Tag: needs

Ernst Haeckel, Discomedusae – Jellyfish; and homepage image, Colony with Symbiotic zooxanthellae
Essay

Kin: A Working Definition

Editors
June 23, 2020

Kin.

We know that our parents, siblings, children, aunties, uncles, and cousins are kin. (And that there’s nothing we can do about it!) But how can we come to understand what Indigeous knowledge systems around the world recognize as a broader, deeper, more “meta” notion of kinship––one that unites the web of existence?

What does it mean to take kinship seriously?

That family is complicated is a truism.

If we want to look at the world through the lens of kinship, it’s helpful to keep this fact in mind. Better yet, keep it in body. We human beings embody the complexity of kinship. You’ve probably already heard about the billions of microscopic organisms that inhabit human bodies. In the worlds that are “our” bodies, nonhuman cells and DNA greatly outnumber human cells and DNA.

Understanding kinship isn’t about learning to love the nonhuman parts of ourselves, but rather recognizing that this microbiome is love. But let’s not get too romantic here, because they are also hate, and fear, and dejection. In other words, the health of one’s microbodies is a key determinant of one’s mental and emotional state. To care for our little microbuddies is to care for ourselves. We might imagine that these microbes sense the human body in a way similar to how we larger, “autonomous” bodies (human and other-than-human animals) sense the world around us––as an environment, as a social sphere.

We strive to keep our house clean, keeping other creatures out. But the other is already within! Our spatial condition is one of bodies within bodies, houses within houses. We are each in community with the creatures that live in and on our bodies. The body is a shared space.

To take kin seriously is to think ecologically, understanding that even the individual, the one, is actually the many. Human bodies are ecosystems and are also a part of larger ecosystems, which are themselves a part of biomes, planets, solar systems, and so on and so forth. Kinship means that everything is made of everything else.

Joining microorganisms in the feedback system of our emotions, personalities, and senses of self are other humans. Our bodies are a mush of other humans (like their DNA) and their nonhuman components (like their microbes). And we are also a mush of their emotions, personalities, and senses of self and other. This soup of self is spiciest in shared households and communities. But we are also all stirred up together in the black pot of nation, culture, and world. Here is where the many once again become the one. Kinship means that everyone is made of everyone else.

The way I see the world, the way I see myself, is influenced by the way you communicate the world to me, the way you respond to my self. The vibes we pick up from each other affect bodily and community ecosystems. Such dynamics can be positive (contributing to the equilibrium and cohesion of the community and body ecology) or they can be negative (contributing to their dysbiosis and dissolution). Put simply, stress kills off beneficial bacteria, encourages the growth of pathogens, transforms the personality, and can lead to alienation, depression, and disease. Put even more simply, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, etc. are forms of fratricide. Kinship means that care (and its lack) is communicable.

We might say that this charge to take kinship seriously is a fundamental human challenge). This is because so many of us have lost our sense of kinship––not just the meta-kinship of humans and nonhumans, but also the simple kinship of all human beings. Human kinship is entry-level Kinship 101. And we have been in remedial courses for centuries.

The Enlightenment knowledge system emerged in the 18th century with a quest to differentiate, categorize, document, contain, and study––that is segregate––existence. Enlightenment severs us from the wisdom that comes from the dark. Dark wisdom is held within our bodies and in the dark matter that connects one’s body to the bodies of others.

Kinship is a dark wisdom.

Toolshed opens a space for encounters in the dark matter of kinship.

Editors
Essay

Shelter: A Working Definition

Editors

The purpose of shelter is usually protection from some kind of bad weather.

Rain, snow, heavy winds, heat—things sometimes called “the elements”: things we’re supposed to need shelter from. And more broadly, changes in weather: shelter from the daily arrival of nighttime, from the seasonal arrival of hot or cold, dry or wet, and from climate, the weather we come to expect in different places over longer periods of time.

Shelters also offers protection from other elements of our environment, mainly in the form of other creatures considered threatening or unwanted, whether dangerous predators or bothersome insects, known enemies or unknown strangers. Protection from coming into contact with them, or being discovered by them.

In these formulations, the environment is cast as something to be protected from. And yet, shelters are also built from the environment—from parts of plants and animals, or from sand and soil, shaped or treated with fire. Shelters also create their own interior environment, and a landscape designed around interconnected shelters becomes a “built” environment.

