Sonderweaving and The Sonderweb
The Sonderweb: the intra-connected web of human and parahuman beings in which the lives of both human and parahuman beings are equally vivid, complex and important in the ongoing co-emergence of each other.
Sonderweaving: to behave in such a way as to invite the growth of the sonderweb. Once I was sitting in a park with my partner, when a curious possum came close to us on the ground. I watched the possum quietly and remained very still so as to make the possum feel comfortable sharing the same space as me and therefore allow its agency to grow. Very quickly, the possum climbed up onto the seat with my partner and I and then climbed onto me, sniffing and investigating my various scents and perhaps looking for what food I might have to offer that it maybe has learned humans do in its past experiences. I, in turn, was permitted by the possum to stroke and pet it gently and enjoy its close company for a while. This would be an example of sonderweaving for both the possum and myself – both of us were allowing of the agency of the other to grow and therefore behaved in such a way as to invite an intra-action to occur between us; neither the possum or myself made any display of threatening behaviour that might discourage a closer and longer intra-action to occur between us, but instead moved carefully and respectfully in regards to the other in order to foster a sense of trust and amicably shared space.
If we can picture human and parahuman beings as leaving a trail of silver thread behind them everywhere they and their thoughts go, we can see how the sonderweb exists whether we are aware of it or not; how we can consciously sonderweave our lives or not; consciously interweave our lives with the parahuman in ways that are more intricate, more delicate than before, and which require more careful attentiveness and awareness than perhaps we have given in the past. One literary text generates a wonderful image of this way of perceiving. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut describes how aliens perceive the human presence as it exists throughout its entire lifetime all at once, which results in their being perceived like long worms that turn back on themselves and interweave with others so that permanent knots are formed; knots that that can never be undone.
Perceiving the sonderweb would function much in this way. As we go about our lives we would see and understand how every intra-action with both parahuman and human beings leaves a permanent mark in time that inscribes how we and the other beings we intra-act with can change each other in very lasting ways; ways that leave a trace like a web that can be read and tells a story of how only one being can leave a permanent trail of all the intra-actions and thoughts that have constituted its lifetime.
For these external trails of intra-action would then also reflect the inner space of the beings that left them – which suggests that the inner workings of any agent of capitalism is premised upon violent ideas; ideas that destroy the possibility of these delicate, intimate and life-affirming intra-actions of one being with another to take place now and in the future. In this way, agents of the capitolcene end up destroying not only the sonderweb, but destroying themselves, because the existence of the self is reliant on the existence of sonderweb.
Sonderweaving the Sonderweb
The word sonder was taken from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It means ‘the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.’ It sounds like wonder, but more sombre; more ‘sober,’ as Rosie Braidotti would say, to the world as it is. The sonderweb is this complex of sonderment; this careful weaving of our thoughts and actions with the parahuman world that weaves itself back into us; into our very flesh as thoughtsilk leaving a permanent trace wherever it goes; a trace that can nonetheless become wound around us like a cocoon if we struggle against it.
This cocoon is deadly. Once we are inside, it is very hard to get out, as the more we struggle, the more its patterns collapse and close in around us like fairy floss on a stick. And we must be aware that it can be fatal to our co-worlding kin, whom we may seek to form an understanding of by weaving our thoughts around them to gain an impression of the inner shapes of their thought based on the outer shapes; the webpattern left by their lived existence; their manner of intra-action and sound making as traces of the thoughts that inhabit them.
But if we watch where we go; where our thoughts wander and dangle like spiders exploding empty space into realidream catchers, we can cast nets delicate enough to catch butterflights of thought about the other side of our skin; intra-imaginings of how other beings perceive, feel and potentially suffer – we can Sonderweave. But sonderweaving is not only an act of thinking. It is also an act of relationality. It is about weaving one’s body through the world in such a way as to invite the overlap of other weavings to entangle themselves with ours. This movement is necessarily delicate and careful but only to the point that one is able-bodied enough to make it so. It is also intricate because beings are intricate. It is intricareful and intracareful; conscious of its impact as it moves both physically and intellectually through the space that it explodes with intraconnectedness.
Thoughtsilk
Like a snail trail, thoughtsilk needs light to make it visible. Our consciousness is this light that follows wherever our thoughts may lead. If we never trace our thoughts over what is dark, then it will never be envisionated in our minds. Thoughtsilk also remains invisible without an outside self to be inscribbled on. For as Timothy Morton observes, all writing is scribbling that only becomes meaningful through the non-meaning that we perceive around it and give it shape to our eyes. If we remember that all sonderweaving is also sonderscribbling, then we can appreciate the significance of the sonderweb as a meaning-making device; a tool of relationality that envsionates the permanency of both action and thought as traces left on the world; scribblings we leave in our wake on our kin and that affect how they are in turn perceived by other beings as a result of these scribblings; scribblings that might not hold any meaning for the beings we perhaps unwittingly weave into ourselves. Only if we sonderweave might we have some chance to co-create meaning with the beings with whom we share this unearthly space; through a careful listening, seeing and sometimes touching we might be able to co-weave a web that is meaningful to both ourselves and our co-worlding kin; by consciously wrapping our thoughts around each being like the cocooned entanglement of a spider web, becoming kinful of their incorpresience by envisionating the shape of their minds via the trails left by their physical presence and actions; the language of their lived experience.
Kin-cocoons and the Empathreadic quality of the mind
Sonderweaving seeks to harness the empathreadic quality of the mind; the materiality of thought as a structure that is built into neural networks through conscious intraweaving; physical bridges between unchartered space in the mind. These physical bridgeways can be designed as consciously as a web to catch the multitudinous forms imprinted by the lived existence of our kin in the fabric of our co-worlding. Once these moulds of our kin have been woven, or kin-cocoons, we are able, like the blind form perceptions of form through touch, or like bats form forms in their mind through sonar, so the empathreadic quality of the mind allows us form forms of our kin, or strange strangers, who, as the cocoon tells us, we can never completely know internally, but rather have a carefully wound stringtheory about based on what perceptions are afforded us. This empathreadic quality emphasises the inability of thought to permeate the substance of existence and rather points to the way that thought can only press itself against the outside of substance; wrap itself around it and be formed into a shadow of substance by the shape the substance leaves in the fabric of existence; it emphasises that thought is not an ephemeral immateriality that can be summoned without consequence, but a permanent record of the paths that we weave through and around the world; paths that affect ourselves and our co-kin in lasting and meaningful ways.
By Claire - z3393668.
