Resourceful: Critique and Creativity in Cultural Inquiry

Iris van der Tuin

Resourceful: Critique and Creativity in Cultural Inquiry

Inaugural Lecture1 Spoken at the assumption of the chair of Theory of Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University, Thursday the 6th of December, 2018.

1 This lecture has been translated from Dutch to English by Bresser-Chapple with financial support of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry.

Sir Rector Magnificus, Dear colleagues and welcome guests,

The American anthropologist of science, Sharon Traweek, concluded her 1988 monograph Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists as follows: I have never met a high energy physicist who would entertain for a moment the question of whether electrons “exist” or not; and I can sympathize with that, for unlike some of my more reflexivist colleagues, I find it appropriate to assume that physicists exist. Unlike most physicists, though, I do recognize the importance of the question, in a less abrupt form: where do the social categories of physicist and physics community and physics culture exist? I mean this book to address that question.

I have presented an account of how high energy physicists construct their world and represent it to themselves as free of their own agency, a description, as thick as I could make it, of an extreme culture of objectivity: a culture of no culture, which longs passionately for a world without loose ends, without temperament, gender, nationalism, or other sources of disorder—for a world outside human space and time.2 For reasons that will become clear, Traweek’s retrospection provides the perfect point of entry for this inaugural lecture, in which I position the professorship of Theory of Cultural Inquiry in relation to the philosophy of science and science and technology studies, and practices of cultural inquiry and cultural theory. Traweek’s quotation brings together different research communities, their assumptions, and conceptualisations. It is precisely to these kinds of communities, assumptions, and conceptualisations that I wish my chair to relate. This interdisciplinary chair seeks to integrate a humanities perspective with discussions that have been held in these communities for many years.

2 Traweek (1988: 162).

Traweek explicitly names the world of physicists and that of her reflexive colleagues. In addition, she makes it clear that, whilst she understands both communities, she does not completely agree with their assumptions. Physicists embrace electrons: they simply exist.

Traweek’s social science colleagues embrace critique: that physicists are at the mercy of discursive constructions of in- and exclusion.

When we read Traweek closely, it becomes evident that she does not so much steer a middle course, but rather, by analysing two extreme positions, forms a new perspective. First of all, Traweek applies the realisms of physicists to her social science colleagues: in the same way that electrons exist, so do physicists. They carry categories of in- and exclusion, and also matter in their own right, both through their actions and with their bodies. We cannot understand their world as merely discursive. Second, she wants to say that the world of physics is not free from social influences and emotions. In laboratories too, decisions are made based on gender, nation, and temperament. The world of physics is messier and less univocal than its presumed extreme objectivity might suggest.

By now, you are probably wondering why we are lingering so long over a publication about physics from 1988. Is that natural scientific culture-of-no-culture in any way still relevant? For this inaugural lecture, it is important to consider Traweek’s perspective by viewing it in relation, both to an extreme culture of objectivity, and to an extreme culture of identity. She observes a culture of identity amongst social scientists; a community of which she does not seem to be a member. Traweek’s analysis is interesting, because it reveals the shared assumptions of two apparent opposites: an unbridled belief in the unmediated existence of subatomic particles (realism), and an equally unbridled belief in the existence of discursive constructions (social constructivism). She recognises an oppositional modality in both extreme cultures. Not only are objectivity and identity mutually oppositional; they can also only exist when they do not have to be applied to a knowing subject. Naïve realists assume a knowable world outside of the laboratory, yet do not consider the matter of 4

the laboratory itself; whilst social constructivists are 100% sure of the influence of structured and symbolically-mediated identities, both in the world and in the laboratory. How the physicist is herself a knowing subject, is a question that remains largely unexplored within any extreme culture of objectivity. The knowing subject is obscured by an ideal-typical method. Furthermore, how the social scientist’s knowing is influenced by identity, is a question that reflexive colleagues often answer in a cut-and-dried manner: an identity-ofno-identity can best be unravelled from below. However, is that by definition where the social scientist is located? And, if so, how does she then operate? Traweek unravels the oppositional modality in a precise manner. She explains that her colleagues deny the existence of the physicists, and also tells us why. In this way, they actually do nothing but reaffirm the existing inequalities between communities of physicists, and between scientific domains!3 Thus, one cannot speak of integrated interdisciplinary research because there is neither mutual understanding of, or respect for, differing research practices, nor simply curiosity towards each other. The existing taxonomy of the sciences—which is organised hierarchically in both cases—remains unchallenged.

Traweek herself has a different approach. She turns towards both natural and social scientists, who she appreciates; she confronts the oppositional thinking of both communities; and she poses a humanities question: “where do the social categories of physicist and physics community and physics culture exist?” Where are those social categories, which cling unnoticed to physicists and characterise both the physics community and culture, located? An example of one such question is how ideas of nationhood have played a role in particle physics research for the benefit of (providing protection against) the nuclear arms race.4 Where have those ideas, by influencing research 3 Cf. Latour (2004).

4 Traweek’s analysis from 1988 is in multiple ways comparable to those of Karen Barad. In the period between 1990 and 2007, Barad primarily wrote about the

5

funding, accelerated the purchase of laboratory instruments, and thus the research itself? Where precisely, and where precisely not, has method-development taken place because of this division of money and labour? For the chair of Theory of Cultural Inquiry, it is interesting that such questions complement objectivity and identity with subjectivity. Traweek’s humanities research poses the question of the coming into being of cultures of objectivity, identity, and subjectivity, as well as the relationships between these three concepts. I would like to characterise a culture of the humanities as follows: it is a culturewithin-the-culture and a dynamic culture of subjectivity. Humanities scholars are self-reflexive and engage their own positions and roles in their research into cultures that differ in terms of time and place (other scientific cultures, amongst others) and into cultural objects that often affect them personally. Many, and cultural scientists in particular, are aware of what they embody; that affect concerns their corporeality.

