*Proto (Bodies, carriers, tools, animacy, semiotics)
*
*To approximate ourselves to the misunderstandings of objects, bodies and vessels, peaking into the history of these subjects is vital. Anthropocentrism, denial of agency, fixation on historicity, power complexes, scientifically derived accuracy and biological generalizations have all contributed to the simplification —and therefore, belittlement and abuse— of our world and its subjects. Can it be that the roots of climate change and queerphobia are paralleled if not interrelated? Is the subjugation of the othered body, the non-normative undesirable ‘them’ —considered inferior or utilitarian devices and mechanized bodies— responsible for social hierarchies which then extend to racism, xenophobia and classism? Does the consideration of the object as inanimate and non-agential contribute to our blindness to the mysteries of our world, and a failure to understand the interconnectedness that wraps through and around all of us? Can empathy, hailed from a layered, nuanced and emotive understanding and respect for all one-things, poetically, positionally, similicly and relationally string us together as subjectual participants and members of the Sensual World? 
*
*Labor and class hierarchies have greatly affected how we experience objects, bodies, genders and races. The concept of anthropocentrism toxically articulates a hazy system of referentiality in which the human derives norms that are drafted from a mono-source, usually from oneself and their immediate society; a common leitmotif in the history of humanity that has fuelled retrograde and conservative sentiments. If one’s references are limited, controlled, homogenous and uniform, this lack of contrast and diversity engenders a pinholed vision of possibilities, therefore training one to opt for probabilities that, if not upheld and consummated, lead to rejection and disdain. For example, if one has grown up around white, cis-gender people, their customs, perspectives and opinions all tend toward the same places and any contrast will be met with hostility; in other words, one's perspectives and references are their sole points of reference and, thus, superior to all others. If one has only ever been surrounded by rich, affluent people, they will value things and base their behavior and interests off of this demographic and what they and their institutions offer them. Some more cultural examples: if one grows up in rural Cambodia, they are likely to have trouble finding literature on gender studies in their local library. Because of a majority interest, the institutions will only provide and promote certain sources of information. In Xi’an, China, if one wants to do research on governmental systems of domination and oppression on the Internet, they are likely to have a hard time as the censorship laws favor the communist government’s interest. If in South Africa, one grows up in an entirely white, gated community in the Gauteng province but then decides to study somewhere in the Eastern Cape, their socio-political views cultivated throughout their life will be heavily contested and radically diversified upon moving down south. 
*
*Take a break, when have changes in geography, context, demographic and culture woken you up?
*
*These reflections hark back to Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, which in full fledge acts in the detriment of diversity, as it is “a product of history, [that] produces individual and collective practices —more history— in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the 'correctness' of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms,” in the words of the philosopher[26]. Hence, the expansion of our perspective is greatly hindered by our immediate society and conditioned to view bodies and objects according to the social hegemonies produced therein. Like Bourdieu states, the reproduction of history and the “active presence of past experiences” generate a schematic norm to adhere to, and if upheld, one is considered an apt, normally functioning and reliable member of society. This conformity is a product of “the objective homogenizing of group or class habitus that results from homogeneity of conditions of existence [which] enables practices to be objectively harmonized without any calculation or conscious reference to a norm and mutually adjusted in the absence of any direct interaction…” [27]. Thus, the norm simply becomes law without anyone brashly promoting or consciously applying it; a stealthy, venomous seed that gets ‘incepted’ into our heads at very young ages. 
*
*Moreover, Vilém Flusser’s urge for informative images is of interest here as his definition of the verb “to inform” is: 
*        “1. create improbable combinations of elements; 
*        2. imprint them upon objects”[28] 
*The more informative, less-probable, polyphonous, heterogenous, diverse images —and therefore, information— that are produced and consumed, the less mono-referential our beliefs, customs, opinions and perspectives will be. Yes, this all may be a very heady way of stating a common hippie-ism that being open to the world and learning about different cultures will make you a better and fuller person. But despite the generic flippancy of these kinds of sentiments, they hint at something sharply urgent: how systems of oppression are formed, how bodies and races are codified, how devices of power are conceived, how perceptive manipulation works, how historical bias and perspective frame what is hegemonically decided as truth. To get closer to understanding where our relationship with certain subjects is, and why it is so severed, we must delve into reflections on the body and the object. Specifically, how and why have bodies been codified and categorized according to race, context, social hierarchies and labor? How have vessels and the concept of a tool and inanimacy belittled subjects that contain (vessels) and thus taken them out of the dialogue and contributed to feudal structures of thinking and organization? 
