TRANSITION–Gender, Digital, Green
For the past while I’ve been thinking about transitions. The shifting of weight, changing of direction. Genders and governments. Choreographic and interpersonal. Transitions, no matter the context, are a political moment. A chance to detach from weighted positions, a chance to be moved. What is a transition that is not a solution? What’s a transition that is not a solution?
-Every Ocean Hughes, from Uncounted (2012-2015)
What is life if not a transition?
Day and night. Inhale and exhale.
We are born toothless, with soft bones. Our first breath is a scream, and then the cord is cut. Our body slowly oxygenates as we age, and our cellular functioning gradually weakens throughout our life. Our skin loses its elasticity and our bones become more brittle. With our final breath, the physical body begins to decompose, slowly taken over by insects, fungi, and plants. The fabric of our being is repurposed as sustenance for new forms of non-human life.
As we live and breathe, our planet spins around the sun. Our moon dances around our earth. Each of the planets in our solar system chart their own course, each forming its own unique geometric dance, as we hurtle through the expanse of space, encircling the center of our galaxy once every 230 million years.
What is human civilization if not a transition?
Each isolated moment in human culture has been a transition from a previous cultural composition. We have always been in the midst of making sense of our existence, struggling with nature, with ideology, and with each other. Throughout the entirety of human history, our civilisations have been a flurry of innovation and expression, empire and famine, peace, war, death, discovery, dissonance, and the most simple of joys.
We are a totally random evolutionary phenomenon of this timeline on earth. If the universe could re-roll the dice, human beings may never have existed. And yet, we exist: fully formed as a random outcome of a living, breathing planet.
What is the present if not a transition?
A Digital Harvest
And our current transition? We have managed to construct a concept of reality so separate from the natural world that we see only our own selfish uses for the materials that surround us, both living and non-living. Our present is dictated by a philosophy of extraction, destruction, and the replication of human designs. After colonizing the entire world and extracting all its material resources, the Western elite have now initiated the next phase of their plan for universal domination: the mining of human beings and human culture for its own commercial value. Everything we are and represent, our cultural histories and our stories, our memories and our data, our biometrics and our labor, are being mined and converted to liquid assets to feed the endless consumptive drive of the wealthy.
We are increasingly surveilled, our bodies and faces mapped at every turn. One might wonder what fate our bodies, our spirits, and our very identities may meet at this current rate of extraction. Are we ourselves becoming the fodder for humanity's dreams of the future? Algorithmic violence and mechanized controls cast their heavy shadows on our daily lives and consciences. An industrial slaughterhouse. The utopian dream of the internet has become a graveyard and panopticon.
The Gender of Becoming
Micro- and nanoplastics, blue light toxicity, mood-enhancing cocktails, endocrine disruptors. The blade of technology shapes our plastic bodies, and Preciado’s pharmacopornographic invocation takes its radical new form. Each human body is a wish, a prayer, a manic tilt-swipe up left right wish I could be that body. I wish I could be anybody but this body. We stroke glass and romanticize the machines with which we co-mingle. We sexualize technical objects whose creation relies on the exploitation and death of child miners in the DRC. We wish we could be as automated as the Large Language Models that divine each of our inquiries neatly in chat boxes. Transgender people worldwide are coming out of hiding and existing in our modern world, and saying, Although you hide us and kill us, we are here, we have been here, before cars, before electricity, before we built huts and before we even knew fire, we have been here and we are here and we are alive and awake now. And yet the tide swells backward, toward the past. As the future presents its perilous new complexity, the patriarchal reptilian brain longs for control of women’s bodies, of trans bodies, of everybody. New laws redraw old worlds.
Greening a Burning Planet
The summers are getting hotter. The clumsy mechanics of contemporary human existence creak into overdrive, pulling our earth and all its life into a downward and outward-facing death-spiral. There are more and more severe floods, typhoons, summer storms and tornadoes. The warmer months are regularly interrupted by vast swaths of fire. Diseases of heat and moisture are becoming increasingly prevalent, and it seems as though there is nothing that can stop this relentless march. We are living in the early phase of what could be a sixth mass planetary extinction. Neoliberal politicians campaign to convert extractive capitalist protocols to new green metrics. Another team of scientists devise a plan for an extensive network of carbon capture machines, a near-future technology unprecedented in its scale and cost, as a last tactic of redemption. Climate protests are increasingly made illegal and policed worldwide. And yet we are not separate from this beautiful planet. As we destroy the earth, we are destroying ourselves.
What is a horizon if not a transition?
A horizon is a distant place not yet reached, some borderland to another possible world.
A horizon that yields new horizons. The walk that never finishes, the work that is never done. As deep space extends beyond our consciousness, as hope transgresses the limits of the body. I want to be connected to everybody, and every thing. Every creature and plant and mushroom, in its beauty and in its delicateness. I want to be alive and new. I want to be connected to you, too.
I want to know that we can be traveling companions in a sensual reimagining of the human condition. I think we owe it to ourselves to go on that deep journey together. I believe that we are more cumulative and more vigorous than our current constructs of being may allow us to perceive. I believe that we are movable, mutable, dynamic in our networked state. I believe that we must all transition out of this cruel reality.
Transition through grief. Transition with rage. Transition through each pulse and beat and song and texture and mirage. Transition from morning into night and summer into bleak winter. Transition from a man to a cat to a woman to a rose to a snake and back to a man again. Transition out of the shackles that keep us tied to an old and dead world. Transition through trust, transition through communion, transition through community and communally. We transition.
And what are we, if not a transition?
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.-Bertolt Brecht