This embodiment should then be understood in a twofold manner: cultural scientists manifest themselves in a culture, including the mechanisms of in- and exclusion that operate within it; and their bodies, emotions, and affects cannot be “switched off” in the course of doing research. *** Thus far, two things may have caught your attention. First, I have illustrated a humanities perspective with the work of an anthropologist of science. Here in Utrecht—and in the Netherlands in general— anthropologists are grouped under the social sciences. Second, I have spoken about the natural sciences, the social sciences, and previously mentioned oppositional thinking. Her agential realism is neither positivisticrealistic, nor social-constructivist in nature. My dissertation, defended in 2008, discussed this development within the framework of feminist epistemology. Since the publication of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), Barad has applied herself to the role of the nuclear bomb in the physics community. An important publication is “Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Re-membering, and Facing the Incalculable” (2017) in New Formations.

6

the humanities as if they were three univocal terrains, which are, moreover, strictly separated. A reaction to point one is informative for point two; after all, many European anthropology students get an MA-title, whilst here, we award MSc-titles. Thus, one can speak of a confluence of scientific fields. More interesting, however, is the question of whether “the humanities” can be afforded a singular unity. The title of my chair already states this clearly: cultural inquiry encompasses a selection of all the humanities, and their adjacent social and natural scientific fields of study. Thus, it is logical that not every humanities scholar present here will feel implicated in my story, and that there are social and natural scientists who do recognise my observations, arguments, and research questions. Thus, the foregoing leads me to ask: what does a “theory of cultural inquiry” consist of?

Because I do not want to lapse into the oppositional modality that Traweek attributes to both the physics community researched by her and her colleagues, in my work as a professor I will apply myself to cultures of subjectivity. Therefore, I turn to Ernst Cassirer in this inaugural lecture in a first attempt to theorise cultural inquiry more specifically. The German-Jewish philosopher Cassirer, who was born in 1874 and died in 1945, was interested in—and his work can be deployed towards when theorising—cultural scientists who are part of the culture that they study, who practice self-reflexivity, and who do not deny their corporeality. He would thus say that a social scientific modality that is oppositional, is merely one modality that has one function, and that we must not reduce the entire culture to it.5 Even though Cassirer might be considered to be exceptionally moderate and nuanced,6 his book containing five essays about the cultural sciences is radical, and continues to be innovative. From a historical perspective, any reflection on disciplinary cultural inquiry can be considered “new”; the humanities itself only emerged in the late

5 See, amongst others, Cassirer ([1942] 2000: 14). Cf. Colman (forthcoming).

6 Eilenberger (2018).

7

18th and early 19th centuries.7 In the English translation of Logik der Kulturwissenschaften [The Logic of the Cultural Sciences] from 1942, Cassirer notes the following: [...] culture by no means falls outside the sphere of the natural scientific approach that is concerned with things and the relations between things. Culture itself and the science of culture do not constitute a “state within a state.” The works of culture are of a physio-material nature; the individuals who create these works have their own psychic existence and their own life. All this can and must be explored and studied under physical, psychological, and sociological categories. But if we proceed from particular works and particular individuals to the forms of culture and immerse ourselves in their contemplation, then we stand on the threshold of a new problem.8 This quotation from The Logic of the Cultural Sciences—which, as an aside, was published earlier as a translation under the title The Logic of the Humanities—touches the core of the way in which I wish to apply myself to the theory of cultural inquiry.9 In the preceding, I extended the boundaries of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities that are so familiar to Dutch scholars and students by quoting Traweek and, in doing so, both recognised and questioned the hierarchically organised taxonomy of the sciences. Cassirer theorises such an impulse by stating that natural scientists concern themselves with things and the relationships between them, which means that expressions of culture too, cannot escape their attention.

After all, expressions of culture—including amongst others, the cultural sciences—encompass embodied entities with all kinds of

7 For more information, see the important work of Michel Foucault ([1966] 1994), but also that of Professor Paul Ziche (forthcoming) from Utrecht, and that of David N. Rodowick (2014, 2015).

8 Cassirer ([1942] 2000: 49–50).

9 Orth (2011: 117).

8

mutual relationships. Therefore, they should (also) be considered from a natural scientific perspective. Terms such as matter and force are applicable to objects of culture.10 In addition, Cassirer creates space for the predecessors of Traweek’s colleagues by also noting that a social scientific identity-approach to expressions of culture is important and useful. After all, the creators, enthusiasts, and critics of such expressions also have personal and social lives. Their bodies, emotions, and affects get a place in Cassirer’s work, even if he does not use these terms as such.

In other words, Cassirer argues that an entity-approach—in which works, creators, as well as scholars are considered to be individual entities—requires a multidisciplinary perspective in which, amongst others, physics, psychology, and sociology play a role. But that is not all: an approach that exceeds the level of entities—or rather, an approach that considers entities such as cultural expressions, but also objects of the natural sciences, as individual manifestations of what precedes entities—requires a different perspective. It is this interdisciplinary perspective that I designate as relevant, radical, and continuously innovative.11 In many contemporary theories of culture and cultural inquiry, the entity-approach is opposed to an approach that puts the event centre stage: entity versus event.12 The question is then whether meaning resides within an entity, sticks to 10 A good example here is http://boschproject.org/#/ (last accessed: the 29th of October, 2018).

