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Katie King – In Knots:
transdisciplinary khipu
Statement
of Research and Study Plans
For
2013 Folger Institute: The Orality-Literacy Heuristic (12 – 14 June), Fox &
McDowell
They can be arranged like
elegant circular maps or spread out as a curtain of knotted strings or stored
like the head of a mop. The word “khipu” means knot in Quechua, a language of
the Central Andes of South America, and khipu are Andean devices made of fiber
(once) used for managing complex information. No longer just not able to make
the cut for so-called “true” writing, today khipu
have become both things to think about
and things to think with,
literalizing new materialities of a workaround concept we might still want to
call writing or perhaps better rewriting,
in the wake of rethinking so-called representationalism. (Quilter and Urton, 2002; Alaimo and Hekman, 2008)
Khipu, best known today in
their Inka and some colonial versions (from 1400 to as late as 1824), are
objects with stories to tell us, and not just about one orality-literacy
heuristic, but about several. (Salomon, 2004:11-12)
The term heuristic puts practice-based trial and error learning at the center
of discussion here, and while orality-literacy relationships have been writ
large in theory, in historical and cross cultural specifics they are just plain
more complicated than that, full of local materialities that matter. But having
to choose just one, either the global-theoretical or a single local time,
place, object, is just too simple. Orality-literacy names a bunch of “things”
in interaction with themselves. (Latour, 1993
[1991]) Simultaneously processes, projects, and products,
orality-literacy things range among:
actual objects with stories, particular relationships constructed for
particular uses and purposes, large meta- or master-narratives that assemble
transdisciplinary “knowledge worlds” across incommensurabilities in bits and
pieces, claims about cognition and culture, ways to defamiliarize the
contemporary, and ecologies of media in pastpresents, where trying to keep
pasts and presents from endlessly mixing somehow, turns out to be labor well lost.
Participating in the Fox &
McDowell faculty seminar would allow me to share materials about khipu from the
talks and writing I have been doing recently, and to get a sense of
transdisciplinary audiences for my next book proposal and project which addresses
some of these issues. How to communicate these issues in the very midst of
their transformation and to various scholarly communities of practice is both
exciting and daunting!
Khipu are transdisciplinary
things. They exist as and among these processes, projects, and products. They
string together and knot and unknot a range of large issues brought into
existence as orality-literacy heuristics. One historian of khipu talks about
“semiotic heterogeneity” – such that because they are not representations of
speech,
both standardization and
idiosyncrasy co-existed among khipu literacies. In other words, they varied in
their types of convention and degree of standardization depending on which
institutionalized relationships they brought into being. (Brokaw, 2010:262) Does something we might want
to call writing require its opposite to be orality or speech in language? How
khipu possibly functioned to coordinate complex systems, in another meaning of
what we might want to call writing, helps us not only to understand past
orality-literacy heuristics, but may well give us clues about what sorts of
coordination artifacts we find ourselves creating and needing today. Khipu make
apparent what those working out among Andean “writings without words” extensively
connect across time and technologies: forms in which processing information
does not have to jump a gap created by ideas about language. (Boone and Mignolo, 1994; Salomon, 2001)
Knotting and unknotting khipu
“included” collectives and individuals into their “webs” of highly complex and
multiply embedded Andean systems of social organization enfolding a range of
environments: • both hierarchical but also contingently collective among
possible groupings; with • different kinds of interactivities possible
with each range of connection in attention, as well as • altered in cycles
social, ritual, and environmental that do not recur in any simple way; and
• always imperfectly “known,” in any time period, to any set of people,
both cooperative but also complexly idiosyncratic. Khipu in this context have
been called “reciprocity made visible” (Salomon,
2004:279), but more than just vision is involved in such haptic objects
as they “allow one to use different parts of the sensorium for grasping the
different variables.” (281) In pairs and used differently at different moments
of social and ritual purpose, in some parts of “their use cycle” (278) khipu
are simulation devices and at other
parts agents in performance of duties and
entitlements. Can all this properly be called writing? Why might we want
to, for then and for now? (Quilter, 2002;
Harrison, 2002)
It is incredibly exciting to
get to the point in Early Modern Studies where we can talk explicitly about why
orality-literacy binaries just don’t work! Yet how we got to these modernisms
also matters: how and why the oral was
invented, and for what sorts of cultural work when. These are questions and
issues that have also preoccupied me over three decades, and my next book
project that addresses them, “Speaking with Things,” draws upon this approach
that has come to be called by some “thing theory” or “object oriented
ontologies.” (Harman, 2009) Khipu as
things thread through the whole book, knotting and unknotting assumptions built
into the great divide infrastructure of orality-literacy. But stories about
particular heuristics contributing to this transdisciplinary infrastructure are
part of the book too. (Although in earlier drafts the working subtitle was “an
introduction to writing technologies,” it seems to me now that it ought to be
instead “an introduction to rewriting
technologies,” in play with the computer rewriting systems that pair objects
with instructions for their transformation.)
