Matterphorics and Japanese Aesthetics

In the last two decades, new materialisms have produced new epistemologies by theorising ‘scapes’ that direct ontologically flat mobilities through flows of energy-matter. Acknowledging that matter is not inert but vibrant (Bennett 2010), they have demonstrated the necessity of thinking in terms of intra-action to understand that entities materialise from relations, and not the other way around (Barad 2013). Matter, on this relational view, is constituted as condensations of responses to the desires / desirings of humans and other-than humans, including flora, fauna, rocks, minerals, and clouds.

This form of perceiving-thinking, called matterphorics (Barad 2021), is a ‘putting into practice’ of Bohr’s famous statement that ‘concepts are material arrangements’, and not ideas in people’s heads (Bohr 1923). It is also an embodied and environmentally embedded form of perceiving-thinking located in durational emergence and complexity, similar to Nagatomo’s notion of actional and affective attunement (Nagatomo 1992).

By focusing on three Japanese aesthetic forms that deal with complexity across the human-non-human divide – yūgen, wabi sabi, and cha-no-yu – this paper develops a theory of cultivation based on matterphorics and actional-affective attunement, as related to their respective provenances: quantum physics and Asian mind-body practices. In the final section, the paper turns to a comparison of the postulated theory of cultivation to affect theory (Berlant 2011; Angerer 2017) to pinpoint the values of this specific approach in a contemporary climate of disaffection and sensorial overload.