“We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.”
SO true! Girls are told to be more tough these days, more handy, more independent! Boys aren't allowed to be sensitive, they aren't allowed to "act like a girl" in any way. It's sad!
I am not a maker. In a framing and value system is about creating artifacts, specifically ones you can sell, I am a less valuable human.
I disagree! Just because one is not a "maker," does not mean they are less valuable as a human.):
We call the latter "education," and it’s mostly done by underpaid, undervalued women.
Hmmm... I would have to disagree
Describing oneself as a maker—regardless of what one actually or mostly does—is a way of accruing to oneself the gendered, capitalist benefits of being a person who makes products.
So, basically.. anyone who works... is a maker? Im a little confused
“People who make things are simply different [read: better] than those who don’t.”
I have never heard of this so-called "widespread idea"
I’m uncomfortable with any culture that encourages you take on an entire identity, rather than to express a facet of your own identity
I completely understand where the author, Debbie Chachra, is coming from. I strongly believe that no one should have a label, but rather live how they want to, and let others form their own opinions without the help of a label.
It is those moments of breakdown, rupture, and loss that allow otherwise ignored infrastructure to be foregrounded and made apparent to our conscious attention. Without the breakdown or rup-ture that allowed for a network to become visible, participants could not have successfully argued for a change in policies, not unlike what we witnessed in the reactions to the apparent exploitation for Homeless Hotspots
Can this be related to Braidotti's "generative cracks" (19) and also L.C. - "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
information incorporates from a metastable abundance of disparate relations and performs processes that are irreducible to a message simply being delivered. Techniques for tuning to an abundance found through transindividuality are a practice not without precedent in rhetorical training.
Ecology
“cascade of effects
response-ability
Did this term originate with Barad, or does it stem from something/one else? Are we to take response-ability as the ability to respond affectively, effectively, and in an intentful manner that helps?
(212).
This reminds me of Hetch Hetchy
esponse-ability
Responsibility in the Islamic tradition stems from what I call "response-necessity". Which means, one is responsible to act when others are not acting while action is necessary. If we as communities, nations and the globe as whole decide what is necessary, responsibility as response-necessity follows.
Whatmight Owens mean by “assume responsibility” when the form of our response-ability is precisely what he is calling into question?
Yes, who decides responsibility and using what parameters?
ts strangeness lies in the call for more relations and not less—not a removal ofhumans from the environment, which is the value underlying much contemporaryenvironmentalism, but another way of comporting ourselves with environments
I wonder whether the shelter would have been burned if it carried a Western value as a sign of civility for instance. So we need more relations not less, but relations between nature and whom, which kind of human?
Conclusion: Rhetoric’s Footprint
If anyone is interested, I kept thinking through the footprint and it became this chapter: "Better Footprints".
I want to think more intensely about footprints. I want to re-emphasize movement, embodiment, place, and inscription, which are all side lined or even implicitly disparaged in the prominent employment of footprint. What is it to place one's feet and to inscribe with one's own body? In making environmentalism a question of a footprint's size, do we lose the nuance of kind? Everything leaves its mark upon the world.
If performativity is linked not only to the formation of the subject butalso to the production of the matter of bodies, as Butler’s account of“materialization” and Haraway’s notion of “materialized refiguration”suggest, then it is all the more important that we understand the natureof this production.
This challenges my understanding of the difference between new-materialism and posthumanism. Matter here is connected to its performance not to its "nature" as something fixed, because that matter keeps changing as it performs.
two distinct and indepen-dent kinds of entities—representations and entities to be represented.
Latour's word/world gap
knowledge (i.e., rep-resentations), on the one hand, and the known (i.e., that which is pur-portedly represented), on the other, the existence of a knower (i.e., some-one who does the representing) is sometimes made explicit. When thishappens it becomes clear that representations serve a mediating functionbetween independently existing entities.
This seems to parallel with Lefebvre's 3 types of space - spatial practice (perceived space), representations of space (conceived space/discourse on space), and representational space (lived space/discourse of space)
matters of practices/doings/actions.
emergent matters of concern
How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter?
One one hand, language is free to trade/share/interact with and matter is often not. It's an exchange we can all engage with on some level. On the other, access to understanding of language is unequal. Perhaps the dominance of language has to do with access. Language is also imbued with human expression, and this is often how we interpret others.
