Speculative Before the Turn: Reintroducing Feminist Materialist Performativity

Abstract

This is a moment for new conversations and new synergies. While a wealth of contemporary speculative materialisms is currently circulating in academia, art and activism, in this article we focus upon a few ethico-political stakes in the different, loosely affiliated conceptions of ontologies of immanence. More specifically, we are concerned here with the very meaning of speculation itself after the many new headings of immanent ontologies, such as object-oriented ontology (OOO), speculative realism or the (feminist) new materialisms. Our concern is a feminist concern, as some of the immanent ontologies seem to actively connect with the varied feminist archive of speculative thought while others seem to actively disconnect from the very same archive. What does this imply for the feminist scholar who is in want of tools for navigating the contemporary landscape of ontologies of immanence? Here, we highlight some important overlapping as well as poignant clashes between various feminist materialist genealogies and OOO/speculative realism. In our discussion we underline the importance of situatedness and context, relationality and affinity—and the possibility for rewiring relations—amid a plethora of lively historiographies and emergent post-disciplinary movements and world-makings.

Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery

“…Drawing upon theoretical insights across new materialist feminisms, science and technology studies, post-phenomenology, biosocial sociology and cultural theories of affect, our engagement with a vital feminism explores and experiments with an ontological politics attuned to gendered life (Alaimo, 2017;Asberg, Thiele, & Van der Tuin, 2015;Coole & Frost, 2010;Ringrose & Renold, 2014). Vital feminist knowledges escape capture in biopolitical formations, their visceral, affective qualities disturb normalised masculine ordering to produce diffractive patterns that are necessary to think otherwise (Anderson, 2012; Barad, 2007;Bennett, 2010).…”

(Re)framing Big Data: Activating Situated Knowledges and a Feminist Ethics of Care in Social Media Research

“…To more clearly unpack how social media data ontologies are preframed (and hold the potential to be reframed, in Markham’s terms), we suggest (alongside Asberg, Thiele, & van der Tuin, 2015) that feminist materialism can usefully reconceptualize speculation as method rather than ontology per se by way of Haraway’s (1988) notion of situated knowledges. Here, we refer to Haraway’s (1988) critique of the chimera of one unified knowledge (namely, the knowledge accepted by those in privileged position) and her call (still relevant today) for academic research methodologies to give us the “ability to partially translate knowledges among very different—and power-differentiated—communities” (p. 580).…”

“…The app continues to collect yet another layer of lively social media data through comments, videos, audio recordings, and photographs shared to the app. For social media in the age of big data, activating research with others rather than conducting it upon others is a material act of performative speculation which “envision[s] a different world and challenge[s] taken-for-granted knowledges by way of situating them in specific historical, sociocultural, material and bodily contexts” (Asberg et al, 2015, p. 153).…”

“…. towards a fuller, more complex and surprising world [that cannot be understood through binaries such as] subject (Thought) and object (Being)” (Asberg et al, 2015, p. 161). It is not just that intersectional feminist practices of care contest what Haraway (1988) called “the god trick”—findings that assert that the world is the way that it is because it has always been that way, or a world divided into typologies based on absolutist binaries.…”

Speculating on childhood and time, with Michael Ende’s Momo (1973)

“…While it is challenging to escape the post-industrial intensification of time as commodity, it is of vital importance to speculatively imagine and to explore wholeheartedly what else is possible (Ulmer, 2016), and what other stories can be storied to support liveliness and vibrancy on a damaged planet (Haraway et al, 2015). Living on a damaged planet means rethinking ethics, response-ability, belonging, relationships across species and in relation to matter, and, perhaps most challenging of all, thought itself (Åsberg et al, 2015).…”