Weather Writing

This is a draft of a text intended for a compilation on new feminist materialisms and teaching gender studies. Please contact me if you wish to cite it, or if you have any comments or suggestions! [email protected] Weather Writing: A New Materialist Practice for (Getting Outside) the Classroom Astrida Neimanis Weather writing encourages a thicker understanding of the reciprocal implication of human subjects and climatic natures. While it can be a robust research methodology, weather writing is presented here as a teaching tool that simultaneously (a) introduces students to key concepts in the new materialisms in practice; and (b) draws links between new materialist theories, feminist ecological ethics, and ecologically oriented phenomenologies. Weather writing has two interleaved goals. First, it aims to invite an expanded meteorological imaginary, whereby the weather and by extension, phenomena related to climate change are experienced in and through our human bodies, as always the very substance of ourselves (Alaimo 2010). By cultivating a deep attunement to our human bodies implication in the weather-world, we can better understand how humans and the weather are always collaborators, co-making a world in thick time and transcorporeal space. Second, weather writing offers a practical tool for developing posthuman and new materialist feminist methodologies. Skills honed include situated observation, thick new materialist description, and collaborative critical dialogue with other participants. Theoretical Apparatus Feminist thought has been at the vanguard of questioning the perimeters of the human, in both ecological and technological terms. As such, feminist new materialist theories provide a key platform for weather writing, where concepts such as transcorporeality (Alaimo), nature writing itself (Kirby), viscous porosity (Tuana), material agency and intra-action (Barad), weathering and thick time (Neimanis and Walker), are explored in practice. Weather writing also invites practical experimentation in feminist new materialist ecological ethics, as described by, Stacy Alaimo, Cecilia Åsberg, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Eva Simms and others. While grounded in feminist new materialisms, weather writing operationalizes these debates through corporeal phenomenological trajectories. Drawing on the work of phenomenologist Maurice MerleauPonty, and the development of his insights by Samuel Mallin, William Connolly, and Alfonso Lingis, weather writing instantiates a phenomenological practice of deep description and knowledge-creativity through an amplification of multimodal embodiment. On William Connolly s reading, Merleau-Ponty already draws us toward an image of nonhuman nature that is more fully developed in later 20 th century thinkers like Gilles Deleuze. As Merleau-Ponty reminds us, Nature outside of us must be unveiled to us by the Nature that we are We are part of some Nature, and reciprocally, it is from ourselves that living beings and even space speak to us. Connolly suggests that such insights invite us to disclose and investigate preliminary affinities between human and nonhuman natures, leading to the organiz[ation of] experimental investigations to uncover dimensions of human and nonhuman nature previously outside the range of that experience (Connolly 45). Weather writing is one such experimental investigation. A transcorporeal phenomenological approach, inspired both by MerleauPontian and feminist new materialist trajectories, understands essence and meaning as emergent and always continually worlded, in collaboration or intra-action with other phenomena. Transcorporeal phenomenological writing attempts to unsediment or destabilize dominant humanist imaginaries of weather and climate and complement them with ones less anthropocentric stretching across times, spaces and species. In doing so, it might also cultivate a new materialist ethics which is about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part (Barad 393). This is a draft of a text intended for a compilation on new feminist materialisms and teaching gender studies. Please contact me if you wish to cite it, or if you have any comments or suggestions! [email protected] PLANNING A WEATHER-WRITING WORKSHOP Allocating around 3-4 hours for a weather writing workshop is ideal in order to introduce students to the theory and practice of weather writing. It can also be implemented in multiple sessions over several days/meetings. A suggested format includes: Activity Background readings Seminar session: transcorporeal & phenomenological theories of embodiment and environment Seminar session: Learning the method Priming for the Field: Generating Questions Time requirement / Chronology 1-2 hours of reading; in advance 20-60 min Notes 20-60 min Demonstrations and discussion of instructions, bodily modalities, and tips. Participants discuss and note questions or issues that they find compelling in relation to the overall thematic, e.g.: How does the primacy of the visual affect our understanding of weather? (How) Can my body experience the past or future lives of this weather world? Clothes as barrier/interface/conductor Human bodies as composed mostly of water Air pollution visible or invisible? Inspiration can be generated by discussing in partners or small groups. Participants begin to try out the method. They will need at least 30 minutes to shift and integrate their corporeal habitus into the weather world which to them will likely seem very long! Encourage them to be patient and let the method unfold. This can be done in small groups of two or three, or in a larger plenary. *Be sure to check in regarding instructions, tips, and bodily modalities. Are