Disorienting the Threshold: Interface, Nonbinary Theorizing and Fictionalized Performance
By
Hannah Holtzclaw BA, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON 2016
Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Communications
In the School of Communication Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology
© HANNAH HOLTZCLAW 2020 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY FALL 2020
Copyright in this work rests with the author. Please ensure that any reproduction or re-use is done in accordance with the relevant national copyright legislation. Declaration of Committee
Name: Hannah Holtzclaw Degree: Master of Communication Thesis title: Disorienting the Threshold: Interface, Nonbinary theorizing and fictionalized performance Committee: Chair: Cait McKinney Assistant Professor, School of Communication Frederik Lesage Supervisor Associate Professor, School of Communication
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Committee Member Professor and CRC 150 in New Media, School of Communication
Vanessa de Olivera Andreotti External Examiner Professor and CRC in Race, Inequalities and Global Change, UBC Educational Studies
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University An Invitation | Hannah Holtzclaw
This is not a MA thesis, but an MA offering
Interface as a set of cognitive relations or process, is deeply performative. As a set of phenomenological, material-discursive entanglements with the world, interface is an experience which grips us, both body and mind. This project has at once, concerned itself with the kind of extension our current interface mythologies afford, and how we ought to dwell, do, teach, learn, be through this space. As filters for knowledge, interface have the ability to expand or contract our understandings of the world. In its contemporary colonial form, interface prefigures agency through an illusion of control, that in the wake of global pandemics, rising sea levels, polarized publics, and pollutant information landscapes, is ruptured. So accustomed to its prefigured plans and narratives, this sudden disjointedness from a cultural and existential center provides an unprecedented ontological opening. This project offers a lensing of how we might reorient ourselves toward knowledge, to expand our capacity for care, understanding and personal, political and environmental relations, by engaging the space in-between, the rupture. Through the offerings of pre- and decolonial, indigenous, nonbinary, and non-western philosophy and thought this project has sought to lay out a decolonial engagement with the colonial wound. Through the fictional aesthetic of Gloria Anzaldúa’s reading of the Aztec myth Coyolxāuhqui and her seven stages of conocimiento, I confront the resonances of ego conquiro within myself through creative writing practice— through fiction and poetics as method. I engage the body, lived experience—to interface something like, decoloniality within academic research practice. I begin from the position that in order to decolonize interface, be it screen or institutionalized practice, begins with decolonizing identity: it begins with recognizing the colonizer harbored within ourselves.
By incorporating story from indigenous, queer, and other non binary writers and scholars, into this work, I also seek to trouble the authority typically afforded to academic authorship. All of my words have been shaped by the voices I incorporate here and have shed light on the concepts I seek to engage in this project. Rather than presenting an individual narrative, severed from their influence, I offer them in their original forms, alongside my own fictionalized practice, inviting you to share in the experience, the sight, their perspectives have provided my own. My intent is to offer you a similar opportunity; to find yourself within whatever patterns take shape in accordance with the text and your own process of self-actualization.
Hence, this is not an abstract, but an invitation. To step into or encounter a different kind of research practice. One that troubles boundaries, colonial regimes of authority, and walks-asking: what are we resisting? What must we confront or let go; what fear, pain and grief must we pass through—in order to become more accountable to our settler-colonial inheritance? And how might the language for creativity offer us a language for healing, for rising?
*The Blackfish Rising fictions and applied creative methods portion of this work is presented in non-linear format and publicly accessible through embedded external links in the Navigation Diagram and the README.TXT—hosted and drafted on my website. Please review both before you begin and visit the stories on the site for a comprehensive reading of this project. See the appendix for a complete list of externally linked content.
URL for Fictions: http://hannah- holtzclaw.squarespace.com/research/readmetxt
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University Gratitude | Hannah Holtzclaw Thank you:
All of this work was marked by indigenous Lakota leadership at Standing Rock, Oceti Sakowin Camp in November of 2016. One of the criticisms that is often, rightfully, expressed with regards to allies of indigenous led (and other BIPOC) movements, and in particular echoed during my experience at Standing Rock is the lack of sustained, informed, and accountable participation and support. It is all too easy for settler or non-indigenous persons to show up for an action divorced from the context of struggle with which they are supporting. Outraged but often ignorant, leadership heeded at multiple daily meetings to visitors: be mindful of your ability to leave and forget all about what is happening here. You will leave the camp and return to your home, to running water and electricity; to daily routines and home environments clean of disturbance or threats of violence and incarceration; you will go back to ‘normal’ life largely unimpacted by the reverberating effects of the encampment. Indigenous peoples at the camp have no such luxury. They are beholden to the fallout of these efforts, in whatever form it might take, and only they will be held responsible. So act accordingly, become accountable to this difference, take what you learn home with you to your communities.
Conducting this research on Coast Salish territory is a privilege and a responsibility. As a graduate student I need to be accountable to this space and a settler cultural inheritance. So. This is my direct action. I am here to bring this home. My time here will not be wasted perpetuating colonial standards and agendas but working to dismantle them: my efforts here at SFU have always been marked by commitments to community and solidarity1--in finding a way to honor and live the lessons Oceti Sakowin offered me. May I continue to walk-asking, in the pursuit of justice and dignity, in the name of good, in the fight for equality, self- determination, and just shared world relations. This project would have been 0% possible without the mentorship of my committee: Frédérik Lesage: thank you for continuously creating the space for me to flourish. You are an exceptional educator that I feel beyond privileged to have worked with. Your mentorship has been nothing short of transformative. You are the kind of educator who elevates and alters the caliber of academic institutions. It has truly been a pleasure and a gift to work with you. Thank you for every bit of your time and
1 Tiger Swan, the ETP contracted mercenary group hired to carry out military-style counterterrorism measures was quoted as reporting of the Water Protector movement: “we can expect to see a continued spread of anti-DAPL diaspora” (Estes, 2017, p198), and indeed, Nepantleras, we are the beginning. Standing Rock catalyzed a generation of activists and solidarity movements against colonial governments, it “changed the conversation about Indigenous- specific issues, [and] also forged a broad alliance that is poised to have tremendous impact on a wide spectrum of contemporary fights for social justice in the Americas.” (Estes, 2017, p175)
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University Gratitude | Hannah Holtzclaw guidance—and for all your votes of confidence when I was “disoriented” and uncertain. It has made all the difference. Additionally, this work has been greatly impacted by work conducted with the Digital Democracies Group and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: I am so very grateful for the opportunity to engage in meaningful and vitally important research provided by the DDI and Wendy Chun. It has been inspiring, empowering, and life changing work that I can only hope to continue to carry forward into my own career and community. Wendy: You are catalyzing an entirely different generation of scholars and researchers, and indeed, critical paradigm of thought. Working with you has been an honor and a privilege—thank you. I have gratitude for the encouragement and support of: my late grandmother, my mother and my sister. You live in every word that fills these pages. Here is to legacies of women: mothers, daughters, sisters. Dr. Michael Forman May this be a testament to your foresight and judgement, my friend. Thank you for your confidence, your mentorship and encouragement. My friendships Tiara Dole Hoppes, Kory Hoppes, Narem and Levon Karakayoun, Kurstin Stowe, Stephanie Mehr-Hickson, Mike Moral, Isabel Gentili, Asura Enkhbayar, Véronique Émond Sioufi, Matt Canute, Zora Feren, Kim O’Donnell, Sofia Han, Julia Scott Lenz, Carina Albrecht, Kenji Johnson, Taha Keyvani, Peter Zurrbier, and Facu. & Jackson Whose companionship and adamant snout have been the sole reason I survived any of this. And lastly to my nepantla generation: My family, my peers, my kin We are the way forward. We are what we are yearning for, and “what they lack in courage, we must have in conviction2”, so, Nepantleras, let us begin.
2 From, Janaya Future Khan, Sunday Sermon’s with family 10/5/2020: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CF7zH55hpBb/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University THE Navigation Diagram: MEDITATION FEVER AN Upper right: Thesis Chapters OFFERING Central nodes: Primary thread Small nodes: Articles THE Large nodes: Subtext WOUND Blackfish: Spirit, Nepantlera, Guide interface
RITUALS FOR HEALING
README.TXT
MANIC NOT MILLIENNIAL(Z) A WOMAN BLACKFISH BUT A SHAMAN RISING
FLIGHT of the PORTUGUESE BULLETHEAD SPARROW
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University List of Figures
Figure 1.1. Bullethead: Blackfish Rising Fictions ...... 2Error! Bookmark not defined. Figure 1.2. Bullethead: Blackfish Rising Fictions ...... 37 Figure 1.3. Bullethead: Blackfish Rising Fictions ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Figure 2.1. Not a Woman but a Shaman...... 53 Figure 2.2. Not a Woman but a Shaman...... 61 Figure 2.3. Not a Woman but a Shaman...... 67 Figure 3.1 Subtext on Gender in Bullethead ...... 77 Figure 3.2 Manic Millennial(Z) ...... 86 Figure 3.3 Not a Woman but a Shaman ...... 100 Figure 3.4 Readme.txt ...... 106 Figure 3.5 Blackfish Rising ...... 107 Figure 3.6 Manic Millennial(Z) ...... 107 Figure 3.7 Bullethead ...... 108 Figure 3.8 Flight of the Portuguese Sparrow ...... 109 Figure 3.9 Not a Woman but a Shaman ...... 110
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University Acknowledgment & Foreword | Hannah Holtzclaw An Acknowledgment;
I foreword
I want to begin by centering both bodily and intellectual presence within the space this text was written. This work took place on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh (Squamish), sq̓ əc̓ iy̓ aɁɬ təməxʷ (Katzie), kʷikʷəƛ̓ əm (Kwikwetlem), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), qiqéyt (Qayqayt), Semiahmoo, and sc̓ əwaθən (Tsawwassen) nations. As a settler who over the last 3 years has been deeply cared for by this land, who was loved on in times of need by the trees, the mountains, the waters; in ways that leave me at a loss for words, to these nations, to these peoples, I want to express not only my gratitude but my love for you. As defenders of the land indigenous leadership and indigenous youth across turtle island have continued to hold the line against colonial regimes of power, greed and environmental destruction. We as students, faculty, researchers, staff, of a colonial institution atop stolen land, as purveyors of knowledge and scientific practice; that has been leveraged to justify things like biological racism and sexism, dispossession, residential schools, and segregation, and as occupants of a position of extreme privilege and power: we must become accountable to this violence. We are not absolved from the wrongdoings of these pursuits. Its our job to dismantle the regimes that perpetuate them. We need to show up for the communities we share this space with. We need to show up for future generations and for our collective health. Land acknowledgements are not an excuse to disengage our bodies from this space, but a call to bring ourselves into it.
To honor it. To become intimate with the ways indigenous sovereignty also means a commitment to indigenous knowledge, indigenous culture and indigenous futures. It means we work the insights of this knowledge, and the responsibility to this colonial inheritance into our practices. It means we no longer relegate black and indigenous knowledge into niches in the academy, segregated under the veil of specialization, distanced and disassociated from the moral center of its praxis. But rather rigorously and honorably engage with the implications of these insights for reality and embodied practice. Because the thing is, the culture here destroys you. The hierarchal structure of the academy has its reasons, but it comes with a certain dehumanization and violence: a pitting of humans needs against competitive structures of productivity, precarity, and scarcity. The bodily dispositions and postures it fosters are cognitively and emotionally limiting. If we don’t recognize this culture
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University Acknowledgment & Foreword | Hannah Holtzclaw
as a by product of its colonial underpinnings even changes to curriculum content won’t fully resolve its violence. Because you see, this habit inscribes colonial relations upon everything. One of the main II experiences that came with graduate school was depression. Was complete and utter mental and emotional depletion. We can explain this away as a symptom of capitalism, but this dismissal, this denial of our experience as students as suffering emotionally, economically, physically and spiritually under the demands of academic culture is just another means of evading responsibility and endorsing coloniality’s formatting of modern education, identity and relations. It is just another means of silencing oppression. This culture reproduces and extends the estrangement of those most oppressed by this system and teaches us to embody its principles. Its conditioning breathing at the backs of our necks, it renders our peers as competition, and filters our learning through a politics of possession. All around us we recognize the repercussions of colonial logic, and we do everything we can as young people to push back, to not buckle beneath its pressure, to not adopt its practices. But we are drowning, suffocating in all of the ways we have been forced to swallow it. Our inheritance: a 400 year daddy fueled massacre; a legacy of violence, destruction, and domination. its original trauma made again and again and again across the world until we've basically destroyed all we hold most in common; till we've destroyed the very humanity within ourselves. So we must ask ourselves, in all our acknowledgement and paternal gesturing; in all our avoidance of our own internalized colonial ills: how have we come to foreclose, to impose limits on our own capacity for empathy, for love, for knowledge? For giving and caring for each other and ourselves. The reality is we all need to sit within this moment and allow its ugliness and trauma to stretch us beyond what is comfortable. We have to do things we have been told we cannot do or influenced, coerced, or forced to set aside or neglect. We have to leave behind ways of life, ways of learning that are harm inducing and destructive to our collective health. We have to sit with the discomfort we have trained ourselves to avoid, resist or suppress. Because, a significant amount of the work we need to do as settlers rests on our capacity to become intimate with the harm we do. Because this isn’t some external imposition of force isolated within the power of the state, the colonial habit is deeply personal. This harm is one done to ourselves and at the detriment of our potential. And the truth is in its current organization, the university is in no way
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University Acknowledgment & Foreword | Hannah Holtzclaw
shape or form hospitable to processing this shared cultural trauma—and we have centuries worth of work to do. It won’t happen if we continue to foster environments that are incompatible with the contours of III human experience. It won’t happen if we don’t create spaces for working through, not around, this kind if existential grief and pain. to deny the urgency of this need, to insist on suppressing or cementing over it, will only result in the continuation of violence and the extension of patterns of harm. Institutional orthodoxy is premised on whiteness. It is premised on colonialism. Our identities and our society are interfaced by this history at every level. And its privileges are nothing if not violently naïve about the illusion of things like safety or security and destructive in what relations it endorses and upholds by design. And history is calling on us to know each other differently. To be differently. The colonial interface is not inevitable, we can dismantle it. But in order to understand ourselves as the interface for change, we must first begin to cultivate creative practices for bringing the world and others, into our-self. This means a return to bodies and the human condition. This means becoming intimate with resonances of ego conquiro within ourselves and developing robust practices for reprogramming its postures and dispositions. So, I have very much been looking forward to sharing this with you, as rather than speak about or at this call, this project has sought to be this work, to practice it. Our orientations toward knowledge and knowledge making, that which interfaces our experience within the world; which “bends time and illusions of self”; the visceral and yet imperceptible; the invisibly visible, but felt—is where and how we begin, to verse, to move, to learn, to do and be differently. This project has concerned itself with the way representational politics bracket away experiences of difference and de-couple epistemology, how we know, from ontology, what we do and practice. It has concerned itself with the relationship between form and content. The space in between processes and people, of enactment. One of the things I hope this offering provides, is a means of critically and creatively becoming accountable to our colonial inheritance. Our ability to position and understand ourselves, within this system is the first step to healing and discontinuing practices within the institution that extend its violence. We harbor and enact the colonial habit. We live inside its narrative. Its resonances mark our being; our bodies; our minds. it pollutes and delimits who we think we are; and what kinds of world we can see, enact and imagine. So, this project has walked-asking: what are we resisting? And what limitations are these resistances imposing? What must we confront or let go; what fear, pain and grief must we pass through—in order to become more accountable to our settler-colonial inheritance? How do we begin to interface something like decoloniality? And how might the language for creativity offer us a language for healing, for reconfiguring horizons, for expanding our relations and our imaginations, for rising?
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University Acknowledgment & Foreword | Hannah Holtzclaw
I took a lot of risks with this project. It is my hope that I mediated these risks with enough care, humility, and love throughout. I hold myself open, ready to bear the responsibility of these risks because it is necessary; because change demands risk and growth can be deeply uncomfortable. And, because being a human in the society we live in is complicated. Its unsettling and IV destabilizing because we have reached this point in our technological development where we can no longer obscure the fallacy of singular historical narratives, we can point and wail and rage over the violences of inequality, greed, and production. But when the infrastructures and imaginaries we are implicated in enforce this logic against our will through obscured automated processes, we hardly recognize ourselves as enacting them. This was really what drew me to the concept of interface and the notion of performativity or enactment. Because of the ways I could feel interface reaching into myself and reformatting everyday life in ways that were deeply unsettling and discomforting. So, this project began from an interest in how we might design interface, access and translate information; communicate differently. If interface technologies are premised on a colonial imaginary that is polarizing, violent and oppressive—if they format and reproduce this by design, what other imaginaries or aesthetics ought we turn to disrupt or deposition its narrative. More fundamentally, if we are to understand ourselves as implicated by coloniality, as coerced into its performance, what can we learn from the ways of being, the experiences of difference, that coloniality denies or absents. Disorienting the Threshold, Diffracting Difference This project became concerned with how we address the harm of the colonial habit as settlers through several concepts that produce relations more hospitable to decolonial relations of difference. My methods for exploring: a theory of disorientation provided by queer phenomenology and the notion of diffracted difference provided by quantum theories of entanglement. So, the work of Sarah Ahmed (2006) and Karen Barad respectively (2007).
Disorientation is super interesting because we tend to be averse to it. It frustrates and rattles us. Shakes and ruptures our routine, sense of direction. Certainly, we can all relate to the ways COVID-19 has had this affect on us. The way it has stripped us of senses of normalcy and produced a sort of gaping unknown that we all have had to contend with. But its also offered us a moment of pause and stillness. To think through what we habitually participate in. the combination of these effects has caused many of us to look down for the first time to realize the ground we thought was there never really existed. I think this is why we’re also seeing this sort of uptick in conspiracy or new religion. Desperate to reground, for meaning, for a story, for something we can attach ourselves to. We have sort of come to this edge of knowing, edge of a world that we were pretty sure was all there was to exist within, and so we reach back out for it out of habit. But safety and security are only an illusion. There was never ground. That was a fiction. Just a habit. Not definitive rules or positions. To live is to change, not remain the same.
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University Acknowledgment & Foreword | Hannah Holtzclaw
So, the discomfort we have felt, is disorientation. Is a kind of suspendedness. And as we have seen, disorientation can produce both freedom and madness. Disorientation in this sense also allows us to let go of control and be present. To reject the violence, the impositions of reality that V once dictated our presence. What this work showed me, was that disorientation when interfaced through creative practices, is a perspective shift that invites curiosity and allows us to not only see reality differently, but enact upon it in ways we wouldn’t otherwise, to ask questions; fumble into the darker more obscure corners of our minds, stretching our hands along the walls of our consciousness. It teaches us to hold ourselves open to sensation, positive and negative. It fine tunes our senses. Disorientation when didactively engaged and sustained through something like fictionalized performance or writing practice, helps us pick up on the resonances we miss when we are habituated into “normative” currents of colonial inertia. And diffraction? Diffraction is about affectedness. We can conceptualize this through a sense of the body as containing an infinite and every- changing degree of difference. This difference is connected to your inherited position or orientation within social reality but is also enacted through your everyday behaviors and daily exchanges and habits. We affect upon the world from the second we wake up every day. This can be understood in one sense from things like our consumer choices, but more pointedly and profoundly I like to position this as how we move through, encounter, and enact upon the world everyday. So, whether we smile at our bus driver or rush into the office meeting breathless; whether we shared a laugh with the barista who made our coffee or remained immersed, during the transaction, in our own thoughts and head. How we choose to greet or not greet strangers we pass during our commute, how we receive or don’t receive others as we move through space are all quantum levels of affection that shape and dictate how we experience the world. As you move through space your difference, diffracts upon the world. You affect everything and likewise all else affects upon you differentially. So, diffraction is about the entangled and relational patterns of difference, it is about interconnected affectedness. It figures the self as a multiplicity. It positions us as actors within a shared ecosystem as already shot through with each other through our necessary interdependence. When we understand subjectivity, ourselves, being human, as being necessarily accountable to the entangled materializations in the world we are apart of this helps us begin to unlearn and reconfigure out position within colonial systems. As well as, understand the implications of whether we do or don’t do in-difference. Its about reciprocity and accountability in ever changing contexts and conditions. The colonial matrix of power is only able to understand large scale differences, to reduce complexity. But we are so much more than this. Infinitely more. When we find concerted kinds of affectedness we facilitate form, habit1. So, diffraction is our own bodily performance as we
1 What I describe in not a woman but a shaman as a wave or historical conditions.
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University Acknowledgment & Foreword | Hannah Holtzclaw
move through space and the ways it resonates or imposes, opens or delimits space for ourselves and others. It is always reciprocal; the fundamental act of giving to one another we are perpetually implicated in. How we orient ourselves to each other and the world dictates our individual and collective identity formation; as we mark the world, the world marks us. VI I applied diffraction and disorientation through fiction. One of the things fiction allowed me to do was to make the link between what interface systems do and what kinds of logic and values are embedded within them. But also, it brought a means of bringing the world, the experiences of difference, into myself. A means of enacting diffractedness. As a settler and a white person, I do not and will not ever have a full understanding of the depths of coloniality’s violence and harm because my body does not carry those memories or encounter the world through that experience of difference. So, I cannot and will not speak from or for that experience. But reading and writing literature and story that puts us in the position of those most oppressed and affected by colonial systems de-orients us from reality in way that is educatively valuable: it takes us up out of our habituated positions and privilege to help us develop adequate understandings of the social world we live in; it better equips us to relate to, work with, and support one another; to become accountable to the marks we leave upon matter and each other. It helps us develop plural ways of being and relating within the world that can expand our capacity to feel; to imagine; to understand our-self and the ways our liberation and future worlds, is tied up and within each other. I chose autofiction due to the way interface of the 21st century proliferate and manipulate the self through emotionally charged and deeply personal network and data practices. Social media requires us, willingly and unknowingly, to write-ourselves into these digital spaces, this expression or gesture of life-writing, is predetermined and formatted for us. We subject ourselves, against our better interests, to the embodied effects of “living” within these digital spaces. Formatted as human capital within interface, we are measured, modulated, segregated, enraged, captured, “normalized” and “cleaned”, sold, and redistributed once again. This process habituates our bodies to act in accordance with the screen’s demands, to think in accordance with its hierarchy of principles. Autofiction allows me to both grapple with the internalized effects of this interface process, as well as, take back authorship, reformat and reconfigure—rewrite, this experience. Additionally, everything about life systems on earth tells us that we demand a set of relations much more complex than what is offered by current colonial or imperial fictions. So, in this sense, for this project, fiction is only as good as the worlds it opens up, not reproduces. It because of this that, the narrative aesthetic I chose to work through for this is:
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University Acknowledgment & Foreword | Hannah Holtzclaw
Gloria Anzaldúa’s reading of the Aztec myth Coyolxāuhqui.
VII Anzaldúa’s work begins from the position that writing is a transformative process. It changes you. It grapples directly with space and identity. Anzaldúa meant for her work to provide as means for other women of color to give story to who they are within political structures and how they affect their bodies. Importantly, I draw on this model not to align my struggle with or appropriate Anzaldúa’s nor anyone else’s. But specifically, due to the way her frameworks and pedagogy also offer a means for me to contend with the resonances of ego conquiro within me, a means of contending with both individual and collective shadows as they present in my experience of difference. It allowed me to speak story; to touch others with the reality I was encountering which was, intimate, unsettling, disorienting and deeply didactive. Anzaldúa’s reading of Coyolxāuhqui, is ultimately about identity formation and transformation, about embracing change and creativity as fundamental. It performs diffraction, as ongoing stage of positioning and depositioning the self. This process is demanding, difficult, and never fully accomplished. So, I took these two concepts of disorientation and diffraction. and read them through an Anzaldúan autofiction, through the Coyolxāuhqui imperative or path of conocimiento Anzaldúa describes in her work in Light in the Dark. Anzaldúa asserts that the seven stages on the path of conocimiento are never fully completed but perpetually enacted. They also overlap and are often occur simultaneously. It is not a resolution but an iteratively unfolding space for healing and transforming. A process by which a dismembered body becomes re-membered. It is the rupture that destroys us, splinters reality and leaves us suspended above the pieces, but its also the act of creatively and intentionally putting those pieces back together. The Blackfish Rising fictions that accompany this text are reflections of the various stages of this Coyolxāuhqui imperative, this path to conocimiento.
This journey in the text is guided by what I’ve called the Blackfish rising. Because this process is not linear, stages of conocimiento are messy and overlapping back and forths of confronting shadows and imaginatively rewriting. The ability to stay open, to listen deeply, to move between forms and states, requires a certain acceptance of complexity and contradiction. An acceptance of change as both death and creation. Nepantlera’s understand that only by accepting ourselves as interface for change, as entangled relational movement and creative inertia, only then can we come into our power. Holding space in this transition, this threshold is difficult. Its rattling. Its uncomfortable. But accepting the complexity, understanding the necessity of companions, of support, of a sense of
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University Acknowledgment & Foreword | Hannah Holtzclaw
connectedness that helps us travel through these stages helps us to embrace the multiplicities we contain within ourselves. Blackfish in this text are just such threshold beings and spirits. They are the nepantlera’s or walkers between worlds ruptured and splayed out before us in stages one VIII and two of the path to conocimiento. Stage One is the rupture or arrebato, what depositions us out our habitual orientations in the world, jerks us out of the habit, explodes the template. Stage Two is la nepantla, the libidinal space where we are in-between who we were before we encountered this perspective, and what comes after. It’s the point with which we are staring down at our fractured bodies and culture, our splintered reality, but not yet called into action. Nepantla is an iterative state experienced in- between all stages, it is the most recurring state on the path of conocimiento. This is what I describe in Manic millennials: the disillusion and disorientation brought about by growing up amidst the contradiction of a globalized promise and threat, as nepantla youth. In particular it attempts to highlight the dynamics of a cognitive development marked by the emergence of the world wide web and internet mediated communication: the explosion of social relations and societal shifts interface ripped across the world; but also the ways we internalize the struggle against the invasion of our private worlds and reification of experience. It draws attention to how these changes stimulated a wave of global civil uprisings (led by youth and students) that indicate a persistent wailing, an intuitive yearning and reaching for a different kind of world. In Stage Three or Bullethead I move from nepantla to desconocimiento. The consciousness of darkness, the underworld, the depression, if nepantla is disorientation, desconocimientos is the regressive and self-preserving impulse to reground. It is the shadow beast within ourselves that lures or lulls us into isolatory feelings of guilt, shame, depression or despair, in order to avoid responsibility. But, shadows have things to teach us, discomfort is a message: poetics, creative enactment, teaches us how to be receptive. Bullethead is about contending with ignorance, shadows, fear, and the coloniality of selfhood and difference—in it’s close it is a highlighting of how myth both frees us and cages us. Subtext in this section unfolds contemplations on race, gender, and diffracted difference (where history= past/present/future). I weave stories of Mexican ancestors and friendships through the hardening of the Mexico/US border and US Imperialism through my experiences of the privileges and assimilatory demands of colonial whiteness. Stage Four and Five take place in Flight of the Portuguese Sparrow. This stage is the call to action; the experience the catalyzes transformation. Its also the stage where we start putting coyolxaughqui together. We don’t necessarily reconcile so much as reconfigure our relationality to knowledge. Here too, FPS is about deep, dark pain. The kind that makes us avoid eye contact. That’s hard for us to look at. That kind that is a result of complete annihilation of humanity, of giving. So deep it triggers our defense and fight or flight responses. We hide from this pain we
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University Acknowledgment & Foreword | Hannah Holtzclaw
see in others because to do so would also bear witness to the resonances of this pain within ourselves. FPS is also a meditation on the experience of change brought about by love in this context; and IX contending with the way coloniality impedes on all of our most intimate relationships and experiences, polluting and delimiting our capacity to care for and give to one another and ourselves. It centers the idea that coloniality perverts one of the most fundamental relations to being within and of the world: giving. Not a Woman but a Shaman is about becoming the bridge, healing, and developing languages for cultural regeneration and social change through returning to natural systems. It works to solidify a loose understanding of “our-self” or collective-identity through narratives that speak of trees, water, and waves. It is a meditation on recognizing ourselves as water, not the wave; or, understanding our natural capacity for love and transformation. Most importantly, it ties this state to our ability to recognize the significance of our own performances in the world and dreaming as a collective task we must engage in order to change. Stage 6 and 7 is this final story but also this entire work and the conversation and insights it offers those who encounter and engage with it. One of the outcomes of this project is how it has provided me a liberating relationship to language that is vitally necessary for both dismantling oppressive orientations and reviving and reconfiguring affectedness. It created the space for me to engage discomfort and better understand its resistances; and suggests we find equilibrium through motion, through enactment, through stepping into unknowns and embracing discomfort as a fundamental to relations of diffraction. This project suggests a literacy we are desperately in need of is one that returns us to the human condition; a radical pedagogy centered on critical intimacy and emotional intelligence; one that provides us a means of attending to existential poverty; to the rupture and to the transition. An offering, it was meant to be an experience with and through others: So, I hope you consider this an invitation, to step into the shadows; stay with the trouble; to reach through the wound to connect; to completely rupture and reconfigure your senses; May this offering help you too, identify ego conquiro’s resonances.
MA Offering 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 1 Prelude | Hannah Holtzclaw
CONTACT: I PRESS MY FINGERS AGAINST IT. FEEL THE COOL INDIFFERENCE. NOT QUITE FLEXIBILITY NOT QUITE RESISTANCE.
I SLIDE MY HAND ACROSS THE SURFACE, FEELING FOR CRACKS AND IMPERFECTIONS. ALIVE BENEATH MY PALM THIS SUPERFICIAL DISAFFECTION. OBSCURED FROM SENSATION, SAVED FROM INSURRECTION. YOU CAN LOOK BUT DON'T TOUCH, DON'T FEEL, WE HAVEN'T TIME FOR INTERCONNECTEDNESS.
IF I LAY MY HAND JUST RIGHT AGAINST THE WALLS OF EXPERIENCE, I CAN FEEL THE VIBRATIONS OF OTHERS, ARTIFICIALLY ESTRANGED AND DELETERIOUS. A FUNNY THING, THE WAYS WE ARE TAUGHT TO UNFEEL THE HUMAN IMPRINT. CAREFULLY ATOMIZED REALITY, MEDIATED EXISTENCE. I OVER OTHER, DETACHMENT'S PRECONDITION.
STANDING AT THE THRESHOLD, PRESSING AGAINST THE SURFACE. SEARCHING FOR CONTACT, RECIPROCAL PURPOSE. interface:
This research emerged from an interest in the way “interface” of the 21st century have come to structure communication and experience and how we might design interface, as a communication tool, differently. The problem with this framing, as I quickly learned, is that the interface I was concerned with is less a distinct object and more an assemblage of historical socio-technical processes.
The definitions of interface are twofold and force the term’s application into either abstract concepts of engagement or loosely described computational processes. As a noun, interface can be described as point of interaction between two or more, subjects, systems or groups; in computing, interface is a device or program, an effect, that allows for human-computer interaction. In the abstract interface is interaction, connection, translation, communication; or what some scholars have called an effect, process, or set of cognitive relations or aesthetic regimes (Bratton, 2015 p229; Drucker, 2014 p157-158; Galloway, 2012 p31-33)
Web applications like Facebook, news and information sites like Wikipedia, search engines like Google, and streaming content sites like YouTube or Spotify all deploy application programming interfaces (API’s) that are driven by software and hardware programming languages; algorithms, network principles and data classification systems; and HCI engineering and design protocols. Each of which house their own instances of interface within an application’s programmed purpose. In short, interface is never just a screen, it is always an enacted multi-textual and multi-
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 2 Prelude | Hannah Holtzclaw
authored phenomenon manifest by a multitude of social actors and interests at various points within experienced and obfuscated processes.
Interface also pervade and intrude upon us in less obvious ways, the structure of say, a research thesis, as well, is a form of interface. A process of translating information. The SFU institution, indeed the School of Communication, are each their own layer of interface, their own filter for knowledge. Identity too, is a knowledge filter. Where again interface proliferate, as the available modes of being and associative cultural objects and subjects within a society construct the parameters for identity and as such, for knowing.
Subsequently, much of what we do, how we communicate, read, see and experience our everyday realities has become increasingly mediated by ever abstracted systems of representation offered by various forms of interface technologies. Thus, interface act as powerful disclosing agents for collective knowledge and social relations. These technologies, be they material or discursive, are value laden and entangled with social and cultural programs of a given subject/world; projecting particular figurations of human subjectivity and ontological horizons. We live within and through these components. They habituate our bodies and demand particular performances of us for engagement.
Due to the way interface act as points of integration into larger more complex, socio-technic systems of society, who we are within these political structures become important sites for study and intervention. This research has unfolded alongside what some have called unprecedented or ‘biblical’ cultural and global developments. The United States 2016 election, the UK’s abrupt exit from the European Union, the rise of extremist political groups, ever advancing environmental catastrophes, a resurgence of identity politics, ongoing protests for environmental and racial injustice, and a global pandemic have all occurred during the course of this project. Likewise, an explosion of scholarly interest and critique emerged in reference to the internet and its subsequent role in the aforementioned socio-political ruptures.
Rigorous analysis have been made with regards to the way the data and network practices that underlie internet experience exacerbate inequalities and oppression by the contributions of Safiya Umoja Noble (2018), Virgina Eubanks (2018), Ruha Benjamin (2019) danah boyd and Kim Crawford (2012), and Cathy O’Neil (2017); as well, Nick Srnicek (2016), Tarleton Gillespie
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 3 Prelude | Hannah Holtzclaw
(2018), Taina Bucher (2018), and Sarah T Roberts (2019) have all pointed to the power of platform technologies to alter (and impede) public discourse and cultural production. Scholars like Angela Nagle (2017), Yochai Benkler (2018), Rebecca Lewis (2018), Whitney Phillips (2018) and Siva Vaidhyanathan (2018) have shown how this media landscape has been coopted by political extremists and undermined democracy. All of this work manifest within the whirlwind of the last 4 years, has rightfully and crucially highlighted how the libertarian dreams of Silicon Valley, have produced a spiralling socio-political nightmare.
This project builds off these insights collectively and departs from their constructivist and deconstructivist approaches, as well as, moves away from scholarly tendencies to map, dissect, critique or pathologize, the effects of interface technologies. While these insights and approaches are vitally important, if we are to learn anything from our contemporary moment, it is that what is being demanded of us is a dynamic and profound shift that cannot be grappled with by the adjustment of mere methodological or epistemological standpoints; not by way of mere inclusions of additional “data”; through solely the inclusion of female, queer or Black and Indigenous voices—for they have always already been present and wailing. Crucially, this work recognizes that though biblical times for some, for others with arguably longer living relations and ancestral memory, the apocalypse has long already been upon us. Life has already been, for upwards of 6 centuries, a living death. Thus, this project asserts that what is being demanded of us is a fundamental shift in how we orient ourselves toward knowledge and knowledge-making in light of, indeed, in motion with, these voices. Read: the problem before us isn’t one of information, but ontology.
Interface blurs the lines of reality, imposing particular configurations of human subjectivity and agency, and warping our sense of collectivity and interconnectedness. To study such a phenomenon outside of it, is to disengage from and under examine these lived and embodied effects completely. Nobody exists outside of the effects of globally networked society; indeed, we encounter and live out its repercussions daily. Thus, from the outset, this project has concerned itself with just this gap in research. Committing to a certain refusal to separate theory from practice, and most certainly a refusal to separate identity from scholarship, it instead engages practices of thinking with and from within imaginaries antithetical to representational models: namely, through nonbinary theorizing and decolonial commitments.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 4 Prelude | Hannah Holtzclaw
First, drawing on the work of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2008, 2011, 2017, 2021), Tara McPherson (2018), Ruha Benjamin (2019), Simone Browne (2015), Virginia Eubanks (2018), Sharene Razack (2015), Ariella Azoulay (2019) and Karen Barad (2007) in The Fever: Mirrors, Maps, and Sameness: The Representational Model, it shows how the development of computational systems has emerged out of a liberal representationalist model of thought, predicated on a master/slave dynamic that subjugates difference and is dependent upon segregated and discriminatory practices mimetic, in theory and practice, to colonial regimes of imperiality and gendered and racialized Otherness. Such deep roots within a colonial system of knowledge and habit of being reveal how mirrors, maps, and sameness, baked in processes by which we come to understand our world and each-other, are the by-product of “New World” agendas that relegate (and as such, depoliticizes) present/future violence to the past and foreclose our ability to respond to our historical inheritance.
The violence and destruction of the rigid ubiquity of such “universal” systems plagues nearly every sector of our world: be it by information silo and communicative echo chamber; institutionalized research framework and metrics for “success”; modulatory disciplinary rhetoric and citation politics; or democratic or other collectively held public imaginaries for togetherness—the imperiality of these systems in all their enunciative authority presents a fictitious “everybody”; “people; or “subject” that brackets away and effectively sanctions the experience of others’, both their violence and potentialities (Azoulay, 2019 p5). Thus, this work seeks to deliberate undo and trouble the stories behind such ontological habitus by disrupting its givenness at all three aforementioned levels.
Second, due to the way interface in its present form, forecloses imaginaries and ontological horizons, estranges identity from being—fixing what is actually a performative multiplicity, and filters the self through a both metaphorical and technically prescriptive screen; it has no means of engaging difference as a self-collective relation. It prefigures agency through an illusion of control, that in the wake of global pandemics, rising sea levels, polarized publics, and pollutant information landscapes, is laid bare. So accustomed to its prefigured plans and narratives, this sudden disjointedness from a cultural and existential center provides an unprecedented ontological opening. Thus, I engage directly the space in-between, the rupture, brought about by
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 5 Prelude | Hannah Holtzclaw
this moment and the offerings of pre- and decolonial, indigenous, nonbinary, and non-western philosophy and thought.
It situates its approach through the theoretical landscape offered by, in The Wound, Emmanuel Levinas (1990, 1989), Enrique Dussel (1993), Anibal Quijano (2007), Franz Fanon (1986), Maldonado-Torres (2007, 2016), Walter Mignolo (2001, 2013), and Jose Salvidar (2007); and in Rituals for Healing: Judith Butler (1988, 1990, 1997) Karen Barad (2007), Sarah Ahmed (2006), Audre Lorde (1984), and Gloria Anzaldúa (2014); here also, it aligns its mission with the work of Vanessa Andreotti and those practicing at the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective. My creative practice in Blackfish Rising has also been influenced by the Sunday Sermons of Janaya Future Khan1 and is inspired by the work of artists such as, Dani E’Emilia, and the writings and poetry of Leanne Betasomasake Simpson, Alicia Elliot, Ocean Vuong, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Rita Wong and Fred Wah. The collective presence and conocimiento offered by these individuals have laid the foundation for my autofictive and poetics based methods in Blackfish Rising.
Rather unapologetically, I make traversing this project via institutionalized norms and expectations2, tedious; I have found the normalized research thesis structure limiting,
1 Khan is a Black Lives Matter ambassador, storyteller and activist from LA. 2 Readers may find the length of this MA thesis to surpass institutionalized requirements and may be inclined to object or request condensation of its elements. To such positions this work states the following: I am here because academics is supposed to be about public service, about bettering society; and this is the one place I can take the problems faced by my community and receive the resources, guidance, and intellectual autonomy (in theory) to research solutions. I am here to uplift my community. The length of this thesis speaks more to the ways I wanted to make a degree of this work accessible to those outside of academics, to reach those otherwise barred from this opportunity and experience. The narrative structure of my methods takes the place of typical research practice, which means I don't have a summarized research analysis section typical of a standard thesis, this in tangent with the fact that one of the purposes of the project was to be inclusive of a non academic audience during the research process, means my methods section is much longer than typical theses. More pointedly, the length stipulation as a measure of the research thesis, is itself a colonial object. Condensation purely for the sake of upholding these standards projects and supports the exact kind of knowledge that this thesis from the start, has set out to undermine and depart. Hence, I ask, that to the best of your ability, in order to engage authentically in this offering for unlearning, you leave, as they say, your colonial habits “at the door”. Lastly, to think ‘we’, students, perceive ourselves as having ‘time’ to pursue interests further, goes against all of the impositions we as young people are contending with in the world. We might ‘have time’ if weren’t implicated by racist, sexist and imperialist agendas that subjugate and distort our own experiences; we might ‘have time’ if we weren’t bearing the weight of our ancestors, of our polluted environment and cultural inheritance; we might ‘have time’ if we remain complacent within privilege—but even this, is an illusion: the only time we can ever have or possess, is now. Normalize changing research standards for students, do not to contain them within templates but create space for their expansiveness. Let young people lead and dismantle barriers to experiences of difference. Concern yourselves with how you are creating space for change, not upholding habits of colonial institutions.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 6 Prelude | Hannah Holtzclaw
suffocating, and incompatible in many ways to commitments to social justice and cultural change. Should the format and presentation of this research aggravate or otherwise trouble the reader, rest assured this is very much the point. I am not asking your permission to transgress formalities, I am directly condemning and subverting their assumed (read: undoubtedly marked) neutrality. I deliberately reject the authority of authorship and problematics of objective translations of research processes by quite literally, taking audiences with me through the entire bodily writing process.
I do not divorce my experience from my research, but rather make every effort of weaving the specificities of it into the work itself as means of more intimately understanding the layered and entangled performativity of difference. I do not separate emotion, spirituality, or identity from my work, as doing so would only serve to extend the status quo of severing such embodied and experiential knowledge, from reality--delegitimizing of a host of other ways of knowing and our common human experience. Such defaults have only served to concretize and cement over historical trauma, projecting and protecting the fiction that coloniality and its violence has no spatial or temporal continuity and can as such be, albeit with forbearance and pacifying acknowledgement, archived.
Thus, this work presents, in closing, that intervention must directly engage where such histories play out most readily, within bodies and across borders. It queers boundaries and suggests that togetherness, like rules, is always already within. Furthermore, it exemplifies, how a return to the body makes plain the decoupling of emotions from politics, pedagogy, and knowledge is not only a violent affront and obstruction to notions of equitability, justice, regeneration, and collectivity; but also a perversion of our collectively held communicative and reciprocal human condition. So, in order to intervene upon the world, to manifest change and de-orient habituated colonial ontologies that manifest in our interface technologies and likewise in social relations, we must decalcify our uniquely human capability to creatively dream. This begins first and foremost, by grappling with and understanding the depth of coloniality’s reach within ourselves.
So, I invite you to partake in reading and engaging with this work in whatever way suits you. Should the reader find themselves unfamiliar with current critical media studies landscape and
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 7 Prelude | Hannah Holtzclaw desiring concrete framework with which to link interface, identity, and representational ontology I suggest beginning with The Fever: Mirrors, Maps, and Sameness: The Representational Model. This provides an overview of the critical media studies, algorithmic studies, and science and technology studies that have informed this work.
Should the reader be interested in the pivot away from “traditional” canons of critical theory, the coloniality of being, and the decolonial turn I suggest beginning with The Wound: On the Coloniality, of the Cartesian-Colonial habit of being. Here, I provide a basis for understanding how colonial non-ethics of war and imperiality frame knowledge and “modern” education and situate the decolonial turn as the necessary antithesis neglected by western philosophy and contemporary theorizing of interface.
For nonbinary theorizing and models for manifesting a decolonial horizon, see Rituals for Healing: Disorienting ontology: queer performance, decoloniality & fiction, fissures and cracks. Here I lay the foundation for my methods and illustrate how the educative discomfort and disorientation offered by fictive and poetic writing can support a generative stream of connections that viscerally activates a sense of relationality, entanglement, responsibility and care.
For more in-depth details on my methods see both The Blackfish Rising fictions and Methods part III Becoming Blackfish respectively. If you want to feel your way through, begin with the former, for the author’s process, reflections, and insights first, begin with the latter. For my research reflection and next steps, see the Closing Meditation: Manifesting the Bridge: Blackfish, Art, and coalition building through creative performance.
If you, despite all of the above, would still prefer the ground linearity seemingly provides, read sequentially in the order I have listed. For full project cartographies (or: “table of contents”) and navigation please see the Navigation Diagram and the Appendix.
*All fiction and creative methods are available for reading through my external website—please visit the text on the site for a comprehensive experience of this project3
3 URL for Fictions: http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/research/readmetxt
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 8 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
these lines don’t extend my skin they burn where they cross over. flesh singed by the latticeworks of the grid.
matter and meaning leave marks on a body Patterns of the un/fitted. un/aligned. un/configured. dis/enabled. beings of the chasm, where silence is codified into the spatial somewhere amongst the inbetweens, of existential perforation, of matter/ing and meaning. o v e r a n d o v e r a n d o v e r,
i bleed. almighty immanence diffractive infinite. blood pools and dries, matters of difference
harden beneath my feet.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 9 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
Mirrors, Maps, Sameness and the Imperiality of Liberal Representational Models
Representationalism is grounded in the notion that there are pre-existing and absolute boundaries between subjects and objects and that knowledge about the world is made manifest through objectively holding and reflecting upon objects at a distance. Likewise, it assumes that words mirror things, free of distortion and have a linear, mimetic relation to their origin (Barad,
2007 p89). It operates upon an epistemological and ontological binary that understands relations as interactions taking place between atomized and separate units of agency. The basis for communication in this dynamic relies upon consensus or pure, fixed and determinate meanings read against one another (ibid).
