Matthew 6:26-34

Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

My colleague Fred Hebert recently shared this Mastodon post about the ingenuity of some birds. Hiemstra et al. have apparently found that they can make good use of anti-bird spikes when constructing their nests, and that inspired me to title this post in the way I have.

I’m also going to use that act of avian bricolage to explore a concept that at once vexes and delights me: boundaries. More specifically, the ambiguous and equivocal role they play in our lives.

Boundaries are a structure. They are things that exist between here and there, this and that. They differentiate and keep things apart. They mediate, as the present separates the past and future.

Yet they also relate. It’s at their bounds that each may interact with another. A boundary connects things: the present moment is the passage by means of which the past moves towards the future and the future passes; it’s how they become the other.

So boundaries are at once objects and events, simultaneously constituting and constraining. They are ambivalences, and as ambivalences they affect the things on each side of themselves. One can also think of them as paradoxes. The temporal example mentioned above highlights this: the present is something that keeps the past and future apart and brings them together. As paradoxes they incite us to think. According to Gillies Deleuze in The Logic of Sense (LoS), paradoxes do not have a pre-given sense and therefore one must think in order to make sense of them. In that spirit I will do a little thinking here.

It seems to me that boundaries, in the paradoxical way they operate, effect a Möbius strip. (This is an image taken from Deleuze’s LoS, to give credit where it’s due.) They are the singular point at which the half-twist of the strip is effected and the circuit is completed. That point brings distinct things together into a coherent whole while at the same time allowing for significant topological changes.

But, one may notice, that if one were to traverse the strip that the circuit only allows for local progress. One can move along the surface but go nowhere else. So a Möbius strip is a kind of trap, and captures the traveler in an illusion of progress.

Why is this? It’s because a Möbius strip is a 3D object embedded in Euclidean space. As a 3D object, it lacks the 4th dimension of time. Returning to the temporal example: I talked about the present as a boundary separating and joining the past and future. But these were ideal notions. The statements were about time but were not historical in themselves. “The” past and “the” future; “the” present. Those definite articles decontextualize and assume that my past and future are reducible to yours. That my present and presence in the world is identical to yours. But we are not identical to one another. We are each irreducibly unique.

It’s the fact of being ahistorical that creates the conditions for the strip to be and for the boundary, any boundary to do its work. So how would one escape this capture and illusion? One would need to bring time into things themselves, to conceive of them as becoming. Instead of a Möbius strip, think of something like a Klein bottle.

It’s in light of the preceding analysis that I want to bring back the birds. What we see in the case of the birds is that the spikes in one ensemble create a hostile space, while in another they contribute to a refuge. In the former they prevent the bird from occupying a space, and in the latter they help constitute a space. One might say that as boundary objects they may be exchanged and in so far as they can be exchanged then they may have a variety of uses depending on the context. But I think this is the wrong way to think of them because it doesn’t include temporality in the objects.

But that way of thinking is reminiscent of another boundary object which we encounter every day: commodities. According to Marx, capitalist society is awash in commodities, i.e. saleable goods and services. He shows in Capital that a commodity is an object with an exchange-value and a use-value. This is possible because, he argues, commodities are fetishized; i.e. they are taken as ahistorical, decontextualized objects. That decontextualization is what makes them exchangeable, i.e. fungible.

So what would an object be that included time? That wasn’t ahistorical, i.e. was not-exchangeable or non-fungible? I propose that we call such an object a provision. These are objects taken up in a process of becoming, augmenting the capacities of the assemblage or ensemble in which they participate. They are immanent to it, and thereby become-other as they join in. (I also like using this word because a provision is something that travelers take with them, a la the nomads that Deleuze & Guattari discuss in A Thousand Plateaus.)

I think it’s better to think of the birds making use of provisions, of the bird-spike assemblage affecting one another and other things besides. This lets us consider the birds in terms of what they can do and how the spikes may empower or disempower them as the case may be. And if we’re to follow Christ’s advice from the Book of Matthew, perhaps it lets us consider those objects around us in new ways and how we might work with them. This would, I think, be the true meaning of “innovation.”