The Project Theory Probe Journal

• You are late. Your footsteps are hurrying from the office through an ocean of people flooding on the street to get to an appointed restaurant. In this complex ebb and flow, thicker and thinner, faster and slower, of bodies, movements, and changing landscapes, your perception focuses on the temporary openings ahead, where one to another leads you closer to the restaurant, not narrowing down onto any thing in particular. That opening is not a hole. Rather, it is an expression of how "everything in the field (your environment), moving and still, integrally relates at that instant" (M&M, 83), these expressions are called a field effect.

  In this mode of moving and perceiving, everything is attended in the same way—to move forward, you need to be at one with the environment and commit to unhierarchy. This is the mode of environmental awareness, a usually peripheral mode of perception, which now gets to come forward. This experience is textured with movements, complexly patterned with change and transition, teemingly differentiated, interweaved.

• Once you walk inside the appointed restaurant, you recognize your family members in the far corner. Their distinct faces, voices, forms, gestures, habits pop out. Greeting each of them discretely, your perception returns to the usual mode of subtractive awareness. You sit next to your partner (whom you feel the most comfortable with in comparison to the rest of the group), and your perception is now collaborating with hierarchical thoughts and things, no longer in the realm of unthinking, non-hierarchical movements.

Introducing: Environmental awareness & Subtractive awareness

These two modes of perception—environmental versus subtractive—are polarities within a spectrum. The distinction is not deployed as a dichotomy, but notions that make visible differing modes of being while honoring their fluidity. Each mode of perception on the spectrum is a differing mode of existence—all inherently valid.

The continuum of awareness, proposed by Manning and Massumi in Coming Alive.

These two polarities remind me of the Law of Indeterminacy in quantum field theory, where an atom can be known either in its position OR its movement, but not both position AND movement at the same time. The apparatuses that measure the atom’s position or movement are mutually exclusive.

When it comes to perception, we can be in the mode of environmental awareness, where we are at one with all things around us—forming a dance of attentiveness that transcends the subject-and-object, active-and-passive binaries. Alternatively, we can be in the mode of subtractive awareness, where the subject of observation comes to the front with affordances, positions, and boundaries. This latter mode of discernment allows effective future-planning, goal achievement, boundary-drawing, and scalable projects.

Inspired by Circuit Lab's Approach to Insight, which then I proposed in light of intimacy and now perception.

The two ends of the spectrum are available to everybody. There are no exclusive zones that is reserved for a specific "brain-type". It is more a matter of situation, preference, tendencies, agitations—not predetermined or fixed traits. Anyone can swing seamlessly between environmental and subtractive, back-and-fro, but the pace and rhythm to which they do so is conditional and individuated.

I do think, though, it is sad that in the "neurotypical" world of today, we willfully undermine the mode of environmental awareness as immature, illogical, fantastical, or even unreal. We can now observe the destructive effects of collectively abandoning a mode of becoming and worlding that which allows us to feel entangled, mesmerized with the larger universe.

But you were thinking, with your movement. Your every movement was a performed analysis of the field’s composition from the angle of its affordance for getting-ahead. Entering the dance of attention, your perceiving converged with your moving activity, and your activity was your thinking. You entered a mode of environmental awareness in which to perceive is to enact thought, and thought is directly relational. This actively relational thinking is also an expression of the field, but in a different mode than story-telling, poetic or not, with no immediate need for language, satisfying itself at a level with the body’s movements: integrally embodied expression. (Manning and Massumi, 2013)

Within this mode of perception is the angle to which we understand the Diffractive Mode of Intimacy:

Ontology in environmental awareness

Autistic people are frequently in the mode of environmental awareness, where life unfolds moment to moment without a subtractive hierarchy that is usually helpful for discernment and goal achievement. Yet many patterns attributed to "autism" also appear in widely celebrated thinkers—from Albert Einstein, Niklas Luhmann, to Virginia Woolf, and Shakyamuni Buddha—figures who are often described as having attained an "enlightened" mode of perception, a rather extraordinary sensitivity.

Contrary to previous misconceptions that assume autists lack empathy or deny relations, recent studies show a heightened, non-hierarchical capacity for relation. Environmental awareness allows humans to live within a relational mode that transcends normative topography—moving toward terrains of the more-than-human, where the whole world interweaves in a non-hierarchical network of livinghood.

"There was very little difference in meaning between the children next to the lake that I was playing with and the turtle sitting on the log. It seems that when most people think of something being alive they really mean, human."
(Daina Krumins, quoted in Miller, Women From Another Planet, p. 23–89)

"I hear the rocks and the trees."
(MM, quoted in Miller, Women from Another Planet, p. 54)

Diffracting across disciplines, I find similar patterns in affect theory, postcolonial studies, actor-network theory, process-relational philosophy, agential realism, quantum physics, ethnography, and so on. I propose that these schools of thought are all perceiving life through environmental awareness, the so-called "autistic POV".

For example, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that an organism is a community of heterogeneous lifeforms coexisting symbiotically—indeterminate, moving as one without a hierarchy. This contrasts with popular evolutionary theories that view species through function and form (i.e., subtractive perception), where individuals compete to be the fittest. They write, "modes of individuation precede the subject or the organism," where becoming involves neither forms nor subjects. "It is the domain of symbiosis that brings into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms." In contrast to evolution, they call this form of change between heterogeneous terms involution. (A Thousand Plateaus)

Returning to the question of intimacy: just as moving through an ocean of people, or being immersed in a dance, a project, an intimate moment, we become without a self, or non-self-consciousness. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously called this "flow." It is a state of environmental awareness.

