New Cartographies, Nomadic Methodologies

Figures

Figure 1.1. What Remains (2019)

Figure 1.2. At the Edge of Visibility (2016)

Figure 1.3. Crystalline (2017)

Figure 2.1. Guzman Box (2015)

Figure 2.2. Self-portrait at my Son’s Grave on His Birthday, from the series Uchronia (2016)

Figure 2.3. Cradle, from the series Pellet (2012)

Figure 2.4. Self-Portrait Once Removed, from the series Uchronia (2016)

Figure 3.1. Jack Hogan, ‘brains in pleasure hold water’ (detail); acrylic on wood (2019)

Figure 3.2. Jack Hogan, to drawing in the forever-wet cement of good worlds to come. Finger in pavement (2019)

Figure 3.3. Moira Tierney, film still from Are We There Yet? (2010). 16 mm loop installation. Colour Super 8 mm blown up to 16 mm; 16 mm projector and loop machine; translucent hanging screen; speakers

Figure 3.4. Moira Tierney, 32 Photographs from the Leitrim-Fermanagh Border. Mobile phone photographs, print dimensions variable, colour (2010)

Figure 3.5. Rachel Gallagher, Bus stop on the way to a plant nursery, Antigua (2019)

Figure 4.1. Crocosmia × crocosmiiflora corm found in the garden of Spirasi (2016). Photo: Sean Breithaupt

Figure 4.2. Jean-Marie Rukundo Phillemon and Peter Rukundo, IADT recording studio (2016). Photo: Clodagh Emoe

Figure 4.3. Marie-Claire and Peter Rukundo at VISUAL Carlow (2016)

Figure 4.4. Jean-Marie Rukundo Phillemon, Marie Claire Mundi, Njong, Siniša Končić, Clodagh Emoe and Peter Rukundo, River Barrow, Co. Carlow (2016)

Figure 10.1. David Lyttle and his Cadillac

Figure 10.2. Tom Harrison (sax) and David Lyttle (drums)

Figure 10.3. David Lyttle in China, 2018

Figure 10.4. Bennigan’s jazz club Derry/Londonderry, 16 August 2016. David Lyttle, Fabrice Mourlon, John Leighton, Conor Murray, Will Anderson, Michael Murray

Anne Goarzin and Maria Parsons

Introduction: New Materialist Encounters

This volume of essays offers new ways of understanding and engaging with Ireland’s contemporary cultural, political, activist and artistic landscape. It emerged out of an international research group on ‘New Materialism’. The group was made up of a cross-section of academics from literature and the visual arts. They became ‘fugitive knowers’,¹ ‘nomadic intellectuals’. As a conceptual methodology and practice conceived by the feminist philospher Rosi Braidotti, nomadism is central to this book. Braidotti writes that philosophical nomadism is:

A cartographic approach [that] fulfils the function of providing both exegetical tools and creative theoretical alternatives. [… Cartographies require] account[ing] for one’s location in terms both of space (geo-political or ecological dimension) and time (historical and gene[a];logical dimension), and […] provide alternative figurations or schemes of representation for these locations, in terms of power as restrictive (potestas) but also as empowering or affirmative (potentia).²

Nomadic thought and practice is about intellectual exploration and taking detours. It is ethical and affirmative, ‘tracing lines of flight and zigzagging patterns that undo dominant representations.’³ Or, as the feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad has argued, ‘Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every “thing” – even materiality – is turned into a matter of language or some ←1 | 2→other form of cultural representation.’⁴ New materialism is a response to the limits of ‘representation’. As Braidotti notes, by the mid-1990s a ‘neo-materialism’ had emerged ‘as a method, a conceptual frame and a political stand, which [refused] the linguistic paradigm, stressing instead the concrete yet complex materiality of bodies immersed in social relations of power.’⁵ Or, the pivotal statement of Karen Barad, that ‘matter matters’,⁶ which came to stand as a catch-all for new materialist philosophies. For Barad, ‘Matter is neither fixed and given nor the mere end result of different processes. Matter is produced and productive, generated and generative. Matter is agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things.’⁷ For Jane Bennett, taking seriously the ‘vitality’ of nonhuman bodies bears political significance, and her seminal book proposes ‘to encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things’.⁸

New materialism is thus an attempt by a diverse range of theorists and scholars that include Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Iris Van der Tuin, Felicity Colman, Rick Dolphijn, Manuel DeLanda, and others, to radically reappraise materiality and subjectivity. As Coole and Frost note, ‘[these] thinkers suggest a return to the most fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the place of embodied humans within a material world.’⁹

New materialism does not intend to add yet another specialized epistemology to the tree of academic knowledge production (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1987, 5). As such, it is thus not necessarily opposed to the crude or Historical/Marxist materialist tradition. It is not necessarily different from any other materialist, pragmatic or monist tradition either, since it carefully ‘works through’ all these traditions in order to avoid, along with the trap of antagonism, the trap of anachronism (Lyotard [1988] 1991, 26–27) or of ‘a retrograde movement’ (Bergson [1934] 2007, 11). New materialism says ‘yes, and’ to all of these intellectual traditions, traversing them all, creating strings of thought that, in turn, create a remarkably powerful and fresh ‘rhythm’ in academia today (Simondon [1958] 1980).¹⁰

Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent-materialist philosophy informed by a Spinozist, or what they call a radical, or ‘minor’ materialist Enlightenment tradition, is central to new materialism as it opposes transcendental and humanist (dualist) traditions. This includes challenging and reconfiguring the Cartesian mind/body split and the division of nature and culture. ‘Rhizomes’, ‘becomings’, ‘intensities’, ‘lines of flight’, deterritorializations, ‘multiplicities’ and ‘affect’ are central concepts to new materialist methodologies.

New materialism also challenges classificatory epistemic trends and disciplines as pre-determined cutting across linear, teleological narratives of progression to allow for generative, vitalistic modes of desire and production. As van der Tuin and Dolphijn argue: