Donna Haraway at ULB


Thanks for being able to speak in her native language.

Bombings in Mousul, Raqqa
Surplus wars: 
    four famines are facing somalia, yemen and south sudan.
    
UN and others are billions underfunded
Money is missing: great wealth has been extracted
Famines, Wars and destructions
Trumplandia
The wall that Trumplandians are proposing to build
as if there are not already too many walls
Cutting trade and affective travels
For whom the border has been pourous and proximate
It will cut communication between people but also the migration corridors for the wildlife
Nobody talks about the attack on environmental justice being a mutli-species environmental justice

One of my heroes is a woman from the state of washington
who is helping people all over the cities to build corridors for insects that polinate the flowers and plants of the world
there corridors are destroyed by the urban building that occurs
she helps people imagine what corridors for insects look like
building the connectioni am compelled by the people who help build connections

In trumplundia, he who must not be named
he wants to take apart obama's climate change plan
EO by Obama has been struck by he who must not be made, surrounded by coal miners
whose jobs will not be restored, but who are made to believe that their work can be brought back
the paris accords were already insufficient
now a major player: trumplandia is certain not to meet its commitments
now that the civilian deaths by the coalition against isis have gotten more than that of the russian bombings
this does not count all of the other deaths from other sources

permanent war
human beings of this planet, 7.2 billion and growing
something well over 65 million are refugees or displaced person
1/113 is a displaced person
that exceeds the people in prisons and jails
the extraordinary production of a planet full of refugees of all species without refuge
the withdrawl of corridors
Tsing: holocene
that period that is replacing the anthropogenic change in the metabolism of the planet
period full of disturbances but there were always refuges from which biodivers processes occur from which the earth develops
we can define the place from which earth is going to develop
where refuges are being systematically shrunk
historically unprecedented
this is not to say that the end is near
not an apocalyptic theory

this is about unprecedented kind of urgencies
nobody asks what we inherit
we don't ask about our obligations
whether we ask or not,t he pattern is now in our hands
how we can possibly in various ways, and not as a single we, construct a good enough we
to respond to the multiple urgencies of the mutlispecies of this world
environment and human justice is not enough
we need to learn the capacities for multispecies justice

my book: 
staying with the trouble
chthulucene
the chthunic: of and in the earth
"cene" is the big now
the time of now
an age of what is present
chthulucene is the many times, multiscalar earthliness
i don't propose this as a replacement for other ways of naming spaces and time
but to build a capacity to respond, another thread in the figuring
in such a way to propose another story
can there be a world that is habitable
what is it to cultivate a world that is habitable for the multispecies of this world
that's the topic of this book, little questions
a print by a philipno artist? xavier?
describes the picture
with the butterfly, strings, human feet, ghostly and alive, something emergent and promising in the unfolding and unfirling of the world
staying with the trouble of the word
disturbing figues that animates


chapters:
    beginning: i am playing with pigeons
    at a meeting in some french establishment
    people who Think with a capital T
    where human exceptionalism was challenged
    named as 'les animaux'
    
    people who train horses
    for show horse 
    learning a kind of invitation to each other
    to be restored to kinetic beauty
    there were people of that kind
    in the room
    and philosophers who cited philosophers
    james, whitehead and deleuze
    other philosophers who have been distorted and restored as feminist
    with gender change ...
    trans
    there were some more people, I don't remember who they were
    
    my contribution was about pigeons
    they are remarkable animals, racing partners of the male working class
    istanbul, new york, ..
    excessive beauty is part of the invention of evolutionary theory for darwin
    monument to the pigeon fanciers
    in a park that was part of the restoration of a farm lan that was commissioned to an artist???
    they are the pigeons of an artist who had been a student of mine
    who worked with engineers, designers and artists
    environmental activists
    concerned with air pollution
    to produce a testimony of the quality of the air
    an art project of more than a year
    to build ... packs
    compatible with the flights of the pigeons
    so that they could not be preyed as they flew across the air
    for an area of california that was not monitored
    an alliance between people and animals, a good place to stay with the trouble

*rats in the air
    transmission of important knowledge
    elderly women, muslim women feeding the pigeons
    kristeva had a pigeon garden on her roof
    
story by Kristeva, pigeon garden on her own roof
wanna take over a litte?
I can try

we're historically situated, thinking with
*remind us that we are ordinary
*he people the apparatuses
*
*pigeons were also employees of the us government
*to rescue people and cargo at sea
*they were put in the transparent belly of an airplane
*and they would indicate when they spotted things on the sea
*they were better than the electronic visualization equipment of the period
*they did well if they were by themselves
*but they were much better at it if they were working with their people, yes, amongst them
*relationality was not investigated, they work by addition, of each other, the equipment
*it hadn't been suspected of pigeons
*they could discern artists of paintings
*not a functional necessity for living
multicompetent
*playing string figures with companion species (title of the chapter on pigeons)
world works through the production of access, the cells are not all
* filled
*what is to come is not yet done...
*the sense of fear and worry that is deep in all of us and for good reason
*
we live in world that is not finished, chthulucene
as we engage with each other, adding capacities to capaicities
not thinking in terms of obligations, because then we see our deficiences, but in terms of capacities

of course there is space for critique: telling the enemy that they are wrong
i was telling isabel this morning: perhaps to my shame, i make epistomelogical pronouncements in Trumplandia
where a year ago, i would have died first
STS people I know: who learn to speak in terms of situated knowledges, what it takes to make those claims
I still speak in those idioms, but 
there are moments when one finds oneself speaking truth to "old facts"
i have fallen into this dilemma in trumplandia

chapters 1-3 form a whole
chapter 2 i consider my philosophical methodology
for patterns of thinking and thinking with
chapter 3: art science activist coalitions

chapter 5: how it is to get old with an aging dog
(today: what is it means to grow young with a 2y old dog)
it throws one into history of the molecules
which throws us back into the women's health movement from not so long ago
a medication that undoes the genetic lineage through mothers and daughters, and sometimes sons
DES
post traumatic feminist shock when my vet prescribes this to my dog
early years of the animal iindustrial complex
oestrogens as part of the global meat indsutrial production scene
oestrogens prescirbed to menopausal women, 
the medicalization of this particular ways of living and diying
zebras in german zoos were research animals for this medicines
pregnant femal horses were kept to collect their urine and kept thristy
developed kidney disease
held in boxes where they could not turn around
not enough human women to collect urine under those conditions
practises have fallen out because of social mouvements
animal advocacy and women's health movements building alliances
farmers who were trying to make a living out of this with a contract
very few degrees of economical freedom
the animal producers had little control over the production process to make living better for the animals
if you tried, you would go out of business under these contracts
women's health movement and animal advocacy had to pay attention to the economics of the people workin with horses
many failures in this story but necessity to create a  'we'
for an old rich lady in california and her dog who are facing estrogens in this new period of their life

I work by situating myself, not in sense of psycho-analytical project
it is situating in the world in which one finds onself and tracking the threads

tracking the threads, to understand the connectivity that makes this way of life possible
the connectivity that makes this life possibile
every time you track the threads, you find it knotted with other threads
being connected to something is being connected to many things and not everything
and we care differentially
everybody who claims unversal caring has an unhappy phantasy
we do learn to care by tracking and learning the threads
it is an activist practice
it is a research practice
it takes one into the history of research labs
feed conversion ratios for animals

study pharmaceuticals, looking into ones colleagues for analytical possibilities, trying to grasp things better

these are thinking and worlding practices

i jump to chapter 7:
    ???'s work Vinciane?
    an opportunity to understand to be made curious by a particular scholar
    what curiostiy meant as a pyschologist, biologist
    always works by opening up the question of capacities and adding capacities to capacities
    the arabian babblers, scientists and the birds
watching sciences and birds shaping each other, in the field
*:)
*it wasn't a question about perspectivism but being entangled with each other
*which changed who everybody was
*they did not preexist 
*both the birds and the scientists, i feel like an ecto-parasite
*mutually beneficial symbiosis
*we leave something of use for the subjects that are part of the study
or animals, who did not choose to be studied but have cooperated
*but at least something that is something mutually beneficial
*
*chapter 8: Camille stories
*speculative fabulation, is for Friday night
*it is polemical
*it is nevertheless a science fiction that works through the symbiosis of a human chiild and a butterfly
*
*
*there are four terms in play today:
*anthropocene: still grumpy about the term, I understand what scientsts were trying to do, understanding the metabolist processes, propsed as geological term, because of the sharpness of the curve
*
*plantationocene
*capitalocene
*chthulucene
*
*anthropocene: 
*they walked right into the trouble
*the antrhropo is the one that looks up
*being shot up and coming down
*masculunist and tragic story
*the end is built in
*apocalyptic and tragic
*they did not intend that
*but they could have known better
*it is not like the rest of us hadn't written quite a lot
*culpable ignorance
*it is no longer tolerable to write as if feminists have not written on the matter
*the systemacity...in these forms of thinking
*it was taken by so many people
*artists, museum directors, activists
*it does a lot of work that i am aligned with
*i am aligned with the scientists
*with systematic climate change it is impossible to avoid this way of naming
*but i want to interrupt it
*
*plantationocene:
*Anna Tsing close friend and thinker (Tsing?) http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10581.html
*we tell each other a rush of contaminated stories
*to nurture the emergence of stories to live with
*we are story tellers and thinkers and story telling is one of the ways that we engage
*plantationocene:
*geofeminism (very modest), a tryptic course
*in the course of which we did a whole expansive part on plantataions
*Anna particlarly interested in biodiversity of sugar
*she studied in indonesia
*she is interested in the extraordinary biodiversity of the indigenous sugar plans
furious at what was done to sugat in its reduction to the deadly sugar of the plantations
*the slave economies of sugar production first in brazil and the caribbean
*that sugar became part of a forced life
*the machines used in the making of molassis: important part of the history of capitalism
*to produce machine for accumulation of welath and extraction
*the kind of worlding that sugar was engaged in
*the plantationocene has not ceded
think of corn, oil palm, forced labour systems of the bees, migrant pickers...
*it is changing metabolism of the earth, changing compositions of its biodiversity , explains our time-space better than anthropocene

*capitalocene:
*people hear and understand it immediately
*a historically located set of actions, and buildings of specific people and their machines
*that it is not the human species all the itme, and not even mankind
*a historical mutation
*taht we may as well call capitalocene
capitlalism is both too big and too small
*
*then we propose the chthulucene
*i regard this as a philosophical invitation, cognitive apparatus 
*we think with each other
*

*one hand proposes another hand that takes up
*perhaps, we reproduce ols patterns, perhaps we remember that string figuring is all over the place on this earth
*invented inependently in many places
*the navajo, the bikeja??
*the string figuring as a comsological practice
*that tells something abut what evil is
*the practices of the string figuring in bikeja are specific
*they become specific in this world
*in the public school systems of the region
*for upper hispano and navajo kids
*taught in upstate new york as a way of teaching astronomy
*they travel
*it is not about a zoo on indigineity
*
*these invite to think cosmopolitically
*as developed by stengers
*not certain and not universalists
*but composes its insides and outsides
*composes its we
*speculative feminism
SF: string figues, science fact, science fiction, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, so far

