Creative Ecologies by Hélène Frichot

Author:Hélène Frichot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

An entangled web of things

Concepts and things are materially, semiotically entangled, as Donna Haraway and Karen Barad and their readers frequently insist. Entanglement is a specific recurring motif to be found across both Barad’s and Haraway’s work, as well as in the recent work on matters of care by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017). Entanglement has in its own right become a conceptual leitmotif. A tangle, as in a tangle of weeds, or a tangle of hair, or a tangle of string, presents a compelling non-linear thought–image, even a diagram by which to think our way through the midst of things. Haraway has taken to using the thought–image of the ‘cat’s cradle’, a children’s game composed of string that is most satisfying when stretched out between two sets of hands belonging to two players. A loop of string can be configured and reconfigured into many different shapes and constitutes one of the oldest games known to human society, Haraway explains (2016: 13). String figures concoct stories by proposing patterns that are performed; a game of cat’s cradle stands in as an apt way of thinking Haraway’s material semiotics as that which ‘is always situated, someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly’ (2016: 4).

Taking Latour’s argument that ‘we have never been modern’ and that the ‘Great Divide’ we habitually construct between what counts as nature and what counts as society is deeply questionable, Donna Haraway, celebrated for her feminist cyborg manifesto (1991), similarly suggests that we have never been human. As she proudly announces, ‘I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only about 10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such’ (2008: 3). This is how she frames Part One of her book When Species Meet, where she also takes a large critical swipe at Deleuze and Guattari’s famous concepts of becoming-animal, and becoming-woman, as having little to do with the situated and material knowledges of either one (Haraway 2008: 27–30). If we have never been human, then we can hardly claim to be post-human, is the implication of such an argument. Thrift insists that what Haraway offers are attempts to forge different relations with the non-human (Thrift 2006: 189), which of course also includes the situation, the different shapes and sizes and material semiotic performances of the human subject. As N. Katherine Hayles explains, the post-human is the concept by which we can better understand the human: ‘the posthuman requires taking the human into account’ (Hayles 2003: 137). At the same time, our definition of the human must necessarily change, especially when the human actor is resituated amidst assemblages of non-human actors. Caught amidst entangled things, composed of an entanglement of material stuff and relations, our (human creaturely) selves bear witness to the dramatization of the vibrancy, even the ‘wildness’ of things including our own human bodies.

The wildness of post-human landscapes assumes the

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