What are you reading?

Hap­py to have the short con­ver­sa­tion I had with @danielarosner pub­lished in Inter­ac­tions Mag­a­zine’s reg­u­lar “What are you read­ing?” col­umn. We exper­i­ment with a brief inter­change about two won­der­ful books: Anna Tsing’s The Mush­room at the End of the World and Sarah Ahmed’s Liv­ing a Fem­i­nist Life.
Below is the long-wind­ed ver­sion before tidy­ing and editing.

A con­ver­sa­tion with Alex and Daniela for the “What are you read­ing?” col­umn in inter­ac­tions mag­a­zine, Nov. 2017.
A.S.T.: Daniela and I want­ed to try some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent for this issue’s “What are you read­ing?”. We want­ed to read some­thing togeth­er that had a res­o­nance between us, and that might give rise to a gen­er­a­tive dis­cus­sion. After a bit of delib­er­a­tion, we set­tled on two books. The first is Anna Tsing’s “The Mush­room at the End of the World,” an extra­or­di­nary exam­i­na­tion of one of the world’s most rar­i­fied mush­rooms across cap­i­tal­ist sup­ply chains and his­to­ries of mul­ti­species cohab­i­ta­tion that explores the ten­sions between cap­i­tal­ist destruc­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tive sur­vival. The sec­ond book is Sarah Ahmed’s “Liv­ing a Fem­i­nist Life,” a fem­i­nist trea­tise that weaves togeth­er ideas from fem­i­nist of col­or schol­ar­ship with per­son­al med­i­ta­tions on every­day fem­i­nist encounters.
Although quite dif­fer­ent in scope, and although inves­ti­gat­ing top­ics con­ven­tion­al­ly out­side HCI, both vol­umes explore fem­i­nist fig­ur­ings of mate­ri­al­ism that Daniela and I have been mulling on for quite some time. […]
Before get­ting into the read­ings, I feel it’s impor­tant to share that over the last eight years Daniela and I have grown togeth­er as schol­ars. Ear­ly on, we shared a keen inter­est in mate­ri­al­i­ties as artic­u­lat­ed by peo­ple like Tim Ingold and Bruno Latour. Over the years, this mutu­al inter­est has devel­oped to cen­tre far more on a fem­i­nist fig­ur­ing of mate­ri­al­ism and a par­tic­u­lar con­cern for the entan­gled enact­ments of being and doing in the world, prob­a­bly best exem­pli­fied in Don­na Haraway’s fig­ures of the cyborg, com­pan­ion species and, most recent­ly, the chthu­lucene. At the same time, Daniela has gone on to devel­op a mature read­ing of craft, hand-work and repair, and demon­strat­ed the impor­tance of these to HCI. And my own inter­ests have thread­ed a vari­ety of top­ics togeth­er, but been uni­fied by a deep inter­est in the struc­tur­al effects and affects of com­pu­ta­tion. Togeth­er, then, we hoped our con­ver­gences and diver­gences might make for some­thing engag­ing, if uncon­ven­tion­al for an inter­ac­tions’ reader.
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Hav­ing read these books what makes them valu­able to be read togeth­er, and crit­i­cal­ly how do they come to be valu­able togeth­er as fem­i­nist fig­ur­ings of materiality?
D.K.R.: I’m in awe of these authors — the scope of their work, their abil­i­ty to entwine a strong activist agen­da with a crisp the­o­ret­i­cal focus, and their skill­ful nur­tur­ing of a poet­ics of prac­tice with pow­er­ful ana­lyt­ic poten­tial. How to search for under­stand­ing while assert­ing dif­fer­ence? Think­ing through mush­rooms, I’ve learned, can help.
