 |
| Mia Kos' Storytelling Chair [click all pics on this site for links] |
FLASHBACK: A BLAST IN SOME PASTS: How we know anything, transdisciplinary thinker Gregory Bateson famously said, means that 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)
OVERVIEW: Media ecologies are not an area of study only, but the air we breath, quite as much a part of global ecologies as global warming, if also ambivalently politically charged and attended to. Media ecologies include the hormonal and neurological circuits within and extending beyond human bodies, along lines of ecological action and distributed being. Even what we might call social media learning takes place across whole systems not just in human heads.
 |
| Ana Willem (trained in sustainable systems design), Dopamine, 17 X 22, mixed media |
Mass and burgeoning new media have many demonstrations for any of “us” moving among knowledge worlds of what we might work with as transcontexualities. And political affects come necessarily to shape work now in and around academies, opposing and investing in, for example, current budgetary crises and realities, explosively media- and activist-intensive.
Among such ecologies academic practices of all kinds are now enlisted as variations on transmedia storytelling; that is to say, they distribute among sensoria, technological platform, commercial, conceptual, transnational and national interests. I call these Queer Transdisciplinarities, but not in a move to register them for identity politics, although sometimes they very explicitly and quite properly are, inside my own feminist fields of interest and attention. Rather, my point in naming them thus is to watch them “queer the pitch”: they require us to attend to, to learn to be affected by, the political economies of knowledge worlds, to how interlinked now are the economies of entertainment, knowledge laborings, globally restructuring academies, governmentalities, the infrastructures of communication, and even our biomes at various levels of scale or forms of embeddedness.
They connect us too to the enlistment of surplus populations into global media, and to the labor of pleasure, hooking us into many layers of system, among these those neurological and hormonal, sometimes irritable and irritating. Many of these worldly processes are variously non-human, if often set into motion with human actions. Even those putatively human, extend far beyond the biomes of single human bodies, making embodiment an active verb extending and distributing agencies and meanings of humanisms and posthumanisms. To “play” with our own consciousnesses, to curiously work at the edge of “this is not it,” to learn to be affected in worlding bits, some activated and activating across the tacit and the explicit, feeling out the edges of rules barely perceptible among distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures – here are creativities needed now among the double binds we find ourselves in. Such complex movements among contradictory processes do not open themselves up for either idealization or disillusionment. Rather forms of good faith feel out ways to work across affiliations as well as within them. Which “we” gathers, locating inside of worlding processes, as elements in reorganizations that “we” matter in, but do not control? do not even -- often very properly -- perceive or speak or are able to make explicit?
Transcontexual movement without falling apart – where we participate as and among these very transmedia ecologies, learning. A struggled after posthumanities tasks itself, from the very depths of restructuring, to refocus its on-going many projects of decolonization, antiracist politics, feminist transformation, and sensitized transmedia knowledge practices.
===
SLIDES [click on each pic for slide show, or just to see them more clearly]
1: title
Good afternoon! My talk today is both about living in the middle of media things and a demonstration of it. I will show and tell multiply. I have created for you an online website, some paper handouts, a powerpoint slide show, and this talk. Some may want to follow my words on the website as I speak them, others to see them outlined with bits of expansion on a handout, or just to focus now on these slides and my voice. Any of these can be followed up later, gathered and explored across media, with pictures and video and links online. And bibliography. This apparatus is itself something I discuss and demonstrate: a version of what some might call “transmedia storytelling.” This phrase today overflows its definitions and origins in commercial product placement, and such overflows and experiments in storytelling, and – dare I say? AS STORIES OURSELVES – is what this talk is all about. These are materialisms that matter, and with them I find myself inhabiting a feminist transdisciplinary posthumanities.
2: intent
It is my intent today to share a practice of becoming aware in the middle of such transmedia storytelling of its flashbacks and flashforwards – remainders left in out of commercial origins or elements in tactical critique – as well as to note what I am calling wormholing dynamics – temporalities, envelopings and analyses that exceed linearity and hierarchy without deleting them. Some current terms emerging out of and back around transmedia storytelling are diegetic prototypes and design fictions. In one spirit of new materialisms, I would like to suggest that these are not objects we just simply make, but ontological states we share with some of the things we companion and even ourselves are. I am a student of cyberneticist and anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and with him I reflect on how, in the pronoun “we,” is included necessarily a range of ecological, infrastructural, and political bits, all dynamically scoping and scaling, making and disputing. We make stories, we make things that tell stories, we are stories or at least we deeply wish to be such.
First I will give a big picture overview – punctuated with terms and bits of ideas that may be more familiar to some than to others. Please be patient: I will do my best to decode and unpack these in the course of the talk or possibly after, and the website and handout may be useful in the middle of all that, to gloss some of these thing-y bits too. Nevertheless these bits to stumble over have dynamic meanings and are not yet finished; they emerge from collaborative processes still in flux. Thus they are properly positioned rather than defined, and I hope my overview helps there.
Then I will share a couple of tools for living among these (media) things, boundary objects and design fictions, sketching out some of their ecologies of practice. Finally, I will offer some speculations and questions for ongoing discussions I see mattering among material feminisms.
