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New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies New Metaphysics Series Editors: Graham Harman and Bruno Latour The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphys- ics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analytic- continental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intel- lectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical ‘sound’ from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main inter- est is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS An imprint of MPublishing – University of Michigan Library, Ann Arbor, 2012 First edition published by Open Humanities Press Freely available online at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11515701.0001.001 Copyright © 2012 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin and the respective authors This is an open access book, licensed under a Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy this book so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 Design by Katherine Gillieson Cover Illustration by Tammy Lu The cover illustration is copyright Tammy Lu 2012, used under a Creative Commons By Attribution license (CC-BY). ISBN-10 1-60785-204-7 ISBN-13 978-1-60785-204-9 Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. Books published under the Open Humanities Press imprint at MPublishing are produced through a unique partnership between OHP’s editorial board and the University of Michigan Library, which provides a library-based managing and production support infrastructure to facilitate scholars to publish leading research in book form. OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS www.publishing.umich.edu www.openhumanitiespress.org Contents Acknowledgements 9 Introduction: What May I Hope For? 13 I Interviews 1. Interview with Rosi Braidotti 19 2. Interview with Manuel DeLanda 38 3. Interview with Karen Barad 48 4. Interview with Quentin Meillassoux 71 II Cartographies Introduction: A “New Tradition” in Thought 85 5. The Transversality of New Materialism 93 6. Pushing Dualism to an Extreme 115 7. Sexual Differing 137 8. The End of (Wo)Man 158 Bibliography 181 Permissions 195 Matter can receive a form, and within this form-matter relation lies the ontogenesis. – Gilbert Simondon Acknowledgements This book is the result of intense interaction between the two authors and many others. Giving names to the particular elements that form this swarm is an impossible but necessary undertaking, since the two names on the cover of this book definitely do not exhaust what made the book. Most of all, of course, the four wise and generous minds that are given a voice in the first part of this book, and whose voices are rewritten in the second part, should be thanked: Prof. Rosi Braidotti, Prof. Manuel DeLanda, Prof. Karen Barad, and Prof. Quentin Meillassoux. Our long-distance interview of Prof. Barad at the “7th European Feminist Research Conference” (Utrecht University, June 2009) opened up the idea of the interviews. We would like to thank Heleen Klomp for transcribing the encounter with Prof. Barad, and we would like to thank Prof. Wolfgang Schirmacher (the European Graduate School) for getting us in touch with Prof. Manuel DeLanda. Thank you to Dr. Marie-Pier Boucher for translating the interview with Prof. Quentin Meillassoux and Sterre Ras for formatting the entire book. Also, we would like to thank the editors that run the series “New Metaphysics” at Open Humanities Press, Prof. Graham Harman and Prof. Bruno Latour, for their enthusiasm, their support and care, and their inspiring scholarly work that has also been of great influence on this book. Let us also thank our home institution, the Department of Media and Culture Studies, Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University, and in 10 particular the Graduate Gender Programme directed by Prof. Rosemarie Buikema, and Media Theory, run by Prof. Joost Raessens. The Research Institute for History and Culture, previously directed by Prof. Maarten Prak and now by Prof. Frank Kessler, and managed by Dr. Frans Ruiter should also be mentioned. Finally, we want to thank Utrecht’s Center for the Humanities, run by Prof. Rosi Braidotti, for being our second home and for supporting us in organizing seminars and conferences. The gust of fresh air that got this whole project started and kept pushing us forward was the Contemporary Cultural Theory (CCT) seminar series that we organized for the past four years. With its more than one hundred seminars, it has created a tremendously rich ecology in which the book was able to flourish. After it