vi. Temporalities of Perception

Temporalities of Perception

“Time, is the accumulation of a lifetime of passing through environments that offer certain kinds of affordances, which then influence the collective perceptions and sensations of the organisms of the earth” 144

Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin

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“Ethic of Historic Consciousness This ethic holds that the past occurs simultaneously in the present and influences how we conceptualize the future. It requires that we see ourselves related to, and implicated in, the lives of those yet to come. It is an ethical imperative to recognize the significance of the relationships we have with others, how our histories and experiences are layered and position us in relation to each other, and how our futures as people similarly are tied together. It is also an ethical imperative to see that, despite our varied place-based cultures and knowledge systems, we live in the world together with others and must constantly think and act with reference to these relationships. Any knowledge we gain about the world interweaves us more deeply with these relationships, and gives us life.” 145 Dwayne Donald

This image is an attempt to represent the ethic of historic consciousness, as in, it represents an interconnected nature between different species, and between those yet to come and those who have passed—an interconnectedness that surpasses any linear temporalities.

The image shows holes in the ground—the first occupied by a person relaxing and having a conversation with the person making food by layering it in the second hole; the third hole holds bodies of those who have passed on and are returning to the Earth as manure to facilitate new life; the fourth hole shows soon-to-be new life within the ostrich eggs. The holes represent life, death, sustenance, leisure—activities that remain true for all living beings, but are prescribed hierarchies based on their proximity to normative, capitalist discourses of human existence. By placing these activities next to each other, perceptions of those essentialist notions are dismantled. Proximity to death does not imply that life and sustenance cannot thrive, and through this shift in aesthetic perceptions, a more deeply knotted web of interconnected reality is revealed, giving rise to new understandings of multi-species living.

144. Davis and Turpin, 12. 145. Boetzkes, 271.

But breathe this deep because this is the message. We did it. We shifted the paradigm. We rewrote the meaning of life with our living. And this is how we did it. We let go. And then we got scared and held on and then we let go again. Of everything that would shackle us to sameness. Of our deeply held belief that our lives could be measured or disconnected from anything. We let go and re-taught ourselves to breathe the presence of the energy that we are that cannot be destroyed, but only transformed and transforming everything. Breathe deep, beloved young and frightened self, and then “ C o n c l u s i o n let go. And you will hold on. So then let go again.

With all the love and the sky and the land and the water,

Lex 146 The above is the final paragraph of the story Evidence by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. It marks the ending of the email written by Alexis PostCapitalism to Alexis During-Capitalism, describing the beauty of the world after Capitalism has been toppled and telling her past self to keep fighting and to let go of normative ways of being that dictate and define life during the time. The email is a part of “evidence” of legacy collected for Alexis’s descendant Alandrix.

This passage verbalizes the hope this thesis dreams of—hope of a world where life is not measured in socially constructed oppressions, where people are not scared to be radical, where interconnected, multispecies, collaborative survival is not a disconnected reality. The foundation of this thesis is hope. José Esteban Muñoz calls for hope as a rejection of the now— an insistence for a better world that is not here yet. He reads Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope to find grounds for the critique of “a totalizing and naturalizing idea of the present in the concept of the no-longer-conscious. A turn to the no-longer-conscious enabled a critical hermeneutics attuned to comprehending the not-yet-here. This temporal calculus performed and utilized the past and the future as armanents to combat the devastating logic of the world of the here and now, a notion of nothing existing outside the sphere of the current moment, a version of reality that naturalizes cultural logics such as capitalism and heteronormativity.” 147

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146. Gumbs, 41 147. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 12

The speculative fiction of this thesis serves as an alternative worldmaking technique, one that rejects the complacency of the now, and like Alexis, lets go to discover new subjectivities through shape-shifting technology in queered temporalities. The scavengers of this world, in what this thesis calls the Age of Love, are alternative imaginations of our descendants— descendants who have the privilege to lead the scavenger life. This focus on the privilege is important because often in dystopian potrayals of the world, scavenging humans are aestheticized to evoke pity and fear. The narrative of the fear associated with the death of modernity is rejected by this thesis, and scavenging is celebrated as the outcome of the death of capitalism and notions of progress. This scavenging privilege for the future is rooted in radical, revolutionary actions that reject the now, and in the hope for beautiful revolutions that uproot Capitalist systems of oppression. This hope is what Muñoz calls “revolutionary consciousness.” 148

The appropriation and subsequent queering of the technologies of the Anthropocene is a rejection of the universalist connotations of the term itself. The scavengers unprivilege the origin stories of these technologies themselves, which becomes an act of decolonization. Technologies are broken away from their perceived inherent-ness of modernity and the “New” world, and are projectively read by the scavengers as shapeshifters—neither good or bad inherently, but affording objective realities.

In uncertain times, imagining futures is a practice of hope. But more often than not, the imaginations of futurity that are acted upon, are utopias for some that are built on the backs of those who were othered by those imaginations. Hoping for a collective, collaborative future is, then, a radical act. It acknowledges the categories that the colonial, capitalist and neo-colonial powers have established and acknowledges the implications of those categorizations. This is not abstract hope that ignores the work done and the work that needs to be done to eradicate the implications of those categorizations to imagine post-racial, post-homophobic, post-colonial futures. But rather, it is concrete hope, that is rooted in the histories of revolutions and builds futurities upon that revolutionary consciousness to begin to blur those categorizations.

The discourse of hope usually does not find a place in “serious” academia—it is considered naive. But that in itself is reason enough to keep talking about it, because that academia is not built to discuss better futures for the othered—it in itself is an institution of othering that seeks to maintain power structures. This thesis rejects these power structures and dares to be naive anyway, because, as Muñoz says, “Hope is a risk. But if the point is to change the world we must risk hope.” 149

148. Muñoz and Duggan, Hope and Hopelessness, 278. 149. Ibid, 279.

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