SO true! Girls are told to be more tough these days, more handy, more independent! Boys aren't allowed to be sensitive, they aren't allowed to "act like a girl" in any way. It's sad!

I disagree! Just because one is not a "maker," does not mean they are less valuable as a human.):

Hmmm... I would have to disagree

So, basically.. anyone who works... is a maker? Im a little confused

I have never heard of this so-called "widespread idea"

I completely understand where the author, Debbie Chachra, is coming from. I strongly believe that no one should have a label, but rather live how they want to, and let others form their own opinions without the help of a label.

Can this be related to Braidotti's "generative cracks" (19) and also L.C. - "There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

Ecology

tipping cascades - Will Steffen

Did this term originate with Barad, or does it stem from something/one else? Are we to take response-ability as the ability to respond affectively, effectively, and in an intentful manner that helps?

This reminds me of Hetch Hetchy

Responsibility in the Islamic tradition stems from what I call "response-necessity". Which means, one is responsible to act when others are not acting while action is necessary. If we as communities, nations and the globe as whole decide what is necessary, responsibility as response-necessity follows.

Yes, who decides responsibility and using what parameters?

I wonder whether the shelter would have been burned if it carried a Western value as a sign of civility for instance. So we need more relations not less, but relations between nature and whom, which kind of human?

If anyone is interested, I kept thinking through the footprint and it became this chapter: "Better Footprints".

I want to think more intensely about footprints. I want to re-emphasize movement, embodiment, place, and inscription, which are all side lined or even implicitly disparaged in the prominent employment of footprint. What is it to place one's feet and to inscribe with one's own body? In making environmentalism a question of a footprint's size, do we lose the nuance of kind? Everything leaves its mark upon the world.

This challenges my understanding of the difference between new-materialism and posthumanism. Matter here is connected to its performance not to its "nature" as something fixed, because that matter keeps changing as it performs.

Latour's word/world gap

This seems to parallel with Lefebvre's 3 types of space - spatial practice (perceived space), representations of space (conceived space/discourse on space), and representational space (lived space/discourse of space)

emergent matters of concern

One one hand, language is free to trade/share/interact with and matter is often not. It's an exchange we can all engage with on some level. On the other, access to understanding of language is unequal. Perhaps the dominance of language has to do with access. Language is also imbued with human expression, and this is often how we interpret others.

I didn't think of the interface when I interviewed the chess pieces. I paid attention to the chess board as it facilitated and restricted the pieces mobility, but didn't recognize the other layer of space which is the interface. To me, the interface at least temporarily disappeared because of my point of focus.

key idea

Key idea here

I would like to hear us discuss this tomorrow.

Interesting that social theory "emulated" rather than attempted to understand connections between social and natural sciences.

The exigency of this article seems to be what we identified in our discussion today which is a new understanding of agency as collective and includes non-human matter.

Updating this transformation, Zach Furness discusses in One Less Car how bicycling and driving dramatically shift your orientation to the world & others.

A quotation from p. 177:

"At the most basic level, cycling slows down the world in ways that tangibly affect interpersonal communication, most notably by promoting face-to-face encounters.56 Scott larkin, author of the zine Go by Bicycle, points this out in interview with the author: “The prospect of someone stopping to talk to someone when they’re jamming by at thirty-five miles an hour is unlikely.”57 in addition, there is a sense among critics that habitual driving engenders an experience of cities that is not unlike tourism, inasmuch as urban spaces and landscapes are often abstracted into “pure, rapid, superficial spectacles.”58 Driving, according to this line of reasoning, physically distances people from both the materiality and the material realities of cities (i.e., the built environment as well as prevailing socioeconomic conditions) by facilitating a process that allows people to metaphorically and sometimes quite literally bypass the problems of cities altogether. The driver’s gaze shaped through privatized mobility, nigel Taylor argues, also objectifies and depersonalizes the world outside of the car in such as way that it transforms the environment, other vehicles, and even human beings into mere “things” that obstruct one’s movement. That is to say, while the car—like all transportation technologies— operates as a framing device, the “visuality of the windshield” becomes more than a casual or temporary looking glass when one considers both the ever- increasing amounts of time people individually spend “sealed off from the public and the street,” as well as a broader cultural/legal context in which “the public” is increasingly being seen as a mere amalgamation of mobile private spheres—a condition Don Mitchell calls the “SUV model of citizenship.” The problem, in other words, is not necessarily what one sees or does not see each time one gets behind the wheel, but rather, the way driving shapes subjectivity and fosters a broader disposition toward urban space and urban life: an entire way of seeing."

