Conference presentations
Saturday, May 26th
May 26th
| 11:30 – 13:30
PAPER SESSION | room Lethe
Chair: Katie King & Marietta Radomska
Gerko Egert: Agency in movement
Pat Treusch: Anthropoid robots
meeting queer_feminist
posthumanities
Ingvil Hellstrand: Are you alive?: New
materialities and shifting power
relations in science fiction series
Battlestar Gallactica
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Gerko Egert studied Theater Studies and Sociology in Berlin and Potsdam. He
works as research assistant at the Cluster “Languages of Emotion” (FreieUniversität
Berlin) and is writing his PhD on touch, movement and affect in contemporary
dance.
Agency in Movement
Even though performace and dance studies moved away from a solely analysis of
the dramatic text to an analysis of the performance as event it still focuses on the
human subject as the only possibility of performative action.Agency is in this
perspective either on the side of the actor (as ideal subject) or the spectator (as
subjecting observer). In my paper I want to challenge these attributions: How does
the notion of agency changes if we do not separate the actor and the spectator, the
stage and the audience by a separating cut enabling the idea of a mirroring or
interpellating relationship between them? What kind of relationships do emerge
between the actor and the spectator but also on the stage and within the audience
if we understand performativity – as Barad is proposing – not as exclusively human
but as a phenomena including humans, nonhumans, and cyborgs?
To get a closer look on theentanglements of these (new) materialisms in
performance and movement I want to go into three contemporary dance
performances. In Xavier Le Roy’s “Title in Progress” the bodies of the performers
(and the audience) are no longer clear cut entities: they transform and (re-)connect
in manifold ways. In Trisha Brown’s “Floor on the Forest” we cannot distinguish
between the movements of the performers and the movement of the pieces of
garments they are entangled with – antransforming entanglement in movement.
William Forsythe’s “Solo” is not the dance of one person but the entanglement of
manifold body/parts, but also of light, camera perspective and space.
These performancesrender the idea of mirroring or identifying the body as a whole
impossible. In the movements of fragmentizing, of becoming relational and virtual
agency occurs in the intra-actions of the (bodily) entanglements. By queering
traditional cuts between subject/object, actor/spectator, intra-actional cuts are
agency in movement, a movement that is not always actual but at its cusp virtual
(Manning, Massumi). My question of agency in movement is double sided: How
does it occur in the movements of the body/parts and in which way is agency in
itself moving? But also: how do these concepts also change the notion of
movement? Do these notions of agency and movement in the performances open
up a moment of virtualityand therefore the possibility of manifold relations and
entanglements.
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Pat Treuch is currently working on her PhD project on the figure of the care
robot in Berlin. Through her encounter with technobodies, she is exploring the
possibilities for lively relations to posthuman corporealizations of agency. When Pat
Treusch is not dis- and re-entangling bodies, meanings and materialities, she is
engaged in establishing transnational networks between queer and gender studies
students, young researchers, activists and artists.
Anthropoid Robots Meeting Queer_Feminist Posthumanities. A
Discussion on Anthropoid Technobodily Entanglements of
Naturecultures.
„In order to be accepted by humans and in order to act together
with them, it is advantageous for the robot to have an anthropoid
shape. […]. Additionally the motion system and the behavior of the
robot will be adjusted on human--‐like motions.“
This quote gives a description of how the “Institute for Anthropomatics” at the
Karlsruhe Institute for Technology envisions the creation of (embodied) Artificial
Intelligence (A.I.). At the Conference “Entanglements of New Materialisms”, I
would like to discuss the innovation process of such a “companion monster”
(Haraway 1995) of recent A.I. research, drawing on possibilities of a posthuman
turn to the material, which is queer_feminist and techno-scientific.
Following the quote above, a robot which (inter-‐‐)acts with humans will be
realized through its anthropoid – that means “humanlike” – shape as well as
behavior and motions. Through its supposed resemblance to humans the
anthropoid is of huge interest for an analysis of how naturecultures entangle in its
innovation process.
My aim is not a matter of making a decision for or against such an artificial
humanlike machine itself. Moreover, my aim is to deconstruct the normalizing
concepts of humanlikeness, which underlay the anthropoid’s design as well as to
deconstruct the anthropoid’s design as an effect of material agencies – human and
non-‐‐human – in their intra-‐‐activity (instead of being a result of an individual’s
or creator’s agency, e.g. the robotic engineer’s). Therefore I focus on the link
between the naturalization of particular capabilities as human and the
technologically mediated ability to interact without reinstalling the dichotomy
between human/robot.
I would like to contribute to a dialogue on transversal posthuman, queer_feminist
engagement with material agencies by presenting a diffractive reading of the
anthropoid’s technobodily materialization. My thesis is, that the anthropoid’s
technobodily materialization of humanlikeness entangles nature/culture,
organic/artificial, human/machine, body/mind, subject/object. Through these
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embodied demarcations, anthropomatics becomes an exemplary field in which
mattering takes place and – as I would like to argue – an exemplary starting point
for a posthuman, queer_feminist engagement with entangled naturecultures.
Ingvil Hellstrand is a PhD candidate at the University of Stavanger, Norway.
My PhD-project (2009- ) is called “Passing as Human: posthuman body imagery in
contemporary science fiction”. My project addresses how non‐human, yet
humanoid bodies in contemporary science fiction mediate late modern discourses
of the human and its limits in light of advances in science, medicine and
technology. My research interests feminist theory; postcoloniality; cultural theory
and media studies; techno‐bodies; posthumanities; normativity; Otherness and
science‐fiction. I’m a member of The Posthumanities Hub.
Are You Alive?: New Materialities and Shifting Power Relations
in Science Fiction Series Battlestar Galactica
My aim is not a matter of making a decision for or against such an artificial
humanlike machine itself. Moreover, my aim is to deconstruct the normalizing
concepts of humanlikeness, which underlay the anthropoid’s design as well as to
deconstruct the anthropoid’s design as an effect of material agencies – human and
non-‐‐human – in their intra-‐‐activity (instead of being a result of an individual’s
or creator’s agency, e.g. the robotic engineer’s). Therefore I focus on the link
between the naturalization of particular capabilities as human and the
technologically mediated ability to interact without reinstalling the dichotomy
between human/robot.
