Tangentiality
Stefanie Heine and Holger Schulze
Our garden is full of blackbirds – I notice them from time to time, when I look up from reading and my gaze drifts off beyond the pages, through our living room window, or when I go out to smoke a cigarette. They are not the kind of birds I go looking for with my binoculars on our birding tours – blackbirds are utterly common, one sees them all the time, in the corner of one’s eye, without paying attention. For me, the most remarkable thing about them has been their name in Danish, “solsort”: sunblack, an oxymoron passing through the ears in a smooth repetition of sounds – where did that come from, their glossy black feathers hardly seem reason enough. And the reason why they are in the garden – in groups of five or sometimes up to ten, hopping, pecking, fluttering and twitching their tails – is hardly poetic: they eat apples, apples I was too lazy to clear away when autumn turned into winter. We are no apple farmers, growing and harvesting fruit methodically. We bought this little patch of nature-culture, and the apple trees were just there. We ate some, baked some pies, half-heartedly cooked five pots of applesauce, and tried to make cider, without success. The amount of fallen apples was overwhelming, I was busy with other things, ignored and then forgot them, leaving them to rot. Now our garden is full of blackbirds. I enjoy watching them occasionally, they are growing on me; as soon as I approach too closely, they fly off. They will be gone when the apples are.
I have a relation to the blackbirds, but I doubt that I “made kin” (c.f. Haraway 2016): there is no contact or bond between us; they do their thing, I do mine; our paths do not actually cross, we meet tangentially: I look at them from a distance, they take off upon noticing me. Surely, our encounter is the result of a series of interconnections between human and non-human factors, elements, and agencies: the tree planted by human hands in the little ecosystem of our garden, my engagements with the apples, etc. But “entanglement” only captures what has been going on here inadequately. The blackbirds’ presence largely depends on what I didn’t do: my lack of care, competence and interest concerning the apples, my unintentional non-interference, taking no action but passively, lazily and obliviously letting them lie where they fell. Given the ontological and essential connotations tied to the term, “entanglement” also seems to fail to describe the transitory nature of our relationship, lasting for a couple of weeks or months at the most. Moreover, entanglements are usually understood as all-encompassing, which is hardly what my distracted, accidental gazes at them are, or their startled takeoffs when I interrupt their business. “Tangentiality” is a much more precise term to outline the relationality at stake here: in geometry, tangentiality designates a line which touches a curve at only one point, without intersecting. Tangential means “merely touching” and, in another sense points to the erratic, divergent, and digressive (OED). These implications are more far-reaching than me, my rotting apples, and the blackbirds. As a new concept, tangentiality offers a welcome refinement of the at times rather imprecise and overgeneralized uses of “entanglement” in contemporary environmental discourses.[i] A tangential coexistence of human and non-human entities in the world does not deny their interdependence. At the same time, tangential relations leave entities as separated and distant as they are connected.[ii] This ambiguity of touch and let go, of being together-apart, allows space for autonomy, singularity, and discreteness. Tangentiality is a nuanced term to designate relations that can easily go unnoticed. While entanglement tends to suggest an ever-morphing continuity or becoming, tangentiality involves breaks, leaps and drifts. Entanglement is everywhere; tangentiality is passing and intermittent. Entanglement is considered a significant, effective concept; tangentiality can be peripheral, inoperative and meaningless.
I stand at my window. Looking out onto the square, I am not part of what is happening there. I can see the cyclists parking their bikes. Others are walking their dogs, carrying heavy bags from the supermarket. Some were just standing there, talking to each other. Later in the day, water runs down the window. It is raining, and this meteorological event also transforms the optical qualities of my window. The world outside appears to be different. In recent modernist thinking, the person behind the window is often seen as an uninvolved, unengaged person. That may be true. One is not, as in Darwin’s famously ecstatic writing, an intrinsic part of an “entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth” (Darwin 1872: 429). A person behind the windowpane is disentangled in this ecstatic sense – yet they are tangentially related and relating, interested and involved, reflecting and reacting to the events, phenomena, entities, and processes around them.
The concept of tangentiality allows for a more nuanced and complex assessment of the various degrees and modes of relating to the given environment. Unlike the concept of entanglement, it does not postulate or demand a full, thorough, deep and indeed total involvement. When we describe relationships as tangential, we acknowledge that there are forms of relationships in our ecosphere that are certainly not total, not existential, not all-encompassing and not exhaustive. They are transitory, ephemeral, often only momentous or situated, sometimes almost insignificant and fugitive. Yet these relationships are at times substantial. Our relationship to a range of animals, a variety of artefacts, and most of the people we will ever meet in our few decades on this planet will necessarily be tangential and transitory. I am not transformed by the person I see in the distance. My daily errands and my effects will certainly not be changed by this patch of moss, these mice and vehicles, this piece of software or group of birches, these clouds or text messages, this mountain range. Yet they have a real and meaningful effect on my here and now, in this very moment, here and now. I would not want to miss them. In this sense, these tangential relations extend our realm of experience beyond the limited space, beyond the soap bubble that Jacob von Uexküll suggested as the hard cocoon of our full experience (Uexküll 1922). Tangential relationships transcend such bubbles. They establish fleeting, often erroneous, perhaps meaningless, but occasionally deeply relevant, moving and consequential relationships. In this sense, tangentiality makes it possible to interpret constellations of ephemeral encounters that have too often been dismissed as irrelevant, simply because of their casual or transitory character. Tangentiality brings back the serenity, the beauty and the respect of not being fully involved, of not exhausting one’s existence. You can leave others to themselves. You can respect an undisturbed existence.
For environmental thinking and practice, tangentiality has great potential: it may contribute to less extractive, exploitative, intrusive, appropriative and anthropocentric relations with the environment.
Bibliography
Darwin, Charles. Origin of Species (1872). Cited from John van Wyhe, ed. 2002. The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Giraud, Eva Haifa. What Comes after Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham und London: Duke University Press, 2016.
Koenig, John. “Moment of Tangency: A Fleeting Glimpse of What Might Have Been” The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, 2021.
Ricco, John Paul. “Sex and Exclusion.” Sex and the Pandemic, ed. Ricky Varghese. Regina: University of Regina Press, forthcoming 2025.
"Tangential, adj. and n.,” OED Online, December 2022, Oxford University Press.
Uexküll, Jakob von (1922). “Wie sehen wir die Natur und wie sieht die Natur sich selber?” Die Naturwissenschaften 10: (12-14): 265-271, 296-301, 316-322.
Notes
[i] The term became hugely popular after having been introduced by Karen by Barad in Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007). In the following years of vibrant reception, “entanglement” became one of the master terms in New Materialist discourses, often used to designate interdependency and interconnection between human and non-human entities in a very broad, and, as we would argue, at times vague sense. It is against the background of such vague notions of “entanglement” that we want to offer the term “tangentiality” as a refinement and extension, in some cases as an alternative, but certainly not as a correction or replacement of “entanglement”.
[ii] In our outline of tangentiality, we were inspired by Eva Haifa Giraud’s What Comes after Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion, John Paul Ricco’s work, for example, “Sex and Exclusion,” Sex and the Pandemic, and John Koenig’s entry “Moment of Tangency” in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.