Storytellers

Embracing the aliveness of objects challenges our grown-up insistence that inanimate objects are inert unless acted upon by us. Stacy Alaimo highlights the problem of ‘How to conceive of nature’s agency (in ways that are neither anthropomorphic, nor reductive, nor sillyseeming).’49 Martha Kenney proposes a solution to this problem by asserting that ‘Storytelling is one practice (among many others!) that can render us capable of responding better ‘within and as part of the world’’ .

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As part of embracing the strangeness of a sensual-encounter (while eschewing ‘the reductive’ since this exercise is all about opening up) I’d like to welcome some hints of the ‘anthropomorphic’ and the ‘silly-seeming’ . Like Kenney’s ‘Fables of Attention’, I see sensualencounters as ‘playful, artful and serious’51 . And remember, fables after all, are renowned for having animals and inanimate objects as the main (often speaking) protagonists.

Embracing mutual fictions through stories and games removes the mundanity of already knowing everything we think we need to know. ‘Over time, the pleasurable potent of not knowing becomes squeezed into designated timeslots called play, breaks or unruly abandon where what is known can once again be rendered unfamiliar, the uncertain or unexpected met with rushes of brief wonder and delight.’52 Cocker furthermore suggests that practice and preparation is required to help us embrace the unknown. ‘To inhabit the experience of not knowing in affirmative terms requires some preparation; one’s capacity for not knowing might need to be practiced, rehearsed or relearnt.’ 53

Kenney tentatively describes her ‘fables of attention’ as ‘small vignettes about the way we pay attention to our world’ . 54 She describes her role in writing as a ‘technoscientific fabulist attuned to the pleasures and dangers of passionate attention.’55 The sensual-encounter that we are searching for is a moment of passionate attention; a moment of passionate attention that can elicit a sense of wonder.

Perhaps passionate attention can be ‘attuned’ through practice like craft? Kenney qualifies that ‘fables of attention are not only stories about modes of attention, they teach us how to pay attention. They get under our skin and act on our sensoria.’56 As potters and wheelmakers well know, this description of fables of attention could also be used to describe the embodied know-how of skilled craftwork.

49 Alaimo, Trans-Corporeal Feminisms p.245. 50 Karen Barad, 2007 in Book Review: Donna Haraway(2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene By Martha Kenney, Science & Technology Studies, Vol.30, Issue 2, 2017, p.75 https://sciencetechnologystudies.journal.fi/article/view/63108 (accessed March 2020). 51 Martha Kenney, Fables of Attention: Wonder in Feminist Theory and Scientific Practice (Santa Cruz: University of California, 2013).< https://escholarship.org/uc/ucsc_etd> [accessed June 2020] p1. 52 Emma Cocker, Tactic s for not knowing, in On Not Knowing by Elizabeth Fisher (London: Black Dog, 2013) p.26. 53Ibid. p.127 54Martha Kenney, Fables of Attention, p.1. 55 Ibid, p.7. 56 Ibid, p.8.

Helen Maurer reveals a moment of sensual encounter by using an anthropomorphic narrative in her short film “The Kiss”.57 The film heightens the sensuality of the moment when she noticed the rhythmic movement of beach balls pushing against each other in a swimming pool.

Figure. 5 Helen Murer, The Kiss

In the case of Helen Maurer’s beach balls, she found something extraordinary in the ordinary. She has also shared it with us in a way that for me elicits a visceral response. How did Helen Murer tell her fable? Is it the suspended belief of the anthropomorphic narrative of beach balls kissing that allowed us a way in? Is it the strange voyeurism of the simultaneous distance and intimacy created by the rich, heady fabric and sound of the Super 8 Film?

Jane Bennett’s first attempt to enhance the readers receptivity to ‘thing-power’ is also through a story of ordinary things. She likewise describes a tale of materiality that is ‘too alien and too close to see clearly’.58

The main protagonists in Bennett’s story are:

57Helen Murer, The Kiss < http://www.helenmaurer.co.uk/index.php?page=57> [accessed 1 May 2020] 58 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter p.4.

Jane Bennett, herself One large men’s black plastic work glove One dense mat of oak pollen One unblemished dead rat One white plastic bottle cap One smooth stick of wood59

Both Bennett and Murer’s sensual-encounters achieve an intriguing combination of intimacy and remove.

‘We can only remember that seduction lies in not reconciling with the Other and in salvaging the strangeness of the Other.’60

59 Jane Bennett, p.4.

60 Baudrillard in ‘Relations with Concrete Others (or, How We Learned to Stopped Worrying and Love the Berlin Wall)’ in Avoiding the Subject by Clemens and Pettman (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), p.56.