IAMD Research

Engenderings: Gender, Politics, Individuation, Erin Manning

26/09/20 2:00 PM start time

Manning, Erin “Engenderings: Gender, Politics, Individuation” in Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. pp. 84-109. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 

READING NOTES

• “To reach toward skin through touch is to reach toward that which is in a continued state of (dis)integration and (dis)appearance”
• “reaching-toward is an engendering that qualitatively alters the relation between being and becoming”
• “The body posited as prior to the sign, is always posited or signified as prior” (Judith Butler/Bodies that Matter)
• “materiality of the signifier itself” (Judith Butler/Bodies that Matter)
• “To posit by way of language a materiality outside of language is still to posit that materiality, and the materiality so posited will retain that positing as its constitutive condition” (Judith Butler/Bodies that Matter)
• “expand on this notion of materiality, suggesting that what a body can do exceeds linguistic signification”
• “focus mainly on the ways in which touch exceeds language’s significability”
• “If politics is understood conventionally as that which renders some bodies legitimate in the name of and through language, a politics of touch can be thought as that which both supports the political and challenges it.”
• “bodies resist normative politics”
• “through reaching across the boundaries imposed by the body-politic.”
• “does engender” “individuation” “stands in the way of pre-constituted organizations of bodies”
• “As a practice of relation, touch reaches toward an exposition of matter and form as processual states. When I reach to touch you, I touch not the you who is fixed in space as pre-orchestrated matter/form. I touch the you that you will become in response to my reaching toward.”
• “one of the shortcomings of touch as a paradigm to a changing notion of politics is that we can touch one another in view of the norms
• by which we identify one another as individual rather than individuating bodies.”
• “Touch functions here as a medium of open-ended exchange: I respond not to your touch as such but to the potentiality your movement incites within my body. I respond to our reciprocal reaching-toward.”
• “Body to body, they will space time and time space.”
• “Tango that bends gender affiliations demonstrates how normative discourses can be subverted, in this case through a reaching-toward enacted through shared touch that produces infinite variations of movement.”
• “”The normative aspect of touch is constrained to an ontologization of touch where “I touch you” inscribes “I” and “you” as forms of Beingrather than becoming.”
• “On the other hand, touch as a concept that implies a reaching-toward is not ontological but ontogenetic. Reaching-toward, qualitative
• changes are expressed in and through the bodies in relation. These are qualities of movement rather than properties of Being. Touch as a reaching toward is not a question of Being. It is a question of becoming. Ontogenetic, touch is incorporeal, it is always beyond its-self, equal to its emergence.”
• Gilbert Simondon, individuation, “implies a leaving-behind of the concept of the individual as the pre-organized sum of stable form and inert matter.”
• “To engender is to explore the potentialities of form and matter at the level of individuations rather than identities.”
• “Relation occurs not between already-produced entities or individuals but as an aspect internal to the system of individuation itself: relation is constitutive of engendering. Engenderings are bodies in-formation.”
• “Being in-formation suggests that form is not a given but a tension between disparate possibilities where becoming precedes Being.”
• “Symbiosis as defined by Margulis suggests a process of individuation.”
• “Human bodies are composites of thousands of millions of years of interaction among highly responsive microbes. Symbiosis is the term Margulis gives this process of composition.”
• “defines symbiogenesis as “an evolutionary change by the inheritance of acquired gene sets””
• “Individuations become compositions that become populations that become multi-unit symbiotic systems.”
• “Positing engendering as my point of departure, what I seek to explore is how human sex practices (and adjacent politics of gender identity) are embedded in our historical and cultural roots8 as mementos to practices of segregation, imposed difference, essential traits.”
• “The concept of engendering invites us to think the project of gendering bodies differently, emphasizing the manner in which bodies individuate,”
• “dephases the body-as-identity, exposing the body to the effects of its reaching toward: the body becomes the multiplicity of its becoming and its having-become.”
• “In genetics, transductions refer to the transfer by a bacteriophage10 of genetic material from one bacterium to another. Simondon”
• “In positing gender as a principle of strict differentiation, form is placed onto matter in a way that calls forth a complete individual rather than an individuation.”
• “imagine life as an emergent property of complex autopoetic12 systems involving nonlinear feedback and combinatory processes.’
• “Symbiosis challenges the view that evolution is a competition among individuals where natural selection weeds out the weak individuals, leaving only the strong ones to survive. SET (Serial Endosymbiotic Theory) argues that the concept of the “individual” is misleading since, while the cells that come together to make a whole may be genetically related, more often “the ‘individual’ is composed of fused elements that are genetically distinct” “
• “All life has direct ancestry among bacteria: we are massive colonies of microorganisms. Human bodies are open, growing systems.”
