the oldest language on earth

Green Informatics: Then, Now, and also Now

A comparative exploration of some New Age/New Thought beliefs and some of their most-enchanting, and perhaps forgotten cross-cultural analogs.

By now most of us have heard of the "Law of Attraction" (abbreviated LoA), a concept popularized by the New Thought movement positing that positive thoughts and intentions will bring about positive material effects. Often this "like attracts like" rule is elucidated in terms of a metaphysics of energy, in which every action or phenomenon, including thoughts and moods, exert effects on their environments within (and even beyond) the boundaries of flesh. According to New Thought, this is possible because spirit— which is equivalent to divine consciousness—is the ultimate reality that all human minds naturally participate in, and if one has faith in this concordance, one will be able to access other (good) things that exist in similar relationship to this divine matrix of energy. But the "New Thought" zeitgeist that swept America in the mid to late 1800's held this belief first and foremost with respect to the body and human health and disease. Christian Science is an American sect of Protestant Christianity that incorporated tenets of New Thought perhaps more than any other (New Thought was concurrent with sharply rising 19th century trends in healing, mesmerism, and mediumship). The core of Christian Science's teachings is the (historical) core of New Thought—that disease is caused by the machinations of the mind, and consequently it is possible to heal the body with thoughts. One of the early heralds of this paradigm was Franz Mesmer (d. 1815), a German doctor who developed a theory he called "animal magnetism" positing that a "universal fluid" or life force that permeated the universe and was responsible for both sickness and health in humans. Similar to concepts of "chi" in Chinese medicine, Mesmer theorized that when this animating fluid flowed unimpeded through organisms, they were healthy; when it got blocked or impeded, it created energetic stagnation and consequently sickness. He developed methods of ameliorating these energetic blockages using charismatic healing techniques—essentially, quite lively performances, that famously would drive his patients into cathartic fits or seizures, after which they would report feeling better.

The very significant statistics documenting the success of the placebo effect (and even its frequent outperformance of many modern drugs, particularly psychiatric drugs) is a testament to the curative properties of belief. The same holds for hypnotism (as well as less dramatic forms of positive suggestion), which has been viewed with varying levels of skepticism by the medical profession, but has also been shown to be remarkably effective at curing a wide variety of ailments. Ironically, the benefits of "positive" thinking & speech in the form of prayer, spells, and rituals have been long known by shamans, priests, and regular folk in societies outside the temporal and physical reaches of Western science. But yet these beliefs are often ridiculed by scientific communities, while at the same time their very own R&D is busy documenting the placebo effect and now conducting dozens of other more specific neuroscientific studies corroborating reciprocal relationships between physiological states, feelings, and external environmental conditions— I can't help feeling like this odd stance on the part of the world of technoscience is a subtle form of biopiracy. What many who oppose organized religion but yet embrace Transcendental Meditation, Tantra or the like (I'm thinking of a prominent neo-atheist here) may fail to realize is that you cannot find a religious tradition in all of creation that does not enshrine its own equivalent of the 'law of attraction' and the power of suggestion. Yes, it may come to enshrine other things along the way, things that are not so great. But Magic is at the center of religions, it just gets patented and trademarked by a particular group of people. Then it accumulates theology around itself. Then, for better or worse it is effectively camouflaged.

In the contemporary New Age movement the LoA got a lot of publicity in the 2006 film The Secret. The Secret is one part self-help film, one part exposé alleging a trans-historical conspiracy on the part of the powerful to hide powerful teachings–essentially magical and occult teachings—from the masses. The film cites historical orders of the spiritual underground—including practitioners of Hermetic magic and the Renaissance-era Rosicrucians—as examples of groups that have kept and cultivated the LoA in times past. It focuses specifically on visualization techniques and other ways to bring about specific outcomes in one's life through positive thinking. The central thesis—that you attract things, events, and situations to your life because of often unconscious mental dispositions, emphasizes that the "law" goes both ways—it can attract both the negative and positive. But far from just being concerned with health and the body, The Secret takes the Law of Attraction to a decidedly materialist application, focusing on increasing wealth and prosperity. It is perhaps the New Age, liberal analog to the Prosperity Gospel, which began in the early 20th century and is still largely affecting evangelical and charismatic theology and ministry today. Essentially the philosophy in The Secret is an amalgam of New Thought and Occult teachings, because it implies that thoughts can affect—even manipulate—"external" material reality.

With respect to the creators of The Secret, I'm most interesting in the popular reception of these sorts of ideas and less in focusing on this particular instantiation of them. But generally, the problems with the New Age, American version of the "Law of Attraction" can perhaps be pointed out by starting with the very naming of it. It is apparently a "law", and to modern English-speaking ears this word conveys a very particular set of meanings—namely things like predictability, mechanistic function, and determinism. Indeed, when we hear about similar laws of causation it is in the context of science. Such laws cause one to assume that things can be predicted, conditions can be replicated, and that there is a future indicated by the arrow of time in which these predicted things will happen. Then there is the epistemological problem created by the mind-body dualism that still haunts our culture. What makes the "Law of Attraction" seem like New Age psychobabble to the empiricists of our time is their fundamental assumption that the external world of material causes and effects is ontologically different from the internal, mental, or spiritual world. Enfolded inextricably within this Cartesian framework is the assertion that humans are superior to non-human animals because they possess rationality—and it is through this that man can be connected to the divine. So there we have the problem—what you get when you introduce notions of the magical properties of language and thought into an anthropocentric world-view that still enshrines rationality and logic. And indeed, the "law of attraction" is often explained AS science. Something just doesn't compute. It's too much precision, too soon. As Bertrand Russell said, one doesn't begin with the precise. Sometimes there's this attitude that "well, subatomic physics corroborates this now, so we can finally make a legitimate argument for it". Well, I agree that "it's all science", but to me that's no different from saying it's all a dream, or it's all language. You don't have to turn to discussion of quantum mechanics or vibrational metaphysics to explain why the LoA works. If that helps you believe, by all means, tell yourself those stories. I guess I've realized those stories don't help me believe, or know anything or hold anything meaningful in my being for any substantial period of time. What helps me are the wild things. In wild places, thinking and feeling collapse into one, sensory perception is primary and naming comes after. Naming happens when you leave.

The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing. 

—Pierre Bonnard

In a society founded on Newtonian science and Rationalist thought, world views to which for better or worse American culture is inextricably indebted, the LoA has been formatted in ways that render it palatable to our distinctly linear, materialist, and textual sensibilities. Most importantly, because of the structure of our current knowledge-economy, it is often a soundbyte with no story, making it easy for people to either blindly accept or blindly reject it (this is true of so many things). Similar concepts that maintain the subtle yet powerful reciprocal relationships between an individual's states of consciousness, speech, and the world they inhabit can indeed be found in esoteric and occult teachings throughout history, as well as within the folk psychology and folk biology of indigenous cultures with strong hunter-gatherer traditions, either actively or preserved in cultural memory. It is the latter that I would like to discuss in this post.

To me, spirituality is best rooted in ecological understanding. It has to be tested in the field, literally. The best outcome would be that ecological and naturalist knowledge would do for us everything that spirituality does—and more. And my contention here in this essay is simply that it's very difficult to understand the causal effects of intention in this world, the world that I am now writing from. A world full of abstraction, of capital, of text and hypertext, of blank and sterile spaces and dislocated and fragmented ecosystems. Blank spaces soak up intention and focus like a sponge, they shatter it into a thousand fragments. (It is a great human challenge to maintain focus in an empty cell, which is I suppose why the Desert Fathers did it.) But those ascetic techniques of 'extreme spirituality' are not part of most modern people's skill set. Of course we have to resort to talking about things we cannot see, particles, or inanimate waves of energy, in order to rein in our focus, which behaves like an animal searching for food, or a mate, even long after our bodies don't (need to) hunger for those things. There is a sense in which our attention will always be feral. It's notoriously condemned for this in Christian thought, and called (lovingly I like to think) the "dog of desire" by Sufi mystics, which is perhaps a better description. Because you don't dis dog magic—the dog spirits are listening, and you want them on your side, you know.

Awareness, perception, intention, and focus—these are all things that evolved because they have biological functions—specifically ecological functions. They evolved not so much to track and follow our OWN thoughts, but rather to sense and track signals and signs in our environment—to recognize and home in on patterns. It is good to observe one's own thoughts of course, as Buddhists teach, but only insofar as that helps you observe the larger world of which you are a part! (The distinction is fuzzy between observation of thoughts and obsession with them. Ideally I should observe my thoughts the way I observe a river, or clouds passing in the sky.) When you rely on your natural environment for sustenance of all kinds, when you are both hunter and hunted (seer and seen), it completely and holistically shapes the way you think. Any survival situation (re)shapes how you think, and it is essential, for our purposes, to imagine our Paleo and Neolithic ancestors as constantly being in a survival situation. All wild animals, too, and plants and fungi—right now—are in a constant, dynamic state of survival. And I certainly don't mean "survival" just in the dramatic sense, like that guy who's arm was pinned under the boulder. I mean it in a much more mundane sense. But it's that quotidian space of survival which is the ultimate testing ground for cause and effect in the biotic realm. Additionally, I do not mean to imply that ancient humans never lived in abundance. I do believe they sometimes did—particularly abundance in the form of skill and craft—things that are carried within a creature and that become intuitive. Abundance of knowledge and awareness. In this way an animal can be in both a state of abundance and a state of survival. Prepared, oriented toward seeking, yet not wasting any energy. Some groups of people have preserved bodies of knowledge that encode the effects of hundreds of years worth of field experience in the causal webs of being. Transmitted orally, these stories are true symbionts—they must merge with our bodies to stay alive (although truly, a virus is a far better metaphor for textual traditions, not oral ones). And in oral/embodied form is where they are maximally effective. The gun is always loaded.