3: overview
Media ecologies are not an area of study only, but the air we breath, quite as much a part of global ecologies as global warming, if also ambivalently politically charged and attended to. Media ecologies include the hormonal and neurological circuits within and extending beyond human bodies, along lines of ecological action and distributed being. Even what we might call social media learning takes place across whole systems not just in human heads.
Mass and burgeoning new media have many demonstrations for any of “us” moving among knowledge worlds of what we might work with as transcontexualities. And political affects come necessarily to shape work now in and around academies, opposing and investing in, for example, current budgetary crises and realities, explosively media- and activist-intensive.
A posthumanities emerges out of a political, intellectual, and affective double bind of having both • to address many diverging audiences simultaneously under the threat of survival, while also having • to author knowledges as merely one of multiple agencies with very limited control. In such an environment the mapping of messages onto audiences becomes increasingly tricky as authorial and receptive agencies, partial and highly distributed, require affective labors not simply anchored by human bodies, although also sifting among authoritative and alternative knowledges and attempting to clarify affiliations, or to inspire trust. Feminisms are affected; "we" learn to be affected.
Among such ecologies academic practices of all kinds are now enlisted as variations on transmedia storytelling; that is to say, they distribute among sensoria, technological platform, commercial, conceptual, transnational, and national interests. I call these Queer Transdisciplinarities, but not in a move to register them for identity politics, although sometimes they very explicitly and quite properly are, inside my own feminist fields of interest and attention. Rather, my point in naming them thus is to watch them “queer the pitch”: they require us to attend to, to learn to be affected by, the political economies of knowledge worlds, to how interlinked now are economies of entertainment, knowledge laborings, globally restructuring academies, governmentalities, infrastructures of communication, and even our biomes at various levels of scale or forms of embeddedness. We come to share enlistment of surplus populations among global media, and a labor of pleasure, hooking us into many layers of system, among these those neurological and hormonal, sometimes irritable and irritating. Many of these worldly processes are variously non-human, if often set into motion together with human action. Even those putatively human, extend far beyond the biomes of single human bodies, making embodiment an active verb extending and distributing agencies and meanings of humanisms and posthumanisms.
To “play” with our own consciousnesses, to curiously work at the edge of “this is not it,” to learn to be affected in worlding bits, some activated and activating across the tacit and explicit, feeling out the edges of rules barely perceptible among distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures – here are creativities needed now among the double binds we find ourselves in. Such complex movements among contradictory processes do not open themselves up for either idealization or disillusionment. Rather forms of good faith feel out ways to work across affiliations as well as within them. Which “we” gathers, locating inside of worlding processes, as elements in reorganizations that “we” matter in, but do not control? do not even -- often very properly -- perceive or speak or are able to make explicit?
Nothing in any of this purges political movement of contradiction, of ironically essentializing tactical critiques, of incorporating by means of capitalist globalization processes, or of actualizing otherings as complex results of affiliation and other attempts at finding the “right” unit of trust.
Transcontexual movement without falling apart – where we participate as and among these very transmedia ecologies, learning. A struggled after posthumanities tasks itself, from the very depths of restructuring, to refocus its on-going many projects of decolonization, antiracist politics, feminist transformation, and sensitized transmedia knowledge practices.
4: boundary objects
5: transcontextual
Double binds as Bateson understood and worked with them vary in their intensities from those so abusive as to produce psychosis to those full of “double takes,” with varying effects and possibilities. Surviving double binds is neither straightforward nor predictable. Bateson said: “It seems that both those whose life is enriched by transcontextual gifts and those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions are alike in one respect: for them there is always or often a ‘double take.’ A falling leaf [or] the greeting of a friend…is not ‘just that and nothing more.’” (Bateson 1972:272)
6: double binds
Transcontextual confusions or transcontextual gifts? Bateson noted that responses to double binds vary considerably: with how often they have been transacted over and over with what sorts of internalizations; with familiarity with multiple channel communication, learning, or play; with the actuality or believability of survival risks at stake; with the possibilities of checking context by explicit inquiries, social skills and knowledges, practices of initiation or membership, or being prevented by bullying or other forms of aggression; or with the possibilities of leaving the field of transaction. The tighter the constraints and the more limited the range of communications, the more abusive the effects.
What role might boundary objects play among double binds or transcontextual tangles? The operative word here perhaps is “play.”
7: play
Notice that metacommunication and metacommunicative media are at stake in double binds: good signaling skills make nonabusive play on the edge of double binds possible: “My body is reacting as if I am in danger, but really I’m in front of a computer screen.” (Reality? Not.) But Bateson was well aware that not every edge of play is so easily resolved: that transcontextual confusions and gifts arise from situations in which “tangles” remain – in which finding out which bits are active, which bits are context, which bits can be made explicit, which rules are perceptible, which distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures are in play, matters.
