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The Living Present as a Materialist Feminist

TemporalityRachel Loewen Walker

Published online: 09 May 2014.

To cite this article: Rachel Loewen Walker (2014) The Living Present as a Materialist Feminist Temporality,Women: A Cultural Review, 25:1, 46-61, DOI: 10.1080/09574042.2014.901107

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The Living Present asa Materialist FeministTemporality

Abstract: Bringing together the work of Barad and Deleuze, this article develops theconcept of the living present as a frame for an emerging feminist temporality. Within feminist and queer theories, there has been much discussion of the value of non-

chronological time in opening up a transformative and unknown future. The author expands on this arena by discussing not only the future, but also the echoes, resonancesand traces of the past —a past whose material effects continue to act as living,changing forces on the present and the future. Described as the present of retentionand expectation, the living present is never a static ‘now’ , but always a stretching between past and future as it contracts all past experiences and expects those yet tocome. As it builds on the work of Grosz, Colebrook and others, the living present encourages non-linear, open-ended readings of past events, and therefore represents anew lens through which to approach documented and assumed histories. By opening up collaborative lines of flight between new materialism, Deleuze and feminism,the thick time of the living present reveals a past of forceful, intra-active materialities.

It is a realm of possibility to which one is accountable, but not bound. Keywords: feminist materialism, temporality, living present, Barad, Deleuze

Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was (Winterson2009: 119, 207)

J EANETTE

Winterson’s The Stone Gods tells the stories of Billie (Homosapiens) and Spike (Robo sapiens), two lovers who blur the boundariesbetween human and non-human, organism and machine, across varyingtemporal sites. Moving through (and back in) time, Winterson’s tale foldsin on itself; time repeats and rewinds, love echoes through technology andorganism, and cause and effect become the ever more distant relatives of possibility and production. The novel’s tone is apocalyptic as each of its

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three vignettes explores the theme of environmental destruction: the firstand third through an imaginative future where humankind has exhaustedthe earth’s resources and has resorted to other means of consumption andcontrol, and the second by travelling back in time to 1774 where Billy andSpikkers are placed in the middle of man’ s takeover and destruction of thelush, balanced ecosystem of Easter Island.1 But there is a sense in whichWinterson is less concerned with a present ‘moment’ of global crisis thanwith re-imagining the stories we tell ourselves about what constitutes thepast, what counts as progress and what ‘humanity’ means in relation to anelongated temporality of earth’s existence, one where the ‘time’ of humanbeings becomes just one ‘moment’ among others. Displacing the reader’sreliance on a linear narrative, The Stone Gods winds through time; it isself-referential, it trips over itself and, at any given moment, it could berevealed that what we think is the future is actually the past (or thepresent, or an alternate timeline altogether).

I begin with The Stone Gods because it expresses two phenomenaloperations that form the touchstones of this article: the co-creativerelationship between meaning and materiality, and the becoming of time.Although there are multiple overlaps between these processes, the firstdraws from new and critical feminist materialisms,2 while the second buildson Gilles Deleuze’s (with Bergson) philosophy of duration, becoming andthe living present . It is in the collaborative contact zones between theseprocesses that we find sites of possibility for feminist projects, as the livingpresent re-imagines our reliance on linear, chronological time, offeringinstead a dynamic engagement with temporality, one where the past is

continually re-imagined in its present invocations. The metaphysicalimplications of such a move lie in its recognition that a living present isalways a live present: it is an enactment of the processes of growth, change,movement and touch that characterize not only our human bodies, butbodies of water, insect bodies, and the systems of a city as it breathes itsworkers in and out from dawn until dusk and beyond. Each of theseprocesses is temporal not in its adherence to an externally imposedtimeline, but to its own making of time as the becoming of materiality.