I commented on the Bignall and Rigney piece that I liked the phrase "affective neighborhood (176). It strikes me here that this neighborhood can defined in terms of resonant "sets of sensitivities."

Doesn't that still put nature in service of the human

I find a lot in common between this understanding of "more than human" and the Islamic guidelines of collective responsibility and inter-dependency.

Like Casey noted about critiques made by disability studies scholars of "schizo-analysis" in Deleuze and Guattari, an additional point to consider is that the "rhizome" framework is based in part on the mapped movements and gestures of autistic children. How do the undergirded connections to disability change how we foreground Deleuze and Guattari's work, Indigenous knowledge, and their 'alliance' in posthuman theory?

"Post-" has always been a curious prefix for me for this reason. Does it imply a recovery from or progress to another stage of thought in systems that are otherwise skeptical of progress narratives?

I wonder: What are the problems of enacting this practice in the reverse? Some Indigenous scholars such as Zoe Todd and Sarah Hunt have argued that Indigenous ways of being and knowing are not concepts to be plucked or employed or drawn from—rather, they are living practices that emerge in relation to particular lands, waters, bodies, and so on. Another way to put this: can a reciprocity happen when Eurowestern philosophies engage Indigenous ones?

Such a succinct statement that captures various critiques of new materialism from Indigenous perspectives. Reminds me of Kim TallBear's now often-cited point. She writes, "First of all, indigenous peoples have never forgotten that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives."

I've been drawn to their use of "alliance" in this chapter, which seems to be a generative and accountable way to bring together these bodies of knowledge.

I really dig this turn of phrase here: it productively suggests not that these carious approaches are doing the same thing, turning over the same ground, but that what is being done resonates affectively--shared commitments, shared interests, etc.

People often neglect how tough it was for Deleuze to articulate this alternative history of/for western philosophy. In some aspects, just looking at Deleuze's career one might see a very grand and long drawn out attempt to write a literature review that rearticulates the problems and possibilities of western philosophy.

Perhaps the older humanities was a break to which posthumanism is finally returning too?

This is very much an affirmative response to confluences between continental philosophy (philosophies?) and indigenous philosophies.

This resonates very deeply with Spinoza's understanding if a body well composed in his Ethics.

Such temporal registers echo/precede those requested by Braidotti.

I've always been curious about, and ignorant of, the conflation of indigeneity into a homogenous category. Whenever someone brings up "indigenous thought" I keep wanting to ask "which indigeniety?"

Similar critiques have been leveled against D&G by disability studies scholars regarding their use of "schizo-analysis" as an interpretive/inventive frame.

In There There, Tommy Orange discusses urban Indians in the prologue - "...but the land moves with you like memory. An Urban Indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonlivingthing from the earth. All our relations."

On exploring the necessity of the negative and affirming the positive in the Anthropocene... Braidotti: "The negativity is part of the exercise, but the moment, the analytical function of negativity is only a moment. The proper job, the task, the ethical obligation is in reversing the negative into conditions of affirmation and positivity."

This is a fascinating use of language, consubstantiation and transubstantiation being highly Western and Christian. Learning to see and value the "other" requires learning and using new terms to reach these levels of intersubjectivity and new ways of being. Interactive ecologies occur with or without hybrid languages, but they will be best fostered with this type of listening and speaking - one that includes and enmeshes the perceived other(s).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autochthon_(ancient_Greece) "In Ancient Greece, the concept of autochthones (from Ancient Greek αὐτός autos "self," and χθών khthon "soil"; i.e. "people sprung from earth itself") means the original inhabitants of a country as opposed to settlers, and those of their descendants who kept themselves free from an admixture of foreign peoples.

In mythology, autochthones are those mortals who have sprung from the soil, rocks and trees. They are rooted and belong to the land eternally.

An autochthon is not the same as the offspring of Gaia, called gegenes (earth-born), although later the terms have been conflated."

An important undercurrent in all of our readings is methodology. What methods does posthumanism orientations require, invent, frustrate, occlude?

