----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
As I opened my facebook today I saw a post from Che Gossett, whose
trans*activism and archival research, mediated in part through their facebook
feed is an inspiring and constant source of engagement/entanglement with the
Black Radical tradition; they posted this last night: "there's a way in which
animal studies reflections on animal suffering make legible and intelligible
and empathizable the zero degree of unimaginable suffering that is never
acknowledged or thought of when it comes to Black suffering.”
I’d like to try to knot this to Margaretha’s question about what it means to
make a radical eco aesthetics, with Randall’s “radicle” (having roots) and
Valentine’s becoming with edaphon, and her demanding question about "how we
live in myriad relations without losing our shit.” Shit, soil, pain, trauma,
slavery, capitalism, neoliberalism, colonialism, fossil fuel economy, and
plastic in our water. Hurricane Maria and half of Puerto Rico’s population (at
least 1.5 million people) without water, even if it does have plastic in it.
Trees ripped out of the soil, a beach named after dead dogs where all the
rescued satos died, and a nearby Monkey island where Macaques survived.
Incommensurate pains, incommensurate traumas, a struggle to translate disparate
affects across a myriad of diversity in bodies and places and times in a myriad
of ways that makes it impossible not to lose your shit. I try to remember that
this is not just now. I try to remember that we are not in a teleological
movement towards an end, that the past and the present and the future collide
and entangle and knot together, and I remember reading about Cortázar and his
men and how surprised they were when upon making contact with the multitudes of
deer in Abya Yala they thought them to be stupid because they did not flee, for
the deer had not yet learned to fear Man; Man who is different than the
indigenous societies who lived with and ate the flesh of these creatures, for
Man, the Man of rational Enlightenment thought, the Man identified by Sylvia
Wynter, Man whose superiority would wage a war of contagion, whose extractive
logic would prey upon the land, upon the radicle, upon the ephedra and its
creatures, creatures who are different than humans, creatures who are not the
same as the anthropos. And I receive a flash from an indio, from a healer whose
videos my partner watches on youtube, who teaches viewers to eat dirt from
different sites to stay healthy, just a little sprinkle of dirt in my mouth for
my micro biome, and for my ancestors, for the eight to twelve souls that Mohan
Rai explained were there in my body, not one, not two, eight to twelve, but
sometimes one or two get lost, and you feel it, you feel sick, and you have to
call them back. He and Parvati Rai and Donaxing showed me how. Did you know
there are tecnological sensors that find mass graves in the dirt, they can map
bodies in the earth with light and translate it into color? Will a device one
day claim to map the unimaginable pain, of and in Black, that Che brings from
the universe and onto my computer? I hope I will be able to grind it with a
mortar and pestle, I hope I will be able to place it under my tongue, I hope
that it will download to that code that we have not yet discovered, that most
of us mistakenly call DNA, that we believe we carry somewhere in our shell or
our bone, to transmit for the next generation, for those who survive, for the
Macaques and the others who will know how to weather the storm.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2017/09/half_of_puerto_rico_doesn_t_have_clean_drinking_water.html
<http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/climate_desk/2017/09/half_of_puerto_rico_doesn_t_have_clean_drinking_water.html>
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/06/plastic-fibres-found-tap-water-around-world-study-reveals
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/06/plastic-fibres-found-tap-water-around-world-study-reveals>
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4931174/No-dogs-Puerto-Rico-s-Dead-Dog-Beach-survived-storm.html
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4931174/No-dogs-Puerto-Rico-s-Dead-Dog-Beach-survived-storm.html>
http://discovermagazine.com/2015/oct/14-body-of-evidence
<http://discovermagazine.com/2015/oct/14-body-of-evidence>
> On Oct 4, 2017, at 8:31 AM, margaretha haughwout
> <margaretha.anne.haughw...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hi all,
>
> I am posting this for Randall, while we try and sort why his emails aren't
> coming through:
>
>
> Hello all. I am looking forward to speaking with, and alongside, everyone. I
> hope to think a bit about each of the separate concepts in this week's title:
> Radical Aesthetics, EcoAesthetic Systems and Entanglements. This message will
> focus on the first concept with the other concepts to follow unless the
> conversation takes us elsewhere!
>
>
> RADICAL AESTHETICS:
> Radical is not a word I have much to do with, except in its Latinate origin
> (having roots). So, I take it quite literally when asked to think about
> radical aesthetics. But it might better capture my sense of things to say
> "radicle aesthetics." In contemporary art, what passes for "radical" is too
> often built on sand, not soil and thus is not amenable to truly radical
> (radicle) life.
>
> In introducing me, Margaretha mentioned another particular word usage that I
> have found useful - terroir. That is a term many of you may recognize from
> wine making, which refers to the total environmental influence on multiple
> facets of a wine's characteristics. I take up the term as a political stance,
> as a terroirist. In the Capitalocene, I would argue that to embrace locality
> and to reject the cosmopolitan art system (or the broader global habitus for
> meaning making) makes one subject to accusations that make such a term
> resonate with its obvious (near) homophone. I would further argue that just
> as we live in specific watersheds, and foodsheds, we also live in specific
> noösheds. This fact, necessitates a radicle (radical) re-thinking of
> aesthetics.
>
> Thus, Liberalism’s (or "art making wholly tied to neoliberalism" as mentioned
> in the intro) obsession with institutionalizing, economizing, and
> professionalizing every sphere of human endeavor leaves us out of love’s
> reach. We need human scale, affectionate practices that generate enchantment,
> and numinous experience.The liberal project is a dead end (or Entzauberung).
>
> Ronald Osborn (quoting Wendell Berry):
> “Our politics and science have never mastered the fact that people need more
> than to **understand** their obligation to one another and the earth; they
> need also the **feeling** of such obligation, and the feeling can come only
> within the patterns of familiarity.”
>
> The affection and skill necessary to prevent the depletion of top-soil, for
> example, only arises through intimate knowledge of and devotion to a concrete
> locality and its supporting natural and human relationships. There simply are
> no technical or global solutions to the crisis of soil loss brought on by
> extractive chemical and machine-based farming methods. What are needed are
> cultural solutions that take diverse local forms and emerge as a deeply
> rooted and affectionate responsiveness to place.
>
> “When one works beyond the reach of one’s love for the place one is working
> in and for the things and creatures one is working with and among, then
> destruction inevitably results,” Berry writes. “An adequate local culture,
> among other things, keeps work within the reach of love.”
>
> Attempts at definition:
>
> noöshed - an area of land in which ideas are formed and (eventually) collect
> into larger flows of ideas forming yet larger noösheds.
>
> terroirist - proponent and defender of one's noöshed, but also an advocate
> for reinhabitation of one's place, resisting globalization.
>
> - Randall
>
>
> --
> beforebefore.net <http://beforebefore.net/>
> guerrillagrafters.org <http://guerrillagrafters.org/>
> coastalreadinggroup.com <http://coastalreadinggroup.com/>
> --
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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