Untitled

The theory of emergence makes it possible to conceptualize change as more than just a rupture or negation of what already exists. Emergence includes the idea that emergent properties cannot be predicted from the lower-level phenomena from which they emerge.

I am interested in the idea of a coming politics, one that is not disastrous for non-human life. Folly (Stage One) set out to explore the way in which the nonhuman world resists our intentions and thwarts human mastery. The structure was anchored on the beach; the question was whether it would stand, sink, swim or break away and float out to sea. Conditions were rough, with an onshore wind and a large swell. As the tide came in, it lifted the structure which floated directly above the anchor, surfacing and submerging with the force of the waves. It came to rest on the sand at midnight. This was repeated in the morning; the anchored leg was bent at quite a strong angle by the pull of the sea.

This act of premeditated foolishness drew on Brian Massumi’s account of the event as ‘the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox’.[1] Mental ecology, as Felix Guattari articulated it[2] demands a radical reconfiguration of the dominant modes of production of subjectivity in contemporary society. Can the subject-object dichotomy that we inherited from Enlightenment thinking be expanded by the notion of a field of materiality, a protean flow of matter-energy? Jane Bennett calls this ‘thing-power materialism’ and describes it as 'an adventurous, ontological imaginary, offer(ing) a picture of matter as . . . active, intricate and awesome'[3].

Objects do not go fully into our concepts of them but leave a remainder, an invisible field that surrounds and infuses them, what Theodor Adorno called ‘nonidentity’[4]. The field of nonidentity opens up a perspective of beings-as-events within a network of relations, continuous with their environment rather than discrete objects located in a time and space from which they are separate and separable. My work draws on this liminal zone of undecidability between the human and non-human worlds, staging absurd and foolish identities and events in an effort to locate sites of emergent subjectivity.

[1] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, Duke University Press, 2002

[2] Felix Guattari, ‘The Three Ecologies’, transl. Chris Turner, New Formations, 8 (1989)

[3] Jane Bennett, ‘The Force of Things: Steps towards an Ecology of Matter’ Political Theory, Vol. 32, No. 3, 347-372 (2004)

[4] Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, transl. E.B. Ashton, London: Routledge, 1973 (published in German in 1966).