Amniotechnics?
I first heard the term while binge-listening to Sophie Lewis’ books on family abolition and surrogacy this past summer (the summer of 2023).
To quote Sophie Lewis, the creator of amniotechnics, “[it] is the art of holding and caring even while being ripped into, at the same time as being held.” (New Inquiry) Amniotechnics refers to amniotic fluid and the dangerous labor of birthing human life. It also refers to all liquids, rivers, oceans, precariously divided or broached by physical and political boundaries and to the care and danger involved in all these relationships.
Speculative thought expands the boundaries of rational thought and creates space for new forms of public action. Amniotechnics is a speculative theory. What actions do amniotechnics liberate?
Vessel Metaphysics
For years, I have considered a speculative theory of containers: skeuostechnics. This is from the Greek word for vessel, σκεῦος. Vessels are one of the the first tools; pottery is one of the first technics (i.e., crafts).
20,000-year-old jar from China
But lately, I feel exhausted by the binary of skeuostechnics. A container has to hold something; a container is to be filled. There is an archetypal imagery of polarity at work here that is no longer relevant. Traditionally, the feminine relates to containing, and the masculine relates to filling: yin/yang, passive/active.
Perhaps an anmnotechnic would fluidly avoid these polarities.
Sensitive Chaos
Theodor Schwenk, a 20th-century scientist, speculated that organisms grow around liquid flows. In a river where water moves in a particular way, differentiated by temperature perhaps, physical bodies are just boundaries around these water flows.
Climate Catastrophe
Last Friday, New York City received the equivalent of 3 months of rainfall in 1 day. Many parts of the city flooded; transportation was severely disrupted. I could not leave Brooklyn and return to my home in upstate New York.
This is the water we must care for, as it is polluted, warmed, rising, and ripping through barriers and arteries of our society’s infrastructure. Often, we care for things that hurt us.
Liminal
Water, in dreams, refers to the unconscious. Our myths and legends about floods and sea monsters express a fear of something irrational and uncontrollable that threatens to overwhelm our ego, which is the core of our individuality. In many philosophies, we strive for ego death, to understand that the boundaries of our ego are only an illusion. The flood is the eternal Self - The Real.
Technics
Instead of a vessel metaphysics about boundaries and edges, perhaps we want tools and techniques to care for liquid.
This is my favorite quote from Sophie Lewis’ New Inquiry Article:
“Midwives to the front! By midwives I mean all those comradely interveners in the more slippery moments of social reproduction: crossing borders; blockading lake-threatening pipelines; miscarrying”
I am preparing to teach Jacque Ellul’s The Technological Society, and we live in a technological society. The way to change a technological society is not to invent but to intervene.
Vanaheimr
I am in the shower. I reach out to do something and I accidentally touch a piece of wood peeling off the wall. I pull it out. “Oh that's not too bad,” I think. A wooden veener maybe, not real wood. But, there is still a piece stuck. And, when I pull that one out, it hurts! Blood gushes out of the wound. This is worse than I thought.