In entertainment—from video games to virtual reality—theinterface achieves its apotheosis as pure thing-in-itself: all that matters isdestroying the space invaders as they appear on the screen. This surface/depthcontrast is an invitation to talk about postmodernity (Jameson 1991) which I willnot take up—except to note that a functioning virtual reality would makepossible a fully alienated subject position.
I didn't think of the interface when I interviewed the chess pieces. I paid attention to the chess board as it facilitated and restricted the pieces mobility, but didn't recognize the other layer of space which is the interface. To me, the interface at least temporarily disappeared because of my point of focus.
We thus see how the material, the conceptual and the social evolvedtogether in the history of the synthetic dye industry. The establishment of newmaterial procedures and products (the coupling reaction and azo dyes), newbodies of knowledge (modern organic chemistry) and topologicaltransformations of social institutions (the enfolding of science by industry in theindustrial research laboratory) hung together, reinforced one another andreciprocally structured each other’s development.
key idea
To return to Marx, we see how‘production not only creates an object [synthetic dyes] for the subject [industry,science, the consumer] but also a subject [an industry with science now enfoldedwithin it] for the object.’
Key idea here
The thematics of a history of agency would thus be close to the thematicsof Marxist historiography, and could easily draw upon empirical work in thattradition.
I would like to hear us discuss this tomorrow.
social theory has traditionallyemulated the natural sciences in seeking to expose hidden structures as theexplanation of visible phenomena.
Interesting that social theory "emulated" rather than attempted to understand connections between social and natural sciences.
nstead we need a posthumanist social theory:one that recognizes from the start that the contours of material and human agencyreciprocally constitute one another.
The exigency of this article seems to be what we identified in our discussion today which is a new understanding of agency as collective and includes non-human matter.
And it is worth emphasizing that panoramic seeingwas not envisaged in the construction and use of the railways—nor was itsomething actively at stake (subject to tinkering) in the evolution of railwaytravel. In this sense panoramic seeing was an emerg entphenomenon—a new wayto perceive that just happened to manifest itself in a new material situation.7
Updating this transformation, Zach Furness discusses in One Less Car how bicycling and driving dramatically shift your orientation to the world & others.
A quotation from p. 177:
"At the most basic level, cycling slows down the world in ways that tangibly affect interpersonal communication, most notably by promoting face-to-face encounters.56 Scott larkin, author of the zine Go by Bicycle, points this out in interview with the author: “The prospect of someone stopping to talk to someone when they’re jamming by at thirty-five miles an hour is unlikely.”57 in addition, there is a sense among critics that habitual driving engenders an experience of cities that is not unlike tourism, inasmuch as urban spaces and landscapes are often abstracted into “pure, rapid, superficial spectacles.”58 Driving, according to this line of reasoning, physically distances people from both the materiality and the material realities of cities (i.e., the built environment as well as prevailing socioeconomic conditions) by facilitating a process that allows people to metaphorically and sometimes quite literally bypass the problems of cities altogether. The driver’s gaze shaped through privatized mobility, nigel Taylor argues, also objectifies and depersonalizes the world outside of the car in such as way that it transforms the environment, other vehicles, and even human beings into mere “things” that obstruct one’s movement. That is to say, while the car—like all transportation technologies— operates as a framing device, the “visuality of the windshield” becomes more than a casual or temporary looking glass when one considers both the ever- increasing amounts of time people individually spend “sealed off from the public and the street,” as well as a broader cultural/legal context in which “the public” is increasingly being seen as a mere amalgamation of mobile private spheres—a condition Don Mitchell calls the “SUV model of citizenship.” The problem, in other words, is not necessarily what one sees or does not see each time one gets behind the wheel, but rather, the way driving shapes subjectivity and fosters a broader disposition toward urban space and urban life: an entire way of seeing."
set of sensitivities in our encounter with empirical phenomena:
I commented on the Bignall and Rigney piece that I liked the phrase "affective neighborhood (176). It strikes me here that this neighborhood can defined in terms of resonant "sets of sensitivities."
This explains in a more explicit fashion the deep interconnectedness between health of Country and health of people and cultural life:Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar (lands, waters, body spirit and all living things) needs to be healthy for Ngarrindjeri to be healthy, and for this reason Ngarrindjeri care for, speak for and exercise cultural responsibility as Ngarrindjeri Ruwe/Ruwar.
