The Position I'm investigating this from:

• I'm a literary scholar so I always immerse myself in how metaphors, motifs, and figures shape narrative; but they also shape discourses and our own mindsets, our emotions, beyond narrative in the literary sense
• I’m interested in how metaphors, fictional figures can help re-think some of the basic political, economic, social, ideological or narrative norms which structure our thinking and shape our actions

What motivates me:
• Climate crisis challenges conventional ideas of the human as separate, challenges the nature-culture divide
• Current ideas of the posthuman are beginning to shift, too: away from sleek transhumanism of perfected, disembodied AI, towards a more ecological version of posthumanism

Donna Haraway's 'humusity'

Reading the ‘Hair Salon’ pitch reminds me immediately of the hairiness of monstrous figures or the snake-hairedness of Medusa; the focus on embodiment is another point that I share, and methodologically, I find the approach of working with a specific matter, such as hair, and look for its relation (or disobedience to) cultural narratives fascinating.

what we are reading at the moment

Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island, London: Penguin Books, 2019.
Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2010.

Aranke, S. (2017). Material Matters: Black Radical Aesthetics and the Limits of Visibility. E-Flux, #79. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94433/material-matters-black-radical-aesthetics-and-the-limits-of-visibility/

Campt, & M, T. (2017)Listening to images.

Giannachi, G., Kaye, N., & Shanks, M. (2012). Archaeologies of Presence. Routledge.

Mengesha, L. G., & Padmanabhan, L. (2019). Introduction to Performing Refusal/Refusing to Perform. Women and Performance, 29(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2019.1574527

Prus, B. P. F. (n.d.). ACTIVATING HISTORY: The Living Counter-Archive of Urban Vernacular Paths.

Sancto, C. (2018). Visibility in Crisis: Configuring Transparency and Opacity in We Are Here’s Political Activism (pp. 1–10). InVisible Culture.

Summers, R. (2015). Queer archives, queer movements: The visual and bodily archives of vaginal davis. Radical History Review, 2015(122), 47–54. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2849522
Thompson, K. (2015). SHINE: The visual economy of light in African diasporic aesthetic practice. Duke University Press.

What infrastructures enable and construct (contemporary) archives?

What modes of visibility, legibility, & ontology do archival infrastructures rely on?

What are the "haptic temporalities" (Campt, 2017) of archives (on various scales?)?

How do counter-archives engage different "haptic temporalities" of residues?

How does opacity (Glissant, 1990) evade, subvert, refuse archival visibility?
What aesthetic modalities can opacity take?

refusal, quiet, stasis (Campt, 2016), fugitivity, “hapticality” (Harney and Moten, 2016), dissimulation (Hartman, 2012), obscurity (Schriber, 2019), obfuscation (Bruton and Nissenbaum, 2016), noise, self-mutilation (McMillan, 2015; Nyong’o, 2009), shine (Thompson, 2015), fractality (Black, 2016), glare (Raiford, 2011), hapticality (Harney and Moten, 2013)—

Opaque materials?
Mud, Grit, Dirt, Fog, (Sediment), Hair!

What are the lingering residues of Critical Utopias?: Affective, Embodied knowledges; Utopian ruins; Terra/ geological/

Can Glissant’s (1990) suggestion of “weaving” opacities as an displace archival imperatives of reduction, taxonomy, and predictability through a “focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components” (Glissant, 1990)?

(archives of)
Critical Utopias

Critical Archiving:

sensing the archive (Munoz, 2020), affective archives (Ann Cvetkovich, 2003; Paladin and Pustianaz, 2017), queering the archive (Kumbier, 2014; Munoz, 1990), and listening to the archive (Campt, 2017)

In our project we want to explore the logistics of the archive, how certain political structures produce modes of documentation that allow only a limited number of biographies, events, and processes to be documented.

We are also interested in the limitations of the archive and why certain materials are considered to lack the documenting capacities.

Is it possible to create other forms of archiving that shift from the Western epistemologies? If so, how knowledge that exists outside the Western canon can be registered?

How to undo the repressive mechanisms of the archive?

By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the
sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted
to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to
imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done. By
throwing into crisis “what happened when” and by exploiting the “transparency of sources” as
fictions of history, I wanted to make visible the production of disposable lives (in the Atlantic
slave trade and, as well, in the discipline of history), to describe “the resistance of the object,”
if only by first imagining it, and to listen for the mutters and oaths and cries of the commodity.
By flattening the levels of narrative discourse and confusing narrator and speakers, I hoped to
illuminate the contested character of history, narrative, event, and fact, to topple the hierarchy
of discourse, and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices. The outcome of this
method is a “recombinant narrative,” which “loops the strands” of incommensurate accounts
and which weaves present, past, and future in retelling the girl’s story and in narrating the
time of slavery as our present.

Yet, the existence of fossils-objects that have meaning relies on a whole speculative armature of world-making that conjures their presence through incomplete material residues. Fossils, then are understood as empirical knots of time that are without corresponding experience, which operate at the level of classification and speculative fabulation. These temporal objects both sediment extinction in realist terms, but also push us to the thought of extinction; a thought that can never quite be fully accommodated in the same realist terms within the contours of Western thought.

Hair might act as a surface upon which identity and spirituality perform, an external projection of internal beliefs and cultural belongings. Hair as surface, hair as geologic, ever-changing crust-level identity. It coats the outside of the body as the earth’s crust coats the outside of the planet. Its presence and absences, buttes (the hightop, big hair of the 70s and 80s, hair metal, etc.) and valleys (where the hair parts, where hair is removed, baldness, tonsure for religious ritual) give us clear information about the topography of the body and the body as form, as a blank canvas for broadcasting inward beliefs, health, and self expression.

The condition of having hair in society and that hair having meaning rests upon a paradox brought up by Critical Utopias: the personal/political. The personal/universal. Hair carries upon it multiple and simultaneous factual expressions of authentic subjectivities by its very nature and materiality. Add to that the choices that each individual makes around the style, the shape, the cut, and the way an individual’s historic/cultural upbringing and context inform those decisions is the nexus around which hair achieves meaning when experienced in the world, and in its secondary lifespan in art, representation in film and TV, and out in the world.

A perfect utopia is generated when hair assimilation is not required. Hair is as political as it is basically biological, as it is personal (from the phrasing in Monstrosity).

The notion of “monstrousness” or perhaps “mussed” and “crazy” hair often rears its head as symbolic of sexual activity or existing at the margins of society. A woman in a romantic comedy will pop out of the pantry with her hair standing on end if she’s just had secret sex in there. Hair that takes on unusual forms is often readable throughout film and literature as evidence of less-than-savory entanglements or at least, existing outside the tidy norm of society or of being "too much."

As regards “big hair” and drag culture and Camp and crusts and excessiveness as space creation: Camp is about the insistence of being witnessed, of being seen and acknowledged by wider culture. And if the exterior feels like a crust, that is only because it is also armor, especially manufactured to protect the tenderness hidden just below that surface: that of a very real and often marginalized identity that burns to be acknowledged and that must shout in order to be seen. That space, therefore, between being and expression is carved out via the form of “muchness” (itself a concept rooted in sexist and racist ideology). Aesthetic “loudness” being a literal creation of space.

Meaning sticks to hair and can never be rinsed or washed or even scraped off. The etymology of the word “shampoo” derives from the Sanskrit word “chämpo” which means to scrape. Smells and fumes stick to my hair like nothing else. I only have to walk by a pile of trash to smell like it for the rest of the day. It’s why I can’t go into a Subway sandwich shop, or buy the wrong perfume. Hair has a way of absorbing smells.

Following the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, when 4.9 million barrels of petroleum leaked into the sea, giant sponges made of gathered up hair were used to soak up the oil.

Redux as in to revive, to bring back. What has been revived over 2020? What must be left behind? Redux as residue?

INCLUSIVE

GENEROSITY

MUCHNESS

materiality as unruliness

From devotional images of saints to satirical fashion plates, HAIR is a potent signifier for vanity, sexuality, and power. HAIR might moonlight as embroidery floss, as a drawn line, as texture, but it remains inextricably linked to its own materiality – as personal as it is universal, as specific as DNA and as generic as dust. It sprouts directly from the body itself and comprises the floating debris of our hallways; HAIR is an organic substance that is central to the rituals of daily life across centuries, cultures, and continents. As the inescapable embodiment of the personal as political, HAIR connects directly to issues of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and politics; it speaks to themes of loss and death, of beauty expectations, of body, illness, and health.

HAIR CLUB seeks proposals for HAIR SALON from artists, scholars, and practitioners. We propose a geographically and chronologically broad but thematically focused consideration of HAIR in visual art and culture, and welcome work and research that intersects with, resonates with, or expands on any of the below:

HAIR CLUB is an interdisciplinary research-based art collective whose work is centered around the multivalent topic of HAIR in our wider culture. Co-founded in 2014 by Suzanne Gold, Kelly Lloyd, and Michal Lynn Shumate, HAIR CLUB operates as a platform for discussion, dialogue, research, exhibition, and publication. The founders of HAIR CLUB are artists, scholars, and educators committed to generative, associative academic inquiry in concert with the indelible mark of the anecdotal. Featured as a case study for public-facing research practice in the forthcoming volume Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond: Alternative Approaches to the Theory and Practice of Art History (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), HAIR CLUB has cultivated a methodology that grows out of the visual arts and works across traditional disciplinary boundaries to advance Feminist and anti-racist perspectives in approach and process.

Bibliography - expansive/associative + HAIR

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how to formalize EXPANSIVE/ASSOCIATIVE academic inquiry?

ARCHIVING NEGATIVE FEEDBACK TO THE METHODOLOGY :

"I think your moves between subject matter are more associative than logical, and cover too broad a range of topics and styles to build to an authoritative conclusion."

HAIR + GEOLOGIC TIME

HAIR + ARCHIVING THE ANECDOTAL

searchable text // not requiring explicit self-identification or characterization?

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BODY HAIR

HEAD HAIR

BALDING

BLADING

SHAVING

PLUCKING

HAIR REMOVAL

GROWING LENGTH

A HAIR JOURNEY

DYEING YOUR HAIR

GETTING A HAIRCUT

BREAKUP HAIR CUT

CATHARTIC HEAD SHAVING RITUAL

COMING OF AGE

HISTORIC EDITING OF PORTRAITURE

MARBLE WIGS FOR YOUR PORTRAIT BUST

MERKINS

WEAVES

PLUGS

RESTORES HAIR WITH PERMANENT WAVE

HAIRSPRAY

PERMA-HOLD

PERM

THE CURLY GIRL HANDBOOK

WAX MUCH?

THE BRAZILIAN

COIFFURE

MARY MAGDALENE'S HAIR COVERS HER WHOLE SINFUL BODY

MERMAIDS & WITCHES

HAIR POWER AND VANITY

SACRED HAIR

RELIGIOUS PILGRIMAGE

HAIR AS BODY PROXY

HAIR MYTH AND CAUTIONARY TALE

LONG HAIR AND THE US CULTURE WARS

HAIR PUNISHABLE BY IMPRISONMENT

HAIR DISCRIMINATION IN THE WORKPLACE, IN SPORTS

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STORIES RELATED TO...

perceived / felt / read upon (as in violence)

vectors //

- hair in art
- hair in fashion
- hair myth and cautionary tales
- witches + mermaids
- hair in popular media & culture
- hair and the natural environment
- hair on/off the body
- wet hair
- hair as body proxy in art
- the personal universal
- hair and death
- hair in religious ritual / sacred hair
- the global hair market
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What happens when I treat monstrosity as a conceptual metaphor a la George Lakoff and Mark Johnson - an unconscious, embodied pattern which shapes perception, norms and choices? Does the idea of a monster subvert our most basic conceptual metaphors, such as:
- up is good
- life is a journey with a destination
- the self is a 'one' with a 'core' truth
- there is an inside and an outside
Politically. what can we make of this?

?Monster as Metaphor?

Is the monstrous a utopia or dystopia?
Does the human need to be monstrous in order to survive?
Can the monstrous de-monstrate a future vision for the human?
Does the monstrous help us 'make trouble' in Harway's sense to create a better future?

?Snake-Hairedness and Entanglement?

disobedient matter - matter that does not behave in the way it should, that is sticky, muddy, full of friction.
I find the idea of Stickiness evocative; textures, residues, grease are all part of the materiality of the monstrous.

?Monstrous materiality?

My main question:
Conventionally, monsters treated as
• Embodiments of our own fears
• Patrolling the bounds of normality
• Punishment (Ovid’s metamorphosis)
Problem with this: monster narratives often stem from exclusion and othering - does paying credence to narrative of monsters as fearful perpetuate this logic of othering?

Monsters and Monstrosity

Starting points:
Reading monstrous creatures against the grain:
• Frankenstein’s monster: at points more humane than the humans, kindness, veganism, sense of wanting to live peacefully with all creatures
• Arachne (Ovid): weaver turned into a spider after calling out the Greek God’s rapes and violations – tends to be read as a figure punished for pride, but is actually a great figure of resistance

I wonder whether its disobedient nature might help us address the current moment of a doubled economic and ecological breakdown

Enmeshed, hybrid, transforming, untameable, indocile, several-in-one: what can the monsters teach us about a future for the human beyond humanism/an alternative posthuman?

Monsters are no-body's heroes but also not necessarily villainous - certainly not more villainous than he heroes themselves. How can the monstrous help re-think narrative beyond the hero-and-villain?
What are the broader cultural implications of losing the idea of the heroic?

‘Is there a kind of thought that does not turn into tyranny?’ (“Gibt es ein Denken, das nicht tyrannisch wird?”) is a question Hannah Arendt noted in her Denktagebuch in the 1950s.

‚The European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters’ (Sartre, intro to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth)

Stacy Alaimo: the Anthropocene is no time to set things straight” (in: ‘Exposed’, 2014, 46)

Deleuze’s body without organs: ‘they have wrongfully nailed me down!

“Single vision produces worse illusions than double-vision or many-headed monsters” (Haraway, cyborg manifesto)

“I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial” (Charles Baudelaire)

Reading
Thinking with soils: Material Politics and Social Theory (Salazar et al 2020)
Field to Palette: Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene
Geologic subjects: nonhuman origins, geomorphic aethetics and the art of becoming inhuman (Kathryn Yusoff, 2014)
Soil Geography (Cruikshank, 1972)
On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards and New Geophilosophy (Woodward 2013)
What if culture was nature all along? (Kirby 2017)
Microbiology as sociology: The strange sociality of slime (Dalziell 2017)
Monstrosity and philosophy: Radical otherness in Greek and Latin culture (Del Luchese, 2016)
To Know, To Dwell, To Care: Towards an
Actionable, Place-based Knowledge of Soils (Krzywoszynska et al 2020)