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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This assemblage resonates with Donna Haraway’s notion of the material-semiotic actor, a conception that attends to the relations and forces that take place within the very process or tissue of making (1991, 210).
- 3.
In her rethinking of art in a posthuman context, Patricia McCormack notes that, “The onus is neither on the artwork nor the mythologized intent of the artist, but the subject’s witness’s coming forward or path taken” (2012, 45).
- 4.
- 5.
Hester is referring to Nick Bingham’s (2006) notion of “nonhuman friendship” as a “capacity to learn to be affected by an out-side.”
- 6.
Thiele sees a congruence between the model of ontology and ethics, which appears in Karen Barad and the Deleuzian inspired formula “ontology – ethics” in the figure of “becoming.” She argues that in Deleuze’s conception of “becoming” the two domains – ontology and ethics – “touch up/on each other” in such a way that “both sides become-different from what either ‘ontology’ or ‘ethics’ in a classical sense were meant to be” (2014, 207). However, Thiele is also concerned that thought-practices “are always/already implicated in and concerned with world(ing),” commenting that an affirmative politics of difference involves “a thought-practice in which concepts are not abstraction from the world, but an active force of this world” (2014, 203). This begs the question of how the politics of difference are played out in and through the Deleuzian figure of the rhizome.
- 7.
- 8.
See an extended discussion of this refiguration of createdness in the chapter “The artist in a post-human world?” (Bolt 2011).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Bianca Hester for her generosity in the preparation of this essay. I very much appreciated her responsiveness and critical engagement with the text and for permission to reproduces the images.
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Bolt, B. (2018). Couch Grass: Ethics of the Rhizome. In: Åsberg, C., Braidotti, R. (eds) A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62140-1_6
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