On The Threshold of New Materialist Studies

This article answers a question addressed to the author during the selection procedure for a research network: if we were to be awarded funding, would we also work toward formulating (under)graduate degrees in new materialist studies? The article engages with this issue of Forum to provide an original impetus for preliminary thoughts on the institutionalisation of new materialist studies as a platform for academic research and scholarly degrees.

distant and close readings of the articles in this issue on 'The New Materialisms', that is, by using methods ranging from digital text mining to traditional interpretation, I will engage with questions such as: what would the new materialist studies entail?What are the necessary academic surroundings in which the studies can flourish?What kind of scholars would they produce?Which academics should be hired for them to develop?Which scholars have provided the genealogy of the field for researchers in new materialism to rely on in their subsequent writing and teaching?By treating this issue as a repository, I will assume that its contents can be studied in their own right in order to address these questions: the articles in this issue of Forum will be taken to provide an original impetus for preliminary thoughts about the institutionalisation of new materialist studies as a platform for academic research and scholarly degrees.

Distant Reading -What would be the key terms of a new materialist degree?
Assuming that the graduate students who have written for this issue of Forum have done so in the capacity of a first, informal generation of new materialist graduates, reading their articles from a distance can generate insight in the key terms of a future new materialist degree.What would this kind of education focus on?Although I am aware of the fact that the basic methodology of tallying words, and studying the subsequent images that are generated, is now going out of fashion (even What we learn from this image is that the new materialist study of addiction, for instance, or of plastic, poetry, performance, or sound happens in an intellectual context compelled by an interest in media and communication technologies such as the Internet.This seems obvious for the study of software and the cyborg, but the extensive use of 'media' in this issue is interesting given Barad's critical remarks about theorising mediatisation as a representational process in generating a certain kind of scholarly, journalistic, and artistic statements (statements that have a disjunctive relationship with a world 'out there'): The system of representation is sometimes explicitly theorized in terms of a tripartite arrangement.For example, in addition to knowledge (i.e., representations), on the one hand, and the known (i.e., that which is purportedly represented), on the other, the existence of a knower (i.e., someone who does the representing) is sometimes made explicit.When this happens it becomes clear that representations serve a mediating function between

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Iris van der Tuin 4 independently existing entities.This taken-for-granted ontological gap generates questions of the accuracy of representations.(804) Luckily, none of the articles in this issue fall into the trap of such atomism or individualist entity logic.
The statements they generate are of a different kind and thus compel a different theorisation of both representation and mediatisation.We encounter in this issue, and therefore tentatively in our future degree modules in new materialist studies, media that are rich and entangled environments producing entities, communication, and imagery.What, then, does the above Wordle demonstrate?Only that it must not be used for our PR materials or placed above our advertisement text because its twodimensional, static, and spatial representation might seem to be based on cumulative and reflective accuracy.This reading of knowledge production, however, is utterly flawed, insofar as it elicits a disjunction between new materialism and such a theory of representation.At the very least, the Bergsonian notion of time as duration, an important gesture of new materialist thought as highlighting the coming-into-being or actualisation of materials and textual representation as distinct based on an inclusive virtual realm that is ontologically prioritised, must be added to the mix so as to do justice to the precise relationships between matter, materials, materiality, and materialism (the '4Ms' as coined by my colleague Ann-Sophie Lehmann).Interpreting representations -words, sentences, images -as mediating between pre-existing entities that differ from each other following fixed parameters assumes also that the knower is positioned outside (above) the research setting, whereas duration is reached even before this spatiotemporal hierarchy is actualised.After all, Henri Bergson 3 stated in his Introduction to Metaphysics that: […] divergences are striking between the schools, that is to say, in short, between the groups of disciples formed around certain of the great masters.But would one find them as clear-cut between the masters themselves?Something here dominates the diversity of systems, something, I repeat, simple and definite like a sounding of which one feels that it has more or less reached the bottom of a same ocean, even though it brings each time to the surface very different materials.It is on these materials that disciples normally work: in that is the role of analysis.And the master, in so far as he formulates, develops, translates into abstract ideas what he brings, is already, as it were, his own disciple.But the simple act which has set analysis in motion and which hides behind analysis, emanates from a faculty quite different from that of analyzing.( 168 Barad, Jane Bennett, and Stacy Alaimo.We find a consistency that runs through the entire transgenerational group, as it finds itself backed by a genealogy that is firmly constituted by a tradition of Continental philosophy (most of all, French).We see shared references to Jean Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Foucault, Bruno Latour, Jacques Rancière, and Bernard Stiegler.References to the work of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Kittler are also present, and through the lens of these philosophers the focus on the media comes to the surface.
One last detail regarding the bibliography and (imagined) scholarly communities pertains to the relations between the new materialisms and object-oriented ontology (Graham Harman, Reza Negarestani, and Timothy Morton feature in this issue), affect theory (the canonising work of Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth appears in this issue), and gender studies.The link to gender studies, in particular, is clearly elucidated by the kinds of questions posed and the scholars staged in new materialist study: these questions and scholarly references have an emancipatory and/or feminist trajectory, which immediately suggests the need to develop a specialised module in our future degree

