and cultural theory but focusing in particular on the feminist new materialist conversation that draws on the work of Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Samantha Frost, Rosi Braidotti, and others. It notes the new materialisms’ continued heterogeneity and describes a turn to method in the field, one that enables a vibrant dialogue between applied and theoretical scholarship. The pieces reviewed share an engagement with that trend. They also illustrate two important problems that the field has engaged with in 2019. The first question concerns the new materialisms’ politics of citation, and the need for a decolonial practice that engages with indigenous and non-western thought. The second is the question of a new materialist ontology: how to reconcile the tension between ‘flat’ and differentiated, subject-oriented accounts of agency, significance, and value. The new materialists this review follows seek a middle ground, one that allows them to emphasize the political stakes of human and more-than-human relations. Following the introduction, sections are: 1. New Materialist Practice, Feminist Ends; 2. Indigeneity and the New Materialisms; 3. Sensation in a Material World; 4. A Cartography of the New Materialisms; 5. Reading's Situation; 6. Exclusion and Activist New Materialism; and 7. The Things We Imagine.

Feminising politics: notes on material and temporal feminist modal logics in action

Feminist activism aims to work to change the inequitable structures of the world. But feminists themselves get bound up in actions and intentions that are tied to their large object of critique (the patriarchy, the planet, the media, the canon, etc), and the micropolitics of the subjects constituting and constituted by those objects can be swept up in humanistic rhetorical gestures and words. How can we teach the modalities and the genealogy of feminist actions that offer tools for everyday living and for a community practice, and which also offer some ways to engage with the affective matter of the world from a posthumanist perspective, and thereby work to shift cultural attitudes? In addition to the valuable work done by those that tirelessly figure methods of communicating social inequities, the work of research led feminist informed teaching and governance can not only excavate the histories of social, political, speciesist, and biological inequities, but also offer a critique of these positions by the terms of their epistemological construction, and provide different modalities of practice. This article focuses on the latter, discussing how we might design curriculum and engage a pedagogy of recognition for a feminist modal ethics. How modes of feminist new materialist practice take the questions of affect, and agency, to enable ethical political practices is a pressing concern for many communities concerned with generating a planetary ethics. How new materialist methodology is useful for thinking the vernacular political reality was the topic of an intensive discussion and debate that took place in November 2017 in Barcelona. Taking an example of the concrete work undertaken by Barcelona Councillor Gala Pin in relation to the neighbourhood ofCiutat Vella,the article proposes that we explore and extend the genealogy of a feminist modal logics.

Althusser with Machiavelli: ‘Thinking the Deed to Be Accomplished’ as a New Materialist Practice of Philosophy

One of Louis Althusser’s most important and abiding preoccupations was, as is well-known, the construction of a definition of materialist philosophy. Such a task, which Althusser set himself in the sixties, underwent several shifts, the most famous of which is the one from the idea of a Marxist philosophy understood as a “theory of theoretical practices” (For Marx, 1965 and Reading Capital, 1965) to the idea of philosophy as “class struggle in theory” (Lenin and Philosophy, 1971, Essays in Self-Criticism, 1976). However, this paper argues for the relevance of another and still underrated definition of materialist philosophy that can be found in Althusser, which he called in some notes from the seventies a “philosophy of the fait a accomplir.” The paper will extract and elaborate Althusser’s redefinition of materialist philosophy through a reading of his engagement with Machiavelli and will outline its specific and original characteristics.

Debugging Robotic Machines in Transdisciplinary Spaces

This paper focuses on a transdisciplinary research project in a historically underrepresented public school in Toronto, Canada. At the intersection of elementary science, technology, and arts-based curriculum, the project employs the feminist new materialist practice of “diffraction” (Barad, 2007) in an after-school robotics club. Following a Baradian ethics, an emphasis is placed on the process of designing machines, which illuminates the need for different modes of measurement in educational research that account for the ongoing relationships within collective learning environments.