One chapter already drafted for
my book tells the story of how the so-called “oral formula” is created in the
1930s in what is now Bosnia-Hercegovina as a mix of “things”: people as well as
objects, processes as well as infrastructures, and among complex systems. These
work together in late modernisms (ironically) to separate carefully “nature”
from “culture” and “the oral” from “the written.” Classicist Milman Parry, his
student, fieldwork assistant and collaborator Albert B. Lord, and their network
of singers and other native informants and collectors, transcribers, and support
staff work hard to ensure the purity of oral-formula. How their recordings were
made so as to count as “not writing” – removing all influences of writing and
reading in their “invasions” – involved not only choosing carefully who to
record in that recently Post-Ottoman region, but also toggling back and forth
in a uniquely local invention between twelve inch aluminum discs, each holding
about four minutes of sound. Over 3500 of these discs, altogether weighing more
than half a ton, were used to record off the power of an automobile battery the
oral-formula in its “natural” setting. The invisibility of the devices and
people in the work of modernist purification allows the data collected to
become the very essence of “epic,” transferred back through time to Classical
Greece, in The Singer of Tales. (Lord et al., 2000)
My last book described shifts
in media ecologies over the 1990s and after. (King,
2011) How in this next one to position some of the now classic issues in
orality-literacy among feminist new materialisms and object-oriented
ontologies, is a piece of the work necessary for this “Speaking with Things”
manuscript, and transdisciplinary khipu are helping me and others to do some of
this repositioning. I would love to share what I have been working on with
others in the Folger Institute faculty seminar on the Orality-Literacy
Heuristic, with an eye to its contributions to and implications for research in
the early modern humanities.
Alaimo
S and Hekman SJ. (2008) Material
feminisms, Bloomington: Indiana.
Boone
EH and Mignolo W. (1994) Writing without
words: alternative literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Durham: Duke.
Brokaw
G. (2010) A history of the khipu, New
York: Cambridge.
Harman
G. (2009) Prince of networks: Bruno
Latour and metaphysics, Melbourne: re.press.
Harrison
R. (2002) Perez Bocanegra's ritual formulario: khipu knots and confession. In:
Urton G and Quilter J (eds) Narrative
threads: accounting and recounting in Andean Khipu. Austin: Texas, 266-290.
King K.
(2011) Networked reenactments: Stories
transdisciplinary knowledges tell, Durham: Duke.
Latour
B. (1993 [1991]) We have never been
modern, Cambridge: Harvard.
Lord
AB, Mitchell SA and Nagy G. (2000) The
singer of tales. Cambridge: Harvard.
Quilter
J. (2002) Yncap Cimin Quipococ's Knots. In: Quilter J and Urton G (eds) Narrative threads: accounting and recounting
in Andean Khipu. Austin: Texas, 197-222.
Quilter
J and Urton G. (2002) Narrative threads:
accounting and recounting in Andean Khipu. Austin: Texas.
Salomon
F. (2001) How an Andean "Writing Without Words" Works. Current Anthropology 42: 1-27.
Salomon
F. (2004) The cord keepers: khipus and
cultural life in a Peruvian village, Durham: Duke.
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KK sites for reference:
Professional website: http://katiekin.weebly.com/
Pinterest talksites: http://pinterest.com/katkingumd/talksites/
Design affections: http://affectdesign.blogspot.com/
Cafe break: http://transkhipu.blogspot.com/
Transcontextual: http://femcontext.blogspot.com/
Media things: http://thingmedia.blogspot.com/
Naturalcultural: http://sfonline.barnard.edu/feminist-media-theory/a-naturalcultural-collection-of-affections-transdisciplinary-stories-of-transmedia-ecologies-learning/
Writing Technologies: http://www.ntu.ac.uk/writing_technologies/Current_journal/King/index.html
Online Intro to Writing Techs: http://writtechintro.blogspot.com/
Demo & Experiments: http://demoexper.blogspot.com/
Feminist Subjects: 2 Studies: http://fwtfemsub.blogspot.com/
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http://katiekin.weebly.com/
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