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SLIDE ONE: TITLE
Thank you Margret for inviting us today. I am excited to
participate in this conference and to share this session with Nick. Margret and
I are connected through the work of Donna Haraway, as well as through
companionships with Helen Merrick among science fiction feminisms. My
presentation here today emerges from a new book I am working on, tentatively
entitled "Attaching, for Climate Change." You can find this talk
online at the URL on this slide and also on the handout. That URL will connect you to
the talksite on the web, which works on a smartphone, tablet, or laptop. The
talksite includes the handout as well as a bibliography and additional links.
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SLIDE TWO: SYMPOIESIS, MEDIA, THINGS
So I will be sharing bits from the book writing as it exists
now, having come to the term sympoiesis, as in a sympoiesis of media, with
Haraway and others, and to speaking with things, that is to say engaged among agencies
enfolding realities, with Karen Barad, Bruno Latour, Vinciane Despret, Jane Bennett,
Elizabeth Wilson, Vicki Kirby, Lynn Turner, Iris van der Turin, Paul Edwards
and others you will find on the talksite's transdisciplinary bibliography.
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SLIDE THREE: TETHERING: PERSONAL
On a humid evening in early summer 2015 I walk around a
little park in my Silver Spring neighborhood, my right ear open and listening
to bird song and kids’ voices, while the earbud in my left ear transfers these
words from my iPhone: “I frequently write in a style that the reader may find
‘personal’ – sometimes provocatively or frustratingly so…. I am one of the
entities caught in the hyperobject I call here global warming…; one of the
entities I know quite well.” (Morton 2013; Kindle iPad version loc 142, joined
to Audible audio file with Whispersync, time remaining 8:46:38) Into my
iPhone’s voice memo app I speak a series of thoughts that begin “it’s personal
because….”
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SLIDE FOUR: TETHERING: DOUBLED
With tissues growing over the macula of each of my eyes
resulting in double-double vision, listening to as many books on audio as I can
is personal. Few academic books are on audio in this way at the time of this
writing though, and the cognitive sensations involved often feel rather alien
to a person who is temperamentally a visual learner and, once upon a time, a
speed reader. Luckily, this one, Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects,
is available for audio download. Books in such multiple media formats differentially
engage varying aspects of the sensorium, for me, actually for everyone. What
comes to attention now is not as in “focus” as it once was, that is to say, in
proportion as visually (and figuratively) sharp as the ocular (and conceptual)
field is narrowed. Certainly not for me, but perhaps not for any of us as we
reflect upon our abilities and attentions, never stable. That sort of focused ir intensive detail depends on reducing the size of the field of view, as one learns only
too disappointingly, trying to find extensively large enough magnifying lenses when
attempting to adapt to double-double vision, struggling to get the
double-double big enough to coordinate with the brain as singled details. I
have to not-quite-see through my seeing, sort of being instead in and with my brain’s
coordinations, which actually know better than what-I-think-I-see, what I
actually do see, that is to say, what my body apprehends. It is a strange way
to perceive, this double-double vision, and unexpectedly a lot of physically
hard work, where you must trust that you are seeing something not quite …there?
The ophthalmologist and retina specialist I see regularly, calls the odd
shadows that result too, ghosting.
Today then, I move among extensive knowledges with newly
embodied sensitivities, walking in the world listening and tethered, often to
kinds of books I would not in the past have devoted time to, science journalism
especially, just because these come in a format that now works for me. I
“world” differently as a result, my attunements have shifted. Now, as linkages
enmeshing infrastructures and embodiments become perceptible on breakdown, many
conscious aspects of this thing, the personal, have to be taken up caringly and
reaggregated. (Star 1999; Despret 2004) I seek out knowledges, materials,
people, objects in order to take up a kind of coordination work that, say, my
eyes and my liver, no longer do without specific attention. The personal
materializes amid tethering elements I did not need to know and know about so
intimately before. And it is not just macular puckers and type two diabetes
that require companioning apparatus, nor is the personal here only about me.