Doesn't that still put nature in service of the human
For example, the Huuy-ay-aht people of Vancouver Island consider themselves governed by three core principles:Hishuk Tsa’walk (Everything is One, denoting the interconnected, interdependent and reciprocal relationship between the people, the land and the wider world(s) in a physical, spiritual and social sense); Uu-a-thluk(taking care of present and future generations and of the resources provided by the land and the natural world); and Iisaak (relational respect, entailing both personal and collective respect for the community and its people, trad-itional knowledge, the natural world, the metaphysical world and other peoples and communities).
I find a lot in common between this understanding of "more than human" and the Islamic guidelines of collective responsibility and inter-dependency.
This image of thought is therefore rhizomatic:the core structure, being a consistent order or a relatively stable interiority, constantly sends out creative offshoots that may combine productively with fresh ideational material encountered by the thinker affected by the changing situations in which she is embedded.
Like Casey noted about critiques made by disability studies scholars of "schizo-analysis" in Deleuze and Guattari, an additional point to consider is that the "rhizome" framework is based in part on the mapped movements and gestures of autistic children. How do the undergirded connections to disability change how we foreground Deleuze and Guattari's work, Indigenous knowledge, and their 'alliance' in posthuman theory?
posthumanist theory at times risks the elision of Indigenous cultural and intellectual authority by remaining blind to the ancient presence and contemporary force of Indigenous concepts of human being
"Post-" has always been a curious prefix for me for this reason. Does it imply a recovery from or progress to another stage of thought in systems that are otherwise skeptical of progress narratives?
looks out-ward to engage European philosophical, legal and cultural traditions in order to build upon all the allied tools available
I wonder: What are the problems of enacting this practice in the reverse? Some Indigenous scholars such as Zoe Todd and Sarah Hunt have argued that Indigenous ways of being and knowing are not concepts to be plucked or employed or drawn from—rather, they are living practices that emerge in relation to particular lands, waters, bodies, and so on. Another way to put this: can a reciprocity happen when Eurowestern philosophies engage Indigenous ones?
Viewed from an Indigenous perspective, the ideas expressed in posthumanism do not constitute a ‘new paradigm’, and there is nothing especially new about the vibrant ‘new materialism’ presently gaining traction in the philosophical academy
Such a succinct statement that captures various critiques of new materialism from Indigenous perspectives. Reminds me of Kim TallBear's now often-cited point. She writes, "First of all, indigenous peoples have never forgotten that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives."
into alliance
I've been drawn to their use of "alliance" in this chapter, which seems to be a generative and accountable way to bring together these bodies of knowledge.
affective neighbourhood
I really dig this turn of phrase here: it productively suggests not that these carious approaches are doing the same thing, turning over the same ground, but that what is being done resonates affectively--shared commitments, shared interests, etc.
This alternative strand within Western philosophy has been expressed momentarily, debated over time, and rearticulated vari-ously by figures including Spinoza, Godwin, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Tolstoy, Althusser, Foucault, Irigaray, Cixous, Deleuze and Latour, among others
People often neglect how tough it was for Deleuze to articulate this alternative history of/for western philosophy. In some aspects, just looking at Deleuze's career one might see a very grand and long drawn out attempt to write a literature review that rearticulates the problems and possibilities of western philosophy.
In fact, however, the ‘new Humanities’ are best considered less as a current break with European modernism and its humanist tradition of progressive Enlightenment; and more as a continuation and elab-oration of an alternative contemporaneous thread evident within the modern period of Western philosophical thinking about the nature of humanity and of human knowledge.
Perhaps the older humanities was a break to which posthumanism is finally returning too?
For us, these congruencies evidence the contemporary contribution that Indigenous philosophies can make to global efforts currently underway to imagine a ‘new Humanities’
This is very much an affirmative response to confluences between continental philosophy (philosophies?) and indigenous philosophies.
or example, a positive relationship between humans and a river would be evidenced by human land management practices that enable a river to maintain and enhance its mauri, which would result in its life-generating capacities being maintained. In this way, the mauri of the river is grown or maintained through ensuring that its life-generating vibrancy is not diminished. Simultaneously, the mauri of people is maintained through the provision of food and other resources to the humans from the river
This resonates very deeply with Spinoza's understanding if a body well composed in his Ethics.
ogies, and events. Rocks, rivers, birds, plants, mountains, animals and oceans, all possess a genealogy, and the divine genealogical order of whakapapa extends through aeons to a common genealogical origin which is Io, the Creator of the Cosmos
Such temporal registers echo/precede those requested by Braidotti.
