Rick Dolphijn

The Transversality of New Materialism

This article centres around three ways in which ‘new materialism’ or ‘neomaterialism’—terms coined by DeLanda and Braidotti in the second half of the 1990s—can be called ‘transversal’. New materialism is a cultural theory that does not privilege culture, but focuses on what Haraway would call ‘naturecultures’. It explores a monist perspective of the human being, disposed of the dualisms that have dominated the humanities until today, by giving special attention to matter, as it has been so much neglected by dualist thought. New materialism, a cultural theory inspired by the thoughts of Deleuze, that spurs a renewed interest in philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, shows how cultured humans are always already in nature, and how nature is necessarily cultured, how the mind is always already material, and how matter is necessarily something of the mind. New materialism opposes the transcendental and humanist (dualist) traditions that are haunting a cultural theory that is standing on the brink of both the modern and the post-postmodern era. The transcendental and humanist traditions, which are manifold yet consistently predicated on dualist structures, continue to stir debates that have a stifling effect on the field (think of the feminist polemic concerning the failed materialism in the work of Butler, and of the Saussurian/Lacanian linguistic heritage in media and cultural studies). New materialism allows for the conceptualisation of the travelling of the fluxes of matter and mind, body and soul, nature and culture, and opens up active theory formation. The three transversalities concern disciplinarity, paradigms and the spatiotemporality of theory.

Fukushima : The Geo-Trauma of a Futural Wave

Abstract: The enduring effects of the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan are explored in this paper through the notions of “geo-trauma” in the authors’ work and geophilosophy in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. At the fulcrum of the 2011 global disaster was the nuclear meltdown and the emittance of radioactive material such as Caesium-137 and Strontium-90. This event mattered and matters, dispersing and deterritorializing organic, non-organic, and anorganic life in all of its articulations. In the wake of the singularity of Fukushima and the Anthropocene epoch more generally, it is timely to ruminate upon in what way this event as a futural wave makes “us” as the present generation both responsible for and part of the ongoing Fukushima meltdown. The questions that Fukushima provokes are not about the specific clean-up operation and environmental impacts around the plant, but more about how we can understand Fukushima as an event in nuclear history, or a singularity of “geo-trauma.” The folly of Fukushima and its aftermath, points to something fundamental about the Anthropocene, in the sense that the interconnected patterning that one may derive from the site of the disaster, gives new life to understanding the darker/non-human sides of ecology, the media, the unconscious, contamination, and space. The posthumanism of Deleuze and Guattari combined with the extinctional impetus of the Anthropocene will drive this analysis forward in terms of uncovering new forms of understanding about the Earth, World, territory, land, and Nature.

The Revelation of a World that was Always Already There: The Creative Act as an Occupation

This chapter sees Deleuze’s concept of ‘occupation’ as the greatest power of art. In occupying that which is loved so dearly, great literature, great music, is able to reveal another world. A world that is completely new yet always already there. The power of art is thus about addressing human deafness and human blindness. This is particularly needed in our times in which the economical and ecological crisis, once again confirm our inability to see and to hear our environment. With the work of Deleuze and Guattari in particular, we see that only art, in occupying spaces and times, has the power to realize a ‘wholly otherness’, both materially and mentally. In present times the explorations of the digital gives rise to a new creative activism that reveals a new world to us. Traversing the dualist oppositions between nature and culture, between technology and the earth, between organic and inorganic, between the mind and the body, as they have been classifying our environments for so long, they embody the creative power necessary to realise another earth, another humanity.

An aesthetics of the mouth

introduction: deleuze and the being of the sensory It is for good reason that Deleuze and Guattari, when exploring the nature of art, attach great importance to the tenderness of the flesh (What is Philosophy? 179). The skeletal structure gives the artwork its frame, its enveloping, its singularity, as art history has often argued. But the flesh, the soft part, the edible part, provides the artwork with its sensuality, with its rhythm, its vibration. Therefore, Deleuze claims that every body (including a body of art) actually has both a state of hardness and a state of fluidity (The Fold 6). Similarly, when examining the nature of the culinary, the creation of a meal is not only about producing a harmonic, polyphonic and contrapuntal combination of tastes, smells and forms, as most cooking books claim. On the contrary, whenever a chef sets himself to work with his pallet of foods it is in the movement away from the skeletal structure that functions as an extension of the plate or of the ground from which food emanates that the creative assembling of elements through which a reproduction of the senses is started. The territories of the arts and the culinary are close to one another in many ways. Their elasticity, their combined hardness and softness, makes similar use of expression when exerting themselves onto us. Both art and food are capable of exploring the being of the sensory. A painting always tries the ability of the eye to touch, to feel the canvas beyond its optical image. The culinary is similarly synaesthetic; the edible plays our senses by more than gustatory and olfactory stimuli. It also involves experiencing structures (the viscosity, the profile), colors and sounds. Both art and the culinary, then, create miniature forms of life, condensed expressions capable of great disturbance, destabilization and metamorphosis. In the moments of detachment, in their power (puissance) to cut us loose, lies their ability to function as portals to the world. The aim of this text is to propose some thoughts on how the arts and the culinary, in their proximity, make use of one another in order to explore this being of the sensory. Both territories are in constant need of new grounds in order to redefine themselves. They need to be on the move, or at least in a permanent state of vibration. This article explores in what ways the culinary realm has furnished the artist with directions in which to push art to its outside and thus opening it up to the world. Similarly, it pays attention to how art has questioned the definitions of cuisine by accommodating the territory of food with adjoining territory. rickdolphijn