is how I am going to erase the information. And what I am going to do is I am going to put a set of shutters (like the shutters you have for blinds on the windows, and you can make it either shut so that the windows completely shut out the light or you can open them so the light comes through). So if we put shutters there, if the shutters are closed, I have the situation I had before where I know the which-slit information. But if I open the shutters, I give it the possibility of being erased.

And what happens here actually is that, if I do this experiment now and open the shutters, I can show that I actually get a diffraction pattern! Now this gets even stranger. So I have these rubidium atoms, they are heading toward the two-slit detector. They leave a telltale photon in one place or the other. They go through the two slits and I am going to let them already hit, completely hit the screen. Now *afterwards* I am going to decide whether or not to open the shutters and erase the information about which slit it goes through. That is called "delayed choice" mode. And if I trace the ones whose which-slit information is erased, I get a diffraction pattern. In other words, *after* the rubidium atom has already hit, I am able to determine whether or not it had behaved like a particle or a wave. In other words, whether or not it had gone through a single slit at a time, like a particle will, or gone through both slits at the same time like a wave will. *In other words, after it has already hit the screen and gone through the apparatus, I am able to determine its ontology, afterwards*.

So the point here is: how do physicists interpret this? The way physicists interpret this is by saying that we have the ability to change the past. Because I am changing how it went through the slit after it has already gone through the slits. So there is a talk about erasing what already was, restoring the diffraction pattern, and basically moving the clock backwards or changing how the particle went through after it has already gone through: *the ability to change the past*. Now I want to suggest, though, that that is a very convenient kind of nostalgic fantasy. I cannot blame physicists for engaging in this. I think this is a very seductive fantasy. Perhaps at one time or another all of us wish that we could change the past and the marks left on bodies, and change the ways in which we materialized the world, especially when we are not being careful, that we would like to undo what has been

done, that we would like to go back and do it differently. But is this really what this experiment is telling us about what is possible?

It turns out that if we look at this experiment more carefully—it is all explained in Chapter 7—the original diffraction pattern is *not* being restored whatsoever and there is no complete erasure going on here at all. What is happening here is that the experiment is not about engaging a past that already was. See, we assume that time is a given externality, just a parameter that marches forward, and that the past already happened and the present, that moment "now" just slipped away into the past, and that the future is yet to come. But if we examine this carefully, again using the insights from feminist theory, from post-structuralist theory, and things that Cultural Studies has been telling us, and so on, and bring them into the physics here, what we can see is that what is going on actually is *the making of temporality*. There are questions of temporality that are coming to the fore here. What we are seeing here is that time is not given, it is not universally given, but rather that time is articulated and re-synchronized through various material practices. In other words, just like position, momentum, wave and particle, *time itself* only makes sense in the context of particular phenomena. So what is going on here is that physicists are actually making time in marking time, and that there is a certain way in which what we take to be the "past" and what we take to be the "present" and the "future" are entangled with one another. What we have learned from this experiment is that what exists are intra-active entanglements. That is the only reason we get a diffraction pattern again, by the way.

And importantly, the original diffraction pattern doesn't return, a new one is created, one in which the diffraction (that is, entanglement effects) is a bit challenging to trace. So, the issue is not one of erasure and return. What is at issue is an entanglement, intra-activity. The "past" was never simply there to begin with, and the "future" is not what will unfold, but "past" and "future" are iteratively reconfigured and enfolded through the world's ongoing intra-activity. There is no inherently determinate relationship between past, present, and future. In rethinking causality as intra-activity and not as this kind of billiard-ball causality—cause followed by an effect—the fantasy of erasure is not possible, but possibilities for reparation exist. That "changing the past" in the sense of undoing certain

discrete moments in time is an illusion. The past, like the future though, is not closed. But "erasure" is not what is at issue. In an important sense, the "past" is open to change. It can be redeemed, productively reconfigured in an iterative unfolding of spacetimematter. But its sedimenting effects, its trace, can not be erased. The memory of its materializing effects is written into the world. So changing the past is never without costs, or responsibility. A recent Ph.D. student of mine, Astrid Schrader (whose work is really remarkable, well worth looking out for) has an amazing paper in *Social Studies of Science* entitled "Responding to *Pfiesteria piscicida* (the Fish Killer): Phantomatic Ontologies, Indeterminacy, and Responsibility in Toxic Microbiology" (2010), showing how previously incompatible experiments on a tiny aquatic organism with large environmental policy stakes can be reconciled by tracing how time is differently made/synchronized through different laboratory practices. She argues that memory is not a matter of the past, but recreates the past each time it is invoked.

What I am trying to make clear is—all of this is an answer to your question, believe it or not—a sample of what I have learned from engaging with quantum physics that helps me further my understanding of feminist issues and practices. My passion for my work is utterly and completely grounded, and hopefully always with its feet attached to the ground, in questions of justice and ethics. This is what totally drives me. So I think there is a way in which the physics here actually helps me to bring an important materialist sense to Derridean notions of justice-to-come. That is not justice which we presume we know what it is in advance and which is forever fixed. So just to end this short answer with a couple of quotes from Derrida:

[The concern is] not with horizons of modified—past or future—presents, but with a "past" that has never been present, and which never will be, whose future to come will never be a *production* or a reproduction in the form of presence (Derrida [1968] 1982, 21; original emphasis).

And furthermore that:

No justice […] seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some *responsibility*, beyond all living present, within that

which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead […]. Without this *non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present* […] without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who *are not there*, of those who are no longer or who are not yet *present and living*, what sense would there be to ask the question "where?" "where tomorrow?" "whither?" (Derrida [1993] 2006, xviii; original emphasis).

So this is an example of what I learned from my diffractive engagements with physics: what responsibility entails in our active engagement of sedimenting out the world in certain kinds of ways and not others. Being attentive to ways in which we are re-doing, with each intra-action materially re-doing the material configurings of spacetimemattering. The past and the present and the future are always being reworked. And so that says that the phenomena are diffracted and temporally and spatially distributed across multiple times and spaces, and that our responsibility to questions of social justice have to be thought about in terms of a different kind of causality. It seems very important to me to be bringing physics to feminism as well as feminism to physics. (To understand my response as something learned from physics and applied to feminism is to have misunderstood something fundamental about what I am trying to say.)

*Q5: A lot of scholars within the Humanities have great difficulties with posthumanist theories especially because they seem to lack an ethics, and you already talked about ethics. Especially when you bring in physics, this critique will no doubt be even stronger. At several moments in your work, however, one gets the impression that the ethics implicit in your approach is of great importance to you, as you already mentioned. Obviously when one wants to be part of feminist debates, it is impossible* not *to articulate onto-epistemology as an* ethico*-ontoepistemology. In your "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter" (Barad 2003) your emphasis on the materialdiscursive seems to critique the idea of the "medium." This idea seems to claim that there are cases in which meaning can be non-material, idealistically traveling through space while not being affected by matter, actually remaining ultimately*

*"the same," or unaltered. Your texts show that this idea of the medium is in conflict with the argument that matter and meaning are necessarily entangled.*

*Our question then would be how to understand this relational ontology that rejects the metaphysics of what used to be called "relata," of words and things. How is an ethics at work in how matter comes to matter?*

KB: I think that you can already probably see from what I have been saying that I believe that questions of ethics and of justice are always already threaded through the very fabric of the world. They are not an additional concern that gets added on or placed in our field of vision now and again by particular kinds of concern. Being is threaded through with mattering. Epistemology, ontology, and ethics are inseparable. Matters of fact, matters of concern, and matters of care are shot through with one another. Or to put it in yet another way: matter and meaning cannot be severed. In my agential realist account, matter is a dynamic expression/articulation of the world in its intra-active becoming. All bodies, including but not limited to human bodies, come to matter through the world's iterative intra-activity, its performativity. Boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted through the intra-activity of mattering. Differentiating is not about radical exteriorities (we saw that in the experiments I just talked about) but rather what I call agential separability. That is, differentiating is not about Othering, separating, but on the contrary, about making connections and commitments. So the very nature of materiality itself is an entanglement. Hence, what is on the other side of the agential cut is never separate from us. Agential separability is not individuation. Ethics is therefore not about right responses to a radically exteriorized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming, of which we are a part. Ethics is about mattering, about taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are part, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities. Even the smallest cuts matter. Responsibility, then, is a matter of the ability to respond. Listening for the response of the other and an obligation to be responsive to the other, who is not entirely separate from what we call the self. This way of thinking ontology, epistemology, and ethics together makes for a world that is always already an ethical matter.

 This has to have consequences for how you value various disciplines. Not falling into the traps of disciplinarity, multi-disciplinarity, inter-disciplinarity, or post-disciplinarity, how would you then qualify your manifesto for academic research?*

KB: Well, manifesto is a thing that my friend and colleague Donna Haraway can get into, but I cannot claim that term. [Laughs.] Of course, she means it ironically. Agential realism is not a manifesto, it does not take for granted that all is or will or can be made manifest. On the contrary, it is a call, a plea, a provocation, a cry, a passionate yearning for an appreciation of, attention to the tissue of ethicality that runs through the world. Ethics and justice are at the core of my concerns or rather, it runs through "my" very being, all being. Again, for me, ethics is not a concern we add to the questions of matter, but rather is the very nature of what it means to matter.

### Notes

## Chapter 4

"There is contingent being independent of us, and this contingent being has no reason to be of a subjective nature"

#### Interview with Quentin Meillassoux

*Q1: Your debut book* After Finitude *([2006] 2008) is considered by many to be one of the fiercest attacks on the history of modern thought, critiquing its humanism, its immanent metaphysics, its anti-materialism.1 You rigorously develop what you refer to as speculative materialism by means of rewriting this history, or as you refer to it, by rewriting correlationalism. This term is conceptualized throughout the book and has certainly triggered many scholars*—*sometimes referred to as the speculative realists (see Bryant et al, eds. 2011)*—*to develop a new philosophy of science and a new view on how move away from Kant. Correlationism, which you refer to as "the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other" (Meillassoux [2006] 2008, 5) is severely critiqued by others who use this term. For you, however, the correlationist standpoint deserves great respect, which you do not just critique, but rather "radicalize from within: as an 'inside job,'" as Harman (2011a, 25) puts it.*

*In this book, which is mapping what we refer to as a new materialism, we felt no need to include or exclude particular scholars, and thus we also see no reason to count you in (or out). What we do notice is that we outline a similar trajectory to your own, albeit that these trajectories are developed in very different ways. Can you give us a rough sketch of the path you have been taking, giving much attention to this most complex idea of "correlationism"?*

Quentin Meillassoux: In my book I frontally oppose two positions: a) "strong correlationism" which, in my opinion, is the most rigorous form of *anti*-absolutism, and therefore of contemporary *anti*-metaphysics, and b) a metaphysics I call "subjective," which, *conversely,* is nowadays the most widespread philosophy of the absolute, one which consists in posing this or that feature of the subject as essentially necessary—that is, its status as part of a correlate.

Let us specify this distinction. In chapter 1 of *After Finitude*, I define correlationism in general as an anti-absolutist thesis: one uses the correlate "subject-object" (broadly defined) as an instrument of refutation of all metaphysics to enforce that we would have access to a modality of the initself. Instead, for correlationism, we cannot access any form of the in-itself, because we are irremediably confined in our relation-to-the-world, without any means to verify whether the reality that is given to us corresponds to reality taken in itself, independently of our subjective link to it. For me, there are two main forms of correlationism: weak and strong (see chapter 2, p. 42 for the announcement of this difference and p. 48 ff. for its explanation). Weak correlationism is identified with Kant's transcendental philosophy: it is "weak" in that it still grants too much to the speculative pretension (e.g. absolutory) of thought. Indeed, Kant claims that we know something exists in itself, and that it is thinkable (non-contradictory). "Strong" correlationism does not even admit that we can know that there is an "in-itself" and that it can be thought: for this we are radically confined in our thought, without the possibility of knowing the in-itself, not even its taking place and logicity.

I then define correlationism's most rigorous contemporary opponent: the subjectivist metaphysician. The one who believes, unlike the strong correlationist (let's call him simply "the correlationist" from now on), that we *can* actually access an absolute: that of the correlate. Instead of saying, like the correlationist, that we can not access the in-itself because we are confined to the correlate, the subjectivist metaphysician (let's call him the "subjectivist" alone) asserts that the in-itself is the correlate itself.

Thus the "subjectivist's" thesis, according to its various instances, absolutizes various features of subjectivity. We have seen this from Hegel's speculative idealism, which absolutizes Reason, to the various actual variations of vitalism (along the dominant Nietzsche/Deleuze axis) that absolutize will, perception, affect, et cetera. For me, Deleuze is a metaphysical subjectivist who has absolutized a set of features of subjectivity, hypostatized as Life (or "a Life"), and has posed them as radically independent of our human and individual relationship to the world.

This distinction between strong correlationism and subjectivist metaphysics constitutes the very core of the book. Chapter 3, in fact, lays the foundation of my enterprise. Chapter 3 is entirely based on the clash between correlationism and subjectivism, and it is that confrontation that allows me to establish the absolute necessity of facticity—a point of view from which you must read all my subsequent positions.

*Q2: In your view Deleuze, who has made important contributions to what we refer to as "new materialism," is not materialist because the absolute primacy of the unseparated ("nothing can be unless it is some form of relation to the world") in his metaphysics does not allow for the Epicurean atom "which has neither intelligence, nor will, nor life" (Meillassoux [2006] 2008, 37) to be possible. Though it should be added that the Deleuze (with and without Guattari) is important to your thinking and still demands more thinking (Meillassoux 2010). You emphasize that science and mathematics have posed questions to philosophy (questions concerning the ancestral) that demand a speculative materialism freed from the primacy of the unseparated. Yet how can you simultaneously claim to break with a transcendental statement such as: what is asubjective cannot be*—*and yet marry a similar approach to that of Kant concerning science or mathematics?*

QM: Let's be precise again. The statement: "what is asubjective cannot be" is the only "common point" of both anti-metaphysical correlationism and subjectivist metaphysics. But we must understand in what way and to what extent. For the correlationist, it means that I can never think the object by doing the economy of my subjective point of view. For the correlationist, the statement therefore means: the a-subjective is unthinkable for us ("it cannot be" means: "it cannot be *thinkable*"). For the subjectivist the statement conversely means that the a-subjective is absolutely impossible: "it cannot be" = "it cannot be in itself." Metaphysics of Life or of Spirit, transcendental philosophy, or strong correlationism: all converge in the denunciation of "naïve realism" proper to an Epicurean type of materialism asserting that some non-subjective exists (atoms and void) and that we can

know it. I really break with this anti-realist consensus, notably with any form of transcendental, and yet without going back to Epicureanism, which in its genre still remained a metaphysics (not subjective but realist) because it supported the real need for atoms and void.

But this certainly does not prevent me from maintaining the demand for an elucidation of science's conditions of thinkability. Such a demand, in fact, has nothing transcendental in itself: it is proper to any philosophy which seeks to know what it is speaking of when using the term "science." My thesis is that we still do not understand what this word means, since we failed to resolve the aporia of the arche-fossil: that the mathematized sciences of nature are only thinkable under the conditions of granting an absolute scope to its statements, an absolute scope that all anti-metaphysical philosophies of the era have challenged. Subjectivist metaphysics could rightly assert that they have maintained the absolute scope of thought and that they therefore do not fall under the problem of arche-fossil: however, I show that these metaphysics are effectively refuted by strong correlationism, and that consequently they are also ultimately unable to resolve this aporia.

*Q3: Perhaps we should talk about why we should rewrite the history of thought. Many authors interested in developing a materialist or realist philosophy today are keen on rejecting humanism because of its (implicit) representationalist or linguisticist theorizations, claiming that in this emphasis on the copy or on language a lethal reductivism has entered thought (in philosophy and the humanities more generally, but in the sciences just as well). You, on the other hand, intend to break open correlationist thinking in order to reach out for the Absolute again. Many will agree with you that the Absolute has been excluded from thinking more and more since the coming of modernity (since the rise of Kant-inspired correlationism, to use your terms). In fact, whereas Nietzsche famously claimed at the end of the 19*th *century (in* Also Sprach Zarathustra *([1883–1885] 1967)) that critical thinking had killed God, you claim the exact opposite: because of correlationism the Absolute has become unthinkable. Critiquing Kant through Descartes and Hume especially when it comes down to causality, you intend to push correlationism to the extreme, revealing what you refer to as the Principle of Facticity: a radically different conceptualization of nature (nature as contingent) and its relation to thinking. Radicalizing (weak) correlationism shows us that, as you put it "every world* is *without reason, and is thereby capable*

*of actually becoming otherwise without reason" (Meillassoux [2006] 2008, 53; original emphasis).*

QM: Let me explain this point again in a few words. The subjectivist asserts that the correlationist discovered, in spite of him, the true absolute: not a reality outside of the correlate, but the correlate as such. Indeed, the correlationist has demonstrated that we could not claim to think of a reality independent of the correlation without immediately contradicting ourselves: to think the in-itself is to think it, thus making it a correlate of our subjective activity of thought instead of making it an absolute independent of us. But this, according to the subjectivist, demonstrates that this absolute is nothing other than the correlation itself. Because, by the correlationist's own confession, I cannot conceive the correlate's disappearance or beingother without immediately reconducting it in its own structures, which means that in reality I cannot think the correlation otherwise than as necessary. This conclusion contradicts the correlationist's anti-absolutist thesis. However the subjectivist nevertheless extracts it from the argument of the correlationist, thus turning correlationism against itself: the correlate, instrument of *de-absolutization* of realist metaphysics, is turned back into an anti-realist absolute. But the strong correlationist has not yet spoken his last word: in Chapter 3, I show that in his most contemporary forms (Heidegger or Wittgenstein) he manages to refute the subjective response by opposing the irreducible facticity to the *absolutization* of the correlation. I shall let you re-read how I describe this answer: the conclusion I draw upon is that strong correlationism cannot be refuted by the absolutization of the correlation as believed by the subjectivist, but rather by the absolutization of facticity (wherein resides the meaning of the principle of factuality).

Q4: *Though you mention several times that* speculative materialism *is in search of a diachronic approach, your use of concepts does point us to a time (and place) long gone (the arche-fossil for instance). Also when you state that "[…] there is a deeper level of temporality, with which what came before the relation-to-theworld is itself but a modality of that relation-to-the-world" (ibid., 123), this depth, which comes back several times in the final chapter, should be searched for "before" thought. This reminds us once again of a Heideggerian approach which intends to take us "back" to the things themselves. Now as we've seen before, you are in fact quite critical of Heidegger (not only in your answer above but also for instance*

*on ibid., 41–2, where you accuse him (together with Wittgenstein) of setting up a strong correlationism that dominated twentieth century philosophy). Though you quote mainly his later work, your critique of Heidegger focuses primarily on questions of being that were more central to his earlier work. In his* Die Frage nach Technik *(1954) and also in* Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes *(1960) we can easily read a materialism that comes close to yours as he too questions relationality and is in search of a more complete and deeper meaning of things (and times) that can be found only before this relationality came into being.*

*Speculatively taking away the idealist and sometimes humanist dimension of Heidegger's thinking, could we say that the phenomenological notion of going back to the things themselves, and also their interest in* rewriting*, as Lyotard ([1988] 1991) would put it, ancient Greek thinking (think as well of your last chapter entitled "Ptolemy's Revenge") is also your interest? Or would you at least share his idea not so much of rewriting a pre-human, but rather a pre-modern or classical philosophy?*

QM: In relation to Heidegger, I take care to show that he has in fact never escaped correlationism, neither in his later nor in his earlier period. That is why I quote his *Identity and Difference* (chapter 1, p. 41–2), which brings back *Ereignis*—a central notion from *after* the "turn" in Heidegger's work—to a clearly correlational structure. The "return to things themselves," which was the slogan of Husserl's phenomenology before that of the early Heidegger, in no way corresponds to my idea of philosophy: as it only consists, by this call, in returning to the things as correlates of consciousness, Dasein, phenomenon, being, or Being. If the given were the thing in itself, then the thing would intrinsically be something given-to, but according to me, this is not the case. There is therefore no return to "things in themselves," but rather to the in-itself seen as indifferent to what is given to us, because indifferent to our opening-the-world.

I am not involved in a return to or a rewriting of the Greeks—such an enterprise offers no determinate meaning to my approach.

*Q5: Michel Foucault was the first to announce the End of Man or the second Copernican turn in* The Order of Things *([1966] 1970). His new way of writing history might not have excluded the human mind, but certainly it at least claims not to start with it. His idea of discourse for instance did not start with language, but with material forms (for instance the prison-form) which came along*  *with expressive forms like delinquency (which is not a signifier, but part of a set of statements reciprocally presupposing the material form of the prison). To push this a bit further, it seems not too difficult to rephrase this argument without the human mind playing even a minor role in it. Think for instance of how sedimentary processes work, where pebbles are picked up by water streams (expressed through them) and are sorted in uniform layers creating the new entity of the sedimentary rock (new substances), a non-linear and ongoing process also in movement because of tectonic movements, weather conditions and much more (complicated) processes of change that in the end create movements very similar to how Foucault saw them taking place in respect to nineteenth century processes of delinquency.*

*In what way then is your approach different from Foucault's? Or, where is the arche-fossil different and less dependent upon the human mind than the pebbles in the example above?*

QM: Concerning Foucault I will simply answer as follows. His investigation focuses on past dispositives of knowledge-power, and eventually on dispositives that are contemporary to him. He can bring us nothing in regards to the disqualification of strong correlationism, because the disqualification is situated at a level that his research does not address, but rather presupposes. Indeed, I examine how correlationism, from its point of departure in the Cogito, has come to dominate all of modern thought, including the most resolutely anti-Cartesian: the "great confinement" was not that of the fools in the asylum, but that of the philosophers in the Correlate—and this also applies to Foucault. Indeed, Foucault does not say anything that would embarrass a correlationist, as all his comments can easily be considered as a discourse-correlated-to-thepoint-of-view-of-our-time, and rigorously dependent on it. This is a typical thesis of some correlationist relativism: we are trapped in our time, not in Hegelian terms, but rather in a Heideggerian fashion—that is to say in the modality of knowledge-power that always already dominates us. His thesis on the "disappearance of man" is about man understood as an object of "human sciences," not about the correlate as I conceive it.

I am not at all hostile to Foucault's thesis, even though in my view he thinks within a historicist ontology that remains unthought in its deep nature—even in his magnificent course entitled "Society Must be Defended" (Foucault 2003).

*Q6: The central question of your book was: How is thought able to think what there can be when there is no thought? (Meillassoux [2006] 2008, 36) A lot of scholars in the humanities, though sympathetic to your re-reading of Kant and Hume, might not see the urgency of this question. Feminism for instance might be interested in thinking beyond the male-female dichotomy and contemporary feminist theory would also definitely not start its analysis from the human (female) mind, but the urgency of thinking a place without thought would probably be considered the pointless question par excellence, as you already phrased it (ibid., 121). How would you suggest convincing them?*

QM: That the question of what there is when there is no thought is considered by many—and not only by feminists—as devoid of meaning or interest is indeed likely. As you recall, I specifically say: the problem is to understand how the most urgent question has come to be regarded as the most idle one. The question is not about convincing anyone to think otherwise, because it is a very strong feature of our era that we cannot fight in a few sentences.

If I had to say something to shake actual certainties, I would formulate it in a provocative fashion, but basically this is what I think: I assert that anyone who refuses to deal with this question simply does not know what he is saying when he utters the words "science," "mathematics," "absolute," "metaphysics," "non-metaphysics," and other words of equal significance. What I say in my book and in the lines above suffice to explain what allows me to say that.

That is why the question of sexual difference cannot be foreign to this interrogation. For instance, Lacan's entire work is crossed by the question of the scientificity or non-scientificity of psychoanalysis, and finds one of its points of culmination in the notion of the "matheme." Well, I argue for any Lacanian discourse—which is admittedly related to the question of the difference between "man/woman" or "male/female"—to be unable to grasp the meaning of its most crucial concepts until it will not have treated as its necessary prerequisite the question of the non-correlational in science. The same also applies to any feminist theory that incorporates in its discourse one of the terms quoted above.