11 “Like every other object [Objekt], a cultural object has its place in space and time.

It has its here and now, it comes to be and passes away. […] although it is indisputable that every cultural object manifests a physical, a psychological, and a historical side, the specific signification of this object remains, nevertheless, obscure as long as we isolate these elements from each other, instead of grasping them in their correlation, their mutual ‘penetration.’ Each of these aspects—the physical, the psychological, and the historical—is as such necessary; but none of them can yield the complete picture that we are searching for in the sciences of culture.” Cassirer ([1942] 2000: 42, 57–8). For more information on Cassirer and interdisciplinarity, see Tupan (2016).

12 Here you may think of Johanna Drucker’s 2009 article, with its main title “From Entity to Event.” However, you may also think of the statement “ENTITY = EVENT”

by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet ([1977] 1987: 66).

9

it (encounter), or finds its origin in events that also produce entities or can be encounters. Concerning this last point, you may consider this inaugural lecture: this setting makes me a speaker, and you a listener.

Whilst an hour ago you may have been a speaker yourself, during a lecture, at a conference, or in the media, I was primarily your beloved, daughter, sister, sister-in-law, niece, or friend.

Earlier in this inaugural lecture, I stated that in my opinion, questions concerning the coming into being of cultures of objectivity, identity, and subjectivity, and their mutual relationships should be central to theory formation within cultural inquiry. Event-approaches enable precisely such questions to be researched, and in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, Cassirer discusses precisely this point, continuing: A critical philosophy of culture [...] must avoid both the Scylla of naturalism and the Charybdis of metaphysics. And the way to do this opens itself if it is made clear that the “I” and the “you” [this can be other people, but also objects] are not finished conditions that create these forms of culture through the effect they exercise on each other. Rather, it can be seen that it is in these forms, and by virtue of them that the two spheres, the world of the “I” and that of the “you” first constitute themselves. [...] as soon as we no longer begin with the I and the you as two substantially separate entities but instead place ourselves in the center of that mutual communication that realizes itself in language or in any other cultural form, this doubt disappears. In the beginning is the act: always, in the use of language, in artistic formation, in the process of thinking and research a specific activity expresses itself, and it is only in this activity that the I and the you at once find each other, and separate themselves from each other. They are in and with each other, as they preserve in this way their unity through speaking, thinking, and all kinds of artistic expression.13 13 Cassirer ([1942] 2000: 50–1).

10

“In the beginning is the act,” or in the original: “Im Anfang ist die Tat”—it is this statement that makes Cassirer’s work so remarkable in the midst of other philosophers, theorists, or cultural scientists that have attempted, or are still attempting, theory formation within cultural inquiry. By thinking from the act, in which a certain activity—either bound to, or transcending, time and place—and the parties and works involved manifest themselves, Cassirer avoids the identified naturalist and metaphysical pitfalls, defining naturalism as the circular argument that, for example, an art form is the sum of every individual expression thereof (one that then secretly first has to be understood as such), whilst metaphysics is considered too essentialist and thus as subject to an extreme culture of identity.14 By also providing the possibility to situate the beginning in the act and its function, the maker becomes an artist when the artwork realises itself.15 As a result, the maker can keep surprising herself, the art lover, the art critic, and the cultural scientist with new work that must, or may only, be classified in the second instance. This classification itself can be bound to time and place, as long as we acknowledge the fact that culture—and thus not only the cultural sciences, but also the social and the natural sciences, and all other symbolic forms identified

by Cassirer, such as language, religion, and law—fundamentally concern the production of works, interpretations, and modalities.16 By situating the beginning in the act, a creative space is opened up for the cultural scientist. And, once in this space, when does she become a researcher, and how does she then operate? I will illustrate this process via a case study concerning the British philosopher Eva Louise Young and the algorithmic condition, to which I turn in the final part of this lecture. However, for now, I would like to suggest that Cassirer’s work concerning the act as the smallest onto-epistemological unit 14 Later it will become clear that this can also be read as “technicity” or “mediality.”

15 Cf. the work of Étienne Souriau (in Latour 2011: 310).

16 Cassirer’s work reminds us here of Henri Bergson’s “creative evolution” ([1907] 1998). In my own monograph Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach (Van der Tuin 2015), which is inspired by Bergsonian philosophy, I also wanted to pay attention to this via the etymology of generation: genoi and genesthai.

11

also describes the event-approach—which I, based on a previous quotation, offset against the entity-approach—for other objects of cultural inquiry.17 In addition to art, you may think of media and technology; two central areas of interest for contemporary cultural scientists.

In the article, “The Ontological Force of Technicity: Reading Cassirer and Simondon Diffractively,” which I published in 2013 together with Aud Sissel Hoel (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) in Philosophy and Technology, we proposed the term performative correspondence to describe the aforementioned activity. Performative correspondence concerns the simultaneous—by virtue of its residing in the activity—finding and coming into being of the technological object, the builder, and the researcher.18 Naturalist and metaphysical pitfalls are prevented in this way, because the technological development under consideration is defined in the process of making, encountering, using, and researching. This process, Hoel and I argue, is punctuated by technicity. Technicity uncovers the sociotechnological processes that precede both the use and the research of technological objects. As a result, technological developments and the interaction between humans and machines can be understood in the act. Here, for “technological development” one could also substitute “media innovation.” By making, using, or researching, one becomes a subject in the mutual communication that occurs along with the innovation.19 Thus, the innovation constitutes certain functions 17 This term is derived from Barad (2007).

