HYBRID ECOLOGIES 9783035804065, 3035804060

Table of contents :
Hybrid Ecologies
Table of Contents
Editors’ Preface
Hybrid Ecologies – An Introduction
Mesology and Ecology
Towards the Rift Valley Crossing (Some Notes, Some Works)
‘Mesopolitics underlines how human and non-human relations have already been thought, way before our noisy concept of the Anthropocene’
Milieu, Mimesis and Mimetism
‘A Way of Being in the World’
Nihilism Upgrade
‘Because you think of yourself as totally integrated in bios and you’ve forgotten that you totally rely on other life forms’
Hurricanes, Popsicles and Plankton: the Hybrid Ecologies of Bodily Natures
The Art of Life in the Age of Mass Extinction
Think Like a Forest – Act Like a Swarm
Toxic Relations: Ecology, Aesthetics (and their Discontents)
Queer Ecologies: Against the Ontologizing of Queerness, for the Development of Queer Collectives!
An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires and Distractions: The Drag of Physicality in a #digitalphysical Hybrid Ecology
‘#Sergina is not an avatar, but a Medusa figure’
Hybrid Media Archipelagos in Sondra Perry’s ‘Typhoon Coming On’ and Louis Henderson’s ‘All That is Solid’
Becoming-Environmental: Toward a Critique of Environmentality as Power-Form, World-Form, and Capital-Form
One Minute Material – A Chronological Analysis of Sound Ecologies
Future-Crafting: The Non-humanity of Planetary Computation, or How to Live with Digital Uncertainty
Ecologizing Design
‘The idea that we can design an ecology is something we should be wary of’
Radical Ecological Imaginaries: Turning the Ruins of our Present into the Legacies of the Future
Ecologies of Existence: The Architecture of Collective Equipment
‘I know nothing more violent than a consensus building exercise around the table amongst the “usual suspects”’
The Authors

Citation preview

Publication series of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich The publications in this series are the results of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies, which was inaugurated at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich in 2011, of its teachings, its research and its practice projects. The cx takes up questions of current central artistic, scientific and social relevance, so as to discuss them from an interdisciplinary perspective. A major focus herein lies on the dialogue between scientific and artistic approaches, and on the close interconnection of theory and praxis. The programme of the cx is facilitated by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s Quality Pact for Teaching. After the volumes Power of Material/Politics of Materiality (2014), Fragile Identities (2016), The Present of the Future (2017) and Real Magic (2018) Hybrid Ecologies is the fifth volume of this series.

Hybrid Ecologies Susanne Witzgall, Marietta Kesting, Maria Muhle, Jenny Nachtigall (Eds.)

diaphanes

Table of Contents

9 Editors’ Preface 13 Hybrid Ecologies – An Introduction Susanne Witzgall (for the editors) 31 Mesology and Ecology. Two Alternative Views of the Environment and Their Political Implications in the Nineteenth Century Ferhat Taylan 42 Towards the Rift Valley Crossing (Some Notes, Some Works) Simon Starling 53 ‘Mesopolitics underlines how human and non-human relations have ­already been thought, way before our noisy concept of the Anthropocene’ In conversation with Simon Starling and Ferhat Taylan 59 Milieu, Mimesis and Mimetism Maria Muhle 73 ‘A Way of Being in the World’: Relational Onto-Epistemologies in ­Contemporary Art and Theory Susanne Witzgall 89 Nihilism Upgrade Timothy Morton 99 ‘Because you think of yourself as totally integrated in bios and you’ve forgotten that you totally rely on other life forms’ In conversation with Ursula Biemann and Timothy Morton 111 Hurricanes, Popsicles and Plankton: the Hybrid Ecologies of Bodily ­Natures Stacy Alaimo 124 The Art of Life in the Age of Mass Extinction John Jordan 135 Think Like a Forest – Act Like a Swarm A class in art, activism and ecological thinking with the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination 143 Toxic Relations: Ecology, Aesthetics (and their Discontents) Jenny Nachtigall 5

153 Queer Ecologies: Against the Ontologizing of Queerness, for the Development of Queer Collectives! Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky 164 An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires and Distractions: The Drag of Physicality in a #digitalphysical Hybrid Ecology Elly Clarke 173 ‘#Sergina is not an avatar, but a Medusa figure’ In conversation with Elly Clarke and Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky 181 Hybrid Media Archipelagos in Sondra Perry’s Typhoon Coming On and Louis Henderson’s All That is Solid Marietta Kesting 197 Becoming-Environmental: Toward a Critique of Environmentality as Power-Form, World-Form, and Capital-Form Erich Hörl 209 One Minute Material – A Chronological Analysis of Sound Ecologies BJ Nilsen 216 Future-Crafting: The Non-humanity of Planetary Computation, or How to Live with Digital Uncertainty Betti Marenko 228 Ecologizing Design Martín Ávila 241 ‘The idea that we can design an ecology is something we should be wary of’ In conversation with Martín Ávila and Betti Marenko 250 Radical Ecological Imaginaries: Turning the Ruins of our Present into the Legacies of the Future Maria Kaika 263 Ecologies of Existence: The Architecture of Collective Equipment Godofredo Pereira 271 ‘I know nothing more violent than a consensus building exercise around the table amongst the“usual suspects”’ In conversation with Maria Kaika and Godofredo Pereira 279 The Authors 287 Photo Credits 291 Colophon 7

Editors’ Preface

In light of the wide range of ecological crises at present, such as climate change or the pollution of the oceans, the term ecology is omnipresent, and not only in current political debates. For some time now it has once again also determined artistic and academic discourses, where it has been reassessed and reformatted to emphasize the hybrid interweaving and mutual influence of living processes, technological and media practices, natural and artificial as well as semantic and material agents. This book unites interdisciplinary essays on these ‘hybrid ecologies’ and on current ecological thinking, which also illuminate critical aspects and examine the genealogy of the term ecology. Hybrid Ecologies comprises the most important lectures and discussions from the eponymously titled series of events held at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, which have been revised, developed, and expanded for the book. It documents the central research results of the researchers at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies and the chair of philosophy/aesthetic theory, contains artistic contributions by cx guest professors and documents the artistic work of the students in one of the project classes. The cx centre for interdisciplinary studies was founded at the Academy of Fine Arts in the winter semester of 2011/12 as a platform for an interdisciplinary studies programme. With its innovative teaching format, it is supported within the federal state programme for better study conditions and more quality in teaching by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The teaching at cx is oriented toward a different theme each year, engaging with the central artistic, scholarly, and social discourses of the present. All of the events of the cx span departments and study programs, and each year include artistic project classes by international guest professors as well as a lecture series with speakers and guest lecturers from a wide range 9

of disciplines. This not only brings the various artistic and scholarly disciplines into dialogue with one another, but also interlinks theoretical and artistic-practical teaching by working on common themes and questions. The primary goal of the cx is to provide students with access to other areas of knowledge, research methods, and ways of thinking, to supplement existing artistic education through expanded theoretical and interdisciplinary teaching, as well as to motivate students to transfer between disciplines and to engage with the central questions of our time by integrating knowledge from different areas. The lecture series Hybrid Ecologies, which took place in the winter semester of 2016/17 at the Academy of Fine Arts and which forms the basis for this book, was conceived and organized by the editors in cooperation with Karianne Fogelberg. Our first thanks therefore go to Karianne Fogelberg, the research fellow for design and architectural theory at the cx, who also moderated one panel in the lecture series. In addition we warmly thank all the scholars and artists who shaped the fifth annual programme at the cx with their lectures and seminars, and who agreed without exception, as in the previous four volumes, to contribute to this book. Special thanks also go to the three cx guest professors in the summer semester of 2017, Simon Starling and Labofii (The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination: John Jordan and Isabelle Fremeaux), who took very different approaches to the topic of ‘Hybrid Ecologies’ along with their students. To wrap up their project class, Labofii and their students held an intervention in urban public space, one that can be seen as an actionist statement. We thank the presidium at the Academy of Fine Arts, in particular Dieter Rehm, Johannes Kirschenmann, Hermann Pitz, Karen Pontoppidan, Martin Schmidl, and Corinna Deschauer for their trust and support in realizing the fifth annual programme of the cx, as well as our then commission members Walter Grasskamp, Carmen and Urs Greutmann, Res Ingold, Katrin Kinseher, Florian Matzner, Maria Muhle, Olaf Nicolai, Julian Rosefeldt, and the representatives of the students and the student convention. We would also like to thank all other persons who in some way, whether small or large, participated in organizing the annual programme ‘Hybrid Ecologies’– in particular our former and current student assistants in the cx programme Sandra Hasenöder, Lea Vajda, Lucie Vyhnálková, and Anna Sofi Hvid, the media technicians Tanja Ferg and Tom Köhler, the house management under the direction of Robert Oeckl, and our specialist for travel arrangements Andrea Schulz. Many thanks are also due to Yusuf Etiman, who with this publication has now designed the fifth volume in our series with reliable élan and empathy, and to Nicholas Grindell, Daniel Hendrickson, Nils F. Schott and Daniel Spaulding for the sometimes very demanding translations from the original German texts into English. Furthermore, our deep gratitude goes to Michael Heitz and Hendrik Rohlf from diaphanes press for their customary professional support and success10

ful collaboration, as well as to Sabine Schulz for copyediting the German texts and Michael Turnbull and Catherine Lupton for the English. In addition we would like to thank the artists, designers, gallerists and institutions listed in the image credits for providing the images for illustration and for permission to reproduce them here. And last but not least, a very special thanks to the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, which finances the programme at the cx, including the present pub­lication, to the German Aerospace Center (DLR) as project manage-ment agency, and to the Bavarian State Ministry for Education, Culture, Science and the Arts.

Translated from German by Daniel Hendrickson

11

Hybrid Ecologies – An Introduction Susanne Witzgall (for the editors)

1

Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London, New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 19. 2

This also applies to Tim Ingold’s concept of ecology, which he says he developed in the 1990s as a ‘relational-ecological-developmental synthesis’. See ibid., pp. 5, 20. 3

Serenella Iovina, ‘(Material) Ecocriticism’, in Rosi Braidotti, Maria Hlavajova (eds.), Posthuman Glossary (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 113. 4

Deborah Bird Rose, ‘The Ecological Humanities’, in Katherine Gibson, Deborah Bird Rose, Ruth Finchers (eds.), Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene (New York: Punctum Books, 2015), p. 4.

Ecology, which despite the many successive reinterpretations of the term’s meaning since its first definition by Ernst Haeckel in the 1860s has always been understood as a doctrine of relations and of dynamic interrelations, as well as a synonym for their totality, has today become a ubiquitous model of thought across the arts and sciences. In concert with an increasingly rapid shift in the meaning of the concept of ecology, there has occurred, especially over the past three decades, a comprehensive ‘ecologization’ or ecological reformulation of heterogeneous realities as well as the growing establishment of ecological ‘interdisciplines’ such as material ecocriticism, ecomaterialism, or ecological humanities. The latter often rely on, or indeed are part of, the discourses of posthumanism and new materialism. What accordingly unites them all is their declared goal of resituating human beings within ecological systems and of overcoming the modernistic notion of a supposed dualism of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. In this respect their concept of ecology avoids presuming that the organism and the environment each have their ‘own integrity’ as ‘exclusive entities (or collections of entities)’ that only subsequently, so to speak, become mutually interrelated – an approach that the anthropologist Tim Ingold sees represented in many conventional textbooks.1 Their concept instead proclaims that organism and environment already exist, a priori, as an inseparable totality, grasping the latter as a single, thick, perpetually in-process network of relations.2 The relocation of the human in a ‘wider web of connections’3 with non-human or more-than-human others, each following their own ‘non-linear recursive logic’,4 found in these recent ecological ap13

5

Serenella Iovino, Serpil Oppermann, ‘Introduction: Stories Come to Matter’, in Iovino, Oppermann (eds.), Material Ecocriticism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), p. 3. 6

Serpil Oppermann, ‘Ecomaterialism’, in Braidotti, Hlavajova 2018 (footnote 3), pp. 120f. 7

Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson, Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 60. The French original, entitled Être singulier plural, appeared in 1996. 8

J.K. Gibson-Graham, Ethan Miller, ‘Economy as Ecological Livelihood’, in Gibson et al. 2015 (footnote 4), p. 10. Gibson-Graham and Miller in turn are quoting from Myra Hird, The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution after Science Studies (Basingstoke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 65. 9

The term ‘Anthropocene’ was coined by Eugene F. Stoermer in the 1980s and popularized by the chemist Paul Crutzen at the start of the twenty-first century. As the name for a new geological epoch, it stands above all for the massive influence of humanity on the earth’s lithosphere. See in addition Richard Grusin, ‘Anthropocene Feminism: An Experiment in Collaborative Theorizing’, in Grusin (ed.), Anthropocene Feminism (Minneapolis, London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2017), p. vii. The sociologist Jason W. Moore however asks us to speak not of the Anthropocene but of the Capitalocene, given that it is capital accumulation and capital’s degradation of nature that is above all else responsible for these massive transformations of the earth and their attendant ecological problems. See Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (London, New York: Verso, 2015), and Jason W. Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press / Kairos, 2016). 10

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Introduction: Ecology’s Rainbow’, in Cohen, Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. xxiv.

11

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 5. Emphasis in the original.

14

proaches is based on comparable relational ontologies and epistemologies, although they each develop slightly divergent emphases: material ecocriticism, for example, focuses on the inextricable fusion of material and narrative (or meaning), describing the world as an ‘intertwined flux of material and discursive forces’,5 whereas ecomaterialism theorizes the ‘multiple becoming’ of interwoven human and non-human bodies, ‘geobiochemical forces, human narratives, discourses and actions’, especially in the context of the ‘global dynamic of crisis ecologies’.6 The two central motifs that – sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly – run through many of these approaches and new conceptions of the idea of ecology are, however, the following: 1. a ‘being-in-community’, as the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy among others has put it, that grasps co-being or the ‘together’ as an ‘absolutely original structure’,7 and 2. coupled with this fundamental co-existence, a co-evolution, as proposed most notably by the American cell biologist Lynn Margulis. Her concept of symbiogenesis challenges Charles Darwin’s thesis of the ‘survival of the fittest’, describing symbiosis rather than competition and selection as the driving force in the development of life. This concept presumes, among other things, that every living cell represents an evolutionary fusion of various bacterial metabolisms and that symbiotic processes are responsible for cellular and genetic modifications. Symbiogenesis thus delineates individuals as ‘diversities of co-evolving associates’.8 Deharmonization and Denaturalization of Ecology The contemporary concept of ecology is however no longer dominated by the idea of purely harmonious cooperation or by the possible achievement or restoration of a supposedly preexisting state of equilibrium. It depends on the inextricable relations and hybrid interweaving of human and non-human, technological and biological, semantic and material elements and processes, and is essentially situated in a changed frame of reference which is involved in its reinterpretation in the face of the increasingly grave human transformation of the planetary ecosystem in the so-called Anthropocene or Capitalocene.9 It is not least for this reason that the concept of ecology now as never before encompasses precarious relations, toxic conditions, and catastrophic dynamics. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen lends colour to this fact by speaking of ‘prismatic ecologies beyond green’. ‘No Green Eden here’, Cohen writes, ‘but a restless expanse of multihued contaminations, impurities, hybridity, monstrosity, contagion, interruption, hesitation, enmeshment, refraction, unexpected relations, and wonder. A swirl of colors, a torrent, a muddy river.’10 The anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing likewise speaks of ‘disturbance-based ecologies’,11 and elsewhere (in collaboration with Heather Swanson, Nils Bubandt, and Elaine Gan) of their monsters.12 By this she refers on the one hand to always already-existing chimerical conglomerates, such as the conglomerate of animal, plant, and nonorganic elements in a developed coral reef, and on the other hand to more recent monstrosities such as the manmade plagues of

jellyfish that simultaneously reveal both the wonder and the terror of symbiotic enmeshments. For indeed the contemporary era of reckless amalgamations not only produces new monsters (such as the jellyfish that – thanks to modern shipping, overfishing, pollution, and global warming – have become invasive predators), but furthermore makes visible ‘old’ forms of monstrosity, precisely by damaging existing symbiotic relations – for example, the symbiosis of coral with dinoflagellates, now under pressure thanks to the warming of the oceans, the long-term disturbance of which leads to bleaching of the corals. Alongside deharmonization and dehomeostatization we may also observe an increasing denaturalization of the idea of ecology that questions not only the existence but even the concept of ‘nature’. ‘In the Anthropocene, some neutral, pre-given planetary nature is no longer available as a fiction of the real. We fucked it up’,13 McKenzie Wark laments, speaking of a ‘de-natured nature without ecology’, in­ reference to the classic homeostatic notion of ecology.14 In Ecology­ without Nature and The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton goes so far as to suggest getting rid of the idea of ‘nature’ entirely. The reasons for doing so lie, for him, not only in the fact that ‘what we call “nature” is a “denatured”, unnatural, uncanny sequence of mutations and catastrophic events’,15 but also – and this is decisive for Morton – because the idea of nature has become too ideologically compromised to be of continued conceptual or aesthetic use. Here he particularly has in mind dominant normative understandings of nature16 according to which nature is idealized as, among other things, the epitome of purity, harmony, neutrality, and the mysterious,17 and is raised to a transcendental principle. What results, according to Morton, could be described as a doubled abuse: first, this idea of nature has been and is being used to define sexual and racial identities18 and to devalue deviations from these as unnatural or pathological; and second, nature is in this way constructed as an idealized distant image withdrawn from human responsibility. ‘Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration’, Morton comments.19

12

Heather Swanson, Anna Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, ‘Introduction: Bodies Tumbled into Bodies’, in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), pp. M1–M2.

13

McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London, New York: Verso, 2015), p. 169.

14

Ibid., p. 180.

15

Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 8.

16

Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 12.

17

See also Morton 2010 (footnote 15), p. 3.

18

Morton 2007 (footnote 16), p. 16.

19

Ibid., p. 5.

20

Erich Hörl, ‘Introduction to General Ecology: The Ecologization of Thinking’, in Erich Hörl with James Burton (eds.), General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 1.

21

Luciana Parisi, ‘Computational Logic and Ecological Rationality’, in Hörl 2017 (footnote 20), p. 76.

Ecologization of Technology / Technologization of Ecology Ecology is however today not only being consolidated as a ‘nonnatural concept’ but has also, as Erich Hörl has noted,20 infected fields that were originally considered highly unnatural – above all the realm of technology. The media and cultural theorist Luciana Parisi, for example, speaks of an ‘ecological rationality’ in connection with the current logic of computerized calculation and design.21 This is how she describes a logic that is no longer based on deductive reasoning but rather operates with evolutionary and genetic algorithms, working with chance and contingency in its calculations. According to Parisi, this ecological form of rationality orients itself to the networked, contingent, and aleatory dynamics and interactions 15

22

Parisi speaks repeatedly of naturalization, as for instance the ‘naturalized logic of affective power’ or the ‘naturalization of computation’, ibid., pp. 75 and 77.

23

Hörl 2017 (footnote 20), pp. 4–5.

24

Parisi 2017 (footnote 21), p. 79.

25

Ibid., p. 78.

26

Ibid., p. 88.

27

Ibid., p. 92.

28

See Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-Technology and the Mutations of Desire (London, New York: Continuum, 2004), especially chapter 4 (‘Biodigital Sex’), pp. 127–167.

of biological, physical, and chemical systems, certain principles of which it has internalized. This supposedly ‘naturalizing’22 assimilation or ecologization of technology and its rationality in turn spills over into technocapitalistic practices and power dynamics that rest on the conviction that all materialities are equivalently open to comprehension and control through computation. The ecologization of technology and its logic is thus immediately and inseparably bound to a technologization of ecology. In this context, Erich Hörl speaks of a cybernetization of the environment that was already developing by the end of the nineteenth century and which has rapidly accelerated since 1950. According to Hörl, the result is an environmental culture of control ‘that is radically distributed and distributive, manifest in computers migrating into the environment, in algorithmic and sensorial environments. […] It entangles us in a new technology of power that has begun to operate in a specifically ecological way and has, in any case, environmentalized itself’.23 Luciana Parisi, though, rejects the presumption of an ontological equivalence (or ‘mutual coconstitution’)24 between biological, physical, and chemical systems and the technical, a presumption that lies at the basis of the controlling will-to-design in some of these processes. According to her, it is the ecological rationality of technocapitalism that needs to be questioned, insofar as the ‘internal pragmatism, its own generic performativity (or even evolution) of data’ are analysed and displayed.25 Data-environments are for her artificial worlds that follow their own ‘notations, functions, physicality and conceptuality’.26 For Parisi, algorithmic processes of calculation must rather be viewed, with the help of a speculative concept of reason, as an ‘automated elaboration of data’ that obeys an ‘alien epistemological production’.27 There is only an apparent contradiction between this and Parisi’s extension of Marguilis’ symbiogenetic model to recombinant networks and developments of biological and technical elements, or more precisely to biodigital assemblages.28 Whereas Parisi rejects an ecologization that is based on an equivalence between the rationalities of technical and biological, physical or chemical systems, she definitely presumes a coupled co-evolution of technical and biological elements, their co-becoming in hybrid ecologies. This differentiation is by no means trivial. It rather indicates an essential critical point within the now-proliferating concept of ecology, which – if it yields to the false assumption that all elements of an ecological network obey the same processual logic, or rationality – can lead to illusions of empowerment and control. Once we presume that the heterogeneous ecological elements must indeed share basic relational or evolutionary principles as well as a common becoming, their ontological equivalency must however be denied; we must reckon with their own specific agency. The latter is not accorded any sovereign status. But it is also not easy to completely replace this agency, to banish it or keep it wholly in check through a synchronized overwriting of its foundational rationality with the rationality of other ecological elements. Because of their divergent materialities,

16

intensities, perceptive potentials, random generations and developmental tempos, not all elements of an ecological network share the same affective, structural-spatial, and temporal dimensions. This is why outbreaks and breakdowns of participants are recurrent events in cyberneticized environments and biodigital assemblages, too. In his reflection on ‘black ecology’, the philosopher Levi R. Bryant uses the fact that black is nonreflective within the colour spectrum, as humans perceive it, in order to draw attention to the ‘power of entities to surprise’. ‘[I]f objects are black objects’, as Bryant explains from his perspective of object-oriented ontology, ‘if there is a sense in which they are nonreflective, then this suggests that things are characterized by a sort of mysteriousness harboring hidden powers that hold themselves in reserve, waiting to erupt under the right circumstances when they enter into the appropriate interactions with other things. […] [W]e­ do not know “what [a] body can and cannot do”. This awareness, in turn, encourages attitudes of humility and caution with respect to practices like genetic engineering, the use of pesticides, the destruction of ecosystems, and so on.’29 Bryant’s warning admittedly comes too late. Many devastating powers of ‘black objects’ have already clearly come to light in increasingly frequent storms and droughts, dying coral reefs, and marine creatures perishing in plastic waste. Along with the agency and dominion of non-human life we gain a renewed experience of the power of the non-living, which modern humans seem to have forgotten, ignored, or negligently perceived as an atmospheric disturbance in the eager pursuit of their usual business. The power of the non-living, too, which can drive humans, together with many species of animals and plants, to the edge of existence, shakes the anthropocentric illusion of human dominance and, according to some theorists, demands a new understanding and concept of power that is not oriented only to the existence of the human and its social regulation of life. In this context, the anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli suggests the term ‘geontopower’, which incorporates geos, the nonliving, in order to distinguish it from bios. According to Povinelli, geontopower – think for example of the influence of coal and petroleum and their discovery as the ‘vital force’ and key for a massive expansion of capital – likewise from the beginning lies at the basis of biopower, or the biopolitical mechanism of late liberalism, which together direct the relations between non-life and life.30 But according to Povinelli, it is perhaps only in the eras of the Anthropocene and climate change that they become truly visible.31

29

Levi Bryant, ‘Black’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), pp. 292–293.

30

Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 167 and 4.

31

Ibid., p. 21.

32

This quote, often given without a citation, comes from a documentary film on Bateson: An Ecology of Mind (dir. Nora Bateson, 2010). See as well: Jan van Bockel, ‘“When we find meaning in art our thinking is most in sync with nature”: A Review of An Ecology of Mind – The Gregory Bateson Documentary’, http://www.naturearteducation.org/ AnEcologyOfMind.htm (accessed 18.7.2019).

33

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1972).

Ecological Thinking and Ecological Practice ‘The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think’,32 as the AngloAmerican anthropologist, biologist, social scientist, cyberneticist, and philosopher Gregory Bateson put it in a much-quoted sentence. The various essays in his 1972 book An Ecology of Mind 33 present a systemic and relational mode of thought that he considers crucial to 17

34

Rick Dophijn, ‘Ecosophy’, in Braidotti, Hlavajova 2018 (footnote 3), p. 130.

35

Ibid., p. 131.

36

Bateson 1972 (footnote 33), p. 484.

37

See Paul Shepard: ‘If man’s environmental crisis signifies a crippled state of consciousness as much as it does damaged habitat, then that is perhaps where we should begin. The secret lies in the darkness of the human cerebrum.’ Paul Shepard, The Tender Carnivore & The Sacred Game (Athens, London: The University of Georgia Press, 1998), p. xxix.

38

Bateson 1972 (footnote 33), p. 477.

39

Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London, New Brunswick: The Athlone Press, 2000), p. 44. The first French edition appeared in 1989 under the title Les trois écologies (Paris: Éditions Galilée).

40

Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 5.

18

the solution of these problems. He compares the structures and developmental processes of cultural and biological systems and draws attention to transversal relations between mind and body, human and animal, or culture and nature. Rick Dophijn therefore describes Bateson’s approach as a secondary strain in 1970s ecosophy – according to Dophijn, the first is the Deep Ecology movement, with its ‘conservative if not reactionary agenda’34 – an approach that is not so much ‘thinking about ecology but does ecological thinking’.35 This ecological thinking should not however be construed as a distanced, reflective reconstruction of the mutual interactions within ecological systems. It rather conceptualizes thinking itself as a relational power that is itself deeply enmeshed in these mutual interactions. For Bateson, mind and environment form a common ‘eco-mental system’ and share the qualities of its condition36 – an idea that in the 1970s could also be found, in its essentials, in the works of the ecologist Paul Shepard and the artist Joseph Beuys.37 Bateson’s approach is thus an important point of reference for contemporary ecological thinking in two respects. First, although like the cybernetics-influenced thinking of his era Bateson’s approach is guided by the idea of a (disturbed or disturbable) equilibrium state and direct causal relations, it nevertheless avoids taking a wrong turn towards a cybernetic culture of control, such as we have already described, which Bateson in fact had in his sights. He describes cybernetics as a dangerous path, but also as a means ‘of achieving a new and perhaps more human outlook, a means of changing our philosophy of control and a means of seeing our own follies in wider perspective’.38 Second, Bateson’s approach embodies a comprehensive ecological thinking that (re)locates the human within ecological systems. In the late 1980s, as is well known, Bateson’s ideas were brought up to date and expanded in Félix Guattari’s essay The Three Ecologies. Guattari formulates his text as an urgent plea for thinking transversally in order to understand the mutual interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and social as well as individual relational worlds. Together with a poststructuralist critique of global capitalism (among other things), Guattari advocates a fundamental transformation of our mental attitude, or indeed for a different, ecological logic, one that is concerned – and this is a further divergence from Bateson – above all with ‘the movement and intensity of evolutive processes’.39 Bateson’s and Guattari’s analysis of the ecological mind is in many respects the ground upon which much current ecological thinking and a transformed concept of ecology are based. Contemporary ecological thinking similarly implies, as we can see for example in the work of the Canadian philosopher Lorraine Code, a comprehensively ‘revisioned mode of engagement with knowledge, subjectivity, politics, ethics, science, citizenship, and agency that pervades and refigures theory and practice’.40 Code nonetheless emphasizes – more strongly than Bateson – the aspect of positioning. According to Code, ecological thinking can be understood as an ecologically reworked and non-anthropocentric form of knowledge that not only analyses relational interactions and attacks hegemonic relations, but above

all begins with ‘the ecological situations and interconnections of knowers and knowings’.41 Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge and Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action, Code reinforces the constitutive significance of a responsible positioning of subjectivity, its situational involvement in epistemic practices and in the ethical-political practices that build upon it. In other words, she sees the consideration of an embodied locatedness of subjectivity and its discursive interdependence as the condition for a kind of knowledge and action that holds the potential for the realization of respectful coexistence.42 Not least, Lorraine Code’s ecological thinking, which thus likewise opposes a hegemonic concept of knowledge that accepts only certain uniform modes of knowing,43 displays parallels with Isabelle Stengers’ ‘ecology of practices’. Stengers describes the latter as a ‘tool for thinking’ and as an example of what Gilles Deleuze called ‘thinking par le milieu’.44 According to Stengers, Deleuze here relies on the double meaning of the French word milieu, which can indicate both ‘medium’ as well as ‘surroundings’ or ‘habitat’. ‘“Through the middle” would mean’, as Stengers continues, ‘without grounding definitions or an ideal horizon. “With the surroundings” would mean that no theory gives you the power to disentangle something from its particular surroundings, that is, to go beyond the particular towards something we would be able to recognise and grasp in spite of particular appearances.’45 Stengers’ ecology of practices also both establishes that there is ‘no identity of a practice independent of its environment’46 and demands that our actions not rest on general principles. Instead it is a matter of analysing the specific situation and its occasion as well as of granting the situation a potential power to stimulate us to thought.47 An ecological thinking and ecological practice understood in this way, and which we support here, doesn’t work with epistemic generalizations and ontological equivalencies, unlike the ecological rationality that Parisi describes. It instead stresses the locatedness and the networked partiality of practices of knowledge and action that are embedded in the multiple differences of ecological nodal points and situations, and examines the dazzling diversity of the actors involved. The concept of ecology connected with this thinking projects the latter not as a homogeneous totality whose elements ‘cannot be reduced either to a privileged layer of triumphalistic physical being, or to a cosmic holism that treats differences as merely contiguous gradients in an uninterrupted, quivering flux’48 – a reproach that Graham Harman levels in perhaps a too-sweeping manner at the approaches of new materialism. At stake is rather a concept of ecology that recognizes the embodied and situated difference of its actors, relations, forces, and processes, and which in the title of the present book is thus programmatically designated as ‘hybrid ecology’. In other words, the adjective ‘hybrid’ refers to a concept of ecology that does not presume a single comprehensive and unarticulated mass, an ‘indistinct jumble’,49 but rather understands ecology as connection, alliance, and the mutual penetration

41

Ibid., p. 6

42

See, among other places, ibid., pp. 19–20.

43

See ibid., p. 11.

44

Isabelle Stengers, ‘Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices’, in Cultural Studies Review 11:1 (March 2005), pp. 186–187, https:// www.researchgate.net/publication/ 282676946_Introductory_Notes_ on_an_Ecology_of_Practices (accessed 20.7.2019).

45

Ibid., p. 187.

46

Ibid.

47

See ibid., pp. 185 and 188.

48

Graham Harman, ‘Materialism is Not the Solution: On Matter, Form and Mimesis’, in The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 24:47 (2015), p. 96, https://doi.org/10.7146/nja. v24i47.23057 (accessed 20.7.2019).

49

Frédéric Neyrat, ‘Elements for an Ecology of Separation’, in Hörl 2017 (footnote 20), p. 101.

19

50

Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Moment, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 76–77.

51

Ferhat Taylan, ‘Mesology and Ecology. Two Alternative Views of the Environment and Their Political Implications in the Nineteenth Century’, p. 39.

52

Ibid., pp. 40–41.

of heterogeneous processes and differentiable elements. At the same time, it nonetheless insists on a shared realm of immanent relations, a common realm of becoming and belonging, which according to Brian Massumi is the precondition for the openness of bodies to the other.50 Contributions to the Book This book collects a number of contributions, written from very different perspectives, that seek to formulate a present-day idea of ecology, or an ecological thinking adequate to our time, but which however also thematize ecology as a controversial and indistinct concept, or contextualize it in genealogical-historical terms. Many of the essays make it clear that the currently widespread loose usage of the concept of ecology as well as neo-ecological thinking have to be continually and critically questioned, differentiated, and rethought in order to avoid trafficking in or reproducing old mechanisms of power and exploitation. One of the book’s emphases lies on contemporary approaches in art and design as well as their connection to media ecologies, to particular characteristics of contemporary ecological relationality as well of neo-ecological practice. In this volume, these practices are present as independent contributions by artists but also as objects of analysis and models of thinking for theoretical texts, alongside and in direct dialog with key research approaches in current ecological discourse. We begin with the contribution by Ferhat Taylan, which illustrates, in parallel to nineteenth century Darwinian ecology, a further strain of modern ‘environmental thinking’: mesology. This discipline, founded by Louis-Alphonse Bertillon, was dedicated above all to the mutual influences and linked transformative processes of the milieu and living beings, and was from the start driven by a positivistic desire for social reform. Its goal was to exert influence over both individuals and organisms as well as the constitution of society, by controlling the environment of the physical and social milieu. Taylan clearly demonstrates that this ‘environmental thinking’ was furthermore by no means oriented towards the ‘conservation of all living beings’, but rather had in view nothing but the purely a­ nthropocentric ‘modifiability and malleability of human populations’ and the improvement of human coexistence.51 He thus reveals a basic modern political principle, working with the means of the milieu, that at the end of the nineteenth century, precisely through Spencer’s marriage of his law of adaption with the Darwinian notion of competition, came to foster dangerous racist and culturally supremacist outpourings, and that Taylan describes as an ‘ecological governmentality’, in reference to the late 1970s research agenda of Michel Foucault, whose ‘biopolitics’ he borrows to coin the term ‘mesopolitics’.52 Ferhat Taylan thus makes visible what has until now been a shadowy historical tradition of problematic sociocentric ‘environmen­tal thinking’ that seems to have facilitated the original ‘sins’ of the Anthro-

20

pocene; it is precisely the forgetfulness of history associated with this concept that underlines the need for ‘alternative environmental histories’.53 With the next entry, by Simon Starling, we jump not only into the contemporary moment, but also to an artist whose aesthetic practice is an exemplary embodiment of the current understanding of ecology and ecological thinking. Starling’s practice is like a dissecting cross-section through heterogenous ecological networks, exposing the precarious relay points and almost absurd-seeming dynamics of their networked biological and cultural-political processes. In its tight bond with a site, with a specific situation, it accords with Stengers’ Ecology of Practices. For Starling, like Stengers, it is not however a question of delegating responsibility for thinking to a site but rather of thinking and developing ideas and narratives par le milieu. This is why he chooses sites in which particularly complex and sometimes bizarre entanglements of ‘political, social, historical, and ecological notions’ exist – or reach a critical point.54 Furthermore, the works that Starling has chosen for his artist pages address urgent environmental themes, such as culturally and politically conditioned ‘environmental degradation’,55 ‘unsustainable provision’,56 climate change with its diverse signifiers and enabling cultural techniques, or the monstrosity of invasive species (rhododendron, zebra mussel) that, according to Tsing et al., reveal the ‘terror’ of symbiotic ecological relationships. The conversation between Ferhat Taylan and Simon Starling that follows crystallizes a number of differences between mesology and the contemporary ecological thinking that Starling’s artistic practice materializes. Whereas in the former ‘the analysis of the material surroundings of human beings was somehow covered up by other reflections about the social milieu and the primacy of the social environment’,57 Starling’s aesthetic-ecological practice by contrast places the nonhuman at its centre and aims to pierce, or even practically dissolve, the clear borderlines between bodies and their environment.

53

Ibid., p. 31.

54

Simon Starling, ‘Towards the Rift Valley Crossing (Some Notes, Some Works)’, p. 43.

55

Ibid., p. 44.

56

Ibid.

57

‘“Mesopolitics underlines how human and non-human relations have already been thought, way before our noisy concept of the Anthropocene”: In conversation with Simon Starling and Ferhat Taylan’, p. 56.

58

Maria Muhle, ‘Milieu, Mimesis and Mimetism’, p. 60.

Maria Muhle’s essay begins by considering the genealogy of hybrid relationality in the current concept of ecology, concretizing this notion of relationality through the concept of mimesis. Mimesis should not however be understood here as imitation, but rather as an ‘excessive and performative concept of contagion, contact, and adaptation’,58 as outlined especially in Roger Caillois’ description of mimetic insects. According to Caillois it is precisely the existential distinction between organism and milieu that is dissolved through mimesis. Like Canguilhem was to do somewhat later, as Muhle shows, Caillois fundamentally declines to conceptualize the living organism independently from its milieu and its productive and quite risky dynamic interactions with the latter (which would seem to anticipate certain insights of the neomaterialist understanding of ecology). What is central here is not to misinterpret the ‘process of becoming-similar on the part of mimetic animals as threatening deception (in the case of mimicry) or protective camouflage (in mimesis)’, that is, as a functional means of self-preservation, because this would be to 21

59

Ibid., p. 65.

60

Ibid., p. 68.

61

Ibid., p. 71.

62

Ibid., p. 72.

63

As emphasized, for example, in the book Ecological Aesthetics, by the interdisciplinary artist Nathaniel Stern, which appeared when the present volume was in preparation. Stern’s point of departure is an understanding of artistic practice as a part of ecological networks, as something that attests to, and participates in, these ecological interactions. ‘Ecological Aesthetics […] re-cognizes […] conceptualmaterial formations around art, thought, and us, and explicates their implications. It creates narratives on, about, and by the various cross-sections of humans, nature, and politics, in and as works of art. […] Ecological Aesthetics, then, takes the being with of people, ideas, and things as its aesthetics framework. Thinking and moving and feeling, matter and concepts and time, humans and nature and politics, are all part of the same relational field: creating, transforming, and mobilizing themselves and the others together. Ecological. And in this book, I present the tactic of stylized narrativization to have us encounter and concern ourselves with what can and is said-, shown-, experienced-, or practiced-with a work of art (and the world), how and why, and (most importantly) the stakes therein.’ Nathaniel Stern, Ecological Aesthetics: Artful Tactics for Humans, Nature, and Politics (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2018), p. 5. Emphasis in the original.

64

Susanne Witzgall, ‘“A Way of Being in the World”: Relational Onto-Epistemologies in Contemporary Art and Theory’, p. 74.

reduce the connection between the living being and its milieu to an evolutionary-biological act of adaptation, or in Canguilhem’s terms, to a pathological life that ‘anxiously clings to the organic norms of self-preservation’.59 Muhle instead invokes Caillois’ alternative interpretation of mimetic becoming-similar as a ‘disturbance in spatial perception’, the disorientation of one’s own perceptual co-ordinates and ‘depersonalization by assimilation to space’.60 This provides h ­ er the occasion – via a detour through Lacan’s concept of ‘derealization’ as the schizoid lack of a connection to the world, among other things – to make a link to the ‘de-authorialization of aesthetic production’ as a minor mimetic aesthetic of the milieu, or of technology.61 Muhle’s final point is that this de-authorialization understands the ‘mode in which artistic things are made as a relational process’ that must always be thought in terms of confrontation with its milieu, ‘ideological illusions of the absolute, free, artistic, creative subject’.62 One form of de-authorialization can likewise be diagnosed in the artistic works of Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, and Antje Majewski, who constitute the essential cornerstones of my own piece. It is not only that the first two of these artists practically enforce this reading, by assembling their works as dynamic networks, as hybrid ecologies whose diverse actors are entangled in unpredictable affective encounters and relations that exceed either full subjective control or singular artistic authorship. The working-out of an ecological aesthetic in these works is however less concerned with the circumstance that artworks themselves must always be seen as elements of comprehensive semio-material and techno-biological ecologies63 than with the fact that many contemporary artworks are shaped by an ecological mode of thought and its relational paradigms.64 Through a transversal analysis of the artworks and the relational approaches of theorists ranging from Gilbert Simondon and Félix Guattari to Karen Barad and Lorraine Code, this text outlines fundamental characteristics of a contemporary ecological thinking decoupled from fantasies of control and power. This thinking is described as both ontological and epistemological in approach, insofar as the presumption of an immanent relation of being as a dimension of becoming immediately corresponds to the idea of a non-representationalist, intra-active form of knowledge-generation. Furthermore, the epistemology of this ecological thinking is opposed to a monoculture of knowledge, instead thinking through and with various disciplinary approaches with a view to alternative practices of knowledge and experience – ­ as becomes especially clear in Antje Majewski’s exhibition project Apple. An Introduction (Over and over and once again). Majewski’s apple project, the primary theme of which is her critique of declining apple biodiversity as a result of global agroindustry and monoculture in plant cultivation – which corresponds to the monoculture of knowledge – touches on the field of agricultural logistics, to which Timothy Morton turns in his essay. As already explained in his earlier book Dark Ecology, Morton sees agrologistics as a

22

globally­dominant agricultural program and finds its hubris and tragedy, as well as the logic upon which it is based, to be responsible for the profound ecological crises of our present moment. His goal is hence to bring agrologistical space to speech and ‘so to imagine how we can make programs that speak differently, that would form the substructure of a logic of future coexistence’.65 His text accordingly begins with an analysis of the logical structure of agrologistics, which above all dissolves the ambiguous contradictoriness of things and draws a clear distinction between a ‘realm of appearances and a realm of realities in the form of reified, constantly present beings’.66 This logic gradually leads to a ‘happy nihilism’, a joyful and self-satisfied manipulation of these easily-conceived beings, or ‘extensional lumps’.67 According to Morton, what we need instead is an updated ‘dark nihilism’ that recognizes the spectrality, the inconceivability and inexhaustibility of things, which resists their complete comprehension and dominance. This would show how things sparkle, and how it is precisely for this reason that play belongs to the structure of reality. Play, according to Morton, is ‘subscendence’, a term he uses to indicate that the whole is ontologically smaller than the sum of its parts,68 that the appearance of a thing is exceeded by the ambiguity and multiplicity of its being. The playful strategies to which dark nihilism shows the way seek out these ambiguities and multiplicities that we contain. As Morton puts it, they bind us with the ‘Lego brick, the lichen, the activist network, the microbiome, the melting glacier’.69 Morton’s essay is followed by a conversation between him and Ursula Biemann. This Swiss artist, author, and video essayist has for years worked intensively on the transformations of our planetary reality, especially climate change and the ‘ecologies of oil, ice, and water’,70 here stating that her artworks themselves generate an ‘aesthetic ecosystem’.71 Biemann further describes her videos as geomorphological and non-representationalist, insofar as she uses them to investigate semio-material elements and forces within ecological systems, with their connections and hybrid constellations, and thus takes part in the processes that form the world. Here she bears witness to an already diagnosed ecological thinking as relational ontoepistemology, which takes on speculative characteristics in her work Subatlantic (2015). The science fiction narrative that unfolds through a voiceover, too, has to do with a female scientist on an island in the North Atlantic who is conducting research on the transformation of the environment in a future thousands of years after the melting of the last glaciers. The central question that emerges is how, in a posthuman world, our senses might adapt to ‘the impacts of future transformations’,72 as well as how we can imagine a ‘reorientation of human-Earth relations’.73 Biemann’s futuristic tale conveys the demand – which Timothy Morton likewise reiterates – to become aware of our ‘inextricable coexistence with a host of entities that surround and penetrate us’.74

65

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), p. 46.

66

Timothy Morton, ‘Nihilism Upgrade’, p. 92.

67

Ibid.

68

See Morton 2016 (footnote 65), p. 114, as well as Morton in this volume (footnote 66), p. 97.

69

Morton in this volume (footnote 66), p. 98.

70

https://geobodies.org/biography (accessed 20.7.2019).

71

‘“Because you think of yourself as totally integrated in bios and you’ve forgotten that you totally rely on other lifeforms”: In conversation with Ursula Biemann and Timothy Morton’, p. 104.

72

Ibid., p. 101.

73

Ursula Biemann, ‘Late Subatlantic: Science Poetry in Times of Global Warming’, in L’Internationale Online, Nov. 12, 2015, https://www. internationaleonline.org/research/ politics_of_life_and_death/45_late_ subatlantic_science_poetry_in_ times_of_global_warming/ (accessed 20.7.2019).

74

Morton 2016 (footnote 65), p. 160.

The consciousness of our inextricable coexistence with other entities is also at the centre of Stacy Alaimo’s essay. Considering tales of 23

75

Stacy Alaimo, ‘Hurricanes, Popsicles and Plankton: the Hybrid Ecologies of Bodily Natures’, p. 112.

76

Ibid., pp. 113 and 116.

77

Ibid., pp. 119–120. Alaimo here refers to Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

78

Alaimo in this volume (footnote 75), p. 115.

79

Ibid., p. 119.

80

John Jordan, ‘The Art of Life in the Age of Mass Extinction’, p. 127.

81

Ibid., p. 131.

82

Ibid., p. 134.

survival and journalistic reports on the devastation of the Texan Gulf Coast by Hurricane Harvey (2017), this text demands an alternative narrative – a narrative that does not foreground the triumphal overcoming of environmental catastrophe by human beings, thus reinforcing the image of an isolated, invincible, and individual subject, but rather contests the latter through ‘ecological modes of being’.75 Against the ‘fantasy of imperviousness’ that is spasmodically maintained through various (often nationalist and racist) attempts at demarcation, she opposes her concept of transcorporeality as a ‘mode of ecological being in which the subject recognizes herself as immersed within material flows’.76 As an exemplary motif that spans the entire essay, Alaimo offers our ‘watery embodiment’, which enmeshes us in an ‘elemental and multispecies hydrocommons of water’.77 Alaimo also describes the registration or conscious nonregistration of these intra-active flows and material agencies that permeate and penetrate the subject – and which can assume highly toxic dimensions, as in the case of the hurricane catastrophe, where the floodwaters were contaminated with chemicals and sewage – as a deeply political matter. She demonstrates the extent to which she understands her own practice as situated, and transcorporeality as a ‘politically oriented onto-epistemology’,78 while at the same time refuting a number of criticisms of materialist feminisms or new feminist materialisms. Alaimo concludes with examples from art and critical design that can ‘motivate modes of ecological being’.79 With reference to a project by Taiwanese design students and an action by the crab fisherwoman and environmental activist Diane Wilson, both of which use similar practices, she furthermore shows that the transition from raising consciousness of ecological conditions through aesthetics and activist struggle for improvement of those conditions can be quite fluid. The manifesto-like artist’s statement by John Jordan that follows, as well as the contribution by Labofii (Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan) and the project-class that they taught at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies in the 2017 summer semester, can be understood as a committed plea for an activist ecological practice. Considering the fact that we ‘are now in the 6th period of mass extinction’ and are confronted with an impending ‘collapse of our biosphere’,80 Jordan in his contribution asks for a radical realignment of art. According to him, what we need is an art that bursts its former aesthetic boundaries, an art that understands that ‘life is a complex multitude of mutating relationships’.81 Instead of merely pointing out the crisis, artists should use their creativity to make and transform the world. Labofii’s approach is accordingly not only non-representationalist: it takes direct aim at the paralyzing power of representation. The prerequisite for their resistant ‘form of care giving and commoning’, as well as of attentiveness, nonetheless appears to be a situated ecological thinking.82 For indeed this art of life, according to Jordan, demands ‘a certain mindfulness and presence to worlds. It has to learn to inhabit its territory as much as its bodies, know the stories

24

that flow through it, sense the texture of things that are important to it’.83 The project-class ‘Think like a forest – act like a swarm’, led by Labofii, was based on just such an attentiveness with respect to the situation in Munich, particularly in view of the advanced gentrification processes in this city, the results of which are horrendous rents and the monocultural homogenization of the urban landscape.84 In order to reanimate urban diversity, the students developed a resistant,­ actionist project that intervened in the urban space of Munich, while at the same time exploring practices of common creation, of nonhierarchical collective work. They designed so-called ‘degentrificator boxes’ that provide various means for passers-by ‘to disrupt the process of gentrification’.85

83

Ibid.

84

‘“Think like a Forest – Act like a Swarm”: A class in art, activism and ecological thinking with the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination’, pp. 135–142.

85

Ibid., p. 137.

86

Jenny Nachtigall, ‘Toxic Relations: Ecology, Aesthetics (and their Discontents)’, p. 146.

87

Ibid., p. 145.

88

Ibid., p. 150.

89

Like Stacy Alaimo, Jenny Nachtigall in her essay emphasizes that the relationality of a hybrid ecology today manifests not least as toxicity. Nachtigall, however, recognizes this toxicity even more comprehensively as the material signature of current ecological relationality, referring not only to the ‘contamination of bodies and territories’ but also to the ‘infrastructural toxicity of financialized capitalism’.86 In contrast to an extensive concept of relationality as the expansion of a too narrowly conceived (humanist or Cartesian) semantics of life, which characterizes a number of prominent varieties of ecological approaches in contemporary art and theory, toxicity draws attention to relationality as the demarcation of life in the ‘Racial Capitalocene’.87 Whereas a focus on the micro-level of the material often tends to lose sight of the macro-level of infrastructural processes, it is precisely the perspective of the toxic, according to Nachtigall, that allows a mediation between the two levels (and thus between the ‘old’ historical materialism and new materialisms). With reference to exhibition and event programs such as Deadly Affairs and Toxic Assets as well as Juliana Spahr’s poetic work, Nachtigall explains how toxicity, as a form of ‘slow violence’ and as a phenomenon from which value can be generated, challenges not only concepts of political agency but also a conventional understanding of the image.88

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, ‘Queer Ecologies: Against the Ontologizing of Queerness, for the Development of Queer Collectives!’, p. 150.

90

At this point it should be noted that the lack of differentiation between object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and new mate­ rialism seems very much worth discussing. See the bitter battle of words between the vitalist materialist Jane Bennett and Graham Harman, a representative of objectoriented ontology, in which the latter pointedly distances himself from new materialism. See, among other sources, Harman 2015 (footnote 48), pp. 94–110.

91

Deuber-Mankowsky in this volume (footnote 89), p. 157.

The essay by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky takes the theme of ‘Queer Ecologies’ as an impetus to pose the question of a possible queer media ecology and to critically confront an ontologization of queerness that she also recognizes in the neomaterialisms of Vicky Kirby and Karen Barad.89 In the first part, she primarily addresses a widely circulated essay by Jordy Rosenberg on the ‘subjectless turn’ in queer theory, which reads the approaches of object-oriented ontology and speculative realism, in particular, as problematic origin stories.90 Together with Rosenberg, and following Peter Galloway’s alternative Queer Theory of Ontology, Deuber-Mankowsky pleads for a link between queerness and collectivity that ‘does not reduce the hetero­gene­ity of experiences and modes of living’ even as it emphasizes ‘radical commonality’.91 Deuber-Mankowsky, following Rosenberg, opts for a shift in focus ‘from the ontologizing of queerness 25

92

Ibid., p. 158.

93

Elly Clarke, ‘An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires + Distractions: The Drag of Physicality in a #digitalphysical Hybrid Ecology’, p. 167.

94

Ibid.

in queer atoms and in the molecular to queer collectivity, and from matter­to the material conditions that not only encompass economic conditions, but also the material conditions of affects, memories, wishes, and desire’.92 Not least, she here sees a proximity to Donna Haraway’s­concept of situated knowledge, which according to ­Deuber-Mankowsky touches not only on Georges Canguilhem’s postulate of the regionality of knowledge, but also on its historicity. Deuber-Mankowsky’s explanations thus make it clear that she understands a queer media ecology less as an ontology than as an epistemology that emphasizes the partiality and situatedness of knowledge, and which thinks the world not as autopoietic but rather, with Haraway – and in agreement with many other contributors to this book – as a sympoietic ecosystem. The artificial figure #Sergina, which the British performance artist and photographer Elly Clarke presents in her artist’s contribution that follows, can be understood as an agent and product of queer media ecologies. In Clarke’s performance, digital media do not merely serve as environments, but rather penetrate all spheres of the subject’s existence, seeming to join with the subject into biodigital assemblages (in Parisi’s sense) in which the subject and media technologies are enmeshed in a co-evolution. ‘[J]ust as the technologies we use feed off us and the data that we generate, and leak’, Clarke writes, ‘so are we evolving (to) them. The relationship is symbiotic’.93 The role of media technologies and their ecological entanglements are here nonetheless experienced as quite ambivalent. On the one hand, they allow the complete unfolding of #Sergina as a queer, ambivalently gendered and transgressive drag queen; they are thus enablers and promoters of her simultaneously virtual and material existence, in which the dualisms of original and copy, norm and deviation are dissolved. On the other hand, their neoliberal functionalization and narcissistic perversion carry the danger of a total absorption of the physical self, whose complete dissolution into a play of zeros and ones can only be hindered by an ‘un/comfortable orgy of the abject detritus of physicality’.94 The following conversation between Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Elly Clarke circles around the motif of waiting – which in #Sergina can be interpreted as a sign of communicative gaps and asynchronicities in the affective coupling of the biophysical and the digital – and addresses possibilities for the meaning and positioning of queerness in the framework of a media theory as epistemology. What is evident here, not least, is that queerness, as an equivocal term that can stand both for deviations as well as for the dissolution of the justly criticized dualism of norm and deviation, or indeed for a questioning of the norm itself, must be constantly recontextualized and discussed anew. Marietta Kesting’s contribution picks up on the theme of media ecologies and treats it through an analysis of the artistic work of Sondra Perry and Louis Henderson, as well as of the medial aggregate states – liquid, gas, and solid – that serve her as models for thinking. Like Deuber-Mankowsky, Kesting here argues against an ahistorical ‘subjectless turn’ in the discourse of media ecology, because ‘this

26

would mean that the political, the social, and in particular capitalism as it is racialized today, which also and precisely has effects in the digital, would disappear from criticism’.95 She thus demands the development of a ‘new materialist theory’96 that takes greater account of the achievements of postcolonial studies. For this reason, Kesting’s concept of media ecologies, which she obtains through the interpretation of artworks, relies not on the radically relational approaches of new materialism, but rather on the intellectual tradition of Marshall McLuhan, which she brings up to date. Kesting accordingly defines media ecologies in terms of media as material and virtual environments, as the ‘canals, circuits, interfaces, surfaces, waters, and islands’ that surround the human and the inhuman, the borders of which have indeed ‘become increasingly nebulous’ and which transform the constitution of the subject97 that nonetheless ultimately insists on a fundamental distinction between the human and/or non-human and an (enclosing) media surrounding of data streams and their immaterial and material transmitters. Nevertheless, from time to time a temporary breakdown of this distinction is evident precisely in Kesting’s metaphors, such as that of the ‘data-cloud’ or the sea as ‘imaginary database’,98 which are linked to the abovementioned thought models of medial aggregate states.

95

Marietta Kesting, ‘Hybrid Media Archipelagos in Sondra Perry’s Typhoon Coming On and Louis Henderson’s All that is Solid’, p. 195.

96

Ibid.

97

Ibid., p. 194.

98

Ibid., p. 183.

99

Erich Hörl, ‘BecomingEnvironmental: Toward a Critique of Environmentality as Power-Form, World-Form, and Capital-Form’, p. 198.

100

Ibid.

101

Ibid.

102

Ibid., p. 201.

103

Ibid., p. 204.

104

Ibid., p. 208.

Erich Hörl begins his essay by noting that nowadays the environmentality [Umweltlichkeit] of digital media technologies is by no means exhausted in the construction of a ‘technological backdrop or distributed spaces that mediate the activities of human and nonhuman entities, spaces that would be environmental because they are distributed’.99 The new forms of environmentality he registers goes far beyond ‘anything that might mark them as surroundings’ and turn out to be immediately entangled with the entities participating with them in processes of becoming, alongside which all of these entities ‘co- and trans-individuate’.100 Becoming, as Hörl shows, is itself above all a ‘becoming-environmental’.101 Furthermore, Hörl focuses on two forms of this manifold environmentality: on the becoming-environmental of power and capital, and the becoming-environmental of thought and world. For the concept of environmentality he refers initially to Foucault’s idea of governmentality, which governs human beings through the control of their milieu, and thus picks up precisely at the historical point, and with the concept of an environmental form of control through the ‘regulation and management of environmental effects’,102 with which Ferhat Taylan concludes his essay. As he goes on to explain, though, Hörl conceptualizes environmentality in a more comprehensive sense that builds on Foucault, as ‘integration and integral actualization of the becoming-environmental of capital, power, knowledge, subjectivity and media’.103 According to Hörl, such an environment­ali­tarian movement and its ‘devastations of the Capitalocene’ in turn have ‘provoked’104 the current becoming-environmental of thinking that he sees embodied in Donna Haraway’s ontogenetic project of sympoiesis, her word for co-worlding. Not least, this represents for him the possibility of giving environmentalitarian 27

105

Ibid.

106

BJ Nilsen, ‘One Minute Material – A Chronological Analysis of Sound Ecologies’, pp. 209–215.

107

Betti Marenko, ‘Future-Crafting: The Non-humanity of Planetary Computation, or How to Live with Digital Uncertainty’, p. 218.

108

Martín Avíla, ‘Ecologizing Design’, p. 229.

forms a ‘non-restrictive turn’.105 It is also in the sense of Hörl’s environmentality and of the idea of ecology described in the first half of this introduction, which is based on a shared realm of becoming and of belonging, that the sound artist BJ Nilson understands his acoustic ecologies.106 For him, these represent acoustic traces of the networked interactions between diverse human and nonhuman actors that are joined in a relationality that is situated spatially-meteorolo­ gically, as well as in terms of the times of the day and of the seasons. The artist here describes his recordings as acoustic, partly speculative objects of knowledge, in whose articulation and focusing the technical conditions of his recordings – the measuring and recording apparatuses – also participate, alongside the artist himself. In this way, these apparatuses do not simply represent from a distance, but rather – as media technologies – help to shape the sound ecologies that are the object of research; they are woven into their processes of becoming and articulation. The design theorist Betti Marenko likewise describes a becomingenvironmental of media technologies, a cybernetization of the world, a planetary calculation, in which ‘our current eco-technological lives are no longer simply mediated by information and computation, but are fully constituted by them’.107 Her real point, though, is that with these new ecologies – as she argues with reference to Guattari and Simondon, among others – we are dealing with non-trivial machines that are entangled in processes of a collaborative and relational production of meaning, and which are distinguished by their receptive openness and indeterminacy. Following Luciana Parisi, it is especially in current algorithmic automatization that Marenko diagnoses a nonhuman mode of reason or of thinking that carries a specific form of chance and incalculability in the heart of calculation. According to Marenko, this has consequences, not least for future-crafting, which in its speculative design of possible models of cohabitation must rely less on avoiding threats and risks than on working with contingency and incalculability. Marenko concludes that to do this it is necessary to develop (in affinity with non-human intelligence and its digital uncertainty) a kind of astute intelligence and method of situated, contingent, and adaptive knowledge, which Marenko names metis, placing it in proximity to ecological thinking. The Spices-Species project that Martín Avíla presents in his contribution can be seen as a design – even if a thoroughly analog one – for (future) possibilities of cohabitation that takes an avowed distance from the idea of control over ecologies. The project initiates and supports a symbiotic cohabitation between a species of carpenter bees and a species of passion flower, as well as with the human, by aiming to consider and responsibly shape the inter- and intra-action between humans and other-than-humans. In this context, Avíla speaks of ‘ecologizing design’, which although it cannot indeed deny the anthropocentric character of design nonetheless understands and shapes it as a practice that ‘is performed in, for, with, and through cohabitation with other beings’.108 He furthermore proposes the thesis that it is

28

possible, on the basis of Spices-Species, to grasp the process of eco­ logization as complementary to a process of decolonization, insofar as we ‘acknowledge diversity in its cultural and bio-eco-geo-logical manifestations’.109 Decolonization in this context represents for Avíla a ‘delinking’ from the colonial social patterns upon which the separation between humans and life-process­es rests, but also – in the sense of ‘epistemological disobedience’ – from prevailing Eurocentric traditions of knowledge.110 Avíla closes with a quotation from Humberto Maturana, and the hope that the impending ecological collapse may encourage an ‘opening for “co-inspiration” towards the dominated’ – a process that must always and ‘agonistically be reassessed; an unavoidably co-adaptive symbiogenesis’.111 In the conversation between Martín Avíla and Betti Marenko moderated by Karianne Fogelberg that follows, both underscore design’s social and ecosystemic responsibility as well as the urgency of a transformed understanding of design. In something of a conjunction between the most important theses in their individual contributions, Avíla and Marenko call for a radical revision of conventional design practice, as well as for a kind of design that understands itself as a mediator of cohabitation, as a connector with non-human forms of existence. This implies above all – as they join in emphasizing – a stronger recognition and appreciation of other forms of life as well as of ‘multi-species, other-than-, more-than-human ecological milieux we are an inherent part of’,112 together with a stronger inclusion of chance and the unexpected in the design process, which operates beyond an idea of the domination of nature.

109

Ibid., p. 237.

110

Ibid., p. 238.

111

Ibid., p. 239.

112

‘“The idea that we can design an ecology is something we should be wary of”: In conversation with Martín Avíla and Betti Marenko’, p. 247.

113

Maria Kaika, ‘Radical Ecological Imaginaries: Turning the Ruins of our Present into the Legacies of the Future’, p. 256.

114

Avíla in this volume (footnote 108), p. 239.

115

Kaika in this volume (footnote 113), p. 259.

Maria Kaika’s contribution in turn points out the pitfalls of ‘ecological’ imaginations of design, which according to her have to date relied on false paradigms. Here she especially considers the failure-plagued experiments that since the nineteenth century have attempted to more harmoniously shape the relationship between city, nature, and society. Concepts ranging from the garden city to the sustainable city, the ecocity, or the intelligent city not only negate the socioecological hybrid character of nature and city, but must also be understood as ‘biopolitical tools’ that intend to produce better human beings with an ‘ideal’ city that seeks a harmonious equilibrium with nature. Their attempts to produce a supposedly socioecological equilibrium can thus be seen, according to Kaika, as a kind of ecological governmentality or mesopolitics, in Taylan’s sense, in the course of which new forms of exploitation, repression, and inequality are produced under the cloak of sustainable development. Kaika thus calls for a fundamental change in research questions and design paradigms. Towards this end, we would have to ‘listen and engage instead with people and groups […] who have been silenced in the sustainability debate’.113 In other words, Kaika likewise recommends an ‘opening for “co-inspiration” towards the dominated’114 in order to derive alternative ‘ways of managing socio-environmental inequality’.115 In contrast to Avíla, however, she aims particularly at a politicization of design, art, and intellectual labour and encourages 29

116

Godofredo Pereira, ‘Ecologies of Existence: The Architecture of Collective Equipment’, pp. 265–266.

117 118

Ibid., p. 270.

‘“I know nothing more violent than a consensus building exercise around the table amongst the ‘usual suspects’”: In conversation with Maria Kaika and Godofredo Pereira’, p. 273.

their participation in the construction of new narratives and the indication of new modes for approaching the relation between the human and the more-than-human world. In his contribution, the architect and researcher Godofredo Pereira’s point of departure is likewise a critique of the eco-city or of an ecological urban architecture that, presuming a conceptual divide between human/city and nature, focuses on a harmonization of this relationship. In place of the ‘naturalist conception of ecology’ that has taken root here, Pereira proposes ecological thinking – thinking ‘that accounts for the fact that ideas of nature are inseparable from modes of existence’ and that subjectivity (together with its modes of existence) is always a collective product, because it is ‘environmentally traversed by a multitude of non-human and energetic fluxes [… ] and ecologically constituted in relations of co-dependence with the social, economic and political existential territories it inhabits’.116 In Pereira’s opinion, architectonic practice should therefore seek to design for collectives and foster the self-empowerment and transformation of collectives. At the centre of his architectonic approach to the ecology of existence are collective equipments that lend consistency to a collective and which can become ‘objects of radical attachment’.117 A conversation between Maria Kaika and Godofredo Pereira concludes this publi­cation. It thus ends with a plea, in hybrid ecologies, to start ‘considering dissent as a positive practice that can lead to social change’,118 and to foster synergies between academic labour and social movements.

Translated from German by Daniel Spaulding

30

Mesology and Ecology. Two Alternative Views of the Environment and Their Political Implications in the Nineteenth Century Ferhat Taylan

1

See for example Dale Jamieson, ‘How to Live in the Anthropocene’ (Comment penser l’anthropocène, conference, Paris, Collège de France, 5–6 November 2015).

While the current ecological crisis seems to lead to a proliferation of highly speculative discourses aiming to characterize our present age or to prescribe normative principles for ecological behaviour, there have been few efforts to understand the historical formation of the conceptual categories by which we are supposed to conceive this ecological present or future. Ecological issues are often presented as if they belonged to an absolutely new historical context, calling only present- and future-oriented discourses full of conceptual inventions, or doomed to atemporal reflections on ‘man and nature’. This discursive situation may partly explain the weakness of speculations on ‘how to live or love’ in the Anthropocene,1 precisely because these discourses seem to lack the necessity to explore any kind of philosophical or scientific corpus ‘belonging to the past’. According to this perspective, the Anthropocene is this brand-new age of ecological awareness, paying the cost of past environmental mistakes without making any effort to grasp historical processes which have enabled them. In contrast I will argue that alternative environmental histories are crucial to all theoretical attempts to deal with the multiple layers of the term and the reality of ‘ecology’. Some stimulating recent works have already begun such an effort, criticizing the neutrality of the notion of the Anthropocene from the perspective of a critical envi31

2

See Christophe Bonnneuil, JeanBaptise Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2017 [2013 for the first French edition]). 3

See Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital, the Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016).

ronmental history2 or elaborating a materialist history aiming to link labour and material environment.3 According to these analyses, the history of ‘ecological’ issues should not be reduced to the protection of nature or to a strict Darwinian context; rather, ‘ecology’ has to be conceived on a larger scale that encompasses labour infrastructure, the collective making of material environments, legal regulations of pollutions and so on. It seems particularly relevant to explore nineteenth-century reflection, knowledge and practice in respect of the human relationship to the environment because of its scope and legacy. In the history of the environmental knowledge of this period, the multiplicity of sources is fundamental to an understanding of how this knowledge was philosophically and politically elaborated in different intellectual traditions. In the following I would thus like to examine the emergence of the French concept of milieu as an early scientific and political environmental category, leading to the notion of mesology as an alternative scientific project that emerged simultaneously with the Darwinian ecology. In a first step I will examine the epistemological divergences between these two scientific projects by focusing on Louis-Adolphe Bertillon’s generally neglected Lamarckian mesology and Ernst Haeckel’s Darwinian ecology, in order to show that these two lineages are alternative views of the relation between the organism and the environment in the nineteenth century. In a second step I will show how the mesological lineage, philosophically elaborated by Auguste Comte, seems to have led not only to an environmentalsocial reform programme in France but also to a competitive and psychological form of ‘environmentalism’ developed later by Herbert Spencer in the English-speaking world in the second half of the nineteenth century. Whereas such philosophers are generally not taken into account in the history of environmental thought because they have nothing to do with ‘ecology’, I will argue that their conception of a single, unified ‘milieu’ or ‘environment’ was a major theoretical invention which should be retrospectively examined regarding its political, social and environmental dimensions. This article aims to discuss the specific kind of social and political ‘environmentalism’ that the mesological lineage led to in the nineteenth century, and that implies the modifiability of human nature by the alteration of its milieus. Such investigation aims to underline that, quite surprisingly, modern philosophical reflection based on naturalscientific findings about the relationships between organisms and their environments has led to a socio-centric environmental thought: within the mesological lineage I seek to explore here, the ‘environment’ was thus problematized mainly as a governmental problem internal to human societies, rather than concerning human/non-human relations. Regarding the scope of ‘hybrid ecologies’ elaborated in this volume, such an account has a major consequence: the nineteenth century not only celebrated a natural environment idealized as a wilderness without humans but also gave way to the idea of a social

32

environment without natural beings which should be governed in order to govern human populations. Such symmetric construction of the isolation of industrial human societies from the biophysical components of their environment seems problematic today. It calls for an effort to grasp its epistemological and philosophical grounds and one of its roots could be located in the mesological lineage I propose to explore here. Mesology and ecology The terms ecology and mesology appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, within a few years of one another, and name two different scientific projects that focused on the relation between organisms and their environment. The Darwinian context, in which the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel proposed the concept of ecology in 1866, has been fairly well explored.4 By contrast, the Lamarckian formulation of mésologie (referring to the Greek root mesos, translated as medium or milieu) by the French positivist Louis-Adolphe Bertillon in 1863 has been largely neglected in the historiography of the environmental sciences.5 Yet Bertillon’s mesology was not a marginal science in its time, but figured centrally in the perception of the relationship between the organism and its environment in the wider geography of nineteenth-century (neo)-Lamarckism and positivism, especially but not only in France. During the entire nineteenth century and beyond, both natural and social sciences elaborated environmental reflections in the lineage of ‘mesology’.

4

See Robert P. McIntosh, The Backround of Ecology. Concept and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Pascal Acot, Histoire de l’écologie (Paris: PUF, 1988); Jean-Paul Deléage, Histoire de l’écologie. Une science de l’homme et de la nature (Paris: La Découverte, 1991). 5

Georges Canguilhem has noticed that the French positivist physician Charles Robin first proposed the term of ‘mesology’ as early as 1848, but with a minimal definition as ‘science of the milieu’. See Georges Canguilhem, Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences concernant les vivants et la vie (Paris: VRIN, 1968), p. 72. However I prefer to focus on Bertillon’s much more elaborated definition of the 1860s, which allows a comparison with Haeckel’s definition of ecology in the same decade. 6

See Ernst Mayr, The Growth of the Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

The main concern of mesology was the study of the milieu (local environment) that surrounds a living being and provides its conditions of existence. According to Lamarck, mesology conceives of the rapport between the organism and its environment as a face-to-face relation between a milieu and an individual type representative of its species. By contrast, as Ernst Mayr has argued, Darwinian ecology introduces the study of populations to the detriment of typological analysis, thus implying an alternative conception of the relationship between organism and environment based on interactions between individuals and species in a given habitat.6 This main epistemological divergence between the two lineages seems even more marked when one considers that Lamarck conceived the milieu as i) a physiochemical medium allowing the generation of life and ii) as determining adaptations of living beings and the very direction of evolution, according to the central idea of the inheritance of acquired characters; whereas for Darwin i) the conditions of life of an organism include relations of conflict and solidarity with other organisms in a given place and ii) the physical environment only indirectly affects heredity by affecting food supply and thus the reproduction of multiple species in a given habitat. A comparative history of these two alternative sciences of the environment cannot be limited to the epistemological level, however, in33

7

See Martin S. Staum, Nature and nurture in French Social Sciences, 1859–1914 and Beyond (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). 8

See Claude Blanckaert, De la race à l’évolution. Paul Broca et l’anthropologie française (1850– 1900) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009). 9

In a plenary session of the Society dedicated to discuss the ‘modifying action of the milieus on man and animals’, Durand de Gros summarized the political ambitions of mesology: ‘Indeed, gentleman, what is this all about? What is at stake is simply to know whether man must bow his head before the fatal laws of birth, or whether he can stand up against them and struggle with some success, by using these forces of the ambient world that science teaches us every day to master.’ Bulletins et mémoires de la société d’anthropologie de Paris, 1859–1999, vol. III (Paris, 1868), p. 229.

asmuch as mesology and ecology seem also to have led to divergent social and political understandings of the environment in nineteenthcentury philosophy and social sciences. Bertillon’s mesology cannot be isolated from political and social considerations in France, where biological debates on the evolution of races and the role of the milieu were inseparably tied to urgent political issues concerning the possibilities of social reform. Indeed, in the 1830s Auguste Comte was already theorizing what Bertillon proposed to call mesology in the 1860s, aiming to establish sociology as the science of the interaction between humans and their social milieu, and thus calling for an environmental reformism capable of re-establishing a harmony between these two terms in the chaotic social context of post-revolutionary France. It is therefore important to recall that la mésologie emerged in France within a context of anthropological debates mainly concerning the impact of the milieu on the formation of human races. Between 1860 and 1880 eminent members of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, founded in 1859, were engaged in a very vivid controversy in which the opposing notions of nature and nurture7 were transposed onto the relationship between race and milieu. If most members of the scientific community agreed that the vaguely positivistic understanding of the influence of the milieu on human beings was still valid, the new paradigm of race raised an opportunity to question the limits of the ‘theory of the milieus’. Anthropologists like Paul Broca for instance – one of the rare supporters of Darwinian theses in this assembly8 – posed the question as to whether the famous ‘environmental impact’ could alter fundamental characteristics of the human race in the process of evolution, such as skin colour. Schematically speaking, proponents of the modifying powers of the milieu clashed within this controversy with defenders of the inner characters of races, distributing epistemological options between nurture (acquis, what is environmentally acquired) and nature (inné, innate characters). The consequences of this controversy were not solely scientific in nature but were profoundly political: if ‘race’ was invariable and determined exclusively by innate characters, no hope remained for a reformism aiming to transform the social milieu in order to regenerate society, a transformation that was envisioned by Comte in the sociologie he developed following the French Revolution. In this context Bertillon’s mesology served as the main theoretical instrument of positivist reformism, which defended the theory of the milieus and the modifiability of human beings against anthropology’s race paradigm.9 The social uselessness of the research programme on race and heredity dramatically collided with the much wider possibilities of social intervention enabled by a science of the milieus. Social reform could implement a set of favourable environmental conditions for humans in order to counteract the degenerative effects that a harmful social or physical milieu might have on them. By contrast, if the inner characters of races were fixed, there remained no hope for social

34

improvement and human transformation, for the possibility of change that had so vigorously been defended since the French Revolution. Hence the renunciation of human modifiability meant that the idea of establishing a harmony between society and its milieu would be rendered obsolete, and Comte’s positivistic political project would be equally doomed to disappear. Thus a science of the milieus, namely mesology, became necessary in order to assure social reform. But what would be the specific character of such a science? Bertillon, a positivist physician, demographer and anthropologist who coined the term mesology, introduced some its central principles in his programmatic article ‘On the Influence of the Milieus or Mesology’. The article outlines the main theoretical lines of this new science: ‘The science of the milieus, or the science aiming to discover relations connecting living beings to the milieus they are immersed in. In other words, such science tries to discover reciprocal influences that the milieu and the living being exert upon each other, and modifications which result from this relationship for each of them.’10 Mesology is consequently and primarily a science of relations of a living being and its environment. Its main concern is to discover modifications that occur in the living being when this environment is altered. In this respect, Bertillon writes, mesology has a certain resemblance to chemistry, which is concerned with the ‘profound modifications that two substances undergo when they are put in contact with one other, or when the conditions of their ordinary milieu are modified’.11 Chemistry could be considered as the mesology of inanimate substances – and its main question thus also applies to the mesological study of living beings immersed in a modified milieu: are they altered, modified or destroyed by this immersion? Bertillon’s definition underlines the experimental character of the new science of mesology, given that its proper model of investigation entails a variation of environmental conditions in order to measure the reactions of living beings.

10

Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, “Mésologie”, Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales, 2nd series, vol. 7, 1873, p. 211–266, p. 211.

11

Ibid., p. 214.

12

Ibid.

13

Ibid., p. 215.

The correlation between modifications of the milieus and of living beings allows mesology ‘to be very rich in applications […]. The importance of mesology for philosophy as well as pathology, for sociology and for public hygiene resides precisely in this fact: it is through mesology that we can act on living organisms and modify and strengthen our own organism according to our wishes: Even though we cannot change our ancestors, we can greatly act on the milieu.’12 Given these ambitions of social reform, mesology can be said to designate a set of rational efforts that aim to orient environmental influences in socially desirable directions. According to Bertillon, one of the central benefits of mesology is precisely its ability to connect biological theories about the influence of the milieus with the arts or techniques ‘allowing us to govern them [the milieus] in useful ways and to increase our happiness’.13 Unsurprisingly, Bertillon accordingly defines mesology as the ‘science on which our power over other organisms and ourselves depends. While other sciences make us 35

14

Ibid., p. 266.

15

Lorraine Daston (ed.), Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 1.

dominate physical matter, mesology will give us power to act upon living beings and to make us masters of ourselves!’14 Retrospectively, such enthusiastic conclusion may appear to be pseudo-scientific in ambition, symptomatic of the grandiose political discourses of the French Third Republic. However, taking the mesological project seriously, one could also ask, following Loraine Daston and her colleagues, ‘how whole domains of phenomena […] come into being and pass away as objects of scientific inquiry’.15 This would enable us to reconsider mesology as a part of an ‘applied metaphysics’, and to open up an understanding of how and why such a conception of the relationship between the organism and the environment prevailed in this specific period. In addressing this nexus I will first examine the epistemological frame of mesology as a project of environmental knowledge, and then explicate the political and philosophical context in which Auguste Comte elaborated his ‘theory of milieu’, which led to the theoretization of mesology in the second half of the nineteenth century. The specific frame of the mesological project is best understood in the light of its divergence from Darwinian ecology, which in its minimal definition was elaborated by Haeckel in 1866. The epistemological differences between these two lineages could be summarized as follows:

Mesology Ecology Invention of the term

Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, »Mésologie«, Ernst Haeckel,

Dictionnaire de Médecine (Nysten), 1865; Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, 1866

First occurrence: Charles Robi (1848)

Greek root mesos oikos Lamarck/Comte Darwin Reference to Unit of analysis

Normal type Populations

(Broussais’s principle) (Malthus’s principle) Relations to analyse

Influence of the milieu on a normal type, Relations for competition and solidarity

representative of it species, and its between populations in a place of co-existence modifications Context of emergence Anthropological and medical debates Diffusion of Darwinism, biogeography in France between 1840 and 1880 Social and political applications

36

Public health, criminology, colonial ––––––––––

acclimatization (end of the 19th century)

Firstly, whereas ecology is defined as the study of interactions between populations living in a same place or habitat,16 mesology is the science of the influences that a physical or social milieu exerts on an individual as representative of the whole species. While it is now well documented how Darwin adopted Malthus’s analysis of populations, presenting a new synthesis of earlier biogeographical studies of the distribution of organisms in nature (Humboldt or De Candolle),17 the historiography of environmental sciences seems to have neglected how a Comtian and Lamarckian mesology followed Broussais’ principle, establishing the limits of the normal and the pathological in a single individual. According to the French physiologist François Broussais (1772–1838), ‘diseases are merely the effects of simple changes in intensity in the action of the stimulants [read: environmental factors] which are indispensable for maintaining health’.18 Thus the limits of physiological normality beyond which an environmental factor becomes pathological depend on the characters of the species as represented by each individual of a given species, and have nothing to do with an analysis of popu­lations. (For instance, the normal ambient temperature for the human species is about 20° C; it is viable between –15° C and +40° C, but becomes pathological beyond such levels.) Hence, according to Broussais (followed by Comte), environmental ‘modifiers’ or stimulants are biologically necessary for each organism that needs to be stimulated. Such modifiers, however, become ‘irritant’ if and when they go beyond bearable levels. The mesological lineage relies on this physiological ‘principle’, which it aims to translate into the level of the social in order to shape a normal social milieu whose action would be bearable by individ­ uals. This divergence between an environmental analysis of popula­ tions and an analysis focused on individuals reveals the main epis­ temic bifurcation of ecology and mesology: according to the ancient Greek roots referred to by Haeckel and Bertillon respectively, the science of oikos implies a place of intra- and infra-species interac­ tions, whereas the science of mesos presupposes a face-to-face relation between a physical/social environment and a single individ­ual surrounded by it. Hence mesology is the science of environmental influences, which it aims to control and orient in order to govern and modify living beings, whereas ecology is the science of the relations of conflict and solidarity among populations living in a same habitat.

