Closing Meditation | hannah holtzclaw
Waiting on unknowns.
Verses caught in transition.mensajes cast into the threshold
At the edge of existence.
There’s this spot where the ocean meets the skyline
The horizon dissolves
Sea and sky lose definition.
At the edge of the world:
A vastness
An opening
an infinite
collision.
I think I find myself there,More than any place else. In what could be,
What is
Was
Will be
isn’t.
I find myself thereVersing unbounded
potential
insisting:
Ser el Puente
Lose the self
Become
the transition.
Manifesting the Bridge: Blackfish, Art, and coalition building through creative performance
“Performativity is properly understood as a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve.”
(Karen Barad, 2007 p133)
Whether we will them to or not, our bodies bear meaning upon the world every day. When we are still and silent, and when we are in motion, we leave a mark, produce an affect within spacetime. Weaves and traces of affectedness ripple outward and manifest from, within and across entanglements in ways we can never be sure of nor keep apace. The turn in data sciences and machine learning to complex systems modeling gestures to us, something about the ways we are aware of our own lived multiplicity on earth. But the framework with which that awareness is oriented ensures that even when machine learning methods do produce something like intelligibility, it is never anchored by lived experience or “intelligence”, but probabilities, repetition, absolute segregation, quantified metrics, and perhaps most importantly, premised on a colonial past. These things enact the formatting of phenomena, the scaling of liveliness into scientific model, a kind of over- and under-fitting of experience into the boundaries of a representation. But knowing, knowing is never so fixed or still, as Barad points out, “knowing is a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement. To the extent that people participate in scientific or other practices of knowing they do so as bodies”; as “differential performances” dancing within the world’s greater creative and dynamic enfolding (2007, p379), or “intra-activity”. Where in this sense intelligibility is a matter of complex embodied performance; affecting and deeply affected by the entangled materializations of which we are perpetually implicated.
This project has taken great care in thinking with the body as interface to illustrate the resonances of ego conquiro that lie beyond the screen; to engage the liminal space between the stories we tell and the stories we embody. In writing about identity as in-process, in ongoing reconstruction and lively entanglement with the world, we are offered opportunities for ritualizing and weaving moments of transition and change; processes for threading personal histories into collective fabrics, “for fashioning a story greater than yourself” (Anzaldua, 2014, p) and responding to the demands of our collective cultural performance; our entangled materializations within the world.
nepantlera i have a secret:
once you realize how malleable identity is, all you want to do is listen; open yourself up to what you can become. creativity is a profoundly intimate process. creativity, when anchored in healing, stimulates emotional intelligence. it reconnects our minds to our bodies; cleans and heals the wound.
Toni Morrison writes about how the “inability to project, to become the “other[1],” to imagine her or him. [is] an intellectual flaw, a shortening of the imagination” (2019, p43) made manifest by a colonial matrix of power that is only able to process, to render, large difference; to reduce complexity. But everything about life systems on earth tells us that we demand a set of cognitive relations much more complex than what is offered by current fictions. Fiction is only as good as the worlds it opens up, not reproduces. Reading and writing literature and story that puts us in the position of those most oppressed and affected by colonial systems de-orients us from reality: it takes us up out of our habituated positions and privilege to help us develop adequate understandings of the social world we live in; it better equips us to relate to, work with, and support one another; to become accountable to the marks we leave upon matter in the world.
Anchored in experiences of the body and the human condition; becoming attune to the discomfort of the current colonial interface, reaching through the wound to connect, concerning ourselves with difference diffracted: opens our bodies to change; to unlearning; to coming undone; contending with our shadows and understanding narratives of identity outside of dominant hegemonic discourse. It offers a means of moving beyond allyship, acknowledgement, reconciliation: to coalitions and community; to accomplices and collaborators; to blackfish. It provides opportunities for creative performances of decolonial solidarity and communication; for moving beyond liberal politics of recognition (Coulthard, 2014; Chun, 2021): for locating ourselves within the circle [2] and in diffracted relations with others[3]. Writing and reading from and through perspectives and identities of those marginalized, silenced, or rendered defective or past by the imperial shutter helps us develop plural ways of being and relating within the world that can expand our capacity to feel; to imagine; to understand morality, our-self, and home.
