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Materials for the session on Feb 3 – part 02

The Archive Problem:

Ottoman archives document Kurdistan. British Mandate archives document Kurdistan. Turkish state archives document Kurdistan. Iraqi, Syrian, Iranian state archives document Kurdistan.

But these archives don’t document the same thing. They create different “Kurdistans” through what they record, how they categorize, which connections they trace, which movements they erase.

Kurdish oral histories document something else entirely—not “Kurdistan” as a bounded entity, but networks of kinship, seasonal movement, shared water sources, marriage alliances that don’t map onto any state archive’s categories.

ACTIVITY III

Your task for 20-30 minutes: Each of you at best brings a different provocation. Together, work through this: How do networks, selective signals, and distributed emergence help you understand what’s happening with these archives?

SPECIFIC ANGLES TO EXPLORE:

For the person from Group 1 (Networks):

  • Archives are infrastructure. They determine what becomes “knowable.” Which scholars get access to which archives? If you’re a Kurdish researcher, which infrastructure do you depend on—Ottoman? Turkish? Iraqi? Western academic databases? How does that dependency shape what you can say? If the archive feeds some narratives and starves others, what does “scholarship” mean?

For the person from Group 2 (Signals):

  • Kurdish oral histories exist in forms that state archives can’t capture—not because they’re secret, but because archival infrastructure can’t process them. Stories passed through kinship networks. Knowledge embedded in seasonal practices. Memory carried in place names that official maps erased. Is this a failure of preservation? Or successful communication that protects itself by being illegible to state power?

For the person from Group 3 (Emergence):

  • Kurdish political movements have repeatedly decided to “emerge”—1920s, 1960s, 1990s, 2010s. Each time: partial information, conflicting signals, irreversible consequences. Were these centralized decisions or distributed ones? Who was weighing which signals? When nationalist movements claim to speak for “Kurdistan,” whose emergence are they talking about—and whose are they not?

WHAT YOU NEED TO FIGURE OUT TOGETHER:

  1. If studying “Kurdistan” means choosing which archive to depend on (which network to be fed by), and that choice determines what you can see—where is the “real” Kurdistan? In the Ottoman documents? The oral histories? The underground networks that no archive captures?
  2. If these different archives create different objects (different “Kurdistans”), not just perspectives on one object—what does it mean to claim you’re studying “the same thing”?
  3. What would Kurdish autonomy even mean when Kurdish survival has always depended on networks (trade routes, kinship alliances, language practices) that cross the borders claiming to contain “Kurdistan”?

Materials for the session on Feb 3 – part 01

“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:

  1. 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?
  2. 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?
  3. 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:

  1. 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?
  2. 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?
  3. 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:

  1. 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?
  2. 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?)
  3. 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?

Session Tomorrow (Feb 3) at 10:15 – Online via Webex

Hi all,

We’re moving tomorrow’s session online due to transport strikes and weather.

Join at 10:15 in my personal Webex room (sent via email).

Same session structure (10:15-13:15 with break), just via Webex with breakout rooms instead of in-person.

Before 10:15:

Quick reminder of the blog post prompt: Think about one political situation where the visible map (official borders, claimed autonomy) differs from actual dependencies (resource flows, infrastructure, who feeds whom).

The questions to sit with:

  • What would an “underground map” reveal that the official map hides?
  • What infrastructure connects supposedly separate entities?
  • If survival is always networked, what does “self-determination” even mean?

We’ll start from there. Don’t write anything—just notice what makes it uncomfortable.

See you at 10:15.

V

Session Postponed to Next Week + Something to Watch

Hi all,

Due to severe weather today and very low attendance, I’m postponing our session to next week, same time (10:15-13:15).

I know it’s frustrating when plans change, but maybe this gives us an unexpected gift: more time to sit with what we’ve been reading.

Something to watch/listen before next week:

I came across this interview with N. Katherine Hayles about her book Bacteria to AI that connects directly to what we’ve been working through with Schlanger:

It’s long (nearly 2 hours), but you don’t need to watch all of it. Here’s what I’d suggest:

Watch/listen to the first 30-40 minutes (up to where she starts discussing her specific experiments with GPT-3).

