[...]rpening focus =/= narrowing focus

workshop for thinking
•with objects
◦moved around
◾in visual play

to take your imaginations along other things
•so their worlds layer and enfold and map out and crochet together
◦so that can be sensed and worked on

(?what are) our helpers in apass:
•companion imaginations = our collective animalities
◦such imaginations have worlds that layer and enfold and map out and crochet together (--> systems humans participate in and do not control)
•our complex personhood
•our distributed being
•objects we take as cognitive companions
•our significant otherness honored in on-going attentions
•new learnings
•new materialities
•

(?what are our) methodology of companioning with things

...................................

what is happening to me: attention to knowledge making practices (in the context of a literary pleasure)
*sharing = making*
*communicating = making*
clues --for--> contexts --shapes--> how we will take what each other says

(Katie King > Anzaldua:) who and what facilitates such movement among worlds?

home = domination + domestication + love


Katie King:
•why science fiction matters?
•how cultural studies helps us make SF meaningful?
interactive possibilities of media art, commercial production, mass culture

SF = effect of defamiliarization
(problem with Star Trek is that it is over familiar)

Janet, from a lesbian utopian future (death by disease of all the men)
Jeannine, from an alternate present (US never entered WWII)
Jael, where “War Between the Sexes” has become deadly literal
Joanna, the author of the book, Joanna Russ (in a shimmering joking literalization has enfolded into her own story)


my ajayeb studies --> *cultural studies: how cultural products are part of cultural processes* (=/= what makes an art work good) --> getting around the term “art”
-mysteries, romance novels, movies, (bestiaries,) all of them deeply commercial forms of entertainment and often produced in complicated technical collaborations [--> and that's what makes them interesting (=/= simple single authorships)]
-genre, formula, (style, fashion,) are intrinsic to the ways these products are produced and the ways they are enjoyed
genre --> subtle shifts possible across many repetitions (=/= something that happens only one time)
premodern literary forms (bestiary) --> structural variations + their pleasurable effects

fandom (collectivities of fans): venues in which high intensities of engagement and collaboration occur --> social and collaborative, (writing) reengineered with various apparatus, [pre-internet Trekkers:]
•...audio tape each episode and listen to the voices over and over in my bed at night, until I had the dialog memorized
•wrote long letters about each episode several times a week, coast to coast, analyzing each in great detail, and writing out particularly memorable bits of repartee
•
--> SF media fandoms (=/= SF literary fandoms), first really organized around Star Trek in the late 60s, early 70s and increasingly international, have tended to be dominated by female fans
[*]poaching: how fans and fandoms appropriate commercial products for their own informal uses

*commercial exuberance* <== media franchises (<-- take advantage of the structure of multinational corporations [film and tv production, book, music and video publishing and distribution, theme parks, theaters, book stores, and so on. tie-in novels and coffee table, graphic novels, toys and games, other paraphernalia such as telephones, t-shirts and porcelain plates, music, commercial internet sites and catalog buying, and even scholarly works] + xeroxed fanfic, fiction written and self-published by fans,)

Star Trek = commercial media art =/= “art for art's sake”
-commercial media art is pleasurable precisely because *one instance of it is always insufficient in a very palpable way*
‘not enough’ ==> interactive & an on-going --> multiply collaborative process (across media)
= processes: people engage in varying degrees and forms of intensity and with varying collaborative possibilities -->{fandom: an interactive engagement that is culturally ambiguous =/= ‘society that values property,’ or ‘unique creations by single artists'}
(such media is) inspirational exactly because *so much is left out*, so much invites elaboration
•gossipy pleasures
•extratextual information
•many layered joke
•alerting the refrain of male friendship
•

like other kinds of SF Star Trek also often does replicate the very aspects of culture and society we find at the root of a range of social injustices, racism, sexism, homophobia, and others

Star Trek, understood by cultural studies, is complexly contradictory, full of progressive possibilities + structures that shut down such possibility
--study--> cultural sites of struggles for power and for competing visions of justice

Kirk speaks Spock's funeral address and movingly says: “his soul was the most human.” --> “human” simultaneously creates unities across races and nationalities (as a universal term for courage or compassion), just as it also valorizes and makes superior the species “human” ==> new inequality between humans and nonhumans

...................................

wmst601fall10.blogspot.com Katie King

zoo spelled backwards

http://www.ediblegeography.com/cross-species-dining-an-interview-with-natalie-jeremijenko-and-mihir-desai/
Jeremijenko @Sarah
edible lures
bio-amplification that happens through the food web

the New York of...
the Brussels of...
(there is always) the Tehran of X [trees, dogs, rats, moms, thugs, etc.] (=/= the X of The Tehran)


approach: targeted drug delivery --> doing focused interventions =/= treating the whole system

links of how *shared interdependent transsex* [shared rearrangement of sex and re/production] is unfolding
-responding to this rearrangement not through fear of the eco-catastrophic assumptions

*shared interdependent* =/= dependence, independence

prefix -sphere =/= -scape
bioscape --> life and energies (not necessarily “alive”) in relation to an imperfect spherical earth, but also its relations to multiple other possible planes, elements, assemblages, and processes (beyond the biosphere)
(jetscapes, oilscapes, foodscapes, microwavescapes, surveillancescapes, mountainscapes, sunscapes, waterscapes, etc.) -Kier


you could love in a goose's world ==> you are *goosomorphous* (~ producing a goose body & being produced yourself by a new identity --> a not-attributing anthropomorphic love)--> *anthropomorphic: to add new definitions to what it is to be a human being*
[*]anthropo-zoo-genetic practice: practice of domestication, by adding new meanings to X, and new identities that provide these new meanings
“Lorenz is articulated by the setting he created. The setting is articulating new ways of talking, new ways of being human with nonhuman, human with goose, goose with human...” -Despret

de-passion knowledge ==> a world ‘without us’ ==> a world without ‘them’

*impoverished: a world of minds without bodies, of bodies without minds, bodies without hearts, expectations, interests, a world of enthusiastic automata observing strange and mute creatures --Despret--> **a poorly articulated (and poorly articulating) world**


•autological subject: discourses, practices, and fantasies about self-making, self-sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom associated with the Enlightenment project of contractual constitutional democracies
Sven, Maarten,
Isabel for whom sex is disseminated
•genealogical society: discourses, practices, and fantasies about various social constraints and psychic assaults on the autological subject by various kinds of inheritances


“liberation denied, liberation achieved” -->
•both visions dependent upon an all-or-nothing approach to social change
•both visions dependent on vision and an unexamined allegiance to the concept of change
...at the self-proclaimed centers of freedom
--Katie--> *how do we know social change when we see it?*

when ‘eye candy’ begins to describe a range of visually induced consumer pleasures

theoret[...]