rituals for healing | hannah holtzclaw
Methods Part I
Disorienting ontology: queer performance, decoloniality &
fiction, fissures and cracks.
nonbinary theorizing and fictionalized performance
The binary non ethics of the modern sociotechnic system, then, are not rogue or wild deviations brought about by technologies. It is from the examination of el conquiro, the colonial presupposition to the cartesian, that we can see these systems are working exactly as they were designed. There have always been bodies buried beneath the commons. The veil is a propriety built on this accord. Liberalism and markets are colonial games, colonial extensions:
“…liberalism is by no means the opposite of racism, racist state formations, colonialism, or apartheid. Liberalism is rather a political ideology that facilitates a transition from vulgar legal forms of discrimination to in many cases less vulgar but equally or more discriminatory practices and structures. Liberal institutions in a modern/colonial world aim to advance modernity without realizing that doing so also entails the continuation of coloniality. Universities become centers of command and control, which make them easy to militarize when opposition rises. Many students feel choked and breathless in this context.” (Maldanado-Torres, 2016, p5)
Thus, domination shifts, in modern capitalist democracies, to less conspicuous, “state sanctioned” mechanisms of control and violence. The kind that reduces the process, the potentialities of learning and knowledge creation to the same kind of atomized abuse of agency and the militant governing of cognitive, spiritual, and bodily horizons of the cartesian-colonial habit. Universities in their siloed and hegemonic approaches to education; in their colonial mindsets that sanction hierarchal structures, labor abuse, paternalism, competition structured and ethno/eurocentric lenses; in their abstracted distance from their world and the violence their inattentive detachment inflicts, effectively foreclose the possibilities for alternative configurations of being to emerge. If we are to truly to dismantle cartesian-colonial habits of being, to work towards ideals of justice, we need to more acutely understand the social and historical forces that brought us here and how they move and connect us. This includes rigorously examining the spaces within liberal institutions that extend and reinforce colonial logic, that close down and prohibit us from imagining, evolving, or engaging other ways of knowing and being.
Race, inequalities, and global and higher education scholar Vanessa Andreotti says of the imposed knowledge filters and cultural horizons of modern colonial approaches to education: “they produce, “cognitive, affective, and relational economies that have left us unprepared and unwilling to address our complicity in systemic harm, or face the magnitude of the problems that we have ahead of us” (Andreotti, 2018 p11). More crucially this means, any decolonial inquiry into a theory of change needs to be anchored in a turn away and deliberate undoing of cartesian-colonial habits of being that underlie, govern, guide, and constrain our current organization of human and nonhuman life. Who we are within political structures; laws; ideas; stories have physical manifestations within our bodies. We come to embody, enact, or chafe against, the material-discursive forces of language, of matter and meaning; in all its anxieties and violence, in all its liberation and freedoms. Thus, we must concern ourselves with the embodied practice of knowledge making. So, this project instead, gathers itself around and engages imaginative offerings for creative, just, and ever-changing futures. An engagement with creativity, rather than creation. Human evolution has always been and continues to be anchored in deeply imaginative, spiritual and creative participation with the world (Cajete, 1999). Bell Hooks in creative fictions speaks of how fiction and writing act as method for creating new possible worlds, for taking back the objects of the mind and moving beyond the neoliberal colonization of minds and imaginations: “…if the mind was to be a the site of resistance, only the imagination could make it so. To imagine, then, was a way to begin the process of transforming reality. All that we cannot imagine will never come into being. Critical fictions emerge when the imagination is free to wander, explore, question, transgress.” (Hooks 1991, p55) So, what does this mean in practice? How do we create space for change?
Both fictions and communication technologies, act as translation systems for collective knowledge and understanding. Both interpellate bodies. Both manifest worlds. Technology itself being value, and as such story, laden, to speak of the latter is to implicitly engage the former by default. Put another way, as we make technology, it also makes us. Being, and as such knowing, is interfaced through these material discursive assemblages, with differential affordances and resonances within, upon and across bodies. The embeddedness of the cartesian-colonial habit renders a certain disjointed logic that poses technology as neutral, as outside of the implications of history or culture, while at the same time posing technology as an overdetermining force, a looming threat, that is destroying democracy. This logic perpetuates a dynamic that divorces what we create from who and what we are and wish to become—it objectifies and distances us from our own nature. It enacts a false cut between identity and being; it masks the agency and role of interface in rendering certain habits, worlds, social relations, and culture.
Thus, fictions and communication media, as political technologies, as cultural interface, generate collective [MOU1] [HH2] belief systems, delimiting both origin and horizon stories of a given society. These commonly held notions of truth, however oppressive, liberating and in any case knowledge producing, merge with individual experiences and personal histories to mark and bound how we come to understand and engage with the world, as well as, how we come to know and understand ourselves. Hence, understanding the role of interface, one of the most critical tasks of any movement of change, is determining how to (dis)organize information in such a way that moves us, that ignites our spirit, fosters relationships across, through and within differences; that engages us eco-politically and helps us understand intimately the conditions of our self-collective experience; it demands courage, love, and responsibility, without guilt, without shame and without fear. Thus, fictionalizing and the imaginary remain crucial to the project of any conceivable future, as the desire for social change itself is driven by a certain collective dreaming of a better world.
