Relations of Unpredictable Encounters

NASTY

Consider an assemblage as a way of troubling conceptual divisions between body and the environment, human and animal, living and nonliving. An assemblage, as Anna Tsing talks about, is a way of coming together; an open-ended gathering that remakes us as well as others. It is a kind of recognition of all of its elements or companions or associations and how each has its own time-making rhythm. Through this open-ended act of being together, varying temporalities converge. Existing in and making up a contingent spatio-temporality that is never closed or finished. It is also within these configurations, within the murkiness of entanglements, where forms of power can reside, where pervasive and overt supremacist systems are reproduced due to an inability to clarify their form and position.

Within assemblages is where patterns of unintentional coordination can develop. It is a space of entanglement and entangled space. To notice the patterns that take place in an assemblage is to “watch the interplay of temporal rhythms and scales in the divergent lifeways that gather.” (1) It is particularly important that companions at play are divergent. As soon as such a space becomes too homogenous it loses any potential for transformation, for movement. It is when differences entangle that new things take place. And it is when social relations are considered spatially that forms of power can be more tangibly positioned and disassembled.

I didn’t really grow up with my father. He was in and out of my life as a child but exists in my memory as very distant. In a way it was luxury to be with him, eating sushi once or twice a week, sometimes taking it back to his office and sitting on the couch with my brother looking at diamonds and gold and all kinds of jewelry that he had in tiny little plastic baggies all over his desk. I remember the smell of sushi takeout. But the intimacy between my father and I was fairly non-existent. I don’t remember ever touching, or talking for that matter. During my second, or maybe third year of high school he was sentenced to 39 months in the Tacoma, Washington prison as part of some international drug bust, or so the news said. The most devastating part was seeing his image online—handcuffed and tucked away from society. He was released just before I graduated college.

In October I visited my father in Holon, Israel. He has lived there now for three years, taken in after his discharge when no other country would open their arms. After his release he was stuck in immigration for three-plus months without anyone’s knowledge of his whereabouts. His green card was revoked and he became heavily addicted to meth—I only just found out. Israel’s invitation was a necessary relief. They are good to the Jews. That’s about it. Anyway, last week I visited him and he gave me a documentary to watch on the United States prison system called 13th.

It was my second visit since he moved. The second time that I have spent more than five hours max with him since age two, when the divorce happened. Living alongside papa for eleven days was definitely something. There was friction and it was beautiful. A kind of friction that I initially recognized as the entanglement of two very different temporalities. A negotiation of intersecting rhythms that are both our own and that that is the relation. As we entangle, the encounter is contaminated, queered simply through the action of being and doing and ultimately relating with(in) a spatial configuration of difference.

The entanglement that happens between my father and I refers to two lifeways from the same species. Ultimately, I would like to complexify such a way of thinking by referencing queer ecologies that extend to non-human matter and the interplays of relating.

Suddenly I realize that all matter is interconnected and therefore, without hesitation, all matter matters or doesn’t, completely. For if matter is one then it is in fact impossible to differentiate between which matter matters more. For there is no matter that matters without the rest. But I will stop now before my poetry becomes forbidden.

I refer here to Karen Barad’s concept of the post-human performativity of intra-acting matter proposed with the intention of contextualizing this essay within new materialist discourse, reiterating the importance of the material as a way of dethroning the human and Man from its central position. Instead I propose a non-essentialist, non-humancentric materiality. This is not a proposition of harmony or conquest, but rather something like a recognition of what is at play, an optimistic approach.

SOFT

My aunt was born in Uzbekistan into an extremely traditional, conservative Bukharian family. She immigrated and relocated many times throughout her life, conflicted between rebellion and personal life desires and her sense of duty to her inherited history and family. Eventually she willfully gave in, or as my father put it, was broken, succumbing almost completely to the expectations of the religion and culture that she at one point was fighting against. She follows now a kind of dutiful retransmission of the ideology that she was born into. Not only does she live by it but has a certain need to transmit the information to me. She holds onto this ideology very tightly, almost as if there is a fear of letting go because if she were to let go then her whole purpose of living would crumble to oblivion.

And now I feel a little self conscious because I am giving an example at the expense of my Auntie, and yet, can’t you relate? One’s personally-built paradigm becomes a kind of protection. Holding onto old beliefs and constructed ways of thinking because they are at least a “stability” to hold onto in the midst of chaos. But stability in this sense is a brittle one—the paradigm itself does not allow for transformation and therefore what is held on to so tightly is a very thin argument that can easily be shattered. Such a paradigm must then be protected from conditions of vulnerability, openness and letting the other in. And now I get all sappy, but holding onto the past can also mean holding onto prejudice.

