Intimacies of Rock

Intimacies of Rock: Writing Culture, Writing Nature

This is an ethnography of rock and ice, inscription, interpretation, and altitude. It is a writing that traces the contours of a region sculpted by glaciers, cycles of freezing and melting, and seasons—landscapes growing fecund and green, dry and brittle, burning into forests of cinder, becoming into the pale depth of snow. More than geomorphology, (geo)politics, ¹ or a simple matter of landscape—a background you can walk through but never live in—my engagement, ongoing, with the mountains of the Canadian West is comprised of many fractures and imaginaries, losses and uncertainties. It is marked by spatio-temporal longing and the hope of return as well as the psychical/physical impressions left on the body of actually having been there (the aftermath of frostbite, broken bones badly healed, the memory of falling, scarred hands, an obsessive search for fossils remaindered in buckets in a North Carolina storage unit). Sparked by a lively interest and a durational immersion in the mountain spaces of the Canadian West, I write from the suspicion that an ethnography calibrated to the dynamic register of performativity can generatively attend to other kinds of intensities and tempos than the cadence of the human. Furthermore, it can productively work to deconstruct what physicist and philosopher Karen Barad (2003) calls the thingification of the world: the deadening transfiguration of phenomena and relationality into a static series of objects/things. ² By engaging what I call a posthuman performativity, whose point of origin is latent in Judith Butler’s earliest elaborations of the concept, I interrogate and revitalize static concepts of embodiment, agency, relationality, and materiality. My aim in doing so is to contribute a useful theoretical framework for developing more nuanced understandings of bodies and embodiment, pointing to the necessity of taking seriously the materializing epistemological cuts we enact when we frame our understanding of the world. Staying with the complexities, unfolding(s), and intimacies of lichen-covered headwalls, ice, water, and planar fracturing, I animate the argument that what we call nature is not a passive, immutable surface on which culture is inscribed, but rather is the production of active, agential practices, each containing divergent wills to power immanent with the capacity to make cuts of their own.

Bodies of Enchantment: Performativity and the Making-Manifest of Mountains

Canada’s Rocky Mountain range comprises the eastern point of the Canadian Cordillera. Landlocked, it is bordered on the east by the boundlessness of Alberta prairies, their slow gradation into a confusion of foothills, the doorstep of the mountains. The Rocky Mountain Trench, otherwise known as The Valley of a Thousand Peaks, borders it to the west: 1,600 km north to south, a uniform 150°/330° geographic vector, a by-product of faulting, planar fractures resulting from earth movement. To the north, it is shored up by the Liard River, which flows southeast from the Yukon down through British Columbia. At its highest point, a peak called Mount Robson stands 3,954 meters above sea level with nothing but vaulted air above, precipitation and spindrift. It is a bounded space. Forced upward into two major groupings of ranges by the fracturing of rock plates, the movement of continents, imbricated layers of continental margin, thrusts, and faults, the Canadian Rocky Mountain range is the source of the Fraser, Columbia, North Saskatchewan, Bow, and Athabasca Rivers—muscular and turgid waterways that support industry (hydroelectric, logging, adventure tourism) before breaking up into smaller estuaries, formidable and cold. Considerably more jagged in appearance than the Rocky Mountain ranges to the south, the tree line is lower. There are cirques punctuated by arêtes and horns. Written by glaciation in the language of petrified coral, it contains on its surface a place at which I once rested my hand on the static archive of bending rock, a ribbon that seems to record the thrusting up of rock from the ocean, inscribed by incredible force over time.

