The 'New Materialism' and the Fragility of Things

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 41, Issue 3, 2013, Pages 399-412

  Connolly, William E ^a  

^a JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Event; fragility; incipience; planetary processes; self organisation

Indexed keywords

EID: 84878859663     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829813486849     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. For an excellent account of the simple agency of paramecia, replete with practices of purpose and meaning, see Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science (New York: Basic Books, 2008). Several other themes presented on my list also find expression in the work of Kauffman.
2. My understandings of human agency in relation to other agentic practices, of human perception and of the human need to invest meaning in this world of entanglements are presented in chapters 1 and 2 of A World of Becoming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
3. For a reflective discussion of the inhuman in the human and the role of larger assemblages in enabling and organising human agency, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: Towards an Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
4. The Fragility of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2013). Some of the themes to follow in this article are condensed and contracted versions of those that receive more extended articulation in the book to come.
5. See William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). James, you might say, is a fellow traveller in this collection of theorists. He emphasises how we inhabit a pluralistic universe of becoming.
6. Whitehead pursues these issues in Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray and Donald Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1929, second edition 1978).
7. Deleuze and Guattari pose the question 'What holds things together?' in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), in plateau 11 entitled 'On the Refrain'. They contend that it is this question which pulls so many people towards 'arboreal' and 'concentric' models of being, but in fact nature and culture are replete with innumerable examples of 'rhizomatic' complexes. The most pertinent contribution of Deleuze and Guattari, perhaps, is in their emphasis on how 'heterogeneous connections' are formed, between bacteria and humans, viruses and other animals, plants and animals, and so on. Before the book is finished, they concede that elements of the arboreal and rhizomatic are typically needed together.
8. Adam Richards, Scientists Discover a Bacteria That Can Grow in Arsenic' (2010). Available at: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1163.abstract (accessed April 2010).
9. This example is discussed more extensively in Connolly, Steps toward an Ecology of Late Capitalism', theory&event 15, no. 1 (February 2012): 1-14.
10. See http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/4302636. For a more extensive account
11. see Meredith Nettles and Goran Ekstrom, Glacial Earthquakes in Greenland and Antartica', Annual Review Earth Planet (Spring 2010): 467-91.
12. See K.S. Delapane, Crop Pollination by Bees (London: CABI Publications, 2000).