Lisa Baraitser - A Feeling for Things - A Conversation around the work of Jane Bennett

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Goldsmiths Department of Art MA Lectures 2013-14 Lisa Baraitser 25 November 2013 A Feeling for Things - A Conversation around the work of Jane Bennett In this paper I extend my interest in the peculiar reverberations and intensities created by mothers in the city. Proceeding from an assumption that human and nonhuman actants share an inherent equality of being, I have previously attempted to trace the desire paths that mothers make in cities by playing close attention to the 'stuff' of motherhood, both the 'tool-beings' that enable maternal labour (such as clothes, blankets, bottles, teats, milk powder, sterilizers, breast pumps, feeding spoons, bibs, pacifiers, rattles, nappies, wipes, changing mats, creams, powders, cribs, cots, baskets, baby monitors, prams, buggies, carry cots, slings, back packs, car seats), and how mothers and their stuff render a certain viscous subjectivity that shows up when mothers navigate the city, bumping into street-furniture, negotiating curbs, riding buses, crossing roads, with their bags and buggies and babies and bottles in tow. What emerges from tracking mothers in the city is a newly vibrant 'maternal' materialism in which it is difficult to disarticulate subjects (the world of humans) and objects (the sphere of physical or nonhuman things). This maternal materialism has recursive effects on public spaces and how the public itself is configured. In this paper, I further develop a notion of 'object-orientated maternity'. Object-orientated philosophy (dubbed OOO) is part of a new interest in 'speculative' realism that encourages more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things, so that a vital materiality can take shape around re-experiencings of the world populated by animate things, rather than passive objects (O'Rourke, 2012). A recent set of debates however, has emerged in this field that opens the question of what an 'object-orientated feminism' might look like -- if passivity and activity are gendered, for instance, then an object-orientated feminism might draw attention to the gendering at work in the distinction between lively active matter and passive objects, and may choose to champion the passive qualities such as viscosity, stuckness, slowness, impededness, and inertia that are associated with the encumbered figure of the mother as she attempts to move with her stuff through the city. Drawing on Jane Bennett's work both on vibrant matter and on hoarding, I investigate the particular relationship that mothers have with stuff where by finding and being found become reciprocal ethical encounters between things. Lisa Baraitser is a Reader in Psychosocial Studies, in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and is a psychotherapist in independent practice. She writes on motherhood and the maternal, on feminist theory, ethics and subjectivity, on affect, temporality and event. She runs the international research network called Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics. MaMSIE organises events and publishes a scholarly online journal, Studies in the Maternal, in collaboration with Sigal Spigel at the University of Cambridge. Lisa Baraitser is author of "Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption" (Routledge, 2009) which was joint winner of the 2009 Feminist and Women's Studies Book Prize for outstanding feminist scholarship. Her recent lectures have engaged with the work of key writers including Lauren Berlant, Rozsika Parker and Rosi Braidotti. Her current research is on gender and temporality, particularly the temporalities of repetition, delay, endurance, staying, waiting, maintenance and monotony and their relation to the contradictory and relentless temporalities of capitalism.