Feminist matters,critique and the future of the political

Abstract

Over the last decades, many scholars, feminist and others, have argued that critique must be reframed in different and more ‘productive’ ways because its ‘conventional’ formulation and practice have outlived its usefulness as a conceptual tool. Instead, they have called for affirmation or affirmative critique and a more generative mode of critical engagement in the search for new imaginaries, transformative potentialities and other futures. New feminist materialist thought’s emergence is, we argue, symptomatic of this contemporary intellectual landscape that claims to move beyond critique. While sympathetic with the desire to rethink a form of critique that speaks to the (urgent) politics of the present and the remaking of political imaginaries, we argue that the theoretical gesture to move beyond critique may offer a potentially troubling remapping organised around certain kinds of repression (of the undetermined and ambivalent work of critique) and amnesia (of feminist genealogies and over different feminist projects’ conceptualisation of matter) that yield a politics without politics.

Keywords

Affirmation critical race theory critique new feminist materialism power the political

Introduction

How might we disentangle the operations of power while never forgetting that it is always historically situated and points to particular ideological and material origins and forms? That work seems to be precisely the work of critique that animates much scholarship aimed at undoing power and thinking the political differently. Some feminist theorists have argued that we uphold the work of critique to reimagine our current political impasses because critique allows ‘the production of something more, the production of something else’ (Thiele, interviewed in Bunz et al., 2012: 3). Yet, critique has also been the term that many scholars, feminist and others, have argued must be abandoned, or more precisely, reframed in different and more ‘productive’ ways because its ‘conventional’ formulation and practice, they explain, have outlived its usefulness as a conceptual tool. This desire to move beyond ‘conventional’ or negative critical habits is juxtaposed, instead, with the search for potentialities, new imaginaries and other futures. It promises to lead us out of our current political impasse by jettisoning what these scholars argue is critique’s insistent negative or destructive practice.

This ‘shift away from critique’ (Barnwell, 2017: 28) is embedded in other claims to move beyond analytical frames that have exhausted their force and possibilities. Over the last decade, a number of scholars under the broad term of new feminist materialisms have voiced their desire for a turn away from deconstruction, post-structuralism and ideology critique. They have urged us to move beyond language, epistemology and discourse by turning to matter, ontology and the real. They have called upon us to embrace surface readings, weak theory and flat ontologies in the hope of a more constructive and affirmative engagement.

Such diverse aspirations to rethink critique have offered important insights, troubling some well-known assumptions in critical theory and emphasising the need for new modes of world building practices, political agency and knowledge production. While we are sympathetic with these engagements that address our political present, we also want to question some of their premises and effects. Taking new feminist materialist claims as symptomatic of this contemporary shift, we argue that to move beyond ‘conventional’ or negative forms of critique embodies a ‘longing for agency’ (Bargetz, 2019), which maps out a future-oriented narrative that, in turn, promises a new and, hopefully, more realist politics. These promises are shaped by the particular temporality of post-Cold War late capitalism and its material and ideological catastrophes that these thinkers seek to diagnose and unseat. The theoretical gesture to move beyond critique, however, may offer a potentially troubling remapping organised around certain kinds of repression (of the undetermined and ambivalent work of critique) and amnesia (of feminist genealogies and over different feminist projects’ conceptualisation of matter) that yield a politics without politics.

The particular emphasis on re-imagining different politics, worlds and futures has indeed, at times, involved a disavowal of the powerful genealogy of critique that has infused feminist scholarship in messy and complicated ways over the last decades, lineages that are now deemed too narrow, paranoid and negative. This erasure of different feminist genealogies risks ignoring the operation of power and conflict in the constitution of the intelligibility of the social and the ways materiality is understood. Claiming to move beyond what is deemed to be a merely negative critique and emphasising, instead, affirmative readings, potentialities and power as an active force allows for a marginalisation of analyses of power relations, structures of inequality and the deployment of difference to shape and give meaning to the world. This risks reinforcing affirmation as an overwhelmingly positive mode of critique rather than deploying affirmative critique as something other than the ‘negation of negation’ (Thiele, 2017: 25). We are therefore interested in asking how we might sustain a form of critique, namely a critical interrogation of the ways power functions and how its uses may subvert, unmoor and rework its operations in the political, without relying on narratives of theoretical amnesias and disavowals.

