Stories, places: storied place and placed story

Stories, places: storied place and placed story . . . the universe is not simply a place but a story –a story in which we are immersed, to which we belong, and out of which we arose. –Brian Swimme & Mary Evelyn Tucker ABSTRACT For a while now I have been ‘wondering’ about, pondering the link between story and place, inhabitant and colonizer: the inextricable and intractable connections that come into being between them. And so in this short diffractive piece where a constellation of concepts (space, place, story, performance, hospitality, refrain, vibe, power to/power over, rhizomes etc.,) come together with no one ‘truth’ privileged, I hope to explore those connections and provide some compelling examples of story as place and place as story with particular reference to one particular place, a school, and the inhabitants of one particular classroom in that school in Cape Town, South Africa. For in schools where matter, in all its forms, is ‘storied’–has its own story to tell–and storified, stories matter.

Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. London and New York: Verso, 2019, 224 pp., ISBN 9781788731003

What makes humans and nonhumans ecological beings in the wake of the Anthropocene? Timothy Morton’s Humankind invites us to consider this philosophical issue as intrinsically aesthetic, ethical, and political. Through his illuminating terminology, Morton argues that becoming human is to understand that we are in fact embedded in the network of solidarity and kindness with nonhumans. Being ecological, for Morton, means being spectral and capable of appreciating the spectrality, pleasure, and beauty of nonhuman beings. In our relationship with nonhuman beings, we are the actants who should overcome our troubled anthropocentrism and mull over what makes us humans, physically and experientially. By putting Marxism, object-oriented ontology, and political ecology into dialogue, Morton revisits the implicit inclusion of nonhuman beings in Marxism, revealing that Marxism can still serve as a critical resource of thinking through a kind of communist existence shared by all ecological beings.

Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Nebraska)

Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience (Nebraska) is a performance for camera. Chapters of the work have developed in Omaha, Nebraska, upstate New York, Galesburg, Illinois and Santa Fe, New Mexico. (Nebraska) is the first chapter, originally performed live at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Within the project, pain is understood as trauma, loss, disruption—everything from polluted landscapes to neglect, from abusive relationships to work stress. Resilience is similarly embraced in an expansive, cross-disciplinary way, invoking everything from the ability of an ecosystem to adapt to disruption, to a human’s ability to cope with traumatic events.

Queer Reproductions in Vergil’s Georgics and Brian Britigan’s Golden

Pairing Vergil’s Latin poem, the Georgics, with Golden, a 2012 painting by Brian Britigan, I explore the sexualities and ecologies of animal bodies. First, I argue that Golden responds to the “bugonias” of the Georgics, scenes in which a dead ox spontaneously generates bees. Through the image of one species emerging from another Vergil and Britigan queer straight ideas of reproduction in different ways. Vergil’s queering is processual, describing bugonia as a collision of human and nonhuman bodies and practices. In Britigan’s paintings, which omit human figures, queerness is stylistic. Britigan pays homage to the foundational work of Thomas Hart Benton while reworking Benton’s beliefs about sex/gender and sexuality. Painted just a few years after CCD devastated the world’s honeybees, Golden poignantly represents the hope of life even after extinction. While earlier criticizing Britigan’s human-less nature, I conclude by considering that the regeneration of life may require our absence.

Life as Performance

In this article I draw on Jakob von Uexküll and a number of thinkers who engage, extend or otherwise resonate with his work to argue for a theory of meaning as dynamic process. Uexküll enables a view of meaning as something an embodied subject does rather than something possessed or accessed. The ongoing life of an organism – relations to self, to environment, to past experience and to anticipated future events – forms an experiential context within which any encounter must take place. It is this broader context which I refer to as dynamic meaning-making processes. I discuss some recent experiments and observations on hermit crabs to illustrate how a view of meaning as dynamic process informs relations of interspecies care. Interspecies care is conceived here as the modulation of human meaning-making practices: spinning out, folding in and strengthening meaningful relations across forms of life, in anticipation of better futures.

Deleuze, Guattari et le posthumanisme

Le texte présente quelques avenues possibles pour situer la pensée de Deleuze et Guattari en regard du postumanisme. Les thèmes des machines, des devenirs non-humains et des forces cosmiques de déterritorialisation y sont notamment discutés.

Book Review: Mapping the Affective Turn in Education: Theory, Research, and Pedagogies

This text comprises a review of the edited volume Mapping the Affective Turn in Education: Theory, Research, and Pedagogies.

Reflections on Posthumanism: What does 'the economy' have to do with it?

reflection piece for inaugural issue

Que nomme le "post" du posthumanisme?

Ce court essai pense les significations du préfixe "post."

Introducing Interconnections / Voici Interconnexions

In December 2015, a group of researchers at Brock University launched the Posthumanism Research Institute to provide an interdisciplinary networking hub for individuals interested in posthumanist theory. One of the goals of the founding group was to establish a peer-reviewed, international, open-access, online, bilingual, and interdisciplinary journal. We are proud to present you with the inaugural issue of Interconnections/Interconnexions. En décembre 2015, un groupe de chercheurs de Brock University a mis sur pied le Posthumanism Research Instituteafin d’offrir une plateforme interdisciplinaire de réseautage à tous ceux qui s’intéressent à la théorie posthumaniste. Un des objectifs du groupe fondateur était de lancer une revue internationale, libre d’accès, bilingue, interdisciplinaire, avec évaluation par les pairs. Nous sommes fiers de vous présenter le numéro inaugural de Interconnections/Interconnexions.