This is a helpful articulation of intra-action in action, so to speak; that is, of how material-discursive practices emerge with the becoming of the world. In Barad’s terms, I wonder if the camera or image technology might be said to be the apparatus? When the apparatus is changed or modified, we get—and also, crucially, participate in— a different view of the world.

Amy raises a really compelling question here for me. I am interested in thinking through an ethics built upon autonomy and minimal intrusion in the context of Barad's investment in intraction.

Yes, even when understanding agency as enacted through assemblages of actors, these actors are not equal because each actor's position facilitates certain quality and amount of power to pass through that actor.

in what ways is "human right studies" posthuman?

I feel that assemblage theory does the same work, especially when we think of agency as spread and enacted through assemblages as in Jane Bennett.

Where does location in term of power hierarchy lies?

I am also thinking of the binary of virtual/actual and online/offline especially in the context of affects that flaw through these non distinct realms.

This resonates with me as the roots of social collective responsibility.

I'm interested in the "use" of the posthuman figuration here. It always pops out at me when there is value added to the posthuman insofar as it can to be a "tool...put to use for the collective" who can imagine and create new "subjects of knowledge." What does it mean to employ the posthuman, even for the collective? What, if anything, does that concept of the user/tool reflect about the user/employer?

It's an interesting move to eschew the necessity of reinventing the wheel by instead noting how conversations that might not have labelled themselves "posthuman" have, in effect, already practiced it as a methodology.

I am interested in what the practical implications of such a figuration, if successful, might be beyond the academy.

I am reminded a of John Dewey's organism/environment continuum articulated in Art as Experience and am interested in what resources critical posthumanism might offer rhetoricians investigating American pragmatism.

I appreciate this passage an an opening to think differently about power. We typically and habitually think of power as only top-down hierarchy which not only elides how power is distributed throughout any given system but that habit of thought reinforces the humanist model of governance/relation. To think how power (and any capacity for change and invention) might operate differently would need to think about the temporal registers as well as the multiplicity of relations in any given situation.

Here again I read the "creativity" she mentioned earlier in the essay, the kind of invention we need for the Anthropocene.

In other woks, I've seen Braidotti state" we are in this together but 'we' are not all the same." I find this turn of phrase to embody the critique of the pan-human she notes in the next line.

This kind of affirmative opening up seems key for any understanding of posthumanist invention. I hear echoes of Latour's "why critique has run out of steam" here, as well as a lot of thinkers in rhetcomp (e.g., Boyle; Lynch).

The most compelling account of the discriminatory power of "human" I've seen is Alexander Weheliye's "'Feenin'': Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music."

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/31935

This anxiety (for me) is best expressed in Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror.

"The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is now here, jetted, abjected, into "my" world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue's full unlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away." (5)

http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/touchyfeelingsmaliciousobjects/Kristevapowersofhorrorabjection.pdf

I particularly value how Braidotti calls attention to our overnaming problem and the integrative, transdicsiplinary nature of the Anthropocene - a nature that screams for us to both identify diference and tear down walls that separate and isolate us from one another and from the material world.

"fast technological advances" occlude social and environmental injustices. Accepting varied speeds of human and nonhuman adaptation is a necessary approach to successful rhetorics in the Anthropocene. See Bradshaw, 2018

"Sets of sensitivities" (Pickering).

As with Parikka, ecology is an operation.

The reason I actually quite like Dithering, aside from being a huge KSR fan, is that it marks not what "we" have done in the past but what "we" are doing now (as speculatively witness from the future).

This really struck me. We aren't observing or describing an ecology, but practicing something as an ecology.

This connects with Braidotti's investment in "pragmatic experimentation."

This is also a spot where I think we can think through the limits/trouble with representationalism as articulated by Barad.

This is really compelling methodologically. Taylor appears to paint speculatively -- what ways do you (or might you) track how you are differently constituted through intra-action with knowledges?

Clear definition of disabled ecologies.

Though every thing we call "world" blooms & constantly becomes through intra-action, I wonder to what extent a generous strategic essentialism is useful, particularly in advocacy.

