Compos(t)ing New/Material/Education

COMPOS(T)ING NEW MATERIAL EDUCATION Mathew Arthur Reuben Jentink COMPOS(T)ING NEW MATERIAL EDUCATION Contents Preface Composing Compost New/Material/Education Study: Future Living 1 3 21 25 ISBN-13: 978-1705704400 You are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon it for any purpose. You must give appropriate credit and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. First edition: December 2019 Cover: World Block, Recess Bundle, 2014 Type: Inter by Rasmus Andersson Reuben Jentink with Mathew Arthur, Future Living, 2015 Preface This zine folds together two knowledge spaces and their people, texts, and vibes. It knots up two cities, Vancouver and Cape Town, nautically connected by a colonial explorer. Connected, too, by commitments to decolonizing methods, new materialisms, slow scholarship, art pedagogies, and now compost. Creative Ecologies Our participation in Simon Fraser University’s Creative Ecologies colloquium has helped us “face the environmental bad news” (Oleksijczuk 2019), sparking feels of culpability and hope. Our work is animated by public lectures curated by Denise Oleksijczuk, Zoë Druick, and Michelle Levy. We’ve thought with Clare Colebrook, Candice Hopkins, Tim Ingold, Elizabeth Povinelli, Susan Schuppli, and Leanne Simpson. New Materialist Pedagogies We met Vivienne Bozalek (University of the Western Cape) and Nike Romano (Cape Peninsula University of Technology) at the Society for the Study of 1 Cape Town presentation Affect’s Summer School (#SSASS). We were happy to learn that our compost methods turned up in their article for the WalkingLab issue of the Journal of Public Pedagogies with Veronica Mitchell. We schemed a way to present remotely at the Cape Town conference. This zine and an experimental slideshow (facilitated by Nike) are the result. Composing Compost Our project is an experiment in writing and teaching heterogenous togetherness that might work at decentralizing composition and the circulation of knowledges for and at colloquiua and conferences. New Materialist Reconfigurations of Higher Ed. 10th Annual New Materialisms Conference December 2 to 4, 2019 University of the Western Cape Cape Town, South Africa President’s Dream Colloquium Creative Ecologies: Reimagining the World September to December, 2019 Simon Fraser University Vancouver, Canada 2 3 Dialogue, nə́c’aʔmat ct Strathcona Library, 2019 Vancouver Public Library 4 nə́ c’aʔ mat ct We are feminist technoscience theorists, non-Native Indigenous studies learners, and adult educators from Canada. We do public seminars and reading groups with Hum, a tuition-free, credit-free, university-level program with low-income residents of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. We meet weekly at the nə́ c’aʔmat ct library to read at the interface of feminist STS, Indigenous studies, disability studies, fantasy, and science and speculative fiction. Anyone can drop in. There’s no “in advance.” We show up with new texts each week. We take turns reading aloud or listening, stopping when there’s something to stretch or hone. There’s no need to get to the end of a text. No correcting of each other’s pronunciation. Each time we’re differently composed. The mix of the room matters to our knowing. We tend to matters together, from where we are in “this here and this now” (Butler 2017). Texts and concepts heap up and regenerate alongside our own situated knowings. Like compost. 5 Compost Extending our own (Arthur & Jentink 2018) and others’ (Haraway 2016; Hamilton & Neimanis 2018) work on compost as a means to think with material practices of regeneration, this zine/presentation is an experiment in writing with compost—a motley figure that troubles what hangs together in words like “new,” “material,” or “education.” It’s also a hack at mixing up how knowledges move with bodies and places, through conferences and other civilities of knowledge. Matter is the frontier of colonialism where earth processes are “discovered” and storied (Papadopoulos 2018). The compost pile evokes multimaterial human-nonhuman encounters while implicating colonial (agri)cultures and knowledge tactics. It hints at how earth processes get storied with competing matters: in a compost heap, critters might be science’s expendable remediators of toxicity (US EPA 1998) or humans and worms might forge new forms of togetherness in environmental humanities (Abrahamsson & Bertoni 2014). 