Chapter One. Protocols.

 

By reaching agreements about methods, different participating worlds establish protocols that go beyond mere trading across unjoined world boundaries.  Susan Leigh Star and James Griesmer.[1]

 

Writing against the grain works with shape-shifting protocols. Writers in different fields, disciplines, languages, and cultures form alliances, within which they develop strategies enabling collaboration. These strategies, such as clarifying a shared purpose and developing conceptual tools in common, become protocols. Protocols change, dissolve, are fluid and fit for purpose. Star and Griesmer’s “unjoined” worlds do not merge in this writing against the grain. During their lifespan, worlds in protocol operate in a common site of overlap, and retain their autonomy.

 

While there are gradations along a scale, protocols contrast with the more fixed mainstream writing template.  Variants on this template, inherited through the ages, mediate what counts as knowledge and how to write it. This means that academic conversations are mainly in-house. Fields of knowledge develop codes, theory, specialised languages and outlets in conferences, journals and books, among other sites. These codes go back to the 17^th century, where “invisible colleges” established unwritten laws of what and how to write. Writing against the grain looks beyond this dominant academic knowledge template for other options.

 

Protocols deliver tools to think and write differently; they embrace the themes, forms and styles of writing which arm wrestle the gatekeepers to admit the multiple dimensions of living and dying into what counts as knowledge; they are hospitable to the worlds inhabited by humans, animals, insects, trees, plants and sacred objects; they are open to strategies, devices, styles, forms and modes which are fit for the purpose of journeying through worlds, with all the risks and hazards entailed. In the process, those worlds may become loud and visible; the contributions of their inhabitants become recognised, respected and accrue power; scholars learn to see and to hear differently; they learn to accept their blindness and their deafness. In this way,  research may contribute to a more just world, one comprised of many worlds.

 

Protocols range from informal influence across intellectual soul mates, to the purposeful formation of alliances of like-minds. They enable multiple worlds to communicate, to connect, perhaps fleetingly. Protocols are soluble in the double meaning of dissolving and solving. Like-minds may collaborate within problem-solving protocols in which their issues overlap; they may then separate, or not, or partly, or re-align later. There is a fluid choreography of protocol formation. Protocols thrive in the language gymnasium of puns, poetry and paradoxes, rather than orthodoxies and certainties.

 

Writers build up their arguments primarily by way of the work of thinkers within the protocol. These become more than sources; they are companions. I elaborate upon their nature in chapter four – “We Write-with Companions.” With my companions, I listen to the voices in the mainstream conversation and extract whatever is helpful, but with the understanding that those voices, which so readily hold the floor, are not the only ones, or even necessarily the best.

 

There is no granite divide between  the template and protocols; there are leaky gradations along an ever-changing scale. There is, however, a tipping point where the template has been profoundly challenged, or where a protocol freezes into an orthodoxy,  becoming defensive of its territory.

Decolonialism could be defined as thinking and writing against the grain of the template, which was burnished through colonial violence.  This is what motivated Achille Mbembe to write otherwise; he coined the term “African modes of self-writing.”[2]  Only by way of this self-writing – this self-fashioning – may complex, multiple knowledges about Africa be produced. “Faced”, he says, “with the cul-de-sac of the many discourses on Africa,” discourses which defaced and deleted African languages, thoughts and innovations, it became necessary “to experiment with ways of writing” which could be “commensurate” with the task of “encountering those zones of contemporary African life overloaded with memory, remembrance and debt.”[3] He calls for boundary-pushing  across all the modes and methods of creating knowledge and across the full heterogeneity of Africa, which has to find styles and theories of expression, fit for its own purpose. This is to forge decolonial protocols against the dominant template.