students simply describing what they see, or are they actively engaging all bodily modalities? Are they experimenting with ways of unsedimenting their usual relation to the weather world, or are they remaining habituated human observers? Sharing initial observations boosts confidence and inspires further questions and curiosity. A second (preferably) longer session gives students a chance to follow through on and develop specific insights. (Note that it is generally difficult to continue generating new insights for more than 60 minutes without a break. Schedule permitting, additional sessions can be planned later in the day or over the course of a unit.) Students will be eager to share their observations and 10-20 min Field Session (1) 30 min Sharing Observations 15-30 min Field Session (2) 30-60 min Group Discussion of: 30-45 min See list of suggested readings; choices can be tailored to level/interest/focus of the group A presentation/discussion of concepts and how these theories might ask us to reimagine the relationship between climatic natures and human embodiment. This is a draft of a text intended for a compilation on new feminist materialisms and teaching gender studies. Please contact me if you wish to cite it, or if you have any comments or suggestions! [email protected] (a) insights, breakthroughs, observations (b) similarities and tensions among participants writings; identification of lines of inquiry for follow-up (individually or collaboratively) (c) feedback on the method will delight in both similarities and differences in experiences of other students. Allow ample time to debrief! You might also ask if the session shifted participants understanding of weather and climate change at all, but the answer will just as likely be negative. New imaginaries require time to unfold and gel but they can begin with small shifts. This discussion can also include how the weather sketches might be further expanded or taken up in other projects, writings, artworks, etc. The following pages (i.e. Instructions; Bodily Modalities; Tips) can be reproduced as a handout for participants. Please include footnotes and proper attribution, as Weather Writing is the outcome of many significant chains of collaboration which the author would like to acknowledge. INSTRUCTIONS FOR PARTICIPANTS Transcorporeal writing is a porous process of embodied experimentation. There is no right or wrong way to do it, but like any other experiment, its potential is best unfolded within specifically established perimeters. These perimeters include ample room for innovation, and as we become comfortable within this general structure, we can also push and pull it, negotiating its boundaries and making room for new transcorporeal worldings.i 1. Begin with open-ended questions. Like a camp stove, our bodies sometimes need to be primed for ignition. Before beginning the practical exercises, we will anticipate questions or issues we would like our bodies to explore. Resonances of these preparations will subtly guide, without overdetermining, our practical exercises. Our experiments might ultimately go in entirely different directions, but this priming begins to orient our bodies in the direction of the weather world. 2. Expose yourself to the weather world. We are seeking new ways of imagining the multivalent interfaces between our human bodies and the climatic environments that sustain us. In order to do this, we will put ourselves in direct contact with these environments without any attempts to choreograph these encounters (i.e. we will not seek perfect or comfortable conditions). We will thus try to minimize (without fully ever eliminating) the distance between experience and mediation. 3. Start writing. Think with a pen. In an attempt to capture what are often fleeting, ephemeral and surprising affects, movements and discoveries, we must write in situ. The physical act of writing will prompt us when we are not sure where to begin. Writing is not a faithful mechanical capture of descriptions or observations already fully formed in our minds, but an inalienable collaborator in the worlding of our discoveries. 4. Activate all bodily modalities. While writing should be mostly free-associative, we will also make deliberate efforts to get out of what phenomenologists call the natural attitude our commonplace engagement with the world. We explicitly seek to shake up and disturb this attitude, in order to make This is a draft of a text intended for a compilation on new feminist materialisms and teaching gender studies. Please contact me if you wish to cite it, or if you have any comments or suggestions! [email protected] room for new corporeal imaginaries. This means deliberately calling upon and writing from all of our six bodily modalities (see below), and not only our cognitive selves. 5. Linger. Repeat. A key to generativity is patience. Each writing session should last no less than 30 minutes (the first 10 minutes will likely be stilted and awkward; our bodies need time to loosen and adjust). Generating useful research data will also require repeated engagement over time. 6. Reflect. Discuss. Once field sessions are complete, these notes form the basis of a collaborative discussion. What surprised you? What kept recurring? What escaped your attention? In what ways were your habitual relations to the weather world affected or disturbed, if at all? How might these observations impact climate change imaginaries? If these exercises form the basis of more extensive research, notes over a number of sessions should be sorted, sifted, and collated. Many observations will be discarded as dead-ends. One looks for recurring patterns, key associations, and also surprising dissonances. Notes are mined