Back in July, I was chatting over the phone with my parents, telling them about the research trip I was taking, the book I was reading, and generally the sort of life-update type things that you do when you live with two entirely separate provinces between their home and the one that you live in. I’m currently reading The Posthuman Glossary by Rosi Braidotti & Maria Hlavajova; on hearing this my parents wanted to know what I meant by posthuman. I entirely failed to explain it to them.
I’ve been thinking about thinking; the way that I do it, the way that I cannot seem to translate what I’m thinking about in to words that are adequate to share that thinking with another human. There are connections buzzing around my brain and it seems like any time I try to explain one particular node, it is imperative to give background, explain jargon, hop from nodes of context away to nodes of reference and back again.
Given that I seem to think along the organizational lines of a Wikipedia entry (what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as rhizomatically), it occurred to me to write up a series of posts about what it is that I’m talking about when I’m talking about stuff. And maybe in the process of explaining it, I’ll figure out how to communicate it. Maybe.
I used to have a tagline on this blog; can’t remember if it still exists but just isn’t showing due to the new skin, or if I deleted it entirely. It was tongue-in-cheek and I can’t remember it all but it had something about probably being a cyborg and definitely being posthuman in it. So maybe I should take that as a starting point.
These posts will be rambly and – I anticipate – probably not very scholarly but hey, nobody is paying me, so I have zero standards to uphold. This is mostly for my own edification, but it helps to have it on a blog, even if the audience is mostly imaginary to me. I try to write my academic papers in a way that my non-academic friends can make sense of them, or at least I used to. I want to get back in that habit.