 

Self-writing is risky especially for young African scholars. it is risky because of the enduring and powerful mainstream academic template, which mandates what constitutes knowledge and how to impart it. I recently ran a series of academic writing workshops, which included senior professors from Nigeria. I encouraged them to write with passion and in the first person; to re-think the deadness of conventional literature reviews; to develop their own flow of the argument, using the multiple Englishes – the code switching – with which they communicated. Their professor was teaching them the opposite. He felt I was confusing them; I was putting them at risk; setting them up to fail in the tough, competitive environment of publication, of the paucity of academic jobs and the difficulty of breaking into the international networks of academia.

 

He was right. And he was wrong. In their attempts to imitate the template, his students wrote stilted prose, in a style that was as conventional as it was mundane. They had to navigate the perilous chasm between their  languages, the styles of their rhetoric and their politics, and what they believed was expected of them if they were to succeed. Could they carry these heavy burdens and leap across the precipice towards the other side?  

 

Some of them would make it. But while they might enter the conversation there, would they contribute to it? Would they make a difference to our understanding of the world? They would not, unless they were afforded the opportunity to bring their own, original voices, politics and languages into the knowledge-making project. Forming collaborative protocols with others, increases the potential for them to succeed.

 

These companions within protocols may come together from the Global North and South, from divergent knowledge sites and species. This is point is crucial; it is at the heart of my knowledge-making adventures. Passing Through Knowledge Worlds may be an epistemological project saturated by decolonial strategies, but its conversations and companions are surprising, sometimes unexpected and always productive. It leaps across predictable alliances and problems into many worlds, conceptual tools, problems and outcomes. This is its mission. This is what passing through worlds entails. Its concepts, tools and dimensions travel, re-group and disband, all the wiser.

 

When companions form protocols to confront shared issues, their differences are not erased. There is an overlap zone, which enables their collaboration. Consequently, participants in protocols need to construct bespoke devices to accomplish shared purpose, practice and thinking.  These devices work to enable  multi-layered feats of communication, across dimensions, languages continents and even species. And all the time, I put into practice experimental encounters with others across worlds in the hope that these experiments bear nourishing fruit.

Donna Haraway accompanies me on many of my passing-through expeditions. Her protocols motivate her as a thinker and a being among other beings and species. She publishes manifestos making her allegiances explicit. It was Donna Haraway who got me thinking about protocols, but my journey to adapting this concept was not straightforward.

 

“The first and decisive question will rather be to know whether

animals can suffer. . . . Once its protocol is established, the form of this question changes everything.[4]

 

I read this, at first, as being Haraway’s point, but it turns out that she is quoting Jacques Derrida, who is in turn quoting Jeremy Bentham, a founder of Utilitarian Philosophy. It was Bentham’s question as to whether animals had the ability to experience their own suffering. Haraway was calling for “a different protocol for asking about a lot more than suffering.”[5]

 

All of this began when Derrida caught sight of his  small female cat, gazing at “his sex”, which caused him acute embarrassment in the face of  

 

the impropriety that comes of finding oneself naked, one’s sex exposed, stark naked before a cat that looks at you without moving, just to see.[6]  

 

Derrida’s shame at this “impropriety” leads him to ponder on whether animals can suffer, which Haraway exposes as the reproduction of the dominant template, which places the human concept of suffering as the benchmark from which all other species are judged. He is preoccupied with who he is and, as Haraway wryly comments,  “somehow in all this worrying and longing the cat was never heard from again in the long essay.”[7] Derrida’s essay is called “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” which riffs on the Cartesian “I think therefore I am,” which could be regarded as the defining feature of the sovereign human being at the heart of the template.

