Assignment #4, Susan S. 2.
“The ‘I’ of new materialism is no longer the sovereign human subject, but is conceived of as a material-semiotic actor, an articulation that, according to Donna Haraway (1991) encompasses the human and the non-human, the social and physical, and the material and immaterial.”
Bolt, “Introduction: Toward a ‘New Materialism through the Arts’” Carnal Knowledge (3)
This quote by Barbara Bolt appears on the third page of her introduction to her anthology of interdisciplinary investigations of “new materialism” by international artists and scholars who work “between a posthumanist neo-materialism and a corporeal materialism” (13). Bolt begins her introduction by differentiating the special place of the Epicurean focus on matter in contrast to the predominant emphases of Western thought that fed humanism. She positions the statement quoted above immediately following a citation of Iris van der Tuin about “dealing with agential matter rather than (gendered) passive matter” (3). In the paragraph that follows, Bolt describes how feminist materialism reacted against social constructivism, before she segues into some historical background of the influence of cultural theory upon the arts in her next paragraph. She uses this information to give context for why artists would identify as part of the material turn and to justify why she discusses these ideas in the introduction to her anthology. Afterwards, Bolt spends the remainder of her introduction breaking down the contents of the book into summaries of the essays, categorized by topic.