Strange Stranger Research Articles

Camera Work

Camera Work

The queer habitat of fascia

Practice-led, somatic research comes to understand fascia not only as structure, but also as a relational mediator ranging from the interior to the exterior. Reflections from this research also reveal fascia as an experienced otherness within us, a matrix modulating inside/outside perception through varying fascial tone. Embedded in the philosophies of feminist scholar Karen Barad and ecologist Timothy Morton, experiential movement of fascia discerns ‘nature’, and thus the body itself, as queer. Fascia connects with-in and with-outer and acknowledges strange strangers living within us. Dissolving the binary of the inside/outside leads to an understanding of the body in its surrounding as ecological, interdependent part of its habitat.

A Mesh of Strange Strangers in Juliana Spahr’s Well Then There Now (2011): An Exploration of Timothy Morton’s Ecological Thought

Summary In this article, I utilise theoretical concepts from Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought (2010) to examine selected poems by Juliana Spahr from her poetry collection Well Then There Now (2011). Many of the poems in this collection, especially “Things of each possible relation hashing against one another” (WT 53-67) and “Gentle now, don’t add to heartache” (WT 122-133), deal with the inter-connectivity of all human and non-human beings. Spahr’s idea of inter-connectedness relates philosophically to Morton’s definition of “the ecological thought” as a “practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings – animal, vegetable, or mineral” (2010: 107/2088). It would thus be illuminating to use Morton’s concepts as set out in his ontology about the interconnectivity of all things, in particular, “the mesh” and “the strange stranger”, to read Spahr’s poems in Well Then There Now. “The mesh” imagines inter-connectedness and asks, “who or what is interconnected with what or with whom” as an attempt to illustrate that “nothing exist all by itself” (2010: 108/2088), whereas “the strange stranger” relates to the interconnectivity of all things because it comes forth from the interconnectedness that characterises everything. Morton (2010: 246/1088) writes: “The strange stranger isn’t just a blank at the end of a long list of life forms we know (aardvarks, beetles, chameleons … the strange stranger). The strange stranger lives within (and without) each and every being.” The interconnectedness of all things is an interesting characteristic of Spahr’s poems, and Morton’s theoretical concepts provide the necessary tools to emphasise these different relationships extensively.

Dark pedagogy – speculative realism and environmental and sustainability education

This article draws on the emerging speculative realist philosophical movement in order to develop new understandings of the issues and content of education that needs framing and reframing within environmental and sustainability education (ESE) research. We argue for the potential of using speculative realist concepts such as correlationism, hyperobjects, the strange stranger, undermining, overmining and duomining in order to develop a dark pedagogy that could draw on insights from speculative realism and object-oriented ontology in particular in order to develop further key concepts and discussions within ESE. Based on inspiration from speculative realism, our conception of a dark pedagogy could strive to: develop an understanding of the hyperobjects and the strangeness of objects of education at the center of ESE. Our conception of dark pedagogy insists on the inherent withdrawnness of the objects at play in ESE, and envisions to develop a sensibility towards eco-, geo-, infra- and chrono-factors in ESE and make explicit the potential educational implications of speculative realisms.

