From where we speak

Nishant Shah: The long stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic induced work-from-home period was constantly punctuated by people asking: “Can you hear me?” and people saying “You seem to be on mute.” An entire genre of body language—rolled eyes, frustrated sighs, frantic clicks, and sheepish grins when you forget your camera is on—has resulted as a response to this hyper-mediated form of communication. For me, the conversations around what Felipe and I have termed the post-Anthropocene seem to be an analogous mind-space. How we talk—about what, with which voices and which bodies—remains a continuous struggle as we seek planetary devices of talking and listening. Our bodies, simultaneously made migrant and hyper located, cease to be intelligible within existing frameworks. Our identities, paradoxically opened up for revisiting and granulated into unforgetting archives, are no longer legible to available modes of meaning-making. Our collectives, no matter how expansive, have proven to be hollow forms that amplify insidious forms of power rather than recalibrate it. The single most common affect in dealing with communication in the post-Anthropocene is frustration. With many of my academic, research, artistic and activist communities and networks, I have experienced frustration at both the ineffability and the incapacity of pinning down meaning. In this contribution, conceived in response to the topic of Communicating, I come in all my different practices, not to dismantle or sidestep the frustration, but to lean into it—making a point that frustration is not the bug but the feature of communication in the post-Anthropocene. In this conversation, through its repetitive, recursive space—always gesturing but never articulating, always coming but never arriving—I offer frustration as a productive and generative state of being. I seek to reclaim frustration, not as a thwarting of the individual, but as the capacity of the individual to stop the systems that have taken on roles and speeds that have superseded the human subject. This contribution, and the pathway it accompanies, is a move, from “frustration” as a passive state—a state of inescapable anguish—to “frustration” as an active state: a tactic to frustrate, impede, and resist the otherwise scripted futures that we are being written into.

Felipe Castelblanco: Following Nishant’s invitation to acknowledge and embrace our intellectual frustrations as unlikely triggers for the ideas and questions we collected in this course pathway, I must confess my own discontent, or as I have called it, recent epistemic crash. Since the onset of the pandemic, I was overtaken by pessimism and distrust in the transforming powers of critique and cultural production stemming from the academic and cultural establishments of Europe, which I, as an immigrant from South America, for so many years had clung to. Grand ideas that aimed to explain the present felt empty of actions, and actions designed for large-scale impact felt blind to the disparity that affected people’s lives, from context to context, during a so-called global collapse. As usual, the institutions of globalization, from the WHO to the health ministers of G7 nations, promoted incongruent but all-encompassing measures for the whole of humanity, which made the pandemic a lot more global and contradictory. Then, triggered by the sudden and clumsy translation of offline to online engagement, and also by the performance of intelligibility and knowledge, many of us in the artistic, academic, and activist communities were called to deliver on-screen stagings and rehearsals of practices, in order to remain relevant, connected, or validated. Meanwhile, the precarity and inequalities of our own creative and intellectual industries were silenced by virtual backgrounds, mute buttons, varying access to internet connectivity or quiet study rooms. All of the sudden, online spaces that were supposed to be promising forums of critical and intellectual discourse at global scales, were once again insular spaces reserved for those at the privileged end of the broadband internet services and tech products spectrum. Not surprisingly, the velocity with which my peers in the North embraced the pandemic-proof communication platforms, run by the tech industry with hefty costs, matched the fast and unprecedented loss of cultural spaces and gathering rituals that artists and activists, in previous generations and other latitudes, struggled to reproduce. Vast reaching communication here was presented as the powerful solution—but it was only a veneer, hiding the real disruption and further concentration of power and influence in a cultural landscape already run by capital and privilege. That is why I embraced this call to draft a path of ideas and experiences around the Anthropocene Curriculum: as a small gesture of reciprocity and as an acknowledgment of voices active in various locales that produce reverberation and polyphony, instead of harmonious answers to the epistemic crash we are still experiencing.

