Materialist Ontology Research Articles

A new materialist (re)configuring of sexuality, age and the discourse of ‘childhood innocence’

AbstractThis article explores the potential of feminist new materialisms for rethinking enduring debates that cohere around children, sexuality, age and ‘childhood innocence’. A new materialist ontology of sexuality and Karen Barad's concept of spacetimemattering are employed to conceptualise sexuality as an emergent becoming of relational material‐discursive forces. Within this paradigm, mobilisation of arguments about ‘sexual innocence and readiness’ become a matter of entanglement of contingent ‘things’, ‘spaces’ and ‘ideas’, that includes young people's own sexual knowledge. We consider how this reorientation shifts the contours, debates and possibilities of sexuality education beyond restrictive ‘age‐appropriate’ narratives.

Ayahuasca ceremonies, relationality, and inner-outer transformations to sustainability. Evidence from Takiwasi Center in Peru

ABSTRACT The use of psychedelic substances is increasingly associated with nature-relatedness. We explore whether entheogenic uses of ayahuasca in settings co-produced between Indigenous and Western knowledges may also foster relationality and sustainability transformations across ontology, praxis, and epistemology. A survey with 74 English-speaking individuals who attended Amazonian healing ceremonies at the Takiwasi Center in Peru, along with 11 semi-structured interviews and a discussion circle revealed unexpected personal shifts towards relationality. Beyond the expected increase in nature-relatedness, participants also reported boundary dissolution and changes in their perceptions of self, leading them to experience nature and non-human beings as having spiritual or human-like agency. The blurring of perceived boundaries between themselves and nature also challenged the materialist ontologies in which they had been educated and socialized. In terms of both epistemologies and praxis, co-produced ayahuasca ceremonies enhanced relational thinking and embodiment of relationality. Inner-outer transformations ensued from the post-ceremonial integration of the ‘plant’s teachings’ into participants’ daily lives. We discuss our findings’ contributions to the emerging field of inner transformations and the relational turn in sustainability. Potential sustainability benefits of scaling plant-based ceremonies need to be measured against their impacts on the Amazon rainforest and its biocultures.

Entangled engagements: a posthumanist and affirmative ethics for tourism geographies

This review summarizes some key moments in the development of ethics in tourism research and practice where three main areas of concern are identified: socio-economic inequalities, cultural discriminations, and more-than-human speciesism. Following a brief historical review, the paper delves into some current trends and ethical concerns in tourism geographies, which trace back to the utilitarian ethics within which contemporary tourism emerged, after which, and with the growing concerns about tourism’s negative impacts, normative and moral approaches to ethics held sway. Then the paper addresses a critical gap in tourism ethics’ research and practice. With few exceptions, tourism environments are seen as something apart, things to be managed, developed or even protected, where the focus is instrumental on how these environments can be maintained or manipulated for human benefit. This modernization paradigm and its promise of progress through growth, together with a tourism industry that (re)produces colonial structures through neocolonial practices reinforced by neoliberal globalization has contributed to a host of present-day challenges and injustices. We argue that to address the injustices above and current existential crises like climate change, and other threats to socio-ecological well-being, a paradigm shift in tourism thinking is needed. Specifically, we propose embracing posthumanist ethics as a novel, experimental (as against normative or moral), situated (as against universal), and affirmative (as against oppositional) critique of structural injustices and structural power; epistemological pluralism (as against essentialism), acknowledging the relationality proper of indigenous cosmologies and other traditional knowledges (where more involvement from the Global South is needed); and a new materialist ontology that overcomes human exceptionalism and abandons oppositional binary thinking. In other words, what is needed, is an affirmative posthumanist ethics for tourism that is relational, plural and differential.

Sexuality-Assemblages, Hyphens, and the In-Between

Sexuality-assemblages emphasize a relational more-than-human approach to conceptualizing the becoming of sexuality. This article brings together Fine’s notion of “working the hyphen” with a new materialist ontology of sexuality, to explore the space and form of the hyphen within the sexuality-assemblage. In “working” the sexuality-assemblage hyphen, I explore the onto-epistemological space it inhabits, who or what is implicated at this material and metaphorical juncture, and how this shapes the production of knowledge about sexuality. More than a simple connecting device between words, the hyphen is conceptualized as a metonym for the dynamic space in-between assembled elements. The hyphen-space is generative and capacious, enacting important onto-epistemological understandings about research(er) “objectivity,” response-ability and ethics integral to a new materialist becoming of sexualities research. More broadly, I consider how a new materialist ontology shapes the form of the hyphen itself, elaborating the view that even the smallest of marks can matter.