16

See Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Berlin: Reimer, 1866).

17

See Robert P. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology. Concept and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

18

See François Broussais, De l’irritation à la folie (Paris: Delaunay, 1828), p. 58 et sequ.

Secondly, ecology and mesology led to very different political and social understandings of the relationship between humans and the environment. Indeed, without necessarily referring to Bertillon himself, the French reformists of the second half of the nineteenth century simultaneously theorized socio-environmental interventions in the mesological frame, taking both colonial environments and criminal anthropology into account, for example. At the First Congress of Criminal Anthropology, held in 1885 in Rome, the French anthropologist Alexandre Lacassagne made the mesological dimension 37

19

See Alexandre Lacassagne, Actes du Premier Congrès international d’anthropologie criminelle (Turin: Bocca Frères, 1886), p. 167.

20

Such policies form a discursive and practical unity in Third Republic France, and were clearly perceived by Paul Rabinow, although with a somewhat excessive fascination for the French Army officers reading biology in Algeria in order to know if they could be acclimatized to this new milieu. See Paul Rabinow, French Modern. Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989). For Rabinow the mesological paradigm is the very expression of a utopian modernism, a successful mixture of social reform with science. However, Rabinow passes over the more negative aspects of the social applications of mesology, such as Lacassagne’s criminology, which aims to cleanse the social milieu of criminals, considered as ‘microbes’.

21

See Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (Paris: Rouen Frères, 1830–1842), p. 682.

22

Ibid., vol. 46, p. 61.

of his enterprise very clear: ‘If the social milieu is defective enough to promote the development of vicious or criminal natures, the reforms must target this milieu.’19 According to Bertillon’s wishes, mesology seems to have flourished in multiple ‘environmental’ policies, aiming at governing human populations by the means of their physical and social milieus.20 Comte and Spencer: the invention of a socio-centric environment Exploring such mesological lineages requires a better understanding of the role played by two major philosophers of the nineteenth century, both of whom elaborated theoretical syntheses that relied on evolutionary knowledge: Auguste Comte, and later on one of his notorious readers, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer. By the 1830s Comte had elaborated what he called a ‘theory of the milieus’, which provided a political understanding of Lamarck’s biological reflections. Comte was the first thinker to synthetize the concept of milieu in the singular form, in order to signify ‘not only the fluid in which the organism is immersed but the entire ensemble of the external circumstances, of whatever nature, necessary to its existence’.21 Without doubt Comte was the main protagonist for transforming the minor biological concept of the milieu into an all-encompassing theoretical signifier capable of unifying natural and social laws. And it is therefore safe to say that no account of the history of the relationship between organism and environment during the nineteenth century should underestimate the central role played by Comte. In the same gesture he elaborated a comprehensive epistemological analysis of Lamarckian biology and a political project aimed at reforming post-revolutionary French society by intervening in its environmental conditions. According to Comte, the concept of milieu was the main operator to provide a satisfactory scientific ground for the establishment of a social science in perfect continuity with the laws of nature. Since organic life, following Lamarck, should be defined as harmony between the organism and its corresponding milieu, no account of social reality could ignore such relationship. Thus the main ambition of positivism was to describe the laws governing social relations as if they were as certain as the laws governing organic life. In line with this ambition, Comte introduced the social milieu as the most complex level of all other kinds of milieus (that is, the physical, chemical and biological milieus), and calledc for a new science that he precisely called sociology. In a context of major social disorder following the French Revolution, in which ‘society was facing the danger of immediate dislocation’,22 the nascent discipline of sociology was the science of the harmonious relationship between humans and their complex milieus. Accordingly, Comte developed this ‘theory of the milieus’ in order to promote a project of full social regeneration based on a conscious action of the society on its own environment. Comte’s work makes clear that at the beginning of the nineteenth

38

century the understanding of the biological relation between organisms and their milieu gave rise to an environmental political thought that took as its main problem the modifiability and malleability of human populations through the transformation of the physical and social milieus they live in. Following Comte, if all living beings need specific conditions of existence to live without pathologies, if they can be improved by the reform of their environment, such a law of nature is also entirely valid for human populations. In fact for most French socialist or positivist thinkers of this period the discovery of the environmental influence on organisms primarily concerned human nature’s modifiable character, rather than that of non-human natural beings. In other words, this ‘environmental thought’ was not about the conservation of all living beings, but about the possibility of social reforms and social improvement by means of the environment. The posterity of this mesological lineage is far from being limited to France, as is apparent in the reflections of the British philosopher Herbert Spencer. If ‘late-nineteenth-century biologists and psychologists focused primarily – as had Spencer – on the environment as an agent of organismal change’,23 this is because they – including Spencer – partly adopted the mesological tradition, transposing Darwinism into a much larger environmental thinking. As an advocate of the ‘struggle for life’, which encountered huge public recognition in the US after the Civil War, Spencer was not only the agent of the ‘Darwinization’ of environmental conceptions within philosophy and the social sciences; he also secured a wide reception of Comte’s and Lamarck’s ideas in the English-speaking world.24 Hence Spencer seems to harmonize two approaches, presenting a synthesis of mesological ideas and the Darwinian struggle for life. The most notable conceptual invention resulting from this attempt is the very notion of the ‘environment’. As shown recently by Trevor Pearce, ‘Before Spencer got a hold of it, the word “environment” was still very rare; he made it a central concept in his popular philosophical accounts of biology and psychology, and by the end of the century it was a common term.’25 Thus, the very concept of the environment in the English language seems to be Spencer’s translation of Lamarckian and Comtian reflections.26 This was anything but a neutral translation, however: whereas the French concept of ‘milieu’ implied a principle of harmony (actual or to be established) between the organism and its environment, the Spencerian ‘environment’ also refered to a space of conflicts, following Malthusian and Darwinian ideas.

23

See Trevor Pearce, ‘The Origins and Development of the Idea of Organism-Environment Interaction’, in G. Barker et al. (eds.), Entangled Life. Organism and Environment in the Biological and Social Sciences (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), pp. 13–32.

24

See Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought 1860–1915 (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944).

25

Pearce 2014 (footnote 23), p. 13.

26

According to Pearce, ‘the word “environment” was first used in a biological context by the social thinker Harriet Martineau as her preferred translation of Comte’s “milieu”. Phrases like “the reciprocal action of the organism and its environment” thus appear for the first time in Martineau’s translation of Comte’s course (Comte 1853, 1, p. 40).’ Spencer made the term popular in the English-speaking world, starting with his Principles of Psychology (1855).

27

Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology (London: Williams and Norgate, 1864), p. 72.

The question remains of how Spencer managed to combine these two apparently contradictory understandings of the organism-environment relationship, namely the Comtian version based on harmony with the Darwinian account of conflict. The key concept of his uneasy synthesis is the progressive adaptation of organisms to their environment: ‘Not only’, writes Spencer, ‘do we habitually look for some response when an external stimulus is applied to a living organism, but we perceive a fitness in the response. […] We have observed an adaptation of living changes to changes in surrounding circumstances.’27 If 39

28 29

Ibid.

Concerning the concept of ‘milieu’ see Georges Canguilhem, ‘The Living and its Milieu’, Knowledge of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008; first pub­lished in French in 1965), pp. 98–120; concerning the notion of ‘mesology’ see Georges Canguilhem, ‘La philosophie biologique d’Auguste Comte et son influence en France au XIXe siècle’, Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Paris: VRIN, 1968), pp. 61–74.

the expression ‘surrounding medium’, often used in the Principles of Biology, refers overtly to the Lamarckian ‘milieux ambiants’, Spencer inserts the Darwinian struggle for life into the organism’s adaptations to continuous changes that occur in such an environment; in the face of a given change of a specific physical environment, only few organisms (namely the fittest ones) could survive and reproduce. By introducing Darwinian competition into the adaptation of organisms to a perpetually changing environment, Spencer aimed to provide the evolutionary explanation that only ‘superior forms’ could survive at the end of the process. ‘Doubtless many who have looked at Nature with philosophic eyes, have observed that death of the worst and multiplication of the best, must result in the maintenance of a constitution in harmony with surrounding circumstances.’28 The harmony between organisms and their environment could only be the result of a struggle, the fittest being ‘chosen’. If primitive human races, Spencer concludes, are characterized by their adaptation to natural environments, the superiority of the European races could be explained by their fitness to complex, industrial environments. These societies are civilized insofar as they adapt themselves to the challenges of a perpetually changing industrial and social environment, for instance to urbanization. Retrospectively such an explanation of the progress of industrial societies by a successful adaptation to the new environments that they themselves created obviously seems to be a part of the intellectual background that led to neglecting the damage caused to other than human beings. It also shows how Spencer’s racial/cultural-supremacy discourse was supported by his philosophical account of organism/environment relationships. Thus Spencer not only introduced the mesological perspective into the English-speaking intellectual sphere; he also added a psychological and competitive dimension to this perspective. Whereas in France environmental reflections mainly concerned social interventions, Spencer insisted on the mental and competitive adaptation of individuals to perpetually changing social environments. Paradoxically, the most pre-eminent philosophers of the nineteenth century, namely Comte and Spencer, having elaborated their theories via Lamarck’s and Darwin’s conceptions of the environment, came to the conclusion that the human species should adapt to an exclusively human, civilized environment. Such a socio-centric environment is additionally understood as a field of political intervention, in order to govern human populations according to the natural law of progress. ‘Mesopolitics’ Ultimately, the history of mesology and of the concept of milieu brings to light another line of thought, alternative to Darwinian ecology. In France this lineage has been studied by Georges Canguilhem,29 and by Michel Foucault, who followed his leads. In his lectures at the Collège de France in 1977, Foucault outlines a research programme about what we could call an ‘environmental governmen-

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tality’, that is, a modern political rationale which tends to ‘conduct the conduct’ [in the French Original: ‘conduire des conduites’] of human beings by planning their surroundings.30

30

See Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 777–795.

31

With a particular emphasis on the concept of milieu, Foucault considers the practices of urban planning in the late eighteenth century as a problem of governing the milieus. According to Foucault, acting upon the milieus implies a way of governing human beings through distanced action, one that does not act directly on bodies, as is the case with disciplinary techniques, but indirectly by acting on the population through planning its environments.

See Ferhat Taylan, Mésopolitique. Connaître, théoriser et gouverner les milieux de vie (1750–1900) (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2018).

It seems relevant to extend and develop Foucault’s indications further, and to sketch a modern political rationale that makes the milieu a central means of governing human populations. I propose to call this rationale a mesopolitics.31 If ‘biopolitics’ is the very general term for the state’s interest in biological processes, mesopolitics more precisely concerns the knowledge and government of the relationship between humans and their environment. Governing human beings by planning their surroundings, by transforming their conditions of existence, seems to have emerged as one of the key ideas of sociological thought, especially in but not limited to France. In this sense, mesopolitics corresponds to the explicit ambitions of the founders of French sociology, including Comte and Emile Durkheim, insofar as they thought that governing its own milieus was a way for a society to govern itself. There are two objections that can be raised to this mesopolitical ideal, however: On the one hand, the emphasis on the social environment kept these modern thinkers from paying attention to the degradation of natural beings, inasmuch as the environmental debate was focused mainly on the human social sphere. The mesopolitical strategy aiming to pacifying society itself came at a high price, insofar as the damage caused to natural beings in general was completely left in the shadows. On the other hand, the ideal of a self-governing society which intervenes in its own milieus seems to be more complex than it had appeared, given that mesopolitical interventions have generally resulted in the governing of populations by bureaucratic elites and decision makers without any consultation with the governed people. To put it even more simply, mesological governmental projects seem to suffer from both a lack of democracy and a lack of consideration of ‘other-than-human’ beings. In this critical sense, mesology was not a viable eco-political alternative, but rather an indicator of a problematic environmental-social thought that emerged in the nineteenth century. It underlines the fact that Darwinian ecology and its political implications are only a small part of a larger modern ‘environmental’ thought still largely unexplored today. 41

Towards the Rift Valley Crossing (Some Notes, Some Works) Simon Starling

The small number of works presented here are part of a much larger body of such works, which are fuelled by the specifics of place or site. They are not works that are bound physically to those sites – they are therefore not site-specific in the traditional sense – but are rather freely roaming, autonomous works that exist as a result of an action or process made at and in light of the particular site in question. These places or sites (while occasionally chosen for me through invitations or commissions) become home to half-formed ideas and/or narrative structures. They inhabit these ideas, flesh out these narrative structures, with their specific geographies, histories and ecologies. As places they are invariable complex amalgams of political, social, historical and ecological notions – places where it is hard to unpick the interwoven realms. Culture and nature become inseparable (in fact perhaps nature is an unproductive term here). They are often temporally complex too – anachronistic – in that they seem both mired in the past and prophetic or even futuristic. As such they often seem to prompt anachronistic responses – responses that push and pull at contemporary notions of time, slowing things down, re-deploying redundant technologies or pre-existing artworks or simply conflating the past and the present. Fig. 1–2

Project for a Rift Valley Crossing (2015/16, fig. 1–2) is just such a response to just such a site. A deeply complex site with an intensely complex and divisive history – a fast disappearing and highly saline body of water at the lowest point on earth, sandwiched between Israel, Jordan and the West Bank. A repository for vast mineral wealth once fed by what was formerly one of the world’s great water ways – the Jordan River – now a mere trickle, its fresh waters diverted for intensive agriculture long before it reaches the Dead Sea. It is a

Project for a Rift Valley Crossing, a canoe built with magnesium extracted from Dead Sea water and used on 30 November 2016 in an attempted crossing of the Dead Sea from Israel to Jordan, 2015/16, ­canoe cast in Dead Sea magnesium, 2 paddles, 2 canvas seats, Dead Sea water, tanks, wooden welding jig, 2 silver gelatin prints, installed dimensions variable (canoe 53 × 474 × 85 cm).

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Fig. 3–4

Blue Boat Black, 2 silver bream, 2 red mullet, 1 saddle bream, 1 European sea bream and three rockfish, caught from a replica of a Marseilles Barque, built from the wood from a museum display case from the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, and subsequently cooked over charcoal made from the wood of the boat, 1997, charcoal, posters, photographs, tools, fishing tackle, cool box, table top, aluminium trestles, life jacket, clothing, installed dimensions variable.

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dystopian vision of long-term environmental degradation fuelled by cultural history and politics – its ever expanding shoreline is pitted with sinkholes that sporadically consume farms, roads and buildings as the environmentally stressed, former seabed collapses in on itself. ··· What I have called the ‘geography of making’ had a very particular resonance in relationship to Glasgow. A city in the early 1990s whose artistic community was hell-bent on establishing the place as a centre of sorts: a viable and vital place to make and exhibit work. Glasgow-based artists were hyperaware of their own geography, and this sensitivity for geography became an active part of my practice. ··· Blue Boat Black (1997, fig. 3–4) was realized on a residency in Marseille, and took the form of a convoluted act of unsustainable provision. A disused museum display case from the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, was transported to Marseille and resurrected, temporarily at least, in the form of a small fishing boat, a traditional barque. The reconfigured vitrine was then put to sea and used to fish in the waters around Marseille. When several fish had been caught, the boat was then further transformed into charcoal in order that

the catch might be cooked and consumed. Coming full circle, the remains of the boat returned to the museological realm in the form of the charred remains, testament to the cycle of construction and deconstruction, use and re-use. ··· ‘You can do what ever you like here but you can’t show climatesensitive archival material – it’s too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter.’ Hans Dünser, Kunstraum Dornbirn Inspired by the unregulated conditions at the Kunstraum Dornbirn, Plant Room (2008, fig. 5–6) was developed as a means of presenting the German photographer Karl Blossfeldt’s vintage prints in accordance with contemporary conservational guidelines. Blossfeldt’s entire oeuvre documents a moment in the history of art when the structure of plants was not only incorporated into aesthetically pleasing forms but also absorbed into concepts of architecture and design. His photographs are not meant as illustrative images of plants, but correspond more to tectonic models that convey a figurative concept. Working with traditional, low-tech mud-brick architecture in combination with a highly efficient fuel-cell-driven heating/cooling system, Plant Room facilitated the display of these highly sensitive and valuable images in this uncontrolled post-industrial exhibition space.

Fig. 5–6

Plant Room, 2008, mud bricks, fuel cell, climate-control system, vitrine, 8 vintage prints by Karl Blossfeldt, building 540 × 630 × 310 cm / vitrine 113 × 178 × 9 cm / prints 30 × 24 cm.

45

··· Even that seemingly grounded and specific work managed to slip its mooring and find a new context in another unregulated space: the Temporäre Kunsthalle in Berlin. In Berlin Plant Room became the sparing partner for another up-rooted work, Kakteenhaus (2002, ­fig. 7–8), which had originally been conceived for Portikus in Frankfurt (2003). An attempt to regulate heat – to maintain museum conditions – was then challenged by a brutish car engine that tried to push up the temperature in the space. ··· Spain’s Tabernas Desert has been a place to which I’ve returned time and again for a number of different projects – for its mixture of prophetic ecology, cultural history and borrowed geography (the simulated American Wild West).

Fig. 7–8

Kakteenhaus, 2002, a Cereus cactus, found growing in the Tabernas Desert, Andalusia, on the set of the Texas Hollywood Film Studios, dug up and transported 2145 km to Frankfurt am Main in a Volvo 240, Volvo 240 estate, Cereus cactus, piping, cables, thermometer.

46

The Tabernas is Europe’s only true desert. It is a small area of undulating terrain bounded to the north-east by the Sierra de Los Filabres and to the south-west by the Sierra Nevada. The desert, which is growing in size each year due to climate change and poor land management, is home to both the film studios, where Sergio Leone made many of his most celebrated Spaghetti Westerns, and the solar platform of Almería, a research facility developing the use of solar energy for the desalination of sea water—a possible way to stem the tide of ‘desertification’ in the region. One of the cacti planted as props on Leone’s former film sets was dug up and transported to Frankfurt in a red estate car. On its arrival in Frankfurt the engine was removed from the car and installed inside Portikus, a simple, prefabricated gallery built on the back of a ruined neoclassical facade, creating a temporary greenhouse for the displaced Cereus cactus. The 30-metre-long extended cooling-system and exhaust from the inefficient internal combustion engine provided ample heat to accommodate the highly efficient cactus.

··· On 9 September 2004, a crossing was made of the Tabernas Desert on an improvised, fuel-cell powered, electric bicycle. The bicycle was driven by a 900-watt motor that was in turn powered by electricity produced in a portable Nexa fuel cell fitted into its frame. The fuel cell is capable of producing up to 1200 watts of power using only compressed, bottled hydrogen and oxygen from the desert air. The entire journey of 41 miles over undulating terrain required the use of two lightweight gas bottles containing 800 litres of compressed gas. The only waste product from the moped’s desert crossing was pure water, of which 600 ml were captured in a water bottle mounted below the fuel cell – the rest escaped as water vapour. The captured waste water was subsequently used to produce a ‘botanical’ watercolour illustration of an Opuntia cactus. The painting of this most hardy of plants refers back to the site of the journey and to Sergio Leone’s cut-price Wild West, while also parodying the somewhat clumsy prototype moped. The work and its title, Tabernas Desert Run (fig. 9), make a direct reference to Chris Burden’s 1977 Death Valley Run, a seven-hour desert crossing made in the real Wild West on a bike powered by a tiny petrol engine. ··· That heightened sense of the ‘geography of making’ found an outlet in botany and biology and the history of the introduction of certain non-indigenous plants and animals into, among other places, the Scottish landscape – most notably Scotland’s weed par excellence, Rhododenron ponticum (at once the spring poster child and scourge of the countryside).

Fig. 9

Tabernas Desert Run, 2004, fuel-cell-powered bicycle, vitrine, watercolour on paper, 170 × 224 × 62 cm.

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···

Fig. 10

Island For Weeds (Prototype), 2003, soil, rhododendrons, water, plastic pipes, metal, self-regulating pressure system, 244 × 610 × 366 cm.

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Originally conceived to float on Loch Lomond, Scotland, within the newly established Scottish National Park, Island for Weeds (Prototype) (2003, fig. 10) is a support structure designed to sustain and contain a small number of Rhododendron ponticum plants. It is part of an on-going body of work that focuses on the introduction and subsequent demonisation of this hardy shrub. The name ponticum comes from the Pontus Hills in Turkey, but the plant is indigenous to many parts of the Caucasus and the southern Mediterranean. It was first introduced into Britain in 1756 from the hills overlooking Gibraltar on the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. From its prized position in many British ornamental gardens, it soon escaped into the wild and established itself as a strong force among the indigenous flora. While admired for its flamboyant spring blooms, and still featured in many a picturesque image of the Scottish landscape, Rhododendron ponticum has become a major problem for landowners and conservationists alike. Its presence in the National Park poses fundamental questions relating to the nature and makeup of the country’s landscape – questions finally considered too contentious to be addressed by a public art work. Following a long

development process over a number of years the project was finally blocked by Scottish National Heritage, who were part-funding public commissions while also paying Scottish landowners to destroy ponticum plants on their land. ··· Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore) (2006–2008, fig. 11) was made over a period of two years, and conflates two seemingly unconnected stories into a single sculpture, orchestrating a collision between the politics of art history and the environment. The first of these stories involves the British sculptor Henry Moore, who despite his perhaps provincial approach to modernism was the first British artist to have a truly global career. Henry Moore’s work was to a large extent introduced to Toronto by the art histo-

Fig. 11

Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore), 2006/2008, steel, zebra mussels, plinth, 162, 6 × 76, 2 × 76,2 cm.

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rian and spy Anthony Blunt. Along with his role as director of the Courtauld Institute, London, and his activities on behalf of the KGB, Blunt became an adviser to the Art Gallery of Toronto in 1947. In 1954 he proposed Moore’s recently completed work Warrior with Shield (1953–54) to the Art Gallery of Toronto for acquisition. This life-sized figure had evolved from the form of a pebble Moore found on an English beach in 1952, and proved a controversial addition to the collection, as did the 1966 acquisition by the city of Toronto of Moore’s Three Way Piece no. 2: Archer (1964) for Nathan Philips Square, which provoked nationalist opposition among sections of the local art community. For Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore), a steel copy of Moore’s Warrior with Shield was submerged in Lake Ontario for one and a half years. During this time it played host to a growing colony of mussels. In this way the work takes the story of Henry Moore’s introduction into Toronto and forces it into a somewhat unexpected relationship with the story of the zebra mussel’s introduction into, and infestation of, the Great Lakes. One of around 180 introduced species now flourishing in the lakes, zebra mussels first arrived in the bilge water of trading ships from the Black Sea as recently as the mid-1980s. Originally native to the lakes of South East Russia, these tiny striped warriors have radically transformed the ecosystem of the Great Lakes, causing considerable problems for both indigenous animal populations and municipal water systems. ··· Autoxylopyrocycloboros is a very new word with ancient origins. It was built, so to say, with the help of a classics scholar, from a number of Ancient Greek building blocks, some functional and descriptive, others rather fanciful. What this rhythmic amalgam of a word names is a strange kind of sea creature, a distant relative of the Ouroboros, that mythical tale-eating serpent of alchemy, the symbol of eternal rejuvenation. Autoxylopyrocycloboros was a creature whose life was far from eternal but tragically, or rather perhaps tragi-comically, short – notions of eternal rejuvenation no longer holding quite the credibility they once did. Its brief life was spent on and ultimately in the submarine-infested waters of Loch Long on the west coast of Scotland, the home of Britain’s increasingly decrepit nuclear deterrent Trident. Autoxylopyrocycloboros (2006, fig. 12) was born out of the very particular history of that deepest of the fingers of the Clyde Estuary, the birthplace of the steamship and subsequent home to its distant cousin the steam-powered nuclear submarine. One of the most picturesque corners of Scotland, whose mountains are in places hollowed out to contain the nuclear arsenal, Loch Long’s banks are also home to the now famous peace camp, a fluctuating community of protestors who have for over 30 years kept the secretive activities of Faslane and 50

Coulport naval bases firmly in the media glare – chivvying, probing, worrying their way under the skin of Her Majesty’s men and women in blue. In 2004 I visited both the peace camp and Faslane with a group of students from the Städelschule in Frankfurt while we were staying at Cove Park, a residency programme for artists. At Faslane we were greeted by Commander Bill, a former submariner who had spent much of his adult life in a three-inch-thick steel tube close to the bottom of one or other of the world’s oceans, but now headed up the PR department for the base. What we got from Bill was essentially the ‘party line’ on the functioning of the base and Britain’s nuclear deterrent, perhaps with the tinniest hint of regret at having had to send submarines to the Gulf. Half way through his PowerPoint presentation, however, quite to our surprise, he played a short sketch from a much loved British sit-com Only Fools and Horses, a slap-stick moment clearly designed to break the ice, show the human side of the navy, that kind of thing. The largely German audience looked on bemused and unsmiling. This bizarre insert, this somewhat existential plea, comedy turned tragedy, lodged in my mind and later resurfaced when I was invited back to Cove Park to work on a commission to produce a new project in the area. My early love for the more violent, self-destructive

Fig. 12

Autoxylopyrocycloboros, 2006, 38 colour transparencies, Götschmann medium-format slide projector, and flight case, slides 6 × 7 cm, projection duration 4 min.

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moments of classic cartoons, the unending abuses of Tom and Jerry for example, also came into play, combined with a sketchy knowledge of the early days of steam on the Clyde Estuary, an ongoing interest in the endless ‘conflagration’ that has marked civilization’s development since the first fire was lit in the first cave dwelling, a love of the tragicomic works of the 1970s conceptual fall guy, Bas Jan Ader, and for the an-architecture of Gordon Matta-Clark. These interests, coupled with a constant use and abuse of defunct technology, all led to the formulation of Autoxylopyrocycloboros and to a four-hour-long entropic voyage on the waters of Loch Long in October 2006.

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‘Mesopolitics underlines how human and non-human relations have already been thought, way before our noisy concept of the Anthropocene’ In conversation with Simon Starling and Ferhat Taylan

1

Maria Muhle is referring to Ferhat Taylan’s lecture in the lecture series Hybrid Ecologies on 15 December 2016. See also Taylan’s contribution to this volume, pp. 31–41.

Maria Muhle [MM]  First of all I would like to stress that it strikes me as really interesting and important to introduce a different genealogy into the contemporary debate about ecology, such as the one Ferhat has sketched with the notion of mesology:1 Mesology opens up the possibility of another distinction, one between a political ecology and a mesopolitics as another form of thinking about the political implications of the science of the milieu. In this line of thought the natural and the political aren’t two separate realms that at some point ‘come together’ within the ecological paradigm when the administration (and exploitation) of nature provokes a political, or managerial or technocratic action (in order to contain undesired effects). On the contrary, mesopolitics as another politics of ecology points to the fact that the political, social dimension has always been there – which would then lead us to abandon the idea that a return to a possibly socially untouched nature might be even thinkable. I was also really struck by a quote by you, Simon, which I found in an interview and which more or less says that everything you touch as a maker has ramifications. I think this notion of ramifications is very important for us, and it becomes really obvious when you talk through your work, which is constructed as a kind of narrative: one project evolves out of the other project and the next and so on; but it also applies to another understanding of transformation, on a more basic 53

level, the transformation from natural things into cultural things and back into natural things etcetera. I would say that this idea points in the same direction as Ferhat’s idea of mesopolitics inasmuch as it contradicts, again, the conviction that ecology is the science that looks into the fact that the natural challenges political or social interventions, and it suggests that this connectedness is somewhat deeper, more fundamental. 2

Ferhat Taylan, ‘Mesopolitics: Foucault, Environmental Governmentality and the History of the Anthropocene’, in Philippe Bonditti, Didier Bigo, Frédéric Gros (eds.), Foucault and the Modern International (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), pp. 261–274.

Simon Starling [SS]  By way of a slight detour in addressing your comments Maria, I just wanted to note that I was reading a slightly more elaborate version of the presentation Ferhat made today.2 In that version you were talking about the problem of urgency, in the sense that discussions about the ecological crisis have been driven by scientists and technological developments. What you’re trying to do, it seems to me, is to carve out a different kind of discourse in relation to those issues. There’s something about speed there that resonated for me, and about trying to establish different kinds of spaces for thinking about these issues. That was one of the things I thought could also be interesting to talk about. I suppose it’s a question of how an artist or a philosopher engages in these urgent conversations in a way that moves the conversation forward. Ferhat Taylan [FT]  The urgency of the ecological crisis is obvious, but I think it shouldn’t keep us from thinking about its historical ramifications in a more detail, taking the time necessary to explore it. Simon’s work is a good example of such a ‘calm’ elaboration of the relation to the environment, engaging at once with historical, technical and political dimensions of the surrounding materiality. As I understand it, Simon’s work concerns the transformation of the common materials of a milieu for the production of unexpected tools – I’m thinking here of his Project for a Rift Valley Crossing (2015/16). The canoe made from Dead Sea magnesium is not a technological invention taking place in a nowhere – Simon used it to cross politically troubled waters from Israel to Jordan. He described it as ‘the physical manifestation of a thought process’. Simon’s intervention is the materialization of the possibilities of a very unique milieu (both chemical, physical, social and political) which is the Dead Sea. ‘The horizon of possibilities’ is an abstract idea, which only takes shape with this kind of projects which show us relations we can establish with a given, hybrid environment. It seems to me that such concrete interventions into specific milieus are much more interesting than all the discussions we could have on the global environment.

MM  Maybe we can add to the notions of milieu, environment and Umwelt/Umgebung the question of the site – your work, Simon, always relates to a context or a specific site that then gives way to further ramifications: it’s the sites themselves that seem to produce these connections, and therefore your work is not ‘site-specific’ in the traditional way, but about specific sites, if I might put it this way.

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SS 

As an artist I carry around these half-formed ideas, what you might call simple ‘models’ for works. What the specific site provides is the flesh on the bones of those models. A big part of each project is finding a home for those half-formed ideas. I have the sense that I’ve had an idea for many years – for example the idea of using a car engine as a way to heat an exhibition space – but then suddenly came the discovery of the Tabernas Desert, which oddly came to me through some research I was doing about rhododendrons in Scotland, tackling this idea of introduced species. It was an interview with the film director Jim Jarmusch, who was talking about the film sets there in the Spanish desert and the cacti that had arrived there as props for filming, which triggered my interest in that place. Suddenly that image, that very simple image of a car engine heating a space, had a home, or a purpose, and that connection of site and initial idea became Kakteenhaus (2002) at Portikus in Frankfurt. Audience 1 [David Weber]  There is a motive I find intriguing in both of your talks. Because ultimately the question of the milieu and the environment is also a question about the relation between the inside and the outside. In both of your talks you tackle the question of the relation between the inside and the outside and the question of what a limit is, what a border is, what a shell is. For instance, Ferhat talked about the particulates that we know are outside in the city, which is our milieu, and in the environment, but also inside yourself, permeating the limit of your body. On the other hand, in Simon’s talk, the first example of the boat on the Dead Sea built out of magnesium in Project for a Rift Valley Crossing is very intriguing because this canoe, its structure, represents the border of a discrete object allowing you to travel on the sea. So you basically undermine the distinction between the milieu as an environment, i.e. as the outside of something, and as a limit. I think there were a lot of examples which tackled these questions, like the mussels on Henry Moore in your Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore) (2007/08), the question of what the surface is, what the limit of the object is. This question about the inside and the outside is a very old question going back to Descartes’s difference between res extensa and res cogitans as the fundamental epistemological model of modernity: me against the world, and the border seems to be fixed. Isn’t this a motive which both of you question and try to subvert in a way? And finally one very specific question: this magnesium boat weights 80 kg, you said – would it work on any other sea than the Dead Sea? Isn’t it too heavy for any normal sea?

SS 

No, you can make boats out of concrete and they float, as long as you have the right volume of displacement. Although regarding what you were saying about the skin between the sea and us – in a way the whole thing was deeply unnerving, even though the sea was calm, there was that sense of you being on or in a lump of metal. If you tipped too much to one side the boat would have disappeared very, very fast, I think, even in the viscous soup that is the Dead Sea. The fact that the skin separating you from the sea below was made of the sea 55

below somehow doubled that sense of disquiet. I think your comment on the inside-outside relation is very apt. Many of my works activate that relationship: the car on the outside of the exhibition space, with its fuel lines and exhaust puncturing the walls to reach the repurposed engine inside, or the highly climate-responsive adobe brick walls of Plant Room (2008). I suppose it also has some resonance with the concept of site and non-site developed by artists like Robert Smithson, this constant flick-flack in his practice between working outside and exhibiting inside – bringing findings made out in the world back to be analyzed in the gallery or museum. I guess I try to confuse those borders still further, extrude the outside inside and vice versa. FT 

The inside-outside aspect is central to the history of what I was talking about. The physiological discovery, in the eighteenth century, of how our biological interiority was penetrated by the ‘outside’ was a kind of shock, because philosophy was used to thinking about a human entity as separate from the materiality of the world surrounding it. This kind of permeability was immediately perceived as a danger: a threatening ‘environment’ from which humans should be protected. Such an idea could have led to an inquiry into how toxic environments were influencing public health (chemical analysis of the air and industrial pollutions were already available by the end of the French Revolution), but it seems to me that, paradoxically, the analysis of the material surroundings of human beings was somehow covered up by other reflections about the social milieu and the primacy of the social environment. In this sense there is a kind of historical lack here: mesopolitics could have been a form of ‘political ecology’ emerging as early as the end of the eighteenth century, articulating social and natural dimensions of the milieus; instead it took the form of a social interventionism on human environments, less concerned with the non-human components of these milieus or with the protection of public health.

SS 

What I understood from what you were saying, Ferhat, is that in the last part of the twentieth century there was a kind of disconnect between the environment and users of the environment. In a way the environment became a rather remote thing to protect – that seems to be a subtext of what you were saying; there seems to be something to hold onto in that sort of mesopolitics.

FT 

Compared to the twentieth-century idea of a remote natural environment which should be preserved because of its supposed wilderness, the theorization of the relationship of human beings to their immediate milieu obviously addresses a much more contextualized and material dimension. It allows some side effects of an ‘ecology without humans’ to be countered, insofar as the mesopolitical tradition always refers to the relation between human populations and the precise milieu in which they live. There could be no ‘protection of the milieu’ in general, as there was a ‘protection of the environment’, meaning the preservation of the planet – the latter is perhaps a very broad perspective for all of us living within specific milieus,

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even though the earth is a larger milieu. Therefore I think the British anthropologist Tim Ingold’s critique of a global environment3 is a very pertinent one; he keeps to the lineage of phenomenological elaborations of the notions of milieu (Merleau-Ponty) or Umwelt (Uexküll). However, if these concepts may be better tools than the ‘environment’, the mesopolitical tradition was a form of social Lamarckism in the Third French Republic, a quite non-democratic form of environmental manipulation of populations. This type of mesopolitics is not an alternative to a contemporary political ecology; but it underlines how human and non-human relations have already been thought about, way before our noisy concept of the Anthropocene.

3

Tim Ingold, The Perception of the environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000). 4

See Ferhat Taylan’s contribution in this volume, pp. 40–41.

Susanne Witzgall  As Ferhat explained, mesopolitcs acts on the environment in order to act on individual behaviour and on the human being; it governs the human being by planning its surrounding, by transforming the conditions of existence.4 I have the feeling that in some of your works, Simon, the Plant Room (2008) for example or the Kakteenhaus (2002), it’s the other way around: You create conditions of existence for non-humans that are neglected by mesopolitics. You plan the surroundings in the exhibition space with devices artificially sustaining things or non-human beings like photographs, the cactus or the rhododendron plants. While in mesopolitics there is this idea of manipulating the environment, of influencing human beings at the expense of problems concerning non-human entities, in some of your works it’s precisely non-humans that are central. SS 

I guess Ferhat’s conception is a very medical one – I suppose it’s about optimizing a work force or a society and all of those things. As for my works, I have tended to extricate myself as a player in the works at the last moment, so to say, but there has always been this sense of a personal accountability and a desire to acknowledge the ramifications of your actions as an individual in the world, and to bring all of those things to the final work. I don't know if that challenges your presumptions? I was thinking today about an exhibition that is on in a space in Munich’s Lothringer 13. They have a project by an English designer called Thomas Thwaites, and he has built a toaster, but he has done it only with raw materials he produced himself. It’s an absurd undertaking; it’s amazing. He went mining for rare earth metals to use in his toaster, and built a kind of strange smelter in his mother’s back garden, so he’s really pushing that notion of accountability very far. Marietta Kesting  Ferhat, you mentioned Ernst Haeckel and morphology (I had to think of his beautiful and idealized images of plants, which he presented in his big atlas-type books) and then you, Simon, made a plant room not for plants or seeds but for the photographic prints of these plants. These photographs challenged the idealized way Haeckel had painted them before it was possible to take microscopic photographs of how the plants really looked. This seems to be a comment on medialization – how we find out about the world and ecology by looking at images. Secondly, the question of introduced species had 57

so many political connotations of illegal immigrants and so on, and if you think about it as being one world, how can a species be an illegal immigrant? Because, of course, when you go back in evolution there has always been change; species haven’t always been in the stage they are in now. SS   I suppose in part what my work is about is trying to create contemporary images that allow for a contemporary understanding – a new view. But always co-opting the images of the past to do that, be they Blossfeldt’s photographs or Henry Moore’s sculptures. It was fascinating to me that zebra mussels had arrived in the Great Lakes at this turning point of twentieth-century history, the end of the Soviet Union, which allowed this new or perhaps renewed passage from one place to another. The mussels exploited that ‘loophole’ to begin colonizing North America! That Cold War story also had a very nice resonance in relation to Anthony Blunt, the art historian and Russian spy, who introduced Moore’s Warrior with Shield to Toronto. Somehow it comes down to a conflation of nature and culture, a confusion of the neverending shifts in nature and culturally and politically induced manmade shifts – it’s in that space that the work tries to operate.

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Milieu, Mimesis and Mimetism Maria Muhle

Diagonals between Aesthetics and the Life Sciences Hybridity has today become a generalized desideratum in advanced, diversity-conscious, and interdisciplinary cultural research that has taken up the cause of opposing, to the ingrained dualisms of the humanities, other forms of relationality which question received oppositions between culture and nature, human and animal, inside and outside, body and mind. So far, so good. The concept of ecology in turn seems particularly suited for use as a topological instance of this hybridization, as the ‘site’, field, or milieu in which these various tendencies towards dissolution can be paradigmatically exhibited. For indeed ecology in its most ambitious sense, under the sign of the Anthropocene, always already appears as a hybrid of natural and cultural tendencies – a hybrid of natural conditions and human interventions. Such an ecology’s ultimate insight is hence that its own hybridity is inescapable, that the range of applied ecological strategies are thus incapable of re-establishing a purely natural ecosystem and thereby averting impending environmental catastrophes. Against this background, it seems advisable to examine this hybrid relationality and to investigate its genealogies, insofar as the popular discourse of the Anthropocene cannot conceal that this ecological 59

1

Regarding this genealogical perspective and the distinction between mesology and ecology, see Ferhat Taylan’s contribution to this volume: ‘Mesology and Ecology. Two Alternative Views of the Environment and Their Political Implications in the Nineteenth Century’, pp. 31–41. 2

See Friedrich Balke, Mimesis zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2019), esp. pp. 27–65. See also Maria Muhle, ‘Praktiken des Inkarnierens. Nachstellen, Verkörpern, Einverleiben’, in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 8:1 (2017), pp. 123–137. 3

See Anne von der Heiden, Sarah Kolb (eds.), Logik des Imaginären. Diagonale Wissenschaft nach Roger Caillois, vol. 1 (Berlin: August Verlag, 2018). 4

Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, trans. George Ordish (New York: Clarkson M. Potter, 1964), p. 15. Roger Caillois, Méduse et Cie (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 18.

hybridity did not first become thinkable only with the catastrophes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.1 The following essay aims to concretize the notion of hybridity through another relational concept, namely that of mimesis, as well as to sharpen the focus of the concept of ecology through that of the milieu. Here it is a question of a mimesis that precisely cannot be reduced to its meaning of imitation or imitatio, for in that case the concept would indeed maintain the dualism of the imitated and its imitation. Rather, mimesis should here be taken in its original, pre-Platonic sense, as an excessive and performative concept of contagion, contact, and adaptation.2 As such, mimesis contributes to hybridization, or is itself a variant of hybrid relationality. Thus considered, mimesis, like hybridization, undermines the formation of identity and therefore must be conceived as an unbounded cultural technique which can be restricted neither to binary practices of imitation nor to purely aesthetic contexts. Mimicry is one term for such excessive imitation. In this sense, what follows aims to outline mimetism as an excessive-mimetic concept, that is, as an exaggerated, excessive, and accordingly also dangerous form of imitation. As is well known, Plato already recognized the grave moral effects and ethical controversies that the actor’s imitation introduces to the well-ordered polis. At the same time, with an understanding of mimetism as ‘dangerous luxury’– to invoke, in advance, the loaded term that the French philosopher and sociologist Roger Caillois would use in his studies of insects – it is possible to question the biological presuppositions of the concept, which thus attains a vital resonance in yet another way. It might then be asked whether mimetism, as excessive (in this case animalistic) imitation, can thus be reintroduced to aesthetics by way of this biological detour, an aesthetics that takes into account precisely such transitions insofar as it ‘diagonalizes’ science, as Caillois also proposes. As Anne von der Heiden and Sarah Kolb have recently reminded us, Caillois’ notion of ‘diagonal science’ is persistently concerned with the disclosure of universal relations in terms of a ‘polyvalent knowledge’ that necessarily eludes the unambiguous, rational, or causal orderings that claim to be able to take into account even the most wayward aspects of the ‘transversal processes of nature’ (Caillois).3 Intersections between art and science thus indicate transitions or, in Caillois’ terms, transversal relations, between aesthetics on the one side – this would be the connection to art – and the life sciences on the other. Against this background, I interpret mimesis and milieu as concepts of a diagonal science ‘straddling the boundaries of many traditional sciences’, and which thus make it possible to ‘find correlations neglected up to now [and] complete the network of those already established’.4 Both terms are distinguished by migrating from one discourse to another: if the concept of the milieu was first

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theorized in the life sciences only then to increasingly migrate into aesthetic discussions,5 that of mimesis has in turn increasingly been discussed in the context of the natural sciences and life sciences, far beyond its original art theoretical meaning – whether in research into mirror neurons in so-called empirical aesthetics, which is perhaps no longer so fruitful, or in the far more interesting discourse of ‘renaturalization’ in discussions of mimetic practices in nature, as found in Roger Caillois. Such ‘renaturalization’ problematizes not only the status of nature in a theory of the milieu, which deconstructs precisely the distinction between first and second nature by instead proposing a ‘third’ nature,6 but also highlights an understanding of aesthetics as an autonomous Kunstwollen (will-to-art, or artistic volition) that is withheld from the human subject. The Living and its Milieu It should be explained, briefly, why the concept of the milieu plays any role at all in a discussion of mimesis – including its excessive forms, such as animal mimicry. On the one hand, Caillois introduces the concept of mimicry as a biological concept that possesses the capacity to dissolve existential distinctions, of which there is surely ‘none more clear-cut than that between the organism and its surrounding’.7 An investigation of mimetic insects can thus only proceed by understanding their relation to the milieu – in Caillois’ words: to space – a relationship which is here pathologized as excessive imitation. A second reason for the central significance of the milieu lies in the function of excessive mimesis in the lifeworld, to which reference has already been made: Plato insistently warned of its consequences for the political-social milieu, if you will – that is, for the polis – and would have preferred to enact draconian measures against it. Following from Plato – but also in opposition to him – something like a mimetic mode of existence that both challenges and threatens life becomes thinkable. Yet life, as Georges Canguilhem showed in his genealogical study of ‘The Living and its Milieu’, cannot be thought apart from its milieu; it is only alive at all in the confrontation with its milieu.

5

See, among others, Florian Huber, Christina Wessely (eds.), Milieu. Umgebungen des Lebendigen in der Moderne (Munich: Fink, 2017). 6

McKenzie Wark understands third nature as the structure of digital communications and information, which renders the object of first and second nature definitively obsolete: ‘Second nature, which appears to us as the geography of cities and roads and harbours and wool stores is progressively overlayed with a third nature of information flows, creating an information landscape which almost entirely covers the old territories.’ McKenzie Wark, ‘Third Nature’, in Cultural Studies 8:1 (1994), pp. 115–132. 7

Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, trans. John Shepley, in October 31 (winter 1984), pp. 17–32, here p. 16. 8

Georges Canguilhem, ‘The Living and its Milieu’, trans. John Savage, in Grey Room 3 (spring 2001), pp. 7–31, here p. 7.

Canguilhem begins his study, which was first delivered as a lecture in 1946 and then published in 1952, as follows: ‘The notion of milieu is in the process of becoming a universal and obligatory means of registering the experience and existence of living things, and one could almost speak of its constitution as a basic category of contemporary thought’.8 Following this observation, there has recently been much talk of an ‘environment studies’ or ‘milieu studies’ that would in fact need to be understood as a diagonal science, possessing the advantage not only of going beyond disciplinary boundaries in order to survey the multitude of forms of knowledge that play a role in the concept of the milieu, but also, and above all, of tracing the already mentioned transversal ‘correlations’ that render this concept 61

9

What is mimetic in this model is however not only the adaptive relation between the living being and its milieu, but also that between human and animal in relation to their milieu. Speaking from the standpoint of life, according to Canguilhem, the social mode of life ‘imitates’ the vital-normative production of the animal’s milieu, as exemplified in Uexküll’s ticks; both processes are the ‘same’ insofar as they permit no hierarchical distinctions. The human being produces and experiences their no doubt far richer milieu in the same manner as does the tick with its reduced milieu: both human and tick centre their milieu around themselves in the same way. 10

Caillois 1964 (footnote 4), p. 22.

productive in a different way, namely, as transdisciplinary in the best sense. This is also, importantly, the service of Canguilhem’s study of the milieu, which makes it clear that the concept of the milieu must be extracted from its narrow mechanistic interpretation in order to unleash its biological – and for Canguilhem, ‘biological’ always means ‘vital’– potential: the milieu becomes a mode of existence for life, which emerges from the confrontation with its environment. The consequence of playing off the mechanistic-reductive understanding of the milieu against its biological-vitalistic connotations is, once more according to Canguilhem, that life itself undergoes a process of reformatting: for indeed life within the milieu is not reducible to its organic dimension. Accordingly, the relation between life and milieu is not an evolutionary one, characterized by adaptation and the organism’s self-preservation; rather, life takes up an excessive attitude towards its organic dimension. For Canguilhem, life that adapts to its milieu in order to secure its self-preservation is pathological life; life is only healthy and thus, in the full sense, only alive when it exposes the constituted milieu, with its homeostatic balance, to constant testing, questioning, and risk. Healthy life is thus a matter of permanent questioning, the making of mistakes, the taking of risks – it feeds on what Canguilhem calls its ‘negative values’. Vital life creates its own milieu, but at the same time continuously transforms it in order not to become immobilized in the stability of an organic equilibrium. For Canguilhem, life is thus an essentially vulnerable dynamic. It is precarious, prone to error, and deviates from organic guidelines. To understand life as organism, to reduce it to this, would be to misrecognize life itself. Canguilhem thus undertakes an anti-functional reformatting of life that cannot be limited to reductionist organological and holistic paradigms, but which rather unfolds only in the encounter with its milieu – and with the productive dynamics that are triggered by putting at risk the security of the previously established milieu. Life that adapts itself would in this sense not be life at all, but simply organic existence.9 Mimetic Milieus A similarly anti-evolutionary understanding of the milieu can also be found in the writings of Roger Caillois, who is explicitly concerned with the relation between life and its milieu: a notion of life that Caillois begins by observing in lower lifeforms, such as insects, in order to draw conclusions for the psychological constitution of the highest and most reflective of animals, the human being. In his 1960 study Méduse et Cie, Caillois thus retrospectively describes the ‘unspoken postulate’ of his texts on the praying mantis and insect mimicry as the claim ‘that complexity [of the development of lifeforms] itself creates certain relationships, implying parallel responses to similar situations’.10 Furthermore, the explicit aim of his expanded 1960 study ‘À propos d’une étude ancienne sur la mante religieuse’ is to consider,

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11

with reference to the butterfly wing, linkages between ‘une ésthetique naturelle et l’art humain’,11 that is, between natural aesthetics and human art.

Roger Caillois, ‘À propos d’une étude ancienne sur la mante religieuse’, in Méduse et Cie (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), pp. 25–33, here p. 31.

Caillois’ argument against an adaptively derived, functional, and onedimensional understanding of the relation between life and milieu is here oriented to the specific phenomenon of animal mimicry, as it is found in various forms amongst various insects. In his text ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, which appeared in the magazine Minotaure in 1935, as well his text ‘The Praying Mantis, from biology to psychoanalysis’, which appeared in the same magazine one year earlier, Caillois thus investigates the ability of many insects to use deception and camouflage to sink into their surroundings and thus to become ‘invisible’. What these creatures do – and this is one of Caillois’ major theses – is nonetheless not meant to activate a defensive mechanism in order to escape predators. Rather, mimetism here amounts to a much more fundamental, existential level of dangerous disintegration of the distinction between the organism and its surroundings: ‘the ultimate problem turns out in the final analysis to be that of distinction: distinctions between the real and the imaginary, between waking and sleeping, between ignorance and knowledge, etc.’12 And this fundamental problem is most clearly illustrated by the distinction between the organism and its surroundings, insofar as there is no other distinction ‘in which the tangible experience of separation is more immediate’.13 Caillois thus pays special attention to this dualism, and, as we have already said, what he finds interesting ‘within the phenomenon, what is even more necessary, given the present state of our knowledge, is to consider its condition as pathology (the word here having only a statistical meaning) – i.e., all the facts that come under the heading of mimicry’.14

12

Caillois 1984 (footnote 7), p. 16.

13

Ibid.

14

Ibid.

Mimicry and Mimetism The pathological aspect of mimetism – and only of mimetism – consequently lies in the fact that it dissolves the distinction between the living being and its lifeless surroundings, the milieu inerte. This assimilation to the milieu is thereby distinguished, importantly, from assimilation to other lifeforms. The need for a distinction between these terms has recently been noted by Peter Geble, the translator into German of Caillois’ text. For whereas in French both modes of becoming-alike – that of becoming like other animals as well as that of becoming like the milieu – are encompassed under the term mimétisme, in English both phenomena are by contrast designated as mimicry; it is only in German that both terms, namely Mimese and Mimikry, are available to the translator and naturally to the biologist, too. In terms of the history of science, Geble explains this state of affairs through the various stages in the discovery of animal mimicry: until the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, all that had yet been discovered was the similarity of certain mimetic insects to 63

15

Peter Geble, ‘Der Mimese-Komplex’, in ilinx 2 (2011), pp. 186–195, here p. 186.

16

Ibid.

17

Ibid., p. 188.

18

Ibid.

19

Lucien Cuénot, La genèse des espèces animales (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1911); Louis Murat, Les Merveilles du monde animal (Paris: Pierre Tequi, 1914).

their surroundings, that is, their mimetism. With their research in the Brazilian rainforests, Henry W. Bates, in England, and Fritz Müller, in Germany, were the first to demonstrate that insects also imitate each other: either (in Bates’s case) defenceless and edible insects imitating well-armed and inedible ones, or in Müller’s case, inedible insects imitating other inedible insects, in order to enhance the protective function of precisely their common inedibility (as Müller explains this phenomenon). ‘Since then’, Geble concludes, ‘we have spoken [in English] of mimicry, whether of Bates’s or Müller’s sort, and when using this term we still think only of the phenomenon of similarity between protected and unprotected species’.15 This proto-Darwinian reduction of animal mimesis to its protective function, which has come to be sedimented in the term ‘mimicry’ (not least thanks to Darwin’s reference to Bates’s studies in his Origin of Species), contrasts with the ‘French’ interpretation in which animal-to-animal mimicry only ‘represents a special case of the general phenomenon of homomorphic organisms, which furthermore cannot be explained through mutation and selection alone. As a result, in France […] morphogenetic speculations continued to focus on the long-recognized phenomenon of animal-environment mimetism’, which indeed is also at the centre of Caillois’ interest. In the German-speaking world, by contrast, both terms became established, thus enabling a distinction between the two phenomena: on the one hand as a theory of mimicry, following Müller, and on the other hand as mimetism [Mimese], following the ‘physiognomic-morphological tradition that stretches from Goethe to Romantic nature philosophy to Jakob von Uexküll’.16 This distinction’s central intervention in connection with Caillois’ argument can thus be summed up as follows: we can speak of mimicry in the case of those organisms that imitate another organism by simulating its appearance, but which nonetheless remain ‘recognizable as an optically circumscribable form’– and which thus do not ‘dissolve themselves’.17 We can speak of mimetism, however, when the organism seamlessly merges into its surroundings in such a way that the ‘optical boundaries of its form are dissolved’. According to Geble, an aesthetics of transformation here confronts an aesthetics of disappearance.18 And it is precisely this aesthetics of disappearance, rather than an aesthetics of adaptation or assimilation to another lifeform, and thus a dissolution of the previously invoked distinction between environment and organism, that Caillois considers in the phenomenon of homomorphy – examples of which are certainly not lacking, as he explains with reference to Lucien Cuénot’s La genèse des espèces animales (1911) and Louis Murat’s Les Merveilles du monde animal (1914):19 [B]ox crabs resemble rounded pebbles; chlamydes, seeds; moenas, gravel; prawns, fucus; the fish Phyllopteryx, from the Sargasso Sea, is simply “torn seaweed in the shape of floating strands,”

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like the Antennarius and the Pterophrynx. The octopus retracts its tentacles, curves its back, adapts its color, and thus comes to resemble a stone. The green and white hind wings of the Aurora Pierid simulate umbelliferae; the bumps, knots, and streaks of symbiotic lichens make them identical with the bark of the poplars on which they grow.20 To misunderstand this process of becoming-similar on the part of mimetic animals as threatening deception (in the case of mimicry) or protective camouflage (in mimetism), that is as a highly functional phenomenon that serves either passive or active self-preservation, would also be to interpret the apparent dissolution of the individual into its environment not as a threat to the individual but instead exclusively as the result of a highly developed will to survive that does not scruple even to change the organism’s own colour and form. Radical adaptation to the milieu would thus be understood as the best way to ensure the individual’s survival. To the human eye, the change of colour and form in many insects may have an aesthetic effect, but fundamentally it is nothing but a capacity that the animal deploys for its self-preservation. Here, the relation between the living being and its milieu would again be oriented exclusively to life’s self-preservation. It would thus be structured as adaptation and would accordingly enable what for Canguilhem is a reduced or even pathological form of life that does not exceed itself, but rather anxiously clings to the organic norms of self-preservation. Connections to Image Theory Paradoxically, Caillois shows that this is precisely not the case with those mimetic phenomena that are generally regarded as the climax of evolution. He is particularly concerned to refute Cuénot’s explanation by way of chance.21 According to Cuénot, for example, the similarity of the Kallima is a result of ‘the sum of a certain number of of small details, each of which has nothing exceptional about it’.22 Caillois rejects the assumption that here we are dealing with ‘combinations like any other, since all these details can be brought together without being joined, without their contributing to some resemblance: it is not the presence of the elements that is perplexing and decisive, it is their mutual organization, their reciprocal topography’.23

20

Caillois 1984 (footnote 4), p. 20. Another lesser-known example is the Kallima of the Indomalayan realm, also known as the Indian oakleaf butterfly or simply the Indian leaf: ‘Among these butterflies, imitation is pushed to the smallest details: indeed, the wings bear gray-green spots simulating the mold of lichens and glistening surfaces that give them the look of torn and perforated leaves: “including spots of mold of the spaheriaceous kind that stud the leaves of these plants; everything, including the transparent scars produced by phytophagic insects when, devouring the parenchyma of the leaves in places, they leave only the translucid skin”.’ Ibid., p. 22.

21

Caillois concretely rejects not only Cuénot’s explanation through chance but also Bouvier’s description of mimesis as the addition of ‘ornaments’, as well as an explanation based on the concept of pre-adaptation (insects search out those milieus that they already resemble). Whereas Caillois rejects the ornamentation thesis, insofar as it registers a fact rather than delivering an explanation, he criticizes the other two models for not being able to adequately ground a phenomenon of such precision. Ibid., p. 31.

22

Ibid., p. 23.

23

Ibid.

24

Ibid. Caillois here refers to Félix Le Dantec, Lamarckiens et Darwiniens: Discussions de quelques théories sur la formation des espèces (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1899).

Against this, Caillois presents a ‘shaky hypothesis’ that marks an image-theoretical turn in the biological discussion of insect mimesis. To this end, he begins by taking up a statement by Félix Le Dantec, ‘according to which there may have been in the ancestors of the Kallima a set of cutaneous organs permitting the simulation of the imperfection of leaves, the imitating mechanism having disappeared once the morphological character was acquired (that is to say, in the present case, once the resemblance was achieved) in accordance with Lamarck’s very law’.24 Caillois presently sees this lost mechanism of imitation at work in morphological mimetism as well, which, 65

25 26

Caillois 1984 (footnote 7), p. 23.

‘C’est un effet la sélection naturelle qui […] a fait les frais de l’explication du mimétisme qu’elle présente comme une réaction de défense.’ Roger Caillois, ‘Mimétisme et psychasthénie legendaire’, in Le Mythe et l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), pp. 86–122, here p. 103.

like chromatic mimetism, is ‘an actual photography, but of the form and the relief, a photography on the level of the object and not on that of the image, a reproduction in three-dimensional space with solids and voids: sculpture-photography or better teleplasty, if one strips the word of any metaphysical content.’25 With this ‘photography of form’ – a kind of 3D printer avant la lettre – Caillois sets the stage for a central thesis that allows him to go beyond Le Dantec and, at the same time, to raise the question of a non-intentional aesthetics. For whereas Le Dantec attributes a will or intention to insects that leads them to mimetism, Caillois here speaks (somewhat in the terms of photography theory) of a mechanical art that need not filter what is to be imitated through the indispensable subjectivity of the artist-as-author. Caillois explains Le Dantec’s desperate gesture of ascribing a ‘volonté de ressemblance’, a will to resemblance, by the plight of the evolutionary biologist, who is unable to explain the emergence of new forms in biology: ‘In fact, natural selection made the explication of mimetism impossible, insofar as it saw nothing in it but a defensive reaction.’26 With Canguilhem, we might say that Caillois accuses the evolutionary biologist of misrecognizing the phenomenon of mimetism when he reduces it to the function of a defensive mechanism – just as the mechanist misrecognizes life when he reduces it to a closed system of forces in balance. The evolutionary biologist aims to reduce the pathology that mimetism represents to a simple actualization of the survival instinct. By contrast, Caillois’ detour through the image – whether two- or three-dimensional – points in another direction, referring to the unfolding of an animal aesthetic that precisely does not attribute a Kunstwollen to the animal (thus anthropomorphizing it in a bad way), but which rather aims at an anti-authorial aesthetic, such as has been developed by various representatives of photographic theory ranging from Walter Benjamin to Douglas Crimp, a theoretical lineage which is concerned not with imposing subjectivism on photography but rather with investigating the excessive moments of a mechanical and therefore minor mimetic art. According to the thesis, this minor mimetic aesthetic is for Caillois intimately connected with the rejection of an understanding of mimetism as both an intentional as well as instinctual expression of the struggle for survival. It rather seems that in mimetism, too, there is something that cannot be grasped in functional terms, indeed something that verges on the anti-functional. Before Caillois arrives at this ‘aesthetic’ intervention, however, he enumerates additional ‘more obvious and less sophistical reasons’ for rejecting an interpretation of mimesis as a defensive reaction. To begin with, such a defence mechanism would only have an effect on predators that hunt using sight rather than smell, in contrast to most animals; these animals in turn for the most part do not seek out motionless prey. Immobility would accordingly be a far better means of defence (‘and indeed insects are exceedingly prone to employ a false

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corpselike rigidity’).27 Furthermore, there are other effective means of making oneself invisible: a butterfly can close its wings so that, while hanging from the side of a flower, it appears as a barely noticeable line, turning with the viewer so that the latter only ever perceives this minimal surface. The studies of Judd and Fouche, according to Caillois, have ‘decisively settled’ the question: Predators are not at all fooled by homomorphy or homochromy: they eat crickets that mingle with the foliage of oak trees or weevils that resemble small stones, completely invisible to man. […] Generally speaking, one finds many remains of mimetic insects in the stomachs of predators. So it should come as no surprise that such insects sometimes have other and more effective ways to protect themselves. Conversely, some species that are inedible, and would thus have nothing to fear, are also mimetic. It therefore seems that one ought to conclude with Cuénot that this is an ‘epiphenomenon’ whose ‘defensive utility appears to be nul’. Delage and Goldsmith had already pointed out in the Kallima an ‘exaggeration of precautions’.28 Mimetism is thus a ‘luxury’, indeed a ‘dangerous luxury’, that leads to a ‘a sort of collective masochism leading to mutual homophagy’, insofar as insects are eaten precisely because they are mimetic, as in the tragic case of the leaf insects that chew on each other because they take themselves for leaves: ‘the simulation of the leaf being a provocation to cannibalism in this kind of totem feast’.29 If mimetism is hence not a defensive instinct and therefore is not a functional element in the larger relation between life and its milieu, which here remains under the paradigm of adaptation, it remains an open question how mimetic similarity ought to be understood and explained – a question that Caillois first attempts to answer by referring to a drive to imitation, or an ‘overwhelming tendency to imitate’. This tendency towards imitation characterizes the magical relation to the world found among ‘primitives’, but it is also ‘still quite strong in “civilized” man, since in him it continues to be one of the two conditions for the progress of his untrammeled thought’.30 For Caillois, insect mimetism can thus be traced back to the ‘tendency towards imitation’ which is, however, precisely not a matter of intention, as for Le Dantec, and which is common to both humans and animals. In the human, this tendency is expressed in mimetic magic, which Caillois however claims to find in insects as well: ‘What else but prestigious magic and fascination can the phenomena be called that have been unanimously classified precisely under the name of mimicry […] and of which the sudden exhibition of ocelli by the mantis in a spectral attitude, when it is a matter of paralyzing its prey, is by no means the least?’31 The aim of this effort is ‘clearly assimilation to the surroundings’.32 According to Caillois, mimetic insects such as the Clolia butterflies of Brazil, which sit in rows on small stalks ‘in such a way as to represent bell flowers, in the manner

27

Caillois 1984 (footnote 7), p. 23.

28

Ibid., pp. 24–25.

29

Ibid., p. 25.

30

Ibid., p. 27. Somewhere between Paris and Ibiza, in 1933 (two years before Caillois’ text), Walter Benjamin also wrote his short essays ‘Doctrine of the Similar’ and ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, in which the same capacity is likewise traced back to its ‘primitive’ genealogies in order to make it reappear in the present, in terms of the theory of language, as ‘non-sensual similarity’. Whereas Benjamin thus refers to the historicity of the mimetic faculty, insofar as language, as a reservoir of nonsensual similarity, has absorbed earlier forms of mimesis, and while he understands modernity as both less and differently mimetic than earlier times, Caillois by contrast understands mimesis as a timeless instinct in all lifeforms, an instinct which accordingly does not distinguish between insects and humans. Michael Taussig has already noted the temporal and spatial coincidence of these two texts. See Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London, New York: Routledge, 1993), esp. pp. 33–43 and 240–264. Perhaps other commentators have been deterred by the contemptuous opinions on Caillois that Benjamin expressed in his correspondence (especially with Adorno but also with Horkheimer), as well as in a short review. See especially Michael Weingrad, ‘The College of Sociology and the Institute of Social Research’, in New German Critique 84 (fall 2001), pp. 129–161; Rosa Eidelpes, Entgrenzung der Mimesis. Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois (Berlin: Kadmos, 2019), esp. pp. 119–135; Maria Muhle, ‘Über den Mimetismus. Eine Rezeptions­ geschichte. Paris, 1934–1939’, in Anne von der Heiden, Sarah Kolb (eds.), Logik des Imaginären. Diagonale Wissenschaft nach Roger Caillois, vol. 2 (Berlin: August Verlag, forthcoming).

31

Caillois 1984 (footnote 7), pp. 27–28.

32

Ibid., p. 27.

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33

Ibid., pp. 27–28.

34

On Caillois’ relationship to the biologist Paul Vignon, see Peter Berz, ‘Tier Blatt Flügel Herbst. Caillois und sein Biologe: Paul Vignon’, in von der Heiden, Kolb 2018 (footnote 3), pp. 115–118.

35

Caillois 1984 (footnote 7), p. 28.

36

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Corpus Delicti’, in October 33 (summer 1985), pp. 31–72, here p. 49.

37

Caillois 1984 (footnote 7), p. 30.

38

Ibid.

of a sprig of lily of the valley’, are subject to a ‘real temptation by space’.33 If mimetism is therefore not a defence mechanism, as Caillois shows with reference to Paul Vignon, among others,34 it must be a pathology, or more concretely a disturbance in spatial perception that affects the organism’s positioning in its milieu. For Canguilhem, the milieu is always centred around the living being – either human or animal – regardless of whether it is a matter of the quantitatively fuller milieu of the human being or the milieu of the tick, which is reduced to only three stimuli. For Caillois, by contrast, this disturbance in spatial perception is expressed in the fact that the animal – the living being, the organism – is precisely no longer the origin of perceptual coordinates: it is ‘one point among others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows where to place itself’.35 ‘Insectoid Psychosis’ Mimetism would thus be something like ‘insectoid psychosis’, as Rosalind Krauss put it in ‘Corpus Delicti’, her commentary on Caillois and surrealist photography,36 a psychosis that Caillois indeed develops into a general psychopathology with his concept of legendary psychasthenia. Here he draws on the French psychiatrist and psychotherapist Pierre Janet as well as from research on schizophrenia, describing a clinical picture of persecution and encirclement by space, which ultimately takes the place of the sick individual: He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is ‘the convulsive possession’. All these expressions shed light on a single process: depersonalization by assimilation to space, i.e. what mimicry achieves morphologically in certain animal species.37 This is connected with ‘a decline in the feeling of personality and life’, given that mimetic species only ever accomplish mimetism in one direction, namely by descending the order of nature: ‘the animal mimics the plant, leaf, flower, or thorn, and dissembles or ceases to perform its functions in relation to others. Life takes a step backwards.’38 By enmeshing insect mimetism, mimetic magic, and psychasthenia, Caillois thus ultimately aims to expose their common root, which is nothing other than this ‘attraction by space’, under the influence of which life retreats, loses ground; the boundary between the organism and its surroundings becomes blurred. That, for Caillois, this is not simply a plight to be rectified – that is, that mimetism is neither a miracle of evolution nor an impediment to be removed – can be seen clearly in the ‘proposed solution’ to this problem: a diagonal science of spatial disturbance. For the latter ‘suggests that alongside the instinct of self-preservation, which in some way orients the creature toward life, there is generally speaking a sort of instinct of renuncia-

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tion that orients it toward a mode of reduced existence, which in the end would no longer know either consciousness or feeling – the inertia of the élan vital, so to speak’.39 His ultimate goal, then, is to propose, in counterpoint to a functionalist, evolutionist, one-sided vision of life, an awareness of life’s passive, depressive, masochistic, inert dimension, which cannot – and here is the fundamental difference from Canguilhem – be fed back into the meta-level of self-preservation, as is ultimately the case in Canguilhem’s understanding of life. Whereas error, for Canguilhem, functions above all as the motor of a vital dynamic that exceeds itself, even as it remains continuously and permanently related to the precarious moments of aberrancy and confusion to be found in living phenomena – a dynamic, that is, in which the permanent putting into question of an already achieved equilibrium state ultimately resembles a form of gambling that aims to grow ever wider, faster, bigger – Caillois’ discourse of mimesis as a pathological state provoked by the threat of space is by contrast far less easy to integrate into such a construction.

39

Ibid., p. 32.

40

Krauss 1985 (footnote 36), p. 45.

41

Geble 2011 (footnote 15), p. 191.

42

‘The jubilant assumption of his specular image by the kind of being – still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence – the little man is at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.’ Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as formative of the I Function’, in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 75–81, here p. 76.

43

Ibid., p. 77.

This discourse rather offers points of connection for a reformulated theory of the subject, such as Jacques Lacan delivered from a psychoanalytic perspective by building on Caillois. Krauss, again, has noted Lacan’s reliance on Caillois in her reading of surrealistic photography through the lens of mimetism, that is, as seduction by space. While Krauss herself saw in surrealist photography not an ‘overturning of reality by those psychic states so courted by the poets and painters of the movement: reverie, ecstasy, dream’, but rather ‘bodies assaulted from without’40 – bodies whose psychotic relation to space she finds described in Caillois’ text – Lacan, too, in his famous 1949 text ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’ probes ‘the shaping power of an external form, or rather the trigger for a psychic instance through the intrusion of an optical perception’.41 Alongside homomorphic identification, which applies to the wellknown situation of the baby which jubilantly recognizes its own image in the mirror,42 Lacan also describes a further, heteromorphic form, which is oriented to Caillois’ model insofar as it is a matter of an identification of the living being with its surroundings and thus also at the same time a becoming-similar to the motionless and the dead, which leads to ‘depersonalization’: […] mimetic facts, understood as homomorphic identification, are of just as much interest to us insofar as they raise the question of the signification of space for living organisms – psychological concepts hardly seeming less appropriate for shedding light here than the ridiculous attempts made to reduce these facts to the supposedly supreme law of adaptation.43 Lacan here speaks of ‘derealization’ – which means a kind of schizoid lack of a relation to the world – that is simultaneous with a beingin-the-world. Caillois described this as precisely an assimilation to 69

44 45

Ibid. (translation modified).

See Erich Hörl, ‘“Technisches Leben”. Simondons Denken des Lebendigen und die allgemeine Ökologie’, in Maria Muhle, Christiane Voss (eds.), Black Box Leben (Berlin: August Verlag, 2017), pp. 239–266, esp. pp. 254–264.

the lowly, a receding of life; for Lacan this is a matter of a kind of identification with the epitome of the shapeless (Bataille and, following him, Krauss would here speak of the formless), with the boundlessness of space and dissolution into the same. Mimetism would thus be a psychosis, as both ‘pose the problem of space for the living organism’.44 Krauss in turn reformulates this deregulated experience of space, which is expressed as assimilation to the minor or inferior, assimilation to the withered and rotten, in terms of image theory and finds it once again in surrealist photography, which precisely makes an image out of this informe or formless – that which has no form. Formation in the Milieu Ultimately, we can distinguish two concepts of mimesis in milieu theory. First, a mimesis that, following Canguilhem’s model, contains a specific logic of transgression, but which – and this is the point – would remain a logic of development, of ‘education’ (Bildung, as in Bildungsroman) or of sublation, insofar as the harmonious interplay of the image and its model always wins out in the end, but only in order to reintroduce the same once more on a higher level. Aesthetic freedom would here no longer only be freedom within a certain milieu, but rather the potential to construct new image-milieus which are continuously at pains to displace and conceal their relation to an original, without however ultimately being able to break through this relation. The polarity of self-preservation and self-transgression, which is formative in Canguilhem’s concept of life, thus in the end must be understood as a binary logic that enables a mimetic order in which an apparent aesthetic freedom presses against the compulsion to imitate, but without however truly disturbing the latter (in that it constitutes a further development thereof). Second, in Caillois we can find, by contrast, a concept of excessive (that is, transgressive) mimesis that leads to a breakdown of the mimetic order precisely in its exaggerated tendency towards imitation. Indeed, in its radical passivity, its abatement of life, its drag on the élan vital, mimesis becomes thinkable in all its dangerousness and, thus, in its existential constitution. Reformulated in terms of the theory of mimesis, life, for Canguilhem, would thus be a creative and accordingly an aesthetic power of innovation, of the new – as Gilbert Simonon, above all, has noted in his rereading of Canguilhem’s theory of the milieu under the sign of invention45 – a power which nonetheless simultaneously works through an imitative logic that is meant to reproduce an organic logic. Both mimetic poles, imitation and innovation, mutually condition each other: creative invention exists, and it occurs not ex nihilo but instead is only possible against the background of preservative, identitarian imitation, even when challenging or rejecting the latter. Caillois’ argument, by contrast – if we may continue the comparison – conflates the two concepts of imitation and innovation, or living

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creation, and thus makes thinkable a kind of innovative imitation, that is, production through exaggerated reproduction. The idea that stands in the background of Caillois’ studies of insects, just as much as in his meditations on stones that seem to depict landscapes, is doubled: on the one hand, it is to permit and indeed to spur serious thinking about the comparison between insects and humans, natural and human aesthetics; on the other hand the aim is not to (anthropomorphically) subjectivize animals through this ‘fraternité’ or ‘équivalence entre hommes et insectes’, but rather to de-subjectivize the concept of aesthetics, insofar as Caillois trans-aesthetically reformulates the concept of mimesis. The aesthetic dissolution of the individual in space, its depersonalization or, speaking with Lacan, its de-realization, thus also implies a de-authorialization of aesthetic production, an inscription of the creative pole of mimesis in its imitative counterpole, and thus the revelation of a potential for ‘productive imitation’. This productive imitation should however be conceived above all in terms of milieu theory, insofar as its function is analogous to the polarity that characterizes the relation of the lifeform to its milieu as one of mutual interaction. We could thus reformulate the question by asking what ‘formation’ means within the milieu and to what extent it necessarily crosses the wires of two different perspectives: on the one hand, a life science perspective that seeks a concept of the milieu not determined by evolutionary biology, and which poses the question of the relevance of this concept for the individual within modern social structures: qua milieu, it is quite possible to sketch out a conception of the human that is not confined to individualism, a conception that makes it possible to think of the individual as always entangled with a milieu, with its milieu. And on the other hand, and against this background, we can trace the contours of an aesthetic perspective that develops alongside the concept of mimesis and that refers to a non-modern aesthetic that is not critical of mimesis, an aesthetic that does not abandon mimesis (understood as imitation) in favour of freedom, creativity, or genius, but which rather thinks alongside the phenomena of imitation, reenactment, appropriation, or reproduction. Such a minor-mimetic aesthetic could also be understood as an aesthetic of technology, against the backdrop of a reformulated, non-deterministic, relational, or ‘symmetrical’ concept of the milieu. An ‘aesthetic of technology’ here refers to an aesthetic that on the one hand challenges technical apparatuses – photography, digitality, etc. – but which moreover also understands the mode in which artistic things are made as a relational process that is located beyond both one-sided artistic intentionality as well as beyond an artistic experience redescribed in terms of reception aesthetics. Considered from the perspective of the model of mutual confrontation between the living being and its milieu, such an aesthetic of technology would also have to be thought of as a confrontation between the agents of art and their milieu, to which they take up an imitative, appropriative, reproductive – and thus minor-mimetic – relation. 71

To exist within a milieu means to move beyond ideological illusions of the absolute, free, artistic, creative subject, instead conceiving of the individual as being formed only through reciprocity, mutual negotiation, and confrontation with its own milieu. Aesthetic formation within the milieu thus implies locating oneself in the non-arbitrary, beyond modernistic ideologies of freedom. Formative relations in the milieu are hence automatic in the sense of being indifferent or equivalently valid, non-discriminatory, anti-humanistic; they are thus lesser-mimetic connections, appropriations, and reproductions. And art-making within the milieu is in this sense always and above all a process of appropriation and reproduction, and thus can be thought of as technical-aesthetic.

Translated from German by Daniel Spaulding

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‘A Way of Being in the World’: Relational Onto-Epistemologies in Contemporary Art and Theory1 Susanne Witzgall

1

Antje Majewski, ‘On ecological thinking and practice: Conversation between Aleksandra Jach and Antje Majewski, via mail’, 2015. http:// www.antjemajewski.de/2015/10/23/ on-ecological-thinking-and-practice -conversation-between-aleksandrajach-and-antje-majewski-viamail-2015/ (accessed 19.8.2018). 2

Lorraine Code, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 4. 3

See also Andrea Doucet, ‘Shorelines, Seashells, and Seeds: Feminist Epistemologies, Ecological Thinking, and Relational Ontologies’, in Francois Dépelteau (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 375–391, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-31966005-9_19 (accessed 19.8.2018). ‘Ecological rationality’, as Erich Hörl calls current ecological thinking, ‘forces and drives a radically relational onto-epistemological renewal’. Erich Hörl with James Burton (eds.), General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 3. 4

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century the humanities and social sciences have witnessed the rise of an ecological thinking that, in the words of the Canadian philosopher Lorraine Code, makes an intensive effort to unsettle ‘the self-certainties of western capitalism and the epistemologies of mastery it underwrites’.2 This thinking emphasizes the vibrating interdependencies of diverse human and non-human actors, their cohabitation, their common becoming, and their constitutive entanglements in biological-artificial and semantic-material assemblages. Its dominant concept, suffusing both theory and practice, is doubtless that of relationality. This applies to both ontology and epistemology.3 Needless to say, this emphasis on the relational cannot be described as an exclusive characteristic of ecological thinking, nor is it without precursors. Ecological thinking thus overlaps and converges with, for example, current theories of new materialism,4 discourses of a post- or nonhuman turn, and the decolonization of knowledge. Alongside often-ignored ancient and non-European lines of development,5 its roots can be traced back to nineteenth century concepts of the milieu, of mesology, and of ecology, among other things.6 Groundbreaking approaches for the present can also be found in a range of twentieth century philosophers, (feminist) theorists of science, cyberneticists, and systems theorists, ranging from Ernst Cassirer, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gaston Bachelard as well as Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, or Ludwig von Betalanffy, Gregory Bateson, and Niklas Luhmann.