The re-imagined science fiction TV series Battlestar Galactica (2004) is an example
of what I identify a shift in the mode of representing the Other in late modern
science fiction: from the non-human object Other as aesthetically different from
the “real” human to humanoids that are almost impossible to tell apart from an
“authentically” embodied human. In this paper I argue that the lack of visible
difference in materialisations of the Other moves the markers of otherness to
issues of human values or ethics, or, in other words, questions of humanity or
being humane. In Battlestar Galactica (BSG), a society of sentient robots, known as
the Cylons, pass as human in terms of embodiment and social conduct. The Cylons,
having named themselves “humanity’s children”, are motivated by the idea that
they are improved versions of their creators, physically and morally. As such, the
Cylons re-address the question of being human both in terms of new materialities
and conventional human ethics. I am particularly concerned with questioning how
ethical capacity, like materiality, can be subject to change and mutability (Shildrick
2005). What is at stake when conventional human ethics serve as a parameter for
“authentic” humanity?
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In this paper, I argue that BSG makes visible how a new world order featuring
posthuman materialities threatens conventional ideas of humanity. I suggest that
BSG brings to the fore how dynamics of “old” and “new” materialisms reverberate
in dynamics of power, and how passing as human raise issues of ethical capacity as
“authentic” or legitimate humanity. Interestingly, the series open with meeting
between a drab military (human, male, white, heterosexual) officer and a sexy
Cylon embodied as a tall blonde woman. The meeting ends with an explosion: the
Cylon destroys the traditional authority of human codes of conduct. However, BSG
can also be said to position the human (“Us”) in the form of a technologically outdated military spaceship run by middle-aged white human males, versus the
enemy Other as dangerous machines embodied as sexy young women. Through a
close reading of the opening scenes of BSG, I explore the ways in which the TV
series can be said to establish shifting narratives of recognition. I suggest that BSG
address questions of humanity and ethics in a way that can be said to challenge
conventional narratives of dichotomous power relations.
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May 26th
| 11:30 – 13:30
PAPER SESSION | room Hygiea
Chair: Astrida Neimanis & Magdalena Górska
Simon Ceder: Is ethics still
philosophy’s first question? Levinas’
philosophy in a contemporary posthumanistic context
Matz Hammarström: Agential realism
and the possibility of a posthumanist
philosophy of religion
S. Pearl Brilmyer: Materializing
Schopenhauer
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Simon Ceder is a PhD-student in Education at Lund University. His area of
interest is the pedagogical relation, ethics, post-humanistic theories as well as the
philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.
Is Ethics Still Philosophy’s First Question? Levinas’ Philosophy
ina Contemporary Post-Humanistic context
EmmanuelLevinas proposes a critique to the whole of western philosophical
tradition and humanistic thought (1969). He states that these thoughtsalways has
tried to include the other into the same, the particular into a universal model,
which according to him is unethical and totalizing. Levinas says that if we really
want to be humane, and care for human beings, the humanistic idea is not
enough. Instead, Levinas places ethics as the first philosophy: placing the Other
before the I in an asymmetrical relation.
However, Levinas considered the subject as a separate human being, a starting
point that comtemporary post-humanistic theories are critical towards. Using
Donna Haraway (2008), the human subject is no longer a separate being, but
instead entangled with technology and science. Human beings are in constant
interaction with other humans, animals, material objects, physical laws and
environmental conditions. Being entangled with the material world, the human is
lacking clear borders and demarcations. An early critique of Levinas’ human focus
was the article Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal) (1991)
where John Llewelyn discussed the question whether the I is only responsible
towards another human, or also together with other animals. Levinas critique
towards humanistic thought was that it was not human enough. Today, we could
argue that Levinas humanistic critique is too human in the sense that the human is
all that matters.
In Heidegger’s Being, the kind of ontology Levinas criticized, the Being is a human
being, described as a solid unity. In a post-humanistic context, the human subject
is instead fragmentized and entangled. How does this affect Levinas’ view on
ethics? If this new ontological turn (Åsberg, Hultman and Lee 2012) only is an
expansion to a broader ontological being, then how does it handle the question of
ethics? Levinas claims that a focus on ontology is repeating the subject again and
again, missing the ethical dimension of the Other. Can Levinas’ claim for ethics as
first philosophy still be valid even for a fragmentized subject towards a
fragmentized Other? Or cancontemporary post-humanistic thought dissolve the
subject enough to make an ethics included in this ontological turn?How can
Levinas ethics be read Karen Barad (2007) and her onto-ethico-epistemological
perspective? These are the questions I will discuss in this paper.
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Matz Hammarström’s doctoral thesis has the working title A Relationalist
Approach to Religious Experience. The aim is to delineate a relationalist
perspective und use this to contribute to the discussion concerning truth,
reference and the construction of reality, and how we can understand religious
experience.
Agential Realism and the Possibility of a Posthumanist
Philosophy of Religion
Traditional philosophy of religion’s preoccupation with the questions of God’s
existence, and rationally justified belief, is a symptom of the mainstream
masculine metaphysics of separateness. Using Karen Barad’s notions of agential
realism and posthumanist performativity I challenge this metaphysics and discuss
the possibilities of a posthumanist philosophy of religion that rejects the idea of a
profound separateness between the divine and the world, and tries to refigure our
understanding of the object(s) and objectives of religious experience.
A relational-performative posthumanist perspective is very interesting for a
philosophy of religion aiming at a transformation of our understanding of the
divine. In our continuous intra-active participation in the world’s becoming,
through our material-discursive practices, there are vast opportunities for
renewing the religious symbolic and thereby opening new ways of experiencing
and understanding the divine, and this in ways highly consonant with the
posthumanist environmental ethics proposed by Stacy Alaimo in Bodily Natures,
that”denies to the ’human’ the sense of separation from the interconnected,
mutually constitutive actions of material reality”.
Barad’s agential realism is a well thought through and well argued prolific
theoretical foundation for a disruption of the mainstream masculine metaphysics
of separateness, and a feminist philosophy of religion could benefit substantially
from her ethico-onto- epistemological approach, amalgamating a robust realist
outlook with an acknowledgment of our participation in the world’s intra-active
becoming, making plain our responsibility for what forms of life we foster – and for
what kind of divinity that comes to matter.
