READING DIARY: OCTOBER 2022- TT SESSION 21: RESEARCH SHAPES- Readings 1-4
OCT22- READING 1. Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick (read pp 9- 15)
After reading McKittrick’s introduction to S. Wynter, I thought MAN1 is “Modern man”, and MAN2 is “Postmodern man”. Then I wondered, do they oppose one another? Do they, or is it even possible for them to co-exist…in real time? …maybe, possibly in different cultures, on the planet at the same time, but not within the same culture…and yet, this is where we are, at least in the USA…modernists co-existing with post-modernists. Though not very gracefully, we do co-exist.
Throughout the rest of the reading, these terms and/or concepts stood out to me, and I had to look up the definitions on many:
“~meta-Freudian
~meta-Darwinian
~ecumenically human (origin) story
~Fanon’s concept of sociogeny (our codes or masks or mythoi or origin narratives)
~linked in semantically activating causal terms
~bios phenomena of phylogeny/ontogeny
~mythoi, (our origin stories, are therefore always formulaically patterned so as to co-function with the endogenous)
~ (Humans are, then, a) bio-mutationally evolved, hybrid species—
~gaze from below
~overtly imperial and colonial liberal mono-humanist premises
~” …politically independent nation-states came to be epistemologically co-opted and globally reincorporated into the Western world system—a system that is now in its postcolonial, post-apartheid but still liberal (or now neoliberal) mono-humanist symbolically encoded configuration.”
~” …liberal mono-humanism, her overall project can be identified as that of a counter-humanism- one now ecumenically “made to the measure of the world.”" …And specifically, regarding the idea of a “counter-humanism-”, it is quite the opposite of pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Protagoras’ claim that “man is the measure of all things”, which of course, is the point. A couple of things come to mind. First, we typically do not recite or reference his other two immediately following claims…a) that he could make the “worse (or weaker) argument appear the better (or stronger)”, and/or b) that one could not tell if the gods existed or not.”
And second, maybe worth mentioning Paul Gilroy, who, when he uses the term “made to the measure of the world,” within the context of his “planetary humanism”, discusses “the way that modern racism works, blackness is the body and whiteness is the mind.”. It reminds me that, according to French feminist, Helene Cixous, who describes language as being essentially or inherently phallologocentric...language also being inextricably “white”.
I have not read enough Sylvia Wynter to resolve the felling baffled as I do after this first, brief reading. She writes from contradictory perspectives. Most confusing for me is that her anti-colonial premise is still tied specifically to a Christianity worldview. She repeatedly cites an “ecumenical”, which I get, but don’t get.
NOTE: Anti-colonial philosophy, de-racialized (yet Christian) method analysis of "place"-GD
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OCT22- READING 2: Friction- an Ethnography of Global Connection, by Anna Tsing (read chapter 1)
After reading Tsing’s introduction, I am thinking of John Locke, the internet, the newish “digital space (frontier)”, NFTs and block chain technology…but she goes another direction…to an actual geographical location. GD
“The late twentieth century saw the creation of new “resource frontiers” in every corner of the world. Made possible by Cold War militarization of the Third World and the growing power of corporate transnationalism, resource frontiers grew up where entrepreneurs and armies were able to disengage nature from local ecologies and livelihoods, “freeing up” natural resources that bureaucrats and generals could offer as corporate raw materials…. This chapter explores the making of a resource frontier in the eastern part of South Kalimantan in the 1990s.” …
To locate where exactly South Kalimantan is, I look it up on google maps, and see that it is part of Indonesia… south east of India, where I have twice been to study yoga… for just over a month each time, so I have a sense of that place… and it is northwest of Australia, where one of my Transart supervisors lives and communicates with me from…so I have a current connection to this geographic location. Still, South Kalimantan in between. So, it remains a place that I only imagine. GD
“The chapter is divided into two parts. First, I tell of how the frontier and its resources are made. This section is based on ethnographic observation from the mid-1990s. Second, I turn to the post-1997 crisis, when frontier-making spiraled out of control.