*Q7: You shift strong correlationism by revolutionizing Kant and Hume, thus by demonstrating how a radical anti-anthropocentrism fulfills the Copernican*  *revolution. Central to this radical anti-anthropocentrism by which you reabsolutize thought is mathematics (ibid., 101, 103, 113, 126): "what is mathematizable cannot be reduced to a correlate of thought" (ibid., 117). This entails a definite move away from thinking science philosophically, because this is what has obfuscated "science's non-correlational mode of knowing, in other words,*  its eminently speculative character*" (ibid., 119; original emphasis). What you state is that of the statement "thought* can think *that event X* can actually have occurred *prior to all thought, and indifferently to it," "no variety of correlationism […] can admit that that statement's literal meaning is also its deepest meaning" (ibid., 122; original emphasis). In line with the argument it makes sense to link this eternal truth that we find in mathematics to a "realism" (albeit speculative), but how could we call it a materialism? Is the morphogenetic dynamics of mathematics* equal to *matter?*

QM: I intend to demonstrate–note here that this is still not done in *After Finitude*—that what is mathematizable is absolutizable. You ask me if this is a materialist thesis rather than a merely "realist" one. It is difficult to discuss the relevance of my thesis if we omit the whole discussion of the problem of the arche-fossil found in Chapter 1. I will nevertheless answer as follows: for me, materialism holds in two key statements: 1. Being is separate and independent of thought (understood in the broad sense of subjectivity), 2. Thought can think Being. Thesis number 1 is opposed to any anthropomorphism which seeks to extend subjective attributes to Being: materialism is not a form of animism, spiritualism, vitalism, etcetera. It asserts that non-thinking actually precedes, or at least may in right precede thought, and exists outside of it, following the example of Epicurean atoms, devoid of any subjectivity, and independent of our relationship to the world. Thesis number 2 affirms that materialism is rationalism (again broadly defined as there are different definitions of reason) in that it is always an enterprise that, through skepticism, opposes an activity of knowledge and criticism to religious appeal, to mystery, or to the limitation of our knowledge.

Skepticism and faith converge in the thesis of our finitude, making us available to any belief: conversely, materialism grants the human being the capacity to think by his own means the truth of both his environment and condition. Under the enemy of reason, he always knows how to detect the

priest. He also knows that no one has more desire to be right—without allowing one to argue against him—than the opponent of reason.

I follow these two theses because I argue and demonstrate—strictly through argumentation—that there is contingent being independent of us, and furthermore, that this contingent being has no reason to be of a subjective nature. I also try to found a scientific rationalism based on the use of mathematics to describe non-human and inorganic reality. This is not to "Pythagorize," or to assert that Being is inherently mathematical: it is rather to explain how it is that a formal language manages to capture, from contingent-Being, properties that a vernacular language fails at restituting. My thesis on mathematics is a thesis on the scope of formal languages, not a thesis on Being. I do not posit it by whim or "scientist" tropism, but because I showed with the problem of arche-fossil that there one had no choice: if the sciences have meaning, then mathematics has an absolute scope. Yet sciences have meaning, and hence sciences rest via their mathematized formulations on a reality that is radically independent of our humanity. This contrasts with the 'qualitative' judgments of ordinary perception, which can safely be thought for their part as correlated to the sensible relation we have with the world, and as having no existence outside of this relation. The absolute scope of mathematics must therefore be established, and our only way to do this is, I think, is to pass through the derivative scope of the principle of factuality. This is the problem left out in *After Finitude*: a problem that simultaneously traces the program of a consequent speculative materialism.

*Q8: In your conceptualization of potentiality vs. virtuality you note that potentiality comes with a determined world, conforming to the laws of nature. Superchaos, on the other hand, comes with virtuality. How is thinking the virtual linked to speculation, and what role is there for matter (and nature)? We ask the latter sub-question, because we noticed that whereas on page 11 you speak of matter, life, thought and justice, on page 14 you only speak of the latter three. We introduced the concept of nature in reference to your apparent affinity with Spinoza's physics (not with his metaphysics).*

*Finally, then, the vectorial subject to be developed in speculative materialism does not emancipate but rather anticipates the unforeseen, though in keeping with the law of non-contradiction. Doing away with idealism, it would be most*

*interesting to see how this emancipation "does not yet exist," especially in relation to how it then affirms or critiques the great French feminists like Cixous and even de Beauvoir, when they emphasize not so much a final emancipation but rather the willingness to write or think femininity.*

QM: For me, matter is not identifiable with "nature." Nature is a world order determined by specific constants, and that determines within itself this set of possibles that I call "potentialities." In return, matter is a primordial ontological order: it is the fact that there must be something and not nothing—contingent beings as such. One can imagine an infinity and more of material worlds governed by different laws: they would be different "natures," although equally material. Matter's second characteristic is negative: it designates contingent non-living and non-thinking beings. In our world, life and thought are constituted on a background of inorganic matter to which they return. One could perhaps imagine a nature entirely alive or spiritual in which case "matter" would be pushed out—but it would remain an essential and eternal possibility of Superchaos because every nature can be destroyed by it, but not the contingent being in a state of pure-material.

Concerning the theory of the materialist subject, I am indeed interested in challenging the identification of action with its pure present deployment, while simultaneously repeating the criticism of the former revolutionary model of future emancipation. However, I think that the present is intimately constituted by the "projection" of the subject to this not-yetpresent. Here I am not saying anything original: Heidegger as well as Sartre has insisted on this constitutive dimension of the future in the constitution of the subjective present. However, I add a very different dimension to this projection: a dimension which is not only devoid of religious transcendence, but also inaccessible to the subject's action—an articulation that I believe effective of radical egalitarian justice (of the living and of the dead) and the eternal return as proof of return (a resurrection intensely deceptive). What interests me is the feedback effect of this expectation on the present of action and on the concrete transformation of the subject.

#### Notes

1. Translation (from the French) by Marie-Pier Boucher.

II Cartographies

## Introduction A "New Tradition" in Thought

Chapter 5 ("The Transversality of New Materialism") focuses on three ways in which new materialism can be called "transversal." So far we have seen that new materialism is a cultural theory that does not privilege matter over meaning or culture over nature. It explores a *monist* perspective, devoid of the dualisms that have dominated the humanities (and sciences) until today, by giving special attention to matter, which has been so neglected by dualist thought. Cartesian dualism, after all, has favored mind. As concerns feminist literary theory in the deconstructive paradigm, for instance, it has been noted that:

Men have aligned the opposition male/female with rational/ emotional, serious/frivolous, or reflective/spontaneous, [whereas] feminist criticism […] works to prove itself more rational, serious, and reflective than male readings that omit and distort (Culler [1982] 2008, 58).

It is this kind of scholarship, according to Jonathan Culler, but also according to DeLanda (as seen in the interview above) that attempts to provoke a shift in thought, but which continues the dominant scholarly mode of thinking. And whereas this act of reclaiming thought has been important for feminism, it has not spurred a revolution in thought (as we will explain in Chapters 5 and 7). New materialism wants to set such a revolution in motion, and for this reason it has a renewed interest in philosophical monism or in the philosophy of immanence. New materialism, as a transversally new intellectual orientation, works through the transcendental and humanist (dualist) traditions that haunt cultural theory, and finds itself transversally on the brink of both the modern *and* the postpostmodern eras. The transcendental and humanist traditions, despite being manifold, are consistently predicated on dualist structures. New materialists open up the paradoxes inherent in those traditions by creating concepts that traverse the fluxes of matter and mind, body and soul, nature and culture, and opens up active theory formation. The three transversalities discussed in Chapter 5 concern disciplinarity, paradigms, and the spatiotemporality of theory—that is, the cartographical methodology introduced in the interview with Braidotti.

Chapter 6 ("Pushing Dualism to an Extreme") discusses the way in which new materialism constitutes a philosophy of difference or immanence by working through or "traversing" the dualisms that form the backbone of modernist thought. This chapter dives immediately into the epistemological or even *methodological* dimension of new materialism itself as displayed by the interviewees in Part One. Continuing the transversal ideas of Lyotard, Deleuze, and Bruno Latour about the temporality of theory formation, new materialists have set themselves to a rewriting of all *possible and impossible* forms of emancipation. This rewriting exercise involves a movement in thought that, in the words of Henri Bergson ([1896] 2004, 236), can be termed "push[ing] dualism to an extreme." By this movement, Deleuze ([1968] 1994, 45) has stated that "difference is pushed to the limit," that is to say, "difference" is "shown *differing*" (ibid., 68; emphasis in original). The chapter addresses the new materialist ways in which modernity's dualisms (structured by a negative relation between terms) are traversed, and how a new conceptualization of difference (structured by an affirmative relation) comes to be constituted along the way. This conceptualization of difference leaves behind all prioritizations (implicitly) involved in modern dualist thinking, since a difference structured by affirmation does not work with predetermined relations (e.g. between mind and body) nor does it involve a counter-hierarchy between terms. The chapter makes explicit the *methodology* of the current-day rise of non-dualist thought, both in terms of its non-classificatory mode of (Deleuzian) thinking, and in terms of the theory of the time of thought thus effectuated (Lyotard's

notion of "rewriting modernity" is not a postmodernism). We conclude by demonstrating how this new materialism traverses the sexual dualisms that structure modernist feminist thinking, anticipating the next chapter that includes a re-reading of Simone de Beauvoir's *The Second Sex* ([1949] 2010), mainly through the work of Elizabeth Grosz*.* This short demonstration forms the bridge to Chapter 7.

The seventh chapter ("Sexual Differing") envisions a new way of mapping the relations between the sexes by moving beyond sex, sexual difference, and gender. Instead of the epistemological groundwork for a new conceptualization of difference, this chapter is interested in new materialism's ontology of difference itself. In the dominant reception of the work of de Beauvoir, finding its apotheosis in the work of Butler, feminists overthrow sex and sexual difference in favor of gender. What we propose in a new materialist spirit is that gender, with which a revolution in thought was intended, did not produce the desired effect. Theorists of gender position themselves in dualistic opposition to theorists of sexual difference, and end up re-affirming sexual difference in its narrowest definition (the biological essentialism of sex). All forms of identity politics, as shown in the interviews summarized by the Culler citation above, involve dualism, and need to be opened up and set in motion. Counter-intuitively, a true revolution in thought does not consist of the dualistic overthrow of a seemingly outdated framework. Similar to Deleuze's rejection of Otherness that runs through a great deal of the new materialist work, we show how a revolution in thought entails the affirmation of the thinking process—that is, a practical philosophy. This chapter in line with the preceding chapter, proposes the setting up of a new materialist theory of sexual difference as a practical philosophy in which concept and creation are considered as intertwined. Rereading de Beauvoir affirmatively, a sexual differing can be made apparent that has an eye for the material ("sex") and the discursive ("gender") in their mutual entanglement, thus shifting identity politics and biological essentialism in favor of a performative ontology, as well as the dominant conceptualization of a "revolution in thought." In the practical philosophical process, then, the present comes about as creating the past and the future: de Beauvoir (the past) is being re-read (the present), while working towards the future of feminist thought. Through our so-called case study

on sex, gender, and sexual difference, we show how the new materialism is a practical philosophy that makes way for thinking metamorphoses regarding—along with sex—"race," class, and the other so-called axes of social difference.

Finally, in the eighth chapter ("The End of (Wo)Man"), we engage most directly with new materialism's new metaphysics by discussing its posthumanism or a-humanism. We start from the work of Foucault, on whose work all interviewees took a position. When Foucault in *The Order of Things* ([1966/1970] 1994) announced that man was only a recent invention, he added a permanent question mark to the humanist and modernist traditions that had dominated European thought for over two centuries. In his recently published accompanying dissertation *Introduction to Kant's Anthropology* (2008, submitted in 1961) he gives us an even more thorough perspective on how anthropocentrism has shaped our (dualist) thinking, and how it has actually distorted our strategies of studying the real. His views can definitely be considered the opening statements of new materialism, especially because Foucault in his later work has shown in so many ways how bodies (think of prisons, for instance) and the words within which they are enveloped (think of "delinquency") act only in entanglement with one another, and that the human being acts within the actualization and realization of these discursive forces. Recently, Meillassoux's *After Finitude* ([2006] 2008) proposed another re-reading of Kant that suggests that Foucault has not pushed things far enough (as Meillassoux explained in his interview).