We fundamentally exist to learn. To live is to change. One of the outcomes of this project is how it has provided me a liberating relationship to language that is vitally necessary for both dismantling oppressive orientations and reviving and reconfiguring affectedness. It created the space for me to engage discomfort and better understand its resistances, its sources. This was an invaluable experience when it comes to theorizing the demands of difference in the wake of the colonial plunder. As this discomfort, this affectedness, this human condition, is very much the point. I can’t tell you how many times I have found myself overcome by deep waves of gratitude for the change this project has brought to my life; for its honesty and its insistence. It took me to the edge of myself and further—it has challenged and demanded of me: will you merely learn, or will you embody this? This is what connecting to the world through story, through writing and reading from the body; through creativity as critical intimacy, radical tenderness, reciprocal offering, might provide us. A homecoming; a return to our bodies, it gets us to start accountably creating; helps us begin the process of regeneration; of healing.
The silos of abstract identity formatted by current interface regimes fragment and distance, Other us from one another. But, as Morrison writes: “Fictional literature can be an alternative language that can contradict and elude or analyze the regime, the authority of the electronically visual, the seduction of “virtual.” The study of fiction may also be the mechanism of repair in the disconnect between public and private. Literature has features that make it possible to experience the public without coercion and without submission... Literature allows us—no, demands of us—the experience of ourselves as multidimensional persons.” (2019, p100) To draw, like I have in other places across this text, on the work of Ocean Vuong, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Audre Lorde, and Anzaldua, the language of creativity has a profound ability to manifest something like home, outside of yourself, within and through others. Language can destroy and oppress, but it is also a fundamental testament to our ability to transform; to connect.
Morrison also writes of how there are several human responses to our perception of chaos (or disorientation; disillusion; unknowns or unrest), most often they are: naming (or representation) and violence ( or conquest)—both attempts at rendering something like security or control; but warrants there is also “a third response to chaos…which is stillness. Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art.”[4] (2019, viii). Our own fragmented, rattled, sense of identity, sense of home, comes from the way colonial fictions foreclose our cultural and cognitive horizons; render a closed world. Fiction opens up the world to reinterpretation, it returns us to the body and the human condition. Or: through fiction, through art, we bring the world into the self—read: some things, in order to be properly learned and unlearned, need to be felt.
So then, what might an interface for decolonial coalition building look like?
“When we have failed at solidarity work we often retreat, struggling to convince ourselves that this is indeed the work we have been called on to do. The fact of the matter is that there is no other work but the work of creating and re-creating ourselves within the context of community. Sim-ply put, there is no other work. It took five hundred years, at least in this hemisphere, to solidify the division of things that belong together. But it need not take us another five hundred years to move ourselves out of this existential impasse. Spirit work does not conform to the dictates of hu-man time, but it needs our courage, revolutionary patience, and intentional shifts in consciousness”
(Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of the Sacred, p283)
History is calling on us to know each other differently. To be differently. In order to understand ourselves as the interface for change, we must first begin to cultivate creative practices for bringing the world and others, into our-self. This means a return to bodies and the human condition, to Lorde’s erotic (1984), and Jacqui Alexander’s pedagogies of the sacred (2006); to Mignolo and Walsh’s decolonial pedagogies rising (2018, p88-96), and Greg Cajete’s native science: our creative participation, responsibility; entangled unfolding with the natural world (2000, p14). So, in relation to this imperative, in closing, I have one more offering for further contemplation, an undercurrent if you will, to all of the previous text you’ve just experienced:
Writing, creative practice, art and embodied learning as interface foster and engage emotional intelligence. They move us beyond the cognitive relations of ego conquiro; the restraints of liberal politics of recognition[5]. But writing won’t save us, we need more than this, (as narrative and knowing is not enough), we need iterative spaces to do; to practice.
Coalition building for change requires just such an embrace of embodied practice; mutual recognition for the human condition and respect for its affectedness. In order to interface something like decoloniality, we need safe, localized community spaces to come together to create shared resonances of justice, suffering, culture, and experience. Additionally, more profoundly, spaces for creative, albeit differential, collective dreaming for a better world. We must create space, in education and knowledge production, in communities, for practicing habits of self-collective experience, for living in diffracted difference. We must create space to engage discomfort: embrace disorientation; lose our sense of ground, in order to understand something about our own complexity and expansiveness. But more pointedly, we need collective cultural practices for cultivating critical intimacy—for developing literacies for entanglement and affectedness; for understanding and accepting the performativity of discomfort and conflict. We need opportunities and tactics for disarming habituated responses to reach for ground, for breaking down internalized defenses.
