Chun-Mei Chuang (Professor of Sociology, Soochow University, Taiwan)
picture by Lisa Ann Yount
Copyright CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0)
Introduction
We are delighted to feature an exclusive contribution by Professor Chun-Mei Chuang, a renowned scholar in Sociology from Soochow University, Taipei. With her understanding of feminist theories, postcolonial discourse, ecology, and animal studies, Professor Chuang’s work has significantly contributed to the field. In this engaging piece, she shares her experiences and reflections on teaching sociology in Taiwan, providing valuable insights into her unique approach and the sociological landscape in Taiwan.
Mark G. Murphy
Transversal Synchronicity
Continuously pushing against the boundaries, reorganizing heterogeneous complexes in fragmentation is an essential practice for island survival.
Taiwan harbours various island groups, successive colonial histories, and a critical geopolitical position between several major powers, all of which have contributed to unique modes of archipelagic thinking that are hybrid and innovative. As such, I see my academic and pedagogical work charting a journey between the islands in the visible and invisible worlds. Just as an organism develops a particular resonance with its habitat, milieu, and planet, the thinker creates a synchronicity with her situation and island.
Writing has been a crucial pathway of artificial selection for the colonized, except that the conventional boundaries between the natural and the artificial have become increasingly problematic, as does the distinction between the colonizer and the colonized, especially in the age of molecular technoscience. To translate is to transgress, and to transgress is to transform. As a postcolonial archipelagic thinker, one cannot afford not to transmute anything that passes through her, to renew herself in historically specific transversal synchronicity with the world.
In the Image of Gaia
Trained as a sociologist, I have always been prone to transdisciplinary studies. Sociology as a discipline relied on a particular set of European problematics and the expansion of a world (re)made in the capitalist’s image, which Karl Marx and Frederick Engels already perfectly captured. Such is the necessary background for teaching sociological theories in Taiwan and anywhere else.
Knowledges out of context are not unlike lifeforms outside their biosphere without their breathable Gaia. I use knowledges in plural following Donna Haraway’s theory of “situated knowledges,” which is a kernel to a feminist critique of mainstream science. Transdisciplinary networks of theory and practice constantly transgress visible limits and reconstitute invisible boundaries, as Gaia encompasses infinite feedback loops connecting all kinds of planetary life at all scales.
According to Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, the emergence of life constantly modifies its own conditions. Gaia is not a solid entity but a planetary-scale metabolism of molecular flows traversing individual boundaries, creating trans-species habitability. The relationship between life, technology, and thought is mechanical; they co-occur at the tiniest scales. The politics of technology is not only about how humanity functions but also about the relationship between life and power. Technology as life’s strategy to sustain and study life is to bring forth sheltered truths, especially molecular dynamics, undetectable by human sense organs and whitewashed by cultural values.
Interactions and cross-references between natural sciences and social humanities are at the core of my transdisciplinary teaching and research through practice. In response to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “cross-hatching of species history and the history of capital,” I suggest the scribbling technique in art therapy using flowing lines to trace multi-dimensional movement is a more flexible metaphor for figuring out the nonlinear historical understanding of our times.
We can draw out what is yet to come by creative molecular scribbling, imagining a more nuanced and multiscale clustering of connections, and anticipating tacit orientations. Here, the significance of “postcolonial” has already departed from the anthropocentric framework in the quagmire of transvaluation of all boundaries and is gradually embracing all the living agents on the planet and their intersecting habitats and cultures.
It is paramount to stress that a non-binary conception of postcolonial hybridity does not imply that we abandon the task of critiquing colonial injustices. It simply means that we need to engage intricate patterns of evolution, not just through hybridization and synthesis, but also through ecological entanglements and cultural alliances, interrupting with each other’s waves of action, and the consequential diffraction patterns, i.e., patterns of differences arising from cross-referencing, mutual interference, and inter-folding, and the corresponding dynamic structural clusters. Please see Karen Barad’s work to elucidate the concept of diffraction patterns.
With the molecular turn in mind, it is critical to articulate planetary thinking to the myriad imperceptible actors in Gaia and investigate the linkages and pathways of co-action. This will require further transdisciplinary theoretical work.
The relationship between technology and life is intimate and involves a historicized understanding of the ecological entanglement among all lifeforms. As the planetary image of our biosphere, Gaia transversally cuts across the living and nonliving elements linking the diverse ways of existence, precisely a mode of cyborg evolution.
