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Sharing agency with things….
SLIDE ONE: TITLE
Thank you for inviting me
here. I’m sharing with you today one thread through three decades of research
on writing technologies. This is something that keeps getting re-entangled into what I do, no matter where
my transdisciplinary work takes me! It is something that is spun anew with rapid and dynamic changes
in research, some happening even very recently, as well as rewoven into a range of shifting contexts for knowledge makings.
SLIDE TWO: PICS1
This thoroughly
transdisciplinary something is called a khipu, which means knot in Quechua, a
language of the Central Andes of South America. And it is not only MY
imagination that has been engaged, but that of many others ACROSS knowledge
worlds, within and beyond globally restructuring academies.
SLIDE THREE: PICS2
Indeed this talk is about
how many of us are “affected” by the khipu, that is to say, find sharing worlds
with khipu to be altering our sensory apparatus across materialisms, and
actually ADDING elements to worlds and embodiments we both know, and that we
can say caringly, are emergent. (Haraway 2011; Latour 2004) Khipu are things in the sense joked about by Bruno
Latour: "Facts are no longer the mouth-shutting alternative to politics,
but what has to be stabilized instead. To use another etymology, 'objects'
which had been conceived as wholly exterior to the social and political realm,
have become 'things' again, that is, in the sense of the mixture of assemblies,
issues, causes for concerns, data, law suits, controversies which the words res, causa,
chose, aitia, ding have
designated in all the European languages." (Latour 2002:21) Sharing worlds
with khipu we find ourselves having to UNLEARN as well as learn anew!
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Pinning things together....
SLIDE FOUR: PINTEREST
Thoroughly altered myself
by writing technological infrastructures, processes, and cognitive reassembly,
when I share my work, I tend to do so as a kind of transmedia story. (King
2011) A story both you and I gather and pin together across media, platforms,
sensory channels, and forms of sharing.
SLIDE FIVE: WEBSITE
I have created this
website to accompany this talk, but really it was also a kind of sandbox for
thinking it out as I prepared to come today. And I use the web as a SET of
sandboxes, or maybe better, knowledge
weavings for intellectual play for all my work nowadays. Such play helps me
think in pictures, to move around and interconnect knowledges distributed among
worlds, to talk to myself and others both verbally and non-verbally. My website
concentrates this TALK today, it has LINKS for overviews, it links to more CONTEXT,
for how it fits into the range of work I do, it collects links to other work on
the web – notice that each PICTURE is also a link – and that the website shares
multi-MEDIA, videos, slides, my handout, google books, and it stores a BIBLIOGRAPHY,
many LINKS here for your further attention, later, after our meeting together. You
can engage a transdisciplinary extensive
range, and you can explore intensive
communities of practice and their very specific meanings too, link by link.
This is a transmedia form
that modestly MAKES knowledges, as well as sharing and demonstrating them,
storing and using them. It is not at all a transparent platform for content:
but rather, as feminist theorist Donna Haraway reminds us about speculative
feminisms of all kinds:
"It matters what
matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to
tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think
thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds
make stories.” (Haraway 2011:4)
Notice you have a handout
too, also downloadable from the website: with quotations and bibliography. It
shares with you the links to this website and to others in an additional and
alternative platform and set of writing technologies. I both talk ABOUT and AM
MYSELF a transmedia storyteller.
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So nowadays I find myself in Knots.
SLIDE SIX: KHIPU = KNOT
As ethno-mathematician
Gary Urton… (He is the guy who won a MacArthur Award in 2001 for demonstrating that
thinking of khipu as if they used computer machine language, allows us to
understand, across time, just how much information such past forms of binary
coding might have been able to hold….) As Gary Urton, and khipu database
administrator and web designer, textile historian and anthropologist Carrie
Brezine, say… (on the online database that hopes to collect for worldwide
scholarly attention the material details of all known khipu across museums and
collections, and shares with a range of publics why all this might matter….) As
Urton and Brezine tell us at that website:
“The word khipu comes from
the Quechua word for ‘knot’ and denotes both singular and plural. Khipu are
textile artifacts composed of cords of cotton or occasionally camelid fiber.
