Prompted to read a text I had downloaded earlier, “On the ‘doing’ of ‘something’” by Teemu Paavolainen, I was fascinated by the discussion on performativity, although the context, performative protests, is not that familiar to me. The text begins with the statement that the essay “grows from the simple observation that ‘performative’ or ‘performativity’, in protest as elsewhere, have a plurality of conflicting meanings.” (p 38) He summarises the duality “between explicitly positive and negative conceptions of performativity as a function of novelty or normativity: active subversion or passive submission, effective doing or theatrical dissimulation”. (p 38) He references Judith Butler’s Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), where she “insists that ‘performativity describes both the processes of being acted on and the conditions and possibilities for acting’, and cannot be understood without both dimensions (2015: 63)”. He summarises the situation: “people do something, and it begins to look like some thing. (Think of verbs and nouns: protesting becomes ‘a protest’, behaviour comes to suggest ‘character’.)” (p 39) Later he speaks of and for “the unsettled duality of performativity as both making and maintaining, and on the ways these intertwine.” (p 43) The article contains examples of various protests and the different tactics utilized, from violence to clowning and also notes: “While the estrangement of the present is relatively easy … imagining new futures is substantially harder, even if many of their ingredients are already present in the present. Perhaps the most that any protest can prefigure is an adjectival sense of a world more open and more openly performative.” (p 45) The text ends by suggesting a possible dynamic for the performativity of protests: “in all cases, there is a doing of things that have real effects both outside the done and back again on the doers. Effectively, the performativity lies in the cyclical relation between the doing and the done: whether consecutive or concurrent, there is an aspect of making and an aspect of maintaining (hence production, approximation/ compulsion, dissimulation). Perhaps, it is simply the balance between the efficacy of the doing and the artificiality of the done that also gives us the more positive and negative connotations of ‘performative protest’?” (p 46)
 
Probably it is this relation between the doing and the done that interests me because it is applicable and relevant in all kinds of creative contexts while trying to do things differently. As is the difficulty of imagining new futures. If I keep talking to trees it is on the one hand suggesting a manner of treating trees with respect as a prefiguration of another kind of coexisting with the vegetal world and on the other hand it is simply maintaining an old folk tradition of humans talking to trees when in distress. But we could ask what exactly is the ‘something’ that is thereby done.
 
Teemu Paavolainen (2022) On the ‘Doing’ of ‘Something’, Performance
Research, 27:3-4, 38-46, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2022.2155394
 
 
 

Finally I read a text I have planned to read for a while – there are many of them lying around on my computer desktop and various files – a text on posthuman phenomenology by Tyson Lewis and James Owen, published already 2019 in Qualitative Inquiry. Although I was very much inspired by Merleau-Ponty when working on my doctoral dissertation Performance as Space in the 1990’s phenomenology has not been my focus since then. It is nevertheless central for many of my colleagues, especially those working with dance and somatic practices, and therefore posthumanism related to phenomenology immediately incited my curiosity. Interestingly, the authors suggest that their approach could be understood as a branch of performance philosophy. “To press the phenomenological tradition beyond its humanist roots, one must commit a radical reorganization of the body and of sensation, and the best way to accomplish this is through the esthetic reinvention of one’s own bodily apparatus.” (p 2)
 
The subtitles describe the main trajectory of the text: Unsettling the Human-Centeredness of Phenomenology, From Imaginative Speculation to Embodied Entanglements, Performing the Posthuman, Posthuman Performance: A Case Study, and Conclusion: Toward the Landscape. What is not so evident by the subtitles is the importance of Jakob van Uexküll’s idea of Umwelt and various ‘life bubbles’ for their argument. Uexküll uses an oak tree to exemplify how the same object can have different perceptual “tones” (Uexküll 2010, 129). For a fox living in a hollow at the base of the tree “the oak possesses neither the use tone from the forester’s environment nor the danger tone from the little girl’s environment, but only a protection tone” (Ibid). Rather, “in accordance with the different effect tones, the perception images of the numerous inhabitants of the oak are configured differently” (Uexküll 2010, 130).
 