This mountain range has formed much of my selfhood: different forms of inscription enacted with different kinds of force. Living in Banff National Park, climbing rock and ice in the Kananaskis Valley, scrambling up Mount Yamnuska, charting courses through glassy waters in my father’s canoe, hiking the Plain of Six Glaciers, clambering through caves in Yoho National Park (50 meters of crawl-space leading to the mouth of Takakkaw Falls), standing above the Highwood Meadows in a sudden viscosity of electrified air, sleeping on the shores of the rock-bound lakes. The Rocky Mountains, as they continue to unfold, always in excess of epistemic capture, of my ability to “know” them, are spaces of close proximity and imbrication, layers of remaindered seasons containing the memory of terrestrial life beginning on the planet. These are places where time bends rock and the boundaries between things, phenomena, animate, and inanimate seem at once the sharpest and the most confounded/ing. Storms flash over the peaks bringing onslaughts of snow, rain, wind, change—all becomes flux as, in an instant, the stable referent of a horizon is undone, the sharp edges of the world made wild and white by confluences of air and frozen particles of water. These places are, above all else, places of intimacy/ies, of crossings, attachments, inter-connectivity, dynamism, and intense planar closeness. Any writing of/on this/these bounded space(s) is thus a tracing of this/these intimacies, where the doing of this tracing is to perform writing as a holding close the connectivities and interstitial acts of interpretation that, performatively, inter-generatively, structure the mountain-making(itself)-manifest. It is an echoing of the breaking of a tree branch that is (also) the making of the world, cycles of breaking and remaking, burgeoning forth, never complete, never again, and never for the first time.

The notion of “breaking and remaking” is axiomatic to performance studies, whose mandated object is the study of the effects, and series of effects, produced by bodies—in other words, in the creative capacities of performativity. Yet, by and large, the vast and vital explanatory and descriptive potential of performativity continues to bolster a kind of human exceptionalism that focuses on human embodiment as if it is the only embodiment. This is certainly no fault of the theory or concept itself, containing as it does the scaffolding for many different arguments and applications beyond its own initial purview. For instance, Judith Butler (2004) argues that discrete genders are what humanize individuals, that we gain entry into the symbolic economy of meaning as signs among other signs, through cycles of repetition and difference. This holds true for nonhuman bodies also, who enter into intelligibility through their own self-iterability. Their legibility (as discrete) is one result of the self-production of meaning that, overabundant to necessity, produces an excess that, itself, produces its own series of effects. This does not mean that bodies as signs actually are discrete objects, only that they must seem as such to other bodies to be intelligible—recall that for Butler, the stylized doing of bodies creates those bodies as objects of belief and not objects of ontology.

Indeed, the feature of embodiment that emerges so clearly through the epistemic lens afforded by performativity is the quicksilver capacity/ies of bodies to always indicate a spatial, temporal, and semiotic world beyond themselves—to always move beyond their own boundaries. What remains most exciting in Judith Butler’s account of performativity is the inherent dynamism central to its unfolding, in the shift between embodiment as a state of being, to embodiment as an active doing. In conceptualizing performativity in this way, Butler resists ontological claims about what bodies “are,” and instead elaborates the productive doing through which bodies are produced and re-produced. Speaking through the lexicon of performativity, then, the mode of being-in-the-world of a body (be it human or nonhuman,) is dynamism: rather than static being, becoming. This becoming is historical and contingent, yes, but in the material effects it produces and re-produces, a body’s own performative capacity is precisely the source of its own critical agency. In this way, performativity indicates a vibrancy that is immediately suggestive of the way in which Grosz (2004) describes biological organization, “whose morphological structures,” she contends,

engender the variety of life in all its forms, instead of ensuring that life conforms to existing social categories, boundaries, and limits, instead of containing existence to what has been, opens up and enables cultural, political, economic, and artistic variation. (p. 1)

The continuity of life over time, in other words, is repetition, but it is repetition with a difference, repetition with/in infinite difference(s), in which difference is productive and responsive, creative, adaptive, and made manifest/intelligible as transcription/inscription: as Barad (2003) describes it, “part of the universe making itself intelligible to another part” (p. 17), the simultaneous marking of a present that is never self-same, and a conditioning of a future that remains open to possibility and radical alterity.

If we approach, from this perspective, the cuts that are enacted to make a mountain, what emerges are divergent temporalities and agential materializations conditioned by history and unfolding within and against a series of possibilities and constraints. The material/izing repetition of acts/boundary-making doings/writings on/of stone are agential and intra-related, ³ unfolding from many divergent wills to power. Looking at the geomorphology of the Canadian Rocky Mountains thus, the ranges themselves are sedimentation made manifest; they are proof of a living/moving world, of dynamism and great force, of intensity and the intra/interaction of matter with, and as, time. The rocks that form the mountains of Banff and Yoho National Parks, for instance, were formed from sediments that accumulated 710 million years ago, but the forces that deformed and pressurized these rocks into mountains formed 120 to 60 million years ago. This asynchronous stratification was further contoured by the tempo of glaciation, the memory of which is held in the cerulean water of rock-bound lakes, its remaindered force remembered by/in language (cirque, moraine, till, diamictite) and debris, the contours of the range itself. Here, in these mountains that seem to be austerity made manifest, there are ocean floors, held suspended in stone and thrust up against the sky. As we clamber among boulders, we find a museum of ancient marine life. Our cliffs are made from the bodies of many millions of sea-born creatures, emerging with the tempo of erosion into the sunlight. We walk the ocean floor as if this trick of time is nothing, but the mountain remembers the sea, bearing the trace left by water on the skin of the world. This kind of inscription reminds us that the world/word is never written once, reminding us that what we understand to be a museum of ancient life, frozen in time, petrified and beautiful, is not archive-as-entity, or history itself, but rather a flashing up of one part of the universe’s intelligibility on the surface of another (in its/their intra-active becoming). It is the still, but not static, performance of Darwin’s descent, the burgeoning outward of complexity—the acts of translation, transcription, and interpretation through which a mountain range makes itself manifest.

These actions of inscription, in which signification always already indicates mutability and/as the absence of an originary form, is what Derrida (1974) calls arche-writing. This mode of inscriptive doing is not the privileged domain of human writing or human practices of making-meaning, but rather suggests that all writing, all acts of inscription, are elegiac, productive/generative performances that make manifest the impossibility of arriving at the originary sign itself, the self-referential sign, the sign that refers to no other sign but itself, pure and self-same. For Derrida, all repetition/representation is split by the absence that makes it necessary, where that which is absent is the existence through space and time of an originary form durable enough to make repetition, iterability, descent, unnecessary. The existence of such an originary moment/movement/being would foreclose the possibility of a future that could be otherwise and exclude difference, curtailing the many splits and fractures of and within difference toward increased exuberance, complexity, and open-endedness. What the concept of arche-writing marks, thus, is both a spatial differing and a temporal deferring, an always moving dynamism that expresses verisimilitude through a trick of inscription and interpretation that makes becoming look, for all the world, like being.

This elemental, or arche-writing is the record of the effects of glaciation on rock, whose specificity of location and density, weight and height, agentically contributed to the formation, ablation, and accumulation of the glacier itself. Like planar fractures and tectonic movement, the sediment of matter and organic life (the fragile skeletons of trilobites, brachiopods, graptolites ⁴ ) into rock, the pressure on rock to make mountains, the vibrant ecology of alpine and sub-alpine terrestrial forests and aquatic eco-zones, the holding suspended of rock flour in the waters of alpine lakes, particles that backscatter the blue and green-ended wavelengths of the visible spectrum, making the water cyan, cerulean, viridian, azure: blue, limpid, still and beautiful, referring us to the clear tones of the afternoon sky. What Derrida’s elaboration of arche-writing usefully explicates is that all writing is always a co-writing, always the opening up of becoming, represented, inscribed, interpreted as if it is being—in other words, performance—which always points to an originary breach that afflicts everything one might want to hold sacrosanct: like self-presence, like knowledge of the world, like being-in/as-itself.

This Derridean-inflected engagement with inscriptive practices and acts of translation and interpretation usefully decenters/destabilizes the anthropocentric perspective that agency is the sole property of human subjects who, alone and as independent agents, inscribe, interpret, repeat, and re-present—as given—the materiality of the world. This instability within the structure of the anthropos holds open a space of possibility in which one might glean some of the ways in which the world is made manifest through many different kinds of agential inscriptive doings, repetitions, and burgeoning(s) forth non-specific to the human. It is also to take seriously—by standing in witness to—the many wills to power that propel the unfoldings into materiality of the world, the dynamism and open-endedness of which do/does not correlate to discrete bounded and propertied entities, things, or objects that exist a priori to their (inter)relations. These arcs/lines of flight of intra-connected becomings leave traces on the world. They are communicative—parts of the universe making themselves intelligible to other parts—and indexical of an originary split in the structure of being that holds the future open to possibility, improvisation, alterity, indeterminacy.

