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tahini ingredients
'Gaston Bachelard's Material Imagination & Karen Barad's New Materialism'
4th April 2016
by Yonat Nitzan-Green
Tessa Atton I Bevis Fenner I Yvonne Jones I Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
Summary
Yonat Nitzan-Green
Text for group’s discussion: ‘”Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers” Interview with Karen Barad’, (from “Meeting Utrecht Halfway” intra-active event, June 6, 2009, at the 7th European Feminist Research Conference, Utrecht University).
‘In the imagination of each of us there exists the material image of an ideal paste, a perfect synthesis of resistance and malleability, a marvellous equilibrium between accepting forces and refusing forces. Starting from this equilibrium, which gives an immediate eagerness to the working hand, there arise opposing pejorative judgments: too soft or too hard. One could say as well that midway between these contrary extremes, the hand recognizes instinctively the perfect paste. A normal material imagination immediately places this optimum paste into the hands of the dreamer. Everyone who dreams of paste knows this perfect mixture, as unmistakeable to the hand as the perfect solid is to the geometrician’s eye.’
(Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, 2005, p. 81.)
This session opened up with a performative act, entitled ‘10 minutes of making Tahini’. The participants were given all the right ingredients, however only one instruction as to how to make tahini. The intention was to bring to light the dialogue between artist and material. In Bachelard’s words: ‘…there arise opposing pejorative judgment: too soft or too hard.’
Both, Bachelard’s quote and this performative act served as an invitation to engage in an interview with Physicist feminist Karen Barad in which she explains her theory of ‘agential realism’.
According to Barad ‘agential realism’ is part of relational ontologies. Agency is ‘about response-ability’. It ‘is not something possessed by humans, or non-humans … It is an enactment. … it enlists … “non-human” as well as “humans.”’ Entanglement is the consideration of meaning and matter together which questions the dualism nature – culture and the separation of ‘matters of fact from matters of concern (Bruno Latour) and matters of care (Maria Puig de la Bellacasa)’. The notion of intra-action is called for in order to re-think causality. ‘Causality is not interactional, but rather intra-actional.’ By this Barad means that causality is a process of emergence rather than a game of billiard balls: ‘Cause and effect are supposed to follow one upon the other like billiard balls … causality has become a dirty word.’ Barad invites us to find new kinds and new understandings of causalities.
Barad developed diffraction as a main concept in her theory, as a practice and a methodology. She expands the classical physics definition of diffraction, by understanding this metaphor through quantum physics. On the one hand, ‘Geometric optics does not pay any attention to the nature of light … it is completely agnostic about whether light is a particle or a wave…’. On the other hand, understanding diffraction by using quantum mechanics ‘allows you to study both the nature of the apparatus and also the object’. This, she claims, is ‘not just a matter of interference, but of entanglement, an ethico-onto-epistemological matter.’
click here to see a clip of the tahini making activity
Reflections and Feedback
Tessa Atton
After a brief discussion about the group’s “manifesto” – does it reflect the current composition and aspirations of the group? – a methodology based on conversation amongst equals, Yonat set us an unexpected task, to make tahini!
The ingredients were there waiting for us, none of whom had tasted tahini before. We set about the task with curiosity, relaxed and not under pressure, so freely commented on our reactions, for example, to the changes in texture and consistency as the lemon then the water combined with the tahini paste. Yonat recorded our reactions then quoted from Bachelard on the “ideal paste” which is the equilibrium between accepting (has the right consistency) and rejecting (is not right) forces. “Paste” is an unhelpful translation of the French “pâte” which means dough or pastry or modelling clay, all of which make more sense in the context and automatically conjure up pictures of hands feeling the consistency and working with it to creativity.