Not even referring to Foucault in his book, Meillassoux's interests in ancestrality proposes us to think the real without it first being represented in the human mind, which, according to Meillassoux, is still the common practice in what is called post–critical theory (which probably includes Foucault). Meillassoux, continuing themes found in the early writings of Alain Badiou, together with other speculative thinkers such as Ray Brassier and Graham Harman, thus intends to fulfill Kant's Copernican revolution of the mind by proposing a radical anti-anthropocentrism, which refuses to see truth only in how it can possibly appear to the human mind. Instead, he proposes an understanding of truth (or nature) through mathematics. We will show how Meillassoux's speculative materialism differs from the positions of other prominent contemporary materialists such as Barad and

DeLanda. These authors, though also inspired by the natural sciences, emphasize that phenomena reveal themselves *from* their relations. However, we will also demonstrate how a coherence can be created between these new materialists that, after having worked through humanism and the different differences it gave rise to, asks how much (wo)man we need at all. Without intending to come to a fixed conclusion, we can see that the different developments in new materialist thinking leave us with many questions in both the sciences and the humanities on the role of the human being in the morphogenesis of the real. This book, together with the new materialist scholars it interviews and discusses, wishes to provide a methodological opening for these ontological questions.

The "new" in new materialism is not a term that accepts or continues a classificatory historiography of (academic) thinking that necessarily comes with a hierarchy or any kind of *a priori* logic. New materialism affirms that such hierachized specialization creates "minds in a groove" whereas "there is no groove of abstractions which is adequate for the comprehension of human life" (Whitehead [1925] 1997, 197). New materialism does not intend to add yet another specialized epistemology to the tree of academic knowledge production (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 5). As such, it is thus not necessarily opposed to the crude or Historical/Marxist materialist tradition. It is not necessarily different from any other materialist, pragmatic or monist tradition either, since it carefully "works through" all these traditions in order to avoid, along with the trap of antagonism, the trap of anachronism (Lyotard [1988] 1991, 26–7) or of "a retrograde movement" (Bergson [1934] 2007, 11). New materialism says "yes, *and*" to all of these intellectual traditions, traversing them all, creating strings of thought that, in turn, create a remarkably powerful and fresh "rhythm" in academia today (Simondon [1958] 1980).

New materialism's metaphysics follows from an interdisciplinary development in thought, whose backbone is a strong interest in Continental philosophy. Yet it seems to have no difficulty in opening up these thoughts to Anglo-American thought, and actually makes their intermingling productive. Yet this is nothing "new." There are many examples in which Continental and Anglo-American thought have been moving in similar directions, as scholars were consciously or unconsciously inspired by a

radical thought they felt to be present beneath what was known. After all, just like Alfred North Whitehead's plea for "wandering" through and beyond grooves (Whitehead [1925] 1997, 207), Lyotard's "working through" is "a working attached to a thought of what is constitutively hidden from us in the event and in the meaning of the event" (Lyotard [1988] 1991, 26). Or in the words of Bergson, "As though the thing and the idea of the thing, its reality and its possibility, were not created at one stroke when a truly new form, invented by art or nature is concerned!" (Bergson [1934] 2007, 11). Good ideas are never bothered by space or time. From Bergson to Whitehead and Lyotard, from Louis Hjelmslev to Benedict Spinoza, from Foucault to British Cultural Studies, and from quantum physics to contemporary feminist theory—time and again, new thoughts travel easily and have always already announced themselves when the conditions are right (De Boever et al. 2009).

One could even claim that the break between Continental and Anglo-American thought, or the divide between the sciences and the humanities as C.P. Snow ([1959] 1965) expressed it in his famous 1950 essay "The Two Cultures," were not so much states that were *noticed*, but were actually prompted by philosophers of science themselves. Snow's taxonomy *created*  and eventually overcoded this radical distinction he claimed to have merely observed (cf. Kirby 2008a). Such major Historiographies, to speak again with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, are not so much critiqued by new materialism. Instead, they are being read in their relations to the minor historiographies which often result in the appearance of alternative *new* trajectories. It is in this sense that the "materialism" of new materialism is also not exclusive. It is not embraced in opposition to transcendental thinking, but instead re-reads metaphysics as a whole from a "natureculture" perspective, as science studies would call it (Latour [1991] 1993, Haraway 2003). The new materialist practice of reading as re-reading, together with the readings proposed by new materialist scholars, perform its new metaphysics.

New materialism wants to do justice to the "material-semiotic," or "material-discursive" character of *all* events, as Donna Haraway (1988, 595) and Karen Barad (2003, 810) would call it. It is interested in actualizing a metaphysics that fully affirms the active role played by matter in "receiving"

a form (cf. Simondon 2009, 4). Working through Cartesian or modernist dualisms, new materialism has set itself to practice the Spinozist dictum that the mind is always already an idea of the body, while the body is the object of the mind (Spinoza [1677] 2001, E2P21, Schol.). In terms of artworks, for instance, a new materialist perspective would be interested in finding out how the form of content (the material condition of the artwork) and the form of expression (the sensations as they come about) are being produced in one another, how series of statements are actualized, and how pleats of matter are realized in the real (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 89; cf. Bolt and Barrett eds. forthcoming). In this way, new materialism is different from most post-Kantian studies of art, since in these studies, the material and discursive dimensions are treated separately. After a short description of the materials used following a "crude materialism," the contemporary scholar influenced by the so-called "linguistic turn" proceeds to deconstruct its messages. New materialism allows for the study of the two dimensions in their entanglement: the experience of a piece of art is made up of matter *and* meaning. The material dimension creates *and* gives form to the discursive, and vice versa. Similar to what happens with the artwork, new materialism sets itself to rewriting events that are usually only of interest to natural scientists. Here it becomes apparent that a new materialist take on "nature" will be shown to be transposable to the study of "culture" and vice versa, notwithstanding the fact that these transpositions are not unilinear. After all, "transposition" is at work in music as well as genetics (Braidotti 2006, 5).

Thinking in such a way reveals to us a "[…] new form of materialist philosophy in which raw matter-energy through a variety of self-organizing processes and an intense power of morphogenesis, generates all the structures that surround us" (DeLanda 1996, n.p.). Studying these metamorphoses as they happen through the formation of content and expression, that is, through the entanglement of materiality and meaning in the widest sense of the word, new materialist thinking allows us to write such a metamorphosis not by excluding parts of it beforehand, but by at least being open to the process in its full manifestation. We need this new materialism because, whether it concerns earthquakes, art, social revolutions, or simply thinking, the material and the discursive are only taken apart in the authoritative gesture of the scholar or by the commonsensical thinker; while in the event, in life itself, the two seeming layers are by all means indiscernible. New materialism wants to move away from the authoritative scholarly attitude and from everyday utilitarian common sense, and wants to engross itself in what is "ontologically prior" (Massumi 2002, 66).

As an important but poorly defined force in contemporary academia, new materialism stands in need of conceptualization, and this second part of the book provides it. We bring together important scholars and texts that have contributed to the new materialism, and by showing the coherence in their (implicit) dialogue, by demonstrating their joint movements, we allow for a natureculture metaphysics of the ontologically prior to be actualized. But we do not map this new tradition from a distance. In this book, we add to new materialism as much as we perform a new engagement with canonical and minor academic literatures. In keeping with new materialism's interdisciplinarity, our mapping shows us how new materialist accounts are similar to certain (empirical) tendencies in accounting for nature on the one hand and cognitive accounts of culture and nature on the other.

## Chapter 5 The Transversality of New Materialism

Manuel DeLanda and Rosi Braidotti—independently of one another—first started using "neo-materialism" or "new materialism" in the second half of the 1990s, for a cultural theory that does not privilege the side of culture, but focuses on what Donna Haraway (2003) would call "naturecultures" or what Bruno Latour simply referred to as "collectives" ([1991] 1993). The term proposes a cultural theory that radically rethinks the dualisms so central to our (post-)modern thinking and always starts its analysis from how these oppositions (between nature and culture, matter and mind, the human and the inhuman) are produced in action itself. It thus has a profound interest in the morphology of change and gives special attention to matter (materiality, processes of materialization) as it has been so much neglected by dualist thought. In the same breath we then always already start with the *mater*, as Braidotti (2002b, 170) already emphasized elsewhere. This explains why, along with the interest in science seen in particular with DeLanda and Latour, the emancipation of mat(t)er is also by nature a feminist project.1

For those familiar with the materialism of Walter Benjamin, "new materialism" is ironic for several reasons. Analyzing modernity, Benjamin ([1982] 2002, 22) rejects the modern fetish of newness and the illusions it presumes. Particularly because he considers "[n]ewness […] a quality independent of the use value of the commodity," staging a materialism that is "new" would make no sense at all. But of course there is no reason why

we should confine ourselves to such a linear modernist idea of History. Especially if, in following Latour ([1991] 1993, 82), we claim that "[h]istory is no longer simply the history of people, it becomes the history of natural things as well," Benjamin's critique can be put aside. The newness we are interested in is not so much a better or improved version of "old" (historical, Marxist-inspired) materialism. DeLanda for instance has made it very clear that he rewrites this Marxism and its (humanist) take on the material (though Benjamin in particular offers us many ways out of these traps). Therefore DeLanda also wrote his famous *A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History* (1997) in which he puts such an "other" history, as proposed by Latour, to work (see also Harman 2008).

In this book it is not so much a history that is presented to the reader, but rather, following Braidotti, a *mapping* of how the materialism that is referred to as a new materialism is at work in the humanities and in the sciences at this very moment. Of course that does not mean that we exclude historicity, time, or memory; texts are read insofar as they are considered important and valuable for the non-dualist, materialist current in contemporary thought, and not judged according to when they were conceived. Thus, it is no problem to state that we see this new materialism we are interested in at work in Spinoza's *Ethics*. Benedict Spinoza, already in 1677, claims that the mind is the idea of the body, making the body necessarily the object of the mind. The mind and the body are the same thing, as he stresses repeatedly. This is a most interesting contribution to a new materialist thinking. Similarly, the present book develops an interest in the new materialist thoughts to be found in the work of the authors mentioned so far, but also in that of Simone de Beauvoir, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead and Brian Massumi, among others.

There is a good reason why a book on new materialism is written now. In recent years new materialism has proven to be capable of opposing the transcendental and humanist traditions that are haunting cultural theory, standing on the brink of the post-postmodern era. Of course dualist traditions are stubborn and have buried themselves deep in the minds of (common-sense) scholars today. These traditions continue to stir debates, which are being opened up by new materialists (think of the feminist polemic about the failed materialism in the work of Judith Butler (Kirby

2006), and of the Saussurian/ Lacanian linguistic heritage in media and cultural studies (Dolphijn 2010), which as Karen Barad (2007) has shown, have prevented the theorization of "agential matter" from being effectuated). But at the start of the 21st century, this new materialist ambition does seem to offer a more than equal alternative for scholars working in the humanities and beyond. Perhaps for the first time in its history, this "minor tradition" in thinking (as Gilles Deleuze would label it) is getting the attention it needs, freeing itself from the Platonist, Christian, and Modernist rule under which it suffered for so long.

In the work of both Braidotti and DeLanda it has been through a rethinking of several French philosophers closely connected to May '68 (including Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) that their thinking came about. And it was the work of Deleuze (and Guattari) that was actually most important to them. Especially in his early work, Deleuze tried to show that the materialist philosophy he proposed was not new but fell into the rich though minor tradition already mentioned. By writing on philosophers like Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, but also on writers like Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka, Deleuze intended to rewrite the history of thinking by giving attention to those materialist authors it had rejected or marginalized for such a long time. At the start of his career, Deleuze puts the emphasis on re-reading radical minds like Spinoza, thus showing how they actually offer philosophy a new way of thinking—namely, a philosophy of the body. And it is by traversing these different philosophies of the body that Deleuze's other work (sometimes with Guattari) really starts exploring materialist/monist thought to the fullest, creating the fertile ground upon which new materialist scholars like Braidotti and DeLanda take root today.