We find it in Newtonian principles and Enlightenment ideals of cartesian subjectivity, that insists on a binary system of knowledge of absolute separation of interior/exterior and words/things, where knowledge about the world is encapsulated in absolute characteristics, pure forms, and indeed “original positions”. Scientific objectivity and instrumental rationality (and their associative practices and tools) emerge as far reaching progeny, of a model of thought that enacts
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 10 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
a false cut between subjects and nature, positioning us as outside of the world we seek to
understand. We see this in the classification systems that undergird and ground the machine
learning processes of search engine algorithms, its present in the network maps that presume
relation on the basis of mimesis and sameness, and its binary conceptually orients our knowledge
producing institutions as well as social and technological development, by presenting knowing as
a secure, measurable and representable force to be defined and accurately replicated—rather than
experienced, embodied, relational and ever-changing. It requires an erasure of socio-material
arrangements, the local conditions required or closed down during knowledge producing
practices, and masks the fact that certain concepts and ideas obtain meaning or significance at the
exclusion of others (ibid p89-93). Put plainly, representationalism is about power.
Barad reminds us that it is not enough to think of variables in scientific practice like gender, race,
or class, as merely included in analysis. For the crux of the matter is not representational
inclusion, but power and how it is understood (ibid p60). How does race, gender, or class come to matter? How do the effects of differences come to matter? As a quantum physics theorist,
Barad sees matter and meaning as ultimately always engaged in sets of material-discursive agential entanglements. These material-discursive components act as orientation devices, apparatus that embody particular concepts and values at the necessary exclusion of others, that enact the cuts that produce subject-object distinctions; i.e difference (ibid p120). Difference takes on meaning in relation to the agencies of its observation, its measurement practices. An enactment of boundaries and as such, also constitutive exclusions. Such exclusions require us to accountably attend to the indefinite nature of boundaries and the contingency of difference and
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 11 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
how such exclusions and absences come to matter in the structure of matter(ing) and meaning
(ibid p184).
Representationalism’s elimination and subjugation of difference, allows it to disassociate with the way it reproduces inequality, injustice and violence as a knowledge-producing practice. As embedded ontological foundations this enframing, found across interface assemblages—whether
it be philosophy, scientific method, or liberal institution—fundamentally denies the
interconnectedness of the world and puts in place a binary logic of self/other, man/nature,
here/there. No such distinctions or separations exist in any other place but the mind. Such is the
paradox, the illusion; the myth of cartesian subjectivity and its absolute separation of
interior/exterior, inside/outside, and man/nature dichotomies. Phenomena, of any material-
discursive capacity in the world, don’t occur in clearly divided binaries of past/present, us/them,
win/loss, right/left, nature/social. Phenomena emerge from relations between and amongst
entangled human and nonhuman conditions, the ebbs and flows of the many. It is this relational
imperative, this human condition, that makes up our collective existence, our doing here on
earth, and likewise in the virtual.
Consequently, when we speak of representationalism’s binary gaze we are also speaking of the
power relations and violence that this system of knowledge engenders, as it is this ontological
enframing that bleeds through interface paradigms as a regulatory practice of their production.
This section illustrates how the representational language of science is an inherently colonial habit that carries particular resonances on publics and individuals. It is crucial to our understanding of difference in a representationalist context, that we recognize this model of thought has developed along the historical axis of power provided explicitly by a colonial and
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 12 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
patriarchal system because what is often left out of critiques of modernity is a sustained engagement with the impositions of this imperial interface on being and the restraints and limitations it places on our learning. Hence, this section begins with drawing on the work of feminist science and technology studies and critical media and technology scholars to illustrate the symptoms (the fever) of the colonial habit within contemporary interface technologies.
Later, in The Wound, it connects the Us/Them, here/there, Othering ethics of separatism and eugenic sameness embedded within modern technologies to the colonial presupposition to knowledge production. Through the work of decolonial and postcolonial theorists it emphasizes how liberal or western philosophy and science institutionalizes certain imperial and colonial postures and assumptions that exploits the human condition and perverts our understanding of the world; short-circuiting our learning and fostering hostile environments to difference. An orientation within the world that positions us as always outside of the world we live with in.
Certifying a certain estrangement from nature (to be understood as both human and nonhuman
“others”; their various forms of life and intelligence and our place within such practicing forms of difference and liveliness as necessary, distinct components to its creative energy and life force) by orienting all that we encounter as objects to be conquered; to be beaten or instrumentalized into a state of subservient submission.
Racism, sexism, and classism are the by-products of imperial grammars and colonial positions.
To address these constructed biases outside of their original conditions is to misunderstand
coloniality and imperiality as a priori formatting systems: as emerging from ego conquiro’s non-
ethics of war and presupposition. Situating liberal academic institutions and scientific research practice within the colonial habit of being illustrates how decoloniality is the necessary antithesis
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 13 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
to current knowledge producing practices. Where antiracist and feminist policy positions provide
triage treatment for marginalized BIPOC and women, by definition and by virtue of their
epistemic emergence, they remain chained to liberal politics of recognition1. Though these are absolutely necessary tools for understanding and teaching, what the decolonial turn provides is a means of moving beyond the horizon of “in opposition”, to the expansive potential laden within the shared human condition—most importantly—through doing, and performance from within diffracted relations of difference. Decoloniality becomes the practice by which we can come to theorize and interface justice, dignity, and nonbinary relations of epistemic difference (as discussed in Rituals for Healing). But first, the symptoms: how representationalism, as a colonial knowledge, presents in digital interface systems—or, how interface reproduces the colonized subject.
Othering Machines & Cartesian Cuts
Representationalism’s ontological foundation extends through and across interfacial components.
Embedded within HCI, AI, network, and data sciences, interface becomes the name for a set of
contingently enacted network cuts occurring in accordance with sociomaterial design practices
that reduce real-world phenomena to nodes and edges and engage the measurable predictability
1 Liberal politics of recognition seek to pacify and neutralize claims of redistribution or reparation because they begin from the position that those ‘marginalized’ by its gaze need only adapt themselves to “modernity”—in effect reproducing colonial and imperial logic by emptying recognition of reciprocity and mutual respect. This Lorde also makes this arraignment in Sister Outside with regards to white feminism (referenced in this section later on) (1984) as well as Glen Coulthard in Red Skin White Masks (2014) and through the work of Sherene Razack in Dying From Improvement (2015); but as well, these politics are embedded, made automatic, by network principles and components like correlation methods and proxies—as highlighted by Chun (2021), where race, sexuality, gender and class figure as ‘latent factors’ for recommendation systems (ibid p201) but on the basis of a politics of recognition steeped in eugenic western white supremacy. This link made by Chun is important because the absence of redistribution, or as she writes, “ recognition as a way to prevent redistribution—has become the rallying call of the reactionary right” ( Chun, 2021 p257) where through the embrace of stigma, and “dis- identifying with the “enemy”, as Chun writes, “[a]lienation [becomes] utopian exile” (ibid p272). Where racism, sexism, and classism are never eliminated, but rather, the colonized subject becomes more acute, as the edges of difference are sharpened and weaponized for further exploitation and division.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 14 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
of efficiency and sameness as formal process (Suchman, 2006 p268). These processes obstruct
and impede communication systems in the following ways: in distancing and severing subjects
from the local-conditions and procedures that drive and produce interface experience; artificially
estranging publics from collective agency through atomized (dis)empowerment; polarizing interaction through the recursive and segregated pursuit of sameness.
In the freedom-filled but ultimately failed promises of cyberspace digital technologies have not resolved racialized and gendered inequalities (as alleged by silicon valley provocateurs) but instead instantiated new more obscured regimes of social control (Chun, 2008, 2011; Galloway,
2012). This logic of “programmability” has both historical and present day manifestations beyond the screen in systems of governance, economics, science, and sociality: where such a habit is problematized by the ways it has become automated, invisible, and deeply personal and affectively charged; drawing attention to the destructive notion of progress presented with every wave of “new media” and additionally, the ways with which at every layer of design, these technologies have default assumptions and discriminatory histories baked into their developmental structures (Apprich et al., 2019; Chun, 2008, 2011, 2017, 2021).
To begin, this section outlines computational programming languages, data capture and classification systems, and network and engineering principles as they pertain to technical interface assemblages and the aforementioned communication problems they impose. It then pivots to show how these themes should be understood not as isolated computational
phenomenon, but rather in relation with, and the far reaching progeny of, the broader cultural
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 15 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
paradigm of their emergence—cartesian-colonial subjectivity. Drawing on Wendy Hui Kyong
Chun, Tara Mcpherson, Simone Browne, Ruha Benjamin, Sherene H. Razack, Virginia Eubanks,
Ariella Azoulay and Karen Barad, it makes the link between the material-discursive components
of interface: representationalism and objective universality to the necessary violence of rendering
residual,”remanant” or “unruly” categories to the peripheral or ‘past’: a spatial and temporal
strategy of imperial logic and the colonial habit, enacted through what Ariella Azoulay (2019)
terms the imperial shutter.
Historical Programming:
Both Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Tara McPherson have outlined the history of digital
computational developments of the 1950’s-1980’s, as emerging within a post-WWII cultural
context accompanied by changing attitudes toward race, as well as gendered and militarial
computational labor. Mcpherson, makes an explicit connection to the rise of personal computing systems and the changing attitudes toward race that also took place during this time period. The cold war context, adjacent domestic unrest in the United States, produced a climate where race was instrumentalized in order to maintain support for conflicts abroad. Overt racism was undermining war efforts, and as such, more covert mechanisms of oppression emerged. Both race and computation represent a turn to modular forms of knowledge that privileges fragmentation and separation. More explicitly, it projects a way of seeing and experiencing the world in discrete modules or levels, through the suppression of context and interrelatedness
(McPherson, 2018 p52-55). At a structural level, this model underscores a worldview, where disruptive troublesome parts, can be rendered to the peripheral and omitted from larger global processes, as to maintain order of the system (ibid p55). When outliers threaten the system as a
whole, modularity and encapsulation ensures the management and control of complexity,
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 16 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
smoothing out disruptions by “cleanly” segregating one “neighbor” from another. (ibid p66).
Both McPherson and Chun, demonstrate how the dual arrival of the World Wide Web as a mass
communication and information resource, and the identity politics of the postmodern era (in the
theoretical, not prescriptive tense) developed in symbiosis with wider more sweeping efforts to
manage the public sphere and populations (Mcpherson, 2018 p. 81; Chun, 2021). Hence, the
“freedom” filled promises of cyberspace, materialized as the reduction of freedom to control2
(Chun, 2008).
Similarly, and in more detail, Chun illustrates how computing technology evolved in response to an already preconceived fixation with a biopolitics of rationalization and optimization of human populations and capital; of which, evolving alongside and within its contemporary neoliberal context, this fixation finds its basis in enlightenment rationality, “that knowing leads to control”, whereby the internet and computers have exploded enlightenment thought “by literalizing it”
(Chun, 2011 p6). Liberal principles of blind self-interest and freedom produce certain forms of governmentality that operationalize biopolitical power through (executively and scientifically)
2 In control and freedom Chun, drawing on Lacan’s linking of autonomy and paranoia, demonstrates how freedom as a discourse of complete autonomy is what facilitates the current conflation of freedom with security (Chun, 2008 p262). Chun links this to discourses of racial equality and facial recognition systems, of which were alleged to remove human error or “racial profiling” and act as a control mechanism for (just post 9/11) national security. But such systems and discourses of freedom they’re associated, are intimately tied, as Chun shows, to race and colonialism through language. Drawing again on Lacan and Franz Fanon, Chun details how freedom as paranoid control claims to eradicate racism but ultimately : “through language, the colonizer “fixes” the colonized inferior” as, “freedom becomes what you cannot not want—not only because the desire for freedom is everywhere but also because those seeking to “free” do not allow anyone else to want anything else. There is no other choice than their , which is the freedom to be an individual—to exceed one’s culture in order to become incorporate into a global market” (ibid p274) So, we dissolve ourselves into cyberspace, a system we neither designed nor can intervene in, for promises of freedom that ultimately render as social control.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 17 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
institutionalized action. This stimulated the conception of computing technology as a central
mechanism for institutionalized population management.
Chun extends this link at multiple levels: showing in, Programmed Visions, how source code
becomes something like judicial process or law, by converting action into language and
becoming, “every lawyer’s dream of what law should be: automatically enabling and disabling
certain actions, functioning at the level of everyday practice” (2011, p27). Additionally, Chun
shows how the commercialization of computer programming, is tied explicitly to the shift into
neoliberal governmentality: “Software, through programming languages that stem from a
gendered system of command and control, creates an invisible system of visibility, a system of
causal pleasure” (ibid p18), whereby pleasure is derived in explicit relation to the hierarchies
embedded within the machine—or more generally those legitimized and carried out historically
(ibid p34). This causal pleasure driven by gamified fantasies of the neo-liberal Sovereign, hoodwinks both programmers and users, master’s and slaves alike, Chun writes, “through automation as both empowerment and enslavement and through repetition as both mastery and hell” (ibid p41).
This is further problematized, as Chun details, in automatic and higher level programming, which “erases the vicissitudes of execution and the institutional and technical structures needed to ensure the coincidence of source code and its execution” (ibid p21). Such an erasure ushers in the conflation of data and information, and subsequently, information with knowledge. Where source code, in all its commanding authority, creates an environment where the computer,
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 18 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw program or user becomes the source of meaning (ibid, p53). Hence, Chun illustrates how software as axiom, or “source code as fetish”, “fastens in place a certain neoliberal logic of cause and effect, based on the erasure of execution” (ibid p 49). A self-evident form of propositioning that forecloses other readings and interpretations in the name of its own artificially constructed horizon, a “programmability”, “that itself relies on distorting real social relations into material givens” in the same way capitalism transforms the labor and sociality of individuals into the reproduction of capital (ibid p50). Chun’s work illustrates how software, is endemic, and indeed vital, to contemporary trends in neoliberal “modes of “governing” that make governing both more personal and impersonal, that enable both empowerment and surveillance, and indeed make it difficult to distinguish between the two” (ibid p58).
Participation & interactivity: master/slave servitudes of the small-s sovereign.
Contemporary society sees the continuation of this program, to its most extreme places. As
McPherson and Chun’s work both elude, identity politics finds a certain resolve (or subjugation) in the modular practices provided by the internet. Offering a placating outlet for the confusion and disorientation brought about by postmodernism and the destabilization of ideology to be funneled into and resolved within3. The parameters for interaction sanctioned by interface produces an environment where the assumption of the sovereign individual, despite such
3 Drawing on the work of Frederic Jameson, Chun illustrates how postmodernism experienced as spatial dysfunction, has a certain disorienting and disconcerting effect on our comprehension (2011, p.72). Such effects, amplify the already cumbersome and challenging feat of understanding the relation between authentic experience and truth (ibid p72-73).
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 19 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
disorientation, remains secure by atomizing experience and veiling underlying processes in such a way that interactive participation renders experientially, as agency.
Interactive principles such as direct manipulation and volitional mobility hardwire ideological interpellation by replacing commands with participatory structures (Chun, 2011 p63). Through volitional mobility, users engage in activities of mapping their individual social reality against the totality of “cyberspace” (ibid p75). This positions individuals as above and outside of the world, rather than implicated by and a part of it. User, as subject, encounters the world, as
Object, where the inside/outside binary of cartesian subjectivity is made technical. Direct manipulation provides an illusion of empowerment through the manipulation of cultural and conceptual objects, the chasing of facts and truths hyper link to hyper link; the magical manifestation of social connection and individual preferences concretized through participatory structures, all contribute to the illusion of user’s actions being the transparent cause of interface’s experiential effects.
By producing users who believe they are the source of their computers actions, they “buttress notions of personal action, freedom and responsibility” (ibid p74), while masking the fact that we are not the only agents contributing to our interface experience. Chun postulates that such interactions have forged upon us certain expectations regarding cause and effect, whilst also offering us experiences of power and pleasure. A “liberating”, or rather seemingly liberating, means of navigating a complex neoliberal context that seduces us into believing its agency, and as we will see, its affordances for cultural sight, is transferable into other contexts (ibid p92).
This “empowerment” is stimulated by the illusion of individual control, by replacing commands
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 20 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
with participatory structures and fostering feelings of mastery (ibid p62-64). All the while, the
central processes for computation, the means with which manipulation is made possible for user
experience, are rendered invisible, imperceivably “daemonic” (ibid p88). So, interface, projects
“mastery” as an ideal state that is nonetheless merely an affective relationship with both the creation and elimination of uncertainty (ibid p65).
The shift from the internet as military weapon to mass communication platform, marks, as Chun
details, the “reduction of freedom to control” (2006). As interpellating, participatory structures
the programmability of interface technologies then further governs, forecloses, and prescribes
user behavior through big data capture systems and network structures, where, Chun writes,
“[t]the media have imploded the social” and “YOU are [now] a character in a drama called Big
Data”4 (ibid p23).
Data & Proxies: eugenic roots, imperial face trace
As mentioned previously, interface is an effect, a process. As users in this space we consume and contribute data, in order to participate in interface processes. This data is then fed back to us via search results and other “recommendation” algorithms for things like news articles, social media accounts, and job postings, and structure our timeline feeds and targeted advertisements as well as a variety of other formulations and analysis of which we may or may not know about. The
4 This drama, Chun writes, marks a transition from “they” (or multiple “I”s) into a both singular and plural “YOU(n): “Whether or not YOU respond, YOU constantly register and are registered—YOUR actions are captured and YOUR silence is made statistically significant through the action of others ‘like YOU…’ YOU register through YOUR habits” (Chun 2017, p23). This transition is facilitated by segregationist principles like homophily.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 21 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw machine learning and algorithmic systems that belie our interface experiences are explicitly generated off what has come to be known as “big data”.
“Big Data” relies on the Figure 1.1: From, Bullethead quantification of objects and human behaviors that is often beyond the scope of our awareness, and as the previous section detailed, we are often affectively coerced into contributing. The sheer volume of data that make up our digital trace would be overwhelming, nearly impossible to interpret without technical expertise, and drawn from an unsettling range of data capture systems and practices5.
Participatory structures and relational principles become further problematized in an information sphere beholden to a neoliberal market 6model, where rife with avenues for manipulation, attention (read: user data+participation) becomes the currency with which private intermediaries wage possession-based pursuits upon publics. Networks, by design, capture subjects7: in such a
5 As boyd and Crawford have noted, resulting in inherent inequalities with regards to the users who create data, companies who profit of it, and technicians who interpret and classify it. (boyd & Crawford, 2012) 6 Tiziana Terranova has made the case most adeptly for the ways the internet and culture as technical and affective production, exists and interacts with late capitalism. (Terranova, 2004 p90) 7 These subjects, however, are never manifest in isolation either: “but rather by a plethora of YOUs: by the very interconnections between various YOU’s” (Chun, 2017 p118) where, “every interaction is made to leave a trace, which is then tied to other traces and used to understand YOU, where YOU is always singular and plural” (ibid p119). How YOU’s become correlated is determined by network science principles like homophily, of which we will get to momentarily.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 22 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
dynamic, as echoed by the work of Wendy Brown, we become commodified nodes of abstracted systems of financialized data capture, where our figuration as solely human capital ensures that,
“equality ceases to be our presumed natural relation with one another” (Brown, 2015 p179).
Thus, the YOU(n) hailed by interactive components is always one which extracts and abstracts upon the liveliness of your actions on the sole basis of deriving profit, of funneling, and incentivizing behavior that deepens the divide between corporate companies and disempowered publics.
Furthermore, data only becomes a conceptual object when we choose to engage with it. It has no necessary or inherent form, purpose, value or ideology. Data is “capta”, taken not given
(Drucker, 2014 p128; Galloway, 2012 p82-83). Which makes it inherently subjective and context dependent. This notion grinds up against the automation of data capture systems which apply blanket classification systems that ultimately target intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality through allegedly neutral proxies (Chun, 2017 p120, 2021).
Crucially, the process of data capture and classification systems 8emerged out of a eugenicist fixations with population management and used in the first account, in the context of slave trade and poor houses, to objectify and dehumanize subjects against the backdrop of colonial white supremacy. Explicitly racist, sexist and classist these tendencies required extensive surveillance and policing practices (Benjamin, 2019; Browne, 2015; Chun, 2021; Eubanks, 2018; Razack,
2015). These undercurrents have not been absolved, but rather incessantly persist across spatial
8 Bowker and Leigh Star have also noted how organizations utilize classification schemes to selectively forget things about the past during the production of knowledge as well as the role of infrastructure standards in certifying certain POV’s over others. (1999)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 23 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
and temporal contexts. Cyberspace has not flattened power, but further obscured it. Their emergence through national statistics and “public health” measures has been furthered in automated technologies that disproportionately surveil and oppress our most vulnerable populations who turn to governments for support, as Eubanks notes “marginalized groups face higher levels of data collection when they access public benefits, walk through highly policed neighborhoods, enter the health-care system, or cross national borders.” (2018, p6-7).
We owe the correlation methods that underlie modern data analytics to the discredited eugenicist research of men like Sir Francis Galton, progeny of Darwin no less. Galton, among the likes of
Raymond Catrall, Hans Eynsenck and Charles Spearman, and the general narcissism of white
European male “intelligence”, drove 19th century marshalled science and census statistics—an allegedly unmarked and neutral case for racial purity and superiority. This eugenicist history, as
Chun has pointed out, is important “because correlation works— when and if it does—by making the future coincide with a selectively discriminatory past.” (2021, p58). Ruha Benjamin
(2019), Simone Brown (2015), Virginia Eubanks (2018), Sherene Razack (2015), and Wendy
Hui Kyong Chun (2017, 2021) have all given brilliant accounts as to the ways correlation maintains and extends, through capturing, assessing and predicting (shaping) our behavior, social inequalities and oppression—particularly with regards to Blackness, Indigeneity and women9.
This is in huge part, as Ruha Benjamin notes from boyd and Data & Society, due to the way
“[t]he datasets and models used in [correlational] systems are not objective representations of reality. They are the culmination of particular tools, people and power structures that foreground
9See also Safiya Umoja Noble’s recent work on racist and sexist search results queried into google by the search terms, “black girls” for instance, in Algorithms of Oppression.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 24 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
one way of seeing or judging over another.” 10 (2019, p36) In the shift from colonial regimes into liberal democracies and capitalism we see the outputs of such models today in the proliferation of racist and sexist cultural narratives 11for instance, in the representations of Black and Indigenous peoples as unhealthy, decaying, or unable to adapt to modern society.
Sherene Razack, In Dying From Improvement, shows how European colonialist narratives in
Canada present indigenous bodies as inherently, “sick, dysfunctional and self- destructive”(Razack, 2015 p17) through early 20th century medical surveys where the
justification for Residential schools was: “predicated on the basic notion that the First Nations
were, by nature, unclean and diseased[;] residential schooling was advocated as a means to
‘save’ Aboriginal children form the insalubrious influences of home life on the reserve.” (ibid
p18) Where ‘saving’ children resulted instead in appalling conditions of dehumanization: sexual
assault, abuse, starvation, torture, and murder of indigenous grade school children--much of
which was conducted under the umbrella of colonial grade scientific ‘experiment’(Mosby &
Galloway, 2017; Porter, 2015; Razack, 2015).
10 Adrian Mackenzie writes in Machine Learners about how machine learning might offer us opportunities for knowing criticality differently, “ a means of effecting a certain number of transformative operations on one’s own conduct, thinking and ways of being amid the determinations of contemporary reality” (Mackenzie, 2017 p209), an opportunity to probe for change, given what we know about the ways “people and things, knowledge and power, combine in novels forms to generate statements” (ibid p210). If as Chun notes (2021), machine learning models are premised on the idea that intelligence cannot be taught, only bred, what operational formations, might create the space for changes in performance? How might machine learning, modeled and trained on theories of quantum or nonbinary realities; on natural systems and indigenous epistemologies; on creative intelligence and embodiment; on lived experience, literature and fiction: offer us in terms of unlearning the colonial habit? In terms of rendering something like decolonial resonances of self-collective identity; of difference?
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 25 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
Specific to Canada and BC, and as we will see most pertinent to this projects subject and
contributions, is also the way colonial Canadian sovereignty certified indigenous populations as
unable to cope with the terms of modern colonial society as a means of also stealing and
withholding land rights to the claims of the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en: “ Chief Justice Alan
McEachern of the British Columbia Supreme court commented on “the relentless energy” of
Europeans, with which Indigenous people “would not, or could not, compete,” concluding that if
Indigenous people were conquered, it was not by dint of force but simply through the superior
capacities of a more resilient group.” (Razack, 2015 p4) Razack notes, that the imposition of
these, “mythologies of the settler colonial project are comparable across geographic regions” and
indigenous populations 12(ibid p19). Similarly, in Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin
writes:
“Racial knowledge that had been dominated by anecdotal, hereditarian, and pseudo-biological theories of race would gradually be transformed by new social scientific theories of race and society and new tools of analysis, namely racial statistics and social surveys. Out of the new methods and data sources, black criminality would emerge, alongside disease and intelligence, as a fundamental measure of black inferiority.”(2019, p32)
12 Crucial to understanding the way indigenous peoples have been made to be “remnants” of a dying culture across contexts is also the way colonial governments withheld resources and land rights pivotal to the well-being and health of indigenous peoples. Razack details how in Canada, due to food and tuberculosis crisis brought about by the European colonies, the Cree peoples during negotiations of Treaty 6 were forced to negotiate for medical aid and famine relief. But the Cree resisted, “Facing extreme reductions in food rations, a withholding of rations until young girls were procured for government officials, and increasingly harsh living an climactic conditions, Indigenous and Metis people rebelled. Punishment was swift and extended: chiefs were hung and imprisoned, a pass system was instituted to keep Indians away from white communities, and a relentless surveillance (involving policing and a suppression of religious practices) was instituted. By 1886, Daschuk reports, all Indians found off reserve were questioned. The devastation of this period was extensive. By 1889, less than half the pre-rebellion population of the Battleford reserves, for instance, survived” (Razack, 2015 p21)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 26 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
Additionally, Virginia Eubanks has shown how automated data correlation methods of today are the progeny of 19th and early 20th century scientific charity and poorhouses, legacy of “regulating” the poor. Eubanks highlights how the scientific charity movement deployed data methods to separate the deserving from the undeserving poor, where, “[e]ach poor family became a “case” to be solved; in its early years, the Charity Organization Society even used city police officers to investigate applications for relief. Casework was born.” (Eubanks, 2018 p21) This distinction was important for scientific charity workers for the same reason it was important to scientists like Galton: “[p]roviding aid to the unworthy would simply allow them to survive and reproduce their genetically inferior stock”, for the breeding of an allegedly genetic elite (ibid p22). The
United States in particular was fixated on eliminating “negative characteristics” of the poor, and the first database for monitoring the poor were carried out by the Carnegie Institute in New
York, with the explicit aim to monitor those in need’s sex lives, intelligence and general behavior, Eubanks details:
“The filled out lengthy questionnaires, took photographs, inked fingerprints, measured heads, counted children, plotted family trees, and filled logbooks with descriptions like “imbecile.” “feeble- minded,” “harlot,” and “dependent.”” (ibid p 22)
These models then went on to shape contemporary policy and reforms of the welfare state that have deeply sexist, racist, ageist, and ableist undertones (ibid p27), most notably sharp and biting when it comes to low-income single women of color with children (ibid p28)
In both Indigenous and Black populations in north America colonial “charity” still surveil and impose today, of which Eubanks illustrates through her discussion of the Allegheny Family
Screening Tool (AFST), an automated child welfare risk assessment tool. Eubanks highlights
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 27 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
these systems are often trained on models whose predictive ability is baked in subjective
outcome variables13 (ibid p146). Namely, she writes, “[t]hey are shaped by our nation’s fear of
economic insecurity and hatred of the poor; they in turn shape the politics and experience of
poverty” (ibid p9). This “fear”, however, takes on new contours when considered alongside the
work of Razack or Tanya Talaga who point out that the extension of surveillance and policing,
the legacy of residential schools and colonial interference, continues today with number of
indigenous youth being placed in the welfare system at rates that exceed residential school
numbers even at their peak “enrollment14” and the “Sixties Scoop” (Razack, 2015 p78; Talaga,
2017 p129-30). These “wellness” programs in tangent with the racialization of surveillance technologies highlighted later in this section by Simone Browne, show how systemic surveillance and spying upon black and indigenous communities is the premise, not the disruption, of algorithmically enhanced policing and public health technologies. As Benjamin has noted, the heat maps and gang databases where, ““criminal”: becomes a proxy for Black, poor, immigrant, second-class, disposable, illegal, alien, unwanted or otherwise disposable un- humans (2019, p33)” emerge from the same federal system of white patriarchal control that, as
Chun highlights, surveilled and infiltrated communities of civil rights activists15 (2021, p76).
13 For example, Eubanks details: “Where the line is drawn between routine conditions of poverty and child neglect is particularly vexing. Many struggles common among poor families are officially defined as child maltreatment, including not having enough food, having inadequate or unsafe housing, lacking medical care, or leaving a chid alone while you work. Unhoused families face particularly difficult challenges holding on to their children, as the very condition of being homeless I judged as neglectful.” (2018, p130) 14 Talaga writes of how, “[t]he scooping of children exists to this day. Assembly of First Nations Chief Perry Bellegarde estimates forty thousand Indigenous children are currently in state care. Less than 8 percent of all kids in Canada under the age of four are Indigenous, but they represent 51.2 percent of preschoolers in foster care.” (2017, p131) 15 Civil rights activists and anti-war groups in the 1950’s-70’s were surveilled through the COINTELPRO program. However, more recently, we see the extension of such efforts in the framing of protest and epistemic disobedience as criminality and domestic terrorism: such as the tactics deployed in neoliberal dress through contracted militia groups like Tiger Swan at Standing Rock, whom coordinated with police forces in five states on “counterterrorism” measures, likening the Water Protector movement to terrorist “jihadists” and “insurgents” (Estes & Dhillon, 2019). Since then, the 45th administration in the United States has instituted a huge push for criminalizing protest across
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 28 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
Chun, has also shown most recently, how these methods have now extended into the murky
public/private space of social media for political gains, such as those used by Cambridge
Analytica during the 2016 elections, of which were deeply gendered, classed and raced (2021).
Most disconcerting, as she highlights, is the way Steve Bannon with the assistance of
Christopher Wiley, perverted Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectional theory not to bridge publics,
but antagonize and divide them. As Chun describes: “Put most bluntly: in an attempt to destroy
any and all in common, communities are not being destroyed but rather, planned and
constructed. These are not happy pastoral or banal groupings, but rather angry ones based on
divisions.” (2021, p55) Whether this divide and conquer strategy is what resulted in the
outcomes of the election is perhaps an insufficient, trite or indulgent after thought in the shit
storm of the internet information sphere of 202016. What is more important is to understand that
these systems, exclusively dependent upon representations--units of encapsulated and abstracted liveliness—divulge more about the system of knowledge that enframes them than the behavior or
phenomenon captured. These discrimination steeped proxies are then further siloed through
network principles like homophily, which assume and project networked “neighborhoods”,
where users are presumed to be like you because they share similar “likes” and “hates17”. But
networks capture our behavior even when we are silent, and as Chun writes,
the country (Browne, 2015; Lefebvre & Adragna, 2019)) and most recently deployed federal officers to make covert arrests at Black Lives Matter protests (Kanno-Youngs & Benner, 2020) 16 Where, for example, a global public health crisis is exacerbated by QAnon conspiracies and misinformation campaigns embraced by political regimes in order to advance racist and discriminatory agendas (Coaston, 2018) and supported the mobilization of radicalized and increasingly dangerous extremists like the wolverine watchmen (Owen, 2020) 17 But the presumption of preference is problematic, as Chun as noted regarding Cambridge Analytica, how much of what is presumed is actually prescribed?
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 29 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
“through your agitated neighbors, you become predictable and linear. These predictions are wedded at every level to the past. …This form of verification means that if the past is racist and sexist, these models will only be verified as correct if they make sexist and racist predictions….” (2021, p10)
Read: contemporary interface regimes are formatted to reproduce and affirm colonial postures and imperial grammars as standard cultural relations; they demand estrangement and subjugate difference in the name of predictable and discriminatory sameness.
Networked Homophily: Warping Relationality, Othering difference
Through the network maps of our interpretation grids we cognitively map our individual relation to others. As theoretical projections network maps enact material-discursive cuts in time and space to produce encapsulated slices of connectivity, where connection is generated according to principles such as homophily.
Homophily as a network principle engages in the perpetuation of inequalities/discrimination as process, by aggregating consensus and similarity into clusters on the basis of comfort (Apprich et al., 2019 p76). This produces what we have come to know as the echo chamber effect in platform communication and its associative worlding practices of You/Other, Us/Them positionality. As a patterning device, homophily produces segregated neighborhoods of presumed individual preference, and names and produces sameness as the basis for relation and connection (ibid p82-
83). It can be tempting to read this as an innocuous interpersonal oversight, surely, we can warrant that many friendships and relational ties are due to shared or similar interests and traits?
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 30 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
But as Chun has illustrated, segregation is the training model for racism (2021, p80). Drawing on
the original analysis of friendship ties conducted by Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K Merton, a
study of two bi-racial social housing projects, that went on to ground and institutionalize
consensus around homophily and network science, Chun has illustrated that from its very
conceptual origins homophily has been actualized through a segregational racial premise, “an implicit assumption that values do not cross racial borders, or if they do, that this crossing is less significant than consensus or conflict within a race. 18” (2021 p121). The presumed individual
preference manifest by network neighborhoods is embedded with a, “presumption that there can
be no neighbors without common cultural traits.” (ibid p125) This presumption is not neutral, but
rather reflects how, to quote Ruha Benjamin in The New Jim Code, “[r]acial codes are born from
the goal of, and facilitate, social control” (2019, p29).
Additionally laden in this initial study, and the flurry of institutionalized citational endorsement that have since followed, like those mentioned by Chun of Easley and Kleinberg from 2010, is the notion that segregation on the basis of sameness (read: race) is a sort of preindividual network state (Chun, 2021 p128). Concurrently, Chun’s work shows how conflict and tenant
18 “Lazarsfeld and Merton examined and modelled the racial attitudes of Hilltown’s white residents. They analyzed the answers to two questions: “Q25. Do you think black and white people should live together in housing projects?” and “Q26: On the whole, do you think that black and white residents in the Village get along pretty well, or not so well?” Based on the answers, they divided the white residents into three camps: liberals, who “believe that ‘colored’ and white people should live together in housing projects and who support this belief by saying that the two racial groups ‘get along pretty well’ in Hilltown”; illiberals, who “maintain that the races should be residentially segregated and who justify this view by claiming that, in Hilltown, where the two races do live in the same project, they fail to get along”; and ambivalents, who “believe that the races should not be allowed to live in the same project, even though it must be admitted that they have managed to get along in Hilltown” (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1954a: 26). They ignored the responses of black residents. They removed their answers from their analysis of value homophily because they argued there were “too few illiberal or ambivalent Negroes with friends in Hilltown” (notably, there was a similar small number of illiberal white friends who chose illiberals, yet this number grounded their formulation of value homophily). Thus, at the core of value-homophily lies racial segregation: an implicit assumption that values do not cross racial borders, or if they do, that this crossing is less significant than consensus or conflict within a race.” (Chun, 2021 p121)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 31 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
complaints emerged most often from white community members of the projects and their
discomfort with being stigmatized for being in the low-income bi-racial housing. Tellingly, this
was not included in Lazarsfeld and Merton’s original report, but surely the years of whiteflight
can attest, the grounding principle for neighborhood comfort has always been about white (read:
colonial) claims to space. We can see then, that by prefiguring segregation as a naturalized claim,
institutionalized racism and the history of race-based inequality and discrimination is erased, and
as Chun points out:
“if taken as an explanation for gentrification, homophily portrays the movement of the urban poor to more affordable and less desirable areas as voluntary, rather than as the result of rising rents and taxes. Lastly, it completely erases—while at the same time presuming—the desire of some to integrate neighborhoods. If this model finds that institutions are not to blame for segregation, it is because it occludes institutional actions.” (ibid, p128)
In the transition to digital space, identity politics, and the solidification of network node
characteristics through gender, class and race present socially constructed and institutionally
policed categories as immutable divisions with which the imposition of differential identities can
be homogenized and pattern discrimination can take place (Apprich, et al, 2019 pi-xi).
Homophily effectively sidesteps the disorienting nature of difference, by instrumentalizing it.
Deploying techniques for managing, predicting and prescribing it as a measure and marker of
sameness. Additionally, this artificial, “scientific” model of connection, unconcerned with the nature, the effects, of connection, has no means of understanding network ties such as conflict, violence, or interrelated dependence (Chun, 2017 p81). In as such, it reproduces, reinscribes, and
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 32 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
extends certain cultural relations or connections over others19, regardless of the inequality, injustice, or violence its logic ascribes. Such systems “train” individuals to expect and recognize this form of segregation, and, as Chun writes,
“Instead of ushering in a postracial, postidentitarian era, networks perpetuate micro-identities via “default” variables and axioms. Through data analytics, differences and similarities—differences as a way to shape similarities—are actively sought, shaped, and instrumentalized in order to capture and shape clusters.” (2021, p55)
Through networked homophily sameness becomes the gaze with which we hold upon the world, the habituated lens with which see. Hence, difference, or difference sustained in such lenses, becomes disruption, crisis, problem, alien, Other. In short, such principles produce interface as
“Othering” machines, beholden to a system of classification and representation takes for granted the interdependencies, the interrelatedness of knowing and being in the world, dealing exclusively in the absolute separation of man/nature, words/things, and interior/exterior states of being.
Such foundational principles of design lack an ability to engage dynamically with difference. In this failure to grapple with the way difference is experienced and produced in practice, it masks the fact that the same map that shows us the world , also traps us inside of it, as Chun puts it, “we are now in a different and perhaps historically unique situation: we are forever mapping forever performing- and so we are told, forever empowered- and yet no more able to imagine, let alone
19 Taine Bucher illustrates this in, If…Then Algorithmic Power and Politics. Algorithms as material-discursive phenomena steer and curate connection and relation; in virtual space the ways with which we relate to each other as “friends” are determined in accordance to what platforms determine are more “worthwhile” or “promising” connections (Bucher, 2018 p6-7). Thus facilitating or fabricating some “relational impulses” over others ( ibid p9).
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 33 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
decisively intervene in, the world around us” (2017, p44). So, while on the surface, the world
projected by the network maps of cyberspace, seemed to be shifting towards more democratic
possibilities, internally to all of these “new” systems of liberation, are systems of value and
models of thought that are ultimately discriminatory, racialized, and imperial shape perception
and serve to construct (or warp) user reality.
The institutionalization of the imperial shutter: Science is fiction. History is a technology.
What the collective work of these critical data and critical media scholars show, is the problem
of interface is one of an institutionalized set of knowledge-producing practices, whose
orientation toward knowledge and conceptual frameworks are gendered, racialized, classist and
imperial. Rendering them incapable of engaging with systemic violence and inequalities by very
design. Leading critical algorithm studies scholars such as Ruha Benjamin to point out that these
emerging technologies do not overcome the feedback loops of inequity, as the founders of this
“new frontier” have alleged, but more accurately enact something like a “New Jim Code: the
employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities but that are
promoted and perceived as more objective or progressive than the discriminatory systems of a
previous era” (Benjamin, 2019 p28). Just like homophily’s seemingly innocuous and naturalized claims that project (and manifest) social ties through segregated sameness, “[t]he view that
“technology is a neutral tool” ignores how race also functions like a tool, structuring whose literal voice gets embodied in AI” (ibid p54). The point I am emphasizing here focalizes around the notion that normative orientations toward knowing and being, in all stages of technological and social development, are the by-product of the invisibly visible colonial gaze. Where the only
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 34 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
thing rendered imperceptible and unseen is power and the imperiality of whiteness; where all
else, defined against its neutrality, become sub-human cultural signs.
Deconstructing the violence of this binary, its infrastructural positioning and critiquing its implications is essential to undermining its authority. However, the gap in question remains in
how to move beyond its seemingly ubiquitous reign. It is not enough to draw attention to the
violence and include excluded categories or conditions for subjectivity, for the pattern persists
across time and space and the voices implicated by its violence, the indigenous, slave, woman,
child, Other, have again, have always been present and wailing. To intervene in representationalism requires engaging in its colonial history. Without contending with its emergence from this cultural trauma any intervention or solution will remain ineffective—this is something critical theory and philosophy of technology has largely overlooked. Read: colonialism is at the heart of western civilization and ‘modern’ educational institutions. Even in its most ‘progressive’ forms, Liberalism peripheralizes non-Eurocentric epistemological contributions, centers whiteness and individuality over collectivity and difference.
Moving beyond the symptoms: prelude to the wound
The point of contention as it pertains to the cartesian-colonial habit, is not merely the
representation of something abstracted as material or concrete (though the critique of absolute
truths and representationalism’s logic on this front is to be sure, very much a part of this project),
but rather the fact that cartesian subjectivity, has from its outset, presented and abstracted upon
the world from the over-representation of Man as human. And while from Marcuse to Feenberg
alike, the notion of the human condition and experience is central to any liberation from this
rationality, the irony in Critical Theory is its inability to engage the human condition beyond the
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 35 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
subjective (and imperial) vantage point of Man, and in doing so keeps ‘waiting for the realization’ of excluded values as if they weren’t already at present, and continuously, wailing and in resistance. This largely overlooks the differential complexity of “modern” regimes of power as well as its ontological predicates.
For example, Andrew Feenberg’s concept of the technical code reflects both the technical function and its meaning expressed through language, of any given technical artifact (2010).
Technical codes, Feenberg says, reflect the design standards of a given set of social actors involved in technical development. These standards carry with them the embedded social needs and values of these actors (Feenberg & Callon, 2010). These ideals become embodied, and as such, enacted, through technical design but are often implicated by what Feenberg terms “formal bias”:
“critical theory of technology introduces the concept of “formal bias” to understand how a rationally coherent, well designed, and properly operated technical device or system can nevertheless discriminate in a given social context. The concept of formal bias also sheds light on notions such as institutional racism and serves much the same purpose, name, to enable a critique of socially rational activities that appear fair when abstracted from their context but have discriminatory consequences in that context. Today justice requires identifying and changing formally biased technical codes.” (2010, p.69)
Feenberg also suggests that, “the democratization of technology is about finding new ways of privileging excluded values and realizing them in new technical arrangements” (2005). But here,
Feenberg sidesteps the historization of this claim, making generalized points about democratically constituted alliances that take into account the imposition of certain feedback
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 36 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
loops on disempowered groups (2005). In doing so misleadingly, through this ambiguity and nondisclosure, notions of gender, race, and coloniality are presented (through their muted nonpresence) as values or actors merely excluded from technological design through “formally biased technical codes”. This bypasses the fact that not only are instrumentalization, objectification, and technocratic tendencies explicitly gendered, racialized colonial phenomena, but philosophical and scientific thought itself is predicated on absented and exploited bodies of
Black and indigenous peoples, and women. Such absences are never empty “waiting to be realized”, but definitive, constitutive and didactive (and presently resistant) to the subsequent teleological violence of technological development. The notion that socially rational activities can appear fair when abstracted from their context but nonetheless discriminate in that context is to speak of such activities from the position of privilege and unmarked neutrality. From the position of that which is not experiencing the system as fundamentally discriminatory, unjust and violent from the outset.
Feenberg’s assertion that technical action provides a temporary escape from the human condition provides perhaps the most realizable opportunity to consider these absences, where his position:
“[distinguishes] the situation of a finite actor from a hypothetical infinite actor capable of a “do from nowhere.” The latter can act on its object without reciprocity. God creates the world without suffering any recoil, side effects, or blowback. This is the ultimate practical hierarchy establishing a one way relation between actor and object. But we are not gods. Human beings can only act on a system to which they themselves belong. This is the practical consequence of being an embodied being. Every one of our interventions returns to us in some form as a feedback from our objects… Technical action represents a partial escape from the human condition. We call an
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 37 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
action “technical” when the impact on the object is out of all proportion to the return feedback affecting the actor…So the technical subject does not escape from the logic of finitude after all. But the reciprocity of finite action is dissipated or deferred in such a way as to create the space of a necessary illusion of transcendence.” (2005, p48)
Considered in parallel to the works of Simone Browne or Ariella Azoulay, this “do from
nowhere” implicates how technology, in both historical and contemporary contexts, is memetic
to the colonial gaze of whiteness, of which imposes and places demands upon objectified bodies
of the conquered. This “do from nowhere” echoing Haraway’s claim regarding “the conquered
gaze20”, is made explicit by the work of Simone Brown in Dark Matter, who shows how the
disembodied gaze of surveillant tech is explicitly a racialized technique, “a gaze that is always
unmarked, and therefore already markedly white and male” (Browne, 2015 p49).
Such looking relations have
much to expose, as Browne
highlights through the work
of Patricia A. Turner, “only
a subject can observe or see” Figure 1.2: From, Bullethead
(2015, p58). Such optical oversight has no concerns with reciprocity, and as Browne’s work on
the historical racialization of surveillance technologies through things like lantern laws for slaves walking after dark, is rather about rendering racialized bodies as “outside of the category of the human, un-visible” (ibid p68).
20 “the “god-like trick of seeing everything from nowhere”, an optics that “fucks the world” (Haraway, 1988)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 38 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
“In situating lantern laws as a supervisory device that sought to render those who could be, or were always and already, criminalized by this legal framework as outside of the category of the human and as un-visible, my intent is not to reify Western notions of “the human,” but to say here that the candle lantern as a form knowledge production about the black, indigenous, and mixed-race subject was part of the project of a racializing surveillance and become one of the ways that, to cite McKitterick, “Man comes to represent the only viable expression of humanness, in effect, overrepresenting itself discursively and empirically” [and as Brown adds, technologically] and namely, “overrepresenting Man as the human” (2015, p79-80).