As Jon K Shaw and Theo Reeves-Evision detail in their introduction to Fiction as Method, “Fictions proliferate in all aspects of our lives, unconstrained by the novel as a specific form of art.”(2017, p27) Westphalian maps, financialization, and democracy have all been established upon imagined relations or fictitious based leaps of faith (Shaw et al 2017; Allen 2014). Such fictions, as we have seen have significant real effects. Shaw and Reeves detail post Reagan-Thatcher deregulation and derivative markets, ushered in alongside complex mathematical modeling, have resulted in an “economy of speculative financial products of which employ fictions to model, and to determine, the future” and “begets a new deterministic relation such that the demands of the market come to shape the matter and relations of life…and the future itself comes to be manipulable by finance, and potentiality—the future as properly unknowable—is permanently deferred”(Shaw et al 2017, p22-23)
Thus for Reeves and Shaw, the emergence of the “term “post-truth” simply describes the spread of this paradigm into a media space that was presumed to be insulated against its effects” (2017, p27). However, they suggest that fiction and fictionalising ought to be understood as an invitation we extend carefully and strategically into, “the radical unknowability of the future” (Shaw et al2017, p23) Hence, the value and stakes of fiction as method, are “no less than the reinvention of the future beyond the impasses of the present”(2017 p23); a “turning toward an outside that has been [yet] colonized by Capital” (Shaw et al 2017, p24). In a “post-truth” era, what has become clear is that, “it is not longer a case of establishing the truth about post-truth, or of cleaving fiction from fact, but making tangible the idea that truth and fiction are dynamic concepts that are both produced and productive” (Shaw et al 2017 29), beholden to a technical interface assemblage over-determined by neoliberal markets and thus exploited via the logics of circulation, connectivity, visibility and order, weaponized by private interests (Shaw et al 2017 29). Accordingly, Reeves and Shaw’s point is that “...categories of fact and fiction are always conditioned by the materials used to craft, frame, and distribute the discursive objects that scroll down our screens in a blur of epistemological indeterminacy” (Shaw et al 2017 32) and likewise, “[t]he issue of how we both construct and are constructed by fiction has over recent years had an increasing influence on thinking about the future of human relations with technology” (Shaw et al 2017 36).
This project is very much concerned with the latter relationship, especially as it relates to performance, identity, colonialized subjects, and just post-digital futures. Just as fictions “can send semiotic ripples in multiple directions at the same time, spreading its reach deep into the material intensities of the body”, additionally they can be “constructed as protective shields against truths too difficult, traumatic, or incongruous to bear” (Shaw et al 2017 35). Thus in an era of increasingly AI mediated social exchange, where fiction is both synthetic and embodied, how can fictionally grounded social relations that acknowledge the necessity of reciprocity in personhood and interaction, “open us toward a sociality based on acknowledging the opacity of the other’s subjectivity”? (Shaw et al 2017 41) Or—if the algorithmic gaze estranges us, Others us in all its quantified speculative leaps, how can embodied fictionalising help us “[imagine] and [practice] new social relations beyond those overcoded by fictional commodities and future-modeling financial-fictions”? (Shaw et al 2017 52) If we have: “[become] both a circulating image and a statistical subject intersected by commercial and governmental algorithms” (Shaw et al 2017 126), what can a return to the body through fictionalized writing teach us about the limitations of representation and identity and potentialities laden within processes of performance?
Thus, this research presents speculative autofiction, as a productive political mechanism suitable for resisting and reconfiguring modern fictions and systems of knowledge that are fundamentally colonial, violent and culturally and politically pollutant. However, it begins from the notion that performativity, not representation, as the basis for ontology. Hence why we can speak indeed even see difference proliferate across disciplinary contexts but fail to liberate and respect its role in the human condition; fail to understand it as a distributed knowledge producing practice. Difference is not a representation, it is a relation. The basic ontological unit is entanglement, not individuality. The performativity of interface (and fictions), then, lends itself to critical discourses surrounding gender, difference, and queer (or quantum) phenomenology to which this section turns to, along with decolonial educational frameworks and commitments, to illustrate creativity as an iterative process that returns us to the body and performance.
Part I: Queer Performativity: refusing the body as sub-human cultural sign
Gender as a generative category of identity, structures and orients experience. It presents as comparable framework for rejecting the binary conceptions of causality (described in previous sections), and begins from the position that identity is not an essence but a doing (Butler, 1990 p.112). Both essential points for interventions into and understandings of, interface: as it understands how “[t]he formulation of the body [is] a mode of dramatizing or enacting possibilities” and as such, “offers a way to understand how a cultural convention is embodied and enacted.” (butler 1988 p4) It offers a performative temporal process that operates through and within a reiteration of norms, “inaugurated into sociality by a variety of diffuse and powerful interpellations” (Butler, 1997, p.160).
Like Butler, I refuse any binary sense of agency between individuals and larger social structures (butler 1988, p1). The point, then, of turning to gender is to render identity as a performance implicated by the colonial shutter. Enacted, embodied, and ongoing, gender reveals the inherent spatial and temporal boundaries and cuts of material-discursive categories and practices (Barad, 2007, p.63) Read: it illustrates the power of constructed cultural fictions.