The world’s Indigenous peoples are diverse and cannot be identified homogenously; however, many Indigenous Nations find they share significant commonalities associated with a philosophy of ‘being-more-than-human’ and a science based upon ‘natural laws of interdependence’
I've always been curious about, and ignorant of, the conflation of indigeneity into a homogenous category. Whenever someone brings up "indigenous thought" I keep wanting to ask "which indigeniety?"
We ask:what is at stake pol-itically when Indigenous ways are conceived erroneously as unstructured and deterritorialising, when (Western) subjectivities are constructed as ‘nomad’ but nomadism is no longer marked as a mode of existence special to Indigenous humanity, and when (Western) subjective transformation is construed as a process of ‘becoming-autochthonous’3 that erases the specifi-city of ‘the Autochthon’ and results in her self-alienation? Whobenefits from this construction, andhow?
Similar critiques have been leveled against D&G by disability studies scholars regarding their use of "schizo-analysis" as an interpretive/inventive frame.
perhaps so that the Indian who is himself Indian becomes something else’
In There There, Tommy Orange discusses urban Indians in the prologue - "...but the land moves with you like memory. An Urban Indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonlivingthing from the earth. All our relations."
Accordingly, Maori ethics involves the practice of mauri-enhancing positive relationships within human communities, and between humans and non-human entities:
On exploring the necessity of the negative and affirming the positive in the Anthropocene... Braidotti: "The negativity is part of the exercise, but the moment, the analytical function of negativity is only a moment. The proper job, the task, the ethical obligation is in reversing the negative into conditions of affirmation and positivity."
onsubstantial intersubjectivit
This is a fascinating use of language, consubstantiation and transubstantiation being highly Western and Christian. Learning to see and value the "other" requires learning and using new terms to reach these levels of intersubjectivity and new ways of being. Interactive ecologies occur with or without hybrid languages, but they will be best fostered with this type of listening and speaking - one that includes and enmeshes the perceived other(s).
Autochthon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autochthon_(ancient_Greece) "In Ancient Greece, the concept of autochthones (from Ancient Greek αὐτός autos "self," and χθών khthon "soil"; i.e. "people sprung from earth itself") means the original inhabitants of a country as opposed to settlers, and those of their descendants who kept themselves free from an admixture of foreign peoples.
In mythology, autochthones are those mortals who have sprung from the soil, rocks and trees. They are rooted and belong to the land eternally.
An autochthon is not the same as the offspring of Gaia, called gegenes (earth-born), although later the terms have been conflated."
“I see Posthumanism as a methodology: a conceptual framework that can be applied to the field of graphic design.”
An important undercurrent in all of our readings is methodology. What methods does posthumanism orientations require, invent, frustrate, occlude?
such an under-standing helps us conceptualize maps and images as not merely depicting the “reality” they set out to represent but also, more agentially, as participat-ing intra-actively, as implicated in “matters of practices, doings, and actions” (Barad, Meeting 135)
This is a helpful articulation of intra-action in action, so to speak; that is, of how material-discursive practices emerge with the becoming of the world. In Barad’s terms, I wonder if the camera or image technology might be said to be the apparatus? When the apparatus is changed or modified, we get—and also, crucially, participate in— a different view of the world.
This idea raises questions about how humans conceptualize the autonomy of nonhuman animals—a consideration central to compassionate conservation
Amy raises a really compelling question here for me. I am interested in thinking through an ethics built upon autonomy and minimal intrusion in the context of Barad's investment in intraction.
ntological equality of actors,
Yes, even when understanding agency as enacted through assemblages of actors, these actors are not equal because each actor's position facilitates certain quality and amount of power to pass through that actor.
human rights studies
in what ways is "human right studies" posthuman?
My argument is that theposthuman enables us to track, across a number of interdisciplinaryfields, the emergence of discourses about the non/in/trans/meta/post-human, which are generated by the intersecting critiques of humanismand of anthropocentrism
I feel that assemblage theory does the same work, especially when we think of agency as spread and enacted through assemblages as in Jane Bennett.
Thismethod accounts for one’s locations in terms both of space (geo-politicalor ecological dimension) and time (historical memory or genealogicaldimension), thereby grounding political subjectivity.
Where does location in term of power hierarchy lies?