Jane Bennett points out in this connection that, in contrast to the approaches of new materialism, the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman (and also Timothy Morton) is distinguished by its deeply anchored ‘animosity’ to relational ontologies. Jane Bennett, ‘System and Things: On Vital Materialism and Object-Oriented Philosophy’, in Richard Grusin (ed.), The Non­ human Turn (Minneapolis, London: Univer­sity of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 227. 5

See among others, Juanita Sunberg, ‘Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies’, in Cultural Geographies 21:1 (December 2013), pp. 33–47, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1474474013486067 (accessed 19.8.2018). Mark Jackson, senior lecturer in postcolonial geography at the University of Bristol, also attests to the ignorance of indigenous relational ontologies. See Mark Jackson, ‘Introduction: A Critical Bridging Exercise’, in Jackson (ed.), Coloniality, Ontology, and the Question of the Posthuman (London, New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 4. 6

Even though these are limited to specific interactions and primarily concentrate on relations either between the individual and the social environment or between populations and their ‘natural’ habitat. See Ferhat Taylan's contribution, p. 33.

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7

See for example Jackson 2018 (footnote 5), p. 1, or François Dépelteau, ‘What is the Direction of the Relational Turn?’ in Christopher Powell, François Dépelteau (eds.), Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 163–185, https://doi.org/10.1057/ 9781137342652_10 (accessed 14.5.2020). 8

On diffractive methodology and the thinking of insights from various disciplines ‘through one another’, see Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2007), chapter 2, pp. 71–94.

Nonetheless, the intensity, specificity, and obvious urgency of current ecological thinking’s focus on the dimension and logic of relations is so distinctive that some have already begun to speak of a ‘relational turn’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century.7 Further evidence for this is the slowly gathering reevaluation of indigenous cosmologies and their central emphasis on relationality, which is becoming increasingly important as a non-modern countermodel to an instrumental, subject-centred paradigm – the paradigm that, in the view of many ‘relationalists’, has led us straight into our current ecological and social crises. Evidence for this is not least the presence of a relational aesthetic in contemporary artworks that do not so much foreground reports of ecological concerns or reflect ecological dependencies as they themselves emerge as continuously transforming ecologies of things and forms of knowledge. For this reason, theoretical and artistic approaches lend themselves to being thought ‘through one another’8 in order to unfold in greater detail certain crucial ontological as well as epistemological characteristics of current ecological thinking. In what follows, with reference to recent works by Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, and Antje Majewski, I would like to show not only that a series of contemporary artworks are deeply shaped by ecological thinking and its relational paradigm, but also that in their own way these works aesthetically embody and independently expand on this thinking. I also intend to further develop as well as to sharpen and concretize the essential characteristics of the contemporary relational approach by traversing both theory and artistic practice. Primarily due to lack of space, my investigation is limited to western theory and aesthetic practice, which mutually expand and illuminate each other. However, in the work of Lorraine Code and Antje Majewski, especially, the relevance of traditional (nonwestern) knowledge and indigenous cosmologies to current relational and ecological thinking will be apparent. Relational Ontology It becomes evident relatively quickly that the exhibitions of the French artist Philippe Parreno are not to be understood as collections of iconographically loaded individual works. They rather embody dynamic networks in which diverse entities and protagonists are entangled in affective encounters, with their mutual interrelations and connections standing in the foreground. In his most recent exhibition at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018) – as previously in the Tate Modern exhibition Anywhen (2016/17) – a bio-reactor filled with living bacteria constituted a neuralgic centre in this fluid mesh (fig. 1). The microorganisms amassed here adapted, as a mutating collective, to changing environmental conditions – above all to the increased or decreased provision of nutrients – while simultaneously interacting via computer with further elements of the exhibition’s setup, such as rising and falling shutters, the shifting light of electric lamps, and concentric ripples in an artificial pond located at the centre of the atrium (fig. 2). In this way they generated complex interdependent

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and nondeterministic chains of events in irregular cyclical repetition,9 while also involving processes from outside the space. Thus, from time to time sounds of the city poured into parts of the exhibition space from centrally installed loudspeakers, and the meditative silence of the atrium was repeatedly disturbed by the apparently arbitrary intrusion of fragments of sound from the local radio. The lighting of the marquees – lightbulb-studded replicas of the entrance architecture of cinemas and theatres commonly found in the United States – were linked to the screening times of the films Anywhen (2017) and The Crowd (2018), which played in neighbouring rooms. Their soundtracks in turn seemed to partially decouple themselves from the picture plane and to migrate from one screening room to the other in a rhythmic alternation during breaks between the films. In another space, which was immersed in a disquieting yellow light, artificial vortices of air played with floating fish-shaped balloons, which appeared to light-heartedly and silently communicate with viewers. Like most of his recent installations, Parreno’s Berlin exhibition was akin to a choreographed yet nonetheless contingent hybrid ecology of spatial and machinic elements, of sounds and rhythms, of images and materials, of fictive and real protagonists, of micro-actors and supralocal, widely dispersed phenomena of the world.

9

See also the interview between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno, ‘La chaine est belle’, in Berliner Festspiele (ed.), Immersion 2 (April 2018), pp. 4–7.

Fig. 1–2

Philippe Parreno, exhibition at Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, installation views, details, 2018.

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10

‘Philippe Parreno in Conversation with Andrea Lissoni’, in Andrea Lissoni (ed.), Philippe Parreno: Anywhen, exhib. cat., Tate Modern (London: Tate Publishing, 2016), p. 68.

11

A ‘quasi-object makes the collective’. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 225.

12

Michel Serres, Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘Quasi-Object’, in Karen Marta (ed.), Philippe Parreno: Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World, exhib. cat., Palais de Tokyo (Paris) (Cologne: Walther König, 2014), p. 149.

13

Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier, 1989), p. 210, cited in David Scott, Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), p. 18. See also Didier Debaise, ‘What is Relational Thinking?’, in Inflexions 5: Simondon, Milieu, Techniques, Aesthetics (March 2012), p. 1. ‘Being is relation’, as Debaise nonetheless clarifies, ‘does in no way mean that we can ignore the specificities of existence of these domains or their problems. It’s a proposition which can be called “technique” in the sense that it has no reach except if it functions in a manner which is local, situated and linked to constraints […].’ Ibid., p. 1.

14

Debaise 2012 (footnote 13), p. 4. Emphasis in the original.

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In this way, Parreno’s relational aesthetics attests to a fundamentally neo-ecological perspective in which relations and interplays between material and immaterial actors, or the networked transformation of macro- and micro-elements, are essential, constitutive aspects of the world. Like many current relational theorists (from Lorraine Code to Jane Bennett to Erich Hörl), the artist here refers especially to Félix Guattari, who already by the end of the 1980s had described the inextricable entanglement of the three ecologies of the environment, social relations, and the microscopic realms of subjective-mental worlds of relation. Parreno acknowledges that the French psychoanalyst and philosopher had ‘an enormous influence’10 on him. Furthermore, with reference to Michel Serres, Parreno calls his exhibited objects ‘quasi-objects’, which are distinguished precisely by being relational and collective.11 He thus explicitly emphasizes that his individual objects are not to be understood as isolated bearers of meaning but rather as affected and affecting relational actors that weave communities between the different exhibits as well as between the exhibits and visitors. The objects displayed often wander like nomads from one exhibition to the next, in order to found new assemblages and thus – as Parreno himself often emphasizes – to create new realities. This too resonates with Michel Serres, who elsewhere explains that: ‘When a quasi-object unites a community, the community becomes real. In this way, the virtual creates the real.’12 Or to put it differently: the virtual becomes real through the relational character of quasi-objects, which among other things have the capacity to found new collectives. What emerges here is the postulate of immanent relationality as a dimension of becoming. This articulates the fundamental principle that ‘being is relation’,13 which here can be defined as a central aspect of ecological rationality as relational ontology, and which stands opposed to the modern paradigm of ‘being-individual’. In his essay ‘What is Relational Thinking?’ Didier Debaise traces this fundamental principle to the theories of Gilbert Simondon, whose significance for current relational thinking is also due to his influence on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, which should not be underestimated. Simondon accomplishes the step from the paradigm of individual being, which grants ontological privilege to an already constituted individual, to the process of individuation, through which the individual first comes into existence and which at the same time must be thought of as relational. In order to do this, according to Debaise, Simondon conceptualized a ‘preindividual nature’ as a ‘pure construction’, so as to preserve a plane that lies prior to the differentiation of every element of experience, and to start with ‘what relates them before differentiating them’.14 Nature is thus conceived more broadly as preindividual reality, as a reality that precedes individuation. According to Simondon, as preindividual nature it must furthermore be understood as the ‘actually possible’, as that which ‘is likely to create something’. An important distinction that Simondon makes in

this regard, according to Debaise, is that between the possible and the actual. The actual is – to put it more precisely – the preindividual singularity, the ‘preindividual specific existence’15 that is able to call forth an individuation, while ‘the actual is the individual produced by the individuation’.16 However for Simondon the possible is not conceived as containing the actual. That is to say, preindividual nature does not virtually include all being-individual. The latter represents a (singular) event that cannot be reduced to any of the particular elements that are needed for its genesis. The actual always differentiates itself, we can further say, in relation to other singularities or other milieus of individuation, and thus always contains emergent qualities. For Simondon, relationality is thus genuinely linked to the genesis of the individual. Relations are however neither prior to the regime of individuation nor succeed it. Relations and individuations are rather characterized by a simultaneity that makes relation an ‘immanent event to individuation’.17 Individuation does not come to a standstill with the individual but rather continues within and/or beyond the individual, for according to Simondon it still contains its preindividual nature as a source of the possible. In this way it is characterized by a hybrid half-individual, half-preindividual shape. Relation, however, concerns such ‘preindividual singularities’, ‘those charges of nature of the possible which all individuals hold and which allow them to extend their individuation and produce new ones’.18 It is precisely at this point that a comparison with Michel Serres’ quasi-objects offers itself. The relationally-determined preindividual singularities of individuals can be placed in parallel with the relational character of Serres’ quasi-objects, of which ‘we don’t know whether they are beings or relations, tatters of beings or end of relations’.19 It is through the relations that, for Simondon, the ‘possible’ is individuated into the ‘actual’, just as for Serres the ‘virtual’ can become the ‘real’. Gilles Deleuze20 also lends the same ontological status to relation: a ‘logical consistency’, as Brian Massumi puts it.21 Relations, connections, and interdependencies are grasped as immanent to being; they are conditions of a dynamic becoming. Body, culture, individual, or society –­ all phenomena and things – are thus not conditions of exterior relations, but rather can be seen as ‘products, effects, coderivatives of an immanent relation that would be change in itself’.22 The basic idea of such a relational ontology lies at the core not only of several recent neo-ecological and neomaterialist theories23 but also of Philippe Parreno’s statements on the virtuality of his exhibitions and the realization/actualization of things and collectives through collaboration and conversation. This idea moreover finds an aesthetic and material equivalent in Parreno’s special installation practice. Against Representationalism Because an ontologically relational approach ‘focuses on how things are brought together and considers each part/object/subject and related practices as contingent on time, place, and whole-part relations’,24

15

Gilbert Simondon, ‘The Genesis of the Individual’, in Jonathan Crary, Sanford Kwinter (eds.), Incorporations (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 298.

16

Debaise 2012 (footnote 13), p. 5.

17

Ibid., p. 7.

18

Ibid.

19

Serres 1982 (footnote 11), p. 227.

20

This is not to erase conceptual differences here. Gilles Deleuze’s relation thinking, for example, indeed makes use of Simondon’s concept of individuation, but links this to the concept not of the possible but of the virtual – a concept that Simondon rejects. In contrast to Serres, moreover, Deleuze does not conceptually oppose the virtual to the real. Rather, the virtual is real; it is immanent to every real object and is determined through actualization. The latter means, among other things, differentiation in the milieu, or in other words, the differentiation of indeterminate elements of the manifold through ‘reciprocal relations’. In short, for Deleuze, as he develops Simondon’s theories, the givenness and actualisation of the virtual are grounded in an immanent differential relationality. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 209: ‘the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object’. See also ibid., pp. 211 and 182. Scott, too, points out the modification of Simondon’s process of individuation implied by Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the virtual. See Scott 2014 (footnote 13), p. 17.

21

Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 70.

22

Ibid., p. 71.

23

Compare, for instance, Estelle Barrett, Barbara Bolt, Katve-Kaisa Konturi, Transversal Practices: Ecology and Relationality, Studies in Material Thinking 16 (April 2007), Auckland University of Technology (Auckland, New Zealand). However, not all neo-materialist theories are distinguished by the postulate of immanent relations situated in the depths of being. Many limit themselves to simply thematizing the external relations of sensible networks.

24

Doucet 2018 (footnote 3), p. 7.

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Fig. 3

Philippe Parreno, exhibition at Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, installation view, detail, 2018.

Fig. 4

Philippe Parreno, Anywhen, 2017, colour film, 11:02 min., surround sound 5.1., widescreen format 1:85, film still.

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this approach is non-representationalist. Indeed representationalism,­ as the physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad explains,25 presupposes the idea that the world consists of preexisting individuals with fixed, inherent attributes that are considered to be independent and separate from their representations. It presupposes the separation between representations on the one hand and phenomena and things on the other, but assumes that the former reflects the latter, or that they function as a mediator that makes knowledge possible. This ‘ontological gap’26 between representations and what they purport to represent cannot be maintained in consistent relational or ecological thought. In the new relational approach sketched out here, the signs, tools, and practices of representation are inseparably entangled with the other semiotic-material actors that make up their assemblages and networks. In this way they not only participate directly in the differentiation, or individuation, of the phenomena and things to which they are directed but are also themselves determined by the relational processes involved. ‘Images or representations are not snapshots or depictions of what awaits us but rather condensations or traces of multiple practices of engagement’, as Barad says.27 In Parreno’s exhibitions, the marquees are among the objects that openly contradict the idea of representationalism (fig. 3).28 ‘Usually movie marquees tell you what movies or plays are on, but here you end up with a thing that doesn’t provide that kind of information’,29 as Parreno explains of his baldachin-like structures. The marquees thus at first make a formal reference to the act of naming or designation, only then consciously to refuse it. In this way they vicariously model the release of art objects from their designating function, from their function as the bearers of concrete signifiers that refer to corresponding (real or fictive) signifieds. For Parreno, the motif of the squid, the protagonist of the film Anywhen (fig. 4), is also exemplary for the suspension of a linguistic or otherwise distanced and reflective mode of representation. This intelligent cephalopod first appeared in Parreno’s work in 2002, in the exhibition Alien Season at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. The changes in the creature’s skin colour in response to its environment, which were shown in six film sequences and which according to Parreno stand for ‘post-symbolic communication’,30 activated various multisensory effects in the Paris exhibition spaces. The more immediate form of perception and communication associated with the squid encroached, tentacle-like, on the rest of the exhibition and on its visitors, condensing into various largely uncoded processes of stimulation, reaction, attraction, and aversion. The shots of the mollusc thus became signs that are not primarily representational, but which rather directly affect the exhibition’s semantic-material flows.31

25

See here above all Karen Barad, Agentieller Realismus. Über die Bedeutung materiell-diskursiver Praktiken (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012), p. 9, as well as the subchapter ‘From Representation to Performativity’ in Barad 2007 (footnote 8), pp. 46–59.

26

Barad 2007 (footnote 8), p. 47.

27

Ibid., p. 53.

28

I first described the non-representationalist character of Philippe Parreno’s exhibitions in a blog entry. Susanne Witzgall, ‘Kein Entkommen. Philippe Parreno und die nicht repräsentationalistische Form der Immersion’, Berliner Festspielblog (7/18/2018), https://blog.berliner festspiele.de/kein-entkommen/ (accessed 20.8.2018). The present modified and expanded interpretation of Parreno’s exhibition is based on central theses of this text.

29

Carlo Basualdo and Philippe Parreno, ‘Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World: A Conversation’, in Lissoni 2016 (footnote 10), p. 37.

30

Zoe Stillpass, ‘Remembrance of Things to Come’, in Lissoni 2016 (footnote 10), p. 41.

31

In the exhibition at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, the wallpaper (Wallpaper Marilyn, 2018) as well as the drawings produced by anthropomorphic automata from the film Marilyn (2012) abandoned the fictive space of moving images and appeared as independent objects on the walls of the exhibition (Modified Dynamic Movement Primitives for Joining Movement Sequences on Marilyn, 2012). They were thus not content with the status of reflective depiction or a passive existence behind an illusionistic surface. Instead they demonstratively entered the field of elements (quasi-objects or partial subjects) that exert an influence on the whole through their openness and affiliation, acting as catalyst, transmitter, or transformer and thus participating in the actualization of the virtual and/or the occurrence or non-occurrence of an event.

A non-representationalist understanding allied to relational thinking is, however, most pronounced in the recent exhibitions of the artist Pierre Huyghe, which in a different way connect human and nonhuman actors of the micro- and macrocosm in ecological networks. 79

32

Pierre Huyghe in Robert Storr, Interviews on Art (London: Heni Publishers, 2017), pp. 228–229.

33

Pierre Huyghe in conversation with Kolja Reichert, ‘Statische Dinge sind so vorhersehbar’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 15.6.2017, unpaginated.

Fig. 5–6

Pierre Huyghe, After ALife Ahead, 2017, total view and detail with aquarium, ice rink concrete floor, sand, clay, phreatic water, bacteria, algae, bee, chimera peacock, aquarium, black switchable glass, conus textile, incubator, human cancer cells, genetic algorithm, augmented reality, automated ceiling structure, rain, ammoniac, logic game, former ice rink at Steinfurtstraße, Skulptur-Projekte Münster.

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Particularly compelling examples of this are the works Untilled (2011/12) and After ALife Ahead (2017), in each of which viewers­ enter a specific web of biological, technological, material, and semiotic elements and their interdependent processes, in ‘a dynamic unpredictable entanglement’, a ‘compost of processes’ determined by emergence and self-organization.32 Huyghe’s recent work includes a complete modification of the abandoned Eispalast skating rink in Münster (fig. 5). Among other things, the artist had the pattern of the Ostomachion, an Archimedean logic game, cut into the concrete floor of the hall, which was partially dug down to the groundwater, exposing loam and sand from the Ice Age. He pierced the ceiling with square skylights, the shutters of which, when closed, protruded into the space as shallow inverted pyramids. The result was a rather dystopian hilly landscape made out of soil, concrete, loam, rubble, and pools of groundwater, inhabited by algae, bacteria, bees – which resided in earthen cones that towered out of the ditch ‘like transmitting stations’33 – and, at least at the beginning, even peacocks. Furthermore, an aquarium on one of the concrete platforms housed, along with fish, a venomous textile cone (fig. 6), whose complex shell patterns made up of inverted, multi-sized triangles provided the score for a soundtrack as well as for the darkening and illumination of the glass of the vitrine. The latter in turn triggered the opening and closing of the skylights, temporarily allowing the elements of the external world to enter. These in turn altered the climate within the space, where bacteria and CO2 levels were registered by sensors and, along

with the recorded movements of the animals, influenced the growth rate of cancer cells in an incubator. In parallel to this, the division of the cancer cells orchestrated black pyramidal forms that viewers could download onto their cell phones, and which in turn influenced their perceptions and movements by virtually overlaying the architecture of the skating rink on their mobile screens. It is above all through the direct involvement of the virtual images in the indeterminable and unforeseeable dynamic of a hybrid ecological system that After ALife Ahead bridges the ‘ontological gap’34 of representationalism. As simple geometric signs, the virtual forms do not explain or symbolize but rather take part in multiply-entangled life processes. ‘It’s a question of the extent to which images are influenced by their environment, or the environment is influenced by images’, Huyghe comments. He notes that: ‘I try […] to make the symbolic and the physical become asynchronous, so the meaning can slip away from the object, or the physical can slip away from the symbolic.’35 This does not imply that the artist refuses every form of symbolic representation, as the recurring motif of the inverted pyramid demonstrates. This motif plays on the Sierpinski Triangle36 and thus on the patterns of fractal geometry, which are often generated through recursive feedback operations. In contrast to the forms of Euclidean geometry, for which the broken Archimedean pattern of the floor seems to stand, fractal patterns can create ever more complex new details, and the logic upon which they are based extends into

34

Barad 2007 (footnote 25), p. 47.

35

Reichert 2017 (footnote 33), unpaginated.

36

This fractal, a self-similar subset of a triangle, was described by Wacław Sierpiński in 1915 and appeared as a three-dimensional depiction alongside other research images for After ALife Ahead in Pierre Huyghe’s contribution to the catalogue of Skulptur Projekte ­Münster in 2017. Kasper König, Britta Peters, Marianne Wagner (eds.), Skulptur Projekte Münster 2017 (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2017), pp. 212–213.

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37

See Hörl 2017 (footnote 3), p. 19.

38

See ibid., p. 15. Hörl in turn draws on Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014).

39

Lazzarato 2014 (footnote 38), p. 72.

40

Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), p. 73; cited from Lazzarato 2014 (footnote 38), p. 60.

41

See Lazzarato (footnote 38), p. 74.

42

Ibid., pp. 84–85.

43

‘By acting on things outside of representation, signs and things “engage one another independently of the subjective ‘controls’ that individuated agents of enunciation claim to have over them”.’ Ibid., p. 86. Lazzarato here cites Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 76; translation modified.

44

Emily McDermott, ‘Pierre Huyghe’s Latest Project is Part Biotech Lab, Part Scene from a Sci-Fi Film’, Artsy, June 19, 2017, unpaginated, https://www.artsy. net/article/artsy-editorial-pierrehuyghes-latest-project-biotechlab-scene-sci-fi-film (accessed 11.9.2018).

45 46

Ibid.

Christopher Powell, ‘Radical Relationism: A Proposal’, in Powell and Dépelteau 2013 (footnote 7), p. 203.

attempts to describe the semi-chaotic, unpredictable behaviour of dissipative systems. In other words, the motif of the inverted pyramid refers to self-organizing dynamic systems in non-equilibrium, among which are those of every lifeform. The recurrent pyramids are for Huyghe neither part of an attempt to mathematically mirror the world, nor do they metaphorically refer to the uncontrollability and unpredictability of complex dynamic or living systems. They are not ‘representative’ but rather ‘operative entities’, as described by Félix Guattari,37 who from the late 1970s onward undertook a non-representationalist reconceptualization of perceptual culture – including that of the sign – with regard to the transformation of techno-ecological conditions.38 With his reconceptualization of perceptual culture, Guattari removes the subject from the centre of a culture of meaning and relates articulation – beyond the semiotic triangle: ‘reference, signification, representation’39 – less to the individual than to the ‘complex assemblages of individuals, bodies, material and social machines, semiotic, mathematical, and scientific machines, etc., which are the true sources of articulation’.40 In this new semiology of meaning, powerless signs, which must first traverse consciousness, representation, and the subject,41 become ‘power-signs’ or ‘signpoints’. These intervene directly into material processes ‘in which the functions of denotation and signification break down’.42 Analogously to Guattari’s conception, in which articulation must be understood as an effect of complex assemblages, in After ALife Ahead the algorithms of the technical machines, which participate in the above-described entwined linkages of the elements of this ecological system, are themselves not static but are rather constructed as adaptive programs that change in response to various conditions. Algorithmic language is accordingly not that of the mathematical registration and reflective representation of firmly defined and calculated relations. It rather exerts an effect on things outside of representation and thus acts beyond the subjective control that the human actor, as the generator of meaning, is so fond of claiming for him- or herself.43 ‘It’s not a program written to be fixed, [but] rather changing operations contaminated by other languages’,44 as the artist emphasizes. The result is a non-representationalist articulation of ecological networks and their partially invisible und unpredictable dynamics, in which and by means of which, according to Huyghe, ‘the centrality of the human position – whether as a maker or receptor’45 is displaced. Ecological Thinking as Epistemology ‘If relations constitute all objects, then one can never know objects independently of the relations through which one encounters them’, reasons the sociologist Christopher Powell.46 The non-representationalist character of current ecological thinking as described above, according to which signs, tools, and practices of representation do not mirror distanced phenomena, but rather participate in the differentiation and determination of these phenomena through reciprocal

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interdependency and only generate meaning in alliance with other actors, already suggests as much. In this relational approach, we are dealing not only with an ontology, but also with an epistemology. ‘Knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world’, writes Karen Barad. In her so-called agential realism, she defines the epistemic practices of experimentation and theorizing as ‘dynamic practices that play a constitutive role in the production of objects and subjects and matter and meaning’. These practices do not intervene or reflect from the outside, but rather intra-act ‘from within, and as part of, the phenomena produced’.47 Barad, who draws both from Niels Bohr and from Donna Haraway’s notion of diffraction (an optical metaphor for the directly intra-active entanglement of the apparatus and object of study), thus conceptualizes understanding and the production of knowledge as radically relational undertakings. This relational epistemology is inseparably entangled with a relational ontology which presumes that ‘phenomena are ontologically primitive relations – relations without preexisting relata’, and that their boundaries and characteristics are only determined – or, in Simondon’s words, individuated – ‘through specific agential intraactions’.48 Because epistemic practices, with their involved methods and technical conditions, thereby participate in the reconfiguration of the world, they elicit, according to Barad, a particular mode of reflection and responsibility. For Lorraine Code, who follows Barad in this respect, ecological thinking thus ‘relocates inquiry “down to the ground” where knowledge is made, negotiated, circulated; and where the nature and conditions of the particular “ground”, the situations and circumstances of specific knowers, their interdependence and their negotiations, have claims to critical epistemic scrutiny […]’.49 A relational epistemology, as Barad and Code understand it, consequently opposes a hegemonic conception of knowledge that lays claim to objectivity and exclusivity, insofar as it loses sight of its situatedness. Whereas Barad in this context proposes a diffractive methodology that above all thinks various approaches in the natural and social sciences through each other, Code instead proposes an epistemology that takes account of a broad spectrum of forms of knowledge in all their diversity and local interweaving – among them traditional or indigenous forms of knowledge; an approach that is, to put it briefly, ‘sensitive to human and historical-geographical diversity’.50

47

Barad 2007 (footnote 25), p. 56.

48

Barad 2012 (footnote 25), p. 139.

49

Code 2006 (footnote 2), p. 5.

50

Ibid., p. 21.

The exhibition Apple. An Introduction (Over and over and once again) initiated by the German artist Antje Majewski together with Paweł Freisler and first realized – with the help of a range of other cooperative partners – in 2014 at the Museum Sztuki in Łódz´, Poland, reveals this epistemological dimension of ecological and relational thinking. In contrast to Parreno or Huyghe, Majweski’s exhibition did not embody a dynamic network of actors that mutually influence each other, but rather a mutually illuminating and silently co-present collection of materials, objects, written works, videos, and poems on 83

Fig. 7

Antje Majewski, Paweł Freisler, Apple. An Introduction. (Over and over again), Kunsthalle Lingen, 2017.

Fig. 8–9

Antje Majewski, Wild Apples, 2014/17, film stills (Eckart Brandt and Erzhan Ashim Kitzhan-uly ­Oralbekov), Antje Majewski, Paweł Freisler, Apple. An Introduction. (Over and over again), Museum ­Sztuki w Łodzi (2014) and Kunst­ halle Lingen (2017).

84

the theme of ‘apples’ – manifestations and traces of diverse forms of knowledge that all had to do with relations between apples, human beings, technologies, and other organisms and materials. Starting with the apple – a quasi-object par excellence – the exhibition’s elements, as well as the workshops and interventions included in the accompanying programming, demonstrated the hybrid ecologies in which the apple is embedded, the communities it establishes, how it is determined in these assemblages and how it becomes individuated through their immanent relations. A central theme here was the loss of apple biodiversity thanks to global agro-industry, the scientific and cultural normalisation imposed by western capitalist societies as well as the confrontation of this normalisation with alternative practices and forms of knowledge. Paintings by Majewski presented isolated portraits of old as well as new apple varieties against monochrome backgrounds (fig. 7). They functioned not only as ancestral images of forgotten species, but also as allegories of the scientific and aesthetic identification and separating systematization of ‘natural’ phenomena. Majewski’s documentary film Freedom of the Apples gathered interviews with an artist as well as with ecological and industrial apple farmers, gardening experts, amateur gardeners, molecular geneticists, curators of gene banks, apple growers and indigenous environmentalists from Asia, Africa, and both Eastern and Western Europe (figs. 8–9). It thus compiled various types of knowledge and critical analyses of the contemporary conditions of apple production, which are largely shaped by monoculture, chemical-technological increases in efficiency, and capitalist marketing interests. Dried and carved apples by Paweł Freisler, which were displayed as objects in the exhibition but also – once staged by Piotr Z·ycien´ski – as photographic motifs

and 3D plastic reproductions, underwent an eloquent metamorphosis from cultural organisms in a state of decay to photographically archived precious objects, to artificial reproductions that seemed to indicate the most recent and intense phase of the technologization of ‘nature’. Finally, Agnieszka Polska’s video piece Garden referred to Paweł Freisler’s perfect egg. This metal object, which the artist produced in 1967, was meant to become the patented model for every egg in Europe, and can be understood, according to the press release, as a ‘topical and ironic response to the ideologies of technocratic standardization’.51 Alongside the apple juice bottles that Jimmie Durham designed for documenta 13, the exhibition project also included a series of collective activities – among them the ‘Fruity Łódz´’ campaign, organized by the activist group Fundacja Transformacja (Foundation for Transformation). This group, which specializes in permaculture and ecological design, collaborated with inhabitants of the city to plant and adopt old apple varieties (fig. 10) that are distinguished by a higher degree of genetic diversity and resistance than their industrially produced relatives. Furthermore, the Łódz´ food co-op communicated ‘knowledge of cooperative ideas and apples in old Polish cooking’52 in a culinary workshop, while the pomologist Grzegorz Hodun conducted a workshop on traditional, biodiverse fruit cultivation.

51

‘Antje Majewski: Apple. An Introduction. (Over and over again), Museum Sztuki, Łódź 2014,’ press release, http://www.antjemajewski. de/2014/10/25/antje-majewskiapple-an-introduction-over-andover-again-muzeum-sztuki-lodz2014/ (accessed 11.9.2018).

52

Joanna Sokolowska, ‘Die Äpfel der Zukunft’, in Apple. An Introduction. (Over and over again) / Der Apfel. Eine Einführung. (Immer und immer und immer wieder), exhib. cat., Museum Sztuki, Łódź, and Museum Abteiberg, Mönchen­ gladbach (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), p. 61.

Majewski’s apple project thus offered a multilayered and dynamic patchwork of the scientific, artistic, cultural-historical, traditional, practical/everyday, and indigenous forms of knowledge and experience of other persons, institutions, and groups, which not only described and criticized the dominance of a Western-style monoculture of knowledge and plant cultivation, but also implied alternative practices of knowledge and action. The apple project’s open call for greater biodiversity accordingly complements the programmatic unification of various forms of knowledge and the transversal

Fig. 10

Planting apple trees with Fundacja Transformajca, Łódź, 2014, Antje Majewski, Paweł Freisler, Apple. An Introduction. (Over and over again), Museum Sztuki w Łodzi.

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53

‘On Ecological Thinking and Practice: Conversation between Aleksandra Jach and Antje Ma­jewski’, 2015, http://www. antjemajewski.de/2015/10/23/onecological-thinking-and-practice -conversation-between-aleksandrajach-and-antje-majewski-viamail-2015 (accessed 11.9.2018).

54

Vandana Shiva, Tomorrow’s Biodiversity (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), p. 129; cited in Code 2006 (footnote 2), p. 21. It is hence no surprise that an article by Michael Specter on Vandana Shiva is linked on the homepage of the apple project. Michael Specter, ‘Seeds of Doubt: An Activist’s Controversial Crusade against Genetically Modified Crops’, The New Yorker, August 25, 2014, http:// www.owocowalodz.pl/ (accessed 11.9.2018).

55

‘Der Apfel und die Kunst – Interview mit Antje Majewski’, gartenvideo.com, min. 4:25, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=RlhuDpnejmM (accessed 11.9.2018).

56

Jach, Majewski 2015 (footnote 53), unpaginated.

57

Hörl 2017 (footnote 3), p. 4.

thinking-through-each-other of diverse partial knowledges, which is based on a situated and relational as opposed to a reductionist approach. ‘Knowledge is not restricted to scientists’, as Majewski emphasizes in a 2015 interview, proceeding to refer to the useful knowledge of the Polish apple grower, the worker in an apple juice factory, or a specialist in traditional agriculture who is the leader of an indigenous people.53 Significantly, the shift implied here from a hegemonic conception of knowledge to a relational epistemological approach answers to the call of Vandana Shiva, who sees such a shift as essential ‘for the protection of both biological diversity and cultural diversity’.54 In this connection, the Indian theorist and activist is likewise interested primarily in the question of how reductionist epistemological methods suppress indigenous and traditional agricultural systems without bothering to examine their local viability – and thus, by extension, their situated knowledge. Relational Thinking and Political Decision It is no coincidence that in Majewski’s work it is the apple, of all things, that stands at the centre of her ecological thinking as relational epistemology. The apple, according to Majewski, is a ‘symbol of knowledge’,55 referring to, among other things, its significance as the fruit of knowledge in Christian iconography. At the same time, the apple, in its cultivated and industrial variants, is among the oldest and best-known biocultural quasi-objects, which – supported on the one hand by its further ambivalent significance as a symbol of power, and on the other hand as a symbol of fertility – seems in almost iconic fashion to condense the conflicted nature of a cybernetization of the environment. As a compact, generally fist-sized manifestation of the ‘anthropogenic biome’ – as Majewski, following the American geographers Ellis and Ramankutty, calls habitats in which crucial ecological properties derive from human land56 – the apple can be grasped as an event or singularity which can be differentiated in relation to other (especially technological and biotechnological) singularities and milieus of individuation. The relational thinking of a new ecological rationality, however, gathers different knowledges and, by way of the apple, not only bears witness to but if need be also purposively and masterfully intensifies the techno-ecological entanglements that reach down to the deepest layers of being. Erich Hörl, in particular, sees the ‘neo-ecological awakening’ on an axis with the technological evolution that continues to dominate the ‘becoming of the concept of ecology’,57 in this way exercising a continuous expansion of environmental control. Ecological or relational thinking thus cannot – as we might guess from Apple: An Introduction – automatically be labelled as ‘good’. ‘The ecology that – literally and metaphorically – generates its core’, Lorraine Code writes, is no innocent place from which to derive pure, benign ‘alternatives’ to the epistemologies of mastery. Ecology is as politically contested as any of the positions this project interrogates, as

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prone to self-serving articulations and to excesses of narcissistic aestheticism as any of the dominant theories on the philosophical landscape. […] ecological thinking is as available for feeding self-serving romantic fantasies as for inspiring socially responsible transformations.58

58

Frédéric Neyrat, ‘Elements for an Ecology of Separation: Beyond Ecological Constructivism’, in Hörl 2017 (footnote 3), p. 105 (emphasis in the original).

60

According to Code, ecological thinking therefore importantly needs concrete decisions, the careful weighing and attentive observation of social developments and reform movements, in order not to fall prey to old patterns or new forms of oppression. This in turn presumes that we are here dealing with relational thinking that has nothing to do with the bogeyman of an ecological constructivism, such as Frédéric Neyrat has recently described – a mode of relational thinking that is paralysed by the immanence of an infinite, undifferentiated web of relations. For this would be to colonize its minority elements in a technophilic and narcissistic ‘fantasy of fusion’59 – a fantasy which indeed invokes the end of the great divides, but without in fact eroding them at all – as well as to lose all ‘capacity for judgment and power of political decision’ through a total loss of differences and spaces for mediation.60 The most compelling version of ecological thinking as relational onto-epistemology, which has here been analysed through a survey of theoretical and artistic approaches and which suggests itself as the most convincing variant, contrasts with the above primarily in two fundamental aspects:

Code 2006 (footnote 2), p. 6.

59

Hörl 2017 (footnote 3), p. 23.

61

Mario Blaser, research professor for Aboriginal Studies at Memorial University, Newfoundland, sums up the political dimension of ontologically informed approaches with a focus on multiplicity, becoming, material-semiotic assemblages, etc., as follows: ‘[…] in my view, the challenge lies not so much in devising ways to indefinitely sustain the possible but contributing to actualize some possibilities and not others. One of these possibilities (but not the only one) might precisely be a “worlding” […] where the possible is indefinitely sustained.’ Mario Blaser, ‘The Political Ontology of Doing Difference… and Sameness’, Cultural Anthropology 13 (January 2014), https://culanth.org/ fieldsights/the-political-ontologyof-doing-difference-and-sameness (accessed 7.10.2020).

1. Ecological thinking as relational onto-epistemology conceives the various material-semantic actors in the world’s assemblages and networks as variously individuated actualizations that are subject to further individuation or differentiation and differentiation in relation to other human and non-human elements of this web. Each respective individual shape of these actors here always also contains a ‘preindividual nature’ as the source of the possible, or the virtual grounded in the immanent differential relationality as the source of the potential. As quasi-objects that neither precede nor follow the external relations of their assemblages, they are just as capable of establishing new collectives as they are of being continuously affected and transformed by them. To that extent, this form of ecological thinking holds in store abundant potential for other actualizations and hence also the possibility for decision, in other words the capacity for political action.61 2. Ecological thinking as relational onto-epistemology understands the generation of knowledge as a relational intra-active practice in which representations and epistemic tools do not mirror the world from a distance in a representationalist manner, but rather contribute as directly involved actors to its reconfiguration. Because these representations and epistemic tools are mutually entangled with the phenomena that they (re)produce, each of them leads – in accordance with the tools, paradigms, and methods that they use – to different boundary-drawings with regard to these phenomena and hence to different shapings of the world. On the other hand, they are them87

62

See also Code 2006 (footnote 2), p. 284.

63

See also Oliver Zahm, ‘Philippe Parreno: New Rituals’, purple Magazine 26 (2016), unpaginated.

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This is precisely what differentiates Huyghe’s work from predecessors in the 1960s, in which a sort of ecologization of perception and thought is already detectable – as for example in the works of the Pulsa group. This experimental collective, which aimed to intensify the perception of relational effects between various ecologies through electronic and medial feedback systems, could not yet entirely free itself from the temptations of cybernetic ideas of control and guidance. This is evident in a programmatic text that Pulsa published in 1968, in which the group describes technical equipment and its use in various environments as an essential element of a ‘long term evolutionary process’ that may lead to an increasing ‘generalized knowledge of and associated instrumentation for generating and controlling phenomena’. Pulsa, Notes on Group Process, pp. 1–2, https://archive.org/details/ Pulsa-NotesOnGroupProcessCa1968 (accessed 12.9.2018).

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‘Yet ecological thinking is not simply thinking about ecology or about “the environment”, although these figure as catalysts among its issues.’ Code 2006 (footnote 2), p. 5.

selves determined by these phenomena and are entangled in various other material-semiotic relations and situated processes of individuation. This relational and situated understanding of knowledge does not privilege any form of cognition as ‘correct’ or exclusively valid. It instead reckons with a multitude of complex epistemological terrains that mutually illuminate each other in a diffractive methodology, and investigates the (theoretical, material, and ethical) consequences of its practices of boundary-drawings. The accompanying critical reflection can challenge conventional models of knowledge and open new paths for thinking,62 thus sharpening the power of judgment for correct political decisions. Philippe Parreno’s Berlin exhibition, with its cool aesthetic and near­ly hermetic aspect, embodies central aspects of this ecological thinking – among them the principle of non-representationalism, of relational being, and of the locating of potentiality at its centre – at a high level of abstraction. Whereas Parreno seems to be interested above all in art-immanent questions that touch on the status of the art object or that define the aim of artistic practice as the transformation of the grammar of reality through rhythms, new orderings, polyphonies, and the production of meaning through the exhibition-assemblages,63 Pierre Huyghe’s relational work After ALife Ahead additionally pursues decidedly ecological concerns and raises environmental questions. The dystopian atmosphere of the desolate skating rink’s environment and the knowledge that cancer cells were dividing in accord with the bacteria and CO2 levels in the air remind visitors of the precarious condition of the earth, while the exposure of glacial sand opens up geochronological dimensions that meet their premature end in the epoch of the Anthropocene. The technologies that are woven through the ecological mesh of After ALife Ahead here reveal themselves not as tools for environmental control but rather as fellow players in the multifarious dynamics of life and its forms of articulation.64 Majewski’s apple project, finally – especially in the workshops and activist campaigns – intervenes directly into reality. It completes the arc traced here from the central theoretical-aesthetic building blocks of a contemporary relational onto-epistemology, to the artistic embodiment of hybrid Anthropocene ecologies that can serve as ‘catalysts’65 for ecological thinking, to a transformed relational modality of engagement with knowledge and political involvement.

Translated from German by Daniel Spaulding.

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Nihilism Upgrade Timothy Morton

There is no pronoun entirely suitable to describe ecological beings. I’ve got into terrible trouble for saying we. But all pronouns are compromised. If I call them I, then I’m appropriating them to myself or to some pantheistic or Gaia concept that swallows them all without regard to their specificity. If I call them you, I differentiate them from the kind of being that I am. If I call them he or she, then I’m gendering them according to heteronormative concepts that are untenable on evolutionary terms. If I call them it, I don’t think that they’re people like me, I’m being blatantly anthropocentric. And heaven forbid I call them we, because of the way strong correlationism has taken over the space of polite humanism. What am I doing, speaking as if we all belong together without regard to cultural difference? As one respondent enjoyed sneering a few years ago, Who is the ‘we’ in Morton’s prose? If grammar lines up against speaking ecological beings at such a basic level, what hope is there? I can’t speak the ecological subject. But this is exactly what I’m required to do. I can’t speak it, because language and in particular grammar is fossilized human thoughts; thoughts, for example about humans and nonhumans. I can’t say it as opposed to he or she, because there’s an implicit assumption that a non-human isn’t a person. I can’t say we because – well I’m going to talk about that in a moment. I can’t say they because where does that leave me and you? Or her, or him? Sure, I can in some sense speak about lifeforms, if I ignore the most interesting question, which is how do I get to coexist with them? To what extent? In what mode or modes? I can do biology, for example. 89

But if I’m a biologist I base my research on existing assumptions concerning what counts as ‘alive’. And implicitly, as a condition of possibility for science as such, I’m talking in the key of it and them rather than the key of we. So I haven’t made the problem go away. ‘We Are All Earthlings’. Right now, in scholarship space, I’m not allowed to like that song, let alone sing it as if it was some kind of biospheric anthem. Given that it is seen to level (cultural) differences, I’m supposed to see it as deeply appropriative of indigenous cultures, as white, Western, ultimately as racist. I’m trying to make the academy a safe space in which to like ‘We Are All Earthlings’. This boils down to thinking hard about the we. Ironically the first scholars in humanist and social science domains to talk about ecology were hostile to theory, to exploring how texts and other cultural objects are constructed, how race, gender and class deeply affect their construction and so forth. They wrote as if talking about frogs was a way to avoid talking about gender. But frogs also have gender and sexuality. Frogs also have constructs – they access the world in certain ways, their genome expresses (whether ‘intentionally’ or ‘with imagination’ or not) beyond the boundaries of their bodies. In a strange way then, the early ‘ecocritics’ were themselves talking about nonhumans in the key of it! In drawing a sharp distinction between the artificial and the natural, for example, they remain well within anthropocentric thought space. Humans are artificers; non-humans are spontaneous. Humans are people; non-humans are, to all intents and purposes, machines. They would hate me for saying it. They have hated me for saying it. Humanities scholarship bemoans its marginalized fate within ultra utilitarianism and neoliberal space. But when you actually try to challenge that utilitarianism by using a word that names solidarity with other beings, the word we, humanities scholars get you into big trouble. As I’m going to show, this view is deeply connected to a powerful line of thought in the post-agricultural ‘civilization’ that I call happy nihilism. Our contemporary world has perfected this type of ‘happy’ nihilism. Happy nihilism cleaves to the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle (two basic logical laws), and the consequence is that ecological beings are brutally ignored when it comes to psychic, social and philosophical space. Happy nihilism reduces beings to some form of non-existence so that they can be manipulated at will by those held to exist. When happy nihilism reduces them downwards to products of atoms or a material flux, the existent manipulator is called the human being. When it reduces them upwards to the effects of a correlator, the existent manipulator is called the transcendental subject, spirit, history, human economic relations, will to power, Dasein. All these correlators are ultimately tied to the human being. 90

Nihilism says something true about beings: they don’t exist in some sense. But in what sense are we to take this absence of existing? Where do we put the absence? Against or behind or as the telos of the being? Or at the heart of the being? What happy nihilism does is to set the absence against the being (or behind it, or as its ultimate end – these amount to the same thing as ‘against’). If we assert that beings do truly exist, that nihilism isn’t true at all, then we leave this dichotomy alone. Absence becomes another being. What we require instead is an upgrade of nihilism that puts the absence at the heart of the being, some things to violate these logical laws. We can do this within logic, luckily. I'll be explaining how we get to what I call ‘dark nihilism’ and why you shouldn't be scared of it.

1

Jared Diamond, ‘The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race’, in Discover Magazine (May 1987), pp. 64–66.

Jared Diamond calls Fertile Crescent agriculture ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’.1 This agricultural mode had to do with establishing city states surrounded by fields, producing a sharp distinction between human and non-human domains. The logistics of this agricultural mode, which I call agrilogistics, had to do with curbing the anxiety generated by the mild global warming of the Holocene – where has my lunch run off to? – and the ontological anxiety of the Paleolithic – how can I be sure that this rabbit isn’t a witch? It was based on increasing happiness, but within the first quarter of its current duration agrilogistics had resulted in a drastic reduction in happiness. People starved, which accounts for pronounced decreases in average human size in the Fertile Crescent. Agrilogistics exerted downward pressure on evolution. Within three thousand years farmers’ leg bones went from those of the ripped hunter-gatherer to the semi-sedentary forerunner of the couch potato. Within three thousand years patriarchy emerged. Within three thousand years what is now called the 1% emerged, or in fact the 0.1%, which in those days was called king. Desertification made swathes of the biosphere far less habitable. Agrilogistics was a disaster early on, yet it was repeated across the earth. There’s a good Freudian term for the blind thrashing (and threshing) of this destructive machination, by which is never meant only what happens for an individual being, since such machinations destroy and constitute such beings and form the bases of their sociocultural exoskeletons: death drive. Because of its underlying logical structure, agrilogistics now plays out at the spatio-temporal scale of global warming, having supplied the conditions for the Agricultural Revolution, which swiftly provided the conditions for the Industrial Revolution. ‘Modernity once more with feeling’ solutions to global warming – bioengineering, geoengineering and other forms of happy nihilism – reduce things to bland substances that can be manipulated at will without regard to unintended consequences.

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2

Plato, Phaedrus, 55; 265e. http:// classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus. html (accessed 30.4.2015). 3

Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 153. 4

Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 45–46.

The underlying logical structure of agrilogistics consists of three axioms: 1. The law of non-contradiction is inviolable. 2. To exist is to be constantly present. 3. Existing is better than any quality of existing. The three axioms entail one another. Number 1 is a rule that has never been proved, from section gamma of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Although it might at first sound strange, there are plenty of times when this law can be violated. Number 2 is what we call the metaphysics of presence. Number 3 is what was formalized as utilitarianism at the start of the era we call modernity. The axioms of agrilogistics are hardwired into social space as well as philosophical and psychic space, making them very hard to address and to change. Consider the case of Plato, who compares the intellectual analysis of the essence of a thing to skilful butchery: how to turn an ‘animal’ (already a degraded term) into ‘meat’ (a still more degraded one); a metabolic metaphor for an anthropocentric process. A good philosopher carves the eidos at the joints as if they were dotted lines on an animal telling one which parts were which.2 Plato exemplifies a pervasive nihilism in Western (that is to say agrilogistical) thought.3 Plato is a nihilist insofar as he asserts a thin bright line between a realm of appearances and a realm of realities in the form of reified, constantly present beings. Such beings are easy to think, easy to manipulate and easy to destroy. The ‘cut along the dotted line’ genre of metaphysics underwrites the dotted lines on diagrams that specify how to turn cows into beef. With the addition of the steam engine, cow appearances could be eliminated entirely in favour of concentrated cow essence, and agrilogistics eventually brought about Oxo, Bovril and other forms of powdered British cow. The Chicago disassembly line gave Henry Ford the idea of massively efficient assembly lines.4 A violent nihilism is hardwired into agrilogistics. A spoon could be a potato. A toaster could be an octopus. A meadow could be a parking lot. Hey, let’s build one—that sounds like a good idea! Let's build another road on the outer limits of the city! More people, more cars! Eventually this impulse is expressed as happy nihilism, the cheerful manipulation of extensional lumps, manipulation for manipulation’s sake. Just for the taste of it. What we require is a nihilism upgrade. We need to move from the substances that underlie appearances to substances deeply intertwined with appearance. We need to move from believing in extension lumps versus accidents versus the absolute void to believing in post-Kantian things suffused with nothingness. So, let’s see about doing some thinking about nothingness. Let's begin by considering two basic types of nothing. Start with the default,

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plastic nothing. Absolute, obvious nothing. After Paul Tillich let’s call this variety oukontic nothing.5 The ouk prefix is Greek for ‘not’ or ‘non’. Oukontic nothing means that there is nothing other than substance or things, just constant presence. There is not even nothing other than the universe of constantly present things. This sort of nothing deeply resembles plastic substance – it’s the flip side of something that is constantly there, remaining the same all the time, just a bland blank. This void is plagued with the same paradoxes and inconsistencies as its cousin, the plastic substance.6 For instance, since it’s absolutely nothing at all, movement across it wouldn’t be possible. It can’t be demarcated. The most consistent way to think it is with Spinoza: there is substance, and absolutely nothing else, not even nothing.7 Oukontic nothing is the perfect complement to the purely extensional, plastic substance of agrilogistics. It’s plastic nothing, if you like. It’s the same thing, just devoid even of extension. Consider a set of things. When you remove those things, you have oukontic nothing, unless you allow a set to remain empty. If you are okay with that you are okay with the idea that there’s a subtle difference between a set and its contents, which is absurd from the point of view of plastic, oukontic nothing. If there is a slight difference between sets and things that sets contain, you can have empty sets that are members of themselves, to the chagrin of philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, who argued that these sorts of set aren’t sets at all, in order to get rid of the contradiction. A world in which this slight difference is possible is a world in which the type of nothing is nothingness, which Tillich calls meontic nothing.8 The me– in the term isn’t privative in the same way as the ouk in oukontic: rather than ‘non-being’ it means something like ‘un-being’, ‘a-being’. It’s a phenomenon; or is it? You can’t quite tell. It causes things to ripple and float and have futurality and dissolve and move. It makes the world go round and it gives you a heart attack. Things literally sparkle with nothingness. They are ‘alive’. Or rather ‘aliveness’ is a small region of sparkling that transcends the life–non-life boundary. Starlight is refracted through the atmosphere and comes onto my retina just so. It twinkles, twinkles.9 When I see that, I am seeing evidence of a thing I can't quite see, called atmosphere, thus biosphere, thus earth’s magnetic shield. Where does one draw the line, ecologically speaking? Earth weather is influenced by space weather such as solar storms.10 When I look at the star, I see a translation of the star in a biosphere-morphic way, and in an atmosphere-morphic way, and in my anthropomorphic way. Atmospheres and magnetic shields can be as ‘morphic’ as humans can. The star is a sort of un-star when the atmosphere translates it, let alone me. A translation of a poem is and is not that poem.

5

Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 188. 6

For much further detail on this topic see David Macauley, Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water as Environmental Ideas (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010). 7

Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin, 2005). 8

Tillich (note 5), p. 188.

9

Jane Taylor, ‘The Star’, Rhymes for the Nursery (London, 1806), p. 10. 10

L. Pustil’nik and G. Yom Din, ‘On Possible Influence of Space Weather on Agricultural Markets: Necessary Conditions and Probable Scenarios’, in Astrophysical Bulletin, 68.1 (2013), pp. 1–18.

Dark nihilism means that things are haunted by spectral versions of themselves. Think about evolution. Stop the tape of evolution at any point and you will find a species, shadowed by some X-power. A fish 93

11

Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

12

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1965).

that can leap out of water and survive for more than a few seconds by gulping air, let’s say. There seems to be no point to this flamboyant behaviour. Some fish might find it disturbing, even insulting to fishkind. Perhaps this fish is dangerous. Perhaps it needs to be confined or put on drugs for its own good. It might do itself harm. The fish is indeed dangerous: ontologically dangerous. Dangerous to the fish who think that they have ‘I am exactly this fish’ inscribed all the way through every part of their structure. Just in the same way as what Luce Irigaray says about sexuality, a species isn’t one and it isn’t two.11 What is the case is a species shadowed by an X-species. Parrots and X-parrots. Men and X-men. Women and X-women. Live oaks and X-live oaks. Cyanobacteria and X-cyanobacteria, which have the special ability to live inside other single-celled organisms: these X-cyanobacteria are called mitochondria, and you have them in every cell of your body. They are why you are reading this: they provide your energy. Your eyes are moving down this page because of a bacterial superpower. You can’t be a lifeform unless you have this spectral double, this mutant shadow. Being alive means being super-natural. Beings contain a basic twist, a difference between what they are and how they appear, which manifests in such a way that it’s impossible to peel appearing away from being. This means that things are exactly themselves, yet never as they appear. The haunting spectrality of a thing has to do with the fact that in itself it’s ungraspable and inexhaustible; it isn’t totally captured by any particular mode of access, whether that access mode be thinking about, licking, ignoring, brushing against, flying over, shooting around a particle accelerator, writing a poem about, crying onto. There is a drastic, transcendental (you can’t point to it anywhere) gap between what things are and how they are accessed – between things and thing data. And this is disturbing – as soon as Immanuel Kant figured out his way very close to this idea, he freaked out and shrunk back. It means, in its most extreme formulation – the one Kant gives but himself ignores – that things are exactly as they appear (they always coincide with their data) but never as they seem (they never coincide with their data). This is a blatant contradiction, and contradictions aren’t allowed in quite a lot of Western philosophy. Hegel (and therefore Hegelians such as Marx) is the exception that proves the rule. Kant had accepted Hume’s sabotage of the default Western metaphysical concept that cause and effect were easy-to-identify mechanical operations happening below appearances in some reliable way.12 According to this, cause and effect are statistical – you can’t with a straight face say that the billiard ball will always hit the other one and ‘cause’ it to move. Kant gives the deep reason for this: cause and ­effect are on the side of data, appearances, rather than part of the thing in itself; they are phenomena that we intuit about a thing

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based on a priori judgment. If you think this is outrageous or bizarre, remember that this is exactly the logic of modern science. It allows us to study things with great precision, unhampered by metaphysical baggage. But it also means that science can never directly talk about reality, only about data. Kant unleashed a picture of the world in which things have a deeply ambiguous quality. Now we could accept that some things can be contradictory and true, and so accept that things are what they are yet never as they appear. Or we could try to get rid of the contradiction. Kant himself pins down the problem by limiting access to data to thinking – or at least positing thinking as the top access mode – and by limiting thinking to mathematizing reason (regarding extensional time and space) happening within the transcendental (human) subject. Raindrops aren’t really weird all by themselves: there is a gap, but it’s not in the raindrop (despite how Kant actually puts it when he talks about them); the gap is in the difference between the (human) subject and everything else. Kant opened up and then quickly shut down the possibility of dark nihilism. He opened Pandora’s jar and all this stuff started pouring out, so he rapidly stuck the lid back on and relabelled it as a sort of blank screen. Don’t worry, there’s nothing as such in this jar. It’s whatever you correlate it to be. Don’t worry, human beings, you’ve got the controls, because you’ve got the top access mode, thinking, and exclusive access to the transcendental subject, the decider that ‘realizes’ the thing, just like a conductor ‘realizes’ a piece of music with an orchestra. A thing is a strange loop like a Möbius strip, which in topology is called a non-orientable surface. A non-orientable surface lacks an intrinsic back or front, up or down, inside or outside. Yet a Möbius strip is a unique topological object: not a square; not a triangle. Not just a lump of whateverness or a false abstraction from some goop of oneness. When you trace your finger along a Möbius strip you find yourself weirdly flipping around to another side – which turns out to be the same side. The moment when that happens cannot be detected. The twist is everywhere along the strip. Likewise beings are intrinsically twisted into appearance, but the twist can't be located anywhere. The non-orientable quality of things means that they are profoundly ambiguous. We spend a lot of time trying to get rid of ambiguity, but perhaps this is a mistake. Artworks, for example, can be highly ambiguous, and we value them for this. Why? Perhaps ambiguity is a strange signal of accuracy, because ambiguity is just how things are. Think about it. When in the optician’s the doctor hones in on your prescription, you face an inevitable choice between two different kinds of lens, both of which might work, because they are so subtly 95

13

Jón Gnarr, Gnarr! How I Became the Mayor of a Large City in Iceland and Changed the World, trans. Andrew Brown (New York: Melville House, 2014). 14

Mathias Guenther, Tricksters and Trancers: Bushman Religion and Society (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999).

15

David Graeber, ‘What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun?’, in The ­Baffler 24 (2014), http://thebaffler. com/past/whats_the_point_if_ we_cant_have_fun (accessed 15.2.2014).

different from one another that it’s hard to tell which one is better. The doctor says, ‘Which one? Number one, or number two? Number one, or number two?’ You might as well choose one or the other. The basic, irresolvable ambiguity that happens at this moment is a signal about the accuracy of the prescription. This is not how we normally like to think about ambiguity. We usually assume that ambiguity means that something is amiss. Here it means that given the physical constraints of the lenses and the constraints of your vision system, your ability to receive and interpret visual data, you are now seeing as well as you can. You won't ever see absolutely perfectly, because physical systems are necessarily determinate and therefore limited. The spectral realm is a space not of indeterminacy: zombies are very different from vampires; chickens are different from lemurs. It’s a realm of profound ambiguity, with many more variables than the ones you find in the optometrist’s chair. The gap between the principle of (perfect) sight and the kind of sight you are achieving with the lenses becomes obvious, and so does something else. The gap between the two kinds of lens exists, but you can hardly detect it. These two facts are deeply related. The lenses have been tuned to your vision. The space of attunement is a spectral realm that is ‘analogue’, thick, not rigidly bounded, so that more than one choice becomes available. The floating of decision in this spectral attunement space is accurate. And highly determinate. Now consider just one thing, such as a tiny object close to absolute zero in a vacuum. This thing also begins to display determinate ambiguity, making us aware of a spectral attunement space. There are certain quantum phenomena in which a weird overlap between two physical systems – called superposition – can occur. The two lenses are different, yet in another way they are the same. In the same way that the most accurate data perception format that we have (quantum theory and the equipment we build to observe quantum states) shows that when a thing is very carefully scrutinized – for instance at near absolute zero in a vacuum – it starts to reveal its profound ambiguity, exhibiting phenomena such as superposition or what is called coherence. Because of the finitude of a physical system, you can’t hit absolute zero perfectly. But the system doesn't need to be absolutely at zero kelvin. What seems to be static and firm starts to reveal its shifty qualities: the way in which it is smeared into itself, or vibrating and not-vibrating at the same time, or shimmering without being pushed in a mechanical way. Look at what the Best Party did in Iceland after the colossal financial crash of 2008. What it did was to reintroduce people, play and joy into politics in a serious – but is it serious? – but is it funny? – but is it … way. Jón Gnarr, the mayor of Reykjavik, and his merry band of anarcho-surrealists shook up Icelandic politics and got things back on a good footing through a blend of playfulness and sincerity that is the most congruent ecological affect.13 The !Kung people among

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the Bushmen of southern Africa resolve problems through play and laughter.14 Play is not an accident that happens to otherwise deadly serious utilitarian lifeforms – but why is strict economic cost-benefit analysis associated with being grown-up and ‘serious’?15 ‘If the !Kung visited our offices and factories, they might think we’re playing. Why else would we be there?’16 Lifeforms play (‘This is a bite and this is not a bite’), because play is structural to reality, because things shimmer.17 A disturbing imbalance and fragility haunts this play in order for it to be play. This is why play isn’t just candy or glue but structural to reality. If you think of (agrilogistical) civilization as normative, you have already decided that it is inevitable, and this means that you have decided that agrilogistical retreat is the only way to move across earth. Writing at the unsettling start of industrial modernity, Friedrich Schiller was in this sense incorrect to suggest that the (aesthetic) ‘play drive’ could balance the ‘drives’ of ‘form’ and the ‘sensual’, or in other words the Paleolithic and agrilogistical. Balance is what play can’t do; transforming deconstructive eruption, sure. One detects the difficulty in the way play becomes impossible in the very chiasmus Schiller uses to underline the importance of play, his most famous sentence: ‘Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.’18 If I have to be a full human being before I play – and if I can only achieve this fullness by playing – then play is what I can’t do. I am condemned to wish for play, a melancholy state that sums up a certain phase of dark ecology.19 And I am also condemned to a moralistic voice that yells ‘Play! Or else!’ at me like the cans of Coke that tell me to ‘Enjoy!’ or Google, which hassles its employees with serious playfulness, where what we want is playful seriousness.20 It sounds like my sensuality is trapped once again in an agrilogistical pipe where play has become a way to make the pipe feel nicer. Play can’t simply be recreation, a weekend. That form of play turns out to be a cheap holiday in someone else’s misery.21 The ‘someone else’ being all lifeforms and the ‘holiday’ being agrilogistical built space and its social, psychic and philosophical affordances.

16

Fredy Perlman, ‘Against HisStory, against Civilization!’, in John Zerzan (ed.), Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2005), p. 28.

17

Gregory Bateson, ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, foreword Mary Catherine Bateson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 177–193.

18

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man In a Series of Letters, English and German Facing, ed. and trans. with intro., commentary and glossary by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 107.

19

On this point see Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

20

I am grateful to Federico Campagna for this asymmetrical chiasmus.

21

Situationist slogan.

22

See Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (London: Verso, 2017), chapter 3.

The trouble is Schiller's sense of ‘fullness’ (in voller Bedeutung des Worts). To play is to be structurally un-‘full’, since play is suspended between presence and absence in such a way that one simply isn’t constantly present. To be ‘fully human’ – what a drag. We seem to have been trying that for twelve thousand years. Playing as a broken toy among other broken toys sounds more like it. Playing as fundamental state, because play is an ontological condition of being a thing at all (because of the irreducible difference between being and appearing), the beach beneath the street always available by collapsing, flopping, sinking, an ‘uncivilized’ deliquescence that also appears too civilized, ‘decadent’. We need our new word subscendence to describe it.22 Subscendence is the inverse of ‘transcendence’ 97

23

Roy Scranton, ‘Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene’, in New York Times, November 10, 2013, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes. com/2013/11/10/learning-howto-die-in-the-anthropocene/?_ r=1&&pagewanted=print (accessed 11.11.2013).

while ‘immanence’ is its opposite. Unlike immanence, subscendence evokes an ontological gap between what a thing is and how it appears or between a thing and its parts. Play is subscendence, connecting me with the Lego brick, the lichen, the activist network, the microbiome, the melting glacier. We are less than the sum of our parts. We contain multitudes. The deliquescent lameness of play counteracts the tensile sporty appearance of play within agrilogistics: I can do anything to anything; everything is a urinal waiting for my signature sort of play. Let’s not stay stuck in happy nihilism, which is always number one in the charts, which is the motivation to turn meadows into parking lots because there are no meadows, because nothing really exists. Let’s go from happy nihilism to dark nihilism. At first dark nihilism is depressing. Then it’s mysteriously dark. Then it’s dark and sweet like chocolate. You find the sweetness inside the depression. Don’t fight it. Find a way to tunnel down. Find a way to see how things sparkle all by themselves. How they play despite intentions. Despite its demonization as narcissistic hippie talk, more and more of us recognize that the personal and the political journeys have the same shape.23 It goes like this. We have guilt because we can have shame. We have shame because we can have horror. We have horror because we can have depression. We have depression because we can have sadness. We have sadness because we can have longing. We have longing because we can have joy. Find the joy without pushing away the depression, for depression is accurate. As I noted earlier, one fine day in September 2014 it was announced that fifty percent of animals had gone extinct in the last forty years. Because of us. I didn’t even watch them go. I never personally signed on for this mission. Neither did you. As one of the animals, I never signed on.

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‘Because you think of yourself as totally integrated in bios and you’ve forgotten that you totally rely on other life forms’ In conversation with Ursula Biemann and Timothy Morton

1

Ursula Biemann and Timothy Morton contributed to the panel Dark Ecologies as part of the lecture series Hybrid Ecologies. The panel took place on 3 November 2016 at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. 2

See Timothy Morton‘s contribution to this volume, p. 98.

Susanne Witzgall [SW]  Your talks1 showed some interesting parallels in your involvements with our changing ecological reality. Both of you, for example, argued against the sharp distinction between the artificial and the natural, and highlighted the inextricable entanglements between humans, non-humans, artificial and biological components, their interconnectedness, making clear demarcations impossible. And you both also alluded to the withdrawing of entities, of things, either because they are invisible and widely distributed all over the world or because they contradict themselves. But what I find especially remarkable – having your video works Subatlantic in mind, Ursula – is that both of you emphasize the exploration of the current and future human attunement to ecological reality. You were both talking about the psychic condition of the human. Tim, you for instance talked about depression when faced with ecological reality, and of finding sweetness inside this depression.2 Why is this attunement to ecological reality so crucial for you? Timothy Morton [TM]  You know this is why art is really, really good, isn’t it? We’ve only just – ‘we’ meaning human beings, in particular white Western ones – started dreaming the Anthropocene. So far, the ecological information delivery mode has been in the form of something like a PTSD dream. When you open the newspaper (I can hardly do it, because it's so traumatizing), it’s not only the content but the way it is delivered. You go ‘5’, ‘200 000’, ‘40%’, ‘3.2’, ‘x, y’ ... everyday there’s another set of numbers like that. The way we talk to ourselves 99

about ecological reality is like having a PTSD dream. It’s like being a post-traumatic-stress-disordered person who has a dream. This dream is like a recurring nightmare and the point of this nightmare is to install yourself just before the horrible things happen, so that you don’t have to be frightened in that very traumatised way, so that you can actually kind of anticipate it. Now the problem is that this is exactly wrong. It’s not even about this scientific data, it’s about the aesthetics as well, because what it’s kind of saying is that the disaster hasn’t happened yet. Can’t we just admit that it has already happened? There’s so much relief from that. It’s a little bit like these horror movies where the character figures out that he or she is already dead. It’s an incredibly relief that you don’t have to worry about dying anymore because you are already dead. And since you’re already dead you can get on with things and figure out how to exist. That’s also true ontologically in the same way: since I’m already haunted by some sort of weird spectral version of my self, I already don’t count as ‘alive’ as opposed to ‘not alive’, or ‘conscious’ as opposed to ‘not conscious’, or even down to the point of ‘existing’ as opposed to ‘not existing’. So I can sort of relax ... I personally believe that human beings are not like Pac-Man. In the Western philosophy space we have been turning ourselves into these negation monsters for a couple of hundred years. They go through the world biting everything, eating everything, swallowing everything. I don’t think that at all. I think we are actually highly capable of being sensitive, comedian-like-beings who can attune to all kind of things, and what we actually really need is a new kind of theory of action, in particular revolutionary action, that doesn’t produce such a sharp dichotomy between passive and active. Actually, when you quantize it down to the bits that comprise an action, you find that those bits are actually appreciation. Aesthetic appreciation is how action actually works. There’s no difference between appreciating something and doing something. That’s because the causal dimension is exactly the aesthetic one. It’s not underneath like some mechanism turning away. It’s in front. So your job is to directly mess with cause and effect. Let’s mess with it in a way that isn’t this kind of traumatizing data delivery mode that we’re kind of stuck in with associated religious overtones like apocalypse. Ursula Biemann [UB]  Attunement is the most benign and optimistic of possible developments we can come up with right now when facing climate change and the speed required for our own mutation, if we are to survive as a species. I like to imagine possible sensorial attunements, such as seeing and breathing underwater, or introducing new legal guidelines like the manual for interspecies communication, which hints to a changed relationship to the living world, as I do in Subatlantic (fig. 1–6). Obviously, when it comes to global warming, what is needed now is not more statistics or more data, although this is what we are getting a lot. My modest contribution as an artist is to find narratives and images, to create cinematic worlds that can address a collective imaginary, rather than merely the rational mind. This is what 100

is at stake, basically, the ability to mutate and imagine ourselves anew. The massive changes that are coming our way are occurring infinitely faster than evolution. So the crucial question now is what’s going to happen to our senses, how can we adapt to, or even anticipate the impacts of future transformations? Aesthetics that are capable of reaching the imaginary will be essential, and these often court the fictional. Strangely, it’s the current eco-crisis that is producing the need to create fictions about the most material dimension of our living conditions, if not our very ability to survive. How does it affect our senses, but also, just as importantly, our thoughts? I treat thoughts as material units. Or let’s say that in these video narratives thoughts materialize. They reconfigure our engagement with the changing ecology they merge with frozen methane, become part of weather events, unhinge new maritime cohabitations. They are out there in the landscape, physical and performative. They speak of a world in which the human-earth relationship is fragile, complicated, poetic and intensely physical. Some of the text passages in Subatlantic are scientific in nature, but they are interspersed with scraps of ‘irrational’ episodes.3 They slam the breaks on the logical, smooth flow of understanding. At the same time they open synapsis in the brain to allow for new ecological connections between our perception and the living environment.

3

For instance: ‘In the Arctic Sea, the dense salty water drops to the deep-ocean floor and then flows back to tropical regions,’ and ‘underwater passages accumulate impersonal intelligence.’ Ursula Biemann, Subatlantic, video essay, single-channel HD video, 11 minutes, 2015, min. 3:50 –4:16.

TM 

Do you know, Ursula, why I so love what you did about efficiency? I think that’s really important. Like data dumping on ourselves, we also tell ourselves that we have to become much more efficient, more sustainable. But what are we actually sustaining? I realized that in the end the efficiency mode is actually all about oil. Even if you stop using the oil, you still might be acting politically in efficiency mode, in oil mode. It’s efficiency mode because oil is a precious toxic resource. So you have to get into this efficiency mode to use it. I just ran through this experiment myself. In Texas there are a lot of wind farms, and I got my house entirely powered by wind. For the first couple of days I was feeling all efficient and holy, like a very good boy. Then suddenly I realized, what this actually means is I could have a disco in every room of my house with decks and DJs and strobe lights, and full of people just partying, and I would affect far far less life forms. So what is that about? It’s about creating and enhancing pleasure modes, not just for me, but for these other life forms, because it’s like allowing them to exist. You know, dying is totally inconvenient from a pleasure point of view, one might say. I feel the ecological future is about enhancing and creating new forms of pleasure. That’s another aspect to which art contributes. SW 

Let’s stick to the arts. Ursula, can you explain a little more about how the current concept of ecology affected your works in terms of form and content?

UB  For one, it made me think about cinematic or videographic ecology, which views the world as consisting of all kinds of relational processes and encounters that produce and reproduce the world anew in every moment. I see my videos as part of the slow and laborious

Fig. 1–6 (following pages) Ursula Biemann, Subatlantic, 2015, videostills, 2015, 11:24 min, HD video, colour, stereo, 16:9 format.

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project of putting the world together somehow. They generate an aesthetic ecosystem, often planetary in scale. In this sense they are geomorphic; they contribute to a process of forming worlds. In my mind they are distinctly non-representational. So you see, I have a deep interest in ecology as a way of thinking of how the living world is composed, how it interacts and interdepends. Each video tends to draw on a particular model of how we can imagine this organization. In Egyptian Chemistry (2012) I got super interested in chemistry as an organizing system through which to explore the ecologies of the Nile. It became a voyage into molecular structures: the river as an accumulation of organic materials or as a hydraulic model, where water interacts with mathematics. Again, the material elements coexist with mental ones, but not in a simplistic cause-effect explanation. The High Dam, water particles, the politics of land usage, fertilizers and peasants are all brought into signifying a sustainable symbiosis. The Nile has always been at once technological, natural and social; it’s a hybrid configuration that I would call ecological. In the end Egyptian Chemistry is an artwork in the sense that it provides an aesthetic exploration of the order of things per se, rather than a specific (political) order in favour of another one. For my part I start to mingle with that order the moment I take a Nile water sample, as well as when I press the record button on my camera. These two instances are intimately linked. TM 

Ecological awareness means being aware of lots of different scales. There’s no top scale anymore – the human scale is just one scale among zillions of scales. Because of this, aesthetic experience always has this slightly weird kind of penumbra of something slightly too strange or disgusting to you from your anthropocentrically scaled point of view. There are other sorts of things happening in that. I loved what the elder in the Amazon said, whom you interviewed for your work Forest Law (2014): ‘The forest is a forest of beings.’ That’s actually very profound. What he’s saying is that there are so many more entities in this forest. The forest is one, but it contains more than one, to say the least. From a certain point of view, that’s like art. A work of art is one, but it contains all this different weird pleasure modes: a fly could land on it and use it as a landing pad, for example. That’s a pleasure mode of the art as well as a human being looking at it. It has this incredible kind of Pandora’s Box quality, a potential infinity, which is wonderful disturbing to anthropocentrism – a potential infinity of scales and enjoyment modes that could come pouring out of it.

UB  Yes. What it’s also saying is that the forest is a living community of thinking and sensing beings, some visible, others not. It’s an intense bio-semiotic universe. In Forest Law I got totally involved in the cosmology of the indigenous people, which somehow runs parallel to our aesthetic practice of cosmo-forming. Tim, I wanted to ask you: does this moment in Subatlantic – which addresses the phase transitions between the melted and the solid, between the virtual and the material world – does this resonate somehow with your idea of the shimmering and vibrating of things?

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TM 

Absolutely. A very good analogy of what a thing is, is a liquid. You can’t grasp it. There’s always something slipping away when you try to hold it.

UB 

But it’s both; it’s not only liquid.

4

Karen Barad, ‘On Touching – The Inhuman That Therefore I Am (v.1.1.)’, in Susanne Witzgall, Kerstin Stakemeier (eds.), Power of Mate­rial / Politics of Materiality, (Zurich, Berlin: diaphanes, 2014), p. 158 and 159–160. 5

TM 

All analogies have their limitations. When you hear the word ‘object’, you normally think of something static. That’s the funny thing about my ideas of objects – they vibrate all by themselves without being pushed. And so actually any phase of transition going from any state to another state involves these little quantum jumps across an impossible gap. It’s called the forbidden zone: Isn’t that beautiful? When an electron jumps from one orbit to another orbit it goes across the zone called the forbidden zone, or the forbidden gap.

Egyptian Chemistry, 2012, part 3, ‘Ecologies and Metachemistry’, 20 min. 9:30–14:40. 6

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, (New York: Cambridge, 2000).

SW 

Furthermore the American physicist and feminist theorist Karan Barad writes about interplays between particles and the void with reference to Richard Feynman, one of the most importent authors of quantum field theory. An electron, for example, could suddenly emit a photon and absorb it again in the very next moment. In the words of Karen Barad, the ‘electron […] exchanges a virtual photon with itself’ and interacts ‘with the virtual particles of the void’. In this way ‘it is an ongoing play of in/determinancy’.4

UB  To take up what you just said, Tim, about there being something always slipping away when you try to hold it. What I find interesting in Barad’s writing is when she talks about instrumental measurement, which produces determinate values for the measured quantity and leaves the complementary quantities indeterminate. This other half is suspended from materializing; it slips away into invisibility. We are constantly producing a world, but half of it remains invisible. This helps us to understand why it’s really difficult to access things. Graham Harman argued in an interview in Egyptian Chemistry5 that alluding to things in a more vague and ambiguous way might actually get closer to what the things themselves are. What in science they call measurement, we call framing in film. That’s our way of determining qualities, defining at the same time what remains hidden. I suppose there’s a strong parallel between how science and video art engage with material reality.

Audience 1  I have a question for Tim relating to aesthetics: could you expand a little more on your concept of play and its ambiguity – specifically how it relates to Kant’s idea of free play, which defines the reflective aesthetics in the judgment of taste?6 TM 

If you think about it, the aesthetic experience according to Kant is like a telepathic mind melt between something that’s supposedly a person unconscious (this thing here) and something that is supposedly not conscious (like a work of art). Why doesn’t Kant put it that way? In order for his theory to work there has to be a tiny little bit of what 105

was called animal magnetism. He was fascinated by Mesmer. The last 200 years of Western philosophy has mostly been guys going: ‘I’m not Yoda. I’m not Yoda. Everything I’m saying is not Star Wars.’ Because the Force might be this animal magnetism. It’s created by life; it surrounds and penetrates us; it enables you to cause things to move, telepathically, without mechanical touching and pushing. And that’s exactly the aesthetic experiment: It’s the feeling of being moved by something that might not even be in the room; you might not even have been to visit it, still you get kind of moved. One thing that’s going on there is a really strong sense of what play could be. It’s not just this ‘Oh look, we’ve hit the play level. We’ve been machinating around with our machinery and causality, and now we can have a break, or now we’re doing it so well that this playful thing is happening.’ It’s more the other way around: it’s more like the playful thing is part of the deep structure of how cause and effect actually works. Audience 2  Tim, could you elaborate a little bit more on your concept of pleasure? I’m wondering whether you know about the happiness of fish? I’m currently writing a book for Verso called Humankind: Solidarity with Non-human People. In this book I ask if you can develop Marxist-related theory to include non-human beings. I would say yes, of course you can – but you’re not going to like it, Hegelian Marxists. What I’m trying to argue is that solidarity is like a super default noise that the biosphere is making. It’s like the ground level of how it feels. And pleasure in this case would be exactly what Marx says it is – but nobody noticed it, because they all equated it with light mechanical labour, which is the abstracted version. Pleasure is what it’s like when you bite into a peach and you let the juice come down. I can’t know exactly what a fish pleasure mode is, but I’m not completely shut off from ‘fishiness’. In a certain way I don’t really know what my pleasure mode is; I can’t be really sure that I’m completely and utterly human. I really loved when Ursula said that the world is full of holes, because I’m trying to argue this. I’m trying to say you can absolutely relate to a fish, like maybe twenty percent, but it’s better than zero. You don’t have to be a hundred percent knowing or zero percent knowing; you can have this kind of approximate model way of understanding.

TM 

We’ve been telling ourselves that we can’t possibly know what it’s like to be x. In particular we have been saying: ‘You can’t talk about non-Western stuff because that is appropriating other cultures and you can’t know what those are.’ The paradox is when you say that you have already measured them, because you’ve put them in a frame where you’ve said: ‘Look we’ve measured these two and we find them to be different.’ However, because this world is full of holes, you can’t totally relate. I’m basically writing a very soppy hippy book about the fact that we can absolutely get along with each other and realize that we are part of a species. That doesn’t mean we’re white-bread patriarchy underneath. We’re just the concept of mankind so far. Being human 106

7

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia, 2016), pp. 161–162.

means being a little bit non-human too. In order to be Tim, Tim has to have all this non-Tim DNA in his bacterial microbiome otherwise he is going to die. There’s so much more of this DNA than there’s Tim-DNA. Tim is a hole but there’s so much more in that hole than there is of Tim in order for Tim to be Tim. There’s some of that stuff, some of that fish pleasure that I can log onto because the fish is one, but the pleasure modes are many, many, and I can have them too.

Marietta Kesting  What I found most thought-provoking in your work, Tim, was something you didn’t mention today, but which I read in one of your texts: that we should look at radioactive waste, and kind of embrace it, for example, keep it in a church, or somewhere within our society instead of burying it under the soil.7 A similar idea appears in your video Forest Law, Ursula, where the polluted soil is sampled. Maybe you can comment a little bit more on this idea of taking the toxins out of the earth and exposing them again? UB  That’s the only way we can see it, right? That’s the problem with so many toxic materials – they are shoved into places out of sight so we’re used to not see them. But we are running out of such sites. Forest Law points to the massive contamination of Amazonian forest lands in Ecuador caused by the oil-extraction industry. The forensic activist in the video plays an important role in mediating and making the toxic sludge speak to us. But he isn’t the main subject, the toxic earth is. He’s just a facilitator who is activating it, making it expressive. The contaminated soil is no longer a deplorable background; it has moved to the fore, as subject. The forensic activist in Forest Law is actually someone who works for a chemistry lab in Quito analysing soil samples. He’s providing evidence for the court, but he’s also an activist. When journalists want to document the ecological disaster, he takes them to the sites and does this performance. So he’s a chemist and a performer. This double figure was really ideal for the project. TM 

The biosphere is a symbiotic biosphere. I call it the symbiotic real. Symbiosis is an uneasy relationship between at least two beings, or between a being and itself in a funny way. In the word ‘host’ is the Latin word for friend and also the Latin word for enemy. If you have too much of a certain symbiont and it’s going to harm you there’s this kind of weird way in which there’s an uneasy relationship. Once you figure that out, it’s called having ecological awareness. Once you see a little bit of that you might have the impulse to get it off you, because you think of yourself as totally integrated in bios and you’ve forgotten that you totally rely on other life forms just to stand up. That’s kind of like what human beings have been doing with nuclear waste. They’ve been pretending that they didn’t even make it. They’ve been trying to hide it underneath whatever that is, Norway, Yucca Mountain or Finland. But it’s like when you flush the toilet – it doesn’t go away, it doesn’t go into this strange mystical different dimension, it goes to the wastewater treatment plant. And now, since you know that there’s no ‘away’, you have planetarian awareness. The same is true for air conditioning:

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the idea that you are pushing the toxic air somewhere else doesn’t work on that scale, because you’re just moving it around on the planet. Once you figured that out, that on that scale there’s no ‘away’, you might as well start treating things that way, too. You might as well start realizing that everything is already inside social space, which means that social space isn’t fundamentally human. How do you want to treat these nuclear materials? Do you want to pretend that they don’t exist? Which is going to cause them to leach into the ground water and all sorts of things, or do you need to actually have them front and centre in your life? Over time I’ve been deeply intrigued and slightly involved in this nuclear guardianship movement, which is like an idea that nuclear waste should be stored above ground in monitored retrievable storage. This means something really intense: it means that for at least another 24,000 years (that’s the half life of plutonium) we have to look after this stuff for the sake of ourselves and other life forms. I can imagine a situation where in the middle of a town square in the future there could be a very very nicely shielded glass sphere containing a very tiny amount of all the plutonium we make. It might even be a really interesting art practice to make a personal cover saying: ‘In the future there will be plutonium stored here above ground.’

8

See Timothy Morton’s contribution to this volume, pp. 98.

UB  There are projects speculating about ways of speaking and signing to a future humanity about places, which have loads of atomic waste deposits underground. Smudge Studio in New York did Repository: A Typological Guide to America’s Ephemeral Nuclear Infrastructure (2012) and other projects marking nuclear deep time. But you suggest to keep it all above ground. TM 

That’s the idea. Instead of hiding it and then having to make a warning sign you don’t hide it at all. So you don’t have to make a warning sign because you have incorporated it into your culture. You don’t have to warn people because it’s already there – in some kind of visible way. Maria Muhle  You said before that we need a revolutionary theory that gets rid of the opposition or dualism between the active and the passive. I can follow this point very well in regard to the active side, because it’s so easily integrated in any efficiency mode or sustainability or what I would call the biopolitical paradigm of ecology. I was wondering about the passive part, however. Doesn’t this relate to the darkness, the depression and the melancholy you mentioned?8

TM 

We are super scared of what passivity could mean. When you say ‘objectified’ or ‘object’ your mind goes quickly through the worst thing that could happen to you, which is to be turned into an object. We got this idea that only subjects get to act and everything else gets either to be totally inert or it has to behave. Following Karl Marx, human beings can imagine things, so even the worst of architects is better than the best of bees. Bees are just executing an algorithm like robots, but humans are imagining scenarios, projecting 109

9

Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 1.283–284 (chapter 7). 10

‘String Pulling Bees Provide Insight into Spread of Culture’, Science Daily, 4 October 4 2016, https://www.sciencedaily.com/ releases/2016/10/161004141432. htm (accessed 7.11.2017).

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them into the future.9 You can run an experiment, however, that shows you that bees can pull little strings.10 These little bumblebees can teach each other to do it. The point is: passive never means inert. Passive always means kind of quaveringly quasi-alive. And so, as opposed to passivity, I prefer to call it stillness: it’s like music, which is really about listening. If you’re playing music with someone, you’re actually listening to that person. You’re going along with something.

Hurricanes, Popsicles and Plankton: the Hybrid Ecologies of Bodily Natures Stacy Alaimo

1

David J. McSwain, ‘“This is the Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Done”, Says Man Who Rode Out Harvey with Wife, Four dogs in Truck’, in Dallas News, 26 August 2017. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/ weather/2017/08/26/dumbestthing-ever-done-says-man-rodeharvey-wife-four-dogs-truck (accessed 31.10.2017). 2

Laura Bassett, ‘Louisiana’s “Cajun Navy” Rescues Texas Flood Victims with Duck-Hunting Boats’, Huffington Post, 28 August 2017, http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hur ricane-harvey-cajun-navy-rescue_ us_59a4c727e4b0446b3b860a94 (accessed 31.10.2017).

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, which devastated Houston and the Gulf Coast of Texas in the autumn of 2017, the national and local media delivered harrowing stories of survival and inspiring accounts of heroic rescues. For example, one couple who decided to stay on the Gulf Coast and endure the hurricane had their house smashed by a tree. They sought shelter in their truck, putting two large dogs in the back seat and two small dogs up on the dashboard. The hurricane raged and the waters rose, filling the truck almost to the top, leaving little space to breathe. Somehow they all survived, though the man admitted to a reporter, ‘This was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.’1 Soon after, around three hundred people from Louisiana, members of the unofficial volunteer group called the Cajun Navy, brought their own small recreational boats to Houston and rescued people from the floods.2 Many such memorable stories circulated after the hurricane. While I would not want to diminish the horror of what people endured, nor the bravery and fellow feeling of those who risked their lives to save people, domestic animals and wild animals from the floods, I worry that the neatly packaged narratives leave us on familiar solid ground. The emphasis on the human spirit allows the listener to take refuge in a subjectivity of transcendence. This stance perpetuates the very attitudes, perspectives, assumptions and practices that end up promoting capitalist, consumerist and anthropocentric modes of being that harm human and non-human lives. A regional Wild West form of neoliberalism – the capitalist, free-market ideology that hails people as hyperseparated, individualistic consumers – has been cast in such a way that it even works in apocalyptic scenarios. 111

3

See Louis Althusser’s notion of ‘hailing’. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: Verso, 1970). 4

George Lipsitz, ‘The Struggle for Hegemony’, in Journal of American History 75.1 (1988), pp. 146–150. 5

Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 105.

Indeed, it works best during such events, as the end of the world would seem to be the perfect time for macho, self-reliance. Although some of the media coverage emphasizes community and volunteerism, those values are cordoned off from any mention of climate change, which has been deemed impolite and improper to speak of in the wake of the hurricane. The divisive topic of climate change is disallowed, enabling the conclusion of these stories to unify and rally their publics with the ‘feel good’ sentiments applauding the ‘Houston spirit’, the ‘Texas spirit’, or the ‘American spirit’. The predictable yet nonetheless gripping narratives interpellate (in the sense of Louis Althusser’s ‘hailing’)3 their listeners into a rugged Western individualism that implicitly distinguishes US hurricane survivors from those engulfed by similar events occurring simultaneously in the global south, such as the horrific monsoons and flooding across south Asia that received little coverage in the US. Thus even as the survival tales in the Texas Gulf area conjure up collective identities, the subjectivity invoked epitomizes that of the capitalist individual of American conservatism, a conservatism that promotes the denial of climate change, applauds the US exit from the Paris Accord, and plans to dismantle government regulations and federal agencies such as the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). While environmentalists may hope that extreme weather events would contest climate denial, what seems to have happened instead, is what Stuart Hall described as the work of hegemony – the ideological dog catchers are sent out every morning to round up all the strays and put everything back in good order.4 This is what makes the work of developing counter-narratives so difficult. In the end every ‘stray dog’ is rounded up to testify to the same old story of capitalist individualism, disregard for the environment and delusions of separation from the material world. Many would love to believe that extreme hurricanes are not about climate change at all, nor about toxins, pollution, impoverished neighbourhoods or environmental racism, but instead they are an occasion for positive news reports in which even the notion of ‘community’ ultimately upholds neoliberal self-reliance. Meanwhile the environmental racism and injustice of the Houston region has been exacerbated by this event. The fact that these narratives follow catastrophic events in a seemingly natural manner betrays their ideological strength and underscores the need for other modes of engagement with the material world. Emphasizing that human will, bravery and spirit can triumph and transcend environmental catastrophes solidifies the impermeable, invulnerable and individual subject. This subject is the very thing that ecological modes of being must contest. As Astrida Neimanis puts it, drawing on Luce Irigaray, the ‘self-sufficient man’ epitomizes an anthropocentric ‘ontological authority’.5 In the midst of the political dynamics of recognition, denial, and disavowal of environmental calamity we must conjure alternatives to self-sufficient man. Figurations of ecological modes of being that emerge from a sense of

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interconnection, immersion and shared vulnerability have never been so necessary. As climate change is expected to increase the severity and frequency of catastrophic weather events across the globe, some people, especially those in the global north, will take refuge in a conception of the human as that which ultimately rises above the risk and fluctuations of the environment, dividing humanity from ecology. The temptation will be to shore up this notion of the human – a conception often allied with the privileged side of the dualisms of gender, race, class, and ability – by erecting walls, borders and boundaries, be they conceptual, material or both. Since the fantasy of imperviousness requires a great deal of work to maintain, it is not surprising that nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia are on the rise in the US This has become all too apparent as the political right wing demands the deportation of immigrants, more stringent standards for entry and a massive wall along the Mexican border. It could very well be the case that one of the primary factors fuelling the current surge in virulent racism and xenophobia is a disavowed recognition of environmental precarity that is psychologically resolved by determining in advance who will be thrown off the lifeboat. Indeed, the ‘alt-right’ in the US seems to have their list already prepared.6

6

After writing the first draft of this essay, Hurricane Irma hit the Caribbean. More evidence of Anthropo­ cene ‘lifeboat politics’ would be that the US president reacted very differently to the devastation of Puerto Rico by hurricane Irma than he did with the Gulf Coast hurri­ cane, blaming the Puerto Ricans themselves for their suffering and, horribly, begrudging them any government assistance. Indeed, he seemed to think Puerto Ricans were not US citizens – all of this despite the fact that Irma was one of the most destructive hurricanes ever to hit the Atlantic.

To reckon with what it means to live in the Anthropocene – the proposed geological epoch in which humans have altered the biological, chemical and geophysical nature of the planet – is to be disturbed and unsettled. In the autumn of 2017 wildfires rage across vast regions of the western US, intensified by the unseasonable heat related to climate change. We wait anxiously as more hurricanes, including record-breaking Irma, roll in. As I draft this essay I recognize that it departs from the scholarly convention dictating that one should write in such a way that one’s work will not seem dated by virtue of being submerged within one particular moment. Indeed, copy editors of some of my books and essays have, in the past, deleted exactly those sorts of passages. And yet, the conventional philosophical style that dodges the cognitive/psychological/ biological immersion in one’s time and place by floating one’s concepts and arguments above the moment is akin to prevailing modes of transcendence that I have attempted to resist in my work and life. Moreover, while one of the conceptual challenges that the Anthropocene poses is to think across the vast scales of geological time, to live in the twenty-first century in the face of climate change and other anthropogenic events entails a recognition that unexpected – often catastrophic – things happen. There is no normal backdrop of ‘nature’ or ‘the environment’ that is stable or to be taken for granted. Volatility speeds everything up as each event diminishes the possibility of things settling into a ‘new normal’. Of course, environmental historians, ecologists, environmental theorists and (feminist) science-studies scholars will claim that nature has never been ‘nature’, in the sense of being an inert, ahistorical stage or resource for the exploits of the human. 113

7

Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1993); Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature Gender and Science in New England (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 8

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p.140. 9

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

Val Plumwood critiqued this sort of ‘backgrounding’ in her 1993 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, and Carolyn Merchant in her 1989 Ecological Revolutions, Nature, Gender and Science in New England,7 insisted that nature must be considered a historical actor. Nearly three decades later the concept of the Anthropocene asserts that humans have affected the material systems of the planet to such an extent that there can be no ‘nature’ as such. But even if the human species has altered everything from the atmosphere to the sea floor, humans do not have things under control. Instead the unpredictable agencies of the swirling, interacting beings, liveliness, energies and materialities of the earth provoke the unsettling sense of uncertainty as climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth great extinction, shortages of food, water and energy, and the proliferation of nuclear, plastic and other pollution threaten environmental destruction and ecosystem collapse. What we used to call nature is certainly an historical actor as Merchant claimed, but it can no longer be considered as separate from human bodies, technologies and manufactured substances. Material assemblages and interacting forces, many of them anthropogenic, mix and transmogrify, shaking things up. Ecologies, in the Anthropocene, are necessarily hybrid, if by that we mean that human and nature, two realms considered as separate, are now irredeemably fused. One of the limitations of the model of hybridity, however, would be that it begins with two separate entities. Karen Barad’s robust new materialist theory, by contrast, begins not with separate domains, realms, objects or beings. Instead, drawing on Niels Bohr, she asserts that ‘relata’ (as opposed to discrete things) ‘do not pre-exist relations’, which means that there are no entities as such prior to the relationalities and happenings that spawn them.8 Barad’s theory, with its onto-epistemology in which all materiality is intraactive, strikes to the core of what the concept of the Anthropocene could and should mean, as humans need to reckon with events that unfold from the standpoint of being immersed within ever emergent and intra-active material agencies. Even though Barad’s theory is grounded in physics, many of its arguments can be extended to more biological and chemical concerns. Her theory has been invaluable to me in thinking through what it means to live as a biological being traversed by chemical toxins, to grapple with the invisible risks posed by xenobiotic chemicals as a non-scientist, to experience how my own chemically sensitive body registers particular substances and to negotiate the onto-ethico-epistemologies in which even the most seemingly quotidian and banal daily practices of middle class industrialized life may be responsible for harming human and nonhuman beings across the planet. Even as weather events seem to have sped up, offering media spectacles of dramatic destruction, it is crucial that we consider the ‘slow violence’9 that unfolds largely off screen. The flooding in Houston, a city with one third of the oil refineries in the US, a multitude of chemical manufacturing companies and a paucity of environmental regulation and enforcement, has disseminated dangerous substances,

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including tiny but treacherous balls of mercury, across the region and into the Gulf of Mexico, making an already terribly toxic region even worse. The flood waters that people and animals waded, swam, or floated through were contaminated by chemicals, sewage and other dangerous substances. Less dramatic than the initial crisis, but perhaps more devastating over the long term, are the risks of cancer, reproductive problems, and other diseases caused by the heightened chemical exposures during the floods. These slow, silent disasters pose epistemological, ethical and political quandaries. Not only are these sorts of harms rarely remedied, they are rarely even captured as data. Such ignorance is often deliberately manufactured, as Robert Proctor explained in Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know about Cancer.10 What sorts of ignorance will be manufactured after Hurricane Harvey? It is likely that one of many things inadequately researched, documented or publicized will have been that those who lived in extremely polluted areas, who are predominantly people of colour and working-class people, who already carry a heavier body burden of toxins as well as a heavy load of racism and injustice, and who have less access to decent health care, were disproportionately effected by the chemicals unleashed in the hurricane. Such scientific captures of emergent, intra-active material agencies are an utterly political matter, as economic and social forces – from the specific industries to more generalized racist and anti-environmental ideologies – seek to manufacture ignorance about how race, class, gender and geographical locale may have terminal effects.

10

Robert Proctor, Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What we Know and Don’t Know about Cancer (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

11

Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

My book Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self argues that environmentalisms begin with the recognition of the human as always the very stuff of the material world.11 My conception of trans-corporeality, as it emerged from environmental health and environmental justice movements, demonstrates the inseparability of ontology, epistemology, ethics and politics. For example, the recognition that one may have absorbed particular toxins that have been dumped in a ‘sacrifice zone’, is a politicized and usually scientifically mediated knowledge rooted in a geopolitical place and in histories of race and class. As a mode of new materialist theory, transcorporeality tunes into material agencies. Specifically it suggests that capturing and mapping material agencies can extend ethical and political practices across multiple directions and scales. Indeed, when seemingly benign objects such as plastic water bottles or coltan-containing cell phones spark environmental activism, there is little that is left that cannot be considered political. It is crucial, however, not to contemplate the objects or substances as isolated entities, but instead to attempt to trace their long intra-actions and affects – spanning the processes of extraction, manufacturing, use, and disposal – in terms of how they affect particular human and non-human lives and ecologies across intimate and planetary scales. In this sense trans-corporeality, with its origins in environmental and environmental justice movements, is a politically oriented onto-epistemology. 115

12

Stephanie Clare, ‘On the Politics of “New Feminist Materialisms”’, in Victoria Pitts Taylor (ed.), Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism (New York: NYU Press, 2016), p. 58.

13

Ibid., p. 58.

14

Stacy Alaimo, Susan J. Hekman, ‘Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory’, in Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), p. 2.

15

Lisa H. Weasel, ‘Embodying Intersectionality: The Promise (and Peril) of Epigenetics for Feminist Science Studies’, in Victoria Pitts Taylor (ed.), Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism (New York: NYU Press, 2016), p. 107.

16

Karen Barad 2007 (footnote 6); Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

17

Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. by Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992).

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Not surprisingly, the criticism of material feminisms as apolitical makes little sense to me. Stephanie Clare opens her essay On the Politics of ‘New Feminist Materialisms’, for example, by saying that she has heard new materialisms ‘described as the “end of feminism”’, citing concern about the political implications of the move from epistemology to ontology.12 While I agree with Clare’s general point that new materialism opens up questions about the nature of the political realm, I don’t think it makes sense to assume that epistemology would be political and ontology would not be. In fact the quintessential feminist slogan ‘the personal is the political’, challenges us to break down the divide between private and public, being and knowing, as such categories have long been employed to discipline and silence. Even feminist ‘consciousness raising’, which sounds entirely cerebral, intimately interconnects theory and analysis with practices that are embodied, commonplace and political. Nor does the dichotomy that Clare poses between representation and reality, in which new materialism ‘moves away from representation towards questions of the “real”’,13 make sense when scholars in science studies, such as Bruno Latour, Donna J. Haraway, Karen Barad and Andrew Pickering, put forth models that do not oppose reality and representation. Indeed one characteristic of material feminisms is that they seek to deconstruct the opposition between reality and language, as well as reality and representation, radically extending, rather than rejecting, the post-modern and post-structuralist feminist critique of dualisms.14 Moreover, feminist new materialisms may enable scholarly and scientific practices that are not necessarily modes of criticism, as Lisa H. Weasel explains, ‘If we are to believe in the validity of our feminist critiques within a materialist context, then we must also anticipate that there could be “outs”, alternative cuts through the same messy terrain, enabling new materializations of meaning that take us beyond critique and into the territory of [re]construction.’15 I would also contest Clare’s idea that what characterizes material feminisms or new materialism is a movement from epistemology to ontology. It depends, of course, on which theories one is referencing – so many different theories overlap and diverge under the broad umbrella of the non-human turn. But for me new materialism involves an understanding of intra-active material agencies (Barad), which require, especially in the Anthropocene, modes of scientific capture that are always mangled (Pickering) by economic, social and political forces.16 What would it mean to move from epistemology to ontology when the two cannot be disentangled in the midst of many of the predicaments we currently find ourselves in? To be and to reflect on being within what Ulrich Beck has called ‘risk society’ entails everyday epistemological practices.17 We think and act as hybrid ecologies, as ‘bodily natures’, ourselves materially part of the intra-active agencies of the world. My conception of trans-corporeality, a mode of ecological being in which the subject recognizes herself as immersed within material flows, is an onto-epistemology in which being and knowing are inseparable from each other but also inextricably entangled with economics, politics and oppressive social hierarchies.

This onto-epistemology may first have become clear to me when I participated in a Greenpeace campaign against mercury in the 1990s which asked me to send them a sample of my hair to be tested. The results they sent back not only included a numerical indicator of how much mercury I was carrying in my body, and what that meant in terms of health risks, but also a description of the different ways I could have been exposed and, most importantly, a guide to various sorts of political actions. This test sparked an immersive, onto-epistemological sense of what it is to be a ‘bodily nature’, and what sorts of political questions, actions and modes of life that could entail. I participated in this Greenpeace campaign at the same time that I was writing Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space, which undertook intersectional feminist analyses of the discourses of ‘woman’ and ‘nature’ within particular political moments from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century, arguing that nature need not be understood as the basis for gendered, racist and heteronormative essentialisms, but instead could be recast as an undomesticated, liberating space that renders essentialisms ludicrous.18 My theoretical grounding was primarily that of cultural studies and post-modern and post-structuralist feminism, which I still find immensely valuable, but I began to critique my own methodologies of discursive critique, which did not leave much space for material agencies to affect discursive formations. The figure I received from Greenpeace, registering the levels of mercury in my body, was something to ponder, as it manifested and travelled upon a mélange of interconnected forces including coal-burning electricity plants, the consumption of tuna in my youth, the political activism of Greenpeace and more. What health problems did this figure portend? And how did its delivery catalyse different conceptualizations of what politics is and could be?

18

Stacy Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).

19

Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980), p. 60.

20

Ibid., p. 16.

Because women, especially women of colour and disabled women, have had to contend with the negative implications of being posed as the more corporeal of the two sexes, feminist theory, art and activism have long been engaged in the difficult work of thinking and acting as embodied beings within a web of ideological and material networks. Audre Lorde, for example, in her Cancer Journals, published in 1980, contends with racism, sexism and homophobia in the medical establishment. She also researches into the carcinogens in food and the wider environment, calling out radiation, air pollution, McDonalds and Red Dye No. 2.19 She often has to rely on sources she cannot trust. Her politics is neither sanitized nor whitewashed: she spurns the puff of lambswool that would hide her mastectomy and make others more comfortable. She asks, most memorably, ‘’What would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended upon Congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic, fat-stored hormones in beef feed be outlawed?’’20 This vision of the political public sphere is not at all disembodied, but instead imagines a collective occupation of the centres of power by women whose bodies dramatically demonstrate the effects of exposure to the greedy 117

21

Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

22

Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions (Malden: Polity, 2006), p. 137.

23

Ralph Jennings, ‘Wastewater on a Stick: The popsicles from Taiwan that you really, really, don’t want to eat’, 16 July 2017, in LA Times, http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/ la-fg-taiwan-tainted-popsicles-2017 -story.html (accessed 31.10.2017).

24

Ibid.

practices of corporate agriculture and food manufacturing. Lorde stands as an important precursor to more recent modes of activism that perform what I have termed an ‘insurgent vulnerability’, or a politicized sense of exposure that grows out of a particularly feminist mode of ecological being.21 Along with scientific captures, literature, data visualization and other artistic creations are necessary for fostering recognition of bodily natures. The connections between everyday human practices and wider ecological networks are often difficult to discover. As we find ourselves ensconced within a series of built environments, focusing on digitized screens, the sense of being physically part of larger ecologies may be elusive, or seemingly immaterial. Visual arts and critical design projects in which the materiality of the media are palpable may catalyse new modes of being that do not disavow our immersion within hybrid Anthropocene ecologies. Many modes of art, design, performance art, activism and DIY avocations – what Rosi Braidotti calls ‘the ordinary micropractices of everyday life’22 – reconfigure the scale and space of politics in response to the strange agencies of the Anthropocene. A particularly striking project from design students at the National Taiwan University of Arts, for instance, freezes what I would term trans-corporeal ecologies within a hundred different popsicles. For their undergraduate class project, Kuo Yi-hui, Hung Yi-chen and Cheng Yu-di collected water samples from a hundred different ports, beaches, rivers and lakes in Taiwan (Fig. 1).23 Then they froze the samples into an array of gorgeous popsicles (Fig. 2–5), their colours and patterns beckoning us to put them in our mouths. The popsicles are aesthetically pleasing, tempting treats and disconcertingly erotic objects, given their oral enticements. But with their bits of plastic trash, cigarette butts and industrial waste they make the pollution of bodies of water immediately apparent. The most ingenious thing about them, however, is that they demonstrate in a direct and vivid way how the anthropogenic pollution of ‘the environment’ becomes what we would (and do) take into our own bodies. Aesthetic pleasure and desire turn to disgust, particularly when contemplating the popsicles that are ‘greasy and oozing bits of garbage’.24 Even the beautiful range of colours, which is initially enticing, becomes revolting when viewers register that these very liquids, with their now strange hues, might be the habitats and drinking water of living creatures.

Fig. 1

Kuo Yi-hui, Hung Yi-chen, Cheng Yu-di, water samples for 100%純污 水製冰所 (Polluted Water Popsicles), 2017.

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While they were sampling the bodies of water, the students discovered dead animals and wished they could include something as large as a fish carcass in the popsicles. They did manage to include a shell, which suggests that the waters are, or should be, habitats for aquatic creatures. Epitomizing the quotidian intellectual labour required in Beck’s ‘risk society’, the students researched each of the water sources and created one hundred ingredient labels, which are included in the exhibition catalogue. Beautifully designed wrappers for each of the

popsicles complete the project, bespeaking the commodification of consumer culture, in which all manner of harmful­substances are packaged in appealing ways. From the sources available25 it is not clear whether the list of ingredients names the industries, corporations,­municipalities or other entities responsible for the pollution in the popsicles. The students probably did not map out the long global reach of the companies responsible, nor conduct research on what is known about how exactly these pollutants harm human and nonhuman creatures. But the appealing and appalling popsicles, the disturbingly upbeat wrappers and the list of ingredients can certainly motivate modes of ecological being in which one’s own bodily needs and desires become the site for onto-epistemological investigations into networks of risk and culpability for multispecies ‘bodies of water’.26 Strangely, however, to return to the start of this essay, the waters of Taiwan and the Texas Gulf Coast are linked by virtue of having been polluted by at least one of the same corporations—Formosa Plastics. The Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan (CET) website calls out Formosa for polluting the Ho-Jing River and Taiwanese irrigation water.27 In the Texas Gulf, coast shrimper and environmental activist Diane Wilson has fought Formosa’s pollution of that region using a wide variety of tactics, including legal actions and hunger strikes. The documentary Texas Gold shows Wilson creating something akin to the Taiwanese popsicles. She bottles water contaminated by industrial discharge, slaps a label on it that says ‘Texas Gold, the Businessman’s Water’ and sends it to the petrochemical businessmen who are responsible to drink.28 Both the toxic popsicles and the bottles of Texas Gold can be understood in terms of what Astrida Neimanis has called the ‘planetary hydrocommons’, which is ‘quite literally channelling and cycling through us’.29 In Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology Neimanis explains that the ‘watery embodiment’ of the human entails a challenge to ‘discrete individualism, anthropocentrism and phallogocentrism’, as we are ‘implicated in other animal,

25

Along with Jennings, quoted above, I also consulted, Elle Hunt, ‘Popsicles of Pollution: Ice Lollies Highlight Taiwan’s Contaminated Waterways’, in The Guardian, 1 September 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2017/ sep/01/popsicles-pollution-icelollies-taiwan-taipei-contaminatedwaterways?CMP=share_btn_fb (accessed 31.10.2017).

26

Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water (London et al.: Bloomsbury, 2017).

27

Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan, https://www.cet-taiwan.org/node/ 2190 (accessed 31.10.2017).

28

Carolyn M. Scott, Director, Texas Gold (Turtle Island Films), 2005.

29

Neimanis 2017 (footnote 5), p. 64.

Fig. 2–5

Kuo Yi-hui, Hung Yi-chen, Cheng Yu-di, 100%純污水製冰所 (Polluted Water Popsicles), reproduction of ice popsicles made from water of the most contaminated rivers or Taiwan, National Taiwan University of the Arts, 2017.

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30

Ibid., p. 3.

31

Ibid., p. 99.

32

Ibid., p. 105.

33

Clare 2016 (footnote 6), p. 68.

34

Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 42.

35

Sylvia Earle, The World is Blue: How Our Fate and the Oceans Are One (Washington D.C.: National Geographic, 2009), p. 54.

vegetable and planetary bodies that materially course through us.’30 Neimanis contends, reading Luce Irigaray through feminist post-humanisms and new materialisms, including my conception of transcorporeality, that our watery corporealities ‘ask us to consider how the ontological expresses a multiplicity of being that extends into and through other beings in an intricate and intimate entanglement of relationality – that is, an elemental and multispecies hydrocommons of water – while never collapsing this interconnectedness into an undifferentiated mass’.31 Neimanis’ conception of the hydrocommons requires that we ‘move beyond humanism as the anchor of ontology and ethics’, thus ‘dissolving the ground of who gets to count as human in the first place, and the order of things that accompanies any such proposition’.32 As material feminisms, new materialisms and other theories in the nonhuman turn have mushroomed, some have sought to rein in their capacious trajectories and to corral political care and concern, returning them to the domain of the human. Clare concludes her essay in Mattering by baldly stating that ‘while new materialist understandings of politics are compelling, feminist scholarship, attentive to morethan-human worlds, cannot but return to the study of power relations between humans, for it is humans whom we address in our writing and it is, arguably, human lives, enmeshed in more-than-human worlds, that we care most about’.33 Invoking the human as enmeshed in more-than-human worlds only to then assert that it is human lives that ‘we care most about’ draws on material feminist, trans-corporeal and post-humanist theories and orientations, and yet at the same time jettisons the ethics and politics that are integral to those theories. Here the human after the non-human turn ends up being the same old human we once knew. Who is the ‘we’ that has erected this hierarchy or limit of caring, and to what end? And why is it presumed that to be properly political means to cordon off multispecies relations? Given that humans evolved from, coevolved with and host other species that enable us to live, how is it even possible to imagine the human as a discrete, solitary or sovereign species? As Donna J. Haraway puts it, ‘We are in a knot of species co-shaping one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down.’34 Marine scientists and activists are often frustrated by the lack of pub­lic concern for ocean ecologies, which are all too easy for most terrestrial humans to ignore. Sylvia Earle, a well-known marine biologist and conservationist begins The World is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s are One with an introductory chapter entitled ‘Why Care that the World is Blue?’ One reason she gives is that one type of abundant plankton, the blue-green bacteria Prochlorococcus,­ generates 20% of the oxygen in the atmosphere: ‘This nearly invisible­ form of life generates the oxygen in one of every five breaths you take, no matter where on the planet you live.’35 Since Earle works closely with the National Geographic, it was not surprising to find a rather clever educational exercise on their website that draws on

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her figurations. The classroom activity Save the Plankton, Breathe Freely, begins by discussing how 70% of the oxygen ‘is produced by marine plants’.36 More specifically, the students are to consider Earle’s formula, that one type of plankton, the Prochlorococcus, is responsible for one in every five of our breaths. Students are then supposed to record their breaths over thirty seconds in order to ‘calculate how many breaths they take in one minute, one hour and one day’. And then the students ‘calculate the number of breaths that come from the phytoplankton Prochlorococcus’. Next, students discuss what measures can be taken to protect ocean ecologies, and the activity is concluded with a call to create a bumper sticker or T-shirt advocating ocean conservation. While Earle’s call for us to consider the fact that marine plankton enable humans to breathe could not be more anthropocentric in its appeal to human self interest and preservation, the exercise in which students actually pay attention to their own breathing – perhaps feeling, listening to and visualizing the air as it enters and leaves their lungs – and then think about how a certain number of their own breaths ‘come from the phytoplankton’, may appeal to something beyond self-interest as the self becomes what can never be self-sufficient or self-contained. And yet this particular exercise is stripped of much of its ethical and political potential, as the threats to ocean ecologies are not described. Notwithstanding the limits of this particular classroom exercise, breathing could still inspire ecological modes of being. Magdalena Górska, in fact, contends in her extensive study Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability that breathing can be understood as trans-corporeal, in that it ‘challenges the boundaries of inside and outside the body’ and is a ‘post-humanist and political matter’.37 In the Anthropocene, when simply breathing air or drinking water entails differential risks and harms, both human bodies and non-human animal bodies can be understood in terms of trans-corporeality. But the oceans may offer one of the strangest sites for reckoning with hybrid ecologies, as chemically laden, anthropogenic plastics are taking up residence within various marine species. Artist Mandy Barker’s Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals (2016), considers what it means that plankton are ingesting the microplastics that permeate the oceans.38 Presenting her work as if it were a dusty old science book (Fig. 6), she alludes to the plankton specimens John Vaughn Thompson collected from Cork Harbour in Ireland in the 1800s, a time when plankton would have been free from plastics. In each of the book’s photographs the round images against black backgrounds look like microscopic samples, but also like gorgeous globes containing mysterious creatures (Fig. 7–8). The samples, however, are actually marine debris that Barker collected in the same area that Thompson collected his specimens. They do not look like broken bits of manufactured objects, however, but much more organic, like soft, undulating or billowing marine species, such as salps, crinoids, featherstars or jellies. Their beauty holds our attention, while their supple vulnerability

36

“Save the Plankton, Breathe Freely,” in National Geographic, Education, https://www.national geographic.org/activity/save-theplankton-breathe-freely/ no date (accessed 31.10.2017).

37

Magdalena Górska, Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability (Linköping: Linköping University, 2016), p. 50. 38

Mandy Barker, ‘Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals’, http://mandy-barker.com/project. php?gallNo=9, no date (accessed 31.10.2017).

Fig. 6

Mandy Barker, Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals, Dummy book, 2016.

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evokes care and concern. Barker warns that the effect of microplastics on marine life and human life ‘is currently of vital concern’. She states, ‘In terms of plankton, and of action, we are “Beyond Drifting”, and must bring into focus these “Imperfectly Known Animals”.’ Within an artistic installation filled with the workings of the scientific process – messy notebooks, microscopes and so on – we might pause to reflect on how even as all non-human creatures remain ‘imperfectly known’, science and art nonetheless transmit some sort of understanding. Taxonomy may still hold liveliness within its grid, but aesthetics can provoke speculative forays into the life worlds of other creatures. We can think with the hybrid species that Barker references – the plankton that are now partly plastic – pondering what they will mean for Anthropocene seas. But we can also experience our interconnected multispecies lives within the planetary hydrocommons, breath by breath.

Fig. 7–8 (opposite page) Mandy Barker, Amphilima distinctae (Coathanger). Specimen collected from Cobh shoreline, Cove of Cork, Ireland; Dinoplage stellices (Mobile phone casing), Specimen collected from Cobh shoreline, Cove of Cork, Ireland, photographs from the series Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals, 2016.

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The Art of Life in the Age of Mass Extinction John Jordan

1

Quoted after Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 99. 2

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p. 12.

Let us start by putting this book down and trying an exercise with your fingers. Imagine you are playing a stringed instrument, a guitar for instance: Try to strut the strings mimicking the gestures of ‘an emaciated crow pecking at the snow in hope of finding something to eat’. If this is too hard, try this time to imitate ‘the nonchalant flick of a carp's tail’.1 Easy? These strangely beautiful instructions are from The Great Treatise on Supreme Sound, a fourteenth-century handbook for musicians. It taught lute players specific gestures, like a staccato pluck, by suggesting they copy the movements of animals, the assumption being that it would be totally normal for a musician to have not only seen these animals behaviour up close, but spent enough time giving them attention to be able to reproduce their gestures. 700 years later in an era where most people are now city dwellers and only see wild animals on screens or in a cage in a zoo, the idea seems absurd. In the metropolis everything is organised so that humans only relate to themselves, so that we create ourselves separately from other forms of existence, other forms of life. The Society of the Spectacle is ‘unity in separation’ wrote Guy Debord, ‘all that was once directly lived has become mere representation.’2 Two generations later, this vision perfectly describes our present, the realm of extreme separation where we are violently separated from our needs and desires, from what we think and how we act in the world. It's a world without worlds, where we are split from our food sources, from our soil, from our plants and our water. The worlds that sustain our life have become alien, unknown planets. We have forgotten how to make our shelter, how to heal ourselves, how 125

to clothe ourselves. We feel alienated from the bacteria that make up 10 percent of our body weight and yet keep us alive. We witness the climate catastrophe, and yet we think this will somehow not affect us. We are floating, without bodies or territory. No artists, no activist, in fact no human being, nor any of the more than human species who live inside and outside of us, has ever been here before. We are living in an era where the deep separation from our biosphere is so extreme that we seem to be able to continue business as usual despite the scientific community telling us that the continuation of life itself on the planet is now in question. Today, the day you are reading these words, over 200 species will be pushed to extinction by the economy, gone forever. The same goes for tomorrow, perhaps when you wake up the day after tomorrow it will be some of these threatened species: Sunset Cup Coral, Corn Buttercup, Red-Squirrel, Field Cricket, Water Vole, Ladies Mantle, Adonis Blue, Hedge Hog, Minke Whale, House Sparrow, Wart-biter Bush Cricket, Red Barbed Ant, Otter, Grass Snake, Bottlenose Dolphin, Grey Dagger Moth, Common Skate, Bittern, Orange Roughy, Prickly Sedge, Coral Tooth Fungus, Loggerhead Turtle, Houting, Tadpole Shrimp, Common Toad, Mining Bee, Purple Milk-Vetch, Turtle Dove, Juniper, Field Gentian, Song Thrush, Fen Orchid, Chalk Carpet, Eyebright, Skylark, Twinflower, Stone Curlew, Starlet Sea Anemone, Greater Water Parsnip, Pink Sea-Fan, Sword Grass, Sea Squirt, Foxtail Stonewort, Reed Bunting, Whiting, Tower Mustard, Nightjar, Bast Bark Beetle, Large Marsh Grasshopper , Cornflower, Mason Bee, Grizzled Skipper, Cod, Stinking Hawk's-Beard, Stonefly, Dark-Bordered Beauty, Marsh Warbler, Sei Whale, Native Oyster, Cut-grass, Grey Partridge, Cuckoo Bee, Bird's nest stonewort, Linnet, Hoverfly, Creeping Marshwort, Stone Curlew, Leafhopper, Shore Dock, Woodlark, Whorl Snail, Wryneck, Wooly Willow, Lesser Water Measurer, Spreading Hedge Parsley, Pool Frog, Corn Cleavers, Lady's Slipper Orchid, Lagoon Sandworm, Spotted Flycatcher, Rock sea-lavender, Ling, Pygmy Rush, Pennyroyal, Medicinal Leech, Tree Sparrow, Wild Asparagus, Bullfinch, Starry Earth Moss, Sperm Whale, Black Grouse, Shepherd’s Needle, Killarney Fern, Icy Rock Moss, Mayfly, Large Garden Bumblebee, Greater Copperwort, Plaice, Broad-Fruited Corn Salad, Brown Hare, Dark Guest Ant, Water Beetle, Great silver Smelt, Common Scoter, Capercaillie, Pygmy Rush, Freshwater White-Clawed Crayfish, Large Blue, Leatherback Turtle, Fin Whale, Adder, Tall sea pen, Pale Bristle Moss, Scottish Crossbill, Sandy Stiltball, Petalwort, Twaite Shad, Cranefly, Gilkicker Weevil, Sandbowl Snail, Pink Waxcap, Snipes, Silky Wave, Hornet Robberfly, Striped Dolphin, Mining Bee, Hairy Wood Ant, Solitary Bee, Doormouse, Marsh Fritillary,River Jelly Litchen,Burbot, Dotted Bee-Fly, Round-mouthed Whorl Snail,Pipstrelle Bat, Black-tailed Godwit, Orange-fruited Elm-Litchen, Olive Earthtongue, Sole,Drab Looper, Silver Studded Blue, Freshwater Pearl Mussel, Hawksbill Turtle, Corncrake, Spangled Water Beetle, Ladybird Spider, Great Crested Newt, 126

Herring, Shinning Ram’s-horn Snail,Leef-rolling Weevil, Royale Bolete, Humpback Whale,White-Letter Hairstreak, Babastelle Bat,Heart Moth, Red Kite, Knotted Wrack, Stiletto Fly, Bordered Gothic, Jumping Spider, Risso Dolphin, Black Bog Ant, Threadmoss, Mole Cricket, Tusk,Hair Silk Moss, Stag Beetle, Sand Lizard, Southern Damselfly, Alpine Moss, Diving Beetle, Reindeer Lichen, Great Yellow Bumblebee, Lagoon Sand Shrimp, Sea Monkfish, Scarce Merveille Du Jour, Violet Crystalwort, Silver Spotted Skipper,Lunar Yellow Underwing, Humpback Whale, Velvet Tooth, Flamingo Moss, Waved Carpet, Great Mouse-eared Bat, Black Backed Meadow Ant, Wood White , Orange Upperwing, Common Dolphin, Natterjack Toad, Ruby-Tailed Wasp, Hake, Northern Dart, Straw Belle, Belted Beauty, Marsh Honey Fungus, Buttoned Snout, The Northern Colletes, Starry Breck-Lichen, Lesser Horseshoe Bat, Slender Green Feather-moss, Harbour Porpoise, Bright Wave, White Stalkball, Speckled Footman, White Spot, Green Turtle, Soldierfly, Rainbow leaf Beetle, Pale Shinning Brown, Ear-lobed Dog-Lichen, Lunar Yellow Underwing, Devils Tooth.

3

See ‘Earth's sixth mass extinction event under way, scientists warn’, in The Guardian, 10th July 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2017/jul/10/earthssixth-mass-extinction-eventalready-underway-scientists-warn (accessed 7.5.2018). 4

Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (London: Penguin Books, 2006).

All the data points to the fact that we are now in the 6th period of mass extinction, the last one wiped out the dinosaurs and ammonites with a volcanic eruption and an asteroid impact. Today the space rocks are economic algorithms which put profit in front of life. The volcanic eruption is the logic of economic growth. The suicide machine is our culture. We are tumbling into the most homogenised world in history, a world which resembles a desert. Research suggests that three quarters of all the earth’s species could be extinct within a few human life times. Some biologists call humans ‘the future eaters’, but to blame ‘humans’ is to let the real culprits off the hook, only 20% of humanity consumes 80% of the worlds resources. It is only a particular set of humans who are eating the future, it of course includes most of us who visit contemporary art galleries and museums. Most humans don't even have enough to feed their families. A ‘biological annihilation’, is how a recent scientific paper named this mass extinction event. It concluded in a tone unusually emotive for biologists: ‘(This) will have serious ecological, economic and social consequences. Humanity will eventually pay a very high price for the decimation of the only assemblage of life that we know of in the universe.’3 And perhaps the biggest problem is not the collapse of our biosphere, it's the fact that the very scale of the crisis dwarves our imaginations and makes us unable to imagine a collective response. As the natural systems collapse around us so does the inner self, we turn inwards, into depression, into paralysis, cynicism, escapes, addictions – ‘what can we do?’ We (the readers of books like this, the cultural metropolitan class) see photos of Chinese rivers running red with poison, we read best sellers with titles like Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.4 We stare at live face book video streams of the artic 127

5

Tristan Zara, ‘DADA manifesto’, 23rd March 1918, in 391 archive, http://391.org/manifestos/1918dada-manifesto-tristan-tzara.html (accessed 13.9.2018).

ice melting, we sit in plush cinemas consuming political documentaries each one plunging into another dark facade of an apocalyptical future, and yet so many of us continue to live life as normal and make art as if we were still in the twentieth century with it's sweet promise of progress, its celebration of ‘culture’. In 1918, as the twentieth century dawned, faced with the unimaginable human slaughter of the first world war, the 19 year old poet Samuel Rosenstock changed his name to ‘Tristan Tzara’. In his native Romanian it meant ‘sad earth’. Together with a band of international artists he moved to neutral Switzerland, an act of desertion which would launch a movement refusing the autonomous myth of art and searching for the authentic political action. Banding together in a loose collective, they called the movement Dada – ‘which does not mean anything’ – and they did not want to make art but to transform the values of the rotten society through acts of provocation, acts they hoped would spark a revolution. Art, politics and everyday life collapsed into one. The cultural explosion spread across the world from Berlin to Tokyo, the refusal of war, work, art, authority, seriousness, and rationality made sense in the shadow of the horrors. Living through an apocalypse they responded with an attack on everything that represented the values of a world that disgusted them, against the machinery of death, their manifesto of 1918 ended with one word in capital letters: LIFE.5 Today the war between the economy and life is approaching its final battles and there are already many more dead than in any previous war. 100 million people died in the wars of the last century, another 100 million are expected to die due to climate change over the next 18 years, nearly all of them people with life styles that produce very little CO2. The climate catastrophe is not only a war on the biosphere it is a war on the poor. Perhaps in these dark times we need to regain the fearlessness that Dada had a century ago, when they had the courage to destroy art and thus give up their identities as artists, in search of something which made sense in a world which didn't. In this what some call the fourth world war the word extinction has now overtaken progress as the imaginary motor of the future. For the last 500 years of European culture art was the bringer of progress, it gave us a taste of the future in the present, visions of a world more free, more conscious, more beautiful. But what happens when the shadows the future throws makes history irrelevant and turns what might happen next into something so terrifying we can't even imagine it? Almost two decades after the Dadaist published their manifesto, in 1936, as the rumblings of a new world war began under the spreading shadow of fascism, Walter Benjamin wrote his landmark essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He began it with a quote from Paul Valéry ‘[…] profound changes are impend-

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ing in the ancient craft of the Beautiful […] perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.’6 He was writing in a moment of historical tipping points not unlike our own, when the future seemed dark. Today the future is not what it used to be and is as dark as it ever has been. Art cannot remain what it was, it is no longer a question of new forms – the body, video, installation, socially engaged art etc. – but a question of radical redefinition. It is high time we grasped the danger of Dada again, and took the risk of losing our identities, of jumping off the cliff without the wings of art, but the faith that we can fly. We have to believe that we can liberate the human imagination from the confines of art, make it wild, free, useful again. Exactly a century after Dada's explosion of a manifesto we need an art that goes so far beyond itself, that is no longer recognisable by its name. An art that is no longer trapped in things and identities, but free because it realises that life is a complex multitude of mutating relationships. Everything is in-between things, beyond the I and the thou, the this and the that. Take this book you are reading, try to imagine it as a rich series of relationships and flows that pass through it rather than a fixed object. Where was the forest that grew the wood harvested for its pages? Who sucked the petrol out to make the inks? How many different forms of bacteria live on its paper?

6

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), quoted after Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p 1.

… Her hand rises up out of the swirling sea. Her dark eyes fix the deep blue sky. She's drowning, not waving. Water is pushing life out of her lungs. She's travelled so far to get here. Her home is on fire, the climate has broken down, droughts have brought hunger, the fields are becoming deserts, the wars never stop and she is in search of life, that's all. But fortress Europe has made sure she never reaches your beaches with their bronzing bodies and sweet smell of sun cream. Her darker body will wash up on the golden sand days later, when the tourists have gone back to their hotels and after the tides are tired of playing with it. You are moved by the TV pictures of the crowded boats and the drowned children. You are moved to make a work that speaks of how Europe's migration policies are killing the exiled. You cover the columns of a theatre with thousands of orange life jackets, you are Ai Weiwei. When asked why you helped design Beijing's Bird's Nest olympic stadium for the very government that has repeatedly repressed you and censored your work, you replied that it was because you ‘loved design.’ The Artic is at times 20 degrees Celsius warmer, than it should be at that time of year. The ice is melting so fast that scientists say it is literally off the charts. Hurricane Orphelia which hit Ireland in October 2017 was off the digital maps prepared by meteorologists who never expected such a large storm to be so far north east, the images of half the storm literally disappeared from their computers. The waters are rising and the climate tipping points are looming, you are moved. You transport hundreds of tonnes of artic ice that has broken off the 131

Hannah Ellis-Petersen, ‘The Extinction Marathon: the art world's bid to save the human race’, in The Guardian, 20th October 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2014/oct/20/serpen tine-extinction-marathon-yoko-onogilbert-george (accessed 9.5.2018)

7

ice shelf to Paris during the United Nations Climate Summit. You leave them to melt in the street. You are Olafur Eliasson. Apparently your studio does not ‘make things’ but ‘ideas’, but that does not stop you selling your wire and light bulb football lampshades for 120,000 pounds to the rich.

8

In this era where other forms of life other than ours are evacuated from our experience as humans, art has become another machine of separation. Disabled by the trap of representing the world rather than transforming it, the artist's creativity goes into showing us the crisis rather than attempting to stop it. It’s as if someone has set your home on fire and instead of trying to extinguish the blaze you take photos of the flames. What kind of separation takes place in our minds, when faced with an emergency we think that simply giving more information, more stories, more facts and figures about the crisis will make a difference. There is no dearth of information, simply a lack of radical action and creative solutions. Why make a dance piece about food riots when your skills as a choreographer could help crowds move through the streets to avoid the police? Why make an installation about refugees being stuck at the border when you could design tools to cut through the fences? Why shoot a film about the dictatorship of finance when you could be inventing new ways of moneyless exchange? Why make a durational performance about the silence left where there were once songbirds, when you could be creating an ingenious way of sabotaging the pesticide factories that are annihilating the birds? Why keep creativity in a cage?

‪Jean-Jacques Rousseau‬‬‪, Politics and the Arts‬: ‪Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre‬ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press‬, 1968), p. 25.‬‬

Representing extinction has even become a hip subject for art. A two day ‘marathon’ show at London's Serpentine Gallery which included art stars Yoko Ono and Gilbert and George, ended with curator Peyton Jones summing up the show laughing: ‘We’re all done for and it’s all our fault.’7 When the only agency we feel as artists is to represent worlds rather than to make them, then perhaps it’s no surprise that we retreat into a certain cynical nihilism peppered with an embarrassed little laugh. To make art has always been to make worlds, but what kind of worlds can we make when we are so separate from the very worlds that make up our life. As long ago as 1758, Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau critiqued the idea of theatre as emotional galvaniser. He thought that it permitted the audience to experience public virtue vicariously while ignoring it in their everyday lives, allowing them to cry over the unfolding drama and crisis played on the stage only to build back all their emotional armour as soon as they left the theatre. ‘In giving our tears to these fictions’, he wrote in his Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre, in Politics and the Arts ‘we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves.’8 We have all seen the desk warriors of industrial capitalism going to the theatre or the art galleries and returning to work in their banks, 132

car and oil companies, energy and chemical corporations, continuing to reproduce the suicide machine and its pathologic desire for profit and monoculture as if nothing had happened. To shock people into feeling is not enough, it never was. Feel the crisis we must, but without the confidence that collective action works, that we can turn the situation on its head, those feelings turn in on themselves, become performances of poetic anxiety by and for the privileged. Suzy Gablik in her paradigm-shifting book The Reenchantment of Art9 called the art world a ‘prison’. To us it feels more like a zoo, because at least in a prison there is a chance of parole. Art is so much wilder than the art world, all of us who have been able to free the beast of art into the world know this. When you free it, it forgets its name, it becomes a force, not a thing, a means not an end, a way of being in the world which erases the divisions between witness and actor, spectator and performer and re-injects sense into everyday life.

9

Suzy Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992). 10

Alan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 196.

11

Paul Lewis, ‘“Our minds can be hijacked”: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia’, in The Guardian, 6th October, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/tech nology/2017/oct/05/smartphoneaddiction-silicon-valley-dystopia (accessed 7.5.2018).

‘Art is simply paying attention’,10 said Alan Kaprow, the US artists who was credited for creating the first ‘Happenings’ in the 1960's: performances where the line between artists and audience, art and life were blurred. Perhaps this is a perfect definition for these times where we must free art from itself and where our attention is being bombarded by neurone stimulating semiotic goods 24/7. We are witnessing a non-stop psychic attack of images and information, via high-tech devices, like the burdening of our atmosphere with too much CO2. Our synapses cannot keep up with the mass of information, our psychic landscape has been transformed by capitalisms new weapons of mass distraction, more tools of separation that amplify our absence from the world. There is even a term used by high tech firms to define an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy. It is called the ‘attention economy’. Designing smart phones and apps to be as addictive and irresistible as possible, this ‘attention economy’ seems to be winning, research show that people swipe or tap their smart phone on average 2,617 times a day. The same neural networks that are stimulated by drugs, food and sex are being activated consciously by the advertising executives, commanding the social networks we think are connecting us better. Paying attention to what is important for us rather than being nudged to look at another tailor-made product seems increasingly difficult. James Williams, an ex-Google high-level strategist describes the high tech industry as the ‘largest, most standardised and most centralised form of attentional control in human history’.11 The overload leads us to paralysing panic, where changing our world feels totally out of reach. We can't grasp anything that seems to make a real difference. When the world goes too fast for our brains, and everyday life is hyper-saturated by information flows, “paying attention” becomes an inherently political definition of art. For a moment of “attention” is an act of inhabiting the world, a gesture of 133

12

The ZAD of Notre Dame de Landes, France, has been occupied since 2009 against a major capitalist infrastructure project, a new international airport for Nantes. The 4000 acres of wetlands, fields and forests was Europe’s largest squatted territory, with 300 people living in 90 different collectives, self managed without police or government officials for over 6 years. The airport was finally cancelled in January 2017 and in the spring of 2018 the French government tried to violently evict those who had saved the land from concrete. Despite destroying 40 living spaces the ZAD continues to struggle to remain a laboratory of commoning. See https://zadforever. blog/ (accessed 7.5.2018).

disobedience and desertion from this society of mass attention deficit disorder. Attention is a form of taking care, it is giving yourself to an object or an activity, be it making bread or love, cutting someone’s hair or planting a hedgerow. It is in itself a form of care giving and commoning, it is the art of life. But this kind of attitude requires a certain mindfulness and presence to worlds. It has to learn to inhabit its territory as much as its bodies, know the stories that flow through it, sense the texture of things that are important to it. This discipline of attention, this deep sensibility to doing and being, is no different from that sensed by all forms of life and a key to the progress of evolution. Every surviving species makes good selections and choices about its environment. It decides how best to inhabit it, to fit it. It adapts itself to its ever-changing world. Creativity is indispensable for the survival of any system. And so the true art of life is paying attention, and it is something that crows and carps, oak trees and worms, cells and foxes do way better than any artist. Beauty will be redefined by the art of life. We are writing this in the communal office of our old squatted granite farmhouse, on the liberated zone against an airport, a world that is known as that of the ZAD12 (fig. 1–8). We have a view onto the Rohanne forest. If there had been no resistance against the building of an airport, people putting their creativity and bodies against the machines for over 50 years, this farm would have been destroyed, in its place would be the duty free shop and through its windows we would see not a forest, but a runway. The beauty is what remains, the forest, when the mega machine of capital has been sabotaged and the desert halted. Holding back the monoculture machine, defending a territory from capital, opening it up as somewhere that enables forms of life to connect and differentiate. That is what is beautiful in the art of life.

Fig. 1–8

Art, life and politics merges on the ZAD of Notre Dame des Landes, against an airport and its world.

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Think Like a Forest – Act Like a Swarm A class in art, activism and ecological thinking with the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

We may see the overall meaning of art change profoundly – from being an end to being a means, from holding out a promise of perfection in some other realm to demonstrating a way of living meaningfully in this one The Real Experiment, Alan Kaprow Reinhabiting the earth means, to start with, no longer living in ignorance of the conditions of our existence To our Friends, The Invisible Commitee ‘[…] how to jump from ecological awareness to action, how to develop an aesthetic of resistance?’ these were the words with which Susanne invited The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Labofii) to be guest professors at cx. We jumped at the opportunity because these are rare words in the milieu of contemporary art, which has a tendency to disdain action in favour of reflection. It seems artists should just 'comment' on political issues, 'explore' a social crisis, they make 'pictures of politics,' perform gestures of rebellion in the safe confines of the art world. Rarely do they try to heal or change the world directly. After all when art acts on the world it looses it's so called sacred autonomy, we are told. When art becomes useful it is no longer art! 
 The Labofii totally refuses such positions, for starters it is a lie, contemporary art is very 'useful', especially for the rich, the collectors, the gallerists who speculate with it and use it to gentrify neighbourhoods and it has become the perfect mask for the multinational corporations who use it as a kind of artwash to hide their social and ecological crimes by sponsoring museums. 135

1

John Berger, interview in The Financial Times, 28 June 1999. 2

Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).


 Meanwhile artists fly from biennial to festival, burning fossil fuels as if there was no tomorrow, floating from one city to another to make ‘radical culture’. It's all part of the ‘rights’ of the hyper mobile cultural class, a global generation that has been uprooted from any material place, ripped from community, distanced from context where they might have some agency in transforming the material world. It suits the status quo that the radical thinkers and makers don't have a territory, that they belong to nowhere and are suspended in an abstract rapid world where no solution is graspable, where creative thinking has no anchor in action. But as the art critic and writer John Berger says ‘to improve something, you really need to know the texture, the life story of that thing’,1 and knowing the story of somewhere takes a lot longer than a festival or a residency, according to some farmers it can take a thousand years to know a place. 
 In this failure to inhabit, lies the failure of art to be part of a shared life, shared with human and more than human species. For the Labofii, the role of art is not to show the world to people, not to represent the world but to transform it together. For us this involves breaking down any separation between art, everyday life and politics. Some could call this an ecological perspective, we prefer to call it one that simply puts life at its centre, one that sees the world as a complex series of living relationships rather than dead things, an attitude that populates the world not with bodies but bonds. In practice this means encouraging artists to work embedded in movements of resistance and to apply their creativity to acts of disobedience and the creation of irresistible forms of shared post-capitalist life. Art for us is simply paying attention to life in all its forms and being prepared to defend it. The theme of Hybrid Ecologies fitted our practice beautifully, and so we took the train from our territory, a commune in France, named the ZAD –1650 hectares of squatted land against an airport project – to Munich to teach our class: Think Like a Forest – Act Like a Swarm. We would aim to share our experience of working collectively, inhabiting and making creative forms of direct action with those who wanted to take part in this experiment. We call everything we do an experiment, not a work, or a piece or even a project – because the Labofii thinks that creativity is only truly free when we accept the risk of failing. From ecology to gentrification In all ecosystems it is the level of diversity that makes them strong and resilient to shocks. The engine of evolution is the development of ever increasing difference. To exist is to differentiate, writes anthropologist Phillipe Descola.2

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Capitalism develops an opposite culture, it is the spread of the desert of monocultures, the same shopping malls, the same foods, the same music, the same museums, the same logic that puts the markets above life everywhere. The Labofii left it open to the students to what social and political material to work with, but gentrification came up very strongly in the collective brainstorms about what were the issues in Munich at that moment. 
 Gentrification is by its nature a way to reduce the diversity of a neighbourhood, kick out the poor and turn it into a machine for making money for property developers, a cool district for the middle classes. Artists often play the role of the pioneer species that go into working class neighbourhoods because they space is cheap and they prepare the ground for the second wave – the art galleries, the expensive cafes, the boutiques etc. The class thought it would be interesting to see how as artists we could act on this without becoming part of the problem itself. 
 The project involved setting up DEGENTRIFICATOR boxes in the public space without asking permission. Inside each box were tools that could be used by passers by to disrupt the process of gentrification, ranging from paint bombs to plants that destroy concrete, free checkers games to a free place to sleep and instructions on free folk dances outside an expensive nightclub. The heavily branded boxes pretended they were part of a UNESCO project for protecting cultural diversity, and an accompanying web site and press and media campaign was set up.

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A conversation between the Labofii and two of the students that took part in the project class

3

Heather M. O’Brian, Christina Sanchez Juarez, Betty Marin, An Artists’ Guide to Not Being Complicit with Gentrification, https:// hyperallergic.com/385176/an-art ists-guide-to-not-being-complicit -with-gentrification/ (accessed 29.3.2018).

Martina [M]  As an artist first of all it's necessary to be aware of the problem of gentrification itself in order not to play under its rules. Before the experience with the Labofii I wasn't giving any name to this mechanism, I wasn't consciously defining its dimension and the role I was playing in it. It's necessary to educate ourselves about the history and the context we're moving into, to carefully choose the spaces and the organizations we decide to collaborate with and to constantly make a check-up of our intentions and priorities, putting in balance the wish to develop our individual careers and the dismantling of oppressive structures. We researched many examples of how gentrification works, about activists and artists fighting this phenomenon in several ways and how often their work becomes an integral part of the problem. In particular there was an essay written by three American artists, entitled An Artists’ Guide to Not Being Complicit with Gentrification3 and published at the time we were working on the project that somehow became a good starting point to create a common base for further discussions. Labofii [L]  What was your experience of working in common? Jenny [J]  In the Munich academy there is this tendency to put the professor on a pedestal, the contrast in the Labofii class to this hierarchical form of teaching was so huge that perhaps people were a bit frightened of having to suddenly work with each other together without hierarchy. In the end the focus was not just how the work against gentrification was successful it was also about how the class was structured, the process of working collectively, where every voice was listened to in order to find shared ideas and intentions. Of course when we first met up we did not share a common theme and so a lot of energy went into finding a situation or issue that we could intervene in. We learned certain values of how to work together, techniques of collective decision making, paying attention to each other, the importance of talking about our emotions, trying to work with consensus rather than voting, all this was in itself a struggle. For example we spent an entire day deciding the colours of the project together, trying to find a consensus ... an entire day! 139

M  Having a common project brought a united goal between an eclectic bunch of people who may or may not have known each other before. The fact that in the academy people stay in one class for so long means they can have a tendency to become accustomed to their surroundings and it becomes easy not to reach out and work in a less self restricted discipline.


 Despite the first obstacles that every group dynamic expects, we were able to perceive ourselves, and therefore move, as a single body, made of different parts and precisely for that, complete. Each of us could choose to deal with a specific aspect of the intervention, based on interests and abilities, or helping where needed, in a very flexible way. Keeping the mood up and alive was also necessary, that's why it was important to have someone feeling more enthusiastic at times and to be the driving spirit in the most delicate moments. We understood that each of us was fundamental, in a horizontal view of values and responsibilities. To make this happen, every member had to leave space and time for others to make their own contribution, to pay attention to how long they were talking and why. J  Yeah I learned to bite my tongue! Not to be so mouthy! To listen more! Everyone was really respectful of everyone else's opinion. M  Accepting not having control over every step of the creative process is another important aspect that emerged out of group work. To achieve this we had to trust the decisions that the others would take in our absence and start from those as if we were the one making them. Of course we couldn't do any of this without pushing ourselves to communicate deeply among ourselves. It wasn't always easy, especially when the group was quite big, but somehow we reached an equilibrium, thanks as well to the many group communication techniques the Labofii showed us. J  Normally the creative process, the brain storming is done alone with our notebooks. Suddenly we were brainstorming out loud with other people in a kind of live stream way, it felt intense. Having to share ideas out loud with others forces you out of your comfort zone. M  MFor me it seemed that conceiving an action with a group allowed it to breath more and provided opportunities to develop so much more than when working alone. Perhaps these two ways can't even be compared, because they are so different. It felt enriching and stimulating working together. Frustrating sometimes, exciting for most. Last but not least, it was fun! L 

How did it feel to do something ‘illegal’? M  Planning something ‘illegal’ in a public space requires a lot of organisation.

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J 

Yeah, I felt so confident because we had been really thorough in preparing.

M  We took most of the decisions and planned the routes in advance, imagining the risks. Aside a good dose of adrenaline, it gave us a different sense of responsibility: the one detached from human laws and at the service of something utopian yet necessary. We had to be fast, pretending to do a normal action in order not to arouse suspicion. We built up a cover story, and we played the characters of it. We have had a bit of fear and indecisions but it was exciting and sure the impact of the action was stronger than if we had asked for permission. J  This is the first time I have ever had a class where I actually had material that I feel could be useful after I graduate. I could see a future in it. It was not about looking back at what artists had done what in the past, it wasn't stagnant, it felt useful somehow, like a seed was planted. There was potentiality. At the end I felt that the class had not really finished because I grasped opportunities that were presented like going to visit the autonomous zone of the ZAD.

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Toxic Relations: Ecology, Aesthetics (and their Discontents) Jenny Nachtigall

1

Juliana Spahr, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 10. 2

See Erich Hörl, ‘Introduction to General Ecology: The Ecologization of Thinking’, in Erich Hörl with James Burton (eds.), General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 1–73.

How connected we are with everyone. The space of everyone that has just been inside of everyone mixing inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acide and titanium and nickel and minute silicon particles from pulverized glass and concrete. How lovely and how doomed this connection of everyone with lungs. Juliana Spahr1

After decades of theory insisting that we must read the body like a text, that the unconscious is structured like a language and that the artwork is a sign, today it seems the tide has turned. Now everything appears to have become ecological: political economy and the political economy of the sign have given way to a political economy of things; ecologies of perception, libidinous ecologies and media ecologies are the order of the day. The rise of ecology as a new semantics with which to analyse and experience the present2 follows a whole series of previous theoretical ‘turns’ away from the primacy of textuality. Over the past decade, they have emerged in quick succession, with affect, materiality, ontology and the real being some of the 143

3

For an overview of the various turns towards life, see Alastair Hunt, Stephanie Youngblood, ‘Introduction: Against Life’, in Alastair Hunt, Stephanie Youngblood (eds.), Against Life (Evanston: Northern University Press, 2016). 6 4

See Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 5

Claire Colebrook, ‘Not Symbiosis, Not Now: Why Anthropogenic Change Is Not Really Human’, in The Oxford Literary Review, 34:2 (2012), pp. 185–209, https://doi. org/10.3366/olr.2012.0041 (accessed 28.3.2019). 6

See Neil Badmington, ‘Theorizing Posthumanism’, in Cultural Critique 53 (winter 2003), pp. 10–27. 7

See Colebrook 2012 (footnote 5), p. 193.

best-known denominations.3 Frederic Jameson’s emphatic demand to ‘always historicize’,4 often deployed since its proclamation in the early 1980s to contest excessive symptoms of post-structuralist infatuation with the sign, is now no more than a faint echo in a present teeming with pulsating things and living relations. ‘Always relationalize’ seems to be the unspoken slogan of a theory of the present that has grown tired of itself and of its discursive repertoire (but without being able to get rid of it). This turn to the boundlessly relational can be understood as part of a broader vitalist turn, a kind of meta-turn to ‘theory after theory’5 articulated via figures of a rejection of the erstwhile primacy of history, textuality and economy as organizing concepts or tools with which to understand the social, the psychological, the physical or the aesthetic. Within this development, ecology appears as a new ontology for a present in crisis that, thanks to the Anthropocene thesis, has become pivotal to political debate. The Anthropocene is commonly defined as the geological age shaped by human intervention in the planet; by the ways ‘humanity’ has literally inscribed itself into the earth in the process of a continual and violent capitalization of natural resources, thus becoming a geological factor (by burning fossil fuels, contaminating soils, cutting down forests, polluting oceans, etc.). The crux of this theory is that Homo sapiens has not only begun digging its own grave as a species, but that it is also working towards the next mass extinction, the sixth of its kind, that could bring about the destruction of the entire biosphere, of all life on earth (the fifth mass extinction eliminated the dinosaurs). To sceptics, all this talk of ecology may look like another academic turf war over who gets to claim authorship of the next big ‘turn’. However, the ubiquity of the climate crisis – whose impact is now also being felt in the global North – has made revising our theoretical and artistic approach to the present a political and ethical imperative. Ecology specifically and the vitalist turn more generally oppose the closet Cartesianism of a theoretical approach that is blind to the mechanisms of power that it itself perpetuates.6 At the centre of this repudiation is the Cartesian primacy of the discursive and the rational, which bespeaks a disembodiment that is itself a symptom of domination.7 What the various vitalist tendencies have in common is thus their critique of the dominant, oppressive rationality of (western) man as a supposedly superior lifeform that has now got all life, including itself, into the catastrophic situation in which we find ourselves. In the name of the ecological, this violent anthropocentrism is countered with a horizontal, post-humanist logic of the relational, with a dynamic order of becoming and multiplicity to widen the overly narrow (humanistic or Cartesian) semantics of vitality, mediality or sociality. Previously excluded elements – non-organic matter, plants, metal, bacteria, algorithms, etc. – all now take on an equal importance within an ecological perspective on life beyond the limits of the human and the ‘natural’. This logic of extensity brought into play

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by an ecological shift, broadening the field to include terrain not previously taken into account, is, however, not entirely novel, nor is it unproblematic.8 In his call for an ecology of separation (rather than relation), Frédéric Neyrat argues that ecological relationality, contrary to the self-proclaimed aims of its advocates (among whose pioneers he includes Bruno Latour), does not break down the barriers of modern dualisms. Instead, in a very modern way, the minority element of their separation is colonized: ‘thus the human has colonized the nonhuman, and technologies have colonized the domain which used to be called nature.’9 Neyrat understands this trend as a symptom of ‘fantasies of fusion’. In terms of critical race theory and critical life sciences, it can be understood more specifically as a gesture of expansion (already implied in Neyrat’s reference to colonization) that seems to stand in a relatively unbroken continuum with the very humanism of which the adherents of ecological approaches are trying to rid themselves. As so often in the long history of upheavals and turns, ecological discourse, too, tends to be at its most humanist where it most emphatically claims to be post-human. Following Claire Colebrook and Jami Weinstein, humanism ‘has always been a way of refusing to see humanity as a biological event within life and has (at least in its Western metaphysical mode) always seen the human as a rational, sentimental, technical, spiritual, cultural, or historical means of surpassing life’.10 In this sense, the post-humanist call to go beyond the human – be it technically or ecologically – is, precisely on account of its logic of extensity, nothing other than an ‘ultra-humanism’,11 with all the inherent structural violence, racism and sexism that the latter implies.12 How, then, to conceive of a concept of ecology that takes this dimension of violence into account?

8

On the problem of a logic of extensity, see Colebrook 2012 (footnote 5). 9

Frédéric Neyrat, ‘Elements for an Ecology of Separation: Beyond Ecological Constructivism’, in Hörl 2017 (footnote 2), p. 105. 10

Claire Colebrook, Jami Weinstein, ‘Preface: Postscript on the Posthuman’, in Claire Colebrook, Jami Weinstein (eds.), Posthumous Life: Theorizing beyond the Posthuman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), p. xix.

11

Ibid., p. xiv.

12

See for example Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, ‘Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in the “Movement beyond the Human”’, in GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21:2-3 (2015), pp. 215–217, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

13

See Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015), pp. 172–173.

14

Françoise Vergès, ‘Racial Capitalocene’, in Gaye Theresa Johnson, Alex Lubin (eds.), Futures of Black Radicalism (London: Verso, 2017), p. 185.

In his intervention in the ecology debate, Jason Moore calls for a shift in terminology: instead of gearing ecological thinking towards discussions of the Anthropocene, Moore introduces the notion of the Capitalocene: the historical era ‘shaped by relations privileging the endless accumulation of capital’ whose beginnings go back to the long sixteenth century, the age of the first colonial empires, the slave trade and genocide.13 This concept, subsequently further specified by Françoise Vergès as the ‘Racial Capitalocene’, emphasizes the correlation between the western notion of a cheap nature and the global organization of a cheap, racialized, disposable workforce.14 The abstract universalism of ‘humanity’ or ‘humankind’ inherent in the concept of the Anthropocene does justice neither to this historical and material specificity, nor to the violence inscribed within it. It is also unable to do justice to the fact that its anthropocentrism obscures the degree to which it is not ‘western man’ with his instrumental Cartesian reason who is responsible for the current disaster, but a system created by western man that has long since escaped his control. Instead, this system controls him. The problem therefore lies not in the oppressive reason of the cogito with western man as its 145

15

See Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).

16

Moore 2015 (footnote 13), p. 14.

17

Arun Saldanha, ‘Geophilosophy, Geocommunism: Is there Life after Man?’, in Claire Colebrook, Jami Weinstein 2017 (footnote 10), p. 226. For a comprehensive critique of the de-historicizing and de-mediatizing tendencies of ontological concepts of materiality, see also Jordy Rosenberg, ‘The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present’, in Theory & Event 17:2 (2014), https:// www.muse.jhu.edu/article/546470 (accessed 28.3.2019) as well as Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky’s essay in this book, pp. 153–163.

18

See Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi, Nerea Calvillo, ‘Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world’, in Social Studies of Science 48:3 (2018), pp 331–439, here p. 334. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127 18783087 (accessed 28.3.2019).

19

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 65. On ‘entelechy’, Driesch’s aesthetically coded concept of vitality, see ibid., p. 71. Bennett’s reading of Bergson is majorly shaped by Deleuze’s re-reading of Bergson. It is worth remembering that this re-reading was situated in the context of a critique of positivism, and consequently had a temporal core, was historically specific (the new materialisms, in turn, seem to criticize Marxism above all). For a critique of excessive (dehistoricizing) references to Deleuze within the new materialisms, see for example N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 7085. For a differentiated reading of (Bergsonian) vitalism beyond the Deleuzian paradigm, see Chris Tedjasukmana, ‘Henri Bergson, das Kino und der Postvitalismus’, in Maria Muhle, Christiane Voss (eds.), Black Box Leben (Berlin: August Verlag, 2017), pp. 181–210.

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outlet, but in the manifestation of this reason as the Cartesian ideal of dominion over nature that has been most systematically enforced by the capitalist economy. From the encounter between economy and science emerged a violent relationality which in financialized capitalism has reached a degree of autonomy that makes it indifferent to human reproduction: human life and its survival are increasingly redundant.15 For Moore, financialized network capitalism is a ‘world ecology’ of ‘capital, power, and re/production in the web of life’16 whose relationality is toxic. Following this book’s approach to ecology as a ‘polemic concept’, my essay examines the conflictuality that is immanent in the concept’s relationality. More specifically, it focusses on the claim that ecology can be understood not only as a widening of an overly narrow (humanist or Cartesian) semantics of life, but also as a restriction of life itself. Today, the relationality of a hybrid ecology manifests itself not least as toxicity: as a contamination of bodies and territories on the one hand and, on the other, as the infrastructural toxicity of financialized capitalism. If, as Arun Saldanha argues, the neo-materialist theorization of the micro-level of the vital – of the ‘singularity of bodies and objects in their local interactions and thickness’ – tends to lose sight of the macro-level of ‘the materialities of the state, money, migration’,17 then the notion of the toxic can mediate between these two levels (and, one might add, those of the ‘old’ historical materialism and the new materialisms). With regard to the Capitalocene as the ‘new age of toxicity’,18 this essay enquires into the material specificity of ecological relationality today, and into whether and how artistic and aesthetic practice can become a medium for articulating this specificity. The emphasis here is on specificity, insofar as relationality is surprisingly often exemplified (in both art and theory) with recourse to aesthetic concepts and artistic practices. In so doing, however, ecological theories of relationality tend to (mis)understand the aesthetic as a privileged place of redemption from the dualisms of a modern non-relational space, thus reducing it – despite all the rhetoric of contemporaneity – to a (modern) image of art that still adheres to the nostalgia of its social exceptionality. Ecology as a Relational Aesthetics (of Redemption) This tendency is exemplified by Jane Bennett’s much-discussed book Vibrant Matter: The Political Ecology of Things (2010) in which she calls for an understanding of inorganic matter as being endowed with an aesthetic agency of its own rather than as a passive substance to be shaped by humans. Bennett’s conception of ‘materiality itself as a “creative agent”’ refers directly to the historical vitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It includes Hans Driesch and Henri Bergson’s aesthetic notions of vitality,19 and thus perspectives that are anything but inhuman. In Creative Evolution (1907),

Bergson’s study on what he called the ‘élan vital’ – in brief: a metaphysical, vital force that animates all objects and subjects – life is compared with the creation of ‘an artist of genius’.20 Mark Hansen follows a similar impulse in his theory of twenty-first-century media as defined by an environmental mode of operation, providing detailed explanations of how the technical interconnection of man and nature distributes agency and in so doing realises a ‘temporal commonality’ of humans and technical processes.21 The evidence used to support this theory and its ‘fundamental openness of the future’, however, is yet again drawn from artistic practice (namely Olafur Eliasson’s installation Your Colour Memory, 2004).22 Such a relational broadening of definitions of vitality and (political) agency equally characterizes a number of curatorial initiatives on the question of the ecological. Among these is Nicolas Bourriaud’s latest project, the 16th Istanbul Biennale (2019), that deals with ‘the most visible effects of the Anthropocene’.23 These include the Pacific garbage patch (a 3.4 million square kilometre area of plastic waste weighing seven million tons) whose epithet ‘the seventh continent’ serves as the biennale’s title. In 2014 Bourriaud organized the Taipei Biennale under the header ‘The Great Acceleration. Art in the Anthropocene’. At its core, it was an approach to artistic practice as the medium for an extension of human consciousness to a ‘cohabitation […] with swarming animals, data processing, the rapid growth of plants and the slow movements of matter’. Man, Bourriaud declared, is, within this relational context, ‘only one element among others in a wide-area network’.24 In his study of the relationship between modern aesthetics and politics, Leo Bersani describes such (excessive) political and ethical demands on art as symptomatic of an ‘aesthetics of redemption’: underpinning this aesthetics, that perceives art as a corrective to life, is a misunderstanding of art as a philosophy. According to Bersani the ‘apparently acceptable views of art’s beneficently reconstructive function [...] depend on a devaluation of historical experience and of art. The catastrophes of history matter much less if they are somehow compensated for in art, and art itself gets reduced to a kind of superior patching function’.25 Bersani’s critique of the culture of redemption, and of the corrective function that the aesthetic assumes within it, is based on his wider, more fundamental critique of ‘authoritative identities’ and their (pseudo-)stabilising function for a life which – experienced as incoherent – jars with philosophy’s striving for ‘the unity, the identity, [and] the stability of truth’. As Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood conclude, the irony of this logic lies in the fact that ‘the illusion of order and meaning assume a superiority in relation to the life it intends to organize. In fact, if the excesses of life achieve coherence and thus value through the organizing principles of art, this redemption of life is achieved only through life’s negation’.26 Where ecological thinking attempts to explain the expanded vitality of the relational in aesthetic terms, it becomes entangled in

20

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola NY: Dover, 1998), p. 89. 21

Mark B.N. Hansen, ‘Ubiquitous Sensation or The Autonomy of the Peripheral: Towards an Atmospheric, Impersonal, and Microtemporal Media’ (2013), p. 40. https://www. scribd.com/document/152445136/ Ubiquitous-Sensation-or-The-Auto nomy-of-the-Peripheral (accessed 26.4.2019). According to Hansen this occurs insofar as environmentally operating media affect us on a level below the threshold of conscious perception, thus undermining the sovereignty of a centred, self-determining subject.