Pay attention especially when she talks about:

  • Why “decentering the human” matters (around 10-15 minutes in)
  • The concept of “umwelt” – how different entities construct their worlds differently (she gets into this around 25-30 minutes)
  • Non-conscious cognition vs. unconscious (early in the conversation)

Why this connects to what we’re doing:

Hayles is making an argument that sounds familiar if you’ve been reading Schlanger: that we need frameworks to understand intelligence that don’t assume it looks like human brains, human consciousness, human decision-making.

Her “integrated cognitive framework” (ICF) is trying to do what Schlanger does with plants – recognize cognitive capacities that work completely differently from ours. She’s just extending it from bacteria to AI.

But here’s where it gets interesting for us: When she talks about how liberal humanism assumes bounded, autonomous individuals, and how this is fundamentally wrong because we’re all “holobionts” (collectivities of organisms) – doesn’t this sound like the covered tree problem we’ve been discussing? The fiction of autonomy when everything survives through networks?

And when she discusses “umwelt” – how different species construct completely different worlds through their sensory and cognitive apparatus – isn’t that another version of asking: what does a plant’s world look like? What signals can it detect that we can’t?

Small task (optional, but useful):

As you watch/listen, notice one moment where Hayles’ argument about non-human cognition, interdependence, or distributed intelligence makes you think differently about something in your Middle East studies work.

Not “could be applied to” – but genuinely: what specific situation, archive, text, community, historical moment came to mind?

Bring that noticing to next week. We’ll start there.

One more thing:

Around 40-45 minutes in, Hayles talks about the “umwelt of LLMs” – how large language models construct their worlds. If you’re interested in the AI stuff we’ve been gesturing toward, that section is worth your time. But it’s not required for our session.

Stay warm, stay safe. See you next week.

Best,
V

P.S. If the weather or other circumstances keep you from attending next week, just let me know. We’ll figure it out.

What does a plant remember?

Plants have memory. They remember being touched. They remember droughts from previous seasons. They pass information to their offspring about environmental threats. Some plants “learn” through repeated exposure—they stop responding to harmless stimuli, conserving energy. Others remember kin and treat relatives differently than strangers.

But plant memory isn’t like human memory. There’s no brain, no central archive. Memory is distributed through the body—in growth patterns, chemical profiles, gene expression changes. The plant doesn’t “recall” the drought. The plant is the record of the drought.

What if we thought about collective memory this way—not as stories we tell or archives we keep, but as something embodied in how a community moves, responds, organizes space, treats strangers vs. kin?

Your task (thinking/discussion, not writing):

  1. Plants remember trauma in their tissue. What does it mean for memory to be in the body rather than in the mind? What gets remembered when there’s no narrator, no central story, just distributed responses?
  2. Plants’ “transgenerational memory”—parent plants chemically prepare seeds for threats they experienced. What happens when memory is inherited but can’t be explained? The offspring doesn’t know WHY it’s sensitive to certain stresses. It just is.
  3. Plants distinguish kin from non-kin. Roots grow differently when near relatives vs. strangers. But there’s no recognition, no meeting—just chemical sensing and response. What does kinship mean without recognition?
  4. Some plants “forget” harmless stimuli through habituation. They learn what’s not a threat by stopping their defensive response. What would it mean for a community to “forget” by habituation—not by erasing the past, but by ceasing to respond to it?
  5. Plant memory is un-retrievable by the plant itself. A plant can’t “think back” to last year’s drought. But its body carries the record. What’s the difference between memory you can access and memory that shapes you without your awareness?

Connect to your field:

How does your discipline/do your disciplines think about collective memory? Does it assume memory needs a narrator? A retrieval mechanism? Conscious recall? What changes if memory is just: the way a system responds because of what happened to it?

Bring to the next session:

Just your thinking. Be ready to discuss: What political/social situation are you thinking about when you read Schlanger on plant memory? What becomes visible if we think about collective memory as embodied response rather than stored narrative?

When communication fails on purpose

Schlanger shows plants making decisions, communicating chemically, responding to each other. But what about communication that’s meant NOT to be understood?

Consider: A plant releases a chemical signal that warns others of herbivore attack. But releasing that signal also attracts the herbivore’s attention—it’s a risk. Some plants don’t warn. Some warn selectively. Some produce signals only certain neighbors can detect.

Or: Mycelium networks connect trees, but not all trees equally. Some connections are cut off. Some signals aren’t shared.

The provocation:

What if successful communication isn’t about being understood by everyone, but about being understood only by the right ones?

In your field—whether it’s literature, philosophy, politics, science—find an example of communication that succeeds precisely because it’s not universally accessible.

Could be:

  • Coded language that only insiders recognize
  • Knowledge that requires initiation to understand
  • Arguments that only make sense if you already know something
  • Communication that protects itself by being opaque to outsiders

Bring to session:

One example of deliberate opacity that works better than clarity would.

Then we may discuss: What does Schlanger’s plant intelligence teach us about strategic inscrutability? When is it ethical to communicate in ways that exclude? When is it necessary?

Connection to politics: Resistance movements, diaspora communities, marginalized groups often communicate in ways authorities can’t intercept. Is this a failure of communication or a different kind of success?

The Knowledge in the Hands

In the videos, their hands move with such certainty that it looks effortless. Press and turn, press and turn. The rhythm is hypnotic. An 86-year-old woman making fusilli ricci, fingers twisting strands of dough that seem impossibly thin. A 95-year-old in Sardinia braiding lorighittas—pasta shaped like tiny hoop earrings—so quickly her hands blur. A farmer from Basilicata rolling raschiatelli with both hands simultaneously, the motion so practised it seems mechanical. Except it isn’t mechanical at all. It’s the opposite: knowledge sedimented in bodies over decades, over lifetimes.

Watching someone’s hands this closely is unexpectedly intimate. More so than watching their face. Hands at work have their own language—the way they grip, the pressure they apply, the small adjustments they make without conscious thought. Watching these grandmothers work, I find myself trying to mirror the motions with my own hands, pressing my thumb against my palm, testing angles. It’s involuntary. My hands are trying to learn something my mind hasn’t figured out yet.

What’s curious is how the fluidity itself becomes the puzzle. When everything looks easy, you can’t see where the knowledge lives. You can’t see what’s difficult about it, what years of practice have made invisible. The challenge isn’t just learning the motion—it’s learning to see that there’s something to learn.

Vicky Bennison didn’t set out to create an archive of gesture. She’d moved to Italy from south London in 2005 because, as she puts it, she wanted a big kitchen and the only way to afford one was to leave the city. If you’re going to leave London, she reasoned, you might as well move somewhere sunny. She’d worked in international development for years, writing about food on the side. In 2014, living in Le Marche, she noticed something that troubled her: only older women still made pasta by hand. The younger generation—even in Italy, even in small villages—were buying dried pasta from shops. The women who knew how to make it were in their seventies, eighties, nineties. They were dying. And when they died, what they knew would die with them.

At first, Bennison thought she’d write a book. But then she filmed her neighbour Maria making pasta and watched it back, and realised that words—even a thousand words—couldn’t capture what was happening. There’s a rhythm to pasta-making, a meditative physicality that exists in motion. Describing it flattens it. So she kept filming. She put the videos on YouTube because that’s where videos go. She never imagined she’d build an audience. She just thought someone should make a record.

Ten years later, the Pasta Grannies channel has 1.05 million followers on YouTube alone and almost one thousand videos. The format hasn’t changed much: simple filming, minimal editing, little narration. Just the grandmother and her hands. Sometimes you hear her voice, explaining something, but mostly you watch. The videos are unexpectedly calming to watch. People say they remind them of their own grandmothers, even grandmothers who didn’t cook. There’s something about the unhurried pace, the competent hands, the sense of being in a kitchen where someone knows what they’re doing.

But what exactly is being recorded? Bennison calls herself a food anthropologist. She talks about preserving skills, sharing traditions. Yet the word “skill” doesn’t quite capture it. A skill is something you can be taught. What’s happening in these videos feels different—more embodied, more particular. These women aren’t demonstrating skills so much as revealing a knowledge that has become inseparable from their bodies. Their hands don’t follow instructions. They know.

