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• 1 2022-12-01T19:48:44-08:00 The Extant Organikin e-concept 6 by Shichan (Celina) Yu plain 2022-12-01T20:24:26-08:00 The complexities of ideas explored in the close reading of A Sound of Thunder and critical reflection in the pathway of Extinction fascinated me greatly. Specifically, the attitude that the author holds towards extinction alters my thoughts towards extinction. Instead of looking at it with melancholy due to the pessimistic outcome of endangered and extinct species, the idea of flexibility and connectedness of time and the “bioblob” gives me hopes of the unforeseeable future bio-possibilities. One modern example would be the fact that the bird, carries the DNA of the dinosaurs, and it’s continuously passed onto their future relative species. If humans are present in the Jurassic World, humans would share similar glooms when the dinosaurs were close to extinction, despite of it being a natural process. We would’ve gone through same distraught to see them disappear, yet unexpectedly, their DNA was passed onto a new form of survived or evolved organisms. Extinction entails “a biological inevitability – the outcome of a species’ inability to adapt to a changing environment or overcome a particular threat.” The extinction of species would be as a result of natural process, which includes human’s activity, if humans are part of the natureculture, except that our end exerts more destruction and violence in this dynamics. However, the deceased or threatened specie is not without hope to live in another form. 
  
  While we are graving and being sympathetic towards those species, Donna Haraway’s speculative fabulation is thought-provoking and imaginative - to think of the symbiosis between human and the non-human either hypothetically or realistically, such as odd kin making, producing compost generation. She suggested “blaming Capitalism, Imperialism, Neoliberalism, Modernisation, or some other ‘not us’ for ongoing destruction webbed with human numbers will not work either. These issues demand difficult, unrelenting work; but they also demand joy, play, and response-ability to engage with unexpected others.” To branch out from there, the “unexpected others” might not yet exist, the intra-action is entanglement of matter and a refiguration of space and time.  
  
  
  
  “Life never speaks simply. It shows itself in its flower, hide itself in its roots.” – Irigaray’s Water Lily
  I’ve chosen this image of a crocheted pseudosphere hydrangea-like coral to help to illustrate my e-concept, the “extant organikin”. The process of crocheting itself is weaving strings together, the threads are used to create connection and binding. It links back to my first inspiration of e-concept, the mycelium. In the Anthropocene, it’s the “narrative threads” that link all human beings together. The “organikin” is derived from a thought process: humankind → organi(c)kind/odd kin → organikin(d). Humans can make kin with nonhuman species, any earthly organic being or organisms.
  
  “extant” is a state of continuity and flow, non-extinct. Barad used quantum physics to show the inseparability of matter and showed that “matter” is constantly entangled with each other, self-organising, never static, and does not exist independently of each other (Barad). Therefore, everything is always in the undying process of becoming through intra-action (Barad). It is in the nonlinear trajectory of expanding outwards in multi-dimension, like blooming flowers at various speed. I prefer it to be “organi(c)” instead of matter is that it embodies an animistic energy that propels the movement of the entanglement.   
  
  The word “kin” has been redefined by Haraway as less constrained relation, which extends to species beyond the bloodline (2019). In David Abram’s Deep Ecology, he reiterated this relation as consanguineous, and is already existing in human’s immersion in the “earthly web of life”, which we often forget (2014). 
  Another reason that I chose this floral shape of crocheted coral to represent the eco-concept, is that the enriching and harmonious co-existent relationship between coral and other marine animals are quite similar to vegetal relation, the state of “flowering-with” that Irigaray recognised in the plant kingdom. It’s a growing, becoming process aligning with each other and with the change of seasons. She found that the flowers have the qualities of being situated/rooted, shapeshifting, “the most hardy among them, those least cultivated by man, come forth while preserving their roots; they are constantly moving between the appearance of their forms and the earth’s resources.” They are as unstable as other life forms. 
  
  Lastly, the concept was established to bring awareness and reminder that we are nested within the planet earth, through “flowering-with”, intra-action, instead of exploitation and inaction, so that we can nurture this relationship that we already have, to protect and prolong the “extant organikin(d)”. 
  
  References:
  Abram, David. “On Depth Ecology”. The Trumpeter – Journal of Ecosophy, vol. 30, no. 2, Athabasca 
  University, 2014, pp. 101-104. 
  Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
  Haraway, Donna. “It Matters What Stories Tell Stories; It Matters Whose Stories Tell Stories.” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, Informa UK Limited, Sept. 2019, pp. 565–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2019.1664163.
  Leonard, Nicholas. “The Arts and New Materialism: A Call to Stewardship Through Mercy, Grace, and Hope.” Humanities, vol. 9, no. 3, MDPI AG, Aug. 2020, p. 84. https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030084.
  Marder, Michael, and Mathilde Roussel. “Irigaray’s Water Lily”. The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. Columbia University Press, 2014, pp.213-230.