Footnotes and references:
[1] Roy Scranton [2] Judith Butler [3] An interdisciplinary field that looks at how science is affected by politics, culture, society and how science produces its knowledges. [4] Barad, K. M. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. [5] Van Oyen, Astrid (2018). Material Agency. In ‘The Encyclopedia of Archaeological Sciences.’ Edited by Sandra L. López Varela. [6] It is difficult to notice this fluidity because a palimpsest of sedimenting strategies and imbrications between ‘humans’ and the ‘more-than-human’ around us has bequeathed ‘us’ a massive and peculiar arrangement of shared anxiety about the world around us: a way of making ‘cuts’ in the fabric of the ‘whole’ that keeps us ‘sane’. So we settle for the logo. The brand name. The mark of quality. The swish of good fortune. And in the sake of scientific products about climate disaster bearing down on us, the implicit trust that this reductionistic vision is trustworthy and complete. “But this is a global matter. And the science supports it.” [7] Feminist physicist Karen Barad noted that these relationships work (and thus everything materializes) based on “intra-actions”. An “intra-action” – as opposed to an “interaction” (where two independent bodies meet one another, maintaining their independence) is when individual bodies materialize as a result of their relational encounter. This reframe privileges relationships and the phenomena or frameworks they produce as the fundamental quality of reality. Reality is made up of relationships, not things that relate. [8] Of which I am a member. [9] Bert Oliver, What is a ‘rhizome’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking? [10] Biologist Donna Haraway decides then to rechristen nature as “naturecultures”, dissolving the binary and highlighting the processual and performatively interesting ways every object (once merely “natural phenomena”) is a relationship.This article was previously published on The Emergence Network’s ‘Mushroom Newsletter’.