Thus, gender offers a clearing with which to begin theorizing models of performativity in technological design, or how identity becomes interfaced through certain resonances or affordances in performance. Where, queer theory offers a model that is premised on inhabiting norms differently, in rejecting fixed assumptions of identity. Queering representationalist binarisms, “[q]ueer lives are about the potentiality of not following certain conventional scripts” or habitual standards of being that codify social space (Ahmed, 2006 p.177). Where queer as commitment, would be an orientation toward being that doesn’t disrupt or require ‘deviation’ from script, but rather, a rejection of scripts, a rejection of representations, altogether (Ahmed, 2006, p. 178). A queering of sociality that refuses incorporation on the basis that queer encounters with the world, like that of disorientation or disalignment, are points of contact and interaction that produce new patterns and new ways of making sense of the world and embodied experience (2006, p. 171).
Furthermore, that these differences, these disenabled and disjointed vantage points carry meaning and ontological significance in their very defiance of a homogenized cultural narrative and imperial structure. So, drawing on Judith Butler, bodies are not instruments for the self, but the doing; performance of self, and what differentiates bodies is how they occupy (i.e, move, dwell, do in) space. I draw on two theoretical tools that allow for nonbinary encounters with difference: a theory of disorientation provided by queer phenomenology and Sarah Ahmed, and Karen Barad’s diffractive difference.
The concept of disorientation is often described in negative terms. Associated with things like disorder, unknowns, or crisis. And indeed, in this vein, the sensation, in some instances lends itself to these descriptions. And as Ahmed herself notes, disorientation can and does, often cause us to reach for ground; we can retreat to conservatism in efforts to reground. But what is most peculiar about disorientation is the way it is entirely dependent upon orientation, order, familiarity. Orientation determines how the body proceeds in space; what is within its reach and what is obstructed. We become disoriented, when we no longer know what direction we face, when what is familiar has become unfamiliar. For a disoriented subject making contact becomes an educative doing that doesn’t subscribe to representation or absolute categories. Barad offers an extension of Ahmed’s theory of disorientation: where Ahmed returns us to the body and its injuries; Barad asks us how these patterns of meaning have come to impress upon skins; their agential patterns.
Thus neither disorientation nor diffraction “overcome the “disalignment” of subjects, objects or lines on axes”, but instead allow what is queer, what is unfamiliar, oblique or absented by the imperial shutter, to “open up another angle on the world” (2006, p.172). Thus these guiding principles are not merely committed to attending to the values excluded by the design process (as Feenberg notes), but in embracing difference as a fundamental, fluid, iterative, and relation ridden ontology.
Orientation as Ideological Project
For Sarah Ahmed, orientation is our position in space from which the world unfolds. We find our way in accordance with how the social is arranged (Ahmed, 2006, p.7). So when the lines we take in space, align with the lines pre-established by the social, we are oriented subjects. As oriented subjects, we might not even recognize ourselves as such, since our lines proceed clearly established and unobstructed. Thus, orientation within the colonial habit, becomes a hegemonic ideological project—as that which produces order and familiarity and enacts the imperial shutter. We should also, in this vein, pay attention to the way orientation indicates privilege. As what differentiates bodily orientation is how bodies occupy (move, dwell, do in) space (Ahmed, 2006, p.8), where space extends some bodies and not others and enables some actions but not others.
Bodies are produced by and produce, the orientational here and now of their bodily dwelling, in the ways, their bodies align or disalign with the normative conventions, the lines, of the social. Through dwelling, bodies acquire the shape of positions and orientations repeated over time, crucially, “the body emerges from this history of doing, which is also a history of not doing, of paths not taken, which also involves the loss, impossible to know or to even register, of what might have followed from other paths” (Ahmed, 2006 p.159). Thus, the pressures of certain habituated turns and ontological postures, reproduce particular patterns within the social. For Ahmed, the physical impressions heteronormative and hegemonic orientations impose, close down potentialities for social gathering (2006, p. 17, p.24), by delimiting the social to a fixed and habituated topography. This restricts what is cognitively placed within our reach to think and do as “it is not just that bodies are directed in specific ways, but that the world is shaped by the directions taken by some bodies more than others” (Ahmed, 2006, p.159). What is ‘normative’, then, emerges from certain bodily repetitions sustained over time, that in their very positioning orient and de-orient, enable and dis-enable, close down or extend, certain habits of being over others (Ahmed, 2006, p.66). Conceptualizing orientation as an ideological project in relation to the construction of meaning and knowledge requires being attentive to bodies excluded by current colonial imperatives; what possibilities for connection disappear, what potentialities close down, when we reduce interaction, movement, within virtual space to what is ideologically comfortable through concepts such as homophily? It means accounting for the way certain directions have skewed the network map over time; how do hegemonic orientations sear limitations into our horizons as a result of the imperial shutter? Furthermore, what can we learn about the world from a de-oriented position?