The gap between knowing about something and knowing how to do it is wider than we usually admit. You can read a perfect description of how to make orecchiette—semolina flour, water, salt; knead until smooth, roll into ropes, cut into pieces, press with your thumb—and still produce misshapen lumps when you try. The instructions are accurate. They’re also insufficient. They tell you what to do but not what to feel for. When is the dough smooth enough? How much pressure is “press”? What does “ready” look like?

I know this because I tried. After watching several orecchiette videos multiple times, taking notes on thumb angles and rotating motions, I thought I understood. I made orecchiette. They were terrible. Thick in some places, torn in others, nothing like the delicate little ears the grandmothers produced. I watched again. Made another batch. Still wrong. By the fifth attempt, something shifted. Not in my understanding exactly, but in my hands. They started to sense something—not what those experienced hands know, but some small beginning of knowledge that couldn’t be written down. A feel.

This is what makes Bennison’s archive noteworthy. She isn’t recording recipes or even techniques, really. She’s recording something that resists recording: the accumulated knowledge of decades of practice, knowledge that lives in bodies. An archive typically preserves information that can be extracted and transferred. Recipes in cookbooks. Dances in notation. Songs in sheet music. But what gets recorded here is movement itself, gesture itself. And gesture, unlike notation, doesn’t translate. It can only be imitated, practised, gradually absorbed.

Some knowledge defies transmission entirely. On the island of Sardinia, in a remote village called Nuoro, there’s a pasta so rare that for generations only three women in the world knew how to make it. It’s called su filindeu—threads of God. The pasta is served twice a year at the Feast of San Francesco, after pilgrims walk twenty miles through the night to reach the village of Lula. For over three hundred years, the recipe has been passed down through the women of the Abraini family. The pasta is made from semolina, water, and salt. That’s it. Three ingredients. But the technique is so difficult that even documenting it hasn’t made it reproducible.

Paola Abraini is one of those women. When she makes su filindeu, she takes a cylinder of dough and stretches it, folding it again and again. After eight rounds of doubling, she’s left with 256 strands, each half as thin as angel hair pasta. She lays these across a wooden frame in three crisscrossed layers and sets them to dry in the Sardinian sun. The whole process looks impossible—like watching someone make lace out of dough.

In 2016, Jamie Oliver went to Sardinia to learn from Abraini. He’s a classically trained chef who once owned forty Italian restaurants and learned Italian cooking from Antonio Carluccio. He watched Abraini work, tried it himself, and failed. Completely. The dough broke in his hands. He couldn’t get it to stretch. Afterwards, he had to admit—on camera, to millions of viewers—that he simply couldn’t do it.

The same year, Barilla sent a team of engineers. Barilla makes more pasta than anyone in the world. They have factories, machines, industrial processes. They sent their best engineers to Sardinia to figure out how to mechanise su filindeu. The engineers watched Abraini, took measurements, analysed the dough composition. They went back to their labs and failed. The pasta broke. They couldn’t replicate what one woman’s hands could do.

What’s interesting is that the recipe isn’t secret. Abraini has been filmed multiple times. The process is documented. Semolina, water, salt. Knead the dough. Stretch it. Anyone can watch. Yet watching doesn’t make it reproducible. There’s something happening in Abraini’s hands—some knowledge about exactly when the gluten has reached perfect elasticity, about which bowl to dip your fingers in (plain water or salted water) and how much and when—that can’t be externalised into rules. She says the only secret is in her hands. You have to feel it.

Abraini tried teaching girls from other families in Nuoro. They came to her kitchen, interested and eager. She showed them the process. They attempted it. And then, when they realised how much work it would take—years of practice for something most of them would never use—they left. None of them came back. Even Abraini’s own niece and sister-in-law, who do know how to make it, haven’t taught their children. The younger generation isn’t interested in learning something so difficult for something so particular.

For years, this seemed like the end of the story. A knowledge dying with the women who held it, despite documentation, despite interest, despite everything.

