object of the past, or not modern. This divides culture and technology and places them in two different linear temporalities. In queer(ed) futurity, however, technology is a shapeshifter which is inherently non-binary, and temporalities flow through one another. This topples the notion of static culture and knowledge and allows technology to be intrinsic to cultural production. The third image allows further appropriation of the apparatus where it is utilized as a watering hole for a small bird and a possible hunting ground for the hawk watching. Amongst the binaries that divide the capitalist world, the divide between humans and non-human organisms is used to substantiate other divides as well. Hierarchy of value of life is established in terms of human-ness and human proximity, and results in induced anthropocentrism. This image is a rejection of the first thought that the viewer thinks of—the birds are occupying the technology used for birthing and food preparation—but rather, that the birds are occupying this technology as a space that affords occupation. The narrative of boundaries has divided even the non-human world into hierarchies—hierarchies that direct human empathy. Companion species like dogs and cats and indoor plants are subjects of empathy due to their proximity to humans, while millions of animals become objects as they are mass murdered in capitalist food production plants. Anna Tsing, in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World discusses this phenomenon—“Over the past few decades , many kinds of scholars have shown that allowing only human protagonists into our stories is not just ordinary human bias; it is a cultural agenda tied to dreams of progress of modernization. There are other ways of making worlds. Anthropologists have become interested, for example, in how subsistence hunters recognize other living beings as “persons,” that is, protagonists of stories. Indeed how could it be otherwise? Yet, expectations of progress block this insight: talking animals are for children and primitives. Their voices silent, we imagine well-being without them. We trample over them for our own advancement; we forget that collaborative survivals require cross-species coordinations.”128 This multi-species, collaborative existence is part of Indigenous knowledge and that of communities of color globally, but have been ignored by the worship of modernization and modernity which render these epistemologies an object of the past. This image is, therefore, an establishment of a multispecies, collaborative existence in a post-capitalist world, where hierarchies of human and non-human are broken down and the worth of non-human lives are not established in human terms.
128. Tsing, 155.