Disorientating in order to diffract: patterns of difference and relational responsibility
To be a de-oriented or unaligned subject is to exist in a space where objects evade our reach and actions are closed down because the lines we seek to trek as non-normative or dis-enabled bodies are not permitted by the grid of the social. To be a disoriented subject is to constantly feel across surfaces for cracks and fissures; it is to engage the darkspots and gaps; to listen for the silences and the vibrations that mark the distinction between signal and noise in interaction. It is this active doing, coming to know through encountering what is absent, unknown, out of reach or unintelligible, that becomes a useful set of optics for encountering difference differently. Boundless, and as such, precarious in all its abysmal depths, “inhabiting a body that is not extended by the skin of the social means the world acquires a new shape and makes new impressions” (Ahmed, 2006, p.17). Ahmed reminds us, that sometimes, “[b]odies that experience disorientation can be defensive, as they reach out for support or as they search for a place to reground and orientate their relation to the world”, in seeking to reground themselves in reality, such politics of disorientation can also foster conservativeness (2006, p158). However, she also insists, that, “the point is what we do with such moments of disorientation, as well as what such moments can do” (2006, p.158). Thus, moments of disorientation itself are neither crisis nor disorder, for the latter pertains to how we respond; what we do when our normative frameworks of reality become strange; when the transient, fleeting, fragility of “knowing” becomes exposed.
To be a disoriented, disenabled, unextended or otherwise nonnormative body, is to live in a space where what is familiar, is unfamiliar. Where what is normative, becomes queer. It is to encounter the space of the social differently. It is a generative and discomforting feeling of searching, reaching, and making contact with information, not for verification, but as a sustained engagement with the unfamiliar in the effort to deOther space. As Ahmed describes, “they are moments in which you lose one perspective, but the “loss” itself is not empty or waiting; it is an object, thick with presence...the presence of an absence” (2006, p.158). Thus, disorientation ruptures binary optics that enact artificial borders between here/there, now/then, or us/them. An undoing principle that queers the Other in such a way that reveals perceived externality, as always already within.
Disorientation changes the way we move, do and relate within the world, by producing space that extends and enriches, that disrupts and reconfigures. It queers the social givenness of that which appears before us, by concerning itself with what disappears in relation to such arrivals (Ahmed, 2006, p.90). Such concern with the relational effects of difference, provides an alternative mode of being that allows us to abstain from representation as an orientation device and denounce the familiar ontological programs that accompany modernity’s project, and as such technological dwelling. To make the familiar, strange. Disorienting allows us to wipe away the grid that constricts what we think to be intelligible. In doing so, disorientation provides us performative means of engaging difference diffractively, by revealing the indeterminacy, the fragility of knowing, and its ongoing boundlessness. In short, disorientation as a principle reveals inequalities but it is also generative and didactic. Hence, in making evident the importance between identity and performance, queering ontology opens up the body to changes in performance.
Karen Barad, physicist and science and technology historian, draws on diffraction, a quantum or queer, optical phenomena during her development of agential realism in Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) Barad’s critique of representational logic stems from the position that the basic ontological unit of reality is phenomena: agential entanglements that emerge out of intra-actions between material and discursive components, human and non human alike (2007, 89). Her agential realist account asserts that bodies are a part of the differential performance of the world’s intra-activity, where “embodiment is a matter of not being situated in the world, but rather of being of the world in its dynamic specificity” (2007, 371) Thus she draws on diffraction as means of engaging with our differential responsiveness to this dynamism—our degree of accountability to the marks left on bodies during ontological performances.
Diffraction, is the effect of difference that emerges as individual waves combine; a co-constitutive worldly phenomena (Barad, 2007, p. 135). In diffraction, difference is not encapsulated, or pre/figured in any one subject, object, or network node, but rather emerges out of specific intra-actions of material-discursive practices: “ a diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather where the effects of differences appear” (Barad, 2007, p. 72). Diffraction patterns offer us a way of engaging that which is not mapped by the network; or relegated to the archive by the imperial shutter. It is engagement with the absences that make certain things matter over others; the ways in which what gets bracketed out or away from mattering, marks the validity, the mattering, of that which does. For Barad, diffraction is not fixed, nor does not it reproduce itself, rather it is an ongoing unfolding, where there is “no leaving the ‘old’ behind” because no such absolute boundaries between the here/now and there/then exist (Barad, 2014, p. 168). Barad’s central argument rests upon the self as a multiplicity, a superposition of “beings and becomings”, of matter(ing) and meaning (2014, p. 37); “a contingent and iterative performativity”, where subjectivity, “is about taking resposniblity and account of the entangled materialization we are apart of…a relation of responsibility to the other.” (389-391).
Where representations mask the historical arrival of difference, and excludes certain experiences and values, diffraction opens up angles within the world. It is important, at this point, to highlight that the indeterminacy of disorientation is essential to its performativity as an educative device, because it illustrates how “that which is determinate (e.g.intelligible) is materially haunted by – infused with – that which is constitutively excluded (remains indeterminate, e.g., unintelligible)” and thus exposes the body, indeed identity and being, to a space where, “the self doesn’t hold; the self is dispersed in an un/doing of self as a result of being threaded through by that which is excluded” (Barad, 2014, p.178). Thus, representationalism and all its binary optics and politics of recognition is a weak principle for understanding justice, change, and the relation demands of ontological entanglement.
