{"id":1677,"date":"2018-01-26T10:34:55","date_gmt":"2018-01-26T09:34:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kartografieobcosci.uw.edu.pl\/?p=1677"},"modified":"2018-01-26T10:35:51","modified_gmt":"2018-01-26T09:35:51","slug":"what-if-culture-was-nature-all-along","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kartografieobcosci.uw.edu.pl\/index.php\/2018\/01\/26\/what-if-culture-was-nature-all-along\/","title":{"rendered":"Recenzja: What if Culture was Nature all Along?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monika Rogowska-Stangret
\nRecenzja ksi\u0105\u017cki “What if Culture was Nature all Along?” pod redakcj\u0105\u00a0Vicki Kirby<\/strong><\/p>\n

What if Culture was Nature all Along?<\/em>\u00a0is a collection of eleven essays curated by Vicki Kirby that proves that there is still something new to be said about feminist new materialisms and that there is value in facing this topic anew.<\/strong><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

\"\"Despite the massive number of monographs and anthologies that aim to capture and conceptualize the cartographies and genealogies, contexts and key concepts, methodologies, challenges, and blind spots of feminist new materialisms, they are far from being canonized and elude “classifixation” (van der Tuin 2014). Kirby’s anthology not only adds to those ongoing debates, but also puts feminist new materialisms into action, and by doing so she offers an insight into what feminist new materialisms can still do (and how). Kirby opens the volume with an introduction, where she asks: “where to begin?” (viii). From my perspective, the starting point for all the essays in this collection is an engaged and generous approach, full of curiosity and unable to be satisfied with shaky theoretical constructions. Thus, although essays gathered in What if Culture was Nature all Along? engage in different topics and develop unique perspectives, the common attitude of affirmative critique and genuine concern is how they all started, even before they actually started. Precisely thanks to the spirit of engagement that percolates through the book as a whole, one may state that this collection of essays was not only born out of engagement, but also calls for one. This is a generous invitation to think with the authors, with feminist new materialisms, over and over again.<\/p>\n

Often I have been challenged by audiences new to feminist new materialisms (but at the same time fascinated or intrigued by them) with the question of how to use or apply this trend. What if Culture was Nature all Along? is an answer to this for at least two reasons. First, in this book–in compliance with the authors’ intentions–“matters of methodology take centre stage” (ix), and the question “how” is in the spotlight. How to think when “the separation of subject from object, or even one position from another, becomes uncertain” (ix)? How to think when everything is “intrinsically social matters” (x)? What results from challenging a well-established belief that “what makes human species-being special, indeed, exceptional, is our self-definition as un-natural” (3) with a lesson that comes out of Kirby’s research, that “those properties and capacities that we understand as properly cultural have always been in the nature of nature to have, to do and to be” (x-xi)? How to proceed when the basis for human identity–the ability to cognize–is the characteristic of life itself? “What if–to recall Jacqueline Dalziell’s question–Nature thinks” (173)? How to shift away from dualism without finding ourselves in its clutches again?<\/p>\n

Second, the question of using or applying methodologies is problematized here–because “method matters” (26), as Ashley Barnwell convinces readers in her essay reflecting on how academics can maneuver between “old” and “new” methodologies–if the method itself “is not without agency” (34). How to turn to the new methodology or approach designed to “repair past errors” (26) without repeating the denounced practice of exclusion? How to position oneself if we recognize the “co-dependent nature of these generational rifts” (27)?<\/p>\n

From the perspective of methodology, Barnwell’s essay is a brilliant postscript to an important book by Iris van der Tuin entitled Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach, where–by coining the notion of classifixation–she insists that: “classification is not a neutral mediator but is thoroughly entangled with the work that it does” (van der Tuin 2014, 19). Following Barnwell, we may add more generally that “a method is not just an instrumental and extraneous means to fix a problem” (Kirby, 38). It is an intrinsic part of the problem. Van der Tuin, in her take on how to understand feminist new materialist methodologies, is inspired by how Donna Haraway comprehends boundaries and ways in which they act: “bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes. Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices; ‘objects’ do not preexist as such. Objects are boundary projects. But boundaries shift from within; boundaries are very tricky. What boundaries provisionally contain remains generative, productive of meanings and bodies” (Haraway 1991, 200-01). Indeed, this is the productivity of boundaries that fuels the liveliness and sharpness of What if Culture was Nature all Along? We see the importance of gaps, cracks, and thresholds, and we are invited to immerse ourselves in the abundance of questions they provoke.<\/p>\n

