QUESTION: Drawing on the work of Braidotti, Haraway and others, analyse the argument in favour of a mode of communication that combines creativity and critique, reason and imagination, theory and practice (Braidotti 2002).
The Mangled Manifesto
Haraway’s cyborg and Braidotti’s nomadic subject are, for me, key figurations, and Braidotti’s formulation for new desiring subjects- who negotiate between conscious and unconscious impulses with political commitment and who retain their gender without becoming fixed and polarized within the subject/object structure- has been useful to me in thinking about alternative registers of desire and knowledge. Virtual Anxiety (Kember 1998:8)
What is adequate about new figurations needs to be the object of a collective discussion and confrontation, and of public debates, and it cannot be determined by a single individual. Metamorphoses (Braidotti 2002:6) This essay will review and analyse in favour of the mode of communication drawn from Braidotti, Haraway and others, by addressing the meanings of the
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following terms that combines creativity and critique, reason and imagination, theory and practice (2002). Firstly, I will review how they are understood within the context of this argument. Secondly, we will analyse these ideas in further detail and draw upon the work of Kember and Zylinska, Barad, and others, within an attempt at a discourse with these figurations within a ‘new mode of address’ that reside in a hybridized theoretical framework (Kember 2012). According to Braidotti, these pairings of seemingly contrasting ideas (below) outline a discourse that embraces a combination of these seemingly diametrically opposed dualisms. •
Creativity and Critique
•
Reason and Imagination
•
Theory and practice
According to Haraway, ‘vision can be good for avoiding binary oppositions’ (1997:283), this metaphoric ‘gaze’ (ibid.) is what she in turn calls ‘situated knowledges (284). The complexities within these dualisms and the attempt at combining these constructs will be navigated by Braidotti’s ‘cartographic approach’ (2002:2). Her theoretical and ‘conceptual risk taking, ‘when it is no longer enough to deal with the breakdown of hierarchical conceptual dualisms’ (Kember and Zylinska 2012: 190) will be explored in further depth throughout this essay. ‘Figurations are steps towards a non-linear rendition of the subject in its deep structures. It is a kind of transposition, a way of revisiting, reclaiming and relocating a crucial shift in the process of becoming subjects’. (Braidotti 2006: 9)
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Braidotti emphasizes a way of becoming, transposing a shift that delineates itself from linear structures. By shifting and revisiting these structures, she stresses a ‘conceptually creative’ approach (2002:241) and likens to the term of ‘nomadism’ (2002) to illustrate the movement that she is attempting to fuel. Furthering this notion, for Karen Barad, ‘theorizing, like experimenting, is a material practice’ (2007: 55). For her, ‘intra-acting’ and ‘diffractions’ are all part of ‘experimental and theoretical practices’ (ibid.). Underpinning the framework to this essay, I will also draw from Kember and Zylinska’ s most recent book After New Media (2012) as they address the need for a creative mode of critique in extension from Braidotti.
…“Creative media” is for us a way of enacting knowledge about and of the media by creating conditions for the emergence of such media.
We envisage such “creative
media” works to be situated across the conventional boundaries of theory and practice, art and activism, social sciences and the humanities. They can take a variety of forms- essays on, polemics with regard to, and performances of what it means to “do media” both creatively and critically. (Kember and Zylinska 2012:188) Throughout this essay, in the spirit of combining and thus ‘remediating’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000) creativity, critique, reason, imagination, theory and practice, I will attempt, with discussion on the performative element of these modes of thinking, by actually experimenting on the fringes of this topic, a ‘performative element’ thoughout parts of this essay (ibid.) I have created a supplementary
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resource and ‘Visual Bibliography’ online at this ‘tumblr’ blog website. http://mangledmanifesto.tumblr.com/ A theory of knowledge which does not replace the intellect in the general evolution of life will teach us neither how the frames of knowledge have been constructed nor how we can enlarge or go beyond them. It is necessary that these two inquiries, theory of knowledge and theory of life, should join each other, and, by a circular process, push each on on unceasingly. (Bergson 2005:76)
The circularity that is spoken of by Bergson and the joining of both knowledge and of life is also touched on as concepts by Kember and Zylinska (2012:188) and ‘of media effects’ by Baudrillard (1994:83).