*
*A tool is an apparatus without organs that helps biological life complete a task more efficiently. It eases our existence, speeds up processes, gets us closer to what we want and need. Therefore, the tool is something that is welded, snapped off, sharpened, sculpted, sanded, forged, bolted together by biological life; thus it ‘owes’ us its existence given the fact that “tools in the usual sense tear objects from the natural world in order to bring them to the place (produce them) where the human being is. In this process they change the form of these objects: They imprint a new, intentional form onto them. They 'inform' them: The object acquires an unnatural, improbable form; it becomes cultural”, in the words of Flusser[29]. When certain species of animals that have a concept of themselves, a memory of what they’ve done and feelings about what they’ve done —the human, for example— creates something out of manipulated material (usually metal, wood, hay, plastic, clay, glass, etc.), it invokes a god-complex-like feeling of dominion over said creation. ‘I touched it, manipulated it, it obeyed, and now it does what I want it to do’. The tool —the cultured and domesticated object— works for us, under our reign. This harks back to Timothy Morton’s “matter-for”: to talk about things, or describe them or even use them is reducing them to their functional materiality, and thus they aren’t their matter but “matter-for” performing a task or simply being thought about[30]. As popularly theorized, the realization —both conscious and physical realization— and use of ‘The Tool’ was a cornerstone of evolution. So, like young children who torture bugs in puddles of water, discovering their hegemonic primacy over other biological subjects, we learn that we exist and operate in a material stratum much higher than that of the other smaller or seemingly inanimate subjects around us (or so we think). Do hierarchies exist in the objectual world? According to us they do. Metal trumps wood
*, plastic outlasts glass, rock beats scissor, scissor beats paper, and so on. Yet, these materials, independent of the human, find a way to coexist, to lean into one another, operate together in cycles of decay, rebirth, destruction and regenesis. They find a way to asymmetrically interlock and mesh into one another, meld, stem from, deteriorate together, sprout from one another, not by ‘using’ but falling into coincidence and the laws of energy/mass conservation or simply letting themselves be affected via causality, which all help guide them through the gelatin of potentiality. 
*
*So how have bodies been classified? How do aesthetics and semiotics constitute a body? How have the consideration of class, race and gender taught us to codify bodies and reduce them to their labor status/functionality? 
*
*Have you ever made an assumption about a body —its aesthetic properties, its adornments (clothing, piercings, weight, tattoos, makeup, etc.)— in relation to said body’s function in society? ‘Oh she must work the streets, look at how she’s dressed.’ ‘He’s trying too hard, look at how much makeup he has on.’ ‘With all of those piercings, they’ll never find a job.’  We aesthetically and semiotically break down and assess bodies, as we do with objects. ‘Does this object fit here? Does its pattern go with my living room décor?’ Which echoes: ‘does she belong here? Look at all of those tattoos.’ Simple semiotics come to reduce bodies and objects to Jacques Lacan’s signs, traces and signifiers. I will use these concepts as a way to articulate a brief historical framework of dangerous simplifications. Lacan’s semiotical dissections rigidly define things in a staunch linear directionality. He describes the sign as: this one-thing unequivocally and unambiguously means ______. Then, the trace is the visual mark of absence of something. Lastly, the signifier is also an absence, but one of meaning and reference. It’s a sign that means nothing. It produces or “engenders…what is not there”, in his words[31]. So what have we? A description, a nullity and an abyss. This bleak and barren reductionism indicates a kind of summary of the way historically subjects have been reduced to their aesthetic skeleton, to their semiotic outlines. Here, anomalies and poetics have no place. In his Seminar III, Lacan describes what he calls the “the biological sign. In the very structure, in the morphology, of animals there is something that has this captivating value due to which its receiver, who sees the red of the robin redbreast for instance, and who is made for receiving it, undertakes a series of actions or henceforth unitary behaviour that links the bearer of this sign to its perceiver. Here you have what gives us a precise idea of what may be called natural meaning. Without otherwise seekin