Introduction

As indicated in the pathway that this contribution accompanies, we use the term “the post-Anthropocene” to refer to our current moment: one in which cascading facts, data points, theories, and renderings of the Anthropocene pile up and obfuscate one another while its palpable effects are no longer deemed external nor global. Communication in the post-Anthropocene has to be freed from both its desire for intelligibility and its claims to knowledge. Mixing memory and desire, communication will have to be positioned as a paradoxical point where what it promises and what it practices will continually be in tension.

At the heart of conceptualizing post-Anthropocene communication is the acceptance that dominant communication practices naturalize and duplicate existing power inequities that are endemic in our technologically-mediated communications: colonial practices of information storage, algorithmic structures that favor digital storage over lived reality, patriarchal conditions that make dissenting voices invisible, militarized nation-states that censor and penalize the circulation of threatening information, and capitalistic tropes that frame people as things.

Communication, as we understand it, articulates and is articulated by the very conditions and limits that it seeks to question. Like a cybernetic loop between its promise and practice, it rehearses the enactment of its promise and the manifestation of its practice as an aspirational event on a disappearing horizon.

In order to break through this paradox of articulated communication—one where the promise of articulation and the practice of articulation bind it in this aporetic condition, we offer the framework of “disarticulation.” Drawing from medical and forensic practices, disarticulation refers to a careful breaking of a biological unit in order to revive it from disrepair and decay. Can we take up our practices of communication, and break this cybernetic loop by establishing a new context within which communication can exist?

The disarticulation framework we employ in this text asks the same question over and over again: Can communication in the post-Anthropocene enact the practice of its own promise?

Each time we ask the question, we find for ourselves a different point of disarticulation, and set out on our splintered and fragmentary journey to perform the answer, hoping that in our writing we establish the practice of disarticulation that we seek to further.

Question: Can communication in the post-Anthropocene enact the practice of its own promise?

Answer: The promise of communication is memory but the practice of communication enacts storage.

Communication eschews fixity. Information flows. And in its flowing, it is subjected to conditions of scale, intensity, duration, and distance. The spread of information accrues new sediments of intentions. The intensity of information twists its meanings with urgencies and emergencies. The durational stretch of information adds willful and unconscious misinterpretations as temporality breeds forgetfulness and forgiveness. The distance of its flow erodes its provenance, and you get a flow of informationality that we can call memory.

Memory is treacherous and nurturing. It carries within it a fundamental inability to trust itself. Memory is fickle and that is its strength. Memory demands a recitation, a dialogue, a discovery, and a denunciation, allowing for fractal meanings to emerge—some to be remembered, some to be recalled, some to be forgotten, and some to be forged. It is in the existential crisis of uncertainty that memory engineers collectivity, and a common responsibility to hold the gentle truths of our harsh experiences, refusing the starkness of clarity that is the demand of storage.

Storage requires, in its materiality, a fixity. Even when subjected to unplanned decay and planned obsolescence, even when deeply in a state of degeneration, storage holds on to its ontologies and taxonomies, favoring only the pre-defined relationships that gives the condition of storage its form. Storage does not have a life but only a presence: no signification but only an explanation. And when the form that stores the information collapses—a library that is burnt, an archive that is buried, a brain that unravels—the information dies with it, never to be recovered, perhaps only to be genealogically restored. The repair work of storage, ironically, is in the realm of memory and remembrance.

Ding Naifei and Liu Jen-peng’s below-linked essay shows us the possibility of enacting the promise of memory by locating us in the penumbrae of information as meaning and memory, rather than in the contrasting clarity of storage that demands discrete production of light and dark, speech and silence. In their poignant analysis of how to frame the promise and practice of communication, they offer the penumbra (wangliang)—the light that surrounds the shadow, or the shadow that defines the light—as an approach. Coining it as the “poetics and politics of reticence,” and drawing from queer lives in East Asia, they show how we can let go of the absolutes of storage but they also do not simply offer a “hybridity” or an “inter-activity” of memory. Instead, in their telling, they show that post-Anthropocene communication will engage with memory and storage to dismantle both, simultaneously.

