Political Desirings: Yearnings for Mattering (,) Differently

Matterphorics, as an aesthethics of thought, attends to modes of thought as ones of matter and meaning production, which are, as such and without exception, inextricable from questions of (in)justice(s). Precisely because thinking is not accepted as representational, expression cannot be considered secondary, let alone separable from what is expressed. As a material-discursive practice of doing theory, matterphorics would be partly unthinkable without Karen Barad's agential-realist rethinking and reworkings of classical concepts as fundamental as space, time, and matter. Agential realism makes a case for the inextricability of knowing and being, that is, of epistemology and ontology, and offers modes of matter and meaning production that neither fall prey to Cartesian representationalism, nor to Newtonian ontology. The radical potential of this offer, or invitation, lies in the fact that it is an incisive reworking not only of the modes of thought arising from Descartes and Newton (and consequently from thinkers closely affiliated with the practice of critique), but also of various critical and poststructural theories, respectively. For, ironically and despite their critical potential, these theories uncritically accept major ontological and epistemological assumptions as, what Barad calls, the "sacred ground of theorizing," rarely engaging critically with the science. For Barad, however, this ground, or, as they also write, "reflection surface," ought not be accepted as limit—be it for thought, critique, science, or questions of mattering. What is needed, then, is less a reflection on critique than an ethico-ontoepistemology.

The vastness of the necessary rethinking suggested by this approach, in addition to Barad's diffractive reworking of social-political and scientific theories, explains the particular positionality of their work. It is of the Western canon while at the same time continuously and rigorously undoing what is said to ground its very foundations—not by means of deconstructing the origins of meanings, but by asking both how meaning comes to matter, and how matter comes to mean differently. The following conversation seeks to highlight this particular positionality, drawing out its non-negotiable ethicality by engaging matterphorically with questions of thinking, ontology, theory, concepts, potential, the material force of justice, the yearning for mattering differently, desirings touching touch, and the politicality of mattering.

The very form, format, and formations the conversation takes and the insistence on thinking thought and expressing expression differently, (re)articulates a shared commitment to both diffractive thinking and an ethics of thought.

I. Theorizing Ontology

"Theorizing is a particular form of intra-acting and as such part of the world."

Daniela Gandorfer:

Before asking more concretely about what a concept is and what it does in the world (or, as we will see, how the world does a concept), let me begin with the question of what theory is, and what it does when thought and performed with agential realism? The italics (is and does) already point to yet two other conceptions that, as becomes clear in Meeting the Universe Halfway, are crucial for understanding agential realism, namely that of ontology and of performativity. You have written quite a bit about theory, already. In fact, your understanding of theory is crucial for what we understand as matterphorical. First of all, your emphasis is not on theory as a noun, but on theorizing as a mode of experimenting. It is not a capacity or practice exclusive to human beings, as you also state clearly in your essay "On Touching: The Inhuman That Therefore I Am:"

The world theorizes as well as experiments with itself. Figuring, reconfiguring. Animate and (so-called) inanimate creatures do not merely embody mathematical theories; they do mathematics. But life, whether organic or inorganic, animate or inanimate, is not an unfolding algorithm. Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish, coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes, and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting familiarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet be/have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with their very being.¹

Importantly, ethics is inextricable from theorizing, thought, and experiment—an argument that has been quite...