Likewise, she highlights how artifacts of slavery such as The Book of Negroes, expose, “[a]n early imprint of how the [racialized] body comes to be understood as a means of identification and tracking by the state” (ibid p97). In tandem with lantern laws, lit candles as supervisory
‘prosthesis’ devices, these examples illustrate early forms of corporeal racialized knowledge production anchored in making racialized Other, visible (and therefore, un-visible), knowable, and locatable (ibid p110). Put more plainly, it exemplifies how early technologies, be they bookkeeping, breeder documents, or lantern, were manifest explicitly from a desire to manage, control, and exploit certain bodies over others. Racialization and imperial logic grounds the very act of documentation, classification, and policing (as detailed further in other sections of this work). The problem is not the nonpresence of marginalized groups but that they have already been embedded into design processes from their very beginnings. As inferior Others; as slaves,
‘Indians’, Negroes, and women. My point is not to arraign all of critical theory and philosophy as useless, but to draw attention to the ways such disciplines are themselves implicated within a
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 39 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
colonial system—to draw attention to the colonial habit’s imperial conditions and operating
principles; to its overshadowing of ontological and epistemological difference21.
Ariella Azoulay’s Potential History offers an understanding of how imperial conditions standardise productions of meaning while simultaneously shaping the phenomenological field with which they are manifested (2019, p301). A photography and visual theorist, Azoulay is very much concerned with the reopening of images to renegotiate what they show, foregrounding the dynamics of power and emphasizing the role of the spectator in bearing responsibility towards that which the camera either does or does not allow us to see. In Potential History, Azoulay applies this arraignment to suggest and engage a reopening of history. Azoulay foregrounds how liberal forms of knowledge constitute and extend what she terms a differential body politic through the imperial shutter. The imperial shutter enacts spatial, temporal and bodily divisions through various imperial technologies such as: borders and nation states; and their associative documents, tools and rights of citizens, and archives, museums and laws; and their imperial sight, language and politics. Such an ontology operates to render the common world as no longer something shared to care for, but scattered enclaves to possess and protect.
The imperial shutter fragments time into an illusion of past, present futures, allowing for the erasure and depoliticization of precolonial or anti-imperial ways of knowing. History is a series of expulsions, separation and colonization that set in motion a long process of dispossession and violence. Azoulay highlights, how this embedded ontology of the imperial plunder, in this sense,
21 For more on this see, The Wound
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 40 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
has come to shape how we relate to our common world and narrate living together. The “New” world manifest post 1492 across different geographical places times, and contexts has been used to justify the destruction of what exists in the name of “modernity” and “progress”. Azoulay draws our attention to the way “modern citizenship” privileges are built and dependent upon the worldlessness of others that emerged from this imperial project:
“Given the fact that the violence used to inscribe privileged citizens’ rights is deployed through the extraction of the material wealth of others from whom the same rights are denied, the nature of rights inscribed in these objects and their entitlement cannot be determined with categories of ownership. These categories enabled the accumulation of differences between those from whom these objects were expropriated and from whom rights were denied, on the one hand, and those who used others’ craftsmanship for their statecraft. Citizen’s privileges depended on the near worldlessness of others.” (2019, p30)
In her discussion of the historical archive, Azoulay shows how the imperial shutter serves to close down the multiplicity of experiences in the world only to subsume them under one homogenized cultural narrative where persons and their worlds, become abstracted, and thus extracted from the colonial history of time, through seemingly neutral and objective language of universal procedure, that is nonetheless and unequivocally violent. Here, she says, is where the
“theaters of imperial violence” reproduce and legitimize particular fictions regarding relationality, subjectivity, and the human condition,
“what is being reproduced throughout these centuries is the distribution of subject positions such as citizens, subjects, the indigenous, non-citizens, slaves, illegal workers, infiltrators, and so on. Despite what actors who embody these positions see, create, say or dream, even while opposing the evils of imperialism, their actions, interactions, and speculations remain bounded by its very condition.” (ibid p32)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 41 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
Azoulay, drawing on several examples like the mass rape of German woman by the allies during the fall of Berlin in WWII, as well as Hannah Arendt’s report in Eichmann in Jerusalem and the virulent reproach received on behalf of the unapologetic account of ‘history’, read: in her refusal to only account the past from a victim’s perspective and emphasize the role of unquestioned obedience to the centralized power of Jewish Council’s Azoulay highlights how, “Arendt did not blur the distinction between perpetrators and victims, but she did question the total identification of all Jews with victims and all Germans with perpetrators”( ibid p313). It was consequently this imposition of meaning that caused backlash and rejection of Arendt’s accounts as legitimately historical and philosophical (ibid p309-313). Arendt’s exposure of the dangers and consequences of the organization and archivisation of a community is the additional layer of context and meaning to the events of the war that she sought to keep open against the theater of imperial history (ibid p313).
In highlighting WWII’s implications for race, human rights, and equality Azoulay shows how even our most “progressive” liberal signposts and principles are anchored in what Maldanado-
Torres terms a non-ethics of war, but what Azoulay is framing as the violence of imperial history. However, Azoulay suggests that not only is this violence reversible, but that we ought to refuse the shutter as a means of beginning to practice potential history:
“Potential history is a form of being with others, both living and dead, across time, against the separation of the past from the present, colonized peoples from their worlds and possessions, and history from politics … Potential history is not the account of radical thinking, of explicit ideological struggles against imperialism, but a rejection of imperialism’s conceptual apparatus altogether.”(ibid p1)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 42 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
Crucial to this practice, for Azoulay, is understanding how the human conditions is the object of imperialism’s assault as well as the bedrock of resistance to it. The human condition, for
Azoulay, is not defeatable nor does it need to be invented, “a free gift from nowhere” (ibid p32), it cannot progress as it is already the basis with “which human life is given and renewed” (ibid p32) and thus does not operate within the realm of linear temporality. Therefore, the human condition supersedes and subsists the imperial shutter and offers a shift from colonial temporality’s beginning, end, or post conditions. It subsumes axis and markers of colonial power, instead provides spaces for regeneration, reparation, and reviving on the basis of
“precolonial patterns and arrangements ungoverned by Man” (ibid p31). And fervently presences itself within and against the destructive wake of progress, to remind us of our own very connection to nature and as Azoulay puts it, “asks not to be ignored for the sake of future utopias” (ibid p31); Azoulay drawing on Hannah Arendt, shows how imperialism exchanges this
“free gift” for something it’s made itself instead22. This involves making those bracketed away or rendered to the dustbins of history and the archive during Man’s construction of history and imperial reality, their memories, moments and potentialities legible, perceptible and redistributed; as well as, a firm rejection of neutrality, newness, and the progressive project.
This includes liberal institutions and the propagation of its tools. Part of the naturalization of imperial differential rule, as Azoulay highlights, is tied to the way institutions draw on the historical archive to propagate both material and discursive objects: “After a few centuries during which imperialism institutionalized its modalities of violence and imposed them globally,
22 Lucie Suchman quote on man creating the miracle of life through the machine
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 43 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
these modalities could appear as the “political and historical a priori” of human experience. This
fabricated field is defined by and defines both the master’s house and the tools used to dismantle
it; that is, it limits what we can see as problems, what we can use as tools, and when we can use
them.” (ibid p302). Drawing on Audre Lorde, she exemplifies this through feminist theory and
the tendency to construct alternative histories still beholden to the master’s house and his tools:
“Lorde associated tools with racial patriarchy, the regime that transforms humans into raw material and asks them not to escape the question: “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” …Lorde confronted her audience of white women directly and called on them to exit their dependency on the master’s house, their trust in it…“What is the theory behind racist feminism?” …Disavowed whiteness, that is, simply feminism, in the American context is one way racial origins are sealed as “past,” and emancipatory politics can be envisaged as color- blind. Lorde regarded white feminists as the protégés of the master’s house who continue to operate its tools against others. However, she didn’t give up on the hope that they would recognize their interest in collapsing the master’s house and find “the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charts.”” (ibid p299)
To act where there are no charts, requires not a crafting of a new plan, place or project, but a
rigorous engagement with the here and now of past/present/futures, as “the only temporality in
which a community persists against the tools that threaten its freedom to exist” (ibid p299).
Because alternative histories still work within the imperial narrative and operate in-service to and
remain defined by binary settler worldviews, this has the effect of rendering, “those who struggle against the archive as victims to salvaged from the archive rather than as allies in a common struggle”(ibid p195). Instead, Azoulay suggests we engage in not alternative histories, but nonimperial grammars. A process by which we “unlearn what one’s ancestors inherited from their ancestors as solid facts and recognizable sign posts—in order to attend to their origins and
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 44 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
render the imperial plunder impossible again” ( ibid p13). Nonimperial grammars are intimately tied to the human condition, shared (and stolen) worlds, and the rejection and resistance to the authority of imperial shutters.
To engage in nonimperial grammars she suggests a form of co-citizenship: “a set of assumptions and practices shared by different people—including scholars—who oppose imperialism, colonialism, racial capitalism and its institution of citizenship” (ibid p 16). It explicitly deprivileges these accounts and agencies to retrieve instead an interaction and resuscitation of the many refusal and precolonial modes of sharing the world inherent in people’s public performances, diverse claims and repressed aspirations. Crucially, not as objects of study or discoveries but as collaborators and companions in partnership against imperial citizenship and the process of unlearning imperialism (ibid p16-17):
“Unlearning is a way of disengaging from political initiatives, concepts, or modes of thinking, including critical theory, that are devised and promoted as progressive and unprecedented. Instead, it insists that finding precedents—or at least assuming that precedents could be found—for resistance to racial and colonial crimes is not the novel work of academic discovery. Unlearning is a way of assuming that what seems catastrophic today to certain groups was already catastrophic for many other groups, groups that didn’t wait for critical theory to come along to understand the contours of their dispossession and the urgency of resisting it and seeking reparation” (ibid p17)
Such grammars engage not disciplinary predecessors but present actors; not hidden nor new accounts but lived realities of the here and now, more pointedly it is a, “[refusal] to be complicit, to claim that justice is due, even after a long time”( ibid p526) that understands this, as well as caring for a share world, as preconditions or premises to living and belonging within a global
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 45 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
community. It is a refusal to engage as the perpetrators of imperial colonial violence by
acknowledging our fundamental interconnectedness and shared human condition; our relational
responsibility to one another. It is rejecting the disassociation from violence provided by the
socially constructed parameters of the imperial shutter.
Reading Azoulay through contributions of critical algorithm and media studies, and feminist
science and technology studies, shows how science and history as socially constructed practices
that necessarily bracket away (and thus depoliticize and delegitimize) pre- and anti-colonial ways
of knowing, are hegemonic narratives conceptually, methodologically and epistemologically
oriented along a racialized, gendered, and classed axis of imperial colonial powers (Chun, 2021;
Browne 2015; Benjamin, 2019; Eubanks, 2018; Barad, 2007; Azoulay, 2019). Where “seeing” in
the scientific sense, involves a bracketing of practices that obscures how science and history as
social practices extend certain assumptions and habits of being over others. Hence, what is
needed is a shift in orientation towards these voices and ongoing resistances to
representationalism’s imperial optics23.
If interface technologies format specific ways of knowing in the world in accordance with these
optics, they also have the potential to open up and hasten forward appreciation and exposure to
23 In the context of reconfiguring ontological horizons to deposition the cartesian binary with regards to interface technologies, knowledge production, and the habitual colonial gaze, recent interventions have been made by Lizzie O’Shea in her work Future Histories. O’Shea’s work offers one point of entry into what processes of unlearning with companions might look like in critical media studies. Though not a critical media scholar, but rather a human rights lawyer, O’Shea writes about how historical social movements and thinkers are relevant to current discourses and debates surrounding interfaced networked culture. O’Shea makes several claims throughout her chapters that are fruitful considerations for this project: one is her discussion of digital trace and Fanonian self-determination discussed in Black Skin White Masks, the second is her reading of the Maori iwi and the Whanganui River in New Zealand (a recent treaty settlement between the Maori and the New Zealand government resulting in the Whanganui River being recognized as a legal person with rights, duties and liabilities) and other indigenous epistemological interventions alongside the notion of digital space as an environment we ought to care for. (O’Shea, 2019)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 46 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
different epistemic positions and resonances (O’Shea, 2019 p237) . This project takes seriously the notion of thinking within, creating and learning from these perspectives by theorizing from nonbinary and decolonial creative practice. It contributes to, extends and transforms all of the aforementioned contributions by engaging their insights through embodied writing practice, through poetics, fiction and storytelling as interface, as cultural device and knowledge filter; as
“research” method. Doing so allows me to resist the typical deliverables afforded standard research thesis practice and reject the authority of scientific language and imaginaries; undermining scientific measurement and representational methods as the sole means of objective knowledge production. It begins from the position that if coloniality is embedded in interface, it is also embedded within the self.
If interface are at the moment,
technologies of the conqueror,
intimately woven into our identity
and general being within the
world, we cannot talk about them
in the abstract. We cannot talk
about identity or ontology without
being inside of it in all its messy
and intimate entanglement. Oppression Figure 1.3: From, Bullethead is personal. It is not abstract. It is not
isolated within black, brown, indigenous and female bodies. It does not occur out there against
others, because it begins with ourselves. To ignore this, to ignore how our daily practices and
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 47 The Fever | Hannah Holtzclaw
relations further colonial violence is to ascribe inequality as purely a representational problem,
and to ignore how it is very much embedded within who we are and what we do in every
moment; in identity as daily performance: habit produces ontology. Contending with imperialism
and the coloniality of being means radical humanizing, through a return and embrace of the
human condition, to a centering of our shared relation to the world, to embodiment. So, this project employs poetics and fiction in its imaginings about interface, it writes and researches, with the body; through engagement with the queer performativity of disorientation and diffraction as educative and transformative practices. It considers both research practice and theory from decolonial positions, imperfect, but open to change, it is both invitation; offering and refusal; applied resistance.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 48 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
keep knocking up against these walls and ceilings. feeling stuck inside this box. these expectations, imprint themselves against my skin.
[in the thick of usurpation, turbid thoughts] hard to tell where the world ends and my self begins. entangled predelections exhaust.
histories, dance across my skin burning permanence, pattern painted thoughts. not sure where my line of intention is trying to get a sense of whats mine and whats not sondering within the fret, dropping threads,
a perpetual promenade between is and ought.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 49 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
On the Coloniality, of the Cartesian- Colonial habit: European philosophy and ego cogito conquiro
This section’s purpose is to illustrate how there have always been colonies, imperial white- supremacy, at the center of Heidegger; at the center of 20th century European Philosophy and
‘modern’ education—an epistemic position that renders relations of subordination and domination within the world through all that it shapes and informs, technology included.
To be clear, I do not mean to oversimplify what I understand as a dynamic and relational absence of what decolonial theorists Walter Mignolo has identified as ‘The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference” or what Ariella Azoulay calls ‘Imperial Differential Rule’
(Azoulay, 2019; Mignolo, 2001). The manifestation of the geopolitics of knowledge and colonial differential rule can be traced back to 1492. Though as Azoulay and decolonial theorists Walter
Mignolo and Anibal Quijano have shown, the imperial plunder takes place at geographically different times and places with shifting social and political contours, its epistemological and ontological dimensions of dominance, dislocation and dispossession remain at the heart of western civilisation and the ‘modern’/colonial global system (Mignolo, 2001; Quijano, 2007).
While it is narratively convenient to render colonial logic as “historical”, and present ‘modernity’ as the enlightened advancement beyond colonialism, monarchy and other pre-capitalist systems, as Mignolo and Quijano note, locating “modernity” as chronologically manifest within the 18th century, erases the Iberian foundational period of capitalist and colonial expansion (Mignolo,
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 50 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
2001; Quijano, 2007). This absence is significant because it overlooks the construction (and
exploitation) of the global south as well as the role of the trans Atlantic slave trade circuit in
constructing “modernity”. Both reveal coloniality as not merely constitutive, but ontologically
and epistemologically generative of modernity as a world-system (Mignolo, 2001 p60-61). The
conquest of the peoples and cultures of what is known today as Latin America was the catalyst
for a series of processes that violently concentrated much of the worlds resources within the
hands of a small European minority; obliged by the enslavement and domination of millions of
African and Latin American peoples (Quijano, 2007). This concentration of power gained inertia
and concretized throughout the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th century, to today, where as Quijano details, “[t]he ‘Western’ European dominators and their Euro-North American descendants are still the principle beneficiaries” (ibid p2)1. Hence, colonialism as a political system, gave way to
an imperial ‘Modernity’: a Eurocentered colonial system of political, social, and cultural
domination that grounds not only European Philosophy but all of ‘modern’ (and ‘postmodern’)
scientific and historical thought (Azoulay, 2019; Mignolo, 2001; Quijano, 2007)
Hence, the gap and critique of Frankfurt School critical theory (as well it’s prodigies) this
research seeks to outline is similar to thinkers that subvert the habituation of western philosophy.
1 “The eighteenth century (or more exactly, the period between approximately 1760 and 1800 was dominated by two distinctive shifts. First, there was the displacement of power in the Atlantic circuit from the south to the north. Second, the main concern in Europe, from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) until the end of the eighteenth century, was nation-state building rather than colonialism. England, France, and Germany were not yet colonial powers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and when they be-came so, they mutually reinforced nation building with colonial expansion, particularly starting in the nineteenth century. However, the strong pre-occupation in the north with the Europe of nations placed colonialism on the back burner, so to speak. Colonialism was a secondary concern for nations such as England and France, whose presence in the Americas was geared toward commerce rather than conversion, like the project of Spain and Portugal. At that point, France and England did not have a civilizing mission to accomplish in the Americas, as they would have in Asia and Africa after the Napoleonic era. Current conceptualizations of modernity and postmodernity are historically grounded in that period. The second stage of modernity was part of the German restitution of the Greek legacy as the foundation of Western civilization” (Mignolo, 2001 p61)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 51 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
Such as Emmanuel Levinas, who illustrate, as decolonial scholar Nelson Maldonado-Torres has pointed out, the difference and potentialities opened by thinking within (not merely including) perspectives that have been historically marginalized, indeed culturally desecrated by western thought (Maldonado-Torres, 2007 p241).
In contrast to Heidegger, Levina’s thought is marked by being a survivor of the Jewish
Holocaust. An experience of which led him to become one of his most radical opposers and perhaps more importantly, in his critique, making the link between ontology and power
(Maldonado-Torres, 2007 p242). Exemplified in such works like that of his essay Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism:
“How is universality compatible with racism? The answer-to be found in the logic of what first inspires racism- involves a basic modification of the very idea of universality. Universality must give way to the idea of expansion, for the expansion of a force presents a structure that is completely different from the propagation of an idea...In spite of the unique accent communicated to it by its creator, it becomes a common heritage. It is fundamentally anonymous. The person who accepts it becomes its master, as does the person who proposes it. The propagation of an idea thus creates a community of "masters"; it is a process of equalization…. But force is characterized by another type of propagation. The person who exerts force does not abandon it. Force does not disappear among those who submit to it. It is attached to the personality or society exerting it, enlarging that person or society while subordinating the rest. Here the universal order is not established as a consequence of ideological expansion; it is that very expansion that constitutes the unity of a world of masters and slaves. .” (Levinas & Hand, 1990 p68)
Furthermore, Levinas’ in, As if Consenting to Horror, a reflection on whether Heidegger’s support for the Nazi regime necessitates evil laden within Heidegger’s work in Being and Time,
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 52 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
takes care in suggesting that evil is never so unidirectional or simplistic and defaulting to a position that fixes its representation ultimately forecloses our understanding, indeed our recognition of its praxis:
“Can we be assured, however, that there was never any echo of Evil in it? The diabolical is not limited to the wickedness popular wisdom ascribes to it and whose malice, based on guile, is familiar and predictable in an adult culture. The diabolical is endowed with intelligence and enters where it will. To reject it, it is first necessary to refute it. Intellectual effort is needed to recognize it. Who can boast of having done so? Say what you will, the diabolical gives food for thought.” (Levinas & Wissing, 1989 p488)
The refusal to oversimplify violence as merely about good versus evil finds resonance in the persistence of colonial impositions like racism and sexism, and pivot us towards a subversion of
European phenomenological and ontological positions that take as their premise and beginning
Man’s encounter with the world and/or the act of thinking. Put another way, the Diabolical is dynamic, processual, emergent out of a set of conditions. It is a certain poisoning. It can’t be censored or easily removed because it emerges out of a colonial and imperial positioning;
Levinas paved way for discussions about the colonial presupposition. Holding the door open for decolonial scholars of the likes of Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Walter Mignolo and Enrique
Dussel towards ways of knowing that instead concern themselves with ethics and the bodily demands of face-to-face, subject-Other encounters: or, the relational demands of transontological difference.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 53 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
To begin from this position, it is crucial to articulate the role of coloniality in ‘modern’ identity
formation. Only then can we begin to fully come to terms with the conditions and relations for
identity the coloniality of being creates and seeks; as
well as what it forecloses and destroys. Situating the
problem of the cartesian-colonial habit explicitly
within its colonial roots, allows me to articulate
decolonial commitments as the necessary antithesis
to contemporary regimes of knowing and being that
are fundamentally violent; and as such, detrimental to
both human and non-human life.
Figure 2.1: from, Not a Woman but a Shaman In short, a decolonial turn or commitment, returns us to several
fundamental truths obscured and estranged by the cartesian-colonial habit: 1. self is always already threaded through with that which is excluded; that which is outside, other, and absent; self is always fundamentally shot through and shaped by the other and all else; and 2. Being is ultimately an ongoing creative relation of reciprocity and participation with the world and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. I turn to the work of decolonial theorist Nelson Maldonado-
Torres who in turn draws on the work of Enrique Dussel, Emmanuel Levinas, as well as Walter
Mignolo and Franz Fanon, to examine the bases of modernity/coloniality that transforms the coloniality of power, to the coloniality of being.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 54 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
Enrique Dussel offers a point of entry with regards to the rhetoric of modernity cultivated by
Frankfurt school theorists. In one of his Frankfurt Lectures he proceeds as follows:
“Modernity is, for many (for Jurgen Habermas or Charles Taylor) an essentially or exclusively European phenomenon... Modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the ‘center’ of a World History that it inaugurates: the ‘periphery’ that surrounds this center is consequently part of its self-definition. The occlusion of this periphery (and of the role of Spain and Portugal in the formation of the modern world system from the late fifteenth to the mid- seventeenth centuries)leads the major contemporary thinkers of the ‘center’ into a Eurocentric fallacy in their understanding of modernity. If their understanding of the genealogy of modernity is thus partial and provincial, their attempts at a critique or defense of it are likewise unilateral and, in part, false.” (Dussel, 1993 p65)
Dussel in this lecture ties the concept of modernity to the Spanish reconquest of the Kingdom of
Granada from Islamic rule in 1492 and the colonization of the Andalusia. Dussel highlights how the “broken treaties, elimination of local elites, endless massacres and tortures, the demand that the conquered betray their religion and culture under pain of death or expulsion, the confiscation and repartition in feudal form of lands, towns, and their inhabitant to the officers of the conquering army” consequently provided the model for the colonial pursuits in the New World and the rendering of Latin America as “first periphery” of modern Europe (ibid p67). The global effects of this moment (or ‘myth’) of origin would set in motion the generative and constitutive process of ‘modernization’ in Africa and Asia as well, where the connection between
Eurocentrism and its associated “fallacy of developmentalism” were imposed unilaterally upon other cultures across the world (ibid). But drawing on Hegel and Kant, Dussel shows how
‘development’ was framed and applied as a form “necessary movement” from humanity’s alleged state of “guilty immaturity”; “laziness”; “cowardice” adolescence, towards an
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 55 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
enlightened and developed consciousness (ibid p67-69). Where through Doctrines of Discovery,
Eurocentrism delegitimized (by violent force) pre-existing ways of knowing and being within
Latin America, Africa and Asia, so that “Spirit’s freedom” could be fully realized through the
“moment of development” and the rational, individual, self—courtesy of explicitly Christian principles.
Concurrently, Dussel links both Hegel’s and Habermas’s discounting of the ‘discovery’ of the
Americas as the violent, necessary imperative to modernity, where the ‘civil society’ of Europe transcends the state through colonies in the New World. Hegel, he writes, does not clearly comprehend that the myth of ‘free space’ in the peripheries of Europe, of which allowed, “the poor, produced by contradictions of capitalist development, to become capitalists or property owners themselves in the colonies” of the New World, necessitated a dispossession, exploitation
(if not complete annihilation) and dislocation of pre-existing cultures and peoples (ibid p74).
That “new possibilities” or ‘transcendental’ subjectivity for the poor and down trodden of
Europe, meant the rearticulation of dominant/subordinate relations elsewhere. Thus, Dussel writes, “[t]this process of discovery and conquest…is not simply of anecdotal or historical interest: It is part of the process of the constitution of modern subjectivity itself.” (ibid p67).
Reason and rationality, as well as their critique, are dependent upon a vision of modernity that necessitates an asymmetrical Other in order to manifest a Self; and willfully, through violence, and through both discursive and material erasure and exclusion, ensures they can neither intervene in such “critiques” or conversations (ibid 76). Hence, to critique and deal with the problem of interface, be it technology as language, device, or institutional policy, one must deal with the resonances of coloniality in identity and being.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 56 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
Ego conquiro
Maldonado-Torres, in The Coloniality of Being, illustrates how cartesian subjectivity was established along a particular axis of power. Namely, domination structured around the idea of race and global markets. Through coloniality, the codification of difference was established through racialized terms of the conqueror and the conquered. The objectification of conquered land and peoples through capitalism became a means of controlling resources and labour.
Through slavery and serfdom at best and cultural genocide at worst, this system of domination and subordination was central to maintaining colonial control in the Americas (Maldonado-
Torres, 2007 p243-244).
Maldonado-Torres, drawing on the work of Enrique Dussel, points to Spanish Conquistador
Hernan Cortes’s expression of ideal subjectivity, one predating René Descarte’s ego cogito, of ego conquiro. Whereby, the significance of Cartesian subjectivity derived from the European enlightenment, must be understood first and foremost, “against the backdrop of an unquestioned ideal of self expressed in the notion of the ego conquiro. The certainty of the self as a conqueror, of its tasks and missions” (ibid p245). Thus, for Maldonado-Torres, the skepticism generated towards the humanity of the conquered barbarian became not only the justification for domination and subordination, but also constituted an imperial attitude. Of which served to form the basis for cartesian formations of identity, or “modern Imperial Man” (ibid p245):
“point of view also leads to the idea that it would be impossible to provide an adequate account of the crisis of modern Europe without reference, not only to the limits of a Cartesian view of the world, but also to the traumatic effects of Manichean misanthropic skepticism and its imperial ethos.” (ibid p245-246)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 57 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
Such ethos can be seen through the accomplishments of instrumental rationality and ego cognito, in the way that notions of progress, freedom, or Rights of Man do not inherently extend equally to all, as their assertion in the first account presupposes universal or shared definitions of which the conquered in question have been stripped in contributing or ascribing to (ibid p246). Thus, “ the preferential option for the ego conquiro [explains] why security for some can conceivably be obtained at the expense of the lives of others” (ibid p246), as coloniality is a process by which the transcendental moment of subjectivity arrives at the behest of an ethical forgetfulness or selectiveness, where “exceptions to ethical relationships become the norm” (ibid p259).
Foreclosing the horizon of interaction amongst peoples; indeed any Other way knowing and being within the world, “by actually giving birth to a world in which lordship and supremacy rather than generous interaction define social dynamics in society.” (ibid p259)
The Non-Ethics of War
Coloniality then must be understood as an ontologically significant event in the history of human societies with which notions of Self emerged in response and relation, always already perforated and shot through, by colonial dispositions of Otherness. Achieved at the expense of subordination, indeed the violence against, the conquered peoples of the Americas. This condition of individual agency is then shaped, by what Maldonado-Torres asserts as, “a transformation and naturalization of the non-ethics of war”:
“This non-ethics included the practices of eliminating and slaving certain subjects - e.g., indigenous and black - as part of the enterprise of colonization. The hyperbolic expression of coloniality includes genocide, which is the paroxysm of the ego cogito - a
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 58 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
world in which the ego cogito exists alone. War, however, is not only about killing or enslaving. War includes a particular treatment of sexuality and of feminity: rape. Coloniality is an order of things that put people of color under the murderous and rapist sight of a vigilant ego. And the primary targets of rape are women.” (2007, p247-248)
Thus, cartesian-coloniality’s non-ethics are a violent racialization of identity that is also explicitly, gendered, “the ego conquiro is constitutively a phallic ego as well” (ibid p248).
Maldonado-Torres then, in recourse to Descartes, postulates three categories of Fanonian
meditations necessary for reflection on the coloniality of being: Trans-ontological difference: the
difference between Being and what is beyond Being; or Being and exteriority, Ontological
difference: the difference between Being and beings, and Sub-ontological/ontological colonial
difference: the difference between Being and what lies below Being or that which is negatively
marked as dispensable as well as a target of rape and murder (ibid p253-254).
The latter is a product of the coloniality of being where:
“The same ideas that inspire perverted acts in war, particularly slavery, murder and rape, are legitimized in modernity through the idea of race and gradually are seen as normal to a great extent thanks to the alleged obviousness and non-problematic character of Black slavery and anti-Black racism. To be sure those who suffer the consequences of such a system are primarily Blacks and indigenous peoples, as well as all of those who appear as colored. In short, this system of symbolic representations, the material conditions that in part produce it and continue to legitimate it, and the existential dynamics that occur therein, which are also at the same time derivative and constitutive of such a context, are part of a process that naturalizes the non-ethics of war.” ((Maldonado-Torres, 2007 p254-255)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 59 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
It is these non ethics of war that become particularly important when addressing the habits of
being embedded within modern institutions, technology and ways of knowing. Understanding
the racialized and gendered violence the colonial habit instantiates, is not a call for mere
reconciliation, acknowledgement or inclusion, it is also a call to pay attention to the ways this
violence against Other is fundamentally always already a violence done to ourselves2. What ego conquiro reveals is that the racist and sexist impasse of modern scientific and social development is predicated on a dehumanization, a dislocation or dismemberment, of a fundamental ontological difference that is always inevitably interwoven with how we see or don’t see, the damne` 3and ourselves4. As Quijano points out, under the reign of a differential politic,
“[t]he differentiated individual subjectivity is real’, but it is not an entity, to it doesn’t exist only vis-a-vis itself or by itself. It exists as a differentiated part, but not separated, of an intersubjectivity or intersubjective dimension of a social relationship. Every individual discourse, or reflection, remits to a structure of intersubjectivity. The former is constituted in and
2 To quote Fanon, in Black Skin White Masks: “The disaster of the man of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved. The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed man. And even today they subsist, to organize this dehumanization rationally.” (Fanon, 1986 p231) 3 “Following Fanon, I will use a concept that refers to the colonial subject, equivalent in some way to Dasein but marking the aspects of the coloniality of Being: the damne´ or condemned of the earth. The damne´ is for the coloniality of Being what Dasein is for fundamental ontology, but, as it were, in reverse. The Damne´ is for European Dasein the being who is ‘not there’. I want to argue that they are not independent of each other but that, without awareness of coloniality, reflection on Dasein and Being involve the erasure of the damne´ and the coloniality of Being” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007 p253) Maldanado-Torres also asserts: “The damne´ is the subject that emerges in a world marked by the coloniality of Being. The damne´, as Fanon put it, has nonontological resistance in the eyes of the dominant group. The damne´ is either invisible or excessively visible. The damne´ exists in the mode of not-being there, which hints at the nearness of death, at the company of death. The damne´ is a concrete being but it is also a transcendental concept. Emile Benveniste has shown that the term damne´ is etymologically related to the concept of donner, which means, to give. The damne´ is literally the subject who cannot give because what he or she has has been taken from him or her.” (ibid p258) 4 As eluded to above, this non ethics can and should be read through the lens of ethical forgetfulness and selectiveness, whereby supremacy and lordship, indeed explicitly white supremacy and lordship, dictate the parameters of ethics and the dehumanization of being. Damne is used by Franz Fanon and Maldonado-Torres here to articulate the subject that emerges from this process, those implicated by the non-ethics of war; the violent absence and silenced, conquered peoples; specifically Black and indigenous peoples; women, of no being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007 p. 257-260).
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 60 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
vis a vis the latter. Knowledge in this perspective is an intersubjective relation…” (2007, p173)
Where knowledge as an intersubjective relation, is not one of atomized individual interiority and something else, but an intersubjective queer relationship between entangled subjectivities and their exteriority for the purpose of something else. Maldonado-Torres, turns to Emmanuel
Levinas to elaborate on that which ties the interiority of being intimately with the exterior of being, the transontological imperative of being in and of the world:
Levinas argues that gift-giving and reception are fundamental traits of the self. Giving is first and foremost for Levinas a metaphysical act that makes possible the communication between a self and an Other as transontological as well as the sharing of a common world. Without giving to an Other there would be no self just as without receiving from the Other there would be no reason. In short, without a trans- ontological moment there would be no self, no reason, and no Being. The trans-ontological is the foundation of the ontological. For Levinas, the ontological, the realm of being, comes to exist out of the introduction of justice into the trans-ontological relation”(2007, p.258)
We see this echoed most reverently in the concluding chapters of Black Skin, White Masks, with
Fanon’s final words laying bare the fundamental imperative of trans/ontological difference,
“Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?” (1986, p231-232). For Fanon, the countering of the force and legitimacy of
European modernity and its dynamics of possession, its logic of dehumanization and subordination demanded, “a war against war oriented by ’love’”, specifically, to situating love as ethics within notions of trans/ontological differences (Maldonado-Torres, 2007 p256). Indeed, the restoration of humanity as givers in perpetual and reciprocal generous exchange, denies all politics of possession the coloniality of being imposes; it is colonization and its extensions, its
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 61 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
obligatory subjugation upon bodies, that instantiates the death instinct 5we wield upon ourselves
and other.
El conquiro provides
we all find ourselves
“in a world in which
things do evil; a world in Figure 2.2: From, Not a Woman but a Shaman
which I am summoned into battle; a world in which it is always a question of annihilation or triumph.” (Fanon, 1986 p228)
Leaving us two paths to transcendence: domination or death. Thus, a turn to decolonial
commitments ought to destabilize el conquiro and el cogito as bodily and institutional habits that
serve to buttress these conditions. Where love as ethics, understands social totality as the radical
threadedness of entangled subjectivities in reciprocal exchange with the world and all else.
Restoring the Gift: The Decolonial Turn
“And, if Sartre has appeared to formulate a description of love as frustration, his Being and Nothingness amounting only to an analysis of dishonesty and inauthenticity, the fact remains that true, authentic love—wishing for others what one postulates for oneself, when that postulation unites the permanent values of human reality—
5 Where the life instinct or life energy in question for this work should be understood as one of receptivity, creativity, and giving; indeed love, in its most honest forms and truth bearing forms.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 62 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
entails the mobilization of psychic drives basically freed of unconscious conflicts... Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.” (Fanon, 1986 p41)
Thus what is crucial to this discussion, is the notion that the coloniality of being is by no means an inherent nor inevitable outcome or mode to being, indeed we might understand it instead, as an unnatural pollutant, a toxin, soiling the dynamic relations involved in the creation of meaning.
A disease, that, “shows itself forth when the preservation of Being (in any of its determinations: national ontologies, identitarian ontologies, etc.) takes primacy over listening to the cries of those whose humanity is being denied.” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007 p 257) Furthermore, a restoration of humanity, of being, requires a theory of a healing, indeed an ethics of love that dismantles imperial man and the paradigm of war imposed in his wake. Where agency is defined in relation to, “a world oriented by the ideals of human generosity and receptivity. This is the precise meaning of decolonization: restoration of the logic of the gift.” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007 p260)
The gift that it is a trans/ontological experience; of difference. This work, then, understands decoloniality and its discourse to be concepts, expressions that act as invitations to dialogue and respond to desires for new meaning to be exchanged across and through different ways of knowing. In such a way (as best put by Fanon), “[t]hat the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.” (Fanon, 1986 p231)
Decolonial commitments, then, are not ones of mere representation and its exclusion/inclusion terms of being, they include, but more appropriately extend beyond acknowledgement and
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 63 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
reconciliation. More appropriately it is a performative ethos that ceases to engage in the neurotic6
demands of colonial being and instead pursues rehumanizing efforts to breakdown “hierarchies
of difference that dehumanize subjects and communities”, and explores methods for, “the
production of counter-discourses, counter-knowledges, and counter-creative acts and counter- practices that seek to dismantle coloniality and open up other forms of being within the world”
(Maldonado-Torres, 2016 p10).
Such commitments, introduce questions regarding the embodied effects of the coloniality of being in modern societies and subjectivities, in order to create space for alternative ways of knowing and relating to the world and each other to emerge; that are ideally committed to the creative generation of meaning more suitable to a collectively implicated world of human and nonhuman being. Where learning, indeed knowing, does not serve to extend, verify, or preference el cogito and its binary non ethics, but rather actively pursues its unraveling:
“The Decolonial Turn is about making visible the invisible and about analyzing the mechanisms that produce such invisibility or distorted visibility in light of a large stock of ideas that must necessarily include the critical reflections of the ‘invisible’ people themselves. Indeed, one must recognize their intellectual production as thinking not only as culture or ideology… a fundamental shift in perspective that leads one to see the world anew in a way that allows one to target its evils in a new way and that gives us a better sense of what to do next…” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007 p262)
Crucially, decolonial commitments are about doing. Not isolating ideas and change in ways that
divorce knowledge from action or theory from practice. Rather, decolonial commitments
6 “The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation. “(Fanon, 1986 p60)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 64 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
“combine knowledge, practice, and creative expressions, among other areas in their efforts to
change the world. “(Maldonado-Torres, 2016 p7) Indeed, we are thinking with and from within
the absences, silences, and gaps that mark and sustain el cogito’s reign. This very much means that decolonial commitments are rife with conflict and imperfections. Unlearning habits is a process that requires feedback and ongoing dialogue in order for new formations of being, new habits, to be developed and sustained. Furthermore, this more pointedly suggests they must remain open to amendments and transformation, “Neither perfect nor pure, decoloniality is rather an attitude that keeps subjects and collectives open to growth and corrections as well as an unfinished project.” (Maldonado-Torres, 2016 p31)
Technologies of decolonization do not name and cannot name, the outside, absence, unknown or beyond, from within the colonial matrix of power7. As detailed elsewhere, when we are
positioned above and outside of the world we are a part of, in all its colonial and imperial
inheritance, we are offered little insight as to how we contribute to or transcend its violence. The
imperial differential transitions in the global south that extend the coloniality of being, are
marked by the social transformation of Third World countries (who were manifest as 3rd through
their exploitation) by the imposition of First World academic, corporate and governmental
structures, as Mignolo writes:
“The scenario is simple: Western expansion was not only eco-nomic and political but also educational and
7 As with concepts such as Dependency Theory or World-system analysis, emergent from the social sciences. That as Mignolo notes, “in the politics of their loci of enunciation”, impose and extend differential imperial rule as praxis and can be understood as, “the difference between center and periphery, between the Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism and knowledge production by those who participated in building the modern/colonial world and those who have been left out of the discussion. Las Casas defended the Indians, but the Indians did not participate in the discussions about their rights. The emerging capitalists benefiting from the industrial revolution were eager to end slavery that supported plantation owners and slaveholders. Black Africans and American Indians were not taken into account when knowledge and social organization were at stake. They, Africans and American Indians, were considered patient, living organisms to be told, not to be heard.” (Mignolo, 2001 p63)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 65 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
intellectual. The Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism was accepted in former colonies as ‘‘our own’’ critique of Eurocentrism; socialist alternatives to liberalism in Europe were taken, in the colonies, as a path of liberation without making the distinction between emancipation in Europe and liberation in the colonial world. Quite simply, the colonial difference was not considered in its epistemic dimension….” (Mignolo, 2001 p64)
This conceptual enframing bleeds through institutionalized epistemic biases beholden and
gripped by the omnipresent imposition of coloniality within liberal academics. To theorize
within an institution that standardizes education and pedagogy through disciplinary enclosures8,
ethnocentrism, credibility metrics, methodologically stunted scientific practices, and a shared
reality bias, is to not only further coloniality via epistemic injustice but also circumvent and short
circuit epistemological accountability, growth and potential (Aman, 2018; V. Andreotti, 2016; V.
de O. Andreotti et al., 2016). Hence, decolonial technologies of epistemic interface ought to
think with and from within pre-colonial or anti-imperial ways of knowing and disengage 9from
the imposed obligation to see and understand the world from within the hubris of an ‘alleged
unmarked universal neutrality.
José Saldívar has suggested that de-colonial thinking is the “pluri-versal epistemology of the
future; an epistemology that de-links from the tyranny of abstract universals (Christians, liberals,
or Marxists).” (Mignolo, 2013 p5) Crucial to this epistemic shift, as Saldivar notes in Unsettling
8 Specifically here with regards to the fact that Women, Black, Indigenous, Asian and Latino people, as Jose Saldívar has pointed out in Mignolo and elsewhere, “are not just a social phenomenon that shall be studied from the perspective of the social sciences modeled from the perspective of White Europeans and US scholars” and under a certain “universal pretension of an epistemology founded, [as Quijano observes], on the experience of one particular ethnicity, white euro-americans” (Mignolo, 2013 p5) 9 In recent years, shifts in university approaches in the Andean region of South America have show what epistemic decolonisation, thinking with and within pre- or anti-imperial or otherwise marginalized epistemologies, might look like indigenous run educational initiatives and interculturalidad educational components (Aman, 2018)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 66 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
Race, Coloniality and Caste, is the refusal to essentialize identity through the reversal of such
enunciative foci 10and the embrace of geopolitical and spatial implications for those whose
experience and identities have been fractured by the borders of coloniality and all its binary
castes. Drawing on both W. E. B. Du Bois and Gloria Anzaldúa, Saldívar explains how the work
of these author’s recodifies ethnoracial subjectivities to hold the tensions; the “warring ideals” of
“inherent US linguistic wars” (or for Du Bois, white Americanism) “both inside the body of the
nation and in the body of [the] soul”, so that new cultural formations might emerge (Saldívar,
2007 p351-352).
Specifically, Saldívar is interested in Anzaldúa’s insistence on the centrality of nepantilism, as a
subalternist vernacular that resists borders, binaries, and castes, a “serpent” dialect “capable of
cracking, fracturing, and braiding the very authority of the master’s English-only tongue.” (ibid
p353) Significant to Anzaldúa’s perspective is the way she understands nepantilism as the
threshold between identities; for Anzaldua the multiple axis of experience privy to being a
chicano, queer, feminist, woman. The vantage point offered by nepantilism it can be said, is
explicitly emergent from Anzaldúa’s struggle with colonial gender binarism11 in and through her
chicano identity.
10 To study white European world-making, from within the colonial crack. 11 Gender dynamics have been from the beginning, fundamental and crucial to fortifying and upholding imperial regimes and the coloniality of power (Schiwy, 2007 p275). Freya Schiwy has drawn attention to how gender and, “[t]he construction of subjectivity is the third dimension of the coloniality of power” (ibid p 274). And while the invention of race as a technology of the conqueror has been highly important marker for the coloniality of power and contributed significantly to the reign of imperial power and unjust governance over subjectivities, as Schiwy details, gender imaginaries have not received the same degree of attention: “The construction of racial subjectivity has served as a bodily metaphor for ordering economic, political as well as epistemic relations, while at the same time creating lived exclusions and abuses as well as forms of organized and quotidian resistance and subversion. Yet, constructs of masculinity and femininity, relations between women and men as well as those who do not fit smoothly into these binary categories have been crucial to all of these dimensions.” (ibid 274-275) Hence, coloniality and imperial differential rule cannot be completely comprehended or contended with in the absence of a theory of gender as Schiwy writes: “[w]hen discussions of the coloniality of power abstract from gender, they risk re-inscribing foundational elements of the coloniality of power where gender binaries and gender imaginaries have
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 67 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
Though Anzaldúa’s theory of nepantilism is expanded upon and revised in her later work to be
both liminal space and embodied spirit (as explained and drawn on in other sections), the braided
and threaded-throughness of its vernacular manifests through performance, as a means of
resisting binary systems of knowledge production. In short, it takes the entangled nature of
knowledge and identity as the fluid state with which we begin in the world; but also the
transformative space with which we can engage and rewrite our selves. Nepantilism is not a
closed world, but rather an openness to totality and change that supports the manifestation of
nonbinary modes of being, privy to the shape shifting demands of concepts like justice, dignity,
and diversity inclusive, or
interculturalidad worlds.
Decolonial technologies of
epistemic interface ought to
queer identity/knowledge in
such a way that resists
essentialist representations and Figure 2.3: From, Not a woman but a Shaman
universal epistemic positions. They should be fundamentally concerned with the performance and embodiment of epistemic (and as such ontologic) transitions; with occupying the space between becoming accountable to what we must leave behind to pursue just and dignity centered
futures, and sensing the world anew through embrace of the messy, uncontainable and
been naturalized11” she goes on: “[t]he colonial imaginary has employed gender as a metaphor and means of subalternization, a metaphor that resulted not only in the representation of territories as female virgin lands that the conquerors penetrated with the sword in hand. The gendering of colonial imaginaries has operated as a means of rendering European masculinity through Othering.” (ibid p275)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 68 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
interrelational threadedness of trans/ontological difference. This means engaging in imaginative methods committed to nonbinary, pre-colonial or anti-imperial thinking and doing as critical project, as well as, more fundamentally, a shift toward love as ethics, and identity/knowledge as performative entanglement. Hence, to decolonize interface as epistemic, this project turns to the embodied demands of quantum physics, gender, precolonial ways of knowing, and fiction and poetics as method.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 69 The Wound | Hannah Holtzclaw
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 70 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
i read once that words are weapons. wield them wisely, in their splendor, in their violence. that in the silence of what it is, and what could be,
they find their defiance. what lies between what’s written, and that which crowns perception? indefinite shadows masquerade upon walls, while the hallows of truth beguile acceptance. i wonder, of the words that don’t break the surface, liminal gods of expression,
what kinds of matters, remain estranged, severed, from man-made transcendence. such sources of vision, however fragmented, of divine prismatics somewhere in-between sentient beings, and sorcery and magic. truth evades us, even as words proliferate,
in the fertile nexus,
the realm of intangibles. simulated experience, blinds us with signals, traps us within the threshold. where meaning, becomes gesture, where word, becomes symbol, what becomes of weapons and splendor, transcendence, in the land of the ephemeral?