This brings us close to a key to understanding conceptions of "intent" in traditional/native systems of knowledge. Especially in urban and suburban landscapes, we inhabit a rather "dead" world, at least in the biotic sense and on a scale visible to the human eye. It's difficult to feel like you're really part of a landscape made up of inorganic textures and objects. Well, unless you're wearing UCP or digi-cam (which is I suppose why that was developed). But truly, it's difficult to feel like you "mean" something in these landscapes constructed by someone else. Do you know the feeling I'm talking about? Some may see it as a sort of existential despair, the ennui of inhabiting the modern, post-industrial world. But it literally does have to do with meaning—with semiotics... a very fundamental form of meaning, perhaps the progenitor (and definitely the engine) of Life itself. It's at once incredibly profound and simpler than any philosophy—it is the meaning inherent in the natural, living world—what I have articulated on this blog as "ecological cybernetics," a green informatics, the study of which a really cool gang of radical molecular biologists even have a name for: biosemiotics.

Biosemiotics is the study of how information flows through the natural world, and also at once it is reframing the very definition of information and processes of semiosis—how meaning is created and what constitutes meaning. In the biosemiotic framework, a sign is any pattern or signal—olfactory, auditory, visual, tactile, magnetic, and beyond—that gets "interpreted"—that is, utilized—by something else. For example, if one studies the metabolic processes of single-celled organisms and how their metabolic byproducts are perceived and utilized by other organisms, that is biosemiotics. Studying the tracks left by squirrels in the woods, and noticing how those movement patterns cause creatures that prey on the squirrels to modify their behavior in certain ways, that is biosemiotics. The forest, the savannah, the desert, or the Arctic tundra—wherever your ancestors are from—that place was, is, full of signs made by living creatures, and also by geomorphological and meteorological processes of strategic value to living creatures. They are available for you to observe, decipher, and extrapolate from, but they are also there without you—without us. The first, most primordial and primal messages were not necessarily intended to be messages. They were not consciously infused with meaning by the sender. They can accommodate sentience, but what really boggles my mind is the notion that meaning is an emergent quality of living systems—and it doesn't require sentient intelligence, or even much intelligence at all. Meaning needs three players to emerge: the signifier, the sign, and the interpreter, and without anyone or thing to interpret, there can be no meaning—but the key is that in the biotic world nearly everything is being "interpreted" all the time. The first messages were molecules, and maybe even atoms, if you dare. Then they were scratches and prints, and then pictograms, hieroglyphics, alphabets. But what we need to remember is that all these forms of signification still exist, alongside each other, and in any given moment they collectively command power far greater than our language does. Biosemiotics sees local evolution as a tendency toward increasing semiotic freedom—in other words, life forms have evolved on earth in ways that enable the messages they send and receive to be increasingly complex. But that doesn't mean that this view is anthropocentric or subscribes to an idea of "progress"—because no form of semiosis is valued over any other, they are all equal. No one is saying that more "semiotic freedom" means better. For the most part, biosemiotics encompasses linguistics in its academic form, without becoming completely wrapped up in and trapped by it. It can then potentially serve as the scaffolding for an evolutionary and even cosmic theory of meaning that bridges an epistemological schism between the humanities and the sciences. Too broad or grandiose? Maybe, but there are great uses for it, I promise you.
It's highest purpose is perhaps simply to teach us the oldest language on earth. You won't see industrial profit come out of this. Biosemiotics isn't here to build spaceships or a faster computer. It's both science and poetics—simultaneously redefining both. But it smashes altars all around, in science, anthropology, theology. It can't be pinned down. Maybe it shouldn't. Maybe that's not the point. (Maybe it shouldn't even be written down...)

In a space where everything is alive, dying, and changing, there is so much "meaning" everywhere—so many signals being sent through multiple sensory channels and between a huge range of life forms—that it creates a constant, static "noise"—it becomes the baseline. Any time a baseline is established, deviations from that basic state can be interpreted as signs, especially if they repeat. This phenomenon of baseline/deviation/sign can repeat ad infinitum and the concept of "baseline" translates to all levels of awareness. Myths and stories transmitted in indigenous cultures about how the natural world came to be, traditions of animal medicine, why certain animals behave the way they do, and how human thoughts and intentions have ecological effects, come from a context where it is understood that nothing is meaningless in the ecological world. This might sound overwhelming to the would-be terrestrial navigator, but this state actually makes it possible to track the effects of very minute changes, because often in a very responsive environment like a forest, subtle events have a butterfly effect. "No event for the Koyukon is ever wholly accident or chance, but neither is any event entirely predetermined" (Abram) This causal ambiguity allows for a fluidity in interpretation, the sort of fluidity and theoretical resilience that is necessary when responding to the dynamic, ever-changing, spiral-moving, fractal face of the wild. One merely has to know what to pay attention to, and in many cases this translates to understanding how you are perceived by your environment. Many instances of native wisdom reveal that it has been proven, again and again, beyond reasonable doubt, that intention and ego can spell one's success or failure, particularly in the hunt. Controlling one's thoughts could, in the most extreme case, be a matter of life or death. In this way thoughts are linked to survival.

Similar yet different to the LoA, here we find that often it is not so much about displaying your intention, but rather masking (camouflaging) it, or even not having it at all.  In practice, this translates to practices that in various ways show respect or reverence to animals, plants, and/or forces of nature that have pivotal roles in one's livelihood. This means measuring and controlling how you think about these things, and your role among them. Chief among these practices is perhaps that of the hunter avoiding saying what he is going to do before he sets out to hunt, or bragging about his achievements after the fact. David Abram writes about a Native American arctic tribe: "The Koyukon people take great care to avoid speaking of certain animals directly using elaborate circumlocutions so as not to offend them."  This is especially true for more powerful animals that occupy important places in the relative ecology/economy of humans. Here is the knowledge that animals are repelled by arrogance but drawn to a disposition of reverence and humility.

It is indisputable that intention effects your focus and your disposition. Intention can be a form of obsession if it turns into a continuous thought. This fragments and narrows your faculties of perception and you can loose the ability to be "part" of the landscape where you are. At this time, for many reasons, it is far easier for you to be perceived by something before you perceive it. And since animals are experts at tracking things they cannot individually perceive based on the perceptions of other life forms in the forest (i.e. through bird language), the creature you are trying to find may just find you first. Many hunters and scouts will tell you that killer instinct can be perceived and they have countless stories of failed hunting expeditions to corroborate it. The animal kingdom has had millions of years to figure out how to perceive predatory behavior. Some groups of people who have spent lots of time hunting have figured out how to counter-track that. It is imperative to be able to love and revere something, and also kill it. These traditions of reverence (from which offering comes?) were practiced not out of duty, but because at the critical moment you literally must have your "heart in the right place" to ensure a maximum chance of success in your task. I guess you could say it's based on the folk-version of statistical analysis. (Nature has peer reviewed studies too, it's called instinct.)

It's true that humans as adept pattern recognizers do tend to see patterns when none are there. It is always important to keep this in mind. The argument could be made (and is) that this is the source of many "superstitions" within animistic world views. But I encourage us to realize that many—not all— cases dubbed "magical thinking" may still be able to be traced to ecological cognition. Some types of divination, particularly augury—observing the flight patterns of birds in order to predict future events—I see as a stylization and ritualization of the act of tracking. Augury became so highly ritualized to the point where priests would literally let a flock of captive of birds go and then "read" them, and it was easily rigged. But this can easily be traced back to remote tracking: tracking something "invisible" through the observable activity of another thing, as with bird language mentioned earlier. It is a form of triangulation, and can work on many scales. It's true too with hepatomancy (the ancient Greek practice of reading a sheep's liver). Of course you can turn that into liturgical bullshit, but examining an animal's internal organs can tell you a lot about the terrain it inhabited when it was alive.

Again, it's difficult to measure the effects of our will and our intentions—things we've been socialized to believe are "internal", "private", and unavailable to the perceptions of others—in a context that's not alive and in a dynamic, interconnected state of survival. Of course on some level modern first-world landscapes are "in a state of survival" too, it's just that the means and definitions of survival have changed. But the causal chains of being that stitch together wilder landscapes are diluted, weak. Here, these networks don't exist between alive things. Will and intention have less power because they are not relied upon in the same ways they were during much of humankind's time in this earth. As we walk through life we are not constantly "perceived" and tracked by the earth the same way many of our ancestors were. Wilderness/earth/nature is much less of an agent, to us. It is not believed in/stories are not told about it. Science explains why things happen, but it never places you within the story, as a participant. Sometimes science makes the world seem more alien and mysterious than do non "scientific" ways of understanding the world. It has often succeeded, historically, in being a narrative that excludes the human participant so that it can attain higher levels of linguistic precision, instead of being a narrative that includes the human participant but uses less precise language. How to balance the two?

