Toolbox
The word ‘toolbox’ makes everything sound so simple and old-fashioned, like we’re workers hammering away on the beams of a new building. Or more likely yet for a simple toolbox, someone working on a home project, hanging frames using the toolbox that is normally gathering dust out in the garage.
What if none of the tools in your toolbox are fully functional? You try to assemble tools that complement each other, filling gaps in your toolbox to ‘work’ on things – questions, problems, projects – but there will always be gaps, even if you can’t see them. Each tool is just a little warped, bent to one side and loose on one end. Maybe some of your grandfather’s tools are still lying there, albeit neglected because they really just don't work any more. You add a shiny new one every now and then, but then always notice defects you hadn’t initially noticed. So, what exactly are you able to build with an incomplete toolbox of dulled implements? Or, rather, what will it take to use this toolbox ‘successfully’ – in your own eyes? In the eyes of others? Skill, time, effort … you have a lot of ‘work’ to do.
“We must invite a sense of kinship and develop a more hylozoic view of the universe that recognizes the expression of certain capacities in all forms of matter.” 55
This reminds me of Zoe Todd’s work with fish, and her sense of kinship with them – she explains that treating fish as kin (as well as other ‘more than humans’) is a reminder of our reciprocal duties for reconfiguring human relationships to land, water, space, stories and time. Her approach, similar to that of Deboleena Roy, would be to “inhabit time and space with care and tenderness … [and] embody ethics of care, reciprocity and kindness in our work” (“Fish pluralities, refraction, and decolonization in amiskwaciwaskahikan” with Zoe Todd,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO-WvCQ3PJU).These are questions I seek to carry with me in my work: how can I invite a sense of kinship recognizing the expression of certain capacities in all forms of matter? How can I embody an ethics of care, reciprocity and kindness in my work?
“For instance, the scientific discipline of taxonomy, which has named and divided grass into more than eleven thousand species, follows in the tradition of hylomorphism whereby clear distinctions are drawn between the subordinate properties of “raw” matter compared to those of actualized or pre-given forms. As useful as it is for organizational purposes, taxonomy is ultimately a practice of drawing lines between raw matters and forms. Taxonomy must go even further by separating forms from each other that are deemed as being different in kind. It is a scientific system that has been utilized to not only differentiate humans from their natural world but to give different elements, organisms, and even some humans a lesser or subordinate status along a supposed great chain of being. This scientific system requires us to deny the capacities for change that exists in all matter and to rule out the ontological reliance any given entity has upon another” (53-54). Every academic discipline creates formal categories through which to organize data into information and knowledge. Meaning may antecede the discipline, but the discipline defines and applies the structures of order through which meaning is understood. However, over-reliance on previously existing categories risks generating knowledge that is stagnant, redundant and hegemonic. And so categories are challenged, blurred, subverted, reframed, etc.