Matters of critique: moving beyond paranoia

The turn of the century saw the emergence of epistemological claims that seemed to announce a promising challenge to and reinvestment of feminist theorising: new materialists argued for the theoretical recuperation of matter, nature and the body in order to yield a more productive mode of feminist theory and practice. One of its most prominent voices is Karen Barad. She first interrogated what she deemed to be an inadequate (because discursive and humanist) notion of materiality that presumed that matter no longer mattered (Barad, 1996: 801). In response to what she perceived as a problematic absence, Barad turns to her own field of quantum physics to suggest a different epistemology that she terms ‘onto-epistemology’. For Barad, quantum physics’ principle of complementarity – which stands in for a simultaneous process of mutual exclusivity and mutual necessity – points to an ‘(ontological) indeterminacy’ (2011: 444). Such ontological indeterminacy allows her to argue that human and non-human, material and discursive, are imbricated and always already entangled. It leads Barad to introduce the concept of ‘posthumanist performativity’ (1996: 801) as a materially informed reformulation and reciprocal ‘intra-activity’ (2014: 168) of discourse and matter.

Barad’s feminist materialism aims to ‘trouble [the] dichotomies’ (2014: 168) in matter, time and space that, she argues, have long structured the work of theorising. The concept of diffraction has been especially crucial to Barad’s work and to her call for a ‘diffractive methodology’ (Barad, 2007: 88; see also Kaiser and Thiele, 2014): since, she explains, ‘Diffraction is a material-discursive phenomenon’, it ‘challenges the presumed inherent separability of subject and object, nature and culture, fact and value, human and nonhuman’ (2007: 381). Building on Donna Haraway’s work, Barad argues that diffraction offers a way out of our modern attachment to what she calls ‘representationalism’ (2007: 86) and allows us to overcome the shortcomings of reflection and reflexivity which, she writes, are driven by ‘the belief that words, concepts, ideas, and the like accurately reflect or mirror the things to which they refer’ (2007: 86). Because diffraction is marked by patterns of ‘difference’ and ‘attends to the relational nature of difference’ (Barad, 2007: 72), it yields something else than reflection and points to the untenable Cartesian separation of mind and world. This is why, for Barad, diffraction as a manner of theorising that which is always already entangled embodies a radically new epistemic frame of critique. As Iris van der Tuin (2011: 27) has explained, it is not a mode of negation but of reworking.

We turn to Barad because of the ways her argument for the recognition of the role of matter in theorising the world and thus the undoing of dualism in knowledge inaugurated an epistemological claim that has, since, resonated widely. It has also been at the heart of Barad’s own argument for a new feminist onto-epistemological orientation. ‘To theorise’, Barad criticises, ‘is not to leave the material work behind and enter the domain of pure ideas where the lofty space of the mind makes objective reflection possible’ (2007: 55). For her, theorising is a ‘material practice’ (Barad, 2007: 55). Most importantly, matter promises to reinvent and transform the world through a return to realism. Barad contends that both positivists and postmodernists have confused theory with play when realism is, in fact, a ‘serious business’ and a ‘responsibility’ that is ‘involved in truth hunting’ (2007: 55). Thinking about and from matter is therefore crucial in order to rethink feminist work and offer a ‘regenerative politics’ in the face of ‘troubling times’ (Barad, 2015: 411; Barad, 2017). Indeed, in recent years, Barad has attempted such rethinking by turning to ‘transmaterialities’, ecology and ‘nuclear colonialisms’ (2015, 2017, 2019).

Barad’s claim to reality and world-building practices has been undeniably influential. However, we want to think about the ways her claim was not so much a singular one but, in fact, was situated at a particular moment when others were also calling for an epistemological ‘turn’ away from feminist modes that no longer appeared productive (Hemmings, 2011). Indeed, her suggestion that ‘matter is imaginative material’ (Barad, 2015: 411; emphasis ours) echoes another scholar’s claim for a turn away from familiar epistemologies, namely Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s call for reparation beyond ‘the methodological centrality of suspicion’ ([1997] 2003: 125). In a now canonical essay, Sedgwick has exposed what she takes to be a particular instance of the limits of critique. Against a mode of critique that she calls ‘paranoid reading’, Sedgwick advocates for a new mode of ‘reparative reading’ ([1997] 2003: 123). Paranoid reading – Sedgwick’s adaptation of what Paul Ricœur named a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ ([1997] 2003: 124) – is problematic because of its ‘suspicious and aggressive attacks’, its reference to negativity and its over-emphasised engagements with power and domination, focusing equally on grand narratives as well as social structures (Best and Marcus, 2009: 11). As the hallmark of ‘strong theories’, paranoid readings tend to focus on latent meanings and the ‘excavation of hidden truths’ (Best and Marcus, 2009: 13). For Sedgwick, these methodologies (of unveiling, unmasking, revealing, exposing or demystifying) are unyielding because they ultimately only expose what is already known and merely reaffirm prevailing modes and matters of analysis. They imply a form of ‘mastery’ and ‘ownership over truth’, informing a dualistic understanding of knowing subjects on the one side, who are then considered as being able to ‘teach’ those without knowledge on the other side (Love, 2010: 236f). This methodology of unveiling ultimately privileges a form of ‘prescription’ rather than ‘diagnosis’ (Sedgwick, [1997] 2003: 125).

