#new materialism

Think, for example, about classrooms. Most all of them are designed to have all the students seated and facing forwards. The teacher is physically oriented as the center of attention and is usually able to stand up, thus further creating a micro power dynamic. The white board behind them constantly draws the eye towards whatever information they've presented; no matter how bored a student is, they will eventually drift back to it.

Classrooms are specifically designed to encourage a specific mode of interaction within them, to create a certain dynamic between teacher and students, and where this gets really crazy is when you start thinking about classrooms in the more abstract sense. Because we have all used them, the social rules for their use have become increasingly cemented such that there are specific expectations people have of the space. The individual layout of each classroom becomes subservient to the larger classroom ideal we are all pulled into once we walk through the doors.

In a very real way, different spaces have incredibly powerful vibes. Through both their physical layout and our social ideas about them, they shape our behavior and even our cognitive processes. They inform what we see as appropriate actions, what we see as transgressive, and our expectations for the next period of time.

Welcome to the Cybergardenities Archive, please read this post to get a hold what we’ll be doing here.

On this page I will be posting my artistic research in the field of anti and posthumanities. There will be several types of posts. Expect source text repositories (links to texts I’m working with), cool art I find (both relating to specific project and appealing to my general interests) and finally my own projects. I will also share music recommendations, and different thoughts I have about state of our world, but I want to maintain focus on documenting creative and research processes I’m doing. I do my research to inform myself and others on different aspects of solarpunk, here understood as a modern, multi-faceted counterculture movement that seeks to overthrow and replace current socioeconomic system with one that respects everything that lives (or not).

Discussion and suggestion is encouraged <33. Bear in mind that transphobes, racists, antisemites, queerphobes, ableists and all bigots will be banned relentlessly, human rights are not up for discussion, respect people here.

Video editing and color grading commissions are welcome, please check at the portfolio post if you want to know more.

At first the model seems to consist of four terms linked by just two tensions. Within the confines of experience, there is a strife between sensual objects and their shifting sensual qualities, precisely as described by Husserl. Even if I sit motionless before a bowl of pears and apples, these objects vary in profile depending on the angle and distance at which I sit, and vary in color depending on the increase or decrease of afternoon shadow in the room, or the lamplight and candles in which they are viewed after nightfall; their imagined tastiness alters as my mood and appetite alter. This is true all the more if I actively stand and maneuver through the room to view them from dramatically different vantage points, and they vary all the more for living species of different size and capacity, whether it be fruit flies or even monkeys. But within certain limits, these shifting features and contours and possibilities of objects do not turn them into different objects. If we consider that they are merely caricatures, exaggerated versions of real pears and apples, then we allude to a dark subterranean underworld of beings that no perception and no relation can ever touch. This underworld, too, is made of objects, but objects that exceed any attempt to grasp them. Since we deduce that they must be individuals rather than a single inarticulate or semi-articulate lump (for otherwise, hammers and pears would not be able to surprise us in specifically hammer-fashion and pear-manner), these real objects must have qualities as well. But for the very same reason, there cannot be a total disconnection between these two realms. The real must be able to affect the sensual, to surge up into the visual realm when tools break or by other means. There must be various crossovers between these two kingdoms—some relation between real objects and sensual qualities, and also between sensual objects and real qualities.

When speaking of Husserl, we have so far referred only to a strife found only within the sensual realm. A sensual object has countless adumbrations, countless sensual qualities, depending on the manner in which it is observed. But Husserl already knows that there is more going on than this. A pear, apple, or hammer not only bathes in a shifting flux of qualities that portray it according to different adumbrations. There are also truly important qualities that these objects must have in order to remain what they are for us. Through the method of eidetic variation, we strip away the noise and confetti of the accidental profiles of a thing, and move toward some sense of what the thing really needs in order to be what it is in the sensual realm. True, Husserl thinks we can determine what these important properties are through a kind of direct intellectual or essential intuition, but we need not follow him on this point. Instead, we need only agree that there is a distinction between the wild masquerade of a thing’s surface appearance and the deeper, enduring apple-qualities that the apple must retain for as long as we acknowledge it to be this very apple. In this way we are led to see that the sensual object crosses into the underworld through its possession of real qualities as well. They are real because they withdraw from direct access no less than efficient hammers or unnoticed lungs and kidneys do. In short, Husserl’s intentional objects, which we can rename “sensual objects” for the reasons mentioned earlier, are a remarkable crossroads where both sensual and real qualities belong to the same sensual object, as if the same planet had both visible and concealed moons. We now have a third tension in our model, and the kingdoms of real and sensual are now linked by a strange sort of bridge, crossing between shadow and light: a rigorous scientific phenomenology generating the sort of strange communicational infrastructure between real and unreal that might be found in a fairy tale.

We should also ask about another unusual crossing, the one between real objects and sensual qualities. And here we are in luck, since Heidegger’s tool-analysis already points the way. When the hammer shatters in our hand or the floor collapses beneath our feet, we experience a kind of shock. These tool-beings no longer function invisibly or simply withdraw unnoticed into shadow. Instead, numerous features of the hammer now erupt explicitly into view. But contrary to some readings of Heidegger, the hammer-object itself never does so. The real hammer remains just as distant as ever before, even when it is “broken.” Yet we are able to get a strange indirect sense of it anyway: our minds do not encounter it directly, but allude to it, or see the hammer without seeing it. The sensual qualities of the hammer no longer just swirl around the phenomenal hammer in the mind, but seem to be enslaved to a dark and hidden object that forever eludes our grasp despite its apparently obtrusive malfunction. And here we have the fourth tension in the model, one between real objects and sensual qualities.

This is not to say that a living, active matter is necessarily benevolent or eco-friendly; it is simply to say that such matter does things that call into question the ontic dominance of “conscious” animals. Omega-3 actively alters the moods of the earth’s purported hierarchs; trash actively generates gases and reconfigures landscapes; and the multifarious “assemblage” of gunpowder, gun, human volition, and bodily mechanics enables a bullet to hit whatever it hits and kill whomever it kills. Agents marked as natural, cultural, material, immaterial, animal, vegetable, and mineral constantly function in such intermingled assemblages to get everything done that is done; “the electrical grid,” for example, is for Bennett “a volatile mix of coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire, and wood—to name just some of the actants.” Mel Chen similarly animates the allegedly inanimate in their analyses of environmental toxins, which enter animal and vegetable bodies in a constant “merging of forms of ‘life’ and ‘nonlife.’” Such toxins, they argue, undertake cultural work, as one can detect in the case of lead’s producing a racist panic among white, heterosexist, American parents when it appears in toys manufactured in China. In the work of Bennett, Chen, and other “new materialist” authors, we find a refusal to divide the world into spirit and matter, life and nonlife, or activity and passivity […].