In 2014 a blogger—I can’t remember her name—wrote about precarity as our current “public secret.” The secret part is fairly irrelevant, but it was her thing, so we go with it for a minute. Precarity was one of a few from a short lineage of public secrets beginning with misery, followed by boredom and dissolving into precarity, or anxiety—she equates the two. She proposes that these public secrets develop out of capitalist mentalities and transform through practices of resistance, claiming that precarity leads to general hopelessness. We see this in the desolate number of youth that never leave home or that work themselves to death or the amount of people on antidepressants, or income insecurity and other instabilities that plague us. Such ideologies have also been explored within the concept of futurelessness which could be understood as the impossibility of imagining an end from within the constant present. But perhaps we can look at precarity as the fabric of our current ecological system and see this as something to embrace rather than fight against. Perhaps we just have no choice—just kidding.

Anna Tsing is a big advocate of precarity as the current condition of our time, or more accurately proposing that our time is ripe for sensing precarity. As we find ourselves entangled in landscapes of ruin, we need to ask ourselves what emerges out of damaged landscapes, how can we become closer to our reality instead of inflicting vaster alienation. In her book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, Tsing exemplifies such a disturbance ecology. She talks about Matsutake mushrooms and Matsutake mushroom pickers in the hills of Oregon. Both the mushrooms and the pickers emerge from landscapes of ruin. The pickers are predominantly Asian immigrants, some undocumented Mexican immigrants and your occasional white hippy from Portland or Seattle wanting to escape the restrictive structures of capitalism and live “off the grid.” Some of the camps are regulated by the government and some are formed, inhabited, and regulated internally. Many of the mushroom pickers have made a very conscious decision to travel from afar, most commonly from various provinces in Japan and China, leaving behind poverty and family, but not tradition, to engage in a precarious but consistent lifestyle as mushroom pickers. It is a kind of dedication that comes from a commitment to a lifestyle as the income acquired by such labor is not equitable compensation, and yet the pickers themselves price the mushrooms. Tsing gives many examples of how these people refer to such a lifeway as “freedom.” Far from the American dream, this lifestyle, or rather, this assemblage, exists on the fringe of capitalism.

The mushrooms also grow out of landscapes of ruin: blood ridden hills from mass logging industries during the industrial revolution, and of course the brutal slaughter of the Native Americans who once lived alongside such trees. The ghosts that inhabit and form these hills are an essential part of this assemblage. Uncultivated, picking and collecting mushrooms is more of a scavenge then a harvest, and when the buyers come, the pricing of these trophies is particularly irrelevant in the sense that the pickers price them as they please and the prices fluctuate a lot. Prices can double over the course of one night. It almost feels like a practical joke on capitalism. Of course, the mushrooms eventually enter into “normal” supply and demand chains across the ocean in Japan where they are sold as a delicacy, but the pickers and the mushrooms care little to none about this part. The care is rather in the assemblage—one that grows out of ecologies of ruin that highlight the possibility of living alongside precarity and indeterminacy as opposed to fighting against it.

What is happening in this depiction are various forms of entanglement that allow for alternative ways of living, entangled cultures as the pickers hold onto their traditions and reassemble them in the Oregon forests. Entangled species, uncultivated mushrooms, ghosts, pickers, etc. Entangled capitalism as the income made by such work is never thought of as compensation for the labor and the mushrooms are priced without considering supply chains but rather as a sort of a game. And so on. Consider then that this entanglement is an assemblage that through cross contamination becomes a happening; more than the sum of its parts, proposing new lifeways and landscapes.

WHITENESS

Approximately four days into my visit with my father I began to realize how stuck I actually felt, encroached upon, confined to constructs that eat at my soul until I have no choice but to scream and break free. I have the tendency to adhere to others, to become malleable when in close proximity to them, attempting to fit into their space as opposed to imposing my own. My father is self-righteous and extremely particular. There is very little space for me in his life, unless I take it. I am not supposed to open the windows in his apartment . . . just a small example. I followed this rule until after my breakdown.

Night three I was overcome with a desolate and desperate freak out that left me hyperventilating by myself in the guest bedroom. I shivered through the night and had very vivid dreams of sucking on the pleasantly cold tongue of a fantasy lover that I have dreamt about (night and day) to varying degrees since college. This was followed by a wave of vulnerability with papa the next morning. I expressed to him my need to be close physically and emotionally, to be soft and open, to practice gentle forms of care. We sat on the couch with his hand on my belly and he helped me to breathe deeply. My digestion had been a knotted shit show since my arrival. As I attempted deep breaths I cried and felt cared for in the way that I needed. I was able to let go a little. I was able to move through the stronghold I had on self-containment. I found strength in vulnerability, in being soft. I felt safe.

