The final version of this article has been published as:

Van der Tuin, I. (2011). The New Materialist Always Already: On an A-Human
Humanities. NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 19.4: 285-90.

The New Materialist Always Already: On an A-Human Humanities1

Dr. Iris van der Tuin, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

It is to Jacques Derrida that most dictionaries, both urban and scholarly, ascribe always
already, which oftentimes implies a linguisticist twist, that is, in the words of Jonathan
Culler ([1981] 2002: 46), the idea that Derridean diffrance designat[es] a passive difference
always already in place as the ground of signification and an act of differing which produces
the differences it presupposes. New materialism does not go well together with linguisticism,
just as it does not stand for a return to the scientistic concept of crude matter. Yet, whereas
contemporary science studies studies of the natural sciences mostly use always already
to state that Matter is always already an ongoing historicity (Barad 2003: 821), thus
challenging the scientistic idea, the always already in the humanities continues to be read
within a linguisticist frame. In this position paper, I will put the linguisticism of the
humanities to the test by re-reading the always already.
As an onto-epistemology of the material-semiotic, to borrow from both Donna
Haraway (1988) and Karen Barad (2007), new materialism has for a long time now been
almost exclusively focused on the natural sciences. Humanities methodologies are being used
to study biased representation, that is, culture in the natural sciences, which sciences, in the
same stroke, get somewhat fetishized. As a corollary, it has been suggested that new
materialism involves importing the natural sciences into the human sciences (Hird 2004). The
assumption of this paper is different. I want to demonstrate that it is in fact the always
already that shapes a new materialism in the humanities. This is to say that a new
materialism is always already at work in the humanities, which demonstrates not only the
transversality of new materialism (Van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2010), but also of the
humanities per se. This will open up the humanities as a less humanist or even a-humanist
terrain that is as suitable for establishing a natureculture metaphysics as the natural sciences
are.
1

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference Intra-action between the
Humanities and the Sciences organized by the Center for the Humanities at Utrecht
University on November 19, 2010.
1

By proposing an always already that is immediately a new materialism I intend to

circumvent the suggestion that the two are to be connected. The latter would imply reasoning
along the lines of the (false) opposition between the always already as inherently
linguisticist and the new materialism. The idea is that a new materialist always already can
be developed from the humanities, that is, along the same lines as Barad and, for instance,
Bruno Latour ([1991] 1993) have done with matter and from the natural sciences. The latter
have proven how nature is always already cultural, and how matter is always already, for
instance, meaningful. A schism will remain in place if we cannot also and simultaneously,
demonstrate how culture is always already natural and how meaning is always already
material, without nature and matter becoming passive foundations again, like building blocks
that are to be picked up by humans.
First, I will close-read the work of Vicki Kirby, who, counterintuitive as it may
sound, develops a new materialism with Derrida and thus from the humanities. How does
Kirby, with Derrida, establish a new materialist always already that is not linguisticist?
Second, I will expand on Kirbys work in order to answer the question of how exactly this
always already allows us to affirm that a new materialism is always already at work in the
humanities, shaping an a-human humanities.
There is no outside of text?
Kirby discusses Derrida throughout her oeuvre, but it is in Judith Butler: Live Theory (2006)
that Derridas always already is most explicitly proposed as anything but a linguisticism.2
Starting from the evaluation that Judith Butler does not question, but assumes the Lacanian
classification (Real, Imaginary and Symbolic) in a way that places Nature, now under
erasure, entirely outside this system (Kirby 2006: 75), Kirby affirms that Butlers work
must have a constitutive outside and thus work with an asymmetrical difference. This
difference is the body of Nature, the substance of radical alterity (ibidem: 76). It is
precisely this problem that Butler has tried to take up in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive
Limits of Sex from 1993. Butler refers to Derrida and to his dictionarized always already,
in order to open up for the possibility of resistance via iterability. So she capitalizes on the
productivity of, for instance, gaps, whereas Jacques Lacan stifles them (ibid.: 77-8). Yet
Kirby explains how Butler ultimately remains Lacanian, continuing difference as separation
(ibid.: 78), Cartesian splitting, or dualist opposition.
Kirby claims that with the linguistic turn in the humanities, the idea began to be
entertained that language brings into being or real-izes an original reality. And whereas an
idea of real-ization reverses the logic of causality[, it] does not contest causalitys discrete,
2

