“A tree covered in darkness survives for years. It’s being fed by other trees through fungal networks underground. But the network doesn’t feed everyone equally. Some trees get resources. Others don’t. The infrastructure decides.”
Activity I
Here’s what I want to know: Where have you seen this pattern in contexts you study?
Not forests. Political situations. Social structures. Knowledge systems. Where does the visible map (what things look like above ground) radically differ from actual dependencies (what’s happening underground)?”
PAIRS (20 minutes):
Pick one example between you. Could be:
- Resource flows that don’t respect official borders
- Survival networks that official systems don’t acknowledge
- Knowledge transmission that happens outside institutional channels
- Communication infrastructure that connects ‘separate’ entities
Don’t write. Just talk. Figure out together:
- What’s the ‘above ground’ story? (What’s visible, what’s official, what’s mapped)
- What’s the ‘underground’ story? (Actual flows, dependencies, connections)
- Who benefits from pretending the above-ground story is complete?”
Activity II
SMALL GROUP WORK: Three Provocations (45 minutes)
GROUP 1: The Selective Network
In forests, mycorrhizal networks connect some trees to each other but not others. A tree might be fed by its neighbors—even trees of different species—but some trees in the same forest get excluded from the network entirely. The infrastructure itself makes decisions about who gets access.
In your fields: Where does infrastructure create communities by determining who gets connected? Not communities based on choice or shared identity, but communities created by who has access to the same networks.
QUESTIONS FOR YOUR GROUP:
- Think about a knowledge network you’re part of (academic databases, language communities, professional networks, informal study groups). Who gets access? Who doesn’t? How did the infrastructure create this division? What’s the difference between being excluded by active gatekeeping vs. being excluded by how the infrastructure is built?
- Regional communication networks: Arabic satellite TV, Turkish internet infrastructure, Persian digital platforms, Kurdish cross-border networks. These connect some populations while excluding others—not by explicit policy, but by how the infrastructure works. What communities get created by shared access? What gets hidden when we talk about “the Arab world” or “the region” as if infrastructure access were universal?
- Mycorrhizal networks are not egalitarian—some trees get more nutrients than others. Where do you see this in knowledge production? Some institutions, some languages, some methods get more resources through the network. Others are technically “connected” but starved. What does it mean to be part of a network that systematically undernourishes you?
GROUP 2: The Signal Problem
Plants communicate chemically. But some signals are only detectable by certain species. A plant might release a warning about herbivores that only its kin can sense. Other plants in the same soil don’t receive the message—not because it’s encrypted, but because they don’t have the receptors.
Communication succeeds because it’s selective. Universal accessibility would be a vulnerability.
QUESTIONS FOR YOUR GROUP:
- Code-switching and selective intelligibility: Consider Arabic with its different registers (fus7a, 3amiyya, specific dialects), or minority languages (Kurdish, Amazigh, Aramaic) where speakers can choose to be understood or not depending on who’s listening. When is unintelligibility a feature, not a bug? When is it protection?
- Historical texts and interpretive communities: Sufi poetry, Kabbalistic texts, Islamic legal reasoning—they don’t aim for universal comprehension. They require training, context, initiation. Outsiders can read the words but miss what’s being communicated. Is this exclusionary? Or is it acknowledging that some knowledge can’t be transmitted without the right receptors?
- The plant releases a warning signal but this also attracts predators’ attention. Communication is risky. Where do you see communities deciding whether to speak publicly or stay quiet? When does visibility become vulnerability? What communication strategies work because they’re not universally accessible?
GROUP 3: The Emergence Decision
Seeds have “decision-making centers”—clusters of cells that weigh antagonistic signals (warmth vs. cold, wet vs. dry) to decide when to germinate. The decision is distributed across cells with no central consciousness. And it’s irreversible: emerge too early, you freeze. Too late, you miss the growing season. Never emerge, you also die. The cells can’t see above ground. They only have fluctuating temperature data. They decide anyway.
QUESTIONS FOR YOUR GROUP:
- Distributed decision-making: Think about a community you know that made a collective decision about visibility, emergence, political claims. How was the decision made? Was it centralized (leadership deciding) or distributed (many people weighing signals)? What were the “antagonistic signals”—the contradictory information people were integrating?
- Irreversible emergence: Some political acts are like germination—once you emerge, you can’t go back underground. Claiming a right. Making a demand. Becoming visible. What examples can you think of where the timing question is impossible? When is it “safe” to emerge? What information would you need to know for certain? (And if you can never know for certain, how do you decide?)
- Seeds decide without seeing above ground. They use temperature fluctuations as proxy data. In political contexts, when do communities have to make decisions based on indirect signals because they can’t see the full picture? What’s the equivalent of “temperature data”—information that hints at conditions but doesn’t show you everything?
Nur der Text ist unter der Lizenz Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International nutzbar. Alle anderen Elemente (Abbildungen, importierte Anhänge) sind „Alle Rechte vorbehalten“, sofern nicht anders angegeben.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Victoria Mummelthei (3. Februar 2026). Materials for the session on Feb 3 – part 01. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 9. März 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/15ly1