Strange Strangers in the Mesh: Maureen F. McHugh’s Uncanny Utopia

Strange Strangers in the Mesh: Maureen F. McHugh’s Uncanny Utopia Marta Komsta (bio) Introduction The focus of traditional spatial studies tended to be anthropocentric, but contemporary research on space and place extends beyond what Yi-Fu Tuan once termed “human environmental experience” into the realm of the nonhuman.1 Accordingly, the spatial paradigm in such diverse fields as post- and transhumanism and biosemiotics and the philosophical discourse of object-oriented ontology, to name but a few, both transcends and complements the limited perspective of the human subject by allowing us to redefine our relationship with the so-called natural world.2 In the context of ecological studies, the nonhuman dimension of spatiality is closely connected with the concept of the mesh, defined by Timothy Morton as a “flowing, shifting, entangled mess of ambiguous entities” that extends beyond the species boundary.3 Denoting the intrinsic interconnectedness of all forms of existence, the mesh is a “radically open form without center or edge” that makes possible the coexistence of humans and nonhumans as “strange strangers,” whose mutual otherness reminds us of the limitations of our perspective vis-à-vis the natural environment.4 In semiotic terms, the mesh is, then, a generator of meanings that include but are not limited to the domain of anthropocentric semiotics; by acknowledging the existence of the nonhuman, we enter the interrelated reality of the mesh, a biosemiosphere where we need new modes of expression and translation in order to facilitate interspecies communication.5 At the same time, nonhuman spatiality has become a particularly pronounced issue in the era of the Anthropocene, whose impact on the environment (and, by extension, the mesh), it has often been suggested, will inevitably give rise to an apocalypse of [End Page 233] human provenance; for Morton, one of the main prophets of the Anthropocene eschaton, “the end of the world is correlated with the Anthropocene, its global warming and subsequent drastic climate change, whose precise scope remains uncertain while its reality is verified beyond question.”6 By irrevocably transforming the mesh, the Anthropocene “collapses the difference between the human realm and so-called nature,” leading to what Morton identifies as “the collapse of a meaningful and stable background” that validated our sense of superiority over the environment.7 Having unseated us from our privileged position within the global ecosystem, the Anthropocene simultaneously abolishes another anthropocentric concept: the distinction between space and place. “From the standpoint of the genuinely post-modern ecological era,” Morton asserts, “what has collapsed is (the fantasy of empty, smooth) space. . . . Space in this sense has collapsed, and place has emerged in its truly monstrous uncanny dimension, which is to say its nonhuman dimension.”8 What Morton sees as “the revenge of place” is tantamount to the inevitable failure of human efforts to dominate the environment, revealing in the process the inherent uncanniness of what we have come to term “nature.”9 Instead of quasi-utopian representations of spatial dominance, pointedly described by Morton as “your grandfather’s place,” “some organic village,” or “a city-state surrounded by fields,” we face thus the reality of the mesh in its apocalyptic form, effected by the anthropocentric politics of consumption and exploitation.10 Following the disintegration of the anthropocentric construct of nature, the mesh functions here as a signifier of a holistic model of spatiality that transcends the anthropocentric distinction between space and place and, in a semiotic context, between the anthropocentric center and nonhuman periphery, as elaborated by Yuri M. Lotman, the latter having become increasingly significant in the Anthropocene crisis.11 The debacle of the anthropocentric hold upon the biosphere resonates with the acclaimed genre of ecodystopias (or, in a broader context, climate fiction) in which ecological catastrophe is often correlated with all-encompassing social collapse, as in J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital series (2004–7) or Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009). A similar thematic strand appears in After the Apocalypse, a 2011 short story collection by Maureen F. McHugh, which, true to its title, attempts to delineate the spatial and semiotic implications of a certain end effected by a series of...

The Postecological World of John Burnside: Dark Green Nature, Pollution, and Eco-Grief in Glister