Technology and life are entangled in molecular composition’s powerful yet invisible threads. For example, the spatiotemporal regulation of cells and their molecular mechanisms, metabolic pathways, and the strategy of photosynthesis that turned Earth into a green planet, and human evolutionary learning from other natural and organic forces, all of which are life’s technology, the most fundamental power struggle, and the planetary “diffractive mattering” of innovated and innovating ways of existence.[i] More than humans, we are diffractively connected to one another and constantly co-evolve as planetary life on Earth. The traditional humanist notion of society needs a trans-species planetary turn.
Gaia as the Planetary Societal
One might wonder why a sociologist wants to discuss the Gaia theory rather than a more specific social life. Nowadays, whether local or global, social life can no longer avoid the Anthropocene predicament on a planetary scale. An evident symbiotic turn occurs in contemporary biology and ecology, as well as in related cultural theories, in response to the planetary emergency resulting from human technological advancement and socio-economic exploitation. The onset of the symbiotic turn is closely related to the molecular turn in modern science, with the former being the latter’s political manifestation.
We have long been compelled to witness and explore the molecular entanglements of our shared planetary habitat. The symbiotic evolution has created an increasingly intricate diagram of life. The pathways of symbiosis are nonlinear and ecologically intertwined, involving differences in relation at all scales. This brings us to the microscale message replicators gathered in their ongoing evolutionary dynamics into biological individuals, ecological systems, and planetary circulations, invoking the politics of cosmic molecules. Indeed, not only must our planets be part of extensive galaxies and energy systems, but the primary nitrogenous bases of the DNA and RNA, building blocks of life on Earth, can be found in certain meteorites.
Recent gene sequencing techniques and genomes have taught us even more about the inseparable bonds of all organisms. At the cellular level, the most fundamental metabolic unit of life, sufficient capacity must and did evolve to control the production of differences in replication. Life can continue in its unique form and maintain its identity by becoming differentiated due to the evolution of crucial mutations capable of controlling mutations, i.e., supermutation. Mutagenesis as a force of innovation is, therefore, at the same time, proofreading all kinds of innovation. The relationship between difference and identity is not binary, far from being dialectical, but a nonlinear evolutionary process among considerable agents.
The humanistic fallacy of a linear conception of history can mislead us to believe that these evolutions are merely ancient and not so relevant to creatures such as ourselves that have detached from nature into brilliant civilizations. However, not only do we live in symbiosis with countless microorganisms and lifeforms at every scale, but the politics of evolution at the microscopic scale are still dynamically embedded in our physical/affective structure.
The organization of life, the assemblages of senses, the transformation of matter, and the becoming of forms interact at various levels, drawing a complicated picture of life, technology, power, and thought. The evolution of life is the development of technologies in a trans-species sense: ongoing observation, measurement, registration, memory, recognition, action, anticipation, mutate, and modification.
In the pressing Anthropocene crisis, the symbiotic Gaia can be understood as the planetary societal that functions as the vital condition on which any notion of human society depends. What we need to develop is no less than a remarkable supermutation that can proofread the Anthropocene.
Molecular Archipelagic Thinking
The transdisciplinary planetary memory is consolidated through endless molecular diffractive translation. We live in an age of translation in many senses, globally and planetarily. Life translates to one another diffractively by colliding, interfering, merging, differentiating, and creating new pathways and strategies. We are often lost in translation between different human languages and also between different but connected ways of planetary life.
Given that we are no longer exclusively human, we face the necessity of trans-species translation for survival and more. After centuries of civilizing processes detaching humanity from nature and creating the delusional gap between human society and the planetary societal, it is time to rejoin the Gaian politics of molecular differences in relation.
Archipelagoes are differences in connection through water movement involving innumerable agents, lifeforms, and molecular assemblages. The island of Taiwan and its fellow archipelagos constitute a geologically active and politically volatile region. Nothing is tranquil about Taiwan’s stunning mountainscape and historical positioning, which also diffractively mirrors its cultural hybridity.
In the Gaian feedback loop of life, technology, potentiality, and thought, molecular archipelagic thinking is in transversal synchronicity with the geobiochemical dynamics embedded in and enlivened through the trans-species diffraction patterns on the island, physically and metaphorically. For further work on trans-species diffraction, please see here.
Chun-Mei Chuang is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. Her research interests include feminist theories, postcolonial discourse, ecology and animal studies.
[i] For diffractive mattering, see Chun-Mei Chuang, 記憶與時間：免疫的繞射政治 “Memory and Time: Diffractive Politics of Immunity,” presented at the 2022 年第四十四屆全國比較文學會議：速度災難 The 44th CLAROC National Convention: Speed Shambles. 15 June 2022.
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