In this way, there is a subtle danger in shelters. They create an inside and an outside—a conceptual divide that is constantly reinforced by physical experience. In seeking protection from hostile environmental conditions, we create an environmental distinction that can itself become insidious. The dwelling comes to seem like a different place from the land, city from country, built from wild. Infrastructures built in and around shelters, designed to hide flows of air, waste, and other stubbornly pervasive materials, help us forget what ecology and spirituality (part of what we mean by “Magic”) would constantly remind us: that inside and outside are both, ultimately, one and the same.

I squash the flies that buzz into my home, as if they should have known better. I open the cupboards in ways dictated by how they were made. As it’s often said: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” We may also become sheltered from awareness of the connections needed to survive. Shelter, after all, is often considered a base for other human needs and “higher” motivations. But collective practices of sheltering can erode a much wider base: they can shape the environment itself, causing worse weather to protect ourselves from.

In a time of increasingly bad weather, how might we move from a culture of hostility and protection to one of cohabitation and sharing? Sheltering with, rather than sheltering from? What can we learn from the sheltering practices of other people, across time and space, and other species? Our common shelter, the roof, so to speak, over all our heads, is a fragile atmosphere regulating solar radiation. If we use Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz’s definition of home—“Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease”—then how might we learn to find shelter together, and to be at home, with everything else under the sun?

“Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease”

Naguib Mahfouz
Editors
Agnes Denes, Wheatfield—A Confrontation, NYC, Summer 1982. Commissioned by Public Art Fund. Photo by John McGrall.
Essay

Food: A Working Definition

Editors

Food nourishes and sustains.

It holds culture, ritual, and memory. It can be a source of shared pleasure or a chance to care for the wellbeing of others. It is also too often a source of want. For many of our grandparents, gathering and growing food was still a primary focus of daily life. Now food in many parts of the world is made and distributed through industry and moved globally. Toolshed thinks about food both in terms of systems: how we grow, consume, distribute and deal with its waste, but also as a basic need—as nourishment, as a conduit for culture and as an aesthetic experience connected to everyday social life.

In Donna Haraway’s words, “we are all compost, not posthuman.” This statement affirms a fundamental notion that animal bodies like other organisms are metabolizers in a cycle of earth-making. We are all involved in a sort of sympoiesis– a making together.  (See Kin and Magic). This kind of systems thinking is a departure from the notion of food described on the side of a cereal box—a mathematical version of consumption. Rather, we are part of a food system and kin with the myriad of critters including the bacteria in our bellies and worms that do the service of digesting our bodies when we return to the earth.

We launched Toolshed in the midst of a pandemic. The pandemic highlighted many inequities and weaknesses in our society. One startling realization was that a pandemic could break our food system overnight. Because of the way corporate food production and distribution is concentrated for the sake of efficiency and profit, millions of tons of food produced for schools, restaurants and other institutions had to be destroyed instead of redirected to people who badly needed food. Meanwhile, workers in the food industry, such as meat packers and farm workers—many from low-income immigrant populations—were deemed essential and infected by the virus due to unsafe workplace conditions. Consider that for a moment: the president invoked the Defense Protection Act, which is reserved for times of extreme National Emergency, to ensure Americans could eat meat, but would not invoke it for the manufacture of medical supplies. The need for a more resilient and secure food system with deindustrialized and decentralized food sources was revealed in stark terms.

In 1982, artist Agnes Denes created a public artwork titled Wheatfield: A Confrontation. Denes planted two acres of wheat on landfill excavated for the construction of the World Trade Center. Denes’ work with its amber waves of grain, became a stage with the World Trade Center towers and Wall Street as one backdrop and the Statue of Liberty on the other horizon. It can be seen as a confrontation between power and commerce versus the promise of sustenance that food provides. Wheatfield: A Confrontation anticipates the so-called Anthropocene and how the behaviors of predominantly western capitalist economies are endangering planetary systems. For us at Toolshed, Denes’ work stands as a brilliant encapsulation of how we see food in terms of systems, security and care. Denes’ work is also emblematic for Toolshed in the way it shows how an artwork can reveal tools, ask questions and assert a cultural value all at once; how a project can be simultaneously, documentary, poetic (i.e. magical) and allegorical.

