POSTHUMAN

GLOSSARY

i
ALSO AVAILABLE IN THE THEORY SERIES

Conflicting Humanities, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Paul Gilroy

General Ecology, edited by Erich Hörl with James Burton

ii
POSTHUMAN
GLOSSARY
Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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 Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2018

© Rosi Braidotti, Maria Hlavajova and contributors, 2018

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Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work.

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PB : 978-1-350-03025-1
ePDF : 978-1-350-03023-7
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Series: Theory

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

iv
Contents

Acknowledgements xii Altergorithm 29

Series Preface xiii Timotheus Vermeulen
List of Contributors xiv
Animacies 32
Mel Y. Chen

Introduction 1 Animal 34
Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova Oxana Timofeeva

Animism (Limulus) 36
A
Karen Kramer
Affective Turn 15
Animism 39
Heather Houser
Anselm Franke
Afrofuturism 17
Anonymity 41
Ramon Amaro
Matthew Fuller
Ahuman, the 20
Anthropism/Immanent Humanism 44
Patricia MacCormack
Neni Panourgiá
AI (Artificial Intelligence) 21
Anthropocene Observatory 45
Luciana Parisi
John Palmesino and Aun-Sofi
Algorithm 23 Rönnskog – Territorial Agency and
Jamie ‘Skye’ Bianco Armin Linke

Algorithmic Studies 26 Anthropocene 51

David Theo Goldberg and Jenna Ng Jussi Parikka

Alienation 28 Anthrˉopos 53
James Williams Neni Panourgiá

v
vi CONTENTS

Architectonic Disposition 55 Cosmopolitics 92

Vera Bühlmann Maja and Reuben Fowkes

Art 59 Critical Posthumanism 94

Tom Holert Stefan Herbrechter

Art in the Anthropocene 63

D
Heather Davis
Decolonial Critique 97
B Shannon Winnubst

Biological Arts/Living Arts 66 Diffraction 99

Oron Catts Iris van der Tuin

Bios 68 Digital Citizenship 101

Neni Panourgiá Bernhard Rieder

Blue Humanities 69 Digital Philosophy 104

Steve Mentz M. Beatrice Fazi

Bodies Politic 72 Digital Rubbish 107

John Protevi Jennifer Gabrys

Body Without Organs 74

E
Patricia Pisters
Earth 110
C Jussi Parikka

Camp 77 (Material) Ecocriticism 112

Ethel Brooks Serenella Iovino

Capitalocene and Chthulucene 79 Ecohorror 115

Donna Haraway Christy Tidwell

Commons, the 83 Ecologies of Architecture 117

Lindsay Grace Weber Andrej Radman

Commutation Ontology 86 Ecomaterialism 120

Lila Athanasiadou Serpil Oppermann

Computational Turn 88 Econtology 123

Luciana Parisi Henk Oosterling

Contemporary, The 91 Ecopathy 125

Tom Holert Timotheus Vermeulen
CONTENTS vii

Ecosophy 129 G
Rick Dolphijn
Gaga Feminism 170
Epigenetic Landscape 132 Jack Halberstam
Susan M. Squier
General Ecology 172
Equation (Mathematical Erich Hörl
Thinking) 133
Vera Bühlmann Geo-hydro-solar-bio-techno-politics 175
John Protevi
Ethereal Scent 138
Wander Eikelboom Geomythologies 178
The Otolith Group
Exclusion Zone 140
Trevor Paglen Geopolitics 181
Ryan Bishop
Execution 141
Critical Software Thing Green/Environmental Humanities 184
Tobijn de Graauw and Elisa Fiore
Expulsions 145
Saskia Sassen Gulf Labor 187
MTL Collective (Nitasha Dhillon and
Extended Cognition 148 Amin Husain)
Goda Klumbytė
H
Extinction 150
Claire Colebrook Hacking Habitat 191
Ine Gevers
F
Hypersea 193
Feminicity 154 Jenna Sutela
Felicity Colman
Hypersocial 195
Feminist Posthumanities 157 Tiziana Terranova
Cecilia Åsberg
I
Food 160
Karl Steel Informatic Opacity 198
Zach Blas
Forests 162
Paulo Tavares In-human, The 199
Katerina Kolozova
Four Elements 167
Gary Genosko In/Human 201
Keti Chukhrov
viii CONTENTS

Insurgent Posthumanism 204 Material Feminisms 242

Dimitris Papadopoulos Astrida Neimanis

Interest/Interesse 207 Mattering 244

Henk Oosterling Brandon Jones

Intermediality 210 Maxwell’s Demon

Henk Oosterling (Non-Anthropocentric Cognition) 247
Vera Bühlmann
Invariance 212
Vera Bühlmann Medianatures 251
Jussi Parikka
‘It’ 216
Stuart McLean Metadata Society 253
Matteo Pasquinelli
J Metamodernism 256
Joy, Ethics of 221 Timotheus Vermeulen
Rosi Braidotti
Metastability 259
Aud Sissel Hoel
K
Monster/The Unhuman 261
Kin 225
Nikita Mazurov
Goda Klumbytė
Multispecies 265
L Eben Kirksey

Lampedusa 228 Multiverse 266

Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson Francesca Ferrando

Leaks and Stings 231

N
Ravi Sundaram
Naturecultures 269
Literature of Liberation 232
Iris van der Tuin
Serenella Iovino
Necropolitics 270
Locality/Non-separability 235
Christine Quinan
Lila Athanasiadou
Negentropy 273
M Vera Bühlmann

MakeHuman 237 Neo/New Materialism 277

Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha Iris van der Tuin
CONTENTS ix

Neocolonial 279 Pill, the (Posthuman Icon) 312

Sandra Ponzanesi Anneke Smelik and Elisa Fiore

Neocybernetics 281 Placenta Politics 315

Bruce Clarke Rosi Braidotti

Networked Affect 283 Planetary 318

Susanna Paasonen Maja and Reuben Fowkes

Neuronal Aesthetics 285 Plasticity 320

Patricia Pisters Tom Giesbers

Noise 287 Political Affect 323

Inigo Wilkins John Protevi

Nomadic Sensibility 290 Post Internet 326

Daniel Baker Tom Clark

Non-human Agency 292 Postanimalism 329

Jeffrey Scott Marchand Tsz Man Chan

Postdisciplinarity 332
O
Nina Lykke
Object-oriented Ontology (OOO) 296
Postglacial 335
Peter Wolfendale
Ursula Biemann
Obsolete Technologies 299
Posthuman Critical Theory 339
Tamara Shepherd and Koen Leurs
Rosi Braidotti
Occupy (after Deleuze) 301
Posthuman Disability and DisHuman
Rick Dolphijn Studies 342
Ontological Turn, the 304 Dan Goodley, Rebecca Lawthom,
Kirsty Liddiard and
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Katherine Runswick-Cole
Organization in Platform Capitalism 306
Posthuman Ethics 345
Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter
Patricia MacCormack
Otherwise Embodied Others 308
Posthuman Literature and
Pierre Huyghe
Criticism 347
Carolyn Lau
P
Posthuman Museum Practices 349
P2P (Peer to Peer) Economies 310
Fiona R. Cameron
Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis
x CONTENTS

Posthuman Rights, A Micropolitics of 352 Rewilding 388

Patrick Hanafin Maja and Reuben Fowkes

Posthuman Sexuality 355 Robophilosophy 390

Patricia MacCormack Johanna Seibt

Posthumanism 356
S
Cary Wolfe
Sensing Practices 394
Posthumanist Performativity 359
Jennifer Gabrys and Helen Pritchard
Elisa Fiore
Socially Just Pedagogies 396
Postimage 361
Vivienne Bozalek
Ingrid Hoelzl
Speculative Posthumanism 398
Postmedieval 362
David Roden
Eileen A. Joy
SS = Security/Surveillance 402
Precognition 365
Stephanie Simon
Ramon Amaro
Stateless State 404
Pregnant Posthuman, The 368
Jonas Staal
Rodante van der Waal
Static Glow 407
Process Ontologies 371
Mirko Tobias Schäfer and
James Williams
Audrey Samson

Q Storied Matter 411

Serpil Oppermann
Quantum Anthropology 374
Vicki Kirby Survival 414
Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann
R Symbiogenesis 416
Radical Mediocrity 376 Bruce Clarke
Henk Oosterling
T
Rationalist Inhumanism 379
Peter Wolfendale Technicity 420
Aud Sissel Hoel
Real Cool Ethics 382
Shannon Winnubst Technoanimalism 423
Rick Dolphijn and Tove Kjellmark
Resilience 385
Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper
CONTENTS xi

Terrestrial 427 Violence 448

Birgit M. Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele Shela Sheikh

Tolerances and Duration 429

W
Harry Sanderson and
Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe War 453
Jolle Demmers
Trans* 433
Goda Klumbytė Wearable Technology 455
Anneke Smelik
Trans-corporeality 435
Stacy Alaimo
X
Transhumanism/Posthumanism 438
Xenofeminism 459
Francesca Ferrando
Helen Hester
U
Y
(Un)Documented Citizenship 440
Youth 463
Ernst van den Hemel
Koen Leurs, Tamara Shepherd
Urbanibalism 442 and Alison Harvey
Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli
Z
V
Zombie 467
Vertigo Sea 445 Oxana Timofeeva
John Akomfrah

Vibrant Matter 447 Cumulative Bibliography 470

Jane Bennett
Acknowledgements

This volume is the culmination of a seminar editing of the manuscript and completed
series, ‘Posthuman Glossary’, at BAK , basis the complex bibliographical details, with
voor actuele kunst, Utrecht in 2015. the help of Elisa Fiore.
The series was conceptualized by Rosi Thanks also to image editor Lucy Lopez,
Braidotti and realized in the context of author editor Tom Clark, editorial assist-
BAK research project Future Vocabularies/ ants Hidde van Greuningen and Gry
Human–Inhuman–Posthuman and in Ulstein, and copy-editor Stephanie Paalvast.
cooperation with the programme ‘The We are also grateful to many colleagues
Humanities in the Twenty-First Century’ of from the Utrecht University, the Centre for
the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht the Humanities and the BAK team for
University, Utrecht. participating in the events that led to this
The co-editors Rosi Braidotti and Maria publication.
Hlavajova would like thank the large, hard- Sincere thanks are owed to all contrib-
working and dedicated teams that set up utors to this volume, including the artists
the initial seminar series in both institu- who contributed their visual work and
tions, and the equally talented team of made Posthuman Glossary an interdiscip-
editors and assistants who helped with the linary conversation.
final publication. Special gratitude to Last but not least, the co-editors wish
Tobijn de Graauw and Toa Maes for input to acknowledge, through this volume as
at both the content and the organizational much as through the many projects in
level. Our heartfelt thanks to the managing their decade-long collaboration, that the
editor of the editorial assistants team Goda academic and the artistic institutions
Klumbytė, who maintained the main belong to, and are accountable for, one and
contact with the authors, co-ordinated the the same world.

xii
Series Preface

Theory is back. world, but it exploded with renewed

Critical theorists of the universal, organic energy in other quarters, in media, society,
or situated kind used to be defined by their the arts and the corporate world. New
ethical-political commitment to account for generations of critical ‘studies’ areas have
power relations at work in the real world, as grown alongside the classical radical
well as in scientific practice. But their epistemologies of the 1970s: gender, femin-
prestige waned throughout the 1990s. The ist, queer, race, postcolonial and subaltern
‘theory wars’ in the USA targeted critical studies, cultural studies, film, television
theory as an outdated ideological activity, and media studies. The second generation
dismissing the theorists as ‘tenured radicals’. of critical ‘studies’ areas includes animal
They were replaced by new ‘content studies and ecocriticism; cultural studies
providers’, experts and consultants, in a of science and society; religion studies;
context of increased privatization of disability studies; fat studies; success
academic research. By the turn of the studies; celebrity studies; globalization
millennium, with the internet as the only studies; and many more. New media has
true ‘content provider’, former theorists were spawned new meta-fields: software studies,
relocated to the market-oriented position of internet studies, game studies, digital post-
‘ideas brokers’ and, in the best cases, ‘ideas colonial studies and more. The end of the
leaders’. Nowadays, we are all entrepreneurs Cold War has generated conflict studies
of the mind. The cognitive character of and peace research; human rights studies,
contemporary capitalism and its high tech- humanitarian management; human rights-
nological mediation paradoxically produced oriented medicine; trauma, memory and
a ‘post-theory’ mood and intensified attacks reconciliation studies; security studies,
on radical thought and critical dissent. This death studies; suicide studies; and the list is
negative mood also resulted in criticism of still growing. These different generations
the social and scholarly value of the of ‘studies’ now constitute a theoretical
Humanities, in a neo-liberal corporate force to be reckoned with.
university ruled by quantified economics Theory is back!
and the profit motive. This series aims to present cartographic
And yet, the vitality of critical thinking accounts of these emerging critical theor-
in the world today is palpable, as is a spirit ies and to reflect the vitality and inspira-
of insurgency that sustains it. Theoretical tional force of ongoing theoretical debates.
practice may have stalled in the academic Rosi Braidotti
xiii
Contributors

Stacy Alaimo is Professor of English, Cecilia Åsberg is Professor at Linköping University,

Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Sweden. She leads The Seed Box: A Mistra–
Director of the Environmental and Formas Environmental Humanities
Sustainability Studies Minor at the University Collaboratory, the largest post-conventional
of Texas at Arlington. Her publications include eco-humanities initiative in Sweden. She directs
Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature the research group The Posthumanities Hub,
as Feminist Space (2000), Bodily Natures: and co-directs the three-university centre for
Science, Environment, and the Material Self gender excellence, GEXcel International
(2010) and Protest and Pleasure: New Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary
Materialism, Environmental Activism, and Gender Studies. Her postdisciplinary research
Feminist Exposure (2016). in gender studies translates into feminist
John Akomfrah (born 1957 in Accra, Ghana) posthumanities.
lives and works in London. He has had Lila Athanasiadou is a freelance writer,
numerous solo exhibitions including Nikolaj researcher and exhibition designer and the
Kunsthal, Copenhagen, Denmark (2016), coordinator of the Corporeal Discourse
Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2016), Bildmuseet program at the Master of Interior
Umeå, Sweden (2015), Eli and Edythe Broad Architecture at ArtEZ. She has recently
Art Museum, Michigan, USA (2014), Tate graduated from the Master of Architecture
Britain, London, UK (2013–14) and a at TU Delft with a thesis on rethinking
week-long series of screenings at MoMA , pedagogical practices through Guattari’s
New York, USA (2011). ‘metamodelling’, examined through the
Ramon Amaro is Associate Lecturer in Critical genealogical relationships between Athens
Theory and Media Philosophy at the Centre and Kassel as dramatized in the spatiality
for Cultural Studies, Digital Culture Unit, of documenta (14).
Goldsmiths, University of London. His joint Daniel Baker is an artist, curator and theorist. A
academic background in philosophy, Romani Gypsy born in Kent, he holds a PhD
sociology and engineering comes to fruition in Gypsy aesthetics from the Royal College of
in his research looking at the philosophical Art, London. Baker acted as exhibitor and
dimensions of computer modelling of social advisor to the first and second Roma
processes, with particular reference to black Pavilions; ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Call the
ontology and algorithmic equality in machine Witness’ at the 52nd and 54th Venice
learning systems. Biennales respectively. His art and writing

xiv
CONTRIBUTORS xv

examine the role of art in the enactment of Zach Blas is an artist and writer whose practice
social agency. Recent publications include engages technics and minoritarian politics.
We Roma: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Currently, he is a lecturer in the Department
Art (2013) and Ex Libris (2009). of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University
Michel Bauwens is the founder of the of London. His recent works Facial
Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives (P2P Weaponization Suite (2011–14) and
Foundation). Among others, he is one of Contra-Internet (2014–present) respond to
three co-founders and partners of the technological control, biometric government-
Commons Strategies Group. ality and network hegemony. Blas is
producing two books: Escaping the Face
Jane Bennett is Professor of Political Science at
(Sternberg Press), and Informatic Opacity:
Johns Hopkins University. She is one of the
The Art of Defacement in Biometric Times.
founders of the journal Theory & Event, and is
currently the editor of Political Theory: An Vivienne Bozalek is a Professor of Social Work
International Journal of Political Philosophy. and the Director of Teaching and Learning at
She is the author of Vibrant Matter: A Political the University of the Western Cape (UWC ),
Ecology of Things (2010), The Enchantment South Africa. Her areas of research include
of Modern Life (2001), Thoreau’s Nature the use of post-structural, new materialism,
(1994), and Unthinking Faith and social justice and the political ethics of care
Enlightenment (1987). perspectives, innovative pedagogical
approaches in Higher Education. She has
Jamie ‘Skye’ Bianco, Clinical Assistant Professor
co-edited Community, Self and Identity:
in NYU ’s Department of Media, Culture and
Educating South African Students for
Communication, is a practice-based digital
Citizenship and Discerning Hope in
media theorist, activist and artist. She mixes
Educational Practices.
images, sound, video, animation and lyrical
prose in multimodal, performative, web-based, Rosi Braidotti is a Distinguished University
computational/algorithmic and installation Professor at Utrecht University. Her books
formats. She runs an organic vegetable farm include The Posthuman (2013), Nomadic
in the Catskill Mountains of New York and Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (2011),
works on a multi-site ecological investigation Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (2006),
of toxic yet inhabited waterscapes. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist
Theory of Becoming (2002) and Nomadic
Ursula Biemann is an independent artist, writer
Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference
and video essayist based in Zurich. Her
in Contemporary Feminist Theory (2011).
artistic practice is strongly research oriented
and involves fieldwork in remote locations Ethel Brooks is an Associate Professor in the
where she investigates climate change and Departments of Women’s and Gender Studies
the ecologies of oil and water. and Sociology at Rutgers University. She is the
author of Unravelling the Garment Industry:
Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and
Transnational Organizing and Women’s Work
Politics at the Winchester School of Art,
(2007). She is currently working on two book
University of Southampton. He co-edits the
projects: Disrupting the Nation: Land Tenure,
journal Cultural Politics with John Armitage
Productivity and the Possibilities of a Romani
and Doug Kellner (Duke University Press)
Post-Coloniality and (Mis)Recognitions and
and the book series Technicities on
(Un)Acknowledgements: Visualities,
technolocultural theory as it pertains to art,
Productivities and the Contours of Romani
design and media for Edinburgh University
Feminism.
Press.
xvi CONTRIBUTORS

Vera Bühlmann holds a PhD in media organizes festivals (‘Papay Gyro Nights’ with
philosophy from the University of Basel, and Serge Ivanov), creating a fertile place for art,
is founder and head of the laboratory for thought and the earth to meet.
applied virtuality (since 2010) at CAAD Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender
ETHZ , as well as a co-editor (with Ludger and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley and
Hovestadt) of the applied virtuality book Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual
series (Birkhäuser, Vienna). The main vectors Culture. Their research and teaching interests
in her work revolve around the philosophy include queer and gender theory, animal
and history of semiotics and mathematics. studies, critical race theory and Asian
Since 2005 she has been working as a American studies, disability studies, science
lecturer and diploma coach at different studies and critical linguistics. Chen’s 2012
academies of art and design in Switzerland. book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial
Fiona R. Cameron is a senior research fellow at Mattering, and Queer Affect, explores
the Institute for Culture and Society, Western questions of racialization, queering, disability
Sydney University, Australia. Fiona has and affective economies.
researched and published widely on Keti Chukhrov is an associate professor at the
museums and their agency in contemporary department of cultural studies at the Higher
societies around ‘hot’ topics of societal School of Economics (Moscow), visiting
importance ranging from the agencies of the professor at the European University at
museum in climate change inter ventions to St Petersburg, and head of theory department
material culture, digital media, collections and at the National Center for Contemporary Art.
documentation. She works with a range of Chukhrov has authored numerous texts on art
theoretical optics including ontology and the theory, culture, politics and philosophy. With
posthumanities to re-work museum practices. her latest video-play Love-machines she
Books include the multi-authored monograph participated at the Bergen Assembly and
Collecting; Ordering Governing (Duke UP, ‘Specters of Communism’ (James Gallery,
2017) and an edited collection, Climate CUNY, New York, 2015).
Change Museum Futures (Routledge, 2014).
Tom Clark was Editor at BAK , basis voor actuele
Oron Catts is an artist, researcher and curator kunst, Utrecht, and was a co-director of
whose pioneering work with the Tissue Arcadia Missa Gallery (2010–15) and
Culture and Art Project which he established editor-in-chief of Arcadia Missa Publications
in 1996 is considered a leading biological and the journal How to Sleep Faster. Alongside
art project. In 2000 he co-founded this he is an independent editor, curator and
SymbioticA, an artistic research centre publisher, also writing and teaching on
housed within the School of Anatomy, contemporary art, curating and publishing. His
Physiology and Human Biology, The co-edited books include (networked) every
University of Western Australia. Catts’ interest whisper is a crash on my ears (2014).
is Life; more specifically the shifting relations
Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of
and perceptions of life in the light of new
Literature and Science in the Department of
knowledge and it applications.
English at Texas Tech University. His research
Tsz Man Chan is a nomad artist who works focuses on systems theory, narrative theory
between performance, installation and video and ecology. Clarke edits the book series
art, while travelling between Hong Kong and Meaning Systems, published by Fordham
the remote Orkney Islands in the north of University Press. His authored books include
Scotland. When the seasons are right, she Neocybernetics and Narrative (2014),
CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Posthuman Metamorphosis (2008) and artistic and theoretic agenda within

Energy Forms (2001). institutional and economical critique has
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is Professor of English and evolved over twenty years, more recently
Director of the Medieval and Early Modern focusing on the early history of capitalism
Studies Institute at the George Washington and globalization. As co-curator of such
University. He has published on medieval paradigmatic exhibitions as Messe 2ok
studies, posthumanism, materiality, ecotheory (1995), ExArgentina (2004) and The Potosi
and the monstrous. His books include Of Principle (2010), Creischer has developed a
Giants; Medieval Identity Machines, Hybridity, specific curatorial practice that correlates
Identity and Monstrosity and Stone: An with her work as an artist and theorist,
Ecology of the Inhuman, as well as the edited including her extensive practice in archive
collections Monster Theory, Prismatic Ecology research.
and Elemental Ecocriticism. Critical Software Thing is a collective of artists,
Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor thinkers and researchers interested in
of English at Penn State University. She has thinking ‘thing’ from the perspective of
published books and articles on literary Software Studies. The group began as a
history, queer theory, visual culture, the series of discussions and a shared set of
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the poetry interests around the notion of execution,
of William Blake. Her most recent book is questioning what exactly execution is and
Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (co- where something like a computer program
authored with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller, might be understood to execute. The group
2016). has published a book project provisionally
titled Executing Practices (published by
Felicity Colman is Professor of Film and Media
Autonomedia in the DATA browser book
Arts at the Manchester School of Art,
series). Contributors to this entry are Audrey
Manchester Metropolitan University. She is
Samson, Lea Muldtofte, Winnie Soon, Eric
the author of Film Theory: Creating a
Snodgrass and Francisco Gallardo as part of
Cinematic Grammar (2014), Deleuze and
the Critical Software Thing collective.
Cinema (2011), editor of Film, Theory and
Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (2009), and Heather Davis is a researcher and writer. She is
co-editor of Global Arts & Local Knowledge working on a book called Plastic: The Afterlife
(2016) and Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life of Oil for Duke University Press which traces
(2007). She is co-editor (with David Deamer the ethology of plastic and its links to
and Joanna Hodge) of the A/V Journal of petrocapitalism. She is the editor of Art in
Practical and Creative Philosophy. the Anthropocene: Encounters Among
Melinda Cooper is Associate Professor in the Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and
Department of Sociology and Social Policy at Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press)
the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the and Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist
author of Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s
Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (University of University Press, 2017). Her writing can be
Washington Press 2008) and, with Catherine found at heathermdavis.com.
Waldby, of Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Jolle Demmers is Associate Professor of Conflict
Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy Studies at the Department of History and Art
(Duke University Press 2014). History of Utrecht University. Her most recent
Alice Creischer studied philosophy, German work is on technologies of remote control (as
literature and visual arts in Düsseldorf. Her deployed by the aid industry and in war) the
xviii CONTRIBUTORS

scramble for resources in the Sahel region, its Others (ETS 2016) was awarded the
the politics of portrayal of borderland philosophical prize "Vittorio Sainati" with the
violence, war games, stateless democracy acknowledgment of the President of Italy.
and Dutch xenophobia. A fully revised She is also one of the founders of the NY
second edition of her Theories of Violent Posthuman Research Group.
Conflict was published in 2017. Elisa Fiore is a PhD candidate at the Institute for
Rick Dolphijn is a philosopher working at Utrecht Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies at
University (Humanities). He writes between Radboud University, Nijmegen. Her research
art and contemporary theory and has a areas are feminist posthumanism, sensory
strong interest in all forms of activism and studies and memory studies. She has worked
ecology. His writings include Foodscapes as personal assistant of Professor Rosi
(2004), New Materialism (with Iris van der Braidotti at the Centre for the Humanities at
Tuin, 2012) and This Deleuzian Century (ed. Utrecht University. Before that, she received
with Rosi Braidotti, 2016). her Research Master degree in Gender and
Wander Eikelboom is a writer and cultural critic Ethnicity, also from Utrecht University.
with an interest in continental philosophy, Maja and Reuben Fowkes are art historians,
participatory media cultures and the curators and co-directors of the Translocal
embodied experiences of interactive media. Institute for Contemporary Art, a centre for
He reads media studies at the Academy for transnational research into East European
Multimedia and Communication Design art and ecology based in Budapest that
(CMD ) in Breda (NL ) and is editor in chief of operates across the disciplinary boundaries
the magazine Void. He is the project leader, of art history, contemporary art and
researcher, writer and editor in chief of the ecological thought. Maja Fowkes is the
Sense of Smell project that resulted in the author of The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde
Sense of Smell book (2014) and Famous Art and Ecology under Socialism (2015) and
Death installation. together they published River Ecologies:
M. Beatrice Fazi is Research Fellow in Digital Contemporary Art and Environmental
Humanities and Computational Culture at Humanities on the Danube (2015).
the Sussex Humanities Lab (University of Anselm Franke is a Berlin-based curator and
Sussex, UK ). Her research explores author. He has been the head of the
questions at the intersection of philosophy, Department of Visual Arts and Film at Haus
science and technology. Her current work der Kulturen der Welt since 2013. He was
investigates the limits of formal reasoning in the chief curator of the Taipei Biennial in
relation to computation. This work aims to 2012 and of the Shanghai Biennale in
offer a re-conceptualization of contingency 2014. His exhibition project Animism was
within formal axiomatic systems vis-à-vis shown from 2009 until 2014 in collabora-
technoscientific notions of incompleteness tion with various partners in Antwerp, Berne,
and incomputability. Vienna, Berlin, New York, Shenzhen, Seoul
Francesca Ferrando, PhD in Philosophy, MA in and Beirut. Franke received his doctorate
Gender Studies, is a philosopher of the from Goldsmiths College, London.
posthuman; she teaches Philosophy at NYU, Matthew Fuller is Professor of Cultural Studies
Program of Liberal Studies. Dr Ferrando has and Director of the Centre for Cultural
published extensively on the topic of post- Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London.
and transhumanism. The Italian edition of With Usman Haque, he is co-author of Urban
her book Philosophical Posthumanism and Versioning System v1.0 (ALNY ) and with
CONTRIBUTORS xix

Andrew Goffey, of Evil Media (MIT ), editor of psychoanalysis and theories of subjectivity.
Software Studies, a lexicon (MIT ) and His forthcoming book is The Wall or the Door:
co-editor of the journal Computational German Realism around 1800.
Culture. He is involved in a number of David Theo Goldberg is the Director of the
projects in art, media and software and is University of California Humanities Research
the author of the forthcoming How to Sleep, Institute and Executive Director of the Digital
in Art, Biology and Culture (Bloomsbury). Media and Learning Research Hub. He is a
Jennifer Gabrys is Professor in the Department of Professor in the departments of Comparative
Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, Literature and Anthropology at the University
and Principal Investigator on the ERC -funded of California, Irvine. He has published twenty
project, Citizen Sense. She is author of a books, including the co-authored The Future
study on electronic waste, Digital Rubbish: A of Thinking: Learning Institutions in the
Natural History of Electronics (2011) and a Digital Age (2009), and the co-edited
study on environmental sensing, Program Between Humanities and the Digital (2015).
Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and His most recent book is Are We All Postracial
the Making of a Computational Planet Yet? (2015).
(2016). Her work can be found at citizen- Dan Goodley is Professor of Disability Studies
sense.net and jennifergabrys.net. and Education at the University of Sheffield.
Gary Genosko is a Professor at the University of Recent texts include Dis/ability Studies
Ontario’s Institute of Technology. He has held (2014) and Disability Studies (2011). His
a Canada Research Chair, and visiting work engages critical studies of ableism and
professor positions at University of New disablism to interrogate the gains and losses
South Wales, University of Sydney, and of those working at the dis/ability complex.
University of Toronto. Genosko works on Tobijn de Graauw is Director of the Justice
communication and cultural theory, Leadership Group. Her background is in
subcultures in the digital underground, and political philosophy, and during her MA at
whistleblowers. His philosophical interests Utrecht University she specialized in global
includes the philosophy of Félix Guattari. justice and human rights. Previously she
Ine Gevers is a curator, writer and activist. worked at the Centre for the Humanities,
Among her exhibitions and publications are Utrecht University, where she led research
Niet Normaal: Difference on Display (Beurs projects and activities in the fields of religion in
van Berlage, Amsterdam, 2010; Berlin, the public sphere, cultural citizenship and
2011; Liverpool, 2012) and Yes Naturally: environmental humanities. She is a co-editor
How art saves the world (Gemeentemuseum, of the book Transformations of Religion and
The Hague, 2013), proposing a non-anthro- the Public Sphere: Postsecular Publics (2014).
pocentric world view in order to become Jack Halberstam is Professor of American
ecologically intelligent. Her large-scale Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and
international exhibition Hacking Habitat was Comparative Literature at the University of
displayed in the former prison of the city of Southern California. He is the author of five
Utrecht in 2016. books including Skin Shows: Gothic Horror
Tom Giesbers is a philosopher at Utrecht and the Technology of Monsters (1995),
University who specializes in German Female Masculinity (1998), In A Queer Time
post-Kantian philosophy and contemporary and Place (2005), The Queer Art of Failure
French philosophy. His research interests (2011) and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender,
include, but are not limited to, realism, and the End of Normal (2012).
xx CONTRIBUTORS

Patrick Hanafin is Professor of Law at Birkbeck Sciences, and a teacher at the ‘We Are Here
Law School, University of London, where he Academy’, an unofficial academy for
also directs the Law School’s Centre for Law undocumented migrants in the Netherlands.
and the Humanities. His research engages His most recent publication is a co-edited
with questions of law and the biopolitical, volume (with Asja Szafraniec) Words:
law and literature, human rights and Religious Language Matters (2016).
citizenship, and the construction of Stefan Herbrechter is a freelance academic, a
community and identity. His books include research fellow at Coventry University, UK ,
After Cosmopolitanism (with R. Braidotti and and Privatdozent at Heidelberg University. He
B. Blaagaard) (2013), Deleuze and Law: is the executive editor (with I. Callus) of the
Forensic Futures (with R. Braidiotti and Brill series Critical Posthumanisms, and
C. Colebrook) (2009) and Conceiving Life: co-director (with I. Callus and M. Rossini) of
Reproductive Politics and the Law in the Critical Posthumanism Network. His
Contemporary Italy (2007). books include Posthumanism: A Critical
Donna J. Haraway is a Distinguished Professor Analysis (2013), Posthumanist
Emerita in the History of Consciousness Shakespeares (2012) and Cy-Borges:
Department and Feminist Studies Department Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of
at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She Jorge Luis Borges (2005).
is the author of numerous books and essays Helen Hester is Associate Professor of Media
that bring together questions of science and Communication at the University of West
and feminism, such as ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ London. She is the author of Beyond Explicit:
(1985), ‘Situated Knowledges’ (1988), Pornography and the Displacement of Sex
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The (2014) the co-editor of the collections Fat
Reinvention of Nature (1991), Modest_ Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism
Witness@Second_Millennium. (2015) and Dea ex Machina (2015), and a
FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™: member of the international feminist
Feminism and Technoscience (1997) and collective Laboria Cuboniks.
When Species Meet (2008).
Maria Hlavajova is the founder of BAK , basis voor
Alison Harvey is a Lecturer in Media and actuele kunst, Utrecht and has been its artistic
Communication at the University of Leicester director since 2000, and is also artistic
in the United Kingdom. Her research focuses director of FORMER WEST (2008–16), which
on issues of inclusivity and accessibility in she initiated and developed as an interna-
digital culture. Her work has appeared in tional collaborative research, education,
Social Media & Society, Feminist Media publication and exhibition undertaking.
Studies and Information, Communication & Hlavajova has organized numerous projects at
Society. Her book, Gender, Age, and Digital BAK and beyond, including, most recently, the
Games in the Domestic Context, was series Future Vocabularies (2014–16) and
published by Routledge in 2015. New World Academy with artist Jonas Staal
Ernst van den Hemel is a scholar of religious (2013, ongoing).
studies and literature at the Meertens Aud Sissel Hoel is Professor of Media Studies
Institute and a lecturer at the Religious and Visual Culture at the Norwegian
Studies department at Utrecht University. He University of Science and Technology. Her
is also a secretary/researcher for the research concerns the role of images and
Theology and Religious Studies foresight tools in knowledge and thinking, focusing on
committee of the Royal Dutch Academy of photography, scientific instruments,
CONTRIBUTORS xxi

measurement, medical imaging and Heather Houser is Associate Professor of English

visualization. Hoel’s publications cover a at the University of Texas at Austin. Her public
wide range of topics on the overlapping ations include Ecosickness in Contemporary
fields of visual studies, science studies and U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014),
media philosophy. and essays in American Literary History,
Ingrid Hoelzl is an image theorist and American Literature, Los Angeles Review of
performance artist, currently Assistant Books, Modern Fiction Studies and Public
Professor at the School or Creative Media, Culture, among others. Her current project,
Hong Kong. She is the author of a monograph ‘Environmental Culture of the Infowhelm’,
on the theory of photographic self-portraiture, investigates the aesthetics of information
Der Autoporträtistische Pakt (2008) and (with management in environmental culture.
Rémi Marie) of Softimage: Towards a New Pierre Huyghe (born 1962 in Paris) lives and
Theory of the Digital Image (2015) which works in Paris and New York. He studied at
investigates the algorithmic paradigm of the the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts
image leading to the thesis of the image as Décoratifs in Paris. He has had numerous
program. She is currently working on a new international solo exhibitions at such venues
book project titled Postimage: The New as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Ecology of Vision, which addresses the (2015), Los Angeles County Museum of Art
dissolution of the image in machine vision and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2014) and
and neuroscience from the perspective of the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013–14),
posthumanism and ecophenomenology. among others.
Tom Holert is an art historian, critic, curator and Serenella Iovino is Professor of Comparative
artist. A former editor of Texte zur Kunst and Literature at the University of Turin. Her recent
Spex, Holert is Honorary Professor of Art publications include Ecocriticism and Italy:
Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation (2016;
of Fine Arts Vienna. Alongside his writings on Winner of the AAIS Book Prize) and Ecologia
contemporary and late modernist art in letteraria: Una strategia di sopravvivenza
journals he has (co-)authored books on (2nd ed. 2015). With Serpil Oppermann, she
visual culture, politics, war, mobility, glamour is co-editor of Material Ecocriticism (2014)
and the governmentality of the present. and Environmental Humanities: Voices from
Currently his research focuses on questions the Anthropocene (2017).
of art and knowledge, and the genealogies of Brandon Jones is a PhD candidate in English
contemporary art’s ventures into knowledge Literature at the University of Illinois,
production and pedagogy. Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation research
Erich Hörl is Full Professor of Media Culture at focuses on post-war American fiction,
the Institute of Culture and Aesthetics of environmentalism and utopia. He has
Digital Media (ICAM ), Leuphana University of published essays in the Journal of
Lüneburg, Germany. His current research Consciousness Studies and O-Zone: A Journal
interests concern the development of a of Object-Oriented Studies on ecology and
general ecology of media and technologies as consciousness in the works of Alfred North
well as a critique of the process of cyberneti- Whitehead, Karen Barad and Richard Powers.
cization of all life forms and modes of Eileen A. Joy is a specialist in Old English literary
existence since around 1950. He has a studies and cultural studies, as well as a
special expertise in Simondon Studies and para-academic rogue drone-strike machine,
Heidegger Studies as well as Guattari Studies. with interests in poetry and poetics,
xxii CONTRIBUTORS

historiography, ethics, affects, embodiments, mechanics and organics. By doing research

queer studies, the politics of friendship, on precisely these issues, she wants to
speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, challenge nature, creating it anew.
the ecological and the post/human. She is Goda Klumbytė is a PhD candidate at the
the Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working University of Kassel, Germany, within a
Group and Co-Editor of postmedieval: a research group Gender/Diversity in
journal of medieval cultural studies. Informatics Systems. Her research engages
Birgit Mara Kaiser teaches Comparative feminist technoscience, new media studies
Literature at Utrecht University, The and posthumanism. Her work has been
Netherlands. She is the author of Figures of published in Everyday Feminist Research
Simplicity: Sensation and Thinking in Kleist Praxis (eds Leurs and Olivieri, 2015) and Fat
and Melville (2011); she edited (with Lorna Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism
Burns) Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: (eds Walters and Hester, 2015).
Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures (2012) Katerina Kolozova is Director and Senior
and Singularity and Transnational Poetics Researcher at the Institute of Social
(2015). Together with Kathrin Thiele she Sciences and Humanities, Skopje and
founded and coordinates the Professor of Philosophy, Gender Studies and
Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Sociological Theory at the University
Humanities Terra Critica. American College Skopje. Her publications
Vicki Kirby is Professor of Sociology in the include The Cut of The Real: Subjectivity in
School of Social Sciences, The University of Poststructuralist Philosophy (2014) and
New South Wales in Sydney. She is the Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism:
author of Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Marx and Laruelle (2015).
Large, Judith Butler: Live Theory and Telling Vasilis Kostakis is Senior Research Fellow at
Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. She Tallinn University of Technology. He is also
has articles forthcoming in Derrida Today, Founder of the P2P Lab and a core member
Parallax, and in David Woods et al. (eds), of the P2P Foundation.
Eco-Deconstruction (Fordham).
Karen Kramer graduated with a BFA from
Eben Kirksey is Associate Professor of Parsons School of Design, New York, in
Anthropology at Deakin University in 2003 and concentrated, for a number of
Melbourne, Australia. He has published years, on a career in graphic design. In
three books with Duke University Press: 2011 she relocated to the UK to begin an
Freedom in Entangled Worlds: West MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of
Papua and the Global Architecture of Power London. Since completing her final exhibition
(2012), Emergent Ecologies (2015), and in 2013 she has exhibited internationally
an edited collection The Multispecies Salon and taken part in a range of studio
(2014). residencies. In 2015 she was a co-recipient
Tove Kjellmark is an artist living and working in of the Jerwood/FVU awards, culminating in
Stockholm, Sweden. She has received the exhibition Borrowed Time at Jerwood
numerous grants and has had many solo Space, London.
exhibitions over the years. In her work she Carolyn Lau is a doctoral candidate in English
searches for Another Nature: a nature that (Literary Studies) at The Chinese University
refuses to accept a difference between of Hong Kong. She was a Visiting Research
technological and natural forces, between Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at
human life and animal life, between Utrecht University in 2015.
CONTRIBUTORS xxiii

Rebecca Lawthom is Professor of Community Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, Internet
Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan critic and author of Uncanny Networks
University. Her work engages at the intersec- (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First
tions of feminism, disability and migration. Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007),
Publications include Community Psychology Networks Without a Cause (2012) and
(2011, with Kagan, Burton and Duckett) and Social Media Abyss (2016). In 2004 he
Qualitative Methods in Psychology: A founded the Institute of Network Cultures at
Research Guide (2012, with Banister, Bunn, the Amsterdam University of Applied
Burman, Daniels, Duckett, Parker, Runswick- Sciences. His centre organizes conferences,
Cole, Sixsmith and Goodley). publications and research networks such as
Koen Leurs is an Assistant Professor in Gender Video Vortex (online video), Unlike Us
and Postcolonial Studies at Utrecht University. (alternatives in social media), Critical Point
Leurs is critical Internet researcher working on of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query
migration, diaspora, gender, race, class, (the culture of search), MoneyLab (internet-
urbanity and youth culture. Recent based revenue models in the arts). Recent
publications include the co-edited anthology projects deal with digital publishing and the
Everyday Feminist Research Practices (2014), future of art criticism. He also teaches at the
the monograph Digital Passages: Migrant European Graduate School (Saas-Fee/
Youth 2.0 (2015) and an article on ‘Feminist Malta) where he supervises PhD students.
data studies’ that appeared in Feminist Nina Lykke is Professor of Gender Studies,
Review (2017). Currently he is co-editing the Linköping University, Sweden, co-director of
SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration. GEX cel International Collegium for Advanced
Armin Linke was born in 1966 and lives in Milan Transdisciplinary Gender Studies and
and Berlin. As a photographer and director of the International Research
film-maker he combines a range of School, InterGender. She has published
contemporary image-processing technolo- extensively within feminist cultural studies,
gies in order to blur the borders between including technoscience studies, among
fiction and reality. His artistic practice is others Cosmodolphins (2000) and Feminist
concerned with different possibilities of Studies (2010). Her current research is a
dealing with photographic archives and their queerfeminist, autophenomenographic and
respective manifestations, as well as with the cultural theoretical analysis of cancer, death
interrelations and transformative powers and mourning.
between urban, architectural or spatial Wietske Maas is a cultural worker and an artist
functions and the human beings interacting researching urban ecologies. Based in
with these environments. Amsterdam since 2005, Wietske combines
Kirsty Liddiard is currently a Research Fellow artistic pursuits with work as a producer and
within the Centre for the Study of Childhood curator for the European Cultural Foundation
and Youth, in the School of Education at the and as researcher, project manager and
University of Sheffield. Prior to this, she managing editor for the concluding phase of
became the inaugural Ethel Louise FORMER WEST (2014–16).
Armstrong Postdoctoral Fellow at the School Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental
of Disability Studies, Ryerson University, Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University,
Toronto, Canada. Her work centres on Cambridge. She has published extensively on
disablism and ableism; and gender, sexuality Continental Philosophy, Feminism, Queer
and intimate citizenship. Theory, Posthuman Theory, Animal Rights, art
xxiv CONTRIBUTORS

and horror film. She is the co-editor of Deleuze in progress can be found on his blog, The
and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (2008), the Bookfish (www.stevementz.com).
editor of The Animal Catalyst: Toward Ahuman Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the
Theory (2014) and the author of Cinesexuality University of Bologna and is adjunct fellow at
(2008) and Posthuman Ethics (2014). the Institute for Culture and Society, Western
Jeffrey Scott Marchand is a PhD student at the Sydney University. With Brett Neilson, he is
University of Arlington at Texas. His research the author of Border as Method, or, the
interests include posthuman ecocriticism, Multiplication of Labor (Duke UP, 2013). He
race/postcolonial studies and contemporary is an active participant in the ‘post-workerist’
cultural studies. His dissertation will focus on debates and one of the founders of the
the possibility of reading various multimedia website Euronomade.
pop culture artefacts as speculative The MTL Collective, Nitasha Dhillon and Amin
imaginings of affirmative ecological, racial Husain, is a collaboration that joins research,
and queer futures in the age of the aesthetics and action in its practice. Nitasha
Anthropocene. is a visual artist based in New York and New
Nikita Mazurov is a data liberation enthusiast Delhi, and is currently a PhD candidate at
and postdoctoral researcher working with the the Department of Media Study, State
Living Archives project at Malmö University, University of New York at Buffalo. Amin is a
looking at how to protect archive participants Palestinian–American lawyer, artist, and
by making archives unreliable. He previously organizer based in New York. He practised
completed a doctoral project at Goldsmiths law for five years before transitioning to art,
which developed a hacker methodology of studying at the School of the International
praxis combining counter-forensics with Center of Photography and Whitney
Stirnerian egoism. Interests include both Independent Study Program. Amin currently
privacy and piracy; specifically how to teaches at the Gallatin and Steinhardt
engage in the latter while assuring the Schools at New York University and Pratt’s
former. Graduate Writing Program.
Stuart McLean is Professor of Anthropology Brett Neilson is Research Director at the
and Global Studies at the University of Institute for Culture and Society, Western
Minnesota. He is the author of The Event Sydney University. With Sandro Mezzadra, he
and its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity is author of Border as Method, or, the
(2004) and Fictionalizing Anthropology: Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press,
Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of 2013). With Ned Rossiter, he coordinates the
the Human (2017) and the editor (with tricontinental research project Logistical
Anand Pandian) of Crumpled Paper Boat: Worlds: Infrastructure, Software, Labour
Experiments in Ethnographic Writing (http://logisticalworlds.org).
(2017). Astrida Neimanis is a lecturer at the Department
Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St John’s of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of
University in New York City. His most recent Sydney. She is Associate Editor of the journal
books include Shipwreck Modernity: Environmental Humanities, a Key Researcher
Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 with the Sydney Environment Institute and
(2015) and Oceanic New York (2015). His co-convenor of the Composting: Feminisms
work in the blue humanities also includes At and the Environmental Humanities reading
the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (2009) group. She is also a founding member of The
and numerous articles and chapters. Works Seed Box: A Mistra–Formas Environmental
CONTRIBUTORS xxv

Humanities Collaboratory. Her first The Otolith Group is an award-winning artist-led

monograph is Bodies of Water: Posthuman collective and organization founded by
Feminist Phenomenology (2017). Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002. It
Jenna Ng is Anniversary Lecturer in Film and creates films, installations and performances
Interactive Media at the University of York, that are driven by extensive research into the
UK . She works on issues intersecting digital histories of science fiction and the legacies
and visual culture, with interests also in the of transnationalism. The Otolith Group was
philosophy of technology, the posthuman, shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2010.
computational culture and the digital human- Susanna Paasonen is professor of Media
ities. She is the editor of Understanding Studies at the University of Turku, Finland.
Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual With an interest in studies of popular culture,
Worlds (Bloomsbury 2013), and is currently affect and media theory, she is most recently
working on a monograph, Undoing the the author of Carnal Resonance: Affect and
Screen: Surface, Space and the Digital Online Pornography (2011) as well as
Image (Palgrave Macmillan). She was co-editor of Working with Affect in Feminist
previously a Newton Trust/Liverhulme Early Readings: Disturbing Differences (2010)
Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. and Networked Affect (2015).
Henk Oosterling is Associate Professor of Trevor Paglen’s work deliberately blurs lines
Philosophy of Man and Culture at the Faculty between science, contemporary art,
of Philosophy of Erasmus University journalism and other disciplines to construct
Rotterdam. By translating the results of his unfamiliar yet meticulously researched ways
academic research on intermediately to see and interpret the world around us. His
and ecophilosophy in urban policies visual work has been exhibited at the
Dr Oosterling plays an active role in the city Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Tate
of Rotterdam as a strategic consultant for Modern, London, The Walker Arts Center,
urban and educational innovation. He is the Minneapolis and others. His most recent
initiator and general director of ‘Rotterdam book, The Last Pictures (2012) is a
Skillcity’, a bottom-up educational meditation on the intersections of deep-time,
intervention in primary and secondary politics and art.
schools in the South of Rotterdam, Neni Panourgiá is an anthropologist, Senior
implementing eco-social skills focused on Research Fellow at the Institute for
sustainable craftsmanship in school Comparative Literature and Society at
curricula. See: http://www.vakmanstad.nl. Columbia University, Director of the Project
Serpil Oppermann is a full professor in the on Aging, and affiliated faculty at the
Department of English Language and Psychology Department. Through the Prison
Literature at Hacettepe University, Ankara. Program at Columbia University she teaches
Her most recent publications include at Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in
International Perspectives in Feminist Upstate New York. Her work engages many
Ecocriticism (2013), co-edited with Greta registers, lexicons, and disciplines and is
Gaard and Simon Estok, and Material concerned with questions of epistemology,
Ecocriticism (2014) and Environmental critical theory, critical medical studies,
Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene humanism and anthropism, social and
(2017), co-edited with Serenella Iovino. She political exception and excision, sites of
has also edited New Voices in International dissonance, complete and austere
Ecocriticism (2015). institutions. She has situated her research in
xxvi CONTRIBUTORS

hospitals, prisons, camps, schools. She has Digital Culture Unit, Goldsmiths, University of
published on theory of anthropology, London. Her research draws on continental
ethnographic methods, art, architecture, philosophy to investigate ontological and
political histories, and intimate epistemological transformations driven by
ethnographies. Her numerous publications the function of technology in culture,
have appeared in American Ethnologist, aesthetics and politics. Her books include
American Anthropologist, angelaki; Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and
Anthropology and Humanism, the Mutations of Desire (2004) and
Anthropological Theory, Documenta, Mousse, Contagious Architecture. Computation,
Naked Punch. Her award-winning books Aesthetics and Space (2013).
include Fragments of Death, Fables of Matteo Pasquinelli (MA , Bologna; PhD, London)
Identity. An Athenian Anthropography is a philosopher and Professor in Media
(1995); Ethnographica Moralia. Experiments Theory at the University of Arts and Design,
in Interpretive Anthropology (2008); Karlsruhe. Previously he has taught at the
Dangerous Citizens. The Greek Left and the Pratt Institute, New York. He wrote Animal
Terror of the State (2009); and a new Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (2008)
edition of Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as and has edited the anthologies Gli algoritmi
Philosopher (2017). del capitale (2014) and Alleys of Your Mind:
Dimitris Papadopoulos is a Reader in Sociology Augmented Intelligence and its Traumas
and Organisation at the School of (2015) among others.
Management, University of Leicester. His work Patricia Pisters is Professor of Film at the
in science and technology studies, social Department of Media Studies of the
theory and sociology of social change has University of Amsterdam and director of the
been published in numerous journals and Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis
several monographs, including the forthcom- (ASCA ). She is one of the founding editors
ing Experimental Politics: Technoscience and of the Open Access journal Necsus:
More Than Social Movements (Duke European Journal of Media Studies and
University Press), Escape Routes: Control and author of The Neuro-Image: A Film-
Subversion in the 21st Century (2008) and Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (2012).
Analysing Everyday Experience: Social
Sandra Ponzanesi is Professor of Gender and
Research and Political Change (2006).
Postcolonial Studies, Department of Media
Jussi Parikka is a media theorist, writer and and Culture Studies/Graduate Gender
Professor in Technological Culture and Programme, Utrecht University and Head of
Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art, Humanities at Utrecht University College, the
University of Southampton. He has published Netherlands. She is the author of Paradoxes
widely on digital culture, media theory, visual of Postcolonial Culture (2004) and The
culture and media archaeology. Parikka’s Postcolonial Cultural Industry (2014), editor
books include Digital Contagions: A Media of Gender, Globalisation and Violence.
Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2007, Postcolonial Conflict Zones (2014) and
2nd ed. 2016), Insect Media (2010), A co-editor of Postcolonial Transitions in
Geology of Media (2015) and The Europe. Contexts, Practices and Politics
Anthrobscene (2014). (2016), among others.
Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Theory, Chair Helen Pritchard is an artist and researcher. Her
of the PhD programme at the Centre for work is interdisciplinary and brings together
Cultural Studies, and co-director of the the fields of computational aesthetics,
CONTRIBUTORS xxvii

geography and feminist technoscience. theory and politics of software, more

Together with Jennifer Gabrys she created the particularly on the role of algorithms in
Citizen Sense Kit for monitoring and taking social processes and the production of
action on pollution from natural gas extraction. knowledge. Part of that is working with and
She is a researcher on Citizen Sense funded building digital methods. He is currently
by the European Research Council, in the writing a book on the history and cultural
Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, significance of information processing.
University of London, and a PhD candidate in Jara Rocha is a cultural mediator, developing
the School of Geography, Queen Mary educational and research programs at Bau
University of London. Design College of Barcelona. She studies
John Protevi is a Professor of French Studies at present cultures and learns through
Louisiana State University. He specializes in transfeminist practices, linking both formal
Deleuze and science, with a particular and non-formal ways of attending to matter.
interest in geophilosophy and affective She regularly collaborates with Femke
neuroscience. His most recent book is Life, Snelting on the interfaces between
War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences so-called-bodies, representation and
(2013); previous books include Political technology.
Affect (2009), Deleuze and Geophilosophy David Roden has worked for the Open University
(2004) and Political Physics (2001). He as a lecturer and associate lecturer. His
is also founding editor of the book series research has addressed the relationship
New Directions: Cognitive Science and between deconstruction and analytic
Continental Philosophy. philosophy, philosophical naturalism, the
Christine Quinan is Assistant Professor of metaphysics of sound and posthumanism.
Gender Studies in the Department of Media His publications include a contribution to the
and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Springer Frontiers volume The Singularity
Christine’s teaching and research interests Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical
include postcolonial studies, trans studies, Assessment. His book Posthuman Life:
queer theory, literary and film studies, and Philosophy at the Edge of the Human was
feminist/queer pedagogy. published in 2014.
Andrej Radman has been teaching design and Ned Rossiter is Professor of Communication in
theory courses at TU Delft Faculty of the Institute for Culture and Society and
Architecture since 2004. A graduate of the teaches in the School of Humanities and
Zagreb School of Architecture in Croatia, he Communication Arts at Western Sydney
is a licensed architect and recipient of the University. His most recent book is Software,
Croatian Architects Association Annual Award Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of
for Housing Architecture in 2002. Radman Logistical Nightmares (2016).
received his Master’s and Doctoral Degrees Katherine Runswick-Cole is Senior Research
from TU Delft and joined the Architecture Fellow in Disability Studies and Psychology
Theory Section as Assistant Professor in at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK .
2008. He is an editor of the peer-reviewed Her research and publications focus on the
journal for architecture theory Footprint. lives of disabled children and their families,
Bernhard Rieder is an associate professor at the including Disabled Children’s Childhood
Media Studies Department at the University Studies (2013, edited with Tillie Curran) and
of Amsterdam, interested in all things digital. Approaching Disability: Critical Issues and
His research interests focus on the history, Perspectives (2014, with Rebecca Mallett).
xxviii CONTRIBUTORS

Audrey Samson is an artist-researcher in the interests lie in the area of analytical ontology
duo FRAUD and a senior lecturer at the (process ontology, method of ontology),
University of Greenwich. Her performative contemporary metaphysics and the history
installations explore how memory and of metaphysics (Wilfrid Sellars, Carnap,
technical objects are both co-determined Leibniz, Hegel, Whitehead), and more
and transformed in the context of networked recently, in conflict research (value conflicts),
data archiving. Samson’s work has been intercultural value studies and philosophy of
presented at festivals and galleries social robotics.
throughout the Asia Pacific, Europe, and Shela Sheikh is Lecturer at the Centre for
Canada. Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of
Harry Sanderson is a London-based new media London, where she convenes the MA
artist. His practice ranges from sound perform- Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy. Prior
ances to interactive software sculptures, video to this she was Research Fellow and
work and online commissions. His main focus Publications Coordinator on the ERC-funded
is labour relations embedded in the language ‘Forensic Architecture’ project based in the
of visual cultures, and the relationship of Centre for Research Architecture. She is
technology to capitalism. He graduated from currently working on a monograph about
Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design martyrdom and testimony in deconstruction,
(London) in 2013. and a multi-platform research project around
Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of colonialism, botany and the politics of
Sociology and Chair of The Committee on planting. Within the latter project, she is
Global Thought, Columbia University. She is co-ediiting, with Ros Gray, a special issue of
the author of several books and the recipient Third Text entitled ‘The Wretched Earth:
of diverse awards and mentions, ranging Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions’
from multiple doctor honoris causa to (Spring 2018).
Named lectures and being selected for Tamara Shepherd is an Assistant Professor in
various honours lists. Her latest book is the Department of Communication, Media
Expulsions: When Complexity Produces and Film at the University of Calgary. She
Elementary Brutalities (2014). studies the feminist political economy of
Mirko Tobias Schäfer is Assistant Professor for digital culture, looking at labour, policy and
New Media and Digital Culture at the literacy in social media, mobile technologies
University of Utrecht and director of the and digital games. She is an editorial board
Utrecht Data School. His research interest member of Social Media + Society, and her
revolves around the socio-political impact of work has been published in Convergence,
media technology. He is co-editor of the First Monday, Triple C and the Canadian
volume Digital Material: Tracing New Media Journal of Communication.
in Everyday Life and Technology (2009), The Andreas Siekmann is a German visual artist who
Datafied Society: Studying Culture through was born in 1961. He has had numerous
Data (2016) and author of Bastard Culture! gallery and museum exhibitions, including
How User Participation Transforms Cultural at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Production (2011). Rupertinum and at the Croy Nielsen. Several
Johanna Seibt is a Professor at Aarhus works by the artist have been sold at auction,
University, Denmark, holding a chair in including Trickle Down: The Public Space in
Transdisciplinary Process Studies for the Age of its Privatization, sold at Villa
Integrated Social Robotics. Her research Grisebach Auctions ‘Third Floor’ in 2014.
CONTRIBUTORS xxix

Stephanie Simon is a geographer and research (2004) and co-author of Graphic Medicine
associate at the University of Amsterdam. Manifesto (2015), her most recent book is
Her research critically interrogates everyday Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawing as
practices and spaces of security and the Metaphor (Duke UP, 2017).
ways in which logics of pre-emption and Jonas Staal is an artist who has studied
resilience are negotiated in urban and monumental art in Enschede (NL ) and
transnational contexts. Her current projects Boston (USA ). He is currently working on his
are focused on the sensibilities of landscape PhD research entitled Art and Propaganda in
and urban design as spatial mediators of the 21st Century in the PhDA rts program of
risk. Her work has been published in the University of Leiden. Staal is the founder
Antipode, Theory, Culture & Society, Journal of the artistic and political organization New
of Urban Cultural Studies, Social and World Summit, which develops alternative
Cultural Geography, Security Dialogue and parliaments for stateless organizations
Space and Polity. banned from democratic discourse and,
Anneke Smelik is Katrien van Munster professor together with BAK , basis voor actuele kunst,
of Visual Culture at the Radboud University Utrecht, of the New World Academy,
Nijmegen (Netherlands). She has published researches the role of art in stateless
widely in the field of fashion, cinema, political struggle.
popular culture and cultural memory. Her Karl Steel is Associate Professor of English at
latest books are Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center,
Contemporary Dutch Fashion and Thinking City University of New York. A medievalist, his
Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists. work concentrates on the history of human
She is project leader of the research supremacy (How to Make a Human: Violence
programme: ‘Crafting Wearables; Fashionable and Animals in the Middle Ages, 2011) and,
Technology’ (2013–2018). more recently, on questions of edibility and
Femke Snelting is an artist/designer developing vulnerability, topics he is exploring through
projects at the intersection of design, studies of medieval feral children, burial
feminism and free software. She is a core practices and imaginations of the minimal
member of Constant, an association for arts life of oysters.
and media that has been active in Brussels, Ravi Sundaram is a Professor at the Centre for
Belgium since 1997. Constant generates the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS ),
among others performative publishing, Delhi. In 2000 he founded the Sarai
curatorial processes, poetic software, programme along with Ravi Vasudevan
experimental research and educational and the Raqs Media Collective. Sundaram
experiments. Together with Jara Rocha they is the author of Pirate Modernity: Media
regularly collaborate on the interfaces Urbanism in Delhi (London 2009), and No
between gender, representation and Limits: Media Studies from India (Delhi,
technology. 2013). His current research looks at the
Susan M. Squier is Brill Professor Emerita of worlds of circulation after the mobile
English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality phone, information fever, ideas of
Studies at Penn State University and Einstein transparency and secrecy and the
Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität, postcolonial media event.
Berlin (2016–19) where she is working on Jenna Sutela is an artist whose installations, text
the PathoGraphics project with Irmela Marei and sound performances seek to identify
Krüger-Fürhoff. Author of Liminal Lives and react to precarious social and material
xxx CONTRIBUTORS

moments, often in relation to technology. Age (2004) and the forthcoming

Most recently, she has been exploring Hypersocial: Digital Networks between the
exceedingly complex biological and Market and the Common.
computational systems, ultimately Territorial Agency is an independent organization
unknowable and in a constant state of that innovatively promotes and works for
becoming. Sutela has exhibited her work at sustainable territorial transformations.
Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, The Founded by architects and urbanists
Institute of Contemporary Arts London, and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino,
The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, it is engaged to strengthen the capacity of
among others. local and international communities in
Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe is a writer and comprehensive spatial transformation
curator whose work focuses on dance, management. Projects channel available
performance and techniques of faithful spatial resources towards the development
reproduction. She is a past participant in the of their full potential. Territorial Agency works
Centre for Research Architecture MA for the establishment of instruments and
programme and the Whitney Independent methods for ensuring higher architectural
Study Program, she currently works in New and urban quality in the contemporary
York and London. territories.
Paulo Tavares is an architect and urbanist based Kathrin Thiele teaches Gender Studies at
in São Paulo whose work deals with the Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is
relations between conflict and space. trained as a critical theorist with research
Spanning various media and conceptual expertise in continental philosophy, feminist
formats, his design, visual arts and writing theories of difference and (post)humanist
work have been published and exhibited in studies. She has authored The Thought of
different contexts and locations worldwide. Becoming: Gilles Deleuze’s Poetics of Life
He was a visiting scholar at the School of (2008) and edited (with Katrin Trüstedt)
Architecture at Princeton and Cornel Happy Days: Lebenswissen nach Cavell
University, and prior to that taught design (2009) and (with Maria Muhle) Biopolitische
studio and spatial theory at the School of Konstellationen (2011). Together with Birgit
Architecture of the Pontificia Universidad Mara Kaiser she founded and co-ordinates
Católica del Ecuador in Quito. He holds a the Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical
PhD from the Centre for Research Humanities Terra Critica.
Architecture, Goldsmiths, and is a long-term Christy Tidwell is an Assistant Professor of
collaborator with the Forensic Architecture English and Humanities at the South Dakota
Project. School of Mines and Technology. She has
Tiziana Terranova is Associate Professor of published articles in Interdisciplinary
New Media and Cultural Studies in the Studies in Literature and Environment
Department of Human and Social Sciences, (ISLE ), Extrapolation, Femspec and
University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’. She has Americana: The Journal of American Popular
written extensively about the cultural Culture 1900 to Present, as well as chapters
politics of digital media, network in multiple edited collections. She is
technologies and media culture in peer- currently writing about ecohorror film.
reviewed journals and edited collections. She Oxana Timofeeva is an Assistant Professor at the
is the author of Corpi nella rete (2015), European University at St. Petersburg and a
Network Culture: Politics for the Information Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of
CONTRIBUTORS xxxi

Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences. of Technology Sydney. His current interests

She is a member of the Russian collective include the renaissance of Australian
‘Chto Delat?’ (‘What is to be Done?’), and Aboriginal pyro-technologies, the history of
the author of Introduction to the Erotic artificial biospheres and climate control, and
Philosophy of Georges Bataille (2009, in the anticipatory politics of industrial
Russian) and The History of Animals: An microbiology. He is currently completing a
Essay on Negativity, Immanence and manuscript entitled More Heat than Life: The
Freedom (2012). Tangled Roots of Ecology and Economics.
Iris van der Tuin is an Associate Professor of Lindsay Grace Weber is a graduate of Wesleyan
Liberal Arts and Sciences at Utrecht University and Utrecht University’s Gender
University, the Netherlands. Her work on the and Ethnicity RMA , and is currently pursuing
new materialisms has been published by, a PhD in Comparative Studies in Discourse
among others, Open Humanities Press, and Society at the University of Minnesota.
Australian Feminist Studies and Hypatia: A She has worked with CASCO ’s (Un)usual
Journal of Feminist Philosophy. She chairs Business research collective and been active
the COST Action New Materialism: in autonomous feminist collectives in
Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Connecticut, Oakland (CA ) and Utrecht.
Matter Comes to Matter’ (2014–18). Inigo Wilkins is in the process of completing his
Timotheus Vermeulen is associate professor in doctoral thesis on the topic of ‘Irreversible
Media. Culture and Society at the University Noise’ at the Centre for Cultural Studies at
of Oslo. He has written extensively about Goldsmiths. He is co-editor of the journal
contemporary culture and aesthetics, in Glass Bead.
particular film and TV. His latest book, James Williams is Honorary Professor of
Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect and Philosophy, The Alfred Deakin Institute for
Depth after Postmodernism, co-edited with Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin
Robin van den Akker and Alison Gibbons, is University. His latest books include A Process
due to be be published with Rowman and Philosophy of Signs (2016), Gilles Deleuze’s
Littlefield in 2017. Vermeulen is currently Difference and Repetition: A Critical
working on a book project on the ‘as-if’ in Introduction and Guide (2nd ed. 2013) and
contemporary art. Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time: A Critical
Rodante van der Waal is finishing her Research Introduction and Guide (2011). He is
Master Philosophy at the University of currently preparing a process semiology of
Amsterdam in 2017 and studies midwifery the sublime and studies of concepts in
at the Midwifery Academy of Amsterdam. In recent philosophy of mind and biology.
her studies, she focuses mostly on Shannon Winnubst is the author of two books,
postmodern French thought, posthumanism, Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race and
feminism and issues concerning reproduc- Ethics (2015) and Queering Freedom
tion. Within the broad field of philosophy, the (2006), the editor of Reading Bataille Now
topics of pregnancy and giving birth remain (2007) and the co-editor, with Lynne Huffer,
as yet very unthought. In her papers and of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental
other writings she tries to think these themes Feminism. She is Professor of Women’s,
from a theoretical as well as a more Gender and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State
intimate, or poetical, perspective. University.
Jeremy Walker is Lecturer in the Social and Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie
Political Sciences program at the University Professor in the Department of English and
xxxii CONTRIBUTORS

Founding Director of the 3CT : Center for considers himself a heretical Platonist, an
Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice University. unorthodox Kantian and a minimalist
He is also the founding editor of the series Hegelian, but is equally happy being
Posthumanities at the University of described as a rationalist. His work focuses
Minnesota Press. mainly on the intersection between the
Peter Wolfendale is an independent philosopher methodology of metaphysics and the
living and working in England. He is the structure of rationality, but also includes
author of Object-Oriented Philosophy: The philosophy of value, ethics, aesthetics and
Noumenon’s New Clothes (2014). He social theory.
 Introduction
ROSI BRAIDOTTI AND MARIA HLAVAJOVA

hat could terms such as ‘altergorithm’, selection of key terms and authors – and a
W ‘rewilding’, ‘negentropy’ and ‘tech-
noanimalism’ possibly have in common?
critical intervention in the field. The crit-
ical part tends to emphasize two main
The answer lies in the pages of this book: dimensions: the first is the significance of
they are all neologisms that attempt to the neo-materialist approaches and of
come to terms with the complexities of the monistic process ontologies in contempor-
posthuman predicament. Every time we ary critical posthuman theory. The second
refer to some of these neologisms in the is an ethical concern for the relationship
introduction, we will insert the inverted between new concepts and real-life condi-
commas, as a way of indexing them and tions, with strong emphasis being placed
alerting the readers to the specific incep- throughout the volume on the need for
tion of the terms. creative responses to the current chal-
This glossary rests on the working lenges. This ethical passion drives the
definition of the posthuman as a field volume and it also helps shape its affective
of enquiry and experimentation that is tone, in terms of accountability, the respect
triggered by the convergence of post- for diversity and the conviction that
humanism on the one hand and critique and creativity work in tandem. In
post-anthropocentrism on the other. this respect, the Posthuman Glossary may
Posthumanism focuses on the critique of be said to both fulfil and defy the usual
the humanist ideal of ‘Man’ as the univer- expectations and aims of a glossary.
sal representative of the human, while
post-anthropocentrism criticizes species
hierarchy and advances bio-centred egalit-
arianism. Equally interdisciplinary in ANTHROPOS REDUX
character, they refer back to different tradi-
tions, cite different authors and tend to The starting assumption of this volume is
take place in-between different disciplin- that the historical situation of today – eco-
ary areas. The convergence of these two logically, economically, socio-politically
strands is producing a dynamic new field as well as affectively and psychically – is
of scholarship right now. Accordingly, in unprecedented. We define our era as the
this Posthuman Glossary we take the term Anthropocene,1 by which we understand
‘posthuman’ to mark the emergence of a the geological time when humans are
transdisciplinary discourse that is more having a lasting and negative effect upon
than the sum of posthumanism and the planet’s systems. As the ‘Generation
post-anthropocentrism, and points to a Anthropocene’2 we believe that new
qualitative leap in a new – perhaps notions and terms are needed to address
‘post-disciplinary’ – critical direction. the constituencies and configurations
This volume consequently is both an of the present and to map future direc-
attempt to reflect the current state of tions. There is the pressure of old and new
posthuman scholarship – by providing a contemporary concerns, such as the

1
2 INTRODUCTION

changes induced by advanced technolo- the wider material world, and with its
gical developments on the one hand and histories and events.3 In a broader sense,
the structural inequalities of the neoliberal this glossary assumes that the human is
economics of global capitalism on the always partially constituted by the non-
other. Accordingly, the contributors to the human and that their interaction is too
Posthuman Glossary analyse both material complex to be reduced to a mere dialect-
and discursive conditions: sociological ical opposition. All the more so, as
reality and the more epistemic dimensions nowadays the non-human also involves
are taken together, as two sides of the technologically manufactured ‘others’ –
same coin. This assumes, as a starting both modernist appliances and objects and
point, a nature–culture continuum that post-industrial ‘smart’ things. The latter
defies binary thinking. In other words, the play a crucial role in defining the posthu-
‘computational turn’ is very ‘earth-bound’ man moment by stressing the primacy of
and the global economy, however ‘planet- digital mediation and electronic circuits in
ary’, is also eminently ‘terrestrial’. It is just our self-definitions and interaction. One of
the case that today, the former ‘four the challenges for the Posthuman Glossary
elements’ (earth, air, water and fire) have consequently is to devise adequate theoret-
mutated into ‘geo-hydro-solar-bio-techno- ical and artistic representations for the
politics’. If this sounds puzzling, it’s because new forms of interconnection between
it genuinely is so. We need to take on the humans and non-human factors and
task of thinking differently about our agents.
current predicament. The boundaries between the ‘inhuman’
As a consequence of these mutations, and the ‘non-human’, however, are porous
two notions that pertain to residual and dynamic. Many scholars use them
humanism – the non-human and the interchangeably to refer to other-than-
inhuman – are very important for the human or less/more-than-human life,
Posthuman Glossary, because they single enlisting selected aspects of geology,
out acute aspects of our social reality. The anthropology, theology, zoology and
non-human refers to the status of depreci- biology to the task of reaching an adequate
ated naturalized ‘others’ whose existence understanding of these terms. In this
has been cast outside the realm of anthro- glossary, we try to make critical distinc-
pocentric thought and confined within tions and by ‘inhuman’ we refer to a double
non-human life (zoe). They are, historic- phenomenon, which raises both analytical
ally, the members of ethnicities other than and normative questions. Analytically, the
the ruling and colonial European powers. term refers to the de-humanizing effects of
But they also refer to vegetable, animal and structural injustice and exclusions upon
earth species and, by now, the genes and entire sections of the human population
genomic codes that constitute the basic who have not enjoyed the privileges of
architecture of Life, or rather its ‘epigenetic being considered fully human. Gender and
landscapes’. The reference to epigenetics sexual difference, race and ethnicity, class
(see the entry on Epigenetic Landscape) is and education, health and able-bodiedness
important to this glossary, in that it are crucial markers and gatekeepers of
contributes to a critique of anthropo- acceptable ‘humanity’. They are terms that
centric genetic determinism by stressing index access to the rights, prerogatives and
that, even at the level of the gene, the entitlements of being human. Those who
human is already interconnected with are excluded from a dominant notion of

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
INTRODUCTION 3

the human based on masculinist, classist, of a double mediation: ubiquitous digital

racist and Eurocentric parameters see their networks and bio-genetic regeneration
lives downgraded from the human as processes on the one hand and environ-
pertaining to ‘bios’, to a bestialized exist- mental destruction on a mass scale on the
ence closer to ‘zoe’. This insight about other. The terminological diversity is very
structural exclusions flies in the face of the creative: some authors emphasize new
universalist pretensions of the humanist ‘general ecologies’ and ‘resilience’, while
tradition. This critical position also lies others focus on human and non-human
at the core of bio-political analyses of species ‘extinction’. Global migration flows
contemporary power relations and feeds – also known as the ‘Lampedusa’ effect –
into a critique of the limitations of human- are read in the frame of enduring patterns
ist thought and practices. of economic, sexualized and racialized
Normatively, however, the inhuman oppression. Data flows in virtual space
also denounces the inhumane, unjust prac- coexist with regimes of earth-bound,
tices of our times. More specifically it spatial management based on growing
stresses the violent and even murderous incarceration and ‘execution’. The perpetual
structure of contemporary geo-political ‘war’ on terror occurs alongside the spread-
and social relations, also known as ‘necro- ing of extensive ‘security/surveillance’
politics’. These include increasing economic systems, to name but a few significant
polarisation and the ‘expulsion’ of people markers of our time.
from homes and homelands in an upsurge The effect of the internally contradict-
of global ‘neo-colonial’ power relations. ory developments of the posthuman era is
Holding these different dimensions of the that they contribute to explode the concept
‘inhuman’ and their social effects in some of the human. The human is no longer the
sort of critical balance is one of the chal- familiar notion that was previously known
lenges of the Posthuman Glossary. and taken for granted, and it is not consen-
Many of the contributors address the sually shared (Braidotti, 2013). The drastic
bio- and necro-politics of the day, notably transformations of our bio and necro-
the strident correlation between the political regimes have come to mark a
redefinition of the humans’ interaction ‘posthuman condition’ that combines
with their ecological and technological exciting new developments with a trouble-
environments on the one hand and the some reiteration of old, unresolved prob-
brutality of the power relations of today, lems. The Posthuman Glossary assesses this
on the other. In this glossary, ‘metadata moment as marking the end of the self-
society’ thrives alongside heaps of ‘digital referential arrogance of a dominant
rubbish’ and the phenomenon known as Eurocentric notion of the human and the
‘neuronal aesthetics’ works in tandem with opening up of new perspectives.
‘exclusion zone’, apparently unperturbed If art, science, and the academic
by their internal contradictions. In other Humanities have shared one thing, it is
words, the new conceptual and terminolo- their common engagement with construc-
gical innovations introduced by the tions and representations of the human
contributors are positive interrogations within their respective realms. Artists and
of ongoing new developments, but they Humanities scholars also mirror each
do not recoil from assessing also their other in their mutual explorations of how
negative repercussions. The entries of this people process, document and analyse
glossary cover for instance the coexistence their human experiences. Reference and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
4 INTRODUCTION

appeals to that particular idea of the ‘Generation Anthropocene’? The urgency

human, however, pertain to a block of of these questions is equal to the vitality
‘common sense’ notions that are constantly of the field: even as a relative neologism,
deployed without ever being seriously the Anthropocene has already become
defined. Too often still, the term ‘human’ is another ‘Anthropomeme’ (Macfarlane
simply accepted and circulated without 2016). It has spawned several alternative
critical analyses of its internal fractures terms, such as ‘Capitalocene’ (Haraway
and constitutive hierarchies. The ‘human’ 2015a, 2015b), ‘Anthrop-obscene’ (Parikka
as concept attains an implicitly normative 2014), but also ‘Plantationcene’ (Tsing
status as what humans ought to be, or not, 2015), ‘Manthropocene’ and ‘Plasticene’.
as well as what they may actually happen This proliferation does not contribute to
to be. In academic research in the linear stability, but it rather fosters intellec-
Humanities, the hegemony of humanist tual and artistic creativity.
values in defining the human is such that Taking the cartographic aim of the
one disputes the notion of the human and Posthuman Glossary seriously by survey-
the worth of humanism at one’s own risk ing the current state of the scholarship, we
and peril. As stated earlier, the Posthuman are also committed to pointing out missing
Glossary pursues a double aim: it presents a links and exclusions. In this spirit, the
variety of alternative responses to the glossary attempts to challenge the contem-
critique of humanism and anthropo- porary manifestations of power in ways
centrism, while also attempting to sketch a that privilege Eurocentric traditions of
theoretically coherent critical position on critical thought and do not engage the
the posthuman. Both approaches are work of ‘decolonial critique’, ‘neo-colonial’
sustained by the conviction that neither politics and black studies in a sustained
the limitations set by the anthropomorphic manner. We are strongly opposed to mono-
nature of humans nor the excesses of their cultures, also and especially of the post-
anthropocentric ambitions have been the human mind (Shiva 1993). Although the
target of sustained analysis and criticism. glossary offers a few entries in the post-
As a result of this range of perspectives, colonial and race fields of posthuman
the posthuman – far from having a stable study, we are aware of our critical ellipses
and coherent identity – manifests itself by and see them as a limitation of this collec-
a vast number of disparate concerns that tion – literally, a matter of finitude. Like
do not always coalesce into a single them- all cartographies, the Posthuman Glossary
atic field. A major axis of reflection running only offers a partial account and a synop-
across the Posthuman Glossary therefore tical view of the field at this point in time.4
consists in a critical overview and assess- The Posthuman Glossary also attempts
ment of the multiple discourses that are to build bridges across a number of other
currently circulating about the notion of missing links. It aims first of all to connect
the Anthropocene itself. How useful is the scholarship and critical thought to the
notion of the Anthropocene? This book real-life issues and praxes that are of
raises sustained critical questions as to immediate relevance to individuals and
whether the awareness of a collective sense society today. Although there is much talk
of ecological, social and affective respons- nowadays of the ‘impact’ of academic work
ibility necessarily enhances ethical agency upon the real world, the gulf between the
and political consciousness. Besides, how two remains large. This volume starts by
inclusive and how representative is the filling in this gap. Secondly, the glossary

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
INTRODUCTION 5

aims at connecting artistic and curatorial highly specialized spheres of knowledge

practice to scientific research, technolo- production, so as to bring together differ-
gical innovations and scholarly work. ent communities of thinkers and practi-
This implies an open-minded attitude on tioners who may not otherwise come
both sides and the conviction that there is across each other. As we mentioned before,
much to be gained through these dialogues. this is especially the case for perspectives
The assumption that we need to experi- developed from decolonial, black and race
ment with different ways of thinking places studies that are often marginalized in both
the contemporary artists in a crucial posi- new media and posthuman scholarship.
tion for scholars struggling with the proto- And it is also the case for the artistic and
cols of established academic work and curatorial community, who can often
language, and vice versa. appear to be physically held apart from the
Thirdly, it is the aim of the glossary to academic world, and vice versa. We also
connect different generations of thinkers hope to trigger some transdisciplinary
and users of human and non-human tech- energy and inspiration from these unex-
nologies. This is especially relevant now pected encounters, so as to renew the
that electronic networks enter into their scope of critical inquiry and move towards
nth operational generation, resulting in a more inclusive posthuman critical theory.
new generations of human on-line users The pace is so fast that the speed is breath-
being defined as ‘digital natives’. It is urgent taking. In response, the Posthuman
to study and work across their respective Glossary is a valiant attempt to escape that
assessments of our present predicament velocity and to reach out for some tempor-
and to explore the implications of the fact ary ‘meta-stability’, by combining a carto-
that age-indexed differences nowadays are graphic approach with a critical response.
structured by sizeable infrastructural
divergences, such as access to bio-medical
technologies that extend and segment life
on the one hand and the accumulation of THE INTERDISCIPLINARY HUBS
debt on the other. Such structural inequal-
ities add additional layers of complexity to It follows from the above that the notion
the question of intergenerational relations. of the posthuman is in full expansion,
Here the posthuman approach offers a in terms both of the sheer amount of
fresh lens with which to frame intergener- scholarship being produced and the new
ational justice in the Anthropocene and qualitative perspectives it introduces. The
across the great digital divide. The need terminological diversity is admirable and
arises to analyse also the implications of it goes hand in hand with a variety of
millennial youth culture’s high levels of genres and theoretical styles. At this stage it
technological literacy for their relationship includes, for instance, a posthuman mani-
to the knowledge and experience of older festo (Pepperell 2003); a school of inhuman
generations of critical thinkers and, for thought (Lyotard 1991; Grimaldi 2011);
instance, the formulation of ‘socially just emphasis on non-human agency (Raffnsøe
pedagogies’. 2013); on posthuman personhood
The breadth of terms, scope and (Wennemann 2013); on the ‘new’ human
purpose of the Posthuman Glossary is not (Rosendahl Thomsen 2013); the ‘a-
only quantitative, but also qualitative: we human’ (MacCormack 2014); the ‘dishuman’
want to de-segregate the different and (Goodley, Lawthom and Runswick-Cole

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
6 INTRODUCTION

2014) and posthuman nomadic subjects to discuss the leading scholars writing in
(Braidotti 2013). Next to these relatively the field. In cases where we were not able to
familiar terms there is a fast-growing world secure an original contribution from these
of neologisms and creative interventions. scholars themselves, we have drafted
With 141 contributors and over 160 specific entries covering their work. Next
entries, our volume bears witness to the to this, there are more critical, creative and
explosion of this new field of research and even experimental entries that aim at
proposes its own discursive strategy for devising new schemes of thought to deal
dealing with the theoretical and termino- with the contemporary challenges. Many
logical exuberance. As stated from the of them aim at fulfilling the ethical task of
outset, one of the aims of the Posthuman exploring the relationship between new
Glossary is to provide an overview of the concepts and real-life conditions. The
different critical terms, the many ‘turns’ cumulative bibliography included at the
and the leading concepts of posthuman end of the volume attempts to reflect as
critical thought and scholarship in the fully as possible both these aspects of the
Humanities today, in dialogue with glossary.
contemporary artistic and activist prac- As a matter of professional ethics, the
tices. The range of theoretical sources the glossary is respectful and open to multiple
contributors draw from may be limited, and potentially contradictory interpreta-
but it is not arbitrary. The selection of tions of the posthuman predicament, both
theoretical references has been left up to on conceptual and on political grounds.
each contributor, but the glossary has a This means also that a broad spectrum of
strong emphasis on a neo-materialist academic disciplines is represented in this
approach and on process ontologies that volume. Multiple new discourses, which
function as the point of convergence call themselves ‘studies’ (gender studies,
among many of our authors. The volume postcolonial studies, media studies etc.
was conceived in May and June 2015 as a etc.) however, have grown in-between the
series of four workshops organized by the disciplines and function as incubators for
Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht new ideas, methods, images and represent-
University and BAK , the centre for ations (Braidotti 2016b). The cross-overs
contemporary art (basis voor actuele between them are currently producing
kunst, Utrecht). Dozens of brilliant papers exciting new perspectives in posthuman
and art performances took place within scholarship.
the flexible framework of those workshops Some meta-patterns are emerging
and the desire to expand and extend the across the different entries in this volume.
discussions led us to this collective enter- We have detected a number of crucial
prise.5 interdisciplinary hubs that play the role of
Although we have opted for a presenta- creative nuclei and we have consequently
tion based on the alphabetical order of the taken them as points of reference for this
entries themselves, there are some key glossary. They are not discrete and neatly
operating principles at work in the selec- defined areas, but rather like rhizomic
tion we have made and the structure we lines that zigzag through many contribu-
have assigned to this glossary. First of all, tions, allowing the authors to belong to
in order to provide an accurate carto- several of them at the same time. Examples
graphy of the field, we have attempted to of these interdisciplinary hubs are, to begin
reflect the state of existing scholarship and with: comparative literature and cultural

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
INTRODUCTION 7

studies, which have played a pioneering Livingston and Puar 2011; Colebrook
role in posthuman scholarship (Wolfe 2014) and the emphasis on ‘posthuman
2003, 2010; Herbrechter 2011; Nayar 2013) sexuality’ (McCormack 2012). The turn
and have innovated on methods as well as to new materialism (Dolphijn and van der
themes, especially eco-criticism, animal Tuin 2012; Coole and Frost 2010; Neimanis
studies and ‘ecomaterialism’ (Iovino and 2014; Laboria Cuboniks 2015) and the
Opperman 2014a; Alaimo 2010). Another affective turn (Clough 2008) are also sig-
pioneering field is new media studies, nificant. Emphasis on bodily materialism
which has taken a more material turn in (Braidotti 1991, 1994) and carnal thought
order to account for the political economy (Sobchack 2004) mutates into ‘vibrant
of human/non-human interaction and matter’ (Bennett 2010); and inventive life
‘networked affect’ in our times (Parikka, (Fraser, Kember and Lury 2006); ‘trans-
Paasonen, Fuller, Gabrys, Terranova in this corporeality’ (Alaimo 2010) and ‘post-
volume). Environmental studies is another human performativity’ (Barad 2007). Of
crucial innovator in posthuman thinking, course the list is not exhaustive and it
both the first Gaia generation (Lovelock demonstrates the staggering vitality of the
2009) and more recent work on the post- new thinkers – such as those who drafted
anthropocentric as a metamorphic entity the ‘xenofeminism’ manifesto – who are
(Clarke 2008); multi-species analysis (van inspired as much by ‘Lady Gaga’ as by the
Dooren 2014) and zoontologies (De feminist classics.
Fontaney 1998; Gray 2001, Wolfe 2003). A brief overview of these interdiscip-
Science and technology studies can be linary hubs also fulfils another purpose.
taken as a nursery of posthuman insights, Our hope is that it may serve as a naviga-
as testified by the seminal work of Donna tional tool to help non-specialists steer a
Haraway (1985, 1989, 1997, 2008), Isabelle course from relatively familiar interdiscip-
Stengers (1987) and feminist cultural linary discourses, into the wilder and more
studies of science (Franklin, Lury and transdisciplinary field of posthuman
Stacey 2000). Recent scholarship returns to studies. The bibliographical references to
Darwin (Creed 2009; Midgley 2010; Grosz these interdisciplinary hubs, in other
2011), an author who had received little words, trace as many road-maps leading
critical attention in the Humanities, with outwards, from within the academic
the exception of the pioneering efforts of disciplines and the critical ‘studies’ areas.
Gillian Beer (1983), Stephen Jay Gould
(1997) and Hilary Rose (2000).
Feminist, gender and LBGT + theory, as
well as postcolonial studies, are another MULTIPLE AXES
intersectional critical hub. Feminists have
long been theorizing the non-human and The embarrassment of interdisciplinary
more especially the continuum between riches offered by the fast-growing field
the human and the non-human (Balsamo of posthuman scholarship is manifold
1996; Braidotti 2002; Grosz 2011; and multi-layered. Therefore the
Halberstam and Livingston 1995; Posthuman Glossary strives to strike a
Halberstam 2012). That trend is now accel- balance between providing a survey and
erating in queer posthuman and inhuman defining some meta-patterns, or emerging
theories (Giffney and Hird 2008; Hird and theoretical lines among the different
Roberts 2011; Gruen and Weil 2012; contributions.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
8 INTRODUCTION

As stated above, the first theoretical In the context of the Anthropocene,

orientations we foreground rotate around that is to say amidst increasing global
neo-materialism, ‘ecosophy’ and monistic environmental degradation, the century-
vital philosophies, in the wake of Deleuze old divide between nature and culture
and Guattari’s agenda-setting philosophy. has to be questioned and displaced. A
Some contributions argue explicitly that combination of factors encourages this
monism is the philosophical grounding for critical move. Such factors occur in a wide
‘posthuman critical theory’ (Braidotti, range of fields, like ‘artificial intelligence’;
Dolphijn, MacCormack and others), advances in the Life sciences, notably
because it allows for rethinking matter as bio-genetics; the introduction of large-
self-organizing process ontology. A scale technological mediation through
monistic ontology, as both material and consumer electronics; and the rise of
vital, offers possibilities of grounding the neural sciences and computational
embodied and embedded posthuman cultures. In critical theory as in artistic
subject in process (Braidotti 2006b). practice the notion of a nature–culture
Moreover, by focusing on the dynamic continuum has become quite accepted,
interaction of Sameness and Difference, though its implications are seldom borne
monism moves outside the scheme of out. Contemporary posthuman scholar-
dialectical opposition, stressing instead the ship pushes the nature–cultural continuum
generative force of living matter itself further, introducing terms such as ‘medi-
(Ansell Pearson 1997, 1999). Freed from anatures’, ‘ecomaterialism’ and ‘make-
the distinction between natural and human’ to replace the old divides.
constructed events, a monistic philosophy The methodological challenge for
of intelligent, self-organizing matter the Posthuman Glossary consequently
produces a materialist political physics and becomes how to represent theoretically
‘political affect’ (Bonta and Protevi 2004; and artistically the profound interconnec-
Protevi 2001, 2009, 2013). tions between humans and non-human
The influence of Deleuze and Guattari’s factors and agents. And how to fulfil
ideas, which is felt strongly in this volume, this task, moreover, while keeping in
is, however, not exclusive. Several contrib- mind the structural inequalities that
utors follow different ways of ‘mattering’, control access to the dominant category
that is to say of exploring matter as a of the ‘human’ to begin with. In accepting
dynamic process. Many other process- the shift towards monistic, neo-materialist,
oriented ontologies are at work, for holistic or ‘process ontologies’, we also
instance in the references to Derrida, need to redefine the very terms of the
Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Meillassoux, nature–culture and human/non-human
Latour, Haraway and others. A major point interrelations. Many authors in this
of theoretical convergence between them volume address the question of how
is the need to overcome binaries and to models of thought and practice in contem-
state that matter, the world and humans porary scholarship and the arts have
themselves are not dualistic entities struc- been redefined by new forms of intercon-
tured according to dialectical principles of nection and interaction between humans
internal or external opposition, but rather and non-humans. Others wonder to
materially embedded subjects-in-process what an extent process-oriented, ‘object-
circulating within webs of relation with oriented’, neo-spinozist, vital monistic
forces, entities and encounters. philosophies can sustain a shift towards

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
INTRODUCTION 9

posthuman ethical relations and post- networks – and for war weaponry – as in
human politics. the case of semi-automated drones – the
The human/non-human; nature– issue of their relative independence of
culture; medianatures continuum includes direct human control raises some ethical
the impact of networked cultures. Digital and political concerns. In this regard, the
mediation has introduced a new public Posthuman Glossary offers a number of
sphere, through the specificity of its models of resistance selected from
‘algorithmic studies’ and culture. Therefore contemporary critical thought, arts and
a new set of questions arises, which again media activism, such as ideas of ‘stateless
covers both the material and the imma- state’ and ‘posthuman rights’, as well as
terial aspect of mediation. For instance, ‘postanimalism’ and ‘robophilosophy’. The
many contributors explore the correlation issue of how to bury the digital dead also
between embedded discourses and prac- receives a great deal of attention. It
tices around ‘digital citizenship’ and concerns defunct people’s email addresses
many forms of ‘undocumented citizenship’. and social network links and pages, but
Digital activism, in groups such as also dead codes, obsolete technologies and
‘Anonymous’, stands alongside the ‘Occupy’ programmes and other forms of ‘static
movement, in a public sphere that is thickly glow’. Electronic Pietas is here to stay.
material, yet completely mediated. These questions flow inevitably towards
At the centre of the public debate about the issue of bio-political management of
the digital public sphere is the question of life – see for instance the growing import-
what may be the social, legal, ethical and ance of ‘food studies’ and ‘wearable techno-
political relevance for the ‘bodies politic’ logies’. More specifically they explore
of the ‘hypersocial’ subjects in the ‘post- contemporary necro-political govern-
internet’ era. A key issue, for instance, is mentality, that is to say the management of
how to assess the different digital agendas death and dying, which often relies on
that are being set up by governments, algorithmic cultures and digital security.
corporations, the military, the global media Technologies have always been linked to
and users themselves. The over-emphasis the military and to population control, but
on corporate priorities such as transpar- such a link has undergone significant
ency and digital rights in public debates mutations today. Many of the entries in
may work to the detriment of more this glossary consequently address the
fundamental analyses of how posthuman impact of contemporary digital technolo-
subjectivity is being re-structured by the gies upon the mechanisms and the tech-
current technological mediation. In this niques of surveillance and monitoring of
regard, the Posthuman Glossary takes a the social space, of border areas and war
critical distance from ‘transhumanism’ and zones. Other authors address questions
its human enhancement project, which about the kinds of changes that have come
serves the corporate interests of the robot- upon visual technologies in the process
ics sector and of the more deterministic of being turned into tracking devices.
strands of contemporary brain research The question of defining the appropriate
(see Ferrando in this volume). objects of study in relation to a culture of
Furthermore, as advanced computa- security, surveillance, counter-terrorism
tional networks have come to provide and the militarization of the social space
the basic logistical infrastructure for the raises the related issue of the responsibility
global economy – as in the stock exchange of the critical thinkers who are dealing