It is in this vein of possibility and the communicative capacity of inter/intra-related becoming that I turn, with great delight, to an elaboration of what is for me one of the most captivating forms of being-with/intimacy to make its home in Canada’s Rocky Mountains. This organism, whose form of life is a holding in tension the productive capacities, vulnerabilities, and wills to power of two independent species in a benign parasitic interaction, is highly suggestive of a more nuanced and relevant ontology, which, I follow Grosz in suggesting, re-figures ontological accounts of “the real,” “being,” and “nature” as unchanging, static, and fixed, composed “of universal principles and ideals, indifferent to history, particularity, or change” (Grosz, 2004, p. 14), to a conceptualization of “their immaterial or extramaterial virtualities or becomings, to the temporal forces of endless change . . . ” (Grosz, 2004). The result of this shift is an understanding of ontology that has real explanatory power relevant to political struggle, robust and vital enough to move us to consider seriously what Barad calls “the material conditions and effects of how different differences matter” (Barad, 2012, p. 31).

Posthuman Intimacies: Becoming Lichen

In the highest places I have climbed in the Rocky Mountains, I have found lichen. It is one of the most prolific forms of life on the planet, existing in all parts of the world. Because of the slow rate of growth—some thalli are up to 10,000 years old—lichen is used by scientists to date glacial recession and assess the effects of pollution on fragile ecological zones (Corbridge & Weber, 1998, p. xii). Erupting in subtle profusion across the surface of the mountains (on tree branches and boulders, even thriving at altitude and conditions of arid infecundity) lichens are beautiful and primeval, echoing in their form the contours of fossils (corals from the Carboniferous: faberophyllus, ekvasophyllum, canadiphyllum). Chartreuse, vermillion, gray, black, their cell walls are made of chitin, the same substance that insects use for their exoskeletons. For lichens to exist as an organism, there must be a relationship between two entities, an alga and a fungus, the ongoing dynamics of this intra/interactivity embodying what we mistakenly perceive to be a homeostatic form of inert/barely animate life, a separate determinately bounded and propertied entity: lichen. The dynamic and hidden intimacy, which comprises the form we (mis)recognize as the thing itself, is in actuality a constant negotiation between the fungus (which is the part we see) and the algal cells (which remain hidden and interior, secreted away just beneath the surface). If one were to break open a lichen thallus with a blade and examine the cut under a magnifying lens, one would see a thin layer of vibrant green held in the center. This is algae. What this dynamic intimacy means is that, encysted within the fungus body, the algae can live in places it otherwise could not, while the fungus, by using the agal cells as nourishment, can do likewise (Corbridge & Weber, 1998). Although this might seem like a kind of static symbiosis, the opportunistic cooperation of two distinct entities into a composite being, the algal cells are killed in the process of metabolism by the fungus; without the algal cells as sustenance, the fungus would quickly perish, and the entire structure would collapse and die. Because of the different temporal structures of the twin components—as one-celled organisms, algae re-produce at a faster rate than the fungus destroys them—the delicate balance of the overabundant re-production of algal cells, and what essentially entails a starvation diet for the fungus, the organism thrives. Technically not a true symbiosis, this is an efficient parasitism in which the parasite does not entirely destroy the host, in which it curtails its own appetite for the greater good, its own and that of the collective entity imbricated to the point that one cannot be distinguished from the other.

What I find particularly enchanting about the propagation of lichens is that they have no known organizers, unlike the growing tips of higher order plants. Yet, as lichenologists James N. Corbridge and William A. Weber (1998) explain, they somehow form

coordinated dichotomous branches, upper and lower surfaces, special reproductive structures, and special hairs that fasten them to the substrate. They can dissolve the cement that holds rock particles together, and they range in life-expectancy from a few years to centuries. (p. xii)

Furthermore, though lichens have been separated in laboratories into their component parts and grown in sterile environments under controlled conditions, their restitution as lichen remains vexingly difficult. Scientists struggle to replicate the delicate balance that characterizes the starvation diet that holds the relation between parasite and host from becoming cannibalistic. Meanwhile, the questions surrounding the origin of this singular relationship, and the ways in which various lichens have evolved over the trajectory of millions of years, remain largely unanswered (Corbridge & Weber, 1998).

Lichen’s parasymbiotic constitution reveals the multi-layered configurations of epistemic capture and performativity in two significant ways. First, it suggests the necessity of a re-figuration of epistemology such that we are able to account for the dynamism, intra-activity and open-endedness at the heart of ontology’s most cherished objects: “nature,” “being,” and “the real.” Only with a more nuanced account of being that takes into account “the virtualities and temporal forces of endless change” (Grosz, 2004, p. 14) that Grosz urges us to consider, might we begin to talk and write meaningfully about the forces, constraints, and conditions that materialize bodies (human and nonhuman). Second, the intimacy/becoming of lichen advances Barad’s project of destabilizing a metaphysics that takes separate determinately bounded and propertied objects to be the primary epistemological unit. As the example of lichen vividly and interestingly shows us, first, the misrecognition of temporal processes and complex tensions and unfoldings as things is both a naïve and anthropocentric rendering of the world. Furthermore, we must not make the mistake of thinking that things exist a priori to the phenomena and relationships in which they participate, and from and within which they are formed (in which biological structuration is both historical and open-ended—repetition with a difference), but rather are bound up, implicated and agential, in the shaping of the phenomena out of which they are shaped. Central to this argument is the claim that nature is performative, that matter is performative, and that shoring up performativity as the conceptual property proper only to the human is to fall into a Sisyphean epistemological border war, in which the boundaries of the human must constantly be drawn and redrawn against the horizon of a future which is far less than certain. Far more efficient, I contend, to explore, become enchanted with, the agential boundary-making capacities of matter itself, interrogating and taking seriously the central metaphors, metonyms, and sets of criteria through which we assess and express which (kinds of) materializing becomings matter.

In this way, unfurling our notions of performativity beyond the exclusive domain of the human is certainly generative beyond the impulse to test the tensile strength of a conceptual object, bending it to see if it will break. Doing so allows us to account for differential structures of identity and agency, causality and relationality that are not predicated upon/fundamentally assume human exceptionalism. This, in turn, insists that we work through what we might mean in arguing for, or upon the basis of, a latent or “natural” exceptionalism—an exceptionalism that “just is”—a cut which benefits some while excluding others, a cut that has material effects in the world. At the very least, it is to recognize that “the very practices of differentiating the “human” from the “nonhuman,” the “animate” from the “inanimate,” and the “cultural” from the “natural” produce crucial materializing effects that are unaccounted for by starting an analysis after these boundaries are in place” (Barad, 2012, p. 31). Re-enchanting the lexicon of performativity, re-figuring it beyond the human, I have staged one variation of the argument that what we call nature is constructed through and as relationships. I have elaborated some of the ways in which nature’s whose dynamism holds at its heart material(izing) practices that make matter manifest as discrete entities, places, epochs over and over again, the iterative materialization(s) of facticity. In doing so I have stressed the many acts of translation involved in the making of meaning, as well as gesturing to some ways in which these acts of translations are predicated upon stylized repetition of inscription enacted by human and nonhuman bodies. These acts of inscription and interpretation are what Deleuze might call territorialization; they are the possibilities that condition epistemological capture. This figuration, predicated heavily upon the virtual, points to the possibility that the excesses that unfold in overabundance to prevailing regimes of epistemological capture might point us to futures yet to be contained within rubrics of knowledge and systems of language, yet to be imagined.