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SLIDE FIVE: TETHERING: GRAPH
Being entities with unstable perceptions caught up in
transcontextual economies of action, we require enriched cognitive apparatus
for reality, companioning global warming. As Morton addresses in his caption of
a NASA graph illustrating his book, global warming “cannot be directly seen,
but can be thought and computed.” (Morton 2013, loc 142, time remaining
8:46:38) I do not hear the graph’s caption, it is not among the verbal bits
spoken in audio, but I do see it and the figure when I shift from the audiobook
version to the ebook version, joined together in one media format. So much we
care for cannot be directly perceived, but can be thought, computed, attuned
to, felt out, companioned. As and among enfolded realities, we have senses and
apparatus, some readied, some emergent, for the distributed, the extensive. And
we share what we call learning at the very point of shift through that
intensively focused bit, to diffuse extensive multisensations. As we world with
things, the personal enfolds as exteriorities within. (Barad 2010, 2012; Kirby,
V. 2011, 27)
Morton speaks of his coining of the term hyperobjects “to
refer to things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to
humans.” (Morton 2013, loc 105, time remaining 8:51:46) Are hyperobjects
somehow Morton’s because he knew no such term himself before 2010, when he
knows himself to have coined the word he needed to use? Can he have really
invented the word but not uniquely? Does the term, word plus meaning, have
alternative, extensive, distributed lives? Does that affect the cognitive,
political, planetary encounters we call global warming? (Ngram 2015 "hyperobject,hyperobjects")
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SLIDE SIX: TETHERING: NGRAM
How do words come to matter when specific interventions
travel extensively, carrying with each a particular intensive action or agency,
a disciplinary knowledge world, a form of authority, or a political intent?
What happens when this particular agency diffuses, or multiplies in extensions
as a point in its alive cycle as a boundary object, something we can apprehend
with our double-double consciousness in play? (Star 2010)
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SLIDE SEVEN: TETHERING: BOUNDARY OBJECTS, DOUBLED
Science journalism or academic philosophy, say, each work to
bring intensive meanings to extensive concerns. They play boundary games.
Notice that boundary objects such as the word hyperobject do not create
boundaries, but they do shift and alter edges of, say, philosophical apparatus,
as well as altering the trajectories of membership in communities at work, for
example, among scientists and artists. These us/them elasticities exist at
various grains of intensive detail, and companion particular sorts of claims
for climate change attentions. How might hyperobject work as, say, a relay, or
a string figure for sharing patterns, for connections that matter? (Haraway
[2011] 2013) How meta or conscious do our coordinations of such boundary
objects and knowledge worlds in media ecologies have to be?
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PART TWO >>>Media
systems, complexity....
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SLIDE EIGHT: MEDIA SYSTEMS: HARAWAY QUOTE
Media systems are not an area of study only, but the very
air we breathe. They are diverse, active materialities and global ecologies.
They actively enfold among and as complex systems such as climate change.
Indeed climate change is at the heart of the work described here, and the claim
is that media, complex systems, and climate change are faces of, for, with, and
about each other: enfolding, in the spirit of physicist Karen Barad's work. The
book I am writing approaches media as ecologies of complexity in dynamic,
generative sympoiesis. Such a making-with, this sympoiesis, matters today for
learning how to work among entangled systems, media systems. The word
sympoiesis, which I learned from kin maker Donna Haraway, is a very mouthful of
sensation; it practices, plays, alters and adapts. It triggers stories at
scales from planetary change and its politics, to gut microbiome
communications, to quorum sensing and quantum memory. (Haraway forthcoming) The
term media as well is properly saturated; it is animated throughout with
attachments and agencies. The word media acts as a lively boundary object,
simultaneously plastic and multiply specific, registering and pressuring edges
between and routes into worlds.