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Iris van der Tuin 6 programmes which acts to repair the currently disjunctive relationship of the new materialisms with fields such as anti-racist and postcolonial studies, and queer and trans theory.
I want to underscore that these observations on the role of gender studies in the new materialisms, and the absence of references to certain traditions within that particular field, highlight two points.Firstly, that the new materialisms are to some degree a 'minor history' in the capitalist times of the neoliberal corporatised university and secondly, that the specific role played by gender studies and feminist theory in the new materialisms -as informed by their Deleuzean heritage of theories of 'becoming' (rather than the entity logic of 'being') -point to the need to continue to develop 'minor' histories of thought.It has become clear then, that in order to address and study the technological side of new materialisms, we need those voices that are themselves not fully and unconsciously defined by the digital technologies such as the blog (as is the case with OOO; see the parodic 2011 piece by Michael O'Rourke in Speculations).This is to say that for our contemporary generation of new materialist scholars, arguably the first generation of new materialist graduates, not caring for mediation because it is purportedly atomistic, as addressed by Bruno Latour and María Puig de la Bellacase, is not at all a productive venture because, in the words of N. Katherine Hayles, it is precisely how we think that must be on the agenda.foremost is an immanent sense of urgency.New materialist studies are written and conveyed with insistence.These articles have underscored the importance of dealing with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch now, with software now, with Internet addiction now, and with the sound dimension of poetry now.Secondly, these articles immediately communicate the need to denaturalise each chosen topic of the author: the acceptance of the immateriality of software, the adherence to certain rules if online participation is to be deemed normal, or the importance of addressing the silencing of the sound dimension of poetry.And more importantly, the authors do not raise the issue of naturalisation in order to invoke a social constructivist mode of thought, but rather highlight the agency of that which is usually naturalised.As Rumen Rachev states, for instance, "the moment software break down, as represented by the well-known 'blue screen' in the case of the operational system Windows, the user is made aware of the existence of software, even though software processes still do not reveal how they operate" (1).Or, in the words of Clare Echterling: "[t]he gyre's circulating currents catch and hold debris, a phenomenon that concentrates garbage into a comparatively small area and thus makes marine pollution more visible than in other areas of ocean waters" (1).This focus on agentiality

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Ngram viewer is getting more sophisticated and data visualisation is now a specialisation that is constantly innovating itself because it comes under continued critical scrutiny), I have loaded the text of all of the articles into the Wordle programme (see www.wordle.net)and this is what came out after a little bit of cleaning up: Image 1: Wordle visualisation of the current issue

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) Not analysing mediatisation or representation, but immersing oneself in what poetry does, or how the Great Pacific Garbage Patch moves in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, would result in that very act of hiding behind analysis; it implies emanating from that other faculty without which analysis would not have started in the first place.Taking this into consideration, the results of such research would differ as a consequence.Bibliographical Study -What would constitute a state of the art module in the new materialist studies?Diving a little deeper into this issue, the combined bibliography of all the authors can provide insight not only in a survey course of the field (so far I have mentionedBarad, Foucault, and Bergson;       Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were brought up in a footnote), but also in a more advanced, stateof-the-art module in which prospective students in new materialist studies can further their knowledge.The survey course is necessary in the first instance because the backgrounds of these students would probably differ significantly.Where they would have done their first degree, for example, and in which discipline or neo-discipline 4 , interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary combinations, let alone as considered in the backdrop of different national contexts and languages?In compliance with the results of my attempt at reading this issue's new materialist output distantly, what strikes me is the notion of transmediality as a prominent topic of new materialist study and debate.Transmediality in this context references, firstly, media and the relations between media as a research topic: the new materialist scholars gathered in this issue study new media, literature, performance, and so on.Secondly, I have also noticed an interesting development in terms of what should be constituted as a reliable source for building up arguments.In relation to this definition of transmediality, we find in this issue an interesting pattern of re-canonisation that characterises not so much new materialist study per se, but very much the type of scholar as herself producing the work: generated by digitally connected researchers, the bibliographies of the articles here published contain scholarly output alongside newspaper clippings, Internet sources such as research or lecture notes of well-established thinkers, blog posts, et cetera.But we can also observe a schism between the introduction of these 'new' sources, and the repetition of the old pattern of referencing more established university presses based in the United States.In random order, I note exemplars such as Indiana University Press, Duke University Press, University of Minnesota Press, Zone Books, University of Chicago Press, Routledge, Harvard University Press, and Stanford University Press.The same goes for the academic journals that are heavily relied upon by the authors published in this issue of Forum: they are well-known and established.The previous observation notwithstanding, the bibliographies also demonstrate an emerging field of new materialist study that is fully transgenerationally composed.We find Deleuze and Guattari and Manuel DeLanda next to Jussi Parikka and Tiziana Terranova; Rosi Braidotti and Susan Bordo next to Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska; N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway next to Reading -What about the theses to be delivered?Since the articles in this issue of Forum have been gathered as a repository of postgraduate and early career research in the new materialist studies, what can we learn about our prospective student body and their research interests?To formulate a response, I have studied closely the opening paragraphs of each article, borrowing heavily from the textual research methodologies of Clare Hemmings.In her book Why Stories Matter, Hemmings analysed the starting paragraphs of articles in the feminist studies journal Signs in order to find out what gender studies scholars assume collectively about the feminist past, present, and future.In this issue of Forum, what we see first and