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 71 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw queer performance, decoloniality & fiction, fissures and cracks.
Methods Part 1: nonbinary theorizing and fictionalized performance
The binary non ethics of the modern sociotechnic system, then, are not rogue or wild deviations brought about by technologies. It is from the examination of el conquiro, the colonial presupposition to the cartesian, that we can see these systems are working exactly as they were designed. There have always been bodies buried beneath the commons. The veil is a propriety built on this accord. Liberalism and markets are colonial games, colonial extensions:
“…liberalism is by no means the opposite of racism, racist state formations, colonialism, or apartheid. Liberalism is rather a political ideology that facilitates a transition from vulgar legal forms of discrimination to in many cases less vulgar but equally or more discriminatory practices and structures. Liberal institutions in a modern/colonial world aim to advance modernity without realizing that doing so also entails the continuation of coloniality. Universities become centers of command and control, which make them easy to militarize when opposition rises. Many students feel choked and breathless in this context.” ((Maldonado-Torres, 2016 p5)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 72 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
Thus, domination shifts, in modern capitalist democracies, to less conspicuous, “state sanctioned” mechanisms of control and violence. The kind that reduces the process, the potentialities of learning and knowledge creation to the same kind of atomized abuse of agency and the militant governing of cognitive, spiritual, and bodily horizons of the cartesian-colonial habit. Universities in their siloed and hegemonic approaches to education; in their colonial mindsets that sanction hierarchal structures, labor abuse, paternalism, competition structured and ethno/eurocentric lenses; in their abstracted distance from their world and the violence their inattentive detachment inflicts, effectively foreclose the possibilities for alternative configurations of being to emerge. If we are to truly to dismantle cartesian-colonial habits of being, to work towards ideals of justice, we need to more acutely understand the social and historical forces that brought us here and how they move and connect us. This includes rigorously examining the spaces within liberal institutions that extend and reinforce colonial logic, that close down and prohibit us from imagining, evolving, or engaging other ways of knowing and being.
Race, inequalities, and global and higher education scholar Vanessa Andreotti says of the imposed knowledge filters and cultural horizons of modern colonial approaches to education:
“they produce, “cognitive, affective, and relational economies that have left us unprepared and unwilling to address our complicity in systemic harm, or face the magnitude of the problems that we have ahead of us” (Andreotti et al., 2018 p11). This means, any decolonial inquiry into a theory of change needs to be anchored in a turn away and deliberate undoing of cartesian- colonial habits of being that underlie, govern, guide, and constrain our current organization of human and nonhuman life. Who we are within political structures; laws; ideas; stories have
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 73 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
physical manifestations within our bodies. We come to embody, enact, or chafe against, the material-discursive forces of language, of matter and meaning; in all its anxieties and violence, in all its liberation and freedoms. Thus, we must concern ourselves with the embodied practice of knowledge making. So, this project instead, gathers itself around and engages imaginative offerings for creative, just, and ever-changing futures. An engagement with creativity, rather than creation. Human evolution has always been and continues to be anchored in deeply imaginative, spiritual and creative participation with the world (Cajete, 2000). Bell Hooks in creative fictions speaks of how fiction and writing act as method for creating new possible worlds, for taking back the objects of the mind and moving beyond the neoliberal colonization of minds and imaginations: “…if the mind was to be a the site of resistance, only the imagination could make it so. To imagine, then, was a way to begin the process of transforming reality. All that we cannot imagine will never come into being. Critical fictions emerge when the imagination is free to wander, explore, question, transgress.” (hooks, 1998 p55) So, what does this mean in practice?
How do we create space for change?
Both fictions and communication technologies, act as translation systems for collective knowledge and understanding. Both interpolate bodies1. Both manifest worlds. Technology itself being value, and as such story, laden, to speak of the latter is to implicitly engage the former by default. Put another way, as we make technology, it also makes us. Being, and as such knowing, is interfaced through these material discursive assemblages, with differential affordances and resonances within, upon and across bodies. The embeddedness of the cartesian-colonial habit
1 Hayles has made the link between fiction and machines as interpolating texts that render certain effects upon embodiment “…bodies within texts and their relation to the human lifeworld as it is reconfigured by interpolating humans with machines that, as they become intelligent, increasingly interpenetrate and indeed constitute bodies” (Hayles, 2005 p62)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 74 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
renders a certain disjointed logic that poses technology as neutral, as outside of the implications of history or culture, while at the same time posing technology as an overdetermining force, a looming threat that is destroying democracy. This logic perpetuates a dynamic that divorces what we create from who and what we are and wish to become—it objectifies and distances us from our own nature. It enacts a false cut between identity and being; it masks the agency and role of interface in rendering certain habits, worlds, social relations, and culture.
Thus, fictions and communication media, as political technologies, as cultural interface, generate collective belief systems, delimiting both origin and horizon stories of a given society. These commonly held notions of truth, however oppressive, liberating and in any case knowledge producing, merge with individual experiences and personal histories to mark and bound how we come to understand and engage with the world, as well as, how we come to know and understand ourselves. Hence, understanding the role of interface, one of the most critical tasks of any movement of change, is determining how to organize information in such a way that moves us, that ignites our spirit, fosters relationships across, through and within differences; that engages us eco-politically and helps us understand intimately the conditions of our self-collective experience; it demands courage, love, and responsibility, without guilt, without shame and without fear. Thus, fictionalizing and the imaginary remain crucial to the project of any conceivable future, as the desire for social change itself is driven by a certain collective dreaming of a better world.
As Jon K Shaw and Theo Reeves-Evision detail in their introduction to Fiction as Method,
“Fictions proliferate in all aspects of our lives, unconstrained by the novel as a specific form of
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 75 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
art.”(Shaw and Reeves-Evison, 2017 p27) Westphalian maps, financialization, and democracy
have all been established upon imagined relations or fictitious based leaps of faith (Allen, 2004;
Shaw and Reeves-Evison, 2017). Such fictions, as we have seen have significant real life effects.
Shaw and Reeves detail post Reagan-Thatcher deregulation and derivative markets, ushered in alongside complex mathematical modeling, have resulted in an “economy of speculative financial products of which employ fictions to model, and to determine, the future” and “begets a new deterministic relation such that the demands of the market come to shape the matter and relations of life…and the future itself comes to be manipulable by finance, and potentiality—the future as properly unknowable—is permanently deferred” (Shaw and Reeves-Evison, 2017 p22-
23).
Thus for Reeves and Shaw, the emergence of the “term “post-truth” simply describes the spread of this paradigm into a media space that was presumed to be insulated against its effects” (ibid p27). However, they suggest that fiction and fictionalising ought to be understood as an invitation we extend carefully and strategically into, “the radical unknowability of the future”
(ibid p23). Hence, the value and stakes of fiction as method, are “no less than the reinvention of the future beyond the impasses of the present” (ibid p23); a “turning toward an outside that has been [yet] colonized by Capital” (ibid p24). In a “post-truth” era, what has become clear is that,
“it is not longer a case of establishing the truth about post-truth, or of cleaving fiction from fact,
but making tangible the idea that truth and fiction are dynamic concepts that are both produced
and productive” (ibid p29), beholden to a technical interface assemblage over-determined by
neoliberal markets and thus exploited via the logics of circulation, connectivity, visibility and
order, weaponized by private interests (ibid p29). Accordingly, Reeves and Shaw’s point is that
“...categories of fact and fiction are always conditioned by the materials used to craft, frame, and
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 76 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
distribute the discursive objects that scroll down our screens in a blur of epistemological
indeterminacy” (ibid p32) and likewise, “[t]he issue of how we both construct and are constructed by fiction has over recent years had an increasing influence on thinking about the future of human relations with technology2” (ibid p36).
This project is very much concerned with the latter relationship, especially as it relates to
performance, identity, colonialized subjects, and just post-digital futures. Just as fictions “can
send semiotic ripples in multiple directions at the same time, spreading its reach deep into the
material intensities of the body”, additionally they can be “constructed as protective shields
against truths too difficult, traumatic, or incongruous to bear” (ibid p35). Thus in an era of
increasingly AI mediated social exchange, where fiction is both synthetic and embodied, how
can fictionally grounded social relations that acknowledge the necessity of reciprocity in
personhood and interaction, “open us toward a sociality based on acknowledging the opacity of
the other’s subjectivity”? (ibid p41) Or—if the algorithmic gaze estranges us, Others us in all its
quantified speculative leaps, how can embodied fictionalising help us “[imagine] and [practice]
new social relations beyond those overcoded by fictional commodities and future-modeling
financial-fictions”? (ibid p52) If we have: “[become] both a circulating image and a statistical
subject intersected by commercial and governmental algorithms” (ibid p126), what can a return
2 This relationship has also been articulated by Katherine N Hayles, who has shown how narrative (mainly SF) offers renegotiations of subject/object binaries and how within these stories we are offered a lensing of how “human action and agency [can be] understood as embodied processes sharing important characteristics with the processes taking place within computational media, including possibilities for evolution and emergence…”What we make” and “what (we think) we are” coevolve together; emergence can operate as an ethical dynamic as well as a technological one.” (Hayles, 2005 p243) Hayles articulates the issue at hand is not inscribing these interactions into structures of domination but rather, the pursuit of understandings “that recognize and enact the complex mutuality of [these] interactions” (ibid 243).
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 77 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw to the body through fictionalized writing teach us about the limitations of representation and identity and potentialities laden within processes of performance?
Thus, this research presents speculative autofiction, as a productive political mechanism suitable for resisting and reconfiguring modern fictions and systems of knowledge that are fundamentally colonial, violent and culturally and politically pollutant. However, it begins from the notion that performativity, not representation, is the basis for ontology. Hence why we can speak indeed even see difference proliferate across disciplinary contexts but fail to liberate and respect its role in the human condition; fail to understand it as a distributed knowledge producing practice.
Difference is not a representation—it is a relation. The basic ontological unit is entanglement, not individuality. The performativity of interface (and fictions), then, lends itself to critical discourses surrounding gender, difference, and queer (or quantum) phenomenology to which this section turns to, along with decolonial educational frameworks and commitments, to illustrate creativity as an iterative process that returns us to the body and performance.
Figure 3.1: Subtext on Gender in Bullethead Queer Performativity: refusing the body as sub-human cultural sign
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 78 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
Gender as a generative category of identity, structures and orients experience. It presents as comparable framework for rejecting the binary conceptions of causality (described in previous sections), and begins from the position that identity is not an essence but a doing (Butler, 1990).
Both essential points for interventions into and understandings of, interface: as it understands how “[t]he formulation of the body [is] a mode of dramatizing or enacting possibilities” and as such, “offers a way to understand how a cultural convention is embodied and enacted.” (Butler,
1988 p4) It offers a performative temporal process that operates through and within a reiteration of norms, “inaugurated into sociality by a variety of diffuse and powerful interpellations”
(Butler, 1997 p160).
Like Butler, I refuse any binary sense of agency between individuals and larger social structures.
The point, then, of turning to gender is to render identity as a performance implicated by the colonial shutter. Enacted, embodied, and ongoing, gender reveals the inherent spatial and temporal boundaries and cuts of material-discursive categories and practices (Barad, 2007 p63)
Read: it illustrates the power of constructed cultural fictions.
Thus, gender offers a clearing with which to begin theorizing models of performativity in technological design, or how identity becomes interfaced through certain resonances or affordances in performance. Where, queer theory offers a model that is premised on inhabiting norms differently, in rejecting fixed assumptions of identity. Queering representationalist binarisms, “[q]ueer lives are about the potentiality of not following certain conventional scripts” or habitual standards of being that codify social space (Ahmed, 2006 p177). Where queer as commitment, would be an orientation toward being that doesn’t disrupt or require ‘deviation’
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 79 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
from script, but rather, a rejection of scripts, a rejection of representations, altogether (ibid p178).
A queering of sociality that refuses incorporation on the basis that queer encounters with the world, like that of disorientation or disalignment, are points of contact and interaction that produce new patterns and new ways of making sense of the world and embodied experience (ibid p171).
Furthermore, that these differences, these disenabled and disjointed vantage points carry meaning and ontological significance in their very defiance of a homogenized cultural narrative and imperial structure. So, drawing on Judith Butler, bodies are not instruments for the self, but the doing; performance of self, and what differentiates bodies is how they occupy (i.e, move, dwell, do in) space. I draw on two theoretical tools that allow for nonbinary encounters with difference: a theory of disorientation provided by queer phenomenology and Sarah Ahmed, and
Karen Barad’s diffractive difference.
The concept of disorientation is often described in negative terms. Associated with things like disorder, unknowns, or crisis. And indeed, in this vein, the sensation, in some instances lends itself to these descriptions. But what is most peculiar about disorientation is the way it is entirely dependent upon orientation, order, familiarity. We become disoriented, when we no longer know what direction we face, when what is familiar has become unfamiliar. For a disoriented subject making contact becomes an educative doing that doesn’t subscribe to representation or absolute categories. Barad offers an extension of Ahmed’s theory of disorientation: where Ahmed returns us to the body and its injuries; Barad asks us how these patterns of meaning have come to impress upon skins; their agential patterns.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 80 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
Thus neither disorientation nor diffraction “overcome the “disalignment” of subjects, objects or lines on axes”, but instead allow what is queer, what is unfamiliar, oblique or absented by the imperial shutter, to “open up another angle on the world” (Ahmed, 2006 p172). Thus these guiding principles are not merely committed to attending to the values excluded by the design process (as Feenberg notes), but in embracing difference as a fundamental, fluid, iterative, and relation ridden ontology.
Orientation as Ideological Project
For Sarah Ahmed (2006 p7), orientation is our position in space from which the world unfolds.
We find our way in accordance with how the social is arranged. So when the lines we take in space, align with the lines pre-established by the social, we are oriented subjects. As oriented subjects, we might not even recognize ourselves as such, since our lines proceed clearly established and unobstructed. Thus, orientation within the colonial habit, becomes a hegemonic ideological project—as that which produces order and familiarity and enacts the imperial shutter.
We should also, in this vein, pay attention to the way orientation indicates privilege. As what differentiates bodily orientation is how bodies occupy (move, dwell, do in) space (ibid p.8), where space extends some bodies and not others and enables some actions but not others.
Bodies are produced by and produce, the orientational here and now of their bodily dwelling, in the ways, their bodies align or disalign with the normative conventions, the lines, of the social.
Through dwelling, bodies acquire the shape of positions and orientations repeated over time, crucially, “the body emerges from this history of doing, which is also a history of not doing, of
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 81 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
paths not taken, which also involves the loss, impossible to know or to even register, of what
might have followed from other paths” (ibid p159). Thus, the pressures of certain habituated turns and ontological postures, reproduce particular patterns within the social. For Ahmed, the physical impressions heteronormative and hegemonic orientations impose, close down potentialities for social gathering (ibid p17, 24), by delimiting the social to a fixed and habituated topography. This restricts what is cognitively placed within our reach to think and do as “it is not just that bodies are directed in specific ways, but that the world is shaped by the directions taken by some bodies more than others” (ibid p159). What is ‘normative’, then, emerges from certain bodily repetitions sustained over time, that in their very positioning orient and de-orient, enable
and dis-enable, close down or extend, certain habits of being over others (ibid p66).
Conceptualizing orientation as an ideological project in relation to the construction of meaning
and knowledge requires being attentive to bodies excluded by current colonial imperatives; what
possibilities for connection disappear, what potentialities close down, when we reduce
interaction, movement, within virtual space to what is ideologically comfortable through
concepts such as homophily? It means accounting for the way certain directions have skewed the
network map over time; how do hegemonic orientations sear limitations into our horizons as a
result of the imperial shutter? Furthermore, what can we learn about the world from a de-oriented
position?
Disorientating in order to diffract: patterns of difference and relational responsibility
To be a de-oriented or unaligned subject is to exist in a space where objects evade our reach and
actions are closed down because the lines we seek to trek as non-normative or dis-enabled bodies
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 82 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
are not permitted by the grid of the social. To be a disoriented subject is to constantly feel across surfaces for cracks and fissures; it is to engage the darkspots and gaps; to listen for the silences and the vibrations that mark the distinction between signal and noise in interaction. It is this active doing, coming to know through encountering what is absent, unknown, out of reach or unintelligible, that becomes a useful set of optics for encountering difference differently.
Boundless, and as such, precarious in all its abysmal depths, “inhabiting a body that is not extended by the skin of the social means the world acquires a new shape and makes new impressions” (Ahmed, 2006 p17). Ahmed reminds us, that sometimes, “[b]odies that experience disorientation can be defensive, as they reach out for support or as they search for a place to reground and orientate their relation to the world”, in seeking to reground themselves in reality, such politics of disorientation can also foster conservativeness (ibid p158). However, she also insists, that, “the point is what we do with such moments of disorientation, as well as what such moments can do” (ibid). Thus, moments of disorientation itself are neither crisis nor disorder, for the latter pertains to how we respond; what we do when our normative frameworks of reality become strange; when the transient, fleeting, fragility of “knowing” becomes exposed.
To be a disoriented, disenabled, unextended or otherwise nonnormative body, is to live in a space where what is familiar, is unfamiliar. Where what is normative, becomes queer. It is to encounter the space of the social differently. It is a generative and discomforting feeling of searching, reaching, and making contact with information, not for verification, but as a sustained engagement with the unfamiliar in the effort to deOther space. As Ahmed describes, “they are moments in which you lose one perspective, but the “loss” itself is not empty or waiting; it is an object, thick with presence...the presence of an absence” (ibid p158). Thus, disorientation
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 83 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
ruptures binary optics that enact artificial borders between here/there, now/then, or us/them. An undoing principle that queers the Other in such a way that reveals perceived externality, as always already within.
Disorientation changes the way we move, do and relate within the world, by producing space that extends and enriches, that disrupts and reconfigures. It queers the social givenness of that which appears before us, by concerning itself with what disappears in relation to such arrivals
(Ahmed, 2006 p90). Such concern with the relational effects of difference, provides an alternative mode of being that allows us to abstain from representation as an orientation device and denounce the familiar ontological programs that accompany modernity’s project, and as such technological dwelling. To make the familiar, strange. Disorienting allows us to wipe away the grid that constricts what we think to be intelligible. In doing so, disorientation provides us performative means of engaging difference diffractively, by revealing the indeterminacy, the fragility of knowing, and its ongoing boundlessness. In short, disorientation as a principle reveals inequalities but it is also generative and didactic. Hence, in making evident the importance between identity and performance, queering ontology opens up the body to changes in performance.
Karen Barad, physicist and science and technology historian, draws on diffraction, a quantum or queer, optical phenomena during her development of agential realism in Meeting the Universe
Halfway (2007). Barad’s critique of representational logic stems from the position that the basic ontological unit of reality is phenomena: agential entanglements that emerge out of intra-actions between material and discursive components, human and non human alike (Barad, 2007 p89).
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 84 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
Her agential realist account asserts that bodies are a part of the differential performance of the
world’s intra-activity, where “embodiment is a matter of not being situated in the world, but
rather of being of the world in its dynamic specificity” (ibid p371) Thus she draws on diffraction
as means of engaging with our differential responsiveness to this dynamism—our degree of
accountability to the marks left on bodies during ontological performances.
Diffraction is the effect of difference that emerges as individual waves combine; a co-
constitutive worldly phenomena (ibid p135). In diffraction, difference is not encapsulated, or
pre/figured in any one subject, object, or network node, but rather emerges out of specific intra-
actions of material-discursive practices: “ a diffraction pattern does not map where differences
appear, but rather where the effects of differences appear” (ibid p72). Diffraction patterns offer
us a way of engaging that which is not mapped by the network; or relegated to the archive by the
imperial shutter. It is engagement with the absences that make certain things matter over others;
the ways in which what gets bracketed out or away from mattering, marks the validity, the
mattering, of that which does. For Barad, diffraction is not fixed, nor does not it reproduce itself,
rather it is an ongoing unfolding, where there is “no leaving the ‘old’ behind” because no such
absolute boundaries between the here/now and there/then exist (ibid p168). Barad’s central argument rests upon the self as a multiplicity, a superposition of “beings and becomings”, of matter(ing) and meaning (ibid p37); “a contingent and iterative performativity”, where subjectivity, “is about taking responsibility and account of the entangled materialization we are apart of…a relation of responsibility to the other.” (ibid p389-391).
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 85 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
Where representations mask the historical arrival of difference, and excludes certain experiences and values, diffraction opens up angles within the world. It is important, at this point, to highlight that the indeterminacy of disorientation is essential to its performativity as an educative device, because it illustrates how “that which is determinate (e.g. intelligible) is materially haunted by – infused with – that which is constitutively excluded (remains indeterminate, e.g., unintelligible)” and thus exposes the body, indeed identity and being, to a space where, “the self doesn’t hold; the self is dispersed in an un/doing of self as a result of being threaded through by that which is excluded” (ibid p178). Thus, representationalism and all its binary optics and politics of recognition is a weak principle for understanding justice, change, and the relation demands of ontological entanglement.
Some bodies are bound to humanity in ways that brackets away their embodied experience, leaving them trapped somewhere along the peripheral, neither in control nor able to intervene in the narratives to which their body is ascribed. And while Barad’s point is that selfhood is already perforated with difference, and we ought to come to understand the ways we are implicated by difference as a relational process, such an understanding is hard to derive from theoretical physics and the language of science. Diffraction and disorientation both are still an abstraction, a distance of sorts, from the problem. The very use of scientific language tends to impose significant limitations on the imaginary and is notably at odds with subjective and intimate terrains of the human condition. Thus while I draw on Barad, Ahmed, diffraction and disorientation through fictionalizing and poetics to engage the ineffable threadedness of
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 86 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
transontological difference, I do so by reading them
through an explicitly decolonial commitment to
undo the imperial plunder.
This means I take the notion of being
accountable to the body, and my role within
the entanglement quite literally. Specifically,
to the privilege I hold as an academic and the
ways liberal institutions, in all their thesis
formats, protocols, standards, and metrics,
extend colonial violence and enact the
shutter; as well as, engage rigorously in the
work of decolonizing myself. If the collective
contributions of the aforementioned scholars,
texts, and paradigms of thought have shown
anything, its that the performances we
choose to engage, the fictions we choose to
uplift and ascribe, have political and material
consequences. These choices reach out and
Figure 3.2: From, Manic Millennial (Z) effect the world and all else because they
are a part of the world and all else. Matter and meaning are entangled with one another.3
3 This carries resonance to Katherine N Hayles definition of materiality: “..an emergent property created through dynamic interactions between physical characteristics and signifying strategies. Materiality thus marks a junction between physical reality and human intention”, she writes, “[f]ollowing Bruno Latour’s call for a turn from “matters of fact” to “matters of concern,” I like to think of materiality as the constructions of matter that matter for human meaning” (2005 p3)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 87 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
Contending to the shadow of our colonial inheritance means we take the imposition of disillusionment, the heaviness of our shared world seriously, understanding that in all of 2020’s ruptures and prior, academics too, is a place where we seek to reground; engage in ontological hiding; evade responsibility.
Consequently, even the school of communication itself, produce and mirror imperial patterns of thinking that continue to manifest in all of the previously critiqued communication infrastructure and more generally in society. Our entire education system is designed to further a version of history that renders its violence as past even as it persists in our present/futures. This system of knowledge production, its principles of enclosure and encapsulation incorporated through institutionalized hegemony, orients us as graduate students to emphasize particular endeavours over others, and forwards particular ways of knowing over others. This bracketing reduces our accountability and engagement to not only local Indigenous communities and marginalized members of the public, but more broadly, distances us from our impact and responsibility within a global society. To be clear: it only serves to reproduce patterns of prejudice and habits of being that foreclose the future by insisting on a colonial ground zero horizon. Are we really to continue to look away and relegate to the past what it means to sit atop stolen indigenous territory but bear the name of its colonizers? To claim to support indigeneity, equality and reparations but not take a stand against the further expansion of colonial regimes through a planned pipeline project? Can we really claim to be about lifting up society when all we do is reproduce the imperial shutter and its blindedness? It is uncomfortable to daylight the structures that extend violence, but this is the point. Social change does not manifest in a vacuum. We cannot rebuild the master’s house with his tools. We need new stories, nonimperial grammars, liberating language; imaginative and
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 88 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
accountable methods for dealing with, rather than sidestepping, conflict, alienation, and traumas
that bereft the imperial plunder and colonized publics.
Methods Part II Disorienting the threshold: decolonizing the self; Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa and writing from within the crack
“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own…and all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other” (Lorde, 1984 p43)
Disillusion and disorientation don’t attempt to present themselves as comforting. But discomfort
teaches us something. Its persistence is teaching us something about impositions on the body and
the mind. About the way we are fundamentally connected to others and all else across space and
time. About the ways we can profoundly affect one another and be affected by the world and all
else. Where we tend to get snagged, where we tend to hesitate, or erect defenses is often where
we ought to pay the most light. In seminar during the course of this project with Karen Barad and
Vanessa Andreotti, in a dialogue about scientific practice, integrity, accountability and justice,
Andreotti challenged us to consider, what are you resisting? In what ways are you still snagged
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 89 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
by the illusion of imperiality? What can leaning into these shadows tell us about what it is going
to take to change? If we are already shot through with each Other, what does it mean to be
accountable to this? If the performativity of interface is organized in accordance with a cultural
myth that permeates the fabric of our modern society, how to expand our horizon? Where do we
begin rewriting stories?
This project takes the latter questions seriously on every front and has thus far suggested we start
with identity. So it proceeds by engaging in an applied praxis of fictionalizing and poetics to decolonize the self and established research praxis. This research, because it is committed to
decolonizing the institution and refusing the imperial imperative, does not work within a
traditional research thesis format. It rejects linear story principles and formats for reading in
order to leave itself open to additional meaning. But perhaps most explicitly it follows in the
footsteps of the likes of chamaneria Gloria Anzaldúa and warrior poet Audre Lorde, and engages
in what has been outlawed, stigmatized, delegitimized; as well as exploited and oppressed most
violently: the human condition; body, mind and spirit, the life-force of creative power; the
embodied knowledge of what Audre Lorde calls, the erotic:
“The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life-force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” (Lorde, 1984 p55)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 90 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
A re-turn to the human condition as the ever most constant, widest, and fullest common denominator we have, this project emerged through creative bodily praxis4, through dreams, poetry, and freewriting as external expressions of internal commitments to change. As Lorde writes “the white western patriarchal ordering of things requires that we believe there is an inherent conflict between what we feel and what we think—between poetry and theory” (1984 p8). But this separation is a by product of a system that is dependent upon the extraction of the creative life-force as patriarchal and imperial resources5. Severing the heart from the mind is not a means of rendering objective truth, but distorting it: “we are easier to control when one part of our selves is split form the another, fragmented, off balance.”( ibid p8), as Lorde describes, our current “living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.” (ibid p39) Indeed, “[t]he white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am.”, but from Lorde we are reminded of a deeper knowledge and truth, as “[t]he Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel therefore I can be free.” (ibid p38)
Re-turning to poetics and fiction opens up learning and unlearning in a way that isn’t constrained or delimited by normative research conventions beholden to the violence of a colonial system,
4 Drawing on Anzaldúa here, “for me, writing is a gesture of the body, a gesture of creativity, a working from the inside out. My feminism is grounded not in incorporeal abstraction but on corporeal realities. The material body is center, and central. The body is the ground of thought. The body is a text. Writing is not about being in your head; its about being in your body”. (Anzaldua, 2015 p5) 5 […]“in order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change…” “As women” Lorde writes, “we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves”. (1984, p53)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 91 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
but also provides a language for transformation and change. It provides a way to engage a
representationally evasive and performative process like diffraction or engagement with the
space where the self doesn’t hold: an understanding of the distortions imposed by the coloniality
of being and a place to begin, without fear, guilt or shame, decolonizing identity. Poetics as an
embodied form of writing, beckons forth the ineffable affects of experience and shines light on
our deepest forms of emotional knowledge that often evade conventional forms of writing and
expression, as Lorde puts it:“ Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be
thought.…[the] spawning grounds for the most radical and daring ideas… a safe-house for that
difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action”, where
poetry acts as not only dream and vision, but also “lays the foundations for a future of change, a
bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” (ibid p37) To draw on bell hooks once more, creative writing like autofiction and poetry, help us manifest the bridge because:
“All too often the colonized mind thinks of the imagination as the realm of the psyche that, if fully explored, will lead one into madness, away from reality. Consequently, it is feared. For the colonized mind to think of the imagination as the instrument that does not estrange us from reality, but returns us to the real more fully, in ways that help us to confront and cope, is a liberatory gesture.” (hooks, 1998 p55)
To connect to the erotic, is to connect to the inner power of our innate creative spirit, that which
moves us to grow, to change. To ignore, repress and neglect our imaginative, emotional and
embodied consciousness is to deny the depths of the human condition and as Lorde writes:
“When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directive only rather than from
our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within
ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 92 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
a structure that’s not based on human need”, hence, “when we look the other way from our
experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who
participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.” (Lorde,
1984 p58).
Likewise, when we deny this knowledge within ourselves, when we separate what we feel from
what we think we starve our creative potential; and enact, “ a total denial of the creative function
of difference in our lives”(ibid p111), and this difference is vitally important for as Lorde notes:
this difference is both what marks our mutual interdependence, and “that raw and powerful
connection from which our personal power is forged” (ibid p112). Consequently, “the true focus
of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but
that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the
oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors relationships” (ibid p123), therefore liberation, justice, and change only emerge from coming to understand and embrace in practice, how to decolonize ourselves. This is how we reject the master’s tools and his house:
“When we view living in the European mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings and to respect those hidden sources our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes” (Lorde, 1984 p37)
Gloria Anzaldúa’s work shows how writing provides the link between the personal and the
collective, when we write from within rather than merely about ontologies instrumentalized and
oppressed by current colonial-enlightenment models. Anzaldúa, like Barad, refused the
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 93 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
distinction between the personal and the collective, and thus never divorced her own empirical
experience from theory or practice, and rather in her late work Light in the Dark, suggests that
what embodied writing offers is an aesthetic artistic practice that transforms (Anzaldua, 2015
xxi).
Indeed, as her writing partner Analouise Keeting writes, “[f]or Anzaldúa, writing is ontological”6
(ibid xxxii), and the words we use through ritualized performance don’t just affect our perception
of reality, but have the power to shift reality. A point Reeves and Shaw allude to with regards to
fiction as method and form. However, what is unique about Anzaldúa’s perspective (and relevant to notions of interface) in her work in Light in the Dark is twofold: 1. Anzaldúa understood intimately the ways that identity becomes a knowledge filter, that delimits your ability to understand reality (ibid p119); and 2. Understood that in order to move away from the illnesses of colonial trauma7 extended by European philosophy and scientific traditions; in order to
decolonize ontology, we need to draw on and develop “a more expansive philosophy embracing spirit, indigenous wisdom, alchemy, mythic figures, ancestral guides”8 and other non-Cartesian
6 Emphasis added 7 Of which I will define broadly in line with Anzaldúa as: “the effects of colonialism, assimilation, racism, sexism, capitalism, environmental degradation, and other destructive practices, epistemologies, and states of being that occur at individual, systemic, and planetary levels”. (2015, xxxii) 8 Critiques of Anzaldúa’s earlier work in Borderlands to oversimplify or romanticize indigenous pasts and peoples are valid and important. However, as Keating notes in Light in the Dark’s editor’s introduction, her later work just prior to her death recognizes and refines her earlier missteps: “Anzaldúa viewed indigenous thought as a foundational, vital source of decolonial wisdom for contemporary and future life and…that indigenous philosophies offer alternatives o cartesian-based knowledge systems which we ignore at our peril…The Gloria Anzaldúa who wrote Light in the Dark was not interested in recovering “authentic” ancient teachings…and inserting them into twenty first century life. Nor did she identify herself as “Native American.” Rather, she learned from and built on indigenous insights; she mixed these hints with other teachings crafting a philosophy designed to address contemporary needs… Anzaldúa does not reclaim an authentic indigenous practice but instead develops a twenty-first century approach—a decolonizing ontology—that respectfully borrows from indigenous wisdom and many other non-cartesian teachings” (xxxiii) This project aligns itself methodologically with the latter and emphasizes a point made by both Azoulay and Lorde regarding pre- or anti imperial ways of knowing or forms of resistance as sites for decolonizing approaches: “there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves.” (emphasis added, Lorde, 1984 p38) Thus, this project see’s its engagement with creative practice
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 94 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
teachings and perspectives (ibid xxxii). When it comes to opening the body to change, Anzaldúa
understood the connection between manifesting nonbinary decolonial change and “consciously
inhabiting your body” (ibid p120).
For Anzaldúa the imaginary and creative process serve as critical aspects for the site with which
epistemological and ontological transformation can take place (ibid xxxiv). For Anzaldúa it is
process, doing, not merely knowing or seeing that catalyzes change, she writes:“ writing is a
process of discovery and perception that produces knowledge and conocimiento (insight)” (ibid,
p1). Through a multidisciplinary auto-ethnographic approach Anzaldúa’s constructs her own
symbolic system in Light in the Dark to develop an epistemology of the imagination and a
psychology of the image; concerned with “questioning, affecting, and changing the paradigms
that govern prevailing notions of reality, identity, creativity, activism, spirituality, race, gender,
class, and sexuality” (ibid p2). Understanding identity as involving both reading and writing
oneself and the world, Anzaldúa consistently blurs the distinction between subject/object, being
both observer and participant at once. This privileging of primary methods of presentation (auto-
historia), decenters hierarchal standards of approach in academic writing to draw on predecessors
or other people’s conception or readings; and simultaneously and quite intentionally, blurs the
boundary between private and public.
Accordingly, not with the master’s house means here for Anzaldúa, manifesting and engaging
theory through one’s own voice and experience. This is the connection to spirit or what Lorde
calls the erotic; that which drives our internal experience. For Anzaldúa spirit (or Naguala) and
as an access point to the self-collective human condition, and respectfully draws on older forms of wisdom and insight offered by indigenous writers, scholars, and epistemologies (as well as other non-western or nonimperial grammars) to better understand the effects of colonization on imagination as a spiritually, and thus ontologically, transformative process.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 95 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
the imagination are interconnected aspects of the same process of creativity (ibid p4), hence writing from an abstracted perspective denies the ways we are implicated by the texts, theories, and conditions within the world that we experience. Consequently, “The writer struggles to capture an elusive life from the imagination, but reality is too big for any ideological system to contain, and literary realism it too small to contain it. To explore experience in an indeterminate world such as the one we inhabit, one in which anything that can be imagined can happen, [we] need a different mode of telling stories” In order to contend with difference diffractively, responsibly, “[we] need a different way of organizing reality” (ibid p43). Imagination and creative writing manifest the space and pathways for both personal and collective change, for the
“transformation of self, consciousness, community, culture, society.” (ibid p44).
Already diffracted by transontological 9difference, “[o]ur bodies are geographies of selves made up of diverse, bordering and overlapping “countries”. We’re each composed of information, billions of bits of cultural knowledge superimposing many different categories of experience…As our bodies interact with internal and external, real and virtual, past and present environments, people, and objects around us, we weave (tejemos), and are woven into, our identities…”; Thus, Anzaldúa writes, “identity is always in process”; is always relational. ( ibid p69) Concerned with the ways “[c]onventional, traditional identity labels are stuck in binaries, trapped in jaulas (cages) that limit the growth of our individual and collective lives” (ibid p66),
Light in the Dark is about the challenge and struggles of representation, identity, self-inscription and creative expression through what Anzaldúa terms the Coyolxāuhqui imperative:
“the Coyolxāuhqui imperative”: a struggle to reconstruct oneself and heal the sustos resulting from woundings, traumas, racism, and others acts of
9 Maldanado-Torres’s definition, for more see The Wound
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 96 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
violation que hechan pedazos nuestras almas, split us, scatter our energies…The Coyolxāuhqui imperative is the act of calling back those pieces of the self/soul that have been dispersed or lost, the act of mourning the losses that haunt us...” (ibid p1)
Coyolxāuhqui acts as the transformative aesthetic with which Anzaldúa explores her onto-
epistemology of “the path of conocimiento”. Anzaldúa’s reading of the Coyolxāuhqui Aztec
myth presents a space for self-collective identity transformation; it is both the process of
emotional, spiritual, and psychic dismemberment and the creative process of putting the pieces
of one’s identity together again anew. This process takes place through stages of conocimientos
and deconocimientos and is brought about by an experience of nepantla10. Nepantla, is the
Nahuatl word for “in-between-space”. For Anzaldúa it is “a liminal space where transformation
can occur”; the space between old worlds and new ones, it acts as a point of rupture and
“indicates space/times of chaos, anxiety, pain and loss of control” (ibid xxxiv). However,
nepantla is also deployed by Anzaldúa in spiritual or supernatural sense when its theorization extends beyond a ready definition to become an embodied or agentic quality. Whereby,
“nepantlera’s” are threshold peoples born from nepantla, “those who move within and among multiple worlds and use their movement in the service of transformation” (ibid xxxv). Hence,
“[d]uring an Anzaldúan nepantla, individual and collective self-definitions and belief systems are destabilized as we begin questioning our previously accepted worlds views (our epistemologies, ontologies and/or ethics)…This loosening of restrictive
10 Nepantla as an Anzaldúan concept emerged first in her work in La Frontera, to describe a process of reconfiguring your identity, a birthing stage, where you are still disoriented and unsure of who and where you are in this process; but it is also used across chicano and other border identity and empire studies to describe suffering under global capitalism and originated in reference to perspectives and epistemologies from the global south. A nahuatl word meaning “in-between space”, nepantla emerged from the struggle of indigenous peoples of the south to reconcile their ways of knowing with the impositional one forced on them by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. (Griest, 2017; Mignolo, 2007)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 97 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
worldviews—while extremely painful—can create shifts in consciousness and, thus, opportunities for change; we acquire additional, potentially transformative perspectives, different ways to understand ourselves , our circumstances, and our worlds” (ibid xxxv)
For Anzaldúa, nepantla can also become embodied during the creative writing process when we
shift from everyday experience into a feeling, fantasy or fiction, when reality as we know it
disappears and imaginative shifts take place. These dream-like states, Anzaldúa reads through an
ancient indigenous lens, understanding them as spirits entering us and influencing the mind and
allowing us a sort of “”seeing” from the other side, seeing the ego as other and seeing familiar
elements from that other alien perspective.” (ibid p34) These dreams or fantasies, for Anzaldúa
are not just coping mechanisms or means of correcting or supplementing reality but rather, “frees
[us] from the confines…of [our] habitual identity” and the constraints of every day reality (ibid
p37).Thus, “to change the or reinvent reality” Anzaldúa writes, “you must interrupt or suspend the conscious “I” that reminds you of your history and your beliefs because these reminders tie you to certain notions of reality and behavior” (ibid p44)
Conocimiento is the Spanish word for knowledge or consciousness. For Anzaldúa it is an onto- epistemology, so, conocimiento is a nonbinary, unfolding “connectionist mode of thinking” recounted often within oppressive contexts (ibid p243). Conocimientos, plural, is the insights learned through the conocimiento process. Desconocimiento, the Spanish word for ignorance, translates in Anzaldúa’s work as the cost of knowing; our shadow beast that grapples with the fear and ignorance we cultivate to keep ourselves from knowledge so that we can evade accountability (ibid p2). Anzaldúa says the two are an interrelated experience during nepantla, and that each serves an educative purpose. Indeed, if nepantla is disorientation, desconocimientos is the regressive and self-preserving impulse to reground. Desconocimientos
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 98 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
also shunts us into isolatory feelings of guilt, shame, depression or despair. But conocimento, “is about relatedness—to self, others, world.” (ibid p151)
The path of conocimiento, Anzaldúa writes: “requires you that you encounter your shadow side and confront what you’ve programmed yourself (and have been programmed by your cultures) to avoid (deconocer), to confront the traits and habits distorting how you see reality and inhibiting the full sense of your facultades” (ibid p118). Anzaldúa explains to us how we already find ourselves at the threshold of a nepantla experience, in the shadow of colonial conquest:
“we are experiencing a personal, global identity crisis in a disintegrating social order…We are collectively conditioned not to know that every comfort of our lives is acquired with the blood of conquered, subjugated, enslaved, or exterminated people…We stand at a major threshold in the extension of consciousness, caught in the remolinos (vortices) of systemic change across all fields of knowledge The binaries of colored/white, female/male, mind/body are collapsing.”(ibid p119)
Though writing in 2001, just post 9/11 at the time, we can now see that this crisis has not led to the collapse of binaries in an algorithmic public sphere, but their polarized and weaponized exacerbation. Nonetheless we can say, this crisis is still upon us, and if “[n]epantla is the zone between changes”, where, destabilized and fragmented we struggle to find equilibrium and balance, we find ourselves in 2020 in a moment of unprecedented looking away and avoidance of the wound. Nepantla is the negotiation between “the outer expression of change and your inner relationship to it”(ibid p127); if our world has only become sharpened by colonial binarisms it is because we have yet to contend with the personal changes needed within ourselves to manifest a different world. We have continued to spin in perpetual
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 99 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
desconocimientos, hedging responsibility thinking we can circumvent our own nature but the paradox, Anzaldúa writes, is this:
“[t]he knowledge that exposes your fears can also remove them. Seeing through [nepantla] cracks makes you uncomfortable because it reveals aspects of yourself (shadow beasts) you don’t want to own. Admitting your darker aspects allows you to break out of your self-imposed prison. But it will cost you. When you woo el oscuro, digging into it, sooner or later you pay the consequences” (ibid p132)
Growth is painful. But discomfort teaches us something. Delving into what leaves us in pain, anger, depression or despair; when we move through what immobilizes and silences us, when we realize we’ve severed the mind from the body to avoid the weight of our own human condition; when we stop avoiding the ways we are undone by the gift of interdependent global existence; when we find the courage to engage our own potential: We heal. We change. We press forward anew. Consequently, “leaving the body reinforces the mind/body, matter/spirit, dichotomy that you’re trying to show doesn’t exist in reality” (ibid p135). To return to the body through creative practice, is to become the bridge, it is to restore the gift. Nepantlera’s, hence, having passed through fire and left the old Self, the previous world behind, “[reach] through the wound to connect” (ibid p153).
As Anzaldúa writes:
“In gatherings where we’ve forgotten that the object of conflict is peace, la nepantlera proposes spiritual techniques (mindfulness, openness, receptivity) along with activist tactics. Where before we saw only separateness, difference, and polarities, our connectionist sense of spirit recognizes nurturance and reciprocity and encourages alliances among groups working to transform communities” (ibid p149)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 100 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
Methods Part III
Figure 3.3: From, Not a Woman but a Shaman Becoming Blackfish
“there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt” (Lorde, 1984 p39)
Preamble: if the performativity of interface is organized in an accordance with a cultural myth that permeates the fabric of our modern society, how to engage alternatives? Where do we begin with writing and living different stories?
I began with reading the stories of others. This originally began with me exploring the fictive pieces by science and technology scholars like Bruno Latour (Latour, 1996) and Donna Haraway (Haraway, 2016). And while useful, they weren’t what I was looking for. The stories, the words, the perspectives I needed to encounter to address the problem of interface as a cartesian-colonial habit, needed to come explicitly from the absences, silences, gaps, of invisible nonbeing. But this also became tricky because I cant and wont speak for these subjects or experiences, I can only accountably & responsibly attend to my own position and agency; finding commonality in wounds or dreams where there are ones; to speculate about these concepts, these dynamics, takes care—so how to build a bridge?
Fiction, poetics, or art based practice, offers a methodological entry point into the complex social problems we face as a collective society not constrained or delimited by normative research conventions, of which, are
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 101 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
often sterilized of appeals to intimacy, emotion, and human connection. It allowed me to dive headfirst into subjects sidestepped or silenced by the academy and actively work to fill the gap that often persists between research and reality. In the school of communication at SFU in 2017, none of my required MA coursework engaged concepts of race, gender, or colonialism on their own accord. Criticality was defined, nearly exclusively, through the lens of European whiteness. And when faculty was pressed to weigh in on these issues as pedagogical mentors, they were not prepared to adequately respond, nor did many feel like they ought to. My experience was that senior faculty, when prompted by students about the role of race or colonialism in the history communication theory or gender and race in the philosophy of technology— framed all of these things as outside of the scope of course instruction and discussion. This is what happens when we maintain the gap between research and reality. This is what neoliberal specialization does to “criticality”. It has taken months of uprisings and the mass proliferation of images of violence to even begin conversations about this colonial habit within the academy. And in all honesty, despite solidarity statements, my faith in an organized, tactful, and timely response to the demands of our moment by the administration and leadership is not high.
It was black student activists, for example, whom mobilized and actively held administrations accountable for changing racist varsity athletics team name—then received no recognition for their efforts by SFU president Andrew Petter; or keeping things local, remind ourselves of SFU’s refusal to grant space through the literal eviction of the black student society SOCA from their long term community space on campus in 2018. Likewise, we could point towards the recent resignation of the head of UBC’s board of Governors Michael Korenberg, after public backlash over his liking of “regressive” tweets that likened BLM to Nazi brownshirts. As the work of Black Canadian Studies Scholar Charmaine Nelson has laboured to show, liberal institutions of Canada have been regressive, hostile, and oppressive because they have rendered issues of colonialism (slavery, racism, and sexism) to the periphery if not all together absent. Safely confined in “critical” race, gender or first nation studies coursework, where the mentorship and moral center of the academy can remain distanced and disassociated from the implications of such research for reality and embodied practice.
