We finished our first lecture with Ingrid Plum, and one statement from Ingrid fascinated me: “Subscribing to certain categories of conciousness can create culture wars.” This idea refracted with my interests in buddhism and awareness. How do we work with an uncategorised conciousness, one free from the prison of objectivity? The path of awareness is depicted as a transcendantal path, one that transcends category. But in truth there are many ways to explore being in this world, and those ways can contradict eachother, even to the point of harm. This is an interesting point, the individual truths that bring us closer to the unknown can be so different, it makes me wonder about truth itself. Can we propose there is another way, one rooted in subjectivity, that does not perpetuate the supremacy of reason above all else? In academia, that tends to be a eurocentric reason.
I do think there is another way, and it’s edges are sharpened as globalisation continues. Does globalisation unite us in struggle? In this context I am imagining globalisation not as an interdependence but an increasing homogeneity of tools, services and architecture. I don’t struggle in the same way as the peasants who grow my own food, but given the trajectory of our systems our struggles may be coming closer together. We may use the same applications. GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) unites all. (To clarify, according to the internet 4.39 billion people use the internet, that is 56% of the global population, so not everyone. This hypothesis imagines that number increasing.) In this sense the categories of conciousness become reduced as we upload ourselves into the metaverse. We are united and yet reduced. The will of GAFA is to exploit, isolate, and dismember people of their hearts, to then mine energy from this disturbed dopamine junkie creation. We are extracted. Here is the language for a non-human solidarity; my polluted mind winces at the polluted river. GAFA will reach into the far corners of human settlement for every last one of us. Can we hitch a ride by the back door perhaps? Can we undermine this process by using the same powerful tools of unification to have a global conversation that revive heart? The xenofeminists say “We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls, neither virtue nor terror. We want superior forms of corruption.” We participate in corrupt systems to undermine them. Interestingly, the xenofeminists use XENO and ALIENATION to make a commonality of struggle similiar to the one I have made. We need to take caution making claims of a global solidarity to not appropriate the struggles of BIPOC. The global conversation is already happening and it is most important to give higher platforms to minority voices. And perhaps we can start to carve a unified heart.