This unceasing is where
Kember and Zylinska are somewhat influenced, springboarding the discourse to the very creation of media. Circularity and its ‘unending-ness’ is seen as a ‘way of enacting knowledge about and of the media by creating conditions for the emergence of such media’. They acknowledge that it is a difficult and self reflexive process, as it is ‘supposed to produce the thing of which is speaks (creative media), while drawing on the very thing (creative media) as its source of inspiration.’ Also known through cybernetic terms, ‘feedback’ (Kember and Zylinska 2009:10). Furthermore, they draw inspiration from Bergson’s ‘creative evolution’ and Derrida’s politicoethical philosophy to ‘invent well’ (2012:175). However, it is also important to regard this notion, not as ‘infinite’ for Haraway deems this infinite vision as a god trick, an illusion. She implores we reclaim the sense of a feminist objectivity, which is a
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situated knowledge. What she deems possible allegories for this view and she wants to ‘argue for a doctrine and practice of objectivity that priveledges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing.’ (Haraway 1997:287)
Before this essay becomes just like another ‘amorphous blob’ (Barad 2007:42), At worst, sounding like ‘bad poetry’? (Braidotti 2002: 243) I will attempt to delineate between the discourse of boundaries, in so much to avoid the potential of creating a ‘blob’ and emphasise the importance of ‘where,’ in a figurative sense these modes of communication reside. ‘It may seem risky or even imprudent to attempt to reclaim creativity as a viable strategy for thinking about the media differently.’ (Kember and Zylinska 2012:175) There is also a wariness to not make critical assumptions of the thinker as ‘judge moral arbiter or high-priest(ess)’. (2012:190)
However, I will share in the creative media work and attempts to form a critical ‘creative practice’ that also satisfies both the intellectual and aesthetic level in an academic writing (ibid.).
The difficult task of enacting the very argument this essay is attempting to reiterate, I am concerned that I will fall back into linearity and chronological discourse that resides within the expectations of academic convention and fail to combine these modes of communication as thus argued.
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This irony and paradox of this performative procedure is that of the very experiment and self reflexive nature that Kember and Zylinska observe is somewhat
problematic
(2012:88).
Furthermore,
Braidotti’s
‘embodied
subjectivity’ of paradox arguably ‘rests simultaneously on the historical decline of mind-body distinctions and the proliferation of discourses about the body’ (2002:244). Thus I will make an attempt at ‘grasping’ (Barad 2007:388) by following Braidotti’s leadership in ‘zigzagging’ and by acknowledging that ‘in order to do justice to these complexities, I have opted for a style that may strike the academic reader as allusive or associative. It is a deliberate choice on my part, involving the risk of sounding less than coherent at times’ (2002:8).
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After New Critique? ‘With this project, we are thus hoping to stage a new paradigm not only for doing media critique-as-media analysis for also for inventing (new media)’ (Kember and Zylinska 2012: 203) This new paradigm introduces the concept of combining the dynamics of expressing this creativity (invention) and critique-as-media. How will they be combined with the right set of creative and critical tools? As nomadic views and with what Haraway terms as ‘mobile’ and ‘critical positioning.’ This challenges the how key practices the organized grounding knowledge organized around the imagery of vision that much Western scientific and philosophic discourse resides. She implores rejecting Cartesian habits of being thus asking how do we relocate the ‘unlocatable’ and thus ‘irresponsible knowledge claims’ (1997:286-289) that pervade common debates? So what do we do? Barad draws on these ‘knowledge claims’ and thus the creation of ‘false problems’ (Deleuze on Bergson 2002:15) whereby she continues this questioning of inheritance of Cartesian viewpoints and claims that we should not ‘trust our eyes to give us reliable access to the material world…we would rather put our faith in representations instead of matter, believing that we have a kind of direct access to the content of our representations that we lack toward that which is represented. To embrace representationalism and its geometry or geometrical optics of externality is not merely to make a justifiable approximation that can be fixed by adding further factors or perturbations at some later stage, but rather to start with the wrong
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optics, the wrong ground state, the wrong set of epistemological and ontological assumptions (Barad 2007:381).
‘Bergson’s composite must always be divided according to its articulations, that is, into elements which differs in kind. Intuition as method is a method of division.’ (Deleuze 2002:22). However, these divisions and thus dualisms of binary composites only takes us so far on this journey. For Braidotti hopes that ‘what is lost in coherence will be compensated for by inspirational force and an energizing pull away from binary schemes, judgemental postures and the temptation for nostalgia (2002:9). Furthermore, she iterates that ‘Transpositions addresses the question of which forces, desires or aspirations are likely to propel us out of traditional habits, so that one is actually yearning for changes in a positive and creative manner.’ (2006: 9)
These transitions are what Kember and Zylinska believe that by producing things, ‘creating’ such as media, the difference in positions and affects and what ‘Kantian tradition’ calls “critique”, will then inform the ‘knowing’ of this difference’ between forms of knowledge.
This ‘knowing the difference’,
contains more significance than in understanding the thinking behind creative media, rather than just focusing on the ‘yet –unrealized’ and ‘unknown corporeal potential’. (2012:179)
The challenge here is by asking the question. How do we modify, differentiate and thus improve concepts and ideas? Are we really propelled?