Some bodies are bound to humanity in ways that brackets away their embodied experience, leaving them trapped somewhere along the peripheral, neither in control nor able to intervene in the narratives to which their body is ascribed. And while Barad’s point is that selfhood is already perforated with difference, and we ought to come to understand the ways we are implicated by difference as a relational process, such an understanding is hard to derive from theoretical physics and the language of science. Diffraction and disorientation both are still an abstraction, a distance of sorts, from the problem. The very use of scientific language tends to impose significant limitations on the imaginary and is notably at odds with subjective and intimate terrains of the human condition. Thus while I draw on Barad, Ahmed, diffraction and disorientation through fictionalizing and poetics to engage the ineffable threadedness of transontological difference, I do so by reading them through an explicitly decolonial commitment to undo the imperial plunder.
This means I take the notion of being accountable to the body, and my role within the entanglement quite literally. Specifically, to the privilege I hold as an academic and the ways liberal institutions, in all their thesis formats, protocols, standards, and metrics, extend colonial violence and enact the shutter; as well as, engage rigorously in the work of decolonizing myself. If the collective contributions of the aforementioned scholars, texts, and paradigms of thought have shown anything, its that the performances we choose to engage, the fictions we choose to uplift and ascribe, have political and material consequences. These choices reach out and effect the world and all else because they are a part of the world and all else. Matter and meaning are entangled with one another. Contending to the shadow of our colonial inheritance means we take the imposition of disillusionment, the heaviness of our shared world seriously, understanding that in all of 2020’s ruptures and prior, academics too, is a place where we seek to reground; engage in ontological hiding; evade responsibility.
Consequently, even the school of communication itself, produce and mirror imperial patterns of thinking that continue to manifest in all of the previously critiqued communication infrastructure and more generally in society. Our entire education system is designed to further a version of history that renders its violence as past even as it persists in our present/futures. This system of knowledge production, its principles of enclosure and encapsulation incorporated through institutionalized hegemony, orients us as graduate students to emphasize particular endeavours over others, and forwards particular ways of knowing over others. This bracketing reduces our accountability and engagement to not only local Indigenous communities and marginalized members of the public, but more broadly, distances us from our impact and responsibility within a global society. To be clear: it only serves to reproduce patterns of prejudice and habits of being that foreclose the future by insisting on a colonial ground zero horizon. Are we really to continue to look away and relegate to the past what it means to sit atop stolen indigenous territory but bear the name of its colonizers? To claim to support indigeneity, equality and reparations but not take a stand against the further expansion of colonial regimes through a planned pipeline project? Can we really claim to be about lifting up society when all we do is reproduce the imperial shutter and its blindedness? It is uncomfortable to daylight the structures that extend violence, but this is the point. Social change does not manifest in a vacuum. We cannot rebuild the master’s house with his tools. We need new stories, nonimperial grammars, liberating language; imaginative and accountable methods for dealing with, rather than sidestepping, conflict, alienation, and traumas that bereft the imperial plunder and colonized publics.
Methods Part II
Disorienting the threshold: decolonizing the self; Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua and writing from within the crack
“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own…and all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other” (Lorde 1984, p 43)
Disillusion and disorientation don’t attempt to present themselves as comforting. But discomfort teaches us something. Its persistence is teaching us something about impositions on the body and the mind. About the way we are fundamentally connected to others and all else across space and time. About the ways we can profoundly affect one another and be affected by the world and all else. Where we tend to get snagged, where we tend to hesitate, or erect defenses is often where we ought to pay the most light. In seminar during the course of this project with Karen Barad and Vanessa Andreotti, in a dialogue about integrity, accountability and justice, Andreotti challenged us to consider, what are you resisting? In what ways are you still snagged by the illusion of imperiality? What can leaning into these shadows tell us about what it is going to take to change? If we are already shot through with each Other, what does it mean to be accountable to this? If the performativity of interface is organized in accordance with a cultural myth that permeates the fabric of our modern society, how to expand our horizon? Where do we begin with writing in new stories?