Subjectivity is not restricted to bound individuals, but is rather aco-operative trans-species effort (Margulis and Sagan, 1995) that takesplace transversally, in-between nature/technology; male/female; black/white; local/global; present/past – in assemblages that flow across anddisplace the binaries.
I am also thinking of the binary of virtual/actual and online/offline especially in the context of affects that flaw through these non distinct realms.
embodied and embedde
This resonates with me as the roots of social collective responsibility.
m. I want to insist thatthe posthuman – a figuration carried by a specific cartographic readingof present discursive conditions – can be put to the collective task ofconstructing new subjects of knowledge, through immanent assemblagesor transversal alliances between multiple actors
I'm interested in the "use" of the posthuman figuration here. It always pops out at me when there is value added to the posthuman insofar as it can to be a "tool...put to use for the collective" who can imagine and create new "subjects of knowledge." What does it mean to employ the posthuman, even for the collective? What, if anything, does that concept of the user/tool reflect about the user/employer?
but there is no question that contemporaryfeminist theory is productively posthuman.
It's an interesting move to eschew the necessity of reinventing the wheel by instead noting how conversations that might not have labelled themselves "posthuman" have, in effect, already practiced it as a methodology.
. I want to insist thatthe posthuman – a figuration carried by a specific cartographic readingof present discursive conditions – can be put to the collective task ofconstructing new subjects of knowledge, through immanent assemblagesor transversal alliances between multiple actors
I am interested in what the practical implications of such a figuration, if successful, might be beyond the academy.
. Two related notions emerge from this claim: firstly,the mind-body continuum – i.e. the embrainment of the body and embodiment ofthe mind – and secondly, the nature-culture continuum – i.e. ‘naturecultural’ and‘humanimal’ transversal bonding. The article explores these key conceptual and meth-odological perspectives and discusses the implications of the critical posthumanitiesfor practices in the contemporary ‘research’ university
I am reminded a of John Dewey's organism/environment continuum articulated in Art as Experience and am interested in what resources critical posthumanism might offer rhetoricians investigating American pragmatism.
Power being multi-layered (potestasandpotentia); the contemporarybeing multi-dimensional (the present and the actual); time being multi-directional (ChronosandAion), and cognitive capitalism being tuned intobio-genetics and informational codes – there is nothing left for criticalthinkers to do other than to pursue the posthuman, all too human praxisof speaking truth to power and working towards the composition ofplanes of immanence for missing peoples. Instead of new generalizationsabout an engendered pan-humanity, we need sharper focus on the com-plex singularities that constitute our respective locations. The criticalposthumanities can be the epistemological vehicle for this project
I appreciate this passage an an opening to think differently about power. We typically and habitually think of power as only top-down hierarchy which not only elides how power is distributed throughout any given system but that habit of thought reinforces the humanist model of governance/relation. To think how power (and any capacity for change and invention) might operate differently would need to think about the temporal registers as well as the multiplicity of relations in any given situation.
ability to enter modes of relation, to affect and be affected, sus-taining qualitative shifts and creative tensions accordingly
Here again I read the "creativity" she mentioned earlier in the essay, the kind of invention we need for the Anthropocene.
we are inthis together!
In other woks, I've seen Braidotti state" we are in this together but 'we' are not all the same." I find this turn of phrase to embody the critique of the pan-human she notes in the next line.
entail creativity:
This kind of affirmative opening up seems key for any understanding of posthumanist invention. I hear echoes of Latour's "why critique has run out of steam" here, as well as a lot of thinkers in rhetcomp (e.g., Boyle; Lynch).
Appeals to the ‘human’are always discriminatory: they create structural distinctions and inequal-ities among different categories of humans, let alone between humansand non-humans (Braidotti, 2013, 2016).
The most compelling account of the discriminatory power of "human" I've seen is Alexander Weheliye's "'Feenin'': Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music."
Social the-orists from different political backgrounds, such as Habermas (2003),Fukuyama (2002), Sloterdijk (2009) and Derrida (in Borradori, 2003),express intense anxiety bordering on moral panic about the future of thehuman and the humanist legacy in our advanced technological times.
This anxiety (for me) is best expressed in Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror.