But then something shifted. After the Jamie Oliver video brought international attention, after journalists wrote about the impending extinction, Abraini made a decision. In 2016, she agreed to teach outsiders for the first time in generations. Not hobbyists—professional chefs who would commit properly. She set three conditions: every time you make su filindeu, you must explain it’s a sacred Sardinian dish; you must recount its history; you must not alter the traditional preparation. Two chefs learned: Sofia Longo in New York and Lee Yum Hwa in Singapore. They practised for a year. Now su filindeu is served in restaurants outside Sardinia, something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

The knowledge didn’t stay local, but it didn’t disappear either. It transformed. It’s becoming something new—a technique that travels whilst keeping connection to its origin. Some in the Abraini family see this as survival. Others see it as commercialisation, as taking something sacred and making it ordinary. Both might be right.

What interests me is how this differs from what’s happening with Pasta Grannies. Su filindeu requires direct teaching—you need Abraini or someone she’s taught to guide you, correct you, tell you when you’re getting it right. Bennison’s videos require something else. You watch. You try. You fail. You watch again. Gradually, through repetition, something starts to develop in your hands. Not the grandmother’s knowledge—you’ll never have that—but your own version, calibrated to your kitchen, your flour, your body.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent years studying how people learn to inhabit social worlds. He was interested in the subtle knowledge that gets transmitted in families—the way a child raised in a working-class household learns different ways of speaking and moving than a child raised in wealth, not through explicit lessons but through immersion. He called this habitus: embodied dispositions acquired through living in particular contexts. You don’t study habitus. You absorb it, the way you absorb an accent. By the time you’re aware of it, it’s already part of you, shaping how you see and move through the world.

Pasta-making is habitus of a different sort—not social class but craft knowledge, the kind that develops through years of repetition in a particular context. An elderly woman’s hands know things that can’t be made explicit. After decades of making orecchiette, the knowledge is sedimented in her body. She doesn’t think about where to press or how hard. Her hands know. This is what Bourdieu meant by embodied knowledge: understanding that exists in the body, that precedes conscious thought, that can’t be fully translated into language.

Traditionally, this kind of knowledge required proximity. You stood beside someone who knew, watched their hands, tried to copy the motion, received correction. You did this repeatedly, for months or years, until your hands developed their own understanding. Apprenticeship worked through presence. You couldn’t learn blacksmithing from a book, and you couldn’t learn it from watching once. You needed to be there.

The video changes the terms of transmission. It reproduces the gesture—not perfectly, but recognisably. You can watch a grandmother making orecchiette as many times as you want. You can pause, rewind, study the exact angle of her thumb. The gesture travels to people who will never go to Puglia, who don’t speak Italian, who come from entirely different culinary traditions. But does the knowledge travel with it?

The answer seems to be: yes and no. Under the orecchiette videos, hundreds of people report trying to make them. Some succeeded on the first attempt. Most didn’t. They describe making batch after batch, getting a bit better each time, discovering small adjustments. Someone notices the dough needs longer to rest in humid weather. Someone else realises their flour absorbs water differently than Italian semolina. Someone figures out you can use the back of a spoon when your thumb gets tired.

What’s happening in these comment sections isn’t traditional apprenticeship—there’s no master present, no one to correct your form—but it isn’t solitary learning either. It’s something new: distributed practice, where people learn not just from the grandmother but from each other, building collective knowledge through shared experimentation. They’re developing what you might call distributed habitus: embodied knowledge that forms through engagement with mediated gesture and conversation with others doing the same.

This shouldn’t work, according to Bourdieu’s framework. Habitus requires immersion in a social context, years of unconscious absorption through proximity. But something is clearly being transmitted. Not the grandmother’s habitus—that remains hers, tied to her life, her kitchen, her decades of practice—but people are developing their own embodied knowledge. The video provides something between instruction and immersion. Not a recipe (too static) and not apprenticeship (too dependent on presence), but a third thing: gesture made visible, available for repeated study and gradual absorption.

Bennison didn’t anticipate this. She thought she was making a record, preserving something before it disappeared. What she created was this: an archive that functions as a teaching tool, not because it explains but because it shows. The grandmothers aren’t demonstrating techniques. They’re just making pasta as they’ve always made it, in their own kitchens, at their own pace. But being watched—being watchable, repeatedly, from anywhere—changes what their hands can do. Not for them (although maybe for them, too). For us.