22

Ibid.

23

https://www.e-flux.com/ announcements/215370/16thistanbul-biennialthe-seventhcontinent/ (accessed 26.6.2019).

24

Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Notes for “The Great Acceleration” (Taipei Biennial 2014)’, in Seismopolite. Journal for Art and Politics, http://www.seismopolite.com/ nicolas-bourriaud-notes-for-thegreat-acceleration-taipei-biennialseptember-13-january-4 (accessed 26.4.2019).

25

Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 2.

26

Hunt, Youngblood 2016 (footnote 3), (kindle location: 424 of 7125).

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27

See Peter Gorsen, Zur Phänomenologie des Bewusstseinsstroms. Bergson, Dilthey, Husserl, Simmel und die lebensphilosophischen Antinomien (Bonn: Bouvier, 1966).

the contradictions that already shaped Bergson’s modern vitalism: life remains just as ‘lifeless’ and abstract as does art (as a medium of authoritative identity).27

28

The fact that Bersani’s study of modern aesthetics sounds so topical today is therefore due to the fact that ecological thinking – as Neyrat has already argued – continues to be haunted by the very modernisms it seeks to expel. Within contemporary art this tendency has been previously criticised with regard to the theory of relational aesthetics from the late 1990s. And it seems hardly irrelevant that the ecologically-minded curator and art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud is the originator of said theory. Drawing on Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, Bourriaud’s manifesto-like essay propagated relational aesthetics as a new definition of the politics of art: relational aesthetics is said to revise the premises of modern ‘avant-garde’ art (following Bourriaud: critical intervention, agitation, representation) in favour of the artistic capacity for creating (temporary) situations. Such situations, unlike (commodity) objects, were to realise alternative, non-capitalised ways of life.28 They looked something like this: ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija organises a dinner in a collector’s home, and leaves him all the ingredients required to make a Thai soup. Philippe Parreno invites a few people to pursue their favourite hobbies on May Day, on a ­factory assembly line. Vanessa Beecroft dresses some twenty women in the same way, complete with a red wig, and the visitor merely gets a glimpse of them through the doorway.’29 As Stewart Martin objects in his comprehensive critique of relational aesthetics, Bourriaud’s claim that the production of aesthetic relations (as, for instance, in the practices listed above) lies outside the sphere of capitalist value production is ironically based on a misunderstanding, which Marx precisely called commodity fetishism.30 For Marx, it is not the commodity object itself that is the source of surplus value, but the labour power expended in producing it. In this view, fetishism consists precisely in the fact that ‘the definite social relation between men themselves […] assumes here, for them, the phantasmagorical­ form of a relation between things’.31 In abstracting the form of aesthetic relations from this framework, Bourriaud (inadvertently) sustains a profoundly modern tradition hinging on the conviction that ‘art is conceived as an immediate form of non-capitalist life’.32 The scope and role of relationality as a conceptual form of contemporary thought have certainly expanded under the auspices of ecology (from a view on human exchange to the notion of an ontological form defining all life, both human and nonhuman); but so did the problem of abstracting relationality as form from its historical, material and situated embeddedness.

See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with M. Copeland (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002).

29

Ibid., pp. 7–8.

30

Stewart Martin, ‘Critique of Relational Aesthetics’, in Third Text 21:4 (2007), pp. 369–386. https://doi. org/10.1080/09528820701433323 (accessed 27.3.2019).

31

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 165 (trans. modified).

32

Martin 2007 (footnote 30) p. 379. On vitalism as a phenomenon of crisis and the role of aesthetics within it, see Jenny Nachtigall, ‘The Modern Subject, a Dead Form Living. On the Aesthetics of (a Fractured) Vitalis’, in Tanja Widmann, Laura Preston (eds.), Post­Apocalyptic Self-Reflection (Vienna: Westphalie, 2019).

This concerns not only Bourriaud’s latest projects, whose conceptual framework seems to work as a kind of ecological update of 1990s discourse, but a whole range of current aesthetic approaches to a relational concept of life. One of the most copious examples is ‘General Ecology’, an exhibition and research project initiated in 148

2018 by Lucia Pietroiusti at the Serpentine Gallery, London. ‘General Ecology’ was principally animated by an understanding of ecology derived from both the holistic deep ecology of the 1970s and the symbiosis theory of microbiologist Lynn Margulis from the late 1960s, that posited cooperation, not competition, to be the driving force of evolution.33 Run by a team of four curators, the various formats of ‘General Ecology’ (symposia, publications, exhibitions, etc.) addressed questions like interspecies communication, plant intelligence and a holistic relational self in interaction with its environment. Like Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, the conceptual framework of ‘General Ecology’ is not without precedents but situated within a specific genealogy of New Age beliefs and neoliberalism that can be traced back – like deep ecology and Margulis’ symbiosis theory – to the 1960s and1970s.34 In 2013, the exhibition project ‘The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside’, curated by Anselm Franke and Diedrich Diederichsen at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, dealt comprehensively with this genealogy, not least in order to situate today’s ecology paradigm within a ‘a specific historical frame, without which it will become increasingly difficult to even address the new relations of power and exploitation as such’.35 Ecology, Franke and Diederichsen argue, is the only utopia of the twentieth century that has survived relatively unscathed into the twenty-first, but whose political implications, beyond a sense of urgency and ‘specific rituals of selfassurance, including an increasingly powerful bio-aesthetic’, remain somewhat unclear.36 Taking as its starting point Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue (1968), a blend of counterculture, eco-romanticism and techno-determinism (and the Californian answer to the challenges of ecology), the exhibition explored the ecological imperative and its notion of a ‘relational self’ as flipsides of a widespread post-war cybernetization and neo-liberalization of various social fields that continues to this day.37 Rather than bestowing upon artistic practice some (exceptional) competence in dealing with questions of ecological relationality, the exhibition focussed on the ‘implicit background conditions and history of this paradigm’.38 This included not least ‘the tendency – still active in the long shadow of cybernetics – that sees its sacred goal in the relational dissolution of all demarcations, and thus always ends up emphasizing that everything has always been relational, and as a result, frequently loses sight of the object of its criticism – the mechanisms of exclusion and the historical continuity of suppression’.39

33

https://www.serpentinegalleries. org/exhibitions-events/generalecology (accessed 26.4.2019).

34

My remarks here refer to the conceptual framework and do not necessarily apply to all the artists and scholars participating in this project.

35

Anselm Franke, ‘Earthrise and the Disappearance of the Outside’, in Diedrich Diederichsen, Anselm Franke (eds.), The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (Berlin: Sternberg, 2013), p. 13.

36

Ibid., p. 17.

37

One year prior to the beginning of the Serpentine Gallery’s ‘General Ecology’ project, Erich Hörl published a book of the same title that addresses the ambivalence and material specificity of a ‘general ecology’, including its implication in environmentally operating forms of power. According to Hörl, ‘relational technologies and an algorithmic governmentality reduce, regulate, control, even capitalize relations to an enormous extent, and precisely in so doing, become essential to the form of power of Environmentality’. Hörl 2017 (footnote 2), p. 8. See also Hörl’s essay in this book, pp. 197–208. 38

Franke 2013 (footnote 35), p. 12.

39

Ibid., p. 18.

Toxic Relations Following Nicholas Mirzoeff, such selective vision is systemic: as a symptom of an Anthropocene (an)aesthetics, it defines a mode of perception that – deeply anchored in our sensorium – experiences our desensitization towards the destructive effects of human subjugation of nature as an aesthetic event. ‘The aesthetics of the Anthropocene 149

40

Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’, in Public Culture 26:2 (2014), pp. 213–232, here p. 220.

41

See Myra J. Hird, ‘Proliferation, Extinction and an Anthropocene Aesthetic’, in Colebrook, Weinstein 2017 (footnote 9), p. 256.

42

Bennett 2010 (footnote 19), p. xiv.

43

Franke 2013 (footnote 35), p. 16.

44

‘Deadly Affairs’ took place at Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp (23 March – 30 June 2019). The exhibition was part of ‘Toxic Commons’, a platform that researches the distribution of toxicity and the ecological injustices that result from it. For further information and the exhibition publication see: https://extra citykunsthal.be/en/exhibitions/dead ly-affairs (accessed 25.3.2019).

45

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 2, and Antonia Alampi, ‘Deadly Affairs’, in Deadly Affairs, Cahier 5 (Antwerp: Kunsthal Extra City, 2019), p. 13.

46

Susan Schuppli, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Mirna Belina (ed.), Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–2016 (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts, 2016), p. 194.

emerged as an unintended supplement to imperial aesthetics – it comes to seem natural, right, then beautiful – and thereby anaesthetized the perception of modern industrial pollution.’40 By equating the beautiful with the controllable, western aesthetics thus cemented the idea of nature as a largely pliable, malleable resource.41 Or, to speak with Bersani: aesthetics undergirded the pseudo-stabilizing effect of authoritative identities. What sets the current discourse on ecology apart from the modern aesthetics of redemption discussed by Bersani, however, is the fact that the mastery of nature by means of aesthetics has been replaced by the mastery of disaster. Not only holistic visions of a ‘greener sensibility’42 or the planetary rhetoric of the relational that characterized Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue are based on a systematic suppression of relationality’s permeation by power (the catalogue’s motto was nothing less than ‘We are as gods and we might as well get good at it’).43 Insofar as the image of a mountain of garbage in the Pacific Ocean acquires its virulence for Bourriaud on account of its spectacular visibility, hence evoking conventional forms of mastery of a catastrophic situation, the ‘Seventh Continent’ biennial also seems – not in spite of but precisely because of its appeal for art as the medium of an ecological rethinking – to fall prey to an Anthropocene (an)aesthetics. By contrast, exhibition and research projects like ‘Deadly Affairs’ deal with toxicity as a form of violence that manifests itself outside of visible, spectacular and (temporally and spatially) localisable forms (and that is often not even understood as violence).44 Organized by Antonia Alampi with Caroline Ektander and Zeynep Kubat at Kunst­ hal Extra City (Antwerp), ‘Deadly Affairs’ focussed on approaches that give the ‘slow violence’ of the toxic an affective rather than only a visual form.45 These include Susan Schuppli’s scientific and artistic engagement with environments as (quasi-photographic) recording media for anthropogenic change. In her film Trace Evidence (2016), for example, Schuppli examines the invisible routes of nuclear radiation in soil, water and air at key moments in atomic history. For Schuppli, such contaminated environments function as ‘toxic ecologies’ that operate beyond the ‘planar morphology of what we might conventionally understand as an image’, on a multi-dimensional and multi-temporal level that can both reach back into the past and point into the future.46 The violence of the toxic can be portrayed in pictures to a limited extent. It produces a molecular reformatting of human and nonhuman materialities that poses a challenge not only to notions of what a picture is and does, but also to the vocabulary of (its) aesthetic and political articulation. According to Elizabeth A. Povinelli, by breaking down the clear outlines of territories and bodies, of (biological) life and (geological) non-life, of inside and outside, toxicity calls for a new political semantics that is not adequately represented by Marxist

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(or, to be more precise, autonomist) concepts of resistance. Autonomist thinkers like Mario Tronti, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, she argues, have turned against the abstractions of academic Marxism and its endemic humanism by rejecting the notion of a subsumption of life under the laws of capital; and yet the autonomist premise of a liberation of life remains attached to a logic of abstraction that now applies to life itself: ‘The problems follow from the same critique autonomists and others level against the anthropogenic Human. Life does not exist in general any more than the Human exists in general. More crucially, in the anthropogenic condition of climate change and toxicity, even the phrase “forms of life” mystifies rather than analyses how the concept of antagonism works when every region of existence is a set of accumulating and dissipating entanglements.’47 In Povinelli’s view, the state of toxicity produces ‘extimate relations’ that cannot be understood using the workerist vocabulary of antagonism and autonomy. ‘From the perspective of the carbon cycle, soil, rock, water, air, microbial, plant, animal: all forms of existence are each other’s internal lung.’48 With reference to indigenous ontologies and vitalist approaches (from Aristotle to Deleuze to the new materialisms), Povinelli calls in her work for a new imagination of resistance, beyond its western (Marxist) form. This dissociation from the (Marxist) tendency to abstraction, however, seems to lose sight of what, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, can be understood as the real abstraction of toxicity. The latter manifests itself not least in the nexus of geography, capitalism and racism, undeniably expressed in the unequal distribution of toxic contamination and anthropogenic environmental change. ‘Racism’, as Wilson Gilmore contends, is ‘a practice of abstraction, a death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organize relations within and between the planet’s sovereign political territories’.49 Processes of abstraction consequently place humans and nonhumans in a hierarchic relationship, and it is this that brings forth the totalising category of ‘the human’.50 So if toxicity produces extimate relations between different human and nonhuman entities, then these relations are structured by the practice of abstraction that characterizes racist and capitalist forms of oppression and dispossession.51

47

Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘Anthropocene, Autonomism, Antagonism, and the Illusions of Our Epoch’, in The South Atlantic Quarterly 116:2 (2017), pp. 293–310, here p. 300. https:/doi.org/10.1215/003828763829412 (accessed 20.3.2019).

48

Ibid.

49

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography’, in The Professional Geographer 54:1 (2002), pp. 15–24, here p. 16 (emphasis mine).

50

Brenna Bhandar, Alberto Toscano, ‘Race, Real Estate and Real Abstraction’, in Radical Philosophy 194 (2015), pp. 8–17, here p. 11.

51

This does not mean that racism is to be understand as a supplement of capitalism. On this see Cedric L. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism (London: Pluto, 2019), and da Silva 2007 (footnote 12).

52

Toxic Assets was part of Ziherl’s curatorial research project ‘Frontier Imaginaries’ and took part in cooperation with e-flux and Columbia University in October 2017 in New York. For more information on the programme and participants see: https://www.e-flux.com/program/ 154262/toxic-assets-nbsp-frontierimaginaries-ed-no3-at-e-flx-and columbia-university/ (accessed 28.3.2019).

53

Tadiar’s contribution was called ‘Powers of Expending Life’. My remarks refer to published work on the same set of issues: Neferti X. M. Tadiar, ‘Life-Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism’, in Social Text 31:2 (2013), pp. 19–48. https:/doi.org/10.1215/016424722081112 (accessed 24.2.2019).

In 2017, with Vivien Ziherl and Brian Kuan Wood, Povinelli organised the ‘Toxic Assets’ events series that looked at toxicity as a value phenomenon in its own right (rather than just as a by-product of capitalist value creation processes).52 As well as artistic and aesthetic contributions from Rachel O’Reilly, the Karrabing Film Collective (of which Povinelli is a member) and Povinelli’s own intervention on toxicity and extimacy, Nerfeti X.M. Tadiar presented parts of her ongoing research on the violence of globally operating capitalism and on how marginalised lives function as capital assets within this system.53 According to Tadiar, the lives of surplus populations in the global South and in austerity-damaged cities in the global North are becoming a ‘soft currency’ for global financial operations insofar as their ‘life 151

54

For example via ‘their promised labor-time as embodied in the debts they take out or that is taken out on their behalf by their representative state’. Ibid., p. 29.

55

Ibid., p. 21.

56

On the distinction between matter and materiality, see Alberto Toscano, ‘Materialism without matter: abstraction, absence and social form’, in Textual Practice 28:7 (2014), pp. 1221–1240. https:/doi. org/10.1080/0950236X.2014. 965901 (accessed 24.2.2019).

57

Spahr 2005 (footnote. 1), pp. 74–75.

58

Lauren Berlant, ‘The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times’, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34:3 (2016), pp. 393–419, here pp. 408, 407. https:/doi. org/10.1177/0263775816645989 (accessed 6.3.2019).

times of disposability’ can be speculated on and used to generate value.54 By thus somatising risk as a mode of existence,55 financialised capitalism produces what could be referred to as a toxic relationality, in which the financial operations of the global North and its (our) forms of violence are directly – but not visibly – connected with the bodies and territories of the global South. In Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, it is precisely this toxically caused shift of temporal and spatial borders that becomes tangible as an inscription into bodies. As a result, Spahr gives the extimacy of the toxic a form in which the micro-level of matter and the macro-level of infrastructural materiality permeate each other.56 In her work, the physical rhythm of a shared space of air and lung that opens This Connection – of air saturated with toxins and dust that simultaneously creates both an expansive and a restrictive link between different existences – cannot be separated from the real abstraction that defines the infrastructural violence of toxicity: In bed, when I stroke the down on yours cheeks, I stroke also the carrier battle group ships, the guided missile cruisers, and the guided missile destroyers. When I reach for yours waists, I reach for bombers, cargo, helicopters, and special operations. [...] Fast combat support ships, landing crafts, air cushioned, all of us with all of that.57 In This Connection, a ‘general ecology’ and a ‘general economy’ perforate one another. Or, to put it in the words of Lauren Berlant: Spahr charts a relational ontology that exists alongside, not outside of, ‘the materiality of raw exposure and extreme risk’. ‘Idioms of sensed impact’ are converted ‘into a patterning that can become a scene of live collective being’.58 To make space for a collectivity emerging from the shared, if unequally distributed, state of toxicity, one might argue by way of conclusion, all of the existing means will be needed, the old and the new. Within this frame, Spahr’s poetics opens up a perspective on toxicity in which Povinelli and Tadiar, the old and the new materialisms, stand not in antagonism to one another but in relation.

Translated from German by Nicholas Grindell

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Queer Ecologies: Against the Ontologizing of Queerness, for the Development of Queer Collectives! Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky

1

Jordy Rosenberg, ‘The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present’, in Theory and Event 17:2 (2014), Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu. edu/article/546470 (accessed 30.6.2017).

Queer ecologies stake out a contested field. This is not only a matter of political questions, but also of wide-ranging methodological ones. These methodological questions are directed at the ontological turn that has accompanied the move to ecology in the humanities. They concern the relationship to epistemology, which investigates the emergence of knowledge, and ontology, which makes statements about the being of the world, and they lead, as I would like to show in the following, to the centre of how queer theory understands itself, and thus at the same time to the centre of questions of a possible queer ecology of media. I will first go into the critique of the subjectless turn in queer theory formulated by the American historian and literary scholar Jordy Rosenberg, a turn, as he convincingly shows, that entails a tendency to ontologize queerness itself. Rosenberg’s critique aims at depoliticizing and despecifying the power relationships that result from this ontologizing of queerness.1 They concern the most important positions of contemporary queer ecologies. Rosenberg accuses these positions of failing to historically situate the material conditions that they describe and the knowledge that they produce. He alternatively proposes a method that he calls a fanatical approach, which first addresses a knowledge that comes from engaged interest, and second links engagement with situating knowledge historically. With his fanatical approach Rosenberg shifts the focus from the ontologizing of queerness to a queer collectivity, and from abstract materials to the material conditions that not only encompass economic conditions, but also the material conditions of affects, of memories, of wishes, and of desire. In this, however, the fanatical approach comes close 153

2

Donna J. Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, in Feminist Studies 14:3 (1988), pp. 575–599, here pp. 595–596. 3

In the last section I will be referring to work that I presented more thoroughly in the essay: ‘Zwischen Apokalypse und Sympoiesis, Neue Materialismen und Situiertes Wissen’, in Corinna Bath, Hanna Meißner, Stephan Trinkaus, Susan­ne Völker (eds.), Verantwortung und Un/Verfügbarkeit. Impulse und Zugänge eines (neo)materialisti­ schen Feminismus (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2017), pp. 151–165.

4

Rosenberg 2014 (footnote 1).

5

Ibid.

6

Ibid., p. 2.

to that methodological concept presented by the historian of science and biologist Donna J. Haraway in the 1980s under the term situated knowledge.2 For this reason, I will finish by presenting Haraway’s latest critical intervention in the discourse of the Anthropocene and the renaissance of the Gaia hypothesis.3 It provides us with ways to approach possible queer media ecologies. Theoretical Primitivism – Methodological Avant-garde In 2014 Jordy Rosenberg published a widely read article with the title ‘The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present’.4 In the abstract he describes the main thesis of his essay, which deals with contemporary theories of new materialism and the new ecologies, with the following sentence: ‘My key proposition is that the humanities’ ontological turn is a theoretical primitivism that presents itself as a methodological avant-garde.’5 To support his critique, which, as he himself puts it, comes from a ‘fanatical approach’, from an attitude of engaged interest and commitment, Rosenberg draws on Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation. Marx uses the term to describe the idea held among bourgeois economists, above all Adam Smith, that the unequal distribution of wealth and the difference between a class of owners and a class of those without property can be traced back to the diligence of the former class and the laziness of the latter. What these bourgeois economists failed to recognize, as Marx demonstrates, is that the class system represents an effect of capitalist commodity production and does not precede it. So capitalist commodity production for its part is based on expropriating the means of production and thus on the separation into one class that owns the means of production and another class that does not own anything except themselves, in the form of the commodity of labour force, and as a consequence is compelled to take its own flesh and blood to the market. Against bourgeois economy, Marx emphasizes the entanglement of social, economic, racist, ecological, and epistemic violence that constitutes capitalism and incessantly and continually reproduces it. In a similar way to the representatives of bourgeois economy, according to Rosenberg’s argument, the exponents of new materialisms and ontological economies fetishize the separation of people on the one side and the objective world of objects on the other. Whether it is objects in the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman, the archifossile of Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative realism, or the molecular in queer ecologies, something primitive always sticks to these concepts of the object or of materiality. They are beyond the human world and hold the promise of jumping out of human history and out of capitalism. Matter and objects function as a kind of terra nullius of the theoretical landscape, with the consequence that, again according to Rosenberg, the object ontologies must be read as origin narratives.6

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7

Ontologizing Queerness

Timothy Morton, quoted in Rosenberg 2014 (footnote 1), p. 5.

Rosenberg initially implicates new materialisms with what David Eng, J. Jack Halberstam, and Jose Muñoz called in 2005 the subjectless turn: the turn from the subject and the simultaneous establishment of a broadly conceived field of normalization as the site of social violence. Rosenberg points out that the subjectless turn not only involves an opening movement toward the problem of difference, but at the same time has the tendency to ontologize queerness, with the consequence that the fundamental, institutionalized power plays which constitute the social world, as in the case of assuming a ‘primitive accumulation’, get lost to view and become de-specified.

Vicky Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

This subjectless turn, as Rosenberg is certainly right to claim, has found a new basis in queer theory’s turn to ontology. The most obvious evidence that he gives for this is a reference to Timothy Morton’s Queer Ecology and its claim that there is no contradiction between ‘straightforward’ biology and queer theory, because it is impossible, according to the most recent findings in biology, to distinguish at the level of DNA between a genuine sequence of genetic code and a viral insertion into the code. Morton infers from this that biology itself is queer and, what’s more, operates deconstructively: ‘In a sense, molecular biology confronts issues of authenticity similar to those on textual studies. Just as deconstruction showed, at a certain level, at any rate, no text is totally authentic, biology shows us, that there is no authentic life form. That is good news for a queer theory of ecology.’7

8

9

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2007). 10

Karen Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, in Kvinder, Køn og forskning/Women, Gender and Research 1–2 (2012), Feminist Materialisms, pp. 25–53, here p. 29.

11

Ibid., p. 48.

12

Ibid., p. 46.

The entanglement of deconstruction, new materialism and life sciences into a kind of vitalistic scientism does not come solely from Morton, but also forms the central speculative step of queer ecologies as conceived and represented by the Australian philosopher Vicky Kirby8 and the American physicist, proponent of queer theory, and co-founder of the turn to new materialism in queer theory, Karen Barad.9 Barad refines the subjectless turn in queer theory with appropriate enthusiasm when she writes: ‘Queer is itself a lively mutating organism, a desiring radical openness, an edgy protean differentiating multiplicity, an agential dis-continuity, an enfolded reiteratively materializing promiscuously inventive spatiotemporality.’10 Much like Morton, Barad and Kirby attempt to support the deconstruction associated with queerness empirically with recourse to experiments from the natural sciences, thus ‘materializing’ deconstruction at the same time. Barad grounds her approach by insisting on a materialist reading of deconstruction: ‘We are insisting on materialist readings of deconstruction that open up the empirical to reworkings that unmoor it from conventional understanding and do not presume that it can (or even ought to) be put to rest.’11 But even if Barad emphasizes an unconventional understanding of the empirical,12 the objection that Rosenberg raises to Morton applies equally to Barad’s description of atoms as ‘ultraqueer critters’: 155

13

Rosenberg 2014 (footnote 1), p. 5.

14

Alexander Galloway, ‘Queer Atonality’, October 21, 2014, http:// cultureandcommunication.org/ galloway/queer-atonality (accessed 20.5.2020). In 2014 the volume Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation appeared, in which Galloway, along with Eugene Thacker and McKenzie Wark, pursues an idea of negative media theory analogous to negative theology, attempting to interpret excommunication not as the end of all communication, but as the beginning of a non-human resistance. At the end of their introduction the authors lay out their program: ‘We wish nevertheless to push media and communication theory further, out into the realm of the absolutely alien’ (p. 21). Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).

15

Ibid.

The molecular object, for Morton, appears to resolve the and/ or of queer theory into a quasi-scientific empiristic collision of Matter and Materialism, in which the aleatory (aka queer) nature of matter ratifies the physical world as imminently antagonistic to the demands and logic of contemporary capitalism – always already having escaped discipline, if you will. This is an authenticating gesture in the garb of a deconstructive one.13 By the either/or logic of queer theory, Rosenberg is referring to the expansion of the object of queer theory, which involves integrating theories of intersectionality into queer theory. Either/or means that this expansion of the object can lead in the direction of both a Marxist-materialist interrogation of capitalism and an escapist ontologizing of the queer object. It is obvious that the direction of an escapist ontologizing of the queer object would necessarily remain unsatisfying from the perspective of media theory, if only because of the forgetfulness of media and technology that forms the basis for the assumption of an unmediated epiphany of matter. Queerness and Collectivity Shortly after Rosenberg’s article appeared, the New York media theorist Alexander Galloway wrote a long and sympathetic commentary on it in his blog under the title ‘Queer Atonality’. I mention this also because Galloway emphasizes right from the beginning that Rosenberg’s critique also applies to his own works in media theory, in particular those that he co-wrote with Eugene Thacker about the possibilities of non-human forms of resistance.14 Galloway sharpens Rosenberg’s critique of ontologizing queerness using the term queer atonality: By queer atonality we mean the notion that queerness can be abstracted to mean deviation as such, aleatoriness as such, or openness as such, and thus, through such extreme abstraction, queerness may be assigned as proper monicker for biological and even ontological systems. In other words, if biology is that thing that works via difference and radical openness, then it is by definition queer. Or if ontology is a scenario of swerves and deviations, then it is, by definition, queer.15 This ontologizing of concepts from the natural sciences – for with both the ultraqueer atoms and the molecular the issue is not ‘nature’, but concepts that serve the scientific description of highly technologized experimental arrangements – not only leads to these concepts, ‘atoms’, the ‘molecular’, etc., being endowed with a primitive queer life force and becoming a projection surface for a better norm. It also has the consequence of turning away from concrete political relationships of hierarchy, power, and violence, which have been analysed in the framework of queer-of-colour and queer-diasporic critiques. Galloway rightly reminds us of the

156

critique that Frantz Fanon made in 1952 in his famous essay ‘The Fact of Blackness’: ‘Ontology – once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside – does not permit us to understand the being of the black man.’16 Ontology enquires into being, but it does not help us to understand what it means to be black. The same is true for the ontologizing of queerness in the name of a queer ecology: it does not help us to understand what it means to be queer. Now the return to the subject does not represent a way out that is either viable or desirable. Galloway thus looks for a possible alternative queer theory of ontology, finding it in the connection between queerness and collectivity. This alternative queer theory of knowledge would not be queer per se, but would nonetheless offer sufficient space for queerness, that is, for other life forms and beings in the world. Galloway provides two possible methodological directions that might bring us to such a queer theory of ontology. One starts from research on intersectionality and is oriented toward exploring differences and toward the question of how we might conceive of a collective that does not reduce the heterogeneity of experiences and modes of living, but embraces them in their complexity. He sees possible points of connection here to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of the multitude. The second direction starts from the reverse perspective, defining the collective not in terms of a radical difference, but in terms of a radical commonality. Much like in Alain Badiou’s work, queer ontology is here construed as radical equality, which nonetheless must relate to the axiomatic demonstration of insufficiency, that is, the limited functionality of the category of identity.

16

Frantz Fanon, ‘The Fact of Blackness’, in Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2008), pp. 82–109, here p. 82.

17

Rosenberg 2014 (footnote 1), p. 18.

18

Ibid., p. 9.

19

Ibid., pp. 2–3, p. 6.

Galloway thus construes the alternative queer theory of ontology as a queer communism. And in fact Rosenberg links his critique of the ontologizing of queerness with a turn to the collective. That which is waiting to be rediscovered in the theories of materialism and the ontological alienation of life under capitalism is not, as he underscores, the subject or the human, but the collective.17 Like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Rosenberg asserts that ‘society’, which is to say, ‘the commons’ – alluding to the title of a collection of essays by Moten and Harney, The Undercommons – and the collective are under fire.18 Historicity, Fanatical Approach What Galloway overlooks, however, in his orientation to Hardt and Negri’s concept of the multitude on the one hand and to Badiou’s radical equality on the other, is that for Rosenberg the thought of collectivity does not only presume complex understandings of equality, identity, and difference, but also that his collective is conceived historically. Indeed, Rosenberg links his critique of the ontologizing of queerness with the reminder that the conditions under which we live can only be conceived as changeable if we view them as historical.19 Correspondingly, the accusation that the ontological turn in the humanities and cultural studies is about a ‘theoretical primitivism that presents itself as a methodological avant-garde’ goes in two directions 157

20

Ibid., p. 2

21

This critique is aimed at Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s practice of science and technology studies in Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979). Haraway writes, in the introduction to her book Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York, London: Routledge, 1989), p. 6: ‘The first temptation comes from the most active tendencies in the social studies of science and technology. For example, the French prominent analyst of science, Bruno Latour, radically rejects all forms of epistemological realism and analyses scientific practice as thoroughly social and constructionist. [...] Fundamentally, from the perspective of Laboratory Life, scientific practice is literary practice, writing, based on jockeying for the power to stabilize definitions and standards for claiming something to be the case. [...] The accounts of the scientists about their own processes become ethnographic data, subject to cultural analysis.’

22

Haraway 1995 (footnote 2).

that in fact meet up in the end. The one direction is the position presented above, of an objective world beyond and independent of the human, which goes along with the idealization of this world and its objects as primitive, queer, sexual, and productive. Rosenberg, as he polemically puts it, sees this as the inscription of a colonialist settler rationality in the centre of queer theory.20 The second direction of Rosenberg’s critique is the loss of feeling for the historicity of the conditions in which we live and under which we create our concepts. In fact, the idea of a terra nullius, of a primitivity that lies outside the realm of human – such as Barad’s queer matter – corresponds with the idea that a change in history is only possible as a jump out of the history of humanity. This apocalyptic trait can be seen in part in the urgency of the demand for a reversal and renunciation of modernism. This is not only found in the proponents of a queer or feminist materialism, such as Elisabeth Grosz or Rosi Braidotti, but much more explicitly in those proponents of the new materialisms for whom the critical concerns of feminism and queer theory do not play any role. Instead of critique and transcendence, which are associated with modernism and postmodernism, affirmation and immanence are stipulated. Rosenberg drafts an alternative method, the ‘fanatical approach’ mentioned above. This means a methodological approach that discloses its own interests and advocates for its own commitment. It is a methodological operation that attempts to change power structures by trying to encourage collective action. For Rosenberg, asking into the historicity of the conditions under which we live also means asking into the conjunctural conditions that generate, reinforce, and support our wishes and our desires. And it means looking into how we might change these conditions. Rosenberg draws our attention to the material conditions of our wishes and our desires, which in the end are not just a question of production, but also of reproduction, which means ordinary collective survival. Rosenberg also reminds us of the history of queer theory’s emergence in the early 1990s from the Act Up movement. To summarize, Rosenberg shifts the focus from the ontologizing of queerness in queer atoms and in the molecular to queer collectivity, and from matter to the material conditions that not only encompass economic conditions, but also the material conditions of affects, memories, wishes, and desire. In doing so, however, the ‘fanatical approach’ that he proposes comes close to the situated knowledges that Donna J. Haraway had already developed in the 1980s. Situated Knowledge and Sympoiesis Counter to the idea that all scientific knowledge is only construction,21 Haraway, in her essay ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’,22 ties back into the strong ecofeminist movement in the 1980s and introduces the idea of the world as an ‘active subject’. For its participation in the process of knowledge, a wide number of evocative figures

158

would be available, with some humour, for feminist visualizations. So the world could be described as a ‘coyote’ and ‘coding trickster’; as a ‘witty agent and actor’23 who has an effect on both the production of bodies and meanings and on the production of knowledge. With this idea and by coining the female cyborg as a composite being between organism and technology, with which she criticized human exceptionalism in her 1985 Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway is considered one of the mentors of the new materialisms. What distinguishes her from them, however, as will be clear in the following, is that she holds onto the concept of situated knowledges, emphatically pointing out that critical thinking is necessary for survival, precisely in this historical situation. In the following I would thus like to work with her latest intervention in the discourse about the Anthropocene and the renaissance of the Gaia hypothesis, while also keeping in mind Rosenberg’s critique of the ontologizing of queerness, to look into a possible approach for a queer media ecology.

23

Ibid., p. 596.

24

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, ‘Kritik des Anthropozentrismus und die Politik des Lebens bei Canguilhem und Haraway’, in Astrid DeuberMankowsky, Christoph F.E. Holzhey (eds.), Situiertes Wissen und regionale Epistemologie. Zur Aktualität Georges Canguilhems und Donna J. Haraways (Vienna, Berlin: Turia+Kant, 2013), pp. 105–121.

In doing so I am coming right back to the questions of methodology and the relationship between ontology and epistemology. In English, epistemology initially means a theory of cognition quite generally. This suggests an equation between epistemology and classical Erkenntnistheorie, for instance in Kant, but it conceals the difference between classical Erkenntnistheorie and the form of cognitive and terminological history, introduced by Gaston Bachelard and Jean Cavaillès in the first third of the twentieth century and then further developed by Georges Canguilhem, which is known by the name épistemologie in France, where it influenced the history of philosophy in the twentieth century. Now, as I have explained elsewhere, there are two central moments above all others that connect epistemology with the concept of situated knowledges.24 These are also the same moments that distinguish the concept of situated knowledges from the approaches of the new materialisms. The first moment is related to the postulate of the regionality of knowledge, introduced by Georges Canguilhem, while the second relates to the historicity of scientific knowledge. By the postulate of regionality Canguilhem is referring to the fact that there are different forms of applying rationality, making it possible to set up an entire geography of these different forms. It is, however, not only the geographically different applications of rationality that come into play with the concept of the regional, but also the specificity of the scientific disciplines that are to be taken into account in the relevant regional epistemologies. In contrast to those philosophies committed to an ontology, epistemology sets up points of articulation between knowledge and practices and their specific materialities, tracing the new and unresolved questions and problems that are brought into play through these connections. For Canguilhem, the historicity of scientific knowledge emerges from insights into the radical randomness of the history of life and the living. The consequence is that neither the history of life nor the history 159

25

Georges Canguilhem, ‘Der Gegenstand der Wissenschaftsgeschichte’, in Wolf Lepenies (ed.), Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Epistemologie. Gesammelte Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), pp. 22–37, here p. 30.

26

Haraway 1995 (footnote 2), p. 96. pp. 595–596.

27

Ibid., p. 596.

28

This is not the place to go into the connection of ontology and epistemology to an ‘onto-epistemology’, as suggested by Karen Barad in her version of a new queer materialism. I would, however, at least like to point out that Barad does not understand ‘epistemology’ in the French tradition developed by Bachelard et al., but as the traditional philosophical theory of cognition. This explains why the dimension of the historicity of knowledge and the specific difference between philosophy and the sciences does not play any role for Barad. 29

Donna J. Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble’, 2014, http://open transcripts.org/transcript/ anthropocene-capitalocenechthulucene/ (accessed 28.8.2020).

30

Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2016).

of the sciences of life are linear and uniform. Neither of them possess a finality, but emerge from constantly renewed attempts and errors. For epistemology this means that their actual object is not scientific objectivity, also not the object beyond cognition, but the historicity of scientific knowledge.25 This point is central. For the historicity of scientific discourse is not simple pregiven; rather it must always be created anew. And this is precisely the task both of epistemology and also of situated knowledges. The active constitution and repeated production of the historicity of scientific knowledge opens knowledge to the potentiality of the new – or, as Haraway, Canguilhem, Deleuze, and ultimately also Whitehead put it, in the direction of a thinking that is completely distinct from the production of scientific knowledge. One consequence of this obligation to the historicity of scientific discourse for the concept of situated knowledges is that objectivity and rationality do not strive, as was long the case, for disengagement and impartiality, but for consciously taking risks: ‘Objectivity is not about disengagement, but about mutual and usually unequal structuring, about taking risks in a world where “we” are permanently mortal, that is, not in “final” control.’26 The situated knowledges are situated exactly in the sense that epistemology is regional. It is about setting up points of articulation between knowledge and practices and their specific materialities, about presenting how the different technological, material, economic, social, and knowledge components interact in the concrete historical situation, producing historical realities. In her essay, Haraway describes the emergence of biological bodies with the following words: ‘The various contending biological bodies emerge at the intersection of biological research and writing, medical and other business practices, and technology, such as the visualization technologies enlisted as metaphors in this essay.’27 A partial perspective is a participatory, engaged perspective. For Haraway the partiality of knowledge contains the requirement to confront the problem of responsibility for generating all visual practices. We will shortly see that the concept of situated knowledges also, and precisely in this requirement, differs in several respects from the apocalyptic approaches of the new materialisms, their understanding of time and history, and their lack of relation to the historicity of scientific knowledge.28 Anthropocene versus Chthulucene In May 2014 Haraway gave a programmatic lecture entitled ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble’,29 at a conference in Santa Cruz on the topic of ‘Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet’. It is one of a series of lectures that Haraway gave starting in 2013, and which form the basis of her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.30 In her lecture, Haraway formulates a clear critique of the usage of the term Anthropocene and the renaissance of the Gaia hypothesis. The Gaia hypothesis, which was developed in the 1960s by the chemist and bio-physicist James Lovelock, on the one hand means that the

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Earth and its atmosphere as a whole can be viewed as a living creature, since the biosphere creates circumstances that simultaneously facilitate the reproduction of life and the evolution of complex organisms. On the other hand, however, the understanding that this notion of life is based on is system-theoretical and thus purely functionalist. To put it another way, the Earth is viewed as a giant self-maintaining, autopoetic system, which, as Lovelock sought to support with the computer simulation Daisyworld, only functions through feedback processes. The Gaia hypothesis is, as Lovelock underscores, completely compliant with the understanding of a scientific rationality, which in his sense means a cybernetic one. The name Gaia refers to the divine figure of the great mother Gaia in Greek mythology.

31

Bruno Latour, Face à Gaia. Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique (Paris: La Découverte – Les Empecheurs, 2015).

32

Latour 2015 (footnote 31), pp. 373–431.

33

Haraway 2014 (footnote 29).

In the context of the new materialisms the Gaia hypothesis has gained new momentum above all through Bruno Latour and his turn to ecology in the EU-funded research project ‘Modes of Existence’.31 With reference to Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, Latour proposes a secular Gaia religion and a Gaia politics based on conflict. Latour’s Gaia politics polemically proposes the Anthropocene as an age of ultimate decision, as a state of exception in the sense of a war of all against all. Alongside her role as a secular goddess, Gaia here also gets the role of an enemy in the sense of Carl Schmitt’s hostis, which means a publicly-recognized – even political – enemy who gains respect and is taken seriously as an adversary. It is Latour’s strategically motivated apocalypse, as he himself claims, to claim a state in which everyone is called on to act politically, meaning – again with Schmitt – to make decisions.32 In her lecture Haraway initially points to the historical context of the 1960s, in which Lovelock connected his biophysical idea of the Earth as an autopoietic system with the divine figure of Gaia. It was the period of the Cold War, the moon landing, and the Apollo missions, in which the social imaginary was marked by technological images showing the Earth from the distant cyborg-outer space perspective of the astronauts as a blue and life-giving planet, in which Lennart Nilsson’s photographs of foetuses in their amniotic sacs were seen across the globe, and in which we were looking, to no avail, for life on Mars. Haraway comments on the historical connection between outer space research, NASA, technological images, cybernetic systems theories, and the Cold War with the sentence: ‘Gaia is a figure who emerges into the consciousness of the Anthropos from space.’33 She is a terrestrial figure, but not a female figure: Gaia is an It, depicting the metabolism of a planet that is a whole, that represents an autopoietic system. Following this, Haraway takes up a comment by the biologist Lynn Margulis, who participated both in the creation of the Gaia hypothesis and in the development and publication of microbiological endosymbiotic theory, which for Haraway represents an alternative, future-oriented, anti-apocalyptic reference to systems theory, built on 161

34

Ibid.

Fig. 1

Rising Earth viewed from the Moon, NASA 1969.

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sym-poiesis rather than auto-poiesis. According to statements made by her students, Margulis is supposed to have said that Gaia should be viewed as symbiosis from outer space. Haraway picks up on this in view of one of the NASA photographs that has taken its place in history, showing the rising Earth from the moon (fig. 1): ‘That is the perspective from which Gaia is the figure of the Anthropocene.’34 Haraway’s approach shows very well how the methodology of situated knowledges proceeds when it places points of articulation between knowledge and practices and their respective materialities, in order to present how the different technological, material, economic, and social components of knowledge interplay in the concrete historical situation, and what it means to take on responsibility for the technologies of visualization. Initially Haraway shows that the Gaia hypothesis is nothing more than an applied systems theory, which explains how order emerges from disorder, and how this order contributes to the creation of a self in the sense of autopoiesis, by distinguishing outside from inside. This is a systems theory dealing with homeostasis and the limits of homeostatic processes. Now at the same time, a systems theory and its logical and technological deployment of feedback, data gathering, and evaluation presents scientific methods that can be used by such research organizations and political institutions as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which scientifically seeks to prove the hypothesis of the Anthropocene and in doing so brings about the geo-historical figure of the Anthropos. The figures of the geo-historical Anthropos, of the Anthropocene, and of Gaia belong, following Haraway’s argu­ment, to the same historical situation as the Cold War, in which the life sciences were dominated by systems theory. This shows that scien­tif­ic dispositifs and operations that belong to the concepts of the Anthro­pocene, to the Gaia hypothesis, and to their global framework – systems theory, and the theory of autopoiesis – are historically and materially specific, and are therefore restricted, both with regard to their mythological potential (Gaia) and in all other respects. They belong, in other words, and as clearly documented by the Gaia politics of Latour, to the twentieth century and to the period of the Cold War. These sciences – with their focus on self-genesis and competition – are, and here we come to Haraway’s central proposition, extremely inappropriate for the kind of thinking that is crucial for our period today. We have already seen why the Gaia hypothesis is so limited. But why is the concept of the Anthropocene so inappropriate? Hara-

way cites two reasons. First, it is not the figure of the Anthropos that causes all the processes that are leading to the menacing collapse of the ecosystem; if we wanted to find a word for the causes, it would be more appropriate to speak of the Capitalocene, the age of capitalism. In place of the figure of Gaia, which belongs to the Anthropocene and the age of systems theory and autopoiesis, Haraway suggests Potnia Theron or Medusa (fig. 2) as powerful mythological figures for the imperilled time in which we live. Potnia Theron is a female divinity from antiquity, in charge of protecting wild animals, mythical creatures, and hybrid forms. At the same time, she is a figure of creation and destruction. The more familiar Medusa is one of the three Gorgons, a monster with snakes for hair, and was the only mortal among the three sisters. Both Potnia Theron and Medusa are chthonic goddesses who belong to the Earth. In Greek mythology chthonic goddesses belong to the underworld, they bring death while simultaneously providing life and fertility. They are the opposite of Gaia as represented in the image of the Blue Planet. They are not autopoietic systems and do not form any kind of globe, but are internally divided, ambiguous, simultaneously both good and bad and then neither. For Haraway they are both figures that fit with a biology that is less interested in autopoiesis than in processes of symbiosis – of sympoiesis. Haraway is interested in a theory of evolution that follows Lynn Margulis’s theory that the driving force of life is not ubiquitous competition between creatures, but subtle cooperation among them. Thus Haraway suggests, in a completely comical way, understanding our current situation as Chthulucene rather than Anthropocene – although she is not, as she emphasizes elsewhere, orienting herself to H.P. Lovecraft’s myth of Cthulhu, but to her chthonic goddess figures. Instead of a polemical apocalypse, Haraway votes for mobilizing chthonic forces in order to compost the waste of the Anthropocene – to transform it into something new and to exterminate the Capitalocene. Now it would be short-sighted if we were to understand the concept of situated knowledges merely as a duty to orient ourselves to the historicity of scientific knowledge, to the current state of the sciences – in this case microbiology, which is more interested in symbiosis than in autopoiesis. I would turn this around and claim that the procedures of microbiology accommodate the requirements of the kind of thinking that the current situation demands. Haraway herself makes this clear at the beginning of her lecture, when she draws on Virginia Woolf and Hannah Arendt to insist: ‘Think we must!’ If, according to Haraway, there were a period in which precise and serious reflection were needed, then it would be now. Thinking, according to Arendt, is the capacity and the will to confront ourselves with the consequences of our own statements and actions – at the same time, this means living with a view to the future without anticipating it. For Haraway, the quite particular urgency of thinking emerges from the threat that arises from the singularity of thinking by reducing it to functionality. In her concern about the singularity of thinking, Haraway, the representative of situated knowledges, meets Canguilhem, the representative of regional epistemology.

Fig. 2

Medusa on Athena’s shield, Roman copy of the original in the Parthenon, Glyptothek Museum in Munich

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An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires and Distractions: The Drag of Physicality in a #digitalphysical Hybrid Ecology Elly Clarke

1

Stelarc: ‘What is important is not a body’s identity, but rather its connectivity. Not its mobility of location, but rather its interface and operation.’ Performance by Stelarc in Second Life, 2011, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=yA-371qD wBgm (accessed 17.1.2018). 2

https://soundcloud.com/ser-gina/ tracks (accessed 17.1.2018).

What is important is not a body’s identity, but rather its connec­ tivity. Not its mobility of location but rather its interface and operation Stelarc1 As an artist, curator and someone who has been around long enough to remember life before the internet, I’m interested in the changing role, feel and experience of the physical body and object in our increasingly digitally-mediated and experienced world. I’m interested in the points at which being physical feels like a drag, and in the impact this has on the way we move, think, relate, interact. I explore this through photography (analogue and digital), performance, video, audio, music, text, curating and participatory/community-based projects. And through #Sergina, a gender-ambiguous, multi-bodied, border-straddling drag queen, who sings and performs songs about love, lust and loneliness2 – with her mobile phone always in her hand. Appearing at first in solo form/at, #Sergina was soon shared out, becoming a wearable, transferable identity, played by several different people. #Sergina is at once physical and digital, online and offline, singular and plural, embodied and disembodied.

Fig. 1 (opposite page) An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires and Distractions at Munich Academy of Fine Art, 2016, Google Docs Script, Page 5 of 14. Fig. 2

Duplicate…

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3

Arthur Kroker, Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 3. 4

Carolee Schneeman in ‘Ask the Goddess’ (performance from 1991), quoted in Amelia Jones/Tracey Warr (ed.), The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon, 2000), p 17.

Fig. 3

Screen Shot from Google Hangout Connected Tech Rehearsal before first ever performance of #Sergina’s Stimulatingly Sexy Simultaneous Simulation of Herself on 11th November 2015, with #Sergina played by Elly Clarke at The Lowry Centre, Salford Quays; Raul de Nieves at Secret Project Robot, Brooklyn; Liz Rosenfeld at Monster Ronson’s Ichiban Karaoke, Berlin; Kate Spence at The Island, Bristol and Vladimir Bjelicic at G12 Hub in Belgrade.

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In a society that gets kicks out of images of its own kicks, I playfully and somewhat presumptuously propose #Sergina as everyone’s selfie and no one’s. She is fully herself and yet never can be herself, as the one self does not exist, and never did. #Sergina is up for grabs, and yet she is untouchable. She is an image and yet she is flawed (and confined) by her flesh/es. She is original and she is a copy. She is a self-sculpted C-celeb and she is no one. Her identity is viral, fluid and amendable, with the potential to self-replicate, given the right conditions. Her self is worn (out), on different bodies. She is the epitome of femininity, and yet she fails at this completely. She competes with her own image, and usually loses. She speaks in quotes, – (mostly) of herself, and (sometimes) of others – but does not distinguish between the two: everything is for the taking.

As debates around AI and robotics relate to ever more aspects of our lives, it isn’t a huge leap to wonder whether we might soon be able to do away with our bodies altogether. Stelarc talks about the body’s value as being more to do with its connectivity than any organic form or function. Arthur Kroker takes this a step further, suggesting that fleshy physicality is but a figment of the imagination: ‘nothing is as imaginary as the material body’.3 However, no matter how many tasks are outsourced to machines, we are – at least for now – stuck with/in our bodies. And these bodies are still charged, and political. Carolee Schneeman states, ‘Go back to the body, which is where all the splits in Western Culture occur’.4 And it is this tension – the sense that being free of a body would be easier on the one hand (why be in only one place at once; why show your tired face when

you can show a filtered, edited, better-looking, digital version?), and the impossibility of achieving this on the other, (who or what am I without a body?) that I – and #Sergina – like to play with. By proposing that a single identity need not be confined to a single body, however, a certain type of slippage emerges, regarding agency, context and commodification. I understand narcissism as the engine behind most social media platforms and #Sergina’s multi-bodiedness is an attempt to sidestep the capitalist cult of the individual, upon which narcissism depends. Although it is of course a circle: #Sergina is also the very embodiment of self-obsession, of selfie culture: her nails, her hair, her handsome boy entourage needs to be documented and shared – but it brings her back only ever to herself.

5

From a proposal for a performance not yet made entitled How are you? Proposal for a Physical digital Viral Transference of Identity, by #Sergina (plural): https:// docs.google.com/document/d/1dvJ pVP66g9tMVB8JBiq4zVwKlBapu7UJWV85O1mpgo0/edit?usp=sharing (accessed 17.1.2018).

The digital image plays an increasingly important role in the creation, performance and presentation of identity – to such a degree that the physical body can find itself overshadowed or upstaged by its omnipresent digital descriptions. Where the digital body flies to people and places unimaginable, the organic body, clunky in its physicality, drags behind: archaic and almost rotten in its inability to be in more than one place at any one time. The digital image allows – and encourages – identity to be plural and promiscuous. Intimacy is dragged up and shared. And meanwhile (as proven by the Cambridge Analytica scandal) our data is understood as our most valuable asset: each individual seen as no more than an orgy of algorithms, which un/invited guests are increasingly paying (or not paying) to play (with). And we have to keep up. With each new popular technological development comes the necessity of a revision (upgrade) of concepts and practices of privacy and intimacy, as well as presence and absence, in ways that are personal and political, public and private, state driven and individual. However, just as the technologies we use feed off us and the data that we generate, and leak, so are we evolving (to) them. The relationship is symbiotic – resulting in A NEVER-ENDING NAVIGATION OF ZEROS AND BUMPING UP AGAINST AN UN/COMFORTABLE ORGY OF THE ABJECT DETRITUS OF PHYSICALITY: CELLS AND BLOOD AND PUS AND BONES AND GRISTLE AND HARD ONS AND EJACULATE AND PISS AND SHIT AND TEARS AND SWEAT AND SKIN.5 This is my take on the #digitalphysical hybrid ecology of our existence.

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DARLINGS, I’M READY FOR MY CLOSEUP

6

Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, ‘You’re Never Alone With Your Mobile Phone: Experiences of Intimacy’, in Pascal Gielen (ed.), Understanding Territoriality: Identity Place and Possession (Brighton: Fabrica, 2017), pp. 106–113, https://understanding territoriality.files.wordpress.com/ 2015/05/understanding_territoriality _identity_place__posession.pdf (accessed 17.1.2018). 7

‘An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires and Distractions’, lecture by #Sergina (plural) with Elly Clarke and Vladimir Bjeličić, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=-dpA6hl U8Z4 (accessed 17.1.2018).

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Moving a finger over the phone screen from one side to the other, stroking a face of a lover or a friend is the same gesture that reveals just how close we are to others and how close we become with things always within our reach. Magdalena Tyz·lik-Carver6 For my lecture performance in Munich I wanted to find ways to blur the boundaries and the distinction between what is live and what isn’t, by lecturing over (entlang) the one I had performed and recorded on (web)camera two weeks earlier with my long-term collaborator Vladimir Bjelicˇic´.7 With both versions of this lecture recorded via Google Hangout/YouTube Live, the Munich performance became a kind of repetition (reproduction) of its earlier self, but with four bodies rather than two: two (apparently) live, two recorded. The Munich lecture was a live screenshare of this older lecture woven in with the current Google Hangout with Bjelicˇic´, the action on stage and other things shown by #Sergina on the screen.

Fig. 4 (opposite page) Still from live feed of An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires and Distractions at Munich Academy of Fine Arts, showing Vladimir Bjeličić as #Sergina, performing live from Belgrade via Google Hangout, 16th November 2016. Fig. 5

Still from live feed of An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires and Distractions at Munich Academy of Fine Arts, showing Elly Clarke as #Sergina performing live in Munich, with Frauke Zabel and Judith Neun­ häuserer as Handsome Boys, 16th November 2016.

Fig. 6

Still from An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires and Distractions: A Love Story To Myself, performed and filmed simultaneously in Berlin/ Belgrade, 31st October 2016.

Fig. 7

Still from live feed of An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires and Distractions at Munich Academy of Fine Arts, showing Vladimir Bjeličić from pre-recorded video performance An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires and Distractions: A Love Story To Myself, shot in Berlin/ Belgrade, 31st October 2016.

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Vladimir was at home in Belgrade during the lecture, as he was when we shot the video; I was in Berlin for the video, in Munich for the performance. As with all #Sergina’s simultaneous networked performances to date, both Bjelicˇic´ and I were wearing the same outfit (designed by Berlin-based Patricia Muriale8), and the same makeup and wigs, following a script based on #Sergina’s song texts edited collaboratively via Google Docs.9 Comments came back that the audience was unsure whether Vladimir was a second person at all (it could have been voice altering tech and different makeup), and if so, whether s/he was truly physically present (online) in that same moment or not.

8

Patricia Muriale designed #Sergina’s costume for the first edition of #Sergina’s Stimulatingly Sexy Simultaneous Simulation of Herself, commissioned by the Lowry in Salford Quays in collaboration with Birmingham Open Media and SHOUT festival, performed at the opening night of digital art exhibition Right Here Right Now and simultaneously at Monster Ronson’s Ichiban Karaoke in Berlin (with Liz Rosenfeld), at the G12 Hub in Belgrade (with Vladimir Bjeličić), at the Secret Project Robot Art Experiment in Brooklyn (with Raul de Nieves) and at the Island Theatre in Bristol (with Kate Spence), plus Handsome Boys and Tech Girls of any gender in each location. The performance has since been repeated three more times, taking on new cities, with new performers (Thomas Doherty and Katy Pendlebury) and new songs. 9

‘Munich Lecture’, take 2: Google Docs script as performed at the Munich Academy of Arts, November 2016, https://docs.google.com/ document/ d/19SG0QLK73nXQX0HfBC8blnR2Cp8AGnmFXc65W8C MBo/edit?usp=sharing (accessed 17.1.2018).

Fig. 8 (opposite page) An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires and Distractions at Munich Academy of Fine Arts, 2016, Google Docs Script, Page 9 of 14. Fig. 9

Still from live feed of An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires and Distractions at Munich Academy of Fine Arts, showing Elly Clarke (in Munich) and Vladimir Bjeličić (in Belgrade), 2016–17.

Fig. 10

Still from (YouTube archive of) live feed of #Sergina’s Stimulatingly Sexy Simultaneous Simulation of Herself at The Marlborough and Places Beginning with B, showing Vladimir Bjeličić (in Belgrade); Elly Clarke (at The Marlborough Theatre in Brighton); Thomas Doherty (in Berlin) and Katy Pendlebury (in Brighton), 17th September 2017.

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Fig. 11

An Orgy of Algorithms: The Collapse, performance still mobile phone photo, which was taken and instantaneously uploaded to @serg1na’s Instagram account by Handsome Boy Frauke Zabel.

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‘#Sergina is not an avatar, but a Medusa figure’ In conversation with Elly Clarke and Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky

1

This refers to Astrid DeuberMankowsky’s lecture and Elly Clarke’s performance on 16 November 2016 in Munich, which both took place as part of the international lecture series Hybrid Ecologies.

Marietta Kesting [MK]  Your contributions have very different formats1 – but there are also commonalities, on the one hand at the level of metacritique, as well as in how they reflect on media images. These issues struck me with both of you. What connections did you see, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky? Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky [ADM]  The format of this event is of course an experiment. When I watched Elly Clarke’s #Sergina videos on YouTube while preparing for this lecture, it was initially not clear to me what kind of connection there might be to my theoretical call for a practice of situated knowledges. But on the train trip here it suddenly became clear to me: of course – #Sergina is not an avatar, but a Medusa figure. What I mean by this is that #Sergina does not represent an avatar figure, which imitates being-avatar, but acts as a figure in the mimetic repetition of the networked lifeforms of the internet. So it’s not just the snake hair and the large red mouth that are reminiscent of the image of Medusa, the similarity also emerges from expanding the figure into many #Serginas, which, in the sense of Haraway’s chthonic goddesses, can be good, but also evil; which are split within themselves and earthbound in this split. This also includes that we never exactly know what space #Sergina is in: below or above ground, inside or outside, in the virtual world or the real one. I would link this perspective to the performance and ask: ‘What stories can be told by creating exactly this character?’ Occasionally these stories have also become quite inscrutable, for instance, in ‘Waiting for’, in which you do nothing more than wait. ‘Waiting for a reply, waiting for ice cream, waiting for something, waiting for an erection, waiting for a revolution.’ 173

2

https://soundcloud.com/ser-gina/ instantaneousculture (accessed 17.1.2018). 3

See Sergina: #Waiting for Ice Cream, https://soundcloud.com/ ser-gina/waiting (accessed 17.1.2018).

The motif of waiting is an important motif in art, but also in the philosophy of history. Waiting contains a messianic moment. Waiting means: ‘I wait and see what happens.’ So waiting is anti-apocalyptic and open to the future. Elly Clarke [EC]  This question of Medusa is very interesting. I think as far as technology goes we are all Medusas in some way – we are seduced by it, but sometimes we also see ourselves reflected back in it, in a not terribly flattering light. The main thing I’m interested in exploring through #Sergina is this fight that we find ourselves in on a daily basis between our physical presence (in the world) and our online presence (digitally), and to whom or to what (or where) we direct our attention – the people we encounter online, or those we are physically with. The more technology invades – or assists – our lives, the more we find ourselves as not always in one place. Of course, waiting also happens all the time. Today my flight was delayed by two and a half hours, and the more I make work about this, the more I see that this idea of Instantaneous Culture2 can never be truly fulfilled. Waiting really goes with technology. Despite faster broadband, faster connections, you’re still waiting: waiting to download, waiting to upload, waiting to connect,3 for that email, for that response – and meanwhile you’re also still waiting for your life to happen. Within the context of feminist history, waiting is also a big theme, illustrated most literally by Faith Wilding’s performance from 1974 – waiting for a first period, waiting for a boyfriend, waiting to get married, waiting for the belly to swell, and so on – although I actually wasn’t aware of this performance when I wrote that song.

MK  I would like to come back to the question of queer subjectivization and queer subjectivity, which plays an important role for both of the presentations today. In her Chthulucene text Donna Haraway demands: ‘Make kin not babies!’ I found this to be a fascinating idea, which can be used ecologically, connected with the problematic that there are too many people on the planet. But it also raises the question of a different kind of collectivity. So I wanted to ask you, Ms. DeuberMankowsky: ‘Why is there no return to the subject, as you suggest in your lecture, and what subject do you mean?’

I really do believe that the return to the subject as a reference point of criticism would be a dead end. The subjectless turn happened for particular reasons. This has to do with the fact that the reference to a subject ‘writ large’ is connected to an identity politics that can’t get by without creating exclusions. I understand queer theory in part as a critique of the biopolitical processes of making subjects. Queer theory arose in the 1990s, at the same time as the Act Up movement. At the time it was fundamentally about the question of subjectivization and the question of which subjects get recognized. Judith Butler’s turn to vulnerability as a constitutive moment of a non-excluding subjec­ tivization is influenced by the discussions at the time. The resistance to

ADM

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AIDS politics was linked to questions of how this politics was related to the interests of pharmaceutical concerns and with health policy. And what further connections there are between this form of biopolitics and drug policies and racism. Why do the lives and deaths of people addicted to drugs not count? Or of people who are black, who are poor, or gay? This gave rise to processes of collective solidarity. And it is exactly this question that is at issue today as well. How can we conceive and facilitate collective processes of solidarity? In this context I would like to come back to waiting once again. It was very nice that Elly Clarke’s performance, as much as technology is central, is indeed about everyday survival strategies, like ‘I want to have a coffee’, ‘I have to go piss.’ Survival strategies are important for queer issues.

4

The Women’s Health Movement was founded in the USA in the 1970s under the slogan ‘Our Bodies Ourselves.’ See also https://www. ourbodiesourselves.org/history/ womens-health-movement/ (accessed 18.1. 2018).

EC  Yes, so it’s that kind of clunkiness of the physical body that is felt in the environment of the digital that makes physicality in itself feel almost queer, because it’s bordering on the abject. The physical body gets tired, it bleeds, it needs to piss like you said, and so on. And meanwhile we have our digital bodies, which you can improve with your Instagram filter and look way better on Instagram than you do in real life. You see it also in the likes that certain images attract, and how many point to an idealized version of the body. So certainly the actual physical body is beginning to feel more and more old fashioned: you can only ever be in one place at once! The more virtual and augmented realities appear and become normalised within everyday life, the more possible it becomes to be in a different dimension than that of your physical body, and the more queer it’s beginning to feel to actually just be present, in one dimension only.

Audience 1  My question would be, if the subject becomes abolished or is abolished, how can we then still think collectively? ADM 

I don’t think anyone wants to abolish the subject, the point today is as little about abolishing the subject as Foucault is about abolishing people. Rather, the question is how we speak about people and subjects, or how and with what dispositifs we relate ourselves to ourselves. The point is not how to abolish the subject, the question is how we think that we might do politics – how, for instance, not only to describe collectivities, but also to practice and help to generate them in the way that we do theory and produce knowledge. In this context I think it’s very interesting to consider how the women’s movement at the beginning of the 1970s related to the woman as a subject of solidarity. Many women took to the streets against §218, saying ‘We have all had abortions’ and even documenting this with their own signatures. Whether or not they personally had had an abortion. They therefore performatively created a subject woman, which previously had not existed. The woman as a strong political subject that calls into question the separation of public and private. This made it possible to make quite new demands and to produce new knowledge, just think of the Women’s Health Movement.4 This unified subject, this we-women was, however, then critiqued and 175

5

Stefano Harvey, Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, New York, Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013). 6

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 91.

rejected, and rightly so, by those women whose survival strategies and stories were not included there. So it became clear that in feminism we would have to speak differently about women and about the subject woman. We begin talking about differences, about different life forms and conditions of power and domination. Then came the queer movement, which on the one hand made reference to feminism, to the texts and reflections and traditions and politics that had been developed in feminism, and on the other hand radically interrogated the relation to the subject woman once again. Only this meant the turn away from the subject. But when we go so far – and this is my critical approach, and also the approach of Rosenberg – as to say ‘the difference itself is already queer’, then we’re missing a counter pole. This counter pole can be the neediness of the individual body, the wishes, desires, sexuality, as fleeting as these things may always be.

Jenny Nachtigall  I wanted to come back to the question of method­ ology and one’s own (epistemological) situatedness, to its political consequences, which you, along with Rosenberg and Haraway, have insisted on. I found this approach to be enormously important with regard to the contemporary discussion about ecology, since the privilege granted here to ontological perspectives often seems to happen at the expense of epistemological ones. When you were just speaking of the question of the form of one’s own knowledge production, you came back to the moment of collectivity that is also absolutely central to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons,5 which you refer to in your lecture. I’m interested in how collectivity can be conceived as a question of (epistemological, political) form in one’s own theoretical work, and whether this question allows us to be open to a different understanding of media ecology? ADM 

Perhaps first a word about Fred Moten and Stefano Harney: in many respects the work by the two of them fits to the question of how collectivity can be conceived and at the same time practiced. Moten is a poet and Harney is a theorist. Together they write theoretical essays, but at the same time they pay attention to the musicality and rhythm of the texts. In their essay collection The Undercommons they ask how we can tie into strategies of survival and solidarity and to radical black resistance politics in order to facilitate collectivity under the conditions of neoliberalism.

Susanne Witzgall  How much, Elly, do media technologies also have a mediating, pleasure-prone, and playful side? I’m thinking of Rosi Braidotti, who makes a plea in her book Posthumanism for a becoming-machine in the sense of a ‘playful and pleasure-prone relationship to technology that is not based on functionalism’.6 For her, today’s machines can also be devices ‘that both capture and process forces and energies, facilitating interrelations, multiple connections and assemblages’. According to Braidotti the merger of the human with the technological can lead to ‘a new transversal compound, a new kind of 176

eco-sophical unity’.7 I got the impression that there are similar plea­ sure-prone and joyful aspects in your works that create transversal structures, and that do not only have a critical view of media technologies. EC 

No, it definitely has two sides: good as well as bad. It enables people to come together, especially in terms of queers growing up in rural contexts, which don’t provide access to the kind of ideas they need to know, and for political reasons too. Of course it brings people together, but the thing is that you get sucked in – it’s a two-way situation. I think it’s really difficult to imagine now life before the internet and before the online community. And what happened last week with Trump … the internet kind of acts twofold: on the one hand it’s this chaos of people’s reactions; on the other hand, you can arrange to meet other people to get together to talk about what’s happening – or to demonstrate. Yesterday a friend organized a group where we just spent three hours talking in someone’s house. That ended up being off-line, and we were very much talking about the necessity to actually talk off-line. And of course where it can go in the future in terms of medicine and therapy is also very interesting. As well as your point – the potential for a post-human resistance, or robotic resistance in a way. I’m intrigued by the idea that if you are ‘post’, you’re not human; you lose your whole burden of history, which is kind of what the futurists did. When the futurists said in the beginning of the twentieth century to smash the museum, get rid of the burden of the Renaissance et cetera. That idea really inspired me, because of the way we interact with machines we are becoming more like machines, we are thinking more like machines, we are moving towards what Donna Haraway was describing in the 1980s.

7

Ibid., pp. 95–96.

8

Donna Haraway, ‘Anthroprocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene’, in Environmental Humanities 6 (2015), pp. 159–165, here p. 161.

MK  Yet in one of her recent texts Haraway says: ‘We are all compost and not post-human.’8 This goes in the opposite direction of affirming the body, its physicality and the decay. You can interpret the cyborg in so many different ways.

Audience 2  Ms. Deuber-Mankowsky, in your lecture we encounter Gaia as an ancient primal mother. I would be interested in whether there are other images, other (non-western) mythologies, that should be considered from a perspective of cultural justice? ADM 

This critical inquiry into the origin of these figures that are called up time and again is very important. In fact, Gaia, Podnia Theron, and Medusa are goddesses adopted from the area that is now India, that is, they can’t be assigned to Greek mythology. And of course they, in turn, have antecedents. Maria Muhle  I would like to come back to the question from Jenny Nachtigall with regard to the constellation of ontology and epistemology in your lecture, which you want to see as different methodologies. 177

Although of course it’s not a matter of asking who works cleanly and who not, and what methodologies are correct. Instead the problem tends to be that the so-called new ontologies assume that there might be something like being unmediated in their access to the world or the real. You also say at the beginning that there is the paradigm of being unmediated, the idea that one could access the real, the thing in itself … all these nice things that we presumably can do by now, if we only finally forget Kant, for instance. In this sense the methodology question actually also raises a specific media question by assuming the idea of an unmediated and immediate access, quasi a-mediality, while epistemology in contrast always means the knowledge of something, and thus always conducts fundamental acts of mediation and translation. This of course is also interesting for life ‘under ecological conditions’, since one might also say that this life is always already mediated by its environment and is connected with its environment. And I would say that it is precisely this connecting in which something like ‘queerness’ arises or occurs. To say that ‘the life’ (the matter, the atoms …) is per se queer thus really seems to me to be a difficult statement, and I agree completely with you that it would then be very enticing to go on to say that we no longer need to disentangle queerness as a whole or the twistings of the queer – that is, not to carry out a genealogy of queers, for it is indeed (practically) already in nature, in the atoms, in biology … Either nature is queer, and so are we, or it’s not. Then, however, there is no possibility to produce queer connections, or to queer identities or subjectivities, etc. This is why I find it productive to bring in the perspective of the opposition between epistemology and ontology that you propose once again with regard to media. This brings us also to Susanne’s question of the positive take on media or technology as well as to Braidotti, who is opposed to a cultural-critical perspective on technology, and of course also rightly so. At the same time, we still have to be careful not to restrict media to the communication media, then understanding the difference in a way that either concerns the ana­ logue or the digital, as you insinuated for #Sergina. For I think that the medial is particularly interesting when we conceive it – ecologically – as a mediating process between life, the subject, the individual, and the milieu, a process that is precisely not (or not exclusively) rational (that is, communicative), but emerges much more by means of disruptions and mistakes in communication, that is, in a different epistemology. Perhaps we could say that something like ‘queerness’ in this sense can only be conceived in such a non-rational, non-communicationstheory epistemological paradigm, and precisely not in an ontological paradigm, which in a certain way has a codifying effect? ADM 

Yes, I really agree with you here. I am also convinced that ‘queerness’ and the medial can both be conceived in an epistemological paradigm in which rationality is related to its own non-ground, and that means, as I would emphasize, in an epistemological paradigm that constantly calls up the historicity of these different forms of knowing. Queerness therefore emerges, as you said, mediated by disruptions and mistakes in communication, which, understood as wrong turns

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or detours, contain a productive sense. We can then once again see how important the methodological question is: ‘methodos’ in Greek means nothing more than ‘pursuing’ and ‘clearing a path’. EC  Yes, through media you can also invent new languages, a whole new way of speaking and connecting with different people. We are such an image-heavy, image-obsessed culture. We are becoming digital bodies, and words are becoming less important than images. The whole way we use language has shifted dramatically due to translation software and so on. Of course, if you communicate with people from different countries, using different languages, you can still collaborate on something. You can collaborate in ways that you never would have been able to do before, so it’s also about bringing new forms of collectivity into play, which go perhaps even beyond language, beyond the traditional forms of speech – it can even be just sharing your life on Instagram. It’s also a new way for people to connect with each other and come up with new narratives. And through noticing what people are noticing, and in following certain subjects through different streams (or hashtags), your perspective changes. It takes you beyond your own community.

9

The panel with the contributions by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Elly Clarke had the title Queer Ecologies. This was the second event in the lecture series Hybrid Ecologies during the winter semester 2016/17 at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. See also footnote 1. (Eds.)

Audience 3  What struck me in relation to the various and complex formulations of ‘queer’ is that proportionally the structure of the performance was very reduced, almost sculpturally minimalist in terms of language. At the same time, the performance expanded out of this small cosmos of language and the few characters. It seemed to set in motion something like an evolution. I’m interested in whether you began with a small partial variant, which then was developed further and further? Is there already a script that includes the future, or is the future still open? At any rate I very much liked the dynamics of the sculptural structure, that they grow out of themselves, so to speak – that also of course fits to the topic of ‘queer ecologies’.9 I found it really impressive. EC  It all started with the songs and the music. I was in a band, writing songs about mobile phones, and my band mates got annoyed – like: ‘Can’t she write about something else?’ And then I realized three years later that I wanted to revisit them, so now I work on each song with a different person each time. It really starts with the songs, and the songs become the text and the texts become the hashtags that then link to different people and images through social media. I started out performing just by myself, and then I thought: ‘Well, this is a made-up character, so why does this identity have to be fixed to my body alone?’ Then in 2015 I created a performance entitled #Sergina’s Stimulating Sexy Simultaneous Simulation of Herself, which involved five of us wearing the same clothes, the same wig, the same make up, dancing to the same music, to the same choreography, at the same time, in different cities, all beginning with ‘B’, linked up by Google Hangout and live broadcast via YouTube. The cities this work has been performed in so far are Belgrade, Brooklyn, (the Lowry in Salford Quays),

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Berlin, Birmingham, Brighton, and Bristol. And each city brings with it a very different audience and way of seeing the work. So in that way I love the idea of making the performances really open source, open to hacking even, if people want to do that. Because I’m actually a photographer, and it’s nice to be able to make a piece of work that you absolutely don’t mind if people rip you off and do whatever they want with it. There’s a kind of freedom in that. I have worked with the internet for about twenty years now, doing some early HTML stuff, and there’s something really liberating in going: ‘Here’s the stuff, do with it what you want!’ and let’s see what happens.

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Hybrid Media Archipelagos in Sondra Perry’s Typhoon Coming On and Louis Henderson’s All That is Solid Marietta Kesting

1

Jochen Hörisch, Ende der Vorstellung. Poesie der Medien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999), p. 134. 2

John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 2. 3

Examples include Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Men (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2007), as well as the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, Schwerpunktheft Medienökologien, 14 (2016). 4

Michael Giesecke, Die Entdeckung der kommunikativen Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007).

EARTH, WATER, FIRE, AIR According to the alchemical tradition, the basic elements earth, water, fire, and air were described until well into the nineteenth century as ‘media’, in the sense of ‘lying in between’.1 This terminological history and its shift of meaning after the formation of the periodic system of chemical elements in 1869, however, also takes on a new currency when we use an expanded notion of media, like John Durham Peters, who argued: ‘Media […] are vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible’.2 Following this perspective, the present text takes to the contact zones between media, environment, and technologies, as well as human and non-human agents. The interdependence of technology and culture is manifest in the imaginary images that get consolidated and deployed as cultural metaphors to explain and popularize media technologies. Even if these images often lead to misunderstandings with regard to technological factors, they are highly influential. They determine how we think and act in medialized environments, creating concepts for new realms of technological application. During the manned spaceflights to the moon with the Apollo missions, a new image of the Earth from space became visible and popular: ‘the blue marble’, a planet predominantly covered in water. Since the beginning of the space age the bodies of knowledge in media theory and ecology have become increasingly interrelated.3 Consequently, ecologies are represented both by visual media and in part as analogies, in the sense of ‘media as ecosystems’.4 Similarly, in the 181

5

Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Delacorte Press, 1982). 6

Erich Hörl, ‘A Thousand Ecologies: The Process of Cyberneticization and General Ecology,’ in Diedrich Diederichsen, Anselm Franke (eds.), The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), pp. 121–130. Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), as well as Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). 7

See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, London: Routledge: Free Association Books, 1991), Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky et al. (eds.), Der Einsatz des Lebens. Lebenswissen, Medialisierung, Geschlecht (Berlin: b_books, 2009). Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky et al. (eds.), Situiertes Wissen und regionale Epistemologie: Zur Aktualität Georges Canguilhems und Donna J. Haraways (Vienna, Berlin: Turia+Kant, 2013). 8

Marie-Luise Angerer, Affekt­öko­ logien (Lüneburg: meson press, 2017). 9

See Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Cameras, Natural Resources (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 10

Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, ‘Even Hercules had to Clean out the Augean Stables but Once’, in Gerald E. Stearn (ed.), McLuhan: Hot and Cool – a Critical Symposium (New York: The Dial Press, 1967), pp. 266–302, here p. 281.

