theres a space between me and the world.
a quivering expanse of experience.
a feeling that transcends mind and body.
a precarious coherence;
a curious skin; particles spin; subatomic cells;
a spectral realm.
it pushes, pulls, lingers.
tugs at the edges of sight and sensation.
bending
time
space;
illusions of Self.
the space between identity and being; screen and world
We live within the words we use to describe the world.
this is essentially what communications studies are all about. the way we use language, words, concepts, stories, to speak the world into being. to impart meaning into our experience. the search for meaning, always bound; suffocated, by the dominant narratives; fictions; imaginaries that organize a society. communication studies then, is such an important, though convoluted, discipline because it draws attention to the way language itself is a technology; where paradigms of meaning take material shape within the world and as a society, we develop, through various and layering forms of interface, more and more ways to abstract upon this as a phenomena.
Communication technologies have the power to profoundly affect our societies and collective belief systems. Indeed, we blinked and 30 years of technological development raged through us. We’ve only barely begun picking up the pieces, shifting our gaze to the tears it’s ripped across historical experience.
Digital space has become a place with which we live and dwell. The stories taken up by the screen, have become the words we embody, we live. Interface acts now as an extension of the Self into the virtual beyond. This project concerns itself with what kind of extension our current interface mythologies afford, and how we ought to dwell, do, teach, learn, be through this space.
The cascade of alternative-facts and weaponized worldviews that have emerged alongside current forms of interface and algorithmic platforms expose how both fictions and communication technologies, act as translation systems for collective knowledge and understanding. Thus, fictions and communication media (old and new alike), delimit both origin and horizon stories of a given society.
consequently, this extension is not neutral, it too is a fiction. We experience an illusion of empowerment. but it is just that, an illusion, a myth, a hallucinatory realm:
where what arrives in front of us in the form of social media timelines and search engine queries, is influenced by a range of actors and processes that publics can neither see nor intervene in for themselves. This has destabilizing effects on public discourse, cultural identity, and indeed truth, as interface operates as a knowledge filter, blurring and convoluting our sense of shared reality and culture.
This is further problematized by the deeply personal and affectively charged commodification, digitization and endless proliferation of self brought about platform sanctioned forms of participation and engagement. Meanwhile, the demands of this extension press us into network grids and user profiles.
Chiseling our agency into carefully atomized units prearranged and predestined by the historical imaginary that defines them.
In the dominant western imaginary, life is organized in accordance with a Liberal/Cartesian-[Colonial habit of being]: where difference was established through racialized and gendered terms of the conqueror and the conquered. Western-identity “discovered itself” through slavery, serfdom, and cultural genocide. Thus, western-Identity and notions of Selfhood emerged in response and relation to colonial dispositions of Otherness. We have become who we are as imperial powers through the violence we have done to Others. This history isn’t behind us, it lingers in our very cells.
Liberalism and markets are themselves colonial games:
the bastard children of colonial regimes of violence and exploitation they enforce cultural postures of competition and relations of subordination and domination. Modern scientific and social development is predicated on a dehumanization, a dislocation or dismemberment, of identity: a denial of how we see or don’t see Others is also a fundamental reflection of how we see ourselves.
recent political events have revealed that in a globally connected socio-technical system, when polarization becomes automated through unregulated algorithmic communication platforms, the ground beneath our feet begins to disintegrate. Our sense of experience, our collective story fragmented, we become estranged from each other. Strung out on its violence we hardly know who we are in its shadow.
As subjects of this story, in this organization of human society, we approach nature and all else, as our object.
This wounds us and nature. Severing, and denying the fundamental interdependence and relationality with the world our livelihood depends. Ironically, this orientation is contradictory to everything science tells us about the world and biological systems. We don’t live outside of nature, we are the by product of nature. We are not superior to our ecosystem, we are a part of it, a contributor to its rhythm, its health.
decolonial technologies, be they fictional or technical, seek to perform and support the transformation into more just and accountable futures; being; worlds; they teach us how to honor and understand how we mark and move, and become marked and moved by, the world and all else. they help us tell new stories; teach us what we must confront, what we must let go, how we must change, in order to move beyond.
“the River’s voice is the sound our body makes when we’re sleepwalking through the abyss of our own presence in the world” (wah; wong, beholden, 80-81)
You can’t separate the waters you encounter at the beginning of the river from those that flow downstream. And all rivers, eventually, find their way to the sea. The ocean swallows all within its depths. None can be filtered out, none can be taken back.
So, if we are to contend with our colonial shadow, to write new stories, reconfigure our horizon, we must first begin with decolonizing ourselves. This demands not an erasure or sidestepping of the colonial history of identity; being; difference, but rather direct and accountable engagement with the messy, situated and agonostic space between the stories we tell and the stories we embody.
