Stuff matters and moves : analysing environmental consciousness and memory objects through a New Materialist Lens

Abstract

Rapid environmental degradation, a pressing issue in the twenty-first century, is almost unimaginably recalibrating human practices and perceptions of interaction, scale, and situatedness. Because the concept of (individual) ‘memory’ can provide vital insights into micropolitical habits in the current century, this study explores the conceptual and material relations between environmental consciousness and memory through a new materialist lens. Within the framework of visual culture studies – an interdisciplinary field committed to rendering the ‘invisible’ workings of society ‘visible’ – this thesis teases out how sentimental objects that have “agency” and “fascinate through their shape, texture, colour, and size” (Rigney 2017:474) are treated in the Anthropocene, or the geological ‘age of humans’.

This study uses the intersection between memory and environmental consciousness to examine the limitations and capacities of the new materialisms and assemblage theory. Through the use of Deleuzoguattarian concepts, it analyses how changes, or deterritorialisations, occur when environmental consciousness and memory are plugged into the same assemblage. In other words, the study explores the ways in which humans’ relationship with their memory objects could potentially change when they start thinking more critically about environmental issues. I critically reflect on the diverse theoretical and practical implications of conducting new materialist research in the humanities in the twenty-first century.

Through conducting semi-structured interviews with South Africans who self-identify as environmentally conscious, I firstly, established whether participants experienced an altered connection with their memory objects due to their eco-consciousness and secondly, foregrounded the affective flows between heterogeneous materialities in assemblages. The discussions that flowed from the interviews allowed the identification of prominent tropes that signal some ways in which humans engage with and understand the Anthropocene. These tropes are, firstly, patterns of the participants’ persistent dichotomous thinking about nonhuman objects, ‘nature’ and ‘the material’; secondly, the complex relationship between pleasure, responsibility, and action; thirdly, the fluctuating value of memory and ‘waste’ objects alike; fourthly, the transience of all things; and finally, the noteworthy role of family lineage in discourses of environmental consciousness and memory.

Relating the tropes to environmental consciousness and memory objects foregrounds the deterritorialising effect plugging one materiality into a new assemblage has, which enlivens novel ways of seeing human engagement around thinking related to binaries, habits, value fluctuation, transience, and lineage/linearity.