TENTACLES, AGAIN!

Why does the concept of "tentacular" catch my attention? Because I'm interested in the act of trying, irritating, and feeling; tentacled ones do this. The tentacles stand for the other, the non-human, in Haraway's studies. Together with accepting Haraway's proposition, the "other" and the second subjects of the act of irritating are queers (but including other ways of existence as "irritating," such as refugees, disabled people, Kurdish people, etc.) in my research. The tentacled existence forms of non-humans are something we can learn from rather than a simple analogy to queers. Non-humans and their tentacles -jellyfish or octopuses, for instance- show us how a perception that is not two-armed, two-eared, and one-brained, but many-armed and many-brained, can generate other forms of knowledge, living and surviving. Queer existence, on the other hand, challenges and irritates state regulations; they do not conform to the proper citizenship model, nuclear nation-state or religious family values, and normative binaries. They also survive within the normatively regulated boundaries of cities, public spaces, domestic spheres, etc. These ways of living, surviving, and dying of non-humans and queers are needed for the rest of the world in these "urgent times," so they should be celebrated, and we need to learn more from them, especially from non-humans. 

This is the point I'll introduce another concept from biology to stimulate this learning process: it is symbiosis. Lynn Margulis, an American evolutionary biologist born in 1938, opposed competition-oriented views of evolution, stressing the importance of symbiotic or cooperative relationships between species. Sympoiesis is explained as "collectively producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change." 

More details about the symbiotic lives of the critters will clarify my points in my coming texts, but what I see as the potential here is that we can learn from these micro entities about living together and companying each other while being strangers, whether tentacled ones or others. As for the relevance of these issues to my project, I was planning to design and model a city (or a part of it) that contains different architecture and residents than the cities we live in. Thinking together with symbiosis, I plan to design characters (human & human-like & cyborg & non-human) as flying, walking, crawling, etc. Their relationship with each other will be inspired by symbiotic living.