D Haraway (Posthumanism as a theoretical framework)
On Cyborgs: If taken too literally, the essay can be misread, for it does not seek to identify the cyborgs among us; she states that the cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality and as such it is used in her argument as a symbol.
Machines as labour – replacing human labour. Extract value from dead labour (Marx’s word). Machines are not our enemies. It is coming to a materialist thinking about the entanglement that is the earth. It is about being responsible – cultivating a capacity of response (able)
AI – a materialist practice that does really interesting things: can possible be integrated into art practices, or labour practices or kinds of agricultural pracitces (31.48/1:11:51 – video with Bruno Latour)
Ideas that are coming up in my research: we are looking for different ways to interact with the planet
Bruno Latour and Hartmut Rosa How we deal with modernity has become a question: time/temporality – modernity is a speeding up of life, and it has become a necessity. So we have become a society that is permanently forced to speed up to stay where we are. We see it technology (transport, communication – but there is also an increase in the speed of change and the pace of life., with issues of anxiety, disconnection etc. Latour adds an extra nuance – by showing a break with the past – now longer the past, it is about the future.
In most storytelling, nature plays a background stage for human dramas to take place. The natural world appears as an inert backdrop. Plants, animals, and natural places are mostly “props, ground, plot space, or prey. They don’t matter; their job is to be in the way, to be overcome, to be the road, the conduit, but not the traveler, not the begetter” (Donna Haraway). Now that the climate crisis has forced us to recognize that the nonhuman world isn’t a mere ‘plot space’ for human stories but an active force shaping human lives, many environmental writers are asking, ‘how do you give voice to the nonhuman world’? How do you tell stories that are expansive enough to tell both human and nonhuman stories?
ANNA TSING Arts of Inclusion, or How to Love a Mushroom- (pdf saved in my docum)
Research-creation
Revisit Natalie Loveless (2019) How to make art at the end of the world: a manifesto for research-creation (Duke University Press
“Research – creation at its best, has the capacity to impact our social and material conditions, not by offering more facts, differently figured, but by finding ways, through aesthetic encounters and events, to persuade us to care and care differently.’
One Man, One Cow, One Planet – Save the World with Peter Proctor – Ideas around protecting soil
Growing mushrooms: Merlin Sheldrake
theorist Sheila Jasanoff (2004) and political scientist Elinor Ostrom (1996). As discussed
by Jennifer Atchison and Lesley Head in this volume, Jasanoff uses the
term co-production to emphasize the need to think about the natural and the
social together (2004, p. 4). Her [Pg 6 →] emphasis is on how knowledge of
the natural and the social world is produced, and particularly the claim
that scientific (and technological knowledge) ‘is not a transcendent mirror
of reality. It both embeds and is embedded in social practices, identities,
norms, conventions, discourses, instruments and institutions -in short, in
all the building blocks of what we term the social’ (Jasanoff2004, p. 3). She
further describes co-production explicitly as ‘an interpretive framework’
(2004, p. 6).
Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature: TheRoaring Inside Her (1978) may also acquire new resonances in current times. The epigraph to Griffin’s book, for example, reads: “These words are written for those of us whose language is not heard, whose words have been stolen or erased, those robbed of language, who are called voiceless or mute, even the earthworms, even the shellfish and the sponges, for those of us who speak our own language’ (1978, v). It could also stand as an epigraph for this collection, particularly in her call for taking seriously the task of listening to and working with the more-than-human
Actor-network theory (ANT) Human Geographers- understanding how people interact with their environment. It is still anthropocentric.
Actor network theory, usually abbreviated as ANT, aims to describe any phenomena — such as climate change or a birthday party — regarding the relationships between the human and non-human actors that create that phenomenon. Actor network theory fundamentally consists of actors or actors and assemblages or networks. These networks have power dynamics leading to phenomena such as translation (the transport with deformation of an idea).
KINCENTRICITY
Laguna Indian, author, and poet Leslie Marmon Silko notes that human beings must maintain a complex relationship with ‘‘the surrounding natural world if they hope to survive in [it]He elegantly expresses how indigenous people in North America are aware that life inn any environment is viable only when humans view their surroundings as kin; that their mutual roles are essential for their survival. To many traditional indigenous people, this awareness comes after years of listening to and recalling stories about the land.
https://lolarosepedersen.com/essay Collaborating with Fungi as an Art of Living on a Damaged Planet.
Good article on ecological awareness of importance of fungi by Alison Pouliot THE GUARDIAN article (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/19/the-fungal-awakening-how-we-came-to-love-and-fear-fungi)
The fungal awakening is also part of a bigger ecological turn, sparked perhaps by concern about climate change, the demise of species and the need to avert our precarious trajectory. From hi-tech labs to kitchen tables, innovations and applications of myco-technology are emerging at a rapid rate. Many hold promise for developing fungal alternatives to current technologies for remediating damaged environments. The great challenge is to scale them up to a useful or meaningful level. But solutions to the environmental issues created by humans are unlikely to be found in a technological fungal fix. That requires a change in thinking. Will fungi save the world? Probably not, but they could offer insights into more sensitive ways of being in the world. Remediating our relationship with the natural world could be a first step toward using fungi to remediate environments.
Ursula K. LeGuin : 1986 The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (pdf saved)
how we can tell stories that give voice to the nonhuman world.
If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”
But I especially like how the environmental anthropologist Anna Tsing suggests we might tell better Life Stories. In describing the writing process behind her fascinating book on the global Matsutake mushroom picking industry, The Mushroom at the End of the World, Tsing writes,
“Ursula K. Le Guin argues stories of hunting and killing have allowed readers to imagine that individual heroism is the point of a story. Instead, she proposes that storytelling might pick up diverse things of meaning and value and gather them together, like a forager rather than a hunter waiting for the big kill. In this kind of storytelling, stories should never end, but rather lead to further stories. In the intellectual woodlands I have been trying to encourage, adventures lead to more adventures, and treasures lead to further treasures.”