I. How to Make Resources in Order to Destroy Them (and Then Save Them?) On the Salvage Frontier
A frontier is an edge of space and time: a zone of not yet—not yet mapped, not yet regulated. It is a zone of un-mapping: even in its planning, a frontier is imagined as unplanned. Frontiers aren’t just discovered at the edge; they are projects in making geographical and temporal experience. Frontiers make wildness, entangling visions and vines and violence; their wildness is both material and imaginative…
An abandoned logging road has got to be one of the most desolate places on earth. It doesn’t go anywhere, by definition…”
Throughout my reading of Ch. 1, Part I, because I live in New York’s Catskills Mountains, and logging routinely happens throughout, the logging road/exquisite beauty-truth of the mountains and their forests, which act as our planets’ lungs, when I am not teaching in NYC, is the context of my living, breathing reality…so I have a lived experience of something similar, maybe, to what Tsing describes. A very pristine, “white" privileged version of it. GD
“…These were landslides of slippery red and yellow clay, with silt-laden excuses for water. The logging roads had eroded into tracks for motorcycles, water buffalo, and the still-streaming mass of immigrant and local blood and sweat that the government calls “wild”: wild loggers, wild miners, and bands of roving entrepreneurs and thieves. Something easy to call degradation rode through the land: Human presence was leaving the terrain all but bare…They go where we go,” a Canadian engineer explained, “and sometimes we follow them” (Williams 1988: 1). Indonesian timber and plywood tycoon Bob Hasan hosted a “10K “Run for the Rainforest” and raked in international environmental prizes.6 “Indonesians don’t destroy their forests,” he told reporters, “We are just given a little time to manage [the forest] for others” (Vidal 1990). This is the salvage frontier, where making, saving, and destroying resources are utterly mixed up, where zones of conservation, production, and resource sacrifice overlap almost fully, and canonical time frames of nature’s study, use, and preservation are reversed, conflated, and confused.”
This is DIZZY-ing and total madness, and of course, reading on, this thought becomes more magnified. GD
… “You could call this corruption, or you could call it, as one North American corporate executive, gracefully submitting to government demands for a share of his company’s enterprise, dubbed it, “Indonesia’s political, economic, and social environment.”14… In the 1990s, most every country redoubled its endorsement of the market, and New Order Indonesia was exemplary. The bureaucracy was the market; its goal was to promote entrepreneurship.”
II. Crisis—and the Confusion of the Senses
In 1997 and 1998, the economy of Indonesia was hit by a great financial crisis that spread across Asia. The internationally evocative term krismon (krisis moneter, “financial crisis”) was coined in the newspapers, but the term krisis also spread on less sophisticated channels. By the summer of 2000, the term krisis had reached remote South Kalimantan villages. I heard it used to refer to all kinds of bad-news events, from family breakups to entrepreneurial failures to regional political upsets… Then the fires of 1997 burned down everything on one side of the road and much on the other, leaving a charred scar. Since then the rice has failed three times, and Kalawan people have become accustomed to discussing the distressing prices of those bottom-of-the-barrel rices, broken and red or black from improper storage, that have emerged as the staple. There is not much hope here, except, for some, in heaven. ... and for others, in the latest resource scam…”
Poison
Klerat Pellets: 0.005% w/w brodifacoum pellets.
Klerat is the original single feed anticoagulant rodenticide.
Klerat Pellets are active against rats and mice, including those resistant to first-generation anticoagulants, such as warfarin. A lethal dose can be ingested as only part of a single day’s food intake. Rats and mice normally die several days later, so bait shyness does not occur as the rats do not associate the symptoms with the food they have eaten.
As multiple feeding is not necessary, “Klerat” can be used most economically and safely when small quantities are applied with an interval between applications. —http://www.sorex.com, “International”
After the fires of 1997, the rice plants grew healthily enough and flowered, but the grains never developed. There was no harvest. By the next year the rats had come out of the forest. They infested the fields and ate everything before them. The plantation company sold the people rat poison, telling them to spread it on their fields at least three times every month. My friends said, “It kills the cats; it kills the dogs. But it doesn’t affect the rats. They come back every night in greater numbers.”
Good lord, capitalism, and the ensuing “cultivation”, “resourcing”, “mining”, and here, specifically the deforesting… for Indonesians immediately, is extremely bleak. The fires, smoke, destruction…the suffocation. It is a global crisis of epic proportions, and we are doing this to ourselves, and to the planet…to our home, our sustainer, and provider. Continuing this way is like knowingly walking a dead-end street with the hope that it is not a dead end. The on-going, unanswered question continues to be asked…what are we doing? It is so frustrating… ugh. GD
NOTE: Post-colonial philosophy, Auto-ethnographic method analysis of "place"- GD
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OCT22- READING 3 Flourshing, by Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan
“No Commoning without Commoners”
Deforestation vs felling. Deforestation is predatory, whereas felling demonstrates respect for the land and its inhabitants. The problem is the same, land cultivation, but what we are examining is the different methods of land cultivation. Two very different methods of land cultivation are highlighted between readings 2 and 3. The felling method described/debated in Flourshing, seems distinctly European, and starkly contrasts the approach described in Tsing’s Friction, which is (colonizing) deforestation. GD
…Obviously, what constitutes this equilibrium is the topic of numerous passionate discussions among the members of the
collective dedicated to taking care of the ZAD’s woodlands and hedges, Abrakadabois – a playful portmanteau pun on “abracadabra,” the magic formula, and the French word for wood, “bois.”