*g how this might take place in man, it is clear that by means of a series of transitions we can manage to purify, neutralise, the natural sign”[32]. A natural sign is the binary, essential and univocal correspondence between object and meaning. Lacan uses the verbs “purify” and “neutralize” as if that which hasn’t a clear meaning, that which glitches in nature, were straying off from some kind of gridded chart of normalized existence, in which things are as they should be. What about the New Mexico whiptail? A female-only species of lizards that reproduces parthenogenetically, without the need of sperm. She is not preoccupied nor bound with Lacan’s biological sign, or any kind of “unitary behavior” that usually applies to other species of lizards. The laws of attraction, function, form and meaning are suspended here. She is not “made for” reception of a male lizard. She constitutes her own, self-sufficient system and disobeys unknowingly an imposed taxonomic classification and canon of normalcy. There are many objects like this. There are many bodies like this. Like Levi Bryant critically states, “many events can occur in the environment of an object without all of these events being capable of perturbing the object and thereby being transformed into information. While rocks, for example, are certainly open to sound waves, they are not, as far as I know, open to signifiers”[33].
*
*I consider the theory of semiotics to be an extension of biological, anatomical and material classification tendency projected onto bodies and objects (let’s not forget Jacques Derrida’s phallogocentrism is a deft tool of stealthy dominance and control whose fuel is semiotics). Every organ, bone, nerve and liquid, every chemical, mineral, substance and gas has a name, a classification, a fixed state, a reference point, a measurability and, yes, a variability; but this margin of variability is precisely calculated according to some standardized base of normalcy. Variability can not exist without a norm. As speculated by Sara Ahmed, “the normative can be considered an effect of the repetition of bodily actions over time, which produces what we can call the bodily horizon, a space for action, which puts some objects and not others in reach. The normative dimension can be redescribed in terms of the straight body, a body that appears "in line." Things seems "straight'' (on the vertical axis), when they are “in line,” which means when they are aligned with other lines”[34]. The definition of “straight” is inculcated and inscribed by the habitus (if there are many straight lines, the crooked line will visually look out of place, thus straight becomes the norm) and becomes this very reference point with which we perceive and evaluate subjects. If things can be classified, they can be hierarchically organized according to an artificially constructed correctness.
*
*Lacan’s conjuring of this semiotic theory is indicative of the solipsistic and anthropocentric tendencies of reductionist human thinking that has inundated our history: the assigning of univocal meaning to subjects which are considered standard, that hegemonically hold a place of power due to their number and influence and, thus, are rendered canons off of which everything else is based. For example, there are a great deal of corporal complexities that are mauled by semiotics given that the body is in fact “a collective; it is an historical artifact constituted by human as well as organic and technological unhuman actors. Actors are entities which do things, have effects, build worlds in concatenation with other unlike actors. Some actors, for example specific human ones, can try to reduce other actors to resources to mere ground and matrix for their action; but such a move is contestable…Other actors, human and unhuman, regularly resist reductionisms,” in the words of Donna Haraway[35]. So if objects and bodies are more than their assigned classifications and semiotical descriptions, why have they been reduced to their form and function? 