• “Violence of individuation creates potential energy”
• “When evolution is used as a calculational process, individuals become the impetus for survival. Genes become the immortal actors in the fight for continuity. Bodies are conceptualized according to strict codes of conduct (Rayner 1997, 70).”
• “Symbiotic Planet, Lynn Margulis emphasizes three main points:(1) Human similarities to other life forms are far more striking than the differences; (2) Humans are not “better,” “more prolific,” or “more advanced” than any other species; (3) We live on a symbiotic planet.”
• “When we begin to think our worlds symbiotically, we be come aware that the worlds we create are altered by the very symbiotic\ processes that “we” always already are.”
• “I feel the movement beginning to take over our bodies. We begin to individuate together. A relation begins to take form. My body can no longer as easily be distinguished from hers. A symbiosis of movement begins to create engenderings we cannot yet pre
• dict. This makes us smile.”
• “I experience in tango a continual shift between the corporeal and the incorporeal that allows my body to matter differently.”
• “”Movement in the dance becomes the way I reach toward the potentiality of spacing time and timing space, challenging the boundaries of multiplicities-in-relation.”
• “In the case of gender politics, what too often happens is that energy is located only at the level of the individual body”
• “Bodies matter in excess of them-selves. As matter is potentialized, it actualizes into form. This form plays an in-forming role by exerting forces that limit the actualization of matter’s potential energy. This does not necessarily stop its actualization, but does in-form it. This process overspills the body’s envelope, suggesting that the body always exceeds its-self.”
• “Traditionally, the political public space (the nation) is define through the presence of men and contrasted to the apolitical, private space—the home—of women.1”
• “turning to the nation’s normative political systems usually reproduces the very same normative genderings.”
• “What happens to this schema if we emphasize the potential of engendering rather than positing gender as an already-defined category?”
• “Engendering exposes the mythical status of this dependence on conformity by calling forth a concept of relation that actively alters time and space as it points to the ways bodies produce matter and form.”
• “Relation occurs in-between, at the interstices between the spaces and times created by bodies as they reach toward one another.”
• “A politics of touch engages a milieu that is continually under construction. This milieu is incorporeal in the sense that it does not exist except in the relation that will emerge through individuations that have not yet materialized.”
• “Nature is abstract potential, leading us toward the Spinozean statement that we do not yet know what a body can do.”
• “Gender is not ontological, it is ontogenetic. To become gendered is to become more than one, but not just two. Being “more than one” is to exist in a metastable state that acknowledges the mutations of a body-in-relation that are not predetermined by a given ideal or an infrastructure that seeks to organize and categorize the realm of the biological possibilities of a body.”
• “Unlike possibilities, which are predetermined within their own systems, potential (or the virtual) designates a movement toward emergence. This virtual body is real but not yet actual. To become actual implies the emergence of new compositions. Matter and immateriality, corporeality and incorporeality are operative on adjacent planes, shifting to and through one another.”
• “Transduction is the movement through which individuations relate.”
• “Relation does not convey a separation between, for example, engendering and gender, but is borne in the emergence of gender within engendering, constituting the terms themselves as relational.”
• “For Spinoza, a body is not primarily an organism or an organization. It is an assemblage of kinetic particles and forces, of motion and energy.”
• “Coexistence is not simply a lack of resistance. It is an activation, a politics of touch.” (simondon)
• “Politics of touch operate within an affective-semantic structure quite foreign to nation-state politics.”
• “Bodies can be regulated, certainly, but bodies relate always beyond or in spite of these regulations,”
• “Engendering does violence to the state by substituting the concept of identity with individuation.”
• “We individuate in relation. Relationdoes violence to identity.”
• Entwurf (Heidegger), “Butler understands this moment of Entwurf as one of radical undecidability, the state prior to a decision in which one can never reach a “pure” context, since every context is “always already” retroactively constituted by a decision.”
• “Touch is a decision to engender that throws us off balance. A politics of touch asks us to be willing to lose our balance, momentarily, to not know in advance, to disagree. Antagonism is at the heart of a politics of touch. When this antagonism remains untheorized, we are left with a politics that understands consensus as the only alternative to antagonism.”
• “Antagonism is analogous to the potential violence of in-formation that creates the metastable systems through which individuations can take place.”
• “My engendering body is difference incorporated symbiotically, difference notsexed through stratified evolutionary narratives, but difference embodied through engenderings toward politics that reach toward differing understandings of what a body can do. “One does not represent, one engenders and traverses” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 364).”

