Sometimes I wish I could articulate the imagination event/flood of simultaneously morphing-compressing-expanding-retracting-unfolding- erecting-dissolving-dissapearing-interfering-noisecancelling-branching- fractaling-atomizing-imploding-birthing-rebirthing-multiplying-instant ((big bang)(genesis style)) creation of the concepts/meanings/symbols/ words/sounds/images that arise from the electrical signal processing that happens in my head all the time, especially when I read things like, “‘ontological choreographies.’ The scripting of the dance of being is more than a metaphor; bodies, human and non-human, are taken apart and put together in a process that makes self certainty and either humanist or organicist ideology bad guides to ethics and politics, much less to personal experience” (8)
Writing/reflecting on this alone reenforces several things:
1. Relating back to Grosz, the virtual/real, plane of immanence + plane of intensity, and the impossibility of realizing the infinite nature of possibility that arises in that virtual space. If only I could express the multiplicity/mess I described above in one instance that can be received and communicated to you/anyone in one instance. But our brains, and our language/communication system of translating intention to thought to word to speech will never come close to providing the bandwidth and speed necessary to allow for that, among other (telepathic) limitations. The only thing I can do is take those million-billion simultaneous universes, and utter something reductive and completely insufficient for transmitting their infinite possibilities (like this sentence).
2. The paradoxical enabling/limiting power of our linguistic structures and the linearity of language to shape our perceptions, our logic, and by extension, our consensus “realities” that activate possibility/impossiblity with/in certain systems (in this case, a lexicon strongly anchored in hierarchical and binary relationships), while simultaneously failing to communicate so much of the ambiguous, irreconcilable characteristics/qualities/experiences of life so awkwardly articulated when constrained to system/s, insufficient for communicating this complexity. And that’s not to say language is useless, on the contrary, it’s amazing(!) — it is the birthing place of the virtual/real — for real! However what this does stress (at least for me), is the importance of combining and exploring every means we have for communicating and understanding our world — through words, visuals, sound, affect, fantasy/dreams, information systems, intuition, and even all the weirdo far out irrational notions of what could exist, if only… It’s one of the luxuries of being an artist (vs a philosopher, or a scientist, or anyone bound to the ideologies or empirical forces that dominate certain fields). Personal aside: The empiricist / skeptic in me keeps me honest and unattached to even my strongest convictions/intuitions, however it does not impede me from exploring the most fantastical and “irrational” of possibilities — it’s just one end of the string I attach to the stake in the ground that keeps me from floating off into oblivion/insanity/belief — always keeping it real.
3. So after all of that exposition/expansion, returning to Haraway, four lines down from the quote I first cited, and reading this: “conceiving of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as either polar opposites or universal categories is foolish” (8), followed by an entire essay advocating for the useful and necessary inclusion of “partial connections” / Haraway’s “relations of significant otherness”(8), other topologies, and word/concepts, like “natureculture”, I am again, left thinking/sighing about/re-reenforcing my above contemplations, convictions, and run-on sentences (sorry - again, this language/ temporality problem).
4. On the subtle/drastic differences between thinking in terms of: nature and culture VS culture and nature VS culture or nature VS nature or culture VS nature and/or culture VS natureculture VS culturenature VS a concept/word that doesn’t even exist because we have been building upon this perceptual difference for so long that it has been inconceivable so far that such a thing exists, and should be named, thus invoking into existence a reality/world born of the very name, the word itself.
(I will now restrain myself from going into examples from religious texts OR what Elizabeth Grosz infers when writing about the “floor being an excess of horonzontality”, giving rise to things like dance and athletics OR what William Burrough’s meant by “language is a virus”).
Sorry, so late. :/ Crazy week…
Emily