A New Political Imagination: Making the Case 2020026748, 2020026749, 9780367481452, 9781003038221

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsement
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
About the authors
Prolegomena
Introduction: The political (de)formation of the now
The failure of politics in the end times
Democracy in crisis: recasting the debate
A starting point: the trilateral commission
The undemocratic underbelly of democracy
Voices speaking crisis: a sampler
Recasting: the relational actuality of crisis
Our ambitions and intent
References
1 Openings: Configuring the critical and criticality
The moment of criticality and the now of crisis
History without telos
Unsettlement at the end of directional time
Undirected futureless ‘leadership’
Chronophobia and the existential repression of crisis
The culture of de-relational knowledge
On relationality
Heidegger/Descartes – Arendt/ Heidegger – Arendt/Levinas
The collapse of ‘the Nomos of the earth’
Confronting complexity beyond an ability to fully comprehend the complex
Notes
References
2 A lexicon of analytics
Fracture zones
Geopolitical reconfigurations, fractures and war
Reimag(in)ing the perpetual war
The post-peace condition and the looming geopolitics of survival
From enemies to dispensable lives
Cooperate rather than compete?
The Arctic:
China – South and East China Seas:
Southwest Russia/Northwest China:
Russia/Eastern Europe:
India/Pakistan:
Egypt/Ethiopia:
Africa:
Southeast Asia:
Israel, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen and Afghanistan:
Venezuela/Colombia and Brazil:
Opening into the futuring of a tragic world
War now
Climate change reimag(in)ed
Un-bounding the climate
One as many
Time mis-placed
Displaced causality
Ontological rupture
The ontological obstacles, rupture, and two breakaways
Encounter two
The lighter and darker sides of the (post)human
Re-subjection (political and technological)
Development, un-development and the agenda of postdevelopment
Nationalism and cosmopolitanism undone
The state of exception as a post-democratic/postsocialist normative condition
The many faces of the ‘posthuman’
A critique of critical posthumanism
An other humanism as a humanism of the other
Technological constructions of reality
Take one: making real
Take two: the technological construction of whose real?
From epistemological to digital techno-colonialism
Relationality and technology
Technology and the human counter-agency
The epistemological maze
Pathways
Path one: the reality circuit of western epistemology
Path two: the narrow way
Path three: the way of the believer (faith in reason)
On disciplinary decadence, post-disciplines and beyond
The onto-epistem-ology and the corpopolitics of knowledge
Path four: political theology
Political theology from the 1930s to the present
The past as the future
Political theology and political imagination
Path five: the ontotheological
Path six: the anti-epistemological
Path seven: the Eurocentric dead-end and border thinking
Multi-spatial hermeneutics
Path eight: relearning to learn
Path nine: the way out
Notes
References
3 Narratives of gathering(s) of the political
On gathering
Prefiguring the political and politics now
The now of the political
The obstacles
The political (and) community: an opening into
Nancy meets Simondon
After democracy. Futuring the political: gatherings
What is to be gathered?
Notes
References
4 Imagination otherwise
The ineffability of complexity and the unbearable inaccuracy of language
Imagination after postmodernism?
Imagination and the technological
A refusal to imagine the end times and the impasse of the sweatshop sublime
Post-Marxist reanimations of the commons: aesthetics as politics
Breaking the Euromodern epistemic dead-end?
Decolonial imaginary and decolonial aesthesis
Undoing something previously created and/or remaking it
Reconsidering the imagination through survival
Some ways of imagining an imagination otherwise
The need for a new political imagination reinstated
Context-formed theory and counter-academy pedagogy
Note
References
5 Towards a research agenda and researching research
Part 1. Openings into research agendas
Mapping the obstacles course of the future
Figures of inter-relational engagement
Cluster1. Climate/anthropology/technology/psychology conflict
Cluster 2. Extinction/migration/biopolitics/posthumanism/post-nation/community
Staging the event of imagination
Points towards a summary
Part 2: A reply in the form of events
Mapping the obstacles course of the future
Accounting the first act of the play of the new age of fire
An inter-relational engagement
Loss, unsettlement, habitus
A staged event
A conversation in and on a borderland (a documented dialogue) between TF/MT
Last words: a dialogue
A final note on resistance
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

“It is seldom that books with bold titles deliver on their initial promise, but this one is among the few that do. Defying disciplinary and theoretical affiliation while drawing from a wealth of truly global and transdisciplinary sources, Fry and Tlostanova make a dense and compelling case for a new planetary political imagination that they do not want to own, but to initiate. Prepare to be skilfully led out of your intellectual and political comfort zone, surprised, irritated, drawn into a most necessary and urgent conversation about what the authors call ‘the age of unsettlement’ and ‘futureless leadership;’ and alerted to the relational interconnections between pathways out of the current epistemological and political maze”. –​Professor Manuela Boatcă, University of Freiburg, Institute of Sociology and Global Studies Programme “Neither new messiahs nor missionaries, Tony Fry and Madina Tlostanova beckon compellingly to us as readers to join their efforts of informing and directing our agency. Calling on us to resolutely reject a reactive pragmatism rooted in impoverished political imagination, they offer sober and tentative hope. The world might still have at least a promise of a future, but only if we, from the present desert, think together publicly about complex issues with no ready answers”. –​Jane Anna Gordon, Associate Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut; and author of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement “A path that takes humanity out of the multiple crises of the present, an understanding able to direct politics to that path –​such is the call of A New Political Imagination. Undogmatic, dialogic, decolonial, Fry and Tlostanova blow open the Eurocentric horizon and reconfigure some of the most radical elements of today’s political action and discourse into an experimental collective work in process. The political imagination suggested here is not fantasy, utopianism or idealism but openminded and deliberated critical judgment in the true sense –​an informed appraisal of facts: that politics as we know it is unsustainable and that we must find new ways of living, learning and acting together. Before the boldness and urgency of this book most contemporary political theory pale”. –​Stefan Jonsson, author of A Brief History of the Masses and Crowds and Democracy and co-​author of Eurafrica, Professor of Ethnic Studies at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University, Sweden

A New Political Imagination

The book presents the case for the making of a new political imagination by offering a critique of existing political institutions, philosophy and practices that are unable to provide the thinking, means and leadership to deal with the complexity and crises of specific locales and the world at large. The authors make clear that there is a fundamental disjuncture between the complexity of the combined critical conditions that are now putting life on Earth at risk, and the divisions and theories of knowledge that are dominantly and instrumentally trying to understand the situation. In response, this work makes the case for the need for a new political imagination that rejects the sufficiency of existing political ideologies (including democracy) being the end point of politics. The book tackles the political underpinnings of social and economic life in a world still embedded in the inequities of the afterlife of colonialism and state socialism. Thereafter it engages narratives of change, rethinks imagination and critical practices, to finally present a relationally connected way to move forward. This trans-​disciplinary volume is directed at those working in political philosophy and epistemology, critical global and security studies, decoloniality and postcolonial studies, design, critical anthropology and the post humanities. It is accessible to both academic audiences and activists and practitioners. Tony Fry is Adjunct Professor, Architecture and Design, University of Tasmania, and Visiting Professor, Universidad de Ibagué, Colombia. Madina Tlostanova is Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms at Linköping University, Sweden.

Interventions

The Series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with alternative critical, post-​structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to international relations and global politics. In our first five years we have published 60 volumes. We aim to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-​structural traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics. Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics. We are very happy to discuss your ideas at any stage of the project:  just contact us for advice or proposal guidelines. Proposals should be submitted directly to the Series Editors: • Jenny Edkins ([email protected]) and • Nick Vaughan-​Williams (N.Vaughan-​[email protected]). As Michel Foucault has famously stated, ‘knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting’. In this spirit The Edkins –​Vaughan-​ Williams Interventions series solicits cutting-​edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations (IR). It is the best place to contribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognise and affirm the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary. Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, USA Edited by Jenny Edkins, Aberystwyth University, and Nick VaughanWilliams, University of Warwick Cultures of Violence Visual Arts and Political Violence Edited by Ruth Kinna and Gillian Whiteley A New Political Imagination Making the Case Tony Fry and Madina Tlostanova

A New Political Imagination Making the Case Tony Fry and Madina Tlostanova

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Tony Fry and Madina Tlostanova The right of Tony Fry and Madina Tlostanova to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Fry, Tony, author. | Tlostanova, M. V. (Madina Vladimirovna) author. Title: A new political imagination : making the case / Tony Fry and Madina Tlostanova. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Interventions | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020026748 (print) | LCCN 2020026749 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367481452 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003038221 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Political science–Philosophy. | Postcolonialism. | Post-communism. Classification: LCC JA71 .F735 2021 (print) | LCC JA71 (ebook) | DDC 320.01–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026748 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026749 ISBN: 9780367481452 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003038221 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

About the authors  Prolegomena  Introduction: The political (de)formation of the now 

viii ix 1

1 Openings: configuring the critical and criticality 

18

2 A lexicon of analytics 

37

3 Narratives of gathering(s) of the political 

132

4 Imagination otherwise 

155

5 Towards a research agenda and researching research 

178

Index 

202

About the authors

Tony Fry is a design philosopher, cultural theorist, writer and award-​winning designer. He has held academic positions and directed research projects in Australia and internationally. Currently he is an Adjunct Professor, Architecture and Design, University of Tasmania; Visiting Professor, Universidad de Ibagué, Colombia; and director, Studio at the Edge of the World, Tasmania. Tony’s research interests span: futures, cities and sustainment, post-​conflict/​postdevelopment, the political, the Anthropocene and the post-​natural life. As a consultant he has worked for government, the private sector and NGOs. Tony is the author of fifteen books, numerous essays and the editor of many collections. Madina Tlostanova is Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms at Linköping University, Sweden. She focuses on decolonial thought, particularly in its aesthetic, existential and epistemic manifestations, feminisms of the Global South, post-​socialist human condition, fiction and art. Her most recent books include Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Re-​existence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and What Does it Mean to be Post-​ Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018).

Prolegomena

We all live in troubled and challenging times. To know this in any detail is also to feel it –​futures are uncertain, global dangers and instabilities appear to continually grow and this situation is unsettling. Individuals so often see themselves as powerless and turn to politics as a means of responding to this situation, and then despair at its inability to acknowledge and thereafter respond to the problem faced. We, and many other critical thinkers, are now concluding that there is a great divide between political issues, policy and rhetoric and the reality and depth of those defuturing planetary crises that arrive and worsen by the day. The global crisis of COVID-​19 has made this divide abundantly clear. Predominantly, it has been understood as a health crisis with secondary, but major, economic impacts. However, the pandemic needs to be understood as one expression of a relational problem that is destined to worsen, as science writer David Quammen, writing in The New York Times on 28 January 2020 pointed out (Quammen 2020). We invade tropical forests that are the habitat of many plants and animals, some carrying unknown viruses. In Asia and Africa significant numbers of these animals are killed or caged and sent to markets. Human actions disrupt ecosystems and our contact with these animals results in us becoming a new host for viruses. Recent information from the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention tells us three-​quarters of all new or emerging diseases that infect us come from animals. This danger is also directly connected to land clearance, rapid urbanisation and a reduction in biodiversity. The result is a diminishing spatial gap between wild animals and humans, so risks are growing for them and us. Seeing these connections and understanding their political implications for future agendas, policies and practices require a political imagination able to grasp the dynamic of relational complexity and forms of a responsive politics. Crisis management should directly lead to crisis prevention –​if it does not, politics, as constantly seen, simply becomes part of the problem. Rather than providing the forum to discuss and the means to address unsettlement, institutionalised politics remains predominantly preoccupied with national interests, economic growth and greater productivity. While this predisposition has been a longstanding problem, especially for international

x Prolegomena relations and ecological sustainment, now in the contemporary setting of a global crisis the situation is becoming even more serious. A  clear disconnect now exists between the growing global conditions of the unsettlement of displaced populations (caused by civil unrest and conflict, the reconfiguration of the world order, the ever-​increasing impacts of climate change and rapid technological change) and the ability of governments to understand the complexity and depth of these conditions and then respond, partly due to unwillingness to heed advice, including from scientists. This inability to fundamentally redirect and change their political agendas portends disaster. Certainly, major increases in the numbers of the physically unsettled, produced by the indicated forces of displacement, will mean hundreds of millions of people on the move during the rest of this century and beyond. The process has already commenced. Unsettlement, however, goes beyond being an existential condition: it is also a state of mind. By degree, almost everyone everywhere is, and increasingly will be, psychologically unsettled by direct or indirect exposure to the electronically delivered world-​picture of relational forms of unsettlement (felt, for instance, as fear of a world war, a global environmental catastrophe, the initial signs of the ongoing extinction event, economic collapse, or simply the displacement of one’s knowledge and job by ‘intelligent robotic technology’). So, while in this age of the Anthropocene1 politics is failing to confront the challenges presented, unsettlement being one of them, the defuturing force of this age will not fail to confront politics. Here then is the most basic and direct statement expressing the need for a new, circumstantially appropriate political imagination and all that it would bring into being. What, then, is there to do once one recognises the scale and criticality of the compound crisis (the relational interaction of individual and very different crises) and realises •​ •​

that recognition is not enough, because the appearances of the crisis do not necessarily reveal its causal nature and the extent of its critical consequences; that transformative agency has to be acquired in the acknowledging that the fundamental problems that constitute the crisis may not be fully identified, appropriately defined or resolvable?

Clearly there are problems that can technically be solved, but this does not mean that it is certain they will be. The political, economic, cultural delivery of the solution is just as critical as its conceptual or technical resolution. If it cannot be implemented it is functionally not a solution. Then there are problems that cannot be solved, but adaptive action can be taken that lessens or neutralises their impact. Finally there are those problems for which no solutions are available or can be created (at least with current and projected knowledge). Such thinking renders reactive pragmatism problematic while

Prolegomena  xi foregrounding an inseparable relation between crisis, problems, responsive agency and epistemology. Thus, by implication: •​ •​

there is no possibility of efficacious action without understanding, and this results from the appropriateness of the theory of knowledge brought to the specificity of the problem; it therefore, can be concluded that (a)  lack of understanding is almost always indivisible from crisis.

These considerations have been directive of the production of this book. What we wish we could have done is create a text replete with ‘real’ solutions to the crisis of politics, as it is integral to the compound crisis that is shaping global futures. We certainly cannot do this as first, we do not sufficiently understand this crisis; and, second, as we shall show, very many of the reductive disciplinary modes of thought that attempt to understand it by abstracting an individual element are attached to the kind of thinking that created the problem. Such abstraction, as we shall show, manifests a lack of imagination, and also precludes seeing the problem in its complexity as there is no appropriate scholarly language or epistemic mechanism to tackle it yet, while the writing of an academic book is expected to remain largely within a set of conventional naturalised rules that allow the topic to slip away. So what motivated us to write this book was first a desire to acquire sufficient understanding to inform and direct our agency, and so assist and motivate those that read it to do likewise. As a result, this work, not uniquely, is a breaking out of scholarship in the service of the academy and a breaking into scholarship in support of transformative action. For this to be possible, the book has to be seen and engaged with as process, open and resisting closure. Clearly the degree to which such an ambition is achieved is for the reader to judge. More specifically, our joint effort is directed at analysing the crisis and, critically, to establish a foundational condition of understanding to which knowledge is subordinate. Now ‘crisis’, as introduced, is obviously an emotive term and rests on different conditions of criticality that are not discrete. The organic character of the compound crisis of our collective age of the Anthropocene is not fixed or stable. So while widely evoked in association with our age, and often assumed to have a shared meaning, in actuality ‘the crisis’ arrives with multiple significations. Because of this it is incumbent on us to convey our own understanding. This is based on a disjuncture between what seem to be phenomenal forms and the existential reality. So while, for instance, there are references made to climate, geopolitics, economics, international security and rapid technological change as specific examples of crisis they actually and differentially morph into each other. Just to take one simple illustration based on the most ‘recent’ data on climate change-​induced sea level rises (which are always revised upward). At the time of writing the projection is of 67 centimetres’ sea level rise by 2100 which is expected to displace 400 million

xii Prolegomena coastal dwellers worldwide (Harvey 2019). This coastal displacement is one impact among many as biophysical systems fail. Thus 400 million will be a fraction of the total of the displaced whole. This situation, when combined with population pressures and resource stress, will have profound geopolitical consequences, not least in causing conflict. The trends are already in play. Economically, the impact of this situation will be massive in two respects. First, the economic effects will often precede the environmental ones as capital takes flight when the fate of a major global delta city becomes clear. Second, the cost of dealing with subsequent effects of rising sea levels will be beyond the means of governments. So a financial crisis of an unprecedented scale as part of a larger crisis has to be contemplated  –​another situation that flows into conflict. Technological change that has fed the creation of this situation is mistakenly posited as a salvational force in response to it. While the cursory account we have given here is but a fraction of the coming complexity, and is not devoid of speculation, it is underscored by an enormous wealth of data and the afterlife of the consequences of modernity. Extant politics (national and international) has shown itself unable to deal with such complexity, putting short-​term interests ahead of longer-​term and essential structural change. There is also a demonstrable inability to establish a foundation for negotiations based on common interest. Even when conducting the discordant negotiations that do occur, the ideas and rhetoric are a very long way behind the actuality of global events. What this means is that politics, as it is, does not observe or respond to crisis but is in fact constitutive of it: politics is part of the compound. While crisis has always been ontologically intrinsic to the human condition (what Heidegger called our ‘being towards death’) it has now become the clearly evident ontology of our (and many other) species. This condition is affirmed by, but extends beyond, the announcement by evolutionary biologists that our collective unsustainable actions have initiated the planet’s sixth extinction event. The climate change-​induced loss of biodiversity accelerating the extinction process is serious, but it is abstracted from the relational matrix of the compound crisis, which means that it acts (without intent) to conceal the full extent of the crisis forming the negative ontology of life on Earth. Declarations of crisis from specific bodies of knowledge, as with the extinction event, are currently obstructing the arrival of action responsive to the total situation. By implication, there can be no appropriate action without first understanding the changing (ontological) ‘nature’ of our species and the increasingly more complex ambiguity of ‘life’ in general. So positioned, understanding ‘our being now’ is a prerequisite in the gaining of the freedom to act. Such freedom cannot arrive without sacrificing the foundations of thought that bind our being towards extinction at its most fundamental (relational) level. The diverse ways of becoming free can only come to be, become collectivised in difference and mobilised, if they are prefigured and articulated politically. Thus a new understanding and a new political imagination are essential in forming the ontologies of the

Prolegomena  xiii directive agents of all forms of instrumental action critically engaging with the compound crisis. Linear reductive thought bonded to unreflective instrumental action is not external to the crisis but is embedded in it. The reason for this rests with the heritage and afterlife of the western Enlightenment and Euromodernity acting in association with extant politics as it is situated in the compound crisis. So framed, the dominant epistemologies and intellectual cultures of the academy and political institutions –​from the local to the international –​are impotent in the face of the relational complexity of the crisis. In common with the now commonplace reference to crisis, complexity is also a non-​specific signifier which is evoked and deployed as if its meaning was shared. But this is not so. ‘Complexity’ is again an epistemological perspective dominantly lodged in the habitus of individuals, thus misunderstanding and relative understanding accompany an assumption of the understood. The complexity of the compound crisis of our collective condition of being is actually a complexity beyond any ability to represent and comprehend complexity. Its scale, relational web and fluid dynamics are such that there is no stasis of appearance or available time of encounter. It cannot be gathered and grasped (that is, held and understood) as all knowledge is situated and conditionally contingent. Reflections on the complexity of the world have become commonplace today. Yet most commentators follow the dominant logic of a fractured and delimited thinking that matches the style of the infamous six blind men who went to see the elephant. The elephant itself in this case is problematic at best. Indeed, complexity is in principle indivisible into separate elements and cannot be reduced either to its parts or to itself as a whole. Moreover, complexity is not a function of an object or a subject, and therefore is irreducible. It is process-​based, internally contextual and emergent. It is in important ways determined by the observer and therefore, contingent in all its contradictory epistemic and existential reverberations, and so requires a contingent way of thinking, a contingent consciousness, if we hope to get any closer to starting to comprehend it (Zirfas 2010). Essentially and reiterating:  the extent and complexity of the defuturing world is de-​forming conditions (enviro-​climatic, geo-​and bio-​political, economic and technological, human and posthuman) in such a way that the emerging age of the Anthropocene, is beyond our fragmenting species’ ability to think the complexity of complexity. Certainly all system thinking is by definition exclusive, and so is inadequate as a means to grasp and model the causal vectors, forces and geometry of this complexity. Reactively: thinking ‘the nature’ –​the synergetic complexity of the bio-​material and socio-​political reality of ‘now’ –​is habitually dismembered and disabled by, as indicated, ‘our’ reductive propensity and by the directive framework of inherited divisions of knowledge. Setting out to solve problems deeply embedded in complexity, on the basis that they can be extracted and de-​relationalised, is a fool’s errand. But striving to learn and understand how to approach solving such problems is not. To do

xiv Prolegomena this means mistrusting an appearance of coherence (complexity hides complexity). It also means resisting the de-​aggregation of what are taken to be its elements, for as soon as de-​aggregation occurs the object of complexity is transformed and thereby disengagement, concealment and contra-​invention follow. The most fruitful way to discover and begin to learn how the world of complexity (‘our’ world) reveals itself ontologically is by an examination of its ‘breakdown’ and dysfunction. Heidegger provides an opening into this undertaking that should not be taken as sufficient but rather as a starting point to question and develop. He understood breakdown as not merely a condition of object dysfunction but a situation demanding ‘our’ attention. He addressed this from three perspectives: conspicuousness (malfunction that is taken note of, addressed and coped with); obstinacy (a temporarily disturbing situation that makes operational –​social, cultural or technical –​conditions unavailable until the repair is done); and obtrusiveness (total breakdown that means that what is broken will never again be available, so that carrying on essentially demands new thinking and action) (Heidegger 1962, pp. 102–​109).

Facing politics A crucial element of the futureless politics –​that is, politics situated in crisis –​ is that it is largely limited to pragmatic instrumental struggles for power and resources. Neoliberalism has, for example consistently led to a degeneration of politics as a result of its preoccupation with economic growth, managerialism and squabbles over more efficient ways to gain profits. Most of the efforts to counter the focus on this market-​based reductive and instrumental rationality have come from ‘the left’: this by reintroducing an outdated ethics into politics. This action failed and all that arrived was an alternative managerialism of the status quo. Within democracies any politics via the ballot box that involves sacrifice and radical change has seemingly become impossible. This has resulted in a growing gap between politics and the political. In general in most ‘democratic nations’ it looks like the truly political has little or no space in politics any more, while there is no political spirit or imagination ‘willing’ the political back into politics. The lack of political imagination is obviously a symptom and result of the complex defutured condition of the political compression so many nations share –​the political sphere has withered and thus conditions of possibility have narrowed. At the same time self-​interested (consumerist) aspirations continue to rise everywhere as touched by ‘globalisation’ and its recoil with the advance of neo-​nationalism that contemporary populism feeds and promotes. At the same time there are clear signs of breakdown (for instance, in the climate system, as well as in the social and political order in nations of the Middle East, Latin America and Asia) that with certainty can be predicted to increase in and beyond the twenty-​first century. As the defuturing of the sustainment of life increases, a further decline in political imagination can be expected. Yet, and arguably, the need for a revitalised political imagination (or a world made otherwise) has never

Prolegomena  xv been greater. While thinking towards short-​term reform and alternatives, with its limited momentum, will continue, the more substantial project is to commence the process of imagining another politics and political future, but not as another utopian hapless projection. Rather, it should be one formed out of the unencumbered and painful freedom of loss and sacrifice that will be the condition and demand of the coming breakdowns that current forms of defuturing will deliver. If there is to be a saving power it will be imagination not technology. Central to a world-​making otherwise would be a rejection of all forms of creation that negate addressing the dialectical relation of creation (destruction), be it the destroyed ideas, environments, technologies, or natural resources. In no way claiming a role as summarisers of a new philosophy or politics, we believe that at the moment, nationally and internationally, the critical conditions of ‘the world’ are still only being addressed by the very political means that have largely created the situation of defuturing. Therefore, the world-​making actions of the present are effectively destroying our future, and that of many other living species. The reduction of our finitude is happening apace, and the temporal horizon of political ‘leaders’ everywhere is hyper-​ myopic. ‘We’ will have no time unless ‘we’ learn to imagine and act in time –​ and this means a major investment in ‘speculative reason’, action in the medium of time (with time fundamentally being understood as change) and as action with a heightened sense of urgency. So positioned, the call for and project of a new political imagination, and by implication, a new politics, is not the result of wishful thinking but an absolute imperative begging a response of action so defined that it stands upon a firm foundation of newly acquired understanding. We contend there is no other option if the current global drift into a defuturing state of unchecked unsustainability is to be countered. All extant political struggles are situated in, and measured by, this context. The arguments to be presented below will substantiate this claim. Facing and provoking political philosophy Although there are dozens of texts on political philosophy published every year, most of them seem to be stuck in the recycling and reworking of the outdated notions and assumptions, formulated long ago and in completely different conditions, but subsequently presented as given once and for all and universal for all people in all epochs. Political philosophy (largely western) remains one of the most Eurocentric disciplines. Its outdated and globally delocalised framework is habitually imposed on a changing reality it fails to recognise, consequently ignoring the actual material conditions, the emergence of new actors, alternative relations and different cause-​effect models. What it is necessary to do is to delink from Euromodern political philosophy, become open to other traditions, yet not merely replace one political ideology with another but rather initiate and maintain a complex polilogue

xvi Prolegomena and exchange with the goal of attempting to give back to the world a comprehensive futural political dimension with sustaining ability beyond just anthropocentric demands. There are many recent works in this or that way addressing this problem and some of them will be engaged with in this book. Yet none of the current political philosophers seem to be able to offer sufficient answers to the complex questions that the ‘realities of now’ are posing. These answers will be still important even if insufficient; they can open up a space for collective discussions and attempt to launch collectives with a will and motivation to work together in clearing the ground from the thought and action that obstruct the quest for ‘solutions’ for interconnected global challenges. Short-​term ‘temporary solutions’ beg to be seen as buying time for more viable means of change. Certainly the time of ready-​made decisions and full construction utopias has passed. Thus conceived, this book is an invitation to a dialogue, an action which we consider to be not a matter of choice but one of necessity, of survival. We believe there is a shared sense that fundamentally new political ideas are not only needed, but have to be made possible as politics as is cannot be deemed to be in its end state. It is too early to announce the coming of the post-​political era as many commentators have hastened to do. Following Chantal Mouffe’s distinction (2006), the political as ontological (in contrast with politics as ontic) is too important for the sustenance of human society and life on this planet. But as indicated, for a new politics to be created a new political imagination is essential. However, this will not arrive as a flash of brilliance from an intellect yet to rise as a shooting super-​star, but will rather come from a process, dialogue and a great deal of critically applied effort. Such action is not seen as a matter of choice but is vital if ‘we’ wish to continue to be. Politics cannot just end or be replaced with the market economy and the accompanying idea of the consensus and avoidance of antagonisms or Habermasian ‘communicative rationality’ (1984). The renaissance of politics freed from economic reductionism and abstract utopianism is crucial for our world to survive. In a sense, this rethinking of politics and the political is not just creating new agendas and vistas but simultaneously going back to pre-​ modern meanings (recovered and remade) of politics to be found in many cultures and civilisations. Just as economics (Οἰκονομικά) in the Ancient Greek understanding was not about money speculation but rather about wise and sustainable household management, politics does not have to be limited by power and profits but should regain its ontological dimensions, existential responsibility being one of them. In spite of neoliberal efforts to make us all into happy consumers, people remain ‘political animals’ (Aristotle, 350 B C E ) or rather must become them again –​not to remain faithful to Aristotle, but because there is too much at stake for us all in this joyless reality quickly rolling to its end (largely due to our own harebrained behaviour). We can no longer afford not to be political in a core ontological rather than merely instrumental sense.

Prolegomena  xvii On our research and methods Our approach to method directly links to our modes of research. We do not mean to adopt a specific method and to form and filter our complete argument by and through it. We do not believe in method-​centrism of contemporary knowledge which is applied to justify any research. Present attitude to methodologies is one more element of the crisis that we are critically reflecting upon. Method-​centrism is a procrustean bed of academia which self-​legitimates and proclaims as valid only specific ways of scientific knowledge production discarding any other knowlelges not sanctified by the Method. Rather, and from our post-​or trans-​disciplinary perspective, what we have done is to assemble and work within a suite of articulated methods (including a selective and critical reflective employment of deconstruction, discourse analysis, hermeneutical phenomenology, speculative research, post-​structural research) which add up to a situated model of deployed relational analysis determined by ‘issue content’ and ‘crisis context’. This does not equate to undisciplined eclecticism but responsiveness to the difference that the discourses of imagination and politics traverse within the milieu of contemporary global complexity. The approach is directly connected to our views, and evolving practice, as based on the need (and demonstration) to unlearn in order to learn. Likewise, our approach also links to the influence of particular forms of practice-​based research that underpin some of the more concrete examples of action discussed in this book. Our research engagement with politics, as a (theoretical) discourse and (applied institutional) practice, is not treated as if it were a discrete discourse, discipline, domain of theory and practice. Rather we specifically address our engagement as it is relationally present in our fields of inquiry and action –​ these spanning modernity, (neo)colonialism, decoloniality, urbanism, feminism, philosophy, relational ontology in design and architecture and other creative practice. We reject what has become a common empirical/​positivistic/​ scientistic view of research and its sufficiency. Rather we adopt a more plural/​ cultural/​deconstructive/​constructivist understanding and application. On the key idea of relationality: an introductory outline Our relation of relationality is first as its epistemological significance and thereafter to politics. It is informed by a number of sources, including, for example François Jullien, David Hall and Roger Ames on Chinese (ancient) understandings; Heidegger, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler on contemporary (western) knowledge, with Yuk Hui as the link between these two traditions. There are two major implications of giving relationality the position of importance that we posit it with. First it undercuts the widespread propensity to atomise ‘crisis’ into particular domains: climate, geopolitical, of democracy etc. Such atomisation actually negates both an understanding and a

xviii Prolegomena critical engagement. Second, rather than giving a lengthy abstract account of relationality as a counter to the reduction of complexity to elements or a reified system that negates the actual dynamics of causality, we aim to demonstrate relationality as a direction of our mode of exposition, as well as being addressed when appropriate as present or absent in a particular object of inquiry. By implication we see divisions of knowledge/​disciplines as obstructions to relational understanding. Instead, we embrace situated contingent links between discourses (critical assemblages). Thus difference of interests within politics is not reduced to discrete specialisms of particular interest groups. Our aim is not to supplement or fill gaps in extant political theory but to redirect the discourse towards action that will constitute a new paradigm. To this end we shall be presenting and outlining a number of redirective practices. These will be directly linked to design agency (as process and object) as a rich and developing field that is advancing relational ontologies that exist in the borderlands between cultures, technologies and cultural practices. The Introduction acknowledges the problem and inappropriateness of Euromodern thinking as hegemonic as it negates relations of difference. This important issue will be discussed at length in a later chapter. The Introduction ends with an assertion that politics now is not prepared for life in the Anthropocene. However, writing as we are against its ever increasing presence, it is important to recognise that what it names is the compounding impact of the relational sum of the actions of our species, especially since the uneven universalisation of industrialisation. What now begs acknowledgement is the disjuncture between an inchoate understanding of the concept of the Anthropocene and an existential grasp of its omnipotence and the extent that this age infuses our critique throughout this work (not least, the challenge of the Anthropocene as being beyond the capability of all existing political ideologies, but one which the imagination must face). On the structure and political structuring of the book To assist the reader in navigating this book and productively engaging with it, we need to say a little about the way we have designed it, its form and structure. The book centres on a relational perspective and thought. And it is also written following the same logic. What this means is that it does not have a linear form based on a progressive sequential account of issues and events organised on the basis of a positivistic ordering of empirical ‘facts’. Such an approach would not allow us to communicate the actual multi-​dimensionality of the complexity of our topic. What is being worked towards is not a closed or definitive account but the opening of a process of unlearning and learning (in which we –​the authors –​are participants) that can be appropriated. We endeavoured to unlearn and learn as we researched and wrote. It is also important to understand that the arguments being presented are recursive: what newly arrives continually returns to, and often, effectively rewrites

Prolegomena  xix what has already arrived. In this sense, our writing in this book is in itself recursive and allows for partial repetition of certain key nodes, for the sake of producing additional meanings at every revisiting. Once again, this is a highly contextual, perspectival and relational process resulting in an open text which requires and hopefully also triggers in our prospective audience a specific way of active and engaged reading signified by an ability to grasp and take into account not just information but also the form in which it is presented, its meaningful textual design through which we are trying (while not claiming any success) to reproduce a model of the complexity that we are discussing in this book. Such an approach creates a condition of emplacement, displacement and replacement that is not only implicit in the book structurally but also linguistically –​familiarity has to be disrupted to allow difference to appear. At the same time ‘plain speech’ is embraced when what is to be presented can be plainly stated, recognising the line of demarcation here is often subjective. The guiding imperative is directed by striving to realise the adequacy of a stated argument. The recursive character of argument and exposition once again begs restating: what is read not only frames what will be read but may recast what has already been read. In briefly outlining the structure of the book, the metaphor that best describes it is ‘layering’. There are layers within each chapter, and the chapters layer upon each other in a forward and backward motion (hence the reference to recursivity). For example the issue of relationality is formally introduced, and at the same time, is illustrated in multiple places and ways. Thus reconnections and new connections are continually being made in building up a picture of a dynamic process. Such an approach is at odds with imposing the conventions of a strict method. If we try to still simplify and verbally linearise the structure of the book, we could say that this process starts with the Introduction which draws a distinction between politics and the political, while pointing out that at any given moment in the global dispersal of politics the political is either becoming deformed and breaking down or reformed or, in almost all cases, returning as the same. The demand of a new political imagination is to create the means to displace this continual oscillation. Chapter 1 responds to this situation by putting forward new ways to configure and reconfigure understandings of what is critical in the conditions of criticality of the compound crisis. What makes this undertaking possible is the employment of relational thought. In adding the next layer of complexity Chapter 2 provides a whole series of political domains in which politics functions as/​or dysfunctions. In doing this the diversity of political agency is acknowledged, including ontologically. Then in the context of substantial increases in the complexity of the complex world of human habitation, the widening gap between politics and its institutions and the generative world-​shaping consequences of such complexity are exposed. Offset against the disjunctive relation between the worlds of politics and the world at large, Chapter 3 will bring together an expanded and relational view

xx Prolegomena of the political by putting forward a number of expository narratives. What these will allow to be made clear are ways in which extant politics can start to be rethought and fundamentally remade. Crucial for the ability to commence such transformations is the development of a new imagination, but for this to begin an understanding of how differential imagination has been formed historically has to be established. This, along with considering new possibilities, is the function of Chapter 4. The final chapter, Chapter 5, is all about outlining the relationally layered picture of the problems and possibilities of politics and the political, as informed by the imperative of a new imagination as a project of research and action. In this respect the book can be seen as aiming to initiate a diverse process of active engagement by a community of concern that by degree already exists and which the book aspires to help enlarge and motivate. On the reader and reading We have a view of a reader who is politically concerned, situated in those unsettling conditions that are now a growing feature of our being-​in-​the-​ world, this irrespective of who or where you are. Such a reader may come from any discipline that in some way is engaged with crisis, complexity and politics. But equally the reader may have a trans-​or post-​disciplinary perspective or be a practitioner or activist completely outside of academic culture. We believe there is a correlation between a reader’s recognition of the criticality of the crisis (in which we are all immersed) and their motivation to view and treat this text as a possible path of constructive engagement, albeit redirective study, research or activism. What we have produced is not an essay for passive consumption. Experience has taught us that a reader’s engagement with a critical text is not so much predicated upon the level of academic study that a reader brings to it, but rather the degree of their intellectual maturity and political motivation. So, while some readers may find the language of our theorisation challenging, the motivated reader makes the effort and is rewarded. We also firmly believe, as Einstein made clear, that ‘you cannot solve a problem with the thinking that created it’. Thus the use of unfamiliar theory and language is not a matter of choice but a necessity. About us While we are not political philosophers per se, we are thinkers who view their practices, such as teaching, writing (academic and popular), giving public talks and media interviews, designing, and collaborating with artists, political and social movements, as profoundly political. This is evidenced by our history of projects, researching, working and creating with diverse cultural groups in Western and Eastern Europe, the Americas and Asia. We share a history as educators and authors but are extremely critical of

Prolegomena  xxi institutionalised education as it has become instrumental, especially in training narrow specialists equipped with a number of skills and competences for a labour market and completely devoid of critical thinking. This criticism also connects to the hyper-​conformity as the main unspoken academic politics of today. Academia itself is trapped into this metrics-​driven managerialism grounded in the necessity to prove its worth by the ‘profitability’ of the knowledge produced. We are also very much aware of the insufficiency of the practice of writing as the circumscription of a cultural politics. This does not imply a diminishing of the importance of writing but a recognition that action beyond it is essential. We don’t come from the same worlds, backgrounds, practice or politics but what we have in common exceeds these differences. In particular, we share a common view of the complexity of what threatens futurally as it goes well beyond familiar evocations of enviro-​climatic crises; a particular ethic that centres on the inequity between the Global North and South that exceeds the economic, and a view of our existence as ever in the shadow of the new forms of colonialism. We also both affirm the critical importance of cultural politics and practices while equally recognising that they remain inadequate to the threats/​dangers of contemporary circumstances  –​education in this context is regarded as part of the problem, educating in error by delivering the very knowledge that supports the continuity of the unsustainable while failing to provide a basis of knowledge required for the future. More specifically, universities have become massively contradictory in so much as they attract huge numbers of students but are overwhelmingly functionally based on business models that privilege profit over pedagogy, and the needs of the labour market over research and modes of learning that equip graduates to make critical sustainable futures beyond the limits of techno-​ sustainability. Crucially, the university is failing to remake itself to provide the knowledge that can counter a world made unsustainable in almost every endeavour of human activity, including politics. So in its attachment to the status quo the university continues to be part of a massive, understated and in so many ways ignored crisis. So often, those within the academy who criticise the neglect of the scale of crisis and its reduction to a techno-​scientific condition that will be technologically fixable, are stigmatised. In such a situation critical thinkers have frequently retreated into spaces of political disengagement where even work that is political, is disarticulated from any means of political agency. This problematic clearly folds back into our project and reaches out to those who acknowledge this situation and would wish to act otherwise.

Note 1 Anthropocene is a term now being widely used to name the emergent time after the present geological time –​the Holocene –​as a designation of the influences of anthropocentric actions in transforming climatic, ecological and environmental systems and futures.

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References Aristotle, 350 B C E . Politics. Book 1, Part  2. Trans. Jowett, B.  [online]. Available from: http://​classics.mit.edu/​Aristotle/​politics.1.one.html [Accessed 12 July 2020]. Habermas, Y., 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. McCarthy, Th. A. Boston: Beacon Press. Harvey, F., 2019. Greenland’s ice sheet melting seven times faster than in 1990s. The Guardian [online], 10 December. Available from:  www.theguardian.com/​environment/​2019/​dec/​10/​greenland-​ice-​sheet-​melting-​seven-​times-​faster-​than-​in-​1990s [Accessed 11 December 2019]. Heidegger, M., [1927] 1962. Being and Time. Trans Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E. London: Basil Blackwell. Mouffe, Ch., 2006. On the Political. London and New York: Routledge. Quammen, D., 2020. We made the coronavirus epidemic. The New York Times [online], 28 January. Available from:  www.nytimes.com/​2020/​01/​28/​opinion/​coronavirus-​ china.html [Accessed 10 July 2020]. Zirfas, J., 2010. Kontingenz und Tragik:  Eine moderne Figur und ihre ästhetischen Konsequenzen. In: Liebau, E. and Zirfas, J. eds. Drama der Moderne. Kontingenz und Tragik im Zeitalter der Freiheit. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 9–​30.

Introduction The political (de)formation of the now

The failure of politics in the end times Indivisible from all the problems that our species now confront is the failure of currently available politics. Political philosophy, organisations, institutions and practices are completely out of step with the complexity of current global circumstance, major planetary change and the speed of the transformation of everyday life, not least in the affluent world in which technology is becoming hegemonic. The bulky apparatus of the existing political instruments cannot be fine-​tuned to adequately detect, understand, analyse and offer ways of solving the complex contemporary problems because it is itself an anachronism distorting the image of the present and incapable of any prognostic thinking except the constant production of over-​simplified, momentary, conceptually impoverished and inoperable utopian models. Moreover, such instruments are predominantly attached to the privileging of national interests that obstruct the very possibility of effectively trans-​ nationally addressing the inter-​ relational complexity of those global problems that now seriously threaten so much of life on Earth. This issue we will examine later. Central to this failure is the lack of a new political imagination which could transcend the usual substitution of one ideology for another and recreate politics as an everyday lived practice, a complex struggle and interaction of many interests (the Ancient Greek πολιτικός [politics] literally means ‘many interests’) and consequently, an ‘art’ of governing, taking into account as many of these interests as possible, including also the interests of those who were previously disqualified, such as various dehumanised human populations and non-​human forms of life –​animate and inanimate. If politics is to overcome its reduction to the habitual power and property (re)distribution, it urgently needs to first shape a political imagination that can offer a vocabulary of new practice, concepts, ideas and transformative ways of making this other politics possible. It does not mean that first a new imagination is created and then it is somehow applied to reality. No neat divisions are applicable here. And the emergence of the new imagination as well as the new politics is an open and unfinished process with unknown results or, to quote the Zapatistas, it is a way of moving onwards

2 Introduction as/​while we ask questions –​‘preguntando caminamos’, and listen to different answers. Hence their slogan ‘leading we obey’ (Marcos 2005) where ‘we’ is a collective subject and authority rather than individual people who are acting at the moment (and for a short time) as leaders, but rather are seen as ‘workers’, as contributors for the public good. So we arrive at asking, and setting out to answer, why a new political imagination is urgently needed, with the aim of undertaking an immediate task of creating an intellectual context that makes responding to such a challenge possible. In recognising the immensity of this challenge our ambition is just to provide a substantial starting point. We are as far from the role of new messiahs or missionaries of some universal truths and solutions as we can be. Yet we dare initiate an important discussion, hopefully eventually leading to an overcoming of the present desert of political thought and its constrained intellectual context. This discussion will, we hope, also lead to the formation of a space in which, through carefully asking questions and listening to answers and then rigorously discussing and debating different positions, we could all contribute to the possibility of launching a new pluriversal (as opposed to universal, i.e. maintaining a coexistence and correlation of many different interacting and intersecting positions with equal rights to existence) political imagination. Therefore, fully aware of our humility we still think that instead of sitting on our hands and waiting for the major catastrophe to take place we should commit to trying to change political discourse not just for the better but to become more circumstantially attuned before the consequences of the immanent complex crisis become so ominous that there is no one left to discuss politics or imagination with. A new political imagination that has any agency cannot be willed into being and arrive out of a eureka moment. It requires arriving out of a clear understanding of the imperatives to which it has to respond, and from a context of intellectual substance that informs it and anchors it to agency, which is to say it cannot just be purely an invention of idealism. Our aim is to address these challenges and to provide a starting point to which we and others can respond.

Democracy in crisis: recasting the debate On an evolutionary scale democracy gets designated as the most highly developed form of political life, and the normative figure against which all other political ideologies are measured and positioned. Yet this picture of the ‘stages’ of political organisation is flawed. Democracy is not only plural (the main strains of democracy are numerous and span positions from ‘right’ to ‘left’ and include: democratic rationalism, the council democracy, capitalistic, liberal, interest-​based, deliberative, participatory, communicative, subsidiary and radical), but its foundations are also fracturing, with the gap between the ideal and the actuality continually widening. This widening gap is used by many authoritarian or semi-​authoritarian regimes which are, on the one hand, accusing the western democracies of being unable or unwilling to meet

Introduction  3 their own democratic requirements, and on the other hand, being aware of the normativity of democracy in the contemporary world, still insist on their regimes being called democratic (the latest examples are the Hungarian ‘illiberal democracy’ and the slightly earlier Russian ‘sovereign democracy’, in which the nominal existence of elections is presented as the necessary and sufficient condition of being called a democracy). Moreover, as Moxie Marlinspike and Windy Hart state in their Anarchist critique of democracy, ‘voting and elections merely serve to reaffirm and legitimate state power no matter how one votes. In voting, you might initiate or overrule any policy, practice, or person except the system itself. For that reason the ruling class of a democratic government as whole finds no real threat in suffrage, even though individual politicians might suffer public disfavor’ (Marlinspike and Hart 2005). One can add that in so many of the world’s inadequately globally engaged and unsustainably oriented, failing democracies the voter faces choices that are just ‘more of the same’, i.e. no choice. Consequently there is now an increasing need to question the adequacy of democracy, especially as the most efficacious political means to bring into being and direct the socio-​cultural and economic conditions capable of sustaining our species’ present and future wellbeing and all that we and life in general, depend upon. Certainly this situation presents representative democracy with fundamental questions about the nature and basis of its process and what is actually being, or should be, represented. The more this mode of democracy is examined the more problematic it appears to be (consider, for instance, Fry 2011, p. 37). Elected representatives claim to represent the interests or concerns of their constituents via rights constitutionally given to them to represent their constituency. Effectively, ‘being represented’ means ‘being a represented entity within the directive regime of a representational object’. In turn, this means that ‘the subject being represented’ is abstracted while the elected representative takes the upholding of the representation (the constitution) as primary and representing the needs of the subject as secondary –​thus the symbolic takes precedence over the concrete (which is not to say the concrete is totally ignored). If we bring the ‘abstraction of the subject’ together with the ‘illusion of the people’ we can see that there is a void at the centre of representative democracy. Claude Lefort’s characterisation of democratic power maps onto this observation. He concluded that power is absent at the centre of democratic government because the people, state and nation are constituted as image, and while politically mobilised as a locus of power, they are in fact in themselves ‘empty places’  –​and thus mere representation (Lefort 1988, pp. 232–​33). More specifically, even within its own terms, representative democracy is becoming seen as compromised  –​the aging of the population in many nations being one causal example (Runciman 2018). In many countries what this means is that, as the median age of ‘the people’ and politicians, who

4 Introduction are mostly around fifty, becomes almost identical, the interests of young voters are rendered voiceless and without even the illusory gesture of representation. Far more serious is the undercutting of freedoms and due process by the actions of the dual and deep state, as will be addressed in a moment. What this means is the opening of a huge schism between the popular idea of the democratic rights by individuals and the actual exercise of power by democratically elected governments  –​this evidenced at its most extreme by the exercise of absolute executive power overriding the sovereign power of the rule of law when the executive of government acts on the basis of ‘a state of exception’. In order to be able to argue for a new political imagination the dysfunction and dislocation of politics now has to be more substantially demonstrated. The case against authoritarian regimes is simple to make:  their absolute imperative is self-​preservation. This creates a closed system of internal politics from which the political is held in check, and when and wherever it is thought to exist it is repressed. The critical predominantly exists as a perceived threat to the future of the regime. In contrast, the case against democracy centres on what follows when a crisis arrives to expose the evacuation of democratic process and an inability to govern in conditions that threaten the nation and its people. In this situation government either breaks down or abandons its claim to be democratic. However, as is now evident, this transformation is mostly protracted. Debating the prospect of a crisis of democracy is not new, as it has taken place a number of times since the end of the nineteenth century. Thus the 1960s were an important watershed that re-​launched efforts to revise liberal democracy in a direction of more inclusivity and recognition. A proponent of communitarianism, Charles Taylor reflects on the shift away from the previous idea that people must suppress their personal differences to assimilate into some dominant, normalised majority that started to take force from the 1960s onwards. He attempts to reconcile liberalism and communitarianism, claiming that democracy is inclusive because it is a power of the people and exclusionary because it is a power of the people. Therefore exclusiveness, at least as a temptation (and usually grounded in national identities), is a by-​product of the self-​governed community’s need for unity. Liberal democracy, then, is a self-​denying model that fails to implement its own principle of universal equality and often becomes ethically flawed and restricted (Taylor 2002). In Fred Dallmayr’s view, this principle is egocentric and homogenising as its limit of recognition of difference is epistemic otherness. It reduces the other to arguably common human rationality, dismissing all other manifestations of difference as marginal (Dallmayr 2003). Nancy Fraser has also commented on the 1960s’ shift to an intersectional critique of previous state capitalist assumptions grounded in economic reductionism, statism, androcentrism, the Westphalian system and national orientation. This critique led to a broadening

Introduction  5 of the concept of justice as arguably a key element of democracy to include along with economics (as in Marxism) and law (as in liberalism), and such elements as family, culture, the quotidian and private life and generally the sphere of representation. And even if the critique soon exposed additional angles of injustice and exclusion, for a while a belief in the possibility of implementing truly participatory democracy stayed alive, until the coming of neoliberal globalisation with its increasingly transnational forms of injustice and the sanctification of the market effectively killed politics (Fraser 2008). With the end of the Cold War, it became clear that the state could not be fully democratised just as it could not be fully decolonised (Quijano 1992), which triggered the emergence of decolonial thought as a particular version of a revisionist decolonisation, limited almost entirely to the epistemic sphere and abstaining from direct political action/​agency. This trajectory of the decolonial option as one of the most promising critical thoughts of the last three decades is in itself a symptom of the crisis in question. Although the crisis of democracy is not an entirely new situation, its present configuration is definitely unique. One of its defining features is that those in power are not in control. They don’t know what is going to happen next, their interests are diverging, and they haven’t agreed on a clear plan. Nonetheless, they’ll throw everything they’ve got into holding onto power. Meanwhile, their failings are on display for everyone to see, and uncertainty is in the air. (Gelderloos 2018) Our focus will be on the present and how such a crisis has been characterised from the mid 1970s onwards, and now has reached a point of serious escalation wherein what is actually critical is being negated.

A starting point: the trilateral commission The Trilateral Commission was a private institution established in 1973 under the directorship of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was a counsellor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and then later was President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981. Soon after its formation the organisation commissioned a report on ‘The Crisis of Democracy’ authored by Michel Crozier (representing Western Europe), Samuel Huntington (a friend of Brzezinski, representing the USA) and Joji Watanuki (representing Japan) (Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki 1975). The aim of the report was to ‘make democracy stronger as it grows and becomes more and more democratic’. As an expression of elites the report was contextualised by the closing moment of the Vietnam war, the associated protest as a linked afterlife of 1960s’ student radicalism, the continuation of the Cold War, proxy wars in Africa, the global energy/​oil crisis, plus an international banking crisis and stock market crash.

6 Introduction Effectively, positioned against the problems of that historical moment, the report was an ideological statement of faith in democracy as an enduring ‘viable system’ and an instrument of foreign affairs and policy, legitimising its export and imposition. But the report equally reflected the concerns of its historical moment and so opened by questioning the pessimism about democracy then being voiced and the challenges it faced. It then asked a series of questions: are European democracies becoming ungovernable? Are traditional institutions collapsing? And what is the impact of social, cultural and economic change upon principles of rationality and core political belief ? Thereafter, responses to these questions were considered in the different contexts of Western Europe, the USA and Japan. Concerns about the future of democracy were expressed in the report’s conclusion. These included issues of dysfunction, the delegitimation of authority, overloading the capacity of government, the disaggregation of its interests, and parochialism projected internationally. The point to make here is that rather than the problems the report named having been resolved, they have continued, while new and even more serious ones have arrived. In spite of the seeming universality and normativity of democracy, it is understood very differently in different parts of the world. As we are experiencing a greater shift towards a confrontation between various models of governance on a world scale, it is interesting to revisit Partha Chatterjee’s idea of democracy as a politics of the governed seen mainly within the scope of the non-​western world: Democracy today is not government of, by and for the people. Rather, it should be seen as the politics of the governed … The conflict that lies at the heart of modern politics in most of the world … is the opposition between the universal ideal of civic nationalism, based on individual freedoms and equal rights irrespective of distinctions of religion, race, language, or culture, and the particular demands of cultural identity, which call for the differential treatment of particular groups on grounds of vulnerability or backwardness or historical injustice, or indeed for numerous other reasons. The opposition … is symptomatic of the transition that occurred in modern politics in the course of the twentieth century from a conception of democratic politics grounded in the idea of popular sovereignty to one in which democratic politics is shaped by governmentality. (Chatterjee 2004, p. 4) An important addition to this picture is the position of the countries that attempt to revive the ideals of national modernities subscribing to and successfully participating in the economic growth and rivalry with the West, yet remaining sceptical about its values and often not regarding democracy as a crucial element of the package of modernity. Thus, K. Mahbubani (2008) enumerates the seven pillars of European wisdom as a free market economy,

Introduction  7 science and technology, meritocracy, pragmatism, a culture of peace, the rule of law and education. Yet he does not include democracy or political openness in this list of critically important parameters. India is an open society (existing by virtue of the split that created Pakistan, but still with residual religious tension) with a closed consciousness and China is a closed society with open thinking within the condition of closure (that has existed for millennia in order to hold together the fragments that constitute the whole) –​and these characteristics do not prevent either country from being technocentrically modern. In common with all dewesternisers, Mahbubani does not dare question the rhetoric of modernity, though honestly tries to divorce it from the logic of coloniality (Mignolo 2012). It proves to be impossible and his attempt ends in a shaky compromise. Three observations of the crisis of democracy follow on from this initial Euromodern moment, and its uninhibited global ‘export’ of the democratic rule of government will be presented. The first registers the deep structural flaws that now underlie democracy. The second considers a variety of ways in which democracy’s crisis has been defined, and the third puts the crisis of democracy into the frame of a larger and over-​determining condition of crisis.

The undemocratic underbelly of democracy The people vote, government is formed, and the nation is ruled  –​well, not quite. A third actor is present: the state. Arguably in its benign form the state is simply the organisational infrastructure that enables government to implement its policies and rule. Yet, in their recent critique of contemporary democracy, the Coordination of Anarchist Groups reminds us that the institutionalisation of the modern State, and in particular its democratic form, led to the birth of ‘citizenship’. Individuals would thus cease to be individuals, and become part of a superior reality –​the State –​which would provide them with security by preserving a handful of their natural and inalienable rights, and neutralising tendencies that are harmful to the community … The State defines what tendencies are harmful to the community, grants the rights and guarantees them, decides what is a right and what is not, and the State imposes or revokes such rights, if necessary by force, because the State has the monopoly on force. (Coordination of Anarchist Groups 2013) Moreover, this refers only to the formally liberal democratic types of the state that are normalised today. A different situation is to be found in authoritarian and semi-​authoritarian countries, where the state is sanctified together with the ruler (who even if called a ‘president’ remains a God-​chosen figure in an almost theocratic state). Thus Russia in its Czarist, Bolshevik and present versions inherits the Byzantine imperial political imagination, and strictly

8 Introduction follows the Christian Orthodox tradition in its extreme statism and seeing the state as a ‘metaphysical principle of sacred cosmology’ (Pelipenko 2007, p.  316). This leads to a transcendentally (rather than judiciary) legitimised dispensability of any human or other lives. But even if we leave such extreme forms aside, the state as a political institution can and does have a dark form named the ‘deep state’. Its present form has been attributed to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey who in 1923 established a clandestine network of military and civilian agents to suppress or murder any individual or organisation that opposed the secular regime he established (Filkins 2012). The deep state has now taken on a far more sophisticated character, first explored in a collection of essays, Bringing the State Back In (Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1985). Alongside the deep state is the associated concept of the ‘dual state’. Under the influence of Max Weber’s analysis of the ‘bureaucratisation of the modern world’ as a phenomenon that has depersonalised everyday life, Ernst Fraenkel developed a theory that he applied to the rise and coming to power of the National Socialists in Germany (Fraenkel 1941). What Hitler created as an administrative structure Fraenkel named as a dual state, as formed by the ‘Prerogative’ and ‘Normative’ State. The former employed the means to ensure the regime stayed in power. It did this by the use of emergency powers and martial law. What this enabled was the making of constitutional changes under the authority of emergency powers. In contrast the ‘Normative State’ maintained the ‘normal’ rule of law and police powers. These two divisions of the State have been adopted and transformed, with national variations into modernised forms, functioning as State Administration and the National Security State. Fraenkel’s thinking was actually prefigured by Carl Schmitt in his books Dictatorship ([1921] 2014) and Political Theology ([1922] 2005). It has predominantly been the influence of Schmitt that has exposed the current presence of the dual state. Moreover, as we shall see, Schmitt has also played a significant role in drawing attention to the crisis in democracy. We find something similar in the Stalinist USSR from the 1930s to the 1950s that reinstated and intensified the traditional neglect for human and other lives. The regime was marked by a growing gap between the official rhetoric of democratising the state to clean it of the previous ultra-​leftists and extremist proletarian dictatorship elements and bring it closer to a more traditional, normalised state that could be presented as attractive to the outside world, and an increasingly maniacal clinging to power by way of metastasing the secret police, mass repressions and deportations with their own parallel state of exception (unconstitutional) logic and law grounded in the inversion of human rights –​as in F. Hinkelammert’s formula: The inversion of human rights that Locke effects, can be summed up in a formula that he does not yet use, but which expresses his point of view well: no property for the enemies of property. This formula can synthesise all the inversions of human rights that Locke effects … It already

Introduction  9 appears in the French Revolution in the following terms: no liberty for the enemies of liberty, as Saint-​Just expresses it. Karl Popper assumes this same formula when he affirms that there is no tolerance for the enemies of tolerance … The same formula appears in the Stalinist purges in the discourses of the lawyer Wyschinski, adapted to that system. Thus, this is the formula in which modernity in all of its systems, as much as it sustains human rights, legitimates the violation of those rights, precisely in their own name. (Hinkelammert 2004, p. 19) While not directly addressing the concept of dual state, Giorgio Agamben’s address to Schmitt’s concept of the ‘State of Exception’ in 2003 (English translation 2005) alerted more readers to Schmitt’s political theory, and his engagement with law and the dualist nature of the State. A direct connection between the ‘state of exception’ and the theorisation of the dual state thus became more widely recognised (Wilson 2012). At the same time, the ‘state of exception’ was graphically exposed by the USA’s conduct at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre in Cuba, established by President George W.  Bush’s administration in 2002, where actual and suspected terrorists were indefinitely detained without trial, in defiance of Habeas Corpus and in violation of the Due Process Clause of the fifth and fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution, and tortured. The same conduct also applied to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Abuses of prisoners carried out there came to widespread public attention in 2004 with the publication of photographs in the USA and internationally showing inmates being tortured. This is an important detail –​as K. Mahbubani reminds us, the golden standard of the western human rights is the ban on slavery and torture. Yet who brought torture back in the 21st century? The USA. For whom then are the abstract human rights intended and where to find a recipe for a successful global discursive democracy (Mahbubani 2008)? More generally, the continuation and ‘naturalisation’ of the ‘war on terror’ as it spread to the ‘weaponisation of everyday life’ and attacks in many major cities globally led to the establishment of a ‘panoptic’ model of omnipresent surveillance that has effectively established the practices of the ‘state of exception’ as a normative condition inscribed into the infrastructure of the national security (dual) State in many nations around the world. There is one final, very general observation to make on the banality of the bureaucratic underpinning of the dual state wherein unnamed and invisible public servants make everyday decisions that have major impacts on people’s lives, sometimes with life or death consequences. As Zygmunt Bauman made clear, underscoring Hannah Arendt’s famous remark in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem on the ‘banality of evil’, it was the fascist bureaucratic machine that issued the instructions that directed the Holocaust and the conduct of depraved enforcers (Baumann 1989). As Bauman pointed out, the lesson has not been learnt: nothing has changed in terms of the power of this machine and

10 Introduction the dangers it poses (p. 115). In fact, in the present age of hegemonic instrumentalism, AI, robotics and educational induction into workplace cultures of compliance, the danger grows. The power relation between unelected public servants and political representatives of the people is actually one of the silent issues of the crisis of democracy.

Voices speaking crisis: a sampler In making the case for a new political imagination, the dysfunction and dislocation of politics will be situated in ways which will make clear the inadequacy of current presentations of the crisis of democracy. In order to do this three very different kinds of voices that are symptomatic of the problem are to be sampled. The first sample is general and is drawn from a group of academics. The second comes from a few mainstream, best-​selling political theorists. And the third is an overview by a French anti-​democracy, new right philosopher whose work has been influential with the alt-​right movement in the United States. We will refrain from comment until the views of these voices have been exposited; needless to say they will all be contested. During early 2018 the online publication The Conversation ran series of short articles asking ‘Is Democracy Dead or Alive?’ (el-​Wakil et  al. 2018) There were contributions from seventeen academics in the humanities and social sciences, from young researcher to senior professor and from ten different ‘developed’ countries. Here is a general compendium of the kind of views expressed. A start can be made with an explicit and implied call that ‘we’ use ‘this’ critical moment to reinvent and expand democracy in response to fewer than half the electorate voting in western democracies and the election of anti-​ democratic politicians, as well as in response to corruption and rising inequity. From several statements it was evident that there was a general recognition of a widespread conceptual abuse of ideas of democracy by the world’s political power brokers –​a problem clearly gaining increased profile as a result of the conduct of Donald Trump. At the same time this situation was seen to combine with another equally pervasive one  –​the reduction of complexity of contemporary critical political issues (if they surface at all) to simplistic and misleading characterisations of the problems of the times and ‘solutions’. In the face of elites appropriating the language of democracy for their own ends a ‘pressing’ need was expressed to rethink democracy in terms of defending and revisiting the basic idea and remaking and reconceptualising it. In contrast, democracy was also claimed as providing a defence against elites, but the reverse view was also enunciated whereby ‘our’ democracies were condemned for failing to protect communities from forces of domination. An even starker view was put forward asserting that ‘ethno-​nationalism and authoritarianism flourish in democracy and the ruins of capitalism’. But then what was put forward to counter this situation was the political idealism

Introduction  11 of the ‘Occupy movement’. Again in contrast, it was stated that claims that democracy is in peril or dead lack empirical evidence. A call for democracy’s values to be affirmed was made that centred on egalitarianism, the delivery of wellbeing, a defence of freedom and hostility towards tyranny. This and other remarks echoed the view of the schism between the ideals and aspirations associated with democracy and its flawed actuality. The contradictory condition of democracy was registered at the most extreme by those authoritarian regimes using the ballot box to create the appearance of democratic choice when there was none. Likewise contradiction was present in the recognition of the propensity of democracy to be an extension of consumerism, with politicians pitching citizens’ desires for lower taxes/​more spending power against more expensive public services –​thus the ‘common good’ being seen to be overridden by self-​interest. These examples reflected a particular view of an emergency, again going to the reform of democracy. Then a pluralist defence of democracy was made based on the idea that it cannot be pronounced as dead because it has so many forms. Additionally, it was acknowledged that there are many perverted forms of democracy that lack any kind of residual trace of ‘the will of the people’. Finally, the claim was made that ‘democracy will never die’. Now we move to briefly sketch how the positions of the three mainstream, best-​selling political theorists characterise the crisis of democracy. The first is by Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State from 1997 until he left office in 2001. In her book Fascism: A Warning (2018), she points to the rise of ‘strongmen’ rulers, a global resurgence of authoritarian regimes, a rising appeal of ideas of the far right and a general increase of xenophobia as all combining to threaten democracy and freedom. In this context she positions Donald Trump as the most anti-​democratic US President in its modern history. In contrast, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracy Dies (2018) cites four causes for democracy’s demise, which the authors view as a tragedy. The causes are:  the rejection of the rules by which the democratic process functions; the denial of the legitimacy of a political opposition; a willingness to tolerate violence; and a preparedness to curtail the civil liberties of anyone who opposes the elected government. Levitsky and Ziblatt point out that where democracies are displaced it is mostly not because of a military takeover but rather as a result of an internal implosion at the ballot box, along with an invasion of political institutions by autocrats. Notwithstanding their concerns, the authors idealistically place faith in ‘American democracy’ because they believe it has a high level of ‘mutual tolerance’ and ‘institutional forbearance’. The third book, How Democracy Ends by David Runciman (2018), a Cambridge University Professor of Politics, goes more directly to crisis, but arrives there more with a whimper than a bang. What he argues can be read first as representative democracy moving into an entropic condition, partly because of changes over time in the social structure, especially in western nations where electorates are more affluent, older and better educated, so that

12 Introduction the gap between the ruled and the political (who are of almost the same demographic) is very narrow indeed. Runciman also argues that democracy’s future is threatened by technology, especially as its power of social management, ‘the how of social reproduction’ increases. ‘Each new technological advancement rewrites social relations, progressively robbing us of control over our lives and giving control to the governments that surveil us and the corporations that exploit us’ (Gelderloos 2018). In actuality this is already happening, as illustrated by the Chinese emergent ‘social credit system’ wherein behaviour is electronically tracked and recorded. This includes data on your health, work record, your driving history, what you spend money on, your telephone records, social media and viewing habits. All of these activities and more are given a positive or negative score, and this score can determine, for instance, where you live, where you can travel to and how, who you can marry, where you can study, and what jobs you can apply for (Ma 2018). With the rise of the power of big data there is the expectation such systems will be universalised. The end for democracy for Runciman is a eurocentrically circumscribed demise of its representative form. His future view is of the emergence of another kind of democracy, more attuned to changed circumstances. Whereas Runciman stands for conservative centrism, the French philosopher Alain de Benoist’s position aligns with the alt-​right  –​one directly addressed in his essay ‘The Current Crisis of Democracy’ (2011). His position contrasts democracy’s status quo with what he deems to be ‘its foundational principles’. He sees the current crisis as a moment of a continuum that started in the 1880s, with the resurgence of liberal democracy (masked by the arrival of the welfare state) post Second World War, which then went into decline in the 1970s, thereafter to morph into pure (neo) liberalism. For de Benoist the crisis is systematic and a result of a contingent historical articulation between liberalism and democracy (pp. 11–​12). More concretely, the crisis is expressed in ‘the rise of the modern individual and civil society’ overwhelming the political authority of ‘the people’, with the result that democracy turns on itself. Another linked element of the crisis for de Benoist is not just the bonding of liberalism to individual rights but also its subservience to the economy and material advantage (p. 13). By implication, as he directly observes, ‘democracy is less and less democratic because it is less and less political’ (p. 14). But then, rather than addressing what it is becoming, he turns the political back to what it was, as the gaining of freedoms by participation in civil society (p. 19) –​which he sees as having little in common with participatory democracy (p. 20). Finally, he recognises ‘governance’ (a system of management and administration that now denotes the dominant form of government) as the end of politics.