As we
cannot ever move beyond representation (as tempting as it might be to
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consider it). ‘For Bergson, intuition is a method or technique that precedes symbolization and representation but that requires them for it to have an effect.’ (Grosz 2004:237). As is re-iterated, these constructs are also inherently influenced by Bergson’s claim that ‘comparisons and metaphors’, ‘suggest what cannot be expressed’ (Deleuze 1992:42).
With so many meanings abounding around the term creativity, which is often ‘linked with so called ideas pertaining to ‘originality’, Kember and Zylinska continues to question ‘against the all-consuming power of creative industries’ and thus the narratives and practices that they set in an attempt to position “creative media” as an alternative paradigm for envisaging some new ways of thinking about and with, the media.’ (Kember and Zylinska 2012:175). With this alternative paradigm, this attempt at reclaiming creativity, using metaphor and comparisons, one must start moving beyond dominant thinking modes of analysis and critique that forms the cultural discourse on creativity and cultural production.
‘Yet what if were to mobilize the critical dimension of the analysis of creative media processes and products and combine it with an actual attempt to produce creative media, while also subjecting the notion of critique to a critique? In other words, what if, rather than just write about the production of creative media by others, we could mobilize the very media that are being critiqued as objects of creative industries’ analyses and put them to critical uses, to think with and through them about change, invention, and sociocultural transformation?’ (Kember Zylinska 2012:177)
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So just how this is mobilized? Through mediation. ‘Mediation stands for a set of entangled economic, cultural, social, technical, textual, and psychological processes through which a variety of media forms develop in ways that are times progressive and at times conservative.’It is ‘always generative, but it is not necessarily progressive.’ (173)
Building on the limited nature of the ‘post-personal’, Kember and Zylinska ‘shall continue working with the notion of “mediation” as a device for thinking about media events and inventions.’ Mediation and metaphor are just some of the tools in combining these modes of communicating, but the answers are not this straight forward. ‘The problem is mediation is for us both contingent and temporal. It centers on the evolution of media in relation to wider socioeconomic forces.’ The role is neither ‘determining nor determined, but rather, is vital and relational.’ (203)
‘Mind-the-Gap-Please’ http://mangledmanifesto.tumblr.com/post/39838979327/soundbites
‘We live in permanent processes of transition, hybridization and nomadization, and these in-between states and stages defy the established modes of theoretical representation’ (Braidotti 2002: 2)
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Alternative London Tube Map- The Chromatic London Underground Map Plate 1 Braidotti speaks of the ‘prolific in-between spaces’ and understands the necessity to take ‘creative leaps’ (Braidotti 2006:6) in order to ‘learn to think differently’. Just how is this done? The questions Braidotti raises is ‘not to know who we are, but what ‘we want to become’ (2002:2). This ‘becoming’ is explored in her book Metamorphoses and her argument towards a cartographic approach that provides the exegetical tools and creative theoretical alternatives.’
She enforces her commitment to the task of
‘reconfiguring a theoretical style in a manner that reflects and does not contradict theoretical nomadism’ (2002:8). The nomadic ‘becomings’, that is, learning to think differently and conceptual leaps she iterates, is for a ‘style of thinking that adequately reflects the
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complexities of the process itself’. ’ It is about repetition and intensities of flow, a ‘intensive interconnectedness.’ (ibid.) Braidotti is compelled to think ‘beyond’ the constructs set from the postructuralist era, the socalled ‘adequate representations’ that they fought so hard to re-imagine. What is this interconnectedness that she speaks of? Her proposition is through ‘reconfiguring political practice and redefining political subjectivity’ in one sense, is a cartographic figuration of a ‘living map’ (2002:3). By this she emphasizes it is ‘no metaphor’, rather like literal nomadic subjects and locations of historical and geopolitical ones. This is a challenging concept as it is quite a comfortable idea to remain on a metaphorical cloud. So where are we on this ‘living map’ (Braidotti 2002:3)? Her answer is in nomadism as it is fluid, moves and flows, just a like a living organism. In these times of accelerating changes, many traditional points of reference and age-old habits are being recomposed, albeit in contradictory ways.
At such a time more conceptual
creativity is necessary; a theoretical effort is needed in order to bring about the conceptual leap across inertia, nostalgia, aporia and other forms of critical stasis induced by the postmodern historical condition. I maintain that we need to learn to think differently about ourselves and the processes of deep-seated transformation. (Braidotti 2002:3, emphasis mine)
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Braidotti’s ‘refusal to separate reason from the imagination also alters the terms of the conventional pact between the write and his or her readers, ‘connection is relinquished into the intensive elements that both sustain the connections and are generated by them. The writer/ reader binary couple is recombined accordingly, and a new impersonal mode is required as the appropriate way of doing philosophy.’ (2002:9)
So what conceptual leaps are we taking? What is leading us through reason and imagination? Like ‘matter’ and life, within media and its mediation, space and time arguably cannot be separated, it is both ‘invisible, indivisible’ (Barad 2007:353)
If these ideas are invisible, indivisible, what hybrid forms of knowledge lead us to the discourse of combining reason and imagination? Kember discusses Haraway’s cyborg and Braidotti’s ‘Mothers, Monsters and Machines’ (2011) and the ‘nomadic subject’ as the feminists response to the figuration and construction of the monstrous mother machines in an attempt to reconfigure the relationship between women and technology with her practice and philosophy of ‘as if’(1998:133,134).
