a shapeshifter Reading the Shape-Shifter Alicia Inez Guzmán, in her article Indigenous Futurisms, refers to Indigenous epistemologies that view technology as a shape-shifter, and quotes Stephen Loft—”the “shapeshifter (not unlike the Trickster himself) [is] neither inherently benign nor malevolent, but always acting and active, changing transformative, giving effect to and affecting the world.”109 Queering technologies then, is regarding them as shape-shifters—accepting their mysterious origins and their undeniable powers of transformation. The nature of those transformations lies in the circumstance, but they are catalysts of change nevertheless. This narrative allows technologies to be fluid, untethered by original instrumentalities. To observe a post-capitalist world with decentered existences, speculative reality is depicted in a time where the resources the Capitalocene exploited to construct its technology have been depleted and humans live as scavengers. But the built technology of the Capitalocene survives the epoch’s end and exists as ruins waiting to be appropriated by the scavengers. This technology is projectively read by them, similar to Rem Koolhaas’s diagrammatic reading of the cartoon by A.B. Walker of a New York skyscraper. By representing a sort of fractured, somewhat suburban life inside a skyscraper frame, architecture becomes, as Koolhaas mentions “..less an act of foresight than before and planning an act of only limited prediction. It has become impossible to “plot” culture.110 The image of villas and trees stacked on 82 floors in a frame is strange, and
this strangeness allows a disabling of normative imaginations of buildings, skyscrapers and the city and invite a multiplicity of interpretations. Sarah Whiting and Robert Somol discuss Koolhaas’s interpretation in their essay Notes around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism--“These New York frames exist as instruments of metropolitan plasticity and are not primarily architecture for paying attention to; they are not for reading, but for seducing, becoming, instigating new events and behaviors.”111 The scavengers therefore read these objects of technology not as a decipherable text, but rather as a projective diagram—capable of giving rise to many possible programmatic and functional realities. A steering wheel becomes a place to rest on, a CD player becomes a method of cooking food, a harness becomes a sleeping device. As Whiting and Somol write,”a more Foucaltian notion of disciplinarity is advanced in which the discipline is not a fixed datum or entity, but rather an active organism or discursive practice, unplanned and ungovernable.”112 The scavengers do not attempt to reverse-engineer the techno-fossils they find to decipher the original intent of the technology and generate a design that would privilege that origin. They practice what this thesis suggests is a projective version of the practice—Diverse Engineering—one that opens up a plurality of possible interpretations.
109. Alicia Inez Guzmán, “Indigenous Futurisms,” InVisible Culture, March 15, 2015, https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/indigenous-futurisms/. 110. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. New York: The Monacelli Press Inc., 1980. Pg. 85 111. Robert Somol, and Sarah Whiting. “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism.” Perspecta 33 (2002): 72–77. 112. Somol and Whiting, 74.
