On Encounters
I just read an article by Kathleen Stewart that seems somehow deeply relevant to youth media.
This is an interesting collection of fragments of emergent stories of collision and force, written poetically and in a fragmented, emergent manner. Stewart defines this cultural peosis to be the creativity or generativity in thinkgs cultural. the embodied affective experience, the still life moment when things resonate with both potential and threat. She seems to allude to this idea as an idea of encounter, a moment in which forces, bodies, and global energies come together to merge momentarily before drifting and shifting into new patterns and new affectations.
“this is a time and place in which an emergent assemblage made up of wild mix of things- technologies, sensibilities, flows of power and money, daydreams,institution, ways of experiencing time and space, battles, dreams, bodily states, and innumerable practices of everyday life- has become actively generative, producing wide ranging impacts, effects, and forms of knowledge with a life of their own. This is what I mean by cultural poesis” (1028)
“What is going on? What floating influences now travel through public routes of circulation and come to roost in the seemingly private domain of hearts, homes, and dreams?” (1028)
“As previously public spaces and dorms of expression were privatized, previously privatized arenas of dreams, anxieties, agencies, and morals were writ large on public stages as scenes of impact” (1029)
“The figure of a beefed up agency became a breeding ground for all kinds of strategies of compliant, self destruction, flight, reinvigoration, and experimentation as if the world rested on its shoulders” (1036)
“The body is both the persistant site of self recognition and the thing tht will always betray you. It dreams of its own redemotion and knows better” (1036)
“The proliferating cultures of the body spin madly around the palpable promise that fears and pleasures and forays into the world can be literally made vital all-consuming passions” (1039)
In her coda, Stewart goes on to describe her purpose in sharing these story fragments, the “arbitrary scenes of impact tracked through bodies desires, or labors and traced out of the aftermath of a passing surge registered…” 1040). She claims that these are “actual sites where forces have gathered to a point of impact, or flirtations along the outer edges of a pheneomenan, or extreme cases that sugget where a trajectory might lead if it were to go unchecked” (1040). This is a fascinating way to think of the ways in which emergent encounters with forces and energies and others shape and construct moments of energy and pause. This kind of fragmented knowing reminds me of Latour and Tsing, and seems to echo Hayles concerns about the ways we are newly sensing the world via new media tech. Maybe Noddings ideas about care can shift into this paradigm, though I still wonder then what happens to the relationship, the extended knowing of another person or being or idea or thing that makes space for care to happen. If there are already extended caring relationships in the life of a young person, then does this kind of fragmented moment-encounter also relate, can we also produce care in a moment this way?
It is as if one if living in vignettes, jumping from moment to moment, reality to reality, RL to SL fluidly yet with an awareness of the disconnect that forms that fluidity. Its a representation of how the RL and virtual and SL interact to shape each other. I have a moment kissing my fiance as he puts on his coat before I re-fragment into SL where I am wearing a skimpy tee and dancing with some one I never met before I teleport over to a new sim and look at art as I pull the brownies out of the oven and the scent overwhelms me. As I check my email and gmail ads orient themselves to the words I type. All of these energies and forces… collide and exist together only momentarily, fundamentally shifting the way we read the world…
Leave a Reply