“How would our experience of reality be different if
existence were commonly imagined to be a collective affair?”

Reading about Karen Barad, her influence in multispecies thinking in the issue of Antennae Magazine on Multispecies Intra-actions…

— the interview with Kirksey— Pindell’s writing on Beuys and Decomposition (de-composing, compost, breakdown seems like an interesting counterpoint to what we think of as “production” and there’s more and more “work” in that category in the human world: handling returns, doing repair work, recycling and handling waste)

Kirksey interview:
– poaching from ethology, a field conventionally understood as “the study of animal behavior in a natural environment.”
– queering science, the performative turn. possibly some clues on how to write this Multispecies Union manifesto
– why the term nonhuman emphasizes the binary too much; more-than-human world also.
Multispecies world(ing) does better.
–
Links:
Feral Atlas
Gleaning Stories, Gleaning Change

Pindell essay:
Considerations and etymology of aesthetics (misunderstood as beauty and used as a tool of power), with regards to decay, compost.

Kant – “German Ästhetik in the sense of a “science dealing with the principles of perception by the senses,” returning to the roots and rhizomes of the word” and “The original meanings of the word aesthetic are
relational, communicative, performative; to return to them is to queer several hundred years of capitalist commodification of the aesthetic experience. Aesthetic, as a verb and as a noun, parallels Barad’s definition of Agency: a relational enactment rather than a quality that one passively has or observes.”

“If we accept Barad’s thesis that phenomena (including ourselves) are performatively created in the world’s
ongoing reconfiguration of itself, then it follows that our experience of those phenomena (including ourselves) are also dynamically intra-active experiences.[x] Aesthetics are intra-actively performative communications, a dynamic dialogue of perceptions and responses.“

Beuys’ Bog Action
Bernie Krause’s biophilic listening, Pauline Olivieros’ deep listening
Derrida: “The question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what ‘respond’ means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction.”
Paul Stamets on mycelial communication

My questions:
– What is poachable here?
– Need research on the aesthetics of work, labor, production and what could be transposed or expanded to encompass a multispecies world
– Ideas about listening sessions, regenerative practices, a systems approach to worlding
– Research into accumulation, regeneration– how to generate a multispecies list of demands?
– to shed the yoke of capitalism, and restore our vitality