An interview of Haraway and my musings

…..situated knowledges.

How do we as a community learn and embrace the concept of situated knowledges? So we can acknowledge our prejudices, our privileges, our histories, our realities but also access others wisdoms and situated knowledges. How do we make situated knowledges collective? What does that even mean?

….concerns how truth is made. Concrete practices of particular people make truth.

By collectivising situated knowledge do we just cement a new “truth”. Is the role of entangled collaboration just to open collaborators up to the notions of multiplicity of truth. How do you then provide space for absolute decisions? If decisions are not seen as the end, or the reason to start – does absolute feel less final? Decisions can be made through out the cause of a relationship or community but the ongoing work of being in relation, being constantly in processes of listening, (re)learning, experimenting and responding becomes the truth.

….the kind of leftist feminist who believes that the best thinking is done collectively.

Truth. Because life and living is more interesting for doing so but also because it is impossible to not. The level to which we open ourselves to the entanglements can vary but the entanglements are there whether acknowledge or not. The collective is apparent but it is how we listen, (re)learn, experiment and respond that makes the collectively really dance, shape shift, surprise and allows us to create beyond our own imaginations.

….reality is a matter of worlding and inhabiting. It is a matter of testing the holdingness of things. Do things hold or not?

I am interested to explore these concepts of worlding and inhabiting more. I understand the idea that something has to land, in the mind, the body, in order for it to resonate and becoming a knowing that can be shared. But I question the holdingness – in our current world order – the things that too often hold are paper. Ephemeral, radical, unreality is looked down upon but isn’t this where much play, curiosity, innovation and in turn potential for new ways of being or knowing come from. Maybe the answers is to build into the processes play, curiosity and from this you find radical innovations that hold in reality or future imaginings.

You have entered an arena where these are all just matters of internal conviction and have nothing to do with the world. You have left the domain of worlding.

The individual, no longer part of the collective. Western colonised society rhetoric is one of the individual/s, of standing on your own two feet. I often am solo, as I like my own company, like the quiet but also, I expend my energy on creating and holding collective rituals. I have started to experiment with being alone in collective rituals that I am not the driver or leader of. But also, if we truly see the world around us as collaborators I am never solo, often lost in long deep generative experiments with the place I call home. Worlding! A new word for me to explore.

You craft a good-enough idiom so you can work on something together. I go with what we can make happen in the room together. And. we go further tomorrow.

In the context of policy in the NT, I think too often we are on the surface agreeing to a good-enough idiom but it is the devil of the detail in which the complexity lays. The power dynamics that inevitable places some as the truth holders and others as those to be consulted with but only listened to in order to reinforce the already established plan or the existing best practice or to tick a box. We have been going round in circles for too many tomorrows.

….generate a new political imagination.

How do we do this? Through collective community knowledges, rituals of advocacy, experiments with system shifts. Perhaps in contradiction to my above point it is about shared good-enough idioms with the common people, not the power and economic servants that continue to enforce existing systems and structures. But us and them is also too simplistic.  How do we teach new skills, new ways of listening? Collaborating? Knowing? To build a strong community all capable of radical future worlding, shifting the to an understanding of a multiplicity of ontologies as the common ontology.

Quotes from Interview by Moira Weigel of Feminist cyborg scholar Donna Haraway: ‘The disorder of our era isn’t necessary’