There’s an essay by John Berger where he talks about how photographs change the meaning of what they show. A photograph of a forest isn’t a forest. It’s a forest made portable, made repeatable, made something you can study. The Pasta Grannies videos do something similar. They make gesture portable. They make habitus—which Bourdieu argued was tied to specific social contexts—available across contexts. An 86-year-old’s hands in Basilicata become watchable by people in Tokyo, São Paulo, Melbourne. The knowledge doesn’t transmit intact, but it does something. It starts something.

When I watch the videos now, after trying and failing and trying again to make orecchiette, I see different things. I see where pressure increases and where it releases. I see the rotation that keeps dough from sticking. I see a hundred small adjustments I couldn’t see before because I didn’t have any sense of what I was looking for. My failed attempts didn’t teach me how to make perfect orecchiette—I still can’t—but they taught me how to watch. They gave me enough embodied knowledge to recognise embodied knowledge when I see it.

Maybe that’s what this archive does. Not preserve knowledge in the sense of keeping it unchanged, but make it visible in a way that invites practice. The grandmothers’ hands show us what’s possible. What we do with that—whether we try it, fail at it, gradually develop our own version—is up to us. The videos don’t teach the way instruction teaches. They show the way presence shows. And showing, it turns out, is enough to start something moving from hands to hands, even across vast distances, even across time.

Bennison is 66 now. She says she can probably keep filming for another ten years. She wants to expand—to film Greek yiayiades, Italian grandmothers in the diaspora in America and Australia and Canada. She talks about setting up a foundation. The project keeps growing because people keep watching. More than a million of them. They come for the pasta, Bennison says, but they stay for the grannies. They stay because there’s something calming about watching competent hands at work, something reassuring about the knowledge that people still make things slowly, carefully, with attention.

But perhaps they also stay because they’re learning something that can’t be put into words. Not recipes or techniques—those are available everywhere—but something about what hands know, about what practice accumulates, about the kind of knowledge that lives in bodies and resists every attempt to extract it into language. They’re learning, as I’ve been learning, to see the difference between description and doing, between knowing about and knowing how, between having instructions and having feel.

The grandmothers’ orecchiette still look better than mine. They probably always will. But my hands know something now they didn’t know before I watched them. Something small, incomplete, entirely my own. That’s what travels: not their knowledge, but the possibility of developing knowledge. Not their habitus, but an invitation to build my own. The videos don’t preserve embodied knowledge so much as propagate it, sending it out into the world where it transforms in each set of hands that takes it up.

The knowledge in the hands, it turns out, wants to move.

When is it safe to emerge?

Chapter 3 of The Light Eaters: Seeds have “decision-making centers”—clusters of cells that communicate with each other about temperature fluctuations in the soil. They integrate information from multiple cells, weighing antagonistic hormones (one promoting dormancy, one promoting germination), to collectively decide when to emerge. The decision is risky: emerge too early, you freeze. Emerge too late, you miss the growing season. The cells can’t see above ground. They only have temperature data, and it’s fluctuating. They have to decide anyway.

Here’s what I want you to think about (not write—think, discuss with someone, sit with it):

Imagine a community that’s trying to decide whether it’s safe to emerge—to become visible, to claim space, to make demands. Like the seed, they can’t see the whole picture. They only have partial data. The environment is fluctuating. Some signals say “it’s safe now.” Other signals say “wait, not yet.”

Questions to sit with:

  1. The seed makes better decisions by having MULTIPLE cells weigh in, using antagonistic information. What would it mean for a political community to make decisions this way—integrating opposing signals rather than trying to reach consensus that one signal is correct?
  2. The seed’s decision is made by cells that have no awareness of “above ground.” What decisions get made by people who have no direct experience of what they’re deciding about? What information do they use instead? Is temperature data enough?
  3. If the seed emerges at the wrong time, it dies. If it never emerges, it also dies (eventually). How do communities weigh this impossible choice? What does “wrong time” mean when you can’t see what’s coming?
  4. Plants can’t move after they put down roots. The decision about when to emerge is ALSO the decision about where you’ll be permanently. What if you had to decide not just “is it safe?” but “is this where I want to be forever?” without being able to see what’s above the soil?
  5. Schlanger notes this decision-making structure is analougous to the human brain—antagonistic signals improving decisions in fluctuating conditions. But the seed has no brain, no centralised consciousness. What if political intelligence doesn’t require centralised leadership? What if collective decisions could be made through distributed signals, not through hierarchies?