Building on this, I develop the concept of a living present as a framefor an emerging feminist temporality. Relying on Karen Barad’s (2007)

concept of intra-active becoming as indicative of a collaborative,productive and open-ended relationship between time and matter, Ilook at the consequences of such an approach in relation to feministand queer theorizing. There has been much discussion of the value of non-chronological time in opening up a transformative and unknown future—for example, Elizabeth Grosz has long argued that the potentialities of feminist politics hinge on the fact that ‘beings are impelled forward to a

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future that is unknowable, and relatively uncontained by the past’ (Grosz2005: 29). Although I support the optimism of such sentiments, I arguehere that what is missing from this arena is a more developed discussion of the past—a past whose material effects continue to act as living, changingforces on the present and the future. I therefore explore the becoming of the past through Deleuze’s living present—an enfolding of past, presentand future (Deleuze 1994). Described as the present of retention andexpectation, the living present is never a static ‘now’, but always astretching between past and future as it contracts all past experiences andexpects those yet to come. As it builds on the work of Grosz, ClaireColebrook and other scholars working on feminist temporalities (Coleb-rook, 2009; Grosz 2004, 2005), the living present encourages non-linear,open-ended readings of past events, and therefore represents a new lensthrough which to approach our documented and assumed histories,including our feminist histories. For, in fact, I understand one of the

radical potentials of new materialism as primarily a philosophy of time,one which illustrates the absolute possibility of any given moment whenconceived as a living present. Through this framing, we can then rereadGrosz’s above-indicated claim, recognizing that a future uncontained bythe past is not a future without a past , but rather a thick time of the presentthat stretches to all past experiences in its very engendering of a novel future.

Matters of Life

New materialist scholars contend that post-structuralist theories of language and discourse have neglected to attend to the role of matter inour epistemological, ontological and ethical projects (see Barad 2006;Hekman 2010; Kirby 2011; van der Tuin 2011a). Now, post-structuralismhas been invaluable as a means of destabilizing binarized biologies of gender, sexuality, race and ability (Where would we be without Butler’s‘ In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself — as well as its contingency’ or Derrida’s ‘there is nothing outside of thetext’ [Butler 1990: 175, original emphasis; Derrida 1984: 158]?), but it hasalso meant that feminist theory has retained a deep mistrust of the body—‘adenial of the materiality of the bodily self’ (Braidotti 2000: 160).3

Consequently, our familiar categories of gender, sexuality, race, class andability, and others, often persist as neat sign systems that are unable totranscend their structuralist legacies (see Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2011).Within such a framing, then, the structural force of the ‘sign’ as only thereferent to an inaccessible ‘real’ leaves us unable to recognize the affectiveforce of the material .4 Instead, new materialisms point towards a radicalimmanence: ‘there is no inside/outside, no origin and end, no gap between

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sign/structure/language and reference/nature/matter’ (van der Tuin2011b: 288). Such projects work to begin at the ‘real’ or the full presenceof the material (sexing/gendering body), exploring the effects we have onthose things (whether people, plants, highways or animals) around us and,

concurrently, the effects that such ‘things’ have on us. By collapsing thebinary between the real and the representational, ‘life itself’ becomes theaffective capacity of matter , where ‘life’ is neither material nor immaterial,neither organic nor inorganic, neither actual nor virtual, but instead aspatio-temporal relationality that constitutes singularities and meaningthrough the dynamism of an intra-active becoming .

Enlisting her background in theoretical physics, Barad uses ‘intra-activity’ to refer to a cardinal relationship between entities, wherebyindividual entities cannot be said to exist as things in themselves, but areinstead understood as relational phenomena. By phenomena, Barad divergesfrom common uses of the term within philosophy and instead relies on thework of physicist and philosopher Niels Bohr. Bohr describes phenomenaas the ‘ontological inseparability of objects and apparatuses’ (quoted inBarad 2006: 128), where apparatuses are externally imposed cuts, boundar-ies and structures that themselves act as material configurations of meaning.Individual entities—matter, human, non-human, discourse, nature andculture—then, only find meaning or expression through their co-creativeconnections and entanglements with other entities. As the process bywhich this activity occurs, intra-action is to be distinguished from‘interaction’, such that the latter refers to the interactions of individualagencies (still interconnected but distinct), while the former looks at the

ways in which these distinct agencies are themselves formed through theirengagement. Intra-activity indicates that meaningful units of analysis are nolonger ‘the table’, ‘the molecule’ or ‘the human’, but rather the construc-tion (or meaning-imbuing) of the table as a surface on which to place one’swork. More importantly, this event of table-making is not merely aproduct of my placing things on the table, but instead the differentiatinginstant of my and the table’s co-creation of the experience, such that‘determinate entities emerge from their intra-action’ (Barad 2006: 128).

