Matèria que performa. Estudi ontològic de la matèria i el sentit a Henri Bergson i Karen Barad

In this paper I elaborate on how matter is thought of in the work of Henri Bergson and Karen Barad, thus challenging the Cartesian split between body and mind.

On the one hand, I disclose Bergson’s envisagement of matter not as a thing but as a process, and stress how matter plays a central role in the experience of duration, therefore shaping reality as a process of becoming-with. Although Bergson’s diagrams are usually figured as static, I argue that they are actually imbued with movement and should be seen as moving. This bond of matter to duration and transformation blurs common distinctions between matter and language and proves especially useful when thinking of dance and performance as arts of mattering.

On the other hand, I follow Barad’s description of quantum mechanics in order to highlight that matter cannot be torn apart from meaning, since knowledge cannot be produced out of matter but is always constructed from within matter. Barad’s insistence on the production of knowledge as an embodied practice reveals a strong political commitment to the world as an ongoing open process of mattering that asks us to rethink the meaning of agency from a posthumanist point of view.

I argue that, for both Bergson and Barad, matter can be said to perform. I eventually raise the question of how such an approach can help us think about and practise dance and performance beyond the Cartesian framework of the primacy of language.