The idea, common to ancient shamans and modern psychedelic visionaries alike, that language is an innate principle of the natural and non-human world even finds a bizarre, rather frantic expression in Derridean deconstruction and poststructuralist literary theory. Even the ivory tower, which was built to rise out of the "primitive" swamps of green informatics, leads back there, perhaps unbeknownst to itself. But that's for another post...

List of People, Things, and Places to help think

"Placebo" — Radiolab WNYC Podcast
Jesper Hoffmeyer (biosemiotics)
The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram
ROOTS School VT
Things written and thought by Tom Brown Jr.
Mammal Tracks and Sign, Mark Elbroch
Forests of all kinds
The Biology of Belief
Andy Clark
Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchins

Will the best allegory for postmodern subjectivity please stand up? My angle on the Cyborg Manifesto

Believe it or not, I only just read "The Cyborg Manifesto" a few months ago. I was born the year it was published (1985), so my generation grew up in a post-Cyborg-Manifesto-World, and I'm realizing that many of the ideas central to this blog are spiritually descended from the kind of work Haraway was doing in that essay. It was awesome to have the opportunity to read her essay closely for my Feminist and Queer theory class this spring.

    In Donna Haraway's seminal and iconoclastic essay she introduces the cyborg as the central figure in an "ironic political myth" that she offers as an instructive and potentially liberating allegory—a myth deployed to combat more destructive myths in the thunderdome of cultural representations. In particular this methodological myth might serve, she suggests, as a tactic for women to re-imagine agency, embodiment and subjectivity, particularly with respect to updating outmoded identity politics and liberatory rhetorics in socialist and feminist thought.

    Echoing the concerns of other postmodern and post-structuralist feminists, Haraway takes issue with essentialist concepts wielded in some dominant feminist movements. Examples would be the concept of "women's experience" (that there is anything universal about it) or early ecofeminist rhetoric that idealizes Edenic matriarchal human legacies, or symbolically associates women/female with earth and holism. Although these imaginings have been part of the necessary dialectical landscape of feminist thought and the strategic complexities of opposing the subordination of women, they have perhaps erroneously pitted the technological and the fragmented in opposition to women, in simplest terms applying a morality of "technology = bad, earth = good". There is a sense in which mechanization, science and technology have been associated with patriarchy by feminists, but also by patriarchal systems of thought themselves (for example, the idea that women are not naturally proficient at math and science). Therefore, the association of technology with male and of earth with female in feminist thought, although it might have served as a way for women to re-appropriate being named as "other" and excluded from participation in high "culture", no longer represents a viable strategy for understanding the cybernetic ecology of personhood in a globalized and increasingly computerized world. Haraway points out that these narratives have been the creations of white first-world women, and indicates that any productivity such narratives might have is to the extreme detriment and exclusion of women of color, women in third world countries or women who face any constellation of multiple oppressions not experienced by white women in America. Although she doesn't use the terminology of "queer" or "trans", this essay was a harbinger for the project of problematizing essentialism in feminist thought from trans and queer perspectives as well. Haraway is criticizing approaches in 2nd wave feminism and certain idealistic strands of ecofeminism as participating—however unintentionally—in the same sort of essentializing discourse as their "oppressors" and not deviating in any radical way from the very philosophies and ideologies that have been so oppressive. Folded into Haraway's manifesto is the perpetual question of what it means to be embodied, to be a subject, and to be "female" (or any gender) in the late 20th century. She wants to encourage speaking and thinking from a lived place (with)in a cybernetic ecology—where we exist embedded within cybernetic systems (both semiotic systems as well as physical, technological systems) that transgress and complicate borders and boundaries of flesh and not-flesh, human and machine, and animal and human. Implicit in here is also the deep critique of Cartesian dualism (thinking of the mind and body as separate things), which Haraway feels is still an ideological pillar in feminist thought.

    She makes the important point that the cyborg (as a trope) can be seen as either emblematizing patriarchal totalitarian control and the hubristic quest for perfection/deification, or it can from another angle be seen as a new ontology with liberationist—not fascist—potential. Better yet, the ultimate challenge is to be able to envision both things simultaneously—in other words, to envision that the cyborg does actually refer to both liberation and control—which evokes the ability of "doublethink" in George Orwell's 1984. "Doublethinking" is holding and accepting two antithetical beliefs in one's mind simultaneously without generating cognitive dissonance. In fact such 'doublethinking' is actually necessary, not in service of top-down control, but in service of producing the best possible map for contemporary reality (that is to say, we, the people, have to "take back" this power from corrupt hegemonic systems). "Cyborg" could be a totalitarian creation, but also a bastard child, an "illegitimate offspring" giving rise to an ironic identity that Haraway compares to Cherri Moraga's envisioning of Malinche (the quasi-mythical mother of mestiz@ culture) as a "violation…that allows survival". Haraway easily justifies the tactic of doublethink, stating that "single vision produces worse illusions than double-vision or many-headed monsters."

    Haraway articulates a sort of iconography of the cyborg, an image that she describes is "at the center of her ironic faith, [her] blasphemy". This figure is neither hero nor villain; it bears neither a causal connection to any origin myth nor represents an eschatological reaper of human atonement, but rather works toward a useful re-appropriation of the demonized "evil" cyborg — or the related trope of the insurgent "android", an imagined humanoid manifestation of Artificial Intelligence - that has been represented as a sort of collective nightmare of technoculture (e.g. the "Borg" in Star Trek). Instead, the cyborg is seen as the definitive contemporary iteration of the trickster figure in late-capitalist, nascently post-industrial society. As a trickster, the cyborg performs a sort of campy ambiguity and effortlessly collapses multiple dichotomies, including animal and human, god and man, male and female, gay and straight, true and false, serious and frivolous, deliberate and whimsical, etc. They call into question what counts as technology, nature, identity, gender, and perhaps most interestingly, what counts as "right" and "wrong". A central attitude of Haraway's cyborg (as with the perennial trickster) is not cynical, but playful—and intrinsically morally relativist.

    Published in 1985, Haraway's essay came during the the dawn of cyberpunk science fiction, which manifested in both literature and film and was close on the heels of the popularization of personal computing (the Apple II in 1977 and the Commodore 64 in 1982). Additionally there were advances in electronic communications technology that had significant cultural impact—in particular, precursors to the internet and world-wide-web such as dial-up BBS, Usenet and the prototypes of commercial online services like Compuserve and AOL. Both Blade Runner and Tron came out in 1982 and the novel Neuromancer by Willam Gibson, considered paradigmatic of the cyberpunk genre and aesthetic, was published in 1984. In classical cyberpunk stories, the setting is often a dystopian near-future society, almost exclusively urban and characterized by extreme political and economic corruption. The tone of cyberpunk fiction is often dark, nihilistic and cynical, and as with Haraway's cyborg, there is no loss of innocence; the subjects of the stories were born knowing nothing outside of post-industrial, technophilic police states, and the plots often revolve around the protagonist as a computer hacker, subverting the technology of his oppressors for his own gains and goals, which are sometimes but certainly not always altruistic. Most often they are simply in accord with a survivalist ethic. Of this very ethic Haraway writes "Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other". (111) This is redolent of the famous line from one of William Gibson's short stories, "the street finds its own uses for things", describing the relationships between users, technology and underground or black market economies. Haraway's cyborg too is guided by adaptationist ethics and strategies, but it moves beyond simply a hermeneutic of revenge or revolt, and exists somewhere in a productive dis-identificatory space between assimilation and rejection.

    This period - the 1980's - also coincides with the "second Gilded Age" discussed in family historian Stephanie Coontz's work, marked by a rise in conservative politics and the coupling of capitalist ideals and consumerist ethics with conservative moral ethics. This era, the era of personal computing and precursors to the internet  because of its political and social backdrops was threatening to feminists as well as gays, lesbians and other minorities compared to the political progressiveness achieved in the 60's and early 70's. It is understandable that a need for a liberatory cyberpunk narrative was dire for the feminist subject in the mid 80's. Haraway even mentions the replicant Rachel in Blade Runner as a symbol of confused desire in a half-awakened or un-self-aware cyborg culture. Haraway's essay indeed was a prophecy whose time had come, although a cyberpunk consciousness was already emerging in hacker culture and was I would argue actually typified in Blade Runner through the veiled allusions to the male protagonist/hero figure actually being a replicant himself. However texts like Blade Runner and Neuromancer, while hinting at the possibility that the cyborg has a soul and might even be able to be "good" despite the totalitarian conditions of its creation, still featured male protagonists and played to the masculinist Western hero narrative quite strongly. Haraway wanted to extend this consciousness to a feminist, post-gender and socialist framework. The critical ingredient for her is the adaptationist ethic embodied in the figure of the cyborg, which you can see hints of in early cyberpunk works like Blade Runner and Neuromancer, but are much more overt in texts that surfaced a decade after the publication of A Cyborg Manifesto, like the Matrix and Battlestar Galactica, where the complication of traditional moral frameworks that is incurred by cyborg subjectivity is explored even more deeply. In post-cyberpunk works like the latter, the question of who is "the bad guy" and who is "the good guy" have become even more muddled, through not only revelations that humans are oblivious to their own cyborgian or machine-based origins, but that even their struggles for liberation might to some extend be helped or masterminded by the very entities they thought of as enemies. In a post-cyberpunk world, the concepts of "enemy" and "ally" can becoming meaningless. (I hope to explore this tangent more in a future post.)