At the time this paper was completed, Kirbys Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large
(2011) had not yet been published.
2

linear discriminations, nor the how of causality (ibid.). Kirby thus states, like many other
new materialists, that the linguistic turn, even in a Continental context, has not qualitatively
shifted, but simply reversed the positivist correspondence theory of truth, according to which
language is led by an original reality out there. Positivism and postmodern linguisticism are
the two sides of one and the same coin. Kirby states that the Derridean always already does
qualitatively shift this double bind and she also references the fact that Louis Althussers
earlier formulation of the always already wanted to qualitatively shift causality and linear
temporality (Kirby 2006: 162, n. 1). After all, Althusserian interpellation suggests that
individuals are always already subjects.
The important move made by Kirby is to be found in the labelling of cultural studies
as fundamentally Lacanian and in opening up for a new materialist Derrida (cf. Barad 2010,
Kirby 2010). Due to the stifled gap in Lacan, difference here only allows for the possibility of
(mis)representation (Kirby 2006: 83). Derridean diffrance, however, is said not to be about
linearity or gaps. Kirby asks: if the origin itself was always/already a congestion of emergent
possibility from within whose differences Life evolves, where, then, is the radical break? If
diffrance implicates all exteriority within interiority, then Culture is not a dissembling
version of an entirely separate and primordial system (ibidem: 84; emphasis in original).
Here we see that we start from interiority (enveloping exteriority), whereas with Lacan there
is a foundational gap between what is interior and what is exterior. Famously, Kirby
continues by stating that For if there is no outside of text, as Derrida suggests, then it is in
the nature of Nature to write, to read and to model (ibid.). From now on, nature is within
our presumed (academic) culture; culture in actuality envelops nature. The Lacanian
representationalism which is based on gaps has been replaced by a much more immanent or
monist, that is, new materialist approach.
I want to take this analysis one step further. Similar to her rewriting of Ferdinand de
Saussure in Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal, which reads: [] we think of the
referent as neither preceding nor following language because it is an immanence within it
(Kirby 1997: 19), Kirby has recently stated that Derridas there is no outside of text should
be rewritten as there is no outside of Nature (Kirby 2008: 229). Here, Kirby firmly
proclaims a univocity (Colebrook 2004) that goes beyond both the above analyses, which still
speak of an exterior and an interior, notwithstanding the fact that the interior envelops the
exterior, which is the first step towards there being no beginning and end, no cause and effect.
Where the Kirby of the interior-exterior coupling still seems to prioritize language the
referent being an immanence within language, nature being enveloped by culture the more
recent Kirby comes to evoke a univocity that comes close to the work of Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guattari ([1980] 1987: 82; emphasis in original) who state in A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia that There are variables of expression that establish a relation
3

between language and the outside, but precisely because they are immanent to language.
Here, we do not look at language in fact, but at immediate circumstantial expression (which
involves what Haraway (2003), following Alfred North Whitehead, would call relating) and
implied collective assemblages (which involves what Barad (2007) would call intra-action).
I want to use these insights to propose a new materialist always already along two
lines, the first being univocity and the second non-linear causality/temporality. These two
lines will be brought to bear on the humanities as always already non-linguisticist and
similarities with what happens in science studies will be indicated.
A true leap into Being
[R]ather than seeing signifiers as imposed on life, new materialists ask, according to Claire
Colebrook (2004: 286; emphasis in original), what life is such that it yields signification.
[] One can only have signifiers a system of ordered relations if there is already a
potential in life for the perceived to refer beyond itself. This potential in life is the new
materialist always already. Thus, stating that it is in the nature of Nature to refer beyond
itself, Kirby (2006: 90) wants to conceptualize what she at some point and already in Judith
Butler: Live Theory, calls the weave, which is a univocity, because there is no
inside/outside,

no

origin

and

end,

no

gap

between

sign/culture/language

and

referent/nature/matter. This weave is also what emerges from science studies. Barad (2007:
153; emphasis in original) states that, with regard to natural scientific experimentation, What
is at issue is not some ill-defined process by which human-based linguistic practices
(materially supported in some unspecified way) manage to produce substantive bodies or
bodily substances, but rather the dynamics of intra-activity in its materiality: material
apparatuses produce material phenomena through specific causal intra-actions, where
material is always already material-discursive that is what it means to matter. Thus it is
not surprising that Deleuze and Guattari ([1980] 1987: 87; emphasis added), when they
formulate their weave or, in Barads terms, their intra-action, along the lines of forms of
content and forms of expression that parcel one another, refer to the natural sciences: []
signs are at work in things themselves just as things extend into or are deployed through
signs. [] the same x, the same particle, may function either as a body that acts and
undergoes actions or as a sign constituting an act or order-word, depending on which form it
is taken up by (for example, the theoretico-experimental aggregate of physics).3
Echoing Deleuze and Guattaris parcelling, Kirby (2008: 234) asks: What happens if
nature is neither lacking nor primordial, but rather a plenitude of possibilities, a cacophony of
3

