Noninnocent (p.11)
How innocent a word can be?
Must it be uttered
erased
written over
remembered
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.
Word: stolonic
This word is both powerful and empowering in several different ways. First, to use the biological property of grass as both a metaphor and a model to connect science and feminist study is a great way to break the boundary and to think (or start to think) that there are no boundaries anymore and everything is connected in some ways perceivable or no perceivable depending on the scale of observation. Also, it is empowering in the way that the once marginalized, erased, and ignored beings that do not fall into any categories and sometimes would be explained as "experimental error" or "outlier" have a rightful place in this fluid onto-epistemological model where beings can simultaneously be one(individual) and a whole.
Sentence: "It matters which cuts are enacted: different cuts enact different materialized becomings" (Roy, 75)
The sentence reminds me of the "double-slit experiment" that physicists used to determine whether light was a wave or particles. Instead, they would observe that light can be 1) a wave 2) made up of particles, and 3) both a wave and particles depended on where or when the physicist stop the experiment. It is a reminder that maybe there are no divisions or the divisions are just assigned arbitrarily because of humans' own biological limitations.
Paragraph
"Visions of biotechnological futures saved me that day. Very early on in my makings as a feminist scientist-cum-cyborg, I realized that I was going to face difficulties in being both "bionic" and "brown" - two of the many stem cells, or material-semiotic "objects of knowledge" that have since come to form my conception of technoscientific body. Which figurations a feminist scientist brings into closer proximity depends on the stem cells and sticky threads that have come together to bring forward that dilemma. So being" bionic" and "brown" can be thought of as two stem cells that I acknowledge as playing a part in constructing my reality. As Haraway explains it, each stem cell is comprised of a "knot of knowledge-making practices" formed by such sticky threads as 'industry and commerce, popular culture, social struggles, psychoanalytic formations, bodily history,' and more" (143).
First, it is interesting here when she talked about bionic she implied Bionic Woman instead of The Six Million Dollar Man which are more often referenced in the scholarly material that discuss the popular culture image of the cyborg. Therefore, cyborg here is situated in the "sticky threads" of race, gender, and technology. Also, I love the Haraway quote which is using scientific languages/metaphors to explain the social science bits in science and that knowledge production can happen in these unexpected intersections between any disciplines no matter how unrelated they seem to be.