The cords are arranged such that there is one main cord, called a primary cord,
from which many pendant cords hang. There may be additional cords attached to a
pendant cord; these are termed subsidiaries. Some khipu have up to 10 or 12
levels of subsidiaries. Khipu are often displayed with the primary cord
stretched horizontally, so that the pendants appear to form a curtain of
parallel cords, or with the primary cord in a curve, so that the pendants
radiate out from their points of attachment. When khipu were in use, they were
transported and stored with the primary cord rolled into a spiral. In this
configuration khipu have been compared to string mops.” (Urton & Brezine 2003—)
SLIDE SEVEN: HOW BINARY?
How could these things possibly be
“binary”? What does that mean here?
Well, first by starting
with understanding Andean social and conceptual systems as radically dualistic.
Situations, for example, in which, say, a common person might wear a tunic
woven from yarn spun z or clockwise and plied s or counterclockwise, while a
pacu or shaman might wear a tunic woven from yarn spun s and plied z. On the
left hand of this slide is a schematic of the 7 bit binary code Urton theorizes
the khipu uses, taken from his book Signs
of the Inka Khipu. (2003) He calculates that this system could manipulate
1536 unique units, comparable to the sign capacities of early cuneiform, Shang
Chinese ideograms, and Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs. Seven types of
information are coded in binary bits: • the material a string is made
from, • the color class of each string and • its spin/ply
relationship, • how it is attached to other cords, • what s or z
direction the knot is tied in, • which of two number classes it belongs
to, and • which of two kinds of khipu string it might be, either one for
recording numbers, or, Urton theorizes, one used to record histories, "poetry
or other ritual, canonical narrative forms." (2003:48) On the right hand
side, is the binary “signature” of one knot on a khipu, showing how this 7 bit
code could be used.
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SLIDE EIGHT: THINK WITH
AND ABOUT
It was in the context of
research on historical and cross-cultural writing technologies that I first
learned about khipu, these Andean recording devices made of strings and knots, not
all that long ago considered by academics to be "counting" and not
"writing." What counts as writing? as counting? as connecting or
disconnecting them? Restructuring knowledge systems in the nineties and after
create contexts – economies, critical design, speculative feminisms, technology
infrastructures, excavations, new historical knowledges – for cascading • forms
of attention and • frames of analysis for alternative khipu speculations at
different • grains of detail. The khipu
is both something to think WITH and something to think ABOUT.
Khipu knowledges today are
created, shared, demonstrated, used, and stored in many writing technological
forms: not only monographs, books, conference talks, but also websites,
databases, images, exhibitions, reenactments, television documentaries, tourist
and heritage tours, sites and festivals, as well as village and kinship ritual
work processes. Gender and nationality, ethnicity and race, indigenous politics
and university restructuring, all play roles in such systems entangled as
current processes of globalization. (King 2010 [2008]; Anderson et al. 2009;
Beynon-Davies 2007; 2009; 2012; Lechtman 2010; Bongen & Karahalios 2009;
and others linked on my Pinterest site)
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SLIDE NINE: TV
Last Saturday morning,
National Geographic TV rebroadcast a recent television documentary in which the
khipu figured. “The Incan Code” webisode for it is online at the site for the
series Ancient X Files on The National Geographic Channel. (There is a link to
the webisode on my Pinterest site.) The show features the work of Sabine
Hyland, Andean ethno-historian who, like others, is attempting to decode khipu.
(She comments herself online on the
webisode, as do various of her colleagues and students.) Her particular share
of khipu knowledges come from working with one of the only two currently known
to scholars khipu-alphabetic texts, recently discovered khipu boards with both
knot strings and apparently, corresponding alphabetic writing, the only
something as close to that elusive model of decipherment, the Rosetta Stone, as
scholars have found so far today.
Who knows what about various khipus
and when? We will have to keep
returning to this question across worlds, temporalities, and knowledge
agencies…. It is a transdisciplinary question, one that does not assume that
objects are unitary, that knowledges are universal or expert, or that times are
not interactively in contact remaking each other.
