I hang out with nepantleras, “those who facilitate
passage between worlds,” both people, and actually lots of objects. (Anzaldúa
2002) Increasingly I think of writing as a cognitive companionship humans have
arranged with their favorite objects and ecologies, managing and being managed through
and among complexly enfolded systems and artifacts.
A design fiction: (very) roughly 5000
years ago in (at least) two segmenting ecologies on our planet humans messed
around with some cognitive companions, each coordinating multiple agencies
characteristically. In Mesopotamia tiny clay token sheep were enclosed in clay
envelopes with markings indicating what was inside. In the Andes strings were
wrapped around sticks and attached to a main cord. In the first case the
favored sensory technology for making was molding and inscribing clay. Worlds
set into motion from this sort of making eventually sustain so-called “true
writing”: that is to say, writing that companions preferentially with language.
In the second case makings involved spinning plant and animal fiber and
feeling, tying, and untying knots. Worlds set into motion there eventually
sustain a different sort of writing, one said to be “without words,” instead
preferentially coordinating actions and practices directly as their very
ecologies. (Boone 1994)
This second sort
of companionship, at the very edge of what has been mostly meant by this word
“writing,” is meaningful today precisely because machine language is binary,
and it turns out, so is this knotted device, or khipu, and so are elements of the worlds it coordinates. This
“design fiction” speculatively entangles “design, science, fact and fiction” as
a practice “that, hopefully, provides different, undisciplined ways of
envisioning new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices.... Design
Fiction is making things that tell stories. It’s like science-fiction in that
the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is
lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating about
the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite
imagination-filling conversations….” (Bleecker 2009)
Nepantleras – including the so-called wizards or
gurus of technology organizations – because they live in “enough worlds at the
same time,” in the words of technoscience theorist Lucy Suchman, are folks with
a feel for work-arounds in ranges. (Suchman & Scharmer 1999) They practice
systems coordination and facilitate the work-arounds of collaboration, often through
the agency of the objects called by feminist Leigh Star “boundary objects.”
Star reflects on
the origins of the concept of a boundary object: “As I delved deeper into the
relations between developers and users, it became clear that a kind of
communicative tangle was occurring. I used the work of Gregory Bateson, who had
studied these sorts of communicative mishaps under the heading of ‘double
binds.’ As with Bateson’s work on schizophrenics, and what he called ‘the
transcontextual syndrome,’’ the messages that were coming at level one from the
systems developers were not being heard on that level by the users and vice
versa. What was obvious to one was a mystery to another. What was trivial to
one was a barrier to another. Yet, clarifying this was never easy. The users
liked the interface when they were sat in front of it. Yet, they did not know
how to make a reliable working infrastructure out of it. They would ask the …
team, who would reply in terms alien to them. I began to see this as a problem
of infrastructure – and its relative nature.” (2010: 610; Bateson 1972: 276)
Khipu, design
fictions, boundary objects, all these participate with nepantleras, not just to facilitate moving among worlds, but to
augment their realities: to learn and demonstrate how to be affected or moved,
how to open up unexpected elements of one’s own embodiments in lively and
re-sensitizing worlds. Collaborations and many makings across
transcontextualities are among the projects of a feminist transdisciplinary
posthumanities and its work to live in enough worlds at the same time, to
re/write cognitive companionships, and to open to ecological complexity.