In my paper I explore the possibility of a feminist posthumanist philosophy of
religion, drawing substantially from Spinoza’s idea of Deus sive Natura, in which
“divine being” is not understood as referring to a divine being seen as a separate
pre-existing entity but rather as divine being, a relational mode of responsible
living as an intra-acting part of the world’s ongoing becoming – a being that is also
a doing.
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S. Pearl Brilmyer
is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the
University of Texas at Austin. She is currently based in Berlin, Germany, where she
is a Predoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her
dissertation “Character Drives: Late-Victorian Literature and the Human Sciences”
is being completed with the support of a DAAD (German Exchange Service)
Research Grant.
Materializing Schopenhauer
For manyArthur Schopenhauer is nothing but an oldidealist. For a handful of lateVictorian women writers, however, he was a new materialist whose
vitalistictheory of ‘the will’ was integralto their vision of the new woman as a force
of change. In an 1879novel serialized in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s journal
Belgraviaa group of womengathers to discuss Schopenhauer’s theories, leaving
empoweredwith the thought that the “regenerating force” of the world is woman.
A few years later, in Braddon’sown novel Phantom Fortune (1883)the fiercely
independentLady
Maulevrierdevelops
a
“materialist
creed”inspired
Schopenhauer’s suggestionthat “we know nothing except the immutable laws of
material life.”
These are but a few of Schopenhauer’scurious cameosin late-Victorian
women’swriting.What did Schopenhauer’s philosophy offerthese women writers—
feminist materialists, as I see them,avant la lettre?Iwill suggest that
Schopenhauer’s sexualized theory of the will, filtered by many through ninteenthcentury materialism, offered a unique platform forwomen writers to theorize
desire as a material, all-pervasivepower of motivation and change. While Victorian
menoftenfound Schopenhauer’s pessimism depressing for the lack of agency it
ascribed to human (read: male) subjects, a handful of women writers recognized
and celebrated his flat ontology in which man, woman, animal, plant—
indeed,even nonliving things—were moved by the same driving force.
Schopenhauer’s theory of the will granted the same level of agency to everything;
as he once put it cleverly: “Spinoza … says that if a stone projected through the air
had consciousness, it would imagine it was flying of its own will. I add merely that
the stone would be right.”
This paper tells the strange story of the developmentof aSchopenhauerian thread
of fin-de-siècle feminist theory—a precursor tocontemporary materialisms like
those of Elizabeth Grosz, Karen Barad, and Jane Bennett. It draws attention to the
crucial role that women editors, translators, and authors played in Schopenhauer’s
rise to fame in both England and in Germany—from the career-making article
George Eliot published about him in the Westminster Review during her
editorshipin 1853 (translated into German by Mrs. Ernst Lindner one year later) to
the translation of his scandalous essay about sexual relations, the“Metaphysics of
*Sexual+ Love,”by Mrs. Rudolf Dircksin 1897. The work of these women, among
others (Helen Zimmern, Jessie Laussot), established Schopenhauer as a
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philosopher of sexuality and agencyfor the emerging generation of British
modernists. Offering a perversereading of Schopenhauer’s famously misogynist
“On Women,”I suggest that the feminist interest Schopenhauerwas not
unfounded: Schopenhauer himself unwittingly centered women in his philosophy
of will.
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May 26th
| 11:30 – 13:30
PAPER SESSION | room TEM21
Chair: Hillevi Lenz Taguchi & Desireé
Ljungcrantz
Anne-Li Lindgren: Enacted childhood
naturecultures: imbroglios of
human/non-human relations with
the example of a theme park
Hanna Sjögren: Teaching
sustainability literacy as ”troubling”
knowledge in teacher education
Eva Änggård: Digital cameras: agents
in research processes with children
Kajsa Ohrlander: Counteracting neoliberal discourses through (material)
feminisms within teacher education
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Anne-Li Lindgren
is an Associate Professor of Child Studies at Linköping
University in Sweden. She has written on the history of educational media (e.g.,
film, radio, and television) and on children’s culture. She is currently involved in a
project studying culture for and by children at theme and amusement parks.
Enacted Childhood Naturecultures: Imbroglios of Human/nonhuman Relations with the Example of a Theme Park
This paper explores Astrid Lindgren’s World (ALW), considering how fiction and
childhood enact ‘naturecultures’ in which the human (i.e. adults and children) and
non-human (i.e. fiction, fictive characters, and notions of childhood) are
interconnected in multifaceted ways. The imbroglio of relationships enacted at
ALW comprise complex gradients of realness in which real and unreal become
mixed, giving rise to interferences between human and non-human relationships.
At ALW, entanglements between the fictive and childhood are specific and
effective modes of enactment, i.e. enactment devices making fictive childhood
naturecultures ‘realer than real’. Interconnectedness, hybridity, and abundance
are highlighted as ways to contribute to the retheorizing of contemporary
childhood.The paper/presentation will focus on two themes: Human/non-human
fictive naturecultures, and Entanglements of time-place-space in fictive urban rural
realities.
Hanna Sjögren
is a PhD Candidate at the Unit of Technology and Social
Change, Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. Hanna's
PhD project is on how knowledge about sustainable development is delimited in
Swedish teacher education, and how these limitations/boundaries affect the
images of what a future teacher is. Hanna is mainly working with focused group
interviews as the method of inquiry.
Teaching Sustainability Literacy as “Troubling” Knowledge in
Teacher Education
In this paper, I argue that teacher education marks an interesting case for studies
seeking to understand how knowledge about sustainable futures is produced and
circulated, thus which imaginaries of the future that are established at the
exclusion of others. I further argue that today's inter-connectedness and intraactions (Barad 2003) with humans and the environment offer a radical challenge
to the educational system, both in terms of organizational structures and learning
contents.
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I develop the concept of sustainability literacy, drawn from earlier discussions
about scientific literacy and agential literacy (Barad 2000), in the context of
Swedish teacher education. At focus here is the negotiation about how knowledge
can be understood in always already times of trans- corporeal relations (Alaimo
2010) and entanglements of e.g. naturecultures, local-global, human- non-humans
and individual-collectives. These negotiations are here seen in the co-productive
context of knowledge-making concerned with problems that are transgressing
disciplinary boundaries in teacher education.
