Hey – I’ve just been trying to get my head around New Materialism. I’m pretty sure the spot where I’ve ended up is not what where’d I thought it would take me. Namely – the Double Slit Experiment and the impact on materialism, solipsism and theism. Prior to that was a talk on the Internet of Things
The metaphor of the clay and the sculptor was very useful. The provocation that material objects have agency other than that which is socially defined and layered on them was challenging. This is because I’m conflating the notions of volition and agency.
Do artifacts embedded in a learning ecology do more than afford agency – do they possess independent agency? Is this even possible outside a socially constructed structure? Does the ‘thingyness’ of a thing objectively and exclusively reside in the space of all its possibilities? Like the bull seal with its harem, it’s very presence discounts the possibility of others being in that space. What does this mean for materialism – where both the possibility for materiality and the phenomena of materiality occur in the same geography. None the less the possibility for materiality (expressed as the wave form in the slit experiment) is expressed through Einsteins’ Spooky Action at a Distance.
Okay – so what?
Does this mean we can look at objects in the learning ecology that afford agency as possessing qualities that are unrepresented – a cosmological homunculus winking back at us when we cast our gaze on the molecular environment.
Well, I’ve just read back over that and it makes no sense to me at all! What I think I’m trying ask is this: Do we have to engage with ‘things’ from more than an ‘andro-colonialism’ perspective where we co opt things in our lived ecologies into the ‘human project’.