Much of the rest of the discussion demonstrated the contrast between Bachelard’s imagery and Barad’s logic in investigating the same ideas: our text was from an interview with Karen Barad (Utrecht June 6 2009)“ entitled “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns”, probably too large a claim in the context but it was very interesting, and novel, to think about agency through the lens of a physicist. For me the key ideas came together as being fundamental to an artist’s instinctive methodology:
Yvonne Jones
We used two texts; Interview with Karen Barad “Meeting Utrecht Halfway ‘ 2009 and Yonat’s written text headed ‘Gaston Bachelard’s ‘material imagination + Karen Barad’s new materialism
The hands on experience with material, that is to say making the tahini, was enjoyable, having not done so before I learnt a lot. With all the same ingredients we all approached it somewhat differently. I concentrated on my task, it was not until I had nearly finished and seeing others doing it, that I tasted it. This is an observation of my priorities. I was ‘feeling’ the mixture through the spoon, seeing the mixture, looking for a pleasing texture, listening to the mixture, and realised that where cooking is concerned, I listen a lot. Listening to the texture, stickiness or smoothness, in all other cooking I listen to the temperature, I can hear when its too hot! I ‘smell’ the mixtures just absorbing the prevailing sense of it, with all cooking this gives me a sense of what’s missing, or of what there is too much. I do not know this information by name, in all cases it is through the senses. It leaves me asking how did, do each of the group approach the task, what was their use of senses?
In conversation, provoked by Yonat’s texts, we approached the notion of diffraction from a feminist perspective, where diffraction can be a metaphor for another kind of critical consciousness, and in opposition to reflection which places the same elsewhere and seen as paternal thinking. (Barad). In patriarchal society ‘difference’ is seen as other (Nitzan-Green). It creates a binary system. Binary society is gradually being challenged, a non-binary approach to gender is displacing gender and by implication is a challenge to a patriarchal society. Barad uses quantum physics as a metaphor for diffraction that allows the study of both the nature of the apparatus and also the object. At this point in the session I experienced a sense of familiarity, of a near oneness with my own life, with my own work. I experienced excitement that the world may just be beginning to make sense and that there is hope for a better way ahead. There is a connection between my discomfort with the world and society as is, and the views of Barad. As part of the unfolding thesis in my text ‘Peeling the Body’ 2010, http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/165501/ was an inbuilt question of subject / medical object. The closer this was examined and the more it was revealed to both myself and the medics, the more interference was created to the norm of binary existence, and the more entanglement there was. Recognising the differences of our needs the medic and myself came into the one arena to address my examinations and treatments. This resulted in a reduction of subject / medical object to an interaction each taking up some of the neither of us continuing to experience totally subject or totally medical object. There was a distinct move to studying both the apparatus and the object. As an artist researcher I was ‘examining my object of research as it was in the world in which I was included’ (Barad). As a medic I was seen as a human individual.
In researching notions of the posthuman I began to develop and change from the Liberal Human Subject that I was, and as I came to understand distributed cognition, a central anchor of posthuman theory, so I observed myself as an emerging posthuman subject.
Distributed cognition may be, 1 - distributed across members of a social group, 2 - may be from coordination between internal and external (material or environment) structure, 3 - may be distributed through time in such a way that the products of earlier events can transform the nature of the later events; that is the coming together of information from different sources. (How We Became Posthuman Hayles 1999). For me there is a connection between Barad, where diffraction is viewed as another kind of critical consciousness, and the posthuman values of gathering of information from different sources to a centre. Cognition through coordination between internal and external (material or environment) - point 2 of distributed cognition above, overlaps, touches, relates to Barad’s notions of diffraction and to quantum physics. It too deconstructs the binary that has been so damaging to social equality over the years.
I consider myself an Emerging Posthuman (possibly-feminist) subject; I say possible feminist because one of the happy consequences of uncovering a posthuman subject is that unlike the liberal humanist subject, ‘constructed as a white European male, that worked to surpass and disenfranchise women’ (Hayles), the posthuman subject circumvents the awful question ‘Are women human?’ It breaks down the binary. Therefore it may by default make feminism defunct.
Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
Yonat kicked off the PIRG session on 4th April by asking us to make tahini. All the ingredients to make the tahini were laid out on the table in an orderly manner. We were each given a bowl and a spoon. Yonat explained briefly what was to go in the tahini but did not elaborate any further as to how much of what we should use. Only thing she did disclose was that the lemon juice had to follow the sesame paste. We were given 10 minutes to complete our task so we got busy. As our hands moved, we were also busy conversing and tasting. We marveled at how the lemon juice altered the consistency of the sesame paste and were surprised once again to see how by adding water, the texture of the paste changed further. When we were happy with what we had created, we gathered the bowls to the middle of the table and tasted each other’s version of tahini. What came to light were the variations. Although we were using the same basic materials/ingredients to make tahini, what got produced in the end were all different in consistency and taste.
The material engagement of making tahini (and Yonat added that it was actually a very political food with both Israelis and Palestinians claiming ownership) led us nicely into the day’s topic examining Gaston Bachelard’s ‘material imagination’ and Karen Barad’s new materialism.
The reading material chosen for the session, an interview with theoretical physicist and professor of feminist studies Karen Barad (‘Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers’), presented a useful overview of some of Barad’s key ideas around new materialist thinking, such as ‘agential realism’, ‘diffractive reading (building on suggestion of Donna Haraway)’, ‘entanglement’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘response-ability’.
Yonat proceeded to compare some of Barad’s new materialist thoughts with Bachelard’s philosophy of ‘material imagination’. The comparison between Barad’s notion of relational ontology where she asks us to rethink causality as a process of emergence rather than cause and effect and Bachelard’s idea of reverberations and repercussions was a particularly insightful comparison to imagine how all things, both human and non-human, are fundamentally connected to each other in a complex entanglement (to borrow Barad’s term).
What I find most inspiring from both Barad and Bachelard’s account of materiality is how they both move away from the humanist thought of placing the human subject at the centre of social and physical world but instead allowing space for matter to create meaning. Although there are views that Barad’s ‘posthumanist’ epistemology, her unique ‘turn to matter’ is untenable because without the human subjectivity as ‘the locus of rationality and objectivity, there will be intractable problems’ (Calvert-Minor, 2013), I find excitement precisely in the idea of ‘distributed agencies’ where nature/culture, subject/object and the privilege given to human in human/non-human binaries start to break down, or become blurry. As Barad points out, ‘new entangled materializations of which we are part’ can create ‘new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities’ (Barad, p.19).
As an artist, materiality of matter lies at the core of my practice. If art was framed as something that humans create using matter (Heidegger calls this the ‘form-matter synthesis’), then matter is left as ‘dumb’, ‘mute’ and ‘irrational’. Instead, as Heidegger outlines in his essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, a relationship of co-responsibility and indebtedness should exist between humans and matter. The well versed example of the silver chalice coming into being gives us a clear example of how a relationship of co-responsibility and indebtedness exists between the silversmith/artist and other co-collaborators (the aspect of the chalice, the purpose of the vessel, the matter of the silver, etc) for the emergence of the ‘thing’, the silver chalice.
Heidegger’s rethinking of how things are created and his re-interpretation of causality shifts our understanding of form and matter to a notion of care and indebtedness between co-responsible elements. Art is a co-collaboration with matter. If you were to think of matter from Heidegger’s viewpoint, we can say that matter has as much responsibility as the artist for the emergence of art. In other words, matter has agency.
When we were making tahini, we were certainly engaged with and paying attention to the materiality of matter. We looked, listened, tasted and responded accordingly to the way the matter was reacting and the sesame paste, lemon juice, salt, pepper and water responded back to us resulting in something that tasted lovely. Thanks Yonat for a really interesting, thought provoking and very tasty session.
Reference
Calvert-Minor, C. ‘Epistemological Misgivings of Karen Barad’s ‘Posthumanism’’ in Theoretical/Philsophical Paper, Springer Science + Buisiness Media Dordrecht, 3 August 2013.
Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. ‘Interview with Karen Barad’ in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, London: Open Humanities Press, 2012, pp.48 – 70.
Heidegger, M. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, New York: Garland, 1977.
Heidegger, M. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Basic Writings, D. Farrell Krell (ed.), San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977, pp.143 – 212.