In this, it is clear that the promise of communication is communication—removing us from the dark. The practice of communication is communication—moving us to light. Post-Anthropocene communication resists these vectors that memory and storage offer, and instead, becomes an invitation to anchor in the penumbra, having and cultivating the power to speak, and exercising the power not to.

Question: Can communication in the post-Anthropocene enact the practice of its own promise?

Answer: The practice of communication is modeling but the promise of communication is forecasting.    

Communication can be a mirage mirror. Too often communication addresses certainties, even if assumed, but other times it creates the certainty that there is something that cannot yet be affixed or addressed, and so communication becomes a self-indulging quest. Paradoxically, inefficient communication only seems to be resolved with more communication. Irrespective of the message or the messenger, communication acts spin around one another in a perpetual dance, one step leading to the next. Like in Salsa dancing, learning the rhythm is what we seek regardless of the song that plays. And in trusting on the exchange as the rhythm that delivers meanings, like trusting on the firmness of the dance floor, communication yields forecasting when anticipation drives the very promise of the address. That promise is reaffirmed by transference, even if that which is handed over is an appearance, the veneer of an assumed becoming, or a model of a world not yet realized.

However, while communication in the post-Anthropocene can be built on measures, estimates, and the rendering of possibility, it does not always drive trust and meaning. By design, the forms of address available to model a world in flux weigh more on conveying proof, or data-driven renderings of change, even if all they can attest to is their own narrowing methods of depiction. But for two dancers moving in complete sync with one another and following the 2-3 beats of the Son clave, they must listen to the music as one body. Fancy spins and twists matter only if both bodies trust and respond to the music.

In building a model of the world—one that can help us to better understand the planet and its complex rhythms, or to sync with it—communication in the post-Anthropocene promises understanding but cannot deliver an image that is complete enough to be entirely trusted. A data point only takes us to the next and, by joining the dots, the knowable brings us to the probable. The quest for creating a comprehensive model of the climate, for example, becomes a quest for creating a system of address that relies on the very promise of cumulative certainties that seize, piece by piece, a monumental uncertainty still undecipherable. Therefore, communication, like a model or a program, is never completed. All that we trust is the chase, the promise of finding new facts and information soon to be readdressed.

In his famous State of the Union speech on May 25, 1961, US President John F. Kennedy laid out the foundations for one of the most important communication acts in the post-Anthropocene. Besides the formal request to Congress to further develop space exploration and the Apollo missions to the moon, President Kennedy also paved the road to developing a vast system for “worldwide weather observation.”

This weather modeling and information system one day would deliver a forecasting technology to address the planet’s changing climate. Designed to help scientists understand planetary weather in the middle of the Cold War and the ongoing nuclear testing in the oceans and the atmosphere, the fourth clause of Kennedy’s speech to Congress included the petition for 75 billion dollars. This budget was requested to support the US Weather Bureau in developing a satellite network capable of recording atmospheric changes, to study cloud surface coverage and understand cloud patterns from a higher orbit. The launching of the Trios-1 satellite on April 1, 1960, equipped with video cameras and radio transmitters, was followed by several other satellite launches under Kennedy’s program and would be the beginning of the largest satellite communication network ever to be built. Soon, this planetary apparatus would be capable of seeing and rendering the weather into an unfixed, ever-changing model. With vast amounts of data generated in the sixty years since Kennedy’s speech, what the model ended up addressing is not just the planet’s weather but its own capacity to grasp and communicate what it predicts.

That is how, in addressing the climate by forecasting it, we uphold the trust in communication flows over certainties, no matter the result. After all, today’s measurements deliver tomorrow’s predictions, and the promise of communication in the post-Anthropocene becomes a chase to conquer the unfathomable or a risky dance with a set rhythm but without music.

