The Importance of Being Useless: A Cross-Cultural Contribution to the New Materialisms from Zhuangzi

Abstract

The recent 'material turn' focuses on materiality in two distinctive ways: one, by including nonhuman agencies, another, by mining indigenous knowledges for alternative conceptions of agency and human-thing relations. A troubling gap persists between the two endeavors. The gap insinuates an us-them dichotomy, and more importantly, curtails communication between radically different visions of thingly agency-thereby impeding the political drive of these conceptual enterprises. This paper is an essay in cross-cultural transposition. Through a close reading of a story of a useless tree in an ancient proto-Daoist text, Zhuangzi (莊子), I show how its fabulist and oneiric form illuminates a distinctive perspective on uselessness. Conversely, the trope of uselessness lets us begin from what I call a 'situated affectivity' amidst more-than-human materialities. The paper concludes with a brief comparison of three modalities of uselessness from different 'cosmologies' of thought-a foretaste of the potentials of cross-cosmological endeavors.

‘Not the Real Me’: Social Imaginaries of Personal Data Profiling

“…Vital materialism, as a new materialist approach, adopts a perspective that incorporates material, ideational, sociocultural and discursive dimensions. As expounded in the work of feminist new materialism scholars such as Karen Barad (2007), Rosi Braidotti (2019), Donna Haraway (2016) and Jane Bennett (2018) as well as in animist Indigenous, First Nation and non-western philosophies (Kwek, 2018; Ravenscroft, 2018; Rosiek et al, 2020; Todd, 2016), vital materialism recognises the dynamic materiality of the more-than-human worlds which people inhabit and through which they move as they go through their lives. This material-semiotic perspective refutes the notion of the individuated human actor that possesses and exerts autonomous agency (Fox and Alldred, 2019; Grear, 2017).…”

Estranged companions: Bed bugs, biologies, and affective histories

“…These commitments are enacted through our development of the concept of "estranged companions." Rather than "lining up" (Kwek, 2018) pest control literatures and cultural theory, we have diffractively read different conceptions of estrangement against one another, drawing attention to the evocativeness of the concept more broadly as well as the specific value of figuring bed bugs as estranged companions. For Ahmed (1999: 134), estrangement does not refer to a "state of being" but a process; a transition, change, or movement that profoundly shapes subsequent affective experiences.…”

“…The position we have taken here reaffirms longstanding approaches in feminist science studies that are grounded in ethical commitment to situated knowledges (Willey, 2016) and diffractive methods that are attentive to the entanglement of ethics, epistemology, and ontology (Barad, 2007). These commitments are enacted through our development of the concept of “estranged companions.” Rather than “lining up” (Kwek, 2018) pest control literatures and cultural theory, we have diffractively read different conceptions of estrangement against one another, drawing attention to the evocativeness of the concept more broadly as well as the specific value of figuring bed bugs as estranged companions. For Ahmed (1999: 134), estrangement does not refer to a “state of being” but a process; a transition, change, or movement that profoundly shapes subsequent affective experiences.…”

“…The purpose of bringing scientific knowledges into dialogue with cultural theory was to unsettle, challenge, and queer assumptions held by each body of work. In contrast, Willey argues that more recent research often straightforwardly deploys findings from the natural sciences, taking an additive approach to knowledge, where diverse perspectives from within different epistemic communities are brought together “like beads on a string” without addressing how such approaches might undercut, complicate, or diffract through one another (Kwek, 2018: 26). This move, it has been suggested, can radically undermine the postcolonial commitments of earlier work (see, e.g., Sundberg, 2014; TallBear, 2017; Todd, 2016), and perpetuate a “risky intimacy” between posthumanism, exoticism, and orientalism (Ahuja, 2016: xv).…”

“…It is possible to tell a straightforward story about bed bugs in which popular discourse, evolutionary biology and psychology, and cultural theory neatly “line up” (Kwek, 2018) without troubling one another’s assumptions. In popular culture, parasitism and vampirism are frequently suggested as defining qualities which make insects such as bed bugs extra scary; the novelist Teju Cole, for instance, states that his protagonist’s concerns over bed bugs “… were primeval: the magical power of blood, the hours given over to dreams, the sanctity of the home, cannibalism, the fear of being attacked by the unseen” (cited in Borel, 2015: 118–119).…”