4th April 2016
by Yonat Nitzan-Green
Tessa Atton I Bevis Fenner I Yvonne Jones I Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
Summary
Yonat Nitzan-Green
Text for group’s discussion: ‘”Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers” Interview with Karen Barad’, (from “Meeting Utrecht Halfway” intra-active event, June 6, 2009, at the 7th European Feminist Research Conference, Utrecht University).
‘In the imagination of each of us there exists the material image of an ideal paste, a perfect synthesis of resistance and malleability, a marvellous equilibrium between accepting forces and refusing forces. Starting from this equilibrium, which gives an immediate eagerness to the working hand, there arise opposing pejorative judgments: too soft or too hard. One could say as well that midway between these contrary extremes, the hand recognizes instinctively the perfect paste. A normal material imagination immediately places this optimum paste into the hands of the dreamer. Everyone who dreams of paste knows this perfect mixture, as unmistakeable to the hand as the perfect solid is to the geometrician’s eye.’
(Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, 2005, p. 81.)
This session opened up with a performative act, entitled ‘10 minutes of making Tahini’. The participants were given all the right ingredients, however only one instruction as to how to make tahini. The intention was to bring to light the dialogue between artist and material. In Bachelard’s words: ‘…there arise opposing pejorative judgment: too soft or too hard.’
Both, Bachelard’s quote and this performative act served as an invitation to engage in an interview with Physicist feminist Karen Barad in which she explains her theory of ‘agential realism’.
According to Barad ‘agential realism’ is part of relational ontologies. Agency is ‘about response-ability’. It ‘is not something possessed by humans, or non-humans … It is an enactment. … it enlists … “non-human” as well as “humans.”’ Entanglement is the consideration of meaning and matter together which questions the dualism nature – culture and the separation of ‘matters of fact from matters of concern (Bruno Latour) and matters of care (Maria Puig de la Bellacasa)’. The notion of intra-action is called for in order to re-think causality. ‘Causality is not interactional, but rather intra-actional.’ By this Barad means that causality is a process of emergence rather than a game of billiard balls: ‘Cause and effect are supposed to follow one upon the other like billiard balls … causality has become a dirty word.’ Barad invites us to find new kinds and new understandings of causalities.
Barad developed diffraction as a main concept in her theory, as a practice and a methodology. She expands the classical physics definition of diffraction, by understanding this metaphor through quantum physics. On the one hand, ‘Geometric optics does not pay any attention to the nature of light … it is completely agnostic about whether light is a particle or a wave…’. On the other hand, understanding diffraction by using quantum mechanics ‘allows you to study both the nature of the apparatus and also the object’. This, she claims, is ‘not just a matter of interference, but of entanglement, an ethico-onto-epistemological matter.’
click here to see a clip of the tahini making activity
Reflections and Feedback
Tessa Atton
After a brief discussion about the group’s “manifesto” – does it reflect the current composition and aspirations of the group? – a methodology based on conversation amongst equals, Yonat set us an unexpected task, to make tahini!
The ingredients were there waiting for us, none of whom had tasted tahini before. We set about the task with curiosity, relaxed and not under pressure, so freely commented on our reactions, for example, to the changes in texture and consistency as the lemon then the water combined with the tahini paste. Yonat recorded our reactions then quoted from Bachelard on the “ideal paste” which is the equilibrium between accepting (has the right consistency) and rejecting (is not right) forces. “Paste” is an unhelpful translation of the French “pâte” which means dough or pastry or modelling clay, all of which make more sense in the context and automatically conjure up pictures of hands feeling the consistency and working with it to creativity.
Much of the rest of the discussion demonstrated the contrast between Bachelard’s imagery and Barad’s logic in investigating the same ideas: our text was from an interview with Karen Barad (Utrecht June 6 2009)“ entitled “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns”, probably too large a claim in the context but it was very interesting, and novel, to think about agency through the lens of a physicist. For me the key ideas came together as being fundamental to an artist’s instinctive methodology:
- avoiding the logic of a chain of cause and effect, but thinking round the edge like diffraction in classical physics,
- entangling meaning and matter, removing the either/or,
- feeling the emanating resonances and reverberate them in our interpretations,
- and, above all, eliminating the hierarchy of difference of a patriarchal tradition.