18 In our article, we cite the translation of Cassirer’s relatively unknown essay dedicated to the philosophy of technology, “Form und Technik” [Form and Technology] from 1930: “For human beings, a fixed relation between subject and object according to which they conduct themselves does not exist from the beginning. [...] There is no solid, static relation between them from the outset. There is, as it were, a fluctuating movement back and forth. From this movement a form gradually crystallizes in which the human being first grasps his own being as well as the being of objects” Cassirer ([1930] 2012: 26).

19 NB: Barad (2007) coined the term intra-action for the process approach to this communication.

12

for both the human and the object, in which the communication can be called mediality, and “[c]ulture [is seen] as [a] paragon of all mediality”.20 Language plays an important, although not overpowering role here. The role of language would be (or become) overpowering when the art lover, art critic, technology user, media consumer, or cultural scientist would put aside an object because it is not understood, or precisely because it is considered to have been already exhaustively described. This act of putting aside occurs often, and then we walk (or click) on to yet another demonstration of an innovation or a design that wants to draw in our attention via words, images, materialities, or procedures in the current world of the neoliberal capitalism of flickering signifiers.21 It is the task of the cultural scientist to also consider, or mould, situations of ignorance, indifference, or, I would suggest, the unconscious as constitutive of the subject.22 Perhaps an unfamiliar object does not yet have an interpretative framework and/or the object places us in a position that is confusing for our identity. Perhaps an already familiar object is interesting in a novel form, or a new relationship with a familiar object creates a refreshing modality. It is the task of the cultural scientist to pose the question of the activity, technicity, or mediality that is expressed by cultural objects in their symbolic form and modality; to look from a multidisciplinary perspective at the physical, psychological, and sociological categories that are available for this purpose, both within and outside one’s own culture and in history, and that—apart from the fact that they have a function—also exclude.23 Further, the cultural scientist’s task is to study 20 Orth (2011: 128).

21 This term is derived from N. Katherine Hayles (1999: 24–49).

22 Mark B. N. Hansen (2015) added the important term nonconscious. Here you may also think of Hayles’ (2017) work, as mentioned earlier, which in an elaboration of the preceding speaks of the cognitive nonconscious, and also of Patricia Ticineto Clough (2018), concerning the user unconscious.

23 Culture is an unrestrained dynamic becoming; yet a process that also produces inand exclusion. I do not read Cassirer as a chronological empiricist (for example, see Cassirer [1942] 2000: 12 concerning Johann Gottfried Herder and ibid.: 76–7 concerning the presence and rendering present of history; the term chronological empiricism originates with Hélène Metzger [1935] 1987). There is little to no feminist or postcolonial

13

the cultural form—or, as I explain later, the condition—that wants to find an expression and can only be understood in an interdisciplinary manner. Thus, here I understand interdisciplinarity as a perspective that comes into being as both situated24 and creative,25 and that uses or produces the knowledge and the insights that are necessary for philosophical interpretation.

This philosophical interpretation is more than the sum of existing knowledge, insights, and practices from the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities—all of which are themselves an expression of their cultural context and are thus part of that culture. It is for good reason that Cassirer characterises good cultural science as neither nomothetic, nor ideographic.26 In cultural inquiry, we are not looking for cultural scientific laws (even though that has been, and still is, attempted), nor do we want to get hung up in an endless series of unique case studies.27 Cultural scientists want to understand dynamic forms such as language, religion, science, law and jurisprudence, art, old and new media, and as a consequence, their work is inherently theoretical. In this way, content is given to a philosophy of culture and cultural inquiry, which ultimately encompasses nature and the natural sciences. The latter is true because that which we term “nature,” and how we both execute and reflect upon natural scientific research, are also cultural phenomena. This argument refers back towards the opening of this lecture, in which I discussed the work of the anthropologist of science, Traweek, and complements Cassirer’s work. After all, Cassirer argued that cultural expressions should (also) be considered from a natural scientific perspective, simply because they are objects. literature available about Cassirer; his understanding of myths did lead to discussions about the presumption of so-called “primitive” cultures.

24 “Situated knowledge” is derived from Donna Haraway (1988).

25 Cf. Orth (2011: 12).

26 Cassirer ([1942] 2000: 58).

27 Bod (2011). Moreover, Cassirer opposed the German version of C. P. Snow’s the “two cultures” (Pedersen et al. 2011).

14

*** In the preceding, I addressed the concept of performative correspondence. Performative correspondence is a newly formed composite of performativity and correspondence theory, with which Hoel and I wanted to make thinkable the dynamic relationship between makers, users, and researchers and the technological object.

Performativity only concerns doing instead of being, and a theory of correspondence traditionally assumes that words represent pre-existing and specific things.28 Thus, with this composite, we wanted to give expression to the possibility of a human-machine relationship that is neither static nor univocal, so that it becomes possible to observe, describe, and analyse the expressed technicity, the subjectivity that has come into being, and the emergent cultural object with greater precision from the act.