For Sedgwick, paranoia implies the ‘disarticulation, disavowal and misrecognition of other ways of knowing’, disallowing ‘any explicit recourse to reparative motives’ ([1997] 2003: 144). But, Sedgwick asks, how might such paranoid modes help when violence is not ‘out there’ to be unveiled and denounced, but now openly visible and seemingly everywhere? This (political) question haunts her meditation on the need for a different form of critical engagement. She defends a weak theory that does not invoke the problem of the critical distance of the researcher and ordinary life. Since, as Heather Love summarises, Sedgwick’s reparative understanding stands ‘on the side of multiplicity, surprise, rich diversity, consolation, creativity, and love’ (2010: 237), it can also bring about change: the unknown and therefore the future are kept open as a possibility for something else to happen.

Interestingly, Sedgwick’s critique of paranoia appears to meet some of Barad’s onto-epistemological interrogations. Barad, too, insists on the limits as well as the impasse of conventional modes of critique that, she has explained, are ‘over-rated, over-emphasised, and over-utilised, to the detriment of feminism’ (interviewed in Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012: 49). Sedgwick’s critique of paranoia as essentially ‘reflexive and mimetic’ ([1997] 2003: 130) seems to have prefigured Barad’s critique of reflection, reflexivity and her call for diffraction (Hollin et al., 2017). Both Sedgwick and Barad contend that familiar critical habits rely on a (problematic) distance and detachment from the world. Sedgwick characterises paranoia as a suspicious and ‘anticipatory’ ([1997] 2003: 131, 139) mode of theorising, and Barad insists that theorising should avoid ‘loftiness’ and ‘linguistic narcissism’ (2007: 42). While Sedgwick is concerned with the affective negativity of suspicion, Barad argues that theorising with language involves negative affects when, instead, thinking about matter promises to reinvent and transform the world through a return to reality. Moreover, while Sedgwick criticises paranoid readings as anxious and rigid, Barad explains that:

Critique is all too often not a deconstructive practice, that is, a practice of reading for the constitutive exclusions of those ideas we cannot do without, but a destructive practice meant to dismiss, to turn aside, to put someone or something down – another scholar, another feminist, a discipline, an approach, et cetera … a practice of negativity that … is about subtraction, distancing and othering (Interviewed in Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012: 49; emphasis ours).

What do these echoes tell us? Certainly, Sedgwick and Barad are not situated in the same theoretical genealogy and their claims have been taken up rather differently. Nonetheless, both problematise what they deem ‘negative’ critical habits: while Sedgwick calls for a reparative reading, Barad insists that we must search for ‘other kinds of engagements that we might practice’ and argues for a ‘practice of diffraction, of reading diffractively for patterns of differences that make a difference’ and no longer ‘keep the world at a distance’ (interviewed in Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012: 50). Yet, their manifestos for a theoretical orientation that goes beyond critique and beyond what many would call its ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai, 2005) suggest something of the kind of political work that has characterised feminist thought in the last two decades. They are symptomatic of a particular constellation of feminist claims that have been animated by a longing and desire for a more affirmative theoretical impulse.

The obsession with critique and the disavowal of political archives

The insistence on the urgent need for different critical modes is at the heart of new feminist materialist thought and its different expressions. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost have summarised, new materialism’s ‘prevailing ethos’ is ‘more positive and constructive than critical or negative’ (2010: 8). However, new feminist materialists are not alone in interrogating the very conditions of hermeneutical inquiry in this way. Since the late 1990s, feminist, queer and literary studies have raised concerns about the epistemological orientation towards critique. In these discussions, which have circulated widely in Anglo-American and European intellectual spaces, most take critique to imply ‘a tacit presumption of reason’s capacity to unveil error’ (Brown, 2009: 9). Already in 1990, Elizabeth Grosz explained that:

Feminist theory must always function in two directions if it is to effectively challenge patriarchal knowledges … if it remains simply reactive, simply a critique, it ultimately affirms the theories it wishes to move beyond. It necessarily remains on the ground it aims to contest … Thus coupled with this negative project, or rather, indistinguishable from it, must be a positive, constructive project: creating alternatives, producing feminist not simply anti-sexist, theory (1990: 59).

Similarly, some new feminist materialists call for a better ‘dosage’ of different modes of critique (MacLure, 2015: 103), others for ‘a combined gesture of critical resistance and affirmative renewal’ (Lykke, 2019: 110) or for ‘detecting inequalities, asymmetries’ and (emphasis ours) doing ‘the work of envisioning transformation’ (Thiele, 2017: 26) (emphasis in original). This is also the case when we look at Barad and Sedgwick. Both recognise that paranoid and reparative modes as well as critique and affirmation may be imbricated. However, we argue that their analyses have often been understood (and translated) as calling for an affirmative reparative orientation that must replace negative paranoid modes. What Anu Koivunen has noted in terms of feminist affect theory also holds true for new feminist materialisms: namely, that such claims have led to a descriptive and prescriptive binary opposition of two opposing feminist camps. Koivunen explains that two ‘new caricatures of feminist scholars’ have emerged ‘at least implicitly and metaphorically’: ‘those for joy, those for melancholy; those for life, those for death; those for reparative criticisms, those constrained by paranoia’ (2010: 23). It is true that discussions are more nuanced than oft-cited caricatures evoke. Nonetheless, the characterisation of certain modes of theory and politics as mostly ‘positive’ and more productive than other more ‘negative’ ones lingers in these diagnoses.

Many of these arguments explicitly problematise both the negatively-charged affective dimension of and the negation in the work of critique as symptomatic of its ineffectual and outdated orientation. While some borrow from Sedgwick in opposing paranoid and reparative reading, others call for criticality or criticism instead of critique, and some pit negative against affirmative critique. Many suggest moving beyond critique since, for them, critique appears to be more destructive than productive. According to Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, new materialists produce ‘visionary’ and ‘creative alternatives to critique’ (2012: 14). Other scholars who are also attuned to matter have called for affirmation or affirmative critique and a more generative and careful mode of critical engagement. Affirmative ways of doing critique are ‘techniques which embrace their own inventiveness and are not afraid to own up to the fact that they add (if so meagerly) to reality’ (Massumi, 2002: 12f). This mode of affirmation should then direct us beyond false alternatives, beyond good and bad, optimistic and pessimistic, and stress instead the ‘power of becoming’ (Manning, 2016: 229). Moreover, as Erin Manning writes, affirmation and negation invoke entirely different logics. While ‘Negation … travels a closed circle predictable in its choreography’, ‘(a)ffirmation creates the trajectory, and from there the potential of the what else emerges (Manning, 2016: 203).

Strikingly, scholars on matter and materialities have not been alone in emphasising the ‘chronic negativity of critique’ (Anker and Felski, 2017: 11). The emergence of new feminist materialism has overlapped with an insistent interrogation of the nature and mode of critique in the humanities. This is more than temporal coincidence. There is a kinship between new feminist materialist claims and calls to undo the hegemony of (‘conventional’) critique and a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, which have structured a constellation of theoretical conversations over the last two decades. ‘Critiques of critique’ (Barnwell, 2015: 907) hold that it is exhausted and fails as a diagnosis of the present as well as a hermeneutics. For instance, one of the most widely quoted critiques of critique is Bruno Latour (2004), who, some years after Sedgwick, provocatively asked, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?’. These positions point to the political impasse that critique has failed to undo, subvert or challenge. Yet, in the insistent and strenuous arguments for the ‘abandonment’ of or moving beyond ‘conventional’ or negative and towards affirmative critique, much of this scholarship produces a particular obsession with critique. This obsession haunts many of these feminist arguments (even as they deploy different forms of critical habits).