 

In terms of my usage, what Haraway criticises Derrida as being party to, is not a protocol; it is, rather, the reproduction  of that template, dominated by the European male, in René Descartes’s image, at its pinnacle. Haraway’s protocol, by contrast, is to form bonds of profound reciprocity and respect with “companion species” –

 

But with his cat, Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning. Incurious, he missed a possible invitation, a possible introduction to other-worlding.[8]

 

And note, only by way of this respectful two-way exchange between humans and cats as companions, is passing through multiple worlds enabled; this is what “other-worlding” is all about –

 

Instead, he concentrated on his shame in being naked before this cat. Shame trumped curiosity.[9]

 

The template ensures that the only questions humans ask about non-humans retain humans at their centre. Haraway’s protocol is different –

 

And what if the question of how animals engage each other’s gaze responsively takes center stage for people? What if that is the query, once its protocol is properly established, whose form changes everything?[10]

 

It entails a reciprocal gaze between animals and humans, all the “critters” which together form her worlds. Haraway’s protocol would seek out different readings and forms of writing and thinking, “delving into the developing knowledges of both cat–cat and cat–human” behaviours.[11]

 

Protocols may be consciously planned by a group of collaborators, but more often emerge more organically through research. We search through the literature, read each other’s bibliographies, and build on the cumulative knowledge of our peers and ancestors. Writing against the grain cannot bypass the necessity for the hard core of research that characterises knowledge production, without exception. This Haraway emphasises as part of her animal-human protocol, which is to read “what people who study cats have to say.”[12]

 

How can we suggest that Derrida, who so often contributes to the politics of social justice, is in this instance reproducing the mainstream template? It turns out that Derrida, in his embarrassment at his cat’s scrutiny of his “sex”, falls back on the question that Jeremy Bentham asked, which spoke to Derrida about his shame in front of his cat. However bizarre, hilarious even, the minutiae of the source trails I will follow, there are no short cuts in the research process. I was saved from being sucked into the vortex of Utilitarian philosophy by another source. Johannes Kniess’s essay, “Bentham on Animal Welfare,” informed me, mercifully, that despite his prominence in contemporary discussions on animal ethics, Bentham actually wrote very little on the subject. His reputation seems to be founded on a single footnote—indeed, part of a footnote—in his major work, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (IPML).[13]

 

Kniess reproduces this footnote –

The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.[14]

 

And this is Kniess’s  explanation, also in a footnote, to Bentham’s footnote –

 

Bentham here references Louis XIV’s Code Noir, issued in March 1685, which regulated the status of slaves in the French West Indies. It gave slaves rights against maltreatment, and prohibited their killing. It also provided that slaves freed in the West Indies should become French citizens.[15]

 

So here, at last, I had it. Bentham was speaking the language of the Law, the template that dictates the Word. While seeming to deplore the conditions of slaves, Bentham was equating their legal right to humane treatment to that of animals. The implication here is that neither slaves nor animals have complex multi-dimensional lives, other than their shared capacity to suffer. 

The Law, which Bentham holds up as ideal in its apparent recognition of  this common capacity for suffering,  is the Code Noir, the Black Code. This brings us to Colin Dayan, Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University, another companion in our protocol, who declares that the Black Code is “the most barbaric product of the Enlightenment.”[16]   

 

The blacks and slaves in French America are introduced not as persons but as a special kind of property: a “thing,” according to Roman law, juridically deprived of all rights.[17]

 

A thing, or an animal? Like the knowledge template more generally, the Black Code’s strength “lies in the unsaid—in those places where the law falls silent — or where the language is deliberately vague or hypothetical.”[18] Dayan has exposed this double speaking Law, which appears humane in the very process of reinforcing the cruelties it enables –

 

No limits are invoked for the number of lashes a slave can receive, or for the number of hours of work that can be imposed on him. Phrases like “corporeal punishment, even death” and “let them be severely punished, even with death” were general enough to permit the severing of ears.[19]

 

Dayan, in her own research trail, traces the ideological origins of the Code Noir to René Descartes: “the thinker of Descartes’ Meditations in 1640 sets the stage for the 1685 edict of Louis XIV.”[20]  Like Derrida, Descartes’s concern was with the nature of ‘man.’ He is the man, a “white universal subject” who enables the legal production of black nonpersons in the New World.[21] What defines him, and through him all men, is not that he can suffer but, famously, that he can think. As Dayan puts it –

 

Listen to Descartes’s elation: “Thinking? At last I have discovered it—thought; this alone is inseparable from me.  .  .  .  I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason.[22]