    Being partially engendered by the invention of the first computers in the 50's, early cognitive science and concomitant theories and metaphors for cognition (including those present in the cyberpunk science fiction of the 80's) are predicated on a computational understanding of mind that has become more and more discredited. In such a framework the mind is conceived of as a type of Turing Machine, which I've written about/critiqued previously in a post on dynamicist models of cognition. Haraway's essay hints at the pervasive epistemological effects of computationalism when she notes that "modern medicine is…full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices" (emphasis mine). However, it is unclear to what extent the Cyborg Manifesto is complicit in the myth of computationalism, since Haraway is so wary of mind-body dualism and given her disclaimer in the beginning about the ironic and mythopoeic nature of the manifesto. Thus her work could be seen as an incredibly prescient anticipation of more dynamic, ecological and situated models of cognition and sociality (particularly in light of the fact that she has since then turned a similar focus to the topic of companion species). It is also worth noting that the mid to late 80's saw a rising interest in Derridean deconstruction and poststructuralist linguistics in the Anglo-American academy, in which language is seen as pre-figuring all human knowledge and comprehension of reality. This has serious methodological ramifications for the analysis of literature and historical texts, which is primarily how it became relevant in the humanities and social sciences. Such a view of the world as "made of" language has also been a central part of the mystical philosophies of visionaries like Philip K. Dick and Terence McKenna, who's ideas, though in many ways analogous to those of Derrida and Saussure, don't receive nearly enough attention in the academy (I suspect because they are so politically radical and generally iconoclastic). Poststructuralist theories challenged objectivism on both a phenomenological and methodological levels, and questioned the tenability of “materialist theories of experience and the ideas of causality and agency inherent in them” (from The Past as Text by Gabrielle Spiegel, p. 4) This, no doubt, has been woven into cyberpunk narratives that envision the world as "code" that can be manipulated and programmed. Indeed, there is still much life in this storyform... but only the future will tell how exactly it will evolve, since our definitions of what constitutes "code" have changed since the 80's and continue to change.

Queering it

     "Cyborg" and "Queer" are both linguistic strategies for navigating postmodern subjectivity. I see Haraway's cyborg as (among other things!) anticipating queer theory, which was to develop a few years later in the early 90's through the writings of like Judith Butler and Eve Sedgewick. Haraway calls for the quest for liberation to be refocused from a search for "identity" to a search for "affinity" or affinities, which is to say, an active construction of relationships, among humans but also among ideas and across multiple frameworks of meaning (her essay serves as a living example of a cyborg text, operating in both the realms of fiction and non-fiction, poem and prose). Identity is too individualistic, too essentialist; affinity on the other hand is coalitional, it is the very currency of the biotic world, which evolves and adapts by means of ecological relationship. Haraway's cyborg represents a rejection of identity and with it of traditional notions of redemption and salvation. Cyborg describes an ontological queerness, the paradox of natural unnaturalism, or unnatural naturalism, whichever you prefer. Similarly, "queer" is a sort of non-identity or anti-identity that does not require any sort of unitarianism or essential quality and questions notions of behavioral continuity and ideological integrity. According to Sedgewick queer refers to an "open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances" which echoes the ways in which Haraway discusses the cyborg. Queer is not an objective category like "gay" or "lesbian", and although it is adjectival it does not necessarily describe a noun. Rather it is a first-person signifier of some sort of oppositional position, which may encompass particular experiences, intentions, pasts or futures. It pertains particularly to "performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation" (Sedgewick). Similar to "cyborg", queer is a strategy with which to reconcile potentially dissonant ramifications of the postmodern condition. A key political task for Haraway is to "dissolv[e] Western selves in the interests of survival". So it is also with "queer"… queer is imbued with the postmodern and post-colonialist understanding that all creation is hybridization or bastardization, and the nostalgia for a primordial wholeness or perfect morality is an illusion.

    Queer has been extended to even describe ecology and the very ontology of the biosphere, of evolution itself. Cyborg denotes a reliance on or incorporation into the self of technologically-enabled processes of semiosis, but when and where do these processes "begin"? Where, indeed, did technology begin? Long, long ago perhaps with the advent of the first sign, but can that even be named? If queer and cyborg could be associated with any identification, it is perhaps a productive identification with fragmentation. Reconciling fragmented lives and selves is something that is still very relevant today, and perhaps even more relevant. Yet the above discussion does not exhaust the mythic possibilities for mapping personhood, identity/affinity, and desire in 2012. "Cyborg" and "queer" came on to the scene 20 years ago now. Lots has changed, more than we can even comprehend, and as is one of the defining missions of this project, new stories need to be told.

(To be continued)

In a Gym Mirror, Darkly: (Queer) Asceticism, (Queer) Nature and (Queer) Identity

The gym has always been a place of worship for me. 

However, although the temple has stayed the same, the object of my devotion has not. When I first was initiated into the cult of “body building”, I was worshiping a false idol.

Around the age of 15, I declared a kind of war on my body. I wouldn’t have called it that at the time, but that’s what it was. I played soccer my freshman and sophomore years in high school, and it coincided with the time when puberty was in full bloom for me, so not only had my body changed drastically in the three years or so leading up to that time, but my mind had only just begun to play catch up. (And it was repeating something along the lines of “What just happened?”)

The social experience of being on a girl’s soccer team was awkward and embarrassing at times, a stark contrast to the new joy of physical fitness emerging in an adolescent body. Unfortunately that social discomfort almost completely eclipsed soccer’s positive aspects, and ended up being the main reason I abandoned team sports for the more solitary ones like rock climbing and ski racing, where I was free to be a wolf-pack of one. Yet when I think back to 9th grade soccer, I recover a nanosecond-long memory in which, after a couple of months of the most structured and rigorous physical training I’d yet experienced, I looked down at my stomach and arms one night while I was half-naked, getting ready for bed. I was lean and surprisingly muscular from soccer practice, and it was very curious because it was as if I’d never looked at my body before. I could see my abdominal muscles swelling and the veins in my hands and arms, and the shadowy reflection in my dark bedroom window conjured up an image—me—that was simultaneously new and old; unfamiliar yet oddly arcane, mythic. This memory is iconic because I think it was the beginning of my awareness of my body as a body that was differently-gendered, and also of a growing body that was becoming something (but what?). When I turn down the dial on the mental noise surrounding that memory and try to identify a single feeling, I realize that in that moment I saw something I liked about myself. Or I saw an image… an icon, perhaps, to which my “self” had maybe only a spectral relation. I thought that maybe, if I could keep “becoming” like that, I could grow up to be just like my older brother. You see, identity isn’t that complex. It’s painfully simple, although the consuming desire to “be(come) something” feels anything but simple at that age.

Some time after this revelation, I cut my hair short, signifying to the world and myself a modicum of awareness about this creature I’d seen in the mirror. Shearing my long, thick and rather unwieldy mane of chestnut locks that had up to that point made me resemble a teenaged metal-head was a sort of flag planting act, or a passage through a magic gate, after which I was definitely Not in Kansas Anymore. I was in between (not in between genders, because I still identify as non-binary and I’m now 26)… but in between understandings. And I would struggle there for some time.

I started going to a local gym and my enthusiasm for working out developed rather quickly into an addiction, supplemented by the worst possible companion: anorexia. I worked out nearly every day after school and sometimes ate next to nothing. Thankfully the eating disorder never progressed to the point where I had to receive medical treatment—I was very lucky. I had always had a lean, compact figure—weight was never “the problem”. Very simply, I wanted my body to be a different body. Isn’t that always what anorexia is about? For me, the “ideal” wasn’t even that different from how my body really was (a relative reality which was unknowable to me at the time)… but it was different enough to create an obsession with a future mirage that I was always only a few steps away from—an eschatological body that, once I stepped into it, would never change. It would stop time—along with my female puberty. To this “false idol” I sacrificed far, far too much, and my “real” flesh-and-blood body paid for it dearly. It was the summer after my 16th birthday that started the long, non-linear path toward healing from this, which is to say, I still suffered from iterations of eating disorders, exercise addictions, and body/gender dysphoria over the several years that followed, but the severity of the anorexia at least subsided.