8: design
According to Julian Bleecker, another alum of the program I also got my phd in, the History of Consciousness, and director of the Near Future Laboratory: "Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It’s like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating about the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. ...It’s meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination." (Bleeker 2005+)
I notice that some of the design fictions or experiments in so-called critical design or values in design that make me gasp in some sort of ah-ha experience are those that produce sensations of scoping, scaling, and embeddedness; that shift points of view on apparatus; that share distributed affect and expression; or that entail understandings of agency at different ranges of scale and among different sorts of distribution. In what ways do they contribute to our becoming aware – in the middle of transmedia storytelling – of critical flashbacks or flashforwards, and of what I am nowadays thinking of as wormholing dynamics. Becoming aware among the diegetic prototypes and design fictions we have involuntarily but not improperly ourselves become....
Diegetic prototypes name a history of film versions of design fictions as they emerge from product placement and participate in the venture capital imaginations of contemporary knowledge work and global academic restructurings. They remind us again to “queer the pitch,” and to be sensitive to these political economies, while also wondering about the ranges of implication involved.
There are examples of all of these in the “Media” section of the website I created for this talk. And you’ll find a quotation from Kirby who coined the term diegetic prototypes on the handout too.
9: transdisciplinary
I am curious about the relational play between what I call intensive and extensive knowledge practices in transdisciplinarity. Intensive practices are those closely negotiated among relatively bounded communities of practice, such as disciplines-in-the-making, local alliances, threatened units, or long-lived organizations, and they are often used to emphasize rigor and membership. I tend to find myself having to justify extensive practices, those of speculative connections, practical coalitions, and trial and error learning; such as one finds in transdisciplinary projects, transmedia storytelling, and alternative practices-in-the-making. These tend to emphasize peripheral participation and the edges of standardized practices. Boundary objects sometimes mediate among extensive and intensive practices simultaneously. For example, Kathy Davis calls the feminist object intersectionality a “buzzword.” (2008) But I prefer to think of it as a boundary object in order to call attention to its intensive local taylorings in the plural as well as its values as a shared representation across extensive gatherings, thus holding in tension divergent critiques and alternative solutions to them. I like that extensive investigations perpendicularly analyze relative and relational shifts across authoritative and alternative knowledges, and that their displays can work without displacing the intensive work of specific communities of practice. This is a perpendularity of extensive examination as transcontextual – befriending paradox and sensitized to double binds. I have my own passionate commitments, limited, partial, and misrecognized as they must be, even as I work to nurture particular boundary objects, by explicitly valuing their invisible works, even while foreseeing cycles of standardization they participate within. A multiple worlds view of, say, material feminisms, speculatively feminist amid varying ranges of generations, disciplines, canons, political action, can work with communicative tangles – but may not be able to, perhaps should not be able to, lower the intensities of conflict or totally resolve anomalies.
10: in medias res
When does it matter to engage in analysis that should not assume that we can predict or control futures or even that we can claim and retrospect on pasts? Or is that also too costly a story as question? How do stories and their temporalities stack up among forms of agency that put humans and their actions at the center? Or that disavow our accountabilities and critiques? How do we get to understand ourselves as stories within stories within stories?
Design fictions acknowledge that we think with things. I have come to write nowadays by mobilizing these website bits and handouts and pics and media. I use them to think things out, put them in temporary order, pick some and not others, and otherwise share in what is happening nowadays: they have become my conceptual sandbox for writing and wondering. One thing I have been thinking with lately is an Andean string and knot recording device called a khipu which has lineages extending back as much perhaps as 5000 years. I haven’t seen or touched one so far, yet they have become design fictions for both pragmatics and imagination.
We live in a time period in which we explicitly work to, say, visualize data, coming up with additional data analytics that work to bypass words and hook right into various sensory apparatus. There are now data sonifications and data dramatizations for example. Well, in that context the khipu is a device for reading data tactilely, and some have called it a kind of data writing that maps itself into worldly systems, in this case, into complex cycles in Andean social organization.
I am only too embarrassed to say that I really do not know how to end this talk: what note to strike or direction to offer, or critique to share. I want to befriend recursively returning to some being in the middle of it all over and over again, each time with an intent to speak to a different aspect, at an alternate grain of detail, in response to a specific exigency, to swap tools and see where that goes, to work out which “we” works on what, where. The “rigor” of transcontextual feminist methods comes into play when we welcome peripheral participations (robust across sites) as well as work for an exquisite sensitivity to each horizon of possible resources and infrastructures, local exigencies, and differential memberships (plastic and local). Transcontextual feminisms as I have come to understand them, work to remain curious, even about and in the midst the affects of affiliation and disidentification, scoping extensively and scaling intensively among Ecologies of Knowledge. (In memory of Susan Leigh Star and her work such as Star 1995)
Being inside and moved around literally by the very material and conceptual structures you are analyzing and writing about is a kind of self-consciousness only partially available for explicit, or direct discussion. Under global academic and other forms of restructuring we are obliged in the middle of things to network among all these lively agencies, as we look to see things as they exist for others, in different degrees of resolution, of grain of detail. I understand some of these design fictions to offer us experiences in working with and as such agencies, and in story forms with so many recursions we cannot work them into the argument forms we currently value or the stories we already know. What does it mean for a chair to have expressive abilities?
===