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1980s Neil Postman pessimistically maintained that experience outside medialized environments was no longer possible.5 In addition, since 2007 theorists of the Anthropocene have formulated an ecology ‘without nature’, and therefore also a new form of media ecology, which no longer primarily concerns any threat to the ‘natural’ environment by media consumption, but investigates the inevitable interdependencies between media technologies and cultural and social transformation.6 In contrast, the perspectives of feminist science studies and queer studies have been arguing ‘beyond nature’ from the very beginning.7 Current media environments are thus constructed as both hybrid ecologies and as ‘intensive milieus’.8 The artistic works by Sondra Perry and Louis Henderson presented here operate in exactly these contact zones between environment and media, idea and technology, determining their incongruity (or difference) as well as their multiple interdependencies, and constructing hybrid milieus in this very process. As is well known, media and technological infrastructures have long been installed throughout the environment, indeed in the sea, on land, in the air and even in space. These multiple connections, operating both metaphorically and imaginarily, which exist between people and media as well as between animate and inanimate matter, are to be analysed here paradigmatically, although without assuming a purely neomaterialist perspective. For on the one hand it should be emphasized that the imaginary metaphors are in turn inscribed in technology, and on the other hand that the approach of ‘new materialism’ should also be critically inspected. Perceptions and descriptions of the environment are always subjectively prefigured and coloured by the metaphors of our thinking, however much we may attempt, in both theoretical description and artistic formations, to get away from or beyond the subjective. Perry’s and Henderson’s artistic projects on the one hand make visible the connections between server architecture, hard drives, depletion of raw materials, and human agents, while on the other hand they present an immersion in aquatic environments made up of liquified digital images with their own history of producing images and concepts, which also affect the imagination of the human body. This shifts the temporalities and materialities of media technologies and products, and the rare earth elements and precious metals needed to manufacture them, into the sights of artistic, theoretical, and media reflexive analyses.9 By focusing on these works, this text initially follows a similar perspective to the one that Marshal McLuhan, the pioneer of media theory, was calling for at the end of the 1960s, namely that of an ‘ecological’ approach to research: ‘A structural approach to a medium means studying its total operation, the milieu it creates – the environment that the telephone or radio or movies or the motorcar created’.10 McLuhan also investigated cultural and imaginary connections, in accordance with his training both as a pastor and as a scholar, and was able to join these different spheres together in

fruitful ways. For McLuhan there was therefore always more at stake than the technological function and its description. The issue was just as much the intensive and psychic impact on people as a whole. At first he merely analysed media as ‘extensions of man’ (1964), but a few years later he updated this approach to media theory by zooming out to a certain extent and also including the environment in his analyses. While McLuhan introduced the metaphors of ‘hot’ – for media involving human agents – and ‘cold’ – for more distancing media – he examines media aggregate states in their characteristics of ‘liquid’, ‘solid’, and ‘gaseous’, which evoke the elements of water, earth and air, as well as clouds/fog as an in-between state, and uses them as imaginary models. Even though any element can become gaseous at sufficiently high temperatures, in the cultural imagination it is usually water that serves as the paradigm, since it also changes its aggregate state under normal, ordinary conditions. This raises the question of the effects of media aggregate states on human agents. Who lives in these media milieus and in what state? And what effects – including biopolitical ones – does this regime have on those that are exposed to it?

11

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005), and for a more current engagement, see Britta Lange, ‘Poste restante, and messages in bottles: sound recordings of Indian prisoners in the First World War’, in Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, 2015, https:/doi.org/ 10.1080/02533952.2014.989721 (accessed 6.1.2019).

12

See Tabita Rezaire, Deep Down Tidal 2017, https://vimeo. com/248887185, as well as http:// www.tabitarezaire.com/ (accessed 1.1. 2019); and Katrin Köppert, ‘“Internet is not in the Cloud.” Digitaler Kolonialismus’, https://www.gwiboell.de/de/2019/04/10/internetnot-cloud-digitaler-kolonialismus (accessed 4.10.2020).

[WATER] [LIQUID] Being surrounded by water, swimming in it, is the primary (even if unconscious) experience of every human being in the amniotic sac before birth. Oceans often serve in close-up as a metaphorical image of immersion, plunging into another environment. Viewed from a great distance and taken together with the ships that operate on it, the ocean can be read as a sign for transport, communication, and data transfer. An early and never particularly efficient use of the sea as a means of transferring data was the message in a bottle, which is nonetheless still applied as a scientific method, for instance to measure sea currents. Theodor W. Adorno had already introduced the message in a bottle as a metaphor: at first generally for new music and then later for his own work, written in exile, both of which were waiting for future addressees.11 In Ted Geier and Peter Ott’s experimental film essay Hölle Hamburg (Hell Hamburg, 2007) sailors from an abandoned ship go into a state of trance to read out the traces of the ships from the water that they sailed on. Here as well the sea is an imaginary database that especially talented people can evaluate. Nonetheless, even today the actual data streams of internet connections do not of course simply flow directly through the ocean. Instead, enormous underwater cables lie on the ocean floor to join the continents. And in fact, ocean lanes and data transfer do have to do with one another, for the main routes of the glass fibre cables installed between the continents still follow the main routes of the trilateral slave trade. The panorama video Deep Down Tidal (2017) by the artist Tabita Rezaire12 also works with this knowledge. Since 2001 the most important link for email and internet traffic between the USA and Europe is the ocean 183

13

Stefan Heidenreich, FlipFlop. Digitale Datenströme und die Kultur des 21. Jahrhunderts (Munich, Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2004), p. 27.

14

Benjamin H. Bratton, ‘The Black Stack’, in e-flux journal 53 (2014), p. 2.

15

On YouTube https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=EiwWmGC7qPI (accessed 6.1.2019).

cable ‘Tat-14’, in which digital information is transformed into optical signals, that is, light, and thus transported over glass fibre strands. Nonetheless, nothing actually ‘flows’ here, since as Stefan Heidenreich has noted: ‘A change at one end of an electronic field, whether conveyed by conductors or by air, has an effect at the other end, practically simultaneously. […] What streams in data streams, and here that means: what runs in time and requires time, is the supply of the signal.’13 The alternative to underwater cables is communication satellites in space, which are often used as a supplement, but which deliver a slower transfer of data. Airless space has an open effect, encompassing the endless expanse of outer space. But signals can also get lost there. In contrast to this, the sea is imagined as a coherent body, which is closed and limited by the layers of the continents and the air and, unlike landmasses and coastal waters, does not belong to any state. The sea, however, not only serves as a data carrier, but is also otherwise embedded in media ecologies. For example, along with nuclear power plants large data server facilities also need cooling water and are thus built in the sea, as Benjamin H. Bratton has observed: ‘The geographies at work are often weird. For example, Google filed a series of patents on offshore data centers, to be built in international waters on towers using tidal currents and available water to keep the servers cool.’14 People, animals, plankton, ocean floors, the planet Earth itself are consequently surrounded by data streams, and it is no longer even possible to emerge from out of them, because we are constantly moving in them. In 2017 the telecommunications company O2 advertised with the following scenario: the whole world is under water, people, football stadiums, traffic, a zeppelin floats through the water, everyone moves smoothly in this aquatic environment.15 People can even breathe under water as long as they are telecommunicatively connected with one another. A stylish young man sits on a bench, he is looking at the screen of his smartphone, where a football game taking place at that moment is streaming. Suddenly he can no longer breathe, bubbles come out of his mouth, he has to rise to the surface, at the last moment a friend comes to his aid, throwing him his scarf as a rescue line and pulling him back down onto the bench. What is going on here? In the logic of the advertising narrative the young man’s data allowance has been used up, so he can no longer ‘swim’ or ‘surf’ smoothly in the sea of data. Access to the net is as important as the air we breathe: this is the inherent subtext of the advert. Everyone is constantly immersively embedded in data streams, so long as they can afford the data volume. With regard to this topos of mobility with aquatic metaphors, Diedrich Diederichsen has noted that the electronic tickets of many urban transport systems also make use of underwater metaphors, such as the ‘Oyster Card’ in London and the ‘Octopus Card’ in Hong Kong. These smart tickets not only simplify paying and being in transit, but of course also constantly collect data

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about their users.16 Smart phones also facilitate access to mobility and navigation in unfamiliar areas in many places – imaginary and concrete – and can in fact be important for survival, which studies on media use by refugees point out time and again.17 The metaphorical image of underwater people or fish creatures evoked in the O2 advert already has a long and differently racialized history, in which attributions of other and self overlap and create effective worlds of images. In the metaphorical ‘water babies’ of the Black diaspora and the ‘luftmenschen’18 of the Jewish ghetto, new imaginary living environments emerged for people segregated from society and targeted by racist and anti-Semitic discrimination. We can see here parallels between the exclusions experienced by Blacks and Jews.19 While Jewish people in the ghetto had to live as it were ‘from nothing’ – that is, they had no housing space and seemingly subsisted solely on air, as Marc Chagall also painted in pictures of the Jewish shtetl in Eastern Europe, in which people floated through narrow alleys – Black people imagined parallel stories of a life under water, having escaped from the bellies of the slave ships to arrive home in the ‘Black Atlantic’. In the ideas of the musical duo Drexciya the unborn children of enslaved women represent a new hybrid form of human being, who could breathe and live under water and on land.20

16

Diedrich Diederichsen, ‘On Cosima von Bonin’, Sculpture Center Conversation Series 2016, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9QTsT4h_utg (accessed 6.10.2018).

17

Vassilis Tsianos et al. (eds.), Mobile Commons, Migrant Digitalities and the Right to the City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

18

Nicolas Berg, Luftmenschen. Zur Geschichte einer Metapher (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht Verlag, 2008, 2015).

19

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (New York: Routledge, 2001). 20

Siehe Drexciya, Liner Notes 1997, The Quest. Submerge SVE-8, compact disc, as well as Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso Books, 1993).

A work that responds exactly to some of these violent and recurring aspects of the media ecologies of the Black diaspora is Sondra Perry’s Typhoon Coming On (2018). In her walk-in multi-screen environment, Perry concentrates on re-reading a painting of the British slave ship Zong, which represents a deadly environment of dark, troubled waters and brown bodies. What is imagined here is both a watery grave and a last act of resistance. The title of Perry’s work and in part her visual material refer to William Turner’s painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On) (1840) (fig.1). Turner’s visual motif takes up the massacre on board the Zong, which was traveling in 1781 from Accra to Jamaica. 470 enslaved men, women, and children from Africa were the ship’s main freight. During the journey 133 of them were thrown overboard by the crew, to later acquire insurance money for the ‘lost’, but in fact destroyed ‘wares.’ Due to the resulting conflict with the insurance company the case was documented, and only for this reason do we know anything about it at all today. Alongside the painting’s technique, virtuosic and innovative for the time, Turner’s picture is also significant because there are hardly any other visual testimonies of events like these. Although historical documents do not indicate that there was any storm that preceded the acts of murder, and although the picture does not even depict the Zong, this does not diminish its value in the least, as Ayesha Hameed argues: ‘[…] this painting is the stand-in for the Zong massacre which has no image and happened on still water. In this storm the water, the limbs of slaves, the mouths of hungry fish and the gawping birds become the ecology of the 185

21

S. Ayesha Hameed, ‘Black Atlantis: Three Songs’, in Forensic Architecture (ed.), Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), pp. 712–719, here p. 713.

Fig. 1

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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brown water of the sea.’21 The painting shows a red-orange sky, the water itself is angry and brownish-white. In the background we can vaguely recognize the silhouette of a sailboat, a few seagulls in the foreground are strongly outlined, next to them two naked brown feet and legs in shackles are visible, protruding bolt upright and aslant from out of the waves, while the rest of the body has already been swallowed by the waves. All other visual elements in fact seem to blur into one another, swirled about by the storm and thus abstracted in the presentation. It is a non-indexical representation of ‘death by drowning’, which spares the recipients the more upsetting sights. Here it is not citizens who are drowning, but people considered to be superfluous. Perry’s installation shows the surface and movement of the water of the sea as painted by Turner, digitally treated and projected largescale on the walls, but only in enlarged sections and without any trace of black bodies (fig. 2). The non-representation of enslaved Africans in Perry’s wall projection underscores their imaginary presence. By estranging Turner’s painting, Perry transfers it into the here and now. Using other videos on smaller screens set up in formations of three in front of the walls, the aftereffects of slavery are thematized, up to today’s racism, and as they appear in ideologies of ‘well-being’ and self-optimizing workers. These themes emerge in the permanent contemplation of the Black diaspora and the ‘Middle Passage’, not as

historically concluded events, but as something that continues to be in effect, including current questions of environmental protection and the living and working conditions of racialized population groups, always reflected by the surrounding media ecologies. Life in digital images and its liquification by means of endless and inconclusive working methods is presented by the periodic shift in the videos to a pure CGI (computer generated imagery) animation of purple-tinged waves, which exist as a preset in the open source software ‘Blender’ by using the filter ‘ocean modifier’. The purple colour of the ocean comes about because yet another level of animation is missing here: it actually indicates the software’s signal colour to show that a film clip is incomplete (fig. 3). It is a digital sea of fluid images in a constant state of ‘becoming’ in Gilles Deleuze’s sense.22 Everything is thus permutated at the level of colour. While schoolchildren usually paint the sea blue, in Turner it is brownish-white and in Perry it is purple. By contrast, in Perry’s work ‘Chroma Key’ blue stands for the colour that was used in the bluescreen process, in which objects and people are filmed in front of a blue background in order to add them later into another environment. She also uses the blue as a sign for ‘Blackness’, indeed to indicate ‘how blackness shifts and morphs and embodies technology to combat oppression and surveillance throughout the diaspora. Blackness is agile’.23 The colour blue is obviously not unfamiliar in African-American culture,

22

See Karl Sierek, Foto, Kino und Computer-Bild. Aby Warburg als Medientheoretiker (Hamburg: Philo, 2007), Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 10 et seqq. and Aljoscha Weskott, ‘After the Melodrama. Zur Dynamik des Melodramatischen im kinofizierten Bildraum’ (Dissertation, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 2017).

23

Quoted in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Yana Peel, ‘Foreword’, in Sondra Perry, Typhoon Coming On (London: Serpentine Galleries, Koenig Books, 2018), pp.14–17, here p. 15.

Fig. 2–3

Sondra Perry, Typhoon Coming On, multi-screen installation, videostills, Serpentine Galleries, London 2018.

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24

Black and Blue, 1929, composer Fats Waller.

25

Blue Black 2017, https://pulitzer arts.org/exhibition/blue-blackcurated-by-glenn-ligon/ (accessed 11.1.2019).

26

See for instance Liquid Blackness Journal 2014,https://liquidblack ness.com/lbjournal-archive (accessed 4.10.2020).

27

Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York, London: Routledge, 1994), p. 183.

28

Nora N. Khan, ‘Acquisition, God Object; Acquisition, Source Code’, in Perry 2018 (footnote 23), pp. 18–29, here p.19.

for example at the level of sound – after all, Louis Armstrong, an icon of jazz and rhythm & blues, once sang: ‘What did I do to be so black and blue?’24 Or Curtis Mayfield, more than forty years later in 1970: ‘We are the people who are darker than blue’. The sounds melodically introduced in blues are called ‘blue notes’. In addition, the recent exhibition Blue Black (2017), curated by African-American artist Glenn Ligon,25 pursued the artistic-visual traces of this special colour. Whether ‘black’ is even a colour at all, as the artist Raymond Saunders polemically wrote in a pamphlet in 1967, is still being discussed with great controversy. The question of ‘black’ skin colour obviously follows from this, which Perry herself treats in the video work projected opposite of the purple ocean. This shows a highly enlarged animation of Perry’s own skin in a computer-generated movement, in which the skin itself seems like the surface of a jelly-like liquid. In contrast, skinless water possesses a surface tension that can seem like skin. The sea as body, the skin as sea. Water and sea here are positioned analogously to the imaginary body, data cables are the other nerve tracts. The question of a ‘liquid blackness’ has long been systematically examined by artists and theorists, working between conceptualizations of abstraction and materiality.26 Both in painting as well as in the photographs of prominent white photographers such as Leni Riefenstahl and Robert Mapplethorpe, black bodies were and are often presented naked, represented as sweating or oiled, with a focus on physical strength and sexual attractiveness. The art theorist Kobena Mercer has pointed out this intensification in the significance of black skin, which has both negrophobic as well as negrophilic dimensions: ‘Harsh contrasts of shadow and light draw the eye to focus and fix attention on the texture of the black man’s skin. According to Bhaba, [...] skin color functions as “the most visible of fetishes”.’27 All visual media make use of this fetish; Perry’s work deconstructs it, constantly putting the abstract representation and its technological means into relation with the corporeal, complicating this by there not being any ‘simple’ or direct depiction. Representation versus Abstraction

Fig. 4 (opposite page) Sondra Perry, Typhoon Coming On, multi-screen installation, installation view Serpentine Galleries, London 2018.

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On another screen Perry uses an avatar figure, digitally created after her own face, which seems to be naked and with no hair (fig. 4). Avatars are digitally created 2-D or 3-D models of human faces and bodies, that is, pure surface. What is inside them is insignificant in this simulation process, what counts is their representational function. They have neither organs nor a brain, but exist only geometrically, as manipulatable objects in a system of XYZ coordinates, usually on a (computer) screen. As Nora N. Khan accurately comments: ‘An entire world can be, is, built out of these models that deny human interiors in favour of surface performance. The social imaginary thrives on some bodies being abstracted, and some real.’28 The digital representation and enlargement of her own skin in Perry’s work, as well as the self-portrait as avatar, also call up the long history of photographing and filming black and brown bodies. The technological apparatus –

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29

See Lorna Roth, ‘Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity’, in Canadian Journal of Communication 34 (2009), p. 111–136.

30

Sondra Perry, ‘Eclogue for [IN]HABITABILITY’, Seattle Art Museum, Dec. 8, 2017–Jul. 8, 2018; http://seattleartmuseum.org/ Exhibitions/Details?EventId=58990 (accessed 11.1. 2019), as well as the artist’s statement on this work: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=u2V0fws7aq0 (accessed 11.1. 2019).

31

Sondra Perry interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine Galleries, London 2018, min. 13.12–13.30, https://www.youtube. com/watch? v=Qunkb4piXGw (accessed 15.08.2019).

32

Tung-Hui Hu, Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015).

previously cameras with light-sensitive film, today digital presets in recording devices – uses white skin as the norm, thereby following racist parameters.29 Perry remarked: ‘The idea of humanness is fundamentally an illusion and in order to avoid White normativity, I prefer to disassemble my own body.’30 Furthermore, Perry also constructs actual existing, fragile work stations in the installation itself (Graft and Ash for a Three-Monitor Workstation), which could come from a spectral fitness studio, for example a stationary bicycle or a rowing machine. In addition, smaller screens show text messages and footage from Fox News reports about police violence in the USA (TK (Suspicious Glorious Absence)). Once again there are no persons visible, but only the often shaky footage of socio-economically disadvantaged housing areas, sidewalks, streets, houses. Perry thus examines the question of access and appropriation of images, which are actually provided by the police surveillance regime. She insistently points out who lives with and in these media milieus, and what biopolitical veneer and discipline is implemented by them. The stream of images is interrupted by Eartha Kitt’s song ‘I Want to Be Evil’, that is, by the refusal to be a submissive subject, and the simultaneous rejection of the racist stereotype. Perry stresses: ‘Imagining is incredibly important because unflexible imaginations create terrible spaces for people to live’.31 In her works the imaginary, imagination – that is, ‘bringing-something-to-mind’ – is closely linked with digital imaging, that is with image processing methods. Perry does not create any utopian environments, but reveals unexpected connections, disturbing and troubling the all too glossy digital surfaces. [AIR] [GASEOUS] [STEAM] The internet and data exchange are usually always conceptualized as ‘above’, ‘in the heavens’ so to speak, and not as ‘below’, here on Earth, as if data were sent through the air. This notion has become inscribed in the metaphor of the ‘data cloud’. While real rain clouds emerge from evaporated sea water, so that the clouds can then be moved elsewhere according to the wind, constantly changing their forms until they dissipate again and rain down to earth, data clouds lie solid and immobile on a central server or, with so-called cloud computing, on several interlinked computers. As the media theorist Tung-Hui Hu argues in his Prehistory of the Cloud, the amorphous ‘cloud’ had already been introduced in the 1920s by engineers as a graphic symbol to mark a still undefined network in circuit diagrams.32 The idea of storing data not locally on each individual computer but on a distant server that can be accessed over the internet already existed by the end of the 1960s, with the US Army’s first attempts with the ARPA Net (Advanced Research Project Agency). This form of non-local data storage has been popularized as a commercial service since 2005, as a supplementary offer by companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle Dropbox, SmugMug, Pinterest and Apple.

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The title of Louis Henderson’s short film All That Is Solid refers to Karl Marx’s dictum ‘All that is solid melts into thin air’, which in the original German reads: ‘Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft.’33 It comes from the Communist Manifesto and describes the deterritorializing dynamic of capitalism.34 This liquid dynamic was also adopted by Deleuze and Guattari and further developed in their description of human-machinic assemblages, bodies without organs, and rhizomes.35 Henderson’s short film begins with the opaque detail of a palm (fig. 5) and then shifts into the genre of the desktop film with screenshots of the graphic user surface and lines from Google’s automatic translator, which is selected for English into French (fig. 6). There we read: ‘This is a film that takes place, in between a hard place, a hard drive, and an imaginary, a soft space – the cloud that holds my

33

Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party (New York: International Publishers, 1983), p. 17.

34

See also Marshall Bermann, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Verso, 1982).

35

Deleuze, Guattari 1987 (footnote 22).

Fig. 5–6

Louis Henderson, All That is Solid, 2014, still, HD video, format 16:9, black and white and colour, stereo.

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Fig. 7–8

Louis Henderson, All That is Solid, 2014, stills, HD video, format 16:9, black and white and colour, stereo.

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data, and in the soft grey matter, contained within the head’. This is followed by views of Wikipedia entries on the so-called ‘Gold Coast’ in Africa, which used to be a British colony (1913) and is now part of the state of Ghana, which was the first former colony on the African continent to declare its independence in 1957. Now the transparency factor of the images changes. At the underlying level, footage from a still undefined place becomes visible, small fires with thick wafts of smoke burn there, and Black people are visible. The level of sound changes from sacred music to a menacing music staggered with unwieldy noise, accelerating with a staccato rhythm. At the level of the image we see gold bars being cast and polished. A text explains: ‘solid – is one of the four states of objects, the others being liquid, gas and plasma...’ This speaks to the contradiction between the notion of a seemingly immaterial cloud memory and the materiality of the hardware that it is based on. Tabita Rezaire makes this even clearer when her work spells it out: ‘The Internet is not in the Cloud’.36 With Henderson, in turn, the image of white-grey clouds in the sky is covered with the bold letters ‘The black stack’, which Bratton described in his text of the same name about computer processor architectures: ‘Instead of seeing the various species of contemporary computational technologies as so many different genres of machines, […] we should instead see them as forming the body of an accidental megastructure […] a vast (if also incomplete), pervasive (if also irregular) software and hardware Stack.’37 Bratton and Henderson thus continue the body and environment metaphors for media and machines in the tradition of McLuhan’s ‘extensions of man’, but they expand these to include the immaterial or virtual part of software, that is, the programming and machine codes.

36

Rezaire 2017 (footnote 12).

37

Bratton 2014 (footnote 14).

38

Derek Walcott, ‘The Sea is History’, in The Paris Review 74, (Fall/ Winter 1978).

While Sondra Perry uses the individual filter levels of animation software in isolation, Henderson invisibly layers the levels over one another for us in order to show their complexity and interwovenness. For him it no longer seems possible ‘simply’ to construct a twodimensional film, he needs chaotic multidimensionality to show the backward references, associations, and connections of his own film production. For Henderson as a white, western filmmaker this also includes references to the colonial film archive, which reflects the orders of knowledge and language represented there. This is contrasted to the Black diasporic experience of the middle passage, in part by quoting Derek Walcott’s poem ‘The Sea is History’ (1978).38 [EARTH] [SOLID] versus [CLOUD] [GASEOUS] The promise of ‘solids’ in the title of Henderson’s work is now revived, and the most precious of all solids is shown – gold. A black hand gently holds a few crumbs of gold, while the soundtrack of a paternalistic colonial film about acquiring the English language continues (fig. 7). A speaker from the present joins in, explaining how lumps of gold are produced from gold dust, while the film preview 193

39

Hu 2015 (footnote 32), p. X.

40

As has been critically discussed for some time now under the heading ‘electronic colonialism’ or also ‘digital colonialism’. On the usage of these terms, see T. McPhail, Electronic Colonialism: The Future of International Broadcasting and Communication (Newbury Park: Sage, 1981), as well as more currently Renata Avila et al., Digital Colonialism: A Global Overview, Re:publica 2018, https://doi. org/10.5446/20595#t=00:00,01:10 (accessed 11.1.2019).

41

This aspect could not be discussed at length here, since this text focuses on the materiality of media environments and their metaphors.

42

See Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. Bruce Benderson (New York: Feminist Press, 2013).

43

Peta Hinton et al., ‘New Materi­ alisms, New Colonialisms’, https:// www.academia.edu/37684644/ New_materialisms_New_colonial isms_2015 (accessed 10.1.2019).

windows with the hand are laid over one another three times, like a Russian matryoshka in which there is always a smaller doll hidden inside the next larger one. Cut. On an initially undefined advertising image white hands now hold a blue cloud. Later this breaks up over a voiceover from Steve Jobs, presenting and explain the iCloud (fig. 8). Henderson’s film therefore demonstrates the connection between solid raw materials and the fictions of techno-capital or the myths of computer firms, which require one another but which do not merge into one another. The cloud historian Hu describes this interwovenness in this way: ‘As a result, the cloud is the premier example of what computer scientists term virtualization – a technique for turning real things into logical objects, whether a physical network turned into a cloud-shaped icon, or a warehouse full of data storage servers turned into a “cloud-drive”. But the gap between the real and the virtual betrays a number of less studied consequences, some of which are benign and some of which are not.’39 One of these gaps between virtual and ‘real’ is expressive in concrete economies. Although African hands ‘hold’ the raw material gold and have dug it out of the earth, they are almost entirely excluded from the wealth brought by its further exploitation in western industrial nations. The digital environments of the age of the internet do indeed promise a global connectedness and a simultaneity in the immaterial, but they obviously create new mechanisms of exclusion.40 Furthermore, the aftereffects of colonialism have neither been overcome nor ended, but can also be seen, alongside material and socio-economic inequality, in relation to ‘cultural’ capital in the politics of language and education. Henderson’s film points in this direction, in part by problematizing the enforcement of English as the governmental and teaching language in the African colonies.41 [ARCHIPELAGIC THINKING] In today’s terms, media technologies are not only additions, prostheses, or extensions of the human, but in reverse they form the material and virtual environments, the hybrid ecologies in which people, among others, live. They form canals, circuits, interfaces, surfaces, waters, and islands whose borders have become increasingly nebulous. At the same time the constitution of the subject itself has been changed by technological media, surgical interventions, and pharmacological knowledge.42 Furthermore, visual media such as film, photos, and installations are obviously not immaterial, but use resources, become toxic waste over the course of their integral obsolescence, and are thus partly complicit in catastrophic environmental changes and exploitative, asymmetrical economies, as Henderson’s work indicates. It is precisely the gradual distinctions and the specific histories of technologies and their metaphors that are significant in this analysis, for the re-conceptualizing and turn to technical objects can – as Peta Hinton,43 Jordy Rosenberg, and others have noted – also activate old

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and new blind spots: ‘The ontological turn […] reshapes an old paradigm, a primitivist fantasy that hinges on the violent erasure of the social: the conjuring of a realm – an “ancestral realm” – that exists in the present, but in parallax to historical time.’44 This also raises the question of how the approach of ‘new materialism’, with its universal decentring of the human, can at times prove to be problematic, when we analyse historical examples in which, for instance, certain racialized people were understood, in the era of the slave trade and colonialism, as ‘material’ or ‘goods.’ What the consequences of a violent ‘equalization’ of human bodies and other goods are has already been tested here.45 The challenge in the discourse of media ecology thus consists in developing an implementation of a new materialist theory that incorporates the critical investments of postcolonial studies. Peta Hinton and her co-authors therefore call for us ‘to consider the body as a material-semiotic actor – that is, a generative axis of the apparatus of bodily production, as Donna Haraway has put it – for understandings of race and how racialized bodies come to matter (in both senses of the word).’46 The current text therefore argues, despite all decentring and all the embeddedness of humans in technological and imaginary assemblages, against the ‘subjectless turn’ in the discourse of media ecology, because this would mean that the political, the social, and in particular capitalism as it is racialized today, which also and precisely has effects in the digital, would disappear from criticism.47 Sondra Perry does indeed use digital technologies to create virtual environments, since, as she emphasizes, ‘digital space allows for the abstractions of identity to happen, and it allows one to build digitally what one cannot build in reality’.48 At the same time, Perry constantly reminds us of the concrete experience of violence that non-white bodies have been and continue to be exposed to, both historically and in the present. Even if post-identity subjectifications and movements are possible in digital spaces, temporary identifications, it should be asserted, can neither be completely suspended nor abandoned, and thus Perry’s and Henderson’s works also deal with the topic of systematic racism and the aftereffects of colonialism and slavery in the USA and globally.

44

Jordy Rosenberg, ‘The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present’, in Theory & Event 17:2 (2014),

45

Ibid.

46

Peta Hinton et al. 2015 (footnote 43), p. 3.

47

See also Robert Fletcher ‘Can the Posthuman Speak? In Defense of Anthropocentrism’, lecture at ICI on May 9, 2019. https://www. ici-berlin.org/events/robert-fletcher/ (accessed 15.5.2019).

48

Perry 2017 (footnote 30).

49

Édouard Glissant, Traité du Toute-Monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 194.

The experience and memory of the Black diaspora is inseparably linked to metaphors of aquatic environments, and these conceptualizations demand another form of making theory. Accordingly, the Caribbean theorist and poet Édouard Glissant considers it necessary to develop ‘archipelagic thinking’, which constructs the oceans not as an element that separates, but that connects people, media, and objects. He affirms: ‘The whole world is becoming an archipelago’.49 This notion is also served on the one hand by the ubiquitous metaphor of surfing in the World Wide Web, but it also seems more than ever to provide an adequate description in the era of climate change and rising sea levels beyond the level of metaphor. Obviously the connected (data) seas are not an ahistorical place, but, as Jean Fisher 195

50

Jean Fisher, ‘In Living Memory’, in Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar (eds.), The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982–1998 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), pp.16–30, here p. 24.

51

Rezaire 2017 (footnote 12).

emphasizes, ‘river or ocean, both imaginatively evoke a space of impenetrable depth like history itself, of ebbs and flows that figure both the separation and unity of space and time: […] as a metonymic sign of the continuity and discontinuities of diasporic experience’.50 In order to underscore the urgency of remembering this history, a central scene in Tabita Rezaire’s work Deep Down Tidal metaphorically connects the actually antithetical elements of fire and water. Suddenly a fire is burning between the waves in the ocean, while the text emphasizes: ‘Our water is traumatized.’51

Translated from German by Daniel Hendrickson

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Becoming-Environmental: Toward a Critique of Environmentality as Power-Form, World-Form, and Capital-Form Erich Hörl

1. Forms of becoming-environmental There is a manifold sense of environmentality that challenges the very foundations of contemporary thinking. It calls for a reconceptualization of what the term might mean and enjoins us to go far beyond what Martin Heidegger may have had in mind when he coined the term Umweltlichkeit – ‘environmentality‘ – in the 1920s.1 Heidegger’s agenda is a symptom (albeit a very powerful one) of a more far-reaching historical transformation centred on the problem of environmentality – even if it is only today that the problem forcing this great reconceptualization is becoming fully articulate. Only if we grasp this more expansive historical movement will we be able fully to appreciate what is at stake in the problematization of environmentality.2 The entire process of cybernetization initiated in the late nineteenth century (and the long half-century of computerization since 1950 in particular), the process in which we entered into multilayered technologically distributed environments of control, has to be regarded as the age of environmentalization and, on the whole, as the great environmental switch. In the late 1970s Foucault was already describing the contemporary, environmentally operating form of governmentality as “Environmentality” (environmentalité).3 As I will demonstrate in the second part of this essay, he thereby named the high point, for now, of the movement of environmentalization and inaugurated an original problematization of contemporary societies. What has been happening in this switch is an unprecedented exposition of the problem, and in the end the breakthrough of a manifold sense of environmentality whose environmentalitarian tendencies (which are just emerging in Foucault’s

1

Yet undoubtedly, and despite his fixation on Dasein, i.e. his opposition of the human, the only being to have an environment, strictly speaking, and the animal, stuck in its surroundings, what was at stake in Heidegger was of enormous significance. After all, environmentality names the ‘worldhood of the environment’ (Weltlichkeit von Umwelt), which is to open up nothing short of the ‘structure of worldhood’ as such, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 94. It served as a counterconcept to the Cartesian interpretation of the world as outside world, as ‘mere nature’, which ultimately ‘unworlded’ the world, Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 168. The difference between environment (of the human being, Umwelt) and surroundings (of the animal, Umgebung) comes in only in the later lecture on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics of 1929/30, where Heidegger explicitly turns to the sciences and the scientific exploration of the environment Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 2

I employ the concept of problematization in Foucault’s sense, which means the constitution of an object for thinking. Every age has its own significant problematizations. Problematization is neither merely a ‘representation of a pre-existing object, nor the creation by discourse of an object that doesn’t exist’, but rather emerges from an interplay of discursive and non-discursive practices ‘that introduces something into the play of true and false and constitutes it as an object for thought’ (Michel Foucault, ‘The Concern for Truth’, trans. Alan Sheridan, in Lawrence D. Kritzman (ed.), Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984 (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 255–67: 257. The central problematization of our time is environmentality. 3

Where the term Environmentality is written with a capital E appears in this essay, it refers to the contemporary mode of governmentality, as used by Foucault (and today Brian Massumi). The term environmentality with a lowercase e, translating the German Umweltlichkeit, refers to a broader sense of the environmental and to the concept Umweltlichkeit as used by Heidegger in Being and Time.

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4

Ulrik Ekman (ed.), Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013). 5

Aware of this break, Jennifer Gabrys suggests Whitehead’s notion of ‘withness’ as a category to capture this shared environmental becoming. Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 241–265, esp. p. 242. 6

The concepts milieu, Umwelt and environment are not congruent. They develop along different, occasionally intersecting lines, and together articulate a complex historical semantics I cannot enter into here. The basic historicalsemantic movement, however, features a prioritization of the English term ‘environment’ that parallels the advance of technicization. See Florian Sprenger, ‘Zwischen Umwelt und milieu: Zur Begriffsgeschichte von environment in der Evolutionstheorie’, in Forum Interdisziplinäre Begriffsgeschichte 3:2 (2014), pp. 7–18. On the question of ‘environmental knowledge’ (Umgebungswissen) see Florian Huber, Christina Wessely (eds.), Umgebungen des Lebendigen in der Moderne (Munich: Fink, 2017). 7

Today’s attempts at a speculative conception of environmentality do not take up Heidegger but instead the speculative vocabulary of, for example, Whitehead, Simondon or James, who are thus turned into forerunners of today’s speculative thinking of environmentality. 8

Within the framework of his general ecology of individuation, Gilbert Simondon reminted the concept of ontogeny – first developed by Ernst Haeckel in his General Morphology­of 1866, which also laid the foundations for the concept of ecology – as a dynamic counterconcept to a static ontology. Gilbert Simondon, L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964), pp. 4–5.

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analysis) are manifest today in the ubiquity of media technology. This manifold sense – and this is the crucial point – is provoking new conceptual and theoretical strategies. The problem of environmentality that arises here is precisely not exhausted by the spatio-temporal distribution of digital surroundings, as the paradigm of ‘ubiquitous computing’, borrowed from computer studies and dominant in most analyses, might suggest.4 This would merely represent environmentality in the weakest, most common sense of ‘surrounding’. Environments, from a re-conceptualized perspective, do not merely constitute the technological backdrop or distributed spaces that mediate the activities of human and non-human entities, spaces that would be environmental because they are distributed. Rather, along with the entities that inhabit or participate in them, and beyond anything that might mark them as surroundings, they now turn out to be directly entangled in processes of becoming, processes through which these entities ‘concretize’ (Whitehead), that is, grow, individuate or rather co- and trans-individuate, whereby ultimately all worlding (Welten) thus taking place reveals itself to be a transworlding (Umwelten).5 With respect to the history of sense this is precisely the crucial dimension of the problem of environmentality: environmentality should be situated in the moment of our entering into techno-ecological conditions, into their manifest infrastructurality, which encompasses spaces and times on multiple scales. These conditions should be conceived, as suggested, beyond any traditional understanding of ‘environment’ as that which surrounds, encloses, as that which is around something – a traditional understanding that undoubtedly dominates the most advanced conceptions of technological environments that in the course of the general cyberneticization of modes of existence have come to shape our common semantics of environmentality.6 The central aspect of this rethinking, which as it were explodes the historical semantics, would be the transition to a speculative conception of environmentality made possible by subtracting the traditional understanding. For it is precisely in conceptually breaking with any readily evident sense of environmentality that such a speculative conception can account for a contemporary experience characterized by specific forms of becoming-environmental.7 Becoming itself turns out to be, first of all, a becoming-environmental, and in fact cannot be conceived independently of its fundamental environmentality. Environmentality is thus not just an ontological but an ontogenetic key category that ultimately can only be grasped speculatively, beyond the established semantics of ‘environment’.8 It is along or through a speculative thinking of environmentality that the transition from an ontological to an ontogenetic perspective takes place, a transition that succeeds in bringing the manifold ways of becoming-environmental into view. Becoming-environmental should be understood as the key ontogenetic event that concerns all modes of existence and that all truly ontogenetic thinking is concerned with. Ontogenetic thinking has to discover the various modes and sites of becoming-environmental. This is the core of its agenda.

If we want to understand the sea change in the history of sense at issue here, we must above all be able to describe the manifold sense of environmentality breaking through in the great switch. Such a description must address the major forms in which this sense undeniably confronts us today: as the form of power (Power-Form), as the form of subjectivity (Subject-Form), and as the form of thinking (Thought-Form).9 Today, power, world, subjectivity and even thinking are all decisively determined by environmentalization and traversed by the vectors of a becoming-environmental. Anything and everything we may refer to as our becoming-environmental takes place within these forms and can only be understood through them. Moreover, insofar as environmentality today happens so obviously on the basis of technology and media, that is, insofar as environmentality becomes the form of media (Media-Form) and the form of technology (Technology-Form), it seems to occupy a privileged position. The twenty-first century’s so-called environmental media, which convey the ‘becoming-environmental of computation’10 turn out to be central agents in this profound historical transformation in the forms just described. They seem truly to implement the processes of environmentalization on all those levels, and thus to propel the manifold sense of environmentality. However, as I will show – and this is my major point – it is environmentality as Capital-Form, of which environmental media are but the most adequate form, that represents the basic experience of our age. This basic experience, in turn, comes to be defined as a becoming-environmental in the forms described, however restrictive or reterritorializing they might be. Becomingenvironmental, in a word, is the cipher of our age, and to decipher it via formal analysis is a central task of critique today. 2. Environmentality: the becoming-environmental of power and capital ‘Environmentality’ (environmentalité) is the central concept Michel Foucault coined in 1979 to describe the coming post-sovereign mode of governmentality.11 Even if ‘environmentality’ is the term that both standard translations of Being and Time (Stambaugh and Macquarrie/Robinson) employ for Heidegger’s notion of Umweltlichkeit, Foucault’s use of the term initially aims at something completely different from an analysis of worldhood – even if, as we will see, the Environmentality he describes will, in a negative-dialectical movement, come to haunt even and especially the various modes of worlding and transform them, less into forms of environmentalizing than of deworlding and unworlding.12 According to the brief analysis Foucault gives in his lecture series on The Birth of Biopolitics, this new mode of governmentality is characterized primarily by ‘power’s becoming-environmental’, as the most attentive reader of Foucault’s ‘steps towards an ecology of powers’, as Brian Massumi has emphasized.13 But what exactly is ‘power’s becoming-environmental’ supposed to mean? What are the technologies of power that implement this new environmental power formation, which Foucault only

9

My argument here takes up Gérard Granel’s reading of Marx, according to which formal analysis represents the core of Marx’s critical method. Gérard Granel, ‘Le concept de forme dans Das Kapital’, and ‘La production totale’, in Jean-Luc Nancy, Élisabeth Rigal (eds.), L'Éclat, le Combat, l'Ouvert (Paris: Belin, 2001), pp. 21–36 and 37–43. ‘Form’ should not be taken in the classical or metaphysical sense of ‘forms of appearance’, as mere appearance or the semblance of a substrate or a real that alone counts as true, but in the sense of an ‘ontophenomeno-logical thinking of form’ that no longer aims at a substrate or a substance but at the ‘essential relationship’ (Marx) or ‘fundamental experience’ (Heidegger); ibid, p. 26. Granel speaks of ‘Capital-Form’ (Forme-Capital) and not just of capital ‘because what is at issue here is not its apparent form on the surface of the market but that form which is the “phenomenon in the sense of phenomenology”, in other words, the law that governs the appearances and, being “form” (now in the sense of logical formality), cannot appear’ (ibid., pp. 40–41). This is also the reason why my analysis of environmentality stresses the diversity of its forms. 10

Gabrys 2016 (footnote 5), p. 4.

11

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Translation modified: Burchell renders Environmentalité as ‘environmentalism’.

12

In the French, Foucault’s concept of environmentalité has nothing to do with Heidegger’s environmentality. In Emmanuel Martineau’s 1984 translation of Sein und Zeit, Umweltlichkeit is rendered as mondanéité ambiante and Umwelt as monde ambiante. In their partial translation of 1964, relevant in Foucault’s case, Rudolf Boehm and Alphose de Waelhen also render Umweltlichkeit as mondanéité ambiante.

13

Brian Massumi, ‘National Enterprise Emergency: Steps towards an Ecology of Powers’, in Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6 (November 2009), pp. 153–185.

199

14

Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

15

Foucault 2008 (footnote 10), p. 260.

16

Ibid.

just saw emerge in his day? How do they differ from the technologies of power of the formations that preceded them? And what implications does this break in the history of power have for the concept and the analysis of environmentality? Is the problem of environmentality exhausted by the problem of power, or does it oblige us to problematize it in completely different ways? In setting out to answer these questions we have to keep in mind that Environmentality and the process of Environmentalization – which, in parallel with the spread of distributive media technologies and cyberneticized environments, and going beyond even the mass media’s modulation of affect and the operative logic of pre-emption emphasized by Massumi,14 has accelerated ever since and now is dominant just about everywhere – have to be considered the key phenomena of our technological condition: so much so that it might be necessary, as suggested earlier, to speak of our environmental or even environmentalitarian condition, and therefore to expand the concept of Environmentality to account for the expansion of the problem. Accordingly, Foucault’s analysis must itself be examined genealogically and supplemented in turn. Foucault operates this conceptual renewal as if in passing, in extremely interesting passages we find in the manuscript of his 21 March 1979 lecture on the history of governmentality, which captures the coming great transformation in just a few rough key terms. The lecture as a whole was devoted to the main theorists of American neoliberalism, to members of the Chicago School and its anti-interventionist advocacy of an absolute, unlimited generalization and a permanent extension of the economic form of the market to all of society and the social system – and even beyond. The horizon of the investigation of this new form of governmentality, he explicitly emphasizes, is no longer the ideal and project of an all-encompassing disciplinary society, its mechanism of pervasive normalization and the exclusion of what cannot be normalized. Rather, it is the ‘image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes’, a society, he continues, ‘in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals’.15 Foucault thus sees a transition getting underway from individualizing (internal) subjugation, which produces the subject of the disciplinary society, to (external) environmentalization and thus, we may conclude, to a different, more embedded, more intensive form of subjectivation and individuation that belongs to an entirely different power/knowledge complex, namely, Environmentality. In a supplement to the manuscript Foucault even writes about a ‘massive withdrawal’ taking place ‘with regard to the normative-disciplinary system’, and notes the rise of a ‘technology’ that is no longer ‘discipline-normalization, but action on the environment’.16 This technology, in short, is an ‘environmental technology’ that, as Foucault states in very precise terms, does not operate ‘a standardizing, identificatory, hierarchical individualization’ but rather creates – and

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this is where the term appears for the first time – an ‘Environmentality’17 open to risks, surprises, and transversal phenomena. The general movement of normalization, whose power technologies – enclosing, parceling out, hierarchizing – Foucault had studied so carefully in his previous work, and which could be characterized as power technologies of moulding, yielded to a general movement of Environmental­ ization characterized by an entirely different form of intervention, a kind of non-intervention in the form of modulation. This constitutes a completely different form of control, the regulation and management of environmental effects that also implies different, that is, molecular and no longer molar, forms of individuation and subjectivation. Even if Foucault did not in detail explore the operating systems of environmental technologies, which were then only just entering the scene, it is quite obvious, and it was obvious to Foucault, that such a profound transformation of power made it necessary not just to rethink individuation and subjectivation but to revise other fundamental categories, such as relation, affecting, connectivity, participation or event, in light of the new regime of envirogenic technologies. It called for a fundamental evaluation of the various modes of becoming-environmental already implicit in this brief analysis, a becomingenvironmental of which Foucault’s ‘Environmentality’ was to be just a restricted form. Environmentality or Environmentalization would then be – and this is decisive – but the title of a restricted economy and ecology that in fact served to channel and constrict becomingenvironmental and would have to be countered by general economic and ecological strategies. This, precisely, is where the central tactical challenges of our present and future should be located.

17

Foucault 2008 (footnote 10), p. 261. Translation modified.

18

Foucault 2008 (footnote 10), p. 270. Skinner was also the author of a 1948 novel about behavioural engineering, Walden II. Here he develops the idea that the behaviour of organisms, including human beings, is determined by environmental variables, and that modifying these variables entails a modification of the socio-cultural system. On Skinner and behaviourism see John A. Mills, Control: A History of Behavioral Psychology (New York: New York University Press, 1998); on the beginnings of behavioural design see chapter 9 of Kerry W. Buckley, Mechanical Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviorism (New York: Guilford Press, 1989).

Foucault for his part mentions environmental psychology as one of the key neoliberal environmental technologies promoted in the United States. He does not outline the more rigorous development of the power/knowledge formation of Environmentality that could be extrapolated from his remark along the lines of a refashioning of the central concepts of behaviour and perception by environmental psychology. The latter took place in close proximity to the cybernetic development, reworking and operationalization of the behaviourist heritage. He merely follows up with a short reference to B.F. Skinner in his lecture of 28 March, which is largely dedicated to the notion of the homo oeconomicus. He presents Skinner, a prominent Harvard behaviourist who conceptualized programmed learning and operant conditioning, as a kind of focal point and mastermind of the ‘behavioral techniques’ he sees proliferating everywhere.18 Even more significant for a genealogical approach to the rise of the Environmentality paradigm is the fact that in the same year in which Foucault gave his lecture course, James Gibson, another Harvard psychologist who resolutely opposed any kind of cognitivism and propagated a new realism, published his essay The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. In this book, without a doubt one of the milestones of environmental psychology, Gibson elaborates his famous theory of affordance, a term he coined as early as the 1950s and which conse201

19

Tim Ingold has emphasized that in a certain sense Gibson’s thinking in terms of affordances is still beholden to a traditional objective conception of an environment we inhabit and to which we have to adapt, that it remains within the traditional difference between organism and environment and thus within the confines of dogmatic representations of environmentality. Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 77–79. 20

Since the late 1980s the concept of affordance has had a separate career (which I cannot trace here) in research on usability, user interface design and human–computer interaction.

21

Digital milieus are constitutive of worlding, of experiencing in digital cultures, and of the concomitant rapid spread of neoliberal logics through digital processes and the rise of so-called environmental media and technologies. With a view to a critical determination of our environmental culture of control, media have to be redescribed as technologies that relate things and produce relationships, that materialize and accumulate, operationalize and exploit relationships through algorithmic processes of interconnecting with and feedback from the environment, thereby constituting digital milieus of becoming. Yuk Hui also uses the concept of the digital milieu, and stresses that ‘in the digital milieu, there is no space but only relations’. Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2016), pp. 242–243.

22

As early as 1994 Philip E. Agree mobilized the ‘capture model’ against the ‘surveillance model’, and developed capture as a basic concept of environmentality. Philip E. Agree, ‘Surveillance and Capture: Two Modes of Privacy’, in Nick Montfort et al. (eds.), The New Media Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press 2003 [1994]), pp. 737–760; Till A. Heilmann, ‘Datenarbeit im “Capture”-Kapitalismus: Zur Ausweitung der Verwertungszone im Zeitalter informatischer Überwachung’,” in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, no. 13, October 2015, pp. 35–47.

23

Luciana Parisi, Erich Hörl, ‘Was heißt Medienästhetik? Ein Gespräch über algorithmische Ästhetik, automatisches Denken und die postkybernetische Logik der Komputation’, in Zeitschrift für

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quently traverses the entire formative period of environmental psychology. As it takes ecology beyond natural ecology, marking a becoming-environmental of perception and psyche, a kind of general environmental orientation of the mind, the book must be counted among the most radical early generalizations of ecological thinking. In Gibson there is no separation between natural and artificial environments; he thinks only in terms of transforming, not to say modulating environments. The neologism ‘affordance’ denotes what an environment has to offer an organism, what it provides and teaches, and it already points to what we may call the co-originarity of organism and environment. Gibson thus moves in the direction of a radically relational and procedural conception of environment.19 Yet what is decisive in the context of Foucault’s environmental re-description of power is that the neo-ecological thinking of affordances already implies a possible operationalization, an automatization even, of the relationships between organisms (especially humans) and their environments precisely by managing and controlling affordances.20 Environmental psychology and behavioural control have to be understood comprehensively as a kind of experimentalization of environmentality that produces environmentalitarian knowledge of control. Studying them is of central importance for a genealogical understanding of the power/knowledge complex of Environmentality and its neoliberal inscriptions. Foucault could not yet have had a more precise grasp of the way environmental technologies of power work, which goes beyond classical behavioural engineering. Against the backdrop of the becomingenvironmental of computation, however, it becomes clear just how much his focus on behaviour articulates an entire power-historical intuition. The development of an environmental culture of control and the genesis of what, picking up on Simondon, I would like to call digital milieus21 have brought out the full force of the process in which all modes of existence are environmentalized and thereby put concrete forms of Environmentalization in place that point to ‘behaviour’ as a central variable. In this process it is not ‘surveillance’ but ‘capture’ that comes to serve as the fundamental concept of Environmentality, whose basic problem consists precisely in capturing and controlling, in managing and modulating behaviour, affects, relationships, intensities and forces.22 It is exactly this displacement from surveillance to capture that encapsulates the governmental transformation of the problem of behaviour from the disciplinary to the environmental. Media, for their part, are being environmentalized in the strict sense of the term: they are moving from being machines for communication to being ‘machines for capturing the unsayable and unrepresentable’.23 In her analysis of what she pointedly calls algorithmic governmentality’s ‘Data behaviorism’,24 Antoinette Rouvroy has begun to give a detailed description of today’s environmentalitarian structure and especially of what I would like to call the environmentalitarian

temporality. The behaviourist regime as such has been completely transformed in environmental terms: what matters is no longer some direct form of adaptation of an actual, experiencing, feeling subject and its behaviour, as had been the case already since the pre-behaviourist beginnings of governmentality; what matters is the ‘constant “adaptation” of environments to individual and collective “profiles” produced by “data intelligence”’.25 This new form of environmental adaptation no longer tackles actualities, it tackles constrained potentialities. And this constraint, according to Rouvroy, will eventually lead us beyond subjectivity and behaviour, to the subjectlessness of infra-individual data and supra-individual patterns. ‘The target of algorithmic governmentality is the inactual, potential dimension of human existence, its dimensions of virtuality, the conditional mode of what people “could” do, their potency or agency’.26 Environmentalization is thus understood as the dissolution of any institutional, spatial, temporal, and linguistic condition of subjectivation that clears the path for a merely objective and operational pre-emption of potential behaviour, a huge reduction of the possible27 – for a pre-emption and not, let me stress this point, a prediction based on statistics of the kind. Such prediction was one of, perhaps even the initial problem of early cybernetics, and it still lay within the realm of probability and not of possibility. In this sense, we might say, cybernetization goes from pre-diction to pre-emption and from the probable to the possible. Pre-emption takes place by means of raw data, which Rouvroy (following Guattari) describes as ‘deterriorialised signals’28 that operate automatically, like a reflex circuit, not via representations. Instead of acting ‘as signs carrying meanings and requiring interpretation’, they ‘induc[e] reflex responses in computer systems’.29 All this – the concept of data and its associated automaticity; the knowledge of a digital reality that is immanent to data banks, can only be uncovered by algorithms, and has no direct connection to a world that might be represented by it; and the temporality of pre-emption, which we would have to conceive of in the terms of relational technologies as the mediatechnological condition of preemption, algorithmic technologies that not only put into relation and produce relations, but also materialize and accumulate, operationalize and exploit them – all this would deserve a much more detailed and patient analysis since what begins to show here is environmen­tality’s automatic apparatus of capture. The difference Derrida insists on time and again between avenir and futur, between an unavailable to come and a programmed, automated, and planned future would be essential to a description of the temporality of this apparatus. Environmentality then comes into view as a rejection of what is to come in favor of a new metaphysical closure of a totaloperational automatic future.

Medienwissenschaft, no. 8, April 2013, pp. 35–51, here p. 39. 24

Antoinette Rouvroy, ‘The end(s) of critique. Data behaviourism versus due process’, in Mireille Hildebrandt, Katja de Vries (eds.), Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 142–168.

25

Ibid, p. 144.

26

Ibid, p. 159.

27

See ibid., p. 161.

28

Ibid, p. 148.

29

Ibid.

Environmentality – understood now in terms that expand on Foucault, as the synthesis of the environmental form of power, form of media and form of knowledge – provokes a strange return of questions of behaviour: technologies of behaviour, and the prediction, controlling 203

30

The behaviourist tendency of early cybernetics is readily apparent in Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth and Julian Bigelow’s programmatic 1943 essay ‘Behavior, Purpose, Teleology’, which discusses the classification of the concept of behaviour and defines the object of cybernetics as active, intentional, feedback or teleological behaviour that is predictable or extrapolates (in different orders). Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth and Julian Bigelow, ‘Behavior, Purpose, Teleology’, in Philosophy of Science, no. 10:1, January 1943, pp. 18–24. The general classes of behaviours defined here are the same for humans and machines. The initial definition of behaviour reads: ‘By behavior is meant any change of an entity with respect to its surroundings’ (ibid., p. 18). The larger connections between cybernetics and behaviour must be recapitulated within the framework of a history of control since the late nineteenth century. This requires re-conceptualizing the question of cybernetics by going beyond the fixation, long dominant in the history of knowledge and media, on the genesis of cybernetics from a hot and then a cold war. It can benefit from the work done by historians of economics and engineering who have begun to outline a more expansive history of controlling behaviour and the machinization of governance, for example David A. Mindell and James A. Beniger. David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); James A. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). Andrew Goffey has pointed out that the history of cyberneticizing behaviour as a central element of the history of control as such must also and above all take into account the ‘much greyer prior history of routinisation, bureaucratisation, calibration and technical tinkering’ that precedes technoscientific cybernetics properly speaking. Andrew Goffey, ‘Towards a Rhizomatic Technical History of Control’, in New Formations 84/85 (2015), pp. 58–73, here p. 59. 31

Rouvroy 2013 (footnote 24), pp. 142–168.

32

Soshana Zuboff, ‘Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization’, in Journal of

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and managing of behaviour. These had been key problems of the early, still highly behaviourist cybernetics, but have become widespread and relevant like never before under our changed mediatechnological conditions.30 This is exactly why Environmentality constitutes the highpoint so far of cyberneticization. It now refers us to the newly environmental modes of exploiting and valorizing the relations, and affects in which subjectivity takes shape today: modes around which – and this is central here – a new behavioural economy establishes itself. It refers, in other words, to the becomingenvironmental of capital, and to the most recent metamorphosis of the Capital-Form. Only here does the contemporary problem of subjectivity and Environmentality become fully legible. In the ‘data behaviorism’31 that characterizes the data economies of computerbased capture-capitalism, as economist Shoshanna Zuboff notes, behaviour morphs into the fourth fictitious commodity, joining the triad of labour, land and money of Karl Polanyi’s Marx-inspired description of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century capitalism.32 The rise of this fourth fictitious commodity marks the emergence of a new form of market, namely the commodification of behavioural control via behavioural markets, and the genesis of a new logic of accumulation based on computer mediation, which according to Zuboff will characterize market dynamics in the hyper-neoliberal twenty-first century. Whereas previously, life, nature and barter exchange were transformed into the fictitious commodities of labour, land and money, now Reality itself is undergoing the same kind of fictional metamorphosis as did persons, nature, and exchange. Now ‘reality’ is subjugated to commodification and monetization and reborn as ‘behavior’. […] The currently institutionalizing logic of accumulation […] produces hyperscale assemblages of objective and subjective data about individuals and their habitats for the purposes of knowing, controlling, and modifying behavior to produce new varieties of commodification, monetization, and control.33 This, according to Zuboff, is ‘reality business’.34 ‘If power was once identified with the ownership of the means of production,’ she concludes, ‘it is now identified with ownership of the means of behavioral modification.’35 It is this shift – one that could be pushed much further still, for example by expanding the capitalist exploitation zone in the direction of the so-called Internet of Things, of platform capitalism or of the rise of supply-chain capitalism36 – that indicates the environmental metamorphosis of the Capital-Form at issue here, which drives and sustains the process of Environmentalization. From this perspective, Environmentality amounts to an integration and integral actualization of the becoming-environmental of capital, power, knowledge, subjectivity and media. In the so-called ‘Fragment on Machines’ in the Grundrisse, Marx points out that ‘the machine’ or the ‘automatic system of machinery’,

which transforms the machine into ‘its most complete, most adequate form’, constituted the culmination of the manifold metamorphoses the means of labour underwent once they had been integrated into capital’s production process. The metamorphosis of the means of labour, that is, their machinization, which historically refashions their traditional form, is inherent to the transformations of capital itself. Moreover, and this is decisive, Marx stresses the function of machinery as ‘the most adequate form of capital as such’.37 This means, on the one hand, that the technological condition as such is unavoidably determined by the capital-form and can in any case never be thought in isolation from it. On the other hand, the becoming-environmental of machinery in environmental media and environmental technologies that we witness today appears from this perspective as the genesis of an environmental form of machinery, the metamorphosis that corresponds to the contemporary Capital-Form and the most adequate form to date of capital as such, the form that environmentalizes all modes of existence and all forms of life. In 1979, the year of Foucault’s remarks on Environmentality, Félix Guattari took a big step in the direction of just this kind of analysis of capital, an analysis capable of capturing the environmental/ environmentalitarian Capital-Form. Under the title of ‘Capital as the Integral of the Power Formation’, he published a highly interesting supplement to Foucault’s analysis. Practically at the very moment that Foucault outlines Environmentality, Guattari offers a rereading of capitalism as a machine-based project of control that is of great relevance today. According to Guattari, capitalism ‘aims above all at controlling the whole of society’, the term ‘control’ here taken in the cybernetic sense of regulation rather than surveillance.38 He continues: ‘it is a power operation before being a profit operation’.39 In Guattari’s analysis, capitalist machinery, thanks to but also far exceeding miniaturized machinic technologies, is grafted onto the ‘basic functioning of the perceptive, sensorial, affective, cognitive, linguistic, etc. behaviors’.40 This points to nothing short of a ‘“machinic direction” of history’, an idea Guattari elaborates when he writes: ‘The machinic phylum inhabits and orients the historical rhizome of capitalism but without ever mastering its fate, which continues to be played out equally with social segmentarity and the evolution of economic modes of valorization.’41 Capitalism culminates in a ‘World-Wide Integrated Capitalism’ or WIC, the name Guattari gives to capitalism as the polycentric project of control that has been restructuring both power and capital since the 1970s, especially by refashioning the various modes of behaviour on the basis of the latest media and technology, and in so doing replaced human time with ‘the real control of machinic time’.42 WIC, we read in another text, does not only “colonize” the entire surface of the planet: all kinds of activity are being ‘overcoded and controlled’: Guattari speaks of a ‘general capture [captation] of all modes of activity’ far beyond the traditional economic concept of labour.43 At issue is the double movement of a geographic and

Information Technology 30 (2015), pp. 75–89, here p. 85. Compare the chapter ‘The Self-regulating Market and the Fictitious Commodities: Labor, Land, and Money’ in Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Octagon Books, 1980), pp. 68–76. 33

Zuboff 2015 (footnote 32), p. 85.

34

Ibid, p. 84.

35

Ibid., p. 82. An additional task lies in investigating the environmentalization of fictitious commodities and procedures. This includes not only digital money, such as the digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin, but above all what stands behind it, as it where: the blockchain as a new, decentralized form of organizing the validation and verification of transactions that represents the ‘basic assumption of neoliberal collectivization sedimented in the form of software’. Oliver Leistert, ‘Bitcoin und Block-chain’, in POP: Kultur und Kritik, no. 7, autumn 2015, pp. 80–85, here p. 85.

36

Anna Tsing, ‘Supply Chains and the Human Condition’, in Rethinking Marxism, no. 21:2, April 2009, pp. 148–76; Ned Rossiter, Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares (New York: Routledge, 2016); Ian Bogost, ‘Das Internet der Dinge, die wir nicht brauchen’, in Florian Sprenger, Christoph Engemann (eds.), Internet der Dinge: Über smarte ­Objekte, intelligente Umgebungen und die technische Durchdringung der Welt (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), pp. 89–100.

37

Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 694.

38

Félix Guattari, ‘Capital as the Integral of Power Formation’, in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), Soft Subversions, trans. Chet Wiener and Emily Wittman (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), pp. 244–264, here p. 254.

39

Ibid., p. 252.

40

Ibid., p. 262. A Thousand Plateaus operates a historical schematization of this grafting on the basis of the difference between ‘machinic enslavement (asservissement machinique)’ and ‘social subjection (assujettissement sociale)’. The third age – the age of cybernetics and information machines, which follows on archaic enslavement in the age of the

205

megamachine analyzed by Lewis Mumford and the social subjection in the age of technical machines – thus not only re-establishes a general regime of machinic enslavement of the kind initially tied in with imperial states but integrates it with the kind of complete social subjection represented by contemporary subjectivity. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 437–448. 41

Félix Guattari, Eric Alliez, ‘Capitalist Systems, Structures and Processes’, in Guattari 2009 (footnote 30), pp. 265–277, here p. 273.

42

Guatttari 2009 (footnote 30), p. 249.

43

Félix Guattari, ‘Le Capitalisme Mondial Intégré et la revolution moléculaire’ (1981), http://1libertaire.free.fr/Guattari4. html (accessed 9.10.2020).

44

Ibid.

45

Ibid.

46

Whereas in A Thousand Plateaus the classic apparatus of capture, the state, functions precisely via establishing the fictitious commodities (Polanyi) of labour, land and money, which subject territory (the earth), activity and exchange, and thus give rise to capital, WIC from this perspective represents the rise of a new, environmental/environ mentalitarian apparatus of capture that has been expanded by behaviour and recodes or overwrites the old apparatus of capture, setting off a new wave of primitive accumulation – the primitive accumulation of behaviour that takes place before our eyes today. Compare Deleuze, Guattari 2005 (footnote 40), pp. 437–448.

47

Guattari 1980 (footnote 35), p. 2. On the significance of semiotics, and non-signifying semiotics in particular, for Guattari’s analysis of the contemporary situation see Lazzarato 2014.

48 49

Guattari 1980 (footnote 35), p. 2.

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

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molecular expansion in which everything is reorganized according to WIC’s particular axiomatic of control. ‘The information revolution considerably accelerates this integration process.’44 Guattari observes the emergence of a ‘ma­chinic-semiotic integration’ that supplements the traditional capitalist register of semiotic subjection of individuals and collectives – for example via monetary signs, stock market indexes or the judicial apparatus insofar as it concerns wage labour, property and public order – and now relies to at least an equal extent on ‘enslavement systems [systémes d'asservissement] in the cybernetic sense of the term’.45 Accordingly, and unlike ‘traditional segmentary capitalisms’, which were founded on human labour, exchange value, and the principle of the general equivalent, Guattari sees WIC as no longer based primarily on the general equivalent.46 And capital, for its part, no longer appears as a primarily economic category that refers to commodity circulation and accumulation: ‘It is a semiotic category that concerns all levels of production and all levels of power stratification.’47 This is why WIC no longer inscribes itself only ‘within the framework of societies divided into social, racial, bureaucratic, and sexual classes and into age groups, but also within a proliferating machinic tissue.’48 We will thus have to merge Foucault and Guattari, as it were, in order to inquire into the environmentalitarian modes of capitalist integration; and to investigate how worldwide capitalist integration is being implemented by digital milieus of environmental media and technologies. Our critical task today culminates in the analysis of the environmentalitarian Capital-Form. 3. Unworlding and transworlding: the becoming-environmental of thinking and world If today our key environmentalitarian experience is that of the implementation, with full force and on all levels, of a new unworlding (Unweltlichkeit), then we need a negative-dialectical thinking of worldmaking, whose conceptual core could be the speculative category of becoming-environmental. This category is capable of developing a negative dialectics of unworlding (unwelten) and environmentalizing (umwelten) that lives up to the environmentalitarian situation. Donna Haraway may orient us in articulating this approach, since, confronted with the ‘unworldings of the Capitalocene’, with the multiple modes in which environmentalitarian capitalism has driven processes of de-worlding, she has begun work on a remarkable rethinking of worlding as such, which for her can henceforth only ever be thought in the plural, worldings. The modes of the world’s worlding become emphatically environmental. They emerge – in a reversal and radicalization of Heidegger’s worlding of world – as modes of trans-worlding: Haraway also speaks of ‘earthly worlding’. The becoming-environmental of world that Haraway elaborates in her recent work, and especially in Staying with the Trouble, as an answer to the process of Environmentalization, comes in different modes: ‘becoming-with’, ‘making-with’, ‘thinking-with’ and finally ‘worlding-with’.49 Haraway thus deconstructs, not to say attacks, the

contemporary environmental Capital-Form in particular, which is merely a limited mode of environmentality and drives unworlding. The current Capital-Form is the most advanced form so far of the environmental organization of exploitation, and forces us to enter ever more deeply into unworlding on all levels.

50

Ibid., pp. 58–59. Sympoiesis is a compound of sym-, ‘together with’, and poiesis, ‘making’, and thus means something like ‘makingwith’.

51

Ibid., p. 58.

52

If in Haraway environmentality, as opposed to the environmentalitarian unworlding, becomes the form of the world, then the possibility of conceiving becoming-environmental as radically as she does, and perhaps even of rearticulating the sense of environment it operates, is taken from the sciences. More precisely, and very strikingly, it is the life sciences that as it were morph into a downright anti-anthropocentric and anti-environmentalitarian counter-knowledge. According to Haraway, a paradigmatic development in the twenty-first century's most advanced biologies shatters the ideas of bounded individuals plus contexts and organisms plus environments; it undoes the traditional conceptualization of the relationship between individual/ organism and environment, and thereby unsettles an entire historical semantics. In Haraway, no other term focuses the problem of becomingenvironmental in all its aspects as successfully as the key concept of ‘sympoiesis’.50 ‘Sympoiesis,’ she writes, ‘is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it.’51 Sympoeisis both recalls Lynn Margulis’s biological theory of symbiogenesis and gives it an ontological turn, and in so doing produces a new mental image.52 Beginning in the 1960s, Margulis elaborated a theory that regards symbiosis as the constitutive relation of life. Organisms do not precede the relations they enter into with one another, but, in a semiotic material involution, reciprocally produce one another from beings that for their part have already emerged from earlier such involutions. According to Haraway, symbiogenetic theory – which in Margulis addresses not the macrolevel of higher organisms but the microlevel of bacteria and archaea, of pre-individual, polytemporal and polyspatial entanglements that form complex patterns – has not just turned out to be a promising approach for twenty-first-century biology; it marks a revolution in our way of thinking as such. In the symbiogenetic awakening of biology, ‘poiesis is symchthonic, sympoietic, always partnered all the way down, with no starting and subsequently interacting “units”’.53

Margulis herself still found her conceptual framework in the concept of autopoiesis developed by the second cybernetics. Compare Bruce Clarke, ‘Neocybernetics of Gaia: The Emergence of Secondorder Gaia Theory’, in Eileen Crist, H. Bruce Rinker (eds.), Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), pp. 293–314. Clarke has also embedded Margulis’s dismissal of the individual (which is of great relevance for speculation today) in the historical context of immunology and symbiosis found in the proximity of cybernetics and particularly in Varela. Bruce Clarke, ‘Planetary Immunity: Biopolitics, Gaia Theory, the Holobiont, and the Systems Counterculture’, in Erich Hörl with James Burton (eds.), General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 193–215.

53

Haraway 2016 (footnote 41), p. 33.

In Haraway’s ontogenetic thinking, symbiopoiesis, making-with, is not just a concept to denote becoming-together, becoming-with and the great chain of cooperation; it names the conceptual core of a neo-materialist critical theory as such. While this theory is substantially a thinking of becoming-environmental on multiple scales, it is nonetheless based on a conception of becoming-environmental as a production that consists in inter-species sympoietic cooperation. 207

54

Gérard Granel, ‘L’ontologie marxiste de 1844 et la question de la “coupure”’, in Traditionis Traditio (Paris: Gallimard, [1969] 1972), pp. 181–230.

55

Gérard Granel, ‘La production totale’, in Jean-Luc Nancy, Élisabeth Rigal 2001 (footnote 8), pp. 37–43, here p. 38.

56

By which I also mean: without a political economy, a political ecology is worthless. The very core of political ecology is a critique of the environmentalitarian Capital-Form.

57

Haraway 2016 (footnote 41), p. 173, footnote 2.

58

Ibid., p. 178, footnote 34.

59

Ibid., p. 104.

60

Ibid., p. 30.

Here Haraway no doubt stands in the tradition of Marx, to whose fundamental ontology of production she gives a sympoietic turn, prompted not least by the fact that the term ‘production’ has been discredited by the history of capitalism and colonialism. Marx, as Gérard Granel has so persuasively shown, developed a veritable fundamental ontology of production; for him, production was the fundamental mode of Being. World, accordingly, became a question of generating or producing world.54 Production, Granel points out, is not ‘one phenomena among many others […] it is the phenomenon par excellence that manifests the essence of our world and determines its course, not to say its fate’.55 Production is the name Marx gives, especially in the German Ideology, to the reality of the real. In Haraway, sympoiesis takes the place of production. In abstracting from the early Marx’s undeniable anthropocentrism – for Marx, production is a basic human behaviour – Haraway operates a radically environmental reconceptualization of the production and formation of world as such in terms of a movement of the real itself. This is where, in contrast to its contemporary restricted environmentalitarian form, the outlines of a general economic thinking of environmentality become visible. Under the conditions of an environmentalitarian Capitalocene, political economy turns out to be a political ecology centered on the concept of sympoiesis.56 Without exception, all worlding now appears – and this is the point – to be constituted sympoietically; all worlding (Welten) becomes a transworlding (Umwelten). It is motivated by a primary, trans-species, shared worldhood, indeed by an environmentality that is based on an originary intertwinement of only partial relations, and manifests itself in this intertwinement. The partiality of these relationships is crucial, since the partial-relational constitution of sympoietic thinking, which takes up a notion from the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, deconstructs the ecological commonplace according to which – as Barry Commoner has it in the first law of ecology set out in his 1971 The Closing Circle – everything is connected with everything else. ‘Nothing is connected to everything,’ Haraway counters, yet ‘everything is connected to something.’57 On the basis of partial relationality, thinking becomes a ‘sympoietic “care”’58 characterized by an ability to respond, by a ‘response-ability’.59 This care for and about sympoietic intertwinement is what Haraway means by ‘tentacular thinking’.60 The becoming-environmental of thinking thus outlined in Haraway’s ontogenetic project is the answer provoked by the environmentalitarian movement of world, by the devastations of the Capitalocene and its deworldings. It is the ultimate consequence of a becoming-environmental into which we have long been swept up. Captured in its environmentalitarian forms, it is our task to give them a non-restrictive turn, and we begin to do so thanks to the becomingenvironmental of thinking itself.

Translation from German: Nils F. Schott

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One Minute Material – A Chronological Analysis of Sound Ecologies BJ Nilsen

My practice as a sound artist has evolved around field recordings from nature and urban environments. The collected sound material, excerpts of which are described in detail below, is used as core material for the digital composition of music. The acoustic tracks are documents in which interactions of different (human and non-human) agents are interwoven, and the sound ecology of each recording depends on place and situation. Different environments have different sound properties and parameters. These depend on the season, the time of day or night, temperature, and the weather conditions, all of which interact with the sounds produced by both human and non-human actors – think of traffic, human interactions, wildlife, sounds of earth, and similar. The recordings of course also depend on the sound equipment used and where it is positioned. My practice includes experimentation with various set-ups and positioning of equipment, such as experiments with distance and reverberation (persistence or echo of a sound after the sound is produced), sound fields (the directional characteristics of the sound source) and psychoacoustics (the interaction between human auditory system and acoustics). 209

The compositional process allows for altering the sound ecologies of the acoustic tracks and adding subjective notions, transforming them into semi-fictional sound ecologies that can be edited and shaped in any desirable way. They lead the way to a utopian soundscape, serving as a suggestion for imaginary acoustic ecologies. As in any art form, distortion of reality has stretched our imagination of shaping our existing environment. This process allows making the inaudible audible, giving a voice to some (unheard) layers of our acoustic environment, for instance to those elements that the human ear cannot detect: electromagnetism, water, fire, earth, or minerals. It explores areas of sound pollution. When and at which point does sound become ‘pollution’ in specific geographical contexts? How does nature respond to technology? How does wildlife sound within industrial complexes and urban spaces? The following is the sound analysis of my one-minute material, recorded at five different locations, and used as source material for various compositions. 1. In a temporarily closed Norwegian factory hall. 2. By the foot of a Russian WW2 monument. 3. In a small French city garden. 4. On a skyscraper development area in China. 5. At a camping site in an Italian village. The sound events of each recording are described in order of appearance with a short note on duration, character and frequency range, a simple method to better understand the acoustic space. When listening and analysing second by second, one discovers the complexity of the soundscape, revealing the big amount of information that can be applied and read into each sound.

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# 1. The sonic environment and compositional elements of the Kirkenes iron ore separation plant during a standstill. Various sounds from the outside filter into the hall and the overall sound coloration is further dominated by the natural reverb of the machine hall, similar to that of a medium sized cathedral. Midday of 9 June 2016, Kirkenes (NO), Temperature +8°C 00:00:00–01:00:00: Distant electrical generators and ventilator hum (Continuous, Low Freq) 00:00:22–01:00:00: Distant drops of water falling from the ceiling (Continuous, Hi Freq) 00:02:03: Very distant unidentified thud. 1 sec (Sudden, Low Freq) 00:02:13: Distant seagull calls from outside. 3 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:03:11: Metal door opening and closing in the wind. 2 sec (Sudden, Low Freq) 00:04:20: Loud drip of water. 1 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:05:01: Unidentified clacking sound. 1 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:07:23: Almost unintelligible distant seagull. 1 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:10:00: Metal door opening and closing. 2 sec (Sudden, Lower Mid Freq) 00:10:18: Distant seagull calls from outside. 3 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:15:03: Metal door opening and closing. 2 sec (Sudden, Low Freq) 00:16:22: Distant low metal rumbling. 4 sec (Irregular, Low Freq) 00:22:09: Metal door opening and closing. 2 sec (Sudden, Low Freq) 00:34:20: Loud drip of water. 1 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:44:18: Distant seagull calls from outside. 2 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:47:14: Metal door opening and closing. 2 sec (Sudden, Low Freq)

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2. The soundscape from the port of Murmansk and the coal loading facilities. Listening position on a hill at the point of the Alyosha monument, overlooking the port and the city. Afternoon of 14 December 2016, Murmansk (RU), Temperature -1°C 00:00:00–01:00:00: Distant engine humming originating from ships, trains and cranes in the port of Murmansk (Continuous, Very Low Freq) 00:00:00 Hydraulic blast. 5 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:07:12: Train breaks. 3 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:09:18: Metal impact. 1 sec (Sudden, Low Freq) 00:14:06: Distant chains against metal. 2 sec (Irregular, Mid Freq) 00:20:15: Distant signal system. 6 sec (Continuous, Mid Freq) 00:24:09: Metal impacts. 5 sec (Irregular, Low Freq) 00:31:09: Crow calling. 3 sec (Continuous, Mid Freq) 00:31:09: Distant signal system. 22 sec (Continuous, Mid Freq) 00:50:00 Metal impact. 1 sec (Sudden, Low Freq) 00:56:18: Metal impacts. 5 sec (Irregular, Low Freq) 00:57:15: Distant signal system. 1 sec (Continuous, Mid Freq)

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3. The acoustic backdrop of Caen, recorded in the garden of Château de Caen, next to the modern museum. Situated on the top of a small hill, overlooking the city as it wakes up. Early morning of 26 August 2016, Caen (FR), Temperature +12°C 00:00:00–01:00:00: Light breeze through linden trees (Continuous, Mid Freq) 00:02:08: Wings flapping from a nearby bird. 1 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:05:18: Wings flapping from a nearby bird. 1 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:06:02: Distant church bells. 32 sec (Continuous, Slow, Mid Freq) 00:15:11: Distant bird tweets. 45 sec (Irregular, Hi Freq) 00:44:00 Distant church bells. 16 sec (Continuous, Fast, Mid Freq) 00:44:15: Moving vehicle passing nearby, rattling crescendo. 15 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq)

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4. Construction site in Yujiapu, China. A former fishing village turned into a smaller replica of Manhattan. Midday of 18 March 2015, Yujiapu (CH), Temperature +7°C 00:00:00–01:00:00: Sparrows tweeting (Continuous, Hi Freq) 00:00:00: Large iron bar dropped on concrete floor. 2 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:08:09: Distant slam of metal followed by dropped iron bar. 3 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:21:18: Distant fireworks. 36 sec (Irregular, Lower Mid Freq) 00:22:00: Large iron bar dropped on concrete floor. 1 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:27:04: Distant drop of iron bar rolling on concrete floor. 2 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:33:00: Vague distant voices. 2 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:36:17: Distant drop of iron bar on concrete floor. 1 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:42:05: Distant drop of iron bar on concrete floor. 1 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:45:03: Distant voice shouting. 1 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:48:12: Distant drop of iron bar rolling on concrete floor. 2 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:48:18: Distant voice shouting. 1 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:55:21: Very distant voices. 5 sec (Continuous, Mid Freq)

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5. A camping site in Gignod in the very northwest of Italy, close to the border of Switzerland. A high-pitched chorus of crickets reverberates through the hills. Evening of 29 July 2015, Gignod (IT), Temperature +10°C 00:00:00–01:00:00 Crickets chirping (Continuous, Hi Freq) 00:00:15: Dogs barking. 45 sec (Irregular, Mid Freq) 00:01:20: Motorbike racing through the roads of the village. 50 sec (Continuous, Mid Freq) 00:37:02: Distant voice. 2 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq) 00:37:12: Hourly bell chime from clock tower nine times. 18 sec (Continuous, Mid Freq) 00:41:09: Distant voice. 1 sec (Sudden, Mid Freq)

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Fig. 1

Octopos vulgo Graeco (illustration by Pierre Belon), from: Petri Bellonii Cenomani, De aquatilibus, libri duo cum [epsilon, iota] conibus ad viuam ipsorum effigiem, quoad eius fieri potuit, expressis …, Apud C. Stephanum, Parisiis, 1553, p. 332, fig. 137, Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library, Cambridge, Massa­ chusetts.

