Introduction
Entanglement, Environment, Matter, and Meaning (Jessica):
In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke UP, 2007), feminist and theoretical physicist Karen Barad establishes the importance of entanglement as a guiding concept for understanding matter and materiality. Barad argues that “Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge thorough and as part of their entangled intra-relating” (iv). Matter and meaning are thus inherently entangled. Entanglement is the natural state of being and the condition for making meaning. This condition permeates from physics to poetics in FishNetStockings, a work that takes meaning-making as embodied material action in ways that demonstrate Barad’s concept of “intra-action,” a neologism poised in opposition to “interaction.”
Barad writes, “’intra-action’ signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual ‘interaction,’ which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that preceed their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action” (33)
“Interaction” was a central term in the development– and debate– around defining digital art and literature. Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), worked to determine what counted as digital, different, and, thus, meaningful. In particular, Aarseth worked to develop a distinction between literature (even digital literature, i.e. hypertext) and games (which contained the rules for their own play). Aarseth’s now-canonical book helped found the field of “game studies” around the importance– dare say, fetishism– of interaction. Barad’s theory of intra-action shifts our focus from genre (games) or readerly activity (interaction) to environment.
A shift from object to context, from text to environment is a vital shift in critical perspective, and it is one that FISHNET STOCKINGS promotes and that situates the work in the emergent field of Blue Humanities.Steve Mentz, in Ocean (Bloomsbury, 2020, Object Lessons), asks us to consider changing our vocabulary in order to change our ways of thinking. He asks “What if instead” of using the term and concept of “field,” “we redescribe the adventures of thinking as currents, as rates of flow and change? Why not emphasize movements and connections between or through difference?”(xvi). Mentz asks, “What happens to ’grounded’ metaphors when everything solid becomes liquid?”
Melody Jue, in Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater (Duke UP, 2020) answers: “oceanic environments challenge some of the most ingrained and sedimented concepts in media history: interface, inscription, and database storage” (xi). Water changes our ability to see. Moreover, submersion changes orientation. So too does language: the shift from “field” to “current” changes everything. FISHNETSTOCKINGS registers and aestheticizes this shift.