A New Materialism Starting from "Weight That Does Not Change with Interpretation"— Ryoto Sato "Trajectories and Possibilities of New Materialisms" Reading Notes (Integrated Dialogue Log Version)

・Preface

This chat (commonly known as "Trajectories and Possibilities of New Materialisms") began with a casual entry point of confirming the date. However, as AI becomes more familiar, the final destination of "what is information" was back-illuminated, and as a result of the operability of language and representation being exposed to the limit, the "weight" that does not change with interpretation—body, place, matter, heat, resistance, unpredictability—has emerged once again.
Ryoto Sato's paper was appropriate as an entry point to accept that sensation as a theory. This is because this paper recontextualizes New Materialism (NM) as a critique of representationism/social constructivism, contrasts the two cores of Bennett and Barad, and even maps out difficult questions (critique of flat ontology/critique of Barad).
These notes integrate the PDF content and unique questions (photography, gift, ethics, locality) that arose during the dialogue, and are written out as a "scaffold" for the next reading (original works of Bennett/Barad).

・Bibliographic Information for the PDF "Trajectories and Possibilities of New Materialisms"

• Author: Ryoto SATO

• Paper Title: "Trajectories and Possibilities of New Materialisms"

• Publication: "Journal of Comprehensive Human Studies" No. 15, Contributed Paper

• Purpose: To map the ideological development of NM and clarify its challenges and possibilities

• Reference PDF: User-provided PDF (equivalent to 14 pages)

• Author Page: https://researchmap.jp/ryoto_sato/published_papers/32720193

・Paper Summary

The paper positions New Materialism (NM) as part of the "new realism" trend, and while sharing problem awareness with speculative realism (Meillassoux, etc.) and object-oriented ontology (Harman, etc.), it depicts it as a movement that asserts "matter as reality" from a different perspective.

1) Basic Claims of NM (Chapter 1, Section 1)

The basic claims of NM are summarized in three points:

1. Overcoming Cartesian-Newtonian dualism (questioning the division of subject/object, culture/nature)

2. Defense of matter as agency (matter is not a passive background but acts)

3. Onto-epistemology consisting of matter-discourse (not separating epistemology and ontology)

2) Context in which NM was born (Chapter 1, Section 2)

The intellectual soil of NM lies in the cultural and linguistic turns, but this created friction between social constructivism vs. natural science.
Subsequently, three turning points shook the "understanding of matter" and accelerated NM:

• 20th-century natural science (quantum mechanics, complex systems)

• Life/body technology (genes, cyborgs, biopolitics)

• The inadequacy of constructivist frameworks in analyzing global capitalism

In response to this, three trends are organized:

• Deleuze & Guattari-style posthumanism

• Feminism (body, life, biopolitics)

• Critical materialism (capitalism, geopolitics, socio-economics)

3) Bennett: Vital Materialism (Chapter 2)

Bennett constructs 'vital materialism' by taking a hint from vitalism (recognizing dynamism in life) and attributing that dynamism to matter itself. Dualism not only divides the world into 'dull matter/active life' but also places humans at the top of an ontological hierarchy. Since this encourages arrogance, aggression, and consumption, Bennett's political goal is not 'complete equality' but enriching communication among members within a polity. Also, she does not link agency to human intention, but reinterprets it as a force of response and generation from the perspective of

efficacy and trajectory. Agency cannot act alone and is understood as an assemblage/entanglement.

4) Barad: Agential Realism (Chapter 3)

Barad criticizes the conflict between scientific realism and social constructivism for both presupposing a 'Cartesian cut' (ontological separation of knowledge/object/subject), and constructs agential realism by combining quantum mechanics (Bohr) and feminism (Butler's performativity). A phenomenon is not just the inseparability of observer/object, but the ontological inseparability of intra-acting components. Relata do not exist prior to relations. Reality is redefined as objectivity that exists only in the local situation of 'exteriority-within-phenomena,' and is neither posited externally nor reduced to language. Furthermore, she extends performativity from a human-body-centered scope to one including non-humans, reinterpreting it not as iterative citation but as iterative intra-action.

5) Final Chapter: Challenges and Possibilities

The biggest difference is how agency is perceived:

• Bennett: Every entity possesses agency in advance

• Barad: Agency is locally distributed as a possibility that shakes fixed boundaries

There are two difficult questions:

1. Critique of flat ontology (If everything is an agent, how do we talk about importance or priorities of care?)

2. Critique of Barad (The danger of repeating the modern observing subject)

As a possibility, a path opens up to go beyond the postmodern relativistic deadlock and discuss objectivity by combining matter without abandoning constructivism. Furthermore, Åsberg et al. cite

• becoming-with-context

• situated knowledge

• speculative alter-worlding
  as strengths of NM.

