Handout: King, Keynote 2 -- talk website: http://pullingtogeth.blogspot.

com/
Conference Matter Materials Materiality Materialism; Department for Media and Culture Studies Conference, Utrecht University, 5 June 2014
pulling together: /es/system-ing: stories transdisciplinary knowledges tell
Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park / Email: katking@umd.edu
Home Page: http://katiekin.weebly.com/ ; follow on twitter @katkingumd ; pinterest talksite: http://pinterest.com/katkingumd/talksites/



NEPANTLERAS, WIZARDS, ENOUGH WORLDS, GRACE, AND PERIPHERAL PARTICIPATIONS
I use the word nepantla to theorize liminality and to talk about those who facilitate passages between worlds, whom Ive named
nepantleras. (Anzaldu 2002:1)
These are what I refer to as wizards: that is, they are both repositories of local knowledge about the social and technical situations,
and simultaneously, they know enough of more than one layer to perform rare cross-layering coordination. By definition, this work is
interdisciplinary. (Star 1995:107)
I guess Id locate my hope in being part of enough different worlds simultaneously. . . . Ive tried to model a way of being in this
kind of an organization that makes sense to me. It makes sense to me in the ways that its been formed by all these other worlds that
Im part of. (Suchman & Scharmer 1999)
"Differential consciousness requires grace, flexibility, and strength: enough strength to confidently commit to a well-defined
structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year; enough flexibility to self-consciously transform that identity according to
the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic if readings of power's formation require it; enough grace to recognize alliance
with others committed to egalitarian social relations and race, gender, sex, class, and social justice, when these other readings of
power call for alternative oppositional stands." (Sandoval 2000:60)
People often cannot see what they take for granted until they encounter someone who does not take it for granted. (Bowker and
Star 1999:305)

A DESIGN FICTION:
(very) roughly 5000 years ago in (at least) two segmenting ecologies on our planet humans messed around with some cognitive
companions, each coordinating multiple agencies characteristically. In Mesopotamia tiny clay token sheep were enclosed in clay
envelopes with markings indicating what was inside. In the Andes strings were wrapped around sticks and attached to a main cord.
In the first case the favored sensory technology for making was molding and inscribing clay. Worlds set into motion from this sort of
making eventually sustain what some consider true writing: that is to say, writing that companions preferentially with language. In
the second case makings involved spinning plant and animal fiber and feeling, tying, and untying knots. Worlds set into motion there
eventually sustain a different sort of writing, one said to be without words (Boone 1994), instead preferentially coordinating
actions and practices directly as their very ecologies.

How do you entangle design, science, fact and fiction in order to create this practice called design fiction that, hopefully,
provides different, undisciplined ways of envisioning new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices.... Design Fiction is
making things that tell stories. Its like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how
life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique
abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. ...Its meant to encourage truly
undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting
boundaries between pragmatics and imagination. (Bleecker 2009)
SF scientifiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, speculative feminisms, science communication and fabulation, wormholes
& the plasticities of embedded realities ecological across systems and multiplicities, amid emergent self-organizing agencies

TRANSCONTEXTUAL
(Star & Ruhleder 1996:127 quote Bateson 1972:276; Bateson:272; Star 2010: 610)
phrases quoted from Bateson: "genesis of tangles," "the weave of contextual structure," and "transcontextual syndrome More
Bateson: It seems that both those whose life is enriched by transcontextual gifts and those who are impoverished by transcontextual
confusions are alike in one respect: for them there is always or often a double take. A falling leaf [or] the greeting of a friendis not
just that and nothing more.

Being inside and moved around literally by the very material and conceptual structures you are analyzing and writing about is a
kind of self-consciousness only partially available for explicit, or direct discussion
Under global academic restructuring we are obliged to network among all these lively agencies, as we look to see things as they
exist for others, in different degrees of resolution, of grain of detail.

A whispering from my left as I sit in the audience for a conference panel: the word
system feels so cold to me in rumination. Sibilant /es/ triggers a sudden involuntary
counter-sensation of warmth for /es/system, memories of Batesons, of peopling
cybernetics among stories and experiences with plants and animals, at waters edge.
Dispersed/diffracted in time and being, people can feel as boundary objects, focusing and
defocusing.