After this encounter I had one night of fever but my head was clear(er) and I was ready to impose myself. Oh, to feel entitled. Something that papa later told me I should do, and that he himself, as an immigrant, also struggles with.

It is urgent to consider the ways in which the world is available. When we begin to consider relations of power, one’s ability to be, to act, to move around in the world depends less on intrinsic capacity, or even upon disposition or habits, but rather on one’s position, or positioning in the world. In her essay, A Phenomenology of Whiteness, Sara Ahmed talks about the corporeal schema that we inhabit as not sufficient for a person of color since the schema is developed or situated and confirmed by the white man. So if the way the world is available, in the sense of corporeal schema, is not through individual sensation—visual, visceral, kinesthetic, tactile, vestibular—but rather situated by the white man’s embodied reality, then one’s experience as a person of color is always going to be made up of the “wrong” kinds of elements, elements that do not fit in. We all know that through histories of colonialism our inherited world is white, and this is a given, prior to an individual’s arrival. The colonized white world is the familiar world, one that we know implicitly, and such a world is prepared for certain kinds of bodies, “as a world that puts certain objects within their reach.” (2) A kind of orientation. This is our general spatial configuration, an inherited and inhabited whitespace.

Space is inherited, but it also takes shape through habitual actions, “such that the contours of space could be described as habitual.” (3) And here it is important to keep in mind what Maurice Merleau-Ponty said about bodies being both in and of space, that space doesn’t begin “outside of us,” but as we move through space, so does space move through us, like intra-acting spatial matter. To be orientated to a space is to feel a certain comfort, and “to be comfortable is to be so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins.” (4) White able bodies have the inherent ability to expand in space as the surfaces of their bodies disappear. To take up space, to extend one’s shape, is a luxury that not everyone has access to.

STUCK

Whiteness coheres as an effect of repetition, in the passing by of some and not others, but it is so far beyond a simple body count. What is repeated is a style of embodiment; certain gestures, ways of moving, ways of inhabiting. These gestures accumulate and sink into that space causing certain forms of embodiment to become comfortable. Bodies that ease into the embodiment of that space take up space as well as engage in a kind of motility of that space; an energetic ability to move actively and with spontaneity.

Let’s consider intersectionality as a way of confirming that relations of power intersect. How we inhabit a given social category such as race, class and gender, depends on how we inhabit others. “Becoming white” in the sense of institutionalized whiteness is closely related to class mobility: “You can move up only by approximating the habitus of the white bourgeois body.” (5) In order to have any sway at all, inhabiting such a body or at least the approximation of its style is necessary. As we know, the capacity to inhabit such a body depends on one’s inheritance.

It was an ongoing conversation. On day seven or so we discussed queer politics in relation to gender binaries. It came up when he told me I was a smart woman and I said something like,

“Why not just a smart person?”

He brought up his usual argument that there is inherent difference between the ways that men and women act, think, etc. I attempted to blur these lines by bringing up non cis-gendered people, considering where they might fit in. He said that there are always deviants and I said no, they are not deviants, for even somebody like myself, with a very discrete gender-queer body and style does not fit into the gender construct that is “woman.” He agreed,

“I am not manly either, but what then should I call you?”

And I proposed just to leave it out, because it makes me feel confined to a construct that I don’t want to be a part of. He asked me why and we got into discussions of body image and the way people look at me as if I am their property. I mentioned that the night before at Sukkot dinner I was consistently busy with trying to hide my tits, feeling extremely self-conscious. I wasn’t wearing a bra and the whole night I felt as though my nipples were simultaneously screaming and trying to disappear. And this is amongst family. The family that papa, in his own way, and momi, with vigor, used to rebel against. I used to be ashamed of my own mother’s nipples because I could see them through her shirt. And now I love hers, and am ashamed of my own. But actions linger. Ways of inhabiting, of deviating from the norm, leave traces. Allowing for contamination with the Other is what changes the world.