This project takes the latter questions seriously on every front and has thus far suggested we start with identity. So it proceeds by engaging in an applied praxis of fictionalizing and poetics to decolonize the self and established research praxis. This research, because it is committed to decolonizing the institution and refusing the imperial imperative, does not work within a traditional research thesis format. It rejects linear story principles and formats for reading in order to leave itself open to additional meaning. But perhaps most explicitly it follows in the footsteps of the likes of chamaneria Gloria Anzaldua and warrior poet Audre Lorde, and engages in what has been outlawed, stigmatized, delegitimized; as well as exploited and oppressed most violently: the human condition; body, mind and spirit, the life-force of creative power; the embodied knowledge of what Audre Lorde calls, the erotic:
“The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life-force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” (Lorde, 1984, p 55)
A re-turn to the human condition as the ever most constant, widest, and fullest common denominator we have, this project emerged through creative bodily praxis[1], through dreams, poetry, and freewriting as external expressions of internal commitments to change. As Lorde writes “the white western patriarchal ordering of things requires that we believe there is an inherent conflict between what we feel and what we think—between poetry and theory”( 1984, p 8). But this separation is a by product of a system that is dependent upon the extraction of the creative life-force as patriarchal and imperial resources[2]. Severing the heart from the mind is not a means of rendering objective truth, but distorting it: “we are easier to control when one part of our selves is split form the another, fragmented, off balance.”( 1984, p 8), as Lorde describes, our current “living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.” (1984, p 39) Indeed, “[t]he white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am.”, but from Lorde we are reminded of a deeper knowledge and truth, as “[t]he Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel therefore I can be free.” (1984, p 38)
Re-turning to poetics and fiction opens up learning and unlearning in a way that isn’t constrained or delimited by normative research conventions beholden to the violence of a colonial system, but also provides a language for transformation and change. It provides a way to engage a representationally evasive and performative process like diffraction or engagement with the space where the self doesn’t hold: an understanding of the distortions imposed by the coloniality of being and a place to begin, without fear, guilt or shame, decolonizing identity. Poetics as an embodied form of writing, beckons forth the ineffable affects of experience and shines light on our deepest forms of emotional knowledge that often evade conventional forms of writing and expression, as Lorde puts it:“ Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.…[the] spawning grounds for the most radical and daring ideas… a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action”, where poetry acts as not only dream and vision, but also “lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” (1984, p 37) To draw on bell hooks once more, creative writing like autofiction and poetry, help us manifest the bridge because:
“All too often the colonized mind thinks of the imagination as the realm of the psyche that, if fully explored, will lead one into madness, away from reality. Consequently, it is feared. For the colonized mind to think of the imagination as the instrument that does not estrange us from reality, but returns us to the real more fully, in ways that help us to confront and cope, is a liberatory gesture.” ( hooks,1991 p.55)
To connect to the erotic, is to connect to the inner power of our innate creative spirit, that which moves us to grow, to change. To ignore, repress and neglect our imaginative, emotional and embodied consciousness is to deny the depths of the human condition and as Lorde writes: “When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directive only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that’s not based on human need”, hence, “when we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.” (1984, p 58)
Likewise, when we deny this knowledge within ourselves, when we separate what we feel from what we think we starve our creative potential; and enact, “ a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives”(1984, p111), and this difference is vitally important for as Lorde notes: this difference is both what marks our mutual interdependence, and “that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged” (1984, p112). Consequently, “the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors relationships” (1984, p 123), therefore liberation, justice, and change only emerge from coming to understand and embrace in practice, how to decolonize ourselves. This is how we reject the master’s tools and his house:
“When we view living in the European mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings and to respect those hidden sources our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes” (1984, p37)
Gloria Anzaldua’s work shows how writing provides the link between the personal and the collective, when we write from within rather than merely about ontologies instrumentalized and oppressed by current colonial-enlightenment models. Anzaldua, a kindred spirit to Barad, refused the distinction between the personal and the collective, and thus never divorced her own empirical experience from theory or practice, and rather in her late work Light in the Dark, suggests that what embodied writing offers is an aesthetic artistic practice that transforms (2014, xxi).
Indeed, as her writing partner Analouise Keeting writes, “[f]or Anzaldua, writing is ontological”[3](2014, xxxii), and the words we use through ritualized performance don’t just affect our perception of reality, but have the power to shift reality. A point Reeves and Shaw allude to with regards to fiction as method and form. However, what is unique about Anzaldua’s perspective (and relevant to notions of interface) in her work in Light in the Dark is twofold: 1. Anzaldua understood intimately the ways that identity becomes a knowledge filter, that delimits your ability to understand reality (ibid, p119); and 2. Understood that in order to move away from the illnesses of colonial trauma[4] extended by European philosophy and scientific traditions; in order to decolonize ontology, we need to draw on and develop “a more expansive philosophy embracing spirit, indigenous wisdom, alchemy, mythic figures, ancestral guides”[5] and other non-Cartesian teachings and perspectives (ibid, xxxii). When it comes to opening the body to change, Anzaldua understood the connection between manifesting nonbinary decolonial change and “consciously inhabiting your body” (ibid p120).
For Anzaldua the imaginary and creative process serve as critical aspects for the site with which epistemological and ontological transformation can take place (ibid, xxxiv). For Anzaldua it is process, doing, not merely knowing or seeing that catalyzes change, she writes:“ writing is a process of discovery and perception that produces knowledge and conocimiento (insight)” (ibid, p1). Through a multidisciplinary auto-ethnographic approach Anzaldua’s constructs her own symbolic system in Light in the Dark to develop an epistemology of the imagination and a psychology of the image; concerned with “questioning, affecting, and changing the paradigms that govern prevailing notions of reality, identity, creativity, activism, spirituality, race, gender, class, and sexuality” (ibid, p2). Understanding identity as involving both reading and writing oneself and the world, Anzaldua consistently blurs the distinction between subject/object, being both observer and participant at once. This privileging of primary methods of presentation (auto-historia), decenters hierarchal standards of approach in academic writing to draw on predecessors or other people’s conception or readings; and simultaneously and quite intentionally, blurs the boundary between private and public.