Bu makale, çevresel ve bedensel kirlenmeyi ve bu kirlenmenin bir İskoç kasabasında günlük yaşamın sosyal ve ahlaki yapılarına etkilerini odak noktasına alır; insanlar ve doğa arasındaki değişen ilişkiyi açıklayarak John Burnside'ın Glister (2008) adlı romanını karanlık ekolojinin bir romanı olarak inceler. İnsanların gezegendeki ekosistemleri değiştiren jeolojik bir güç olduğu yeni jeolojik çağ Antroposen'in gözlerimizin önüne serdiği garip değişimlerin izini sürerken bu makale, Timothy Morton ve Paul Kingsnorth'un ortaya çıkardıkları karanlık ekolojiler ve kirlilik ile ilgili günümüz insansonrası ekoeleştirel tartışmalar bağlamına Glister romanını koymaktadır. Burnside, yeşil ekolojinin reddine dayanan karanlık ekolojinin iki farklı versiyonunu aynı hizaya getirir; insan ve insan-dışı dünyanın birlikte varoluşu karanlık ve korkutucu olursa da insanların, insandan öte dünyayla temel olarak ağ gibi sarılı ve birbirine bağlı olduğu “karanlık yeşil” bir ekolojik vizyon ortaya koyar. Böylece bu çalışma, Burnside'ın çevrenin gerçek ve spektral olmasının yanı sıra hem yeşil hem de karanlık olduğu yeni bir doğa tanımı öne sürerek nasıl bir “ekolojisonrası” gerçekliği öngördüğünü göstermektedir. Öte yandan çalışma, romanın vurguladığı insan ve insan-dışı varlıklar arasındaki eşikteliğin ve radikal olarak birbirine bağlı olmanın altını çizerek “ekolojik ağ örgüsü” ile “yabansı yabancı” gibi Morton'ın kavramsal araçlarının tartışmasıyla Burnside'ın savını geliştirmektedir. Garip varoluşta diğer bedensel doğaların yanı sıra insanların başına gelen toksik beladan kaçışın imkansız olduğunu belirten Burnside, sadece insan kaybı için değil, insanın ekolojik gerçeklikten kopuşu için de ekolojik bir keder uyandırarak karanlık yeşil doğayı sorgulamasını derinleştirir.

SEXUALITY IN A CONTEXT OF SPECULATIVE POSTHUMANISM: HUMAN-POSTHUMAN RUPTURES AND DISCONNECTIONS

In this article human-posthuman ruptures and disconnections both in comprehension and in practices, as well as the possibility of epistemological contingency contemporaneously are investigated. This means that an epistemological ruptures and an ontological disconnections of sexuality both differ from one another, and also join together. Since ancient times both sensitive and sensible practices of sexuality were considered the best mode to concern to sexual care of self. It has shown that, in relation to sexuality, a correlation of epistemological discontinuity and continuity is possible. Sexuality, which is actualized with the help of both natural, vital and death, annihilative drives, fits into the context of onticology as a posthuman ontology. Being connected with the thermodynamics of infinitesimal vital parts, anonymous strange strangers, singularities, it turns out to be especially awesome. Such a mode of sexuality is not necessarily reproductive; rather, it unfolds in the fluid space of non-presence and at the same time determines this space. It emphasizes that that the cos mo‑illogical becoming of posthuman leads to negentropy or extropy as vitality. Following this position, the foucaultian conception of the care of self mirrors lacanian graphs of sexuation in a context of object-oriented ontologies in comparison with philosophies of presence. It is recognized that this is the sexuality of the productive disconnection and the pleasure cosmic dissolution. This article concludes by illustrating that the mode of sexuality of Speculative Posthumanism is contingent with the Libidinal Materialism or Vital Posthumanism in a context in which the sexuality of Wide Human Descendants (WHDs) is thought to be oriented to that which is pleasure and is differentiated.

The Hyperobject and the White Cube: The “Strange Stranger” in Douglas Coupland’s Canada House

Abstract Douglas Coupland’s site-specific installation Canada House, temporarily erected in 2004 in a house deemed by locals to be a “tear down” in a Vancouver suburb, unwittingly captured the zeitgeist of the era eco-critics and theorists have named the Anthropocene, the age where the future of the climate and the environment are most influenced by human activity. In my article, I examine Coupland’s work from the perspective of new materialist philosophy, with particular attention to what Timothy Morton calls the “hyperobject.” In so doing, I attend to the specific dynamics of the installation as a phenomenon in real time and space, as well as its enduring reality as an artifact that translates specific dynamics of interconnectivity between aesthetic, linguistic, and ecocritical discourse as they relate to space and human/nonhuman relationships.

Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past

Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past

Narratorhood in the Anthropocene: Strange Stranger as Narrator-Figure in The Road and Here

ABSTRACTThis essay develops a definition of a type of “narratorhood” specific to the Anthropocene. The concept of the strange stranger is adapted from Timothy Morton into narratological terms through an ecocritical perspective on unnatural narratology and the reading experience, arguing for an ethic of de-anthropomorphized reading that resists the interpretation of narrators as humanoids. Through analyses of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road and Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here, this ethic is described as the encounter with a narrator-figure that is dialogic, radically indeterminate, and that foregrounds spatial juxtaposition and description over linear time and discourse representation.