These analyses take critique to task because they argue that its hegemony relies on the troubling fact that, as Rita Felski writes, ‘Suspicion sustains and reproduces itself in a reflexive distrust of common knowledge’ (2009: 29). They also echo Sedgwick and Barad. They associate the exhaustion of critique to a refusal of ‘bad’ or ‘negative’ feelings that accompany it. For Felski, ‘Becoming a critical reader means moving from attachment to detachment and indeed to disenchantment, undergoing not just an intellectual but also a sentimental education’ (2009: 30). Because ‘critique can encourage a paranoid vision’ (Anker and Felski, 2017: 15), it thereby forecloses an emancipatory politics. According to Felski and others, critical theories rely almost one-sidedly on negative and destructive critique as the response to political despair. Why such an obsession with critique? Why this insistence upon and use of the grammar of ‘bad’ or ‘negative’ feelings as symptoms of its alleged exhaustion? Are calls for moving beyond critique not, in themselves, political responses to a historical impasse that requires different forms of thinking? And what does that mean for feminist politics? What does this manifesto-like epistemological ‘call for action’ (White, 2007: 220) leave unavowed in its turn away from and beyond critique?

Arguments against the work of (‘conventional’) critique demand that we problematise what is imagined to offer a way out of our current historically-situated political impasse. As Heather Love emphasises, we must examine ‘the methodological claims and affective appeal of the turn away from critique’ (2010: 238) that these theoretical pronouncements call for. The narrative of moving beyond critique (and, with it, paranoia) risks ignoring the work of attending to power and difference for imagining the world otherwise. It also implies overlooking the complicated ways in which (‘conventional’) critique may still be useful for the acknowledging and undoing of power relations. Such narrative reproduces binaries in our feminist story-telling that guard against the spectre of belatedness that always haunts feminist theory (Ngai, 2005; Hemmings, 2011). It opposes the hopefulness of realism to the despair of suspicion, thus writing out affective and material(ised) histories of violence and how these shape or haunt the historical present. As Lauren Berlant points out, it risks ‘idealizing’ a new form of hermeneutics that promises ‘repair’ in the face of ‘ongoing crisis and loss’ (2011: 123–124, 5). Moreover, the longing for the transformative force and potentiality of matter embodies a familiar attachment, that is the promise ‘that if only we find the right discourse, object of study, or analytic tool, our critical practice will be adequate to the political commitments that inspire it’ (Wiegman, 2012: 3; see also Zerilli, 2017: 597).

Claims to temporal overcoming of antiquated analytical modes rely on narratives of ‘progress’ that seek to restore what has been ‘lost’ – for new feminist materialists, an emphasis on language, discourse and (supposedly merely negative) critique must be jettisoned if we are to propose a more ‘productive’ politics that relates to the world differently (Hemmings, 2011: 61, 64–65). They require a certain amnesia (of other feminist genealogies) where ‘disagreements are cast as part of the march of time rather than spatially enacted’ (Hemmings, 2011: 230). Critique has been crucial in feminist theory and earlier feminist materialism that borrowed from and reworked historical materialism and Marxist thought (Combahee River Collective, [1978] 1997; Davis, 1983; Fraser, 1985; Guillaumin, 1992). Ignoring, and sometimes even erasing, some of these feminist genealogies and their archives risks making invisible some power relations as well as the history of (feminist, antiracist and anticapitalist) political struggles and the political and theoretical effects these struggles have had.

These narratives – going beyond ‘conventional’ critique while emphasising affirmation, active force and futurity – contribute to the unintended erasure of engagement with the materiality of historically specific power relations and its very concrete material effects. This particular forgetting may speak to some of what is lost when the political is understood to be related only to culture, language and the social as opposed to matter and ontology (Ahmed, 2008: 32–36). But this amnesia must be interrogated since it has taken place within the context of ‘femonationalism’ and the appropriation of feminist rhetoric by reactionary, ‘liberal’, ‘nationalist’ and ‘far-right’ political ideologies (Farris, 2017). The context of (hetero-)sexist, racist and nationalist politics makes the work of the intersectional interrogation of power an especially urgent task and sheds a different light on new feminist materialist politics of matters of critique.