The accompanying concept of becoming is no stranger to feministprojects, as it has been used to destabilize normative categories of

identity (for example, illustrating that identities such as ‘heterosexual’or even ‘homosexual’ are stagnant and fixed, therefore limiting theproductive uptake of diverse sexual subjectivities). Such a proliferationof identities and movements places an emphasis not on coherence,sameness or self, but on difference—an ontology not of being per se, butof being in process. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze illustrates thephenomenon of ‘becoming’ by reference to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in



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Wonderland . When Alice first falls down the rabbit hole and ispresented with the dilemma of fitting her body through a doorwaythat is half her size, she drinks a bottle of liquid which shrinks herdown to the door, only to realize that she is now too small to reach thekey, which she has left on the table above. Alice then eats a piece of cake, which shoots her up to the ceiling, turning not only the door, butalso the table and key into tiny fixtures below. With regard to Alice’schange in size, Deleuze draws attention to the way we often try tounderstand such events as having happened in time, such that when onesays ‘Alice becomes larger’, one means that ‘she is larger now; she wassmaller before’ (Deleuze 1990: 3). We identify Alice as huge and Aliceas tiny as distinct events taking place in static time. When thinking interms of becoming , however, we must refrain from thinking accordingto distinct events, for becoming ‘does not tolerate the separation or thedistinction of before and after, or of past and future’ (Deleuze 1990: 3).

Becoming eludes the present moment; Alice becomes larger than shewas at the same time as she is smaller than she becomes.

In effect, the process of becoming means to move in both directions atone: ‘Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa’ (Deleuze1990: 3). Furthermore, her becoming taller and becoming smaller donot occur in abstraction from the food and drink that accompanyher change—much less the table, key and doorway which are themselvesbecoming smaller/larger along with Alice. In this sense, becomingconstitutes more than an (anti-)identity claim; it expresses a temporality,a movement of an intra-active becoming , whereby rather than thinking

about time as a chronological counting of moments—sets of befores andafters that are progressively directed towards a future—an intra-activebecoming illustrates that time is a durational succession of changewhich apprehends any distinct ‘moment’ or ‘present’ as a becomingthat is co-determinate with a live temporal frame. In this way, Barad’sidiomatic quote that ‘matter comes to matter through the iterative intra-activity of the world in its becoming’ illustrates that materiality andtemporality are inextricable (Barad 2003: 823, original emphasis); ourcomprehension of materiality itself—take Alice’s key, for example—ismade possible by a memory of the function a key serves, as well as the

anticipation of a future where its use satisfies Alice’s present desire tomove her body through a doorway.

Rethinking Time as Progress

Such an operation of time contrasts with traditional views of time aschronos: a chronological before and after that we can bind together



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through interpretations of cause and effect. This method orients itself towards a set of goals that will remedy the travesties of the past and, in sodoing, it remains fixated on the anticipation of a superior future.Discussing this future-oriented politics of temporality, Vincanne Adams,

Michelle Murphy and Adele E. Clarke note the affective power of ‘anticipation’ in maintaining such a perspective, describing it as ‘a regimeof being in time, in which one inhabits time out of place as the future’(Adams et al. 2009: 247). Alice shrinks so that she can get through the door (and yet no one thought to wonder whether or not the door grew so that shemay step through) . Although the authors are not entirely critical of thefunction of ‘anticipation’, they raise concern about the ways such a focuscan form a totalizing orientation. For example, modes of ‘preparing for’or ‘speculating upon’ future events, whether in the realm of tech-noscience, biomedicine or environmentalism, have the effect of bringingfuture events (and disasters) into the frame of the present moment. In thisway, Adams et al. write, ‘the future increasingly not only defines thepresent but also creates material trajectories of life that unfold asanticipated by those speculative processes’ (Adams et al. 2009: 248, originalemphasis). Take, for example, the discourse surrounding new reproduct-ive technologies. In ‘Disciplining Mothers: Feminism and the NewReproductive Technologies’, Jana Sawicki writes that while fertilitytreatments, surrogacy and genetic developments respond to infertility inincreasingly adept and effective ways, there is a faction of the discoursethat relies on the image of a future where there is no infertility as justification for procedures in the present. The result is that medical

models and norms ‘isolate types of abnormality or deviancy, while[constructing] new norms of healthy and responsible motherhood’(Sawicki 1999: 194). Sawicki’s observation that medical solutions tofertility issues will become the only methods of response, while otherapproaches will be ignored, illustrates the ways in which an anticipatedfuture where new reproductive technologies are considered de factovaluable ends up working ‘as if the virtues of movement into valuedfutures are already known’ (Adams et al. 2009: 251).