I argue that these transgressions offer a challenge what counts as knowledge, a
challenge perhaps most vital to those assigned with the commitment to educate
future generations – the becoming teachers. Here, questions are raised about the
re-conceptualization of responsibility, ethics and accountability connected to
knowledge and knowledge-production.
By using focused group interviews with teacher educators as the method of
inquiry, I study how knowledge about sustainable development is negotiated and
performed in the context of Swedish teacher education. The interviews reveal the
“trouble” that sustainable development creates in teacher education both in terms
of establishing what a good teacher is, and what can count as valid and desirable
knowledge (i.e. literacy) when educating future teachers.
I investigate how the imaginaries of future teachers, students and societies are
changing in the education of becoming a teacher of sustainable development. I
argue that the trouble that sustainable development creates in teacher education
can be studied with help of insights from the growing hub of new materialisms. I
situate this study in the inter-disciplinary fields of environmental humanities as
well as those of the feminist post-humanities and educational studies.
Eva Änggård is an assistant professor at the Department of Child and Youth
Studies at Stockholm University. I completed my Ph D in 2005 at The Department
of Thematic Studies, Child Studies, Linköping university. My dissertation was about
preschool children's art activities. At the moment I am working with a project
funded by The Swedish Research Council concerning children in outdoor
education.
Digital Cameras: Agents in Research Processes with Children
The aim of this paper is to discuss possibilities and limitations using children’s
photographs, a research method that has been more frequent during the last
years. The paper is based upon an on-going study about children’s relations to
outdoor places. In all, 42 children between sex and eight years old, at two primary
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schools with outdoor education programmes, participated in the study. The
children took photos with digital cameras during walks in their school yards and in
nature environments. They were asked to show places for their play and other
activities. Thereafter, ten girls and ten boys were interviewed about their
photographs. The children were informed about the project and that their
participation was voluntary. In the analysis the concept of intra-activity (Barad
2007) has been used. The concept implies that not only humans but also material
objects and discourses have agency. This opens up opportunities for analysis of the
interplay between children, cameras and outdoor environment. The result
indicates that the cameras are useful tools that make it easier for children to talk
about their everyday environments and account for aspects that are difficult to
verbalize. The cameras, as well as the photos, help children to reflect over and
communicate their experiences of the outdoor environment. However, the
cameras as well as discursive factors concerning photography also influence the
children and the research process. The cameras invite the children to explorative
and experimental activities like using the cameras as magnifying glasses, turning
the camera upside down or take pictures and move at the same time, so that the
image is blurred. Furthermore, discourses and conventions concerning
photography are at play; the children take photos from traditional motives like
flowers and views. They also take many photos from other children who often
pose in front of the camera. Thus, the cameras invite children to activities of
explorative and social character, activities that sometimes do not coincide with the
purpose of the study, i.e. to investigate children’s relations to outdoor places.
Kajsa Ohrlander is a senior lecturer in the Department of Education in Arts
and Professions at Stockholm University. She has used feminist poststructuralist
perspectives and material feminism in her historical research on children, gender,
feminisms and welfare reforms in Sweden. She is presently working on a book
called "Revolution in the home corner"; a collection of articles about the Swedish
pre-school reforms of the 1970s. She is also co-editor, together with Hillevi Lenz
Taguchi and Linnea Bodén, of the recent book "A pink pedagogy. Gender
pedagogical challenges" (2011). Kajsa Ohrlander has for several years devised and
taught BA, MA and Phd courses on gender and pedagogy.
Counteracting neo-liberal discourses through (material)
feminisms within teacher education
This paper makes the point that there is potential for political change in and
through feminist/gender courses within teacher education. It thereby also goes
beyond the dichotomies often set up between feminist research as analytical, and
activism and practice as “doings” (Ahmed, 2012, Scott, 2012).The paper analyses a
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course held in 2010. The political in this course is made possible by setting
thoughts and concepts, formed by Karen Barad and Judith Butler together with
theoretical/practices picked up from Reggio Emilia pedagogy, into work. In this
way a course process is opened up which not only counteracts, but is also
proactive in relation to, “making children into soldiers in a worldwide competition”
(Pederson, 2003). It is proactive in relation to the increasing use of hierarchical and
dichotomizing measurements of individual performances in preschools and
schools. It connects to traditions and gender equality practices foremost in
Swedish pre-schooling.
By creating a cooperative learning process of teacher/students/documents, the
dichotomies between research, practice, matter and activism are challenged and
research gets entangled and formed within the course process. The students have
produced films and other documents about pre-school and school practices. By
setting concepts like performativity, agentic realism and gender into work, it is
possible to challenge the individualistic metaphysics, and to cooperatively work
out how the intra-actions between bodies, materials and discourses make children
and things come into being.
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May 26th
| 14:30 – 16:30
PAPER SESSION | room Lethe
Chair: Rick Dolphijn & Line Henriksen
Julia Bee: Diffractional aestethics
and gender interference in film and
media
Marietta Radomska: The lesson of
tissue cultures: thinking the radical
immanence of life through bioart
Miriam Wistreich: When blood
trickles down my thigh, I become
menstruant: actor-network theory
and the menstruating body
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Julia Bee is currently working as a scholar for Media and Cultural Analysis at the
Institute for Media and Cultural Studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.
Since 2009 she works in a interdisciplinary project on discourses, images and
narrations of torture in current film and media. She is working on a PhD thesis on
the reception and production of precariousness in contemporary film.
Diffractional Aesthetics and Gender Interference in Film and
Media
The paper wants to propose a relational, feminist media aesthetic according to
Donna Haraway’s and especially Karen Barad’s notion of diffraction. Diffraction is
not only a theory of science or scientific apparatuses, but of media entanglements.
Following Barad´s concept of agential realism reality is no separable (ontological)
realm, but rather a mutual shared becoming, an enacted entanglement and
engagement: “In fact, diffraction not only brings the reality of entanglements to
light, it is itself an entangled phenomenon.”