The use of composites, in which words enter into new relationships with one another for the benefit of improved conceptualisations, is inherent to event-approaches and frequently occurs within interdisciplinary research, as does the use of neologisms (newly formed words). Creative ways of speaking are both necessary and desirable because—and now I am citing from the description of my chair—“cultural scientific developments are typically studied whilst they are in the process of ‘becoming.’” This type of study requires the appropriate tools. An interesting development in contemporary cultural inquiry is thus the increasing popularity of glossaries. Consider for example the Posthuman Glossary by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova from Utrecht, which was published earlier this year, and also the two glossaries on which I am working: the New Materialism Almanac, which has emerged as part of the COST Action IS1307 New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on “How Matter Comes to Matter” (2014–2018), and the special issue of the journal Philosophy 28 Barad (2003).

15

Today, “New Concepts for Materialism,” which I am currently finishing together with Adam Nocek (Arizona State University). The title of this inaugural lecture also contains such a new deployment of a word: resourceful. Although the adjective in daily use means: “the ability to always come up with something new,” and is synonymous with “ingenious, original, inventive,” as a researcher, I would like to observe, describe, and analyse “resourcefulness” a little differently.29 How this research looks, and why I attach importance to it, provides the theme upon which I will close this inaugural lecture.

Resource-ful. Our age is characterised by the omnipresence of algorithmic media. This is why, in the research project Ethics of Coding, executed in 2017, amongst others, Vera Bühlmann (TU Wien), Felicity Colman (Kingston University), and I have called our time the algorithmic condition.30 We argue that every cultural form differentiated by Cassirer, including scientific research, is widely influenced by the forms of media with which we are now occupied (and which are occupied with us) almost 24/7. Today, scientific research too begins—and ends—in the dynamic archives of Web 3.0.31 The algorithmic condition is an extension or intensification of JeanFrançois Lyotard’s postmodern condition. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge from 1979, Lyotard stimulated reflection on the role of ICT in science and society. The use of ICT influences knowledge production and so-called productive lives. People as well as truths (indeed, in plural) have to perform.32 The algorithmic condition does not only concern the role and the effects of ICT. As both a concept and an object, the “algorithmic

29 I have made use of Van Dale: Groot Woordenboek van de Nederlandse Taal, 15th, revised edition.

30 See Colman et al. (2018).

31 With “dynamic achieves,” I refer to Wolfgang Ernst’s dynarchives (Ernst 2013).

32 Jon McKenzie (2001) summarised this as follows: “perform, or else.” McKenzie’s work was introduced in Utrecht by Professor of Theatre Studies Maaike Bleeker.

16

condition” strives to uncover the socio-media-technological processes that precede the role and the effects of ICT. Algorithms predict the present and the future based on data from the past. However, they neither do this alone, nor flawlessly, but rather act together with people, platforms, machines, and code.33 If a contemporary cultural scientist tries to access background literature via Google Books or Google Scholar, or if she does so in the Web of Science, then she will have to ingeniously edge her way, sometimes through millions of hits that a simple search may yield. Working within Web 3.0, a form of data-subjectivity emerges that demands further research.34 The previously mentioned services themselves are also resource-ful: after all, find-ability does not reside solely with the human user. Documents have to be discoverable and systems “navigable” in socio-mediatechnological intra-action.35 The methodological implications of this algorithmic condition for cultural inquiry form an important area of research for the chair of Theory of Cultural Inquiry. In addition, I think that theorists of cultural inquiry should make use of critical and creative registers. We are critical when—either within our own research, towards another research, or towards cultural expressions other than the scientific—we take note of the fact that the activity, technicity, or mediality that constitute both subject and object and are therefore inclusive (albeit, in rudimentary form), also have exclusionary effects. These effects over-code socio-media-technological processes according to familiar world-historical lines: sexism, racism, heteronormativity.36 We have 33 For example, see Wendy Chun (2011: 9), Johanna Drucker (2013: §11), and the work of PhD student David Gauthier, who I supervise together with Robin Boast from the University of Amsterdam.

34 I first heard the term “data-subjectivity” in 2016 during a lecture by Leah A. Lievrouw.

35 For navigation, see the work of Nanna Verhoeff (2012). Intra-action is derived from Barad (2007).

36 Here, I refer to Haraway (1988: 588, emphasis added): “Feminist accountability requires a knowledge tuned to reasonance, not to dichotomy. Gender is a field of structured and structuring difference, in which the tones of extreme localization, of

17

to conceive of these lines as intersectional, or as interfering with one another.37 We can be creative when we realise that the potential inclusivity of activity, technicity, and mediality can lead to surprising encounters, events, and insights. To speak with the French-Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson: “In many cases [...] we feel the frame cracking.”38 I want to argue that critical and creative registers are mutually dependant on one another. Not only does critique assume that things could be different, but we can also only be creative with surprising research outcomes or encounters when we perceive these research outcomes or encounters as such.39 What does such a dual perspective look like in practice? I will explain this in light of a case study that offers insights into the type of research projects with which I will engage as professor of Theory of Cultural Inquiry, and upon which I aim to expand in the coming years.

Earlier, I introduced the British philosopher Eva Louise Young.

Young was born in 1861 in the Punjab, in the former British colony of India; she died in Letchworth Garden City, England, in 1939. I met her online in October 2016, and it was love at first sight. This may sound odd, and yet it is true. I was searching for literature in the field of new materialism via Google Books on my laptop, and her book, A Philosophy of Reality from 1930, appeared as one of the

the intimately personal and individualized body, vibrate in the same field with global high-tension emissions. Feminist embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning. Embodiment is significant prosthesis; objectivity cannot be about fixed vision when what counts as an object is precisely what world history turns out to be about.”

37 My use of the term intersectionality is derived from the work of Gloria Wekker (2016); interference from that of Evelien Geerts and Iris van der Tuin (2013).