This is too much highlighting and probably not helpful. Esp. as it was copy and pasted post.

INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS

Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge.

Margulis, Lynn. 1998. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. Amherst: Basic Books.
Margulis, Lynn, and René Fester. 1991. Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Margulis, Lynn, and Dorian Sagan. 1997. What Is Sex? New York: Simon and Schuster.

Entwurf (Heidegger)

26/09/20 3:35 PM

POST-READ

Manning does a much better job of making concepts and ideas tangible, uses coherent examples (dancing and symbiosis) to help me conceptualize ideas of movement, touch, relation, potentiality. Escaping a framework of evolution helps me grasp what it means to escape a framework of identity and ideology. It allows me to begin to get out of my own way in imagining possibilities and other ways of thinking of being / becoming. It also made me grateful for primary and secondary education and the efforts put into giving me a foundation of knowledge even if in politics that knowledge will be used as an antagonist. Thinking about children in the pandemic who are having their education disrupted (something I feel should be accepted) and what it would mean for a generation to set formal education aside for a year (I know the issue is more complex than that, but I feel my own burden of new mental load even as an adult).

I highlighted the text and will return to it. I am grateful that Maria-Belen has given us the whole book and am looking forward to listening to the audio posted. It is wild that I feel I am still learning how to read.

26/09/20 3:45 PM end time

27/09/20 7:30 PM start time

The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa, Njabulo S. Ndebele

Njabulo S. Ndebele. “The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa” In Journal of Southern African Studies Vol. 12, No. 2 (Apr., 1986), pp. 143-157