I started this blog just before entering graduate school. Initially thinking it would present as a portfolio of sorts. In the fall of 2017 i started my graduate school program, and in all honesty in the procrastination of my first big term essay, I started my free writing stream. I hoped this space might spur me to expand my writing practice or at minimal force me to write something regularly—and since free form lets me explore with my own voice, i figured something good might come of the experiment.
i initially called the space, river running. liking the form as a kind of stream of consciousness that seeks meaning, like rivers descend from mountains and outstretch in search of the sea. but also to the thrill and change of the riverbed as you chase it downstream. the way calm pools feed into boiling and boulder stricken rapids. the way a steady current carries you past wolves, natural springs, and a vast degree of organisms and life. this was, at the time, one way for me to describe the embodied practice of writing for me. what it feels like to reach towards the depths of experience. As my studies have progressed, so has my understanding of the river.
Throughout this text you will see me incorporating the words of Indigenous and queer writers and storytellers. Indigenous and other nonbinary ways of knowing have greatly influenced this project at every level: be it queer and gender studies, quantum physics, biology and natural systems, buddhist thought, or the Oceti Sakowin encampment at Standing Rock. hence, this text gestures itself toward the antithetical work of disjointing the mind from colonial and habituated patterns of knowledge, identity, and being.
I seek here, not to place these forms of knowledge on a pedestal, as a cure all, nor uncomplicated paths forward, but rather to refract the insight and space they offer theories of difference and change; in reorienting ourselves toward knowledge, nature, and each-other; and in bringing us back into relational accountability to our bodies and other life-sustaining systems.
In particular, to honor the river in me and in all of us, I incorporate the poetic works of Rita Wong and Fred Wah in Beholden, a poem as long as the river; as well as, to honor the ocean and its depths, Islands of Decolonial Love by Leanne Betasamosake-Simpson, and lastly, to speak of life, death, love and their gifts, I also turn to Robin Wall Kimmerer and Braiding Sweetgrass.
Additionally, I incorporate the works of Ocean Vuong, Alicia Elliot, Thich Nhat Hanh and M. Jacqui Alexander, to trouble the boundaries between bodies and memory; love and abuse; and indeed, pedagogy and nature. It is through these works, I suggest, we might begin to locate and come to understand a language of healing.
By incorporating story from all of these authors I also seek to trouble the authority typically afforded to academic authorship. All of my words have been shaped by the voices I incorporate here and have shed light on the concepts I seek to engage in this project. Rather than presenting an individual narrative, severed from their influence, I offer them in their original forms here as well, inviting you to share in the experience, the sight, their perspectives have provided my own. My intent is that you read the layers of the displayed text through one another, finding yourself within whatever patterns take shape in accordance with your personal experience.
true to form, the river and its story has changed for me. as the waters have evolved, so have I. and now, as I close this chapter, this project, I am ready to tell you of river’s gifts, its lessons, its medicine.
so this is the story of the river’s coming of age; of its transformation, of its future.
this is blackfish rising.
this text is not meant to follow a linear format. know that it is not a singular story. it is a multitude. a mess. much like the movement or transition of an identity. you will need to read the entire section to understand the relations taking place between each block of story. you are encouraged to read each segment of the writing in whatever way you choose.
that being said some suggestions and things to keep in mind as you read:
Please do click the links.
blue hyperlinked text offers you additional subtext.
hover over text to see what linked content is. content is either press or journal articles of relevance, videos or social media content, or autocontext/subtext—additional layers of meaning within the story thread.
If you’re curious about my writing process and fiction as method, please see this short description of my methods linked here as Becoming Blackfish.
Blackfish Rising Fictions:
She emerges on her own accord and is in both everything and nowhere else in this collection. savor her. listen for her. return to her when you find yourself lost. she is the spirit of this story, meant to both guide and challenge you.
Subtext in this section makes reference to the presence of Blackfish as guides/spirits.
both columns tell of where our story begins. the right column is what we share, left column is another translation of this arrival—presented through an experience i now share here, with you. i suggest beginning first with the right.
Subtext in this section references the lived realities of our current cultural context.
is a trip. you’re either dead or on drugs anyway. don’t look for ground, you won’t find any. just enjoy the ride.
Subtext in this section unfolds contemplations on race, gender, and diffracted difference (where history= past/present/future entanglements).
in order to rise we must also learn what it is to fall; this is more of a dance or a bird in flight, shift between segments on the right and left as you work your way down to glide through the text.
Subtext in this section primarily serve as meditations on personal and collective trauma; on mental health, suicide and depression.
is about love; the art of giving; healing; becoming the transition; change. it is a gift; an offering; an invitation
Subtext in this section is about divine potential and affectedness.