Wendy Brown likens this uncritical acceptance of the virtuousmovement into the future to modernity’s progress narratives: ‘The

conviction that history has reason, purpose, and direction’ (Brown 2001:5). Through its description as having emerged in inegalitarian, unen-lightened times, ‘modernity’ embodies the movement of continualprogress. Likewise, the thesis that ‘humanity is making steady, if unevenand ambivalent, progress toward greater freedom, equality, prosperity,rationality, or peace’ emerges as a condition for the possibility of contemporary human subjectivity (Brown 2001: 6). Folded through



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Sawicki’s critique of new reproductive technologies, this progress narrat-ive links with the logic of ‘consumerism and commodification by incitingthe desire for “better babies”’ (Sawicki 1999: 194). The result is that suchtechnologies are fundamentally perceived as enabling, as themselves better ,

more productive and as indicative of technological progress. Furthermore,by locating the problem of infertility largely within women’s bodies, thediscourse around new reproductive technologies replicates neoliberalconstructions of time as a linear and cumulative movement forward . Theresult is that we remain fixated on human agency as the sole means bywhich we can bring about the anticipated future.

The force of the neoliberal progress narrative has also been criticallytaken up within queer theory, as Shannon Winnubst argues that it isprecisely a temporality of futurity that ‘anchors [a] contemporary politicsof normalization’ (Winnubst 2010: 138). By this she means that the socialand political forces of capitalism, whiteness, heteronormativity andnationalism are structured by their reliance on teleological progressnarratives which maintain our ‘unwitting obedience to the future’(Winnubst 2010: 138). To contrast this, there is a long history within queertheory of re-imagining temporality outside of a heteronormative future of childhood→ adulthood→marriage→ children→ death (see Ahmed 2006;Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005; Winnubst 2006). While this trajectorymay indicate the given course of development and growth for most, forqueer subjects, movement through time has often taken a different path.For example, Judith Halberstam’s ‘queer time’ explores the elongatedadolescence that queer persons may experience as she writes that: ‘in

Western cultures, we chart the emergence of the adult from the dangerousand unruly period of adolescence as a desired process of maturation; and wecreate longevity as the most desirable future’ (Halberstam 2005: 152).Halberstam questions these pre-existing chronologies of maturity bytracing the diversity and richness of queer subcultures, thus retelling andre-imagining the ‘time’ of a stretched-out adolescence, rather than thedirectedness towards a predetermined (heteronormative) future that casts aparticular net of maturity and expectation.5

Now, it is not ridiculous to hope for a future that is different, a futurewhere queer youth can attend high school without fear or where

reproductive technologies make it possible for two women to contributegenetic material to their shared child. Although there are problemswith the myth that we can progressively reach a particular space and timeof liberation and freedom, there is merit to the complexities of ‘hope-fulness’, ‘imagining the new’ and ‘wishful thinking’, which havebeen invaluable for feminist theorizing and political feminist projects(see Coleman and Ferreday 2010; McKenna 2001; de Pizan 1982).



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As Rebecca Coleman indicates, ‘hope’ operates as a potentiality, aninterpellation into a future that is within the present (Coleman 2013;Coleman and Ferreday 2010). At the same time, the very presence of hope reminds us that ‘feminist visions of the future have not been

realized in the present’ (Ahmed 2004: 187, my emphasis). I would arguethat materialist feminisms are deeply and productively infused with anoptimism that we are not doomed to live out the same injustices,discriminations and violences for all time, and yet they are notcircumscribed by expectations of what exactly a feminist future mightlook like. The temporality of hope is such that at the same time as itprojects us forward, it recognizes the ‘persistence of the past in thepresent’ (Ahmed 2004: 187), and, furthermore, its potentiality is one of inventiveness; in hoping for transformed futures, we, as feminists, areenacting such possibilities in the present (Coleman 2013). Thus, there is

‘hope’ in Barad’s call for ‘a different starting point, a differentmetaphysics’ (Barad 2003: 812), and a view of the future as an open-ended arena that holds possibilities for worlds, bodies and practicesbeyond what we can imagine in the present—as Grosz calls for inThe Nick of Time and Time Travels (Grosz 2004, 2005).