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Future-Crafting: The Non-humanity of Planetary Computation, or How to Live with Digital Uncertainty Betti Marenko

1

Luciano Floridi, The 4th Revolution. How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

The age of planetary computation Planetary computation. An epochal shift rewires humanity by impacting on our capacity to feel, to perceive, to sense and to think. Far from being a mere matter of speed of communication, this change has to do with the creation of new interlocking ecologies where information is sensed and the cognitive, perceptual and affective spheres mutate. Sensation prevails over signification. Data becomes us. Mediation shifts to immediation. This is the Fourth Revolution, when the digital-online world spills into and merges with the analogue-offline world. In this onlife experience data is the new currency, code is synchronized to the human and the infosphere becomes synonymous with reality.1 The proliferation of smart algorithmic environments evolving in real time, the colonization of daily life by social networks, the tsunami of data, the unstoppable googlification of knowledge together create new ecologies of cohabitation and co-evolution of the human with the non-humanity of planetary computation. Given this scenario, two questions emerge as urgent. What is the impact of the ongoing informatization of bodies, artefacts and environments on the whole of human cognition, affectivity and perceptual faculties? What kind of narratives, images and fictions are needed to make sense of the ecologies we now inhabit, which are populated by agents on a continuum between the human and the non-human, data flows, codes, algorithms, and strange entanglements of silicon and carbon? 217

2

Félix Guattari, ‘Regimes, Pathways, Subjects’, in Jonathan Crary, Sanford Kwinter (eds.), Zone 6. Incorporations (New York: Zone Books, 1992). Originally published as ‘De la Production de Subjectivité’, Chimères 4 (1987). A version also appeared in Schizoanalytic Cartographies (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) pp. 1–15. 3

Félix Guattari, Lines of Flights. For Another World of Possibilities (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 191. 4

Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London and New Brunswick: The Athlone Press, 2000), p. 38. 5

Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions (New York: Semiotext[e], 1996), p. 106. 6

Félix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 42. 7

Guattari 1996 (footnote 5), p. 118.

8

In Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm the emphasis lies on the machines that make existence possible. While the ‘aesthetic’ concerns the creation of mutant affects that carry one beyond the familiar and the known, the ethical implications of Guattari’s paradigm address the fact that any creation involves responsibility in regard to what is created. As it offers a model for a production of subjectivity beyond dominant equilibria and based on affects, uncertainty, openness, emergence, renewal and creation, it could be understood as a paradigm of liberation. 9

Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis. An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 4.

The indeterminacy of open machines In the 1980s Félix Guattari was one of the first thinkers to write about the coming ‘age of planetary computerization’.2 Already in 1979 he had declared: ‘The computer is effectively on the point of being integrated into a complex of enunciation in which it will become impossible to “separate out” human intervention and machinic creativity’3 – effectively anticipating the current ecological landscape where the human and the non-human cohabit in unprecedented ways. In The Three Ecologies Guattari discusses how the ‘acceleration of the technological and data-processing revolutions, as prefigured in the phenomenal growth of a computer-aided subjectivity’4 would lead to a series of human and nonhuman openings, unfoldings and becomings. Foreseeing the present-day function of computers as vehicles of machinic semiotisation, Guattari heralds the coming ‘post-media era’5 as a remapping of subjectivities thanks to newly formed computerization-driven assemblages. For him the emergence of computer-based practices of subjectification is charged with potentialities: ‘One may assume, in this respect, that it is the extension into a network of databanks that will have the biggest surprise in store for us.’6 Guattari emphasizes the creative and liberating potential of these new subjectivities that, perhaps for the first time in history, would be able ‘to lead to something more enduring than mad and ephemeral spontaneous outpourings – in other words, to lead to a fundamental repositioning of human beings in relation to both their machinic and natural environments (which, at any rate, now tend to coincide)’.7 If subjectivity is produced through large-scale machines including languages, media and technological innovation, then computer technology becomes a non-human component feeding into pre-personal parts of subjectivity.8 ‘Just as social machines can be grouped under the general title of Collective Equipment, technological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of human subjectivity, not only within its memory and intelligence, but within its sensibility, affects and unconscious fantasms.’9 Put differently, our current eco-technological lives are no longer simply mediated by information and computation, but are fully constituted by them. This is how Guattari furnishes us with ways of thinking about new human–non-human ecologies, staying clear of both technodeterminism and technodystopia, while also refuting the naïve notion of machines and technologies as neutral tools. What is emphasized instead is the extent to which planetary computation undermines the structural distinction between machine and cognition, and forces us to reimagine the boundary between human and nonhuman. The object is no longer to compare humans and the machine in order to evaluate the correspondences, the extensions, the possible or impossible substitutions of the ones for the other, but to bring them in communication in order to show how humans are a component part of the machine, or combines with something else to constitute a machine. The other thing can be a tool, or even an

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animal, or other humans. We are not using a metaphor, however, when we speak of machines: humans constitute a machine.10 The cyberneticization of the world, that is, the introduction of information on a planetary scale, is the key to new modes of sense-making that are contextual, relational and not fully predictable, emerging in the contemporary technological condition.11 New practices of subjectivity arise from the increasing miniaturization and personalisation of apparatuses; an age of digital ensembles unfolds, characterized by open machines and by instability, uncertainty and indeterminacy. In his discussion of the history of technological objects, media theorist Erich Hörl articulates the shift from sense-making as the outcome of subjective acts, to sense ‘emerging from the non-signifying collaborative practices of humans, objects, and machines’.12 The technical object ceases to be instrumental accessory to the establishment of meaning in order to become the hinge of an open, collaborative and relational – even ‘post-discursive-meaning’ – production of sense. This shift to openness and indeterminacy is what in cybernetics underpins the distinction between trivial and non-trivial machines. While a trivial machine is characterized by a one-to-one relationship between its input (stimulus, cause) and its output (response, effect), and is therefore entirely predictable, non-trivial machines ‘are quite different creatures’,13 as cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster wrote: Their input-output relationship is not invariant, but is determined by the machine’s previous output. In other words, its previous steps determine its present reactions. While these machine are again deterministic systems, for all practical reasons they are unpredictable: an output once observed for a given input will most likely be not the same for the same input given later.14 The French mechanologist and philosopher Gilbert Simondon acknowledges the role of indeterminacy in the evolution of machines in a short text on ‘Technical Mentality’, in which he discusses the openness of technical objects as the condition of their perfectibility.15 This form of openness whereby the object is worked upon, expanded, amplified and upgraded entails the irruption of the unexpected, the off-grid, the unplanned, the emergent and the accidental in the constitution of machines.16 In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon reminds us of the crucial role of indeterminacy in this process:

10

Félix Guattari, ‘Balance-Sheet for Desiring Machines’, in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), Chaosophy (New York: Semiotext[e], 1995a), pp. 119–150, p. 120.

11

Erich Hörl, ‘The Technological Condition’, in Parrhesia 22 (2015), pp. 1–15.

12

Erich Hörl, ‘The Artificial Intelligence of Sense: The History of Sense and Technology After Jean-Luc Nancy (By Way of Gilbert Simondon)’, in Parrhesia 17 (2013), pp. 11–24, here p. 12.

13

Heinz Von Foerster, Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (University of Illinois: Springer, 2003), p. 208.

14

Ibid., p. 208.

15

The text was discovered after Simondon’s death and written probably around 1970. Gilbert Simondon, ‘Technical Mentality’, in Parrhesia 7 (2009), pp. 17–27; reprinted in: Arne de Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, Ashley Woodward (eds.), Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 1–15.

16

On uncertainty and the accident in relation to technical objects and in particular to computation, see Betti Marenko, ‘When Making becomes Divination: Uncertainty and Contingency in Computational Glitch-Events’, in Design Studies 41, special issue: Computational Making, ed. Terry Knight and Theodora Vardoulli (London: Elsevier, 2015), pp. 110–125.

17

Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017).

The true progressive perfecting of machines, whereby we could say a machine’s degree of technicity is raised, corresponds not to an increase of automatism, but on the contrary to the fact that the operation of a machine harbors a certain margin of indeterminacy [emphasis added]. It is this margin that allows the machine to be sensitive to outside information. Much more than any increase in automatism, it is sensitivity to information on the part of machines that makes a technical ensemble possible.17 219

18

Franco Vaccari, Fotografia e Inconscio Tecnologico (Torino: Einaudi, 2011).

19

Nigel Thrift, Knowing Capitalism (London: Sage, 2005), p. 213.

20 21

Hörl 2015 (footnote 11), p. 9.

Betti Marenko, ‘Digital Materiality, Morphogenesis and the Intelligence of the Technodigital Object’, in Betti Marenko, Jamie Brassett (eds.), Deleuze and Design (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 107–138.

The technological unconscious The milieu of pervasive computing, ambient intelligence and immersive, instantaneous connectivity producing new techno-aesthetic sensibilities can be described as the technological unconscious. Italian artist Franco Vaccari first coined this expression in the late 1960s to signal the autonomous capacities of the machine to produce memory independent from human awareness.18 The technological unconscious evokes an image of humans as increasingly constituted by computation, software and codes, and of electronic objects recursively and continuously reshaping the world. It evokes digital uncertainty, defined here as the potential for unprogrammed, unknown, and contingent outcomes in computation. For sociologist Nigel Thrift the technological unconscious is an immersive milieu where humans and computation feed into and adapt to each other. As computing flows in the environment filling every interstice, the technological unconscious becomes the operation of powerful and unknowable information technologies that generate ‘a pre-personal substrate of guaranteed correlations, assured encounters and therefore unconsidered anticipation’.19 These technologies produce everyday life. Today’s general ecological reality, then, is made of extensively cyberneticized, heterogenic subjectivities distributed in the environment, plugged into oscillating networks of digital uncertainty and signalling a radical ontological reorganization of the human. Having addressed this fundamental transformation already in the 1980s, Guattari has been rightfully described as the ‘first general ecologist and theoretician of a technological unconscious’.20 The non-humanity of artificial intelligence Whether we call it Fourth Revolution, technological unconscious or planetary computation, what matters is the potential this scenario harbours for producing new concepts, new images and new narratives, and for instituting new models of knowledge creation, enquiry and future building. A key question prompted by planetary computation concerns how to envision the encounter with the nonhumanity of artificial intelligence. Indeed, this encounter has no previous road-mapping and should be embraced as an entirely novel experience, moving away from the anthropocentrism that permeates current attitudes towards AI. Rather than expecting AI to be like human intelligence this opportunity should be used to experiment with notions of intelligence inclusive of what is other-than-human: distributed, extended, relational, emergent and, crucially, not necessarily carbon-based modes of thinking. After all, the most common element on earth after oxygen is silicon, a crystal found mainly in beach sand. The world of computation, the allegedly ‘immaterial’ world of data and hyperconnectivity, hinges on crystals of sand.21 In a 1980 interview with Catherine Clément, Gilles Deleuze commented on this fact:

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You know, it’s curious, today we are witnessing the revenge of silicon. Biologists have often asked themselves why life was ‘channelled’ through carbon rather than silicon. But the life of modern machines, a genuine non-organic life, totally distinct from the organic life of carbon, is channelled through silicon. This is the sense in which we speak of a silicon-assemblage.22 Undeniably, the silicon assemblage has now become a reality. In his book on Michel Foucault, Deleuze makes further reference to the ‘potential of silicon’ in third-generation machines, and to the impact of cybernetics and information technologies on the formation of subjectivity.23 The era of silicon gives tangible form to the vision of new hybrid individuals entangled with rocks and inorganic matter, gathering within him/herself both human and non-human forces (the enigmatic Superfold). Deleuze’s prescient analysis helps us to reframe human-machine interactions as an encounter with the non-human, and thus offers a way out of the anthropocentric assumption of the Turing test (in which the benchmark is human intelligence). What if, instead, we recognize the multiplicity of existing intelligences, refrain from making them like us and experiment with the unknown potential they may be heralding? Design theorist Benjamin Bratton argues eloquently against the anthropocentric fallacy that permeates the encounter with AI.24 Rather than asking AI to pass the Turing test, this encounter should instigate different questions, so as to reimagine what counts as intelligence. Rather than fixating on something that is not there (the human-machine similarity), the focus should lie on grasping the alien intelligences that are not even recognized because they do not match human expectations. What if we paid attention to non-human forms of intelligence already existing among us? Enter the octopus.

22

Gilles Deleuze, ‘Eight Years Later: 1980 Interview’, Two Regimes of Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975–1995 (New York: Semiotext[e], 2006), pp. 175–180, here p. 178.

23

Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 131.

24

Benjamin Bratton, ‘Outing Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning with Turing Test’, in Matteo Pasquinelli (ed.), Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and its Traumas (Luneburg: Meson Press, 2015), pp. 69–80.

25

Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds. The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (London: William Collins, 2016), p. 59.

26

Ibid., p. 64.

27

‘Synthetic smarts. With learning robots and emotional computers, artificial intelligence becomes real’, http://www.raytheon.com/news/ feature/artificial_intelligence.html (accessed 25.6.2017).

28

Leah Burrows, ‘The First Autonomous, Entirely Soft Robot’, in Harvard Gazette, 24 August 2016, http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/ story/2016/08/the-first-autonomous -entirely-soft-robot/ (accessed 25.6.2017).

29

Alfonso Íñiguez, ‘The Octopus as a Model for Artificial Intelligence – A Multi-Agent Robotic Case Study’, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, 2 (2017), pp. 439–444.

The nonhumanity of the octopus The octopus is an extraordinary creature (fig. 1). Unique among invertebrates, it has been listed as an ‘honorary vertebrate’ because of its intelligence, adaptability and capacity to feel and express pain.25 Octopuses are renowned for being smart, curious, resourceful and adventurous; they can handle tools, solve mazes, open jars and escape from impossibly tight spaces.26 With two thirds of its neurons located in the arms rather than the brain, the octopus’s neural system is exceptionally decentralized. Its arms are effectively autonomous agents. As a paradigmatic example of embodied and distributed cognition, the octopus has become a model for soft robotics and AI research.27 This has led to the first entirely soft octobot recently developed by Harvard scientists.28 As the closest form of alien intelligence that we can study, the octopus is the blueprint for the development of an autonomous AI whose neural networks can adapt to and learn from the environment.29 221

30

Vilém Flusser (with Louis Bec), Vampyroteuthis infernalis. A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

31

Ibid., p. 67.

32

On the historical lineage of algorithm as a cultural object of enchantment see: Betti Marenko, ‘Filled with Wonder. The Enchanting Android from Cams to Algorithms’, in Leslie Atzmon, Prasad Boradkar (eds.), Encountering Things. Design and Theories of Things (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2017).

33

Andrew Goffey, ‘Algorithm’, in Matthew Fuller (ed.), Software Studies: A Lexicon (London and Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008) pp. 15–20.

34

Nicholas Diakopoulos, ‘Algorithmic Accountability Reporting: On the Investigation of Black Boxes’, in A Tow/Knight Brief (New York: Columbia Journalism School, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, 2014), p. 3.

35

Yuk Hui, ‘Algorithmic Catastrophe—the Revenge of Contingency’, in Parrhesia 23 (2015), pp. 122–143.

36

Luciana Parisi, ‘Instrumental Reason, Algorithmic Capitalism, and the Incomputable’, in Matteo Pasquinelli (ed.), Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and its Traumas (Lueneburg: Meson Press, 2015), pp. 125–137.

222

37

Ibid., p. 129.

38

Ibid., p. 130.

Design theorist and polymath Vilém Flusser dedicated an extraordinary work of philosophical fiction to this creature. In his Vampyroteuthis infernalis30 he re-configures human ontology and communicative capacities from the inhuman perspective of the giant deep-sea squid. Denouncing the one-dimensional anthropomorphic criteria by which humans understand life, Flusser deploys the non-humanity of the Vampyroteuthis to raise thought-provoking questions about information technology and its powers of control and capture. We are vertebrates of such complexity that we have managed to appropriate, by developing an immaterial art, an evolutionary strategy of mollusks. As our interest in objects began to wane, we created media that have enabled us to rape human brains, forcing them to store immaterial information. We have built chromatophores of our own-televisions, videos, and computer monitors that display synthetic images with whose help broadcasters of information can mendaciously seduce their audiences.31 The non-humanity of algorithms The technological object ‘algorithm’ informs a radical revision of the order of things, of human rationality and of thinking itself.32 As the epitome of the post-industrial technical object, the algorithm embodies a technicity potentially open to infinite re-combinations and endlessly perfectible. Andrew Goffey’s formula ‘Algorithm = Logic + Control’ emphasizes the algorithm’s programme of action: its pragmatic functioning.33 As a statement of intent, the algorithm makes things happen; it both utters and generates. However, the conventional definition of the algorithm as recipe or ‘a series of steps undertaken in order to solve a particular problem or accomplish a defined outcome’34 is not sufficient. For media philosopher Yuk Hui the comparison algorithm = recipe fails to distinguish between an automatization of instructions (pure repetition) and an automatization through recursion, where functions are (partially) self-defined. Instead, he argues that the algorithm is modulated by a horizon of contingency, of what is neither known, nor present, yet.35 For digital media theorist Luciana Parisi the current computational paradigm is based on the algorithm’s capacity to respond and adapt to external inputs, learn rapidly and recursively base new outputs upon this learning.36 A new dynamism intrinsic to computation emerges, a space in ‘between input data and algorithmic instructions, involving a non-linear elaboration of data’37 where ‘algorithmic automation heralds the realization of a second nature, in which a purposeless and impersonal mode of thought tends to supplant the teleological finality of reason’.38 Parisi contends that algorithmic automation, in its radical indifference to human qualities, signals the emergence of an alien, non-human mode of thinking. A case in point is the ‘machine-phase’ of financial markets (that is, high-frequency stock-trading) where algorithms make decisions in the order of a millisecond, faster than any human possibly could. Not only do the sub-millisecond speed

at which algorithmic trading operates and the massive quantity of algorithm-to-algorithm interactions exceed human comprehension; neither can they be fully controlled nor their outcomes fully anticipated. In Parisi’s words: ‘The increasing volume of incomputable data (or randomness) within on-line, distributive, and interactive computation is now revealing that infinite, patternless data are rather central to computational processing.’39 Drawing on mathematician Gregory Chaitin’s algorithmic randomness – a concept according to which in every computational process the output is always greater than the input – Parisi argues that the entropic transformation of data that takes place in computation is what gives rise to the incomputable, to what she describes as the ‘increasing yet unknown quan tities of data that characterize rule-based processing’.40 The incom­ putable, in other words, is now at the heart of computation. This means that algorithmic automation can no longer be understood through Turing’s discrete computational machine – a closed system of feedback based on a-priori instructions and endlessly repeatable stepby-step procedures (first order cybernetics). If within this older order of automation initial conditions were to be reproduced ad infinitum, the current mode of algorithmic automation marks a decisive break:

39

Ibid., p. 131.

40

Ibid., p. 133.

41

Ibid., p. 131.

42

Ibid., p. 134.

43

Ibid., p. 134.

It is designed to analyse and compare options, to run possible scenarios or outcomes, and to perform basic reasoning through problem-solving steps that were not contained within the machine’s programmed memory. For instance, expert systems draw conclusions through search techniques, pattern matching, and web data extraction, and those complex automated systems have come to dominate our everyday culture, from global networks of mobile telephony to smart banking and air traffic control.41 This is the essential difference between Turing’s position – where computation stops when the incomputable begins – and Parisi’s, who asserts that computation is defined by its internal margin of incomputability. Incomputability, far from being a break from reason, signals the expansion of reason ‘beyond its limits to involve the processing of maximally unknown parts that have no teleological finality’.42 Remarkably, ‘this challenges the view that computational processing corresponds to calculations leading to pre-programmed and already known outputs’.43 Far from demonstrating the shortcoming of a mechanical view of computation, which equates randomness to error, the incomputable has become the absolute condition of computation, thus provoking irreversible change in algorithmic rules. If we accept Parisi’s argument, then computation becomes an incomplete affair constantly open to revision, signalling the irruption of non-human thought and demanding suitable modes of interaction. How then can the human build affinity with the non-human logic of the machine? What are the strategies to adapt to the contingent, the inventive methods to imagine new relations, the stratagems to finetune to the unknown? If openness, uncertainty and indeterminacy 223

44

Betti Marenko, ‘Incertitude, Contingence et Intuition Matérielle: un Cadre de Recherche pour un Design Mineur’, in Manola Antonioli (ed.), Biomimétisme: Science, Design et Architecture (Paris: Éditions Loco, 2017).

45

Alex Wilkie, Mike Michael, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, ‘Speculative method and Twitter: Bots, energy and three conceptual characters’, in Sociological Review, 63 (2015), pp. 79–101, here p. 82.

46

Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 57. 47

Betti Marenko, ‘The UnDesignability of the Virtual. Design from Problem-Solving to ProblemFinding’, in Gavin Sade, Gretchen Coombs, Andrew McNamara (eds.), Undesign: Critical Practices at the Intersection of Art and Design (London: Routledge, 2018).

48

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 220.

characterize the new ecologies we inhabit, then we must act with astute intelligence. We must design ways of thinking from within the human-non-human ecosystems. We must develop speculations unhinged from teleology and top-down directives. We must navigate ever-shifting territories and negotiate flexible boundaries. If this is the challenge, we need tools to create new figures of thought: what I call Future-crafting. Future-crafting Future-crafting is concerned with re-conceptualizing contingency and rethinking uncertainty within design processes.44 It is about treating them as material to work rather than as risks or threats to be avoided, which is symptomatic of a need to impose patterns of control and predictability. Future-crafting is the activity of giving shape to the future – here and now. Future is about speculating, but avoiding the trap of escaping into a fantasy of what the future could or should be. Instead, future-crafting involves ways of capturing the future and bringing it to bear on the present. This is the crafting part: crafting pertains exquisitely to the now. Future-crafting is speculation by design, a performative rather than descriptive strategy, whose interventions are designed to probe and problematize, provoking ambiguity and challenging the limited as much as limiting order of (anthropocentric) rationality.45 To borrow philosopher Isabelle Stengers’ words on ‘speculative methodologies’, Future-crafting is a practice that ‘affirms the possible, that actively resists the plausible and the probable targeted by approaches that claim to be neutral’.46 I would push this argument further, however, and argue that, more than affirming the possible, future-crafting has the propensity to actualize the virtual. There are three crucial points to consider with respect to the virtual: ·  Actualization is always problematic and problematizing. Actualization is nothing but the creation of problems. This is why it is creative, because it breaks with the principle of identity, questions the existent and introduces the unforeseen.47 ·  The actual does not resemble the virtual from which it emerges. Thus the outcome of the process cannot be predicted: unpredictability is integral to actualization. ·  Actualisation needs imagination. The creation of difference and divergence needs the imagination of what has not been seen before. Imagination, Deleuze writes, ‘crosses domains, orders and levels, knocking down the partitions coextensive with the world, guiding our bodies and inspiring our souls, grasping the unity of mind and nature; a larval consciousness which moves endlessly from science to dream and back again’.48 Framed like this, future-crafting becomes a strategy and a stratagem to conjure new figures of thought. Future-crafting is a set of tools

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at once forensic, diagnostic and divinatory. It is forensic because it concerns things taken as witnesses so to articulate the existent.49 It is diagnostic because it invents explanatory hypotheses in an interrogative fashion – it relies on abduction, a method of investigation unconstrained by a-priori theory or a posteriori verification, but tuned to unpredictability, speculation and imagination. Drawing on cyberneticist Gregory Bateson and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, Parisi describes abduction as the process of inventing explanatory hypotheses formulated in an interrogative fashion. This is what makes abduction different from both deduction and induction: while deduction explains causal relations, induction relies on empirical facts and evidence to draw predictive hypotheses.50 Finally, future-crafting is divinatory, because it attracts images around which new thoughts can coalesce. Future-crafting gives priority to imagination over direct observation, searches for the least familiar hypotheses, those with no verifiable answer, and leans toward the production of what is not there yet. It is driven by the question what if? It is speculative, like sorcery, and thus resonates with similar orientations in fields like philosophy, artistic practice, design, experimental science and finance. What all these different terrains have in common is that they act in the gap between the ‘could’ and the ‘is’. This other space is where Future-crafting encounters planetary computation and its urgent demands, providing us with tools to live with digital uncertainty. Crucially, digital uncertainty draws attention to the tension between machines that are increasingly autonomous and unpredictable and the systemic control and pre-empting of expectations performed by digital apparatuses of capture. Much has been written about this: from Google’s ambitious project of telling its users what they ‘should be typing’,51 to the filter bubble argument according to which personalized search reinforces users’ views and perspectives,52 to the uber-connected dystopian scenario envisioned by American writer Dave Eggers in The Circle.53 Planetary computation largely operates through dispositives of affective capture that, by narrowing down open-ended choices, effectively tame potential. Potential – which is always potential to actualize unknown relations and express the unexpected – is thus turned into prediction. Media theorist Anna Munster writes lucidly about this process, whereby what might happen next becomes what will happen next.54

49

The word ‘forensics’ comes from the Latin forensis, which means ‘in public’ and describes the practice of making an argument by using objects before a professional, political or legal gathering. Forensics is the creation of a forum through the investigation of objects, and is inclined towards complicated, unstable and contradictory accounts – a fuzzy forensics, rather than conclusive, objective claims.

50

Luciana Parisi, ‘Speculation. A Method for the Unattainable’, in Celia Lury, Nina Wakeford (eds.), Inventive Methods. The Happening of the Social (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 232–244.

51

Scott Morrison, ‘Google CEO Envisions a “Serendipity Engine”’, in Wall Street Journal (2010), https:// www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424 05274870388240457552039056728 6252 (accessed 25.6.2017).

52

Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble (London: Penguin, 2012).

53

Dave Eggers, The Circle (New York: Vintage Books, 2014).

54

Anna Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks. Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology (London, Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2013).

55

Betti Marenko, Phil Van Allen, ‘Animistic Design: How to Reimagine Digital Interaction between the Human and the Nonhuman’, in Digital Creativity, 27:1 (2016), special issue: Post-Anthropocentric Creativity, ed. Stanislav Roudavski, Jon McCormack, pp. 52–70.

This is why uncertainty is a precious resource.55 It alters established perceptions, disrupts linear predictability and shows the potential of indeterminacy, in which the construction of what is possible depends on random, contingent and not fully known components. This, it can be argued, is the essence of creativity. Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz writes on how the production of art is linked to the chaotic emergence of the future. Grosz describes creativity as ‘the capacity to elaborate an innovative and unpredictable response to stimuli, to 225

56

Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 6.

57

David Bohm, ‘Time, the implicated Order and Pre-Space’, in David R. Griffin (ed.), Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time: Bohm, Prigogine and Process Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 177–208, here p. 198.

58

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything. Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 2014); Alex Coles (ed.), Design Fiction (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016).

react or, rather, simply to act, to enfold matter into itself, to transform matter and life in unpredictable ways’.56 A similar argument is found in the science of non-linear systems, where indeterminacy is essential to the emergence and evolution of life. Physicist David Bohm sums it up neatly: ‘If we were to remove all ambiguity and uncertainty, creativity would no longer be possible.’57 If contingency and uncertainty are resources to capitalize upon, then future-crafting strategies that embrace uncertainty rather than shun it or flatten it, should be employed to experiment with scenarios of cohabitation, entanglements of the human and the non-human, and to test the creative responses emerging in the space between them. What is fostered in this space is potential, the same potential eroded by the systemic capture of planetary computation. It is on this potential that we must focus in order to craft possible futures. Metis To do so we need new myths, new stories, new fictions and even new dreams that counteract the capture of the imaginary. Futurecrafting steps in as a way to produce interventions that can trouble us, to produce fictions that create frictions. The feature that distinguishes future-crafting from other speculative approaches, which use design to propose critical alternatives to the existent order, resides in the specificity of its productive capacity.58 Although future-crafting resonates with similar concerns and is likewise engaged with expanding what design can do, it puts greater emphasis on two aspects: the theoretical framework and its political valence. Acknowledging a legacy of philosophical concepts is crucial to both ground and propel forward any genuinely critical endeavor. The practice of speculating on different futures, whether to contest received notions of technology or invent new modes of human-machine interaction, is a leap into the uncertain zones at the edge of thinking. This is where the power of the imagination in seizing alternative possibilities becomes a radical tool for change and where it acquires political significance. To live with digital uncertainty, we must develop affinity for nonhuman intelligence. What is needed is astute intelligence, craftiness, cunning science, the capacity to act quickly and effectively within ever-changing contexts, an intelligence that can produce localized, contingent, adaptable situated knowledges. We have it already. It is called metis. In Greek mythology Metis was the goddess of cunning intelligence, and Zeus’s first wife. Zeus swallows her as soon as she conceives Athena, transforming her into his own body of sovereignty and control, and eliminating any unpredictability and disorder from the establishment of logos. Metis is a type of intelligence and thought, a way of knowing; it implies a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviour which combine flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism,

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various skills and experience acquired over the years. It applies to situations which are shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic.59 If the classical human embodiment of metis is Odysseus, the Trickster, the wily agent of craftiness, multi-skills, and technical intelligence, I would like to conclude by evoking again the tentacular intelligence of the octopus: for the ancient Greeks the octopus served as the most advanced non-human embodiment of metis; most recently Donna Haraway made it a key figuration in her work on sympoetic, ecological thought.60 In advocating the octopus as a possible image to think with, I am following the words of mid-sixth-century BCE Greek lyrical poet Theognis of Megara:

59

Marcel Detienne, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978), p. 3. 60

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

61

From the Theognidea (lines 213–218), Andrew M. Miller (trans.), Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996).

Adopt the disposition of the octopus, crafty in its convolutions, which takes on The appearance of whatever rock it has dealings with. At one moment follow along this way, but at the next change the colour of your skin: You can be sure that cleverness proves better than inflexibility.61

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Fig. 1

Carpenter bee collecting nectar from the nectary with pollen on its back. On top of the stamens we also see a leaf-footed bug of the Coreidae family (these are phytophagous; they feed on the sap of the plant).

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Ecologizing Design1 Martín Ávila

1

This is the original title of a presentation given at the lecture series Hybrid Ecologies on 12 January 2017 and organized by the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies together with the Chair of Philosophy|Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. The text is also, and mainly, based on a paper written later and presented at the Design + Power conference, organized by Nordes (Oslo, June 2017), entitled Ecologizing, Decolonizing: an artefactual perspective.

Relating For humans, it is natural to produce the artificial. In spite of the negative connotations of the word artificial, what must be questioned is not the artificial as such – which is what design enacts, what design generates – but in what way (this is always a design question, the how) the artificial participates in, through and with the living and dying of humans and other-than-humans. My title Ecologizing Design attempts to explicitly address the need to understand and create a practice, the professional practice of design, as performed in, for, with and through cohabitation with other beings. Ecology, as the science of the interactions among living organisms and their environments, pays attention to the hows, to the way relations among beings are enacted on multiple levels, and it does so through analytical epistemological models from the so-called natural sciences. An ecological study would show that most artefacts interrupt or disrupt rather than participate in the life cycles of other-than-humans. Importantly, the practice of ecologizing design does not imply human control over ‘ecologies’ (which would entail the continuity of the human exceptionalism’s paradigm), instead, and throughout this article, ecologizing design implies a double operation; the performance of a relational (forward-looking) practice, and a decentring of the human. To be sustainable, design must be capable of relating humans and other-than-humans, becoming life-affirming in a holistic sense, becoming biocentric, becoming responsible and 229

2

This term is borrowed from Haraway, see Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2016). 3

Developed between 2014 and 2016, it was financed by the Swedish Research Council. The design proposals of this paper resulted from a collaboration with the designer Leonardo Lopez, while consulting scientists at the Multidisciplinary Institute of Vegetal Biology in Córdoba. Crucial to these studies was the advice of Mariano Lucia, a researcher specialist in carpenter bees at the Entomology Museum in La Plata. 4

See Martín Ávila, Devices. On Hospitality, Hostility and Design (Gothenburg: ArtMonitor, 2012). For a more explicitly political description of the devising process see Ávila and Ernstson, ‘Realms of Exposure: On Design, Material Agency and Political Ecology’, in Henrik Ernstson, Sverker Sörlin (eds.), Grounding Urban Natures: Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019). 5

‘Their common names, “passion flower”, “flower of Christ”, refer to different plant structures that resemble different aspects of the life of Jesus Christ.’ See Alicia Sérsic, Andrea Cocucci (eds.), Flores del Centro de Argentina, (Córdoba: Academia Nacional de Ciencias, 2010), p. 264. The edible fruit worldwide and commercially known as ‘passion fruit’ derives from Passiflora edulis and Passiflora edulis flavicarpa. The fruit of the one we presently discuss, Passiflora caerulea, is edible but not as sweet to the human palate as the edulis varieties.

response-able,2 by responding on multiple levels that nurture the life of others, humans and other-than-humans. As a case-study, I will present a project entitled Spices-Species, which is also an example of an attempt to create a proposal for an artefact that connects us to the vital cycles of (some of) the different beings that participate in its ecologies, as well as to the human cultures attentive to them. Spices-Species Spices-Species was one of three projects developed in Argentina in the context of my post-doctoral research entitled Symbiotic Tactics.3 All three projects addressed everyday life, and in the case of SpicesSpecies on an intimate level; based on the relations we humans establish with other-than-human beings, in this case plants, by ingesting them, either because they are edible or because they can be used for medicinal purposes, and thus inter- and intra-act with our bodies through their chemistry and materiality. To lead a human life in any part of the world implies the use of devices, that is, artefacts, services, rituals and/or systems that in one way or another divide, organize our everyday while including some and excluding others, both human and other-than-human.4 Design practices enact prescriptions, and thus materialize and orchestrate forms of power-knowledge. From a biodiversity perspective it becomes explicit that the ones that are included in the devising are, for the most part, humans (particular human groups enacting the fluid and overlapping categories of gender, race, class, ethnicity). Design as a practice has been anthropocentric (something I will briefly elaborate on below), and is the reason why one of the aspects that framed the studies was species’ correlations to human preferences, such as the general human predilection for floral plants, with the resulting presence or absence of certain plant species in the city of Córdoba. Together with researchers from the Multidisciplinary Institute of Vegetal Biology, we identified four native floral species of this region that could be either edible and/or medicinal. These were: Tagetes minuta, Caesalpinia gilliiesi, Nicotiana glauca and Passiflora caerulea. After a first-year period of studying, growing and experimenting with the four of them, we decided to develop our proposal based on Passiflora caerulea, a variety of passion flower,5 for being both medicinal and edible, and for specific interactions it has with carpenter bees that makes it vulnerable in the built environment of the city of Córdoba. Varieties of passion flower grow in different locations. In the central regions of Argentina the variety known as Passiflora caerulea is mostly used for ornamental purposes, while its fruits are eaten and its parts (leaves, flowers, stems and fruits) used to make infusions, decoctions and tinctures that alleviate human discomfort through its sedative and anti-stress effects; the reason why it is, perhaps, the most cherished of

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the native medicinal plants in the region.6 Several other species have a preference for this plant. Agraulis vanillae maculosa, the most common Argentinean butterfly, lays eggs and feeds on it; several carpenter bees of the genus Xylocopa prefer it for its abundant nectar (fig. 1), a variety of birds feed on its fruits, and an ant species cohabits peacefully with some of its visitors to draw mutually beneficial relations that maximize the availability of nectar. These are a few of the most common interactions that are visible to the human eye and give a sense of their co-evolutionary symbiogenesis. Throughout Spices-Species we have attempted to acknowledge some of these inter- and intra-actions, and to incorporate them into the final design proposal, with the intention of making explicit the possibility not only of growing the plants as (useful and beautiful) companions to humans, but also of hosting and/or nurturing several other-than-humans that relate to the plant. By referring to ‘humans’ I do not mean to emphasize the homogeneity of our ‘species’.7 On the contrary, I am interested here in the specific ways in which a variety of human legacies of knowledge and relation to biomes affect the potential to establish affective bonds that might benefit the cohabitation of humans and other-than-humans. The category ‘human’ is predominantly used to distinguish human animals from non-human animals and non-human things in general. In the particular case of the human population of the province of Córdoba, a region formed by the historical influx of (mostly) European immigrants, the cultural hybridity repeats colonial patterns found in many other parts of the world: colour as the deviation from the (white) norm, and indigenous knowledge as naïve and archaic in relation to scientific knowledge. Questioning these, what this proposal engages with are the mixtures in their potential for sustainable development, and the multiple onto-epistemological approaches that enrich and diversify, rather than silence, how sustainable development might be enacted. Emphasising the mixture, this approach builds on the existing continuum that can be described through several categories, such as naturecultures,8 urban ecologies, agroecosystems, bioregions, places, locality, among others. My use of these categories attempts to pay attention to the (physical and material) dynamic aspects in and of their enaction, but also, and beyond their geographical location, to the geopolitical ‘in the sense of how imperially made regions, beyond natural environment shape and conform people dwelling in that region’.9 Being where one does and thinks matters, and in this sense we must acknowledge the myriad otherthan-humans that matter, shape and conform these naturecultures.

6

The fruits are edible if ripe or raw but not if cooked. Syrups from them can be obtained to produce a refreshing drink traditionally used against jaundice and scurvy. The most well-known property of this species is the sedative or tranquilizer, for which leaves, flowers, stems and fruits are used. The roots are attributed anthelmintic, antispasmodic, contraceptive and emmenagogic properties. Root syrup is used against pneumonia. However, it is narcotic and in high doses can cause death. The infusion of flowers, leaves and stems has been used as a diuretic, emmenagogic and contraceptive. It is also credited with antifungal, antimicrobial, vermifuge and antituberculous properties. See Gloria E. Barboza, Juan J. Cantero, César Núñez, Adriana Pacciaroni, Luis Ariza Espinar, ‘Medicinal plants: A general review and a phytochemical and ethnopharmacological screening of the native Argentine Flora’, Kurtziana 34:1–2 (2009), pp. 7–365, http://www.scielo.org.ar/scielo.php?pid=S185259622009000100002&script=sci_ arttext&tlng=pt (accessed 28.6.2017); Gustavo J. Martínez, Las Plantas en la Medicina Tradicional de las Sierras de Córdoba. Un recorrido por la cultura campesina de Paravachasca y Calamuchita (Córdoba: Detodoslosmares, [2010] 2015). 7

Although I cannot develop this here, what is at stake is the recognition of the complex inter- and intraactions of the multiple umwelts in their own multiplicity. See Yogi H. Hendlin, ‘Multiplicity and Welt’, in Sign Systems Studies 44: 1–2 (2016), pp. 94–110; Kalevi Kull, ‘The Biosemiotic Concept of the Species’, in Biosemiotics 9:1 (2016), pp. 61–71, https://doi. org/10.1007/ s12304-016-9259-2 (accessed 28.6.2017). 8

Haraway speaks of this continuum in terms of ‘naturecultures’, see Haraway 2016 (footnote 2). 9

Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures, Decolonial options (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 117.

The knowledge derived from indigenous and mestizo or criollo cultures and their hybrid cosmologies are predominantly based on the ecological knowledge of the hilly landscapes (las sierras) in the region. My work focuses on the urban context of the city of Córdoba, also surrounded by the sierras, and is influenced by the knowledge 231

10

See for example ‘Córdoba: peligran los últimos bosques nativos de la provincial’, by the Argentinean Foundation For Wild Life, http://www.vidasilvestre.org. ar/sala_redaccion/?16260/Crdobapeligran-los-ltimos-bosquesnativos-de-la-provincia (accessed 28.6.2017).

11

Barboza et al 2009 (footnote 6), p. 8. See also Martínez 2015 (footnote 6).

12

Barboza et al 2009 (footnote 6), p. 10.

13

Some of which can be found on http://www.martinavila.com/ projects/spices-species/ (accessed 28.7. 2017).

and worldviews of those that practice alternative medicine. In spite of recent legal measures to combat deforestation, only five to three percent of the forest native to of the region of Córdoba survives.10 The knowledge of plants that has been collected by experimentation over centuries by people living in intimate association with their environment is disappearing, with the result of silencing these cosmologies, leaving scientific knowledge not only dominant but also as the only epistemological register. About eighty percent of the world’s population ‘still relies upon plants for primary health care; even today in Western medicine, and despite progress in synthetic chemistry, some 25% of prescription medicines are still derived either directly or indirectly from plants’.11 This is important since it implies the presence and liveliness of human heterogenic ways of knowing and relating to the world, as well as different approaches to validating the knowledge enacted. It is also important because it indicates that the majority of the human population practices and lives by compound belief systems that vary in degrees. However, ‘accelerated acculturation is disintegrating ethnopharmacological information often faster in many areas than the extinction of plant species, which rampant deforestation invariably entails’.12 Cycle initiator The design proposal of Spices-Species was prototyped through several experiments.13 The following description attempts to contextualize the plant, some of its visitors and their habitats while giving an account of the main considerations that shaped the proposal. Being a climbing plant, the local variety of passion flower named Passiflora caerulea climbs on other trees or stronger plants that can support it without obstructing all the sun from the supporting plant. Although, as noted before, the plant interacts with myriad of beings, the design of the proposal and this paper focus on the plant’s main pollinators: carpenter bees of the genus Xylocopa (fig.1). There are eighteen species of Xylocopa in Argentina. These nest in dry woods by excavating holes to oviposit and protect their young. Of those found in Córdoba we decided to work with two species, Xylocopa artifex and Xylocopa ciliata. The peculiarity of these two is that they do not excavate on solid wood (like the majority of its genus) but on hollow woods such as cane or the stems of Eryngium. Since cane and Eryngium are more threatened by human preferences for other plants, we decided to work with these two species in particular because both are increasingly rare in the built environment of Córdoba. These varieties of Xylocopa use the sawdust from scraping the walls to build partitions (fig. 2) in which they oviposit inside the cane/Eryngium. Their larvae grow inside these partitions and are also provided with food (a mixture of nectar and pollen). Even when they have grown up so as to look like fully mature carpenter bees, the mother keeps bringing them food to the nest until they are fully grown and able to procure their own food.

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We sketched, modelled and prototyped several versions to create what we call a cycle initiator. The intention was to create a device that could help to initiate the life cycles of the plant and provide the housing to enable these species of Xylocopa artifex/ciliata to nest. As such, the cycle initiator should provide the means by which two cycles can be initiated – that of the plant and that of its main pollinator – while remaining instrumental in relation to the human caring for it (benefiting from its medicinal properties). As observed, Xylocopa artifex and Xylocopa ciliata build nests in soft (hollow) woods, and in order to provide them with a soft material that they could excavate without repullsion (because of its chemistry and/or structural properties), we experimented with local varieties of wood and resins that could be used to create compound materials. Due to difficulties in producing a material of our own that could be mechanized and would prove to be long-lasting enough, we decided to experiment with commercially available compound materials such as MDF, which was accepted by Xylocopa throughout our tests.

Fig. 2

Longitudinal section of the nest of Xylocopa in a cane of Arundo donax.

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14

Although I cannot develop this point here, this is a crucial aspect of what is at stake through a bio-geocentric practice of design, since it implies ecosemiotic/biosemiotic recognition and the addressing, explicitly, of the concept of semethic interaction. See Jesper Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics. An Examination into the Life of Signs and the Signs of Life (Scranton, London: University of Scranton Press, 2008); Timo Maran, Kalevi Kull, ‘Ecosemiotics: Main principles and current developments’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, in Human Geography 96 (2014), pp. 51–65.

Fig. 3

Cycle initiator.

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The cycle initiator has three cylindrical compartments and a solid peg (fig. 3), as well as a flask that contains two plant germinators. These compartments were mechanized to cylindrical shapes following the observation that one of the main procedures of Xylocopa artifex and Xylocopa ciliata, when identifying potential nests, is to circumnavigate the cylindrical stalks of their plants of preference (cane and Eryngium). The diametrical size of the cylindrical compartments (22 mm) is based on the average diametrical size of the canes of the region.14 To use the set for starting germination, a sequence of steps is necessary (fig. 4–7) which encompasses the preparation of a pot, the disassembling and mounting of the set and the insertion of the germinators in soil. Once the germinators are placed in the soil it takes on average 30 to 50 days for the plant to germinate. As it grows, the plant searches with its tendrils for supporting structures on which it can tangle up and climb. The compartments that were first used to pack the parts are now turned into fasteners and a structure for the plant to climb up. When the plant has matured and exceeded the height of the initiator it can be pruned. Pruned parts are placed in a container to make tinctures. This is done by adding edible alcohol of at least forty percent and storing in a cool, dark place between four to eight weeks. After this

Fig. 4–7

Disassembling, mounting and planting procedures.

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Fig. 8–13

time the leaves and stems are filtered and the tincture is removed and put into the dosing tube (flask) that comes with the set. Taking a dose of tincture has a sedating, relaxing effect. The dosage will vary depending on the physical condition of the person ingesting it, as well as on the quality of the tinctures produced. Although similar (sedating) effects can be obtained by directly boiling the parts of the plant in water to create infusions/decoctions, we designed the set to encourage the production of tinctures, which are less wasteful of the plant and better at concentrating the chemicals of the plant than infusions are (fig. 8–13).

Fig. 14 (opposite page) Female Xylocopa peeking from its nest.

If the vital cycles of the plant and the bees coincide with the installation of the set, what we would ideally see after a while is an inhabited compartment (fig. 14).15 This, however, is becoming more difficult

Growing process as well as pruning and tincture procedures.

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to occur naturally in the built environment of the city of Córdoba, as there is scarcity of the plants that these pollinators inhabit (cane, Eryngium). Hence the need to relate to these native plants in a way that also includes their pollinators and other visitors; enabling us to be affected by their presence and behaviour, engaging in mutual learning, choosing to be affected by the chemistry of the plant, considering them all, in our interdependencies, companion species. Delinking; relinking otherwise Taking Spices-Species as a case study and departure point, can we speak not only of an ecologizing process but also of a decolonizing process? I believe that these processes can be complementary to each other when one begins to acknowledge diversity in its cultural and bio-eco-geo-logical manifestations, human and other-than-human entangled, multi-layered and plural. Decolonial strategies, combined with the performance of designed artefacts, may help to acknowledge not only human diversity but also the multiple and diverse other-thanhuman beings that conform and participate in different localities. A process of delinking, on a micropolitical scale, from colonial social patterns that could reconnect humans with natural processes and beings to which they are detached by means of devices.

15

Only a few experiments have been realized so far, and have not led to conclusions regarding the viability of the life of these species of Xylocopa in these conditions. Studies in Canada on ‘bee hotels’ (from a survey of almost 600 during a three-year period) showed, for example, that native bees were more parasitized than introduced bees and that the females of introduced bee species provisioned nests with significantly more female larva each year. See J. Scott MacIvor, Laurence Packer, ‘“Bee Hotels” as Tools for Native Pollinator Conservation: A Premature Verdict?’, in PLoS ONE 10:3 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0122126 (accessed 28.6.2017). It is important to note, however, that the present proposal differs from such generic ‘hotels’ in that it was specially designed for a specific species and to relate to the plant that these species prefer.

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16

See my work on prepositions as well as the use of the conjunction ‘and’ Ávila 2012 (footnote 4). See also Haraway’s use of ‘becomingwith’, Haraway 2016 (footnote 2).

17

This definition of sustainable development comes from ‘systems ecology’ and not from ‘economics’. Crawford S. Holling, Lance H. Gunderson (eds.), Panarchy. Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Washington: Island Press, 2002). For a critique of the implications of ‘development’ in current ‘sustainable development’, see Walter Mignolo, ‘Sustainable Development or Sustainable Economies? Ideas Towards Living in Harmony and Plenitude’, https:// www.academia.edu/29415578/ Sustainable_Development_or_ Sustainable_Economies_Ideas_ Towards_Living_in_Harmony_and_ Plenitude_CLICK_ON_LINK_ https_doc-research.org_en_ report2_sustainable-developmentor-sustainable-economies-ideas-towards-living-in-harmony-and-plenitude_2016 (accessed 26.5.2017). For a critique of development see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, [1995] 2012).

18

‘Decolonizing Western epistemology means to strip it out of the pretence that it is the point of arrival and the guiding light of all kinds of knowledges […] decolonizing knowledge is not rejecting Western epistemic contributions to the world. On the contrary, it implies appropriating its contributions in order to then de-chain from their imperial designs.’ See Mignolo 2011 (footnote 10), p. 82.

19

Mignolo 2011 (footnote 10), p. 123.

20

I choose to emphasize this, to point at the relevance of biosemiotic understanding, since design tends not only to be anthropocentric but also anthropomorphic in its way of framing communication. See Hoffmeyer 2008 (footnote 15); Claus Emmeche, Kalevi Kull (eds.), Towards a Semiotic Biology. Life is the Action of Signs (London: Imperial College Press, 2011); Maran, Kull 2014 (footnote 15). Some of the philosophical implications can be found in Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Hendlin 2016 (footnote 8); Haraway 2016 (footnote 2).

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The cycle initiator proposes an engagement with the preparation of tinctures, a technology that was developed later than the understanding of the medicinal properties of these plants. In this way the set may combine pre-Hispanic with scientific knowledge and Eurocentric traditions daily present in the region studied, not introducing something epistemologically new but participating, as a device, in the extension of the existing power-knowledge relations of this region’s naturecultures. In my view, however, its newness lies in its attempt at de-linking from anthropocentrism to extend our sense of self so that ecological belonging acknowledges other scales of being, a becoming-with, a becoming-through, a becoming-for and …16 It exposes us to the short-sightedness of not caring for the companion species that cohabit with us (whether we like them or not), and on which we are dependent upon. Decolonizing implies epistemological disobedience, ‘de-linking’. In the case of Spices-Species, the project does not propose an expansionist model, but the responsible use and understanding of local materials and species, and a reestablishment of affective bonds, a de-linking from ‘growth’ and a re-linking to the processes of living and dying. In this context sustainable development is not a contradictory expression (since development does not imply expansion), but one that emphasizes the dynamic aspects and the interrelation between the two words: sustaining (create, test and maintain adaptive capability) development (create, test and maintain opportunity).17 More specifically, the micropolitical and decolonial frame of this project implies that both words, sustainment and development, should also be anchored in multiple anthropos and acknowledge the plurality of human cosmologies and ways of knowing. Through its proposed medicinal use the project suggests a de-linking from (not to replace but to complement) allopathic ways of knowing and the industry of synthetic chemistry, which disconnect us from the multiple levels of life of the biomes we inhabit;18 a serial production based on the potential of materials and processes of the biome. The project suggests, in short, an everyday material device that as a commonplace pushes for ‘a reworking of the geo- and bio-graphic politics of knowledge’.19 I have mentioned that design as a practice has been anthropocentric, that is, designed by humans for humans. This is partly because it has enacted a material culture organized around the perceptual capabilities of humans and human cognitive features, such as our own linguistic capacities.20 Regarding the linguistic framing, we might refer to Jacques Derrida’s word play when, thinking of his cat, he describes the difference in understanding the uniqueness of that cat as l’animal (animal), and not as the cat that we normally and generally categorize in conversations and to which he refers as a being belonging to des animaux or as l‘animot (the latter sounding perfectly adequate to animaux when spoken out loud); des animaux evokes at once the plurality of non-human creatures which can’t be subsumed under a allegedly homogeneous animality (as opposed to humanity) by means

of the category ‘animal’ through the use of words (hence the pun ‘mot’ – word in French – instead of ‘mal’ in l’animot).21 In the words of Yogi Hendlin: ‘In treating the other like a token of a type instead of a semiotically-capable being, we miss the relational aspect of the interactive event, as well as the opportunity to learn the nuances of meaning for the other more thoroughly.’22 If we as humans think about other humans, other-than-humans and companion species as a representative of a type, we miss the diffractive and resonant interand intra-active aspects of communication.23 The (human) recognition of shared precarity, vulnerability and codependency24 becomes the precondition that might open up to living (and constructing) with uncertainty and make it possible to enter into what Humberto Maturana calls a domain of ‘co-inspiration’ by means of putting ‘objectivity in parenthesis’: When one puts objectivity in parenthesis, all views, all verses in the multiverse are equally valid. Understanding this, you lose the passion for changing the other. One of the results is that you look apathetic to people. Now, those who do not live with objectivity in parentheses have a passion for changing the other. So they have this passion and you do not. For example, at the university where I work, people may say, ‘Humberto is not really interested in anything,’ because I don’t have the passion in the same sense that the person that has objectivity without parentheses. And I think that this is the main difficulty. To other people you may seem too tolerant. However, if the others also put objectivity in parentheses, you discover that disagreements can only be solved by entering a domain of co-inspiration, in which things are done together because the participants want to do them. With objectivity in parentheses, it is easy to do things together because one is not denying the other in the process of doing them.25

21

Derrida 2008 (footnote 21), p. 37.

22

Hendlin 2016 (footnote 8), p. 96.

23

See Hendlin 2016 (footnote 8); Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2007); Hoffmeyer 2008 (footnote 15); Emmeche and Kull 2011 (footnote 23); Haraway 2016 (footnote 2).

24

See Judith Butler, ‘Precarious Life and The Obligations of Proximity’, lecture at the Nobel Museum on 28 June 2011 in Stockholm, http:// www.nobelmuseum.se/en/nwwlecture (accessed 5.7.2011); Ávila 2012 (footnote 4); Haraway 2016 (footnote 2).

25

Quoted in Mignolo 2011 (footnote 10), p. 27. This quote can also be found in several online forums. For Maturana’s development of this concept and the difference it creates on our perception of reality see: https.//www.univie.ac.at/con structivism/papers/maturana/88reality.html (accessed 30.9.2016).

According to Walter Mignolo this is the equivalent of (in the discourse of science and coming from a scientist, Humberto Maturana) the Zapatistas’ dictum: a world in which many worlds would coexist. If, as Maturana claims, disagreements can only be ‘solved’ by entering a domain of co-inspiration, in which things are done together because the participants want to engage in them, so that we can ‘co-inspire’ one another, why would those who benefit from the current socioeconomic and material system change and do these things? From the perspective of the dominated, to get the other to co-inspire means to build your power to change the world. And if the differences among humans are so pronounced, what can be said of the human forms of exclusion and exploitation of most other-than-humans? At this historical moment, the real threat of the ecological collapse of the natural systems that support human life has the potential to make possible an opening for ‘co-inspiration’ towards the dominated; a process that must continuously and agonistically be reassessed; an unavoidably co-adaptive symbiogenesis. 239

26 27

Haraway 2016 (footnote 2).

Thanks: Swedish Research Council (project diary number: 438-2013-297), Henrik Ernstson, Leonardo Lopez, Gabriel Bernar­ dello, Ana Calviño, Mariano Lucia, Karianne Fogelberg.

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Through this attempt to expand our response-ability26 I have presented a design that is an account layered on multiple textual and material registers, in an effort to engage in alternative bio-graphies. The very determination to produce the tinctures and understand the developmental processes of the plants brought me and other non-plant specialist colleagues in contact with multiple aspects that demand an active appreciation of the organisms and the biomes studied, thus nurturing a sense of care for these and other species related to them, and provoking a shift in our practices in an attempt to move from a (Eurocentric) anthropocentrism to a pluriversal biocentrism and to develop devices that perform human responses co-inspired by and for multispecies cohabitation. Being where one does and thinks matters, and matters differently.27

‘The idea that we can design an ecology is something we should be wary of’ In conversation with Martín Ávila and Betti Marenko

Karianne Fogelberg [KF]  You both address design less as a discrete and self-contained artefact than as a set of practices, processes and modes of actions in a wider context – as something that is created by different forces and by different actors. According to you, in what ways is this understanding of design as bound up in a set of relations, or ecologies, significant for contemporary design practice? And by extension, could it nurture genuinely ecological modes of existence? Betti Marenko [BM]  I think that design has a huge responsibility – and when I say design I specifically refer to the assemblage of design industry, design education and design practices – because design contributes greatly to determine the ways in which ideas, discourses and what is known as ‘wicked problems’ are manifested into tangible realities with the power to affect people and to create worlds. This is something that we discuss a lot with our product-design students at Central Saint Martins (fig. 1–6), who enrol to become product designers and then, roughly half way through the course, they come to me and say: ‘I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to be responsible for landfill.’ It’s as if the penny drops! They become aware of the connections, and realize the extent to which design is implicated. And this is great, because at this point 241

1

Martín Ávila refers to the talk by Betti Marenko on 12 January 2017 at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich within the context of the lecture series Hybrid Ecologies. 2

See the contribution from Martín Ávila in this volume, pp. 230–232.

the tools, techniques and thinking that inform design can be put to better use. We must acknowledge that design worldwide, as an industry, is particularly responsible for landfill, and this responsibility must be addressed within design education. At the same time, design and designers play a crucial role in the process of changing these scenarios. Now, if there’s a hinge that connects and divides – and I really liked Martín’s notion of devices as these artefacts that divide, give shape, arrange and organize – if there’s a hinge between the thinking and the making, then design is clearly that hinge. Ethical, environmental and political considerations should be way more prominent than what they are now within design theory and practice, in order to address these ecological modes of existence that you were mentioning. Martín Ávila [MA]  What has been happening is that most artefacts, the devices we use, tend to disconnect us from what is usually called ‘nature’. We normally live in spaces like this one [making reference to the auditorium]. There’s not even a plant here, and this isn’t unusual, it’s standard. Whether we are in our vehicles or in our houses, we get to be mediated by technologies and material arrangements that include (some) humans and exclude most other-than-humans. And when we try to get in tune with our surroundings, we’re in trouble. Still, every single artificial creation that we have come up with during recent years has tended to make us more comfortable and more detached from the ecological substratum that supports us and that we are part of. We tend not to see the implications of this. Being disconnected from these places and spaces where we come from has consequences both ecological and psychological – a lot of people now are suffering from seeing and being immersed in only artificial landscapes. They are in need of therapy with animals or therapy through walking in the woods. This is very common in cities across the world. Even though we must always think in terms of ‘degrees of …’, and keep in mind that we’re co-evolving and constantly adapting to and with the ‘artificial’ environments we create. We’re very much in need of technologies, especially artefacts, that actively amplify – and this is what Betti was talking about1 – that put us in contact with, make visible and somehow give us other forms of access, other forms of tuning in to the multiple other-than-human registers. If you think of the example of the cycle initiator (from my project Spices-Species, 2014–16):2 It attempts not only to grow a plant which many of us have in our house but also to put us in tune with the plant’s needs; with its pollinators and with other beings and systems that the plant depends upon, thereby hopefully becoming an agent for cohabitation. If we have a relationship with the plant, we might as well extend it to what the plant needs. What’s required is a design for other-than-human beings that connects us to them. There are very few existing products that will put us in contact with something not human, unless we’re talking about pets, but the pet industry is yet another world. The ecologies we have in cities are human-centred in so many ways. So this is a very critical aspect of these ecological modes of existence. Right now, we’re very detached from the physical and ecological reality of most beings.

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BM 

I think you’re absolutely correct in describing those examples as ways of establishing relationships with nature, the type of nature you have shown us, in ways that make the user very much a participant of what’s going on rather than a consumer or a detached user. You didn’t mention your paper about shower gratings and scorpions tonight, but I recommend reading it because it is very much about creating a sense of responsibility that otherwise would be completely negated. This is similar to when we talk about ‘living in a post-industrial society’ simply because we no longer see production. Production has been delocalized, but the fact that we don’t see it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. So I think to facilitate access and to make us all feel part of the chain of action and reaction, which some of your design interventions provide, is a terrific way to go for design. I think you’re absolutely correct in describing those examples as ways of establishing relationships with nature, the type of nature you have shown us, in ways that make the user very much a participant of what’s going on rather than a consumer or a detached user. You didn’t mention your paper about shower gratings and scorpions tonight, but I recommend reading it because it is very much about creating a sense of responsibility that otherwise would be completely negated.3 This is similar to when we talk about ‘living in a post-industrial society’ simply because we no longer see production. Production has been delocalized, but the fact that we don’t see it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. So I think to facilitate access and to make us all feel part of the chain of action and reaction, which some of your design interventions provide, is a terrific way to go for design.

3

Making reference to Ávila’s project Doomestics (2014–2016), discussed in Martín Ávila, Henrik Ernstson, ‘Realms of Exposure: On Design, Material Agency and Political Ecology’, in Henrik Ernstson, Sverker Sörlin (eds.), Grounding Urban Natures: Histories and Futures of Urban Ecologies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019). In this project Ávila proposes a shower grating designed to prevent scorpions, which live in the canalisation, from entering the shower, while at the same time making their existence visible and exposing our fears.

KF  The way you, Martín, describe how we’re being detached from surrounding processes and non-human species sounds almost as if it were an alienating situation, and that design could contribute to exposing us to a greater degree to our surroundings. With the work you presented, Betti, I wonder if there’s a similar sense of alienation when it comes to digital objects? BM  I wouldn’t really use the word alienation, because we – and I talk about as ‘we’ humans actively engaging with digital objects – we love it, we absolutely adore it, we can’t stop it, we behave in a borderline obsessive compulsive manner with our smartphones and all the other digital companions we use daily. This is a fact that we should acknowledge. I’m not saying that we should celebrate it, but we should really be mindful and reflect on what that is doing to our way of thinking, of behaving, of moving, of holding ourselves as embodied agents. We should also remind ourselves that all this didn’t exist ten years ago – I’m talking specifically about the smartphone here – and it’s a tremendous change that’s happening worldwide. Even though not the entire world population has access to digital devices and connection, still we’re dealing with hundreds of millions of humans actively and relentlessly engaged with the same type of embodied behaviours. Just think about the repertoire of gestures that our bodies are performing constantly – and the extent to which it has been

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4

Anna Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks. Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2013). 5

Betti Marenko, Philip van Allen, ‘Animistic design: how to reimagine digital interaction between the human and the nonhuman’, in Digital Creativity, 27:1 (2016), pp. 52–79, https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2 016.1145127 (accessed 1.8.2019).

reduced and streamlined in order to accommodate particular typologies of interface design. Maybe that doesn’t mean that we’re completely alienated as human beings, but it certainly is something we should be thinking about. Not in a negative sense, but in order to extract from what’s happening already, the intelligence and modes of thinking that can take us further – modes of thinking that I argue should be more non-linear, oblique and not necessarily consciousness-based. KF  In a text with the interaction designer Philip van Allen you mentioned the predictive behaviour patterns which Anna Munster talks about, and how this tendency in computation design to predict searches, for instance, or to predict what we want to consume next, how this in fact tends to turn potential into something that actually does happen.4 And then you elaborate about how in your collaboration with Phil van Allen you’re trying to seize the potential of the unpredictable to counter this current development.5 BM  Yes, the tension between prediction and potential, capture or openness, that’s one of the key issues of the work I have been doing together with Phil, trying to find ways of injecting unpredictability in

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interactions that otherwise would be dictated by expectations, predictability and complete linear efficiency. This is what I more broadly call ‘digital uncertainty’, the potential for unpredictable and un-programmed outcomes in computation. Obviously, the claim for the value of digital uncertainty has to be taken within the right context. When I type my lecture for tonight, I would like to be sure that when I press ‘save’ my computer is actually saving my work rather than performing some unexpected action! However, while in some circumstances it’s essential to know that users’ expectations are reliably fulfilled by the machine, in research scenarios the value of uncertainty clearly becomes highly significant. Some of the questions Phil and I have been working on are these: Is there a way to capitalize upstream on uncertainty (at the research and development stage), where designers, developers and software engineers are thinking about and experimenting with how to imagine the new interfaces of tomorrow? What will the interface of the near future look like? These seem to us to be the key questions. For instance, the next thing after touch interfaces is going to be voice recognition. This is what our digital companions demand from us, that we talk and they respond. So unpredictability is already creeping in in ways that are perhaps already somehow uncomfortable.

Fig. 1–4

Maggie Roberts (from Orphan Drift, in collaboration with Ranu Mukherjee), Unruly City, video stills, single screen HD video, 16 min., 2016. Built around the Hexagram 49 of the I-Ching, Unruly City brings together densely layered collaged video and animation, charting a course through a shifting urban imaginary emerging in the shadow of climate change and bio-capital, creating an amalgamation of potential spaces, materialities and creaturely life. A mutating world set in a forest infected by sublime references of ancient and futural entities and a pervasive foreboding of cosmological uncertainty – portents prescient of profound ruptures in the fabric of realities. The artist creates technoanimistic and techno-genetic images of a radical, non-conscious co-evolution of human and machine that produces new hybrid organic/ inorganic life-forms that are beyond human and confound all humanist and capitalist agendas.

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6

Martín Ávila, Devices. On Hospitality, Hostility and Design (Gothenburg: Art Monitor 33/University of Gothenburg, 2012), pp. 129–158. 7

Ávila, Ernstson, 2019 (footnote 3).

Now – and this is another question – is there a space for uncomfortable interactions? And what can we extract from this type of interaction with our devices? One way to see this is to extract creativity and to foster the potential that would otherwise be captured by the apparatus of digital control, profiling and data trading. And that will be the way we see it at the research and development level.

KF  Another parallel in your work is that you both investigate how user-centred approaches to design are running into their limits. And following from that you are both engaging with attempts to no longer exclusively place the human at the centre of design, albeit in very different ways. Martín, from your description of the mutualistic radio for instance, Radiophonum Piscea Energia, from the series ¡Pestes! (2011), and the concept of giving food to fish,6 it becomes clear that on the one hand the design intervention is an attempt to depart from conventional anthropocentric practice by taking as a starting point not merely human needs but the conditions and potentials of local ecosystems and the way humans interact with them. On the other hand, it still privileges the human user or – as you write in the context of your scorpion grating – ‘our device still divides and organizes an “above” and “below”’, so the hierarchy is still in place.7 Could you elaborate on this inherent tension? MA  The project was aimed at investigating and making explicit the ways in which the artefacts that we create are part of the biosphere in a very general sense; what they are dependent upon, what they feed on, how they become ‘things’. Hierarchies are always enacted, and they are always dynamic, temporally and spatially. The project used the notion of symbiosis to explore its three main forms of interaction: parasitism, commensalism and mutualism. There were many questions: How does the ‘artificial’ complement and support the existent? To what extent can we or do we actually cohabit or co-evolve? At the same time it’s still we who design artefacts, so there’s always a degree of anthropocentrism. I’m not saying that by taking a biocentric perspective we should (or could) avoid the anthropos, not at all; we should recognize it as being plural. When I think of interactions among humans and other-than-humans, this is still unavoidably led by (my) human considerations, but with the acknowledgement of other forms of life. We already discriminate against humans in all kinds of ways, so think of the kind of things we’re doing to other-than-humans – they aren’t even part of the considerations. So conceiving designs that acknowledge other beings is already a step in the direction I am talking about. As I said, we still have hierarchies. We still have the human deciding what’s to be done or not. In my proposal there is no participatory design for fish; they just eat. There are many levels of difficulty. Designing in the name of someone else is also problematic if you pay attention to the ethical aspects. So again this is unavoidably anthropocentric. I don’t see a way out of this except for acknowledging and articulating as much as we can all that we know while keeping uncertainty principles. We don’t know if the fungi that affect the fish by making

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them ‘sick’ are eco-systemically more important than the fish. We still privilege the fish, because we like them; they trigger more affection from us than the fungi do. We tend not to sympathize with the decomposers in a forest, but we like the trees, we like the birds, we like the butterflies. This is a very human perspective. If we start conceiving designs based on the potential ecological implications that artefacts might have, then the needs of other beings relating to our designs also come more and more into focus. This could be one way to obtain a more complete picture of what we might develop in the near future. BM 

You have touched upon something quite relevant, which we perhaps tend to take for granted. We have this notion of nature that suits us. When you talk about ‘we like the fish, we like the tree, we like the butterfly’, this is the same notion of the cute and the pleasant to the eye that a lot of design interventions based on anthropomorphism work with. But nature in itself is a cultural construction, so different moments in history, different human assemblages, will produce different versions of what nature is. What is nature after all? Is nature something we must save and preserve, starting from the cute panda? Or is it also something that could be terrifying and destructive, like viruses or earthquakes? Or is nature something we should idealize and turn into a goddess, which for instance is what the Gaia notion is about. There are so many conflicting and simultaneously occurring notions of what nature is, but we should remember that we’re creating this variety. In other words, all these notions are profoundly anthropocentric, and in order to break free from this (toxic) perspective we must acknowledge the multi-species, other-than-, more-than-human ecological milieux we are an inherent part of, and in coexistence with them build new forms of knowledge. And this process demands humility, as well as images of thoughts, new thoughts to think with. I see designers as being in a position of being able to capture the intersection between these images, the figures of thought and the tangible expression of these thoughts, a little bit earlier than others. That’s the kind of sight they have, which they have cultivated in order to change the world. I think that designers should really pay attention to this.

MA  This is something I planned to include in my presentation. Tonight’s session is called ‘Designing Ecologies’ and I called my presentation ‘Ecologizing Design’ – to somehow get away from the designing-ecologies title. One way of understanding designing ecologies in a constructive mode would be the design of artificial systems to complement natural systems. That’s how I understand it, and what I’m trying to do. But designing ecologies also suggests or might be understood as control over nature. The idea that we can design an ecology is something we should be wary of. We should really not go into trying to decide for the fish, but – as much as we can and understand – do it with the fish and for the sustainment of the systems that keep them alive. Avoid adhering to the legacy of mastery of nature, dominion, control – all those things which we need to get away from. We need

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8

Ávila, Ernstson 2019 (footnote 3).

to work with uncertainty principles. In different ways, both Betti and I are looking at ‘the accident’, the unexpected, what is out of control, as something that we also need to embrace, as a positive element and aspect of design. For example, ‘not knowing’ might be a more constructive way to relate to others, and doubt might be a source of affirmation.

Audience 1  I started a project at the Technical University here in Munich three months ago. With a background as a cultural anthropologist and social scientist, I spent a lot of time working through the theories you point to, Deleuze and Guattari and post-human philosophy. Now I’m working in a project with urban planners and landscape architects. Some of them consider themselves designers, and some of them are very smart and talented, but none of them would have understood your talk, Betti, because they have never dealt with stuff like that. I think there’s a need to develop a common language in order to be able to bring the notion of ecologizing design or actual philosophical ideas into design processes. This seems to be something really important if we want to have transdisciplinary projects and bring these ideas forward. BM  I think that’s an absolutely valid point. It could be quite tricky for designers who might see themselves as makers in the first place. But I’m completely convinced that it’s fundamental for both disciplines – design and philosophy, and this of course applies to many other disciplines – to branch out of their own ‘silo’, and requires effort. It’s a matter of creating a common languages, so we have to work at creating more platforms, where that exchange can actually be possible, can be practiced. And luckily for us, we live at a moment in which there are terrific programmes at a lot of academic institutions, that are truly interdisciplinary, where different stakeholders, different competences come together to work on a particular theme. And the beauty of it is that whenever different disciplines are working together, something is created. Obviously the first part of this type of work is really to figure out how to talk to each other. MA  Perhaps in a concrete way, with regard to your current project, let’s say that if you’re designing a building in a particular place, you could try to think of the relationships that might put us in contact with other than human beings, for example plants or rodents, that are local and that might foster the urban ecosystem, but who might have become invisible to us. We – whether designers, architects, philosophers or whatever – mostly use tools for analyses that don’t help us to act holistically. And we aren’t really aiming to change this, because we don’t have the capacity to empathize with a huge variety of beings at the moment, we don’t see the relevance, nor understand the complexities of the inter- and intra-actions. Scorpions and cockroaches, for example, are undesirable beings in our eyes, yet they are beneficial to the sewage system. Although they have partly adapted to sewage conditions, sewage systems aren’t designed to relate to them at all.8 Try to see what surrounds us and to see what is unique to a specific

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place. ‘The unique’ is a very tricky issue in this context, but it’s crucial to talk about it. If we pay attention to most right-wing conservative politics, they have, by association with locality and ‘identity’, always connected deeply to ecology and privileged some species over others. For example, since I work in Sweden, what’s associated with Swedishness isn’t just Vikings and picturesque red wooden houses, but also, as everywhere, the mammals, the birds, the plants, and whatever comes from there, which is perceived to be valuable by those who identify with that nation as a place. It’s important however to think in dynamic and no longer in static terms, as if these were things to be only preserved. We must understand aspects of symbiosis, of adaptation, of mobility, of scale, of interdependencies with localities, and create designs that reflect an understanding of and through local ecosystems while maintaining life-affirming praxes. We navigate a very thin line between nationalisms that identify with a location and genuine pluriversalisms or cosmopolitanisms that can emerge from bringing ecology and diversity together – not only cultural diversity but biodiversity in a dynamic sense. What we nevertheless have to strive for is an engagement with different forms of interspecies design.

Fig. 5–6

Virginia Toffetti, Survalgae Kit, inhaler made from glass and algae fiber 3D print filament, 6,5 cm diameter, 15 cm height; set made from acrylglass, paper obtained from algae fibre and recycled post consumer waste, capsules with algae culture Chlorella Vulgaris, calico cloth, salt, 31 cm width, 9 cm height, 25 cm length, 2017. Survalgae Kit is a survival kit for urban pioneers living in 2030 – an unbreathable future when urban air pollution forces humans to wear inhalers in order to breathe. This eco-fiction project imagines a scenario where humans have to craft new types of symbiotic relationships with the nonhuman in order to survive. Survalgae is a survival kit that exploits the properties of algae to perform carbon biofixation so that the user is an active participant to the photosynthetic cycle of oxygen production.

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Radical Ecological Imaginaries: Turning the Ruins of our Present into the Legacies of the Future Maria Kaika

1

‘Dutch air quality breaks EU standards in some cities’, Dutch news (11.5.2016), http://www.dutch news.nl/news/archives/2016/05/ dutch-air-quality-breaks-eu-stand ards-in-some-cities/ (accessed 16.8.2016). 2

Francesca Perry, ‘Can “Smart” Birdhouses Help Improve Air Quality in Amsterdam?’, in The Guardian, 10 June 2016, https://www. theguardian.com/cities/2016/ jun/10/city-links-smart-birdhousesimprove-air-quality-amsterdam (accessed 7.11.2016). 3

Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Nature, Modernity and the City (New York: Routledge, 2005). 4

Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford, Blackwell 1984).

In May 2016 the Dutch environmental group Milieudefensie reported that the air quality in parts of Amsterdam, Maastricht and Rotterdam was lower than EU-set standards and exposed citizens to hazardous levels of pollution.1 One month later newspapers featured a new Dutch-designed smart technology: the TreeWifi. Netherlands-based designer Joris Lam designed a smart birdhouse that glows green and gives passers-by free Wi-Fi – but only when the air quality in the city is good (fig. 1). ‘Can smart birdhouses help improve air quality in Amsterdam?’ was the title of the article that presented the new technology in the Guardian.2 Smart cities and smart technologies are the latest addition to the long history of tools designed to balance development with environmental protection; to bring harmony to city/nature/society relations. However, the history of the Western world is a history of disrupting this ‘harmony’. It is a history of conquering nature.3 We made possible the creation and expansion of cities only by piercing mountains, damming rivers, deep-drilling ocean floors and – more recently – fracking and blasting through landscapes. Since the industrial revolution the production of ‘second natures’4 has been a process of relentless and uneven creative destruction that has systematically favoured the few and dispossessed the many. Most of the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century urban planning, design and urban theory is a history of efforts to reinstate balance, to compensate for the personal and social disarray brought about by relentless development and urbanisation: the garden city, the city beautiful, Broadacre City, the futurist city, the sanitary city, the modernist city, and more recently, the sustainable city, the eco-

Fig. 1 (opposite page) Joris Lam, TreeWifi, 2016.