That summer was 2001 and I backpacked for seven weeks in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California with a small group of other teenagers who I’d previously gone to summer camp with. That summer I began to learn the simple but yet complex lesson that food was fuel for my body (and all bodies) and that it was what kept me alive. Beyond that, food was what could allow me to perform well above and beyond the baseline of simply “surviving”. It could actually help me thrive. (Rocket science, I know!) That summer we hiked Mount Whitney on an 11 day trek—the highest mountain in the continental U.S. at 14,505 feet. The summit was a jumble of sun-warmed boulders, with little rivulets of old snow packed into the shadows, and there was an outhouse with no doors or walls—just a gleaming white toilet behind a small pile of red rocks. This ironic throne glibly symbolized the circular nature of all of life, and the endless sequences of consumption that form its often tenuous foundations. It was definitely a wake up call… but I still had a long way to go. Recovering from an eating disorder is a long process, and the recovery happens in stages. That same year I also joined a climbing team and started a regular training regimen for competition. If long-distance backpacking inaugurated the process of repairing my relationship with food, climbing did that with respect to my relationship with my body. In rock climbing I truly found a moving meditation, a place of flow that collapsed all surrounding time and space into the corporeal trinity of my muscles, my breath, and my center of gravity, which was also the earth.

Fast forward this tape about ten years, to today, and I’m in the best relationship with my body yet. Since the stories I’ve shared with you, I’ve been compelled to explore beyond the monolithically human end-user world of physical fitness, into the world where food comes from, the rhythmic realm of seeds, soil, pastures, udders and milk. As the tattoo on my chest “earthling” alludes to (which means in Old English “one who dwells on (or cultivates) the land”), this realm is not a faraway, bucolic utopia where food comes from—it is, in a primordial sense, where we come from. Working with non-human food animals in biodynamic and organic settings and experiencing the ways they enrich our relationship with the earth, and also with time and space (opening up the possibilities and elasticities of those very concepts), was another step on the path toward my own practice of ‘fitness’. Those years of work in the small scale agriculture “business” (although I can hardly call it that since everywhere I’ve worked has always been intrinsically and in all ways opposed to industrial agriculture) deeply reconfigured the way I related to my body and also my gender (see the related post gender identity and participatory ecology for an elaboration).

Additionally I’ve written here and elsewhere about how beginning to learn naturalist skills in my native geography has furthered those understandings, in particular in revealing the paradoxical—and painful—truth that in the forest there is no gender, at least not in human terms, and in That Place the earth sees “me” for who I am because when I’m there, she is me (seeing her, seeing me, in an infinite regression of reflections). It’s been devastating in its own way for me to realize the ways in which gender is so very social and yes, so very constructed…and nature does not end at the gates of the city, either. It is here, we are it, and so I must learn to live with multiple realities, multiple truths—to hold in my mind, without any damaging dissonance, that gender both exists and doesn’t. It is worth mentioning though that I’ve also discovered that to say that something is “constructed” is indeed a high order compliment—for we are creatures that construct “by nature”, and that is beautiful. As Buckminster Fuller said, being myth-making and storytelling animals is perhaps one of our unique purposes as indicated by our silly brain-on-a-stick-with-opposable-thumbs anatomy. ;)

Connecting with the biotic world—the dark, boreal forests and the sun-drenched pastures—has taught me… far from the traditional (and problematic) romantic notion of nature being a harmonious, ordered system—that nature is a wild, lawless place; an ongoing science experiment; a relentless, unforgiving tug-of-war between mutation and replication, chaos and order, and dynamicism and stasis. So I’m in good company.

Asceticism comes from the Greek word “askesis” which means “training”. It doesn’t mean deprivation, repression or hurting the body. Its true meaning is more along the lines of the sort of training an Olympic athlete undertakes… and its purpose is to transform the body (and mind, and soul) into the cleanest vessels for the divine, for grace, chi or prana, whatever one chooses to call it. It’s a methodology of mastery which acknowledges that in order to gain competence in anything, one has to engage in choosing what not to do so that one can be chosen by one’s environment (an environment which one’s ascetic practice has helped to create!) It’s not about exercising your rational or free will—forget that. It’s about setting up the conditions under which you won’t need to choose—or rather, where your agency will be elevated to a level where your choices will have maximum positive meaning and impact for you. I’ll never forget the day I first learned what that word meant, I was in a Christian History class at the University of Vermont. I felt, with alluring certainty, that asceticism wasn’t some exotic thing that happened in an ancient time or in some oriental locale. Perhaps it had “gone underground”, but it was, somehow, at the essence of culture, and what it means to be human.

I got asceticism wrong when I was 16 years old. I tried to achieve freedom by hurting the body, and it was unsustainable. But I didn’t know any better at the time. No one does, especially at that age, more so because we don’t live in a world, or at least in a society, where the ecstatic potential of the human body (and the synergy it is capable of with the heart and will) is nurtured. So ever since then I’ve been on a path to get asceticism right, to wonder what it looks like here, now, in the modern world, in urban Los Angeles or rural Vermont. What I’ve learned is that on the other side of that battle with the body, is a different battle, one where I don’t fight against my body, but I inhabit my body fully, with the greatest love and respect, in order to fight a greater fight. That is, the fight to move through the world with curiosity and compassion, and to be present on the earth, and in love. And the body is not a barrier to this, like I perhaps once thought, but rather, it is our only hope.
Over the last couple of years I’ve come to a place where the next step seemed to be to see what hormone therapy could do for me. I’m currently on biweekly testosterone injections, and at the moment it feels like this has been the last nail in the coffin of my struggles with food, my body, gender, and the troubled relationship between those things. I’m on a lower dose than many trans men so my levels aren’t as high as “average” male levels, but all the same, the psychological shift has been remarkable. It’s hard to say to what extent my psychological welfare is connected to the subtle—yet vitally important to me—physical changes I’ve gone through. But I no longer feel the need to “fight” my body, and no, it’s not because I’m stronger, faster OR in better shape than I was “pre-testosterone”. I don’t want to perpetuate false gender stereotypes that relate to exercise and fitness… and in fact, I know I’ve been in far better shape in the past, at least if we’re talking purely physically. But at what cost did that come? Simply put, I reached a point where I wanted to have the opportunity to have a healthy relationship with fitness, instead of use it as a crutch. That meant admitting that I badly needed to express a masculine identity, in the social world as well as within my own self (and I’m not so convinced that the two are so separate—I don’t know how much I believe in a pre-existent self at all… although don’t tell that to my doctors because they might take my T prescription away!) :P

Healing the wounds of body dysphoria had been a long time coming, and affirming this thing people call “gender identity” had something to do with it. Gender reassignment is not something that’s done to you… it’s something that you do to yourself, and it’s always first linguistic and symbolic, before it’s anything else (and it may not ever be “anything else”). I wonder what it’s like to be a cis gender woman and also be an athlete whose practice is self-affirming… unfortunately I’ll never know because I’ve never felt like a girl. But the fact that I know several amazing women who are quite exemplary practitioners of mindful and compassionate “asceticism”, whether it’s yoga, martial arts, climbing or some other bodily practice, reminds me that in the end, it’s all about transcending self-limiting attitudes we have about ourselves, whether we’re men or women, cis or trans.

***
The balance I feel physically has brought with it an odd kind of freedom whose effects aren’t quite what I thought they would be. When you are unchained from something that—however unhealthily—defined and structured a great deal of your life, you can find yourself in a place where you need to re-calibrate your “ascetic” practice, as it were. And it’s not all triumphal and celebratory… in fact it’s downright scary, because it means you’ve let go of something to which you were very attached, and that creates a space, which can easily become a void. I’ve dealt with quite an odd brand of depression lately because, as a creative and poetic creature, I’ve always thrived on a certain kinds of absence. Many artists, mystics and scholars experience this, and I’m no exception. The absence cannot be too great—or it will swallow you whole—but it can also not be too little—or else you might be lulled into a sort of creative amnesia, where you forget how to desire what is beyond. Right now I am needing to get to know my inner mystic in a whole new way, and see what his healthy discontent… his longing for the great mystery… looks like. Lately I’ve secretly feared that I’m experiencing a crisis of disenchantment in the death of a muse… my guilty mind frames it as a terrible (but maybe necessary?) consequence of my privileged ability to “cure” gender dysphoria with modern medicine. In this scenario my “power” or mystical inspiration (being characterized by discontent or lack) is taken away. But alas, this quaint story is merely another way for me to beat myself up, and it’s an unworthy notion, far from the truth.

I forget where, but I once heard the quote “discontent is the beginning of freedom.” It rings true for me, with a caveat; freedom is a tricky concept, and what many of us imagine (or are conditioned to imagine) “freedom” to be would actually, if it were to truly come to pass, be a sort of slavery to unmediated chaos. Too many folks casually imagine freedom to mean lack of constraint, theoretically enabling a vast multitude of unrestricted choices and courses of action. To many a free-market-loving liberal subject, “freedom” is an actual material state of existence, defined by what one is able to do with or concerning material resources. But this notion is a red herring; a carrot-on-a-stick; bait for a well-hidden trap. Why? Because there can be no agency in a void. Meaningful action can only arise from constraint. So too, real “individuality”—empowered subjectivity—can only arise from the collective, to paraphrase a quote from the EZLN.

Thus, I would modify that initial quote about discontent being the beginning of freedom; Discontent can inspire work that produces feelings of empowerment and autonomy… those holy moments of union between the will, the heart and the body, so powerful because they are one part ephemeral and one part eternal, seeming to open up a crack in the surface of things that allows you to peer into the universe’s dark, glittering center. These feelings are transient and they emerge like bright and crackling sparks out of a process… a flow that will not ever slow down, stop, or wait for you. The feeling of “freedom” is epiphenomenal… it rises and falls, like a waveform, in tandem with the process of your life and work. It’s not a destination, it’s not a currency, and it’s certainly not an essential state of being. Like your mana pool (if you’re a role-playing gamer), it’s a mercurial feeling that is coupled with your actions in the world. It’s very important for me to remember this. That freedom is a state of mind… and well, “freedom ain’t free”. Now it is here; now it is gone… but there’s no holding onto it, because it only works through that binary oscillation.