*my guardian figure is not gaia
*it is medusa
*she was killed by Athena the god of philosophy, wisdom
*her dripping blood on the sands
*...and the coral reefs
*the gorgonia, closely tied to medusa's blood,
*medusa's body becomes Pegasus' wings
*this particular mask is made from the skind of a marine creature, a clam, a gooiduck
*it lives in the sandand sticks its neck out
*is phallic
*kids dig the clam out of the sand, stripped the skin
*found out how to cure it and made me a mask
*she is my figure for thinking
*
*'Think we must!' Virginia Woolf
*it matters what stories we tell stories with
*with which we do other stories
*
*I tell my own stories differently because of the navajo stories, it matters what thoughts think thoughts, it matters what worlds world worlds
*
*contact zones:
*stories infect other stories
*the entanglement change the way we story the world
*new persons get made in malenisia
*new kinds of relays made through the elbow?
*substances are put together into composing new persons
*it changes the way i think about production and reproduction
*doing welth
*meets in intellectual property law disputes
*where a contractor... japanese lumber
*it changes the interpretation of law as long as these stories gain legitimacy before the law
*
*
*i tell stories along lines
*as did ursula le guin, Always Coming Home
*involve training the mind to go visiting
*hannah arendt said that eichman could not do this
*he could be a functioning manager
*he could not live in consequences
*and train the mind in a world that was not himself
*a cognitive failure, not just a moral and emotional failure
*
*anthropocene: the earth from space
*gaia
*modeling systems, technologies, very important, but mistaken for the world itself
*technological achievement which is mistaken for the world i:)
*mistaking the earth from space for the whole earth
*the mistake is not the apparatasus that allows for nasa visualization fo the earth
*lovelock and ... in their invention of the gaia hypothesis
*mistake of totalisation that I don't think lovelock did
*they depend on feedback equations
*the biologies and genealogies that look at units
*molevules, tissues, or organisms or populations, species
*units that nest like russian dolls
*units plus relations
*with equations derived from thermdynamics
*that allow the modern evolutionary syntehsis
*terribly important for understanding the history of this earth
*
*anthrpocene
*making new fossils burning old fossils as fast as possible
*

*plantationocene
*turning plantations into palm oil production
*...
*tired! :)
*
*the globalizing trade routes
*these are not synonyms for bad
*but ways of understanding the routes of worldings
*the pathways and the materialities of the making and distributing and provoking of wealth
*the age of carbon
*leave it in the ground movement
*mainly driven by first nations native peoples
*that organize as water protectors
*i don't know more
*leave it in the ground
*strongly rooted in native people's contemporary struggles
*people who have lived the catastrophy 500y ago
*white people imagine catastrophy as yet to come
*native people imagine it something that has already occurred 500 years ago
*and we did not disappear, thank ou!
*people who think catastrophy is still to come were benefiters of the previous catastrophies
*
*the learning about how to think time
*people understand that catastrophies of the past that have not stopped
*in australia that 90 percent of the people who did the dreaming and telling the stories and taking care of the country
*were flat out exterminated
*how do you reinvent the taking care of the country of old and new
*the australians think of other temporalities of the problem of catastrophy
*
*he thrid age of carbon
*another catastrophy would be the burning of all the carbon
*if it is burned, the intensity o carbon change will be off the charts
*the means of extraction to get previously hard to get carbon
*you no longer need giant icebreakers
*the militarization fo the northern pole is intesne and it is about the carbon in the gorund
*
tgoal is not about the carbon itself, but it is
*to produce the effect of believing that if you invest your value be realized
*investors have a 5-10 year cluck
*so to create value they invest
*a way to continue the streams of capital of finacialisation
*
*
*ryan dewey
*supply chain core samples
*taken from walmart, compressed layers of commodities, hyperconsumerism
*geomorphology of the time that we are liing in
*
*capitalocene
*the great acceleration
*i believe that the rate of change in so many areas of the human practice
*6 million more people in one generation, since 1950
*charts of scoio-economic and earth system trends
*everything is striking through the roof
*an extraordinary family of curves
*major mutations of the metabolism of the planet
*the chart is sobering
*this period of 60-70 years is the place where the need to stop and think is intense
*
*
*chthulucene
thinking in tentacularity
*the sciences, the modern evoultionary synthesis depends on units, relations and equations

not good enough for doing best science
*best biology works through extended or new synthesis
*understanding that relationaties are what are
*and entities are sedimentation of the processes of relations!!!
*entities are always in ongoing relationality, partially opening, partially closing
*the world must be understood
*whatever sience you speak of
*the world must be thought as a practice of becoming with

Books referred to:
Acquiring genomes, a theory of the species, Lynn Margulis https://books.google.be/books/about/Acquiring_Genomes.html?id=DS-VehE00ncC&redir_esc=y
Ecological Development Biology, F. Gilbert
*a good enough whole
*to do cell things
*
*Lynn Margulis
*endosymbiosis
*eating and getting indigestion
*
*emergence of animal multicellularity roseate cluster of infected choanoflagellates
*
*in lectures: too often - even by women - the only people cited are men, she's overcompensating :-)
*nicole's lab in berkeley
*has developed a model system
*things you can share with your colleagues that can be worked
*they are working entities that engage people, technology and critters
*they are held together well enough that they can be confidently taken by another lab
*it won't work for the 50 times, first 6 phds will fail to get the model system working in santa cruz that worked in berkeley
*mdoel systems of contemporary biology 
for understanding symbiogenesis