When we are in environmental awareness, we see that everything is changing from one moment to another without a permanent position. There is no fixed goal like a marathon; instead, it is a playful, indeterminate swim around a calm lake. The whole world looks different and feels different in such an ontology. The boundary between "I" and "we," "self" and "environment" dissolves, for entanglement is lived. And in that moment, we are experiencing intimacy.

Postscript: A contaminated reality

…staying alive—for every species—requires livable contamination. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. (Anna Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 28)

Encounter is the site of every collaboration, thus, diversity. In an encounter, contamination is inevitable. We cannot remain the "pure self" that we had been before the encounter. There is no origin of purity to begin with. Every moment is contaminated by countless nodes of relations, which makes being alive possible. The mode of environmental awareness makes contamination undeniable and inescapable from our lived experience.

Tsing contrasted, "Self-contained individuals [though] are not transformed by encounter. Maximizing interests, they use encounters—but remain unchanged in them. Noticing is unnecessary to track these unchanging individuals. A ‘standard’ individual can stand in for all as a unit of analysis. It becomes possible to organize knowledge through logic alone."

If the dominant language of our globalizing world is capitalism and the construction of capitalism is only possible through a language from subtractive awareness (standardization, unchanging, controllable…), then the promotion for environmental awareness opens up alternative possibilities of life and growth.

Making A Fuss creates a language for engagement within a system rooted in fear, control, and a rejection of engagement. Daring To Archive is a material-discursive practice that inscribes an ongoing mark of fussing into the world-scape. These archives may take the form of informal gatherings, gossip, storytelling, fiction-making, and more. Fussing and archiving expand existing realities, contaminate them, challenge and complicate them. Contamination makes diversity, which makes staying alive—for every species—possible. Yet when we speak of life, we must also know of the dead. In this metaconversation, I explain Knowing the Werewolf, the third zine in the series, and why it is vital to understanding love through knowing the dead effectively.

A fertile land for abuse and lies

The construction of the contemporary nuclear family is fertile soil for abuse. bell hooks writes in All About Love, "In our culture the private family dwelling is the one institutionalized sphere of power that can easily be autocratic and fascistic."

Many children are raised in homes where some degree of care is given, but love may not be present. Behind closed doors, millions of children are verbally and physically abused every day—environments where neglect, chaos, and coercion reign…

Through my formal training and lived encounters across Nepal, Japan, Italy, Denmark, and the US, I have come to resonate with hooks’ claim: "Adults across lines of class, race, and gender indict the family." Many of us reading this had been smacked, grabbed, beaten, lied to, coerced, violated, blamed, shamed, gaslit, ignored, or threatened with love withdrawal…

Yet, across cultures, we rarely intervene to question or challenge how our peers raise their children. hooks concludes that we are victims of intimate terrorism… In the pandemic of lovelessness, we cannot tell love from abuse.

Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively. Yet parents do this all the time in our culture. Children are told they are loved even though they are abused. (All About Love, 22)

Children often get hurt by adults who themselves never learned of love. Still, "they will cling to the misguided assumption that their parents love them even in the face of remembered abuse, usually by denying the abuse and focusing on random acts of care (All About Love, 25)." To survive emotionally, the child must idealize their parents.

In my home country, the mother’s embrace is an eternal symbol of safety and perfect love. I call this the cult of the irrefutable mother (or parents)—a totalitarian regime that gaslights and censors diverging experiences of parenthood, where violence is justified as love, and gentleness becomes conditional luxury.

Ăn cho roi cho vọt, ghét cho ngọt cho bùi.
A Vietnamese proverb: Loving means the rod and the whip; hating gives sweetness and softness.

Japanese equivalent: 愛の鞭 ("The whip of love")

And the famous international lies:
It hurts me more than it hurts you.
This is for your own good.

John Bradshaw calls this confusion mystification. In Creating Love, he writes: "I was brought up to believe that love is rooted in blood relationships. You naturally loved anyone in your family. Love was not a choice… [yet] even with the best intentions our parents often confused love with what we would now call abuse."

Raised in a culture that cannot distinguish love from abuse, it is no wonder that we become confused in adulthood. Thanks to the emergence of pop psychology, we now learn that the more we idealize our childhood and family, the more we deny existing pain and become prisoners of illusion.

"Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood." (Alice Miller, Drama of the Gifted Child, 3)

My commitment to being honest in daily life has been met with the frequent drag of being seen as a "freak", "naive", or even "cruel". I write these lines fully aware that we live in a subversive culture where liars and deceivers often rise to the top. Perhaps that is why since childhood play-pretend to party games, practice lying becomes entertainment.

When truth-telling is repressed in favor of fictional stability, children quickly learn that to be accepted, they must perform a false self. This normalization of lies may offer temporary comfort, but it blocks our capacity to know love, feel safe, and discern manipulation.

The cover of Knowing The Werewolf.

I created Knowing The Werewolf to talk about abusive relationships. I was raised in a perfect family, praised for academic excellence and social achievements. Yet at home, I was routinely shamed, lied to, gaslit, controlled by my own mother, and neglected by my father who wasn’t present enough to intervene. These family dynamics became blindspots that nearly cost me my life in adulthood. This zine is an attempt to initiate honest conversations about the dramas that are happening all around us in projects, relationships, institutions, and organizations.

Daily truth-speaking may not be convenient, but it is the most effective practice against distortions. It enables clarity and insight. It makes it harder for others to project or be manipulative. It helps us discern self-contained individuals who resist truth to preserve self-interest.

It is in the hope that by creating and widening a language for truth-speaking and discernment, we can learn to tell love from abuse. And from there, we can begin to truly know intimacy.