Definitions for Fictional Aesthetic:
**All of these concepts are drawn from and guided by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, and specific to her usage and deployment in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro.Anzaldúan Autofiction:
this work also adopts and works within an Anzaldúan reading of the Aztec myth of Coyolxāuhqui and its stages of conocimiento and desconocimiento. Blackfish in this story are chamaneria, rising spirits, surging from depths, guardians; walkers between worlds. teaching us of greater truths. helping us tell the stories we need to tell in order to change. The chapters follow the ‘stages of conocimiento’ one encounters upon the disorientation and rupture of a Coyolxāuhqui story of dismemberment and creation; death and rebirth. The following are some definitions to support your reading:
Coyolxāuhqui:
Is the narrative aesthetic this story emerged from. Each chapter a stage of its insight. It is an aztec myth about a goddess who kills her mother after she becomes impregnated by a ball of feathers. upon killing her, the fetus springs from the body full formed as Coyolxāuhqui 's brother, who proceeds to rip Coyolxāuhqui into a thousand pieces. Throwing her head into the sky (which becomes the moon--she is a goddess of the moon) and her body down the mountain.
The reading of the myth as I am drawing on it here (via Anzaldúa) marks it as a process of emotional and psychic dismemberment or rupture, where all that you are and all that you know is shattered and cast out in front of you in pieces; as well as, the creative , transformative work of putting all of the pieces together again anew and forever changed. Its process of estrangement and rewriting, that wounds, exposes, causes confusion and confliction as you become removed from a cultural center and identity. You work through this experience by moving through stages of conocimiento and desconocimiento: insight/knowing and the cost of that insight/knowing.
Nepantla:
is a nahuatl word meaning “in-between space”
is the rupture, that which splinters or fractures our identities and cultural sight. a space where reality has become fluid; a transitional, libidinal space where we struggle to find equilibrium between outer expressions of change and our inner relations to it. nepantla is also a reference to the effects of colonization and globalization in the global south.
Conocimiento:
is essentially the development of insight and consciousness as a result of experiences. It is an ongoing and ever changing state. It is a space where you start to reconstitute order and meaning after nepantla: trace patterns, track ongoing circumstances of life; sift, gather, scan, then create anew. it is where you re-invision the map of the known world, creating new descriptions, new stories that you then test out in the world and then embody as daily practice. For Anzaldúa, conocimiento is often triggered by calls to action that break one from habitual coping strategies and because of this, is always entangled with experiences of desconomiento, in the moments when we are called to about-face the truths we have been reluctant to face.
Desconocimiento:
is the cost of knowing; contending with the responsibility of conocimiento’s knowledge. the strategies and means with which we try to avoid and dodge the chaos of the nepantla rupture; where we retreat, into despair, depression, self-loathing, hopelessness; paralysis. Resisting the truth of what is really happening, refusing to face it; still mourning original cultural traumas. There is a cling to self-hood and 'safety'; self-absorbed suffering. This is not a place we "transcend inevitably" but that is always involved in conocimiento ongoings and developments; teaching us of our multiplicity.
(Anzaldúa , 2015 xxxiv)
Stage 1, Coyolxāuhqui:
THE RUPTURE; THE CRACK
Perched along the threshold watching life flicker by. Furrowed brows, vacant eyes. Little black boxes, cradled life. Infinity at their fingertips. Scrolling through space and time. Formal principles. Closed categories Capture essence, put it in a box. Sever it from its life force, Hold it still, chained, locked. Stripped away context. Malnourished thoughts. Crooked necks, sacral positions. For the gods we sacrifice. Pour our souls into an abysmal vice. Strung out on dopamine spikes. Scroll, scroll, double tap, swipe! Reality, carefully atomized. Hollowed out insides.Tap here for comfort, release. Stay here for hours; then we’ll hail you when you leave. There is a saying, if you gaze upon the abyss long enough, The abyss will gaze back upon you. Twisting the infinite. The longer you stare the more you see.No taming the glutton capitalist: Consuming essence, not for truth, But for greed.Self-indulgent, intemperance: We eat and we eat. Bottomless guts, eternal famine; Not knowing we empty ourselves As we drink.So limited a threshold; Such constrained means; We have never been taught what it is, To see.Upload. Post. like! Can this filter fix my insides? Swipe left to keep shopping. Right to try me on for size. Mouths open, eyes wide. As identity, we cannibalize.Set the angle just right. Don’t forget to caption. Catching god’s secret in bits. Lest we walk the world in rapture.Zoom in, zoom out. Trying to find a focus. Pin prick the atom. Trying to figure out what a self is. Be real. Stay woke. Click, hover, share, scroll. This is counter culture gone internet rogue.Solidity is an illusion. Truth blinds.Who needs bodies, earth, soul,When you can colonize the mind?