*plant multicellularity is older than animal multicellularity
*single cells, in the presence of the right bacteria clump and acting like fungus
*they start doing multicellular things
*what happens in these infectious events
*the argument is that multicellularity is the result of infection and not of mutation
*that is a fundamental biological claim
*when you have the tools that are powerful to look for something, you find it
*biologists are finding system after system developmental structural of critters
*that require communication with other .. through signaling
*hawaiian bobtail squid
*squid and bacteria are loquatious, in live long conversation
*bacteria make them look as starry sky, so not recognized by prays
*there is no program for an organism one at a time
*the genome is a record of encounters and partial assimilations
*
*art science activism
*biologists that influence artists, and back and influenced by political groups
*where collective political action is necessary and is taking place
*sometimes they are the same persion, coalition biologist-artist-activist
*frequently they require many people
*crochet coral reef
*engaging with hyperbolic shapes (also when you eat red salad)
*not easy for euclidian space
*
*detailed description of the art works:
*jelly fish made of plastic bags
*they reel people into an awareness and respond to the reef differently than a diver
*an iconic project for me
*
*another project:
*the ako project
*bilingual stories of madagascar naturecultures
*
*project she's interested in, madagascar
*they cared a lot about the crisis of endemic species in Madagascar
*every single leamer in Madagascar faces extinction (only place where they live)
*recovery form land of burning is no longer possible
*scool children don't learn their own natural history, they learn that of France...
*
*
*allison and hanta come together to do bilingual books about 6 different species of leamers
*they are ... bildungsroman
*the young limers become adult limers
*they learn things
*that make us of the natural history: the critters they eat, the foresters, the tourists are in there, too

'it's a multispecies affair'

*madagasi in big print, with subtitles in english in fine print
*their noises are madagasi sipaka noises
*these books were distributed throughout madagascar
*in an effort to produce something to read
*i find this an act of love and rage, captures her imagination
*
*pigeonblog
*daCosta and allies did
*the machines, the bird and the people
*
*David Dunn, the sound of light in trees
*transponders in pine trees in areas of drought
*so that we can listen to the pine beatles of the sick pine
*he is interested in controlling diseases through sound
*rather than pesticides
*these critters conduct their lives sonically
*
*never alone
*cook inlet tribal council
*e-line games
*young person who faces the storm and gets help to get through it
*traditional narrative space
*nothing new in mythology, coalition that intrigues her

Camille Stories
*make kin not babies
*this is a mexican sim
*it is a common figure
*20th century figure
*Camille has to discover a ... on november 1st, sdia de los muertos in Mexico
*and the returning butterflies coming abck from North America
*from the point of view of a mazahuca?
*experience the butterlflies as the returning of the souls of the dead
*drinking the tears of the butterflies is part of the stories

next day the dia de los santos, the bees are xxx children?
*
*
*the end 
*we are the granddaughters/grandchildren of the witches you didn't burn
*
*
Q&A
q: the collective we, finding a language
*what language can we form to make a collective we?
*we are very sensitive with the trumpologists trumping our lives
*and the decline of langauge
*a very simple, aggressive defenses of a lot of people
*maybe it is ok that people are being defensive because they need to protect themselves
*
*do you have a proposal as to the transformation of language?
*your language is simple and complicated
*and i am thinking about everyday langauge
*in meeting each other
*the sensitive moment in your talk today
*when you talk about the pigeons and their relationship to history and mankind
*you mentioned that the women who were doing the feeding were muslim
*do we need to use that word?
*
question of language in relation to animas, what language do you use with them?

'muslim woman': to differentiate her form tourist, should have said, a resident of the city
combination of brexit and trumplandia might decrease dominance of english

OUCH! indeed
all of it terrible
the question and the answer
mabe even the original description, she could have given more context - yessss, it is not about one language in particular!

standing rock protestors areusing english
but with different conceptual apparatuses 

it matters not to go too fast
be quite long enough to hear
to be part of the coalition
waiting to be invited
or not being invited
the question of inclusion and exclusion among common struggles
all over the world it is a common struggle to be aginst the building of the pipelines
but the struggles are also local
undoing the birthright of universal access
that is a lifelong work

if we think of the anthropocene or climate change
the ... polar north: alasaka, siberiea
the melting and changing of the ice
the word for thinking about all of this that circulates and is comprehensible around that region (alaska, eastern canada)
so that they are mutually comprehensible to each other
the notion of sila
the anglophones will translate as "the weather" 
it doesn't do the job for the breathing and connection fo the lands and the airs
sila is much more powerful way of talking about climate change
cimate change and sila have to interrupt each other to see what is urgent in these problems

in relation to the navajo
their word for 'beauty' : a missed opportuntiy around problem of drought...  lost her

Question: notion of response-ability

you touched upon it when you talked about the pigeons
there is a production of excess / access? oh! not sure :-)
adding capacities and rendering each other capable: isn't this a humanist perspective
Martha Nussbaum, catalogue of capabilities
sotries with optimistic touch, too much presupposed about what the pigeons would think
what do you mean by rendering each othe capable?

Answer:
i don't make a list of capabilities
in ways that donot already prejudge but allows something to happen in encounters
it is not a theater, a unit + relations that do things
an encountering of doings when brought into relationship with each other that something happens
i understand the critque of nussbaum and humanist philosophies of care
this does not mean i have nothing to learn from nusbaum
even if i read most of what she/he has done aside
but i go for a practice of atonement

interested in practise of listening for what is offered, creates connection I'm somehow hungry for (lol) !
semiosis: we  do with out body minds
with pigeons we share a long history
there is a whole lot that we don't know about each toher
mistakes get made on both sides
pigeons go about their lives without us for the most part
they are opportunistically socail beings
nathalie jeremijenko records
records pigeon communications
and translates them into a speaker on street level 
"give me your hamburger" which is a joke about mistranslation
how can people work with animals and plants
how we learn to engage with each other
while it may all one sided: humans are doing it
it is not true

we had barbarian puppy talking mandarin
we have to figure out who we are together
building of the capacity to pay attention to each other ---- huhu with the previous question (!).... we can not judge her too much :-), it is only 1 mistake in 2 hs!
dog relationship co-evolution talk: semiotic apparatuses???!
i am loosing her
not sure if it is interesting to type down all the little attitudes of the dog :-)
it is her!
i am doing what she said with atonement and taking what is there from an author


a man wants to introduce a word to this room that we didn't hear yet!!!!
ritual
moment where physical space-time and sotrytelling space-time come together
conscious choice to focus more on language of sciences? rather than focus on language of rituals and spirituality