It is important that white bourgeois embodiment does not exist as the ultimatum, but in such a world, this becomes very difficult to challenge. Agency over one’s own body can easily be taken for granted as an inherent ability, however something as seemingly obvious as movement or action is accessible to some and not others. So it becomes necessary to propose a different kind of movement, a transformative kind of fluidity that develops out of intra-action and the entanglement and contamination with the other. How can a space propose motility for people that are stuck or confined by the motility of others? If bodies come to feel at home through orientation, how can a spatial configuration avoid the perpetuation of usual social and bodily orientations of whiteness? How can we disrupt such feelings of home, recalibrate them, reestablish and again disrupt? If we can agree that social configurations are spatial configurations of intra-acting matter, and spatial configurations continuously oscillate between stagnation and disruption, then we have the ability to mess with whitespace by proposing new assemblages; entanglements that contaminate. And yet propositions of entanglement and intra-acting matter are concepts that unfold from within whitespace.

Ever since I can remember, my breathing has been very shallow, constricted to my chest. Such restriction causes my digestion to suffer, and triggers headaches. While breath is not at the forefront of my thoughts, when I am reminded, I do all that I can to breathe into my belly. And then my physical habits of holding, of desperately trying not to expand into the world become clear. This action of holding my belly in and clenching my rib cage comes from a conflictual desire to disappear, to retreat from worldly pleasures or my own materiality and sort of implode as opposed to expand into and within the world. This is of course not uncommon for (a) women, (b) sexual abuse survivors (c) people of color (d) dancers (e) queers (f) immigrants (g,h,i…).

Edmund Husserl as well as other scholars that I have mentioned—Merleau-Ponty, Barad, Tsing—propose a kind of movement in their ideologies. But one cannot look at movement without considering who benefits or to whom these propositions are accessible. To discuss the potentiality of movement is also to come up against walls, barriers and various power structures that perpetuate stuck-ness. From a phenomenological perspective, barriers are as much internalized and inherited as they are external. Here we can consider Barad’s proposal of intra-acting phenomena as entanglement that allows for movement to happen across and between structural borders. Consider the #metoo movement . . . its entanglement with technology allows for congregation, support, disruption and collective uprising to permeate barriers and disassemble power structures. And yet it is a feminist movement that is most accessible to white bourgeois women. Even more tangibly, there is a difference between #metoo and the physical walls that confine. There is no denying that physical walls still keep certain people confined more than others. Look at the prison system in the United States for instance.

I remember when my father was released from prison he didn’t reappear into the public sphere for another four months. Nobody knew where he was during this time, not even his attorney. Later we found out that he was being held in the limbo land of immigration as the US government tried to deport him. Nowhere would take him. Papa once told me that he never wanted a passport because he never believed in borders. Perhaps a political statement, or perhaps an attempt at reclaiming agency that is perpetually taken from immigrants.

The disruption of whitespace is not the responsibility of people of color. And for black or brown people to offer their bodies as an embodiment, a social promise of diversity to be used as a sign of diversity, is nothing more than a confirmation of whitespace in which black or brown bodies are seen as the stranger or the guest. How, instead, can a space propose strangeness, propose itself as a guest to itself in which all of its inhabitants collectively make up the space and also deviate, or propose a kind of consistent strangeness that constantly transforms whilst sometimes stagnating? I would like to configure socialities that propose friction through contamination from the entanglement of contesting forms and deviant forces. This is a proposal for new movement.

MOVEMENT

With such a new materialist approach, it is our practice of being and doing that ultimately has an impact. It was four days ago that I left Israel. Papa and I talked on the phone today and when he said “I love you” I really felt it. I told him I had a really nice time and he agreed.

“Despite all the shit I get from my daughter, it was a really good time. And I have done so much thinking since you left.”

It’s undeniable.

A sort of high school dropout definition of sociality could be the tendency in individuals to gather together, forming packs or groups as a way of associating with one another. This terminology originally came to my attention while reading about wolves and other animal species that form packs as instinctive survival mechanisms. I quickly and simply made my own associations, as I was, at the time, reading Bruno Latour’s writing on his rendition of the social as an assemblage of associations. “Associations” coming from the latin root of social, socius, which denotes a companion, an associate. While I find plenty of his claims to be totally uninteresting, I relate to his depiction of society as connectivity: far from being the context in which everything is framed, society is rather construed as one of the many connecting elements circulating inside tiny conduits. These particular things that are being connected are not social in and of themselves.

When I speak about a sociality as some thing, I refer to Latour’s terminology; an assemblage of associations, but with a twist of Barad. She doesn’t believe in assemblages because they propose each element as existing on its own as an independent entity prior to its encounter with the other. I would like to twist Latour’s terminology to allow for sociality to exist as an intra-acting force, where all associations have a mutual constitution of entangled agencies in which the ability to act emerges from within the relation. I can act because of it. This is a transcorporeal perspective in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than human world. Jason Moore, an environmental historian who writes a lot about the anthropocene and entanglements of capitalism, says sociality is like a second nature. Who knows what the first is, but I like having a second nature.