Discontent is an important spiritual process, indeed, it is imperative to the spiritual journey. It dictates where the path will go, where the line will point. It is holy suffering, it is being in love, it is that which orients all earth creatures, great and small. As such it is, indeed, at the root of mysticism. Sometimes I am afraid that this muse disappears… I lose sight of her and stand, idle in the woods, without any trace of a trail to follow. So then I stop trying to search for her, not knowing that she’s behind me the whole time. When I take a step back, I realize that the crisis of lost inspiration or lost creativity or lost hope is merely the muse giving chase, in her wrathful Kali-form. And the only way out is to chase back.

***

For now we see in a mirror, darkly, but then we will see face to face.

 1 Corinthians 13:12

Related posts:
The Orthodoxy of Embodiment: Gender Heresy/Gender Magick in Human Culture

The Orthodoxy of Embodiment: Gender Heresy/Gender Magick in Human Culture

Or: The Shifting Roles of Gender-Benders, Crossers or (insert other verbal noun here) in the Ongoing Drama of Civilization, and the phenomenological "Which-craft" of the Destabilization of Fundamental Ontological Categories That Such People Perennially (and with a multitude of variable effects) Enact Within Their Mother-Cultures

…In which I discuss the strange, magical and often counter-intuitive phenomenon of how (in my limited experience and humble opinions) the people most "accepting" of gender-heretics are people who live like Americans lived 200 years ago. I also speculate on why this is so.

You can only "bend" gender in a system that's too rigid to begin with

-Paraphrase of a thought by Leslie Feinberg

Humans are social, visually oriented creatures and gender is one of the sets of signs by which we communicate. But gender is not merely an arbitrary assemblage of signs, it is in a way a special sign (or perhaps "signing") that occasions a vast repertoire of more mundane significations. Thus it is a platform or interface, existing as a hypostasis of meanings from which other meanings emanate. It is a "ground of many signs" if not of all signs. Because of its coupling with the flesh (and not just coupling with patterns of behavior, as with the construction of sexual orientation) I think "gender" deserves special critical attention, especially when discussing to what extent it is socially constructed.

*First, a necessary disclaimer. It won't do to simply claim that gender is either a social construction or that it is a product of biological determinism. There is no easy answer. First of all, to denigrate the idea of social construction and its value is to miss the critical point that for humans, things that "exist" largely in the realms of language, symbol and process are NO LESS REAL than material things (again, as far as humans are concerned. Other animals, that's another story). We are humans, social mammals of a high order, and so to say that something is "socially constructed" is not actually to say that it's "not real", "fake", "less real" or that it is "bad". Such appraisals and value judgements are actually the result of projecting one's own conservative, misguided assumptions onto the discussion. In actual fact, to say something is socially or culturally constructed is to acknowledge its incredible power and leverage in human life and experience. Therefore, the joke is on you if you reject social constructivism out of hand. Just a word of warning because I've been there. ;)

I must emphasize that I for one am not interested in implicating or shaming others through a discussion about how we should "all" abandon gender, whatever that means. What follows is not some pretentious, political call to action, (although it might consist of one I direct at myself, which is of course my own business). Rather it is philosophy, it is questioning as worship of the perennial trickster-deities of myth, magic and mysticism. It is not cynical exposition or muckraking, as critiques of capitalism or other hegemonic systems are often seen, but rather it is a curious homily, a reverent, open discovering, necessarily iconoclastic because nothing is sacred other than the pursuit of revealing what is hidden, at least where possible (through the subjective experiences of the ones who are "othered"), and compassion for all oppressed peoples. Just to get this out of the way, I don't believe that we can live without categories, unless we devolved into marsupials or fish or something that doesn't have complex language. Categories create necessarily tensions, including categories that deal with gender and sex. Without identity there can be no identity crisis. And neither one is better or more desirable than the other. Which is better, the crest of a wave or the trough? It's a ridiculous question—they are both inter-complementary components of the waveform. So it is with categories. Nature creates the corporeal 'category' of species, which even then is not fixed, and often that category acts as a platform for deviation or mutation. Then after a long time, perhaps the category has moved, perhaps it encompasses other flesh, other boundaries. It is the eternal swing dance of entropy. But the category, however fuzzy its borders are, is never eradicated, and no one is saying it should be. But people ARE saying that we should see categories for what they are, in the course of cultural, historical, and even (in the case of biological categories) geological time. I write about this, about the category of gender, because being a person with non typical gender presentation (and identity) in the world I live in today is a fascinating journey that constantly yields unpredictable discoveries for both myself and those around me, as I pilot this somatic vehicle through human space. It also yields many questions about about cultural history, particularly the history of "gender liminality", which has yet to be fully written. Many people seem to believe that transgender is a "new" thing. Like it's a new social trend that has developed out of gay liberation. I guess that's easy to think if you watch too much TV and have never thought about it before (many of us). In reality, like with many identities, new spaces have been created—or found—in society that allow transgender identities to exist and (re)invent themselves, but as with gay/lesbian identity, the *behaviors* have existed as far back as the historical records take us. But the behaviors are often occluded, hidden behind the comprehensive labels we stick on top of them. It is such naming systems that are modern, and culturally derived—and that indeed accounts for a lot, because words are important. We take for granted these days entire concepts about what the self is and can be, but modern Western personhood, and the things it consists of (like "identities", hobbies, career, gender, life goals etc.) has not always been what it is today. I find this idea endlessly thought-provoking.

I just read the essay My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage by Susan Stryker, a transsexual woman. Written in 1994, it is a foundational text in the trans-disciplinary (and also "post-normal" in the sense of breaking down barriers between the academy and activism) field of transgender studies. I’m just beginning to realize how many radical queer warrior-poets she’s influenced, including some of my favorite lyric essays like "Monster Trans" by Boots Potential and the poem "The Seam of Skin and Scales" by the blogger Little Light (the authors are either genderqueer or transgender). Stryker's essay is simply iconic (and iconoclastic!) and totally transcends the (often classist)boundaries of academic writing… as it very much should. For anyone not familiar with it, it is an intensely moving and bold manifesto reclaiming and subverting “monster” (and, also “creature” as this previously self-defined Earthling/Faun-kin was delighted to find) as identities from which authentic, unpredictable, non-deterministic and integral consciousness emerges—upending heteronormative and cis-sexist assumptions about what these "monstrous" or corporeally-heterodox beings are supposed to be like. And that consciousness has a few things to say about the orthodoxy of the flesh… :) At its time of writing it was a complete inversion of the at times hateful criticism that transsexuals were getting from the first-world feminist movement, which explicitly described the monstrousness of the "constructed" transsexual body as a sinister arm of the patriarchy, as well as a symptom of its derangement. To some feminists, the transsexual, particularly the male-to-female transsexual, represented an ultimately "patriarchal" attempt in an oblique and masked way to infiltrate and control women's space. This is of course, a ridiculous set of claims, and such hate and audacity from the most privileged group (of the oppressed)—white first-world cisgender woman feminists is enough to make any transgender person's blood boil. Styker made darn the sure boiling of her own blood would fuel one of the most amazing pieces of writing I've ever read. She wastes no time getting straight to the point in the first paragraph of the monologue:

"The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster's as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.

I am not the first to link Frankenstein's monster and the transsexual body. Mary Daly makes the connection explicit by discussing transsexuality in "Boundary Violation and the Frankenstein Phenomenon," in which she characterizes transsexuals as the agents of a "necrophilic invasion" of female space (69-72). Janice Raymond, who acknowledges Daly as a formative influence, is less direct when she says that "the problem of transsexuality would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence," but in this statement she nevertheless echoes Victor Frankenstein's feelings toward the monster: "Begone, vile insect, or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust. You reproach me with your creation" (Raymond 178; Shelley 95). It is a commonplace of literary criticism to note that Frankenstein's monster is his own dark, romantic double, the alien Other he constructs and upon which he projects all he cannot accept in himself; indeed, Frankenstein calls the monster "my own vampire, my own spirit set loose from the grave" (Shelley 74). Might I suggest that Daly, Raymond and others of their ilk similarly construct the transsexual as their own particular golem? (1)"

Well, that's what I call "bringing it". She saw your "monster" and your "transsexual menace" and raised ya' a manifesto by an expert on the subject.

And now for some earthling pride:

“A creature, after all, in the dominant tradition of Western European culture, is nothing other than a created being, a made thing. The affront you humans take at being called a “creature” results from the threat the term poses to your status as “lords of creation,” beings elevated above mere material existence. As in the case of being called “it,” being called a “creature” suggests the lack or loss of a superior personhood. I find no shame, however, in acknowledging my egalitarian relationship with non-human material Being; everything emerges from the same matrix of possibilities.

…Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself. “

(emphasis mine)

Ah yes. (I write this in 21st century Los Angeles, having migrated here from a little shire town in the tundra so I can attend graduate school) And I don't know about where you are from, dear reader, but here in America, here in Generation Y, we are all cyborgs, monsters, mythical beasts that have been exploded and put back together again by the fragmentation inflicted on our bodies and minds by culture, by media, by texts and hyper-texts and biomedical technology and by the collapse of space and time. Even if we think of ourselves as heterosexual and completely gender-conforming, well, we've still "suffered" the fulfillment of Marxist prophecy. (I use "suffer" in its antiquarian meaning, analogous to the Latin "passio", "to experience"). I will come back to this point later in this essay. By the way, I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing when you get the chance. It's not long, but it is a deep, and alive text. Every paragraph is delightfully electrifying and fur-bristling.

Stryker's meditations unleashed and legitimated a whole mountain, whole ecologies of thoughts within me, both academic and personal, as I've been wrestling with the demons (or self-styled priests, perhaps) of what I'll call "orthodox embodiment" for much of my life, definitely all of what might be called my "adult life". Naming myself as transgender, though empowering and productive, has not seen the demise of this battle, because now there is a whole new set of problems, a whole new "orthodoxy" to contend with. But I want to be free of orthodoxy, completely! I want my position in the "religion of gender" to match my spiritual position, which is, I am a mystic, one who walks that razor edge between saint and heretic, ecstasy and agitation, sacred and profane. Others define such people in relation to the binary spectrum of Orthodoxy/Heresy after the fact, in acts of retroactive continuity. Mystic/heretics don't define themselves in relation to it—that's not how they articulate their own, lived personhood. I am not attached to neither "orthodoxy" nor "heresy", because in all spheres those are merely constructed categories, devised by and meant for people who control lots of other people, not for humble little me. I continue to re-emerge to myself as a creature who, yes, is transgender, but NO, does not want to be "cured", because if society sees me as male, I will be just as fucking queer as I was when I was a "female." I face the reality, both terrifying and liberating, of being in a space of gender ambiguity and fluidity and "transition" perhaps for my whole life, but not out of confusion. Not at all. But because there are some people who really are somewhere between male and female… and even if I ever look completely male on the "outside", I will, essentially, have an "intersex" body. There is no way some aspect of hybridity can ever be eradicated. And I, as well as a whole new generation of transgender youth, don't want to eradicate it.

There is an undeniable sense in which the appearance of ambiguous or "transgressive" gender presentations or bodies in our visual field actually has the power to change us, and to do so in fundamental ways. This is achieved though the manipulation of cues that normally act as signifying anchors, suspending each person, and indeed, whole societies, in a relational gel that has the feeling of being fixed. Whether we like it or not, the bodies of other humans, in the course of our perception, act as referents to aspects of both other selves and OUR selves. Thus, viewing bodies (any bodies, not just "non-normative" ones) can occasion breakdowns of barriers between subject and object that usually remain relatively solid and do not belie much plasticity or permeability. Indeed, this subject/object "wave-particle collapse" (to borrow a term from quantum physics) has been explored by neuroscientists in studies of the neurological correlates of empathy and imitation. There is an extent to which, when viewing others perform a certain physical action, neural pathways corresponding to the motor performance of that action are activated in primates (and ostensibly humans) without them actually performing that action. In other words, when we view another body performing a distinct action (especially a meaningful one, like reaching for food or mating) our brains simulate that action. Our brains similarly respond when viewing physical pain be inflicted on others, though the intensity of the felt empathy is modulated by circumstances like if we know the person or how much we like or dislike them. Additionally, there is evidence that similar mirroring occurs when viewing basic emotions (in facial expressions), even able to be traced to micro contractions in our own facial muscles. Much of this mirroring is automatic and we don't have control over it. Mimicry and mirroring is literally built into us, from the level of the neuron to our physical movements.
There is a sense in which we—the human family—are all one flesh. And our brains know it.

Inter-sexed, cross-dressing, and androgynous beings (or chimeric beings that transgress species boundaries) have long represented shamanic or super-natural power in both mythologic and ritualistic dimensions. Such bodies are indisputably sites of rupture. The potential benefit, danger, or other utility of such rupture has been evaluated in a whole range of ways by different human cultures and civilizations. I want press the point that there really is a sense in which people have seen, interpreted, imagined or even felt such bodies—shapeshifting, gender-crossing, hermaphroditic or monstrous bodies— as having causal effects on the world and on other beings. Being able to be more than one thing or contain more than one essence, in the course of much of our history (where we believed in souls, spirits and other essentializing substances) has indicated a concomitant ability to possess unique perceptual abilities or to be able to receive a wider spectrum of sensory or ethereal information (i.e. see into other dimensions or have mystical visions). Or, on the negative side, it could be interpreted as demon possession.

But maybe these fantasies of magical power and material causation are grounded in the phenomenology of the crisis of encountering a "monstrous" or mixed body, and naturally relating oneself to it in all the ways that we are wont to do. No wonder gender non conforming or gender-crossing folk have been variably called "witch" or "saint", "miracle" or "monstrosity", depending on who is doing the name calling! An imperative question is, of course, who gets to profit off of these "sites of rupture", to name them as either sacred or profane? Is it a transgender person themselves? Is it their family, kin group or tribe, or their persecutors? Is it the ones who "cure" them—whether it is exorcising a demon or administering medical care?

Kate Bornstein discusses this anxiety or "identity crisis" (that is simultaneously a double crisis of naming both the self and the other) in her description of the scene in the film The Crying Game where, on seeing the body of his lover revealed for the first time as transsexual, one of the protagonists vomits due to shock, as he previously did not know of his love object's transsexuality. Bornstein shrewdly notes that despite the hype surrounding the film, no one gave a critical glance at this intensely visceral scene, perhaps "because it would draw focus to the other side of revulsion: desire" (237, The Transgender Studies Reader). She continues:

"His vomiting can be seen not so much as a sign of revulsion as an admission of attraction, and the consequential upheaval of his gender identity and sexual orientation." (ibid.)

In the proverbial encounter with the transsexual or androgynous body, I suspect that the more fixed our notions of identity are, perhaps the more disruptive (for better or worse) such an encounter can be. As Foucault and others have shown, fixed identity categories like gay, lesbian or heterosexual are only there in the first place due to civilizing structures that are largely historically contingent. So long as such identities are understood to be fixed, essential, cosmically orienting (and thus containing soteriological possibilities), and self-contained behind the skin of each individual (that is, non-collective), encounters with such bodies will run the risk of being experienced and framed as potentially threatening, more so because what exactly is being threatened is often not understood due to psychological and linguistic barriers that are culturally upheld. I wonder, especially after mulling over Susan Stryker's monster manifesto, if a visual encounter with the transsexual body (and/or transsexual subjectivity) not so much symbolizes to the viewer the crisis of fragmentation of the self, but in fact represents a resolution of that fragmentation. In an ironic turn of events, within a society undergoing social change faster than can be psychologically accommodated, where fragmentation of identity—ALL our identities, whether normative or not—is both seeded and profited off of by capitalist society, the stitched-together, DIY transsexual body both represents a sought-after or nostalgic integrity AND simultaneously parodies it. Either way it is easy to see how it becomes an ideal target for derision.

In Transgender Liberation, Feinberg focuses on the societal/collective manifestation of this identity anxiety in her survey of historical campaigns of oppression and violent persecution waged on gender non-conforming people by imperial authorities and institutions. In this essay—foundational to transgender studies as well as transgender consciousness in the U.S.— Feinberg engages in a Marxist analysis of the treatment of gender-different individuals, and alludes to just some of the ways in which they have long been the casualties of the game of empire building. Records of such attitudes date back over two thousand years, and some of the first extant evidence of such persecution exists in the book of Deuteronomy (c. 7th century B.C.E.) Gender nonconforming people, while even celebrated and valued in communal, pastoral, often polytheistic contexts, become targets of the regulatory and organizational agendas of centralized governments that are the colonizers of less socially complex and less hierarchical societies. Since such bodies represent rupture on multiple ontological dimensions, what they signify is contested and can be inverted on a dime by those who are in charge of the means of production (of meaning).

"A glance at human history proves that when societies were not ruled by exploiting classes that rely on divide-and-conquer tactics, "cross-gendered" youth, women and men on all continents were respected members of their communities." (p. 207, from the Transgender Studies Reader)

A gender nonconforming person in a more closed, small scale (and by that fact more egalitarian, even if only in a strictly statistical sense) society could be valued for their difference (where deviance from the norm is seen as potentially conferring strategic benefits to the whole group). However, such a person can be seen as a liability by a more hierarchical, large-scale and centralized society. This seems especially true of societies whose size, complexity, goals (or a combination thereof) lead them to deploy religious or moral ideologies as homogenizing mediums. Ironically, in imperial or colonial situations, gender variance, and the possibility of more fluid roles, could epitomize to the hegemony the fear of insurrection. Feinberg emphasizes that for much of European history, the moving target of "witch" has often rested on women who engaged in gender-transgressive behavior (for their time, not necessarily behavior which we would today see as gender transgressive). Such behavior could include but was not limited to a woman who was not a consecrated virgin, anchoress (or otherwise connected to the Church) living alone, not marrying, practicing herbalism, cross-dressing or having same-sex relationships.