*
*Going back to labor and status, that which is most effective, efficient, ergonomic, pleasurable, satisfying and symmetrical has always taken reign over all other subjects that don’t perform this kind of immediate and precise mechanical functionality. This is yet another solipsistic and anthropocentric kind of reductionism in which, as Gilles Deleuze reflects, “every object whose relation agrees with mine (con­venientia) will be called good; every object whose relation decom­poses mine, even though it agrees with other relations, will be called bad (disconvenientia)”[36]. For example, a person with a vagina and ovaries who can not reproduce has historically (and in many cases currently) been ousted from their community, considered defective or a sinner as their ‘promised function’ is ‘not completed’ (having a vagina and ovaries which semiotically equals having the capacity to procreate, again, derived from and considered a fact due to a majority of people who can reproduce). Therefore, they are inferior to the standard, effective person with a vagina and ovaries; they are an unwanted variance. If a glass of water is slightly cracked and produces a leak, its ‘promised function’ is ‘disobeyed’ and considered defective and therefore thrown out. Naturally, the examples are of varying degrees of severity, but isn’t the origin of the violence mirrored? So, given that bodies and objects are classified according to their functionality (what they do, how well they do it, how long they last, how little they will vary), they are hierarchically and binarily organized into superior versus inferior, effective versus defective, and so on. This is pure pragmatism. Even aesthetically or aurally we discard things that are dissonant, asymmetrical, atonal, unsuited to our domestic feng shui, bothersome to the ear, and so on.
*
*Take a break from reading, have you ever discarded or discredited a subject based on its functionality? Why?
*
*A dissident body is that which opposes any social, physical, canonical or political norm or standard. They are not the masses, they receive little visibility in society and they are typically considered undesirable. From functionally diverse people to hyper-pierced lesbians, they are the anomalies, the unexpected and the uncoordinatable. These bodies are considered inferior by the collective mass of normativity given that said reigning class fails to place these in-betweeners, outcasts and outliers in society according to their criteria. A dissident body has always been met with dismay as their social and ‘mechanical function’ is dubious and ambiguous. Much before capitalism, the non-normative body garnered great opposition and discrimination. Similar to what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls “materialist history” which “identifies democracy as a ‘formal’ régime, and describes the conflicts with which such a régime is torn, the real subject of history, which it is trying to extract from beneath the juridical abstraction called the citizen, is not only the economic subject, man as a factor in production, but in more general terms the living subject, man as creativity, as a person trying to endow his life with form, loving, hating, creating or not creating works of art, having or not having children. Historical materialism is not a causality exclusive to economics”[37]. We, and all non-biological subjects, are more than our capital weight and our contributions to economy. Yet we impose and are imposed with prescribed duties and are considered out of place and reprimanded if we don’t.
*
*Whether it be during the Roman Empire or in Aboriginal culture, those that ‘failed’ to perform their proverbial duty as a man or woman, or their labor function within their societies, were in some cases assigned other, less ‘noble’ functions, or simply punished with “exilic flight, or the liminal state of in-betweenness. These social conditions create punishing or distant gazes that compel an exilic subject to take account of themself” as stated by Yana Meerzon[38]. So the othered body, given its functional indeterminacy and improbability in any society, is simply misunderstood and rejected. There is a strong, irrefutable history of discrimination based on color, sexuality, gender and culture in all societies as the image of the non-normative other is subject to a “secondary gaze…directed at the exilic subject, one that judges whether they can fit into this society or not” and evaluates the effectiveness, correctness and cleanliness of said subject[39]. This classifies the body in terms of its mechanics, aesthetics and conformity to the habitus of a given society. Precisely this statement can be applied to other non-biological subjects, which I will explore later on.