‘As if’ is an act of the imagination’, embodied within the cyborg figurations, grounded in utopia which is apparently ‘both here and not here, fact and fiction’ that can lead to the ‘strategic relocation of subjects.’ ‘As if’ is both embodied in the nomadic subject and cyborg. Kember has seen this embodiment as a key to parodic figure of the masculine unconscious using a
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vampire as a metaphor on information technology debates. This has lead to her thinking differently about desire, subjectivity and ultimately discourses about knowledge and power. The fluidity of ‘blood’ as a metaphoric allegory in parallel to the obsession of technological ‘advancements’ and networked ‘flows’ (ibid.)
‘Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourse can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed myth and tool mutually constitute each other.’ (Haraway 1991:164)
Or as Kember further argues,‘ fluidity of information has become synonymous with the flow of blood, turning us all into (metaphorical) vampires… vampirism is the irrational monster myth which is (the stake) at the heart of the supposedely rational convergence of biological and computer sciences.’ (1998: 135)
So who or what are these monsters? Posthuman?
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Björk's music video -'Army of Me’
Source: Youtube Plate 2
In Björk's music video, 'Army of Me' (Plate 2), you see a surrealist account of a hybrid machine/ monster, driving a truck with a giant mouth for an engine eating diamonds. When she goes inside the ‘Museum’ to implant a bomb by the side of a exhibition of a corpse, the explosion simultaneously awakens the corpse and all but 3 letters spelling ‘MUM’ remain on the ‘MUSEUM’ sign (Plate 1). This clearly analogously connects the ‘mum/mother/monster’ falling on the ‘wrong side’ this dichotomy.
‘A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.’ (Haraway 1991:149) The ‘use of the term ‘cyborg’ as it is perhaps proving misleading as salient concepts, debates and disciplines, and suggests new couplings or hybridities of the human and the technological in contemporary everyday life. It implies, and is often taken to mean, a discrete bounded entity (a cybernetic organism):
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a monster no doubt, but one generally more or less human in origin and form. Think of the cyborg’s fictional figurations: Robocop and the Terminator’. (Lister et.al 2011: 282)
‘The monster is the bodily incarnation of difference from the basic human norm: it is deviant, an a-no-maly; it is abnormal… The monster helps us understand the paradox of “difference” as a ubiquitous but perennially negative pre-ocupation.’ (Braidotti 2011: 216)
This ‘cyborg other’ that Haraway emphasizes throughout her manifesto, is about how women, on the fringes and non-dominant discourse of history, is also where Braidotti argues about feminist discourse falling on the ‘wrong’ side of history. The ‘cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work… deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism… physical artefacts associated with ‘high technology’ and scientific culture (Haraway 1991:154).
Haraway urges that ‘who cyborgs will be, is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival.’ (153) How will these answers form the basis of a life saving apparatus? What are the answers? Cyborg writing, she implores, is about ‘seizing the tools’ that has marked them in the world as ‘other’. (175). The religious allegories connected is not on the basis of original innocence or ‘before the fall’ per se, but ‘reassembling the disassembled’ (163) by reconstructing the socialist-feminist politics through theory and practice. This
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will be by addressing the myth and meanings structured around the imaginations that stem from social relations of science and technology. ‘From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.’ (154)
So how will this be reimagined? Are we now just ‘technobodies in the socialcyber space? (Braidotti 2002: 244) How will there be a non-fear of the ‘other’ and how will we ‘stand’ amongst these contradictions and not live in fear of difference with this ‘other’, those dichotomies of man- woman, animals and machines? Are we post human? Post personal? Braidotti emphasizes a ‘new impersonal mode’ as a ‘complexified’ set of possible connections and of ‘becoming animal’ (2002:8) while Haraway explores the complex relationships between man and animal in Becoming Companion Species (2008). There is an animal that Haraway terms as ‘Cobbled together.’ The Mixotricha paradoxa most commonly known as the humble Australian mammal, the wombat. The latin translation meaning ‘the paradoxical one with mixed up hairs’. (Haraway 2008:285) Perhaps this is a gentler view of how humans view or even thus ‘label’ their relationship or understanding of their companion species. Or perhaps, the humans’ agency, when having given the wombat its original latin names’ meaning, ’constituting’ and thus speaking of their own ‘other worldliness’ when trying to encapsulate the myth and meaning of this creature. Thus ‘Ideas’ themselves are considered ‘technologies for pursuing
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inquiries’.‘Its not just that ideas are embedded in practices; they are technical practices of situated kinds.’ (ibid: 282).