The creation of Wheatfield: A Confrontation was an opening—a brief moment when a pile of industrial landfill became a canvas. After Denes harvested the field, the land was developed into billion dollar luxury real estate. NYC could have engaged in a very different kind of urban planning in the space opened by Denes’ confrontation but chose not to. The virus and the sudden closing of life as we know it is also such an opening from which new life can grow. What will we choose to grow from these ruins?

Editors
Essay

Magic: A Working Definition

Editors

Of the four categories we chose for our tools, magic has perhaps the least obvious connection to human need. 

Food, Shelter, Kin—these are all more or less clear in this regard.  But magic?  What is magic anyway?

Magic can mean a lot of different things, but isn’t “transformation” always its basic characteristic? Whenever we call something magic, isn’t it because one thing has become a new thing or because something new has appeared as if out of “thin air?” The moments we call “magic” are all typified by this sort of revealing—the moment of appearance. Presto. The rabbit out of a hat; the card you did not expect; the sublime pass in basketball; lines of true poetry.

Seen in this light, magic is everywhere, at least potentially. For example, all making can be felt as magic. Making means bringing something into being that was not there before. Isn’t that magical? (As identified by the telltale “Presto” element).  If we do not always feel that way, isn’t it only because we have the tendency to dissolve our regard for made things and even the tools that make them into what philosopher Timothy Morton calls an “economic acid”—meaning our habitual reduction of the world to a sort of means-ends, rationalist mentality that has become dominant in post-Enlightenment, capitalist society?

The characteristic of “transformation,” then, is necessary and yet not quite sufficient to define what we call magic. Magic is transformation plus some sort of awe, or at least surprise. Magic is a transformation that we cannot completely fathom—a transformation that we are unable (or unwilling!) to dissolve in the economic acid of our disciplined perceptions. Magic works against the reductive tendencies of our rationalized world.

This last observation gets at the root of why for us Magic is an essential category of Toolshed. We believe that an ecological understanding of the world, and thus our future, depends upon a certain humility, a certain openness to enchantment and wonder that can expose transformation–all transformation–as magical, that is to say, unable to be dominated and dismissed by our more instrumentalized understanding.

Such humility is important for ecology because it complicates the question of agency. Who makes magic, where does it come from? Our habit of mind is that humans themselves produce it and that magic is always merely an illusion. However mysterious something seems, given the time and method we could certainly get to the bottom of it, dispel its magic.

But this is a rather stupid way of understanding causality.  Consider again the idea of making something. Humans make and make to a purpose, no? But, a-ha! Already in this very rational conception isn’t that purpose itself confederate in the making, exerting a definite agency, determining what sort of thing gets made? And what, in turn, caused this purpose to appear? A complicated set of environmental and cultural conditions? Well, what sort of thing is that? A fog into which our understanding disappears. Further, what about the materials out of which the thing was made (the silver, the wood, the chemicals)?  Do not these materials themselves have a sort of agency, a hand in the causality, a demand on the limits and shape of the thing, even a special pleading, a crying out to be formed? Looked at in this relational (i.e. ecological) way, there is much less difference between what is made and what is not, between the cultural and the natural.  Both appear before us as a sort of miracle, conjured, a mystery of compound causalities, magic. In this way, magic is not the opposite of science (as we have been taught to think), but rather its complement.

That magic so conceived is essential to our existence can be detected in the well-known quotation that “man cannot live on bread alone” (often attributed to Christ but actually Christ himself was quoting the Old Testament).  This extra thing upon which we depend, according to the Bible, is spirituality, and for us in this project, magic connotes that spirituality.  Magic is a measure of feeling alive, un-deadened by habit, that originates from perceiving one’s self in relation rather than in isolation. Magic is a relinquishing of habitual notions of causality in favor of a world of appearances appearing, of things happening, of effects as causes and causes as effects.

We can also see magic’s essential operation in this quotation by Malcolm X: “Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity.”  There is magic in every step of X’s chain. It begins with light (coming from where and how does it reach us?) and presto we get unity. There can be no Kinship without Magic. Likewise there can be no Shelter without Magic, as any shelter depends upon transforming the everywhere into somewhere; revealing the somewhere out of nowhere. And what is Food but Magic incarnate, the very essence of magic—the sun transformed into energy tailor-made for us (by whom?).

The tools of magic, therefore, are what we use to transform in a spirit of humility and gratitude.

Editors