Accordingly, not with the master’s house means here for Anzaldua, manifesting and engaging theory through one’s own voice and experience. This is the connection to spirit or what Lorde calls the erotic; that which drives our internal experience. For Anzaldua spirit (or Naguala) and the imagination are interconnected aspects of the same process of creativity (ibid, p4), hence writing from an abstracted perspective denies the ways we are implicated by the texts, theories, and conditions within the world that we experience. Consequently, “The writer struggles to capture an elusive life from the imagination, but reality is too big for any ideological system to contain, and literary realism it too small to contain it. To explore experience in an indeterminate world such as the one we inhabit, one in which anything that can be imagined can happen, [we] need a different mode of telling stories” In order to contend with difference diffractively, responsibly, “[we] need a different way of organizing reality” (ibid p43). Imagination and creative writing manifest the space and pathways for both personal and collective change, for the “transformation of self, consciousness, community, culture, society.” (ibid, p44).
Already diffracted by transontological [6]difference, “[o]ur bodies are geographies of selves made up of diverse, bordering and overlapping “countries”. We’re each composed of information, billions of bits of cultural knowledge superimposing many different categories of experience…As our bodies interact with internal and external, real and virtual, past and present environments, people, and objects around us, we weave (tejemos), and are woven into, our identities…”; Thus, Anzaldua writes, “identity is always in process”; is always relational. ( ibid p69) Concerned with the ways “[c]onventional, traditional identity labels are stuck in binaries, trapped in jaulas (cages) that limit the growth of our individual and collective lives” (ibid p66), Light in the Dark is about the challenge and struggles of representation, identity, self-inscription and creative expression through what Anzaldua terms the Coyolxauhqui imperative:
“the Coyolxauhqui imperative”: a struggle to reconstruct oneself and heal the sustos resulting from woundings, traumas, racism, and others acts of violation que hechan pedazos nuestras almas, split us, scatter our energies…The Coyolxauhqui imperative is the act of calling back those pieces of the self/soul that have been dispersed or lost, the act of mourning the losses that haunt us...” (ibid p1)
Coyolxauhqui acts as the transformative aesthetic with which Anzaldua explores her onto-epistemology of “the path of conocimiento”. Anzaldua’s reading of the Coyolxauhqui Aztec myth presents a space for self-collective identity transformation; it is both the process of emotional, spiritual, and psychic dismemberment and the creative process of putting the pieces of one’s identity together again anew. This process takes place through stages of conocimientos and deconocimientos and is brought about by an experience of nepantla[7]. Nepantla, is the Nahuatl word for “in-between-space”. For Anzaldua it is “a liminal space where transformation can occur”; the space between old worlds and new ones, it acts as a point of rupture and “indicates space/times of chaos, anxiety, pain and loss of control” (ibid, xxxiv). However, Nepantla also deployed by Anzaldua in spiritual or supernatural sense when its theorization extends beyond a ready definition to become an embodied or agentic quality. Whereby, “Nepantlera’s” are threshold peoples born from nepantla, “those who move within and among multiple worlds and use their movement in the service of transformation” (ibid xxxv). Hence,
“[d]uring an Anzalduan nepantla, individual and collective self-definitions and belief systems are destabilized as we begin questioning our previously accepted worlds views (our epistemologies, ontologies and/or ethics)…This loosening of restrictive worldviews—while extremely painful—can create shifts in consciousness and, thus, opportunities for change; we acquire additional, potentially transformative perspectives, different ways to understand ourselves , our circumstances, and our worlds” (ibid, xxxv)
For Anzaldua, nepantla can also become embodied during the creative writing process when we shift from everyday experience into a feeling, fantasy or fiction, when reality as we know it disappears and imaginative shifts take place. These dream-like states, Anzaldua reads through an ancient indigenous lens, understanding them as spirits entering us and influencing the mind and allowing us a sort of “”seeing” from the other side, seeing the ego as other and seeing familiar elements from that other alien perspective.” (ibid p34) These dreams or fantasies, for Anzaldua are not just coping mechanisms or means of correcting or supplementing reality but rather, “frees [us] from the confines…of [our] habitual identity” and the constraints of every day reality (ibid p37).Thus, “to change the or reinvent reality” Anzaldua writes, “you must interrupt or suspend the conscious “I” that reminds you of your history and your beliefs because these reminders tie you to certain notions of reality and behavior” (ibid p44)
Conocimiento is the Spanish word for knowledge or consciousness. For Anzaldua it is an onto-epistemology, so, conocimiento is a nonbinary, unfolding “connectionist mode of thinking” recounted often within oppressive contexts (ibid p243). Conocimientos, plural, is the insights learned through the conocimiento process. Desconocimiento, the Spanish word for ignorance, translates in Anzaldua’s work as the cost of knowing; our shadow beast that grapples with the fear and ignorance we cultivate to keep ourselves from knowledge so that we can evade accountability (ibid p2). Anzaldua says the two are an interrelated experience during nepantla, and that each serves an educative purpose. Indeed, if nepantla is disorientation, desconocimientos is the regressive and self-preserving impulse to reground. Desconocimientos also shunts us into isolatory feelings of guilt, shame, depression or despair. But conocimento, “is about relatedness—to self, others, world.”(ibid p151)