The thought:

We study decision-making in political contexts as if it’s about rational actors with full information making conscious choices. But what if emergence—political visibility, claiming rights, making demands—works more like seed germination? Distributed information. Antagonistic signals. Fluctuating conditions. No way to see the whole picture. And the decision is irreversible.

What to bring to next session:

Your thinking. Not written—just be ready to discuss: What political or social or cultural or relational situation are you thinking about when you read this? (Don’t name it if you don’t want to.) What changes if we think about it as emergence rather than strategy? What does the seed’s decision-making tell us about collective political intelligence?

What if they already knew?

You’re reading about plant communication now. Scientists “discovering” that plants send chemical signals through the air. That they warn each other about danger. That they share resources through underground fungal networks.

Here’s what Schlanger mentions briefly but doesn’t dwell on: traditional farmers have known this for centuries.

Intercropping. Companion planting. Don’t plant tomatoes near black walnut trees. Plant marigolds to protect your vegetables. Beans give nitrogen to the soil that corn needs. Everyone’s grandmother knew this. Indigenous peoples knew it. Ottoman agricultural manuals described it. Medieval Islamic botanists documented it.

But “Western” science “discovered” it in the 1980s. With chemicals. With lab equipment. With peer review.

So here’s my question: What’s the difference between knowing and discovering?

Traditional farmers couldn’t explain the chemistry. They didn’t have mass spectrometers to detect volatile organic compounds. They just knew: plant these together, they help each other. Plant these apart, they hurt each other.

Was that knowledge? Or just “folklore”? What’s the difference anyway?

Because if it was knowledge—real knowledge—then what does that say about the past 200 years of “Western” botany that ignored it?

Your task this week:

Find one thing in the book where scientists “discovered” something about plants. Then ask: Who already knew this?

Not in Europe. In the Middle East. In Indigenous communities. In agricultural traditions. In the knowledge systems you study.

Then ask harder: Why did it have to be “discovered” by “Western” science to count as true?

What does this tell you about:

  • Who gets to be a knowledge-maker vs. a folklore-holder?
  • What counts as evidence vs. what counts as superstition?
  • Why “discovering” (with instruments) is legitimate but “knowing” (from experience) isn’t?

This isn’t about romanticising traditional knowledge. It’s about asking: what knowledge exists right now, in the communities you study, that academics are ignoring because it doesn’t come in the right form?

What are we planning to “discover” in 2050 that someone’s grandmother knows today?

Keep reading. But read suspiciously.

See you in January.

When Frameworks Fail

November 19, 2025 | 10:15-12:45

This session of Beyond Human Language focused on a fundamental question: what happens when the frameworks we use to understand the world prove inadequate to what’s actually there? Using Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters as a lens, we explored how knowledge gets made, who decides what counts, and what we do when we encounter something our training can’t explain.


Opening: The 2012 Problem

We began with a passage from the book:

“In 2012, a group of scientists gathered at the University of Cambridge to formally confer consciousness on all mammals, birds, and ‘many other creatures, including octopuses.’ Nonhuman animals had all the physical markers of conscious states, and clearly acted with a sense of intention.”

The provocation: The internet is older than scientific consensus on animal consciousness.

What emerged in discussion:

We were struck by several things:

  • Scientists had been studying these animals for decades but couldn’t SAY they were conscious until 2012
  • The animals didn’t need the declaration—humans did
  • The declaration was permission: permission to see what was always there
  • Language matters: before 2012, scientists used terms like “behavioral flexibility” instead of “consciousness”

Key questions that surfaced:

  • What took so long? (Answer: not evidence—frameworks, careers, institutional conservatism)
  • Who was this declaration for? (Answer: scientists themselves, who needed permission to say what they’d been seeing)
  • Does recognition change reality? (Answer: not for animals, but it changes everything for how humans relate to them)

The connection to Middle East studies: We identified parallel moments where something was obvious but couldn’t be said until frameworks changed—Orientalism, Palestinian history, women’s agency in Islamic contexts.