Before read­ing Tsing’s book, I nev­er thought much about mush­rooms as more than some­thing deli­cious (or dead­ly!) to con­sume, and cer­tain­ly not as an object for fem­i­nist world-mak­ing. But as with Ahmed’s focus on fem­i­nism, read­ing Tsing’s account of the mat­su­take mush­room is a deeply per­son­al account of notic­ing —show­ing how the impulse to notice can take mul­ti­ple forms. For Ahmed notic­ing is a polit­i­cal act, draw­ing forth and real­iz­ing exclu­sions and omis­sions. What is it that peo­ple learn not to notice? In learn­ing and unlearn­ing across dif­fer­ence Ahmed promis­es oppor­tu­ni­ties for lis­ten­ing, for notic­ing. Tsing works with a notic­ing of unpre­dictabil­i­ty, the dance of fol­low­ing tracks in the dark, of fol­low the mush­rooms, of notic­ing what mat­ters. Bod­ies, both liv­ing and dead, become tools for “show[ing] us how to look around rather than ahead.” (2015, 22) They enroll addi­tion­al instru­ments for know­ing; forms of polit­i­cal lis­ten­ing that, in Tsing’s words, “look for dis­tur­bance-based ecolo­gies in which many species some­times live togeth­er with­out either har­mo­ny or con­quest” (ibid, 5).
Have these forms of notic­ing infect­ed your work? What did you find?
A.S.T.: You cap­ture a strong com­mon­al­i­ty between what have been for me two exhil­a­rat­ing and deeply mov­ing texts. I felt the same way: notic­ing is thor­ough­ly enlivened by both authors. I found their ideas turned and fold­ed in together—involuted! (Hus­tak and Myers)—to offer up some­thing more and at the same time point­ing to a deep­er, more crit­i­cal atten­tion to things.
I was delight­ed with Tsing’s insis­tence on fol­low­ing the sto­ries, of choos­ing to turn away from the usu­al modes of schol­ar­ly account­ing and, instead, stay with the noticed details of lines spun by mush­rooms and peo­ple across time, and along glob­al sup­ply chains. Also, I was touched by Ahmed’s atten­tion to revis­it­ing her own pro­found encoun­ters with vio­lence, (un)happiness and self-dis­cov­ery, and respond­ing by dar­ing to ‘get in the way’—like Wolf’s Mrs Dal­loway, find­ing ways to stop and ori­ent the body dif­fer­ent­ly. Between them, such shifts in scale! But togeth­er they invite, as you say, a care for pay­ing atten­tion and ask­ing, to use Ahmed’s words, “ques­tions about how to live bet­ter” (2017, 12).
It’s with an empha­sis on the lat­ter that I want to respond to you, and that I mean to ask a fol­low on ques­tion. Cer­tain­ly pay­ing atten­tion to the details has been cen­tral to my research in study­ing how lives entan­gle with tech­nolo­gies. This has always been the start­ing point for the ethno­graph­ic enter­prise that chan­nels my work. And yet, I’ve man­aged to brack­et this kind of eye for detail from what I bring with it, what worlds I bring with such notic­ings. I agree with you, Ahmed and Tsing (along with oth­er fem­i­nist writ­ings) show how notic­ing has its pol­i­tics, that by ‘mere­ly’ notic­ing we are always already entan­gled in a cos­mopol­i­tics (Stengers) in which the per­son­al and struc­tur­al are strung togeth­er, and where injus­tices, inequities and vio­lence are imma­nent. What Ahmed’s and Tsing’s notic­ings show for me, then, is a com­mit­ment to much more than the detailed accounts of the world. By pay­ing atten­tion to the trou­bled con­di­tions we are impli­cat­ed in, they are mak­ing the space to seek repar­a­tive meth­ods and the pos­si­bil­i­ties for oth­er more bear­able worlds.
What I’m curi­ous to hear is whether these ideas of what I am begin­ning to think of as ‘resis­tances and repa­ra­tions’ res­onate with you in read­ing the texts and, per­haps more impor­tant­ly, if/how you see them com­ing through in the design research you do.