Most faithful to the work of Deleuze (and Guattari), DeLanda's early version of new materialism proffered the claim that the concept "abstract machine" (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987) captures processes without form of substance that can be found in concrete assemblages of biology, sociology, and geology alike, in a manner that enables cultural theory at large to move away from linguistic representationalism towards "the realm of engineering diagrams" which are "shared by very different physical assemblages. Thus there would be an "abstract motor" with different

physical instantiations in technological objects and natural atmospheric processes" (DeLanda 1996, n.p.). This new materialism engenders *immanent* thought and, as a consequence, it breaks through not only the mind-matter and culture-nature divides of transcendental humanist thought, but also thinking causal structures and teleology (i.e. a determinism):

This conception of very specific abstract machines […] indeed points towards a new form of materialist philosophy in which raw matter-energy through a variety of self-organizing processes and an intense power of morphogenesis, generates all the structures that surround us. Furthermore, the structures generated cease to be the primary reality, and matter-energy flows now acquire this special status (ibid*.*).

The way in which matter seems to gain primacy in DeLanda's new materialism points instead at a "generative matter," which is a concept that does not capture matter-as-opposed-to-signification, but captures *mattering* as simultaneously material and representational (cf*.* Cheah 1999, Barad 2007).

Braidotti introduced new materialism or "a more radical sense of materialism" by framing it as "[r]ethinking the embodied structure of human subjectivity after Foucault" (Braidotti 2000, 158). Coming from a very rich materialist tradition in Australian feminism, Braidotti's "after Foucault" should not so much be read as a reference to a move *beyond* Foucault, given that she and DeLanda (as well as other new materialists) can be said to affirm, one way or another, the much-noted prediction of Foucault ([1970] 1998, 343) that "perhaps, one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian." Compared to DeLanda, Braidotti's new materialism is equally immanent and non-linear, and "embodied subjectivity" is conceptualized accordingly:

A piece of meat activated by electric waves of desire, a text written by the unfolding of genetic encoding. Neither a sacralized inner *sanctum*, nor a pure socially shaped entity, the enfleshed Deleuzian subject is rather an "in-between": it is a folding-in of external influences and a simultaneous unfolding outwards of affects. A mobile entity, an enfleshed sort of memory that repeats and is capable of lasting through sets of discontinuous variations, while remaining faithful to itself. The Deleuzian body is ultimately an embodied memory (Braidotti 2000, 159).

Apart from the immanence of the new materialism qualitatively shifting the many instantiations of cultural theory that exemplify the transcendental, there is a strong emphasis on the intra-action2 of the technological and the natural, or as Braidotti has called it, on "the 'posthuman' predicament" which entails "much more than the definitive loss of the naturalistic paradigm" (ibid*.*, 158). Bringing "nature" into cultural theory does not make new materialists susceptible to adopting the ontology of the so-called positivist natural sciences. One of the pillars of the new materialism is the claim that modern natural science and postmodern cultural theory are both humanisms (cf*.* Colebrook 2004). In Braidotti's work the shared humanist subject of biological determinism and social constructivism is exchanged for a *post-humanist subject*, which entails for starters a qualitative shift away from the two poles of present-day epistemology: positivism and postmodernism (cf*.* Haraway 1988).

In their subsequent work, DeLanda and Braidotti continued constituting new materialism by posing *dual oppositions* as their main target. Reworking and eventually *breaking through* dualism appears to be the key to new materialism. Dualism comes to the fore as the structuring principle of the transcendental and humanist traditions that they want to shift in their work. Prioritizing mind over matter or culture over nature is a transcendentalizing gesture following humanist and dialecticist thought. It posits postmodernism as overcoming the flaws of positivism, and social constructivism as overcoming biological determinism. As such, the gesture is predicated upon sequential negation, and has a progress narrative structure. The reliance upon dialecticism has been uncovered as an effect of what Lynn Hankinson Nelson (1993, 127–8) termed "unreal dichotomies" or "non-exhaustive oppositions." Nelson has made clear that one pole of a dichotomy or binary opposition is always already implied in the other *as its negation*, which makes dichotomies unreal and oppositions non-exhaustive. In the words of Michel Serres:

An idea opposed to another idea is always the same idea, albeit affected by the negative sign. The more you oppose one another, the more you remain in the same framework of thought (Serres with Latour 1995, 81).

The intimate relation between two so-called opposites makes it clear that the transcendental and humanist tendencies, which are fought by new materialist theorists are fundamentally reductive. After all, negation implies a relation, which is precisely what is undone by the dependence of transcendental humanist thought on dualism.

Attempting to break through reductive dualist thought in *A New Philosophy of Society*, DeLanda (2006, 45–6; original emphasis) makes the following statement:

[…] general categories do not refer to anything in the real world and […] to believe they do (i.e. to reify them) leads directly to essentialism. Social constructivism is supposed to be an antidote to this, in the sense that by showing that general categories are mere stereotypes it blocks the move towards their reification. But by coupling the idea that perception is intrinsically linguistic with the ontological assumption that only the contents of experience really exist, this position leads directly to a form of *social essentialism*.

Linguisticality (which is *not denied*, but given its proper place, that is, a more modest one) forms the nexus of DeLanda's non-dualist argument about new materialism. *Anti-representationalism* (an immanent gesture) is employed so as to break through the assumed binary opposition between realist essentialism and social constructivism. Due to the fact that causally linear, predetermined and constrained reasoning has been left behind (or at least is included in an open, constrained yet undecidable3 notion of causality that fills up all of its dimensions), it cannot be argued that new materialism entails a simple move *beyond* social constructivism in a progressive way. According to DeLanda, new materialism is *neither* realist *nor* social constructivist. It is precisely the commonalities of realism and social constructivism that are being recognized, though shifted.

Braidotti (2006, 130; cf*.* Rossini 2006) theorizes similar moves in *Transpositions*, yet with a clear focus on feminist politics:

In the political economy of phallologocentrism and of anthropocentric humanism, which predicates the sovereignty of Sameness in a falsely universalistic mode, my sex fell on the side of 'Otherness,' understood as pejorative difference, or as being-worth-less-than. The becoming-animal/ becomingworld speaks to my feminist self, partly because my gender, historically speaking, never quite made it into full humanity, so my allegiance to that category is at best negotiable and never to be taken for granted.

This is neither an essentialist statement, nor one of semiotic constructivism. It is rather the materialist acknowledgement of a historical location: a starting position of asymmetrical power differentials. This location is not only geopolitical, but also genealogical and time-bound.

Braidotti's claim is anti-representationalist in two ways. First of all, she cuts across a biological (or Platonic) essentialism and "semiotic constructivism" (here, a relativism) in a manner that mirrors DeLanda. Secondly, a feminist politics is conceptualized, which does not embrace the dualist move of creating counter-identities (a modernist feminist project) nor does it attempt to move beyond dualism by producing a plethora of counter-identities according to a pluralizing gesture (a postmodernist feminist project, and again a relativism). Feminists "rather go further and push towards qualitatively stronger de-territorializations" (ibid*.*, 134), that is, towards becoming-animal/becoming-world, which entails a breakthrough of the naturalizing tendencies of both sexist humanism *and* the denaturalizing tendencies of modern and postmodern feminisms.

What we find in the work of DeLanda and Braidotti is a series of moves that complexify cultural theory in the light of the habit of dualism. We claim that the immanent philosophies of DeLanda and Braidotti (though by no means exclusively), in their early as well as their recent incarnations, exemplify the constitution and enactment of new materialist cultural theory.

This chapter engages with the constitution of new materialism, as an object of study and a shared ambition with the scholars whose work we study. Following the interviews in Part One of this book, and building on a comprehensive review of enactments or instantiations of new materialism in recent cultural theory, this chapter proposes that the immanent gesture of new materialism is transversal rather than dualist as it intersects academic (neo-)disciplines (for instance feminist theory, science and technology studies, and media and cultural studies), paradigms (for instance the Saussurian/Lacanian linguisticism that is still prevalent in cultural theory today, or the dualistic take on the natural sciences and the humanities), and the linear spatiotemporalities conventionally assigned to epistemic trends (for instance "new" materialism versus Marxist historical materialism as practiced by Benjamin for instance4 ). Our proposition is that new materialism is itself a distinctive trend, both in feminist theory and in cultural theory more broadly, and a device or tool for opening up theory formation. This is to say that new materialism not only allows for *addressing* the conventional epistemic tendency to what can be summarized as classification or *territorialization* (when a new trend appears on the academic stage, it is usually interpreted as a "class" that can be added to an existing classification of epistemologies), but also—and at the same time—for *de-territorializing* the academic territories, tribes, and temporalities traditionally considered central to scholarship. After all, the classificatory strategy perfectly exemplifies transcendentalism and the two characteristics of dualism (sequential negation and a narrative of progress). Braidotti has summarized the need for this double move as a "qualitative leap" towards "creating conditions for the implementation of transversality" (ibid*.*, 123). In this chapter, we intend to affirm the *transversality* of new materialism. That is to say, we study and propose a new materialism that *cuts across* or intersects dual oppositions in an immanent way. Félix Guattari ([1964] 1984), coining this term as early as 1964, insists on the "micropolitical" nature of transversality, introducing it as a means to search for the new—not by critiquing the old, but by radically questioning (or smoothening out) all the barriers that supported its logic. "Transversality is the transference become vehicular" as Gary Genosko (1996, 15) then concludes. The strength of new materialism is precisely this nomadic traversing of the

territories of science *and* the humanities, performing the agential or *noninnocent* nature of all matter5 that seems to have escaped *both* modernist (positivist) and postmodernist humanist epistemologies.

#### New Materialism Generated: Depending on Disciplines

Although we want to show here that a first instantiation of transversality enacted by new materialist cultural theorists cuts across scholarly disciplines, there is a whole range of scholars working on new materialism from their respective disciplinary locations. In these specific disciplinary takes on new materialism, the potentialities of the new materialism get lost in unnecessarily narrow understandings. Introducing new materialism *into* a discipline entails a transcendental gesture according to which the new materialism and the discipline in question (e.g. sociology) are positioned as pre-existing or *generated* rather than generative, and consequently as interacting rather than intra-acting. In other words, due to the presumed schism or dualism, the transversality of new materialism is being undone rather than affirmed or put to work. To transversalize can only be done when always already "invoking a new frame of analysis," as Jonathan Gil Harris (2003, 281) puts it. A new materialism that emerges *from* a discipline is an immanent gesture that we will discuss in the next section.

Momin Rahman and Anne Witz (2003, 245) in "What Really Matters? The Elusive Quality of the Material in Feminist Thought," for instance, focus exclusively on sociologically induced feminisms, and argue that "there needs to be a recognition of both the limits of a constructionism grounded in materialism and the potential of a constructionism that deploys materiality as a more porous and flexible concept." Rahman and Witz recognize the shift engendered by a new materialism (conceptualizing "materiality"), and claim that the conceptualization of the material employed in the early days of feminist sociology was more complex than simply economical. This cartography is in line with what we want to present here. Although new materialism has set in motion a *qualitative shift* in cultural theory at large, this shift is transversal, not dualist. Striking alliances between the old and the new, Rahman and Witz claim that early feminists broadened the definition of the economically determinist material to include social relations and the domestic sphere, and worked on the

material as including everyday and institutional practices as well (ibid*.*, 250). As a consequence, they read Butler's claim about "the distinction between the material and the cultural [being] no longer a stable or viable one" (ibid*.*, 249) as an outrage, precisely because of the fact that 1970s and 1980s feminist sociology did not necessarily work along the lines of such a distinction. In the work of Butler, they imply, a second-wave feminist materialism functions as a straw person.6 Rahman and Witz find that good-old feminist sociological work worked along the lines of an expanded conceptualization of the material.

Simultaneously, however, they claim that the good-old feminist sociological work simply *added* new (relativist, they say) theoretical frameworks to the existing economically determinist materialism. They question whether, in such a context, "the distinctive materiality of materialism has any residual conceptual integrity" (ibid*.*, 252). In other words, they stumble upon the problems of additive/quantitative epistemic approaches, especially, we would say, when the two quantified approaches are non-exhaustive oppositions. We claim that adding a so-called feminist postmodern epistemology with relativist inclinations to a modern epistemology, feminist or not, materialist or not, does not necessarily result in a qualitative shifting of *either* the modern *or* the feminist postmodern. This is why the questioning of conceptual integrity is justified in the case of the cartography of Rahman and Witz, but not in the context of new (feminist) materialism per se. The conceptualization of "materiality" that the sociologists Rahman and Witz engage with does not necessarily shift the term towards something that differs from the economical simply because of the fact that early feminist sociologists seem to have *added* a bodily materiality *to* the economical.