I also recognize that there are vast differences between the progressnarratives of modernity that shape popular discourse and the talk of futurity that characterizes feminist and new materialist scholarship.However, for the purposes of this discussion, I remain hesitant aboutan uncritical acceptance of such a politics. Like Brown and Sawicki, as

well as Adams, Murphy and Clarke above, I worry that by continuing tofocus so much on the future, even in its untimeliness and open-endedness,we may unwittingly subject ourselves to a paradigm in which therational, human subject remains at the helm of time’s passing. I wonderwhether, in lauding a politics based on random ruptures and chance, wesometimes forget the value of thinking the past. A materialist temporalityshifts the focus on an open-ended future, ever so slightly, to include theaffective power of the past and the present, or, rather, cueing Winterson’stime travellers Billie and Spike, we cannot think of their story as thecumulative journey of autonomous individuals to a future in which we

will finally access the knowledge needed to fix our past mistakes andrespond to our present environmental problems. The Stone Gods refuses toprovide a sequential tale of cause and effect, and instead skips around onitself; it reminds us that, by thinking in duration, we can never fullymark the future as future. In fact, there is a scene in the novel where Billiefinds the unfinished manuscript of The Stone Gods on the London Tube,presumably the copy that the reader is presently reading. She writes:



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I was traveling home on the Tube tonight and I noticed thatsomeone had left a pile of paper on the seat opposite … The StoneGods, said the title. OK, must be anthropology. Some thesis, somePhD. What’s that place with the statues? Easter Island? I flickedthrough it. No point starting at the beginning—nobody ever does.(Winterson 2009: 119)

The novel’s reflexivity ensures that the reader is never fully able todetermine the chronology of the narrative—a piece (or manuscript) isalways left behind.6 The three vignettes of the narrative could, in fact, beread in reverse, out of order or even horizontally, as if they are takingplace simultaneously in presents that could have been. In this way, thereader is compelled to let go of an expectation for a particular outcome.Each moment of the narrative becomes a living present, where time isstretched to include the effects of that which has not yet happened and to

re-imagine a past that has supposedly already been lost.

The Living Present

The value of the living present lies in its resistance to conceptions of thepresent as a fixed ‘now’. Instead, the time that we may experience as present is always a stretching between past and future, as it contracts thoseexperiences that contribute to the sense of the moment and expects thoseyet to come (Deleuze 1994). This means that the past and the future arealways dimensions of the present, and they operate on, with andalongside the present through the passive synthesis of habit. Movingbeyond the common understanding of habit as an acquired behaviourpattern, Deleuze 1994 describes it as the automated retention of pastexperiences and expectations of future outcomes that give meaning to thepresent: an adult hand reflexively pulls away from a hot surface, while achild reaches towards the stove, not yet having lived through the presentthat will add this experience to her plethora of habitual contractions.Habits constitute our expectation that a familiar song on the radio willcontinue and not end abruptly after the next note, therefore formingthe material of continuity. It is only because the present is living — a

contraction of past and future—that we experience a connection betweenone note and the next at all. We know that the melody follows acertain form and has a particular character to it, and so we are able todraw a connection between sounds which would otherwise be noise.