6 7 Namco, Katamari Damacy (塊魂), 2004 Compose Compost is a place where life and nonlife are ongoingly made and unmade at the join of matter and story. It implicates the ways in which science’s stories civilize land. Compost is compositional: it’s put together by heterogeneous things. It can fail. It can be well or badly composed (Latour 2010; Haraway & Franklin 2017). Compost is messy. It confuses material capacities across inter-imbricating scales, speeds, and states with a messiness expedient to disrupting the sanitizing force of settler nationalisms (Arthur & Jentink 2018). Compost thinking tracks “modes of syncretism” (Law et al. 2013) in settler encounters with Indigenous worlds: what is being made to fit, what is quarantined, what is being domesticated, what is being cared for, and why? Whether the pile is a heap of organic scraps or a bibliography, body of theory, university, or nation, compost specifies contingent capacities. The responsibilities of turners, decomposers, makers, and bystanders must be continuously negotiated. 8 9 Tomohiro Tachi, Crumpled Paper Variations, 2010 Scraps Compost is a mix of scraps: leftovers and things spoiled or wasted. True, compost is regenerative. But like all practices, it has history. It’s not innocent. Its matters are tangled in ways of knowing and working land: tied to a colonial version of “the human” (Wynter 2003), to a “nonhuman” scaffolded by racial violence (Jackson 2015), and to a white people’s (agri/mono)culture of nonagential nature (TallBear 2015). How to write and teach with matterscapes sedimented with incommensurable stories—colonial, Indigenous, diasporic? In the aftermath, we’re pulling up scraps. Scraps are doubly “partial” (Haraway 1988). Their conditions of arrival are made and told from unevenly enabled bodies and, no matter the angle, they remain incomplete. Each page/slide is scrappy: a disorganized but determined text fragment that cultivates “attention and riffing” on what’s being re/de/composed (Berlant & Stewart 2019) as enabled (or not!) by what’s already been affected (Massumi 2015). 10 11 Crossings We shared our Google slides to Vivienne and Nike through a digital “cloud” of undersea conduits that follow colonial crossings: spice and slave trade routes (Starosielski 2015). Crossings are moves that knot histories and materialities across time and space. They map violence and restitution, regulation and speculation (Alexander 2005). If compost piles were ships they would say: nothing crosses without being recomposed. What does this mean for our presentation (and now zine)? The internet says it’s 10,500 nautical miles from Vancouver to Cape Town. The “directions” feature is landlocked, no route loads. In 1776 Captain Cook was looking for a northern passage. Sailing by way of the Cape of Good Hope, he never found what he was after. Instead, he skimmed the rocky edges of Vancouver Island, tarrying in what he called Hope Bay. Our two Hopes. Distant nodes on an explorer’s map. But for far longer, they’ve been connected by a continuum of brine (Jeong 2019). “Matter is hope,” mapping divulges desires (Papadopoulos 2018). 12 13 Interlude Theseus’ ship called at ports across the Aegean Sea. Each stop, his crew removed the ship’s rotting planks, setting in their place new lengths of freshcut timber. They recaulked leaky seams. If the mast was decayed, a tree was felled to replace it. Eventually, not a single original part remained. Theseus’ Paradox is one of the oldest Western philosophical concepts: is this ship the same ship? In the video game Katamari Damacy (塊魂), the player controls a sticky “clump spirit” that grows in size as it picks up paper clips, soft drink cans, mountains, or asteroids. A three-millennia-old paradox works like this, too: an accumulation of heterogeneous ideas of time, movement, and identity (Mesku 2019). But compost isn’t a ship or a clump. By working at the simultaneity of composition and regeneration, compost can never be thought separate from its constitutive mix. It’s possible to think of a ship as the entanglement of trees, histories, tar pits, practices, seafarers, and maps. But we usually don’t. 14 Master of the Campana Cassoni, Theseus and the Minotaur, ca. 1500 New Materialisms Civilities Starting theory-making from movement “alludes to cartography” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012). The transversality of new materialisms can work to situate, attending to what concepts pass through at distinct points. How they form and deform. But maps embody their authors and audiences (Star 2002). Concepts clustered around “new” bank on civility in their conditions of material production and reception: standardized citational habits, field-consolidating special issues, university press circulations, and economies of celebrity that maintain institutional intelligibility. The problem with “matter” in this sense is that it conscripts everything into the civility of its own writing. Otherwise knowledges (non-Western, folk, anecdotal, gut feelings, indistinctions, mess, the para- and extra-academic) become material to work with. When we hang on to a compos(t)itional cartography, we’re forced to reckon with what writing and teaching re-entrenches and to engage material struggles for land justice. Compos(t)ing is about staying with material practices of doing theory-work. What we write gets rewritten: composted, regenerated. Concept