POST-ANTROPOCENTRIC HYPOSUBJECTIVATION

The article considers hyposubjectivation as the most essential kind of subjectivation in a post-Antropocentric context. Hyposubjectivation is a variety of subjectivation that takes into account the possibility and necessity of anthropological nothing or even less than nothing, the non-presence of a human being. In comparison with hyperobjects from weather catastrophes to celebrities hyposubjects appears as lacanian lamella, deleuzian double fan of a sensation or, in a more philosophical-anthropological formulation, as an uncanny ontological strange stranger. Post-Antropocentric particularization and singularization of a human being bring it to the statement of not-All as othing or hing, less than nothing. And it’s a statement of hyposubject with its contingency in n-dimentions, agentiality, resistance to any -isms, holeness in a weird reality. In the aricle it’s shown that exactly hyposubject, strange stranger realizes schizotrategies for openness of a human being, which non-presents in its meontic nothingness, or tactics of mœlting as becoming-Nature. Such an approach is developed in the aspect of non-human turn as a significant philosophical and anthropological direction. The study is based on post-postmodern philosophy, object-oriented ontology, weird, agential realism of intra-actions, etc., when a human being is considered in its manifold in nothingness. Philosophical anthropology in this case is associated with a deep, dark and weird ecology and the human being appears as a natural object devoids of its own nature. The material for the study was inured the actual cultural appearances such as the artworks of Bjork, Olafur Eliasson and A Place of a Bury Strangers, as well as relevant life practices. Thus, the principle of hyposubjectivity of a human being in a post-Antropocentric context is proved.

Nature-Function in Caryl Phillips' Cambridge

Abstract: The consensus in ecocriticism today is that deconstructing the human/nonhuman binary is crucial if we want humanity to care for the environment. Indeed, viewing the environment as something to which we are connected is seen as more conducive to producing an environmentalist consciousness than seeing it as something categorically other. By contrast, my ecocritical reading of Caryl Phillips' Cambridge (1991) reveals the extent to which nonhuman landscapes in Caribbean fiction are paradoxically represented as categorically other. In Phillips' novel, this reification of the binary works in tandem with sites of difference such as race and gender to expose how the very category of is constructed through this process of othering. Instead of discussing the environment as backdrop to the human affairs and relations that it may or may not influence, in Cambridge the environment operates as form of nature-function that echoes Michel Foucault's of authorship. For Foucault, the author is not the originator of meaning but function of discourse, of the set of assumptions that govern the production, circulation, classification, and consumption of texts. Similarly, the notion of nature-function challenges approaches that foreground the environment as pre-existing space that evolves outside of the subject and instead sees it as function of discourse. In Phillips' text, this discursively produced environment then goes on to produce the human subject. Keywords: ecocriticism, Caryl Phillips, Cambridge, environment, human ********** At first sight, Caryl Phillips' fiction may not be an obvious candidate for an ecocritical analysis. Indeed, unlike Caribbean writers like Wilson Harris or Derek Walcott, whose work explicitly engages with the environment, (1) Phillips seems interested in it only peripherally or insofar as it helps him provide context for his characters. At recent colloquium in Belgium, he inquired about ecocritical studies in way that revealed his lack of active engagement with the discipline. (2) I argue that an ecocritical study of his work is nonetheless in order in the same way as feminists have shown the study of gender as a social category of analysis (Scott 1053) to be relevant in texts in which gender is not mentioned explicitly. After all, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), classic work of feminist literary criticism, focuses exclusively on male writers who were not priori writing about gender politics, and Helene Cixous identifies her transgressive ecriture feminine as embodied by the writings of male authors such as James Joyce and Jean Genet. Similarly, I argue that Phillips' fiction lends itself to an ecocritical reading not because his texts showcase the environment as motif but because of his noted adeptness at exposing the construction of boundaries between self and other, male and female. Insofar as our understanding of the environment is predicated on culture/nature, human/nonhuman binary and Phillips masterfully deconstructs binaries throughout his work, it is therefore unsurprising that his fiction provides excellent fodder for an ecocritical analysis. Two of ecocriticism's significant impacts have been to show that humans are part and parcel of the very environment from which they had previously seen themselves as separate (3) and that the so-called nonhuman other is always already part of the human body (Timothy Morton's strange strangers and Donna Haraway's companion species, for example). For instance, William Cronon's anthology The Trouble With Wilderness (1995) was instrumental in raising consciousness about humanity's imbrication with the natural world in way that contested the elitist concept of Nature-as-tableau-in-natural-parks-for-the-rich that often defined the nineteenth century's environmentalist movement la John Muir. (4) Similarly, Morton's Ecology Without Nature (2007) and The Ecological Thought (2010) emphasize the interdependence of humanity and the environment in order to make people more accountable to an environment that is as much part of them as they are of it. …