SLIDE TEN: WEBBED
In the seventies US scholars
Marcia and Robert Ascher demonstrated just how a decimal numeric reading of specific
“counting” khipu works. They began a process of collecting data of material
significance – something that changes – on every surviving khipu, at that time
in museums across Europe and North and South America, a process continued since
by Urton and Brezine. The Asher code books are in eformat available for
download today, and the Harvard database site is still in operation, although
Brezine is no longer its manager. Brezine has also worked with anthropologist
Frank Salomon, who has documented on the web the current display and ceremonial
use of khipu in Rapaz, Peru, where a storehouse of khipu still exists in
community. These differ strikingly from the Inka khipu described by Urton: not
in decimal array for sure, but rather full of objects tied onto a single cord. (Salomon
2005-2008)
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SLIDE ELEVEN: DESIGN
FICTIONS
In some communities of
practice, is it fun, a kind of serious play, to consider khipu even as design fictions: and then wonder for
whom and how? (Latour 2002:21; Bleecker 2006 [1993]) As my fellow alum of the
program in the History of Consciousness in California, and “Director” of the
NearFuture Laboratory online, Julian Bleecker asks:
“How do you entangle
design, science, fact and fiction in order to create this practice called
‘design fiction’ that, hopefully, provides different, undisciplined ways of envisioning
new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices.... Design Fiction is making
things that tell stories.” (Bleecker 2009)
• Specialist in
ancient technologies Heather Lechtman teaches her undergrads at MIT about textiles
as engineering materials, and recently they made a giant khipu in order to
explore fiber as THE fundamental Andean technology. (Lechtman 2010) • Computer
scientist Karrie Karahalios, heads the Social Spaces group at the University of
Illinois, working out new ways visualizations and physical space can shape
interactive media. Photo Khipu is a group project made with grad student Kora
Bongen that uses khipu knot and cord positions to connect collective
interactive photo albums that narrate social transactions. (Bongen &
Karahalios 2009)
SLIDE TWELVE: YOU TUBE
VIDEO
• You can see a brief
khipu video in the media section of my talk site made by ecoartist and film
poet Cecilia Vicuña, or her website linked in the bibliography to her set of
installations and performance pieces on The Menstrual Khipu, or streams of
blood. (Brown 2011)
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SLIDE THIRTEEN: WRITING
WITHOUT WORDS
In the Introduction to his
book The Cord Keepers, about Andean
cultural continuities, multivalent and multi-temporal, anthropologist Frank
Salomon speaks of
“Khipus in Search of Contexts and
Vice Versa” (Salomon 2004:18)
What would writing have to
mean to include what “we” (who is this we?) may perhaps know about the khipu – so
far? What does this something called a khipu have to teach “us” (which us?)
about thing-ness? And what sorts of temporalities do “we” need to share with khipu in order to figure with them or to figure them out? They seemingly have
their own temporalities to teach us.
Khipu can be understood for
us as interrogations themselves about assumptions embedded in all of these. As
agents of and for knowledge play. Anthropologist Salomon likens them to
infographics, but he means by this to suggest that khipu have a sort of agency
we usually reserve for only one side of that gap we think we jump across to
create a “representation” or to engage in “making.”
Khipu possibilities in play
today consider how writing might operate as a system or perhaps several
interacting systems, each with alternate layers of semiosis mapped onto or
perhaps better, mapping themselves
together with other objects and features of the world than words, indeed some
never verbalized. Some of the most exciting rethinkings of khipu today involve
what we might call workarounds for
something we might still want to mean by “writing.” The Andes become then a multi-temporal geopolitical zone for
considering “writing without words,” the title to a ground-breaking book on
alternative literacies in Meso-America and the Andes. (Salomon 2001; Boone
& Mignolo 1994; Brokaw 2010a, 2010b)
Salomon points out “the
fact that data can be formulated as speech is not the point. The quipocamayo process
would have compacted social process into an impressively data-dense medium
whose clarity did not depend on expansion into words.” (Salomon 2001:266)
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data writings: visualization,
sonification, dramatization, textilization
SLIDE FOURTEEN: DATA
How would this work? Caringly working out in great detail bits of who
knows what over which ranges of Andean cultural continuities, Salomon in The Cord Keepers pays close attention to
the transpositions of content over time among different historical khipu
sharing worlds with us. Such continually re-enveloping temporalities that khipu
now impress upon us, flickering among progressive chronologies, wormholed
simultaneities, cyclical coincidences, and other time-traveling ecologies,
require us to cultivate the sort of knowledge making that Bruno Latour reminds
us, has never been modern. (Latour
1993 [1991]) The pastpresents (all
one word strung together) of binary coding, allow us to play extensively and transcontextually, at the very same time
that they urge us to finer and finer grains
of detail, carefully textured and textiled.