Interface as a set of cognitive relations or process, is deeply performative. As a set of phenomenological, material-discursive entanglements with the world, interface grip us, both body and mind. Interface is always an experience. This project has at once, concerned itself with the kind of extension our current interface mythologies afford, and how we ought to dwell, do, teach, learn, be through this space. Interface, as filters for knowledge, have the ability to expand or contract our understandings of the world—hence, another aim of this project has been to offer a lensing of how we might reorient ourselves toward knowledge, to expand our capacity for care, for relations with the world and others. On this front, future extensions or applications of this project are numerous but ultimately begin with systems of learning, communication and education. Or put another way: how can we rewrite technologies of interface to foster the emotional intelligence necessary for sustainable and just relations?[6] I walk asking[7], how might pre- and decolonial epistemologies, that bridge the self to the collective through creative participation, help us better understand and manifest something like “criticality”, pedagogies, coalitions, or, interface for unlearning and re-existence?
NOTES:
[1] To draw once again on Maldanado-Torres and the importance of centering historically absented and oppressed experiences: “Questioning is a key part of self-understanding and of understanding and knowledge in general. Knowledge and understanding are fundamentally inter-subjective affairs. The damné has to break from the solitude of its prison to be able to reach out to an Other. Speaking, writing, and the generation of questions are part of the drama of a subject that starts to regain its humanity in reaching out, without masks, to others” (25)
[2] The concept of the sacred circle is an indigenous espistemology regarding the interconnectedness and interrelationships of all life (Hanohano, (1999). Williams and Snively write “cycles and circles can be seen in the relationships of all things: seasons, migrations, life cycles, food chains, tidal cycles, interdependence of all life, the movement of the sun and moon in relation to the earth, and the earth in relation to the universe. Time is perceived as cyclical rather than linear”, in accordance with the sacred circle, in indigenous epistemologies “wholeness is the perception of the undivided unity of life forms” (Williams and Snively, 2016). Notions of Oneness are also found indigenous epistemologies like Tsawalk (Atleo).
[3] E Richard Atleo’s reading of the theory of Tsawalk “ Nuu-chah-nulth origin stories and traditional Nuu-chah-nulth life ways and experience indicate that the basic character of creation is a unity expressed as heshook-ish tsawalk (everything is one). This unity of existence does not mean that individuals are denied a separate existence; on the contrary, individualism is a very strong value. Heshook-ish tsawalk is a matter of the first principles laid out in the original design of creation. The creator and creation are one.” (2004 p117); Tsawalk, Atleo writes: “ assumes the unity of creation irrespective of any of contemporary society’s contradictions…They came to understand the value of the individual without necessarily undermining the value of the group. They understood the value in life and the value in death, the value in love and the value in pain.” (2004, p133)
[4] in Peril, The Source of Self Regard.
[5] Of which, format and prescribe alienation (Chun, 2021; Coulthard 2014).
[6] Might we consider for example, Adrian Mackenzie’s position on machine learning and preindividual reality:
“[p]articipating in a collective, individual subjects, far from losing whatever defines their unique or essential identity, gain the chance to individuate, at least in part, the share of preindividual reality that marks the collective within them…by participating in a collective, even an operational formation, individuals may transform themselves (to attain certain state or experiences) but also affect the collective itself” (2017, p214), alongside Jacqui Alexander’s work in Pedagogies of the Sacred, where, she asserts, “embodiment functions as a path-way to knowledge, a talking book, whose intelligibility relies on the social—the spiritual expertise of a community to decode Sacred knowledge”, where spiritual practice, rituals for healing, coming into alignment with the divine (where the divine is the collective and so also the self) and practices of “the Sacred becomes a way of embodying the remembering of self…neither habitually individuated nor unwittingly secularized.” (2006, p297-298)
[7] Catherine Walsh, On Decoloniality, 2018 p 88