Kirby What If Culture Was Nature

What if Culture was Nature all Along? 55242_Kirby.indd242_Kirby.indd i 222/12/162/12/16 44:59:59 PPMM New Materialisms Series editors: Iris van der Tuin and Rosi Braidotti New Materialisms asks how materiality permits representation, actualises ethi- cal subjectivities and innovates the political. The series will provide a discursive hub and an institutional home to this vibrant emerging fi eld and open it up to a wider readership. Editorial Advisory board Marie-Luise Angerer, Karen Barad, Corinna Bath, Barbara Bolt, Felicity Colman, Manuel DeLanda, Richard Grusin, Vicki Kirby, Gregg Lambert, Nina Lykke, Brian Massumi, Henk Oosterling, Arun Saldanha Books available What if Culture was Nature all Along? Edited by Vicki Kirby Critical and Clinical Cartographies: Architecture, Robotics, Medicine, Philosophy Edited by Andrej Radman and Heidi Sohn Books forthcoming Architectural Materialisms: Non-Human Creativity Edited by Maria Voyatzaki 55242_Kirby.indd242_Kirby.indd iiii 222/12/162/12/16 44:59:59 PPMM What if Culture was Nature all Along? Edited by Vicki Kirby 55242_Kirby.indd242_Kirby.indd iiiiii 222/12/162/12/16 44:59:59 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation Vicki Kirby, 2017 © the chapters their several authors, 2017 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 1929 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1930 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1931 4 (epub) The right of Vicki Kirby to be identifi ed as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 55242_Kirby.indd242_Kirby.indd iivv 222/12/162/12/16 44:59:59 PPMM Contents Acknowledgements vii Foreword viii 1 Matter out of Place: ‘New Materialism’ in Review 1 Vicki Kirby 2 Method Matters: The Ethics of Exclusion 26 Ashley Barnwell 3 Sensory Substitution: The Plasticity of the Eye/I 48 Florence Chiew 4 Allergy as the Puzzle of Causality 70 Michelle Jamieson 5 Pregnant Men: Paternal Postnatal Depression and a Culture of Hormones 90 Rebecca Oxley 6 Material Culture: Epigenetics and the Molecularisation of the Social 110 Noela Davis 7 Racialised Visual Encounters 134 Xin Liu 8 Microbiology as Sociology: The Strange Sociality of Slime 153 Jacqueline Dalziell 9 Nature Represents Itself: Bibliophilia in a Changing Climate 179 Astrida Neimanis 55242_Kirby.indd242_Kirby.indd v 222/12/162/12/16 44:59:59 PPMM vi contents 10 Climate Change, Socially Synchronised: Are We Really Running out of Time? 199 Will Johncock 11 A Sociality of Death: Towards a New Materialist Politics and Ethics of Life Itself 223 Peta Hinton Notes on Contributors 248 Index 251 55242_Kirby.indd242_Kirby.indd vvii 222/12/162/12/16 44:59:59 PPMM Acknowledgements A big thank you to Iris van der Tuin for her early appreciation of our collective efforts and her vision and encouragement in helping us to realise this project. I would also like to thank those participants in Mull, our regular reading group, who did not make it into the book. The con- versations and general good cheer of several ‘fl oating’ Mull members over several years of the book’s gestation have been invaluable; Naama Carlin, Holi Birman, Jasmin Kelaita, Suzi Hayes, Sophie Robinson, André Etiamby, Nayana Bibile and James Banwell. And one thing we can agree upon is that The Cricketers Arms and Strawberry Hills Hotels have never let us down. The University of New South Wales, School of Social Sciences, has provided welcome support with a small grant towards the indexing of the book, which is much appreciated. 55242_Kirby.indd242_Kirby.indd vviiii 222/12/162/12/16 44:59:59 PPMM Foreword Where to Begin? A visit to Sydney by Iris van der Tuin, one of the editors of the New Materialisms Series with Edinburgh University Press, fi rst alerted most of the contributors to this collection that we were doing some- thing unusual. The ‘doing’ involved our participation in a regular research workshop that we affectionately called ‘Mull’, and it was here that we committed to reading the most challenging texts in our individual research areas. We weren’t too fussed about the subject matter or whether we all shared an interest in a particular author; the agreement was to read together and to encourage an environment of curiosity. I have mentored all of the contributors in one way or another over many years, and as a result we have all become com- fortable with our differences. Looking back however, I can see that in the beginning we were especially satisfi ed with the outcome of these get-togethers – we could spot an argument’s logical misstep and follow its repetitions with reasonable ease, enjoying the advan- tage of a group hunt. But as cornering and despatching our quarry with