*
*When we evaluate a body, our eyes jump to the most obvious places. Skin color, accent, clothing, hygiene, smile, context. ‘What is that man doing here?’ The othered body is presented with this kind of evaluational violence constantly, as their ‘correct’ or ‘true’ context doesn’t exist, thwarting them into a sustained state of not-pertaining-to. Cis-heterosexual white people in affluent western cultures ‘belong’ in clean, rich neighborhoods, in well-funded public or private schools, in well-paid jobs in tall buildings. This is the general image derived from a semiotical equivalence, calculated by systemic and historical privilege; it is an associative, visual analysis that boxes in these normative white bodies. Yet, this boxing in does not endanger these white bodies but protects them, bestows them with a sense of free rein and contextual omnipotence. They can go almost anywhere and be treated well as their appearance protects them. If we talk about black and brown bodies, and the context in which they ‘belong’ according to an oppressive society and system, and the associative, semiotical analysis that box these bodies in, we get a very different outcome: racism and xenophobia, to name two. A black or brown body in a white context conduits discomfort, discrimination, fear, hostility, suspicion, questioning and violence. When the habitus is perturbed, it causes a contextual chasm given that “the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products —thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions— whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning”[40]. The mere visuality of the othered body in normative-majority contexts (again, extended to racial minorities, queer people, the functionally diverse, etc.) fractures the fragile existence of limit-setti
*ng habitus; ‘they don’t look like they’re supposed to be here…’, ‘they are out of place’. Space and race as a conflict is touched on by Sara Ahmed who considers racism “an ongoing and unfinished history; how it works as a way of orientating bodies in specific directions, thereby affecting how they ‘take up’ space. We ‘become’ racialized in how we occupy space, just as space is, as it were, already occupied as an effect of racialization”[41]. In 1862, after the semi-futile emancipation of slaves in the United States, a black person simply existing in a white-majority context, where the habitus excluded black people from coexisting peacefully in society, was subjugated by a stealthy (or screaming) presence of control. They were not afforded the same access to well paying jobs (back to labor and class, they were considered lesser, mechanical bodies; their black skin semiotically equal to slave labor and to white service), were not payed the same for doing the same jobs and had to survive under the dominion of the white gaze which constantly exercised violence by magnifying their supposed ‘out-of-placeness’. This discrimination is still very applicable to all western societies, and more generally to all of humanity. The history of discrimination is the history of the other, the Greek barbaros, the barbarian, the ‘that-which-is-not-us’. Be it an Aboriginal person in Melbourne, a hot pink-colored hair queer in Lesotho, a vocally liberated feminist in Abuja, a pierced punk in Seoul, a tattooed person who is paraplegic in Lima, a Guatemalan person who struggles with English in Montana or a black man walking down the streets of a white neighborhood in Houston, that which disobeys the habitus has always been and is currently subject to treatment, discrimination and projection as a lesser, inferior being who belongs in a given context and must perform a specific function. This is beyond simple stereotypes. This is violent corporal, racial and visual reductionism, which reduces
* beings to their semiotics, to their ‘what-they-mean-where’. Humans throughout history have incessantly assigned the other with names, meanings, functions, therefore belittling and inhibiting their potential and slashing our relationships with each other. To end this section with another quote by Ahmed: 
*
*“…beginning with the experiences of a black man in a white world begins with the loss of orientation, as the body becomes an object alongside others. The experience is one of nausea, and the crisis of losing one's place in the world, as a loss of something that one has yet to be given. For the black man, consciousness of the body is "third person consciousness" and the feeling is one of negation. To feel negated is to feel pressure upon one's bodily surface, where the body feels the pressure point as a restriction in what it can do. As Lewis Gordon suggests in his critique of Hegel, 'White people are universal, it is said and Black people are not". If to be human is to be white, then to be not white is to inhabit the negative: it is to be "not." The pressure of this "not" is another way of describing the social and existential realities of racism.”[42]
*Take a break from reading, what has your relationship to discrimination been?
*
*I’d like to now shift the focus to objects and specifically vessels and their history. As argued by Ursula K. Le Guin, the vessel, the container, has been the unsung heroin of history given the fact that “the first cultural device was probably a recipient…. Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier” (Le Guin citing Elizabeth Fisher’s Women’s Creation)[43]. Le Guin also talks about Botulism, a lexical subversion (or transversion) of a word used to describe a food poisoning that was noted in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Glossary’[44]. Woolf reevaluated Botulism, considering it synonymous with hero(in)ism. The bottle, the carrier, the vessel, the ordinary, unassuming and unexpected subject which is categorically rendered inanimate like solid, gaseous and mineral forms of life and inferior in relation to biological, animal life. All which is misunderstood and discriminated against to varying degrees of severity, be it a visually dissident body or an Ikea plant pot, has a history of being brushed away due to the suppositions that come from the ruling majority. Similar to non-normative and othered bodies, vessels have silently —or loudly if we successfully attune to their frequencies and become aware of their agency— slipped through centuries of brutal negligence. To quote the monolithic Middlemarch by Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot):
*
*“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity”[45]. 
