liquid ground

Tag: material-semiotic

  • The material-semiotic continuum

    “Material-semiotic is one word for me.”

    Donna Haraway, “Morphing in the Order: Flexible Strategies, Feminist Science Studies, and Primate Revisions”

    Ming Smith, Cascading Light (1981)

    The criticism directed at new materialism that revolves around its assumed tendency towards repetition or reduction to “sameness” within its frameworks: by prioritising the centrality of materiality over language and/or representation, NM risks becoming the very thing it seeks to challenge, reinforcing the binary it aims to disrupt. (Does feminist new materialism remain in the phallo-anthropocentric, classifixationist, representationalist, hierarchical paradigm?)

    In fact, Barad, Kirby, Alaimo, and other FNM theorists, following Haraway, problematize a dichotomous understanding of nature and culture, engaging with the concept of the material-semiotic, and with the idea that material and social cannot be understood within the framework of negativity, as if they are separate and/or opposites –instead they are deeply intertwined, mutually shaping and informing one another.

    “Material-semiotic is one word,” as Haraway writes, a continuum that does not accentuate or over-invest in “material” on one side and “semiotic” on the other.

    Michel Serres: “An idea opposed to another idea is always the same idea, albeit affected by the negative sign. The more you oppose one another, the more you remain in the same framework of thought.”1

    The idea is not to destroy but affirm, not to produce sameness but difference, and engage in boundary-making practices that allow differences to flourish and stand out in their uniqueness.

    1. Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations On Science, Culture, and Time – Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 7. ↩︎
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“In me everything is already flowing, and you flow along too if you only stop minding such unaccustomed motion, and its song. Learn to swim, as once you danced on dry land, for the thaw is much nearer at hand than you think. And what ice could resist your sun? And, before it disappears, perhaps chance will have the ice enflame you, dissolving your hardness, melting your gold.

So remember the liquid ground. And taste the saliva in your mouth also—notice her familiar presence during your silence, how she is forgotten when you speak. Or again: how you stop speaking when you drink. And how necessary all of that is for you! These fluids softly mark the time. And there is no need to knock, just listen to hear the music. With very small ears.”

Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche