“Mending enacts a radical response-ability for and towards liveable more than human worlds. Yet mending seems impossible to do” ⤴️
“The ‘sensible’ becomes shorthand for the neoliberal ordering of reality which conceals the material trouble and ‘unexists’ alternative ways to inhabit a world.” ⤴️
“I turn to technoscience and feminist materialism” ⤴️
“Mending is material action which does not count in/for the ‘sensible’ order, and which constitutes noncapitalist worlds by reconfiguring capital’s excess.” ⤴️
“I am an ontoworker living in/as experiment. Previous roles of artist, activist and researcher have become undone.” ⤴️
“Ontoexperiments follow emergent protocols to bring material entanglements into relation through risky ontological manoeuvres and concrete everyday matterings, like consuming no more clothes ever, or escaping the sensible force field and its comforts by moving to Cuba.” ⤴️
“my experience of becoming otherwise in an alter-ontological construction site.” ⤴️
“unknowing, indeterminate performance of un/ becoming in continuous experience and outside politics” ⤴️
“I remember the utter voicelessness of the group of women prisoners of HMP Peterborough who participated in our radically asymmetric ‘collaboration’, ‘The Mending Shop’, in which I had an embarrassment of privileges; freedom, voice, visibility, pay, recognition; and so little of any worth to offer them. Their only available comment, ‘that idea is from Mars’, taught me a valuable lesson in incommensurability.” ⤴️
“Neoliberalization is hegemonic, but it is not invincible. It is merely hegemonic now. Counter-projects are possible; indeed they are inevitable.
— MARK PURCELL, Resisting Neoliberalization (2009, 144)” ⤴️
“‘It is possible, from any given point, to try to reconstruct the conceptual network that [ ] causes reality to appear transformable or inalterable’ — JACQUES RANCIÈRE, The Politics of Aesthetics (2004, 49)” ⤴️
“In which world would you like to live, and what can you do to bring such a world into being?
— WOOLGAR AND LEZUAN, The wrong bin bag (2013, 326)” ⤴️
“My inability to mend becomes a thesis. The hole in my sock takes on unthinkable dimensions. It expands out into more troubling holes which should concern us all, holes which urgently require our response, the mending of which feels more impossible still. My ambition expands first from mending socks to mending material worlds, and then to mending perceptual worlds. The thesis becomes a set of experiments in how to make mending a possible, everyday response for troubling holes, large and small.” ⤴️
“With Donna Haraway’s ‘loopy materiality’ (2016, 79), Elizabeth Grosz’s (2011) ‘becoming undone,’ Barad’s quantum ‘ongoing un/ doings’ (2015), and Puig de la Bellacasa thoughts on care (2017), I think of the darn and the hole as the un/doing of damage, and the un/doing of care.” ⤴️
“e a material experiment to bring the trouble into intimate relation, to weave in and out of it, performing the agile dance of what I come to identify as an inside-outside politics of matter (with” ⤴️
“Papadopoulos et al 2008; Papadopoulos 2014b; Sandoval 2000; Purcell 2008, 2009). The forwards-backwards, right-side wrong-side motion of the darning needle follows the course of an undisciplined inquiry which darts across the boundaries of the im/proper.” ⤴️
“how a broken object might be able to carry on (and on) when it is perceived to be unmendable or of no use.” ⤴️
“Mending is a reconstituent material politics which can piece matter back together in unthinkable, unrecognisable ways. It’s the piecemeal reconfiguring of possible material alternatives to the predicament of breakdown. As an experimental ontology for troubling matter, mending can reconfigure what matter can be, what it can do and what it can be for. Mending is an experimental material politics of possibility.” ⤴️
”, the process of ontoexperiment extends equally to the mender as to the broken object — both are the subject/object of the mend.” ⤴️
“what we are for — what mobilises our everyday actions? T” ⤴️
“7 I follow Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) and others in adopting Whatmore’s (2002, 2006) term ‘more than human’ as the preferred term for the ‘posthuman’.” ⤴️
“Mending performs a noncapitalist politics of matter in response to capital’s excess. 8” ⤴️
“Mending fills the hole of the new thing that was never extracted, never fabricated, never needed, never thrown away. Mending makes the productivist option redundant and compiles the material evidence that copious alternative responses to capital’s excess can and do exist. We already have all we need to reconfigure liveable lifeworlds in the now.” ⤴️
“There is nothing irreversible about the matter currently (dis)regarded as waste (Douglas 2007, Gregson and Crang 2010, Wynne 1987, Hird 2012).” ⤴️
“By breaking ties with capital, mending precipitates the possibility of capitalism’s undoing. Mending is an improper, more than human relation borne of capital’s material excess. Being ‘improper’ (Panagia 2009) or ‘wrong’ (Woolgar and Lezuan 2013) is a fundamental criteria for a politics of ontology, as I go on to explore.” ⤴️