These ‘paradoxical ones with mixed up hairs’ are inherently embedded, connected and these ideas of connection or ‘interconnectedness’ is valued highly by Braidotti (Kember 1998:130). Pickering creates a strong summation on this ‘mixed up-ness’. ‘I do not think that analysis and politics are necessarily as closely linked as, for example, Haraway’s “Manifesto” suggests. While Haraway sees her cyborg imagery and her politics as tied together, this book, after all, has arrived at notions of the coupling of human and nonhuman agency quite congruent with Haraway’s, but via a consideration of the temporality of practice rather than through any commitment to nonessentialist socialist-feminism (though, as it happens, I would be happy enough to support Haraway’s agendas).
Nevertheless,
cultural studies of science and the mangle can be made to intersect with political debate. Thus along with their different axes, both serve to destabilize the nonemergent and humanist premises of traditional political thought. The posthumanist perspective that emerges from my analysis of practice, for instance, tends to undermine any faith in a distinctively humanist politics; it reinforces, to put it the other way around, political programs that explicity aim at symmetrically interlinked transformations in the human and social, scientific, technological, and material spaces we inhabit.’ (Pickering 1995: 228-229)
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Braidotti continues further by arguing that ‘the hyper-reality of the cyborg of post-human predicament does not wipe out politics or the need for political resistance: it just makes it more necessary than ever to work towards a radical redefinition of political action.’ The ‘crisis of modernity for feminists, is not a melancholic plunge into loss and decline, but rather the joyful opening up of new possibilities.’ (2002: 245) ‘An affirmative ethics for a non-unitary subject proposes an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the on-human or ‘earth’ others.’ (2010:144)
Let’s play!
‘What kind of constitutive role in the production of knowledge, imagination, and practice can new groups doing science have?’ (Haraway 1991:169). The role of production could be argued by Barad using the tool of ‘agential realism’ and ‘intra-activity’ to re-imagine our relationship between these modes of communication that we are seeking to combine.
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Comic XKCD Source: http://xkcd.com/240/ Plate 3
Barad argues that ‘Believing something is true doesn’t make it true.
But
phenomena- whether lizards, electrons, or humans – exist only as a result of, and as part of, the world’s ongoing intra-activity, its dynamic and contingent differentiation into specific relationalities. “We humans” don’t make it so, not by dint of our own will, and not on our own. But through our advances, we participate in bringing forth the world in its specificity, including ourselves. We have to meet the universe halfway, to move toward what may come to be in ways that are accountable for our part in the world’s differential becoming. All real living is meeting. And each meeting matters (2007:353). How do we thus intra-act with others? What is our constitutive role in the production of knowledge, imagination, practice and with animals, science, the universe? (Plate 4)
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Alternative Tube Map of the Galaxy
Plate 4
According to Barad, agency is ‘doing’ or ‘being’ and is a matter or intra-actvity. It is an enactment, not what ‘someone or something has’ (2007:178). It is what she terms ‘Agential Realism’. This is a key towards the combination of these modes of communication that we have been unpacking. It is not simply posed as a different set of dynamics, but in fact, introduces a different understanding of those dynamics. This brings us back to the understanding of ‘refiguring’ ‘new modes of address’. For not only has causal relations been changed, but ‘the very notions of causality, as well as agency, space, time and matter, are all reworked.’ Thus the ‘very nature nature of change and the possibilities for change changes in an ongoing fashion as part of the world’s
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intra-active dynamism.’ (ibid:179) So what is of this intra-action of becoming? Barad states it is ‘not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency.’ (151)
Furthering our discourse on ‘companion species’ and ‘bodies’, Barad introduces us to the marine creature, the brittlestar. Arguably ‘brittlestars challenge not only the disembodied epistemologies but also traditional, and indeed many nontraditional notions of embodiment. Bodies are situated in the world, they are part of the world. Objectivity cant’ be a matter of seeing from somewhere, as opposed to the view from nowhere (objectivism) or everywhere (relativism), if being situated in the world means occupying particular coordinates in space and time, in culture and history. Just as the importance of the body as a performance rather than a thing can hardly be overemphasized, so should we resist the familiar conception of spacetime as a preexisting Euclidean container, (or non Euclidean manifold) that presents separately constituted bodies with a place to be or a space through which to travel.