Ontological assumptions on the introduction of the concepts of cells and the functioning of living beings in school textbooks

ABSTRACT Within the scope of this investigation, educational instruments grounded on materialist ontology were employed to undertake a semantic analysis of the concepts of cell and the mechanisms of living organisms as they appear in biology and natural science textbooks. Drawing upon the ontological categories applied to distinct biological system levels, our findings demonstrate that the dominant approach for introducing the concept of cell and living organisms is via a holistic approach. However, prevalent inaccuracies relate to the presentation of tissue or organ properties, which neglect to reference the types of cells and their interactions responsible for emergent properties at this level. Our findings suggest that the use of a holistic approach to teach the functioning of living beings, may partially account for the difficulties when transitioning between levels of reality to construct explanations by students in this field of study. Our work provides tools to transition towards a biology education with a systemic approach to the content of cells and living organisms.

The Transformative Potential of Everyday Life: Shared Space, Togetherness, and Everyday Degrowth in Housing

ABSTRACT This paper proposes that everyday life in housing contains the possibility to shape and transform its material, cultural, and social conditions. Mobilizing a materialist ontology and insights from human geography, we examine how shared spaces manifest practices of togetherness which prefigure the enactment of socioecological degrowth. We draw on ethnographic fieldwork on a housing estate in Manchester (UK) to identify practices that characterize everyday housing geographies, including reappropriation, commoning, accepting limits, and territorializing tendencies. These constitute a therapeutic assemblage, facilitating wellbeing while simultaneously enfolded with(in) the political possibilities being realized on the estate to form a contingent, yet durable, instantiation of everyday degrowth. We thus contribute to revealing how transformative degrowth politics are sustained in everyday housing contexts.

Педагогічний аспект метаантропологічного пізнання канонічного права

Good and evil will never agree. A spiritual struggle is needed. The evil deeds of man testify to the absence of true, perfect knowledge. The factory of knowledge is a person who, with the help of existential and transcendental virtues and having a higher spiritual inoculation, a spiritual vaccine, knows, reveals in the universe the synergistic processual effect of ionization, that is, the transformation of potential good into ontological matters. At the same time, evil necessarily takes part in ionization, as a certain incentive to the opposite action. Ionization is caused by such an ionizer as the spiritual energy of a person, his organic cognition. This process is ontological and necessary for a person to master himself and win a place for himself in the transcendental world. The metastases of evil are so penetrating that a person cannot comprehend them from beginning to end. The natural ability of man to know the world is blocked by evil. If the earthly phenomena can be known in the main, then the supernatural ones - only a part, referring to irrationality, that is, the permissibility of existence, but the impossibility (absurdity) of revealing the essences. The philosophy of law, together with its introductions to the deontology of law and canon law, convincingly proves that it is necessary to learn about the world through the prism of law. In particular, the deontology of law appeared thanks to the ontology of law. The ontology of law derives from human organics about the laws of creation of the world. Every day of the creation of the world is justified by a specific system of laws: light, space and time, the plant world, the solar system, the nature of water-air space, the nature of terrestrial space. These are the fundamental laws of the development of the world, the laws of reality act on a person and in his body, thoughts and feelings. That is why man has a name - microcosm. Thoughts and other organic factors are the basis of the human spirit, which is the leader in relation to the body, the organism. The human spirit is influenced by various teachings, theories, and religions. This leads a person to confusion. The way out of the situation is found in canon law, which offers a single knowledge, a single theory, a single faith. Therefore, there is a need to pay attention to the knowledge of canon law.

On the Ontic Origin of Art: Can Art Tell Us Anything about God?

Heidegger’s ontological differentiation and Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysics rearranged the key players of the onto-stage, essence, being, existence, and entity (the being), which had an impact on the contemporary understanding of ontology. This paper focuses on the study of the origins of art, but also on the ontological matter to the extent to which it might be related to the matter of art. It appears that the origins of both ontology and art are at the core of this interaction. The ontological matter is connected to the issue of art in the way that questions: what if freedom, in a co-creative way, is that which is immutable and fundamental to being? What if the essence of being is the freedom of co-creating? Such an essence would always be capable of alteration (via co-creation) and transformation. It is important to note that the perception of form in art, as an experiment of the form, i.e., continuous movement and growth from the conventional to the unconventional, will also be examined. This artistic observation emphasizes the relational dynamics within a work of art, shifting the focus from its “objectivity” (an ontological perspective) to its inherent relational nature (an ontic perspective).

