From Becoming-Geology to Geology-Becoming: Hashima as Geopolitics

Abstract

What kind of geopolitics emerges when heat, stress, fracture, transduction, sublimation, and so on, are envisioned not as standing reserves for a creative, evolutionary-based life, but as an Earthly vitalism that can and does proceed otherwise via the play of order and disorder, intensity and extension? Following some comments on the recent uptick in the work expected of geologic imaginaries and geologic materials in Anthropocene debates, this chapter dwells on the visible role of feminist materialism as a means of articulating a critique of classical and critical geopolitics, and an openness to the expressive work of Earthly forces as a ‘geopolitics’, but also the simultaneous backgrounding of a feminist material emphasis on the analytic work of sexual differentiation in the process. That is, sexuality as the principle of a ‘not-One’ mode of difference has become a vehicle for interrogating the stratified ontologies of state and academia; but, feminist materialism’s conception of sexuality as a polymorphous, difference-producing force that can be captured by all cellular-based organisms has not sat well with a broad-scale effort to ‘geologise’ human subjects and social relations. This chapter responds to this twofold movement by looking to feminist materialism’s reworking of ‘becoming’ as a situated process to ask what geologic imaginary hoves into view when we consider a ‘geology-becoming’, as opposed to a ‘becoming-geology’? Acknowledging that all naming is tactical, how can we look to an analytic of, say, accretion as part and parcel of an Earth that actively participates in the affective force of material organisation?