introduction: Objects, Environments and Materials

Abstract

The imedia industry is making up stories about the world that theorists of imedia (or what is left of what Jodi Dean refers to as the ‘academic and typing left’ [2009:4]) are in danger of being complicit with. How so? I argue that there is currently too much emphasis on what is, or is to come and on the failure or irrelevance of critique as something negative, uncreative and unworldly. In place of critique, there is a tendency to affirm and celebrate the existence of objects, environments and materials in themselves; to elide writing and other forms of mediation and to engage in disembodied knowledge practices. Disembodied knowledge practices tend toward both scientism (including physics envy) and masculinism. It transpires that there is no ‘we’ in t(he)ory¹. Where there is some degree of convergence, some compatibility between masculinist and feminist thinking about objects, environments and materials, there is also divergence, conflict and the possible opening toward a politics of imedia. For me, this possibility hinges on the antagonism between a Harmanesque speculative realism and Harawayesque speculative fabulation/fiction/feminism and also on the non-dialectical relation of structure and scale, objects and relations, epistemology and ontology (2010; 2011).