Salomon asks us to
consider khipus as “an immensely consequential data writing.” (Salomon
2004:281) Data writing is a term that emerges from current data analytic
practices, which today play consciously among sensory modalities: taking for
granted, say data visualizations or even data sonifications, just now
suggesting data dramatization, and you will even find on the web, data textilization….
Salomon and others working
out among Andean “writings without words” extensively connect across time and
technologies forms in which processing information does not have to jump a gap
created by ideas about language.
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SLIDE FIFTEEN: DIFFERENT
PARTS OF THE SENSORIUM
In chapter after chapter Solomon
teaches us how to understand in detail a highly complex and multiply embedded Andean
system of social organization, • both hierarchical but also contingently
collective among possible groupings; one with • different kinds of
interactivities possible with each range of connection in attention, as well as
• altered in cycles that do not recur in any simple way; and one • always
imperfectly “known,” in any time period, to any set of people, both cooperative
but also idiosyncratic. He calls khipu in this context “reciprocity made
visible” (2004:279), but means by this something more variantly sensible than
vision as they “allow one to use different parts of the sensorium for grasping
the different variables.” (281) In pairs and used differently at different
moments of social and ritual purpose, in some parts of “their use cycle” (278) khipu
are simulation devices and at other
parts agents in performance of duties and
entitlements.
The kind of “aboutness”
here is not representational but rather a kind of recursive relational agency,
both “of” and “about” reciprocities in worldly processes. Salomon understands
khipu in pairs worked as both • simulation devices knotted and unknotted
in projection, planning, enactment and re-enactment; and also as • records
of how things have happened, with whom, when, with what informational needs,
and sometimes as agencies travelling worlds. (2004:276)
“Semiotically
heterogenous” is what cultural studies scholar Galen Brokaw calls khipu
themselves, khipu contexts, and khipu techniques. That different khipu
“developed at different levels of society” over time, but worked at historical
moments simultaneously across worlds, means that both standardization and
idiosyncracy existed among khipu literacies. In other words, “the existence of
different levels or domains of khipu literacy…often employed different types of
conventions and exhibited different degrees of standardization based on the
nature and relationship among the institutions functioning in each domain.” (2010b:262)
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transdisciplinary: both extensive and
intensive
SLIDE SIXTEEN: TRANS
Who knows what about various khipus
and when? Let’s return to this
question across worlds, temporalities, and knowledge agencies….
I would argue that it is
not by accident that semiotically heterogenous khipu become interesting to so
many so extensively at a time period in which it is to our own advantage to come
to terms with our own practices of semiotic heterogeny ourselves.
Khipu live with us now in
media ecologies that are not an area of study only, but the very air we breath,
quite as much a part of global ecologies as global warming, if also
ambivalently politically charged and attended to. Media ecologies include the
hormonal and neurological circuits within and extending beyond human bodies,
along lines of ecological action and distributed being. Even what we might call
social media learning takes place across whole systems not just in human heads.
Mass and burgeoning new media have many demonstrations for any of “us” moving
among knowledge worlds of what we might work with as transcontexualities. And
political affects come necessarily to shape work now in and around academies,
opposing and investing in, for example, current budgetary crises and realities,
explosively media- and activist-intensive.
A posthumanities emerges
out of a political, intellectual, and affective double bind of having both • to
address many diverging audiences simultaneously under the threat of survival,
while also having • to author knowledges as merely one of multiple agencies
with very limited control. In such an environment the mapping of messages onto
audiences becomes increasingly tricky as authorial and receptive agencies,
partial and highly distributed, require affective labors not simply anchored by
human bodies, although also sifting among authoritative and alternative
knowledges and attempting to clarify affiliations, or to inspire trust.
Feminisms are affected; "we" learn to be affected.
Salomon speaks of sharing
agency with khipu that “never ceased to be updated, never stopped changing, and
therefore never ceased to be of ‘live’ interest.” (2004:233) How to share
agency with and among things as things ourselves is a design fiction khipu help
us to narrate in an ecology we begin to want to inhabit explicitly.
Thank you.
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