The authors describe various imaginative experiments based on Uexküll’s ideas before introducing experiments in embodiment, arguing that “a more efficacious starting point for a posthuman phenomenology of the non-human animal can be found in performance philosophy.” (p 4) They suggest that “through embodied imitation of non-human animals, the body can begin to think differently.” (p 5) This they exemplify with some experiments by Charles Foster, who tried to live like a badger and develop his fingertips to sense somewhat like the whiskers of an otter. After discussing the ethical problems in such experiments they refer to Merleau-Ponty and note how “there is always already a chiasmic intertwining of self and other in all forms of touching” (Merleau-Ponty 1968 143), and “in this touching the human cannot remain untouched, producing an intercapture through mimetic performance.” (p 6) For the authors “there is an interface that enables bubbles to cohabitate and potentially touch one another” and which “is revealed through performance”, a “necessary, shared commonwealth between worlds that make such touching possible”, a shared interface they call landscape. (Ibid) They write: “The landscape is not reducible to any given world (any given bubble) or to a form of subjective intelligence but is, to use phenomenological language, the clearing that enables bubbles to appear and potentially touch/contaminate one another. Without the attempt to perform (rather than to merely imagine), posthuman phenomenology would not have succeeded in exposing this realm that exists alongside our worlds but is not reducible to worlds.” (Lewis & Owen 2019, 6)
 
The idea of performing as a way of exploring through imitation is closer to theatre and performance groups like Other Spaces and not at all what I have been trying to do. Or perhaps there is something related in my attempt at remaining still with trees or shrubs, breathing together with them, sharing their relative immobility in some manner. Landscape as a common ground for various life-worlds or bubbles resonates better with my aspirations, I guess. I’m also reminded of Emanuele Coccia’s claim that there are no separate niches or life-worlds, because we are immersed in the worlds of others. “Being in the world means to exercise influence especially outside one’s own space, outside one’s own habitat, outside one’s own niche.” (Coccia 2019, 43) According to him, “the world is by definition the life of others: the ensemble of other living beings”.(Ibid) And yes, we are breathing in the air others are breathing out. Following Lewis and Owen we could ask, however, how could we understand those others. And as they suggest, besides trying to imagine, we can also try to do something, not necessarily to imitate but to perform in some manner.
 
 
 
Tyson E. Lewis and James Owen. 2019. Posthuman Phenomenologies: Performance Philosophy, Non-Human Animals, and the Landscape. Qualitative Inquiry Volume 26 issue 5, p 1 –7.
 
Coccia, Emanuele. 2019. The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
 
Texts referenced by Lewis and Owen:
Foster, C. (2016). Being a beast: Adventures across the species divide. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible (A. Lingis, Trans.) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Uexküll, J. (2010). A foray into the worlds of animals: With a theory of meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
 
 
 

A text to be discussed in a reading circle at Bioart Society seemed currently relevant and inspiring despite being already ten years old, that is ” Weathering: Climate Change and the ‘Thick Time’ of Transcorporeality” by Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker. I have been so focused on plants and trees that I have not read much about broader issues. I remember participating with the paper “Working with the Weather”, in PSi #22, (Performance Studies international) Performance Climates, University of Melbourne, 6-9.7.2016. The text was later published as “Performing with the Weather” in Global Performance Studies Issue 1.2.2018 Performance Climates. I wish I had read this text about weathering back then.
 