I'm reminded of Jane Bennett:

“We are now in a better position to name that other way to promote human health and happiness: to raise the status of the materiality of which we are composed. Each human is a heterogeneous compound of wonder-fully vibrant, dangerously vibrant, matter. If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper relief. Vital materialism would thus set up a kind of safety net for those humans who are now, in a world where Kantian morality is the standard, routinely made to suffer because they do not conform to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other) model of personhood. The ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such. Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans…. [A] vital materialism does not reject self-interest as a motivation for ethical behavior, though it does seek to cultivate a broader definition of self and of interest” (Vibrant Matter 12-13).

Late 19th century (originally as oecology): from Greek oikos ‘house’ + -logy.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ecology

How do we account in our scholarship our practices of "unfocusing"?

One vector I think of is Jaishikha Nautiyal's piece in the Women's Studies in Communication 2018 special issue on New Materialities and Precarious Mobilities, "Becoming a Detour de Force: Dehierarchizing Directionality and Mobility in Rhetorical Research."

Nautiyal generally aligns becoming a detour de force with Braidotti's nomadic subjectivity & reflects on their fieldwork at SXSW to describe this modality of research.

Some quotations:

"As a research ethic, a detour de force opposes a tour de force, which views a critic’s inventions as the egocentric product of vertical excellence, geocentric mastery, and the telic exceptionalism of human agency. Invention as a tour de force privileges spatial economies that value the predominantly and largely masculinist faculties of vision and intellect at the expense of sense perceptions related to touch, sound, smell, and taste (Irigaray 25–26; Cimitile and Miller)" (430).

"Through this approach, I attempt to reclaim the traditionally inferior, haptic, gustatory, olfactory, and aural senses into the material corpus alongside the ocular, while also demonstrating the diminishing returns of distributed sensory attention within fieldwork (e.g., anxiety, overstimulation). In becoming a detour de force, my desire is to touch the earth before I can limit, subjugate, and fetishize it with my vision—a vision compromised and facilitated by the nexus of advanced capitalism (Cimitile and Miller 122). My desire is to take a sensuous detour of feeling and attention before cognition forecloses on navigation through the fixity of a destination" (432).

This transports me to Saya Woolfalk's "accessible and concrete" multi-modal art work and fantasy worlds of data colonialism. Pieces like "Ethnography of No Place" and her development of The Institute of Empathy (whose non-profit work gets appropriated by the company ChimaTEK) motion us toward Braidotti's calls to situate posthumanism within the intensification of technologies/capitalism.

I read this piece through Braidotti's emphasis on pragmatic experimentation. I have been re-reading her book The Posthuman for a directed reading course I am doing this summer on Posthuman Design and it keeps striking how many "design challenges" Braidotti's work spin off. Her work is a kind of posthuman progymnasmata, and Raina's work, described here, really brings that across for me.

Geometry & topography might springboard some useful ways to think about coalition/kin building that simultaneously hold up the work of standpoint theory & decenters humanness at the same time.

Fusing this "conceptual persona" with the persona of the "critic," my mind travels to some of Chuck Morris's work. Perhaps a generous twist on "critical liminality" and the persona of the "archival queer" offer initial resonances for how rhetorical scholars have done some of what Braidotti maps in a different register.

https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639609384153

https://www.academia.edu/3659972/Queer_Archives_Archival_Queers_co-authored_with_Charles_E._Morris_III_

Another line of thought I would like for use to pursue is method. Braidotti turns to cartography here as a method (always selective, impartial, mobile). What other methods are suggested, enacted, demonstrated through the readings to respond to what Braidotti calls the "posthuman predicament"?

One of the big concerns or critiques leveled against posthumanism is that it never gets "beyond" the object of its critique but I wonder to what extent is that exactly the point?

Interesting parsing here to discuss

We debated whether or not to include this essay last or first. The thought was that this kind of essay is something we might want to arrive to after building up a case for posthumanist thought, but we decided instead to start at the end and then reverse engineer this "effect."

I am intrigued by Braidotti's use of predicament both in terms of what the word my denote/connote and in relation to her general dislike for framework of vulnerability that sometimes accompanies posthumanism.

I'd be interested in exploring the phrase "more-than-human" in relation to other formulations such as post-human, extra-human, non-human and even inhuman. What does more-than bring/do that the others do not?

What rhetorical concepts might lend themselves to anti-colonial "joyful acts of disobedience"? What pieces or scholars come to mind that practice, model, or are in proximity to this "joyful disobedience"?