New
Materialism

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Note 'NM Special Focus' is located in middle section.

Extract from introduction below:

Vera Bühlmann, Felicity Colman, and Iris van der Tuin
Introduction to New Materialist Genealogies
New Materialisms, Novel Mentalities, Quantum Literacy

Like the new materialist turn, feminist new materialist scholarship (Haraway 1988; Barad 2007) draws attention to a novel understanding of literacy that incorporates code and is not limited to linguistic registers of grammar, syntax, and semantics (Haraway 1997). At stake is the conception of literacy, whose articulations are capable of organizing the generative potential/contingency of the expressions and forms of conceptions as real things.

From the materialist investigations that coalesced through and in the merger of the sciences with humanities research (notably in Bergson 2004; Haraway 1988, 1991, 1997; Barad 2007; Lévy-Leblond 1976, 1999; Plotnitsky 2006, 2009), new materialist investigations join as part of a paradigmatic shift that we witnessed occurring across the pedagogic landscape of the early twenty-first century in environmental humanities, science, and technology studies as well as across the humanities and in the sciences (see Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). In the humanities, some of these shifts are articulated under the concepts explored in postcapitalist, posthumanist, and postcolonial positions. In the sciences, these new fields that opened in the twentieth century manifest, transversally rather than disciplinarily, the roles that informatics, systems theory, and cybernetics have de facto come to play in all fields (Wiener 1948; Bateson 1972; Whitehead 2011; Margulis and Sagan 2008; Hayles 2012). These investigations all result in a change in the narratives concerning knowledge forms, their production, and their meaning (Floridi 2015; Lyotard [1979] 1984; Serres 1969–80; Terranova 2004).

Through our study of new materialist research, what we have come to discern is that this new materialist literacy has in part come about as part of a consideration of the methods that feature in the twentieth century in “quantum-thinking.” The epistemological as well as the ontological status of these methods in their practice—that is, in their current actualization—have largely unsettled the pedagogical landscape as a whole, and they are profoundly disturbing from the
point of view of both objectivist and subjectivist philosophy. In effect, there are numerous attempts at disentangling—often in orthodox fashion—the disturbing co-incidence of information and energy, of code and matter, that we witness in electro-technics and informatics.

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