Answer: no, most of yesterday I spent talking about rituals
today I demphasized that word
lol: bettina and an are like "we didn't hear her talk about rituals"
rituals are contaminated words
anthropology
lithurgy of the church
come from ways of talking about what one does in theaters of enactments for the gods, the spirits, for each other
to animate powers that evooke
rituals are, if they are not dead, practices of animation
i have learned a great deal about rituals reading/meeting isabel stengers
who starhawk  http://starhawk.org/ 
practices of taking care of the earth
care is not a bad word forme
i don't want to throw it away because it is subject to critique
scientific practises that are dead, like dead rituals, are no longer ingaging in 'worlding'

q:
    introduce a colleague working on string figure making???
*at VUB
*border at the campus
*it is such a rich concept
*i am reflecting on the research that we are making on the local string figure making
*to give value from a western mathematical perspetive is also reducing this practice
*what are you doing?
*
a:
*it is problematic
*people of the kalamatu
*have string figuring
*Flemish following Wikipedia call it https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heksenspel
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_figure
*ethnographers collected technologies and artifacts of string figuring
*it was not a mathematical interpretation
*dominant practices in western science
*comparative method with strong knowledge making practice
*string figures fell out of concern as an object to think of these things with
*with colonial concerns
*
we use string figures to think about history of colonialism
*decolonial collaboration
*this is mathematics, too, oh good
*this is real mathematics, not just some traditional ....
it is real astronomy
we can modernize it through science
croche is modernized with mathematical work on hyperbolic surfaces
women have done this for years
why does it gain some "penache"?? when we reach the mathematical
is this a reduction?
no, i like ways in the world that make us nervous and are a little noisy
i affirm that adding mathematics, it is the addition fo capacities in the interrogative mode
is this a friendly addition or a reduction
you don't know that in advance, depends on the people of pacific islands 
they are active in affirming their knowledge, their practises are very robust

i wonder what she thinks about experimentation!?
(my neighbor bettina says stengers does more about it)

1970 as part of left science studies activism
Helen Duran, David Turnball (?) and their aboriginal australian teachers  have been influential in science studies
decolonial histories of science  (i find nothing)


not forbidding maths, as a possible symbiosis for string figuring, but to think, is this also something interesting?

LUNCH!


Afternoon
1. 3 chants Katrin Solhdju (FWO-VUB)
non thinkable = not available to think with
refuge on all levels
stories able to replenish, to create refuge
historical practises of remembering,... how we inherit the past matters for what we're able to transmit
H insists on changing the story
stories in partiality not necessarily weighing on politics?
history writing: connecting ourselves differently to the past, not innocent
Trumplandia does it all the time, danger of justification of creating alternative stories

Donna H:
    coral reef
    tradition of science & technology studies, Sandra Harding notion of 'strong' and 'objectivity'
    objectivity is a precious and fragile achievement
    situated/strong objectivity is one of contributions of William James and of feminist scientific studies (?)
    f.ex. division of labour built into machines, frozen labour
    
'feminist strong objectivity'  demands attention to what is excluded of 'weak objectivity' (produces knowledge from above)
    knowing and making should occur together
    
    as if all knowledges are equal & perspectivists, every knowledge is situated in its own zoo
    vs feminist knowledges
    we should organise community of feminist knowledge makers and invite William James
    a methodological point,  'hygienic practice', to never start from epistemological frameworks which ignore the conditions of women.
    this is a hygienic practise that I had to learn when studying philosophy
    
    anti-rape whistle :-) (???) problem whistle!
    bergson was one of heroes when she was doing philosophy
    gave her ways of thinking through evolutionary spiritual worlds
    neologisms might be taken up / or be forgotten
    'cyborg' was taken up!
    
    Anna Tsing is person I think with about 'home', prefix 're-'
    reactivite, replenish, refuge
    makes us think we're doing it again, but with a difference
    reminds us that we're not the first, we're not alone, others have done it in advance of us
    we need to reactivite the past + the present
    lost causes are not truely lost
    taking up the task again, including the task of joy: 'rejoice!'
    I don't want to be part of the revolution if I cannot dance
    living world is always doing stuff, most of which fails
    confronting facts with storng objectivity, remembering the intimacy without proximity and xxx?
    