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
10 INTRODUCTION

with them. How can critical theorists produce adequate representations of our
and artistic practitioners address effect- real-life conditions in fast-changing times.
ively the key terms of reference of the We might go so far as to suggest that
current political economy of visual repres- uncritical reliance on terminological
entation and its impact on posthuman conventions today betrays a form of intel-
subject-formation? lectual laziness that is ethically inconsist-
To answer this burning question, new ent, considering the urgency of some of
evaluation criteria are needed to assess the the issues we are facing. In this glossary,
computational turn in media and cultural ethical accountability works in tandem
studies in relation to issues of power and with the production of adequate intellec-
security. The Posthuman Glossary offers tual cartographies. Accordingly we have
many resources to come to terms with this encouraged the contributors to experi-
challenge: from explorations of ‘biological ment with what we can only describe as a
arts’ to very diverse theoretical constructs, grounded, pragmatic and accountable
such as ‘rationalist inhumanism’ and approach to theoretical creativity. We want
‘immanent humanism’, to name a few. to examine the many ways in which the
collective imagination is able to draw
terminological inspiration from a variety
of theoretical and real-life sources.
THE NEED FOR CREATIVITY The Posthuman Glossary pursues this
aim by way of a twofold enquiry: on the
Another major operating principle of the one hand the volume questions the ability
Posthuman Glossary is the conviction that of any one field of contemporary know-
we cannot solve problems by using the ledge production in isolation – be it art,
same kind of thinking we used when we science, or the academic Humanities – to
created them, as Albert Einstein lucidly put provide relevant analyses, let alone
it.6 We need new terms. And new termino- adequate solutions. More than ever we
logies require conceptual creativity, which need to bring together interdisciplinary
means to trust in the powers of the imagin- scholarship and even aim at a more trans-
ation, as well as rely on academic creden- disciplinary approach in order to embrace
tials and conventions. Such creativity is not the complexity of the issues confronting
an optional extra, but a necessity in both us. The parallelism of science, philosophy
cognitive and ethical terms, in order to and the arts – so dear to Gilles Deleuze and
keep up with the emerging scholarship. We Felix Guattari – is more relevant than ever
think that the interdsciplinary hubs we in this endeavour.
outlined above provide useful connections On the other hand we argue that much
between critique and creativity, by framing more – and different kinds of – effort is
inter- and trans-disciplinary scholarship as needed to achieve new ways of thinking:
a particularly fruitful source of conceptual we may need to draw resources from areas
creativity. of expertise that do not always meet
Posthuman scholars are not inventing scientific standards of excellence. One of
new words or coining new concepts just these fields is the arts: the Posthuman
for the sake of it, or out of disrespectful Glossary actively pursues the interconnec-
impatience with the limitations of past tion between academic work and arts
frameworks. The experimental approach is theory and practice by exploring what
rather an integral part of the effort to particular kinds of research are developed

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
INTRODUCTION 11

by artistic and curatorial practice. natural and constructed resources (Shiva

Considering the importance of experi- 1997; Chakrabarty 2009; Braidotti 2013,
menting with new ways of thinking that Haraway 1985, 2015a).
exceed the determination of existing Thus, the glossary focuses on how
categories, throughout the glossary the contemporary scholarship and the arts
readers will find several visual essays that respond to the posthuman predicament –
explore the concepts pertaining to post- not only in the propositional content of
human predicament (from ‘geomytholo- their arguments, but also through the
gies’ to ‘anthropocene observatory’, ‘forests hybrid and complex methods by which
as polis and politics’ to ‘hypersea’) through they bring these questions to bear. The
the language of visual arts. Several contrib- assumption that the Anthropocenic social
utors raise the following questions: which imaginary is created by images and meta-
are the assumed subjects and presumed phors, representations and anticipations
object matters of the arts and how do they that emerge from the arts, literature,
intersect – or fail to – with academic schol- cinema and new media entails crucial
arship? What can artistic practice and implications in terms of their social
scholarly research do to strengthen and responsibility. This book raises serious
inspire each other on the issue of the in/ questions about the ways in which
non/post/-human? What methodological academic scholarship in the Humanities
and political alliances do we need to is reacting to this situation and how it
sustain in order to co-create robust con- assesses the role culture plays in shaping
ceptual and experimental terminologies the contemporary social imaginary. Some
that may be adequate to the complexity contributors question which images can be
of our times? This glossary provides a taken as emblematic of the posthuman
broad spectrum of answers to these crucial condition: is the icon the spectacular, shiny
questions. body of cybernetic mechanism? Or should
we rather value to the more humble icon
that is the anti-conception ‘Pill’?
Wary of the fact that the ‘human’ has
MULTIPLE HUMANITIES never been a neutral term, but rather a
notion that indexes access to entitlements
The ambitious goal of filling in missing and power, and ever mindful that ‘we’
links and bringing together several are not human to the same degree,
communities takes us back to some funda- extent and scale, ‘we’ have a problem of
mental self-questioning, namely: who are both self-representation and recognition
‘we’, exactly? In some ways the continued of devalorized ‘others’. This critical insight
emphasis on a general idea of the posthu- is politically significant considering that in
man and the Anthropocene – all variations the public debate at present there is a great
and puns notwithstanding – becomes yet deal of stated cognitive and moral anxiety
another way of perpetuating a narcissistic about the state of the health of the human
form of anthropocentrism. This general- (Armstrong and Montag 2009); the status
ized notion entails a further risk that, by of Anthropos today (Rabinow 2003; Rose
creating a new sense and image of pan- 2007; Esposito 2008a); the crisis of the
human interconnection, it may actually humanist vision of the human (Habermas
erase categorical differences, structural 2003; Sloterdijk 2009a; Pope Francis 2015);
injustices and disparities in access to fear of the posthuman future (Fukuyama

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
12 INTRODUCTION

2002) and of possible extinction (Klein analyses of the politics of our locations and
2014). The effect of these, often reactive, adequate representations of their contra-
positions is that they result in hasty re- dictions.
compositions of a new pan-humanity Crucial to this project is therefore the
bonded in fear and anxiety about its own question: how do power differences based
survival. Following this position, a new on race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity,
‘humanity’ thus arises from the ashes of its religion, age and able-bodiedness feature
Anthropocenic self-destruction. In this in the posthuman universe? How can we
glossary, we want to resist such generaliza- both analyse and resist the violence of the
tions, while taking our responsibility for times? Where do art and scholarship sit
the multitude of problems in which we within this resistance, and what role can
find ourselves – together. While ‘we’ are not they play here? What epistemic and meth-
the same, we are in this together. odological transformations do practices
Accordingly, the Posthuman Glossary need to undergo in order that they should
gathers contributors who propose a not reproduce the inhuman structures of
wide range of alternative visions emerging our times? The entries in the volume show
from the implosion of the category of that we need to acknowledge that there
the ‘human’ and the explosion of may well be multiple and potentially
multiple forms of inhuman, non-human contradictory projects at stake in the
and posthuman subject positions. Such complex re-compositions of the human,
diversification is both quantitative and inhuman, non-human and posthuman at
qualitative: it expresses geo-political work right now.
and socio-economic differences while
sustaining common concerns in a
post-anthropocentric world order.
Analyses of bio- and necro-power run MULTIPLE AFFECTS
throughout this glossary. They take the
form of neo-materialist, grounded or The multi-layered and pluri-directional
immanent interconnections that are both lines of thought pursued by the
embedded and embodied, relational and ‘Anthropocene Generation’ contribute also
affective cartographies of the new power to install an intense affective economy,
relations that are emerging. Significant expressed in concepts or images. What is
markers of human ‘normality’ based on the sensory and perceptive apparatus of
traditional views of class, race, gender, age posthuman subjects like? A survey of the
and able-bodiedness continue to be at literature reveals some fundamental
work as key factors in framing the notion alterations of our ‘ethereal scent’, ‘sensing
of and policing access to something we practices’ and affective responses. We
may call ‘human’ or ‘humanity’. Thus, alternate between euphoria and despair, in
although there is no denying the global a manic-depressive cycle of frenzy and
reach of the problems we are facing today, fear, narcissism and paranoia. Schizoid
which indicates that ‘we’ are in this anthro- loops and systemic double-binds mark,
pocentric crisis together, it is equally true together with xenophobic paranoia, the
that such awareness must not be allowed to political economy of affects in advanced
flatten out the power differentials that capitalism. They enact the double imper-
sustain the collective subject (‘we’) and its ative of global consumerism and the
endeavour (‘this’). We need sharper inherent deferral of commodified pleasure,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
INTRODUCTION 13

which induces addictive habits of repeti- angles and creative insights about affect
tion without difference. Deleuze and that are emerging between theory, science
Guattari’s critique of capitalism as schizo- and the arts. Our authors argue that these
phrenia (1980) is a highly relevant analysis domains combine forces in addressing the
of this perverse political economy. challenge of our collective ‘ecopathy’. Or,
The posthuman is not only a mode of to paraphrase Donna Haraway: why are
critical thought, but also a mood of affect- the machines so lively and the humans so
ive belonging. It introduces a multi-faceted inert?
‘affective turn’ that combines emotions The Posthuman Glossary attempts to
usually held as opposites: nostalgia with strike a balance between these multiple
the passion for utopian vision; the politics theoretical lines, swinging moods and
of life itself with the spectre of mass extinc- over-active interdisciplinary hubs. The
tion; melancholia with anticipation; volume wants to think about and highlight
mourning for the past with a brutalist the interconnection between our fascina-
passion for the not-yet. In this respect, tion for novel technological artefacts,
Pathos and Thanatos stare at each other in environmental degradation, economic
the eyes while Eros looks away. The disparities, structural injustice and the
Posthuman Glossary is as much a rhetor- recrudescence of power differences
ical and aesthetic exploration of the claimed to have been left behind. In other
posthuman condition as a literal descrip- words, the passion that sustains this
tion of its defining features and analytic volume is essentially ethical: how can we
conditions of possibility. The eco-elegiac come to terms with the breathtaking trans-
tone of some of our contributors is echoed formations of our times while being able to
by the flair for ‘eco-horror’ expressed by endure and to resist? How to keep in mind
others. New affects require new languages: issues of social, feminist, queer, trans,
what do you call that haunting feeling of decolonial, anti-racist, inter-species, dis-
ecological memories of landscapes trans- ability and transnational justice while
figured by violent development? Eco- keeping pace with the amazing bio-
nostalgia? Remembrance of trees past? scientific, media and communication, and
Geo-physical semiotics? Portrait of a the cognitive technological advances of
young wasteland? Colonial transfigura- our times?
tions? Scar wars? Terrestrial delirium? And Faced with such complexity and the
how should we describe that sinking wealth of new perspectives emerging
feeling at the thought of the unsustainabil- from posthuman investigations, another
ity of our future? Post-anthropocentric crucial question that emerges from this
nausea? Extinction-attraction syndrome? glossary is whether multiple forms of
Global obscenities overload? No country alternative humanisms – of the non-
for any human? Western; non-liberal; non-masculinist;
The affective dimension is central to non-heterosexist; non-anthropocentric
the aims of the Posthuman Glossary and and non-imperial kind – are feasible today.
cannot be separated from conceptual And how would these inspiring but poten-
creativity. In an era that is increasingly tially contradictory approaches fare in the
defined by the critique of anthropocentric conflictual geo-political forum of today’s
apathy and the recognition of the vitality world?
of matter and of non-human agency, this Asking these questions across the
book wants to explore the new critical multiple axes, the proliferating glossaries

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
14 INTRODUCTION

and the theoretical vitality of our 141 contribute a first set of premises towards
contributors express an act of confid- that kind of dialogue.
ence in the capacity of collective and indi-
vidual critical thought to address head-on
the challenges of today. But in order to
Notes
succeed in this daunting task, the critical 1. The Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul
thinkers in this volume have taken the Crutzen coined the term ‘Anthropocene’
institutional and intellectual freedom to in 2002, to describe our current geolo-
roam across a variety of fields of compet- gical era in terms of human impact upon
ence and areas of ‘studies’. Freedom from the sustainability of the planet. The term
need, constraints and censorship, but was officially adopted by the International
also the freedom to take risks and to Geological Association in Cape Town in
experiment. August 2016.
In conclusion, the Posthuman Glossary 2. See Robert Macfarlane: ‘Generation
hopes that some fundamental gratuity – a Anthropocene: how humans have altered
the planet forever’, The Guardian, 1 April
principle of non-profit – will be re-stated
2016.
as the core value of fundamental post-
3. With thanks to Stacy Alaimo.
human critical theory in the arts, sciences
4. With thanks to Shannon Winnubst.
and the Humanities today. We need to
5. The glossary is also produced as an e-
cement the bond between conceptual book and some items are available on the
creativity and intellectual courage, so as to Bloomsbury Academic website. For more
dare to dream up new scenarios in the information on the original seminars,
midst of the roller-coaster of exciting new consult the websites of the Centre for
developments and brutal old injustices the Humanities at Utrecht University
which is characteristic of our times. To be (http://cfh-lectures.hum.uu.nl) or of BAK
worthy of these new contradictions and in Utrecht (http://www.bakonline.org/
challenges, we need to break old partitions nl/Index).
and vested interests and install dialogues 6. In ‘The Real Problem is in the Hearts of
of a qualitative different kind. It is our Men’, New York Times Magazine, 23 June
hope that the Posthuman Glossary can 1946.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
 A
AFFECTIVE TURN these are the feelings that are ‘perhaps more
suited in their ambient, Bartlebyan, but still
Can there be affect without the human? To diagnostic nature, for models of subjectivity,
address this question in the spirit of a gloss- collectivity, and agency not entirely foreseen
ary, let’s take these two keywords – affect by past theorists’ (5). Ngai’s account of affect
and posthuman – at face value. A paradox and those it has inspired does not exfoliate
would seem implicit in the pairing. the agential human subject, even if states
Admittedly, there is no consensus on the such as anxiety do, for a time, ‘suspend’
meaning of affect, even from within a single agency (1).
disciplinary formation, whether it be philo- Perhaps those who more strictly delin-
sophy, cultural theory or psychoanalysis. We eate affect from its cognates decouple
can, however, distinguish those theorists humanity from affectivity more decisively.
who make distinctions between this concept Brian Massumi’s definitions of affect and
and possible cognates – emotions, feelings, emotion have been germinal for affect
moods, sentiments, etc. – from those who theory and would seem, prima facie, to
do not. Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, a study swerve from humanism into posthuman-
that drew a long arc of the affective turn in ism. Parables for the Virtual and Massumi’s
the early 2000s, exemplifies the refusal to writings leading up to it establish ‘the
distinguish. ‘Feelings,’ ‘emotions’ and ‘affects’ autonomy of affect’ (2002: 23). ‘An emotion
flow interchangeably within Ngai’s work, a is a subjective content,’ he proposes, ‘the
conceptual choice she addresses head-on: sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an
‘The difference between affect and emotion experience which is from that point onward
is taken as a modal difference of intensity or defined as personal . . . It is intensity owned
degree, rather than a formal difference of and recognized’ (28). Affect, by contrast, is
quality or kind’ (2005: 27). Emotions ‘unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or
become – or ‘denature into’ (27) – affects recognizable and is thus resistant to critique’
based on the degree to which they are artic- (28). If affect is not ‘owned’, perhaps it floats
ulable and narratable. The continuity free of a human possessor. But reading on,
between these terms suggests, at minimum, we learn that, though affects are not recog-
that affect and emotion both revolve around nized cognitively, they are still ‘irreducibly
a human perceiver and feeler. This human bodily and autonomic’ (28). The pre- or sub-
orientation is vital to the political force personal quality of affects does not, for that,
Ngai’s theory carries. Ugly Feelings rests on a make them posthuman.1
historical argument, that late capitalism has When we consider not only how such
deformed the political such that we must germinal studies define affect but also the
reckon with ‘less powerful’ – often ‘ugly’ – style of many affect studies, the human
affects such as anxiety and irritation because intrudes even more forcefully. Thinkers

15
16 AFFECTIVE TURN

forming the ‘Public Feelings’ group – world in a sense stronger than what one
notably Lauren Berlant (Cruel Optimism), typically finds in affect theories that
Ann Cvetkovich (Depression), José Esteban treat the stuff of the world – typically art
Muñoz (Cruising Utopia) and Kathleen objects and other people – as catalysts for
Stewart (Ordinary Affects) – write from the emotion.
embodied ‘I,’ at times in an avowedly How might affect be a litmus test for
memoiristic mode. These and generically interspecies – and even inter-matter – ani-
similar studies substantiate Eugenie mation? In my study of contemporary
Brinkema’s point that the affective turn narratives of environmental and somatic
has ‘a performative dimension . . . that sickness, affects like disgust that might seem
emphasizes the personal experience of the infelicitous for feeling transcorporeal
theorist’ and thus ‘preserve[s] a kernel of connectedness in fact make these flows
humanism’ at the core of its endeavour knowable, if not predictable (Houser 2014).
(2014: 31, 32). For Matthew Taylor, the ‘ecophobia’ that
The human, then, contaminates affect laces Edgar Allan Poe’s writing nourishes an
studies; across the differences between ‘ecological posthumanism’ rather than
theorists, this attribute makes the enter- human superiority and mastery (2013: 359).
prise cohere. Looking to environmental Affectivity does not mark human unique-
cultural studies, affect is the fulcrum for ness. The world does not give us the choice
imagining posthumanism as vulnerability of separation and superiority, ecological
rather than as a state of being ‘not’, posthumanists instruct. Care might not be
‘beyond’ or ‘after’ humanism. This strain of the stance or ethic that results from the
posthumanist thought posits a prosthetic affective messiness through which beings
being defined by ‘constitutive dependency experience ‘the inextricability of depend-
and finitude’ (Wolfe 2010: xxvi) rather ency, the inescapability of vulnerability, the
than a disembodied entity2 or one opti- impossibility of mastery’ (Taylor 2013: 370).
mized by biotechnological engineering. Whether through fear, disgust, anxiety or
A structuring problematic of affect wonder, realizing vulnerability is rarely an
theory – the relays between subject and easy matter; it is just as prone to set more
object – is constitutive for thinking post- troubling emotions into motion as it is to
humanism from within environmental create comfortable relations. For the envir-
thought. In this intellectual tradition, the onmental humanities, the affective turn of
‘object’ typically belongs to the more- the 2000s may not have made it any easier to
than-human realm of other animal species, be good toward (I use this phrase with all
plants, elements and forces.3 Stacy Alaimo deliberate naiveté) other ‘vitalities’ (Bennett
proposes ‘transcorporeality’ to figure the 2010: xvii). It has, however, offered ways of
permeability of the membranes between describing how feelings seemingly contained
humans and those others with which it is by the human show the errors in the very
enmeshed. In her feminist materialist idea of containment.
analysis, posthumanism requires
See also Ecohorror; Ecomaterialism;
‘accountab[ility] to a material world that
Green/Environmental Humanities;
is never merely an external place but
Multispecies; Political Affect; Precognition;
always the very substance of ourselves and
Trans-corporeality; Vibrant Matter.
others’ (Alaimo 2010: 158). The human
persists, but she is not alone. Her very
materiality is made of the stuff of the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
AFROFUTURISM 17

Notes subject of the body cam or racial profiling,

the efficiency of redlined pricing and
1. Cultural theorists Ngai and Massumi are
other technologies that disproportionately
undoubtedly only two notes in a complex
symphony that has affect as its theme. I
reduce the manoeuvrability of black
use them as exemplars here because of people. For technology has been, and
their influence for cultural and social remains today, an insufficient means of
theory and because their definitions liberation for the black body.
diverge. Yet interestingly, since the projects of
2. See Hayles (1997, 1999) on how post- the Enlightenment and the technological
humanism lost its body. dystopia called modernity, the technical
3. On plants, see Marder (2013) and Kohn has also functioned as the black body’s
(2013). On elements and forces, see the precise mode of collective departure.
emerging ‘elemental ecocriticism’ repres- Technological speculation, as a techniques
ented by Cohen (2013a) and Cohen and of relation borrowing from Massumi
Duckert (2015a), as well as varieties of (Massumi and McKim 2009), offers the
materialism formulated by Bennett black body a method by which the
(2010), Chen (2012), Meillassoux (2008) alienness of terrestrial belonging is re-
and others. scripted, re-coded and re-organized into
alternative narratives of being and becom-
Heather Houser ing (see Akomfrah 1996). Dery calls this
convergence Afrofuturism, which makes
use of the sublegitimacy of science fiction
AFROFUTURISM to form new entry points into self-
representation within black Diasporic
‘The preservation of black life is articulated experience (Nelson 2000; Eshun 1999).
in and with the violence of innovation.’
Although generally positioned within
S. Harney and F. Moten (2013),
African-American literary, sonic and film
The Undercommons: Fugitive
culture, Afrofuturism, like science fiction,
Planning & Black Study
extends to global social platforms, video,
In his 1994 essay ‘Black to the Future: gaming, cosplay, graphic arts and other
Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg digital and geek ecologies. Afrofuturism
Tate and Tricia Rose’, Mark Dery describes can also be said to extend into the levels
the black body as inhabiting a perverse of sensation. According to cultural critic
space of cultural intolerance; or in a very Greg Tate, ‘science fiction eschews the
real sense, occupying a place in history psychological dimension in terms of char-
where the body of the African diaspora is acter portrayal for an all-encompassing
more reminiscent of the strangeness of look at the impact of the various institu-
alien abduction, rather than signification tions that govern behavior and the trans-
of a self-determinant people. mission of knowledge’ (as quoted in Dery
According to Dery, subjugation of the 1994: 211).
black body is situated at the techno- Dery is considered the first to use the
scientific, where the subject is articulated term Afrofuturism. It is not, however, a new
as real only inasmuch as it develops in concept, but rather a generative and heur-
contact with the most (dis)functional istic movement of black speculative
modes of technological progress: today performance that solicits a do-it-yourself
in terms of the tip of a police bullet, the perspective to subjective experience (see

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
18 AFROFUTURISM

Eshun 1999). This is seen most readily in ities of historical, spiritual and cultural
the black fiction works of Mark Sinker, situatedness ‘is not something that’s given
Richard Wright, Amiri Baraka and earlier to you institutionally; it’s an arduous
contributions by Octavia Butler and journey that must be undertaken by the
Samuel R. Delany, not to mention Sun Ra’s individual’ (Dery 1994: 210); even as the
Space Is The Place, George Clinton and his black body calls upon a collective cultural
bands Parliament and Funkadelic, Afrika memory to capture new beginnings
Bambaataa and all of the margins of black (Walker 2015).
performance in between. This calls into question how the black
These cultural endowments are not to body is conceptualized in relation to ecolo-
overshadow the current technocultural gies of culture, and how the body gains a
experiments in art, and in sonic and literary connection to self-determining outcomes.
culture by author Ingrid Lafleur and Afrofuturism thus draws upon this tension
singer Janelle Monáe, online Afrofuturist in extending Afrocentrism towards a
communities founded by Alondra Nelson simulated new beginning based on a myth-
and Art McGee, artists Juliana Huxtable, ical past of greatness. Technology then
Rasheedah Phillips, Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, emerges at multiple sides of the obelisk –
performer M. Lamar, or the late dubstep one in a historical relationship with the
artist The Spaceape. subjection of a peoples and another in
Afrofuturism operates at the intersec- concert with their deliverance through
tions of history, speculation and perform- self-discovery.
ance – within modes of potential – to The aesthetic, however, does not seek to
develop a methodological immediacy that change history per se, but to establish a
combines the speculative sufficiency of future where people of African descent are
fantasy, fiction, performance and other central to their own stories. Black identity,
technocultural reflections with historical as such, is an abstraction, a language that
modes of sufferings and displacements. has neither corporeal form nor transcend-
The purpose is to imagine new relational ental grounding. Blackness is conceptual-
frameworks. In a way, Afrofuturists seek to ized and continually reconstructed in the
understand where the black body ends and process of doing, being black, always in
representation begins; and how the impos- relation to but not dependent on the
ition of historical circumstance emerges as fictions of race or racism. Even so, black
a politics of present and future collective identity is often represented as existing
belonging. within two states: (1) a historical enunci-
Afrofuturism, however, is foremost a ation represented by spatio-temporal posi-
humanist agenda. What is of particular tioning among other racialized assemblages;
interest in Afrofuturism is its draw upon and (2) aesthetic markers, like Afrofuturism
futurity’s Zionist promise – in convergence that serve as new potentialities of subjective
with Pan-Africanism and Afrocentrism – understanding.
to reconceptualize alternative self-repres- It is here, at the junction of encounter
entations. Central here is a symbiotic and context, that Félix Guattari views the
cohesion between the self-directed trans- racialized group as assigning meaning. This
formation of the individual and the meaning is a force that ‘constitutes the seeds
connective properties of black conscious- of the production of subjectivity’, as ‘we are
ness. Greg Tate reminds us that knowing not in the presence of a passively represent-
yourself as a black person in the complex- ative image, but a vector of subjectivation’

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
AFROFUTURISM 19

(Guattari 1995: 29–30). It is through the place a peoples’ history into celebrations of
meaning of blackness that the black, future possibilities. Esedebe has validity
brown and other subjected individual despite relying on what Gilroy (1987) calls
creates a cohesion of (mis)representation, an ‘ethnic absolutism’ to reimagine black
expounded by aesthetic markers, dynamic identity. Just as Afrofuturism risks being
vibrations and a cultural kineticism often reduced to a reflection of the existing
expressed as a sense of belonging. world, reflection is precisely what moves
Nonetheless, Afrofuturism’s fragility Afrofuturism into the contingencies of
comes from liberation-based ideologies other-worldness that allow for the
found in black identity politics. Here, a ethereal to articulate itself both in seas
commitment to the idea of race and of darkness and in the brightness of the
ethnic-based centrality is thought essential sun. Still, perhaps neither dichotomy is
to techniques of survival (see Bogues 2003; adequate, as the nuances that comprise
Morrison 1992; West 1989). Racial identity collective belonging are captured no more
then becomes a source of security, as a neatly into ideas of blackness than they are
body politics nonetheless, that implies sufficient descriptions of Afrofuturism –
the stability of black identity in denial of even if the resilience of black culture and
race as an ever-shifting technological black life is about ‘imagining the impossible,
articulation of wider ecological relations. imagining a better place, a different world’.1
Critics also argue that Afrocentric logics After all, each Afrofuturist expression is
are vulnerable to cultural normativities collective only in as much as it can’t be
that extend beyond the representational represented.
and symbolic. Marlon Riggs, Michelle Science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany
Wallace, Angela Davis and bell hooks reminds us that
have already illustrated the dangers of
composing a blackness in which queer- one of the most forceful and distinguish-
ness, gender openness, trans lives and ing aspects of science fiction is that it’s
marginal. It’s always at its most honest
other non-linear alignments are foreclosed
and most effective when it operates – and
in efforts to maintain the rigidities of self-
claims to be operating – from the margins
referentiality (Riggs 1994). This, then,
. . . I don’t want to see it operate from
raises the following question: if Sun Ra had anyone’s center: black nationalism’s,
succeeded in taking us to Jupiter or his feminism’s, gay rights’, pro-technology
self-proclaimed home planet of Saturn or movements’, ecology movements’, or
if George Clinton and Parliament had any other center
been taken up on their invitation to ride Dery 1994: 189
the mother ship, which of us would be left
behind? According to Ytasha Womack (2013),
Central to this question are reflections Afrofuturism is an apparatus by which a
on the role of history in pre-empting non-linear and fluid imaginary emerges.
the future, and the lens through which But how does one remain at the margins
potential futures are performed and without recapturing new, equally volatile
assessed. Afrofuturism offers a breach in forms of representation? All this
the technique of relation to celebrate the considered, Afrofuturism might be best
awkwardness and disjointedness of culture, illustrated by the impossibility of
or, as Esedebe (1994) argues, of black cent- blackness, the impossibility of being
ralities. The mythical narrative is enough to black, an impossible engagement with

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
20 AHUMAN, THE

the self and other, or as Sun Ra explains: Ahuman theory comes from two
‘something that’s so impossible . . . it can’t motives. The first is the increasing move-
possibly be true’ (as quoted in Corbett ment from animal rights to absolute
1994: 311) – a heterotopia in the abolition. Animal rights traditionally
Foucauldian sense, or a black resistance as serves the interests of nonhumans based
a way of living already present and still yet on equivalences with humans and is a
to exist. flawed politics of equality (equal to the
human) rather than difference. Abolition
See also Alienation; Necropolitics;
sees the rights of any entity based on not
Posthumanist Performativity; Decolonial
what it is but that it is. Human compul-
Critique; Real Cool Ethics.
sions to define animal rights define the
animal, and the discourse is ultimately one
Note between humans and their dominant
1. Interview with Alondra Nelson, perceptions of nonhuman entities in order
Afrofuturism, Soho Repertory Theater, to vindicate their exploitation of those
30 November 2010, https://youtu. entities. So all animal studies is inherently
be/IF hEjaal5js [accessed 13 February human studies between humans of the
2017]. other and has no nonhuman benefit
except in its capacity to catalyse humans
Ramon Amaro to stop being human. In animal rights
and animal studies the nonhuman is
imposed within a structure for which it
has neither given consent nor has the
AHUMAN, THE power of address and for this reason
becomes the differend after Lyotard’s
The ahuman is a concept coined in the 2014 (1988) description of the victim who
collected anthology The Animal Catalyst: cannot be plaintiff because it cannot
Toward Ahuman Theory. It sees post- manipulate the master’s discourse.
humanism in a parabolic configuration Abolitionists are activists against all use
to challenge both the evolutionary mono- of animals, acknowledging communica-
directional linearity of cyber biotechnic- tion is fatally human, so we can never
based posthumanism and the increasing know modes of nonhuman commu-
use of nonhuman animals in post- nication and to do so is both hubris and
humanism as a devolutionary metaphor. materially detrimental to nonhumans.
The ahuman’s parabola has in one direction Abolitionists advocate the end of all use of
nonhuman animals and in the other some- all animals for all purposes and select
thing which refuses the privilege and signi- words to exchange for those in circulation
fying systems of the human but does not in describing the oppression of non-
institute a new version of posthumanism humans – ‘food’ (cannibalism for meat,
which would continue those tendencies rape and theft and murder of young for
albeit in a mutated form. The apex of the dairy and chicken use, murder), ‘entertain-
parabola is the (now defunct myth of ment’ (enslavement), ‘research’ (torture) and
the) human. The nonhuman animal and so forth. Abolitionist philosophers are also
the ahuman are thus close in proximity but against the fetishisation of nonhumans
absolutely extricated from each other in posthuman becomings and refuse the
simultaneously. use of human perceptions of nonhuman

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
AI (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE) 21

systems and entities as assimilative and co- Note

optive. In both incarnations, abolitionism
1. See Church of Euthanasia, http://
remains antagonistic to and is considered
churchofeuthanasia.org.
radical by animal rights, animal studies
and ethology in its refusal to utilize Patricia MacCormack
animals. Abolition, after Serres, follows the
tenets of symbiosis which is a form of
necessary care and grace which is a leaving AI (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE)
(to) be in reference to human–nonhuman
inevitable interaction – a natural contract In 1955, American computer scientist and
(see also becoming-world) which over- cognitivist scientist John McCarthy inven-
throws the entirely social contract within ted the term Artificial Intelligence to
which most current debates around describe machines designed to be intelli-
nonhuman entities occurs and which thus gent agents equipped with beliefs systems.
will always exclude them. With the proliferation of automated
The second motive for ahuman theory machines programmed to accomplish
negotiates the question of what becomes of tasks and carry out functions without
the human when it is neither posthuman supervision, from the thermostat to soft-
cyborg nor animal fetishist. We remain ware updating on your computer, this
non-nonhuman animals yet we must still rich field of research has manifested the
acknowledge our biological organism’s cultural imaginary of a techno-social
place within the ecosophical series of intelligence emerging from the human
relations (see cosmology). Ahuman theory investment in instrumental thinking. With
promotes catalysing becoming-other from the algorithmically driven processing of
the majoritarian or all human privilege knowledge and communication, this
and renouncing the benefits of the imaginary has undergone a profound
Anthropocene. This can occur in infinite change and become an epitome of a
ways. Some of the suggestions offered primary ontological question: what is the
include the use of all manifestations of art to being of thought?
form new terrains of apprehension of the In the last thirty years, automation has
world and encourage new ethical relations achieved an irreversible re-modelling and
between entities, the cessation of reproduc- acquired a dynamic quality whereby its
tion toward an end of the human as a para- mechanical repetitious tasks no longer
sitic detrimental species (see extinction), define its function. These new logical
and thinking differently about death by possibilities available to a machine today
advocating for suicide, euthanasia1 and a could be grasped from within the cultural
good life over biotechnologies’ drive for imaginary, for instance if one simply juxta-
immortality. However, these are few of any poses the cinematically refined articula-
variety of tactics which could shift human tions of artificial intelligence in Kubrick’s
signifying systems toward ahuman asemi- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and in
otic reterritorializations of connectivity and Garland’s Ex Machina (2015). In particular,
novel participations. one cannot overlook the striking contrast
between Hal, the sentient intelligence of
See also Animal; Animism; Ecohorror; the spaceship based on logical rules that
Cosmopolitics; In/Human; In-Human; exclude its fallibility, and Ava, the artificial
Extinction. intelligent android programmed to break

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
22 AI (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE)

the Turing Test (i.e. to pass as a sapient In the late 1980s and 1990s, after the so-
agent able to reason beyond any reliable called ‘AI winter’, new models of AI research
responsive disposition). The AI Hal here addressed sub-symbolic manifestations of
impersonates the logical model of so-called intelligence and adopted non-deductive
‘high church computationalism’ and also a and heuristic methods to be able to deal
strong AI thesis (i.e. the idea that machines with uncertain or incomplete information.
can overcome human intelligence), Boxing away symbolic logic, AI systems
sustained by a representational model of emerged that were able to learn directly
thinking, which was based on the analo- by trial and error by interacting with the
gical association between symbolic struc- environment. These embedded agents are
tures and neurobiologically encoded and learning machines retrieving information
thus computable concepts (i.e. calculable through sensory-motor responses that
because derivable from given premises). enable agents to map and navigate space by
Algorithms were here programmed on the constructing neural connections amongst
model of deductive or monotonic logic, interactive nodes. Central to these models is
characterised by a step-by-step procedure the idea that intelligence is not a top-down
and consequential reasoning aiming to program to execute, but that automated
solve problems that could be justified systems need to develop intelligent skills
within the framework of pre-established characterized by speedy, non-conscious,
axioms or truths. non-hierarchical orders of decision based
In the instance of 2001: A Space on an interactive retrieval of information
Odyssey, the AI Hal insists that its logical sorted out by means of trial-and-error
procedures could not fail and that that attempts at determining functions. Statistical
the central system HAL 9000 backups approaches were particularly central to
had failed because of the error-prone this shift towards non-deductive logic and
activities of human behaviour. Unable to the expansion of an ampliative or non-
understand that the machine deductive monotonic processing of information.
reasoning was limited and could fail, General methods for including the
Hal decides to eliminate human errors computation of uncertainty eventually
by plotting to kill the spaceship’s astro- became dominant in models of probabil-
nauts. Famously inspired by American istic reasoning. The error, uncertainty or
cognitivist scientist Marvin Lee Minksy, fallibility of computation no longer
the failure of the AI Hal was rather demarcated the limit of AI , but the limit of
supported by the then scientific belief the mechanization of deductive logic in
that AI ’s logical model of intelligence was AI . As opposed to deductive logic, non-
unable to deal with contingencies and monotonic thinking (induction and
with thinking beyond rule-obeying abduction) is the process by which infer-
conduct. Hal was supposed to behave like a ences or the process of explaining how one
neural network that could grow artificial truth is contained into another starts with
intelligence by exactly mirroring the a hypothetical statement or an elaboration
growth of human brains. In the book of the uncertainties embedded into the
Perceptrons, Minsky claimed that a single material world. Conjecturing hypotheses
neuron could only compute a small to explain unknown phenomena is the
number of logical predicates in any given process by which what is known of exist-
case, and casted a long shadow on neural ing conditions is overlapped by a speculat-
network research in the 1970s. ive tendency towards another statement

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ALGORITHM 23

that adds on, enters into dialogue with and computing, and general artificial intelli-
exposes a forward-order of explanation. gence. Differently from Hal, these contem-
Here what is given is not known unless it porary forms of collective thinking
becomes abstracted from its particular loci machines are not stopped by paradoxes
so that it is possible to return to it from and neutralized by fallibility. Instead, inde-
another standpoint, a meta-relational view. terminacy and uncertainty are incentives
With non-monotonic logic, the ingression for the development of their task of
of uncertainties into what is given is not synthesizing randomness through predic-
geared to prove an existing truth, but to tion as they grow their learning possibilit-
expand its methods of explanation so as to ies and become able to include error within
achieve the determination of new truths. their operative functions. This is where
Such logic is evolutionary. Ava in Ex Machina shows us how to break
In AI research the development of the Turing Test and casts her spell on the
probabilistic thinking has similarly seen a truth of thinking as being not bounded to
crucial overlapping between statistical human sapience by necessity. Instead, with
methods based on given probabilities and Ava, the existential condition of machines
strategies of searching the most probable seems to parallel in another dimension the
outcomes through the abstraction of infin- condition of a primordial existence of
ite varieties from a given set of data. This human knowledge that the scenes about
process of abstraction is computational the monolith found on the moon in 2001
(see computational turn) and is defined by instantiate. The computational age of AI
the logical procedures of its functions demarcates the raise of an informational
carried out by algorithms. The latter are stratum whose logical operations are not
iterative patterns emerging from the simply symbolic or static modes of under-
inductive and heuristic methods of sub- standing. Instead, Ava’s mission of persuad-
symbolic intelligence, informed, as it were, ing a human to set her free shows us how
by the data environment through which the task of processing uncertainty is
they operate. Algorithmic logic, however, is central to a general form of artificial think-
also determined by the statistical compu- ing. The realization of thinking in machines
tations of indeterminate outcomes, where shows us that intelligence is primarily an
what is probable is better understood in alien affair, an engine of abstraction forcing
terms of predictive thinking. Prediction a constant de-naturalization from what is
indeed is central to the temporal activities given.
of thinking insofar as it demarcates the
See also Computational Turn; Non-
synthetic processing of infinite quantities
Human Agency; Extended Cognition;
of information through which thinking
Neocybernetics; Networked Affect;
leads to acting. Prediction and not probab-
Robophilosophy.
ility is central to the dynamic automation
of the new generations of AI .
Luciana Parisi
Inductive and heuristic methods of
logic in automated systems together with
predictive control mechanisms have been
adopted in automated planning, natural ALGORITHM
language processing, machine perception,
speech recognition, robotics, machine Perhaps the most present forms of
learning, social intelligence or affective algorithms, present in the conscious

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
24 ALGORITHM

awareness of most computational and instructions – in execution – for the doing

internet users, occur in corporate app and or making of something, which includes
interface relationships: the Google search necessary elements, constraints and
algorithm providing ranked (ordered) procedure, taken together dynamically.
results; recommendations for future Often when definitions of algorithms are
purchases from Amazon, eBay or Alibaba offered to a non-technical audience, the
based on indices of implication of purchas- algorithm cooks up through the metaphor
ing habits; Facebook status update streams, of the recipe and its relation to baking. The
queued and delivered as cues for reciproc- list of ingredients corresponds to input, a
ation and circulation; ad placement in the data set and/or variables, and the step-by-
sidebar of Gmail and many ‘free’ commu- step instructions for mixing, blending,
nications apps, returning bits (and bytes) of sifting, blanching and heating food
your messages as potential opportunities ingredients corresponds to the procedural,
to push communications into financial embedded, nested, iterative and return
exchange. The functionalities of these commands composed through code. And
algorithms, by design, appear and engage at just as the recipe for pumpkin bread is not
friendly levels of human perception. The the baked pumpkin bread, the code itself
levels of abstraction, the functionalities of is not algorithmic until it is run. The
code, the relations of code and hardware materialization of pumpkin bread, or a
and human somatics, and the temporalities Google search, is in its execution, an intra-
of computation and internet transmission action instantiated through particular
do not appear, do not engage nor operate at materialities, at once discrete and modular.
friendly or at any conscious level of human The previous sentence suggests that for our
perception. In this human imperceptibility metaphoric equivalence to remain true,
in service to circulation and value extrac- pumpkin bread might easily, but with a
tion, the computational algorithm offers difference of an ingredient, become banana
itself as an artefact of the posthuman and bread. But it doesn’t. The materiality of
the Capitalocene. banana does not equate to pumpkin. The
For many users, critical knowledge of spices complementing pumpkin and
this artefactuality is conscious, if not banana, while shared in part, differ. The
consensual, but the materiality, functional- chemistry of baking bananas is closer to
ities and modalities of algorithms remain, that of baking eggs than pumpkins. The
in the most classic sense of the term, black- point here is belaboured precisely to point
boxed, a knowing by demonstrated effects to the material differences and affordances
without comprehension of process. And of analogue algorithms and computational
demonstrated effects constitute only a algorithms.
small intersection of designed (including The chemistry of baking pumpkin
non-conscious) affects: desiring, somatic bread, including heat and temporality,
and rhythmic. But in order to arrive at this operates through a tracing of the com-
entanglement of effects and affects, the box binatorial rhythms of the matters of flour,
must be opened and a simple turn to basic baking powder and soda, sugars, spices,
questions must be made: ‘What is an oils and/or butter, eggs and/or bananas
algorithm? What can they do? What do and sugar pumpkin. Even in this list,
they make?’ ingredients and process differ if the
An algorithm, in itself, is not computa- pumpkin bread comes into being as the
tional. It is a set of modular or autonomous tracing of vegan and purely vegetative

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ALGORITHM 25

material rhythms, oil not butter, bananas of the second line specifies the process
not eggs, or as the tracing of a concatena- that the ingredient or variable will
tion of animal and vegetative material undergo, a = a + 1, which on the first
rhythms. These material rhythmic differ- iteration (and all subsequent ones)
ences might be thought of, with substantial means that every time the ‘a’ is thrown
abstraction, as differences between in the mix, it will be increased by one,
composing functionality through the a = 0 + 1 [therefore after the first run,
material rhythms for an Android device a = 1]. The curly brackets work like a
versus an Apple OS device. And the bowl, containing the results of our loop. So
metaphor might extend even further to the machine ‘prints’ ‘1,’, but most import-
capture unconscious effects and affects: antly, this ‘for’ demands we stay in its loop
the baked sugar–carbohydrate compounds until ‘a’ exceeds 100. So the bowl, the print
of pumpkin bread digestively entering function, will be filled until a = 100, and
a human body increases rates and the machine will print ‘1, 2, 3, [. . .], 100’
volumes of blood sugar, speeding metabol- and then stop. This result will happen in
ism followed by a triggered insulin less than a second after hitting the ‘run’ or
response, which slows and dulls the ‘go’ feature without any necessary under-
body and brain function (and much standing of the counting and temporality,
much more . . .). Relations of speed and condition and constraint, or design of the
slowness, rhythms of complex intra-active output. This result is not the process.
matters, constitutive of a body. This Neither is the explanation of the syntax of
rhythmic material process, perceptible in the algorithm.
part, known by its effects and affects, quite Each character, moment of syntax and
literally operates at the temporalities of the system function (‘for’) in this very simple
human, the body, not just and not wholly bit of pseudo-code – in execution – is
consciousness. something quite different for the machine.
But what of the material rhythms of The ‘a’, the ‘=’, and the ‘0’ of the first line are
computational algorithms? What digestive bundled bytes, code within code, corres-
correlate that doesn’t suggest eating a ponding to an electrified arrangement of
computational device? To be explicit, circuits, a temporary and stilled burn in
computational algorithms run, and only memory. The ‘for’, the ‘a <= 100’, etc., are
run, on computational devices. A pseudo- nested functions, bundles of code
code example (a partial code/natural within bundles of nested code, that make ‘a’
language articulation of an algorithm/ circuits dance, move, change, charging and
function): decharging, a rhythmic burn, unburn, burn
inherent in the very materiality of the
a = 0;
circuits. As the ‘a’ counts, iterates to 100, the
for (a <= 100; a = a + 1) {
machine resonates, vibrates, heats, charges,
print (a, “, ”) };
discharges. An algorithm is more accur-
Machines read one line at a time, top to ately understood as an algoRhythm, mater-
bottom, unless redirected. The first line, ial charges, resonances, temporalities in the
a = 0, is an ingredient, or the declaration guts of the machine, and also directed and
of a variable. The first part of the second designed charges, resonances and tempor-
line tells the machine how long to cook for, alities distributed across and through its
a <= 100, or as long as a is less than rhythmically energized and promiscuous
or equal to 100. It counts. The second part interfaces, deeply compatible across and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
26 ALGORITHMIC STUDIES

through human somatic charge, bio- tinguishability between humanity and

rhythms, affective–aesthetic attendancies. animality, the human and the non-human
Under a second. Black-boxed, in conscious – classical binary oppositions unhinged by
effects, exceeded in non-conscious affects. the ubiquitous intervention of technolo-
Bodies, in motion and rest, constraint and gical mediation. By developing sensorial
design, energetics and discrete materialit- capacities and evolutionary ‘smartness’,
ies, intra-actions, modular, autonomous digital technologies make possible and
functions and somatic affections. materialize another condition of Being
Swipe. Click. Hold. Check. Checksum. between (or beyond?) the human and the
Check. Like. Buy now. animal, coinciding with neither but
Posthuman algoRhythms. affecting both. These technologies pervade
Google’s invasion of our data privacy our flesh and fuse with our skin and
doesn’t even begin to scratch the skin. blood; they re-wire our neural networks
and alter our thought patterns, even as
See also Computational Turn; Altergorithm;
objects acquire ever-increasing capabilities
Algorithmic Studies; AI (Artificial
for intelligent learning, reaction, judge-
Intelligence), Informatic Opacity, Metadata
ment and response. These changes
Society, Networked Affect, Non-human
profoundly affect the consciousness, the
Agency, Posthuman Ethics.
sensorium, the evolution and the cognition
of both human and non-human agents.
Jamie ‘Skye’ Bianco
Even that binary may no longer hold:
might we start to think about the digital in
an ahuman form – a digital agent in its own
ALGORITHMIC STUDIES right, with its own intelligibility, whose
sense of the world is genuinely beyond the
Algorithmic studies rest on the epistemo- anthropocentric?
logical assertion that digital technologies A key element of this shift of perspect-
remodel the conditions of possibility for a ive and possibility towards this other
number of crucial discursive and material definition of Being is the computational
practices. These practices and their modes algorithm, briefly defined as the instruc-
of production, representation, distribution tions or rules written in an appropriate
and circulation include the definition of language for a computer to process a
Being, the structuring of the Social, the task and, subsequently, to perform or
instrumentalization of the Political and execute it. As digital technology takes its
the animation of the Cultural. Through place in the new ternary (with humanity
intense interventions into the very struc- and animality) it accomplishes a double
ture of these key conceptual practices, they feat. The algorithm takes on a life of its
re-tool – and in many ways manufacture own, but it also takes on our lives, to the
anew – the very nature of what we under- extent that we can begin to speak of
stand as life itself. algorithmic life itself and its conditions
Bruno Latour and Eduardo Viveiros de across its many instantiations in the world.
Castro, among others, have commented on As computational culture shifts and
the significant shifts undergone by categor- evolves, we can begin to clarify not only
ical distinctions that had been upheld with the state of the algorithmic conditions in
relative stability within the western project twenty-first-century living, but also to
of modernity. Consider the growing indis- identify the mishaps and the ways in

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ALGORITHMIC STUDIES 27

which computational culture fails to AS is the study of algorithmic

deliver what it promised. The analysis knowledge, its epistemic formations
of rules, glitches and errors alike is of great and formulations.
relevance to the assessment of how AS is the study of algorithmically
algorithms rise and fall. In short, this kind produced networks, the machinic
of analysis frames a new discursive field, production and inter-communication
where algorithms become the object of of networked machines. AS is, thus, the
socio-critical study. study of algorithmically enabled
The Codex we have developed1 sets machine life.
out the parameters for studying the AS is the study of the algorithmic
algorithmic determinations (Peters 2012) subject: the social and political
of economic, social, political and cultural subject produced by and reproducing
life, alongside their emerging modes of algorithmic practice, and its modes
being and doing. It outlines a non-exhaust- of being, doing, and becoming.
ive list of propositions for the study of
AS is the study of the algorithmically
algorithmic states, for attending analytic-
compelled (pre-)dictable futures,
ally to the life forms produced by
the consuming subjectivities it
algorithms, for thinking critically about the
structures.
extent of the entanglements of life with
algorithms and algorithmic operation. The AS accordingly is the critical study of
Codex expresses our call for Algorithmic the algorithmically modelled restruc-
Studies (AS ), and opens up explorations turing of agency and its loss, autonomy
of algorithmically defined, refined and and its strictures and restrictions.
produced horizons of being. AS , in short, is the critique of
algorithmic capitalism, its mode of
production, being and subjectivities; of
Codex transitory life; of consuming life; of
Data are the currency of our time. political culture and cultural politics.
The use and exchange value of data are AS is the study of the increasing
algorithmically driven. transitivity of data-fied social life, its
Data production, collection, distribu- coding, its codes, and its applications:
tion, circulation, and ownership the algorithmic.
operate only as effectively as the
algorithms enabling them. See also Algorithm; Altergorithm;
Computational Turn; Feminist Posthu-
AS is the critical study of the social,
manities; Postdisciplinarity; Tolerances
political and cultural life of the
and Duration.
algorithm and its conditions of change,
evolution and possibility. It critically
assesses the social order(ing) of life Notes
effected by algorithms. 1. Jenna Ng and David Theo Goldberg,
AS is the study of the digitization of ‘Codex for Algorithmic Studies,’ http://
data, the data-ification of life, the algorithmic stud ies.uchri.org/codex/
appification of being, bio-instrumenta- [accessed 5 May 2016].
tion and the instrumentalizing and
calculability of the everyday. David Theo Goldberg and Jenna Ng

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
28 ALIENATION

ALIENATION for example, when we only have access to,

and a say in, a small part of a productive
Alienation is to be rendered alien, or to process, or when the product of our
be estranged from something. We can be work becomes a mere commodity, rather
alienated from home (exile), from a ficti- than something of shared social use. We
tious world (in the theatre, in the arts), are alienated from ourselves, when we
from ourselves (according to Marx, as are either forced into, or acquiesce to,
alienation from our productive force, becoming a thing rather than a communal
creations and work). Alienation can imply actor; for example, when we think of
dependence on a power other than ourselves as our price, or as our market-
ourselves; when we become a marketable ability.
commodity, or when we are manipulated According to these points of view, alien-
by others through our feelings and ation depends on what we really are and on
affections. how we are kept from that – by capitalism
Alienation is therefore usually a negat- and by tradition, for instance. This more
ive term, implying forced loss of proper subtle understanding of alienation reverses
possession and estrangement from who we the criticism that can be made against the
really are, or who we should be. It would posthuman as alienating idea and process.
seem, therefore, that the posthuman is It is the idea of the human that is alienat-
open to a negative judgement, for the ing, because it imposes a false representa-
alienation it implies in moves away from tion on existence. We are not individual
the human. To become posthuman, in alli- and self-contained beings, defined by a
ances with plants, animals, societies, core essence, ideal, consciousness or body.
materials and machines, would also be to We are multiple processes connected
become alienated. The posthuman might across different forms and places. When
then be a place of exploitation, exile and those processes are denied, when an alli-
loss. ance with animals, or a dependence on
Two senses of alienation begin to point technology, or a multi-agent coalition, is
to an answer to this criticism. For Brecht, defined as a distortion of a properly human
the ‘alienation effect’ in theatre is a way to core, then there is alienation.
divest the audience of an implicit accept- True alienation happens when we cling
ance of the illusions of classical theatre. In to the human, against assemblages and
this alienation, distance is created between forces that constitute us as posthuman
the audience and the action on stage by processes of transformation. When aliena-
unfamiliarity and discomfort. This has a tion is defined in terms of being and prop-
positive goal: the audience has to be erty, we are led to think of the human as
estranged from the stage in order to then static, in the sense of having a particular
return to it afresh and more critically alert fixed state or fixed belongings and charac-
to its implications. Alienation is a way to a teristics. This thought is itself alienating,
greater truth. because in truth we are always going
For Marx, alienation is not estrange- beyond states, properties and predicates.
ment from property but from powers, To be posthuman is to become alien in
from our communal powers to transform many different ways at the same time.
our social worlds through joint work. Thus, against the accusation that the
We are alienated when we are enclosed posthuman is unethical because it fosters
and separated by modes of production; alienation, posthuman theorists have

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ALTERGORITHM 29

insisted on the possibility of posthuman and politically, beyond our control. Many,
ethics based on ideas of collective ecolo- including myself, have described this reality
gies (MacCormack 2012: 139). as the return of History with a capital H,
Alienation is hence a useful critical but the increasingly popular Anthropocene
concept for posthuman thought in three (Steffen et al. 2007) or indeed Capitolocene,
ways. First, it allows for a critique of the Jason W. Moore’s (2014) term for the correl-
alienation forced upon us as multiple ation between our ecological state and the
processes by false ideas of human essences capitalist condition, may be just as appro-
and properties. Second, it allows us to track priate a label, perhaps even more fitting.
the positive kinds of alienation effect The second process the altergorithm is a
involved in becoming posthuman, where response to is what Ulrich Beck (1992; see
new assemblages and alliances increase also Giddens 1998) has referred to as the
our powers. Third, it allows us to pay atten- ‘risk society’ and what more recently has
tion to the ways we can still fall into the simply been called ‘algorithmic culture’
negative sense of alienation as destructive, (Striphas 2015): modern culture’s tendency
when a process of becoming is taken too to use algorithms, codes and simulations to
far or too fast and a line of transformation predict and pre-empt the possible outcomes
disappears or loses power, thereby leading of existing processes. A pilot in training, for
us to be alienated from collective creative instance, might use a flight simulator to test
powers. his abilities to respond to all possible scen-
arios; an investment banker might develop
See also Rationalist Inhumanism;
an algorithm to speculate on the price of a
Posthuman Ethics; Bodies Politic.
stock; an insurance company calculates the
chance of accidents, illnesses and deaths;
James Williams
and during the first Gulf War, as Jean
Baudrillard (1995) argued, the US army
premeditated all of the above, playing out a
ALTERGORITHM play scripted to the comma without the
consent, and at the cost, of its enemy. What
The ‘altergorithm’ takes its name from the the altergorithm responds to, in other
words ‘alternative’, signifying the possibil- words, is the extent to which the first
ity of a state of affairs that is different from process is the antithesis or, perhaps rather,
the one at hand, and ‘algorithm’, a set of indicates the failure, of the latter. The
autonomous rules informing a computa- Return of History is that scenario that
tion, often used in mathematics, coding, either wasn’t predicted by algorithms, or,
risk assessment and above all speculation.1 more likely, wasn’t what the decoders
Indeed, I use the term to refer to those wanted to read.
practices that envisage alternative, often What I mean by altergorithm is a map
impossible scenarios through algorithmic of an actual future emerging from a virtual
modelling, or, rather still perhaps, present, as opposed to the algorithm, which
algorithms that challenge natural laws of is used for the mapping of virtual futures
probability. within the parameters of an actual present.
The trope of the altergorithm as I see it The altergorithm is the name for the prac-
is a reaction to two overlapping processes. tice, in the arts or elsewhere, that uses the
The first of these processes is an environ- algorithm, code or simulation to develop
ment that spins, ecologically, economically scenarios that will more likely than not, or

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
30 ALTERGORITHM

simply cannot, happen; or that question the altergorithm acts as if a scenario could
what may and may not happen. It pertains take place even, or especially if it could not;
to artworks that plot unlikely trajectories the algorithm asks which scenarios will
from uncertain and unstable points of take place, is interested exclusively in those
departure. To put it in other words: the that can take place. The point of the alter-
contemporary altergorithm posits an ‘as-if ’ gorithm, indeed, seems less to predict the
statement; the risk society’s algorithm future, than to think, to extend the possib-
poses a ‘what-if ’ question. ilities of the present. As you might expect
As the early twentieth-century reneg- from a digital code, the altergorithm’s as-
ade philosopher German Hans Vaihinger if statement often spells out an alter or
(2009) has argued, the conjuncture ‘as-if ’ is non-human present (see Rosi Braidotti’s
an analogy – ‘as’ – with a conditional – ‘if ’ excellent recent study on Posthumanism,
– a comparison with an unstable other; it is published with Polity in 2013, for an incis-
an equation in which not only the variables ive consideration of the nature of this
change, but also the constants. If you treat present).
one scenario as if it were another, regard- Unsurprisingly, the trope of the alter-
less of the relation one has to the other, you gorithm is particularly pervasive in the
open up the terms of the debate. The Dutch genre, or sensibility, in art relating in one
artist Jonas Staal, for instance, by discuss- way or another – logic, aesthetic, mode of
ing politics as if it were art raises entirely production, distribution or consumption –
new questions and alternate answers. to the internet and its effects on contempor-
Many of these Q’s and A’s will, when trans- ary culture. Indeed, in thinking about the
lated back to politics, make no sense, but altergorithm, I guess I am thinking above all
some might just help rethink what politics of the projects by artists like, amongst many
is and can be.2 others, Ed Atkins, Katja Novitskova, Ian
The risk society’s ‘what-if ’ questions, in Cheng, Timur Si-Qin, Wu Tsang, Mark
contrast, close down. As Shell’s scenario Leckey, Aleksandra Domanovic, Lawrence
planning division explains on their Abu-Hamdan and Oliver Laric.3
website: In Ed Atkins’ video performances a
digital avatar modelled after the artist
Shell Scenarios ask ‘what if?’ questions to holds forth monologues – Atkins’ recorded
explore alternative views of the future and voice – about the meaning of life. In stark
create plausible stories around them. They contrast to the avatars of role-playing
consider long-term trends in economics, games, however, the avatar here is not the
energy supply and demand, geopolitical double enacting his organic counterpart’s
shifts and social change, as well as the intended narrative, as much as an inad-
motivating factors that drive change. In
equate placeholder for his incoherent
doing so, they help build visions of the
subconscious, lost from its proper locus:
future.
the human body. Now hybrids, bodies
Shell, 2015
without genitals, then disembodied, a head
What-if questions, in other words, calcu- isolated in the dark, a head shrinking, a
late all possible routes one might take from head deflating like a hot-air balloon,
one’s present position. ‘What happens’, they talking from a digital realm with an
ask, ‘when you go left here, and right there, analogue voice, to everyone and to no one
and left, another left, and then right?’ Or: in particular, Atkins’ avatars intersperse
‘Where does this road lead?’ The trope of incomprehensible ramblings with grand

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ALTERGORITHM 31

theories, casual smoking with heartfelt models that, first, relate to the possibility
declarations of love and even, in his latest of a world that develops differently with,
installation in the Serpentine Ribbons or even independently from human inter-
(2014), intensely performed love songs of action; and second, utilize technocratic
Randy Newman and Bach. The simulation models of prediction to envisage these
here does not present a scenario of a alternative scenarios that defy all prediction.
possible future, but a posthuman stream of The point here seems less a plea for a world
consciousness of the present that raises without humans, than a world where
questions about both the sustainability of humans are able to consider options other
that present and the possibility of any one than the ones stemming from their own
future story at all. localized, embodied brains, options that
Ian Cheng’s video loop Entropy may well support those humans’ opportun-
Wrangler from 2013 also envisages a post- ities for survival. In this sense, I guess, the
human digital stream of consciousness. Yet altergorithm in the arts does not have to
where for Atkins posthuman means a situ- look long for its philosophical counter-
ation that is alter-human, Cheng literally parts: new materialism, speculative realism,
imagines a past-human plot, one where no object-oriented ontology (OOO ).
humans interfere with the action. Cheng
See also Algorithm; Algorithmic Studies;
has developed an algorithm that replicates
Informatic Opacity; Makehuman; Post
unpredictably: one time one thing happens,
Internet; Tolerances and Duration.
the other time another. The point of
departure – a given – is a virtual display of
an undefined space filled with a chair, a Notes
ball, a stick figure and some other objects. 1. I first theorized the altergorithm in
At a press, the objects begin to evolve, each the essay ‘Thoughts on the Space of
time differently, sometimes moving into Contemporary Sculpture, or: Stringing
each other, sometimes away, then cracking Along’, published in Jörg Heiser and Eva
the chair, now breaking the figure, and so Grubinger’s edited volume Sculpture
on. The algorithm takes into account some Unlimited II (Berlin: Sternberg, 2015).
laws of nature, but not all, causing scen- 2. See also Vermeulen, 2014.
arios which are decidedly improbable, as 3. I would be interested to see how the
well as being irrational, in that there is no practices of these artists relate to those
logical – that is to say, humanly conceiv- of the so-called ‘algorists’, the new
able – reason for their coming into being. media art network founded in the
What Cheng’s algorithm achieves is an mid-nineties by Roman Verostko and
imagination that supersedes the human Jean-Pierre Hébert. An overview of their
mind, in that it is conceived independent work titled All.go.rhythm was recently
from human interference, in that it doesn’t shown at the Ukrainian Institute of
follow the human rationale, yet that in turn Modern Art in Chicago (October to
will obviously inform the human’s creative November 2015).
capabilities.
What these, admittedly isolated
Timotheus Vermeulen
examples of Atkins and Cheng show – for
there are many other case studies possible
that extend, nuance or problematize these
two – is a desire, in the arts, to produce

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
32 ANIMACIES

ANIMACIES works unlike other facets of language that

are similarly deeply grammaticalized, and
Animacies raise a twofold issue. On the that makes it particularly fascinating. This
one hand, there are obligatory, cross- combination of para- or extra-linguistic
linguistic grammatical and arguably also richness alongside a deeply grammatical-
hegemonically encoded obligations to ized presence suggests there is much to
register degrees of animacy, that is, levels explore here, challenging the idea of any
of sentience, mobility, personhood or live- simple border between the linguistic and
ness. On the other hand, they suggest the non-linguistic.
consequences for cultural politics and First, the linguistics. consider the
theory, particularly along the lines of race, phrases: the food that we eat. The mice that
coloniality, gender and dis/ability. cats catch. The hikers that rocks crush. In
Animacy’s history as a linguistic this last example, the difficulty frequently
concept is traced to cross-linguistic studies experienced by English speakers in
of grammar, first noted by the linguistic processing this phrase has much to do with
anthropologist Michael Silverstein in 1976. the inanimacy of the rock (which plays an
He suggested that ‘animacy hierarchies’ agent role in relation to the verb crush) as
were an important area of intersection compared to the animacy of the hikers,
between meaning and grammar. Even who in this scenario play an object role.
within linguistics today, animacy most ‘The hikers that rocks crush’ thus violates a
generally refers to the grammatical effects cross-linguistic animacy preference among
of the sentience or liveness of noun phrases, speakers. They tend to prefer animate head
but this ostensibly simple meaning opens nouns to go with subject-extracted relative
into much wider conversations. clauses (the hikers who __ crushed the
In my book on this topic, Animacies rock) or inanimate head nouns to go with
(2012), the plurality of the title acknow- object-extracted relative clauses (the rock
ledges that I have built on and expanded that the hiker crushed __). Add to this that
beyond the original conceptual apparatus there is a smaller plausibility that rocks will
of animacy as defined in linguistics. There agentively crush hikers than that hikers
are specific approaches one can take while will agentively crush rocks: a conceptual
exploring animacies’ cultural politics, order of things, an animate hierarchy of
drawing upon a number of often segreg- possible acts, begins to take shape.
ated discourses. Each has its set of sensibil- Even within the case of ‘the hikers that
ities – for instance, queer theory gives a rocks crush’, however, it is only within a
feeling for the regulation of intimacy, and specific cosmology that stones so obvi-
critical race provides a sense of the subtle ously lack agency or could be the source
ways that racialization can happen. A of causality; in numerous indigenous
transdisciplinary approach to animacy cultures, including the native Hawaiian
means that for every point of inquiry there people, Kanaka Maoli, stones can be taken
are many structural understandings, which as living beings. But these are devalued
might be brought to bear, together, upon it. accounts within geopolitical spaces
Pluralizing the term is also to recognize dominated by settler colonialism and
that even within linguistics scholarship, supported by the hegemony of languages
animacy remains a mysterious, mobile such as English. Paralleling this, we also
thing, just beyond one’s reach, and yet find patterns of dehumanization within
having a powerful hold on language. It which those in specific circumstances of

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ANIMACIES 33

structural poverty, disability, racism, hierarchy is doomed to fail, to have gaps.

gender, are considered less fully human Above all, animacy is political, shaped by
than others who are in positions of what or who counts as human, and what or
hierarchal privilege. This interpretation is who does not.
accurate insofar as the embellishment of The hierarchical scale positions human-
humanness is only afforded to some, ity in one place and animals in another
whereas others become, for certain place, despite humans’ resolutely animal
circumstances, biopolitically ‘no better being, and leaves inanimate objects in
than’ those in positions lower in the several significant ways out of the equation.
animate hierarchy. How else can we explain We could say that governments in the
the utility and potency of figurative perpetual race of capitalism disregard
resources that, for instance, animalize the environmental concerns to pursue the
human targets of racism? This leads to commodity, but there is something else
situations within dominant languages going on in the priorities of matter itself
such as English in which non-human that makes environmentalism seem unim-
animals and humans stereotyped as portant. Ultimately I am arguing that these
passive, such as people with cognitive or inanimate objects in the world, despite
physical disabilities, inevitably are subjec- their marginalization, are exceedingly
ted to the calculus of animacy: what important. They are the doubled matter of
happens when they are intuitively judged biopolitics: the idea of political power or
as less animate? What are the full government, not necessarily through
consequences of this position? governmental bodies, which takes biolo-
Hence while I consider the animacy gical life as its point of management and
hierarchy as a prevalent conceptual struc- control. They furthermore participate in
ture that might come out of understandings complex ways in race, gender and sexuality
of lifeliness, sentience, agency, ability and discourses. The business of animacy theory
mobility in a richly textured world, I actively is about how the respective positions and
contextualize this hierarchy as a politically interrelations between humans, inanimate
dominant one, potentially affected and objects and non-human animals are ostens-
shaped by the spread of Christian cosmolo- ibly explained in relation to one another,
gies, capitalism and the colonial orders of when they are in fact intertwined in further,
things. Animacy’s ‘grammar’ thus extends surprising ways. These include the surpris-
beyond linguistic coercion to broader ing racializations and sexualizations and
strokes of biopolitical governance. I read abilities/disabilities that underrun the hier-
this animacy hierarchy, treated by linguists archy of animacy.
as an avowedly conceptual organization of In this analysis words, and genres of
worldly and abstract things with grammat- language, become akin to a first level of
ical consequence, as a story of relative animation, a primary site in which the
agency. Animacy hierarchies are precisely matter of the world takes shape and is
about which things can or cannot affect – or affectively informed, in this case for
be affected by – which other things within a humans. Non-human animals take critical
specific scheme of possible action. places in both theory and in cultural
Moreover, I study not only this dominant production. And in this analysis we also
animacy hierarchy’s norms, but also its become exposed to the affectivities of lead
leakages, its ‘ambivalent grammaticalities’, to and mercury as industrial pollutants that
map the ways in which such a conceptual simultaneously affect, in the popular sense

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
34 ANIMAL

of toxins, as well as effect, living bodies. There is therefore a coercive underpin-

Animacy theory allows one to question the ning to the primacy of English transna-
self-evident relevance of a word like tionally (with clear doubling consequences
‘toxicity’. for scholarship) that reaches beyond the
In the original study of animacy by fact that it must be spoken for economic
linguistic anthropologist Michael Silverstein advantage, and that underpinning involves
that I mentioned above, selected indigenous a mandate to treat certain affects, certain
American and Australian languages, includ- agencies and certain relational configura-
ing indigenous North American Chinookan, tions as plausible, and others as implaus-
Australian Dyirbal and other indigenous ible. Ultimately, animacies are meant to
Australian languages, were all identified as explore the kind of possibility for justice
sharing such hierarchies with Indo- within conceptions of matter in which
European languages. That indigenous humans play only a part.
languages have been at the foundation of
See also Animal; Animism; In-Human; In/
linguistic animacy theory, and yet that in
Human; Posthuman Ethics; Postanimalism.
terms of governance indigenous groups
have been targets of cosmological violence
Mel Y. Chen
under settler colonialism, appears paradox-
ical. But it is worth noting that the fact of
hierarchical categorization can mean a
variety of different things. It can mean either
supremacy or simply difference, which may ANIMAL
mean that one can’t equate the animacy
Animals are living beings of various kinds.
hierarchies of some indigenous languages
According to the famous Chinese encyclo-
and cosmologies with some colonial
paedia, quoted by J. L. Borges, quoted by
languages. Furthermore, as my book
Foucault,
Animacies details, there are some troubling
patterns in the linguistic research that animals are divided into: (a) belonging
default to a kind of dehistoricized account of to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame,
animacy, which neutralizes the politics of (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous,
the patterns we observe. Indeed colonial (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present
practices often use indigenous forms of classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumer-
trans-animate co-identification against able, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair
themselves (as in, their primitivisms have brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken
the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way
not advanced to a proper understanding
off look like flies.
of justified human – that is to say, white –
Foucault 1973: xv
supremacy). Within scholarship there are
tensions worth sitting with and exploring, This is only one of many possible ways to
not only to take in the radical violence of the classify animals with which we share the
ongoing occupation of indigenous and planet. Thus, Aristotle divides living beings
other spaces in ways that do and do not into animals that have blood and animals
mimic the more limited set of relations that do not. All the animals with blood,
under European colonization, but also to ask according to Aristotle, have a spine. In
in what ways scholarship habitually ignores Lamarck, animals are divided into verte-
or consumes indigenous knowledges and brates and invertebrates. George Cuvier
what are the ethical ramifications. combined the principles of both Lamarck

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ANIMAL 35

and Aristotle: in his theory, vertebrates selves from the rest of the animal kingdom
have red blood, and invertebrates have and think that they fall under a separate
white. Generally speaking, Lamarck category. This is called human exception.
thinks the same way, but he defines blood However, in fact humans are, of course,
through the intensity of its red colour. animals, too, as they are born, breathe,
Therefore, according to him, invertebrates move, eat other living things, reproduce
do not have true blood, which is red, and eventually die. Angels, even though
and so on. Hegel, in his turn, bases further they do not die, can also be regarded as
classification of vertebrates on the elements animals, since they possess wings, claws,
to which animal bodies are adapted – that talons and tails; everything which has
is, earth, air or water – and thus we have a tail must be qualified as animal, aero-
land animals, birds and fish (Hegel 2007: planes, comets and rockets included, in
425). One could also divide animals into spite of the fact that human beings usually
human, non-human, pre-human and separate celestial bodies and machines
posthuman. with tails from other beasts. Finally, gods
An almost infinite variety of today’s are animals. At least, they were. At the
animals emerged as a result of the so-called cradle of humanity, our first gods were
Cambrian explosion and the Skeleton animals.
revolution, which happened around 500 Prehistoric people believed in the divine
million years ago. This revolution gave nature of animals they saw around, and
to animals not only exoskeletons, but used to draw them on the walls and ceil-
complex organs, eyes and even brains. ings of their caves. These paintings were
Before that, animals existed, too, but they icons of prehistoric men. Lizards, snakes,
were absolutely different. Some of them elephants, lions, eagles, giraffes and other
resembled inflatable mattresses; others great things that they met did not work and
were rather like discs, tubes or mud-filled did not speak languages, therefore they
bags. These organisms, called Ediacaran were considered higher than men. They
biota, which are now completely extinct, were, and they still are, as Georges Bataille
were mostly sessile, permanently attached puts it, sovereign, or ‘essentially free beings’
to their places. In contrast to them, perhaps (Bataille 1986). However, the attitude
the main thing which all contemporary towards animals in ancient totemism was
animals have in common is their motility, extremely ambiguous. Animals were fore-
although there are animals that still prefer fathers and gods, but at the same time
to rest. provided people with everything they
Traditionally animals are differentiated needed for life – food, habitation, clothes,
from plants, mushrooms, bacteria and stuff tools and arms. Their flesh, their skins,
like this, on the one hand, and human bones, horns – everything was of use.
beings, angels, machines and gods, on the For this, people were killing animals,
other. These divisions, made by science, but if these animals were their gods, great
are, of course, very conventional. In a way, ancestors or other divine entities, such
every living thing has something animal in killings were called sacrifices. Sometimes
it, at least if we pay closer attention to the sacrificed animals were invited to the feast
etymology, which shows that the word where their own flesh was served and
‘animal’ derives from anima, a Latin term where all members of a given community
for the soul and the animating principle of – say tribe – were praising them while
life. Human beings often exclude them- eating them.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
36 ANIMISM (LIMULUS)

Human attitude with regard to animals emphasized by John Berger, who, in his
remained paradoxical throughout the essay Why Look at Animals? claims that
whole of history. With the rise of other, this process is simultaneous with the
more recent forms of religion, especially appearance of zoos: ‘Public zoos came into
Christianity, animals lost their divine existence at the beginning of the period
status, but animal sacrifices remained. which was to see the disappearance of
Of monotheisms, for instance, Islam still animals from daily life’ (Berger 2009: 30).
keeps the tradition of a massive animal According to Berger, ‘The historic loss, to
sacrifice, with lambs offered to God, which zoos are the monument, is now
whereas Christianity tends to be a kind irredeemable for the culture of capitalism’
of post-sacrificial religion: the death of (ibid. 37). More and more animals depart,
Christ on the Cross symbolizes the last one by one, leaving humanity with pets
sacrifice from which Christian history and toys. To these striking observations,
starts. Animals nevertheless keep pro- Akira Mizuta Lippit adds that in fact they
viding men with all the stuff needed ‘never entirely vanish, but rather continue
for human life – flesh, skins, bones, etc. to exist in a state of perpetual vanishing’.
As Michel Serres notes in his theory of the Their existence become spectral, or, ‘In
parasite: supernatural terms, modernity finds
animals lingering in the world undead’
We adore eating veal, lamb, beef, antelope, (Lippit 2000: 1).
pheasant, or grouse, but we don’t throw When the last animal disappears, the
away their ‘leftover’s. We dress in leather
sun will die out and never rise again.
and adorn ourselves with feathers. Like
the Chinese, we devour duck without See also Ahuman; Animacies; Animism;
wasting a bit; we eat the whole pig, from Animism (Limulus); Bios; Postanimalism;
head to tail; but we get under these Urbanibalism.
animals’ skins as well, in their plumage or
in their hide. Men in clothes live within Oxana Timofeeva
the animals they devoured. And the same
thing for plants.
Serres 2007: 10
ANIMISM (LIMULUS)
In Serres, it is not use or exchange value,
but abuse value which drives human Limulus is a film. The narrator is a super-
economy based on the constriction of natural piece of marine debris.
parasitic chains. To this, we can add that
the most perfect of such chains is called See also Animism; Non-Human Agency;
capitalism: it is a religion in which animal Biological Arts/Living Arts; Hypersea;
sacrifice is mostly replaced with a massive Multispecies.
industrial slaughter.
It is no surprise that the epoch of the
Karen Kramer
human activities on Earth, recently known
as the Anthropocene, is characterized by a
gradual extinction of other living entities.
Capitalist modernity is especially emblem-
atic in this regard. The disappearance of
animals in the last two centuries was

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ANIMISM (LIMULUS) 37

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
38 ANIMISM (LIMULUS)

Stills from Karen Kramer, Limulus, 2013, film.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ANIMISM 39

ANIMISM crucial node in the discursive formation

of colonial modernity in the nineteenth
‘Animism’ designates a cosmos in which century, with its concerns over media,
theoretically everything is alive and materiality and the validity of non-
communicating, and potentially possesses European knowledge.
the qualities of being ‘a person’ or, at the Drawing on classical philosophy and
very least, an agent of some kind. It a then-virulent debate on vitalism and
describes a world in which all social and spiritism, it was Edward B. Tylor (who held
ontological boundaries are porous and can the first university chair in anthropology)
be crossed under specific circumstances, a who gave the term its colloquial meaning
world of becomings and metamorphoses, in his major work Primitive Culture (1871),
in which no entity precedes the sets of signifying a ‘belief in spirits’ that for Tylor
relations that bring it into being. was the universal origin of religion. The
From the perspective of state order, term carried the allegation that so-called
insofar as the latter relies on stable identit- primitive cultures were incapable of assess-
ies, all kinds of animisms pose a potential ing the material world.
threat. The discourse about ‘savage’ Tylor claimed that every religion
animism is hence above all a question of stemmed from the attribution of life, soul
what is permitted into the social collective, or spirit to inanimate objects. According
with full status and rights, and what gains to this theory, Europeans have advanced
only minor or subjugated status or is from animism, via polytheism, to mono-
completely excluded. The border of separ- theism, and from there to the highest stage
ation between the fully ‘human’ and its of science, rising from a state of nature to
others – the primitive, the savage, the one of civilization. In contrast, indigenous
animal, the insane – is not simply a given, peoples of North and South America,
but a cultural construction and evolution- Africa, Asia and Polynesia were left behind
ary product at the same time, with some during this evolutionary process and
distinctions arguably less mutable then remain as the savage survivals of a natural
others – for the border between a plant and state. But while Tylor legitimized the colo-
a human to be crossed, an entire cosmo- nial agenda both explicitly and implicitly,
logy and its order of the elements would he also was among those European writers
need to be upset. who insisted early on about the mental
unity of all mankind – a fact that was of
great significance in a climate of scientific
Colonial Implications
racism that often explicitly denied non-
Animism, derived from the Latin anima, Europeans rationality or even humanity.
inextricably links questions of communic- Despite its enormous influence in cultural
ability and media with long-embattled theory from psychology to art, Tylor’s
questions over the soul and its relation to animism was long shunned throughout the
materiality. Is the soul an enclosed property twentieth century due to its all too explicit
of human beings alone or a realm of evolutionism and its investment in what
mediality, the condition of possibility to Claude Lévi-Strauss termed the ‘archaic
be- in-a- medium-of- commu nic a tion? illusion’ – the fallacy characteristic of
Inheriting earlier theological discourses modern primitivism that blended children,
transposed into secular and novel scientific savages and the insane and declared them
vocabularies, the concept came to be a to be survivals of an archaic past. In the late

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
40 ANIMISM

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries their others, as the minimum demand put
‘animism’ was frequently invoked in the forth by the concept is that at least these
European struggle to account for the onto- borders and their underlying categories
logical enigma of the mode of communic- can potentially be re-thought. The charac-
ation in so-called primitive societies, as ter of the concept as a real conceptual and
well as mediumistic phenomena inside imaginary limit is underlined by the fact
Western societies and the rise of technolo- that for the majority of European authors
gical media. The discourse of animism writing on animism, just like Tylor, the
hence constituted a ‘media-technological ‘spirits’ of others actually remain enigmatic
phantasm’ (see Hörl 2015) situated ontolo- and inaccessible. ‘Spirits’ appear to categor-
gically in the abyss between the dichotom- ically escape the objectification methods
ies opened up by (Cartesian) poles of of Western epistemology. Within their
matter and mind, subject and object, respective systems of knowledge and
humans and nature. It is equally invoked disciplines, most authors are incapable of
with great frequency whenever the concep- acknowledging their ontological status as
tual certainties related to these poles and ‘real’, and hence transpose them into other
their mode of representation are fractured, ontological designations – as phenomena
designating a liminal zone in the encounter of psychology or even art.
with alterity and ontological difference. To talk of animism today still means to
Throughout its history, the term stands approach the limits of the matrix of Western
for the attempt to fixate contradictory thought. With this concept, modernity
moments of conceptual bewilderment, sought to differentiate itself from its other
from the promise of transformability and with a gesture of inclusive exclusion, assign-
unbounded intelligibility across ontolo- ing such otherness a place within its own
gical divides, to the experience of these matrix. The otherness of animism is simul-
divides as unbridgeable and untranslatable. taneously a horizon that circumscribes and
encircles modernity and its civilizational
discourse, from both the past and the future.
From the past, because the animism
Contemporary Uses described by the ethnologists and psycholo-
In recent years, the concept has been gists of the late nineteenth century as the
revived in debates that critically mirror primordial ground of ‘religion’ (cf. Hörl 2005;
and question the ontological partitions Schüttpelz 1872; Schott 2015) is that which
and assumptions of modernity and its modern civilization must suppress and leave
standard metaphysics. The new under- behind in order to become civilized and
standings of animism are not based on the modern. But animism also appears at the
fundament of identity and being, but other end of the vector of time – as a future
rather on becomings, echoing an alternat- condition in which alienation and the great
ive strand of Western philosophy.1 This divides of modernity are imagined as over-
resurgence of animism as ‘relational onto- come. A politicized discourse on animism
logy’ is perhaps symptomatic of a wider hence may ask not about the subjectivity of
crisis of Western objectivism under a new perception, but about the subjectivity of the
information paradigm (see Hörl 2015). so-called object. It is not only the histori-
The continued challenge of the concept ography of slavery and colonialism that
of animism lies in the imperative to re- demands that the question of animism be
think the border between humans and approached inside out, as it were.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ANONYMITY 41

Animism and Capitalism the horizon of de-objectification, the

horizon of a relational subject within the
During the further course of the twentieth field of an expanded mediality. The animism
century animism ceased to function as of capital is a resource which grants the
modernity’s excluded counter-image. In neoliberal subject access to (self)transform-
the middle of the twentieth century Claude ability and perhaps even more importantly,
Lévi-Strauss declared the ‘archaic illusion’ following the imperative of flexibility and
to be over (Lévi-Strauss 1949), and this ecological behaviour, with the means to
end was associated with the dissolution of adapt. In a certain sense, the mechanisms
substance-based thinking and its dualistic described by Freud, according to which the
oppositions of man and nature, body and animist projects his consciousness into the
soul, even life and non-life. On the basis of world, are becoming increasingly realized
information technologies, cybernetics and in the algorithmicized world of digital
system theories, the former oppositions tracing and tracking, at least to the extent
became increasingly obsolete. The entire that the difference between consciousness
second half of the twentieth century bears and world is annulled when we inhabit the
witness to an ontological transformation, in feedback loops, continually encountering
which the categories, the representational, the preferences and projections of our own
substantial and transcendental thought of digital profiles.
Western modernity are gradually replaced
by the paradigm of communication, cul- See also Animism (Limulus); Anthrōpos;
minating in a relational reformulation of Non-human Agency; Anthropism/
reality. Immanent Humanism.
To this day we still occupy the framework
of this new discourse: the previously Note
excluded (banished to the abyss of the
‘archaic’) middle now shifts to the centre: 1. See, for example, Viveiros de Castro
‘Everything takes place in the centre’, through (2004), Bird-David (1999), Descola (1992)
and Holbraad and Willerslev (2007).
‘mediation, translation and networks’
(Latour 1993: 76). In the world of distributed
consciousness, with the power of agency
Anselm Franke
allotted to human and non-human protag-
onists, it is no longer the shaping of the
world of objects through human labour that ANONYMITY
constitutes the core of production, but the
‘I mourn the loss of my anonymity every
modulation of milieus, and within them, the
day.’
‘transindividual’ dimension of the produc-
tion of subjectivity (cf. Aspe 2013). The Writing from prison to supporters, an
‘return’ of animism to the centre of modern- anarchist activist who is inside for placing
ity essentially proves to be a result of compu- a home-made ‘stinger’, a plank with an
terization and the experience of medial array of upturned nails, outside the car exit
environments and their feedback loops. of a police station in Bristol one night,
The horizon of neoliberal ideological grieves for her change in status from an
mobilisation is, as Achille Mbembe recently unnameable force to that of a known
proposed, an identity of capital and quantity (Shepherd 2015). This loss of
animism (Mbembe 2015: 17). It delineates anonymity, of turning a pluripotent person

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
42 ANONYMITY

into something with a record, a name, writhe together without name or obligation,
address and date of birth, with biometric though variably riddled with the systems of
measurements, known associates and affil- nomenclature given in the anthropic toolkit.
iations is a point of anguish. Anonymity Becoming the agent of history, rather than
for her is a space of freedom, a chance to of the mere passage of time, in such a
move in the city without being logged, context meant moving backwards and
without being anticipated, without bring- forwards across the boundary of nameless-
ing the plague to others who might lose ness at different times and in different ways,
their anonymity by becoming persons of giving words to a process, uttering new
interest to the police by observable contact words, sometimes attaching them to some-
with her. The loss of anonymity in this case thing that became a subject.
is tragedy, losing itself to identifiability as a The question of alienation, in which the
force that negates anonymity, shapes and human became strange to itself, through
disembowels its constituent capacities and work, obligation, custom, and indeed experi-
its spaces of feeling and action. ment, sometimes as a release, sometimes as
Anonymity has its structural conditions anguish is core to this era, but it was also the
and its histories, its contours changing over era in which anonymity to oneself, as Eduard
time in relation to the techniques of the Glissant writes in terms of opacity, becomes
state, of science and of media. Anonymity, paradigmatic of the question of being a self
more broadly, is not only the welcome dark (Glissant 1997). Knowledge and anonymity
cloak of the revolutionary, but also the are not mutually exclusive, but intertwined.
space in which much of life takes place and For Foucault, these two tendencies were
which, historically speaking, it has unfol- negotiated by the ‘anonymous murmur’
ded. Anonymity is the space of evolution (Foucault [1973] 1994) of discourse in
and the coming into being of life amidst which the ideas of the time were developed
the interactions of millions of unnamed not in the decidedly named operations of
entities. The way in which different histor- the world of philosophy, but in the complexes
ical moments articulate the tension of ideas and operations that formed ways of
between processes of naming, describing knowing and doing in medicine, and the
and knowing, and anonymity as a primal human and natural sciences more broadly.
condition constitutes a submerged strata of Probing the unspoken and explicit terms
the condition of knowledge. of this process, from the formulations of
The literature of the nineteenth century disciplines to the circulation of techniques
made a virtue and a problem of the city as provides in turn an initial means of recog-
the engine and the theatre of anonymity. nizing the way in which technologies take
The night and the proximity of thousands part in the shaping and induction of know-
of unknown persons became the space in ledge. In such a condition for Foucault, a
which figures such as the ‘masses’ could be problem was to find a means of erasing one’s
conceived. The enormity of human force name, of gaining the succour of disappear-
driving industry, filling slums, devouring ance behind the cloak of anonymity
resources, reproducing and doing unname- (Foucault 1996).
able things in anonymous rooms is a staple, Such a position, within this tension
and imagined as a space of freedom, of between anonymity and the mechanisms
fascination and of disgust. Here history of knowledge, forms the grounds for much
becomes an immense black chamber at the of the way in which modes of anonymity
back of a pub, a space in which bodies are formed in contemporary politics, with

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ANONYMITY 43

the specific condition also that such polit- may also invert and become a defining
ics is also partially prepared and embed- contour of a literal concrete border wall.
ded in technological forms. One can say Alongside this condition is that of the
that there are broadly two tendencies here, relation between privacy and anonymity in
neither of which is immune from the digital media. Whereas anonymity is to not
other: the discourse of human rights and yet become named or to exist outside of
the related though partially contradictory the condition of the registration of names,
one of the tension between anonymity and privacy is to maintain identity as a
privacy in computational and networked resource; to parcel it out, to operate with it
digital media. as it has already entered the economy of
In the contemporary era, human rights identification but held in reserve as an
has been formulated as against the asset within possessive individualism. The
anonymizing functions of cells, torture, large-scale platforms that aim at produ-
mass graves and labour camps, which cing and enforcing global monopolies in
themselves used mechanisms of identifica- particular varieties of digital information
tion and enumeration aimed at erasing the services have the erasure of anonymity as a
singularity of a person (Wachsmann 2015). core business aim. Subsequently, what
Human rights discourse consists of identi- passes for privacy is also eroded by them.
fying and raising to a level of attention Part of this condition is what makes for
those who are effaced and dismembered. It new political movements: those that
extols and defends people without the embrace privacy as a form of human right;
papers that name, those without access to and those that engender anonymity as a
anything but anonymity. It makes public form of conflict and refusal. Anonymity as
the means of erasure and provides a means a condition, in the figure of the multiple-
of reverse-engineering such processes to name ‘Anonymous’ used by hackers, is also
name their mechanisms and their opera- a declaration of solidarity in this condi-
tors (Forensic Architecture 2014). In doing tion, a figure of the unknown as one of
so it must negotiate the difficulty of pro- generosity (Coleman 2014). Here, those
posing a universalized version of humanity identified and isolated from this current
that acts not as a condition of solidarity but have often shown themselves to have an
as an agent of differentiation of what falls astute political analysis of the present day.
above and below such a standard and that One particular episode is perhaps
can thus, once codified and turned into a symptomatic of the interconnected fault
legal operator in itself, be manipulated in lines of this condition. In 2012, people
turn against the conditions that it aimed at using the Anonymous name leaked the
defending. Such, for instance, is the condi- email log of the consultancy group Stratfor
tion in Gaza where, as Eyal Weizman via WikiLeaks. Stratfor’s work involves
describes it, the legal defences of human trading in political and economic inform-
rights are used by Israeli military lawyers ation, often against political activists
as a means to describe, and thus tighten, and human rights movements, especially
the inside of a tourniquet (Weizman 2012). those that may have some consequence for
Human rights thus becomes a paradoxical the continued profitability of resource-
yet universal foundation that is at once extraction based industries. The informa-
both a Möbius strip, turning itself inside tion that led to the public release of this
out in grotesque convolutions, but also data came from a hacker called Sabu,
essential, a barrier and a barricade, that an FBI -supported agent provocateur. The

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
44 ANTHROPISM/IMMANENT HUMANISM

data released revealed the list of Stratfor’s there any premises that can be retained
subscribers and the hysterically sober tone from a concept that seems to have been
and content of their advice on acting evacuated of all its promises, having
against emerging threats to the status quo. traversed the space from project to an ideo-
Here, identity (of the informant), anonym- logy that has supported both the most
ity (of information sources and hackers) horrific and the most sublime acts by
and privacy (of the companies and others human beings? Humanism is a notoriously
subscribing, including of the judge who slippery concept that, as Vito Giustiniani
decided the result of the consequent trial) (1985) points out, shifts meanings from
are tangled in a knot that reveals their language to language even within the same
crucial role as parameters of contempor- linguistic family (from German to French),
ary forms of life. Crucially, all three are linguistic traditions (from continental
involved with different modalities of Europe to Britain) and political genealogies
power that effect their capacities and their (from Greek to Latin). Humanism writ
unfolding in time. The rights to property large is of course, an anthropocentric
and privacy set protective boundaries praxis, a praxis that centres the world on
around the capacity to circulate anonym- the human being as the human in its
ous murmurs that in turn propitiate the Renaissance iteration, sourced from
easy facility of transgressing what might be humanus, who is always already a being
established as the human rights of workers predicated upon that which it excludes, be
and those living in parts of the world that woman, Black, First Nation, dark-and-
targeted for resource-depletion. The simple darker, African, indigenous, resting on the
facts of who goes to prison and who does transcendence of its own meaning. It is a
not, what information flows and what concept and a praxis that was vacated in the
must be leaked, who remains anonymous Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes,
and who does not in such a case, make where the classical content of humanism
things remarkably easy to name. was replaced by the turn to science and
technology. As Giustiniani notes, in
See also Algorithm; Leaks and Stings;
Classical Latin humanus carried with it, in
Metadata Society.
addition to various determinants of the
human (speech being one of them) two
Matthew Fuller
other attributions of the human, one being
‘benevolent’, the other being ‘learned’.
Giustiniani shows that while ‘learned’ was
the dominant determinant in classical times
ANTHROPISM/IMMANENT it was lost during Middle Latin while ‘bene-
HUMANISM volent’ was retained. From there Giustiniani
argues that ‘in antiquity humanus defined
I propose that we retool and repurpose human nature downwards, towards the
humanism to an anthropism, an immanent animal, while in the Middle Ages it rather
humanism (in a Spinozian, Deleuzean, mattered to define human nature upwards,
Balibarian immanence). But first let us towards God’ (1985: 169). It is this human-
think if there is anything to be salvaged ism that seems to have produced what is
from the original concept of humanism known as ‘colonial humanism’, a humanism
that would be useful not only in thinking that rested and depended upon the bene-
about, but also in acting as humans. Are volence and humanitarianism of the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ANTHROPOCENE OBSERVATORY 45

colonialists and their local proxies (Césaire now in Aimeé Césaire, now in the utter-
1972; de Gennaro 2003; Wilder 2005; ances of Malcolm X, of the inmates at
Cooper 2006). Attica, of the Palestinians in Gaza, on signs
The German neoclassical movement held by the refugees and immigrants
in architecture of the late eighteenth and on the Greek border with Macedonia
early nineteenth centuries (itself the result pleading for safe passage to a safe place.
of the hellenomania of the Germans for I train my gaze, then, to a new iteration
Ancient Greece) that looked at ancient of humanism, an immanent, secular,
Greek rather than Roman art challenged democratic and anthropological human-
the Latin-based humanism of the time and ism that will further trouble and upset the
introduced German neuhumanismus that field, that will unsettle the archive, a
privileged Greek thought (and democracy) humanism centred on humanity, one that
over Latin thought (and res publica). Until neither falls back to the anthropocentrism
Hitler showed up. of the Enlightenment nor reimagines the
In the space between the humanitarian human as the aleatory experience of itself,
benevolence of humanismus (what Césaire a human that places the méconnaissance of
called in his Notebook 53 ‘benefactors itself, the mis-recognition of the subject by
of humanity’) and the rationality and sub- the subject at the centre of a new political
limity of neuhumanismus stepped Edward project of a promised autonomy. An
Said (2004) to draw a distinction between immanent humanism that listens to how
Heidegger’s humanism as the logos of the humans define themselves, a humanism
metaphysical relationship of humanism to that is an anthropism, so that it skirts the
a prior Being, and what Said meant by exclusionary mechanisms of the past and
humanism, a term that he imbued with the re-proposes the ánthropos of the now,
experience of exile, extraterritoriality and outside of any transcendence, engaging
homelessness. Keeping in mind the abuses with no metaphysics.
that humanism suffered in its iterations as
See also Anthrōpos; Anthropocene;
Eurocentrism, Said called for a different
Critical Posthumanism; Posthumanism;
kind of humanism, ‘humanism as a usable
Posthuman Critical Theory.
praxis of intellectuals and academics who
want to know what they are doing, what
Neni Panourgiá
they are committed to as scholars, and who
want also to connect these principles to
the world in which they live as citizens’
(2004: 6). Said saw humanism as the ‘process ANTHROPOCENE OBSERVATORY
of unending disclosure . . . self-criticism,
and liberation . . . as critique that is demo- A new intensification is reshaping the
cratic, secular and open . . . and that its surface of the planet: human changes to the
purpose is to make things available to Earth’s climate, land, oceans and biosphere
critical scrutiny as the product of human are now so great and so rapid that the thesis
labor’ (21–2), a humanism that, with a nod of a new geological epoch defined by the
to Isaac Deutscher’s ‘non-Jewish Jew’ would actions of humans – the Anthropocene – is
engage the ‘non-humanist humanist’ (77). now being widely debated and articulated.
This is a humanism that rests on the under- This thesis is developing across a number
standing – no, demands the recognition – of circuits, institutions, organizations,
of a shared humanity, now in Franz Fanon, scientific and intellectual fields, all of which

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
46 ANTHROPOCENE OBSERVATORY

are equally affected by this unfolding these practices in a series of short films,
discourse, as much as the environments in interviews and documentary materials: the
which they act. aim of the project is to illustrate in detail the
Operating as an observatory, a compos- unfolding of the thesis of the Anthropocene
ition of documentary practices and in its many streams of influence.
discourses, this project traces the forma-
tion of the Anthropocene thesis. The
Territories
project combines film, photography, docu-
mentation, interviews, spatial analysis and The Anthropocene is the new geological
fieldwork to form an archive and a series epoch where the world-system dominates
of installations, seminars, debates and and impacts the earth system at new and
cultural interventions. unprecedented scales and intensities. It
Across a number of specific interna- sets in motion a series of reverberations
tional agencies and organizations, informa- and oscillations that scatter long-estab-
tion about scientific research is acquired, lished boundaries and it opens up a new
registered, evaluated, processed, stored, set of divisions of time and space.
archived, organized and re-distributed. Territories are the specific forms of the
These behind-the-scenes processes and links between the earth and humans,
practices, that lead to the equally complex between the earth system and the many
decision-making procedures, form new world-systems that humans shape.
discourses and figures of shift. The Territories are the sustained form of the
Anthropocene Observatory documents relationship between human cohabitation

United Nations COP19 Climate Change Conference. Warsaw, Poland, 2013.

GIULIA BRUNO AND ARMIN LINKE

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ANTHROPOCENE OBSERVATORY 47

and material processes, unfolding in time humans, and between us and natural
and across space. They are a construction resources, processes and forms.
developing over time, and they mould the The rise, development, articulation and
structures of both environmental processes organization of territories divide time
and the specific forms of human polities. and establish boundaries and borders in
The boundaries of the social, economic, space. These divisions are as dynamic as
legal, political and cultural spaces that their counterparts. The rise of new terri-
territories shape, their rules of legitima- tories cuts across established relations;
tion, inclusion and exclusion, their in their wake new articulations are formed,
members, their hierarchies, their cohesion and previous ones disrupted and severed.
over time and space, are reflected and The conceptualization of these moments
marked into the forms of terrains, river of transition, the relations to the material
basins, shorelines, fields, the modes of traces and the human histories of these
organization of work on the land, the transformations, is what guides and forms
shape of settlements and the framing of aspirations of knowledge, governance and
circulations. influence over human spaces and earth
Territories evolve in time and in space, processes. The Anthropocene is reshaping
they are a dynamic system, shaped by a these aspirations, reallocating and redis-
vast array of individual interactions, local tributing agencies, establishing new power
contingencies and specific sets of agents. relations and new links between atmo-
The particular forms of those interactions, spheric chemistry and human political
and their relative stability over time, shape action, between ocean circulations and
vast systems of coherence and power; they infrastructures, between sedimentation
establish the forms of the relation between processes and engineering, between energy

Mesopotamia: territorial transformations at the age of global war. Multiyear satellite multispectral
analysis, normalized difference vegetation index. © TERRITORIAL AGENCY

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
48 ANTHROPOCENE OBSERVATORY

and natural resources extraction and the forming a coherent whole sustained in
forms of globalized economy and war. space and over time, with clear boundaries
A series of Anthropocene tipping and durations of its internal and external
points, of rapid transitions away from the relations. Earth System sciences set out to
long-established forms of modern world- understand the complex interrelations that
systems and from the territories of the characterize the Earth as a whole. They
Holocene, are depicted here. They charac- integrate a variety of disciplines and fields
terize how the concept of the Anthropocene of knowledge production.
is resonating across human spaces, cutting The development of Earth System
through notions of government and plan- sciences has shown that the Earth operates
ning, survey and management of resources, as a complex single system, with physical,
modifying scientific practices and their chemical, biological and human com-
relation to humanities, setting in spin ponents, each one interacting with all the
forms of cohabitation. A dark, new space is others. They contribute to shape a system
opening up, where only small glimpses of that is self-regulating and presents multi-
new territorial structures taking form are scale temporal and spatial coherences. The
visible. dynamics of the relations that characterize
the Earth System are unique and they
are dominated by life. The conditions to
Earth System maintain life are the result of complex self-
In a system, different elements or com- organizing relations between the compon-
ponents interact and are interdependent, ents of the Earth System. The interaction

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 99.9 per cent air-based substance. Pasadena, USA
1999. ARMIN LINKE

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ANTHROPOCENE OBSERVATORY 49

Copper mine. Chuquicamata, Chile 1999. ARMIN LINKE

between living forms and their inorganic rituals have a major role in human history
environments affects the atmosphere, as much as local contingencies and imme-
global temperature, ocean salinity, oxygen diate actions have.
in the air, the water cycles and the carbon The intertwined relation between the
and nitrogen cycles that guarantee that life history of nations and the history of the
is sustained on our planet. Earth has been at the centre of many differ-
The development of Earth System ent conceptualizations and civilizations
sciences over the last decades has indicated over time. The development of these
that human activity is deeply affecting concepts, their specific history, their form-
the entire system. The atmosphere, the alization, structuring and diffusion are
geosphere, the cryosphere, the biosphere equally a key element in the formation of
and the hydrosphere are faced with new world-systems.
forces, mobilizing the Earth towards World-systems are a coherent, sweeping
instability and possible great fluctuations force, unfolding across large areas and
in its interdependent dynamics. through economic, social, political and
cultural structures and interactions. They
operate at very high levels of coherence and
World-systems unfold at scales well beyond the individual
Human systems and societies have forms elements that shape them. They are whole:
that develop over history. The specific the boundaries they structure and the flows
human relations are shaped, structured of energy, money, ideas, language, social
and hardened by these historical processes. class and rank, law, population and power
Individuals, groups and societies are that characterize each world-system in its
shaped in their interactions by these particular development shape complete
processes as much as they contribute to systems which operate as a complex
their dynamics. Long-term inhabitation of entities.
cities, lands and territories, intricate The social construction of time and
networks of communication, long-term space evolves through rapid transforma-
development of everyday life-forms and tions, a succession of different dynamics,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
50 ANTHROPOCENE OBSERVATORY

Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer, flower auction, test room. Amsterdam, Netherlands 1998. ARMIN LINKE

Greenhouse. El Ejido, Spain 2013. ARMIN LINKE

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ANTHROPOCENE 51

where different forms of documentation massive level changes (Steffen, Crutzen

and different practices of power affect and McNeill 2007: 615). Hence, discus-
the overall system. World-systems develop sions of the air are about the Earth too
through tipping points, through transitions while the future of the geologic era might
that bring the systems from one level of be something determined by the oceans
complexity and coherence to another. This and especially the melting ice (Wolff 2014).
is a complex process which leaves stratifica- The concept of the Antropocene marks
tions in language, social relations, ideas an intertwining of geological Earth time
and rituals. It also leaves material forms in and human history; it triggers massive
its wake: the intricate geometries of cities, amounts of paperwork, data, discussions,
monuments, fields and infrastructures that conferences, art works and philosophical
sustain a specific form of a world-system ideas as well of course as misrepresenta-
are carried over from one world-system to tions in its wake. Suggested by chemist Paul
a new one. Monuments, documents and Crutzen in 2000 it has launched a wide
technologies are the material inscriptions of debate in both geology and the wider
world-systems. To decipher them, humans academic and art communities. The term
need to conceptualize their own history in suggests that the ten to twelve millennia of
relation to the history of the planet. the Holocene is followed up by the acceler-
Anthropocene Observatory is a project ated version of human impact on the planet
by Territorial Agency (John Palmesino and (Crutzen 2002). One of the periodizations
Ann-Sofi Rönnskog), Armin Linke and for the start of the Anthropocene marks it
Anselm Franke. as starting in the eighteenth century ‘when
analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed
See also Anthropocene, Capitalocene
the beginning of growing global concen-
and Chthulucene; Resilience; Expulsions;
trations of carbon dioxide and methane’
Extinction; Hacking Habitat.
(ibid.). In any case, the analyses usually
converge around the period as one of new
John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi imbalance in ‘the stocks and flows of
Rönnskog – Territorial Agency major elements in the planetary machinery
and Armin Linke such as nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus,
and silicon’ (Steffen et al. 2007: 614) as well
as energy consumption. Similar concepts
ANTHROPOCENE have emerged since the nineteenth century,
including Antonio Stoppani’s ‘Anthropozoic
Much of the debate about the global era’, but only in the 2000s has the impact of
climate change is often discussed through the concept itself consolidated around
the amount of CO 2 concentration in the issues with political and scientific efficacy.
atmosphere. But besides the atmosphere Already the earlier ideas marked the
and questions about fresh water and ocean specific difference of human impact from
ecosystems, the geological has also become natural variation that has then become an
one central perspective for understanding object of analysis with specific scientific
the fundamental change concerning the tools that discuss the historical aspects –
planet. It relates to a recognition of the what is a suitable start date for this period
Earth as a whole, interlocked feedback – as well as its future implications: what is
system with various nonlinear speeds and the tipping point of no return in the process
rates of change that can however trigger of acceleration? Hence we are not dealing

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
52 ANTHROPOCENE

with a naive assumption of ‘balance’ of the resources. Indeed, metabolism was a term
planet but a historicization of the chemical used by Marx to ‘define the labor process as
doses and elements, of reactions and “a process between man and nature, a
processes as one significant context where process by which man, through his own
the politics of existence of life unfolds. actions, mediates, regulates and controls
In many ways, a lot of the accounts the metabolism between himself and
including the more popular texts about the nature” ’ (Foster 2000: 141). Interestingly,
Anthropocene resonate with histories of the Modern era – so crucial as a reference
technology: the emergence of agriculture point for the social sciences especially –
is one crucial threshold that has changed was itself as a concept an attempt to purify
the chemical relations of the Earth. The Nature out of human activities, which,
invention of fire is another. The steam however, itself hides the multiple attach-
engine gets a frequent mention in narra- ments across any artificial Nature–Nurture
tives of the Anthropocene, as well as divide and the difficulty of detaching
modern synthetic chemistry. One of the politics from science and nature (Latour
key issues is of course the radical change in 2014a: 21). More specifically, and with a
the energy economy: from the use of wind more acute awareness of the political
and water to the excavation of fossil fuels economy of the Anthropocene, McKenzie
such as coal and oil. The accounts of the Wark (2015a) continues Marx’s theoretiza-
Great Acceleration focus on the energy tion by pointing out that one can actually
and war economies after 1945 with an understand the Anthropocene as meta-
intensification since the 1950s because of bolic rifts, movement of materials and the
the increase in nuclear bomb testing; the labour that mobilizes these elements.
global processes of urbanization; increase With the Anthropocene, any earlier
in fertilizer use and various other types periodization is even more directly driven
of processes of technological society by a scientific understanding of the Earth.
(Zalasiewicz et al. 2014). It involves an analysis of human impact
Humanities and social sciences have but also the other way round: to read
anyway in the past often relied on general- human history through chemistry, the
izing periodizations. Human history has atmosphere, the geological and more.
been divided into epochs of capitalism, There is an implicit challenge here to the
imperialism and colonialism, as well as Humanities. It is hence no wonder that it
other earlier periods that offer heuristic becomes itself a useful trigger for a variety
support to understand historical time. of approaches that are interested in the
Some of the archaeological periods place non-human and posthuman. These are
special emphasis on the main materials important ways to steer clear of the anthro-
around which culture is organized: the pocentric fallacy and towards, for example,
Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. Some a more geocentric understanding of the
of the later concepts have also understood planetary life (see e.g. Braidotti 2012.
that the relation to natural resources is Bennett 2010). Furthermore, it introduces
significant in order to understand that new ways to think about time not merely
period. For example, Karl Marx’s analyses in terms of human history but as time
are obviously very aware of the changing marked by chronostratigraphy that uses
industrial basis of production, from agri- rock strata as the main focus for under-
cultural relations to the new metabolism standing evolution and change. As such, it
produced by capitalism’s focus on natural resonates with various ideas in the past

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ANTHROˉPOS 53

years of humanities theory and philosophy ical and policy relating to the Anthropocene
that open up new avenues towards tem- has anyway to face up to the massive polit-
porality (see for example Grosz 2004). ical mobilization of the neoliberal agenda
Time becomes detached from the specific that is also global, unevenly distributed and
anthropocentric onto-epistemologies to extremely harmful across the continuum
take into account the multiplicity of of matter-affect that defines the current
temporalities and alternative metaphysics. ecology. In other words, even if the
The Anthropocene arrives in contempor- Anthropocene sets the important question
ary discussions not merely as geology but it might not be the best conceptual solution
as a politics of visual culture (Mirzoeff out there to solve the complex interlinks
2014) and as a demand to rewrite the gene- between scientific analysis of natural
alogies of cultural theory (Wark 2015a). processes, political agendas, economic
Furthermore, as a concept that refers to the drives and the affective desire that still
scientific era, it raises the question relevant governs the very tightly fossil-fuelled state
to technology scholars, and to students of of the contemporary era. Since the incep-
media and humanities writ large: not what tion of the concept, the debate about
it does to humans only, but how nature is massive-level geoengineering has also been
being framed, rearranged and targeted flagged up as one option (Crutzen 2002)
(cf. Peters 2015). although, to be sure, any such planetary-
While becoming an important platform level design should be contextualized in a
to discuss climate change, offering impetus wider realization about the political
to both humanities and art practices, the economic stakes of the environmental
Anthropocene has its limitations. How far disaster and its possible solutions that
is it really possible to discuss the Age of involve an entanglement of politics, nature
Humans as really homogeneously about and design.
the human impact when it actually should
See also Capitalocene and Chthulucene;
register the specific economic and political
General Ecology; Earth; Four Elements;
actions, often specific to capitalism, that
Posthuman Critical Theory; Ecohorror;
have effects very unevenly across the global
Extinction.
south–north divide (see Chakrabarty
2009)? Hence to speak of the Capitalocene
Jussi Parikka
(Moore 2014, Haraway 2015a, 2015b) has
also been suggested, as well as other related
terms such as the Anthrobscene (Parikka
2014) and the Chthulucene (Haraway ANTHR ŌPOS
2015a, 2015b). The Anthropocene is not
saying that the human being really has Anthrōpos has content and properties,
agency but something more like culpability both of which produce obligations. Logos
(Chun 2015). But how that culpability is (as language, speech and logic) attributed
being distributed is itself a rather burning exclusively to ánthropos, creates the obliga-
political question. We need to be able to tion for inductive thought that sets it apart
investigate how the environmental debates from animal language; hexis (as agential
and scientific analyses respond as well as habit, engagement with acts that are recog-
are also held back by the strongly anti- nized and shared by the social environ-
democratic forces of the neoliberal era ment) creates ethics; to koinōnikon (the
(Brown 2014). Any sort of effective polit- social) creates and demands politics.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
54 ANTHROˉPOS

Anthrōpos – a conceptual circularity of ἄνθρωπο) (Plutarch, Bioi, ‘Alcibiades’ 23.7).

meaning, from ἀνήρ/ἀνδρός (anēr in the Even though the meaning of anēr towards
nominative/andrós in the genitive), human the end of the Classical era is fixed to mean
being, and ὤψ (ōps), face, appearance, look, an adult male, ánthropos never lost its non-
the one who looks like oneself, the being gendered force and remains, to this day,
that looks like itself, human being writ the all-inclusive, unmarked signifier of the
large, sexless and genderless. We know this, human being.
that it is genderless and sexless, because Plato, in Cratylus 399, has Socrates
Homer tells us that Zeus was the father of explain to Hermogenes that the meaning
all humans and gods (Ζεύς πατήρ ανδρών of ánthrōpos (ἄνθρωπος) is that it is the
τε θεῶν τε), and Oedipus drives the Sphinx only animal that examines (ἀναθρεῖ) what
to her death by uttering the genderless it sees (ὄπωπε), therefore only this examin-
response ánthropos (and I am reading it ing animal is correct to be called ánthrōpos,
with a nod to Muriel Rukeyser)1 to the the one who is looking up at what it sees
riddle ‘what is that which having one voice and considers it, examines it, is an animal
becomes a quadrupedal and a bipedal and that is anathrōn ha opōpen (ἀναθρῶν ἅ
a tripedal and it is at its strongest when it ὄπωπεν), as it engages simultaneously in
has the fewest’? that she had been taught an act of avowal and disavowal, as it avows
by the Muses and she deployed to drive the examined life and disavows the impos-
men to their deaths. sibility of such an examining, it bespeaks
Only the Spartans among the Greeks the krisis, the critical thoughts of the
had a gendered type of the term – he human as it belies its animality.
anthrōpós, doubly marked with the femin- Etymologicum Magnum (the Byzantine
ine article and the stress accent on the last lexicon originally compiled in the middle of
syllable, the Spartans who knew the value the eleventh century CE and printed in
they placed on the male and the radical Venice in 1499 at the Greek printing press
alterity of the female. Or, maybe, they of Zacharias Kalliergi) gives as a possible
marked it for precisely the opposite etymology for ánthrōpos para to anō threin,
reasons, considering that it was the female ‘the being that looks upwards’ (παρὰ τὸ ἄνω
of the species, the mother, who, when her θρεῖν), continuing that it is the only being
son came of age, thought him better dead that looks upwards, the only one that
than a coward as she handed him his shield considers itself as a self, an etymology that
and ordered him not to drop it on the has been proven to be erroneous since by
battlefield, but either to bring it back or to other, more systematic etymologists. But si
be brought back stretched out on it (ἤ τάν, non è vero è ben trovato, since it actually
ἤ ἐπί τάς). creates an interesting tension with the
There is one occasion where ánthropos etymology of human from the Latin Homo
appears in the feminine. Plutarch uses tēn (earthling) through the Greek hamai
ánthrōpon in order to denote a specific (χαμαί) that means ‘ground’ or ‘soil’ (and
woman, Timaia, wife of King Agis of should not be confused with the other term
Sparta, who fell so desperately in love with that comes from Greek, homo- that means
Alcibiades that she bore his child in secret ‘the same’ from which Havelock Ellis has
when he was a guest at the royal palace, been erroneously debited as having coined
while her husband was away at war – ‘such the term ‘homosexual’). The spillage from
eros had possessed the she-human,’ says ánthrōpos to human becomes important
Plutarch (τοσοῦτος ἔρως κατεῖχε τὴν insofar as it permits a proleptic conceptual

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ARCHITECTONIC DISPOSITION 55

motion that brings the term human out of 49 (Panourgiá 2009); the Tutsis by the
antiquity and provides a linguistic bridge Hutus in Rwanda (Hilsum 1994; Moshman
with the post-antiquity scriptural land- 2011; Baisley 2014); the Andaman Islanders
scape. If ánthrōpos means the being that at the end of the nineteenth century; the
looks upwards, and homo means the earth- Jews by the Nazis; the Puerto Ricans by
ling who comes from the soil, then the mainland US (Herrera 2008).
gradual privileging of homo seems to be There is, then, a human being that tran-
pregnant with The Fall, seems to be antici- scends the transcendental, moral or even
pating Christianity’s ‘dust to dust’. James ethical categories, in claiming its origin as
Boon notes that despite the many qualifiers a human in its immanence when faced
(taxonomic tools, not much more than with a technology that is imbued with
rhetorical exaggerations) attached to Homo agency, the beating club, the chemical
– rationalis, ridens, ludens, thanatos, weapon, the naked and raw power that
absurdis, oeconomicus, hierarchicus, aequalis, seeks to obliterate it, or, even worse
religiosus, magicus, saecularis, Homo- perhaps, to engineer it differently but also
whoever – and contrary to them, ‘abstract with that which is invisible: the economy,
Homo is more of a humanist anthropos: the markets, that seek to create a human
intrinsically both comic and tragic, selfish being that will be compliant differently,
and philanthropic, capable of asceticism willingly, submissively, that will be think-
and hedonism . . .’ (1982: 22–3). ing of itself as a free agent when, in actual-
These seemingly innocuous categorical ity, as we have seen repeatedly, it will be
classifications, engaging in an affirmative always already an indebted being. A human
declaration of the identity of the human being, then, that is an anthrōpos.
(Homo who laughs, thinks logically, makes
See also Exclusion Zone; In/human;
symbols, creates hierarchies, religions,
Lampedusa.
magic, understands death, navigates the
seas, engages with economy) are pregnant
with a negative such declaration (not Note
simply the human who does not laugh, 1. Athena Athanasiou (2008: 96) brought to
labour, make symbols, or think logically) my attention the poem ‘Myth’ by Muriel
but its radical alterity – the non-human. Rukeyser.
Such have been the negative declarations
about the indigenous peoples of the Neni Panourgiá
Americas from north to south and the
Caribbean (as in Juán Ginés de Sepulveda;
cf. Sublimis Deus of 1537: Taussig 1986); all
of sub-Saharan Africa and the African ARCHITECTONIC DISPOSITION
slaves in the Americas (as in the 1857
Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott vs Ichnography, Scaenography,
Sanford); African Americans even currently Orthography
(as in the acronym NHI (Non-Humans
Involved) used by the police throughout The notion of ‘architectonic disposition’ is
the United States in cases involving relevant to a posthuman glossary in that it
only African Americans: Wynter 1994; contributes critical methods to the new
Panourgiá 2017); leftist and communist materialist interest in ‘agential matter’. In
exiles during the Greek Civil War of 1946– the legacy of architectural treaties, this

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
56 ARCHITECTONIC DISPOSITION

notion is part of the Roman invention of a help to develop methods of quantum-

set of categories for addressing, as I want reading and quantum-writing information,
to argue, something very similar to the that expresses itself in mathematical models
‘material-discursive set-ups’ that increas- (Michel Serres) – a literacy that can do
ingly come into focus today. Karen Barad without any idealized notion of symmetry,
rightly foregrounds that these set-ups have one for which ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ compre-
a systemic kind of agency (her ‘apparatus’ hends mathematical thinking and the
notion) that is at work, so to speak, behind constitutive asymmetry that propels its very
the back of any critical consciousness that inventiveness (see Equation).
might attempt to focus on it: either such a In his Ten Books on Architecture, the
consciousness focuses on the material Roman architect Vitruvius gathered all the
aspects, and remains blind to the discurs- existent knowledge on architecture in one
ive dispositive from within which it does comprehensive treaty including the build-
so; or it focuses on the discursive aspects ing of temples, of course, but also the
and thereby deprives an a-personal construction of clocks (gnomon, sundials)
objectivity of this set-up’s autonomy and and the fabrication of machinery. The
power of resisting. Like the particle/wave dedicated aim of gathering all the distrib-
set-up in quantum physics, both aspects uted knowledge in architecture has been to
are equally real and valid, but phenomena generalize from local customs and the
in such set-ups cannot be traced in this ethical/religious meanings attributed to
double makeup at one and the same time. the built works, and to propose rules and
Additionally, it is also impossible to conceptual distinctions for addressing and
bypass the decision by proceeding in an iter- critically evaluating ‘the establishment of
ative way, by stacking discrete observations public order’ in a manner that can preserve
such as to eventually compare them, and the built environment’s ‘worth’ without
decide, in well-informed manner, in the end. deciding upon an ultimate reference for
For there is an irreversibility to such tracing this ‘worth’.1 Vitruvius proposed three
itself that cannot be undone retrospectively categories – utilitas, firmitas, and venustas
(see Negentropy, Maxwell’s Demon). This is – and introduced six elementary concepts
precisely the similarity this article points out by which an architectural object can be
between the ‘material-discursive set-ups’ qualified according to these categories.2
that have been at stake in the treaties of None of these concepts is self-standing,
architecture since Vitruvius, and those now like a separate metrics, but rather must be
at stake in new materialist politics, ethics brought to work together by the architect
and science: A built structure acts situatively, in singular manners; the planning of this
and asymmetrically, with regard to whatever interplay – this is the work in which an
the intentions of the architect might have architect can be more or less professed.
been (what kind of beauty, truth, order or Vitruvius’ conceptual apparatus is to
simply pragmatics her building is to mani- provide critical assessment of such profes-
fest), as well as to how such intentions are sionalism, such that the ‘worth’ of architec-
projected to the work by a public, in ture can be preserved over generations and
discourse. If agency is a lived relation rather regions without determining it positively.
than something one does or does not have, It includes practical aspects as well as
then architectonic disposition, and the theoretical ones, which he distinguished as
conceptual triad that constitutes it (ichno- fabrica and ratiocination. The six element-
graphy, scenography, orthography), might ary concepts are: (1) ordinatio: centring in

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ARCHITECTONIC DISPOSITION 57

selecting one module from which the (thermodynamic conservation), Vitruvius’

metrical unit for the overall taxation is to apparent failure reveals itself as its very
be derived in order to establish a singular mark of distinction and excellence: whatever
work’s ‘ordination’ by articulating and the value this worth preserves may be –
proportioning the members of the work; beauty, harmony, the good, etc. – such an
this idea of ordination is analogous to approach at systematization in order to
Vitruvius’ suggestion that rather than ideas conserve, without fighting the impurity of
of the magnitudes and scales imperson- the system introduced through transforma-
ated by a particular God, the human body tions (its historicity), lives from not specify-
can be referent to proportionate metrics in ing the nature of this value in any determin-
architecture; (2) dispositio: regarding the ate manner (see Negentropy, Invariance).
conception and disposition of all the The preservation of this value would
work’s elements in a generalized form in be achievable only as a state of entropy, in
plans; (3) eurythmia: the well-proportioned which all of its articulations would be
overall appearance of the particular work; equally ‘likely’ – meaning in the architec-
(4) symmetria: for the harmony of the tonic context, which is concerned with
order with regard to the module from criteria of adequacy rather than of happen-
which its metrics is derived; (5) decor or ing, equally ‘adequatable’. Such an architec-
propriety: for customization of the work tonic state of entropy provides an atomism
according to established customs; and (6) of value like the thermodynamic state of
distributio (in Greek oikonomia): for a entropy (of the universe) provides an axio-
distribution of building materials and matism of forces. We can think of the
expenses adequate to the wealth and status disposition of a work, its plan-ability, as
of the customer. such an entropic state, and we can call this
The generalization from local customs ‘architectonic disposition’, picking up on
and the ethical/religious meanings attemp- Alberti and Serlio, an ‘architectonic model’.
ted by Vitruvius is so interesting because According to Vitruvius, the elements of this
it proceeds in a manner of which I claim disposition – quasi its vertices – must
here that it parallels rather than imitates comprehend the full combinatorial space of
or reproduces philosophical methods of the totality of possibilities the six element-
generalization and classification. Against ary concepts are capable of determining.
this postulate there is a long tradition of ‘Planning’ or ‘design’ – to use today’s
Vitruvius’ reception; according to this recep- concepts – can be read as a reduction of the
tion, architecture, especially the public order combinatorial potentiabilities, by configur-
it articulates in cities, was thought of as real- ing the potential elements in an objective
izing an ideal of a cosmic order in the here way.3 Vitruvius foresees three dimensions
and now of the world. The predominant of conception which we know today as
critique on Vitruvius since the Renaissance ground plan, elevation and perspective.
is that his proposed methods operate with He calls these three dimensions of concep-
proportion, without ever specifying the tion orthographia (the natural, potential
attributes of the proportions with precise elements, in renaissance: elevation), ichno-
ratios (Fischer 2009). If, however, we return graphia (the contraction of the potenti-
to his interest in the preservation of archi- abilities of these elements, in renaissance:
tecture’s worth not through the discourse floorplan) and scenographia (the operation
of aesthetics, but through an approach of contracting, in renaissance: perspective
informed by a climatic kind of energetics or three-dimensional plan).

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58 ARCHITECTONIC DISPOSITION

If Vitruvius’ triad of architectonic and never self-evident, which he explored

disposition could be demonstrated in a perhaps most prominently in his book
generalized form, then his architectural Le Système de Leibniz et ses Modèles
theory might lend itself for developing Mathématiques (1968). The introduction
an information architectonics. It might here is entitled ‘Ensembles théorique’
provide orientation in how to generalize and Serres begins with the subchapter
again from the numerous spreading out of ‘Scénographie, Ichnographie’. Scholars
disciplines that fall victim to increasing interested in Leibniz share a kind of embar-
local seclusion, hermeticism and what rassment, he begins. It concerns the irre-
could be called a certain banality of highly concilability of Leibniz’s rigorously system-
technical specialization without systemic atic thought, while this very systematicity
overview. Might the architectonic categor- doesn’t cease to refuse itself to rigorous
ies that constitute architecture as a profes- understanding. Leibniz presents his reader,
sion (rather than as an art or as a science) as Serres puts it,
provide a model of how to preserve the
‘worth’ of the public order that is embodied a potential ordonnance which lets itself
in knowledge? This, of course, is but a be divined and which refuses itself
biased and speculative outlook. But here ceaselessly, a vague idea of a perceived
are some indexes of how such a re- coherence seen a thousand times in the
mode of cavalier, and which hides its
interpretation of architectonic disposition
géometral, the sense of progressing in a
could be started.
labyrinth of which one holds the thread
The notion of architectonic disposition
but has no map. Offered perspectives,
has recently been picked up by Michel multiplied points of view, infinitely
Serres, who argues exactly along these iterated possibilities: it never seems that
lines. Ichnography, scaenography and one could actually arrive at the exhaustive
orthography are terms that allow him to limits of a synoptic, spread out, complete
theorize a notion of system which contracts and actual plan.
the first and the second laws of thermody- Serres 1968: 1624
namics: its invariant conservation (first
law) and its drift towards dissolution Serres here argues for a notion of the
(second law). ‘Physics describes a system,’ system which comprehends and organizes
he argues, ‘but not one that is hierarchic, all that obeys the principle of identity, yet as
deductive, or tightly ordered, as in the an invariant of which he assumes nothing
series of the Stoics: it is a set, a general equi- else except that it be capable of absorbing
librium, a balance sheet that takes account and integrating all the variations that can
of the stochastic’ (Serres 2000: 128), as he actually be attributed to it; one can refer to
puts it in The Birth of Physics (1977), where such a notion of system only via mathemat-
he develops his notion of the foedera ical models, he maintains. Such models are
naturae, the natural contract, in distinction not addressed as representing a reality (or
to what he calls the foedera fati, the contract ideality); they must be fashioned in profile
of destiny. Serres’ interest in the contract, to each other rather than to a frame of
here and in other texts, can best be under- reference. Their profiles are to be worked
stood as translating the dimension of out under the criteria of isomorphism
architectonic ‘orthography’. Like this, one (equality with regard to their formality)
can decipher the same notion of system, between all of them, rather than correlation
always contracted to mathematical models (linear hierarchies of consequentiality) or

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ART 59

representation between model and Notes

modelled reality. In Serres’ notion of a
1. Cf. the preface by Vitruvius, dedicated to
mathematical system ‘there is a plurality of
his Ceasar.
possible paths of deduction’ (1968: 190); it 2. I understand these concepts as ele-
is thus a notion of system which is ‘an irre- mentary in a quasi-material, quasi-pre-
versible order’ which ‘like a ladder’ is made socratic sense: all of them factor in all of
up of a plurality of ‘orders, derived from an the architectonic work, like the material
infinitely replicated infinity of infinities’ elements in the Timeaus factor in all of
[par infinité d’infinités infiniment répli- the sensible bodies (all things are made
quée] (1968: 487). Within such a sheaf of up of fire, water, earth and air, and
orders, ‘my enunciations are universal and between them we can assume the lawful-
they conserve the analogy’ [analogy here ness of a proportionality: fire is to earth
is a ‘discrete multiplicity’ which Serres as air is to water).
contrasts with a function as ‘a continued 3. One can say that Vitruvius introduced
variation’] (492). This is why mathematical models in ‘space’, and that the Renaissance,
modelling of the system, conceived as a with Alberti, introduced the models we
ladder where different orders, each infinite, are used to today (lineamenta), as models
are leading from one to the other, progresses of motion in ‘time’, and that in today’s
indefinitely. Its steps are governed by ‘laws discrete (digital) geometric paradigm
of binding one – multiple, finite – infinite, we are discovering models in ‘life’ (see
which are of value in multivalent manner Invariance).
for perception, liberty, knowing, creativity, 4. Here and in the following I use my own
translation of Serres.
remembering etc., which all are at work
also in the mathematical model’ (493).
Hence, to Serres it is not mathematics that
Vera Bühlmann
govern all these aspects of reality (percep-
tion, liberty, consciousness, creation,
remembering, etc.); rather, he assumes, ART
‘there is no relation of cause and effect
here, there is a parallelism of structure’ Somewhat paradoxically, or almost too
(580). Serres’ notion of a system which logically, the impossibility of art, painfully
contracts the invariant conservation (first obvious in any moment we attempt to
law, orthographia) and its drift towards speak of it, has proven immensely product-
dissolution (second law, ichnographia) is ive. Ever since Theodor W. Adorno opened
always integrated, bound together (sceno- his Aesthetic Theory with the notorious
graphia) mathematically, in models. The disclaimer, ‘that nothing concerning art is
system, thereby, is never represented by its self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not
models. The relation between them is a its relation to the world, not even its right
contract that formulates their mutually to exist’ (Adorno 1997: 1) reflections on
implicative cordiality, the orthographic art, on its concept, its ontology, its relations
politeness that makes up the foedera (to society, to politics, to technology) have
naturae, the Natural Contract: ‘the model of thrived on the apparent absence of its
the system, this is the system of the model’ legitimacy or necessity. The desolation
(481). expressed by Adorno, however, is the very
ground from which the late modernist
See also Equation; Negentropy; Invariance. critic’s subjectivity arises. The pressure this

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
60 ART

subjectivity exerts on the object of its spectacle of knowledge about how to get in
reflection has proved constitutive. The and how to grow beyond expectation.
crisis of art invoked in Aesthetic Theory Today’s unprecedented expansion of art
may correspond to a self, fashioned as may have originated in Enlightenment
fragile and vulnerable. But rather than thinking and Romantic philosophy that
turning to art for consolation, it looks for supported a notion of art as ‘beaux arts’,
an elusive sense of ‘the possibility of the ‘schöne Künste’ or ‘fine arts’, encompassing
possible’ (ibid.: 132). The question to be all genres and media from literature to
asked today may be whether art is still sculpture. The subsequently established
capable of providing such a futurist sense custom of singling out the ‘plastic’ or ‘visual’
of the not-yet. arts to embody ‘art’ proper remained trans-
At the time of writing this article, the itory in historical terms, as the 1960s
concept of art finds itself once again put marked the advent of an ever-increasing
under increased strain, particularly where expansion of the concept of ‘contemporary
it is being identified as ‘contemporary art’, a art’, leading to art’s ‘radical openness’
term that has become the subject of some (Osborne 2013: 57).3
debate. For regardless of the language As a direct consequence of such expan-
deployed,1 speaking of art in the networked, sion any reference to ‘contemporary art’ is
globalized now, it is ‘contemporary art’ that alarmingly in need of qualification and
is being addressed. This penchant of concretization: where is it that I am speak-
narrowing down (or, some would claim, ing from? Who is it that I am speaking to
expanding) the discourse on art as univer- (and for)? What are my stakes in the matter?
sal category to one of ‘contemporary art’ Where do I place myself in the discourse?
immediately concerns the very boundaries In 1972, critic Rosalind Krauss (who expli-
(or the proclaimed inexistence of any citly stated her age of 31 in the article)
boundaries) of art.2 The aforementioned wrote a kind of open letter to the reader-
strain is composed of dissatisfaction, dis- ship of the New York-based art magazine
illusionment, resentment even. Arguably, Artforum, re-positioning herself in the
contemporary art is all about losing contact (already fading) debates around modern-
with the traditions of practising and theor- ism and ‘modernist criticism’ (Krauss 1972:
izing art as a historically informed critique 48–51). Having discovered that the ‘histor-
of the present condition, providing an idea ical necessity’ of ‘modernist painting’ no
of freedom and autonomy that enables a longer disclosed itself to her instantly (‘at
dialectical, counter-imaginative relation to the moment of perception of the work
reality. The loss of self-evidence, noticed itself ’) but increasingly relied on ‘narrative’
by Adorno, has since become the utter and ‘temporality’, Krauss considered herself
denial of art’s legitimacy in the face of its now ready for a ‘larger modernist sensibil-
apparent failure to respond adequately to ity and not the narrower kind’ (ibid.: 51).
the extreme and interlinked disruptions She concluded her intervention on a rather
caused by climate change, neoliberal peculiar note, insisting on the personal and
restructuration, invasive digitalization, autobiographic whenever it comes to say
rampant racism, militarization of the anything critically valid on art, since ‘it
everyday or the new fundamentalisms. matters who one sounds like when what
Happily indulging in its own glamour, one is writing about is art. One’s own
presentism and criticality, contemporary perspective, like one’s own age, is the only
art for many has mutated into an obscene orientation one will ever have’ (ibid.).

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ART 61

The crisis of modernism embodied in pulling into its comportment anything that
the expanding universe(s) of contempor- exists in our social and material reality’
ary art that took root in the ‘larger modern- (Chan 2014 [2009]: 76). Chan’s critique of
ist sensibility’ necessitated the fashioning art that is bereft of any autonomy which
of a subjectivity as specific as possible: age, would enable it to reflect on (and resist)
perspective, voice had to be forged into a ‘the global arrangement to which life is
critical identity prerequisite of walking the increasingly beholden for sustenance’
expanded fields of post-modernist art. But (ibid.) is heavily reminiscent of Adorno’s
what happens to this ethico-political ideal equally sombre (and problematic) pursuit
of the critic’s self once the situation gets of the non-identical as a residue of aesthetic
completely out of control? The often truth. Moreover, like Adorno, he refuses to
lamented absence of the brand of strong bargain in the illusion of a utopian reinven-
criticism cultivated by Krauss and her tion of art’s situation through its expansion.
fellows in the 1970s and 1980s may be ulti- For even though art may not only be found
mately ill-conceived; however, it points to a in the places and institutions proper to it
widespread assumption of powerlessness (‘galleries, nonprofit spaces, museums,
with regard to today’s art. In fact, the entire corporate lobbies, and such’), but every-
edifice of art’s conceptualizations seems where else (‘on the sides of buildings, on
on the verge of collapse and in dire need of abandoned grounds, in the sky, in make-
an ethics that may be convertible into an shift kitchens, on river barges, at demon-
aesthetics. Fantasies of escape and exodus, strations, in magazines, on human skin,
of reaching contemporary art’s ‘beyond’, as souvenirs, and through speakers and
of toppling individual authorship in the screens of every imaginable shape and size’
name of participation, of merging in activ- (ibid.: 82)), it merely expands and dissem-
ist politics, of investing in a ‘usological inates, Chan argues, as to stay functional
turn’ (in order to revitalize art as a mode and operative while affirming the very
of operation with effects on the real; see totality that grants it entitlement. Rather
Wright 2013) abound. than multiplying, rather than feeling every-
Such visions resemble the well-known, where at home, he concludes, art should
albeit long-discarded (neo-)avant-gardist become an agent of un-belonging.
and productivist notions of the fusion The tenet of art’s very homelessness and
of art and life, but their present urgency untenability, the demand of art’s refusal to
seems to stem from a somewhat different signify is one of the most powerful (and
analysis and experience of crisis and certainly most difficult) axioms in aesthetic
despair. Among the possible inferences to theory. Where it is not exclusively bound
be made under the current predicament is to an imperative to dissent, obliging it
the critical longing for an art that explicitly to be ‘a form of expanded ideological (and
fails to be subsumed through the disarticu- institutional) critique’ (O’Sullivan 2010:
lation of any call to conform to the powers 197) or else ‘some kind of production of
that be. Rendering the progressive oppor- signification’ (Nancy 2010: 96), art may
tunism of the majority of contemporary partake in an actualization of other worlds,
art, artist Paul Chan projects a perfect temporalities and lives that do not neces-
negative picture of any future that art sarily correspond to textual understanding
might have: ‘Art, by allying itself with and the routines of critical reading.
contemporary life, has found its purpose as Escaping representation and its critique,
a cunning system of mediation, capable of however, usually comes with a price tag –

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
62 ART

the abandonment of an essentially his- which are universal by default. In this

torical and genealogical approach to art philosophical context, aesthetic autonomy
making, criticism and aesthetic experience and art itself were largely to be understood
that analyses and engages with the mater- as attributes of human agency. However,
ial and mental work of constructing an the critique of aesthetic autonomy, the
image, an event, an experience. attack on the category of the artwork, the
Therefore, in order to avoid de-his- re-evaluation of experience and affect,
toricization and de-politicization, while post-war art’s institutional, geographical,
acknowledging the necessity of breaking technological and epistemological expan-
the spell of critical routines of Marxist sions, the discovery of non-human actors
social history and post-structuralist modes and activities in the making of art all
of critique, the reflection on art should be amount to a situation in which the
shifted and opened to allow for considera- subjectivities produced by and for art have
tions of lives, human and non-human, and changed for good.
the matters and materialities that constitute
art despite certain anthropocentric notions See also Art in the Anthropocene;
of it. The real challenge here would be to Contemporary, The; Gulf Labor;
imagine and theorize an art (theoretical) Metamodernism; Postimage; Posthuman
practice that is critically aware of its own Museum Practices.
humanist bias and deconstructive with
regard to any notion of a culture/nature Notes
divide. For historically, the semantics of
‘art’ have been gradually changing from 1. Including the one in which this article
referring to various kinds of ‘ars’, that is happens to be written, as if there would
human activity based on knowledges and exist a reliable linguistic entity called
skills often in close vicinity to (if not English, particularly where it comes to
identical with) ‘science’, to a concept that speaking of and about ‘art’ and to using
is linked to operations which are to be the lingua specifica that has been devel-
oping around objects and events associ-
distinguished from those of nature, thus
ated with this very term, for that matter
establishing the problematic dualism that
(see e.g. Rule and Levine 2012 and the
has since kept ‘art’ firmly on the side of
subsequent debate it entailed, including
‘humanism’ rather than of nature or matter.
Steyerl 2013 and Rosler 2013).
According to the anthropocentric terms 2. Since the early 2000s, the negotiation of
of Karl Marx’s 1844 Economic and the notion of ‘contemporary art’ has
Philosophical Manuscripts, ‘[A]n animal developed into a sort of sub-discipline of
forms only in accordance with the standard art history that by now appears solidly
and the need of the species to which it canonized or even gridlocked as a
belongs, whilst man knows how to produce proper discourse (see e.g. the numerous
in accordance with the standard of every publications of art historian Terry
species, and knows how to apply every- Smith (2009, 2010), the ‘Questionnaire
where the inherent standard to the on the Contemporary’ (Krauss et  al.
object. Man therefore also forms objects in 2009) or the two-part special issue on
accordance with the laws of beauty’ (Marx ‘What Is Contemporary Art?’ of e-flux
2007). Put in original Hegelian termino- journal (2009, 2010)). Aside from strident
logy, art has to be linked to ‘the deepest dismissals of contemporary art’s role in
interests of mankind’ (Hegel 1975: 7), neoliberal economy and finance (see e.g.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ART IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 63

Fraser 2011), much of what has been said petrocapitalism and its links to extractive
and written in this respect amounts to colonialism – that have resulted in the
sociological musings on how contem- massive transformation of the Earth
porary art constitutes a newly distrib- through industrialized agriculture, resource
uted world system replacing the modern extraction, energy production and the
center/periphery model by a network widespread use of petrochemicals.
of ‘hubs’ (see e.g. Stichweh 2014) and However, the Anthropocene, as a
philosophical classifications aiming at charismatic mega-concept, does important
contemporary art’s alleged post-media work by grouping together the environ-
and transdisciplinary character, its
mental crises of the sixth mass extinction,
determinate disintegration and expan-
climate change and the ongoing processes
sion and specific aesthetic and temporal
of terraforming and increasing toxification
politics (most interestingly perhaps
articulated in Osborne 2013 and
of our world, as these are all written into
Rebentisch 2013). the body of the Earth. Further, despite its
3. This boundary-defying concept of art troubling re-assertion of the Anthropos
that superseded the various attempts by coupled with the elision of the ideological,
twentieth-century modernists to impose political and economic factors that have
medium-specificity as a norm is charac- resulted in this situation (and the disturb-
terized by Osborne as ‘generic artistic ing way in which ‘Man’ has again come to
modernism’, a nominalist tendency stand in for humanity) the Anthropocene
‘equivalent to the crisis of modernism asks us to re-think the trajectory of
itself ’ (p. 51). humans on this planet in both biological
and geological terms. In other words, it is a
Tom Holert concept that has the power to remind us of
our limited and contingent time on this
earth, and that our being itself is tied to
the rocks and other-than-humans that
ART IN THE ANTHROPOCENE compose us.
So what does art have to do with all
The Anthropocene is a disturbing concept. this? As I argue, with Etienne Turpin, in
Imported from Geology to signify a Art in the Anthropocene (2015), the
proposed new epoch when humanity is the Anthropocene, in so far as we are to accept
primary geologic agent, its life within the this term and its mobilizing potential, is an
humanities, arts and social sciences aesthetic event. I mean this in three ways.
has been a troubling one. This is primarily First, aesthetics can be understood from its
because of the figure of the Anthropos and etymological source in aesthesis, that is, the
the problematic designation of a universal perception of the external world by the
species being that accompanies this figure, senses, from the ancient Greek αἴσθησις
as Andrew Malm, Jason Moore and Donna meaning sense perception. Taken in this
Haraway have all pointed out. Further the light, the Anthropocene marks a period
periodization of the Anthropocene fails to of defamiliarization and derangement of
do the critical analytical work of properly sense perception. This is primarily what is
attributing the necessary precedents that unfolding around us: the complete trans-
give rise to this condition, namely, the formation of the sensations and qualities
asymmetrical power relations entwined of the world. In other words, the world that
within a destructive economic system – we are born into is receding in front of

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
64 ART IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

our eyes, causing a re-arrangement of earth’. As T. J. Demos has argued, ‘Such

the sensory apparatus of our organism. imagery speaks to a problem articulated
Additionally, many of the threats to our by recent theorists of ecology – that the
health are not immediately sensible: chem- expanded spatial and temporal scales of
icals that infiltrate and proliferate in the geology pressure, if not altogether exceed,
environment or the gradual warming of human comprehension, and thereby
the planet are hard to feel or see or touch. present major challenges to representa-
The rapid transformations that we are tional systems’ (2015: n.p.). The seemingly
exposed to, as organisms, are also changing endless flow of numbers within the hyper-
just as fast for the other-than-human mediated spectacle of terminal capitalism
creatures that also inhabit the earth. This – 400 PPM of atmospheric CO 2; seven
sense of rapid reorientation to the world is billion people; one in eight birds, one in
one of the reasons why creatures are going four mammals, one in five invertebrates,
extinct at such extreme rates, as the worlds one in three amphibians, and half of all
they inhabited disappear and as chemicals turtles facing extinction; consuming 400+
are introduced into the environment so years of planetary biomass per day as fossil
quickly and ubiquitously that there is little fuel – all articulate the vast scales at which
time to adapt. Climate change, under these anthropogenic conditions play out. To
terms, can be understood as a complete re- attempt to comprehend the vastness of
arrangement of our sensory and percept- these global problems, the use of model-
ive experience of being in the world, where ling is necessary to begin to make sense of
the threat itself becomes hard to identify the data. But this logic of calculation is not
based on the sensory limitations of our without its drawbacks, as the Invisible
bodies. As Nicholas Mirzoeff (2014) Committee write, ‘what’s remarkable is that
argues, the problem with these changes is he continues relating in the same disastrous
that they are often written into the canon manner to the disaster produced by his
in a way that signifies beauty. He uses the own disastrous relationship with the world.
example of Claude Monet’s Impression: He calculates the rate at which the ice
Sun Rising (1873). This painting, one of pack is disappearing. He measures the
the most circulated images in art history, extermination of the non-human forms
marks not just a particular aesthetic shift of life’ (2015: 32, emphasis in original). At
associated with Impressionism, but the same time, these questions of numer-
portrays the intense smog produced by acy, of being literate in the graphs and
early industrialization. The fact that air charts and data produced through various
pollution has been anaesthetized into a scientific discourses, are essential to a
kind of beauty marks one of the central critical apparatus and are increasingly an
problems of the Anthropocene era. This index of power within the technoscientific
fetishizing of environmental destruction bureaucratic management of ecological
which troublingly straddles the realms of crisis.
beauty and awe can also be seen in the Third, art is a polyarchic site of experi-
work of photographers such as Edward mentation for living in a damaged world,
Burtynsky and Andreas Gursky. offering a range of discursive, visual and
Second, the Anthropocene has been sensual strategies that are not confined by
framed through modes of the visual: data the regimes of scientific objectivity, polit-
visualization, satellite imagery, climate ical moralism or psychological depression.
modelling and other legacies of the ‘whole Art can provide a space for dealing with the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ART IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 65

affective and emotional trauma of climate Garneau says, ‘What art does do – and what
change, dams and environmental pollution is difficult to measure – is that it changes
as it can hold together contradictions. We our individual and collective imaginaries
need modes of expression for the collective by particles, and these new pictures of the
loss we are suffering through and venues to world can influence our behavior’ (quoted
express the emotional toll of living in a in Hill and McCall 2015: ix). The arts
diminished world. This sense of multipli- are part of the emergence of narratives
city that is contained within art provides a about the ways in which we live in the
way to sift through the numerous contra- world, narratives that can be damaging or
dictions of our everyday lives, to deal with visionary, which can connect or dislocate
divergent and discontinuous scales of time, us from the earth. The fact that so much of
place and action. Art practice can also Anthropocene discourse has been taken up
provide a space of propositions and future in the arts merits more attention.
imaginaries, exemplified by projects such
See also Art; Anthropocene; Anthropocene
as Swale (2016) by Mary Mattingly, a float-
Observatory; Ethereal Scent; Biological
ing edible tree forest and self-contained
Arts/Living Arts; Ecohorror; Neuronal
ecosystem on the Hudson River that resid-
Aesthetics.
ents and tourists can visit and which
provides a site for workshops and other
forms of community engagement. As David Heather Davis

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
 B
BIOLOGICAL ARTS/LIVING ARTS the Human to involve non-human agents,
through direct and experiential engage-
An artistic practice that involves the use of ment (Catts and Zurr 2014).
living biological systems; in most cases the Biological Arts deals with the theory,
biological systems are manipulated and/or practice, application and implications of
modified by the artist using technological/ the life sciences; creating a platform that
engineering biology as opposed to tradi- actively engages in raising awareness, by
tional modes of biological intervention. proposing different directions in which
It is linked to the notion of emerging knowledge can be applied, and technology
knowledge and emerging technologies. can be employed. This can be seen as
Biological Arts seems to work on the spec- cultural scrutiny in action, articulating and
trum from the speculative to the actual, subverting the ever-changing relations with
from the hyperbole to the disappointing, life. Much of the work of biological artists
form the techno-utopian to the contest- seems to be transgressive, trespassing into
able, while using living biological systems areas where ‘art should not go’. Yet it often
as part of the process of art making.1 does little more than culturally frame and
Humans’ relationship with (the idea articulate meanings to the manipulations
of) life is going through some radical of life that have become commonplace in
shifts; from the sub-molecular to the the scientific laboratory.
planetary, the cultural understandings of This aesthetically driven and confront-
what life is and what we are doing to it ing treatment of life by artists can create an
are lagging behind the actualities of uneasy feeling about the levels of manipula-
scientific and engineering processes. tion offered to living systems. This uneasi-
From Synthetic Biology and Regenerative ness seems to stem from the fact that current
Medicine, through Neuroengineering and cultural values and belief systems seem to
Soft Robotics to Geoengineering – life be ill-prepared to deal with the consequences
is becoming a technology, a raw material of applied knowledge in the life sciences.
waiting to be engineered; thus providing a Life is going through some major trans-
new palette of artistic expression in which formation, even if that might be more
life is both the subject and object. Within perceptual then actual. Through rigorous,
the realms of science and engineering, critical and indeed wondrous explorations
radical approaches to life, driven by mind- in the life science laboratory, Biological Arts
sets of control, seem to be taken haphaz- begins a dialogue that engages with the
ardly; exposing unintentional ontological extraordinary potentials and pitfalls of our
breaches, and calling for the urgent need new approaches to life itself.
for cultural and artistic scrutiny of the However, Biological Arts is not a move-
concept of life. This scrutiny goes beyond ment with a coherent manifesto; it is

66
BIOLOGICAL ARTS/LIVING ARTS 67

merely an umbrella term to describe art forms of art, like Biological Arts, are
that uses life and living systems as both its ephemeral, transient, in which by the end
subject and object (Yetisen et al. 2015). of the performative duration they leave
Biological Arts has been seen as: relics of remembrance.
Some may trace Biological Arts to
● Critical/tactical media arts in which the Media Arts, where the artist’s engagement
artists actively critique, question and with new technologies and their effect on
problematize these developments as bodies and societies are the point of
well as the socio-economic contexts in interest. In the case of Biological Arts,
which they operate (da Costa and these technologies are of the life sciences
Philip 2008). and therefore raise some unique consider-
● Promoting transhumanism; differently ations, sensitivities, ethics and applications.
to the posthuman approach, the trans- Biological Arts is different from Speculative
humanist agenda serves the interest Biology in that it works directly with living
of the human (or some humans) in biological systems. Avoiding the notion of
the quest to become a ‘better’ human the ‘speculative’ (with its capitalist associ-
and transcend, through advancement ations), it tends to align more with the
in science and technology, into a seam- notion of materiality. Therefore Biological
less amalgamation of a technological Arts will be positioned in the spectrum of
human. the actual, authentic and contestable
● Following a more traditional approach, expressions and further away from a
some Biological artists follow the fictionalized and speculative approach.
Formalist approach in which life Biological Arts is sometimes referred to
becomes a raw material for aesthetic as bioart; however, the term bioart seem to
expressions concerns with form, encompass more than Biological Arts, in
perspective, colour composition etc. that bioart also includes, among other
that is supposedly devoid of socio- things, traditional art expressions that are
political context. loosely dealing with the future of life, spec-
● Public engagement with life science/ ulative Photoshopped images, and in some
engineering in which the artists are cases other branches of science not directly
seen as either raising awareness of linked to biology.
techno-scientific developments, or as See also Art; Art in the Anthro-
promoting technological developments pocene; Transhumanism/Posthumanism;
and suggesting current and future scen- Hacking Habitat; Non-Human Agency;
arios. Some initiatives have been Technoanimalism; Speculative Post-
actively trying to recruit artists to create humanism; Vibrant Matter
public acceptance for technologies not
yet realized.
Note
Biological arts has links to other forms of 1. ‘It’s now a reality [that] artists are in the
art which touch upon life – for example labs. They are intentionally transgressing
live art or performance art, where the procedures of representation and meta-
human is the organism on display and phor, going beyond them to manipulate
serves as a subject and object; eco or envir- life itself. Biotechnology is no longer
onmental arts in which landscapes are just a topic, but a tool, generating green
being manipulated and explored. All these fluorescent animals, wings for pigs, and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
68 BIOS

sculptures moulded in bioreactors or viotá (“βιοτά”) instead of zōē to the same

under the microscope, and using DNA effect.
itself as an artistic medium’ (Hauser The tenses of the verb zēō (ζήω-ῶ) are
2003: 3). divided almost equally between zoë/zōē
and bios/vios: from zōē come the Present
Oron Catts zō, Simple Past ezōn, and the rare Future
zēsō; while from vios come the common
Future viōsomai, Aorist B eviōn, Present
BIOS Perfect veviōka, Past Perfect eveviōkein.
Zōthalmios and viothalmios in Pindar’s
Bios/ zoë [vios/zōē] is the foundational 7th Olympian Ode (0.7.10) both mean the
property of ánthrōpos, the site that both preservation of life, and the Sōsivios (life-
binds and delimits ánthrōpos to and from saving) incantation to Asklēpios is asking
the rest of the other animals. The two obviously for the saving of zoē (life itself)
forms of the term are far more similar in not of the accumulation of knowledge and
content and context, whether in Aristotle experiences that the rigid distinction
or anywhere else in Greek language, between zoë/bios that Giorgio Agamben
ancient or modern, than what has recently reads in bios; see, for instance, the
been made to be. Although not entirely inscription Sōsivios Asklēpiō kai Ηhygeian
conjoined, they are far from being distinct. euhēn, that appears on a votive offering
The intricacies and intertwining of the two plaque exhibited in the New Acropolis
words are attested from the crudely Museum. Graffiti that appears scrawled on
grammatical langue, i.e. the structure of walls in Greece since the beginning of the
the verb zēō (ζήω-ῶ), to the most intricate financial crisis in 2010 demand “zōē, óhi
parole that includes locutions such as vios epiviōsē” (life, not simple survival); modern
zoēs (the life of life) in Plato’s Epinomis and ancient Greek share the locution,
(982a), or the Homeric complex zōēs d’ descriptive of unspeakable suffering, such
agathon vion (hence the fine vios of zoë, as when Sophocles has Ismene respond to
Odyssey O: 491). In general terms, it Antigone’s question “how we are going to
appears that zōē references the biological use up our life (alōmenai viou) trying to
aspect of life, the state of living, while bios procure our hard-to-find food?” (ἀλώμεναι
can be thought of as referring more βίου δύσοιστον ἕξομεν τροφάν;) by
specifically to the length of the experience conceding that their life (βίος) will be
of living. A look at Homer though (Odyssey unlivable (ού βιωτός) after the death of
E 96), where we find that to zēn includes their father (ὁ μέλλων βίος οὐ βιωτός).
not only one’s biological life but also one’s Sophocles here is certainly conflating the
property in its entirety, practically one’s meaning of zōē as a biological process,
bios, one’s means of life, would challenge with the meaning of bios as the cumulative
such a definition. In Pindar, the distinction quality of texture of that life. The binary
between the animal and the human negation of the form bios is found in other
dimensions of the two words become even instances in Greek grammatology, such as
more occluded, since Pindar uses the verb in the atimōn tēn gynaikan kai ton vion
vioteuō (βιοτεύω) to mean zō (to live), aviōton paraskeuazōn (he humiliated the
whereas Herodotus (Histories 8.105) woman and created an unlivable life) in
speaks of the making of life (τὴν ζόην Aishinēs Against Timarchos (par 176); or
ποιέεσθαι). Euripides (Heracles F664) uses ton dhe mohthēron kai aviōton autois

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
BLUE HUMANITIES 69

kathistōnta ton vion (while the wicked one inserted a “line of conjugation along
who had made their life unlivable) in John which bíos is exposed to zōē, naturalizing
Chrysostom (:465), an expression perfectly bíos as well”, problematizing thusly the
legible in Modern Greek (mou’ kanes ton presumed disjunction of the two aspects
vio aviōto). Of course, all this becomes of life (2008: 14).
further complicated by the locution zō Rosi Braidotti complicates the gesture
vion (ζῶ βίον), as it appears in Demosthenes of distinction even further when she
Against Aeschines (18, 263) where argues that it was Christianity that left its
Demosthenes accuses Aeschines of having indelible mark upon the relationship (and
lived his life under democracy as a hare the distinction) between zōē and bios, still
lives his life—in constant trembling and retaining the semantic rigidity proposed
fear: lagō vion ezēs (λαγὼ βίον ἔζης). In by Agamben, even though I suspect that
Attican Greek the common usage to this rigid distinction that Braidotti traces
denote “to live” is zō or vioteuō (ζῶ, βιοτεύω, through Christianity might be more
Present tense), ezōn (ἔζων, Simple Past). As pronounced in Western than in Eastern
Vernardakis points out, the Atticans used Christianity (where zōē aiōnios—eternal
the form eviōn (ἐβίων) and veviōka zōē, eternal life—is found only in Christ).
(βεβίωκα) instead of ezēsa, ezēka (ἔζησα, But Braidotti sees correctly that the
ἔζηκα) to mean “I have lived”. examined life of Plato and Aristotle, bios
In other words, and with every respect theoretikos, the “self-reflexive control
due to Giorgio Agamben, his theory over life”, in Christianity has come to be
regarding zōē and vios appears to be based colonized by the “male, white, heterosex-
on a presumed rigid distinction between ual, Christian, property-owning, standard-
the two, when he writes “the Greeks had language-speaking citizens” (2008: 177–
no single term to express what we mean 178).
by the word ‘life.’ They used two terms
See also Anthrōpos; Animacies; Kin;
that, although traceable to a common
Vibrant Matter; Zoe; Posthuman Critical
etymological root, are semantically and
Theory.
morphologically distinct: zoë, which
expressed the simple fact of living common
Neni Panourgiá
to all living being (animals, men, or gods)
and bios, which indicated the form or way
of living proper to an individual or a
group” (1995: 1). There is no question that BLUE HUMANITIES
the two forms of the word are not
tautological, but there is also no question Blue Humanities names an off-shore
about the fact that when Aristotle talks trajectory that places cultural history in an
about the act of living well he uses the oceanic rather than terrestrial context.
form zēn (as in eu zēn) rather than eu Recognizing, in the words of science
viōnai, which would be equally available to fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and numer-
him, if the distinction that he was making ous marine biologists, that ‘the name of
needed to be disinfected from the polluting this planet should be Ocean, not Earth’,
(or simplistic) implications of animality. blue humanities scholarship uses the
On this precise point (and thinking on the alienating pressure of the deep ocean to es-
antinomies present in the conceptualiza- trange familiar stories and rewrite familiar
tion of Biopolitics) Roberto Esposito has narratives. Against discourses that situate

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
70 BLUE HUMANITIES

human cultures in pastoral fields, enclosed of new configurations of bodies, selves and
gardens or teeming cities, the blue human- subjectivity, oceanic scholarship finds disor-
ities pose the sailor and the swimmer as ienting posthuman turns in ancient as well
representative figures, each differently as ongoing discourses of fear and fascina-
threatened by and attuned to an inhospit- tion in relation to the great waters. The
able fluid environment. Sailors float with ocean haunts Western culture as boundary
technology, hoping that their vessels stay and chaos, from tearful Odysseus’s first
off the rocks. More vulnerable swimmers appearance in Homer’s epic, lamenting his
use practised motions to keep their bodies saltwater exile, to the georgic vision of
afloat. The inhuman ocean, on which Hesiod that asserts the only happy men are
humans depend for food and transport but those with no need to go to sea (Works and
in which we cannot long survive, pushes Days), to the Biblical vision of the New
humanities scholarship into alien environ- Jerusalem in which ‘there was no more sea’
ments. The blue humanities find posthuman (Rev. 21.1). We fear and love the sea, a salty
alienation in a history of human–ocean posthuman body alongside which we place
contacts that stretch from prehistory to last our own salty and watery bodies. The
weekend’s trip to the beach. prehistory of the posthuman, the blue
The turn toward blue humanities humanities suggests, lies underwater.
reveals maritime history, with its passion Beneath the surface of the ocean lies a
for technical exactitude and, particularly vastness we comprehend as poorly as the
in a western European context, conserva- surface of Mars. In the roughly 90 per cent
tive historiographical methods, uneasily of our planet’s biosphere that lives underwa-
making space for a posthuman turn. ter promises of biotic opulence float, along
Literary critics, environmental scholars, with carbon-eating phytoplankton, glossy-
sea-level activists, poets and artists are picture-ready cartoonish life forms and
turning to the sea to place human histories an invisible depth that gnaws at the ocean
in more-than-human contexts. Oceanic swimmer’s imagination. Melville’s cabin-
perspectives replace stories of national boy, having fallen overboard from his
expansion or decline with multiple vectors chasing whaleboat, finds mad visions of
of movement, so that human history totality beneath his feet: ‘Pip saw the multi-
becomes a story of multiple estrangements tudinous, God-omnipresent coral insects,
rather than progressive settlements. With that out of the firmament of waters heaved
particular attention to the constantly the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot on
reconstituted locations where sea meets the treadle of the loom’ (Melville 1999:
land, blue humanities scholarship removes 319). According to literary scholar Josiah
human actors from controlling heights and Blackmore, the oceanic turn of early modern
plunges them into uncertainty, movement culture provides poets and writers with a
and dissolution. potent metaphor for endlessly receding
Perhaps the richest historical paradox of depth that would profoundly shape modern
the oceanic turn in theoretical scholarship ideas of selfhood (Blackmore 2012). As
is the rich and often familiar archive of sea levels rise and storms ravage coastal
cultural history that this method enables settlements in the Anthropocene, uncom-
us to rediscover. Unlike some futurist or fortable and disorienting entanglements of
technologically framed versions of the sea and self become increasingly relevant to
posthuman project, which imagine twenty- twenty-first-century writers, artists and
first-century humans on the bleeding edge activists.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
BLUE HUMANITIES 71

The long literary and cultural history of punctuates Western literary culture form
human entanglements with ocean butt up Odysseus, Aeneas and Jonah to Ishmael,
against what literary scholar Robert Foulke Robinson Crusoe and the story of the
(1997) has called the twentieth century’s Titanic. Especially during periods of mari-
turn away from maritime culture. While time expansion, from the Roman empire to
global capitalism’s goods still float on the the settlement of the New World to Pacific
broad oceans, which Hegel called the island-hopping in the nineteenth century,
native element of exchange and economic shipwreck narratives provide stark visions
expansion, the shift from schooners to vast of humanity caught between divine fiat and
container ships has dehumanized modern the insufficient promise of human agency.
humanity’s relationship with the ocean The chastened but necessary technical
(Hegel 1967 [1821]: 151). In much of the labours of sailors in crisis represent valuable
twenty-first-century world, we have stories of humans surviving (sometimes) in
become communities of swimmers, not the face of non-human powers.
sailors. As the artist and film-maker Allan Researching representations of ship-
Sekula has powerfully shown, the human– wreck in and beyond the early modern
ocean interface has become increasingly period has led me to deploy four subcat-
mechanized and dehumanized, even egories or interpretive clusters for human–
though robot-piloted vessels still transport ocean encounters: wet globalization, blue
our economy’s life-blood across physical ecocriticism, salt aesthetics and shipwreck
oceans (Sekula 1996; Sekula and Burch modernity. Each of these double-barrelled
film 2010). As the size of container ships phrases identifies a trajectory for the blue
grows along with their automation, fewer humanities in the future. New work in
and fewer merchant marine sailors ply the feminist and ecomaterialist models also
oceans – though it seems noteworthy that provides rich seas to cross, as do the
the emblematic figure of the pirate has not continuing resonance of such metaphors as
entirely disappeared. the ‘ship of state’ and such geographic
My own work in the blue humanities constructs as the World Ocean. In elaborat-
explores the posthuman environment of ing these four categories, I hope to identify
the sea as a space especially valuable in our currents for the blue humanities rather
era of Anthropogenic climate change. The than setting boundaries on the element
unstable and destructive environment in that always overflows all boundaries.
which we live now increasingly resembles
dynamic sea rather than stable land. Wet Globalization: Twenty-first century
Agricultural and pastoral visions of responses to globalization sometimes fly
sustainability and predictability are giving above the earth with passenger planes.
way to narratives of threatening and unre- Blue humanities scholarship recalls that
liable environments. These posthuman historically and still today, the global
and post-sustainable narratives can be economy floats on the ocean.
terrifying – but I suggest that oceanic liter-
ature and culture can provide us with a Blue Ecocriticism: The sea’s overwhelming
rich cultural archive for raising new kinds presence in the natural environment
of environmental questions. reminds us that this element, long margin-
No trope in the oceanic archive seems alized by green thinking, has the potential
more resonant than shipwreck, an ancient to revolutionize ecological thought in a
story of disorientation and disruption that post-sustainability context.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
72 BODIES POLITIC

Salt Aesthetics: The disorienting pressure social systems requires producing certain
of the inhuman environment of the sea has types of ‘somatic bodies politic’ (those
influenced artists and poets from Homer whose affective-cognitive patterns and
to J. M. W. Turner and beyond. Salt water triggers fit the functional needs of the
carries aesthetic force. system) while those social systems or ‘civic
bodies politic’ are themselves bodily in the
Shipwreck Modernity: From an oceanic sense of directing material flows.
perspective, the story of emerging modern- The term was developed in dialogue with
ity resembles a catastrophe-ridden epic of and can be seen as resonant with numerous
ocean-fuelled expansion and its attendant scientific and philosophical projects that
disasters.1 can be associated with the ‘posthuman’.
Among them would be the historical-
Responding to the alienating pressure of libidinal materialism of Deleuze and
the ocean on human bodies and institu- Guattari (1984, 1987), the enactive biology
tions makes the blue humanities a form of and cognitive science of Evan Thompson
posthuman investigation. With cognates (2007), the cultural neuroplasticity of Bruce
from cyborg studies, post-sustainability Wexler (2006), the evolutionary technicity
ecocriticism, catastrophe studies and other of Andy Clark (2003), the developmental
discourses that separate humans from the systems theory of Susan Oyama (2000) and,
spaces that comfort them, the oceanic turn after the fact, the radical black feminism of
in humanities scholarship combines an Sylvia Wynter (Weheliye 2014).
ancient discourse that still thrives in Bodies politic are embodied, with indi-
contemporary culture with a modern viduated physiological and psychological
understanding of dynamism and change somatic dimensions, and they are embed-
in the relationship between humans and ded in multiple and overlapping socio-
their environments. political relations with other bodies
politic, relations which are themselves
See also Earth; Green/Environmental
as well physiological and psychological.
Humanities; Monster/Unhuman; Post-
We can thus distinguish compositional
disciplinarity.
and temporal scales for bodies politic.
Compositionally, we can distinguish first-
Note and second-order bodies politic. First-
1. These points are adapted from Steve order bodies politic are at the ‘personal’
Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of scale, whereas second-order bodies
Globalization, 1550–1719 (Minneapolis: politic can be at either the ‘group’ or ‘civic’
Minnesota University Press, 2015), scale. Temporally, we can distinguish the
xxix–xxx. short-term or ‘punctual event’ scale, the
mid-term or habit/training/developmental
Steve Mentz scale, and the long-term historical scale. It
must be remembered, however, that these
scales are analytical rather than concrete;
all concrete bodies politic are imbrications
BODIES POLITIC of all compositional and temporal scales.
An individual, then, is a first-order
‘Bodies politic’ (Protevi 2009) imbricate the body politic, at once social and somatic,
social and the somatic: the reproduction of embedded and embodied, connected and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
BODIES POLITIC 73

individuated, in both physiological and and let live’. In most synchronic episodes a
psychological dimensions. This is the quite precisely limited virtual repertoire of
micro-level of compositional analysis, the affective cognitive response is available (a
personal. When viewed synchronically (that limitation of all that the body could do,
is, on a relatively short time scale), a first- modelled as a regularly recurring attractor
order body politic is a dynamic physiolo- layout) and efficacious (although we can at
gical system that regulates its material and any time be overwhelmed by events that
energetic flows as they enter, circulate seem ‘senseless’ to us and that scramble our
within and leave the socially embedded yet sense-making ‘codes’). Diachronically,
individuated body to take part in the however, we can see changes at critical
economy of higher-order bodies politic at points as intensive processes disrupt actual
the group and civic scales. These dynamic sets of habits; this can be modelled as the
physiological patterns can be modelled as production of new attractor layouts, and is
basins of attraction in the phase space of the experienced as psychic turmoil or exciting
body, as regions of its virtual, and are exper- novelty. During childhood, such transitions
ienced as background affects, as sharp or in affective cognition are well mapped by
diffuse feelings of well-being, unease or any developmental psychologists, while even
of a variety of intermediate states. Events in adulthood traumatic events or flashes
on the fast/personal scale are seen neurolo- of insight can profoundly rearrange our
gically as the formation of resonant cell habitual ways of making sense, that is,
assemblies or RCAs. Viewed diachronically rearrange the virtual repertoire, modelled
(that is, on a relatively slow mid-term/ as the production of new attractor layouts.
habituation or long-term/developmental A second-order body politic is
time scale), the patterns of this physiolo- composed of individuals who are them-
gical flow regulation coalesce through child- selves first-order bodies politic. Here we
hood, change at critical points entering and find the interaction of the personal with
leaving puberty, and often settle down into the group compositional scale, where
stable habits during adulthood. In other encounters can be one-off occurrences or
words, system patterns gradually crystallize can be patterned and customary or even
or actualize as intensive processes disrupt institutionalized (and thus operate at the
previous patterns; this can be modelled as border of group and civic). A second-order
the construction of new attractor layouts, body politic is at minimum a couple, but
and is experienced as being out of touch can be larger; a second-order body politic
with your new body (the famous gawkiness has itself somatic and social aspects in both
of adolescents). physiological and psychological dimen-
Psychologically, the first-order or sions. A second-order body politic has a
personal body politic engages in affective physiology, as it regulates material flows (1)
cognition, making sense of the situations among its members (the first-order bodies
in which its somatic life is lived in socio- politic as the components of its body) and
political embeddedness. This making sense (2) between itself (its soma as marked by its
is profoundly embodied; the body subject functional border) and its milieu. For
opens a sphere of competence within which example, a second-order body politic might
things show up as ‘affordances’, as oppor- regulate the production, distribution and
tunities for engagement, and other people consumption of food and drink: think of
show up as occasions for social interaction, the way a family kitchen is a distribution
as invitations, repulsions or a neutral ‘live node for affectively charged material flows.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
74 BODY WITHOUT ORGANS

This regulation of group system dynamics 28 November 1947, Antonin Artaud

can be seen as construction of a virtual declared war on the organs, introducing
repertoire, modelled as the production of the idea of a body without organs
an attractor layout, and affectively experi- that would be free from the capturing
enced as the background affect or mood of confinements of automatic reactions and
the group. A second-order body politic can habitual patterns. In their co-authored
also be studied psychologically, as it regu- philosophy books Anti-Oedipus (1972)
lates inter-somatic affective cognition, the and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Gilles
emotional and meaningful interchanges Deleuze and Félix Guattari propose
(1) among its members, and (2) between Artaud’s body without organs as a concept
their collective affective cognition and that to critique western Enlightenment forms
of other bodies politic, at either personal, of autonomous subjectivity. While Deleuze
group or civic compositional scales. In and Guattari never explicitly relate the
other words, groups have characteristic body without organs to the posthuman,
ways – a limited virtual repertoire – of the concept may be relevant to understand
making sense of what happens, on the basis why N. Katherine Hayles in How We
of which decisions take place as actualiza- Became Posthuman can conclude that ‘we
tions or selections from that repertoire. have always been posthuman’ (Hayles
These decisions can be seen as channelling 1999: 291).
toward an end state, modelled as the For Deleuze and Guattari the body
approach to an attractor in the group’s state without organs is an evolving concept. In
space, and experienced as a spontaneous Anti-Oedipus it is introduced in relation to
agreement in which the collective subject the body of ‘the schizo’ that resists the
makes up its mind: ‘all of a sudden it habitual organization of the body. Hence
dawned on all of us that this is what we had the reference to Artaud, who in all his
to do.’ In terms of its temporal scales, a delirious and artistic expression points out
short-term event for a second-order body that underneath the traditionally coded
politic is an encounter of first-order bodies body with an assigned place and role in
politic. In the mid-term, we see repeated society, underneath the organs, there is a
patterns of such encounters or subjectifica- chaotic, messy world full of intensive
tion practices, and in the long term, we see potentiality. Men, women, children; all
the becoming-custom of such practices, have their place in a social hierarchy.
their deep social embedding. Physical labour, bearing children, sitting
up straight in class; all have an orderly
See also Alienation; Body Without
place for their organs. The (schizoid)
Organs; Geopolitics; Posthuman Rights;
body without organs defies the social code
Posthuman Disability and DisHuman
and deliberately ‘scrambles all the codes’
Studies; Trans-corporeality.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1972: 15). In A
Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari
John Protevi
invite us to ‘make a body without organs’,
to experiment (artistically, socially and
philosophically) and find new ways of
BODY WITHOUT ORGANS relating to the body: ‘Why not walk on
your head, sing with your sinuses, see
In ‘To Have Done with the Judgement through your skin, breath with your belly?’
of God’, a radio play broadcast on (1980: 151) They elaborate the liberating

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
BODY WITHOUT ORGANS 75

strategies against the stratifying regimes of without organs a posthuman concept

the socially accepted body, starting with a (Pisters 2014).
call for doses of caution: the anorectic More specifically, based on these
body, the masochist body, the addicted transversal extensions, the body without
body, the paranoid body – they are all organs can also be productive in the
bodies without organs that demonstrate context of the technosphere. In her book
that such resisting strategies are not How We Became Posthuman, Hayles
without danger and can turn out to be discusses how the model of the human
deadly. But there are no preset rules, except since the Enlightenment has been subjec-
to be watchful and wise, acknowledging at ted to alienation by cybernetic machines
the same time our fragility and need for and artificial intelligence. Hayles brings
freedom and the creation of new possibil- together both scientific theories and
ities for life. fictional narratives of literature that equally
The body without organs is the sub- construct ideas about the posthuman in
personal, not-yet-organized level of affect- the computer age. She discovers two
ive qualities that allows new perceptions, tendencies. On the one hand, there is an
new connections and new affects. Because apocalyptic narrative that indicates the fear
it dives below the categories and codes, the of the loss of humanity, loss of control and
body without organs can make cross- the dissolution of the human self. These are
cutting connections between the human the stories where technology is conceived
and the non-human: materially on the as separate from the human body: ‘Only
level of the combination of human and if one thinks of the subject as an autonom-
animal DNA , or on the affective level of ous self, independent of the environment,
the proximity in movement (speed and is one likely to experience the panic
slowness) in processes of becoming- performed by Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics
animal (e.g. prowling as in a becoming- and Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (Hayles 1999:
cat). So a second way of understanding the 290). On the other hand, Hayles emphas-
body without organs goes beyond the izes (scientific and imaginary) stories that
concept of the human body altogether, propose a contrasting vision of the human
when transversal relations between species in relation to the contemporary techno-
emerge. Thirdly, even further, the non- world: ‘When the human is seen as part of
organic itself can be considered a body a distributed system. . . it is not a question
without organs. The earth is a body without of leaving the body behind but rather of
organs, full of vibrant matter (Bennett extending embodied awareness in highly
2010). Most fundamentally, metal is a body specific, local and material ways that would
without organs. Metal elements can be be impossible without electronic pros-
found in all human, animal and inorganic thesis’ (290–1).
matter. In its primordial and transformat- Hayles’ conception of the posthuman is
ive quality, metal is even the prime explicitly related to the articulation of the
conductor of all matter, indicating an human with intelligent machines. However,
immanent power of corporeality in all by disentangling certain assumptions
matter (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 411). about the human conceived as an inde-
These in-human and inhuman extensions pendent entity, she opens up possibilities
of the body, beneath the organs and for the posthuman to survive in close
beyond human corporeality and into the circuits with other life forms, human,
geology of the earth, make the body otherwise embodied and inorganic, that

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
76 BODY WITHOUT ORGANS

we depend on. The body without organs to all other entities on the earth, the body
suggests that we did not have to wait for without organs proposes indeed that we
prosthetic machines, extensions of men by have always been posthuman.
technology, to understand that the ‘scram-
See also Alienation; AI (Artificial
bling of the codes’ is first and for all
Intelligence); Earth; In-Human the; In/
connected to a desire and fundamental
Human; Contemporary, the; Otherwise
need to deliver our automatic reactions
Embodied Others.
and habitual self-contained forms of
subjectivity. In acknowledging our deep
Patricia Pisters
and ever-changing transversal connections

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
 C
CAMP century, including ‘how camp spaces are
currently discussed, imaged and construc-
The notion of the camp presents both ted’ (2009: 2).
some residual humanist features and Central to any discussion, imagining
distinct posthuman elements. It raises and construction of the camp is a notion of
imperatively the question of the relation- humanity that rests on the possibility of
ship between posthumanism and the containing the inhuman. Specifically, we
inhuman aspects of the contemporary have to ask who are the residents of camps,
world order. The origins of the word ‘camp’, who constructs the camp and how are its
according to the Oxford English Dictionary residents, and the camp itself, imagined? Is
(OED) (1989: 809), are military, and the it possible to reimagine the space of the
first definition is ‘Martial contest, combat, camp in the name of other histories –
fight, battle, war’. The idea of camp as a site Romani histories, for one, and histories of
of battle is one that I want to keep constant, encampment that can be posited as
precisely because I see the camp as a site of critique, as future, as possibility? If the
critique, resistance, opposition and, in the Paris Commune was a form of encamp-
end, combat. ment, and we take seriously the political
The OED has more than two pages practices of the Romani camp, how do we
defining camp, beginning with the military then understand the states of exception
and transferring to ‘the temporary quar- that mark the concentration camp and the
ters, formed by tents, vehicles or other refugee camp? These multiple, contradict-
portable, improvised means of shelter, ory meanings and practices of the camp
occupied by a body of nomads or men on are constructed through and formed by
the march, by travellers, gipsies [sic], categories and notions of in/humanity.
companies of sportsman, lumberman, I would push us to take these questions
field-preachers and their audiences, or seriously – to claim this continuum of
parties “camping out”; an encampment.’ By meanings – as we enter into a considera-
the twentieth century, such ‘temporary tion of the politics and practices of the
quarters’ included ‘quarters for the accom- posthuman.
modation for detained or interned persons, In order to understand the camp as a
as in concentration camp’. As Charlie Haley temporary space, marked, at the same time,
has argued, ‘defining the camp is a central as a figuratively permanent constitutive
problem of our contemporary moment’ outside, we come to the definition of the
(2009: 1), and he has meticulously worked camp put forth by Giorgio Agamben in
to document the spaces and ideas of the Homo Sacer, as the nomos of the modern.
camp at the beginning of the twenty-first Agamben argues:

77
78 CAMP

But what is first of all taken into the of contestation across various iterations
juridical order is the state of exception and significations, from the military to the
itself. Insofar as the state of exception is temporary to the site of internment or
‘willed’, it inaugurates a new juridico- concentration, from practices of leisure
political paradigm in which the norm and holiday to those of bodily or affective
becomes indistinguishable from the excess. In this way, the state of exception
exception. The camp is thus the structure produced by the camp can be seen, also, as
in which the state of exception – the a site of possibility, where the camp and
possibility of deciding on which founds practices of encampment can be taken up
sovereign power – is realized normally.
as critique, as resistance, as opposition, as
1998: 96–7
politics and as archive. Hannah Arendt, in
This new juridico-political paradigm has ‘We Refugees’, claims the refugee as the
been produced through the concentration agent of a new political position, arguing:
camp, the refugee camp, the migrant camp, ‘refugees driven from country to country
the Romani camp and the prison camp at represent the vanguard of their peoples – if
Guantánamo Bay, which itself has existed they keep their identity’ (1943: 119).
as a space of exception created in the wake Arendt’s argument in that last clause ‘if
of the War of 1898 – a US Naval Base on they keep their identity’ was a call to claim
Cuban soil – and in its subsequent itera- refugee status; the status, as she says earlier
tions as a containment camp for Haitians in in the essay, of the ‘so-called schnorrer’, or
the 1990s and an extraterritorial, extrajudi- beggar, as a call to solidarity and a new
cial prison in the wake of 9/11. Camps have understanding of belonging, rather than
not simply been produced and maintained fighting ‘like madmen for private exist-
as states of exception, they have grown and ences and individual destinies’ (114).
spread globally. Camps exist in cities and In the current moment, it is crucial that
spaces from Kenya to Calais, from Dhaka to we claim the camp – from the lager to the
Turkey, and from Jordan to Chennai. Recent refugee camp, from the Romani encamp-
history has seen Second World War-era ment to the mahala, from the slum to the
concentration camps, former mass murder tower block. Such claiming can be the
sites – including Dachau in Germany and basis for a new politics, one that takes
Sajmište in Serbia – turned into refugee seriously the connections and intimacies
camps. Thus the state of exception has that make up the human and non-human;
achieved spatial dominance, with large the relation of human to animal, to material
areas of the world maintaining sovereign objects and productive practices, to the
states of exception for the longue-durée, as Commons and the larger world. Claiming
sites of death and of what Agamben has the camp means taking up a political
called ‘bare life’. Camps, spread across economy that is not based on the Lockean
Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia, have fiduciary trust, on ownership and enclos-
reproduced the state of exception on such ure. Rather, we can take up new questions of
a large scale that, we could argue, necropol- temporality and temporariness, usefulness
itics, as conceived by Achille Mbembe and practice, common space and common
(2003), has, in fact, triumphed over biopol- sites, community formations and serious
itics to become the dominant productive engagements with (gendered, racialized,
machinery of sovereignty. classed, sexual, embodied) difference.
The space of encampment, and the Claiming the camp for me, as a Romani
meaning of the camp, has also been a site woman, means, on the one hand, claiming

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CAPITALOCENE AND CHTHULUCENE 79

the genocide against Roma and Sinti, empire; I argue that we cannot take up the
claiming our existence in the lagers, the idea of a planetary humanism without
extermination camps set up by the Nazis claiming the camp and its multiple legacies,
and their allies to destroy our people and its problematics and its inhabitants.
our history. It means coming to a recogni- Furthermore, the camp moves beyond the
tion of that history, of those who were individual and the collective, moves
murdered and those who survived, and of beyond the human, as the subject of the
the generations who have come after, still political. The camp incorporates history
marked by the loss of our people, our and archive, space and nature, protest,
history, our place in the world. On the resistance and critique. It incorporates
other hand, it means taking the Romani trajectories of eviction and expulsion,
camp – in its old and new formations – as collateral damage and flight; it takes up
one of the means of our survival and one new forms of temporality and can posit
of the possibilities of our dignity, our new claims against capital, sovereignty, the
difference, our politics and our community, nation-state and regimes of citizenship. It
that has been the site of our archive and is Zuccotti Park, certainly, but also Geneva
our history. Elsewhere, I have written Camp in the centre of Dhaka and the
about the camp as a living thing, as the site Jungle in Calais; by claiming the camp as
of decolonization; it can only become such protest and as the constitutive outside of
if we claim it as our history, our archive, the city, we can open up space for other
our living present (Brooks 2013: 2). politics, for other subjects, for other histor-
Again, we can draw from Agamben, but ies and other futures.
this time to take up the camp as possibility,
See also Expulsions; In/Human; In-
as the site of another politics:
human; Necropolitics; Lampedusa;
It is even possible that, if we want to be Occupy (after Deleuze); (Un)Documented
equal to the absolutely new tasks ahead, Citizenship; Nomadic Sensibility.
we will have to abandon decidedly,
without reservation, the fundamental Ethel Brooks
concepts through which we have so far
represented the subjects of the political
(Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also
the sovereign people, the worker, and so
CAPITALOCENE AND
forth) and build our political philosophy CHTHULUCENE
anew starting from the one and only
figure of the refugee. We are not posthuman; we are compost.
Agamben 2000: 16.7 We are not homo; we are humus. We are
terran; we are earthlings; we are many; we
This conception of the refugee is one basis are indeterminate. We bleed into each
upon which we can build a new political other in chaotic fluid extravagance. We eat
philosophy, but, for me, it is the idea of the our own snakey tails in sympoietic whorls
camp that opens up new political possibil- to generate polymorphic ongoingness; we
ity. Paul Gilroy (2004: 16) argues for a are enmeshed with the ouroboroi of
‘planetary humanism’ based on ideas of diverse interlaced netherworlds. We are
decolonization put forth by Fanon and chthonic, of and for the earth, of and for its
Césaire, and asks us to move beyond the unfinished times. We live and die in its
‘camps’ of race, the nation-state and ruins. We tunnel in the ruins to germinate