Question: Can communication in the post-Anthropocene enact the practice of its own promise?

Answer: The promise of communication is possibility but the practice of communication enacts probability.

The “first electronic person” in the history of computation was an R2-D2-esque robot called Shakey. Shakey lived in a world of its own: a world of doors, windows, and carefully-defined objects through which it had to navigate taking commands from a software that guided its seven functions like pan, tilt, move, push, and roll. As the predecessor of our semi-autonomous moving machines that surround us with ease, Shakey was not just a technological marvel but also a pivotal point in defining what post-Anthropocene, human-computer interaction was going to look like.

Shakey worked on principles of dead reckoning—it counted turns of its wheel drives and deduced its location, supported by the visual information provided by the camera mounted on it. From these two data points, the pattern recognition algorithms could pick up things like object outlines or room and door borders, allowing for a virtual map that facilitated navigation to evolve. However, in its first iterations developed at the Artificial Intelligence Center of Stanford Research Institute, Shakey quickly hit the processing and data storage walls. The problem was very simple: the more variables and unpredictability were introduced into the Shakey’s environments, the more processing power was needed to compute all the available possibilities, in order for decision-making to happen. Not only did this slow down Shakey’s mobility but it also introduced the difficult question of what to do with the possibly infinite things that it could encounter in our complex and contingent uncontrolled environments.

Shakey would have never developed if it was forced to engage with the possibility horizon of lived reality—the almost endless combination of data and information that seems to so smoothly flow through human interaction and communication, with and beyond other life forms. This was the moment when scientists realized that in order for the “electronic person” to develop, a commitment to the realm of probability was necessary. Probability, in this case, is a reality and epistemology guided by the principles of logical abstraction, deduction, and pattern recognition. Probability is not so much the computation of meaning as it is the removal of noise. Based entirely on historical precedence and calculated simulation, probability removes anomalies by placing them in what Wendy Chun calls “networked neighborhoods.” Probability, it was decided, was the future of communication, and for Shakey to survive, we are going to have to build probability-driven societies and worlds.

There was one obvious flaw in this thought experiment. Human interactions by definition are not logical. Our languages are syntaxes of possibility, manipulation, obfuscation, and uncertainty. Indeterminacy is a fundamental human condition and it would be impossible to think of the human seamlessly connecting with machines through the matrices of logical thought and functioning. There were two options then: One was to train human beings to be like machines and the other was to create machines that became surrogates for human beings, being able to communicate with each other.

The idea of the human as like machines is not new. Douglas Engelbart, in his famous experiments training human beings to communicate in If-This-Then-That models of coding, had already proposed that it is only when we learn to be logical, that we will be able to live in a world looked over by “machines of loving grace.” Kelly Dobson, one of the most exciting robotics engineers and artists working on ideas of “machine therapy,” shows us the logical absurdity of this process. In one of her first prototypes, known as Blendie, Dobson introduces us to a mixer-blender that no longer takes the measured commands through electric switches that modulate its speed and intensity. Instead, Blendie takes commands from a human voice, with the user having to use that voice to simulate the sound they think Blendie’s motors should make in order to reach a desired speed and rotation for blending ingredients. The machine was now engaging with human possibility but any idea of efficiency or purpose had to be sacrificed. With Blendie, Dobson shows us that human-machine interaction is not just an extension or a modification of meaning-making, but the development of an entirely new paradigm of meaning-making that is contingent upon who is the recipient and beneficiary of that meaning.

The promise of the post-human, especially when coupled with digital technologies, has been the possibility of augmentation, extension, expansion, and escape. The promise of possibility is what the machine can do; the enactment of this promise seems to demand the human restrict itself to what probability can allow.

Question: Can communication in the post-Anthropocene enact the practice of its own promise?

Answer: The promise of communication is to speak up but the practice of communication enacts listening.