I've experienced surprising acceptance among rural folks in New England. I've met and have known lots of folks that, while I'm not sure would be considered "rednecks" according to the popular representations, are definitely considered the ecologically-minded equivalent, (we call them green-necks in Vermont). They are people who don't have much or any experience living in urban environments and have little or no connection to television and/or representations that come out of Hollywood. Usually living in geographically remote places, saltwater farms or cabins in the Green Mountains, they live somewhere on the continuum of "off the grid" that encompasses symbolic and social disconnect from greater pop culture and corporate entities to, say, a literal disconnect from the electric grid. They are pragmatic and utilitarian people, survivors, people you wouldn't normally think would look kindly on mohawks, tattoos, piercings and gender ambiguity, much less all rolled into one person! Then again, I grew up in rural Vermont and have spent my whole life there up until recently, so that has supplied me with some cultural access that I perhaps couldn't otherwise have if I'd grown up in an urban environment. I'll never forget the time when I was volunteering at Northeast Animal Power Field Days in Tunbridge, Vermont. This is a multi-day gathering, on historic old fairgrounds, of teamsters who work with oxen, horses and mules. There is an emphasis on people who do it not just for hobby, but who actually run their farms or woodlots on draft power. It's chock full of educational workshops as well as field demonstrations and vendor exhibits, pretty much everything you'd expect from a proper old-school ag fair. At this gathering, octogenarian libertarians, conservative families with kids in 4H programs, Vermont secessionists, and young progressive college or graduate age activists on the front lines of the new "back to the land" movement all mingle with each other out of common joys and passions. The political undertones are there, expressed on countless bumper stickers with slogans like "Oil is Over", or "Oil: The Original 'Alternative' Energy", but such views are neither overt or pretentious nor ignored or disputed. No one is threatened by anyone else. If you can't tell, this amazing intersectional social, political, and productive space is one of my happy places. I think that was either the first or second gathering ever, and I saw license plates from all over the northeast and eastern seaboard. But anyways, one of the most amazing demonstrations I saw was by a fellow from Connecticut, definitely well into his 80's, who brought his team of oxen up to Vermont with him for the Field Days. When I encountered him he had them yoked to a cart and on display for all to see. As they stood there, epitomizing the sublime blend of tranquility and raw power that bovines do, he lectured about his experiences raising and training them. I specifically remember him detailing the painstaking and artful process by which their horns are weighted and capped so as to not inflict injuries on themselves or their driver. Afterwards, when he was receiving questions from the crowd, I went up to tell him how his oxen were the most beautiful I'd ever seen and to express my interest in oxen driving. At that point, I'd had several years of farm jobs behind me, mostly at small-scale operations where the only machine around was, other than the vacuum pump that ran the milking machines, the occasional and often antique tractor. And more specifically I had some amateur experience driving horses and mules on a mostly draft-powered dairy farm I'd apprenticed at in Upstate NY, a summer for which I am forever grateful. As I related my experiences to this fellow (I forget what question or questions I actually did ask) I'll never forget the grace and friendliness in his demeanor. It was more than just being polite. I mean he didn't blink, and I perhaps only then started to realize how much I wasn't used to people in that generation and from a rural background completely looking past my appearance, effortlessly, no less. Our interaction was one between two farmers, two people whose identities, albeit in very different cultural settings, had been so much shaped by a relationship to the land. Not just ay relationship either, but an embodied one, one that was expressed through direct physical interaction with ecologies and with big, powerful, beautiful animals that were our partners in stewardship. In my case of course that relationship was not something that I was born into or inherited from my family, but something I sought out, and yes, often with a hint of romance. But this guy didn't have any hint of a smirk in his smile (it's funny when you define your interactions with folk by what they DON'T do, but such is the life of some of us), and for one of the first and most memorable (but not only) times in such an interaction, I felt seen.

Since then, I've had many more such interactions, not just with people entrenched in an agrarian world, but also in the spaces I've wandered into through my still nascent journey into the "primitive" skills community, where often quite solitary and stoic folks—hunters and trappers and First Nation people—of the Baby Boomer generation or older rub shoulders with young, politically charged (and needless to say privileged!) people like myself. These experiences have given me a great deal of humility… something that I think is explicitly NOT achieved by exclusionary or elitist attitudes that paradoxically probably come from the same desire (to instill a measure of respect in an 'ignorant' or ostensibly misguided younger generation).

It took me a while to figure these dynamics out, because sometimes I'd feel, and do feel, that in cities, urban and suburban environments I get more stares and weird looks than in rural areas. People are more defensive, wary perhaps. This seems so counter intuitive because cities are supposed to be hotbeds of "diversity", right? Vermont and Maine are some of the whitest states in the union… people don't "understand" diversity there. Right? …Wrong. I think much of it has to do with a particular brand of [Yankee] libertarian ethics that predominate among rural people of particularly northern Appalachia. The key is that many such people are, in libertarian fashion, fiscally conservative but socially liberal. They are against government regulation, not just in the realm of markets, but in all realms. I think this really has an effect, whether conscious or not (I suspect not) on the ethics and aesthetics of identity and personhood, in some positive ways I think. The essential anti-government and anti-state intervention stance and the constellation of resulting outlooks that it precipitates effect a kind of self-reliance and rejection of all language of empire, including that which serves to constrain non-heteronomative expression. Why is this so? I suspect that it has much to do with the resulting subjective position in which such people are not principally self-identified or objectified as consuming units, because of their distal (in terms of both space and ideology) relationship with large-scale hierarchical social, political or economic structures. For many of these people, their senses of self are intimately connected to production, not consumption. And I don't mean production in a consumerist context, I mean production of things for their own use or for the use of close kin or local community. Production in this sense is not just production of children or of labor-time vaulted by some abstract overarching economic system, but production of food, skills, soil (fuck yeah compost), and whatever things necessary to maintain traditions of cultural and ecological stewardship. Ironically, when our prime job is to consume, it is easier to cling to and unconsciously "protect" the only primal production left to us—childbirth and parenting, which are in the dominant society represented optimally in conjunction with heterosexuality, marriage and monogamy. This is definitely changing, but still to a large extent true. You might be thinking that I'm mistaken, and I'm just talking about wealthy back-the-the-landers and hobby farmers. But I'm not. I'm talking about working class people, who I often would only call "privileged" in the sense that they are blessed with the knowledge of how to live a self-sufficient rural life, which didn't used to be a privilege, it used to be a fucking birthright.

I've found difference and diversity is valued more at the level of smaller communities. I'm not saying urban, more consumerist environments are less tolerant per se, but I've found that in small, close-knit communities difference is valued more readily, and it is less prone to being categorized or labeled as something before being valued. This isn't just true of times long gone, as in autonomous pre-modern tribes of pastoral herding communities in the mountains of Europe (as Feinberg alludes to) but also just in certain contemporary rural settings, too. I think there is an evolutionary explanation for this. I think that at a small group level, especially when that group is relatively regionally isolated, the skill set of the group is very important. Differences, as long as they do not cause physical illness or severe disability, are tacitly understood to present possible unpredictable expansions of that skill set. Examples of this are non-neurotypical individuals like people who are hypersensitive to sensory input—such people could become empaths, psychics or soothsayers. People with visionary propensities or ambiguous genders could be shamans or priests, people with attention "disorders" or "compulsions" could be the best plant identifiers or animal trackers you've ever met because of their indexical and categorizing brains and attention to detail. When you are a small community trying to survive, or just trying to thrive, difference and diversity equal novelty, and you want the maximum chance to benefit from novelty, so to make the most of your environment and situatedness. After all, nature herself is a freak for diversity, and without it not only would we not have the complex ecologies that we do, but intelligence would have never evolved past a certain point.

But, as soon as a ruling elite gains sovereignty over a wide range of such smaller groups, such difference is no longer an asset, but a liability. The key is that the one doing the appraising of what proper (=useful) expression or behavior is shifts from the subjectivity of the group to that of the empire. From a distant position of theoretical top-down control, heirarchs can deploy homogenizing and regulatory ideologies and technologies, and ideas (manifested in universal ethical and moral codes) take the place of face to face speech, which flows two ways and is naturally more democratic—indeed, the true ground for human negotiation. When centralized civilization occurs, and this civilization is concerned with its nationality, with its national identity, naturally inclining to the aspiration of "alpha nation", differences that might otherwise be valued or valuable become monstrous. This reflects the perceived power of "monsters", "freaks" and "heretics" as insurrectionary agents who could potentially weaken the structuring of empire.
For an army to be successful, maximum uniformity and conformity at the level of individual soldiers is critical for the success of the chosen endeavors of the commander-in-chief. It is, in fact, a top-down will and intent that must be expressed through the coordination of many individual agents. This takes a really high level of organization, and its truly hard to not admire it, however awful it could potentially be (and I don't think it always has to be awful). In many ways though, the success and prospering of civilization has necessarily involved a deliberate reversal of organic ecological principles of bottom-up evolution of systems. Even cultural systems that have evolved in that bottom-up fashion (economies) still get appropriated in terms of top-down, hegemonic goals.