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80 CAPITALOCENE AND CHTHULUCENE

in the seams. We can yet be resurgent. to think with. Moore himself first heard
There may still be time. Composting is so the term ‘Capitalocene’ in 2009 in a seminar
hot.1 in Lund, Sweden, when then graduate
The outrages meriting names like student Andreas Malm proposed it. In an
Anthropocene or Capitalocene are about urgent historical conjuncture, words-to-
socio-ecologically, historically situated think-with pop out all at once from many
human beings (not humankind all the time bubbling cauldrons because we all feel the
everywhere) destroying places and times need for better netbags to collect up the
of refuge for people and other critters. stuff crying out for attention.4
The Anthropocene and the Capitalocene However, the Anthropocene or
designate double death, the killing of the Capitalocene are perhaps really more
conditions of ongoingness.2 These are boundary events than epochs, like the
appropriately ugly names for unpreced- K-Pg boundary between the Cretaceous
entedly destructive webs of systemic and the Paleogene.5 The Anthropocene
processes. Their consequences, their mater- and Capitalocene mark severe discontinu-
ialities, are already etched into the rocks, ities; what comes after will not be like what
airs, waters and flesh of terrans, in chemical came before. The scale of destruction
and nuclear signatures, in heat-trapping wreaked in the Anthropocene, in the
gasses, in hot acid seas. Capitalocene is one Capitalocene, has consequences. There will
of those necessary but insufficient words be no status quo ante. Loss is real and
that pop into one’s mouth unbidden. ongoing. Mourning is required, and it is
Unhappy with the false and arrogant and will be hard. The boundary that is the
humanist universalism of Anthropocene, I Anthropocene/Capitalocene means many
started lecturing about the historical things, including that immense, irrevers-
extractionism and extinctionism of the ible and unequally borne destruction is
Capitalocene (and of the Plantationocene, really in train, not only for the eleven
that name for processes for making wealth billion or so people who will be on earth
through radical simplification, rooted in near the end of the twenty-first century,
global transportations of peoples, plants, but for myriads of other critters too. (The
animals and microbes and in slavery, colo- incomprehensible but sober number of
nialism, hetero-normative familialism, around eleven billion people will only hold
racism and other forced systems of produc- if current worldwide birth rates of human
tion and reproduction, all of which made babies remain low; if they rise again, all
the great accelerations of the Capitalocene bets are off. Anti-racist, anti-imperialist
possible).3 But no one invents terms like feminists stopped talking about this;
Capitalocene de novo; notice how many shame on us.) The edge of extinction is not
people propose similar important terms just a metaphor; system collapse is not a
at the same time. We lust for names to thriller. Ask any refugee of any species.
designate a shared, intolerable and flatly Our job is to make the Anthropocene and
unnecessary condition. The established dis- Capitalocene as short and thin as possible
order is not necessary; how many times and to cultivate with each other in every
and in how many ways must we learn way imaginable epochs to come that can
to notice this fact? Not only was ‘my’ replenish refuge.6
Capitalocene part of a cat’s cradle game of
invention, as always, but Jason Moore had Right now, the earth is full of refugees,
already developed compelling arguments human and not, without refuge.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
CAPITALOCENE AND CHTHULUCENE 81

‘Chthulucene’ is a simple word. It is a again and again to exterminate the

compound of two Greek roots (khthôn and chthonic ones. The scandals of times called
kainos) that together name a kind of time- the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene
place for learning to stay with the trouble are the latest and most dangerous of these
of living and dying in response-ability on exterminating forces, these Singularities
a damaged earth. Kainos means now, a dealing out double death. Living-with and
time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, dying-with each other potently in the
for freshness. Nothing in kainos must Chthulucene can be a fierce reply to the
mean conventional pasts, presents or dictates of both Anthropos and Capital in
futures. Thick times have many shapes; the exterminationist times of the Moderns.
arrows entangle, double back on them- It turns out that the chthonic ones are not
selves, proliferate and lead astray; times are dead; they writhe and slither within all of
bumptious materialities. Besides all that, earth. Like Medusa, they are mortal and on
there is nothing in times of beginnings the move. Like the octopuses, squid and
that insists on wiping out what has come cuttlefish appreciated in fifth-century BCE
before, or, indeed, wiping out what comes Greece, the chthonic ones are critters of
after. Kainos can be full of inheritances, aporia. They secrete inky darkest night;
of remembering, and full of comings, of they are artisans of disguise; they are
nurturing what might still be, as well as relentlessly polymorphic; they entangle the
noticing what still is. Resonating in world in their numerous tube-feet-lined,
sympoietic complexity, kainos plucks the stinger-endowed tentacles.7 The chthonic
threads of thick, ongoing presence, with ones are spiders of the sea; they are predat-
stringy hyphae infusing all sorts of tempor- ors; they are not exterminators.
alities and materialities. We need a name for the dynamic
Chthonic ones are beings of the earth, ongoing sym-chthonic forces and powers
both ancient and up-to-the-minute. of which people as humus are a part, within
Chthonic ones are replete with tentacles, which ongoingness is at stake. Ongoingness
feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs is not futurism; ongoingness is full of
and very unruly hair. Chthonic ones romp continuities, discontinuities and surprises.
in multi-critter humus but have little Maybe, but only maybe, and only with
patience with sky-gazing anthropos. intense commitment and collaborative
Chthonic ones are monsters in the best work and play with other earthlings, flour-
sense; they demonstrate and perform the ishing for rich multispecies assemblages
material meaningfulness of earth processes that include human people will be possible.
and critters. They also demonstrate and I am calling all this the Chthulucene – past,
perform consequences. Chthonic ones are present and to come. These real and
not safe; they have no truck with ideo- possible timespaces are not named after SF
logues; they belong to no one; they writhe writer H. P. Lovecraft’s misogynist racial-
and luxuriate in manifold forms and mani- nightmare monster Cthulhu (note the
fold names in all the airs, waters and places spelling difference), but rather after the
of earth. They make and unmake; they are diverse earth-wide tentacular powers and
made and unmade. They are who are; they forces and collected things with names like
are what are. They do not do ‘I’ very well; Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa (burst from water-
they are sym-poietic, not auto-poietic. No full Papa), Terra, Haniyasu-hime, Spider
wonder the world’s great monotheisms in Woman, Pachamama, Oya, Gorgo, Raven,
both religious and secular guises have tried A’akuluujjusi and many many more. ‘My’

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
82 CAPITALOCENE AND CHTHULUCENE

Chthulucene, even burdened with its prob- attempt to describe graphically the
lematic Greek-ish tendrils, entangles growth curves of natural and social
myriad temporalities and spatialities and systems from 1750 to the present. Like all
myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages such global aggregates, the data mask
– including the more-than-human, other- vast and diverse inequalities and also
than-human, inhuman and human-as- threaten to mystify the sympoietic
humus. Even rendered in an American natural-technical processes for making
English-language text like this one, Naga, such data, as well as making such
Gaia, Tangaroa, Medusa, Spider Woman inequalities and ontological homogeniz-
ations. Still, the striking shared inflection
and all their kin are some of the many
points around 1950 of so many hetero-
thousand names proper to a vein of SF that
geneous exponential growth curves
Lovecraft could not have imagined or
(human population, species extinctions,
embraced – namely the webs of speculative use of paper, carbon emissions, metals
fabulation, speculative feminism, science extraction, industrial animal production,
fiction and scientific fact, so far.8 forced and free human migrations, etc.
We need ugly words like Anthropocene etc.) cry out for situated historical
and Capitalocene to do needed critique; analysis of webbed processes, and not for
we need the snakey no-name/thousand- enthralled appeals to the mathematics of
name ones for actual living and dying as exponential growth curves as if they
earthlings. It matters which stories tell described natural laws and necessary
stories, which concepts think concepts. directions of time.
Mathematically, visually and narratively, it 4. For his first widely available Capitalocene
matters which figures figure figures, which argument, see Jason Moore, ‘Anthropo-
systems systematize systems.9 cene, Capitalocene, and the Myth of
Industrialization’, https://jasonwmoore.
See also Anthropocene; Epigenetic wordpress.com/2013/06/16/anthropo
Landscape; Expulsions; Extinction; Gulf c e n e - c a p i t a l o c e n e - t h e - my t h - o f -
Labor; Kin; Vibrant Matter; Survival; industrialization/, 16 June 2013, and ‘The
Posthuman Critical Theory. Capitalocene, Part 1: On the Nature and
Origins of Our Ecological Crisis’, http://
www.jasonwmoore.com/uploads/The_
Notes
Capitalocene__Part_I__June_2014.pdf,
1. Sticker made by artists Beth Stephens 2015 [accessed 15 March 2016].
and Annie Sprinkle with Kern Toy 5. Scott Gilbert pointed out that the
Design, www.sexecology.org. Anthropocene (and Plantationocene)
2. ‘Double death’ is from Deborah Bird should be considered a boundary event
Rose, ‘What if the Angel of History Were like the K-Pg boundary, not an epoch.
a Dog?’, Cultural Studies Review, 12(1): See Donna Haraway, Noboru Ishikawa,
67–78, 2006. Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L.
3. Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Tsing and Nils Bubandt, ‘Anthropologists
Deutsch, Owen Gaffney and Cornelia Are Talking – About the Anthropocene’,
Ludwig, ‘The Trajectory of the Ethnos, 81(4): 1–30, 2015. As far as I
Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, know, this conversation is the first place
The Anthropocene Review, 2(1): 81–98, the term Plantationocene appeared
2015. The very useful notion of the great (p. 22).
acceleration for dating the ugly thing 6. Refuge and resurgence are developed in
called Anthropocene dates to 2004, in an Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
COMMONS, THE 83

the World: On the Possibility of Life in understood as one such concept, as a

Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton something – relation, affect, space, time,
University Press, 2015). lack – that is shared by all, used by all, and
7. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre accounts for all things in/of/on the
Vernant, Les ruses de l’intelligence: la common(s). The commons is a constant
mètis des Grecs (Paris: Flammarion et emergence of common social, economic
Cie, 1974). The Titan goddess Metis is of and environmental relations and practices.
an earlier, more tangled age than Zeus They are spaces of experimentation, for
and his siblings. Despite efforts to build both theorizing and practising, providing a
her into Olympiad genealogies by marry-
lens for critique and affirmation, a method
ing her to Zeus, in my stories of the
for resistance and creation. They might be
Chthulucene, Metis remains true to her
purely affective, tethered to a specific loca-
earth-wide tentacular kin.
8. Os Mil Nomes de Gaia/the Thousand
tion, or an unpredictable entangling of
Names of Gaia was the generative inter- both. Perhaps they are a riot, a party, a free
national conference organized by space, an invisible space, a non-space, a
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Déborah commonplace. The interpretation of the
Danowski and their collaborators in commons as such finds further support in
2014 in Rio de Janeiro. See Haraway, Deleuze’s explication of philosophical
‘Entrevista,’ by Skype, 21 August 2014, production; he clarifies that while some
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= concepts require specialized, extraordin-
1x0oxUHO lA8. For all the videos from ary or affectively charged words, ‘others
The Thousand Names of Gaia/Os Mil make do with an ordinary, everyday word
Nomes, see https://www.youtube.com/c/ that is filled with harmonics so distant that
osmilnomesdegaia/videos [accessed 17 it risks being imperceptible to a nonphilo-
December 2015]. sophical ear’ (Deleuze 1994: 7–8). Suffice
9. This glossary entry relies heavily on to say, it would be hard to find a more
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the apparently mundane word that ‘common’,
Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene yet this simplicity belies the contradictory,
(Durham, NC : Duke University Press complex, multiple and ever-evolving
Books, 2016). praxes that denote the commons of the
past and present.
Donna Haraway The commons of advanced capitalism
are myriad, multiple, contradictory and, at
times, imperceptible. They have taken
COMMONS, THE shape as digital (Terranova 2004), cultural
(Lessig 2002), intellectual (Moten and
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Harney 2013), aesthetic (Moten 2003),
Guattari argue a philosophical praxis historical (Linebaugh 2014), environ-
based on the production of concepts. Such mental (Shiva 1997), domestic (Federici
concepts, they contend, are intertwined 2012) and urban (Harvey 2012) commons.
with the problematic forces they are As a practice of communal management of
created to address, ‘without which they resource access, the commons determines
would have no meaning and which can transversal relations between all living
themselves only be isolated or understood beings and their common environment.
as their solution emerges’ (Deleuze and With thousands of years of practical know-
Guattari 1994: 16). The commons can be ledge, the concept of the commons can

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
84 COMMONS, THE

easily transverse entrenched dichotomies study of the commons, exemplified in the

of nature–culture, human–non-human work of Silvia Federici (2004, 2012), Peter
and individual–collectivity, relying on self- Linebaugh (2014) and Maria Mies (1998),
organizing and process-based formations points to the commons, or rather their
to find points of relationality to enact privatization and destruction, as a key
becoming-in-common. As a practice, point in the development of modern
commoning might also regulate the capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism.
production and dissemination of imma- Likewise, a survey of feminist economic
terial resources, like knowledge, culture and geographic studies reveals that forms
and communication. The commons as a of common resource management have
political praxis may operate based on successfully persisted at the heart of many
capitalist, anti-capitalist or sharing communities, especially throughout the
economic lines (Caffentzis and Federici global South, albeit requiring ongoing
2014; Gibson-Graham 2006). They can be struggle against colonialism, neocolonial-
globalized, localized, ‘glocal’, as immense as ism and multi-national exploitation (Shiva
our galaxy or as specifically and minutely 1997; Ostrom 1990). This work has shown
singular as the sustainable ecology of a that ‘commoning’ is the principle by which
three-toed sloth. A commons might human beings have organized their exist-
manage resources that are finite, as is the ence on this earth for thousands of years,
case with natural resources, or impossibly and that ‘there is hardly a society that does
infinite, as is the case for knowledge and not have the commons at its heart’
cultural commons. (Caffentzis and Federici 2014). Yet these
With this complexity, multiplicity and approaches to the commons focus primar-
constant state of becoming, the commons ily on material or physical commons – the
of the anthropocene present an ideal land, natural resources, fisheries, the ocean,
conceptual terrain to experiment with an the air. Here, the relations that constitute
actualized posthuman ethico-politics. the common are grounded in physical
Such a posthuman commons would extend locations, embedded in a common earthly
the dictum omnia sunt communia to its territory, and often come with pre-formed
vitalist materialist horizon, the inclusion of structures and institutions to manage
all forms of life and accountable to, not common resources. While such common-
subsumed by, affective and immaterial ing touches the ecological agency and
relations. These moves, following Rosi relations of posthuman ethics, the continu-
Braidotti, might inspire ‘an ethics based on ation of basic anthropocentric ideals – wage
the primacy of the relation, of interde- relation, social institutions, established
pendence, which values non-human or a- forms of governance – inevitably stymie
personal Life’ (Braidotti 2013: 95). Towards the realization of a posthuman commons
activating this posthuman ethics being-in- that is an immanent, embodied and every-
common, it is necessary to identify the day practice (Papadopoulos 2012).
salient and generative commonalities of The commons as method of tracing
existing manifestations of the commons codes, flows and potential ‘lines of flight’
and commoning. is also addressed in the (post)operaismo-
As abiding financial, social and ecolo- inspired work of Antonio Negri, Michael
gical crises reverberate across the globe, Hardt, Cesare Casarino, Paolo Virno and
the commons have made a resurgence as a Matteo Pasquinelli. Here, too, the concept
promising line of flight. The historical of commoning embodies a relational,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
COMMONS, THE 85

subject-making process, which assists in question becomes to find the specific,

charting the development of advanced adequate, historical form through which
capitalism. This reading identifies import- it should determine itself ’ (Casarino and
ant shifts in labour, production and accu- Negri 2008: 104). This function of collect-
mulation, all of which move towards ive praxis underscores the ability of
immaterial relations and production. Here, commoning practices to root out existing
the concept of the multitude replaces the hierarchical and anthropocentric relations.
commons, as ‘a form of political existence While the investment in collective
that takes as its starting point a One that is political praxis itself may be interpreted as
radically heterogeneous to the State: public implicitly accepting human superiority
Intellect’ (Virno 1996: 201). The concept of over the common, a more affirmative
the multitude was popularized through reading of this collective praxis involves an
Hardt and Negri’s adaptation of it in their infinite multiplicity of non-human species,
widely read Empire trilogy, which mapped forces and entities, all of whom self-
the emergence of immaterial capitalist organize the reproduction of life and
relations, particularly forms of immaterial creation of transversal subjectivities
labour, biopolitical production and global- through their immanent and unpredict-
ized financial systems (Hardt and Negri able common relations. Rather than
2000, 2009). precluding all non-human matter and
While these innovations stretched the agencies at the start, a posthuman collect-
concept of the commons beyond the ive praxis might help unveil the common
unforeseen horizons of financial, cognitive nature of humanism in social life, freeing
and communicative capitalism, their both political practices and singular,
analysis did nothing to displace the cent- bounded humanist subjectivities towards
rality of the human as ruler of the earthly unknowable possibilities. Casarino and
commons. The praxis of a posthuman Negri’s dual emphasis on exploring the
commons demands an ongoing commit- transformative gestures of collective
ment to fleshing out the web of lively and praxis, and on experimenting with collect-
mechanical interconnections that remain ive relations in search of an adequate form,
unseen prior to the establishment of a establishing a basic commonality from
common relation (Pasquinelli 2008). which to stage the posthuman commons
However, a posthuman common that of the future. This commons is no longer
criss-crosses the material and immaterial, limited to the material (re)production of
the organic and the technological, can illu- life itself, but includes the production of
minate the structures and relations of that radical new modes of transversal subjectiv-
support the dominance of western human- ities, generative and inclusive commoning
ism and traditional forms of governance relations, and wholly new ways of
(Papadopoulos 2010). Through their dialo- becoming-in-common in and with the
gical exploration, In Praise of the Common, world (Read 2011).
Cesare Casarino and Negri consider the The emerging conception of a posthu-
possibilities of ‘unveiling’ wrought by man commons is that ‘ordinary, everyday
collective praxis, or ‘the common nature of word’ that has found ‘specific, adequate,
social life’. But even this generative possib- historical form(s)’ that live up to the
ility of ‘unveiling in and of itself is only half needs and pressures of our age. As a
the story: as soon as such an unveiling meld of cross-species/trans-material social
is about to take place, the fundamental relations, ecological embededness and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
86 COMMUTATION ONTOLOGY

political economics, the posthuman COMMUTATION ONTOLOGY

commons activates the affective forces
induced through the process of radical The twenty-first century has encountered
concept-making. With this renewing well a proliferation of models. Models are
of energy, the force and liveliness of conventionally considered as mediations
posthuman conceptions of the commons between a subject as the agent of obser-
enable the multiplication of immanent and vation, and independently existing,
embodied forms of transformative prac- external entities which become its
tices and subjectivities. In this, many exist- object. This results in a human-bound,
ing commons can be viewed as already an anthropocentric model, which is being
expression of the posthuman politics to challenged by current posthumanist
come, one that will continue to innovate approaches. The shift to a non-anthropo-
collective posthuman forms of relational- centric model is more than a mere
ity, subjectivity, and political praxis (Dyer- decentring of a subject’s position. The
Witheford 2006). These characteristics focus is shifted from the production of a
resonate with feminist Braidotti’s concep- subject to the production of subjectivity –
tualization of ‘becoming-posthuman:’ the capacity to reciprocally change with
the environment, and to affect and be
a process of redefining one’s sense of
affected in a relationship of commutation
attachment and connection to a shared
world, a territorial space: urban, social, (Deleuze 1988b: 124). As subjectivity is
psychic, ecological, planetary as it may be. defined by the capacity to change, it is not
It expresses multiple ecologies of belong- bound any more to the human realm and
ing, while it enacts the transformation of encompasses human and non-human
one’s sensorial and perceptual coordin- entities, flattening the ontological ground.
ates, in order to acknowledge the collect- Quantum physics’ spatial models and
ive nature and outward-bound direction Leibniz’s differential calculus as elaborated
of what we still call the self. by Gilles Deleuze provide an alternative to
Braidotti 2013: 193 discrete models of representation and are
in tune with the process ontology of
Common to both posthumanism and the
becoming that grounds the posthuman
concept of the commons is a drive towards
turn.
a more ethical mode of being-in-common,
Quantum physics provides a formal
one which acknowledges and affirms the
model to conceptualize an ontology not
interconnected, transversal relations of all
based on representation subordinated
living matter. It is the radically transversal
to pre-defined identities, but on a commut-
and materialist character of both that
ation of agents involved intra-actively
resound the transformative possibilities of
in their emergence. This epistemological
a posthuman politics that is adequate to
model requires a discontinuity; a slicing
the challenges of the Anthropocene.
through the continuum of reality where
See also Feminist Posthumanities, Food; the agent of observation and the agent
Occupy (after Deleuze); Political Affect; observed are ‘co-constituted’ simultan-
Posthuman Rights; Stateless State; Survival; eously while space and time are enacted as
Organization in Platform Capitalism; P2P products of this cut (Barad 2007: 139). In a
(Peer to Peer) Economies. similar manner, in Leibniz’s model of
reality and perception, space and time
Lindsay Grace Weber cannot be considered a priori but instead

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
COMMUTATION ONTOLOGY 87

are co-constituted ‘genetically . . . in the Within Bohr’s conceptual framework,

ensemble of the differential relation when the agential cut in the continuum of
in the subject’ (Smith 2012: 55). The calcu- reality is enacted, that is the moment of a
lus model has been generally criticized measurement could be described as clear
for distinguishing between the continuity but not distinct. This moment is clear
of space–time and the discreteness of a insofar as relations can be drawn, space–
matter that is pre-formed and given. In the time–matter is made specific, and an
above model, the present would proceed epistemological distinction between the
from the past in a deterministic manner object and the agency of the observation is
and would lead to the future within a established. However, the moment of the
smooth, continuous fully definable move- agential cut is not distinct insofar as it is
ment. However, in Leibniz’s differential ontologically inseparable from the continu-
calculus model, the object and subject as ity of the world. The causal structure of
well as the time and space are all the result both models neither follows a fixed traject-
of the differential relation: they are its ory nor is completely left to chance. In the
products. The relation is external to the quantum model, determinism is avoided
relata; in a way that it precedes and through the mechanism of the agential cut
constitutes them, defining what Deleuze which intra-actively foregrounds certain
would term as ‘difference-in-itself ’ (Smith exclusions and therefore opens up a poten-
2012: 53). tiality that would be otherwise closed-off
In both the quantum and the differen- in a deterministic sequential causal struc-
tial model, there are no pre-existent entit- ture (Barad 2007: 179–82). The model does
ies to be empirically discovered by the not entail a preformed matrix of possibilit-
subject but rather any temporal and spatial ies that a pre-traced path will actualize. The
relations are contingent on how the cut has non-arbitrariness of the model lies in the
been enacted on the relationship of fact that new exclusions and inclusions are
commutation. The basis for this commuta- enacted in every intra-action, therefore
tion brings forward the inseparability of reconfiguring any possibilities.
the objects and the ‘agencies of observa- Following Barad’s ‘ethico-onto-
tions’ (Barad 2007: 114). epistemology’ (Barad 2007: 185), a non-
The result of this inseparability was sequential co-constitution of cause and
observed by Niels Bohr as he could only effect simultaneously emerges on each side
measure the values of objects that particip- of the agential cut. Humanist ethics, based
ated in the experiment, as framed by the on the human subject as the locus of
apparatus. His conclusion that ‘observa- responsibility, require a representation of
tion-independent objects do not possess the ‘other’. This condition of ontological
well-defined inherent properties’ (Barad separability is problematized by models
2007: 196) finds resonances with the irre- based on entanglement (quantum physics)
ducibility of the principles of ‘clear and and the milieu (Deleuze’s model) as they
distinct’ developed by Descartes and refor- co-constitute cause and effect, space, time
mulated by Leibniz. Leibniz envisioned and agency and they acknowledge no prior
that ‘conscious perceptions [of the subject/ separability between the terms. The spatiality
observant] are necessarily clear but of this ethical model makes the anthropo-
confused (not distinct), while unconscious centric temporal causal structures redund-
perceptions (Ideas) are distinct but neces- ant and sets up a topological grounding for
sarily obscure (not clear)’ (Smith 2012: 55). new ethical models. In the same way that

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
88 COMPUTATIONAL TURN

an entanglement refuses prior distinctions neural networks importantly shows that

and pre-existing entities, a posthuman the task of breaking down has been super-
ethical model denies the split between the seded by the function of elaboration for
human and non-human. Instead, it rethinks which automated machines learn from
the two terms as entanglements of each data by establishing inferential relations
other with the boundaries that can be between facial images and names, or voice
drawn between them as purely contingent frequency and patterns. The speed of
on the epistemological cut that is enacted. correlation between independent chunks
A commutation ontology that recognizes of data corresponds to algorithmic func-
the inseparability of agency and the tions of elaboration for which this and that
simultaneity of cause and effect can kind of information become inferentially
radically shift human exceptionalism but processed, elaborated upon through the
also raise the ethical stakes as agency linear and non-linear logic of implica-
becomes distributed and spatial, instead of tion for which a general rule or truth
pre-given and temporal. As agency lays can be determined. With the develop-
new ground in this nevertheless ground- ment of artificial neural networks and
less model, ethics becomes extremely the method of machine learning, the turn
contingent to the material effects on to computation means the emergence
the bodies that are constituted by the of automated systems of knowledge
agential cut. (see AI).
The idea of automated knowledge,
See also Locality/Non-separability; Post-
however, is not new and needs to be histor-
human Ethics; Posthumanist Perform-
ically mapped back to the very invention
ativity; Ontological Turn; Multiverse.
of the alphabetic atomization of language.
With the discretization of the continuity
Lila Athanasiadou
and locality of speech, the alphabet already
defined a computational order of communi-
cation that established grammatical rules
COMPUTATIONAL TURN and a syntactical arrangement of letters
that could contain infinite quantities of
In the twenty-first century, the epistemolo- meaning. Despite the argument that com-
gical dominance of computing has not putational functions are present in nature
only reduced knowledge to information (i.e. the idea of a pan-computational
but information itself has come to coincide universe), one cannot overlook how the
with large chunks of highly complex data historical invention of formal language
that learning algorithms correlate and rather expressed the computational func-
continuously model. This new form of tion of breaking knowledge into bits but
discretization involves not only a breaking also re-assembling bits to transmit, store
down of information chunks into bits that and communicate meaning. As long ago as
can be more easily reassembled and classi- the early 1700s, Gottfried Leibniz imagined
fied. Instead, in this century the computa- a universal formal language able to express
tional turn has been demarcated by a new scientific and metaphysical concepts. His
kind of information processing able to not idea of characteristica universalis consti-
only divide and add strings of data accord- tuted the basis of the alphabet of human
ing to programmed functions. The devel- thought working as a discrete machine
opment of learning algorithms in artificial that could deliver ideas and things directly.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
COMPUTATIONAL TURN 89

This symbolic order of knowledge was not logic of programmed truths, but on the
represented in the form of the mathemat- capacities of automated systems to retrieve
ical model of a calculus ratiocinator, but (and thus to directly act upon) large
more importantly was a vision of the auto- amounts of information. With the interact-
mated capacities to rational thinking ive machine, the computational methods
insofar as computing could be embedded of knowledge have also radically changed
in machines that could perform calculus. and involve no longer programmed, but
Leibniz’s early modern project of comput- programmable truths stemming from
ing knowledge foresaw the link between the capacities of algorithms to establish
discretization and automation and the inference from the retrieval, correlation
emergence of a universal machine that and classification of data. As knowledge
could store, processes and transmit know- becomes computationally processed by
ledge by means of a binary logic. Since means of algorithmic procedures of
then, the turn to computation has envis- searching and sorting data, algorithmic
aged the possibility of inventing a general automation has become central to cultural
system of ordering, classifying, compress- production (through algorithmic-oriented
ing and correlating data: a transcendental search and analysis of computer simula-
mode of thinking. Only after two centur- tions), to the political machine of
ies, with the invention or the thought governance (through algorithmic and
experiment of the Turing Machine, could data mining systems of security and
the automation of knowledge finally control) and to the nature of machine
become more than a mere recombination thinking. More explicitly than ever,
of discrete bits. The method of discretiza- the computational turn is raising the
tion no longer has the task of breaking question of what and who is producing
down complexity into finite units, but knowledge.
instead acquires the power of elaborating It is possible to distinguish three distinct
information to search for problem-solving orders of knowledge (cultural production,
solutions. From crunching numbers to the governance and thought itself), which have
automation of problem-solving, the Turing become entangled with the twenty-first-
Machine introduced a radical discovery century form of computational automa-
in computation, namely the operative tion. The first order concerns how the
function or the performative activity of computational infrastructure is transform-
information. With the Turing Machine, ing the very task of knowledge production
knowledge fully enters the modern infra- within the humanities (an algorithmic-
structure of computational axiomatics or driven production of culture). The second
truth containing logic absorbing social concerns the way autonomic machines,
activities of information communication data scraping and data mining techniques
and transmission. The consequences of show how the governance of populations
this new form of automation re-write the is increasingly tending towards the
history of Western culture through the meta-governance of data, involving the
industrial machine of the assembly line algorithmic embedding of the social body
and Taylorist methods of production. By within the body of data. The third order
the late 1980s, the Turing Machine had concerns the computation of thought itself;
developed to become interactive and not the imitation of thinking, but whether
dialogically responsive to the environ- computation is learning how to elaborate
ment; no longer based on the deductive concepts through social, linguistic and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
90 COMPUTATIONAL TURN

cognitive synthetic abstractions, and not variations. The shift towards a non-rational
simply learning that, i.e. specificities or model of power has meant that governance
context-bound knowledge. has acquired a systemic functionality,
which is inclusive of exceptions as these
become captured by the performative
Automated Criticality production of norms, emerging as and
when these are needed. No longer depend-
In How We Think, Katherine Hayles argues
ent on a priori axiomatics, but on the inde-
that the computational turn has led to an
terminacy of exceptions, the systematic
irreversible transformation of analytic
quality of governance works to predict
processing central to humanities research.
erratic conducts and to statistically
As methods of research and knowledge
produce truths assembled by the data-
production in the humanities have become
driven computational machine. Here
computationally formed, Hayles suggests
prediction involves forward-looking eval-
that code, algorithms and digital theory
uation of data (the computational stratifi-
must become recognized as an integral part
cation of population within the fractal
of knowledge production. Whilst computa-
matrix of data, metadata, big data, software
tion involves quantitative methods of text
programs, algorithmic processing) estab-
analysis, the continental tradition in
lishing a conduct of conduct, or regimes of
humanities has historically questioned the
intelligibility run by machine.
notion-based and mnemonic studies in
From this standpoint, not universal
favour of critical, reflective and comparative
truths, but the mutability of contingency –
learning. Hayles insists, however, that tech-
lawless nature or unknown unknowns –
nical modes of knowledge are to be inte-
have become the dynamic motor of a
grated and not opposed to critical modes of
computational mode of prediction aiming
learning. As technology has a direct impact
not simply at avoiding but at streaming risk
on modes of understanding and learning,
towards its inevitable consequences. With
Hayles argues that web-based and machine
the computational turn, the dominance
reading offer new capacities to process mass
of uncertainty and its unprogrammable
amounts of information that fundamentally
implications have accelerated the prolifera-
extend knowledge production and not only
tion of autonomic responses. Here fear,
possibilities of knowledge storing.
anxiety and panic, as well as erratic beha-
viour and continuous distraction are the
motor of a social media culture of hyper-
Algorithmic Sovereignty
presence, and have become the univocal
The issue of how computational processing determinant of polarized positions, short-
can extend the limits of knowledge and circuiting decision-making through YES
whether it can enhance the possibilities of and NO. As algorithms become the execut-
critical thinking raise the question of ors of sovereign decisions acting when and if
governance at the core of the computa- the unselected amounts of data can become
tional turn. As autonomic computing functional in streaming, anticipating and
subtends the ubiquitous use of statistical structuring risk, then the computational
methods to calculate risks, so has techno- turn comes to coincide with an apparatus of
governance, as Michel Foucault antici- governance operating not only on bodies,
pated, become operative or able to act upon but through the datification of biological,
or respond directly to contingencies and physical and cultural specificities.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
CONTEMPORARY, THE 91

See also AI (Artificial Intelligence); might imagine a reflection of and in time

Metadata Society; Altergorithm; Execution; and temporality that precisely looks for a
Neocybernetics; Postimage. relation to the present that would allow
escaping the logic of deferral and post-
Luciana Parisi ponement towards which the revolution-
ary left is often tending. Drawing on
Nietzsche’s notion of the untimely and the
CONTEMPORARY, THE anachronistic, as prerequisites of being
truly contemporary, philosopher Giorgio
In the aftermath of the ruptures of 1989, Agamben renders ‘the contemporary’ as
when postmodernity ultimately turned the individual ‘who firmly holds his gaze
posthistoire in certain quarters of ideology on his own time so as to perceive not its
production,1 a pervasive present seemed light, but rather its darkness’ (Agamben
to have triumphed for ever over past and 2009: 44). To be contemporary then means
future alike. At the final stage of the to inhabit a stance toward the present that
imminent breakdown of the grand narra- pays attention to the ‘unlived’. Agamben
tives of progress and emancipation, with thus proposes ‘an archeology’ that ‘returns
globalization and digitalization prioritizing to that part within the present that we are
spatial over temporal matters, exclusive absolutely incapable of living’ (ibid.: 51). In
and exclusionary relations with a particular this view, to be contemporary is the capa-
understanding of contemporaneity became city to recompose the present by having it
something of a norm. Obsessively and being ‘touched’ (53) by the past, in order to
violently colonizing the present as the actualize its trans-temporal potentialities.
only temporal zone relevant for capitalist Alternative models of a less melancholic
valorization and geopolitical tampering and instead urgent politics of the present
necessitated the methodical obliteration of have been developed in the fields of posthu-
what may cause threats to the monopoly of man, postcolonial, feminist or postracial, as
the now. Hence, the discursive and material well as in recent environmentalist, climate
neutralization of the past by a cultural change and anthropocene discourse.
economy of memorialization and museifi- Leaving behind linear and teleological
cation is only paralleled by the temporal patterns of thinking time, the ‘absolute
philosophies of finance and security, both boundary between here-now and there-
predicated on notions of anticipation, then’ is being questioned by thinkers
‘futures’ and pre-emption. Combined, conceiving ‘new temporalities (spacetime-
retromaniac nostalgia and the policing of matterings)’ such as feminist physicist
tomorrow elicited a dispersal of contempor- Karen Barad (2014: 168). ‘There is nothing
aneities; the production of a ubiquitous that is new,’ Barad maintains, ‘there is
present of however multiple presents blocks nothing that is not new’ (ibid.). In other
futurity as much as it does historical thought. words, one cannot (not) be surprised by
Most conceptions of time and tempor- what is taking place in time, while tradi-
ality based on a critique of the present state tional notions of cause and effect become
of power relations and the projection of a lost in the nonlinearity of ‘spacetimematter-
coming revolution reject any affirmation ings’. Deconstructing any dichotomy
of the present as a sign of stasis, anomie or between (historical) humanity and (time-
surrender. Yet pausing for a moment with less) nature, the revision of temporality
the contingency of that affirmation, one according to the complexities of an updated

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
92 COSMOPOLITICS

materialist ontology which fully acknow- of some responsibility,’ based on a ‘non-

ledges the transformative, hybrid entangle- contemporaneity with itself ’, concerning
ments of technology, geology, biology, ‘those who are not there, of those who are
physics, politics, etc., may yield a concept of no longer or who are not yet present and
the present to be appropriately framed as living’ (Derrida 1994: xix). Assemblage
‘the contemporary’. Such framing may be and assembly of disparate temporalities,
expanded to be organized around the realiz- posthuman ontologies and political
ation that the realm of the now is always projects alike, the contemporary conceived
shared by others of whatever kind and time. as a reality of becomings and an ethical
The ‘shared inhabitation of time’, as artist resource relinquishes the reductive con-
and theorist Shuddhabrata Sengupta from temporaneity of posthistoire. This way, to
Raqs Media Collective once put it, ‘leads one enter the contemporary means to leave the
to think of different registers of temporal present as now-time for the potentiality of
existence’, because, contrary to the assump- a communality of temporalities, in which
tion ‘that contemporaneity has a certain the thinkability of the future is connected
single direction and a certain single velocity’, to, but not limited by, an archaeology of a
it may be possible ‘to think of these inhabit- shared present touched by whatever past.
ations of shared moments of time leading to
See also Afrofuturism; Art; Art in the
movements in very different directions and
Anthropocene; Metamodernism; Ecopathy;
at different speeds’ (Raqs Media Collective,
Posthuman Museum Practice,
Sundaram and Zyman 2012). The emphasis
on multidirectionality and multivelocity
certainly is key to an understanding of the Note
contemporary that avoids any reification of 1. For a useful discussion of the problematic
the present as homogeneous, merely notion of ‘postmodernism’ as a ‘special
temporal and operative disjunctively with moment in posthistoire thought’ see
regard to past and future. Heterogeneous, architectural historian Anthony Vidler’s
5-D, non-identitarian and inclusive, the chapter ‘Postmodern or Posthistoire?’ in
contemporary in this other sense is a his Histories of the Immediate Present:
moving assemblage of temporalities, spati- Inventing Architectural Modernism
alities, materialities and livelihoods that is (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2008),
not necessarily dependent on a future to be 191–200.
activated. Although potentially ‘drawing
energy from the thinkability of the future’ Tom Holert
and thus facilitating ‘a transformation at the
in-depth level’ (Braidotti 2006a: 207), the
contemporary also thrives on radical COSMOPOLITICS
coevalness, or what anthropologist Johannes
Fabian has identified as ‘the elements of a Cosmopolitics points towards the re-
processual and materialist theory apt to invigoration of the planetary sphere of
counteract the hegemony of taxonomic and political theory and action in the age of
representational [i.e. visualist] approaches’ ecological anxiety. It arises out of the reali-
(Fabian 2002: 156). Furthermore, the zation that the triumphalist rhetoric of
contemporary is the subject of a justice cosmopolitanism is out of place in a world
‘beyond all living present’, as Jacques in which the cultural and political assump-
Derrida called it, that is of ‘the principle tions on which it rested have been radically

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
COSMOPOLITICS 93

destabilized. The confidence with which a more fundamental cause. Despite the
cosmopolitanism could assert the validity broadness of the cosmopolitan outlook in
of an affirmative and progressive political comparison to the narrowness of national-
narrative that was destined to eclipse out- ist essentialism, the vision of the cosmos
dated modes of national identity has been to which it appeals has been revealed as
undermined by the apparent reversibility both anthropocentric and ethnocentric.
of the processes of globalization, both Awareness of the momentous scale of
economically and in terms of political con- anthropogenic changes to the natural
sciousness. The cosmopolitical proposition processes of the Planet summed up by the
recognizes the desirability of an ambitious Anthropocene and accelerated by ever-
reframing of politics that reaches beyond more tangible evidence of climate emer-
settled categories, borders and territories, gency and species extinction has rendered
but also the practical and philosophical redundant attempts to think the politics of
difficulties in recomposing planetary the cosmos in purely human terms or
politics on a more inclusive basis. solely in reference to the Western political
Even during the rise of globalization in tradition. The timeliness of cosmopolitics
the 1990s, advocates of cosmopolitanism lies in the potential it offers to open up for
were forced to acknowledge that there was discussion the automatic exclusions
nothing inevitable about the emergence of inscribed in cosmopolitanism, thereby
a global, plural, popular political conscious- lifting the restriction on imagining a plan-
ness as a consequence of increased mobil- etary community that is inclusive of all
ity and interconnectedness, with theorist kinds of human and non-human actors.
Pheng Cheah stating that ‘an existing global Cosmopolitics signals the emergence
condition’ should not be mistaken for an of an expanded notion of politics which,
‘existing mass-based feeling of belonging to as Bruno Latour has argued, both goes
a world community (cosmopolitanism)’ beyond ‘give-and-take in an exclusive
(Cheah and Robbins 1998: 31). In the wake human club’ (2004b: 454) and dislodges
of the global economic crisis beginning in unreflecting assumptions about the
2008, the material conditions for the cosmos as a ‘finite list of entities that must
production of sentiments of trans-national be taken into account’. The opening up of
and post-national belonging have retreated, the list of entities entitled to participate in
bringing a retrenchment of cultural paro- cosmopolitical debate could be seen in the
chialism and popular cynicism towards the rise of a planetary jurisprudence that in
political motives of global elites and their the case of the Constitution of Equador
cultural agents. In place of the accepted codifies the rights of Pachamama or
rules and restrictions of political rationality nature, while the Swiss Constitution now
based on the interchange between nation- recognizes the right to dignity of plants
states and citizen-subjects, the cosmopolit- and other organisms. The novelty of
ical proposal opens out onto what Isabelle cosmopolitics as a supra-political project
Stengers has referred to as the ‘unknown lies in making explicit the connection of
constituted by . . . multiple, divergent humans to other species, but also to entit-
worlds’ (2005: 995) and their potential ies with a distinct materiality and non-
articulations. human agency, from rocks and rivers to
The stalling of the cosmopolitan particles and physical forces.
mission, and the mobilization of the The ecological urgency of the cosmo-
cosmopolitical proposition, stem also from political proposition can be detected in

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
94 CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM

Peter Sloterdijk’s call for a ‘new constitu- globalization, technoscience, late capital-
tional debate’ involving a ‘network of ism and climate change (often, very prob-
processes’ to ‘reconstitute the collective lematically, by deliberately blurring the
of Earth Citizens as a collective subjective distinctions between science fiction and
in various arrangements’. Such a process, science fact; cf. ‘science faction’ in
responding to the revival in the Herbrechter 2013: 107–34).
Anthropocene of a neo-Hobbesian State- The prefix ‘post-’ (in analogy with the
of-Nature, would as he argues necessarily discussion of the postmodern and post-
have to take into account ‘the cohabitation modernism following Lyotard 1992b) also
of the citizens of the Earth in human and has a double meaning: on the one hand,
non-human forms’ (Sloterdijk 2015: 337– it signifies a desire or indeed a need to
9). Cosmopolitics shows the way beyond somehow go beyond humanism (or the
the business-as-usual consensus around human), while on the other hand, since
the subject and boundaries of the domain the post- also necessarily repeats what it
of global politics to tackling the deep- prefixes, it displays an awareness that
rooted conflict of interest between global- neither humanism nor the human can in
ized elites and the planetary poor, who are fact be overcome in any straightforward
least well equipped to delay the impacts of dialectical or historical fashion (for
climate change. It also reflects recognition example, in the sense: after the human,
of collective, political responsibility on the the posthuman). The critical in the phrase
level of humankind for the transformation ‘critical posthumanism’ gestures towards
of the cosmos from a species-neutral back- the more complicated and non-dialectical
drop to an unwitting extension of the relationships between human and post-
human realm. human (as well as their respective depend-
ence on the nonhuman). Posthumanism in
See also Anthropocene; Planetary;
this critical sense functions more like an
Ecosophy; Earth; Geopolitics; Non-
anamnesis and a rewriting of the human
Human Agency; Posthuman Rights.
and humanism (i.e. ‘rewriting humanity’, in
analogy with Lyotard’s notion of ‘rewriting
Maja and Reuben Fowkes
modernity’: Lyotard 1991). Critical post-
humanism asks a number of questions that
address these complications: how did we
CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM come to think of ourselves as human? Or,
what exactly does it mean to be human
Critical posthumanism is a theoretical (especially at a time when some humans
approach which maps and engages with have apparently decided that they are
the ‘ongoing deconstruction of humanism’ becoming or have already become
(cf. Badmington 2000). It differentiates posthuman)? What are the motivations for
between the figure of the ‘posthuman’ (and this posthumanizing process and when did
its present, past and projected avatars, like it start? What are its implications for
cyborgs, monsters, zombies, ghosts, angels, nonhuman others (e.g. the ‘environment’,
etc.) and ‘posthumanism’ as the contem- ‘animals’, ‘machines’, ‘God’, etc.)?
porary social discourse (in the Foucauldian The adjective critical in the phrase
sense), which negotiates the pressing ‘critical posthumanism’ thus signifies at
contemporary question of what it means least two things. It refers to the difference
to be human under the conditions of between a more or less uncritical or

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM 95

popular (e.g. in many science fiction contemporary desire to leave the humanist
movies or popular science magazines) apparatus of literacy and its central institu-
and a philosophical and reflective approach tion of literature, with all its social,
that investigates the current postanthropo- economic and cultural-political implica-
centric desire. This desire articulates itself, tions, its regimes of power and its aesthet-
on the one hand, in the form of an antici- ics behind.
pated transcendence of the human condi- To counter the trend of seeing posthu-
tion (usually through various scenarios of manism merely as the ‘next theory fashion’,
disembodiment – an approach (and an my Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis
entire movement that is best designated by (Herbrechter 2013) takes as its starting
the term ‘transhumanism’) and, on the point the question as to what extent post-
other hand, through a (rather suspicious) structuralism and deconstruction have
attempt by humans to ‘argue themselves anticipated current posthumanist formu-
out of the picture’ precisely at a time when lations and critiques of subjectivity. This
climate change caused by the impact of aspect is particularly important with
human civilization (cf. Anthropocene) calls regard to the current discussion about the
for urgent and responsible, human action. importance and future role of the human-
The other meaning of ‘critical’ is a ities. The first academic publications that
defence and possibly a re-invention of systematically engage with the idea of the
some humanist values and methodologies posthuman and posthumanism appeared
which, in the face of a fundamental trans- in the late 1990s and early 2000s (in books
formation provoked by digitalization and and articles by Neil Badmington, Rosi
the advent of ubiquitous computing and Braidotti, Elaine L. Graham, N. Katherine
social media, appear to have become Hayles, Cary Wolfe and others), all of
obsolete, or to be in urgent need of revi- which approach posthumanism through a
sion (especially critical methodologies more or less poststructuralist or decon-
which are related to traditional forms of structive lens. They do so, however, by
‘literacy’, ‘reading’ and ‘thinking’). The embracing two new aspects: a return to
question here is how to remain ‘critical’ in or of the question of technology (as it
the sense of developing reading tech- had been provocatively formulated by
niques, forms of conceptualizations and Heidegger (1977)) and the question of the
subjectivities that are both self-reflexive future of the humanities.
and aware of their own genealogies (i.e. An increasing part of the academy and
able to stay ‘critically’ connected with the (theoretical) humanities in particular
humanist, and pre-humanist, traditions have been embracing this new context to
and especially ‘literal’, ‘literary’ and ‘textual’ form new, interdisciplinary alliances with
approaches).1 the sciences and critical science studies
Studies of literature’s twenty-first- (e.g. with Bruno Latour’s actor–network
century extensions2 have questioned the theory, speculative realism or new feminist
broader resonances of the idea that the materialism). One major aspect concerns
literary is currently being ‘overtaken’ by the redefinition of the relationship between
processes of digitalization, globalization humans and technology – or the role of the
and technoscientific change. In this current history of ‘technics’ for human (and non-
supposedly ‘post-literary’ moment, a crit- human) evolution. Donna Haraway’s early
ical posthumanist (and ‘countertextual’) work on the cyborg (in the 1980s) received
approach is both aware and wary of the the widespread discussion it deserved.

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96 CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM

Attempts to rethink the ontological aspect what is at stake is a rethinking of the

of technology and the political role of relationship between human agency, the
technological determinism, however, also role of technology and environmental
look at previous philosophies of techno- and cultural factors from a post- or non-
logy (especially in Heidegger, Ellul and anthropocentric perspective (Braidotti
Simondon), most prominently in Bernard 2013). Postanthropocentric posthumanities
Stiegler’s work. In the aftermath of the so- are still about humans and humanities but
called ‘science wars’, which highlighted at only in so far as these are placed within a
once the necessity of cultural recupera- larger, ecological, picture (cf. for example the
tions of scientific practice and the call for a institutionalization of ‘medical humanities’,
new dialogue between the sciences and the ‘environmental humanities’ and ‘digital
humanities, the new or ‘posthumanities’ humanities’).The latter, in particular, will have
(cf. the title of Cary Wolfe’s influential to address the role of new and converging
series with University of Minnesota Press) media and their social and cultural implica-
are set to overcome the traditional ‘two tions, as well as the proliferation of digital
cultures’ divide at last. This is, however, and virtual realities and their biopolitical
happening under extremely adverse condi- dimensions (e.g. new forms of surveillance
tions, namely the material base of an and commodification, new subjectivities and
increasingly globalized advanced and ‘biomedia’; cf. Thacker 2004).
neoliberal capitalism, and the transition Critical posthumanism thus draws
from ‘analogue’ (humanist, ‘lettered’, book together a number of aspects that consti-
or text-based) to ‘digital’ (posthumanist, tute ‘our’ early twenty-first-century reality
‘code’, data or information-based) societies, and cosmology and links these back
cultures and economies. genealogically to their beginnings and pre-
The currently emerging ‘posthumanities’ figurations within humanism itself (cf.
therefore have to engage with the positive Herbrechter and Callus 2005, 2012).
but also the problematic aspects of the trans-
See also Anthropism/Immanent Humanism;
formative potential that a new dialogue or
Posthumanism; Decolonial Critique;
alliance between the humanities and the
Posthuman (Critical Theory; Speculative
sciences contains. The focus on the post-
Posthumanism).
human as a discursive object, on posthu-
manism as a social discourse and on
posthumanization as an ongoing historical Note
and ontological process allows both com- 1. This is one of the main concerns of the
munities – the humanities and sciences – to Critical Posthumanism Network, which I
create new encounters and test new hypo- co-direct with Ivan Callus and Manuela
theses that may lead to greater political and Rossini; (see http://criticalposthuman
ethical awareness of the place of the human, ism.net).
the nonhuman and their environments 2. See for instance the journal CounterText
(especially in connection with pressing ( http://www.euppub lish ing.com/loi/
issues like climate change, depletion of count).
natural resources, the destruction of bio-
diversity, global migration flows, terrorism Stefan Herbrechter
and insecurity, biopolitics etc.). Basically,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
 D
DECOLONIAL CRITIQUE The divide between the two fields, however,
is not merely historical: it is ontological.
To think and live race is to think and live Racialization, from a decolonial
history in every atom of one’s body. Unlike perspective, is not an aberration of history
the essentialist stain that haunts concepts produced by yet another of ‘the human’s’
of sexual difference, racial difference is constitutive exclusions or otherings.
purely the effect of violent cultural encoun- Racialization does not run along the same
ters with differing manners of living. Yet, ontological lines as, for example, sexual
despite this historically constructed char- difference or gender: it is not that the basic
acter, we cannot shake it off: we continue to mechanism of constitutive exclusion was
embody race as the damning mark of also applied to non-European bodies and
difference that W. E. B. DuBois named ‘hair, populations in a manner that differed
skin, and bone’. Decolonial scholarship on historically from the application to non-
race, especially that inflected by queer male bodies. The project of decolonial
theory, locates this violent history of racial- critique is not the task of another correct-
ization as the site of the production the ive to the unjustified normativity of the
concept and figure of ‘the human’. It insists concept and figure of ‘the human’. Rather,
that racialization, a central tool of the colo- the founding commitment of decolonial
nial scene, drives the emergence of the critique is a challenge to the very ontology
modern concept of ‘the human’. For deco- of ‘the human’ as an endemically violent
lonial critique, racialization is endemic to conceptual apparatus.
‘the human’, not a pesky by-product or This clear focus on racialization and its
problematic effect of it. anti-black logic as the essential structure
To bring race and racialization into of ‘the human’ particularly distinguishes
contact with posthumanism is, therefore, this scholarship from that of posthuman
not a simple task. As the 2015 Special Issue feminism, with its roots in the debates
of GLQ, ‘Queer Inhumanisms’, makes about the concept of sexual difference. As
amply clear, the divisions between decolo- the essentialist/constructionist debates of
nial, queer scholarship on racialization and the 1990s displayed, the concept of sexual
scholarship on posthumanism are fraught difference lies on the razor’s edge of a
politically, historically and even ontologic- universalist, biological determinism and
ally. The co-editors, Dana Luciano and Mel geopolitically specified, social construc-
Chen, explain in their Introduction that tionism. Emergent out of this tension,
they chose ‘inhumanisms’ in an effort ‘to posthuman feminism approaches embodi-
recollect and foreground the very histories ment through the axes of sexual difference,
of dehumanization too often overlooked in gender binaries and polymorphously
celebratory posthumanisms’ (2015: 196). perverse sexuality. This work tends to

97
98 DECOLONIAL CRITIQUE

emphasize the socio-epistemological claim to universalism. In this manner,

instabilities of these metrics, focusing posthumanism inherits the long tradi-
particularly on the constitutive exclusion tions of Anglo-American and European
of sexual difference as the ‘other’ or ‘partic- feminisms, with their nineteenth-century
ular’. By historicizing this phenomenon in roots in precisely this problematic
the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century eclipse of the gendered character of
normalization of bourgeois sexuality, Enlightenment humanism. Posthumanism,
posthuman feminism opens onto the a late twentieth-century emergence,
immanent plasticity of embodiment and, complicates and extends this fundamental
ultimately, zoe for the posthumanist critique to the entangled arcs of technolo-
project. This historical location places it in gical mediation and nonhuman sentient
provocative tension with decolonial femin- life, valorizing zoe and embodiment as the
ists, such as Hortense Spillers and Maria ontological sites of interrogation.
Lugones, who argue (with different geopol- Decolonial theories of racialization,
itical referents) that gender is always especially those grounded in the post-
already a product of colonial modernity, identitarian epistemologies of queer
interpellating only those subjects already theory, generally assume one, if not both,
in the throes of identification with the of two geohistorical coordinates: fifteenth-
figure of ‘the human’. The differences century European colonialism and/or
between the foci on sexual difference and nineteenth-century chattel slavery, espe-
gender in these critiques remain to be cially in the United States. The distinctions
parsed. From the perspective of decolonial between these two geohistorical sites are
critique, however, the effort to undo ‘the crucial, but I generalize them here as one
human’ through the axes of either gender movement to explain how they both place
or sexual difference still works within the racialization at the primary and essential
closed economy of colonial modernity. origin for the construction of the figure
At a general level, both posthumanism of ‘the human’. These geohistorical co-
and decolonial critique share a common ordinates thereby instantiate different
point of departure – namely, the demand social ontologies from those assumed in
to move through and beyond the figure posthumanism.
of ‘the human’. The decolonial emphasis on Decolonial scholarship emerges out of
the violent dehumanization endemic to classical postcolonial critiques, such as
the figure of ‘the human’, however, orients Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Edward Said,
decolonial scholarship towards a different and also out of slightly later iterations,
set of historical coordinates than those such as Gloria Anzadúa, Stuart Hall, Paul
assumed by posthumanism. The following Gilroy, Sadiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers,
is a brief account of these different histor- Eduard Glissant, Maria Lugones and
ical coordinates, which manifest distinct perhaps especially Sylvia Wynter. It is
ontologies operative in the two projects. Wynter who gives the most expansive and
Posthumanism largely places the emphatically materialist account of the
figure of ‘the human’ in the European decolonizing of, as she calls the figures,
Enlightenment era of seventeenth-century ‘Man1’ and ‘Man 2’. I offer a brief overview
rationalism and eighteenth-century of her work as an exemplar of the decolo-
liberalism. This epistemological-political nial critique of Man.
construction, so the critique goes, birthed Wynter’s work is historically expansive
a humanism that stakes an unassailable and the full bibliography of her published

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
DIFFRACTION 99

work is, as yet, difficult to assemble. In Across Wynter’s expansive historical

‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/ arguments, she also develops a radically
Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, materialist account of the embodiment of
After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An these conceptual apparati that offers a
Argument,’ Wynter locates the emergence particular point of contact with threads of
of the problematic figure of Man 1 in the posthumanism. Wynter builds on Fanon’s
writings of the Renaissance humanists of invention of sociogeny to argue for a
the fifteenth century, the same century that neurochemical account of our embodi-
brings European colonialism to various ment of racialized differences. As she
parts of the globe. Focusing on ‘the theo- writes in ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for
Scholastic knowledge system of the medi- Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a
eval order of Latin-Christian Europe’ (2003: Different Future: Conversations’, socio-
20), Wynter argues that the shift in this genic scripts of symbolic life/death repeat
period from supernatural causation to and sediment normative evaluations of
natural causation enables and enlivens two our shared social worlds by activating
other global shifts: the massive expropri- ‘the opiate-reward (placebo) and
ation and enslavement of two human opiate-blocking (nocebo) neurochemical
groups (‘Indos’ and ‘Negroes’); and the system of the . . . uniquely evolved human
possible rise and development of the phys- brain’ (2015: 58). This materialist turn
ical sciences as a new order of human towards the neurochemical embodiment
cognition, which would come fully to of both positive and negative evaluations
fruition in the work of Darwin. According carried by the conceptual apparatus of ‘the
to this same Renaissance humanist ‘closed human’ offers an intriguing bridge to the
order of knowledge’, wherein ‘Nature’ Deleuzian, Harawayan techno-mediation
replaces ‘God’, the figure of the ‘Negro’ threads of posthumanism.
emerges as the secularized ‘name of evil’
See also Afrofuturism; In/Human;
(2003: 307), leading Wynter to place early
Necropolitics; Neocolonial; Postmedieval;
definitions of ‘race’ in Peter Martyr’s texts of
Real Cool Ethics; Socially Just Pedagogies.
1516, with the first attempt at racial classi-
fication in the work of Francois Bernier in
Shannon Winnubst
1684. The fifteenth-century contemporan-
eous movements of European colonialism
and Renaissance humanism thereby mark
the emergence of what Wynter names DIFFRACTION
‘Man1’, a complex conceptual apparatus
that locks the figure of the human directly ‘Diffraction’ is Donna Haraway’s term for a
into the violence of colonialist racialization. reading method that is neither negatively
‘Man2’ then emerges as the nineteenth- critical (dismissive) nor reflexive (identity-
century ‘biocentric’ concept of post- political). Haraway ([1992] 2004a, 1997)
Darwinian science, building on the late argues against the politics of negation as
eighteenth-century racializing taxonomies well as she argues against the politics of
of Linnaeus, that carries the binary violence reflection. Negation puts the negated on a
of Man/Other endemic to the prior theolo- pedestal and may therefore not be the best
gical apparatus into the fully secularized feminist reading strategy. For example,
discourses of science and their intertwining negating the work of Bruno Latour for its
with bourgeois capitalism. genderblindness, its neat separation of the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
100 DIFFRACTION

social and the technical and its overlook- liberal or Marxist/socialist or lesbian or
ing of the labour and suffering of laborat- sexual-difference or. . .). Diffractive read-
ory animals does not change the work or ings take off elsewhere and have differing
do any good for feminism. Instead, a negat- effects. Imagine accidentally picking up a
ively critical evaluation of Latour’s scholar- book written by Y or encountering an
ship and writing draws more attention to artwork of Z. It may very well be that the
Latour and less to feminism. Likewise, reader or viewer is interpellated by Y’s
Haraway says that ‘reflexivity, like reflec- writing (van der Tuin 2014) or affected by
tion, only displaces the same elsewhere’ Z’s artwork (Papenburg and Zarzycka
(1997: 16) and is equally not critical 2013) before having consciously recapit-
enough. For instance, if I were to reflect on ulated one’s position as scholar, one’s
the French philosophy of Michel Foucault, feminist stance or the makers’ canonical
I would first expose my feminism and then representation. This implies that one
I would use what has become of feminism cannot presume to know when and where
within the confines of my analysis in order scholarship begins, when and how femin-
to expose Foucault’s masculine bias, ism is triggered or how a text or artefact is
notwithstanding the fact that both (my) liked or disliked. The diffractive moment is
feminism and Foucauldian historical when such interpellations or affections
epistemology exceed such expositions! A happen. The surprise of an interpellation
certain pattern of repetition underlies both or of affect is taken to be a moment of
negatively critical and reflexive analyses as insight that is of importance for the
a dismissive feminist analysis tends to production of knowledge.
repeat the negated minutely and reflexive Karen Barad (2003, 2007) has worked
feminist analysis does the same by care- out the consequences of Haraway’s diffrac-
fully mirroring what a text or other cultural tion by furthering the argument that
artefact does to a preconceived feminist diffractive readings can be made product-
subject. Both methodologies ultimately ive for feminist scholarship:
leave the negated or the displaced
unchanged. Diffractive readings try to Moving away from the representationalist
circumvent these consequences and trap of geometrical optics, I shift the focus
provoke change. to physical optics, to questions of diffrac-
Diffraction is first and foremost a tion rather than reflection. Diffractively
reading the insights of feminist and queer
reading strategy that does justice to cracks
theory and science studies approaches
in the academic canon (van der Tuin
through one another entails thinking the
2015a). Readings of texts that follow the
‘social’ and the ‘scientific’ together in an
canon are readings that carefully repro- illuminating way. What often appears as
duce the established parameters of separate entities (and separate sets of
academic scholarship. Such reproduction concerns) with sharp edges does not actu-
may be caused by negation or reflection. ally entail a relation of absolute exteriority
Imagine performing a feminist reading of at all. Like the diffraction patterns illu-
the work of X. The result is a distancing act: minating the indefinite nature of bound-
both feminism and the work of X are left aries – displaying shadows in ‘light’ regions
untouched because the reading method and bright spots in ‘dark’ regions – the
assumes that feminism and X’s work are relation of the social and the scientific is
separate entities and that ‘feminism’ is a a relation of ‘exteriority within’. This is not
known and stable position (it is either a static relationality but a doing – the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP 101

enactment of boundaries – that always pendently existing things as they exist

entails constitutive exclusions and there- frozen in time like little statues positioned
fore requisite questions of accountability. in the world. Rather, we learn about
Barad 2003: 803 phenomena – about specific material
configurations of the world’s becoming.
This quotation demonstrates not only that Barad 2007: 90–1
diffraction has a quantum physical back-
ground and is firmly based in the counter- Just like quantum physical interference is
intuitive insights offered by quantum not about particles hitting an obstacle or
physics. The quotation also makes clear about waves being disturbed by an obstacle
what the outcomes of a diffractive reading but about the pattern emerging from the
of texts are: they expose ‘exteriorities entanglement of object (like light) and
within’. In other words, not only do diffract- measuring device, the diffractive reading
ive readings question the separation of the of texts and/or artefacts through one
social and the technoscientific; and the another is about the patterns emerging.
separation of feminist, queer and science These patterns do not depend on canons.
studies oeuvres. They also provide insight See also Joy; Critical Posthuman Theory;
into the nature of difference without a Feminist Posthumanities; Mattering
capital D.
Diffractive readers do not care about Iris van der Tuin
canonical renderings of texts or of arte-
facts because they zoom in on how texts,
artefacts and human subjects interpellate
or affect each other. Instead of submissively DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP
following a (counter-)canon, diffractive
The question of citizenship has been at the
readers ask how texts, artefacts and
heart of philosophical interrogations since
humans may inform each other as a result
at least Plato’s Republic. The Enlightenment,
of their preconscious or sub-subjective
with its particular way of connecting
entanglement. Scribbling ‘cf. Ernst Cassirer’
rationality, ethics and politics into an
in the margins of a text written by Gilbert
integrated whole, has cemented the ques-
Simondon is a diffractive moment that
tion as central to our thinking about the
may have far-reaching consequences. The
relationship between individual and
diffraction may lead to an analysis of how
collective, between citizen and govern-
Cassirer and Simondon inform each other,
ment. At the same time, from the Greek
leading to a concept as yet unknown to the
banishment of techne into the realm of
philosophy of technology (see Hoel and
those excluded from citizenship (women
van der Tuin 2013). Again, in Barad’s
and slaves) to the highly critical stance
terms:
toward technology in twentieth-century
a diffractive methodology is a critical philosophy – such as Heidegger, Ellul,
practice for making a difference in the Illich and Adorno – there is a ‘devaluation
world. It is a commitment to understand- of technology in Western philosophy’
ing which differences matter, how they (Frabetti 2011), a distinct uneasiness, if not
matter, and for whom. It is a critical prac- a downright refusal, to consider techno-
tice of engagement, not a distance-learning logy with the same depth of attention as
practice of reflecting from afar . . . We do art, ritual or politics. Digital citizenship
not uncover preexisting facts about inde- thus is a field in which the two come

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
102 DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP

together as a result of profound changes we receive [is] distorting, if not outrightly

brought about by the proliferation of the corrupting, our national civic conversa-
digital, which in turn affects the way we tion’ (Keen 2007), we find numerous attri-
become and express ourselves as citizens. butions of direct causality – such as in the
case of the Arab Spring – between new
media and varying states of culture and
Politics and Practice politics.
From Lippmann to Habermas and beyond, On the level of political practice,
the argument has been made again and which includes forms of government
again that there is a close relationship and governance, non-governmental work,
between democracy (to which the notion voicing of consent or dissent, campaign-
of citizenship is closely related) and config- ing, resistance, value production and
urations of communication and informa- identity formation, new media may not
tion exchange. With John Hartley, one can be a sufficient ‘cause’, but they are nonethe-
thus approach the question of digital less instrumental to actors and social
citizenship not so much in terms of indi- movements such as the Arab Spring
vidual conduct or participation, but as and enable new forms of activism such
referring to the question of the ‘infrastruc- as hacktivism (Coleman 2013), ‘leaking’,
ture’ of democracy, or the ‘technologies of online campaigning, citizen journalism or
democracy’, i.e. ‘the mechanisms through ‘crowdsourcing for democracy’ (Aitamurto
which democracy and the public are 2012) and sousveillance (‘watching the
created, sustained, and operated’ (Hartley watchers’).
2003: 269). These mechanisms have been As a result, political institutions, and in
affected by technological change, and quite particular the governments of traditional
dramatically so. nation states, appear weakened by these
On a very immediate level, it has been new forms of communication and parti-
argued that ‘varied properties [of the inter- cipation. However, if Facebook and
net] enable new forms of participation, Twitter are playing their role in political
which may either change or replicate exist- dynamics, it is necessary to understand
ing social relations’ (Mossberger, Tolbert these platforms themselves as institutions,
and McNeal. 2008). But on a more general i.e. as ‘multifaceted systems incorporating
level, our sense of self, our ways of becom- symbolic systems, cognitive constructions
ing, our modes of expression, our practices and normative rules’, which ‘provide stabil-
of relating to others, and so forth, are ity and meaning to social behavior’ (Scott
equally affected, and these elements are 1994). In this sense, we need to interrogate
central to the development of the political the affordances of new media platforms
desires that drive us. and maybe go as far as considering soft-
The ‘democratizing’ effects of the inter- ware as an institutional arrangement in
net have been discussed at length, all too its own right (Rieder 2012a). With Hartley
often in simplistic terms, pitching one set (2003), we can describe these platforms
of facile generalizations against another. as ‘technologies of the public’ that are
Between the announcement that ‘[t]he Net shaping public discourse, for example by
interprets censorship as damage and routes introducing socio-technical regimes of
around it’ (attributed to John Gilmore) and ‘issue visibility’, where issue hierarchies are
the assessment that the ‘decline of the often set by combinations of crowds and
quality and reliability of the information algorithms. These questions can be brought

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP 103

into contact with notions of the public society: ‘Digital citizens are those who use
sphere, in relation to Habermas or not technology frequently, who use technology
(Calhoun 1993). for political information to fulfill their civic
These new public spheres and duty, and who use technology at work for
discourses are characterized by the emer- economic gain’ (Mossberger et al. 2008).
gence and transformations of modes of However, does use of technology imply
expression and communication, as well as participation or engagement in a political
the structuring of dissemination, debate sense? The larger social context and the
and production of meaning through actual ramifications for participation and
online platforms (YouTube, Instagram, engagement are complex and it is difficult
Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and the multidi- to generalize findings focusing on indi-
mensional modes of circulation between viduals. While one can indeed point to
them. Mobile telephones allow for making studies indicating correlation between
photos and videos on the go, their manipu- frequency of internet use and civic engage-
lation through editing or visual filters, ment, larger trends undermine overly
instant sharing, commenting and complex optimistic conclusions: ‘why is it that
forms of ordering or collection-making. Internet use is at an all-time high while
Other visual-narrative formats, such as civic engagement overall continues to
information visualization, web document- decline?’ (Greer 2008).
aries, etc. add to the proliferation of forms, Engaging with this issue begins with
the core characteristic of which is their the critical questioning of terms like ‘digital
embeddedness (hyperlinks, related items, native’, where technological competence is
comments, etc.) and the blurring between equated with growing up in an environ-
reception and production (Kessler and ment where digital devices are readily
Schäfer 2009). accessible. The question of digital citizen-
ship in relation to youth – and why not
considering older people’s activism like the
The Making of Digital Citizens Spanish seniors organizing in the ‘iaio-
New visual and textual forms of (self-) flautas’ movement1 – needs to go beyond
expression and participation affect not only the question of access and basic skills in
the political landscape as such, but also the order to interrogate people’s ‘capacity to
development of political and civic project identities in collective spaces’
subjectivities. In this respect, citizenship is (Bennett 2007) and to develop an idea of
frequently discussed in connection with how they engage political practices and
youth and, in particular, with the question imaginaries without ignoring the afford-
of how to ‘produce’ citizens, i.e. how to ances of the medium. This includes the
make sure that young people are learning question how movements like Anonymous
the ethos and skills required for civic and may function both as a gateway to political
political participation. The concept is often activism and as an avenue for slacktivism,
discussed in similar terms as the now less the low-threshold illusion of actual polit-
current notion of the ‘digital divide’: use, ical participation (Coleman 2013).
and in particular competent use, defines an
in/out logic, where the often explicit goal is
Infrastructure of Citizenship
to bring as many people as possible into the
fold. Citizens are, in a sense, simply under- Digital citizenship, understood in a wider
stood as the functioning units of a liberal and more fundamental sense than simply

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
104 DIGITAL PHILOSOPHY

familiarity and daily use, requires us to (also) a prescription. With Hume, one
interrogate technology as a place where could say that it forces us to leave the ‘is’ for
power and knowledge find mechanized the uncomfortable domain of the ‘ought’.
expressions, and politics are circumscribed Here, we will need a new kind of ethical
by particular interfaces, information archi- thinking that is up to the challenge (cf.
tectures and modes of ordering. This Braidotti 2013).
means not only analysis and critique of the
See also Algorithmic Studies; Metadata
platforms themselves, not only analysis of
Society; Organization in Platform
particular political moments that link to
Capitalism.
them, but also reflection on the design and
production of tools that shape human rela-
tions and experience – in other words, we Note
need to interrogate the infrastructure of 1. See http://www.iaioflautas.org
citizenship and politics.
This needs to go hand in hand with a Bernhard Rieder
critical distance from what Morozov
(2013) calls ‘solutionism’, the belief that
every social problem can and should be
solved by technological means. It is worth- DIGITAL PHILOSOPHY
while to remember that ‘not all political
actors are individual human agents: a wide The expression digital philosophy is used to
variety of agents, or “actants” in Latour’s denote a number of theoretical perspect-
terminology, have political effects while ives concerning the ultimate nature of
not being political subjects in any conven- reality. Advocates of digital philosophy
tional sense’ (Karatzogianni and Schandorf maintain, via a variety of different and
2012). We need not go as far as thinking often irreconcilable voices, that the
that, by producing particular software universe is fundamentally discrete. That it
designs, we are ‘coding freedom’ (Coleman is, in fact, digital. The digital, according to
2012), but if software has become a crucial these views, is a universalizing ontological
element in political practice, the time for principle: a principle that is believed to be
‘embedding the humanities in engineering’ operative well beyond the technological
(Fisher and Mahajan 2010) has come. constraints of computational media, and
New media environments have not which is held to characterize both mental
only accommodated forms of political states and physical entities as informa-
practice that are, ultimately, directed tional and, therefore, as also computable.
towards emancipation and political parti- The origin of digital philosophy can be
cipation, they are also sites and agents in traced back to the work of the computer
more brutal struggles, including phenom- pioneer Konrad Zuse. In the late 1960s,
ena such as state-sponsored censorship, Zuse put forth the hypothesis of a
cyberwarfare and the fully digital theatre computation-based physical universe.
of war of which the much-discussed drone Zuse believed that ‘objects and elementary
ships are but one element. The notion of a dimensions of physics must not be comple-
‘morality of things’ (Verbeek 2011) never mented by the concept of information but
becomes as tangible, as insisting, as in the rather should be explained by it’ (Zuse
practice of designing a technical object 1993: 176). Focusing on the operations of
that is never a mere description, but always cellular automata,1 Zuse (1970) extended

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the latter’s discrete model of organization Nature hypothesis (see Fredkin 1992)
to the structure of the cosmos, and presumes that all things in nature, along
advanced the thesis that the entire universe with their properties, can be shown to be
is nothing but the output of a deterministic discrete. Consequently, Fredkin argues
computation. Today, digital philosophy that continuity and infinity are just illu-
draws in part on Zuse’s insights to develop sions, and that the past, present and future
a diverse body of theories that hold that of the universe all evolve in a step-like
there is a fundamental informational and fashion. In this respect, it is possible to say
quantitative principle underlying the that digital philosophy proposes an onto-
universe, which processes the latter’s evol- logy in which computation is seen as a sort
ution in real time. of lowest common denominator for all
To a greater or lesser extent, this sort of that exists. It is possible to say, therefore,
Aristotelian prime mover has been identi- that at the core of digital philosophy one
fied in terms of a computational mechan- finds not only the systematic quantitative
ism. Some see it as a discrete system similar transformation of the qualitative, and the
to a cellular automaton (see Fredkin 2003; belief that the immaterial will lead to the
Wolfram 2002); others view it as a quantum material, but also a profound re-assessment
computational process (see Lloyd 2007; of the relation between simplicity and
Deutsch 1997), or as a universal Turing complexity.
machine (see Schmidhuber 1997). This is evident in the work of Stephen
Generally, however, all of these perspect- Wolfram (2002), who uses cellular auto-
ives consider information to be more mata to demonstrate that, by following
fundamental than matter and energy. The basic discrete rules, very simple computa-
notion of computation, in turn, comes to tional systems are capable of generating
the fore as a concept that supersedes both increasingly complex levels of behaviour
mathematics and physics: it is viewed as a over time. Wolfram extends these observa-
principle or as a cause, or indeed as ‘a phys- tions to the universe itself, which he sees
ical activity’ (Toffoli 1982: 165), that might running on similar simple (and comput-
be able to account for what the theoretical able) rules that gradually construct
physicist John Archibald Wheeler has complex results. In this sense, Wolfram
called ‘it from bit’ (1990: 310). defines his Principle of Computational
Digital philosophy maintains that, ‘if Equivalence as explaining empirical
our universe is digital, then all the things in phenomena via the most fundamental
it are too, including human bodies and hypothesis: everything builds up from a
brains’ (Steinhart 2004: 183). It therefore simple level, and when a system has
holds that computation is not just a tool to reached its own point of maximum
simulate reality, but rather the ontological complexity, it should be considered to be as
ground of reality itself. This claim is complex as anything else. Wolfram main-
advanced explicitly by the computer tains that this principle opens up a ‘new
scientist Edward Fredkin, who is perhaps kind of science’ (Wolfram 2002). In fact, for
one of the most radical proponents of him it is a ‘new rule of nature’ (ibid.: 720)
digital philosophy (and who gave it its with ‘a quite unprecedented array of
name). For Fredkin, physical laws are implications for science and scientific
nothing but algorithms or on/off instruc- thinking’ (5). Epistemologically speaking,
tions, and subatomic particles are nothing the principle aims to prove the existence of
but units of binary information. His Finite an upper limit not only on the complexity

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106 DIGITAL PHILOSOPHY

of possible real-life computations, but also Algorithmic Information Theory, arguing

on the heuristic capacities of science. Our that the complexity of a law is to be meas-
most powerful computational tools, then, ured by comparing it with the complexity
are just as powerful as the natural phenom- of the data that this law attempts to account
ena that they are intended to model. In for (see Chaitin 2006b and 2006c).
Wolfram’s view, however, it also follows According to Chaitin, a rule must be
from the Principle of Computational simpler than the outcome of its applica-
Equivalence that the natural is not super- tion. In this respect, a law truly explains
ior to the artificial, because algorithms can something only if its input is concise whilst
do anything that life does. its output is not. Chaitin consequently
Digital philosophy is an orientation in applies his algorithmic theory of informa-
contemporary science, yet its considera- tion to biology (for example, he makes
tion of the physical nature of beings aims DNA the simple input that generates a
to say something about the metaphysical complex organism as its output; see
nature of Being. From a historical perspect- Chaitin 2012), and to the development of
ive, because of its search for an origin or a everything that exists. ‘All is algorithm’,
unique source of existence and becoming, he claims (2007: 235), for the essence of
this digital metaphysics recalls pre- objects is to be conveyed by the shortest
Socratic philosophies. Moreover, when program able to express that object’s
tracing a genealogical trajectory for digital informational content. In this view, it is
philosophy, one should also include computational processing, rather than
Pythagoras’ belief that number is the mathematical equations, that can best
unifying principle of the real, Democritus’ describe the real: in Chaitin’s theory there
atomism, Zeno’s demonstration of the is no formal reduction to static and eternal
contradictions of continuity, and Galileo’s perfection, but rather an operative
description of the universe as written in a compression, which leaves room for the
code that needs to be deciphered. However, comprehension of the dynamism of
there can be little doubt that the most empirical phenomena.
important philosophical reference for Digital philosophy might well be ‘a new
digital ontologists is Leibniz. Despite its way of thinking about how things work’
many variants, digital philosophy can be (Fredkin 2003: 189), yet many develop-
seen as a contemporary re-elaboration of ments in science and technology have
Leibniz’s monadology of discrete and self- made this digital cosmology possible.
contained units of being. Digital philo- Digital philosophy can be seen to have
sophy’s monist metaphysics is meant to grown out of the twentieth-century
offer an answer to the Leibnizian question technoscientific belief that information
of ‘why is there something rather than is essential to the universe, and to attest
nothing’ (Leibniz 1989a: 210). It does so by to the fact that the computer is ‘a
proposing, in a Leibnizian spirit, a world new and fundamental philosophical
that is ‘the simplest in hypothesis’ but ‘the concept’ (Chaitin 2006b: 11). Whether this
richest in phenomena’ (Leibniz 1989b: 39). concept should be taken as a metaphor
The mathematician Gregory Chaitin or (as digital philosophy maintains) as
has openly acknowledged that ‘digital revealing universalizing metaphysical
philosophy is Leibnizian’ (2007: 236). truths remains open to debate.
Chaitin pays tribute to Leibnizian ideas on One possible objection to digital philo-
complexity and randomness in his sophy follows from considering that other

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DIGITAL RUBBISH 107

technoscientific developments have, in Extended Cognition; Plasticity; Postimage;

the past, also introduced foundational Robophilosophy.
modes of interpreting the universe and
everything in it (for instance, in terms Notes
of clockwork mechanisms or electric
impulses). Similarly, the philosophical 1. First studied in the 1950s as a model of
soundness, as well as the technocultural biological organization, a cellular auto-
usefulness, of systematizing both physical maton consists of a collection of cells (i.e.
reality and cognition into what is ulti- spaces) on a line or a grid. A cell might
mately a pancomputationalist framework, be black or white; its colour changes via
a set of discrete steps, which are deter-
according to which every process is
mined by simple rules based upon the
computation, is questionable, and indeed
states of the adjacent cells.
questioned.2 Perhaps one of the greatest
2. See, for instance, N. Katherine Hayles’
contributions of digital philosophy is that investigation of the ‘Regime of
of assigning to computation an onto- Computation’ (Hayles 2005) in science
epistemological relevance and operativity, and culture, and the argument ‘against
beyond those of mathematics and physics. digital ontology’ proposed by the philo-
This contribution might help a posthuman sopher of information Luciano Floridi
society to recognize, and engage with, the (2009).
potentiality of computational systems –
systems that are so fundamental to that M. Beatrice Fazi
society – to generate being and knowing.
However, whether this computational
being and this computational knowing are
all that there is to be and know remains a DIGITAL RUBBISH
question that should still be critically
addressed. To do so vis-à-vis the construc- Rice might seem to be an improbable
tions of experience and subjectivity that object to link to digital media technolo-
the posthuman condition engenders gies. Yet in areas of Asia where e-waste
involves considering that digital philo- recycling occurs, high levels of heavy
sophy might well find its place in the metals, including cadmium and lead, have
posthuman predicament in virtue of the been found in rice samples, which have
profound reassessments of agency and been contaminated through polluted water
nature that it affords. However, according and soil (Fu et al. 2008). What appear to be
to the views proposed by the authors dematerialized and harmless devices,
mentioned in this essay, it is neither ‘matter’ digital media technologies instead are
nor ‘life’ (important concepts in post- material and toxic entities that generate
human elaborations of experience and waste across their lifespan. At the same
subjectivity) that ultimately account for time, pollution from electronics remakes
these reassessments of agency and nature, ecologies, organisms, bodies – and even
but rather a fundamentally mechanical food crops. The residues from digital
category such as computation. media technologies accumulate as material
effects that unfold through posthuman
See also Algorithm; Algorithmic registers, since the strata that electronic
Studies; Computational Turn; Informatic waste would contaminate, and the entities
Opacity; Execution; Digital Citizenship; that would be affected by these new

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108 DIGITAL RUBBISH

material-ecological arrangements, exceed form. Electronic technologies inform the

a human-centric approach to technology types of relations, practices, experiences
or ecology. The wastes from digital media and becomings of human and non-human
give rise to new and posthuman techno- entities.
ecologies in the making. At the same time, it is not just through
‘Digital rubbish’ is the term I use to the making but also through the breaking
investigate the particular material of electronics that particular worlds come
processes and modes of mattering charac- into being. Electronic waste is the fastest-
teristic of electronic waste (Gabrys 2011). growing waste stream, since given the
The common perception of digital techno- rapid obsolescence of electronics the
logies is that they are relatively light and number of discarded technologies prolif-
resource-free, and that they are demateri- erates in equal measure to the new devices
alized in relation to other technologies and introduced. While ‘mattering’ is often
industries. However, electronics require approached as a process of things coming
considerable resources for their manufac- into being (Barad 2003; cf. Dolphijn and
ture, and from the mining of minerals and van der Tuin 2012), mattering also occurs
metals for the essential operation of micro- through the dissolution of things and the
chips and mobile phones, through to the residue and fallout left behind, as well as
use of numerous chemical solvents to etch the new fossils that are formed (Gabrys
circuit boards, to the increasing rates of 2006, 2011). From these remainders, new
consumption of electronics as well as the material conditions, human and non-
electronicization of environments, homes human entities, as well as environments
and transport through the ‘Internet of and techno-geographies form.
Things’ (Gabrys 2016b) and the increasing While the infrastructures, resources
disposal of short-lived electronics, whether and material requirements that undergird
for scrapyards, repair shops in developing digital media technologies are often over-
countries or landfills, it is evident that the looked, a posthuman encounter with these
modes of mattering in which electronics technologies then indicates that these are
are entangled generate intensive and not seemingly dematerialized gadgets
extensive environmental, political and bound only to human users, but rather are
social relations. expanded material-ecological concretiza-
From sensors to smart grids to mobile tions and processes. Digital media techno-
phones, electronics are remaking the logies are material in multiple ways, but
planet. These ‘techno-geographies’ waste reveals most poignantly just how
(Simondon 1958) generate new materialit- material these devices are. Digital techno-
ies and milieus in and through which logies create wastes across the lifecycle of
human and nonhuman processes unfold manufacture, consumption, repair and
(Gabrys 2016a). Such electronic techno- disposal. These wastes are toxic, difficult to
geographies might also be approached as classify, leaking and amorphous, relatively
forming distinct posthuman conditions, unseen, disproportionate in comparison
where the particular concretizations of to the size of the devices, productive of
technologies, humans, nonhumans and environmental and labour injustices,
milieus are not centred on or through a contaminating of bodies, carcinogenic,
pre-existing human subject, but become and polluting of soil and aquifers.
constitutive of the possibilities for experi- As this sprawling yet far from compre-
encing subjects and for new worlds to hensive list of electronics-related wastes

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DIGITAL RUBBISH 109

indicates, the modes of mattering to which Electronic wastes form new ecologies
digital media technologies contribute are and new materialities that together also
multiple. Which is to say that digital produce new organisms and relations,
rubbish is generative of more than just which can be harmful in their effects (as
obvious material remainders in the form the rice contaminated with heavy metal at
of discarded hard drives and computer the beginning of this entry indicates).
monitors. Instead, digital rubbish is gener- Digital rubbish then suggests not only that
ative of processes of materialization that we might attend to the overlooked materi-
splinter off in multiple directions depend- alities and material relations of these tech-
ing upon whether electronics are being nologies, but also that we develop an
manufactured, minerals are being mined expanded approach to these materialities
for their internal workings, or cast-off that does not settle on a fascination with
personal computers are circulating to the ruins of consumption, merely, but
landfills or processing plants. To focus on that creates new material explorations
these material aspects of digital rubbish is and material practices that address the
to commit to a particular material-political splintering and complex inputs, outputs
and ecological construction (Stengers and posthuman transformations that
2008) of the effect of these technologies. accompany our techno-ecological digital
While electronics continue to prolifer- lives.
ate, and seem to offer up newfound levels
of speed, efficiency and productivity, See also Mattering; General Ecology;
they at the same time generate material- Obsolete Technologies; Noise.
political and environmental problems that
are distinctly posthuman in character. Jennifer Gabrys

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
 E
EARTH did – or what cyberculture then rehashed
with a dose of Silicon Valley excitement –
The Earth is a planet, of an age of about but the different visualization systems that
4.54 billion years and defined by its give us operational representations of the
geological formations, density, biosphere, planet. This is the view of the Earth since
hydrosphere and an atmosphere that the Vostok I space flight in 1961 carrying:
sustains life. It is more than a world for the first human to orbit the planet and able
humans and defined by its life-sustaining to describe the ground-detached view. It’s
conditions and its planetary relations the Earth that features on the cover of the
(Woodard 2015). On a planetary level, first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, and on
it is one complex dynamic system where the inside pages hailing the imagery of the
biosphere, atmosphere and many of the satellite era: the necessary coffee table
geological spheres interact; on an extra- book of 243 NASA images, in full colour,
planetary level it is as dynamic, part of from the Gemini flights in 1965 – for only
the gravitational pull, periodic rotation, $7. The Earth furnishes the home.
cosmic rays and the radiation of the sun. Our understanding of the Earth is
Buckminster Fuller called it ‘spaceship mediated by a variety of representational
earth’, marking the speculative beginnings techniques and is itself a product of the
of post-planetary design: ‘We are all astro- technological era. ‘They alone shall possess
nauts’ (Fuller 1969: 14), who spin in space the earth who live from the powers of the
travelling at 60,000 miles an hour, in the cosmos’, quoted Walter Benjamin (2008:
midst of rich non-human life as well as the 58) in his short text ‘To the Planetarium’
intensive relations to other planets and from 1928, analysing technological ways of
the sun. organizing the physis – both the gaze
The Earth is also a complex ecosystem upwards, and from up there, back down-
where one should never mistake humans wards. The satellite-based images of the
to be the centre of action; they are merely Earth since the 1960s and leading up to the
one part in a larger loop of processes. One famous Blue Marble of 1972 (the Apollo 17
way to refer to it is by way of a ‘holarchy flight) mark subsequent examples in the
arisen from the self-induced synergy of series of images that define the Earth from
combination, interfacing, and recombina- space. The escape velocity (Virilio 1997)
tion’ (Margulis and Sagan 1995:18). that allows accelerating objects from aero-
Besides the life of the organic and the planes to spaceships to leave the Earth’s
inorganic spheres, it is also a mediasphere gravity-bound surface is also what then
– by which we don’t have to think only of allows us to see the Earth from above. The
the Jesuit fantasies of the immaterial reality old etymology of the Earth as eorþe, refer-
of cognition such as Teilhard de Chardin ring to something different from the

110
EARTH 111

heavens and the underground, gives way to to the otherworldly away from the Earth
a dynamic of vectors where the Earth was a way to sharpen the focus on the
becomes defined from the heavens. The planet but the technological gaze toward
energetic powers of acceleration transform deep space with telescopes such as Hubble
into the visual survey from above. As Fuller was never just about space and the
puts it, writing in the late 1960s, ‘However, interplanetary.
you have viewed more than did pre- Geographical surveys benefited from
twentieth-century man, for in his entire the developed lenses and image processing
lifetime he saw only one-millionth of the of satellite-enabled remote sensing (Cubitt
Earth’s surface’ (Fuller 1969). This media- 1998: 45–9). The perspective back to the
enhanced understanding of the Earth Earth has enabled the fine-tuning accuracy
seeps into the biological work of Margulis of corporate digital maps such as Google
and Sagan even, when they narrate the new Earth and a massive military surveillance
metamorphosis of visual epistemology system too.
that this technological thrusting and The Earth is constantly targeted by
imaging brings about. It brings forth an satellites and remote sensing systems such
imaginary of the orbital that is shared by as the Planetary Skin Institute. The insti-
satellites and astronauts: ‘As if floating tute is one among many systems that offer
dreamily away from your own body, you a polyscalar view of a multiplicity of
watch the planet to which you are now processes for analysis. It boasts the ideal of
tied by only the invisible umbilicus of reading these as ‘scalable big data’ that
gravity and telecommunication’ (Margulis benefits communities and can ‘increase,
and Sagan 1995: 18). They use such images food, water, and energy security and
and narratives to contribute to the idea of a protect key ecosystems and biodiversity’
holarchic view where the human is part of (quoted in Bishop 2016). Alongside such
the micro- and macrocosmos. For them, systems as Hewlett Packard’s Central
the event is a sort of a planetary-level Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE ) it
mirror image that carries Jacques Lacan’s creates real-time surveillance systems that
concept from babies to space: to perceive intend more than mere observation. As
‘the global environment’ as the ‘mirror Ryan Bishop (2016) argues, these are
stage of our entire species’ (ibid.). massive level systems for constant data-
Much more than an echo of a psycho- based interpretation of the various scales
analytic stage for the planetary design, the of the Earth that indeed define a specific
mediated vision turned back on the Earth corporate-security angle to the planet.
itself was instrumental to a range of polit- Our relations with the Earth are medi-
ical, scientific and military considerations. ated through technologies and techniques
Seeing the Earth from space was one such of visualization, sonification, calculation,
thing that had an effect on climate research mapping, prediction, simulation and so
(also impacted by nuclear testing; see forth: it is primarily through operational-
Edwards 2010). It had an effect on military ized media that we grasp the Earth as an
planning and geopolitical evaluation. It object of analysis. Even the surface of the
opened up again a holistic view of the Earth and geological resources used to be
planet as one, although at the same time mapped through surveys and field observa-
as a complex system of a non-linear tion. But now this advances through remote
kind. It contributed to a variety of cultural sensing technologies (see also Parikka
moods and movements. Even the gaze 2015). One can argue that they are in a way