piles get pitched into other piles. Where are the edges? When did it start? Compos(t)ing fucks messes up attribution and authority, even as it attends to who did and didn’t make it into the mix. It’s anti-civility, but tangled in it. It’s always new and old, redone. The compos(t)itional holds sovereignty in view (who is doing the assembling), even as it yearns for a world beyond “parts” (Latour 2016). So often, we promise the nonsovereign in writing, but do theory-work architected by individual people and papers. In attending to what’s settled, indigenous, and diasporic to the mix, the compos(t)itional lends itself to projects of “rhetorical sovereignty,” letting compos(t)ers negotiate modes, styles, and languages (Lyons 2000) and craft new politics of attribution. Compost affiliations are not stable. It does not want canonicity. It’s field is forever soiled. 16 17 Land Pedagogies Compost is getting done all the time. It moves at disparate paces: different starts, ends, and incompletions. It scrambles and generates histories. It’s attended to on loose or rigid schedules, with incompatible versions of success. Some scraps resist (don’t incorporate or finish), while others make good soil. Weeds crop up. Others become fertilizer. Compost might include land-based pedagogies. But more than that, it’s a mode of attuning to the “sensory skills and teachings” material forms have to offer as they are (Cariou 2017). Compost doesn’t distinguish between urban and rural, artificial or organic: it teaches regeneration and failure no matter what. Its pedagogies attune to what’s mixed up in a particular place. It might mean making kin with plastics (Nye 2018), rather than establishment recycling. Or chaining yourself to a bulldozer. Re/de/ compositional potential is always scattered amidst the colonial (Ngũgĩ 2010). It’s how you turn with it. Alice Fox, Plastic Fragments, 2011 18 19 NEW/MATERIAL/EDUCATION Get Composted! Both humans and compost need water, carbon, and nitrogen. To make muscle. To make soil. Both need air to breath. “Some see objects in the Earth, where I see lungs” (Pico 2017). It’s how you write with it. i. New Aztec Zodiac Man, 1831 20 “New” invokes the compost pile as a place of where difference and responsibility are presenced. As new materialisms and other relational ontologies take hold in citational erasures of indigeneity (Arthur 2019; Bessire & Bond 2014; Todd 2016; Wilkinson 2017), we wonder how theory formation might be otherwise. What if we went after earthly regenerativity instead of newness (Ingold 2018)? What would it mean to consider multiple “regimes of witnessing” (Schuppli 2017). We want to put pressure on how “newness” has saturated climate mitigation and adaptation strategies as technological innovations are called on at the expense of regenerative earth processes. Is compost a technology? 21 ii. Material We look to the material as both the technoscientific frontier of colonialism (where the world is ongoingly discovered and named) and as a site of resistance where alterontologies might be composed (Papadopoulos 2018). A composting sensibility asks for alternative practices of everyday life and nuances the difference between the ever-sedimenting materials of mainstream education and the unruliness and partiality of land-based alternatives that engage in folk, anecdotal, ritual, and other registers of practice. We wonder if the “expressive qualities” (Schuppli 2017) of matter might act as a land pedagogy in urban environments where sustainable practices like composting are both regenerative and caught up in extractive industrial systems (municipal waste management, for example). to unearth. Taking “complexity and complicity” (Shotwell 2016) as our starting points for sustainability and education, we imagine land education as turning with place in a compost-like rhythm of care, experimentation, failure, and regeneration that ethically implicates the endurance of multiple forms of existence and non/lifeways. iii. Education We want to resist intellectual “turns” in which always-contaminated lands are mined for theoretical generativity as well as uneven urban practices of getting “back to the land”—as if there were a purity 23 STUDY: FUTURE LIVING After the Korean War, when my father returned to us and I was eight, my parents moved to Colorado Springs to live in a housing project called Stratton Meadows, a name that signified that the land there was once beautiful. — Linda Hogan Future Living takes inspiration from annie ross’ (2009) art series Happy Birthday Super Cheaper and Stephen J. Jackson’s (2014) “Rethinking Repair.” It’s a small study that brings together some of our interests including, in very broad terms: architectural design, the feeling-ness of space, Indigenous sovereignty, expressions of anticapitalism, dioramas, futurisms, relationships of responsibility, and ethics of care. These interests don’t sit together easily. In bringing