 

 Slaves, animals, and women presumably, are not men in the Cartesian order of things –

 

Once you establish who is rational man, you can ascertain what is not. What is this thing that does not think or feel, and cannot will, refuse, deny, or imagine? The Black Code responds by inventing the slave.[23]

 

Like the seemingly innocuous, even empathetic, “can they suffer?” the apparent beneficence of the Code is belied.  Now I understand the full force of Haraway’s objection to Derrida’s response to the gaze of his cat; he is replicating the Enlightenment template, as he defers to Bentham, who places his hope for the better treatment of animals, of which slaves are a category, with the Code Noir. Haraway and Dayan, as far as I know, do not refer to each other. I bring them together in a protocol, which interrogates the Enlightenment, with its hard borders and classification certainties, as we will see in chapter 3, “Conjugating Knowledge Worlds,” where received, ‘common sense’ classification systems are placed under erasure. This is one way of building protocols.

There are multiple protocol building strategies. Another is by way of constructing boundary objects, which are conceived of by Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesmer as devising  “a common coin that makes possible new kinds of joint endeavor.”[24] Boundary objects exist to enable the construction of a shared zone between worlds that are otherwise different –

 

Often, boundary implies something like edge or periphery, as in the boundary of a state or a tumor. Here, however, it is used to mean a shared space, where exactly that sense of here and there are confounded.[25]

 

These boundary objects “act as anchors or bridges, however temporary.”[26] They may anchor the differences, being a still point; they may enable communication across differences by being bridges – being “a common coin.”

 

Protocols with their enabling boundary objects are a vein through the worlds encountered in the chapters that follow. These enabling ‘objects’ include invented words that become material in their ability to evoke multiple languages, music and places; an open sesame word like “kimay” in chapter 5, which Binyavanga Wainaina invents in One Day I Will Write About This Place; and ‘boojum’ in chapter 13, where the physicist David Mermin moulds Lewis Carrol’s word out of his poem, The Hunting of the Snark, to act as a kind of hinge to  bring the worlds of fantasy and physics into a fleeting shared space. Or Bruno Latour’s “factish” which bamboozles fact and fetish, science and magic, Europe and Africa as distinct entities.[27]

 

As a kind of boundary object, a factish is a tool of practice enabling personhood as a whole, to “pass”[28],  to “live.”[29] It is “the wisdom of the passage. To take an alternative path from the designated route of power and domination, thinkers within a protocol need to be armed with a different language. And so, ‘lights cross paths’ and African divinities are welcomed into the science laboratory.[30] Lights that flit and shine across paths create new routes and portals across them. They create the possibility that religious rituals and brews bubbling in laboratory test tubes may share as much as they dispute with each other.

 

Boundary objects as blanks – jokers in the pack, tricksters, the profound presence of absences – populate and facilitate Passing Through Knowledge Worlds, like Ozzy the owl in chapter 13; the sacred stone in chapter 11; and tricksters which wreak havoc with the accepted order of things in chapter 8.  The “Allegorical Blank Objects” comprising chapter 12 abound with boundary objects.

 

Boundary objects could be travelling concepts enabling the construction of overlap sites between different worlds. Edward Said is at first critical of travelling theory. He is concerned that theory loses its transformative power when it is exported –

 

What seemed almost inevitable was that when theories travelled and were used elsewhere they ironically acquired the prestige and authority of age, perhaps even becoming a kind of dogmatic orthodoxy.[31]

 

Later, however, in “travelling theory reconsidered” he considers the possibility of a progressive combustion between that theory and its new habitation; he questions what would happen if, on arrival, this theory moves “to another site” where it could create an amalgam, where the travelling concepts enable redemption and transformation –

 

‘transgressive theory,’ in the sense that it crosses over from and challenges the notion of a theory that begins with fierce contradiction and ends up promising a form of redemption?[32]

 

What could happen is the construction of an overlap zone between sites, enabled by metamorphosed tools to think with.  Concepts, which have travelled, could be lighter, more malleable and fit for purpose.[33] We see this in in chapter 10, where Warwick Anderson and Vincanne Adams construct a conversation between the postcolonial and technoscience when technologies travel from Europe to Indonesia. This rich conversation between these apparently very different fields of knowledge is exemplary of the enabling vision which fuels Passing Through Knowledge worlds.