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112 (MATERIAL) ECOCRITICISM

extensions of Leibniz’s universal calculus, of the ecological humanities. It was the

which offered one way to account for the end of the 1970s, and until then the
order of the Earth, including accidents planet’s bio-geo-chemical cycles, non-
like earthquakes (such as the infamous one human beings, elements, the Earth and the
in 1755 in Lisbon). But as the architect- Sun, had noticeably been the ‘stone guests’
theorist Eyal Weizman argues, this calcula- of literary studies. Almost consistently,
tion of the Earth is now less organized they were treated as subjects but bereft of
according to the divine order of the subjectivity – symbolically present but
Christian deity and more about the ‘increas- absent as concrete entities, material actors.
ingly complex bureaucracy of calculations Still, Rueckert’s point was, the world in
that include sensors in the subsoil, terrain, which we teach and study literature, the
air, and sea, all processed by algorithms and world in which literature is made, is the
their attendant models’ (Weizman, Davis same world in which humans, along with
and Turpin 2013: 64). Also practices of innumerable other species and beings, live.
meteorology are to be understood as such What physically affects this world, affects
cultural techniques and media operations all the activities happening in it, including
that order the dynamics of the sky as analys- our intellectual and cultural productions.
able data. The terrestrial opens up through Even more, all these cultural productions
what circulates above it, the atmosphere do not spring out from the void, but emerge
becomes a way to understand the ground in the process of our evolution as living
and the orbit is where the understanding of things. And so, like the simplest one-cell
the Earth begins by way of massive data- organisms, this expression of life that we
driven remote sensing systems. The nomos call ‘literature’ ultimately depends on the
of the Earth that defines its geopolitics is energy provided by the sun; like them, it is
one that reaches out to the heavenly spheres intrinsically at home in the biosphere.
as much as to the data-intensive operations A critical practice meant to understand
of multiple scales (see Bratton 2015). the role of literature ‘in an immensely
complex global system in which energy,
See also Anthropocene; Anthropocene
matter, and ideas interact’ (Glotfelty 1996:
Observatory; Four Elements; General
xix), ecocriticism is an incitement to
Ecology; Geomythologies; Terrestrial; SS =
consider ‘culture’ not as apart from ‘nature’,
Security/Surveillance; Medianatures.
but to see nature and culture, world and
text, as mutually permeable. In its numer-
Jussi Parikka
ous methods and forms – encompassing
or intertwining with feminist approaches
and nature writing analyses, animal
(MATERIAL) ECOCRITICISM humanities and biosemiotics, environ-
mental justice and postcolonial studies,
‘We need to make some connections petrocriticism and ‘toxic discourse’ –
between literature and the sun, between ecocriticism invites us to see how world
teaching literature and the health of the and texts are connected, how they meet
biosphere’ (Rueckert 1996 [1978]: 109). and eventually combine.
With these words, coming as an outburst This can mean many things. For example,
of discontent for the absence of bios from it means to examine how literary creations
literary criticism, William Rueckert was mirror the ecologies of the ‘outside world’, or
adding a crucial signpost in the direction how they culturally respond to the crises

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
(MATERIAL) ECOCRITICISM 113

affecting these ecologies. But it can also ical development of ecocriticism that,
mean another interesting thing, namely, following the onto-epistemologies of the
that the world itself becomes a text in which new materialisms, takes material relation-
these crises, along with all the crossings of ships as its objects of enquiry (Iovino and
nature and culture, are scripted. This idea of Oppermann 2012, 2014a). ‘Material rela-
the ‘world as a text’ is not to be interpreted tionships’ refers here not to the mere mater-
in the radical deconstructionist sense, iality of substances, processes and things,
implied by Derrida’s often-misunderstood but to the entanglements of bodily and
assertion there is no ‘hors-texte’. Rather, it discursive relationships that constitute our
suggests that the world’s complexity can be life, both socially and biologically. ‘Matter’ is
seen as a story emerging from the process of here regarded in two basic aspects: first, as
becoming-together of nature and culture – formative and creative; secondly, as inter-
and that it is only thinkable as their inex- locked with meaning and with discursive
tricable co-emergence: natureculture. practices (e.g. power, race, gender, class,
Based on these premises, the encounter ethnicity, identity, justice, etc.). Material
of ecocriticism with posthumanism is a ecocriticism is therefore a perspective
coherent upshot. As Serpil Oppermann focusing on the corporeal dimension
writes, ‘With their intersecting stories and of human and non-human agents, phenom-
theories, posthumanism and ecocriticism ena, collectives and environments, both in
have something in common: they introduce their reciprocal and meaning-producing
changes in the way materiality, agency, and permeability, as well as in their cultural
nature are conceived’ (Oppermann 2016). representations and social perceptions. As a
That this is necessarily confluent with a consequence, another important character-
vision that, like the posthumanist view, is istic of material ecocriticism is that it
meant to overcome our ‘historic’ solitude, is extends the focus of interpretation beyond
palpable: in line with posthumanism, in the conventional categories of text. Not only
fact, ecocriticism and the literary imagina- does it analyse literary texts representing,
tion it heeds augment the population of our for example, situations of environmental
cultural world, relocating the human in a risk, but it also sheds light on the way the
wider web of connections by staging a ecologies of risks are inscribed on material
‘performative metaphor that allows for realities. Toxic bodies, polluted ecosystems
otherwise unlikely encounters and unsus- and the various ‘landscapes of risk’ in their
pected sources of interaction, experience, multiple aspects become, in this sense,
and knowledge’ (Braidotti 2013: 38). corporeal texts which express the material
Therefore, just like the posthuman does not forces and discursive practices at work in a
erase, but rather completes the picture of the society’s naturalcultural dynamics. Diffracted
human by situating it in a relational onto- through the prism of the new materialisms,
logy of ‘(fractious) kinships’ with the thus, ecocriticism investigates matter not
nonhuman (Bennett 2010: 112), ecocriti- only in texts but also as a text, contend-
cism tries to offer a more realistic picture of ing  ‘with the vexing sites where figures,
our cultural practices by taking them narratives, concepts, and histories bear the
beyond their alleged distance from the marks of their worldly entanglements’
natural world. (Alaimo 2015: 300). In this perspective, the
The reconsideration of materiality, matter of the world is read as a ‘storied
agency and nature becomes even more matter’: an eloquent text emerging from the
radical with material ecocriticism, a theoret- concurrence of material-discursive forces

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114 (MATERIAL) ECOCRITICISM

and expressing the interactions of human pretation which characterize life, ‘fed back
and non-human actors. A material eco- into [the] world . . . producing new layers
criticism becomes in this way an attempt to or strata of understanding’ (2008:154).
elicit the implicit message of this worldly Seen in this light, ‘interpreter’ has here
textuality, using literary representations as two meanings, which are complementary to
prisms to possibly bring out the predica- one another: the first is ‘reader’; the second
ments of the more-than-human collectives is ‘actor’. Interpreting their objects, ecocrit-
in which our lives are embedded. ics read them into being: they literally voice
A key role is played by the concept of their objects, contributing to create narrat-
diffraction, here employed to read concepts ives about them, also emphasizing that the
and bodies ‘through one another in ways world’s textuality is a reciprocity through
that help illuminate differences as they which human and non-human agents are
emerge’ (Barad 2007: 30). As Karen Barad constitutive of the reality we know. But
suggests, in order to think the natural and ecocritics act, too. They carry on a more or
the cultural together, without ‘holding less explicit (in any case, inescapable) form
either nature or culture as the fixed refer- of cultural activism. There is, in other words,
ence for understanding the other’, we need no neutrality in experiencing, knowing and
‘a diffraction apparatus’ (ibid.). Material telling a story: if, as Barad again says, ‘we are
ecocriticism’s objective is that of working a part of that nature that we seek to under-
as a ‘diffraction apparatus’ to see these stand’ (Barad 2007: 67), the way we exhibit
entanglements; it wants to act as a crit- this understanding belongs in the process
ical lens that enables us to think the natural of becoming of this very reality. Every inter-
through the cultural and the cultural pretation is therefore an act of mediation
through the natural, reminding us of the between text and cognition, essential to
‘compositional’ structure of our world the use of such text: in the congealing of
(Latour 2010a) – a common world of mani- discursive and material factors which
fold beings and alien affinities, a ‘pluriverse originate reality in all of its forms, interpre-
. . . traversed by heterogeneities that are tive practices are ‘a material practice for
continually doing things’ (Bennett 2010: making a difference’ (Barad 2007: 381). This
122). The concept of diffraction also process has ethical and cognitive outcomes,
considerably affects the idea of interpreta- in that it not only relocates the horizon of
tion (Iovino 2015). In fact, just like the human action into a more complex and
presence of the experimenter contributes interconnected geography of subjects and
to determine the behaviour of the forces, but also enables ways of seeing that
subatomic particles in a quantum experi- compel new posthuman ethics and less
ment, the interpreter’s presence contrib- destructive behaviours. To read bodies and
utes to the agency of the interpreted text landscapes as the storied embodiments of
(Oppermann 2015). Even if matter is per countless intra-acting agencies – pollutants,
se endowed with agency, the narrative political choices, non/human creativities,
agency of matter acquires its meaning and and natural dynamics – might indeed reveal
definition chiefly through a reader. This unexpected proximities which prompt us to
practice of ‘reading’ is our participation in redesign the maps of agency and responsi-
the world’s ‘differential becoming’ and is bility, thus creating a deeper awareness in
itself responsible for crafting further levels matter of ‘sustainability’.
of reality; it is, as Wendy Wheeler says Like its consonant approach ‘elemental
about the processes of semiosis and inter- ecocriticism’ (Cohen and Duckert 2015a),

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material ecocriticism discloses an attempt which birds attack humans for no discern-
to think the world ‘disanthropocentrically’, ible reason, and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws
to use Cohen’s insightful coinage (2013b: (1975), in which a great white shark terror-
xxiv). To ‘anthropo-dis-center’ our sight izes a New England coastal community, also
means to literally swerve our priorities, with no obvious reason. While Them!
liberating the world’s bodily natures from presents its creatures as the direct result of
the discursive – and material – delusions human intervention, The Birds and Jaws
of human-centred narratives. In our ‘post- present their attacking animals simply as
geological’ epoch – call it Anthropocene, instances of nature’s Otherness. More recent
Plantationocene or Capitalocene (Haraway examples of this type of ecohorror narrative
2015a, 2015b) – the critical tools of (mater- can be found in creature features from the
ial) ecocriticism can be usefully complicit Syfy Channel and low-budget production
in the ‘joint efforts and collective imagin- company The Asylum, including, for
ings’ (Braidotti 2013: 197) necessary to this instance, Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus
veering move. (2009), Sharktopus (2010) and Sharknado
(2013). The subgenre isn’t just about sharks,
See also Diffraction; Ecomaterialism;
of course, although sharks (whether
Mattering; Naturecultures; Neo/New
modern or prehistoric) are a popular choice.
Materialism; Ontological Turn; Storied
Other modern examples feature piranhas,
Matter; Trans-corporeality; Literature of
spiders, birds, crocodiles or alligators, bears,
Liberation; Material Feminisms; Posthuman
rats, snakes, and sometimes even bugs.
Critical Theory.
Many of the modern creature features
are campy and difficult to take seriously, but
Serenella Iovino
they nevertheless reflect real anxieties about
the natural world and its existence outside
of human control. This anxiety is high-
ECOHORROR lighted by such films’ similarities to other
types of horror. In her blog Horror
Ecohorror is a relatively newly delineated Homeroom, horror scholar Dawn Keetley
subgenre of horror that nevertheless has argues that Jaws is essentially a slasher film
deep roots in the genre. If horror is a genre featuring a shark instead of a masked
about fear, concerned with exploring what human murderer; furthermore, she writes,
frightens us and perhaps temporarily exor- ‘Whether they render it in shark or human
cising or taming that fear, ecohorror is a form, though, both Jaws and Halloween
genre that deals with our fears and anxieties disclose the terrifying confrontation with
about the environment. It grows out of and the nonhuman (the inexplicable, irrational,
includes narratives that have been referred and implacable) at the heart of horror.’ This
to, variously, as natural horror, creature confrontation with the nonhuman is central
features, and ‘nature strikes back’ narratives, to ecohorror.
in which the central narrative is frequently Ecohorror is not limited to the ‘nature
one of some element of the natural world strikes back’ narrative, however. Stephen
attacking humanity. Classic examples of this Rust and Carter Soles provide an expan-
narrative include Them! (1954), in which ded definition of the genre in their intro-
spiders mutated by atomic testing in the duction to a special cluster of articles about
New Mexico desert must be defeated, ecohorror in Interdisciplinary Studies in
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), in Literature and Environment (ISLE), writing

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that this larger definition ‘includes analyses animacy as ‘the inanimate, deadness,
of texts in which horrific texts and tropes lowness, nonhuman animals (rendered as
are used to promote ecological awareness, insensate), the abject, the object’ (2012: 30).
represent ecological crises, or blur human/ Taxidermied animals illustrate this end of
non-human distinctions more broadly’ the scale, as do many horror film monsters
(2014: 509–10). Ecohorror, they continue, (zombies, vampires, animal monsters),
‘assumes that environmental disruption is while the humans who star in the films exist
haunting humanity’s relationship to the at the opposite end of the animacy hier-
non-human world’ (510). This definition of archy. Applying Chen’s animacy hierarchy
ecohorror broadens the genre’s scope both helps reveal both the value system the
in terms of what texts it might include as audience brings to such narratives and also
well as in terms of its relevance to theories the breakdown of this value system in these
of the posthuman. films. This breakdown can be seen clearly
This expanded definition means that in Night of the Living Dead. Surrounded
ecohorror appears not just as a distinct and overwhelmed by creatures and objects
subgenre of horror but as an effect that may lower on the animacy hierarchy than
surface within other horror narratives as they are (i.e., zombies), the human charac-
well. One instance of its environmental ters (and their animate superiority) are
disruption can be found in taxidermy’s destroyed and their place on the hierarchy is
presence in horror film. Animal taxidermy revealed to be extremely unstable. Thus
repeatedly recurs within the genre, although taxidermy in horror film serves the broader
it usually remains in the background, only functions of ecohorror, blurring the lines
briefly attended to (if at all), as in The Blob between human and nonhuman.
(1958), Night of the Living Dead (1968), This blurring of lines can be taken even
Frogs (1972), The Exorcist (1973), Dawn of further within ecohorror. Although discus-
the Dead (1978), Willard (2003), Shark sions of ecohorror have often emphasized
Night 3D (2011), and Cabin in the Woods attacks by the natural world or invasions
(2012). Rachel Poliquin writes, ‘All taxi- ‘from our immediate natural environment’
dermy begs the question, what is it? Perhaps (Tudor 1989: 62), this emphasis is built
we no longer wonder what species the upon a presumed separation between
preserved creature once was, but the ontolo- humanity and the non-human world.
gical question what is it? Is always lurking Human and non-human are not separate,
with taxidermy’ (2012: 38). These questions however, so it is crucial to also consider
do not apply only to the taxidermy itself; ecohorror narratives that examine the
taxidermy’s presence evokes these questions connections between the two. This means
in a more general sense and highlights blurring the lines between ecohorror and
horror’s already existing anxieties about the body horror. In The Fly (1986), for instance,
nonhuman, death and the lines between the horror comes not only from Seth
categories such as human/non-human, life/ Brundle’s bodily disintegration over the
death and animate/inanimate. Furthermore, course of the film but also from the disin-
taxidermy in horror evokes Mel Y. Chen’s tegration of the boundaries between
animacy hierarchy, in which some types of human and fly. And in Junji Ito’s manga
life or being are valued more highly than Uzumaki (1998–99), in which a Japanese
others (with sentient life at the top of the village is contaminated by spirals, the
hierarchy and inanimate objects at the horror comes both from the way human
bottom). Chen describes the opposite of bodies are twisted and changed by the

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spirals as well as from the transformation archy, or perhaps we will have to acknow-
of some humans into snail people. ledge our interconnectedness with other
Another source for this kind of eco- beings. In doing so, ecohorror risks reinfor-
horror is the parasite-focused horror narrat- cing those fears and the categories they are
ive. These parasite-focused horror narratives built upon, but ecohorror also asks us to
(e.g., Mira Grant’s novel Parasite and its reconsider some of those fears and to
sequels) draw attention to the ways in which imagine what might happen if we were not
humans wish to see themselves as in control to insist so vehemently upon such divisions.
of their bodies, their lives and even the
See also Animacies; Animal; Anthropocene
natural world, while simultaneously high-
and Chthulucene; Trans-corporeality;
lighting the limits of this control. After all,
Posthuman Literature and Criticism.
we are influenced – sometimes significantly
– by the organisms living within us. This
Christy Tidwell
inclusion of parasite narratives within
ecohorror highlights the subgenre’s connec-
tion to the posthuman. If posthumanism is
a mode ‘in which there are no solid demarc- ECOLOGIES OF ARCHITECTURE
ations between human and animal and in
which the human is coextensive with the
Reinventing architecture can no longer
emergent natural/cultural world’ (Alaimo
signify the relaunching of a style, a school,
2010: 151), then parasite narratives certainly
a theory with a hegemonic vocation, but
reflect this. Because this blurring of lines
the recomposition of architectural enunci-
takes place within the horror genre, however, ation, and, in a sense, the trade of the
the lack of such solid demarcations is not architect, under today’s conditions.
necessarily represented as a positive thing; Once it is no longer the goal of the
instead, these narratives ask their readers or architect to be the artist of built forms but to
viewers to consider the dangers of such offer his services in revealing the virtual
interconnectedness (Tidwell 2014). As desire of spaces, places, trajectories and
Donna Haraway writes, ‘[a] great deal is at territories, he will have to undertake the
stake in such meetings [between species], analysis of the relations of individual and
and outcomes are not guaranteed. There is collective corporeality by constantly singu-
no teleological warrant here, no assured larizing his approach. Moreover, he will
happy or unhappy ending, socially, ecologic- have to become an intercessor between
ally, or scientifically’ (2008: 15). Connections these desires, brought to light, and the
between species, as both Haraway and interests that they thwart. In other words, he
posthuman ecohorror reveal, are not inher- will have to become an artist and an artisan
ently positive but may just as easily be of sensible and relational lived experience.
harmful or dangerous. This is why, as Alaimo Guattari 2013: 232
argues, ‘[t]rans-corporeality is a site not for
affirmation, but rather for epistemological In a desperate attempt to catch up with
reflection and precautionary principles’ forms of contemporary media culture,
(2010: 144). architects tend to perpetuate earlier notions
Ecohorror reflects our fears about non- of culture as representation rather than
human nature in a variety of ways. Perhaps culture as forms of life (Lash 2001: 107).
animals will attack us, perhaps we will lose Architecture has yet to break with culture as
our place at the top of the animacy hier- reflection still firmly embedded in its

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118 ECOLOGIES OF ARCHITECTURE

concepts of Utopia, Type, History, City, common function by placing them before
Geometry, Landscape and Ornament. To their own limits: ‘thought before the unthink-
speak of the ecologies of architecture is able, memory before the immemorial, sens-
to break with judgement for experience, to ibility before the imperceptible, etc.’ (Deleuze
break with the propositional knowing-that 1994: 227). The eco-logical ‘perspectivist’
for the impredicative knowing-how (Ryle assault on the ego-logical representational
2009: 25–61). As the self-declared empiri- thinking inevitably impinges upon the
cist (i.e. pluralist) Gilles Deleuze put it in his identity of the subject. Where Kant founded
book on Nietzsche, it is not about justifica- the representational unity of space and
tion, ‘but a different way of feeling: another time upon the formal unity of consciousness,
sensibility’ (Deleuze 1983: 94). If to think difference fractures consciousness into
differently we have to feel differently then multiple states not predicable of a single
the design of the built environment has no subject. In other words, difference breaks
other purpose but to transform us (Kwinter with the differentiation of an undifferenti-
2014: 313). While engineering focuses ated world in favour of the homogenization
on solutions, architecture dramatizes the of a milieu or umwelt (Deleuze and Guattari
problem so that we may stumble upon a 2004: 62). To speak of Whiteheadian super-
new emancipatory potential (Kipnis 2013). ject is to break with earlier notions of
After all, problems always have the solution subject as a foundation (Whitehead 1978:
that they deserve (Smith 2012: 307). 29). ‘Desiring-machines’ connect, disconnect
and reconnect with one another without
meaning or intention (Deleuze and Guattari
2008: 288). Paradoxically, actions are primary
Pedagogy of the Senses in relation to the intentions that animate
Posthuman architecture ought to focus on them the same way that desiring is primary
the encounter between thought and that to volition. Individuality is not characteristic
which forces it into action. While accepting of a self or an ego, but a perpetually individu-
multiple nested scales of reality, the ecologies alizing differential. It is not the subject that
of architecture challenge the alleged primacy has a point of view, rather it is the point of
of the ‘physical’ world. What we engage with view that has its larval subject (Deleuze
is the world considered as an environment 1980). Deleuze explains: ‘Each faculty, includ-
and not an aggregate of objects. The emphasis ing thought, has only involuntary adventures’
is on the encounter, where experience is seen and ‘involuntary operation remains embed-
as an emergence which returns the body to a ded in the empirical’ (Deleuze 1994: 145).
process field of exteriority (Colebrook 2004). This constitutes his famous ‘pedagogy of the
Sensibility introduces an aleatory moment senses’.
into thought’s development, thus turning
contingency into the very condition for
thinking. Not only does this upset logical
identity and opposition, it also places the
Asignifying Semiotics
limit of thinking beyond any dialectical The ecologies of architecture rely on
system. Thought cannot activate itself by cartography to overturn the theatre of
thinking but has to be provoked. It must representation into the order of desiring-
suffer violence. Art and architecture may production (Deleuze and Guattari 2004:
inflict such violence. They harbour the 12). The ultimate ambition is to debunk
potential for breaking up the faculties’ hylomorphism – where form is imposed

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ECOLOGIES OF ARCHITECTURE 119

upon inert matter from without and where (Stiegler 2008–11: 12). Experience is not
the architect is seen as a god-given, inspired an event ‘in’ the mind. Rather, the mind
creator and genius – and to promote emerges from interaction with the environ-
the alternative immanent morphogenetic ment. The predominant homeostatic notion
approach that is at once more humble and of structure in architectural thinking has to
ambitious (DeLanda 2002: 28). There lies a give way to the event-centred ontology of
(r)evolutionary potential in creating the relations. The metastability of existence
‘new’, defined as the circulation of de-coded (formerly known as sustainability) is to be
and de-territorialized flows that resist the mapped in the very act of becoming. The
facile co-option by re-coding or capturing Affective Turn in architecture concentrates
(Deleuze and Guattari 2008: 379). To speak on perception which occurs not on the level
of univocity of expression is to break with at which actions are decided but on the
equivocity of the hegemonic linguistic sign. level at which the very capacity for action
Action and perception are inseparable, as forms, the virtual (Massumi 2002: 79). If rep-
are forms of life and their environments. If resentation is a means to an end (to classify),
the objects of knowledge were separated schizoanalytic cartography is a means to
from the objects of existence, we would end a means (to intervene) (Guattari 2013).
up with a duality of mental and physical Teleology cannot be used as the sole design
objects – bifurcation of nature – that leads criterion because the freedom of action is
to an ontologically indirect perception. By never a de facto established condition, it
contrast, the premise of the ecologies of is always a virtuality (Evans 1997: 16–17).
architecture is that perceptual systems This proto-epistemological level of poten-
resonate to information, where information tialization (priming) is already ontological
is defined as a difference that makes a differ- (Massumi 2015a: 71). It concerns change
ence (Gibson 1986: 249; Bateson 1972). This in the degree to which a life-form is enabled
‘direct realism’ is grounded on the premise vis-à-vis its (built) environment. Their
that, from the outset, real experience is a reciprocal determination commits contem-
relation of potential structure rather than a porary architecture to ecology in general
formless chaotic swirl onto which structure and ethico-aesthetics in particular (Guattari
must be imposed by cognitive process 1995). The psychotropic cry that ‘we
(sapience). The world is seen as an ongoing shape our cities; thereafter they shape us’ is
open process of mattering, where meaning to be taken literally. Only recently have
and form are acquired in the actualization biologists conceded the effect that ‘niche
of different agential virtualities (Barad construction’ has on the inheritance system
2007). Following Deleuze’s argument, it is (Jablonka and Lamb 2005; Odling-Smee,
possible to assert that the genetic principles Laland and Feldman 2003). They confirm
of sensation (sentience) are thus at the same that a life-form does not only passively
time the principles of composition of submit to the pressures of a pre-existing
art(efact) (Deleuze 2003). environment (evo), but also actively
constructs its existential niche (devo), that
being the city in the Anthropocene. The
Niche Constructionism implications for the discipline of architec-
Architecture ought to reclaim its vanguard ture, considering its quasi-causal role in the
position within the Epigenetic Turn which neo-Lamarckian Baldwian Evolution (evo-
embraces tekhne as constitutive of posthu- devo), remain significant and binding
manity, and not just the other way around (Wexler 2010: 143).

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120 ECOMATERIALISM

Futurity ECOMATERIALISM
The New Materialisms in general, and the A bird’s-eye view of contemporary intellec-
Affective Turn in particular, seem to be tual developments reveals an increasingly
gaining momentum to such an extent that debated and widely exercised material turn
even some of the scholars of this affiliation unravelling transversally across entwined
have been urging caution (Colebrook research fields. Ranging from science
2010: 168–9). However, as far as the discip- studies, ecophilosopy, ecocriticism and the
line of architecture is concerned, this environmental humanities to feminist
otherwise healthy dose of scepticism is not philosophy, gender and queer studies,
only premature but also counterproduct- anthropology, art theories and media
ive. In its history, architecture has under- studies, this new paradigm has assumed
gone a gradual disassociation from the various cross-developing forms and labels,
material realm and become an ultimate such as new materialisms, neomaterialism,
white-collar profession. The consequent material ecocriticism and ecomaterialism.
withdrawal from reality (thesis of They all contest the master narratives of
autonomy) has been variously seen as liberal humanist culture, fostering instead a
‘bad’ escapism or a ‘good’ strategy of resist- revolutionary model of environmentality
ance (Hays 1981). The urge to ward off the based on the idea of agentic materiality for
givens and to continue to contemplate the apprehension of current and future
(possible) alternatives is praiseworthy. But ecological complexities.
idealist bracketing and messianic ambition Of all the terms associated with the
come at a price. Architects might end up material turn, however, ‘ecomaterialism’ is
painting themselves into a corner of the most underdefined, leaving us in doubt
impotence by depriving themselves of the as to its being just another label that did not
(virtual) means to intervene. After all, turn into a catchphrase like ‘new material-
intervention has always been the main isms’ or ‘neomaterialism’. ‘Ecomaterialism’
trait of (any) materialism. The best strategy inevitably leaves us guessing whether it can
of resistance seems to lie not in opposition or cannot be used as a mere synonym for
but in (strategic) affirmation (Braidotti either of these terms, as it not only intersects
2012). The recognition of the present– and overlaps with their discourse, but is also
future relation provides a point of depar- similarly accompanied by a flourish of
ture for an ecological account of anticipa- redefined concepts: matter, agency, nature,
tion and/or creation akin to Isabelle human, non-human, inhuman, posthuman,
Stengers’ thinking par le milieu (Stengers objects, things and relations. Despite this
2005: 187). What defines the concept of ambivalence, ecomaterialism is currently
futurity is the inseparability of the event conceived as a project of theorizing the
and its environment. Futurity is a condi- earth’s human and other-than-human
tion of the present; it is the anti-utopianism dwellers in terms of multiple becomings
of the ecologies of architecture par with a detailed consideration of what, in
excellence. fact, is the major concern of this approach:
See also Affirmation; Anthropocene; the global dynamic of crisis ecologies as a
Ecosophy; Mattering; Metastability; Neo/ result of human-driven alterations of the
New Materialism; Posthumanism. planetary ecosystems, otherwise known as
the compulsive powers of the Anthropocene.
Andrej Radman Even if all the environmental uncertainties,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ECOMATERIALISM 121

geopolitical struggles and social dilemmas solved conflicts between human and
spilling out of multiple becomings create a nonhuman ‘forces, bonds, and interactions’
paradoxical sense of worldly embodiment as Michel Serres has put it in The Natural
in the hybridizing mix of the Anthropocene Contract (2002: 39). The human influence
epoch, an ecomaterialist philosophy of on Earth interfering with the evolution
being and becoming played out on these of the planet attests to these conflictual
cross-scale interactions is admittedly a human–non-human–environmental inter-
needful mode of thought. actions. But ecomaterialism suggests that
In the face of intensifying ecological despite the anthropogenic signatures in the
crises and material intimacies, ecomaterial- geological record and in global landscapes,
ism assists in imagining a world that is not waterscapes and the climate, the human is
relentlessly objectified, systematically polar- the interstitial species of generative ecolo-
ized and innately gendered, but is profoundly gies and vital materialities.
earth-centred with flexible disanthropo- ‘Ecomaterialism’ was first employed in
centric models. Accordingly, ecomaterial- this context by Jeffrey J. Cohen and Lowell
ism is the epigenesis of the new materialist Duckert in their introduction, titled “Howl,”
theories, developing in gradual differenti- to the special issue of postmedieval: a journal
ation through their platform and amplifying of medieval cultural studies. Cohen and
their ecological frameworks, but not in Duckert argue that ecomaterialism ‘asks us
the sense of restoring a utopian ecological to hear the howls of heterogeneous life
harmony, or calling for an idealistic bioso- forms – everywhere and from every thing,’
cial view of life. Instead, the understanding and that it “compels us to think of our own
of ecology it supplies is an understanding of existence as interstitial beings” (2013:5). In
‘life in a vortex of shared precariousness and her response essay ‘The Elements’ in the
unchosen proximities’ (Cohen 2015a: 107). same issue, Jane Bennett describes the
Ecomaterialism, in other words, compels us term ‘as an attempt to re-describe human
to reckon a living world with the protean experience so as to uncover more of the
conditions of being mineral, vegetal, animal activity and power of a variety of nonhu-
and human; a material world in which man players amidst and within us’
earthly beings, things and forces are (2013:109). In this sense, ‘ecomaterialism’
environed with the same ecological, geolo- refers to the new ecologies of what
gical and also biopolitical plight. Cohen and Duckert call ‘precarious bonds’
In essence, then, ecomaterialist thought (2013: 4) and unpredictable partner-
is resolutely ecological – and admittedly in ships between the human and the
multiplex ways that acknowledge the envir- nonhuman agents in conceptually fluid
onmental vicissitudes resulting from the and materially porous landscapes. Cohen
‘unmappable landscapes of interacting and Duckert reinvigorate the term in
biological, climatic, economic, and political their introduction to Elemental Ecocriti-
forces’ (Alaimo 2010: 2). By analysing how cism, inviting ‘a deeper contemplation of
multiple becomings within these landscapes ecomateriality’ (2015: 269) in terms of
entangle bodies, ecosystems, geobiochem- elemental relations. Ecomaterialism, they
ical forces, human narratives, discourses claim, ‘conjoins thinking the limits of
and actions, ecomaterialism becomes an the human with thinking elemental
ecologizing recourse to the material- activity and environmental justice’ (2015b:
discursive practices explored in the new 5). In studying the collisions, frictions,
materialist paradigm that often elicit unre- confluences, and intimacies between the

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122 ECOMATERIALISM

human and the inhuman natures in their shifting meanings that are pivots of ideolo-
ongoing co-emergences, ecomaterialism gical, cultural and environmental conflicts.
also enacts a concern, not only for the Furthermore, analysing the vital but also
globetrotting crisis ecologies with convoluted materialities in which the non-
detrimental corporeal effects, but for the human is entangled along with the human,
specific pragmatics of the ethical, social, and ecomaterialism catalyses a disanthropo-
political conditions of multiple becomings. centric ideology that demands not only
The end results are the complicated sustainable ecological policies but also a
phenomena of toxic landscapes, acidic discursive change in cultural ethos.
oceans, dying species, viral microorganisms, Placing a concerted emphasis on
and changing climate, indefinitely being multiple modalities of becoming that
reshaped by the intermixing geopolitical involve messy interactions of human and
forces with intensifying catastrophic non-human agencies, flows of elements
effectivity that eventually triggers social and geobiochemical forces in the highly
unrest not containable in local geographies. problematized zones of naturecultures,
This disenchanted material reality, as Karen ecomaterialism also liberates us from our
Barad rightly points out, is undeniably speculative exceptionalism. It invites a
‘sedimented out of particular practices that practice of thinking with what is around
we have a role in shaping and through and inside us, before and after us, to
which we are shaped’ (2007: 390). When extend the connective tissue of our rela-
humans sediment with the world they tions, our materiality and our creativity
shape, the problematizing conditions of enmeshed in environmental complexities
their enactment become seamlessly bound that unfold from the threshold of their
together with the nonhuman to disclose ecological, philosophical and literary
what is not only susceptible of materially labyrinths. Ecomaterialism, to put it bluntly,
based ecological change, but also of conceptualizes the human subject as both
social transformations that often manifest materially and cognitively involved in
as regional chaos, social struggles, and these complexities and multiple becom-
disrupted sociopolitical structures. The ings. In this vision, the porous borders
impacts of climate change on agriculture between human beings and more-than-
and ecosystems illustrate well how the human environments underscore a sense
ecological becomes an extension of the of the seamlessness of the join between
social, often resulting in political and social material and social dynamics, and conscript
strife and crisis. the criss-crossing stories of human and
According to the World Bank report non-human agencies grounded in an
from November 2015, for example, ‘climate endlessly revisable narrative of life.
change could drive more than 100 million Although ecomaterialism is not a self-
people into poverty by 2030 largely due to authenticating mode of thought, as it is not
difficulties producing crops’ (Worland a static way of looking at the ecological
2015). Climate change, the researchers decline the world at large is facing, it may
claim, seriously impacts food security, land well be that the most difficult task which the
and water productivity, and livestock theorists are called upon to perform today
management (Hallegatte et  al. 2016). is to expose the historically and culturally
Thinking through such high uncertainties conditioned character of their disciplines,
in symbolic and material landscapes, to preside over the dissolution of anthropo-
ecomaterialism navigates a multitude of centric theoretical knowledge. Offering new

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ECONTOLOGY 123

positions to theorize the current disparate, phrenia’ and ‘plateau’ in Anti-Oedipus

multivalent social and environmental (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980),
phenomena may be the first step in devel- the two volumes of Capitalism and
oping ecological ways of being. These posi- Schizophrenia. Patterns are the eco-social
tions, however, must be able to produce substance of a mental ecology. In The
workable solutions in order to override the Three Ecologies (1989) Guattari forged an
persisting utilitarian humanist principles environmental, a social and a mental
that are still operative in world cultures. ecology together. In this way nature, socio-
And whether ecomaterialism opens this cultural relations and individual subjectiv-
path as the next step is yet to be seen. ity were interwoven into an ecological
texture. I have labelled this threefold
See also Anthropocene; In/human; Non-
ecology as ECO 3: physical, social and
human Agency; Neo/New Materialism;
mental (Oosterling 2015).
(Material) Ecocriticism; Naturecultures.
Ontology is the philosophical study of
the nature of being and becoming. What are
Serpil Oppermann
the basic categories of being and
how do beings relate? After the critique and
deconstruction of metaphysics by Friedrich
ECONTOLOGY Nietzsche, thinkers inspired by his writings
like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault,
Econtology is a neologism we need in Deleuze and Guattari focused in their
order to address philosophically the prob- ‘reality check’ on forces instead of entities.
lematic situation man has manoeuvred The latter are secondary phenomena: ever-
himself into in the twenty-first century. provisional results of the clash of forces that
Modern categories, based on oppositional strive to incorporate or annihilate each
thinking, lack the clarity to analyse our other. Yet these forces in themselves are
current situation that has been labelled as non-significant vectors. In order to under-
the Anthropocene: the present geological stand their efficacy and comprehend their
epoch that started in the Industrial coherency – by asking not ‘what are they?’
Revolution, during which humanity has but ‘how do they work?’ – their specific
begun to have a significant impact on articulation as power relations need to be
the environment. Econtology combines investigated. Forces are always already
ecology and ontology. Ecology is the inscribed into patterns of being as power
science that analyses interactions between relations. This shift from force (puissance) to
organisms and their environment. In this power (pouvoir) led thinkers of difference to
systemic approach feedback recursivity is the conclusion that ontology and politics –
the crucial mechanism that regulates the exclusive domain where power relations
processes in which all species, all articula- are addressed – are no longer separate
tions of being are involved. This insight domains. Ontology is political by definition.
inspired Gregory Bateson in Steps to an Politics immediately defines being.
Ecology of Mind (1972) to redefine collect- This asks for a more articulated defini-
ive consciousness of nature as ‘mind’. From tion of power. After Claude Lefort’s distinc-
a cybernetic perspective he mapped reality tion between Politics and the Political and
as a pattern of patterns. By then Félix Foucault’s focus on a microphysics versus
Guattari in cooperation with Gilles Deleuze macrophysics of power, the interaction of
had reworked Bateson’s notions of ‘schizo- forces can be analysed on different plateaus

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124 ECONTOLOGY

or planes: macropolitically on an institu- given. On a performative and practical

tional and corporative plane whereupon plane the experimentation of theoretical
politics and corporations as global players physicists in their laboratories – scientific
operate, mesopolitically on the plane of practices where reality is checked ‘theoret-
grass-root resistance where disciplined ically’ – is already biased by the handling
normality is contested, and micropolitic- of tools and by the progressive translation
ally on the sub-individual plane of affects of the results to a higher theoretical level,
where people primarily connect and on upgrading the findings of a particular case
which market strategies and branding to a universal law.
control collective and individual desire. Latour and Isabelle Stengers have
These levels can only be distinguished analysed this scientific practice critically.
systematically and cannot be separately The latter’s co-research with Ilya Prigogine
manipulated. They are interdependent, on what really takes place – methodologic-
intertwined in networks, encompassing all ally and epistemologically – in laboratory
life forces on earth. practices of physicists led her to develop
Given these insights, ecological issues the notion of an ecology of practice:
can be redefined from a network theoret-
ical point of view as has been done by An ecology of practices does not have any
Bruno Latour in his Actor-Network- ambition to describe practices ‘as they
are’; it resists the master word of a
Theory (ANT ). In our globalized, digital-
progress that would justify their destruc-
ized, technologically highly advanced
tion. It aims at the construction of new
network society, as analysed by sociologist
‘practical identities’ for practices, that is,
Manuel Castells in the 1990s, everything new possibilities for them to be present,
is connected to everything and as such is or in other words to connect. It thus does
influenced by and influencing every other not approach practices as they are –
thing. The ontological emphasis therefore physics as we know it, for instance – but
is on relations, not on (id)entities. In our as they may become.
present state of hyperglobalization the Stengers 2005: 186
complexity of interconnected processes
has reached critical limits in which human Within this (per)formative context the
indecisiveness can no longer be checked notion of political ecology is used. Political
by human action. In the present Anthropo- ecology is the study of the relationships
cene, human action immediately and non- between political, economic and social
intentionally determines reality in its factors with environmental issues and
essential connectivity. This asks for a more processes. On a macropolitical plane envir-
precise notion of ontology. onmental issues are politicized. This one-
According to Peter Sloterdijk, man’s dimensional notion of political ecology,
contemporary predicament is techno- addressing power only on a macropolitical
relational. Dasein is design (Oosterling level, was introduced by Frank Thone in
2010). Theory is a practice. Although onto- 1935 and elaborated by Hans Magnus
logy as a philosophical enterprise is highly Enzensberger in the 1970s and 1980s.
theoretical, it has practical application in Inserted in the Anthropocene perspective
information science and technology. Theo- it needs multipolitical (Deleuze/Guattari/
retical physics deals with the immanent Foucault) and intrascientific (Latour/
structure of reality. Yet, this cutting-edge Stengers) explanation. Mesopolitically it
research does not describe an objective thematizes power relations within an ecology

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ECOPATHY 125

of practices. Micropolitically it deconstructs developments, what Fredric Jameson (1991)

modern desire that is inscribed into the body might have called a cultural dominant: a
in order to produce a disciplined subjectivity prevalent structure of feeling, a sentiment,
(Foucault) that is overdetermined by a or rather still, mood, shared so widely as to
discourse that opposes nature to culture suggest it is one of the key characteristics of
(Latour). This multi-layered extension of contemporary culture. The point here is not
political ecology politicizes ontology in a simply that the Anthropocene is on our
triple sense (Guattari). Latour problematized minds, but rather that our bodies are on the
the simple notion of political ecology by Anthropocene, in the sense that one is not
asking whether the discourse of modernity thinking about speed but is on speed – or
allows the Anthropocenic combination of LSD, or crystal meth, or rather still, asbes-
politics and ecology: ‘To modernize or to tos: thoughts spinning, muscles tensed up,
ecologize? That’s the question’ (Latour 1998). blood pumping, heart racing, increasingly
In the final instance the modern opposition out of control. Ecopathy is the cultural con-
between culture and nature does not allow a dition of being on climate change-speed,
critical estimation of the role of all parti- involuntarily dancing on a Thai beach long
cipants – human and non-human, from after the full moon has been obscured by
minerals to technological media – in the the sun, joylessly bopping in the sunset as
immense transformation that the Earth is the rising tides wash away the sand at our
currently going through. Political implies an feet, twerking beyond exhaustion, tripping
equality of all beings, not as actors with over our own feet in agonizing pain. What
subjectivity, but as ‘actants’ with agency. In follows below is an anecdotal account, I
order to establish a multipolitical and intras- guess you could call it, of walking on these
cientific explanation of how reality works, post-apocalyptic shores, avoiding the
the philosophical discourse on ecology wasted bodies only to tread on the refuse of
needs an extended notion of ontology: eco- pins and needles every other step. One step,
ontology or econtology. ‘hey, climate change’; the next, ‘oh, the last
panda’, ‘drought’, ‘tsunamis’, ‘posthumanism’,
See also Ecopathy; Epigenetic Landscape;
and so forth, to the point that a walk on the
Ontological Turn; Neo/New Materialism.
beach resembles the experience of a walk
on a garbage belt. The beach, or the field,
Henk Oosterling
that I most often stroll on is that of art,
and culture more broadly. What I want to
discuss here are some of the things I couldn’t
help – because they were so ubiquitous, so
ECOPATHY
embarrassingly omnipresent – but step on
the past years. What I present you with, if
A Trip to the Beach
you will, is a socio-cultural history of the
In his superb study Anthropocene Fictions sore soles of my feet after a stroll on the
literary theorist Adam Trexler (2015) has shores.
argued that the Anthropocene is as much One of my earliest memories walking
an environmental development as it is ‘a on the beach is a Seinfeld episode I came
cultural transformation’. Extending Trexler’s across which is set on the New York shores.
argument, my thesis here is that the The episode – ‘The Marine Biologist’, from
Anthropocene is also parallel to, though not the fifth season – weaves together a number
necessarily a consequence of, ecological of stories, two of which are of interest here.

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126 ECOPATHY

In the first of these stories, Jerry Seinfeld’s Seinfeld’s Anthropocene is exclusively

best friend George Costanza, who is, at this white, western and male. In short, Seinfeld
point, miserably unemployed, pretends he presents the Anthropocene as a funny
is a marine biologist so as to attract a mishap which can be straightened out by
nature-loving woman. The second story middle-aged white guys.
pertains to Jerry’s idiosyncratic neighbour, I take Seinfeld’s approach to the
Cosmo Kramer, who has been practising Anthropocene, which is as hilarious as it is
his golf swing off the New York coast, disturbing, to be characteristic of the atti-
hitting balls into the ocean. In the final tude towards environmental problems in
scene,1 in which the stories are tied in to the 1980s and 1990s – or, for that matter,
one another, George and his girlfriend are economic, political or moral issues. That is
walking on the beach only to find a not to say that it was the only approach,
distressed whale stranded on the shore. that there weren’t any NGOs and individu-
Trapped in his lie, in which he is a scholar als ringing alarm bells, that Greenpeace
of ocean ecology, George feels forced to activists weren’t roaming the shores on the
approach the whale to see what is wrong. lookout for whale or seal hunters, or that
As he comes close – quite surprisingly, there weren’t any artists and writers
given that he is not actually a marine biolo- worried about climate change and rising
gist; indeed he doesn’t even know that a sea levels, about tsunamis and extinct
whale is a mammal rather than a fish – he animals. Indeed, when I posited this ques-
finds out what the problem is: a golf ball tion to friends and colleagues, they pointed
obstructs the whale’s blowhole. out numerous examples of texts that did
Seinfeld here addresses the just that. The art critic Tom Morton
Anthropocene, humanity’s impact on the proposed Alan Moore’s graphic short story
world around it – below, above, between, ‘Sunburn’ (1970), which imagines a beach
through, within – that is to say, quite liter- resort on the sun, while philosopher Nina
ally, its imprint on the Earth’s geology, Power reminded me of more or less the
through at least three distinct tropes. First, whole of Ballard’s oeuvre.2 Someone like
the Anthropocene is presented as a joke, as Ursula K. Le Guin also comes to mind, as
a pun. It is less a tragic reality – for we do do Frank Herbert and of course Philip K.
not actually see Kramer’s golf ball strike Dick. However, I would argue that in the
the whale, nor do we witness George’s eighties and nineties, Seinfeld’s moral
rescue – than a story told for laughs. disinterest was the most common attitude
Second, the Anthropocene is an accident, a towards the Anthropocene – the others, at
coincidental effect of a careless but by no the time, were what Raymond Williams
means malignant attitude towards nature. (1977) might have called ‘emergent’,
It is obvious that Kramer had no intention peripheral structures of feeling yet to
of hitting a whale. His so-called ‘hole in take centre stage. Indeed, the very wording
one’ was as unfortunate as it was unfore- of the problems, the label of the
seen. At the same time, he wouldn’t have Anthropocene, had by this time not yet
struck the whale had he not mindlessly been formulated.
clubbed golf balls into the sea . . . Third, the Returning to the beach twenty-five years
Anthropocene is easily resolved. Even on, one finds its culture has changed beyond
George, an idiot if there ever was one, an compare. George and Kramer have nearly
unparalleled narcissist, is able to save the been pushed out of the picture, crowded out
whale. Finally, it might be noted that by a more environmentally conscious

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ECOPATHY 127

bunch – to be sure, not necessarily better structure of feeling to a dominant one. I

or worse people, just people with other guess this much is obvious. More import-
priorities. I am referring here above all to antly, however, I want to argue that the
the popularization of post-apocalyptic eco- nature of our engagement with the envir-
novels and films – ranging from, most onment has changed. Of course, we’ve
recently, Kim Stanley Robinson’s canon and become more serious, but that’s not what I
Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker to Michel mean. Seinfeld’s interaction with the
Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island beach’s ecosystem was not just humoristic;
and (the filmic adaptation of) Cormac it’s comedy was of a particular register:
McCarthy’s The Road – in which the chro- distinctly object-specific, local and short-
notope of the beach signifies the border lived. It begins and ends with the stranded
between land and water as well as between whale. The sentiment in a post-apocalyptic
past and future, ruins and air castles, desol- film like The Road or the installation
ation and despair. If Seinfeld’s trip to the Beached Whale, in contrast, is objectless,
beach was light-hearted and episodic, global and protracted. In The Road,
contemporary literature more often than environmentalism is less a response to a
not arrives there in a grave mood, as its particular problem than, if you allow me
final, destitute destination: it’s here, or to stretch the term, an experiential a
nowhere – and if it is here, I suppose, it is priori that informs every possible problem.
only briefly, echoing Foucault’s final lines in Even the point of Beached Whale is less
The Order of Things: ‘Man would be erased, the image of a dead whale, than it is the
like a face drawn at the edge of the sea’ sense of finality it implies. The plumpness,
(2005: 422). But I am also thinking of an art the solemnity, the blood, the rot, the smell,
project like Captain Boomer’s 2008 installa- the scientists documenting after the fact:
tion Beached Whale. The Belgian collective we’re always already too late.
created a realistic seventeen-metre-long It would be a mistake to say that culture
carcass of a sperm whale, covered in blood, has relocated to the beach. Rather, it’s the
smelling of rot, which they installed on other way around: the beach, as chronotope,
Scheveningen beach – and in later years has moved into culture – a sort of chro-
other beaches all over the world. A team of nomove, a chronomotive (I wish I had
actors was hired to play the roles of scient- invented this term, but a quick internet
ists, examining the mammal’s cadaver. browse suggests it already exists, and even
Seinfeld’s white men were still in time to appears to be trademarked). The number of
save the whale, but by the time Captain novels in which rising sea levels and super
Boomer’s men and women in white coats storms have pushed the beach into or
arrived they could do little more than grieve beyond cities like London and New York
over it. Their sole function was documenta- has increased exponentially over the past
tion, the production and distribution of decades – I am thinking here again, of the
information, after the fact. likes of Robinson, Bacigalupi and
My argument here is twofold. First, I Houellebecq, but also of the last chapters of
argue, like many others, that in the past less obvious choices like T. C. Boyle’s A
decades, our relationship to the environ- Friend of the Earth, Margaret Atwood’s The
ment, beach, whale or elsewhere has Year of the Flood, Jennifer Egan’s novel A
gradually come to occupy the centre stage Visit from the Goon Squad or David
of our imagination. To put it in Williams’s Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. In film, the trope
terms: it has intensified from an emergent of the retreating coastal line features in

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
128 ECOPATHY

anything from the blockbuster disaster flick affective register of the relationship (maybe
The Day After Tomorrow to the independ- it’s very repressive), ‘are killing the planet!’
ent eco-community feature Beasts from the If in response my partner apologizes, says,
Southern Wild. An interesting example in ‘Oh, sorry, I wasn’t thinking clearly for a
contemporary art is Olafur Eliasson’s 2010 second there’ (imagine a conversation
installation series Driftwood. In this project, would ever run like that!), chances are I
the artist distributes driftwood he collected forgive that person instantly. An emotion
at the Iceland coast across Berlin. Placing is related to an externality that transgresses
the weathered wood at pavements, round- your affective boundaries, as it were. If it
abouts, parking areas and alleys in the city, retreats, your harmony is restored.
he both extends and reverses western A mood, by contrast, Carroll notes, is
culture’s Romantic relationship to nature. ‘dependent on the overall state of the organ-
On the one hand, the pieces of driftwood ism, its level of energy, the level of resources
invoke mystery – of origin, of journey, of at its disposal for coping with environ-
placing. It poses questions like: ‘Where are mental challenges, and the degree of
these pieces of wood from?’ and ‘How did tension it finds itself in as a result of the
these pieces get here?’ Or, simply: ‘What do ratio of its resources to its challenges’
they mean?’ and ‘What do they invoke?’ On (2003: 529, my emphasis). What Carroll
the other hand, however, the weathered logs suggests here is that whereas emotion is
also suggest an alternate hierarchy between the effect of an external transgression of
culture and nature, one where Kramer is no your affective boundaries, mood is the
longer hitting golf balls into the ocean, but result of an internal, or rather still, an
where the sea is pitching them back at us. internalized disintegration of the affective
What Eliasson’s installations imply here is a register: a lack of sleep, maybe, or too
different relationship between culture and much sleep, stress, relaxation, too little
nature, one in which the latter is not an exercise, a lot of exercise, unhealthy food,
external obstacle, or an incorporated means smoothies, or all of them disorganize the
to an end, but always already an integral body’s affective automata, its intensities.
part. As Timothy Morton explains so evoc- Yes, I guess that’s it: the organism’s
atively in The Ecological Thought (2010): we affective automata are out of sorts. Indeed,
coexist. It just that we’ve only now realized as Carroll continues, a mood is non-
as much. intentional, and often protracted: ‘when
In his brilliant essay ‘Art and Mood’, I am irritable’, he writes, ‘in an irritable
philosopher Noel Carroll distinguishes mood, there is no one in particular who
between an emotion and a mood. An irritates me. Everyone and everything that
emotion, he writes, is a response to a state falls into my pathway is likely to become
of affairs in the world. It is ‘directed’ the locus of my foul mood’ (ibid.: 526). In
towards a particular object, and is short- this case, the anger I feel towards my
lived. If I am angry, after all, the anger is partner precedes the waste incident, nor is
related to someone or something who has it, for that matter, related to my partner,
angered me. I might well depart with my though it may well be exacerbated by
anger if that person apologizes. For either of them. It subsequently will not
example: I am angry because my partner reside when he or she apologizes. Emotion,
has put the organic waste in the regular bin Carroll perceptively suggests, cuts through
instead of the recycling bin. ‘You’, I shout, detail, while mood ‘pulls ambient detail
or whisper, or think, depending on the into its orbit’ (528).

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ECOSOPHY 129

The difference between Seinfeld and 3. See Paul Robbins and Sarah E. Moore,
Captain Boomer, between Kramer’s golf ‘Ecological Anxiety Disorder: Diagnosing
balls and the driftwood, is not only quant- the Politics of the Anthropocene’, Cultural
itative, but also qualitative. Seinfeld Geographies, 20(1): 3–19, 2013, for a very
presents the Anthropocene, or whatever it interesting discussion of the conflation
was called at that time, as an emotion, between anthrophobia and autophobia.
oriented, local and short-lived, informed
by a distinct event, a distinct transgression Timotheus Vermeulen
of our affective boundaries. Captain
Boomer and Eliasson, in contrast, intro-
duce it as a mood, an objectless, or ‘object- ECOSOPHY
lessable’, global, protracted sentiment that
informs, that cannot but inform, all other According to Nobel Prize laureate Paul
interactions. We no longer need to head Crutzen (2002), we are living in the era
out to the beach to experience how we’ve called the Anthropocene, an era in which
affected the environment; the beach is humanity is the geological force respons-
always already with us; the golf balls, the ible for fundamental changes in the
whale, the driftwood, invariably on our biosphere. As a geologist, the hole in the
minds. As Naomi Klein writes in This ozone layer and the increasing amounts of
Changes Everything, it’s nothing less than carbon dioxide in the deep Arctic ice gave
an ‘existential crisis’ (2014: 15): a ‘fear that him evidence to make this claim. But it is
comes from living on a planet that is dying, not only in terms of geology that these
made less alive every day’. It’s a fear that fundamental changes reveal themselves,
‘won’t go away . . . is a fully rational Crutzen claims. Human presence is chan-
response to the unbearable reality that we ging the earth in many different ways, and
are living in a dying world, a world that a he has added to this more recently in
great many of us are helping to kill’ (28).3 It articles written with a broad range of
is, indeed, a condition, one that we were, concerned scientists (Steffen et  al. 2011;
and will be born with, for as long as, well, I Zalasiewicz et  al. 2010). Habitat destruc-
guess, there still is a Mother Earth to give tion and the introduction of invasive
birth to us. species are causing widespread extinc-
tions; ocean acidification changes the
See also Ecosophy; Animism (Limulus);
chemical make-up of the seas; urbaniza-
Metamodernism.
tion vastly increases rates of sedimentation
and erosion. Of course the discussions on
Notes these issues are ongoing and in no way in
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u8 agreement on how serious this impact of
KUgUqprw&feature=youtu.be, [accessed humanity is (recently for instance new
2 December 2016]. measuring methods showed us that global
2. I would also like to thank the others who warming happens mainly in the northern
suggested artists, series and titles: hemisphere and that these warmer local
Alexander Ayoupov, Jonathan Bignell, intervals have happened before in global
Mareike Dittmer, Raoul Eshelman, Manuel history: Moinuddin et al. 2013).
Graf, Jörg Heiser, Dorus Hoebink, Edwin This, however, does not take away the
van Meerkerk, Leszek Stalewski and Daan conclusion that, taking an overview of the
Vermeulen. many changes that the Earth is going

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
130 ECOSOPHY

through in our times, human dominance (or counts) and, because it came with a non-
to be more precise, the dominance of local source of energy (coal, oil, electricity),
‘modern man’) reveals itself geologically ‘on was largely indifferent to the environments
a scale comparable with some of the major surrounding these procedures (and thus in a
events of the ancient past. Some of these way necessarily polluting them). Modern
changes are now seen as permanent, even on technology’s uneasiness with its surround-
a geological time-scale’ (Zalasiewicz et  al. ings, informed ecocriticism and with that the
2010: 2228). In a follow-up article, the first strand of ecosophy in the 1970s, with its
authors went even further, claiming that most prominent author Arne Naess and his
‘The Anthropocene is here treated as a Deep Ecology Movement (also known as
geological phenomenon, comparable to Ecosophy T). The Deep Ecology Movement,
some of the great events of the Earth’s deep celebrating life from a deeply humanist
past. But, the driving force for the compon- perspective, had quite an impact, including
ent global changes is firmly centered in politically, with various Green parties that
human behavior, particularly in social, polit- have been fairly successful especially in post-
ical and economic spheres’ (Zalasiewicz war Europe, and that play a prominent role
et  al. 2011: 838). By stressing the various in the ecological debate to the present day.
‘spheres’ in which we live, Zalasiewicz et al. Continuing Naess’s idea of ‘self-realization’
emphasize that the idea that human activity (see for instance Naess 1993), which was all
dominates the planet does not mean that about humans realizing themselves anew in
humanity is somehow ‘in control’ of our age. relation to at least parts of nature (thus
On the contrary, our Brave New World real- promoting a full scale ‘humanization of the
izes itself in many ways that were unfore- environment’, as Braidotti put it (2006a:
seen; as consequences of long-gone activity, 116)), this ‘Green Movement’, though all
marginal accidents and a series of other too often found to the left of the political
‘swerves’ that have begun to live lives of their spectrum, holds a quite conservative if not
own, folding themselves deeply in the reactionary agenda most of the time. The
surface of the Earth and the atmospheres narrative of Naess fits Crutzen’s threatening
embracing it, far beyond the reach of futures and those of other concerned scien-
humanity. The new reality it produces, and is tists today: together with modern techno-
about to produce, is thus accompanied with logy, modern humanity has removed itself
new types of unrest (new types of weaponry from nature, and the revolution to take place
even), in many ways unknown to us. is, very classical, a return to a State of Nature
Crutzen and others state that the that has been left behind.
Antropocene started over 200 years ago, or An alternative, much more posthuman
to be more precise with the improvements ecosophy has been developed since the
made to the steam engine by James Watt, and 1970s by scholars like Gregory Bateson. In
the new concept of technology this launched. his 1972 book Steps to an Ecology of Mind,
Contrary to those mechanized processes Bateson introduces us to an ecology that
that, quite randomly, helped us in our every- was not so much aimed at ‘protecting’
day activities in the pre-modern world, nature and distrusting technology (and
modern technology, it is claimed, was a culture, and humanity at large). Echoing
program in that it introduced us to a new the way in which Alfred North Whitehead
generation of machines that was all about had already noted that all technology is
optimizing our everyday procedures necessarily an abstraction from nature,
economically (the increase of profit is what Bateson offered us an ecosophy that starts

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ECOSOPHY 131

from the complex transversal relations that everything that matters. The analysis by
make up everday life, producing the series Bateson in the early 1970s then offers us a
of assemblages in and through which we very different analysis of environmental
act. (In that sense there is no intrinsic issues or ecological disasters as they are
difference between modern technology called. Bateson explains:
and the wheel.) Conceptualizing the mind,
Bateson thus shows how thinking is neces- Let us now consider what happens when
sarily a relational power, a consequence of you make the epistemological error of
the material assemblage. choosing the wrong unit: you end up with
the species versus the other species
What thinks and engages in trial and around it or versus the environment in
error is the man plus the computer plus which it operates. Man against nature. You
the environment. And the lines between end up, in fact, with Kaneohe Bay polluted,
man, computer and environment are Lake Erie a slimy green mess, and ‘Let’s
purely artificial, fictitious lines. They are build bigger atom bombs to kill off the
lines across the pathways along which next-door neighbors.’ There is an ecology
information or difference is transmitted. of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of
They are not boundaries of the thinking weeds, and it is characteristic of the
system. What thinks is the total system system that basic error propagates itself. It
which engages in trial and error, which is branches out like a rooted parasite
man plus environment. through the tissues of life, and everything
Bateson 1972: 491 get into a rather peculiar mess. When you
narrow down your epistemology and act
This wholly other form of ecosophy, in on the premise ‘What interests me is me,
which one does not start from oppositions or my organization, or my species,’ you
between mind and body, man and animal, chop off consideration of other loops of
man and nature, nature and culture, tech- the loop structure. You decide that you
nology and earth (to name just a few of the want to get rid of the by-products of
oppositions (implicitly) at work in Crutzen human life and that Lake Erie will be a
and Naess), but instead from relations, good place to put them. You forget that
allows us to analyse the crises of today in a the eco-mental system called Lake Erie is
completely different way, if only because part of your wider eco-mental system –
the role of ecological thinking as such now and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its
insanity is incorporated in the larger
changes from critical (oppositional) to
system of your thought and experience.
affirmative (mutual coexistensive): it is not
Bateson 1972: 491–2
so much in search of answers to problems
posed by our era, but rather searches for In the late 1980s, Félix Guattari rewrote
ways to be interwoven with the move- Bateson’s ecology of mind in his famous
ments and the swerves of today. Or better: essay The Three Ecologies (1989) expanding
this second form of ecosophy is not so on this idea that the three ecological
much thinking about ecology but does registers (environmental, social and
ecological thinking. Being unlimited it mental ecologies) are necessarily entwined
rethinks our era as a whole, offering us a and can only be studied in their entwin-
(possibly) complete philosophy and a ings (relations). The kind of ‘insanity’ that
(possibly) complete idea of what threatens Guattari analyses (‘insanity’ being a refer-
peaceful coexistence not only between ence to the excerpt from Bateson above)
people and between states, but between always concerns all these three registers in

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
132 EPIGENETIC LANDSCAPE

their interconnectedness, which means EPIGENETIC LANDSCAPE

that to worry about Lake Erie is also to
worry about the insanity that has over- The epigenetic landscape originated as a
taken kinship networks, domestic life and charcoal drawing by the British landscape
neighbourhood relations. Or to translate artist John Piper, commissioned in 1940 by
this to our age, the denuded dry landscape British embryologist-geneticist Conrad Hall
in inner Syria, and the major urbanization Waddington to be used as the frontispiece
that followed cannot be seen as separate to his volume Organisers and Genes. This
from the current civil war. precursor work in the field of epigenetics
Especially in the post–2008 landscape, examined the processes governing embry-
where a series of crises have surfaced and ological differentiation and the role of genes
seem to hold the world in a tight grip in guiding development. Waddington inten-
(ecological, economical and geopolitical) a ded the image of the epigenetic landscape
Batesoninan/Guattarian analysis of the to represent the developmental process
ecological and posthuman mind seems to (common to all eukaryotic species, that is
be more needed than ever. Yet even in the species with cells and cell nuclei) through
late 1980s and the early 1990s Guattari which a pluripotent cell develops, over the
himself noticed that we are running out of course of interactions with its environment,
time: ‘Now more than ever, nature cannot to its specific, differentiated cell fate.
be separated from culture; in order to Pause for a moment to assimilate this
comprehend the interactions between information: this scientific model of devel-
ecosystems, the mechanosphere and the opmental processes was originally a work
social and individual Universes of refer- of art. C. H. Waddington selected it –
ence, we must learn to think “transvers- rather than a forking path, train diagram,
ally” ’ (2000: 29). tree diagram or any of the other possible
It is depressing to conclude that these scientific representations of development –
alternative ways of thinking ecology, as to capture an essential aspect of animal life:
they have been developed by great minds how development progresses from genotype
like Bateson and Guattari, are only now, to phenotype, or from the hereditary genetic
decades after their writings, being heard in make-up to one specific morphology. After
a series of scholarly movements that are this initial image, which he commissioned
increasingly worried about the ongoing during the London Blitz (and there is a story
reign of the humanism. Thirty-five years there, still to be told), Waddington moved
after Bateson, twenty-five years after away from artistic representations, though he
Guattari, thinking transversally, thinking also considered and discarded other visual
the social, the mental and the environ- models for development. Instead, by 1957 he
mental as ‘one’, has only just begun. The had settled on the schematic representation
conclusion can only be bitter, as Michel of the epigenetic landscape with which we
Serres tells us: ‘We will pay for this blind- are most familiar today, an engraving-like
ness’ (2009/2014: 19). image picturing a ball near the top of a hill
fissured with channels that extend from
See also Animism (Limulus); Ecopathy; the top to the bottom. In Waddington’s
Ecologies of Architecture; General Ecology; schema, the ball is a fertilized egg cell, and
Planetary; Urbanibalism. the hills and valleys indicate not only the
different directions the developing cell
Rick Dolphijn might take as it differentiates, but also the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
EQUATION (MATHEMATICAL THINKING) 133

degrees of probability that the cell might evolution of the natural and social environ-
take one particular direction in the journey ments. As a core influence on the develop-
to that ultimate cell fate. ment of René Thom’s catastrophe theory, the
The field Waddington founded, epigenet- epigenetic landscape can be understood as
ics, drew together the insights of embry- an early model of the non-linear relations
ology, the emerging field of genetics and of the posthuman era, in which algorithms
evolutionary theory to explore morphogen- model the development of complex systems,
esis: how it was that an individual organism linking individuals, species, economic
developed from the hereditary genome. markets and the global climate.
Although researchers now examine the Why return to this image abandoned in
interaction between the individual and the the rush to understand genomics and most
environment in fields as widespread as envir- recently epigenomics? We might explore why
onmental toxicology, prenatal medicine, this embryologist/geologist chose a work of
nutrition, psychiatry and cancer biology, the art for his foundational intellectual image,
application of epigenetics in these fields and why the abstract and schematic graphic
reveals an epistemological narrowing of the to which he then turned achieved great
concept to a focus on gene activation. Yet currency in the life sciences in the period just
when naming this new field, Waddington before the rise of the era of the gene as code.
borrowed the ‘epi-’ from the old term ‘epigen- We might wonder what was lost with the
esis’, to emphasize that the field was also turn to that second image, that ball on a
concerned with aspects of development that fissured hill that has become the classic
lay beyond, over, or above the gene. version of the epigenetic landscape. What
The epigenetic landscape image lost ecologies did Waddington invoke when he
currency in the late 1960s to be replaced with chose to represent the relationship between
the more precise notion of DNA as code. Yet gene and environment unfolding in the
this image merits re-examination. As it was temporal course of development as a land-
conceptualized, the epigenetic landscape scape? Did the epigenetic landscape contrib-
linked time and space: the time it takes for ute to our current vision of a general ecology?
something to develop from its pluripotent to While the epigenetic landscape is currently
its differentiated state, and the role of under active reconceptualization across the
elements above the genes, the cell, even the life sciences, where it is serving less as a
environment around the organism, in the source of scientific content than as a method-
development of new life. Although the young ological prompt, its form and function in the
Waddington was interested in morphogen- humanities has yet to be explored. In that role
esis – the explanation for how life took we may indeed find its most powerful legacy.
specific form – because of his years of exper-
See also Algorithm; Animal; Art; General
iments on chick embryos, in his later years
Ecology.
he understood that the model for morpho-
genesis embedded in the epigenetic land- Susan M. Squier
scape could stretch beyond the individual to
the environmental and social. He extended
the application of this image to express not EQUATION (MATHEMATICAL
merely the course of one cell’s development
THINKING)
or the probability that the cell would, over
time, develop in one direction or another, but The notion of ‘equation’ is relevant to a
also the forces explaining development and posthuman glossary in that it illuminates the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
134 EQUATION (MATHEMATICAL THINKING)

ongoing discussion between rationalism ematics as an art, the equational notion of

and empiricism. It foregrounds the urgency identity is always already in pact with the
of finding ways of accounting for an imper- mathematical irrational (the infinitary). It
sonal cognitive agency at work within math- remains undetermined with regard to
ematics (and thereby within computing, whether identity as a postulated principle is
within technology) – and hence not only to be regarded as a logical device, or whether
human rationality, but also the rationality there is to be assumed a substantial reality of
attributed to nature. This entry hence this principle in nature that can empirically
supports the posthumanist interest in a be studied in physics (Monod 1972: 100–1;
critique of such anthropocentric shortcuts see also Invariance). This undeterminedness
in that it discredits the view on mathematics is indeed the key aspect which Michel Serres
as a toolbox of purely objective mechanisms: attributes to algebra for the advent of modern
an impersonal subject is at work amidst the science and its paradigm of experimentation
universality of mathematical objectivity (see at large: experimentation, invention, consist
Maxwell’s Demon). How to address it? in making the cypher under which nature
The mathematical notion of the equa- hides appear, he maintains. ‘At the beginning
tion is first documented in the sixteenth of the seventeenth century, when what we
century, when it seems to have been intro- came to call the applied sciences first made
duced as what we would today call a their appearance, a theory spreads that one
terminus technicus for organizing the prac- can find in several authors, although none of
tice of equalizing mathematical expres- them is its sole source, which seeks to
sions. It seems to have been introduced to account for a harmony that is not self-
European Renaissance science and philo- evident’ (Serres 2001: 140). Rather than
sophy together with algebra: an equation is looking at conceptual identity as the provider
the mathematical form for rationalizing and for self-evident harmony to look for in
reasoning identity. The term ‘algebra’ comes nature, what begins to spread, since Galileo
from Arabic al-dschabr for the ‘the fitting and certainly with Descartes, Leibniz,
together of broken parts’, and its first Pascale, Fontenelle, so Serres, is ‘the idea that
appearance is usually referenced to the title nature is written in mathematical language’
of the Persian scholar al-Chwarizmi’s book (ibid.). But Serres immediately points to the
Al-Kitāb al-muhtasar fī hisāb al-ğabr wa-ʾl- insufficiency of the term language here; he
muqābala (The Compendious Book on points out the constitutive role of algebra for
Calculation by Completion and Balancing). the role of mathematics in experimentation,
Two things are important to point out right and specifies that
ahead: the mathematical term of an equa-
tion references a mathematical form for in fact mathematics is not a language:
stating identity, and it does so precisely by rather, nature is coded. The inventions of
not assuming identity to be given as a whole. the time do not boast of having wrested
In this regard, it crucially differs from the nature’s linguistic secret from it, but of
having found the key to the cypher.
identity notion in philosophy – it helps to
Nature is hidden behind a cypher.
reason and rationalize identity, but in the
Mathematics is a code, and since it is not
original sense of Greek mathema, literally
arbitrary, it is rather a cypher.
‘that which can be learnt’, and mathematics (ibid.)
for ‘all that pertains to what can be learnt’.
Through this emphasis on learning Serres’ speaking of cypher here is to be
(rather than knowing), and hence on math- taken in a mathematical sense: cypher is a

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
EQUATION (MATHEMATICAL THINKING) 135

term for how, in mathematical notation, evident harmony (an interplay of parts that
nought can be expressed. It literally meant function well, work together fittingly, etc.),
zero, from the Arabic term sifr, for zero. A must be considered strictly decoupled
cipher constitutes a code that affords from any notion of truth: in this sense
encryption and decryption such that once equational identity is genuinely abstract.1
the operations have been performed, the This article indexes Alfred North
‘text’ or ‘message’ – nature, in Serres’ cited Whitehead’s Treatise on Universal Algebra of
passage – that it envelops has not been 1898 as the moment in which algebraic
affected by these operations. Algebra, as abstractness begins to find a novel embodi-
the art of speculative completion and ment in ‘information’. It will trace some of
balancing, experimentally searches for the the ‘genetical’ heritage of mathematical
code without having it to start with: the abstraction whose lineages come together
equational notion of identity hence is here.2 When Whitehead wrote his Treatise,
capable of organizing the practice of equal- algebra needed to be addressed by means of
izing mathematical expressions in experi- what he suggested to think of as ‘a comparat-
mental manner. ‘Now, since this idea [i.e. ive study’ because it had given rise to ‘various
that the harmony to be sought is not self- Systems of Symbolic Reasoning’ (Whitehead
evident but depends upon experiment, 1910: vi). And those Systems of Symbolic
VB ] in fact constitutes the invention or the Reasoning, as Whitehead calls them, had
discovery,’ Serres continues, ‘nature is been looked upon ‘with some suspicion’ by
hidden twice. First under the cypher. Then mathematicians and logicians alike – as
under a dexterity, a modesty, a subtlety, Whitehead puts it: ‘Symbolic Logic has been
which prevents our reading the cypher disowned by many logicians on the plea that
even from an open book. Nature hides its interest is mathematical, and by many
under a cypher. Experimentation, inven- mathematicians on the plea that its interest
tion, consist in making it appear’ (ibid.). is logical’ (Whitehead 1910: vi).3 This confu-
This emphasis on an equational identity sion – literally, materially, a confluence of
notion, whose determination correlates ‘clarities’ – constitutes the spectrum through
with its articulation in the characters of a which mathematics, since the early twenti-
cipher and by the rules of a code, bears two eth century, poses ‘postmodern’ challenges
great promises: (1) it affords a thinking that to every philosophy concerned with separ-
is capable of leaving its object – that which ating legitimate statements from illegitimate
it envelops in code and makes appear – ones (Jean-François Lyotard 1984 [1979]).4
unaffected, and thus gives new support to a Today, we encounter Whitehead’s algebra
scientific notion of objectitivity; (2) this (systems of symbolic reasoning) in the ‘arti-
thinking proceeds algorithmically and ficial languages’ articulated by computers –
formally, and hence can be externalized whereby calling it a ‘language’ is neither
into a mechanism that can perform it speaking in a metaphorical nor in a clearly
decoupled from a human cogito, but at the defined manner. The challenging question
same time this does not liberate thought that arises from the sheer performativity of
from mastership and literacy. For ‘reading’ algebra’s abstractness is, from a philosoph-
this cypher behind which ‘nature hides’ ical perspective, how to acknowledge that
crucially depends upon dexterity, modesty there exists something like ‘mathematical
and subtlety. In other words: a reasoning thinking’. This is a challenge for the modern
that can be externalized into a mechanism, tradition of science, with its dualism between
and hence render obvious a not self- nature (objective) and culture (subjective),

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
136 EQUATION (MATHEMATICAL THINKING)

because it points out a certain impersonal entailed an intermediary symbolical-

subject (thought) amidst the very reign of notational formality (codes or polyto-
objectivity (measurement and calculation). mistic alphabets, elements that are not
Until the late nineteenth century, algebra non-divisible, atomic, but partitionable in
was used almost synonymously with a many ways). The decisive aspect is not that
theory of equations, and its symbolical letters of the alphabet were newly used in
notion was thought to encode quantity in its mathematics;5 it is that alphabetic letters
classical double-articulation as magnitude began to be used for the notation of numbers
(metrical, answering to how much? presup- in a manner that changed the concept of
posing a notion of unit) and multitude number: numbers, now, could be articulated
(countable, answering to how many? presup- as an interplay between variable parts
posing a notion of number). When and constant parts. This was not the case
Whitehead wrote his Treatise, this had in antiquity. Here, numbers were always
changed: with Cantor’s countable infinities determinate numbers of things, while the
(among many other factors that had been algebraic concept of number works upon
contributed, to name only a few of the most what is a ‘given’ only in the form of a metrical
important names, by William Rowan measurement point. Eventually, this novel
Hamilton, Richard Dedekind, George Boole manner of thinking about numbers gave
and Hermann Günther Grassmann), the rise to sophisticated procedures of estima-
classical distinction between multitude and tion like stochastic interpolation and extra-
magnitude had given way to a more abstract polation. Mathematics thereby came to be
distinction between ordinality (answering to seen as an activity, an intellectual and prac-
the howmaniest? as in first, second, third, etc., tical art, and the resulting geometry was
thereby implying an ordering place-value referred to not as ‘elementary’ (stochastiké,
grid) and cardinality (how many? as in one, in the tradition of Euclid’s Elements), but as
two, three, thereby implying the discreteness ‘analytical’, ‘specious’, and eventually as
of the countable) (cf. Stenlund 2014). The ‘population based’ (modern stochastics,
generalized quantity notion was now that of probabilistics). The notion of a mathemat-
‘sets’; the status of mathematics with regard ical object was called by the early algebraists
to philosophy and the natural sciences, but la cosa, the unknown – or not exhaustively
also with regard to linguistic form (structur- known – ‘thing’ (Esteve 2008).
alism) and literary form (e.g. in Wittgenstein’s This novel notion of the object triggered
notion of ‘natural language’ as ‘mathematical in philosophy (and in politics) the inception
prose’) was profoundly unsettled thereby. of concepts of sufficient reason on the one
This is what it means to say that mathemat- hand, and of absolutism, literally meaning
ics is no longer concerned with quantity, but ‘unrestricted; complete, perfect’; also ‘not
with symbolical systematicity (ibid.). relative to something else’,6 on the other
With this, the genealogy of the equation hand. Not relative to something else meant
has come a long way, from the practice of for mathematics that the role of proportion
equalizing mathematical expressions which (A is to B as C is to D) as the classical
once gave rise to the notion, and which paradigm for analysis – literally the dissolv-
then meant that arithmetic could not only ing (from Greek -lysis, for ‘a loosening,
be done with numbers (arithmos) under- setting free, releasing, dissolution’; from
stood in an Aristotelian sense (as ontolo- lyein ‘to unfasten, loose, loosen, untie’) what
gical science), but with what we could is analogue (from Greek analogon; from
call ‘lettered/characterized numbers’ that ana ‘up to’ and logos ‘account, ratio’) – was

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
EQUATION (MATHEMATICAL THINKING) 137

generalized, and thereby also relativized; ought perhaps best to be understood along
proportion was now addressed as ‘propor- the lines of what Michel Serres calls ‘the
tionality’, and reason was now relative to natural contract’ (1991). Without such an
conditions of possibility and the inclin- account, the modernist decoupling of science
ations of dispositions (see Architectonic from notions of the transcendent is being
Disposition). The practices of equalizing replaced with a fundamentalist (scientist)
mathematical expressions unfold in this coupling up of experimental insight (empiri-
generalized role of proportion as propor- cism) with the uncritical affirmation of a
tionality, and the notion of ‘equation’, with particular anthropological or sociological or
the symbolic forms of organizing these ecological assumption (rationalism as realist
practices, can be understood as the technical reason; see Negentropy).
term to express this relativization of the
See also Architectonic Disposition;
analogical structure of proportion. It intro-
Negentropy; Invariance.
duced a novel art, the ars combinatoria, and
the practice of algebraically equalizing
mathematical expressions culminated with Notes
Newton’s and Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus 1. For an extensive discussion of mathe-
as a novel mathesis universalis (a universal matics; abstractness see Alfred North
method) which triggered a fierce dispute in Whitehead, An Introduction to
the eighteenth century between philosoph- Mathematics (London: Williams and
ical Rationalism (baroque-ish and ‘orthodox’ Norgate, 1917), especially the first chapter,
in spirit) and Empiricism (reformationist ‘The Abstract Nature of Mathematics’.
and ‘modernist’ in spirit). Immanuel Kant’s How this role can be played today by a
notion of the transcendental, together with mathematical notion of information
his programme of critique for philosophy, remains a largely open issue to this day.
eventually relaxed the disputes (temporar- Cf. Serres 2007a and 2014.
ily)7. Algebra, as the theory of equations, was 2. A remarkable study on the Cogito in terms
now to provide insights not about the nature of a materialist genetic heritage is by Anne
of elements immediately, but in rules that Crahay and Michel Serres, La Mutation du
can be deduced from Natural Laws that Cogito: Genèse du Transcendantal Objectif
reign in physics. Mechanics came to be seen (Brussels: De Boeck, 1988).
as a particular case of a more general physics, 3. See also the discussion of how Universal
Algebra proceeded and evolved until
including dynamics and soon thereafter
the 1960s by George Grätzer (1968); as
also thermodynamics. It was now the formu-
well as for a discussion of the subject’s
lation of these laws (no longer that of mech-
developments from the 1950s until
anical principles) that was to be stated in the
2012 Fernando Zalamea (2012), and the
form of equations, accessible critically critical appreciation of Zalamea’s book
through empirical experiment coupled with by Giuseppe Longo (2015).
exact conceptual reasoning, and hence 4. It is for precisely this reason that Lyotard
decoupled from an affirmation of any meta- has staked the condition of knowledge in
physical (and theological) assumptions in computerized societies as the central
particular.8, 9 problem that triggers a break with the
This is the modernity with which modern traditions (1984).
Lyotard’s ‘computerized societies’ inevitably 5. Indeed, the separation of a particular
have to break: the formulation of laws is notational system for mathematics is a
equational, and it is because of this that laws rather recent development compared to

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
138 ETHEREAL SCENT

the history of mathematics; it is a bifurca- (1980); there is an English edition of this

tion after many centuries of using one and book by Geoffrey Keene (1962), but it
the same script for linguistic as well as excludes the crucial two chapters with
mathematical articulations. Cf. Schubring which Blanché ends his study, discussing
(2016). the implications for science and for
6. See the Online Etymology Dictionary, philosophy. On the genealogy of philo-
www.etymonline.com; also Jacobs (2010). sophical notions of necessity and contin-
7. It seems not entirely implausible, at least, gency, and the relatively recent upheavals
to think about the early twentieth-century with regard to this genealogy, see also
foundational crisis as a continuation of Vuillemin (1996; 2009).
just these disputes on higher levels of
abstraction. For a largely unbiased account Vera Bühlmann
and a serious and open-minded sugges-
tion of how to approach the dilemma, see
Weyl (1994).
8. Due to its brevity, this summary follows ETHEREAL SCENT
the lineage in the critical tradition that has
turned out as the predominant one, The Sense of Smell and the
linking twentieth-century analytical as
well as continental philosophy; it thereby
Posthuman Experience
understates the ideas of Leibniz, Lambert People stink in science fiction movies.
and others, who maintained that algebra, Heavily perspiring, they toil to survive an
by its calculatory and symbolic methods, overpopulated planet earth (Elysium), a
could actually be seen as opening up the dump of apocalyptic proportions (Wall-E)1
closedness of classical logics in the or in a disintegrating urban agglomeration
Aristotelian tradition, thereby introducing on a global scale (Blade Runner). The wet
an ars inveniendi, an art of invention into spots under their armpits and on their backs,
logics – an approach that was still pursued the dirty worn clothes and their hair that
by figures as eminent for the nineteenth- hangs in sweaty strands over their foreheads
century development of algebra as Charles
give away the human condition in all its
Sanders Peirce (abduction) or Richard
future greasiness. The individuals who can
Dedekind (abstraction as a creative act).
afford it have left Earth and live in highly
Against these ideas, Kant famously stated:
‘Die Logik ist . . . keine allgemeine
technologized environments that are
Erfindungskunst und kein Organon der immaculate, sterile and above all inodorous.
Wahrheit; – keine Algebra, mit deren In these feature films the difference between
Hülfe sich verborgene Wahrheiten human and technology exposes itself also
entdecken ließen’ (1800; here cited in through the nose. The Matrix is exemplary of
Peckhaus 2006). For an introduction to the this: everything connected to human(ity) is
conflicts the unsettled status of algebra dirty and smelly and the world of the
triggered in the empirical sciences them- machines (the matrix) is clean. The rebel
selves, see Stengers (2010), especially Book forces live and work in the decrepit spaceship
II , The Invention of Mechanics, Power and Nebuchadnezzar.2 They dress in worn-out
Reason, 68ff., therein ‘The Lagrangian tatters where the sweat stains are clearly
Event’ (112ff.) and ‘Abstract Measurement: visible. In Zion – the last vestige of free and
Putting Things to Work’ (129ff.). pure humanity – they party in a moist orgy.
9. The seminal study on the implications of When Neo, Morpheus, Trinity and the other
this for axiomatics is by Robert Blanché rebels upload in the matrix, all characteristics

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ETHEREAL SCENT 139

of humanity seem to disappear. The tight are used in these rituals are often synthetic
costumes they wear, the sunglasses they use derivatives of the smell of the wild. They
to shield their pure souls from the false truth create a better, more intense and controlled
of the hyperreality, and the superhuman (i.e. hyperreal) experience of nature than
forces they exhibit, mirror the powerful and real nature. And in their intensity they create
efficient systems they fight. But even in this an immersive experience similar to the one
artificial world of the matrix their humanity generated by the matrix. But whereas the
reveals itself through smell. While interrog- cinematic experience is mostly visual, this
ating a heavily sweating Morpheus, Agent one uses fragrance to transport the body to
Smith confesses he particularly can’t stand other spheres, as was done in the experi-
the smell of humans: ‘I feel saturated by it. I ments with smell in the cinema from the
can taste your stink. And every time I do I early 1900s onwards. From Hans Laube’s
feel I have somehow been infected by it. It’s patent for Smell-O-Vision and Morton
repulsive, isn’t it?’ That there is no such thing Heilig’s Sensorama to the virtual reality
as smell in the matrix makes this fact even systems of the nineties designed to effect-
more significant. Humanity, unbounded by a ively immerse gamers, and the more recent
biological body, fragrantly saturates all smell-o-internet or i-smell and o-phone,4
possible nodes of the network computer they all turned to smell as the next level in
systems that construct the matrix. creating simulations that give an experience
Smell is an integral part of the body but that is more real than reality.
also separate from it. That characteristic This sensitivity to the embodied
makes it the ideal vessel to transcend oneself. human experience was lost during the
Since antiquity, perfume has always had a Enlightenment. Descartes separated body
transcendental function. In ancient Egypt and mind and in this act created the modern
smell played an important role in rituals. human subject that can perceive, know and
The gods were considered to be fragrant rule the world by the power of the ratio. The
beings. Besides, smell was considered to matrix as informational space is a contem-
have protective worth. The well-known wax porary representation of this world of the
cones the Egyptians wore on their heads mind. However, just as Neo as ‘The One’
fulfilled a ritual value. They guided the eventually succeeds in uniting body and
spirits of the deceased in their transition to mind, nature and culture, biology and tech-
the world of the dead. In the Middle Ages, nology, today in our technological society
smell was also a means to contact the super- we see a reappraisal for the body as it is
natural. Art historian Caro Verbeek argues defined as an information processing
that the incense diffused during holy mass system. The body as information is no longer
was a spiritual medium. To the twelfth- centrally organized by the ratio of the indi-
century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, vidual subject. Just as the other information
smoke was the most appropriate means to processing systems, as wetware it is part of
communicate with God because – just like the infosphere. As such it can be regulated
Him – it is invisible and it exceeds our intel- and adapted by means of biotechnology. In
lect.3 Today we see a revival of this spiritual this sphere, smell is one of the signals that
power of fragrance in ethereal oils, scented can be coded, manipulated and networked.
candles, aromatherapy and potpourri mixes The protagonists in science fiction films still
used in new-age-styled faith. Smell plays an stank. The posthuman, as hybrid species
important part in self-healing and the spir- between biology and technology, creates its
itual cleansing of the home. The aromas that own atmosphere to design itself and to

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
140 EXCLUSION ZONE

communicate with other human and non- 7 February 2013, http://www.trouw.nl/

human creatures in its network. tr/nl/5009/Archief/archief/article/
detail/3389818/2013/0 2/07/Geuren-van-
See also Sensing Practices; Art; Post- betekenis.dhtml [accessed 13 April 2017].
humanism; Noise. 4. Christina Agapakis, ‘Smell-O-Vision’,
Scientific American ‘Oscillator’ blog, 12
Notes November 2012, http://blogs.scientific
amer ican.com/oscil lator/2012/11/12/
1. Although the cleaning robot Wall-E is smell-o-vision/; oNotes, http://www.
not actually a human, in its appearance onotes.com/ [accessed 13 April 2017].
(as an old and dirty model) and its
intrinsic quality it shows more humanity Wander Eikelboom
than the actual humans who have left the
trash in their high-tech spaceship.
2. Nebuchadnezzar was the king of Babylon
and designed its famous Hanging EXCLUSION ZONE
Gardens that were well known for their
fragrant plants. Irradiated broken glass collected from
3. Maurice van Turnhout, ‘Geuren van inside the Fukushima Exclusion Zone
betekenis’ [‘Scents of significance’], Trouw, forms the outer layer of this sculpture. The

Trevor Paglen, Trinity Cube, 2015, irradiated glass from the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, Trinitite,
20 × 20 × 20 cm. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND DON’T FOLLOW THE WIND.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
EXECUTION 141

Trevor Paglen, Trinity Cube, 2015, irradiated glass from the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, Trinitite,
20 × 20 × 20 cm. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND DON’T FOLLOW THE WIND.

work’s inner core is made out of Trinitite, Zone opens again, any time between three
the mineral created on 16 July 1945 when and thirty thousand years from the present.
the United States exploded the world’s first
See also Expulsions; Extinction; Geo-
atomic bomb near Alamogordo, New
Hydro-Solar-Bio-Techno-Politics.
Mexico, heating the desert’s surface to the
point where it turned surface sand into a
Trevor Paglen
greenish glass.
Trinity Cube was created by melting
these two forms of glass together into a
cube, then installing the cube back into the EXECUTION
Fukushima Exclusion Zone as part of the
Don’t Follow the Wind project curated by Execution is a function that operates
the Don’t Follow the Wind Collective within a range of systems, such as language,
(Chim ↑ Pom, Kenji Kubota, Eva and computation or biology. The following
Franco Mattes, Jason Waite), Fukushima, entry traces a few of these instantiations
2015 – ongoing). The artwork will be view- of execution in order to highlight the
able by the public when the Exclusion material discursive quality of any particular

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
142 EXECUTION

being. It is not deceasing, nor is it homicide,

it is death by punishment. It is sudden
death forced upon a body of punishment
which has no control over the violence
executed by the system. In these iconic,
self-presencing actualizations, we are made
to forcefully witness execution’s quality as
an event, an act of a juridical, political,
technical or biological discourse enacted
decisively upon its sentenced subject.
Language can be seen as such a discurs-
ive system, one that executes by consisting
of two separate dimensions: langue and
parole (Saussure 1916). Langue as the
Bourreau tranchant la tête d’une condamnée
(Exécution de Léonora Galigaï, 1617). PUBLIC system of language is the formalized struc-
DOMAIN IMAGE. ture, the underlying system of distinct
signs, opposing parole, which is articulated
speech. Thus parole is the executive side of
executing system, with the discussion language. The point of note in this instance
moving across law and guillotine, language is that exercising language is not a shift
and langue, computer instruction and from the non-linguistic to the linguistic.
memory. In each case tracing the way in It is the actualization and execution of a
which execution produces situated posthu- system into an instance of discourse.
man couplings in a dynamic ensemble of In relation to this, subjectivity in
such conjugating systems. language is inseparable from the moment
The word execution stems from of execution, the instance in which language
l’exécuteur du testament (twelfth-century as system becomes language-in-use (when
French), designating the executor of the langue is converted into parole). An execu-
will. Here we see how execution is from its tion deictically designates a speaker, there-
inception embedded in regulatory forms of fore it is when entering language and
bureaucracy (Vallaro 2005). The ancestor of converting the virtual system to actual use
the executor of the will was the bourreau, that the subject is constituted (Benveniste
whose function goes at least as far back 1958). However, the subject evaporates in its
as Ancient Rome, and who performed own articulation of itself as it becomes a
executions decreed by the court, with mere property of a symbolic system.
punishment acting here as spectacle and Execution of language is thus related to the
demonstration of power, perceived as a ‘killing of the subject’ (Barthes 1968) – it is
means to socially regulate crime and in the actualization of the language system
disobedience. This social function was that the speaking subject produces itself as
actualized in the public square, where an abstraction separated from a body.
beheadings took place live. As an effectu- Executable systems like language can there-
ation of a sentence, execution always relates fore be said to be inherently violent, effectu-
to the now, to an actualization, a presence ating a killing, be it abstract or literal.
which is always already over. The tongue, the embodied executioner
Execution in this instance then is not of language, the interface of executing
dying, but specifically to be deprived of langue, both gobbles and babbles. Following