…To move beyond these divisive conflicts, the group has committed to develop a shared vision and increased sensitivity through skill-sharing, collective learning and a common appreciation of the forest. Since 2016, it has brought together passionate amateurs, an ex-forestry engineer, a gaggle of tree surgeons, and lumberjacks, and has been organizing reading groups to share knowledge and questions about plant biology, the latest research about mycorrhizal symbiosis and the communication between trees, as well as anthropological texts on interspecies collaborations developed by hunter-gatherer civilizations around the world… Abrakadabois’ approach is so refined, so dignified, and again, so very European… in comparison to the deforestation practices of multi-national corporations of Indonesian lands. This is the difference/contrast between the treatment of the “formerly” colonized, BIPOC occupied lands vs the colonizer’s treatment of his own, white-occupied lands. Both must still be “owned” and/or cultivated…again, I think of John Locke. See definitions and differences between “deforestation” and “felling”:
If we examine the strictest definitions of the terms, we will find that logging is described as the commercial felling of trees to make other products. Deforestation, on the other hand, is defined as the complete removal of the forest and all its associated life forms. In essence, logging is an action, and deforestation the result of that action. But deforestation is caused by so much more than just logging. Climate change, agricultural expansion, and urbanization all contribute greatly to the destruction of our forests and rainforests. https://www.greenmatters.com/p/deforestation-vs-logging#:~:text=If%20we%20examine%20the%20strictest,of%20its%20associated%20life%20forms.
… Clear-cutting has become increasingly common and violent: nowadays trees are not just cut down – stumps are dug out and the slash (debris) is taken away to turn into the supposedly “ecological” heating source of biomass, even though leaving it in place would protect the soil and the aquifer and aid in restoration. Then a monoculture forest is planted: rows of fast- growing trees on an impoverished soil needing fertilizers (copper, phosphorous) that end up in drinking water!
ugh GD
Synergies and Regards
Against this extractivist logic, Abrakadabois has been learning from and networking with folk throughout France also researching, practicing, and defending a silviculture that does justice to the inherent dynamics of the forest. As philosopher Baptiste Morizot describes, by taking the point of view of the forest, their practices are “full of regards for it.”3 … As philosophers Léna Balaud and Antoine Chopot describe, “This ... changes the experience of the forest: by allowing everyone to go beyond one’s own identity, it multiplies the beings and relations to take into account.”4 Such a contrast between the ideas about and treatment of the “formerly” colonized, BIPOC occupied lands vs the colonizer’s treatment of his own, white-occupied lands. I think this over and over throughout the rest of the text. GD
NOTE: Eco-Aesthetics philosophy, ecological method of analysis perspective on "place"- GD
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OCT22- READING 4, the Lure of the Local_Being in Place by Lucy Lippard
Lippard discusses place as an abstract, art historical concept. In contrast to the first three readings, this is such a different treatment of land and geography. She writes in a specifically American style, about specifically American “locations”, and specifically about 20th Century American regionalism…calls to mind images by Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Norman Rockwell.
She writes on page 37, “In all discussions of place, it’s a question of abstraction and specifics. If art is defined as “universal,” and form is routinely favored over content, then artists are encouraged to transcend their immediate locals. But if content is considered the prime component of art, and lived experience is seen as prime material, then regionalism is not a limitation but an advantage, a welcome base that need not exclude outside influences but sifts them through a local filter. Good regional art has both roots and reach.”
Then, in her conclusion, citing works of Dan Higgins, The Forgotten Trash Can Photos (1975) and The Incredible Onion Portraits (1978), she makes a case for a new regionalism…a dada-style, conceptual “picker-curator” kind of regionalism.
NOTE: Conceptual, deconstructive, and art historical methods of analysis of "place". GD
FINAL NOTE: The four readings illustrate at least 3 different philosophies, and more than four different, all legitimately intersectionality-based, creative research methodologies or frameworks of analysis of “place”. - GD
