Reflections on MIGC 2020

In the weeks since MIGC 2020, we took some time to reflect on the conference and what it meant for us. Here are some of our thoughts.

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Talking to people before and after sessions is one of the best parts of the conference experience. Luckily, running a workshop means that the conversation becomes a part of the session, perhaps even more so than the usual Q&A after a panel. At our Thing’s Matter workshop at MIGC 2020 Rendition, I had several conversations with colleagues that I’ve been thinking about over the past few weeks, but one thread of conversation has stayed on my mind. I spoke with a group of graduate students and a professor about their prior exposure to new materialism. I was struck by the comment that the approach had not been welcoming to them in the past, coming off as insular and self-serving to a small group of scholars with specific interests. To me, this comment emphasizes the advantage of the collective of graduate students on our workshop panel—each of us brings our own set of ideas, interests, and motivations to the group. Often in the humanities we are alone when we research and write, and the chance for collaboration is welcome. I believe this also enhances the approachability of a methodology that can seem at odds with the humanities, considering it is dedicated to an ongoing focus on non-human, or more-than-human things. With openness, creativity, and sensitivity, thinking more about things can enhance research in the humanities, while simultaneously encouraging the interdisciplinary work that fuels gatherings like MIGC.  

-Joni H.M.

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I thought the MIGC had some excellent showings this year. In particular, I thought Peter Woods’ presentation “Rendering the Abject Audible Through CON-DOM and Moor Mother” was a fascinating interrogation of the abject through its use by two contemporary noise artists. Woods raised important distinctions in each artist’s use of the abject and positioned each in a distinct dialectical space. The resulting discussion was extremely engaging and something that spurred my interest in exploring the noise genre. Another excellent talk was Jesse Allen and Arron Vaugue’s presentation on the power of flags (“On Vexillology in Art”). The presentation was just a treat and something that will forever impact the way I look at the symbolic in flag design and use. I told everyone about it.Of course, our own Kristine Koyama and Janelle Morgan presented, as well! (Sorry I wasn’t ableto attend yours, Janelle!). Kristine’s discussion focused on a delightfully obscure Victorian text as exemplary of progressive empowerment of New Womanhood in late 1880’s America. Her presentation (“But a Business...it is Progressive!: Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop as a Guide to the Technology of New Womanhood”) spanned several years of work and it showed. The result was a very prescient and relevant literary and social critique. I thought our Thing’s Matter workshop could not have gone better. We had a strong attendance and it was a pleasure to contribute and take part. The resulting discussion was so engaging, in fact, that we were called for time. I think the audience could easily have workshopped for another hour. A big thanks to Janelle Morgan for all her work on the Thing’s Matter site – we appreciate it! But a big thanks to all my Thing’s Matter cohorts for their work at MIGC. I am loving this and looking forward to carrying material forward.

-Brandon Henry

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I hope our workshop forever changed how each attendant looks at a sweet, yellow rubber duckie. For me, it did. Donavan Hohn’s coverage of the shoreline beautification and natural restoration projects of the 1980s-present kept resurfacing in my memory. The thought that these projects, while important for public health reasons, were equally responsible for abstracting the public’s recognition of the continuing global waste problem. 
Donavan asks, “What misanthrope, what damp, drizzly November of a sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a Crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart?” And he certainly has a point, in fact, to his point—the smiling eyes of a rubber duck are essentially an icon of childhood. Is this why the rubber duck holds a cherished space in our homes? While other forms of similar plastic—ones without bright smiling eyes—must end up on the forever journey to “away” where they will spend their vibrant energy in a landfill, generating toxic methane winds that permanently damage our planet. Whether or not our plastic smiles at us, how it makes us feel—is this how we determine where this thing spends the rest of its life? In many cases, yes. And when undesirable things—what Kristeva calls the “abject”—encroach on our beaches in the form of used IV bags and surgical needles, we sound the alarm to beautify and disperse—take those things away!  
One attendee of the workshop and I discussed these IV bags in particular, also generally speculating on products like disposable diapers, etc. Certainly, the disposability of these items makes them revolutionary necessities of modern life. I would never condemn someone for using disposable diapers (my goodness, its frightful just to imagine). Likewise, single-use hospital items make creating an environment conducive to healing possible. But why does the last moment of human thought given to these products have to be when we send them off to a landfill? Once we close the lid on that can-- goodbye! We have christened the thing’s voyage to “away,” nevermore to effect or impact the earth or humankind again. This is the lie we tell ourselves. It’s the lie of beautification, and the same one sitting behind those big, adorable duck eyes. 
But there’s hope. I wouldn’t just end on that! The point is: the workshop, in all its parts, started a conversation about what happens beyond the trash can. The one that talks about how a thing’s matter matters. If we can start thinking about things and their lives in abstraction--where they came from before they entered our lives and where they’ll go once they leave, then how we look at the world what beautification really means and does. By doing this—we can start making efforts to actually protect the planet we spend so much energy trying to “clean up.” 

-Kristine Koyama

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First and foremost, thank you to the dedicated MIGC organizers and committee members for giving us the space to create an exploratory workshop that aimed to help consumers shift their perspective on “trash,” “garbage,” or the otherwise “abject.”  
Onto the rest. This workshop did everything I hoped it would and more (for me—I can only hope that others, as Kristine suggested, went home, looked at their rubber duck, and read its materiality from a new perspective. I had a paper to write due the day after our workshop and the conversations we had at the workshop inspired me to revise and reconsider my position. Sitting in a room with twenty people having lunch, talking with one another, looking at bricks and pets and trash and technological refuse—it helped me foreground the critical conversation about the climate crisis and what the uncertain future looks like based on our (colonial) cultural relationship with materials.  
Since then, I’m working to include subaltern perspectives in my understanding of new materialism, especially Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics. In a chapter on perspectivism, Viveiros de Castro writes that  
In seeing us as nonhumans, animals and spirits regard themselves (their own species) as human: they perceive themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their houses or villages, and apprehend their behavior and characteristics through a cultural form: they perceive their food as human food—jaguars see blood as manioc beer, vultures see the worms in rotten meat as grilled fish. (Viveiros de Castro 55)  
Cannibal Metaaphysics, translated from its original French into Viveiros de Castro’s first language of Portugese, uses metaphorical analogies to create parallelisms between what we (in the West) read as the human and non-human. From here, I’m hoping to channel the energy from the workshop into conversations about deconstructing this Western ideology through subaltern frameworks that would help us recognize and reconfigure our perspective on garbage, trash, and the abject. 

-Janelle Malagon

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First, I want to thank the organizers of MIGC for accepting our proposal and providing us a space to discuss vital materialism, rubber ducks, eco-felines, lithium batteries, Purington blocks, and well, garbage. I too cannot thank enough the attendees who came and talked with us about garbage. The discussions I heard and participated in proved once again the applicability of trash across disciplines. The climate crisis we face is not an issue only for the sciences, but for all of us. We all, no matter our discipline, must consider what our materials are, what their agency is, where they come from, and where they go.

I am particularly fond of the fact that we decided to splay literal trash on our display table—coffee cups, wrappers, and napkins. We made trash a centerpiece. My hope going into the workshop as well as now is that we all learn to see the world as vital materialists. People who, as Jane Bennett defines, “try to linger in those moments during which they find themselves fascinated by objects, taking them as clues to the material vitality that they share with them” (17). My hope is that we all learn, in our lives and in our research, to make trash the centerpiece.
 
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.

-Johnny Zagrodnik