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5

Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), p. 149. 6

Federico Caprotti, Maria Kaika, ‘City and Nature: Ideology and Representation in Fascist New Towns’, in Social and Cultural Geography 9,6 (2008), pp. 613–634.

city, the smart city. These are ideas, plans, visions that share the aim to restore socio-environmental balance by rethinking and redesigning the relationship between cities and nature. Redesigning the relationship between the environment and urbanization has been the centrepiece of imagining new ways of re-organi­ zing capitalism and of overcoming crises.5 During the nineteenth century, when labour/capital disputes were threatening to overturn capitalism, Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities would provide the charm of good design, the small scale and the ample green spaces which – it was hoped – would reinstate a new harmonious relationship between cities and nature that would become the container of a new relationship between workers and capital. Efforts to restore harmony continued well into the twentieth century. Mussolini’s 1930s massive programme for building the fascist new towns aimed to expose the population forced to settle in them to the ideal ‘fascist’ city/nature balance. This new balance would become the incubator of the ideal fascist male and female.6 Similarly, Stalin’s new towns were envisioned and built as the breeding ground for the perfect communist man and woman. But efforts to bring social harmony by restoring socio-environmental harmony were not confined to totalitarian regimes. Le Corbusier’s plans for the Ville Radieuse and Ville Contemporaine proposed bulldozing the meandering streets of central Paris to replace them with massive concrete blocks. But this was part of a ‘green’ vision. Erasing the meandering streets would allow more light and air to circulate through the city, better functionality and efficiency in movement, and healthier living. The modern building would become a living machine for forging the perfect modern man and woman: an able, strong, efficient, highly performing functional subject. Equally, the massive development of new towns across Europe after the Second World War was aimed both at restoring a lost socio-environmental balance and at housing the population and repairing war damage. The most recent additions to plans and designs that claim to offer a desirable equilibrium between cities societies and the environment are eco-cities, smart cities and sustainable cities, which promote green lifestyles (recycling, local food consumption, zero carbon emissions and so on) in gated secure communities open only to those who can afford them. These designs renew the promise of restoring some lost balance between human societies and nature. The plans, visions and ideas that are briefly presented above span a period of a century and a half. But they share three key characteristics. The first characteristic they have in common is that they were radical ecological imaginaries instituted in the hope and expectation of establishing a new social order. In these visions the readdressing of the relationship between nature and society was explicitly approached as a means of social change. Underlying the conception and implementation of these plans was the strong belief that the ideal

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city, the ideal home or the ideal male and female (futurist, modernist, fascist, communist, green, sustainable or smart) would be the ‘natural’ outcome (positive side effect) of the broader transformation of the relationship between nature and society. Socio-ecological imaginaries were the biopolitical tools and the ideal city was the biopolitical technology to produce ‘better’ men and women, to produce a broader collective socio-environmental change. However, a second characteristic the above plans and visons also share is that they all manifest an almost schizophrenic attitude towards nature. Nature features discursively, but also in terms of design choices, as both the frontier that needs to be conquered and the divine superior order that needs to be preserved and protected. On the one hand, nature in the form of untamed species, uncontrolled weather, natural disasters, wild rivers, indigenous populations, sewage, garbage and so on, appears as a threat to Western societies that needs to be controlled, mastered, civilized and tamed. On the other hand, nature in the form of green pastures, beautiful flowers, lush forests, organized animal societies, appears as an inspiration of a higher moral/ecological order that needs to be preserved and to which human societies should aspire. This almost schizophrenic attitude towards nature (frontier to be conquered and divine order to be preserved) persists today in gated zero-carbon communities that have to seal themselves off from all external threats (from people to unwanted species) in order to maintain their ‘green’ credentials. The third characteristic these plans have in common is that they all treat nature as something outside human beings, outside cities, outside human societies. The city is posited as the antithesis of nature: the artificial against the organic, the cancerous overgrown organ that needs to be checked and controlled. Even in contemporary eco-cities design, nature remains something out there that can enter contemporary lifestyles in the form of green walls, wild species, clean air, pure water and local food, or as the pleasant backdrop to the gated prime shelters, or as a pleasure ground. At any rate it enters contemporary urban lifestyles only after it has been fully processed and controlled, after it has been conquered in order to be safely consumed. If only we could bring back equilibrium, and with nature could create better cities and a better society. The urbanization of nature: the violence of capitalist urbanisation and the impossibility of restoring balance But this idea of restoring balance by design is an idea that has failed to deliver for over a century now. The imaginaries that depicted nature and cities (human settlements in general) as two distinct and separate entities that were once alienated and need to be brought into some form of harmonious coexistence disavowed the fact that there is no city as such in here, and that there is no nature as such out there. Both are socio-environmental hybrids, things neither purely 253

7

Kaika 2005 (footnote 3).

8

David Harvey, The Nature of Environment: Dialectics of Social and Environmental Change. Real Problems, False Solutions (London: Merlin Press 1993), p. 29. See also Maria Kaika, Erik Swyngedouw, ‘The Urbanization of Nature: Great Promises, Impasse, and New Beginnings’, in Gary Bridge, Sophie Watson (eds.), The New Blackwell Companion to the City (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), pp. 96–107. 9

Maria Kaika, ‘Interrogating the Geographies of the Familiar: Domesticating Nature and Constructing the Autonomy of the Modern Home’, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28, no. 2 (2004), pp. 265–286; Maria Kaika, Erik Swyngedouw, ‘Fetishising the Modern City: The Phantasmagoria of Urban Technological Networks’, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24, no. 1 (2000), pp. 120–138.

natural nor purely human-made; they are part of a continuous global metabolic process of creative destruction which I call the ‘urbanization of nature’.7 Capitalist urbanization was not just a violent movement of people from the countryside into cities, a violent transformation of peasants into industrial workers; it was also an equally violent transformation of natures. Everything we see around us in cities is nature transformed and commodified with the input of human labour technology and capital investment. The bricks making up a building are earth fired with the aid of human labour, technology and capital investment. The framework of a skyscraper is steel processed through a similar set of inputs. Think of Las Vegas. A patch of land in the middle of the desert that turned into a high-density urban settlement with thousands of swimming pools, blinding flickering neon lights, jackpot machines operating twenty-four hours a day. How is it even possible for such a dense consumption of water, energy, food, money, to exist in the middle of the desert? You have to travel about thirty miles south-east to the Hoover Dam to understand how it all comes together; to understand how the violent transmutation of the landscape around the dam is actually the foundation upon which Las Vegas operates. This dense concentration of water, food, energy and people in the middle of the desert can exist only because of the continuous metabolic process that transmutes landscapes, and harnesses resources through continuous investment of capital labour and technology. In this sense, paraphrasing David Harvey,8 we can say that there is nothing unnatural about Las Vegas. By the same token, however, there is nothing natural about an urban park either. As every gardener can testify, in order to produce and maintain an urban plot of land in a form that resembles what we have in mind as ‘nature’, it takes daily investment and toil, daily input of human labour, technology, resources, fertilisers, irrigation systems, money. The city of Vienna recently calculated that one urban tree costs 5,000 euros a year to maintain. This includes the cost of the labour of municipal workers, of water, fertilisers, transport, pruning and so on. Each urban tree is a co-production, a hybrid that is neither fully natural nor fully man-made – exactly the same as a city. Water is another excellent example of a hybrid we encounter in our everyday urban lives. Urbanized water is not H2O. Like other natural elements (gas, petrol and so on), water is produced, purified, standardized and commodified. As I explain in detail elsewhere,9 it is abstracted, dammed, channelled, stored, distilled and chlorinated. Its physical and social qualities change; it becomes a ‘hybrid’, neither purely ‘natural’ nor purely a ‘human product’. The modern city and the modern home can’t function without an adequate supply of this modernly produced quasi object: drinking, bathing, cleaning, draining are all subject to its continuous flow inside the city and inside one’s home.

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The urbanisation of nature, this global metabolic process of socioecological transformation involves the exploitation of human and more-than-human actors and resources, capital investment, geographical imaginaries and power relations. It is a deeply violent act that creates increasingly uneven hybrid geographies across the world. Let us take the smart birdhouse as an example of such a hybrid. It is supposed to provide a solution to improving air quality in Amsterdam. However, this or any other smart technology can’t be a solution to socio-environmental ills because in fact smart technologies are part of the problem, as we can see if we examine more closely just one of the components of the TreeWifi: coltan. Coltan is a metallic ore present in mobile communication circuit boards and necessary to make smart technologies function. If we trace the full socioenvironmental cycle of coltan, we get an entirely different picture of how sustainable smart technologies really are. Coltan is precious and sold at prices that range between 600 and 3,000 US dollars per kilogram. But a high percentage of the world’s supply comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and is mined by hand under near slave labour conditions that the UN repeatedly reports to be a highly organized and systematic exploitation of both local nature and local people.10

10

See Maria Kaika, ‘“Don’t call me Resilient Again!” The New Urban Agenda as Immunology … or what happens when communities refuse to be vaccinated with “smart cities” and indicators’, in Environment and Urbanization 29, 1 (2017), pp. 89–102.

11

Miriam Greenberg, ‘Whose Ecotopia? The Challenge of Equity in Urban Sustainability Planning’, in Julie Sze (ed.), Situating Sustainability: Sciences/Humanities/Societies, Scales, and Social Justice (New York: New York University Press, 2016).

12

Frederico Cugurullo, ‘Urban eco-modernisation and the policy context of new eco-city projects: Where Masdar City fails and why’, in Urban Studies, vol. 53, no. 11 (2016), pp. 2417–2433.

13

Sarah Dooling, ‘Ecological Gentrification: A Research Agenda Exploring Justice in the City’, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (2009), pp. 621–639.

Coltan is not a unique or extreme case of internal contradiction in the pursuit of sustainable development. Under the banner of sustainable development we have witnessed more carbon-free projects than ever before, more advanced recycling techniques, more institutional frameworks for penalizing pollution. We have more options to consume free-trade, eco or local products, to live and work in carbonneutral buildings. But we are only just beginning to document the full scale of the perversion of the pursuit of localized techno-managerial green solutions to global socio-environmental ills driven by sustainability indicators. For example, the famously ‘ecotopian’ region of the San Francisco Bay area has seen its sustainability indexes rise at the same time that it has become one of the most expensive and unequal urban areas in the US.11 We also now have evidence on how Masdar City – Abu Dhabi’s showcase for post-carbon urbanization – not only depended upon mining for minerals under slave-labour conditions but also upon local near-slavery working conditions on the construction sites, on underpaid and often uninsured Asian migrants.12 A growing body of academic research is systematically examining the way in which ‘green’ developments have been going hand in hand with new forms of displacement; a form of ‘environmental or ecological gentrification’.13 Still, despite the fact that we now know more about the contradictions of sustainability, we keep on acting as if we didn’t know. In October 2017 the new Urban Agenda presented at the UN Habitat III conference renewed the promise of more sustainable, resilient, inclusive and safe cities through the pursuit of smarter technologies and better monitoring. However, to understand the inequalities and 255

power relations involved in the urbanization of nature, we don’t need bigger data or better indicators; instead we need to focus on small everyday gestures and practices. Think, for example, of turning a tap on; a simple everyday gesture that gives us fresh clean water in the comfort of our home. In order to be able to perform this small gesture daily, and to deliver water into our homes, it is necessary to have in place and continuously maintain an intricate network of technology, beneath and outside the city, that continuously harnesses water from its source – often hundreds of miles away – and channel it through reservoirs, quality control stations and invisible underground pipes into the city and the comfort of our homes. The constant metabolic flow that makes the turn of a tap effective is a process that requires the continuous input of human labour technology and capital investment to control, clean, monitor and finally deliver the precious resource inside our homes. It is therefore impossible to understand cities without understanding them as hybrids made out of this human/more-than-human/technology interaction. It is impossible to understand cities without looking beyond what is visible, without understanding the invisible intricate set of networks of technology, capital and the exploitation of human labour and resources involved in maintaining urban metabolism. Unless we address these relations and the power and violence involved in the urbanisation of nature, we cannot even begin to pursue socio-environmental harmony. Sustainability has come of age; time to take our failures seriously We believed that sustainability was something that could be injected into cities in the form of green roofs, greater numbers of trees, more recycling and bicycle lanes or smarter technologies, but we repeatedly failed to deliver the promised socio-environmental equality. Sustainability has come of age, and the failed experiments of the past no longer hold the alibi of the new, the promise of a fundamental transformation. So, what if – instead of path dependency and the pursuit of sustainability through techno-managerial solutions – we actually broke free from these paradigms? What if we tried to change our research questions and design paradigms? What if we thought of intellectual labour, of art, design, architecture and planning not as a technical exercise but as a political praxis once again? To do this we first need to change our interlocutors. We need to erase our assumptions of primacy and listen and engage instead with people and groups beyond the ‘usual suspects’ and established ‘stakeholders’ of urban change. We need to focus on those who have been silenced in the sustainability debate. So, what I suggest as a way forward towards fresh design ideas and practices is this: instead of inviting the usual suspects around the table for the usual consensus-building exercises over the design of new sustainability indicators (policy makers, NGOs, local stakeholders, selected local representatives, international organisations and so on) we focus instead on where dissensus, disagreement and conflict lie. 256

We need to deliberately seek out and engage with emerging dissident practices and emerging actors that produce new radical imaginaries and alternative ways of pursuing global socio-environmental equality. It is these actors who can point us to ‘real’ smart solutions. It is these actors who are producing new hybrid ecologies of change. For example, after Hurricane Katrina victims received the umpteenth praise from policy makers about the resilience they had displayed in the face of socio-ecological disaster, Tracie Washington, president of the Louisiana Justice Institute, launched a public campaign that demanded policy makers and the media to stop calling Hurricane Katrina victims ‘resilient’(fig. 2). ‘Every time you say, “Oh, they’re resilient,” [it actually] means you can do something else, [something] new to me […] We were not born to be resilient; we are conditioned to be resilient. I don’t want to be resilient […]. [I want to] fix the things that [create the need for us to] be resilient.’14 Similarly, the Rosieni community, at Rosia Montana, Romania, refused the invitation to be included in discussions over how a new mining project that would destroy their environment and livelihoods could be made more ‘sustainable’ and more ‘beneficial’ to their

14

Josh Feldman, ‘MSNBC Guest: Stop Using the Word “Resilient” to Describe Katrina Victims’, in Mediaite, 29 August 2015, http://www. mediaite.com/tv/msnbc-gueststop-using-the-word-resilient-todescribe-katrina-victims/ (accessed 17.8.2016).

Fig. 2

‘Stop calling me resilient’-campaign, New Orleans, quote by Tracie Washington, Louisiana Justice Institute.

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15

Irina Velicu, ‘To Sell or Not to Sell: Landscapes of Resistance to Neo-Liberal Globalization in Transylvania’, in Globalizations 9 (2012), pp. 307–321. See also Irina Velicu, Maria Kaika, ‘Undoing Environmental Justice: Re-Imagining Equality in the Rosia Montana Anti-Mining Movement’, in Geoforum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2015.10.012 (accessed 17.8.2016).

16

Sheela Patel, Jockin Arputham, Sheridan Bartlett, ‘We Beat the Path by Walking: How the Women of Mahila Milan in India Learned to Plan, Design, Finance and Build Housing’, in Environment and Urbanization 28 (2016), pp. 223–240.

17

Melissa García-Lamarca, ‘(De) Mortgaging Lives: Financialisation, Biopolitics and Political Subjectivation in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region’, PhD thesis (University of Manchester, 2016).

18

Melissa García Lamarca, Maria Kaika, ‘“Mortgaged Lives”: The Biopolitics of Debt and Housing Financialisation’, in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, no. 3 (2016) pp. 313–27, https://doi. org/10.1111/tran.12126 (accessed 17.8.2016).

19

For further details see Kaika 2017 (footnote 10).

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community. As Veliciu15 reports, the Rosieni did in fact originally accept the invitation to sit around the negotiating table with the mining company and local authorities. But they soon realized that the invitation to be ‘included’ meant that there was already a clear role assigned to them: not that of the equal co-decision-maker in setting development goals and allocating resources; but that of the subordinate subject only allowed to choose from a menu of monetary or other compensations in return for the destruction of their livelihoods and environment. In a similar vein, Patel, Arputham and Bartlett16 draw our attention to the highly successful community practices for safe housing provision developed over the past thirty years by the Indian Alliance of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC). The community practices operate outside markets, and undercut the continuous failures of officially promoted market solutions to housing. What if we took seriously the practices of the Platform for MortgageAffected People (the PAH), which supported over 300,000 families evicted by banks in Spain after 2008 because they couldn’t repay their mortgages? García-Lamarca17 details how the PAH establish housing as an indisputable and undeniable right for all: when not given, this right is not negotiated; it is just taken. The PAH established methods that not only rehouse but also re-dignify evicted people by taking them outside the domain of defining themselves only as powerless indebted objects.18 What if we took the debate and policy agendas on sustainability beyond the false dilemma of market efficiency versus public accountability? What if we took seriously the Initiative 136 (K136), SOSte to Nero and other collectives that redefined water as the commons in Thessaloniki, Greece? Initiated by the public water company’s trade union as a response to privatization calls, K136 produced new imaginaries that radically changed the framework for negotiating water as the commons and as a collective global right. Instead of simply protesting against the pending privatization of the municipal water company, K136 instituted practices and means to buy up the water company and make it a collective again when it came up for privatization. 136 actually refers to the number of euros that each citizen would need to contribute in order to make such a bid possible. By doing so, K136 posed a deep political dilemma for every citizen: either keep 136 euros as spending power, or turn 136 euros into real capital – that is, into the ability to make decisions over the use, management and allocation of water resources in their city. Like the PAH, K136 turned citizens from indebted powerless objects into potentially powerful decision-makers who can reclaim their commons by producing alternative means of managing it. ‘Buying back the public; 136 euros at the time’ was their motto. The collectives did raise the capital,19 and were up there competing in the public tender against global corporate giants like Suez Water and Merkorot when Thessaloniki’s water company came up for sale in 2013.

From immunological practices to real smart solutions The new practices for communing water, housing or community-recovery practices described in the previous section share many things in common. The first is that they point clearly at what is wrong with pursuing global socio-environmental equality through smart design and techno-managerial solutions. It is that smart technological and managerial solutions can only be allocated/handed down from those in power – to those in need. Smart solutions can perhaps mediate some of the consequences of global socio-environmental inequality, but they do little towards alleviating this inequality. The best they can do is act as immunological practices: they vaccinate people and environments alike, so that they are able to take larger doses of inequality and environmental degradation in the future. The second characteristic the movements and actors I mentioned above share is that they refuse to take this immunological vaccination. They don’t beg for the allocation of justice and rights from those who hand it down to them. Instead they take socio-environmental equality as a given right and act upon it themselves. They establish new methods and imaginaries to make it operational in their everyday lives. They do this by rupturing their previous subject position of the underdog and institutionalising new ways of managing socioenvironmental inequality. When Tracie Washington posted her ‘Don’t call me resilient!’ campaign posters all over New Orleans, she was stating that she (and the community) was not prepared to tolerate immunological practices any longer. She (they) instead demanded to become part of the decision-making that would change the practices that led them to need resilience in the first place. When the president of the union of workers at the public water company in Thessaloniki offered a T-shirt with the movement’s logo to the CEO of Suez Water (one of the bidders for the Greek public water company), telling her that all she could expect to get from Greece was this T-Shirt (but not the water company), he transcended his own everyday existence as a water-company employee. He adopted a position of equality visà-vis the CEO of one of the most powerful global water corporations because he assumed this equality. He, his colleagues and the wider citizens’ anti-privatisation collectives showed commoning as a means to move beyond the false dilemma of ‘market versus public’ management of water resources. If we are looking for real smart solutions and real social innovation, here they are! These methods and innovations are not born out of consensus; they are born out of necessity, and are forged through dissensus. These emerging imaginaries of human and more-than-humans environments being and working in common, in urban settlements with collective and equal rights to housing, healthcare, education, water, clean air, challenge socio-environmental degradation in ways far more efficient, effective and meaningful than any set of indicators 259

or techno-managerial solutions or market practices we have devised thus far. They can potentially lead to the institution of alternative means to tackle global socio-environmental inequality. Rethinking art, design and academia in a changing hybrid world: beyond the professionalization of intellectual and design labour. At moments of growing insecurity, fear, crisis upheaval and change, like the moment we currently live in, the transformation of ecological imaginaries and the construction of new socio-environmental narratives is no longer an intellectual exercise or a design drill. It is an act of need and a necessity. It is a political act. At such moments, more than at any other time, intellectuals, artists, design and planning practitioners need to engage with the uneven geographies, inequalities and power relations that contemporary hybrid ecologies breed. We can symbolize these practices and methods into visual or verbal narratives that can de-localize them and make them universally politically relevant – not policy relevant but properly political. We – academics artists, architects, planners – are actually afraid of being properly political. We are reluctant to become part of constructing new master narratives from a fear of being accused of unprofessionalism. Philip Johnson, the once great advocate of architecture as a social art declared at seventy-five years of age that he was happy he could finally practice architecture to please himself and not to reform society! Like Johnson, we have become apolitical professionals and agnostic intellectuals, and we relish this new role as a means of being professionals. We are shocked by the failures of modernism, numbed by the totalitarian vision of socialism and horrified by the socio-economic and environmental consequences of neo-liberalism. But through fear of repeating the mistakes of the past, we don’t even engage in drafting possibilities for the future. And we become coresponsible for losing the collective ability to imagine new ways of being in common. As we dwell on the glorified professionalization of our intellectual and design labour, in fear of new master narratives, new master narratives are in fact being constructed around us. We are no longer simply a part of their production. And these new master narratives are not the ones we necessarily want to live in: the normalization of climate change as inevitable; the triumph of the debate on socioenvironmental change over the debate on smart cities; the rise of populism, totalitarianism, racism and xenophobia; the collapse of a vision for a European political unification; the normalization of the concentration of fifty percent of the worlds wealth among a handful of people. These are new collective master narratives; these are radical imaginaries that are becoming effective and changing our world. They are put into effect by techno-managerial ‘experts’. Planners, architects, artists, urban professionals, intellectuals are no longer part of the construction of these narratives. At best we are only called 260

to participate in their ‘operationalization’ through design exercises within predetermined frameworks and norms. The imaginaries of the past may have failed to deliver the perfect present that everyone hoped for. But we need to reclaim and re-common of the production of space – by acknowledging that no act of producing space, no design and socio-environmental intervention, however well meant, can be restorative. These are by definition violent acts that cannot restore any previous supposedly pristine harmonious condition between nature and society. And by acknowledging that we cannot separate the hybrids we have produced by purifying acts; we cannot repair climate change through new technologies and sustainability indicators. If we focus on dissensus and pay attention to new grassroots practices and methods that demand and deliver (locally) socio-environmental equality, we can perhaps try to universalize out these practices.

20

David Pinder,‘In Defence of Utopian Urbanism: Imagining Cities after the “End of Utopia”’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, in Human Geography 84, no. 3–4 (2002), pp. 229–41.

21

Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003), p. 2.

We should not be afraid to fail again. But let us be determined to fail better. Because the quality of our failures is the ultimate judge of the quality of any idea, vision, blueprint, or radical imaginary. Think of the ruins of some of the ideas and visions of the past, from Howard’s garden cities to Le Corbusier’s modernist visions. Even though many are discredited as totalitarian or oppressive, these earlier spatial experiments in alternative living still inspire (or haunt) – for better or worse – our ways of thinking and planning for cities. Howard’s garden cities radicalized the way we perceive the relationship between cities and nature, and still inspire visions for eco cities. The City Beautiful Movement brought nature into the city and Olmstead’s Central Park still functions as a successful public space (even part privatized). The Karl-Marx-Hof experiment in magnificent social housing remains an iconic sought-after dwelling in Vienna for middle-class incomes, whilst still operating under social-housing regulations. Le Corbusier’s Ville radieuse, which reconceptualized the relationship between city and nature as a seamlessly interconnected hybrid, is still inspirational. And despite fierce criticism his Unites d’habitation, a unique experiment in collective living, actually still function pretty well today. These utopias, which put collective visions and radical demands into play,20 have proved that they can fail better than the pursuit of individualized lifestyles we experience now. Of course, as Leonie Sandercock21 notes, the failures of past utopias discourage future attempts. However, we can no longer wait for geoengineering and robotics to provide the new Promethean paradigm that promises to save humankind (and capitalism) from the disastrous effects of its own actions. We can no longer pursue only the preservation of our ‘green’ souls through consumer choices (locally sourced organic food, vegetarianism, recycling) or even voluntary extinction, as some strands of deep ecology profess. Despite the doom, gloom 261

22

Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Ithaca, N.Y., London: Cornell University Press, 2002). See also Luce Irigaray, J’aime a Toi: Esquisse D’une Felicite Dans L’histoire (Paris: B. Grasset, 1992).

23

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Susanne Witzgall, Maria Muhle, Marietta Kesting, Jenny Nachtigall and Karianne Fogelberg for putting this volume together and for their invaluable input. This chapter is based on a transcript of a lecture by Maria Kaika, which draws upon original work published by Maria Kaika in the following articles: Kaika 2017 (footnote 10), Maria Kaika, ‘Architecture and Crisis: ReInventing the Icon, Re-Imag(in)Ing London and Re-Branding the City’, in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35 (2010), pp. 453–474 and Maria Kaika ‘Planning as Radical Ecological Imaginary’, in European Planning Studies, vol. 26, issue 9 (2018) (early online). The copyright of this text remains with the author.

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and fear, we are not short of ideas for collective socio-ecological transformation that propose new ways of administering the relationship between the human and the more-than-human world. So, as Luce Irigaray22 urges, let us militate politically for the impossible, and desire what does not exist yet as the only possibility for the future.23

Ecologies of Existence: The Architecture of Collective Equipment Godofredo Pereira

Ecology In an age of planetary transformation, ecological concerns have risen to the top of our priorities. The complex entanglements between humanity and the earth are today at the centre of discussions in scientific, political and economic fields. The awareness that humankind (or part of it) has had a geological impact – see the discussion about the terms Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene – has further increased these concerns. Demonstration of how the ‘earth system’ has been heavily affected by human actions has made evident the need to critically rethink modes of inhabiting the earth. These are issues that both directly and indirectly affect architecture. Directly, due to its large degree of responsibility in these matters: the endless expansion of urbanization has been key to groundwater depletion, soil degradation and air pollution. Indirectly, as its object of study is facing dramatic transformations: pollution, changes in land-use, water scarcity or climate change impose drastic reconfigurations in modes of living and co-existence. In the face of these developments, ecology has assumed vital importance for architects and design practitioners at large. And yet, our conceptions of ecology remain profoundly conservative. Consider for instance how in architectural image-making, ecological perspectives frequently come into view as an endless repetition of lush tropical settings that evoke the science-fiction imagery of James Cameron’s film Avatar (2009) rather than any political and historical context. The images for Masdar City (Abu Dhabi) by Foster + Partners 263

1

Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014).

Fig. 1

Indigenous people protesting the Belo Monte dam project at the Rio+20 conference, Brazil, 2012. They say the dam will destroy their livelihoods along the Xingu River.

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and the master plan of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city are a case in point. Eco-cities’ key promotional strategy is the association of real-estate developments with the image of luxuriant gardens and tropical vegetation. Greenhouses, winter gardens, palm trees, long grass and healthy shrubs are evidence of the biologically diverse and perfectly controlled artificial climates that architecture is able to conjure. These eco-city models are just two instances of a larger tendency of ecological architecture that either highlights peaceful cohabitation with nature or environmental protection. What is missing from so many images of ecological architecture, however, is the fact that humanity and nature are not always two opposing categories: the Mapuche in Chile, for instance, consider humanity as a small part of nature. From this perspective, as well as from that of many indigenous peoples from the US to India or Australia, the opposition makes no sense at all (fig. 1). Another example is Amerindian cosmology and how it does not ascribe ontological primacy to being but to relations. As anthropologist Viveiros de Castro explains, several peoples from the Amazons consider the human as a function of predation, by which each entity (animal, human, tree) will see itself as human and the other as prey.1 We could list many more examples of different understandings of what defines nature and the human. Or instead we could simply conclude that what is missing from the common images of ecology are different peoples, bacteria, chemicals or other less obviously ‘green’ agents – and more

2

importantly, the multiplicity of their worlds. As long as we continue to associate ecology with the protection of idealized natures, instead of understanding it in relation to modes of existence, we will remain unable to construct a properly ecological practice.

Such shift in perspective is central to bring together environmental and labour disputes. See e.g. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism In The Web Of Life: Ecology And The Accumulation Of Capital (London: Verso, 2016).

In this context, questioning the meaning of ‘nature’ is not only necessary for decolonizing research practices and for acknowledging the perspectives of indigenous peoples from all around the world: it is also essential for highlighting differences between modes of production. For instance, as argued by Jason W. Moore, as long as capitalist environmental destruction keeps being described as an action that is external to nature, we misconstrue nature as something passive and ‘out there’ that we can protect from human interference. This view lacks both the anthropological awareness of how humanity is profoundly entangled in its environment as well as the tools to think critically about how we inhabit the Earth. Instead it is crucial to recognize that capitalism is not exterior to nature: it is a specific mode of organizing it.2

For a detailed discussion of multinaturalism see Viveiros de Castro, 2014 (footnote 1).

3

4

Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Continuum, 2011). 5

Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution (Paris: Union Generale d’editions, 1977), p. 95.

Against this backdrop I would like to propose a model of ecological thinking that accounts for the fact that ideas of nature are inseparable from modes of existence. Ultimately this understanding of ecology aims at the disruption of one of the key ideological devices of neoliberalism, namely the promotion of multiculturalism. What is the value of supporting the cosmopolitan coexistence of multiple cultures, if only one type of nature (the cheap nature of capitalism) is taken into consideration? Instead of protecting nature, perhaps architecture has to become multinaturalist – as defined by Viveiros de Castro–in the sense of recognizing the existence of multiple natures and multiple worlds.3 Subjectivity Ecological thinking should concern itself first and foremost with modes of existence. Shifting perspective from a naturalist conception of ecology to one based on ecologies of existence implies directing one’s focus to the workings of subjectivity. Following Félix Guattari I understand capitalism in terms of a crisis of subjectivity, that is, as a crisis of the modes of living and inhabiting the earth.4 Taking into account that it is impossible not to relate our current epoch of largescale environmental transformations to the expansion of a capitalist mononaturalism and its planetary quest for resources, we should not forget that this condition is supported by an exponential proliferation of subjectivities. Or, to put it with Guattari, ‘Capitalism launches (subjective) models the way the automobile industry launches a new line of cars.’5 Not unlike in naturalizing discussions of ecology, we seem to remain prisoners of conservative conceptions: subjectivity is typically understood as the self-conscious perspective of the subject, and often 265

6

On the idea of collective subjectivity see the essay ‘So What’, Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–1985, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009). 7

Axiomatics are a set of axioms that define a formal system. An axiom is a proposition which cannot be proven true or false and from which systems of rules are constructed. Capitalism proceeds by continuous axiomatizaiton, continually inventing new forms of capturing life, i.e. by constantly inventing new axioms. See Daniel W. Smith, ‘Axiomatics and Problematics as Two Modes of Formalisation: Deleuze’s Epistemology of Mathematics’, in Simon B. Duffy, Virtual Mathematics: the Logic of Difference (Manchester: Clinamen Press 2006), pp. 145–168. 8

Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: University of Minnea­ polis Press, 2005), pp. 456-457.

as opposed to the objectivity of rational or scientific thought. There is much to say about this, but what is often missed are not only the complex processes by which the subject is constructed (Marxist, psychoanalytic or feminist theory have provided us with a strong critique of this) but also the fact that subjectivity is collective from the start. This is evident once we take an environmental and ecological perspective: if the subject is environmentally traversed by a multitude of non-human and energetic fluxes (from bacteria and microbes to energetic and chemical flows), and ecologically constituted in relations of co-dependence with the social, economic and political existential territories it inhabits, subjectivity could never be reduced to individuality but should instead be understood as a collective product.6 Subjectivity is a key target of capitalist axiomatization.7 Guattari (with Deleuze) argues that this happens in two distinct and yet complementary ways: via social subjection and machinic enslavement.8 The first refers to how human beings are constituted as subjects by capitalism. It could be exemplified by media or advertising and how these affect subjectivity via frequency, in the sense that certain ideas, positions, ways of understanding are produced not so much through a convincing message but rather its endless repetition. Think about the power of advertising or news in shaping what is socially imaginable and acceptable in terms of gender, racial or political expectations. Social subjection takes place via injunctions that are surreptitiously repeated over and over again. At the same time, at the machinic (corporeal) level, capitalism is also constantly producing new forms of enslavement – and this too has dramatic consequences for the production of subjectivity. Notice, for instance, how people are not simply the (external) subjects of financial systems, but in their choices and decisions have become active participants of a generalized financialisation of daily life. The video-game industry is an exemplary case of these two combined: while as a ‘user’ the gamer is constituted as a subject, as a direct participant in online forums or software trials he or she takes on the role of a cog, enslaved by a complex profit machine. Subjectivities might not be exclusive products of capitalism, but they clearly are one of its main objects of investment. But why is the production of subjectivity central to ecological thinking? The connection is simple: a key aspect of capitalist politics consists in the specific mode by which it articulates forms of machinic enslavement through forms of social subjection. In other words, how it brings together the material/energetic economy and the subjective one. This is evident in the coupling of new forms of precarious labour with the promotion of ‘socially liberated’ and flexible work/life relations, or in the global promotion of real-estate developments with lush tropical imagery, as an index of ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ living. In both examples, profit and the production of subjectivity go hand in hand. At their interception is the production of styles of living: a multiplication of commoditized ‘subjectivities’ – each with its own

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app, dress code, specialized shop or film and music culture. None of these styles necessarily correspond to a transformation of modes of existing in the world. On the contrary, they reinforce modes of existence that never put in question the neoliberal mode of production. The more ‘radical’ the ‘lifestyle’, the further away it tends to be from posing any danger. The production of subjectivity is therefore the key process by which capitalism enslaves people into reinforcing its axiomatics, disconnecting subjectivity from modes of existence. And it is for this reason that it is an ecological battlefield. Architecture What then is the role of architecture in this context? I have been explo­ring this question while jointly teaching the MA architecture course at the ADS7 studio of the Royal College of Art in London with Platon Issaias. In my view our approach is threefold: a) to always start with collectives; b) to understand architecture as a practice that has the ability to give consistency to modes of existence; c) to explore the role of collective equipment. To clarify the first point I should define what collectives are. Similarly to the French term agéncement, collectives could be understood as several entities operating in relation to each other. One example might be the collective composed of dihé algae (Spirulina) and groups of Kanembu women around Lake Chad. These collectives allow the formation of networks of mutual support for the development of alternative modes of sustainment in the face of human-induced environmental transformations – and the progressive shrinking of lake Chad. It also applies to the collective formed around climate research – including humans, gathering spaces, systems of communication, technologies of seeing, modes of knowledge production and data banks, and more broadly it concerns the multiplicity of collectives that populate this earth, be they composed of humans, non-humans or non-living entities. It is worth adding that one is always part of multiple collectives. Collectives are not to be mistaken with fixed identities. They are rather defined by doing something together, by collective activity. For this reason, common terms such as the ‘community’, the ‘group’, the ‘99%’, the ‘workers of the world’, do not necessarily refer to a collective. Equally, doing something together does not require all members of the collective to belong to the same gender, race or species. Indeed, they don’t even need to be living beings. We propose to design for collectives because focusing on collectives allows us to sidestep the capitalist rhetoric of the individual and instead address collective modes of engaging with the earth and the socio-environmental issues these raise, and the subjectivities they produce. In other words, it allows us to directly confront the way capitalism disconnects the production of subjectivity from modes of existence. 267

9

See Justin McGuirk, Radical Cities (London: Verso, 2015).

Fig. 2

Alto Comedero, Jujuy, Argentinien.

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This approach is linked to the conviction that architecture gives both material and existential consistency to living. It does so, we argue, by providing spaces for things to happen, by giving form to a specific programme, or even by giving visibility to certain peoples and their demands. Giving consistency in this sense is not simply to reinforce what exists but to provide support so that collectives can empower and transform themselves. It fosters self-management and autonomy. There are innumerable ways in which architecture provides consistency to modes of living. We could think of the Túpac Amaru organization in Alto Comedero in Argentina, for example. Taking control of the construction processes the indigenous organization mobilized state housing funds to design and build their own houses, streets and collective equipment such as social centres or schools. Since 2001 they have built 2,700 houses. And yet in this case the most important feature the community called for was the construction of a dinosaurthemed playground and a swimming pool (fig. 2). It is not that housing provision or infrastructures were not important – but it was the architecture of leisure and iconic references that best allowed the Túpac Amaru organization to develop a mechanism of both empowerment and collective-making. The aqua-park was not merely a service provision but a transformational intervention.9 Another important reference for us is the square designed by Sandil Hilal in 2009 while leading the UNRWA Camp Improvement Program at the Al-Fawwar refugee camp, West Bank (fig. 3). The design of

a very simple and rudimentary plaza – made out of stone pavement, cement-block walls and a tensile cover – enabled radical transformations of the life in the camp. Women’s groups started meeting in the space, weddings began to be held outside (previously they were all confined to private interior spaces) and children were given a safe place in which to play.10 In both cases a transformation of existing collectives took place out of an economy of limited means.

10

Sandi Hilal, ‘Roofless’, Jesko Fezer (ed.), Wohnungsfrage: Housing After the Neoliberal Turn (Berlin: Spector Books, 2015), pp. 31–37.

Collective equipment The two previous examples fall into the category of what we call collective equipment, a term that typically refers to public facilities or amenities. Collective equipment is traditionally understood as instruments of religious and military powers, as tools deployed by the modern nation-state or, increasingly today, by private entities such as schools, hospitals, social clubs, shopping malls and so on. The point, however – and the previous examples show this – is that collective equipment is often a device of transformative politics: there are multiple cases in which collective equipment has emerged from social movements or popular organizations, as an essential element of struggle and product of conflict, in the form of popular theatres and social clubs to cooperative healthcare centres or mutualist schools. So although the history of collective equipment is most famously associated with that of the state, it is also that of many other forms of social organization.

Fig. 3

Al Fawwar refugee camp, West Bank, 2012.

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11

Depending on the reference, collective equipment is sometimes associated with public facilities, at other times with non-private spaces, including highways and urban infrastructure, and often with domestic spaces as well, which after all are spaces where important production of the collective has always been at stake. For a unique genealogy of collective equipment in the French context see François, Fourquet, Lion Murard, Los equipamientos del poder: ciudades, territorios y equipamientos colectivos (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1978).

12

http://www.bbc.co.uk/earth/ story/20160323-the-uniquemosquito-that-lives-in-thelondon-underground (accessed 7.11.2017).

13

Eyal Weizman, The Roundabout Revolutions (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015).

14

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Being against the World Rebellion and Constitution (Oxon: Birkbeck Law Press, 2009).

15

Isabelle Stengers, Andrew Goffey, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (Luneburg: Open Humanities Press/Meson Press, 2015).

Leaving aside the discussion of what exactly counts as collective equipment or not, I would argue that no collective can organize itself within an environment, without some form of collective equipment.11 In this sense we could define collective equipment as any spatial device that provides consistency to a collective. Water infrastructure is perhaps the key archetype of collective equipment, due to its unique history of territorializing and giving form to different kinds of socio-environmental relations and modes of existence, from the Iranian qanat to the Roman aqueduct. The diversity of entities that make up the collective – including infrastructures, soils, vegetation or minerals – becomes apparent in the case of water distribution. Not to mention that the same infrastructure can become the equipment for a multiplicity of different collectives: the London tube, for instance, is famous for giving rise to a unique subspecies of mosquitoes, the Culex pipiens molestus.12 The relevance of collective equipment arises as well from the fact that they often become objects of radical attachment, through which equivalences between distinct peoples and social struggles (class, gender, race, ethnicity and so on) are articulated and brought together. This was the case with the Chicago nightclubs that promoted the emergent house-music scene in the 1980s at the interception of gay and black communities (starting with the Warehouse and DJ Frankie Knuckles); of the illegal shebeens in the South African townships, where jazz was key to mobilizing the growing anti-apartheid movement; or the series of roundabouts that helped to catalyse the Arab Spring, as Eyal Weizman argues.13 In other words, collective equipment contains the potential to become the part-objects through which attachments between different collectives occur.14 These two mains aspects – collectives and consistency – and their site of expression in collective equipment form the core of an architectural approach to ecologies of existence. Its purpose is to shift perspective from the protection of nature to an attention to different ecologies of existence, taking into account their material, social and psychological domains. In doing so, the objective is the development of alternative modes of co-existence that would allow the challenge presented by contemporary environmental transformations (of what Isabelle Stengers has called ‘the intrusion of Gaia’15) to be addressed. The question is not how to understand the relation to nature, sustainable or not, but of how to think about environments as existential territories, not only of humans but of all other kinds of collectives that populate the earth, including animals, spirits, bacteria and even future generations. Instead of exploring the relation between humanity and nature, an ecology of existence sets its sight on the transformation of what we mean by humanity in the first place: where does it end, what does it include, what does it care for? This is the only ecology that matters.

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‘I know nothing more violent than a consensus building exercise around the table amongst the “usual suspects”’1 In conversation with Maria Kaika and Godofredo Pereira

1

Maria Kaika, see page 272 of this contribution. 2

Susanne Witzgall is referring here to the talks by Maria Kaika and Godofredo Pereira on 26 January 2017 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich as part of the lecture series Hybrid Ecologies. Both talks are published in this volume in slightly shortened and modified versions, pp. 250–262 and 263–270 (editors’ note). 3

According to Jacques Rancière, ‘(p)olitical dissensus is not a discussion between speaking people who would confront their interests and values. It is a conflict about who speaks and who does not speak, about what has to be heard as the voice of pain and what has to be heard as an argument on justice’. Jacques Rancière, ‘The Thinking of Dissensus‘, in Paul Bowman, Richard Stamp (eds.), Reading Rancière (London, New York: Continuum 2011), p. 2.

Susanne Witzgall [SW]  Maria, you focused in your talk on dissent and conflict instead of consensus-building, and you, Godofredo, termed architectural practice a category of ecological struggle. You said for example: ‘Fighting for rights is fighting for a different city.’2 I find this a very interesting point, which connects both of your talks, because one might normally link ecological thinking with the idea of a peaceful cohabitation guided by attachment and empathy. Why do you put so much emphasis on dissent, and is Jacques Rancière’s notion of politics as a form of dissensus of importance to you? And my second question relating to the first is: humans who aren’t being heard in hybrid ecological systems might raise their voice and claim rights for themselves, but what about non-humans, who often can’t express their dissent?3 Godofredo Pereira [GP]  I find it odd to be able to even start thinking about ecology without uttering the word violence, because it concerns a history of violence. It concerns forms of knowledge production that are violent, whose consequences are violent and that are employed violently. Apart from that I would say that politically, even when you say that you want consensus, you know quite well that this claim is an intervention in a force field. Politics is violent. This can be qualified in all sorts of things. You can differentiate between the violence of dissent, of an agonistic relationship, or the violence of imposing consensus. 271

4

See Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (1980; repr., London/New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 257.

But we should keep in mind that in what concerns nature and living, the violence of politics has literally meant genocide: genocide and ecocide are the two great histories of ecology, unfortunately. Of course, in a banal sense we often want to achieve consensus – this is a given – but what one needs to keep in mind is that consensus is never produced without abdicating, disagreeing, deciding for something to the detriment of something else. Furthermore, it isn’t produced with everyone, because you don’t speak with all, you don’t speak in the name of all, etcetera. So, regardless of the consensus, it nevertheless consists of a decision made by the people that sat, could sit or were allowed to sit at the negotiating table. It’s important to put into focus that even the most positive, progressive claims imply all sorts of violence. Regarding your second question, on the non-human – this is a Western concept, right? It obeys and is located within specific epistemic discourses. This is a very import thing to understand politically. Sometimes people presuppose that just because our conceptual apparatus refers to bacteria or utters the word non-human, our practices of the world are different. They might be as well, but this isn’t a causal necessity. For instance, the design of a most simple thing like a little boat is carried with massive knowledge about the non-human, about water, about particles, but it also implies a power of abstraction that necessarily reduces the complexity of what water is, producing a concept and a type of relation. That’s what we necessarily do in relation to non-humans. It shouldn’t be the question of whether you take nonhumans or animals or plants into consideration. The question should be the kind of projects you want to engage in. How do you enter in composition with the world?4 The reason why I put the topic of social movements on the table – for instance indigenous mobilization in Latin America – is that there are incredibly interesting processes of bringing to the forefront the importance of what we tend to call ‘nonhumans’. Nature, for instance, is essential to the new constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia, and to a certain extent also to the constitutions of South Africa and Brazil. This is the case partially because of large social movements and voter participation within the indigenous population. But the nature (or the non-human) in these constitutions is not our nature or our (non-)humanity – it is Pachamama, it is buen-vivir, and so on. We need to move away from the dialectic of humans and non-humans. Maria Kaika [MK]  I find it really interesting that the moment one highlights the political importance of dissensus, one is invariably confronted with ‘objections’ based on two recurring and unsubstantiated assumptions: first, the assumption that dissensus is a necessarily violent process/practice; and second, the assumption that consensus is the non-violent – and therefore better – more democratic alternative for enacting change. However, I know nothing more violent and less democratic than a consensus-building exercise around the table among the ‘usual suspects’. Consensus-building exercises are performed amongst pre-selected actors who act within fixed social roles

272

and within fixed institutional frameworks. No change is possible or desirable though such exercises. Yes, it’s easy to have a non-violent discussion about a thorny environmental issue when the affected parties are either not invited at all or – if invited – are expected to stay within a position of presumed inequality, that is, within their fixed role as the subaltern who can’t set new agendas but can only select amongst a set of predetermined ‘options’ about their future.5 Seen this way, consensus is the ultimate suppression of alternative roles, alternative identities and alternative actions. True, it is possible to avoid violence under suppression, but is there anything more violent than treating non-equals as equals? Is there anything less democratic than not questioning existing roles and positions of inequality? By contrast, democracy is the opposite of consensus-building. It’s about enabling – encouraging even – dissensus; encouraging disputes over what is right within a context of presumed universal equality. Dissensus is central to democracy. It lies at the core of democratic politics. Democratic institutions were in fact originally built to enable agonistic debate amongst equals. Every Athenian citizen was obliged to be present at the gatherings of the demos on the Pnyx hill, the designated stage for agonistic politics. Every citizen was obliged6 to take part in the debates that shaped the polis. Citizens were educated in the art and science of rhetoric so that they would be able to participate as equals and use reasoning to fight for what they believed to be justice. As Rancière7 notes, the political (la politique) isn’t consensual; it is what opposes and interrupts existing norms. It’s therefore pure perversion that Western societies have come to equate democratic politics – originally a par excellence agonistic process in which everybody participated as equal – with a consensus-building exercise in which a selected few participate as non-equals.

5

Jacques Rancière, ‘Introducing Disagreement’, in Angelaki, 9, 3 (2004), pp. 3–9. 6

Peter Liddel, Civic Obligation and Individual Liberty in Ancient Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 7

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2006). 8

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (New York, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993). 9

See also Maria Kaika, Erik Swyngedouw, ‘The Urbanization of Nature: Great Promises, Impasse, and New Beginnings’, in Garry Bridge, Sophie Watson (eds.), The New Blackwell Companion to the City (Oxford: Blackwell, 2011), pp. 96–107.

A clear distinction needs to be made between democratic change, which thrives on dissensus and on challenging set institutions’ norms and positions, and consensual policy-making, which is an exercise that stays within already instituted practices and roles. So the wider question is: ‘How can we even produce change if we stay with consensus building exercises?’ If we don’t take dissensus seriously, how do we manage not to get stuck in institutional path-dependencies that can’t rapidly address changing social-environmental needs? We need to go beyond our fear and seriously start considering dissent as a positive practice that can lead to social change. Regarding the non-human: I prefer to use the term ‘more-than-human’ rather than duplicate a human/non-human dualism here. In fact this dualism, as Latour8 – amongst many others9 – argued, is a construct of Western civilisation. The violence of capitalist urbanization performed in the name of producing the socio-environmental hybrids called cities not only demands the exploitation of the labour power of humans; it also demands the exploitation of the more-than-human world in its entirety: of animals, minerals, crops, trees, air, water and so on. Is there a 273

10

Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, London: Duke University Press 2016), pp.16–25.

11

See footnote 1.

way to avoid this universal violence? Is there a way to turn exploitation of humans and more-than-humans into synergy and into collaboration towards a universal emancipatory project? In her book Staying with the Trouble (2016) Donna Haraway10 thinks through the possibilities for new ontologies and emancipatory interspecies collaboration. She uses the example of PigeonBlog, an artistic research project developed to challenge official air-pollution data in Southern California. The project joined together racing pigeons, artists, researchers and pigeon fanciers in what Haraway terms ‘interspecies “collaboration”’ to develop an alternative method for monitoring air quality. Using ‘citizen science’ and ‘home-made’ electronic technology, the project developed the ‘pigeon backpack’, a kit for air-pollution data collection and transmission that could be worn by racing pigeons. As pigeons flew though diverse neighbourhoods and at different heights, they transmitted airpollution data from areas and heights that had thus far escaped official monitoring, since standard air-quality monitoring devices can usually avoid high-traffic zones or highly polluted areas (often located within zones of social exclusion). Haraway uses this project as an example of a synergy between the human, and the more-than-human world driven by the demand for more just air-quality monitoring. The project successfully challenged existing air-pollution data. The ethics of the project, however, were scrutinized by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), and it’s very likely that the artistic research project would never have cleared ethics permissions in the US or at European universities. However, it does raise interesting questions regarding the extent to which our research ethics frameworks impede or enable human and more-than-human collaboration.

Jenny Nachtigall [JN]  Godofredo, I’d like to return to one of the examples you introduced in your talk.11 You mentioned an indigenous person being asked about various political types of living and which one of them she would prefer. Nobody cared to ask what the ‘indigenous categories’ would be though, and whether working with and in indigenous contexts might necessitate a re-orientation or even dis-orientation of the institutionalized (northern European) notions of architecture and politics. This sounded as if you suggest that the architectural practice you’re interested in operates within a relational framework of investigating different modes of existence and developing structures or working methods so to speak from the ground. Instead of coming with preconceived ideas of what is necessary from the outside or instead of simply introducing new concepts to ‘grasp’ the specificity of the context, you seemed to propose a horizontal model as opposed to a vertical framework. Working from a ‘relational’ perspective with communities and social movements and so forth, how do you see your role as an architect or architectural theorist? Is there a limit to relationality? How do you deal with the role of representation (and the power/colonial relations it implies) – for example in representing a community to itself (materially, theoretically), which architecture in a way seems unable to fully evade? 274

GP 

The little story about the indigenous is not so much that no one bothers to investigate or ‘get’ their categories. That can’t simply be a matter of you trying to capture their categories, they have to speak for themselves. Anthropologically, there’s a framework that assumes that we’re looking at the same thing, or speaking to each other, and the way we speak is different, or that we misunderstand each other based on some sort of communality. What contemporary anthropologists in the Amazon would say is that even the misunderstanding starts from completely different structures. So for indigenous people of the Amazon, what you share with an animal is humanity. It’s the inverse of our case where what you share with the animal is the body. When the shaman speaks with the jaguar, he’s translating the speech of a person not of an animal.12 You raised the question of how can architects deal with this, and you’re asking about fieldwork and collaboration. To address your point, when I think about collaborations with social movements, these are movements with whom I have political affiliations or alliances. There are certain claims that we share. For instance, in the case of previous fieldwork against mining, which I’ve done in collaboration with indigenous peoples in Chile, I shared their critique of the mining company. I neither represented the indigenous – I worked with them, and the representations I produced were of mining contamination, of vegetation decrease, representations that were produced to corroborate things that local people had been claiming for several years – nor would I produce work that requires me to be local in such a context.

12

See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014).

In any case we should also dispute what ‘local’ means. Regarding climate change, who is local to the idea or concept of climate change? Climate scientists. Each problem frames its own locality. Climate change corresponds to a transformation in a history of climate that is only ‘local’ to climate scientists. For instance, I have some technical expertise in remote-sensing analysis of water and vegetation. We could say I’m local to that problem. A small community isn’t necessarily ‘local’ to the technical problem of measuring water and vegetation. On the other hand, they are surely ‘local’ to the social and political dimension of water distribution in that specific context. The issue is how we articulate these two. This is to say that how you define locality and the non-local needs to be problematized very carefully: it can’t be simply a matter of geography, but of understanding who is local to a specific question or problem. In these contexts the biggest overall problem is the politics of aid, of the global North going to the South, ‘helping people’ without a self-critical perspective – this is often a mark of a colonial past. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a political critique about what’s happening in other parts of the world, and therefore engage in alliances with other peoples or in actions of solidarity. Audience 1  I was reading a few days ago about an architectural group called PAU. They sent a letter to the mayor of New York thanking him for giving people the opportunity to meet in places. Then they suggested that people shouldn’t go to special central places to make a 275

big demonstration, but that they should meet in small squares all over the city, just to make it easier to be there with your body, to protest and to show up. 13

http://www.forensic-architecture. org/ (accessed 7.11.2017).

MK  Streets and squares are public spaces par excellence (although some are now becoming privatized). You don’t actually need permission to be there, as long as you don’t act illegally. Holding small meetings in designated public spaces challenges nothing. But when movements like the ones Godofredo and I talked about hold large public gatherings demanding change, these gatherings are often violently supressed even though they take place in public spaces. The Occupy movement is a good example of this. Meetings that demand change and which don’t conform to existing rules and institutions aren’t welcome in public spaces. Although the kind of politically benign gatherings you are referring to are almost invariably welcome and even encouraged, movements that try to institute new radical imaginaries are more often than not suppressed and evicted from public spaces. The least we as researchers/observers can do is to pay attention to these emerging radical imaginaries, these emerging methods for social change that can potentially become institutionalized.

I’ve been struggling with my own role in this process. I’ve been questioning the validity of my role as a researcher/observer of such collectives and movements, thinking ‘I’m in such a luxurious position … a white European researching European movements’. But when people from within those collectives were telling me ‘We want you here, to tell our story’, I eventually got it. The role I’m called to play is to symbolize their struggle. To put a narrative to what they do. Not to indulge into existential self-doubt. There’s a clear need for synergy between academic work and social movements. This kind of research doesn’t necessarily get you large grants. But is it political? Yes it is. Is it socially necessary? Yes it is! GP  What you increasingly find in academia is not only the practice of giving a voice but also of deploying its labour and research power in support of social movements. When Syriza was at the height of its ‘creative dialogue’ with European Institutions, the Centre of Social Studies at the University in Coimbra, headed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, was helping them with reports on Bitcoin. The forensic-architecture project that I worked on is mobilizing PhDs and grants that come through academia to deploy their research ability in several cases, in partnership with lawyers, social movements, NGOs, depending again on the ones they find a political affiliation with.13 But unfortunately what architects tend to do most of the time is to urbanize conflict. For instance, take something like a demonstration, whose key point is disruption – because without a disruption you don’t get to be heard – and they design for it. Often the design of public space is a history of civilizing disruption: ‘This is where you should demonstrate, you go there, you wave and then you go back.’ It’s all to make it very polite. But this massively undermines politics. You know how every time someone

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demonstrates, particularly if it disrupts public transport, people spend half an hour complaining about delays, and not even two seconds thinking about why those people had to demonstrate in the first place. Against this, the idea you mentioned of meeting all across the city is quite beautiful. But you should always say: ‘If that space or square was designed for demonstrations, then lets demonstrate elsewhere.’

277

The Authors

Stacy Alaimo is Professor of English and Core Faculty Member in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon. Her books include Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (2000); Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010), and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016). She co-edited Material Feminisms (2008) with Susan J. Hekman, and edited the 28-chapter volume Matter (2016) in the Gender series of Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks Alaimo is currently writing the book entitled Composing Blue Ecologies: Science, Aesthetics, and the Creatures of the Abyss and co-editing a book series at Duke UP called ‘Elements’. Martín Ávila is Professor of Design at the Department of Design, Interior Architecture and Visual Communication at Konstfack in Stockholm where he has taught previously as a senior lecturer. The designer and design researcher obtained a PhD in design from HDK (School of Design and Crafts) in Gothenburg, Sweden, and his thesis Devices. On Hospitality, Hostility and Design published in 2012 was awarded the prize for design research by The Swedish Faculty for Design Research and Research Education in the same year. Therein he investigates the complex reciprocal relations between human and non-human actors as well as artificial devices and designs interventions within these networks, going beyond conventional user-centred approaches and cultivating ecologies as a design strategy. More recently he has continued this approach in his postdoctoral project Symbiotic tactics (2013–2016), which has been the first of its kind to be financed by the Swedish Research Council. www.martinavila.com Ursula Biemann is an artist, writer, and video essayist based in Zurich, Switzerland. Her artistic practice is research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations where she engages with the political ecologies of forests, oil and water. In her video practice she interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, science fiction poetry and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality. Her video installations have been shown at the international art biennials in Istanbul, Liverpool, Sevilla, Shanghai, Gwangju, Montreal, and Venice, and are represented in museums worldwide. In 2013 she had a comprehensive solo exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstver279

ein n.b.k. In addition to other books, she has published Stuff it – The Video Essay in the Digital Age, and she is founding member of the collaborative art and media project World of Matter. Biemann studied at the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. In 2008 she received a doctor honoris causa in Humanities by the Swedish University Umea, and 2009 the Prix Meret Oppenheim, the Swiss Grand Award for Art. www.geobodies.org Elly Clarke is an artist and researcher. The focus of her multimediabased artistic work lies on the transformation of the physical body in an increasingly digitally-mediated and experienced world, which she explores though performance, video, photography, music, curated and community-based projects. And through #Sergina, a Drag Princess alter ego, who performs songs online and offline about love, lust and loneliness in the age of digitalism. Performances take place usually in more than one place at once, with #Sergina played by different people simultaneously, linked up by Google Hangout and broadcasted live via YouTube. In this format, #Sergina (plural) has performed in museums, galleries, in queer and theatre contexts in several cities in the UK, in Europe and the USA, including The Lowry Centre, Salford Quays; Marlborough Theatre, Brighton; Kulturni Centar GRAD, Belgrade; Monster Ronson’s, Berlin, BOM, Birmingham; Secret Project Art Experiment, Brooklyn and The Island, Bristol. Other work has been shown at mac birmingham; Milton Keynes Gallery; Franklin Furnace, New York; Kiasma, Helsinki; ONCA, Brighton and Galerie Wedding, Berlin. Clarke has a BA in History of Art from Leeds University, a Masters in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College, London, and is a current CHASE funded PhD scholar at Goldsmiths, London, exploring the drag of physicality in the digital age. Elly has been collaborating with Vladimir Bjelicˇic´ on the #Sergina project since 2015. ellyclarke. com Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky is Professor of Media Theory and Gender Studies at the Institute for Media Studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and an active contributor to the university’s Gender Studies network. Furthermore, she is an external affiliate of the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at of Humboldt University, Berlin, the ICI Berlin and the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmith College, University of London. Deuber-Mankowsky studied philosophy and German literature in Zurich and Berlin and she co-founded and edited the journal Die Philosophin. Forum für Philosophie und feministische Theorie from 1990 to 2005. Her current research focuses, among other things, on the topic of queer subjectification in film in the light of the current transformation of film technologies and genres in the works of Todd Haynes, Su Friedrichs, Yael Bartana und Sharon Hayes (Queeres Post-Cinema, 2017). From 1995 until 2000, she was research fellow at the Department of Cultural History and Theory at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Among her recent publications are: Conatus und Lebensnot. Schlüsselbegriffe der Medienanthropologie (ed. with Anna Tuschling, 2017), Denkweisen des Spiels. Medi280

enphilosophische Annäherungen (ed. with Reinhold Görling, 2017), Situiertes Wissen und regionale Epistemologie: Zur Aktualität Georges Canguilhems und Donna J. Haraways (ed. with Christoph Holzhey, 2013), Praktiken der Illusion. Kant, Nietzsche, Cohen, Benjamin bis Donna J. Haraway (2007) und Lara Croft. Cyber Heroine (2005). Karianne Fogelberg is research associate for design and architectural theory at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. In her work she explores the present expansion of the notion of design in the light of current theoretical approaches including those from social sciences and political theory, and conceives events on the subject. In 2018 she founded the studio UnDesignUnit (with Sarah Dorkenwald and Tanja Seiner) whose work relates to present issues in design and its expanded agency. Her academic writings have appeared most recently in the journal Design & Bildung (ed. June H. Park, 2018) as well as in the publications The Present of the Future (ed. Susanne Witzgall, Kerstin Stakemeier, diaphanes, 2017) and Real Magic (ed. Susanne Witzgall, diaphanes, 2018). Fogelberg studied European Studies at King’s College London and the London School of Economics as well as History of Design at the Royal College of Art/ Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Erich Hörl holds the Chair of Media Culture and Media Philosophy at Leuphana University Lüneburg. He works on the conceptualization of a general ecology, a critique of cyberneticization of all modes of existence and a critical theory of Environmentality as well as on a history of fascination with non-modernity. He publishes internationally on the history, the problems and challenges of the contemporary technological condition. Among his publications are: General Ecology. The New Ecological Paradigm (ed., Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Die technologische Bedingung. Beiträge zur Beschreibung der technischen Welt (ed., Suhrkamp, 2011); ‚Die Ökologisierung des Denkens‘ (in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 2016); Die Transformation des Humanen. Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Kybernetik (ed. with Michael Hagner, Suhrkamp, 2008); ‘A Thousand Ecologies: The Process of Cyberneticization and General Ecology’ (in The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside, eds. D. Diederichsen and A. Franke, Berlin, 2013); Sacred Channels: On the Archaic Illusion of Communication, with a preface by Jean-Luc Nancy (Amsterdam UP, 2018). Maria Kaika holds a PhD in Urban Geography from Oxford University, and an MA in Architecture and Planning from the National Technical University of Athens. She is the Chair in Urban, Regional and Environmental Planning, at the University of Amsterdam and is also Professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester, Honorary Fellow of the Manchester Architecture Research Centre, and co-editor in chief of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. In 2012 the architect and geographer was endowed with the Professorship of the City of Vienna. She has taught at the Universities of Oxford, 281

Paris Est (LATTS), KU Leuven, University of London and TU Vienna. The focus of her research lies on urban political ecology, urban radical imaginaries, cities and crisis, and land financialization. Her work has been awarded funding from national and international research councils and organisations (including the British Academy, the EU Framework Research Programme and the Marie Curie programme). Kaika is Principle Investigator for the European Network for Political Ecology ENTITLE. Amongst her academic publications are City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the City (Routledge, New York 2005) and, as coeditor with Nik Heynen and Erik Swyngedouw, In the Nature of Cities: urban political ecology and the metabolism of urban environments (Routledge, London 2006). Marietta Kesting holds the position of junior professor for media theory at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich since April 2016. She studied photography, film, cultural studies and media theory at Bennington College, USA and Humboldt University, Berlin. From 2008 to 2011 she was a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and from 2014–2016 researcher at the interdisciplinary laboratory Image|Science|Gestaltung at Humboldt University. Her PhD Affective Images of Post-Apartheid. Documentary Perspectives on Migration, Xenophobia and Gender in South African Film and Photography (2015) was funded by the DFG and nominated for the Humboldt-Award. From 2015 to 2018 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, in the FWF project ‘A Matter of Historicity. Material Practices in Audiovisual Art’. She curated the photography exhibit ‘Now you see me, now you don’t’ for the National Theatre of Mannheim and directed several essayistic films. Kesting is part of the publishing collective b_books, Berlin since 2004 and has become a member of the editorial board of FKW journal for visual culture and gender studies in 2017. She writes for Texte zur Kunst, Social Dynamics and fkw Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, among others. A recent publication is ‘Changing Visual Politics in South Africa’, in Anne Graefer, Media and the Politics of Offence (2019). Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination: Art activist John Jordan has been described as a ‘magician of rebellion’ by the press and a ‘Domestic Extremist’ by the UK police. He co-founded the initiative ‘Reclaim the Streets’ (1995–2000) and the group Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army and is co-author of the book We Are Everywhere: The irresistible rise of global anticapitalism (Verso, 2003). Isabelle Fremeaux is a popular educator, action researcher and deserter of the academy. Together Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan coordinate The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, bringing artists and activists together to design tools and acts of disobedience. They are infamous for launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station, for turning bikes into machines of disobedience during a UN climate summit, for co-building an illegal lighthouse and refusing to 282

be censored by the BP sponsored Tate gallery. Co-authors of the film and book Les Sentiers de l‘utopie (Editions La Découverte, 2012), they now live and work on the ZAD of Notre-Dame-Des-Landes, a liberated territory in the west of France, which won the long fight against a projected airport in 2018. The design theorist Betti Marenko is reader in Design and TechnoDigital Futures at the University of the Arts London (UAL), as well as Contextual Studies Leader for Product Design at Central Saint Martins (UAL). Furthermore she is Visiting Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Her work at the intersection of philosophy and design investigates the tension between design taken as way of speculating on, and instigating, futures, and thought that addresses materiality, the virtual and the nonhuman. She is interested in repositioning design in the 21st century as a problematising tool for thinking, making and creating change. She is the co-editor of the volume Deleuze and Design (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and her writing appears in several edited volumes, most recently: Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural (Oxford University Press, 2019), UnDesign: Critical Practices at the Intersection of Art and Design (Routledge, 2018), Encountering Things. Design and Theories of Things (Bloomsbury, 2017), as well as in the journals Design and Culture, Design Studies and Digital Creativity. www.bettimarenko.org Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He has collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Jeff Bridges, Sabrina Scott, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. He co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. He is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. His work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory at the Critical Theory Institute, University of California, Irvine. Maria Muhle is professor for Philosophy | Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and founder of the August Verlag Berlin. She is a member of the DFG research group ‘Media and Mimesis’ at the International Doctoral Program of the LMU Munich and, in spring 2018, was a fellow at the research group ‘BildEvidenz’ of the FU Berlin. Her main research interests are political aesthetics, media philosophy, mimesis, strategies of reenactment, and biopolitics. Among her recent publications are Black Box Leben (2017, ed. with Christiane Voss); ‘Mimesis und Aisthesis. Realismus und Geschichte 283

bei Auerbach und Rancière’ (2018, in Die Wirklichkeit des Realismus, ed. Joseph Vogl, Veronika Thanner, Dorothea Walzer); ‘“Beweis zu nichts”. Marcel Odenbachs Geschichtsbilder’ (2018, in Marcel Odenbach. Beweis zu nichts, Kunsthalle Wien), and ‘Praktiken des Inkarnierens. Nachstellen, Verkörpern, Einverleiben’ (2017, in Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung). Jenny Nachtigall is a professor of art history and theory in interim at the Städelschule in Frankfurt since 2019. She studied art history, cultural studies and philosophy in London and Lüneburg (2005–2010). From 2014 until 2019 she was research associate at the chair of philosophy | aesthetic theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. She worked as curatorial assistance at the Tate Modern, London (2010–2011) and has taught at the Humboldt University Berlin and the Art History Department of the University College London (UCL), where she completed her PhD in 2016. She teaches and researches the history and theory of modern and contemporary art, with a focus on questions of mediality, form and mass culture and currently works on the role of vitalisms in art and theory since 1900. Together with Dorothea Walzer she realized the project art and(re)production (HU Berlin/UCL, 2013/14) and, together with Manuela Ammer, Eva Birkenstock, Kerstin Stakemeier and Stephanie Weber the exhibition and magazine format Klassensprachen (2017). Among her recent publications are ‘The Modern Subject, a Dead Form Living. On the Aesthetics of (a Fractured) Vitalism’ (2019, in Post-Apocalyptic Self-Reflection, ed. by Tanja Widmann, Laura Preston), ‘Vitalism/Living Form’ (2018, in Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930, ed. Anselm Franke, Tom Holert), and Klassensprachen – Written Praxis, (2017, ed. with Manuela Ammer, Eva Birkenstock, Kerstin Stakemeier, Stephanie Weber). She writes among others for Artforum and Texte zur Kunst. BJ Nilsen is a composer and sound artist based in Amsterdam. His work primarily focuses on the sounds of nature and how they affect humans. Recent work has explored the urban acoustic realm and industrial geography in the Arctic regions of Norway and Russia. Based upon his research he collaborated with filmmaker Karl Lemieux to develop the audiovisual work unearthed (2014) which was featured in the Sonic Acts publication The Geologic Imagination (2015). His original scores and soundtracks have featured in theatre, dance performances and film, in collaborations with Chris Watson, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Stilluppsteypa and others. Moreover Nilsen co-edited the book-CD The Acoustic City (jovis, 2014) and had his two latest solo albums Eye of The Microphone (2013) and The Invisible City (2010) released by the Touch label. Godofredo Pereira is an architect and researcher. He leads the MA Environmental Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London, where he also coordinates the research group Architecture and Social Movements. His doctoral research The Underground Frontier: Technoscience and Collective Politics at the Centre for Research Architecture 284

at Goldsmiths University investigated political and territorial conflicts within the planetary race for underground resources. Prior to joining the RCA, he taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture. He was a member of Forensic Architecture where he led the Atacama Desert project, an investigation of environmental and human rights violations in the Atacama Desert, Chile. He edited the book Savage Objects (INCM, 2012) and was the curator of Objectology (European Capital of Culture, 2012) and of the exhibition Object / Project (Lisbon Architecture Triennial, 2016). Among other things, he is currently working on the publication Ex-Humus: Architecture and Territorial Politics in the Underground Frontier (forthcoming) and he is part of Transversal Collective, a design platform for institutional programming and territorial intervention. Simon Starling lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art and has established himself as one of the leading artists of his generation. In his work in a wide variety of media (film, installation, photography) he explores the histories of art and design, scientific discoveries, and global economic and ecological issues, among other subjects. He represented Scotland at the 50th Biennale di Venezia (2003) and was awarded the 2005 Turner Prize for his work Shedboatshed. Between 2003 and 2013 he taught as Professor of Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. His work was shown in solo shows worldwide, amongst others at Villa Arson in Nice, France, at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Basel, at Mass MOCA in North Adams, USA; at Tate Britain in London, at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, and at MUMA in Melbourne, and is represented in major international collections, including Astrup Fearnley Collection; Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasglow; Tate Modern, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Ferhat Taylan is postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the University of Liège within the context of the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS). The focus of his research lies on the modern categories of environmental knowledge and their implication in social policies. His PhD thesis explored the French notion of ‘milieu’ as well as its ramifications in social sciences and politics, published 2018 by Editions de la Sorbonne as Mésopolitique. Connaître, théoriser, gouverner les milieux de vie (1750–1900). He is author of an essay on historical epistemology, ‘Concepts et rationalités. Héritages de l'épistémologie historique de Meyerson à Foucault’ (Editions Matériologiques, 2018). Furthermore Taylan has taught philosophy of environment at the Nanterre University and science studies at Sciences Po in Paris. Susanne Witzgall has been the academic head of the BMBF-funded cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich since 2011. She studied art history, theatre studies, psychology and art pedagogy at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich and the University of Stuttgart, where she received her doctorate in 2001. From 285

2003 to 2011 she taught in the department of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. She has worked as a freelance curator, and was a curator at the Deutsches Museum Bonn and the Deutsches Museum München from 1995 to 2002. Susanne Witzgall curated or cocurated Art & Brain II (1997/1998), Das zweite Gesicht/The Other Face (2002), Say it isn’t so (2007), (Re)designing nature (2010/2011) and other exhibitions, and is the author and editor of numerous books and essays on contemporary art, the relationship between art and science, and subjects of current interdisciplinary debates. These include her monograph Kunst nach der Wissenschaft (Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2003) as well as the publications New Mobility Regimes in Art and Social Sciences (ed. with Gerlinde Vogl and Sven Kesselring, Ashgate, 2013), Power of Material/Politics of Materiality, Fragile Identities, The Present of the Future (all three ed. with Kerstin Stakemeier, diaphanes, 2014, 2016 and 2017 respectively) and Real Magic (2018). Since 2019 she is member of the advisory board of the Piet Zwart Institute/Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam as well as of the Institute of Modern Art Nuremberg.

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Photo Credits

Cover Ian Cheng, Emissary Forks at Perfection, detail of the Live Simulation, 2015/16, © Ian Cheng, courtesy Gladstone Gallery LLC, New York Simon Starling: Towards the Rift Valley Crossing (Some Notes, Some Works)

Fig. 1–2: Courtesy Simon Starling and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow • Fig. 3–4: Photo Simon Starling, Courtesy Simon Starling and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow • Fig. 5: Photo Adolf Bereute, Courtesy Simon Starling and neugerriemschneider, Berlin • Fig. 6: Photo Jens Ziehe, Courtesy Simon Starling and neugerriemschneider, Berlin • Fig. 7: Photo Simon Starling, Courtesy Simon Starling and neugerriemschneider, Berlin • Fig. 8: Photo Wolfgang Günzel, Courtesy Simon Starling and neugerriemschneider, Berlin • Fig. 9: Photo Simon Starling, Courtesy Simon Starling and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow • Fig. 10: Photo Jeremy Hardman-Jones, Courtesy Simon Starling and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow • Fig. 11: Photo Steve Payne, Courtesy of Casey Kaplan, New York • Fig. 12: Photo Simon Starling, Courtesy Simon Starling and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow Susanne Witzgall: ‘A Way of Being in the World’: Relational Onto-Epistemologies in Contemporary Art and Theory

Fig. 1–2: © Philippe Parreno, Courtesy Philippe Parreno and Pilar Corrias, London, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Photo © Andrea Rossetti • Fig. 3: Philippe Parreno, Courtesy Philippe Parreno and Pilar Corrias, London, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Photo © Andrea Rossetti • Fig. 4: © Philippe Parreno, Courtesy Philippe Parreno • Fig. 5–6: © Pierre Huyghe and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster. • Fig. 7: Photo Roman Mensing, © Antje Majewski and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019 •

Fig. 8–9: © Antje Majewski and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019 • Fig. 10: © Anna Taraska-Pietrzak ‘Because you think of yourself as totally integrated in bios and you’ve forgotten that you totally rely on other life forms.’ In conversation with Ursula Biemann and Timothy Morton

Fig. 1–6: © Ursula Biemann Stacy Alaimo: Hurricanes, Popsicles and Plankton: the Hybrid Ecologies of Bodily Natures

Fig. 1–5: © Kuo Yi-hui, Hung Yi-chen, Cheng Yu-di • Fig. 6–8: Photos © Mandy Barker John Jordan: The Art of Life in the Age of Mass Extinction

Fig. 1–8: © ZAD Think Like a Forest – Act Like a Swarm. A class in art, activism and ecological thinking with the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

Fig. 1: Photo Florian Kuhn • Fig. 2: Photo John Jordan • Fig. 3–5: Photos Florian Kuhn • Fig. 6: Photo Sandra Hasenöder

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Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky: Queer Ecologies: Against the Ontologizing of Queerness, for the Development of Queer Collectives!

Fig. 1: © NASA 1969 • Fig. 2: Medusa Rondanini, Inv. Gl 252, Courtesy Staatliche Antikensammlungen and Glyptothek München, photo Renate Kühling Elly Clarke: An Orgy of Algorithms and Other Desires and Distractions: The Drag of Physicality in a #digitalphysical Hybrid Ecology

Fig. 1: © Elly Clarke and Vladimir Bjeličić • Fig. 2: © Elly Clarke and Patricia Muriale, 2015–16 • Fig. 3–7: © Elly Clarke • Fig. 8: © Elly Clarke and Vladimir Bjeličić • Fig. 9: © Elly Clarke • Fig. 10: Photo Vesna Lalic, © Elly Clarke • Fig. 11: Photo Frauke Zabel, © Elly Clarke Marietta Kesting: Hybrid Media Archipelagos in Sondra Perry’s Typhoon Coming On and Louis Henderson’s All That is Solid

Fig. 1: Oil on canvas, 90,8 × 122,6 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, photo © 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston • Fig. 2–4: Sondra Perry, from: Sondra Perry, Typhoon Coming On, London, Serpentine Galleries, Koenig Books, 2018, S. 217, S. 9 and S. 47 • Fig. 5–8: © Louis Henderson. BJ Nilsen: One Minute Material – A Chronological Analysis of Sound Ecologies

Fig. 1–5: © BJ Nilsen Betti Marenko: Future-Crafting: The Non-humanity of Planetary Computation, or How to Live with Digital Uncertainty

Fig. 1: Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Ernst Mayr Library, Cambridge, Mass., https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/5765#/summary (accessed 18.2.19) Martín Ávila: Ecologizing Design

Fig. 1: Photo Martín Ávila • Fig. 2: Photo Mariano Lucia • Fig. 3–14: Photos Martín Ávila ‘The idea that we can design an ecology is something we should be wary of’. In conversation with Martín Ávila and Betti Marenko

Fig. 1–4: © Maggie Roberts • Fig. 5–6: © Virginia Toffetti Maria Kaika: Radical Ecological Imaginaries: Turning the Ruins of our Present into the Legacies of the Future

Fig. 1: Photo and Courtesy Joris Lam • Fig. 2: Photo and Courtesy Phillip W.D. Martin Godofredo Pereira: Ecologies of Existence: The Architecture of Collective Equipment

Fig. 1: © epa/Fernando Bizerra Jr., Natives, members of Movement Landless and students protest the construction of an hydroelectric in the Amazon region of Belo Monte, during the UN Conference for Sustainable Development RIO+20 outside convention center Riocentro in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 20 June 2012, European Press Photo Agency • Fig. 2: Photo Tomás Garcia Puente • Fig. 3: Photo Luca Capuano, 2012

Unless otherwise stated the copyright for the reproduction of the art works and design objects remains with the respective artists. We thank all owners of image rights for their friendly permission of publication. In the case of an owner of image rights not having been taken into account despite intensive research, the legitimate claims will be satisfied within the framework of common agreement.

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This publication is funded from resources of the Federal Ministry for Education and Research under the grant number 01PL16023. The responsibility for the content of this publication lies with the authors.

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Editors Susanne Witzgall, Marietta Kesting, Maria Muhle, Jenny Nachtigall Translations from German Nicholas Grindell (text Nachtigall) Daniel Hendrickson (preface, text Kesting, text Deuber-Mankowsky, conversation with Deuber-Mankowsky and #Sergina) Nils F. Schott (text Hörl) Daniel Spaulding (introduction, text Muhle, text Witzgall) Copyediting Michael Turnbull, Catherine Lupton Editorial Assistance Karianne Fogelberg (KF) Transcriptions of the Conversations Anna Sofie Hvid, Sandra Hasenöder Image Editing Lea Vajda, Lucie Vyhnálková Design Yusuf Etiman 1. Edition ISBN 978-3-0358-0406-5 © diaphanes, Zurich 2020 www.diaphanes.net All rights reserved