Walter Benjamin: Translation and Spirit in the Time of the Now

This combined essay and poetry translation focuses on Walter Benjamin’s little-known collection of sonnets written predominantly for his friend, Fritz Heinle, who died by suicide at the start of World War I. Relying on the recent translation of the entirety of Benjamin’s sonnets into English by Carl Skoggard, the two-part essay attempts to situate these sonnets as an overlooked but important element to an overall understanding of Benjamin’s life and work. Further, the sonnets and Benjamin’s biography point to a vital spirituality at the heart of Marxist materialist critique and practice, forming a constellation from which an understanding of Benjamin should not be separated and pointing toward the need for a renewed sense of urgency to continue his work in the time of the now.

Working at the Wonder: Collaborative Writing as Method of Inquiry

This article offers a discussion concerning the future of collaborative writing as a method of inquiry. Taking the form of a dialogic exchange, we take up Isabelle Stengers’ notion of “wonder” as a creative and political lens through which to consider the disruptive, radical, and productive methodological capacity that collaborative writing as a research method potentially offers. Working particularly with Deleuze and Guattari, we argue that language in collaborative writing practices is deeply entangled with complex materialist practice, and through engagements with these “matterings” we make sense of collaborative writing as immanent event. We discuss—and experience—the challenges that collaborative writing has for research and this article pushes at established categories, works against the fixities of conventional theory construction, contests the humanist and phenomenological proclivities that arguably limit the process and effectiveness of collaborative writing as method of inquiry, and wonders at t...

The Animator’s Body in Expanded Cinema

Building on phenomenological studies of the body and feminist structural materialist film theory and practice, this article proposes that performed methods of direct-on-film animation shape novel choreographies and produce original filmic patterns and rhythms. The author draws a parallel between Foucault’s disobedient ‘non-normative’ body and non-standardized interventions with film technology. The article analyses the innovative choreographies that arise from rotoscoping techniques, direct-on-film practices and expanded cinema performances. Focusing specifically on Free Radicals (Len Lye, 1958) and Reel Time (Annabel Nicolson, 1973), the author uses these analyses to shed light on her own performance of making films by moving in unusual ways, in time with technologies, and marking directly onto the film surface with the animated body. While engaging with structural materialist questions of film form, process and materials, this article departs from such modernist concerns to propose that the performance of filmmaking offers opportunities to explore the tenacity and vulnerability of particular bodies. The author suggests that performed filmmaking is equally about the traces of actions made on film and the unusual choreography that brings these marks into being.

The Detour of Abstraction

This article provides a reconstruction of the theory of abstraction elaborated by Louis Althusser in two recently published book manuscripts of the second half of the 1970s, Être marxiste en philosophie (1976, published in 2015) and Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-philosophes (1978, published in 2014). It focuses in particular on the practical character of abstraction, or more precisely, on the plurality of abstractive practices explored by Althusser, contrasting it with Marxian theories of real abstraction, as well as with Althusser's own theory of “Generalities” in For Marx , and touching on whether with his account of abstraction in language Althusser was drifting into a philosophical anthropology. It argues that these manuscripts, starting from the thesis that philosophy began in ancient Greece with a reaction against the subversive character of mathematics, delineate another materialist practice of philosophy, founded on detotalization and oriented towards the question of communist transition.

The aesthetics and politics of obsolescence: Hand-made film in the era of the digital

This article discusses contemporary handmade film-making as a form of critical practice that is now developing within the context of celluloid obsolescence and the frequent proclamations about the waning significance of film in the digital era. Because of its engagement with the materiality of film, artisanal film-making offers itself as a form of metacinematic reflection – film reflecting on the possibility and meaning of its own disappearance and the eventuality of its survival. Hence, in the films described below, to work with celluloid is to go beyond ‘analogue nostalgia’ in a restrictive, fetishistic sense, and to focus instead on the significance and topicality of the specific creative process that artisanal film-making entails. We argue that, whilst these films continue a structural-materialist tradition of experimental cinema, they reframe and renew materialist practice by engaging with wider themes of technological and cultural obsolescence.