started as a reading group for the two of us, it caught the interest of staff members and graduate students and others interested from outside Utrecht University, and it received the generous support of the Centre for the Humanities, Media and Culture Studies, and later the Research Institute for History and Culture. It is impossible to name all those who have shared their valuable thoughts with us in the seminar over the past years, but several of its “usual suspects” have to be named (in no particular order): Marianne van den Boomen, Dr. Birgit Mara Kaiser, Dr. Kathrin Thiele, Nikos Overheul, Dr. Bram Ieven, Beatriz Revelles Benavente, Prof. Frank Kessler, Paulina Bolek, Marietta Radomska, Jannie Pranger, Richard van Meurs, Dr. Nanna Verhoeff, Dr. Paul Bijl, Adinda Veltrop, Freya de Mink, Alex Hebing, Dr. Kees Vuijk, Prof. Paul Ziche, Dr. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Prof. Ed Jonker. The seminar series “New Materialism: The Utrecht School” featured our colleagues Prof. Rosi Braidotti, Prof. Maaike Bleeker, Prof. Joost Raessens, Dr. Kathrin Thiele and Dr. Birgit Mara Kaiser. As part of CCT we had the pleasure to welcome national and international guest speakers (Dr. Marcel Cobussen, Prof. John Protevi, Prof. Rosemarie Buikema, Prof. Gloria Wekker, Dr. Vicki Kirby) and organize conferences. On November 19, 2010 we hosted “Intra-action between the Humanities and the Sciences” with Prof. Rosi Braidotti, Dr. Birgit Mara Kaiser, Jannie Pranger, Prof. Peter Galison, Dr. Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, Dr. Kathrin Thiele, and Dr. Bibi Straatman. On April 7, 2011 we hosted “New Materialism: Naturecultures” with Prof. Donna Acknowledgements 11 Haraway, Dr. Cecilia Åsberg, Dr. Vicki Kirby, Prof. Rosemarie Buikema, LeineRoebana (Heather Ware and Tim Persent, and Andrea Leine and Harijono Roebana), Dr. Adrian MacKenzie, Dr. Jussi Parikka, Dr. Milla Tiainen, Dr. Melanie Sehgal, and Prof. Rosi Braidotti. The first “New Materialism” conference, organized by Dr. Jussi Parikka and Dr. Milla Tiainen, took place in June 2010 at Anglia Ruskin University/ CoDE in Cambridge, the UK. Our second conference was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, the Posthumanities Hub (Tema Genus, Linköping University), the Center for the Study of Digital Games and Play, the Graduate Gender Programme, the Center for the Humanities, and the Research Institute for History and Culture (Utrecht University). On November 17, 2011 we organized “Lissitzky Space: New Materialist Experiments” at the Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven) with Dr. Jondi Keane, Dr. Linda Boersma, Dr. Leslie Kavanaugh, Willem Jan Renders, Annie Fletcher and Piet van de Kar. Finally we would like to thank our loved ones. Utrecht, December 2011 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin Introduction What May I Hope For? In academia, revolutionary and radical ideas are actualized through an engagement with scholars and scholarly traditions of the canonized past. Contemporary generations read, or more often reread older texts, resulting in “new” readings that do not fit the dominant reception of these texts. Also, academics tend to draw in scholars from an unforeseen past, those who come from a different academic canon or who have been somewhat forgotten. It is in the resonances between old and new readings and re-readings that a “new metaphysics” might announce itself. A new metaphysics is not restricted to a here and now, nor does it merely project an image of the future for us. It announces what we may call a “new tradition,” which simultaneously gives us a past, a present, and a future. Thus, a new metaphysics does not add something to thought (a series of ideas that wasn’t there, that was left out by others). It rather traverses and thereby rewrites thinking as a whole, leaving nothing untouched, redirecting every possible idea according to its new sense of orientation. “New materialism” or “neo-materialism” is such a new metaphysics. A plethora of contemporary scholars from heterogeneous backgrounds has, since the late 1990s up until now, been producing (re-)readings that together work towards its actualization. This book is written on the new materialism simultaneously with its fleshing outof the new materialist ambition. The negotiations concerning the new tradition are carried out in the first part of this book. This part consists of four interviews with the 14 Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin most prominent new materialist scholars of today: Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux.
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