The strange potential of ANTi-History: a reply to Reveley

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present a reflexive review of ANTi-History written as a reply to a critique by James Reveley, published in the Journal of Management History, called “Firm objects: new realist insights into the sociohistorical ontology of the business enterprise.”Design/methodology/approachReveley’s critique of ANTi-History focuses on three aspects, namely, matters of ontology, actors and relationalism. Using the logic of ANTi-History, the author reviews each and offers a reply.FindingsThis paper demonstrates that ANTi-History is inspired by amodern thought. This condition negates the need and desire to classify social and physical objects in the study of history. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, ANTi-History assumes that historical actors are heterogeneous, and the consequence is that both human and nonhuman actors should feature in the study of history. The focus, in using ANTi-History, should be in-between the human and nonhuman actors that make up the past and history. This is the premise of using a relational lens.Originality/valueThe review of ANTi-History is structured as a reply to critiques of the approach. In reflecting on these criticisms, the author realizes that ANTi-History has gotten beyond its originators. As one of those originators, the author inspired to continue to develop its strange potential.

Musicking assemblages and non-human becomings: Mapping morphogenetic processes and distributed agencies in Wolfgang Buttress’ the Hive

AbstractThe paper introduces the concept of musicking assemblages to account for the agency of non-human actants in a project by contemporary artist, Wolfgang Buttress, that involved creating a musical soundscape together with bees. Collapsing distinctions between popular music, contemporary art and scientific research, the project exhibits musicking not as a result of human action but as emerging from intensive flows of matter-energy circulating between a multiplicity of actants, both human and non-human. Consequently, it presupposes a materialist ontology that breaks with anthropocentric hierarchies and encourages us to rethink popular music as always already involving ‘becoming with’ non-human others, in a way that overcomes the division between culture and nature, as well as its epistemological corollaries.

Crowdsourcing infrastructures of green everyday life: how sustainable sharing, swapping and gardening initiatives in Vienna tackle the lack of transformative agency in eco-politics

ABSTRACTEmpirical researchers of environmental alternative action organizations (EAAOs) have called for grounding two eco-political theories: David Schlosberg’s sustainable materialism (SM) and Ingolfur Blühdorn’s simulative politics (SP). In this article, I discuss results of an ethnographic study on a library of things, a cloth swapping initiative, and a community garden in the City of Vienna, Austria. Regarding SM, participants indeed suffer from a lack of substantive eco-political actions by liberal democratic institutions and themselves personally, however they barely convey a new materialist ontology. Regarding SP, participants indeed show an ambivalence towards consumer capitalism and ecological commitments, yet they tend to be highly critical and reflexive on the matter. Both theories are unable to detect that the EAAOs fill an eco-political lacuna in Vienna’s foundational economy: Via positive framing and flexible participation virtually everyone – the crowd – is invited to co-create sustainable routines. As such, they represent rudimentary infrastructures of green everyday life.

Labour geography I: Labour agency, informal work, global south perspectives and the ontology of futures

This review builds on Strauss’s (2020) discussion of how labour geographers conceptualise worker agency ontologically and epistemologically. Research on labour agency has been dominated by a narrow and limited lens based on a materialist ontology of capitalistic production which tends to depict labour agency as a ‘spatial fix’. Considering this critique, I review three themes of research on labour agency that push the boundaries of such dominant conceptualisations: understanding labour agency in informal work and by workers on the fringes of formalised economic spaces; from perspectives in the Global South; and via an ontology of the future.

Dissociation as Dislocation From Violence

Those of us with embodied experiences of gender diversity and sexually assault have and continue to be subject to psychiatric diagnosis and categorization that pathologize our acts of dissociation within a medical framework. In this paper we adopt Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press new materialist ontology of agential realism to argue that agentially cutting psychiatric discourse on dissociative symptoms could materialize new realities for embodied people which have been excluded to the psychiatric realm of abjection via gender diversity and sexual assault. Specifically, we explore how approaching dissociative symptoms not as dysfunction but as forms of agential dislocation from hegemonic norms of race and gender could open new political horizons by naming relations of dominance.

No Such Thing as Society? On Competition, Solidarity, and Social Bond

This essay revisits Margaret Thatcher’s notorious claim: “There is no such thing as society.” Not only does this remark sum up the neoliberal political programmatic but it also, and more fundamentally, exposes an entire political ontology, which organizes the antisocial tendencies of the capitalist mode of production. After reflecting on the implications of Thatcher’s implicit stance in ontological matters, the text moves on to the critique of capitalist antisociality in Freud by reflecting specifically on the affective conditions of solidarity. In the end, the encounter of psychoanalysis and emancipatory politics, as well as their own solidarity, is exemplified in the concept of the symptom.

A Framework of Social Ontology

The research sets out an organizing framework for the field of social ontology, the study of the of the nature of the social world. Social ontology is also gaining prominence in traditional philosophical discussions. The subject matter of social ontology is clarified, in particular the difference between it and the study of causal relations and the explanation of social phenomena. For any social fact, there are two distinct ontological questions: what is the ground for that fact, why is that fact grounded just the way. Two different inquires are defined and explained: the study of how social categories are “anchored” or “grounded”. The distinction between these inquires is used to clarify prominent programs in social theory, particularly theories of practice and varieties of ontological individualism. Anchoring and grounding are two fundamental aspect to the building of the social world, Correspondingly, social ontology consists of two distinct project - “project of grounding” and “project of anchoring’.

Green capitalism, climate change and the technological fix: A more-than-human assessment

Green capitalism is an approach that attempts to use free-market mechanisms to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Its advocates argue that the market supplies the best means to innovate technological solutions that can compete with existing polluting practices. Using a relational, post-anthropocentric and materialist ontology, this article analyses the micropolitics underpinning the capitalist market economy in terms of production and market assemblages and the affective forces within them. This novel approach reveals previously overlooked more-than-human affects within these capitalist assemblages. These affects generate the unintended and inevitable consequences of a capitalist economic framework: growth, waste and inequalities. Based on this micropolitical assessment, the article uses the example of the electric car to conclude that green capitalism is inadequate to address the climate crisis, and offers an alternative approach.

Bodies and environmental matters in Maoism and Gandhism

AbstractWhen the global material reality has already been reshaped and determined by western modernity, Gandhism and Maoism stand for attempts to discover a material world other than the existing one. I examine the ways in which the theory and practice of the body in Mao and Gandhi resonates with new materialisms' views of the body and matter as dynamic multitude and anti-dualistic open system. Gandhi and Mao share the concerns of new materialism in terms of seeing human bodies, environments, (in)organic matters and systems as configurations of multiple influences and dependencies. To put Maoism and Gandhism in the perspective of today's new materialism, the entanglement of human, nature and matter in their ideas also functions as a kind of agency in connection to other socio-political forces (instead of deploying ethics, as current new materialist ontologies have done) to enact changes. The ways in which the two formidable Asian thinkers grasp materials sound more like an abstraction, revealing that materialisms – either old or new – may be something other than what they define themselves as.

New Materialism, Micropolitics and the Everyday Production of Gender-Related Violence

This paper assesses how a new materialist ontology can inform the sociological study of gender-related violence (GRV). The new materialisms are relational rather than essentialist; post-anthropocentric as opposed to humanist; and replace dualisms such as agency/structure, reason/emotion and micro/macro with a monist or ‘flat’ ontology. To make sense of GRV from within this ontology, we explore violence as assemblages of human and non-human matter and draw upon the DeleuzoGuattarian micropolitical concepts of ‘the war machine’ and ‘lines of flight’. While violence may supply a protagonist with new capacities (a line of flight), it typically closes down or constrains the capacities of one or more other parties in a violence-assemblage. This theoretical exploration establishes the basis for a methodological approach to studying GRV empirically, using a Deleuzian toolkit of affects, assemblages, capacities and micropolitics. The paper concludes with an assessment of what is gained from this new materialist ontology of GRV.

Simultaneous multiplicity: new materialist ontologies and the apprehension of language as assemblage and phenomenon

ABSTRACT This paper explores two prominent strands of inquiry within new materialism – Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage thinking and Karen Barad’s agential realism – and situates them in relation to language studies. While a singular definition of new materialist scholarship is not feasible, we argue that the selected approaches have potential to come together to reconfigure the trajectory of language studies and critical applied linguistics, as they have begun to do in other fields of inquiry. We draw on new materialism to develop accounts of how language may be ontologically apprehended as assemblage and as phenomenon. However, rather than presenting these accounts as definitive, we invite further consideration of the implications of new materialist ontologies for our capacity to apprehend simultaneous multiplicities, and particularly, for the consequences of these on the conceptions of language that are mobilized through our theoretical and methodological tools.

Why and how ontology matters: A cartography of neoliberalism(s) and neoliberalization(s)

AbstractIn this article, I discuss the importance of ontology and its implications, demonstrated in the examples of different approaches to neoliberalism. The lack of careful ontological considerations leads to confusing and often contradictory usages of the term ‘neoliberalism’, obfuscating its usefulness. Instead, I suggest a cartography which consists of integrating two ontological debates ‐ structure‐agency and material‐ideational ‐ through the interplay between the problematiques of structuration and semiosis, and the operational debate on ideas/interests. In so doing, this cartography can provide readers with various heuristic devices to understand the making of theories, why and how conceptualizations of neoliberalism differ between and within theories and pinpoint the thematic implications of these differences. The translation of this cartography helps to achieve two things, (1) to move beyond the static analyses of neoliberalism and endorse the dynamic understand of neoliberalization processes, (2) to understand why systemic process‐based understandings of neoliberalization can create distinctions between analytical understandings of neoliberalism in terms of either the commodification of marketization processes or the marketization of commodification processes.