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 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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