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Monday Seminar:
Kimberly DeFazio
UW System Fellow (2019-2020)
English, UW-La Crosse
After the “fading away” of the “Derridean fashion” (Slavoj Žižek) in the early 21st century, “new materialisms” have emerged as the shaping concepts of contemporary thought in the posthumanities of the global north. The most urgent questions, new materialists like Diana Coole and Samantha Frost argue, now concern not only humanity’s dependence on matter and objects but the ontological status humans share with all nonhuman and natural life as “vibrant” (self-acting) matter (Jane Bennett). Matter and materiality are read in terms of a Deleuzian “plane of immanence” without exteriority, within which matter exists in contingent, heterogeneous “entanglements” (Karen Barad) operating beyond the correlations of human intentionality “on a cosmic scale in a universe whose boundaries we are unable to grasp” (Steven Shaviro).
What are the implications of reading the world as entangled, event-al matter? In the face of proliferating environmental, political and social crises, does centering affect and ethics make humans more attentive and responsive to their obligations to each other and to nonhuman being(s) (Simone Bignall and Rosi Braidotti)?
In my talk I argue that new materialism’s concern with the “subterranean power of things” (Graham Harman) is based on a matter-ism that suspends conceptual thought and social relations. It places out of view the unequal historical and material relations that mediate experience, affect, and the boundaries of “human” and “nonhuman” existence, and foreshortens the horizon of change. I argue instead for a counter tradition of materialism-as-relations and analyze the market relations that are normalized by contemporary matterism.
Kimberly DeFazio is the author of City of the Senses: Urban Culture and Urban Space (Palgrave 2011) and co-editor of Human, All Too (Post)Human (Lexington 2016). She recently co-edited a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose on Marx’s Speeches. Her writings have also appeared in such books as Confronting Universalities: Aesthetics and Politics Under the Sign of Globalisation (Aarhus University Press 2011) and Marxism and Urban Culture (2014) and in such journals as Textual Practice. Her first book, City of the Senses, is being translated into Chinese (forthcoming from Beijing Normal University Press). Her talk is drawn from Everyone Is a Materialist Now: New Materialism and Cultural Hermeneutic, one of two books she is currently writing which address the theoretical genealogies and contemporary iterations of materialism in the (post)humanities. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.