Yet more re:words, reverberations and resistances

Abstract

Reverberations and Resistances

However hard one tries, the frontier separating the ‘useful product’ from ‘waste’ is a grey zone; a kingdom of undefinition, uncertainty – and danger.

This quote from Wasted Lives by Zygmunt Bauman, his study of the impact globalisation has on the modern world, pinpoints the problematical nature of matter deemed waste in our society.

My own practice is concerned with the current use or rather mis-use of resources. I focus on single use products, whose immediate disposability is inherent in their production; a problematic and unsustainable state of affairs I find difficult to comprehend. Thus I seek to re-examine, reassess and ‘elevate’ certain forms of ‘matter’, which, when viewed in the current hierarchical value system of materials in our consumerist culture, would be seen as being pretty near the bottom. My work seeks to re-evaluate and renegotiate commonly held interpretations of materiality; an exploration of its diverse definitions.

How can ‘waste’ materials be re-instated so that these too are seen as part of an integral whole, with no one material, human or otherwise being seen as dominant or more important than the other? Jane Bennett, in her book Vibrant Matter, attempts to answer these questions and beguilingly calls this shift in definitions ‘enchanted materialism’.

As recent developments in quantum physics tell us that matter we commonly think of as being ‘inert’ is in fact made up of sub-atomic particles that are more like ‘vibrating strands of energy’, it seems an appropriate time for a re-assessment of material relationships.

How can ‘craft’, encompassing as it does the experiential, the tacit, commodity exchange and its inferences, capitalise and contribute to this renegotiation, building on its traditional resistances to capitalist modernity?

Whose word do we trust as political and institutional dogma seems ever more distanced from authentic ways of being and common experiences - dogma that can seem solely interested in propping up outdated models of capitalist culture?

In his work The Fragility of Things, the American theorist William Connolly examines the shortcomings of neoliberal policies. He questions how vitality and creativity are inter-linked and talks of ‘allowing creativity to be folded into thought.’ He also asks ‘Is it through the periodic acceleration of ‘vibrations’ within and between entities that novel formations emerge?’

From the privileged position of high capitalism and looking to a post-consumer future, what would new definitions and a new form of benign materialism look like? This is an exciting field which Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s publication The New Materialisms attempts to examine, searching for ‘new paradigms for which no overall orthodoxy has yet been established.’

As, almost unwittingly, ‘the environment’ has increasingly become ‘the other’, it is imperative that we find new frameworks and propose different paradigms to creatively counteract and challenge (to quote Timothy Morton) the ‘boring, rapacious reality’ we have created. Morton optimistically states, ‘In the future, people might see what we now call postmodern art and culture as the emergence of global environmental culture,’ whereas Jane Bennett visualises a future ‘green materialist’ ecophilosophy.