D.K.R.: I like think­ing of these as repar­a­tive meth­ods — and, in this sense, I see their meth­ods as reflec­tions of geneal­o­gy. The lin­eage of design we receive as HCI prac­ti­tion­ers looks very dif­fer­ent from the one I inher­it­ed as an under­grad­u­ate design stu­dent, which looks dif­fer­ent from the one I now seek to recu­per­ate in my recent work (explor­ing the prac­tices of women who wove ear­ly forms of com­put­ing mem­o­ry by hand). In this mul­ti­ply pro­duced tra­jec­to­ry, in seek­ing out var­ied path­ways toward defin­ing design, I see pos­si­bil­i­ties for recon­fig­ur­ing what com­pris­es design today. Design might not work toward progress or toward ruin but instead, after Tsing, it may help us think with “sal­vage rhythms.” It might help us notice the uneven, con­tin­gent, and col­lec­tive work required for change. Ahmed writes of women’s stud­ies departments:

“We have to shake the foundations”

“But when we shake the foun­da­tions, it is hard­er to stay up” (2017, 232). Does design call for the same will­ful com­mit­ment to keep going, “to keep com­ing up?” (ibid, 12).
Ahmed and Tsing don’t speak direct­ly to design as a field or as a prac­tice. But I won­der if you see in their cri­tiques and poten­tials — from “decen­ter­ing human hubris” to “diver­si­ty work” — an open­ing for elab­o­rat­ing a dif­fer­ent kind of tech­nol­o­gy design? Tsing writes, “To lis­ten polit­i­cal­ly is to detect the traces of not-yet-artic­u­lat­ed com­mon agen­das” (2015, 254). As you do this lis­ten­ing, this repa­ra­tion and resis­tance, what not-yet-artic­u­lat­ed com­mon agen­das might you find?
A.S.T.: There’s so much to say in response to this, but in the inter­ests of space (which we are run­ning out of), let me lim­it my answer to one thing in par­tic­u­lar, name­ly what I see to be our con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous obses­sion with num­bers, count­ing and sim­u­lacrums of the mar­ket place. To me, this unerr­ing drift (that some­times feels like a surge) towards mea­sure­ment and the mar­ket ratio­nal­is­ing of every­thing, has become such a big part of how we approach tech­nol­o­gy design. It oper­ates as a ratio­nal­is­ing force in so much work, to the point that we mask how—in the way Tsing shows so com­pelling­ly— labour and cap­i­tal is strewn togeth­er through such a het­ero­gene­ity of flows, eddies, dis­tur­bances and even ruin. Indeed, the labours and prod­ucts that many of us are involved in appear to be so bound up with this pow­er­ful log­ic, but there are still so few pos­si­bil­i­ties to ques­tion or resist it, to “shake the foun­da­tions” and “keep com­ing up”.
For me, Tsing and Ahmed show that we need, urgent­ly, to find ways to act togeth­er, to make more pos­si­ble with the pos­si­bil­i­ties you write of. Inspired by Ahmed’s lan­guage, in par­tic­u­lar, I come away want­i­ng to build an army in which each of us is not afraid of putting our bod­ies into it. All around us, there are ide­olo­gies, struc­tures, meth­ods, norms, prac­tices, etc. that seek to smooth so much over and remove each of us from being count­ed, real­ly count­ed, from being “alive with a world”. What we need are ways to keep push­ing, resist­ing, and being sen­sa­tion­al. We need to ensure our notic­ings are noticed.
D.K.R.: So maybe then, for HCI, this call to arms makes pos­si­ble a renewed con­cern for the prob­lem-solv­ing her­itage of the field. Across its method­olog­i­cal rubrics and case stud­ies, HCI schol­ar­ship tends to frame design as a means of accom­plish­ing ends, of seek­ing out too-easy res­o­lu­tions rather than encour­ag­ing cre­ative lis­ten­ing, in Tsing’s terms. These texts, by con­trast, cau­tion against such pre­fab­ri­ca­tions and fatalisms. They show that what is at stake in mak­ing and inhab­it­ing unpre­dictable encoun­ters is our abil­i­ty to rec­og­nize and become more account­able to those who lose out — to the things that lie out­side our imme­di­ate view, to the bac­te­ria that make the soil in which many design­ers mine, to the “users” haunt­ed by our patri­ar­chal lega­cies of inno­va­tion work. Tsing and Ahmed ask read­ers to strug­gle against — to take in and wres­tle with our sur­round­ing ecosys­tems. “We become a prob­lem when we describe a prob­lem,” writes Ahmed (2017, 87). For HCI, Tsing and Ahmed show that design­ers are not self-con­tained enti­ties but design­ers-in-motion, con­tin­u­al­ly work­ing togeth­er across difference.