 

While ways of operating within the overlap are many, there is one requirement for all protocols if they are to produce knowledge. These are what Star and Griesmer call “obligatory passage points” which are necessary if diverse worlds are to produce knowledge instead of provoking an out-of-control maelstrom where anything goes.[34]

 

I was at first perplexed by the insistence of compulsory points as we pass through worlds. Is this to return gatekeeping through the back door? No. They are correct in their insistence on the need for some rules, no matter how fluid and experimental this writing may be. Protocols have situated conventions and obligations, fit for purpose and dissolved when they no longer fit.

Dangers lurk. Star and Griesmer warn that

 

protocols are not simply the imposition of one world’s vision on the rest; if they are, they are sure to fail.[35]

 

Protocols must avoid becoming a rock on the heart, a boulder on the brain; protocols have to guard against becoming orthodoxies; writers within the perilous terrain of striving to be different and make a difference, could become gurus and insist on the final word, which cements the protocol into a new template. We saw the gravitational force of the old template pull Derrida into the same old Cartesian benchmark of  the European man. Donna Haraway vividly unpacked this process, but there is a moment when she herself succumbs to it. That a protocol-turned-template could emerge out of a collaboration of radical women academics, led by none other than Haraway herself, illustrates the propensity for protocols to solidify. I am referring to Haraway’s “The Camille Stories. Children of Compost.”[36]

 

At a writing workshop in Cerisy in 2013, Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers  and Vinciane Despret formed a group to produce “a speculative fabulation.” All of these radical, erudite writers have woven in and out of chapters in Passing Through.  Here, their task, the terms of their collaboration, their protocol, was to “fabulate a baby, and somehow to bring the infant through five human generations.”[37]  

 

The Children of Compost insist that we need to write stories and live lives for flourishing and for abundance, especially in the teeth of rampaging destruction and impoverization.[38]

 

This insistence becomes a command.

 

We could hardly approach the five generations through a story of heteronormative reproduction (to use the ugly but apt American feminist idiom)! More than a year later, I realized that Camille taught me how to say, “Make Kin Not Babies.”[39]

 

I had understood the famous refrain about making kin and not babies to be a hospitable call for all the kinds of companions imaginable – human and animal, animate and inanimate, heterosexual and other sexualities. I think it is most of the time, but not here. The resistance to heteronormativity becomes an injunction –

 

In the infectious new settlements, every new child must have at least three parents, who may or may not practice new or old genders. Corporeal differences, along with their fraught histories, are cherished. New children must be rare and precious, and they must have the robust company of other young and old ones of many kinds. (My emphases.)[40]

 

Must, must, must. Babies must be “joined to animal symbionts … Humans must be modified in their cells and molecules.”[41]

 

The fable of the five generations of Camilles could rival those of Aesop, with stern, fixed moral purpose and style. Thus a protocol formed collaboratively becomes a Greek chorus for an outsider orthodoxy. This is notwithstanding that, singly and together, they also produce wonderful, hospitable worlds in motion. In fact, it was Haraway who called for big stories and theories “that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections.”[42] Open edges enable travellers to pass through; this seems unavailable to the children of compost.

 

To be fair, Haraway’s passion for hospitality to worlds, to the planet and all its species, her resistance to male domination in every form, is thread through this book. This small moment in the large body of her writing serves as reminder of the difficulty of retaining the fluidity of protocols enabling them to travel lightly.

Forces, seen and unseen, spirits and gods, whose worlds may be opaque, but the ability to acknowledge their existence, to imagine and respect them, is critical to producing knowledge against the grain. This calls for the humility to honour  the ghosts inside the monolithic knowledge machine.