In the opening essay by Kirby, we are faced with the first gap: between “symbolic systems” and “what they purportedly re-present” (1). Barnwell meditates upon the impossibility of methodological clear-cuts between “old” and “new.” Florence Chiew problematizes the distinctions between observable objects and observing subjects, senses and reality, senses and the brain, even between particular parts of the brain, I and environment, possibility and deficit. By doing so, Chiew offers a biological (meaning always already social) understanding of sensory substitution and brain cross-modal plasticity. Michelle Jamieson challenges the notion of causality in cases of allergy and the gap between reason and effect. Allergy that emerges from Jamieson’s text is a phenomenon attesting to the impossibility of detaching the individual from the antigen or genes from the environment–they are entangled even before they happen to be exposed to each other. Rebecca Oxley is perplexed by paternal postnatal depression and how it is differently understood in fathers, and with this she opens up the complex cultures of hormones (“already bodies, and already social” [99]). Noela Davis explores the boundary between phenotype and genotype, between an individuum and its environment, between the past, present, and future that manifest bodily. She illustrates this with epigenetics: a scientific discipline that renders the world as “a materialization of differentiations within one system” (114) rather than a collage of autonomous, discrete, independent factors. Xin Liu investigates the nuances of difference (particularly racial difference) as a gap and mobilizes the complex nature of visual encounter and its perceptual, conceptual, and corporeal histories. Jacqueline Dalziell tests several boundaries: between individuum and collective, sociology and (micro)biology, human and nonhuman, program and language, intelligence and intelligence-like, matter and thinking, revealing the epistemological and political stakes of feminist new materialisms. Astrida Neimanis meditates upon the breaks in the concept of representation, thinking about how nature (including humans) writes and reads itself without the blind spots of representationalism. John Willcock ponders the separation of space and time in the discourse of environmentalism and urgencies associated therewith. Last but not least, Peta Hinton invites us to dwell on the boundary between death and life, potestas and potentia, affirmation and negation, being present and absent, indifference and difference. She thus offers us the frame to look closely at feminist new materialist political and ethical stances, positions, and views.<\/p>\n

With this wide range of boundary-revisiting projects, readers are faced with all the layers of “boundary-making practices” (125): ontological, epistemological, ethical, political, and methodological. This results in a deep problematization of how feminist new materialisms are sometimes conceptualized: matter instead of language, biology rather than linguistics, ontology and not epistemology, object and not subject, postanthropocentrism in place of anthropocentrism, and so on. Even the “turn to matter”–the possibility of making the movement of turning to something–is questioned here: if we turn to something, what is it that we leave behind and how is it possible to leave it behind, if, rather than with separated entities, we are talking here of “tangled intimacies” (ix)?<\/p>\n

Ca\u0142o\u015b\u0107 do przeczytania na stronie Hypatia<\/em> Reviews Online:\u00a0http:\/\/hypatiareviews.org\/reviews\/content\/343<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Monika Rogowska-Stangret Recenzja ksi\u0105\u017cki “What if Culture was Nature all Along?” pod redakcj\u0105\u00a0Vicki Kirby What if Culture was Nature all Along?\u00a0is a collection of eleven essays curated by Vicki Kirby that proves that there is still something new to be said about feminist new materialisms and that there is value in facing this topic anew.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1678,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-teksty","category-49","description-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kartografieobcosci.uw.edu.pl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kartografieobcosci.uw.edu.pl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kartografieobcosci.uw.edu.pl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kartografieobcosci.uw.edu.pl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kartografieobcosci.uw.edu.pl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1677"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kartografieobcosci.uw.edu.pl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1681,"href":"https:\/\/kartografieobcosci.uw.edu.pl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1677\/revisions\/1681"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kartografieobcosci.uw.edu.pl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kartografieobcosci.uw.edu.pl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kartografieobcosci.uw.edu.pl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kartografieobcosci.uw.edu.pl\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}