The materialism brought to the fore by Rahman and Witz—if compared with economical (neo-classical) materialism, the constructionist approach remains constant, as DeLanda also stressed in the interview in Part One—should in fact be labeled "new" in the teleological sense of the term, whereas we have argued that it is among other things *teleology* (as shared by realist/totalizing/modern and social constructivist/relativist/ postmodern epistemologies) that is broken down in new materialism. Rahman and Witz themselves yearn for a breakdown of linear continuity

as well, while remaining in a dualistic mode (pre-distinguishing the social and the physical), which we would interpret as an artifact of their territorial approach to new theory formation:

The social constructionism being worked at here is not one that is limited by physical matter, but rather one that is able to incorporate body matters as an indivisible part of lived, gendered experience and action. […] it seems to us that there is an attempt to consider the *social* effectivity of the physical—materiality as embodiment, experienced and rendered meaningful within gendered and sexualized frameworks of meaning and action (ibid*.*, 256; original emphasis).

Rahman and Witz thus affirm dualisms throughout their article—the dualism between new materialism and sociology being the starting point, and the one between physicality and sociality being the end result. It seems as if they have wanted to rescue (good-old) feminist sociology in light of a materialism that is new in the teleological sense of the term.7 Analyzing their article, we have shown that such an approach does not allow for the qualitative shifting of concepts that is to be found in the work of, among others, Braidotti and DeLanda. The materiality celebrated remains reduced to being the polar opposite of a sociality—that is, the material here has to be made socially effective, rather than seeing the social and the material as co-constitutive forces through, for instance, the "abstract machine." We read this absence as an artifact of the authors buying into disciplinary territoriality. Bringing new materialism (here assumed to be a pre-existing body of work) into contact with a scholarly discipline (equally assumed to be pre-existing) has distortive effects. The presupposition that a new materialism is *generated* contradicts new materialism's own *antirepresentationalism*. New materialism, then, takes scholarship into absolute deterritorialization, and is not an epistemic class that has a clear referent. New materialism is something to be *put to work*. 8

Cultural theory being less disciplined than (feminist) sociology, the beginnings of a *transversal* understanding of new materialism can be found in Susan Sheridan's "Words and Things: Some Feminist Debates on Culture and Materialism." Sheridan (2002, 23), while not using the term

new materialism herself, argues that the impact of post-structuralism on feminist cultural theory has resulted in the displacement of "the primacy of social and economic relations in analyses of women's situation," and in the implementation of taking into consideration the primacy of "issues of sexuality, subjectivity and textuality." Sheridan claims that this seeming shift rests on a misinterpretation of post-structuralist theory, in which words and things got separated (all of a sudden "words" gained primacy) whereas post-structuralism, if read unpolemically, and together with recent work on matter, "demonstrates how inseparable are the symbolic and the material in examining the discursive construction of 'objects' of knowledge, and the material effects of that discursive power" (ibid*.*, 25). In other words, post-structuralism and new materialism in Sheridan's understanding should not be read as dual opposites, and together they should not be seen as theoretical moves *beyond* a feminist sociological materialism. This cartography is qualitatively different from the one presented by Rahman and Witz, and it finds confirmation in the work of French post-structuralist feminists such as Hélène Cixous ([1975] 1976, 879, 884), one of whose main concerns, after all, was representationalism.

Sheridan, like Braidotti, positions herself amongst post-structuralist feminists who have argued that cultural constructivist feminism "is not materialist enough" (ibid*.*, 27), and who have attacked "reductive (essentialist) representations of the nature/culture binary divide itself" (ibid*.*, 28). Here, a post-structuralist feminist cultural theory seems to be dualistically opposed to a "cultural constructivism." Post-structuralist feminists are said to have critiqued cultural constructivism for working with a "de-materialised body," whereas another critique is that they have been working with "understandings of 'discourse'" that are "limited" when language is taken to be performative (ibid*.*). At the same time, poststructuralist feminist cultural theory is said to have attacked the reductive essentialism of *both* feminist sociology (focusing on the material) *and* cultural constructivism (focusing on the cultural). Traversing the nonexhaustive opposites of feminist sociology and cultural constructivism, and analyzing the reductivism effected on the basis of a reliance on *either* matter *or* discourse demonstrates transversality. In other words, Sheridan argues that the current rise in new materialist analyses in cultural theory shows that *both* language-oriented cultural constructivisms *and* sociologically induced feminisms are to be critiqued, since *neither* has fully employed the agential qualities of matter. Sheridan's reading of what she calls a "new stage" (ibid*.*; cf. Hekman 2010, 7 on a "new settlement") in feminist theory generates a focus not only on biological matter or on a cultural theory incorporating insights from the natural sciences, but also on the matter of the political economy, thus qualitatively shifting a concept of matter as purely physical and opposed to the social or linguistic.

The new stage's disciplinary transversality comes to be fully delineated by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (2008, 9–10; cf*.* Squier and Littlefield 2004) as a new materialism (here called "material feminism") that is to be found in the disciplines of "science studies, environmental feminisms, corporeal feminisms, queer theory, disability studies, theories of race and ethnicity, environmental justice, (post-)Marxist feminism, globalization studies, and cultural studies," and which as an epistemic trend is involved in "integrating them into what amounts to a new paradigm for feminist thought. […] this paradigm is currently emerging and […] is a necessary and exhilarating move for contemporary feminism." In *The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures*, Hekman (2010) goes so far as to demonstrate that new materialism is to be found in *all* scholarly disciplines, cutting across the trans-Atlantic disconnection between analytic and continental philosophy, and putting feminist theory at the forefront. For us, too, the new materialism allows for a move away from disciplines towards the meta-disciplinary, in feminist theory and in cultural theory more broadly, which is a claim that alludes to the importance of studying and engaging with the effect that this move might have on the *paradigms* of contemporary cultural theory. In what ways does new materialism traverse paradigms?

#### Generating New Materialism: Playing with Paradigms

Demonstrating the workings of new materialism, that is, generating a new materialism rather than relying upon a new materialism already pre-generated, Braidotti (2000, 160) argues that what is to be found in postmodern cultural theory (i.e. the body of social/semiotic constructivist cultural theory considered state-of-the-art once theory formation is

positioned on a global classificatory map) is a "denial of the materiality of the bodily self" in paradoxical conjunction with the fast circulation of an excessive number of theoretical discourses about, and cultural representations of, the human body. In other words, cultural theory in the postmodern era has been unable to account fully for materiality, whereas it found itself surrounded by an excessive representation (thus objectification) of (bodily and non-bodily, organic and inorganic, always already feminized) matter in popular culture as well as cultural theory. Braidotti takes postmodernist constructivism's specific form of anti-essentialism, which affirms representationalism, to be responsible for this curious situation. Postmodernist constructivism is discovered to be a paradigm in which the space for materialism is, in Alistair Welchman's words (2005, 390), "restricted," and postmodern cultural theorists are simply included in the huge category of "critics who use an impoverished conception of matter inherited from non-materialist systems of thought" (ibid*.*, 388). Postmodern cultural theory, otherwise seen as constituting and having been constituted by the *Crisis* of Reason, seems to have continued to work within the legacy of modernism's foundationalism. The modernist system of thought relying on Reason (and concepts like Logos, Mind, Representation) has not been fully broken down, and this is why transcendental and humanist tendencies continue to haunt present-day cultural theory. We have already explained that a postmodernism dualistically opposing modernism cannot entail anything but a continuation of the Same (cf*.* Alaimo and Hekman 2008, 2–3, Hekman 2010, 48). How does new materialism succeed in qualitatively shifting the paradigm that had supposedly already left the academic stage after May '68? And how does it introduce a conception of matter that is *not* impoverished?

As already stated, Braidotti's new materialism, which she also terms a "bodily" or "carnal" materialism (2006, 182) begins with "the enfleshed Deleuzean subject," which is "a folding-in of external influences and a simultaneous unfolding outwards of affects." The exterior and the interior, the subject(ive) and the object(ive), the individual, the social, and the symbolic are conceptualized as co-constitutive instead of pre-determined levels or layers. The genealogy of this Deleuzean subject is created in Continental thought; it includes "Descartes' nightmare, Spinoza's hope,

Nietzsche's complaint, Freud's obsession, Lacan's favorite fantasy, Marx's omission" (Braidotti 2000, 159). This cartography shows that new materialism has something to say about Reason/the modernist paradigm as well as the Crisis of Reason/the postmodernist paradigm. In other words, it is a *qualified* cartography, which opens up for a qualitative shifting of a dual opposition. This shifting is done by rethinking matter. Affirming a radical sense of materialism, or simply radical immanence, instead of starting from Reason (whether adjectified, thus postmodernized, or not), Braidotti does not define matter as solid and stable, as self-identical. A radically immanent conceptualization of matter *necessarily* affirms its ongoing "metamorphosis" (Braidotti 2002a), or in the words of DeLanda (1996, 2002), its ongoing "morphogenesis" as it shows an interest in intensive material processes and the actual forms they can produce.

According to a philosophy of radical immanence informed by a Bergsonian concept of time (*durée* instead of linearity and progress), matter is not thought of as Matter, the photonegative of Reason or Logos or Mind or Representation, but rather by a focus on "duration [inserted] into matter" (Grosz 2005, 111). It is a focus, indeed, on metamorphosis or morphogenesis:

What endures, what is fundamentally immersed in time is not what remains unchanging or the same over time, a Platonic essence, but what diverges and transforms itself with the passage of time (ibid*.*, 110).

This boils down to matter *immanently escaping* every possible representation in the modernist, scientistic meaning as well as in the postmodernist, social or semiotic constructivist sense of the term according to which representation is not the scientistic "mirror of nature" but rather the equally representationalist "mirror of culture" (Barad 2007). This is to say that whereas a modernist scientific materialism allows for one, True representation of matter, and a postmodernist cultural constructivism allows for a plethora of equally true representations, it is the *shared representationalism* that is questioned and shifted by new materialism. Matter is a transformative force *in itself*, which, in its ongoing change, will not allow any representation to take root. This is also how Miguel de Beistegui (2004,

110) reads Deleuze with Heidegger, elusively concluding that: "Behind or, better said perhaps, beneath every object, every representation, every physical of metaphysical ideality lies a phenomenon, which is the flesh and blood of the world, the life that continues to live in and through being as it is represented in itself. This is being as it is *lived*."9

In "What is the Matter of Feminist Criticism?" Mariam Fraser affirms Braidotti's new materialism, by working on the academic whom Claire Colebrook (2004, 293) has called the epitome of contemporary (feminist) postmodern cultural theory: Judith Butler. Representationalism or linguisticality is key to the work of Butler.10 Fraser (2002, 613) claims that in this work, language ends up addressing only the exterior. As a corollary, the interior appears as fundamentally ungraspable as any grasping is done through language. How do Barad and Vicki Kirby, whom Fraser positions alongside Braidotti for the generation of new materialism, qualitatively shift the relation between matter/materiality and language, between the exterior and the interior of the body? The key point is the abandonment of assumptions about linguisticality, and about who does the speaking/ writing. For Barad (1998, 105 in ibid*.*, 618; original emphasis), "what is being described by our theories is not nature itself, but our participation *within* nature." She theorizes the intra-action of the observer, the observed, and observing instruments, all of which are "agential." In line with this, Kirby starts from the literacy of matter, re-reading Derrida and Saussure in order to show that a close reading of their work also uncovers their emphasis on materiality-in-change. In the work of Kirby, matter appears as something that is not only spoken about or spoken with, but rather as itself simply *speaking*. Nature and culture, word and flesh are "all emergent *within* a force field of differentiations that has no exteriority in any final sense" (Kirby 1997, 126–7 in Fraser 2002, 619; original emphasis). Both cases of transversality, signified by the "within," entail leaving behind the primacy of either language/culture or matter/nature. In other words, a false dualism comes to be traversed. New materialism, that is, cuts across postmodernist and modernist paradigms as it shows that *both* epistemologies start from a distinctive pole of what Colebrook (2004, 56) has called "the representation/ materiality dichotomy." Questioning this dichotomy involved the following:

When feminists criticized or rejected the notion of women as mired in material embodiment, they did so because matter was deemed to be devoid of dynamism. When, subsequently, that phobia regarding matter was questioned, it was precisely because the border between mind and matter was deemed to be the effect of a prior linguistic or social production. And when 'linguisticism,' in turn, was challenged, this was because language had been erroneously taken to be a fixed, determining, and inhuman grid imposed upon life, rather than a living force (Colebrook 2008, 64).