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
EXECUTION 143

Michel Serres’ account of the five (human) Such cuts – execution performed by
senses, every time an organ – or function computation – are expressed at the temporal
– is liberated from an old duty, it re-invents dimension of code execution, constantly
itself (Serres 2001). As Hominina1 stood up rendering the now in networked and pervas-
from her quadruped ancestor, the tongue, ive conditions. The fetch–execute cycle in
freed from the vital necessity to sense computing is used to describe the opera-
danger, became a universal tool (Serres tional steps of performing code instructions
2014: 2). According to Serres, the ‘infor- by a Central Processing Unit (or CPU )
mation imperative’ is to receive, store, following its clock cycle. A CPU fetches each
process and emit information. The tongue’s instruction from the memory and breaks it
embedded subjectivity has become a down into micro-instructions, including the
literal geographical expansion of the post- controlling operation sequence, computing,
industrial and the nutraceutical2 market. transferring, reading, updating and storing
It divides bodies between obese/skinny, data in memory (Burrell 2004). Thus what is
food between organic/fair-trade. It clears written in a piece of source code should only
Amazonian rainforests for soya plantations be regarded as a partial instruction within a
used for feeding livestock (Morton et  al. wider, dynamic ecology of many executing
2006). It fractions populations between systems. When extending the notion of
young high-paid social entrepreneurs and execution into any dynamic networked
the violently displaced. The tongue is a environment in which things are networked
decisive and divisive organ of gentrifica- seamlessly and data is processed continu-
tion and land forming. ously, there are different ‘micro-decisions’
Such discursive systems divide and that are executed at the level of network
conquer, working to make entities execut- protocols to control and regulate the trans-
able according to their particular logics mission of data (Sprenger 2015). Such deep
and delimited needs. In his foundational internal and operational structures of
article ‘On Computable Numbers, with an computation, data processing and digital
Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, networks execute a distinctive rhythm and
Alan Turing provides a definition of temporality; a computational form of
computability as that capable of being ‘micro-temporality’ (Ernst 2013: 57).3 These
enumerated and made into effectively computational cuts and micro-decisions are
calculable algorithms for execution upon intertwined, dynamic and subject to change
and by machines (1936). In the further at any moment in time. In other words,
materialization of Turing’s thesis into execution involves micro-instructions,
actual computing machines, the act of micro-operations and a micro-temporality
making things discrete, so as to be comput- of things where codes, materials and actions
able, becomes one of establishing machine- are composed in a dynamic environment.
readable cuts. These are the switchable on This micro-temporal dimension of execu-
and off state elements, or flip-flops that are tion again draws attention to the phenom-
enacted at the level of logic gates used to ena of liveness; the dynamics of execution
store and control data flow. Such flippable that constantly render the now.
states constitute the material basis that Any such cuts in the name of execut-
allows for the writing and running of the ability can be compared to what Karen
executable binary instructions of machine Barad refers to as ‘agential cuts’ (2007: 429).
code upon this ‘manic cutter known as the They are made in the name of a certain
computer’ (Kittler 2010: 228). agency; in the case of computer code,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
144 EXECUTION

a computational agency. In its levelling of reactivated, it mutates. Memory becomes

all data into a binary form of on and an ongoing site of execution, rather than
off, computational cuts enact a radical one of static storage, in which both habitu-
and seemingly non-discursive treatment ation and deletion are crucial. The brain
of information. The data structures of actively erases information as part of its
computing are noticeable for the way regulatory processes (Hadziselimovic et al.
in which they are particularly amen- 2014). In the absence of this regulatory
able to reconfiguration and application function, a human becomes crippled by a
towards a range of operations (Lovelace form of neurological condition called
and Menabrea 1842). Such a changing of hyperthymesia.4 Erasure and death are
states and configurations is, unsurpris- regulatory functions performed through
ingly, often strongly felt by any entities execution and its continuous actualization.
brought into contact with their executing The very etymology of execution is
logics. Turing himself was made to be administrative, and as a regulatory
acutely aware of this executive power of processing of living beings, bureaucracy is
code, whether programmable, political or the performance of the law. But a violent
cultural. Definable as a war hero accord- disjunction occurs in the conflation of law
ing to one set of patriotic parameters, he and execution: the state of exception; or
soon found himself rapidly switched from the conflation of death and execution:
national saviour back to sexual deviant capital punishment. Cuts, which are inher-
and criminal to be persecuted by the state. ently exclusionary, also contain a ready
Computable according to some logics and potential of violent impositions of a system
configurations; uncomputable according onto bare life (Agamben 2005). If the cut
to others. Such is the potential power and and its execution materialize on the one
violence of any cut and its executability. hand in the actualization of an event, they
This violence of entangled and often can also, in biopolitical fashion, take on an
competing executable logics inevitably operative function as a self-perpetuating
leaves ‘marks on bodies’, in which the threat of violence to come. Such menacing
marks are ‘the differences materialized’ potential events of crisis become import-
(Barad 2007: 89). From Turing’s chemical ant in actual execution, helping to prompt
castration to the growth of synapses cata- a range of pre-emptive forms of violent
lysed by repeated stimulus, organisms bear coded logics and crisis-oriented forms of
the marks of inscription and execution. execution (Cox 2015; Chun 2016).
Implicit memory, in the Pavlovian tradi- Execution situates and is situated.
tion, is inscribed into long-term memory Whether via the tongue, the guillotine, the
through habituation. The environment is CPU or the synapses, execution produces
constantly executing memory. Such is the integral couplings of subjectivity and
power and force of trauma that it boot- desubjectivity through systems such as
straps long-term memory creation (Kandel those of language, of judiciary, of computa-
2006: 342). Nevertheless, memory is also tion and of memory. A powerful force,
forgetting, a dynamic process of constant leaving marks on bodies and indelible trau-
read/write execution. The recalling of matic memories. Such ecologies of execu-
memories is based on chemical exchanges tion are manifold, and the effectuation of a
within highly mutable synaptic networks system is always conjugating amongst a
that require protein synthesis (Nader, mesh of other heterogeneous agents,
Schafe and Le Doux. 2000). As memory is processes, energies and material strata.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
EXPULSIONS 145

See also Non-human Agency; Mattering; workers whose bodies are destroyed on the
Ecosophy; Extinction; Necropolitics; job and rendered useless at far too young
Violence. an age, of able-bodied surplus populations
warehoused in ghettoes and slums. But I
Notes also include the fact that pieces of the
biosphere are being expelled from their life
1. Originally described as one of the space – and I insist that the tame language
earliest ancestors of humans after they of climate change does not quite capture
diverged from the main ape lineage. the fact, at ground level, of vast expanses of
2. A portmanteau of the words nutrition and dead land and dead water.
pharmaceutical. Although the term can be My argument is that this massive and
attributed to Stephen L. DeFelice, food as
very diverse set of expulsions is actually
medicine has a long tradition in western
signalling a deeper systemic transforma-
medicine, as Hippocrates famously put it
tion, one documented in bits and pieces in
in ‘Let food be thy medicine and medicine
multiple specialized studies, but not quite
be thy food.’ The term is applied to
marketed products as wide as isolated narrated as an overarching dynamic that is
nutrients, dietary supplements and herbal taking us into a new phase of global capital-
products, specific diets, processed foods ism – and global destruction. As an analytic
and beverages. category, expulsions are to be distinguished
3. Taken from Wolfgang Ernst, micro- from the more common ‘social exclusion’:
temporality refers to something that is the latter happens inside a system and in
processual and operative, a different that sense can be reduced, ameliorated and
understanding of historical and narrat- even eliminated. Expulsions as I conceive of
ive macro time (Ernst 2013). them happen at the systemic edge. In the
4. For further explanation on hyperthy- types of complex systems I focus on, there
mesia see ‘What is Hyperthymesia? are multiple systemic edges. This partly
The Highly Superior Autobiographical reflects the multiplicity of diverse domains
Memory (HSAM )’, http://hyperthyme in such systems: from prisons and refugee
sia.net/hyperthymesia/ [accessed 13 April camps to financial exploitations and envir-
2017]. onmental destructions.1
Today, after twenty years of a particular
Critical Software Thing type of advanced capitalism, we confront a
human and economic landscape marked
by divergent dynamics. On the one hand,
EXPULSIONS there is the familiar reconditioning of
terrain in the direction of greater organiz-
At the Systemic Edge ational and technological complexity,
epitomized by the state-of-the-art space of
(A Rumination) the global cities that are proliferating in the
I use the term ‘expelled’ to describe a North and the South. This extreme upgrad-
diversity of conditions. They include the ing comes at a high price to those excluded
growing numbers of the abjectly poor, of from its riches (Sassen 2001, 2016a).
the displaced who are warehoused in On the other hand, there is a mix of
formal and informal refugee camps, of the emergent conditions often coded with the
minoritized and persecuted in rich coun- seemingly neutral term of ‘a growing
tries who are warehoused in prisons, of surplus population’. A key underlying

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
146 EXPULSIONS

condition of this ‘surplus’ is the accelerat- that are visible to us all. Thus a dam, for
ing expanse of territory that is devastated instance, makes visible its complexity and
– by poverty and disease, armed conflict, its enormous capacity to destroy whole
brutal extractions of natural wealth by areas of a region, submerging their villages
national and foreign firms (see Sassen and monuments and such. This type of
2014: chs 2 and 4). And then there are the visibility is absent, for instance, in the case
governments rendered dysfunctional by of the complex financial instruments that
acute corruption and a crippling interna- can extract value from reducing the wages
tional debt-regime, all of it leading to an of millions of garment workers sewing
extreme inability or lack of will to address simple clothing: extremely low wages can
their peoples’ needs (Sassen 2016b). To this raise the stock-market value of the shares
we should add the sharp increase in large- of the pertinent corporate firms because
scale land-acquisitions by foreign firms they show the firm is willing to maximize
and governments (ibid.).2 These land grabs value extraction. This is a much-over-
are generating additional mass displace- looked factor in critical analyses of low
ments of whole villages and smallholder wages.
agriculture districts, all replaced by vast There are, thus, two vectors in the
plantations which use excessive fertilizers search for low-wage labour. The familiar
and pesticides, thereby rapidly killing the one is that the firm can sell its products at
land, which will in turn lead to yet another a low price. But the far more significant
phase of land grabs and the resulting vector in the corporatizing of more and
displacements. more economic sectors is a positive valu-
It is this second emerging condition ation in the stock market when a firm
marked by extractive logics that concerns demonstrates a will to lower costs no
me here. It goes against the familiar notion matter what – exploited workers, unsafe
that our modernity is marked by an irres- workplaces, environmental destruction
istible growth in organizational and tech- and more. This is a profoundly insidious
nological complexity. In vast stretches of overlay to an already damaging search for
our very modern world, we see shifts from mere low wages. It also feeds into a massive
the complex to the elementary: from the distortion of how we construct value in a
complex encasing of land that is the corporatized economy that is increasingly
doctrine of ‘national sovereign territory’, to part of a financializing process.
land in devastated nation-states as a Beyond the specifics described above,
commodity to be sold on the global market; we see a spread of this combination of
and from the complexity of people as rising complexity and expanding element-
citizens to people as surplus – to be ware- ary extractions. It generates multiplier
housed, displaced, trafficked, reduced to effects for one side of the process (large
mere labouring bodies and body organs. I corporations, financial markets) even as it
find that one critical component of these destroys the less advantaged. It weaves
shifts that matters to my analysis is how itself into how we measure the ‘growth’ of
much of the sharp rise in complex systems, our economies – for instance GDP per
instruments and knowledge winds up capita – and generates an acute distortion
producing these kinds of simple brutalities. as to what is valuable, what adds to
In short, too many of our increasingly ‘economic growth’. Replacing smallholder
complex capabilities and knowledges do agriculture with corporate plantations is
not even produce complex brutal outcomes registered as a massive growth in GDP per

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
EXPULSIONS 147

capita. But it actually destroys the land not merely damaged but plain dead – land
rather quickly and buries the knowledge of overwhelmed by the relentless use of
smallholders about how to ensure a long chemicals, and water dead from lack of
life for land (notably, rotating crops that oxygen due to pollution of all sorts. The
ensure fertility and minimize pests). surge of foreign land acquisitions by
Similarly in urban economies, replacing governments and firms examined above is
mom and pop shops (for selling flowers, or one of many sources of this destruction.
food, or a good latte) with a corporate But these acquisitions are also partly a
outlet sucks knowledge (it takes know- response to the crisis: more land and water
ledge and experience to run a mom and need to be acquired to replace what they
pop shop) and profits out of the locality killed.
and passes it on to central headquarters. The trends described here point to
The locality loses capabilities and, further- accelerated histories and geographies of
more, part of its collective consumption destruction on a scale our planet has not
capacity goes to headquarters rather than seen before, making substantive the notion
re-circulating in the locality. Corporate of the Anthropocene, the age marked by
headquarters make gains. And these gains, major human impact on the environment.
further, can translate into positive valu- Many of these destructions of land, water
ations of their shares in the stock market. and air have hit poor communities partic-
This shift is measured as a growth in GDP ularly hard, producing an estimated 800
per capita so experts and governments see million displaced people worldwide. But
it as a positive. none of us is immune, as destructions can
These examples illustrate one aspect of reach us all, spread by massive transforma-
what I mean by the systemic edge: it is that tions in the atmosphere.
point in a process when our existing In my work, I have focused on diverse
categories (analytical, conceptual, statist- destructions and sites. This is a partial view
ical) can no longer capture what is going that rests on the assumption that extreme
on. There are simple and there are complex conditions make visible trends that are
instantiations. more difficult to apprehend in their milder
The second major domain where I versions. Much of the land and most of the
deploy this type of analytics concerns the water on our planet is still alive. But much
biosphere.3 The biosphere’s capacities to of it is fragile even when it looks healthy.
renew land, water, and air are remarkable. Scattered evidence in news media suggests
But they are predicated on specific tempor- that the extent of this fragility may not be
alities and life cycles that our technical, widely understood or recognized. For
chemical and organizational innovations instance, polls show that few in the United
are rapidly outpacing. Industrialized States seem to know that more than a third
economies have long done damage to the of that country’s land, including much of
biosphere, but in at least some of these the cherished fertile Midwest, is actually
cases, and with time on her side, the stressed according to scientific measures,
biosphere has brought damaged land and even if on the surface it looks fine. Or that
water back to health. Current analyses and some of the six major gyres that help keep
evaluations signal that we have gone well our ocean currents going and oxygenated
beyond this capacity for recovery in a are becoming massive trash zones leading
growing range of conditions. We now have to the asphyxiation of marine life. Nor is it
vast stretches of land and water that are widely known that there are at least 400

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
148 EXTENDED COGNITION

clinically dead oceanic coastal zones. We the proliferation of systemic edges and
made this fragility and these deaths. expulsions renders the extreme negatives
We can think of such dead land and invisible, no matter their full materiality.
dead water as holes in the tissue of the Destroyed economies, livelihoods, bodies,
biosphere. And the edges of these holes are land and water have become a generic
also systemic – they tell us something that condition for part, and only part of our
is larger than the particular site. I conceive epoch, dis-embedded from the geopolit-
of these holes as sites marked by the expul- ical landscape of nation-states and main-
sion of biospheric elements from their life stream international policies that caused it.
space, and as the surface expression of My point is that we need to go back
deeper subterranean trends that are cutting to ground level, by which I mean a variety
across the world, regardless of the local of analytic operations – to de-theorize, to
type of politico-economic organization. exit some of our inherited categories, to
As I examine at length in Expulsions ask what I do not see when I invoke the
(Sassen 2014), we have collectively traditional concepts. The ground here is a
produced conditions that override national condition that tells us there is something
differences: my guiding conceptual effort we have not engaged with, not seen. We do
throughout the examination of concrete not need more replicating: it serves mostly
cases across our planet was to make visible to confirm established knowledge and to
the recurrence of environmentally expand its grip. We need to explore and
destructive modes no matter how diverse discover in order to re-theorize.
the political economies and political
See also Extinction; Food; Survival;
systems in play. Together and over time, we
SS = Security/Surveillance; Exclusion
have generated a planetary condition that
Zone; Capitalocene and Chthulucene;
reaches far beyond the specific sources of
Necropolitics; Rewilding.
destruction and the specific forms of
politico-economic organization within
which they take place. It is a condition that Notes
hovers in spaces that range from the strato- 1. For two diverse cases see Sassen 2017a;
sphere to deep ocean gyres. It destroys the and, at the other end, Sassen 2015. And
Arctic permafrost even though the local for the fairy-tale version, see Sassen and
indigenous Eskimo people had nothing to Koob-Sassen 2015.
do with that destruction; it was rather the 2. See also for specific cases Sassen 2017b,
polluting factories of the US and Russia, 2017c.
among so many others. 3. See e.g. Sassen 2014, ch. 4.
By way of conclusion: there is a profound
disjuncture between the diverse local, Saskia Sassen
national and planetary conditions briefly
described in this entry and the dominant
logics shaping governmental and experts’
policies and responses. This disjuncture is EXTENDED COGNITION
partly enabled by the divergent systemics
that mark this period. On the one hand, The extended cognition (EC ) or ‘extended
much of the visual order speaks the mind’ thesis claims that cognition extends
language of quality and luxury, signalling beyond the organism into techno-social
that we are doing fine. On the other hand, environment, where the latter plays an

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
EXTENDED COGNITION 149

active part in driving cognitive processes Clark and Chalmer’s essay constitutes
(Clark and Chalmers 1998). This stand- the basis of what is called the ‘first wave’ of
point is that of active externalism and arguments for EC , mostly based on the
resonates with theories of embodied (e.g. above-mentioned parity principle (Menary
Wilson and Foglia 2016), embedded 2010). The second wave of arguments is
(Suchman 1987; Hutchins 1995), enactive developed in closer orientation to empir-
(Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991) and ical and enactive approaches (see, for
situated cognition (Smith 1999; Robbins instance, Sutton 2010; Menary 2007 and
and Aydede 2009). Such a view of cogni- 2010; Wilson 2010; Wheeler 2010;
tion not only has implications for research Malafouris 2013). Second-wave EC
in cognitive science, robotics and artificial thinkers highlight that external elements
intelligence but also challenges individual- and processes can differ dramatically from
istic understanding of cognition as taking internal ones (Sutton 2010), and this differ-
place exclusively in the brain or even ence is, in fact, required in order for
brain-body. To an extent that this model ‘external’ and ‘internal’ components of the
blurs the boundaries between technical cognitive process to be complementary
objects and human agents in the domain (Rowlands 2010a) and integrated into the
of cognition, the extended mind thesis also cognitive system (Menary 2010). Finally, a
questions the human exceptionalism and third wave of arguments is emerging as
anthropocentrism inherent in more tradi- well, focussing on what Sutton calls ‘a
tional cognitive sciences. deterritorialized cognitive science’ (Sutton
The extended mind thesis was intro- 2010, 2013) that goes beyond the boundar-
duced by Andy Clark and David Chalmers ies of biological organism and deals rather
in their article ‘The Extended Mind’ in with cognitive assemblies in which none of
1998. In their essay they propose that reli- the elements have analytical priority, as
ance on environmental support in some well as with questions of transformation
cases produces ‘epistemic actions’: actions that occurs due to processes of extension
that alter the world so as to aid and and coupling (Kirchhoff 2012).
augment cognition (Clark and Chalmers One of the traditional lines of critique
1998). This leads them to propose that towards EC is based on the claim that EC
such actions should also deserve epistemic performs a coupling-constitution fallacy:
credit: ‘if, as we confront some task, a part the fact that agents rely on certain external
of the world functions as a process which, objects for cognitive purposes, thus being in
were it done in the head, we would have effect cognitively coupled with the object,
no hesitation in recognizing as part of the does not mean that the object in question
cognitive process, then that part of the constitutes a part of the agent’s cognitive
world is . . . part of the cognitive process’ apparatus (see, for instance, Adams and
(ibid.: 8). The latter is also what was coined Aizawa 2008, 2010). While this and similar
as the ‘parity principle’, which helps define critiques imply prioritizing clear boundar-
when cognition is extended. Such exten- ies of cognition and clear indication of
ded minds are, in fact, cognitive systems, cognitive agents, other critical voices
where all elements play an active causal suggest that EC does not go far enough in
role, continuously influencing and dethroning the biologically delineated
responding to one another and thus human as the main agent of cognition.
coordinating to produce behaviour (Clark For instance, Di Paolo (2009) proposes
1997). that in order to do away with biological

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
150 EXTINCTION

chauvinism and human-centredness, an sense of impending human extinction

autopoietic enactivist account of cognition (both literally, with the biological species
is needed that would position cognition coming to an end, and figuratively, with all
as a relational phenomenon that emerges that passes itself off as human facing anni-
between autopoietic systems and their hilation by way of technological, ecological
interactions with environment. In this way and political catastrophe); and at the same
a non-species-specific definition of cogni- time humanity has declared itself to be a
tion, agency and mediation could be geological force with the power and will to
developed that does not completely deny recognize and reverse the changes it has
the extended mind thesis. Kirchhoff (2012) made to the Earth as a living system. In
also suggests that EC should be pushed what follows I outline three articulations
towards a deterritorialized cognitive science of the concept of extinction, all of which
that dissolves the individual and displaces are inextricably intertwined with the
agency, instead of marking it as an indi- problem of the human.
vidual (human?) property. The question of First, and most obviously, extinction
agency was also taken up by theorists such announces itself today as the sixth great
as Wheeler, who asks what happens when mass extinction. Humans are at once
technologies that are part of our cognitive threatened by this mass extinction event at
apparatus start exhibiting agency them- the same time as they contribute to the
selves (see, for instance, Wheeler 2011). All acceleration of this extinction, and have
in all, EC theory is important not only done so since the earliest days of human
for cognitive science and its methods migration (Diamond 1989). The current
(Should the object of study be individual era of intense anthropogenic climate
agents or cognitive systems? Should we change, along with the declaration of the
consider consciousness as extended? See, Anthropocene, seems to have enabled a
for instance, Rowlands 2010a, 2010b on shift in degree that has ultimately gener-
this question) but also opens up new direc- ated a difference in kind. Extinction may
tions in artificial intelligence and robotics have been as much a part of life as growth,
research (via focus on interactive learning decay, mutation and proliferation, but it
and reactive or behaviour-based robotics; may also be that extinction reaches a
see Brooks 2002 on the latter). threshold and rate that generates a new
dynamic between life and loss. ‘Mass
See also Artificial Intelligence; Execution;
extinction’ far exceeds the ‘background
Plasticity; Neocybernetics; Robophilosophy.
rate’ of the ebb and flow of life’s creation
and destruction but there are nevertheless
Goda Klumbytė
different ways one can mark the threshold
between extinction as part of the dynamics
of life, and massive losses of species and
EXTINCTION biodiversity (Wang 2003).
Extinction is as natural and inevitable
Extinction is at once the most human and as emergence, but it may be that when
the most inhuman of concepts. The very extinction can be witnessed from within
possibility of this contrary tendency is the ‘a’ life that this aspect of existence opens a
hallmark of our most fragile and most new way of problematizing the limits of
robust present. The twenty-first century is thinking and what it might mean to mourn
at one and the same time marked by a or save a form of life. Having emerged

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
EXTINCTION 151

from previous mass extinctions, humans subtle genealogy of the current experience
are at once part of the ebb and flow of life of extinction does not fetishize a certain
and non-life on earth, but are nevertheless type of hyper-consuming, risk-exposed
the first beings to witness, mourn and and globally predatory late-human exist-
articulate extinction as an explicit event. ence, it does operate with a sense of the
Elizabeth Kolbert provides a wonderful bounds of species.
genealogy of the sense and milieu of If, prior to modernity, there were
extinction, charting the emergence of the apocalyptic narratives – with day-to-day
concept of species loss (prior to Darwin’s existence being a constant experience
theory of evolution), and then the increas- of exposure, fragility and contingency –
ing awareness of the fragility of many the pre-modern sense of apocalypse was
species from the carrier pigeon to Panama’s also pre-human. To feel that one was living
golden frogs (Kolbert 2014). This ‘simple’ in end times, that all might be brought to
and primary sense of extinction neverthe- nought, that a flood or pestilence might
less already harbours political tensions and annihilate ‘everything’ was quite different
contrary tendencies. To say that humans from the sense of there being a specific
are the first species to witness and contrib- kind of life – human thinking life, a life of
ute to extinction is to define humans as a reason – that might one day cease to be.
species, and to deploy species thinking. But Extinction – as opposed to the sense that
who are these witnessing species-aware everything might end – relies upon a
humans? The briefest glimpse of what has new sense of life that takes the form of
come to be known as post-apocalyptic distinct species (which, in turn, requires a
culture – from Cormac McCarthy’s The modern, Western, tabulating comportment
Road (2009) in literature and the Mad Max to the world). The thought of human
series in cinema, to the efflorescence in extinction, in turn, entails the sense of ‘us’
every aspect of cultural output including as a species; while the preliminary mourn-
television, music and gaming – evidences ing and panic that accompanies the
that the experience of extinction requires a thought of human extinction indicates a
certain affective comportment towards the fetishized and supreme self-regard which is
world. Kolbert’s reflective journey is a brought to the fore in the next understand-
model of mild-mannered culturally sensit- ing of human extinction that I explore
ive respect. Her book expresses none of the below. For now, I would suggest that even
narcissistic panic that accompanies the the general notion of the ‘sixth mass extinc-
majority of ‘end of the world’ narratives, tion’, which ‘we’ are witnessing and perhaps
which are predominantly ‘end of the afflu- feeling responsible for, is grounded in a
ent world’ stories in which ‘man’ either panoramic view of life and humanity
becomes exposed to his fragility and saves that is culturally and historically specific.
the day (World War Z (2013), The Day the What has come to call itself ‘the human’
Earth Stood Still (2008), The Day After both requires and problematizes species-
Tomorrow (2004)); or, more recently, the thinking. Without the unifying and divid-
end of man and life is figured in terms of ing logic of species it would be difficult to
species-bifurcation, with some humans think of global humanity – even if human-
commandeering and squandering the few ity most often defines and regards itself as a
remaining resources while enslaving the species that has transcended its ground.
majority of barely-living humans (Lane- This brings me to my second, ultra-
McKinley 2015). Yet, even if Kolbert’s human, sense of extinction. The very

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possibility of extinction, along with a where simply being more green will not
milieu in which there is an awareness suffice; only more technology will save us
of possible catastrophe, intensifies the (Aitkenhead 2008). But who is this ‘we’ that
modern sense that reason is bound to life, has reached a tipping point and has
and that this singular life that is bound to a declared ‘game over’? And who is this ‘we’
species may become extinct. Nick that declares that only the technology that
Bostrom’s work on existential risks and the got ‘us’ into this mess will help us into the
future of humanity not only outlines all the future? The threatened ‘we’ of techno-
scenarios in which human intelligence science finds nothing more alarming than
might be destroyed, and not only insists on the possible end or non-being of techno-
the avoidance of that catastrophe at all science, even as it acknowledges that
costs; he also allows for the possibility that technoscience has been the motor of
what is valuable in the human species may destruction. The Cartesian echo of ‘I face
survive biological extinction (Bostrom extinction therefore I must continue to be’
2002, 2013a). One may have parochial, alerts us to the modernity and hyper-
sentimental and irrational attachments to humanism of the logics of extinction. It is
life as we know it in its current human and only with a radical separation of thinking
fragile form, but a genuinely rational as a substance, and not (as it was prior to
consideration of life and its values would Descartes) a potentiality of ensouled life,
yield two imperatives. Bostrom insists that that the possibility of the erasure of
upon reflection we should direct resources thought becomes thinkable.
to averting existential catastrophe, and that Once humans think of themselves as a
the true task of the future is that of secur- life-form, and then as a life-form with the
ing the full technological maturity of exceptional capacity of thinking or reason,
human intelligence. This may require some it becomes possible that the potentiality
form other than human biological life. for thinking could cease to be, and that
Here his thought intersects with other such a non-being of thinking is what must
theorists whose intense investment in be averted at all costs and without ques-
human intelligence is at once quite happy tion. Nothing seems to justify our exist-
to contemplate a future in which intelli- ence more – nothing seems to generate
gence survives without humans, while also more of a feeling of the right to life – than
assuming that nothing is more cata- the contemplation of human non-being,
strophic than the loss of this definitive especially when that non-being is figured
human capacity (Kurzweil 2005). While as the absence of rationality.
Bostrom and thinkers like Ray Kurzweil Yet it is just this sense of entitlement
might appear to be extreme outliers in and right to life that might be fruitfully
a world that is attached to humans as a vanquished in an inhuman future. It has
species rather than the human intellect as a become a commonplace in discussing
capacity that might outlive ‘us’, I would post-apocalyptic culture to say that it is
nevertheless suggest that their thought easier to imagine the end of the world than
captures a tendency of post-apocalyptic it is to imagine the end of capitalism. The
extinction culture. It is almost as though problem with this cute phrase is that the
the axiom of the twenty-first century is ‘I imagined ‘end of the world’ is an imagined
am threatened with non-being, therefore I end of affluent capitalism. The ‘end of the
must survive.’ James Lovelock, for example, world’ is one where humans wander
has argued that we have reached a point aimlessly, just surviving, exposed to the

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EXTINCTION 153

contingency of a nature that is no longer so at the end of the world is perhaps, if one
abundant with resources that everyone is takes away the disdainful ‘first-world’
suffering from obesity, hyper-consumption framing, what a great deal of beings have
and stimulus-overload. (One might concur known and respectfully lived as life. If one
here with McKenzie Wark (2015a), who thinks about extinction beyond species-
argues for a nature without ecology.) fetishism one might think of other modes
This post-apocalyptic landscape is media- of existence (that might survive what ‘we’
deprived, all of the archive left in tatters, can only imagine as the end of the world)
bereft of shopping, art galleries or leisure as the beginning of new worlds.
industries. It is a world that one might
See also Ahuman; Expulsions; Food;
think of as dystopian and post-apocalyptic
Survival; Necropolitics; Capitalocene and
if what makes life worth living is reflective
Chthulucene; Rewilding.
human reason and hyper-consumption
grounded in a specific archive. This world Claire ColebrookTrevor Paglen, Trinity
Cube, 2015, irradiated glass from the
Fukushima Exclusion Zone, Trinitite,
20 × 20 × 20 cm. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND
DON’T FOLLOW THE WIND.

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154 FEMINICITY

F
FEMINICITY 1999; Wajcman 2004). This connection of
second-wave feminist and digital media
Feminicity is the expression that describes highlighted the gender-bias of the notion
where feminist work has used digital of ‘neutral’ technologies, and the so-called
algorithmic environments to generate ‘net-neutrality’ of the digital market. The
active-points, which insert feminist ideas, cultures created from this connection
designs, information and meanings into between information technologies and
the mainstream commons. Feminicity is a feminism produced not just another
speculative tool, creative of new signifiers language or series of standpoints (cf.
of being and new data content with specific Harding 1986, 2004; Hayles 2002; Plant
feminist-oriented goals. There is an expli- 1997), rather emergent sets of feminist
cit reference and critique of gendering practices were given form, changing defin-
institutions in actions of Feminicity. itions of normative ‘naturalized’ racial,
Active-points of Feminicity generate sexual and social relations (Braidotti 2013:
specifically feminist-oriented datafication, 99), enabling a re-imagining of the mater-
where the content injected into the system ial actions and consequences of informa-
will demand resourcing from all areas of tion, and the epoch of Digital Feminicity
society and culture. Speculating on exist- began. Historically, changes in knowledge
ing material ontologies and generating forms are politically aligned, according
active-affects, Feminicity works to manip- to the contexts through which they are
ulate the algorithmic ideologies of capital- produced, maintained and distributed.
ist nihilistic and narcissistic behaviours, But in the global digital commons, the
opening new realities. question arises as to what is the extent of
The kinds of relationships produced by ethically positive change to the capitalist
information and communication techno- ‘normative’ referential frameworks that
logies and their interactions with vernacu- actions of Feminicity achieve?
lar experiences and events enable dynamic Active-points of Feminicity are found
cultural and political conditions and emer- in the practices and activities from the
gent behaviours. Individuals, collectives sciences, humanities and creative arts that
and cultures can be mobilized or fractured create, identify and analyse, through the
through such changes and the speeds of emergent behaviours generated between
those changes. When the second-wave feminisms and the digital spheres. These
feminist movement plugged into the action-points use theoretical and physical
digital era of the 1990s, new feminist forms to materialize their feminist agency.
ethical modes were generated through this There are examples to be found in and
interaction between feminism and digital across all disciplinary fields: the sciences,
technologies (cf. Haraway 1991; Hayles humanities and the arts. The art collective

154
FEMINICITY 155

VNS Matrix’s Cyberfeminist Manifesto for ing identity politics that defy racial or
the 21st Century (1991) included multi- anatomically given positions generative of
media art works that function as active- affirmative modes of understanding life in
points that comically berate and agitate the terms of different species, and their poten-
patriarchal algorithms of the new domains tial in terms of the experience of a range of
of technology in the 1990s. Sadie Plant’s biopolitical positions and the possibilities
Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the for new forms of collective communities.
New Technoculture (1997) offers more Haraway’s cyborg as an exemplar of
utopic forms of Feminicity than VNS Feminicity enabled countless other active-
Matrix, and both of these active-points in points where the notion of a digital gender,
their respective works celebrate the joining and/or digital feminism, to conceptualize,
of the digital with the feminist as a positive speculate upon and produce new forms.
reclamation of masculinist discourses of These are expressed under a range of names,
technology. including Technofeminism (Wajcman
Donna Haraway’s text, A Cyborg 2004), Cyberfeminism (Cornelia Sollfrank
Manifesto (1985–1991), identifies the 1998) and Xenofeminism (Laboria
epistemological significance of the shift Cuboniks collective 2015). Artist Juliana
into bio-technological frameworks for Huxtable’s performance There Are Certain
understanding the different forms of polit- Facts that Cannot Be Disputed (2015) frames
ical realities that is produced in the digital the research questions of many practitioners
merger of machine and sentient subject. of the first decades of Feminicity, where
The system of governance of the Industrial visual symbols still govern racialized and
Revolution over its machine-man changed gendered normative behaviours.
through the historical juncture of the Within a functional digital environ-
digital revolution. Significantly, Haraway ment, new tools for expression and articula-
describes this change in terms of the cybor- tion of feminist positions are enabled. While
gian personae as ‘not subject to Foucault’s global digital markets currently come under
biopolitics’ but rather, it ‘stimulates politics, different regulations and legislation (for
a much more potent field of operations’ example the DSM (Digital Single Market)
(Haraway 1991: 163). Haraway uses the model adopted by the European Union in
concept of this cyborg (a neologism 2016), common global informatics points
produced through political considerations enabled a relatively free distribution of
of the field of cybernetics) to express a active-points (the disseminated content of
‘disassembled and reassembled’ self, which which may have consequences for the
feminists must ‘code’ under the late capital- maker/user of the material). The YouTube
ist system of an ‘informatics of domination’ digital broadcast channel, launched in 2005,
(Haraway 1991: 163). Haraway’s cyborg is a for example, gave the feminist collective
flexible active-point for Feminicity; stimu- Pussy Riot the platform by which it could
lating in a functional way, and productive globally distribute ‘A Punk Prayer’ (2012), a
of new feminist forms for thinking and potent active-point of Feminicity, that
coding feminist operations, through the redirected the media commons attention to
expansiveness of its configuration which a range of breaches of human rights issues,
works to arouse new political desires. As a made by normative patriarchal forms of
speculative concept, Haraway’s cyborg religious and gender repressive systems.
proposes a number of utopic as well as The Twitter social media platform (2006)
probable ideas for radical changes in think- enables a saturation of feminist content,

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156 FEMINICITY

through simple use of a hashtag, restricted that Foucault identifies are no longer the
character limit and images, employed as only ways of being, as actions of Feminicity
action-tools. Whether as systemic confes- demonstrate. Katherine Hayles refers to
sional like #feministselfie, or as a situated this change from the equational operation
evidence of feminist activism #FEMEN ; of something (as in the performative
#pussyriot, a parody of patriarchal values, adherence to given institutional geomet-
such as #FeministsAreUgly, the hashtag of ries of life) to the current state of the
the post-Twitter digital commons works as ‘materialist informatics’ of ‘material, tech-
a political and ethical vector of Feminicity; nological, economic, and social structures
polarizing opinion, but algorithmically that make the information age possible’
raising the issues to the top of the informa- (Hayles 1993: 148).
tion pile. Frequently the hashtag records not Generating more ethically focused
so much a narrative of situated politics, but gender content in the world’s global
rather offers a feminist tactical intervention economy means creating new activities
into constructed genders. Given the terms that require new kinds of resourcing
of the current capitalist market that treats to enable their realization. Actions of
people as living capital, the information that Feminicity can be differentiated by the
such active-points convey is often paradox- terms, duration, speed and mediums of
ical, but nevertheless it contributes to their agency of forms and concepts. Some
the growth of self-organizing, affirmative function as speculative (in the utopic
feminist ideas and ontologies. examples of applications and outcomes of
Active-points of Feminicity are thus technology; or Haraway’s alternative world
not just carriers of ideas, they are creators proposals). Some action-points can be
and generators of innovation in fields discerned through policy (where govern-
that work for gender equality and the mental changes have enabled legislation),
ethical treatment of differences. The evidential (in the case of advocacy groups
object-oriented coding of gendered beha- that work for human rights for all genders,
viours, consumption and non-sustainable education equality, enhanced curricula
practices in an informational economy with ethically responsible knowledge),
provides the focus of intervention for scientific (action-affects after new know-
feminist active-points. Through tactics of ledge is applied and tested and which
saturation, speculation, code additions results in positive change), theoretical
(through APIs for example), redirections, (new forms of expression and or revision-
mis-directions, insertion of errors, changes ist feminist histories). Active-points can
to capitalist normative behaviours, positive generate innovative tools, including ethical
speculative content and biased personas, feminist-oriented codes, and new forms of
more feminist content is being circulated, feminist communication methods, counter-
and more anti-feminist content is removed ing destructive actions and redistributing
through methods of under-resourcing. capitalist ideologies, tackling issues of
Positive images of people made through gender and racially biased inequalities and
the invention and implementation of legis- gender and ethnically based violent actions
lation that is pro gender diversity and zero that dominate societies. Active-points of
tolerance of violence and discrimination Feminicity provide creative and speculat-
against difference is the aim of ethical ive alternatives for ethical models of living.
feminists. The forms of institutional In this they are useful as they provide
subject constituted by its environments analysis tools for a feminist data structure

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of materialist informatics, as well as companions (Haraway 2008). If critical

contributing to forming a future that is not thought after the Holocaust forced us to
governed by a masculinist hubris driven by question our own intra-species humanity,
violence and hatred, but which is instead the human question has not exactly dimin-
productive of a positive and creative ished in relationship to science, medicine,
embrace of all life forms. technology, the environment and other
organisms. At the same time, human societ-
See also Algorithmic Studies; Earth;
ies have impacted Earth’s biosphere and
Naturecultures; Post Internet; Technicity;
climatic systems such that some scientists
Gaga Feminism.
propose naming a new geological era,
beginning with industrialization, mass
Felicity Colman
deforestation or the US nuclear detonations
(depending on what expert is asked), as the
Anthropocene, the Age of Man. This Age of
FEMINIST POSTHUMANITIES Man that we now inhabit follows upon the
aeons of deep time of the Holocene. It
Cognisant of shifting terrains in the contem- seems we tried to make nature into our
porary humanities, feminist posthumanities image, but with a less than pretty result.
engages with critical and creative pursuits However, it is beyond doubt today that
that address changing relations between we are as much in nature as nature is in us.
political animals of a more-than-human It follows from this tenet that the classical
kind, bodies, technologies and environ- objects of study for the humanities –
ments, and it does so from interdisciplinary culture, and, of course, the human – are
and post-conventional perspectives (Åsberg anything but given or self-evident. Humans
2008; Åsberg and Braidotti 2017). Feminist today are, after all, more obviously than
posthumanities may describe post- ever entangled in co-constitutive relation-
conventional research that already thrives ships with nature and the environment,
on the margins or outside the conventional with science and technology, with vulner-
scholarly comfort zones. Under this heading able embodiment, and with other animals
or others, it has become clear that nothing by which we live and die. Critical and creat-
remains evident or given about the human ive forms of humanities take such make-
of the humanities. or-break entanglements into account, and
The human body may well today be do not take the figure of Man as its taken-
regarded as a microbiotic multi-species for-granted centrepiece. Rather, forms
ecology in and of itself. Only 10 per cent of of posthumanities, or more-than-human
the trillion cells that constitute it are of the humanities, take reciprocal and conditional
human-animal variety, while a motley relationships by which we become human
majority of other microscopic organisms with ‘Earth others’ (Plumwood 1993) as its
dominate our bodies. Even our genes are starting point. Feminist research, long
less than fully human: the human genome, critiquing the centrality of the figure of
hailed in the 2000s as our chromosomal Man for its gender chauvinism, stands as a
genetic make-up and the ‘recipe’ for human- case in point; a set of research approaches
ity, surprised scientists with its display of that focus on power relationships that
evolutionary co-constitution of humanness shape words and worlds.
with other species, counting majorities of Feminist posthumanities stand as
viral, bacterial, fungi and other microbiotic one possible response to the posthuman

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158 FEMINIST POSTHUMANITIES

challenges to the humanities today attempts to reconceptualize the relation-

(Braidotti 2013), but they draw in effect on a ship between the rapidly changing field of
set of meandering alter-genealogies in anti- technology and the conditions of human
colonial cyborg studies (Haraway 1991), embodiment (Hayles 1997). However,
science and literature studies, queer theory, popular and scholarly notions of the
cultural studies (Franklin, Lury and Stacey ‘posthuman’ often signify vastly different
2000), situated knowledge practices things. Troublesome posthumanisms in
(Haraway 1991), advanced sex-gender popular circulation often share a belief
theorizing, power-knowledge and sexual in modern progress, in technology as
difference theory (Braidotti 1994). Some of salvation from bodily vulnerabilities,
these are, under different headings, quite even from death. Uncritically celebrating
long-standing scholarly conversations; Enlightenment ideals of anthropocentric
some are more recent. For instance, some of humanism, this figuration of posthuman-
the long-standing feminist theorizations ism can even manifest as a form of super-
of sex and gender trace theories of humanism, or ‘transhumanism’. This
denaturalization, such as Donna Haraway’s transhumanism works to transcend and
cyborg ontology, Judith Butler’s dispelling overcome the body through mind (or
of any heteronormative foundation of belief in science) and thus complete the
biological sex, Stacy Alaimo’s post-natural imagined mind–body split (as also seen in
eco-feminism or Myra Hird’s insistence science fiction fantasies of digitally down-
on all organisms’ inherent, cellular trans- loading minds or cryo-preserving bodies).
sexuality. But such feminist theorizing Such unwholesome post-feminist and
also traces the ontological, bio-affirmative post-biological understandings of post-
or renaturalizing turn, exemplified by human embodiment fail to consider the
authors such as Elisabeth Grosz, Lynda recalcitrant and connected nature of
Birke, Elisabeth Wilson, Vicki Kirby and bodies and embodied selfhood as more
Karen Barad. than a bounded, cerebral affair. Thus, in my
In fact, feminist posthumanities is today view, they are incompatible with the motifs
but one response among many to the age- for doing feminist posthumanities.
old feminist question of who gets to count Feminist philosophers and scholars of
as human within the authoritative annals science studies and cultural studies have
of the humanities and sciences. Yet it is instead deployed the notion of the
a multi-headed response defined by its posthuman in order to break or otherwise
open-endedness, by its inter-, trans- or overcome the fixed, dyadic and hierarch-
post-disciplinarity, and by its insistence ical categories of nature and culture, or
on the bio-curious creativity of feminist the human and the non-human, thereby
theory. Gender, like genus and generation enabling alternative analyses that explore
(Hemmings 2011, van der Tuin 2015a), may the entanglements and mutual produc-
well in this setting be regarded as an engine tions that result. For Karen Barad, ‘post-
of discovery as much as a critical category humanism marks a refusal to take the
of intersectional difference analysis. distinction between “human” and “non-
human” for granted, and to found analysis
on this presumably fixed and inherent
Posthuman Humanities set of categories’ (Barad 2007: 32). For
The term posthuman has come to desig- Katherine N. Hayles, the posthuman
nate a very loosely related set of recent signals both a problem and a possibility:

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FEMINIST POSTHUMANITIES 159

If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by no patience with the over-determined

posthumans who regard their bodies as notion of ‘the posthuman’, nevertheless
fashion accessories rather than the finds the term ‘useful’ for ‘tracking scholarly
ground of being, my dream is a version of conversations’ on the changing relation-
the posthuman that embraces the possi- ships between the human and non-human,
bilities of information technologies culture and nature, technology and the
without being seduced by fantasies of body, and Other and Self.
unlimited power and disembodied The prefix ‘post-’ here does not signal
immortality, that recognizes and cele- any kind of end, but rather the inclusion
brates finitude as a condition of human
of the humanities in a perhaps counter-
being, and that understands human life is
intuitive movement away from the con-
embedded in a material world of great
ventional comfort zones of human-centred
complexity, one on which we depend for
our continued survival.
research at large. It questions and troubles
1999: 5 human exceptionalism (Tsing 2011) and
other normative forms of chauvinisms. As
From early work on the cyborg (Haraway such, posthumanities, like the nomadic
1991) to more recent work on agential transversality of feminist analyses (Braidotti
realism (Barad 2003; 2007), the posthu- 1994), may well translate and mutate into
man has proven to be productive for an several bodies of thought across disciplines,
ontological politics of feminist and critical while benefiting from, and contributing to,
theory, as exhibited by Rosi Braidotti the analytical approaches developed within
(2013). the humanities. From situated knowledge
(Haraway 1988), to embodied and embed-
ded starting points, to the multivalent
Posthumanities as Embedded and corporealities (Grosz 1994) that make or
Embodied Knowledges of Worlds-in- break the world, these approaches make for
rich analyses.
the-making Strange encounters are key to this
Posthumanities, a slightly different yet endeavour, as is a willingness to expose
related term, stands then as the operation- oneself to alienation. Nothing remains
alization of such more-than-human schol- natural or given, yet all is worldly and
arship (Whatmore 2002, 2012; Wolfe processual. Feminist posthumanities can
2010): posthumanities work recognizes contribute an oppositional conscious-
the role of the non-human for the human ness – a double vision on renaturalization
of the humanities. The book series and denaturalization – as well as post-
‘Posthumanities’, inaugurated and edited conventional community-building (with
by cultural and animal studies scholar scientists, environmentalists and animal
Cary Wolfe, defines itself as situated at a and body activists). It provides critical and
crossroads. Instead of ‘reproducing estab- creative re-toolings of the human sciences
lished forms and methods of disciplinary from their starting points in the embodied
knowledge, posthumanists confront how and embedded worldliness of knowledge.
changes in society and culture require Respectful conversations across borders,
that scholars rethink what they do – processes of ‘rooting and shifting’ (Yuval-
theoretically, methodologically, and ethic- Davis 2012) are what might ensue at such
ally’ (Minnesota University Press 2017). crossroads. Feminist posthumanities is but
Similarly, Donna Haraway (2008), who has one possible name for such encounters, as

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
160 FOOD

they reject both extreme culturalism other bodies, but rather on resisting
and naturalism, in the transdisciplinary cultural practices of human supremacy.
borderlands of the humanities today. The posthuman eater need not await some
technological tomorrow, as that post-
See also Postdisciplinarity; Posthuman
human possibility has always been here,
Critical Theory; Neo/New Materialism;
wherever humans, particularly dominant
Gaga Feminism.
humans, have recognized themselves as
food too.
Cecilia Åsberg
In a passage lauded by ecocritics for
describing a ‘transhuman ethic’ (Schalow
2006: 112), Martin Heidegger’s 1946 ‘Letter
FOOD on “Humanism” ’ declares that ‘Man is not
the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of
Technological improvements in food being’ (1998: 260). But to be a shepherd is
science open one route to address the to be singular and heroic among a crowd,
possibilities of ‘posthuman’ eating. The the fortunate, often witless recipients of
science fiction cliché of the meal in a pill our protection; and to be a literal shepherd
offers the hope of nutrition without the means not just protecting a flock, but living
bestial messiness of foraging on and then off wool and, at last, mutton. Heidegger’s
excreting great masses of stuff, and without metaphor, even if it inspires charitable
equally bestial gustatory delights; Adam attention to suffering herbivores, has not
Roberts’ 2011 novel By Light Alone gone far enough. ‘Man is the universal
imagines humans spliced with a photosyn- parasite,’ observes Michel Serres ([1980]
thetic gene, freeing eating from its reliance 1982: 24); ‘all the footprints point towards
on the exploitations of land or labour: the lion’s den’ (ibid.: 26). They lead this way,
economic collapse follows, while oral however, only within the fantasy of human
eating becomes a pleasure, even a perver- mastery, in which we are only the eaters,
sion, for the remaining wealthy elite; and and never the meal.
laboratory-produced flesh – a real possi- By emending Heidegger’s maxim to read
bility in the next several decades – might ‘man is the fodder of beings’, we recognize
allow for carnivorous meals liberated both that however much we believe ourselves to
of the cruelty of slaughter, whether indus- exist within the clearing we make for being,
trialized or ‘humane’, and of the associated we are also material things, and therefore
steakhouse fantasies of masculine mastery subject to the uses of others. The authentic
over life and death (Ferdman 2015). (post)human condition must recognize our
All of this suggests, however, that a inescapable material presence amid other
truly posthuman turn in food must await material things. Increasing attention to the
disruptive technological interventions into human microbiome – the mites that live
the practices of eating and food produc- exclusively on humans, the intestinal
tion. Meanwhile, the human remains, that bacteria necessarily for our digestion
species that habitually believes itself to be (Bennett 2010: 112; Yong 2015) – bears
the one life meant properly to be just an witness to a growing awareness that every
end rather than means. A more thorough individual human is a microcosmic home-
posthumanism should therefore concen- land or pasture for swarms of other life,
trate not on the eating itself, not on trying indifferent to our parochial illusion of
to surmount our animal dependence on solitude or self-mastery.

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FOOD 161

Some of the most thorough conceptual- Posthuman practices must counter the
izations of the materiality of human bodies idea of the ‘uneaten eater’ by requiring a
appear long before these modern micro- recognition of the shared immanence of at
scopic insights, in the death poetry of least our bodies and their enabling, uneven
medieval Christian Europe, which revelled interdependencies. A posthuman ethics of
in the decomposition, and hence the edi- food would replace the concept of the ‘food
bility, of human bodies. A work like the pyramid’ with a ‘food chain’ or, better yet, a
fifteenth-century ‘Disputation between the food web. This would not aim to render us
Body and Worms’, for example, pictures a as ethically irrelevant as many of us tend to
crowd of worms insisting to a complaining assume our food to be, but would rather
corpse that she has always been food for dispel the interwoven illusions of innocent
others: bedbugs, lice, and now, in the grave, eating, material independence and personal
maggots. It is not accidental that this poem, transcendence. Patterns of consumption
preserved in a document produced by an are never one-to-one (as with a chain), as
unusually severe male monastery, makes anything that continually relies on the
its beleaguered corpse a once beautiful, consumption of a host of others, and is
wealthy woman. Its celibate male readers subject in turn to other, uncountable
would be led to recognize their own edibil- appetites. Nor can eating, enacted as it is
ity, while simultaneously delighting in the amid the continual flux of beings, ever be a
humiliation of a fleshy vanity that they closed loop. Eating is open-ended.
disdained as particularly feminine. And Several contemporary artistic practices
they themselves imagined that they would centre on fostering this recognition. Jae
be resurrected into perfected, unchanging Rhim Lee’s Infinity Burial Suit is crocheted
bodies, freed of the necessity of eating or with a rhizomatic pattern infused with
the humiliations of excretion. Left behind mushroom spores, that when combined
is the pullulating body of this woman, like with mineral and fungal reagents both
so many other disdained bodies, treated as helps the body decompose and captures
food. the environmental toxins that we ingest
This poem is evidence that only a few while alive (‘The Infinity Burial’). Elaine
humans have tended to be granted the Tin Nyo is currently engaged in a ‘Little
full protections of human mastery. The Piggy’ project: she is raising five piglets,
Christians of late medieval England told whose lives will end in an abattoir,
stories about the descent of Jews from pigs, whereupon Tin Nyo will render them into
one of the few domestic animals raised sausage. She has paired this project with
only for meat; crusade fictions imagined one she plans to realize decades from now,
captured Muslim soldiers butchered and when she meets her own (natural) death,
fed either to each other or to their captors; by having herself also transformed into
eighteenth-century accounts of maritime sausage (Moy 2014). A still more challen-
cannibalism attest that white sailors were ging posthuman food practice, neither
rarely the first sacrificed to stave off their awaiting death nor relying on directly
shipmates’ starvation; and what often killing animals, is recorded in Alex Branch’s
distinguishes the heroes of post-collapse 2011 video Nothing Left to Take Away.
fiction like The Road or World War Z from Branch stands on a parking lot hillock of
the swarms of eaters and eaten is their snow, amid a swarm of seagulls, feeding
being, with few exceptions, well-armed, them bread, until, empty handed, she
able-bodied white men. collapses to let the gulls peck frantically

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
162 FORESTS

and angrily at the food that remains: this is Multispecies; Postmedieval; Trans-
her helmet, which Branch has fashioned corporeality; Urbanibalism.
from bread. Branch has not evened out the
distinction between herself and the gulls: Karl Steel
she is the artist, this is her work, and her
gift to them is also a cultural practice for
herself; she has not returned the world to a
presumptive ‘balance’: after all, the gulls FORESTS
fight with one another, and bread is the
paradigmatic food of settled agriculture Forests occupy a singular role in the
and its inequities; and to shoot the film, she history of Western thought, figuring as
had first to accustom the gulls to her pres- the territory – material and imagined;
ence: this is therefore a practice of mutual concrete, symbolic and metaphysical –
domestication, which requires taking a that lies outside the borders of the social
body from one home and training it for contract, the space of the civic and the
another. This practice is one of negotiation, realms of reason. Forests demarcate a
dependency, shared exposure and danger. threshold – as much environmental as
Food is the substance par excellence of political and legal, epistemic and ontolo-
nostalgic attachment to the maternal or gical – against which civilization is defined,
even grand-maternal, the homeland, the being considered both its primeval pre-
‘pure’, ‘authentic’ and ‘hand-crafted’. In condition and its antithesis or negation. In
these forms, food functions as a material- the Western imagination, the space of the
ized form of fantasies of innocence and social par excellence – and by extension of
belonging and the irresponsibility of being culture, politics, law and history – is the
taken care of. Posthuman materialisms, in city, and the city stands to the forest in a
their frequent dedication to disrupting relation of fundamental opposition.1
notions of ontological fixedness, some- The myth of the foundation of Rome
times forget that anything that exists, tells that the city was erected in a clearing
whatever its entanglements with others, carved in a dense forest. The burning and
still has or is had by that one thing that cutting of trees was the first and decisive
cannot be shared, its own end, whether we inscription of history in the landscape, the
call this end a disruption, a dispersal or a inaugural act in the construction of human
death. A posthuman awareness of eating institutions. At the margins of the city and
recognizes it as a practice of bodily and its rural states, the undomesticated forest
hence ontological porosity; it knows that drew the borders of the res publica, setting
eating is never innocent, always a death the limits of Rome’s jurisdiction beyond
practice, always an unequal exchange which land was res nullius or terra nullius,
between mortal bodies, always a negoti- ‘belonging to no one’, ‘nobody’s land’. At the
ation between bodies more or less fitted for edges of empire, where the forest loomed
each other, and that being a companion – beyond the horizon, there existed the state-
as with Branch and the gulls – can some- less, lawless, unruly territory of barbarian
times require offering up what one believes tribes.
to be one’s own body to another. Within the social and spatial order of
medieval feudalism and Christianity in
See also Animal; Art; Ecomaterialism; Europe, with its networks of dispersed,
Ethereal Scent; Feminist Posthumanities; walled city-enclaves, forests were considered

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
FORESTS 163

Anthropogenic sculpted landscapes of raised fields punctuate the flooded tropical savannahs
of the northern Amazon basin. Nearly invisible from the ground, these large clusters of cultivation
(c. 1,000 years BP) were uncovered through the infra-red ‘photographic-archaeologies’ produced by
archaeologist Stéphen Rostain in the 1980s.

as the ‘outside’. Wooded lands configured a by reason, forests were seen as landscapes
dark, wild zone beyond the city’s enclosure opposed to the human and the social by
that was inhabited by all sorts of outcasts virtue of the scientific objectification of
and outlaws: fugitives and persecuted, mad nature. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
and lepers, the fallen and the beasts. In centuries, at a moment when deforestation
theological terms, forests were the realm reached vast extensions of the European
of anarchy, shadows and the inhuman, continent, forests started to be considered
the frontier space of the ordained social- under utilitarian perspectives, framed as a
religious world of the city. Modernity, natural resource to be rationally domestic-
whether in the humanist tradition of the ated and subjected by human knowledge
Renascence or in the Enlightened post- and power. Whereas the geometric urban
Cartesian manifestation, perpetuated this designs of planned towns represented the
lineage of thought but at the same time intro- exemplary spatial manifestation of the
duced a radically different paradigm. As exercise of reason – ‘those well-ordered
the human species took centre stage in the towns that an engineer lays out on a vacant
Western imagination and the place of myth- plane as it suits his fancy’, as Descartes
ology and theist philosophy was occupied wrote (Discourse on Method, Part I, 1637)

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
164 FORESTS

– forests represented the space of random- urban complexes in the forest landscape,
ness, arbitrariness and irrationality. both in the ancient past, as archaeological
During colonial modernity the image of evidence, and in the modern present,
the forest as a natural, pre-civilizational as long-lasting architectural structures.
space was recast anew by the concept of Constrained by the insurmountable forces
‘state of nature’ in political and moral philo- of the tropical forest environment, so the
sophy. The battlefield of Hobbes’ war of all theory went, ‘primitive’ societies did not
against all was a densely forested landscape, develop the technological means to alter the
more precisely the tropical forests of the land in any meaningful way.
New World as they were imagined by early Recent archaeological findings are radic-
colonial accounts, where ‘savages . . . have ally transforming this image of Amazonia
no government at all and live at this day in and completely reconfiguring the ways by
that brutish manner’ (Leviathan – Chapter which both the nature and the history of the
XIII : ‘Of the Natural Condition of Mankind forest are interpreted. Archaeologists and
as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery’). ethnobotanists are revealing the existence of
Rousseau’s noble savage also dwelled in a large and complex pre-Colombian civiliza-
primeval landscape covered by ‘immense tions spread throughout the Amazon basin
woods’, but idyllic and peaceful, ‘laying which employed advanced landscape
himself down to sleep at the foot of the management techniques. The evidence tells
same tree that afforded him his meal’ us that not only the modes of inhabitation
(Discourse on the Origin and Basis of of native peoples leave a clear ‘architectural
Inequality Among Men). By the nineteenth trace’ in the landscape, but also that they
century, this imaginary was entangled with play a remarkable function in shaping the
the orientalist/occidentalist geographies of vegetative associations and species contents
colonialism and modern scientific theories of the forest. The past and the present of the
of social evolution and racial inferiority. most biodiverse territory on Earth is as rich
Through the hands of white explorers, colo- in nature as in culture: the forests of
nial administrators, naturalists and ethno- Amazonia are to a great extent an ‘urban
graphers, forests – especially tropical forests heritage’ of indigenous societies.
– became the quintessential representation This new archaeological, forensic image
of the natural realm, the Earth’s remaining of Amazonia unsettles the colonial
pristine environments where society was in perspective of Western imagination, to
its infancy and humans remained in a whom the forest represented the antithesis
primitive, animal-like condition. of the space of civilization, a resource of
Amazonia, the world’s greatest tropical radical alterity against which the city was
forest, became one of the most important defined. The radical other that the forest
symbolic and epistemic spaces through presents is not a completely natural land-
which the reasoning behind this image of scape, the absolute negation to the cultur-
nature and society, and the power structures ally saturated civic-political space of the
it sustained, were forged and legitimized. In urban. It is an altogether different form of
the tradition of Western imagination, the urbanity itself that escapes the spatial and
nature of Amazonia is as much luxurious as epistemic geometries of colonial modern
inhospitable, refractory to civilization and reason and imaginaries. Instead of seeing
nearly unmodified by social designs. One of the forest as an environment lacking the
the central arguments supporting this view city, it is the very concept of the city that
was the apparent inexistence of indigenous has to be widened and transformed to

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
FORESTS 165

Forests 1. Copyright Stéphen Rostain

Forests 2. Copyright Stéphen Rostain

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
166 FORESTS

incorporate the constructed, political Many societies indigenous to Amazonia

nature of the forest. From that perspective, do not only recognize this urban nature of
the origins of the polis – the space of the the forest, as for example by identifying
political – is not located on the ontological areas of dense ‘natural’ forests as anthropo-
cleavage between city and forest, nature genic landscapes, or by attributing cultural
and culture, but in the constitution of an values to elements such as streams and
expanded political arena across these trees, and thus codifying the natural envir-
borders. The city’s relation figure-ground is onment in an analogous form to the ways
subverted. Instead of the empty canvas Western societies treat buildings and
upon which history was drawn, nature monuments. They also extend the boundar-
emerges in the foreground as the picture ies of this forest-polis beyond the human.
itself, the intentional creation of societies Forests and rivers are populated by what the
and not merely their support. The founda- Sarayaku people call llaktas – ‘villages’ and
tions of the city do not rest on the act of ‘towns’. In contrast to Western cosmology,
clearing the forest, but on the practice of where the social is restricted to the domain
its cultivation. Another image of the city of the human species, in Amerindian
is rendered visible, one that initially we thought the space between humans and
might find hard to recognize because for non-humans, peoples and nature, is from
too long we have been confined within the outset a socialized space.
the epistemic and imaginary walls of the ‘What we call the environment is for
Western city. them a society of societies, an interna-

Forests 3. Copyright Stéphen Rostain

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
FOUR ELEMENTS 167

tional arena, a cosmopoliteia,’ philosopher dynamic and productive device that leads
Debora Danowski and anthropologist thought to new places and may even
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro write (2014). assist in the construction of a new reality.
This conception of the forest as a cosmo- The diagram’s creativity is filtered by
politeia implies that every being that lives constraints. It works, it forces things
in the forest – trees, jaguars and peoples – together; but not without some lines to
are city-dwellers, that is, they are ‘citizens’ guide its unfurling. The diagram in addi-
within an enlarged political space to whom tion does not project the idea that the
rights should be attributed. The necessary elements are natural; they may be artificial
reconfiguration of the social towards a or a mixture of both. The diagram pilots a
more horizontal and less destructive rela- forward-looking trajectory in the form of
tionality between humans and nature an experiment with the new fundamental
passes through the reconceptualization of elements of our time.
the polis as forest, requiring a radical shift Diagramming the four elements utilizes
in perspective and an exercise in decolon- the principal alignments of ancient thought:
ization of thought and gaze. The nature of Anaximenes’ AIR ; Aristotle’s EARTH ;
nature is social, and therefore political. In Heraclitus’ FIRE ; Thales’ WATER , and
the context of the post-climate-change the basic oppositions between hot/cold
world order, this forest-polis calls for the and wet/dry. In terms of contemporary
constitution of an universalist, multi- elemental theory, I draw upon philosopher
species social contract beyond the human. Reza Negarestani (2008), who offers an
analysis of the geo-mythic foundation of
See also Geomythologies; Postglacial;
the Middle East as a ‘dust plateau’ in the
General Ecology; Green/Environmental
form of dust particles and fluxes and how
Humanities; Rewilding.
they mix according to a revised version of
the diagram. Negarestani’s original redraw-
Note ing of the diagram expresses a trajectory
1. The brief ‘archaeology’ of the role of that is influenced by the combination of
forests in Western thought presented here three elements with various kinds of ques-
is drawn from Robert Pogue Harrison, tionable wetnesses. The ancient desire of
Forests: The Shadow of Civilization the dry for the wet, to be rehydrated and
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, settled, is to render dusty air, earth and fire,
1992). and to connect these with moisturizing
alternatives to water; for example, oil.
Paulo Tavares New cosmic dynamics are also investig-
Images by archaeologist ated through flammable waters, perverse
Stéphen Rostain wetnesses that permit lakes and rivers to
burst into flames. The key example is that
methane makes the tap water supply flam-
FOUR ELEMENTS mable as a likely result of leaks or gas
migration from hydraulic fracturing. Such
The ancient metaphysical diagram of the threats to groundwater integrity, exacer-
four basic roots or elements, earth–air– bated by fracking fluids, forge a burnable,
fire–water, is closely associated with the explosive wetness that bubbles in the water
fragments of Empedocles, as well as the and flows around it. According to the rules
explications of Aristotle. A diagram is a of direct transformation discovered by

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
168 FOUR ELEMENTS

Aristotle, water cannot be directly trans- Congolese Army and a rebel militia of
formed into fire; the rule governing direct displaced Rwanda militiamen, as well as the
transformation requires adjacency around interception of raw materials in nearby
the triangle. As Fire and Water are not rebel-controlled villages, illustrates the shift-
adjacent, but opposed, they lack a so-called ing ground within and beyond borders.
common quality. Hence, an indirect trans- The question that philosopher Peter
formation may take place by means of the Sloterdijk poses is whether and under which
introduction of a linking element, namely conditions a basic element like air can itself
Air, which in this case is methane, an become ‘the war theatre’: a weapon and a
odourless and colourless gas, which is also battlefield (2009b). Atmoterror in the form
combustible and commonly used as a fuel. of a ‘dark meteorology’ consisting of lethal
A number of NGOs have disseminated clouds and deadly precipitation developed
the phrase ‘blood diamonds’ within a originally on the gas fronts of the First
growing complex of contested minerals. World War that necessitated a combination
Profits from diamond mining in Africa, of environmental and design consciousness.
specifically Angola, Congo and Sierra Leone, To make the open air lethal is to make it
have funded weapons, armies and civil wars. unbreathable within a quasi-contained
International certification regimes have theatre, according to the balance between
been created to prevent blood diamonds factors such as diffusion, wind prediction,
from entering the global diamond market, air pressure and humidity. The ground
and every legitimate diamond is said to be campaign chemical attack gives way after
traceable to its place of origin. But this was the First World War to the aero-chemical
precisely the problem that the supply of war in Morocco (Rif War, 1922–7), and to
blood itself faced in the 1980s and early the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and
1990s before the expansion of screening Nagasaki. As a condition of existence, the
programmes in light of the devastating atmosphere supporting collective lifeworlds
impact of HIV /AIDS on the haemophiliac is erased by poisoning.
community. Recently new technologies for Before Anaximenes air was murky,
screening, with greater haemovigilance, foggy and dark (perhaps not fully the fog
have been introduced, and a move to target- of war but a darker shade of mist) until it
ing donors who are low-risk, voluntary and was distilled and clarified in a cosmogenic
unpaid is under way. Blood can be tracked distillation-unification. The principles of
from donor to patient. Just like the move- rarefaction or thinning (fire) and conden-
ment of ethical diamonds through the sation (wind–cloud–water–earth) informed
supply chain. Not all such flows – blood or Anaximenes’ theory of air. Unable to
conflict minerals – enjoy this level of surveil- dissipate the long-standing mist of war
lance. Control over mines in some countries that lingers in it, air is again darkened by
remains highly fluid, including the situation atmoterror, air war, gas attack – chlorine,
with coltan quarrying on the Congo/ phosgene, mustard gas – and the long-
Rwanda border. Coltan is the short form for term lethality of radioactive particles
a mineral called Columbite–Tantalite, which emitted by nuclear weapons. The darker
contains niobium and tantalum used in the skies the more intense the conflict.
capacitors for high-tech devices like mobile Even pollution – like the heavy smog that
phones and electronic circuitry in general. engulfs Beijing on many days – or the
The struggle for control of the mine on threat of airborne viruses like SARS can
the Congo/Rwanda border between the bring out the HEPA filtered breathing

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
FOUR ELEMENTS 169

masks, a reminder of the gas masks of the which contributes to the greenhouse gas
First World War. effect – and by means of especially commu-
Based on the analyses presented here it nicative matters, like microscopic frag-
is possible to repopulate the diagram with ments of plastics that perfuse the oceans
new fundamental elements: EARTH : dust; and get into the food chain, and constitute
WATER : blood; AIR : lethal fogs; FIRE : fine dusts that affect respiration, settling
flammables. Wrapped around these among the fogs, gases and lethal clouds.
elements is the planetary phylum, a great Today, condensed air is a toxic dust of
tellurian cable bunch with its own frayed oil-based materials. The example of
products: EARTH : electronics; WATER : blood as a general liquid of exchange
liquidities like water bottled in plastic, extends beyond the human to the moun-
which throws forward diagrammatic tain gorillas butchered for bushmeat to
intensities in the explosion of plastic feed the armies and labourers engaged in
debris; AIR : gases (greenhouse); and ‘freelance’ mining operations. This is
FIRE : smouldering car tyres, slashed rain- neither an environmental nor an aesthetics
forests and seasonal wildfires in the great of the elements, but an unruly diagram of
northern forests. However, as we have seen, abominable combinations and post-
the new elements combine both in existing natural forces and substances.
directly – blood mixed with dust in the
See also Anthropocene; Earth; Geo-
extraction of conflict minerals and oil
mythologies; Terrestrial.
fields, or methane, a flammable unnatur-
ally mingled with the water supply, and Gary Genosko

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
170 GAGA FEMINISM

G
GAGA FEMINISM but will change according to the game;
wild also has meant barbaric, savage or
My book Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and that which the civilized opposes. It refers
the End of Normal (Halberstam 2012) has often to a so-called state of nature, whatever
made the claim that the ‘existing condi- that may be, and has recently been used to
tions’ under which the building blocks of refer to the practice of going off the grid or
human identity were imagined and cemen- behaving in a chaotic or anarchic manner.
ted in the last century – what we call Wild, in a modern sense, has been used
gender, sex, race and class – have changed to signify that which lies outside of civiliza-
so radically that new life can be glimpsed tion or modernity. It has a racialized valence
ahead. Our task is not to shape this new life and a sense of anachronism. It is a tricky
into identifiable and comforting forms, not word to use but it is a concept that we cannot
to ‘know’ this ‘newness’ in advance, but live without if we are to combat the conven-
rather, as Nietzsche suggests, to impose tional modes of rule that have synched
upon the categorical chaos and crisis that social norms to economic practices and
surrounds us only ‘as much regularity and have created a world order where every
form as our practical needs require’ form of disturbance is quickly folded back
(Nietzsche 1968: 278). In new work, I build into quiet; every ripple is quickly smoothed
upon ideas from Gaga Feminism and begin over; every instance of eruption has been
to develop a theory of queer anarchism tamped down and turned into new evidence
from a new companion project titled The of the rightness of the status quo.
Wild, in order to weave a story about emer- For my project, ‘the wild’ is not a place,
gent and posthuman forms of life through person or practice; it is a potential in the
the glimpses we catch of it in popular sense that José E. Muñoz describes the
culture and subcultural production. queerness of potentiality: ‘Queerness is
The wild as a concept has lost its essentially about the rejection of a here
meaning in our age of post-civilization and now and an insistence on potentiality
development, post-industrial production or concrete possibility for another world’
and post-identity being. As a word, wild (Muñoz 2009: 1). The wild is not what
comes from old or middle English and limns the present, what lies outside of the
refers to undomesticated modes of life, bounded here and now, it is something that
disorderly behaviour, the lack of moral we already conjure from within the here
restraint, excess in all kinds of forms, the and now – we constantly call it into being.
erratic, the untamed, the savage. When Wildness does not exist separately from
referring to nature, the wild tends to mean our desire to break loose from a set of
unaltered by human contact: in card constraints or a determined understand-
games, a ‘wild card’ lacks an intrinsic value ing of what is appropriate, good and right.

170
GAGA FEMINISM 171

My use of this word, a word laden with deny leaps that have been engineered by
meaning, saturated with sense drawn from feminism, we should explore carefully the
colonial and ecological contexts, repres- new idioms of glamour and femininity as
ents an attempt to stretch our critical they appear within the performance-scape
vocabularies in different directions – away, of stars like Lady Gaga. Like Poly Styrene,
for example, from the used-up languages Grace Jones and Pauline Black before her,
of difference, alterity, subversion and Lady Gaga creates alter egos, she syncs pop
resistance and towards languages of unpre- and punk sounds and she mixes dance
dictability, breakdown, disorder and shift- stutters into sonic hiccups to create a spas-
ing forms of signification. modic femininity that lurches and jerks
In Gaga Feminism, I track the action of into action. She also confuses the boundar-
‘going gaga’ as something that Lady Gaga ies between internal and external, both
channels but that is not particular to her. highlighting the ways in which girls are
Instead, I show how Lady Gaga’s global forced to see themselves always as ‘image’
visibility hides a much longer history of and contesting that image by revelling in a
wild and often punk female performances. radical, Warholesque superficiality. Going
The name Gaga, supposedly taken from gaga is not simply being Gaga, it is a
the Queen song ‘Radio Ga Ga’, signifies the journey to the edge of sense – Grace Jones
creative mayhem that has spread through goes gaga in her cover version of Joy
our sex gender systems and Lady Gaga Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control’ and Poly
herself occupies several sites of radical Styrene went gaga on ‘Oh Bondage Up
ambivalence and ambiguity and embodies Yours!’ While masculine versions of going
these shifts in the meaning of desire. For gaga take on heroic proportions in rock
example, when rumours flew around the history (guitar smashing, stripping on
internet about Lady Gaga being inter- stage, crowd surfing), feminine ecstatic
sexed, she refused to deny the rumours performance is read quickly as sexual
about her own genital ambiguity in a excess, wardrobe malfunction or psycholo-
phobic way. Gaga has said instead in an gical breakdown. In Lady Gaga, however,
inter view with Barbara Walters: ‘I portray feminine performative excess finds a new
myself in a very androgynous way and I performance horizon and hovers between
love androgyny.’1 Like David Bowie, Lady madness, mayhem and the dark side.
Gaga cruises on her appeal to male and While many readers of Gaga Feminism
female fans, and like Grace Jones, she read the book as a kind of homage to Lady
alters the meaning of feminine iconicity Gaga herself, the figure of Lady Gaga was
through refusing to operate within the representative rather than authorial – in
rules of popular consumption that would other words, her particular synchroniza-
freeze her through complex processes of tion of performance, sensationalism, hyper
fetishization. and hypo femininities, affect, stylization
The ambiguity that surrounds and even and animatedness falls within the new and
defines Lady Gaga – genital, musical, shifting boundaries of identity and embod-
aesthetic – allows her to both question and iment within what we call posthumanism.
revel in spectacular forms of femininity. It I was not, therefore, trying to track who
also signifies as a vivid example of posthu- Lady Gaga was and what her performative
man modes of inhabiting the body. In a legacy might be so much as account for the
post-feminist age when young women particular shape within which popularity
both benefit from and simultaneously and newness fuse.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
172 GENERAL ECOLOGY*

Posthumanism names a configuration ecology, hardly any area not open to an

of flesh, matrix, drugs and pleasure, a ecological reformulation (Hörl 2013a).
matrix that has also been named the ‘phar- This proliferation of the ecological is
macopornagraphic’ by Paul Preciado accompanied by a striking shift in the
(2013); it frames the various understand- meaning of ‘ecology’. The concept is
ings of self, body and otherness that make increasingly denaturalized: whereas previ-
up and undo identity in an era of fast and ously it was charged, politically and
hot cultures, environmental ruin and the semantically, with nature, it now practic-
disintegration of the social. Gaga Feminism ally calls for an ‘ecology without nature’
proposed that we have not paid close (Morton 2010b) and begins to occupy
enough attention to the morphing of sex even fields that are definitively unnatural
and gender protocols within the last two (Fuller 2005; Goddard and Parikka 2011).
decades and it provides a quick account of In losing this dimension, the concept also
these shifts and changes in relation to sheds a constrictive set of immunopolitical
landmark shifts like the embrace connotations along with its ties to dogmas
of gay marriage, the new visibility of the of proximity, immediacy, the unscathed,
transgender body and the move away the proper, the house (Derrida 1998;
from the medicalization of identity and Neyrat 2008), to dogmas, in short, that
towards its mediatization. Arguing that we have haunted and reterritorialized the
are in a state of almost constant flux, Gaga concept of ecology (due to its origin in the
Feminism argues for an intensification of Greek oikos and as its problematic logo-
confusion and chaos and the embrace centric heritage) ever since its genesis in
of social, political and representational the nineteenth century. This historical-
anarchy on the way to the next incarnation semantic reorientation begins to distance
of the queer, the strange and the beautiful. ecology from what Bataille called restric-
ted economy (Bataille 1988) and to gener-
See also Feminist Posthumanities;
alize it. Ecology as such becomes a central
Postdisciplinarity; Xenofeminism.
cipher of the great transformation in the
politics of concepts and theory that marks
Note our posthuman challenge: the general
1. See online interview for ABC News, 22 ecologization of thinking and of theory.
January 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/ Yet what exactly is the conceptual core
Entertainment/video/lady- gaga-love- of this movement of ecologization? What
androgyny–9640579 [accessed 14 April set of problems do general ecologization
2017]. and the emergence of a new ecological
image of thought – for that is what we are
Jack Halberstam dealing with – react to?
First of all, the generalization of ecology
and the formation of the new ecological
paradigm, which cut across all modes of
GENERAL ECOLOGY* existence and domains of being, refer to a
twofold development in the politics of
Our age is characterized by the rise of a difference that is of particular significance
new historical semantics: the rise of in the current situation. They express a
ecology. There hardly seems to be an area transvaluation of the relationship between
that cannot be considered the object of an technics and nature and, at the same time,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
GENERAL ECOLOGY* 173

between technics and sense. They thereby all modes of existence and domains of
take into account the great break in the being in the twentieth century, the dawn
history of rationality and sense implemen- of a new age of technicity marked on all
ted by our entry into the technological levels, from the micro- to the macrolevel,
condition (Hörl 2015). Finally – and this is by the emergence of machinic assemblages
what the movement at issue here aims for (Simondon 1989) in which technology
– general ecologization is encoded in terms becomes the previously unthinkable
of power. It is exacted by the new apparatus milieu of all being: they radically demon-
of capture that is Environmenality strate that there are no pre-given purposes
(Foucault 2008; Massumi 2009), in which of any kind. Technology even turns out to
power is environmentalized by media tech- be the absolute agent of this absence
nologies that are based on distribution (Nancy 2003, 2013; Hörl 2013b). Nature,
infrastructures and begins to operate too, now begins to be subject to technics.
ecologically.1 Yet at the same time, the What emerges is an essential technicity of
generalization of ecology in its most radical nature, a technological or, more precisely,
forms, which fundamentally reconceptual- a cybernetic state of nature (Moscovici
ize thinking and theory, also represents a 1968). Geologists even observe the genesis
critique of this new apparatus of capture. of a technosphere in addition to the exist-
While from the perspective of the ing ones ranging from the litho- to the
history of concepts and discourses the atmosphere (Haff 2014). In the entry into
concept of ecology has primarily and for the technological condition, in which this
the longest time designated the other side great historical mutation is concentrated,
of technics and of mind, it has now begun the concept of ecology is pluralized and
to switch sides within the nature/technics disseminated; it is defined and consoli-
divide. It undoes the sutures that have dated in the concept of generalized ecolo-
bound it to nature. And it is doing so, gies (Guattari 2008, 2013; Gibson 1986;
crucially, in parallel with or perhaps even Bateson 1972); it soon traverses all
as a result of a fundamental unsettling of domains of existence under its spell; it
this very difference, which, in the twentieth finally transforms into technoecology. It
century, is no longer comprehended in the becomes the guiding concept of the deter-
time-honoured Aristotelian way from the ritorialization of the relationship between
side of nature. The supplementation of nature and technics that characterizes the
nature by technics no longer seems to be present age.
inscribed in nature, and its guarantee of Thereby technoecological rationality
purposes no longer seems to be circum- succeeds on instrumental rationality. A
scribed and regulated by nature. In its conception of relations as radically origin-
entirety, the instrumental logic of means ary and constitutive of relata as such
and purpose that technology was to replaces a conception in which relationality
embody, the long-lived teleological ration- was thought to manifest itself most purely
ality that seemed to manifest the sense of in relations of means and purpose and
technics, indeed, the entire western order of causes and effects, one in which relations
of teleology – let’s call it ontoteleology – were thought as derivative, secondary,
has been shaken to the core, unsettled sometimes even minor figures over against
precisely by the evolution of technics itself. the entities that preceded them, a con-
The becoming-technological of technics ception, in other words, in which the
under way in the total cyberneticization of sense of relationality was schematized in a

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174 GENERAL ECOLOGY*

classical instrumental way. This radical- of sense as a whole: there is a technological

relational onto-epistemological renewal shifting of the sense of sense itself. In line
under the auspices of a general ecology with the technological destruction of
critical of all anthropocentrism – para- western ontoteleology, the mode of given-
digmatically understood as machinic ness of sense as such changes; there is no
collaboration of human and nonhuman sense given or to be given, no sense sedi-
agents and forces, as great cooperation, mented or to be restituted. Against this
primary entanglement, originary being- background, the cult of sign and meaning,
with, inevitable participation, hetero- and the primordiality of human language,
symbiogenesis, as sympoiesis of living and and the despotism of the signifier, which
non-living entities and forces – constitutes characterized the traditional logocentric
the core of the fascination with non- culture of sense and were mostly borne by
modernity so central for understanding a non-technical, speaking subject that gave
our posthuman situation (Braidotti 2013). meaning, turn out to be pretechnological
At the same time and intrinsically illusions. In the age of a cyberneticization,
linked to this renewal there is a change in computerization and algorithmization
the inner economy of the difference characteristic of the technological condi-
between technics and sense. All the way tion, they are replaced by different, non-
to the twentieth century, the traditional linguistic, asignifying semiotics (software
politics of sense, culminating in Husserl’s and programming languages, algorithms,
discussion of the total destruction of sense mathematical equations, diagrams, stock-
by mathematical-technological mobiliza- market indices, etc.), which combine with
tion, was organized not just by the juxta- affective forces to form a new machino-
position of sense and technics alone. The centric regime of sense, producing effects
aspect of technics has always been subor- of subjectivation that are as much charac-
dinate to the aspect of sense and to its teristic of the cybercapitalist constitution
guardian, the sense-giving subject. Every as they are potentially capable of under-
shift of emphasis toward technics ulti- mining it (Guattari 1995, 2012; Lazzarato
mately threatened a collapse of sense. Such 2014).
an assessment, however, holds true only in Ultimately, however, this significant
the context of a very specific disposition in transvaluation in the history of sense and
the history of sense, albeit one of funda- rationality, the crossroads at which general
mental significance for the dogmatic ecology appears, is not a mere event of tech-
philosophical politics of sense: it manifests nological evolution but the expression of a
the culture of sense of meaning and repres- transformation in the history of power: the
entation, its specific technological-medial technological evolution that codetermines
condition and its most important support, these transvaluations develops along a
the alphabetized reading-writing-subject history of machines that can be deciphered
of the transcendental tradition. In contrast, as a history of control (Beniger 1986) and
we have for quite some time been living a has led to the current reconfiguration of the
shift in the culture of sense provoked by apparatus of capture. What has developed
the entry into the technological condition, from out of the process of cyberneticization
a shift from signifying sense to technoeco- since the late nineteenth century and espe-
logical sense, in which the essential medi- cially since 1950, and finally from out of the
ality and technicity of sense comes to the breakthrough of computers emigrating into
fore. This, however, transforms the concept the environment, the widespread imple-

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GEO-HYDRO-SOLAR-BIO-TECHNO-POLITICS 175

mentation of algorithmic and sensoric tions of all kinds, on an economy and

environments (Parisi 2009; Hansen 2013; mathematics of relations (Rouvroy 2013;
Munster 2013; Easterling 2014; Gabrys Zuboff 2015). The cybercapitalist organiza-
2014), is a radically distributed and distrib- tion of the web of life (Moore 2015), which
uting, one might say environmental culture articulates the cybernetic hypothesis with
of control. Interconnection with the envir- the capitalocene, is relational.
onment as a new function of media and General ecology is the name of a new
effects of Environmentalization thus image of thought. While the developments
determine twenty-first-century media in the history of rationality, sense and
(Hansen 2015). They lead to the compre- control that culminate in the turn towards
hensive implementation of the cybernetic Environmentality exact the general eco-
hypothesis of universal controllability and logization of thinking and theory, this
the regulatory ideal that comes with it, to the ecologization at the same time critically
mesh of a new technology of power that has works through this turn: it outlines (or at
begun to operate ecologically or at least least has the potential to outline) an onto-
environmentalizes itself. In this process, epistemological counterknowledge of the
even what used simply to be called ‘environ- ecological whose beginnings are clearly
ment’ is made environmental thanks to manifest today (Ingold 2000).
mediatechnological infrastructures of
See also Algorithm; Capitalocene and
control. Environmentality, which is imple-
Chthulucene; Computational Turn;
mented first and foremost by media techno-
Ecosophy; Technicity.
logies, is the contemporary form of govern-
mentality.
This, precisely, is the flipside of the pro- Notes
grammatic emergence of environmentality * The article is translated from Germen by
and its correlate, the primacy of relations in Nils F. Schott.
light of technoecological rationality. 1. Note that the term ‘Environmentality’
The radical environmental distribution of with a capital ‘E’ refers to the contem-
agency by environmental media technolo- porary mode of governmentality, as used
gies not only renders environmentality by thinkers such as Michel Foucault
visible and prioritizes it like never before. In and Brian Massumi. The term ‘environ-
Environmentality as a form of govern- mentality’ with a small ‘e’, translating
mentality, environmentality as a problem the German Umweltlichkeit, refers to a
becomes manifest in the first place. Its broader sense of the environmental and
guiding problem is the registration and especially to the concept Umweltlichkeit
control, the management and modulation as used by Heidegger in Being and Time.
of behaviour, affects, relations, intensities
and forces by means of environmental Erich Hörl
(media) technologies. The contemporary
apparatus of capture and the diagram of
power can be grasped only in ecological
registers. To a certain extent, even the emer- GEO-HYDRO-SOLAR-BIO-
gence of relationality itself is inscribed in TECHNO-POLITICS
this historical development of control: this
new form of power is based on the registra- One (Deleuzean) version of posthuman
tion, capitalization and exploitation of rela- theory entails showing the production of

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
176 GEO-HYDRO-SOLAR-BIO-TECHNO-POLITICS

multiple actual (or ‘differenciated’) forms It may seem odd at first, but from the
of human life from irreducibly differenti- geo- hydro-solar- bio-techno- polit ics
ated ‘multiplicities’, that is, networks of perspective we can claim olive oil as a key
natural, social, political and physiological factor in the genesis of Athenian demo-
processes. This analysis does not deny cracy. Olive oil is a storage form of solar
subjectivity, but embeds it in processes energy burned for light in lamps and
above, below and alongside the subject. burned for energy in human bodies. One
Here we see ‘bodies politic’ that imbricate of the tipping points in the democratiza-
the social and the somatic: the reproduc- tion process in Athens occurs when Solon
tion of social systems requires producing forbids debt slavery and debt bondage
certain types of ‘somatic bodies politic’ (Raaflaub, Ober and Wallace 2007: 59; Ste
(those whose affective-cognitive patterns Croix 1981: 137, 282) as well as all agricul-
and triggers fit the functional needs of tural exports except that of olive oil. This
the system) while those social systems or last provision stabilizes the middle class
‘civic bodies politic’ are themselves bodily of small farmers who were threatened
in the sense of directing material flows by aristocratic dominance by providing
(Protevi 2009). them with a ready cash crop (Milne 1945;
Using the ancient Athenian Empire as a Molina 1998). This stabilization of a mass
case study of geo-hydro-solar-bio-techno- olive oil export market also creates
politics, we can look above the subject to demand for work by urban artisans who
the geopolitics of circuits of food qua produce jars for olive oil and manufac-
captured solar energy, below to political tured goods for export (also arms for
physiology qua entrainment-provoked hoplites to forestall aristocratic re-
solidarity, and alongside to bio-technical conquest). A growing urban population
assemblages such as the phalanx and the needs grain importation, however, and
trireme (Protevi 2013). The choice of this protecting the import routes needs a naval
case study is useful in disabusing us of the force. In turn, what we can call the ‘military
presentist notion that only now are we egalitarianism’ thesis retains its force,
entering a posthuman age. The geo-hydro- and claims that a dependence on a naval
solar-bio-techno multiplicity behind the force pushes the regime toward urban
morphogenesis of imbricated civic and democracy, that is, to expanding the polit-
somatic bodies politic in the ancient ical base beyond that of the hoplites, for
Mediterranean world includes geological rowers are drawn from the ranks of urban
factors such as ground slopes and surface masses unable to afford hoplite gear
friction; biological factors such as type (Raaflaub et  al. 2007: 119–36; Gabrielsen
and strength of local flora and fauna; and 2001).
hydrological factors such as river currents, Now democratic rowing in the
channels and wave strengths. In addition, Athenian navy (leaving aside the question
it also includes social-technical factors of seaborne marine troops) was relatively
such as the speed capacity of warfare low intensity, at least compared to the
assemblages: the phalanx as man–spear– hand-to-hand fighting depicted in Homer,
shield assemblage; the chariot as horse– and the phalanx clashes of the classical age.
men (driver and fighter)– bow assemblage; (Actually, we should note that ‘hand-to-
and, the waterborne assemblages of rower- hand’ is a misnomer, for shield and sword/
powered warships and sailing-power spear is itself quite a bit less intense than
merchant ships. just one-on-one with hands.) Thus for

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
GEO-HYDRO-SOLAR-BIO-TECHNO-POLITICS 177

rowers there is less necessity for the high- tion from grain ingestion. Ste Croix uses
intensity training needed for noble single this to undercut ideological explanations
combat. Phalanx training was intermediate of Athenian foreign policy: ‘I have . . .
between aristocratic single combat and explained why Athens was driven by her
naval rowing; it is less intense than single unique situation, as an importer of corn
combat, because of teamwork; that is, on an altogether exceptional scale, toward
emergence. In the phalanx, you stand by a policy of “naval imperialism”, in order to
your comrades rather than surge ahead as secure her supply routes’ (1981: 293). The
did the Homeric heroes for whom staying singularities in the Athenian actualization
in line would be cowardly. of the geo-hydro-bio-political multiplicity
The discrepancy between phalanx are what get us out of ideological condem-
soldierly courage and Homeric warrior nations of a supposed Athenian ‘lust for
courage is an excellent example of the need power.’ As Ste Croix points out, rower-
to overcome essentialism: you will never powered warships had a much shorter
come up with a set of necessary and suffi- range than sail-driven merchant ships,
cient conditions to define ‘courage’, so it is which are able to capture solar energy in
much better to investigate the morphogen- form of wind power – itself generated
esis of warrior and soldierly bodies politic: from a multiplicity of temperature differ-
how are the warrior and the soldier dif- entials of land mass/sea/water currents
ferent actualizations of the virtual multi- producing wind currents (1972: 47–9; see
plicity linking political physiology and also Gomme 1933). So the Athenian
geo-hydro-solar-politics? The practice of democrats needed a network of friendly
marching and standing together is the regimes whose ports could provide food
key to the civic and somatic bodies politic and rest for the rowers of their triremes.
expressed by the phalanx. As we will see That is, to use our terminology, to replen-
in a moment, William McNeill’s Keeping ish the biological solar energy conversion
Together in Time allows us to account units of the triremes qua ‘man-driven
for this bonding in terms of collective torpedo[es]’ (Gabrielsen 2001: 73).
resonating movement provoking the Bringing the geo-hydro-solar dimensions
entrainment of asubjective physiological of the multiplicity together with bio-
processes supporting emotional attach- technical and more traditionally socio-
ment (McNeill 1995: 117). political dimensions, a recent scholarly
But before we go below the subjective article puts it this way: ‘the concept of
level to entrainment and political thalassokratia [sea-power] implies intense
physiology, we should note its comple- naval activity, primarily in order to defend
ment in the supra-subjective materialist existing bases and to acquire new ones, and
explanation of Athenian foreign policy intense naval activity, in its turn, requires
by the noted Marxist historian, G. E. M. command over enormous material and
de Ste Croix. In The Origins of the financial resources’ (Gabrielsen 2001: 74).
Peloponnesian War (1972) and again in Adopting this viewpoint allows us to
Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World understand the supra-subjective and anti-
(1981), Ste Croix points out that the geo- ideological materialism of a key passage
political key to the transition from from Ste Croix:
Athenian democracy at home to the
‘Athenian Empire’ after the Persian Wars is Athens’ whole way of life was involved;
the threshold of human energy produc- and what is so often denounced, as if it

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
178 GEOMYTHOLOGIES

were sheer greed and a lust for domina- GEOMYTHOLOGIES

tion on her part, by modern scholars
whose antipathy to Athens is sharpened With the traditional methods of know-
by promotion of democratic regimes in ledge acquisition, the natural sciences on
states under her control or influence, was the one side and the humanities on the
in reality an almost inevitable consequence other, mankind has reached a limit. The
of that way of life. indivisible concatenation of industrial
1981: 293, emphasis added metabolism, climate change, soil erosion
But we should not be content with only and the extinction of species requires a
going above the subjective; we should go new approach to the world that is governed
below it as well. McNeill’s reading of the by material interconnections from the
political consequences of entrainment- accumulation of plastic islands in the
provoked military solidarity takes us below ocean to the particularity of a speck of
the subject, complementing Ste Croix’s dust on its way from the Sahara to the
supra-subjective geo-materialism. McNeill Brazilian rainforest. A new sense of
writes, ‘the Athenian fleet developed amazement at the wonder of Planet Earth
muscular bonding among a larger propor- is required: what can we do, how can we
tion of the total population than ever know and to what extent are the two
fought in Sparta’s phalanx’ (McNeill 1995: connected? With what means, methods
117). Furthermore, ‘feelings aroused by and senses can we encounter the world of
moving together in unison undergirded our own creation?
the ideals of freedom and equality under In their essay film Medium Earth
the law . . . The muscular basis of such (2013), The Otolith Group explore the
sentiments also explains why the rights of earthquake-endangered geology of
free and equal citizens were limited to the California as well as the infrastructural
militarily active segment of the population’ unconscious of planetary capitalism.
(ibid.:118). Through pictures that appeal to the senses
In this entry we have shown a version and the voice of a medium whose body is
of posthumanism by going above, below sensitive to seismic occurrences, the film
and alongside the subject. Above to Ste listens to California’s deserts, translates
Croix’s supra-subjective geopolitics, below the writing of stones and decodes the
to McNeill’s sub-subjective entrainment- calligraphy of the earth’s crevices. Who
provoked emotional solidarity, and along- Does the Earth Think It Is? (2014) consists
side to Gabrielsen’s adjunct-subjective of redacted and scanned selections from
bio-technical assemblage (the trireme the unofficial collection of unsolicited
as ‘man-driven torpedo’). We have thus earthquake predictions sent by members
sketched the dimensions of a geo- of the public to the United States
hydro-solar-bio-techno-political multipli- Geological Survey Pasadena Field Office at
city expressed in the naval democratic California Institute of Technology,
empire of ancient Athens. Pasadena, Southern California, between
1993 and 2007.
See also Body Politic; Capitalocene and
Chthulucene; Geopolitics; Medianatures; See also Anthropocene; Art; Capitalocene
Necropolitics. and Chthulucene; Earth; Forests.