Recasting: the relational actuality of crisis Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy was first published in 1923. The English translation (based on the 1926 edition), an early text in

Introduction  13 the rekindled interest in his work, arrived in 1985. It marked a significant contribution to the debate on modern politics and its fundamental problems, especially because much of what he addressed still illuminates political conditions in the present, in particular ‘theoretical questions of political will in a democracy’ (Kennedy 1985, p. xxxii). With respect to government and the contradictions between parliamentarism and democracy Schmitt pointed out that ‘The crisis of the parliamentary system and of parliamentary institutions in fact springs from the circumstances of modern mass democracy’ (Schmitt, trans. Kennedy 1985, p.  15). This observation echoes Runciman’s concerns voiced some ninety years later. What Schmitt recognised was that the modern state was actually incapable of delivering mass democracy (p. 16). While taken to be an irresistible ‘self-​advancing force’ it was divided between competing agents (e.g. civil society, liberalism and capital) (p. 24). Prophetically, in the context of the present, he remarked that ‘democracy seems fated to destroy itself in the problem of the formation of the will’ (p. 28). While this is a substantial critique it is overarched by a larger one, as is going to be made clear, but first a response to the critical positions of democracy presented so far. The undemocratic underbelly of democracy evident in the practices of the deep and dual state unambiguously reveal the poorly hidden undemocratic forces that reside under democracy’s representational facade. Between it and the projection of an operative democratic system is a middle ground of senior invisible bureaucrats wielding considerable power in the name of legislated policy, with varied degrees of oversight and knowledge by government ministers. So the mandate to govern enables unrepresentative policy to be enacted by ‘the people’s representatives’ and enforced by public servants with often considerable latitude. One of the areas where this has become most apparent is ‘border protection’ where, in the name of national security, people are detained and imprisoned in detention centres, often for years, without due process or any right of redress. Thus the bureaucracy is complicit in the operation of the ‘state of exception’. In their own terms there are obviously important issues of concern raised by many of the arguments and positions sampled. However, they also display a constricted view of the political sphere that overlooks the more complex and dynamic disjunctural relation between the political, democracy and politics. Effectively, the crisis of democracy no longer resides within its institutions, electoral practices or political theory and national and international affairs. Forces of a global scale unlike any time before in the historicity of our species, are now redefining the conditions of ‘the political’. Above all, politics and politicians are totally out of kilter with the temporality and complexity of an ontologically transformed political sphere as it is being redefined by those forces that are changing the conditions of life on Earth. The frequently evoked indeterminate ‘we’ and ‘the people’ no longer summon a political agency. The fundamental crisis of democracy is its inability to recognise the most significant issues determining the future viability of life as it is known. Consequently the need for pre-​emptive and reactive action to deal with this

14 Introduction situation remains unidentified and nothing is done. Myopically, winning support from an electorate to secure or improve existing ways of life, and the continuity of a political party in power, rules. Likewise, democratic politics is nationally introspective: foreign and global affairs are mostly at its margins, or are ‘played’ to galvanise a national interest. Such politics is obviously over-​ determined by the duration of an electoral cycle, which again is totally at odds with the temporality of the forces of change and the major crises that have already begun to unfold. The interplay of the relations of these crises exceeds the critical condition that the Anthropocene names. Moreover, the five categories that converge to constitute this situation –​geopolitical reconfiguration, climate change, loss of biodiversity, population pressures and natural resource stress, and hegemonic technology –​all exceed containment and signification of their particular singular category or any collective designation. Therefore an epistemological crisis is integral to the meta-​material psycho-​social crisis. For instance, the causal chain that climate change sets in motion is not contained by the discourse constituted in its name. Such change directly links to the loss of biodiversity, which in turn is also caused by, and causes, additional change factors. So in both cases these two problems not only connect to each other but also to the other forces of change that currently constitute the defuturing structural condition of unsustainability that are now normative and ensure increasing geopolitical instability and accompanying conflict. In the longer term the conditions of structural unsustainability that have now been established have initiated what evolutionary biologists have named as the planet’s anthropocentrically caused sixth extinction event. What is being outlined, all of which will be considered in more detail later, represents a coming profound change in the human condition. Confronting this prospect will clearly demand a massive practical and intellectual exercise that currently, even though the processes of transformation are underway, are not in any way being appropriately recognised. Certainly there is no politics available to begin to engage with this absolutely profound foundational change in the nature of the political condition of life on Earth. ‘Green politics’ sloganising an impoverished agenda gets nowhere near it, while democracy daily demonstrates its inability to face this situation in any substantial way and respond to it. The threat to life on Earth in general is not fundamentally the problems so far indicated, which are clearly massive, and beyond purely techno-​ instrumental means to resolve, and all require being addressed, mitigated or learnt to be lived with. Rather the key problem is ‘us’, our destructive conduct, and mode of being. In all our difference, to continue to be, ‘we’ have to become other than we are. This imperative makes the primary problem onto-​political, and this is why a new political imagination and the practical remaking of politics, but on a new ground of the political, are essential starting points to create and develop. The more our species attempts to retain its status quo –​albeit in a state of fragmenting –​the less chance we will have

Introduction  15 of a viable future, instead of one as ‘a machine busy producing a new version of the same old domination in order to bury all the unmapped possibilities suggested by the system’s decay’ (Gelderloos 2018). Clearly what is being suggested is not another political vision for an ideal society but an organisational structure able to begin to confront and respond to those known imperatives that will decide our collective fate, while equally acting against the pragmatic myopic ‘business as usual’ disposition that is dominant today.

Our ambitions and intent Against the backdrop of multiple planetary crises, we aim to make clear why a new political imagination is an issue of pressing critical importance to global futures, and the viability of our own and very many other species. Such an imagination has to start where politics currently ends: democracy cannot be taken as the flawed best of all possible options. Even in its plurality it cannot be taken to be the terminal point of political theory. A going beyond democracy has to be the realised possibility of the seemingly impossible. Here one has to remind oneself that impossibility is always the epistemological and perspectival circumscription of a specific socio-​cultural historicity. In this respect the present, if could have been viewed from the distant past would have looked like the impossible attained. The attainment of the seemingly impossible is in actuality one of the distinguishing attributes of our species. We will identify and analytically interrogate the ways that the nature of existing politics structurally, ideologically, conceptually organisationally/​institutionally obstructs a more complex, developed and appropriate understanding of ‘the political’, and thus a recognition of the foundational basis from which to start approaching a new political imagination. This review process will be done in the recognition of the ontological and technological transformations now underway that are remodelling the plural socio-​cultural natures of our being. Advancing an epistemological framework makes it possible to conceptualise the conditions in which a new political imagination can be created together with the gathering of a series of narratives that provide a more comprehensive and complex understanding of the foundational character of ‘the political’. The approach that will be adopted will not be delimited by Eurocentric and Euromodern perspectives. To support the entire exercise a clear account of how imagination has been understood and situationally deployed will be put forward. An extensive range of philosophical, historical, cultural and sociological sources will be drawn upon from a trans-​disciplinary perspective.

References Agamben, G., 2005. State of Exception. Trans. Attell, K. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

16 Introduction Albright, M., 2018. Fascism. A Warning. New York: Harper. Baumann, Z.,1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. New  York:  New  York University Press. Chatterjee, P., 2004. The Politics of the Governed. Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press. Coordination of Anarchist Groups, 2013. Against Democracy [online]. Available from: http://​againstdemocracy.blog.com/​ [Accessed 12 January 2020]. Crozier, M. J., Huntington, S.J. and Watanuki, J., 1975. The Crisis of Democracy. Trilateral Commission Report. New York: New York University Press. Dallmayr, F., 2003. Cosmopolitanism: Moral and political. Political Theory 31.3, 421–​ 442. doi.10.1177/​0090591703031003004 de Benoist, A., 2011. The current crisis in democracy. Telos 156, Fall, 7–​23. doi.10.3817/​ 0911156007 el-​Wakil, A., Szolucha, A., Teegarden, D., Smith, G., Rosenblum, N., Wilkin, P. and Yamanda, R., 2018. Is democracy dead or alive? Democracy has a future, if we rethink and remake it. The Conversation [online], 17 January, 2 and 7 February. Available from: https://​theconversation.com/​is-​democracy-​dead-​or-​alive [Accessed 2 June 2019]. Evans, P., Rueschemeyer, B.D. and Skocpol, T.,1985. Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Filkins, D., 2012. The deep state. The New  Yorker [online], 12 March. Available from:  www.newyorker.com/​reporting/​2012/​03/​12/​120312fa_​fact_​filkins?printable= true& currentPage–​all [Accessed 3 June 2019]. Fraenkel, E., [1941] 2010. The Dual State:  The Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. Trans. Shils, E.A, Lowenstein, E. and Knorr, K. Clark, New Jersey: Lawbook Exchange. Fraser, N., 2008. Scales of Justice. Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World. New York: Columbia University Press. Fry, T., 2011. Design as Politics. London: Berg. Gelderloos, P., 2018. Diagnostic of the future. Between the crisis of democracy and the crisis of capitalism:  A forecast. CrimethInk [online]. Available from:  https://​ crimethinc.com/ ​ 2 018/ ​ 1 1/ ​ 0 5/ ​ d iagnostic- ​ o f- ​ t he-​ f uture-​ b etween-​ t he-​ c risis-​ o f-​ democracy-​and-​the-​crisis-​of-​capitalism-​a-​forecast [Accessed 13 June 2019]. Hinkelammert, F., 2004.The hidden logic of modernity: Locke and the inversion of human rights. Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise (WKO), Fall. Available from: http://​ jhfc.duke.edu/​wko/​ [Accessed 12 January 2017]. Kennedy, E., 1985. Introduction. In:  Schmitt, C., 1985. The Crisis in Parliamentary Democracy. Trans. Kennedy, E. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lefort, C., 1988. Democracy and Political Theory. Trans. Macey, D. Cambridge: Polity Press. Levitsky, S. and Daniel Ziblatt, D., 2018. How Democracy Dies. New York: Crown  Forum. Ma, A., 2018. China has started ranking citizens with a creepy ‘social credit’ system. Business Insider [online], 30 October. Available from:  www.businessinsider.com. au/ ​ c hina- ​ s ocial- ​ c redit- ​ s ystem- ​ p unishments-​ a nd-​ rewards-​ explained-​ 2 018-​ 4 /​ ?r=US&IR=T [Accessed 12 August 2019]. Mahbubani, K., 2008. The New Asian Hemisphere. The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East. New York: Public Affairs. Marcos, S., 2005.The borders within:  The indigenous women’s movement and feminism in Mexico. In:  Waller, M. and Marcos, S. eds. Dialogue and Difference. Feminisms Challenge Globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 81–​112.

Introduction  17 Marlinspike, M. and Hart, W., 2005. An anarchist critique of democracy. The Anarchist Library [online], transcript, 1 November. Available from: http://​audioanarchy.org/​ radio/​democracy [Accessed 14 June 2019]. Mignolo, W., 2012. Delinking, decoloniality and dewesternization:  interview with Walter Mignolo. Critical Legal Thinking [online], 2 May. Available from:  http://​ criticallegalthinking.com/​2012/​05/​02/​delinking-​decoloniality-​dewesternization-​ interview-​with-​walter-​mignolo-​part-​ii/​ [Accessed 20 January 2019]. Mouffe, Ch., 2006. On the Political. London and New York: Routledge. Pelipenko, A., 2007. Dualisticheskaja Revoljutsija i Smislogenez v Istorii [Dualistic Revolution and Meaning-​generation in History]. Moscow: Librokom. Quijano, A.,1992. Colonialidad y modernidad/​ racionalidad. Peru Indigena 13.29, 11–​20. Runciman, D., 2018. How Democracy Ends. New York: Basic Books. Schmitt, C., 2005. Political Theology. Trans. Schwab, G. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Schmitt, C., 2014. Dictatorship. Trans. Hoelzl, M. and Ward, G., Cambridge: Polity. Taylor, Ch., 2002. Democratic exclusion  –​and its consequences. Eurozine [online], 21 February. Available from:  www.eurozine.com/​democratic-​exclusion-​and-​its-​ consequences-​3/​ [Accessed 12 January 2020] Wilson, E. (ed.), 2012. The Dual State, Parapolitics, Carl Schmitt and the National Security Complex. London: Routledge.

1  Openings Configuring the critical and criticality

A future without a future accelerates towards us all with every increment of sea level rise, newly arrived global conflict flashpoints, heat and drought-​driven abandonment of land, wildfire of unprecedented intensity, record-​breaking planetary temperature rise, extreme weather event, and disastrous loss of biodiversity. These events ensure an ever increasing volume of displaced human population. Indivisible from the relational complexity of this crisis, one which is beyond any other we, Homo sapiens, have ever experienced, are the commitments of governments to economic and political ‘business as usual’. Thus directionally committed, all they do, at best, is make token gestures to addressing specific environmental problems, including climate change, while under the aegis of ‘sustainability’ reforming the status quo.1 In doing so they fail to recognise and respond to the scale and seriousness of those compounding problems that are now transforming the very conditions of ‘life on Earth’. So contextualised, all available political institutions, means and ideologies are now completely out of joint with the pressing planetary political imperatives of confronting the extraordinary depth and extent of a crisis deeply embedded in the ontic condition of the complexity of our being. Thus ‘the crisis’ cannot be fully gathered and grasped (that is held and fully understood). In our emerging age of the Anthropocene, this crisis is beyond our fragmenting species’ ability to think the complexity of its complexity. The understanding of crisis that does arrive comes via instrumentally gathered data that provides the means for a hermeneutics that makes sense of those existential conditions deemed critical. Existentially ‘we’ know that floods, bush/​wild fires, droughts, cyclonic events, wars, pandemics and so on create critical environments that constitute the specific conditions of crises experienced. But what goes unknown is the relational causal historicity of these events and their compounding futural consequences. Gaining such knowledge requires not only the techno-​scientific means but also an epistemological foundation able to expose effect and affect beyond immediately discernible material impacts. Essentially, this means learning the critical character of crisis while being situated within it as an actor rather than as an illusory disassociated, objective observer. Positivistic knowledge is dis-​associative and thus its represented content can never communicate the actual scale and

Configuring the critical and criticality  19 dangers that reflect the relational nature of a compound(ing) crisis. We name the negation and inability of the compound crisis to be represented as ‘the crisis of crisis’ –​this is to say it is integral to crisis itself and the capability of it being understood and addressed. Yet thinking and acting in confrontation with the seemingly impossible is not a choice but an absolute imperative. While the relational complexity of the compound crisis can be objectified in the ways outlined, this still does not reveal the known but negated essence of the problem, its cause and eventual consequence (our eventual extinction). At the core of our unceasing defuturing propensity is our being anthropocentric. In putting our individual and collective interests above our foundational and common interests ‘we’ are the critical core of crisis: anyone who reflectively thinks about our being in crisis knows this. Uncriticality infuses almost everything we do, even that which is done in the name of engaging the critical. Notwithstanding claims made, it is almost certain that anthropocentrism cannot be transcended. But likewise it is almost certain that unless it is constrained and redirected our demise will be certain and not to be in the distant future of the solar catastrophe evoked by Lyotard (Lyotard 1992, p. 8). If anything is to provide the catalyst for a new political imagination and politics it has to gather around the negation of the power of anthropocentrism, for it is the essence of the compound crisis of the defuturing world unmaking that is now exposed as the ground of our species’ unwitting world-​making. At its simplest, ‘we’ have been unable to recognise what had been destroyed during the process of what ‘we’ have created. In the celebration of creation there has been an absolute inability to recognise its dialectical locus.

The moment of criticality and the now of crisis Criticism has almost totally forgotten that the critical moment is synonymous with crisis. This moment is the when what is ‘in balance’ falls into the past or the future, lives or dies. The forgetting of the critical begs critique, but as Bruno Latour wrote:  ‘Critique has not been critical enough in spite of all its sore-​scratching’ (Latour 2004, p. 232). It is worth noting here that crisis and criticism are cognate words, that crises (stemming from the Greek word krenein  –​to choose) are related to change. They should provide an opportunity for a more or less conscious choice of the future, for making a decision. As reflected in the two characters of the Chinese word for crisis –​danger and opportunity –​crisis should therefore be viewed as potentially productive and essential to confront. Reiterating, our collective being in difference is in crisis wherein there is a continual foreshortening of our species’ temporal existence. The fundamentally critical feature of this crisis is the absence of its appearance by intent. Its presence is ignored. The illusory magnetic power of normality holds crisis at bay and lets life go on, except it doesn’t. Life is critical –​the condition as crisis has been registered in numerous ways, each with its own condition of limit, possibility and time. The sixth extinction event, a quiet but growing risk

20  Configuring the critical and criticality of nuclear war, climate change passing a tipping point that renders the planet inhospitable for large numbers of species –​these are but three examples. But the most critical thing about the crisis is the crisis of the crisis. The crisis of the crisis is crisis being ignored, repressed or being displaced by the immediate concern for pressing problems of pragmatic ‘importance’ (Gordon and Gordon 2010, p. 19). Led by a myopic political preoccupation with maintaining power and securing the ‘normality’ of ‘business as usual everydayness’ the crisis of the crisis is nonetheless sensed, but then placed beyond epistemological reach while automatically and instantly being deferred. In truth, if this crisis were to be politically acknowledged the powerlessness of all extant political institutions would be exposed. Besides its omnipresent absence, the crisis of the crisis has underlying and very discernible features. First, it is a structural accumulation of defuturing forces. As such, while it can be known, this is only in part and possible via desegregated symptoms. Second, while many people have knowledge of its different individual features they are mostly not seen as relationally connected. Third, fragments individually seen or relationally connected are mostly viewed as if they were moving slowly, whereas by any measure of futural significance and geo-​ecological time their movement is rapid. And finally, even if crisis in its complexity is acknowledged, be it unevenly in our difference, we are not mere observers of it. As a critical condition: we are integral to it. As it changes and deepens, its character alters –​but so do we. For instance, in the specific case of ‘human/​technology modal relations’, Stefan Herbrechter pointedly remarks, ‘The “critical” in “critical posthumanism” names precisely this:  the task of analysing the process of technologisation, based on the idea of a radical independence or mutual interpenetration between the human, the posthuman and the inhuman’ (Herbrechter 2013, pp. 21–​20). Put plainly, besides being generative and recipients of crisis, the very nature of what we now plurally are is integral to the crisis as our species transmogrifies to become something other than what we currently are. Now, in the making of the world-​within-​the-​world that ontologically made and still makes us, we can assume that the other beings that ‘we’ become, have created, and are creating, will make another world extending the crises of now, that will be (already is) completely alien to us. As a result of this process the previous teleology of our existence is shifted or cancelled.

History without telos Hegel’s philosophy of history (Hegel 2011) which has informed much of the modern conceptions of historicity was grounded in a specific teleology aimed at the imminent triumph of rationality through continuous progress towards the reign of spirit. In spite of abundant criticism of this model in various philosophic schools and in spite of the parallel existence of alternative teleological models devalued by modernity, it has survived as its main engine until recently acquiring in the mainstream political models a form of the total

Configuring the critical and criticality  21 marketisation and a global expansion of liberal democracy. Modernity as a newness project has seemed to always have a better future as its purpose and a belief in such a future has remained an important drive within people’s lives in the lighter and darker (colonial) sides of modernity. In the twentieth century the liberal capitalist and state socialist versions of modernity both had their own teleological recipes of the imminent harmonious tomorrow of cancelled time, while the competition between these images of the future constituted the core of the Cold War drama. Yet outside of this dichotomy there have existed positions that questioned the presumed connection of modernity and (happy) future, seeing it instead as ultimately a defuturing phenomenon, taking the world to the empty present, the limited ‘surface of representation’(Vázquez 2017, p.  84) and erasing step by step the diversity of the futures to come. This position is particularly emblematic of indigenous, former colonised and minoritarian groups expelled from modernity, whose past was forcefully erased and therefore begs for restoration. However, at times such a position tends to focus exclusively on the past, avoiding confronting the issue of the future. With the end of the Cold War and the accession of neoliberalism, teleology was quickly cancelled. F. Fukuyama’s infamous ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1992) thesis was presented at first as an ideal state of freedom from teleology, a marvellous liberation from the necessity to fight the enemy or go through the day of doom scenarios. Initially, neoliberal globalisation was wrapped in an attractive packaging for the winners –​the erasing of borders, the unified shrunken world, the unlimited travel of people and money. The world indeed seemed to have lost its purpose and reached its homeostasis. The time of grand utopias was over. Soon history continued its course while the gap has been steadily growing between the neoliberal mythology of the flat world of eternal present inhabited by atomic individuals and unbound phenomena, and the negated relational temporal and spatial multiplicity of the world. The discriminatory nature of the global culture, its unfair conditions of inclusion through erasing identities or through their exaggeration and commercialisation have emerged with full force. Today in its negative phase the globe trotter has been replaced by the refugee as the protagonist of globalisation (Krastev 2017, p. 22) and the eternal now of the happy consumers has shown its negative affinity with extreme social apathy and impasse. Neoliberalism successfully ‘atrophied the utopian imagination’ (Klein 2017, p. 219). Defeated modernity looms as a truly post-​global condition of abandonment that is becoming manifest in terms of people (refugees and other dispensable lives or crisis emblems who are being avoided at all costs and on whom we collectively give up), the notion of a world order and international law (reconfiguring dislocated power blocs/​dying and renewing empires, which results in a joyless, polycentric model grounded in a mortal clash of irreconcilable reckless ambitions, rather than a pluriversal2 idyll), and at the most extreme, beginning to implement the idea of abandoning the planet itself (the Mars project).

22  Configuring the critical and criticality In recent years and especially among the losers of neoliberal modernity a popular replacement of the lost global telos is turning to artificially constructed images of the grand national or other local pasts masking the missing future and diverting the public attention from global challenges. This stance is radically different from indigenous and minoritarian reclaiming of the erased past as a guarantee of the possibility of alternative futures as it wants to simply recreate the very past that led to today’s disastrous present. The consumers are matched by populist politicians who do not want to change the future or even speak of it at all. They meet in the realm of the eternal status quo and the endless present, in which no one needs to change, everyone is good the way they are. This position lacks telos as such. It is not offering any common project to fight for, simply prolonging abeyance for a little while longer. The focus on highly politicised sensational issues or technological and scientific achievements is unable to mask the predominant dystopian sensibility of our times and the negative ontological condition we share. The lost shared telos generates a futureless ontology (Tlostanova 2018, p. 1) in which no one is promised happiness even in the distant future, to say nothing of the possibility of any future as such. The bankruptcy of regular political institutions and previous grounds for coalitions and solidarity further increases the global atomisation and dissociation. How to compensate for this lost telos? Only by carefully re-​cultivating the human ability to envision a radically different future. Only through nurturing an open utopia of a positive life-​building, a picture of a different world which could unite the majority of the people on the planet, even if at the expense of the necessary sacrifice of some of our interests and stopping to compete for misery. This leads us to one of the key concepts which we consider definitive for contemporaneity and the gist of the global crisis –​that of unsettlement.

Unsettlement at the end of directional time Unsettlement names a moment in human existence that recognises an ending without any clear sense of what is beginning. Along with this goes a certain feeling of foreboding about what will arrive and will be unwelcome. As a result, life is lived in ever expanding conditions of uncertainty. The slow existential realisation of this situation heralds the coming ‘age of unsettlement’. Confronting this age extends from seeing it enfolding the present ‘state of the world’ to it being lived as condition directed by, and experienced as, a ‘state of mind’ –​a psychology. For the geo-​physical and psycho-​socially unsettled masses of lived unsettlement the past is memory occupied by a pain of loss and a procession of all that was once experienced and treasured. As for the present, it is lived as a non-​life, while the future is merely a void filled with a daily mix of faint hope and despair. This primary constituency of the unsettlement is destined to grow, not least from displacement by the impacts of climate change (Fry 2015, pp. 8–​ 11). Organisations as diverse as the World Bank, Oxfam, the International

Configuring the critical and criticality  23 Red Cross and the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) are saying that there will likely be hundreds of millions of climate refugees by the end of the century, or a little after. This is an incredibly disturbing prospect recognising that the ‘international community’ already has problems accommodating at the time of writing (March 2019) the 68.5 million refugees, internally displaced people and asylum seekers listed by UNHCR as currently existing in the world. Beyond the primary constituency of the unsettled there is a huge global secondary order:  a world of onlookers observing all that is displaced, unsettled and called into vision by the spectre of a ‘world picture’ as it is formed from images of conflict, climatic change, unnatural disasters, environmental crises, economic collapse, political repressions, social dysfunction and more. Unsettlement so mediated arrives again as a psychological state of mind –​one that either is filled with a sense of helplessness, destined to become nihilism, lived as all-​consuming alienation or as global recoil and thereafter withdrawal that is followed by a retreat into a minimal-​self or diversionary preoccupations. Prior to the coming of the electronic ecology of the image, the ‘state of the world’ only arrived slowly, partially and in fragmentary form. But now is the time of a ‘real-​time digital world picture’ with its instant and totalising, all-​ enveloping exposure to the pain and suffering of an entire world of violence, abuse, abandonment and unsettlement. To look is to be captured in a frame of the incomprehensible that takes possession of thought and vision to so often dull it. Hereafter, unsettlement becomes psychologically integral to being-​in-​ the world that is mostly numbed, and occasionally amplified by seen events. Unsettlement cannot be dealt with unless it is faced (which itself presumes a certain level of stability and privilege that only comes once the fundamental physical and psycho-​social essential needs of life are met). However, facing it does not mean an overcoming but, at best, confronting it with resignation and resolve. One can hardly be sanguine that our leaders, political and economic, will be inclined to so act. Out of resolve, we (that’s all of us who have a condition of possibility) have to try to place ourselves in a position to imagine and act towards another kind of future, another kind of politics, economy and culture, obviously within the scope of whatever our circumstances allow. No matter what these are, ‘we’ have to learn to think in ways other than those into which we have been inculcated. In doing so there is a coming to terms with the realisation that so much of what is thought is not just ours, so not chosen or produced by us. There is no liberation from the ‘ecology of mind’ (Bateson 1973, pp. 445–​481), but there is critical selection and assessment of the thought that one inducts. Of being in a state of second order unsettlement and resolve here is what Richard Sennett has to say: ‘So great are the changes required to alter humankind’s dealings with the physical world that only this sense of self-​ displacement and estrangement can drive the actual practices of change and reduce our consuming desires’. He then, with a detectable but critical slide

24  Configuring the critical and criticality into characterising a Eurocentric minimal-​self, concludes that, ‘rather than confronting the self-​destructive territory we have actually made, we strive to escape into “idealised nature” ’ (Sennett 2008, p. 13). However, in the decade plus since this view was expressed the increased impacts of anthropogenic-​ enhanced climate change, the huge loss of the planet’s biodiversity, and greater biotechnological incursion into the natural have tainted this idealisation. The situation of complex unsettlement and futurelessness is neither addressed nor comprehended by those who make decisions for the world. This leads to a paradoxical phenomenon of futureless leadership.

Undirected futureless ‘leadership’ In Hollywood dystopias it is often the aliens among us who are responsible for mass hallucinations, Plato caves and various Matrix effects. In reality it is the presumed leaders or the ruling elites that perform this brainwashing function. They are increasingly unsuccessful as the selfishness, economic and power greediness, lack of vision, –​particularly a denial of material limitations imposed by the Earth, by nature itself –​myopic unwillingness to think of the future in any long-​term perspective, and a reactive rather than preventive type of agency, are becoming obvious to everyone. Disaster or shock capitalism (Klein 2008) as a contemporary configuration of the naturalised state of exception, acquires new forms and increasingly global dimensions cancelling the future for us all. Civil and political society (Chatterjee 2004) are increasingly aware of this, yet the current political instruments and existing institutions, as well as the remaining political rhetoric and conceptual apparatus, do not allow for a radical shift, staying instead in the grip of outdated assumptions and unable to keep up with a reality in which the global challenges are now being actively remapped and re-​envisioned. As briefly discussed above and just like everyone else, politicians involved in global decision making have lost their telos, the same way as politics ‘has lost its identifiable goal’ and become ‘a politics with no object’ in effect ‘rejecting the world that it claims to inhabit’ (Latour 2018, p. 38). This stance by definition does not include the future and particularly a shared future for all people or, more broadly, for all life on this planet. The selfish goal of staying in power by ‘administering’ the apparatus of institutional continuity to maintain the status quo requires pretending to live in the eternal present, propped up by the sanitised model of the ideal past. The most obvious examples of this toxic, futureless leadership grounded in a denial of the common future and cheap attempts to persuade the people that it is possible for their nation-​state to become the sole great power while the rest of the world perishes are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, each with their own specific electorate of those confused populations whose ontological assumptions stay squarely within their respective normalised yet inherently contradictory brands of modernity. However, even these groups are today beginning to understand that they were deceived, that instead of the promised national renaissance and grandeur

Configuring the critical and criticality  25 they have ended up with yet another edition of neoliberalism extracting profits not only from the violated land but increasingly from the people in a contemporary version of zoological economic coloniality (a parallel annihilation of fur-​providing animals and the indigenous people who were forced to hunt for those animals under pain of death during the early colonisation of Siberia, Schapov 1906). The pseudo-​leaders are aware of this growing awakening and dissent and have prisons, detention camps, total surveillance, walls enclosing whole countries, etc. ready. It whould be naïve to assume that the change of the futureless leadership would be painless and smooth or even come at all. Their undirected and reckless management style has already made it almost impossible and too late to attempt such a shift. The failure of leadership in today’s world reflects a deeper and more pervasive problem of chronophobia which increasingly marks political thinking and our existential condition, the inability to rethink our relations with and understanding of time in the face of disorder and defuturing.

Chronophobia and the existential repression of crisis Time is not one. Different discourses, different time  –​none have the right time. The gap between chronos (time as a medium) and kairos (time as the right and opportune moment) is unbridgeable (Fry 2012, p. 111). So too is the gap between the characterisation of time by physics (a dimension) and a philosophy of time (multiple theories and levels of temporality –​including, wherein everything has its own time). So, while the word ‘time’ is common, and while functionally there is a consensual use of the everyday measure of time, there is no shared object of reference beyond this. Yet even in this commonality of ‘clock time’, as a directive operative mechanism of regulation, there is an existential and cultural difference in the felt presence of measured time. Talking of measure, however, physics has a very different calculus. Here is an example: a second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-​133 atom (Fry 2012, p. 112). Time objectified is always time negated by change (aeternitas: a continuum of the pure present of a passing away and a passing to –​Walter Benjamin called this everlasting now a time filled by the presence of the now –​jetztzeit (Benjamin 1970: 263) in which all of us are forever situated). And then, as Einstein, in implied agreement with Heidegger, who was citing Aristotle’s Physics, pointed out, ‘time is that within which events take place’ (Heidegger 1992, 3E). Thinking chronophobia: chronophobia draws its presence out of the variable duration of our mortality. Understood as fear of time and of the illusion of permanence, chronophobia takes us away from the futuring demands we face:  the consequences of ‘our’ past actions travelling towards us from the future. Drawn from Nietzsche’s understanding of Eternal Return (Loeb and Richardson 2013) the concept of chronophobia was refocused by Bernd Magnus (Magnus 1978, pp.  190–​195), although Kant had already exposed

26  Configuring the critical and criticality the notion of ‘permanent presence’ as being merely an illusory product of the fiction ‘of a temporalising projection of man’s finite existence’ (Kearney 1988, pp.192–​193). For the modern subject, the fear of time is of ‘becoming and change’ together with the wish for permanence in the knowledge of the uncertain moment of death (Kearney 1988, pp. 192–​193). It was this disposition towards time that Nietzsche took as a mark of the decadence of western metaphysics. One can extend this thinking to modernity and the global imposition of the time of the West. Here is a conflation between the attempt to bring the world into order and the establishment of a world order –​the Nomos of the Earth of Jus Publicum Europaeum (Schmitt 2006). As a result, indigenous cultures were obliged to function in the duality of their own and the imposed time. As Indian subaltern historian Partha Chatterjee pointed out when questioning Benedict Anderson’s concept of the empty homogenous time (Anderson 1983) (the time of the nation, of modernity, of capital), by imagining capital (or modernity) as an attribute of time itself, this view succeeds not only in branding the resistances to it as archaic and backward, but also in securing for capital and modernity their ultimate triumph, regardless of what some people may believe or hope, because after all, time does not stand still. (Chatterjee 2004, p. 5) Chronophobes have a disabled sense of finitude and are unable to confront their ‘being in time’. As a result they become inherently inauthentic subjects who search for ways to live that will avoid confronting their own mortality. To do this they focus on trying to create a present centred on the realisation of ‘fame, wealth and power’ (Zimmerman 1981, p.  225). So doing has serious consequences, for it constitutes a subject purely concerned with the self who negates the possibility to grasp and comprehend that the future has to be secured. Chronophobia in such a setting also denotes an arrested imagination:  an inability that significantly diminishes the possibility of ‘thinking in time’ (understood in relation to time as a medium and thinking with an urgency that enables taking action to avoid an emergency). Chronophobia, as indicated, needs to be recognised as a widespread and very depowering psycho-​cognitive block to gaining the ability to act futurally. In current global circumstances, it is merging with a fear of a popular culture-​ projected crisis-​filled future. What this combination constitutes is a fear of ‘time without time’ that brings an existential confrontation with finitude into immediate presence. So placed, time can be seen as disappearing, as itself being defutured, thereby heightening a condition of psychological unsettlement. The development of any new political imagination and associated practice have to be able to counter the fatalistic recoil that such a state of mind induces, by making available a desired form of action that brings into being an attainable felt sense of a futural authenticity.

Configuring the critical and criticality  27

The culture of de-​relational knowledge An additional impediment in configuring the critical and criticality is that scientific and expert knowledge mostly produced in academia is increasingly becoming de-​relational (both towards the world outside the university or research centre, and also in the way different areas of knowledge less and less relate to each other) and unable and unwilling to address the burning issues and global challenges. The steadily growing mass of accumulated factual knowledge does not help to change the world for the better, as the neoliberal knowledge production mode allows only for the existence and promotion of knowledge –​or even just skills –​that can bring profit in the near term or make one competitive in looking for a job. Such a pragmatic and monetised interpretation of knowledge does not leave any space for a long-​term perspective and engaging with global challenges in a preventive rather than reactive way, and without immediate concrete beneficiaries or sponsors in view. In other words, global problems and challenges are too enormous and hard to grasp or organise within the existing disciplinary matrix of knowledge with its specific economic, institutional, structural and social machinery. As in politics, in academic culture it is easier to pretend that the problem of futurelessness does not exist than attempt to rebuild the system to make it fit to tackle complex problems at different interrelated levels and in a dynamic relational way. The conventional disciplinary sieve, in spite of occasional token inclusion of interdisciplinarity, often sifts out any elements of relational knowledge which could serve as an important ground for alternative learning and cognition models. It is impossible to delink from this epistemic crisis while staying within its cognitive matrix, keeping its methodological tools and institutional boundaries intact. Looking for solutions to the global challenges needs a global will to change not only in politics but also in epistemology and in pedagogy which is largely still lacking. Moreover, the now dominant business model of the academy bonds many academics to compliance requirements delivering ‘performance and graduate attributes’ that not only serve the economic status quo but create a condition of alienation that for some produces intellectual paralysis. It is difficult or at times impossible to assume the legitimate role of knowledge producer outside the limits of academia, which allows only the selected (and already established) few to have the courage to delink. An excessive fragmentation of knowledge together with unreflected upon or denied chronophobia make it difficult to rethink the mechanisms, conditions and goals of knowledge production. An awareness of knowledge’s potential to change the world for the better rather than solipsistically close in on itself often remains a declaration. Universities do require researchers to justify their research topics through explaining their connection to beneficial societal changes, yet in most cases it turns to be an empty ritual –​whereas the truly relational knowledge growing out of and together with complex

28  Configuring the critical and criticality experience, interaction with real life and activism, and building knowledge in relation to research, dialogue and projects and services, targeted at changing the world, is often dismissed as falling outside the prescribed definitions of what constitutes (scientific) knowledge. Indeed, the more we know the less we understand. The necessary shift towards putting knowledge back together after its excessive fragmentation is noticeable from several directions. One of them refers to more conventional integrative trans-​disciplinary forms of inquiry such as synergetics in its different modes (Haken 1982, Prigogine and Stengers 1984); another stems from critical post-​disciplinary trends such as Donna Haraway’s radical stand, claiming that alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope, and neither is a sensible attitude. Neither despair nor hope is tuned to the senses, to mindful matter, to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence. (Haraway 2016, p. 4) Still another approach reconnects with the erased indigenous (other-​than-​ modern) cosmologies for which integrative complex relational experiential knowledge of the world and in the world has been always a default assumption (Simpson 2017, Wildcat et al. 2014). Yet persistent institutional impediments still make it difficult for such forms of knowledge to develop and be properly acknowledged and taken into account –​that is to say, those forms aiming at the development of reflective and intuitive practices and ‘stressing heteronomy and multi-​faceted relationality, instead of autonomy and self-​ referential disciplinary purity’ (Braidotti 2013, p.  145). This concise discussion of derelational knowledge, to which we will come back later, brings a need to focus on relationality as a promising epistemic, existential, affective and actional principle.

On relationality Relationality travels under and in various dimensions, names and guises. Here is what its euromodern overview looks like. From the start of his lectures given in 1925 prior to the publication two years later of Being and Time, Heidegger presents the reader with the largest Earthly frame of relationality by positing relationality as the fundamental condition of the relation of worldhood to our being-​in-​the-​world. Present at numerous scales, in its visible and invisible presence, as concept and agency, relationality reappears throughout his oeuvre, often returning as an ever-​open question: We immediately conceive the relation in terms of the things, which in the given instance are related. We little understand how in what way, by what

Configuring the critical and criticality  29 means, and from where the relations come about, and what it properly is qua relation. (Heidegger [1959] 1971, p. 83) The actual locus of relationality in thought is relational. Take, for example the porous and triangular relation of relationality between these thinkers: Heidegger, Descartes, Arendt and Levinas. Heidegger/​Descartes –​ Arendt/​ Heidegger –​ Arendt/​Levinas Andrew Benjamin argues that Heidegger ‘recovered’ relationality from aspects of Descartes’ project (Benjamin 2016, pp. 35–​60), but this observation simply opens into another question of origin. Arendt clearly embraced relationality in Heidegger’s orbit, but she made it directionally her own, as is evident in her politics of plurality –​not to be mistaken for pluralism (Topolski 2015). But then she shared another source and common heritage, this with Levinas and Judaism wherein there is a medieval relational theology that argues against omnipotence. For Levinas relationality was central to the indivisible relation between the self and the Other mediated by the face and his ethics of alterity, while also grounded in this medieval Jewish past. Philosopher and scholar of Jewish thought, Andrew Benjamin’s work on relationality (Benjamin 2010 2016) has set out to recover this origin, while Sandra Lubarsky (2010) presents it in a modern form as linked to Whitehead and process philosophy. Not only does relationality flow between these thinkers but equally back and forward in time. As such it is known even if not felt, as described in Whitehead’s writing on being conscious of feelings and ‘that particularity of the nexus between particular entities’ that points out that consciousness of the ‘spatial and temporal relations between things’ cannot be from those feeling of which we are conscious (Whitehead, [1929]1978, p. 229). ‘We’ are thus not mere observers of that which is relational but are implicated in the condition of relationality. The overarching principle is the primacy of the relation, be it as different as the inter-​textual relation between signs to signs; the interaction of subjects to an event; or the being of being-​in-​the-​world –​while the underlying process is prehension, the grasping of what is perceived at a cognitive and/​or emotional level. For all the significance of the concept of relationality, the weight of its epistemological and political importance has not been adequately acknowledged. Relationality is the other of disciplinary closure and division of knowledge that disarticulates the structures of complexity, and as Benjamin (2016) puts it, is ‘philosophy’s other possibility’. More specifically, relational ontology can be characterised as a trans-​disciplinary epistemology. As such it is a matrix of connectivity that can underlay atomised knowledge and overlay it. Knowledge is not accessed from a position external to this connectivity but from a specificity of a locus within it that channels the conjuncturally particular from the

30  Configuring the critical and criticality relationally whole. The singular is actually an occurrence within the plurality of relationality (Benjamin 2016, p. 2). Because of the trace of medieval Judaism evident in the epistemological origins of relationality taken in its Euromodern frame, Eurocentricity could be seen, like much else of western thought, as not totally pure. Certainly a relational mode of thought infuses many so-​called ethno-​epistemologies3 permeating a complexity spanning, for instance, kinship structures and wider social relations, the configuration of the biological self in the biosphere, the dynamic structuring of a cosmology, the phenomenal relation of things, and inculcated modes of perception. More specifically, there is an active debate on relationality in African cultural theory (Horsthemke 2017, pp. 183–​189). Relationality (pratitya-​samutpada) was integral to classical Buddhism as ‘a doctrine of the reciprocity and dependent co-​arising of all things or beings’ (Dallmayr 1996, p. 178). References have been made to various indigenous or indigenous-​derived concepts akin to relationality such as Southern African Ubuntu, Andean Pachamama and Sumak Kawsay, Indian correlational principle so-​hum (Eze 2017, Escobar 2018, pp. 100–​104; Shiva 2005, p. 140). An interesting and different documented relation to relationality is also provided by the continuity from the ancient to the modern in Chinese correlative thinking where ‘… elements are selected and correlated from the perspective of the correlator’ (Hall and Ames 1995, p.  124). The elements are seen as a ‘species of imagination’ and presuppose ‘association and differentiation’ (p. 125). As process, the correlative (as language and thought) transcends but accommodates the singular, as it functions from relations extending the particular to the cosmos, for ‘all things flow’ (pp.  136–​138). Relationality and correlative thought are different but the same, in so far as both are predicated upon process. In this respect, brought together, they could be viewed as an archetype of border thinking that begs examination. The disjunctive relation of the political could be seen as even more serious, for it not only shares the epistemological problems of divided knowledge but also disconnects and abstracts the causality of local, national and international problems. The departmental and ministerial division of government becomes the administrative instrument of such reification. This structuring excludes thinking and acting in time because of the over-​determination of the electoral cycle and/​or the consensual popularism of (non)‘democratic’ regimes. But then above all this, the disjunctive relation produces an inability to comprehend and address the largest, most pressing and serious global problems able to be brought to presence. These are not engaged with because they are simply beyond the capacity of political institutions to grasp and address, within the restrictive imagination and structurally delimited institutional system. Finally, relationality should be acknowledged as underpinning the theoretically informed practice of ontological design, as it (relationality) recognises the causal inter-​relation of objects and ‘things’ in space and time (Escobar 2018; Fry 2009; Willis 2006). Thus designed objects come out of a relation

Configuring the critical and criticality  31 to other objects. For example the form of a chair arrives out of a historical relation to the design of chairs that prefigured it, and in being a chair it enters into an environment as a futural designing agency, for instance, as it designs a mode of sitting, which in turn has bodily design effects; as a chair is integral to designing the space in which it arrives; and, as a chair is directive of the functions it affords  –​like sitting at a table eating, or at a desk writing. Objects combine to create a relational world of ontological designing things that endlessly design our being in ‘being-​in-​the-​world’ and of the world-​in-​ being –​everything brought into being by design goes of designing. The lack of relationality influences, among other aspects, the functionality of dysfunctional international relations and results in the loss of the grasp of the world as an interrelated entirety and the collapse of the Nomos of the earth.

The collapse of ‘the Nomos of the earth’ From the sixteenth until just after the end of the nineteenth century, the Nomos of the Earth arrived and ruled as a Eurocentric, imposed global spatial order. This had four primary characteristics: violent colonial occupation, the subordination of indigenous peoples, land appropriation and resource extraction. This ‘rule of the Earth’ was designated Jus Publicicum Europaeum and, in European eyes, deemed lawful. Its major final act was the Congo Conference in Berlin in 1885 that ‘carved up’ Africa by making lines on a map with pen and ruler that were thereafter transposed onto the land by colonial force. Such an act by European powers marks the capstone of this epoch of injustice. This actions’s ongoing afterlife of environmental and cultural vandalism remains inseparable from the continuing problems that African nations still face. This world order of imposition did not survive two world wars and numerous wars of colonial liberation. Yet the institutional creation of a new, Kantian-​inspired, idealised world order was attempted first by launching the League of Nations between the wars, then, in the same spirit, in 1948, through the formation of the United Nations. The UN maintained the fiction of realising a world order via the resolution of global division of difference into the developed world (as the normative model to universalise), the second world (mainly the communist bloc), the developing world (an imposed designation), and the fourth world (indigenous, politically and economically dysfunctional and de facto, abandoned). Notwithstanding the division of the Cold War and the arrival of communist China, the UN objective and transformative agenda was directed at ‘the developing nations’ via US ‘inspired’ Rostow’s capitalist five-​stage modernisation theory model. Its aim was to take traditional society to an age of mass consumption (Rostow 1960). The economic agenda was complemented by a cultural one including ‘functional literacy’ (‘how to’ read economic, functional information, such as machine operating manuals). Here, then, economic imperialism, masked by the rhetoric of social and economic development, was assisted by a constructed image

32  Configuring the critical and criticality of ‘one world’ humanism’, aided and managed by international relations (a practice born of the same moment as The League of Nations).4 While the UN lingers on, the humanism and idealism of its project is all but exhausted. The UN model of development was overtaken by an ‘end of the Cold War’ neoliberal attempt to create a global economic hegemonic order. Continuing to function in the exchange relations of international commodity capitalism and its labour market, this order remains dominant (Brown 2015) and includes the states which have visibly shifted to conservative, protectionist, rightist agendas (these may be used in mass media and public discourses but the economy and the social reality are becoming steadily more and more neoliberal everywhere). However, this order is totally unsustainable, and now ever under risk as the geopolitical power blocs of the world have become increasingly fractured, while deep fissures of instability increase  –​ including environmental and economic unsustainability, climate change and a rapid loss of planetary biodiversity. The myopic political pragmatic of the current moment rests on the proposition that market forces can hold the ailing geopolitical body of the planet of unsustainable practices together. But this misplaced action is failing. The impetus of climatic-​environmental crises continually increases, market competition is becoming infused by economic modes of conflict, while international law breaks down, especially in relation to asymmetrical wars and insurgencies. Then the treatment of refugees and the associated abandonment of ‘human rights’ further add to the terminal state of global humanism and the evident limitations of the agency of the UN and instruments of international justice. For example it has not been possible to bring an aggressor nation to justice because, while the Nuremberg Tribunal (1945–​46) established ‘war of aggression’ as a crime, there has never been an international agreement that defines its meaning. The general structural problems of the world (dis)order include major shifts of the geopolitical tectonic plates of the planet –​as seen, among other things, in the US contraction into life behind walls of protection and likely backing away from support to its allies; Chinese regional expansion with Asia tailgating; the weakening of Europe; and the disruptive aims of Russia. But underlying these structural difficulties there are also many conceptual problems, including the entropic destiny of the global economy and the non-​relationality and chronophobia of international relations addressed above. Conceptually, put briefly, fundamental theo-​political differences of worldviews undermine any commonality of a shared notion of ‘world’, and this forms a condition that continually breaks down to create a substrate of disagreement and misunderstanding. Then there is a crucial disparity between the global power-​ broking, centred on states, and the reality of the ignored, who include ‘the world’ of weak states, dysfunctional states, non-​state mass forces, the agency of the dual states, the multiple worlds within states, and the refusal to confront the most fundamental defuturing problems our species faces.

Configuring the critical and criticality  33

Confronting complexity beyond an ability to fully comprehend the complex The natural world is complex and, for all the efforts of science, all that is known is a fraction of an unknown totality. Layered upon this situation of limit is the complexity of our species’ made world that has in part fused with the natural, mostly with negative consequences. The level of complexity now created has folded into ‘what is’ –​the ontic –​and has become a complexity beyond our reach and means to understand. Yet confronted with this condition, of which the Anthropocene is but one naming, there is no choice but to stand before whatever of this complexity we can perceive and critically engage with what we can. Our species has to rise to this challenge of making sense, as best we can, of the increasing complexity of the processes and environments in which we are implicated and immersed in as actors. To know this is to proceed with only a partial knowledge of the risks, while not having the ability to fully comprehend this complexity as such. The reality is extreme fragmentation of knowledge and of our perception of the world and ourselves which the still predominant cognitive mechanisms are grounded in. These mechanisms prevent us from fully understanding this complexity, including its elements of constant change, openness, volatility and unfinished nature. The social-​cultural and political models launched and legitimised in and by modernity are increasingly outdated with their instruments unable to react in time to the accelerated changes and further complications that are taking place within a short time span and with unpredictable results. The proverbial inability to see the forest for the trees continues to mark the onto-​epistemic modes of being and inquiry gradually dissociated from the emerging and ongoing ‘earthly worlding and unworlding’ as ‘becoming with each other, composing and decomposing each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff’ (Haraway 2016, p. 97). In order to even begin to understand this complexity we need to leave our comfort zone of established tools and predictable notions and venture into a space whose rules are unknown to us and uncontrollable by us. The contemporary global challenges intensify the complexity and interrelatedness of the world, making our understanding even more limited. This intensified and unruly complexity requires being able to adjust in the process, on the go and as we go, and venture to act upon it before reaching any final understanding of complexity. This imperative cannot be denied or postponed as it is linked with the very capacity to survive relationally with the complex and unpredictable world, incompatibly with any previous utopias or dystopias. This is a very uncomfortable sensibility for humanity, so used to its self-​proclaimed arrogance and confidence in its own explanatory modes. Yet we have no choice but to learn to live with this feeling of growing uncertainty. One of the ways to do it is a conscious humbling of ourselves and delinking from the long criticised yet persistent anthropocentric perception

34  Configuring the critical and criticality and cognition, evident not only in biology but also in politics and social life. It is time we questioned the autopoesis and other such ‘self-​forming and self-​sustaining systems fantasies’ and turn to sympoetic models instead as ‘a carrier bag of ongoingness, a yoke for becoming with, for staying with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016, p.  125). Such models better answer the unpredictability and volatility of complexity. To learn to live with complexity that we cannot grasp and still venture to interact with for the sake of survival we might need to start learning from and with those whom modernity discarded as full interlocutors –​from indigenous peoples to companion and endangered species with which we can hope to enter into a complex ‘compost’ (rather than posthuman), in D. Haraway’s formulation, relationality. For that we need to stop being afraid of losing the control and especially to stop trying to restore it with worn-​out means such as war, oppression, destruction of environment, as well as outlived utopias and dystopias clinging to a hopelessly changed and changing world. Collectively we must also fully realise that our humble or bold efforts might still be unsuccessful in the end. Yet we must try, if only for the sake of responsibility for what we have done to the world. This is a peculiar stoicism of vainness and sober awareness of our own lack of understanding of the complexity of the problems we face.

Notes 1 Over recent decades this has been most evident in the expressed goal and token instrumental action toward ‘sustainability’ without any rigorous and public exposition of the extent, omnipotence and defuturing force of ‘the world’ made unsustainable. One very basic example is the technology of energy generation. Since 2000, the world has doubled its coal-​fired power capacity to around 2,000 gigawatts (GW) after explosive growth in China and India. A  further 236GW is being built and 336GW is planned (Carbon Brief 2019). Sustainability asserts the solution is the replacement of fossil fuel-​generated energy with renewable sources. But from the perspective of the unsustainable, the global demand for energy continually grows as the overall population increases, as more nations embrace industrialism, as the desire for higher standards of living (from whatever the extant base is) grows, and as technology continually proliferates (now especially via the electronicisation of everywhere). The result is an increased demand for energy from any fuel source –​ thus China, the largest producer of renewables, is, as indicated, also undergoing a massive expansion of coal-​fired power stations so the energy to drive economic growth can be maintained. 2 Pluriversality is a concept with its philosophical roots in pluralism that recognises multiple perspectives displacing the notion of there being one world (Lewis 1986); the term has widened its use in the past two decades to include decoloniality, postdevelopment and design. 3 Ethno-​epistemology is an accepted term to denote epistemic views of the non-​ western populations of the past and the present. It normalises western epistemology as the one with no ethnicity. We are aware of its condescending and exclusionary nature and are using it here for the sake of understandability, while fully realising that a different concept needs to be launched and accepted.

Configuring the critical and criticality  35 4 The state socialist modernity as a first cousin of the liberal capitalist one used exactly the same rationale and tools, save the ideological wrappings.

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36  Configuring the critical and criticality Latour, B., 2018. Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lewis, D., 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell. Liang, Q. and Xiangsui, W., 1999. Unrestricted Warfare. Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House. Loeb, P. and Richardson, J., eds. 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lubarsky, S.B., 2010. Toward a dynamic, relational Judaism. Conservative Judaism 62, 1–​2, Fall, 58–​66. doi.10.1353/​coj.2010.0041 Lyotard, J.-​ F., 1992. The Inhuman. Reflection on Time. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Magnus, B., 1978. Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative. Bloomington:  Indiana University Press. Prigogine, I. and Stengers I., 1984. Order Out of Chaos:  Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam Books. Rostow, W.W., 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Schapov, A., 1906. Sochineniya [Writings]. Saint Petersburg: M.V. Pirozhkov. Schmitt, C., 2006. The Nomos of the Earth. Trans. Ulmen, G.L. New York: Telos Press. Sennett, R., 2008. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press Shiva, V., 2005. Earth Democracy. Justice, Sustainability and Peace. New  York, Boston: South End Press. Simpson, L.B., 2017. As We Have Always Done. Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press. Tlostanova, M., 2018.What Does It Mean to Be Post-​Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire. Durham: Duke University Press. Topolski, A., 2015. Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Vázquez, R., 2017. Precedence, earth and the Anthropocene:  Decolonizing design. Design Philosophy Papers 15.1, 77–​91. doi.10.1080/​14487136.2017.1303130 Whitehead, A.F., [1929] 1978. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press. Wildcat, M., McDonald, M., Irbacher-​Fox, S. and Coutlhard, G., 2014. Learning from the land:  Indigenous land-​based pedagogy and decolonization. Decolonization, Indigeneity, Education and Society 3.3, I–​XV. Willis, A., 2006. Ontological designing –​laying the ground. Design Philosophy Papers. Collection Three. Ravensbourne, Queensland:  Team D/​E/​S Publications, 69–​92. doi.10.2752/​144871306X13966268131514 Zimmerman, M., 1981. Eclipse of the Self. Athens: Ohio University Press.

2  A lexicon of analytics

In this chapter we are putting forward a number of interrelated problems that we consider definitive for the present crises and the failure of political imagination and therefore urgent to address if we wish to start thinking and acting otherwise. They form an open and unfinished lexicon which presents a series of layers of issues with more layers within them. Although addressed individually in the form of short essays, the items of the lexicon build a relational picture that, unlike the arrested linear text, do not stay in fixed place and closed, but exist in a variable and open relation to each other, circumstantially determined by the concerns and context in which they are read. Relationality is the dynamic of this inter-​textual condition; while the dynamic cannot be represented textually, it can emerge as an understanding and sensibility brought to texts. What is presented below is suggestive of elements of a relational complexity. As such they cannot be totalised and characterised as the content of a total system because there is no system. No attempt has been made to ‘capture’ and present an exclusive listing of elements. Every element exists in a variable interactive condition of flux produced by situated contingent factors, which means that whatever is said has already been superseded by change events. For all these limitations, a clear sense of complexity within and beyond the indicated complexity can be gleaned from reviewing the seven elements discussed, which are: geopolitics; world future forces; climate change (reimagined); ontological rupture (coming from varied forms of disruption); technological constructions of reality (and a new organics); and epistemology (examined via nine pathways of unknowing and knowing).