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SLIDE NINE: MEDIA SYSTEMS: UNDERSEA CABLES
Working for climate change justice requires activisms to
address global warming and its interlinked ecological damages and areas of
concern, such as waste flows, the impact of extractive industries,
ocean-atmosphere circulation, and the health of biodiverse ecosystems; and it
includes more than that. Climate change is both a model for and the literal
being of planetary scale distributed embodiments, a version of media as action
writ large. Connect such model-data symbiosis (Edwards 2013, 281) with how as a
general designation media keeps shifting scale and reshaping, while new media
in action is always reorganizing actors and objects. All of this involves an
entanglement of matter and meaning as we come to understand it quite literally:
ethical realities and quantum becomings among knowledge worldings that shift
scales and actions. What Karen Barad calls meeting the universe halfway. (Barad
2007)
Attaching for climate change also requires attending to some
very material double binds and living paradoxes. These include the considerable
difficulties of working against the bad faith, big money efforts of fossil fuel
lobbyists to create media climates of doubt about the sciences of climate
action and justice, with instruments for manipulating loyalties. Knowing more
about a systems analysis of double binds is important here. Double binds are
not just irreconcilable demands, although such demands are in place politically
today when it comes to climate issues. But anthropologist and cyberneticist
Gregory Bateson, the teacher from whom I learned about double binds, theorized their
more complex agencies. In some of the most abusive and violent forms double
binds constitute communication disorders across infrastructures and systems
entangling bad faith, misrecognition, self-deception, and secrecy. But double
binds are transcontextual tangles at other scales too, via multiple cognitive
and perceptual enfoldings, and by no means uniformly under conscious control.
They create and involve circumstances even more tangled than political
conspiracy or overwhelming and self-justifying resources. In political terms
they are evidence of mismatches of obligation and attachment, and these in
circumstances of unpredictable rewards and punishments with survival itself
understood as the very stakes of action.
Play in all its permutations figure here: double binds are
often, however also abusive, the grit around which new creativities accrete,
and figure in spiritual, religious, philosophical, educational, and artful
practices too. Media work in all of these. During the last four decades, the
time period of my own intense interests, participations, and research into and
with media, designations for just what media attentions encompass continually
transform, overlap, merge. All this play activates sensations and feelings, as
old and new words reaggregate, and as new things agentially re-imagine worldly
action, systems justice, forms for working out climate change and for being
that change ourselves.
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SECTION ONE OF PART
THREE >>>Attending in real time ....
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SLIDE TEN: ATTENDING: CORAL
Attending in real time to what is happening when it happens
is a methodology of companioning with things, speaking with things, all of us
bits together in emergent processes. Imagine touching and making the crocheted
worlds on this slide: here you can see and later can find on the web a set of crowdsourcing
worldly sensitizations to global warming and its effects on coral reefs. These
are crocheted worlds curated and otherwise shared by Margaret and Christine
Wertheim. A science writer and a performance artist respectively, these twin
sisters are founders of the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles and on the
web. (2003) Only recently was it realized that physical models were possible to
make, in crochet, for the hyperbolic mathematics involved in the forms that
coral reefs take. Over 5000 people have crafted these crocheted reef worlds,
while over the planet more than three million have inhabited exhibitions of
these, feeling out and sensing newly our
agencies, our “us” as bits in complex systems.
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CONTINUING PART THREE
>>>Attending in real time to double binds, attachments, triggers
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SLIDE ELEVEN: ATTENDING: METHODS
As media, climate change, complex systems, things are all
points of attachment changing now literally moment to moment, so too are their
knowledge infrastructures and apparatus expressions of critical experiments in
progress. We find ourselves required to participate in the citizen science of
this approach to media, while never denying the many double binds we find
ourselves in too. I appreciate the gatherings created by anthropologist and
journalist Candis Callison in her book How
Climate Change Comes to Matter: the communal life of facts. There she
explores the non-denying climate change discourses of an Alaskan Inuit
community, the evangelical movement Creation Care, and the translations to
climate risk performed by the corporate social responsibility group Ceres; as
well as analyzing just how journalists and scientists are caught up in what she
calls advocacy and near advocacy –
even how climate change itself is best understood as a very
form of life.