One particularly striking embodiment of this amnesia and silence has been in discussions of race – a question that has only slowly emerged in new feminist materialist discussions despite the call by some to rethink the materiality of race (Saldanha, 2006; Hames-García, 2008) and recognise its importance (Irni, 2013; Hinton and Liu, 2015; Hinton et al., 2015). Recent scholarship in critical race and Black studies has focused on problematising ‘flesh’ and offering a ‘materialist reconceptualizing of suffering’ (Weheliye, 2014: 14). Engagements with the question of race, violence and bodies have long shaped the theoretical orientation of feminist and critical race scholars, who have shown that, already, ‘affect, gesture, and a vulnerability to violence constituted blackness’ during the era of American slavery and have endured since (Hartman, 1997: 26). More recently, scholars have argued that, to think of the materiality of race, we must first denaturalise and problematise the very categories and ‘genres of the human’ at the heart of epistemological categories (Weheliye, 2014: 14, 2). Taking his cue from Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the idea of ‘Man’, Alexander Weheliye asks what it means to think about the posthuman, animal studies, the world of neurobiology or quantum physics when some have never been even accorded existence within the category of ‘human’. Like Barad, Black feminist theorist Michelle Wright has turned to quantum physics. She does so, however, not to reclaim the agency of matter but to complicate the ways in which (human and nonhuman) matter is given meaning in order to reflect on the ‘phenomenology of Blackness’ (Wright, 2015: 4). She insists especially on the historicity and situatedness of matter and lived flesh. Weheliye’s and Wright’s diagnoses rely on critical genealogies in order to reinvest projects that are explicitly emancipatory and political.

Yet, these questions do not figure at the heart of new feminist materialist theorising. While Barad explains that her theory of agential realism ‘takes feminist, antiracist, poststructuralist, queer, Marxist, science studies, and scientific insights’ seriously (2003: 810f), not all these objects and frameworks make their way into a new feminist materialist analysis and diagnosis. Although Barad emphasises that the quantum is both queer (2011) and ‘racialised’ (2018), these commitments – however important – remain ‘political investments’ (2015: 388) rather than concrete analyses and interventions on how to rethink the complex materiality of a politics of transformation. While commitments to transmaterialities, colonialism or racism have, especially recently, informed her inquiry and objects (Barad, 2015, 2017, 2019), one wonders whether they, in turn, do the work of material creative intervention that Barad (2019) calls for. Likewise, Jasbir Puar has argued that new feminist materialist thought (as well as ‘posthumanism’ and ‘object-oriented ontology’) too often relies on ‘unraced genealogies’ that offer ‘deracinated and desexualized notions of vibrancy and agency’ (2017: 25f).

New materialist critiques of the hegemony of the human as epistemological and ontological category often rely on unquestioned assumptions regarding who and what constitutes an object. Even though theses critiques are compelling in their emphasis that another world is possible, too often they appear to lose sight of the complexity of the here and now, institutional forms of power and violence, as well as the fact that a different world is not possible for everybody in the same way. As Sari Irni explains, while ‘race “sticks” to the materiality of materialist feminism’, it ‘tends to be left out of the sphere of the presumably new and exciting material feminisms’ (2013: 347). This points to a glaring aporia within new feminist materialist critiques, namely a theoretical orientation that resists engaging with ‘the counter-hegemonic contributions of post-colonial and [critical race] feminist theories’ (Hemmings, 2005: 548). Moreover, as Hinton and Liu (2015) have argued, the turn away from critique embedded in some materialist claims erases the complexity of modes of difference and ontological effects that thinking about race demands. This aporia cannot be rectified by merely adding the question of race to new feminist materialist thought, but demands interrogating what gets lost when such engagements do not happen (Lykke, 2010). If we understand the political to embody productive force and the organisation of power and its production and material effects, a new feminist materialism absorbed by a merely positive and ontological orientation may indeed yield a politics without politics. To avoid producing a ‘white episteme’ (Hinton and Liu, 2015: 130, 142, fn. 4), it is necessary to question and reconceptualise our assumptions regarding the categories of matter, materiality and humanness.

Reconfiguring the political and feminist longings

Some critical race, post-colonial and disability studies scholarship has recently theorised the political stakes of such reimagining of matter, language and the body, and has revealed the effects of ‘sorting the world into hierarchies of life’ (Cohen, 2015: 159). Mel Chen (2012), for instance, has offered a theorisation of ‘biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect’ that points to the risks of ‘investing in notions of vibrant matter without’ paying attention to the ‘material conditions of its production’ (Puar, 2017: 26). Chen works within queer feminist materialist thought to suggest the framework of ‘animacy’, namely a ‘specific kind of material and affective construct that is not only nonneutral in relation to animals, humans, and living and dead things, but is shaped by race and sexuality, mapping various biopolitical realizations of animacy in the contemporary culture of the United States’ (2012: 5). Chen brings together discourse and matter by scrutinising how different materialities, such as heavy metal lead, become powerful within public discourses, political institutions and everyday practices, which reflect as well as enact existing relations of inequality, through racialising, nationalising and heteronormative modes of power. For Chen, materialities are agentive because they produce specific risks, create specific bodies and animate inanimate objects, things and spaces. But they are also socially and politically mediated. However, while different matters beyond the human occupy a specific place in Chen’s concept of animacy, this is always also a deeply human question. Animacy, Chen claims, ‘is political, shaped by what or who counts as human, and what or who does not’ (2012: 30).

