Re/Seeding
Report for in-class “Sowing Worlds” facilitation/presentation on December 1, 2016. Link to presentation: here.
One of the most salient concepts in Haraway’s text was (re)generation. This made me think about where “life” begins, specifically in plants, but also in humans in a different way: seeds. Seeds are conceptual and material sites of hybridity, symbiogenesis, and growth. Similar to Haraway’s use of the concept of “worlding” I thought about the dynamic process of what seeds do /make/embody — the active work of “(re)seeding” — and the potential relationship that (re)seeding has to both feminism and futurism. I focused my in-class facilitation on the sequence of reseeding, which I broke down into three key themes: collecting, storing, and distributing seeds.
I used an example from Mad Max: Fury Road because it very clearly visualized the concept I wanted to discuss. One of the members of the Vuvalini is the “Keeper of the Seeds”, who kept a carrier bag of seeds harvested from trees, flowers, and fruit that used to be abundant, but can no longer grow in their post-apocalyptic society. She carried these seeds with the hopes of replanting them in a fertile place. In the movie, seeds embody hope, life, and renewal.
To re-situate this example within our contemporary context, I asked the class what seeds they would hold with them, or what seeds they would like to (re)sow. Katie responded by offering the seed of “criticality”. She hoped that this seed would grow into conversations, (self)reflexivity, and accountability for individuals and institutions. She offered the idea that seeds be seen as embodied “tactics”, in Sandoval’s terms, for survival.
On the theme of storage, I discussed seed libraries and banks in terms of both their tangible and symbolic value. The categorizing and archiving of seeds seems to be a manifestation of neoliberal ideology. Institutions like the Millenium Seed Bank that store seeds in clinical, lab environments, seem quite paranoid. The commodification of seeds speaks to an insidious human exceptionalism whereby we, as a species, try to create our own “logic” of nature, and try to control it. Louie, very astutely, referred to this as creating an “epistemology of seeds”: the unnatural process of forcing a classification hierarchy/regimentation system onto seeds.
Finally, to discuss the distribution of seeds, I shared a short video about “Ice Books”. We agreed that the performance of arranging seeds into “textual shapes”, and freezing them into ice sculptures shaped like books, felt contrived. The intent behind the process seemed to present nature as innocent, fragile, pristine. But that picture-perfect, idyllic side of “nature” is a privileged, Eurocentric one. Fallon offered a counter-example in the work of Erica Violet Lee, who talks about the value of Wastelands. She pushes back against the idea that something has to be aesthetically beautiful for it to be important, cared for, or engaged with. To me, engaging with wastelands is a process of “staying with the trouble”, of being transgressive, and decentering “humanness”.
What I learnt from this conversation is that reseeding is as much a metaphorical praxis as a physical one. Similar to the argument made in the Cyborg Manifesto, this reading made me more aware of the artificial distinctions that humans make between the self and others. In that context, I see reseeding/terraforming/reworlding as a call to action. When Haraway talks about “terraforming with Earth others” I think that she means looking critically inwards, as a human species, and holding ourselves accountable for the myriad ways in which we have changed the worlds to suit our needs, and the consequences that has in our deeply interconnected, politicized, enculturated, commodified, globalized, ecosystem.