38 Bergson ([1907] 1998: 197).

39 With “encounter,” I refer back to part two of this inaugural lecture. “Historical situatedness,” derived from the work of Frank Kessler (2002), can be seen as such an encounter. Drucker’s use of engagement (Drucker 2011) must be understood more as an event-approach.

18

search results.40 Nothing about the scanned book that appeared on my screen after several mouse clicks made it explicit that E. L. Young is a woman, yet Google’s side bar made mention of “Eva Louise.”

Whilst I was not looking for a metaphysical publication, I allowed myself to be distracted by this dynamic record. It struck me that I was unfamiliar with the author (I thus immediately critiqued philosophical canonisation), but I also realised that she may become important to my research (I was thus immediately creative with the search result).

Using the internet, I was quickly able to uncover several additional facts: Young wrote only a single philosophical book; and, beyond the 1930s, her work has hardly been referenced. Furthermore, reviews of the book in the 1930s were predominantly negative, and many of the reviewers were mistaken about her gender. I also noticed how difficult is was to find Eva Louise Young; simple internet searches generated few results. The photograph that I found later in the Garden City Collection nicely illustrates this point. Young has been effectively erased (eclipsed). So, why do I still attach such importance to obscure search results?

Image: LBM3056.43.47 – Digital copy of a photograph of Eva Young, her brother and Lord Lytton. Copyright: Garden City Collections.

40 For more information on new materialism, see Dolphijn and Van der Tuin (2012).

19

Contemporary researchers and anyone else (including children) who makes daily use of the internet via laptops and mobile phones, have to be resource-ful.41 Time and time again, we edge our way through the dynamic archives that are consulted via the internet of algorithmic media. Yet how do we do this? If we follow Cassirer’s logic, then we become subjects in this world. The algorithmic media themselves, and the artefacts that emerge in that communication, are constituted as objects through networked acts. Archives are organised hierarchically—think of Wikipedia—and propagate familiar ways of structuring and representing knowledge. We have to be critical towards this. Yet by virtue of their “on-demand” nature, such archives are also inclusive (albeit in a rudimentary form) and thus there is room for creativity. What I encounter online, depends on my search history, the way in which I deal with issues of privacy, and the extent to which I allow the algorithms and procedures of the various platforms and search engines to access my searching behaviour. After all: “every swipe [is] a record in a database [...] [and] every choice we make is recorded.”42 It is precisely for this reason that my search results differ from yours, and thus, truth is at stake.

Yet with the term resource-ful, I do not merely want to indicate that the relationship between words and things has changed. I also want to point out that something fundamental is the matter with the constitution of the subject and the object. We have to show a certain kind of digital literacy in order to function within the algorithmic condition, by which I mean that we must be able to use ICT well, and that we have to be critical towards the implied interpretation of both truth and productivity. Yet we now also live in a time in which the entangled nature of search-and-find-results increasingly leads to situations that are characterised by ignorance, indifference, or the

41 For more information on children and the internet, see Michel Serres’ important book Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials ([2012] 2015). A Dutch translation has been published by Boom.

42 Witten and Frank (2005: 4).

20

unconscious. Who are we, and in what kind of world do we live when this world, its objects, and our data-subjectivities come into being according to procedures that are both invisible and have far-reaching reality effects? In the follow-up project to Ethics of Coding, Bühlmann, Colman, and I argue that, in addition to digital literacy, we also need a quantum literacy—a term from Bühlmann’s work—in order to understand these reality effects in all of their contra-intuitive fullness.43 I have now been researching my encounter with Eva Louise Young and the ways in which a socio-media-technological intra-action intervened in the canon of new materialism (because that is what eventually happened) for about two years. I ordered the only available copy of A Philosophy of Reality on eBay, and by now have given a few lectures—amongst others this inaugural lecture—in which Young has been put forward as part of that canon. I have brought the search-and-find-process back to its fundamentals, which means I have understood, described, and analysed the role of metadata in that process. Google Books has, in a successful and inimitable way, brought together metadata from all kinds of databases to finally come to the pronunciation that it was Eva Louise Young that published A Philosophy of Reality in 1930.44 The way in which Google has operated, has to be understood in an interdisciplinary manner: the nanopublications from the history of philosophy45 have to be supplemented with insights into micro-attributions, precise references, and quantum references from bioinformatics.46 What interests and fascinates me is how online intra-actions produce such facts in a socio-media-technological process that cannot be described exhaustively, both because of its speed, and because the description itself is part of, and data for, that process. After

43 Bühlmann et al. (2017).

44 For Google’s use of metadata, see Ryan James and Andrew Weiss (2012).

45 See http://emto-nanopub.referata.com/wiki/EMTO_Nanopub (last accessed: the 18th of November, 2018) and http://nanopub.org/wordpress/ (idem).

46 Patrinos et al. (2012). Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index. php?title=Microattribution (last accessed: the 18th of November, 2018).

21

all, we no longer write without wifi or 4G, not even when we use a fountain pen or a pencil. How do we handle such doubling of data?