(2007:377) In other words, the brittlestar is at once nowhere but
somewhere. It challenges our worldviews of where ‘it’ lies within ‘space’ and ‘time’, if that even ‘exists’ in this construct. It is dynamic and space and thus boundaries and properties are essentially reconfigured and has an ongoing interactive engagement, that is somewhat endless.‘ Embodiment is not a matter of being specifically situated in the world, but rather of being of the world in its dynamic specificity.’ (378).
Brittlestars literally enact the entangled practices of knowing and being that points to Barad’s agential realist ontoepistemological account.
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creatures also challenge ‘our Cartesian habits of mind, breaking down the usual visual metaphors for knowng along with its optics of mediated sight.’ Controversially, she argues that knowledge making is not a mediated activity. ‘Knowing is a direct material engagement, a practice of intra-acting with the world as part of the world in its dynamic material configuring, its ongoing articulation.The entangled practices of knowing and being are material practices. The world is not merely an idea that exists in the human mind. To the contrary, “mind” is a specific material configuration of the world, not necessarily coincident with a brain. Brain cells are not the only ones that hold memories, respond to stimuli, or think thoughts. Brittlestsars intra-act with their ocean environment and respond to different stimuli made intelligible through these intra-actions, adjusting their positions and reworking their bodies in order to avoid predators or find food or shelter, all without brains or eyes.’ (2007:379).
So how are we to ‘make sense’ of this? (Kember and Zylinska 2012:181). If brittlestars, a creature without brains or eyes, who intra-acts, by reworking their bodies, who can also articulate their surroundings, respond to stimuli and survive by adjusting their positions outside of the constructs, the mangle, how much more as ‘we’, humans, cyborgs, companion species, can re-imagine, reconfigure and consider ‘new’ modes ‘knowing’, ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ by formulating new ways of combining communication discourses?
Which brings us back to ‘earth’ in How like a Leaf, Goodeve is challenged through this interview with Haraway that ‘art by way of producing new
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meanings offers a critical breakthrough- opening up and producing. Critical work can be productive not just a negative activity. I read this wonderful distinction recently that said theory should found change not find it.’ Haraway continues this thought that perhaps traditional academia is ‘rooted in the fear of embracing something with all of its messiness and dirtiness and imperfection.’ (2000:112). Gary Hall argues further in relation to academic constructs for what is at stake is not practice vs theory or theory vs practice. It is rather, ‘the degree to which each position is already implicated in the other’ (2008:32)
Jackie Orr certainly has explored these notions and pushed these boundaries of implications in Panic Diaries (2006). She quotes Haraway’s observation that is encapsulated by the idea that “The entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly. What practices of language, what creative countercodes, can cut through the dominant communicative patterns structuring contemporary power and perceptions?’ She asserts she has no perfect answers, however she also forms a ‘commitment to performing writing’ as not just a material practice, but one in which could be a possible, imperfectly political form of social science scholarship, whereby she experiments in several places with techniques in the texts, that involve collage/montage. Drawing from Dada and surrealism, ‘collage can be one performative strategy for telling more than one story at a time, bringing together on the same textual surface’… At the same time, she uses ‘metaphors of performance to describe the techniques and technologies
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developed by twentieth-century social science to produce or “perform” its objects of study.’ (2006:28-29)
‘So this is a story about panic, and also about knowledge and power. Here the social sicences are important not only in informing the methods used to compose such a story but also as players in the story itself, active historical participants in the social theatre that they claim as their site of research. Doubling as both a method and an object of my study… situated in shifting historical networks of power.’ (ibid:10) So back to Braidotti. Is she panicked? She acknowledges all the hard work of poststructuralists in innovating the form and style of philosophical content that preceded her, however even for her,
with
her
zigzagging,
nomadic
mode
of
understanding
and
communication, some of her work, has been met with a ‘mixed reception in the academic community’ which was at times referred to as ‘ bad poetry’ (2002: 243). Ouch. Should ‘we’ be panicked? Or can we find a level of comfort in a little experimenting without throwing the metaphorical ‘baby out with the bathwater’?
Kember and Zylinska think so. ‘Performativity is an empowering concept, politically and artistically, because it not only explains how norms take place but also shows that change and invention are always possible.’ (2012:189) Furthermore ‘Working in and with media is for us first and foremost an epistemological question of how we can perform knowledge differently through a set of practices that also “produce things.”
The nature of these “things”- academic monographs, novels,
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photographs, video clips – is perhaps less significant (even though each one of these objects does matter in a distinctly singular way) than the overall process of producing “knowledge as things.’ (188)
‘…Feminists
are
coming
up
with
their
own
more
responsible and accountable visions which take the form of figurations. Figurations are alternative utopian images or political imaginaries which embody a shift in the terms of knowledge, power and subjectivity. They are being put to work in the context of contemporary technoscientific culture, where their main mode of operation is parody… They figure a contest for power and a change which is both here and not here, and which will be slow to emerge and hard won.’ Virtual Anxiety (Kember 1998:8)
So how have contests for power and change, that in many sense are still ‘slow to emerge and hard won’ will take us towards the combination of these figurations and modes of communication between creativity and critique, reason and imagination, theory and practice? I believe that ‘play’ will be an essential element to throw into these performative ‘intra-actions’ and into the mangle for media, technology towards not only the current but future discourse.