Now, Deleuzian habits must also be differentiated from com-mon human-centred understandings, as they do not refer to psycholo-gical processes that only take place in the human mind. Just as the



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preoccupation with human consciousness has tied us to modernist progressnarratives, our understandings of time have bound us to a metaphysics of counting, calculating and living ‘in’ a time which we apprehend throughhuman reason. Instead, all organisms and entities are made by passive

habits of contraction: ‘What we call wheat is a contraction of the earth andhumidity’ (Deleuze 1994: 75). The act of ‘contraction’ in such a process,then, indicates the synthesis that takes place in a living present that isthick with the past (Deleuze 1994: 70–1). It is through contraction thatwe intuit duration, or a whole universe which is relational and intensive,and what this indicates for us is that time itself is formed through thesepassive contractions of habit. Time neither pre-exists the contraction of the melody, as a timeline on which we find distinct notes, nor is it thecontainer in which a five-minute-long piece of music takes place; it ismade by the duration of the notes themselves (Williams 2011: 25). Wecould think of this in relation to a tree: a tree that ages, grows larger anddecays is not acted on by the passing of time, but rather making timethrough its movements and changes. In this way, matter itself is theforce of time’s passing and, consequently, ‘[w]e live as time makers’(Williams 2011: 37)—tables, chairs, animals and plants live as timemakers. Existence is predicated on the making of time, and each timemaker is part of a living present or an intra-active duration.

Feminist Re-imaginings

To think about a living present in relation to the projects of feministphilosophy is to develop a different sense of the ‘time’ of history. Ratherthan relying on chronology or the construction of a politics of thesubject formed around key dates and events which represent progressivestates of self-actualization, we are able to think such events ‘out of time’.Take, for example, the date that same-sex marriage was achieved inCanada: 20 July 2005. In such a chronological time, the past is onlyactual—‘only the set of archived and stored events that have occurredand been completed’ (Colebrook 2009: 12). So the passing of Bill C-38:The Civil Marriage Act constitutes a moment forever emblazoned in the

history of queer rights—the moment of emancipation. The problem withsuch a telling of history is that it aligns with the modernist progressnarrative identified above. Here we have a group fighting for their ‘rights’and ‘freedoms’, attaining them and then continuing to live on in afuture that has overcome the past. The past in this narrative is a static, actualevent, while the living present construes the past as intra-active—that is,as always already enfolded in the present.



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The ethical implications of such an enfolding are that the living presentintroduces a responsibility to the past in the present ‘not as a specificdemand from particular past commitments, but rather as an awarenessthat the present cannot absolve itself selectively of the past’ (Williams

2011: 18). So the present Canadian government cannot continue to use BillC-38 as the poster child for its tolerance while enacting human rightsviolations against transgender persons. Ahmed might call this the‘stickiness of the past’, such that historical harms live on not only in thebody of the individual, but in the ‘skin’ or the intergenerational affectivityof whole communities (Ahmed 2004: 33–4). To forget the past (and we areno strangers to such large-scale forgettings in the face of historical injustices),then, would be a ‘repetition of the violence or injury’ (Ahmed 2004: 33);our bodies, our communities and our ecologies remember these pasts. AsNoela Davis has recently demonstrated in relation to epigenetics, our verybodies are rich compositories of past experiences, and these experiencesserve as much more than haunting memories, but rather play out throughpatterns of illness and social behaviours (Davis 2013). Thus, if we focusonly on a future yet to come, we fail to see that there is still an infinitenumber of past experiences, habits and memories that enact our particularpresent. A homophobic slur could be examined according to its distinctspatio-temporal location: why did that word come from that individual atthis time? By asking questions about what wider materialities are at play inany event, we respond to the complexity of injustices, which can not onlybring about change for the better, but also reveal the assemblages of violence and negation, which are different every time.

A temporality of new materialism, or of thinking in duration, meansthat the past is always a haunting of the present: ‘each text, word, fragmentand image of the past … acts as an always present resistance (or insistence)to a simple moving forward’ (Colebrook 2009: 13). Just as we cannotexpect to jump up and run away the minute after we twist an ankle, wecannot erase a history of exclusion with the great big stroke of ‘legalizingsame-sex marriage in Canada’. Our pasts are remade in the present,through the anti-gay sermons of a Catholic priest and in the hetero-normativity that pervades the concept of marriage itself. The living presentis heavy with lineages that mimic, critique and undo our assumed histories,

and, rather than wiping away the past or seeking absolution for ouractions, we can embrace this thick temporality, recognizing its ability todeepen our accountabilities to those pasts and their possible futures. In thisway, such a focus becomes a necessary form of ethical engagement with theworld which begins not from the point of subject/object relations (orhuman/inhuman, nature/culture or cause/effect, for that matter), butfrom the position of being always already entangled in a vital materiality.



