Investigate: Notes in New Materialsm

New Materialism(s)

New materialism focuses on “the vitality of matter” human and non human. It serves as a consideration of how physical bodies, spaces and environments contribute to subjectivity.

Physical things and bodies inform experience. There are physical and social constructions.

Nature/culture question.

Fausto Sterling – our bodies experience the world and respond to environmental signals at cell level not just surface.

Ontology.

Matter as agential.

Barad – object/subject divide, based on particle physics and quantum field theory – moves away from an human centric approach

“Human does not act on matter, but rather humans and non humans are agential actors in the world as it continuously comes into being”.

I think Bogost’s proposal for us to “consider perceiving objects as things, rather than filtering our perception of things through human experience” could be interesting but I also think it is impossible to filter information through any other lens than a human one. We make sense of the world through human experience. Perhaps Bogost’s proposal is a kind of anthropamorphistation of objects in itself?

Bennett’s “thing-power” promotes that objects “manifest a lively kind of agency”. “Thing-power gestures towards the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence of aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience”. Establishes a hierarchy with the word “status” and would like to read more about Walter Benjamin’s object aura as Bennett’s proposal seems to align with the notion of object aura.

Within the theory of New Materialism, I’m interested in the idea of a more holistic approach to understanding the world, of an interactive approach to the environment rather than an anthropocentric one. I am particularly interested in the way that we as humans perceive the world and the way that we relate to our environment. I am interested in the spiritual/imaginative elements of humanity that make sense of the world around us. Perceived relationships. The individual and shared perception/memory. Yes matter has agency and objects have agency but I’m interested in how we make sense of that through different and shared lenses.