Leaving the Matrix: Inhabiting Our Interconnectedness
Cara Judea Alhadeff
March 2024
Art Links, Cara Judea Alhadeff
“The womblike composition of [Cara Judea Alhadeff's] “Disarticulated Membranes” presents intimately tangled bodies. When this photograph was on view in San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art's “Picturing Modernity: Photographs from the Permanent Collection” most viewers paused in front of it. Its sensual, abstract composition held their attention and challenged them to form opinions and interpretations about its content. The picture positions the viewer in that powerful experience of attraction/repulsion and invites them to investigate their assumptions of what they are seeing. By challenging the viewer’s expectations concerning beauty and order, Alhadeff offers an alternative system for organizing the world and understanding our place within it. She questions the body’s fundamental identity and the wholeness of our concepts of it. She confronts the deep-seeded cultural distinction between public and private, self and other. Ultimately, the subject Alhadeff explores is our undeniable connectedness.”
—Terri Whitlock, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Curator of Photography
Click on the image to enlarge.
In last month's Mother Pelican installment, Promiscuous Crossings: A Foot in Both Worlds, I may have shared too much. In my attempt to demonstrate the fertility of the private seeping into the public, the personal as political (what Christianna Deichmann recognizes as “leaving the matrix,” I may have crossed over into the monstrous: the verb “demonstrate” derives from the Latin monstrare. Perhaps I exposed too much, became too vulnerable—an apocalypse, meaning “to reveal.” (Next month I will explore what I call “Apocalyptic Parenting”).
Because of my own vulnerability as a minority within a minority,[1] since I was a child, I have always attempted to model theory as practice. I live my environmental-justice values, sometimes at the expense of my intimate relationships and frequently at the expense of self-care. Anyone who has attempted to live against the grain of societal norms, to live as much as possible in a practice of deep inquiry, recognizes how that can put you at odds with the very communities you are hoping will re-evaluate their compliance with habituated infrastructures.
At University Press Books in Berkeley, during my book launch for Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene, Jill Nagle, editor of Whores and Other Feminists, introduced me by stating, “the care and intention with which you make your life choices ... these aren't just ideals ... you are a living example.” Revealing my intimate struggles is one attempt to ignite a micro antidote to xenophobia, cultural somnambulism, and ecological devastation. In my professional and personal lives, I act on the belief that we are truly alive—our lives have meaning—because we are all interdependent.
My creative process and daily life weave together different kinds of educational-action—both deeply personal and political ranging from my commitment to a shared economy, reproductive and environmental justice, affordable/creative housing, social permaculture, anti-racism coalitional work. While resisting green colonialism and uprooting petroleum parenting (how I parent Zazu), this practice includes my photographic/video and written works. As a mother, artist, author, community activist, and former university professor, I relentlessly negotiate normalizing infrastructures. My collaborative climate-justice performance work mobilizes layered possibilities for creativity and vulnerability as personal and cultural healing.[2] I challenge industrial-waste consumer culture—learning from and collaborating with diverse peoples to trust and act on intuition, moving us closer to profound cultural paradigm shifts.
Beyond the “I”—The Individual as Collective
My eco-social commitment is intricately rooted in the potential of a rhizomatic uncanny—“reducible neither to the One nor the multiple.”[3] Tyson Yunkaporta describes how he uses the “dual first person...a pronoun in Indigenous languages but not present in English; that's why I translate it as “us-two.”[4] Similarly, in her exposition of her friendship with Kathy Acker, and of the problematic of friendship itself, Avital Ronell self-interrogates:
“I have to interrupt myself here and confess my uneasiness as I write: in the first place, so unaccustomed to saying 'I' in my texts...the effacement of self and the radical passivity exacted by writing—it is very shocking to me to have to include myself in this unnuanced way...but saying, for me, brazenly, 'I' makes me shudder. ...'I' is vulgar, or so goes my prejudice and practice.”[5]
I am aware of the precarious territory I tread. Like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I am unequivocally compelled to invoke the “blur of the theoretical and the auto-referential granted permission to make bodies matter.”[6] My choice to insinuate and implicate the “I” unapologetically is not simply a reaction to our socially constructed reductive vernacular but a vital commitment to embodied thinking. As a strategy to elucidate my theoretical queries, I practice an embodied theory that advocates a political, philosophical, and pedagogical commitment rooted in everyday behavior and interaction. In his introduction to On Nietzsche, Sylvère Lotringer elucidates Georges Bataille’s practice of embodied theory: “Bataille never developed ideas that he didn’t backup with his life.”[7] For me, this embodiment sets the foundation to co-evolve our epigenetic potential rooted in our undeniable connectedness.
For this to manifest, I believe it is essential for us to learn to become comfortable speaking in the first person. Our personal experiences, insights, and dialogue are critical; we must be willing to take creative and intellectual risks. Creative, life-affirming, biophilic work emerges from confidence in communicating through intuition and the deeply personal. As we move through our daily lives, I model speaking in relation to theoretical and philosophical issues directly from the “I”—from my position as a mother/writer/activist/artist. I encourage community capacity-building by recognizing the fertility of unexpected relationships, unpredictable alliances.
Apparently that isn't how things work in modernity. My expectations and courage backfire—especially when it comes to parenting. Where/what is that in-between space that doesn't “make” others feel too uncomfortable—including my son? Does it mean that I don't “out” my light-skinned, Black, Sephardic, Arab-Jewish, sometimes white-passing pre-teen son? I am hypervigilant when I speak out about how my racial-justice values connect to how I raise my child. When does focusing on a potentially controversial issue make it contentious, thereby creating a sense of alienation in my child? Does my son have to choose between fitting in with his friends or accepting my prosocial defense? For example, for five consecutive years I was invited to teach the Martin Luther King, Jr. assemblies at Zazu's various schools, using our personal experiences to illustrate historical travesties.
Next month, we will continue to play with the implications of “leaving the matrix” by recognizing the dangers of homogeneity, the fallacy of purity, and the inherent fecundity of ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox.
Notes
[1] As an Arab-Jew, I am told I don't exist. As a Sephardic woman, I slip between multiple cracks.
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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