How do we apply the well-known “doubled vision”47, not only to use ICT differently for the benefit of a critical intervention in “the cycles of continuous reciprocal causality” so that we do more than passively responding to the pressures of accelerating information flow of which we are part.48 How do we become aware of the fact that we, as art lovers, art critics, technology users, media consumers, and cultural scientists, can potentially benefit from “[leaving] the potentialities open and to suggest alternative and more complex architectures of knowledge”?49 What a posthuman, critical, creative, and resource-ful data-subjectivities ask of us, is to position ourselves as literate, because there is no escape from algorithmic media. We will have to specify that literacy in a cultural scientific manner. In the words of Tara McPherson: In extending our critical methodologies, we must have at least a passing familiarity with code languages, operating systems, algorithmic thinking, and systems design. We need database literacies, algorithmic literacies, computational literacies, interface literacies. We need new hybrid practices: artist-theorists; programming humanists; activist scholars; theoretical archivists; critical race coders. We have to shake ourselves out of our small field-based boxes, taking seriously the possibility that our own knowledge practices are “normalized,” “modular,” and “black boxed” in much the same way as the code we might study in our work. […] While many of us “identify” as interdisciplinary, very few of us extend that border crossing very far (theorists tune out the technical, the technologists are impatient of the 47 This term is derived from Joan Kelly (1979).

48 Here I paraphrase a proposal by Hayles (2012: 102).

49 This is a proposal by Matteo Pasquinelli (2018: 256). After all: “With the temporality put to work by microprocessors, enormous quantities of data and problems can be processed in minuscule periods of time, in such a way that the new machinic subjectivities keep on jumping ahead of the challenges and stakes with which they are confronted” (Guattari 2012: 11) in ibid.

22

abstract, scholars of race mock the computational, seeing it as corrupt). [...] We need new practices and new modes of collaboration; we need to be literate in emerging scientific and technological methodologies, and we’ll gain that literacy at least partially through an intellectual generosity or curiosity toward those whose practices are not our own.50 The interdisciplinary research that I would like to study and simultaneously execute as professor of Theory of Cultural Inquiry, adopts the self-reflexive perspective of cultural sciences-withinthe-culture, as sketched in this inaugural lecture. In future research into specific case studies such as that of Eva Louise Young, I will, together with colleagues, explore how the algorithmic condition develops itself. I also apply this self-reflexive perspective for the benefit of broader developments within cultural inquiry—and in the humanities generally. Developments within this field that concern my chair—the digital, environmental, and medical humanities, and the public and professional humanities—but also what is yet to come within our dynamic domain—I want to study as well as practice. I am looking forward to discussing this further with you at length in the years ahead.

I have spoken.

50 McPherson (2012: 35–6).

23

Bibliography Barad, Karen. 2003. ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3: 801–31.

---. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

---. 2017. ‘Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-turning, Remembering, and Facing the Incalculable.’ New Formations 92: 56–86.

Bergson, Henri. [1907] 1998. Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

Bod, Rens. 2010. De vergeten wetenschappen: Een geschiedenis van de humaniora.

[The Forgotten Sciences: A History of the Humanities] Amsterdam: Prometheus.

Braidotti, Rosi and Maria Hlavajova, eds. 2018. The Posthuman Glossary.

London and Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic.

Bühlmann, Vera, Felicity Colman, and Iris van der Tuin (2017). ‘New Materialisms, Novel Mentalities, Quantum Literacy.’ The Minnesota Review: A Journal of Creative and Critical Writing 88.1: 47–58.

Cassirer, Ernst. [1930] 2012. ‘Form and Technology.’ In Ernst Cassirer on Form and Technology: Contemporary Readings, eds. Aud Sissel Hoel and Ingvild Folkvord, trans. W. McClelland Dunlavey and J. Michael Krois, 15–53.

Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.

---. [1942] 2000. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences, trans. S. G. Lofts. New Haven, NJ and London: Yale University Press.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2011. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory.

Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

Clough, Patricia Ticineto. 2018. The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media and Measure. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Colman, Felicity. Forthcoming. ‘Modality.’ Philosophy Today.

Colman, Felicity, Vera Bühlmann, Aislinn O’Donnell, and Iris van der Tuin.

2018. Ethics of Coding: A Report on the Algorithmic Condition [EoC].

H2020-EU.2.1.1. – INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP – Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies – Information and Communication Technologies. Brussels: European Commission. https://cordis.europa. eu/project/rcn/207025_en.html Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. [1977] 1987. Dialogues, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. London: The Athlone Press.

Dolphijn, Rick and Iris van der Tuin. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.

Drucker, Johanna. 2009. ‘From Entity to Event: From Literal, Mechanistic

24

Materiality to Probabilistic Materiality.’ Parallax 15.4: 7–17.

---. 2011. ‘Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory.’ Culture Machine. 12: 1–20.

---. 2013. ‘Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface.’

DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 7.1.

Eilenberger, Wolfram. 2018. Het tijdperk van de tovenaars: Het grote decennium van de filosofie, 1919-1929 [The Era of Sorcerers: The Big Decennium of Philosophy, 1919–1929], trans. W. Hansen. Amsterdam: De bezige bij.

Ernst, Wolfgang. 2013. Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, Michel. [1966] 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books.

Gauthier, David, Dorotha Golanska, Sam Skinner, eds. 2016. New Materialism Almanac. www.newmaterialism.eu Geerts, Evelien and Iris van der Tuin. 2013. ‘From Intersectionality to Interference: Feminist Onto-Epistemological Reflections on the Politics of Representation.’ Women’s Studies International Forum 41.3: 171–8.

Hansen, Mark. 2015. Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Haraway, Donna. 1988. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.’ Feminist Studies 14.3: 575–99.

Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

---. 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis.

Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

---. 2017. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Hoel, Aud Sissel and Iris van der Tuin. 2013. ‘The Ontological Force of Technicity: Reading Cassirer and Simondon Diffractively.’ Philosophy and Technology 26.2: 187–202.