In the Southwest of Colombia, clouds crash against the Andean mountains and give birth to the Amazon jungles. In return, plants release moisture as tiny droplets and mist through fine pores in the underside of their leaves, thus creating new clouds. But what do clouds tell us during this life-enabling relation of beginnings and ends?

In the 100km that divide the cities of Pasto and Mocoa, rapid changes in altitude that go from 300 to 3000 meters above sea level have produced a transitional ecoregion. The eastern flank of the Andean cordillera is a natural wall where the Trade Winds that travel west, all the way from the Atlantic Ocean and across the entire length of the Amazon jungle, finally meet the Andes and morph into potent rivers, haze, and plants. The Andean-Amazon piedmont is known as the recharge zone, a buffer area where precipitation levels are at their greatest, and where trees move water upwards into the sky and back towards the east. The clouds born in these areas not only filter the sunlight but also trap humidity, form major rivers, or even provide nutrients for numerous plants to grow, sweat, and breathe. Therefore, the region is of incredible importance for maintaining the delicate climate across the rainforest. However, the Andean-Amazon piedmont is fragmented by highly-contested territorial boundaries, economic zoning, nature and Indigenous community reserves, all overlapping one onto another.

The section of subtropical Andean climate and cloud forest that holds together the mountains and the jungle is today an endangered ecosystem. For centuries, numerous European explorers penetrated and investigated these territories while seeking mythical or biological treasures—from Hernan Peréz de Quesada’s failed expedition in search of El Dorado in 1541, to Humboldt’s numerous discoveries of plant species, climate, and altitudinal relations in and around the Colombian and Ecuadorian border. Meanwhile, ancestral communities have to resist abuses and fight for the survival of their languages, lives, knowledge, and the fragile biocultural relations holding together these territories. Ultimately, the struggle to communicate discovery, suffering, and resistance has framed the Pan-Amazon region into a contested epistemic ground where competing voices become louder and louder until they cancel one another out.

In these regions, communication is often practiced as an act of voicing, of speaking and addressing, either through the authority of Colombia’s government, the many environmental and conservation NGOs, and the collective practice of communication and self-representation performed through Indigenous media collectives, such as Ñambi Rimai Pan-Amazon Media Group for Biocultural Peacebuilding. Still, when speech is dissonant and communication freezes, power and bullets speak louder. After all, each segment of society represents different interests, from the extractive practices promoted by the Colombian government to the radical positions assumed by many environmental groups pushing off farmers and Indigenous communities who long ago settled in natural reserves, or the efforts of ancestral communities to defend life across these territories. In fact, the demand of various Indigenous communities across the region, like the Inga Nation represented by Taita (chief) Hernando Chindoy, is for the government and NGOs to deliver and partake in communication by practicing an attentive and mutual form of listening. This entails listening to Indigenous communities, to farmers, and to Afro-Colombians communities, but, most importantly, it means listening to the territory itself. Yet without a common language, how do can the establishment and non-indigenous people listen to those whose voice does not translate into utterance?

Looking up to the Pan-Amazon skies from within the forest, and noticing what the clouds express, is the focus of the film essay Rio Arriba [Upriver]. I (Felipe Castelblanco) created the film during several field trips to the Pan-Amazon region between 2018 and early 2020, while collaborating with members from Ñambi Rimai and facilitating training on Media production for Indigenous youth. During these trips, we focused on devising reciprocal forms of listening to these territories through film and participatory documentaries. On the one hand, the filmmakers borrow the approach of Humboldt’s cross-section renderings and the altitudinal studies that first made these ecosystems known elsewhere to create a film essay that traverses through various layers of overlapping landscapes, framed by territorial struggle and resistance, below and above the forests. On the other hand, this film essay is an attempt at noticing, reporting, and listening to what natural and human-made clouds reveal in the contested skies of the Andean-Amazon.

Question: Can communication in the post-Anthropocene enact the practice of its own promise?

Answer: The promise of communication is prediction but the practice of communication enacts scripting.