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So, to return to Bill C-38, 20 July 2005 need not stand in as the day of queer rights in Canada. Instead, it can be folded into the present rise inqueer teen suicides. How do we read the present politics of queer identityalongside the legislation of same-sex unions and the largely sanctionedbullying of queer youth? Just as Colebrook writes that ‘any feministclaim in our present is in harmony and dissonance with a choir of pastvoices’ (Colebrook 2009: 13–14), any instances of violence against queerpersons in the present echo a past (and a future) of violence anddiscrimination that continues to act. This method of reading producesnew futures at the same time as it produces new pasts, and furthermore itentails a more careful reading of the apparatuses of knowledge produc-tion that contribute to the organizing narratives of history. In fact, itmay lead us to interrogate (and forget) those identities, representationsand reflections that we cling to—the way that we call ‘marriage’ progressand the fact that we want ‘sameness’ in our rights and freedoms, without

questioning the complex materialities that mitigate these rights andfreedoms. The living present of a feminist politic is one where we canbring Sojourner Truth’s bold query—‘Ain’t I a Woman?’—to bear ontwenty-first-century identity politics, for it (re)creates a space where wecan question the effects of this category ‘woman’: the freedoms it affordsas well as the deeply drawn boundaries on which it relies.

Conclusion

I began this discussion with Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, a novelwhich creatively and pointedly looks at the relationships between human-kind and the earth in a variety of temporal zones. The central characters, Billieand Spike, are the star-crossed lovers who find each other across time,regardless of sex, gender and race (in two out of the three vignettes, Spike is aRobo sapiens), lending to the quasi-Nietzschean view that life is the eternalrecurrence of the same. However,as it plays out, Winterson adeptly illustratesnot the return of the same, but rather a temporality that is fundamentally oneof difference and repetition. History repeats itself in The Stone Gods, but eachrepetition differentiates the one that came before. As a result, the novel tells usthat we can never properly predict, speculate or anticipate what the future

will hold, at the same time as we must look deep into our presents and ourpasts in order to make sense of those things that we think we know. Deleuzedescribes this dual process as that of always creating and always forgetting.On the one hand, we are always participants in the creation of a worldthat is otherwise—and this is not a spontaneous, mystical activity; it meansthat the examples I use in a journal article (queer rights in Canada) have forcein future configurations of partnership arrangements. Holding the pages of



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Winterson’s cyber-feminist narrative between my fingers compels me torethink the trajectory of a story, to imagine ways of writing and thinking thatdo not rely on a beginning and an end . On the other hand, we must forgetthose identities, representations and reflections that we cling to—to begin

from an assumption that ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ constitute distinctand divergent identities is to argue for rights based on beings who are fixed intime. Were we to forget these identities, we may be able to multiply ourunderstandings of the changing subject; we may begin to imagine differentia-tions not based solely on sex or desire, but rather on the connections andpossibilities that are afforded by one’s material engagements with the world.

In effect, Winterson is correct when she writes that ‘[e]verything isimprinted forever with what it once was’ (Winterson 2009: 119, 207), andwe could extend this to include the sentiment that everything isimprinted forever with its own futurity, its own becoming. In manyways, such an immense stretching of time indicates that there can neverbe anything purely ‘new’ in the abstract, disconnected sense of being anoriginality, void of ties and conditions: each ‘new’ becoming has aduration that contracts the past virtualities from which it came. And yet,it is important that we do not mistake this for a metaphysics of determinism, a sense that we are bound to our pasts and fated to ourimpending futures. We can, rather, understand memory as the passivecontraction of the whole of the past, where the act of contractioninfluences, transforms and recreates the living present. This reflexivepractice illustrates the difference (every moment becomes anew) andbecoming (while at the same time the new is always in process, imprinted

with a past and an anticipated future) that shape our experiences andunderstandings. The living present constructs new feminist futures at thesame time as it rewrites the stories and events that we take to befeminism’s past, so that we are unable to remain fixated on being as aknowable identity and instead are stretched to comprehend the dynamicresponsibility afforded by the living present. The feminist politics thatarises from a living present can then apply this responsibility to the waythat we use these stories and events (i.e. rather than criticizing ‘second-wave feminism’ for its liberalism, we can think about the work that theact of critique does in challenging feminisms of the present to imagine

alternative political and social configurations).7

Such a practice illustratesthat to be ‘of the world in its dynamic specificity’ is to be a time maker(Barad 2006: 377): a complex process of habit, memory and chance asthey make and unmake the world around us. By opening up collaborativelines of flight between new materialism, Deleuze and feminism, the thicktime of the living present reveals a past rich with intra-active materialities—a realm of possibility to which we are accountable, but not bound.