Strange strangers: The Jerusalem correspondents in the network of nations

This research is based on an ethnographic investigation of foreign press correspondents working in Israel–Palestine. It strives to understand how the work of these correspondents is linked to a network of changing and overlapping collective identities, be they national or ethnic, for both journalists and their audiences. This is analyzed at three levels: (1) just as the Western world is politically divided in respect to this conflict, so too is the journalistic world, where suspicion of pro-Palestinism or pro-Israelism is voiced, albeit mezza voce or off the record; (2) the journalists feel professionally challenged when their impartiality is questioned due to their own religious or ethnic identities; and (3) finally, audiences have changed, through a revival of ethnic and religious identities, overlapping political involvement in the conflict, and technology which makes surveillance and ‘media monitoring’ much easier. This form of ‘diasporic nationalism’ puts increasing pressure on journalists.

The King's Tree Body: The Taming of the Wilderness and the Ecology of Kingship in Perceforest

The fifteenth-century French prose romance Perceforest portrays the relationship between the king and his forests in terms of both control and intimacy. The king's legitimacy arises from his ability to civilize the forests and regulate their resources, yet in another sense he himself is the forest. Both the eponymous king Perceforest and his great-nephew and heir Gallafur experience dream visions in which their subjectivities appear in vegetal form: Perceforest's depressive mental state manifests itself as an overgrown forest landscape, while Gallafur sees his body become tree-like. A reading of these visions suggests an ecology of kingship, in which proper governance, land management, and licit sexuality are all interconnected. At the same time, the visions resonate with recent strains of ecological thought, notably dark ecology and queer ecology. Encountering himself as a “strange stranger” within the dream landscape, the king experiences his mystical body in vegetal terms.

‘That sonofabitch could cut your throat’: Bigger and the Black Rat in Richard Wright’s Native Son

In his controversial urban novel Native Son (1940), Richard Wright inverts animal stereotypes often used by whites to characterize African Americans. While critics typically focus on Wright’s use of the ape in the novel, I examine the role of the rat. Not only does the rat act as a creaturely trope for the impoverished conditions of Bigger and his family, it exposes the arbitrary boundaries white landlords and city leaders used to contain African Americans living in the Black Belt tenements of the South Side, Chicago. In transgressing these boundaries, the rat becomes an environmental fugitive, modelling for Bigger a form of resistance to the racist social and economic practices that trap blacks in constricting environmental spaces. By connecting Bigger and the rat, Wright also highlights links between racism and forms of anthropocentrism in ways that critique typical understandings of what constitutes human and animal “pests.” Drawing upon Timothy Morton’s “the strange stranger” and Jill Bennett’s “critical empathy,” I argue that Bigger and the rat create an aesthetic encounter with otherness, offering readers an empathic experience that recognizes and accepts difference.