 

The ghosts in the machine are rogue protocols that produce unforeseen worlds of knowledge, haunting the dominant template of power with their alternative realities. This is not the philosophical understanding of the classification of the mind as occupying a spectral site separated from the mechanical body.[43] These ghosts are the bodies, minds and souls of those who have been erased by the wealth and power of orthodoxy.  Ghosts are happenstance, the lack of teleology, the surprise of strangers finding themselves touching, feeling, producing the speck of dust that ignites into another truth.

 

Allowing the ghost to return into flesh is precisely where outsider knowledge works against the tides and finds its many voices.  The ghosts in the machine are coyotes, tricksters, witches, fairies and vodou gods. They return from where they were repressed and become flesh, citizens of their worlds.

 

In Passing Through Knowledge Worlds, I form protocols with writers who dare to take the risks entailed in following that tiny, smaller-than-a-flea creature to their church and to give thanks to their saints. There may well be fleeting, only partial, connections between human and flea worlds. But in the moment that knowledge of their church and their saints shatters into plural knowledges, they have the potential to light up the planet.

 

As you pass through worlds with me, my, and their, companions, you will encounter strange creatures – foxes, chickens, a goat, a rat and an owl. Animals tell stories and trouble our species classifications; witches expose academic intolerance to the refrain, evoking the stench of the fires in which they still burn. There is the interspace of the bardo, where the writer is metamorphosing as she ages and faces mortality. And everywhere there are more worlds of knowing and unknowing, and protocols for exploring them, than we can imagine.

[1] Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesmer, 2016, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations,’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals” in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907 – 1939, published 1989. It is reproduced in chapter 7 of Geoffrey C. Bowker, Stefan Timmermans, Adele E. Clarke, and Ellen Balka, Boundary Objects and Beyond: Working with Leigh Star, The MIT Press,  179.

[2] Achille Mbembe, 2002, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Public Culture, 14 (1), 239.

[3] Ibid. 254.

[4] Donna Haraway, 2006,  “Encounters with Companion Species: Entangling Dogs, Baboons, Philosophers, and Biologists”, Configurations, 14, (1-2), 105.

[5] ibid.105-6 footnote.

[6] Jacques Derrida, 2002, “The Animal That Therefore I Am”, Critical Inquiry, Winter, 372.

[7] Donna Haraway, 2006, op.cit.103.

[8] Ibid.105.

[9] Ibid.106.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid. 106.

[13] Johannes Kniess, 2019, “Bentham on Animal Welfare”, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 3, 556.

[14] Ibid. 557.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Colin Dayan, 1996, Haiti, History, and the Gods,  University of California Press, 203.

[17] Ibid. 203.

[18] Ibid. 210.

[19] Ibid. 210-211.

[20] Ibid, 204.

[21] Ibid. 207.

[22] Ibid. 204

[23] Ibid.

[24] Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesmer, 2016, op.cit. 194.

[25] Ibid. 200.

[26] Ibid. 194.

[27] Bruno Latour, 2010, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Duke University Press,11.

[28] Ibid. 23.

[29] Ibid. 28.

[30] Ibid. 6

[31] Edward W. Said, 2012, “Travelling Theory Reconsidered” in  Reflections On Exile: And Other Literary And Cultural Essays, Granta Books, 575.

[32] Ibid. 576.

[33] See for example, Mieke Bal, 2002, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, University of Toronto Press.

[34] Susan Leigh Star And James R. Griesmer, 2016, op.cit. 179.

[35] Ibid. 194.

[36] Donna J. Haraway, 2016, Staying with the Trouble, Duke University Press, 134.

[37] Ibid. 134-5.

[38] Ibid. 135.

[39] Ibid.136.

[40] Ibid. 138.

[41] Ibid.146.

[42] Ibid. 101.

[43] Gilbert Ryle, 1949, The Concept of Mind, Hutchinson’s University Library, 11–25.