"The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is now here, jetted, abjected, into "my" world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue's full unlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away." (5)
http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/touchyfeelingsmaliciousobjects/Kristevapowersofhorrorabjection.pdf
I particularly value how Braidotti calls attention to our overnaming problem and the integrative, transdicsiplinary nature of the Anthropocene - a nature that screams for us to both identify diference and tear down walls that separate and isolate us from one another and from the material world.
weneed to make careful ethical distinction between different speedsof both knowledge production – with the predictable margins of institu-tional capitalization – and the construction of alternative knowing sub-ject formations
"fast technological advances" occlude social and environmental injustices. Accepting varied speeds of human and nonhuman adaptation is a necessary approach to successful rhetorics in the Anthropocene. See Bradshaw, 2018
“stretch our sensory, perceptual, experimental, and conceptual powers so that our [methods] can be tested and extended” (2013, 169).
"Sets of sensitivities" (Pickering).
Ecological thinking is not limited to environmentalist projects, so any adaptive system (a city, a lab, a discipline) could serve
As with Parikka, ecology is an operation.
Perhaps the Dithering is a more apt name than either the Anthropocene or Capitalocene!The Dithering will be written into earth’s rocky strata, indeed already is written into earth’s mineralized layers
The reason I actually quite like Dithering, aside from being a huge KSR fan, is that it marks not what "we" have done in the past but what "we" are doing now (as speculatively witness from the future).
Ecology is more like an operation.
This really struck me. We aren't observing or describing an ecology, but practicing something as an ecology.
They take us higher, lower, deeper, involve us speaking to minerals, taking a breath of air with the wind, and seeing differently
This connects with Braidotti's investment in "pragmatic experimentation."
This is also a spot where I think we can think through the limits/trouble with representationalism as articulated by Barad.
So this image, not the other one, is in fact a study I made in the early days of this project, part of a series that I'm making of speculative aquifers. So I began this aspect of the project in order to track my own changing perception of what an aquifer is. Because I really didn't know what an aquifer was, and I wanted to be able to follow the ways in which I learned about it and how I would imagine it differently. So this is just a very blocky and rough watercolor with lots of blues and grays, and the layout presents the aquifer as resembling a dam or something of some kind. So some sort of combination of industrial or human made and natural environment.
This is really compelling methodologically. Taylor appears to paint speculatively -- what ways do you (or might you) track how you are differently constituted through intra-action with knowledges?
disabled ecologies, the webs of disability that are created spatially, temporally, and across species boundaries when ecosystems are contaminated, depleted, and profoundly altered.
Clear definition of disabled ecologies.
. In doing so, it helps us conceptualize tracking technologies neither as “mere instruments or devices that can be deployed as neutral probes of the natural world,” nor as human manifestations or human/nonhuman assemblages
Though every thing we call "world" blooms & constantly becomes through intra-action, I wonder to what extent a generous strategic essentialism is useful, particularly in advocacy.
I'm reminded of Jane Bennett:
“We are now in a better position to name that other way to promote human health and happiness: to raise the status of the materiality of which we are composed. Each human is a heterogeneous compound of wonder-fully vibrant, dangerously vibrant, matter. If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper relief. Vital materialism would thus set up a kind of safety net for those humans who are now, in a world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer because they do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other) model of personhood. The ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such. Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans…. [A] vital materialism does not reject self-interest as a motivation for ethical behavior, though it does seek to cultivate a broader definition of self and of interest” (Vibrant Matter 12-13).
ecology
Late 19th century (originally as oecology): from Greek oikos ‘house’ + -logy.
Artistic practice is often located in techniques such as focusing but it can benefit as immeasurably from unfocusing;5 to train oneself to observe what appears out of sight so as to cultivate an understanding of the structural complexity and agency of our environment and its various layers of activity.
How do we account in our scholarship our practices of "unfocusing"?
One vector I think of is Jaishikha Nautiyal's piece in the Women's Studies in Communication 2018 special issue on New Materialities and Precarious Mobilities, "Becoming a Detour de Force: Dehierarchizing Directionality and Mobility in Rhetorical Research."
Nautiyal generally aligns becoming a detour de force with Braidotti's nomadic subjectivity & reflects on their fieldwork at SXSW to describe this modality of research.
Some quotations:
"As a research ethic, a detour de force opposes a tour de force, which views a critic’s inventions as the egocentric product of vertical excellence, geocentric mastery, and the telic exceptionalism of human agency. Invention as a tour de force privileges spatial economies that value the predominantly and largely masculinist faculties of vision and intellect at the expense of sense perceptions related to touch, sound, smell, and taste (Irigaray 25–26; Cimitile and Miller)" (430).