New materialism reconfigures sociality as it raises the possibility that there are laboring practices that are impactful. It proposes something more than analysis, engaging in prefigurative and generative discourse, where movement itself embodies the relation. As movement and movements take place, all that is entangled, all intra-acting matter, is involved.

Socialities, as well as assemblages, networks, hybrids, cyborgs and many more that have been offered as a way of comprehending the irreducibly dialectical relation between human and extra-human, deconstruct the Nature/Society binary that capitalism perpetuates. Instead what is proposed is to begin neither with humans nor nature but rather with relations, relations that are open to the organic and inorganic. While a sociality does not have a defining form, all social relations are spatial relations that develop through and within and among materiality. Moore says it nicely in one of his footnotes:

All social relations are spatial relations; social relations develop through, and actively co-produce, space; spatial configurations are always in motion, but are also fixed for definite periods of time. Space is, then, not simply “out there” but joins in specific complexes of social relations and “built environments” that shape the possibilities for contingency, but not infinitely so. (6)

If we recognize that social relations are spatial relations then we can consider human bodies as sites of environmental history, recognizing what we engage in as producing and reproducing patterns and relations of power.

SAFE

Safe space is a practice that has developed mostly out of universities. It is a shared space where marginalized people such as POC or LGBTQ+ people come together to discuss oppression and personal experiences of marginalization without dominating power structures dictating the exchange. As the structure is proposed, organized, and produced by marginalized people, it somehow exists outside of or on the fringe of whitespace. If whitespace is the common space, safe space is other.

Thinking in line with disturbance ecologies, safe space has developed out of a landscape of ruin. It is a space where movement can happen for bodies that otherwise do not have access. It does not, in and of itself, disturb—in the sense of manipulate or transform—whitespace. It does however have the potential to generate that which can be utilized outside of its context. My last experience in a so-called safe space for POC, which was also my first, was eye opening. With a personal gratefulness and minor astonishment, I was invited to join the meeting. Astonished only because I am, with slight indignation, often not recognized as a person of color. It is a conflicting matter, both externally and internally.

During this meeting, what really struck me, other than all the emotional content that was released, was the sheer importance of such meetings as a way of supporting one another. It was about sharing relatable experiences, not so much in content, but rather in relation and ability. I shared my self doubt and my inability to take space or make certain claims. I was confirmed in such expressions as we talked about the almost imperceptible effects of white supremacy. In everyday life, such claims are constantly refuted and met with unknowing ears. Even among friends who attempt to listen, the experience of the other within whitespace will never be understood from the level of embodiment by somebody who the context caters to. I would also like to say that I am in no way an authority on the experience of being a deviant, this is rather a recognition of the grey zone that I and many others swim around in. And trying to explain water to a fish is not an easy task, and only slightly less confusing for a mermaid.

For me, and for many who are still trying to comprehend what it means to take space, engaging in conversations that attempt at depicting the components of whitespace whilst existing within it, often leaves me feeling more confused, uncomfortable and ashamed—a burden, and flat out wrong. Often, I feel like I need to apologize for taking up space and time and for not being coherent. My point is that safe space for POC and other marginalized groups is important as a way of accessing a vulnerability and finding a shared strength that can support each individual. The collective strength that comes from such meetings can also be used when entangling with whitespace. Something new can be proposed in a homogenous environment, something that developed outside of it, causing friction, contamination, and change.

It is pertinent that we recognize that these disturbance ecologies, that precarity, is what we grow out of and our access to its potential has to do with a kind of celebration of what this reality has to offer; a change in perception. We can use strange, transient and semi-spontaneous socialities that entangle and contaminate as a way of replacing Man with assemblages of species, objects, cultures, and historical trajectories. Proposing instead a post-Man ethics of vulnerability focusing on the relation of unpredictable encounters. This kind of contamination allows for new ethics, learning a heightened perceptiveness. Inviting contamination through entanglement offers us the opportunity for futures that embrace ecologies of difference and celebrate disruption.

Citations:

1 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in
Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 23.

2 Sara Ahmed. “The Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory Vol. 8, No. 2 (2007): 154.

3 Ibid., 156.

4 Ibid., 158.

5 Ibid., 160.

6 Jason W. Moore. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Brooklyn: Verso, 2015), 16.