HUMUS THEORETICA Global ecocides and the inability to think

THE MATERIAL THREAD

Three main actors compose the theoretical substrate that holds this work (Wasted Away) together: Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and Miranda Bruce. Their conceptual threads are interwoven and deeply embedded throughout the text and the installation.

Global ecocides and the inability to think (Think we must)

How do we perceive our surroundings, and what do we acknowledge? Our perception is filtered through a difficult-to-disguise apparatus that allows certain things to enter our consciousness while excluding others. Even after the results of this first filtering process question remains, which things do we still perceive as disposable, and which ones do we categorize as essential? Is this selection process deliberate, or does it simply happen (as bestowed upon us)? The latter shares some similarities with Donna Haraway’s notion of “thought- lessness”:

“I turn to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s inability to think. In that surrender of thinking lay the “banality of evil” of the particular sort that could make the disaster of the Anthropocene, with its ramped-up genocides and speciescides, come true.18 […] Arendt witnessed in Eichmann not an incomprehensible monster but something much more terrifying—she saw commonplace thoughtless-ness. That is, here was a human being unable to make present to himself what was absent, what was not himself, what the world in its sheer not- one-selfness is, and what claims-to-be inhere in not-oneself. Here was someone who could not be a wayfarer, could not entangle, could not track the lines of living and dying, could not cultivate response-ability, could not make present to itself what it is doing, could not live in con- sequences or with consequence, could not compost. Function mattered, duty mattered, but the world did not matter for Eichmann. The world does not matter in ordinary thoughtlessness. […] This quality was not an emotional lack, a lack of compassion, although surely that was true of Eichmann, but a deeper surrender to what I would call immateriality, inconsequentiality, or, in Arendt’s and also my idiom, thought-lessness.”

In the text above, Donna Haraway describes “immateriality” as being opposite to materiality in a sense Miranda Bruce explains in her script “The Matter with Matter New Materialist Theory and the Internet of Things.” Understood in this light, materiality as a concept challenges the notion that humans are separate from the world they are immersed. That is if we view ourselves as being “alive” and consider things and materials as being “inanimate,” what would stop us from exercising whatever it takes onto “the rest” that is not us, a rest that we see as disposable and that has no other agency than to serve our purposes? Miranda Bruce dwells on this idea and explains it as follows:

“What do I mean by materiality? I’d like to start with an old idea: think about a block of clay and a sculptor: usual idea about matter is that, before the clay is sculpted by the artist, it is formless. It only gains meaning, presence, legitimacy, and life after it has been given an intelligible form.”

She goes further on to explain the concept of hylomorphism:

“This is an example of hylomorphism: a term from Aristotle to denote the relationship between being and forms—where structure is something that is given to form through being. It has been used as a metaphysical starting point for much philosophy and social theory, whether or not that’s been acknowledged”.

She then formulates a key question and subsequently answers:

“[…] How would something like New Materialism look at it? First: it would argue clay as a material is not inert. In fact, it has a very specific molecular makeup; it has specific responses to stimulus, it acts on other bodies in particular ways: for example, it dries out human skin and hardens under high temperatures. So instead of passive matter being acted upon by an active life form, the meeting of clay and sculptor is actually an encounter between material bodies, each with their own agency and capacities.”

Donna Haraway extensively explores materiality in a sense as exposed by Bruce, and she coins the notion of “tentacular thinking” or thinking with tentacles, that is, thinking in a way that is not abstract but “touches” and feels the things it explores. Regarding this, she also comments on critical concepts expressed by author Anna Tsing in her book “The Mushroom at the End of the World,” describing what, in my view, is an example of best practices under the umbrella notion of “tentacular thinking”:

“Anna Tsing urges us to cobble together the “arts of living on a damaged planet,” and among those arts are cultivating the capacity to reimagine wealth, learn practical healing rather than wholeness, and stitch together improbable collaborations without worrying overmuch about conventional ontological kinds.”

Donna Haraway discusses Anna Tsing’s book in further detail:

“She performs thinking of a kind that must be cultivated in the all-too-ordinary urgencies of onrushing multispecies extinctions, genocides, immiserations, and exterminations.[…] Refusing either to look away or to reduce the earth’s urgency to an abstract system of causative destruction, such as a Human Species Act or undifferentiated Capitalism, Tsing argues that precarity—failure of the lying promises of Modern Progress— characterizes the lives and deaths of all-terrain critters in these times. She looks for the eruptions of unexpected liveliness and the contaminated and nondeterministic, unfinished, ongoing practices of living in ruins. She performs the force of stories; she shows in the flesh how it matters which stories tell stories as a practice of caring and thinking.”

My work delves deep into the concept of materiality in the way it was previously exposed; I choose found objects, discarded materials, overlooked characters, and improbable heroes as the subjects of my creative undertakings and open up a space through my praxis where they eventually get a different voice and a body in new flesh.

“Wasted Away” take the case of banana peels ubiquitously considered debris and sheds light on some of its often overlooked properties.