The Actor, the Pilgrim and the Fieldpath

Abstract This article aims to cast a glance on some questions relevant for theatre, with an emphasis on the actor’s point of view, not in order to investigate the acting practice but to develop a reflection. Theatre is a marginal art; an actor’s action is a displacement action, out of the centre, searching, moving. Also, the actor is always a foreigner, a strange stranger. We follow these questions while going through the fieldpath, with direct reference to Martin Heidegger’s text “Der Feldweg” (1949). As an actress, I try to understand it by walking my own path.

Sustainability, ‘collectivity’ and Thomas Hardy’s vision of life entire

This article reconsiders the work of Thomas Hardy in the light of Timothy Morton’s concept of ‘the ecological thought’, and links this discussion to contemporary debates about ‘sustainability’, and more specifically, Sustainable Development. It links this conceptual framework to recent ideas about ‘collectivity’ (as opposed to community), underlining the role of literature in creating the imaginative reach it presupposes. It explores Hardy’s engagement with nineteenth-century ideas and the emergence of his own thoughts about what Morton calls ‘strange strangers’, and beyond them, the mesh to which Morton also refers. These ideas take root in his novels, but they find their most ambitious realisation in his verse and verse-drama. If sustainability – if survival – depends on recognising the interdependencies that make up what Hardy called this ‘one great network’, then his imaginative realisation of just such a ‘collectivity’ represents an important and still relevant contribution to the debate.

Taste in the Anthropocene: The Emergence of “Thing-power” in Food Gardens

Taste in the Anthropocene: The Emergence of “Thing-power” in Food Gardens

Strange strangers and uncanny hammers: Morton's The Ecological Thought and the phenomenological tradition

Phenomenological notions of ‘dwelling’, particularly as presented by Heidegger, have recently come in for a great deal of criticism (Garrard 2010; Morton 2010; Plumwood 2008; Spencer 2010). This article will evaluate these criticisms, particularly those set out by Timothy Morton in his book The Ecological Thought (2010). Morton argues that the concepts of the ‘lifeworld’ and ‘dwelling’ raise several problems: the extinguishing of the ‘otherness’ of nature, the eradication of difference and the equating of ‘place’ with ownership, exclusion and nationalism, thus failing to allow for uncanniness within intimacy, and for other beings to remain ‘strange strangers’ (Morton 2010). I will consider whether Morton's notion of an ecological ‘mesh’ may be a reiteration of the insights of those thinkers he is criticising, and I will argue that the phenomenology of Heidegger and Husserl has more space for gaps, absence and uncanniness than Morton and others are allowing.

Vieraslajisuudesta vierasmaailmaisuuteen – lintujen kohtaamisen uutta runousoppia

From Other Species to Otherworldliness – Toward a New Poetics of Meeting Birds When discussing animals, both scientific discourse and everyday parlance often rely on the concept of species. In addition to its ambiguity in biology, this concept has raised ethical concerns among posthumanist philosophy and human-animal studies as it may entail hierarchical separations between different types of animals. This article proposes an alternative way for thinking about nonhuman animals and a conceptual tool for analysing cultural representations of animals. Otherworldliness refers to nonhuman animals as having their biologically and ecologically specific ways of experiencing their living environments. Instead of a human-centered view of animals as representing a certain species – named and classified by humans – animals are thought of as otherworldly, having their own worlds. As the concept is intended for analysing nature writing and environmental art, it is developed in a literary context, using bird poetry as examples. Two poems from Jouni Tossavainen’s collection Kerro (2007) and one poem from Jonimatti Joutsijarvi’s collection Tule on minun nimeni (2007) are shown to mediate bird life on thematical and formal levels. Theoretically, otherworldliness is based on Jakob von Uexkull’s ethological theory, most notably on his concept of Umwelt. Timothy Morton’s conceptualizations of humans and nonhumans as coexistent strange strangers and the Earth as an entangled mesh are connected to the Uexkullian Umwelt in order to highlight the connectedness of human and nonhuman worlds. Thus humans can imagine and create art works that mediate the worlds of nonhumans, even though this attainability of otherworldliness always remains partial.