Johnny, I should clarify that I did not really intend to embody a Trickster in any significant way. Rather, I was drawing on the archetype in a casual and passing manner (which speaks to my own lack of care/carefulness in communication, I know…more on that below), in an attempt to offer a frame for my behavior; I was visiting the thread because I had been re-reading the Latour article and wanted to share it as a potential point of discussion. The reason I resorted to the trickster idea in that context was because I felt I needed to do something to account for the “pre-ponderance of pre-discussion discussion”. While my hope was to simply to say “Hi all, here’s an article that I’d like to propose as an important piece of the posthuman discussion”, I found myself overwhelmed and ‘flooded’ by the amount and depth of meta-discussion that was already taking place in this thread.
I do support the project that you wish to enact, Johnny, and I will bring an open curiosity to it, further, an enthusiasm for it, which may not come through in my post here, but I promise, is genuine. I agree about the importance of finding patterns and meta-patterns, and appreciate any attempts to help avoid the dangers of talking past one another, or worse yet, talking unmindfully in general. However, I want to mark a couple of concerns that are raised for me, at a meta-level, more generally.
First, while I do recognize the power of bringing a skillful methodological approach to bear at the outset of such a discussion, I question whether we are putting the cart before the horse vis-a-vis the posthumanism discussion. In other words, I wonder whether your project would be better situated as a separate activity, and one that relates more directly to the broader Cosmos community, less tightly-coupled to the discussion on posthumanism. Wishing to respect the importance and value of your project, which I admittedly don’t fully understand yet (especially how it relates exactly to posthumanism), I want to note my sense that we are shifting/drifting the purpose of this discussion time away from an open, low-structure, low-stakes attempt for a group to collectively discuss and figure out ‘what is post-humanism and why does it matter’ (which is what I envisioned and hoped for, of course you may disagree with and contest these goals on their own merits), and moving toward a higher-stakes, higher-structure, more methodologically-serious discussion format. Of course, I recognize that we may be better off by treating these not as opposed goals, but in a “both-and” manner, where we take time for each approach.
Second, and this is both a response to my own first concern and to the broader conversation here, I recognize that I simply may not possess the commitment to participation and to maintaining high-resonance mindful communication at what I perceive is a significant level of labor, which may or may not be implied as a requisite for participation in this Cosmos project. As I’ve mentioned above, and elsewhere in the IC forums, I increasingly feel overwhelmed by the amount of effort and time that is implicitly asked (the amount of time I’ve spent responding, and attempting to respond, to this thread alone, while productive, is considerably more than I had hoped to be spending, and for me this implicit expectation of a large time/effort commitment is a potentially existential threat to my participation in Cosmos’ and IC). A major reason for my wanting to do the posthumanism discussion as an emergent and relatively-unstructured conversation was because I frankly feel that the process of trying to sort things out in a text-based forum is very labor-intensive. I hoped, and still hope, to commit only a couple of hours each week to participation in the Cosmos discussions, however this commitment may not match with what others are committing, and I recognize that and accept the outcome, if the group finds my level of participation wanting. I do want to note that on a sense/impressionistic level, this feels like a thicker underbrush, a heavier burden than I anticipated, and aside from my own sense of being buried by the weight of it, I suggest that it also would be perceived as a high barrier-to-entry by anyone else wishing to participate in these discussions, and by extension, in this community. My understanding of the weekly Tuesday conversation spaces in particular (and my intent in shaping them, insofar as I had an influence on it via my discussions with Marco) is that they are meant to help lower the barriers for participation in the Cosmos community, and to provide opportunities for low-stakes, or at least low-overhead, engagement. However, I am seeing a pattern/meta-pattern that is pushing in the opposite direction, and even as I appreciate these efforts as attempts to raise the overall quality of our time, I feel the need to raise my concerns about the toll that insisting on ‘doing things carefully’ can have, namely the perversely-exclusionary effect of raising the barriers-to-participation, despite having the opposite intent.
Johnny, I know that I’m probably misconstruing your project in some ways by raising these more-general concerns in relation to your specific suggestions, and I sincerely apologize for that. It is my sense that we don’t really have a ‘problem’ here, and I think it will work well to structure our time in two parts, to include a demonstration and enactment of your methodology, followed by a general and open discussion of posthumanism. Despite the fact that I recognize my own words to be less-than fully mindful and high-resonance, I nonetheless feel it important to express my sense of being flooded and overwhelmed (and already ‘burned out’ before even engaging in the referent discussion), and to acknowledge that the answer may be, simply (and importantly), that we are not on the same page vis-a-vis the expectations for participation in this community (or in this discussion, more specifically).