Hence, this project never waited for permission to unlearn these habits, it created the space for decolonial critical practice because it was offered none; because the performance of change does not take place solely through the staging of a scene or a conversation, the performance of change requires actors. So in an effort to collapse the master’s house and find the” sustenance to act where there are no charts.”, I do my best to create space for other ways of knowing and contributions to knowledge to take precedent: by breaking the master’s rules and refusing his conventions and standards of practice. There are and were undoubtedly missteps made throughout this process, but I invite those mistakes to become a part of my learning, as all learning, all conocimiento requires ruptures; thus, this project is not a thesis statement, but an offering, an invitation to others to think deeply about what we need to change in order to truly become accountable to the coloniality of academic spaces and truly engage in decolonial research practice.
During the process of developing stories, when I would start to begin to think from within concepts, the most expressive and accessible means to engage a subject like diffractive difference or the coloniality of the screen, was initially poetics. Poetics is an embodied form of writing that gets at those sticky ineffable effects of experience that often evade more conventional forms of writing. Every story emerged first from poetic processing. Fictionalizing had multiple stages. It took place on my blog because I could format the stories literally alongside the literature and writers that inspired or informed them. I was able to hold the complexity of certain concepts, experiences, and issues together while I processed them. It also allowed me to decenter
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 102 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
my own words and trouble the authority of authorship—I am not the authority on these subjects, I am the learner—I am inviting you to join in on my learning process.
All of this, chaotic and disorienting, is intended to allow additional layers of meaning to circulate by allowing readers to recognize and determine their own textual resonances. It is also very much an attempt at capturing the messy interiority of experiential processing, unlearning habits, and transformative processes: the threaded fiction, literature, theory, and poetics speaks to the layers of story that perforate our identities and influence how we make sense of our world. Rather than telling or trying to explicate this, I invite readers to experience it for themselves11.
The subtext or “autocontext” of the stories offer additional contemplations or layers of meaning to the primary threads. All of which were added after primary story development. They are a means of reaching through the wound to connect: coming to terms with the reciprocity of relationality; coming to understand myself and the world through the experience of others. These texts are, then, necessarily, unfinished and likely rife with potential stumbles. These texts are flawed, incomplete, and messy. Though I have organized each bloc of text in ways I hope produce salience, remember reader: disorientation guided this process; and you will no doubt have questions: this text was always meant to be an offering for additional discussion.
On Anzaldúa, Coyolxāuhqui, and Supernaturalism
This project takes concepts of queer disorientation, diffracted difference, and reads and writes them through an
Anzaldúan Autofiction. Each section of Blackfish Rising is a stage of Anzaldúa’s ‘path of conocimiento’, though Anzaldúa presents her aesthetic through 7 stages, I have blurred several of her phases and presented them here as four diffracted narratives with a situating README.TXT document and hyperlinked subtext. I explore these concepts from within my own position within the diffraction pattern. This means I do not avoid or erase my experience but foreground it as a means of better understanding the ways ego conquiro operates through my identity and filters my encounters with the world. It also means I read narratives of experience by those marginalized, disenabled, or un-visible within the diffraction pattern through my own to better understand and learn from the resonances and affordances, absence and presence, of epistemic difference. Or, put another way: some things in order to be taught, need to be felt. For me this mean contending with the shadow of difference in my life. Contending with whiteness, with gender, with ancestors, with difference
11 Interactive iterations of such methods might also allow readers to contribute and make their own additions.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 103 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
meant I walk asking12: how did I get here? How will I bear witness, yield responsibility to my inheritance?
How will I interface something like change within myself?
I chose Anzaldúa’s reading of Coyolxāuhqui as a narrative model with which to nest this fiction for several reasons: 1) Ultimately writing within a science fiction frame (Stephenson, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K Dick,
Gibson) proved quite a struggle because most SF cannot engage the aforementioned gaps and ineffables
because they still work within the Cartesian-Colonial habit. This is a point of which Wendy Chun gestures in
Control and Freedom—in her chapter on Cyberpunk and Orienting the Future, illustrating the relationship
between the rise of the internet and cyberpunk, where the internet as racial utopia attempts to eradicate conflict
and antagonism by reconfiguring it so that domination stems from one’s very body, to produce cyberspace an
othering space (Chun, 2008 p158). Hence, fictionalizing from this framework only serves to extend the
narrative of cyberspace as a new colonial frontier and has very little to offer decolonial relations to
difference13. I grappled with this for awhile trying to develop something that worked. I spent an entire summer
writing stories, but I found that the writing I was doing was very hard to work into an SF narrative. What’s
12 Walsh write about how in order to move and think within; open up and extend, fissures and cracks requires considerations and reflections of our own explicit locations (our cognizance and participation) with which, we “act and move within, from, and with respect to the cracks” (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018 p83); it means lessons, “in humility, displacing, and decentering what I thought I knew, how I thought I knew it” and confronting assumptions. To walk asking, writes Walsh, is a part of the decolonial and pedagogical weave, of a decolonial pedagogy rising: “making itself and becoming, opening and extending cracks and fissures in the dominant world and, at the same time, contributing to the building of a world—of worlds-muy otro(s)” (ibid 88). It is an engaged pedagogy, that emphasizes well-being, and healing and is “constructed in, resistance and opposition, as well as in insurgence, affirmation, and re-existence (as re-humanization), in imagining and building a different world” (ibid). 13 I think it is important to note a few things here: writers such as Octavia Butler and Ted Chiang challenge and breathe new life into the SF genre, and this work is deeply marked by their uniquely resonating capacity to express shared human conditions and their potentialities with loving, critical curiosity. In particular, resonances of Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents can be found in the final section of the fictionalized text, Not A Woman but a Shaman—and Chiang’s Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom in his collection of short stories in Exhalation marks the narrative in Bullethead. However, often indigenous and black and other POC science fiction writers are categorized as slipstream, “magical realism”, or indigenous- afro-futurism writers. This transgression of genre is telling. Because the focus for this stage of the project was understanding epistemic difference, I needed to begin with reading about the effects of coloniality, within myself and those rendered un-visible by the cartesian- colonial habit. Further stages of this research would more rigorously engage the aforementioned bodies of work by black and indigenous writers in the area of slipstream, and indigenous- or afro futurisms, as such epistemologies open up our capacity to imagine and dream about the world from a de- or pre-colonial perspective, and perhaps most crucially, offer transformative speculative, future oriented lenses with which to render something like justice in a shared world. Put another way, it will engage with these perspectives beyond the wound, to as it were, other potential worlds.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 104 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
more I began to feel like I was just rearticulating the problem with similar tropes. Mirroring instead of depositioning the binary. Which is why I turned to Gloria Anzaldúa, supernaturalism and “magical realism” as these provided my creative process a whole new set of compositional frameworks and tools, and more pointedly to the aims of this project, began from the place that really engages writing as a process that transforms, and deals directly with space and identity.
2) Anchoring this creative process within a reading of an Aztec mythology allowed me to theorize about identity and decolonial transformation through a precolonial epistemology—it allowed me to disavow the authority of the imperial shutter. The form of cognitive relationality brought about by this epistemology created a liminal space hospitable to theories of transformation or change, regeneration, healing, and decolonial embodiment—hence, Coyolxāuhqui’s grappling with the life and death of identity, with the nepantla rupturing of reality and disillusion of cultural center, offers not only a timely metaphor for contending with our current moment, but speaks to the ways precolonial, indigenous, or aboriginal ways of knowing harbour crucial insights for dealing with implications of the colonial plunder. It teaches us to understand that life emerges from death, that disorientation can offer us new means of understanding, taking back, and accountably rewriting embodiment. But only if we move, we do, we create, we practice. This requires we rewire our notions of change to understand it will always require conflict. The idea is not to shy away from what lingers in shadows or what is complicated or messy to process: but step into the lessons darkness offers.
There is no duality, no binarism, in a Coyolxāuhqui transformative process. There is only complete spiritual and cognitive dismemberment, and creative, accountable, and liberatory rewriting: metamorphosis through autofictive writing practice.
On Autofiction
I chose autofiction due to the way interface of the 21st century proliferate and manipulate the self through affectively charged and deeply personal network and data practices. Social media requires us, willingly and unknowingly, to write-ourselves into these digital spaces, this expression or gesture of life-writing, is predetermined and formatted for us. We accept the terms of service, with little other option and limited language for articulating objections. We subject ourselves, against our better interests, to the embodied effects
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 105 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
of “living” within these digital spaces. Formatted as human capital within interface, we are measured, modulated, segregated, enraged, captured, “normalized” and “cleaned”, sold, and redistributed once again. Fed back to ourselves for additional hedging and fitting, sharpening the edges of sameness. This process habituates our bodies to act in accordance with the screen’s demands, to think in accordance with its hierarchy of principles. Autofiction allows me to both grapple with the internalized effects of this interface process, as well as, take back authorship, reformat and reconfigure—rewrite, this experience.
On epistemic location:
I have a fairly hybrid, dime-a-dozen north American background, which is to say I grew up working- class/working-poor in the United States. I am the daughter of a mostly Irish white woman and Mexican-
American father, which left me somewhere in between but never fully apart of, American whiteness, nor
Mexican-American or Mexican culture. I’d label this as also outside of typical “American” identity, except, I think this greyness is increasingly more commonplace, or complex,—depending on how you choose to observe it—revealing, nonetheless, of the indeterminate center of American statistics, cultural complacency, and economic disparity. In some senses somewhat residual, indeterminate or contradictory: I am white but
Mexican; cis but queer; educated but “low brow”; but more significantly, as a westerner and a white person, this position yields ignorance’s, privileges and biases that inherently oppress black, brown, and indigenous persons. This position demands accountability. Additionally, I grew up millennial: my generational development marked by the cognitive and imaginative expansion offered by the internet; watching interface become an ever more invasive and determining force in my social encounters and experience. At once, none of these things define my identity, and yet, all of them do. So I try my best to hold all of these things together- apart as a I write from the subject position of a graduate student in North America, studying the affects of interface and difference in the shifting cultural relations of a post-digital society.
In preparation for fictionalizing I read the science fiction of: Ursula Le Guin (1966, 1976, 2001), Octavia
Butler ( 1993, 1995, 1998), Ted Chiang ( 2010, 2019), Neil Stephenson (2003), Stanislaw Lem (2002), and
Philip K Dick (2011). I also read the words of Audre Lorde (1984), Maya Angelou (1969), Rita Wong and
Fred Wah (2019), Leanne Betasomasake Simpson (2013, 2017), Alicia Elliot (2019), Robin Wall Kimmerer
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 106 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
(2013), Tanya Talaga (2017), Toni Morrison (2019), Malcolm X (1964)and Ocean Vuong (2019).
Additionally, I read and learned about the life of trees and fungi (Wohlleben, 2016), hallucinogenics (Pollan,
2019; Wolfe, 2008), Pranayama (Roberts-Oss), Buddhism (Hanh,
2013, 2015), quantum field theory ( Barad, 2015; 2007,
2014), Tsawalk (Atleo, 2007), and love (hooks, 2018); as
well as the ethnographic accounts of Jacqui Alexander
(2005) and Nancy Scheper Hughes (1993). In preparation
for writing I reviewed higher education suggestions and
pedagogical experiments by the Decolonial Futures
Collective14, and attended two brilliant fiction based
workshops led by Alexandra Juhasz (2019) and Gillian
Russell (2019) at the Digital Democracies Conference in
201915. This fiction owes a great deal to Karen Barad and
Figure 3.4: From, Readme.txt Vanessa Andreotti specifically, with regards to discussion
they provided at Barad’s seminar at UBC in March of 2018—without which I would have never become
undone. Lastly, it begins from the experience of Lakota Indigenous leadership at Standing Rock—whom
changed everything about what I understand of community, solidarity, and home.
Blackfish Rising Fictions:
README.TXT is the situating document for the entirety of the project. It sets the stage for your reading,
providing context to the plot’s emergence and offering suggestions for reading and navigating the non-linear
format. All of the Blackfish Rising fictions, as well as thesis chapters, are hyperlinked here. This text also
14 Namely the HEADS UP Checklist (V. Andreotti, n.d.), but was also emboldened by social cartographies (Andreotti 2016) and pedagogical experiments featured here: https://decolonialfutures.net/project-type/pedagogical- experiments/, like pedagogy of attunement and Hummingbird. (V. de O. Andreotti et al., 2016; Andreotti, Pedagogical Experiments, n.d.) 15 Future iterations of this project would include deeper readings of Decolonial Futures Collective projects (and their associative educational paradigm) through the critical design practices and approach offered by these workshops and scholars. Both speak directly to the aims and curiosities of this offering.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 107 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw includes an index of terms for the reader’s reference, tips for identifying subtext, and an opening story-poetics called
Stage 1: The Rupture. Figure 3.5: From Blackfish Rising Blackfish Rising: is the spirit guiding my creative writing; the spirit of the story. My naguala but also, like Anzaldúa, an embodiment of nepantlera, of a threshold spirit that manifests pathways for change.
Blackfish Rising is about transformation, personal and collective knowledge and growth; Blackfish is about bearing witness and becoming the bridge for change as we dive deep into what is seemingly unknown about both.
Blackfish is about embracing complexity, contradiction, dark and light, and coming to understand the depths of being within the world. I alternate hailing for “Blackfish” and “Nepantlera” interchangeably throughout the stories, and in the final stage of conocimiento solidify the connection between spirit, chamaneria, blackfish, and our natural relation to the world Subtext in this section makes reference to Haida indigenous epistemologies of Blackfish in an effort to make clear the Blackfish spirit as I tell of it here is no doubt influenced by, but not to be conflated with, these histories or cultures.
Manic Millennial(Z): the nepantla generation, Figure 3.6: From, Manic Millennial (Z)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 108 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw articulates the experience of coming of age in an era of interface; the experience of seeing and being within a nepantla. This story is more precisely addressing North American’s roughly between the ages of 20-40, with emphasis on the disillusion and disorientation brought about by growing up amidst the contradiction of a globalized promise and threat, as nepantla youth. In particular it attempts to highlight the dynamics of a cognitive development marked by the emergence of the world wide web and internet mediated communication: the explosion of social relations and societal shifts interface ripped across the world; but also the ways we internalize the struggle against the invasion of our private worlds and reification of experience. It
Figure 3.7: From, Bullethead draws attention to how these changes stimulated a wave of global civil uprisings (led by youth and students) that indicate a persistent wailing, an intuitive yearning and reaching for a different kind of world. Subtext in this section is mostly “real-life” press articles and videos because this section deals mostly with the lived realities of our current cultural context.
Bullethead: Or La Guera of the Mexican Dogs, is a stage of desconocimiento. In this section I am working through my relationship to my ancestors, difference, the effects of colonization and my relationship to race within my family, and thus subsequently, white privilege. The thread regarding
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 109 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw
Maternal Solutions is a fictionalization of my relationship to colonial whiteness. It is a meditation on navigating the greyness of racial hybridity, and the plot line of a drug induced hallucination is a play on the
Figure 3.8: From, Flight of the Portuguese Sparrow role of ego and disorientation in rendering experiences and knowledge legible. More profoundly, Bullethead is about contending with ignorance, shadows, fear, and the coloniality of selfhood and difference—in it’s close it is a highlighting of how myth both frees us and cages us. Subtext in this section unfolds contemplations on race, gender, and diffracted difference (where history= past/present/future). I weave stories of my Mexican ancestors and friendships through the hardening of the Mexico/US border and US Imperialism through my experiences of the privileges and assimilatory demands of colonial whiteness.
Flight of the Portuguese Sparrow is about coming to terms with colonial trauma (or memory) and decolonizing relations (or love). It is the shedding of a previous selfhood, to make room for the first stage of becoming Blackfish: a meditation on the experience of change brought about by love. FPS is also about contending with the way coloniality impedes on all of our most intimate relationships and experiences, polluting and delimiting our capacity to care for and give to one another and ourselves. It centers the idea that coloniality perverts one of the most fundamental relations to being within and of the world: giving. Coloniality is about taking, is about possession, and because of this it has taught us to hate and hence, empty us, of
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 110 Rituals for Healing | Hannah Holtzclaw ourselves. Subtext in this section primarily serve as meditations on personal and collective trauma; on mental health, suicide and depression.
Not a Woman but a
Shaman is about becoming the bridge, healing, and languages for cultural regeneration and social change..
It works to solidify a loose understanding of Figure 3.9: From, Not a Woman but a Shaman “our-self” or collective-identity through narratives that speak of trees, water, and waves. It is a meditation on recognizing ourselves as water, not the wave; or, understanding our natural capacity for love and transformation. Most importantly, it ties this state to our ability to recognize the significance of our own performances in the world and dreaming as a collective task we must engage in order to change. Subtext in this section is about divine potential and affectedness.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 111 A Closing Meditation | Hannah Holtzclaw
Waiting on unknowns. Verses caught in transition. mensajes cast into the threshold At the edge of existence.
There’s this spot where the ocean meets the skyline
The horizon dissolves
Sea and sky lose definition. At the edge of the world:
A vastness An opening an infinite collision.
I think I find myself there, More than any place else. In what could be, What is Was Will be isn’t.
I find myself there Versing
unbounded
potential insisting:
Ser el Puente
Lose the self Become the transition.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 112 A Closing Meditation | Hannah Holtzclaw Manifesting the Bridge: Blackfish, Art, and coalition building through creative performance
“Performativity is properly understood as a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve.” (Barad, 2007 p133)
Whether we will them to or not, our bodies bear meaning upon the world every day. When we are still and silent, and when we are in motion, we leave a mark, produce an affect within spacetime. Weaves and traces of affectedness ripple outward and manifest from, within and across entanglements in ways we can never be sure of nor keep apace. The turn in data sciences and machine learning to complex systems modeling gestures to us, something about the ways we are aware of our own lived multiplicity on earth. But the framework with which that awareness is oriented ensures that even when machine learning methods do produce something like intelligibility, it is never anchored by lived experience or “intelligence”, but probabilities, repetition, absolute segregation, quantified metrics, and perhaps most importantly, premised on a colonial past. These things enact the formatting of phenomena, the scaling of liveliness into scientific model, a kind of over- and under-fitting of experience into the boundaries of a representation. But knowing, knowing is never so fixed or still, as Barad points out, “knowing is a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement. To the extent that people participate in scientific or other practices of knowing they do so as bodies”; as “differential performances” dancing within the world’s greater creative and dynamic enfolding (Barad, 2007 p379), or “intra-activity”. Where in this sense intelligibility is a matter of complex embodied performance; affecting and deeply affected by the entangled materializations of which we are perpetually implicated.
This project has taken great care in thinking with the body as interface to illustrate the resonances of ego conquiro that lie beyond the screen; to engage the liminal space between the stories we tell and the stories we embody. In writing about identity as in-process, in ongoing
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 113 A Closing Meditation | Hannah Holtzclaw
reconstruction and lively entanglement with the world, we are offered opportunities for ritualizing and weaving moments of transition and change; processes for threading personal histories into collective fabrics, “for fashioning a story greater than yourself” (Anzaldua, 2015) and responding to the demands of our collective cultural performance; our entangled materializations within the world.
nepantlera i have a secret: once you realize how malleable identity is, all you want to do is listen; open yourself up to what you can become. creativity is a profoundly intimate process. creativity, when anchored in healing, stimulates emotional intelligence. it reconnects our minds to our bodies; cleans and heals the wound.
Toni Morrison writes about how the “inability to project, to become the “other1,” to imagine her or him. [is] an intellectual flaw, a shortening of the imagination”(Morrison, 2019 p43) made manifest by a colonial matrix of power that is only able to process, to render, large difference; to reduce complexity. But everything about life systems on earth tells us that we demand a set of cognitive relations much more complex than what is offered by current fictions. Fiction is only as good as the worlds it opens up, not reproduces. Reading and writing literature and story that puts us in the position of those most oppressed and affected by colonial systems de-orients us from reality: it takes us up out of our habituated positions and privilege to help us develop adequate understandings of the social world we live in; it better equips us to relate to, work with, and support one another; to become accountable to the marks we leave upon matter in the world.
Anchored in experiences of the body and the human condition; becoming attune to the discomfort of the current colonial interface, reaching through the wound to connect, concerning ourselves with difference diffracted: opens our bodies to change; to unlearning; to coming undone; contending with our shadows and understanding narratives of identity outside of dominant hegemonic discourse. It offers a means of moving beyond allyship, acknowledgement, reconciliation: to coalitions and community; to accomplices and collaborators; to blackfish. It provides opportunities for creative performances of decolonial solidarity and communication; for moving beyond liberal politics of recognition (Chun, 2021; Coulthard, 2014): for locating
1 To draw once again on Maldanado-Torres and the importance of centering historically absented and oppressed experiences: “Questioning is a key part of self-understanding and of understanding and knowledge in general. Knowledge and understanding are fundamentally inter-subjective affairs. The damné has to break from the solitude of its prison to be able to reach out to an Other. Speaking, writing, and the generation of questions are part of the drama of a subject that starts to regain its humanity in reaching out, without masks, to others” (Maldonado-Torres, 2016, p25)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 114 A Closing Meditation | Hannah Holtzclaw
ourselves within the circle 2 and in diffracted relations with others3. Writing and reading from and through perspectives and identities of those marginalized, silenced, or rendered defective or past by the imperial shutter helps us develop plural ways of being and relating within the world that can expand our capacity to feel; to imagine; to understand morality, our-self, and home.
We fundamentally exist to learn. To live is to change. One of the outcomes of this project is how it has provided me a liberating relationship to language that is vitally necessary for both dismantling oppressive orientations and reviving and reconfiguring affectedness. It created the space for me to engage discomfort and better understand its resistances, its sources. This was an invaluable experience when it comes to theorizing the demands of difference in the wake of the colonial plunder. As this discomfort, this affectedness, this human condition, is very much the point. I can’t tell you how many times I have found myself overcome by deep waves of gratitude for the change this project has brought to my life; for its honesty and its insistence. It took me to the edge of myself and further—it has challenged and demanded of me: will you merely learn, or will you embody this? This is what connecting to the world through story, through writing and reading from the body; through creativity as critical intimacy, radical tenderness, reciprocal offering, might provide us. A homecoming; a return to our bodies, it gets us to start accountably creating; helps us begin the process of regeneration; of healing.
The silos of abstract identity formatted by current interface regimes fragment and distance, Other us from one another. But, as Morrison writes: “Fictional literature can be an alternative language that can contradict and elude or analyze the regime, the authority of the electronically visual, the seduction of “virtual.” The study of fiction may also be the mechanism of repair in the disconnect between public and private. Literature has features that make it possible to experience the public without coercion and without submission... Literature allows us—no, demands of us— the experience of ourselves as multidimensional persons.”(Morrison, 2019 p100) To draw, like I have in other places across this text, on the work of Ocean Vuong, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Audre Lorde, and Anzaldua, the language of creativity has a profound ability to manifest something like
2 The concept of the sacred circle is an indigenous epistemology regarding the interconnectedness and interrelationships of all life. Williams and Snively write “cycles and circles can be seen in the relationships of all things: seasons, migrations, life cycles, food chains, tidal cycles, interdependence of all life, the movement of the sun and moon in relation to the earth, and the earth in relation to the universe. Time is perceived as cyclical rather than linear”, in accordance with the sacred circle, in indigenous epistemologies “wholeness is the perception of the undivided unity of life forms” (Snively and Williams, 2016). Notions of Oneness are also found indigenous epistemologies like Tsawalk (Atleo, 2007). 3 E Richard Atleo’s reading of the theory of Tsawalk “ Nuu-chah-nulth origin stories and traditional Nuu-chah-nulth life ways and experience indicate that the basic character of creation is a unity expressed as heshook-ish tsawalk (everything is one). This unity of existence does not mean that individuals are denied a separate existence; on the contrary, individualism is a very strong value. Heshook-ish tsawalk is a matter of the first principles laid out in the original design of creation. The creator and creation are one.” (2007, p117); Tsawalk, Atleo writes: “ assumes the unity of creation irrespective of any of contemporary society’s contradictions…They came to understand the value of the individual without necessarily undermining the value of the group. They understood the value in life and the value in death, the value in love and the value in pain.” (2007, p133)
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 115 A Closing Meditation | Hannah Holtzclaw
home, outside of yourself, within and through others. Language can destroy and oppress, but it is also a fundamental testament to our ability to transform; to connect.
Morrison also writes of how there are several human responses to our perception of chaos (or disorientation; disillusion; unknowns or unrest), most often they are: naming (or representation) and violence ( or conquest)—both attempts at rendering something like security or control; but warrants there is also “a third response to chaos…which is stillness. Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art.”4 (Morrison, 2019 pviii). Our own fragmented, rattled, sense of identity, sense of home, comes from the way colonial fictions foreclose our cultural and cognitive horizons; render a closed world. Fiction opens up the world to reinterpretation, it returns us to the body and the human condition. Or: through fiction, through art, we bring the world into the self—read: some things, in order to be properly learned and unlearned, need to be felt.
So then, what might an interface for decolonial coalition building look like?
“When we have failed at solidarity work we often retreat, struggling to convince ourselves that this is indeed the work we have been called on to do. The fact of the matter is that there is no other work but the work of creating and re-creating ourselves within the context of community. Sim-ply put, there is no other work. It took five hundred years, at least in this hemisphere, to solidify the division of things that belong together. But it need not take us another five hundred years to move ourselves out of this existential impasse. Spirit work does not conform to the dictates of hu-man time, but it needs our courage, revolutionary patience, and intentional shifts in consciousness” (Alexander, 2005 p283)
4 in Peril, The Source of Self Regard.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 116 A Closing Meditation | Hannah Holtzclaw
History is calling on us to know each other differently. To be differently. In order to understand ourselves as the interface for change, we must first begin to cultivate creative practices for bringing the world and others, into our-self. This means a return to bodies and the human condition, to Lorde’s erotic (Lorde, 1984) and Jacqui Alexander’s pedagogies of the sacred (2005); to Mignolo and Walsh’s decolonial pedagogies rising (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018 p88-96), and Greg Cajete’s native science: our creative participation, responsibility; entangled unfolding with the natural world (Cajete, 2000 p14). So, in relation to this imperative, in closing, I have one more offering for further contemplation, an undercurrent if you will, to all of the previous text you’ve just experienced:
Writing, creative practice, art and embodied learning as interface foster and engage emotional intelligence. They move us beyond the cognitive relations of ego conquiro; the restraints of liberal politics of recognition5. But writing won’t save us, we need more than this, (as narrative and knowing is not enough), we need iterative spaces to do; to practice.
Coalition building for change requires just such an embrace of embodied practice; mutual recognition for the human condition and respect for its affectedness. In order to interface something like decoloniality, we need safe, localized community spaces to come together to create shared resonances of justice, suffering, culture, and experience. Additionally, more profoundly, spaces for creative, albeit differential, collective dreaming for a better world. We must create space, in education and knowledge production, in communities, for practicing habits of self-collective experience, for living in diffracted difference. We must create space to engage discomfort: embrace disorientation; lose our sense of ground, in order to understand something about our own complexity and expansiveness. But more pointedly, we need collective cultural practices for cultivating critical intimacy—for developing literacies for entanglement and affectedness; for understanding and accepting the performativity of discomfort and conflict. We need opportunities and tactics for disarming habituated responses to reach for ground, for breaking down internalized defenses.
Interface as a set of cognitive relations or process, is deeply performative. As a set of phenomenological, material-discursive entanglements with the world, interface grip us, both body and mind. Interface is always an experience. This project has at once, concerned itself with the kind of extension our current interface mythologies afford, and how we ought to dwell, do, teach, learn, be through this space. Interface, as filters for knowledge, have the ability to expand or contract our understandings of the world—hence, another aim of this project has been to offer a lensing of how we might reorient ourselves toward knowledge, to expand our capacity for care, for relations with the world and others. On this front, future extensions or applications of this
5 Of which, format and prescribe alienation (Chun, 2021; Coulthard, 2014).
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 117 A Closing Meditation | Hannah Holtzclaw
project are numerous but ultimately begin with systems of learning, communication and education. Or put another way: how can we rewrite technologies of interface to foster the emotional intelligence necessary for sustainable and just relations?6 I walk asking7, how might pre- and decolonial epistemologies, that bridge the self to the collective through creative participation, help us better understand and manifest something like “criticality”, pedagogies, coalitions, or, interface for unlearning and re-existence?
6 Might we consider for example, Adrian Mackenzie’s position on machine learning and preindividual reality: “[p]articipating in a collective, individual subjects, far from losing whatever defines their unique or essential identity, gain the chance to individuate, at least in part, the share of preindividual reality that marks the collective within them…by participating in a collective, even an operational formation, individuals may transform themselves (to attain certain state or experiences) but also affect the collective itself” (Mackenzie, 2017 p214), alongside Jacqui Alexander’s work in Pedagogies of the Sacred, where, she asserts, “embodiment functions as a path-way to knowledge, a talking book, whose intelligibility relies on the social—the spiritual expertise of a community to decode Sacred knowledge”, where spiritual practice, rituals for healing, coming into alignment with the divine (where the divine is the collective and so also the self) and practices of “the Sacred becomes a way of embodying the remembering of self…neither habitually individuated nor unwittingly secularized.” (Alexander, 2005 p297-298) 7 Catherine Walsh, On Decoloniality, 2018 p 88
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 118 A Closing Meditation | Hannah Holtzclaw
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 119 Critical Reflections on Decoloniality | Hannah Holtzclaw
“The gifts of failure”
A review and reflection of decolonial gestures and experimentation provided by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective workspace.
Decolonial gesturing and experimentation is premised on the persistent and ubiquitous presence of coloniality. Interwoven into individual and collective social fabrics its habit is not something that can be resolved through mere critique, acknowledgement, or resistance. This work has spent a good deal of time insisting that, rather, we must understand coloniality as something that lives within and through us, despite all of our best and most innocuous intentions; it is both subtle and devastating in its patterns of resonance.
Additionally, this work began from a position that embodiment is ultimately always also, an entanglement. How we practice and conceive of relations is already premised on a world and selfhood shot through with otherness. When violence, dispossession, destruction and displacement (and likewise with ‘wealth’, accumulation or privilege) occurs within the world it is never in isolation, but always constitutes interconnected resonances and implications.
So, in incorporating perspectives of epistemic difference, the aim was not to expropriate or essentialize indigenous knowledges, nor place them on a pedestal, but rather offer the audience an opportunity to more adequately sense and contend with these differential and interconnected resonances. To recognize the shadows of ego conquiro within their own bodies, experience, and practices; as well as, learn from and reflect on the insights offered by de or precolonial, nonbinary and non-western thought and aesthetic creative practices; and cultivating strategies for “staying with the trouble”; for embracing conflict, discomfort, confrontation and differential friction.
Critiquing and resisting coloniality’s framing of education has not dissolved these resonances within myself, I still very much grapple daily with its marks and habituation. And, importantly, my disrupting and resisting coloniality in this project (and beyond) begins from a position of epistemic ignorance, what can be described as the violent “innocence” of incomprehension that accompanies both whiteness and settler subject positions. This means my approach is necessarily grounded in colonial patterns of thinking (as educational and societal; material-discursive conditioning) that have a tendency to be detached of, if not completely overlook, the lived realities of high-impact struggles in experiences of difference.
This produces a potential for failure in a few different ways. One of which is in its ability to romanticize entanglement, due to inexperience or blindspots that idealize interconnection free of violence, conflict, pain, and “shit”. This romanticization also has a tendency to present decoloniality as transcendence through mere creativity or engagement with indigenous teachings; leaving behind or neglecting the necessary discomfort of confronting and becoming accountable to colonial resonances and privilege. But entanglement is disorienting and ontologically rattling, its depositioning and repositioning of the self through the collective should not lead us to clean transitions nor settled self actualizing conclusions because decolonial change is ongoing, difficult, and complicated.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 120 Critical Reflections on Decoloniality | Hannah Holtzclaw
This project has attempted to grapple responsibly with these potholes by highlighting the critiques and potential pitfalls of working through Anzaldua’s reading of an Aztec myth, by locating it’s own creative practice through the situatedness of the writer’s own structural position, and by incorporating additional non-western thought and nonbinary theory and systems. It has sought to center the collective insights of this knowledge for understanding complex relations of change and difference, rather than present the author through a lens of authority or any one tantamount assertion of meaning; and its done its best to read these insights through the specificities of my own experience of difference and its associative relational agency in entanglement.
Nonetheless, writing from the position of an academic scholar in a colonial institution, my ability to even critique coloniality without the threat of violence, expropriation or dispossession, highlights the important distinction between high and low impact struggles, and the importance of attending to this difference. My western form of being is premised on the exploitation, dispossession, and displacement of black, indigenous and other people of color; and being in academics, effectively distanced from lived experiences of struggle, means I am disproportionately afforded both authority and certain protections. To remain in the abstract, divorced from embodied realities of colonial systems, is to remain necessarily detached and in negligent contrast to those structurally excluded from (and whose subjugation drives and maintains) these systems to begin with.
This text has no lived experience with dispossession or displacement, residential schools, or racialized surveillance and discrimination. It has no lived experience of the struggles of indigenous groups nor the threat of violence faced by those most outspoken to colonial systems. My body does not render as an existential threat to the colonial matrix like black or indigenous persons. Hence, frontline activists and Indigenous groups are likely to roll their eyes at the frivolity or indulgence of the particular form of my methods. As a mixed white westerner the intimacy of this text could likely come across as overtly out of touch wailing and privilege. But the point of this text was to work through resonances and colonial ills that impede me from doing the work necessary to become a better accomplice1. Otherwise I risk reproducing harm and colonial regimes inadvertently by not recognizing the patterns within myself that forward them.
So, though the theory of change accompanying this text is about offering people, all people, a certain language for recognizing the colonial habit within their experience, it is because I write from this specific epistemic position that I have imagined an audience that shares some aspects of my experience or plane of
1 Anzaldua writes about the necessity of the later stages of conocimiento that bridge internal knowledge with public acts, through the forming of holistic alliances and forms of spiritual activism. This latter stage is only possible through embodied on the ground coalition building and action. This text is a necessary stage of conocimiento but is not meant to replace this fundamental aspect of change and decolonial strategy. One of the major realizations of this project was the ways creative practice, though valuable and necessary, cannot in isolation, replicate or replace knowledge gleaned from on the ground activism, community or support networks. Doing this work alone was incredibly challenging. Divorced from necessary and important community feedback and interaction, hands on learning or engagement with the demands of frontline work and black and indigenous modes of being would help to deromanticize and more appropriately honor and understand the depth of other forms of knowledge and practice. This to me, is apart of going deeper: falling out of habits that require individualized or isolated gains, that service colonial matrices of power, and into relational and frictional demands of interconnected struggles for community and change, visceral knowledges of entanglement; forms of being that service eachother.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 121 Critical Reflections on Decoloniality | Hannah Holtzclaw
difference: I write to westerners, millennials and Z’s, members of the general public and academics who benefit from or experience subjectivation through imperialism, settler-colonialism and/or whiteness.
It is because of this audience focus, that some parts of this work were articulated through rhetoric of the academy and potentially inaccessible to other audiences that might need to receive it, and in this way, reproduces aspects of colonial education and the critique being made of it (additionally, this project is still text heavy and not yet collaborative). However, treading lines of difference; walking between worlds, is the nepantlera’s business, who engage the shadows of our inheritance across differential positions. So, much of this work was focused on offering a language for locating and understanding diffractive absences and colonial resonances that comes with these locations and epistemic positions; as well as, composting these modes of being and shared traumas we have inherited without instrumentalizing difference nor seeking relief or escape from our own discomfort or affect(tedness).
I am accountable fundamentally to everybeing. A big part of my own differential accountability means becoming intimate with the claims of settler colonialism and whiteness that destroy, steal, erase or inhibit relationality, in order to invite instead, forms of relationality that are open to change, discomfort, failure, complexity, and critical intimacy. It means calling others within my academic (and otherwise) community into this space with me: both challenging the prefigured limitations of the colonial habit and supporting the recognition of its resonances. It is my hope that the intimacy and openness provided by the creative practice in this project, in all its failures and missteps, highlights the importance of approaching decoloniality, in this sense, with honesty and humility; a cognizance that challenges to purity, innocence, or correctness offer in their place a deeply didactive and generative acceptance: disorientation can bring both freedom and madness; both failure and death, desconocimiento and shadows, bring important lessons. So, we must walk- asking about decolonial resonances for re-existence; where to live is to change; and good is a practice.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 122 Bibliography: Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion (1st edition). Routledge. Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (First Edition). Duke University Press Books. Alexander, M. J. (2005). Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822386988 Allen, D. S. (2004). Talking to strangers: Anxieties of citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education. The University of Chicago Press. Aman, R. (2018). Decolonising intercultural education: Colonial differences, the geopolitics of knowledge, and inter-epistemic dialogue / Robert Aman. Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business. http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315616681 Andrejevic, M. (2013). Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know (1st edition). Routledge. Andreotti, V. (n.d.). HEADS UP checklist. Global What? Retrieved November 8, 2020, from http://globalwh.at/heads-up-checklist-by-vanessa-de-oliveira-andreotti/ Andreotti, V. ((n. d.)). Pedagogical Experiments. Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures. https://decolonialfutures.net/portfolio/pedagogical-experiments/ Andreotti, V. (2016). The educational challenges of imagining the world differently. Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue Canadienne d’études Du Développement, 37(1), 101–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2016.1134456 Andreotti, V. de O., Stein, S., Pashby, K., & Nicolson, M. (2016). Social cartographies as performative devices in research on higher education. Higher Education Research & Development, 35(1), 84– 99. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2015.1125857 Andreotti, V., Stein, S., Sutherland, A., Pashby, K., Susa, R., & Amsler, S. (2018). Mobilising Different Conversations about Global Justice in Education: Toward Alternative Futures in Uncertain Times. Policy and Practice: Development Education Review, 26 (Spring), 9–41. Angelou, M. (1969). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Random House Publishing Group. Anzaldua, G. (2015). Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (A. Keating, Ed.; Illustrated edition). Duke University Press Books. A.P. (2016, May 23). Freddie Gray death—What we know. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32400497
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 123
AP. (2018, March 6). Tres políticas mexicanas son asesinadas en menos de 24 horas. Publico. https://www.publico.es/internacional/mexico-asesinadas-tres-politicas-mexicanas-madrugada- sabado.html A.P. (2019, February 1). Greg Ritchie ID’d as man shot and killed by police at mall | CBC News. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-fatal-police-shooting-family-1.5000285 Apprich, C., Chun, W. H. K., Cramer, F., & Steyerl, H. (2019). Pattern Discrimination. University of Minnesota Press. Atleo, E. R. (2007). Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview. UBC Press. Azoulay, A. (2019). Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Verso. Baker, M., & Armstrong, K. (n.d.). Oso neighborhood never should have been built. The Seattle Times. Retrieved October 12, 2020, from https://special.seattletimes.com/o/html/localnews/2023794966_landslidehistoryxml.html Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Second Printing edition). Duke University Press Books. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Beck, M. G. (2003). Heroes and Heroines: Tlingit-Haida Legend. Graphic Arts Books. Bellacasa, M. P. de la. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. U of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim code. Polity. Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford University Press. Bhattacharya, K., & Keating, A. (2018). Expanding Beyond Public and Private Realities: Evoking Anzaldúan Autohistoria-teoría in Two Voices. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(5), 345–354. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417741976 Born, G. (n.d.). ‘Computer Software as a Medium: Textuality, Orality and Sociality in an Artificial Intelligence Research Culture’ (1997). In M. Banks and H. Morphy (Eds.) Rethinking Visual Anthropology, 1997, Pp.139-169. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Retrieved December 20, 2020, from https://www.academia.edu/15229062/_Computer_Software_as_a_Medium_Textuality_Orality_a nd_Sociality_in_an_Artificial_Intelligence_Research_Culture_1997_ boyd, danah, & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical Questions for Big Data. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 662–679. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 124
Bratton, B. H. (2015). The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press. Brown, A. (2019, June 5). Trump Administration Asks Congress to Make Disrupting Pipeline Construction a Crime Punishable by 20 Years in Prison. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2019/06/05/pipeline-protests-proposed-legislation-phmsa-alec/ Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution (First Edition.). Zone Books MIT Press. Browne, S. (2015). Dark matters: On the surveillance of blackness. Duke University Press. Bucher, T. (2018). If...Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. Oxford University Press. Butler, J. (1988). Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519–531. https://doi.org/10.2307/3207893 Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1st edition). Routledge. Butler, J., Butler, P. J., & BUTLER, K. C. (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Psychology Press. Butler, O. E. (1993). Parable of the Sower. Open Road Media. Butler, O. E. (1995). Bloodchild: And Other Stories. Open Road Media. Butler, O. E. (1998). Parable of the Talents. Open Road Media. Cajete, G. (2000). Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Clear Light Publishers. Cajete, G. (2016). Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (1st edition). Clear Light Publishers. Carter, C., C., C., Cabrera, & Brumfield B. (n.d.). Washington landslide: Families remember loved ones as death toll grows. CNN. Retrieved October 12, 2020, from https://www.cnn.com/2014/03/26/us/washington-landslide-vignettes/index.html Chiang, T. (2010). Stories of Your Life and Others. Knopf. Chiang, T. (2019). Exhalation: Stories. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Chun, W. H. K. (2008). Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. MIT Press. Chun, W. H. K. (2011). Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. MIT Press. Chun, W. H. K. (2017). Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. MIT Press. Coaston, J. (2018, August 1). QAnon, the scarily popular pro-Trump conspiracy theory, explained. Vox. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/1/17253444/qanon-trump-conspiracy-theory- 4chan-explainer
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 125
Coulthard, G. S. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. U of Minnesota Press. Dick, P. K. (2011). The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Driver, A. (2018, June 13). Unprecedented wave of political violence rocks Mexico. The World from PRX. https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-06-13/unprecedented-wave-political-violence-rocks- mexico Drucker, J. (2014). Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Harvard University Press. Drucker, J. (2017). Information visualization and/as enunciation. Journal of Documentation, 73(5), 903– 916. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2017-0004 Dussel, E. (1993). Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures). Boundary 2, 20(3)(The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America), 65–76. El violador eres tú—LETRA COMPLETA del HIMNO FEMINISTA Un violador en tu camino. (2019, December 5). [Youtube]. La Nacion Costa Rica. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB1cWh27rmI Elliott, A. (2019). A Mind Spread Out on the Ground. Doubleday Canada. Entrevista a Gastón Soublette - Parte III: La Cultura Mapuche. (2015, October 26). [YouTube]. Universitas Nueva Civilizacion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N27LAd906yM Estes, N., & Dhillon, J. (2019). Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement. University of Minnesota Press. http://muse.jhu.edu/book/70330/ Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Fanon, F. (1986). Black Skin, White Masks (R. Philcox, Trans.; Revised edition). Grove Press. Feenberg, A. (2005). Critical Theory of Technology: An Overview. Tailoring Biotechnologies, 1(1), 47– 64. Feenberg, A. (2017). Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason. Harvard University Press. Feenberg, A., & Callon, M. (2010). Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (Illustrated edition). The MIT Press. Galloway, A. R. (2012). The Interface Effect (1st edition). Polity. Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 126
Golebiewski, M., & boyd, danah. (2018). Data Voids: Where Missing Data Ca Easily Be Exploited. Data & Society Research Institute. https://datasociety.net/wp- content/uploads/2018/05/Data_Society_Data_Voids_Final_3.pdf Griest, S. E. (2017). All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands. In All the Agents and Saints. University of North Carolina Press. https://northcarolina.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.5149/northcarolina/978146963159 2.001.0001/upso-9781469631592 Guin, U. K. L. (1966). Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Three Complete Novels of the Hainish Series in One Volume--Rocannon’s World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions. Tom Doherty Associates. Guin, U. K. L. (1976). The Left Hand of Darkness. Orion. Guin, U. K. L., Barton, T., Chodos-Irvine, M., & Hersh, G. (2001). Always Coming Home. University of California Press. Hanh, T. N. (2013). The Art of Communicating. Harper Collins. Hanh, T. N. (2015). The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation. Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066 Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Illustrated edition). Duke University Press Books. Harrell, E. (2019, January 23). Neuromarketing: What You Need to Know. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/01/neuromarketing-what-you-need-to-know Hayles, N. K. (2010). My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. University of Chicago Press. hooks, bell. (1998). Narratives of struggle. In P. Mariani (Ed.), Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing (pp. 53–61). The New Press. hooks, bell. (2018). All About Love: New Visions. HarperCollins. Jack, J. (n.d.). The Cowichan Thunderbird and Orca Legend. Coast Salish Artist Joe Jack. Retrieved October 15, 2020, from http://www.joejack.com/thunderbirdandorca.html Jaynes, G. (1982, September 30). Suit On Race Recalls Lines Drawn Under Slavery. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/30/us/suit-on-race-recalls-lines-drawn-under- slavery.html Juhasz, A. (2019, May). Fake News Poetry Workshops [Workshop]. HASTAC proceedings, British Columbia, CA. http://alexandrajuhasz.com/websites/fake-news-poetry-workshops/
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 127
Jusu, N. (2020, September 25). To the detriment of our own peace. Twitter. https://twitter.com/NotNikyatu/status/1309691239529414663 Kanno-Youngs, Z., & Benner, K. (2020, June 3). Trump Deploys the Full Might of Federal Law Enforcement to Crush Protests. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/02/us/politics/trump-law-enforcement-protests.html Khan, J. (2020a, May 31). “A sermon on the project of whiteness. I once said privilege is not about what you’ve gone through, but what you haven’t had to go through….” Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/tv/CA3OB9fByeN/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet Khan, J. (2020b, September). “This is what makes Khan a different kind of activist. They are here to change policies, for sure, but the sermons and talks and writing go….” Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/CE9tjRxhCn_/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link Kimmerer R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants / Robin Wall Kimmerer. (First edition.). Milkweed Editions. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=683 745 Latour, B. (1996). Aramis, Or, The Love of Technology. Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2012). Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together. Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies, 3(T), 207–260. Lefebvre, B., & Adragna, A. (2019, June 3). Trump administration seeks criminal crackdown on pipeline protests. POLITICO. https://politi.co/2HSZxwH Lem, S. (2002). Solaris. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Levin, S. (2017, February 6). Fake news for liberals: Misinformation starts to lean left under Trump. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/06/liberal-fake-news-shift-trump- standing-rock Levinas, E., & Hand, S. (1990). Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism. Critical Inquiry, 17(1), 63– 71. https://doi.org/10.1086/448574 Levinas, E., & Wissing, P. (1989). As If Consenting to Horror. Critical Inquiry, 15(2), 485–488. Lewis, B. (2018, September 18). Alternative Influence. Data & Society; Data & Society Research Institute. https://datasociety.net/library/alternative-influence Little, B. (2018, September). This Teenager Killed Nazis With Her Sister During WWII. History.Com. https://www.history.com/news/dutch-resistance-teenager-killed-nazis-freddie-oversteegen Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches / by Audre Lorde. Crossing Press.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 128
Lyons, M. (2017, January). Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The origins and ideology of the Alternative Right. Political Research Associates. https://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/01/20/ctrl-alt-delete-report-on-the- alternative-right MacDonald, N. E., Stanwick, R., & Lynk, A. (2014). Canada’s shameful history of nutrition research on residential school children: The need for strong medical ethics in Aboriginal health research. Paediatrics & Child Health, 19(2), 64. Mackenzie, A. (2017). Machine learners: Archaeology of a data practice. The MIT Press. Mackey, R. (2020, June 4). White House Forced to Retract Claim Viral Videos Prove Antifa Is Plotting Violence. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2020/06/04/white-house-forced-retract-claim- viral-videos-prove-antifa-plotting-violence/ Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the Coloniality of Being. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 240–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548 Maldonado-Torres, N. (2016). Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality. Caribbean Studies Association, 37. Manne, K. (2018). Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford University Press. Manovich, L. (2013). Media After Software. Journal of Visual Culture, 12(1), 30–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412912470237 Marcuse, H. (1974) Marxism and feminism. Women’s Studies International Forum, 2, 279–288. Marcuse, H. (1992). Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society. In: Journal of Socialist Ecology. CNS, 3 (3) McPherson, T. (2018). Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design. Harvard University Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2001, August 31). The geopolitics of knowledge and the colonial difference. multitudes. https://www.multitudes.net/The-geopolitics-of-knowledge-and/ Mignolo, W. D. (2007). DELINKING: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 449–514. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162647 Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(7–8), 159–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409349275 Mignolo, W. D. (2013). Introduction: Coloniality of Power and De-colonial thinking. In Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies ‘Others’ in the Andes (pp. 88–103). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315868448-10 Mignolo, W., & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Duke University Press.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 129
Miller, J. (2000). Tsimshian Culture: A Light Through the Ages. U of Nebraska Press. Mni Wiconi: The Stand at Standing Rock. (2016, November 14). Divided Films. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FDuqYld8C8&feature=youtu.be Morrison, T. (2019). The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (First Edition). Knopf. Mosby, I., & Galloway, T. (2017). “Hunger was never absent”: How residential school diets shaped current patterns of diabetes among Indigenous peoples in Canada. CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association Journal, 189(32), E1043–E1045. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.170448 Nagle, A. (2017). Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right. John Hunt Publishing. Nahon-Serfaty, I. (2018, April 24) The hypodermic effect: How propaganda manipulates our emotions. The Conversation. Retrieved October 12, 2020, from http://theconversation.com/the- hypodermic-effect-how-propaganda-manipulates-our-emotions-94966 Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctt1pwt9w5 O’Neil, C. (2017). Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Reprint edition). Broadway Books. O’Shea, L. (2019). Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology (Illustrated edition). Verso. Owen, T. (2020, October 8). FBI Uncovers Massive Militia Plot to Kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Vice News. https://www.vice.com/en/article/pky7b7/fbi-uncovers-massive- militia-plot-to-kidnap-michigan-governor-gretchen-whitmer Papacharissi, Z. (2015). The unbearable lightness of information and the impossible gravitas of knowledge: Big Data and the makings of a digital orality. Media, Culture & Society, 37(7), 1095–1100. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443715594103 Parker, K., Graf, N., & Igielnik, R. (2019, January 17). Generation Z Looks a Lot Like Millennials on Key Social and Political Issues. Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/01/17/generation-z-looks-a-lot-like-millennials-on-key- social-and-political-issues/ Phillips, W. (2018). The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online (p. 128). Data & Society Research Institute. Pitts, A. J. (2020). Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Autohistoria‐teoría as an Epistemology of Self‐ Knowledge/Ignorance. Hypatia, 31(2), 352–369. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12235
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 130
Pollan, M. (2019). How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Penguin Books. Porter, J. (2015, July 29). Research prompts residential school survivors to ask “what else happened to me?” | CBC News. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/residential-school- nutrition-experiments-explained-to-kenora-survivors-1.3171557 Prorok, C. V. (2000). Boundaries are Made for Crossing: The feminized spatiality of Puerto Rican Espiritismo in New York City. Gender, Place & Culture, 7(1), 57–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/09663690024861 Quijano, A. (2007). Full article: COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 168–178. Razack, S. (2015a). Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (1st edition). University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. Razack, S. (2015b). Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody. University of Toronto Press. Retzepi, K. (2019). You, the Users. INTERFACE CRITIQUE, 2, 79-87. https://interfacecritique.net/journal/test-retz/ Richardson, V. (2017, February 5). Burning teepees, floating buffalo and zombies: Dakota Access pipeline protest plagued by ‘fake news.’ The Washington Times. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/5/dakota-access-pipeline-protest-plagued-by- fake-new/ Roberts, S. T. (2019). Behind the screen: Content moderation in the shadows of social media. Yale University Press. Russell, G. (2019, May). Reimagining the Now Workshop. Digital Democracies Conference, British Columbia, CA. Saldívar, J. D. (2007). Unsettling Race, Coloniality, and Caste. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 339–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162563 Scheper-Hughes, N. (1993). Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. University of California Press. Schiwy, F. (2007). Decolonization and the Question of Subjectivity. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 271–294. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162555 Shaw, J. K., and Reeves-Evison, T. (Eds.). (2017). Fiction as Method. Sternberg Press. Simpson, L. (2013). Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs. ARP Books. Simpson, L. B. (2017). This Accident of Being Lost: Songs and Stories. House of Anansi.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 131
Smith, C. (2017). Counting Descent. SCB Distributors. Snively, G., & Williams, W. L. (2016). Knowing home: Braiding Indigenous Science with Western Science [BC Campus, University of Victoria]. Textbook Project. Srnicek, N. (2016). Platform Capitalism (1st edition). Polity. Stephenson, N. (2003). Snow Crash. Random House Publishing Group. Suchman, L. (2006). Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808418 Talaga, T. (2017). Seven fallen feathers: Racism, death, and hard truths in a northern city / Tanya Talaga. Anansi. Terranova, T. (2004). Network Culture: Politics For the Information Age. Pluto Press. Turse, N. (2020, June 5). Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2020/06/05/pentagon-war-game-gen-z/ Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. Oxford University Press. Vuong, O. (2019). On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin. Wah, F., & Wong, R. (2019). Beholden: A Poem As Long As the River. Talonbooks. Wan, W. (2019, October 16) Teen suicides are increasing at an alarming pace, outstripping all other age groups, a new report says. Washington Post. Retrieved November 8, 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/teen-suicides-increasing-at-alarming-pace-outstripping- all-other-age-groups/2019/10/16/e24194c6-f04a-11e9-8693-f487e46784aa_story.html Wohlleben, P. (2016). The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate— Discoveries From a Secret World. Black Incorporated. Wolfe, T. (2008). The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wolfson, S. (2018, May 24). Amazon’s Alexa recorded private conversation and sent it to random contact. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/amazon-alexa- recorded-conversation Wong, J. C. (2017, February 23). Police remove last Standing Rock protesters in military-style takeover. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/23/dakota-access-pipeline-camp- cleared-standing-rock Wunderlich, A. (2019, June 10). Deepfakes: Can You Spot a Phony Video? | Above the Noise. KQED. https://www.kqed.org/education/531954/deepfakes-can-you-spot-a-phony-video-above-the-noise X, M. (1964). The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Random House Publishing Group.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 132
Subtext Appendix: Blackfish Rising
Story URL: http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/research/blackfishrising
SUBTEXT:
“Black fish” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/blackfishstory
REFERENCES:
Atleo, R. E. 2007. Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chah-Nulth Worldview. UBC Press.