Determining Fictions: Posthuman Performativity and the Ethics of Acting “As If”

Writing on the explanatory and imaginative force of Charles Darwin’s accounts of evolution, Gillian Beer (1983) points to the literary style of Darwin’s prose, particularly his propensity to analogy and metaphor (p. 73). She notes that in the plurality and multivocality of his language, Darwin “deconstructs any formulation which interprets the natural world as commensurate with man’s understanding of it” (p. 90). For Beer, Darwin’s theory proved productive in the force of its narrative qua narrative because it instantiated the telling of a new story “against the grain of language available to tell it in” (p. 90) and yet remained so imaginatively powerful precisely because “all its indications do not point the same way. It is rich in its contradictory elements, which can serve as a metaphorical basis for more than one reading of experience” (Beer, 1983, p. 6). When a theory such as Darwin’s is first advanced, Beer elaborates, it is at its most fictive, its most enchanting. Calling on evidence from beyond our senses, such new theories disturb assumed relationships and overturn the observable world, shifting what has been substantial into metaphor. As Beer (1983) describes it, “The awkwardness of fit between the natural world as it is currently perceived and as it is hypothetically imagined holds the theory itself for a time within a provisional scope akin to that of fiction” (p. 1). Over time, however, the fictive power become laminated onto the phenomena they were first elaborated to make strange—signifier and signified collapse into the sign. What this process of normalization makes us forget is that the study of fact is, at its inception, the study of the fantastic. It is the melting into air of solid assumptions and the calling forth of evidence beyond the common sense, beyond the reach of our senses and understanding. At its inception, it is the unmooring of fixed causations and correlations, “skimming off the familiar” (Beer, 1983, p. 75) and making it enchanted.

Yet, over the processes of normalization/naturalization, the mythological, fictive force of theories subsides into the given, the factual, the way things are—their narrative power becoming elided with their explanatory power. This phenomenon whereby, what Beer (1983) calls, “the arc of desire” (p. 74) transforms the conditional into the actual, the theory into the “fact,” bears a striking resemblance to Butler’s description of the performed repetition into “fact” of gender norms. There is much more to be said of this connection than the scope of this essay allows. It is vital to point out, however, that this essay was galvanized by the hypothesis that performativity as a heuristic fiction, productive in its ability to make strange, or hold in enchantment, has lost much of its imaginative force, has become conscripted into a epistemological border war that seeks to shore up the very metaphysical presuppositions it once seemed so adept at deconstructing. What Beer’s insightful comments on the language of Darwin’s evolutionary theory usefully bring to light in this context is that the absorption of theory into givenness is inherent to the arc of the “fact,” a kind of dynamism that begins with hypothesis and moves into provisional fiction, then confirmation, and ends in givenness. The facticity of the fact lies in this givenness. Just as Darwin advances the notion of ever-burgeoning complexity, to prevent concepts with vital and interesting narrative force from becoming encysted in lexicon as “fact,” we need new heuristic fictions. It has, therefore, been my over-arching argument that extending our notion of performativity beyond a concept predicated on human exceptionalism is an attempt to advance a new hypothesis from the foundation of the now taken for granted. It has been to advance a new kind of heuristic fiction, suggesting that in doing so we might attend to the material, rather than simply the discursive, conditions and effects of how “different differences matter” (Barad, 2012, p. 31), with the effect of accounting better and more ethically for relationality and the forces that we assume passively provide, as given, our own agency and the conditions of its possibility as “exceptional.”

Through an animated account of becoming (rather than “being”) lichen, and what I have called “the intimacies of rock,” I have suggested a re-figuration of relationality that radically redistributes agency from a network of actors and agents that preexist their inter-relations, into a system congruent with Nietzsche’s wills to power, or Darwin’s theory of the evolution of life toward complexity—his elaboration of infinite variation within and among species and expressions of life and depiction of evolution as a kind of repetition with a difference (never again, never for the first time, a becoming that is never complete). This detaches our mode of engagement with the world from an obsession with taxonomy and representation(alism)—in which the differences that matter are the differences between degree and kind, and in which temporality is the partitioning of moments from other moments through inscriptive practices that conceal their own genesis, in which acts of interpretation, translation, and inscription are mistaken for acts of ontological, and interpretive acts of transcription themselves stand in for, produce, come to be, “the real.” What this re-figured account of performativity calls for is not the abandonment of the body/bodies, but rather the acknowledgment of the many modes and becomings of bodies which, as Butler (1993) points out, “tend to indicate a world beyond themselves” (p. x), foregrounding the kind of dynamism that makes shoring up the boundaries around notions of human agency, being, or bodies, an untenable project at best.