them together, questions crop up. 24 25 Equisetum How might we think architecture and design as a response to the already-produced? How might we confront the pleasures of sleek future worlds while being responsible for and to the present? The materials of our future dwelling were sourced from drawers and garbage bins. Our study doesn’t challenge disposability to the extent that ross’ art does (through the reclamation and honouring of junk). But we’ve worked to ensure that our study doesn’t create more waste. With the exception of stalks of Equisetum (Horsetail or Snake Grass), foraged from the University of British Columbia campus, all the plants pictured are from our home. The bones of the two-story structure are constructed from empty boxes: a cigarette carton and Tibetan incense box. The windows and other glass panels are strips of scrap cellophane. The structure’s cladding and window and door frames are crafted from popsicle sticks held together with a high strength adhesive. These materials have histories. Were we to trace their pasts by way of reports and ingredient lists, we would find ourselves at sites of deforestation, pulp 26 27 While we’ve taken cues from ross and Jackson (anti-capitalist practices and ethics of repair), our future world inhabits an uncertain ethical frame. In one of the scences we’ve staged, mountains of refuse crumble just beyond the property lines: over there. But what will happen to all this trash? For ross, care entails clothing junk, living with it. Jackson implores us to rethink repair. Yes, our future dwelling looks sleek today. But tastes change. The trash heap encroaches. Long after we’re gone, “skyscrapers, overpasses, garnets for lasers, graphene, and bricks” will be geological strata (Morton 2013). There’s no such sense of continuity in our scenes. What we’ve staged could be anywhere. The landscape is variable, taking cues from sci-fi imaginaries. 28 annie ross, Happy Birthday Super Cheaper, 2007 production, oil and gas extraction, chemical creation, and animal reduction. These materials not only reach us at the end of long networks of global trade —but they become rather sinister. This is a point made by Stephanie LeMenager (glossing Latour) in Living Oil: “modernity and ecology are entangled” (2014). Glue, wood, and polymers trace to distant sites of degradation. It’s not often we think of arts and crafts supplies this way. 29 Our dwelling speaks to a strong notion (in the Pacific Northwest) that the future will be clean: dwellings will be poured concrete, cedar or birch planks, glass, and white paint. Nature is uncompromised—but contained. Mess is quarantined. This future doesn’t sound altogether bad. It’s quite attractive actually. But fresh water is scarce and life carries on beneath a protective cover. Is the air too polluted? What’s left is organized for productivity. The unnecessary is felled to make room for what can afford to survive. Future worlds are zen. They are spiritual. But their histories trace back to our present: a disingenuous syncretism of crystals, Ikebana-like plant fragments, and trending pastel-neon colours. In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Lecha (a Yaqui woman) describes a New Age convention in Tucson: In the next room freshly cut evergreen trees were arranged in a circle by white men wearing robes; it looked as if tree worship was making a comeback in northern Europe. In the corridors there were white-haired old hippies selling cheap crystals and little plastic bags of 30 31 Of course, there are consequences to living without care: mountains of trash, smoggy air, oil and other chemical spills, the degradation of forests, the exploitation of non/humans, and polluted waterways. The future we’ve imagined is possible. But it could be otherwise. We might orient to materials with care and repair—reject the promise of cleanliness and techno-liberation. We might labour to bring about a world in which visions of the future are engendered through present ways of being. Always here, stirring in the rubble. homegrown chamomile. There were white men from California in expensive new buckskins, beads, and feathers who had called themselves “Thunder-roll” and “Buffalo Horn” (1991, 719). This milieu, surveyed by Lecha, underwrites our scenes. Crystals, mica, and cut evergreens, can be purchased for the right price. These are worlds absent of an ethic of relationality. 32 33 References Abrahamsson, Sebastian, and Filippo Bertoni. 2014. “Compost Politics: Experimenting with Togetherness in Vermicomposting.” Environmental Humanities 4 (2014): 125-148. Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Arthur, Mathew. “Writing Affect and Theology in Indigneous Futures.” In Religion, Emotion, Sensation: Affect Theories and Theologies, edited by Karen Bray, Stephen D. Moore, 187-205. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2020. 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