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Handout: King, for "The Diseased Posthuman: Choreographies of
Toxic Embodiment," 6 June 2016 -- talk website:
http://newmatsf.blogspot.com
A Posthumanities International Network (PIN) symposium at Tema
Genus (Dept. of Gender Studies), Linköping University, Sweden
Worlds-becoming: diabetes, mood, gut feminisms, new materialist
SF
Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College
Park / Email: [email protected]
Home Page: http://katiekin.weebly.com/ ; follow on twitter
@katkingumd ; pinterest talksites:
http://pinterest.com/katkingumd/talksites/
• “People often cannot see what they take for granted until they
encounter someone who does not take it for granted.” (Bowker
and
Star 1999: 305)
“As I delved deeper into the relations between developers and
users, it became clear that a kind of communicative tangle was
occurring. I used the work of Gregory Bateson, who had studied
these sorts of communicative mishaps under the heading of
‘double binds.’ As with Bateson’s work on schizophrenics, and
what he called ‘the trans-contextual syndrome,’ the messages that
were
coming at level one from the systems developers were not being
heard on that level by the users and vice versa. What was obvious
toone was a mystery to another. What was trivial to one was a
barrier to another. Yet, clarifying this was never easy…. I began
to see
this as a problem of infrastructure—and its relative nature.”
(Star 2010, 610)
TRANSCONTEXTUAL PRACTICES:
• phrases quoted from Bateson: "genesis of tangles," "the weave
of contextual structure," and "transcontextual syndrome” • More
Bateson: “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.’” (Star & Ruhleder 1996:127
quote Bateson 1972:276; Bateson: 272; Star 2010:610)
BOUNDARY OBJECTS (Bowker & Star 1999: 297-8)
"Boundary objects are those objects that both inhabit several
communities of practice and satisfy the informational requirements
of
each of them. Boundary objects are thus both plastic enough to
adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties
employingthem, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity
across sites. They are weakly structured in common use and become
strongly
structured in individual site use. These objects may be abstract
or concrete.... Such objects have different meanings in different
social
worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one
world to make them recognizable, a means of translation. The
creation
and management of boundary objects is a key process in
developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting
communities.”
The “rigor” of trancontextual 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)
A DOUBLE BIND IS
•
intense: needing fine discriminations between kinds of messages
for urgent appropriate response as survival appears to be at
stake• contradictory: and this at two different orders of
message, each of which denies the other
• unvoiced: not permitting the meta-communicative
statements that check one’s choice of what kind of message is
appropriate for
response, or otherwise making such checks of context impossible,
inappropriate or meaningless. (See Bateson 1972)
GATHERING AS SYSTEMS OF COMPLEXITY AND CHANGE
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.
To go with and beyond human intention and systems of control we
need many ways to gather now to minimize damage and maximize
flourishing. What do we need to gather? “Us” gatherssympoietically,
that is to say, in makings and beings WITH, all these boundary
objects storing details and affects. (Haraway 2013) Our
“we” and “us” register too with Bateson’s living patterns, from
the starfish’s invertebrate radial symmetry to redwood cloning
“How do you entangle design, science, fact and fiction in order
to create this practice called
‘design fiction’ that, hopefully, provides different,
undisciplined ways of envisioning new kindsof environments,
artifacts and practices.... Design Fiction is making things that
tell stories. It’slike 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 bout the course
of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to
incite imagination-filling conversationsabout 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.” (Bleecker 2005+)
SF – scientifiction, science fiction, speculative fiction,
speculative feminisms, science
communication and fabulation, wormholes & the plasticities
of embedded realities –
ecological across systems and multiplicities, amid emergent
self-organizing agencies