Fracture zones The general condition of breakdown that defines the state of global being of this age of the Anthropocene announces its presence by the intermittent arrival of multiple fracture zones and their lines of intersection. They appear from situated perspectives of knowledge and circumstantial placement. There is no position of absolute overview. What follows thus comes from where, in our difference, we are and what we know. Notwithstanding the limitations

38  A lexicon of analytics implicit in the specificity of our point of view, we do claim it is sufficiently broad to expose that a seismic shift is underway in the way the world we have created now exists, needs to be understood and engaged with politically. Geopolitical reconfigurations, fractures and war War is a condition we assume to be self-​evident. ‘We’ know what it looks like. But we don’t. Our imaginaries of war are increasingly of its past, whereas war has, and continues, to change in cause and conduct. As will be shown, it does this in response to geopolitical events, and as their generator, while at the same time, changing its own technological and political character. Reimag(in)ing the perpetual war The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the state socialist system have brought the post-​Yalta and post-​Potsdam world order to its end. The triumph of neoliberal globalisation seen at first as a universal eternally present condition of happy consumerism in the shrunken world of erased borders and weakened nation-​states has turned out to be short-​lived. The emergence of several new international unions and nodes questioning the previous unconditional western dominance resulted in their mostly failed attempts to establish a caricature of the multipolar world of asymmetrical and perpetually fighting enemy parties with no global vision, a world in which any global responsibility is replaced with lawlessness or the sword law. The political decolonisation rhetoric of the Cold War time has shifted to the conception of decoloniality ‘as a response from the underside to the enforced homogeneity of neoliberal modernity and to the realisation that the state cannot be democratised or decolonised’ (Walsh and Mignolo 2018, p. 106). The reactionary securitised nation-​state politics has returned today, overlapping/​conflicting with the ‘parapolitical’ or the ‘dual state’ that has never stopped and has presently dispersed among several old and new conflicting Grossraums. The dual state is understood here as a secret supranational network of power with little accountability (Tunander 2012). This seems to be a sketchy geopolitical trajectory of roughly the last three decades. Today the optimistic neoliberal chant has clearly demonstrated its unsightly darker side. The movement of capital and goods and perhaps a few globetrotters easily changing continents and jobs from one transnational corporation to another have been replaced with a threatening image of globalisation in the centre of which stand the figure of the refugee and the increasing flow of people who migrate to escape death, famine, war, political repressions and in the nearest future  –​devastating climate change consequences. The failure of the global promise has resulted in a next wave of particularisms grounded in a sober realisation of the impossibility of providing a universal progress  –​even in a simplified neoliberal understanding. The neoliberal global model has manifested the familiar old darker colonial sides, albeit at

A lexicon of analytics  39 times in new wrappings, causing the revival of stale geopolitics and the defensive strengthening of opposing nation-​states with overt top-​down nationalist agendas or neo-​imperial nationalist rhetoric guarding their borders and defending their local interests. The post-​peace condition and the looming geopolitics of survival This situation is increasingly a post-​peace condition as one element that is disturbingly on the rise is the revival and reformulation of war rhetoric in multiple forms that once again start to act as a momentum within global politics and our shared negative horizon. In the Cold War bipolar system keeping the war and peace balance acted not only as coercion tool for political enemies, but also as a teleological lever linked to the idea of the future. Today’s world disorder is marked by a complete loss of even such a negative global responsibility and makes the present return of aggressive geopolitics different from its previous manifestations. Nation-​states with the voice are increasingly collectively unable to reach any agreements at the international level within the card houses of the outdated international organisations. As a result, paradoxically, globalisation has led to a quick loss of the global dimension in political thought. As Ivan Krastev points out, ‘the outcome is unworkable: you end up with democracy without choices, sovereignty without meaning and globalisation without legitimacy’ (Krastev 2017, p. 70). The return of aggressive geopolitics only superficially resembles the situation of a century ago as the shared future is increasingly the future of perpetual war whose reasons cannot be lifted within the existing world order and in terms of existing political mechanisms and instruments. To do that a global will and a global readiness to give up immediate benefits are necessary to cultivate, yet instead we have an array of dispersed and mismatched actors with no shared idea of and responsibility for the future –​their own or their descendants, no faith in the future as a shared experience. It is truly a global epidemic of myopia and tactical thinking with no strategic dimensions. The present major disagreement and incommensurability of various contesting political, social, and economic agendas, a contradictory coexistence of discourses of different order and coming from different eras, weakens the shared attention to the global challenges that can be addressed only with common effort, and re-​intensifies the all-​pervading war rhetoric closing the future dimension once again. Although wars have never stopped in human history, the recent developments, linked with the growing indeterminacy of the world order and the ineptness of its existing institutions and control levers, have increasingly normalised the state of exception and war as a permanent condition even outside the actual zones of open conflict. It is enough to come to any large international airport and try to go through security to experience this intensified bio-​political pressure and the naturalisation of the state of exception. The normalisation of terrorism becomes one of the legitimate realisations of the

40  A lexicon of analytics naturalisation of war, justifying our collective and permanent loss of rights and freedoms. The same logic is used in the case of natural and technological catastrophes that irrevocably reduce our rights and freedoms under the excuse of fighting their consequences (Gordon and Gordon 2010). The normalisation of the state of exception often induced by the dual state machinery is also expressed in contemporary post-​panoptic visual regimes and the emergence of the post 9/​11 total surveillance society in which ‘surveillance has become emergent, unstable, and lacking any discernible boundaries or accountable … departments’ effectively ‘turning every citizen into a potential threat needing to be monitored’ (Galič, Timan and Koops 2017, pp. 6, 9). As a result, the regimes of visuality are securitised and militarised and we all become deprived of our rights as real and potential visual subjects (Mirzoeff 2011). The sheer diversity of the present war types is amazing. The conditions of the so-​called ‘unrestricted warfare’ (Liang and Xiangsui 1999) have been increasingly complicated, refined and normalised involving all imaginable spheres in various combinations, contexts and degrees, such as trade, finance/​ economics, technology, terror, ecological destruction, piracy and smuggling, cultural aggression, use of drugs, aggressive use of the media, law, psychological war and cyber war, and invariably marked by a complete lack of any ethical principles or adherence to law (Fry 2019: 137-​154). The ordinary warfare remains in place but is increasingly accompanied by the revival of civil wars and various other internal conflicts such as urban battles, making grim cyberpunk writers into social realists, to say nothing of the more unusual militant endeavours for which scholars do not have time to invent names and so are quickly replaced by propaganda gurus whose aim is often to hide the real motives for aggression: hybrid wars, creeping wars, virtual wars, wars forcing someone to peace, etc. A typical sign of our times is the cynical small-​to-​middle scale victorious (often postcolonial) and proxy war conducted in situations when the actual borders of the nation-​state are not even in danger. Yet virtual threats are constantly manufactured to justify the aggression against the invented enemies, indicating yet another attempt to re-​divide the world. An example of such a propagandistic threat hiding the real economic and political goals and diverting the attention from the manipulative, intimidating blackmail tactic used to negotiate advantages, is Putin’s ‘defence’ of the ‘Russian world’ in the countries of the former Soviet influence, or the American militant ‘protection’ of human rights in the Middle East following F. Hinkelammert’s logic of the inversion of human rights, when those who are violating someone else’s rights are automatically dehumanised and become a legitimate target of aggression (Hinkelammert 2004). The nuclear war that seemed to be firmly a matter of the past only recently, as well as the space wars reminiscent of the old sci-​fi, re-​emerge once again as a real threat due to a complete rejection of collective responsibility, lack of interest in keeping the previous international agreements, the dwindling of international cooperation and will to negotiate in many crucial areas,

A lexicon of analytics  41 a refusal to address the future, and apathy in relation to any vigorous critique of the present situation in its entirety and to any attempts to challenge the fragile status quo. What is triggering this reckless willingness to destroy the world? Perhaps a syndrome of futurelessness, a dystopian notion that the points of non-​return have already passed and we have nothing to lose, which then means that nothing is forbidden. What we are collectively left with is a sense of being in a feast in time of plague which is in itself one more proof of our reluctance to delink from the comfortable myth of stable reality, an illusion that was sustained before by the empires, superpowers, international agreements on keeping a certain state of the world order, etc. The feeling of new instability and the threat of a random but quickly globalising military conflict are linked not only with such relatively novel factors as international terrorism, but also with the arrival of cyber, high precision non-​nuclear and space arms, and first of all, with the emergence of the tactical nuclear weapon officially launching the new arms race by the US/​Russian 2019 abandonment of the Intermediate-​range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. This shift buries the Cold War basis of strategic stability –​the principle of mutual assured destruction. Additionally, the US and Russia are joined today by several other nuclear countries and most importantly by China which has long left behind the Cold War nuclear giants in its production of tactical nuclear weapons. These shifts link to visible and invisible global flashpoints remapping geopolitics and constructing implicit new hierarchies and intersections of geopolitical interests. The present asymmetrical polycentric world demonstrates two main lines of collective delimitation. The first is the familiar old Russia-​ NATO division in which the countries of Central, Eastern and South-​Eeastern Europe were used as token money in the US–​USSR opposition. Today those countries can potentially become the focus of local tension between NATO and the support-​losing Putin’s regime desperately trying to improve its ratings by aggressive propaganda and militarisation. The second division line is a newer and more alarming opposition of China and the US exemplified by the complex situation in the South and East China Seas –​a knot of potential and incipient local and global military, geopolitical and economic conflicts involving territorial disputes, oil and gas deposits, trade routes and strategic footholds. Objectively, this could lead to a closer economic and political partnership between China and Russia, with China being in a most preferable position balancing the West and Russia (which has the least attractive prospects) and using the latter as its resource bank. The instability of the asymmetrical multipolar world is determined among other factors by the lack of any military-​political alliances such as NATO between the new regional centres, whereas each of them is more dependent on western technologies, markets and investments than on each other’s economies, and harbours deep, unresolved mutual conflicts. It is likely that in the nearest future the Russia-​China-​US triangle will continue to sit in a mesh of extant and prospective proxy wars. Yet the control of

42  A lexicon of analytics nuclear or other arms (appearing for many as a déjà vu from the Cold War) is not officially regarded today as a priority either by the leaders of the nuclear states or by local and global civil and political society that find other agendas more important. This new sentiment in a way rhymes at first site with Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes yet the state as an increasingly outdated political institution can no longer be justified as a guarantor of peace and social order. Contemporary states infringe upon our rights and freedoms without providing any protection in return and once again, without promising any future. However, we do not go back to a Hobbesian imagined natural condition, as all the modern political institutions and repressive mechanisms remain in place in their inefficiency and outdatedness. Rather, we are plunged into the total war at the personal, local, state, transnational and global levels, with nothing to compensate and nowhere to turn to as a stable peaceful point of arrival. One of the important shifts in comparison with the previous territorial or resource-​focused re-​division of the world is the shift towards geopolitics of mere survival, so that the oil wars risk being replaced by water, food, clean air and shelter wars very soon. This new global challenge is not matched by a corresponding political imaginary. Instead the most parochial and base versions of war ethics are revived with a predictable focus on the quest for new enemies. From enemies to dispensable lives The quest for the next enemy becomes once again the main motivation of international alliances and unions and in fact, following Carl Schmitt’s ultimate logic (Schmitt 2007), the essence of the political. Humankind has never learned to create unions for rather than against, to group not for a tactical search for yet another enemy but rather for building a fairer and more just world for us all. There are no signs of any alternative global political imaginary today which would be able to act in this role. Who is the current enemy? How is it constructed? What is the correlation between the internal and foreign enemy representations in contemporary politics? In President Trump’s rhetoric refugees on the Mexican/​US border are referred to as enemies of the state. In President Putin’s mock Stalinist rhetoric, the foreign-​funded human rights organisations together with the internal political opposition –​the so-​called fifth column, are the new/​old enemies of Russia. In China, the internal enemy is represented today among other groups by the tens of thousands of local disenfranchised Muslims placed in inhumane detention camps. Are these diverse images of the enemy different from Schmitt’s formula in which the enemy is what makes the political dimension possible and finds its perfect manifestation in war? The present notion of the enemy is perhaps more nuanced and complex than Schmitt’s, and not only because new forms and kinds of enemy constantly emerge and the nation-​state

A lexicon of analytics  43 constellation of the world is irrevocably lost in spite of the recent revival of nationalist rhetoric. Today’s return of the idea of the world consisting of hostile states is an artificial propagandistic construction, a smokescreen taking us away from really urgent issues requiring our immediate collective attention and misleading us to the rivalry of prides and victimhoods, hiding the fact that the world is more global than ever, even if it is in the state of denial of this mostly negative shared universal condition of unsettlement and imminent demise. An important facet of the shift is that the category of the ‘problem people’ (whose humanity is questioned and/​or negated) (Gordon and Gordon 2010, p. 19) previously more or less contained in the Global South and tamed by identity politics in the myopic Global North  –​today is becoming central everywhere. Plunged into the ethics of perpetual naturalised war, their human rights are systematically revoked, restricted and inverted. They are regulated, threatened and monitored through disciplinary regimes and different forms of immobilisation such as racial, ethnic and religious profiling, identity controls, draconian immigration laws as forms of excluding from the ontological reality and effectively denying their existence as humans. One example is the European inability to structure its relations with refugees and migrants, and its sliding into the outdated discourses of charity, assimilation, demonising, etc. The refugees placed in temporary camps or shelters are taken outside the realm of the political because they are naturally visible and at the same time, publicly invisible (Borren 2008, p. 214), exempt from any political action, any political space or the space of appearance (Arendt 1958, pp.  198–​199). In more extreme cases of detention centres or special, often private prisons for migrants such as the Australian-​funded Nauru offshore processing centre (Doherty 2019), the dehumanisation and dispensability of lives conveniently tucked away from the sight of the public, exponentially increases, whereas the very hope for any future is completely removed. Both the refugees endlessly waiting for their asylum status to be approved and those indeterminately punished for their attempt to escape for life in detention centres, are taken outside of the existential (human) sphere and therefore do not quite fit into Schmitt’s definition of the enemy. They are emblems of their own suffering and at times, aggression and threat, or Fanonian phobogenic objects (Gordon 1996, p. 80) but never agents of their own emancipation and subsequent empowerment. This imag(in)ing of the new enemy reflects the deep internal contradictions and unresolved dilemmas of modernity/​coloniality in the conditions of declining global capitalism. Pushed outside of the nation-​state logic, these groups are also pushed outside of modernity, of life, of humanity, and identified as people of a lower status than the enemy, not human enough to be seen as an enemy. The global coloniality in its present defensive stage makes democracy act as an instrument of exclusion. Thousands of refugees today are subjected not to the universal hospitality that Kant regarded as one of the preconditions of perpetual peace (Kant

44  A lexicon of analytics [1795] 1917), but rather to a universal exclusion and a peculiar form of temporal war –​their time, the actual term of their lives on earth, is stolen when people are taken out of the flow of reality and placed in limbo, in prison-​like conditions –​often for many years, waiting for the migration agencies to decide on their future –​in many cases only to be deported back to where they fled from, their lives again under threat. Once again, the logic justifying the idea that people can be left to drown in the sea, and toddlers can be imprisoned as illegal migrants, is based on the same modern/​colonial human taxonomy that has not essentially changed in the last five centuries. Just as the same modern/​ colonial logic is detectable in the technological facets of dehumanisation that are threatening to divide the world into the advanced posthumans (Hayles 1999) who deserve to survive and the inferior ordinary people who can be sacrificed. Yet there are new overtones in the present situation. A crisis of increasingly outdated political institutions and tools, unable to cope with the changing reality and lacking a future vision, demonstrates more and more clearly the contradictions of democracy with no real choices and token liberalism, undergoing a major crisis of legitimacy. The increasingly grievous global economic prospects are combined with the largely unaddressed, except in the most superficial, applied and technical ways, environmental challenges. All of these conditions are acting together. One can already detect the frightening signs of changing national and international law to justify the present and future violence in relation to unwanted and uninvited others. These changes are not defending the universal hospitality but rather speak in favour of the justification of mass killings and criminal liability for law-​abiding citizens for saving the refugees’ lives and acting hospitably, at least at the most basic human level, which is already a fact in several European democracies. We are collectively desensitised to this legitimised cruelty (not in the least by its turning into the sensationally exotic media object), thus paralysing our will to hospitality and making one more step in the direction of normalisation of the state of exception and war in planetary terms. The imminent increase in the number of dispensable lives which causes already today what Ivan Krastev calls ‘an exit driven revolution of individuals and families remaining a solitary act of people who do not share a common ideology, leaders or manifests’ (Krastev 2017, p.30) will probably lead to uncontrollable chaos and war between the millions of the disenfranchised and the lucky ones, already in the near future, when the number of the displaced and unsettled crossing the fortified borders exponentially increases. This will clearly result in major violence and genocide making the present restrictions and violations seem rather minor. More and more groups which previously used to enjoy relative equality within their nation-​states and as part of democratic regimes are being transferred to the category of precarious lives that do not matter, taken outside the realm of the political or/​and not seen as human enough to even be considered enemies in Schmitt’s sense. These groups are increasingly excluded not only socially and economically but also politically, with the rise of

A lexicon of analytics  45 protests –​including those in the Global North and in semi-​peripheries to say nothing of authoritarian states –​where this tendency leads to the revival of the idea of internal enemies, fifth column, foreign agents in tune with the general militarised, constant-​mobilisation way of life. These groups are also easily deprived of their right to exist and can be sacrificed without any additional ethical or judiciary consideration. This rationale is certainly not new, as it has been an efficient tool of colonialism. Yet now within the logic of the global coloniality it is spread onto the world regardless of nation-​state relations or borders and is also intensified through additional factors such as technological facets of coloniality. These facets, among other things, intensify the dehumanisation and virtualisation of the enemy thus lifting the moral limitations and remorse. Contemporary technologically advanced wars using drones instead of actual bloody in-​person battles virtualise death and suffering and make enemies into distant, abstract targets rather than living and breathing people. The spreading of the enemy rhetoric beyond the boundaries of the nation-​ state does not deny but in fact reinforces Schmitt’s thesis on war as a necessary element of reality. It is just that the war-​inducing borders today may take quite real but also virtual and supra-​national forms, not always indicated on the map, including the borders between the Global North and Global South, or the actualised and deadly borders between citizens and non-​citizens. Even in the most egalitarian and presumably democratic societies such borders are still grounded in a fundamental and unresolvable contradiction between equal rights for everyone and advantages given to citizens who are seen as more human than others –​and not just any citizens at that, but those who were born in the country and belong to its ethnic majority. So nativity remains the main principle of citizenship and, by association, of belonging to humankind, thus creating potential internal enemies and disposable lives (Arendt 1978, p. 213). Cooperate rather than compete? The fundamental commonality of interests in the increasingly interconnected and interdependent world pushes us in the direction of solidarity and extra caution in the choice of geopolitical instruments, of a shift from the politics of fear (such as nuclear destruction) to a relational politics of responsibility. Yet there is no political will for such a shift. The overwhelming present negative sensibility is not a family but merely a condition of fellow sufferers who have not fully realised yet that we are indeed in the same fragile boat, that it is problematic to imagine at this point an escape from the Earth for the chosen ones, however technologically advanced they are, and that we need to cooperate rather than compete to survive. How can we grasp the end of the peaceful world as an idea, ideal, or prospect for the future? What kind of political imaginary do we need collectively to alter this condition? There are no recipes, and all we can do is to try to get away from both comfortable delusions

46  A lexicon of analytics and eschatological recklessness to engage in a complex critical reflection on this new post-​peace world of perpetual war we are all in. It would be naïve to assume that it is possible to change the political will at the global level in any foreseeable future, to shift to ‘not only political responsibility but also a peculiarly political form of love’ (Gordon 2018) for the lives of those who remain anonymous to us, or perhaps beyond our understanding, and for the tentative and precarious future of life itself. Opening into the futuring of a tragic world The scale of the defuturing consequences of our species’ world-​making and occupation are still only now becoming apparent. But even less recognised is that the implication of what has been, and is being, discovered is that our species’ relation to the environments of its dependence, its modes of earthly dwelling, and inter-​communal and inter-​cultural relations (from the local to the global) all have to fundamentally change if we, and so many other life forms, are going to continue to exist. At the most general level ‘we’, in and by our differences, have to become futural and as such, develop futuring practices in all domains of thought and action. There is no freedom without this condition of directional limitations. To acknowledge this is to recognise the redundancy of the grounds of extant politics. … The world within the world of human occupation has been made tragic in two senses. First, and unwittingly, by many of our species establishing patterns of world-​making actions and values that have led to putting life on Earth at risk. Second, by the situation of biospheric and atmospheric hominoid destruction becoming identified and partly understood in the late industrial age, and variously named as structural unsustainability, business as usual, defuturing, the commencement of the sixth extinction event and the Anthropocene. The amazing thing about this situation as is stated above is that it is almost totally ignored by the world’s leaders, governments, institutions, corporations and informed populations. In every sense, the investment in the status quo obstructs any willingness to change, and even more crucially, a willingness to sacrifice. It seems there is an absolute inability to confront the basic logic of the most fundamental of equations –​unless ‘we’ now sacrifice something, everything we need will be lost. The concept of sacrifice has to be broken free of its anthropological and theological connotations. One cannot claim this general state of myopia as universal, for it is created by uneven development producing conditions of inequity that leave hundreds of millions of people uninformed. Effectively maintaining the status quo and ignoring the complexity of the created deworlding condition overrides all action to secure viable futures. Rather than sacrifices to secure a future, by default, the biospheric domain of our existence is sacrificed to save the present. All claims that action now being taken is in any way adequate, are delusional. Irrespective of political

A lexicon of analytics  47 ideology, all governments everywhere bow before consumerism (maintained or to be realised) as ‘the opiate of the people’. They, albeit with a few authoritarian exceptions, supply it, as otherwise they will not stay in power. Instantly two conclusions follow:  the situation outlined, as it maps onto many geopolitical crises, will not change without a new political imagination and mode of politics; and, as can be learnt from Classical Greece, acknowledging and confronting the tragic is not a receipt of despair but a prerequisite for affirmatively acting futurally. So, what most threatens is not the sum of the deworlding crises, but the failure to confront and engage with them in the knowledge of the pain, struggle and suffering of ‘agon’. In its essence, the tragedy to be faced is that ‘we’ have broken our world of dependence and are at war with ourselves as a species. There is no easy transition. Writ large, all that exists between us and our oblivion, is a new politics (which is to say a new organised order of being), prefigured by a new political imagination, underpinned by an epistemological foundation upon which to think and create viable futures capable of bringing new ontologies of being-​ in-​the-​world. Without the materialisation of this imperative, ‘we’ are truly heading into the end of the ‘end times’. War now has no other. In its plural intensities and mutating forms, it has become an omnipresent condition of being. But this is not how it is mostly perceived. In actuality, evoking war at this moment denotes a very substantial disjuncture between idea, knowledge, representation and actuality. What is generally thought to be war, how it is known, and the forms in which it is imagined and seen no longer coincide with what it has become. It is not that what is taken to be war is not warring, but rather it is so much more. War is now visible and invisible, no longer spatially contained, no longer an event of a fixed duration. Thus it mostly has no clear beginning or end, is domain specific, just a military affair, terrestrially confined, and therefore the other of peace, the political, the economy and civil society. War is intrinsic to, and the future of, a broken world. Broken world: unsustainability is ontologically integral to what we are and the consequences of our actions in the world. They/​I/​we break the world of our dependence. We reveal and conceal this condition in the blindness and deafness of our being anthropocentric –​here is the ontological foundation of unsustainability that becomes quantitatively amplified. The more of us there are, the more the resources of the planet are utilised and squandered, and the more damage is done. This situation is not new, but has been massively increased by our extraordinary ability to create technologies of enormous material productive output to sate those manufactured desires and excesses that have come with globalised mass consumption (be it in condition of huge inequity). Somehow for all our ‘cleverness’ an essential stupidity endures. Knowledge gets elevated and valorised while understanding and wisdom become overlooked. Contrary to an acquired and unrestrained instrumental capacity and the trappings of development, we ‘moderns’ are not superior to the ancients and indigenous people. In ‘our’ absolute obsession with speed –​of

48  A lexicon of analytics materials extraction, construction, production, movement, the communication of information, and numerous means of destruction –​‘we’ are accelerating our species, and through our actions, many others, towards extinction (Kolbert 2014; Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo 2017). Some 251 million years ago the End Permian event ended the life of over 96 per cent of all living species. This was the third of the planet’s five extinction events. As a result of number five, the most recent End Cretaceous event, which occurred 66  million years ago, 76 per cent of all species were lost (Hallam and Wignall 1997). ‘We’ and most other forms of life on Earth are a product of the leftover life of these events. The rapid loss of biodiversity mainly caused by the manifest forms of unsustainability for which ‘we’ are responsible (not least in creating rapid climate change), has commenced the planet’s sixth extinction event. We are thus breakers of a great deal more than our own future as our collective action defutures the being of many other species. The fact that ‘we’ moderns, the privileged knowers, are aware of this destruction induced by our species’ action, yet turn away from it, has to be taken as an indicator of a profound flaw in our being. For all that has been learnt we have forgotten or failed to learn the most important lesson –​how to care for that upon which we most depend. It seems so obvious, yet such is the speed of our trajectory (named progress, productivity, advancement, development) it seems that we cannot stop ever faster heading for the ultimate disaster. Nietzsche believed our world to be mad. The form of this madness can now surely be defined as a condition of absolute and total distraction from that which is critical, combined with a complete loss of valuing all that is of the greatest value, while at the same time giving so much value to things valueless. Nihilism has clearly reached new heights and the tragedy has come to new depths. Hope is useless in this situation. The only possible corrective is redirective knowledge informed by imagining the possible (fate) and the realisation of the possible (action). In our ‘dwelling in the world’ we all occupy ecologies of mind, image and dislocated exchange (misnamed as consumption). What in fact human beings do is mostly expend the use/​functional and aesthetic value of things and then abandon them (consumption is a misnomer; it does not consume). Thus not only are the ‘things’ themselves broken but so is that metabolic process of transformation upon which actual consumption depends. Therefore, the capitalist economy is one of incomplete ecological and material exchange. Hence its fundamental unsustainability. ‘Civilised humanity’, in the negation of its foundational animality, not only –​unlike many indigenous peoples –​de-​ relationalised itself but also turned ‘the natural’ into an object of externalised observation, which included the nature of its own body. This action of replicated ontological alterity has had two major consequences: the displacement of proportionate need that almost all other animals are driven to meet; and, the ‘installation’ of an ontologically ruptured way of seeing/​cognition. Thus all ‘our’ attainments are equally a condition of limitation and loss that

A lexicon of analytics  49 made unsustainability inevitable. By implication, sustainment cannot be progressed without changing what we are and not just what we do –​and war clearly exemplifies this point. Worlds of breaks, fractures and warring: what warring does is to turn geopolitical fractures into breaks between worlds. This was made possible, and occurred for several centuries by modernity’s universalising conflict, especially between colonising powers over territory and natural resources. In the late modern age such action was seen in modernisation theory of the 1950s promoted by the USA to extend the global reach of capitalism in competition with the state socialism of the Eastern bloc. In this precarious condition of the ‘Cold War’, the balance of force was predicated upon the deterrence of mutually assured nuclear destruction. This pragmatic and fractured world order fell with the falling of the Berlin Wall (1989), along with the break-​up of the Soviet Union (1991). Rather than these events heralding the arrival of hegemonic global capitalism and thereafter establishing a new world order, the reverse has been true. ‘The world’ has become more dangerous and fractured for three reasons. The first can be briefly registered. It is the proliferation of nuclear weapons without any structures of agreement. This is accompanied by the arming of more nations who have antagonistic relations with others equally armed. Reason two is complex, goes to a broken world order, the changing nature of war, and the reconfiguration of global power blocs. It is defined by the arrival of new and old antagonisms (political, nationalistic, economic, ‘racial’ and theological), but at a global scale. Added to this is still the unfolding and undoing of the promise of globalisation and development. Increasingly there is the possibility of regress where gains were made. De-​development as postdevelopment will occur for multiple reasons. These reasons will include economies marginalised by free-​trade agreements, regional communities excluded from megaregions, the impact of climate change on agricultural and aquaculture systems, robotic technology in nations with advanced economies and large domestic markets increasingly displacing the use of cheap labour to those nations that are defined as ‘newly developing’. For the latter, the cost of the technological is higher, as is the cost of venture capital, while exporting goods becomes less competitive as prices fall in economies employing robotics. Not only will the disposable income of the ex-​producers of the domestic market decline as unemployment increases, but these already small national economies will further reduce. Reason three is very significant, but more slowly unfolding. It is the condition of unsustainability, as environmentally damaging industries and products, hyperconsumption-​generated waste and competition for natural resources are meeting the increased and growing impacts of climate change, global human resource pressures, a continued loss of biodiversity, conflict and population displacement. To ground these remarks, give a clearer sense of present dangers and indicate the opening of conditions of fracture that can become potentially

50  A lexicon of analytics catastrophic breaks, a brief and partial review is offered for consideration. Obviously these comments refer to volatile situations, and therefore may have changed since the time of writing. The Arctic: As ice melts and seaways open, competition to gain access to under-​sea minerals will increase. Russia, the USA, Canada, Norway, Denmark are all competing for these resources and are deploying naval vessels. Although a number of agreements have been signed, the area is regarded as ‘at risk’, with a significant conflict possible (Axe 2019). China – South and East China Seas: China has claimed these seas as territorial waters enforced by its navy and airforce. It has also constructed artificial islands on which to base its military forces. Its objective is to assert its power as a regional military power, and to exclude the US Navy and its allies from the region. The risk of conflict is high and has increased the likelihood of China retaking Taiwan on or before the 100th anniversary of the communist revolution in 2049. Southwest Russia/​Northwest China: One significant climate change scenario is a mass border crossing into Russia by Chinese people seeking food, water and shelter as a result of the collapse of the regional agriculture system (areas of central China are already deemed uninhabitable due to heat). In this scenario, Chinese entrepreneurship and resilience clashes with Russian apathy and lack of any interest in maintaining territorial integrity, improving the environment and the chronic inability of the centre to control the national margins. The risk is seen as a possible trigger for nuclear war (Dyer 2008). North Korea: North Korea, now with a developing nuclear missile capability and a history of brinkmanship, is a nation seen as being at a high risk of conflict. It can come as a result of pre-​emptive action by or against it, or by weapons’ testing accidently striking another country and thus triggering war. Russia/​Eastern  Europe: Since the break-​up of the Soviet Union the Russian Federation has wished and sought to regain lost territory, as affirmed by overt and covert incursions into Georgia and the Ukraine, as well as the struggle over the independence of Chechnya and increasingly other North Caucasus republics. Many border

A lexicon of analytics  51 nations of Northern Europe including the Baltic littoral states and the former Russian/​Soviet colonies in Central Asia also feel under threat from Russia, and the risk of conflict increases as NATO weakens with the prospect of declining support from the USA. India/​Pakistan: The tension between these two nuclear-​armed nations now extends over decades and regularly leads to border clashes with all-​out war being narrowly missed on several occasions. Therefore the risk of a major war remains high. Egypt/​Ethiopia: Both nations depend on and compete for water from the Nile. Currently Ethiopia is building a dam that would restrict water flows to Egypt. This situation is likely to cause war. Risk will increase and climate change impact will deepen. This scenario represents many similar actual and potential conflicts around the world over water. Africa: Africa is replete with actual and potential conflicts. Libya, Mali, Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and especially the Democratic Republic of Congo –​these are some of the most immediately identifiable examples. Again, the causes of conflict are a mix of competition over natural resources, with climate change adding to the risk, as do enduring historical problems of nationalism, tribalism and ethnicity, all in the aftermath of colonialism. Southeast Asia: This region is not free of problems. Thailand’s military has a history of intervening in politics. Climate change impacts in Bangladesh could well displace large numbers of people (India has built a fence along its entire border with Bangladesh and had its army patrol it). In the course of 2019 conflict between Myanmar military and Arakan Army rebels the issue of displacement intensified with over 750,000 Rohingyas displaced. This situation has created stress between Myanmar and neighbouring countries, including Bangladesh. Israel, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen and Afghanistan: This area of the world, with fragmented nations, remains deeply embedded in active and latent conflicts, all of which have the potential to dramatically escalate. Such asymmetrical wars, and major regional wars, all have global implications, especially the antagonism between nuclear-​armed Israel and, potentially, Iran.

52  A lexicon of analytics Venezuela/​Colombia and Brazil: Poverty, political instability and civil unrest in Venezuela and the US-​Russia contest to direct these nations’ futures combine to create a condition of serious immediate and future risks. Colombia at the end of a fifty-​year war exists in a condition of ‘uneasy peace’, which an influx of displaced Venezuelans into the country does not improve. The reactionary political regime in Brazil, another country to which displaced Venezuelans are fleeing, with US encouragement, may also become a source of regional destabilisation. War now Widely held ideas about war, the representational landscape of war, the characterisation of war in popular culture, how the military are understood and deployed politically, the terminal binaries of war and peace, the military and the civil, weapons and non-​weapons are all out of joint with general understandings of the actuality of war. What is seen does not equate with what empirically is. War is not discrete. It is now not just where conflict appears to be. For example a drone strike in Afghanistan is triangulated by satellite surveillance based in Australia, the UK and USA, with the drone piloted by an operator sitting at a console in a US Army airforce base in Nevada. Likewise, the beginnings and ends of wars have become unclear as the event can commence well before any fighting and continue by other means after it stops. Along with this fluidity there is an increase in the number of levels of intensity of war that can continue to smoulder. For instance, on 22 May 1998  ‘peace’ was declared in Northern Ireland. Twenty-​one years later we read in The Guardian newspaper (Carroll and Davies 2019) that 29-​year-​old investigative journalist and activist Lyra McKee was killed by republicans from a group known as the New IRA … McKee was shot during rioting in Derry on Thursday while standing near a police Land Rover. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said the shooting was part of an orchestrated attack on its officers and described it as a terrorist incident.1 Most days, say in Iraq or Colombia one could pick up a newspaper and read an equivalent story. There is no divide between war and peace, no sense of peace –​an amorphous concept  –​as the other of war. War is now a multi-​domain action without clearly defined borders, a specific form or definitive time of occurrence. As stated above, it is not discrete. It exists as all that is between inner space (of psychological aggression) and the outer space (war in space). It is visible (a war-​fighting on land, at sea and in the air) but also invisible (as espionage, cyber-​warfare, the weaponising of information where a computer and data

A lexicon of analytics  53 can be deployed to destroy the operation system of infrastructure such as a power station, and so initiate a malfunction that will destroy it. War is to be found in the artefacts of the everyday, the panoptic society (where every electronic transaction and communication, every watchful eye in the sky and CCTV on the street combine to enable huge numbers of the global population to be observed and, if ‘signs of deviance’ in a particular individual are identified, to initiate them being arrested or targeted for attack). All of this is not the product of the conspiratorial actions of an evil empire but the structuring of the banality of the modernised everyday wherein everyone everywhere is treated as a potential threat in a world of distributed terror –​which is not just the prerogative of terrorism, for all war is terror. When a whole city is levelled to kill the small fraction of its population who are insurgents, when a drone takes out an entire apartment block to kill one ‘terrorist’, the barbaric becomes unbounded. The (mis)perception of war cannot be divided from popular culture and associated media –​TV, film, games, books, the web –​constructing our imaginaries and desires. This situation was summed up in a simple comment by a US soldier in an on-​the-​spot vox pop TV interview during ‘Desert Storm’ (the first Gulf War, 1990–​91). He said: ‘Man it’s great and just like the movies’. It will be recalled that the US turned vast columns of undefended retreating Iraqi troops into a highway version of a killing field by attack from the air. No matter how graphic, war cannot be understood via exposure to images. The war of battle is not usually seen clearly, it smells, fear is palpable, noise is felt as well as heard, every sense is invaded. In contrast, its other dimension is boredom: as war changes, so do popular perceptions of it, and it is actually becoming increasingly disparate. Finally, a few words are needed on what changes are happening with war now. In one respect a certain philosophy has formed. It is addressed to conventional direct contact warfare and is defined by the US Army’s concept of Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). The concept turns on maximum firepower with the least exposure of its troops to the enemy. It is thus technocentric and the remaking of an old practice where modern weapons were used against an adversary armed with spears, bows and arrows. RMA aims at the same kind of gap, but more than this, it is also aimed at disarming resistance to war on the homefront. The political message learnt in the mass-​ media age post the Vietnam war has been that popular and political support is lost if the public sees an endless stream of body bags returning home from war. So, in essence, RMA is also about increasing the ability to go to war as well as the ability to win it. The ultimate RMA weapon is totally autonomous. Once launched it has the capability of seeking, finding and destroying a target without any human assistance. Enabled by AI, such weapons are controversial and are regarded as unethical. But the relation between war and ethics is long gone and is now only argued from a position of weak relativism that trails back from the use of semi-​autonomous weapons (as with the current generation of drones) to

54  A lexicon of analytics the longer history of weapons of mass destruction. Regardless of resistance, autonomous weapons are going to arrive. Not least because the technology is travelling ahead of the opposition to it and seems to be just an incremental advance of what already exists. At the other extreme is the dominance of lawless asymmetrical. These wars are within and across nations. They are fought with irregular forces that are often hard to distinguish from civilian populations. These fighters can be nomadic, can fade away and reappear, and the wars are borderless, and impossible to resolve by a clear victory. History indicates that when a foreign opposition returns home the conflict reappears (which, with mixed results, is why effort is put into training local forces). Insurgents favour urban warfare for even a relatively small number of fighters requires huge numbers of troops to counter them. The expectation is that this kind of warfare will increase with the rise in the number of megacities in nations with high levels of inequity in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Currently, how to fight such wars is unknown. Existing urban warfare and counter-​insurgency methods are inadequate for cities of populations of 10 million and more. What these kinds of conflicts have done, where war is conducted in spaces of everyday life, is to further blur the distinctions between war and peace, the military and the civil, but also to change war at a conceptual and epistemological level. There are two particular examples to support this claim. One is the extended use of anthropology (which has a long history of military use) in the warzone to gain intelligence about communities in which insurgents operate. So far it has been done badly, but lessons have been learnt (whether they are needed is another issue). The other example is design: it has been weaponised, and a military design movement was created to establish ‘tactical creative advantage’, thus enabling more flexibility in the engagement with insurgents –​as opposed to the use of rigid military doctrine. The whole approach to combatting insurgency with new methods and retaining the need for large numbers of ‘boots on the ground’ is at odds with RMA. The difference marks significant and unresolved tensions existing between these two camps. Meanwhile, war-​fighting, especially at the more invisible and complex level, is slipping beyond the grasp of the military. Climate change reimag(in)ed The raw, basic and almost completely ignored fact of climate change is that if the climate significantly changes, which it has started to do, then almost everything else changes. Natural and built environments, ecologies, physiologies, psychologies, economies, ways of life, dress, food production, diet –​all being immediate and obvious examples. The very way climate change is reported and is seen obscures its essence as process in time. The change in climate cannot be taken to individual events: droughts, wildfires, extreme weather events, sea level rises from season to season. Rather it is a compound event over a great expanse of time linked to greater amounts of energy in the atmosphere, and

A lexicon of analytics  55 past and present human ineptitude. As will be shown below, science both reveals and conceals its compound nature. … Organic beings have always existed in a changing climate, and the ability to adapt to change has always determined survival or extinction. But what is new is that the actions of our species, especially from the industrial revolution onward, have denaturalised change and increasingly created a post-​natural mode of beings in and of ‘the world’. Un-​bounding the climate The language of addressing the climate cannot be, and is not, contained within science. The actuality and determination of environmental and atmospheric conditions indivisibly affect the form of our being-​in-​the-​world existentially in every respect. Science and culture are not distinct except as institutionally inscribed divisions of knowledge, practice and associated ontologies. Disjunctures between phenomenal and operational understandings of climate have had enormous negative structural and perceptual consequences. For example climate science presents statistically informed views built from historical data, recorded contemporary observations, and information extrapolated from climate modelling. From this composite data a global picture of impacts and trends is presented. However, as Bruno Latour (Latour 2011, p. 6) has pointed out, at a fundamental level, global measures are not meaningful because they inform nowhere: situated impacts are never standard, which means ‘there are only local views’, and these go unshared. In a ‘post-​natural world’, global conditions are simultaneously revealed and concealed by the authority of those discourses emanating from extant division of knowledge. Scientific assumptions insinuate themself into humanities’ expositions as if they are given facts. A  cultural theorist asserts, for instance, that ‘the nature of our being is primarily ecological’. In many/​most cases this statement would be read as self-​evident and biologically grounded. But this statement can be equally understood to be both false (if the ecological is just read as a biological fact) and true (if it’s comprehended as a collective compound noun). The latter understanding is evident when one reads Félix Guattari’s ([1989] 2000) essay on The Three Ecologies in which he makes clear that everyone of us exists in, and depends upon, a composite ecology constituted from the relations between a biophysical and social ecology as well as an ‘ecology of mind’ –​an idea Guattari drew from Gregory Bateson. So presented, the ecological can be deemed as neither a scientific nor a socio-​ cultural category. With these remarks in mind, climate change will be first approached from a somewhat familiar perspective  –​one that while informative will equally expose a scientific bias open to being critically questioned. Following this, a problematised set of comments will be made to introduce and examine a still nascent humanities’ response to climate change.

56  A lexicon of analytics One as many In the seemingly singular dis-​associational life of our species, our actuality is mainly an under-​recognised envelopment in the biophysical, artefactual, inter-​subjective and atmospheric. With that ontologically induced propensity to render the absolutely visible invisible intrinsic to our being (human), what is most critical to grasp for us to become futural, becomes concealed. ‘Climate change’ is a pressing example of this situation. The relational fecundity of anthropogenic and amplified changes to an always and ever-​changing climate, resides in the unseen and unthought. This arrives by the very project of producing its representation, which is to say what is actually systemically changing atmospherically, is out of sight and mind. Meanwhile the concept of induced climate change is widely employed to interpret climatic events that may or may not be the result of such change. As will be seen, headlines in the media, images of climate events, scientific studies and reports, metrics, as they have now been arriving for many decades, all support the claim that to have knowledge of climate change does not provide the means to know what you see. Not for the first time in geological time, the pluralities of ‘ways of life’ on planet Earth are being reconfigured. So situated, we hominoids, in common with all other life forms, are to a large degree a discernible product of evolutionary change linked to climate. Our physical differences (size, stature, skin colour), psychology (mood and disposition), ethnic locational geographic origins, dietary traditions, forms of dress, structural forms of dwelling, cultural practices and ways of life were/​are all profoundly influenced by climate. Ecology (the plural process), environment (the specificity of location), genetics and the climate of place have combined to make us, and all living things, what we are. Obviously, the historicity of climate, while directive of our being, is no way affirmatively responsive to it. For the climate our change-​inducing negative feedback is indistinguishable from any other source of change: we simply do not exist for it. Time mis-​placed Our ancient ancestors were exposed to the severity of eight glacial periods of ice age conditions and dramatic swings of temperature in 150,000 year-​cycles that spanned a period of more than a million years (Fagan 1999; Hoffecker 2002). Most notably the creation of a global ‘ice desert’ almost 200,000 years ago reduced our species numbers to just a few thousand. Geo-​climatically, planet Earth is thus not stable, but swings between cycles of hot and cold, stability and instability, with impacts of great geographic diversity over time. Irrespective of induced global warming, the current conditions of relative stability will not last. The climatic challenge to be confronted by ‘life on Earth’ obviously exceeds its characterisation as ‘climate change:’ the designated problem of the moment. Our chronophobic propensity not only obstructs thinking of distant times but those just a few generations ahead of us.

A lexicon of analytics  57 Displaced causality The uncontained, linked symptoms of ‘climate change’, like global greenhouse emissions, underscored by hyperconsumption and associated lifestyles, a rapid utilisation of natural resources, the depletion of natural carbon sinks, unsustainable agriculture, terrestrial pollution creating rural and urban metabolic breakdown speeding the arrival of new and hot wastelands, and all the problems caused by these causes, combine to obscure the fundamental causal problem. The problem is that the unthinking of environmental consequences is ontologically intrinsic to anthropocentrism –​as is evident in the ecologically disarticulated self-​interest our species inhabits and displays. Effectively this is a foundational condition that acts to circumscribe our epistemological capability. Layered onto this situation are discourses that appear, and claim to be, explanatory but are at best partial, or at worst misleading, instrumentally reductive, almost always provisional and frequently politically muted. To make the point more explicitly, consider the following two examples, each of which is framed by a chronophobic sensibility that exposes an inability to see and comprehend in the medium of time. Ongoing sea level rises are partly a product of heat (as it creates water expansion) and ice-​melt inflows. As this is a continuous process, a constant revision of level data is needed. These causal factors equally affect fish migration, changes in deep-​water temperatures (which can take hundreds of year to alter), influence ocean current patterns and CO2 absorption rates, all of which feed back into the climate system (remembering that the oceans act as a global thermostat). The presentation of general metrics does not deliver an adequate indication of sea level rises, which vary according to geographic location, shoreline and seafloor topography.2 Difference is more extreme in delta regions where estuary narrowing and backpressure from river inflows means significant variation in level between the river’s head and mouth. As silt deposits make delta regions fertile and thus agriculturally exploited and productive, many river deltas also have natural or created deep harbours. Those with the logistical advantage of being navigable historically became favoured locations for the development of settlement and trade. But changes in climate are now turning advantage to disaster. Many delta cities are under erasure (as the water saturation of silt increases and the sea levels rise, they start to sink). The Flood Delta City Index (Verschuur, Kolen and van Veelen 2017) lists 35 major global cities, including Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Cairo, London, Dhaka and Guangzhou, as being at significant risk. Population displacement is already a climate change impact. The expectation, even from conservative organisations like the World Bank, is that such displacement will increase to scores of millions and more in and beyond the coming century. The IPCC projection is 400 million people by 2100. However, this figure should be read as a fraction of the total number of people displaced by the compound impacts of climate change. With delta cities, abandonment

58  A lexicon of analytics will not wait for inundation; it will commence once property values crash. Miami, with many areas at less than a metre above sea level, could well be the first mega-​causality of economic-​climatic collapse. It stands to lose up to ‘$3.5 trillion in assets by 2070 due to sea level rise’, according to a new National Wildlife Federation report (Kellegis 2016). What this means is that property values will crash and millions of people, before and after this happens, will flee the city, resulting in significant problems with flow-​on effects to many other well-​populated US cities. A wider-​spread and protracted abandonment of mega and large cities globally will converge with other causes of displacement, like the failure of agricultural systems. Huge numbers of people without food, water or shelter will pose a massive security risk, especially if they invade cities or cross national borders en masse. Military planners are seeing prospects of such conflict as high-​risk, and the notion of ‘climate wars’ is being taken seriously, including geopolitically (Dyer 2008; Welzer 2012). Such prospects travel ahead of themselves and unsettle. Likewise, as the poor mental health of millions of farmers globally attests, unsettlement produced by living with the fear and prospect of a changed climate goes ahead of the actuality of the end of their ability to farm. More widely, existentially, unsettlement is the psychology of the end times now experienced by many people in many nations. Both the crises of delta cities and large-​scale population displacement are coming realities by mid to late 21st century. The scale and timing of these events, although now unclear, will become apparent in the next few decades. The danger associated with the loss of biodiversity, which has already led to the announcement of the commencement of the planet’s sixth extinction event, is a more indeterminate prospect. It could be in the distant future, but equally a condition of criticality could arrive whereby the once-​thought-​to-​ be-​far-​off becomes a now-​present crisis. By implication this makes the making of (this) crisis, as an overlooked condition of criticality, tangible, urgent and an unavoidable imperative –​one that requires imagination as well as recognition as shown by The Great Derangement, a non-​fiction work by the novelist Amitav Ghosh (Ghosh 2016). These observations move us from the established but inadequate ways of engaging with issues of climate change delivered by a mostly scientific view to the nascent one to come from the ‘humanities after humanities’, critical environmental humanities, etc. In common with ‘philosophy after philosophy’, theory after theory’, and ‘design after design’ such a ‘coming after’ has to be acknowledged as a disarticulation, an unmaking, a selectively critical appropriation, and a construction of a border praxis post the project and paradigm of humanities past. Atmospheres of change of and beyond the humanities need to be mentioned here. There is a desire within a body of thinkers in the humanities wishing to critically and productively confront climate change, with some working to do this. But in the post-​natural era of the Anthropocene, as stated above, disciplinary divisions undermine this action. While the Anthropocene

A lexicon of analytics  59 is generally understood as the current geological age seen as the period of time wherein ‘human activity’ became the dominant influence upon climate and the environment, such an understanding fails to expose the implications it has for critical thought and political practice. Rather than being cast as a specific period, it is better grasped as a far more indeterminate moment when the gradual intentional and unwitting consequences of our species’ activities infiltrated, contaminated, transformed and redirected bio-​spheric and atmospheric processes at a fundamental level. As a result, the natural and the artificial (as well as mutation and hybridisation) become indistinguishable, thus evidencing the mark of our global presence in all that exists organically. So understood ontological distinctions between the sum of our species’ activities and natural processes, as Etienne Turpin has acknowledged (Turpin 2013, pp. 3–​4), become increasingly unclear, and as such have produced profound, and still only partly recognised, epistemological problems. Moreover, as Karsten Schulz pointed out, the notion of an undifferentiated humanity is precisely ambiguous because it raises a number of critical questions regarding the political, historical, epistemological, and ontological assumptions that undergird contemporary discussions about the human condition. What does it mean to be ‘human’ in the Anthropocene –​and who decides? Who (and what) is included and excluded as soon as notions of a single ‘humanity’ are invoked? (Schulz 2017, p. 49) Added to this situation, in the face of the critique coming from thinkers engaging with decoloniality, another set of epistemological issues and problems arrives in which a very different understanding of ontological relations is made present, not least between the animate and inanimate; life/​ being and death/​ non-​ being; and the nature/​ knowledge. Rather than anthropology mediating ways of thinking otherwise and the dominance of Eurocentric knowledge, its disciplinary apparatus delinks it. Any retained commitment to the humanities, be it remade and resituated, that still maintains the centrality of the human, reinstates disciplinary boundaries and reconnects with the history in which they are embedded. As Latour indicated in his rejection of the science/​humanities division, the humanities are an anathema in a post-​natural world (Latour 2018). They are also equally so in a world where the ongoing and metamorphosing agency of colonialism continues to exist. What the post-​natural and the ontology of decoloniality both actually do is to reframe how the ‘what is’ of the unreachable ground of our groundless being is adopted as the basis of a reality not reducible to the idea of the real. Put another way –​thinkers as diverse as Charles Darwin and Georges Bataille concluded that in the last instance life was meaningless and thus indeterminacy and uncertainty dissolve the possibility of a knowable real(ity) standing at the core of a groundless ontology of a contingent reality

60  A lexicon of analytics that enables action. One can argue it has been ever so, for the foundation of all and everything (the ontic) has always been seen as unknowable. It is clear that institutional and epistemological barriers to this recognition still remain substantial and fully in place. In particular, the exposure of the Eurocentric over-​determined foundation upon which so much knowledge of the humanities is ordered and rests, is a huge challenge not just for the Global South but equally for the North. In both cases such a confrontation exposes the hegemonic establishment of the human as universal, and the necessity of the post-​anthropocentric counter-​discourses of decoloniality and new materialism among the others (a concern to be discussed elsewhere), problematising the human/​animal, nature/​culture and other core binaries of modernity. Against this backdrop, climate change could/​can provide the prospect/​ possibility of a contextual space of negotiated transformation and innovation. For this to happen, the centrality of the human needs to be displaced by a relational ecology akin to Guattari’s wherein animality, inter-​subjective dependence and mind (seen as distributed rather than just embodied) undercut the centred human of the humanities. This means that the attachment of the humanities, as directed at the study of the varied creative forms of the output of the human, has to be broken and replaced by a more complex understanding of the ontological relation between creation, being and things. Thereafter, the ‘human’ becomes seen as both a producer and product of cultural production. Yet this human still retains a binary relation to the corporeal human of natural science. The actual conditions of being other than human/​post-​natural by ‘virtue of’ the conditions of ‘historical and living becoming’ (Colebrook 2014, p.161) include the presence of technology (as techno-​culture and artifice) as an ontologically designing force of becoming a post-​natural being. Empirically, post-​natural being has left biocentric notions of Homo sapiens and the human (extant, anti-​human and posthuman) of the humanities stranded in the past, thus revealing that the modes of being are now ahead of available descriptive language. Added to this view is a need to acknowledge the return of the violence which prefigured the formation of the ‘human’ of the humanities, the fragility of humanness (as well as the ease by which it can be dissolved), and the bio-​politically produced abandonment of humans as new post-​natural forms of the ‘dehumanised’ are created. Here one includes the evacuation of the human and a non-​human other (with a self-​designated different identity), by their ‘being overcome’ by total instrumentalisation’ (technological psycho-​ colonisation): a now prevalent but under-​acknowledged negation. De facto, the future of the humanities (posthuman humanities) is behind a post-​natural, epistemological critical engagement needed with climate change understood as an unfolding, uncontained relational condition of being occluded by the forms of its objectification. Whoever, or whatever, the ‘problem’ is, it is beyond a solution, thus the imperative is changing with the change, acknowledging the change agent to be an ontological ‘being with’ a receding finitudinal horizon, an agent who

A lexicon of analytics  61 has psychologically ‘abandoned an illusion of commanding the conditions of the collective. Living unsettled with a sense of the uncertain, the political agency of this agent of change demands a non-​universal politics beyond the practices, management, governance and situated chronophobia of the status quo. Likewise it demands overcoming a paralysis of imagination produced by a pragmatics of the present, its retained faith in reason, and the political agency of an agent of change confronting a future capitulating to technology. Ontological rupture Transposed from the theoretical to the lived, ontological rupture in the present times of everywhere means that in order for our being to become futural there has to be an ontological break, as will now be argued, with the overwhelming and under-​recognised defuturing propensity of our species. To acknowledge such a change implies a profound transformation of the nature and project of politics. … Writing in 1938 Gaston Bachelard (1884–​1962) proposed in his book on ‘the formation of the scientific mind’ that the history of science is replete with epistemological obstacles (Bachelard 1986), and to deal with them required an act of epistemological rupture. In parallel, the history of philosophy is likewise replete with epistemological and ontological obstacles that equally require acts of rupture. As the epistemological has been addressed elsewhere, our attention will focus on the ontological  –​it is a serious problem with implications that go well beyond the concerns of scholarship and intellectual culture. For such obstacles function to misdirect understanding of the problems, challenges, possibilities, and emergent dangers existing in the conditions of a plural present. What now follows is a first pass towards an indicative response to such a situation. The ontological obstacles, rupture, and two breakaways The proposition is that without a break from obstacles that block conditions of viable futures there can be no liberation from what negates them. To say this prompts comment on a current debate on emancipation centred around and involving Jean-​Luc Nancy (Watkin 2019). Two positions are articulated by Watkin, one on the necessity of a historical rupture, the other (Nancy’s) on what we can call a transcendence of the individual or collective subject surpassing its conditions of limitation. The difference of position is characterised as ‘emancipation-​from’ versus ‘emancipation-​by-​and-​from’ (Watkin 2019, p.  6). Rather than stepping into this debate, the position here steps out of it  –​in the recognition that by engaging with the issue of ontological rupture a commitment to it has already been made. However,

62  A lexicon of analytics irrespective of adopting a position of exclusion from the debate as posed, it precipitates a recoil that needs to be acknowledged. This is not simply because of its absolutely human-​centred Eurocentrism, but mostly because it is politically vacuous in so far as emancipation is discussed outside of conjunctural conditions of restriction –​be they psycho-​subject(ive) or socio-​ historical. Consequently, difference is excluded and emancipation arrives from an abstracted zero point (‘the from’ is always situated in conjunctural difference). As soon as a conjuncture arrives, the difference of position in the debate cited by Watkin dissolves. Moreover, at the very moment of ‘emancipation’ another set of conditions of limitations arrives  –​and while they may well be less oppressive, the situation does not equate to ‘freedom’. For freedom itself arrives as an onto-​epistemological problem/​obstacle as it ‘tends to denote a human property and capacity for spontaneous initiative divorced or severed from ontological mooring’ (Dallmayr 1984, p. 204). Thus the point to be made is that a breaking ‘out and away from’ is always also a breaking into the creation of a condition of delimited political possibility. The ‘broken with’ never completely remains in the past because memory has agency in the present and consequently the break so often arrives from the future. To support these assertions, two plurally exposited encounters will be given. The first is directed at the being of the individual and social collective beyond subject, its historically constituted and ontologically directed selfhood. The second is with worlding conditions that constitute the worlding conditions of such subjects. Both encounters reflect a much larger and implied complexity. The habitus is constituted from the naturalisation of all that has been formally and informally, practically and conceptually learnt. Here is the locus of all that is known that acts as the taken-​for-​granted basis of our actions as they travel from the conscious to the unconscious and in so doing constitute an element of our ontology. Obviously, it follows that for the possibility of an ontological rupture of the self from its historical formation of the known, there has to be a break with the extant habitus –​so that what ‘is known’, and all associated values and meaning, can be disclosed and engaged. While this is easy to say, it is hard to do. Yet disruptive knowledge, and the experience of difference that brings the assumed into question, both have disclosive ability. The force of the deconstructive epistemology has the ability to rupture an invested ontological being posited in a particular mode of being-​in-​the-​world. This happens, for example if one accepts that meaning has no independent existence but is the product of discourse (understood as the historically contingent social system that produces knowledge and meaning, Foucault 1974)  as it relationally articulates with habitus. This thinking leads to concluding that the meaning of life has, as Darwin knew, no meaning in itself. To realise that all that stands between us and an infinite regress into meaninglessness, the uncertain and complete unknowing, is the constructed and contested fabric of meaning that our species has created. To come to such a realisation produces an ontological break opening into a dogmatic retention of belief,

A lexicon of analytics  63 nihilistic fatalism, or an acceptance of the contingency and responsibility of making one’s life meaningful for oneself and others. Ontological resistance is one of the ways nihilism expresses itself. It does so in the form of akrasia whereby knowledge is gained, understood but then refused. Thus what is learnt is excluded from any transformative relation to the agency of habitus. This condition is, for example at the core of mass consumption culture as it moves into a critical juncture wherein the imperative to change one’s values and way of life (by, e.g. the need to adapt to conditions created by climate change) arrives as a critical choice between their abandonment and retention. Current ‘trends’ suggest that it is likely that akrasia will effectively mean that the future will continue being sacrificed for the present until a breakdown of the unsustainable status quo occurs as a condition of absolute crisis. A very different ontological rupture of the individual and collective subject arrives as the process of decoloniality is embraced. It is worth noting that in our understanding decoloniality as an ontological, epistemic and ethical condition is primarily marked by the bordering, indeterminate and unfixed positionality of neither-​nor and both-​end at once, meaning that, being aware of the power asymmetries that are still in place, it is undesirable to translate decoloniality into a homogenous and clearly defined identification of indigeneity or subalternity radically shutting oneself out from any dialogue with modernity. The condition of between-​ness that constitutes this interpretation of decoloniality unevenly establishes alienation from an epistemologically colonised, historically formed, and culturally reproduced life-​world. The embedded identity and habitus of such a subject finds its being between the condition of unmaking and making anew, or between resistance and re-​ existence (Albán 2009). The ability to do this rests in significant part, but obviously not solely, on a cognitive ability to selectively appropriate and synthesise a new knowledge from the epistemological resources of the culture of the coloniser and the known, repressed, and often damaged indigenous epistemological substantive or minor fragment informally or formally, via narrative and practice, inducted into the habitus. This is an open and unfinished process grounded in the dynamic intersectionality allowing for remaking and voluntary interaction in decolonial interstices of subjectivities which are habitually still seen as frozen in their power asymmetries, including the epistemic one. Although decoloniality is formulated from the exteriority (the outside created from the inside, Dussel 1985) ultimately there is no outside to the global coloniality, it is just that we belong to it in different and usually several intersecting and constantly changing and frequently contradictory roles of subjects and objects, critics and accomplices, the subaltern and the dominant, etc. The in-​between-​ness attempts to facilitate a complex interplay and exchange of these fluid and leaking positionalities. Crucial to gaining the efficacy of a realised transformative agency is the ability gained from an ontological rupture to produce a discord of between-​ ness in which anxiety, the search for openings into another way of being,

64  A lexicon of analytics recovered and new trans-​epistemological knowledge  –​all meet. To be able to create a futural imagination of decoloniality, so situated, requires such a rupture, and the political resolve and the prefigurative cultural means to transcend it in localised and continuing conditions of ethnocide (Clastres 1994, pp. 43–​52; Willis and Fry 2002, pp. 123–​132). One can place a contemporary reading of Hegel’s master and slave dialectic into such a context (Hegel [1807] 1977, pp. 113–​119). The Other of the Other can contribute towards ‘emancipation’ through a release of knowledge and authority by ‘making available’ for selective appropriation in the recognition that appropriation is not an act of theft, or a gift, but a transfer into mutual ownership. The fifth example is of an ontological rupture in which the subject is completely dis-​empowered and defutured. This can come in a number of ways. One is by the destruction of a culturally constructed ‘human’ being beyond ethnocide. These ‘people’ are not only removed from humanity, but are also abandoned, criminalised and imprisoned in camps, without due process, and stripped of their identity. Another very different example results from occupation of the conscious of ideologically or theologically recruited technocentric warriors who are induced into a technologically constructed reality with its discourse of fully realised instrumentalism. Such operative subjects of warring, whose actions are completely directed by the technical means of destruction, can be understood as both dehumanised and posthuman. Encounter two This is the second part of the story; it comes with three examples of the ontological ruptures that still retain an afterlife with misdirecting agency as ‘obstacles’ influencing the formation of those relational worlding conditions in which subjects come to be. In each case what is broken is a binary relation that nevertheless still retains representation connections to material referents that continue to have ontological semiotic affects, and obstructive effects, upon the perceptions of ‘the masses’ of the semiosphere. As stated above, war is no longer discrete and now arrives in plural forms, yet it still retains its savagery, though now delivered and amplified by advanced technologies that are not all purely military. At the extremes, the nature of weapons, the enemy, sites of conflict, and forms of aggression have all become indistinct, hence the claim that the distinction between war and peace no longer exists. Even so, the afterlife of the idea of the distinction lingers. The next leftover obstacle from an ontological rupture is the natural/​ artificial binary. We all exist in an age where empirically there is no point of separation. The industrial deposits of our species’ material actions have contaminated entire terrestrial, marine and atmospheric environments in ways beyond the past impacts of eruptive and disruptive natural events. This has been done with a huge array of chemicals and waste matter with massive defuturing impacts on biological life. The resulting loss of biodiversity is only one major anthropogenic crisis transforming the planet’s biosphere.

A lexicon of analytics  65 Inseparable from this issue is the intervention in natural processes by genetic engineering, be it good or bad, as it has more than anything else directly removed any natural/​artificial distinction. A simple question that captures the point: is a genetically modified tomato artificial or natural? The third rupture is between politics and the political that ‘democratic’ and authoritarian equally share. Politics as fundamentally directive of the form of social life of the populace, which is an intrinsic condition of ‘human being’, was initially articulated in what is considered the western tradition by Plato and Aristotle, as embracing the totality of human conduct. However, this understanding of politics has been subsequently displaced by the politics of the institutionalised instruments of state administration that facilitate the economic functionality of production, trade and consumption and national defence under the conditions of managed order and the international hegemony of capitalism no matter what are its espoused ideological dispositions. Political difference in such a framing reduces all variants to economic ends, administrative priorities and style. Above all, pragmatism is directive of action taken to maintain the fabric of the political order and of the retention of ‘business as usual’. All change is directed towards this objective. What this contraction of the politics is unable to do is to recognise major transformative global forces of change, like those already mentioned  –​the loss of biodiversity, climate change, structural unsustainability and omnipresent war –​and respond to them in any way beyond token gestures. Not only do political institutions lack the ability to govern that which most needs to be governed, but they are also bereft of futural insight and futural leadership. Resistance to such a huge critical mass of inertia cannot occur without a new political imagination –​one not based on ideological displacement then replacement with another paradigm based on existing notions of ‘a regime’, but one that retrieves and remakes politics as a lived practice of the politicised everyday being socially, culturally, economically and spiritually remade. This is an ontological process of incremental repair of ‘what is’ (of which decoloniality is one example) and the antithesis of utopianism. The challenge to imagination is seeing how ‘what is’ could be made otherwise. In so far that ontologically all of our actions are future-​directive, politics in sum now needs to begin to be thought of as graduated, relational, non-​ utopian and ethically determining what is individually, collectively and societally remade, brought into and taken out of being. Obviously, the key socially collective question is how can this be conceived and thereafter enacted? In the face of the status quo, the ambition could be posed as the production of redundancy and situated autonomy, as a claimed space and condition of local transformation and function, disarticulated from the normative condition, over revolution. As stated above, whatever follows after the rupture, after the break, is always another condition of limitation coming from, and caused by, the disruption of the different impacts and imperatives of any particular conjuncture. The current situation is that there are large and pressing global problems

66  A lexicon of analytics already unevenly having very significant consequences around the world. Effectively, the complexities of these events are ahead of how they are mostly being perceived, theorised, understood and engaged with (if engaged with at all). Largely, this is because of epistemological obstacles that prevent the events being understood sufficiently as problems, and equally as ontological obstacles, of them being ontologically embedded in the subjects and worlding of the worlds in which they exist. The lighter and darker sides of the (post)human Change is not of the unchanging but change brought to conditions that are in constant flux. This observation is to be specifically directed at the continuum, and emergent form of, colonialism and its ‘interface’ that looks to be the fragmentation of the species Homo sapiens. Re-​subjection (political and technological) It has long become axiomatic that there is no postcolonial condition and coloniality as the constituent indispensable part of modernity continues in neocolonial forms of control over subjectivities, knowledges, sensibilities, aesthetic models, gender and sexuality, etc. Yet the more general pattern of enthralment set up by and in modernity thanks to colonialism and imperialism is not limited by these more investigated spheres, spreading presently in the direction of technological and political subjection not necessarily directly stemming from colonial legacies. For example coloniality refers to technological enslavement changing not only the nature of our relations to the world and to each other, but also human nature as such. Political forms of resubjection, which are often hard to separate from the technological ones as they often merge together, no longer necessarily act in the form of territorial annexations or neo-​imperial Reconquista (although such anachronistic excesses also take place). Resubjection can easily take the form of transnational extractivism, global economic exploitation (often in semi-​virtual and virtual forms). Moreover, there is a distinct tendency towards a re-​capturing of those spaces and spheres which were considered free or liberated before. This resubjection increasingly traverses the geopolitical divisions into the North and the South often taking imaginary yet powerfully limiting forms of the shrinking rights and freedoms and the control of totalising secutirisation grounded in the totality of constructed fear (of global terrorism, of reinvented enemies, etc.). Development, un-​development and the agenda of postdevelopment As briefly discussed above, development and its critique from different positions are a crucial factor in the understanding of human nature, inter-​ human relations and those with other living beings and the world at large.