James, Ryan and Andrew Weiss. 2012. ‘An Assessment of Google Books’ Metadata.’ Journal of Library Metadata 12.1: 15–22.

Kelly, Joan. 1979. ‘The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory: A Postscript to the “Women and Power” Conference.’ Feminist Studies 5.1: 216–27.

Kessler, Frank E. 2002. Het idee van vooruitgang in de mediageschiedschrijving.

[The Idea of Progress in Media Historiography] Inaugural lecture, Utrecht University.

Latour, Bruno. 2004. ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.’ Critical Inquiry 30: 225–48.

25

---. 2011. ‘Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les Différents Modes d’Existence.’

In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, eds. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, 304–33. Melbourne: re.press.

Lievrouw, Leah A. 2016. ‘Algorithms and Activism: Resistance in the Age of Data.’ First Marianne van den Boomen lecture at Utrecht University, the 24th of November.

Lyotard, Jean-François. [1979] 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform, or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge.

McPherson, Tara. 2012. ‘U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX.’ In Race After the Internet, eds. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White, 21–37. New York and London: Routledge.

Metzger, Hélène. [1935] 1987. ‘Réflexions sur l’École de Vienne’ [Reflections on the Vienna School]. In La méthode philosophique en histoire des sciences: Textes 1914–1939, eds. Gad Freudenthal, 165–7. Corpus des Oeuvres de Philosophie en Langue Française. Paris: Fayard.

Nocek, Adam and Iris van der Tuin. Forthcoming. ‘New Concepts for Materialism.’ Special issue of Philosophy Today.

Orth, Ernst Wolfgang. 2011. ‘Ernst Cassirer as Cultural Scientist.’ Synthese 179.1: 115–134.

Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2018. ‘Metadata Society.’ In The Posthuman Glossary, eds. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, 253–6. London and Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic.

Patrinos, George P., David N. Cooper, Erik van Mulligen, Vassiliki Gkantouna, Giannis Tzimas, Zuotian Tatum, Erik Schultes, Marco Roos, and Barend Mons. 2012. ‘Microattribution and Nanopublication as Means to Incentivize the Placement of Human Genome Variation Data into the Public Domain.’ Human Mutation 33.11: 1503–12.

Pedersen, Esther Oluffa, Claus Festersen, Steen Brock, and Stig Andur Pedersen. 2011. ‘Preface.’ Synthese 179.1: 1–5.

Rodowick, David N. 2014. Elegy for Theory. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

---. 2015. Philosophy’s Artful Conversation. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

Serres, Michel. [2012] 2015. Thumbelina: The Culture and Technology of Millennials, trans. Daniel W. Smith. London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.

26

Snow, C.P. [1959] 1971. ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.’ In Public Affairs, 13–46. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

---. [1963] 1971. ‘The Two Cultures: A Second Look.’ In Public Affairs, 47–79. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Traweek, Sharon. 1988. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tupan, Maria-Ana. 2016. ‘Bachelard, Cassirer and Early Interdisciplinary Humanities.’ Rupkatha: Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 8.4: 13–20.

Van der Tuin, Iris. 2008. ‘Third Wave Materialism: New Feminist Epistemologies and the Generation of European Women’s Studies.’

Dissertation, Utrecht University.

---. 2015. Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield (Lexington Books).

Verhoeff, Nanna. 2012. Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Wekker, Gloria. 2016. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race.

Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Witten, Ian H. and Eibe Frank. 2005. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques, 2e ed. Amsterdam etc.: Elsevier.

Young, E. L. 1930. A Philosophy of Reality. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Ziche, Paul. Forthcoming. ‘Histories of the Humanities.’

27

Curriculum Vitae Iris van der Tuin is professor of Theory of Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University (Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies). She is also the Director of Education of the School Liberal Arts and Programme Coordinator of the interdisciplinary bachelor Liberal Arts and Sciences. Her research is part of the group Transmission in Motion of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry.

Iris trained as a feminist epistemologist and works as an interdisciplinary researcher. She works at the crossroads of philosophy of science and science and technology studies, cultural theory and practices of cultural inquiry (in particular, humanities-based research that exceeds the boundaries of the “two cultures”). Together with Rick Dolphijn, Iris wrote New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Open Humanities Press, 2012); published the monograph Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach (Lexington Books, 2015); and in 2016 edited the volume Nature, which appeared as part of the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender. Iris was the chair of the COST Action IS1307 New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on “How Matter Comes to Matter” (2014–2018) and worked on the H2020-project Ethics of Coding: A Report on the Algorithmic Condition (2017, led by Felicity Colman). Together with Rosi Braidotti, she initiated the book series New Materialisms by Edinburgh University Press. Iris is the editor of Somatechnics (together with Holly Randell-Moon). She is part of the editorial board of amongst others Australian Feminist Studies and Goldsmiths Press.

Until the 1st of February, 2018, Iris worked as senior lecturer Liberal Arts and Sciences at Utrecht University (Department Philosophy and 28

Religious Studies). Previously, she worked as senior lecturer Gender Studies and Philosophy of Science at the Department Media and Culture Studies. In 2011–2012, she was connected to the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University as a guest researcher.

There she worked, supported by a NWO Veni grant, on the project “The Material Turn in the Humanities.”

29

Colophon

Copyright: Iris van der Tuin, 2018 Design: Communication & Marketing, Faculty of the Humanities, Utrecht University Image: LBM3056.43.47 – Digital copy of a photograph of Eva Young, her brother and Lord Lytton. Copyright: Garden City Collection.

30