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human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many. Donna Haraway (When Species Meet) And these entanglements and collaborations do not stop with our bodies -- we are fully involved in and with many many creatures and systems -- both human and non-human. (It is just as important to note -- many many creatures need us -- we have co-evolved. They need us not simply to leave them alone but to be very active in their lives). What does this mean for questions of Justice, Power and Decision Making? We think that it makes a huge difference. And today we would like to dig into some of the some of the possible ramifications of this. Again, Donna Haraway says it well, Becoming with is about the cats cradle games in which those who are to be in the world and are constituted in intra- and interaction. The partners do not precede the meeting; species of all kinds, living and not, are consequent on a subject- and object- shaping dance of encounters. Some Useful Terms and Questions: Symbiosis: How all living creatures and mutually dependent on other creatures. How all living creatures are the landscape for other creatures lives. How all living creatures are subject to other creatures needs and interests (sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes neutral). How all creatures have evolved fully entangled with specific other creatures. Ask of us new ideas about individuality, collectivity and collaboration. Collectives: Everything is already part of multiple collectives. No thing starts from a clean, neutral, independent beginning. Life is collective, messy, and ongoing. What happens when we imagine things separate (disembedded) from their collectives? How does this seeming neutrality of individuality undermine, deskill, and ultimately pacify community? Resource Thinking: The transformation of complex entangled things in discreet packages, and singular neutral commodities (e.g. Water, Air, Land, Intellectual Capital). It involves radical forms of rupturing actual ecosystems, and negating actual communities. What does it take to avoid resource thinking today? Nature: A system to rupture co-evolving systems into the pure and the impure around whether humans are part of them or not. In seeing us separate from the world, our ideal role becomes one maintaining a boundary, and staying in our world and leaving the world alone. But what happens if such a separation is impossible? Or never existed? What is ecology after nature?
Emergence: When things get together as systems they take on wholly new qualities and characteristics irreducible to their previous qualities. This can really shock us. Especially if we thought things had a purpose. Things, and systems, are doing this all the time. How do we pay attention? How can we follow emergence? Non-linear Causality: We like to get from A to B. From clear problem to obvious solution. But nothing works this way. We like to call this unintended consequences. And to try to keep using a linear model of change but be on the lookout for unintended consequences -- which we then believe we can minimize. But what if systems really are non-linear? How do we unplug from linearity in politics and action? Purpose vs. Affordance: We look at the world around us and see things that serve a purpose -- the hammer is to hit nails, credit cards to make transactions, trees to provide shade or perhaps lumber; but what if things had a life beyond their purpose? Shoes can become doorstops, credit cards can pick locks, and so on. This set of affordances is a start, but still, it is just looking at how things help us. We still do not know what a thing can do. What is a thing politics? And why do we need it? Distributed Agency: If nothing happens alone or because of the action of one thing -- then how do we speak of responsibility? Is it not at the level of some form of system? Some set of entangled things in collaboration? How do we begin to see these agents beyond individuals and discreet things? How do we sense how distributed and dependent action is?
While Ivan Illich says this quite precisely about our houses -- it is true of most of our lives -- and it is especially true about the big issues facing us today. We have as a culture we believe that change can come about simply by purchasing the right light bulb, protesting certain laws and refusing shopping bags. But is this real change? What skills would real change require of us on a daily basis? Some Useful Terms and Questions: Resource Thinking: The transformation of complex entangled things in discreet packages, and singular neutral commodities (e.g. Water, Air, Land, Intellectual Capital). It involves radical forms of rupturing actual ecosystems, and negating actual communities. What does it take to avoid resource thinking today? Needs: The other half of the world of resources is the belief that the world of creatures (including ourselves) can be reduced to needs. These needs are thought to be neutral and universal substances: nutrition, housing, education, etc. The problem becomes one of delivering and receiving commodities. Once we accept this logic the very possibility cultural/ecosystemic self-determination becomes impossible -- and even worse inconceivable. The government continues to bet on democracy and development; we respond by emphasizing autonomy and the right to have our own life project (The Organization of Black Communities of the Pacific Coast of Columbia). How do we get beyond justice and equality as the equitable meeting of basic needs? How do we become world makers and not need fulfillers? How does this entangled with distinct communities (both human and non-human)? Skills: If we are required to participate in our environment what skills would we need? If we wanted to ask questions of others (both humans and non-humans) what tools and skills would we need? These feel like the skills of inquiry, tinkering, active listening -- what does that concretely look like? Deskilling: The logics of a commodity driven reality we are being deskilled in ways that narrow our imagination, curiosity and perplexity to the logics of needs. How do we resist this radical deskilling?
Assemblage: Things and creatures are best seen as composites of all sorts of very different things -- some parts are other critters, some are other objects, some are ideas, some are processes. And each thing contains multiples of each of these. How do we see this? How do we work with assemblages? What new scales to we need to think and act at? Apparatus: Those very concrete things we will be seeing today -- tools to measure the waters, talk with mussels, collect rain water -- these are all apparatuses. And our real question is how are these things, that we made, now remaking us (and the world)? Are apparatuses how we communicate, and interact with other things, critters and systems? Non Human Agents: Yep -- the world is really busy as we sleep -- all sorts of things are making this world -critters, ecosystems, collectives, objects, tools, ideas... So how do we meet this stuff? (Given that it is comaking us?). Do these things have rights? Construction: Well -- if everything is active and entangled then it is best to say that we live in a world that cannot be divided into Nature and the Unnatural. Nor is it useful to imagine that our role in this reality is one staying out of the way of things. We are all co-constructing reality. So what does it mean to make things well or poorly? How do we judge our apparatuses? How do we judge this garden, boat, river, or roof? How do these judgments become further pragmatic action? Who gets to be part of these decisions? What is their role?