increasing alacrity began to disappoint I think it was only then that the more diffi cult task of learning how to read with an author – how to fi nd the value that might be hidden in faltering hesitations and contradictions, how a weak spot might be an oppor- tunity to be mined rather than a fl aw to be condemned – became our main objective. My own view is that we were learning how to read grammato- logically, and yet this description tells us very little. Deconstruction is the methodology that eschews methodology, indeed, its paradoxi- cal identity is a mirror maze of confusion for the novice. Not surpris- ingly, its linguistic reductionism and hermeticism have drawn criticism, and in the main, deconstruction has appeared peripheral and even redundant in relation to contemporary political and sociological con- cerns. Although I have never accepted this reading it has been popular nevertheless; a ready excuse for dismissal without the bother of actual 55242_Kirby.indd242_Kirby.indd vviiiiii 222/12/162/12/16 44:59:59 PPMM foreword ix engagement. However this perspective appears to be shifting, and in regard to this particular project, scholars such as Claire Colebrook, Cary Wolfe, David Wood, Michael Marder and Timothy Morton argue that deconstruction might ventilate current debates in posthumanism and deep ecology, and complicate the impasse between the humanities and the sciences. Although this book’s collective argument is not an ‘application’ of deconstruction – Derrida’s name is rarely mentioned – many essays deploy deconstructive strategies to explore what might be called ‘natural sociologies’. To explain this; a conventional reading of Derrida’s well-known axiom, ‘no outside text’, is usually interpreted to mean ‘no outside culture’. However, my own revision of this apparent enclosure to read, ‘no outside nature’, discovers a comprehensive landscape where nature is literate, numerate and social, and where the exceptional status and identity of the human is one of quantum dis/location. Importantly, we have not left the text in this revision, nor privileged nature instead of culture, because, quite simply, there is no outside, no remainder that is not already involved and evolving as text. Inevitably, the very notion, ‘text’, assumes the status of a question in this reading. As a result, matters of methodology take centre stage because the separation of subject from object, or even one position from another, becomes uncertain. This in turn complicates the triumphalism of negative critique and dismissal that can too easily motor and justify new materialisms – ‘not episte- mology but ontology’, ‘not the subject but the object’, ‘not language but matter’ – instead, refracting individual positions through tangled intimacies. Rather than rely on these blunt and censoring adjudications our collective commitment is to enable and encourage curiosity through an ethics of generosity, one that refuses to refuse an argument outright, or too quickly. We may well fall over in the attempt to re-read through complicities, but we may also achieve a less predictable outcome by attempting such an exercise. A signature ingredient in all these contributions is the question, ‘where to begin?’, and for this reason there is heavy reliance on feminist and critical theories whose sustained scrutiny of the nature/culture divi- sion and its conservative legacies have proven transformative. Although there is healthy scepticism about all oppositional logic that rests on an unquestioned a priori, the aim is to shift the temperament of these logics rather than to discount them automatically. A powerful intervention, for example, is to search for the usefulness in arguments we might otherwise denounce by rendering certain words and their meanings more pliable, even delinquent. 55242_Kirby.indd242_Kirby.indd iixx 222/12/162/12/16 44:59:59 PPMM x foreword ‘Biologism’ and ‘naturalism’ tend to be terms of accusation in critical analysis and commentary: they describe relatively static determina- tions whose causal prescriptions can seem timeless and irrevocable. All too predictably the reliance on these terms is answered with calls for ‘de-naturalisation’, a gesture that focuses on the productive intervention of cultural interpretation and the difference that context makes. This reversal from natural to cultural explanations brings a sense of dynamism and political possibility – in short, no need for despair if we can change things. Yet such interventions also carry the message that nature/biology/physis is, indeed, the ‘other’ of culture, the static and primordial benchmark against which human be-ing and its agential imagination secures its exceptional status.

Load more