What if we lived our lives as if we knew one another’s stories? And the stories of the objects around us—objects that we too often take for granted
“The inevitable cost of modernity” is a phrase that has become a self-fulfilling prophesy, one that none of us can afford to take for granted. One that we must creatively, collectively refuse. Rather than accepting “the inevitable cost of modernity,” we need to co-create infrastructures that support our different ethics—ethics counter to the norm. Drive less. Share vehicles for transportation. Buy less. Find and share what you think you need. Take more risks, take nothing for granted—collective, creative explorations into unfamiliar territories. These culturally-transformative possibilities are not one liners. They are not reductive They imply a commitment to the unknown, a commitment to explore the parameters of how we define need and want….
I recently returned from my peregrinations on Amtrak (built primarily by Chinese transcontinental railroad laborers)—a cross-country climate-justice performance-lecture tour focusing on how we can reconceive of externalities, sacrifice zones, and disparate impacts: humans and more-than-humans subjected to hyper-commodification and utilitarianism that renders vulnerable people, wildlife, and natural habitat “disposable.” Instead of the underlying racist, xenophobic, ethnocentric, anti-immigration implications of the double question: "Where are you from?"..."No....Where are you really from?" being directed at this “collateral damage” (often those who appear different from "us"), we should be asking this question about the objects in our daily lives that we take for granted. When this question is asked to people we are objectifying, we are framing those individuals as resources to be extracted. When this question is asked to objects in our daily lives, we are witnessing those objects as subjects. As ecotheologian Thomas Berry reminds us: “we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” Similarly, the universe is a collection of stories, not atoms.[2]
By recognizing their supply chains, life-cycle analysis, cradle-to-grave, their embodied energy—defined as local and global industrial and digital production (extractive mining, agribusiness, industrial dams, physical and economic wage slavery, data mining), consumption (advertising and the construction of desire), and disposal (greenhouse gases, toxicity in our water and soil, and electronic-waste), we are co-creating objects as active storytellers. Once we inhabit this recognition in both our individual, cellular bodies and our social bodies, we ignite our interrelational epigenetic potential. In this light, objects (ranging from slave labor/ sweat shop-enduring humans to single-use plastics) can no longer be reduced to utilitarian, expendable, and ultimately disposable resources.
Playing with collective creative risk taking, can we explore our epigenetic potential to not only imagine, but con-spire (breath together) other ways of being, collaborative becomings. In order to denaturalize ideologies that perpetuate interlocking systemic oppressions, we must contextualize our conversations within the Christianized, commercialized mind-body split. Like the dissolution of socialized mind-body binaries, reinvention of the private ruptures the borders of the public while interweaving (techne, the root of technology) art, politics, economics, work, and daily life. Merging the private with the public, we can generate ethical individual and collective eco-corporeal justice—occupying the intermedial. Infrastructures of storytelling—narratives as webs of local-global, personal-political sense-making—can help guide us through this process. Infrastructures of storytelling co-generate sensorial relationality in the face of "common-sense," status quo normalcy (remembering that Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech was originally titled: "Normalcy No More").
How can we shift our epidemic of individualism from consumer-convenience-waste culture bred entitlement to creative self-accountability that integrates interpenetrating sustainable changes in individual behavior, community action, infrastructural design, corporate accountability, and policy reform? This collaborative anthology calls for collective action that disrupts ossified superstructures; collective imagination in which each of us co-creates opportunities for public investment in humane infrastructures in which human rights and ecological resilience are implicit in every social system. Countering consumer convenience-culture, we invite citizen-activists to embody reciprocal, rhizomatic interrelationships: the personal is political as the political is personal. Two imbricated examples are gift economies and food justice.
To counter hegemonies of cultural erasure, we can play with “contact zones,” Bioregional Learning Centers such as my eco-action, gift-economy model S.O.U.L. (Shared, Opportunity, Used, Local) electrifies individual, community, corporation, infrastructure, policy paradigm changes as a collective practice of environmental justice, ethical consumerism, and community action. Equilibrium means galvanizing a constant shift and re-balance among these five components.[3] A central theme is how to integrate the personal with the political, the private with the public. S.O.U.L. generates “contact zones,” Mary Louise Pratt’s term for intermedial third spaces of cross-sector exchange, generate creativity through insatiable curiosity and a profound respect for and cultivation of difference.
Pernicious neocolonialism debilitates the vitality of “contact zones” and reinforces “sacrifice zones” that rely on the externalization of costs and a standard of living that is maintained at the expense of people, wildlife, and more-than-human ecosystems—all seen as dispensable, disposable. Such venal institutionalized norms jeopardize present and future generations. Ravaged through high-tech fabulations and economies of alienation, like with climate-crisis injustices, those least responsible for converging calamities are hardest hit. And these externalities, sacrifice zones, and disparate impacts are normalized as collateral damage. Clearly, there is no Plan B. No time to waste
Rather than asking how we can “save” or “conserve” industrial civilization (nation-state thinking/convenience-culture consciousness), my object-storytelling practice[4] explores how we can collectively embody an ethic of kinship. Driving my practice is a set of key questions:
Click on the image to enlarge.
We must examine the personal-political permeable borders of these intersecting questions. Together, we will challenge human exceptionalism and white modernity (both rooted in concepts of property and mind-body schisms) and will question what we take for granted as ostensibly inevitable. Instead of ignoring other peoples’ exploited labor as a resource, we can establish infrastructures that support our local communities—where economies and ecologies can co-evolve rather than be in competition or opposition, as in our current predatory paradigm. Both the words economic and ecology derive from the Greek oikos, meaning home. Collaborating across cultural, economic, and ethnic differences, oikos can become a model for interdependency that generates community, neurodiversity, cultural diversity, and biodiversity for ethical everyday living.
The cibopath (cibo=food & path=Knowledge/Intuition/Suffering), someone who has the ability to consume food and know everything about the food's history—someone who embodies a supply-chain consciousness, imagines one model of oikos as it reverberates through an economics of solidarity. This embodied kinship commons imagines an ecology of interspecies intimacies—a vital sense of interconnectivity with animate and inanimate objects that make up our daily lives. Cibopathic capacity represents cellular knowing of an “object’s” (in this case, food) supply chain—its embodied energy, life-cycle analysis, cradle-to-grave awareness. If someone bites into a banana, they get a somatic download of how the banana was grown (with or without DDT banned in the US, but flagrantly used by North American corporations throughout the Global South), the banana eater senses those people who were involved in the production and transportation of that banana (migrant workers, cargo ships powered by coal, the coal miners, and on and on). The imbricated stories of agribusiness and subsistence farming unfold with each bite. Or if someone bites into a hamburger, the story of the cow is revealed: did the grass-fed cow come from a nearby small farm or did the industrialized animal-object/ meat come from a massive-scale CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation), slaughtered indiscriminately or by using Temple Grandin’s humane “squeeze machine” techniques. I am suggesting that this embodied awareness as we eat could influence how we consume and digest. I am asking for others to play with vigorous attentiveness, a somatic intuition that already exists within us just waiting to be realized (Stephen Hawking). What if these intuitive insights were part of our genetic make-up, our cellular understanding of the world? We could develop infrastructures that support and sustain this capacity.
MLK, Jr. declared: “One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them” (Why We Can’t Wait, 90). I'm curious about this palpability as an epigenetic strategy. I live and parent this challenge of palpability. I believe we can redefine normalcy. Thus, I not only believe in the impossible, I practice the impossible. I believe we can shift our cultural evolutionary “inevitability.”
Cultural evolution does not have to be self-reinforcing complicities. It is a theory of ecologies, rhizomatic entanglements of possibility. Given that cultural evolution is not a linear trajectory, but an ever-unfolding rhizomatic process/practice of interrelationships, what if we could evolve our own cellular consciousness, our somatic cognition to 1) charge profound refusal to accept our status-quo mind-body dichotomies that reifies both institutionalized body phobia and institutionalized fear of thinking/ anti-intellectual passions and commitments;[5] 2) drive profound infrastructural changes thus shifting fundamental societal relationships, shifting our evolutionary myceliation. “Contact zones,” infrastructures of storytelling, cultivate webs of sense-making. Like mycelium that travels and tell stories beneath our feet, “contact zones” nourish intergenerational ecoliteracies that cultivate the potential for Bioregional Learning Centers. Scaling the boundaries of normalcy, we inhabit our oikos, a mandate of place; the density of specificity—the continually shifting center of the bioregional.
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological
Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and
articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics,
gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including
the critically-acclaimed Zazu
Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable
for the Anthropocene Eraand
Viscous
Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
Alhadeff's
theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for
international films and public television. She has been interviewed
by
The
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica
Radio, NPR, and the
New Art Examiner.
Alongside
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the
Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her
work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E.
Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G, Eve Ensler, Alphonso Lingus, Avital
Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and
artists.
Alhadeff's
photographs/performance-videos
have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic
Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the
ACLU), and are
in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA,
MoMA
Salzburg, Austria,
the
Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical
practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and
lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former
professor of
Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at
UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff
and
her family
live in their eco-art
installation repurposed schoolbus where
they perform and teach creative-zero-waste
living, social
permaculture, and cultural diversity.
She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars,
and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please
contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com
or
via her websites, Cara
Judea
and
Zazu
Dreams.
See also this article: Social
ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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