A lexicon of analytics  67 Development is a current form of social-​economic coloniality, a euphemism that replaced by the mid-​twentieth century the discredited civilising mission and placed the so called developing countries (mostly former colonies) in the position of eternally catching up flunkeys, towards the end of the century adding to them the freshly failed postsocialist states in Eastern Europe. In a sense, developmentalism is a quintessence of all the modern/​colonial vices such as progressivism, infinite growth, sanctification of markets and profits, an instrumental if not exploitative take on nature, etc. However, even if this approach has been openly criticised at least starting from the 1970s if not before, the developmentalist paradigm has stayed in power in institutional apparatuses, dominant discourses and real practices, in effect, expanding globally and continuing to shape people’s minds, identities, life goals, and self-​ perception, therefore exponentially increasing the defuturing tendencies. Various models of de-​growth and un-​development exist in different parts of the world. This is clearly expressed in regress and economic abandonment which accelerate as robotics in dominant economies displaces cheap labour in the marginal nation producers. But even when the agenda of de-​growth is shaped as a powerful social movement, these movements are not yet able to radically change the power balance and their victories over transnational corporations or legislative changes are still local, while at the level of international agreements the status quo ‘sustainable development’ still wins, unable and unwilling to change the present situation and simply suggesting to do ‘less of the same’ rather than ‘living with less and differently’(Kallis, Demaria and D’Alisa 2015) and thus leading to an imminent collapse. On a mass scale, developmentalism and racing for constant material and economic growth remain the main triggers of people’s lives and identities. Postdevelopment is a model emerging mainly in Latin America and is an unfortunate term as the prefix ‘post’ brings us back to the same logic of progressivism and vectorial thinking –​the logic of modernity/​coloniality. If we want to get rid of these notions, we need to call the model ‘an alternative to development’ or perhaps ‘an entirely de-​modern paradigm’ (Quijano 2017). Here in Latin America there are already real examples of applying the postdevelopment principles in social-​economic projects of localised capitalism with the aim of creating a proliferation of distributed and decentred producers for local markets, targeting marginalised, stigmatised and discriminated-​ against groups. The Gaitana project in Tolima, Colombia, is an example of such action. With autonomous design and marketing support from a regional university, the backing of the National Agency for Reincorporation and Normalisation, plus a technology support group, local coffee growers, ex FARC rebels, local women and members of the indigenous community came together and formed a collective. Its aim was to create employment and market a brand of coffee that improved the local economy, but equally to use this activity to produce and communicate autonomous collective action, all enshrined in a formal agreement, that unified competing social and political interests after a war lasting fifty years. The project demonstrates the

68  A lexicon of analytics existence of places where there are still residual indigenous cosmologies with their radically different view of the relations between humans and the world, and a growing number of re-​emerging models of alternatives to development, that are also being implemented in concrete social, economic and cultural practices. One of them is the ‘buen vivir’or ‘sumac kawsay’ model of communal wellbeing (Vázquez 2012; Escobar 2018). The problem is that such models and historically traceable trajectories have survived in only a few regions of the world and the issue then becomes how and based on what to construct an alternative-​to-​development paradigm on a larger scale? Nationalism and cosmopolitanism undone The former antipodean nationalism and cosmopolitanism have drastically changed their meaning today, at times becoming so blurred and all-​ encompassing that it is impossible to continue using the terms anymore. The delocalised, spaceless universalism of post-​Enlightenment institutions and utopian agendas is still discernible in the operations of the UN and other such international bodies rapidly becoming outdated and inefficient. Moreover, the Kantian idealism in relation to maintaining perpetual peace now demonstrates a century of failure to deal with conflict. On the other hand, the latest trend is definitely that of particularism, even among those who ardently defended universalism only a while ago. Today’s resurgence of exclusionary locality in the nationalisms of the Global North rejects both the transnational cosmopolitan and the discarded precarious other. The anticolonial nationalisms, important in the twentieth century’s political struggles, are largely left in the past, giving place in many postcolonial and postsocialist countries to militant reactionary nationalisms of conservative elites. Generally, the rise of nationalism on the exit of a colonial power backfired  –​partly ‘unifying’ a tribal nation that was never a nation, but far from always being inclusive, and so often based on a model drawn from the former colonial power and ending up creating more conflicts, as we witness today in so many countries. The many remaining grassroot indigenous and ethnic liberation movements are a different story, as these minoritarian forms of localism are marked by a power asymmetry and still struggle to serve (however unsuccessfully) as an alternative political strategy within dominant cultures. Moreover, in spite of the rightist efforts to defend the national borders –​real and symbolic –​the national itself today is increasingly problematised, blurred and translated into virtual trans-​border forms. Universalist cosmopolitanism in its Kantian and post-​ Kantian understanding never included everyone and soon degenerated to a culture of urban elites. The Enlightenment subject proclaimed equality but only for those who were part of the legitimate group  –​humanity, synonymous with the Western European people of a particular class. That meant that some people were ‘more equal than others’ (to recall Orwell’s Animal Farm, 1945) or even that some people were more human. Cosmopolitanism in the

A lexicon of analytics  69 disguise of delocalised universalism has increasingly manifested its exclusionary facets, preventing the multiplying numbers of undesired others of the western cosmopolis from entering its imagined space in the capacity of full humans. The growing dissatisfaction with the unipolar, bipolar or even multipolar world order grounded in geopolitical rivalries pushes in the direction of imagining a still utopian polycentric relational world abandoning agonistics and grounded in cosmopolitanism understood as a relational pluriversality, or a ‘cosmopolitan localism’ (Mignolo 2011a). It is opposed both to neoliberal globalisation projects/​ ambitions and to Kantian cosmopolitanism which corresponded to the Westphalian world order and consisted in the universalisation of the core European vantage point. In this sense, cosmopolitanism and globalism can be seen as different versions of the same western imperial expansion and dominance which is now questioned from dewestwesternising hubs and has led to a polycentric capitalist world with no consensus. Commonality in difference needs a substantial element that is capable of gathering many different actors, whereas all forms of cosmopolitanism lack this quality. The problem here is that the old political concepts cannot be remade to work and progress; despite attempts to do so, they are just acting as placeholders awaiting new, situated ideas and the historical conjuncture that enables them to be made to emerge. Clearly the fragmentation of cosmopolitanism into its variants is not producing a regenerative force of praxis. As with nationalism, cosmopolitanism today has so many faces and political agendas that the very use of the term becomes problematic. One of the obvious faces is the postimperial and postcolonial cosmopolitan nostalgia. The sad cosmopolitanism of Central European remnants of Habsburg rule or the Balkan outskirts of the Ottoman Empire (often channelled through a longing for a previous belonging to a larger world albeit in a subaltern position, which the subsequent weak nation-​state cannot provide) in this sense rhymes with the post-​Soviet bitterness at lost grandeur which is manipulated by national elites into aggressive forms. This cosmopolitanism is obviously not the same as the cynical cosmopolitanism of the neoliberal post-​ national circles. As with nationalism, it is important to see who speaks from the cosmopolitan position, and how the speaker is positioned in relation to power. The prehistories of modernity included various forms of cosmopolitan strategies and outlooks:  from religious and mercantile (Muslim, cross-​ Asian) to the cosmopolitanism of migrants, slaves and refugees  –​all those who needed to be cosmopolitan to survive. In the contemporary complex world, messy cosmopolitan tendencies out of necessity once again start to fork and multiply. Cosmopolitan localism destabilises the previous status quo principle of the division into those in power and the governed. Cosmopolitan localism is grounded in pluriversality, non-​homogeneity and the preservation of the right to remain different and impenetrable. The governed then also have their cosmopolitanism and their own politics. Arjun Appadurai offered a term ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ to make a distinction between the high-​brow cosmopolitanism which is a move made

70  A lexicon of analytics willingly and by choice, and a cosmopolitanism of survival and coalitional resistance which is helping to reclaim hope for the future. This latter type of cosmopolitanism is driven by the ‘exigencies of exclusion rather than by the privileges (and ennui) of inclusion’ (Appadurai 2011). As an instrument of enfranchising, cosmopolitanism from below is identified with cultural coexistence, the positive valuation of mixture and intercultural contact, the refusal of mono-​culturalism as a governing value, and a strong sense of the inherent virtues of rubbing shoulders with those who speak other languages, eat other foods, worship other gods, and wear their clothes differently. (Appadurai 2011, p. 30) Critical cosmopolitanisms and cosmopolitanisms from below, as well as other forms of cosmopolitanism of survival transversally connecting social movements and elements of political society in the world, try to offer some promising alliances, although they have gone so far from the original Euromodern concept of cosmopolitanism that perhaps it does not even make any sense to continue using that term to describe them. Rethinking cosmopolitanism and nationalism is linked with the neo-​ imperial revanchist tendencies in the interplay of the old and new conflicting Grossraums that is reflected in the politics of a number of countries and affects human (re)identifications and (re)classifications. These countries are not only those who belonged to the first imperial league (Great Britain, France) and who today often practise various forms of ‘postmodernist imperialism’ or neo-​trusteeship (Fearon and Laitin 2004), but also –​maybe more so –​the second-​rate modern empires marked by imperial difference and also those who have never reached the status of empire in modernity and have entered the geopolitical scene after formal decolonisation was over. The imperial globalism of the USA stands slightly apart as its trajectory vacillated between the ‘American century’ and ‘Pax Americana’, both still grounded in providentialism (Smith 2003), and today acquires a strange hybrid form that combines remaining claims to global dominance with a complete denial of any responsibility for the future of the world. This is a considerable shift from the typical American manifest destiny ideology. At the same time, new imperial players emerge and old and forgotten ones re-​emerge demanding to be included and recognised in their claims, and under a negative scenario they can easily become a threat to humanity and to the future. Lacking as yet the global dominance goals, these old and new self-​ proclaimed ‘empires’ demand a re-​division of the world into zones of geopolitical influence which resemble the logic of the pre-​Cold War world, except for the unregulated multi-​vector nuclear threat (with the start of a new nuclear arms race and the increased prospect of the use of ‘tactical nuclear weapons’). A typical example is Russia with its recycled imperial ideology, but there are also others such as China, Turkey, India, etc. The regional nature of their imperial

A lexicon of analytics  71 claims further reduces their liability for the common future of humanity and the world we inhabit. In a way, the present revival of quasi-​imperial sentiments continues the typically modern imperial rivalry for a better position in the global hierarchy. Some countries proudly manifest the neo-​imperial revival as their agenda (Russia). Others practise more virtual forms of control linked with cultural expansion, soft power and axiological dominance that nevertheless at any point can turn into military, economic and/​or political spheres. Immaterial geographies of the so-​called natural boundaries as a subjective and highly constructed and manipulated perception of the country’s place in the world play an important role in the present revival of stale geopolitics. As in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it is a war for the people’s imaginaries, for the ways they look at and remake the world and themselves. Additionally, major geopolitical regroupings along different and often multiple axes and geopolitical fragmentations take place on a global scale. Many of such alliances are unclear, unstable and indeterminate, particularly in any future dimension. For example today a country like Australia is aligned with the US militarily but economically with China. The US is no longer a secure ally to any nation. China is becoming more internally repressive and externally expansionary. It seems that nations are soon going to have to decide who is going to command the world’s natural resources. This is likely to result in more warfare and conflicts. Indeed dangerous times are ahead but it is up to us how to interpret this danger and how to act upon it. Remembering the significance of the tragic in Greek culture, it is important to reaffirm it was the basis of a consciousness that prompted avoidance of danger; as such it still offers a lesson for today. Along with the presence of quasi-​imperial and neo-​imperial states (and sometimes as part of their profiles), today’s global politics is marred by the increasing number of dysfunctional and failing states –​all at different stages of the process of losing their efficacy and legitimacy. Although the number of such states is not particularly high according to the definition’s formal characteristics (such as inability to collect taxes, control the territory, provide public services or maintain some vote of confidence), there is a growing number of states which are dysfunctional in more indirect or hidden yet very serious ways, while the term ‘dysfunctional state’ traverses the previously unshakable boundaries between the North and the South to include countries that seem to correspond to all Euromodern governance norms yet encounter an increasing crisis of legitimacy. The erosion over the last three decades of the social contract in which the states fail or refuse to fulfil their obligations directly affects their citizens. They not only find it meaningless to continue sacrificing their rights and freedoms in exchange for non-​existent support and protection, hence developing various forms of economic, political and social secessionism, but also experience existential anxiety, grounded in the necessity to radically rethink their personal and collective allegiances previously firmly connected with the nation-​state that they understood as natural and final. Some researchers even suggest that

72  A lexicon of analytics the nation-​state model as such is becoming outdated and unable to function properly in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex situation; and there are emerging alternative interconnected models in the making, which are not yet sufficiently conceptualised or even acknowledged by academics (Bos 2018; Jeffery and Wincott 2014). In this context, contemporary politics, institutions and modes of political conduct would all beg rethinking and re-​forming, as would the life-​worlds of politicians and many academics. The state of exception as a post-​democratic/​postsocialist normative condition The Cold War confrontation of the two versions of modernity  –​the liberal market and presumably democratic, and the state socialist, habitually associated with totalitarianism –​led to an important shift from the system in which the presence of the state socialist alternative allowed both the first and third world left and democratic forces to argue powerfully for better working conditions in their struggles and negotiations with governments that were scared of potential revolutions and protests, to an entirely new configuration with no alternatives left. Certainly the inhabitants of state socialist modernity knew better that their real situation was different from the one packaged in propaganda for external use. At the core of state socialist utopianism for a long time stood the idea of universal happiness and consequently a happy future for everyone. Way too soon utopia became sealed and exclusionary. But the social contract of the people living in state socialist countries was linked to this imagined future happiness that they were offered to exchange for the hardships and difficulties of their present. Today the belt-​tightening rhetoric is no longer compensated by a promise of universal happiness in the near or distant future. This future dimension finally left the stage in the late 1980s, parallel to the global neoliberal accession. As stated above, until recently the Global North has seen only its lighter side whereas the Global South and the former second (socialist) world were immediately plunged into the darker realms of neoliberal global modernity and soon equated. After all, the economic, political and social measures applied in the postsocialist countries such as shock economic models, the abrupt abandonment of all social welfare responsibilities, the imposition of the logic of survival, were all copied verbatim from Milton Friedman’s works previously tested in Pinochet’s Chile and other such regimes ready to sacrifice any amount of people to economic growth. In Russia this general neoliberal tendency was superimposed onto the local centuries-​old tradition of disempowerment and devaluing of human and other lives. Radical economic deregulation might have seemed beneficial after the rigid Soviet control but in reality this step resulted in dozens of millions of lives thrown into the state of exception not because of any external military threat or internal conflicts, but rather because those in power quietly decided that these lives were of negligible value. Re-​legitimation of power, rebuilding

A lexicon of analytics  73 the authority of the state and the increasingly geopolitically dispersed supranational para-​political control of the dual state as a clandestine and practically unaccountable power network were habitually achieved through warfare and bloodshed, such as the Chechen campaigns conducted by Russia or the use of international terrorism as a tool to manipulate large groups of people into subordination. After 11 September 2001 the Global North has finally felt that it was also part of the global state of exception and what N. Klein called ‘disaster capitalism’ (Klein 2008) which is constantly fed by technogenic, natural and media and politicians’ invented catastrophes in order to further normalise the state of exception as an irreversible human condition. The many faces of the ‘posthuman’ One can single out, following Rosi Braidotti’s taxonomy, the three major strands in contemporary posthuman thought:  the one coming from moral philosophy and developing a reactive form of the posthuman, the one from science and technology studies, enforcing an analytic form of the posthuman; and the one stemming from the tradition of anti-​humanist philosophies of subjectivity and proposing a critical posthumanism (Braidotti 2013, p.38). The reactive posthumanism comes from a wide range of liberal and leftist conceptions (Vinge 1993; Habermas 2003; Fukuyama 2002; Wallerstein 1999; Lecourt 2003) which share an anxiety over the human condition, the human being as an object of manipulation in the technologically changing reality, the new human as a half-​stuff that may be manufactured or changed according to market needs. The technocratic posthumanism is the best-​known kind, grounded in the belief that quantitative shifts in technologies lead to qualitative changes in human ontology. Technocratic posthumanism largely remains blind to the questions of economic, ‘racial’, political and spatial injustice convergent with social inequity, distribution, appropriation and discrimination and it avoids issues of subjectivity or epistemology, while easily becoming an instrument of bio-​power and bio-​politics. This further fixes the division into chosen and doomed, valuable and dispensable lives. Champions of this scientific posthumanism see it as a complex response to biological, social and technological global challenges; its goal is to ensure the survival of humankind, coordinating and merging cybernetics and neuro-​technologies for the betterment of humanity. Yet fighting the problem using the very means that caused it is not the best strategy. The risks and challenges in question are often created by the very thoughtless use of technologies for the sake of growing profits in the conditions of an unregulated market. The colourful futuristic details of scientific posthumanism include the imminent translation of the human subject into an electronic (non-​organic) form, the fascinating games of connecting additional ‘memories’ to our brains, erasing the boundaries between corporeal existence and computer simulation, and between biological organism (where our body is just the first

74  A lexicon of analytics but not the best prosthesis which we learn to master, according to Katherine Hayles 1999) and cybernetic mechanisms. The favourite posthumanist topic is the qualitative changes in human corporeality, neuro-​system, intellect and physiology in accordance with the strategy of negligible senescence (Grey and de Rae 2007) leading to the immortality of those who can afford it. The simple cyborg apology times are long gone, which is evident in the jump of the founding mother of philosophic cyborgology, Donna Haraway, to her current manifesto of companion species and to the border, not between the human and the robot, but between the human and the animal in her Chthulucenic dystopia of voluntarily shrunken (through following the new logo ‘make kin not babies!’) and increasingly symbiotic (through adding the endangered species genes to the human bodily heritage) humanity (Haraway 2003, 2016). Yet, the very differentiation of the human, animal and technological that these and other theorists claim to dismantle is highly problematic and constructed from the start, as it fails to take into account both our animality and the super-​structural and technological ‘nature’ of our humanity. As Ingold and Palsson point out, humans are fluid beings, with flexible, porous boundaries; they are necessarily embedded in relation, neither purely biological nor purely social, which may be called ‘biosocial’, and their essence is best rendered as something constantly in the making and not as a fixed, context-​independent species-​being. (Ingold and Pallson 2013, p. 39) After all, ‘we’ have always been technological –​as tool-​makers and users we are ontologically designed by all that brings us into being. Thus framed, the current uneven debate is about what is now designing what we in great difference are becoming. Moreover, almost all the existing academic versions of posthumanism, along with the dominant political and legal conceptions of the human and humanity, continue to ignore or dismiss as superstition the parallel existence of multiple other cosmologies and world-​visions  –​non-​western and non-​ modern, that have never been grounded in the binary opposition of people and nature, and therefore have not had to romanticise or objectify it. The indigenous people in many parts of the world do not see themselves as the dominating species divided from nature and cosmos by their superior, ‘outside’ point of view, but rather as an equal element along with the myriads of others, coexisting in the complex spiritual and physical continuum with other beings, deities, ancestors, animate and inanimate nature and the larger world. Such cosmo-​visions are marked by fluidity and plasticity of dualities, understanding the universe and life as consisting of ‘complementary sides on a spectrum of continuously interacting and mutually redefining fluid shades’ (Marcos 2006, p. 28), which combine in an infinite number of ways without losing their ambivalence. In this cosmology, life and death, internal and

A lexicon of analytics  75 external, material and spiritual, up and down, feminine and masculine, good and evil, heavenly and profane, hot and cold, Moon and Sun are not divided by stiff oppositions but exist in each other and through each other in a state of constant friction and dynamic, explosive interaction. The existence of other cosmologies that have had a very different sense of being and its naming folds the very name ‘human’ into colonial imposition and violence. Even the UN notion of ‘the family of man’, the notion of human rights, of universal humanity asserts a difference that refuses the difference without a voice. Analytical posthumanists avoid discussing the social, ethical or existential risks of their utopias, either finding them irrelevant or not having any sufficient explanation, and retreating into the familiar sphere of ‘how’ and not ‘what for’. Their reductionism and empiricism of the near-​sighted triumphant rhetoric of the controlled evolution and the creation of the new anthropic environment in fact repeat the worn-​out approach of transcending and conquering objectified nature (including human nature) with an embellishment of postmodernist toppings such as relativism, moral scepticism and militant libertarianism. If informational patterns are more important than material ones, then our embodiment in a biological substrate is just a historical chance which can and should be altered. But who will determine the anthropic change? Who will acquire the right to controlled evolution of identities and in whose interests will it happen? What will be the criteria of dividing people into those who are worthy of becoming the posthumans (or super humans) and those who are only good for being dispensable or leading precarious lives as material for experiments and objects of biophysical management? Predictably the first candidates for exclusion in the new human/​posthuman model are the same disenfranchised populations who were racialised and discriminated against before. Yet the biopolitically excluded beings more and more often include those who used to think they were untouchable by their right to belong to the first world. The global nature of the present challenges, including the uncontrollable war and climate change, makes the included/​excluded distinction highly permeable. Some of the posthumanist scientific scenarios are more attractive than others  –​for example the idea of creating a planetary computer network which would integrate with the users to perceive itself as an evolving supra-​mental being. Another interesting idea is panhumanity, including the interconnections between human and the non-​human environments –​urban, social and political (Franklin, Lury and Stacey 2000, p. 26). N. Rose offers a model of bio-​sociality and bio-​citizenship grounded in the bio-​political nature of contemporary subjectivity (Rose 2007). A  productive posthuman approach is advocated by P.-​P. Verbeek who opts for the post-​anthropological turn linking humans to non-​humans. This view is rooted in a moralisation of technologies (Verbeek 2011, p.  5). Yet the dangerous consequence of technocratic posthumanism is a new version of discrimination based on the mastering and legitimation of trans-​human technologies. This kind of thinking implies a common misconception of technological universalism. But

76  A lexicon of analytics globally almost the entire history of technology is in play, from the oldest and most basic to the contemporary and most sophisticated. It follows that there is no uniform, ontologically designed subject/​user. Technological beings (us) exist in the recursive time of an ever-​returning past. Yet how people/​cultures/​ societies are positioned along a line of technological development has become another classificatory marker of value and, therefore, yet another mechanism of discrimination. Curiously, in arguing against the old anthropocentrism, this kind of posthumanism in fact reinstates it as a new master narrative based on the ‘abstract plurality of more-​than-​human entanglements’ which ‘provides a discursive background for the mythopolitics of the newly proclaimed human époque (Schulz 2017, p. 57). This may easily lead to another division of the world into the chosen and the damned. In J. McDermott’s conception, posthumanism is a modern version of the Faustian deal –​not with the devil but with technologies (McDermott 1997). A major issue here is who gets left out of all the competing forms of human futures. The host of the silent, marginalised non-​participants is likely to become even more marginal under the techno-​Euro-​globalist scenarios. What could have begun is perhaps (in the sixth extinction context) the dying out of Homo sapiens and the arrival of another species. A critique of critical posthumanism Critical philosophical posthumanism, of which Braidotti herself is a good example, grows out of the anti-​humanist strand which is linked genealogically with Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze. Anti-​humanism delinks ‘the human agent from the universalistic posture, calling him to task … on the concrete actions he is enacting’ (Braidotti 2013, p.  223). Anti-​humanist thought has often focused on the deconstruction of the subject as a unitary and homogenous entity, reimagining it instead as increasingly complex, problematic and relational, as well as framed by sexuality, corporeality, empathy, affectivity and desire. Moreover, the fractured human subject as framed by technology is now being projected, especially by techno-​posthumanists, as a being that is fundamentally ontologically different. But a fracturing of humanity occurred long before this moment, with the imposition of racial divisions. Long before the production of technological difference between humans, race has been deployed, in particular by western colonialism, as the most ‘developed’ means to categorise levels of ‘the human’  –​from the inferior sub-​human to the superior, fully civilised (Quijano 2007, p.171). The error of such action was made clear decades prior to science proving that race has no biological basis, among others by W.E.B. Du Bois in his now famous and much discussed paper of 1897, ‘The Construction of Races’ (Appiah 2014). As briefly mentioned above, critical posthumanism claims to alleviate the tension between humanism and anti-​humanism and offers more positive alternatives instead of the present negative common vulnerability of all forms

A lexicon of analytics  77 of life. It borrows ideas from feminism, postcolonial thought, contemporary ecology and environmentalism with their struggle for new concrete forms of universality, which are based on respect for all kinds of lives. Braidotti constructs this view in opposition to the classical Euromodern humanism, rationality and secularity linked with science and technology. Proponents of critical posthumanism call for a move beyond anthropocentrism and expand the notion of life towards the non-​human or zóé (Braidotti 2013, p. 49). In contrast with Agamben or Butler, Braidotti reinterprets zóé in a positive way as a non-​human vital force of Life, erasing the previously stable boundary between the bio and the zóé. Zóé-​centred egalitarianism for Braidotti is the core of the post-​anthropocentric turn which is opposed to today’s political economy of turning human and non-​human matter into a commodity. Yet in spite of the growing popularity of this latter type of posthumanism it is still limited and exclusionary, particularly if we look at it from the underside of modernity, from the position of those who were and are denied their belonging to humanity and hence to humanism, anti-​ humanism or posthumanism. An important critique of a Braidottian, enthusiastic posthumanist utopia is provided by German scholar of Black thought Sabine Broeck who claims that this type of posthumanism ‘relegates Black (and, we can add, any other disqualified from modernity and from humanity) knowledge to a social, political and cultural immobility and past-​ness only to be transcended by posthumanist vitalism’ (Broeck 2018, p. 179). Broeck captures the gist of Braidottian limitations linked with her ‘programmatic turn away from history’ and hence with her being a ‘presentist’, ‘lateral’ thinker, someone who ‘insists on immanence against history’s melancholia’ (Broeck 2018, p. 179). This is actually a typical ailment of Euromodern thinking: dismissing all the past manifestations of the modern violence against everything and everyone considered not modern and not human enough to be included and treated ethically. Following her presentist, forgetting mode Braidotti discusses the combination of necro-​political violence, the totality of global neoliberal capitalism and accelerated technological digital changes as a new challenge, as if she is unaware of the darker, irrational, dehumanising sides of modernity and its humanism that were always there from the start, or rather she is ready to bury them for the sake of her positive, life-​asserting posthumanism for the privileged ones who can chose which brand of humanism to belong to. The positions of those who were never seen as human enters this type of posthumanism only as a token, brief mentioning of established postcolonial names and terms. But the Braidottian posthumanist equation does not take into account the disposable and wasted lives of indigenous people, Blacks, the colonised and other minoritarian subjects who have been always unwelcome in Euromodernity. Like many other Euromodern commentators, Braidotti refuses to admit that slavery, dehumanisation, genocide and other excesses of modernity were

78  A lexicon of analytics its integral and indissoluble parts rather than exceptions. This kind of ahistorical posthumanism sees the present situation as catastrophic and new only because the general logic of coloniality as the darker side of modernity is now applied more easily and on a broader scale to previously relatively empowered populations of the Global North. Yet this is a myopic lamentation similar to the European thinkers’ shock in relation to the dehumanising discourses of Nazism and fascism famously ridiculed by A. Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire 1950), which claimed that fascism merely transferred the modern/​colonial logic which had existed for centuries to Europe. Braidotti and other posthumanists are reluctant to jump off the only legitimised progressivist linear vector along which modernity is replaced with postmodernity and altermodernity, and human by posthuman, but this leads to a provinciality in their position which is blind to anything and anyone outside of this vector, going parallel or in other directions. As a result there is no historical engagement with the heterogeneity of the human: ‘the rhetoric of the posthuman and its specific rendering of anti-​humanism opt instead to envision the “post”-​ing of the human from the vantage of the human subject, not from the position of the historically dehumanised’ (Carr 1998, p. 120). Broeck accurately defines the Braidottian celebration of vitalist universalism at the expense of erasing trauma, wounds, memories and violence against modernity’s unhumaned others who have been positioned outside and beyond the division of bios and zóé, as a form of ‘white voluntarism’ if not a ‘wistful theoretical solipsism’ (Broeck 2018, p. 196). This effort to erase memory, grief and mourning in favour of a seemingly egalitarian vitalism is ultimately a limiting step, as it throws posthumanism back to the same unresolved dilemmas of the old humanism that it cannot leave or transcend. Braidotti and other Euromodern critical posthumanists tend to merely, condescendingly mention postcolonial, critical race, indigenous, Black, Caribbean and decolonial studies to demonstrate their awareness of other positions. Yet in the end this superficial enumeration only devalues the non-​ western critique of humanism, never taking it seriously or engaging with its views. Moreover, many concepts and terms introduced by non-​western critical thinkers are hijacked and appropriated in a distorted and often depoliticised way to be framed and tamed within the flat ahistorical construction of positive posthumanism, whereas the other concepts of modernity remain locked in the very death zone that the celebratory posthumanists refuse to talk about, in the phobogenic interplay of invisibility and hyper-​visibility (Gordon 2000). In a sense, this hip philosophical posthumanism attempts not a critique but rather a revival and refurbishing of an otherwise unredeemable western topic, but under a different name  –​vitalism, zóé, rehabilitated and reconsidered matter. This is a newly constructed positionality from where the posthumanists perform their enunciation and promise a new ideal posthumanist world, albeit marked by the same exclusions. It will be trendy to be a human-​machine, human-​animal or posthuman, whereas indigenous, Black, former and present colonised populations would be left out with their boring, outdated,

A lexicon of analytics  79 and oh so ‘humanistic’ problems. Broeck is right to point out that behind the trendy words here we find the same familiar post-​technologically reassembled white subjectivity. It helps to demarcate from the outdated human (just as the Renaissance humanists demarcated themselves from the medieval ‘dark ages’ by inventing the concept of tradition), and also from its darker others. Yet this exclusion is hidden behind the presumed universality of the posthuman today, which is yet another consequence of the normalised modern ontology of history. It makes us believe that ‘all on the planet is posthuman when, in reality, modernity has reduced the majority of the population to quasi-​human (Walsh and Mignolo 2018, p. 119). An other humanism as a humanism of the other A different taxonomy of humanism and posthumanism emerges if we pay attention to the long-​standing non-​Euromodern critique of the human and humanism. For Africana, indigenous and decolonial thinking, the point is to scale down the totality of the Human and open up the possibilities of diverse other humans and other than humans with equal rights to being. Putting aside for a while the issue of how effective epistemic decolonisation can actually be when it is divorced from praxis or when its praxis is limited to academic theorising, let us point out that a decolonial critique of the human is grounded in Frantz Fanon’s concept of sociogenesis (Fanon 1967, p.  11) and Sylvia Wynter’s ‘Man 1’ and ‘Man 2’ (Wynter 2000). These important contributions allow us to delink from the vector progressivist teleology of ‘posts-​’ and, instead of rejecting the content of the human by equipping it with the prefix ‘post’, first ask ‘how these concepts came into being:  when, why, who and what for?’ (Walsh and Mignolo 2018, p. 171). Mignolo suggests reading the Braidottian version of posthumanism alongside but without comparing it to Sylvia Wynter’s critical reflections on the human and humanism. Then we will be able to see that ‘Wynter’s and Braidotti’s concerns to a certain extent overlap:  two women confronting western hegemony … of the idea of human and of its bodyguard, humanism. Posthumanism is a Eurocentric critique of European humanism, while Wynter and Fanon open up for a decolonial critique of both the concepts of human and posthuman’ (Walsh and Mignolo 2018, p. 171). Africana, indigenous and decolonial perspectives question the human and humanism –​yet not in the direction of prolonging the vector to posthuman or discarding the human in any of its versions altogether, but rather in trying to think of humanism and humanity from the position of those whose belonging to humanity has always been questioned or denied. Among the modern/​colonial paralysing oppositions the ‘dichotomous hierarchy between the human and the non-​human is the central’ one (Lugones 2010, p.  743). Within this opposition, large groups of people were not even considered as people being seen rather as belonging to the animal kingdom. Contemporary bio-​ political strategies have not changed the modern/​ colonial logic of

80  A lexicon of analytics classifying the anthropos with the help of orientalist or progressivist schemes. As demonstrated by Nishitani among others, anthropos was constructed as a position of the object absorbed into the domain of knowledge produced by humanitas’ (Nishitani 2006, p. 266). The asymmetrical relation between humanitas and anthropos is being continually reproduced: the former as the owner of knowledge, the latter as the owned object to be folded into the domain of knowledge. (Nishitani 2006, p. 267) In other words, anthropos is an other which does not exist ontologically. Its otherness is constructed epistemically and then reontologised. This other relegated to the sphere of nature (and hence to the position of the object of the justified exploitation) can be then subjected to any violence interpreted as a cost of economic, social or technological development. This move subjects large groups of the population to ‘misanthropic scepticism’  –​a form of questioning their very humanity’ (Maldonado-​Torres 2007, p. 246). This logic, originally formulated in relation to indigenous and colonised people, is today spreading towards many other groups and clashing with the reciprocal movement of the disqualified humans no longer interested in being assimilated or accepted into the sphere of sameness. Jamaican thinker Sylvia Wynter problematises the (Western) Man, which has represented itself as the Man as such in the last five hundred years, the bio-​evolutionary chosen being. She proposes a movement in the direction of ‘after man towards the human’, claiming that we are torn between the two extremes –​the western model of humanism (including posthumanism), in which ‘Western Man’ secures ‘the well-​being of our present ethnoclass … conception of the human’, and a different model, whose goal is ‘the securing of the well-​being of the human species itself/​ourselves’ (Ferry, Renault and Philip 1992, p.  260). This viewpoint is not falling in behind or reiterating posthumanist ideas that are still grounded in erasing the European locality of the concept of ‘Man’ and European implication in it. Rather, it strives to further problematise human existence and draw attention to the fact that it is grounded in a much more complex and variegated idea of reality than that of western humanist, anti-​ humanist or posthumanist thought. Therefore, instead of posthumanism we can speak of an ‘other humanism’ as a dialogic planetary humanism of the dehumanised other. Parallel to Euromodern anti-​humanism, this dialogic, planetary humanism grows out of a specific local history, subjectivity and tempo-​locality; or, in decolonial terms, out of a particular geopolitics and corpopolitics of knowledge, being and sensing. At the same time, there is also a growing awareness of the other than human political agency and efforts to define it vis-​à-​vis other political agents. An interesting example is Bruno Latour’s recent proposal to introduce an additional attractor complicating the binary scheme of the global versus local which has almost completely lost its meaning, accompanied by the typically

A lexicon of analytics  81 modern vantage point of the out of this world. The fourth attractor is defined by Latour as terrestrial and seen as a new political actor (Latour 2018, p. 40). Frantz Fanon’s sociogenic principle questions the universal for its refusal to see how the social affects the rational. Starting from the social contextuality of our identities, Fanon juxtaposes sociogenesis with Eurocentric ontogenic (Freudian) and phylogenic (Darwinian) principles that claim to be objective yet are grounded in the hidden territoriality of modern thinking. Hence Fanonian rethinking of the general questions of western philosophy, such as what does it mean to be, or even what it is like to be human, according to purely biological or ‘genomic’ (Wynter 2000, p. 31) terms. Fanon instead asks what it means to be constructed as Black in a racist society whose rules you cannot control. Downsizing the dominant epistemic frame of reflecting on humanity and humanism, Sylvia Wynter defines western humanism as ethno-​ humanism (Wynter 2003, p. 18), whose darker side is the marginalisation and underrepresentation of the vast majority of people defined as sub-​human or liminal. The anthropos or the problem people (people seen as problems, Gordon 2000) are increasingly vocal in their refusal to submit to humanitas and in their claims to revise the idea of humanity which is comprised of anthropos as much as of humanitas. This attempt at a reestablishment of an other humanism as a humanism of the other is not trying to revive the homogenous idea of the self as a sovereign individual or go back to some pre-​post-​structuralist notions of identification. On the contrary, Sylvia Wynter understands ‘human’ as a praxis (Wynter 2007) and not a noun. Yet people with denied humanity, those regarded as mere tokens of their culture, religion, race, sexuality, have experienced ‘the real nature of humanism fiction, the fact, that the fictive character of the liberal subject does not make it any less real’ (Karkov 2013, p.  57) or, perhaps, we could add, any less suffocating. For such anthropos, stressing the subjective specificity of knowledge is different from a delocalised claim to situated knowledges. This other humanism as a humanism of the other often grows out of a dialogue with indigenous cosmologies that have never dichotomised people and nature. Decentralising the human being in critical anti-​and posthumanist forms, rethinking anthropocentrism and shifting towards a ‘more than human’ thinking beyond the limitations of the species-​oriented world (Manning 2013) is a relatively new trend in western thinking, whereas in the liminality of modernity this viewpoint has always been axiomatic, even if stigmatised as prejudice and dismissed in the mainstream rhetoric. The issue of dehumanisation travels not just towards the abandoned  –​ the biopolitically managed masses of the displaced  –​but also towards the fully instrumentalised, the totally compliant techno-​subjects who have been transitioned from being users of technology to the ‘used by’; the counter de-​ posthumanised other of Braidotti’s posthumanism. Yet, the very populations whose outlook and ideas could offer humanity a different way of thinking about the human, posthuman and other than human, and a different

82  A lexicon of analytics demodern set of tools with which to question the normative assumptions, are also the most vulnerable and systematically dehumanised within the logic of modernity/​coloniality. It is the indigenous and stateless people who are the displaced and extremely devalued, the populations of abandonment who have no future in the current world (dis)order. It is the former fourth and also the present fifth world of migrants and refugees, the unhomed whose ranks are exponentially growing today. Hidden in reservations, slums and detention camps, these groups exist in the regime of invisibility and, at times, hyper-​ visibility which is erasing their belonging to humanity and interprets them within the slightly modified ‘losing race’ rhetoric. The ideas, visions, sensibilities and dreams of these devalued lives cannot just be included along with the dominant Euromodern knowledges –​this model has long demonstrated its falsity and inefficiency as it does not question the very knowledge structures and hierarchies, the rules of the discourse, the provincial point of view naturalised as objective and universal. Hardly can we find instances of radical delinking from this norm. Yet neglecting the accumulating tension may at some not so distant point lead to an intractable and devastating crisis. Technological constructions of reality Our species’ relation to technology is not a matter of choice. Technology is not merely a ‘something’ at hand to be functionally employed by ‘a user’. Neither is ‘it’ an instrument over which total control is, or can be, exercised. Rather, technology has become integral to the ontic conditions out of which our becoming emerged and emerges. Thus it is a material and ontological force in our world formation, and in our own creation as technological beings. … Numerous stone, bone and wooden tools, as object and utility, formed an important part of the material world into which the first Homo sapiens were born. Thus, from its inception our species has always been a user of tools with skill and prefigurative thought (techne+logos), and so we became inherently technological (Fry 2012). As such, the act of making and ontologically being made were, and remain, inextricably connected. However, this relation of exchange between the maker and the made is now radically changing. Under the direction of artificial intelligence many tools now function independently from direct user control, in both mental and physical domains. This change has dramatically and continuously transformed the circular interaction between the maker, making and the indivisibly functional and symbolic agency of the made together with that of the subject (partly biomechanically but especially cognitively). Collectively and unevenly globally, in recent decades these changed relations have diminished, and are still diminishing, the status and numbers of skilled and semi-​skilled industrial craft workers worldwide. This overall situation places two linked issues of concern on the

A lexicon of analytics  83 agenda of criticality to be addressed: the extent to which reality is becoming dominantly constructed by technology (rather than sociality); and the degree to which instrumentalism and techno-​centrism, as hegemonic powers, are now a force of colonisation of our diversity as late modern beings. Peter L.  Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s (1966) extremely influential book, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge established the constructivist paradigm of the real dovetailing with Aristotle’s view of ‘man’ as Zoon politikon (a political animal), and thus a social being. Viewed over half a century later, the book manifests a huge void –​there is not a single mention of technology within it. Yet technology had been an object of critical inquiry in the East and West from at least the fifteenth century (Clunas 2004; Mitcham 1994). By the late nineteenth century the term ‘philosophy of technology’ had been coined (Ernst Kapp, Philosophie der Technic, 1877 as cited by Mitcham, pp. 20–​24) and by the 1930s and 40s a diverse array of international thinkers (including Lewis Mumford, José Ortega y Gasset, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Elull, and Landon Winner) had placed the relation between technology and the social under critical examination. Such has been the ‘development’ of technology now over many decades that it has moved beyond just the mechanical or electrical to engage the bio-​ chemical, immaterial, metaphysical and ontological. As a result, its place in the reality of everyday social life around the world (albeit unevenly) not only massively expanded but became increasingly transformative to the extent, as will be indicated, that its power started to become constructive of reality itself. In so doing the processes of the social construction of reality have begun to weaken, as Gilbert Simondon started to show. Marie-​Pier Boucher, writing on Gilbert Simondon (1924–​1989), a key thinker on the ontological nature of technology, comments that his ‘thought holds a great potential to think and link the coupling life’s material and processes with technology’ (Boucher 2012, p.92). While what follows concurs with and critically extends recognition of the influence of Simondon’s thought, it also acknowledges his most significant contemporary reader, Bernard Stiegler. What engaging such thought will make clear is that our species’ past and present entanglement with technology within ‘life’s material processes’ now extends to western and non-​western futures. In his PhD thesis Simondon wrote of the misplaced fear of ‘the cultivated man’ directed at ‘machines that threaten mankind’ (Simondon 1958). To counter this view he presented ‘man’ in relation to technology like the conductor of an orchestra in the midst of all that has to be brought into harmonic convergence (Simondon 1958, p. 4). This metaphor of control, if it ever held, certainly no longer does. First the televisual, then the Internet, social media and the digital domain in general have escaped any overall means to control them, and the effects/​affects of much of what they bring into being. So, while the technology corporations that dominate this technology retain a generative capability to bring ‘things’ into ‘being’, they have shown little to no understanding and (along with the state), exercised very little control over

84  A lexicon of analytics the ontological consequences of what they create. Thus in its familiarity technology ever becomes an object of misrecognition. So framed, the concept of the evolution of technology is completely misplaced. Moreover, the speed of change exceeds any induced ability to adapt to wider environmental change, beyond the scope of sensors, and other panoptic technologies, to make life visible (as part of the architecture of power of the constructed reality). It has been also noted that Simondon himself had no sense of technology having any particular evolutionary direction. At the same time, he did view technology as having a direct environmental nexus between nature and the human, but rather technology was seen as ‘nature in the human’ (Barthélémy 2012, p. 113). This binary relation can be juxtaposed with a more contemporary notion of techno-​natural synthesis characterised as the ‘naturalised artificial’ (Fry 1994, pp. 79–​86). Any asserted relation of difference between the natural/​organic and machine/​ technology cannot be taken as self-​evident. As Georges Canguilhem clearly showed, such thinking comes with an understanding of ‘the mechanical’ and a perception of ‘the machine’ as well as the relation between the ‘organic’ and ‘organisation’, that is epistemologically problematic (Canguilhem 1994, pp. 287–​302). At its most basic this is evident in the transposition of the idea of the mechanical, via the machine as given (by mechanist philosophers), to the biological (thus creating the reductive and projective notion of bio-​ mechanics). Of this Canguilhem comments that ‘the biological problem of the organism-​machine cannot be treated separately from the technological problem whose solution it assumes, namely, the relation between technology and science’ (Canguilhem 1994, p. 292), which in turn requires the revision of this relation. Central to this task is the overarching notion of ‘system’ as bio-​technically organic. However, ‘being organic is not merely maintaining part-​whole relations, but also designates self-​organisation and autopoiesis, which we would like to call recursivity (Hui 2019, p. 42). Such recursivity can be taken as the ‘essence’ of the ‘naturalised artificial’ relation. Simondon was interested in the relation of, and the distinction between, life, non-​life and machines. His views are a clear expression of the character of his radical empiricism and expose the strength and weakness of his position –​ which centres on his Eurocentrically formed universalism, as it excludes the cosmologies of others and how they objectified other realities. The presence of life in non-​life is a good example of his thinking: the relation of sameness as difference. For Simondon non-​life has a presence in life, as life emerges out of it. Clearly this understanding has been common in many indigenous cosmologies past and present within which the animate and inanimate are not an absolute binary. That empirical truths can be concluded from totally different cultures and epistemologies was partly recognised by him. But what is now becoming an increasingly salient observation is that, while Simondon argued that there was a linear passage and process of non-​life towards living, other cosmologies frequently posited this relation as circular and in so doing negated a life and death distinction.

A lexicon of analytics  85 Take one: making real The real is plural as constituted by its cosmotechnics. For Yuk Hui cosmotechnics is defined by ‘the unification between the cosmic order and moral order through technical activities’ (Hui 2016, pp. 19–​20). Cosmologies designate the imperative and significance of the made (culturally and as artifice), including tools  –​both communicative and instrumental. The moral order provides the metaphysical framework of the knowledge by which the self, other beings and worlds are known and valued. Thus they fabricate the perception and operation of reality as lived. Cosmotechnics cannot be reduced to equipmental function, but rather to a use-​function. Although their authors have been exposed to the ravages of neo-​colonising globalisation, they are/​ likely to re-​form out of a bricolage left in its wake, or from conditions of the breakdown of the local defuturing unsustainable environment. So positioned, Simondon’s and subsequent work offers an inroad into thinking the technological construction of reality. Here it is important to grasp that reality is always in formation, albeit negative or positive. While one can say its extent and eventual forms remain unclear, notwithstanding fictional speculation, what is irrefutable is that both the full arrival of the new will have a profound impact on our being (in difference), and also the process of its becoming already underway. Simondon recognised that the transformative dynamic of life was not constrained just within the biological but had become linked to the technological. This view has now become much clearer with the influx of biotechnologies/​genetic engineering/​medical genetics, creating, modifying and manufacturing living matter. The two most salient features of understanding this dynamic for Simondon were the convergence of life and technological objects, and the ability of what he called individuation to constitute naturalised artificial biotechnical individuals (non-​ human synthetic life). What is now happening is the extension of such thinking to bring non-​human/​ posthuman beings into existence (not an objective that Simondon supported but yet one development his thinking encouraged). To say that the dynamic in play is ethically fraught is to understate the potential, and currently undecidable, confrontation with the futuring and defuturing ontologically designing consequences of such action. They will be especially amplified by the dialectic of sustainment wherein creation and destruction are forever co-​joined. Thus the pre-​individual nature that is formative of the individual (the condition and milieu of ontogenesis out of which it emerges) is not purely ‘charged with potentials’ but with a propensity towards the affirmation or negation of life and its milieu. Death (of live labour): in the present epoch, technological change is resulting in, at least for a significant number of the global population, the creation of a condition of material disassociation that produces: (i) the death of industrial workers’ skills and knowledge; and (ii) a worlding of immaterial interfaces, and techno-​ mediated social exchanges, that constitute a dematerialised

86  A lexicon of analytics mediated reality. To a significant degree, such a reality evacuates ontogenesis as a becoming from direct experiential global engagement. So qualified, pre-​individual nature can arrive with an ability to form or deform future or defuture the individual. Yet technology equally occupies plural time, whereby the pre-​ industrial, industrial and post-​ industrial geospatially coexist in divided and overlapping realities. A very basic example is that an industrial manufacture plant can span a foundry casting component with a technology unchanged for centuries while fifty metres away production is taking place in a completely robotic facility. These remarks prompt comment on Simondon’s understanding of causality in relation to invention. While the case made by Simondon is strong, it is again based upon a linear view, in this case on a Bergsonian understanding of time, seen as the durational progression of a succession of individual constructs that sequentially unfold (like the frames of a film). In contrast, the counter view was delivered by Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘everlasting time of now’ (Jetztzeit) wherein the past and the future are only viewable and thinkable in the present moment. It begs consideration, for invention so situated responds to an imperative that can be handed down from the past or arrive from the future (and this is exactly the case with climate change). Mind: mind is not being approached here in its psychological, anthropological, phenomenal or objective characterisations but via Simondon’s notion of ‘psychic-​individualism’. He understood it as the non-​physical emergent means, by which ‘we’ deal with our individuation in a world of challenges, problems, opportunities and the implications of our actions and tensions. Psycho-​social life for Simondon makes possible the artefact as the carrier of ‘the being that produced it’ (Barthélémy 2012, pp. 110–​111). The artefact can also be understood as an ontological designing agent that collectivises social engagement or disaggregates it. In the case of social media, the designing agent does both via:  inauthentic sociality, the fragmentary character and attention-​seeking ‘noise’ of information content, as well as the reduction of communicative engagement to entertainment. All of this diminishes ‘users’’ capacity to sustain any form of prolonged attention to informational content. Attention, as Stiegler emphasises is ‘the reality of individuation in Gilbert Simondon’s sense of the term’ (Stiegler 2012, p.  105). Stiegler goes on to qualify attention as ‘the mental faculty of concentration on an object, that is, of giving oneself an object’, and as ‘the social faculty of taking care of this object’ (Stiegler 2012, p. 105). A qualification of the destruction of attention is made by Simondon, for destruction is seen as ‘both the destruction of the psychical apparatus and a destruction of the social apparatus (formed by collective individuation) to the extent that the latter constitutes a system of care, given that to pay attention is also to take care’ (Stiegler 2012, p.106). The problem of a lack of ability ‘to attend’ is brought to a condition of mind by Stiegler. He comments: ‘The major stake of attention deficit disorder, and the destructive effects of the exploitation of attention by psychopower is therefore the fragilisation of the infantile psychic apparatus and of sociability

A lexicon of analytics  87 founded upon philla’ (Stiegler 2012, p.106). Of this condition research psychologist Larry Rosen argues that while it is not possible to say this disorder (and a growing number of other psychological orders) are caused by technology, they have a tendency to produce disorder like symptoms (Rosen 2012). What this equivocation registers is a failure to distinguish between the ontological and pathological. Memory:  the claim is that the loss of memory is technologically ‘offset’ because so many of the occasions of our lives are gathered in and retained by databases. However, this gathering is dominantly not by us, and is not available for us to access. Memory is being made malleable. Additionally, the information that we do deposit in computer memory lacks the responsive materiality of the written and printed word and other associated prompts of recall that are intrinsic to situated memory –​the sound of a voice or a piece of music, a recognised face, place or gesture, a date in a diary, the hint of a touch from a once familiar perfume, a photograph that brings back the forgotten, a face that recalls a name. The invention and industrialisation of digital mnemotechnical devices and products that integrate ‘the mnemotechnical system in the production system’ to bring it ‘under the control of a global technoindustrial system’ is the ‘ambition’ of a number of corporations (Van Camp 2012). At its most basic, the aim is ‘to capture and control the psyche’s attention’ so that ‘consumers’ strive to acquire ‘ever more commodities and services (Van Camp 2012)’ Creating an addictive relation to an aesthetic inductive screen interface to ‘hold’ the consumer’s attention for a directive memory to arrive, is an example of not just the technological construction of a material reality but its economic underscoring. The ‘you’ no longer just buys the product: you are a product of the product. In the socio-​cultural and economic inequity of ‘our’ fragmenting post-​ industrial age, Stiegler has recognised that politically confronting the ‘interfacial’ content of the screens of all ontologically designing electronic media has become crucial. For him such action means identifying and developing forms of counter-​psychopower able to detach populations from those created market identities that bond them to consumption (a produced relation of mind, memory and commodities). Breaking such attachment requires counter-​ psychopower being able to decouple pleasure, social interaction from ‘online life’, as agents of inculcation within the commodities’ sphere. This action does not mean creating another ‘system’, rather it implies acts of unmaking under the direction of a new political imaginary via a recovered and re-​calibrated, re-​asserted ‘agency in being’ alienated from its technological colonisation. Take two: the technological construction of whose real? Instrumentalism is already, or is becoming, a dominant epistemology and a mode of global engagement. It is directing the operative material and immaterial technological systems of power of everyday life, from communications

88  A lexicon of analytics in all their digital forms to financial transactions, transportation, accessing public services, waste collection, electronic entertainment, commodities and much more. Systems theory and practice so contextualised has had a profound impact on forms of reality beyond the materiality of its technosphere. Such theory, as Yuk Hui points out citing Lyotard, comes from ‘… cybernetics as a powerful thinking of governance and social regulation’ as it establishes a dominance of a ‘performativity of procedure inscribed into a society of compliance’ (Hui 2019, p. 241). Historically, as Zygmunt Bauman made clear, echoing Hannah Arendt, nowhere were the dangers of such an order more apparent than in the Holocaust wherein the disposable life itself was reduced to an object of banal ‘bureaucratic management’ (Bauman 1989, p. 103). As he and others have recognised, ‘civilisation’ remains just as much in danger from the direction of contingent ‘system’ as it was then. For it ‘negates all knowledge’ in its recursive drive to return a recurrent causality to the same (Hui 2019, p. 190). Essentially, formally and informally acquired instrumental knowledge has become a major contributive agent in constituting the diverse contemporary subject’s habitus. As such it is completely relationally articulated to psycho-​ technologies as they infuse systems’ compliant conduct, commodity desires, perception and memory. In sum, as indicated, the ontological designing of our species being was integral to ‘our’ becoming a technological being –​this capability continually increased over eons. At the same time so did the efficacy and extent of the power of such ontological designing whereby being-​ in-​the-​world became (especially the world of the Global North) being in a post-​natural technosphere where the distinction between the natural and the artificial no longer existed, genetic engineering being an obvious instrument of this transformation. It needs to be emphasised that global differences between generations, socio-​economic classes and cultures that populate what have been outlined as pluriverses are widening. The reality of this difference is, at its performative extreme, the arrival of a technological nemesis, whereby what was appropriated and created by the use of tools, making, the made and the maker, not only enabled our first becoming but also our species’ material maturation. But now this process has turned back upon us. It has started to unevenly fully subjugate the plurality to which ‘our’ technological being was integral. As techno-​colonisation emerges out of technology as a convergence of its being a longstanding agent of capital, we become increasingly subjugated through the ontological designing of (and from) encountered technological things, material and immaterial, and as a created receptive disposition of ‘our’ being to ‘give over’ to technology as desired productivism is realised. In so far as the exposure to technology is concerned –​in difference, across and within nations, and between knowing and unknowing subjects –​the techno-​ colonisation of already epistemologically colonised subjects (the naturalisation of Eurocentrism as universal thought) is acknowledged as globally uneven.

A lexicon of analytics  89 The convergence between Simondon’s philosophy of technology and how technological colonisation can be seen to arrive is evident in a process that he called singularity. In essence, as will be remembered, it is ‘the many from the one’. Taking the notional first stone tool as a point of origin of this process, it is evident that there is an ongoing ontological transformative force expressed by singularity in a progressing from tools, to proto-​machines, to technological industries and now, to the contemporary conditions of psycho-​technologies. This process has been unceasingly transformative of us hominoids, our presence in the world, and of the biophysical world itself. The generative power of ‘the one’ continually re-​arrives as an end-​point and as origin. From epistemological to digital techno-​colonialism The centuries of European global colonisation, the destruction of indigenous cultures and the imposition of western knowledge upon colonised people were all integral to the creation of the domination of the Eurocentric mind as a condition of functioning in the modern world. By the early to mid-​nineteenth century this process had become incorporated into the transfer of technologies to both colonised and non-​colonised nations, with claims that superior science and technology equalled superior knowledge, understanding and modes of organisation. Market-​expansive technology transfer always travels with unknowing. This is especially evident in how communication technology is being introduced into indigenous communities. As has been recognised now for a long time, many indigenous people do not divide themselves from nature (the concept of nature itself and the nature/​culture divide being a Euromodern, artificially constructed and subsequently legitimised idea), so that inter-​species relations are for them a naturalised condition. In contrast, the ecology of the ‘naturalised artificial’ and ‘mind’of the arriving technology, as precursors to the dystopic utopianism of techno-​posthumanism, are proclaimed without any sense of the consequences, which is a failure of technological innovation in general. But in relation to cosmology/​world connectivity of indigenous people, the impact of technologies like social media on the social fabric is a particular failure, for it has the potential to create far more ontologically disruptive implications for perceived and felt world and inter-​personal proximities. Against such a backdrop, what the ontological designing of the technological romanticism of the posthuman has set out to do is to rebreak the already broken (fiction of the) human –​the one that was never one but always a doubled two (the animal and the ‘human’ (of repressed animality) and the human and the indigenous other (of embraced animality). In this context, if the pluriverse is taken seriously and informed by the human as broken, Homo sapiens is perhaps now more appropriately understood as Homo pluralis (the being that evidences the technological breakdown of natural evolution). The general characterisation of the human/​posthuman relation, as discussed above, is usually presented as one of clear difference. But on the basis of what

90  A lexicon of analytics has been argued, and considering the technological being deemed essential to the ‘human’, and the techno-​colonised being deemed posthuman, what we see is a graduation from the one to the other that is neither uniform nor universal. This becomes all the more evident once the economy of psychopower is considered (Grincheva 2013, pp. 16–​22). What is effectively unfolding, as Stiegler recognises, is an entropic breakdown of the social fabric and democratic process creating a loss of values as an ongoing spreading of the spirit of nihilism (Stiegler 2011). It follows that the affect of psychopower directly correlates to this breakdown and the scale of the uneven global spread of the digital empire (and consequential forms of individuation between and within particular societies). While the impacts are very significant, one must again resist projecting them as universal. Stiegler’s political position towards this situation is to call for a new ‘cultural politics of memory’. While having conceptual merit, this is stranded in the familiar nether-​region of political idealism. In the face of the forces of the digital empire the call is hapless and without (an) agency and power. This critical situation, techno-​colonisation in general, cannot be disaggregated from the wider planetary geo-​environmental/​geopolitical crisis that is now our species’ destiny. The question here is can ‘we’ (a growing fragment of) a fractured species, survive psychopower and the deepening environmental and geopolitical crises as they produce a new political landscape that demands a very different political imaginary and new political practices? Certainly the autonomic colonising power of technology as a compound system of ontological construction removes any possibility of neo-​Luddite resistance. In this situation it is hard to see how any immediate formations of effective political resistance can be even contemplated, let alone constituted. Yet the scale of the levels of the breakdown to come (which will make disruptive capital completely irrelevant) has to be viewed as a monstrous potentiality (for cosmotechnologies). What can be done, and immediately, is to attempt to build a situated critical culture in differential contemporary circumstance. While one can attempt to render digital ‘tools’ as functionally supporting progressive means, any illusion that they can have any emancipatory power begs to be abandoned. They are not mere tools, but the most powerful of ontological designing agents. There is also a strong conceptual and political case for creating a ‘borderland’ discourse between Eurocentric and indigenous technological knowledge  –​for example manufactured, chemical-​based rapid industrial processes of dying fabrics versus slow indigenous practices using plants, minerals and the effects of different environments (like storage in a particular clay or soaking in water for several months). Within a decolonial praxis and the ambition to open another way of knowing and acting with emancipatory potential, there is a clear case for structured and respectful exchanges of knowledge. Likewise, the culture of the psycho-​technological, as it takes no care beyond techné (and thus no care of life, beings, things, futures), is attached to the ever-​expanding market culture of capital. As such it invites association with and mitigation

A lexicon of analytics  91 by, practices of care drawn from the indigenous, traditional and contemporary crafts that produce but are equally often aesthetically masked. Taking this kind of action is not a romantic indulgence but a significant element in the advancement of more sustainable practices. Working against the lack of care, it is possible to think, create and advance a politics of designing and making with care directed and connected to the (post-​sustainability) practice of sustainment. So positioned, design with care brings the designed object into being to provide performative care in the course of its material functionality (Fry 1995). One cannot claim such action as having overall transformative emancipatory power, but it can be seen as a practice of resistance with situated generative potential. It has the virtue of modesty and the potential to transfer a counter-​aesthetic to the performative quality of things/​made objects (as opposed to the ambition of Simondon’s notion of a new aesthetic of technology). Here there is linkage to an extant craft tradition of utility that returns such crafts to the mundane. Care thus becomes defined as the articulation, proximity (Levinas 1987, p. 109–​26) and product unifying the affect between the subject and the object able to create conditions of ontogenesis of/​as the pre-​individual of an individual (de Boever et al. 2012, p. 188). As such, in its everydayness care transcends the epistemological difference between Simondon and Heidegger, Levinas’ ethics and Foucault’s ‘care of the self’. Relationality and technology The issue of the impact of ‘big data’ and datafication on the Global South has generated concern and events from scholars and activists internationally. However, to just focus on such a specific issue is problematic. It does not function as discrete. Rather it is operationally relationally connected to other technologies and contexts. To address it as a particular object of concrete concern contextually, actually dislocates and abstracts it. The fundamental ‘reality’ of technology now is that it is deeply and profoundly implicated in the transformation of ‘all that is’ (the ontic). This is to say that ‘what is actual’ and is epistemologically unreachable, is now constitutive of a designing force, directive of a post-​real reality. This situation is becoming evident in a variety of ways. So seen, ‘Big Data’ is not just a making present of whatever systems of observation, underscored by a particular epistemology, constituted as informational ecology. Big Data is not ontologically discrete. Rather it is the face of the appearance of a complexity, integral to a transformed/​transforming unknowable ontic that exceeds any reduction to a circumscribed individuated or relational system. It also makes explicit the complete instrumentalisation of life-​ worlds that emanate from a technosphere that is becoming even more deeply structural. As such, artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics all form part of a new materiality and psycho-​domain of which Big Data is but one expression.

92  A lexicon of analytics Effectively, the knowledge that ‘powers’ what has now been technologically created is increasingly disarticulated from any understanding of the futural agency of what has been created. Just to give one modest and final short-​term example:  Big Data driven auto-​corrective writing systems are under development. This means that as a student, or author, writes, any data cited is checked and updated, errors are corrected and, in the example of a student, a comment and a grade are assigned. De facto, the very notion of what is an author is going to be subject to radical change. More broadly, who or what controls the data controls the technological construction of reality in the North and much of the South. While technology is never neutral, it is now moving to a hyper-​level of ontological designing –​this in a world where the centre and periphery are no longer just geographically defined. Technology and the human counter-​agency Resistance in the face of the rampaging behemoth of technology is now no more realistic than a notion of overcoming nature. Thus does not our relation to the natural world inform our relation to the naturalised artificial and imposed world of technology? The lesson of nature recedes back to our origins and forward into our future: we embrace it and protect ourselves from it. So in a world of technological construction embedded in a defuturing crisis the quest(ion) is –​how do we do this? For Stiegler this situation, characterised as the age of the Anthropocene, demands ‘inventive production’. He, along with organisations with which he is associated, believes that responding to this situation ‘requires a total reinvention of the architecture of the World Wide Web’ (Stiegler 2018, p. 38) as the means by which the Anthropocene has been made present. What is so striking about this evocation is that it seems totally at odds with how he understands Simondon’s concept of individuation. As artefact, the web has become a ‘thing in itself’ with a ‘life of its own’. As such, while its distributed architectonic elements are operationally managed, they are not fully controlled, neither is its ongoing state of emergence. While interventions are made, its amorphous form transmutes. Moreover, the flow of digitalised information behaves in the same way as water as expressed by Lao Tzu in a famous description: ‘In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it’ (Lao Tzu 1963, p.78) So in a particular place, and under specific conditions, water can be controlled, yet water in its totality is beyond control. More fundamentally, no matter if the web could be completely reconfigured: this action would make no difference to global transformative processes that are already in play. In a planetary situation of cascading biophysical, geopolitical and techno-​futural impacts what ‘inventive production’ actually requires is the creation of the agency able to begin to change the diversity of ‘our’ modes of being-​in-​the-​world that enables an accommodation of what cannot be changed and the creation of means of protection against that

A lexicon of analytics  93 which threatens (within and external to) us. In turn, elements of the agency to do this can start to be identified as assembled: a new political imagination, relearning how to learn, the remaking of the externalisation of the capacity to prefigure (design), constructing borderland spaces in which different cosmologies and epistemologies can become the resource to build a commonality in difference centred on cultures, material conditions, modes of organisation and economies of sustainment. These examples are not exclusive; they do not bring ready solutions. They are just developable actions towards transformative process –​they are very challenging but not purely idealistic or impossible.

The epistemological maze The complexity of the complexity of our being now defies epistemological reduction. It cannot be explained by any single or ethnocentric theory of knowledge. By implication ‘we’ are faced with the problem of trying to make sense of, and construct a sensibility to confront, a field of contested understandings that by degree we all occupy. So know it or not, the maze is the locus of our being in the domain of knowledge, living as we all do existentially situated living. We live lost in a global relational complexity beyond all available modalities of knowledge to be able to comprehend. Whatever we do know its insufficiency is a constantly felt presence. To be able to deal with this abysmal, mostly repressed distress of being lost, the maze first has to be faced. A question immediately emerges: on our planet of worlds of disharmony, divergences, discord and incompossible realities, steeped in its ever-​increasing relational complexity, how does one find the means to know what one needs to know in order to be able to think critically and take sensible action? So posed it can be expected that the response to such a question by many/​most people will be simply to turn away from it. But for the few who entertain the prospect and engage in it, any attempt can but be philosophical, while also responding to the imperative of imagining a learning and acting otherwise. Unavoidably, immediately one thinks ‘where next’, another complexity appears, and one realises that rather than offering a mirror reflecting the means to think reality, philosophy exposes itself as being just a subset of the greater ‘disharmony, divergences, discord and incompossible’ worlds of which there is no overarching truth. Journeying in a maze one finds oneself confronting the option of many pathways. Normally the picture that a maze calls to mind is of an ordered geometry. In trying to find a way out, one gets confronted with circling back on oneself, dead ends, and then eventually finds an escape. The ‘epistemological maze’ has all these features, although it lacks the neatness of the physical object, plus it contains a danger. Without warning one can stray into another maze, this of an alternative reality  –​the anti-​ epistemological. Moreover, there is an unknown and unstable multitude of such realities and jumbled paths. And their correlations are as complex and unpredictable as Borges’ garden of forking paths which is also a novel and

94  A lexicon of analytics a labyrinth where anyone would get lost, a network of infinite temporal sets (Borges 1941) of new and unexpected discovery. Now some will make a choice of dogma and follow a single path. Others by degree follow several paths, striving to form an understanding of critical issues as they meet, inform, or mis-​form each other at intersections and in doing so, expose the situatedness of epistemologies. The ambition is to draw attention to the gap between the vast corpus of the known and the lack of recognition of just how much has to be learnt by our species to become futural. The paradigm shift of relationality is really about breaking the bonds between western epistemologies and disciplines, to liberate imagination. In this sense a new political imagination is not a new ability to imagine a vision of a future delivered by a new political philosophy, but an ontological condition freed from being educated by replicating the past and the status quo (which universities as feeders to the job market dominantly do) with an ability to see and create things otherwise. Pathways In what follows we will trace several possible pathways complexly intersecting to find ways out of the current epistemological maze, will briefly analyse why they are failing to find the exit and start reflecting on alternative rescue paths. There is no single and clear path able to guide us, in difference, in thought and action to an enduring future. We cannot view the pathways as if there was an external location other than from a position on a path, be it epistemological, functional or political. To argue for the need for a new political imagination is set upon a path and is directive of how each path is read and what relational connections across paths are made. Path one has plural strands, all of which converge to form the enlightening and endarkening power of the Eurocentric canon. Path two traces the most powerful world-​shaping strand of applied thought that has emanated from this path. Path three cuts across one and two to expose faith and reason as conjoined. Path four continues to follow where faith can lead but shows it as bonded to politics. Path five explicitly addresses the relation between religious belief and ontology. Path six not only makes clear that philosophy has not completely erased mythology but reconfigured the relation. Path seven confronts the terminal prospect facing hegemonic Eurocentric thought, the arriving of thinking in the borderlands and the associated issues raised by ethno-​epistemology. Responding to the challenges posed by path seven, path eight foregrounds the imperative of unlearning and relearning. Finally, path nine takes stock of the nature of the maze and its paths and considers how to find a way out and forward. Path one: the reality circuit of western epistemology Two overarching conditions of limitation of claim frame western epistemology. The first is that no overall authoritative voice exists. The second is

A lexicon of analytics  95 that all assertions of universality stand upon an ethnocentrically contestable rock of reason (Jullien 2014). So said, competing and fractured theories of knowledge and reality populate epistemology. There are two convergent perspectives of it: (i) the kinds and conditions of knowledge (belief, truth, justification, causal, foundational, sceptical); and, (ii) specific theories of knowledge, as examples briefly listed indicate, that contest the nature of the real and how it may be known. However, in all cases differences of perspective within each theory have produced subdivisions. Empiricism (rationalism and positivism) rest upon knowledge depending on a posteriori ground based on specific confirmation gained from sensory and perceptual experience –​sight, touch, smell and hearing deliver a confirmation of the reality of the real. Realism in contrast presents an a priori position towards the real by pointing out that it exists independently from how it is theoretically understood, and is only known by virtue of the knowledge, concepts, language, categories and experience we bring. Constructivism (ethical) contests realism on the basis that what is understood is not determined by any kind of theoretical understanding but comes from what is believed and its associated values as they construct a picture of reality. Pragmatism extends such thinking by the addition of what action reveals to experience. Conventionalism is based on a mathematical and linguistic doctrine of logical truth establishing correspondences between statements and facts. The failure to come to an agreement on the reality of reality and people’s (in)ability to know it is historically linked with the changing attitude of western post-​Enlightenment philosophy to reason (from its totalising to periodic contesting and negation up to the present fashionable new materialist turn) which has shaped the agendas of epistemology. These competing notions of the knowability of reality and the relations of human mind/​consciousness and reality are invariably formulated within the dominant Euromodern ‘geography of reason’ (Gordon 2010) which automatically dismisses all other notions of reality, its cognition and the actual place of this process in people’s lives. By contrast, in most non-​western philosophies ontological issues linked to epistemology are either less central or configured differently (e.g. in classical Chinese philosophy the metaphysical issues were overshadowed by a specific hierarchical relational approach, prompting a model of cognition whose goal was deciphering the symbols given in the experienced world, not through rational, logical constructions, but through wanderings in Dao). The blindness to these other models of correlation of ontology and epistemology has contributed to a closing of the possibility of leaving the reality circuit for western epistemology that has assumed its own universality and indispensability. This assumption (grounded in the erasing of its real locality and in likening its vantage point to that of the God reimagined as reason, or in Colombian thinker Santiago Castro-​Gómez’s terms, ‘the hubris of the zero-​ point’ epistemology (Castro-​Gómez 2005) has led to a grave consequence –​the

96  A lexicon of analytics sanctified reason has started imagining itself as over-​all and self-​sufficient and most importantly, not even needing reality as such (Gordon 2018). Path two: the narrow way The path of instrumentalism narrows thought but prompts a widening of action.3 Epistemologically it is anti-​realist while embracing a reductive form of pragmatism. In practice instrumentalism underscores compliance to the operation of instrumental systems, and as such evacuates critical interrogation of the self and context. Rather it creates an ontological disposition towards functional behaviour and relations. This is now evident in interactions with robotic systems and algorithmic interfaces in daily and professional life as instrumentalism itself extends the reach of instrumentalism. It establishes a socio-​cultural condition whereby, as instrumental performance increases, understanding of the condition of being-​in-​the-​world diminishes. The most explicit expression of the determinate force of instrumentalism is the gathering of data and metrics (often by unrigorous means) that are thereafter directively deployed in automated decision-​making processes. In the knowledge production sphere, this tendency is also expressed in the epidemic of scientific metrics imposed as the main evaluating principle of the quality of knowledge produced and the researcher as its producer. The shift from the question of why, what for, to the purely instrumental question of how, that came to occupy the central place together with western modernity taking historically various forms and degrees of influence, is shaped today in a more graphic form of technological (self)colonisation. It is further thinning the semantic load, the production of meanings, and replacing it with a collection of data, which in itself does not mean anything and requires precisely well-​thought of ways of making sense of it, well-​grounded value systems that were dismissed as unnecessary and obsolete. Path three: the way of the believer (faith in reason) Reason drove the intellectual project and the spirit of the age of the Enlightenment. Leibniz, as one of the major thinkers of the Enlightenment, formulated the principle nihil est sine ratione (‘nothing is without a reason’). Heidegger described this as ‘the most enigmatic of all possible principles’ (Heidegger 1996, p. 5) and devoted a lecture course exclusively to it during 1955–​56. Consider: nothing is without reason; reason, as essence, invades all thought; all that is not reason is only so by virtue of reason. Again, no matter what are the claims, there is no meta-​theory of reason but configurations out of epistemological difference and commonality. To make this clearer three perspectives will be briefly contrasted: Kant’s definition and critique of pure reason, Spinoza’s definition of reason as defined by Deleuze (1988) (as this defines in part his position), and Whitehead’s understanding, as it resonates with Spinoza’s.