And what of feminist impulses that do not wish to relinquish the work of critique and its orientation to emancipation as world-building practice (Schafer, 2012)? How might we productively mine the thought-provoking insights of new feminist materialisms in terms of reconfiguring the political without abandoning critique? How might we think together the ‘complicated’ matters of ‘negative’ and ‘affirmative critiques’ (Sonderegger, 2012: 260)? We do not propose to find a ‘middle ground’ that might blend feminist materialist insights with a politically urgent form of critique. Still, despite its own problematic Western colonial genealogy (Spivak, 1999), critique may not be as exhausted as many claim: it still requires the kind of uncomfortable and ambivalent work that does not offer closure or a readily accessible politics. As Joan W. Scott has explained, ‘There is no question that critique is uncomfortable’ (2007: 31) because it neither ‘justif[es]’ nor ‘discredits’ (2007: 35; see also Fassin, 2011). By making us uncomfortable, critique contains within itself a transformative orientation.

Critique is neither negative nor positive. As many have already said elsewhere, it has a long genealogy and has taken many forms: Judith Butler, for instance, has called for establishing ‘critique as the very practice that exposes the limits of that epistemological horizon itself, making the contours of that horizon appear, as it were … in relation to its own limit’ (2003: 8). Critique always already entails an imaginary of the elsewhere and otherwise, but an imaginary that does not presume its outcome, end or project. As Michel Foucault put it, it works as the ‘criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination’ that might bring about the ‘lightning of possible storms’ (1980: 323). Critique embodies an understanding of politics, which, according to Rosemary Hennessy, ‘is never how to make our conception of it accord with reality alone, but rather how to inhabit the relationship to fantasy that political struggle inevitably reveals’ (2013: 209). Critique implies both a political vision and a critique of prevailing conditions and structural constraints without being a ‘prescriptive politics’ (Connolly, 2017: 4). Critique, as such, seeks not only to erase what it purports to undo, but to allow for different modes of political imaginaries to emerge. At the same time, new feminist materialists’ ‘longing for agency’ (Bargetz, 2019) does not merely entail the claim for affirmation and reparation. It is also a sign of dissatisfaction with the historical present and consequently a critical intervention into the here and now. This understanding requires us to move beyond a merely reparative or optimistic view and, instead, attend to the (utopian) ambivalences of critique. Since these desires for ‘better worlds’ always also remain ‘the desire of a specific (human) subject’ (Meißner, 2016: 15), should we not pursue and embrace ‘critical sensibilities’ and their subjects?

The work of critical imaginaries and their ambivalences is also the work of refusal and of anger, modes that sustain their capacity for interruption and insurgency into the political. Certainly, anger and rage are familiar feminist affects and orientations that have sustained political and epistemological work with ‘transformative power’ (Stryker, 1994: 249; Barad, 2015). As Audre Lorde (1981) summed it up many years earlier, anger suggests more than a politics of suspicion and blame. Anger and rage ‘can transform differences through insight into power’ (Lorde, 1981: 9). These ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai, 2005) retain within them the productive and generative capacity of recognition and relationality. The work of critique therefore also invokes anger as its animating affective orientation. By addressing relations of power and inequality, anger acts as a connective force for the interruption of the common sense and can foster political change. Anger is not inherently moral or political but, as the diagnosis and articulation of an impasse, it is transformative, an insistent demand for a remapping of the political. As such, rage and anger allow for the conceptual work of critique that is important to any feminist and theoretical work and that, in the words of Christina Sharpe, ‘may have enough capaciousness to travel and do work that’ has not yet ‘been imagine[d] or anticipate[d]’ (2016: 22). This is the work of critical imaginaries that begins from an interrogation and interruption of power relations and of the material(ised) structuring of inequality as a way to reconfigure the political.

Supplemental Material

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Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Brigitte Bargetz

Sandrine Sanos

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