Mediality is a differential process, a relation. It does not combine detached
entities, but let them emerge as intra-actions. Here a medium is no coherent
apparatus, inter-acting with subjects or other apparatuses, like in theories of
intermediality, but a performative agencement of humans and nonhumans.
It makes sense, according to Barads concepts of posthuman performativity,
diffraction and agential cuts, to resolve the division of the inner and outer media
reality, and at the same time the gap between the inside or mental space and the
seemingly independent world outside of the recipient. Media, for instance film,
and reality are not given, but are performed relations, emerging through powerful
agential cuts. As there are no protagonists acting in front or through things, film
does not play inside a given reality, detached from the world in its differential
becoming. It is the entanglement between filmic and subjective differences that
performs the world, not staging action, but intra-acts agencies. Agential cuts occur
in the in between of the body of the film and the body of the spectator as a
responsive matter in a sensitive and unconscious way.
We want to develop this perspective on filmic examples, which we regard not as
copy or representation of agency, but as agency itself building specific social and
aesthetic assemblages at the same time, like haptic and kinetic intensities, genre
and social differences like gender, which emerge as specific relations and agencies
between the filmic body and the body of the recipient, as knowing and being at
the same time.
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Marietta Radomska is a PhD candidate at Tema Genus – The Zoontology
Research Team, Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University (Sweden)
and a member of the Posthumanities Hub at LiU. She gained a Research Master
degree in Gender and Ethnicity Studies at Utrecht University (The Netherlands) in
2011 and a Master of Arts in Philosophy specialised in Social Communication at
Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland) in 2008. In her current research project she is
investigating the ways in which the contemporary hybrid and transdisciplinary
practices of science and art understand, redefine and conceptualise life, while
taking into account the ethico-political consequences and possible revisions of
human/nonhuman relationships. Her academic interests include: feminist
posthumanism, feminist science studies, feminist philosophy, new materialism,
Deleuze and Guattari studies and animal studies. She has published in Nowa
Krytyka, Praktyka Teoretyczna, Artmix and Potentia.
The Lesson of Tissue Cultures: Thinking the Radical Immanence
of Life Through Bioart
This paper aims to examine the ways in which life, matter, the subject as well as
ethics are conceptualised through the contemporary artistic and technoscientific
practices comprised by bioart.
More specifically, I will focus on The Tissue Culture and Art Project, formed by
IonatZurr and Eduardo Catts. Through their collaboration with scientists, the TC&A
artists create semi-living “sculptures” out of different tissue cultures grown on
biopolymer scaffoldings. The presentation of their artworks is usually
accompanied by the so-called rituals (of nurturing or killing the semi-living objects)
performed by both the artists and the audience. Such a form of engagement with
the hybrid merger of bioscience and art opens up a space of discussion concerning
responsibility and accountability for and to the life created through the advanced
technoscientific procedures.
The Deleuzian idea of life as radical immanence (always already comprising death)
has inspired many contemporary theorisations of life (by Claire Colebrook,
Elizabeth Grosz, Paul Patton, Keith Ansell Pearson, Daniel Smith, KathrinThiele
among others). I will, however, take into special consideration a Deleuzian feminist
and posthumanist account of life proposed by RosiBraidotti. In her perspective, life
is conceptualised as zoe, a radically immanent and relentlessly generative,
impersonal, “mindless” and inhuman force, which appears as both the subject and
the object of contemporary biopolitics. Taking Braidotti’s readings of the Deleuzian
immanence and desire, Spinozian affect and ethics as well as Bergsonian duration
as my analytical tool, I will explore the following questions: what posthumanist
understandings of life and materiality are engendered through TC&A works? How
do they affect the conceptualisation of the subject? And last, but not least, how
may these transdisciplinary practices enable us to imagine a truly nonanthropocentric and non-speciesistethics?
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Miriam Wistreich is a
writer and researcher based in London, UK. She holds
a BA in Art History from Copenhagen University and an MA in Interactive Media:
Critical Theory and Practice from Goldsmiths College, where she is currently
conducting her research at the Centre for Cultural Studies FLOSS Lab under
Professor Graham Harwood.Her interests revolve around bodies, both human and
non-human, fictions and feminist thinking. A rather hopeless romantic, her
previous research has engaged with Victorian prostitution in London, baroque
dollhouses and desire.
When Blood Trickles Down My Thigh, I Become Menstruant:
Actor-Network Theory and the Menstruating Body
Menstruation, sticky, flowy and smelly, is a reminder of the body’s permeability
and its animal character. Menstrual blood is both ‘me’ and ‘not me’, both
reassuring and confusing to the fiction of the self. Historically, ‘the curse’ has been
treated as a locus of shame over the female body and has been used as a tool to
cast women as inferior to men. Building on feminist theory, phenomenology
and body studies, this paper examines previous discourse formations surrounding
menstruation and suggests a Latourian approach to understanding the flesh and
blood reality of a bodily process that is still widely considered taboo.
Attempting to chisel out a strategy for engaging with matter, the paper uses ActorNetwork theory as a tool with which to create a menstruating body that is
processual and inclusive, that omits dualisms and privileges assemblages. A range
of lived experiences are examined; read through Latour menstruating bodies
become ones of affect and multiplicity, of learning and becoming, bodies enacted
through leakage and tied to other bodies through flows.
The methodology generates a massively different narratives and readings of
menstruation and leaking bodies, doing away with repression and shame and
instead activating the body in an ontological chain of materialities, speaking
entities that all interact.
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May 26th
| 14:30 – 16:30
PAPER SESSION | room Hygiea
Chair: Stacy Alaimo & Tara Mehrabi
Magdalena Górska: Entanglements
of breathing and feminist theory
Rebeca Ibanez-Marítn, Sebastian
Abrahamsson, Filippo Bertoni &
Annemarie Mol: Living with omega3: notes on new materialisms and
feminist theory
Fiona Druitt: Thinking
things/embodying throught:
modernity’s double edged sword
and the ”Two Cultures”
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Magdalena Górska is a PhD. student at Department of Thematic Studies:
Gender Studies at Linköping University, Sweden and a member of the
Posthumanities Hub. In 2009 she obtained a graduate degree at the Department
of Gender Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Czech Republic.
