HOMUNCULUS Bearing Incorporeal Arcticulations

This dissertation studies ‘the Arctic in Change’. In contrast to a traditional research setting, its aim is to engage with questions that respond to both ‘the Arctic’ and ‘in Change’ as preformed answer and outcome. Since ‘the Arctic’ is not constituted by a single definition, mode, science, art, discipline, method, state, continent, image, symbol, instance, agent or unit, it is considered and treated with the means and matters of bricolage in the spirit of post-qualitative inquiry. Accordingly, this approach requires involvement from a multiplicity of theoretical, methodological and research material: the intra-actions of performativity theory, the genealogy of discursive material practices, studies on perception, visual culture, aesthetics and ethics, art & design, ecology and ethology, as well as the politics residing in them. Furthermore, the recognition of the partiality, influence and agency of the elements constituting this study beyond the rationalised and controlled research design requires a more fluid manner of writing, deriving from the ideals of writerly and open text, infused with inter- and intratextuality and co-conducted in phenomenological writing to produce a novel conduct in avoiding firm structuring and hierarchy while pursuing open-ended objectives. The analysis begins by compromising the cohesion of Arctic representations as objects with unaltered identities, exhibiting a diorama of a polar bear. The seemingly neutral and passive object occupies several inherited subject positions that emerge from it as material outcomes. The representation holds the capacity to record the audience’s corporeality through sensory and motoric traces and to perform through their bodies as fixed prepositions. The encounter endangers and re-establishes the participatory subject and object positions as co- and counter to each other. How representations are conducted is foremost a question of the manipulation of distance, which proceeds from aesthetics to epistemological and ontological conditions. Different characteristics emerge, disappear, become manageable or are in reach depending on their distance, which is defined as the relationship between the point of perception and the perceived. Attempts to overcome this distance with various scientific technologies and artistic techniques are inevitably influenced by what comes in-between. To penetrate the distance with direct bodily engagements for the purpose of Arctic investigation, is an act limited to the ontology of the knowing body. In order to perform under the natural and cultural environmental conditions related to the Arctic, the body is contained and reproduced as non-Arctic with specific material arrangements within the research vessel, from labour to recovery, to maintain it as a societal human subject. These discursive–material arrangements constitute the human body through an incorporeal–animal binary, constructed within the equipment of ergonomics and exercise inherited from agriculture and industrialisation. When the same adjustment, human–animal, is conducted in micro-space, it is transferred into the colonial project of discipline and cultivation as a rectilinear school: it emerges as an invasive species in the regional circular ‘ecology’ and as cultural violence towards the landscape that is formed by seasonal and regional movement that happens in circles, conducting the livelihood and the identity of the People. The reading and rewriting of the landscape, as well as the history and memory of the bodies within it, do not place these human–animal binaries beneath one another, but rather within an act of performative restructuring. While certain iconic animals, are considered representatives of the Arctic region, in the animal activist’s attempt to speak for the other, to witness animal subjectivity with documentary techniques and technologies, they do not succeed in ethically mediating or negotiating the subjectivity of the animal-other as such. Such technique produces a hybrid subjectivity of the human, animal and recording technology combined that also fails to free itself from the weight of the genealogy of the human–animal relations of trapping, hunting, slaughter and putting on display. While problematising the capability to engage with the animal subject as an animal, the study further indicates the ‘small other’ taking place in subject–object encounters, restating ‘in-between’ as ‘in-the-midst’. The human–animal relation contained in an artefact, and its capacity to contain and surface such genealogies, is finally studied in the context of contemporary political debate on the use, meaning and matter of the inuksuit, communities building and enacting stone figures erected traditionally by the Inuit for various purposes. While the inuksuit have been adopted by the national state with its colonial practices towards the indigenous peoples, the inukshuk re-emerges as a re-establishment of identity and power over life and region, natural, social and political bodies. The questions throughout the thesis suggest that ‘the Arctic’ is not accessible or returnable as the ‘truth’; it is not capable to exist in the Lacanian Real, resisting all definitions and relations. It is composed in linguistic, imaginary and symbolic manner and matter as a figuration ‘arcticulated’ into an entity existing only ‘in Change’. This entity is to be expressed with a figure that bends and reads in multiple modes. The Arctic is therefore a bearing in which one can dwell as a human being, where this being owes and invests itself in an intra-face, named a ‘homunculus’, a transferring and conducting of human characteristics. The outcomes ought to enable radical and critical thinking towards the ‘taken for granted’ truths of the Arctic as an object of inquiry through established metatheoretical conceptualisations. The ‘homunculus’ is offered as a guide for understanding the forms and matters of politics on the issue in a new way in order to have an impact on political science and beyond.

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