Small Group Discussions: Three Problems

Students divided into two out of three groups, each working with a different passage from the book.

Group 1: The Parenthesis Problem

Passage: Ibn al-Nafis (Arab physician, Damascus, 13th century) accurately described pulmonary circulation 300 years before William Harvey. Harvey is in every textbook. Ibn al-Nafis is in a parenthesis.

What they discussed:

  • Why “first European” is a meaningful category (Answer: it’s not—it’s a linguistic trick to avoid saying “second”)
  • How colonial power determined whose knowledge counted as universal
  • Whether the pattern is fixable or structural
  • Examples from their own fields: Ibn Khaldun as “precursor” not “founder” of sociology; Islamic Golden Age as “preservers” not “innovators”

The provocation: What would your field look like if non-European knowledge wasn’t in parentheses?

Group 2: The Definition Trap

Passage: Scientists arguing against plant intelligence were using human-centric definitions of intelligence to prove plants aren’t intelligent—circular reasoning.

What could have been discussed:

  • How definitions exclude by design
  • Examples: “literature” excluding oral traditions; “history” requiring written records; “philosophy” starting with Greeks
  • Who benefits from narrow definitions (Answer: those who already fit them)
  • The political stakes of definitional battles (“terrorism” vs “resistance”)

The provocation: What if “intelligence” was defined by plants? What would count?

Group 3: The Decision Problem

Passage: Seeds have a “decision-making center” that integrates information and decides when to emerge. McClintock called it “the knowledge the cell has of itself.”

What they discussed:

  • Whether “decision” is metaphor or description
  • What we’d have to accept if it’s not metaphor (that decision-making doesn’t require brains)
  • What else might “decide” (rivers, immune systems, algorithms, ecosystems)
  • Whether there’s a politics to who/what we grant decision-making capacity

The provocation: What if decision-making is everywhere, and consciousness is just the version we recognize?

Cross-group connections:

  • The definitions (Group 2) are made by people whose knowledge already counts (Group 1)
  • If we can’t grant decision-making to seeds (Group 3), how do we grant it to non-Western knowledge systems?

Pair Work: Your Field’s Blind Spots

Students paired with someone from a different discipline to discuss:

  1. What’s one thing your field systematically cannot see—not because it’s hidden, but because of how the field is structured?
  2. What would have to change for your field to see it?
  3. Is there a version of the Ibn al-Nafis problem in your field—knowledge that exists elsewhere but isn’t recognized?

What emerged:

  • Fields are structured to miss what doesn’t fit their methods
  • Knowledge in the “wrong” language becomes invisible
  • Academic credentialing determines what counts as knowledge
  • The most interesting insights often come from people without PhDs

Closing: The Book and What’s Next

The assignment:

Read The Light Eaters before January 27. But don’t read it as a book about plants. Read it asking:

  • Where do I see this pattern in my own field?
  • What am I trained not to see?
  • Whose knowledge am I ignoring without realizing it?

The question for next session: What in this book made you most uncomfortable?

Not what you learned. Not what interested you. What disturbed an assumption. What made you question something you thought you knew.


Key Takeaways

  1. Recognition is political: Scientific “truth” depends on who has permission to say what. The 2012 animal consciousness declaration didn’t change reality—it changed permission.
  2. Frameworks filter reality: We don’t see everything that’s there. We see what our frameworks allow us to see. The rest is invisible—not absent, just unnameable.
  3. Definitions are power: Who gets to define “intelligence,” “knowledge,” “consciousness,” “decision-making” determines what counts as real and what gets excluded.
  4. The parenthesis problem is everywhere: Whose knowledge ends up in the main text and whose ends up in footnotes reveals the structure of power in knowledge production.
  5. You’ve already seen it: The thing you can’t name in your research—the pattern you noticed but couldn’t prove, the insight that didn’t fit—might be the most important thing. The question is whether you’ll find language for it or let your framework filter it out.
  6. This is happening now: In 2050, students will read about our moment and wonder why we couldn’t see what was obvious. The question is: what is it? And do we have the courage to name it?