Magdalena’s graduate research followed bumblebees in a biochemistry lab in
order to discuss the non-human agentiality of scientific research processes and the
ways how agency, materiality and discursivity are enacted and (re)configured in
everyday research practices. In 2006 Magdalena completed her undergraduate
degree at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University with the undergraduate
thesis discussing the notion of embodiment and materiality in Judith Butler’s work.
In the course of her education Magdalena also studied at the Netherlands
Research School of Women’s Studies, Utrecht University (2008) and at the Faculty
of Humanities, University of Turku (2005). In 2006-2008 she was a researcher of
the KNOWING research project (FP6, EC).
Entanglements of Breathing and Feminist Theories
The paper is an invitation for entangling feminist theories with breathing. By
engaging with breathing both as a phenomenon as well as a figuration the paper
argues for a non-anthropocentric understanding of human embodiedsubjectivities that challenges culturally sedimented boundaries and binaries (such
as mind-body, human-non-human, inside-outside, organic-inorganic) which
delimitate individualistic, rational, and universalistic understanding of the human.
The paper will also flesh-out how breathing reconceptualization of the human as a
phenomenon that is of the world opens up possibilities for engaging with feminist
theories and methodologies.
Rebeca Ibáñez Martín is a PhD candidate in the STS Department at the
Philosophy Institute in CSIC, Madrid. She is a guest researcher at the Universiteit
van Amsterdam in the ‘Eating Bodies in Western practice and theory’ project. She
is currently studying different daily practices in which fats are enacted, and eaten.
Sebastian Abrahamsson
holds a DPhil in Geography from Oxford
University and is now working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of
Amsterdam. He is currently studying the ways in which different foodstuffs, edible
and nonedible, are wasted, saved and recycled in everyday practices.
Filippo Bertoni is a PhD candidate at the Universiteit van Amsterdam in the
‘Eating Bodies in Western practice and theory’ project. His research, following
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different species and different scientists, considers how eating figures and is
enacted in sites where ecological knowledge is produced or put to use.
Annemarie Mol is Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the Universiteit
van Amsterdam and the leader of the ‘Eating Bodies in Western practice and
theory’ project. What is it to eat? How is ‘eating’ done in ordinary – and extraordinary – practice/s? How to reframe ‘the actor’ by drawing on a sophisticated
understanding of tasting, digesting, appreciating and other activities that
characterise ‘the eater’?
Living with Omega-3: Notes on new materialisms.
These days (if only because environmental issues are getting ever more pressing),
many of us seek to attend to matter and its capacities to act. Going with other
forms ofnew materialism, Jane Bennett talks of ‘thing-power’. But how to best
attend to materialities? To address this question, we will focus on a specific case,
that of omega 3 fatty acids. In her Vibrant Matter Bennett relates that these
‘things’are capable of altering the moods of the people who ingest them. But
when explored in more detail, it appears that this is not everything they do. In
different contexts (prisons, research labs, fish, oceans) omega 3 fatty acids engage
in a range of different activities. And, or so we would like to argue, they never do
so alone. It is laudable that Bennett seeks to draw ‘things’ into an all too human
political philosophy. However, our empirical explorations make us wonder ifshe
might not (at the same time) be drawing(as a Trojan horse) an doubtful political
philosophy into new materialism. For the solitary things of her stories show a
striking resemblance to the liberal subject. We will suggest ways of importing
other political philosophy traditions into our materialismand propose a shift from
the question what ‘things’do, to that other one: how might we live together.
Fiona Druitt leads a somewhat double life. She completed graduate research
in 2005, with first class honours, and taught, in the Department of Mathematics
and Statistics at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has a science degree
with two majors, mathematics and physics. She now applies some of this
mathematics of thinking things (petrol tanks mainly) in the petroleum industry
(environmental risk). At the same time, Fiona is a feminist philosopher and
creative writer. She also has a humanities degree with two majors: cultural studies
(gender/queer/literary studies) and creative writing. She blames her parents for
this rather Kantian twist (one faces the humanities, the other science) and luck for
there being something theoretical and something empirical that she found
interesting on each side. She has never really understood why everyone else in
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modernity takes it that the two cultures divide is supposed to be obvious. She has
always been as much of one as the other.
In 2006 Fiona was awarded Melbourne University’s (Culture and Communication)
Dwight prize for best honours thesis, for her work on Modernity, Darwin, Gender
and Embodiment. She is currently completing her PhD at Melbourne University
(Culture and Communication) under the auspices of an Australian Postgraduate
Award, and the guidance of Professor John Frow. The first half of this project was
supervised by A. Prof Vicki Kirby, at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney.
Fiona’s PhD project is (at least at this particular point in time) entitled: Across the
Great Divide: Thinking Things and Embodying Thought in Modernity.
Thinking Things/Embodying Thought: Modernity’s Doubleedged Sword and the ‘Two Cultures’.
What ever happened to the sex/gender puzzle in feminist and queer encounters?
Thinking it went out of fashion for a while, but it’s not like it ever went away. Or,
how might we enliven it, flesh it out (pun intended) in new materialisms emerging
today? How can these questions be related to the broader question of modernity?
They always were, weren’t they? Wasn’t modernity what Foucault (1966) was
critiquing in the first place?
One of the most central and enduring dilemmas of modernity is that thought and
things have become divided, at best reductively, at worst paradoxically. Foucault
argued that, as Bruno Latour (1993) put it, ‘we have never been modern’. This, by
now, is obvious, and is without originality. But what he didn’t say, what he
couldn’t quite say (Foucault openly admitted this) was what being non-modern
might be? This isn’t a play on words. It is a stronger statement that Foucault’s
proof by contradiction. How then, to borrow Heidegger’s term, might we ‘think
things’ differently?
The pre-discursive body is the most well-worn queer and feminist dilemma – and
yet, it is one in which we have hardly breached the skin. Connecting writing and
embodiment, Vicki Kirby (qtd. in Blumenfield & Sönser Breem 2005, p15) asked
Judith Butler the following question: there is a serious suggestion that life itself is
‘creative encryption’. Does your understanding of language and discourse extend
to the workings of biological codes and their apparent intelligence?
Butler resists citing what she calls a ‘conflation’ between ‘the ontology of biology
itself’ and mathematical writing. Kirby (1997) brilliantly argues against Butler’s
thought here, against her conception of language. But this strikes me too, as a
mathematician (Like Kirby (Anthropology) and Barad (Physics), I too lead a double
ontological life). Applied mathematics, the mathematics of things, doesn’t just
write things, it reads them like Braille. They are alive to the touch. ‘Nature
performs itself differently’, as Kirby (qtd. in Barad 2007, p878) once put it, which is
actually the whole point of applied science. Theorists might think things, but
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applied scientists embody them; they ask things themselves empirical questions.
And things speak back! Things, it seems, have never been modern. It turns out that
they have quite a lot to say.
In his ‘thing theory’, which brings the study of things to literary studies, Bill Brown
(2001, p8) asks, what habits have prevented us - prevented you – from thinking
about objects, let alone things? Or, more precisely, perhaps: what habits have
prevented you from sharing your thoughts? In one of his neglected, slightly mad
manifestos, Jean Baudrillard sanely declares that “we have always lived off the
splendor of the subject and the poverty of the object.” “It is the subject”, he goes
on to write, “that makes history, it’s the subject that totalises the world”, where as
the object “is shamed, obscene, passive”.
This is an apposite critique, of course; subjects and objects were never that
divided. But it is only half of the story! For applied scientists (and perhaps the
more empirical humanities, which is what Brown is attempting) things are quite
literally the other way around. In modern science we live off the splendour of the
object and the poverty of the subject! Baudrillard’s claim short-circuits across the
two cultures.
What I want to know is, what does it mean to be non-modern? What habits have
prevented us from thinking things and embodying thought simultaneously in
modernity? How might we think things differently? To borrow C.P Snow’s trope of
the ‘rude question’ posed across the two cultures, then, why don’t you ask them?
Things speak to science like this all the time! But this is also the place where
thought and things short-circuit in modernity, across the two cultures. It is here
that resistances lie. Now, this might sound like a complication, or a reduction – but
if we realise that, the very disciplines that we have for thinking and embodying
modernity are part of the problem at hand; and that it is their very divides that
also connects them, for they are cut with a double-edged sword – then this
becomes, not a complication, but a clue.
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May 26th
| 14:30 – 16:30
PAPER SESSION | room TEM21
Chair: Lissa Holloway-Attaway & Hanna
Sjögren
Maria Svanström: Discourse ethics
and bodily notions of materiality in
the context of deliberative
democracy
Thomas Kjellqvist: Materialities and
entanglements in the history of
development aid
Anna Kaijser: Negotiating
Pachamama: constructions of
nature, power and social identity in
Bolivian environmental debates
Anne Møller Gabrielsen: A
dangerous dog story
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Maria Svanström is a doctoral student at the Department of Political and
Economic Studies in the University of Helsinki. My PhD dissertation
”Intersubjectivity Revisited. Relationality, Discourse Ethics and Bodily Notions of
Materiality in the Context of Deliberative Democracy” is planned to be sent for
precontrol by the end of this year. Besides this, I have taken part in several
research projects related to trade unions.
Discourse Ethics and Bodily Notions of Materiality in the
Context of Deliberative Democracy
To discuss democracy in terms of deliberation has been a very popular theme in
political theory and political philosophy during the last two decades. Also many
feminist thinkers have taken part in this debate – which might not be surprising
considering the importance of the theme of verbal expression and the frequent
use of metaphors related to voice in feminist theory and practice. In the tradition
of deliberative democracy, participants in a decision making process are often
expected to treat one another with mutual respect in order to end up in legitimate
decisions. However, this ideal is seldom elaborated more in detail – in other
words, the starting point is that the participants already recognize one another as
equals. This has to do with the fact that many contributions in this tradition are
based on discourse ethics, where the political subjects are tied together by an
intersubjective system of language and where the selves/the self of the
community disappear in subjectless forms of communication. However, reading
texts on deliberative democracy more closely, traces of both phenomenological
thinking (especially via Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas) and of
psychoanalysis (with references to Melanie Klein and in feminist contributions to
Luce Irigaray) can be found when the relation between subjects taking part in a
decision making process is discussed. By elaborating these traces, different ways of
conceptualizing intersubjectivity can be crystallized. In the presentation I will show
how sexual difference philosophies – by turning the attention to relationality,
dialogue, bodily notions of materiality as the voice and related hierarchies in
Western thinking – can be used to give new insights when elaborating the concept
of intersubjectivity in the context of deliberative democracy. It will also be noted,
that democratic procedures are related to the outcome of political conflicts that
always take place in materia.
Tomas Kjellqvist is born in 1957 and trained as a human geographer. After
18 years of work in Swedish aid bureaucracy he is now doing his Ph.D.- studies at
Technoscience Studies, Blekinge Institute of Technology. His work experience has
been devoted to research cooperation, first at the Swedish Agency for Research
Cooperation with developing Countries, SAREC and the on the Swedish Agency for
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International development cooperation, Sida. Within these agencies, Tomas has
worked both with support to thematic research programs and with programs for
research capacity building in developing countries. Tomas was responsible for the
research capacity building program in Tanzania when Sida decided to upgrade
from a project based approach to support to building institutional capacity at
universities in developing countries. Starting in 2011, Tomas is currently writing his
Ph.D. thesis on “Aid, knowledge and technology transfer: the case of Swedish aid
to the energy sector”. The thesis looks at aid with an innovation systems approach
to reveal how different kinds of learning processes have influenced the outcomes
of aid contributions. In particular he examines knowledge flows within the Triple
Helix constellation, aid bureaucracy, academia and industry.
Materialities and Entanglements in the History of Development
Aid
Development aid takes off from a moral imperative generated by a distant
materiality. Humans living in a built environment liberated from material
sufferings want to helpother humans living in a materiality of distress. This moral
imperative for development aid is entangled with the modernization paradigm,
with neo-colonialism, with globalization, with foreign policy and with
professionalization. Responsibilities for the moral imperative of aid have been
assigned to governmental bureaucrats.
