New Feminist Materialisms

What seems to be an emerging trend in STS and remotely perhaps in anthropology, is a move towards New Feminist Materialisms. With recent publications from Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things, an edited collection from Diana Coole and Samantha Frost: New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Karen Barad's 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway, Whatmore and Braun's, Political Matters: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life, and what looks to be an interesting addition by William Connolly entitled, A World of Becoming, and no doubt many other books and articles (I'm thinking of Latour and Haraway specifically), New Materialism is poised to encourage a serious rethinking of the relationship between humans and nonhumans beyond or building out from what we have seen before.

It is without doubt reframing the way I'm writing my dissertation, seeing as I consider very seriously the relationship between people and things (machines) in the concept or ritual/worship practice. So far this rethinking has led me to consider aspects (and possibilities and politics of) material agency but I have been struggling with the inherent dilemma of anthropomorphism even in the attempt to decenter the human in this story. It has been exceedingly rewarding however to read and write through some of these perspectives as they just begin to gain momentum. My hope is that my work will contribute a little something to the process.   

Walter Benjamin on writing

Came across a great blog that included a post on Walter Benjamin's advice on writing. Taking some of it to heart... though perhaps not all. It's seemingly a real slog to get though endless chapters for this dissertation (especially on grey days like today). Not discouraged though, just taking my time.

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with themselves and, having completed a stint, deny themselves nothing that will not prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this régime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea [“no day without a line” (Apelles ex Pliny)] — but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.

From “One-Way Street” (1955; slightly ed.), Reflections:Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978) 80-81.

modular essay

The modular essay.

A bit part composition
That frames the shored up snows that creep through
And into the assemblage of parts.

It's plane extends as pieces begin to collect, it's dimensions shift and take up new configurations.
I am surprised by its tenacity to cause a frictive sense of generation.

Benjamin was assembling Passagen-Werk. The quotes and scraps cobbled into the famed montage, then the dialectical image. I think of the snowy streets of Paris and the sheltered arcades. The juxtaposed revelation and deceit.

I came upon a modular home one day: it's cubical connections and array of spaces seemed so organized. A veritable spatial neoliberalism.

This two-bit composition: a modelled modular, confirmed through transductive geuss-werk- a veritable political irony.

On refrains and melodies stuck in my head

Play inside Deleuze and Guatarri (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1987:350).

"Produce a deterritorialized refrain as the final end of music, release it in the cosmos-that is more important that building a new system. [the gestural notes of bodies arising from sleep... how does the refrain territorialize itself? What fleshy boundaries must it pass and also fix to create qualities, signatures? How do melody's establish themselves?] Opening the assemblage of sounds to the Machine that renders it sonorous, from the becoming-child of the musician to the becoming-cosmic of the child, many dangers crop up [the rhythm captures, is an apparatus of capture- even in becomings, sometimes]: black holes, closures, paralysis of the finger and auditory hallucinations [the house awakes in the morning, groaning as the rain makes it swell and shift], Schumann's madness, cosmic forces gone bad, a note that pursues you, a sound that transfixes you" (1987:350).

The melody that pursues, becomes lodged, the catchy song: caught up in morning bird-songs where melody's are becoming-expressive as sonorous, guttural, cracking, stretching movements herald a new day.

On waiting for words.

I sit down to write. Staring at the screen, waiting for the words to form, thoughts to congeal, sentences to miraculously leap from my fingertips to the bouncing cursor on the page. A research proposal, the last step before leaping into fieldwork, is on my mind. On my mind, waiting. The fog rolls in as I look out the window. Lapping the window pane it hauntingly fills the street. The sun is about to rise. I'm still waiting.

Drought

it's a drought you know

that consumes more than flash floods

the tense winds of whips and quips

that fly along barren 'scapes

it's the lack, the without, the beginning

of an end that you see

from the start

a precipice that you shy from at every breath

it's a love you know

that carries waters

like leaves on trees wind-swept and torn by time

it is the failing light and the sun that disappears behind the clouds

it's time, an imperceptible movement of seconds, moments

with no signifier, no reference point

to hold sway against the passage of beat upon beat

of your heart

it's a drought when water does not quench

words do not abate the barren days

nor reach the stone in your chest

that sits like a wayward symbol of disdain

the flood is the moment revealed, you know,

when the street lights illuminate only

the ground below, looking up does not blind,

nor burn, nor starve for want of water.

machines of such precision

I stood between                
the towering shelves
of third-world labour        
in the local Dollarama.

 the shelves grew towards the ceiling

saturated, angels dripping melting macabre faces down on decorative demons, the shaping of worlds in twisted lethargy  

anxiety grew,
fellow shoppers became hogs grunting in the muck, rolling in the excrement of exploitation.

then they were machines
filling their baskets
in mechanistic harmony

rote shopping etiquette.

the shelves seemed alive.