SPECULATING, THEORIZING, STRINGING ALONG WITH URTON
Urton explores what materials we have on Andean string records, looking for something(s) like a decompiler to make transformations
from the seven-bit binary codes of the string records themselves to the high-level Quechua language of administration in the Inka
empire, in order to begin an extended collective process in which he hopes with others to translate the quantity of information he
argues knotted string records hold in a range of binary code possibilities. At least 1536 unique
units, he calculates, comparable to the sign capacities of early cuneiform, Shang Chinese
ideograms, and Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs.[v] Urton believes this alternate set of
transformationscomparable and contrasting with those analogic ones that translate string
records into numerical accounts or into mapsmight reveal histories and narratives. And the
seven-bit binary codes of the khipu would not be read directly, not even if we had the code book
to the meanings of the 0/1 choices of material (cotton or wool), color class (red or dark rainbow),
spin/ply relations (z-clockwise/s-counterclockwise or s/z), pendant attachment (recto or verso
ties), knot directionality (z or s), number class (ch'ulla-odd or chi'ullantin-even), and information
type (decimal or nondecimal).[vi] Urton muses: "How could one 'write' using strings, knots, and
colors, rather than pen, paper, and graphemes?"[vii] Stringing along with Urton we find out that
binary coding is especially meaningful because Andean social organization and conceptual
systems are structured within moieties and dualities. Urton thus makes it possible to use both
operations specific to digital understanding (in either/or choices) and operations specific to
analogic understanding (more like maps which draw analogies between territories and
representations), not privileging one over the other or needlessly polarizing them. It is this kind
of action that the game of cat's cradle is good for engaging. Theorists such as Walter Mignolo
have properly criticized too easy, facile analogies with the Book in investigating New World
"sign carriers."[viii] But this kind of particularism, being locally very specific, is not the only
corrective for such errors; scholars still need analogically global terms in order to translate and
theorize across and beyond communities of scholarly practice, between and beyond disciplines.
Local and global do not have to be either/or intellectual choices; instead they can be disclosed
and used as multiple and relational, layered and distributed. [ix]

USE DIFFERENT PARTS OF SENSORIUM TO GRASP DIFFERENT VARIABLES
Salomon points out the fact that data can be formulated as speech is not the point. The
quipocamayo process would have compacted social process into an impressively data-dense
medium whose clarity did not depend on expansion into words. (Salomon 2001:266) In chapter
after chapter Solomon teaches us how to understand in detail a highly complex and multiply
embedded Andean system of social organization, both hierarchical but also contingently
collective among possible groupings; one with different kinds of interactivities possible with
each range of connection in attention, as well as altered in cycles that do not recur in any simple
way; and one always imperfectly known, in any time period, to any set of people, both
cooperative but also idiosyncratic. He calls khipu in this context reciprocity made visible
(279), but means by this something more variantly sensible than vision as they allow one to use
different parts of the sensorium for grasping the different variables. (281)

Some references [more online: http://worldsenough.blogspot.com/p/bibliography.html]:
Anzalda, G. 2002. (Un)natural bridges. In eds. Anzalda, G. & Keating, A. this bridge we call home, pp. 1-5. Routledge.
Ascher, M., & Ascher, R. 1978. Code of the Quipu: Databooks I and II. http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/quipu-ascher/
Ascher, M., & Ascher, R. 1981. Code of the quipu: a study in media, mathematics, and culture. Michigan.
Bateson, G. 1972. Double Bind, 1969. In Steps, 276, 272.
Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chandler.
Bateson, G. 1979. Mind and Nature. Dutton
Bleecker, J. 2009. Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction. http://nearfuturelaboratory.com/2009/03/17/design-fiction-a-short-essay-
on-design-science-fact-and-fiction/
Boone, E. H., & Mignolo, W. (Eds.). 1994. Writing without words: alternative literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Duke.
Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. 1999. Sorting things out: classification and its consequences. MIT.
Brokaw, G. 2010. Indigenous American Polygraphy and the Dialogic Model of Media. Ethnohistory, 57(1), 117-133.
Brokaw, G. 2010. A history of the khipu. Cambridge.
Clarke, A. 2010. In Memoriam: Susan Leigh Star. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 35(5), 581-600.
Latour, B. 1993 [1991]. We have never been modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Harvard.
Salomon, F. 2001. How an Andean "Writing Without Words" Works. Current Anthropology, 42(1), 1-27.
Salomon, F. 2004. The cord keepers: khipus and cultural life in a Peruvian village. Duke.
Schmandt-Besserat, D. 1992. Before writing. Texas.
Star, S.L. & Ruhleder, K. 1996. Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure. Information Systems Research 7(1), 127.
Star, S.L. 2010. This is Not a Boundary Object. Science, Technology & Human Values, 35/5: 601-617.
Star, S.L., 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist (Nov/Dec) 43/3, 377-392.
Star, S.L., ed. 1995. Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and politics in science and technology. SUNY.
Suchman, L. & Scharmer, C.O. 1999. I have, more than ever, a sense of the immovability of these institutions.
http://www.dialogonleadership.org/interviews/Suchman.shtml
Urton, G. 2003. Signs of the Inka Khipu: binary coding in the Andean knotted-string records. Texas.