"Through this approach, I attempt to reclaim the traditionally inferior, haptic, gustatory, olfactory, and aural senses into the material corpus alongside the ocular, while also demonstrating the diminishing returns of distributed sensory attention within fieldwork (e.g., anxiety, overstimulation). In becoming a detour de force, my desire is to touch the earth before I can limit, subjugate, and fetishize it with my vision—a vision compromised and facilitated by the nexus of advanced capitalism (Cimitile and Miller 122). My desire is to take a sensuous detour of feeling and attention before cognition forecloses on navigation through the fixity of a destination" (432).
While working on my MFA thesis, entitled Posthuman Polymythology, I visited a biogenetics lab
This transports me to Saya Woolfalk's "accessible and concrete" multi-modal art work and fantasy worlds of data colonialism. Pieces like "Ethnography of No Place" and her development of The Institute of Empathy (whose non-profit work gets appropriated by the company ChimaTEK) motion us toward Braidotti's calls to situate posthumanism within the intensification of technologies/capitalism.
According to design educator Anastasiia Raina, it’s not too early to begin considering what the roles of designers might be in a future where tasks like layout and production are completely automated.
I read this piece through Braidotti's emphasis on pragmatic experimentation. I have been re-reading her book The Posthuman for a directed reading course I am doing this summer on Posthuman Design and it keeps striking how many "design challenges" Braidotti's work spin off. Her work is a kind of posthuman progymnasmata, and Raina's work, described here, really brings that across for me.
Geometry is concerned with shapes and sizes (this is true even of the non-Euclideanvarieties, such as geometries built on curved surfaces like spheres rather than on flat planes),whereas topology investigates questions of connectivity and boundaries. Although spatialityis often thought of geometrically, particularly in terms of the characteristics of enclosures(like size and shape), this is only one way of thinking about space. Topological features ofmanifolds can be extremely important. For example, two points that seem far apart geo-metrically may, given a particular connectivity of the spatial manifold, actually be proximateto one another (as, e.g., in the case of cosmological objects called “wormholes”).
Geometry & topography might springboard some useful ways to think about coalition/kin building that simultaneously hold up the work of standpoint theory & decenters humanness at the same time.
Although the posthuman is empirically grounded, because it isembedded and embodied, it functions less as a substantive entity thana figuration, orconceptualpersona. It is a theoretically-powered carto-graphic tool that aims at achieving adequate understanding of theseprocesses of undoing the human
Fusing this "conceptual persona" with the persona of the "critic," my mind travels to some of Chuck Morris's work. Perhaps a generous twist on "critical liminality" and the persona of the "archival queer" offer initial resonances for how rhetorical scholars have done some of what Braidotti maps in a different register.
I hope the readerswill take my over-crowded article as an attempt to compose a missingcommunity of posthuman scholars: the essay as assemblage
Another line of thought I would like for use to pursue is method. Braidotti turns to cartography here as a method (always selective, impartial, mobile). What other methods are suggested, enacted, demonstrated through the readings to respond to what Braidotti calls the "posthuman predicament"?
eohumanist2claims
One of the big concerns or critiques leveled against posthumanism is that it never gets "beyond" the object of its critique but I wonder to what extent is that exactly the point?
posthumanism on the one handand post-anthropocentris
Interesting parsing here to discuss
A TheoreticalFramework for theCritical Posthumanities
We debated whether or not to include this essay last or first. The thought was that this kind of essay is something we might want to arrive to after building up a case for posthumanist thought, but we decided instead to start at the end and then reverse engineer this "effect."
posthuman predicament
I am intrigued by Braidotti's use of predicament both in terms of what the word my denote/connote and in relation to her general dislike for framework of vulnerability that sometimes accompanies posthumanism.
‘more-than-human
I'd be interested in exploring the phrase "more-than-human" in relation to other formulations such as post-human, extra-human, non-human and even inhuman. What does more-than bring/do that the others do not?
Employing posthumanist philosophy in a way that is sensitive to differential experiences arising from colonial legacies of imperial humanism and contributes to the ongoing task of decolonisation, can require ‘joyful acts of disobedience and gentle but resolute betrayal’ to conceptual assemblages originating in the (imperial) West.45
What rhetorical concepts might lend themselves to anti-colonial "joyful acts of disobedience"? What pieces or scholars come to mind that practice, model, or are in proximity to this "joyful disobedience"?