The most abusive double binds, as Bateson analyzes them, are
not simple contradictions but rather complex systemic ones. Two or more
mutually exclusive or complexly entangled messages are conveyed on different
perceptual channels: voice and action, say, or in divergent sensory media,
surveillance and entertainment perhaps. Each requires an action that the other
precludes somehow, and both are pitched at levels of such urgency and danger
that survival itself is felt to be at stake. There are two additional elements
that escalate the danger and damages, psychically and socially, of double
binds: if one cannot walk away or leave the situation, and if one cannot say
what is happening. There are many reasons one might not be able to say
something: you literally might not know what is happening. Double binds are
confusing, and misplaced trust or reactive dissociation might make it hard to
perceive what is going on. You may be told explicitly that lives, including
your own, are in danger if you say anything at all, or you may intuit this.
Your sense of reality may be disordered and attempts to seek reality checks are
refused in various ways, from disbelief, to self-interested but misrecognized
implication, to human reactions in which one upholds one’s own reality at the
expense of that of others. And words are all too inadequate to convey the
complex perceptions of patterns, effects, danger, layers of escalation, and
non-linear entanglements that can be happening all at once.
Experiencing double binds recurrently has intensifying
effects. Today we use terms such as trauma, PTSD, and microagressions, to name
some of these escalations, each different from but also overlapping with this
complex structure of interaction in various layers of experience and
neurobiology. And double bind abusive effects vary in modulations too: lower the
intensity and danger of any of the elements, talk about them and check out
pieces of their reality, walk away; these are common and responsible reactions
to double bind situations as well.
Add to that, that mystical practices, initiation into
“gated” communities, creative insight, professional advancement, innovation,
are also results of or participating elements in the structure of double binds.
At this point then, the range of what can count as a double bind becomes in
itself daunting. Triggered are reactive responses such as “if it means
everything, it really means nothing,” a parsimony of explanation with its own
misleading or even punitive effects in its attempts at clarification. Complex
systems exist, and even though one productive response is to take them up in
pieces and work out segmented details, enfolded systems are not simply the sum
of all those pieces.
What double binds do we find ourselves in now, individually
and collectively, and just how do we speak with and about them?
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PART FOUR >>>systems
justice and learning
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SLIDE TWELVE: SYSTEMS JUSTICE: BATESON
Systems
justice sensitive to multiple contexts, what Chela Sandoval called
“differential consciousness,” calls out to various politics of attachment.
(Sandoval 2000, Anzaldúa 2002, ASCA forthcoming 2015) Belief and disbelief,
really perhaps memberships and belongings, triggered and assembled, stagger
between, say, climate change publics, amid money behind global restructurings,
and even, we realize, together with feminist juggling acts and territories,
amid objects, new materialisms, and communities of justice and practice.
Register such intensities and traumas: when do they become ends in themselves?
Eschatology, the study of end-times, companions a paradoxically long history in
human attention. And humans are often precariously enduring on the planet, and
have threatened its existence before. I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis
myself, and we might well have ended then. This fear motivated much of Gregory Bateson’s
work. (See Childs 2012; Bateson 1979:98, 174) Yet Bateson was very vocal and
concerned too about unanticipated movements the complexities of systems take on
when urgencies become too predictive. Then our urgencies result in less
sensitivity to the unanticipated, result in too narrow a focus, as all too
human desires for control or for moral prescriptions are inadvertently
escalated. Systems justice requires
something much more complicated. It means, for example, we have to work with our extended being in the very
processes of co-creating being and becoming aware of new things about being.
Bateson famously said, in “the pronoun we, I of course
included the starfish and the redwood forest, the segmenting egg, and the
Senate of the United States.” (Bateson 1979:4) This is one differential set reminding
us that ways to speak of “we” and “us” are as dynamically rescaling bits in
systems of complexity and change. Our “we” and “us” register too with Bateson’s
living patterns, from the starfish’s invertebrate radial symmetry to redwood
cloning timelines to recursive epigenesis, mechanism and structure in a segmenting
egg to those human affiliations of power and state and love that we could wish
for in the Senate of the United States.