Le Guin
retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag’ rather than a weapon of domination. She argues that the bag is a recipient,holder, story, sack -for holding words; and in turn, ‘words hold things.’ The carrier bag theory allows room for everything and everyone. This generous and generative mode ofenquiry frees us from the limitations of the linear, heroicanthropocentric/phallogocentric(Braidotti, 2013) narrative. Instead, it opens up opportunities to explore stories with nohappy-ever-after, embracing speculations about what else unfolds as we forage and gatheralong the way. We offer a scrabbling methodology like Anna Tsing’s (2015) ‘assemblage’: in our case, fragments of stories and sketches from imaginative and ‘real’ reading experience scoalesce with a method of scrabbling ‘down the back of the chair’ (both literally and metaphorically). This arts-based, feminist methodology attunes to assemblages of odds and ends, hair and dust mites, children’s literature and child readers, and facilitates a deep exploration of the intersectional, spatial, relational meanings that might tell us something else.
I wondered what might come up if we allowed students to rummage in the carrier bags of their lives and make some new connections between who they are and the research they are doing. What I will say though is that the session demonstrated to me that fresh ways of thinking about doctorates can open up possibilities for innovative connections and different forms of writing. Le Guin’s ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ can be used as a springboard to give students permission to value non-linear ways of talking about their research, adding depth and richness to the research stories we are all striving to tell.
Not only is the carrier bag theory plausible, it also does meaningful ideological work — shifting the way we look at humanity’s foundations from a narrative of domination to one of gathering, holding, and sharing.
Le Guin’s carrier bag is, in addition to a story about early humans, a method for storytelling itself, meaning it’s also a method of history. But unlike the spear (which follows a linear trajectory towards its target), and unlike the kind of linear way we’ve come to think of time and history in the West, the carrier bag is a big jumbled mess of stuff. One thing is entangled with another, and with another.
…This is a pretty radical way of looking at the world, one that departs from the idea of history as a long line of victories. Le Guin describes her discovery of the carrier bag theory as grounding her “in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before.”
My teeny-tiny edition, which was published by Ignota Books, includes an introduction by Donna Haraway, a feminist scholar and scientist who has the distinction of becoming the first ever tenured professor in feminist theory in the U.S., at the University of Santa Cruz. Haraway’s introduction links the essay to three literal carrier bags, given to her by various women in Colombia during a working visit there in 2019. The connection between Le Guin’s essay and the textile arts of the women in Colombia—who weave and sew and embroider as a way to facilitate healing, storytelling, and rebinding—is quite interesting. It’s another layer to this tale. I feel it would have been better served as an afterword, once Le Guin has laid the foundation with her unparalleled skill, but it is a thought-provoking inclusion nevertheless.
Haraway artfully integrates Le Guin’s theory back into the nonfictional world from which it first arose. She focuses mostly on insights from contemporary environmental and racial justice work in Colombia, positioning the carrier bag theory in conversation with the methods of activist groups such as Asociación de Mujeres Defensoras del Agua y la Vida (the Association of Women in Defense of Water and Life), Movimiento Ríos Vivos Antioquia (the Living Rivers Movement of Antioquia), and the Indigenous Students Association of Universidad de Magdalena. In a fascinating move of form-meets-content, Haraway uses three literal carrier bags gathered in her research in order to illustrate her findings, incorporating the symbolic resonances of carrying as well as the literal embroidery and materials from which the bags are made into her piece.
Haraway’s presentation highlights how real-life communities are already writing an alternative story—and have been writing it, and weaving it, for a long time—in resistance to the seemingly dominant story of imperialist violence and oppression. The theory thus becomes secondary to the action itself: the defending of real-world water and the healing of real-world communities that techno-capitalist forces continue to threaten in the name of a tragically limited, “Techno-Heroic” idea of progress. The bag made by Movimiento Ríos Vivos Antioquia is stitched with a poignant verbal play in Spanish: Flore-Ser. It is a pun on florecer, to flourish or bloom, and ser, the verb “to be” which also acts as the common substantive equivalent for being (as in un ser vivo, a living being): blooming-as-being. Much larger than “winning” any given battle, here, the never-ending goal is simply to survive and thrive.
Soil Culture: Don’t soil your home, make soil your home!
Dr Daro Montag, Falmouth University (saved the article)
Barad: In addressing the possibility of nonhuman agency, Karen Barad comments: “From a humanist perspective the question of nonhuman agency may seem a bit queer, since agency is generally associated with issues of subjectivity and intentionality. However, if agency is understood as an enactment and not something someone has, then it seems appropriate and important to consider nonhuman and cyborgian forms of agency as well as human ones” (Barad 1998, 112). I take from this reading that agency is not something that either the human or nonhuman simply possesses. Barad writes: “Agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has. Agency cannot be designated as an attribute of ‘subjects’ or ‘objects’.” For Barad agency becomes a matter of intra-action. (Barad 2007, 33).
Our South African pre colonial acknowledgement to people who lived here:
San people of Southern Africa – history of people living on the land where I live, before colonialism:
It is well attested that hunter-gatherers in general, and the Kalahari Bushmen of
southern Africa in particular, have an intimate, detailed and extensive knowledge of the
plants around them. (http://www.ethnopharmacologia.org/prelude2020/pdf/biblio-hm-75-mitchell.pdf)
Art making and reconciliation – Look at the book: Eyes for Art, exploring visual art with children, Gerd Dierckx and use the groupwork done as RASA project as a type of case study around need for culture/art in our community to heal wounds from the past.