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Lightning Perceptual Computing Demo
Source: Youtube video. Plate 5
Intel’s experiments in their Lightning Perceptual Computing Demo (Plate 5) involves the interplay of the conceptual, virtual and real. The hands of a man is projected via a webcam onto a screen, alongside virtual ‘lighting’ as he moves his hands in the air. Perhaps the characters in Kember’s ‘ The Optical Effects of Lightning may have used this tool as a way of ‘fusion’, that are ‘more than metaphors for fiction, or indeed theory. Instead, they become materialized and play a performative role within theory. This sort of intervention is therefore also something of an invention.” (Kember and Zylinska 2012:191)
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Source: Youtube video. Plate 6
Within this very short stop motion video on ‘metamorphoses’ (Plate 6), a small square being of plasticine literally ‘taps’ (pun intended) into a new discourse within itself. It is the same materiality, but essentially transitions into a different functionality. The plasticine, in this instance is the agent of metamorphosis, of a ‘new way of seeing things’.
CONCLUSION
Throughout this ‘Mangled Manifesto’ I have attempted to extrapolate the argument in favour of a mode of communication that combines creativity, and critique, reason and imagination, theory and practice. Braidotti and others implored us to ‘think differently’, beyond the constructs of Cartesian ways of knowing, being and seeing. Bergson provided an initial framework, but we found that his binaries were too limiting to remain at that juncture. http://mangledmanifesto.tumblr.com/
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explored the complex relationship of myth and meaning through imagining Haraway’s Cyborg and its relation to ‘monsters’. Through the mangle, we saw another way of seeing, through our companion species and Barad’s ‘agential realism’ as proliferated via the brainless ‘brittlestar’.
On this cartographic
journey, we then continued through the performativity of theory and practice, at the risk of being deemed a ‘bad poet’ and yet, being vitally energized by Kember and Zylinska’s belief that change and invention are possible.
Within creative media, the nomadic, transposed, remediated and intra-acting entities are all in literally moving in favour of supporting and combining these modes of communication that has underpinned this essay. The dualisms that we began with are thus although like matter indivisible and invisible (Barad) within this discourse, the vitality that ensues by asking the ‘right’ questions, and moving beyond false problems enables us to ‘re-imagine’ the way forward through the mangle.
Kember and Zylinska’s manifesto and ‘call to arms’ (Pickering 1995:227) are summarized as this: 1) All of old. But ask again. Ask better 2) Cut. Cut again. Cut better. 3) Try again. Fail again. Fail better. ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (2012: 205) is perhaps one clear motivation to go to these ‘new’ spaces to ‘experiment’ and thus re-ask ‘better questions.’ The consequences of this experimentation may entail moving beyond
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questioning these so called ‘false problems’ as a necessary part of the process of what Braidotti terms as ‘becoming’. The combination of these modes of critique, through performativity and representation will hopefully continue to enlist more followers and consider the premise of ‘taking the riski of the unknown and the impossible, the not-even-yet-new, against all odds’ (ibid:205) Dr. Sheldon Cooper’s character in the popular television sci-com The Big Bang Theory on his subtle motivation to change when faced with the limitation of his failure as a teacher.
Sheldon: Do you realize that teaching is the first thing I’ve failed at since my ill-fated attempt to complete a chin-up in March of 1989? Amy:
If
this
humiliating
experience
is
really
troubling you, there are things we could do about it. Sheldon: For instance? Amy: Well, the first thing that comes to mind is isolating the part of your brain where the memory is stored and destroying it with a laser. Sheldon:
Hmm,
suddenly
I’m
no.
One
slip
sitting
in
of
the
the
hand,
and
Engineering
Department, building doodads with Wolowitz. Amy: All right. Have you considered improving your
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socialization
skills,
thus
allowing
you
to
communicate more effectively with other people? Sheldon: Isn’t that their burden? I’m the one with something interesting to say. Amy: Fair enough, but in its essence, teaching is a performance art. In the classroom paradigm, the teacher has the responsibility to communicate, as well as entertain and engage.
