Miscommunicating & Design

—
Researching Miscommunication
as a Proposition for Designing
Political Scenes
—

—
Barbara Neves Alves
March 2017
[...] The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance
for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. [...] She
has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic
mode [...] Not only does she sustain contradictions,
she turns the ambivalence in to something else.
[...]
In perceiving conflicting information and points
of view, she is subjected to a swamping of her
psychological borders. She has discovered that she
can’t hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries. [...]
Only by remaining le is she able to stretch the psyche
horizontally and vertically.
Gloria Anzaldúa, in Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Chicana
Studies / Woman’s Studies (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999). p. 101.
‘Ãhhhh… nãsim… nhh… nhquase…’ disse Rahel
‘Ãhhhh… noyes… nhh… nhalmost…’ Rahel said
‘Tens quase a certeza?’perguntou Chacko
‘You’re almost sure?’ asked Chacko
‘Não… era quase Velutha’ disse Rahel, ‘quase se parecia
com ele…’
‘No… it was almost Velutha’ said Rahel, ‘almost
looked like him’
‘Então não tens a certeza?’
‘So you’re not sure?’
‘Quase não’
‘Almost no’
Political ecology affirms that there is no
knowledge that is both relevant and detached.
It is not an objective definition of a virus or
of a flood that we need, a detached definition
everybody should accept, but the active
participation of all those whose practice is
engaged in multiple modes with the virus or with
the river.
Isabelle Stengers in The ‘Cosmopolitical Proposal.’ p.1002
Designing a scene is an art of staging. It is
not naked citizens who are participating,
each defending an opinion; it is a matter of
distributing roles, of artfully taking a part in
the staging of the issue. It is important here to
avoid thinking in terms of stereotypical roles,
since in political ecological terms they have to be
determined around each issue.
Isabelle Stengers in The ‘Cosmopolitical Proposal.’ p.1002
Aldeia da Luz, Portugal
idiot the one who always slows the others down,
who resists the consensual way in which the
situation is presented and in which emergencies
mobilize thought or action. [...] because ‘there is
something more important.
Isabelle Stengers in The ‘Cosmopolitical Proposal.’ p.994

And it happens in the mode of indeterminacy,

that is, of the event from which nothing follows,
no ‘and so...’ but that confronts everyone with
the question of how they will inherit from it.
Isabelle Stengers in The ‘Cosmopolitical Proposal.’ p.996
parasite [...] the message, passing through his hands in the location of the
exchanger, is changer. It arrives neither pure nor unvarying nor
stable. I am willing to have it improved, but that is a judgment. [...]
The Parasite has placed itself in the most profitable positions, at
the intersection of relations. [...] It is at the knots of regulation, and
suddenly, it relates to the collective.
Michel Serres, in The Parasite. p.43

[...] But one must write as well of the interceptions, of the accidents
in the flow along the way between stations-of changes and
metamorphoses. What passes might be a message but Parasites
(static) prevent it from being heard, and sometimes, from being sent.
Like a hole in a canal that makes the water spill into the surrounding
area. There are escapes and losses, obstacles and opacities. Doors and
windows close; Hermes might faint or die among us. An angel passes.
Who stole the relation? Maybe someone, somewhere in the middle,
made a detour. Does a third man exist?

Michel Serres, in The Parasite. p.10-11

Antanas Mockus, Bogotá, Columbia
diplomat practice first implies that whatever its good will,
its practitioners will not cross the border of the
practice it addresses without a transformation of the
intention and aim of the address, what is often called
a misunderstanding. And the practical certainty of a
misunderstanding is something an ecology of practice
has to affirm without nostalgia for what would be
faithful communication.
Isabelle Stengers, in ‘Introductory notes on an Ecology of Practice’. pg189

What ‘drives’ diplomats and experts toward the

cosmopolitical Parliament? [...] Not the convergence
of all calculations as realized or even realizable, but the
production of convergence as a possibility.
Isabelle Stengers, in Cosmopolitics II, p.414-15
What Starhawk understood was that the answer could
not be made in terms of generalities, presenting
herself as an anonymous, self- sacrificing, righter of
wrongs, but required being able to tell about her own
attachments, in order to meet in dignity.

[…]

the political importance of ‘reclaiming’ what made [her]

able to fight, in order to share with others who also
fight, for different reasons.

Isabelle Stengers in ‘Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the

Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism.’