On the basis of Deleuze and Guattaris reference to parcelling in the theoreticoexperimental aggregate of physics we can now surely say that Barads apparatuses as
phenomena are congruent with Deleuzes assemblage/agencement.
4

convers(at)ions? Indeed, what if it is that same force field of articulation, reinvention, and
frisson that we are used to calling Culture? Indeed, both Nature and Culture are
Haraways naturecultures (Haraway 2004). But also, the new materialist always already
qualitatively shifts causality and temporality. A reversal of cause and effect (the idea that an
original reality is linguistically being brought into existence, which is the Bergsonian
retrograde movement (Bergson [1934] 2007: 11)) has already been said to lead to the
mimicking of the positivist correspondence theory of truth by postmodern linguisticism. I
suggest that qualitatively shifting both correspondence (equivocity) and the assumption of a
linear causality implies alluding to the virtual or the virtual-actual coupling that, for
instance, Deleuze (and Guattari) have taken from Henri Bergson and that Manuel DeLanda,
in turn, has taken from Deleuze (and Guattari).
The first and foremost goal of new materialists is of course the break-through of the
schism between sign/culture/language and referent/nature/matter. Starting from the
humanities, this would entail revitalizing ontology as the element that has seemingly become
lost under the paradigm of representationalism. Kirby has shown that the most
representationalist theories as a matter of fact allow for a new materialist re-reading. So has
there always already been an ontological element to the humanities?
In Deleuzes Bergsonism, a notion of a reversal is actually considered applicable,
precisely because the present is not; rather, it is pure becoming, always outside itself. It is
not, but it acts. Its proper element is not being but the active or the useful. The past, on the
other hand, has ceased to act or to be useful. But it has not ceased to be. Useless and inactive,
impassive, it IS, in the full sense of the word: It is identical with being in itself (Deleuze
[1966] 1991: 55; emphases in original). For the discussion about the new materialist always
already, then, it is important to note that, similarly, the past is a virtual past: a past in
general that is not the particular past of a particular present but that is like an ontological
element, a past that is eternal and for all time, the condition of the passage of every
particular present. It is the past in general that makes possible all pasts (ibidem: 56-7). Most
importantly, this implies a leap into ontology (ibid.: 57; emphasis in original), which is to
say that: Far from recomposing sense on the basis of sounds that are heard [i.e. signifiers]
and associated images [i.e. signifieds], we place ourselves at once in the element of sense,
then in a region of this element. A true leap into Being (ibid.; emphasis in original). In order
not to be lured back into something that this paper has called a Lacanian representationalism,
Bergson ([1934] 2007: 160) has developed his idea of fluid concepts: the intuitive
metaphysicist will arrive at fluid concepts, capable of following reality in all its windings
and of adopting the very movement of the inner life of things. This anti-representationalist
leap into ontology/Being, then, suggests that, epistemologically, we have to think differently

about causality (a leap) and temporality (at once; the virtual-actual coupling).4 But then we
should also think differently about the humanities.
A-Human Humanities
Coming to a conclusion, then, the new materialist always already installs a univocal stance,
attainable via a leap into ontology, recordable via fluid concepts. In the humanities, this
stance is performed when placing oneself into sense, for instance, instead of trying to
recompose it. Who holds the power of definition in such a situation? By breaking through an
epistemology of recomposition, the separate elements of positivist science and Lacanian
cultural studies are no longer in place. We no longer presume a Subjective starting point a
human breathing life into seemingly passive foundations such as the words in a poem
and/or the grain/pixels of a photo. These words and this grain/these pixels are always already
active material-semiotic actors (Haraway 1988: 595) not only on the paper and in the
encounter with the reader/observer, but also in the Derridean/Deleuzean/Bergsonian, that is,
new materialist humanities, for the conglomeration of seemingly dis-connected subjects,
objects and instruments is working with the past as a virtual past. Words and grain/pixels
yield signification. They leap (us, too) into ontology. They shape an a-human humanities in
which a Baradian notion of agency is at work, according to which: Agency is not an attribute
but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world. The universe is agential intra-activity in its
becoming (Barad 2007: 141).

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