Modes of Mattering: Barad, Whitehead, and Societies

Abstract

What does a commitment to relationality require of practices of knowledge- and world- making? By providing a constructive criticism of Karen Barad’s general assertion that ‘relata do not preexist relations’, in this paper I explore the ethical and methodological implications and demands of relational forms of thought and knowledge in relation to enduring creatures, or what Alfred North Whitehead calls ‘societies’. I argue that instead of treating relationality as a matter of general principles and assertions, we should approach it technically and carefully, as a question to which each practice has to find its own mode of response, for which each practice has to learn how to become responsible. In other words, this involves attending not only to different, situated processes of mattering, but to the modes of mattering through which different societies come into existence.