Goes with Weaving Oxford presentation for CRESC

1. Handout for the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change’s Sixth Annual Conference:
The Social Life Of Methods, St Hugh's College, Oxford, 31 August 2010
“Knowledge-weaving”: Befriending transdisciplinarity under the urgencies of global academic restructuring
Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park / Email: katking@umd.edu
KK website: http://katiekin.weebly.com/ Talk online: http://weaveknowledge.blogspot.com/
“To spin is to stretch, to co-develop our imaginations and thus build and weave new ways of
knowing. This methodological approach also creates our communities of practice. A critical
component of this kind of distributed cognition means finding new paths for citing each other’s
conversations, insights, novel use of artifacts, and animal allies….
“Let’s be brave and funny and pushy about this …if we can stretch to really open up academic
writing and other forms of representation, how much more usable, relevant and responsible to
our multiple communities shall we become? …This constitutes a kind of methodological
weaving….”
(Susan Leigh Star in Bauchspies 2009: 335-6)
context: Under current conditions of academic restructuring, the so-called interdisciplinary can only too easily be
(Star in Bauchspies 2009: 335)
used to justify, say, financial decisions to consolidate units and resources, and especially, end up promoting a kind of
easily assessed instrumental practicality, as if easy assessment was the factor that characterized good
interdisciplinary methodology. Conversely, perhaps simultaneously, under academic capitalism we also may see and
indeed feel intensively how disciplinary chauvinisms are made urgent, personal and compensatory, when communities
of practice are required to compete for these resources and justify themselves in terms of assessment that also
simplify and instrumentalize collective projects. My own department and college are pressured right now in these very
ways. Perhaps yours are as well.
On the one hand, strengthening disciplinary identity is an easy-to-communicate way to offer authority, while on the
other, working in collective multi-disciplinary projects understood as problem solving tasks is more easily
instrumentalized with clear outcomes when assessment is demanded. Quantitative assessment is especially
persuasive for establishing and maintaining authority in an environment in which many knowledge worlds compete, in
which productivity and authority are measures for advancement, status or just getting a job done. The empirical, the
data-driven, the concrete, and the local are all more manageable, more easily broken up into tasks and held
accountable to a very particular set of folks and their properly urgent ethics. Yet diverging knowledge worlds keep
making such management problematic, uneven, partial, at times virtually impossible.
working the transcontextual: Bateson, 1972: 276, 272: “It seems that both those whose life is enriched by
transcontextual gifts and those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions are alike in one respect: for them
there is always or often a ‘double take.’ A falling leaf [or] the greeting of a friend…is not ‘just that and nothing more.’”
our four themes: devices, digital data, visuality, transformative practice:
• “Devices” keep being things, that is to say, difficult to stabilize outcomes of dispute, jumpy materializations of
practices, lively, transforming and dissimilar agencies rather than elegantly inert guarantors of epistemological
simplicity. • The so-called “digital” keeps morphing, no longer just one sort of code among several, becoming,
sometimes, a fungible actor that valorizes some data, literally “funds” it, in new disciplinizations. • “Visuality”
attempts to reorder a contemporary sensorium, and keeps coming up against synesthesias that defy both the stability
of devices in favor of their infrastructures, and the economies of scale and detail that appear to anchor either the
disciplinary or the interdisciplinary. • And “practice” or “transformation” become defaults, even when inspirational,
even when obligatory, even when undecidable.
devices & digital: khipu knowledges: Urton, 2003, 37, 40-2: "How could one 'write' using strings, knots, and
colors, rather than pen, paper, and graphemes?" And "why didn't the Inka just invent an iconic, grapheme-based
system of signing information? I think the most satisfactory explanation for the question…relates to the status and
physical characteristics of the medium3⁄4cloth3⁄4of which the khipu represented one form, or expression. In a seminal
article published forty years ago, John V. Murra (1962) instructed us on the central role of cloth as a marker of status,
wealth, power, and authority in Inka statecraft. Clearly, cloth was not just any medium among the Inka; it was the
medium of choice, and as such, the records of state were, not surprisingly, fabricated of this material.... Thus, the
system we're considering here should not be conceived of as non-graphic and non-two-dimensional, as though the
khipu can or should be defined by what it is not; rather, the khipu was (positively) three-dimensional and tactile.... it
is as though all other ancient civilizations developed graphic scripts in forms similar to the images seen on our
computer monitors, whereas the Inka devised a system more closely resembling the binary digital coding sequences
of the ASCII code: out of view, inside the workings of the computer."

2. writing without words: Saloman, 2004, 265: Data writing is a kind of writing that does not map onto language
but instead maps onto features in a social world co-constituted, or "articulated" with such writing: as Salomon puts it
"Life had to be lived like a khipu." Such a khipu simulation device operates a range of nested hierarchies, performing
layers of locals and globals, cognitive, material, social organizational, at levels of complex behavior and self-
organization with opportunities for a range of adaptive possibilities.
visuality: Hayward, forthcoming, “Sounding Out the Light”: “I want to also suggest that subtending the
materiality and visuality of these photographs are other sensory registers, an index shaped by tonality, sonorousness,
and other kinesthetic forces. These sensations are not necessarily recorded by the content of the image, not the
splashing of flukes, but a sounding-out and moving that simultaneously preexist the photographic event (such as
whale songs and migrations) but are also constituted in that act (whale songs shape our affective investment in their
well-being; researchers migrate with the whales). Photos sing, whoop, and moan; they also migrate and travel.”
transformative practice: Kier, forthcoming, “Interdependent Ecological Transsex”: Kier argues that material
changes in the distributed ecology of hormones now pervading the environment in many layered forms of
augmentation, toxicity, and permeability actually require us to consider seriously how many beings, including humans,
are now involved in and experiencing many processes of transgendering. “’Transgender’ fish and the recent media
spectacle correlating reproductive anomalies (or adaptations) with mostly human made EDCs and the toxifying
conditions created in waterscapes, is one of several examples pointing out on a popular culture level that various
embodied forms share relations, responsivity, and possible capacity for suffering. While “transgender” fish may not be
suffering and merely adapting, the spectacle of transgender fish and the fear that EDCs may pose a threat to
normative notions of human re/production and embodiment, at least exposes our shared interconnected embodiment
of inhabitants of planet earth.”
Being inside and moved around literally by the very material and conceptual structures you are analyzing
and writing about is a kind of self-consciousness only partially available for explicit, or direct discussion. Under global
academic restructuring we are obliged to network among all these lively agencies. In medias res, in the middle of
things, as these things themselves resolve or not, as we look to see things as they exist for others, in different
degrees of resolution, of grain of detail.
And attention to any particular grain of detail provokes response and affect. And that matters. In the midst of
such cognitive overload, we end up always experimenting with strategies for working with it, rather than denying it.
Transdisciplinary work befriends and experiences a range of academic and other genres of writing, entailment and
analysis, together with their consequent and diverging values. Having to address many actively diverging audiences
simultaneously and having to author knowledges as merely one of multiple agencies with very limited control are both
circumstances that become more and more intrusive for various communities of practice.
Knowledge-weavings then, practice being just frustratingly alien enough to actually be nodes in trial and error
learning, yet satisfying and successful enough to keep weavers hooked on their own sensations of shifting cognition
and intensities of affect, however plain or subtle, hooked on sensations of their own possible agencies in groupings
beyond individual control.
A few references (more bibliography on talksite online):
• Balka, E. (2010). “Obituary: Susan Leigh Star (1954–2010).” Social Studies of Science, 40(4), 647–651.
• Bateson, G. (2000 [1972]). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago.
• Bauchspies, W. K., & Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2009). “Feminist science and technology studies: A patchwork of moving
subjectivities. An interview with Geoffrey Bowker, Sandra Harding, Anne Marie Mol, Susan Leigh Star and Banu Subramaniam.”
Subjectivity, 28 334–344.
• Clarke, A. (2010). “In Memoriam: Susan Leigh Star (1954-2010).” Science, Technology, & Human Values, 35(5), 581-600.
• Hayward, E. S. (forthcoming). “Sounding Out the Light: Whale migrations and photographs.” In E. Pär Segerdahl (Ed.)
Undisciplined Animals: A displaced Epistemology. Lieber.
• Institute for figuring (2010). “Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef | Upcoming Exhibitions | Sant Ocean Hall, Smithsonian.” Available
online at: http://crochetcoralreef.org/exhibitions/upcoming.php
• Kier, B. (forthcoming). “Interdependent Ecological Transsex: Notes on Re/Production, ‘Transgender Fish,’ and the Management of
Populations, Species, and Resources.” Women and Performance.
• King, K. (2005) "In Knots: emergent knowledge systems and the Inka Khipu." Paper presented at the panel on "Narrative and
Emergent Knowledge" at the Annual Meetings of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Conference: Emergent Systems,
Cognitive Environments," Chicago, 11 November. Available online at:
http://www.womensstudies.umd.edu/wmstfac/kking/present/KnotsSLSA05.html
• Salomon, F. (2004). The Cord Keepers: Khipus and cultural life in a Peruvian village. Duke.
• Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L. L. (1997). Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Johns Hopkins.
• Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). “Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces.”
Information Systems Research 7, 111-134.
• Urton, G. (2003). Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary coding in the Andean knotted-string records. Texas.
• Urton, G., & Brezine, C. (2003). Harvard khipu database project. Available online at:
http://khipukamayuq.fas.harvard.edu/index.html