    Question: emphasize 
    we need to do things deliberately otherwise they will not happen
    epistemological practise you're doing is refuge for thinking
    not only refuge on biological level, we need to create our refuges for thinking
    it is artificial but a good artificiality
    your way of quoting, people you want to think with, is creating friendship space of thinking
    and an interesting way of research
    
    H: Geco is kind of refuge, wildlife part for thinking
    Many people are being politically animated
    too many think they have to invent, instead of seeing what is going on, join them
    
    I: feminists that deliberately insisted, were excluded
    cfr example in Modest Witness leading to exclusion of women from labs (airpump?)
    all the people in lab are doing stgh different, ... no control on what they are thinking
    problem might be exclusion, but you also have to be interested on what I'm showing you
    'stop, interrupt your frivolity'
    mobilisation of attention seems very important, as important as the fact that women were excluded
    there were also naughty boys excluded
    
    H: airpump is good example
    was a place to go, mobilisation of proper witnesses did not iccur in those saloons for scientific entertainment
    women were included in spical events, but excluded as proper witnesses
    cfr popular aquaria, but the labs of the aquarium are behind the scenes, interested in inclusion/exclusion
    
    what do you want to include/exclude?
    will you exclude virusses from your efforts?
    questions of witnessing are fundamental
    
   I:  entertainment is a beautiful concept, you can entertain a host/an idea

B: exchanges make me thing of Virginia Woolf, and outsider society
excluding women from universities + we are already at work
we are already doing the stuff
watch out, it is happening, but we're not seeing it
we're everywhere

H: study of diabetes, impacts different communities
native americans and class related problem in US
in what constitutes proper study of diabetes? in what degree communities already looked at fresh food, not regarded to scientists?
they are considered as outsiders,...
Virginia Woolf/me were already there, it is not always the right metaphor for exclusion/being already there
(did not get this last bit...)

Aline Wiame (ULB)

speculative fabulation
not only subject or kind of writing
storying/worlding are use as synonyms
storytelling seems to be condition

term is interesting
friction between speculative part about ocncepts/ideas, and part of storytelling/fiction

Maintain a connection between speculation and ... storytelling? Geco has its own definition. Looking for potential changes. 

dictionary : most common use of 'speculative' is ...
develop specific mode of attention to situation in the making, look for spy/potential changes

why tool for making speculative present
Thick present, the mushroom at the end of the world. (Anna Tsing) Storytelling as a method for producing knowledge.
why not call it a science, an addition to knowledge?
Walter Benjamin: stories/history connected to moment of danger

debaise, stengers - multitudes 65 / 2017
speculator

Concept of history, 1940 -- what is danger/urgency for history. Danger as a mode of storytelling. 
In the face of danger. 

SF mode = a practice of worlding that pays attention. 

science facts and speculative fabulation need each other and need feminist speculation (?)

We need to think about thinking as being enmeshed.

2nd aspect of benjamin's text
Material consequences of 'danger' o. conformist history writing.
 
Deleuze fabulation, missing peoples. What made them disappear? Double colonization: stories from elsewhere and their own myth.

all kind of imperialists dominants, preventing the people from existing

Fabulation disturbs colonial attempt (does it?)
(she's difficult to understand)

thoughtworthy: 
in DH work speculative fabulation comes up in face of similar problem: earth & xxx people?
Terrapolis people

Fabulation neither personal nor impersonal.
Deleuze: fabulation occurs to median voice
fabulation happens in between, refuses fatalism and escapism. 

fabulation is addition to reality it deals with 

inventing (?) a median voice between genders, people, ....

(loving the lievels :-)) best way to deal with ?death?

ways not to conclude:
yes what about the multimedia collective projects that are NOT happening in academia? feels like the cyber-elephant in the room :)

DH this is so rich, it is perverse to instantly respond
notion of median voices of the 5 Camilles, between living and the dead, 
factual - invented. not between but median = thinking with. Not fables either. 
"wild facts", facts that do not want to settle (risk of conspiracy).

task of affirming living and dying well together

it is not about making things up, but affirming something that is not yet

storying and knowing are bound together. storytelling is a fundamental part of the scientific process.
storytelling and science making need each other, struck me
thanks for emphasis on materialist dimension of storytelling -> benjamin

"if he (Benjamin) is talking about danger, he is not kidding"
storytelling as facing dangers. we are facing dangers of huge entitites
tell histories that enroll each other, in order to living through these histories well
there is stories being told "being great again"
 stories, how are they connected to slogans?
real enemies, eugenic nationalism
resurgence of these kind of storytelling that must be resistent

resistance is robust through storying
people who have been excluded form stories of the powerful, are vulnerable

Nicolas: 
how can we participate in ongoing process of camille stories

H: they began as collaboration with F Terranova, Benedicte.. here 
it begins as an assignment, given a baby, take it thorugh 5 generations
rosi braidotti and Anneke Smelik were a joke (?)

Camille has changed a lot of lives.
children of compost/
"we own the domain name" what? camille.com? I don't find it
set up a ?monitored? website where fan can put up stories
fan fiction is an important practise
we want to foster sym-fiction

"can we proliferate stories?" Interested in invention. Opening up space for sym-fiction.
they can also propose a slogan, a small philosophical text
but only freshly written stories
a way of speculatively fabulating possible worlds among the communities of composts

No post-humanist fiction allowed (how to monitor that?)
No post speculative realism
:D

we are not doing speculative realism, we want to do speculative fabulation and sym-fiction.
'now we're going to have to do it', oooh

IS: Taking back SF work. Camille as a skeleton.
young authors coming in and try their first novel
many stories can branch, contradict, but respecting the skeleton
H: would be nice if skeleton is honoured, but it can take all sorts of shapes, 
"it looks like science"

from real existing science writing plausible science. "this is the beard I want" :-)

Question: in FR
préoccupé sur la possibilite de faire lien entre la question de 'faire l'Europe' et l'exemple brittannique

To make a link between Europe and anglo-SF. Your friends Bergson and James have been lost in Europe.
Rethink this story in function of potentialities in our own territory
Attention to the future.

