Matterphorical

Matterphorical is the title of the January 2021 special issue of Theory & Event Journal (Johns Hopkins University Press), co-edited by Daniela Gandorfer and Zulaikha Ayub. 

Introduction can be read here (open access). The full issue can be accessed here.

Whereas the concept “metaphor” is the trope of meaning transfer and substitution by means of analogy, matterphor denotes the articulation of meaning in relation to matter, understood not as fixed entity, but as constantly shifting (-phoric) and thereby establishing entanglements and relationalities. This changes not only how we conceive of the relation between meaning and matter, and consequently of knowledge production, but also presents a different way of doing theory. 

The question of how matter and meaning relate, which is at the core of the project, can neither be answered once and for all, nor simply as a theoretical exercise, detached from its many embodied and situated actualizations. In other words, rather than being concerned with a theoretical question about the adequacy of rhetorical tropes and visual representations, this special issue is concerned with the political, aesthetic, legal, social, technological, and environmental entanglements that not only shape, but are epistemologically and ontologically constitutive of, the very processes of knowledge and meaning production. 

It is in this sense that each contribution addresses these questions from the perspective of its own disciplinary situatedness, together emphasizing the multiple, versatile and concrete actualizations of the theory at stake.. Most importantly, Matterphorical is concerned with an understanding and ethics of theory that allows us to think, write, and collaborate in precarious times.

Contributors include: 

Karen Barad (Quantum Physics & Philosophy)

Raviv Ganchrow (Sound Art)

Peter Goodrich (Law)

Suzanne Guerlac (French Literature)

Stefan Helmreich (Anthropology)

James Martel (Political Science)

Katrin Pahl (German Studies)

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (Law & Legal Theory)

Elizabeth Povinelli (Anthropology)

Debarati Sanyal (French Literature & Film)

Philip Steinberg, Elizabeth Johnson, & Jessi Lehman (Geography)

Eyal Weizman (Architecture)

Patricia J. Williams (Law)