New Materialism: Forgetting Postmodernism

Abstract

In their monograph on the emerging cultural paradigm known as 'new materialism', Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin argue for a transversal approach to dealing with various dualisms that dog current thinking, such as between matter and meaning, or between "realist essentialism and social constructivism" ('New Materialism' 98). This transversal approach is an affirmative play of conceptual immanence rather than the implementation of a transcendental ordering through the operation of conceptual negation. They contend that new materialism "cuts across postmodernist and modernist paradigms as it shows that both epistemologies start from a distinctive pole of what [Claire] Colebrook (2004, 56) has called the 'representation/materiality dichotomy'" ('New Materialism' 108). In response to the obscurity that attends this call to "cut across" postmodernism, this thesis delivers a series of distinct performances - predominantly deconstructionist and deterritorialising - that demonstrate and clarify the details of this transversal action. By engaging specific textual iterations of postmodernism across three diverse media types - prose, film, and poetry - this thesis elucidates how and why postmodernism is productively reconceived in line with various new materialist problems and insights. This thesis argues that new materialism engages postmodernism via a 'dual action'. This includes the recognition of postmodernism, on the one hand, as both actual and able to be negated, and on the other hand, as ethereal and implicated in new materialism's own cultural-theoretical becoming. Part One argues that a distinctive West Indian materialist deconstruction is at work in Dionne Brand's novel, 'In Another Place, Not Here', which has partly been construed as postmodern. Part Two draws entirely on the cinematic philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to make manifest several ways that cinematic postmodernism can and should be re-thought for its more material, textural properties. Finally, Part Three contends that Kate Fagan's collection of poetry, 'The Long Moment', which has also been read as postmodern, is an aesthetics of complexity theory, or rather, that it mobilises the materialist pragmatics that Deleuze and Felix Guattari defend in 'A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophenia'.