GUSHING TENTACLE: an open reading group for "Plants and Animals"
Gushing Tentacle is the first public tentacle of the Plants and Animals curatorial project
Format/m.o.
When: Each Sunday: April 15th to May 7th (possibly longer)
How long/what time: 2 hour meetings, 1pm-3pm
Where: No Nation - Art Gallery and Tangential Unspace Lab, on the back patio if the temperature allows, or inside the gallery
Note:
You can join the group anytime. No need to have attended former discussions. Get in touch to obtain the chapters' pdfs.
*Reading specs*
April 15 - Matters of Care, Introduction (24 pages)
April 22 - Matters of Care, chap. 2 (+3, optional)
April 29 - Staying with the Trouble, Intro+chap.1 (2 if you can!)
May 6 - Tbd
We are going to go through selected chapters from 2 books to start with, 1-2 chapters per week.
And a third book if folks wish to extend the reading book beyond mid-May. tbd.
Current book we are reading
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway, 2016
+++ +++
About Staying with the Trouble
In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.
About The Author
Donna J. Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of several books, most recently, Manifestly Haraway.
Previous book (discussed in April)
Matters of Care, Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, María Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017
+++ +++
About Matters of Care
Challenging the view that caring is only human
Matters of Care presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. A singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate, it expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.
Through its observations and appreciations of the worlds in which many forms of care happen, this bold and synthetic book makes two transforming contributions to contemporary theorizing as it subtly invites everyone to appreciate the centrality of posthuman thinking. Feminists and posthumanists can no longer speak past each other: here’s why. (Joan C. Tronto, University of Minnesota)
About the author
María Puig de la Bellacasa is associate professor in science, technology, and organization at the University of Leicester School of Management.
Third book
(if readers want to extend the discussions past mid-May!)
Habeas Viscus, Alexander G. Weheliye, 2014
+++ +++
Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of "racializing assemblages," taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye's argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the "bare life and biopolitics discourse" exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity.
About The Author(s)Alexander G. Weheliye is Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, also published by Duke University Press.
Format/m.o.
When: Each Sunday: April 15th to May 7th (possibly longer)
How long/what time: 2 hour meetings, 1pm-3pm
Where: No Nation - Art Gallery and Tangential Unspace Lab, on the back patio if the temperature allows, or inside the gallery
Note:
You can join the group anytime. No need to have attended former discussions. Get in touch to obtain the chapters' pdfs.
*Reading specs*
April 15 - Matters of Care, Introduction (24 pages)
April 22 - Matters of Care, chap. 2 (+3, optional)
April 29 - Staying with the Trouble, Intro+chap.1 (2 if you can!)
May 6 - Tbd
We are going to go through selected chapters from 2 books to start with, 1-2 chapters per week.
And a third book if folks wish to extend the reading book beyond mid-May. tbd.
Current book we are reading
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway, 2016
+++ +++
About Staying with the Trouble
In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.
About The Author
Donna J. Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of several books, most recently, Manifestly Haraway.
Previous book (discussed in April)
Matters of Care, Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, María Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017
+++ +++
About Matters of Care
Challenging the view that caring is only human
Matters of Care presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. A singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate, it expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.
Through its observations and appreciations of the worlds in which many forms of care happen, this bold and synthetic book makes two transforming contributions to contemporary theorizing as it subtly invites everyone to appreciate the centrality of posthuman thinking. Feminists and posthumanists can no longer speak past each other: here’s why. (Joan C. Tronto, University of Minnesota)
About the author
María Puig de la Bellacasa is associate professor in science, technology, and organization at the University of Leicester School of Management.
Third book
(if readers want to extend the discussions past mid-May!)
Habeas Viscus, Alexander G. Weheliye, 2014
+++ +++
Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of "racializing assemblages," taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye's argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the "bare life and biopolitics discourse" exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity.
About The Author(s)Alexander G. Weheliye is Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, also published by Duke University Press.
Thank you to our host No Nation - Art Gallery and Tangential Unspace Lab
William Amaya Torres and Ryan Greenlee for catching that ball and collaborating with us!
Looking forward to thinking together!
William Amaya Torres and Ryan Greenlee for catching that ball and collaborating with us!
Looking forward to thinking together!