・Dialogue Summary

The uniqueness of this chat lies in the fact that it did not just 'explain' the PDF, but articulated the reader's own sense of 'salvation' while connecting it to embodiment in the AI era, photography, and the ethics of gift-giving.

A) AI → Information → Weight → Vital Materialism (Establishment of Intuition)

• The arrival of AI has revealed the endpoint of 'what information is,' exposing the lightness of language

• As a reaction, 'things/events = information accompanied by embodiment' are being re-evaluated

• 'As long as there is mass, it was exerting some influence' = the agency of matter

• In particular, the realization of 'weight that interpretation cannot change' became the core

B) Bennett's Salvation: Detachment from the Compulsion of Intent

• Separating efficacy from the 'intent of a moral subject'

• The point of grasping agency as response and difference-generation resonated as 'salvation'

• A feeling of affirmation for the self-understanding of 'being told one has no ulterior motives'

• An interpretation of political goals as preparation for not missing the voices of matter

C) Barad's Intra-action: Resonance with Snapshot and Vernacular Photography

• Strong reaction to the idea that 'existence is determined only in local situations'

• Felt it also resonates with the localization theory of Western medicine (seeking causes in local areas)

• Snapshot/vernacular photography resembles 'intra-action'

• Photography = a device where 'memory, record, and recollection' are generated in a local field

D) The Difficult Problem of NM and the Translation of 'Gift and Reciprocity'

• Re-interpreted the critique of flat ontology (the problem of priority) as the problem of 'reciprocity to a gift = responsibility to respond'
  

• Saw the need to accept the asymmetry of human power while avoiding anthropocentrism

・Considerations

From here on, as a clean copy, I will organize the core of our dialogue into three layers in a form that can be "repurposed for your next production or writing."

1) "Weight that does not change with interpretation" = The ethical reality of matter

The weight you speak of is not mere physical weight, but a bundle of:

• Resistance (which does not disappear through paraphrasing or interpretation)

• Unpredictability (things not going as expected)

• Distributed causality (occurring without anyone's specific intent)

• Ethical weight (responsibility does not vanish, but is rather reconfigured)
  This is a circuit where AI paradoxically exposes the "weight" that postmodern language-centrism made invisible, and NM receives it.
  

2) Bennett's "Ethics of Creation" and Barad's "Ethics of Observation"

The application to photography that emerged during our dialogue is highly precise.

• Bennett: Vibrant matter / assemblage / effect as response
  → A trigger for art, creativity, and generation (the moment art arises)

• Barad: Phenomena / intra-action / agential cut / local objectivity
  → The question of "what has been established as reality" in documentary, reportage, and snapshots
  

By placing these two side-by-side, your creative practice can be developed into a
theory of photography that oscillates between creation (vital) and observation (agential).

3) The difficult problem of NM becomes a "design problem of gifting" for you

The critique of flat ontology is not simply about "everything being equal is problematic."
In your translation, it becomes:

When applied to production, this becomes a problem of framing ethics:
"to shoot/not to shoot," "to capture/to exclude," "to record/not to preserve."
In other words, for your theory of photography, the challenge of NM is embodied as the ethics of

editing = cutting = reciprocating.

・Appendix

Appendix A: The "next reading route" after finishing this paper

• Jane Bennett "Vibrant Matter"
  → assemblage / vibrant matter / political ecology

• Karen Barad"Meeting the Universe Halfway"
  → phenomenon / intra-action / agential cut / objectivity

• Candidates for parallel study:

  • Haraway's "Situated Knowledges"

  • Comparison with Latour (ANT) (though Barad delves into the generation of relata)

Appendix B: Drafts of "Core Sentences" for use in artist statements (Templates)

・20 hashtags

#NewMaterialism #NewMaterialism #TatsuhitoSato #JaneBennett #KarenBarad #VitalMaterialism #AgentialRealism #Agency #OntoEpistemology #IntraAction #Phenomenon #LocalObjectivity #FlatOntology #SocialConstructionism #ScientificRealism #Representationism #Posthumanism #SnapshotPhotography #VernacularPhotography #GiftAndReciprocity