The path of conocimiento, Anzaldua writes: “requires you that you encounter your shadow side and confront what you’ve programmed yourself (and have been programmed by your cultures) to avoid (deconocer), to confront the traits and habits distorting how you see reality and inhibiting the full sense of your facultades” (ibid p118). Anzaldua explains to us how we already find ourselves at the threshold of a nepantla experience, in the shadow of colonial conquest:
“we are experiencing a personal, global identity crisis in a disintegrating social order…We are collectively conditioned not to know that every comfort of our lives is acquired with the blood of conquered, subjugated, enslaved, or exterminated people…We stand at a major threshold in the extension of consciousness, caught in the remolinos (vortices) of systemic change across all fields of knowledge The binaries of colored/white, female/male, mind/body are collapsing.” (ibid 119)
Though writing in 2001, just post 9/11 at the time, we can now see that this crisis has not led to the collapse of binaries in an algorithmic public sphere, but their polarized and weaponized exacerbation. Nonetheless we can say, this crisis is still upon us, and if “[n]epantla is the zone between changes”, where, destabilized and fragmented we struggle to find equilibrium and balance, we find ourselves in 2020 in a moment of unprecedented looking away and avoidance of the wound. Nepantla is the negotiation between “the outer expression of change and your inner relationship to it”(ibid p127); if our world has only become sharpened by colonial binarisms it is because we have yet to contend with the personal changes needed within ourselves to manifest a different world. We have continued to spin in perpetual desconocimientos, hedging responsibility thinking we can circumvent our own nature but the paradox, Anzaldua writes, is this:
“[t]he knowledge that exposes your fears can also remove them. Seeing through [nepantla] cracks makes you uncomfortable because it reveals aspects of yourself (shadow beasts) you don’t want to own. Admitting your darker aspects allows you to break out of your self-imposed prison. But it will cost you. When you woo el oscuro, digging into it, sooner or later you pay the consequences” (ibid p132)
Growth is painful. But discomfort teaches us something. Delving into what leaves us in pain, anger, depression or despair; when we move through what immobilizes and silences us, when we realize we’ve severed the mind from the body to avoid the weight of our own human condition; when we stop avoiding the ways we are undone by the gift of interdependent global existence; when we find the courage to engage our own potential: We heal. We change. We press forward anew. Consequently, “leaving the body reinforces the mind/body, matter/spirit, dichotomy that you’re trying to show doesn’t exist in reality” (ibid, p135). To return to the body through creative practice, is to become the bridge, it is to restore the gift. Nepantlera’s, hence, having passed through fire and left the old Self, the previous world behind, “[reach] through the wound to connect”(ibid p153).
As Anzaldua writes:
“In gatherings where we’ve forgotten that the object of conflict is peace, la nepantlera proposes spiritual techniques (mindfulness, openness, receptivity) along with activist tactics. Where before we saw only separateness, difference, and polarities, our connectionist sense of spirit recognizes nurturance and reciprocity and encourages alliances among groups working to transform communities” (ibid p149)
[1] Drawing on Anzaldua here, “for me, writing is a gesture of the body, a gesture of creativity, a working from the inside out. My feminism is grounded not in incorporeal abstraction but on corporeal realities. The material body is center, and central. The body is the ground of thought. The body is a text. Writing is not about being in your head; its about being in your body” (2014, p5)
[2] “in order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change…” “As women” Lorde writes, “we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves” (1984, p53)
[3] Emphasis added
[4] Of which I will define broadly in line with Anzaldua as: “the effects of colonialism, assimilation, racism, sexism, capitalism, environmental degradation, and other destructive practices, epistemologies, and states of being that occur at individual, systemic, and planetary levels” (xxxii)
[5] Critiques of Anzaldua’s earlier work in Borderlands to oversimplify or romanticize Indigenous pasts and peoples are valid and important. However, as Keating notes in Light in the Dark’s editor’s introduction, her later work just prior to her death recognizes and refines her earlier missteps: “Anzaldua viewed indigenous thought as a foundational, vital source of decolonial wisdom for contemporary and future life and…that indigenous philosophies offer alternatives o cartesian-based knowledge systems which we ignore at our peril…The Gloria Anzaldua who wrote Light in the Dark was not interested in recovering “authentic” ancient teachings…and inserting them into twenty first century life. Nor did she identify herself as “Native American.” Rather, she learned from and built on Indigenous insights; she mixed these hints with other teachings crafting a philosophy designed to address contemporary needs…Anzaldua does not reclaim an authentic indigenous practice but instead develops a twenty-first century approach—a decolonizing ontology—that respectfully borrows from Indigenous wisdom and many other non-cartesian teachings” (xxxiii) This project aligns itself methodologically with the latter and emphasizes a point made by both Azoulay and Lorde regarding pre- or anti imperial ways of knowing or forms of resistance as sites for decolonizing approaches: “there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves.” (emphasis added, Lorde, 1984, p 38) Thus, this project see’s its engagement with creative practice as an access point to the self-collective human condition, and respectfully draws on older forms of wisdom and insight offered by indigenous writers, scholars, and epistemologies (as well as other non-western or nonimperial grammars) to better understand the effects of colonization on imagination as a spiritually, and thus ontologically, transformative process.
[6] Maldanado-Torres’s definition, for more see The Wound