DH: There is a library with Camille. It has plenty of possibilities for different traditions
communities of compost in the camille world, all over the world communities of different sizes appeared in damaged places, coal mines, diamond mines, war zones
come together to live as generations to heal the damaged worlds

Philisophical and other inheritances.
cannot be imported from elsewhere
Camille stories I told were located in the coal mines of West-Virginia
Geco-stories were everywhere

MacBook Pro de Katrin: 
:) the objects are speaking :-)

science fiction as a genre is imperial genre
Octavia Butler's Brood (Liliths Brood) 
they're weary of the term sf
taking up science-fition somewhat

friendly to the communities of compost

Benedikte Zitouni (USL-B)

Felipe Luciano (Black Panthers): We are a life force

"what about opportunism"

ordinary stories of the ongoing
opportunism: to fit actions to circumstances while holding the goals dear, a craft of circumstance and consequence

barely possible worlds
it is messy
set against complacency

they can do whatever they want
working against the odds.
claiming rightness won't change a thing

what are we facing?
the 'storm' (geophysical and geopolitical)
goomers (?) holding up their goasl, preserving their kins, their children, their privileges

attraction is the motor, sensual curiosity, insaitable hunger

tentacular love of the world, falling in love in sensual and brainy ways. 
ex of this morning : woman falling in love with leamers (Australia)

hardest taks: reach out to material worlds....
stop ciritquing the ennemy, start exploring the worlds we want
'shut up and train (?)'

return the gift: string figure
oct 1984, sabotage nato-operations facing a nuclear base
Diary: Women for life on earth records, 1981-2002
'police are having to think about it too'

DH: A seriously beautiful paper.
woman calling out to the waters, infecting the police

what happens in occupation: metabolism between securers and occupiers.
cfr standing rock at Dakota Oil Pipeline, enacting there and then, reestablishing the right of presence, reclaiming the waters
encountering each others' stories
they have left the encampment stornger than when they came altough the battle has been lost, in narrow sense pipeline will be build, but the strength of people will not go away

stay in touch with people that made each other strong. 

we are not small, our strenghtening each other requires that ongoingness, we have to enact and live it

on-goingness. We are not for the future, but for a habitable world in which we must live and live. 

'gooman' of the earth?
we're composed, not post-human !
committed for some worlds and not others, together, in a messy way
it is not all to be invented from scratch.
particularly in times of danger, remember this

Black Lives matter movement has not (did she say 'yet'? possbly :-)) disappeared, but a lot depends on what kind of support they get now
Occupy has not yet died?

shut up and train and show up
comes from police training dogs
we're relationalists not relativists
we persuade enemies, don't kill them

practise of peacemaking involved learning to shut up
'make kin' is phrase that is strongest for me now
(serious about 'not babies too')

cfr Shakespear kin-kind
kin: category/relatives: if you have a cousin, a cousin has you, you 'have' each other
if you have a dog, a dog has you.
relationality = 'having' each other

woman wrote story about inviting Trump to stay one week in her house and live like she does, 'no rest'
as a way to learn English

Aline Wiame question:
    relation to marxism, in 4essay of practises' you talked about socialist feminism and now it seems it became speculative feminism..
 SF = also Socialist Feminism (but it is now speculative?)
something has changed here or?

DH: that should not have happened! 
"I am embarrassed" not too many spaces on the list on a slide.. but I have never refrained from long lists too..
(long lists)
time to re-animate marxism / through? feminist marxism

Isabelle Stengers: we're not futurists
so far we are there and well

it is the same for socialists
do we know what socialism is capable of

when we turn 'so far' into dialectical resolution, makes us stupid
the sense of needing to have a future, thinking that way makes us stupid

Question:
I wento to conference yesterday as well
questions not sure I can ask
want to break with the idea of "composition", so I wrote a letter

I wrote you a letter
hear more about idea of inheritage and relation with inhabiting
inheritance / inhabiting
inheritance gives idea of sthg fixed you have to care for

EU/US
Geneology vs place - belonging. 
inhabitation: notions of place, belonging

DH: when you are in your 70s, names fly away

Inheriting something that is stolen, you don't own it.

Looking for a home in a place of displacement.  

People who have each other in struggles.

IS: DH using “really” as if nature has spoken

Science wars = not an enemy of facts

facts make a difference, but how and for whom.
System-collapse is not a thriller

Tough love. Not “really” getting the point. Forgetting what was acquired. Forgetting to create a contact zone, a mistake.

“She got it” “She got me” “I got her back”

Secularist have a hard time to listen. What do we know vs. what can we know.  

“real” transformations








--------------------------------------------------
NOTES FS Morning + part afternoon

Stengers intro: “We urgently need to step out of our routines”.

Haraway going through Staying with the trouble

one out of hundred living beings (?) “has no refuge”

Pigeons as good animals to think with: caring for natureculture corridors.
Story of being called for dinner as 'les animaux'
Stories of animals and people and their technologies

What counts as a multispecies 'we' is the big question, finding a good enough answer.

Chtulucene is not an alternative to anthropocene, but another thread.

Capitolocene – better word than anthropocene (is world seen from space; mistake is to think it is the only world). Capitalism = too large, too small.
Gaia / Anthropocene – feedback, units, molecules … nesting like russian dolls. Mathematical description. Visualisatons.

Supply chain core samples (Ryan Dewey)

Plantationocene (= living in the ruins)
Capitalocene – understanding routes and routes. Third age of carbon. “Leave it in the ground”.
Indigenous have already lived catastrophy (white people think it is yet to come), they did not all disappear (90%). Other temporalities.

SF = String figures, science fact, science fact, speculative feminism, … and 'soin des ficelles' (Stengers)

Thinking together – producing new patterns

a cosmological practice. IT tells something about the stars.

Practices travel, not caught in authenticity, cosmopolitics; composing a we (not universal)

How to hold love and rage together.

Medusa as a guiding figure. 

Think we must!

“It matters what worlds world worlds.”

ways substances are put together … changing modes of production.

Changing the practice of allocating wealth

Always coming home (Le Guin)

“Training the mind to go visiting” (Ahrendt, on Eichman)
= living in consequence

If you invest, your value will be realised. 

