Revisiting Matters Cryptography in the Atmosphere of (Post-Cyber-)Feminist Technosciences

• In Event: States of Matter/Matters of State: Amphibious Scholars in Technoscientific Space

Abstract

Feminist STS is working with “material conditions”, “material states” or “material practice” while claiming to intertwine (critical or post-)humanities with sciences. Through a genealogy that explores the development of “matter” in the works of Vicky Kirby who provides a “corporeography” of matter and Elizabeth Grosz who gives a “new idealist” account of mind and form, I want to examine the role of language(s) in the atmosphere of neomaterialist (post-cyber-)feminist technosciences. There is very diverse knowledge about “matter/ materialization/ mattering” that is circulating internationally in scholarship, and it is not yet systematized what it means to say “matter.” Since the very first ages of philosophy “matter” was conceptualized and re-conceptualized in manifold manners, the lately performed “material turn” claims to give it another try. Driving from the heritage of (largely Australian) feminist theory, neomaterialist concepts of matter mutate and transform older views of matter especially from Europe that are determined by division and difference, binaries and dichotomies. As a traveling concept in the STS, matter is theorized as spectra of processes and dynamisms that are expressed within different forms of decentralizations, digital and physical relational entanglements that aim to free knowledge production from hegemony, gender, essentialism and anthropocentrism. But it is also worth looking at the mediative role of the investigative apparatus – language(s)/ cryptography/ incorporeality – STS is operating with to restock neomaterialist feminist technoscientific enquiry.

Author

• Anastassija Kostan, University of Mainz/ University of Frankfurt Germany