Yvonne Jones
We used two texts; Interview with Karen Barad “Meeting Utrecht Halfway ‘ 2009 and Yonat’s written text headed ‘Gaston Bachelard’s ‘material imagination + Karen Barad’s new materialism
The hands on experience with material, that is to say making the tahini, was enjoyable, having not done so before I learnt a lot. With all the same ingredients we all approached it somewhat differently. I concentrated on my task, it was not until I had nearly finished and seeing others doing it, that I tasted it. This is an observation of my priorities. I was ‘feeling’ the mixture through the spoon, seeing the mixture, looking for a pleasing texture, listening to the mixture, and realised that where cooking is concerned, I listen a lot. Listening to the texture, stickiness or smoothness, in all other cooking I listen to the temperature, I can hear when its too hot! I ‘smell’ the mixtures just absorbing the prevailing sense of it, with all cooking this gives me a sense of what’s missing, or of what there is too much. I do not know this information by name, in all cases it is through the senses. It leaves me asking how did, do each of the group approach the task, what was their use of senses?
In conversation, provoked by Yonat’s texts, we approached the notion of diffraction from a feminist perspective, where diffraction can be a metaphor for another kind of critical consciousness, and in opposition to reflection which places the same elsewhere and seen as paternal thinking. (Barad). In patriarchal society ‘difference’ is seen as other (Nitzan-Green). It creates a binary system. Binary society is gradually being challenged, a non-binary approach to gender is displacing gender and by implication is a challenge to a patriarchal society. Barad uses quantum physics as a metaphor for diffraction that allows the study of both the nature of the apparatus and also the object. At this point in the session I experienced a sense of familiarity, of a near oneness with my own life, with my own work. I experienced excitement that the world may just be beginning to make sense and that there is hope for a better way ahead. There is a connection between my discomfort with the world and society as is, and the views of Barad. As part of the unfolding thesis in my text ‘Peeling the Body’ 2010, http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/165501/ was an inbuilt question of subject / medical object. The closer this was examined and the more it was revealed to both myself and the medics, the more interference was created to the norm of binary existence, and the more entanglement there was. Recognising the differences of our needs the medic and myself came into the one arena to address my examinations and treatments. This resulted in a reduction of subject / medical object to an interaction each taking up some of the neither of us continuing to experience totally subject or totally medical object. There was a distinct move to studying both the apparatus and the object. As an artist researcher I was ‘examining my object of research as it was in the world in which I was included’ (Barad). As a medic I was seen as a human individual.
In researching notions of the posthuman I began to develop and change from the Liberal Human Subject that I was, and as I came to understand distributed cognition, a central anchor of posthuman theory, so I observed myself as an emerging posthuman subject.
Distributed cognition may be, 1 - distributed across members of a social group, 2 - may be from coordination between internal and external (material or environment) structure, 3 - may be distributed through time in such a way that the products of earlier events can transform the nature of the later events; that is the coming together of information from different sources. (How We Became Posthuman Hayles 1999). For me there is a connection between Barad, where diffraction is viewed as another kind of critical consciousness, and the posthuman values of gathering of information from different sources to a centre. Cognition through coordination between internal and external (material or environment) - point 2 of distributed cognition above, overlaps, touches, relates to Barad’s notions of diffraction and to quantum physics. It too deconstructs the binary that has been so damaging to social equality over the years.
I consider myself an Emerging Posthuman (possibly-feminist) subject; I say possible feminist because one of the happy consequences of uncovering a posthuman subject is that unlike the liberal humanist subject, ‘constructed as a white European male, that worked to surpass and disenfranchise women’ (Hayles), the posthuman subject circumvents the awful question ‘Are women human?’ It breaks down the binary. Therefore it may by default make feminism defunct.