Feminist fear to address their own colonialism and racism.

Sympoeiesis = “making with”

Extended synthesis, understanding relationalism. Not ephemeral, but stringed; already there. 
EcoEvoDevoHistoTechnoPshycho “good enough holding together”

Cells come out of indigestion. Endosymbiosis

“perhaps overcompensating by solely quoting women”

animal multicellularity

“model systems takes work”

relationality is not: things + relations

clumping, acting like sponges

watchful tools … critters exchanging with others. When you have the desire to find, you will start to find it. Loquations (?) = species in lifelong conversation.
Symbiosis is rather general, biologist find.

Art-science-activism. Coalitional work between artists, biologists, activists.
Crochet = hyperbolic spaces, excess surface. [Pascale Barret objects?]

Margaret Wertheim Crocheting Coral Reef
using different material – plastic oceans, bleached coral

The Ako Project – bilingul stories for madagascar nature cultures

World Games – never alone (game, traditional narration)

Make Kin Not Babies
Camille bonded to butterflies

Ends with: We are the grandchildren of the witches you didn't burn

Q: Collective we, what language can we form to make a new we, decline in language. Is defensiveness ok? How to deal with transformations of language? What words? Using the word Muslim, need to define and need of definitions? What language to use with animals? 

A: Muslim is not tourist, should have said resident of the city. Adjectives to make one nervous. Brexit and trumplandia might decrease English? Entrance of Chinese, Arabic, other languages.
How to hear … English growing in combination with other words, stories. Be quiet long enough. Waiting for the invited (or not). Not assuming universal access, undoing birth right. Climate change as a term vs. Sila (vs “the weather”) more powerful? What emerges when concepts meet each other (not replace each other). Missed opportunities of language.

Q: Response-ability? A production of excess in rendering each other capable. Adding capacities, is it a humanist concept? (ref. Martha Nussbaum). Too much presuposition? What does it mean to talk about the capabilities of pigeons

A: Not listing them (insists on not making lists). Not a theatre, an encountering of doings, something happens that could not be done alone. Not what to dismiss in Nussbaum, but to see what can be used. Atunement. Speaking in human languages. Having a grip on each other, and mysteries on both sides. Jeremijenko joke on translating pidgeons. Develop capacities to pay attention to each other, in a calming way. Technologies of captivity (leash, collar)

Q: Ritual?

A: Scientists are ritualistic. Today de-emphasize that word to foreground others. Term contaminated by religion, its colonizing moves. Theatres of enactments. Practices of animation. Reading Stengers (thinking with Starhawk), coming to care. Care is important (even if subject of critique). Scientists animate ideas.

Q: Study of local string figure making, anthropologist and mathematician, but math perspective is Western/reductive?

A: String figuring, collected, ethnologists comparitive method as a strong knowledge making practice. As a way to think about deep colonial collaboration. It IS math too. Ref. Crochet as a knowledge/practice can do hyperbolics without math. Noisy ways of being in the world. Adding math, as a friendly addition (and hopefully not a reduction) [additivism?]. Decolonial practices? Geneologies that not lead to Manchester or Paris. Aboriginal teachers, look at Australian thinkers. Decolonial science studies. Interrupting stories with stories. Asking: “is this also something interesting”.


Afternoon

Katrin Souhou

Staying with the trouble as a guide. 
Habits of making-thinking

Versions of a chant. Attentitiveness. Defiance (not denying) of devastation. Invites us to go visit (in imagination) [TGSO]. Intimacy without proximity. Not virtual but real presence [PB]. Shifting habits of attentativeness. Non-Euclidian space. Hyperbolic space does not exist? Mathematician should look better at their lettuce. Deeply in love with method. James: do not exclude anything. James: “Truth is a species of good”. Precision because of engagement.

Chtulucene, kin – making/doing something differently. Bergson: good problems, not ready-made problems, as a task. Truth virtually known.  Bergson: Finding/stating the problem, is inventing [PB]. Tentacular empowerment. Utilitarianism, human exceptionalism = not available to think well with.

In need of additions. Earthbound, realist stories. DH capacity of interrupting habits. 

Replenishing refuge, for humans and other animals. Requires stories, remembering, commemorating, recuperate. Inherit and narrate. Big enough stories. Account for a lot, but not everything. Dietrich Krakauer (?), terra incognita. Re-attaching differently. Trumplandia = also changing stories. Staying with the trouble.

DH: yes, guide to research. Bergson, Krakauer, James. Non-exclusion, tradition of science- and tech studies. Sandra Harding, “strong objectivity” = situated objectivity. Weak objectivity = normalised universality. What does laboratory work looks like when we pay attention to divisions of labour.
Feminism is not relativist, but relationalist. Citational apparatus: to start from inclusive thinkers, a hygenic practice, and invite the others after. “Bergson was one of my heroes” for refusing protestantism. Neologisms. Feminist cyborg. 
'the feminist cyborg that does not make bergson spin in its grave'?

xxx is a woman I think with … Doing again with a difference. 'We' are not alone.
Lost causes are not lost. The living world is getting on with it. Task of activitation. Practice of rejoycing and revising. 

Q: Refuge … not only on a bio level, need to have refuges for thinking. Your research is doing that.

A: Geco is a refuge, the wildlife part of thinking. Find what is already done, and join it. 

Q: (Stengers) Mobilisation of attention is important. A way to save entertainment (it is a beautiful word!)

A: Airpomp as entertainment, women could not be women. Problem of inclusion. 

Q: Ref. Woolf, “We must think”. We are doing exclusion/inclusion AND it is already there.

A: Study of diabetes. Class, native Americans.