A lexicon of analytics  97 Kant (1724–​1804) has a very clear view of what reason is. He tells us in Critique of Pure Reason ([1781] 1990) that reason is ‘the faculty which furnishes us with the principles of knowledge a priori’. Hence, pure reason is ‘the faculty which contains the principles of cognising anything absolutely a priori’. (Kant 1990, p.15). In undertaking a critique of pure reason what Kant sought to do was to present ‘a transcendental critique’ aimed at ‘the correction and guidance of our knowledge, and to serve as a touchstone of worth or worthlessness of all knowledge a priori’ (Kant 1990, pp.15–​16). In contrast to Kant’s understanding, Deleuze tells us how Spinoza understood reason. He does this from affirmative relation to Spinoza that reveals something of Deleuze’s own conceptual understanding. Spinoza (1632–​1677) approached reason on the basis of a ‘common notion’ shared by all minds. Framed in such a mode, reason is defined in two ways. First, as ‘an effort to select and organise good encounters’, that is, encounters with modes that enter into ‘composition with ours and inspire us with joyful passion’ (feelings that agree with reason). Second, the perception and comprehension of the common notion, that is, of the relations that enter into this composition, from which one deduces other relations (reasoning) on the basis of which one experiences new feelings, active ones this time (feelings that are born of reason). (Deleuze 1988, pp. 55–​56) Towards the end of his career Alfred North Whitehead (1861–​ 1947) published The Function of Reason (1929). For him, the function of reason is to ‘promote the art of life’. He divided the function into three stages: ‘to live, to live well, and to live better’ (Whitehead 1929, pp. 4, 8). Whitehead established himself in his early career as a mathematical logician, but via his interest in the philosophy of science and thereafter metaphysics, he deviated from past and contemporary western philosophy to establish ‘process philosophy’ in which he argued that there are no objects but just processes –​thus everything is movement in time (a view that Henri Bergson applauded). Such thinking has gained new currency in recent years: it resonates with relational theory within which critical global issues are seen not only to be interconnected but becoming more serious, not least because of deepening ecological/​enviro-​ climatic crises. This history recasts how Whitehead’s view on reason as a way to ‘promote the art of life’ can be understood as bonding reason and process in an organic connection. Faith in reason thus becomes no different than faith in life. Now the pantheist convergence between Whitehead and Spinoza reveals itself. Here then is also the underscoring of Whitehead’s belief, with which he concludes the first chapter of The Function of Reason, that reason ‘disciplines counter-​agency which saves the world’ (Whitehead 1929, p. 34). One would first add that reason, reduced to instrumentalism, has played a major part in putting the world at risk, and second, the saving of the world cannot presume

98  A lexicon of analytics the salvation of our species, which in the end just names a temporary measure. The world as planet, like all other planets, is dependent upon a star, which is fated to eventually fade. Now such thinking of reason can continue on and traverse backward and forward over the entire history of philosophy, but enough is enough: reason is not actually the property of philosophy: it claims it, but this is not the same as tenure. Here is but one example of discipline/​disciplines obstructing as much as directing thought. On disciplinary decadence, post-​disciplines and beyond Afro-​Caribbean phenomenologist Lewis Gordon is one of the vocal opponents of disciplinary nationalism who coined the term ‘disciplinary decadence’ (Gordon 2006) –​a deontologisation of method and its ossification in narrow methodologies cut off from reality. Gordon starts from the idea that reason is broader than rationality and finds it important to practise teleological suspension of disciplinarity through revamping and revisiting the open goals and ideas which stood in the origins of disciplines. In effect, it is an overcoming of a discipline for the sake of staying loyal to reality and keeping one’s links with reality. It is grounded in questioning the type of reason that claims to be absolute and loses its teleology, becoming solipsistic. Questioning disciplinary decadence as a manifestation of ratiodicea means suspending our own methodological claims and problematising the ontological status of our own methods, cultivating at the same time a ‘good faith’ which requires respect for evidence, conclusiveness and responsibility in the social world and in the world of inter-​subjective relations. Echoing many indigenous pedagogical principles and epistemic tools, the claim to end disciplinary decadence is grounded in the principle of relational-​experiential rationality, reuniting the thinkers with the world and making them aware and critical of their own vantage point. As we have already addressed above, another and much more fashionable trend in western critical thinking, claiming a strong anti-​disciplinary position, is a shift towards the so-​called post-​disciplines which in spite of their overt criticality still remain within the Eurocentric knowledge matrix. The post-​disciplines are defined by Danish feminist Nina Lykke as loose ‘fields of knowledge production with their own profile, which enables them to pass as a discipline and claim the academic authority of one, but which also keeps up a transversal openness and a dialogical approach to all academic disciplines’ (Lykke 2010, p.  8). Yet this declared transversal openness often leads to an ‘anything goes’ principle that remains blind to epistemic asymmetries and local histories of oppression, hijacking initially contesting concepts and tools and taming them to become an agreeable edutainment product. The best-​known version of such a token call for post-​ disciplinarity, in effect leading to yet another proliferation of increasingly narrow disciplines, defined within the provincial-​turned-​universal Global North perspective, is Rosi Braidotti’s model of the post-​anthropocentric,

A lexicon of analytics  99 transdisciplinary, ethically charged inquiry in which the identity of humanistic practices is expected to be altered ‘by stressing heteronomy and multi-​ faceted relationality, instead of autonomy and self-​referential disciplinary purity’(Braidotti 2013, p. 145). However, the only identifiable shift in these new rebranded humanities that their theorists talk about is a merging with or borrowing concepts and methods from hard and natural  –​as well as, sometimes, social  –​sciences (examples include death studies, trauma studies, peace studies, humanitarian management, ecological-​cum-​social sustainability studies and many other more exotic new disciplines). This diminishes their revolutionary claims as the main Euromodern epistemic instruments of posthumanities remain the same, whereas they hardly ever seriously address (apart from the token ritualistic mentioning of intersectionality in the first paragraph) the question of where they speak from and how it affects their thinking. Typically, the authority of science is so much higher and uncontested that the posthumanities always borrow their tools from science (and not the other way round), whereas any knowledge that has been excluded and dismissed as non-​knowledge in modernity (such as indigenous cosmologies) continues to be treated as outside epistemology just as before (unless hijacked, packaged and tamed in predictable status quo ways). The onto-​epistem-​ology and the corpopolitics of knowledge Seen previously as a universalist, objectivist and disembodied realm, epistemology has been thoroughly questioned, relativised and contextualised by several strands of critical thinking. Following Donna Haraway’s idea of situated knowledge (Haraway 1991) claiming the possibility of a partial and localised objectivity, Karen Barad attempted to reunite ontology and epistemology in her neologism ‘onto-​epistem-​ology’ (Barad 2007, p.  185), indebted to both post-​constructionist feminism and Niels Bohr’s quantum physics. Erasing the difference between being and knowledge in Barad’s case is a move needed to conceptualise the ‘subject/​object relations interpreted as material/​discursive constructed cuts’ (Lykke 2010, p. 141). Instead of the positivist assumption of the delocalised, disembodied objective researcher whose vantage point is somewhere outside the studied objectified world, Barad insists on the localised position in which the researcher and the tools and conditions of research all get entangled in the world to which they are inseparably linked and bound. In a sense, it is an attempt to solve the dilemma of the absolute constructivism and the impossibility of the Truth without parenthesis by introducing the idea of cuts which define the boundaries of subjects and objects valid for specific temporal and spatial situations and research conditions. This provisional epistemic objectivity is partial and specifically localised. Yet it is not grounded in detachment but rather in active involvement in the world and in ethical responsibility ‘for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are part’ (Barad 2007, p. 393).

100  A lexicon of analytics Barad and other New Materialists come to this hybridising of ontology and epistemology from sciences and in a hope to salvage science from its increasing meaninglessness. Indigenous, Africana and decolonial thinkers have long discussed epistemic issues from their local knowledge production models, grounded in material and corporal worlds. In a sense what New Materialism has discovered only recently and in roundabout ways looking for support in hard sciences, for many non-​western cosmologies nurturing unified knowledge-​being models went without saying from the start. Critical anti-​ humanism up to its radical forms denying the Anthropocene and Capitalocene for the sake of the Chthulucene (Haraway 2016) have emerged quite recently and with no obvious links or even awareness and acknowledgement of the similar and long existing perspectives from the colonial side of modernity previously dismissed as superstition. Additionally, not only being thrown out of knowledge production as such but also having a very palpable affective everyday experience of the others of modernity has contributed to an interest in the intersection of being and knowledge. It is an experience of systematic dehumanisation that has intensified and made urgent and very concrete the damnés’ perception of the entanglements and relations between bodies, materiality, being and cognition (Fanon 1963). The geopolitical dimension of knowledge is inextricably linked with the corpopolitical as spaces are signified in gender and racial as well as rational and epistemic terms by the people who inhabit them. Also our bodies are spaces of meaning formation and knowledge production. The intersection of somatic and ideational, ontology and epistemology, stands in the centre of indigenous, Africana, decolonial corpopolitics. A good example, as stated above, is Sylvia Wynter’s re-​conceptualisation of Frantz Fanon’s sociogenesis (Fanon 1967, p. 11; Wynter 2000) which was itself an elaboration of W.B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’ (Du Bois 1903). The positions of the mainstream (global) Northern and (global) Southern takes on knowledge production and its links with ontology intersect, yet they come to this intersection differently and often remain incommensurable. In a way the corpopolitics of knowledge and being correlates with the more mainstream affective turn, interpreting affect as embodied perception. Here as well, rethought ontology is reborn where previously only epistemic and linguistic structures were allowed to be noticed. The social narratives and power relations are then strengthened with the biology of perception, the visceral responses subtending the semantic, cultural and other ideational codes. There is a difference between the New Materialist and affective turn and the decolonial corpopolitics and geopolitics of knowledge, being and perception, or ‘theory-​in-​the-​flesh’, to quote Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Theory-​in-​the-​flesh is ‘the one where the physical realities of our lives –​our skin colour, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings  –​all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity’ (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981, p. 23). Looking in the same direction, the New Materialists and indigenous, Africana and decolonial thinkers do it with an epistemic spatial difference

A lexicon of analytics  101 as well as with a time lag  –​in this case, a western time lag:  the embodied knowledge has stood in the centre of non-​western thinking for a long time remaining unnoticed or hijacked by the mainstream western theories. Path four: political theology The relations between politics and belief fuse to create a theological foundation of politics (and in some circumstances a political foundation of theology). These relations are perspectival and have been ontologically present in the relation of politics to religion for millennia. As such they render any discrete claim to a political theology problematic. Notwithstanding, this claim made by contemporary theory has become especially associated with the political Catholicism of Carl Schmitt (1888–​1985). But interest in, and the influence of, modern German political theology predated and extended beyond him. This is seen for instance in Hegel’s relation to the Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz (1928–​2019). In another context, political theology is evident in the Christian Realism and thinking of the American Reihold Niebuhr who, writing in the 1930s, contributed to the advance of liberation theology as a political agent in the Global South. Questions of politics, belief and faith were dramatically amplified by the nature and consequences of the First World War –​this event disrupted and reconfigured what had constituted ‘the world’s religious map’ (Jenkins 2014, p.  5). The religion of every culture and nation in the conflict called upon divine help in the pursuit of victory. The faith virtually every subject in the war brought into question was conditioned by the sheer unprecedented scale of death and horror of technologically delivered slaughter. The war seemed to be completely godless. Added to this view was the willingness of political leadership of all nations involved to send tens of thousands of mostly young men to their death year after year.4 One cannot separate the political ferment of the 1920s and 30s from the aftermath of the war and its impact, especially upon Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism. At the same time the roots of the war in the territorial contests and violence of European colonial powers, not least in Africa, as it was conducted in the name of God and the bringing of civilisation, should not be forgotten. Now over a century later it is hard to grasp how the war changed the very meaning of sacrifice. Religion as brought to politics cannot be distilled from the action of nations long before and after the First World War. Here the immense and enduring influence of Martin Luther begs comment. As the key figure of the Reformation his political theology played a moral part in the split from Rome and papal power while assisting the rise of Protestantism. These changes redrew the political map of Europe, and contributed to its cultural transformation. Most notably, Luther wrote 120 volumes, over 30 per cent of all books published in Germany were by him, and half a million Luther bibles were published (reading the bible, the only book in many households, has been

102  A lexicon of analytics credited as a driving force in the spread of literacy) (Acocella 2017). It is for these reasons that Luther has been credited as one of the founding figures of European modernity (Mataxas 2017). Luther’s writing also has to be seen as further legitimising the already prominent presence of anti-​Semitism in Europe with disastrous historical consequences in the twentieth century. Nothing epitomises this moment more than the Christian disposition and treatment of Jews that was seeded by Luther. Jenkins (Jenkins 2014, p. 210) summarises this well: Luther himself denounced the Jews of his day in language so ugly that the Nazis had no need to distort his writings in order to recycle them for their own ends. He had explicitly called for Jews to be subject to forced labour in special institutions. Beyond Germany there was also the more general theologically projected vision of an ‘Aryan Jesus’ (Jenkins 2014, p.  211) and the whitewashing of Christianity through, among other means, erasing its Middle Eastern origins. The early twentieth century accentuation, reformulation and politicisation of religious agendas was manifested not only in the anti-​Semitic wave evident in the mass pogroms in the Tsarist empire and wider, in Central and Eastern Europe, but also in national-​religious Orthodox interpretation of politics and political interpretations of religion. For example during 1917’s Easter celebrations, in some parts of Russia the traditional Russian Orthodox Easter acclamation ‘Christ is risen’ was answered not with the usual ‘Truly he is risen’ but with ‘Russia is risen’. As in the case of the expulsion of Jews from Spain in the end of the fifteenth century and the final acts of the Reconquista, here it was hardly possible to disentangle the imperial, the national, the religious and the geopolitical. Political theology from the 1930s to the present Current interest in political theology, as indicated, is partly attributable to the attention that has been given to the thought of Carl Schmitt, especially over the past few decades. The reason is that so much of his critical agenda has resonated with the rise of neoliberal and authoritarian popularism that characterises the national and international politics of the present age. Schmitt’s publishing career started in 1910, extended over sixty years and included an exposition of the concept of the political, a critique of liberalism, analyses of sovereignty, dictatorship, law and the international order. His first work on political theology was published in Germany in 1922, with a second edition in 1934. Schmitt’s concern with the concept was contextually situated by its relation to the state, sovereignty, law and God. He argued that modern theories of the state are ‘secularised theological concepts’ because they were historically grounded in ‘the omnipotent God’ as the ‘omnipotent law giver’ and because of their ‘systematic structure’ –​here Schmitt evokes Leibniz who

A lexicon of analytics  103 ‘emphasised a systematic relationship between jurisprudence and theology’ (Schmitt 1985, pp. 36, 37). Schmitt’s views here cannot be divorced from a/​ his Eurocentric perspective, his controversial ‘political Catholicism’5 and an understated relation between Roman law and the externalisation of the power of canon law to wider society, by the early Catholic church. Meanwhile the political landscape of the 1930s provided a peculiar background for Schmitt’s insights. Thus, both Nazi Germany and the Stalinist USSR in their prime time (1930s) tended to replace the political appeals to Christianity with a revival of earlier polytheistic cults associated with pseudo-​ ethnic-​national roots –​the Old Germanic (Nordic) warrior ones in Germany and a milder version of a peaceful agricultural civilisation linked with the native land that was exploited by the Stalinist rhetoric up to the Second World War (when Stalin appealed to Christian and patriotic arguments at once, to mobilise the population). These were political equivalents of almost Jungian archetypes effectively used to manipulate the mass (sub)consciousness. In effect, it was an attempt to create an alternative religion competing with Christianity. This tendency is evident in the totalitarian aesthetics of Stalinist and Nazi urban planning, architecture, monuments, films and officially approved visual art, particularly in gigantic buildings and mass parades (Golomstock 2012). The past as the future While Schmitt significantly figures in the current overt theoretical discussion of political theology, political theology has a far more general phenomenological presence in the national and international political domain. What becomes clear when looking historically at the influence of theology on politics is that is does not stay in the past but is continually being reformed and reinvented in the present. Two particular examples communicate this view: American society and the place that religion occupies in politics; and what can be called, the political revenge of the Crusades. America –​in 1620 the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ arrived in New England to establish the first permanent colony. One hundred and two colonists disembarked from the Mayflower: some thirty-​five of them were members of the English Separatist Church (a radical, persecuted faction of Puritanism). They came so as to exercise religious freedom without constraint. They had negotiated with a London stock company to finance the pilgrimage to America. The remaining sixty-​seven were non-​Separatists, hired to protect the company’s interests. It is also true that the puritan rule in the American colonies was not limited to such relatively mild and generally liberatory versions but also included quite theocratic regimes such as the infamous Massachusetts Bay Colony ruled for many years by John Winthrop and expelling most religious and political dissidents (Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson being the most famous examples). Puritan rigour, providentialism and passionate belief in

104  A lexicon of analytics their own exceptionalism and ‘chosen-​ness’ indeed were crucial in creating the American nation. Yet the underside of this zeal was the witch-​hunt pattern of domination –​both literal as in seventeenth century Salem, and symbolic, as in 1950s’ McCarthyism, and the recurrent lamentations of the type ‘Does the Puritan survive?’ (Harpers New Monthly, 1886) or ‘Survival of the American [i.e. Anglo-​Saxon Protestant] Type’ (Atlantic Monthly, 1896), that accompanied for instance the American anti-​immigrant hysteria of the turn of the twentieth century. Today the sentiment of the WASPs’ grievance over their lost dominance is reformatted and revived once again in President Trump’s populist rhetoric. Religious freedom, politics and capitalism were thus all inchoately present in the founding conditions out of which the nation was to emerge. The Declaration of Independence, as a political document created against the backdrop of revolution against colonial rule and unfair trade, was to evidence and institutionalise this union. The document was based on a theory of rights that depended on a Supreme Being for its validity. Famously stating that ‘all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ –​ so said, the spirit of the founding fathers was echoed in the words of Thomas Jefferson who drafted the declaration in 1776. The place of God (which for the deist Jefferson was not just the Christian God) in American political life has been continually re-​asserted and pluralised. For example in 1952 President Dwight Eisenhower, in dialogue with Billy Graham, called for a national spiritual renewal centring on the fundamental relation of faith, patriotism and free enterprise. Faith was posited as the dominant value. It was under Eisenhower that Congress added ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance’ (Jain 2017). The rise of evangelical Christianity was one of the major roots in this moment. It was also to become part of a religious right-​voting block that has played, and is still playing, such a significant role in the nation’s political theology and Republican politics. The Crusades –​ for the West the Crusades are a poorly remembered historical moment given mostly an erroneous form by historical novels and movies. However, what they established was an enduring antagonism between the West and Islam (and as a by-​product, between the Orthodox Church and Catholicism) that bonded religious beliefs to geopolitics in various configurations of conflict for almost 1,000 years (Asbridge 2012). Certainly, across the difference of the umma (the Islamic community), especially in North Africa, and the Eurocentrically designated Near and Middle East, the crusader is an eternal and living collective subject and presence. Two explanations are given that seek to rationalise the instigation of the First Crusade in 1095. One was that it was a strategic political ploy by Pope Urban II to unify a fragmented church:  establishing a single force to overcome a common enemy and in doing so establish himself as the church’s head. The other linked reason was to contain the spread of Islam and retake control of the Holy Land. However, underlying both these explanations was/​is a

A lexicon of analytics  105 harder-​to-​historically-​place origin of action against Islam, this being the more complex, emotive and evasive agency of fear of ‘the Other’. The last Crusade of 1271–​1272, the ninth (led by Prince Edward of England) continued the rationale of the first and was actually an extension of the eighth foray. But it did not herald the beginning of peace in the region. And if in the case of Garnhata, western Christianity seemed to accomplish its victory over their age-​old Muslim enemy through a permanent expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian peninsula by 1492, this was not the case with the slightly earlier 1453 arrival of the next figure of fear and force of antagonism between Islam and the West: the Ottoman Empire. It lasted until the foundation of modern Turkey as a republic by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in October 1923. While the world of the present is obviously dramatically different from that of 1095, the rhetoric of the reactionary right and structural racism of the West continues to present Islam and Muslim nations as a threat to the Christian and secular civilisation of the West. Amplified by the four al-​ Qaeda attacks on the USA on 11 September 2001 and almost two decades of ‘the war on terror’, the fear of Islamic fundamentalism has been politically exploited by western political parties and regimes to reinvigorate nationalism and to stigmatise Muslim nations and Islamic communities at large. As many Muslim thinkers and politicians, as well as a wider critical community, have recognised, everything has changed but what is fundamental remains the same. Hence we note that George W. Bush, speaking at a press conference at the White House on 16 September 2001, refers to the start of the war on terror as ‘a crusade’ –​a remark that was recast in an editorial in CounterPunch on 7 September 2002 by the journalist Alexander Cockburn as ‘The Tenth Crusade’.6 Schmitt displaces the well-​used dictum of von Clausewitz ‘that war is politics conducted by other means’ by simple stating that ‘war is politics’. Crusades, old and new, named and unnamed, are conflicts of /​over belief. So framed, as seen in the First World War and the Crusades, political theology positions war as the most extreme stating of the application of the relation between politics and belief. From what has been argued, the proposition that ‘religious conflicts drive political ones’ (Pan 2019) is not correct. A contemporary and non-​Eurocentric historical/​Christian understanding of political theology (as it embraces transcendental and secular systems of belief) recognises belief and politics to be fully articulated, thus religion is political, and political ideology is underscored by belief. This is just as true for and in USA as it is in, for example Iran or Russia which, in spite of its seventy years of official Bolshevik atheism has never really separated the state from church and effectively transformed Marxism into a militant religion. One cannot pose an instrumental evaluation of theology as an ‘add-​on factor’ to aid a political and military assessment of the nature of a particular conflict. This is because all the relational elements of conflict converge to constitute the historical-​ontological basis of action for all protagonists.

106  A lexicon of analytics Political theology and political imagination If we take religion to be a systematised regime of belief, what it does is act for its followers to provide and define a narrative for what is often a transcendental political, as well as spiritual, goal. For instance, one formed in the distant past, yet ever-​travelling forward is a presented account of a desired future. It follows that such an institutionalised, prefigured and prescribed form of imagination curtails the very possibility of imaging otherwise. Yet this does not have to be so if the designated end is invitational and emergent rather than fixed and if the means are plural and can be developed from positions of diversity. Certainly this is how the concept of ‘sustainment’ can be introduced into the arena of political theology. So seen, it emerges as a materialised value with the agency to secure affirmative futures. But in the uncertainty of it being realised it can be taken to be a secular object of faith able to posit futural actions and means as being sacred (as life is so posited). As a futural condition it does not have a single and exclusive specified form but rather has to be constituted in ways that are able to negate clearly identified and situated conditions of unsustainability that are not reduced to the purely instrumental. By implication, this means the discovery and/​or creation of plural means. Sustainment thus arrives as both the consequence and objective of imagination. Path five: the ontotheological A discussion of ontotheology directly follows on from considering the relation between faith and/​in reason. Ontotheology in the western frame of thinking can be understood in two ways: one coming from Kant, the other from Heidegger. They have very little in common. Kant’s ontotheology aims at gaining knowledge of God independent of Christian theological teaching or reason. As such, the project is one of ontological argument. In contrast, what Heidegger set out to do was to deploy it as a critical term directed at metaphysics and western philosophy in general as denying the ontological difference, that is the distinction between Being and beings (Heidegger 1962). In doing this, the relation between metaphysics and faith, as posited in reason, was brought into question. Our focus will be on the position adopted by Heidegger, in significant part informed by Iain Thomson’s excellent book on the topic (Thompson 2005). The basic intent of metaphysics, as an ontotheology of competing epistemologies, each with a belief in its own truth claims, is to be able to make ‘reality’ available to be grasped by ‘human’ understanding. Metaphysics thus arrived as a source of delivering a definition of reality as universal, under which all being is subsumed. Hereafter being therefore enfolds all beings (and as such being becomes all that is the highest entity, primary force, pantheism realised, or God). However, what Heidegger does is to reframe the metaphysical claim of ontotheology and redefine it as the truth of entities that is the essential truth

A lexicon of analytics  107 of what they are and how they exist. Respectively considered, this turning to ontology can be corrective of a universal designation as entities always exist somewhere and thus are affected by location. But at the same time, as soon as ontology asserted that a commonality is found via a shared ‘nature’ in all beings then the universal is imposed. The difference between a universal and a situated view of the being of entities actually mirrors a clash between western and non-​western metaphysics (Jullien 2014). Moreover, this very situatedness of being may be regarded through a prism of decolonial relationality of western metaphysics of the ego conquiro and coloniality of being of the damnés. Heidegger formulated the relations of ontological difference through a situated concept of Dasein (‘being there’). However, he was not interested in exploring the darker colonial side of being in modernity. The agents of this darker side –​the damné –​would have a different Dasein trajectory. Consequently, it is possible to elucidate Heidegger’s model and reflect on coloniality of being not only at the level of ontological difference, but also at other levels. This is what Nelson Maldonado-​Torres attempts to do following in the steps of Emmanuel Levinas and Frantz Fanon and differentiating between trans-​ontological difference (difference between Being and exteriority), ontological difference (difference between Being and beings) and sub-​ontological or ontological colonial difference (difference between Being and below Being, that which is negatively marked as dispensable) (Maldonado-​ Torres 2007, p. 253). This potentially leads to a different understanding of the future as an existential modality that yet has to be spelled out. Heidegger’s Dasein is projected to the future and reaches its authenticity through anticipating its own mortality as a closing of the future. Existential reality of damné’s dispensable lives is grounded in a constant mundane proximity to death and a lack of the future horizon as such. Fanon calls such life an incomplete death (Fanon 1965, p.128) that is, ‘existence in the mode of not being there’ (Maldonado-​Torres 2007, p.  257). Today not only the (former) colonised subjects and other disenfranchised groups are the agents of this futureless existence marked by the planetary coloniality of being. It is becoming a new negative universality of the lacking of a common horizon or a ‘place to land’ (Latour 2018, p. 5). The mode of subsuming all beings to the reality of metaphysics is understood by Heidegger to be a process of continual reduction leading towards complete instrumentalism wherein calculative reason becomes directive of how reality is understood, how worlds are constituted, and the meaning and value of ‘being-​in-​the-​world’. Effectively it reduces the material world, and all beings within it, to a standing reserve. The exploitation of this standing reserve by capital exposes it not as the source of the instrumental, but as its servant. Against this backdrop, the greater a subject’s exposure to this world of instrumentally directed, technologically constructed reality, the greater the loss of their global concern and care for its future, plus the more their desire for the ‘material rewards’ of its exploitation. Now, in the company of Thompson a little needs to be said on ontotheology, technology, and education.

108  A lexicon of analytics As Thompson clearly argues, Heidegger’s understanding and critique of technology and the contemporary age cannot be divided from how he understood it and mobilised ontotheology (Thompson 2005, p. 44). Stripping the argument back to its basics, the connection put forward is attributed to the relation between Heidegger’s view of Nietzsche’s ‘unthought’ as carried by metaphysics and the nihilism implicit in the nexus between ontotheology and the reduction of ‘the thought of being’ to the instrumental, and the world as ‘standing reserve’ (Thompson 2005, pp.44–​45). What is then argued is that there is a general failure of most readers of Heidegger on technology to recognise the connection to ontotheology, which means that the power of his critique ‘forfeits much of the philosophical force and appeal, and so can easily appear to be motivated extraphilosophically –​for example by Heidegger’s supposed ‘nostalgia’ for the preindustrial world of the Black Forest’ (Thompson 2005, p. 45). As Thompson says, viewing him as a reactionary anti-​modernist, as many philosophers and critical thinkers have, has failed to recognise, and encouraged the dismissal of, the weight of his critique. Of all the actions and statements Heidegger made that have been deployed by his detractors, none has had more negative currency than those on education. Unquestionably, his actions and address as rector of 1933 at the University of Freiburg have permanently stained his reputation and sustained a controversy that has ranged over decades. One cannot refute the accusation that he and his actions were flawed, but neither can his brilliance be refuted. The reason to mention this contradiction is not to examine or resolve it: one makes a choice measured not just by the man, but rather by how one measures the affirmative efficacy of the influence of his work. With this caveat, the relation between education and ontotheology as outlined by Thompson (Thompson 2005, pp.141–​181) will be considered. What Heidegger showed, the significance of which is still unrecognised, is that education is a crucial and powerful ontological designing force in the becoming of what we are. Tragically, as his actions demonstrated, he was somehow oblivious to his own prophetic insights. Writing on the crisis in higher education, Thompson says: Heidegger’s unique and profound understanding of the nature of crisis –​ his insight that it can be understood as a near total eclipse of Plato’s original ideal by the Nietzschean ontotheological understanding of our age –​reveals the ontohistorical trajectory leading to our current education crisis and, more important, suggestively illuminates a pedagogical strategy meant to help lead us out of this crisis. (Thompson 2005, p. 143) One can concur with Thompson’s conclusion on Heidegger’s understanding, but his view on a way out of the crisis is problematic. This is because in the decade and a half between his remark and this moment of writing the situation has drastically worsened.

A lexicon of analytics  109 Education, across the board, has become more instrumental as the power of digital technology and its algorithmic culture has increased. Education is also bonded more firmly to the economic status quo, delivering labour feedstock to the market. It also became further developed as a commodity. Fundamentally, how education has been, and is being, enframed is changing (enframing as understood here as a constructed double movement of revealing while concealing). Thus instrumentalised, education reveals its instrumental content while concealing a greater and richer epistemological complexity epitomised by Bildung (which was the underlying ‘unifying idea of the modern university’ (Thompson 2005, p. 153) –​it centred on cultural form and formation and organisation, education and a culture of learning (Fry 2011, p. 192). Dominantly, such a condition of ontological design has negatively transformed the character, desires and aspirations of students and in so doing reduced ‘the education experience’ to a use-​value. Moreover, the crisis of education is rendered relationally indivisible from the wider plural configurations of a planetary crisis. Sadly, it is no longer the case (if it ever was) that Heidegger provided a strategy ‘to help lead us out of this crisis’ –​this ‘us’ and its agency was and is unclear. Thompson defines ‘genuine education’ as teaching us to dwell, which can be recast here as learning to be in the world, but always in a situated context, and in ways that sustain the ability of beings to continue to be in their diverse and transformative modalities. Such an objective translates into learning anew how to acquire and deploy a huge array of knowledge, practices, critical sensibilities and capabilities over time. As for strategy, what has to be acquired are the strategic means to unmake the contexts, forms and content of education to meet specifically identified demands of sustainment –​and this effectively is the agenda of a Neu Bildung (Fry 2011, pp.192–​208). This, in turn, demands relearning how to learn under non-​ideal circumstances, initially by catalytic change communities (which in the advancement of education has always been the case). Path six: the anti-​epistemological There are three perspectives to consider. The first will be briefly acknowledged, but only in general terms: the long passage of the anti-​epistemological as it extends from the birth of knowledge to the present and centres on the negative dispositions of western epistemologies towards mythological knowledge. Historically, there are examples of gradual and incremental transformation of forms of mythology into rational epistemologies, but mostly the relation has been one of mutual antipathy. Yet there has been some history of coexistence. One can see all these positions in the history of the Nubian Kingdom of Kush and pre-​Pharaonic Egypt, Ancient Greece and Rome. Notwithstanding the rise and globalisation of the epistemologies of western philosophy, mythology has not been completely erased. Moreover, the very naturalised

110  A lexicon of analytics post-​Enlightenment scientific worldview with all its claims to objectivity, positivist cognition and verifiability ultimately operates according to a logic which is not dissimilar to mythological/​religious scenarios, yet asserts itself through dismissing other epistemic systems fashioned as preceding and therefore immature (if it refers to Europe’s own past), or not pertaining to the sphere of knowledge production at any time for the reason of translating geographical difference into chronological (if it refers to non-​European spaces). The dominance of the dismissal of this knowledge as de facto worthless by the ethnocentricity of western epistemologies is implicitly anti-​epistemological. Our consideration of ethnoepistemology in perspective three will bring a counter view to such action. Perspective two addresses the modern anti-​ epistemological standpoint within western philosophy. The story starts with how Nietzsche viewed the possibility of knowledge. Mark Warren provides a succinct characterisation of Nietzsche’s beliefs:  ‘Usable and authoritative knowledge is possible if grounded in those philosophical considerations that follow from the historicity of the human condition’ (Warren 1988, p. 90). Nietzsche’s perspectivism is well known and centres on a view grounded in a relational and situated set of conditions that are configured around human agency. This situated proximity to what is to be known he understood as ‘a necessary condition of knowledge’ (Warren 1988, p. 91). The critical response to Nietzsche’s adopted position was that it lacked the ability to deliver unequivocal truth –​a position that failed to recognise that truth itself is perspectival. For instance, Newton and Einstein both presented the truth of objects in motion according to the laws of physics but this was done according to the perspective of the situated contexts of the epistemological basis of observation. ‘Truth’ so attained is plural, accumulative and provisional –​new truths always have the ability to render old ones redundant. In rejecting the subject/​object locus and notion of truth and in adopting a plural perspectivism, Nietzsche created a fissure within western metaphysics that enabled it to be undermined in ways that open up the possibility of incursion of other knowledge, this time from other traditions of thought within and beyond the western. Controversially, Georges Bataille recognised, adopted and exploited the freedom of thought he believed Nietzsche provided. In a sense he positioned himself between Nietzsche and Hegel to form existentially an anti-​ epistemology of a philosophy broken free from the grip of the ‘community of philosophy’. Partly this position came from his retained recoil from Hegel, especially experienced in attending Alexandre Kojève’s famous lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit that ran in Paris from 1933 to 1939 together with many rising intellectual stars, including Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-​ Ponty and Raymond Aron (Kojève 1969). For Bataille, a crucial Hegelian idea was that ‘absolute knowledge definitive is non-​knowledge’ (Bataille 1988b, p.108). In relation to this he writes: ‘Even supposing that I was to attain it I knew that I would know nothing more than I know now’ (Bataille 1988b, p 108). Bataille’s existential anti-​epistemology was effectively an ontological

A lexicon of analytics  111 stance he occupied to write from a position of ‘un-​knowing’ that poses questions and challenges for philosophy. So while Hegel was a figure from whom to recoil, he became a permanent presence for Bataille as the condition of restriction that came to be integral and generative of his thinking; including influencing his understanding of economy. However, Bataille’s concept of the ‘general economy’ was shaped through his thinking about the expenditure of excess in the early 1930s. It initiated a long period of gestation leading to the publication of The Accursed Share in 1949. The process began with his reflections on three observations: the first was on the Wall Street crash of 1929, the second came from his reading of anthropology, especially Marcel Mauss’ The Gift, that he brought to this reflective moment, in particular the description by Mauss (Mauss 1967, pp. 31–​36) of the destruction of wealth as a major element of the North American Indian potlatch ceremonial feast; and, the third was linking these two observations via a transformative reading of Marx on the ‘… seizing of the means of production not as the prelude to a better and more productive socialist society but as the occasion for a festival of expenditure’ (Noys 2000, p. 106). Initially Bataille brought these observations together in a 1933 essay ‘The Notion of Expenditure’ reproduced in Visions of Excess: Collective Writings 1927–​1939 (Bataille 1985, pp.116–​129). The understanding developed in this essay extended to the expenditure of under-​utilised energy in any form. As Derrida made clear, reflecting on this under-​utilisation, while Bataille’s theory of the ‘general economy’ (the notion of a ‘general economy’ in which the ‘expenditure’ –​the ‘consumption’ of wealth, rather than production, was the primary object was based on the proposition that the ‘restricted economy’ (the capitalist system of exchange) produces excesses of energy that cannot be utilised, this energy ‘can only be lost without the slightest aim, consequently without any meaning’ (Derrida 1978, p. 270). Thinking against containment of the absolute knowledge of Hegel’s phenomenology of mind Bataille does not strive to ‘overturn’ but comprehends it not by knowledge-​gathering comprehension, but inscribed within the opening of the general economy along with the horizons of knowledge and figures of meaning. General economy folds these horizons and figures so that they will be related not to a basis, but to a nonbasis of expenditure, not to a telos of meaning, but to the indefinite destruction of value. (Derrida 1978, p. 271) The aim here is not to give a comprehensive exposition of Bataille’s understanding of the restrictive and general economy which he himself did in the first volume of The Accursed Share (Bataille 1988a) and Noys elaborates on (Noys 2000, pp. 103–​124) but to show the parallels between his thinking, under the influence of Nietzsche, and the relation to Derrida. What we

112  A lexicon of analytics have here is anti-​epistemology and deconstruction as the dissolution of the ground of meaning via the exposure of groundlessness of the epistemological foundations of western metaphysics. Effectively anti-​epistemology became transposed into the practice of deconstruction as its animated materiality. But just as Bataille was ever negatively bonded to Hegel so also was deconstruction attached to the Eurocentric foundations of thought that it sought to expose as groundless. For the so-​called postmodernist philosophers, the problem with Euromodern epistemology was precisely its modern element but not its European-​denied spatiality as this kind of critique was and still is conducted from within this very Euromodern model and therefore is limited. Unknowing thus ever eternally arrives as a zero point of knowing. As for the Bataille and Derrida relation  –​it was not that Derrida was influenced by Bataille, but rather there was a kindred fascination and difference that Benjamin Noys captures in writing on Bataille’s relation to reading. This is seen where he … emerges as torn between his desire to read and his desire to have done with reading, he is at war with himself. This is part of the fascination of Bataille, a writer who reads some of the most difficult works (not least Hegel and Nietzsche) but who also violently tries to destroy reading. He is the reader who wants to have done with reading, the reader who reads not to gain intellectual authority but to experience ‘un-​knowing’. (Noys 2000, p.136) Now in moving to the third perspective of ethnoepistemology the circle again turns. What it sets out to demonstrate is the arbitrariness of the distinction between theories of knowledge. In so doing ethnoepistemology accuses western epistemology of double standards whereby it anthropologically marginalises the knowledge of ‘the Other’ while placing itself outside/​beyond the anthropological gaze of scrutiny. Rather than delegitimising all knowledge lacking reason as epistemologically illegitimate, ethnoepistemology is inclusive  –​thus there is no clear division made between the mythos and logos, the magical and the real. The western mind and science have claimed to have transcended mythology and magic but remain in a search for them, and refract attainment through them. Thus the pursuit of material with ‘magic’ properties is not predicated on the mere use of metaphor; the mythological dream of an artificial being with a downloaded human brain is not mere fantasy. In truth, that magic begot science is the basis of its mythology:  here one remembers that Newton, as and alchemist and scientist, was a believer in both. Ethno-​epistemology is grounded in the principle of equality and incommensurability of various cognitive models, rejecting the naturalised rule of regarding them always with the western epistemology as a template. Borges’s Averroes skilfully translating Aristotle’s Poetics was yet unable to understand what is theatre, having no analogy in his native culture, and Borges himself

A lexicon of analytics  113 claimed that he was equally unable to understand Averroes with only his western simplified and biased interpretations at hand (Borges 1947). Similarly, ethnic anti-​epistemology focuses on the opacity which can be overcome relationally through focusing not on the nature of the individual Averroes’ or Aristotle’s epistemologies but rather on the texture of their weave generating new meanings (Glissant 1997, p. 190). Crucially –​culturally, politically and futurally –​the anti-​epistemology of ethno-​epistemology is only anti-​to the exclusive ethnocentric character of western epistemology. It adopts this position for the sound epistemological reasons that it excludes the knowledge of so many indigenous and non-​ western others, and in so doing exposes itself as an unknowing knowing at the level of its collective habitus. What is slowly starting to be realised at the margins of the centre of the western mind is that among the knowledge of the excluded are understandings of practices of sustainment that beg exploration, adoption and possible refinement to mobilise against that hegemonic condition of unsustainability. Path seven: the Eurocentric dead-​end and border thinking The absolute rights of epistemology at the expense of ontology and other branches of philosophy is an old problem of western modernity that has been criticised time and again, both from within –​in various ‘turns’ (back to the things themselves, the New Materialist turn, etc.), and from the exteriority of modernity. As briefly addressed above, one of the stumbling blocks of the Eurocentric epistemic dead-​end is the ‘hubris of the zero point’ as a central feature of Euromodern thinking, presenting its own way of looking at things and making sense of them as universal, absolute and delocalised. The hubris of the zero point is a manifestation of the self-​referential and self-​legitimating Euromodern epistemic system, disavowing all other systems as non-​belonging to modernity and therefore irrelevant. The hubris of the zero point is a specific positionality of the sensing and thinking subject, occupying a disembodied vantage point which eliminates any other ways to produce, transmit and represent knowledge (Castro-​Gómez 2007). This epistemic vantage point is marked by a special optics which Bruno Latour called ‘the view from nowhere’, ‘from the great outside’ ‘as if from Sirius’ (Latour 2018, p. 68). This view is unable to take into account the multiple and complex transformations actually taking place on the thin liveable surface of our planet, making us in the end see less and less of what is happening on Earth (Latour 2018, p.70). An alternative optics and consequent political imaginary, which Latour calls ‘terrestrial’ would have to occupy a relational and shifting positionality from within, involving all beings and entities connected to and supported by the Earth (compare with Indian vasudhaiva kutumbakam  –​‘the earth family of all beings supported by the earth’, Shiva 2005, p. 1).

114  A lexicon of analytics Border thinking is one of the possible relational antidotes humbling the zero point epistemology, and grounded in the constant negotiation between the alternative epistemic principles coming from non-​Euromodern cosmologies and those of modernity. Border thinking is a specific form of epistemic response emerging from the lacunas, cracks and interstices of modernity and escaping its control. Its initial impulse is often a discrepancy between having to live in the colonial matrix and never really belonging to its memories, feelings and ways of sensing and knowing (Mignolo 2011). The gap between the corpopolitics of knowledge and perception, and the established mainstream ways of knowing is what prompts the negotiating border thinking and acting as an in-​between positionality of neither/​nor or both/​and. Border thinking as an in-​between positionality of a constant epistemic negotiation of thinking of the one and the other is inextricable from and mutually dependent on the ontological shift of being the border, of being of between-​ness, also leading to a potential shift in the political. This complex positionality and shifting epistemology may breed both positive and negative results depending on the interpretation of the border in the full spectre from a pariah’s neglect of the devalued world to a mentality of an eternal passive victim whose ‘future is mortgaged’ (Fanon 1963, p. 22); from a manipulative and at times pragmatic trickster to a border dweller or rather the one inside whom the border dwells, who sees and understands more than any of the monotopical positions on either sides. For such a border thinker/​dweller it is natural to discard the binary dichotomies including not only the interplay of localities but also the dynamics of the large and the small. Thus border thinking becomes an exercise in scaling. Border thinking allows balancing the dictate of local attachments and abstract universal discourses and potentially gives the border dweller to trigger ‘deep coalitions’ (Lugones 2003, p. 98) of different, often incommensurable positions targeted at refuturing. The entry point into the onto-​epistemological between-​ness can be different and contextually fluctuate including how we experience and conceptualise our own between-​ness –​as a curse of exile and a longing of a new belonging or as a privileged condition charged with responsibility. Some examples of border thinking and existence include pluriversality as a universal principle linked with relationality or, in Amerindian terms, ‘vincularidad  –​an awareness of the integral relation and interdependence amongst all living organisms with territory or land and the cosmos’ (Walsh and Mignolo 2018); animism rehabilitated from the Eurocentric condescending interpretations and seen as ‘understanding relatedness from a related point of view, within the shifting horizons of the related viewer’ and seeing environment as ‘nested relatedness’ (Bird-​David 1999, pp. 77–​78). One of the attempts to escape the dead-​end of Euromodern epistemology parallel to non-​western orders of knowledge, but starting and departing from science, is to be found in the views of Chilean neurobiologist Humberto Maturana who claims that we do not see what there is; we see what we see, and that everything said is said by an observer (Maturana 2004). Maturana

A lexicon of analytics  115 radically questions objectivity, reality and truth without parenthesis, in effect performing something similar to border thinking and existence yet formulated from an unconventional scientific position. He is not denying the materiality of the world (though is often accused of that), but merely draws our attention to the fact that various interpretations of being are no more than interpretations and that they do not represent or reflect reality as they are largely elaborated within particular (scientific, cultural and other) traditions and rules of looking at the world, subsequently naturalised as objective. Having changed the usual optics of his discipline (namely, the evolutionary approach which the scientist replaced with a focus on the origin of humanness and the biology of love), Maturana radically problematised the very validity of neurobiology as an epistemic endeavour rather than simply filling its framework with new content (Maturana and Verden-​Zoller 2009). Niklas Luhmann, who attempted to apply Maturana’s views to social systems, layers complexity upon complexity in addressing one system observing another. Among other things Luhmann claims that one can, and does, bring to the abstraction of systems theory a specificity and an imperative –​from our concerns with reconfiguration as bringing a constructive violence to the constrained logic of systems theory. The underlying idea here is also that creation depends on destruction, be the system metabolic, thermochemical, cosmic, epistemological and so on (Luhmann 1989, pp. 22–​27). A system ‘can see only what it can see. It cannot see what it cannot’. It follows that ‘what cannot be seen cannot be seen’. This is the absolute reality of the system. But the system can observe ‘a system by another system’. Citing Humberto Maturana, Luhmann points out that this type of observation can be called ‘second-​order observation’. The system observing the other system can observe ‘the restriction’ its system imposes on it, and the horizon environment in which its boundaries are excluded. So doing clarifies the operation of the system/​environment relation as a kind of second order cybernetics. Since social systems in general and societies in particular constitute themselves through autopoietic self-​reference, every observer is confronted with the question of how these systems come to terms with the problem of the tautology and paradox that necessarily follow when a system operates through self-​reference alone, that is, when it must ground all its operations on self-​ reference. ‘An observer who recognises that an object is a self-​referential system notices at the same time that it is constituted tautologically and paradoxically, i.e. is arbitrary and inoperable, unobservable’ (p. 24). To deal with the situation the observer needs to distinguish ‘natural and artificial constraints’. In the presumed reality of second order cybernetics ‘one can see that the observed system constructs the reality of its world through a recursive calculation of calculation’ (p. 25). Now where does all this lead Luhmann? Here are three of his key conclusions: 1. We have to choose second-​order cybernetics as a point of departure. ‘We have to see that what cannot be seen cannot be seen. Only then can we

116  A lexicon of analytics discover why it is so difficult for our society to react to the exposure to ecological dangers despite, and even because of, its numerous function systems’ (p. 26). 2. To the extent that society can differentiate structurally an observing of observing and explain this theoretically it finds itself in the position of establishing the conditions under which it will react through its respective (function) systems to whatever is the environment. 3. Every operation and every observation has structural limitations, which is precisely what second-​order observation makes clear. A better evaluation of the situation is attainable only when this insight is applied to itself, that is, is employed recursively. Multi-​spatial hermeneutics Most of relational epistemic models are struggling with the implementation of what can be called a pluritopical (Mignolo 1995) or multi-​spatial (Tlostanova 2017) hermeneutics helping us understand something which does not belong to our horizon through a dialogic and experiential (not merely interpretative) learning from the other. The understanding subject is placed in a colonial periphery or imperial semi-​periphery, in a non-​European tradition, or other marginalised space, disturbing the habitual western vantage point and questioning the position and homogeneity of the understanding subject. Multi-​spatial hermeneutics traverses the cultural, religious, gender and other boundaries, refusing to colonise the other by its set of pre-​existing categories and notions. It stresses neither cultural relativism nor multiculturalism. Instead multi-​spatial hermeneutics accentuates the politics of the embodiment and construction of the space for formulating and expressing one’s active positionality. Although the cognising subject should presume the truth of the cognised, this subject should also admit the existence of alternative politics of space with equal claims to truth. Relativism is an important step in the realisation of cultural or epistemic differences but it is not enough without the accent on power asymmetries –​epistemic and other. The monotopical hermeneutics claims to represent modernity through inventing its other(s). The multi-​spatial hermeneutics rebels against the monotopical model, letting the others speak, reason, argue, and create as equals to the same, and from their own body and experience, subsuming the imperial reason that taxonomised them as others. Yet the challenge is to make this multi-​spatial method of understanding and making sense of the world not a mere declaration but a praxis. And here we face the challenge of combining and most certainly overcoming the relationality of global and local optics (perhaps discarding this binary opposition itself as we would have to discard the outdated political divisions into the right and the left). How to initiate a dialogue of enormously different if not incommensurable and mutually opaque vantage points constituting pluriversality, of positions with equal rights to relational and shifting truth

A lexicon of analytics  117 in parenthesis, and a dialogue without which it will soon be impossible for anyone to ‘find a place to land’ (Latour 2018, p. 5). How not to be caught in the trap of extreme constructionism with its potentially solipsistic predominance of the observer which allows us to hide behind relativity yet still is unable to solve the problem of our mutual futureless condition. Path eight: relearning to learn With the emergence of euromodernity and through the shaping of disciplines, institutional structures, professionals and later experts, the university as the main post-​Enlightenment knowledge production institution has developed particular modes of cognition and representation, specific notions of what counts as knowledge, who is to produce knowledge and who is to consume, as well as models of nurturing of a particular subject with a specific view of the world. These notions not only directly affect the expectations for the present and the future, but also educate people in accordance with the ideas of the model citizen and society that are prescribed by the state and the market. The celebration of the post-​industrial or ‘knowledge society’ (Innerarity 2012) has become commonplace. Yet, starting from the late 1980s, the university has slid into a crisis of legitimacy (Readings 1996; Chomsky 1997; Derrida 2002; Taylor 2009) and the academics, philosophers or any institutionalised intellectuals have gradually lost their impact on the society. The corporatisation of the university has contributed to its crisis that has deepened in the 2010s with the reinstatement of intolerant particularisms. Still, knowledge production mechanisms have remained neoliberal and subject to commercial, instrumental, narrow vocational, depoliticised and ultimately utilitarian principles (Fry 2012). The university has come to be assessed exclusively by the profits received immediately in exchange for the produced knowledge. In the university, this crisis was linked with the shift from the Cold War university model that was originally American but became accepted worldwide (Chomsky 1997) to the corporate university (Readings 1996), also originating in the US and driven largely by the market considerations. The Kantian-​Humboldtian university, as a citadel of academic freedom and a safe harbour for bright minds supported by the beneficiary state, has turned into empty rhetoric. Behind this rhetoric hides precarisation, a predominance of the self-​financing schemes and a swift turning of education and knowledge production at large into a service rather than a public good (Smyth 2017; Williams 2016). The national and the corporate models of the university cannot cope with the challenge of the exponential increase in ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious diversity claiming its epistemic rights. Palliatives offered in response to these challenges, such as programs to achieve gender equality, strengthen multiculturalism and increase diversity and inclusion, do not suffice, as universities are still built on the ‘Eurocentric epistemic contract’ (Mignolo and Tlostanova 2012) that was launched as a result of a self-​referential and self-​legitimating

118  A lexicon of analytics epistemic system disavowing all other systems as non-​belonging to modernity and subjecting them to continuous epistemicide (Santos 2016). Knowledges are always constructed by someone and in someone’s interests, from particular spatial, historical and corporeal positions. Yet epistemic coloniality has been represented as objective and delocalised, obscuring the links between knowledge and the knower, knowledge and those who circulate it, knowledge and its representation. Efforts to decolonise the university are omnipresent all over the world. Recent examples include the Fallist movement in South Africa (UCT Rhodes Must Fall 2015), the SOAS students’ protests against the exclusively white curriculum (Decolonising SOAS Vision 2017), various university commissions on diversity and inclusion (Wekker et  al. 2016). Academics critical of the modern/​colonial university have been striving to advance the ideal of education as an emancipating force giving people back their erased memory and hope for the future. Yet such efforts are mostly restricted to indirect ways such as the slowing down of research and academic life, the use of yet another technological gadget, problematising and widening the curriculum, filling the standard courses with new names and content, offering critical classes applying Global South methodologies and bursting the Eurocentric epistemic normativity, questioning the predominant modes of perception, cognition, and representation. All of this is hardly enough under the persistent structural inequality, intersectional discrimination and stubborn epistemic hierarchies blocking a symmetrical dialogue of different knowledge systems. In effect, it is only a preparation for a radical dismantling of the university as such through shattering the system from within, opening new options and vistas in the interpretation of the nature and function of knowledge, the goals and aims of education, infiltrating it with islands of decolonial thinking and agency, the micro-​interventions and the longer, higher-​impact events. A complete decolonisation of the university would mean dismantling it and rebuilding anew or better yet abandoning the idea of the university as such and designing alternative knowledge production institutions including the indigenous ones such as the short-​lived Amawtay Wasi pluriversity of the indigenous people and nations of Ecuador (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012) that decentred the western educational canon, making it equal with indigenous learning systems, and shifted the emphasis from supplying the learners with a sum of facts, or from teaching them to comply with national and state expectations, to letting them learn how to be themselves. In the centre of its cognitive matrix stood the already mentioned principle of relational-​experiential rationality and building knowledge not outside the human experience and not by presenting the problem outside the context, but necessarily, through a never-​ending process of learning to unlearn in order to relearn. It is crucial to design such alternative correlational models of learning and thinking together which not only take into account the larger spectre of human interests, but are themselves created with the active participation of various local groups with their specific epistemologies, as agents of epistemic

A lexicon of analytics  119 and pedagogical emancipation. This would allow people to affectively experience their connections with forgotten roots yet remain contemporary and up-​to-​date, to bring the past into the present. This would mean a shift from dismantling the master’s house using his methodological tools, to focusing more on questioning the ‘hegemony of the master’s house’ as such, ‘in fact, mastery itself which will then cease to maintain its imperial status’ (Walsh and Mignolo 2018, p. 7). More and more students are interested in such ‘learning otherwise’ initiatives. Yet the coloniality of knowledge still does not allow regarding such projects as more than an exotic addition to the traditional curriculum or a short-​scale edutainment. A shifting in the geography of reasoning (Gordon 2010) and reclaiming the erased and appropriated spaces of alternative knowledge production are necessary to legitimise discarded knowledges as equal to normalised forms that we find in the classroom and in the textbook. Contemporary university as an empty signifier, criticised from all positions in the ideological spectrum, still retains its legitimacy as a naturalised and self-​ proclaimed modern institution with a monopoly on knowledge production. Even if the most interesting knowledge is produced today beyond the university and traditionally packaged university knowledge becomes extremely perishable and quickly outdated, in its present business model and as part of the market totalitarianism the university in effect enslaves researchers, learners and teachers, leaving them no other option to survive but comply with the rules. University degrees are still necessary to get a job and university tenures are necessary to be publishable and therefore maintain one’s academic reputation. The university ‘transforms producing knowledge from a calling and makes it exclusively into a job’ (Gordon 2018). Emancipating knowledge production from the constraints of the university requires harmonious actions of different groups, including those outside the academy. A relearning to learn otherwise is its mission linked to the necessity of working out a new imaginary, transcending the purely utilitarian and instrumental goals and maintaining a close connection between what we believe in and how we act upon it in our own lives and in opening options for the others. It is impossible to fix the all-​pervasive structural and notional bias in the grounds of the existing knowledge production system in one school or one national education system. It is necessary to develop ‘deep coalitions’ that ‘never reduce multiplicity’ and ‘span across differences … towards a shared struggle of interrelated others’ (Lugones 2003, p. 98). These deep coalitions could evolve as dynamic alliances of different knowledge systems with transnational outlets such as educational and research platforms involving local communities on a parity-​ grounded basis. These communities will start rethinking asymmetrical relations between teachers and learners and encourage learning as a constant transcending process for intellectual elites as well as for local communities, subjects and objects of critical inquiry. Moreover, they would launch beyond-​the-​university learning and thinking

120  A lexicon of analytics together activities and relational spaces in which different groups could meet and interact, learning with and from each other. It is urgent to delegitimise the university and wider academia as increasingly obsolete and commercialised spaces and actors, which go further and further away from relational transversal learning and knowledge production, away from being attuned to people’s lives and life as such rather than commodfying and devaluing lives (Desmarias 2007). An alternative model of learning would be grounded in border thinking coming from the in-​between-​ ness of modernity and its darker colonial side, from the border spaces of negotiation which have never been seen before as sites of knowledge production, and focus on the right of being fully informed and the right to choose, as prerequisites of a real knowledge society as opposed to the present monopoly of corporate science seeing life as property. A key principle of such reimagined learning is a dynamic correlational principle which refers not only to a correlation of different epistemic spaces but also to a temporal interaction, ‘moving towards opening up the multiplicity of histories that have been suppressed by the normative power of the contemporary and its control over the fields of legibility’ (Vázquez 2017). Knowledge production would not be a mere tool for modelling the world and the people in the present. It would also be a creative reflection and realisation of the people’s forgotten and discarded needs, wishes and longings, inevitably linked to local cosmologies, ethics and systems of knowledge seen not as a museumised past, or a fundamentalist dystopia, but as a living present and a promise for the future. Such a radical delinking from the dogmas of modern/​colonial discourses would have to be grounded not only in the acceptance of the right to difference but more radically, in seeing relationality as a necessary condition for the possibility of any difference in the pluriversal symbiotic world. This approach entails a rebuilding of the generally accepted models of teaching, learning, and understanding naturalised in the university, with a special emphasis on the decoding of such harmful tendencies as increasingly narrow specialisation, the applied bias in educational practices, inability to perceive the global dimension not as global market or profit, but in the sense of the global interconnectivity of everything and everybody on Earth thus linking the world, things and humans. This task requires a nurturing of a different kind of subjectivities which starts with humbling of modernity and humbling of humankind. A shift from the dominant Occidentalist politics of knowledge to a dynamic dialogue of multiple cognitive models, reflecting the pluriversal nature of the world, cannot be taken to be merely a change in the packaging, the set of courses taught, the increase in efficiency or the renovated list of skills and competences. It is crucial to dismantle the very grounds of the corporate understanding of knowledge, teaching and learning. A good example is Paulo Freire’s decolonial pedagogy (Freire 2004, 2007) whose present-​day followers have expanded its initial class and colonial frame to include ethnic-​ racial, queer, ecosophical and other aspects of pedagogical democracy. Such

A lexicon of analytics  121 shifts stem not only from the previously silenced non-​western cosmologies but also from broader anti-​essentialist beliefs and a critical attitude to any dominating cognitive, educational and solipsist disciplinary regimes that fetishise researchers, disciplines and methods of learning (Gordon 2006) thus taking learners and teachers away from the world including the human life-​world. One of the promising relearning to learn tools that can take us as researchers, teachers and learners back to the world is the Urmadic university (Fry 2012) which allows overcoming the typical-​for-​the-​present academic bubble lack of transformative energy, or the ways of energy’s application to concrete reality. The Urmadic university starts as an essentially nomadic project with no fixed place –​a constant move of a flexible collective of thinking and learning subjects to the actual location of the relational and historically contextualised problem, and a trigger for the emergence of the new futural culture of learning. This is one possible way of crafting a new political imagination. Path nine: the way out Finding a way out of the maze is not just a question of exploring the paths, it’s also about overcoming obstacles, in particular, an acquired habitus of compliance which assumes there is a correct path (in accord to its designers’ schema), whereas there may be no correct path. And then there is the fear of having to abandon not only a good deal of what is known, but also the function of this knowledge as it provides the foundation of practice. The implication here is that a way out has to be learnt and this learning can be at the same time the means to unlearn what obstructs; new learning; and discovering that the way out of the maze is equally a way towards a new learning. Key to gaining the ability to learn learning to re-​learn to learn are three fundamental requirements. First is embracing the imperative of what demands to be learnt. Now there is obviously no single issue to learn. Certainly the imperative of sustainment rides high, but not as addressed by the techno-​centric instrumental agenda of sustainability, which is dominantly about re-​forming the status quo of business as usual. Rather, the demand is about making a fundamental ontological shift in order to significantly alter ‘our’ mode of being in the world: this recognising that causally ‘we’ –​our desires, dreams, demands, anthropocentric self-​interests –​are at the core of the problem of the unsustainable. Yet beyond feeble efforts towards sustainable lifestyles and consumption, which mostly get adopted by a progressive minority, the critical challenge is creating ontologically transformative circumstances that directly engage transformation, while recognising our difference (including and beyond ethno-​cultural, political, socio-​economic, age, gender). Sustainment is currently unthought, and so goes by unaddressed, but crucially it needs to become the commonality of what fundamentally sustains us, and thereafter bridges difference without eliminating it. Another and linked imperative goes to the way global Eurocentric knowledge totally dominates academic disciplines, and also defines ‘humanity’, in particular ways. These problems

122  A lexicon of analytics are begging full disclosure. Following from these two examples, as our overarching concern, is the need for a new political imagination. Existing politics shows itself unable to confront and deal futurally with the scale and complexity confronting our species and the biosphere upon which life as we know it depends. This inability is a basic problem in its own right. Requirement three is leaving the environment of extant knowledge. The claim of this knowledge is not that it is totally redundant (although some of it is) but that it is completely insufficient to respond to the non-​exclusive imperatives noted. Essentially events are speeding ahead of the means by which knowledge is acquired. Moreover, the number of problems of which there is little knowledge, and even less understanding, ever increases. Likewise, the dominance to deliver solutions to those serious problems so often overpowers the need for them to be properly understood. What is actually needed is a totally different approach. One where ‘we’ go to the problem, with modesty, in the realisation that in our unknowing the situated problem demands to be learnt and understood, that even so there might not be a solution, and if there is that new and existing knowledge, the corpus of the academy may not be able to provide it. The reconfiguring of the function of learning, as already touched on, is the third requirement. This is totally counter to the dominant instrumentalisation of almost everything in the academy and its degeneration into being directed at vocational ends measured by the metric of employment. This not only has dramatically changed a great deal of what is dominantly taught but has dramatically changed the value and status of areas of knowledge less amenable to pragmatic application. Learning has to be recovered –​for it (formally and informally) is the ontological designing of our becoming. And for being to continue to be, our species needs to learn how to become futurally other than ‘we’ are. The current school system and academy are clearly not doing this, but are completely unaware of this absolute need. Linking these three requirements is a model of ‘contingent learning’ that invites being resituated and rethought. This mode of learning was developed in various contexts for people with learning difficulties. Framed as we are, in an educational paradigm that negated the imperative of what is most essential to learn, everyone has a profound structural learning difficulty: de facto, there is a huge institutional block to learning what is now most essential. As indicated, the first step is to critically reposition where and how one is before focusing on what needs to be learnt  –​going to the problem to learn being one clear example of this. Another very different example is displacing the mechanical and impoverished, administrative and legalistic model of ethics employed by the academy, which reduces it to an instrumental list of functional rules of conduct and consequently requirements to be met so that the institution is protected from litigation. The next step will be creating the agency able to replace this defunct ethics with a creative and futural model wherein ethical futures are made normative to the essence of learning, again

A lexicon of analytics  123 the ‘how’ being contingent to what was being set out to learn. Originally, two of the main features of contingent learning were that individual subjects were allowed to learn at their own rates, and the ability to recall what had been learnt over time, presented in any way, was an important measure of sustaining ability (Buschke 1979, pp. 283–​286). Another example concerns the way in which context is directive of epistemological adoption. This is not the same as the general application of pragmatics, and it is counter to the attachment of a particular epistemology as an individuated position of thought and speech. Essentially what this means is developing a critical sense of one’s proximal placement to a problem, and its evident impacts, while acknowledging one’s state of unknowing. It is most likely that the problem has been misrecognised, ill-​defined or misunderstood, but to be in a position to assess this situation one places oneself before the problem to observe it through the prism of what one already knows, while observing one’s process of observations. In so doing, the constructed perceptions and limits of one’s knowledge become revealed to oneself. Thereafter, the possibility of identifying what has to be learnt to adequately understand that problem has the potential to be made available.

