My “non human” is television. Well, sort of. (Bateson 1972 [1954]) And “sort of”
is the relationality I work with and out of to participate with, among, and as
another actant in eddying washes and distributed interactivities of “tools,
bodies, networks, animals, climate, media, or biomes” as SLSA's call for papers puts it for 2012. Clarity and unmixed
metaphors are not my aspirations. Indeed I seek out transcontextual confusions
for the very “tangles” for communication (Star & Ruhleder 1996:127; Haraway 2011)
motivating a feminist transdisciplinary posthumanities. In the late sixties
Bateson challenged us to question “conscious purpose,” to recognize its worldly
effects, wondering about “orders of recursiveness” in “the hurly-burly of
organisms.” (Bateson 1968, 1979:201) My non human ecologies cannot get along
without registering the play of commercial entertainment amid restructuring
academies, being inside of and moved around literally by the very material and
conceptual structures analyzed, a kind of self-consciousness only partially
available for explicit discussion, never only “human.” TV idiom (Hopkins 1999) has a “sort of”
relationality presaged by a quipping Latour: “Reason today has more in common
with a cable television network than with Platonic ideas.” (Latour 1993:119) TV
is never simply a transparent platform and its agencies always include the non
human. Epistemological TV melodramas of the nineties play with sensation and
affect in terms that invite us to experience agencies only “sort of” conscious (King 2011),
even to work out and among the vibrant matters (Bennett 2010) that can be called new
feminist materialisms in their transdisciplinary entanglements (for example, Barad 2008 [2003]), only partially
available for explicit discussion.