John Protevi The Otolith Group

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
GEOMYTHOLOGIES 179

The Otolith Group, Who Does the Earth Think It Is? (detail), 2014. COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
180 GEOMYTHOLOGIES

The Otolith Group, Who Does the Earth Think It Is? (detail), 2014. COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
GEOPOLITICS 181

The Otolith Group, Who Does the Earth Think It Is? (detail), 2014. COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS.

GEOPOLITICS Kant and Hegel had a nascent and occa-

sionally explicit geopolitics, its current
An entry for geopolitics in a glossary usage (perhaps now outmoded) stems
devoted to posthuman thought is simul- from trajectories that can be gleaned from
taneously paradoxical and self-evident: early Modern colonialism to the Cold War.
paradoxical in that the concepts that Kant’s intervention into this fray comes
constitute ‘geo-’ and ‘politics’ are so firmly with his ‘Essay on Perpetual Peace’. This
rooted in humanist traditions with human- treatise contains an empirical problem,
centric a prioris underpinning them that perhaps even an irresolvable paradox.
to consider them without the human Every human, Kant claims, has an equal
risks being meaningless; self-evident in right to a place on the earth’s surface
that the larger forces of environmental because we are constrained and circum-
degradation and geological time coupled scribed by its spherical shape. If the earth
with polyscaler autonomous computing contained infinite space, then such claims
and sensing systems might have already could not be made or even be an issue. But
removed the ‘geo-’ and politics from by the very act of asserting one’s natural
human agency. right to this space, Kant also argues, one
The constants in thinking geopolitics becomes an offence simply by being
remain the intimate correlations and occa- another’s neighbour. Kant’s essay on
sionally determinate relationships between perpetual peace becomes instead an essay
terrestrial space and power. Although a on perpetual agonism as the unintended
number of philosophers from Aristotle to result of striving for perpetual peace.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
182 GEOPOLITICS

Derrida argues that Kant’s natural law mobilized by the military – as well as by
found in common possession of the earth’s corporate and civic organizations – indeed
surface prohibits anyone from claiming a have the potential to result in killing at
right to a specific spot while excluding a distance, which is clearly a matter of
others from so claiming, for no one has any a subject controlling and manipulating
more natural right to a place than any objects. It is the self of mastery and control
other. So there are limits to this law. The that often fuels various tele-technological
limits of a right to a place on the earth are drives, and which constitutes the short-
the limits of spherical space, and the limits hand version of the sovereign and political
emerge as the host of institutional limits subject, or self. This self replicates on the
known as boundary, state, national, public micro-level larger formations such as
or political space. community, state, globe and a host of other
The current usage of geopolitics draws cordoned-off areas.
on a number of tele-technologies deployed The self as philosophical and political
in and through the Cold War into the concept is difficult to disentangle from the
contemporary moment for policing the subject, sovereignty, identity and a host of
earth and rendering the ‘geo-’/earth other concepts and terms that relate to a
portion of geopolitics in specific ways that specific stripe of metaphysics that Derrida
hold ramifications for thinking the polit- terms ‘logocentrism’, and Heidegger before
ical, especially as it pertains to the notion him calls ‘onto-theology’. Much of critical
of agency. These same tele-technologies theory from the 1970s to the present has
have led to the oft-invoked ‘deterritorializ- been engaged with this figure: the self
ation’ of the earth in the most blatant (though mostly as subject). Nancy, in his
reconceptualization of space, sovereignty 1979 work Ego Sum, anticipates this return
and control. Equally these tele-technolo- to the subject but as one that questions or
gies have further rendered the status of the moves beyond, perhaps out of structural
human as political subject, and indeed necessity, the metaphysical subject such as
nation as autonomous entity, in question. one finds in Derrida’s and Heidegger’s
Much of how Western thought has inter- critiques. As with the intellectual projects
preted tele-technological development – as of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno and
McLuhan, Baudrillard, Virilio and others Derrida – to name but a few of many –
have argued – depends on the understand- current conditions constitute a need to
ing of the self or subject as an agent think geopolitics without a certain kind of
enacting its will upon a world of objects self at the centre of it: a decentring that
(including other subjects). As a result, the ironically results explicitly from the self ’s
means by which we can and do imagine concerted technological attempts to
extensions of that sensing and acting self remain at the centre.
invariably fold into and influence the These tele-technological attempts have
interpretation of that self. Multi-sensory figured the earth-as-globe, which is fully
tele-technologies as they pertain to the bounded, networked and observed in real
implications for the enactment of agency time. These capacities and attributes are an
relate fundamentally to the constitution and inheritance of the Cold War, as are the
expression of the self and the many systems remote sensing systems that led to real-
in which it is embedded, formulated, time global surveillance. Obviously all of
constructed, subsumed and articulated. these have a military provenance. For
Remote sensing and tele-technologies as example, the Limited Test Ban Treaty on

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
GEOPOLITICS 183

nuclear testing signed in 1963 and the into ‘the politics of culture’. Heidegger
attendant requirement to monitor adher- brings mathematics, science, machine
ence to it through remote sensing systems technology, art, aesthetics, culture and
coincides with the emergence of the prefix metaphysics together in a penetrating view
‘geo-’ becoming synonymous with the of the legacies of twentieth-century traject-
earth as globe, as strategically networked ories that further lead to an elision of
and completely surveilled entity. The prefix human culture as a primary driving force
‘geo-’ clearly conflates earth with ground of geopolitical conceptualization.
and surface. The first issue of The Journal of The cultural geopolitics of Heidegger’s
GeoElectronics (in 1963) underscores the interpretation of modernity’s generated
moment the ‘geo-’ becomes codified as metaphysics can be charted in the capacity
primarily a techno-scientific engagement for representation to equate with experi-
with the earth. That first issue included an ence and the real, for the map to create the
introductory meditation on the changing territory and the technological means for
understanding of the prefix ‘geo-’ in rela- cartographic representation to become the
tion to tele-technological developments. tools for human ‘worlding’. Peter Sloterdijk’s
The journal is now called The Journal for expansive meditation on spheres and the
Geoscience and Remote Sensing. metaphysical lineage of the globe as
Satellites play an integral role in many human goal and achievement argues post-
large-scale remote sensing systems and Heidegger that ‘at no time, however – not
have helped craft a ‘geo-’ bereft of territory. even in the age of space travel – could the
They metonymically manifest many of the enterprise of visualizing the earth deny its
ways that modern techno-scientific culture semi-metaphysical quality. Anyone who
in the post Second World War moment wished to attempt a portrait of the whole
began to ‘world’ and shape the metaphysics earth after the downfall of heaven stood,
of the imaginary in terms of what worlds knowingly or not, in the tradition of
could and should be. In the first few para- ancient occidental metaphysical cosmo-
graphs of his essay, ‘The Age of the World graphy’ (2014: 774).
Picture’, Heidegger (2002) argues that Benjamin Bratton in The Stack: Software
modernity’s essence coalesces around a and Sovereignty (2016), contra Sloterdijk,
series of phenomena including science’s ‘develops a new model of political
most visible manifestation as machine geography and systems design for the early
technology, itself using specific forms of era of planetary-scale computation’ that
mathematics to realize its visibility and steps beyond this occidental metaphysical
power. This situation aligns modern cosmography. Bratton links infrastructure
science with modern metaphysics. Further at many material and perceptual scales to
he argues that within the very late modern- examine multi-layered structures of soft-
ity of the middle part of the twentieth ware, hardware and network ‘stacks’ that
century, art moves into the world of operate independently and interdepend-
aesthetics and thus becomes a means for ently at modular levels. Using the logic
simultaneously creating and articulating of platforms, he outlines ‘an alternative sub-
human experience. All of this culminates division of political geographies at work
in human action being understood as now and in the future’ that lead from
culture, which then means that culture the supposed ‘eclipse of the nation-state to
articulates the highest of human achieve- the ascendance of political theology as
ment and care, with care being converted an existential transnationalism, from the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
184 GREEN/ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES

billowing depths of cloud computing and ment and speculation for immediate profit-
ubiquitous addressability to the logistical gains – sets the current posthuman agenda
modernity of the endlessly itinerant object’ for thinking geopolitics.
operating in political institutional refor- In much the same way that the Cold
mulation amidst massive wealth realign- War removed specific spatial formulations
ments and ecological collapse on a for political decision making in relation
planetary scale (ibid.). to fixed space by flattening the earth into
Bratton’s argument can be furthered by an oxymoronic globe with no horizon,
examining any of the host of current poly- these new platforms outstrip national
scaler remote sensing systems, such as sovereignty and governance in a host of
Hewlett-Packard’s Central Nervous System intended and unintended ways. DARPA’s
for the Earth (CeNSE ) or the NGO project website slogan is ‘Creating and Preventing
called The Planetary Skin Institute. CeNSE Strategic Surprise’. However, the elimina-
uses ‘Smart Dust’,1 a nano-sensing project tion of the event will have been determ-
described by its creators as ‘autonomous ined by an indeterminate object that senses
sensing and communication in a cubic as a subject, communicates as a subject and
millimetre’. Hewlett-Packard intends to yet does not and cannot enact its own will:
distribute a trillion of these micro-sensors it is merely a node in a network shuttling
from the bottom of the ocean and up into data. This might describe the position of
space. Smart Dust coupled with CeNSE populations and governments, known as
was funded by DARPA (with HP partner- subjects in politics and philosophy, just as
ing with Shell in its current formation) and easily as it does the smart dust chip.
thus has military and corporate applica-
See also Algorithmic Studies; Bodies
tions designed for offensive battlefield
Politic; Earth; Non-human Agency; War.
use and profit-driven surveillance. The
Planetary Skin Institute, according to its
website, intends its ‘platform to serve as a Note
global public good’ through automated, 1. See Smart Dust project website, http://
multi-user, Web 2.0, sensor-saturated robot ics.eecs.berke ley.edu/~pister/
global coverage of ‘change events’. The SmartDust/ [accessed 7 February 2017].
language, the technologies, the touted
benefits, the agencies allowed are the Ryan Bishop
same for CeNSE and The Planetary Skin
Institute – and, as previously noted, their
antecedents date back to the Cold War,
test ban treaties and experimental closed GREEN/ENVIRONMENTAL
systems of automated sensing and firing in HUMANITIES
the Vietnam War. The only differences
between these polyscaler, automated and Since the early 2000s, there has been strong
autonomous remote sensing systems can scientific consensus on the need for an
be found in their stated intended use – interdisciplinary field capable to address
differences and uses that can be altered the complex societal relations to both
with the flip of a switch. And who or what natural and built environments (Braidotti
flips that switch – nation-state, interna- et al. 2013; Dolphijn 2013). This timely ‘call
tional corporation, self-adjusting algorithm to arms’ has coincided with the growing
or automated response to futures invest- awareness of the impact of anthropogenic

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
GREEN/ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES 185

activities on the global environment. In humanities to environmental issues is their

2000, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and ability to question the tenets of what is
biologist Eugene Stoermer named the commonly understood as the human condi-
current geological epoch ‘Anthropocene’ tion in the age of the Anthropocene. This can
(2000: 17) to emphasize the role of human- help develop a better understanding of
kind in geology and ecology. In their short human agency and human beings’ interac-
article, Crutzen and Stoermer predict that, tion with the ecological communities they
without any major catastrophe, humans are part of. The environmental humanities
will remain a major geological force for bring questions of meaning, value, ethics,
millennia, even millions of years, to come. justice and the politics of knowledge produc-
Hence, they urge the scientific community tion into environmental domains, thus
‘[t]o develop a world-wide accepted articulating a notion of humanity that
strategy leading to sustainability of ecosys- rejects modernist accounts of self-contained,
tems against human induced stresses’ and rational, decision making subjects (Bird
call for ‘intensive research efforts and wise Rose et al. 2012). Rather, ‘the environmental
application of the knowledge thus acquired humanities position us as participants in
in the noösphere’ (ibid.: 18).1 lively ecologies of meaning and value,
This framing of the notion of entangled within rich patterns of cultural
Anthropocene betrays, nonetheless, a faith and historical diversity that shape who we
in modernist theories of technology and are and the ways in which we are able to
progress that places the human outside “become with” others’ (ibid.: 2). At the core of
of nature and thus reduces nature to a this approach is a focus on those ‘new mater-
passive object of culture. According to ialist’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012),
Gisli Pálsson et  al. (2013), the taken-for- non-dualist philosophies/practices that
granted unnaturalness of the human is propose to see the world as the result of the
itself part of the environmental problem. intra-active workings of more-than-human
To deal with global environmental change, assemblages. In short, by operating in the
they state, it is necessary to start from a nexus between modernist oppositions and
conception of the environmental as inex- dualisms, they promote a vision of the whole
tricably entangled with the social and thus world as a ‘naturalcultural contact zone’
return our attention to social theory and (Haraway 2008: 7) where the ‘natural world’
the humanities to effectively face the is not just the passive background or
human and societal challenges posed by it. container for human activity and doings, but
The appreciation of the environment and an active factor in its iterative materialization
the human as ‘naturecultures’ (Haraway (Barad 2007). To paraphrase Australian
2003) will inevitably produce a radical philosopher Val Plumwood (2003), the
reshaping of the notion of environmental environmental humanities are engaged in an
responsibility and foster an ecological – operation aimed at resituating the human
relational – approach to systemic change. within nature, and non-humans within
Over the last decades, the term ‘environ- cultural and ethical domains.
mental humanities’ has been gaining ground Braidotti et al. (2013) mention a second
to designate the interdisciplinary area important contribution of the environ-
capable to promote such a conceptual shift. mental humanities: their ability to chal-
According to feminist philosopher Rosi lenge the disciplinary separation between
Braidotti et al. (2013), the first important and the human, social and natural sciences.
original contribution of the environmental Deborah Bird Rose and others, much on

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
186 GREEN/ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES

the same line, state that ‘the emergence of (Haraway 1988) as well as the power differ-
the environmental humanities indicates a entials that are crucially part of wordly re-
renewed emphasis on bringing various configurings (Barad 2007, 2012). In this
approaches to environmental scholarship respect, environmental humanities are
into conversation with each other in particularly suited to address gender, racial
numerous and diverse ways’ (2012: 1–2). In and postcolonial dimensions, and stress the
general, the approaches coalescing under entangled nature of social and environ-
the banner of the environmental humani- mental justice (Nixon 2011; Chakrabarty
ties explicitly reject the assumed ‘non- 2009). As feminist philosopher Karen Barad
scientificity’ of humanities work on the states, in a naturalcultural world, questions
environment, a critique that is still too of ethics and justice ‘are always already
much enmeshed with narrow conceptualiza- threaded through the very fabric of the
tions of ‘human agency, social and cultural world’ in such a way that ‘epistemology,
formation, social change and the entangled ontology, and ethics are inseparable’ (in
relations between human and non-human Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012: 69).
worlds’ (ibid.: 2). This effort has produced To conclude, the environmental human-
the emergence of a wide range of novel ities appear to have picked up philosopher
interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship and activist Félix Guattari’s ([1989] 2000,
that ‘bridge’ the natural, human and social [1992] 1995) call to use the current ecolo-
science and put them in renewed dialogue. gical crisis and sustainability issues as an
Among these, it is worth mentioning Bio ‘opportunity’ to redefine humanity as a
Art practices, which, as Dolphijn (2013) whole, and work towards the development
reminds us, are making a vital contribution of an ecosophical perspective/logic.2 In
in tackling important questions regarding helping us to understand how individuals
the Anthropocene, the ecological crises and and societies respond to global environ-
sustainability in general. Through these mental change, environmental humanities
and other practices, the environmental contribute to our understanding of factors
humanities have proven capable of provid- likely to enhance the human capacity to
ing distinctive research tools, presenting transform paradigms in thinking and
precedents and complex narrative schemes patterns of behaviour. Finally, the develop-
that offer historical perspectives on social- ment of this interdisciplinary field3 shows
environmental challenges that we face. the entanglement of the humanities and
The non-dualist approach of the envir- the sciences as well as a renewed ethico-
onmental humanities with respect to both political practice of relationality and
the (non-)human and scholarship is finally mutual entailment as the basis for produ-
responsible for a revitalization of ethics into cing systemic change and working towards
a posthumanist space of care and responsi- sustainable futures.
bility. Moving away from a notion of
See also Algorithmic Studies; Bodies
ethics as human attribute and thus still too
Politic; Earth; Non-human Agency; War.
preoccupied with moral dilemmas, environ-
mental humanities attend to the entangle-
ment of human and non-human forms of Notes
life and invite a kind of accountability that 1. Noösphere is a concept first introduced
transcends the humanist sphere of agency. by French paleontologist Pierre Teilhard
Ethics, in a naturalcultural world, implies de Chardin in a 1922 essay titled
accountability for what comes to matter ‘Hominization’ (in Teilhard de Chardin

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
GULF LABOR 187

1966) to indicate ‘a human sphere, a

sphere of reflection, of conscious inven-
tion, of conscious souls’ (63). He con-
ceived the noösphere as discontinuous
and superior to the animal biosphere, and
therefore capable of defining the next
stage of terrestrial evolution through the
transformation of the biosphere.
2. Ecosophy, for Félix Guattari ([1989]
2000, [1992] 1995), is a ‘generalized
ecology’ that seeks to rethink human
praxis in its relation to three ecologies: Returned migrant workers from UAE , Telangana,
the environment, the social relations and India, January 2015. IMAGE BY MTL .
subjectivity.
3. See, for instance, journals such as
Environmental Humainties (http://envir the ground research / worker publications /
onmentalhumanities.org) and Resilience voice amplification / heart of empire /
(http://www.resiliencejournal.org). Demands, non-negotiable: Debt Jubilee /
Living Wage / Worker Representation. In
Tobijn de Graauw and solidarity / GULF LABOR
Elisa Fiore
High Culture
On Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, meaning
GULF LABOR in Arabic ‘Happiness Island’, we see monu-
Gulf labour / high culture / hard labour / in ments to ‘culture’ woven into a monstrous
a racialized ultra luxury global economy / assemblage of fossil fuels, financial power
with ultra low wages / black and brown and imperial geopolitics. Saadiyat cultural
bodies / South Asian migrant workers / sell district, which spans a total area of 2.43
land / pawn gold / incur debt / leave family / square kilometres, includes an £85 million
pursue a false dream / for better life / Louvre museum set to open in 2017, as
shackled by recruitment debt / passports well as a Guggenheim Abu Dhabi by Frank
confiscated / tied and beholden to a single Gehry, the Sheikh Zayed National Museum
employer / lose your employer, lose your by Foster + Partners, and a Performing
visa / organize, you’re imprisoned and Arts Centre by Zaha Hadid.
deported / no human dignity / but workers
strike / together / across national and ethnic Ultra Luxury
identities / WhatsApp used / organized over
tea / unions not involved / there are no The global cultural brands setting up in
leaders / labour camps / bachelor camps / Abu Dhabi – Guggenheim, Louvre, British
surveillance / politics emerges from mater- Museum, NYU – claim zero responsibility
ial conditions / do not board buses / shut- for exploitation and poor worker condi-
downs and slowdowns / and emergence of tions. They insist that the problems of
transnational solidarity / target Guggenheim the workers should be addressed to the
New York / occupations / creative direct government, to the subcontractors, to the
actions / boycotts / decolonial practice / on middlemen, to the ‘sending country’, but

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
188 GULF LABOR

Left: Site of death of a 28-year-old Pakistani worker on 8 June 2015, Louvre Abu Dhabi.
Right: Image from a crane installing the stars on the Louvre, Abu Dhabi, July 2015. IMAGES BY
ANONYM OUS LOUVRE WORKERS.

Louvre Museum Abu Dhabi, March 2016. IMAGE BY ANONYM OUS LOUVRE WORKER.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
GULF LABOR 189

never to the disinterested heights of art these cultural institutions are housed in
institutions themselves who possess a remote, segregated and surveilled worker
leverage they refuse to acknowledge. camps. They incur substantial debt to leave
their home country to obtain construction
work that pays very little. They have no
Hard Labour right to worker representation or any form
These monuments are built on the backs of of collective bargaining. They organize
migrant workers from Bangladesh, India, strikes, slowdowns and the like when they
Pakistan, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka are not paid for months or in response to
and, most recently, Cameroon, Uganda poor living conditions or poor food. In
and Nigeria, who migrated for a better retaliation, punishments levelled by
future for themselves and their families. employers are often harsh. They include
They are drawn to the Gulf by economic indiscriminate imprisonment or deporta-
precarity in their home countries, and tion, or both.
typically end up bonded to their work
through debt under the kafala system, to
work in construction.
Worker Resistance
From the May Day 2016 action in Saudi
Arabia where workers set fire to seven
Ultra Low Wages buses belonging to one of the largest
The workers who have been building the construction companies over unpaid
Louvre and the infrastructure for the rest of wages, to the shutdown of a mall and a

G.U.L.F. projection action on the facade of the Guggenheim for May Day 2016 in collaboration with
Illuminator in Hindi, Telugu, Punjabi and Arabic languages. IMAGE BY G.U.L.F .

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
190 GULF LABOR

highway in Dubai in March 2015, and to local conditions at once. G.U.L.F. and the
smaller everyday acts of resistance against GLC disrupt and refuse the role that art
abusive supervisors and managers, workers now plays in the normal functioning of a
are at the forefront of struggles to better global system that propagates racism and
their conditions, focusing on wages and inequality in its shadows. In the broader
labour reforms that challenge the very horizon of decolonization and climate
terms of Gulf petro capitalism, which is justice, these small actions make visible
itself embedded in flows of global capital that capitalism has always been hostile to
and labour. human and non-human life, and that
people fight where they are for a shared
horizon of liberation and human dignity,
Action/Amplification excavating in the process a culture of deep
Gulf Labor is a chain of resistance across solidarity and togetherness.
geographies amplifying the demands of See also Art; Contemporary; the;
the workers in the Gulf. Direct actions in Commons; the; Organization in Platform
the Gulf by the workers and in New York Capitalism.
and Venice by Global Ultra Luxury Faction
(G.U.L.F.) and Gulf Labor Coalition MTL Collective (Nitasha
(GLC ) target both global systems and Dhillon and Amin Husain)

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
HACKING HABITAT 191

H
HACKING HABITAT an integral part of our habitat, but also
change the power structures that permeate
Across the globe, more and more of our these environments. To hack the habitat
daily experiences are managed and thus means to re-establish a conscious
surveilled by networking technologies, relationship with and through machines, to
system protocols and algorithms, result- critically investigate how we are caught up
ing  in a ‘remote control society’, where in systems, and explore ways of resistance.
ubiquitous, networked systems – from HACKING HABITAT was a large-
corporations to politics, from military to scale international manifestation on the
entertainment – influence and dominate boundaries between art, technology and
our surroundings. The internal mechan- social change, and consisted of three
isms of institutions have begun to lead components: a run-up with four Life Hack
their own life – services are automated, Marathons in 2015, an expanding Art
data is the new currency, and optimum Exhibition, and an Open Stage in 2016.
efficiency has become the norm, as exem- Around eighty artists, hackers and design-
plified by everyone’s proper adjustment to ers presented their work, prepared inter-
machines. Technological developments ventions and provided workshops to
not only saturate our environments – reflect and act upon the often invisible but
social, natural and cultural – constituting structural containment we find ourselves

James Beckett, Voodoo Justice for People of Finance, installation in HACKING HABITAT, 2016.
PHOTO: PETER COX.

191
192 HACKING HABITAT

in. Controlling technologies are simultan- world, managing to elude intrusive forms
eously both sexy and frightening. Whereas of regulation and coding. Citizens find
the panopticon was once invented as a each other in the battle.
‘humane’ model to control and discipline
prisoners, now we wilfully accept mass
surveillance and behaviour regulation in
Life Hacking
exchange for free internet and smart apps. In the run-up to the projects’ ultimate real-
The choice for a real prison for the final ization, human feedback was collected
exhibition thus logically follows the initial during four Life Hack Marathons. Life
concept, strengthening experiences of hacking is not a trick or luxurious
digital constraint, with the smartphone as commodity to manage time even more
our new panopticon. efficiently, but rather results from a ‘maker
mentality’ (Walter-Herrmann and Büching
2013). Moreover, life hacking is based on
Developing A-Whereness the work of Michel de Certeau. In The
As Stefania Milan notes (2016), hacking Practice of Everyday Life (1984) he exam-
entails subversion or circumvention of the ines the difference between strategies
workings of an object or a mechanism. that affirm the status quo of the powerful
The concept first emerged at MIT around – governments, banks, multinationals,
the 1960s, and was rooted in programming cultural hegemonies – and the flexible
and computer science. Hacking meant tactics of those who are subjected to power.
exploiting the limits of what is possible, and According to him, the powerless have a
implied a certain kind of ethics: decentral- different kind of power. With their indirect
ization, openness and sharing (Levy 1984). and errant trajectories they cleverly and
Today hacking constitutes survival through skilfully bend the rules in order to survive
creative use, appropriation, resistance and while retaining their culture, identity and
subversion of digital technologies, social dignity. Life hacking is thus about search-
practices and institutions, including bodies ing for shared solidarity and (post)human-
and biology (Milan 2016: 29–30) as well as ness to discover playful forms of civil
borders (Dijstelbloem 2016) and financial disobedience (Celikates and de Zeeuw
systems (Ridgway 2016). 2016) to fight the power that has grown
Hacking habitat thus interweaves and nomadic and immaterial.
exposes two narratives: that of a globally Art and culture has a crucial role to play
increasing technocracy and that of its self- in the process of hacking habitat: as a
organizing opposition. The narration is not channel of empowerment, self-organization,
about good or evil, but connects awareness and control of ‘social capital’ and creativity
of an invisible ‘velvet dictatorship’ with for communities, allowing for local know-
affirmative examples of human resilience. ledge to become an inspirational force in a
In symbiosis with intelligent machines, wider global context. Deliberately choosing
people are developing a new kind of a supporting role, artists can develop test
sensitivity, a feeling of ‘a-whereness’ that models for new ecologies of belonging.
makes the workings of high-tech control Interventions by Aram Bartholl, Henrik
more tangible, thus opening the routes van Leeuwen, Forensic Architecture,
to low-life survival in the everyday life. Melanie Bonajo, Circus Engelbregt, Kendell
Self-organizing initiatives and social Geers, Lino Hellings, Buro Jansen & Janssen,
networks are cropping up around the Samson Kambalu, Van Lunteren/ Kastelein,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
HYPERSEA 193

Susan Hiller, Die Gedanken sind Frei, 2013, installation in HACKING HABITAT, 2016. PHOTO: PETER
COX.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Ansh Patel, Renée Girl at South London Gallery on 26 July
Ridway, Merlijn Twaalfhoven, Dries 2014. The story was an ode to wetware
Verhoeven and the Centre for Political next to the literally dry, silicon-based
Beauty substantially and constructively transhumanism discussion. It took place in
break the rules. Going against the flow, they an oceanic lounge setting consisting of sea
plant viruses mobilizing counter forces sponge bag chairs, blue light and water
and taking over public spaces as new places popsicles. The spatial aspect was supposed
for negotiation. The emerging frictions to enhance the listeners’ experience of
become tools for transformation. being water, while depicting humans as
water’s avatars. Here, I was interested in
See also Art; Digital Citizenship; Expulsions;
both the universalist side of acknowledging
Stateless State.
ourselves as part of a larger, aqueous
ecology as well as breaking the extropian
Ine Gevers
illusion of getting rid of the wetware of
the human state altogether by saying
that, in fact, the more refined a technolo-
HYPERSEA gical process is the more it uses (virtual)
water.
New Degrees of Freedom, Act 3: Water was The work is part of New Degrees of
an audio play and an installation as part of Freedom, a performance series with an
the event The Posthuman Era Became a online component, as conceived together

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
194 HYPERSEA

Jenna Sutela with Johanna Lundberg: New Degrees of Freedom, Act 3: Water, 2014. Audio play, sea
sponge bag chairs, blue light and water popsicles. PHOTOS: FELICITY HAMMOND.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
HYPERSOCIAL 195

with graphic designer Johanna Lundberg. ‘projection of models in the real’ constitut-
The project has its premise on the idea that ing an ‘in-the-field, here-and-now, transfig-
the body can no longer be emancipated uration of the real into the model’ (83). Like
online as the internet has proved to be the hyperreal, the hypersocial abolishes the
not virtual enough. Instead, it explores social ‘not by violent destruction, but by its
different means to identity fluidity and assumption, elevation to the strength of the
autonomous zones in the offline world. model’ (84). The hypersocial, thus, indicates
the transformation of the social from refer-
See also Blue Humanities; Forests;
ent to model, which activates a strategy
Postglacial; Vertigo Sea
of ‘[d]eterrence of all real potentiality’
operating ‘by meticulous reduplication, by
Jenna Sutela
macroscopic hyperfidelity, by accelerated
recycling, by saturation and obscenity, by
abolition of the distance between the real
HYPERSOCIAL and its representation’ (85). One of the
consequences of this new configuration for
The term ‘hypersocial’ appears at the end of Baudrillard is that the hypersocial puts an
Jean Baudrillard’s pamphlet In the Shadow end to the ‘socialist illusion’, that is the idea
of the Silent Majorities and describes what that there exists a ‘“real” sociality, a hidden
he calls the ‘hyperrealization of the social’, sociality’, which can ground socialism as
that is the transformation of the social from the ‘optimal collective management of men
referent to model (Baudrillard 1983: 85). In and things’ (80). While Marx dreamed of
Baudrillard’s anti-humanist, postmodern the re-absorption of the economic into a
philosophy, the social does not designate a ‘(transfigured) social’, for Baudrillard what
universal, but it is endowed only with an we are witnessing is the re-absorption
‘ephemeral existence’, falling between pre- of the social ‘into a (banalised) political
modern and postmodern societies, that is economy: administration pure and simple’
‘societies without the social’ which function (81). For Baudrillard, hence, the hyper-
through ‘networks of symbolic ties’ and social is the reverse of socialism, that is it is
societies which are in the process of putting the culmination of the process by which the
‘an end to the social beneath a simulation of social first abolished the political and then
the social’ (ibid.: 67). In modern societies, with the hypersocial became reabsorbed
the social expressed a ‘dynamic abstraction’ into the economic (81).
resting on the hypothesis of the existence of Baudrillard’s reference to the end of the
‘social relations’; it operated as a ‘functional social and the rise of the hypersocial haunts
integration of remainders’ (such as the contemporary discussions of new forms of
‘excluded’ who were taken in charge by the sociality instantiated by the transformation
modern State); and functioned as ‘scene of of the social into an ‘information visualiza-
conflicts and historical contradictions’ (83). tion’ which operates as the model through
The modern notion of the social thus which new type of media (social media)
implies a ‘reality principle’ produced by a operate. This model is the ‘social network’
‘centralized perspectival space’ which based in the mathematical abstraction
enables effects of ‘meaning and truth’ (68). of graph theory – a model which both
As such, then, for Baudrillard ‘the social duplicates and informs the social in new
dies in the space of simulation’, where there ways (Lovink 2012). The most evident sites
is ‘no critical, speculative distance’, but of such reconfiguration are social media

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
196 HYPERSOCIAL

platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, economy (such as Open Source software or

Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn and the like) Wikipedia) which challenge the hegemony
which can thus be seen, from the point of of the market (Benkler 2006; Rifkin 2014).
view of Baudrillard’s hypersocial, as the From this perspective the hypersocial is an
means by which the modern social is ‘augmented social’ which affords the possib-
absorbed into a new medium, the social ility of a transition to post-capitalist p2p
network, which reconfigures the social as a commons-based societies (Bauwens 2014).
process of circulation secured by network On the other hand, Autonomist Marxists
protocols (Foucault 2009; Terranova 2015). see social cooperation as the ontological
Contemporary critiques of the social of source of value production (living labour)
social media platforms echo Baudrillard which become increasingly autonomous
when they argue that the social modelled by from capitalist organization by incorporat-
social networks is a ‘social without society’ ing portions of fixed capital in a new config-
which enacts new forms of control and uration called ‘biopolitical production’ and/
forecloses the possibility of solidarity and or ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Vercellone 2007).
identification with the collective while also The hypersocial here bears the potential of a
severing all links with social reproduction ‘becoming autonomous of social coopera-
such as theorized by feminist political tion’ which is played out in the struggle to
economists (Dean 2013; Fortunati 2007). re-appropriate forms of platform cooper-
Such new configuration of the ‘social’ is ativism against the capitalist subsumption
argued to be functional to a ‘re-organization of the sharing economy (Scholz 2016). In
of neoliberal governmentality’ and its tech- this way, such enhanced social cooperation
nologies of algorithmic governance (Davies resurrects the dream of a socialist cybernet-
2015; Morozov 2014). The new social or ics which overcomes the limitations of
hypersocial enacted by social network centralized state planning and requires a
models is thus said to enact a process of transition towards an anthropogenetic
further dissolution of social bonds, which socio-economic model founded in a new
dissolves society into networks of isolated form of welfare called ‘commonfare’ (Dyer-
individuals (Turkle 2011; Berardi 2009). Witheford 2013; Marazzi 2007; Vercellone
Most of these analyses do not follow 2015).
Baudrillard’s anti-humanist post-structur- Against Baudrillard’s reductionist notion
alism in as much as they evoke the modern of matter, his hypostatization of pre-
social as space of conflict and contradiction, modern societies as ‘the real’ and his meta-
solidarity and collectivity, against the physics of reality and appearance, it is
subsumption of the social into a model of desirable to transform the notion of the
‘optimal circulation’ – Baudrillard’s hyper- hypersocial into a concept which names a
social as a space of deterrence. singularity where the decline of the
Other evaluations of the ‘hypersocial’, modern image of the social and the rise
however, conceive it as expressing the of a new image produced by means of
potential for renewed forms of socialism informational and computational techno-
and/or communism which do not necessi- logies of tele-communication enacts new
tate state planning or centralized control configurations of power and resistance
(Kelly 2009; Hardt and Negri 2009). On the (Foucault 2001) or strategies of capture
one hand, liberal theorists argue for the and lines of flight (Deleuze 1992b).
radical novelty introduced by social Contemporary engagements with the
production in the networked information hypersocial thus raise a set of questions

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
HYPERSOCIAL 197

which challenge the classical humanities energy-flows and forces of association/

and gesture towards the critical posthu- dissociation (Tarde 2012); affirmative
manities. To start with, the hypersocial critiques and transfigurations of political
provokes us to produce new forms of crit- economy and neo-classical economics
ical knowledge which defy neo-positivist which formulate new theories of labour
and shallow forms of social analysis and and value/s (Lazzarato 2002; Latour and
quantification without returning to the Lépinay 2009); affirmative contestations of
modern, humanist social of classical soci- the politics of Big Data (Blackman 2015);
ology (Braidotti 2013). Such critical know- and cartographies which specify the new
ledges might include: critical genealogies nature of processes of subjectivation
of social software as biopolitical dispositifs (including racialization and sexualization)
of power/knowledge and in general new in social network ontologies (Nakamura
approaches to the study of automation, and Chow-White 2011; Sharma 2013;
computation and algorithms (Rieder Terranova 2016).
2012b; Kaldrack and Röhle 2014; Parisi
See also Networked Affect; Youth;
2013b); non-anthropocentric philosophies
Algorithm; Computational Turn.
of the social or ‘cosmic sociologies’
which see matter and life (organic and Tiziana Terranova
nonorganic) as constituted by affective

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
198 INFORMATIC OPACITY

I
INFORMATIC OPACITY Empire and control, which subsumes iden-
tity and difference into its logic of
As early as the 1970s, Caribbean philo- governance. As such, we bear witness to the
sopher and poet Édouard Glissant theor- continued erasure of embodiment and the
ized opacity as an anti-imperial modality of coterminous proliferation of what Critical
relation and existence. His evocative Art Ensemble labels the ‘data body’ (Critical
demand that ‘we clamor for the right to Art Ensemble 1998). Donna Haraway once
opacity for everyone’ refuses a logic of total articulated this problematic as ‘the inform-
transparency and rationality, disrupting the atics of domination’, the coming commu-
transformation of subjects into categoriz- nications networks of control that translate
able objects of Western knowledge (Glissant ‘the world into a problem of coding’
1997: 194). Opacity, Glissant tells us, (Haraway 1991: 161, 164); a biometric
concerns ‘that which protects the Diverse’, template to police national borders, an
that is, the minoritarian (ibid.: 62). Although instant credit check to determine economic
his writings often evade an engagement viability, a gene to determine sexual orient-
with technology – or are overtly techno- ation. Amongst teeming transnational flows
phobic – newfound urgencies arise to of information, Haraway is careful to
consider Glissant’s philosophy of opacity remind us that ‘People are nowhere near so
within the context of technics in the early fluid, being both material and opaque’ (ibid.:
twenty-first century. Whether innovations 153). This eradication of opaque excess by
in Big Data, secret data sweeps of govern- informatic standardization Glissant might
mental surveillance or the growing popular- call transparency. As an Enlightenment
ity of the Quantified Self, the world’s people principle of universalism, transparency, for
are increasingly reduced to aggregates of Glissant, claims to make a person fully
parsable data. Alexander R. Galloway and intelligible and interpretable, and thus is a
Eugene Thacker have described this era as barbarism, as it destroys the opacity of
one of ‘universal standards of identification’ another.
(Galloway and Thacker 2007: 131). Opacity is a paradigmatic concept to pit
Technologies such as biometrics, GPS , against the universal standards of inform-
RFID, data-mining algorithms, collaborat- atic identification. According to Glissant,
ive filters, DNA and genomics become opacity persists as ontology – it is the
operational through global protocols that world in relation. Therefore, struggles for
aim to solve ‘today’s crises of locatability opacity are not oriented towards gaining
and identification’, for governments, milit- opacity, as we are always already opaque;
aries, corporations, and individuals alike rather, it is that power violates opacity,
(ibid.). These identification technologies which must be resisted as a commitment
gain ascendence in a time of neoliberalism, to anti-imperial politics. This is precisely

198
IN-HUMAN, THE 199

how opacity makes an ethical demand, as persons are subjected to terrorist inspection
an appeal to prevent its denigration. when their bodies are misread by airport
Importantly, this does not imply that scanners and people of colour are profiled
opacity is a stasis or sameness that must be by biometric technologies. Crucially, this
preserved; alternately, it is the world reveals a crux of informatic opacity: it
without standard or norm – materiality in is both liberating and oppressive. As
durational flux, which is the very aesthetics informatic identification is linked more and
of the Other, for Glissant. At once ontolo- more to governance, mobility and freedom,
gical, ethical and aesthetic, Glissant contin- becoming informatically opaque can have
ues to explain opacity as a politics: ‘if an excruciating political consequences, such
opacity is the basis for a Legitimacy, this as the loss of basic human rights. In spite
would be the sign of its having entered into of this, informatic opacity makes a more
a political dimension . . . [Opacity] would utopian gesture to exist without
be the real foundation of Relation, in identification. Yet, in doing so, it does not
freedom’ (Glissant 1997: 194). A politics of ask us to return to Glissant’s technophobia,
opacity, then, establishes itself in contra- but instead it offers an infinitely more
distinction to state-based forms of legal challenging and utopic proposition: to live
recognition, which necessitate the elimina- with technologies that express the joy of
tion of ambiguity to obtain the rights of a opacity, not its destruction.
free citizen. Unified as a philosophical
See also Algorithmic Studies; Metadata
concept, opacity provides a consistency for
Society; Hypersocial; Leaks and Stings.
minoritarian forces that are burdened by
the norms of the day but can never be
Zach Blas
extinguished by them.
Informatic opacity starts with the
premise that struggles for opacity occupy
multiple perceptual and interpretive strata, IN-HUMAN, THE
notably because being opaque to a person
is not the same as being opaque to a Donna Haraway radicalized the postruc-
machine. Consider a drone: while a drone turalist thesis of the human as a construc-
operator might not be able to locate a tion by way of bringing it to its constitutive
person with their own embodied senses, dyad of the organic and the technological,
the thermal imaging system of the drone or of body and language. The dyad is
can achieve this via heat detection. Today, affirmed in its radical irreconcilability
acts against global surveillance exhibit an without the desire or the tendency to
immense investment in informatic opacity, resolve into a synthesis or a hierarchical
from protest masks and cell phone signal subsumption. As the result of the radical
jammers to online encryption. Although affirmation of the dyad an unnameable
Glissant does not define opacity as tactical, remainder occurs which keeps inviting us
such political techniques suggest that to understand it and tame it through
informatic opacity is a practice of anti- meaning – the inhuman.
standardization at the global, technical The inhuman is an idea very close to
scale. As a kind of ontological tactics, it is Laruelle’s concept of the ‘human-in-
of and for the minoritarian, who are the human’ or what I will term here as the ‘non-
most violently impacted by informatic human’. It is non-human insofar as it is
identification standards: transgender non-humanist, and, more radically, insofar

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
200 IN-HUMAN, THE

as it makes no sense in the philosophical or or a doctrine. Regardless of the posture

theological terms. It precedes its meaning. of thought (be it philosophical or non-
Yet again, it also prompts it. It necessitates philosophical, or scientific), there will
and engenders the auto-referential process always be a remainder of the unruly and
of ‘making sense out of it.’ The pre-lingual senseless real at the heart of what seems to
self which is the ‘real’ under the ‘first name be a ‘meaningful reality’, one domesticated
of the lived’ (Laruelle) or the human-in- through a subjectivity. That which escapes
human nesting at the heart of all subjectiv- sense, the trail of the monstrous real is the
ity necessitates its self-estrangement and inhuman at the heart of the human. It is
linguistic mediation as its means. The figure neither natural nor technological, it precedes
of the ‘Stranger’ is thus born. The Stranger the distinction – it is non-human or inhuman.
(also a term borrowed from Laruelle’s non- A cyborg, an animal or the dark-out-
analytical vocabulary) is the posture of the there which can never be reduced to a
lived that is proto-linguistic, and it refers to meaning or truth, that which escapes
the primitive self-estrangement prefiguring philosophy or transformation into ‘what
subjectivity (Laruelle 1995: 78). Subjectivity makes sense’ is inhuman or monstrous.
is the philosophical Self. It is of the ‘World’ Humanity is a theologico-philosophical
which, according to non-philosophy or the creation and it is always naturalized. The
non-standard philosophy, is synonymous same goes for the nature: thanks to philo-
to ‘Philosophy’ (Laruelle 1989: 53, 58, 61). sophy, it has always been humanized.
The real, albeit indifferent to the processes Therefore, as long as the technological
of ‘making sense’ or thought, necessitates component of the radical dyad called the
those very processes, brings about their Cyborg (Haraway) can be humanized, it is
trajectories. neither monstrous nor inhuman. If it can
The thought therefore acts unilaterally: be rationally grasped, if it can be rational-
it correlates with the effects of the real ized or make sense according to the
whereas the real, inasmuch as it is a singu- anthropocentric reason, it can be and will
larity, remains radically indifferent to it and unavoidably be humanized. Moreover, it
different from it. For example, the trauma will be naturalized. The inhuman is that
prompts its own transcendence through which escapes rationalization, that which
neurosis but the latter acts unilaterally with has no meaning or reason for existence. It
respect to it. The trauma itself remains is just out there – senseless, brute existence,
outside the field of ‘what makes sense’ as matter regardless of whether organic or
the symptom precedes the neurotic artificially produced. The technological
response. The real manifests itself as the prosthesis and the biological body are both
Lacanian symptom or as trauma which alien to the subjectivity we believe exhausts
comes about as the tuché vis-à-vis the auto- our ‘true self ’. They are both equally
maton (Aristotle). It produces a structure inhuman as is the primitive configuration
of occurrences governed by internal laws, a of subjectivity – or the protosubjectivity –
‘syntax’ of a sort (Kolozova 2014: 63). we called above ‘the Stranger’.
Transcendence is necessary. Nonetheless, Contemporary capitalism is enabled by
it can be carried out philosophically or non- the absolute rule of pure speculation over
philosophically. The latter refers to opera- the physical or the material (regardless
tions (of thought) with philosophical of whether organic or synthetically
material which succumb to diktat of the produced), materialized as surplus value,
real rather than to a cosmology of thought i.e. as the fetish called ‘money’. Wage labour,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
IN/HUMAN 201

estranged fruits of labour and alienation nature, universe – were disenchanted and
from the species-being take place as the rationalized. In this case the mind that
result of the exploitation of the inhuman claimed its new sovereign rationality not
on the part of the self-sufficient automated only asserted its limits, but realized its
speculation. In the Capitalocene, the groundlessness, doom to death and extinc-
inhuman constitutes the global concentra- tion; whereas earlier all inhuman compon-
tion camp for the female, the animal, the ents cooperated with humanity as the
black and the body that labours for wage mystic cosmic ‘home’. In other words, it was
or is exploited for the production of a with humanism that the dimension of the
commodity. agency of the inhuman manifested itself as
utterly alien.
See also Animal; Ahuman; Anthropocene;
In German idealism, nevertheless, these
Capitalocene and Chthulucene; In/
alien, inhuman components were not
Human.
treated as ungraspable for the human
mind. On the contrary, even for Kant the
Katerina Kolozova
human mind remained a tool for extend-
ing oneself to such uncomfortable, alien-
ated otherness. Kant’s notion of the
IN/HUMAN sublime or the thing-in-itself implied the
incapacity of human cognition to exceed
Unlike the condition of the posthuman, human consciousness. However, this
which mainly implies an irreversible evolu- ‘beyond’ was imagined as the human
tionary transition to the geological time of mind’s regulative idea about the broader
the Anthropocene, the concept of the in- inhuman mind.
human presupposes alterhuman agencies Even more so in Hegel; for him the
and presences parallel to human existence. inhuman (absolute) mind exists; yet
The posthuman condition posits man as human thinking is able to develop to the
an obsolete phenomenon of deep history niveau, where it reaches this universal
and geological time, whereas the condition inhuman mind without ceasing to be
of the inhuman enables one to determine human. As Evald Ilyenkov states in his
the limits of the human mind within both ‘Cosmology of Mind’, it was Hegel who
human and posthuman agencies. tried to solve the problem of the over
As a matter of fact, the birth of (in)human mind: human thought was
Renaissance humanism was not so much considered capable to cognize according to
about the narcissistic adherence of human- the laws of absolute mind (Ilyenkov 1991).
kind to itself, but rather about the secular- According to such logic, the fact that the
ized mind that had to remain without once human mind can infer the existence of a
guaranteed non-human complements to broader cognitive capacity and a mind
life: mythology, faith, mysticism, religion, supreme to it only confirms that this infer-
God, eternal life. It was actually due to the ence of the inhuman belongs to the human
secularized claim to be merely human that mind per se and there is nothing that
it became possible to actually experience excels over it or exceeds it. Despite having
the uncanny burden of remaining human limitations the human mind remains the
in an inhuman environment: all those only agency of the quest for the absolute. If
spheres of the non-humanness that had it were not so, one would have to allege the
hitherto patronized humanity – cosmos, necessity of supernatural spirits, gods,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
202 IN/HUMAN

divine realities, etc. Hence, the syndrome society. It is obvious, too, that various
of the alien disconnected and uncorrelated manifestations of machinic intelligences,
with human subjectivity inevitably returns computational sciences and, more broadly,
back to theology or some sort of techno- the infrastructure of cognitive capital
pantheism. exceed the capacities of human mind and
Ray Brassier provides a completely human life. Contemporary conditions of
converse treatment of the dialectic of the economy, military technology and media
humanness and inhumanness of mind. are operated by such artificial abstractions
According to him the transcendental and non-human agencies. Therefore, it is
subject and thought can only be non- important in this connection to prove
anthropological, alien, extraterrestrial and that experiments with neurophysiology
inhuman (Brassier 2001). An excellent demonstrate that the human brain itself
example of such a stance in art was contains elements of artificial non-human
Karlheinz Stockhausen. He believed that intelligence and computation. An import-
his music was incomprehensible to the ant argument in the apology for algorithmic
human ear and hence completely inhuman, and cybernetic intelligence is that compu-
since the human species is ascending to a tation is not at all an automaton of inform-
new cognitive turn, presupposing enhanced ation and calculation, but includes in itself
intelligence and perception; this would split gaps, traumas, paradoxes and incomput-
humankind evolutionally into those with able conditions (Parisi 2013a). Thereby the
higher sapient cognitive skills and those debate on the inhuman does not claim any
with the lower sentient and reproductive expiration of the human. What it insists on
needs. is that technological excellence, contem-
Speculative realist, accelerationist and porary cognitive production and the capa-
object-oriented theories go even further in cities of the human mind in its non-correl-
this direction. For them inhumanist univer- ational autonomy are much more similar
salism in the history of thought is only a to artificial intelligence than to what the
false projection of a finite human mind. human mind appeared to be in history or
The history of humanity, its material culture philosophy.
and the history of human thought can be Such treatment of the inhuman is not
no more than a tiny episode in the life of preoccupied with the dialectical intersec-
the universe, and thought can only serve to tion of the human and the inhuman, i.e. by
mythologize what a really autonomous the inquiry into the extent the individual
inhuman knowledge might be. Intelligence human mind can extend itself towards
has the attributes of the human mind, but something cognitively supreme. Along
its procedures of cognition and intellect with excellence of the mind, exceeding the
should be externalized and nominalized human condition, theories of autonomous
beyond the domain of the human brain intelligence rather insist on the overall
and mind. reconsideration of the mind as an inhuman
In other words the contemporary capacity (Pasquinelli 2015a). They search
debate about inhuman agencies rejects its within the mind, human as it is, for a neural
philosophical background to posit the function that would be alien, non-human
issue of the inhuman not so much as one of and would have no cognitive continuity
mind, but rather as an autonomous with the dimension of mind inscribed into
inhuman intelligence, even though it might human experience, consciousness, history,
occur in a nominally human body or etc. Such functions of intelligence might

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
IN/HUMAN 203

possess an alien inhuman autonomy which 1. Mind can only be defined as intelligence
leads to the assertion that within thinking, realized via machinic, algorithmic para-
science, technology, the economy and soci- meters, i.e. it is inhuman by definition.
etal infrastructure there has always existed 2. Which leads to the second assertion,
a considerable component of alien intelli- namely, that emancipation is mainly an
gence, and what had always been import- inhuman potentiality.
ant in philosophy, mind or thought had
rather been characteristic for the artificial Thus, the inhuman is not merely some
non-human intelligences, than a thought alien intelligence parallel to the human
as a transcendental, philosophical and crit- one; rather, human intelligence itself must
ical operation (Negarestani 2015). be reconsidered as alien and alternative to
Such abstract, autonomous intelligence its own previous historically biased implic-
needs no consciousness. In other words the ations. However, what is taken for granted
point is not that something that used to be here is that the development and expan-
human should transform into something sion of mind can only occur due to over-
more radical and developed, but that s/he coming the mind’s human condition.
should re-assess itself as the inhuman with Hence machinic and algorithmic intelli-
all its background – past, present and future. gence becomes a new irreversible mode of
Referring to Alan Turing, Negarestani mind’s capacity; but as well, the transform-
claims that there is nothing in the human ation of thought into algorithmically
that could not be abstracted and computa- grounded intelligences marks the inevit-
tionally realized (ibid.). Moreover, what is able obsolescence of what critical thought
considered to be ‘a human mind’ is a func- used to be in the long run of history. So
tion open for future reconstitution, which that the inhuman artificial intelligence is
means that the modes of realization of considered as a function ‘augmented’ and
mind can be superseded by certain func- supreme with regard to thought and mind.
tions of intelligence that might have But what if mind is not just a cognitive
changed the type of human intelligence category, whose autonomous function is
altogether. Not only is a human able to intelligence? What if intelligence is only a
become other in the long run of evolution, small part of the mind’s capacity? In this
but it is able to regard its human-ness as case, the augmentation of intelligence
other than a human. Being a human it would not presuppose sublating human
nevertheless is able to terminate to see itself mind, nor would it imply confining mind
as human. to neural functions. The issue of the human
According to Negarestani, ‘Turing’s is about sapience to the extent that sapi-
thesis on the computational functional ence as mind is not about just intelligence
realizability of the human mind . . . and its excellence. Is not therefore the
suggests there is no essentialist limit to the notion of augmented intelligence closer to
reconstructability of the human or what Hegel’s Understanding, intellect (Verstand)
human significance consists in’ (ibid.: 152). than reason (Vernunft)? It is exactly intel-
What is valuable in this inference is that lect (Verstand) that deals with formaliza-
it directs the agenda of the human towards tion, systematizing, abstracting; whereas
the indefinite future, opening up versatile reason overcomes abstraction to achieve
developmental and emancipatory potenti- the concreteness of the notion. Intellect
alities. On the other hand, such futuristic- and Understanding are nominal and
ally opened potentialities imply that: abstract; reason is concrete and general.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
204 INSURGENT POSTHUMANISM

The dimension of the general is not so disorderly mobs populating the streets of
much about the scale of intelligence or the cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth
knowledge, exceeding the limited human centuries (Papadopoulos, Stephenson and
mind; rather, it is about human mind being Tsianos 2008).
assembled out of social relations and the Many of these scattered insurgent
diachronicity of labour, i.e. it is general due movements of people did not enter the
to broadly non-self being of humans in nascent capitalist humanist regime of
social context. labour but created non-proprietary and
Human mind, along with cognition, is non-enclosed worlds through ‘common-
therefore not merely a gnoseological func- ing’ (Linebaugh 2008) matter and the
tion. Knowledge emerges along with material world, the land and soil, plants
suffering from non-understanding, with and animals. The reassembling of the state
the awareness of mortality, just as cogni- as a secular, liberal and humanist institu-
tion is not worthwhile without the ethic- tion and the establishment of capitalist
ally biased deed. relations of employment was a response to
these non-humanist struggles. There was
See also AI (Artificial Intelligence);
no historical necessity for this reorganiza-
Computational Turn; In-Human; Monster/
tion of the state other than the insurgency
The Unhuman; Non-human Agency;
of these non-humanist movements that
Violence.
force pre-capitalist and proto-capitalist
social organization to collapse (Moulier
Keti Chukhrov
Boutang 1998).
The experimentation with novel
embodied practices and alternative ways
INSURGENT POSTHUMANISM of being remain at the core of these move-
ments. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s
Can we think of a posthumanism that is we can see the resurfacing of such non-
explicitly political and is coexistent with humanist politics which can be now called
social movements? Such insurgent posthu- posthumanist: they attempt to depart from
manism would not only redraw the theor- and challenge the by-then long-established
etical contours of posthumanism itself but domination of humanist politics. Rather
also question the fixation of many social than a direct confrontation with state
movements on the state and political power and established politics many of
power in order to uncover traverse histor- these feminist, environmental, antiracist,
ies of non-humanist struggles within them. sexual, countercultural movements put
One can trace these struggles back to the forward alternative ways of everyday life
exodus of labourers from indentured, that challenge power by their very own
forced work and slavery. The singularities presence. Instead of the fixation on the
that composed the escaping, wandering fidelity to an event to come that will over-
mob were far from the humanist indi- come current political power the mundane
vidual emerging in Europe and spreading politics of these movements gravitate
across the world through colonial expan- around the joy of putting together a whole
sion; they were much closer to the nonhu- cosmos around everyday radical material
manist pleb crossing the countryside and practices (Bakhtin 1984). With Anzaldua
the high seas from the mid-fourteenth and (1987) – and I am thinking here also of
fifteenth centuries and, later, to the Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Jose

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
INSURGENT POSTHUMANISM 205

Martí, Oswald de Andrade and many politics stops. Is it possible to escape the
others – we see how radical change passes dichotomy that opposes the violence of
through the posthumanist transformation protest to the oppression of the state? Is it
of the materiality and socio-ecological possible to commit to the fundamental
relationality of the body (Braidotti 2002). possibility of non-violence, and simultan-
As these posthumanist movements of eously promote justice and create alternat-
the 1960s and after were gradually ive ways of existence?
absorbed into the emerging neoliberal For more than social movements the
transnational governance they came to be question of justice is a question of tempor-
called New Social Movements (NSM s). ality: justice is now, justice is against defer-
And, indeed, those which weren’t already ral; the space of deferral is the space of
‘social’ became social in the way we destructive violence. A posthuman reading
commonly use the adjective today: they of Benjamin’s Critique of Violence (1996)
turned primarily to questions of identity, would see justice worlded through the re-
representation and rights, political appropriation of matter and the immedi-
governance and the accountability of the ate making of alternative forms of life.
state. With this change insurgent posthu- Paradoxically this is the end of any form of
manist politics declined again, only to violence, social or individual. The more
reappear in the wave of social mobiliza- justice is concrete and material, the more
tions that erupted at the beginning of the non-violent and collective it is. This is
twenty-first century and in particular postanthropocentric history: it is not made
during the 2008 to 2013 cycle of social through the eternal dialectical struggle
unrest. between constituent and constituted
What if social movements action today power; rather, history is made with and
is not just targeting existing political power outside of the history of society, it is made
but is also experimenting with worlds and when justice is restored materially – a
the materiality of life? Many current move- posthuman justice, the co-construction of
ments engage directly with technoscience just forms of life with other species and
and material/ecological experimentation; things.
they immerse into the human–non-human The central question facing more than
continuum and change society by engaging social movements is how this commitment
with both the human and the non-human to justice can address the radical asym-
world (Haraway 1997). Social movements metries which pervade our human and non-
start to become more than social, move- human worlds. Symmetry is not enough to
ments of matter and the social simultan- reverse the modern purification of humans
eously, movements that change power by and non-humans (Latour 1993) and to
creating alternative forms of life that cannot stop imposing our ‘we’ – humans – on
be neglected by instituted politics. ‘them’ – non-humans. We have never been
Traditionally this power to create modern not because the modern purifica-
conditions that cannot be neglected or tion is impossible but because we have
bypassed has always involved the question never been ‘we’ and they – the non-humans
of violence. Against the purported tight – have never been ‘they’. The constitution
articulation of violence and transforma- of modernity is based on a set of universal-
tion (primarily as protest violence against isms that have their provenance in colonial
the state), dominant liberal humanist expansionism and the spread of the colo-
thinking asserts that violence starts where nial matrix (Quijano 2007).

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
206 INSURGENT POSTHUMANISM

The aim is to politicize posthumanism and everyday life, the proliferation of

and simultaneously to posthumanize distributed ‘cooperation without consensus’
politics by decolonizing both of them (Star 1993), the topological stacking of
(Mignolo and Escobar 2010). More than materials and processes, ecological trans-
social movements encounter the question versality between different social and
whether there is a ‘one-world world’ (Law material registers, complex traffic between
2015) or a pluriverse of words (de la instituted and community technoscience,
Cadena 2015) as a practical problem: they the ‘involution’ (Hustak and Myers 2013) of
engage in a continuous materialism, that is human, animal and inorganic actors, the
they start from what exists to create other centrality of craft, the continuous folding
worlds that escape existing ones. Zapatista’s of the commons and the private and public
matrix of a ‘world where many worlds fit’ is spheres into each other, the creation of
neither an epistemological issue nor a plea generous infrastructures and infrastruc-
for changing our worldview to acknow- tural imagination, the cultivation of
ledge the existence of multiple worlds; it material literacy, the proliferation of
is a guidance for practice and an invitation ‘experimental labour’ (Kortright 2013),
to a movement. Neither the making of community technoscience and indigenous
one single ontology nor the making of knowledge practices.
multiple ontologies, but grounded making: Distributed invention power character-
from alter-globalization to alter-ontologies. izes the transition from the information
From epistemology to ontology to move- age (note: big data is only a sign of peak
ment. If there are ‘plural ways of being in digitization) to the time of composition.
the world’ (Chakrabarty 2000) then more Experimental politics is about the compos-
than social movements give birth to plural ition of the digital and the material, wet
ways of making the world; they give birth and dry, matter and code; it is about
to indigenous ontologies (Blaser 2012). forming material alliances through the
These ontologies can only come into being association, mutualism and articulation
as they disconnect from the Western between not directly connected forms of
temporal register that relegates indigenous life. Endosymbiosis instead of endocolon-
worlds to the past and set up autonomous ization. Cooperation instead of toxicity.
indigenous ontologies – be it inside or Warm compost instead of acidity.
outside the Western space. Commensality instead of contamination.
Autonomy here is, of course, not meant ‘Material spirituality’ (Puig de la Bellacasa
as the modernist humanist value of indi- 2014) instead of instrumentality. Ultimately
vidual independence but as political experimental politics revolve around care
autonomy which requires material inter- as an ‘ethopoietical practice’, the simultan-
connectedness and intensive ontological eous production of ethos and ontology
alliances. And these are always more than (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). More than
human (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), they social movements fork worlds into altern-
always involve experimentation. The ative ontologies: one always relies on what
experimental politics (Papadopoulos 2017) existed before and then you split, redirect.
of more than social movements is about Innovation happens rarely through sudden
invention – not the individual achievement novelty and more through hacking, stretch-
of experimental science but distributed ing, knitting, crafting, weaving, tweaking,
invention power: dispersed experimenta- mending, recombining existing processes
tion in the continuum of technoscience or substances. What is at stake in the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
INTEREST/INTERESSE 207

posthuman experimental politics of more aesthetics’ underpins the events in Palais de

than social movements is not just social Tokyo in Paris. In Relational Aesthetics
relations but the ontological constitution Bourriaud defines this museal event as ‘a set
of life, the creation of commensal worlds. of artistic practices which take as their
More than social movements are world theoretical and practical point of departure
movers. the whole of human relations and their
social context, rather than an independent
See also Critical Posthumanism; Commons,
and private space’ (2002: xv). While
the; Geo-Hydro-Solar-Bio-Techno-Politics;
Bourriaud in the 1990s was transforming
Political Affect; Posthuman Critical
the space of the museum into an interactive
Theory.
relational rhizome, to figure a certain visi-
bility in these relations, the Canadian–
Dimitris Papadopoulos
Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
intervenes in public space with his dynamic
interactive installations, calling his work
INTEREST/INTERESSE ‘relational architecture’.
The concept of interesse is the philo-
The focus of this contribution is a sketch of sophical counterpart of this ‘relational turn’
the conceptual contours of a relational in art and design. As a philosophical notion
philosophy that comes to the fore by it is introduced into modern discourse by
combining a variety of twentieth-century Martin Heidegger. In Being and Time
philosophical perspectives. Relational (1927) he states that ‘Dasein is the being of
philosophy reaches beyond metaphysics this “between”.’ But he warns his readers not
and subject philosophical perspectives, to make the mistake of understanding this
affirming Nietzschean revaluation of all constitutive in-between (Zwischen) ‘as the
values, instantiating an affirmative nihilism. result of the convenientia of two objectively
In that sense it is a posthuman perspective. present things’ (DATE : 124). The in-
In thematizing an affect ontological between precedes any position. In What is
perspective, acknowledging the constituting called Thinking? (1954) in-between is reph-
power of the in-betweenness of mediatiza- rased as ‘Interesse’: ‘being with and between
tion (see Radical Mediocrity) it also reaches the things, being in between and enduring
beyond modern man- and male-centred this’. However, ‘nowadays “Interesse” deals
individualism in a transhuman way. with what is interesting. Something that
Therefore the core concept of a philosophy enables someone to be indifferent the next
of relations is the notion of interesse: being moment, something that is followed by
interested, literally being (esse) in-between something else that is as indifferent as what
(inter) as the core of a relational perspective. preceded it’ (122). I coined this in another
Psychologically being interested indicates lemma: radical mediocrity. So Heidegger
an attitude of openness without anticipation makes a distinction between an inau-
emphasizing the quality of interacting over thentic, ephemeral condition of the inter-
the instrumentalization of the communica- esting as shallow entertainment and a
tion for external goals. Philosophically fundamental being-in-between (Zwischen-
interesse connotes the ontological primacy sein) as the ‘cement’ (Kit) of relationality or
of the in-between, i.e. of relations. In aesthet- Being-with (Mit-sein). In a relational philo-
ics the relational turn is claimed by Nicolas sophical context interesse goes beyond
Bourriaud. The concept of a ‘relational shared interests and excludes indifference.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
208 INTEREST/INTERESSE

Interesse is the affirmative counterpart of not designate a localizable relation going

an uncritical radical mediocrity. from one thing to the other and back again,
The concept is adopted and adapted by but a perpendicular direction, a transversal
one of Heidegger’s former students: movement that sweeps one and the other
Hannah Arendt. In her American publica- away, a stream without beginning or end
tions the German notion Interesse is trans- that undermines its banks and picks up
lated as ‘interest’, giving the concept a speed in the middle’ (1980: 25). ‘Inter’ is a
specific economic and political twist. In heritage of French philosophers of differ-
The Human Condition (1958) Arendt takes ence. Over the last decades of the twentieth
Heidegger’s distinction one step further, century the emphasis in their work gradu-
politicizing Heidegger’s ontological notion ally shifted from difference to the in-
of language as the House of Being: between or ‘inter’. This transition is already
methodologically explored in Derrida’s
These interests constitute, in the word’s Of Grammatology (1967): ‘Immediacy is
most literal significance, something derived’; ‘that all begins through the inter-
which inter-est, which lies between people mediary is what indeed is “inconceivable”’
and therefore can relate and bind them (1976: 157). In Margins of Philosophy (1972)
together. Most action and speech is
différance is presented as an ‘interval’:
concerned with this in-between, which
varies with each group of people, so that neither simply active nor simply passive,
most words and deeds are about some announcing or rather recalling something
worldly objective reality in addition to like the middle voice saying an operation
being a disclosure of the acting and that is not an operation, an operation that
speaking agent. cannot be conceived either as passion or
Arendt 1998: 182 as the action of a subject on an object,
or on the basis of the categories of agent
In Eurotaoism (1989) Peter Sloterdijk
or patient neither on the basis of nor
addresses this shift from Heidegger’s
moving toward any of these terms.
male-dominated negation of life – ‘Being- 1972: 9
toward-Death’ – to Arendt’s female-
oriented, open attitude of ‘natality’: a Derrida’s crucial notions resonate in (con)
coming-into-world (zur-Welt-kommen) texts of Jean-François Lyotard, Michel
that includes both bi-unity and creativity. Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze and
(205) In his Spheres trilogy Sloterdijk Félix Guattari. All of these notions are
concludes in Spheres III: Foams that an instrumental to draw the contours of a
uncritical interesse asks for ‘the combina- philosophy of relations.
tion of “de-interesting and re-interesting” The initial focus of philosophies of
in a nondual type of morals’ (2004: n. 332). difference is an ontological primacy of
In emphasizing the supplementary several modalities of difference developed
tension between ‘de-interesting and re- in the course of the 1960s and 1970s:
interesting’ Sloterdijk refers to the rhizo- difference (Derrida), the Differend
matic philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. (Lyotard), sexual difference (Irigaray), the
At the end of the preface to A Thousand Other (Foucault), desiring machines and
Plateaus on the rhizome the French philo- the schizo (Deleuze/Guattari). This is the
sophers circumscribe the ontological mode backbone of a relational philosophy for
of this in-between: ‘The middle is by no the twenty-first century. But this is already
means an average . . . Between things does prefigured in an earlier critique on the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
INTEREST/INTERESSE 209

autonomous subject in the works of those (1983) Kimmerle systematically sketches

whom Paul Ricoeur labels as the ‘masters the transition of Hegelian dialectics to a
of suspicion’: Karl Marx, Friedrich philosophy of difference. Hegel’s system is
Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. These are beheaded, i.e. the differing of sublation is
the canonical thinkers that drove the radicalized. The entwinement of differ-
autonomous subject, residing in the centre ences that is liberated beyond dialectical
of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical universe, opposition and negation is literally radic-
out of the centre of philosophical thought. alized (Latin: radix = root) in the rhizo-
In Marx’s, Nietzsche’s and Freud’s critique matics of Deleuze and Guattari.
the subject turns out to be the result of Relation is the core characteristic of
respectively politico-economical forces De Saussure’s structuralist semiology.
and power relations, of rivalling vital forces Meaning is no longer established by refer-
and of libidinal energies. From a meta- ring to a state of affairs in the world, nor is
physical point of view it addresses no signification the result of an intentional
thing, nothing. In preceding the subject self-consciousness. Language is mapped as
Labour, Life and Libido are instances of the an immanent system of signs in which
nihilism Nietzsche diagnosed. In a more signification results from the grafting of
sociological phrasing self-consciousness concepts onto graphemes or phonemes, i.e.
is embedded as a node in networks onto writing or sounds. Only the positive
nowadays. In the final analysis these relations between principally arbitrary
infrastructural forces have and are no linguistic elements produce meaning. In
metaphysical foundation. relating to, differing from and negating
Next to these inspirations three other each other signs immanently produce
‘negative’ inspirations have to be taken into meaning. This deconstruction of the
account when it comes to a transition from subject is deepened by French thinkers
difference-based subject critique to a who combine structuralism with other
philosophy of relations: Georg Wilhelm human science disciplines. Jacques Lacan
Friedrich Hegel, the founding father of combined linguistic structuralism with
modern dialectics, Ferdinand de Saussure, Freudian psychoanalysis, Louis Althusser
the founding father of structuralism, and grafted structuralism onto Marxism, and
the founding father of a philosophy of Roland Barthes elaborated the notion of
death, Martin Heidegger. All the above- sign, applying it to all cultural expressions,
mentioned philosophers of difference transforming De Saussure’s semiology into
one way or the other had to get even a general semiotics.
with Hegel’s dialectics, incorporated and In line with the aforementioned philo-
surpassed De Saussure’s structuralism in sophers, over the past twenty years a philo-
their discursive deconstruction, genealogy sophy of relations has been articulated
or rhizomatics and had to re-adjust from different perspectives into different
Heideggerian thought on a Nietzschean- directions by – among others – Bruno
inspired philosophy of life. As Heinz Latour, Isabelle Stengers and recently
Kimmerle systematically described, the Bernard Stiegler. But the most radical and
deconstruction of the Hegelian system by systematic approach is given by Jean-Luc
French philosophers led to the liberation Nancy. His work bears witness to a rela-
of the relational foundation of Hegelian tional ontology that revaluates Nietzschean
dialectics. In Entwurf einer Philosophie nihilism in rethinking the unconceiv-
des Wir: Schule des alternativen Denkens able ‘inter’ of Derrida with notion as

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
210 INTERMEDIALITY

being-in-common, being-with, being-in- societal issues. Intermediality research

between. In Being Singular Plural (1996) addresses the question: what specific
Nancy overrules Heidegger’s statement on experience is triggered when artistic media
Interesse: interact in order to transform our discurs-
ive perception, taking into account polit-
Everything, then, passes between us. This
ical issues and philosophical perspectives?
‘between’, as its name implies, has neither
a consistency nor continuity of its own. It In literature, images have always been
does not lead from one to the other . . . It used to illustrate texts. Titles of paintings
is neither connected nor unconnected . . . in a museum setting also connect text and
It is that which is at the heart of a connec- image. After being read these might change
tion, the interlacing of strands whose the perception of the painting. Conceptual
extremities remain separate even at the artist Joseph Kosuth, with his One and
very centre of the knot. Three Chairs (1965), is known as the
founding father of conceptual art. Here he
Fully in accord with a philosophy of differ- experiments with multimedia in showing a
ence ‘the law of touching is separation’ photo of a chair, a dictionary gloss on
(Nancy 1996: 5). The ‘inter’ is not a cement, ‘chair’ and a real chair within one piece of
it does not create a ‘mi-lieu’. Relation is a work. The installation art of Bruce Nauman
tensional ‘partage’, a sharing and dividing, or Robert Smithson’s land art involves a
the core of which is ‘no thing’. bodily awareness in its three-dimensional
See also Ecologies of Architecture; environment. Its audiences are affected in a
Intermediality; Posthuman Museum subtle and complex way. The performance
Practices; Radical Mediocrity. art of Ulay and Abramovic experiments
with its audiences even more directly,
Henk Oosterling transforming them into a constituent part
of the work of art. The cinematographic
work of film director Peter Greenaway
crosses every boundary in using all kinds
INTERMEDIALITY of media. He mixes film, fashion, theatre,
dance, visual arts, architecture, minimal
Intermediality is a field of research travers- music, literature and the internet, describ-
ing three domains: arts, politics and philo- ing his films as ‘cinema of ideas’. In
sophy. The research is focused on the Intermedialität: Das System Peter
interplay between art disciplines (art), Greenaway Yvonne Spielmann qualifies
the impact of this interplay on individual Greenaway’s oeuvre as ‘an aesthetic form
and collective consciousness (politics) and of intermediality . . . on a comparative level
the way this experience mobilizes new Greenaway gathers images in which the
concepts that enrich the current discourse difference between medium and form is
(philosophy). It is neither art theory nor mediated’ (1998: 262). Dutch theatre
philosophy of art. It differs from multi- company (ZT ) Hollandia has changed the
media in which different media are used to theatrical landscape between 1985 and
illustrate and enhance each other within 2000 with their innovative location theatre,
one production. Yet it is interdisciplinary, in which political issues are addressed
but reaches beyond art by involving other theatrically and acoustically by combining
disciplines of research such as philosophy, nearly all disciplines, performing in aban-
while connecting with public debates on doned warehouses, underneath city

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
INTERMEDIALITY 211

bridges and in factories. So ingredients of became a topic of international discourse

intermediality research are the productive on art practices. In the first half of the 1990s
intercourse of multimedial artisticity, inter- some books on intermediality were
disciplinary creativity and self-reflective published in Germany. Most of these texts
conceptuality. dealt with the crossovers between literature
Intermediality developed itself into a and theatre, but also cinema and visual arts.
serious academic field of research during Franz-Josef Albersmeier paid attention to
the 1990s and has since produced a vast hybrid genres such as ciné-roman, ciné-
body of knowledge. The first debate and poème and ciné-drama. In his critique on
analyses appeared in Germany. Most of the ‘medial one-way traffic’, emphasizing the
research was done from a reception- productive interactions between these
aesthetic hermeneutical perspective. genres, he hermeneutically analyses cros-
French post-structuralism, deconstructiv- sovers that in the final analysis converge
ism and philosophy of difference provided and complete each other (Albersmeier
new approaches. Yet the notion ‘inter- 1992: 81). In Literatur intermedial (1995)
media’ has its roots in early modern art. Peter Zima also aims at convergence and
Samuel Coleridge coined the notion of complementarity as a ‘symbiosis’ of words,
‘intermedium’ in 1812 to describe a literary images and sounds. By introducing TV
process in which the function of symbol Jürgen Müller adds a new element. He
and allegory are compared (Coleridge, in refers to Higgins in Intermedialität: Formen
Raysor 1936: 33). The term was reintro- moderner kultureller Kommunikation
duced by the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins: (1996), concluding that an artistic medium
intermedia. In a 1965 article he qualifies is never pure but always already connected
the experience of artworks that make use to other media. Conceptualization, co-
of two or more artistic media as inter- operation and communication are the
medial. In Horizons: The Poetics and Theory Habermasian keywords for Müller. Artistic
of the Intermedia (1984) he elaborates on statements are understood and experi-
the specific meaning and analytical value enced within the context of a life-world
of this notion. It is indicative that a member that integrates the different experiences:
of the Fluxus movement proposed this ‘Intermediality does not mean an adding of
notion. In the 1960s Fluxus was an interna- different medial concepts nor a situating-
tional network of artists, composers and in-between-media of separate works, but
designers who blended different artistic an integration of aesthetic concepts of
media and disciplines in their art practices. separate media in a new medial context’
The movement was inspired by John (1996: 89).
Cage and Marcel Duchamp. Their cross- In spite of Müller’s dismissal of the in-
breeding of performance, noise music, betweenness, the tensional aspect of the
visual art, architecture and design but ‘inter’ and its reception-aesthetical impact
also literature – Fluxus was the title of a come to the fore in one of the contributions
magazine – had an explicitly anti-art and to Zima’s book. Hubertus von Amelunxen
anti-commercial sensibility. Given this elaborates the experience of the ‘inter’,
background it is possible to rewrite the adapting categories from Barthes’ Camera
history of twentieth-century avant-garde Lucida (1980). The emphasis is no longer
art from an intermedial point of view. on production, but on an ambiguous recep-
After Higgins’s first sketch of intermedia tion, i.e. the working of the work and its
it would take another ten years before it experiential effects. In Peter Wagner’s Icons

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
212 INVARIANCE

– Texts – Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis In references to Deleuze’s books on cinema,

and Intermediality (1996) intermediality is Volker Roloff deconstructs conceptuality
positioned as a neglected but important as the locus of reflectivity by stressing the
subdivision of intertextuality. Applying relation between thinking, images and
Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality he bodies. Gradually the hermeneutic
stresses the porosity of an interactive approach is deconstructed by emphasizing
texture of images, words, movements and tensional differences and the affective
sounds. Analysing the interactions between impact of intermedial works of art.
images and texts in so-called ‘iconotexts’, he Rephrased in a perspective that Gilles
specifically emphasizes the differential Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed in
tension that insist within one and between What is Philosophy? (1991) the primary
different media, resisting an unambiguous emphasis in intermedial research is on a
reception of the work of art. In his appreci- multi-faceted reflection involving sensa-
ation of this deferral, in the final instance tions (art), affects (micropolitics) and
Wagner favours Derrida’s ‘différance’ over concepts (philosophy).
Kristeva’s textuality. For an understanding of the in-between,
Crucial notions of French philosophers a more systematic implementation of a
of difference gradually enter the discourse philosophy of difference is instructive. In
on intermediality. Wagner remarks that criticizing dialectics, hermeneutics and
structuralist and poststructuralist theor- structuralism, these philosophers have
eticians – from Bakhtin, Barthes and implicitly forged a vocabulary that is more
Kristeva to Foucault, Lacan and Derrida – apt at understanding the ‘inter’. Their
have published a series of studies that critique on the rational subject and the
should have shaken the foundations of a deconstruction of oppositional thinking
number of disciplines and put into ques- finds a counterpart in the artistic research
tion cherished beliefs as the ‘mutual illu- on intermediality. Eventually this raises
mination of the arts’ (1996: 2). In Luis the question as to the specific quality
Buñuel: Film – Literatur – Intermedialität of the ‘inter’ of intermediality. Philoso-
(Link-Heer and Roloff 1994) the idea of phically this concerns the ‘sensational’,
integration and symbiosis is left behind. non-discursive quality of the being (esse)
Buñuel’s films widens the in-between of this in-between (inter), i.e. of inter-esse.
spaces between image and text and ‘makes
See also Art; Interest/Interesse; Meta-
visible the invisible and the eerie, the
modernism; Radical Mediocrity.
“other” space between the discourses, that
Foucault qualified as heterotopy’ (1994: 4).
Henk Oosterling
For capturing this heterotopic in-between,
conceptual reflection alone does not
suffice. Buñuel’s artistic reflections on the
‘inter’ of the media transgress discursive INVARIANCE
thinking in affecting its audiences with a
specific method. Referring to Lyotard’s The The main inclination that this article will
Differend. Phrases in Dispute from 1983 try to develop concerns a danger that
and applying its core concept to Buñuel’s Michel Serres has stated as follows: not to
cinema, Vittoria Borsò claims that inter- confuse invariance and identity (Serres
mediality is focused on ‘a differend 1992). Jacques Monod, to whom Serres
between media instead of a dialogue’ (160). refers with this statement, has pointed out

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
INVARIANCE 213

the source of this likely confusion with ‘culture’ as well as in ‘nature’) and the evol-
regard to what he calls the ‘quantic revolu- utionary interplay among such niches (in
tion’:1 ‘The principle of identity does not the earth and environmental sciences as
belong, as a postulate, in classical physics. well as in history and politics). This is situ-
There it is employed only as a logical ated materiality rather than completely
device, nothing requiring that it be taken drawn from ideally constructed typolo-
to correspond to a substantial reality’ gies, morphologies or ideologies. Must it
(Monod 1972). After the quantic revolu- not be regarded as an ethical obligation to
tion, however, the principle of identity commit ourselves to a derivative, differen-
ceases to be a merely logical device; in tial and functional view on sexuation
quantum physics, one of its (ontologies: genderedness, queerness,
nomadicity, ‘bodies-that-matter’) rather
root assumptions is the absolute identity than a structural or homeostatic,
of two atoms found in the same quantum symmetry-based and equational view
state.2 Whence also the absolute, non-
rooted in identity (metaphysics: prin-
perfectible representational value
ciples, laws, axioms, elements, atoms; cf
quantum theory assigns to atomic and
especially Haraway 2012)? Hasn’t this
molecular symmetries. And so today it
seems that the principle of identity can no
been the great emancipation of the last few
longer be confined to the status simply of decades? It certainly has. And it is at the
a rule of logical derivation: it must be core of the confusion of which Serres
accepted as expressing, at least on the warns us, between invariance and identity.
quantic scale, a substantial reality. In such a confusion, this term, invariance,
Monod 1972: 101 would cast a shadow against whatever
brightness about the future may be evoked
But isn’t the notion of identity, at least in by the painfully wrought emphasis on
its philosophical scope, always already difference over identity and the ethical
entangled with notions of substance? And practices of counterbalancing normativity
hasn’t it been one of the most valuable and standardization through the appraisal
achievements of twentieth-century philo- of singularity in its own rights. But Serres’
sophical discourse to argue that talk of warning of confusion not only points to
identity, at least with regard to cultural the fragility of how we value the emancip-
issues, is unnecessary? That its substantial- atory worth of such critique; it also entails
ity is always already discursively consti- coming to terms with a notion of substan-
tuted? And that we can learn from science tial and absolute identity.3
that to speak of identity means evoking a
A blue alga, an infusorian, an octopus,
logical abstraction, at odds with any realist
and a human being – what had they in
position? I would suggest that the issue
common? With the discovery of the cell
had better be addressed in terms of a and the advent of cellular theory a
notion of materiality that must be forged new unity could be seen under this
in a situated manner. This notion of mater- diversity. But it was some time before
iality is obliged to take into account a very advances in biochemistry, mainly during
large number of factors, to a degree of the second quarter of this century,
complexity about which we can only learn revealed the profound and strict oneness,
from ‘real’ bodies of all kinds. This includes on the microscopic level, of the whole of
organic and/or chemical bodies, with the living world.
regard to their environmental niches (in Monod 1972: 102

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
214 INVARIANCE

This oneness is the subject of Serres’ terms. What Michel Serres and Jacques
ciphered atomism (Serres 2000 [1977]), of Monod, building on the information
the entropic cataract of atoms falling, theory in the tradition of Oswald Wiener,
as particles of regularity in declination – Léo Szilard and Léon Brillouin, suggest (cf.
clinamen, an angularity – through the void, Negentropy) is that such identity can be
conjugating into local turbulence, where quantized as binding amounts of informa-
and by which ‘atoms meet’ (ibid.: 6); his tion capable of preserving a certain struc-
notion of the atom is the minimal condi- ture across variable transformations.
tion to explain how turbulence forms, Monod’s invariance can be understood as
‘appearing stochastically in laminar flow’ an ‘invariance content’ (quantized specie-
(ibid.), the substance of chance, the catar- iality) that is ‘equal to the amount of
act. His notion of the atom encrypts the information which, transmitted from one
magnitude of a substantial notion of chance generation to the next, assures the preser-
as the universal principle (Zufall), in which vation of the specific structural standard’
pockets of negentropy capture local and (Monod 1972: 13). Invariance is reserved
temporary order: ‘Systems of conservation for a quantity that establishes a niveau of
for chance, systems which orientate and information or negentropy (Serres 1992:
control themselves, packed to their limits 57) (bound information). What is hence
with negentropy. Enzyme catalysis, a capa- established, from invariant content, is what
city for discrimatory selection’ (Serres 1992: Monod calls ‘teleonomic information’.
63). Can ontogenetic life (specious life Teleonomy refers to probabilistic calcula-
forms) be compatible with the second law tions on the combinatorial total of trans-
of thermodynamics (the drift towards fers that can apply, in conformity with the
maximum entropy, the disintegration of all laws of conservation, to an invariant
forms of organization into its atomization amount of information (Monod 1972: 14).
where each particle of formality is of equal It is Monod’s great achievement to have
probability), apparently compatible only distinguished (1) an operable definition of
with phylogenetic life (the common origin chance as the unknown (due to the imper-
of all individuals), he asks? And Serres fect experiment, while not knowing all the
maintains yes, it can: ‘the conceptual pair initial conditions, the cost of observa-
information–entropy reduces to a level of tions), chance at work in logical/formal
the objective, calculable, positive, the old terms in stochastical statistics; and (2) an
metaphysical twin notions of chance and essential definition of chance, by attribut-
necessity’ (ibid.: 62). Because the role of ing chance a substantial and absolute iden-
information as a currency in the economic tity.4 We can easily associate the operable
calculations of the thermodynamic balance chance with entropy as an operational
sheets (information is not gratuitious, every measure in thermodynamics, and essential
observation has its price, cf. Negentropy, chance with the principle assumption that
and Maxwell’s Demon), we find afforded by the amount total of energy in the universe
the pair information–entropy a physical be finite and invariant. The latter cannot be
theory of heritage. counted; it can only be coded and like the
The question that can be foregrounded identity of all life forms in terms of DNA ,
by a discussion of the term ‘invariance’ it can be deciphered through translating
concerns how substantial identity, absolute between manners of coding.
because governed by chance, might There is a universal nature (substantial
possibly be distinguished in quantitative identity) that pertains to all things, and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
INVARIANCE 215

this universal nature is what Jacques between the occurrences that can provoke
Monod suggests to address in terms of an or permit an error in the replication of the
object’s ‘strangeness’.5 One confuses invari- genetic message and its functional
ance with identity whenever one reads consequences there is also a complete
Monod’s use of ‘strange’ in his discussion of independence. The functional effect
‘strange objects’ as an adjective. Serres depends upon the structure, upon the
elaborates: ‘strange does not qualify a actual role of the modified protein,
substantive’, rather ‘strange’ operates as a upon the interactions it ensures, upon the
quantifier, not as a qualifier. The molecular reactions it catalyzes – all things which
have nothing to do with the mutational
theory of the genetic code is ‘a physical
event itself nor with its immediate or
theory of heritage’ that complements the
remote causes, regardless of the nature,
Darwinian evolutionary view. A physical
whether deterministic or not, of those
theory of inheritance is a basis that quanti- causes.
fies substantives in terms of different Monod 1972: 114
niveaus of negentropy (as amounts of
chance, that can be deciphered from the In order to illustrate this postulated inde-
mutually implicative relation between pendence between the code itself and its
invariant and teleonomic information). articulated manifestations, Monod discusses
With his notion of the strange object, the coincidence of genuinely heterogenous
Monod suggests a notion of the object that sequences via the example of a worker fixing
neither contradicts the principles of a roof, letting go of his tool accidentally, and
physics (second law of thermodynamics, a passer-by who is in no way related to the
one universality) nor those of Darwinian worker on the roof but who is hit by the
biology (natural selection in evolution, falling tool and killed thereby. If one were to
pluralist universality of natural kinds). assume that there be a larger logics that
Hence ontogenetic and phylogenetic life homogenizes these two heterogenous series,
are both compatible with thermodynam- one would indeed have to assume that the
ics. But the central assumption thereby is passer-by was fatefully predicated to die like
that invariance genetically, chemically and this from the very beginning of his exist-
physically precedes teleonomy: ‘the ence; against the assumption of such fatal-
Genomenon is the secret code of the ism, Monod stresses his two definitions of
Phaenomenon’, as Serres puts it (1992: 59). chance as (1) operable and (2) substantial.
The ‘strange object’ is one which neither While the genetic text itself is a closed and
presupposes a distinction between natural finite system (with its residual alphabet of
and artificial, things endowed with a amino acids and nucleotides), the source of
purpose (project) and things natural the biosphere’s incredible variety results
(without purpose), nor one between from errors in the transcription of the code’s
animate and inert. It is crucial for under- sequences. For this transcription process it is
standing Monod’s primacy of code to crucial that one always has to consider pairs
emphasize that what is all-too-often short- of nucleotides (literally that which is with a
circuited as ‘the code of life’, to Monod is a nucleus); one cannot do with singularized
relation between code and its secret (life) and original ones. These pairs – and this is
that is one of mutual independence, one the essential role invariant amounts of
regarding the phenomenon of life (not life information need to play, counterbalancing
itself) and one entirely chance-bound in the structural teleonomy of bound informa-
the substantial definition of the term: tion – must be deciphered in a double sense.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
216 ‘IT’