Universal Design Research as a New Materialist Practice

In Disability Studies, Universal Design (UD) is a concept that is often borrowed from an architectural or design context to mean an ideology of inclusion and flexibility with a range of applications in education, technology, and other milieus. This paper returns to UD as a design phenomenon, considering knowledge production practices as conditions of possibility for inclusive design. UD appropriates and redefines normalizing research methods, namely anthropometry, that were developed in the 19th century for uses that are contrary to disability rights and justice, such as eugenics, colonialism, and scientific racism. The paper argues that critical disability theory should understand work in UD research and design practice in order to formulate a nuanced, new materialist and historical disability epistemology, particularly in engagements with scientific knowledge. Keywords: Universal Design, accessibility, anthropometry, normate, misfit, 19th century science, eugenics, new materialism

Themes of Scarcity

Goodbun is the lead guest editor of this issue of the international journal Architectural Design, and the primary author of the substantial introduction to this edition. In addition, he is the sole author of an article in it entitled 'Flexibility and Ecological Planning: Gregory Bateson on Urbanism', and is co-author of an article (with Karin Jaschke) on 'Architecture and Relational Resources: Towards a New Materialist Practice'. The publication is related to a £1 million EU HERA funded research project 'Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment' (SCIBE) (see www.scibe.eu), led by the University of Westminster (Goodbun a co-investigator), and including the Technical University Vienna and Oslo School of Architecture. Scarcity, whether conceived of as an actual limit on resources, or as a socially constructed condition of uneven social or global distribution of resources, has been largely absent as a critical concept in mainstream architectural discourse. This issue of Architectural Design examines ways in which architects and designers may respond to scarcity by means of a change in their design practices and their design thinking. The publication includes work by leading thinkers and designers, including the design theorist Ezio Manzini; architectural theorists and practitioners Winy Maas, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Michael Sorkin, and MUF; ecological philosophers Tim Morton and Kate Soper, and geographers Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika.

Architecture and Relational Resources: Towards a New Materialist Practice

AbstractThe most immediate impact of scarcity on architecture is the insufficient supply of building materials. As Jon Goodbun and Karin Jaschke explain, this requires an engagement with more than the direct influences on the exhaustion of natural resources. Looking beyond the conventional capitalist model of flows driven by ‘the market’, they look at how new ideas on materialism are demanding a radical revision of the relationship between matter and social, economic and political forces.

Polyphonic Theory and Contemporary Literary Practices

This paper briefly explores some of the ways in which Mikhail Bakhtin reaffirms the principle of the nonidentity yet inseparability of theory and practice in literary criticism. The lesson is one which stresses the need to disentangle the critical discourse from idealistic theoretical issues and engage in a materialist practice of criticism. If polyphonical dialogism (especially with respect to contemporary polyphony) is not to be confused with dialectics, then the most urgent and perhaps the most difficult task for the critic facing a polyphonic narrative is to negotiate the text in terms of the socio-historical actuality of the transformation which that text proposes. An analysis of D.M. Thomas' The White Hotel illustrates the ideological problems that arise when the operative system of the polyphonical narrative structure is stretched to the limit—as is moreover the case with many contemporary novels. And if the critic is to engage in a form of praxis, then he has to re-dialecticize the political (unconscious?) consciousness, in short, to politicize and not merely theorize its anticipated actualization. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol9/iss1/7 POLYPHONIC THEORY AND CONTEMPORARY LITERARY PRACTICES M.-PIERRETTE MALCUZYNSKI McGill University Any theoretical discussion presents at least one real danger: The temptation to closet the discussion tautologically and further theorize the theory, thus remaining within a speculative and experimental framework. This would mean having succumbed to the seduction of language, what Jean Baudrillard refers to when he asks whether every