POLITICISING NEW MATERIALISM AGAINST THE TOXIC ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE NOW - Towards a New Materialist philosophy of the car

I am still at donaufestival, and this shot taken from the actual TV-news of the Austrian Public broadcasting ORF from the report on Toxic Temple is the perfect segway to a publication of mine that has just come out. It has the not fully melodic title "POLITICISING NEW MATERIALISM AGAINST THE TOXIC ENTANGLEMENTS OF THE NOW - Towards a New Materialist philosophy of the car" and is one of three (upcoming) more academic papers that I wrote as a kind of precision / warm-up / focusing for my book on the car I am currently working on. I have found a very nice and devoted publication-outlet for it and am very happy to work along with them in the future. Do check out there well selected program at becoming.press 

Abstract: Contemporary ecological discourses that go by names such as “New Materialism” identify modern, “Cartesian” cosmologies as something old and ecologically problematic they deem necessary to overcome. In this paper, I want to address a certain romantic tendency within many such discourses that focus on what they call the “new” without thoroughly reflecting their own material entanglement with the “old”. To expand this argument, I will demonstrate that “old” Cartesianism has, by means of the car as an prosthesis central to the partaking in modern life, become a material practice vital to all modern dwellers. When Cartesianism is, by many New Materialist thinkers, deemed to be “no longer available to think with”, this might be because its features need no longer be philosophically thought and taught at universities, for they have become an embodied practise for everybody living a “modern” way of everyday life. Central Cartesian features such as the body-mind dualism, the relegation of the environment to a mere “given” and a ocularcentic and logocentric bias are reproduced by the car. An unfolding of the inherent political potential of New Materialist discourses should include such reflections about our very toxic entanglements with the “old” that still forms so much of our ecologically catastrophic now.

 --> find the paper here