Series 4, Episode 14 (emphasis mine)
I’ve figuratively, metaphysically metaphorically jumped, leapt into the mangle/ swam through the pond, the hybridized enmeshed space that is the remediated mode of communication that throughout this essay I have now fought so hard to arrive at… If it is even a destination at all. Nomadic? Yes. Cyborg? Yes. Animal? Yes. Intra-acting? Yes. Zigzagging? Yes. Bad Poet? Perhaps. Becoming? Hopefully. Perhaps I was already here, there and nowhere, at the same time, all along
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Available in a ‘Visual Bibliography’ online via http://mangledmanifesto.tumblr.com/visbib
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham and London: Duke University Press Bergson, H. (2005) Creative Evolution, Cosimo, New York (Kindle edition 4868 pages) Bergson, H. (1946) The Creative Mind, Greenwood Press, New York Bergson, H. (1992) [fp 1946] ‘Introduction (Part II) Stating the problems,’ The Creative Mind. An Introduction to Metaphysics, Carol Publishing Group: Citadel Press Bergson, H. (1992) [fp 1946] ‘Philosophical intuition’ and ‘The perception of change,’The Creative Mind. An Introduction to Metaphysics, Carol Publishing Group: Citadel Press Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. (2000) ‘Self,’ Remediation. Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press Braidotti, R. (2002) Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Polity Press Braidotti, R. (2006) Transpositions, Cambridge: Polity Press Conboy, K,. Medina, N., Stanbury, S. (eds), (1997) Writing on the Body, Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, Columbia University Press Deleuze, G. (2002) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books Derrida, J. and Stiegler, B. (2002) ‘Right of Inspection,’ Echographies of Television, trans. Jennifer Bajorek, Cambridge: Polity Press Grosz, E. (2004) ‘Intuition and the Virtual,’The Nick of Time. Politcs, Evolution, and the Untimely, Durham and London Hall, G. (2008) ‘Metadata 1. Notes on Creating Critical Computer Media’, Digitize This Book! Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press Haraway, Donna, J. (2008) ‘Becoming Companion Species in Technoculture’ and ‘Parting Bites: Nourishing Indigestion’ When Species Meet, Minneapolis and London: University Of Minnesota Press Haraway, Donna J. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge Haraway, Donna J. (1999) How Like a Leaf, Donna J. Haraway: An interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. Routledge.
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Haraway, Donna J. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium, New York and London: Routledge Hemmings, C. (2010) ‘On reading Transpositions: A response to Rosi Braidotti’s Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics’, Subjectivity Vol. 3, 2, 125-148 Kember, S. and Zylinska, J. (2009) ‘Creative Media: performance, invention, critique’, in M. Chatzichristodoulou, J. Jefferies and R. Zerihan (eds) Interfaces of Performance, Ashgate Kember, S. (1998) ‘Conclusion: the importance of as if,’ Virtual Anxiety, Manchester University Press Kember, S. and Zylinska, J. (2010) ‘Creative Media between Invention and Critique, or What’s Still at Stake in Performativity’ Culture Machine, Vol. 11 Kember, S. and Zylinska, J. (2012) Life After New Media: mediation as a vital process, MIT Press Kember, S. (2010) ‘Media, Mars and Metamorphosis’, Culture Machine, Vol. 11 Lister, M. Dovey, J. Giddings, S. Grant, I. and Kelly, K. (eds) (2009) New Media. A Critical Introduction. Second Edition, London and New York: Routledge Orr, J. (2006) ‘History, Memory, Story: Openings,’ Panic Diaries, Durham and London: Duke University Press Pickering, A. (1995) ‘Representation and Performativity’, The Mangle of Practice, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press Suchman, L. A. (2007) ‘Agencies at the Interface,’ Human-Machine Reconfigurations, Cambridge University Press
Internet Plate References All hyperlinks were accessed on 6 January 2013. Plate 1 Chromatic London Underground Map http://londonist.com/2012/02/alternative-tube-maps-the-chromatic-underground.php Plate 2
Björk's music video, 'Army of Me' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3biZkA-TNvs Plate 3 Comic XKCD Number 240.
http://xkcd.com/240/ Plate 4 Alternative Tube Map of the Galaxy http://londonist.com/2010/01/a_tube_map_of_the_galaxy.php
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Plate 5 Intel’s Lightning Perceptual Computing Demo http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9FB73PafuDY Plate 6 Stop Motion Animation ‘Morph’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMnCAr0ZRiE
Internet Resources and Bibliography All hyperlinks were accessed on 6 January 2013. The Big Bang Theory- Script Blog extract from Series 4, Episode 14 http://bigbangtrans.wordpress.com/series-4-episode-14-the-thespian-catalyst/ Fembotcollective.org Books aren’t dead- The Optical Effects of Lightning. Podcast Joan Haran interviews interviews Sarah Kember http://fembotcollective.org/blog/2012/12/01/books-arent-dead-the-optical-effects-oflightning/ The Mangled Manifesto http://mangledmanifesto.tumblr.com/ Soundbites: Mind the Gap http://www.haltestellenansage.de/ansagen/u/london/mindthegap.mp3
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