Cajete, G. 2000. Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Clear Light Publishers.
Beck, M. G. 2003. Heroes and Heroines: Tlingit-Haida Legend. Graphic Arts Books.
Jack, J. n.d. “The Cowichan Thunderbird and Orca Legend.” Coast Salish Artist Joe Jack. Retrieved October 15, 2020 (http://www.joejack.com/thunderbirdandorca.html).
Miller, J. 2000. Tsimshian Culture: A Light Through the Ages. U of Nebraska Press. Manic Millennial (Z)
Story URL: http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/research/manicmillennials
SUBTEXT:
“I only know how to tell stories from the beginning” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/tellstoriesfromthebeginning
REFERENCES:
Levin, S. (2017, February 6). Fake news for liberals: Misinformation starts to lean left under Trump. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/06/liberal-fake-news-shift-trump-standing-rock
Parker, K., Graf, N., Igielnik, R. (2019). “Generation Z Looks a Lot Like Millennials on Key Social and Political Issues.” Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. Retrieved October 12, 2020 (https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2019/01/17/generation-z-looks-a-lot-like-millennials-on-key-social-and- political-issues /).
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 133
Mackey, R. (2020, June 4). White House Forced to Retract Claim Viral Videos Prove Antifa Is Plotting Violence. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2020/06/04/white-house-forced-retract-claim-viral-videos-prove- antifa-plotting-violence/
Mni Wiconi: The Stand at Standing Rock. (2016, November 14). Divided Films. WK Kellogg Foundation. YouTube, retrieved 2020/10/20: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FDuqYld8C8&feature=youtu.be
Nahon-Serfaty, I. (2018, April 24). The hypodermic effect: How propaganda manipulates our emotions. The Conversation. Retrieved October 12, 2020, from http://theconversation.com/the-hypodermic-effect-how- propaganda-manipulates-our-emotions-94966
Retzepi, K. (2019). “You, the users.” Interface Critique Journal 2, p79-87. DOI: 10.11588/ic.2019.2.66984
Richardson, V. (2017, February 5). Burning teepees, floating buffalo and zombies: Dakota Access pipeline protest plagued by ‘fake news.’ The Washington Times. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/5/dakota-access-pipeline-protest-plagued-by-fake-new/
Simpson, L. (2013). Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs. ARP Books.
Turse, N. (2020, June 5). Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Domestic Gen Z Rebellion. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2020/06/05/pentagon-war-game-gen-z/
Wong, J. C. (2017, February 23). Police remove last Standing Rock protesters in military-style takeover. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/23/dakota-access-pipeline-camp-cleared- standing-rock
Bullethead:
Story URL: http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/research/bullethead
SUBTEXT:
“her brown eyes bore into me” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/isa “she whispers” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/uraeus “1/4th of a person” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/fourthofaperson “the role of the grey is to trouble the boundaries of sameness” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/withmyancestors “gender” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/morelikewater “madness is never entirely wrong” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/madnessisneverentirelywrong
REFERENCES:
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 134
AP.(2016 May 23.). “Freddie Gray Death - What We Know.” BBC News.
AP. (2018, March 6). Tres políticas mexicanas son asesinadas en menos de 24 horas. Publico. https://www.publico.es/internacional/mexico-asesinadas-tres-politicas-mexicanas-madrugada-sabado.html
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. John Wiley & Sons.
Driver, A. (2018, June 13). Unprecedented wave of political violence rocks Mexico. The World from PRX. https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-06-13/unprecedented-wave-political-violence-rocks-mexico
Harrell, E. (2019, January 23). Neuromarketing: What You Need to Know. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/01/neuromarketing-what-you-need-to-know
Jaynes, G. (1982, September 30). Suit On Race Recalls Lines Drawn Under Slavery (Published 1982). The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/30/us/suit-on-race-recalls-lines-drawn-under-slavery.html
Juhasz, A. (2019) Fake New Poetry Workshop. HASTAC proceedings. Vancouver. May 2019.
Khan, J. (2020, May 31). “A sermon on the project of whiteness. I once said privilege is not about what you’ve gone through, but what you haven’t had to go through….” Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/tv/CA3OB9fByeN/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet
Khan, J. (2020, September). “This is what makes Khan a different kind of activist. They are here to change policies, for sure, but the sermons and talks and writing go….” Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/CE9tjRxhCn_/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Simpson, L. (2013). Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs. ARP Books.
Vuong, O. (2019). On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin.
Wah, F., & Wong, R. (2019). Beholden: A Poem As Long As the River. Talonbooks.
Wolfson, S. (2018, May 24). Amazon’s Alexa recorded private conversation and sent it to random contact. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/amazon-alexa-recorded- conversation Flight of the Portuguese Sparrow:
Story URL: http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/research/flightoftheportuguesesparrow
SUBTEXT:
“memory is a flood” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/memoryisaflood “mark my memories of childhood” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/iremember “why do we hate women?” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/whydowehatewomen “that’s also my mother’s fault” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/thatsalsomymothersfault
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 135
“but instead I was drowning” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/drowning “The edge of knowing terrifies most people. I’ve never felt more home in my life” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/theedgeofknowing
REFERENCES:
AP. (2019, February 1). Greg Ritchie ID’d as man shot and killed by police at mall | CBC News. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-fatal-police-shooting-family-1.5000285
Elliott, A. (2019). A Mind Spread Out on the Ground. Doubleday Canada.
El violador eres tú—LETRA COMPLETA del HIMNO FEMINISTA Un violador en tu camino. (2019, December 5). La Nación Costa Rica. Youtube, Retrieved 2020/10/20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB1cWh27rmI
Jusu, N. (2020, September 25). To the detriment of our own peace. Twitter. https://twitter.com/NotNikyatu/status/1309691239529414663
Kimmerer R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants (First edition.). Milkweed Editions.
Little, B. (2018, September). This Teenager Killed Nazis With Her Sister During WWII. History.Com. https://www.history.com/news/dutch-resistance-teenager-killed-nazis-freddie-oversteegen
Razack, S. (2015). Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody. University of Toronto Press.
Simpson, L. (2013). Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs. ARP Books.
Talaga, T. (2017). Seven fallen feathers: Racism, death, and hard truths in a northern city /Anansi.
Vuong, O. (2019). On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin.
Wah, F., & Wong, R. (2019). Beholden: A Poem As Long As the River. Talonbooks.
Wan, W. (2019, October 16). Teen suicides are increasing at an alarming pace, outstripping all other age groups, a new report says. Washington Post. Retrieved November 8, 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/teen-suicides-increasing-at-alarming-pace-outstripping-all-other- age-groups/2019/10/16/e24194c6-f04a-11e9-8693-f487e46784aa_story.html
Wunderlich, A. (2019, June 10). Deepfakes: Can You Spot a Phony Video? | Above the Noise. KQED. https://www.kqed.org/education/531954/deepfakes-can-you-spot-a-phony-video-above-the-noise Not a Woman But a Shaman:
Story URL: http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/research/notawomanbutashaman
SUBTEXT:
“memory does not reside in the folds of the individual brain…”
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 136
http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/gravitationalwaves “not a woman, but a shaman; a healing presence ourselves” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/avemariamarymatriarch “earthseed: the books of the living” http://hannah-holtzclaw.squarespace.com/autocontext/earthseed
REFERENCES:
Barad, K. M. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.
Hanh, T. N. (2015). The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation. Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale.
Juhasz, A. (2019). Fake New Poetry Workshop. HASTAC proceedings. Vancouver. May 2019.
Simpson, L. (2013). Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs. ARP Books.
Prorok, C. V. (2000). Boundaries are Made for Crossing: The feminized spatiality of Puerto Rican Espiritismo in New York City. Gender, Place & Culture, 7(1), 57–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/09663690024861
Vuong, O. (2019). On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin.
Wah, F., & Wong, R. (2019). Beholden: A Poem As Long As the River. Talonbooks.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 137 Critical Reflections on Decoloniality | Hannah Holtzclaw
Potholes in the road toward decolonization (for people in low-intensity struggle)
1. Having a critique of colonialism means that you are already decolonized. Saying you are doing it does not mean you are actually doing it. 2. Seeing all resistance to authority as anti-colonial. Page | 1 Many forms of resistance are inherently colonial and/or imperial. 3. Celebrating all attempts to disrupt colonial patterns as contributing to decolonization. Most attempts to disrupt colonialism are still grounded in colonial patterns. 4. Extracting, selectively consuming and mis-interpreting Indigenous teachings. The perceived entitlement to access and mastery of Indigenous knowledges is a colonial entitlement. 5. Imagining entanglement as interconnection with beauty only. Rather than seeing entanglement as entanglement with “shit” as well. 6. Emphasizing entitlements and forgetting accountabilities. Attempting to transcend privilege without giving anything up. 7. Expecting other people (especially Indigenous people) to shoulder the costs of your learning. Attempting to decolonize without considering the impact of your work on different Indigenous peoples. 8. Confusing self-actualization with decolonization. Seeing individual free/creative self-expression as a decolonial gesture. 9. Erasing distinctions between high- and low-intensity struggles. Positioning yourself on the basis of individual choice rather than structural location. Flattening uneven struggles. 10. Being a victim of systemic oppression means you are not complicit in colonialism. No one is off the hook, ever.
Hyper-self-reflexivity questions
1. To what extent are you reproducing what you critique? 2. To what extent are you avoiding looking at your own complicities and denials, and at whose expense? 3. What are you doing this for? Who (what communities) are you accountable to? What is your theory of change? What would you like your work to move in the world? 4. Who is your imagined audience? What do you expect from this audience? What compromises have you had to make in order for this to be possible? To what extent can these compromises compromise the work? 5. To what extent are you aware of how you are being read by communities of high-intensity struggle? Who would legitimately roll their eyes at what you are doing (i.e. find it indulgent and/or self-infantilizing)? 6. Who is this really about? How does integrity manifest in your work? 7. To what extent is the politics you are proposing based on the modern grammar of exceptionalism, entitlements and exaltedness? 8. How wide is the gap between where you think you are at and where you are actually at? Who would be able to help you realize that? Would you be able to listen? 9. To what extent can you respond with humility, honesty, humour and hyper-self-reflexivity when your work or self-image are challenged? 10. What would you have to give up or let go of in order to go deeper?
All of the above is drawn directly from Gesturing Towards Decolonial Horizons’, The Gifts of Failure, workspace for the review and critical reflection of decolonial gestures and experimentation.
MA Offering Fall 2020 School of Communication Simon Fraser University 1 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 138
HANNAH PROLOGUE POESÍA FREE WRITE STREAM HOLTZCLAW RESEARCH CONTACT blackfish rising
Comment 3 Likes Share View Post →
<> theres a space between me and the world. README.TXT a quivering expanse of experience.
April 14, 2020 a feeling that transcends mind and body.
a precarious coherence;
a curious skin; particles spin; subatomic cells;
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 2 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 139 a spectral realm.
it pushes, pulls, lingers.
tugs at the edges of sight and sensation.
bending space and illusions of self.
interface:
the space between identity and being; screen and world
We live within the words we use to describe the world.
this is essentially what communications studies are all “the River’s about. the way we use language, voice is the words, concepts, stories, to speak sound our the world into being. to impart body makes meaning into our experience. the search for meaning, always when we’re bound; suffocated, by the sleepwalking dominant narratives; fictions; through the imaginaries that organize a abyss of our society. communication studies own presence then, is such an important, in the world” though convoluted, discipline (wah; wong, because it draws attention to the beholden, 80- way language itself is a 81) MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 3 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 140 technology; where paradigms of meaning take material shape within the world and as a society, we develop, through various and You can’t separate the waters layering forms of interface, more you encounter at the beginning and more ways to abstract upon of the river from those that flow this as a phenomena. downstream. And all rivers, eventually, find their way to the Communication technologies sea. The ocean swallows all have the power to profoundly within its depths. None can be affect our societies and collective filtered out, none can be taken belief systems. Indeed, we back. blinked and 20 years of technological development raged So, if we are to contend with our through us. We’ve only barely colonial shadow, to write new begun picking up the pieces, stories, reconfigure our horizon, shifting our gaze to the tears it’s we must first begin with ripped across historical decolonizing ourselves. This experience. demands not an erasure or sidestepping of the colonial Digital space has become a history of identity; being; place with which we live and difference, but rather direct and dwell. The stories taken up by accountable engagement with the the screen, have become the messy, situated and agonostic words we embody, we live. space between the stories we tell Interface acts now as an and the stories we embody. extension of the Self into the virtual beyond. This project I started this blog just before concerns itself with what kind of entering graduate school. extension our current interface Initially thinking it would mythologies afford, and how we present as a portfolio of sorts. In ought to dwell, do, teach, learn, the fall of 2017 i started my be through this space. graduate school program, and in all honesty in the procrastination The cascade of alternative-facts of my first big term essay, in and weaponized worldviews that hindsight already resisting the have emerged alongside current mold of the research thesis forms of interface and practice, I started my free writing algorithmic platforms expose stream. I hoped this space might how both fictions and spur me to expand my writing MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 4 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 141 communication technologies, act practice or at minimal force me as translation systems for to write something regularly— collective knowledge and and since free form lets me understanding. Thus, fictions and explore with my own voice, i communication media (old and figured something good might new alike), delimit both origin come of the experiment. and horizon stories of a given society. i initially called the space, river running. liking the form as a CONSEQUENTLY, THIS kind of stream of consciousness EXTENSION IS NOT that seeks meaning, like rivers NEUTRAL, IT TOO IS A outstretch and search for the FICTION. WE ocean. but also to the thrill and EXPERIENCE AN change of the riverbed as you ILLUSION OF literally chase it down stream. EMPOWERMENT. BUT the way calm pools feed into IT IS JUST THAT, AN boiling and boulder stricken ILLUSION, A MYTH, A rapids. the way a steady current HALLUCINATORY carries you past wolves, natural REALM: springs, and a vast degree of where what arrives in front of us organisms and life. this was, at in the form of social media the time, one way for me to timelines and search engine describe the embodied practice queries, is influenced by a range of writing for me. what it feels of actors and processes that like to reach towards the depths publics can neither see nor of experience. As my studies intervene in for themselves. This have progressed, so has my has destabilizing effects on understanding of the river. public discourse, cultural Throughout this text you will see identity, and indeed truth, as me incorporating the words of interface operates as a indigenous and queer writers and knowledge filter, blurring and storytellers. Indigenous and other convoluting our sense of shared nonbinary ways of knowing have reality and culture. greatly influenced this project at This is further problematized by every level: be it queer and the deeply personal and gender studies, quantum physics, affectively charged biology and natural systems, commodification, digitization buddhist thought and Pranayama,
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 5 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 142 and endless proliferation of self or the Oceti Sakowin brought about platform encampment at Standing Rock. sanctioned forms of participation hence, this text anchors itself in and engagement. Meanwhile, the the antithetical work of demands of this extension press disjointing the mind from us into network grids and user colonial and habituated patterns profiles. of knowledge, identity, and being. CHISELING OUR AGENCY INTO I seek here, not to place these CAREFULLY forms of knowledge on a ATOMIZED UNITS pedestal, as a cure all, nor PREARRANGED AND uncomplicated paths forward, PREDESTINED BY THE but rather to honor the insight HISTORICAL and space they offer theories of IMAGINARY THAT difference and change; in DEFINES THEM. reorienting ourselves toward knowledge, nature, and each- In the dominant western other; and in bringing us back imaginary, life is organized in into relational accountability to accordance with a our bodies and other life- Liberal/Cartesian-[Colonial habit sustaining systems. of being]: where difference was established through racialized In particular, to honor the river in and gendered terms of the me and in all of us, i incorporate conqueror and the conquered. the poetic works of Rita Wong Western-identity “discovered and Fred Wah in Beholden, a itself” through slavery and poem as long as the river; as well serfdom at best and cultural as, to honor the ocean and its genocide at worst. Thus, depths, Islands of Decolonial western-Identity and notions of Love by Leanne Betasomasake- Selfhood emerged in response Simpson, and lastly, to speak of and relation to colonial life, death, love and their gifts, I dispositions of Otherness. We also turn to Robin Wall have become who we are as Kimmerer and Braiding imperial powers through the Sweetgrass. violence we have done to Others. This history isn’t behind us, it Additionally, I incorporate the lingers in our very cells. works of Ocean Vuong, Alicia Elliot, Thich Nhat Hanh and MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 6 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 143 LIBERALISM AND Jacqui Alexander, to trouble the MARKETS ARE boundaries between bodies and THEMSELVES— memory; love and abuse; and COLONIAL GAMES: indeed, pedagogy and nature. It the bastard children of colonial is through these works, I suggest, regimes of violence and we might begin to locate and exploitation that enforce postures come to understand a language of competition and relations of of healing. subordination and domination. By incorporating story from all Thus, the racist and sexist of these authors I also seek to impasse of modern scientific and trouble the authority typically social development is predicated afforded to academic authorship. on a dehumanization, a All of my words have been dislocation or dismemberment, shaped by the voices I of identity: a denial of how we incorporate here and have shed see or don’t see Others is also a light on the concepts I seek to fundamental reflection of how engage in this project. Rather we see ourselves. than presenting an individual recent political events have narrative, severed from their revealed that in a globally influence, i offer them in their connected socio-technical original forms here as well, system, when polarization inviting you to share in the becomes automated through experience, the sight, their unregulated algorithmic public perspectives have provided my communication platforms, the own. My intent is that you read ground beneath our feet begins to the layers of the displayed text disintegrate. Our sense of through one another, finding experience, our collective story yourself within whatever patterns fragmented, we become take shape in accordance with estranged from each other. strung your personal experience. out on its violence we hardly true to form, the river and its know who we are in its shadow. story has changed for me. as the its hard to find our own breath, waters have evolved, so have I. our own hands. and now, as I close this chapter, AS SUBJECTS IN THIS this project, i am ready to tell ORGANIZATION OF you of river’s gifts, its lessons, HUMAN SOCIETY, WE its medicine.
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 7 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 144 APPROACH NATURE so this is the story of the river’s AND ALL ELSE, AS coming of age; of its OUR OBJECT. transformation, of its future. This wounds us and nature. Severing, and indeed denying the fundamental interdependence this is blackfish and relationality with the world rising. our livelihood demands. Ironically, this orientation is this text is not meant to follow a contradictory to everything linear format. know that it is not science tells us about the world a singular story. it is a multitude. and biological systems. We don’t a mess. much like the movement live outside of nature, we are the or transition of an identity. you by product of nature. We are not will need to read the entire superior to our ecosystem, we section to understand the are a part of it, a contributor to relations taking place between its rhythm, its health. each block of story. you are encouraged to read each segment decolonial technologies, be they of the writing in whatever way fictional or technical, seek to you choose. perform and support the transformation into more just and accountable futures; being; that being said some worlds; they teach us how to suggestions and honor and understand how we things to keep in mind mark and move, and become as you read marked and moved by, the world and all else. they help us tell new stories; teach us what we must confront, what we must let go, how we must change, in order to move beyond.
Please do click the links.
BLUE HYPERLINKED TEXT OFFERS YOU ADDITIONAL SUBTEXT.
hover over text to see what linked content is. content is MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 8 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 145 either press or journal articles of relevance, videos or social media content, or autocontext/subtext—additional layers of meaning within the story thread.
If you’re a non-academic reader—not interested in my formal thesis chapters but curious about my writing process and fiction as method, please see the short description of my methods linked here as Becoming Blackfish.
Blackfish Rising Fictions:
BLACKFISH RISING:
She emerges on her own accord and is in both everything and nowhere else in this collection. savor her. listen for her. return to her when you find yourself lost. she is the spirit of this story, meant to both guide and challenge you.
SUBTEXT IN THIS SECTION MAKES REFERENCE TO THE ROLE OF BLACKFISH AS GUIDES/SPIRITS.
MANIC MILLENNIAL (Z)
both columns tell of where our story begins. right is what we share, left is another translation of this arrival, presented through an experience i now share here, with you. i suggest beginning first with the right.
SUBTEXT IN THIS SECTION REFERENCES THE LIVED REALITIES OF OUR CURRENT CULTURAL CONTEXT.
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 9 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 146 BULLETHEAD:
is a trip. you’re either dead or on drugs anyway. don’t look for ground, you won’t find any. just enjoy the ride.
SUBTEXT IN THIS SECTION UNFOLDS CONTEMPLATIONS ON RACE, GENDER, AND DIFFRACTED DIFFERENCE (WHERE HISTORY= PAST/PRESENT/FUTURE ENTANGLEMENTS).
FLIGHT OF THE PORTUGUESE SPARROW:
in order to rise we must also learn what it is to fall; this is more of a dance or a bird in flight, shift between segments on the right and left as you work your way down to glide through the text.
SUBTEXT IN THIS SECTION PRIMARILY SERVE AS MEDITATIONS ON PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE TRAUMA; ON MENTAL HEALTH, SUICIDE AND DEPRESSION.
NOT A WOMAN BUT A SHAMAN:
is about love; the art of giving; healing; change. it is a gift; an offering; an invitation
SUBTEXT IN THIS SECTION IS ABOUT DIVINE POTENTIAL AND AFFECTEDNESS.
Definitions for
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 10 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 147 Fictional Aesthetic:
Anzaldúan Autofiction:
this work also adopts and works within an Anzaldúan reading of the Aztec myth of Coyolxāuhqui and its stages of conocimiento and desconocimiento. Blackfish in this story are chamaneria, rising spirits, surging from depths, guardians; walkers between worlds. teaching us of greater truths. helping us tell the stories we need to tell in order to change. The chapters follow the ‘stages of conocimiento’ one encounters upon the disorientation and rupture of a Coyolxāuhqui story of dismemberment and creation; death and rebirth. The following are some definitions to support your reading:
COYOLXĀUHQUI:
Is the narrative aesthetic this story emerged from. Each chapter a stage of its insight. It is an aztec myth about a goddess who kills her mother after she becomes impregnated by a ball of feathers. upon killing her, the fetus springs from the body full formed as Coyolxāuhqui 's brother, who proceeds to rip Coyolxāuhqui into a thousand pieces. Throwing her head into the sky (which becomes the moon--she is a goddess of the moon) and her body down the mountain.
The reading of the myth as I am drawing on it here (via Anzaldúa) marks it as a process of emotional and psychic dismemberment or rupture, where all that you are and all that you know is shattered and cast out in front of you in pieces; as well as, the creative , transformative work of putting all of the pieces together again anew and forever changed. Its process of estrangement and rewriting, that wounds, exposes, causes confusion and confliction as you become removed from a cultural center and identity. You work through this experience by moving through stages of conocimiento and deconocimiento: insight/knowing and the cost of that insight/knowing.
NEPANTLA:
is a nahuatl word meaning “in-between space”
is the rupture, that which splinters or fractures our identities and cultural sight. a space where reality has become fluid; a transitional,
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 11 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 148 libidinal space where we struggle to find equilibrium between outer expressions of change and our inner relations to it. nepantla is also a reference to the effects of colonization and globalization in the global south.
CONOCIMIENTO:
is essentially the development of insight and consciousness as a result of experiences. It is an ongoing and ever changing state. It is a space where you start to reconstitute order and meaning after nepantla: trace patterns, track ongoing circumstances of life; sift, gather, scan, then create anew. it is where you re-invision the map of the known world, creating new descriptions, new stories that you then test out in the world and then embody as daily practice. For Anzaldúa, conocimiento is often triggered by calls to action that break one from habitual coping strategies and because of this, is always entangled with experiences of desconomiento, in the moments when we are called to about-face the truths we have been reluctant to face.
DESCONOCIMIENTO:
is the cost of knowing; contending with the responsibility of conocimiento’s knowledge. the strategies and means with which we try to avoid and dodge the chaos of the nepantla rupture; where we retreat, into despair, depression, self-loathing, hopelessness; paralysis. Resisting the truth of what is really happening, refusing to face it; still mourning original cultural traumas. There is a cling to self-hood and 'safety'; self-absorbed suffering. This is not a place we "transcend inevitably" but that is always involved in conocimiento ongoings and developments; teaching us of our multiplicity.
(Anzaldúa , 2015 xxxiv)
All of these concepts are borrowed and guided by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, and specific to her usage and deployment (though honorably transformed here) in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro.
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 12 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 149 Stage 1, Coyolxāuhqui:
THE RUPTURE; THE CRACK
Perched along the threshold watching life flicker by. Furrowed brows, vacant eyes. Little black boxes, cradled life. Infinity at their fingertips. Scrolling through space and time. Formal principles. Closed categories Capture essence, put it in a box. Sever it from its life force, Hold it still, chained, locked. Stripped away context. Malnourished thoughts.
Crooked necks, sacral positions. For the gods we sacrifice. Pour our souls into an abysmal vice. Strung out on dopamine spikes. Scroll, scroll, double tap, swipe! Reality, carefully atomized. Hollowed out insides.
Tap here for comfort, release. Stay here for hours; then we’ll hail you when you leave. There is a saying, if you gaze upon the abyss long enough, The abyss will gaze back upon you. Twisting the infinite. The longer you stare the more you see.
No taming the glutton capitalist: Consuming essence, not for truth, But for greed.
Self-indulgent, intemperance: We eat and we eat.
Bottomless guts, eternal famine; Not knowing we empty ourselves
As we drink.
So limited a threshold; Such constrained means; We have never been taught what it is, To see.
Upload. Post. like! Can this filter fix my insides? Swipe left to keep shopping. Right to MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 13 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 150 try me on for size. Mouths open, eyes wide. As identity, we cannibalize.
Set the angle just right. Don’t forget to caption.
Catching god’s secret in bits. Lest we walk the world in rapture.
Zoom in, zoom out. Trying to find a focus. Pin prick the atom. Trying to figure out what a self is. Be real. Stay woke. Click, hover, share, scroll. This is counter culture gone internet rogue.
Solidity is an illusion. Truth blinds.
Who needs bodies, earth, soul,
When you can colonize the mind?
Share
Newer / Older
Powered by Squarespace
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 14 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 151
HANNAH PROLOGUE POESÍA FREE WRITE STREAM HOLTZCLAW RESEARCH CONTACT blackfish rising
Comment 0 Likes Share View Post →
Blackfish Chamaneria; Rousing the deep Rising Once there was a river, April 14, 2020 whose waters came from the very center of the earth. the life it carried across earth brought the wonders of the cosmos to the center of vision and experience. its waters carried knowledge of an abundance of earthly gifts; conocimientos de las maravillas del mundo, una conocimiento sagrado. the river has seen it all. it has given and recieved life, all at MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 15 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 152 once, for eternity.
One day Coyote came upon the river.
enamoured by her knowledge and eager to learn of her gifts, Coyote decides to chase the river along its journey. no matter the way the earth and terra around it shifted and changed; died only to be reborn. burned only to be nourished again to life, the river was the river. the river just is and does. and Coyote, bearing witness, ran alongside her.
when the river and the coyote finally reached the point where the river ruptures, opening up to the depths, where the sea and sky meet: the river sweeps up Coyote and all the knowledge of a river running and tosses her into the depths of the sea; el alma de la tierra. a great storm began to swirl and fester above the water. for days the sea surged and swelled. thunder rippled across turbulent waters; lightening and wind berated both land and sea.
Until finally,
from the the eye of the storm, un gran ser de luz y obscuridad; a great blackfish emerged. a walker between the known world and what lies beyond. for the river and coyote needed a spirit, a chamaneria most wise; to navigate the depths of the collective conocimiento of all that lives, dies, and spills into the sea. a spirit of change, of entanglement, capable of teaching us how to navigate la dédalo of identity-being; of futures yet to come and of worlds past.
“what remains and resurges wave by wave, generation by generation is blood memory, cell memory, is river memory, remembering the future for the ones yet to come, who matter even if we do not know their names, who remain relatives to salmon, relatives to you, relatives to the river”
(WAH; WONG,BEHOLDEN P.76-79) MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 16 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 153
this is the story of the blackfish rising
emerging from the depths.
arcs of light and dark at once,
a rising rhythm of life rippling across the skin of the world.
carrying with it the deepest of truths, of beauty, of life and death at once.
Walkers; Nepantleras; Guardians; Chamaneria of Good
they come in the night.
when the world is dark but the sky is alive in the light of the october moons. i walk barefoot to the water, heart racing. as my feet first find sweet grass, then sand and sea, i call for them. knowing even then, as i did, that they were already there; waiting, hearts at the threshold.
i wade into the water.
finger tips trailing across the surface. i can feel them now. their voices reaching for me through the water swirling around my feet, my legs, i lie belly down and begin paddling out into the moon light. finally i let my arms fall to my sides in the water, and just as they submerge, i feel the blackfish upon me. her smooth ebony breaching the water beneath my very palm.
XX
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 17 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 154 i keep having dreams about blackfish.
sometimes i am calling for them, beckoning for their presence. other times i feel fear, paralyzing apprehension, as i wait at the surface for their arrival. a resistance to the water, for fear of what is rising from its depths. on these occasions when blackfish rose, breaching the surface, she made certain her dark eye found my gaze, gleaming as it reached into the center of my own irises:
“you needn’t fear me, nepantlera, for I am you, & you are already blackfish. you need only listen, trust. press forward.”
dédalo:
LABYRINTH, “Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes MAZE al andar.” SPIRIT OF ENTANGLEMENT. ― Gloria E. Anzaldúa
For blackfish there are no bridges, ser de la dédalo, we become the bridge as we walk; move; dwell; do. creating passageways for change; for travel between new and dying worlds. MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 18 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 155 Share
Newer / Older
Powered by Squarespace
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 19 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 156
HANNAH PROLOGUE POESÍA FREE WRITE STREAM HOLTZCLAW RESEARCH CONTACT blackfish rising
Comment 2 Likes Share View Post →
manic millennial- (Z): the nepantla April 4th, 2017 generation Stage 2: Seeing April 14, 2020 It was 3 months 2 MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 20 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 157 Nepantla weeks and 6 days YOUR REALITY IS post Standing SUBJECT TO Rock. DISILLUSION ☼
still the smell of this story begins with the sage, the sting of nepantla generation. or what tear gas clung to white people call: millennials the edges of my and Z senses. Memories still churning through my body: nepantla here because they were born into a time of “living The compulsion to between stories”; a global release feelings identity crisis. of fear on the bridge with somewhere, some genius pin thousands of water pricked the center of the atom protectors; the and the world cracked open. sudden realization naturally all the religious cults that I was on the and neuros are going ape shit. the side of history mormons have completely lost it that never gets and are gearing up for battle told; the way fear royale with hell, sending smoke becomes rendered signals to the air gods every obsolete in these hour. fucks sake. circumstances, the dishonor and so, anyway, now, destruction its presence brought there’s a crack in the to the pocket of world. and people experience I was keep falling into it. holding. and thus, the deeper ripple they haven’t even put up of truth, courage barriers! its been years. and still and connection no matter the signage and regular that propelled my PSA’s, people keep walking up
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 21 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 158 feet forward; the to it to take selfies and just experience of sliding right off the jagged edge. being flanked by an existential clusterfuck of hundreds of armed proportions no one was prepared men in tactical for (per usual). gear as elders sing and drum no ones really doing anything around you; as the because the religious cults have air cracks with everyone up in arms about this the explosion of inevitable rapture, most of us are flash grenades, all just bumbling about in swollen clouds of confusion, in feverish and fearful biological weapons apprehension, perpetually swallow us in a holding our breath. avoiding fog of toxins; direct eye contact; avoiding the involuntary grief wound. streaks my face. the crack is deep. infinite, some waves of shock, say. a wound on the skin of god. anger and helplessness, i dont think god is in there transformed into though. movement, the thing is, we enact society, but stripping down and we don’t believe in it. we get its redressing frozen all a bunch of bullshit. we get it frontliners bone so well we’ve completely cold and numb with detached from it. we had to. the shock by the fires weight of its burdens, its before the militia violence, is too much. from our hosed them out. place on the river, the wrongs All of this. and and the solutions, are clearly in not a blink of view. it is the collective mainstream media. intelligence of man that has got White media. us here, but how we choose to Colonial privilege wield it is always set within kept this violence sand. from ever its easy to remain to detached happening into the from the real meaning of this. gaze of the MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 22 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 159 until you return to basic biology; collective basic story and realize that hallucination we climate change is literally the call society. earth trying to rid itself of Shock was disease, an organism, a being, an privilege; grief ecosystem, our own fucking was privilege; ecosystem, just responding to breath; water; threats to its own survival: the life. parasite that is “modern” human The people I life. occupied the as children of the crack, our bridge with, the upbringing is marked by the history I was splitting of reality by virtual surrounded by, space; of interface, if you will. this ongoing this experience has greatly resistance against impacted our relation to the violent world and how we generate imposition; this—- meaning. at foundational levels, -they lived this it has shaped our generational every day of their development and overall ‘being’: lives with every passed down fiber the nepantla of their being. generation wont be made to fit into, nor this. this was enforce, any mold of truth. language that contains and restricts identity And just like that through categories of everything I gender, race, class, thought I sexuality or any other understood; socially constructed everything I imposition you old thought I’d known; white bastards fucked began to warp like us all up with in the the insides of a fever dream. It beginning. grew enumerous, the internet splayed out the MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 23 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 160 contorted and collective contents of human life; defiled when the contents of the world appendages. become disembodied, taken up nothing escaping by the screen, objectified instead its reach, its of experienced; when your tendrils sucking reality is with regularity and life from my very consistency, subject to veins. disillusionment, you tend to start opting out of the next top seller. theres nothing when since we were old enough quite like an to understand we have watched explosion of the earth scream for help, lashing cultural sight. out for our attention: we are when ripples of wounded, you are hurting us; understanding pass laying bare more truths than we through the body. were willing to look at with the a sort of sudden racialized and gut wrenching drop and deep fallout of hurricane katrina, of sinking at once: haiti, of puerto rico. as a How had I not seen generation our transition to this before? How adulthood is marked by the had I not looked decline and failures of down at my own establishment ideologies and hands? I felt a narratives. as a generation we fraud. A coward. a responded to these revealings, betrayal, of what collectively, as the most diverse I could not generation to date with social determine at the movements like arab spring, time. But occupy wallstreet, DREAMers, understand better black lives matter, and now. indigenous led environmental movements. as a nepantla How will generation we weaponized the image for good across you respond, intersections. we mobilized to re- when history write the world.
asks you to but one of the hardest parts about living in MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 24 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 161 bear witness an information to it’s society, is the fact violence? that it is so very rarely quiet. “The closing of stillness, the camp is not introspection, the end of a silence, have become movement or fight, foreign, alienating it is a new experiences in a world beginning,” said where we are Tom Goldtooth, continuously and with executive director fervor pulled out of of the Indigenous our own bodies, our Environmental own minds. Network, in a interface reaches statement: forward into us. tugs on our chain, forces "they cannot us to give, to engage, extinguish the hollows us at every fire that Standing beckoning; Rock started: it burns within each placing blackholes of us." inside our chest.
we feel it because we’re sick, and i mean ☼ fucking ill, from all
We were driving the ways we’ve learned when I got the to abuse; exploit; message. destroy; hate
Dear Hannah Holtzclaw, ourselves.
hate I am pleased to inform you that the Senate more generally. Graduate Studies Committee has approved more violently. your admission to the more destructively. MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 25 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 162 Master of Arts program in the School of THE PROBLEM IS, Communication at Simon INTERFACE IS ALSO Fraser University for the THE PLACE WHERE 2017 Fall term. WE’VE BEEN COERCED INTO PERPETUALLY all i can do is RAPING NATURE AND scream; cry. OURSELVES. A TECHNOLOGY OF THE i read those words CONQUEROR THAT and felt something CALLS US TO BID, TO big give away PERFORM, TO UPHOLD, inside me. stunned HIS VIOLENCE, HIS stupid by relief; WILL, HIS INTERESTS. elation. i’d felt so alienated; where all off us, were trapped; collectively taught to hate exhausted. alone. ourselves. resting so just another force to be precariously upon subjugated, homogenized, the razor edge of pressed through the latticeworks hope, i’d of the grid; pressed into a myriad forgotten to of repressive representation. breath. lest i blinked and the this is the only way to guarantee world; the violence, non ethics of war. for opportunity i’d as long as individuals lose just barely themselves in inward abuse, self- manifested in harm, self-deprecation; sick and front of myself, scared shitless as this dissolve into dehumanizing disease permeates dust. into could- your cells, you’ll never see have-beens or yourself as one part of a greater not-quite. into wholeness. surrounded by never-was and algorithms that cannibalize, miles-behind. you’ll just lie there and bleed, or slip into the pattern of violence, there’s a certain turn on others and yourself. naivety to hope. and such a short uploading every livable moment MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 26 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 163 distance between to a network of people that you arrogance and mostly don’t know or see; idealism (Elliot: Forcing every detail of our lives 38). an even on each other through the screen. shorter one Facebook fucked us all up, between ego and throwing back memories at us intellectualism. from when we were blacked-out if you like and flailing in our early 20’s like yourself going we want to remember that shit. into graduate perpetually pinned down by our school, don't trace, by our past, we remain expect that kind trapped here. every blip of of existential agency captured and transcribed security moving as measurable proof of who we forward. are or who we are not. trained by the networks we occupy to scroll academics is like and scroll until our prefrontal getting hit by a cortex goes numb; this house of truck. then handed mirrors making us mad, making 75 papers to grade us grasp for anything that has and about as many even a scent of stability, realness, nervous young authenticity. crisis-fatigued and undergrads drowning in all the ways the hovering over you world has told us we are wrong while you lie or aren’t enough. there spattered across the so with our mouths open and our pavement: eyes shut we continue to swallow. convince ourselves we "its okay guys, you are live outside of it. that we all going to get through this know its not real-life. and yet. term. i realize the counseling and well being that dopamine hits hard after a app isn't therapy, if you stream of interactions generated could solve your problems from a well-lit selfie. egos through an app you would inflate, if only temporarily so, have just gone to when we smash the ‘like’ button YouTube. i’m sorry. we're to gesture towards what used to failing you and i know be human connection. but once it
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 27 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 164 that. you're worth more all dies down, and your moment than this. you are of glory zapped of relevancy in important. your hurt is the deluge of the incessant real, the world is heavy. documentation of Self, and all yes you can have an your left with is the hashtags to extension." remember what used be bodily experience; when everything you you'd spend more do boils down to snapshot, a time thinking caption, 250 characters of about how fucked brilliance, only to be all but up it all is if erased in the wake of the you weren't insatiability of consumption and already bleeding curated life; fabricated out on the importance, whats left? pavement on account of the whats left when truck. so we put our heads down and you’ve contorted your pour whats left of very being to our bodily matter accommodate the into surviving it. demands of a screen?