“Improper relations with matter resonate with what Papadopoulos et al (2008) call ‘inappropriate/d sociability,’ (” ⤴️
“Trinh T. Minh-ha’s (1987) ‘inappropriate/ d Other’ (also Haraway 2004).” ⤴️
“y define ‘inappropriate/d sociability,’ as ‘a sociability which exceeds what can be appropriated for the purposes of value creation in embodied capitalism … something which is incommensurable with, that is inappropriate to, the current regime of labour regulation’ (2008, 255).” ⤴️
“8 I choose ‘noncapitalism’ as the working term through the text for an economic alternative, as a more affirmative option than the most commonly used term, anticapitalism, and in preference to postcapitalism, which suggests having to overthrow capitalism first. My use of noncapitalism is also intended, with Gibson-Graham 2006a, to acknowledge the underestimated existence of noncapitalist economies which operate alongside capitalist economies.” ⤴️
“n inappropriate/d sociability with abiotic Others.” ⤴️
“Mending a sock is a nonsensical gesture on a piece of material scum which shouldn’t even still be kicking around.” ⤴️
“Mending is a gesture of human response-ability (Haraway 2008; Barad 2010, 2012) in the more than human world. ‘Care is a human trouble, but this does not 9 make of care a human-only matter’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 2). It’s an operation to do what is humanly possible for an abiotic other.” ⤴️
“Mending disrupts Western, humanist perceptions of material entitlement and material privilege. Mending’s unending creative possibilities reconfigure perceptions of brokenness and tolerance of non-normative performativity. 10” ⤴️
“No-one and no-thing else cares about ‘my’ hole. Not even the sock.” ⤴️
“10 Queer Theory offers potential ways to expand this discussion which I do not pursue here. In fact, mending could be framed generatively as a queer material practice following, in particular, the work of Elizabeth Freeman (2010) and Eve Sedgwick (2003) on queer time, Eve Sedgwick also on reparative justice, Lauren Berlant and Katie Stewart on queer affect, Heather Love (2007, 2013) on the politics of refusal, and José Esteban Muñoz (2009) on queer utopia, among others.” ⤴️
“unfixing notions of what it is to be working, to be broken, to be useful and to be waste/d.” ⤴️
“’The sensible’ is borrowed from philosopher Jacques Rancière’s account of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ which is his term for the particular arrangement of the dominant ordering of reality (2004). The distribution of the sensible describes: ‘the implicit law governing the sensible order that parcels out places and forms of participation in a common world by first establishing the modes of perception within which these are inscribed. The distribution of the sensible thus produces a system of self-evident facts of perception based on the set horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made, or done. Strictly speaking, ‘distribution’ therefore refers both to forms of inclusion and to forms of exclusion’ (85).
In a later articulation, he clarifies this as ‘the play of relations between the visible, the sayable, the thinkable and the doable at the heart of which gazes operate, things are named, discourses produced, actions undertaken’ (2011, 242).” ⤴️
“the excluded parts are imperceptible. This, the only imaginable world, the only possible world, fits together in a knowable way with clear and determinate limits.” ⤴️
“an ordering of reality which Boaventura de Sousa Santos describes more compellingly than Rancière: Modern Western thinking is an abyssal thinking. It consists of a system of visible and invisible distinctions, the invisible ones being the foundation of the visible ones. The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of ‘this side of the line’ and the realm of ‘the other side of the line’. The division is such that ‘the other side of the line’ vanishes as reality, becomes nonexistent, and is indeed produced as nonexistent. Nonexistent means not existing in any relevant or comprehensible way of being. Whatever is produced as nonexistent is radically excluded because it lies beyond the realm of what the accepted conception of inclusion considers to be its other. What most fundamentally characterizes abyssal thinking is thus the impossibility of the” ⤴️
“co-presence of the two sides of the line. To the extent that it prevails, this side of the line only prevails by exhausting the field of relevant reality.
Beyond it, there is only nonexistence, invisibility, non-dialectical absence (2007, 1).” ⤴️
“No other forms of thought are ‘available to think with’ (Haraway 2016, 30).” ⤴️
“There are innumerable sensible orders, all in ongoing flux. My particular use of ‘the
sensible,’ however, refers to the dominant ordering of reality which is currently
available to sense perception in my UK location.
14 The particular world that has
been given to us in the Global North is that of global capitalism, a given world now
thickly blanketed in neoliberal ideology.” ⤴️