Interestingly Neimanis and Walker justify their mixing of climate and weather by trying to bring the idea of climate change closer to embodied experience. And of course their key concept, weathering, needs that mixture for relevance. Weathering means ageing, in Finnish ‘vanheneminen’, while to weather means to change in colour or form over a period of time because of the effects of sun, wind, or other weather conditions but also to deal successfully with a difficult situation. In Finnish the verbs include both ‘rapautua’ and ‘selvitä’. A relevant combination; as Neimanis and Walker write: “Like these trees, we are all, each of us, weathering.” (Neimanis & Walker 2014, 559). What I liked especially about the text was the discussion and further development of the concept trans-corporeality proposed by Stacy Alaimo, which I have found useful, because it emphasises the constant exchanges taking place between all kinds of bodies.
 
They write about transcorporeal weathering and emphasise the temporal and processual aspects of trans-corporeality and note that “attention to the subtle differences among relations of contiguity, continuity, immersion, and co-constitution also helps clarify weathering in terms of Barad’s concept of intra-action.” (Neimanis & Walker 2014, 565) They further state: “Nuanced this way — as incorporation that engenders differences that matter, rather than contiguity or immersion — transcorporeal relations reveal the enactments of weathering.” (Neimanis & Walker 2014, 566) Moreover, “a felt sense of our mutual weathering demands that we think about time.” (Ibid).
 
When speaking of transcorporeal temporalities they note that “our human bodies are contractions of climate, and concurrently that climate is a contraction of our bodies (and others’)” (Neimanis & Walker 2014, 570). They stress that “to recognize this co-laboring is also to engender a new temporal imaginary of climate change, where climates and weather are not something we pass through (in a linear progression of time) or sustain (in an impossible denial of time), but are rather a time that we weather together.” (Ibid). They note that “the passive habits of contraction take place at the cellular, organic, and inorganic levels” and quote Deleuze: “What we call wheat is a contraction of the earth and humidity…. What organism is not made of elements and cases of repetition, of contemplated and contracted water, nitrogen, carbon, chlorides and sulphates,thereby intertwining all the habits of which it is composed?” (Deleuze 1994, 75 quoted in Neimanis & Walker 2014, 571). Moreover, they problematise the notion of an open future and the ‘new’. “How do we think of a future that is ‘open and uncontained by the past and present’ (Grosz 2004, 75)?” when “transcorporeal temporality means that everything has a trace, an echo, a past.” (Ibid).
 
Neimanis and Walker propose responsivity as responsibility to form a way towards a politics of possibilities: “A new climate change imaginary—one of transcorporeal temporality—can engender what Barad refers to as a ‘politics of possibilities,’ that is, ‘ways of responsibly imagining and intervening in’ the entanglements of which we are a part” (Barad 2007, 246, quoted in Neimanis & Walker 2014, 572). They are aware of the limitations, though: “As Grosz writes, ‘concepts’ —like the notion of weathering we propose — ‘do not solve problems that events generate for us,’ but ‘they enable us to surround ourselves with possibilities for being otherwise’ Grosz 2012, 14 quoted in Neimanis & Walker 2014, 572).” And they do return to the trees as well when noting that we cannot selectively get rid of only some parts of the past “for just as the rings of the tree are a material record of years of soil conditions, patterns of rain and drought, our bodies are records of the pharmaceuticals we pump into our waterways; increases in skin cancer are contractions of our carbon emissions. These records, memories, and intensities are indications of our ‘insurgent vulnerabilities’: we are responsive to the weather, as it is to us.” (Neimanis & Walker 2014, 573)
 
In the epilogue they note that the weather is always changing and there is nothing wrong with that. “Perhaps climate change — as a concept that we ostensibly find so hard to feel — is really about speed. About the danger of outpacing, outracing ourselves.” (Ibid). Without that last comment such a “relaxed” attitude to the climate crises and our seeming impossibility to do anything about it would feel rather strange today. The notion of weathering is nevertheless useful and appealing, perhaps also dangerous, because it assumes that we can somehow simply wait and “weather the storm”.
 
 
 
Neimanis, Astrida & Rachel Loewen Walker. 2014. Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality. Hypatia vol. 29, no. 3 (Summer 2014) 558-575.
 