i had several “but by now, the anishinaabeg mentors heed had lived without the wiindigo warnings prior to for so long, or so they’d thought, entering graduate that they’d relegated wiindigo school: this is out of real life and into the realm going to put of myth. They’d forgotten strain on your entirely that story and reality are relationships, one and the same. The wiindigo with both friends had insidiously reincarnated and and family. come back stronger. Instead of coupled with: an insatiable appetite for the prepare to be anishinaabeg, this time, they had isolated and make had a insatiable appetite for sure you go out anishinnaabeg aki and all of its and drink every gifts. Of course, to the once and awhile to anishinaabeg, this was the same decompress. seemed thing. This seemingly minor
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 28 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 165 obvious, so at the adjustment to wiindigo strategy time i dismissed had shored up their superior these things. military power and made death for the anishinaabeg much nobody warns you slower and more painful than though, about the before and any potential ways the endless interventions were that much intellectualizatio more difficult to realize…their n distances you system of replication permeated from the very everything. They were brilliant world you seek to instead of just scary, and they know and be a part found a way to convince people of. how you lose to buy disconnection, insatiable touch with humans, hunger and emptiness. The lucky with living, ones worked their whole lives so trying to discern they could buy more ever abstracted disconnection, hunger and definitions of emptiness. The unlucky ones worldly phenomena were destroyed by it, and the and experience. unluckier still had parents that obediently were destroyed by it.” (Simpson, extracting. p.109 IDL)
because “gezhizhwazh knew this was how academics too, is those wiindigo first planted the a place where hole inside each of these new people seek little people in the first place. The hole that they tried so ground; desperately to fill for the rest of ontological their lives. They filled it up with articulation; food, with drink, with stuff. They hiding. cut themselves down, flooded themselves, they fevered imagine my themselves, they ate, drank, surprise to find swam and breathed in the toxic the whole soup they’d inadvertently experience to be created, all in an attempt to fill just as grating on the bottomless hole. They sat in my morale (though front of screens for most of their wholly its own MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 29 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 166 waking hours. They became breed) as the cannibals.” (Simpson, p111 IDL) space i was so desperate to get away from. nobody warns you about ☼ how progress itself, and its associative I study institutions, in theory and interface. practice, extend the imperial a few years back i imperative. started saying this institutions and thing to people. knowledge just a testament: violence lingers about how we needed to in the body; in fundamentally redesign the mind for our access to centuries. information online; the way we conceive of the internet as a X public resource and I had a professor suggest i how we filter meaning write my first term paper through the digital. on fascism and trump. i dont think he realized this Convinced a handful of suggestion felt like he’d my college friends to just dug his fingers into basically come up with the bullet wound, the a campaign about this. gaping hole in my chest invited our friends, that 2016 had left. There families, networks, to aren’t many people who talk about it and come really understand how up with a plan for convoluted, fucked up and more localized shell-shocked american community based needs. identity is at the moment. i kept insisting: ya'll its the MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 30 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 167 in canada, honestly interface. we gotta probably because they’re fix it. and in 2016 too busy encountering, when we wanted to and by that i mean blame the russians, i evading, their own kept saying: ok, but colonial shadow. guys, the internet...better yet, meanwhile all across the modern communication, globe, crises ripple. unrest, its breaking, uprisings. younger gens, something's gaslit and pissed, still happened... catching up to the last 30 years of humanity’s spiral: the thing is even z’s barely old enough to before Cambridge vote (or drive) but trolling Analytica, even before presidents and stanning 2016, interface was Anonymous like they making us mad, warping understand the legacy reality's image. Legion and everyone else created for them. can’t even legally drink but still if you are anywhere showing up in the streets between the ages of and at government 20-40, chances are at buildings to demand a some point between better world. millennials 2010-2020 you came still trying to grow the across some weird ass fuck up; reaching for a shit on the internet. ground that never existed; its also quite all of us, collectively possible, that amidst realizing this shit isn’t a initial rabbit hole fairytale and Obama spins, you were wasn’t a hero, but a moderately intrigued sacrifice; that we have if not undone by novel fallen asleep at the wheel; conspiracies of the avoiding life; sidestepping internet spectacle. discomfort, responsibility, and once you’ve gazed thinking we could just that far in, you begin load the labor of change, to notice the
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 31 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 168 of growth once again on fragility, the the backs of people of illusion of ground and color. you never really make it fully back into Like Elizabeth Eckford’s your own skull again. parents, sending their 15 year old daughter into an but for me it isn’t angry-white mob of over really conspiracy that 400 people during is the problem. desegregation. its the skepticism and same, but different, with storytelling are Obama when we kick our healthy exercises for feet up and pat ourselves the mind. for me its on the back for our the imposition of altruism but forget that games; what we are Eckford had national forced to plug into in guard there to “protect order to participate her” too, while white or exist in the segregationists threatened digital and otherwise to lynch a 15 year old that do the most harm. tasked with carrying out SOMETHING EQUAL national policy in ways PARTS FASCINATING white people have never AND FUCKED HAPPENS been asked to—yet still WHEN WE GAMIFY find themselves struggling SOCIAL RELATIONS. to convince white america that their sacrifice, their especially when our suffering, their loss is real, emotional response, that their lives carry that which grips our meaning, that Black lives attention, becomes matter. Obama was just shorthand for our another Black-american general personhood and saddled with the burden of preferences and we are holding space against the quickly habituated force of oppression, that into an ever more gives in excess to create enclosed loop of space, give in the system. identity and sameness. but no more human and no more capable than anyone this kind of dynamic MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 32 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 169 else to convince cops (and ensures an emotion governments) to stop driven economy of fucking killing people, sorts, that even in that Black, Brown and the deluge of Indigenous people are information the human, that its the internet is saturated inhumanity in ourselves with, even if doubt, that brings us to hate, to and conspiracy plague do violence against each the minds that plug other. in; even if belief, in its fullest sense is now gone--we chain still, we all ourselves nonetheless have seen to its violence; its this coming. involuntary hate. game’s structure for millennials and z’s, participation as we have collectively felt domination and the the tear, the rupture, submission. Hammer, begin to strain and tug at nail. incessant the skin of our experience competition with at very early ages. perpetual adversaries. winner, loser. if you i sit here now writing this aren’t right, you’re during the fallout of a wrong. with the global pandemic. sameness, in the governments across the habit, via the globe have gone into template, on the lockdown. the market has lexapro—or against it, tanked (whatever that underneath it, choked means). planes and travel, by it; pummeled daily grounded. industry, by the stakes of haulted. schools, closed. in surviving it. all this stillness our gaping
vulnerability is made what a life. plain; unavoidable. ☼
& progress in all its
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 33 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 170 inertia, devolves into chaos, as tyrannical governments, and all their "so why stay the same? One war-game practices have should change. One should now moved in on us: become better, in some vaguely threatened by the defined way. Maybe happier? insurgency of togetherness Defnitely happier." brought about by this - You, The Users moment, muddying the waters, polluting relations, staging antagonism, “in the face of instigating violence. [commonly] accepted truths— and it is from these but these attempts at that the tissue of control, like insurrection history is formed— itself, overlook the to propose, to collective cause of their present, to describe arrival; the collectively and to tell a different held conditions that drive version of the story, populations towards a different truth, is revolution, that assist in sometimes a the transformation of courageous act of chaos; of noise: to signal, dissidence and to voice, to change. these resistance. Or an act frantic attempts cannot of lunacy. Or both. obscure the most This resistance has liberating shared truth of its source in the this moment: history is not need to protect foreclosed. paradigms can ourselves from the be shifted. truth. But not, or not only, because this the world can suddenly, truth is too painful within a matter of weeks, or too boring to completely change and life bear, but because its become profoundly is imposed on us” different. this is a (Reeves, Fiction as nepantla experience. Method, p. 172) forcing us to sit with and
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 34 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 171 in full awareness, our Disillusion and current moment. in all its disorientation don’t splintering of reality. in all attempt to present its disorienting potential. themselves as this gaping unknown comforting. But that’s suddenly ruptured discomfort teaches us into our collective something. Its experience reminds us of persistence is telling two things we’ve been us something about desperately avoiding eye contact: (1) that are we impositions on the completely undone by body and the mind. eachOther, in ways our About the way we are cultural imaginary denies, fundamentally & (2) we’ve remained connected to others complacent with the status and all else. About quo; and in our own the ways we can collective profoundly affect one disempowerment and estrangement. and we are another and be tired. so fucking affected by the world exhausted. trying to just and others. what are exist within the current you resisting? In what organization of human ways are you still life, that strips us of snagged by the agency, stifles being, illusion? What can captures and contains it. leaning into these torturing our bodies and spirits, destroying any shadows tell us about glimmer of sustainable what it is going to life, both human and take to change? nonhuman alike.
this grid is violent.
but it is an illusion. a collection of stories, inherited histories, myths that despite their fantasy, MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 35 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 172 physically govern our bodies, our minds.
the lesson here is this: we are always fundamentally connected to each-other and all else in the world. our identity and being always entangled, in relational process with everything and every one else. our negligent insistence, as westerners, that we can remain in objective separation from nature and others, unaffected by our environments, unimplicated by our collective actions; the imaginary that supports this logic?
is colonialism.
seeing the state of the world as it is, and occupying the space of ‘knower’ we are still holding out on that edge of doing, still fucked up on its arrival, unwilling to touch ground for fear we might wretch everywhere. infect our friends, our family. soil our careers, while we MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 36 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 173 remain chained, nonetheless to this fucking crack. and all of the ways its turned the world upside down.
we all are looking for something, to cope with the ache of it all. we all do what we can with the experiences we have. sometimes more mindfully than others. anyway. this is all to say, like many-a-disillusioned; seeking transition; change; meaning; rebeling; coping; in bare skinned limbo between veils of selfhood, dizzy by the depths of the crack, i looked for resolve; ground elsewhere: equal parts drugs and love- i took a trip.
and fuck wouldn’t you bet, the first thing i went and did was die...
(curious? see Bullethead next)
Share
Newer / Older
Powered by Squarespace
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 37 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 174
HANNAH PROLOGUE POESÍA FREE WRITE STREAM HOLTZCLAW RESEARCH CONTACT blackfish rising
Comment 2 Likes Share Share View Post →
Bullethead Stage 3, April 14, 2020 Deconocimiento:
THE COST OF Or: la guera of KNOWING; IGNORANCE IS DEAD.
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 38 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 175 the mexican woke up in the trunk dogs of a ford focus. on my
i’m a little worried about when way to do ayahuasca in we finally do commercialize the desert with a hallucinogenics like LSD and mexican shaman. psyilociben. what will happen the shaman was driving when we decide to extract and like a mad man. abstract the most profound barreling across experience of meaning; its most barren landscapes, ineffable and simultaneously hitting a vape pen so undeniable truths. what happens vigorously it could if this is what K. DIck had in have stunt doubled as mind with Chew-Z and Earth. one of the mill smoke how transcendence, doing, stacks in january. experience itself, becomes cracked on the head as commodified; when it sedates at a kid, one of his eyes the molecular level, because bulged in its lid, reality has become the thing that just barely bigger nobody asked for and everyone’s than the other--prone given up on. because even to wandering and nature, life, now, has turned its losing focus; jumpy back on us. from the nicotine. his surname on his website “dolled up American translated to imperialism that turns something like freedom into “bisexual jaguar in reservations… orgasm”. says it sounds edgier, more all the forked tongues hip, in spanish. hes whispering Doctrines irish i think (not of Discovery Not a really irish though, think the guy is from rival but a River Not ontario). a period but a bullet Not a war but a im fucked. workforce Not a this was such a bad idea. treaty but a trait MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 39 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 176 d’union Not the i start recalling the conversation the night before outside the floods of ’48 but Be mexican freak show: “Venga! Prepared Not the Ver! Un vaca con sies pies!” International Joint Commission but the "what the fuck are you saying." Army Corps of "chica, im just saying, i tell Engineers “Not nicole all the time, you cant trust waving but nobody but yourself. you dont Drowning” trust nobody else. you shouldn’t trust me neither." (WAH, WONG, BEHOLDEN, P55-56) "Isa you invited me. You brought me here." X
in vancouver the police drive "No chica, you brought you here. around vans so they can scoop you wanted to see. you wanted to up all the first nation peoples understand. to touch truth. i only who fall asleep on the stoops of fulfilled your wish. i never colonialism. promised you safety. you should have known that. or else why did no one says anything about this you come?" her brown eyes bore but every time i see one i think o into me, unyielding. of when Freddie Gray got picked up by the cops in a van in Baltimore. i averted my own.
“im just saying. you were never safe to begin with. you still arent. He was alive when the police now do you want to meet the arrested him. Came out in a coyote or not?” coma. His voice box was crushed and his spinal cord severed “in i closed my eyes. and stepped transit”. docs said the kind of through the curtain. still not sure injuries sustained in extreme if it was fear or a pistol that high speed crashes. the van dropped me to the floor. stopped twice before dropping him off at a trauma center but no and now all i can do is sit here vehicular accidents occurred. and argue with my shadow beast about how the fuck we’re gonna MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 40 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 177 they say things like that dont get back to Pareo and Isa. dont happen here. ask me when i got a shadow beast. shes just here now. here they just hand people showed up and started jabbering blankets, gifts, infested with away at me. passed a raven small pox. steal their children. earlier, she said she goes by dehumanize their kin. erase a Ego. pinche pendeja. culture. then avoid eye contact for decades, pretend poverty is a i tried to tell you. choice. pretend addiction isn’t trauma. pretend the violence has always quick to pipe in on the ended. executive decisions but never with the escape strategies eh X cabrona?
when we are already one of the things here? when you have that’s funny already relinquished control, dropped down about pain is the into the center of way we like to experience where death and life proliferate? pretend it isn’t tonta, we got no where tied to power. else to be but here. might as well buckle as if we aren’t all already up and settle in constantly vulnerable to and nepantlera. undone by each other’s touch. i hear the shaman singing like there is anything else that Estrella Morente from the grips us like the body. pain, driver’s seat: discomfort, these impositions on the body; the mind, are speaking to us in forms language evades. “Tengo “I'm afraid telling us of relations between miedo del of the bodies and experience. encuentro encounter Con el with the past our job is not to react to these pasado que that returns impositions, these wounds, but vuelve to confront rather, what we must do, requires A enfrentarse my life an opening to them. con mi vida MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 41 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 178 I'm afraid of “the trees need the Tengo miedo the night, that river and the river de la noche so full of que poblado memories, needs the trees and de recuerdo chains up my we need both river encadenan mi dreams and trees in ways that sonar are buried in bone But the and sinew, uncanny pero el traveler who returns, shifting viajero que escapes, huye tarde Sooner or baseline syndrome no o temprano later must excuse for not detiene su stop his learning the cultures azar wandering. of this land, better late than never to not Y aunque el And even if olvido oblivion, take abundance que todo lo which generosity or humility destruye destroys all, for granted on this aya matado a has killed my spinning earth, keep mi vieja old illusion the language and the ilusión Half hidden, story honest, don’t cuarto is a humble call a reservoir a escondido y piece of hope, lake…don’t una that is all the naturalize the hubris, esperanza fortune don’t hide the humilde que of my heart” arrogance of es todo la destroying what you fortuna de mi don’t understand.” corazón!”
(wah; wong, Beholden, p28-29) he's got a horrible voice. Estrella would be offended. but my “listen for what’s shadow beast isn’t paying underneath the attention still harping away narrative of beneath the shaman’s wailing: convenience the inadequacy of speed aye guera, listen to me! esta sombra eres MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 42 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 179 and progress, or its deadly outcome,from tú. no lo teman, afronten! the perspective of trees & herons & my eyes roll to the back of my wolves, who head to hang over the top of my remember the before, heart. I stay here awhile, watch the organ pulse, do my best to the during & the after ignore her. its a funny thing, a as we wait for the heartbeat; liveliness; nature. just deep to take hold or continuing to carry life forward for the machinery of despite us. greed to dig a mass …. grave for those who refused to learn to we’ve stopped now and respect the land, the the shaman gets out, river” flips open the trunk.
(beholden, 32-33) in the middle of deadass nowhere, he “MANY DREAMS readies things for the DROWNED IN THE ceremony. placing RESERVOIR. first sage, then USING WATER THIS cedar, on the circular WAY IS VIOLENT” stones he lugged from the backseat. as im (Wah; Wong, beholden, 41) pondering where the fuck he got cedar in the middle of god damn mexico, i watch him product of my experience; take a wooden pipe, a stone bowl, a-- think i blocked out half of it. wait. from the depths, “what the fuck is the pistol for?” resurfacing as words, as agonist; he looks at me fighting to shape space; truth; bewildered over the brim of his moustache. daimon: there is a pause so MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 43 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 180 equal parts still and quiet that miracle and for a second i doubt masochist myself—-i feel like i’ve really spoken freedom—always takes the shape these words but his of its outlet. stare makes me unsure. I try to say them again but a snake falls out of my mouth.
"it is a part of the journey." she sometimes i lock myself in to whispers. watch the dust gather,
each particle, its own mess of infinite. the shaman promptly smashes the snake settling in along the shelf, amidst beneath his boot, the bindings of books. spits, and hands me as i sit, the world spins. the pipe.
and life we begin. ——— outside this room i open the fridge. close it. unravels. considering the possibilities. i am reminded of the honestly, they made it hard to insignificance of my personhood, turn down. and with all the when i remain shared benefit really difficult to feel bad about. still there’s this static, frozen, still, subtle gnawing, a stifled alarm bell; breathing heat against the in the wake of existence. back my neck. the kind of cell moments pass way like petals of deep distrust the damne know a dying flower, best.
slipping from life with ease, and the kind of thing that makes you yet an object, a conflict. a holdout. a social sandbag, weighing down MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 44 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 181 with permanence. the accelerated destruction of ego
there is truth in the roses, conquiro, for not willingly and perpetually splaying my insides who find their final resting place for anything i came into contact as the dust that gathers, with.
on shelves, particles of that was a huge fucking problem existential mercy, lie still at first. all of that information; energy at once. it was at ease. overwhelmingly difficult to outside establish sincere connection if it wasn’t approached with relative the world unravels care.
with permanence, the sudden rupture had committees scrambling to keep that not even the eye can see. up with everything but people were falling into the crack. it was only recently i came to terms that it wasn’t a gaping wound, but a trying to shake off birth. this stickiness. all affective and creation is violent. clinginess. just want to stop grasping for anyway, here i am now, in something. looking for subsequent kind of way, perched ground and finding in the kitchen, doing hotlaps nothing. make me from the fridge to the window. whole, fill me up. my pondering whether it was still body aches from these considered rape if you’re doing it embodied cuts. you to yourself. am i murdering god? dont belong on this or releasing him? side, but neither think you’ll never have to ask there. 1/4th of a yourself the same questions? person, barely seen, think you wont be debating the are you even here? forking of your spectral self into what to make of all a super-computer to optimize these vacancies and your life, aka, upgrade your emptiness. the life in labour potential in accordance this place just seems MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 45 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 182 with a Harmonized AI Social not mine to touch. Infrastructure Net? Ha! Wait til outlier. fringed but 2022 when you finally hear still here. this ones about how Instagram is tracking not marked like the and selling your neural data to rest. apologies fall fascist intelligence bodies from my mouth but they are not enough. trying to fit in, guess that (yeah, like hell they weren’t means im a masochist. going to find a way of scraping beads of sweat, data from your very organic adrenaline, all spine matter —eye movement tracking, and pin pricks, each MRI scans, electrodermal testing interaction a gaping —the works) hole of judgement or disinterest. im at the fridge again. when the phone rings.
is this what i’ve already been forced due to they call: proximity (i am surrounded by hardwired communities on all d i f f e r sides. enclosure feels a lot like e n c e ? silence, but the suffocating kind. the white out) to adopt some Harmony compatible plugins just X to maintain normalcy. without my dad is mexican- the share of the network, american, chicano. information wrangling was an enormous feat, what took a my mother is a white nonnetted human three weeks to woman. complete, took a netted 2-3 days. I’d managed, for months, to growing up my dad only siphon information from their spoke spanish to my public square without notice. But grandmother, my tio, and eventually the slowdown was our dogs. occasionally my flagged and they served me with sister and i would press his a disruption notice. anyway this patience and a tonta! is all to say: would be lofted in our
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 46 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 183 direction. and we learned from him how to chirp Harmony can call me through mamacita! from far away my house already. They’re rooms to hail for my already in the walls of my home. mother. Watching, listening. Not recording, they aren’t allowed my sister is of my dad’s yet. Nor can they share or report kin, all dark hair and latina anything ever to anyone unless features. and in photo’s subpoenaed. with his side of the family i am la guera, the image of my mother. anyway i answer it and its the Technician. even within my very family structure, hi hannah difference has been a measure for sameness. Hi with my sister and i both, I am just following up on our in our own ways, reaching conversation from this morning toward that which our regarding Harmony’s AI image was not. for me that Community Model, Maternal meant reaching for the Solutions. I’m wondering if words i never got to speak you’d be interested in a no hastle to my father, to my tio, to one month trial? my grandma, my tia lupe, to tata and nina. I hate it, but i know the fucker can see me. staring at the knowing another holoinvite he sent seconds ago language; another lineage; projected against the fridge. i another world of knowing gesture with a finger for him to lived so close but continue. remained out of touch, out of sight, left a restless Oh! Well we just wanted to blank spot: an absence, a invite you in to do a preliminary silence thick in my chest; data intake. All of it will be a hole the size of 1/4th my anonymized and deleted should heart. it didn’t really you not want to continue after matter to anyone else. the trial.
i hesitate. the technician is sharp, MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 47 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 184 but this silencing of sensing my reservations: difference in my family, has produced just as much look i know how invasive this confusion for me as feels to you. and honestly i gender. both constructions completely respect that. not so good at coming to terms with their i frown slightly. feeling gaslit. he limitations; their binaries; knows damn well how intrusive not so good at creating and agency stealing this kind of more space for identity; technology was. how could he for human. respect my body, my mind, while simultaneously asking to exploit it? i didn’t buy it, but luckily respect wasn’t something i really we are all felt was on the table here for fragmented with either of us. difference; the words we choose to would it help— make our stories, the objects we No. it wouldnt. grasp, the meaning i say outloud. remembering with that comes to a jolt that once i am netted i wont physically mark even have this power anymore. and matter: this of illocation, of saying anything. is what is my thoughts will catch in the net important; the and without a single word or ways difference breath anticipated, or augmented. both fragments and unites us, the way i’ll be in at 4pm tomorrow. death and life does. the threads great! of history have the technician surges the light brought us here, around the holoinvite as he says to the ground we this, eluding to something like stand. we ought to emotion. crazy what they think use them to weave we will make us fleshies a better story, a comfortable. more accountable identity, into i snap my fingers so the lights go being; to engage out all at once. close my eyes to MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 48 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 185 deeply in the way stare into the darkness of my space , bodies, own lids. and meaning is its tricky living on and off the warped by colonial grid. you have a sense of the regimes of world because, physically you whiteness and still live here, and despite how absolute truths. much of life (think 80%) takes this story wont place on the virtual grid now, the end here, and has oligarchies, if only out of only barely begun, historical ritual, inundate us with but i assure you messaging in our homes and nepantlera, along the sidewalks and transit; blackfish; interface embedded into train traveler; terminals and fuel stations, make chameneria; spirit sure none of us miss out on the it is time to let game of existence. plus i siphon go of that which from the network community you hold against around me, Algora does her yourself. that magic and returns the world back which holds you to me without nearly as much down, heavies your bullshit as a plugs experience. heart, fucks with filtered. or unfiltered. depending your honor, on who you ask i guess—its poisons your mind. fucked up though, how in obstaining from it all, in not molding your very matter to conform to its dictations of Mexican dogs keep following meaning, of living, you walk me. around a stranger to your entire You can’t make this shit up, community. like you don’t there’s like 3 on every corner of actually exist. no matter you my block. smiling at me from the walk, flesh and blood, alongside sidewalk. just fucking beaming people in the street every day. with the joy of a dog given new they can’t see you anymore. life. you know them when you see matter only ascribes meaning them because they have this way through the grid when you’re a of suddenly shifting down a layer plug. anything outside of it might in cell memory, where the hand as well be dead. MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 49 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 186 that feeds them is suddenly Its raining as i walk into the data holding their head under water, care facility the next day. or smacking them to the everything is white and perfect pavement. they’ve felt both the and screaming at me. extremes of humanity. estos sabios saben: all dogs don’t go everything in my body is telling to heaven. some of them just die me to run. the wild in my veins in mexico. throbs and i am suddenly reminded that god wants no part so when you see one here, now, in this: in canada, you fucking know. cause they’re smiling, tail to this is place is snout—but they remember where capture. jaulas. they come from. they don’t forget extraction, death, they don’t forget violence. containment. desperation dressed up as normalcy.
how many filters must we impose upon the mind before it collapses upon itself? are you happy? are you a blackhole; a free? schizophrenic abyss.
read: ———
lets talk about freedom. I walk through the does it set you on fire? valley of my own shadow. does it bring you peace?
does freedom put your mind to playing hide and seek rest? with myself.
does it get lonely? ———
does freedom i take a seat at the table get depressed? opposite the creepy ass two-way mirror.
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 50 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 187 does it fix that incessant feeling they sure know how to make us THAT YOU ARE NEVER feel human. but i know just being ENOUGH? here relegates me to a caste all its own: a plug
quick. find a it doesnt matter how much i hate them, hate distraction. this place; we already lost the battle for find an escape. our humanity when we busy heads; vacant wrote off our face. responsibility to it.
think i’ve got the spins. the witness behind this reciprocal mirror remains hidden because think this happy was laced. one side of the mirror is brightly lit, while the other is dark. This DRUNK ON allows for the occupants of the VALIDATION, room to be witnessed from the ROUND THE MERRY darkened side but not vice versa. GO ROUND, the light against the shattering AS CENTER, whiteness of the room made it feel like a fucked up gateway to we chase. heaven; a blinding, burning baptism—salvationism is always tell me im good enough. dressed in “god’s” robes. what is success? desperation had forced many into just want a taste. a chase for normalcy, security, and extension in the fall out of let it poison these bones, the global pandemic of 2020. while governments quietly bailed hollow this soul, out corporate oligarchies, so this skin won’t increased policing and public go to waste. surveillance in partnership with tech giants, the general public are you happy? are you floundered. the internet—a free? complete garbage fire of misinformation, deepfakes, and MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 51 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 188 read: propaganda—sent thousands into lets talk about happy full fledged schizophrenia by the end of 2022. no one knew what what is happy? was real anymore. the only thing that was certain was our can i earn it? collective vulnerability. work so hard, initially, some of us teetering on grind flesh and bone the edge of precarity, embraced the EI, unemployment, this body is no determent. government relief funds. once i get there; exhaling for the first time in when i’m dead years, we were finally allowed for a brief moment to not work I’LL HAVE LEARNED ourselves into the ground just to IT. stay above water, just to manifest something like opportunity, what is happy? is it something like stability. we were purpose? allowed to pause and not be faulted for our resignation; our purpose means drive, right? sinking. finally, something had what propels me forward. happened. something would change.
and things did. just not in the ah ha! momentum—just gotta way we hoped. or maybe exactly get further; optimize self— Am i the way we’d hoped. history isn’t getting warmer? so easy to evade. old habits die hard.
cultural relations became so illusive this happy; swear i completely polluted by the old just saw it. digital media sphere. “botnets” maybe ill make a map, scratch it swarming users and flooding out, then redraw it. media events, white washing history all over again. when you alienate the entire populace through targeted IF I COULD JUST FEEL counterintelligence ops of FREE; FEEL THERE; MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 52 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 189 various form and rancor, the FEEL COMPLETE masses will begin, under duress, then! at the end of the rainbow, to eat each other. unaccustomed to boundlessness, the dynamics i’ll find purpose, of engagement when the ground i’ll find happy. is gone, we flail, flounder.
but anyway. as it turns out academics weren’t the only ones GUESS TILL THEN, obsessively collecting data I’LL JUST BLEED. during the pandemic; trying frantically to chase the white rabbit as it hopped across no sweat. continents, to pinpoint the exit of aint’ nobody ever died truth; to map the unraveling of the mind as it traverses, exposed, infected, a polluted collective belief system beholden to the trying to be free. aims of wartime weaponry and colonial logic.
governments were watching too. signing contracts with private security agencies and i think i am already telecommunications companies dead. to better “protect” us; analyzing all of our responses to fear, maybe you are too. isolation, estrangement, uncertainty. capturing our drifting between states movement through our digital of horror and hope, trace and triangulating geospatial data with sentient analysis of fucked up and spinning social profiles. then moving on to containment, slowly in this divine ruse. instituting provisions, legislation tell me, what’s it like? and emergency measures that pretending to exist. strip public agency and human rights, that extend inequalities is there salvation in the and repressive politics. performative, MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 53 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 190 we still used money for awhile. existential grid? far longer than really makes sense considering when the every upload, a hail mary, let banks failed. but as time went on there be life, proof. it started to get increasingly more isn’t it funny, how we make dangerous to do so. if people believe importance, weren’t getting jumped on the streets they were getting hacked, dress up existence in costume. closed out of their own accounts, into nothing we cast what is, their lives virtually hijacked by pirates. then in ceremony, everyone was vulnerable. we consume. everything was broken.
thou shalt deliver us, faced with either poverty and in simulation. containment (concentration) camps or implants (plugs) and eternal life through the perpetual the netted communities new. subsidized by government contracts, most people ran full ashes fall from the heavens. sprint into the technosolutionist the sky, bleeds red. arms of companies like Maternai Solutions after the virus. heads bow to the will of pledging their very organic threshold matter to “the community”; their own enslavement.—if you could i think i am already afford it, you paid to have your dead mind colonized by this whiteness.
hi hannah
i stare at the mirror.
you seem uncomfortable? can i offer you anything? " madness is rage boils beneath my never entirely skin. wrong"; no. MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 54 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 191 there is a pause. fleeting but just as i splintered, shattered, register it the mirror short-circuited, even speaks again: broken maybe, but your reservations needn’t cause laden with you so much suffering. once you conocimiento it often stop struggling you’ll see we’ve reveals to us the taken great care to maintain borderless chaos of your comfort. meaning; he’s sifting through my data now. cross referencing my where as we spin we interests with all of the sensor come to understand capture from my home. that the rules of the comparing my current grid are always self- physiological responses to inflicted; held within. footage of me captured in other settings in similar states. i can a straight jacket we almost feel him peeling back the put on to keep the layers of my own skin, probing infinite potential my insides with bloodied within ourselves still; scalpels and forceps. holding me quiet; contained. open to his gaze; his dissection because both madness and extraction. pruning me of all and freedom are the liveliness, the change, the always right there power within myself. my cheeks ready to swallow us; streaked with equal parts grief and rage as i sit motionless, if we’d only open to while my body is involuntarily their embrace. undone. so with desperation we reach, frantically, for ground. for solidity, however warped and “to assimilate into a calcified by historical fiction; system that we didn’t however hollowed by language, design...is to forfeit we turn to the past to make sense a part of yourself…And of things, forgetting that the I don’t think that future is always drawing us people really MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 55 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 192 forward: understand that that’s the trade-off. You can’t fully know who forgetting that you are if you we are always assimilate and disappear yourself already the into a set of bridge. conditions that you didn’t design.”
Janaya Future Khan
the sidewalk’s turned to stardust
engulfed by the depths of experience.
equal parts freedom and confusion;
freefalling;
cant seem to ground myself;
“solidity is such an illusion”.
fantasies rule the mind,
paint narratives across experience.
silver tongues, like razor blades
speak the world into delirium.
WHAT STORIES DO MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 56 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 193 YOU TELL YOURSELF?
what lies?
what myths?
how do you shield yourself from the world?
how is truth set adrift?
how do you cope with the infiniteness
of the a b y s s ?
———
My parents say i used to talk story to myself all the time as kid. Sometimes with toys, sometimes just while i hanging out on the window ledges, watching the flies bash and buzz into the glass. baby hannah just mumbling away, hardly aware she’s even here, always where ever the story took her.
i really wonder about this now.
you mean to tell me, you never catch yourself dead center of the middle of a story in your head, only to realize it wasnt yours?
like you’d somehow, in some hiccup of a soft focus, teleported into someone else’s words, experience, mind? like the voice you heard when you suddenly became aware of your thoughts wasn’t yours? MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 57 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 194 i find that hard to believe. we already do this at more surface level programming anyway. allow other peoples story into our heads, let them move our bodies, dictate the horizon of our thoughts. maybe thats all we are in the end, finite glitchy twoway radio systems between the universe and earth. a dubious wormhole into universal consciousness; the collective mind. just constantly recording and expressing. its no wonder at all, really, how we ended up with “anxiety and mental health epidemics” cropping up right alongside new world wonders like “neuromarketing”.
the second we speak in front of most of our devices our words are captured, correlated, transformed, then spoon fed back to us, in stories and forms we never intended them to take, that we never actually ask for nor have a say in.
and this is only one layer of code in the system folks.
its dizzying. how fragile the ground is. maybe thats why we cling so fiercely to the sounds of our own voice in our head. the stability of ego; of selfhood.
i think all of us experience these points continuously, in variant MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 58 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 195 shapes and conditions, some big some small, where we are offered this glimpse into experience that brings out or reveals the shadow within us.
often our first instinct in these moments is to panic, frantically reach out, hide, flee; ground.
or.
we lean in. deepen its touch, engage its politics.
X
———
we’re back at the fire, im staring at the dead snake. its tongue splayed out like a red flag, a single beady eye glaring up at me from the dirt.
i hear the click of a bullet loading in the chamber.
“ah…i see.”
“ensuenos bien, nepantlera.”
he pulls the trigger and the back of my head explodes.
Share
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 59 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 196
Newer / Older
Powered by Squarespace
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 60 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 197
HANNAH PROLOGUE POESÍA FREE WRITE STREAM HOLTZCLAW RESEARCH CONTACT blackfish rising
Comment 0 Likes Share View Post →
Flight of the Stage 4 of Portuguese - “It’s not easy to be a nepantlera; it’s Conocimiento: Sparrow: risky, lonely, exhausting work. Never entirely inside, always somewhat outside, every group A Beam April 14, 2020 or belief system, nepantleras do not fully of Light belong to any single location. Yet this willingness to remain with/in the thresholds “We cannot think of enables nepantleras to break partially away being acceptable to MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 61 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 198 from the cultural trance and binary thinking others until we have that locks us into the status quo. Living within first proven and among multiple worlds, nepantleras use acceptable to these liminal perspectives…to question ourselves.” “consensual reality” (our status quo stories) ― Malcolm X and develop alternative perspectives—ideas, theories, actions and beliefs that partially reflect but partially exceed existing worldviews.” (Anzaldua, 2014, p.xxxvi) so can i ask you something? I do this thing sometimes. yeah. Where instead of just sitting down to hash out whatever how do people… monster of a mental construct how do you like is cannibalizing my mental reconcile with space, I just continue to let yourself after all it fester. Avoiding it while it this mind altering, putrefies my drug induced thoughts. Pretending it doesn't epiphany? how do exist, while it slowly eats me you reconcile with from the inside. This is me the reality of materializing it and it's experience? the overall process, in an effort sheer madness of it to understand and disarm it. all? how do you not want it to be Pt. 1 the shedding something else? First, it takes my sleep. well i mean theres I am dreaming. My bird is sick. I can't see her no cancel or eyes anymore. her face is gone. but she is alternative setting. crying. Her wings fall apart in my hands, coal grey feathers slip away between my fingertips. long silence. I just want her to be at peace. I know she is he can feel dying. I gently stroke her while my father my shouts at me to get back to taking care of the resistance. other animals, she is just a bird. The dogs i mean you can’t howling, escape out of the front yard. I can just opt out. like we only cry. have to do it. MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 62 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 199 I am awake. But I feel dead. Bloodless. silence fills Sallow. I lie here, remembering my dream. the space Remembering I am alive. That my bird is again. dead. Why am I here? id like to opt out. I walk outside. There are coal grey feathers in the grass. X
I walk along my street. YOU’VE FORGOTTEN. There, beneath the climbing roses of a white picket fence, lies a wing. A feathered YOU’VE appendage, ripped from the breast muscle, FORGOTTEN humerus protruding, repose across the grass. THAT THE There is only the wing. Nothing more. TRUTH IS, Bloodless and disquieting. Something has THAT LOVE? happened. but I hear no birds. LOVE IS SO my scapula press and pulse against the skin of BIG AND SO my back uncomfortably. MIGHTY—TO TRY TO HOLD This is not a dream. ONTO IT AS A THOUGHT Pt 2. new wings OVERWHELMS YOU, It’s ultimately a process of calling it to the front, where BECA I can see it. Revealing it. USE IT While it burns the edges of my WAS heart. NEVE my chest fills with smoke. breathe in, breathe R out. trying to shake this lens from my sight. EVER wipe the uncertainty from my brow. i stumble MEA to the water, just need a drink. need to get rid NT of this smoke, these clouds, so i can think. TO BE HELD as i wade in my skin begins to sting, my back STILL. begins to bleed. the water turns red, tears X flow down my cheeks. i close my eyes and grit my teeth, dive in to the water, searching for MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 63 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 200 relief. memory is a all at once i feel my skin rip to the bone, flood. where my scapula pressed uncomfortably. all it once, i feel both ineffable pain and sublime release. “after the flooding homes, farms, hunting grounds, is this a dream? after the forced evictions, after the burning, the violence, the “WATER SLIPS THROUGH YOUR indifference, after FINGERS BUT TEACHES the betrayal, the TEMPERATURE, TURBIDITY, inadequacy, the TOXICITY THROUGH TOUCH” mistakes, the ghosts, the spirits, (WAH, WONG, BEHOLDEN, 121- the survivors 122) remain and X remember the future”
Everyone is looking for help, “to dive into love not always on modest terms. with the river &
Sometimes we light things on fire to cleanse spend 165 days the soil, burn away disease. other times we’re swimming in its just burning trash—blowing smoke, spreading enormous embrace toxicity, poisoning the atmosphere just to get and to know that the rid of our own bad energy. river does not end at its shores but flows I spend a lot of time at the beach. through slowly the trees & grass, the i find it a good place to remind myself of the electrical fields & layers upon layers of life and existence that lie logging yards, the beneath my feet. of the oceans, the worlds, the hum of the depths of living that lie just outside of reach. refrigerators & flash there’s this gathering point, just before a wave of your cellphone breaks; when it goes from holding shape, relying on river
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 64 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 201 gliding across the surface of the water, to whether you know reaching towards us, a swollen barrel of it or not, river as overtaking; breaking energy: archive of rain, pesticides, urban i think this must be what both the best and debris rural runoff worst parts of experience feels like. a rise of as encryption of sorts, that as you breach the arc fills you with political power as both dread and relief. exodus of endangered species leaping upstream to bash against the it matters the way that light concrete” hits the earth. (wah; wong, beholden, 37-38; it changes everything. paints phenomena in 98-103) color, enlivens-indeed brings to life- all matter in the world.
we see light in frequencies;
within a “visible spectrum”. many species can X see light in frequencies outside the human spectrum. indeed, potentialities reverberate “he walked through electromagnetic currents lying just with the beyond the edges of human perception. anishinnabeg humming against the threshold of our senses. to teach them magnetocardiography is a procedure that about both measures that magnetic fields of your heart’s sides of electrical currents. they use highly sensitive, honesty. The superconducting quantum interference power of devices, to project an image of the magnetic being field emanating from our chests. forthcoming (such devices are also is used to make with another inferences about the neural activity in our being and the brains, which we allow to be representations art of of mind; of information worthy of extraction, cherishing but feedback we deny as relevant, as another’s intelligence, when projected from the heart: a most naked MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 65 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 202 telling metaphor for “modern” science) truth.” think about this for a second. (simpson, p74IDL) we can image the frequency of our heart’s energy. when we resuscitate people during cardiac arrest we shock them with electricity to spark life back into their chest. april 24th 2019 our hearts are Ive been thinking about love lately. conductors with What its supposed unique magnetic to feel like. More and more I don’t currents: think its supposed to be something you at a quantum level we radiate give or receive in a our own frequencies. we oddly partnered or even don’t need superconducting familial sense. I devices to sense this. we feel think this is so this with our very bodies, even limiting and not to as it escapes our spectrum of the core of the sight. human experience.
Part of me knows all this accomplishment is wrapped up in the love I don’t have arc of the sublime: for myself. The worthiness I cant sitting under the trees always see, so I seek. You smiled and the light hit you just right,
And yet i know, s e n t s u n b e a m s d o w n & l i t u p love isn’t a person. m y e n t i r e l i f e . A relationship. A cracked open friendship. In and of itself. It’s a gift you surrendered give, you do. A way MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 66 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 203 ALIVE. of being. A way of moving and reached for your hand encountering fell into your mind. experience.
spun out on inaudible sensations, it is never something to be had as frequencies combine. nor to be lost.
don’t want to just exist anymore May 29th 2019
never knew truth could get me Thinking I may this high. have been a bit over zealous with the space changes with contact. with connection. ‘healing’, ‘love is a gift’ epiphany. the world takes on new angles. Didn’t consider is it upside down, or right side up, when you what it would mean find yourself entangled? to receive it in return. What It lying here, but it feels like falling—floating? would feel like. But I guess that is very undone and marked from the inside. much the point (and the pain) of the healing hands touch broken whole ordeal. places
that mere attachment can’t seem Giving is an to find. opening that understands you can’t see with the ego, what you can only its feel through the divine. vulnerability occupying superpositions; bodies collide; , & proceeds diffracted light anyway. It has no pockets of transcendental experience, concern with ends. It is riding the arc of the sublime. courageous & deep.
I gave it to you, not
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 67 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 204 to receive it (back), we’d just spent the entire day on the rock by but because I’d the river; listening to her secrets. melting into already been eachother; sun baked and blissed out on each carrying it for you. other’s presence. in a mushroom state of Without ever really wonder; flight. knowing it. Its yours. now, perched on the back of the jeep, drinking rosé of all things. all murmurs and necks; I hope you crackling. enjoy the gift. Its we’d nearly escaped it all that healing weekend. brings new til the res campsite manager light, new suddenly appeared before us and eyes. I hope both of us were reminded that upon matter never escapes meaning. encountering it you allow “oh i just wanted to introduce you all to my yourself to granddaughter, she came up to visit me for be moved, to father’s day.” be marked. What you do her gaze caught my breath in my with it throat. held it there. her beyond that stare pouring into me. is not my i try to tell you about it. concern.
i don’t know how to explain it, but i can just Love is not see it. the wisdom of those irises runs deep an ends. into the soul of the earth. and while she stands June 25th 2019 motionless in front of me, the unbearable weight of historical violence reaches forward It feels a lot like and bores into me. shes 6, maybe 7. and the music—the way it knowing, grounded distrust, betrayal, can take you gently numbness, her gaze pierces me with makes to peaks and valleys my gut fall to the dirt. silent tears stream my of emotion. Drop face. you effortlessly into a rhythm; lull or the signs on the campground ask enliven you at a you to honor the land you’re on MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 68 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 205 cellular level. by not drinking or doing drugs Where the air on Xa’xsta territory. the quivers; space hotsprings are sacred, breaths. ceremonial waters. i pour out Frequencies crackle what’s left in my cup when you and snap in silence; aren’t looking. send a prayer all of this: when up to spirit. i know it's too you look at me. little too late. July 20th 2019 XX I find myself there’s a hole in you too. wondering i can feel it in my own chest. the look in your constantly about eyes that gives away how much hurt you have letting you go. Like stored up in there. the grief. the ruptures that I love you so much loss tears across your existence, aches up and I shouldn’t try to out through your eyes, your posture, your keep you for fear cells. it hurts to look at you. my arms might hold you too close. My maybe i should have asked you about your eyes, see too deep. I dad more. about those memories that worked wonder what it their way out of your skin as depression; means to feel a anxiety; shame. but you weren’t ready to bear person so all that yet. and dignity is important. i think. effortlessly love and until it becomes hiding; until it becomes toxic. accept you. What it means for their until it poisons you. and me. presence to as i try to suck the death of instantly lift your it all right out of you. infect spirit to another myself instead. so caught up in dimension. How your own shadow; your own self- quick I am to fear imposed confliction. oh the losing it; Of its loss. ways we hide from ourselves So strange. when we want to avoid discomfort. so we hollow out What if it goes our own chest and fill it with away? other people, other objects. only to find it bottomless, Oh my love. just a blackhole eating up But it is MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 69 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 206 every light beam that happens here. It is into its wake. perpetually now. It is starved, of meaning, of with you it daybreak, of peace. is surrounding XX you. It will never leave its this really interesting thing you. You will when i sit down to write forever be something to you, i read it marked, back and realize i need those engulfed, words myself. and it catches changed, on me. makes me sit with wrapped, them. how much of this is undone, by what i need to hear? what we its all need to hear? and that’s encounter. why it feels so important: How funny we both love and fear all of ITS EVERYTHING WE CAN’T the most beautiful SEE FOR, OR SAY TO, and revering; OURSELVES. unexplainable and miraculous; ineffable and when we understand that the nature of life is profound; giving, and that all life, all love, is a gift, only completely raw and then will we come to understand how we must undoing, wonderous allow it to move us, to say thank you, to honor things. the change, the relation it brings to our experience. gifts are not free, but an active “a gift comes reciprocity, a relation of circulatory honor and to you respect. through no when something is bought the obligation to action of that who offers it and the nature of the object your own, itself is emptied of connection. when a gift is free, having taken advantage of or taken for granted, moved instrumentalized, exploited, it is theft. toward you both, are violence. without your MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 70 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 207 beckoning. It good is a practice, not is not a reward; you a possession. cannot earn it, or call it to you, or even deserve it. And yet it appears. Your only role is to be open-eyed and present.” (Kimmerer, p24)
the thing about a gift, is it has to be reciprocal. otherwise its stealing; an abuse of sorts.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about how her native language, Potawatomi, is 70% verbs, compared to english’s 30% proportion. How much more life the words of her people are capable of speaking upon and into the world. how this translates to MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 71 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 208 how they also conceive of all things as living, as human, as knowing and feeling, as kin.
“Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1215 Oklahoma time, i join the Potawatomi lunchtime language class, streaming from tribal headquarters via the internet. There is usually about ten of us, from all over the country. Together we learn to count and to say pass the salt. someone asks “how do you say please pass the salt?” Our teacher, Just Neely, a young man devoted to language revival, explains that while there are several words for thank you, there is no word for please. Food was meant to be shared, no added politeness needed; it was simply a cultural given that one was asking respectfully.” MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 72 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 209 (Kimmerer, p.52)
Gifts establish kin- like relations within the world. Where instead of severing our ties through transactions of exchange; of pleasure, we enter relations through “bundles of [reciprocal] responsibilities” (Kimmerer, p.28). Understanding that to take means we must also give in return, so as not to hollow out, spoil, dishonor, the offering before us.
“…WHEN FOOD DOES NOT COME FROM A FLOCK IN THE SKY, WHEN YOU DON’T FEEL THE WARM FEATHERS COOL IN YOUR HAND AND KNOW THAT LIFE HAS BEEN MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 73 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 210 GIVEN FOR YOURS, WHEN THERE IS NO GRATITUDE IN RETURN— THAT FOOD MIGHT NOT SATISFY. IT MAY LEAVE THE SPIRIT HUNGRY WHILE THE BELLY IS FULL.”
(KIMMERER, P.31)
good does not mean being perfect.
good just is and does. perfection has no place to sit, no candle to hold in its presence. good just exists in all its complex brilliance. perfection remains a formula with no perceivable solution at its ends, but with which we desperately function and calculate in pursuit of. good demands no such frivolity. it needs no description, & exceeds representation:
good just practices.
in all the words that will never do it justice, bring it to life; in all the things it supersedes and transcends; in all the ways it exists, above, beyond, outside and within.
good is a gift forever in abundance.
we need only reach in, open up, see: how easy it is to both give and receive. it is self-collective-restorative in that it really never needs anything to be or do: it is always already there. this must always be the MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 74 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 211 place from which you begin; your center; your truth; from that which you move. because within it is infinite strength: good runs deep—within all of us. the depths of this collective truth can be frightening; ego- shattering; ontologically rattling:
good does not mean without-suffering or conflict.
suffering too, is a part of its gift; its healing; its lesson; its ascent. there is relief in this, and profound meaning, especially now—read:
it has always already been within and around you, you need only let go of that which you hold against yourself. take your hand from the fire, my love, rest now, breathe. you needn’t suffer to be good. you can have joy, peace, & hope in darkness. nothing can take this from you; it needs no one else to sustain or advance it. it is home; you already are.
So. Good finds a complicated home in human.
“love can be a horrible toxic drug if you take it the October 25th, 2019 wrong way. It can act like a virus. We should listen I remember his reaction when he to our gut instinct when it found out I read his notes for the comes to men and not first time. Like he was so entitled believe the crap they feed to privacy. To selfhood. Like any us. That love can heal all. of us are. Like we could be. Women especially. It can’t and actually its not When we cut ourselves open. supposed to.” When we fork our psyches; what’s ours with others. How –the outage (Erica Scourti much we hide from the world MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 75 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 212 in Fiction as Method, within and behind the screen. p.150) how much we live within the projections of others. how we pour our ‘selves’ into devices, both knowingly and cell memory: unknowingly, we perpetually reveal and disclose; we do so knowing full well the fragility of this ‘hiding’; drunk on our own guess delusions; like white femininity; this that exposure, indeed violence, wasn’t isn’t always a fingertips length just a away. skeleton in a closet
skeletons are dead. please is a call this thing is pounding on the door for mercy; a
after you’ve closed it. plea for respect
locked it. It was the week after your bedtime monologue guess you always of despair about the struggled with film industry. You’d abandonment come home in a cloud of disillusion because always trying to control the set decorator had the future, tasked you with first so you burn the bridge cleaning up an alley with them standing on it. on the downtown eastside: sweeping up cover up fear with all used needles, and kinds of anger; silence. cleaning up the smother pain with remnants of homeless accomplishment; shelters and kindness. occupants--only to “redress” the alley in MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 76 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 213 fight or flight kicking in— more appropriate something’s bout to hurt garbage (heaven forbid you—quick better stifle it. the inequality resonate with too much why you familiarity). they get so didn't even have uncomfort gloves for you at able when first. didn't warn you talk you. just threw you about into what was left of mama? the violence. frantic cloudedness; there is a 4th wall in reaching for ground; the film industry think they call this trauma. people don’t talk about much. The one dont say too much. that hides moments like this in even better: change the production, where subject. space itself is raped of its meaning, its cover it with a significance, its laugh, humanity. then hides internalized violence; self behind a sort of deprecating numbness; dissonance that convinces itself that models for self-harm, dressing an alley to look like the city of mark my memories of gotham for a c rated childhood catwoman series owned by an american media mega-conglomerate is WATCHED YOU being politically DESTROY critical, not a YOURSELF , MA. profiteer of drowning in your own inequality, of shame, self-hate, imperial violence judgement. itself; not exploitative and MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 77 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 214 GUESS I LEARNED wholly fucked. FROM YOU WHAT IT MEANT TO BE a dissonance that then WOMAN. has to go drop acid in the woods somewhere on hold love like a razor indigenous territoy blade just to work out all in piercing tension that reverberating emptiness; depression; metal against skin. self hate; lie to
never be so foolish yourself that its about creativity, art. as to be that you're coping. that you're sticking its victim. it to them. that trembling hands, you're free; when really all you are is courage transcends pain content: slop in the trough of the pig. the but of his power, I strip crack touches fucking him. everything. blood on my hands, but Anyway. The reality of my body is mine; the world seemed to OURABOROS; snag on you on this particular day. I TWISTED think I knew even then WISDOM. you would smother and muffle these moments from here on out with whatever you could to men don’t get it. ignore the heaviness, the cost of knowing. You rambled on for 35 if women suddenly desired minutes about how much to fulfill all of our most waste and money goes coldblooded fantases and into an industry schemes? we'd have designed to distract already done it and you and shape cultural would have neither seen it MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 78 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 215 consciousness to coming nor known it was uphold a system of happening. we might even human exploitation and kill you slowly. over the violence; while our span of years, if you're an planetary resources especially evil or arrogant deplete and earth does bastard. its best to rid itself of the disease of modern-human-life call us crazy sure, but we where social and all know at a certain level economic inequality you sense this and you’re run rampant. scared shitless. because you also know you then promptly passed probably deserve it. out.
How the fuck can & yet here we are. people wind up so good Nurturing you to a state of and tight next to depletion; “ to the truth, only to snap detriment of our own the lid shut so peace”; at the expense of sharply? our own potential; dignity; freedom. Meanwhile, I am over here holding my breath as you finally come clean about all that guilt you got stuffed down just beneath your trachea, on that spot why do we just above your hate women? stomach behind your sternum; where the vomit hangs heavy; waiting for the moment we’re fucking humans. where you release the tension: we’ll love you into a thousand different A week later you dimensions. stop hurting announced your MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 79 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 216 us. stop disrespecting us. aspirations of stop trivializing us. stop becoming a production stifling and possessing us. designer. stop taking without giving cognitive dissonance back. stop saying its ok by feels a lot like remaining complacent. whiplash for those of please. stop. its not. none us already bastardized of this has ever been ok. or disaffected by get healthy. learn how to privilege. Maybe I take care of yourself. shouldn’t be so hard on you. You’re a don’t valorize your own Canadian. This is incompetence in this; Vancouver. You are so don’t seek a woman,a distanced from white man, another, to heal you. supremacy's rage; all do it your self: work on that MDMA at shambhala your attachment issues, has most of you white your internalized folks in the true misogyny and your north convinced racism tendency to romanticize doesn’t live in Van. unhealed trauma and Nobody better bring up toxicity. learn how to them indigenous folks process your emotions; for though. Barricading fucks sake, help us, we’re the ports, hanging drowning. we can’t do it their bodies from anymore, we won’t. this bridges. Bleeding isn’t freedom, this isn’t reminders, spirits, love. you are taking. messages, screaming at how can you love and us that something has respect anyone, genuinely, gone terribly wrong; when you’ve been taught that we are hurting to gaze upon Others as people; that we are objects; trophies, doing harm. meanwhile instruments or most everyone just obstructions in the pursuit scrolls along, numb, of your own glory? Read: abiding the code: when you use Others to AVERT YOUR EYES augment an identity you LESS' YOU INTEND TO MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 80 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 217 can’t seem to find for SPOIL THE CROWN. yourself, all you can do is Anyway. feel shame, guilt, challenge or threat in their I try my best to be presence. because of what supportive, to you are not. because of understand—but I’m what you have not done or not, and I don’t. I cannot do for yourself. sift through the
how can you respect sludge of fragile someone, whose masculinity, of ego subordination is the basis and self-actualizing for your self-worth? how narratives that can you love someone surround and immerse whose humanity you’ve this exchange, trying perverted by relegating to find a response their body as vessel to be that creates more possessed, penetrated, to space, something that derive pleasure, agency, abstains from the release? game, that doesn’t drown in the toxicity you cant fuck your way to of all this—its taking wholeness. longer than I’d like—I chop bell peppers that emptiness? furiously in the meantime, avoid your is the hate your eyes. harbor towards yourself. “I just think I have an eye for it, you know?” X “how do you want the fennel cut?” aye, pssst, Nepantlera, you glance at my work. eschucha, Then lean back onto can you hear them? the counter, take a el himnos drink of your beer. feministas del And reply: futuro? “chop them bigger, they get too MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 81 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 218 soft when you cook them that size. & Don’t cook the garlic too long. I hate the taste when its postmortem: overcooked.”
I swallow. i'm sorry i said something about the vape. extend instead: “you could say please” that’s also my
mother’s fault. You disgruntled: “what does it even mean to say please?”
I never saw her vape leave I just stare back at her mouth in the 48hrs I you. Tired. Tired of was trapped within her being perpetually cloud of a presence. It just baffled by your hung there, precariously as ability to evade she shifted and floated responsibility; tired throughout the tiny of watching you do apartment, invariant puffs backflips and loomed over her head contortions to incessantly. Like a smoke circumvent your self. stack it hovered as she murmured hesitant Space bristles. remarks: “how about a And somehow we’ve both gotten walk?”; “can you tell me so tired and broken that we have what would help?; “how forgotten, and the crack has about a shower?”; “it will snuck in and is bearing down on get better”, as she slid a us now in the kitchen; and as we box wine out from behind both stand here, not looking at her oversized TV in the each other, avoiding the wound: bedroom and filled her something somewhere quietly cup. Once. Twice. three breaks between us. times over. A convenient, inconspicuous and You had a point. And I had a economically friendly choice. But it’s the 3rd time this solution to everyone’s week i'm here, cooking, giving, evening walk of shame loving. After I have spent the back to the bottle only to entire week reading about how
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 82 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 219 find it mostly gone interface has facilitated the rise already on a Tuesday at of hate groups and polarized 845pm. Boxes last for society; furthermore that this days. Habits, if left wasn’t a fluke, that the system unchecked tend to swell itself perpetuates it; endorses it; up, swallowing what time; carries out violence by design. space; life; wine you leave the adulteration of own belief in within reach, all without reality; in humanity; truth— even flagging your radar. stripped away from us: Their slow rise from your waist to your neck a warm as the deep fakes; the lull of complicit and nightmarish whispers of cowardly self medicating; Blackmirror are already here. numbing. We’ve already slipped within its X grip, amidst all this unaccountable taking. Already I flashbacked to seized by the patterns of abuse your frantic imposed upon our bodies by the fidgeting, screen; the habit already agitation rippling breathing at the backs of our through your body; necks as we plugin to the games the way your eyes demanded of us just to exist, flitted around desperate for relief, for agency, with guilt before: for escape. Meanwhile: capitalism chomps forward, “I lost my vape” insatiable, drunk on its own landed flatly at my feet. delusions.
Blank stares.
“You need one, then?” NORMALCY TOO IS A “…I’m embarrassed that I SORT OF have to drag you out there POISON; to get one” DRUG; Silence. ILLUSION.
trying to dodge and i keep waiting your own shame, for the moment when MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 83 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 220 you continuously you break free and i stepped outside to am no longer alone use it. with all the heaviness, the you’d missed it so dizziness, of knowing. much you shocked when we can run away your entire and forget all about system, vomited, the fucking crack. ended up dead write our own story. weight on the unbind our own floor, sheet white spirits; free our and drenched in minds. the sweat of your own stress. So I tried. I tried to “well if you will be more swallow it all, to comfortable we might as love through it. But well.” instead I was drowning; death Was what I said, percolating in the as I let you dark around my eyes. poison your own And you were too busy well and watched chopping up lines of you drink from it. affirmation, of Anyway. I only looked it validation and self- up after. worth, snorting up quick fixes of ego; The effects. how it kick agency; plugging in to starts your adrenal glands: the game to avoid the both of you so damn anxiety of freedom, to strung out on adrenaline, even notice. And your fleeing your own demons, arrogant impatience chasing relief. and obvious annoyance
The consequences. The mostly just read as way it steals your sleep, entitled. your peace of mind. stops life from reaching your but then i remember heart. Lacing with your that there are some agency at its roots, people that will never MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 84 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 221 shortening your fuse, read Ocean Vuong, and clouding your brain. that some barriers, to conocimiento, to I let myself get good and language, to sight, mad at it for the both of remain because to see you guys. Taking on your it all, to hold its pain like it was my own, gaze, means you have per usual. Caring for both to completely lose of you because you can't, sight, read: you wont, care for completely rupture, yourself. simultaneously your sense of Self. silencing and emptying my insides, to hold you and i guess really all both within myself. a this is to say: waking memory of these cells. you can’t heal river's don't what you hate. forget. everything floats downstream.
WE GIVE BECAUSE WE 2 REMEMBER. MONTHS LATER.
Its 2am on my 30th birthday. And here we are. In the middle of everything. And I am holding when you spend your hands as they hold the gun your entire pressed against my forehead, adolescence screaming at you: watching your mom get the spirit Kill me. kicked out of her; your young Just fucking do it. adulthood pulling But you wont. You just stand your friends out there, dead, broken. And i’m so from beneath men, angry at you for not going drunk on conquest; through with it. For not being watching others strong enough to do the right MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 85 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 222 still, unearth thing. I’m so angry at you for their own children taking and taking knowing full and loved ones well you had nothing to give from beneath the back. That you were already too remains of regime- busy hiding again from yourself made disasters; to ever be accountable to all this. when you’ve Too busy trying to fill the gaping created space for hole; chained to the fucking grief where your crack. own environment has offered none; Im walking away from my when it's too apartment. From my thesis. From toxic to care for life. From you. We’re 5 blocks itself, so you lay from the lionsgate. And though I yourself down as a never said it you knew it was place to rest for where I was headed. You stride others: in front of me, facing me, block the sidewalk.
YOU LEARN HOW “Hannah stop. Stop doing this. TO GIVE UNTIL You can’t do this. You can’t do YOU'RE DAMN this to me. You can’t just walk NEAR DEAD. away in the middle of the night.
You don’t do this You don’t have your phone or voluntarily. Its just the your keys or your wallet what only thing to do when the fuck are you doing. Stop inundated with the doing this” presence of suffering, 3 can’ts. Two stops. But I’ve injustice, loss greater than already decided. Im already there your own. You give to in my head. I’ve spent the whole restore balance; evening unraveling the purpose equilibrium. You do of my own life, of giving. so i’m because other’s cant. saving myself now, slipping over the railings. Looking down at the I just forgot sea. about the part where i also give I try to move past you. this to myself. till you. “Hannah please” MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 86 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 223 the truth is i You’re crying now. would really love My insides are cold. Lifeless. I to be your friend. don’t feel anything except for the i miss when we illusion of salt and wind could sustain whipping across my hands, lips, that. when the cheeks; the cold wet metal distance between against my skin. In my head I us—was respect. lean forward, let gravity lull me
but i think its into the mist above the water. too late now. i “please Hannah stop” already know you don’t hold that your arms outstretched fall heavy for yourself. one on top of my shoulders. Your way or another head bowed, you’re sobbing. that kind of self- I stare past you; motionless. dead hate has a way of anger under your weight. reaching out, infecting those as my gaze manifests the waves, around you. and i the salt, the sea, i feel the wild am damn near sick return to my eyes, and i know its to death of time now, to let go, to be freed. watching you hate yourself. so i lean in close to whisper:
ma, you were strict, but “…what does it mean to you kept my leash tight say please?” because you knew what could hurt me. i And just like that complained but this didn’t I let go of the railings. really bother me. Of life. what i was really angry at you for was for letting him Of you. stay. for trapping me. for forcing me to choose Of me. between taking care of I dissolve into mist you or taking care of myself. falling gently onto the surface of
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 87 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 224 the sea. when you repeatedly push yourself past the point of pain just to exist in limbo between freedom and violence, between love Flight of the and theft, you learn to swallow. hold your breath. portuguese bite the bit. sparrow: you learn that JOURNEY TO THE even silences, EDGE OF THE WORLD speak;
THE WORDS THAT We walked into the stone store, NEVER FIND OUR the five of us, Bruno, Viking, the TONGUES, SINK; Argentinians and myself. Today SIT HEAVY IN THE marks my 14th day and our last PITS OF OUR evening together at the edge of STOMACHS. the earth. The magic of the Algarve lifting our spirits, this tactic has a shelf life. leaving our hearts open so wide we can only stomach so so full we practically floated into much. unhealed wounds the shop. are magnetic. what we’ve
left in the corner to die, we I recall as we walk in, how the often find perpetually oceans that crash and boil along mirrored back to us until the cliffsides of the edge of the we turn to face it; till we earth, are both abysmal and work through rather than wonderous at once. you can feel around our pain. the earth breathing here. The bigness of time, of life, swallows You are very much you as you hike along the cliffs. affected, and affect upon The boundary between worlds the world: Mind your seems to reach violently towards mark. Mind your you from the waters below. Your neighbors. Cleanse your breath caught in the verge; the presence. threshold of perception: XX
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 88 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 225 we fore-give to create space. The edge of knowing terrifies most people. we surrender; Ive never felt more home in my life. palms open up
to let go. A slip of yellow and black streaks past me, and yanks me back into the fractured light and tobacco smells of the shop, as a I know its stupid, but i small sparrow lands on the want your shirt back. graphite beside me. I gently
you knew i would. lower my index finger to his tiny barreled chest and as he steps which is why you gave it onto my finger the old german back to me. twice. man from behind the counter knowing full well i’d growls, “be careful. he is not remember how i much i well.” And indeed as he situates loved you in a few days himself on his new perch I can time when i came down feel his discomfort. “he flew into from the grief of it all. the shop two weeks ago and was remember how much you singing and dancing. But the last brought me back to life. week hes stopped flying, and he remember how fucking will no longer sing. he is not real it all was. be pissed at well.” My heart aches from a my petty resistance to place so deep and familiar, I your memory; your gently raise my hand so that his presence. tiny body breathes just in front of me. I softly stroke his back and it is only ever a gift! begin to sing: this giving we do, we are, Little bird little bird. we can be. Can you feel me. Sending love unbounded, indeterminate, down through beams of light. but meaningful, kind, deep. i had no idea the Little bird little bird. capacity for love i had in my heart till you happened Open your heart, close your eyes.
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 89 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 226 into it. filling it in places Little bird little bird that had long be neglected. surfacing wounds; in Life is not a cage, free your healing color; sight. mind.
Little bird little bird light makes You needed only to rest, all the you haven’t forgotten how to fly. difference. Little bird little bird
it brings Can you feel me? the world; Love surrounds you, the heart breathe deep, let it in. back to life. Little bird little bird Find your voice, stretch your I’m sure you’re pissed wings, reading this. I’m sorry I had to make you a part of the journey has only just begin. it. all this cutting open; gutwrenching vulnerability; paradigm shifting acceptance. the kind of seenness that seeps i blink. into your cells. Falling in love with you was like and i'm awake. seeing falling into myself. color again, for the first time in 8 I hope you understand months. but this why I couldn’t avoid spectrum is new. i sharing this, like we thought i could see always talked about, with color before, but others. How it feels to be this, this is an deeply seen, deeply entirely new practice touched, deeply accepted. of sight. its like i How much joy radiated can feel the green of out of our arc in the story. the trees under my MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 90 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 227 How from day 1 love, skin. like through sheer reciprocity cracked light, being reaches both of our hearts open to for me, gently grazes bath in it. entangled; my cells. we respond frequencies alive in the to color both most profound, physiologically and inexpressible way. The psychologically; and truth we both caught everyone sees color glimpses of, that we could differently. a play of never find the words for; light and frequencies but that the river, we that when positioned agreed, knew well. just so explodes our i hope you know loving visual cortex and you taught me more than i lights up a non-visual could have imagined, pathway to the region about how to deeply love; of our brains how to deeply accept and responsible for give to myself. regulating our bodily energy; for Giving is an opening that maintaining balance in understands its conditions of living. vulnerability, and when it comes to proceeds anyway. It has tending to the body; no concern with ends. It is the heart; the mind, courageous and deep. It is light makes all the understanding the ways difference. color your actions within the changes everything. world come to matter. How they mark and move read: we are not others. And thus, how breaking. we are not others mark and move broken. we are you. unfolding. literally bursting forth; A certain kind of knowing cracking open to premised upon giving as create the space for fundamental to being. new identity; new Choosing to love, sight. choosing to begin from this position, is to choose do not fear this. do MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 91 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 228 love for loves sake. For its not hide or run power. Its change. because it is unpleasant. fevers must burn to remove illness. truth chafes as it rids our minds of disease. it is excruciating, yes. but it is also a gift: miraculous, beautiful, and absolutely worth it.
this is growth. this is change. this is learning. this is rebirth. you can’t be ahead, behind, or outside of it. so here we go, time to break bread, lift your soul: you are never alone; love is boundless; good is infinite; you are already whole; you are already home.
on my knees
s t r i p p e d;
made bare
by all the ways,
fire made me clean.
burned away Self MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 92 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 229 ego muerto,
alma libre
coals in my chest.
flames fall like feathers from my wings.
there is
deliverance;
in this poiesis;
STRANGE DIVINITY,
WITHIN ME.
donde riegas, crece.
cultive amor. marchite miedo
i rise from the ashes;
from all that—to touch the sky—I must
let go.
UNDER THE STARS, WE START AGAIN;
i am already home.
Share
Newer / Older
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 93 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 230
Powered by Squarespace
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 94 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 231
HANNAH PROLOGUE POESÍA FREE WRITE STREAM HOLTZCLAW RESEARCH CONTACT blackfish rising
Comment 4 Likes Share View Post →
Not a Stage 5: woman, but "truth is the space a shaman of love; a we fight to shape." April 14, 2020 conocimiento story WHAT WE MUST MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 95 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 232 we are all looking for a LET GO, LEAVE place to rest; to hold our OPEN, pain, to cast it out into any and everything but to encounter fully. ourselves. avoiding our own shadows for fear of for the moment is always already what lurks in our own shot through with unbounded darkness. indeterminacy. forgetting that that which love is not fixed; but complexity we fear, is only ever the embraced—in motion infinity, the interconnected potential within our-self. there is a certain freedom; hope; conviction
in that which remains o p silly human, e n.
love is what you are.
where you came from. “ RITA: WATER IS INFUSED THROUGHOUT sheer creative EVERYTHING, EVERYONE. inertia, WE’RE TWO-THIRDS in motion; WATER. WHILE WE’RE TALKING ABOUT THE in flight RIVER, ITS NOT JUST THE RIVER THAT ENDS AT ITS BANKS. IT’S THE RIVER THAT POWERS OUR the ego is the only thing CELLPHONES, IT’S THE that interferes with this. RIVER THAT ALLOWS FOR thinking, Self, or THE BIRDS AND THE FISH, personhood seeking ALL THE PEOPLE WHO ground—certainty; safety. RELY ON ALL THAT THE but this is never promised RIVER ENLIVENS, ALL OF to us. it’s appearance is an IT, THAT’S THE RIVER illusion. a problem of TOO. WHEN WE’RE
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 96 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 233 scale, of spectrum. TALKING ABOUT WATER, WE’RE ALSO TALKING these human optics so ABOUT LAND, AND WE’RE limited. we can’t see what ALSO TALKING ABOUT we are. what we aren’t. OUR BODIES AND from this height. we feel OURSELVES. A LOT OF IT so small, we only see what IS UNCONSCIOUS” is front of us, in experience. and it is near (WAH;WONG; BEHOLDEN, impossible to understand P139)” the wake of our existence; the transference of our bodily energy as we move through time and space i think ive found her because we cannot see the again. complexity of our human imprint—in all its i hear her whispering. beautiful superpositions, sending messages in the in all its diffracted wind, multiplicity: through the trees. complex beings how you suffer. i sit still
suffocating the universe listening. within a box. heeding these murmurs from the " memory does not deep: reside in the folds of the individual brain..." Man tries to control water.
He builds dams and reservoirs to —Karen Barad, Meeting extract its power; his vanity forcing the Universe Halfway. form.
validate me. he says to the river. make me Man. render me whole; seen. MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 97 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 234 rising from As he defaces her, he pleads: build me an empire the ashes, a because the logic of living green conquest is weak. pulse among trees:
sometimes i walk HATE dear Woman: around my entire REEKS take your hand from neighborhood just HAVOC the fire. to say hi to the ON THE trees. BODY. chameneria, ITS nature has this DISEASE those bones aint way of reaching CRAWLS dead, they’re dying; forward into us; UNDER soothing us; THE dear Woman caressing our SKIN, read: do not save cells. reminding SINKS her. do not revive us we’re alive. INTO THE her. making us again, BONE— feel home. MARKING dear Woman: THE as i walk beneath EDGES you needn’t suffer canopies of green, OF THE to be good. i am struck WORLD suddenly with the these veins that HARD realization--that burn red, aren’t AND i am no longer in meant to be pure. SOFT AT my body but ONCE, amongst, somehow, LEAVING dear Woman: the trees! US hold on to the way not just in HOLLOW,UNSATISFIED,you live observation, but ACHING, in full ILL. all the way down to experience. body your cells. means nothing, as MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 98 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 235 i have become dear Woman: indistinguishable dear there’s no one from the sprawl of coming. save branches above Woman: yourself. down to the roots, People are the mycelium; the going to want fungi system to contain beneath. i can you; to feel the rush of capture your water through my liveliness; trunks, and my trap it, keep it leaves as they for drink. somewhere i themselves. laugh, and cry out, "i am of the you see light trees!" and indeed is a drug, a i feel all of sorcery of the them. their cosmos, and chattering reaches darkness? forward into me: darkness is being deeply how many are we? felt by the eyes of an i don't know how Other. and but i can feel the this kind of trees smile: seenness is one. both fire and still water. an wow…what about all of undoing that them? heals; lays bare; i gesture towards transforms. the moss and the bush. a human passes. then a And to hold that kind of crow. a bee. power? to conquer it; tame
we care for those too. in a it; instrumentalize its sense, they are also of us, medicine for individual they ‘know’ us differently use: that kind of seizure MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 99 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 236 of spirit, is the of course. foundation of our modern but they take from you? society, our current mode of historical violence. we don’t understand this, against nature, against ‘take”. we only speak in others; terms of giving. against ourselves. i am, at once, nepantlera’s its time to ask ourselves: overwhelmed by emotion. if i’d of why, if we didn’t have power, would we had knees, i’d of need to be contained so much? fallen to them: impositions and expectations swarm us, your love is so big! foreclose our identities with shame and (self) hate. a wind moves but we are not the wave. we are water. through the leaves our energy is constant and finite, across the canopy present in ultimately all things: but our and i form, is already expanding, our form, feel...embrace? is a reminder that we can, we must, we …what else is there to do, change. give, but yourself? “WATER suddenly i am OVERFLOWS WITH beneath the MEMORY. canopy, patterns EMOTIONAL of reach and MEMORY. BODILY extend, sprawl out MEMORY. SACRED before me, as each MEMORY. leaf stretches CROSSINGS ARE forward and up NEVER toward the sky; UNDERTAKEN ALL making perfect AT ONCE, AND space for access NEVER ONCE AND to light and FOR ALL." ensuring livable (ALEXANDER, 2005, P289- conditions for 290) each other. i find myself weeping. MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 100 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 237 ser de la remembering dédalo: somehow, that somewhere, beyond, in all their a labyrinth; complex grace and generosity, that AN OCEAN OF MEMORY.
humans are taking that extends beyond our bodies. too much, that swallows the Self. they are doing harm to us. to the thing is. beridding ourselves of ego this. ive said conquiro is a highly complex and labor nothing but the intensive process. it takes critical trees respond: conversations about fundamentally reconfiguring how we orient ourselves we’ve noticed. we work a toward knowledge and being in the little slower, more subtly world. how we conceive of identity, than humans, but we’re collectivity, and past/present/futures. remediating. regenerating. how we design our technological remember, we are only infrastructure; be they material device, ever harming our-self, language or institution. interface little green pulse. provides us a conceptual apparatus to but some of you..of us, approach the entanglements of social some forms of life, will phenomena. but any kind of approach die? to reconfiguration requires an appraisal of the outcomes of our current model, but until then, little pulse, and crucially, how each of us, everyday we live. we carry contribute to it. where are we life forward. and in our exacerbating its violence? how do we hands lies the pollen of the speak to and orient ourselves toward dawn. we need only to Others? and likewise toward Our- become motivated; moved selves? what places in our own lives is by the living itself. in all there resistance to the truth of our its openness; potential; historical inheritance? we have to beauty. walk quietly, little process our own hate, our own one, and you will start to disjointed relationship to difference if see. with care, you too will we are ever to stop reproducing it. feel, will know the wisdom; in loving like the read: what are you MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 101 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 238 trees. a way of sensing resisting? in what ways yourself in everybeing. does encountering this and this was of fiction frustrate or conflict course, how we you; crawl under your figured out to skin? breach the nets; deworld the hello discomfort; shadow Maternal Solutions beast, my dear old friend. system. we spoke your lessons do not leave to people through me, for such an exit, such their cells. an absence, would dishonor reached forward, the wisdom brought forth and grazed; made by their darkness. may felt both presence they be a reminder of the and nonpresence, multiplicities we carry on their skins, within our cells. the collective- shall we learn from these self. through histories, that dance their bodies we'd across our skins, bending speak: "remember time and illusions of what you are. Self? where you came from. what you can shall we come be." together en conocimiento, in “The living solidarity, arroganc in loving e of certainty of our English collective health? is that i stand at the ocean, waist deep. sand the only filling the space between my toes and way to feet begins to creep away from me, be sucked back by a deep inhalation of the animate, sea. i watch as she pulls back the skirts to be of her waters in preparation for her next worthy wave of release. of i shove my board out in front of me, MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 102 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 239 respect hop on top and begin to paddle out. and once in the line up, i sit up, straddle my moral board, stretch my toes toward the concern depths below and turn to face the is to be horizon. human” i feel the tug of the sea’s inertia below (KIMMERER, P 57) me as a massive wave begins to rise in front of me. a blue-green wall of rising “Fred: Could you energy stretching higher and higher elaborate on the paradox curls and reaches towards me. just as of learning what you need the lip begins to peak, i throw myself to learn? forward Rita: it relates to the and dive right into it. problem of authorship, how it sometimes i feel sometimes the aggrandizes or idealizes inertia of this moment all the author as an authority at once. from the center figure. When you are put of my spine to the base of in this position, you my skull. a gripping; a realize how inaccurate thrownness. the wave is that can be if its played breaking now, and we’ve like a god-trick. If the got only but a moment to work is doing what I hope decide if we will catch it it will do, it will or be destroyed by it: encourage people to both will we recognize that we listen more carefully, and are more than the wave? to voice their own stories will we recognize and experiences, have ourselves, eachother, as more engagement and water? better relations with the river. To get beyond ego “THERE IS NO and into deeper relations END TO WHAT with land, people, and life. A LIVING I think the figure of the WORLD WILL author can be problematic DEMAND OF because of what it makes YOU” invisible, so part of the
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 103 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 240 work is to contextualize it earthseed: the books of so that those social the living relations and historical relations aren’t erased (BUTLER O. 1993 and the importance of P138) collective culture and efforts is better people like to say no one recognized…I think to lives on purpose; nobody acknowledge our limits belongs anywhere, but and our positioning is an everybody dies. nihilism important thing to do, is a great way to avoid ethically. I worry that the your own potential. Play structures that we’re in, it safe, small, self- under capital, under oriented. colonization, tend to truth is you live on oversimplify and purpose every single day. misrepresent things that its just matter of whether are actually relational. you become accountable to They assume a mindset of that access, entitlement, control, when the cultures or not. we need in order to survive on this planet are ones that require we respect and learn from the “colonization has earth’s limits, working to produced fragmentation foster the conditions for and dismemberment at care, diversity and both the material and coexistence of life…The psychic levels, the work of Maori say: “I am the decolonization has to make river, and the river is room for the deep yearning me”” for wholeness, often expressed as a yearning to (beholden, p145-146) belong, a yearning that is both material and when does the existential, both psychic war; the violence and physical, and which, end, when it lives when satisfied, can subvert
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 104 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 241 inside your and ultimately displace the language? Grips pain of dismemberment. you by the throat, Anticolonial and Left dictates your liberation movements have tongue. Read: not understood this sufficiently in their how are we to rid psychology of liberation our minds of and, as a result, we have extraction not made ample political mentalities? room for it. This yearning to belong is not to be (VUONG, ELLIOT) confined only to one of the most membership or citizenship compelling and profound in community, political lessons of telling stories, movement, nation, group, in comparison to playing or belonging to a family, games, is how however constituted, participation is structured although important… The around contributing, source of that yearning is giving, offering. the deep knowing that we are in fact interdependent as opposed to mastering, —neither separate nor winning, possessing. autonomous. As human these games sever our beings, we have a sacred bodies from our minds, connection to one another, our emotional intelligence and this is why enforced stunted; crippled. and the separations wreak havoc fear? the anxiety? the on our Souls. There is grief? great danger, then, in living lives of segregation. is merely the awareness of Racial segregation. our power; what is inside Segregation in politics. of us. how big it is; it Segregated frameworks. feels. how much we long Segregated and to come home to it. to compartmentalized experience it in selves… it can never wholeness. fullness. ultimately feed that deep place within us: that space “is that what art is? To be MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 105 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 242 of the erotic, that space of touched thinking what we the Soul, that space of the feel is ours when, in the Divine. ‘‘To sense the end, it was someone else, presence of the Soul and in longing, who finds us?” commune with her’’ is the (Vuong, p243) job that excavation requires. It is a job of we carry the changing the self. And it is a job. It requires work. It spirit of requires practice. It cannot change; of be someone else’s excavation that we easily creativity; in appropriate as our own our very and use as our own. It cannot be done as cells spectator or ventriloquist.”
what is being demanded of (Alexander, 2005 p282) us is a new set of complex social relations; ones that teach of multiplicity and reciprocity.
we are so much more profoundly connected; so much more powerful than we can perceive. we ought to invite more ways of lensing this; of breathing new sight into being.
love is a higher, wider, indeed deeper form of intelligence that we must
stretch ourselves to Montreal: 9:57 AM · Jun 7, 2020·Twitter Web App: embrace fully. in part by @pamplemoussable coming to know ourselves as nature.
“FOR ONCE THEY nepantlera
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 106 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 243 INTUITED THAT remember: THE HUMAN WILL WAS LONG blackfish are always INTENT ON already the bridge. CAPTURE, THEY while completing this project, in that ALL CONSPIRED funny way the universe has, of gifting TO REST THEIR you things you’ve never requested, i TRUTH EVERY- was offered an opportunity to WHERE. AND IN preemptively share some of this work THE SIMPLEST OF with some truly wonderful kin within THINGS. LIKE A my community. we talked about the RAINDROP. AND state of the world and our historical THEREFORE THE inheritance. how we can feel the MOST BEAUTIFUL impositions of a binary system press OF THINGS, SO into our most intimate experiences. THAT TRUTH AND how it has influenced how we orient BEAUTY WOULD ourselves toward each Other, our sense NOT BE of self, our environment, relationships, STRANGERS TO love. ONE ANOTHER, BUT WOULD RELY we spoke about how nature, nature ONE ON THE doesn’t give a shit about right or OTHER TO GUIDE wrong. nature is about giving, loving in THE FOOTPRINTS its fullest most complex sense. OF THE sometimes this means life and DISPLACED, AND sometimes this means death. as humans THOSE WHO we tend to forget, that we also must CHOSE TO allow this kind of change to take place, REMAIN PUT; OF without judgement, without hate or THOSE ONLY fear, within ourselves. we must allow ONCE REMOVED habits and parts of ourselves to die. we AND THOSE must let go of safety, lose ground, in WHO HAD order to to truly grow and step into life. JOURNEYED FAR IN THE this kind of love, when directed MISTAKEN radically inward, inadvertently comes BELIEF THAT again, into contact with everything else; BOOKS WERE to fall in love with nature, with the way life gives to you every single day, MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 107 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 244 THE DWELLING PLACE OF without fail: what we learn from life; WISDOM; THOSE from nature, is how to love deeply and WHO THOUGHT deeply accept and give to our-self. this THAT THE LURE takes an unlearning of the colonial OF CONCRETE habits laden within bodies and WOULD REPLACE committing to its refusal in ways that OR SATISFY THE repattern, but do not erase the memory CALL OF THE of, our cells. in conversation often i FOREST; THOSE received the response: WHO BELIEVED “but how? how do you keep doing this? THAT GRACE WAS its so hard.” A
PREOCCUPATION good only manifests in the OF THE INNOCENT world, in our environment, AND THE DESIRE once we begin practicing TO BELONG A ourselves. part of this CRAVING OF process, is learning to THE WEAK. exhale. to fore-give; to BEING let go, and start again EVERYWHERE when we, and i mean we in WAS THE ONLY the fullest sense, fail. WAY, THEY anything that holds or REASONED, TO stops our flow of breath, EVADE CAPTURE demands our attention, for AND TO ENSURE it is here where we try to THE PERMANENCE hide or withhold love, OF CHANGE withhold from eachOther; our-self. read: when we —ONE OF THE open our bodies to change TRUTHS OF THE we become: OCEAN.”
(ALEXANDER, 2005, P289) the life force of water not a woman, carves truth into rock despite us, its resonances but a shaman; leave traces of what was a healing MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 108 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 245 before, its ruptures create space for currents to carry presence truth forward and while ourselves. our present currents are deeply polluted: and my generation? this is a nepantla movement. clean waters you're going to know who heal. we are. you're going to hear from us. and we will READ: LOVE IS A not quit. we will refuse BELIEF IN THE this system, so hostile to GOOD YOU SEE IN our existence, that we did YOURSELF. not design. we will no longer feel like we dont not in what you do, but in belong, we will move what you are. beyond the violence of our we are all constantly and inheritance, by tending to unassainably undone by a the health of our living. complex and somos nepantleras; somos interconnected memory; el puente: coming and intelligence; a being of the creating home as we walk. worldness. “gezhizhwazh figured that part out. She’d figured out the next part too. Decolonizing That if they could bring new life identity and being through the doorway without that hole, requires us to there would be nothing to feed. Without rigorously come to the weight of large gaping holes in understand the their beings, people would no longer be violence and willing to pay for disconnection. With trauma brought nothing to feed, the entire system would about by the fall apart. So while that other one was colonial plunder. out carousing, protesting, or Dealing with pontificating to anyone who would trauma means listen, gezhizhwazh was at work as opening ourselves bami ondaadiziike, circling around up to both other those birthing women to protect that peoples pain and ceremony. Foiling those interventions, our own. It means MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 109 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 246 protecting the circle. For no, her battle creating enough with the wiindigo was in its resurgence space for everyone stage. Gezhizhwazh was building an to breath and army—a diffuse, scattered group of access light and souls that could see through the life in the wiindigo illusion, because they were canopy. It means whole. The light of gezhizhwazh’s army redistributing of dancing eyes would ignite the world. nutrients to those Just wait.” who have been wounded or made (simpson, p.111-112 IDL) ill by imperial coloniality’s pursuits. it means all of us are already waiting till there a part of this. is space in the canopy to grow, You. Me. Them. Us. They. rather than We’re all already a part competing for of this. I am already you. resources on your You are already me. All of way to the top. It this, has been for means more you/me/us. I hope you can fundamentally, to see that. live with care, to live slow. It Don’t forget what its like means to hold the gaze of understanding our another human. What its role in the like to feel seen. In diffraction person. Good or bad, that pattern, just like shits real. The only real water we are thing we have. The only sensitive to all thing that hasn’t been fluctuations above sucked up into a symbol and below the and spoon fed back to us. surface. Water The perpetual poison of teaches us much language turning our about how we are stomachs, our minds, to all profoundly cement. We all ought to affected by and sit on the edge of the affect one another earth. On the edge of MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 110 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 247 and our knowing. Dangle our feet environment. How into the abyss. We might we move through learn to get over a lot of space, what we do that little shit. Like with our bodies gender. Race. Commas. and minds casts Politics. Ego. i guess ripples across the that's what i've been skin of the asking of you. to sit with social. me up here, on the edge of the earth; knowing; infinity. to cry. to rage; to dream. this rupture, stop looking. there was nepantlera, is also an never any ground. opening. and we? we are nothing if not divine ONCE YOU meaning: shear creative REALIZE HOW inertia, in motion, in EVER CHANGING, flight. AND MALLEABLE, TRANSFORMATIVE, So. Don’t think you aren’t IDENTITY IS: necessary. Don’t think YOU BECOME your story doesn’t wield COMPELLED TO significance. Don’t think LISTEN; TO OPEN you aren’t in these pages. YOURSELF UP TO what if i told you you WHAT YOU CAN have more love in your BECOME. body than can possibly be contained by any vessel or and its because of all this measure? that your very potential within ourselves, ability to give is what we ought to foster more sustains your life? that ways of communicating; this love can ignite the new languages and world; can manifest performances that rupture change. and transcends representations, and create your sight because it begs the space for others, and to be performed, ourselves to grow. experienced, felt, not we must become merely seen. but because it is alive. because you MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 111 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 248 cognizant of how intimacy, our necessary are of the river, the vulnerability within the earth, the sky, the sea. i world, requires us to give love each and every and become entangled fucking one of you. every with the world and all day. with everything i do. else. and learn how to i am with you, you are create the space to become with me. i am in the wind, more intimate with the and with the trees. depths of our own creative embracing you in every lifeforce; power; center; beam of light, in every collective-self. leaf of green. Nepantleras, ahora debemos how might the caminar; blackfish it is language for time to manifest the creativity become bridge. Stop letting the a language for limitations of current healing; for fictions steal your loving; for freedom: giving, in radical abundance? a new form of writing Dreaming is a upon the world, radical politics; escribo para idear, in its good is a practice... fullest sense, to change the world we must do. that comes from deep within our bodies. a language for regeneration (vuong, 224), indeed rising, from the reciprocal relation of giving we have with the world. a remembering; a surrendering that MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 112 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 249 opens our bodies, our being to change.
“remember: The rules, like the streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there —where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.” (Vuong, p246)
whats inside of you can never be contained; and it isn’t meant to be.
because you exist within, outside and beyond yourself. in the histories and eyes of others; in the marks and meaning you’ve imparted upon other people and the world. your identity is never yours. and in this way, we can never actually see ourselves, we can only be. but this being is everything. because when you start to practice it enough, you begin to grasp a form of knowledge, conocimiento, sight, that transcends your skin, extends out into the world around you. a movement, a liveliness
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University 113 Hannah Holtzclaw Appendix 1.3 250 that is always there, open, waiting:
Share
Newer / Older
Powered by Squarespace
MA Offering Offering Fall 2020 SchoolSchool of of Communication Communication SimonSimon Fraser Fraser University University