Notes 1 The police patrol areas like the city of Derry in armoured Land Rovers, and the New IRA merged with the ‘real IRA’ in 2012. 2 At the time of writing, the current IPPC projection is a global rise of 74 centimetres by 2100, which is expected to displace 400 million people. 3 See, for example, ‘Designing After the End’, section VIII of the Design Philosophy Reader (Willis 2019, pp. 251–​290). 4 The magnitude of the event was so tragic that it overshadowed other horrific (and interrelated with this war) events, including the genocide of up to 1.5 million Armenians during and after the war by forces of the dying Ottoman Empire, or 12.5  million people (according to most sources) exterminated as a result of the Russian Tsarist empire collapse, the 1917 revolution, triggered largely by the First World War and the subsequent Bolshevik terror and civil war. 5 Brian Fox, who has examined Schmitt’s political Catholicism in great detail, cites Martin Conway’s useful definition to define his relation to it. It does not mean ‘Catholics who were active in politics but political action which was Catholic in inspiration’ (Fox 2015, p. 30). 6 The actual number of Crusades is contentious. Some accounts end with the eighth, other with the ninth, but then the Alexandrian and Nicopolis Crusades of respectively 1365 and 1396 are deemed as the tenth and eleventh.

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3  Narratives of gathering(s) of the political

It cannot be presumed that politics reimagined would arrive and immediately produce direct confrontations with existing political ideologies, parties and institutions. Rather what could be expected is that it would initially show itself, and gain agency, by the extension of already politicised practices and the politicisation of many currently un-​politicised.1 The agenda of such action is unambiguous, although it would be circumstantially specific and situated, and as such, principally address countering: those forces that act to defuture the sustainment of ‘life on Earth’ in all of its affirmative forms. A reimagined politics would do this by the redirection or elimination of existing defuturing practices and the creation of new ones that do future. The action will be informed, directed and actualised by a relational understanding of, and engagement with, problems linked to the negation of affirmative futures. This will be done in the recognition that solutions are not necessarily to hand, and in some cases not even possible, which means the creation of adaptive strategies and practices. So framed, how politics and the political are thought and understood links directly to the forms of organisation, content and action taken. It follows that what will be argued here foregrounds exposing those narratives that gather, as a comprehending and bringing together, the political in the face of the defuturing forms of politics’ breakdown, and the thinking of the imperative of it becoming futural. … Political philosophy has been defined as the study of coercive institutions –​ from the family and the state to transnational organisations –​as well as the political ideologies that support or oppose them. Fundamentally, what is shared is contestation over the form of the individual and/​or common good and how each is delivered. Configured as a sub-​discipline of philosophy, and largely over-​determined by the existing form of the discourse, political philosophy exists mainly delimited by its history and thus is an unlikely source of a new political imagination.

Gathering(s) of the political  133

On gathering Martin Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s account of the making of a sacred vessel in his Physics provides a useful characterisation of the concept of gathering. It has its philosophical roots in aition –​being responsible for the ‘cause’ of something, and as legein/​logos  –​ here, a means of bringing forth together into appearance, and thereafter to deliberate and comprehend (McNeill 1999, p.  196). Gathering also directly links to bringing our being into being as the event of our collective becoming –​this having been gathered is the coming to presence of language itself (pp. 316–​17). Gathering is thus the essence of embodied and ‘informal learning’. So understood, it prefiguratively goes ahead to frame the relation between the political and politics. Gathering will be revisited later in the conclusion, presented as a re-​gathering of politics, as a potentiality to ground the thinking of a new political imagination.

Prefiguring the political and politics now Carl Schmitt opened his book The Concept of the Political by asserting that the ‘concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political’ (Schmitt 1996, p.19). He then goes on to present a linguistic definition of the state as ‘the political status of an organised people in an enclosed territorial unit’, but nonetheless leaving a definitive definition of the state open. The political is more elusive: ‘One seldom finds a clear definition’ (p. 20). He goes on to say a definition ‘can be obtained only by discovering and defining the specifically political categories (p. 25). On this, Schmitt will be taken on his word. However, he adds a crucial qualification:  ‘The specific political distinction to which political action and motives can be reduced is between friend and enemy’ (p.  26). Nothing that Schmitt wrote has been more misunderstood than this distinction. At the most general level, the friend and enemy distinction does not forever arrest the relations between nations or render a condition of neutrality impossible. Schmitt points out that if neutrality were to become global then both neutrality itself and the friend-​enemy distinction would end, thereby terminating the possibility of politics (pp. 34–​35). No matter the moral, religious, ethical or economic nature of a grouping, it becomes political as soon as it defines its other as enemy (p.  37). Thus, as soon as difference is eliminated again, the political vanishes (p. 53). At the level of the individual, and however difference is defined, ‘he is, nevertheless the other, the stranger … something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible’ (p. 27). But the relation should not be confused with ‘economic, moral, and other conceptions, least of all in a private-​individualistic sense of a psychological expression of private emotions and tendencies’ (p. 28). What Schmitt is recognising is that the friend’s (under-​defined) relation to the enemy (the predominantly defined) does not lead to a condition of auto-​destruction, but

134  Gathering(s) of the political to the political –​and, as Leo Strauss pointed out, the friend’s relation to the enemy is an ‘affirmation of man’s dangerousness’ as it is taken into ownership (Strauss 1976, in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 97). Here, then, is an evaluative frame and measure of the adequacy of politics. This is politics as an object of political struggle over the efficacy of our being’s dangerousness, be it as life-​diminishing economic exploitation, racist persecution, crimes of theft or violence, war or the destruction of the environments on which we depend, as exercised by the legislation of the forms and social conduct of everyday life and the means by which it is structured and decided. The possibility and impossibility of politics is determined by the degree to which the responsibility for the political has been gathered by politics as a regime of care in confrontation with a dangerous enemy. Currently, at best liberalism accommodates the dangerous in its eternal bondage to the negative dialectic of capitalism (structural unsustainability), while at worst a de facto totalitarianism embraces the dangerous as the means to sustain itself (repressive intolerance). The dangerous in general demands a politics of decision capable of authorising action to overcome all that unambiguously threatens (the enemy). If we take up Schmitt’s understanding of the enemy as a political designation (rather than animosity towards an other), writ large as war as politics, what is directing the need to work towards a new political imagination is the evacuation of the political from contemporary institutionalised politics. Effectively, the neoliberal managerialist politics has become the enemy of ‘the political’, which, in contemporary circumstances, can be defined by those redirective actions at any level –​from individual to the collective, from the group to the state –​the efforts to secure and advance the common good of being in common. This is now understood as a condition of qualitative sustainment in the face of, and counter to, the dangers of all that negates the potentiality of the futural being of our being. Albeit from our own excesses, our auto-​destructive propensity to defuture all we biophysically depend upon effectively means that we wage war on our own, and now fragmenting, species. Democracy, as it has become the administrative instrument of liberalisms, and as the agent of the economy of unsustainability (capitalism), is now a politics of the negation of the political (recognising that the essence of the political determines politics). So said, Schmitt’s antipathy towards liberalism stems from his view of it as a negation of the political and as installing the economic as the primary domain of contestation (Schmitt 1996, pp. 70–​71, 78); and as destructive democracy (p. 69). More than this, he also saw liberalism as waging an ‘internal struggle against the power of the state’ as it was deemed an ‘encroachment … on individual freedom and private property’ (p. 70). Moreover, Schmitt recognised the external struggle as a continuation of the effects of the free-​trade mercantile capitalism that constituted the core of European colonial expansion, aided by militarised trading companies.

Gathering(s) of the political  135 There is clearly continuity from the formative moment of liberalism, its implication in imperialism and the globalisation of unequal trade and the contemporary conduct of neoliberalism as a reduction of all relations and values within and between nations to the economic. This ideology has constituted the centre of gravity of a process of unlimited commodification: culture, nature, politics, education, health, information, art, entertainment –​there is virtually nothing beyond this process of ontologically embedded economic colonisation. Causally, what still mostly goes unacknowledged is that this ideology and the materiality of its processes are at the core of unsustainability. However, the politics and practices of sustainability activism constantly address the symptoms rather than the cause and thereby become complicit with ‘business as usual’. A  contemporary eco-​critical view of the ‘logic’ of neoliberalism exposes its nemesis for it is being consumed by its own defuturing impetus as it ever invests in the unsustainable. Just as darkly stated is another still resonant view found in the last paragraph of The Concept of the Political: ‘A war waged to protect or expand economic power must, with the aid of propaganda, turn into a crusade and into the last war of humanity’ (p. 79).

The now of the political As the oft-​quoted opening to Marx’s book-​length 1852 essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louise Bonaparte says, paraphrasing a remark dubiously ascribed to Hegel: ‘all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice’. To which Marx then says ‘He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, then second as farce’ (Marx [1852]1973, p. 146). From the present, it would seem we are clearly in the historical moment of farce, but with every trace of humour gone. In this situation, more than ever, there is little point in abstract discussion of the political, for the nature of the farce is that nowhere is there a coherent condition that can be generalised as the political, yet the farcical political parties, politicians and media pundits all behave as if there were. Let us consider this brief overview. Neoliberalism, especially in wealthier nations, has created a widespread condition of political stasis by hyper-​ reductively making economic metrics the normative measure of performance for almost every institution, including government, education, hospitals, prisons, public transport, housing, utilities and services. At the same time, the privatisation of numerous public services, the selling of public assets and the reduction of welfare provision have all contributed to a shrinking of the state. But then two other extremes can be found:  the economic and socio-​ ethnic fragility of weak dysfunctional states (often associated with conflicts within them) that is producing a complete political implosion and become a name signifying nothing but loss; and the ascent of the structurally contradictory, neo-​illiberal, totalitarian, de facto capitalist state, of which China is the archetype. In each case the political has withered. Thus contextualised, globalisation has actually ushered in post-​globalism, as the end of the idea and possibility of a unified world and world order.

136  Gathering(s) of the political This situation is evident in the fragmenting relations of the global power blocs, and the protectionism and racial-​nationalism of increasingly reactionary and internally divided nations. Then layered onto all these situations have been the ‘disruptive’ effects of technology on industrial production, communications and culture; the growing and creeping impacts of climate change; the universalisation of what is appearing as permanent fear, and distributed presence, of terrorism as created by terrorists, together with the forces that oppose them, as is evident in omnipresent regimes of surveillance that function on the basis that anybody anywhere has to be viewed as if they were a potential terrorist. So in the company of the shrinking state has been the arrival of the dual state, with its invisible powers and its direction from authority vested in regimes exercising their actions in a state of exception. All of these transformative forms and forces are having a profound direct and indirect impact on our very being in difference, as the ontological conditions in which they are variously formed are becoming increasingly, even dramatically pluralistically present. As a consequence our species is fragmenting (a condition only being partly recognised by discussion of the posthuman). One does not have to be aware of the detail of these nihilistic conditions to be unsettled by them. One response is a withdrawal into what Christopher Lasch called the ‘minimal self’ (Lasch 1984). Effectively any activity then gives a sense of excluding the presence of a world feared: opera, gardening, chess, collecting fine wines, dancing, fishing, cooking  –​the options are myriad  –​manifest such withdrawal. Obviously, there is also a self-​negating, auto-​destructive cynical drift into a politically apathetic social disengagement. Equally the reverse is true, with seemingly active social reformism aiming to contribute to the social good constituting therapeutic gestures that can foster political illusions that Schmitt defined as Political Romanticism (Schmitt 1986). Reform of the existing political status quo that retains the extant paradigm can also be so classified. The other response to the political lacuna and crisis of the present embraced here confronts them through the processes of unmaking and remaking that recognise the need of another political imagination, not approached as a project of speculative, idealist contemplation but as informed, action-​ grounded practice (praxis). This requires first, recognising there is no available recourse to a viable new global(ising) ideology, movement, revolution or utopia, and then acknowledging a series of unavoidable global imperatives that all have been partly engaged instrumentally, but can only be understood as effect in ‘a local presence in difference’  –​climate change, for example is a global problem with general characteristics, but with impacts that differ according to conditions of place. These imperatives converge on modalities of the unsustainable that enfold a defuturing political economy. This political economy supports cultural and terrestrial life, atmospheric and oceanic impacts; conflict; the destruction of life, environments and futures; and the defuturing consequences of the excesses and violence of the Global North as it has degraded, damaged and disadvantaged the peoples of the Global South and their futures. Thus, within a new political imagination issues of

Gathering(s) of the political  137 de-​globalisation as a displacement of the deeply inscribed directive power of the Global North over the future forms of the Global South (contained in the notion of universal unsustainable development) have to be unavoidable confrontations. So are the locally generated practices and extractive knowledge of decoloniality enacted in the geographic and globally exported Global South. What the opening of such an agenda could initiate would be the substantial project of commencing processes of de-​development coupled with redirective development spanning all forms of knowing and acting. The beginning of such a transformation is evident in the projects, economic innovations and newly introduced ontologies now underway via more recent postdevelopment practices (Klein and Morreo 2019). The imperative is plainly to go beyond critique and put in place procedures that, in contrast to utopian visions, work on the construction of the material and epistemological foundations of transformation. To move forward, these expressed sentiments have to engage with four onto-​epistemological obstacles:  philosophy, technology, practice and community  –​not with the assumption that they can be surmounted but rather that they have to be navigated and negotiated in conditions of between-​ness (of world cultures, time, epistemologies and politics). To begin to bring this concern to the present, first, a number of Heidegger’s ideas are addressed as obstacles to thinking technology and politics now, in so far as they present perspectives and invite conduct that have been in significant part rendered redundant. Yet the ability to think the complexity of technology now is not thinking against Heidegger but a thinking beyond him that has been enabled by his thinking. To make this clearer, we will draw on a few of his insights; thereafter the relation between politics and philosophy will be registered to reframe a return of technology in the context of the political.

The obstacles 1. The essence of technology is nothing technological: Heidegger’s statement that ‘the essence of technology is nothing technological’ (Heidegger 1977, p. 4) recognised technology as an instrumental contrivance, but its agency and character as such were not seen as its essence, understanding essence not as an embedded quality but the performative character of something (hence his much quoted example of the essence of a hammer being hammering  –​and what it defines is techne:  the intrinsic knowledge of the habitus exercised as skill). So understood, essence is not reducible to causality (p. 7). In moving towards the essence of technology, Heidegger acknowledges it as a mode both of revealing and concealing (p.  13). However, what has become clear is that this is not a simple duality but one with a telos towards concealment (as with the appearance of a screen interface). Remembering that Heidegger started talking about his concerns about technology in a series of lectures between December 1949 and March 1950, the

138  Gathering(s) of the political scale and presence of technology now has not only dramatically increased but also has become more ontically inscribed and ontologically pervasive. Yet the more ‘it’ has become structurally and elementally to, and as, world (as naturally integrated), the more this fact becomes concealed. Biotechnology has removed the division between technology and nature, breaking down as well any sense of itself as a discrete sphere of technology (as seen in its relation to electronics and chemical engineering). So while Heidegger moved the thinking of technology into a higher order of complexity, it is now of a domain and dynamic of complexity that in total exceeds any available thinking of the complex. Thus the way Heidegger understood the relation of technology to nature and the ‘standing reserves’ –​including the reality of the natural resources of techno-​human exploitation of which technology has made us a part –​has been overtaken by technology itself, first as cybernetics as natural post-​natural feedback. Heidegger recognised the agency of technology in a way which is not reducible to instrumentality, which allows us to say more about its essence: ‘Modern technology as an ordering of revealing is, then, no merely human doing. Therefore we must take that challenging that sets upon man to order the real as standing-​reserve in accordance with the way in which it shows itself …We now name that challenging claim which gathers man thither to order the self-​ revealing as standing-​reserve: “Ge-​stell” [Enframing]’ (p. 19). 2 Heidegger later goes on to say something that brings the moment into stark relief with ours: Enframing, as a destining of revealing is indeed the essence of technology, but never the essence of genus and essentia. If we pay heed to this, something astounding strikes us: It is technology itself that makes the demand on us to think in another way what is usually undééerstood by ‘essence’. (p. 30) Essence is again repeated as the enduring of Enframing as ‘a destining that gathers together into the revealing that challenges forth’ (p. 31). But the ability to meet this challenge is not taken for granted: As this destining, the coming to presence of technology gives man entry into That which, of himself, he can neither invent nor in any way make. For there is no such thing as a man who, solely of himself, is only man. (p. 31) As stated above, we as a species have never been without technology. Ontologically we came into being with and by technology, and it has been deeply implicated in the indivisible transformation of self and world (Fry 2012). Thus ‘we’ make it and in its world-​making, it makes us:  we are not ‘solely of’ ourselves. But from the changing ratio of revealing and concealing, our being technological has changed, is uneven and fragmented. The totalising

Gathering(s) of the political  139 of our being as ‘man’ can no longer be sustained and partitioned by philosophy. ‘We’ are not one but a fragmented many divided by inequity, injustice, violence, space and place, different cosmologies and their respective culture and exposure to/​engagement with particular technologies. Effectively in its most sophisticated forms, the user/​used relation between ‘us’ and technology no longer holds. This is just one aspect of the ontologically profound impact of technology where it no longer ‘makes the demand on us to think in another way’ but forces us to do so. As enframing, technology reveals that to which ‘we’ must comply. Most advanced technologies control use, and make decisions (via algorithms) during the course of use that the ‘used user’ may or may not be aware of. Moreover, technology as dematerialised has become articulated to mind as technological (artificial) intelligence that can functionally educate itself. All this is common knowledge in socio-​economically advantaged cultures, but what is revealed is instrumentally designed functional use that does not conceal, counter to an enframed destining. Rather, it is a result of imposed concealment by the instrumental design of an interface to maximise the commodification of use-​function by the designed concealment of technical complexity. Thus technology never actually comes to presence while its essence brings the user into being as one moment in a life-​world of technological ontological designing of being that ‘object-​orientated technology’ has only gone part way to understand in the form of being of things (Harman 2002) as agents of ontological design. If one asks what has been the consequence of the historicity of the ontological designing of technology (which is to say, the designing that designed technology goes on to design), the first answer is our emergence as technological beings (as the complementary being to our animality). By degree this applies to all. The second answer is the erasure of much of our psycho-​ social being by the scale, nature and impact of the instrumental environment brought into being technologically as instrument and essence. By degree this applies to some. Unlike the planet’s biosphere, to which it is articulated, the technological environment is unbounded:  functionally and metaphysically instrumentally it is without known finitude. In so far as there is nothing that cannot be instrumentalised it enfolds the standing-​reserve and subsumes all value. The productivism of instrumentalism thereby is the full realisation of nihilism in that all values are reduced to the expendable use-​value of commodity, and nothing is excluded from this gathering process of commodification, including our very being (for life is quantified as variable material and cultural ‘value’). One of the most overt manifestations of the situation is the instrumental creation of hegemonic metrics, the most common being economic worth, so that it configures how, for example education, government, art, health and so on are viewed. Here then are our end times, wherein disappearance is reappearance as the completely instrumentalised. Here is our zero point. But in our geo-​ technological unevenness, there may be a saving power of gatherings of being otherwise within which technology is in a borderland of technologies of

140  Gathering(s) of the political past and present modalities’ enframing. This was already signalled in what Heidegger had to say several years before he directly addressed technology in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ and displaced its instrumental understanding with the still open question ‘what is the instrumental itself’ (Heidegger 1977, p. 6)? Writing in the Beträge zur Philosophie (1936–​1938), deemed his second most important book, but not published in Germany until 1989 (and in English in 1999), he addresses ‘machination’ –​which prefigured his thinking on enframing. After acknowledging the common understanding as the name of a ‘‘bad’ type of human activity and plotting for such an activity’ he points out: ‘Rather, the name should immediately point to making’ of which he says ‘that something makes itself by itself and is thus makeable for a corresponding procedure that the self-​making by itself is the interpretation of nature that is accomplished by techne’ (Heidegger 1999, p. 88). Machination so understood implies that technological skills, like natural processes, bring things to being out of themselves. Thus the etymology: the word comes from the old French machinacion –​‘plot, conspiracy, scheming, intrigue’ and directly from Latin machinationem (nominative, machinatio)  –​ ‘device contrivance, machination’, a noun of action from the past-​participle stem of machinari –​‘to contrive skilfully, to design; to scheme, to plot’, from machina –​‘machine, engine; device trick’. As linked to the Spanish maquina, Italian macchina, from Greek makhana, ‘device, tool, machine;’ also ‘contrivance, cunning’, traditionally magh-​ana-​‘that which enables’, from root magh ‘to be able, have power’ (Online Etymology Dictionary 2020). Heidegger brings machination to lived experience as a belonging together, by implication in a relation of making (Heidegger 1999, p. 81). He later goes on to say that ‘Machination is the domination of making and what is made. But in this regard one is not to think of human dealings and operating but rather the other way round; such [human activity] is only possible, in its unconditionally and exclusively, on the basis of machination’ (p. 92). What has been named here can be claimed as intrinsic to ontological design, defined as the designing of the designed –​which is to say that things that are designed go on designing. A simple example is that chairs are designed, and one thing they design is a mode of sitting, and over time sitting contributes to the designs of bodily posture. 2. Politics and philosophy: writing on a new concept of the political, reflecting on Schmitt’s thoughts, and arguing for a broader philosophical context, Jean-​Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-​Labarthe (1997) argue that it would need to derive from a political/​philosophy nexus. In reviewing the position adopted by Nancy and Lacoue-​Labarthe, what Andrew Norris suggests is that ‘politics is always caught up in and determined by the essence of the political’, which is philosophical (Norris 2012, p.  150). Nancy and Lacoue-​Labarthe both then draw a parallel between the essence of the political and the essence of metaphysics as technicity as put forward by Heidegger’s account of technology. So while Heidegger concludes that

Gathering(s) of the political  141 the essence of technology is nothing technological, Lacoue-​Labarthe, cited by Norris concludes that the essence of the political ‘is by itself nothing political’’ (p.150). In considering this conclusion, Norris asks what the implications for politics are, a question he then takes back to Heidegger’s politics and issues of liberalism (p. 151). Our response adopts another direction to suggest the political can exercise agency in practices, and be a figure of conceptual and material struggle, independent of institutional politics –​a view to be developed a little later. Norris discusses deconstruction in relation to Nancy’s remarks on Schmitt’s characterisation of ‘the metaphysical image that defines an epoch forging of [sic] the world while having the same structure as the world it understands being an appropriate form of its political organisation’ (Nancy 1997, pp. 92–​ 93). But as Norris points out, ‘it is hard to see how deconstruction alone can play the political role Nancy at times promises it will’ (Norris 2012, p. 155). The question is taken beyond a promise as Nancy returns us to connections between essence, the political and practice. This means shifts of focus from metaphysics to ontology, as deconstruction can reveal the political agency of practice as a political form of the worlding of its essence. In so far as all practices are by degree world-​making, at a scale from micro-​individual to the planetary, they are a material expression of a decision that gives form to the world to which ‘appropriate’ forms of ‘political organisation’ direct or respond. 3. The political, nihilism and technology:  Heidegger’s questionable politics went for many years from a largely ignored smouldering collection of inflammatory texts to an intellectual inferno ignited by the translation of Victor Farias’ ill-​motivated book Heidegger and Nazism in 1989. The fire it lit still burns and is fed by what is now a steady flow of combustible material. There will never be a consensus. The contradiction between an extraordinary thinker and flawed human being cannot be resolved. One makes a choice. But there is a context: the extent of his influence, visible and concealed and what it has engendered is an enduring unavoidable presence in contemporary critical thought, as it brings what is critically taken as given into question. Such thought does not equate with prefiguring ‘radically’ transformative futural action for the common good, but it does beg to be viewed as a registration of this as potentia. With this caveat, the task at hand excludes Heidegger’s politics from its remit while drawing attention to the modest importance of what he had to say on ‘the political’. The significance of the political arrived for Heidegger in the early 1930s. His thinking of this moment was ‘gathered’ by his seminar course ‘On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and State’, delivered in 1933–​1934. In this course he both made reference to Schmitt and defined his difference

142  Gathering(s) of the political of position asserting the political which ‘does not have to be identical with state and people’ (Heidegger 2014, p. 46). It is from this position that some of what he has to say will be considered in the light of its relation to the contemporary nature of the political. In particular, we will address the political as it constitutes ontological modes of being by the ways it is embedded in the ontic conditions in which people come to be. Thus, rather than being just an element of the state the political is integral, as agency, in the conditions of the worlds of our becoming, in all of its respects –​these worlds are indivisibly constructs of nature and our species’ artifice. Clearly Heidegger’s ideas, as the reference to Schmitt indicates, were not formed in a vacuum independent of his historic moment. He was, for example influenced by critiques of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West [1918] (1920), on which he gave two lectures in 1929; and by Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Association, [1887 reprinted in 1912] (1920), (de Beistegui 1998, pp. 167, n. 21 and 22). Ernst Jünger is a later example, especially as we shall see below, his essay ‘Total Mobilisation’ that appeared in a collection he edited in 1930. However, the most influential thinker whose ideas framed Heidegger’s perspective on the political was Nietzsche and his understanding of nihilism. Heidegger’s relation to Nietzsche’s stance passed through three stages. The first was a grappling with the notion that it was possible to overcome nihilism. The next focused on metaphysical nihilism (instrumentalism) as it ruled the age of technology. The third was a development of a new understanding of the will to power (of self-​overcoming as a never ending ‘overtaking and overcoming of power’ (de Beistegui 1998, p. 73) as a will to will as it prefigures and ‘underlies the calculation and the organisation of beings as a whole’ (p. 72). At this point Heidegger had transcended his prior influences. Although the relation to Jünger remained important, it is perhaps worth first saying something about the meaning of the will to will. We can start with Heidegger’s own qualification of will to will being ‘the consummation [Vollendung] of that essence of the will that announced itself in Kant’s concept of practical reason as pure willing’ (McNeill 1999, p. 198, n.  32). The actual activity of will to will is literally nothing apart from the presencing and presence of the products it produces (p. 205). Such thinking folds back into the light and dark side of Nietzsche’s thought that Heidegger grappled with. First, the self-​overcoming that produces the übermenge, whom Heidegger read not as a goose-​stepping superman but as a being who is ‘poorer, simpler, tenderer and tougher, quieter and more self-​sacrificing and slow of decision and more economical of speech’ (Heidegger 1968, p.  69), yet the dark-​side, contra reading was of the overman as a totally realised all-​powerful anthropocentric being with ‘absolute domination of pure power over earth’(de Beistegui 1998, p. 74). Heidegger’s confrontation with nihilism was longstanding and is especially evidenced by his essay ‘On the Question of Being’ that was a contribution to a publication in the honour of the sixtieth birthday of Ernst Jünger (Heidegger 1998, pp. 291–​322), whose thought is directly addressed under the heading of

Gathering(s) of the political  143 ‘Concerning ‘The Line’’ (denoting a dialogue with Jünger’s essay ‘Über die Linie’, 1950). The line is the ‘zero point’, the locus of nothing and the space constituted by nihilism having destroyed all values and goals where there is ‘no meaningful claim of healing’ and where, Jünger argued, ‘the human being is missing’ (p. 305). Heidegger asserts that the ‘essence of nihilism, which finds its ultimate consummation in the domination of the will to will, resides in the oblivion of being’ (p. 319). So whereas Jünger retained hope in overcoming nihilism, Heidegger argued there is none. This was not a consistent position, which can be argued as a result of change rather than indecision, a change which has continued, especially in relation to the political and technology extended and also becoming metaphysics. Heidegger contended in his conversation with Max Müller, cited by de Beistegui (p. 81), that Nietzsche and Jünger both ‘failed to think nihilism according to its essence’.

The political (and) community: an opening into We move here from a concern with technology as implicated in the political as world-​making to ‘community’ as troubled and damaged condition of being in being. The appeal to community falls between loss and the desired. Moreover, community is now firmly placed in the frame of the unsustainable in so far as it has been rendered so by the forces of unsustainability. These forces are complex and multiple in forms and extend from colonialism’s erasure of cosmologies of collective identity, to the technological dissipation of conviviality, the economic erosion of commons and the associated material destruction of social ecology, as well as the social impact of conflict. The protracted consequences of the undoing of being-​in-​common as a lived condition of exchange by the individuation of consumption requires special attention, for this shift has devalued social ecology as the means by which being-​in-​difference connects with the interdependence of becoming and the pragmatic of working together for the common good and sharing (which is not just a common use of resources). Sharing is something far more fundamental, as Nancy clearly states: ‘Sharing comes down to this: what community reveals to me, in presenting to me my birth and my death, is my existence outside myself’ (Nancy 1992, p. 22). Effectively what capitalism’s elevation of the individual consumer did was not just to undercut the commonality and cultures of sharing economies but to transpose market competition into an individualised acquisitive (‘invidious’) culture of conspicuous consumption, first named by Thorstein Veblen in 1899 (Veblen 2008). The relational impacts of this culture have been enormous, in one direction travelling to devalue social capital and in the other to be directive of urban design and the labour market that fragmented material conditions of commonality. One can cite Henry Ford’s introduction of the five-​dollar day in 1913 as a linking example. It doubled disposable income as a trade-​off for deskilling craft workers employed in online assembly and destroyed a convivial working-​together workplace and informal learning culture. During this time, Ford also specified a moral order and directed ways

144  Gathering(s) of the political of life as conditions of employment overlooked by a sociological department (Beynon 1975, pp. 25–​29). What this historical example of the breaking of the production of social relations illustrates is what Heidegger called mitsein/​mitda-​sein (being with/​ dasein-​with), as ‘being with’ is intrinsic to dasein. Our being is with others in our being-​in-​the-​world: ‘The world of Dasein is a with-​world’ (Heidegger [1927] (1996), §118). These others are ‘not objectively present thing-​persons, but we meet them at work, that is primarily in their being-​in-​the-​world’ (§120). These concepts of Heidegger play a key role in Jean-​Luc Nancy’s seminal work on community (Nancy 1992). What Nancy does is position the individual being as the singular plural coexisting with others. This dynamic relation resonates across discourses (as seen with the notion of social ecology) and is foundationally present in our coming-​into-​being. It is also the socio-​ethical condition of the possibility of the political. It follows that one can translate damage to community, as a variable degree of the dissolution of the plural condition of singular and its being with others. Of this, in the opening of his first chapter Nancy says: ‘The gravest and most powerful testimony of the modern world, the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer (by virtue of some unknown decree or necessity, for we bear witness also to the exhaustion of thinking through History), [sic] is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community’ (Nancy 1992, p.1). Later he elaborates on this situation and points out that an increased consciousness of ‘decolonised communities’, the increase in ‘channels of communication’ and the rise of a ‘multiracial society’ have not ‘triggered any genuine renewal of the question of community’ (p. 22). Being-​with cannot be a ‘desevered’ experience wherein the close and the near are divided (Heidegger (1996, §105) –​there is no ‘virtual community’. The relationality of being-​with is the closeness of the multiplicity of ‘being in touch’ in the conditions of the potential of the political of ‘being-​in-​common’, as a relation of difference kept open rather than as a condition of reduction to the same. In itself community cannot be reified, as it has no independent substance. As for plural singular beings, ‘community is simply their being  –​the being suspended upon its limits’ (Nancy 1992, p. 30). Moreover, community is given to us –​or we are given and abandoned to community: a gift to be renewed and communicated, it is not a work to be done or produced. But it is a task, which is different –​an infinite task at the heart of finitude (p. 34) A significant commonality to members of community that Nancy spends time considering is myth, for ‘myth and community are defined by each other’ (p. 42). As Goethe pointed out more than a century prior to Nancy, myth –​ secular or religious –​is what binds people of difference together, and for this

Gathering(s) of the political  145 reason has survived the ravages of reason for millennia. It follows that the ‘absence of myth’ corresponds to ‘the interrupted community’ (p. 61). Nancy’s understanding of the inoperative community is a recognition of the brokenness of community –​a condition that the agency of neoliberalism has worsened over the almost three decades that have passed since he presented his argument. Community does exist as a condition that confers meaning and purpose upon the beings that constitute it, for the sharing that constitutes them as a collective of singular pluralities, who share the identity in their difference, is afforded by a shared myth. The politics of community so understood requires recognising, as Nancy says, that ‘the absence of community must be the ground of any possible community’ that has to be seen as a ‘contagion’ that takes on a life of its own: it is not simply a work (p. 60). However, there are contradictions implicit in this statement and in other references to community, as it presumes the presence and assembly of singular plural beings with community, for in many indigenous communities there is no being ‘with’ or ‘in’ but a being of. No binary exists between the one and the many, no individuated individuality. The signifier ‘community’ is not a universal signification of the same, which is to say, there is nothing but difference. What thus becomes at stake is what creates, and is the nature of, this difference. Neoliberal economics has fostered in the ‘new economies’ of the south rapid urban development:  formal and informal. Illegally created informal settlements, in which hundreds of millions of people live, have dramatically grown in vast numbers of cities as people abandon rural areas in the hope of economically improving their lives. Yet in their poverty a culture of conviviality and sharing is often created, as well as crimes of survival and the exploitation of their labour by the formal sector. Nonetheless, these broken physical and economic settlements frequently have more social cohesion and communalism than the ‘communities’ of the more affluent formal neighbours. For instance, the formal city is provided with services, paid for directly or by taxes, which means households exist in conditions of relative independence. In contrast, informal areas of cities have very few or no services, and as a consequence this generates inter-​dependence: people help each other.

Nancy meets Simondon Nancy’s claim that ‘we are opening up a new stage and a new environment of sense’ begs a response, in particular in relation to the figure and the agency of technology as the bringer, harbinger and deliverer of the new incarnation and horizon of sense. Giving consideration to Nancy here will preface what will be said on technology and the future by means of addressing the ideas of the French philosopher of technology, Gilbert Simondon. Nancy presents a view of the world that makes no sense while setting out to show that, inoperationally, this world is sense. In doing this, a discussion of sense unfolds with a life of its own, without a subject, and in a totalised world of generalisation. His understanding of sense gathers the meaning of

146  Gathering(s) of the political sensed, sensuality, and sensation, as this is understood as a bringing to and taking from meaning. What Nancy does is to establish an attachment to, and investment in, thinking sense that is revelatory but also problematic in what it excludes as other than what sense gathers. One can say that such a preoccupation is a trope of philosoph(y)ers –​that only the reader can correct what they bring into the text. The other qualification to bring to sense that is present and absent, is the danger of its universalisation: meaning, senses, sensuality, and sensation existing in worlds of environmental and cultural difference that reconfigure what does and does not make sense. Thus a Eurocentric exposition of sense excludes different worlds of common, overlapping and totally different understanding of sense and the sense-​less. As particular worlds, the worlds of globalisation function without sense as directives of their function are taken as sense-​able, for centres of power within them see function itself as sense –​this as it is taken to be integral to the capitalist logic of productivism. Function here becomes meaning-​full, for erased subjects instrumentally interpolated and ontologically designed by the labour of functional operation. In Nancy’s discussion of sense it unfolds as that without a subject in a totalised world of generalisation, but there is a cluster of fundamental problems with the argument that follows. Two especially beg to be mentioned. The first is that worlds of difference are totalised as ‘world’, thereby flattening all world-​views of subjects of worlds of cultural difference, as they constitute other senses of other worlds. In other words, Nancy still practises the mono-​ topical hermeneutics addressed above, which does not dare to cross spaces or traditions (dia-​ topoi as formulated by Raimundo Panikkar 1975) lacking shared models of understanding (making sense) and understandability. As a preeminent European philosopher, Nancy’s view of sense is treated  –​as is art, music, and sacrifice –​as if universal, whereas such designations speak the voice of Eurocentrism (a normative condition of his peers, as Hamid Dabashi (2013) asks, ‘Why is European philosophy ‘philosophy’, but African philosophy is ethno-​philosophy?). Second, the distinction Antonio Gramsci made between ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’ as they historically, socially and existentially situate thinking sense in the everyday practices of all trades persons is dismissed by omission. The exercise of sense that treats sense as sense in a world that makes no sense floats above the difference of sense in the everyday for ‘every social stratum has its own ‘common sense’ and its own ‘good sense’’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 326, n. 5). While good sense so seen is grounded in reason, is coherent and critical, ‘common sense’ is the received ‘truth’ of myth and folklore. It is uncritical and makes non-​sense appear to be informed by sense as belief (thus community is/​can be enabled by sense that is sense-​less) (p. 325–​326). While much of what Nancy has to say, from an emergent position of technological existentialism, is insightful, as will be argued, it is also in many respects socio-​culturally dislocated, particularly in how he understands the relation between technology and ontology. Media philosopher Erich Hörl suggests that what Nancy offers is an ‘exposition’ of technics as withdrawal

Gathering(s) of the political  147 of the ground of ‘being-​outside-​itself’. This paves the way for the appearance of ‘art-​technique’ demanding that technics establishes a ‘new treatment of the relation between art and technics’ marking ‘art as technics’. In summation, art is asserted as ‘the tekhnè of existence’ (Hörl 2013, p. 16). What this account suggests is that the social ecology is the existential event and its material ground in which being is individuated, which is displaced by the aesthetically over-​determined condition of becoming. In this construction of exposition, drawing and design are drawn into an ‘onto-​aesthetics’ modality situated in a ‘historico-​systematic place’. But the more one reads the more what is said seems completely disarticulated from the actual complexity of the forms and forces of ontological difference. For example it is as if technics, art, drawing and design exist in a condition of universal equivalence and with agency independent of context. However, technics, art, drawing and design, while claimed as universals, are only so as abstracted categories. For ‘in truth’ they exist in multiple forms across situated conditions of material, cultural and semio-​ spheric difference –​for all their effort, globalisation and epistemological colonialism have not been completely eliminated. To make clear just how problematic is the argument made by Nancy, and supported by Hörl, a text quoted by Nancy will be closely read and then placed back as framed by the project of the book that cites it (Nancy 1997, p.  41). So reconsider the following passage with our comments shown in square brackets: ‘The world of technics, that is, the ‘technicised’ world, is not nature delivered up to rape and pillage … It is the world becoming world, that is, neither ‘nature’ nor ‘universe’ nor ‘earth’ [the ‘technicised’ world is a constructed world within-​the-​world of arrival and disappearance which adds to and negates the given world of its dependence, and as such has constituted a crisis of biophysical, socio-​cultural and economic unsustainability. In doing so the distinction between the natural and the artificial have been removed in unidentifiable and still to be identified ways]. ‘Nature’, ‘universe’, and ‘earth’ (and ‘sky’) are names of given sets of totalities, names of significations that have been surveyed, tamed, and appropriated. [But equally, the giving of names can differ according to particular cosmologies and be given non-​instrumentalised significations that do not allow meaning to acts of surveying, taming and appropriation.] World is the name of a gathering or being-​together that arises from an art –​a tekne –​and the sense of which is identical with the very exercise of this art [as there is not one world there is not one gathering as, for the world cited, any claim of any gathering that unifies representation of any kind with sense is accompanied with the void of unknowing]. It is thus that a world is always a ‘creation’:  a tekne with neither principle nor end nor material other than itself. [Likewise, the creation of ‘a world’ is also an act of destruction –​as is evident in relation to the ‘given world’ of biophysical and atmospheric

148  Gathering(s) of the political damage and the world-​within-​the-​world’ –​the material registration of the Anthropocene]. And in this way, a world is always sense outside of knowledge, outside of the work, outside the habitation of presence, but the désoeuvrement of sense, sense in excess of all sense  –​one would like to say the artificial intelligence of sense, sense seized and sense by art and as art, that is, teknè, that which spaces out and defers phusis all the way to the confines of the world. [Sense as the made, as the given, as the sensed, as the revealed, as epistemologically defined –​sense as a free-​floating imposition, makes no sense and this is ‘the désoeuvrement of sense –​sense in excess of all sense’ (p.41)’]. What goes unthought in the non-​annotated quotation is that ‘we’ are a product of an epistemologically created ontological rupture that has made a sense of distinction between Being and being, ‘world’ and ‘us’. Notwithstanding there is no exteriority to being in Being and being-​in-​the-​world, what Nancy went on to say was: There is no point protesting –​and it is even dangerous to protest –​against the putting-​to-​work of technology on nature, or in wanting to subordinate technology to the end of mythical nature that never took place and will never take place. An ecology properly understood can be nothing other than technology. (p. 41) Nancy then places technology in the ambivalence of the world posited with the power to ‘reduce itself to nothing just as it has the power to be infinitely its own sense’ (p. 41). Now Nancy is addressing a particular community of sense in the ‘shared world of philosophy’ occupied and constituted that in itself makes sense to its members. Nancy constitutes a view of philosophy that makes no sense while setting out to show that for his community of sense it is sense. As Gramsci stated, ‘philosophy in general does not exist. Various philosophies, or conceptions of the world exist, and one always makes a choice between them’ (Gramsci 1971, p.  326). For a world of critical engagement with technology, it is clear that Nancy has failed to realise that technology has become the techno-​natural and rather than having the option or not to protest about its monstrosities, we are in it, ‘we’ have no position of external observation. As stated above, we have always been technological beings. Tool being, tool making and making with tool were the gifts of our progenitor hominoid ancestors. At the end of his article Hörl adds a 2013 postscript that acknowledges Nancy’s more recent writing on sense. He concludes, with a celebratory ecologisation of everything, by saying: If Nancy had already (and repeatedly) brought the notion of ‘ecotechnics’ into play in order to describe the general becoming-​technical of the world

Gathering(s) of the political  149 and remain in close proximity to the new ecological paradigm, general ecology now appears in his writing as a key destination of our highly technicised culture of sense. And then: We are currently going through a fundamental ecologisation of the image of thought and the image of being. The concept of a general ecology, as I am developing it, has a double meaning: on the one hand, it refers to a fundamental change in experience, and a fundamentally new position, that characterises being and thinking under the conditions of a cyberneticised ‘state of nature’; on the other, it refers to the new description that this transformation demands, and the new philosophico-​conceptual politics that it entails. (Hörl 2013, p. 21) In reply to Nancy’s notion of ‘ecotechnics’ a critical unpacking is required, but prior to this there is a need for a statement of disassociation: Hörl’s ‘we’ is not me or they. His assertions are contestable and, in their complexity, a reduction. ‘We’ the population of the planet’ are unevenly knowing and unknowingly currently going through many environmental, psycho-​social, and techno-​ontological transformations that, differentially and by degree, future and defuture ‘us’. The singular-​plural exposited by Nancy and affirmed by Hörl is marked by a positively acknowledged but implicit Eurocentric totalisation of the worlds of (the) other as a world that is not one world. World is conflated with planet, whereas worlds are many, and thus the thinking of sense, technics and ecology is articulated from a world that speaks for that world –​the globalisation of the epistemologies of the North has normalised this ‘slip of tongue’ that converges with another totalisation in play: the world of ‘the community of human beings’. However, the human instead needs to be understood as a product of cosmological imposition by modernity and colonisation that sought to destroy other designations of being by the peoples of non-​western cosmologies. There is no ‘world’ to appeal to. There is an unintended violence in the discourse of a totalised partly disclosed and partly misdirected future that, once named and disclosed, designates a political enemy, which is to say, the nature of what an enemy actually is according to Schmitt. Problematically, Nancy’s notion of ecotechnics excludes the processes of ecological destruction wrought by the past of technology in the present and its self-​negating futuring. Here is the technological effect from the agency of our species’ ‘world-​making’ as it has produced and produces technologies of destruction, terrestrial contamination, atmospheric pollution and oceanic degradation that are diminishing the ability of the environments upon which we depend to sustain ‘us’. There is a dark side of ecotechnology that now feeds conflict and negates futures. There is no sense of this as a complexity

150  Gathering(s) of the political beyond our grasp, as conditions beyond control, and as the current trajectory of ‘our’ planet’s sixth extinction event, promulgated by our unknowing of the consequences of our action. One of the ‘causes’ of the situation travels with the rhetoric of Nancy (Hörl 2013) as it carries a focus on creation/​creativity to the exclusion of the indivisible relation to destruction (material and immaterial). With the created event of our futuring there is no ‘globalised techno-​ecological evolution’ (Lindbert 2018, p. 95). There is just futuring and defuturing, regressive and progressive transformation, creation and destruction, caring and uncaring. In the face of this unstoppable prospect, recourse to a kind of updated gelassenheit –​‘a serene openness to a possible change in our understanding of being’ (Dreyfus 1991), reworked in the unworking of ecotechnology, is a fatalistic surrender. It leaves Hörl’s ambition for the new philosophico-​conceptual politics stranded in the politically romantic past. As a conceptual political dis-​location ecotechnology rises as a negated recognition of absolute crisis of ‘now’, devoid of the question of the political to be thought, elaborated and enacted.

After democracy. Futuring the political: gatherings As Nancy has made clear, over several years, politics has been semiotically eviscerated. As a result it signifies almost nothing. Politics and government are becoming domains of administrative management under different inflected liberal-​capitalist ideologies predicated upon extending ecologically unsustainable economic and social business as usual. Like many of the institutions that it supports, including universities, democracy contextualised in such a way has become politics without a project. But more than this, and even more serious, in the face of structurally defuturing unsustainability it is unable to deliver viable sustainable futures. The reason for this is simple, but responding to the situation identified is not. To address the conditions of sustainment requires massive economic, social and political structural change to fundamentally transform our ontological-​being-​in-​the-​world. A double multi-​generational joint movement is essential:  very significant dematerialisation and descaling of global anthropocentrically constituted environmental impacts coupled with a massive program of socio-​environmental repair; and the commencement of a vast project of mutual cultural unlearning, relearning and reconstruction across cultural recreation and exchange across cultural difference. For to be coherently conceptualised, planned and embarked upon, a new foundation of the political would have to be created, centred on material sacrifice to meet clearly defined and sound basic material needs, complemented by a massive extension of the means of socio-​cultural life and wellbeing. There is no way this can happen under existing hollowed-​out democratic regimes that are based upon gaining support for bringing, maintaining or advancing high-​consuming ways of life. It is not a matter of proposing futurist scenarios, hypothetical solutions or utopian visions, but rather generating the

Gathering(s) of the political  151 conditions in which expansive conversations of substance and an expansive research program can be instigated and progress via the creation of change-​ communities of concern and redirective action. This is exactly what autonomous design does when brought to a community, for it gives it the power to design, and bring into being, a redirected future under people’s own control (Escobar 2018). The starting points here are not in specially contrived settings but working in the margins where extant conditions and a disposition of compliance meet. So said, there are resources available to be gathered that can help facilitate such a process.

What is to be gathered? It is crucial to remember that gathering directly links to bringing our being into being as the event of our becoming while acknowledging that in our plurality the ‘we’ is becoming in difference from the abandoned to the fully techno-​ colonised. To continue to be with auto-​directive agency as the individuated plural and as plural collectives, that ‘we’ has to become otherwise –​not by acts of willing but by gathering assemblages of futural ontologically designing agents (material and immaterial) as a new ground of the political. Its aim is the creation of being towards sustainment. By implication, this is realised by process over vision. All that is possible here is to indicatively outline a few forms of action that would and could open a way into a large, distributed and lengthy self-​replicating distributed multi-​vectoral project. One can start with a focus on practice. Practices are political in that, by degree from the barely discernible to the immediately identifiable, they are positively or negatively future directive. As such, of themselves, and through what they bring into being, they are ontologically designed by effect/​affect. This is not new and many examples are to hand  –​the management of waste, education, recycling infinitely recyclable materials like steel, and the adaptive reuse of buildings are four of a myriad existing but un-​gathered actions. However, elevating redirective practices to a major policy and mass project, understood as a means of bringing more futural conditions and beings into being, has never been conceptualised and then created as integral to a transitional process and politics. The very idea of redirective practice invites and evokes imaginaries that can be materialised. Agriculture, building construction, health, communications technologies, transport, energy generation –​in fact almost all industries and professional practices –​have redirective activities within them that are developable as the building blocks of ‘change platforms’ of the builders and the built. But equally there are new practices directed at redirection to create. One of them that has already received some attention is the practice of elimination design. So much that capital and technology have brought into being is now understood as unsustainable and so needs to be designed away. Again, there are plenty of examples, from coal and oil-​fired power stations to cigarettes, the internal combustion engine, poker machines, fast fashion, nuclear weapons

152  Gathering(s) of the political and a great swathe of the ‘creative industries’ that support the promotion of hyper-​consumerism. Obviously and predictably, such action would be met with a cry of the deprivation of freedom. The retort is simple: on a planet of inequity, finite resources, a population that exceeds them, and an economy and cultures that have produced catastrophic damage to the fundamental ecological processes upon which life depends, there is no freedom without those restrictions that halt the creation of ‘the means of destruction’ (so often viewed as the means of production). Redirective practice of elimination, unmaking, remaking and repair can also be understood as a practice that transcends existing practices’ division of knowledge. As such it opens into gatherings of cognate practices able to form collaborative collectives and change-​communities. For instance, one possible consequence of the redirection of the creative industries could be collectives working to create and disseminate forms of cultural production to counter nihilist cultural consumerism (such as violent video games). This is a coming together of a specific ontological design practice directed at the elimination and the replacement of what has been eliminated with something futural. What such collectives also invite is the development of trans-​collective trade relations. This idea is not new as evidenced especially by the rise of the nexus between decoloniality and postdevelopment practices in the Global South. In such contexts, epistemological spaces in the borderland between the failing knowledges of the Global North can be stripped to appropriate their situated use-​value and synthesised with the valorisation of local indigenous knowledge. For example in the state of Tolima in Colombia, a cluster of craft beer collectives has been created where technical knowledge has been employed to create an excellent locally produced product with postdevelopment organisational structure. Rather than growing an industry, what is being created is a chain of autonomous collectives making the same type of beer, via the sharing of knowledge, technical detail and experience. The redirection of education is a vast area of importance and opportunity. In one context, artificial intelligence and machine learning make a good deal of what is currently taught redundant, not least as it applies to practices that will be totally the domain of robotics. The redirection of education requires learning how to live in, manage, redirect and make futural such a world, as it is exposed to the vicissitudes of a damaged biosphere and social ecologies. But there are also worlds outside those of advanced economic and technological development that in a postdevelopment, post-​sustainability paradigm have to establish the knowledge and means to create an other, viable future. Both prospects are coming, as well as the expected conflicts created by the impacts of terrestrial and atmospheric destruction. So between the worlds of hyper-​techno-​function and basic functionality are expected worlds of abandonment. In their nascent forms all these worlds already exist. So although what will unfold will be vastly more complex than just indicated, gaining the ability to acquire knowledge to ‘deal’ with this situated complexity will be vital to the survival of our species, no matter its mutated form.

Gathering(s) of the political  153 The dynamic between the technosphere world (if it manages to establish the means to sustain itself and deal with its internal contradictions and tensions), the world of the South outside conditions of privilege, and the world of the abandoned, can be designated in sum as worlds that do not make sense. A  world of fully realised naturalised technology cannot stand for a completely nihilistic ‘state of the world’. For each world is universally uneven, graduated and plural. A sense of meaning of the meaningless of these sense-​ less worlds has to be made, just as meaning is made and given to the meaninglessness of life itself. Another mode of being cannot emerge without another mode of unlearning and learning of those beings with a residual agency exercising being. The act of redirection so positioned can be seen as one kind of appropriative event that a new political imagination energises.

Notes 1 These practices are professional, vocational, technical, social, cultural and recreational. 2 Enframing is ‘fundamentally a calling-​ forth,’ for it is a ‘challenging claim,’ a demanding summons, that gathers [our emphasis] so as to reveal’.

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154  Gathering(s) of the political Hörl, E., 2013. The artificial intelligence of sense:  The history of sense and technology after Jean Luc-​Nancy (by way of Gilbert Simondon). Trans. De Boever, A. Parrhesia 17, 11–​24. Klein, E. and Morreo, C.E., eds. 2019. Postdevelopment in Practice. Alternatives, Economies, Ontologies. London: Routledge. Lasch, C., 1984. The Minimal Self. London: Abacus/​Sphere Books. Lindbert, S., 2018. Onto-​techniques in Bryant, Harman, and Nancy. PhoenEx 12.2, Winter, 81–​102. Marx, K., 1973. Surveys from Exile. London: Penguin Books. McNeill, W., 1999. The Glance of the Eye. New York: State University of New York. Mitcham, C., 1994. Thinking Through Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nancy, J-​L., 1992. The Inoperative Community. Trans Conner, P., Garbus, L., Holland, M. and Sawhney, S. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, J.-​L., 1997. The Sense of the World. Trans. Librett, J.S. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, J-​L. and Lacoue-​Labarthe, P., 1997. Retreating the Political, ed. Sparks, S., trans. Stamp, R. London: Routledge. Norris, A., 2012. Jean-​Luc Nancy on the political after Heidegger and Schmitt. In: Gratton, P. and Morin, M.-​E. Jean-​Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking. New York: State University of New York, 143–​158. Panikkar, R., 1975. Cross-​cultural studies: the need for a new science of interpretation. Monchanin 8, 3–​5, 12–​15. Schmitt, C., 1986. Political Romanticism. Trans. Oakes, G. Cambridge: MIT Press. Schmitt, C., 1996. The Concept of the Political. Trans, George Schwab. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Van Camp, N., 2012. From biopower to psychopower:  Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacology of mnemotechnologies. C-​Theory [online]. Available from: https://​journals. uvic.ca/​index.php/​ctheory/​article/​view/​14946/​5842 [Accessed 30 January 2019]. Veblen, T., [1899] 2008. Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Dover.

4  Imagination otherwise

The current critical state of the world enfolds a crisis of political imagination as a way of transcending contemporary reality through realising that it can be different, thinking of how to change it and taking concrete action in that direction. According to F. Broncano, ‘political imagination emerges as soon as a problem is seen as a problem, in other words, as soon as reality (or the market, or time) is not allowed to define future possibilities’ (Broncano 2018). A set of ‘imaginative processes by which collective life is symbolically experienced and this experience is mobilised in view of achieving political aims’ (Glaveanu and de Saint Laurent 2015, p.  559), political imagination is almost impossible to imagine today. The failure of all previous grand utopias (both open and closed) and the debunking of all attractive or frightening political myths as normalised forms of political imagination make it extremely difficult to imagine the political and/​or imagine politically in the futureless world where we are completely enslaved by the logic of consumerism, rivalry for material wealth and technologically induced lack of creativity. The imperative for imagination has never been as sharp as it is now, yet the ability to respond is very low in an age when compliance is the key to career success and innovation is a nominal slogan rather than reality-​changing tool. The exhausted imagination whose wake was announced over three decades ago by Richard Kearney (Kearney 1998), does not seem to be possible to reanimate in the conditions when most shared global points of non-​return seem to be passed. It’s hard to even start looking for a ground from which a collective yet multiple and heterogeneous imagining of another world could be possible, not as another romantic fantasy or utopian dream to long for, but as a vision which one can actually take part in creating and implementing, thus practising a constructive or creative kind of imagination (as opposed to the reproductive one that seems to be typical of most politicians today if they are not suffering from a peculiar aphantasia) at the crossroads of cognition, memory, intuition, affects, will, and necessarily innovation and agency. This complexity of imagination reflects one of our peculiarities as a species –​namely, the ability to use simultaneously two different mechanisms of orientation in the environment and regulation of our behaviour –​intellect and emotions, and two types of cultural experience  –​rational-​ analytical and emotional-​ sensual.

156  Imagination otherwise Imagination is where the two mechanisms intersect and interact. In this sense imagination is a fundamental ontological category for human beings; in fact, to paraphrase Descartes following Kagan, ‘we imagine therefore we are’. Imagination then can be defined as a ‘creation of nonbeing as a condition for the emergence of new forms of being’ (Kagan 2000). The difficulty in imagining a political imagination otherwise is that it cannot be universal and that the wake of imagination that Kearney announced in his genealogy, can be also a morning wake of different, other imaginations –​nonfinite and not eternal, as the diversity of different interpretations of imagination as a specifically human quality, the emergence of which scientists attribute to the so-​called upper paleolithic revolution, is historically and culturally astounding, with extremes ranging between perceiving the world around us merely as a figment of someone’s imagination and a belief in a physical embodiment of the imagined in other times and spaces. What we can talk about is the end of the imposed normativity of the Euromodern imagination as the only legitimate one and re-​emergence of other imaginations woven into a complex dialogue with each other and with the Euromodern exhausted normativity, for human mechanisms of perception may be universal, yet the manifestations of the affects and modes of our perception are always locally, historically and culturally specific, and arguably untranslatable and incommensurable. Like truth, imagination also cannot be constituted as a thing in itself, as it has no independent substance. It is also inevitably someone’s imagination and therefore is situated, contextual and grounded in specific geopolitics and corpopolitics of knowledge, of sensing, of being, of memory. And the kind of agency it produces or hopes to produce is also of necessity situated and contextualised.

The ineffability of complexity and the unbearable inaccuracy of language Any attempts to build genealogies, trajectories, chronologies of concepts and phenomena such as imagination are always meaningless in the end as they simplify and artificially straighten reality, history, human experience, making them look more unilateral than they are, trying to capture and freeze them in some semblance of stability, which is a myth. Such a familiar academic exercise is grounded in a deliberate forgetting that the world is never pure, it is always already creolised, there is no uncompromised experience bounded by one tradition of thinking or one way of imagination. Various models of time, space and subjectivity do not exist separately, isolated and apart; on the contrary, they are always interacting and changing. Historically, we all constitute a different assemblage of plural modes of imagination. Our collective and individual constantly leaking and multiplying selves are non-​reducible to some simple identifications and concrete models of imagining, being permeable instead.

Imagination otherwise  157 Additionally, it is not possible to divide the affective in them from the epistemic. The experiential, as ontologically constituted in situated difference, is always alongside the textual. And many of us are aware of our visual/​design, musical, textual/​theoretical and historically/​culturally formed and acquired imaginations as the indivisible assemblage that constitutes us. As in musical counterpoint, many trajectories of imagination are repeated with a variation at a different time, and as a result combine into complex chords depending on their relative lagging behind or staying ahead of the presumable norm. Therefore we should register the coexistence and active interaction of multiple moments in the imagination trajectory on the historical and contemporary scale of many different simultaneous worlds and traditions. Significantly, even this attempt to formulate the insurmountable circumstance of ineffable complexity fails because the very logic and structure of language we use resists our wish to express the evasive, dynamic and forever open and becoming complexity of imagination as the main driving force of human creation. Kearney’s historical account of imagination is confined to western culture and a self-​constructed western modern genealogy of imagination grounded in the Judeo-​Christian tradition and in the belatedly appropriated Ancient Greek heritage. Both traditional cultural historians (e.g. those dealing with the Middle Eastern roots of Ancient Greek culture) and decolonial thinkers (who are traditionally stronger in their historical critical analysis) have demonstrated that the concept of modernity with its understanding of politics, imagination, culture and the human, in fact emerges historically quite late, and distorts and simplifies the genealogy of real interaction of schools of thought, concepts and models of the imaginary, etc. Taking this fact into account allows us to destabilise the vectorial narrative of European imagination habitually marching from the history of Asia, seen as the prehistory of Europe, through Ancient Greece and Rome to the Christian medieval world and on to modern Europe. This progression hides the gaps, breaks and relapses along the way, excluding the presence of other models of economy, politics and imagination which often acted as bridges between the otherwise disjointed stages of the cultural, epistemic and political development that were later gathered into a coherent Euromodern narrative. A large number of different cultural, epistemic, economic and political systems coexisted and correlated before the sixteenth century, and those societies which were organised differently from the West (particularly in religious matters) were in fact dominant in the world of pre-​European hegemony (Abu-​Lughod 1989, p.  355). An obvious example is the specific Muslim (largely Aristotelian) strand of thinking with its centre in Andalusia, which allowed for an epistemic link between Ancient Greece and Medieval Europe. Later the history of the early Muslim and Christian interactions was rewritten and heavily edited in Europe in order to hide the fact that the Muslim world could claim the intellectual legacy of Ancient Greece as much (or maybe even more in the early medieval period) as could the Eastern Roman Empire. This well-​known example is not convenient for the simplified scheme of the

158  Imagination otherwise evolution of western imagination, as it points to the provinciality and dissociation of Europe as a political, economic and cultural region up to modernity (which finally launched its global design), drawing the attention to the ‘semantic slippage of the concept of Europe’ (Dussel 2000); and reveals Europe’s conscious striving to affirm itself through constructing the opposition of modernity and tradition (Europe’s own pre-​modern tradition and that of other cultures) grounded in the translation of geography into chronology (Mignolo 2002).

Imagination after postmodernism? Having traced the genealogy of imagination in the Euromodern teleological understanding as ‘an analogical relation of unity through resemblance’ (Kearney 1998, p.16), Kearney in his account of the end of imagination as we knew it, claimed that in the postmodernist frame the image precedes reality and reality becomes a pale copy of the original (if there is any). Today this has become a commonplace as well as a successful marketing tool, so that no one is surprised or amused any more with the possibility of buying a house in the town called Celebration, Florida, which is entirely a revived copy of Disney films, and to literally live inside a brand. Yet, Kearney’s book finishes at the high postmodernist point when the absolute relativism and the loss of the subject reached their climax and soon triggered a backlash of various theories and practices which attempted to shift back towards material reality and/​or some return of essential identitarian standpoints. In the last three decades when postmodernist tendencies have been largely internalised, naturalised, creolised and instrumentalised at a global scale, efforts to come back to more familiar traditional representational modes have taken place in various arts, mass media, in social and political movements and philosophical trends,  –​one example being the ‘new sincerity’ and ‘new authenticity’ (Fitzgerald 2012; Benson 2019), in a new materialist going back to the matter, in different attempts to do away with serial thinking and perception, and to problematise and denounce the mirror in the mirror reflection effect and the empty signifier. Yet the general tendencies in the advancement of imagination that were pointed out by Kearney have not been seriously altered and, in fact, only intensified. Today we can easily speak of postmodernist politics and not just postmodern architecture or fiction.

Imagination and the technological Although many commentators claim that the development of technologies has a positive effect on our imagination, in fact it is the opposite as technologies strictly control the limits of imagination and guide it along predictable and prescribed instrumental lines. Echoing Kearney’s thoughts twenty years later, Nicholas Bourriaud speaks of the shift from the artist as a creator to the

Imagination otherwise  159 artist as a programmer or even a DJ who is merely selecting cultural objects to place them into new contexts (Bourriaud 2002), thus recycling what was already created before. A wide spread use of computer simulations and prototypes in virtually all spheres of life has led to a dramatic shrinking of the participation of human imagination per se in any activity, from designing a house to planning a war. The illusion of a plethora of possible variants instantly created by computers in fact hides their givenness and therefore finiteness, and hence the inability of a particularly (un)trained imagination to go beyond this technological constraint that has subordinated the minds which created it to begin with. Ironically, Deleuze and Guattari’s well-​known metaphor of Chess (striated space) as opposed to Go (free nomadic spatiality) (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 389) is collapsed today into a total striatisation of not just space but also the very principle of organisation of reality and our capacity to think (of) it. The claim of technological companies and the technologically seduced is that digital technology especially liberates creativity and expands imagination. For an informed and critical elite this may be partly true, but dominantly for ‘the masses’ technology delivers many kinds of ‘template-​isation’, which arrives in sophisticated designer software (e.g. key information can be dumped in a wine label design program and it will then churn out hundreds of variants to select from). This software is presented as ‘design democracy’ (not to be confused with design for democracy), supported by an ideology espousing the proposition that ‘anyone can design/​be a designer’, whereas in actuality it is just another example of design-​based consumerism linked to branding. This also refers to the way education is organised today  –​stunting and instrumentalising rather than liberating the students’ imagination and creativity. In 2009 Bourriaud attempted to link his technocentric view of the imagination with the political, claiming that there is a difference between appropriation and ‘formal collectivism’ (Bourriaud 2009). For him, the challenge lies in the remaking of the montage of reality and reprogramming of the everyday material in order to implement alternative and temporary versions of life, stressing the importance of precariousness, instability and permanent transit as elements of contemporary society. The development of technologies lures us with a promise of the limitless possibilities of fulfilling our imaginative desires. Yet most of these desires are orchestrated in a narrow way of disciplining the consumer and making us effectively subordinated. If the majority of the technologically colonised are politically status quo individuals enchanted by the new god of technologies that they believe can solve all the problems of today and tomorrow, the smaller group of technology advocates who are aware of the risks of the end times still believe in a technological salvation, yet in a grim cyber punk way: it is a salvation for only the chosen few, a future into which only these few will be taken.