like any other cultural text in order to draw conclusions or make generative suggestions. As with any other method that draws on experience, a critical orientation is key to ensuring rigour and relevance. THE TRANSCORPOREAL BODY: ENGAGING MULTIVALENT MODALITIES Drawing on the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Canadian phenomenologist Samuel Mallin suggested that our bodies engage the world according to four primary modes: perception, motility, affect, and cognition. While overlapping and mutually imbricated, each mode has its own logic, and yields its own kinds of knowledge about the world. The corporeal schema used in this exercise is heavily indebted to Mallin s schema, but adds two modes (viscerality, transcorporeality) to be considered during our experimental writing exercises. Perception How are taste, sight, touch, smell, hearing engaged by the weather? Which senses are most engaged, and which are muted? How are the senses synaesthetically or otherwise stimulated or suppressed? In what specific ways? Motility/Movement How does the weather ask you to move? What speeds or rhythms does your body take up? In what specific ways do certain body parts move? Which specific limbs does your situation engage? Are the movements you are being asked to take up physically comfortable or not? Does the situation ask your body to literally go new places? What do you notice if and when you exceed your physical comfort zone? Sociality/Sexuality/Affect How does the weather ask you to engage it on an affective level? What/how does it make you feel? How does it choreograph your interpersonal relations with humans or nonhuman species? What are the contours of these engagements? If we understand sexuality as a desiring drive that seeks out certain bodies or experiences, what sort of erotics does the weather call up? How does it fit you and you it? Do you feel any dis-ease or psychic discomfort? Do you feel alienated? Or welcomed and on familiar ground? Cognition What categories or taxonomies or other acts of naming does the weather invoke? What do those names tell you? How do you rationalize the weather within larger schemes or contexts (its function, its history, its value, etc.)? What logical or structural associations does it invite you to make? This is a draft of a text intended for a compilation on new feminist materialisms and teaching gender studies. Please contact me if you wish to cite it, or if you have any comments or suggestions! [email protected] Viscerality How does the weather affect your organic, visceral, or biological body? What is going on beneath your skin, in the inner workings of your body? Does this encounter induce an upset stomach, a headache, a quickened heartbeat, etc.? Transcorporeality This may or may not be a mode of its own. In what ways do experiences, affects, movements, etc. of the weather extend in or through you? How are your other lived experiences manifest in the weather world? Can you identify where and how your body is porous and open, or conversely, closed and seemingly impermeable to the weather? What transits through, and what is blocked? How? Where? Why? *While schematized as discrete, this division is a cognitive construct that inevitably shows up and accentuates certain aspects of embodiment while covering up others. These modalities bleed into one another, work in tandem, and are often various sides of one experience. Exploring their inseparability can also be productive. TIPS Certain tricks can assist us in activating, accessing and writing our transcorporeal, ecological selves, all the while bracketing or attempting to suspend our sedimented human(ist) habits of engagement. Organic Amplification / Muting: Our bodies interface with the weather world through various portals and pathways eyes, hands, skin, liver, tongue, etc. Clearly, no body is identical, and bodies of all abilities compensate for a looser grip in some interface regions with amplifications in others.1 Every body can stretch and amplify its corporeal relations to the world by voluntarily muting or amplifying some of its common modes of interfacing. If we can, and if it makes sense to our bodies, we might shut our eyes, listen closely, explore haptically, or taste things we normally might not. How might we amplify or mute our lung, our spleen, our skin in their sensing of the weather? Scalar contraction, expansion, diffraction: Merleau-Ponty refers to proximal distance i.e. the ideal or perfect distance from which to take in certain phenomena for a painting in a gallery that is 1x1 metre in size, it is likely from about 4 feet away, but for a massive canvas, one will need to increase this proximal distance substantially. At the same time, if we go right up close to the large canvas, we see things we wouldn t otherwise have noticed, and we gain a new perspective that enhances our NOTE ON DIS/ABILITY AND NORM-AL BODIES: There is a generalized (in the weakest and non-normative sense) way in which human bodies exist in the world, even if these logics are always shot through by experiences of sexuality, gender, ability, race, geography, and so on. It is crucial to emphasize that this generality is not a norm that actually exists as a specific body (i.e. presumed to be white, sighted, male, etc). This human-bodied generality is more like a Deleuzian virtuality a generalized cloud of potentiality out of which each specific iteration of human embodiment emerges. While it is ultimately open-ended over time ( we do not yet know what a body can do ), in this moment and in the context of our human spacetime scale, this virtuality is conditioned by the generalized limits of human materiality: e.g. we are mammals, we have forward-oriented faces, our anuses and mouths are necessarily distantly-located from one another in our bodily schemas, etc. These general orientations are not rules, but rather a set of always shifting and contested human material potentialities. The important thing here is that at some level, it still makes sense to talk about the generality of humans (as opposed to tree frogs, or glaciers, or thunderclouds) even if our writing experiments also seek to perforate that generality and articulate kinship with non-human bodies and natures. 