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SLIDE THIRTEEN: SYSTEMS JUSTICE: BOUNDARY OBJECTS THAT LEARN
When
a set of feminist educators wanted to come up with an alternative to
privatizing MOOC platforms they companioned with the web, partner and workshop,
making FemTechNet, a Distributed Open Collaborative Course or DOCC. They
inhabited their DOCC with what Alex Juhasz and Anne Balsamo, media designers
and technologists, called caringly “boundary objects that learn.” All of these
feminist specialists in emergent learning processes wanted to enable
companionships in which such an object “participates in the creation of meanings:
of identity, or usefulness, of function, of possibilities.” Juhasz and Balsamo
reminded us that Susan Leigh Star (and her various collaborators) came up with
the concept of a boundary object “to assert that objects (material, digital,
discursive, conceptual) participate in the co-production of reality. At base,
the notion asserts that objects perform important communication ‘work’ among
people: they are defined enough to enable people to form common understandings,
but weakly determined so that participants can modify them to express emergent
thinking.” (Juhasz & Balsamo 2012) Boundary objects that learn are always
up for redesign, up for speculative feminisms.
Boundary
objects are workaround things, concepts, processes, even routines that permit coordination,
sometimes collaboration, without consensus (non-conscious and conscious). (Star 2010:602) This is a new kind of
“attachment politics” in which we work for contextually sensitive forms of
trust and affiliation among proper practices of dissensus, as Margret talks
about in her work, such as Beyond the Cyborg (Grebowicz & Merrick 2013; ASCA
2015)
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THE FINAL BIT: PART
FIVE >>>Stigmergy: coordinations for climate justice
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SLIDE FOURTEEN: COORDINATIONS: TALKSITE
Working as a transdisciplinary scholar is always tricky. One
can take neither authors nor audiences, nor especially citation pools for
granted. And no proper question is actually answered by saying you should have
read what I have read. In that spirit I share what I am actively learning
myself as new attachments form. I assume here that we all have differential and
on-going knowledges, that they each take up their own range of details, and
that we hope to companion well.
My talksite on the web is a workshop for thinking with
objects moved around in visual play, a venue for speculative feminisms. Whenever
possible I like to take imaginations themselves as my companions, along with
other co-creators of worlds. Such imaginations can be sensed and worked on, but
not predicted easily, and that is a good thing. All this happens with attention
and caring, and among systems humans participate in and do not control.
Attention to knowledge making practices makes it clearer
that ways of sharing are makings too. Audiences of all kinds today are in the
middle of actively diverging: in practices as well as being unpredictable in
their circulations and ranges. These now are actually complex systems. And
emergent ones too because audience is always something yet to be performed: What
can be taken for granted? What would best be explained? What do we assume are
the most urgent issues and things to care about and with? Who and what facilitates such movement among worlds? (Anzaldúa
2002)
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SLIDE FIFTEEN: COORDINATIONS: RESTRUCTURING
These are some of the complex systems I care about. Attempts
at systems justice.
From the very depths of restructuring, struggled
after feminisms task themselves to focus and refocus many on-going and
differential projects of decolonization, antiracist politics, and feminist
transformation. To “play” with our own differential
consciousnesses, to curiously work at the oppositional
edge of “this is not it,” these are creativities needed now among double binds
and confusions we find ourselves in. Transcontexual movement without falling
apart – where we participate as and among these very knowledge worlds and
ecologies, learning. I am advocating ways of thinking with and about
transdisciplinary attentions and practices. These interconnect multiple actors,
among them “ourselves,” extensively inspecting
knowledge approaches across time, fields, disciplines, methods, perhaps
economic sectors, or ecologies. We can do this while at the same time also
savoring and participating in the intensive
workings (always only some) of these too, in communities of practice, and among
objects that may yet tie these together. Such transdisciplinary travel is
functional in its uneven coherences. (Law 2013)
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SLIDE SIXTEEN: COORDINATIONS: MEDIA
In other words, I respect how much is required of us to not
exit from the double binds of transcontextual necessity that it takes to
address climate change. And systems justice. I respect how difficult it is, and
also how profoundly it enriches our reality apparatus, to travel among and
using boundary objects, as boundary objects ourselves, pulsing at edges,
tethering worlds, demonstrating just how alive media, systems, and we, are.
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