Plastic Memories of the Anthropocene

Plastic has become a ubiquitous material on planet Earth. I use Bennett’s term, thing-power, to analyse various aspects of plastic’s onto-materiality. Generally considered a single-use material, plastic is easily discarded, leaving the individualized, private space of capitalism, and becoming a nomad, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, thus travelling through a smooth space. Then, plastic enters a symbiotic relationship with all biotic and abiotic bodies, becoming endo-plastic. As a geological layer, it becomes a “vibrant” memory of the nexus between capitalism and humanism, revealing its full political potential. Plastic is a witness, by-product and determinant of the Anthropocene, and its memory tells the political and ideological geostory (Donna J. Haraway) of human exceptionalism. Becoming-plastic is one way of overcoming anthropocentrism: not just by advocating for “post-humanism,” but by advocating for “posthum-ism,” even if this means “embracing human extinction” (Patricia MacCormack).

Becoming Rhizomatic: Researching Flowing in/between Striated and Smooth Space

Exploring long-term educational change, we investigate our re/construction of research methodology as we moved from a positivist framework to working with ideas drawn from Deleuze and Guattari. We reveal our becoming rhizomatic in data analysis in the metamodelling of the richness flowing horizontally through our practices. We tell of our struggles to escape hierarchical thinking and relations researching between the smooth and striated. A space of interactions, conversations and writings created relations between polyphonic voices, leading us to an emergent methodology. Our struggle against hierarchies in data analysis yielded rich educational possibilities for becoming that Deleuzo-Guattarian thinking offers us.

Ultra-smooth and space-filling mineral films generated via particle accretion processes

Well-tuned bioinspired mineralization via liquid mineral precursors yields ultra-smooth, space-filling bodies, transgressing the supremum of packing densities of nonclassical crystallization.

Boundary Value Problems for the Lorentzian Dirac Operator

On a compact globally hyperbolic Lorentzian spin manifold with smooth space-like Cauchy boundary, the (hyperbolic) Dirac operator is known to be Fredholm when Atiyah–Patodi–Singer boundary conditions are imposed. This chapter explores to what extent these boundary conditions can be replaced by more general ones and how the index then changes. There are some differences to the classical case of the elliptic Dirac operator on a Riemannian manifold with boundary.

ANALYZING THE SMOOTH AND STRIATED SPACE IN PASAR CIPUTAT TANGERANG SELATAN

Striated is seen as a fixed space and carries a sense of border. On the other hand, smooth space is seen as continuous and open interval. However, both terms are always intermingling, at one point smooth can be striated and vice versa. A city can be seen as a striated (border) and as smooth space (urban sprawl). Looking at a strip near Pasar Ciputat, Tangerang Selatan, this paper investigates how space changes function and identity overtime. The strip becomes a good example of analyzing the smooth and striated space practiced in everyday life. This strip is heavily populated by street vendors who has ‘occupying schedule’ and continuously changes the patterns of occupation. They prefer to sell goods on the road instead of in the provided building. By midnight, the road is not accessible as the vendors closed off and sell their goods on the road. In the morning and afternoon, some vendors disappear and their former space has been used by other vendors to sell different goods. Through observation, urban morphological mapping and photographic analysis, this paper uncovers the fluid uses and meaning of the space.

A Space with No Place (Straus and Ecstasy)

This chapter argues that Erwin Straus assigns dance very definitely to the domain of smooth space. Music is dance’s condition of possibility because it establishes the only space that could be adequate to dancing: an acoustic space, both homogeneous and nebulous, in which the directionality of praxis is obliterated. This acoustic space of dance contrasts with the optical space of directed and purposeful movement. The optical space, Straus tells us, is “historical”; the acoustic space, meanwhile, is “presentic.” Dance, as an extension of music, enables this “presentic” relation to space, which Straus calls “ecstasy” or “becoming one.” But ecstasy is only really apparent in dances “which are not yet dances” such as children’s dances, social dances, or primitive dances.