Bodies are texts that *unfold* according to genetic encoding, Braidotti says, which implies traversing the material and the representational.

Key to the new materialist paradigm, then, is an emphasis on the "material-discursive" or "material-semiotic" that we know from the paradigm-shifting work of Haraway (1988, 595; original emphasis):

[…] bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes. Their *boundaries* materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices; 'objects' do not pre-exist as such. Objects are boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies. Siting (sighting) boundaries is a risky practice.

Such a claim is transversal when it comes to the broad (modernist and postmodernist) paradigms of cultural theory. The focus on the *materialization* of bodies and other so-called objects of investigation demonstrates how "duration" has in fact gotten "inserted into matter" (how DeLanda, for instance, got to focus on "matter-energy flows"), and how the "the representation/materiality dichotomy" has indeed been broken down (how Braidotti, for example, came to conceptualize the body as "a piece of meat activated by electric waves of desire, a text written by the unfolding of genetic encoding") in new materialist cultural theory. Working with "material-semiotic agents," as Haraway calls them, allows for a complexification of the way in which matter used to be defined. An

object is no longer passive matter that has to be re-presented; meaningmaking takes place on a two-way track.11 Here it is also demonstrated how new materialism does not discard signification (cf*.* Ahmed 2008, 34) but rather directs it to its proper place and qualitatively shifts the linguistic turn accordingly (i.e. non-dualistically).

In the passage cited above as well as in her later work, Haraway focuses upon the ways in which bodies and systems of scholarly signification/ representation materialize alongside each other. Harawayian instantiations of new materialism affirm what Barad (2007) has called an onto-epistemology, or even an ethico-onto-epistemology, according to which being and knowing (and the good) become indistinguishable. Inspired by Haraway and Barad, we lastly wish to discuss the *cartographical methodology* that generates and is generated by the disciplinary and paradigmatic transversalities of new materialism.

## Cartography Rather Than Classification

New materialism is a cultural theory for the twenty-first century that attempts to show how postmodern cultural theory, even while claiming otherwise, has made use of a conceptualization of "post-" that is dualistic. Postmodern cultural theory re-confirmed modern cultural theory, thus allowing transcendental and humanist traditions to haunt cultural theory after the Crisis of Reason. New materialist cultural theory shifts (post-) modern cultural theory, and provides an immanent answer to transcendental humanism. It is a cultural theory that is non-foundationalist yet nonrelativist. In conformity with the interviewees in Part One of this book, we have shown that there is much to be gained from an argument such as the latter; after all, postmodernisms and modernisms are manifold, on the one hand, and epistemologically very similar on the other. It is for this reason that new materialism continues to rewrite the history of philosophy. As already stated, the minor tradition Deleuze proposed is now widely read and commented upon, but increasingly, great minds of the past are being given the attention that their work needs. For there is no need to limit this tradition to a series of personae or even to what the History of Philosophy has labeled a particular "type" of thinking. Scholars at work within modernism such as Bergson, Whitehead, William James and Edmund

Husserl, all of whom had been pushed aside or reinterpreted by dualist thinking, are in need of serious materialist re-readings, which are in fact being carried out by an increasing number of scholars today. There is not even any reason to exclude Hegel from this list. For when he stated that "Action divides [spirit] into substance and consciousness of the substance" (Hegel [1807] 1977, paragraph 444), this not only comes very close to Spinoza's solution to the mind-body problem with which this chapter began, it also allows us to rethink Marx's (Hegel-inspired) materialism as a (non-dualist) neo-materialism. The richness of all these philosophies had by and large been suffering from dualism-dominated modernism and postmodernism. The way in which new materialism was generated in the previous paragraph alluded to the fact that duration not only came to be inserted into matter (ontology), but also and simultaneously into theory formation (epistemology). In other words, theory formation also entails the materialization of boundaries. Starting theory formation from *movement* alludes to cartography rather than classification, which is the third instantiation of transversality that we intend to highlight in this chapter.

In the introduction we claimed that new materialism not only *enacts* a thinking about theory formation that is other than classificatory (new materialism sets in motion a non-dualistic epistemic practice), but also that it enables us to understand the way in which theory formation used to be thought (following a territorialization pattern). We claimed that classification exemplifies the territorial and is fully dualistic, and throughout this chapter we have made clear how seemingly opposite epistemic tendencies or classes are in fact non-exhaustive oppositions. New materialism criticizes not only the use of "a discipline" or "a paradigm" as pre-determined, but is also critical, along the lines of the dismantling of binary oppositions that it enacts of the pre-determination of classifications of theoretical trends. Classifying epistemic tendencies that are supposedly prevalent in cultural theory implies working along territorial lines, which is a transcendentalizing gesture along with invoking sequential negation and a narrative of progress (i.e., it is dualist). This does not allow for the (un)folding of cultural theory—the matter-energy flows of theory formation, the non-linear coding practices, the cutting across matter and signification—to be captured. New materialism de-territorializes the ways in which cultural theory has been classified, and

this process we call cartographical. We referred above to Colebrook, who questioned a conceptualization of "language" as "a fixed, determining, and inhuman grid imposed upon life." She defined new materialism as allowing us to see not only matter, but also language as a "living force." Questioning fixity thus opens up the possibility of thinking about theory formation in a non-linear, cartographical way.

Barad's "Re(con)figuring Space, Time, and Matter" is useful for explaining the move away from the classificatory towards the cartographical. Earlier we mentioned Barad's neologism "intra-action," which allowed us to demonstrate that terms such as mind and matter, or sociology and new materialism, do not exist independently before they begin to inter-act. Barad (2001, 98) explains the machinery of intra-action as follows:

[…] structures are to be understood as material-discursive phenomena that are iteratively (re)produced through ongoing material-discursive intra-actions. This machine is not a Euclidean device, nor is it merely a static instrument with a non-Euclidean geometry. It is a topological animal which mutates through a dynamics of intra-activity. Questions of connectivity, boundary formation, and exclusion (topological concerns) must supplement and inform concerns about positionality and location (too often figured in geometrical terms).

Affirming onto-epistemology, Barad talks about mapping practices that draw boundaries, and she claims that *the same* objects/boundaries materialize in non-exhaustively opposite mapping practices (Euclidean space versus stasis in non-Euclidean space). The mapping practice, generating intra-action and generated through it, shifts both options and works along the following lines:

What we need are genealogies of the material-discursive apparatuses of production which take account of the intraactive topological dynamics that reconfigure the spacetime manifold. In particular, it is important that they include an analysis of the connectivity of phenomena at different scales. […] The topological dynamics of space, time, and matter are an agential matter and as such require an ethics of knowing

and being: Intra-actions have the potential to do more than participate in the constitution of the geometries of power, they open up possibilities for changes in its topology, and as such interventions in the manifold possibilities made available reconfigure both that will be possible. The space of possibilities does not represent a fixed event horizon within which the social location of knowers can be mapped, nor a homogenous fixed uniform container of choices. Rather the dynamics of the spacetime manifold is produced by agential interventions made possible in its very re(con)figuration (ibid*.*, 103–4).

These genealogies, or "cartographies" in our vocabulary, are non-dualist approaches to theory formation that allow for absolute deterritorializing. Not primarily interested in representation, signification, and disciplinarity, new materialism is fascinated by affect, force, and movement as it travels in all directions. It searches not for the objectivity of things in themselves but for an objectivity of actualization and realization. It searches for how matter comes into agential realism, how matter is materialized in it. It is interested in speeds and slownesses, in how the event unfolds according to the inbetween, according to intra-action. New materialism argues that we know nothing of the (social) body until we know what it can do. It agrees with studying the multiplicity of modes that travel natureculture as the perpetual flow it has always already been.

In the next chapter we will take up the question of non-dualism, and we will discuss in a detailed manner *how* new materialism pushes dualism into non-dualism, thus allowing for a non-reductive take on matter and language.

#### Notes

#### 114 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin

## Chapter 6 Pushing Dualism to an Extreme

This chapter engages with the way in which several significant contemporary (Continental) philosophers establish a philosophy of difference in the form of a "new materialism." It builds on work on new materialism's specific philosophical impetus as well as carefully unpacking the methodology through which it is actualized. Though we will demonstrate that this double move concerning ontology on the one hand and methodology on the other is inherent in the new materialism, most contemporary commentaries focus on ontology only by *positing* the new philosophical stance. In other words, the materialism of new materialism is reflected upon, whereas a clear perspective on how new materialism is *new* remains underdeveloped. This chapter addresses this discrepancy by demonstrating how the new materialism produces a revolution in thought by traversing modernity's dualisms (structured by a negative relation between terms), and by constituting a new conceptualization of difference (structured by an affirmative relation) along the way. This conceptualization of difference entails an ontological philosophical practice predicated on leaving behind all prioritizations (implicitly) involved in modern dualistic thinking, since a difference structured by affirmation does not work with predetermined relations (e.g. between mind and body) nor does it involve a counterhierarchy between terms (which would make the new materialism into a postmodern philosophical exercise).

The "new" of new materialism (that is, the way in which its non-dualist philosophy is related to dualist philosophical stances) comes close to Jean-François Lyotard's plea for a "rewriting" of "modernity." In chapter 2 of his *The Inhuman* ([1988] 1991) Lyotard, who is famous for his thoughts on "post-modernism," critiques this concept in particular because of its implicit notion of time. Postmodernism *is* modernism in the sense that the issues raised by modernism are also on the agenda of postmodernism, which is rather an after-modernism. Issues, as Lyotard continually stresses, that predominantly include the emancipation of humanity as a whole. Yet by appropriating the term post-modernism, his project automatically claims itself to be a linear consequence of modernism *and* (at the same time) refuses to think the here and now (or at least, it can only think the here and now as a consequence of a period in cultural history long gone). In rereading Aristotle's *Physics* (Book IV), however, Lyotard agrees with the idea that what has already taken place (*proteron*) and what is about to take place (*husteron*) cannot be considered apart from the now. Both history and the future unfold from the now. Our age then should not be considered an age that follows from modernity, but rather an age that sets itself to a continuous rewriting of several of the (emancipatory) features that have been raised by modernity, thus actively creating a past (while projecting a future). That is why Lyotard ([1988] 1991, 24) suggests rephrasing his project as "rewriting modernity."

The idea of rewriting modernity might also be considered a good description of what Gilles Deleuze (Lyotard's close colleague at the University of Vincennes) proposed. Deleuze (e.g. [1966] 1991) too seems to accept the Aristotelian notion of time, which, in his books, is mainly at work in how Henri Bergson rewrote Aristotle (using the concepts of actuality and virtuality). Deleuze himself (like his interpreters) always claimed that he intended to rewrite the history of philosophy as a whole, or at least, his goal—especially in the early part of his career—was to question the History of Philosophy (with capital letters) as a whole, as its dominant lines of thought overcoded many ideas that he considered to be of the greatest value. Yet without prejudice to his timeless contributions to thought, there are good reasons to consider the work of Deleuze not so much a rewriting of the entire History of Philosophy, but rather as a rewriting of modernity.

For although authors like Lucretius, Duns Scotus, and the Stoics play an important role in his thinking, they have never been at the centre of a particular study, nor has Deleuze made much effort to shed new light on their ideas. He did, however, give philosophy and many other parts of academia important rewritings of philosophers such as Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche and Bergson, and writers like Proust and Kafka. These were authors who, in very different ways, all lived their lives in the so-called modern era. Renaming Deleuze's project as "rewriting modernity" seems all the more agreeable, because its key feature, being the emancipation of humanity in its most radical form, seems *precisely* what Deleuze's philosophy is all about. Gilles Deleuze's (and Félix Guattari's) rewriting of modernity was about the rewriting of a "minor tradition" in thought, as it was named (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987), which is mainly based on the four "modernist" thinkers mentioned above. By rewriting their modernity, and not in the least place modernist ways of thinking emancipation, Deleuze did not create a post-modernism that continued (in any way) the traits that had given form to the modern era. Rather, in line with how Lyotard conceptualized it, Deleuze's goal was to set this whole tradition in movement. We will show later that Deleuze's take on the Other, for instance, cannot be captured by the post-modern countering of the One.