This paper focuses on the changing roles of the Swedish development aid
workersin Africa. Swedish aid in the 1960’ssent out personnel to assist in
modernization efforts. The Swedish experience of transition from agricultural to an
industrial welfare societywas embeddedin goods sent as gifts to modernize the
other country. Swedish materiality was meant to help people living in a different
materiality. While assisting this transmission, the aid worker moved into the
materiality he/she wanted to change.
By the mid 1970´s the convergence of the two Materialities seemed to have failed.
Collisions had been manifold, the machinery produced in a boreal zone did not
function properly in the tropics, and a capitalist mode of production was not easily
imposed on populations that still had excess of cultivable land. Mind-sets needed
to change before materiality could be transformed. During the 1980’s and the
1990’s aid became gradually dematerialized. Aid assisted in developing policies,
plans and procurement practices. Development aid workers moved into the
capital, away from the materiality they wanted to change. The new millennium
reinstated development goals in international agreements, with demands that aid
donors should coordinate and harmonize their doings. Development workers came
to spend more time in coordination groups, in analready modernized materiality,
distant from poor people’s materiality. Now, aid critics focus on the lack of
measurable results, awakening a return to materiality, but conducted by private
enterprise.
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To analyze this history of the development workers changed approach to the two
Materialities I have developed a framework using David Harvey’s matrix of space
and Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of capitals, habitus and doxa. The rows in Harvey’s
matrix represent absolute, relative and relational space and are combined with the
columns of material, representational and lived space. Using this matrix to diffract
the entangled practice of aid I hope to reveal how ideas on aid, its practices and
results are linked to the development worker’s approach to materiality.
Anna Kaijser is a PhD Candidate in sustainability science at Lund University,
Sweden, with a background in gender studies and social anthropology. In her
research she is exploring the complex interactions and entanglements between
environmental issues, power and social structures in the particular case of Bolivia.
She asks questions like: In what ways do we talk about ourselves and our societies
when talking about the environment? Which aspects of our identities are
emphasized, and which are neglected? How are power relations among humans
manifested, reinforced and challenged in these processes? An intersectional
analytical framework is employed as a sensitive tool for understanding the
complex patterns of interaction and power.
Negotiating Pachamama: Constructions of Nature, Power and
Social Identity in Bolivian Environmental Debates
In what ways do we talk about ourselves and our societies when talking about
nature? Which aspects of our identities are emphasized, and which are neglected?
How are power relations among humans manifested, reinforced and challenged in
these processes? How are the categories of “human” and “nature”, and the
relations between them, constructed?
In my paper I use the example of recent environmental debates in Bolivia to
explore the material-semiotics of thecomplex interactions of environmental
debates and social structures. Bolivia is an interesting case as ongoing negotiations
of identity have been drawn into environmental discussions. Environment has
been mobilized in the government’s project of redefining the state and Bolivian
national identity, while the government has in turn been criticized by social
movements – to a large extent using the government’s own argument against
them – for keeping double discourses on environmental issues.Two prominent
examples of this are the government’s strong positioning in international climate
change negotiations, and the conflicts around a new highway which is planned to
be built through a national park collectively owned by three indigenous
communities. In these debates, social categories such as ethnicity, class and
gender are mobilized, reinforced and contested, along with understandings of
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nature and human relations to it. This all takes places in a particular, post-colonial
spatial and historical setting.
The issues under study are inherently discursive as much as they are inherently
material, and the discursive and material aspects need to be analyzed as
intertwined with each other. A post-humanist, or more-than-humanist, approach,
taking nonhuman agency and the material seriously, is needed in this effort. I am
building on material-feminist theorizing including the work of Donna Haraway and
Stacy Alaimo, and employing an intersectional analytical framework inspired by
Nina Lykkeas a sensitive tool to understand the complex patterns of interaction
and power in the particular Bolivian context. Empirical material is generated
through ethnographic fieldwork.
Ane Møller Gabrielsen
is a phd-student at the Department of
Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, Norwegian University of Science and
Technology. My project is about dogs and society and is called "Når villdyret
våkner", the English working title is "The Beast Within". I am currently working on
dog legislation, mainly the issue of dangerous dogs and breed specific legislation.
A Dangerous Dog Story
In this paper, I want to use the case of the American Staffordshire Terrier in
Norwegian law and public debate to explore certain aspects of discourse and
materiality. The American Staffordshire Terrier, or the “Amstaff”, is a dog
breedwhich in 2004 was defined as dangerous, and therefore illegal, in Norway.My
material consistsof law preparatory work and media texts, and I will use the
”Amstaff” as a “figuration”, a concrete being existing in the space between the
real and the imaginary, to show the entanglements of discourse and materiality.
However, I also wantto show how this breed and its concrete, material
manifestations, i.e. the “Amstaffs” themselves, also represent an embodied
critique against existing categories and understandings as well as a potential for
changing the ways we think about dogs, danger, nature and culture.
There are still perfectly legal ”Amstaffs” walking the streets of Norway, due to
being born before the ban. What separates them from their illegal and dangerous
relatives, are their pedigrees and date of birth. As these are not visible features,
the legal “Amstaffs” cause the same fear as illegal ones. However, the “Amstaffs”
were not banned because of their actions, but because of their visual resemblance
to Pit Bull Terriers. Thus, their dangerous bodies are the material effects of a
discourse where danger is connected toappearance, while their bodies themselves
are corporeal manifestations of a written breed standard portraying an ideal dog.
The “Amstaffs” make these paradoxes visible to dog owners in general, which
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means a lot of people are given reasons for resistance and change. A concrete
example is how Norway’s largest association for dog owners, the Norwegian
Kennel Club, changed their policy towards breed specific legislation as a
consequence of the ban of the “Amstaff”. They also embody and demonstrate the
arbitrariness and the unstable boundaries of “breed”, a category central to
modern understanding of dogs, closely connected to race and class, amongst other
things.
However, these issues concern not only some more or less unfortunate dogs and
their human companions. Critique against this ban is also a critique of how our
society handles “danger”, and the categories we use to make sense of the world.
Thus, the case of the “Amstaff” speaks to larger theoretical debates by highlighting
and questioning the categories we often take for granted, such as “breed”,
“nature”, and even “dog” and “human”.
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