1 This is a draft of a text intended for a compilation on new feminist materialisms and teaching gender studies. Please contact me if you wish to cite it, or if you have any comments or suggestions! [email protected] appreciation for the artwork. We can do the same with the spacetimes of our corporeal existence in the weather world. What if we examined the cracks in the soil right up close? What if we took 10 minutes, instead of 30 seconds, to walk around a tree? How are our various senses of weather affected when we alter our distance from and temporal engagement with associated phenomena? Motile Contortion: Put your body literally in uncommon postures and move in uncommon ways. Stand on your head and see how the sounds change. Walk backwards. Run quickly. Feel with your elbow, or toes, instead of your fingers. Non-native Languages and Stuttering Tongues: Writing is best able to unsediment when it can shake off grammatical, syntactical, and semantic strictures that force not only our writing, but our very experience, along correct and predetermined paths. Instead, we might try to bend and squeeze the words we know, and their combinations, in new ways. This is what Merleau-Ponty calls first order language. Not being a master of the language in which you are writing can be an advantage that lets us write in more literal and directly experiential ways. Proxy Stories & Syncretic Assemblages: Weather writing is grounded in embodied engagement. However, our embodiment is also contextualized in and conditioned by stories and knowledges that extend beyond immediate embodied experience in situ. These include science stories, which can tell us about molecular, chemical, quantum or other processes in which our weather bodies engage; as well as human and more-than-human histories which narrate for us the thick pasts of these weather bodies. Such stories cannot substitute for embodied engagement, but they can serve as amplifiers and sensitizers. We can draw on them to intensify or heighten our corporeal experiences. For example, researching local species, hydrogeologies, or climatic anomalies can provide an opening toward embodied engagement. Our embodied experience may support and/or challenge such established knowledges, but in any case our weather writing will produce another layer of knowledge to be interleaved and negotiated within the broader stories of the weather. NOTES For Sam Mallin, who taught, encouraged and inspired even when I disagreed. The development of this method emerged from just such a process. I was schooled in the method of body hermeneutics as a way of doing phenomenology by one of my graduate professors, Sam Mallin, at York University (Toronto). Sam, for his part, honed his method engaging primarily with the work of Merleau-Ponty but also Heidegger, Husserl, and Nietzsche. Sam never published notes on his method, as he was in part concerned that these guidelines and tips would congeal into some sort of Law. I have engaged and rearticulated this method in my own ways, namely trying to pull it in posthuman directions, while also attending to (gendered, raced, geographical, temporal) differences of embodiment that are backgrounded in Sam s own methodological interpretations. Using Sam s method as guidance, my colleague David Koukal (University of Detroit Mercy) and I have articulated a written version of these guidelines and employed it in our Back to the Things Themselves! Workshops, more recently co-ordinated with the participation of Chris Nagel (UC Stanislaus). This exercise is thus a collaboration with both Sam and Dave, and now Chris, although this specific iteration is my own. i SUGGESTED READINGS & REFERENCES Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2010. This is a draft of a text intended for a compilation on new feminist materialisms and teaching gender studies. Please contact me if you wish to cite it, or if you have any comments or suggestions! [email protected] Åsberg, Cecilia. The Timely Ethics of Posthumanist Gender Studies. Feministische Studien 31. 1 (2013): 7-12. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Connolly, William. A World of Becoming. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Kirby, Vicki. Quantum Anthropologies. Durham and London: Duke, 2011. Lingis, Alfonso. Dangerous Emotions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Mallin, Samuel. Merleau-Ponty s Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. Routledge, 2012. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Nature: Course Notes from the College de France. Trans. Robert Vallier. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Neimanis, Astrida and Rachel Loewen Walker, Weathering. Hypatia. Forthcoming. Neimanis, Astrida. Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water. in Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice, eds. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny Söderbäck. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Simms, Eva Marie. Eating One s Mother: Female Embodiment in a Toxic World. Environmental Ethics. 31 (2009): 263-277. Tuana, Nancy. Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina. Material Feminisms. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. pp. 188-213.