Globalization, collaboration, is necessary for sustaining the life of all species. Tsing says, “Precarity is a state of acknowledgment of our vulnerability to others” (29). Anti-globalization, indigeneity without contact, is impossible because Homo economicus is always scoping for a new frontier. If we don’t collaborate with each other - which is to say if we don’t contaminate our lives by intermingling with those humans and other species which we see as radically different from us – then we are destined for extinction. This is one of Tsing’s main arguments, and it is a continuation of one of the themes that reverberates across all of texts read thus far in our discussion about the Anthropocene. When we change the conditions, the conditions
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I think Tsing’s pointing out the need for a sociopolitical model of egalitarian reciprocity, where all living things would find and establish mutually rewarding encounters that preempt no voices in the process of its foundation. She states, “Perhaps…we need to tell and tell until all our stories…are standing with us to face the challenges of the present” (34). However, there is a problem of fear of implication in the messy history of human disturbances that seems to suspend communication about our current precarious …show more content…
Tsing uses the term patches, identified as a sociopolitical translation through the use of a “single hammer” or a “unified system of knowledge." Her counter-theory, the indeterminacy of life in a time of precarity, uses personal encounters to describe the world as historically multidirectional as opposed to the earth-flattening globalizing effect of capitalism. She argues for a postcolonial understanding of nature that disrupts the single-handed hammer translation of science. In other words, there is nothing wrong with messiness, miscommunication, interruptions and divergences. She says:
Translation…creates patches of incoherence and incompatibility in science. To the extent that there are separate bodies of research, review, and reading, such patches may persist despite cross-cutting forms of training and communication. These patches are neither closed nor isolated; they shift with new materials. Their distinctiveness is not prior logic but an effect of the convergence. Watching them returns me to the open-ended gathering I am calling assemblages. Here layered, inconsistent, and jumbled ontologies form even within the domain of the machine. Matsutake science and forestry are vivid examples
I think Tsing’s pointing out the need for a sociopolitical model of egalitarian reciprocity, where all living things would find and establish mutually rewarding encounters that preempt no voices in the process of its foundation. She states, “Perhaps…we need to tell and tell until all our stories…are standing with us to face the challenges of the present” (34). However, there is a problem of fear of implication in the messy history of human disturbances that seems to suspend communication about our current precarious …show more content…
Tsing uses the term patches, identified as a sociopolitical translation through the use of a “single hammer” or a “unified system of knowledge." Her counter-theory, the indeterminacy of life in a time of precarity, uses personal encounters to describe the world as historically multidirectional as opposed to the earth-flattening globalizing effect of capitalism. She argues for a postcolonial understanding of nature that disrupts the single-handed hammer translation of science. In other words, there is nothing wrong with messiness, miscommunication, interruptions and divergences. She says:
Translation…creates patches of incoherence and incompatibility in science. To the extent that there are separate bodies of research, review, and reading, such patches may persist despite cross-cutting forms of training and communication. These patches are neither closed nor isolated; they shift with new materials. Their distinctiveness is not prior logic but an effect of the convergence. Watching them returns me to the open-ended gathering I am calling assemblages. Here layered, inconsistent, and jumbled ontologies form even within the domain of the machine. Matsutake science and forestry are vivid examples