Noriko Suzuki-Bosco
Yonat kicked off the PIRG session on 4th April by asking us to make tahini. All the ingredients to make the tahini were laid out on the table in an orderly manner. We were each given a bowl and a spoon. Yonat explained briefly what was to go in the tahini but did not elaborate any further as to how much of what we should use. Only thing she did disclose was that the lemon juice had to follow the sesame paste. We were given 10 minutes to complete our task so we got busy. As our hands moved, we were also busy conversing and tasting. We marveled at how the lemon juice altered the consistency of the sesame paste and were surprised once again to see how by adding water, the texture of the paste changed further. When we were happy with what we had created, we gathered the bowls to the middle of the table and tasted each other’s version of tahini. What came to light were the variations. Although we were using the same basic materials/ingredients to make tahini, what got produced in the end were all different in consistency and taste.
The material engagement of making tahini (and Yonat added that it was actually a very political food with both Israelis and Palestinians claiming ownership) led us nicely into the day’s topic examining Gaston Bachelard’s ‘material imagination’ and Karen Barad’s new materialism.
The reading material chosen for the session, an interview with theoretical physicist and professor of feminist studies Karen Barad (‘Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers’), presented a useful overview of some of Barad’s key ideas around new materialist thinking, such as ‘agential realism’, ‘diffractive reading (building on suggestion of Donna Haraway)’, ‘entanglement’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘response-ability’.
Yonat proceeded to compare some of Barad’s new materialist thoughts with Bachelard’s philosophy of ‘material imagination’. The comparison between Barad’s notion of relational ontology where she asks us to rethink causality as a process of emergence rather than cause and effect and Bachelard’s idea of reverberations and repercussions was a particularly insightful comparison to imagine how all things, both human and non-human, are fundamentally connected to each other in a complex entanglement (to borrow Barad’s term).
What I find most inspiring from both Barad and Bachelard’s account of materiality is how they both move away from the humanist thought of placing the human subject at the centre of social and physical world but instead allowing space for matter to create meaning. Although there are views that Barad’s ‘posthumanist’ epistemology, her unique ‘turn to matter’ is untenable because without the human subjectivity as ‘the locus of rationality and objectivity, there will be intractable problems’ (Calvert-Minor, 2013), I find excitement precisely in the idea of ‘distributed agencies’ where nature/culture, subject/object and the privilege given to human in human/non-human binaries start to break down, or become blurry. As Barad points out, ‘new entangled materializations of which we are part’ can create ‘new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities’ (Barad, p.19).
As an artist, materiality of matter lies at the core of my practice. If art was framed as something that humans create using matter (Heidegger calls this the ‘form-matter synthesis’), then matter is left as ‘dumb’, ‘mute’ and ‘irrational’. Instead, as Heidegger outlines in his essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, a relationship of co-responsibility and indebtedness should exist between humans and matter. The well versed example of the silver chalice coming into being gives us a clear example of how a relationship of co-responsibility and indebtedness exists between the silversmith/artist and other co-collaborators (the aspect of the chalice, the purpose of the vessel, the matter of the silver, etc) for the emergence of the ‘thing’, the silver chalice.
Heidegger’s rethinking of how things are created and his re-interpretation of causality shifts our understanding of form and matter to a notion of care and indebtedness between co-responsible elements. Art is a co-collaboration with matter. If you were to think of matter from Heidegger’s viewpoint, we can say that matter has as much responsibility as the artist for the emergence of art. In other words, matter has agency.
When we were making tahini, we were certainly engaged with and paying attention to the materiality of matter. We looked, listened, tasted and responded accordingly to the way the matter was reacting and the sesame paste, lemon juice, salt, pepper and water responded back to us resulting in something that tasted lovely. Thanks Yonat for a really interesting, thought provoking and very tasty session.
Reference
Calvert-Minor, C. ‘Epistemological Misgivings of Karen Barad’s ‘Posthumanism’’ in Theoretical/Philsophical Paper, Springer Science + Buisiness Media Dordrecht, 3 August 2013.
Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. ‘Interview with Karen Barad’ in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, London: Open Humanities Press, 2012, pp.48 – 70.
Heidegger, M. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, New York: Garland, 1977.
Heidegger, M. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Basic Writings, D. Farrell Krell (ed.), San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977, pp.143 – 212.