Instead, what I call for here is a willingness to recognize the natural forces that contour bodies, to expand our notion of agency as an attribute or quality immanent to self-actualized subject-hood, and to recognize agency as the ongoing materialization of the world. Dynamism is not a product or end result of agency; dynamism is agency. Such a re-figured perspective allows us to acknowledge the agency of glacial mass in its intra/interaction with other phenomena in the ongoing becoming of the mountain-making-itself-manifest, in the many writings on stone that indicate just as vibrantly as human practices of inscription and representation the fundamental/originary split in being that holds the future open to possibility, improvisation, and indeterminacy. It is our next ethical/aesthetic challenge to view this open-endedness not as a site for panic or foreclosure but as a site of radical agency—an agency we do not own, but instead must share with the world.

Furthermore, attending seriously to what I have proposed as the fundamental breach in being revivifies ontology, returning the question(s) of ontology to the center of inquiry, allowing us to shift our focus from the human and/or nonhuman body, interesting to prevailing currents in contemporary theory only, as Grosz (2004) has argued, “in its reflection through discourse, its constitution in representation, or its mediation by images” (p. 3), to the body as an open-ended system, a boundary-making doing that always actively refers to worlds beyond itself, to worlds it cannot control or fully anticipate. To claim a performativity beyond the human is to recognize that there are many millions of life spans and wills to power, many rhythms and intensities constituting (many) temporality/ies. It is a loosening of our privileged domain of time as that which demarcates the boundaries of our own finitude, and a remembering of the debt we owe to the inter/intra-relations of and between bodies that condition the possibilities of our being in, and experience of, the world. Furthermore, it requires the recognition of, and enchantment with, the nature of biological being/nature as that which opens itself up to inscription, to the practices of discursivity that allow writings on stone, emergences of species, stylized repetitions, and the materialization of matter, the transcription of the cultural and natural signs and sites that comprise our world.

In the contemporary context of struggles over wild spaces against development, resource extraction, and industry, and immersed as we are in the legacy of moralism and ethnocentrism that led, for instance, to the historically sedimented acts (ongoing) of marginalization of its First Peoples, we need to continue to engage with, and generate, heuristic fictions that allow us to think through and forestall the moralization and anthropocentric metaphysical presuppositions that shore up, as fact, the facet of nationalism that relies on logics of exclusion and marginalization drawn along the axis of human/other. The singularity of the mountain ranges of the Canadian West, the way I have taken it up in the essay, thus offers an emergence into the realm of the political, political struggle, and the epistemologies that underlie them relevant to, and generative for, those invested in politics of identification and difference. Just as I argue that the shoring up of the boundaries around “the human” is not an epistemological/political border war worth waging, nor is the staging of political struggle solely on the grounds of entry into the master signifier (in which “the human” is conceptualized as the only term that matters, and thus the only term conceptualized in positive rather than in/as lack). My imagining of performativity beyond the human is not an attempt to jettison the category of the human altogether, but rather to show the limitations of a metaphysics that bolsters anthropocentrism and the accompanying kind of moralizing that allows the partition between human and other to be the only distinction that matters. It is to understand and take seriously what Barad (2012) calls, “the materializing effects of particular ways of drawing boundaries between ‘humans’ and ‘nonhumans’” (p. 31), “nature” and “culture,” rather than beginning analysis on the grounds of these categories “as if” the boundaries between them were already given. If, then, there is an ethics to be found in the kind of relationality I propose in this essay, it lies in the claim that what we call “the human” is an unstable, contestable fiction. Each time we utter or inscribe its name, we are already acting “as if” there is something solid behind what it signifies; meanwhile, each act of “saying something,” invoking the human, is also a “doing something.” With each reiteration of “the human,” we disambiguate its fictive quality, acting as if the line of exclusion between human and its other(s) is clean, uncontestable, uncontested, and natural—so natural it appears always to have been there—and in so doing, bringing it further and further into facticity. It has been my attempt in this essay to perform the argument that behind the phenomena (intra/inter-active in its becoming), there is no thing-in-itself. However, the ways in which we perform and repeat the concept over time “as if” there is an ontological thing-in-itself behind it, “the human” has material effects in the world. We are persistently and urgently responsible for those effects.