160  Imagination otherwise

A refusal to imagine the end times and the impasse of the sweatshop sublime The intensified sense of the approaching disaster that even the most thick-​ skinned cannot escape forces the imagination to focus on the end times as such. It is not surprising that eschatological and doomsday scenarios and predictions are extremely popular once again (as they were, e.g. at the turn of the twentieth century). Humanity, confused, seems to be waiting for some global catastrophe or a second coming to save us from the necessity of acting and being responsible, to get out of the trap we largely created ourselves. Yet our imagination, trained to function along the lines of a Hollywood blockbuster with a happy end or any mythological narrative with a moral of goodness rewarded, refuses to imagine other and less rosy scenarios or to trigger any action leading to change. It seems that today’s world lacks an imagination that would at least intend to lead to such a change, especially if it is political. It is not a chance that in mainstream theoretical discourses, imagination is mostly placed within the limits of the aesthetic sphere which is in its turn understood as a safe and rather sterile realm for keeping the status quo, with no access to direct political action. This is yet another symptom of the crisis we are trying to address in this book. A consumer as a new global subject undergoes what B.  Robbins called long ago ‘a sweatshop sublime’, triggered by our realisation that we belong to the global world of capital and labour. Although this is a clearly post-​ Marxist economy-​centred view, Robbins’ model is worth mentioning as it demonstrates one of the reasons why the contemporary imagination, certainly as exposed to the excesses of the culture industries of the Global North looking South, fails as an emancipatory praxis. Robbins believes that the specific sweat shop-​sublime sensibility is based on the effort to link the common situation of everyday consumption and the myriad interrelated hands and minds that actually produce the objects of this consumption in conditions of hard exploitation. A person experiencing the sweatshop-​sublime suddenly realises the global (mostly economic) dimension of being and becomes aware of the other side of their consumer identity. Yet the global sweatshop-​based imagination does not generate agency. It ends nihilistically in stagnation, apathy, inaptness, inertia and a humble sense of impossibility to make any political change happen (Robbins 2002, pp.  85–​6). The same sensibility is pointed out by David Brooks who significantly shifts from his earlier diagnosis of the ‘Mcdonaldised’ society to a critical analysis of the predominant mood of the aestheticised, tamed and trivialised protest embodied in the image of ‘Bobos’ (Brooks 2000) –​a hybrid of the bohème and the bourgeoisie. The impasse of political agency and the feebleness of imagination are therefore mutually linked and determined and one of the urgent tasks is to try to break this vicious circle apart.

Imagination otherwise  161

Post-​Marxist reanimations of the commons: aesthetics as politics The majority of post-​Marxist efforts to conceptualise imagination in the last three decades of the predominant political status quo tend to focus more on the sphere of aesthetics, being largely confined to the salvatory sandbox of the intellectual elites and highbrow contemporary museums. Needless to say, the aesthetic sphere is much broader than art, which is evident even in the ‘classical’ Euromodern aesthetic accounts such as Kant’s or Hegel’s, to say nothing of the twentieth-​century aesthetic theories. The breadth of the aesthetic sphere is all the more evident in most indigenous cosmologies and other than Euromodern systems of thought in which various complex notions of beauty –​goodness –​perfection –​harmony (e.g. Confucian Mei or Egyptian Nefer) act as an integral part of the understanding of humans in and of the world, where art and creativity in general are not confined by Euromodern professionalisation, compartmentalisation and commodification. In fact, taking the conversation to the sphere of aesthetics and often elitist contemporary art, which is very far from the interests and needs of most people, the leftist critique thus puts out its own presumably revolutionary pathos, finding itself in a familiar situation of impasse and inability to grasp or change the situation outside the museum. Thus, Jacque Rancière’s presumably politically sharp aesthetic theory is rather far from being able to act as a catalyst of any true change. Although Rancière puts a watershed between the previous representational and the modern aesthetic modes in the early nineteenth century (rather than in postmodernism), and links the turning point to the French revolution with its slogan of equality, which eventually destroyed the boundaries between imagined and real and shifted the relations between the passive sensibility and active understanding, his diagnosis is very similar to that of Kearny as it also associates the aesthetic mode with the eventual death of imagination as such. Rancière claims that aesthetics is connected with the articulation of various forms of agency, production, perception and thinking, a new explicit institutionalised philosophic, moral, cultural and social sphere, which gradually led to the demise of art as such, and to its merging with other activities (Rancière 2009, pp. 36–​7). For Rancière, aesthetics can still act as a reconfiguration of the political which can ‘reframe a sense of community and mend the social bond and time that bind together practices, forms of visibility and patterns of intelligibility’ (Rancière 2009, p. 49). He does not believe that art becomes political through reaching the real, but rather claims that it does politics through inventing fictions that challenge the distribution of the real and the fictional (p. 31). Rancière coined a term ‘community of sense’ which plays on the two meanings of the world ‘sense’ –​that is, meaning and feeling, emotions and intellect. Regarding art as an instrument of ‘reframing a sense of community and mending the social bond’ (p.  49) Rancière (re)imagines the community of lived experience as ‘maintaining a heterogeneous and

162  Imagination otherwise autonomous sensibility grounded in the eternal connection and disconnection of sense and sense’ (p. 39). Rancière’s rather narrow aesthetic ideas can be placed in a wider context of the above-​analysed Jean-​Luc Nancy’s formulation of the political and our critique of his understanding of sense. The same myopic Euromodern universalism grounded in totalising only particular meanings of sense and habitually divorcing them from the sensing subject is to be found here as well, whereas all other senses continue to be erased, homogenised or appropriated. Another post-​Marxist, Bourriaud, totalising aesthetics instead of politics in his ‘relational aesthetics’, and later, in ‘altermodernity’, not questioning modern progressivism merely extending its vector to the next stop, also reflects on artistic practices which take as their ‘point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space’ (Bourriaud 2002, p. 113). For him, such a relationality is then producing inter-​subjective encounters and relationships with the world by means of signs, forms, actions and objects produced ‘collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption’ (pp. 17–​18). Fascinated by the Internet, computer technologies and computer metaphors, Bourriaud ignores the social and political power asymmetries, homogenising all contemporary artists as well as audiences and assuming they are all modern subjects capable of and willing to create some collective shared meaning. Yet which groups and why would decide to collaborate in these collective relational, imaginative and creative acts remains unexplained. Bourriaud wants to solve the contradiction of the global and local by means of yet another universalisation of modernity, arguing for the new (or alter) modernity (a reloading of modernism) based on a translation of cultural values and connecting them to the world network, and on a creolisation of cultures in transit into some homogenised universal world culture of altermodernity which makes postmodernism and postcolonialism outdated and old-​fashioned (Bourriaud 2009a). The stance of Rancière and Bourriaud echoes Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s view of collective network opposition from the side of the multitude, organised through conflicting yet accordingly acting manifestations of singularities in the common. Hardt and Negri also dismissed imperialism and colonialism as modern phenomena, claiming that in the post-​Fordist world the previous power hierarchies dissolved and a unique opportunity emerged for the multitude to practise a radical democracy supporting the multiplicity of possible worlds opposed to the single world of Empire (Hardt and Negri 2005). However, this is an illusion, as the Empire successfully reproduces all modern hierarchies, including the expropriation and absorption of someone else’s knowledge. Therefore the democratic ideal of multifarious and equal knowledges serving the commonwealth rather than capital, remains utopian. In Rancière’s as well as in Bourriaud’s understanding of relationality in the work of imagination and politics, community is reanimated either through a liberal understanding of the commonwealth or the Marxist idea of the

Imagination otherwise  163 commons, both of which increasingly demonstrate their insufficiency in the end times. Both accounts suffer from the well-​known defect  –​they universalise their own privileged experience, oversimplify the complexity of the world, and steadily move in the direction of reflection divorced from agency, in fact breeding new generations of bored ‘bobos’ whose paradise, however, is coming to an end with breakneck speed.

Breaking the Euromodern epistemic dead-​end? The epistemological dead-​ end discussed above and linked, among other things, with the end of ‘the Truth’ and the triumph of epistemic relativism must be conceptualised as a product of a specific way of thinking with particular historical and cultural coordinates. In other words, it is a problem of western philosophy and subjectivity, artificially elevated to a universal rank and seemingly cancelling the very possibility of the imagination and the impossible. Yet, the totality of epistemology as a condition of limitation does not necessarily refer to all other cosmologies, even if in their majority one way or another they have all been infected by modernity. Different efforts are needed for the restoration of the almost erased or trivialised and appropriated alternative positions, which can potentially give impetus to breaking down the enforced epistemological obstacle and thus open the possibility of imagining otherwise. Many of the commonplace postmodernist notions underlying the epistemological closure and generating a complete standstill of merry death have their incomplete or false doubles or other deceptive correspondences in indigenous and other enslaved and forgotten cosmologies, in the sense that these doubles relate to the same sphere of being or knowledge, yet are less nihilistic and pessimistic, and they intend to preserve the world in all its complexity, relationality and dynamic fluidity, in contrast to their radical western counterparts that have been normalised in the last few decades. This refers, for example to intersecting yet non-​identical concepts of relativism and relationality, as well as to the postmodernist negation of progressivism and the indigenous cyclical temporality and a preference for precedence, as in the Zapatistas’ slogan: ‘the past is in front of us’. The absolute postmodernist relativism leads to closure and stagnation, to an impossibility and uselessness of any change or any action. Yet even when proclaiming the death of the subject, postmodernism remains a highly solipsistic and egocentric endeavour. Relationality, on the contrary, offers a recognition of oneself as part of the complex global consonance, with a clear realisation that one is not its central note or vantage point, and a willingness to learn diligently how to sing in this communitarian choir without sounding out of tune, and always listening to the others –​animate and inanimate. Likewise, the well-​meaning postmodern critique of progressivism in fact closes down the idea of time as such, leaving only some eternal present with no telos and regarding the past as some playful cosplay playground, like a floating opera lacking any life-​giving connection with ancestors, devoid of

164  Imagination otherwise spiritual support and continuity, both of which are habitually ridiculed in postmodernist thinking. As mentioned above, indigenous ideas of cyclical temporality and a preference for the past offer a completely different type of relation with heritage and with ancestors, not grounded in total irony or debunking. The idea that the past is in front of us is also a negation of progressivism in its simplified versions. It is important that it is not nihilistic, rather giving us a sense of unity, and strength through this unity, with ancestral bodies, with myriads of lives in the past but also in the future, which is certainly linked with a different understanding of one’s self, one’s individuation and individuality, and its relation to various collectivities. It would be naïve to call everyone to follow this principle. Yet introducing this alternative to people and attempting to work for its implementation while creating real and concrete objects, phenomena, and worlds is possible already today.

Decolonial imaginary and decolonial aesthesis Contemporary mainstream theories related to imagination and creativity are predominantly post-​Marxist and universalist. They tend to erase geopolitical and corpopolitical affective differences, stumbling against the age-​old problem of either taking the non-​western other to sameness or fetishising its difference. In contrast with these largely (post)Marxist models, the decolonial aesthesis (Tlostanova 2012; Tlostanova 2013; Tlostanova 2017) and decolonial imaginary it generates are formulated in and from the Global South and from the zones of imperial difference (Tlostanova 2018). Decolonial aesthesis starts from the experience of those who were not supposed to have an imagination, only serving as passive objects for the imaginative exercises of the western subjects who appropriated and utilised them as Calibans or Ariels. Aesthesis in decolonial thought is understood as a mechanism to produce and regulate sensations which is closely linked to the body as an instrument of perception mediating our cognition. Setting aesthesis free from the limitations of normative aesthetic canons allows delinking from the dominant epistemic, existential and affective politics, which is grounded in suppression of the geo-​ historical dimensions of affects and corporalities. As in all decolonial thinking and agency, the most challenging task it to make a shift from the negative and often destructive resistance to creative and life-​asserting ‘re-​existence’, in Colombian thinker Adolfo Albán Achinte’s words. When a human being exists in the core of the colonial matrix as an other with no rights, for such a person an inclusion and an active reworking of the odours, tastes, colours, and sounds of his or her ancestors and the remaking of systematically negated forms of interaction with the world  –​of being and perception  –​become a necessity, a sensual response of resistance and of building of one’s own existence anew in defiance of coloniality (Albán 2009). In spite of its urge to recreate the forgotten and erased memories and worlds, re-​existence is far from a primordialist call to return to some essentialised authenticity. Rather, it is a way to relive the erased and distorted cultures while taking into account

Imagination otherwise  165 the temporal lag and resistance, the compromises and losses that have taken place. It is not a repetition of the past, but a variation with a stable core and a necessary creative element of difference, dynamics and change. Decolonial aesthesis is aimed at the emancipation of corporality and affectivity from the norms and limitations of artificially delocalised and disembodied (post-​) (alter)modern aesthetics including its boutique multicultural forms that allow only those imaginaries of the Global South that are ready to comply. Decolonial aesthesis is linked with a specific subliminal experience which is different from Kantian and post-​classical western forms of the sublime such as the sweatshop sublime mentioned above, and to some extent seems to be offering a way out from the impasse of the stagnant imagination, though this promise has not been fulfilled yet. Importantly, the category of the sublime as it is addressed here is not necessarily a trace of the classical modern aesthetics that needs to be instantly discarded if we are to decolonise the aesthesis. Various forms of the sublime as a certain human mechanism of overcoming fear, dependency, lack of freedom, and consequently, of triggering the launch of the constructive imagination and creativity in relation to oneself and the life-​world, have existed in the majority of cosmological and later philosophic conceptualisations of the world and the human in and of the world. What the decolonial sublime attempts to stress is the importance of the shift to agency as a result of the subliminal experience, to praxis instead of mere contemplation. In decolonial sublime, the nature which was used in the Kantian model as the anonymous threatening force against which human dignity and prevalence were articulated and enacted is replaced by modernity/​coloniality and our relational and intersectional belonging to it in various roles  –​objects to subjects, critics to accomplices and those who attempt to delink. Global coloniality is often illuminated in an image or a metaphor, not necessarily unequivocal or straightforward, momentarily lighting up the trajectory of further agency and a form of solidarity in subversion. The cathartic mechanism is then grounded in unmasking the darker side of modernity  –​that of violence, injustice, dehumanisation of large groups of people, objectification of nature, and the disembodiment of historically and culturally bound experience. The decolonial sublime in art as well as in life should not be based on overcoming the fear experienced by an insignificant human being in front of the greatness of nature, as in the Kantian model. It should not get stuck either in Bruce Robbins’ sweatshop-​sublime impasse as a realisation of the global socio-​economic dimensions of being that nevertheless does not lead to any action. People undergoing the experience of decolonial sublime learn to recognise the enormity of global coloniality and identify it in various phenomena, people, events, institutions and works of art, combining their own experience of being objectified, with decolonial sensibility, education and knowledge. Politically contesting art in many authoritarian contexts is feared by the state, not for what it directly represents but for what the act

166  Imagination otherwise of making and showing signifies –​for it invites the viewer to resist, which is why such artists are often persecuted. Actionist and artivist forms act head on and affect wider audiences, yet they are also more vulnerable to censorship, whereas decolonial artworks engaging with embodied memories and the emancipation of aesthesis are less unambiguous and often manage to escape censorship, even in the most authoritarian regimes. The decolonial sublime is not a prerogative of people from the Global South. Those from and of the North are not unable to appreciate decoloniality and should not be excluded from the decolonial sublime. The dividing line is more in the (in)ability of overcoming the ‘tyranny of the close over the distant’ (Robbins 2002, p. 86) and in the willingness to participate in decolonial communities of sense in their internal plurality and complex collectivity grounded in difference rather than sameness. The challenge is to avoid both universalism and particularism, to never lose a global yet pluriversal dimension. Decolonial community of sense as a producer of decolonial imagination needs further conceptualising. Stemming from the experience and existential knowledge of coloniality in its corpopolitical and geopolitical dimensions (which cannot be intellectually owned), the decolonial imagination can hardly be a product of individual consciousness, or at least for it to be fully realised it needs a communal resonance and co-​action. The challenge, then, is to develop the real ways and means to relationally situate decoloniality in thought and in action which can then give existential meaning to the borderland as the condition of mutual exchange of the gifts of difference. Decolonial thinkers often evoke the example of the Zapatistas who have managed to preserve a non-​European and non-​modern form of political organisation guiding human lives. It is grounded in a concept of democracy which is misunderstood by most western commentators. The Zapatistas’ principle of obedient power cannot be grasped in the frame of a western understanding of humanity, society and representation. What is meant by the principle is a collective ‘we’ which acts as an authority rather than individual people who might play the role of political leaders. The power is delegated to these leaders only for a short time. Therefore democracy in the understanding of the Zapatistas is not the same thing as in western political philosophy. The concept loses its abstract universal value and becomes a connector or a meeting space for different epistemic principles in the ground of the social organisation and moral codes of collective behaviour. Yet, how to make this experience operational, and if this is even possible or desirable outside Abya Yala, remain open and still insufficiently addressed questions. For it is also clear that a mechanical reproduction of indigenous cosmological principles in the contexts of the Global North simply would not work and the task in this case is perhaps even more complex than in the case of re-​existing and re-​emerging decolonial agendas, for it has to balance and negotiate a self-​critical humbleness (as a de-​automatised and de-​centred view of themselves and their history) with a carefully nurtured creative impulse of designing alternative communities of change grounded in a situated praxis as

Imagination otherwise  167 a dialogue between the always-​problematised Euromodern premises and the reconstituted (and brought into a more direct dialogue with contemporary challenges) foundational communities. The goal of the decolonial sublime (which in our view is yet to be fully implemented) is not to stop at mourning the forever lost (although this is also an important step), not to get stuck in passive perception (instead of active understanding), but rather to trigger a resolution to change the world and give it back a future dimension, to push us in the direction of agency –​ethical, political, social, creative, epistemic and existential. What kind of world it might be remains yet an open question and the biggest challenge even for the most wild decolonial ‘imaginators’ who must struggle daily with turning their negative resistance into positive re-​existence, through delinking and relinking with various Euromodern and Global South models, disrupting the previous progressivist unidirectionality of the prescribed imaginaries. As is obvious from what has been said above, decolonial aesthesis deliberately refuses to be universal and embrace all the existing experiences, instead focusing primarily on the positionality of those who suffered the colonial wound. Yet it is still possible to look for a middle ground, or at least a space for dialoguing in and through the decolonial sublime, which arguably may include not only the subjects from the darker side of modernity but also those from the lighter side, as well as all possible variants in between these extremes, provided they are aware of the global coloniality and also of their own intersectional and contradictory, ‘liquid’ position within it.

Undoing something previously created and/​or remaking it If the decolonial aesthesis generally falls under the rubric of reproductive imagination as it focuses on the revival and reinstatement of forgotten memories and histories, an opposite movement which has not yet been sufficiently explored by decolonial thinkers, but needs to be mentioned, is connected with undoing, remaking, and redirection. The self-​critical grounds of the political imagination otherwise that we are trying to trace here would make it question and disassemble and undo many previously designed and created objects, institutions, environments and practices, in some cases completely re-​orienting them for other purposes. This is a practically difficult task, not least because when the monsters of the modern/​colonial design were first created no one thought that at some point it would be necessary to disassemble them in order to eliminate their negativity –​be it a nuclear power plant, a mine, a city, a financial system or a nation state, no one imagined the grim consequences of such a disassemblage. Today, working with these monsters of industrialisation, urbanisation and extractivism often becomes a joyless quest for hidden and erased darker histories grounded in censored memories of violence, mass executions and mass graves; nuclear, chemical and bacteriological contaminations; devastated, deserted spaces where natural resources used to be, etc. Remaking the

168  Imagination otherwise made and redirective practice is one of the practical ways of imagining and implementing a different political imagination. The point is here not to slip into the familiar market and profit driven gentrification and the renovation of old factories and industrial zones into fashionable and highly expensive real estate, business parks and designer lofts, but to keep the initial creative goal of reimagining the world intact. Among many such projects the Palestinian Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) is worth mentioning. One example is Return to Nature, which is an intersection of human and non-​human (re)claimings and (re) definitions of spatiality and a decolonising architectural/​environmental project which focuses on the critical recycling of the buildings, space and landscape around an evacuated Israeli military fortress, Ush Garb, at the southern edge of Beit Sahour. The unusual volcano-​ crater shape of the fortress appeared during the second Intifada when the Israeli troops piled sand and rubble around the hill surrounding the fortress. Evacuated in 2006, the Ush Garb hill started to be contested by various groups of local settlers, activists, Israeli military and migratory birds, the latter using the hills of Palestine, situated between Africa, Asia, and Europe, for millennia for their seasonal resting on the way from North East Europe to East Africa and back every spring and fall. The project focuses on the idea of spontaneous recapture of architectural objects and their recycling in various functions –​from building materials which the locals immediately reused, to the fragile posthuman devastation spaces of other species reclaiming their damaged environments. As the authors of the project claim, they ‘seek to accelerate the processes of destruction and disintegration through an architectural project of obsolescence and return the ghost town to nature’ (Hilal and Petti 2018, p. 157). This project is a curious example of destructive design, where the human part in the avian reclaiming of space is played in subtle and imperceptible forms exploring the boundary between the natural and the man-​made –​for example perforating the walls (to make them unusable for people), creating mobile earth mounds (questioning the relations between the buildings and the landscape), etc. More often, destructive design projects are linked with symbolic and public purifying, exorcising and reinstating of spatial memories, previously erased or contaminated by the rhetoric of dictatorships, totalitarian regimes, colonialist states, apartheid, etc. One such example from Central Asia comes in the succession of eleven monuments (from the statue of the general governor of Turkestan through abstract symbols of Bolshevism to Stalin, Marx and finally Tamerlane) that over the course of the twentieth century occupied the same pedestal in a Revolution Garden Square in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Mark Weil, in his documentary The End of an Era. Tashkent (1996), gathered together all of these monuments signifying the change in ideologies and capricious preferences of ruling powers, in a poignant visual metaphor: the eleven abandoned figures are slowly covered by the sands of oblivion, so that soon Lenin’s familiar raised hand is indistinguishable from

Imagination otherwise  169 the threatening finger of Amir Timur (Tamerlane) pointed in the direction of Moscow. Important as they are, many of these decolonising spatiality initiatives are still too much focused on the past, fixed on modern/​colonial wounds and so becoming requiems rather than refuturing motivations. A shift from lamenting and commemorating (the lost indigenous traditions of thinking, of organising agriculture, of the lost natural and natural/​manmade objects such as the Aral lake [Aral 2009] or the Circassian forest gardens [Daurov 2011]) towards working for a decolonised future is thus an important objective for the decolonial imagination and agency. For example instead of documenting the catastrophically fast drying of the Aral lake and exploiting the sensational images of dilapidated ships and fishermen’s boats in the midst of the lifeless saline desert, it is much more important to work on the projects linking the almost forgotten local forms of careful relational interaction with the environment, the revival and nourishing of the diversity of local crafts, forms of agriculture, handicrafts and, generally, the age-​old ways of providing sustenance and the scientific methods of restoring water balance (albeit not to its original level), re-​cultivation of cotton-​drained lands, necessarily taking into account the present economic situation, which as a result of Soviet mono-​ economic cotton colonialism and post-​Soviet neocolonial negligence and ecological catastrophe, has deprived of their livelihoods not only the majority of local people but also dozens of other species (Abbasov 2009, Aral Sea Foundation 2019).

Reconsidering the imagination through survival While in no way trying to come back to the notorious universalism and impose some generic imagination on all people, it is still important to remember that our adaptation to the environment and ability to survive as a species (both in the infancy of humankind and today) link the imagination with a sense of beauty understood as a complex intersection of harmony, balance, perfection, symmetry, expediency, measure and goodness, as an overall characteristic of human life and life as such,1 and consequently linked with an active making of a harmonious and sensible environment, even in the most intolerable circumstances. Aesthetic impressions, senses, needs and reactions emerge at a certain stage of brain development leading to its further complication and diversification, which is a necessary precondition for survival and adjustment to environment, thus acting as an important cultural homeostatic regulator of human life and agency (Soulé and Orians 2001). We need to reflect on the mutually interconnected triad of survival, design and imagination; and the mechanism that turns these on –​arguably easier in situations of survival than prosperity –​and triggers people to actually create/​make/​design something as a form of agency, making it possible to cope with the intolerable being, especially needs to be reflected upon as well.

170  Imagination otherwise An example of this complex relation can be seen in informal settlements all over the world where people living in cardboard boxes under a freeway overpass or a bridge decorate their ‘homes’ with pictures torn from found magazines and make cooking utensils from tin cans out of rubbish bins. With absolutely nothing but what they can find they make something. Likewise, refugees and migrants confined to camps often for decades, dream of a different reality in which their meager shelter would transform into a beautiful (often in a fairy-​tale exaggerated way) home. Thus, Chechen artist and former refugee Aslan Gaisumov attempts to capture this stubborn willingness to decorate the miserable reality of the refugees’ existence (in this case, a military tent in which Chechen refugees lived for many years) with the dream of comfort, luxury and blue peaceful sky (Gaisumov 2014). Such a design as a way of survival rhymes with the so called ‘autonomous design’ in the interpretation of Arturo Escobar, which often emerges in conditions of extreme repression and violence in the communities under ontological occupation, paradoxically allowing the ideal of autonomy to flourish (Escobar 2018, p.167). Autonomous design is a form of ontologically oriented design for and from autonomy (p. 15). It is a design that becomes a part of the tool kit for transitions towards the pluriverse. Autonomous design ‘broadens the range of possible ways of being through our bodies, spaces and materialities’ (p. 19). Design then becomes potentially capable of being realised through a wide spectrum of imaginations  –​in terms of matristic cultures with feminists; in terms of autonomy and communal modes of living with those struggling to defend landscapes and territories worldwide; or in terms of the artificial, with design thinkers striving to steer a course between the prevailing defuturing practices and the futuring potential of science and technology. (p. 19)

Some ways of imagining an imagination otherwise Today the adherents of the pluriversal world and relationality are scattered around the world and disassociated. We are often not even aware of the existence of other such groups and individuals, who might use different terms to understand similar principles, concepts and ideals. An important step in this sense would be a dialogue and coalition of such forces, not for the sake of gaining power but rather for the sake of defending and promoting life in all its diversity and difference. As the political imagination we are talking about is by definition situational and contextual, it can and should grow, not out of armchair or desk-​top scientific reasoning, but out of practice with its trial and error. Therefore it is necessary to support and develop such border spaces (between the North and the South, the privileged and the disenfranchised) in which another agency, another life, another economy can be imagined and launched –​launching in their turn another political imagination.

Imagination otherwise  171 Importantly, the Global North and the South have been closely communicating for a long time and although this was and continues to be a highly asymmetrical and unfair process along with violence, death and the erasing of whole cosmologies and millions of lives, it has also brought amazing examples of relational, transcultural imaginaries  –​not in B.  Malinowski’s sense (Coronil 1995) but in the original Fernando Ortiz (Ortiz 1995) sense of the mutual influence of dominant and suppressed cultures, the weaving of one into the other, which empowers the suppressed and humbles the dominant, not for the sake of abstract justice but more to revive and justify the world as a flow of unstoppable changes whose rhythm we must learn to feel and join instead of continuing to be dissonant with it and interrupt its complex symphony. This may be an element of art, as likely as an element of social life or political agency. Paradoxically, it is at once easier and harder for the Global South to act in this situation: harder because it is still lacking rights and its knowledge is still delegitimised, easier because the necessity of existing in spite of and contrary to, constantly negotiating its own cosmologies and the imposed western norms –​is something the Global South is very proficient at. Another thing is that being always in the condition of a victim and in need of defending oneself is also easier than formulating a positive program and political imagination which would not stop at just being utopian or archaic, but rather would be linked with and reflect the present and directed towards the future. Undoubtedly, most cultures of the Global South have much more experience in developing their protective flexibility and ability to juggle multiple identifications to re-​exist in the interspace between modernity and their own cosmologies. But a necessary and urgent step now is to make this willingness and skill bilateral, to have them reciprocated from and by the Global North. And this move is still very hard to imagine. People in the Global North must be ready to finally get out of their comforting shells and stop pretending that their life will always go on as it is now. It is a difficult task but reality offers more and more opportunities to realise that we are indeed in the same boat in a global, ultimate sense and that the relative safety and material wellbeing of a shrinking privileged group is in fact fleeting and elusive. This complex condition has not yet been fully recognised. The politicians along with their populations tend to recycle the old twentieth century recipes such as populism, nationalism, the ultra-​right parties and various efforts to hide behind the boundaries which quickly turn into walls yet remain unable to defend the new/​old particularists from the world. Yet the discordance and disassociation between reality with its truly important problems and this rhetoric are growing rapidly and becoming obvious for larger amounts of people. Unfortunately, the situation may stay in this indeterminate condition for a relatively long time, until a serious catastrophe takes place –​not just financial or economic but jeopardising life as such (major war, enormous social cataclysm or environmental disaster). The more important it is to start reflecting on the kinds of conditions that could bring imagining to presence, before rather than after the catastrophe arrives.

172  Imagination otherwise

The need for a new political imagination reinstated The basis from which we argue recognises that there is a demonstrable divide between: the political ideologies, structures and institutions of our society’s invention; and, the complexity of the major problems that now challenge our species’ ability to sustain itself, the conditions upon which it depends and values beyond anthropocentric interests. Remembering, these challenges include the relational interaction between: • the very diverse environmental and socio-​cultural impacts of climate change, especially in terms of food security and mass population displacement and the related loss of biodiversity. In turn, these emergent conditions are contributing to what evolutionary biologists have identified as the beginning of the planet’s sixth extinction event. • the reconfiguration of the geopolitical order and power structure of the world, recognising that spheres of influence, economic and military power are all changing, thus increasing the likelihood of conflict as circumstances become ‘high-​risk’ and competition over planetary natural resources increases. • globally uneven technological transformations that impact upon and fragment the very ‘nature’ of our species being, converging with social and cultural change, and so further diluting the authority of universal claims and propositions. Fundamentally, the world to which political regimes and practices are attached is rapidly changing with the result that knowledge by which the world has been known and politically managed is becoming redundant, but mostly goes unrecognised as such. What this situation represents is an unacknowledged epistemological and temporal crisis. At its basis there is a lack of knowledge appropriate to current, emergent and future circumstances, together with a disjuncture between the time frames in which identified critical conditions are being only partially engaged with and the actual speed of change of transformative forces and events. Placing imagination into the context just outlined, there are two evident critical failures. The first is a general failure of, and within, political culture to imaginatively grasp what is actually happening. Pragmatics, vested interests, instrumentalised ontologies, parochialism and the structural limitations of the political order all variously combine to create a situation of hegemonic myopia. This condition of limitation links to one of cognitive constriction whereby the recognition of the need to imagine beyond all currently available systems, including democracy, cannot arrive and even if it did, would seem to be unsurpassable. Yet the dynamics of the circumstances outlined that urgently need to be addressed actually demand a newly imagined politics that is timely, insightful, appropriately critically informed, decisive, and mobilises effective action. Even so, the result will be worse than a zero sum scenario.

Imagination otherwise  173 This does not mean that action taken will be pointless, but it does recognise that even with a massive amount of effort the situation will be worse than it is now. Progress here becomes damage limitation of processes of negation already in play (like climate change impacts, loss of biodiversity and mass population displacement, all with long time frames), plus action to reduce and counter short-​term destruction with ongoing defuturing consequences). All such action would combine with the intention of establishing a condition of relative stabilisation. ‘Sustainment’, so positioned, is the totalisation of all actions that slow the anthropocentric defuturing impetus that is accelerating entropy. To create qualitative conditions of life under these circumstances is possible, but to do so highlights again the demand for and absolute importance of a political imagination powering a politics of life-​sustaining (re)creative action. The second critical failure is an associated and longer neglected myopia of the anthropocentric generative condition of global criticality, this by the powers that command the status quo: the longer it reigns the greater will be the suffering and loss. The prospect of a new viable political imaginary, as the foundation of a new politics, depends on making the depth, complexity and urgency of the ‘crisis of being now’ present. Counter to this imperative is the current delay, deferral and token gestures of the political present implicit in its short-​termism and attachment to ‘business as usual’ that need calling out for what they are: a crime against the future of life. Clearly the relational complexity of the challenges that have to be met demands a huge amount of intellect and imagination, of which a new politics would be one required output. However, the starting point has to be the formation of a culture of relational collectives, the members of which are all trans-​disciplinary and fully cognisant of the epistemological basis of relational thought –​the unavoidable question is how to make this happen. There are no safe and easy options available here. It first means such collectives have to be formed by committed individuals as a counter-​culture within institutions or as autonomous precarious entities external to them. Initially they will be few in number. But what will generate the dynamic of their proliferation will be the agency of what is produced by the few, and this turns on the quality, insight, energy and commitment of the collective membership, the time given and effective promotion of what is produced. By implication, to create the conditions out of which a new political imagination and imaginative response to the challenges of the age can emerge also needs an imaginative approach to organisation able to bring the relational collectives into being. The new political imagination would have to avoid a too easy way of slipping into abstract or idealised solutions. A good deal of the history of political philosophy is a remaking of the same and effectively an intellectual waste bin full of undeliverable political idealism and utopian dreamings. In recoiling from this predilection, what needs to be imagined has to be grounded in ‘the making possible’. The conceptual is essential, but it cannot

174  Imagination otherwise dissolve into pure abstraction, and has to arrive as realisable. The kinds of world-​shaping problems indicated above do not have, cannot have, prefigured solutions. If solutions are created they have to be formed in process, ‘walking as we ask questions’ (preguntando caminamos, in the Zapatistas’ words; Sitrin 2005), and will likely only be partial. In many cases containment and mitigation of problems will accompany them. This experiential way of moving forward, through questions to which no answers are known in advance by anyone, could bring us closer to a different politics and a different, non-​hierarchical and maximally horizontal organisational culture. By implication, this means that learning how to live with problems deemed intractable becomes essential. Here the pre-​historic ice-​age lesson of mass migration and population depletion is easy, but unwise, to ignore.

Context-​formed theory and counter-​academy pedagogy Conjunctural configurations of crisis are going to vary significantly according to differences in economic circumstances, environmental impacts and levels of available resources, the existence and scale of conflict, the numbers and physical conditions of populations. To recognise this, as indicated, is to acknowledge that responsive action and possible solutions require thinking and action in diverse situated contexts. The already mentioned collective is one example, and independent research organisations (IROs) another –​and a third, overlapping the other two, is a ‘staged event program’ (outlined below). Again this clearly militates against any kind of dogmatic universal politics and towards one that is context-​responsive. So, the basic idea may remain the same but local forms of its realisation can be different. Globally, the academy continues to travel in three parallel directions: an ongoing provision of intellectual capital to the economic status quo; furthering the instrumentalisation of higher education; and maintaining the hegemonic order of disciplines. As such, it is positioned as structurally counter to the project of developing and mobilising the relational knowledge and action appropriate to meeting the vital challenges of the age. There can be little expectation of major organisational or pedagogic reform. For all the capital expenditure on built infrastructure globally and the vast increase in student numbers, the university is, as Bill Readings (1997) argued several decades ago, in ruins as it has firmly become everywhere a service rather than a public good. Culturally, it has no project and in a dedication to conformity excludes the exception so is destined to be an institution of administered mediocrity (a fate intuited by Nietzsche, 1967). More realistically, if a strategy were created based on allowing the appropriation of knowledge, with demonstrated agency in advancing sustainment (remembering that such appropriation was of central importance in the history of the rise of the modern university) the transformation of the academy might be possible.

Imagination otherwise  175 To do this would mean establishing a distributed model of a counter-​ academy of futuring based on relational research and pedagogy. It would also mean an inversion of the relation of research and learning –​rather than bringing the problem to the institution, the institution would move into the world to discover how relational problems as situated in time, place and space need to be understood and engaged with. What such an approach recognises and applies is a continuous contextually emergent condition of imagination in order to identify, find, and create problematic contexts in which to learn to imagine. There is no easy way to make this happen. While the spirit of the university is all but dead, the corpse not only remains but also continues to bloat. Not only do students not know any other reality but, now, neither do many younger academic staff. This situation is universal and has an inherent instrumental contradiction: it fails to guarantee that graduates get employed, while for several years keeping them out of the labour market. This situation is more extreme in the Global South and it is there that the possibility of the creation of the ‘autonomous university’, an actual community of learning (in contrast to the ‘corporate service university’ with its market driven structure from micro-​accreditation to post-​doc company placements) might be possible. But the window of opportunity only exists so long as a generation of pre-​neoliberal and disenchanted academics exists. Two immediate ‘process trigger’ actions can perhaps be considered. One is the creation of a series of events to explore and develop possible ‘autonomous university’ project-​based learning projects where academic unlearn and relearn to become futural (and thus delinked from servicing the status quo). The other is to establish an ‘autonomous university’ development program as a not-​for-​profit organisation with a funding strategy: hyper-​crowd funding, an open invitation to sponsors, and a fund-​your-​own-​liberated-​academic-​career levy for academics (0.5% on annual salary). The overall focus on imagination needs to be grasped, not as being about acting after a condition of possibility is created by an act of imagination, but rather by recognising imagination in a continual process of affirmative transformation that perpetually defers a moment of solution. Obviously this does not mean abandoning all existing knowledge but rather testing its conceptual and pragmatic reach, recognising that much higher levels of social and cultural, as well as practical, knowledge is futurally needed.

Note 1 Reducing beauty to an abstract category delinked from social and political life and, consequently, restricted by the mode of passive contemplation, is yet another result of the post-​Enlightenment degradation of esthesis into aesthetics, failing to see the beautiful as the main positive form of grasping existence and as present in the majority of human cosmologies and philosophies, and divorcing the imagination from its crucial ontological and epistemic functions.

176  Imagination otherwise

References Abbasov, N. (director), 2009. ‘Aral. Forgive Us Once Forever’ [documentary film]. Tashkent: Gala Film Studio. Abu-​Lughod, J., 1989. Before European Hegemony:  The World System A.D. 1250–​ 1350. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Albán, A., 2009. Artistas Indígenas y Afrocolombianos:  Entre las Memorias y las Cosmovisiones. Estéticas de la Re-​Existencia. In: Palermo, Z., ed. Arte y Estética en la Encrucijada Descolonial. Buenos Aires: Del Siglo, 83–​112. Aral Sea Foundation, 2019. Agenda [online]. Available from: www.aralsea.org/​3.html [Accessed 15 January 2020]. Benson, O., 2019. The cult of authenticity. Free Inquiry [online]. 39.3, April–​May. Available from:  https://​secularhumanism.org/​2019/​04/​the-​cult-​of-​authenticity/​ [Accessed 15 January 2020]. Bourriaud, N., 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du réel. Bourriaud, N., 2009. The Radicant. Berlin: Lukas & Sternberg. Bourriaud, N., 2009a. Altermodern Manifesto. Tate Trienniale. www.tate.org.uk/​ britain/​exhibitions/​altermodern/​manifesto.shtm [Accessed 2 May 2014]. Broncano, F., 2018. The limits of political imagination. Open Mind [online], 9 January, www.bbvaopenmind.com/​en/​economy/​geopolitics/​the-​limits-​of-​political-​ imagination/​[Accessed 15 January 2020]. Brooks, D., 2000. Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. New York: Simon and Schuster. Coronil, F., 1995. Transculturation and the politics of theory:  Countering the center, Cuban counterpoint. Introduction. In: Ortiz, F., Cuban Counterpoint. Durham: Duke University Press, ix-​lvi. Daurov, K., 2011. The Old Circassian Gardens [online]. Available from: www.youtube. com/​watch?v=mBcvpl23q64\ [Accessed 14 January 2020]. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1988. A Thousand Plateaus. London: The Athlone Press. Dussel, E., 2000. Europe, modernity and Eurocentrism. Nepantla: Views from South 1.3, 465–​478. Escobar, A., 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse, Durham: Duke University Press. Fitzgerald, J. D., 2012. Sincerity, not irony, is our age’s ethos. The Atlantic [online], 20 November. Available from:  www.theatlantic.com/​entertainment/​archive/​2012/​11/​ sincerity-​not-​irony-​is-​our-​ages-​ethos/​265466/​ [Accessed 15 January 2020]. Gaisumov, A., 2014. Untitled. Mixed technique. Tent, Acrylic, Gilding. 500x500x350sm. Glaveanu, V.P. and de Saint Laurent, C., 2015. Political imagination, otherness and the European crisis. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, November, 557–​564. doi.10.5964/​ ejop.v11i4.1085 Hardt, M. and Negri A., 2005. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books. Hilal, S. and Petti, A., 2018. Permanent Temporariness. Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing. Kagan, M., 2000. Voobrazhenie kak ontologicheskaya kategoria (Imagination as an ontological category). Symposium 3. Scholarly Conference Materials, 11–​13 April 2000. Saint-​Petersburg: Saint Petersburg Philosophical Society, 71–​74. Kearney, R., 1998. The Wake of Imagination, London: Routledge. Mignolo, W., 2002. The enduring enchantment:  (or the epistemic privilege of modernity and where to go from here). The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.4, Fall, 927–​ 954. doi.10.1215/​00382876-​101-​4-​927

Imagination otherwise  177 Nietzsche, F., 1967. The Will to Power. Trans. Kaufmann, W. and Hollingdale, R.J. New York: Vintage. Ortiz F., 1995. Cuban Counterpoint:  Tobacco and Sugar. Durham:  Duke University Press. Rancière, J., 2009. Contemporary art and the politics of aesthetics. In: Hinderliter, B., Maimon, V., Mansoor, J., McCormick, S., eds. Communities of Sense. Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 31–​50. Readings, B., 1997. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Robbins, B., 2002.The sweatshop sublime. PMLA 117.1, 84–​ 97. doi:10.1632/​ 003081202X63537 Sitrin, M., 2005.Walking we ask questions:  an interview with John Holloway. Left Turn. Notes from the Global Intifada [online], 1 February. Available from:  www. leftturn.org/ ​ % E2%80%9Cwalking-​ we-​ a sk-​ q uestions%E2%80%9D-​ i nterview-​ john-​holloway [Accessed 13 January 2020]. Soulé, M.E. and Orians, G. H., eds. 2001. Conservation Biology: Research Priorities for the Next Decade. Washington: Island Press. Tlostanova, M., 2012. La aesthesis trans-​moderna en la zona fronteriza eurasiatica y el anti-​sublime decolonial. In: Mignolo, W. and Gomez, P., eds. Esteticas y opcion decolonial. Bogota: UD Editorial Creaciones, 49–​89. Tlostanova, M., 2013. The observatory of the bereaved:  Unbinding the imaginary in Eurasian borderlands. Social Text. Periscope. Decolonial AestheSis Dossier [online], 15 July. Available from: https://​socialtextjournal.org/​periscope_​article/​the-​ observatory-​of-​the-​bereaved-​unbinding-​the-​imaginary-​in-​eurasian-​borderlands/​ [Accessed 12 January 2020]. Tlostanova, M., 2017. How to disengage from the coloniality of perception. In: Tlostanova, M., Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Re-​Existence. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 23–​44. Tlostanova, M., 2018.What Does it Mean to be Post-​Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire. Durham: Duke University Press. Weil, M. (director) 1996. ‘The End of an Era. Tashkent’ [documentary film]. Netherlands: Stichting Deen and Taskhkent: DAGO Film Studio.

5  Towards a research agenda and researching research

There is no ready-​to-​hand-​programmatic agenda to simply exposit. What there is, though, are openings into areas that invite researching with the aim of selecting/​creating specific research pathways and projects:  Three will be rehearsed.

Part 1. Openings into research agendas Mapping the obstacles course of the future The future is not empty. Rather it is filled by all those things that have been thrown into it from the past, as they come towards us and we travel towards them. Once again, climate change is a clear, but not the only example. There are still emissions in the atmosphere from the late industrial revolution, they combine with those more recent, the warming effect arrives and will go on arriving for several hundreds of years even if miraculously they ceased tomorrow. Thus we travel in time towards emissions as they towards us. Effectively, this means time and space are littered with obstacles that futuring has to navigate around, over or through. The problem is firstly that many, most, of the obstacles go unseen. Thus ‘we’ and ‘they ‘are on an unrecognised collision course with unknown consequences. Second, those obstacles that are seen are only partly comprehended. Climate change is a good example. It is more than its data, its effects are not contained and they feed back into the dynamic of its process and it extends into the indeterminate time of a continually changing finite atmospheric system. And third, we are currently bereft of anything like an adequate means of representing this obstacle course because many things are unidentified, partly identified or known yet unbounded. One can, for example acknowledge there are many carcinogenic substances of our own making in the environment that exist at dangerous levels: some of them are known, but one wonders how many others are not. Likewise, particles from plastic waste are in the terrestrial environment and oceans, in the bodies of animals, including our own, and in the food chain. What will be the consequences? The volume and types of waste that industrialised societies produce, from mining and building products to pharmaceuticals and cosmetics,

Research agenda and researching research  179 ever increase as consumption levels and populations grow. As a result, hormone level-​changing chemicals, and others that transform biological life in waterways and thereafter, enter the food chain, as do other toxins, for example radioactive substances from electronic waste and expended munitions in warzones; while the emissions and particulates of numerous gases enter the atmosphere and our bodies, both with negative transformative consequences. All that is noted here is a fraction of the known. What is certain is there is also a fraction of the unknown. None of these problems are static, they are all increasing, and they are all integral to the present and future and contribute to putting the viability of life, as we know it, at risk. These problems are predominantly reported as if they were specific and isolated. But that is not how they function in the operative condition of the unsustainable in which they all function relationally. The reality is interconnectedness, while reporting and representation are grounded in disconnectedness. The obstacles that obstruct viable futures for us and many other organisms have to be seen, placed, represented and addressed inter-​relationally in a regime of time. Efforts to capture and freeze, at the initial analysis stage and most often by means of ever narrower and more specialised disciplinary tools, the separate moments and parts of the complex problem lead to an inability to see the whole in its complex changeability and internal and external interrelatedness. This leaves us in a situation of solving the ‘wrong’ problems, while the real and grave ones remain unidentified and head towards us by leaps and bounds. Dealing with this issue is critical in making a difference to the larger challenges to be faced. Figures of inter-​relational engagement Part of meeting the representation challenge is to grasp that the referent is relation rather than the truth of the real. Moreover, relations are not viewed or constructed as fixed or exclusive but changeable and fluid. Every set of relations also poses an epistemological problem –​what do you need to know to be able to get to know what needs to be known? Consider the following overlapping clusters, as addressed via a very partial and abbreviated characterisation of relations: Cluster1. Climate/​anthropology/​technology/​psychology conflict Climate affects the conditions of everyday life and the means to sustain it. Thus how people live, work and dwell directly connects to the climatic conditions in which they live. So from the most basic to the most sophisticated, technologies of food production, building construction and heating or cooling were, among others, devised and developed to deal with this situation. The differences between these activities, as climatically and environmentally situated, together with the practical exchange and symbolic value given to them, directly correlate to the production of culture, but equally to the

180  Research agenda and researching research emergence of different psychologies. All of these relations were and are subject to disruption, as the history of war and colonialism confirms, with often profound life-​changing directional implications. Cluster 2. Extinction/​migration/​biopolitics/​posthumanism/​post-​nation/​ community Land clearing contributes to climate change while it turns productive land to inhospitable desert; both add to the causes of the loss of biodiversity. People displaced by the loss of the environments that sustain them migrate. The loss of natural resources, livelihoods and the disruption of communities create large numbers of displaced people which can easily lead to local and regional conflicts, which further add to population displacement. The way ‘the masses’ of the displaced are managed and controlled means the creation of refugee camps and detention centres wherein identities and many other differences are erased by bio-​political regimes that reduce everyone to units of administration. This situation devalues and dehumanises people’s lives and adds to a widening gap between the dispossessed and the techno-​privileged. Overall, this cluster of relations links to nations becoming dysfunctional, which is one instance of a drift towards the breakdown of nation-​states. Staging the event of imagination In addressing the notion of a new political imagination there is a set of basic conditions to establish. It has to come out of a critique of the politics of the status quo and a recognition of the imperative of the need for a new political paradigm with an appropriately informed epistemological ground from which to think it, and arrives from a conducive context that invites/​ prompts imagination, which may well be a play between a collective and individual situation. In his conception of metapolitics A. Badiou (Badiou 2005) attempts to remove the watershed between knowledge production as a trade and political action, and to recognise that politics and thinking are essentially identical. Such a view generates a different interpretation of political events. They are no longer contemplated in the detached, passive and essentially collaborationist way typical of the majority of people. It is not then the case that people go to where politics is being done (and thinking being thought), but rather that politics and political knowledge grow around the agents. Therefore any state is by its nature against politics whereas we can try to bring to life and support a new subject who would be doing politics as thinking and as knowledge production. Our proposed approach is to establish such conditions by ‘staging an event’. To make clear what is meant by this proposition, we need to explain how we understand the meaning of these terms and the relationship between them, starting with the notion of ‘an event’. The event thought philosophically is not other than ‘an event’ but rather the recognition of what it fundamentally is beyond its observed activities. As

Research agenda and researching research  181 such, it denotes a preoccupation with that which ‘becomes in time’ as a synthesis of past and future. Thus being, life, ‘the world’ and so on are events. What drives this process and what foundationally constitutes an event is thought differently from passion to physics, but in all cases it is the result of a gathering. So, while a life can be designated as a single event, it exists as this from what it gathers together to form itself as composed. It follows that for Heidegger, ‘the event’ –​das Ereignis, the title of his series of lectures given in 1941–​42 (Heidegger 2013) –​is at the centre of his concern with the question of being (as it is understood as ‘the event’ of that which exists as occurrence in time). Notwithstanding Heidegger’s efforts, there is no last word given on ‘the event’, no definitive position. Alain Badiou discusses the complexity of the notion at length when reviewing Deleuze’s position, of which he says that it has ‘strongly marked the nature of the philosophical combat in which the destiny of the word ‘event’ is played out’ (Badiou 2007, pp. 37–​44). This contesting of meanings is very evident when considering the different ways the term is translated (that is: ‘Das Ereignis’ translated as: appropriative event, occurrence, presencing, unconcealment, enowning) within particular philosophical positions. One can argue that it is not necessary to decide which is the correct or desired term, if the process of gathering is privileged as appropriating the essence of the event, as evidenced in Richard Rojcewicz’s translation of The Event (Heidegger 2013, p. 153). As both a theorist of theatre and ‘the event’, Badiou provides a bridge to how staging is to be introduced and understood. He understands theatre as a form of action and as ‘the most political art form’ as it extends the performative beyond the theatrical stage (Badiou 2013). For Badiou, who acknowledges he was clearly influenced by Plato (whose writing was based on scenes and dialogue), theatre is an assembly of texts, acting, set, design, and music that expands the scope of performative ideas politically. From the perspective of staging an event, in the context of a new political imagination, this needs to be seen as located political action where there is an imperative for a transformative politics. ‘The borderland’ between ongoing forces of colonisation and decoloniality, understood as the locus of cultural and epistemological exchange formative of a mutual political ground, is one clear example that invites exploration beyond existing cultural/​race politics. Certainly, staging practices would aim to employ a variety of media and performative settings almost exclusively outside ‘the theatre’, with events that could be a matter of minutes or extend over days as floating changeable nets resisting institutionalisation and ossification, stitching and piercing reality though necessarily starting on a micro-​level, to avoid becoming prey for media and normative institutions quickly turning into political regimes (Herbst 2006). Events have the potential to attract and bring into engagement considerable ontological difference (local activists, performers, artists and designers, organic intellectuals, academics) in action of informed production. In so doing they would aim to provide an environment that would

182  Research agenda and researching research break the political disjuncture of dislocated academic discourse on issues such as decoloniality which claims the importance of the geopolitics and corpopolitics of knowledge, of being, and of sensing, yet often remains itself at the level of declaring some abstract disembodied principles (though quite attractive at times), leaving it to others to do the hard job of their application to reality. As such, staging events arrives with the potential of political experimentation, cross-​boundary dialogue, developmental progression and individual reflection. This is not to suggest that new political imaginaries will necessarily arrive out of them, although they may, but rather they will feed a milieu that will loosen the ontological grip of existing political ideologies, epistemologies and institutionalised practices without a slippage into a gestural avant-​gardism. Essentially, such events are about communicating what needs to be known and acted upon by performing it so as to ontologically own it and thereafter to create the conditions out of which a new political imagination can be contemplated and worked towards for both performer and audiences. Performance here is as much a pedagogy of situated dangers –​ if not more –​as it is deinstitutionalised theatre. On both counts it is serious (political) entertainment. Badiou directly links his theory of event as ‘an exceptional occurrence’ to theatre as ‘an event’ on a path to ‘the event’ (Puchner 2009) that is as an ‘exception to the exception’ (Badiou 2013, p. 2). The exceptional occurrence here becomes a break with how politics and the political are thought and enacted now in the realisation that this is thinking and becoming beyond the limits of the now. Points towards a summary The implications of such thinking are that there has to be: •

a confrontation with the imperative meaning of all that defutures and enfolds into the unsustainable and all that are essential responses to counter it; • a critique of the situated politics of the status quo as it dominantly upholds the unsustainable; • the construction of conditions in which imagination is possible and stimulated, and without which affirmative transformative thought and action will be impossible; • the creation of staged event(s) as a developable domain of action research/​ project prototyping, communication, pedagogy (for performers and audience) and provocative serious entertainment; • the establishment of epistemological conditions of knowing otherwise both during creation and production as well as post-​performance reflection by performers and audiences; • an organisational strategy appropriate to transformative political ambitions and action.

Research agenda and researching research  183

Part 2: A reply in the form of events Mapping the obstacles course of the future Revisiting what we started this chapter with: ‘The future is not empty. Rather it is filled by all those things that have been thrown into it from the past, as they come towards us and we travel towards them’. Climate change is not only an example of the force of a future travelling towards everyone everywhere now. It also exposes the disjuncture between ruling political regimes, philosophy and practices and unfolding global circumstances that demand a political transformation of how the relations between ‘our’ being-​in-​the-​world and ‘the world’, in all our difference, need to be understood and engaged with to counter an increasing (in)human propensity to defuture life as we know, understand and live it. Such conduct emanates from a misplaced sense of reality completely at odds with that essence of Being which constitutes the ontic (‘the real’ totality of all this is beyond reach). In the example to be considered now –​Australia in 2019/​2020: burning the future and the return of the same  –​a confluence between an environment in disaster in ‘the real’ and a political disaster (national and global, historical and contemporary) in reality misplaced, can be clearly seen. What is important to understand is that these fires are the ‘sharp end’ of a global crisis in process that by degree is affecting everywhere. Accounting the first act of the play of the new age of fire Fire has always been part of the ‘nature’ of Australia. There are trees and plants that need to be burnt for their seeds to germinate. Every year there is a fire season and for millennia the environment recovered from its impacts. For the first ‘Australians’, fire was incorporated into their cultures and practices of hunting and cultivation. With colonisation, ‘settlers’ unknowingly and inappropriately occupied and built settlements in areas of high risk of fire –​this has continued. But now things have changed. Global warming has created a lethal combination of drought (another environmental feature of Australia), with extremely high temperatures that have broken all records where those in the mid and high C40s have become common and widespread (for the first time in 2019 there was a day where it was more that C40 degrees in every state of the nation). What this produces and increases is a very dry ground fuel load (grass, leaf litter, fallen branches, dead trees). When weather produces ‘dry lightning’ huge areas of forest ignite. So now, in the normal abnormality of Australia, fire burns in unpredictable way and for months. Fire management is more about containment, so the fires burn themselves out, than extinguishing them (which, as they are so huge, can only be done by heavy rain. Against this backdrop, the 2019/​2020 fire season started in August 2019 and at the time of writing (January 2020) continues. It needs to be seen in a

184  Research agenda and researching research global and national context. In terms of scale, now over 8 million hectares have been burnt, in contrast to the 906,000 hectares of the Amazon fire of 2019 and the 4 to 5 million hectares of the fire in the Siberian taiga.1 So far, more than half a billion animals have perished, with as many or more injured. This number will increase as fire has destroyed the source of the food of so many of them. Certainly, some native species will become extinct. Hundreds of thousands of injured farm animals have been put down, with stories of farmers running out of bullets. The performance of the fires has been extraordinary. Flames of 70 metres have reached into the sky with smoke plumes rising 14 kilometres into the atmosphere. Each fire season in recent years has been marked by fires behaving in unexpected ways, but the 2019/​2020 season has surpassed all prior experience. These fires have created their own weather such as dry lightning, huge winds, fire-​balls and tornadoes (one throwing a 10 ton fire truck into the air, killing the driver and injuring other crew members). The amount of smoke generated has been enormous, covering an area the size of Europe, turning the sky yellow, red and, in the worst conditions, black in daytime, with ash snow on mountains in New Zealand and reaching South America. People have died from the smoke as well as from fires. Because of the quality of fire monitoring, warning and mass evacuations, while thousands of homes, workplaces and utility buildings, and many towns, have been destroyed, the number of deaths has been low. As a result of so many businesses losing their premises, infrastructure (roads, power and water) and supply chain, large numbers of people have no income and are experiencing considerable hardship. Because of the massive scale of material damage to infrastructure and settlements, a great number of communities were stranded and surrounded by fire. This created logistical problems for communities without power, water and food: helicopters from as far away as Singapore arrived to help deal with this situation. Australian Defence Force reservists have been mobilised for the first time in peacetime. Specifically, the navy has rescued people from beaches, the air force extracted people from danger zones of supply-​stranded communities; and the role of army has been to support fire fighters and assist in disaster recovery. Confronted with the biggest disaster in the nation’s history, the government was found wanting. It ignored warnings from twenty-​two of the nation’s former fire chiefs in September 2019, and rejected requests for more fire-​ fighting resources from 2016. Its lack of preparedness cannot be separated from its reluctance to accept climate change as a key factor of the crisis –​a position directly linked to its support for the coal industry. That the government views the fires as falling within a purely natural disaster classification underscores its failure to acknowledge that climate change is changing the nature of Australia. The Prime Minster did not help in communicating governmental concern by going on vacation with his family to Hawaii during the crisis, returning only after a public outcry at the death of two young fire-​fighters.

Research agenda and researching research  185 Above all, the narrow view of the government means that the relational impacts of climate change have not been discussed and addressed, while there are parts of Australia that are on a rapid route to becoming unliveable because of heat and lack of water. Thus there are communities (including indigenous ones who have lived in these areas for scores of millennia) that need to be moved via a planned process to designated and developed new locations. Sea-​ level impacts also need contingency planning and action –​the IPPC projection is 51 centimetres to one metre by 2100, with the expectation of a 74 centimetres rise (Vaughan, 2019). This situation will be ongoing and have serious consequences for Australia. It will redraw the nation’s shoreline and likely mean an influx of several million climate refugees from the Indonesian archipelago (a situation beyond the ability of the nation’s border protection force to deal with). There are more identified problems, such as food security, in processes that are being overlooked. There are no doubt other problems yet to arrive. Two failures of government are immediately evident. The first is a failure in its ‘duty of care’ to protect the nation. The second is a failure to think about the complexity of those climate impact problems travelling towards the nation, and thereafter develop and adopt mitigation and adaptive strategic planning measures, and material practices, to cope with the situation. This failure is embedded in politics itself (across ideologies) in so far as the survival of government has become completely articulated to consumerist aspirations and expectations –​exposing the schism between individual and common interests. Thus in a democracy like Australia the survival of a government turns on what ideas it can ‘sell’ to the electorate. Effectively this means that actions towards sustainment that come with significant economic sacrifice are ‘unsellable’. This predisposes government to short-​term pragmatic action and the crisis management of problems that in fact cannot be managed by such a political ontology. Indivisible from this situation is the intellectual lacuna of government, which can be seen in a number of ways. •

•

Knowing and unknowing/​thinking and action –​this names an intellectual poverty whereby what is known about the future-​determining problems that are now arriving is completely overwhelmed by what is unknown. This is a structural issue, not just an epistemological one. The most obvious illustration is the rejection of scientific advice (internationally and nationally as the history of the IPPC globally indicates). Less obvious, is the neglect of the humanities and the demand for their transformation beyond disciplinary containment and culturalism by the subordination of their function in education to instrumental ends. Clearly, as ‘the world’ has become more complex, politics has become less informed and more inclined to present simplistic (as opposed to simple) solutions to complex problems. Failing to grasp the picture of the ‘everlasting now’, which comes with failing to notice that time has changed –​at its most fundamental, time has changed because what constitutes the ‘event’ of Being has changed.

186  Research agenda and researching research So framed, Einstein’s theory of relativity is actually subsumed by a general theory of time. The speed of travel and communication has been often cited as changing durational times, as has technology at large. Climate change ‘now’ arrives to add to this dynamic. It returns as the same and becomes constitutive of the same. For instance, the changed nature of fire events in Australia is going to recur annually unless there is a massive global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, which the fires themselves increase (Australia’s fires have already exceeded two-​thirds of the nation’s expected annual emissions). If temperatures go on increasing, this return of the same will continue until a condition of the same arrives. This is exactly what happened in North Africa at the end of the last Ice Age:  first, with warming, ice melted, soil moisture became high, and the region became lush grasslands. But the warming continued until eventually the grasslands died, the topsoil was blown away, and the area turned to desert:  thus establishing an enduring condition of the same. The rhetoric of crisis management and crisis recovery marks a refusal to make clear that whatever is present now as change is destined to return in a more aggressive form. Recovery here is part of a language of deception that negates the imperative of national climate adaption planning and action.2 • Destruction: there are things that will be able to regrow or be rebuilt in a form directed by the adaptation imperative. But there are also things which will never return (not least all that has been incinerated and the flora and fauna that have been rendered extinct). Moreover, destruction is far more deeply embedded in the present world of anthropogenically induced climate change, which is itself an example of the destructiveness of our species’ defuturing mode of world-​creation. This propensity, expressed in the confluence of modernity, development and progress, underscored centuries of extractive, genocidal and bio-​physical violence enabled by numerous technologies. Central to this propensity has been an ontologically directive force to create without recognising and exploring the consequences of what inseparably was destroyed in the process. A lack of awareness of the dialectical relation of creation and destruction, while intrinsic to politics, economics and industry, is integral to anthropocentrism. Once responsibility is taken for it, a material ethics (a recognition and action taken to counter unsustainability as affect) arrives in the realm of possibilities of the political as practice. • Practically learning how to relationally map the impact of events travelling towards (us) now, can become a ground(ing) of action. Such learning implies imperfection, error, correction and improvement. Again, using the example of Australia and fires would mean extending existing practices, and creating new ones to: (i) Make anticipatorily present a new post-​disaster landscape (as it will arrive as a series of recurrent events), thus taking destruction as the foundation of adaptive redirection rather than attempting to think

Research agenda and researching research  187 of the recovery/​recreation of what will be lost. This kind of action requires bringing speculative reason to the act of mapping, subject to continuous evaluation and iterative change. (ii) Support a new ecology, post the damage to the old. There are two types of fire. The cold fires are where all that is burnt is black. Recovery from these fires is good, many non-​ rainforest trees will recover and seed in the soil will germinate. Hot fires are far more destructive, where everything that is burnt is white. Hot fires kill trees and reduce soil nutrients and the seed stock it holds. Recovery therefore takes longer, and the area has a much lower capacity to host animals and insects and is open to invasive species. The increase in the size and frequency of these hot fires requires innovation in post-​disaster land management. (iii) Establish a new economy: one that can comprehensively reduce the cost of disaster impacts, finance adaptive action and create new futural industries in areas like material recovery, independent living (affordable and less infrastructure-​dependent), provide self and home protective technologies, and deliver urban metrofitting and secure food production. Crucially, living in the more climatically challenging environments of the future will need not just more adaptive material conditions and means of sustainment, but people more able to adapt to unexpected and unwanted change, while being less dependent on commodities (as choice and ‘off the shelf’ solutions). Overarching all these remarks are the expected combined and ongoing costs of climate change-​related negative environmental impacts from extreme heat/​weather events, sea level rises resulting in cities being abandoned, the breakdown of agriculture systems and reduced food productivity/​security, resource conflicts and the management of huge numbers of displaced people. That these costs will almost certainly be beyond the means of many/​most governments will create a major political crisis and drive either chaos, the break-​up of nations or the creation of new modes of governance. (iv) Establish a new mode of settlement post the abandonment of the hot lands. There will be a relentless progression, as already touched on, to move communities, build new settlements and retro-​fit the existing ones. The faster the rate of change, the more populations will be and feel unsettled. The sense of things (cities, nations, institutions, industries) being permanent will decrease. Any sense that the kinds of circumstances rehearsed are incredible and distant is misplaced. While they are perhaps unlikely to unfold exactly in the ways sketched above, they will arrive in coming decades. This is said with some confidence because the events to bring them into being are already in process and visible. Global warming is not going to stop, the only questions are: at what level, and can the climate system be stabilised? Likewise, and with the same

188  Research agenda and researching research qualifications, sea levels are going to rise. Geopolitically, the more the changes arrive environmentally, economically and politically, the greater will be the instability. None of this is to say that in response to such prospects all that can be done is fatalistically resign to life in the end times and seek hedonistic distraction. Rather, the already identified politicisation of practices has to command imagination and investments of energy and spirit, as the path to the situated conditions, wherein a new political imagination can be formed and give rise to another politics built upon transformative practices. The opening into this prospect, as has been indicated, has to counter idealism and be based on a ground of relational thought and action bonded to freedom predicated upon sacrifice and redirection, remaking and a new creation of ‘world-​making’ practices (here again is the world-​within-​the-​world of our own creation re-​articulated with the bio-​physical world of life’s dependence). To do this is not just a pragmatic exercise: it is as much an intellectual challenge as it is a practical one. To come to such a recognition is to acknowledge that in the critical times in which we are all now, to abstract the advancement of knowledge from crisis (and the crisis of crises) and thereby stay in the sheltered workshop of de-​relational discipline (that the academy and its business model not only supports but polices) is an abrogation of responsibility. The intellectual challenge of helping to get to a future with a future in the defuturing world of the Anthropocene is greater than any other at any time. A dialogue to follow shortly will make this clear, but first, a brief reiterated qualification of unsettlement. An inter-​relational engagement Loss, unsettlement, habitus As indicated, a panoply of loss spreads out before us. The felt prospect and sense of its now speeding arrival is, and increasingly will, create an existential and psychological condition of unsettlement in an unsettled bio-​material environment in which the numbers of the physically unsettled ever grow, and will evermore do so. The disruption and destruction of many familiar relations of, and to, ideas, beliefs, values, and practices that accompany rapid technological change, enviro-​ climatic instability and geopolitical tensions make the future seem increasingly insecure. Learning to live with conditions of change results in the disappearance of much taken-​for-​granted knowledge. The result is the loss of the old habitus and the slow gaining of a new one. In turn, such change feeds a transformed sense of ‘reality’ that mostly unknowingly renders much of the epistemological basis of one’s way of knowing redundant. Existentially, the gap between the complexity sought to be understood and coped with and the actual complexity constantly widens. There is an increasing gap between: •​

the discourse of the governmental politics of the everyday and the global presence of biopolitics;

Research agenda and researching research  189 •​ •​

the familiar language of humanism and the rise of a discourse enfolding posthumanism (and the inhuman, the non-​human, and interspecies); the notion of technology as a tool under human control displaced by a recognition of it as an organic condition of our becoming.