Their references quoted here:
Alaimo, Stacy. 2008. Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature. In Material feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. Nick of time: Politics, evolution, and the untimely. Durham, N.C. , and London:Duke University Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2012. The future of feminist theory: Dreams for new knowledges? In Undutiful daughters: New directions in feminist thought and practice, ed. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny S€oderb€ack. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
 
 
 

A text I happened to read, “The Art of Environmental personhood and the possibility of environmental statehood” by Devon Ward, published in Artnodes in 2023 contains an interesting analysis of two approaches to art. According to the abstract the text “examines the impact that the concept of environmental personhood has had on art and culture, and suggests that projects such as The Embassy of the North Sea hint at the possibility of environmental statehood” (Ward 2023, 2), which would potentially “provide greater protections for natural entities that span multiple countries” and theoretically “also provide greater representation in supra-governmental assemblies such as the UN General Assembly.” (ibid)
 
What caught my interest was a section called “A framework for the art of environmental personhood: the agency-personhood continuum (APC)”, where the author proposes “two typologies for artworks that amplify agency: agentials and performances of personhood.” (Ward 2023, 4) According to him “Agentials are works that amplify the ac¬tivity of a localised subject – an organism, object, or process – into our range of our sense perception. However, the agential subject does not have enough complexity to rise to the level of personhood.” (ibid) He uses as an example a project that amplifies microbic activities and translates them into sound audible for humans, thereby highlighting the activity and agency of the microbes. At the other end of the scale “performances of personhood are projects that amplify the agency of complex actor networks such as a river, swamp, or forest.” (ibid) As an example, he uses a durational video of a walk along a trail in a swampland speeded up to give a glimpse of the larger ecosystem. He emphasizes that “the APC is a sliding continuum in which complexity builds from left to right, from agential to performances of personhood.” (ibid)
 
Ward then presents two case-studies as examples of the latter strategy, Terra0 and The Embassy of the North Sea, and notes “three common patterns… in addition to the amplification of agency.” (Ward 2023, 5) First they “often rely on ephemeral performative acts created by humans or nonhumans… preserved using documentation strategies like photography, time-based media, and the presentation of artifacts.” (ibid) Second, audio-video representations …rely on time compression or expansion” which “translates the nonhuman timescale into the human umwelt” (Ibid.) And third, “tropes of metonymy are used: one part of an ecosystem stands in for the whole environmental entity.” (ibid). He concludes by emphasizing “the agency-personhood continuum (APC) as a fluid framework to or¬ganize and understand different creative practices, ranging from art¬works that amplify the agency of nonhuman actants to performances that embody notions of environmental personhood and environmental statehood.” (ward 2023, 9)
 
Terra0, “an artwork that proposes using blockchain technology and smart contracts to create an automated steward for a forest” (Ward 2023, 5) is based on “a thought experiment that investigated how environmental personhood might be achieved through market-based solutions.” (Ward 2023, 6) The Embassy of the North Sea, “a Dutch organization… founded by an interdisciplinary collective” with “the idea that the North Sea ‘owns itself’ and requires greater social and political representation”, basically “acts as an intermediary between the North Sea and the public.” (Ward 2023, 6) Ward focuses on some of its projects A Voice for the Eel and F/EEL (Ward 2023, 7-8). Overall, the examples he analyses rely on the idea of representation in both senses of the word, as audio-visual representation but especially political representation and the challenges arise from the extensive size and complexity of the represented entities. His main proposal concerns environmental statehood as a possible new stage.
 
My own interests fall outside these examples, but the scale seems nevertheless very useful, especially if we don’t think only in terms of size and complexity. If agentials are works that amplify the ac¬tivity of an entity into our range of our sense perception” the lack of personhood does not have to be the result of the lack of complexity in the agential subject, but rather in our attitude and approach. We “give” them agency rather than subjectivity or personhood by showing their activity. And performances of personhood need not be limited to projects that amplify the agency of complex actor networks but could include all kinds of works that either “subjectify” non-human entities or consider them as legal persons, or even anthropomorphise them in some manner. This latter approach I find relevant for my own work in writing to trees are talking to them, thereby emphasizing their personhood, which is so clearly distinguished from the mainstream of plant performances, which usually function like ‘agentials’.
 