*
*This failure to tune into said “roar”, like a 80 kHz frequency that only bats can detect, indicates that the human has been limited (or limited itself) in perceptive and affective evolution by our reductionist tendencies (fight versus flight, friend or foe, fuck versus kill, etc.). Objects are not inanimate. ‘The objects are not what they seem.’ Returning to the vessel, this object has —not surprisingly— carried us through history. Because humanity’s focus has been on labor and war, the objects that are used to ease said bloody tasks garnered more protagonism. Le Guin pleas: “We’ve heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks, spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news”[46]. The seeming passivity of vessels, the fact that they ‘simply hold something’, is precisely the origin of their belittlement and undermining. History is fraught with stories of violent, penetrative actions while the passions (understood as acts that are considered passive) have had no representation or have taken a second tier; e.g. Penelope, the co-star to Odysseus, who ‘passively’ weaves away a tapestry (‘passively’ in the sense that the narrative focus is not on her or her weaving) to abstain from sex and remain faithful to her ‘active’ husband who had been fighting in the Trojan War[47]. ‘While she ‘doesn’t’, he ‘does’.’ ‘While the vase ‘doesn’t’, the ax ‘does’.’ Not only has history been told by the victors, but it has emphasized and favored some participating subjects over others. Continuing with the thread of Greek mythology, many of these sacred epics of ‘active’ heroism were passed down or made reference to via red or black figure painted amphoras and vases. Yet, these stories were painted on the surface of these vessels, the ‘active’ visual layer, the protagonist’s spotlit stage. But then there is the inside of th
*e vase, where the eye doesn’t immediately reach. This hidden interior, where liquids, solids and gasses dwelled and nested, was fervently fomenting and fermenting and incubating and regenerating. It was the wine fermented and transported in these vessels that consoled the warriors, the olives and meats that fueled them and the water that kept them alive. This very sentiment extends throughout humanity, from the Yuchanyan caves in China, to the Minoan culture in Crete, from the Mayans in pre-colonial Americas, to Sotogahama in Japan, from Ounjougou in West Africa, to the Lapita culture in Oceania: vessels have enabled subsistence. Despite the isolation between these aforementioned Neolithic cultures across the globe, the practice of creating vessels was a conclusion that humans naturally came to without having to influence one another. Yet the emphatically prized tool, deemed superior because of its immediate ‘active’, violent effects, has distracted our perception. It is time for the vessel to be caressed by our gaze. 
*
*All objects, vessels, bodies, minerals, gasses and liquids orbit an affective web of interrelationality. We subsist because of each other, around each other, within each other. That which is strange, unconsidered, unsung, forgotten, brushed off, accused of inanimacy, inferiority, subject to servitude and lower labor status all share a queerness. Even the very word ‘vassal’, a subordinate subject of a lord, king or ruling state, finds similar etymological roots in Latin as ‘vessel’; lexically indicative of their low-tier position in human history. For this very motive, I contend that discrimination is strongly rooted in reductionist tendencies, atrophic perspectives, mono-sourced references and affective blindness. To close, I’d like to introduce two quotes, the first from Merleau-Ponty and the second, a poetic winding of a quote from Le Guin:
*
*“Social space [acquires] a magnetic field, and a region of the exploited is seen to appear. At every pressure felt from any quarter of the social horizon, the process of regrouping becomes clearly discernible beyond ideologies and various occupations. Class is coming into being, and we say that a situation is revolutionary when the connection objectively existing between the sections of the proletariat (the connection, that is, which an absolute observer would recognize as so existing) is finally experienced in perception as a common obstacle to the existence of each and every one”[48].
*
*___________
*
:P
*“Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that's what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all…That’s right, they said. What you are is a {vessel}. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of {Tool} the Hero.”
*“Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that's what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all…That’s right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero.” {original text}[49]
*If we locate and layer together the commonalities of the plights and struggles of biological, non-biological and mystic life, a fertile revolution will be birthed. If we are able to “turn our heads heads elsewhere”, in the words of Björk, and affectively negotiate through renewed approaches to our neighbors (especially those we previously rejected as neighbors), can we get closer to abolishing discrimination and violence[50]? Can the recognition of the vessel, can the dissident body, can the unsung heroin, push us forward towards a more empathetic, consciously symbiotic world?