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Notes

1. Winterson’s use of Easter Island refers to the factual Polynesian island of the samename. Also called Rapa Nui, Easter Island is famous for its 887 stone statues, calledmoai, which were created by its early inhabitants. For Winterson, these ‘Stone Gods’represent the humanist desire to master both time and nature.

2. The ‘

new materialist scholars’

which this article echoes include Karen Barad (2003,2006), Rosi Braidotti (2002, 2006, 2010), Elizabeth Grosz (2004, 2005, 2010), VickiKirby (2011) and Iris van der Tuin (2011a, 2011b), among many others.

3. That said, it is this particular critique of post-structuralism—the claim that post-structuralists have failed to fully account for the body—that has caused the largest stirin relation to the wider reception of new feminist materialisms. A set of articles in the

European Journal of Women’ s Studies, spanning 2008 to the present, has gone back andforth on the issue, beginning with Ahmed’s challenge to Barad and others within thefield. She writes: ‘the reading of Butler as anti-matter seems to be motivated, as if themoment of “rejection” is needed to authorize a new terrain’ (Ahmed 2008: 33). Ahmedargues that this enactment becomes a gesture of the ‘theorist embarking on a heroicand lonely struggle against the collective prohibitions of past feminisms’ (32). Shefurther charges new materialisms (and Barad, in particular) as providing a ‘caricature of

poststructuralism as matter-phobic’ (34), a practice which has the unintended effect of fetishizing materiality (35). Responses from van der Tuin and Davis argue that Ahmedprovides only a cursory reading of the scholarship and fails to attend to thecomplexities of Barad’s work, but, more importantly, they clarify nuances of newmaterialism, as Davis draws attention to the fact that new materialists are not arguingthat feminist theory has been anti-biological per se, but rather that the ways in whichbiology has been understood and used have been reductive—it has been restricted to adualist framework where biology remains the other to the social (Davis 2009: 70). Vander Tuin demonstrates that new materialism is deeply indebted to the contextualizedhistoricity of feminist theory. In fact, she describes the work of new materialism asthat of feminist generation, as in the multiple generations of feminist projects that havegone before and those that are yet to come—projects which always operate as a mess of entangled conditions of emergence and possibility (van der Tuin 2008: 412).

4. My use of ‘

affect’

here and throughout the article draws more on a Deleuzianunderstanding of affect than its indication of an emotional or physiological force.Specifically, I use the term to refer to that which is produced when things come intocontact, whether bodies, a body and a song, or a chair leg scraping along the floor. ForDeleuze and Guattari, affects result in intensities beyond themselves, as they discussaffect most often in relation to art, indicating that the affective power of art is thecapacity it has to create sensations, knowledges and meanings beyond the piece itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 162–3). The affective force of the material, then, is notonly its emotional impact, but also its capacity to be world-making. The chair leg’sscrape along the floor is an intra-active intensity. It moves us to understand therelationality of the chair and the floor in the production of a sound, a scratchedfloorboard or a moment of surprise.

5. For example, think about the North American ‘It Gets Better’ campaign, which relies

on the ‘bootstrapping’ humanist narrative of the autonomous man who strugglesthrough persecution (the requisitely painful teenage years of the queer youth) in orderto reach an adulthood of wholeness, progress and freedom from constraint.

6. In fact, one of Winterson’s editors did leave a copy of the unfinished manuscript at anunderground station in south London, where a fan found it and then returned it to thepublisher.

7. The value of a responsible feminist politics has further been developed by Peta Hintonin this special issue, where she attends to the importance of a materialist ‘politics of location’, such that, as feminist scholars, we are responsible for our modes of



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theoretical production as they create the very identities, positionalities and margin-alities with which we engage.

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