These are a few examples of a complexity that unsettles not just those who become aware of the disjuncture between language and the world of habitation. Rather, the true and critical moment of unsettlement is when there is an existential encounter that exposes that the language by which reality is known does not correspond with the reality being experienced. Truth has died in this spacing, not just as the rise of the power of the lie, but as action committed to unknowing. A staged event A conversation in and on a borderland (a documented dialogue) between  TF/​MT Introduction:  The borderland seems to us to be a good example of a formative conceptual and political space in which new imaginaries and practices can emerge and become enacted. Yet in its arrival, especially in the discourse of decoloniality for which border thinking is a central category, it is being delimited. The theoretical annunciation of what needs to be subjected to decoloniality expands by the day. The notion of decoloniality as ‘a way, option, standpoint, analytic, project, practice and praxis’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, p.  4) has been stated and restated in many ways, by a number of voices, for a number of years. But somehow the political as a situated practice remains deferred, which is most evident in insufficient conceptualising of what the borderland actually is or might be as it is inescapably located in the defuturing maelstrom of the ‘crisis of crisis’ of the plural ‘now’. Here it is useful to mention that our understanding of the borderlands is different from, though at times intersecting with, many well-​known theories, discourses, and by now, institutionalised studies in which border acts as an organising trope. Examples include mostly semiotic conceptions of limitrophe civilisations (Lotman 1990) which tend to accentuate the temporal dimensions of border crossings; post-​ Foucauldian heterotopic variations divorcing the border from its concrete physical and historical circumstances (Foucault 1986); different border studies that grow out of transcultural spatiality such as the thriving sub-​discipline of estudios de la frontera that was launched in US–​Mexico anthropology to grow subsequently into a more global focus on migrations, diasporas and creolisation and, therefore, on border selves as increasingly widely spread and normalised displaced and unsettled subjectivities; border discourses that are grounded in the study of marginalism and transgression.

190  Research agenda and researching research Our take on borderlands rhymes with but is not identical to the best-​ known and often quoted formulation by Gloria Anzaldúa  –​La Frontera ([1987] 1999)  that was also a major source and inspiration for decolonial academics in their coining of border thinking. The subsequent shift itself from ‘borderlands’ to primarily ‘border thinking’ is significant as it reflects the predominant academic decolonial preoccupation with epistemology. Yet Anzaldúa’s borderland is a concrete and embodied manifestation of a political–​cultural situation of the colonial territorial expansion resulting in an unnatural boundary, and a subjectivity related to a specific geo-​historical and corpopolitical condition in which a Mestiza as a creolised border self (rather than a holistic self who is just crossing borders) becomes complexly and painfully yet ultimately fruitfully entangled with her habitat –​a cultural, political, ethical and linguistic frontier where the unhealing colonial wound persists (Anzaldúa 1999, p. 25). What we perhaps find insufficient is that in discussing the borderlands, most border thinkers focus exclusively on their own affects and identification issues reflecting their non-​belonging and ultimately, their ‘unhomed’ (Bhabha 1994, p.9) condition. Thus Anzaldúa’s home is ‘this thin edge of barbwire’ (p.  25), Chilean-​ American playwright Ariel Dorfman’s borderland is an imagined ‘bridge’ between the Global North and the South (Dorfman 2011), Anglo-​Caribbean Caryl Phillips (Phillips 2001) feels at home either in the airport or in the triangle between Europe, Africa and the New World. When these and many other ‘border subjects’ venture to look into the outer world they tend to see it as hostile and rejecting, and immediately start, following I. Prigozhin, inventing escapist border utopias of ‘morphogenesis’ (Anzaldúa [1987] 1999, p. 97) that could change the world and the people beyond recognition. These border worlds exist only in their imagination. We are far from dismissing such border metaphors or belittling their impact on people’s eventual mental decolonisation. Yet we do think that more effort should be spent on spelling out and implementing the idea of borderlands as a ‘tempolocal’, carefully nurtured environment of not only thinking or dreaming but also acting together to turn the borderlands (which historically and today are threatening to claim the whole world in its totality) into a territory of positive ontological designing –​human and other. We think that the political and cultural geometry of this moment is of a dis-​order beyond the ‘colonial matrix of power’ past and present. In a way we are past the stage where Franco-​Caribbean poet and thinker E. Glissant’s ‘chaos-​world’ could be interpreted positively and creatively not as a world in dis-​order but mostly a world of the unexpected which is difficult to accept because we fear the uncertain (Glissant 2011, p. 259). Glissant, as well as other border thinkers, is fixed in the moment when the Occidental thinking and hence, conquering the world, should have stopped because ‘today the world is realised, known, in its totality. In practice, the physical conquest of space is no longer possible. We no longer have the kind of legitimacy that Christopher

Research agenda and researching research  191 Columbus, for one, enjoyed’ (p. 259). But the world is in fact not known and cannot be known, not only in its imagined provisional physical characteristics but also in its processual enormous and drastic changes that the Occidental thinking was careless to trigger and cannot even start imagining how to effect. This complex challenge makes decolonial, Africana and indigenous readings of border thinking and borderlands a crucial yet insufficient optics. The ontological forces of the world-​making and un-​making have created a larger and more complex relational milieu for which our currently available descriptive categories are inadequate. This is very evident in ‘our’ inability to describe what we are to ourselves, as we become a fragmenting/​transforming species. Know it or not, there is nothing for us now that is not unsettled: thus unsettlement is arriving as the normative global existential state of being. So obviously, to realise the political potential of ‘the borderland’, its repositioning and strategic reconfiguration need to be considered and discussed. One of the approaches to doing this is unstaging staged borderland events. While learning from radical theatre practice (Badiou 2013, Puchner 2009) and having a theatrical performative dimension, such an unstaging does imply a certain kind of acting out of a politics of ‘encounter and exchange’ (in contrast to delivering ‘entertainment’). Initially this would mean a ‘staged’ (contrived) exchanged encounter between cultural groups who have a commonality (of political) interest in their conditions of difference that prompts an openness to unlearn, relearn and learn anew  –​all with the objective of constituting synthetic understandings to inform action of mutual benefit. However, such ‘staging’ would undermine its agency if idealised resolution were assumed and presented. Thus an acknowledgement of unresolved difference would always be present and named. In such a context futural common political interest would accommodate a history marked by, for example injustice –​there will always be elements of the unresolved/​irresolvable in borderland relations. To make this apparent, and available to be learned, negotiated and tolerated/​ accepted, what has been staged requires being unstaged through a deconstructive acting out (Fry 2019, pp. 267–​296).3 Thus the observers of what has been staged become participants in a process in which they are led to reflectively observe what they have seen (observed). Last words: a dialogue There have been many exchanges between us over the course of the production of this book. What we have tried to demonstrate is the imperative to publicly think about complex issues in ways that do not presume there is a definitive answer to state. But rather that there is an understanding to search for and work towards. Our final words make our dialogue explicit, and while contrived, honestly reflect what we think. They aim to prompt you to reflect upon your own view of what we have discussed, while also inviting you to return to all that has gone before this final exchange.

192  Research agenda and researching research T.F. Do you think like me that the borderland, geo-​culturally, epistemologically and politically, is continually being circumstantially de-​formed and re-​formed as a result of the transformation of the forces of its constitution? M.T. Indeed. As Renato Rosado once wrote, border zones ‘are always in motion, not frozen for inspection’ (Rosaldo 1989, p. 217). I would also add that it is much more important to try to grasp the trajectory of the changing meanings of interactions between these different elements and factors, rather than hoping to describe some imagined stable essence of each component. Easier said than done, but at least we should always keep this in mind. T.F. What should be also taken into account are the formative histories of difference of imposition: there is no one reducible ground zero of colonialism. Thus, the very language of analysis seems to flatten difference. Moreover, colonialism is changing in an age of ‘postcolonialism’ (from cultural imperialism, epistemological colonialism, to technological colonising universalism). M.T. I  believe that it is not even necessary (anymore, if it ever were) to firmly link borderlands with colonialism as border zones generating specific identifications do not just come to colonialism in its multiple and often incommensurable manifestations, and its aftermath. There are many more power asymmetries today whose logic is unsolvable through an imperial/​colonial lens, particularly when the forms of territorial colonialism are mutating beyond recognition, up to their complete transference into virtual forms. The decolonial coining of the term ‘decoloniality’ was precisely an attempt to shift from concrete different historical versions of colonialism and also from Occidentalist master narratives of modernity, globalisation and progress, to still find some binding categories, elements, features and tropes that could be traceable in spite of and in fact due to these differences. Such an epistemic operation or even optics was and is bound to be potentially straightening and simplifying the real complexity and entanglement of the world, inadvertently arresting it for inspection. This essentialist fallacy in decolonial thinking has been criticised time and again from different sides and decolonial thinkers are increasingly aware of it. But here we are stumbling against the well-​rehearsed dilemma of stand-​point/​particularist/​descriptive discourses and overarching generalising grand narratives. Navigating both pitfalls is an enormously difficult task. And I suspect that tackling it from within the academic bubble is just impossible. How do you suggest we can avoid the devil of the provincial particularist discourses and the deep blue sea of yet another edition of grand narratives explaining the world in its totality? T.F. The complexity of complexity constitutes a position of impossibility from which we think and write. We can never be in the right place at the right time. Overtaken now by history, new information and events, we ever glide between the universal that we recoil from and the particular that dislocates and excludes the relationality beyond it. Yet we have something to say that we believe can take thinking about a new political imagination forward and inform action so politicised.

Research agenda and researching research  193 On the borderland, I think it’s worth pointing out that it defies a definitive definition. Rather, it requires a specific address via local responses to the forces that constitute it in a situated conjuncture. To grasp this means that while understanding can advance by considering a number of general remarks that outline forces of change, specific knowledge is particular to context. M.T. Absolutely. To me this is the problem with institutionalised border studies of all sorts that tend to reproduce the Euromodern epistemic operation that they often criticise, i.e. the operation of masking their own particularity under the guise of some neo-​universal thinking or approach. Moreover, such studies often operate with a limited set of ‘sins’ in specific configurations that were in fact typical for their original border zones, such as racism, hetero-​ patriarchy, xenophobia of different kinds, etc. that they assume is to be found everywhere on earth in precisely the combination they are familiar with. This, once again, can potentially flatten and oversimplify their conclusions. Starting from a local situation and collaborating on equal terms with local voices and actors sounds like a better approach, but it would mean changing dramatically the whole system of knowledge production as well as agency. How do you think it could be started? I have a feeling that it would start in the local communities themselves and not among the high-​brow desk-​top critical thinkers, and most importantly, in a different dynamics from what there is now. T.F. While still formative, autonomous design practice provides a path into working in border zones that constitutes borderland practices. What it does is to understand that local need is not self-​evident or necessarily consensual but requires the local ‘community’ to draw it out of its social ecology and be critically assessed during the process. Likewise, local knowledge and expertise again require to be discovered and disclosed by situated action that enables identification by observation informed by a communally formed critical sensibility. External expertise does not arrive with knowledge to impose, but with the ability to facilitate in a wider environment of mutual learning. Community cannot be assumed: it is part of what has to be created –​this in a situation of mutual exchange in which there is a potential for a borderland to be formed. Such an approach to design is not ‘co-​design’ but a redistribution of design power (there is a direct correlation between the exercise of power and the power to design). Moreover, it seems to me that the striking thing about the decoloniality agenda is that it is the product of global cosmopolitan elites in the absence of any input from, and associated understanding by, the intellectual strata of the former colonialised nations that I/​we are familiar with. These elites in such nations are of course themselves not the norm. Dominantly, the ongoing agenda in these nations by its internal critics is on decolonisation and recolonisation by external culture and/​or a neocolonial internal elite. This is to say ‘development’ still remains seen as the path to ‘progress’ and the future (cultural globalisation has thus met widespread resistance, while economic globalisation/​modernity continues to be embraced).

194  Research agenda and researching research M.T. I think the situation is even more complex in the sense that within the decolonial collective itself there is an untold hierarchy of those who made it to the top US universities and those who stayed in their postcolonial countries, in this case, obviously, in Latin America. The former are not necessarily acting as appropriators of the latter’s ideas but by virtue of their established positionality, they act as translators and mediators of decolonial thought in the global academic discourse where, in their turn, their ideas are hijacked and de-​politicised by mainstream theorists. The accusations of the global decolonial elite of intellectual appropriation are also constantly heard from various indigenous and grassroots decolonial initiatives who often tend to confuse their own local and situated struggles for the land rights or other such specific issues with decoloniality that is different precisely because it is cosmopolitan and, like it or not, largely informed by Euromodern education (even while denouncing it). On top of this it should be mentioned that the decolonially informed layer is very thin in the postcolonial countries and indeed, as you say, the majority of local intellectuals there are still operating within some versions of developmentalism and outdated (in decolonial terms) decolonisation. Walter Mignolo addressed this discrepancy through his notion of dewesternisation (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, pp. 128–​130). Many former colonies, particularly those with considerable economic growth and influence, are indeed trying to selectively accept ‘positive’ elements of modernity such as technologies, progress, and development, while condemning (neo)colonialism and dependency and attempting to keep their cultural values and freedoms protected from the ‘bad’ western influence. But if Mignolo (judging mostly by the foreign policies of dewesternising nations and doing it from the US) tends to celebrate the fact that dewesternisers are claiming their place in the polycentric world refusing to obey the western orders or prescribed political ideals, I  have been more sceptical of this tendency from the start as it ultimately ignores real lives for the sake of imagined geopolitical advantages. The lives of common people in dewesternising countries are very far from questions of global power asymmetries and it is these people who experience the excesses of neoliberal capitalism combined with fundamentalist revivals in social relations that make their lives miserable. Besides, dewesternisation is provincial and selfish in relation to the rest of the world. In fact it replicates a group identity politics on the scale of whole countries. Yet exercising one’s rights to equal participation in the destruction of the environment on the grounds that one could not do it as a colonial nation and now needs to grow is rather short-​sighted as we are all on the same planet. Finally, I do think that in postcolonial nations decolonial impulses should come from within and not from the decolonial gurus blessed by the Western universities. T.F. Following on from that, I  would add a remark on the disjunctive time of subaltern shadow-​modernity. Here is a modernity out of time, where the old of the West arrives as ‘the new and done bigger’ excess in nations, enframed by the colonial experience and devoid of a trace of the culture in

Research agenda and researching research  195 which it is being ‘deposited’. The semiotics of the statement is completely counter to its intent. Rather than saying ‘we are a modern among moderns’, it says ‘we desire recognition as being modern’ –​albeit ‘the people, the vast majority who are poor’ are not beneficiaries of modernity, and are in fact paying the price for the excesses of the nation’s leaders. The vast and environmentally irresponsible new desert capital of Egypt is a very clear example of modernity out of time.4 It also should be added that, for the indigenous population, their culture continues to be appropriated in the formation of the semiotics of a national culture while they remain mostly powerless, epistemologically under-​or not valued and, as the most disadvantaged, the most exposed to economic hardship in nations under economic stress, climate change and other environmental impacts, and to the racism coming from the growth in the number of authoritarian regimes and groups in the world. Against this backdrop, one has to also recoil from the romanticism that celebrated the often ‘life sustaining’ character of their knowledge and culture. It follows that their participation in the borderland must acknowledge and address their plight in terms of a new politics of equity, social justice and spatial justice. M.T. Interestingly enough, this romanticising of indigenous people is generally to be found among those who know very little about them or among those who use the indigenous models as their epistemic or political capital. The first is definitely typical of some academics. And the second is curiously to be found in the intellectual and political elites of the indigenous people themselves. I know this very well from my own experience as an indigenous (Circassian/​Adyghe) person. In any case, it is clear that indigenous people today cannot exist in some eternal paradise of pre-​ modern/​ pre-​ colonial world allowed to keep their value systems and cosmologies intact. Tracing and reclaiming the traumatic trajectories  –​in history and today  –​is a crucial task for indigenous inquiry and, most importantly, continuing indigenous struggle and revamped agency. Moreover, the necessity of existing for centuries under the imposed conditions of colonialism and subsequently being erased, eliminated, exploited and assimilated by force has continuously negatively impacted the life philosophies of indigenous people. In order to survive they often had and have to sacrifice their onto-​ethical principles, which leads to a double consciousness combining a self-​hatred and sense of guilt in relation to indigenous culture, and a feeling of rejection in the space of larger national culture. Generally, the indigenous histories are so tightly inter-​woven with modernity at this point that it is extremely difficult to untie this knot, especially since there is no such a thing as an ideal pure indigenous cosmology (if it ever existed). Besides, any efforts at decolonial re-​emergences –​including the concrete social-​economic models and not just political slogans –​are met with hostility by the nation-​state. T.F. To me the academicism and reform within cultures of domination (of neocolonial and national ‘postcolonial’ elites) do not seem to be offset by a politics of, and directed at, conjunctural borderland creation and exchange

196  Research agenda and researching research wherein a praxis of decoloniality can arrive. This is to say:  there is a clear gap between the rhetoric and ambitions of the voices of decoloniality and its realisation in practice (which includes a making, as well as an adoption of a practice). M.T. This is a very frequent critique of decolonialists. This is why, it seems to me, decolonial thinkers often stress that their main sphere is epistemology –​decoloniality of thinking and knowledge, whereas practical outcomes of this shift are a matter of choice for the people themselves whose minds are decolonised. That is why in decolonial parlance we find ‘border thinking’ and not so much ‘borderlands’. At the same time, decolonial thinkers have had and continue to have links with social movements and political society, the most obvious examples being Mexican Zapatistas, Ecuadorian and Bolivian indigenous movements and Afro-​Brazilian groups. Yet the nature of these encounters is rather sporadic and comes basically to periodic meetings and discussions but seldom to any concrete projects with real, materially tangible results or systematic shared struggles for any agendas. I certainly agree that this is not good. But leaving this vicious circle is a difficult task because the role of the academics in contemporary universities can hardly be combined with the role of active actors in any collaborative changing agency. So, primarily it is an ethical and political choice which is made individually. While the majority of critical thinkers (decolonial or not) remain the slaves of the neoliberal university and system at large there will be no palpable movement in the direction of praxis. T.F. Newton’s third law of motion states: ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’. Transposed to the political domain of colonialism one could say that, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction –​thus decolonialism produces recolonialism (as seen in the post-​geographic epistemological colonialism, globalism and techno-​colonisation), so decoloniality produces recoloniality. To recognise this is to grasp that political activism is not situated in the elsewhere but in the place and agenda of ‘the here’. In its double movement it travels over the future form of the academy, and how and to where political understanding of ‘the now’ is carried by knowledge that is futural. Disciplinary disobedience thus becomes complemented by post-​disciplinary activism. By implication, this means that politicised ‘critical thinkers’ in neoliberal universities (who cannot be so without being alienated from the institution), have to bring the notion of ‘delinking’ to themselves, and redirect their intellectual labour to a counter-​project of unlearning and relearning: individual and collective. In my view, to act in an increasingly insecure world as if security is possible is a romantic delusion, as is to work to become a change agent while expecting career rewards. More specifically, it seems to me that a double movement of epistemological negation also needs acknowledgement (failing to recognise that the other has an epistemology which by degree the discourse of decoloniality recognises and addresses). Decolonial thinking, from what I know, is failing to recognise the relational exclusions of epistemologies that could advance/​enhance the

Research agenda and researching research  197 political agency of decoloniality itself. There are few engagements with technology, a few more with science, hardly anything with conflict, apart from a few reflections in Maldonado-​Torres’ Against War (2008). What is clear to me is that the engagement with politics looks thin and potentially needs development and correction. The impression is of a discourse becoming dogma with a policing of difference. Put most starkly, the combined defuturing forces of the Anthropocene demand a relational politics –​hence our argument for a new political imagination. In this respect a politics of decoloniality looks like an attempt to hang onto the old rather than move towards remaking it as part of the new. M.T. I  think that this situation is largely connected with, once again, a selective and at time cautious attitude to decolonial goals and also the areas of knowledge which decolonial thinkers are ready to tackle. An open political agency has not yet been included into a number of decolonial priorities, as well as conceptualising politics as such, although there are notable exceptions such as Dussel’s Twenty Theses on Politics (Dussel 2008) and several other works (although they are not necessarily adequate for the contemporary situation and, at times, indeed a bit stuck in some idea of the world that is already a thing of the past. It will be interesting to see if and how Walter Mignolo addresses these issues in his forthcoming manifesto of decolonial political theory (Mignolo, forthcoming), which is indirectly linked with a certain exhaustion of the decolonial agenda. Besides, decoloniality insists on its radical delinking from Euromodern authorities and agendas rather opting for those issues that are important and interesting for the ‘wretched of the Earth’. There is nothing wrong with this selectivity except that in today’s situation of the complex crises that we have attempted to discuss in this book, it is no longer acceptable to stay inside the carefully constructed decolonial bubble, not listening to anyone outside it. Dismissing other critical discourses is easier than engaging with them. But for that it is necessary to transfer one’s notions of relationality and the integrity of the world from the imagined deontological space of idealised indigenous cosmologies to the messy and complex world of here and now. As for the danger of dogmatisation, unfortunately it always lies in wait of any discourse. And no matter how firmly decolonial thinkers insist on the premise that none of them owns decoloniality, still such Euromodern tools as academic recognition, the publishing system, employment, etc. are highly dependent on how the boundaries of decoloniality are defined by its major figures. As far as I  can see, the line of acceptance and rejection now is drawn on the disciplinary formats and selection of subjects for one’s inquiry. In other words, a truly decolonial thinker is expected to publically denounce the previous disciplinary frames and make decoloniality not just another optic (even if central) or replacement of method, but in fact the main and only subject of research. For example one is expected to write a book which is not on anthropology with a decolonial bent, but is entirely on decoloniality of human beings, thus bypassing anthropology as a discipline.

198  Research agenda and researching research This works wonderfully as a radical promise, yet quickly deflates because having decolonised various elements of being; the researcher is bound to ask a question: what to do next? Repeating the same conceptual postulates with new examples is hardly enough. T.F. Another thing we cannot forget is the recent history and the changing web of power (geopolitical fragmentation/​conflict and displacement/​environmental disaster and displacement/​neo-​authoritarianism in Eastern Europe and Latin America among other places/​the arrival of late-​modern Chinese colonialism/​and other factors). One could say that the oppressed have been pluriversalised. If so, how now can liberation be thought? Can an approach still be learnt from Paulo Freire (a new literacy of the text of the world, with a learning that discloses those practices that have structured the power which constituted this world, establishing ontological and existential grasp of the political)? M.T. Moreover, the oppressed of the old and new kinds turned out to be not ready or willing to advance some dialogue among each other. The predominant trope among the oppressed remains that of victimhood rivalry and guarding the borders of their own unique otherness instead. Deep coalitions maintaining differences of different others that are still sharing some larger agendas, for which María Lugones opted some time ago, for me is still a viable idea (Lugones 2003, p. 98). But it, once again, needs a practical implementation which is not easy to do. Especially since agendas that can be shared by pluriversalised others are also hard to grasp, verbalise, and communicate to other others to be discussed and negotiated.

A final note on resistance One of the most interesting things about the borderland as space of dialogue, cultural exchange and potential synthesis is that it breaks the binary of resistance and its one-​way vector. It thus recognises that liberation has to travel in both directions. Decolonial, indigenous, Africana and other non-​western critical thinkers are not interested in this reciprocal movement, in what the homogenised privileged group in all its real diversity has to say. Although this standpoint positioning is justified through power asymmetries, it still leads to a dead-​end of a sort. Another important feature of borderland is that its form structurally acknowledges that exchange commences with an engagement of epistemologies, their difference and commonalities. The borderland does not have a fixed scale, or predetermined agenda. It does not come to one common denominator or one positionality  –​be it minoritarian or majoritarian, and hence, it does not impose its view onto the rest of the world yet also does not rejoice in its indifference to this world. Recognition of the borderland does not necessarily follow after a discussion of decoloniality; rather it begs to be also seen as the primary location of reflection and conversation. As such, it is a finding/​witnessing of being placed

Research agenda and researching research  199 in-​between where what is already known is discovered (via the word, spoken or read). Here then is an opening into a practice centred on ‘event(s)’. Efficacious action is indivisible and dependent from learning –​this leading to a pedagogy of/​in the borderlands and a politics of actualised materialised ‘epistemological disobedience’. That the pluriverse speaks of multiple worlds and cosmologies is significant. But the perspectives seem to be too horizontal in ‘a reality’ where vertically worlds are forming, deforming, reforming, expanding, contracting, thriving and dying. It is important to keep the balance between rehabilitating spatiality and delinking from vectoral progressivist temporality in favour of local histories and locales in history. T.F. Finally, where have we left the absolute importance of relationality as the re-​ordering principle of knowledge? For me unlearning an induction into a discipline, and then learning how to organically connect with what one learns, does deliver that ontological shift upon which taking relationality into ownership depends. Of itself this shift cannot deliver the ability to imagine otherwise, but it can provide the ungrounding, the confrontation with the abyss, the collusion between interiority and the exterior, that opens the possibility. Taken to the political, as we have bonded it to practice, I see the union between relational thought, imagination and the political as absolutely essential ‘to take to ground’ if in our difference ‘we’ are to stand any chance of making conditions of sustainment and in so doing becoming futural. M.T. I can only reiterate that after a too long period of nonsense fragmentation and divorcing thinking from acting, relational thought, imagination and politics should be indeed reunited for the world to have at least a promise for a future. And this potential change to some extent still depends on our collective readiness to think and act otherwise.

Notes 1 The Siberian fires of the summer of 2019 which, according to Russian official sources came to 4.3  million hectares (Federal Forestry Agency 2019), while according to Greenpeace totalled as much as 5.4  million hectares (Greenpeace 2019), have received rather modest attention in the international media due to a number of well-​known reasons. The most obvious one is geopolitics, according to which anything that happens outside the Global North or its former and present colonial acquisitions is regarded as a non-​zone or a zone of non-​being and therefore irrelevant. For an ordinary person outside Russia this is exactly how Siberia is seen. And this is why it becomes possible to take it outside of the general contemporary notions of the presumably interconnected world and the immediate zone of influence on climate change, on the economy and on the future, as if Siberia were on a different planet. This is yet another manifestation of the defunct politics, for even if we were not to worry about the extinction of rare and endangered animal species and enormous age-​old evergreen forests of Siberian trees (dozens of indigenous nations of Siberia being long extinct or forcibly assimilated), the smoke in the summer of 2019 covered not only a larger Northeastern part of Russia, causing

200  Research agenda and researching research mass deaths and illnesses in the already ecologically disastrous big industrial cities, but also covered Mongolia, parts of China and several other Asian countries, reaching also to the US and Canada. A more dangerous and far-​reaching global consequence of the Siberian fires is the massive accumulation of ashes on the Arctic ice, causing it to melt many times faster, and a rapid acceleration in the thawing of the Greenland ice-​sheet. In part, the indifference of the world in relation to the Siberian fires was a result of normalised anthropocentrism, according to which a burning forest is not as important as the burning of man-​made objects and constructions. As the Siberian fires were burning in the areas where the density of population is the lowest and this was precisely why these fires started to be fought with very late (in Russia some time ago a new law has rapidly enlarged the so-​called control zones, i.e. territories with no inhabitants where extinguishing fires is considered economically inefficient). Finally, if in the case of Australia we can at least discuss the issues of inefficient government, the failing democratic institutions, etc., the Russian neglect of nature and people’s lives accepted on an almost judicial level has long ceased to be news to anyone and therefore does not even get to the top news in the media. In 2019 what was truly different and somewhat promising was that many autonomous independent local communities and national seeds of social movements in defence of the Siberian forests and their inhabitants –​human and other –​have emerged and gathered their efforts with some success, which has never happened before on such a scale. 2 In this sense many Russian politicians and scientists promote positive outcomes of the climate change for one country –​their own, unable to grasp the impossibility of solving the global issues at a nation-​state level. Thus, they welcome the fact that global warming will cause climate change in the territories that before were not suitable for agriculture such as Siberia or the Far North, and therefore will lead to their economic growth. A similar positive prognosis was offered in the discussions of the sea level rise as Siberia, once again, is mostly upland and therefore, according to these insane autarchic predictions, will not perish under the water (Davies 2019). 3 Most problematic in this setting is that recolonisation is always in process even in the very act of decoloniality (here then is a ‘riss’ (German for tear) that while ignored is an agent of autodestruction). 4 With an overall budget of $300 billion it will be the biggest new capital ever built. The first phase, costing $45 billion ($20 billion coming from China) is underway. The high-​rise city will have planted park lands twice the size of Central Park in New York (this in a desert city where all water has to be pumped in) (Michaelson 2018).

References Anzaldúa, G., [1987] 1999. Borderlands/​La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Badiou, A., 2005. Metapolitics. London: Verso. Badiou, A., 2007. The event in Deleuze. Parrhesia 2, 7–​44. Badiou, A., 2013. On theatre and philosophy. Lecture at the University of California, Los Angles. Lara Turner Journal [online], 9 December. Available at:  http://​ laraturnaljournal.com/​7/​ alian-​badiou-​on-​theatre-​and-​philosophy [Accessed 28 August 2017].

Research agenda and researching research  201 Bhabha, H., 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Davies, S., 2019. Could climate change make Siberia more habitable? IOP Publishing [online], 7 June. Available from:  https://​ioppublishing.org/​news/​could-​climate-​ change-​make-​siberia-​more-​habitable/​ [Accessed 11 January 2020]. Dorfman, A., 2011. Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Dussel, E., 2008. Twenty Theses on Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Federal Forestry Agency of the Russian Federation, 2019. Information on the quantity and area of forest fires, open data section [online], 5 June 2019. Available from:  http://​rosleshoz.gov.ru/​opendata/​7705598840-​RegisterForestFires [Accessed 11 January 2020]. Greenpeace, 2019. 2019 can become a record year in the forest fire area [online], 20 August. Available from:  https://​greenpeace.ru/​news/​2019/​08/​12/​2019-​god-​mozhet-​ stat-​rekordnym-​po-​ploshhadi-​lesnyh-​pozharov/​ [Accessed 10 January 2020]. Foucault, M., 1986. Of other spaces. Diacritics 16.1 (Spring), 22–​77. Fry, T., 2019. Unstaging War, Confronting Conflict and Peace. London: Palgrave. Glissant, E., 2011. Europe and the Antilles. In: Lionnet, F., and Shih, S.-​m., eds. The Creolization of Theory. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 255–​261. Heidegger, M., 2013. The Event. Trans. Rojcewicz, R. Bloomington:  Indiana University Press. Herbst, T., 2006. Interview with Beatriz Preciado. Queertheorist. Paris/​Princeton. www.google.com/​search?q=cache:f0aARXpKm88J:www. assembly-​international. net/​ interviewz/​Interview-​Beatriz%2520Preciado.ht m+interview+with+B%C3%A 9atriz+Preciado&hl=ru&gl=ru&ct=clnk&c d=1 [Accessed 25 October 2010]. Lotman, Y., 1990. Universe of the Mind:  A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Trans. Shukman, A. London & New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. Lugones, M., 2003. Peregrinajes/​Pilgrimages:  Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Press. Maldonado-​Torres, N., 2008. Against War. Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Michaelson, R., 2018. ‘Cairo has started to become ugly’:  “hy Egypt is building a new capital city. The Guardian [online], 8 May. Available from: www.theguardian. com/​cities/​2018/​may/​08/​cairo-​why-​egypt-​build-​new-​capital-​city-​desert [Accessed 12 August 2018]. Mignolo, W., (forthcoming). Decolonial Political Theory. A Manifesto. Mignolo, W. and Walsh, C., 2018. On Decoloniality. Durham: Duke University Press. Phillips, C., 2001. A New World Order: Selected Essays. London: Secker & Warburg. Puchner, M., 2009. The Theatre of Alain Badiou. Theatre Research International 34.3, October, 256–​266, doi.10.1017/​S0307883309990058 Rosaldo, R.,1989. Culture and Truth. The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Vaughan, A, 2019. IPCC report:  Sea levels could be a metre higher by 2100. New Scientist [online], 25 September. Available from:  www.newscientist.com/​article/​ 2217611-​ipcc-​report-​sea-​levels-​could-​be-​a-​metre-​higher-​by-​2100/​ [Accessed 17 December 2019].

Index

abandonment 18, 23, 32, 41, 57, 58, 60, 67, 72, 82, 187 Abbasov, N. 169, 176 Abu-​Lughod, L. 157, 176 academia, xvii, xxi, 27, 120 Acocella, I. 102, 123 aesthetics, 48, 66, 87, 91, 103, 128, 147, 160–​2, 164, 165, 169, 175–​7; counter-​  91 aeternitas 25 aggression 32, 40, 43, 52, 64 Albán Achinte, A. 63, 124, 164, 175 al-​Qaeda  105 Ames, R. 30, 35 Anderson, B. 26, 35 Agamben, G. 9, 15, 77 animal ix, xvi, 25, 35, 48, 60, 68, 74, 78, 79, 83, 89, 129, 139, 178, 187, 199 animality 48, 60, 74, 89, 139 animism 114, 124 anthropogenic 24, 56, 64, 186 anthropology iii, 54, 59, 124, 127, 179, 189, 197 anthropocene viii, x, xi, xii, xviii, xxi, 14, 18, 33, 36, 37, 46, 58, 59, 92, 100, 129, 130, 148, 188, 197 anthropocentric/​anthropocentrism, xvi, xxi, 14, 19, 33, 47, 57, 60, 76, 77, 81, 98, 121, 142, 150, 172, 175, 200 anthropos 80, 81, 129 anti-​semitic  102 Anzaldúa, G. 100, 129, 190, 200 Appadurai, A. 69, 70, 124 Aral Sea Foundation, 176 architecture, 84, 92, 103, 130, 158, 168 Arctic, 50, 124, 200 Arendt, H. 9, 29, 36, 43, 45, 88, 124 Aristotle, xvi, xxii, 25, 65, 83, 112, 113, 133, 157

Aron, R. 110 Asbridge, T. 104, 124 autonomic 90 autonomy 28, 65, 99, 170 autopoiesis 34, 84, 115, 131 Axe, D. 124 Bachelard, G. 61, 124 Barad, K. 99, 100, 124 Barthélemy, J-​H. 84, 86, 124 Bateson, G. 23, 35, 55 Bataille, G. 59, 110–​12, 124, 129 Bauman, Z. 9, 16, 88, 124 Benjamin, A. 29, 30, 35 Benjamin, W. 25, 35, 86 Benson, O. 158, 176 Berger, P. L. 83, 124 Beynon, H. 144, 153 Bhabha, H. 190, 201 big data 12, 91, 92 Bildung 109; Neu-​ 109 biological/​biology 14, 30, 34, 55, 64, 73–​6, 84, 85, 100, 114, 115, 127, 128, 172, 177, 179 biodiversity ix, xii, 14, 24, 32, 48, 49, 58, 64, 65, 172, 173, 180 bios 78 biosphere 30, 64, 139, 152 Bird-​David, N. 114, 124, 168 borderland(s) xviii, 90, 93, 94, 139, 152, 166, 177, 181, 190–​2, 196 border thinking 30, 113–​15, 120, 128, 189 Borges, J. L. 93, 94, 112, 113, 124 Borren, M. 43, 124 Bos, P. B. 72, 124, 160 Boucher, M-​P. 83, 124 Bourriaud, N. 158, 159, 162, 176

Index  203 Braidotti, R. 28, 35, 73, 76–​9, 81, 98, 99, 124 breakdown xiv, xv, 37, 57, 63, 85, 89, 90, 132, 189, 187 Broeck, S. 77–​9, 124 Broncano, F. 155 Brooks, D. 160, 176 Brown, W. 32, 35 Buddhism 30; pratitya-​samutpada  3 buen vivir 68, 130 Buschke, B. 123, 124 Butler, J. 77 Canguillhem, G. 84, 125 Capitalocene, 100 Care 48, 86, 90, 91, 134 Carr, B. 78, 125 Carroll, R. 52, 125 Castro-​Gómez, S. 95, 113, 125 Catholicism 101, 103, 104, 123, 126 Ceballos, G. 48, 125 Cesaire, A. 78, 125 Chatterjee, P. 6, 16, 24, 35 Chomsky, N. 177, 125 Christianity 8, 101–​6, 136, 157, 190 chronophobia 25–​7, 32, 56, 57, 61 chronos 25 chthulucenic see dystopia Clastres, P. 64, 125 climate change x–​xii, xvii, 14, 18, 20, 22–​4, 32, 35, 37, 38, 48–​51, 55–​60, 63, 65, 75, 86, 125, 126, 129, 136, 172, 173, 178, 180, 183–​7, 195, 199, 200, 201; sea level rise xi, xii, 18, 57, 58, 128, 185, 187, 188, 200 Clunas, C. 83, 125 Cockburn, A. 105, 125 Colebrook, C. 60, 125 Cold War see war colonial/​coloniality/​colonialism xvii, xxi, 21, 25, 31, 43, 44, 45, 51, 66–​8, 75–​7, 82, 91, 100, 101, 104, 107, 114, 116, 118–​20, 126, 128–​31, 134, 143, 165–​7, 169, 177, 180, 190, 192–​9; neo-​ 85; post-​ 40, 162 Congo conference 31, 51 Coordination of Anarchists 7, 16 complexity ix–​xiv, xvii–​xxi, 1, 10, 13, 18–​20, 29, 30, 34, 37, 46, 62, 91, 93, 109, 115, 137–​9, 147, 149, 152, 155, 156, 163, 172, 173, 181, 185, 188, 189, 192 communism/​communist bloc  31, 50

constructivism 95, 99 Coronil, F. 171, 176 correlative thinking 30 cosmology/​cosmologies 8, 28, 30, 68, 74, 75, 81, 84, 85, 89, 99, 100, 120, 121, 139, 143, 147, 149, 161, 163, 165, 166, 171, 176, 195, 197, 199 cosmopolitan(ism), 16, 35, 68–​70, 124, 129, 193, 194 cosmopolis 69 creation xv, 19, 31, 56, 60, 62, 75, 82, 85, 89, 92, 115, 126, 132, 139, 147, 150–​3, 156, 157, 174, 180, 182, 186–​8, 195 crisis ix–​xxi, 7, 8, 10–​22, 26, 27, 44, 58, 63, 64, 71, 82, 90, 91, 108, 109, 117, 136, 147, 150, 155, 160, 172–​6, 183–​9 Crusades 103–​5, 123, 124 cybernetics 73, 74, 88, 115, 127, 138, 149 cyborg 74, 127 D’Alisa, J. 67, 127 Dabashi, H. 146, 153 Dallmayr, F. 4, 16, 30, 36, 62, 125 Darwin, C. 59, 62, 81 Davies, C. 52, 125 Davies, D. 200, 201 Daurov, K. 169, 176 de Beistegui, M. 142, 143, 153 de Boever, A. 91, 124, 125, 154 de Saint Laurent, C. 155, 176 decoloniality iii, xvii, 17, 34, 38, 59, 60, 63–​5, 130, 137, 152, 166, 181, 189, 192–​4, 196–​8, 200, 201 decolonising 118, 129, 168, 169 defutured/​defuturing ix, x, xiii–​xv, 14, 19–​21, 25, 26, 32, 34, 46, 48, 61, 64, 67, 85, 86, 92, 132, 134–​6, 149, 150, 170, 173, 182, 183, 188, 189, 197 Deleuze, G. 76, 96, 97, 125, 126, 159, 176, 181, 200 delink/​delinking xv, 17, 27, 33, 41, 59, 76, 79, 82, 120, 164, 165, 167, 196, 197, 199 deontology/​deontologisation, 98, 197 Demaria, J. D. 67, 127 democracy/​democratic i, iii, 2–​17, 21, 36, 39, 43, 44, 120, 129, 134, 150, 159, 162, 166, 172, 176, 185 Derrida, J. 111, 112, 117, 125 Desmarias, A. 120, 125 design vi, viii, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, 2, 14, 16, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 54, 56, 58, 60, 67, 74, 76, 84–​93, 104, 106–​109,

204 Index 118, 121–​6, 130, 139, 140, 143, 146, 149, 151–​3, 157–​9, 166–​70, 176, 181, 190, 193 development viii, xx, 26, 28, 31, 32, 34, 39, 46–​9, 57, 66–​8, 76, 80, 83, 85, 137, 142, 145, 152, 154, 157–​9, 169, 175, 182, 186, 194; un-​development  66, 67 deworlding 46, 47 Dirzo, R. 48, 125 displacement x, xii, xix, 22, 23, 49, 51, 57, 58, 137, 173, 180, 198 Doherty, B. 43, 125 Dreyfus, H. 150, 153 Du Bois, W. B. 76, 100, 124, 125 dual state x, 3–​9, 11, 13, 16, 17, 21, 26, 32, 37, 38, 40, 59, 65, 73, 85, 117, 123, 130, 132, 132–​4, 136, 137, 141, 143, 145, 153, 180, 196 Dussel, E. 63, 125, 158, 176, 179, 197, 201 dwelling 46, 48, 56 Dyer, G. 50, 56, 125 dystopia 22, 24, 33, 34, 41, 74, 89, 120; chthulucenic 35, 74, 100, 127 ecology 55, 56, 60, 77, 89, 120, 148, 149, 187; image 23; informational 91; of mind 35, 55; social, 143, 144, 147, 193 economic/​economy iii, ix–​xii, xiv, xvi, xxi, 3–​6, 12, 18, 23–​7, 32, 43, 36, 39–​41, 44, 47–​9, 54, 58, 65–​8, 71–​3, 77, 80, 87, 88, 90, 93, 109, 111, 121, 133–​7, 139, 142, 147, 150, 152, 154, 157–​60, 165, 169–​72, 174, 176, 187, 188, 193–​5, 199, 200 Ehrlich, P. 48, 125 Eisenhower, D. 104 el-​Wakil, A.  10, 16 Elull, J. 83 end of history 21, 35 enframing (gestell) 109, 138–​40, 153, 194 Enlightenment xiii, 68, 94–​6, 110, 117, 175 enviro-​climatic xiii, xxi, 97, 188 epistemology iii, xi, xiii, xvii, 14, 15, 20, 27, 29, 30, 34, 37, 47, 54, 57, 59–​64, 66, 73, 84, 87–​9, 91, 93–​6, 99, 100, 109–​15, 118, 123, 124, 129, 137, 147–​9, 152, 163, 172, 173, 179–​82, 185, 188, 190, 192, 195, 196, 198, 199 Escobar, A. 30, 35, 68, 125, 151, 153, 170, 176 empiricism 75, 84, 95

ethics/​ethical xiv, xxi, 4, 29, 35, 40, 42, 43, 45, 53, 63, 65, 75, 77, 85, 91, 95, 99, 122, 125, 133, 144, 186, 190, 195, 196 Euromodernity see modernity Evans, P. 8, 16 extreme weather 18, 54, 183, 187 Eze, M. O. 30, 35 FARC 67, 135 Fagan, B. 56, 126 Fanon, F. 43, 79, 81, 100, 107, 114, 126, 130 Farias, V. 141 Fearon, J. 70, 126 feminism 16, 77, 99, 127, 128 Ferry, L. A. 80, 126 Filkins, D, 8, 16 First World War see war Fitzgerald, J. D. 158, 176 Ford, H. 143 food security 172, 185, 187 Foucault, M. iv, 62, 91, 189, 201 Fox, B. J. 36, 123, 126 Fraenkel, E. 8, 16 Franklin, S. 76, 126 freedom xii, xv, 4, 6, 11, 12, 21, 40, 42, 46, 62, 66, 72, 103, 104, 110, 117, 124, 125, 130, 131, 134, 152, 165, 188, 194 Freire, P. 120, 126, 198 Fry, T. 3, 16, 22, 25, 30, 35, 40, 64, 82, 91, 109, 117, 121, 126, 130, 138, 153, 191, 201 futures ix, xxi, 15, 21, 22, 35, 46–​8, 52, 61, 76, 83, 90, 106, 122, 132, 136, 149, 150, 179, 182 Fukuyama, F. 21, 35, 73, 126 Galič, M. 40, 126 Gaitana project 67 geopolitical xii, xvii, 14, 32, 38, 45, 58, 66, 69–​71, 73, 90, 93, 100, 102, 166, 172, 188, 194, 198 Ghosh, A. 58, 126 Glissant, E. 113, 126, 190, 201 globalisation 5, 21, 38, 39, 49, 69, 85, 109, 135, 137, 146, 147, 149, 192, 193 Global North, xxi, 43, 45, 51, 52, 60, 66, 71–​3, 78, 88, 92, 97, 100, 104, 111, 136, 137, 149, 152, 166, 168, 170, 171, 186, 190, 199, 200

Index  205 Global South xxi, 30, 41, 43, 45, 51, 60, 66, 71, 72, 91, 92, 100, 101, 118, 128, 136, 137, 152, 160, 164–​7, 171, 175, 184, 190 Goethe, J. W, von 144 Golomstock, I. 103, 126 Gordon, L. R. 20, 35, 40, 43, 46, 78, 81, 95, 96, 126, 127 Gordon, J. A. 20, 35, 40, 43 Gramsci, A. 146, 148, 153 Greek, Ancient xvi, 1, 19, 71, 140, 157 Greenpeace, 199n1, 201 Grey, A. 74, 127 Grey, G. J. 154 Grincheva, N. 90, 127 Grossraum 38, 70 Guattari, F. 55, 60, 127, 159, 176 Habermas, J. xvi, xxii, 73, 127 habitus xiii, 62, 63, 88, 133, 121, 127, 188 Haken, H. 28, 35 Hall, D. 30, 35 Hallum, A. H. 48, 127 Hardt, M. 162, 176 Harman, G. 139, 153, 154 Haraway, D. 28, 33, 36, 74, 99, 100, 127 Hayles, N. K. 44, 74, 127 Hegel, G. W. F. 20, 35, 64, 101, 110–​2, 127, 128, 135, 161 Heidegger, M. xii, xiv, xvii, xxii, 25, 28, 29, 35, 83, 91, 96, 106–​9, 125, 129, 130, 133, 137, 138, 140–​4, 153, 154, 181, 201 Herbrechter, S. 20, 35 Herbst, T. 181, 201 Hilal, S. 168, 176 Hinkelammert, F. 8, 9, 16, 40, 127 Hinduism 101 Hobbes, T. 42 Hoffecker, J. 56, 127, 128 Hörl, E. 147, 149, 150, 154 Homo sapiens 18, 60, 66, 76, 82, 89 Horsthemke, K. 30, 35 Hui, Y. xvii, 84, 85, 88, 127 human rights 9, 16, 32, 43, 75, 127 humanness 60, 115, 128 humanities 10, 55, 58–​60, 99, 185 humanism 32, 77–​81, 128, 189; anti-​10 imagination ix–​xx, 1, 2, 4, 7, 10, 14, 15, 19, 21, 26, 30, 35, 37, 47, 58, 61, 64, 65, 93, 94, 106, 121, 122, 132–​4, 136, 153, 155–​82, 188, 190, 192, 197, 199

Ingold, T. 74, 127 inhuman 20, 36, 189 indigenous 16, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 34, 26, 47, 48, 63, 67, 68, 74, 77–​82, 84, 89, 90, 91, 98–​100, 113, 118, 152, 161, 163, 164, 166, 169, 185, 191, 194–​8 individuation 85, 86, 90, 92, 124 industrial 46, 55, 64, 83, 85, 86, 87, 90, 136, 168, 178, 200; pre-​industrial 86, 108; post-​industrial 86, 117 INF Nuclear Arms treaty 41, 42 instrumental/​instrumentalism xii xiv, xvi, xxi, 14, 18, 34, 47, 60, 64, 67, 81, 83, 87, 88, 91, 96, 97, 105–​9, 117, 119, 122, 136–​40, 142, 146, 147, 158, 159, 172, 174, 185 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 27, 57, 201 IRA (Irish Republican Army); New 52, 123n1; Real 123, 123n1 Ireland (Northern), Police Service, 52 Jefferson, T. 104 Jeffery, C. 72, 127 Jenkins, P. 101, 102, 127 jetztzeit 25, 86 Judaism 29, 36, 101; medieval 30 Jullien, F. xvii, 95, 107, 127 Jünger, E. 142, 143 Jus Publicum Europaeum 26 kairos 25 Kallis, G. 67, 127 Kant, I. 25, 31, 43, 68, 69, 96, 97, 106, 117, 127, 129, 142, 161, 165 Kearney, R. 26, 35, 155, 157, 158, 161, 176 Kellegis, K. 58, 128 Kemal, M., Ataturk 8, 105 Klein, E. 21, 24, 35, 73, 137, 154 Kojève, A. 110, 128 Kolbert, E. 48, 128 Kolen, B. 57, 130 Koops, T. 40, 126 Krastev, I. 21, 35, 39, 44, 128 krenein 19 Kush 109 Lacan, J. 110 Lacoue-​Labarthe, P. 140, 141, 154 Laitin, D. 126

206 Index Latour, B. 19, 24, 35, 36, 55, 59, 80, 81, 107, 113, 117, 128 Lasch, C. 136, 154 Lecourt, D. 73, 128 League of Nations 31, 32, 70 Levinas, E. 29, 36, 91, 107, 128 Lewis, D. 34, 36, 83, 98 Liang, Q. 36, 40 Loeb, P. 25, 36 Lotman, Y. 189, 201 Leibnitz, W. G. 96, 102 literacy 102, 198; functional 31 Lubarsky, S. 29, 36 Luckmann, T. 83, 124 Lugones, M. 79, 114, 119, 128, 198, 201 Luhmann, N. 116, 128 Lury, C. 75, 126 Luther, M. 101, 102, 123, 128 Lykke, N. 98, 99, 128 Ma, A. 16 Magnus, B. 25, 36 Machination(s) 140 Maldonado-​Torres, N. 80, 107, 128, 197, 201 Mahbubani, K. 6, 7, 9, 16 Manning, E. 81, 128 Marcos, S. 2, 16, 74, 128 Maturana, H. 114, 115, 128 Mauss, M. 111, 128 Marx, K. 111, 135, 154, 168 Marxism/​post-​Marxism 5, 105, 160, 162, 164 Mataxas, E. 102, 128 McCormick, S. 177 McDermott. J. 128 McKee, L. 53, 125 McNeill, W. 35, 133, 142, 153, 154 media xx, 32, 40, 44, 53, 56, 73, 83, 87, 135, 146, 158, 181, 199, 200; social, 12, 89 megaregions 49 memory 22, 62, 78, 87, 88, 90, 118, 125, 155, 156 Merleau-​Ponty, M. 110, 168, 169 metaphysics, western 26, 97, 106–​8, 110, 112, 140, 141, 143, 153 Metz, J. B. 101 Michaelson, R. 200, 201 Mignolo, W. 7, 17, 38, 69, 79, 114, 116–​19, 128–​30, 158, 176, 177, 189, 194, 197, 201 Mirzoeff, N. 40, 129

Mitchham, C. 83, 154 mnemotechnical 87, 130, 154 modern/​modernity xii, xvi–​xviii, 6–​9, 11–​13, 15, 16, 20–​2, 24, 26, 28–​31, 33–​5, 38, 42–​4, 47–​9, 53, 60, 63, 66, 67, 70–​83, 89, 95, 99, 100–​2, 105, 107–​10, 112–​4, 116–​20, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130, 138, 144, 149, 156–​8, 161–​7, 169, 171, 174, 176, 177, 186, 192–​95, 197, 198, 201; Euromodernity xiii, xv, xviii, 6, 7, 15, 28, 30, 70, 71, 77–​80, 82, 89, 95, 99, 112–​4, 117, 157, 158, 161–​3, 167, 193, 194, 197 extinction x, xii, 14, 19, 46, 48, 55, 58, 76, 125, 127, 128, 150, 172, 180, 184, 186, 199 Moraga, Ch. 100, 120 Mouffe, Ch. xvi, xxii, 17 Morreo, C. E. 137, 154 Muslim(s) 42, 69, 105, 157 Negri, A. 162, 176 Nancy, J-​L. 4, 61, 130, 140, 141, 143–​50, 154, 162 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) 41, 51 nation xii–​xv, 1, 3, 7, 8, 11, 26, 31–​5, 39, 49–​52, 54, 58, 67, 68–​73, 88, 89, 101–​5, 118, 133–​6, 180, 185–​8, 194, 195, 200; nation-​states 38, 39, 40, 45, 72, 180; nationalism xiv, 6, 10, 35, 68–​73, 98 natural/​naturalism: natural resources xv, 14, 24, 33, 34, 48, 51, 57, 71, 167, 172, 180; naturalised artificial 65, 84, 89; post-​natural 58, 60, 88 nature x, xii, 15, 24, 33, 34, 59, 60, 61, 67, 75, 84, 89, 92, 126, 135, 138, 140, 147, 168, 169, 183, 184, 186 Nazis 78, 102, 103, 141 neo-​colonialism see colonialism neoliberal(ism) xiv, 5, 21, 25, 27, 32, 35, 38, 69, 72, 77, 102, 117, 129, 134, 135, 145, 175, 194, 196 New Materialism 100 Nietzsche, F. 25, 26, 36, 48, 76, 108, 110–​3, 130, 142, 143, 174, 177 nihilism 23m, 25, 48, 63, 90, 96, 108, 136, 139, 141–​3, 152, 153, 160, 163, 164 Nishitani, O. 80, 129 nomos of the earth 20, 31, 36 Norris, A. 140, 141, 154

Index  207 Noys, B. 111, 112, 129 nuclear 20, 40, 41, 42, 45, 49–​51, 70, 151, 167 onto-​epistemology 62, 99, 114, 137 ontotheological 106–​8, 130 ontic xvi, 18, 33, 60, 82, 91, 138, 142, 183 ontogenesis 81, 85, 86 ontology/​ontological xii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xix, 1, 15, 20, 22, 24, 29, 30, 31, 36, 37, 48, 55–​7, 59–​66, 73, 74, 76, 79–​92, 94–​6, 98, 99–​101, 105–​10, 113, 114, 121, 122, 125, 135–​42, 146–​52, 154, 156, 157, 172, 175, 176, 181, 182, 185, 186, 190, 197–​99 organic(s) xi, 37, 55, 59, 73, 84, 97, 181, 189, 199 Orientalism 35, 80 Oretega y Gasset, J. 83 Ortiz, F. 171, 176, 177 Orwell, G. 68, 129 Ottoman Empire 69, 105, 123, 169 Pachamama 30 Pallson, G. 74, 127 Pan, D. 129 Panikkar, R. 146, 154 parapolitical 38 peace 7, 35, 36, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45–​7, 52, 54, 64, 68, 99, 103, 105, 127, 129, 170, 184, 199, 201; post-​  39, 46 Pelipenko, A. 8, 17 periphery 45, 92, 116 Petti, A. 168, 176 Philip, F. 80, 26, 140 philosophy xv, xvii, 1, 20, 25, 29, 35, 36, 53, 58, 61, 73, 81, 83, 93–​5, 97, 98, 106, 109–​11, 113, 123, 125, 126, 130, 132, 137, 140, 146, 148, 153, 163, 166, 173, 183, 200 phenomenology xi, xvii, 8, 21, 24, 30, 55, 86, 98, 103, 110, 126, 127, 156, 162, 164, 165 Plato 24, 65, 108, 181 pluralism 29, 34 pluriverse/​pluriversal 2, 21, 34, 35, 69, 88, 89, 114, 116, 118, 120, 125, 153, 166, 170, 176, 198, 199 political theology see theology popular culture xx, 6, 26, 52, 53, 160 popularism 30, 102

positivism xvii, xviii, 12, 18, 22, 70, 76, 77, 85, 95, 99, 114, 149, 151, 158, 167, 171, 175, 190, 194, 200 posthuman/​posthumanism xiii, 20, 34, 36, 44, 60, 64, 73–​81, 85, 89, 90, 99, 124–​8, 136, 168, 180, 189 pre-​industrial 86, 108 posthuman see human posthumanism see human post-​industrial see industrial practice ix, xvii, xviii, xx, xxi, 1, 3, 9, 13, 23, 28, 30, 32, 46, 53, 56, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 88, 90, 96, 99, 109, 112, 113, 120, 121, 132, 135–​7, 141, 146, 151–​4, 158, 161, 162, 167, 168, 170, 172, 181–​3, 185, 186, 188–​90, 191, 193, 196, 198, 199; redirective xvii, xx, 48, 134, 137, 151, 152, 168 pragmatism x, 7, 65, 95, 96 pre-​individual 85, 86, 91 pre-​industrial see industrial post-​industrial see industrial Protestantism 101, 104 Prigogine, I. 28, 36 productivism 88, 139, 146 propaganda 40, 41, 43, 72 psychic-​individual(ism) 86, 124 psychology 22, 56, 58, 176, 179 psychopower 86, 87, 90, 127, 130, 154; counter-​  87 Puritanism 103, 104, 125 Putin, V. 24, 40–​2 Quijano, A. 5, 17, 67, 76, 129 race/​racism 6, 76, 78, 81, 82, 105, 181, 193, 195 Rancière, J. 161, 162, 177 Readings, B. 117, 129, 174, 177, 191 redirective practice see practice refugees 21, 23, 32, 38, 42, 43, 69, 82, 124, 170, 180, 185 relationality xvii, xix, 28–​32, 34, 36, 37, 91, 94, 99, 107, 114, 116, 120, 130, 144, 162, 163, 170, 192, 197, 199 Renault, A. 80, 126 resistance 26, 53, 54, 63, 65, 70, 90–​2, 130, 164, 165, 167, 177, 193, 198 Richardson, J. 25, 36 RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs) 53, 54 Robbins, B. 160, 165, 166, 177

208 Index robotics see technology Rose, N. 75, 129 Rosen, L. 87, 129 Rostow, W. W. 31, 36 Rueschemeyer, B. D. 8, 16 Russia 3, 7, 32, 40–​2, 50–​2, 71–​3, 102, 105, 123, 199, 200, 201 Santos, B. 118, 129 Schmitt, C. 8, 9, 12, 13, 16, 17, 28, 36, 42–​5, 101–​3, 105, 123, 129, 130, 136, 140–​2, 149, 154 science/​scientism xvii, xxi, 7, 22, 27, 28, 33, 55, 56, 58–​61, 73, 75–​7, 84, 89, 96, 97, 99, 100, 110, 115, 120, 124–​7, 130, 154, 156, 169, 170, 185, 197, 200, 201 Second World War see war Schulz, K. A. 59, 76, 129 Sennett, R. 23, 24, 36 Simondon, G. xvii, 83–​6, 89, 91, 92, 124, 125, 129, 145, 154 Simpson, L. B. 28, 36 Sitrin, M. 174, 177 sixth extinction event x, xii, 14, 19, 46, 48, 58, 76, 128, 150, 172 Shiva, V. 30, 36, 113, 129 Smith, N. 70, 129 Smyth, J. 117, 129 sociogenesis 79, 81, 100, 130 socialism 49, 130, 177 Soulè, M. E. 169, 177 Soviet Union 36, 40, 49–​51, 69, 72, 169, 177 speculative reason xv, 187 Spengler, O. 142 Spinoza, B. 76, 96, 97, 125 Stacey, J. 75 Stalin/​Stalinist 8, 9, 42, 103, 168 state of exception 4, 8, 9, 13, 15, 39, 40, 44, 72, 73, 136 Stengers, E. 28, 36 Stiegler, B. xvii, 83, 86, 87, 90, 92, 129, 130, 154 Strauss, L. 134 Sumak Kawsay 30 sustainability xxi, 18, 34, 99, 121, 135; post-​  152 sustainment x, xiv, 85, 91, 93, 106, 109, 113, 121, 132, 134, 150, 151, 173, 174, 185, 187, 199 systems 9, 12, 34, 49, 58, 87, 88, 91, 92, 96, 105, 110, 113, 115, 118–​20, 129, 157, 161, 172, 187, 195

Tamerlane (Amir Timur) 168, 169 Taylor, M. C. 17, 117, 129 technè 82, 90, 137, 140 technical 64, 87, 129, 148, 152, 153; cosmo-​ 85; bio-​ 84, 85; mnemo-​  87 technology xv, 1, 7, 12, 14, 20, 34, 40, 49, 54, 60, 61, 67, 73, 76, 77, 81–​4, 86–​92, 107–​9, 124–​30, 136–​43, 146–​51, 153, 154, 159, 170, 179, 186, 189; robotics, 10, 49, 67, 91, 152 terror 9, 39, 40, 41, 52, 53, 66, 73, 105, 123, 136 theology 8, 29; onto-​ 107, 108, 130; political-​ 17, 101–​6, 129 Thompson, I. D. 106–​9, 130 Timan, T. 40, 126 Tlostanova, M. 22, 36, 116–​8, 126, 129, 130, 164, 177 Tönnies, F. 142 Topolski, A. 29, 36 trade 40, 41, 49, 57, 65, 104, 134, 135, 143, 146, 152, 180 Trump, D. 10, 11, 24, 42, 104 Tunander, O. 36, 130 Turpin, E. 59, 130 Un-​development see development United Nations (The) 31; UNHCR 23 utopia/​utopian 1, 21, 22, 33, 34, 65, 68, 69, 72, 75, 77, 89, 136, 137, 150, 155, 163, 171, 173, 190 unsettlement ix, x, 22–​4, 43, 58, 188, 189 universal/​universalism xv, xviii, 2, 4, 6, 12, 31, 38, 43, 44, 46, 49, 60, 61, 68, 69, 72, 75–​7, 79–​82, 84, 88, 95, 98, 99, 106, 107, 113, 114, 127, 136, 137, 146, 147, 153, 156, 162–​4, 166, 167, 169, 172, 174, 175, 192, 193 universities xxi, 27, 67, 94, 108, 109, 117–​21, 150, 174, 175, 194, 196; urmadic-​  121 urbanism ix, 40, 54, 57, 68, 75, 103, 127, 143, 145, 167, 187 United States (U. S.) 9, 10; Army 52; Airforce 52; Navy 50 unsustainability xii, xv, xvi, 3, 14, 32, 34, 46–​9, 57, 63, 65, 85, 106, 113, 121, 134–​7, 143, 147, 150, 151, 179, 182, 186 USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) see Soviet Union van Camp, N. 87, 130, 154 van Veelen, P. C. 57, 130

Index  209 vasudhaiva kutumbakum 113 Vázquez, R. 21, 34, 84, 94, 120, 130 Veblen, T. 143, 154 Verbeck, P-​P. 75, 130 Verden-​Zoller, G. 115, 128 Versschuur, J. 57, 130 Vinge, V. 73, 130 vitalism 77, 78 von Clausewitz, C. 105 Wallerstein, I. 73, 130 Walsh, C. 38, 79, 114, 119, 130, 189, 194, 201 war x, 9, 31, 34, 38, 39, 40, 42–​7, 49–​54, 65, 71, 73, 77, 101, 105, 112, 134, 135, 179, 180, 197; Cold War 5, 21, 32, 38, 39, 41, 42, 49, 70, 72, 117, 125; civil x, 40, 52; climate 50, 51, 58, 75; cyber 40; first Gulf-​ 53; First World War 101, 105, 123; hybrid 40; of aggression 32, 39, 40; nuclear, 20, 41, 50, 70; proxy 5, 40, 41; Second World 12, 103; unrestrictive 36, 40; Vietnam 5 Warren, M. 110, 130

Watkins, C. 61 Weil, M. 168, 177 Wekker, G. 118, 130 Welzer, H. 58, 130 Westphalian world order 4, 69 Whitehead, A. N. xvii, 29, 36, 96, 97, 130 Wignall, P. R. 48, 127 Wildcat, M 28, 36 Willis, A-​M. 30, 36, 64, 123, 130 Wilson, E. 9, 17, 130 Wincott, D. 72, 127 Wynter, S. 35, 154 world picture x, 23 world order x, 26, 31, 32, 38, 39, 41, 49, 69 worlding 33, 62, 66, 85, 141 worldhood 28 Xiangsui, W. 36, 40 Zapastistas 1, 163, 166, 174, 196 Zimmerman, M. E. 26, 36 zoe 77, 78 Zoon politikon 83