READING NOTES

• “history of the representation of spectacle.”
• “the most outstanding feature of South African oppression is its brazen, exhibitionist openness.”
• “problematic relationship between art and objective reality in South Africa: […] ‘…life itself is too fantastic to be outstripped by the creative imagination.’ ” (T.T. Moyana)
• ’emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, (the) exhaustion of the content by the form. ‘
• ” The writers of these stories seemed keen only to tell fantastic stories so that readers could enjoy themselves much.”
• “Creative writers simply titillated the readers with good stories, and the journalists concentrated on their work, writing about politics, sports, fashion, etc.”
• “emergence of … Protest Literature.”
• “the ritualistic enactment and the drawing of significant meaning … the aesthetic centre.”
• “the lack of specificity of place and character so that we have spectacular ritual instantly turned into symbol.”
• “…painting and sculpture where we are most likely to see grotesque figures in all kinds of contortions indicative of agony.”
• (Assumptions that this writing is unartistic, crude, too political…) Eurocentric school of criticism of African Literature imposed false assumptions…. “never enabled the critics using them to understand the real nature of much of what African Literature was doing and what its methods were.”
• protest literature… “never enabled the critics using them to understand the real nature of much of what African Literature was doing and what its methods were.”
• “They defiantly said: if you accuse us of being political hard luck, that’s what our writing is going to be because that is what the conditions dictate. The fault is not so much in the statement itself, but in the assumption that the statement reinforces.”
• “Siluma has moved away from merely reflecting the situation of oppression, from merely documenting it, to offerring methods for its redemptive transformation.”
• “rationality can be detected behind the brutality of the system”
• “It is an analytical story; a story designed to deliberately break down the barriers of the obvious in order to reveal new possibilities of understanding and action.”
• “Siluma has rediscovered the ordinary. […] ordinary is defined as the opposite of the spectacular… sobering rationality… forcing of attention on necessary detail”
• “even under the most oppressive of conditions, people are always trying and struggling to maintain a semblance of normal social order… constitutes the essential drama in the lives of ordinary people.”
• “we should be careful that that condemnation[of exploitive conditions] does not extend to condemning the necessity for work and the satisfaction that can result from it […] necessary political vilification of exploitation should be separated from the human triumph associated with work”
• “it is natural to expect that people engaged in every human endeavour ought to make a contribution towards the eradication of injustice. The problem[…]is that it now appears as if the means of combating the situation have become too narrow and constricting… everything must make a spectacular political statement… [easier to dismiss stories because] they offer no obvious political insight.”
• “vitality of the tension”
• “day-to-day lives of people […] constitute the very content of the struggle”
• “[if seeking to bring new society]… that newness will be based on a direct concern with the way people actually live.”
• “Most [writers] are victims of Bantu Education which has deliberately stunted the intellectual growth of the average African child.”
• “Political visions of the future have not reached art with sufficient, [or committed,] theoretical clarity.”
• “Young writers appear to have taken up the challenge, albeit unwittingly”

QUESTIONS

Who is Njabulo S. Ndebele?

What is the point of theorizing, reading critical theory? Why dedicate time to reading rather than rigourous making?

Why write an analysis of the spectacle vs the ordinary that includes critique of the weaknesses of the content?

What is the relationship between Ndebele and Manning’s texts? Why are they being presented alongside each other?

POST-READ

I am feeling a struggle in prioritizing the readings in my classes over making, even though I do not feel inspired to make anything specific. I guess I would write? I get into a spiral of thinking of having limited time and energy, and having x time to dedicate to my studies, of which I include “making,” although that is not my coursework right now. Intellectually I understand the use of equipping myself with knowledge, and that reading/writing/talking is a way of retaining information and methods of critical thinking. It is hard to make an argument for it when other people in my life do not see the benefit over it considering the amount of labour that goes into it, I have only just begun I am not so efficient yet.

Last night we watched No Direction Home, it was a wild ride. I am thinking a lot about Anne. It was difficult to watch as I am already grappling with the balances of time and having to learn to write and speak about art, one of the key challenges Dylan faced (although in the maw of the music-industrial-complex of pop-idols). The Rediscovery of the Ordinary articulates the reasons for a resistance to for “spectacular” literature being labeled “protest” literature, that it implies a “political and […] expository declaration of dissent,” and denies any literary or artistic value(p.19). Bob Dylan didn’t want to be shoehorned into being a protest artist, what he wanted to do was make and play music, and to be immersed in becoming an affective transducer. When he was positioned as an idol, he crumbled because he was no longer moving—or was being criticized for moving/changing—and he escaped.

It feels real shitty to write about boomer nostalgia that is not my own in response to decolonial cultural theory.

27/09/20 9:00 PM end time

Assignment

Related assignment (October 16, draft due. October 26-30, upload recording. Responses due Nov 6.):

• Record “introduction” through techsmith knowmia.
• Prepare written script, 7-9 minutes, 1000-1200 words.
• Share selected moment in life and reflect on it using Manning’s Engenderings OR Ndebele’s Rediscovery.

How does one aspect of either reading inform or resonate own experiences, contemplations and/or event that speaks to concepts+approaches described in chosen reading. Connections+parallels to own experiences as a way to share presences w/ class. Also evaluated on level of engagement w/ other sections post, respond to min 3 introductions, acknowledge how student used readings.

• We ask how it is that “we” perform as “subjects” and under what conditions of social life?
• What is the value of a first person introduction in online platforms?
• What affordances do interactive technologies, and the relationships (if any) initiated there, offer critical theorists spaces for collaboration?