 
Ward, Devon. 2023. “The art of environmental personhood and the possibility of environmental statehood”. In: Pau Alsina & Andrés Burbano (coords.). “Possibles”. Artnodes, no. 32. UOC. https://doi.org/10.7238/artnodes.v0i32.411208
 
 
 

By coincidence I listened to Henrika Ylirisku, university lecturer in design at Aalto University, recount the research process for her doctoral dissertation Reorienting Environmental Art Education (2021). It was an interesting and visual presentation of her use of theoretical reading and orienteering practices to thoroughly rethink her approach from a traditional phenomenological humanistic ground to a relational, posthumanist one. She mentioned one text that had been influential during her process and had given it as reading material for the students; naturally I was curious and wanted to check it out. “On the Need for Methods Beyond Proceduralism: Speculative Middles, (In)Tensions, and Response-Ability in Research” by Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman. Published in Qualitative Inquiry in 2017 was easy to find and I read it in the evening.
 
Not that interested in the discussions within art education and not at all knowledgeable about the debates concerning qualitative methodologies in social sciences I found the text slightly tiresome, with the constant referencing and strong emphasis on reading, that is, with the authors showing how well they know what everybody else has argued before daring to share any of their own experiences. Some of the points seemed reasonable and familiar, like the “insistence that methods are generated both as a means to produce, create, and materialize knowledge and practices of dispersal, collective sharing, and activation of knowledge at the same time.” (Springay and Truman 2017, 9), which leads them to suggest the creation of research events rather than gathering data to be analysed. This can be useful in many types of community art and educational contexts and for contemporary forms of performing arts that try move beyond showbusiness. In my own work participatory events or performances, which could be understood as producing knowledge and disseminating it at the same time, are rare. Usually I “generate knowledge” or make art on my own, and what I then show to others, even if “traces from the process” or variations rather than finalised artworks, is nevertheless something else than what happened “in the field”.
 
The following section (from the middle) of the article could serve as a kind of summary:
Regardless of what methods are incorporated, they (a) cannot be predetermined and known in advance of the event of research; (b) should not be procedural, but rather emerge and proliferate from within the speculative middle, as propositions, minor gestures, and in movement; (c) should not be activities used for gathering or collecting data. Instead methods must agitate, problematize, and generate new modes of thinking-making-doing; and (d) methods require (in)tensions, which trouble and rouse ethical and political matterings. (Springay and Truman 2017, 9)
 
As an artist my relationship to methods is somewhat different, even though I feel that methods are the core of what I can try to develop and contribute to other researchers, besides the artworks themselves. Insisting on ‘how’ questions easily lead to methods as results or outcomes. I have often repeated the idea that artists already have their methods, they have their practices, and should develop or articulate those practices into research methods. This means, however, that the methods dictate what kind of questions can be asked or what kind of problems can be dealt with using those methods. If I take Springgay’s and Truman’s proposal seriously, I should not only rely on my old methods and practices, my accustomed and familiar ways of working, but try to develop new methods, experiment with new ways of working, or “thinking-making-doing” and clarify the “(in)tensions.”
 
References
 
Henrika Ylirisku, 2021. Reorienting Environmental Art Education. Aalto University Department of Art https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/items/51f412c0-45be-42cc-b5d3-293918ae9f65
 
Stephanie Springgay, Stephanie and Sarah E. Truman. 2017. On the Need for Methods Beyond Proceduralism: Speculative Middles, (In)Tensions, and Response-Ability in Research.
Qualitative Inquiry Vol. 24. Issue 3. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464