In Lyotard's wake, the perpetual rewriting of modernity is something also taken very seriously by those inspired by new materialist thought today, as already seen in the interviews in Part One of this book and subsequently noted at the end of the previous chapter. The work of this rapidly growing group of contemporary scholars rewrites modernism, or bits of modernism, opening this (philosophical) tradition up to the arts and the sciences, actualizing and realizing it in the here and now. Some authors, like Braidotti and DeLanda, are very much interested in re-reading Deleuze and his minor tradition, though it should be mentioned that both of them are also using other fertile (modern) grounds. Braidotti has always shown an interest in psychoanalysis (Freudian psychoanalysis in particular). DeLanda, on the other hand, though always viewed as a committed Deleuzian, makes at least as much use of the work of Fernand Braudel, Mario Bunge, and Max Weber. Others, like Karen Barad and Quentin Meillassoux, have come to this path through still other routes. Barad (2007), emerging from the field

of theoretical physics, is mostly inspired by the work of Niels Bohr. Quentin Meillassoux ([2006] 2008) sets himself to rewriting the dominant stream in the modernist project as a whole (which he labels "correlationalist"), which brings him back most of all to an affirmative re-reading of David Hume.

All of these authors are in touch with a material spirit whose imperceptible forces they perform in their writing in diverse ways. Yet their common interest in doing this *affirmatively*, in and through a re-reading of modernity, demands more refinement. For instance, in *Nomadic Subjects* Braidotti (1994, 171), in a Lyotardian vein and in reference to Deleuze's minor tradition, states that we ought to "work through" the notion of woman: "Like the gradual peeling off of old skins, the achievement of change has to be earned by careful working through; it is the metabolic consumption of the old that can engender the new." Expanding their interest in "naturecultures" (as Donna Haraway [2003] puts it) or in "collectives" (which is a concept of Bruno Latour ([1991] 1993)), the way in which they rewrite modernity's processes is by rewriting the dualisms that are so central to modern thought. Latour for instance has stated that he is "trying the tricky move of unveiling the modern Constitution without resorting to the modern type of debunking" due to the fact that his project is to affirm "that the [modern] Constitution, if it is to be effective, has to be aware of what it allows" (Latour [1991] 1993, 43). This kind of argumentation can be summarized, in the words of Bergson ([1896] 2004, 236), as a movement of "push[ing] dualism to an extreme." In this chapter we discuss the way in which a new materialism comes to be constituted precisely by this movement, which Deleuze ([1956/2002] 2004, 32) in discussing Bergson has typified as methodological (it touches upon ways of arguing, ways of doing philosophy) as well as ontological (it is interested in a material spirit, that is, in what Brian Massumi [2002, 66] calls "ontologically prior"). It is the type of movement Deleuze himself has adopted as his own methodology, especially in *Capitalism and Schizophrenia*, the diptych written together with Guattari. In their *Anti-Oedipus* ([1972] 1983), they already claimed to perform what they called a "schizoanalysis" (a materialist philosophical practice interested in conceptualizing sexuality beyond the male/female dualism and even beyond human sexuality), and in breaking through the Oedipal plot that overcodes the ways in which we think (through

psychoanalysis), and oftentimes individually and collectively experience, desire. Far from respecting Cartesian dualisms, this style of thinking is much more interested in rethinking Spinoza's monist solution by means of these oppositions and what they can do, as Eugene Holland argues (1999, 111–2). But it was in *A Thousand Plateaus* (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 20) that they came closest to capturing their project in words, when they state as follows: "We invoke one dualism only to challenge another. We employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models." Hence, the methodology and ontology proposed in rewriting modernity in no way "follows from" modernity. By pushing dualism to an extreme, "difference is pushed to the limit" (Deleuze [1968] 1994, 45). Consequently, by radically rewriting the dualisms of modernity, new materialism precisely becomes a philosophy of difference that opens up for a "new" ontology, or rather, a "new" ontogenesis.

In the previous chapter we suggested that new materialism is a transversal cultural theory that qualitatively shifts the dualist gesture of prioritizing mind over matter, soul over body, and culture over nature that can be found in modernist as well as post-modernist cultural theories. We thus "invoke[d] the same testimony" (Bergson [1896] 2004, 236) against two seemingly opposite cultural theories. Despite the fact that such prioritization appears commonsensical even today in prominent parts of the sciences and the humanities, its reliance on dualism is by no means beyond question. The outcomes of the prioritization exercises are generally presented as True in its most totalizing meaning, whereas minor traditions throughout the centuries have opposed them in convincing ways. In other words: a new materialism is constituted by demonstrating how the canonized relations between the aforementioned terms are in fact the outcomes of "power/knowledge" according to which Truth is an instantiation of a politics or régime, as Michel Foucault (1980) would have it. In this chapter we will take our previous arguments a step further by focusing on the methodological and ontological issues surrounding the present-day rise of non-dualist thought. We will begin by considering what a radical rewriting of modernity in the case of new materialism entails. *How* do scholars such as Braidotti, DeLanda, Barad, and Meillassoux produce their work?

## New Materialism's Radical Rewriting of Modernity

Let us agree on the point that a cultural theory can only be truly distinctive and *original* if its establishment does not claim to be the next step in a discussion that is structured according to the dominant lines of sequential negation and the narrative of progress; that is, if its installment does not follow the classificatory lines that started dominating thought within modernism as it has branched off into so many different parts of life. Similarly, *opposing* this narrative is also not an option. Lyotard has already taught us that his increasing concern with the idea of postmodernism also had to do with the prefix "post-," and the way this opposed yet (re)created the narratives of modernity. As already mentioned in the previous chapter, it was Michel Serres who put the latter into a general theory, when he stated: "An idea opposed to another idea is always the same idea, albeit affected by the negative sign. The more you oppose one another, the more you remain in the same framework of thought" (Serres with Latour 1995, 81).

Therefore, not just the idea of postmodernism but actually *all thought* that starts either with classification or with the repudiation of it, does not radically rewrite, cannot set forth a revolution in thought. Elizabeth Grosz (2005, 165), who follows Luce Irigaray's investment in thinking through (feminist) revolutions in thought, states most clearly that it is *only* in a radical rewriting that revolutions in thought can come into being. After all, such movement

is not a revolution on any known model, for it cannot be the overthrow of all previous thought, the radical disconnection from the concepts and language of the past: a revolution in thought can only use the language and the concepts that presently exist or have already existed, and can only produce itself against the background and history of the present.

Earlier, Grosz (2000) had already explained that the seemingly constraining model, or framework of thought, or concept allows in fact for the indeterminacy of a revolution in thought.1 Wishing to anticipate future thoughts and practices by negating the past, one positions oneself in a relation to past thoughts and practices that is solely constraining. In such a situation, the past undergoes nothing but re-confirmation in the

present, albeit that progress is assumed to be made. *This*, we want to argue, is the structuring principle of classificatory modes of thinking, which are consequently prevented from a radical rewriting of thought, from being truly revolutionary.

Our goal in this chapter should thus be to find out in what way the revolutionary constitution of new materialist cultural theory rewrites modernity as a present according to which a past and future unfold. In order to get there we shall first demonstrate by what means the new materialist breakdown of dualism, of the structuring principle of modernist cultural theories, stirs a revolution in thought. New materialist cultural theorists do not involve themselves with ongoing repetitive discussions in the modernist humanities (cf. Serres with Latour 1995, 86). New materialism helps us analyze and (therefore) shift the structuring principles of these discussions by showing how classificatory negation involves a specific relationality, which is reductive. Later we will demonstrate how new materialist cultural theories are not relational in a negative, reductive manner, but rather are structured along the lines of an affirmative intensity, which in the end turns into a nondualism, a monist philosophy of difference, or more precisely, *immanence*. Invoking one dualism in order to challenge another allows new materialism to rewrite modernity *as an* emancipation.

## Dualism: A Negation is a Relation Structured by Negativity

Bergson ([1869] 2004, 297) argued that "[t]he difficulties of ordinary dualism come, not from the distinction of the two terms, but from the impossibility of seeing how the one is grafted upon the other." Bergson's "ordinary dualism" indicates the structuring principle of Serres' repetitive discussions, and Grosz's (failed) overthrow of previous thought. Even in our time cultural theory is structured predominantly according to this ordinary dualism. It continues—implicitly or explicitly—the modernist framework of thought, accepting and thinking along the dominant lines of dualist distinctions of mind and matter, soul and body, and culture and nature. But although Bergson demonstrated that ordinary dualism is inherently problematic, the act of making distinctions between terms is not. The treatment the distinguished terms receive is what makes dominant cultural theory, then as now, questionable. Bergson implies that as long as we are

clear about the fact that one term of a dichotomy is "grafted upon" the other, we will not fall into the trap of setting up a discussion that leads us away from serious thought. This also applies to how contemporary thought, often through denial, is grafted upon modernist cultural theory—such as through Barad's term "representationalism," as will be discussed below.

Let us provide an example that proves our point. Consider a big name in contemporary sociology and philosophy: Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard was no doubt part of a very talented generation of French scholars that also included Lyotard and Deleuze. But in contrast with the latter two, Baudrillard was from the outset very much accepted in mainstream cultural theory. He is the prototype of those post-modernist thinkers from whom Lyotard implicitly wanted to distance himself, insofar as Baudrillard wholeheartedly accepts the modernist dualisms and continues their arguments. There is no other way to think, for instance, of Baudrillard's theory of simulacra (e.g. Baudrillard [1981] 1995, [1995] 1996) as anything other than a continuation of modernity, as a general acceptance of its theories, and a refusal actually to rewrite the dualisms involved. Discussing for example the imaginary of Disneyland, he concluded that "[i]t is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle" (Baudrillard [1981] 1995, 12–3), he refuses to make any analysis whatsoever of the duality of real vs. representational. Accepting the difference (even while twisting it around) is by no means the way in which new materialism is always already questioning these principles and rewriting them from the start.

Thus the time has come to draw a formal difference between this ordinary dualism, as Bergson analyzes it, and the radical writing of modernist dualisms as proposed by Lyotard and Deleuze, but also by scholars such as Latour. The difference lies not in the fact that this latter group suggests a dualism that begins with the act of relating whereas ordinary dualism denies this relational nature. Rather, both groups start from this relating (insofar as it exists outside of its terms). Yet ordinary dualism is undergirded by a *negative* relationality, and it is this particular type of relationality that is not subscribed to by Lyotard, Deleuze, or Latour (or even Bergson, for that matter). Let us continue therefore by focusing

more specifically upon the set-up of argumentations about the deficiency of ordinary dualism. We have to return once more to Bergson, whose work provides insight into the ways in which the concrete cases of ordinary dualism that structure cultural theory (the humanities) as well as scientism and common sense can be overcome. Yet his work also shows how nondualist philosophy is always "onto-epistemological" (Barad's term)—that is, how philosophy involves the way in which "concept and creation are related to each other" (Deleuze and Guattari [1991] 1994, 11). This refers back to Deleuze's remark about the work of Bergson as both methodological and ontological: Bergson not only provides insight into ordinary dualism as the structuring principle of non-revolutionary thought, but also he re-writes modernism so as to provide a non-dualist ontology structured by the "unity of the thing and the concept" (Deleuze [1956/2002] 2004, 33).

When Bergson introduces the concept of ordinary dualism in *Matter and Memory*, he works on the problem of the union of body and soul. The centrality of this union comes to the fore, according to Bergson ([1896] 2004, 235), on the basis of a distinction made between matter and spirit. This ontological distinction, and more importantly the specific way in which it is treated, constitutes Bergson's analysis as exemplary of the (necessary) circumvention of ordinary dualism. Moreover, a distinction is still being made between terms: