Apocalypse of the Familiar: Transforming Digital Normalcies through Apocalyptic Parenting
Cara Judea Alhadeff
May 2024
Zazu and I converting our Love Bus home. Click the image to enlarge.
"Say it, no ideas but in things."
— William Carlos Williams
How could I possibly give up?
How could I possibly not give up?
In a rage of urgent care and overwhelming parental impotency I quickly layer on my winter gear and flee our Love Bus. In tears, past silhouettes of ancient junipers and deer traveling with moon shadow, I walk through the night. Standing in what feels like the crest of our mesa—encircled by mountain ranges—I finally exhale. We live in an exceptionally unelectrified region—an officially designated Dark Skies. The cosmos is saturated with swarms of starlight. Electrical and electricity pollution far below, far away. I breathe in the wonder of the infinite.
Wait a minute. Don’t those twinklings look oddly bright? And aren't they blinking unusually quickly? And aren't they way too consistent? And why are there so many of them? Why are they moving?
Shit. There is no escape. There is no away.[1] Who am I kidding? Do I really think I can raise my now almost-teenage son through a commitment to my ecological-social-justice values—my exquisite joys and excruciating challenges? Those are not stars. They are satellites. Hovering. Surveilling. Monitoring. Dictating what we naively take for granted. Big Brother’s panopticon has thoroughly integrated into our quotidian, insinuating itself into our psycho-cellular make up. We have voluntarily succumbed to what was once seen as an improbable science-fiction horror. Now, Artificial Everything is our everyday reality. As Scott Gilbert, my dear friend and colleague, chimes in: “Instead of the awe of nature, one has the awe of a technology that can tell me that I should get my car into the right-hand lane for an exit coming up in 500 feet. Something in the Heavens ‘cares’ about me?”[2] So many of us seem to be quite content that our agency is neutered.
The following series of “Apocalypse of the Familiar” installments for Mother Pelican is the foundation for the new book I am writing. We have confused Apocalypse with Armageddon. Unlike Armageddon, a decisive (albeit illusory) battle between “good” and “evil,” apocalypse refers to disclosure or revelation. “Apocalypse of the Familiar” is not referring to an end of the familiar, but an ongoing revealing of what we take for granted in dominator-cultures. How can we loosen the grip of our habituated obedience, that relentlessly, numbingly comfortable sense of the known? Most people are so entrenched in the familiar, they will only hear what they want to hear, only see what they choose to see.
[A]grilogistics, is the one thing that would end global warming, but it is usually considered out of bounds, because it implies accepting a non-‘modern’ view, a view established on (although it thinks itself as a further disenchantment of) now ancient and obviously violent monotheisms, which in turn find their origin in the privatisation of enchantment in the Neolithic with its ‘civilisation’. We are all still Mesopotamians. We are Neolithic humans confronting the disaster the Neolithic fantasy smoothly functioning agricultural logistics has wrought, and we want to hold on to the philosophical underpinnings of those logistics for dear life…
If we succumb, such neurotypicality of white modernity will continue to infuse parenting with pre-programmed, reformist, technocratic, greenwashing “solutions”—lip service that includes renewable energies, carbon offsetting, emissions trading, climate-smart agriculture, and geo-engineering. Apocalyptic Parenting creatively and collectively refuses to embody these Neolithic fantasies of agrilogistics. Apocalyptic Parenting is not a devastating, paralyzing, disempowering “method” of raising children. Rather, this practice is a committed release from the trappings of habituated obedience to industrial consumer-waste convenience culture.
Not-giving-up is my only choice. My only choice is to embody my deepest values on a cellular level while building my capacity to navigate the anguish of always swimming upstream. My only choice is to embody the contradictory nature of this anguish that reveals the magic of parenting. This is my embodied apocalypse (a revelation that disrupts our familiar), an Apocalyptic Parenting that weaves integrative realms of the sensual, cerebral, spiritual, and political. And the “my” is anything but mine—it is unequivocally ours. If we continue to refuse to acknowledge our us-ness, the absurdity of our collective parody will engulf us. [3] It results in quicksand parenting—relinquishing our agency to the shared oblivion of the status quo. In his “Finding the Dark: Decolonizing Darkness,” Báyò Akómoláfé, my friend, my brother writes: “Someone once told me that civilization is the shared obliviousness to the fact that we have not gotten rid of wild things, and that they dwell 'within' us—somewhere beneath the threshold of normalcy. This wildness, this darkness, is not an 'other.' We are continually source, recreated, and reconfigured here.”[4]
This is the task of Object-Oriented Ontologies (OOO, ontology from ουσία, the Greek word for "being"). The object is integral to itself (Graham Harman). It far exceeds the thingness about which William Carlos Williams wrote (Bruno Latour). The object is story and storyteller. It is emergent. Nothing exists in isolation; everything is relational.
In South Africa, 2015, a rhinoceros used its horn to rescue a young zebra from quicksand.
Click on the image to enlarge.
“Quicksand” (digital normalcies, industrial agriculture, Big Pharma, compulsory education, to name a few interlocking hegemonies) cannot absorb us into its nightmarish vacuum if we commit to co-evolving interdependent infrastructures. Together, we can play the trickster: weaving (techne) the both/and; exposing how the refusal to ask questions (anti-intellectualism) converges with https://carajudeaalhadeff.com/religious-studies-review-volume-49-issue-4-surrealism-↔-the-sacred-celebrating-the-100th-anniversary-of-the-manifesto-of-surrealism/
body phobia which converges with solipsistic ethnocentrism.[8] In the context of a coalitional community, parenting can continually become a daily commitment to anarchist, collective capacity building. Apocalyptic Parenting reflects and offers a continual interplay between gratitude and grief, courage and curiosity, process and potentiality.
Click on the image to enlarge.
In the context of multiple constituencies, creativity becomes a political imperative in which intellectual and aesthetic risk-taking gives voice to eco-social justice. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari remind us how nomadic, multifaceted corporealities unfold; thus, “in a becoming, one is deterritorialized" (291). Revitalization of both individual and social bodies produce enfoldments of psyche-somatic consciousness. No hierarchies survive these monstrous, heterogeneous entwinements of body intelligence and wisdom. Merging the private with the public, parents can generate ethical individual and collective corporeal justice—occupying the intermedial.
What if our parenting reflected the intermediality of Object-Oriented Ontologies (OOO)? What if our parenting generated a gift-economy and cibopath consciousness rooted in supply-chain knowledge?
Ten years later as an undergrad in the 1990s, I was required to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Test. The MMPI, considered the “gold standard” in personality testing in mental health fields, was designed to determine what is “normal” (i.e., proper). The results categorized my personality as INVALID (all caps, theirs).[9] Rather than categorizing the table, stool, and chair as the generalized abstract identifier, furniture, I had seen these objects as things one puts something on; rather than categorizing the orange, banana, and pineapple as the generalized abstract identifier, fruit, I had seen these objects as things one peels in order to eat —(relational verbs rather than static, abstract nouns).[10]
For our embodied practice, we play with potentialities that can guide us from solipsistic complicity to collective agency—what Karen Barad calls “agential realism.” Such interspecies collaborative processes invite a becoming intimate with our material world, becoming animate. This ability to respond (response-ability in the context of Donna Haraway and of Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña)[11] offers the opportunity of being fully alive.
Next month we will continue to play with the "object as storyteller." We may even get a chance to explore OOO through an epigenetic lens—specifically in the realm of Scott Gilbert's term “thermoerotics.”
[2] Personal conversation with Scott. See also: "A Field Guide to Unfamiliar Landscapes and Common Types of Mysterious Objects,"by Meredith Root-Bernstein and Pierre du Plessis and Heather Ann Swanson’s “The Banality of The Anthropocene.”
[4]These Wilds beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2017).
[5] Also see the U.S. quest for minerals leads to a remote nation surrounded by adversaries: Mongolia has been nicknamed “Minegolia” because of its abundant reserves of copper, gold and coal. Jose Fernandez, Undersecretary of State for economic growth, energy and the environment, emphasized the “need for us to find critical minerals and rare earths in order to achieve our clean energy goals,” Politico’s E&E News.
[6] Each time we flush a toilet, we not only waste soil nutrients, increasing our dependency on quick fix synthetic chemical fertilizers, we add to the sewage monstrosity growing each day in the US: “Every day, America must find a place to park 5 billion gallons of human waste, and our country appears increasingly unable to find the space. …A civilization that cannot escape its own fecal matter is a civilization in trouble—unless, of course, the uneasy relationship between man and his effluents can evolve. Perhaps we could bridge the chasm, heal the rift, transform the untouchable into something rich and strange and marketable” (Frederick Kaufman, “Wasteland,” ed. Elizabeth Kolbert, The Best American Science and Nature Writing. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 135-155: 135, 136). The average person’s excrement weighs about eight tons—this is eight tons of ‘waste’ that could produce 20 kg of organic fertilizer (Oliviero Toscani, The Encyclopedia of Poo: Cacas, Cologne: Taschen, 2000: 37) (cited in Zazu Dreams, Endnote 66, p. 99).
See the raccoon's description of a Dorito in the 2006 DreamWorks smash hit, “Over the Hedge.” Did anyone change their consumption habits after lauding this film?
Updated edition, 2024, with Foreword by Vandana Shiva
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.