The most challenging part of communication is interpretation. The uncertainty of language, compounded by the diversity and opacity of context and intention, makes communication a complex practice of prediction, where we can arrive close to meaning but never quite grasp it. This gap between the intended and the received has not only been the space for artistic, creative, and experimental expressions but also the space for political, ideological, and social contestations. Communication is, both temporally and directionally, an act of prediction.

However, in the age of human-machine communication, this prediction quotient is under attack. Through the increased focus on fake news and misinformation in particular, there is a presumed distrust of communication’s predictive potentials, and an insistence on authorized and verified information that is free from the fragility of human memory and desire. The demand for unwavering information immediately takes the responsibility and ownership of meaning-making from the human and delegates it to machines, presenting them as objective, neutral, and efficient in their execution of meaning. It has been manifestly shown that not only do these machines—which rely on limited data sets and circumscribed algorithms—discriminate and amplify human capacity for misinterpretation, but that they also lack the capacity to infuse into information the embodied and shared lived experiences that form the basis of human expression. And yet, we see a rise in machine learning that employs the human as a filter, while making the final decisions on what the communication is going to be like. Stories abound of machine learning farms in India, where human subjects help algorithms detect the difference between a muffin and a chihuahua, or of content moderators in the Philippines, who review material flagged by an abuse detection algorithm on social media.

While there is much to be said about the decentralizing of the human subject in these processes of information and the exploitative and extractive labor practices that are endemic to contemporary mass-social-media communication practices, what is of peculiar interest is what this new communication practice portends. This is because, as the uncertainty of human prediction gets replaced by the certainty of machine scripting, we experience an inversion in our orientation towards temporality.

The reason why human prediction is uncertain is that communication is a temporal exercise that gestures towards the future. Even when narrating the past, the intention and reception of communication is towards an unknown future, where the context of its reception might change its meaning. The promise of communication as this act that makes sense in the future—only after the moment of its reception—has embedded a promissory note of a future of possibilities. The idea that the act of communication opens up multiple quantum interpretations and hence infinite routes of action and negotiation, keeps the future as a non-commodifiable, non-scriptable entity that engineers a politics of hope and offers the space for correcting the course of the present.

With machine prediction, we no longer have that futurity. The idea of encoding prediction through pattern recognition forecloses the future and presents it as a drop-down menu of carefully curated options that give choice without the freedom of encountering possibilities. The scripted prediction of machine learning is in fact so deeply engrained with pattern recognition that its orientation is towards the past. The communication of machine prediction finds its meaning only in the past—evidence gleaned through multiple repetitions and simulations. Thus, incidentally, machine communication opens up our past for prediction even as it narrates the scripts of the futures. Ranging from revisionist historiography that erases people and populations to DNA testing kits that fabricate eugenic ancestry, we see a new trend where our pasts are open for digital and granular excavations and our futures are narrated along predictive tropes scripted by machine communication.

This inversion of temporality creates opportunities for the proliferation of hate, revisions of histories, and the perpetuation of discrimination by infusing historically-inaccurate data into contemporary exchanges. Perhaps one of the most viral instances of this involved a recent social media video in India, where two medical students (one of whom happens to be a male Muslim) recorded a Rasputin dance challenge. After posting the video, they found themselves suddenly embroiled in the conspiracy theories of #LoveJihad, where right wing Hindu groups falsely claim the existence of a Muslim conspiracy in which Muslim men seduce Hindu women into marriage, thus forcing them to convert to Islam. The entire conspiracy theory hangs on the refusal of historical facts and evidence, such as the timelines of marriage acts and laws in India, instead presenting alternative histories and facts that immediately produce a “purity argument” around relationships and progeny in the country.

In the post-Anthropocene, this is the reversal that we are going to have to encounter as we decenter human informationality and find it being replaced by digital machinic predictive indices. Because as our pasts become open for prediction and our futures get foreclosed by scripted narrations, we enter into a new ontology of being that is no longer going to support the epistemological resistance that we engage with through our merely human communication practices.