Rowboat Phenomenology: Dispatches from the Surface of an Incompatible Milieu

Keywords: anthropocene, posthumanism, process philosophy, attunement
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 31

Abstract

There's something about being in a rowboat that puts me in speculative mindsets. The stillness in motion, perhaps. Bound to the surface, but in contact with the depths below. Once I put the oars up and float freely with the currents, the rowboat becomes a vessel for thought and allows me to enter the landscape differently, adding to practices for building, or staging, posthuman encounters for thinking with the nonhuman and nonhuman temporalities. From the surface, the rowboat acts as a portal into nonlinear depths of ecological complexity. You enter tide time. The moon dictates your progress. You melt a bit into the water, sink into movement and flow. There is an entering. And a surrender of control of my own movement, in an effort to allow climate change to be presented on the ecosystem's terms. These landscape encounters serve as exercises in releasing control and resisting the desire for domination of an environment. They subvert intentional navigation of space in a way that both decenters and disempowers the human and the human sense of time, scale, progress, presence, and memory. This abandonment of control, or even agency, is an exercise that resonates with larger concerns around the control society and late neoliberal technocapitalism. The aim then, without aiming, of the Rowboat Phenomenology project is to speculate what types of new subjectivities are produced from the surface of environmental ruin, when agency is delivered to the currents themselves to curate our journey into the depths of the Anthropocene.