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

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2018
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Theory, Culture & Society ; 35 (2018), 7-8. - pp. 21-48. - ISSN 0263-2764. - eISSN 1460-3616
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 endeavours. 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 article 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), the author shows how its fabulist and oneiric form illuminates a distinctive perspective on uselessness. Conversely, the trope of uselessness lets us begin from what she calls a ‘situated affectivity’ amidst more-than-human materialities. The article concludes with a brief comparison of three modalities of uselessness from different ‘cosmologies’ of thought – a foretaste of the potentials of cross-cosmological endeavours.
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300 Social Sciences, Sociology
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affect, indigenous, materiality, nonhuman, ontology, situated affectivity
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ISO 690KWEK, Dorothy H. B, 2018. The Importance of Being Useless : A Cross-Cultural Contribution to the New Materialisms from Zhuangzi. In: Theory, Culture & Society. 35(7-8), pp. 21-48. ISSN 0263-2764. eISSN 1460-3616. Available under: doi: 10.1177/0263276418806381
BibTex
@article{Kwek2018-12-10Impor-45514,
  year={2018},
  doi={10.1177/0263276418806381},
  title={The Importance of Being Useless : A Cross-Cultural Contribution to the New Materialisms from Zhuangzi},
  number={7-8},
  volume={35},
  issn={0263-2764},
  journal={Theory, Culture & Society},
  pages={21--48},
  author={Kwek, Dorothy H. B}
}
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