This is how Serres can say: ‘nature is hidden revolution’. Any notion of a situatively,
twice. First, under the cypher. Then under differentially forgeable, embodied mater-
a dexterity, a modesty, a subtlety, which iality today, hence, will find itself affected
prevents our reading the cypher even from by it. Karen Barad (2007) has made a
an open book. Nature hides under a hidden strong case pointing in this direction.
cypher. Experimentation, intervention, 4. This is his commitment to Léon
consist in making it appear’ (Serres 2000: Brillouin’s emphasis on the substantiality
140).6 of code in information theory, which led
him to distinguish negative and positive
See also Equation; Negentropy; Maxwell’s information alongside the distinction
Demon. between negative and positive entropy.
See his seminal book (Brillouin 1956).
Serres discusses this commitment at
Notes length in his article ‘Leben, Information
1. Algebra, which used to be regarded in und der zweiter Hauptsatz der
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Thermodynamik’ (Serres 1992).
as the theory of equations, had trans- 5. See the introductory chapter in Monod’s
formed by the early twentieth century Chance and Necessity, entitled ‘Strange
into what was now called Quantics, the Objects’ (1972: 3–22).
theory of ‘algebraic forms’ also called 6. Serres further developed this idea of a
‘residual forms’. These are forms that ciphered atomism in his more recent
‘define’ by conserving something indefinite book L’Incandescent (2003).
throughout transformations, while it is
by the transformations themselves that Vera Bühlmann
they regulate their formality, their
morphisms (not the nature of any sort
of content, as in the hylemorphic tradi- ‘IT’
tion). With the seminal work of Emmy
Noether and others on reformulating
the Laws of Thermodynamics as Laws Will find a way
of Conservation, Quantics turned into a
general theory of invariances. See Goes on
Kosmann-Schwarzback (2011) and
Levy-Leblond and Balibar (1990). Not as we know it . . .
2. The author here refers his reader to V. Where does anything begin? In the middle
Weisskopf (1969: 28). perhaps? Not with ‘you’ or ‘I’ but some-
3. We might say, invariance applies ‘only’ to
where in-between? A bookish narrator,
the quantum domain; but what might
searching for the exact location of a cele-
appear at first like a hygienic ‘restriction’
brated Roman battle (the Battle of Munda,
of the upheavals that announce them-
45 BCE ), takes a vacation from the library
selves to one domain in particular is in
fact its total expansion. Not only particle to wander in the mountains of Andalusia
physics, but also all of chemistry and in southern Spain not far from where
molecular biology, as well as the math- Europe confronts Africa across the Strait
ematical quantity of information of Gibraltar and the Alboran Sea. He
(through its operationalization in terms comes across a bandit asleep in the sun
of entropy and negentropy) involves beside a spring that runs down following a
the ‘indefinite scalarity’ of the ‘quantic gorge from the peaks of the Sierra de

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
‘IT’ 217

Cabra. A scholar and an outlaw; this time Carmen (1845) to illustrate the importance
they both live to walk away, and so there’s a of what he calls the third person (Serres
story to tell. They will meet one more time 1997: 57–62). Serres’s third person desig-
to walk away again and then, for the last nates whoever or whatever is excluded from
time, in a prison cell as the bandit, Don the community of interlocutors, of ‘I’ or ‘we’
José, awaits execution. His lover, Carmen, and ‘you’. Linguists have often emphasized
the devil girl, the wild gypsy, the story’s the importance of such pronomial ‘shifters’
turbulent raison d’être, lies dead by his in orienting and enabling human commu-
hand. Sentence has been passed and waits nication (Silverstein 1979). Serres’ concern,
only to be carried out. Everything is however, extends beyond the human. The
decided. It remains only to recount what third person, for Serres, partakes simultan-
has already happened. To discover the eously of exclusivity and inclusivity. It can
might-have-beens, the paths not taken, it is encompass not only specific excluded
necessary to work backwards. What lies others – the ‘hidden people’ implied in any
upstream of the facts? What is there before two-way exchange – but also externality in
the branching and bifurcating of ways, general – the world as such in the imper-
before the decisions that produce this sonality of its taking place – it rains, it hails,
world rather than that, this story rather it snows, it thunders. More expansively still,
than that? Might literature know some- it is also the third person that gives and
thing about this that science can’t? articulates Being, as rendered in the French
expression for being there – il y a (Serres
Begs to differ 1997: 46).
Serres of course attaches great import-
Never ends ance to such third spaces, the spaces of
transition and transformation, of aberra-
The ‘inter’ of interlocuttion tion and incalculability, the middle where
everything commences. Such are the spaces
Vibrations and flows of the parasite, of the ineradicable noise
that accompanies and enables meaningful
Absent, worthless, ridiculous . . . communication, of the departures and
castings off that inaugurate new projects
The Third Man
and entities, and of the tortuous and elusive
‘northwest passage’ between the institu-
Racketeering amid the rubble
tionally divergent knowledge-cultures of
The excluded third
the sciences and humanities. Serres
describes himself too as occupying such a
Outside the conversation tertiary zone, that of the ‘instructed third’
(Le Tiers Instruit being the original, French
Outside communication title of The Troubadour of Knowledge): a
left-hander taught to use the right,
Outside belonging ‘completed’ as he puts it, a self-described
descendent of Gascon peasants, turned
Or just outside . . .? sailor, turned mathematician, turned philo-
sopher – passing always through the
The philospher Michel Serres summarizes middle, the undecideable. The third person
the plot of Prosper Merimée’s novella and third space are at once between and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
218 ‘IT’

antecedent to the oppositional differenti- the guise of a subject or an organism.

ation of subject and object or self and other, Indeed, as Claire Colebrook has suggested,
effecting an opening to the universe in all it assigns no necessary privilege to the
its turbulent generativity. organic, but can be thought of rather as
an impersonal force of difference and
The space of externality in general becoming that extends beyond biological
evolution to encompass the geologic
Excluded but all-inclusive
and planetary prehistory that Deeuze and
Guattari’s ‘geophilosophy’ would seek to
All the others – objectivity
evoke (Colebrook 2010; Deleuze and
Necessity – il faut
Guattari 1994).
The Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector
From nothing to everything (like Deleuze an avid reader of Spinoza)
calls it the ‘it’ – an inhuman life of matter
and back again forming the impersonal substrate of exper-
ience and subjectivity without being
Art and literature have sometimes been directly accessible to either, or indeed to
described as quintessentially humanistic language, demanding that words be used
pursuits but perhaps they are no less as ‘bait . . . fishing for whatever is not word’.
marked by a constitutive inhumanity. Variously characterized as ‘living and soft’
Deleuze once wrote that literature’s closest and ‘hard like a pebble’ the ‘it’ is to be
affinities lay not with the first two persons approached circuitously via a succession of
of I/you interlocution but with the imper- mythic, animal, vegetable and mineral
sonality of the third person: ‘it is not the metamorphoses, a multiplication of
first two persons that function as the analogues and personae conveying its
condition of literary enunciation; litera- shifting and elusive being – insects, birds,
ture begins only when a third person is frogs, tigers, black panthers, witches, Diana
born in us that strips away the power to say the huntress, pestilential swamps, caverns
“I” (Deleuze 1997d: 3).1 The third person filled with stalactites and fossils.
articulates the space not only of missing Sometimes, however, one catches a more
or absent people, the ‘people to come’ to direct glimpse – for example, watching the
whom, according to Deleuze, art and birth of an animal:
literature address themselves but also that
of what Deleuze elsewhere refers to as ‘a To be born: I’ve watched a cat give birth.
life’ (Deleuze 2001). ‘A life’ describes a The kitten emerges wrapped in a sack
condition of pure immanance, of the kind of fluid and all huddled inside. The
that Spinoza, another of Deleuze’s inter- mother licks the sack of fluid so many
locutors, took to obtain between divine times that it finally breaks and there a
‘substance’, the infinity of ‘attributes’ into kitten almost free, only attached by its
which it determines itself and the ‘modes’ umbilical cord. Then the mother-creator-
through which it is actualized (Spinoza cat breaks that cord with her teeth and
another fact appears in the world. That
1992). It is composed of virtualities, events
process is it.
and singularities and thus possessed of a
Lispector 2010: 28
distinctiveness that cannot be reduced to
a determinate identity (Deleuze 2001). As ‘It’ – not the animal thus born into the
such ‘a life’ precedes its individuation in world, but the process of its birthing.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
‘IT’ 219

Is ‘It’ another term for the Unconscious, Canada in the 1920s, found that his Inuit
then? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Freud’s hosts used the name ‘Sila’ to refer to a
exposition of the Unconscious draws power (usually, but not always male-
interchangeably on the German third- identified) associated, variously, with the
person-singular neuter – Es – and on the air, the wind, the weather, the physical
Latin Id. For Deleuze, Lispector and Serres, environment in general or the animating
however, the third person seems to refer- ‘breath’ of the natural world. Sila (other-
ence something more expansive than the wise referred to as or the ‘indweller in
psychic economy of libidinal repression the wind’) was identified both as the
and paternal law that would become part defender of traditional observances and
of the orthodoxy of a later Freudianism. punisher of taboo violations and as the
Jean-Luc Nancy acknowledges as much patron and guardian of shamans and
when he writes that what is at stake, ulti- shamanic initiations. Rasmussen learned
mately, in Freud’s concept of the Id is ‘what that Inuit shamans did not derive their
links us together . . . not only us humans power from their retinue of helping spirits
but the totality of beings – the animal (who could take a variety of human-like
within us, and even the vegetable, the or animal forms) but from a more elusive
mineral’ (Nancy 2012: 91). and diffuse power that could never be
definitively personified. It was a shaman –
Bats, rats, crabs, cockroaches, wild
or angakoq – by the name of Najagneq
horses . . .
from Nunivak island who described
Carnivorous plants Sila to Rasmussen in the following
terms:
Legendary animals A great spirit, supporting the world and
the weather and all life on earth, a spirit
Elemental creatures so mighty that his utterance to mankind
is not through common words, but by
Mythical sex storm and snow and rain and the fury of
the sea; all the forces of nature that men
Soft oyster placenta fear . . . When all is well, Sila sends no
message to mankind, but withdraws into
Hard pebble his own endless nothingness, apart. So
he remains as long as men do not abuse
God is it? life, but act with reverence toward their
We might ask then whether intimations daily food . . . No one has seen Sila, his
of such an inhuman, asubjectival life are place of being is a mystery, in that he
is at once among us and unspeakably
symptomatic of a contemporary crisis of
far away.
humanism, fuelled by, amongst other
Rasmussen 1999: 385–6
things, global capitalism, rapid technolo-
gical change and fears of impending ecolo-
What lies hidden between ‘you’ and ‘I’?
gical catastrophe? Or are art and literature
in the present simply articulating what Remote and up close
many humans in many other times and
places have always known? The early The last substratum
twentieth-century Danish anthropologist
Knud Rasmussen, traveling in Arctic The impersonal

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
220 ‘IT’

Inside Note
1. Deleuze comments: ‘Literature here
Outside
seems to refute the linguistic conception,
which finds in shifters, and notably in the
Everything . . .
first two persons, the very condition of
enunciation’ (1997: 185).
It is. . . .
Stuart McLean
See also Animacies; Animism; Anonymity

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
JOY, ETHICS OF 221

J
JOY, ETHICS OF proposes an ethical coding that distin-
guishes power relations that are empower-
Posthuman critical theory produces an ing – affirmative or active – from those
ethics of joy or affirmation. A joyful ethics that are entrapping – disempowering or
rests on an enlarged sense of a vital inter- reactive. The former enhance potentia (the
connection with a multitude of (human positive face of power), whereas the latter
and non-human) others by removing the play into potestas (the restrictive face of
obstacle of self-centred individualism and power). Politically, it is associated with an
anthropocentrism on the one hand and ontological form of pacifism that is espe-
the barriers of negativity on the other. It cially relevant for ecological justice,
assumes a new-materialist philosophy that environmental activism and posthuman
rejects dualistic oppositions and posits all ethics.
subjects as differential modulations of a The ethics of joy requires the following
common matter. This political vision rejects conditions. First, given that power is a
the dialectics that pitches self-versus-other. complex strategic situation that humans
It is critical of the importance granted to constantly inhabit, but with different
negativity in the dialectical scheme, where degrees of entrapment and empowerment,
difference is traditionally defined as ‘differ- it is best posited as a continuum. This
ent from’ a dominant norm, which is implies that terms like active and reactive,
hence interpreted as ‘less than’. A joyful negative and positive, are not to be under-
ethics frees difference from pejoration and stood as dialectical opposites, but rather
replaces it with positivity. as negotiable and reversible points of
Consequently the politics flowing from encounter with others.
affirmative ethics does not postulate Second, ‘affirmative/positive’ and
subjectivity along the binary oppositional ‘reactive/negative’ affects are not to be
axes that separate humans from non- taken as emotional states in a psycholo-
humans, culture from nature, ‘us’ from gical frame that assumes the liberal indi-
‘them’. On the contrary, posthuman vidual as point of reference. Within a
subjectivity is nomadic, distributed, rela- posthuman framework affects are rather to
tional and process-oriented. This process be understood as transversal, non-human
ontology, inspired by feminist theory forces that need to be assessed in terms of
(Lloyd 1994) and contemporary re-read- their impact on subjects and on the world.
ings of Spinoza in French philosophy The ethical behaviour is what can activate
(Deleuze 1988b, 1992b), asserts a trustful and increase relational capacities (potentia)
relationship with the world and allows and the unethical is what restricts or
for greater interaction between humans hampers them. This assumes that the
and non-humans. An affirmative stance ethical subject desires and is driven to the

221
222 JOY, ETHICS OF

affirmation of a positive essence (conatus) transformation of negative relations and

that yearns for the expression of its passions into affirmative ones: a political
freedom and force. In other words, humans praxis. Cooperation means active labour-
– like all living entities – are drawn to ing towards an adequate understanding
perpetuate  and structurally gravitate of conditions, which is not the same as
around positivity. endorsing them. The aim of producing an
Third, the notion of the negative refers adequate cartography of the present condi-
less to a normative value than to the effect of tions is to identify points of resistance.
arrest and blockage that often comes as a What is positive in the ethics of affirm-
result of a hurt, a shock, an act of moral, ation is the belief that negative relations
epistemic or emotional violence, or by and passions can be transformed through
intense tedium. Negative passions destroy an engagement in collective practices of
the self’s capacity to act as they harm the change. This implies a dynamic view of
self’s ability to inter-relate to others – both passions and affects, even those that
human and non-human – and thus decrease freeze us in pain, horror or mourning. The
one’s relationship to the world. On a larger ethical subject is the one with the force to
spectrum, negative affects diminish the grasp the freedom to depersonalize the
capacity to express the high levels of inter- event and transform its negative charge.
dependence, the vital reliance on others, This is in keeping with the method of de-
that constitute the key to an affirmative or familiarization that is central to posthu-
joyful ethics. man thought (see critical posthuman
Fourth, joyful ethics redefines the theory in this volume). Affirmative ethics
persistence of destructive or negative rela- puts the motion back into e-motion and
tions. Mindful that not all relations are a the active back into activism.
priori positive, it makes the ethical distinc- Consequently, the ethics of joy is about
tion between, for instance, affirmative transcending the force of the negative by
encounters and aggressive disempower- acknowledging negative emotions like
ment. The ethics of joy does not deny the pain, anger, greed and fear. It is about a
reality of pain, trauma and violence, but process of becoming: becoming-ethical.
rather proposes a different way of dealing This is a far cry from applying moral rules
with them. It warns against the pious and protocols as a form of self-protection.
harmonization of conflicts and offers an Endurance is the Spinozist term for this
alternative structure of dealing with differ- process, which has both a spatial and a
ence, which is not oppositional in a dialect- temporal aspect. The spatial aspect has to
ical mode but still allows for antagonism. do with the body as an enfleshed, affective
Joyful ethics consists in being able to tell field of actualization of passions or forces.
the difference, but to recognize it posit- Endurance combines vulnerability with
ively, so as to enact the transmutation resilience. It stresses the struggle to sustain
of a negative relation into an affirmative the pain without being annihilated by
mode. it. It thus opens the temporal dimension;
The ethics of joy does not equate the duration in time. Joyful or affirmative
acquiescence with the conditions of the ethics is based on a collective praxis of
present: endurance is not resignation and enduring – surviving and lasting – by
immanence is not the mystical acceptance constructing positivity. This means to
that all that lives is holy. What is required undo existing conditions so as to actualize
instead is an active practice of collective alternatives. Every event contains within

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
JOY, ETHICS OF 223

it the potential for being overcome and that transform and empower the capacity
overtaken: its negative charge can always to act ethically and produce social hori-
be transposed (Glissant 1997). zons of hope and sustainable futures
The ethics of joy is thus at heart a (Braidotti 2006a).
process of becoming. Because such a A fourth step to achieve an ethics of joy
becoming is not contained in present is to acknowledge life as a generative force
conditions, and cannot emerge from of becoming. This means that life, zoe, is a-
them, it has to be brought about creatively personal and non-anthropocentric. What
by a qualitative leap of collective praxis is affirmed in the ethics of joy is precisely
and ethical imagination. To accomplish an the power of zoe/life itself – its very poten-
ethics of joy, ‘we’ need to compose a tia. Life is a dynamic force that unfolds
community and produce a qualitative leap through vital flows of connections and
that breaks productively with the present. becoming. An ethics of joy taps into that
The first step consists in reaching an flow. The Kantian imperative not to do
adequate cartography of the conditions unto others what you would not want done
of bondage. The ethics of joy proposes an to you gets thus enlarged. In affirmative
alternative way of extracting knowledge ethics the harm you do to others is imme-
from pain, that starts with and is conveyed diately reflected in the harm you do to
by the quest for an adequate understanding yourself; what’s more, life itself gets
of power. The analysis of power as a diminished in terms of loss of potentia, the
complex and multi-layered situation capacity to relate, and to explore one’s
subjects are caught in is consequently the freedom.
beginning of ethical wisdom. A fifth step for an ethics of joy entails
The second step consists in mobilizing sustaining processes of subject-formation
a subject’s ontological desire – the vital that do not comply with the dominant
potentia of the subject – by reframing it in norms. For posthuman theory, the subject
disruptive directions capable of resisting is fully immersed in and immanent to a
codes and powers. The ethics of joy is network of non-human relations: animal,
engendered by the collective construction vegetable, viral, technological. This process-
of ethical subjects who actively desire oriented vision of the subject expresses a
otherwise and thus break with the doxa, grounded form of accountability, based on
the acquiescent application of established renewed claim to community and belong-
norm and values, by de-territorializing ing to ‘a collaborative morality’ (Lloyd
them and introducing alternative ethical 1996: 74). When applied to environmental
flows. An ethics of joy shows that the issues, the ethics of joy thus involves
motor of political change is an affirmative continuous negotiations with both domin-
force, not merely dialectical opposition. ant norms and values and the politics of
The third step is to create a laboratory affirmative and sustainable alternatives. It
of the new. To live out the shared capacity entails a new way of combining ethical
to affect and to be affected, posthuman values with the well-being of an enlarged
subjects need to disengage the process of sense of community. It expresses multiple
subject formation from negativity by ecologies of belonging that acknowledge
attaching it to affirmative and relational the collective nature and outward-bound
vision of the self. The ethics of joy is a direction of the nomadic self. The post-
pragmatic engagement with the present in human era needs to create ethical subjects
order to collectively construct conditions through a collective practice activated

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
224 JOY, ETHICS OF

around the shared desire to actualize new See also Posthuman Critical Theory;
potentials. An ethics of joy then means Posthuman Ethics; Process Ontologies;
that ‘we’ are becoming posthuman ethical Neo/New Materialism; Mattering; Non-
subjects in our evolving capacities for human Agency.
cooperating in the composition of affirm-
ative relations. Rosi Braidotti

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
KIN 225

K
KIN ing that kinship structures are constructed
first and foremost on the grounds of sexual
This entry outlines a multispecies account reproductive relations.
of kin in Donna Haraway’s work in general The 1970s and 1980s also witnessed the
and more specifically in the book Staying emergence of what can be called ‘feminist
With The Trouble: Making Kin in the anthropology’, and with it a greater focus
Chthulucene (2016). Donna Haraway on de-naturalization of the notion of kin
proposes kinship as a non-genealogical through the critique of its basic premises:
mode of relation that is based on response- gender, reproduction and power hierarch-
ability and becoming-with, extending ies.2 A strong push towards the interroga-
beyond Anthropos and humanist accounts tion of the nature–culture divide as it
of relationality. I will start by briefly sketch- relates to kin-making also came from the
ing out the context of kinship studies and works of scholars such as Sarah Franklin
the way it has been challenged by feminist (1997, 2001, 2013), Marilyn Strathern
perspectives, and will then discuss Haraway’s (1992a, 1992b), Henrietta Moore (1986,
work against this background. 1988, 1994) and Janet Carsten (2004). These
Kin structures were primarily the scholars argue that with the advancement
research object of anthropology, a discip- of bio- and reproductive technologies, as
line that was founded, according to Franklin well as with new family formations gaining
and Ragoné (1998), amongst the obsession visibility (examples may include LGBTQ
with kinship, procreation and succession. families or, more recently, three-parent
Classical anthropology not only researched families formed via IVF that combines a
kinship mainly in the so-called ‘primitive’ donor mitochondria with DNA of two
societies,1 in order to answer the question other parents3) the core questions of
of how they functioned without a clear kinship – what constitutes a biological tie
regulatory apparatus of the state, but also and what is the significance of such ties in
defined it primarily as genealogical and kin-making – are constantly re-defined, not
inheritance-based phenomenon (Carsten least by technological mediation. These con-
2008). Kinship was moreover naturalized temporary developments re-invigorated
in that it was seen as a product of nature – a the field of kinship studies and gave an
stance that in the mid-twentieth century impetus to not only challenge the inherent
started being heavily criticized by the so- anthropocentrism and humanism of the
called ‘culturalist’ school of kinship research field but also inquire into cross-species and
(ibid.). Scholars such as David Schneider post-human kinship relations.4
(1968, 1984) argued that kinship is primar- Much of the above-mentioned scholar-
ily based on shared meanings and symbols, ship owes to Donna Haraway’s creative
and criticized western scholars for assum- re-imaginings of kinship through the

225

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
226 KIN

construction of her own queer/hybrid/ proximity to strangeness, thus opening up

anti-Oedipal and post-patriarchal family of space for partial recuperation and ‘getting
material-semiotic figurations (Haraway on together’ (ibid).
2004). Starting with the figure of the cyborg Such kinships, Haraway argues, are made
in the 1980s, she later proclaimed her not autopoietically but sym-chthonically
kinship to OncoMouse,™ that is to say a and sym-poietically, without transcendental
genetically modified mouse that carries belief or (potentially equally transcend-
a gene which increases its susceptibility ental) cynicism or indifference. Kinships are
to cancer. Haraway also bonds with not without trauma (think of the painful
Plutonium–239 – a fissile isotope created in histories of domestification, colonization,
nuclear reactors and used for the produc- imperialism, slavery and other forms of
tion of nuclear weapons. This social bond is exploitation), nor are they completely open
not postulated along the classical line of – they include some and exclude others,
social contract theory, based on the patri- and thus must be formed with attention to
archal exchange of women in heterosexual complex historical ties and situatedness,
marriage and family structure, but rather resisting temptation to generalize too easily
by sharing with these post-natural critters either in the direction of common human-
a sense of agency and material intimate ity or multispecies collectives.
interconnections through complex shared Haraway’s stance, perhaps most clearly
histories (Haraway 1997). Haraway has reflected in the slogan ‘make kin, not
written two pioneering books on compan- babies!’, should be read not as against-life,
ion species (2003, 2008), in which she high- but rather as a non-natalist, anti-capitalist,
lights significant otherness as a productive anti-anthropocentric ethical call for
relation that further blurs the human/non- sustainable forms of living. Drawing on
human, organic/technological, nature/ indigenous thought that proposes non-
culture binaries by showing how different monogamous, interspecies kinships as a
species co-constitute each other through mode of claiming each other (see, for
mutual connections. instance, TallBear 2011, 2013, 2016),
Haraway’s work on kin-making (or Haraway urges the invention of new ways
‘kinning’) is indebted to feminist science of proliferating other-than-natal kin, while
and technology studies, feminist takes on simultaneously fighting the colonialist,
biology, science fiction, scientific fabula- racist, xenophobic and misogynist state
tion and indigenous scholarship (Haraway policies of population control. As she
2016). Staying true to her politics of care- herself writes, resistance to Anthropos and
ful and responsible worlding, Haraway Capital calls for kinnovators that acknow-
aims to re-claim kin and kinship as non- ledge that ‘babies should be rare, nurtured
genealogical technology of becoming-with and precious; and kin should be abundant,
and rendering each other capable, detached unexpected, enduring, and precious’ (ibid.).
from notions of inheritance and ancestry.
See also Anthropocene and Chthulucene;
For Haraway kinning is a matter of making
Animism; Feminist Posthumanities;
persons – not necessarily individuals or
Naturecultures; Symbiogenesis.
humans – that are capable of living and
dying well with each other in a ‘thick pres-
ence’. In other words, she highlights the Notes
practice of relationality that goes beyond 1. The study of modern Western kinships
Anthropos, that is focused on staying in (essentially monogamous families) was

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
KIN 227

at the time undertaken by sociology and 3. Such modified in vitro fertilization (IVF )
focused on economic and instrumental method has recently been approved in
aspects, since families were seen as rele- the UK : see James Gallagher, ‘UK
gated to the domestic, private sphere and approves three-person babies’, BBC News,
of little political significance (Carsten 24 February, http://www.bbc.com/news/
2008). health–31594856 [accessed 29 November
2. See, for instance, Collier and Yanagisako 2016].
1987, Gailey 1987, Ginsburg 1989, 4. See Edwards and Salazar 2009; Kroløkke
Martin 1987, Rapp 1982, Rubin 1975, et al. 2015; Riggs and Peel 2016.
Ortner and Whitehead 1981, Strathern
1988, Weiner 1976. Goda Klumbytė

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
228 LAMPEDUSA

L
LAMPEDUSA of the sea between Lampedusa and North
Africa; the drowning of 300 people off
Lampedusa is a borderzone – geologically Lampedusa in October 2013; and the death
Africa, politically Europe. Part of Italy of 700 migrants in a shipwreck off the
since its unification, the island has since Libyan coast in April 2015. The litany can
the early 2000s become a hot spot – a go on. But Lampedusa is not an atrocity
switch point and holding bay for migrants exhibition. Getting behind the ‘border
attempting the deadly crossing of the spectacle’ played out on this fated island
Mediterranean from North Africa to requires an analysis of the forces and stakes
Europe. This passage has a long history. at play in the global policing of human
Before the formation of the European mobility and the remaking of territory
Union, the movement of people across the implicit in such control.
Mediterranean followed seasonal labour Lampedusa is an iconic site within a
patterns. Only in the wake of the Schengen wider geography of border control that has
accords was this motion rendered ‘illegal’. taken shape at least since the appearance
Contrary to the rhetoric of emergency, of the ‘boat people’ in the wake of the
which attributes the route’s lethalness to Vietnam War in the mid–1970s. This is an
random influxes of migrants, the danger of elusive and mobile geography, which is in
crossing was augmented at this point. A no way limited to the ‘open wounds’
series of stark administrative measures (heridas abiertas) in which, as Gloria
tangled the human passage from Africa to Anzaldúa writes, ‘the Third World grates
Lampedusa with the border between life against the first and bleeds’ (Anzaldúa
and death. 1987: 3). Sure, such sites as the US –
The headlines and events are well Mexican border or the northern border of
known: the stand-off following the rescue Australia are hot and relatively stable spots
of thirty-seven migrants by the Cap for any attempt to map this geography. But
Anamur in 2004; the forced return of the global multiplication of migratory and
African migrants from Lampedusa to escape routes has been matched both by
Libya under a secret agreement reached by multifarious attempts to externalize the
the Italian government; the efforts of the control of these borders and by a prolifera-
EU and UNHCR to involve ‘third coun- tion of limits and holding zones around
tries’ in asylum practices; the destruction and within national and regional spaces
by fire of an overcrowded holding centre in outside of the ‘Global North’. The ‘Rohingya
2009; the arrival of 48,000 migrants on refugee crisis’ of May and June 2015, which
Lampedusa following the Arab revolutions involved Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia
of 2011; the involvement of the European and the Philippines, is just a recent
border agency Frontex in the surveillance reminder of this.

228

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
LAMPEDUSA 229

The geography of border control is at Borderzones like the one surrounding

the same time a geography of violence and Lampedusa set the conditions for the
abjection where the ‘human’ is continu- operations of multifarious actors, who take
ously tested, worked upon and reframed. the illegalization of border crossing as a
Death is often anonymous at the border, chance for business. ‘Traffickers’ and ‘smug-
particularly but not only in maritime glers’ are often presented as responsible for
borderscapes. Even when names are the inhuman treatment of migrants and
assigned to bodies, the prevailing image is refugees as well as for their death. Images
one of an indistinct mass of corpses, well of ‘slave trade’ and ‘indenture’ are invoked
beyond the threshold of individuality. The with regard to their operations. What is
awareness of this underlies one of the most usually not mentioned is that the spaces
powerful works produced on Lampedusa, and conditions in which these actors
the short film Asmat – Nomi by Dagmawi operate are not created by them but by
Yimer (2014), where the victims of the political decisions and the working of
shipwreck of 3 October 2013 are specific border and migration regimens.
mentioned by their names, one by one. And, equally importantly, the parallel with
Border and mobility control have the transport of bonded labour erases a
become privileged sites for humanitarian crucial difference – that is, the fact that
intervention, be it for established inter- migrants and refugees, in most cases, want
national institutions like UNHCR or to cross borders and are not compelled to
NGO s and other heterogeneous actors. do so. While there is a persistent reality of
The intertwining of humanitarian logics ‘forced migration’ which deserves critical
with concerns regarding ‘security’ and investigation, this is true for instance for
economic valorization of the ‘human people crossing the Mediterranean Sea, as
capital’ of people on the move is a defining apparent in the so-called ‘migration crisis’
characteristic of many emerging border of summer 2015.
and migration regimes. In this assemblage Besides being spaces of control and
of governmental rationalities, which is selection, violence, death and abjection,
not adequately grasped by a focus on borderzones are also sites of resistance
‘exception’, national states continue to be where a kind of elementary search for
important actors while being continuously freedom clashes with a control machine
compelled to negotiate their sovereign predicated upon the imperatives of secur-
power with international legal orders and ity, economic valorization and human-
global players like the International itarian management of mobility. The
Organization for Migration. ‘Biopolitics’ geography of border control is often chal-
(understood as an attempt to stop, select- lenged and tested by the power and dynam-
ively filter and channel people on the ics of mass migration. In the European
move) appears here as structurally artic- ‘crisis’ of the summer of 2015, the relevance
ulated with the ‘necropolitics’ of ship- of Lampedusa within this geography was
wrecks, drowning and asphyxiation in itself challenged and displaced by the
trucks. Gender, class and race, ‘skills’, opening up of new migratory routes (most
culture and religion are continuously at notably through the Greek islands and the
stake in this articulation of biopolitics and ‘Western Balkans’). We have been confron-
necropolitics, which crosses the figure of ted with a multiplication of sites, which
the human, producing new hierarchies and rapidly became iconic for the conflicts and
new boundaries within it. tensions related with migration – from the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
230 LAMPEDUSA

Greek island of Kos to the wall built by the space, while at the same time pointing
Hungarian government at the border with to the need to reorganize the relations
Serbia, to name just two of them. of Europe with its multiple ‘outsides’.
Already, after the arrival of thousands There is a slogan that was often heard in
of Tunisian migrants from Tunisia after the Lampedusa in the past years and that
end of the Ben Ali regime in 2011, their resonated across Europe in the summer of
further movement throughout Europe was 2015: we are humans. It is a slogan that has
connected with a kind of ‘travel’ of the name a long history in anti-colonial and anti-
Lampedusa to very centres of the Euro- racist struggles, for instance in African-
pean space. A ‘collective of Tunisians from American movements in the USA . If we
Lampedusa in Paris’ squatted in a public pit it against what we called, echoing
building, while ‘Lampedusa in Hamburg’ Fanon, the massacre of the human connec-
and ‘Lampedusa in Berlin’ became the names ted to the working of border and migra-
of important campaigns and migrants’ strug- tion regimes we begin to get a sense of the
gles in Germany. This was a powerful anti- radical stakes that connect the tensions
cipation of what happened in the summer surrounding mobility in our global present
of 2015, when the tensions and conflicts with the mutations of the human.
that the border regime (and its ‘spectacle’) These tensions and mutations are clearly
should purportedly ‘contain’ and manage at not amenable to easy resolution. They are
the margins of the European space penet- subject to radical alterations in space and
rated into its very centre, through the stub- time, and variable connections between
bornness of migrants, the commitment of the geological and political. That the claim
their activist supporters and a significant to be human emerges as a rallying cry
movement of solidarity within the ‘public among the most vulnerable of mobile
opinion’ of several European countries. subjects tells us something about critical
‘Leave this Europe where they are never idioms that trouble the distinction between
done talking of Man, yet murder men the human and non-human. Whether these
everywhere they find them.’ These famous idioms celebrate technological prosthesis,
words taken from the last pages of The explore the environmental consequences of
Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon human exceptionalism, or assert the inde-
(2001: 251) have displacing and uncanny pendence of objects from human thought
resonances when read against the back- and perception, they must at the very least
ground of these events. What we are reckon with the poignancy of this all too
confronted with are masses of dispos- human politics. At stake is an urgent need
sessed people, profoundly heterogeneous to rethink our understanding of borders,
in their composition, heading towards both epistemological and geographical, and
Europe and at the same time challenging it the role they play in violent and discrimin-
to account for its imperial past, implication atory expulsions and practices of differen-
in the wars at its borders and for the tial inclusion. Lampedusa is the very icon
massacre of the human which is struc of this responsibility.
turally related to the everyday working of
its border and migration regime. These See also Camp; Anonymity; Expulsions;
movements and struggles of migration In-Human.
have a deep political nature insofar as they
challenge the internal limits, borders and Sandro Mezzadra and
hierarchies which structure the European Brett Neilson

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
LEAKS AND STINGS 231

LEAKS AND STINGS pologist Brian Larkin, ‘shape the nature of a

network, the speed and direction of its
Leaks and stings offer us a way of rethinking movement, its temporalities, and its vulner-
circulation in a posthuman condition. ability to breakdown’ (2013: 328) Igor
Leaks emanate from both material and Kopytoff (1986) has spoken of the many
information infrastructures, bypassing ‘lives’ of commodities as they move in and
‘normal’ or authorized channels of circula- out of circulation. Media objects like audio
tion. Media leaks refer to unanticipated or and video also take on multiple lives as they
deliberate disclosures of privileged inform- move in diverse time–space configurations.
ation by a range of actors: rivals, activists In events linked to stings and leaks, a
claiming public interest, transnational premium is placed on the moment of live-
groups committed to transparency, network ness: the burst of affective energy when the
manipulation. Data leaks may emerge from information is released in the public domain,
software platforms, either by ‘malfunction’ designed to multiply the political effects of
or through hacker attacks. ‘The leak’, say the act. This is often not the end of the story,
Mathew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, ‘is as media moves to other environments and
the emission liberated from its proper place platforms. Leaks and stings are part of a
by an act of omission, or neglect of right generative movement, where practices,
containment’ (2012: 100). objects and people attach themselves to
Stings used be a privilege of the state, changing assemblages. This assemblage is a
where police gathered evidence to record dynamic media ecology, which is not a stable
but actually not provoke criminal acts. In arrangement of technologies and environ-
parallel police entrapment records staged ments, but rather is productive, resulting in
encounters with hidden media devices, new interventions or ‘space-times’ (Deleuze
whereby the target is induced to commit an 1990: 176). Once the initial event has taken
incriminating act. In the contemporary place we see a constant redistribution of
media landscape, this police technology forces and new platforms and spaces emerge:
has been deployed by activists, journalists political scandal, activist mobilization or a
and private individuals, who use hidden judicial event like a court case.
media devices to entrap individuals or hack This ‘loop’ shapes much of contempor-
into mobile phones of celebrities as in the ary media circulation, wherein media
recent cases in the UK . The ‘private’ media objects move in and out of infrastructures,
sting significantly transformed the older attach themselves to new platforms of
police technology: it initiated new fields of political-aesthetic action, and are drawn to
circulation, and opened larger questions or depart from the spectacular time of
of the public interest and sovereignty, as media events. This drive marks the turbu-
systems of secrecy, censorship and control lent, dynamic ecology of stings/leaks, with
face new challenges. As techniques of changing combinations of protagonists,
disrupting authorized circulation both technologies and spaces: television news-
leaks and stings offer us ways of thinking rooms, online platforms, police stations,
about infrastructure and circulation. government offices, courts, enquiry
As physical forms that govern the commissions, demonstrations and activist
engines of circulation, infrastructures typic- forums.
ally bring together populations, commodit- Michael Warner (2002) points to the
ies, money and practices of making and ‘fruitful perversity’ of all acts of modern
unmaking. Infrastructures, says the anthro- publicity. Once initiated, these acts

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
232 LITERATURE OF LIBERATION

abandon intended audiences and face the LITERATURE OF LIBERATION

risk of dispersal, misuse and escape.
The older forms of governmentality Liberation, like love, is never abstract. It
privileged particular (legal) sites of media refers to relationships of mastery and
exhibition and consumption through subjugation; it refers to political mastery,
regulatory systems. Today new forms to class and gender mastery, to human
of unauthorized publicity have actively forms of abuse. But there is more. For Peter
destabilized this regime and fed into new Singer, for example, it is a concept that
loops of circulation. Media has become the involves all sentient beings. In a famous
infrastructural condition of life rather book titled Animal Liberation (1975),
than (just) enclosed in distinct, regulated he strongly attacked ‘speciesism,’ a way
sites like film and television. What we of discriminating against non-human
see is a new condition of affect driven animals – killing them, exploiting them,
media modernity in most parts of the treating them as if they were mere objects,
world today (Berlant 2011). Thus stings and simply ignoring their capacity to feel,
and leaks offer a window into the re- whether pleasure or pain. Drawing atten-
arrangements of sovereignty in the tion to the suppressed suffering of non-
posthuman condition: equally they are human beings, Singer solicited their
also co-conspirators in the ‘post-public acknowledgment as our partners in the
sphere public’ (Berlant 2011: 223). moral world. Other important thinkers,
Evacuated from the mythic of stranger like for example Val Plumwood (1993,
sociability, the new circulatory loop spans 2002), took a step further and spoke
public–private, consumption/politics, and against the ‘hyperseparation’ practices of
surveillance/counter-surveillance. ‘the logic of Othering’ (2002: 117) that
Michael Warner has pointed out that subjugate not only humans and sentient
when public discourses move away from animals, but whatever is not a hegemonic
set audiences, it also ‘puts at risk the subject. The kind of liberation Plumwood
concrete world that constitutes its condi- envisioned was therefore a liberation from
tion of possibility’ (2002: 109). Leaks and the ontological and moral systems of
stings reflect this tension between acts of mastery that frame our social as well as
publicity and their possibility, as user- ecological relationships. All dominated
driven infrastructures mobilize police subjects – enslaved people and enslaved
technologies, disrupting engines of natures alike – are enclosed, for Plumwood,
circulation. Equally, these disruptions into a regime of ‘moral and cultural blind-
of infrastructure may generate a ‘poetics’. ness’ (2002: 118) through which ‘the
These may range from sensorial-political Other’s independent agency and value is
strategies of NGO s, anti-government downgraded and denied’ (2002: 105). This
movements (Maclagan 2012) and trans- radicalized ‘hyperseparation,’ however,
parency groups, as well as individual acts creates in the dominant subjects the
by newly media enabled populations in the illusion of their ‘disembeddedness,’ thus
non-Western world. blocking their own survival. These issues
also belongs to the tradition of postcolo-
See also Anonymity; Contemporary, the; nial studies, which has in recent times
Informatic Opacity. congealed with ecocriticism in the analysis
of how the rhetoric of ‘developmentalism’
Ravi Sundaram and globalization affects exploited humans,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
LITERATURE OF LIBERATION 233

animals and lands (Huggan and Tiffin Luis Borges and many others demonstrate
2010; DeLoughrey and Handley 2011). how the human is not the apical element of
It is clear that the only way to grant an ordered creation, but rather an expres-
independence to oppressed people and sion of the world’s morphological irony. In
beings – the only way to liberate them – is their own fields and styles, they provide
to give them a voice, and to see their stories. creative tools that liberate us from the
But there is another, even more ontologic- obsessions of anthropocentrism, pulling
ally radical form of liberation. This is the the human back into the wider horizon of
liberation of things from their silence, the being. More in general, the authors and
consideration of non-humans as ‘full- genres entering this lineage of imagination
fledged actors’ (Latour 1999: 174) in a – from Lucretius to Philip K. Dick and
‘political ecology’ which involves all mater- Margaret Atwood, from magical realism to
ial beings, and which has been articulated science fiction, from toxic autobiographies
by authors such as Bruno Latour, Jane to cli-fi – have something in common: they
Bennett, Karen Barad, Bill Brown, Ian help readers (and critics) to build narra-
Bogost, William Connolly, Roberto tives about the world that are therapeutic
Esposito and Philippe Descola. Liberating against the isolation of the human self. In
things from their silence is not merely this dimension of intersecting players and
an exercise of human creativity, but an presences, recognizing ‘impersonal stories’
essential act of ecological imagination. – stories of land, of things, of hybridity, of
Resonating with this discourse, literary processes – is in fact as important for a
imagination can be a way to overcome the healthy relationship to our world as recog-
boundaries of subjectivity, and to eman- nizing personal stories, stories of people.
cipate storytelling from the standpoint of These impersonal stories embody and
the individual ego. This idea is effectively express many of the dynamics that influ-
expressed by Italo Calvino in the final lines ence our life: like the trans-corporeal
of his Six Memos for the Next Millennium: exchanges of substances and the trans-
Think what it would be to have a work
locality of environmental processes show,
conceived from outside the self, a work now more than ever, the impersonal is
that would let us escape the limited political. This is even truer if we consider
perspective of the individual ego, not only that, as posthumanist thinkers insist, the
to enter into selves like our own, but to impersonal agency of a vast array of ‘others’
give speech to that which has no language, is also crucial to our very existence. In a
to the bird perching on the edge of the profound sense, materially as well as
gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in discursively, it is the non-human that
the fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic . . . makes us human (Haraway 2008; Braidotti
Was this not perhaps what Ovid was 2013; Marchesini 2002).
aiming at, when he wrote about the By creating new vocabularies apt to
continuity of forms? And what Lucretius show, interpret and represent the world in
was aiming at when he identified himself its multiplicity of players and stories, litera-
with that nature common to each and ture has a power to act as a privileged means
every thing? of liberation and of emancipation for both
2009 [1988]: 124 the human and for its ‘other’, especially if
Like Calvino, authors and thinkers such as considered in the framework of a an
Ovid, Lucretius, Spinoza, Darwin, Goethe, ecology of culture (Zapf 2016). The emer-
Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, Kafka, Jorge gence of these cultural tools is decisive,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
234 LITERATURE OF LIBERATION

because only if we have names for things do the relationship between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in
we really see things. Whether on exploited terms of permeability, of exchange and co-
humans, animals or other natures, oppres- presence. If we want to live realistically we
sion is far more ferocious when it is cannot pretend that our dimension of
unspoken, unacknowledged, unsocialized. existence is separated from theirs. What
The obvious reason for it is that it is more this literature helps us understand is that
difficult to see (and recognize) things and there is no ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’: all these
beings that have no name, than things and things, all these living and non-living
beings whose existence is amplified through beings share with us a common terrain of
words. Seeing Napoleon’s ghost on horse- existence, and enter into a relationship
back is much easier than seeing a dying with our life and with the life of the world.
ecosystem, if you are not able to read its Considered in its recent developments,
signs, meanings and stories. Helping us to literary criticism – and ecocriticism in
connect words with the world, literary particular – displays a constant trajectory:
narratives are potential means of liberation. from issues related to human subjectivity
Literary imagination accepts in fact ‘the (for example experience of or encounters
challenge of rendering visible occluded, with landscapes, places or non-human
sprawling webs of interconnectedness’ others) the focus has shifted to processes,
(Nixon 2011: 45). As Rob Nixon has writ- collectives and entanglements (for example,
ten: ‘In a world permeated by insidious, yet global warming, species extinction, trans-
unseen or imperceptible violence, imagin- corporeal fluxes of toxins). In other words,
ative writing can help make the unapparent literary studies too have been important
appear, making it accessible and tangible by players in moving the humanities’ move
humanizing drawn-out threats inaccessible beyond the human, thus paving the way to
to the immediate senses’ (2011: 15). the posthuman Humanities (Braidotti
Literature, as Calvino also said, ‘is 2013). The function of critical approaches
necessary to politics above all when it gives and practices such as posthumanism, mater-
a voice to whatever is without a voice’ ial feminisms, ecomaterialism and material
(1986: 98). This can mean endless things. ecocriticism is crucial to this challenge. Not
Literature can give a voice to the voiceless, only do they favour post-anthropocentric
the dispossessed, the disempowered; and it narratives, thus redeeming the stories of the
can give a voice to those who cannot speak, impersonal but, in so doing, they also allow
but can nonetheless feel pleasure or pain; us to see more of the part we humans play in
literature can give a voice to natural beings, this vast intersectional scenery. In other
elements, phenomena, processes; it can words, by freeing the ‘impersonal’ from its
give voice to the ‘storied matter’ of the structural silence, these critical methodolo-
world. Stimulating the imagination of new gies enable ways to redress human oppres-
dis-anthropocentric ontologies (Cohen sion, thus becoming part of a wide and
2015b), literature can create bridges – both articulated project of liberation literacy.
ethical and cognitive – toward others,
thus opening our eyes and ears in front See also Animacies; (Material) Eco-
of the many worlds that, with us and criticism; Ecomaterialism; Non-human
notwithstanding us, inhabit our world. A Agency; Storied Matter; Ontological Turn;
literature of liberation is therefore a litera- Posthuman Literature and Criticism.
ture that contributes to creating a posthu-
man imagination, namely a way of seeing Serenella Iovino

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
LOCALITY/NON- SEPAR ABIL ITY 235

LOCALITY/NON- SEPAR ABIL ITY Our Newtonian notions of absolute

time and space have to be revised taking
The posthuman turn has transformed and into account relational models elaborated
re-envisioned nomadic subjectivity through by advancements in quantum physics and
the radical re-articulation of the notion of mathematics. Notions such as absolute
location neither as a universal ground nor distance and size in Cartesian space can be
as a reification of difference, but as a spatio- replaced by proximity/nearness and ratios
temporal specificity that materially co- of density in a topological (non-trivial)
produces the subject (Braidotti 2006b: 199). space. The strict categorization of spatial
This shift has become particularly relevant models, purely based on nested
for research on territories, mobility and geographical scales ranging from global,
geo-political relations as the constellations regional and local together with the
of revolutionary social movements sequential account of time are rendered
spreading across time and space with obsolete through the commonness that
increasing speed bypass physical and resistance movements generate. From
cultural borders. Capitalism creates a unify- the anti-austerity riots to the Occupy
ing, artificial grounding, a master-code or movement to the Arab Spring and to
common language that allows objects the hundreds of student protests, the
and ideas to be compared against each rise of these social movements can
other under the rules of the market. This only reveal the enmeshed socio-political
‘overcoding’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: properties of the intra-connectedness of
42) is not only merging, hierarchizing and scale. A cartographic mapping of these
stratifying objects, ideas and individuals, movements would resemble a Deleuzean
but is also allowing socio-political and section (DeLanda 2002: 125) that reduces
economic problems to surface globally the events to their purely diagrammatic
almost instantaneously, only to be amplified assemblage, eliminating quantifiable data
by their co-dependence on the universal to its vectorial forces as a way to cut
Capital. The parallel development of through a continuous dynamic system
network technologies has led to the tighten- projecting a discrete tracing of its relations.
ing of time intervals, spreading events and The relational character of this model
ideas faster than ever before in a non-linear indicates the blurred lines on which none
fashion. The simultaneous homogenization could claim locality or nonlocality. This
of space and the abrupt discontinuities of disprovement of Einstein’s local realism
time brought by networked cultures render through ‘spooky action at a distance’ exper-
the drawing of a coherent cartography of iments, in which two particles have
these resistance movements harder and entangled states, influencing each other
harder to trace. The ‘entangled genealogies’ instantaneously (faster than the speed of
(Barad 2007: 389) of these movements light) in spite of the distance between
cannot correspond to a sequential reading them, suggests that non-locality could
that sees them as a domino effect as their exist in a continuous space without the
emergence is non-linear. A tracing of the separability required by distance. The
conditions that made these movements and principle that an object is directly affected
events possible would require a renewed only by its immediate surroundings and
focus on their relational character rather that any measurements observed are
than their reading as an all-encompassing independent of the experimental setup was
narrative. proven inadequate; entangled particles

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
236 LOCALITY/NON- SEPAR ABIL ITY

could influence each other at a distance fully expressed individually nor is it repre-
instantaneously. In fact, quantum entan- sentational as it emerges as a mood: non-
glements and relational models show that teleological and directional rather than
there is no separability; no external posi- intentional. Its local manifestations dis-
tion that can be maintained. The only tinguish and define the specificities of its
externality can be that of the relations that conditions of emergence. It can act instant-
make things emerge. This system, however, aneously and at the same time its effects
does not dismiss the reality of locality. can be slow and gradual, fermenting and
Events, places and borders are both real transforming vectors of change, leading to
and distinguishable, as the ongoing refugee new ‘lines of flight’. This posthuman con-
crisis, environmental tragedies, and dition clearly underlines that the locality
political struggles still taking place remind of events is real and epistemological. It is
us. As Karen Barad suggests, our way of an ‘agential cut’ (Barad 2007: 140) that is
knowing and distinguishing the locality of iteratively enacted and in this way opens
‘phenomena’ is purely epistemological up novel ways of knowing. As we remain
and ‘enacted’ and does not automatically ontologically entangled and inseparable, it
cancel out their ontological inseparability is crucial to reformulate a new solidarity
(Barad 2007:128). that can transform our ethical models and
Within these jerky trajectories, a post- the way we affect and are being affected.
human, pre-individual, universal affect
appears to resonate within different ethni- See also Commutation Ontology;
cities, cultures and geographical scales Ecopathy; Neo/New Materialism; Nomadic
taking local manifestations according to Sensibility.
the specificities of the materialization of
its time and space. This affect is neither Lila Athanasiadou

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
MAKEHUMAN 237

M
MAKEHUMAN Software: We’ve Got a
Situation Here
MakeHuman is an Open Source soft-
ware  for modelling three-dimensional MakeHuman is ‘3D computer graphics
humanoid characters (http://www. middleware designed for the prototyping
makehuman.org). Through its curious of photo realistic humanoids’ and has
naming the project evokes the demiurge, gained visibility and popularity over time.4
dreaming of ‘making’ ‘humans’ to resemble It is actively developed by a collective of
his own image. Including a concrete soft- programmers, algorithms, modellers and
ware object in this glossary means address- academics and used by amateur animators
ing specific entanglements of technology, to prototype modelling, by natural history
representation and normativity: a potent museums for creating exhibition displays,
triangle that MakeHuman sits in the by engineers to test multi-camera systems
middle of. But it does not only deserve and by game developers for sketching
our attention due to the technological bespoke characters.5 Developers and users
power of self-representation that it evidently work together to define and
affords. As an Open Source project, it is codify the conditions of presence for
shaped by the conditions of interrogation virtual bodies in MakeHuman.6 Since each
and transformability, guaranteed through of the agents in this collective somehow
its license. Like many other F/LOSS operates under the modern regime of
projects, MakeHuman is surrounded by representation, we find the software full
a rich constellation of textual objects, of assumptions about the naturality of
expressed through publicly accessible perspective-based and linear representa-
source code, code-comments, bugtrackers, tions, the essential properties of the species
forums and documentation.1 This porous- and so forth. The deviceful naming of the
ness facilitated the shaping of a collective project is a reminder of how the semiotic-
inquiry, activated through experiments, material secrets of life’s flows are strongly
conversations and mediations.2 In collab- linked to the way software represents or
oration with architects, dancers, trans*- allows bodies to be represented.7 The
activists, design students, animators and modern subject, defined by the freedom to
others, we are turning MakeHuman into make and decide, is trained to self-
a thinking machine, a device to critically construct under the narcissistic fantasy of
think along physical and virtual imagin- ‘correct’, ‘proper’ or ‘accurate’ representa-
aries. Software is culture and hence soft- tions of the self. These virtual bodies
ware-making is world-making. It is a matter to us because their persistent
means for relationalities, not a crystallized representations cause mirror affects and
cultural end.3 effects on both sides of the screen.8

237
238 MAKEHUMAN

Screenshot MakeHuman

MakeHuman is ‘middleware’, a device in practices crossing through MakeHuman

the middle: a composition machine that produce images, imaginations and imagin-
glues the deliriums of the ‘quantified self ’ to aries that are part of a concrete and situated
that of Hollywood imagery, all of it made cultural assemblage of hetero-patriarchal
operational through scientific anthropo- positivism and humanism. Found in and
morphic data and the graphic tricks of fed by mainstream mediated representa-
3D-hyper-real rendering. From software tions, these imaginations generally align
development to character animation, with the body stereotypes that belong to
from scientific proof to surveillance, the advanced capitalism and post-colonialist

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
MAKEHUMAN 239

projections. Virtual bodies only look parameters, tightening the space of these
‘normal’ because they appear to fit into that bodies through assumptions of what they
complex situation. are supposed to be. This risky structura-
tion is based on reduced humanist categor-
ies of ‘proportionality’ and ‘normality’.
Un-taming the Whole Parametric design promises infinite differ-
The signature feature of the MakeHuman entiations but renders them into a mere
interface is a set of horizontal sliders. For a illusion: obviously, not all physical bodies
split second, the surprising proposal to list resulting from the combinations would
‘gender’ as a continuous parameter prom- look the same, but software can make that
ises wild combinations. Could it be that happen. The sliders provide a machinic
MakeHuman is a place for imagining imagination for utilitarianized (supposedly
humanoids as subjects in process, as open- human) compositors, conveniently cover-
ended virtual figures that have not yet ing up how they function through a mix of
materialized? But the uncomfortable and technical and cultural normativities.
yet familiar presence of physical and Aligning what is to be desired with the
cultural properties projected to the same possible, they evidently mirror the binary
horizontal scale soon shatters that promise. systems of the modern proposal for the
The interface suggests that the technique world.10 The point is not to ‘fix’ these prob-
of simply interpolating parameters labeled lems; quite the contrary. We experimented
‘Gender’, ‘Age’, ‘Muscle’, ‘Weight’, ‘Height’, with replacing default values with random
‘Proportions’, ‘Caucasian’, ‘African’ and numbers, and other ways to intervene with
‘Asian’ suffices to make any representation the inner workings of the tool. But only
of the human body. The unmarked when we started rewriting the interface
extremities of the parameters are merely a could we see it behaving differently.11
way to outsource normativity to the user, Renaming markers, replacing them by
who can only blindly guess the outcomes questions and descriptions, by adding
of the algorithmic calculations launched and subtracting sliders, the interface
by handling the sliders. The tool invites a became a space for narrating through the
comparison between ‘Gender’ and ‘Weight’ generative process of making possible
for example, or to decide on race and bodies.
proportions through a similar gesture. A second technique of representation
Subtle and less subtle shifts in both textual at work is that of geometric modelling or
and visual language hint at the trouble of polygon meshes. A mesh consolidates an
maintaining the one-dimensionality of always-complete collection of vertices,
this 3D world-view: ‘Gender’ (not ‘Sex’) edges, planes and faces in order to define
and ‘Weight’ are labelled in the singular but the topology of an individualized shape.
‘Proportions’ in plural; ‘Age’ is not expressed Each face of a virtual body is a convex
as ‘Young’ or ‘Old’, but race is made finite in polygon; this is common practice in 3D
its intra-iterations by naming a limited set computer graphics and simplifies the
of options for mixture.9 complexity of the calculations needed for
Further inspection reveals that even the rendering. Polygon meshes are deeply
promise of continuity and separation is indebted to the Cartesian perspective by
based on a trick. The actual maths at work their need for wholeness. It results in a
reveals an extremely limited topology firm separation of first inside from outside
based on a closed system of interconnected and secondly shape or topology from

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
240 MAKEHUMAN

surface. The particular topology of the latent potential of working through

MakeHuman is informed by a rather software objects. Sharing our lack of rever-
awkward sense of chastity.12 With all its ence for the overwhelming complexities of
pride in ‘anatomical correctness’ and high- digital techniques and technologies of 3D
resolution rendering, it has been decided imaging, we collectively uncovered its
to place the genitals outside the base-body- disclosures and played in its cracks.14 We
mesh. The dismembered body-parts are could see the software iterate between past
relegated to a secondary zone of the inter- and present cultural paradigms as well as
face, together with other accessories such between humans and non-humans. These
as hats and shoes. As a consequence, the virtual bodies co-constructed through the
additional set of skin-textures included in imagination of programmers, algorithms
MakeHuman does not include the genital and animators call for otherwise embodied
add-ons so that a change in material makes others that suspend the mimicking of
them stand out, both as a potentiality for ‘nature’ to make room for experiences
otherwise embodied otherness and as that are not directly lived, but that deeply
evidence of the cultural limitations to shape life.15
representing physical embodiment. Our persistent attention to MakeHuman
In MakeHuman, two different technical being in the middle, situated in-between
paradigms (parametric design and mesh- various digital practices of embodiment,
based perspective) are allied together to somehow makes collaboration between
grow representative bodies that are renor- perspectives possible, and pierces its own
malized within a limited and restricted field utilitarian mesh. Through strategies of ‘de-
of cultivated material conditions, taming familiarization’ the potentialities of soft-
the infinite with the tricks of the ‘natural’ ware open up: breaking the surface is a
and the ‘horizontal’. It is here that we see political gesture that becomes generative,
modern algorithms at work: sustaining the providing a topological dynamic that helps
virtual by providing certain projections of us experience the important presence of
the world, scaled up to the size of a powerful impurities in matter–culture continuums.16
presence in an untouchable present. Exploring a software like MakeHuman
But what if the problematic under- hints at the possibility of a politics, aesthet-
standing of these bodies being somehow ics and ethics that is truly generative. To
human, and at the same time being made provide us with endless a-modern mestizo,
by so-called humans, is only one specific an escape from representational and agen-
actualization emerging from an infinite tial normativities, software CAN and
array of possibilities contained in the MUST provide the material conditions
virtual? What if we could understand the for wild combinations or unsuspected
virtual as a potential generator of differen- renders.17
tiated and differentiating possibilities?
See also Altergorithm; Bodies Politic;
This might lead us towards mediations for
Informatic Opacity; Otherwise Embodied
many other political imaginaries.13
Others; Storied Matter; Trans-Corporeality.

A Potential for Imaginations Notes

By staging MakeHuman through a 1. Free, Libre and Open Source Software
performative spectrum, the software (F/LOSS ) licences stipulate that users of
turned into a thinking machine, confirming the software should have the freedom to

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
MAKEHUMAN 241

run the program for any purpose, to study 8. A code comment in modeling_modifiers_
how the program works, to redistribute desc.json, a file that defines the modifica-
copies and to improve the program. tions operated by the sliders, explains that
2. In 2014 the association for art and media ‘Proportions of the human features, often
Constant organized GenderBlending, subjectively referred to as qualities of
a work-session to look at the way beauty (min is unusual, center position is
3D-imaging technologies condition social average and max is idealistic proportions)’,
readings and imaginations of gender. The https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/
collective inquiry continued with several makehuman (version 1.0.2) [accessed
performative iterations and includes 18 April 2017].
contributions by Rebekka Eisner, Xavier 9. humanmodifierclass.py, a file that holds
Gorgol, Martino Morandi, Phil Langley the various software-classes to define
and Adva Zakai (http://constantvzw.org/ body shapes, limits the ‘Ethnic
site/-GenderBlending,190-.html). Modifier(MacroModifier) class’ to three
3. The potential of software as a ‘thinking racial parameters, together always
machine’ is that it can activate mech- making up a complete set: ‘# We assume
anisms of knowledge production, of there to be only 3 ethnic modifiers. self._
not-only-text-based critical theory: ‘A defaultValue = 1.0/3’, https://bitbucket.
cartography is a theoretically based and org/MakeHuman/makehuman (version
politically informed reading of the 1.0.2) [accessed 18 April 2017].
present. Cartographies aim at epistemic 10. In response to a user suggesting making
and ethical accountability by unveiling the sliders more explicit (‘It really does not
the power locations which structure our really make any sense for a character to be
subject-position’ (Braidotti 2013: 164). anything other than 100% male or female,
4. ‘MakeHuman is an open source 3D but then again its more appearance based
computer graphics software middleware than actual sex.’), developer Manuel
designed for the prototyping of photo Bastioni responds that it is ‘not easy’: ‘For
realistic humanoids. It is developed by example, weight = 0.5 is not a fixed value.
a community of programmers, artists, It depends by the age, the gender, the
and academics interested in 3D model- percentage of muscle and fat, and the
ing of characters’, Wikipedia, https://en. height. If you are making an adult giant,
w i k ip e d i a . o r g / w i k i / Ma k e Hu m a n 8 ft, fully muscular, your 0.5 weight is X . . .
[accessed 18 April 2017]. In other words, it’s not linear’, http://
5. Present and past contributors to bugtracker.makehumancommunity.org/
MakeHuman: http://www.makehuman. issues/489 [accessed 18 April 2017].
org/halloffame.php [accessed 18 April 11. MakeHuman is developed in Python, a
2017]. programming language that is relatively
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ accessible for non-technical users and
MakeHuman#References_and_Related_ does not require compilation after
Papers [accessed 18 April 2017]. changes to the program are made.
7. The Artec3 3D-scanner is sold to 12. When the program starts up, a warning
museums, creative labs, forensic institu- message is displayed that ‘MakeHuman
tions and plastic surgery clinics alike. is a character creation suite. It is designed
Their collection of use-cases shows for making anatomically correct humans.
how the market of shapes circulates Parts of this program may contain
between bodies, cars and prosthesis: nudity. Do you want to proceed?’
http://www.artec3d.com/applic ations 13. The trans*-working field of all medi-
[accessed 18 April 2017]. ations is a profanation of sacred and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
242 MATERIAL FEMINISMS

natural bodies (of virtuality and of flesh). increasing attention to the non-human or
It evidences the fact of them being tech- more-than-human, and the biological and
nological constructions. ecological dimensions of life matters, this
14. Here we refer to Agamben’s proposal for turn has also elicited questions about the
‘profanation’: ‘To profane means to open focus of feminist theories. Do material
the possibility of a special form of negli- feminisms undo or otherwise discount
gence, which ignores separation or, rather, language, discourse and representation as
puts it to a particular use’ (Agamben tools of power? Is this turn’s espoused
2007: 73). reorientation towards ontology a dismissal
15. ‘The ergonomic design of interactive
of epistemology as a site for ground-
media has left behind the algorithmic
breaking feminist scholarship? Or even
“stuff ” of computation by burying
more troublingly, is it a disavowal or for-
information processing in the back-
ground of perception and embedding it
getting of ethics as feminism’s raison d’être?
deep within objects’ (Parisi 2013a). What does concern about non-human or
16. Breaking and piercing the mesh are more-than-human matter have to do with
gestures that ‘This topological dynamic the ethical and attendant political projects
reverberates with QFT processes . . . in a of feminism? In this turn, have we not, so
process of intra-active becoming, of to speak, lost the feminist plot?
reconfiguring and trans-forming oneself One response to these concerns would
in the self ’s multiple and dispersive sense be the assertion that material feminisms
of it-self where the self is intrinsically a don’t think merely ‘about’ matter. They
nonself.’ (Barad 2015). attempt to think with it, in ways that artic-
17. ‘Experiments in virtuality – explorations ulate specific ontological, epistemological
of possible trans*formations – are integral and ethical commitments. Material
to each and every (ongoing) be(coming)’ feminism is thinking with matter. Matter
(Barad 2015). here is lively; it destabilizes anthropo-
centric and humanist ontological privilege.
Femke Snelting and Jara Rocha Understanding matter (including non-
human nature and the biological substrata
of human life) as something that ‘feels,
MATERIAL FEMINISMS converses, suffers, desires, yearns, and
remembers’ (Barad 2012: 60) as that which
What’s the matter with feminism? The ‘reads and writes, calculates and copulates,’
recent so-called ‘turn’ in feminist theory (Kirby 2011: 95) or as what attempts to
toward matter has been met with mixed ‘question, solve, control, calculate, protect,
reactions. After all, even if the poststruc- and destroy’ (Wilson 2004: 82) suggests
turalism that dominated feminist theory in that matter is in fact agential. While this
the 1990s might have put the emphasis claim is not uncontroversial (as it may risk
elsewhere, feminist interest in materiality diluting feminist conceptions of moral
– in fleshy, material bodies, in the material agents), it importantly reminds us that
effects of immaterial processes, in ‘nature’ when matter moves us (or moves other
that too often served as a foil to ‘culture’ – matters) this is not a brute causal deter-
has remained steady. A concern for mination. Agency here is quite basically
materiality – if that is all that this turn about ‘changing the possibilities of change’
means – is hardly new. Characterized as (Barad 2007: 178). All matters take part
primarily ontological, and drawing (differently) in this agency-as-a-doing,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
MATERIAL FEMINISMS 243

where possibilities for change emerge in effort ‘to respect and meet well with, even
ongoing intra-actions of matters that are extend care to, others while acknowledging
never completed. Rather than a dilution of that we may not know the other and what
agency as applied to humans, agency in the best kind of care would be’ (ibid.: 8).
feminist materialisms invites us to consider The ethical commitments of thinking with
how non-human bodies or matters might matter do not come from a ‘normative
contribute to their own actualization. morality’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2010); ethics
This recuperation of matter’s liveliness here does not comprise intentional ‘right
does not mean that issues of language and actions’, moral universalisms, or an exten-
representation are overwritten, or effaced. sion of human ethical programs (e.g.
Thinking with matter also foregrounds human rights) to the non-human world
thinking. Important insights into repres- (Braidotti 2013: 190). Because this ethics is
entation and discursive constructions are inseparable from the ontologies and
not eschewed, but rather themselves under- epistemologies that condition it, it must
stood as entangled in matter’s own express- also reject human mastery. We may not
ive limits. Self-evident materiality does not know who or what the other we encounter
trump discursivity, any more than onto- is, or needs, but forever entangled in these
logy would epistemology; considerations relations, we must negotiate the ethics of
of matter as agential in fact substantially these meetings and their collaborative
contribute to why feminist materialisms matterings. As such, this ethics demands
are not only an ontological but also an that we remain open, attentive and curious
epistemological and ethical concern. Such towards the other, and what she asks of us.
epistemological stakes are highlighted, for Barad calls this an ethics of responsivity: it
example, when Barad reminds us that is ‘about responsibility and accountability
‘knowing is a matter of part of the world for the lively relationalities of becoming of
making itself intelligible to another part’ which we are a part’ (Barad 2007: 393).
(Barad 2007: 185). Even if the matters we This material thinking expands a
think with inspire us to think in new ways, feminist conception of ethics, but it also
we are never thinking alone. Or, put other- raises the difficult question of toward
wise: if we understand non-human matter whom or what a feminist ethics should be
as agential, then we must also give up on directed. Might we join thinkers such Val
epistemological mastery. Material femin- Plumwood, Rosi Braidotti and Claire
isms thus draw on feminist epistemological Colebrook in understanding ‘a critique of
critiques of total knowledge, resonant with masculinism [as] intertwined with a
what Donna Haraway has called ‘situated concern for the nonhuman’ (Colebrook
knowledges’ (Haraway 1988) and Rosi 2012: 72)? If the deep structures of power
Braidotti has called an epistemological and oppression are a feminist issue, then
position of ‘embeddedness and embodied- these concerns do not stop at the human
ness’ (Braidotti 2005). subject – or rather, they force a recognition
Still, in the context of these onto- of that subject as also a material one,
epistemologies a question remains: ‘was embedded in and as worldly materiality.
this turn (whatever we want to call it) an Such an expression of care and concern for
ethical turn?’ (Åsberg 2013: 7). Cecilia the non-human is not a homogenized or
Åsberg provides an excellent synopsis of ‘flat’ ethics; within a feminist cartography
the ethics at stake in the new feminist turn of power, difference still always matters
to materiality, where this emerges in an (Braidotti 2013). A relationship of respecere

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
244 MATTERING

toward the non-human does not erase potential futures; it collects not only
differences between humans and non- feminist thinkers from diverse types of
humans, or among differently situated inquiry, but also acts transversally, unfold-
humans. In fact, an ethics of responsivity, ing both backwards and forwards, and
never knowable in advance, pointedly gathering thinkers from different (non-
underlines such differences: how am I linear) times. It might be that we are only
responsible to this body, this time, in this recently paying attention to material
encounter? Material feminisms are not a feminisms as such. In other words: femin-
negation or erasure of a feminist genealogy ism has never been immaterial.
of ethical thinking, but its very embrace
See also Neo/New Materialism; Post-
and further development.
human Critical Theory; Postdisciplinarity;
Yet to fulfil this ethical promise, feminist
Feminist Posthumanities.
materialisms must resist instrumentaliza-
tion at all levels; we must remain vigilant in
Astrida Neimanis
our refusal to reduce these matters to their
use-value for the thinker. Here, this includes
a refusal to treat these matters as mere
fodder for our intellectual products, or to MATTERING
simply recruit matter as metaphor, concept
or conceit. Even (or especially) as we call on Karen Barad begins Meeting the Universe
non-human matter to ignite our theoret- Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
ical, creative fires as our collaborators, ‘we Entanglement of Matter and Meaning with
must find another relationship to nature’ – a seemingly straightforward definition of
or non-human matter more broadly mattering. It refers to the idea that ‘Matter
construed – ‘besides reification, possession, and meaning are not separate elements . . .
appropriation, and nostalgia’ (Haraway Mattering is simultaneously a matter of
2008: 126). We must insist that matter, in all substance and significance’ (Barad 2007:
of its non-human and more-than-human 3). The material world and its meaning are
guises, is not only a ‘co-labourer’, doing all co-constituted through the iterative
the grunt work for little or nothing in process of mattering. But this notion of
return (Neimanis 2012). The ethics at stake mattering has a complicated theoretical
here are thus not just ‘in general’, to be history. Its genealogy can be traced
learned from these matters, but an ethics to from Barad’s transdisciplinary formulation
be directed specifically toward these matters of the term at the intersection of
we ‘think with’. ‘Thinking with’ in a feminist physics, science studies, material femin-
context must remain committed to holding isms (Alaimo and Hekman 2008), new
on to this ‘with’, even once the heavy think- materialism (Coole and Frost 2010) and
ing is done. These matters give us insights, posthumanism to its earlier development
theories (publications, jobs, livelihoods), in poststructuralist and feminist theory.
but what are we giving back? How are we While I want to make the case that ‘matter-
honouring these matters and their gifts? ing’ is the most robust framework the
An acknowledgement of the ethics implic- (post)humanities have for theorizing the
ated in a feminist material turn is also a dynamics of naturecultures (Haraway
provocation. 2003) – which is to say the way in which
This ‘thinking with matter’ isn’t new as change occurs across entangled material
such. It gathers both possible pasts and and discursive phenomena – I also want to

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
MATTERING 245

highlight how the term’s rhizomatic ances- entities, how can we claim to observe that
try is a testament to the non-separability of system’s evolution in isolation? This insight
dynamics and ethics. suggests that we completely rethink
Mattering is a kind of posthumanist dynamics. With mattering, ‘the very nature
performativity that emphasizes matter’s of change and the possibilities for change
capacity to matter, to achieve significance changes in an ongoing fashion as part of
in its being as doing. Matter here is not the world’s . . . dynamism’ (Barad 2007:
ground or essence, but agentive, ‘produced 179). A performative understanding of
and productive, generated and generative’ matter, in other words, alters the very
(Barad 2007: 137). To attend to matter in nature of change and causality.
this way is posthumanist because agency, Causality, the core principle of classical
historicity and intentionality – the keys to dynamics, suggests that change occurs
meaning-making – are understood not as when one discrete entity (cause) influences
attributes of human culture and subjectiv- another (effect), where both the causative
ity, but as transcorporeal enactments that and effective agents pre-exist their relation.
extend across and through human and However, once we replace causality with
nonhuman bodies (Alaimo 2010). And it is performativity as our central dynamic
performative because it suggests that principle, the concept of change changes.
discrete entities and the meanings attached Change is no longer a question of what
to them emerge within, rather than causes what, but of what coexists with what.
precede, the relations that constitute them. The rules of Bohr’s (1958) complementarity
When we pose the question of what and indeterminacy relations – the quantum
matters and how, we are not dealing with theoretical precedents for Barad’s dynamics
pre-existing bodies upon which language of mattering – are such that they provide
inscribes meaning, but with relations of information not about what causes produce
doing, acting and becoming that exist in what effects, but about what observable
material-discursive superposition until an values and corresponding states of exist-
agential cut intervenes to demarcate clear ence can come into being simultaneously.
boundaries between words and things. As I have noted elsewhere, ‘Theoretically . . .
And this agential cut, or boundary-making indeterminacy relations should thus tell us
practice, is a part of the very phenomenon how mind and matter can or cannot coexist
it specifies, rather than apart from it. within different events, given a sufficiently
Performativity is thus the dynamic core detailed account of the apparatus/experi-
of mattering. ‘To specify or study the mental arrangements in question’ (Jones
dynamics of a system’, Barad tells us, ‘is to 2014: 193). The dynamics of mattering
say something about the nature of and tell us what meanings and states of matter
possibilities for change’ (2007: 179). can simultaneously co-exist and which
Normally, in the natural sciences, studying cannot within specified material-discursive
dynamics means observing how the vari- contexts.
ables that describe the state of a system The combination of the cultural studies
change over time. But this understanding vocabulary of performativity with the
of the nature of change is rendered incom- vocabulary of quantum physics in this
prehensible under the rubric of mattering’s account of mattering should provide a
performative dynamics. Indeed, if the rough sense of the term’s complex
properties of a system are not determinate disciplinary history. We certainly cannot
outside of the system’s relation with other mention performativity without evoking

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
246 MATTERING

Judith Butler’s pioneering formulation of invites nonhumans as well as humans, but

the term in gender studies, feminist theory what, if anything, does this proposal do to
and queer theory. Indeed, Barad makes address the kinds of concerns that femin-
clear that her twin concepts of posthu- ist, queer, postcolonial, (post-)-Marxist,
manist performativity and mattering are and critical race theorists and activists
further developments of Butler’s concepts have brought to the table?
of gender performativity and materializa- 2007: 58, emphasis added
tion as she articulates them in Gender The inclusion or exclusion of accounts of
Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter the materialization of matter, meaning or
(1993). Barad extends to matter Butler’s identity, in other words, is not an end in
reconceptualization of gender as a doing itself, but comes to matter through the artic-
rather than an attribute. She thereby devel- ulation of those accounts within specific
ops a parallelism between the processes of contexts and histories. That is, including
gendering and mattering. If ‘gender is a versus excluding is a difference that makes
doing, not in the sense that there is a a difference to certain political concerns
pregendered person who performs its and priorities and not others based on how
gender, but rather with the understanding those concerns have been addressed within
that gendering . . . is a temporal process that the field(s) in question. We cannot include
operates through the iteration of norms’ or exclude ‘certain issues without taking
(Barad 2007: 57), then mattering accounts responsibility and being accountable for
for the role of matter, as an active agent, in the constitutive effects’ (Barad 2007: 58)
such processes of the materialization of those inclusions or exclusions have within
gender and other identities. Mattering is a certain disciplinary histories.
part of the process of gendering, amongst Such is the ethics of mattering that
other performative practices. The concept complements and is non-separable from
of mattering thereby expands the dynam- its dynamics. For, according to mattering’s
ics of performativity to include nonhuman account of how some bodies and meanings
bodies and practices as well as human ones become associated and not others, when
– a step Barad laments Butler neglecting. we decide to draw on certain theorists and
But neither Barad’s extension of traditions and not others, we are particip-
performativity to matter nor my gesture to ating in a boundary-making practice that
the indebtedness of the concept of matter- matters for the field in which we are
ing to Butler is ultimately about inclusion. making an intervention. We are a part of a
It is about responsibility, about ethics, an material-discursive process of changing
ethics inscribed in the very dynamics of the possibilities for change. As such, we
mattering. As Barad writes about her cannot feign to be exempt from the
insistence on bringing the insights of ‘responsibility and accountability for the
performative cultural analysis to bear on lively relationalities of becoming of which
science studies, we are a part’ (Barad 2007: 393). By focus-
The issue is not simply a matter of inclu- ing on the dynamics of performativity in
sion. The main point has to do with power. this entry, I am part of an agential cut
How is power understood? How are the within posthumanism that places Barad
social and the political theorized? Some and Butler at the centre of the conversation
science studies researchers are endorsing about the terminology of mattering.
Bruno Latour’s proposal for a new parlia- With this theoretical cut, I mean to
mentary governmental structure that address, share and promote the broader

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
MAXWELL’S DEMON (NON-ANTHROPOCENTRIC COGNITION) 247

concerns of posthuman feminist theory. force nor in (metaphysical) substantial

Proto-posthumanist and posthumanist terms (see Negentropy). Before discussing
feminists – such as Butler, Haraway, Barad, how the stakes were formulated in this
Alaimo and Braidotti (2013) – have thought experiment, and how these same
developed the concept of mattering in stakes were re-articulated in famous
order to understand material bodies as discussions of it, it is important to under-
sites of political struggle. These theorists stand that here, we have the beginning of a
deploy the term to account for the agency certain coinage of thinking about chance
of human and non-human bodies in the in purely operational terms: one which
iterative (re)configuring of gender norms attributes probability to humanly imper-
and sexual power differentials. According fect faculties that need not, in principle, be
to this genealogy, the dynamics of matter- taken into account if operations in the
ing are never not political. Thus, even when natural sciences be carried out by a ‘pure’
theorizations of mattering ‘do not speak agency like the particular intelligence
directly to the questions of sex or gender, which Maxwell set out to design in his
they still have their roots in feminism as thought experiment. This very background
a social movement, via their insistence links the concept discussed in this brief
that the human body is, simultaneously, a article to the discussions about artificial
political, ontological, and epistemological intelligence at large, also beyond the selec-
site’ (Alaimo 2014: 16). An ethical investi- ted aspects that will be discussed here.1
gation into the dynamics of mattering, then, James Clark Maxwell responded to the
means not just including the theorists problem of thermodynamics’ irreversibil-
that developed the concept, but also ity with a thought experiment designed to
responsibly supporting their feminist, resolve the subjectivity which apparently
posthumanist politics. inheres to experimental science when it
involves heat balances (through probabil-
See also Commutation Ontology; Locality/
ity). If heat is apparently not to be held
Non-Separability; Neo/New Materialism;
identical with energy (irreversibility,
Material Feminisms; Naturecultures;
second law) nor approached in metaphys-
Posthumanist Performativity; Trans-
ical terms as a new kind of substance, then
corporeality; Quantum Anthropology.
we can think of heat as the motion of
molecules in populations, Maxwell main-
Brandon Jones
tained. Individually – so he formulated the
belief of many of his contemporaries – the
molecules must obey Newton’s Laws:
MAXWELL’S DEMON (NON- Every action, every collision, must be
ANTHROPOCENTRIC COGNITION) measurable and calculable in theory. This
assumption led him to invent a scenario
In this entry, I would like to discuss one of that involves a perfect observer, one whose
the key moments of reference in twentieth- faculties were not to be flawed like the
century information science, which arose human imperfect ones, in short, a cognit-
from thermodynamics and which in fact ive agency freed from all subjectivity and
links the latter to the former in many probability, and hence whose reasoning
important aspects. Maxwell’s famous would be freed from irreversibility.
thought experiment explores how to think Maxwell set up the ideally perfect experi-
of heat, if we can conceive of it neither as a ment where the observer is to be capable of

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
248 MAXWELL’S DEMON (NON-ANTHROPOCENTRIC COGNITION)

purifying the science of heat from the But there were problems with faculties
factual irreversibility at work in it (see perfected in Szilárd’s manner as well:
Negentropy). For this observer, thermo- once we assume that a system needs to be
dynamics would be as determined and quantized in order to be measured and
without need for the assumption of a final hence remembered, we are dealing with the
cause or any other agency that acts in non- unknown quantities of microscopic vari-
reasonable manner from a distance, as ables that ‘make it possible for the system
Newtonian physics.2 to take a large variety of quantized struc-
When Leó Szilárd attended to Maxwell’s tures’: stochastic definitions (Laplacean
thought experiment, he hoped to dissipate determinism) apply only to lower frequen-
the rather metaphysical discussions that cies like those of a thermostat (in essence
had emerged and gave rise to both animist the kind of intelligence Maxwell conceived
as well as vitalist discussions of the possi- of), but not to higher frequencies like those
bility of a ‘perpetual movement’ which of an oscillator (the re-devolpment of
Maxwell’s agency – if considered a legiti- Maxwell’s intelligence by Szilárd); higher
mate concepts – would render real.3 Instead frequencies display no stochastic distribu-
he re-considered Maxwell’s purely mech- tions; the position and magnitude of the
anical agency at stake in computational waves cannot be at once observed and
terms and equipped it with the capacity to hence such observation involves probabil-
memorize and evaluate all the observations ities. Even if the perfect agent would apply
it makes, and hence be capable of making his perfect faculties by measuring (object-
up for the inevitable expenditure of energy ively), its assumption would not lend itself
through understanding how it could be to stigmatize probabilities to the side of
balanced again.4 The core assumption of subjectivity against a supposedly stochastic
Szilárd5 was that even this perfect observer’s distribution of objective nature.
faculties of observation would have to be Probability enters the picture of
accounted for in terms of measurement Laplacean determinism in that the move-
and calculation or else – if observation is ment of molecules has to be measured and
not formalized – the thought experiment’s calculated in populations (rather than indi-
value for justifying a classical notion of vidually). This implies a foregrounding of a
experimental science is nullified at once certain role of code in this measuring and
(since by definition such observation calculating.6 The methods of probabilistics
would transcend the conditions of experi- differ from those of stochastics with regard
mentation). In order to account for the to this role of encryption. From this
demon’s observation in those terms, Szilárd perspective, entropy is a term to measure
introduced ‘information’ and ‘memory’ into the dissipation of heat by means of encrypt-
the set-up (although he did not speak of ing ‘a large amount’– large enough to count
‘information’ properly, but spoke of the the totality of possible transformation in
results of measurements which needed to an ideal state in which every next step is
be memorized in whatever ‘form’) (Gleick equally likely (entropy). The core assump-
2011). Szilárd effectively transformed tion of thermodynamics is that the total
Maxwell’s original conception of a demon, amount of energy in the universe is invari-
acting mechanically like a thermostat, into ant, that nothing can be added or subtrac-
a deus ex machina, an artificially intelligent ted to it (First Law of Thermodynamics).
being that can remember whatever experi- Entropy is the name for that number, and
ences it makes while measuring. its extension (largeness of this number) is

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
MAXWELL’S DEMON (NON-ANTHROPOCENTRIC COGNITION) 249

subjected to encryption in algebraic code The implications of such an economy,

(see Equation). To think of energy like this, one that transforms information into
in terms of entropy, does not depend upon energy and vice versa, has only rarely been
a semantic or substantial interpretation of explored so far. It is mainly pursued in the
energy, and it does not need to know just work of Michel Serres, which I want to
how much energy there really is in the point to in conclusion to this entry. Thus
universe (see Invariance). Every system we want to ask with Michel Serres: ‘What
that real (empirical) science can identify is does this demand for an absolutely exact
one that factors in in this only cryptograph- measurement mean?’ He resumes:
ically knowable invariant amount total of
In a famous theorem, Brillouin proved
energy in the universe.
that a perfect experiment can absolutely
Léon Brillouin, building upon the work not be realized, because it would produce
of Szilárd, went a step further. Familiar with an infinitely large amount of information
Turing’s (1936, 1952), Shannon’s (1948) and and, in addition to this, an infinitely large
Wiener’s (1948) work on a mathematical amount of negentropy would have to be
notion of information and their dispute expended . . . the classical physicist
with regard to whether information can be believed that he could go to the very
measured in terms of the experimental limits, and observe what would happen if
entropy notion applied to physical systems all mistakes in observation could be
(Shannon), or whether it needs to be reduced to zero; today we know that this
accounted for in Schrödinger’s terms of margin is impossible, because the costs
negentropy import in biological systems,7 for this observation would rise to infinity.
Brillouin foregrounded the role of ‘code’ in Absolute determinism is a dream, for
such ‘intelligent’ computation and applied a perfect precision with regard to the initial
double notion of negentropy and entropy – conditions cannot be achieved. In other
one to energy, one to information, under words, this demand [for the perfect
the assumption that both are linked by experiment, VB ] exceeds the limits of a
code: free (entropic) information to him is possible experiment, it transcends its own
the maximum amount of a priori cases postulates. It is possible to prove that one
can never know exactly all the parameters
formulated in a code. The a priori cases can
of an experiment. There remains a rest of
be computed by combinatorics, and each of
chance, a remainder of the unknown.8
them must be regarded as equally likely to
happen in entropic information. Bound The consequences Michel Serres draws
(negentropic) information is empirically from the failure are as original as they are
measured information (in experiments daring: chance is to be regarded as the
with any particular manifestation of such a object of science, he maintains, not nature!
code). This transcendental in the measure- Michel Serres sees in information theory
ment of information allows for thinking of a philosophy of physics that is inherent
information as a kind of currency that to the domain of physics. It is remarkable,
through circulating is capable of trans- he points out, that Brillouin titled his book
forming energy into information and vice La science et la théorie de l’information.
versa. This is how Brillouin could affirm the This book contains, according to Serres,
ultimate failure of Maxwell’s thought experi- an epistemology of the concept and the
ment: not even an observation can be praxis of experimentation, formulated
obtained gratuitiously, he maintained, and in the language of physics, exhaustively
all information has its price. descriptive, quantified, normalized and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
250 MAXWELL’S DEMON (NON-ANTHROPOCENTRIC COGNITION)

constitutive. This epistemology is at once Notes

one of abstract principles, of natural laws
1. The point I want to highlight is that
that empirically grant precise and approx-
against all enthusiasms of this outlook
imational insight in the sense of natural (non-anthropocentric cognition and
philosophy. But at the same time, in the reason) stands a certain complication in
theory of code, language, script and trans- how we think of chance: from a quantum-
lation it contains, this epistemology is at science point of view, there appears the
once one of modern, critical philosophy need to complement the operational
as well. ‘Philosophers ought no longer definition with one that considers also a
search for an epistemology of experi- certain ‘substantiality’ of chance itself –
mental reason, nor write schoolbooks not in order to relativize the objectivist
about it; it exists already’.9 The theory of paradigm of science, but, quite contrarily,
information is the philosophy of nature in order to maintain its centrality for a
inherent to physics precisely in that it non-dogmatic, scientific understanding
acknowledges this remainder of chance, of knowledge (see Invariance).
which insists in all that can be known as 2. ‘A being whose faculties are so sharpened
substantial to any concept of understand- that he can follow every molecule in is
ing and knowledge. It is this remainder course, and would be able to do what is at
upon which Serres’ ‘logiciel intramatériel’ present impossible to us . . . Let us suppose
operates. The subjectivity or agency of this that a vessel is divided into two portions,
‘logiciel’ constitutes ‘l’objective transcend- A and B by a division in which there is a
entale’, a transcendental objectivity whose small hole, and that a being who can see
the individual molecules opens and closes
forms of intuition are not, as in Kant,
this hole, so as to allow only the swifter
constituted by physics notions of time
molecules to pass from A to B, and only
and space, but by Brillouin’s ‘a priori
the slower ones to pass from B to A. He
probabilities’ – the maximum and finite will, thus without expenditure of work
(albeit, depending on the code at stake, raise the temperature of B and lower that
very large) number of equally likely cases of A, in contradiction to the second law of
which the combinatorics of a code may thermodynamics’ (cited in Brillouin and
compute. To Brillouin and to Serres, the Jeans 1921: 183).
codes in terms of which information can 3. Second perpetual motion of a second
be measured – as the currency that circu- kind . . .
lates in energetic expenditure – are to be 4. As Gleick (2011) points out, Szilárd
regarded as different levels of negentropy thereby anticipated Turing’s famous
in a manner analogous to the energy levels thought experiment by some years.
in quantum mechanics, where bound 5. In his 1928 Habilitation entitled Über die
particles can take on only certain discrete Entropieverminderung in einem thermo-
values of energy (rather than any energy, as dynamischen System bei Eingriffen intelli-
is the view for particles in classical mech- genter Wesen.
anics). Codes, as levels of negentropy, 6. The systems of real physics can count as
provide the sufficient reason for a certain universal only in the mediate sense that
disposition of knowing or ‘architectonic they obey the laws of thermodynamics.
speculation’ (see Architectonic Disposition). But the entropic, thermodynamic
universe itself cannot be thought of as a
See also Architectonic Disposition; physical system properly, because the
Equation; Execution; Invariance. universe’s entropy itself is an assumed

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MEDIANATURES 251

ideality – an ideality which is to serve as a either but embedded in the cultural under-
support to the experimental paradigm of standing of life. This is not to say that
science, with the least possible semantical nature – to use the shorthand to refer to
(biased) import. the biosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere and
7. Shannon discusses the term negative also atmosphere – is merely a representa-
entropy, but considers its distinction negli- tion or defined by cultural meanings. It is
gible for information as a mathematical just to point out that the nature and
quantity notion. It was Norbert Wiener, animals have been understood and opera-
who, via the work by John von Neumann, tionalized as a resource (as Martin
Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and Leo
Heidegger and others argued, including
Szilard, maintained against Shannon that
Braidotti 2006a: 98) and by way of tech-
negentropy is in fact crucial, rather than
noscientific frameworks that define it
negligible for a mathematical theory of
information; it is largely due to this dispute
through its chemistry and other sorts of
that until today, different notions of analytics. This does not exhaust the intens-
mathematical information are in usage: ity of nature as a living formation (Braidotti
(1) information as a measure for order 2006a; Parikka 2014) but it does for sure
in terms of entropy, and (2) information force us to consider it as part of a feedback
as a measure for order as negentropy; loop that involves much more than just
while both speak of information as a nature. Hence to talk of medianatures, a
measure, and hence capable of establish- term that is a useful neologism, is a way to
ing order, the two concepts of order are try to grasp the intensive co-determination
actually inverse to each other: order as and co-emergence of the two spheres of
negentropy means minimal entropy natural dynamics and media cultural
(maximal amount of bound energy, epistemologies, of the onto-epistemological
minimal of free or available energy in situation that defines our technical
Schrödinger’s terms), while order as modernity. Media are in and of nature in
entropy means minimal negentropy ways that expand any talk of the environ-
(maximal amount of free and available ment into a virtual ecology of ‘social, polit-
energy, minimal amount of bound energy ical, ethical and aesthetic dimensions’
in Schrödinger’s terms). Much confusion (Braidotti 2006a: 123; see also Guattari
in the understanding of ‘information’ 2000 and Fuller 2005).
arises from this still today.
Medianatures is a concept that owes its
8. ‘Leben, Information, und der zweite
existence to Donna Haraway’s notion of
Hauptsatz der Thermodynamik’, in
naturecultures. Naturecultures is a key
Hermes III Übersetzung (Berlin: Merve,
1992), 53–96, Here in my own English
term that features in many of Haraway’s
translation, pp. 90–1. examples and discussions of companion
9. Ibid. species. It is a concept that troubles separa-
tions of nature from culture, and in general
Vera Bühlmann addresses the problematic categories by
way of the microinteractions that define
for example animal–human relations.
Hence, when addressing companion
MEDIANATURES species, Haraway speaks of the shared co-
becomings in which the two are mutually
Media is hardly just about media. implied: they are symbiotic and emergent.
Furthermore, nature is not merely nature Such situated case studies are not merely

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
252 MEDIANATURES

for the purposes of ontological meditation Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, feminist
but they are ways to address ‘livable polit- theory and for example Strathern – could
ics and ontologies in current life worlds’ be seen related to Gilbert Simondon’s
(Haraway 2003: 4). They teach that ontolo- notion of individuation. Furthermore,
gies not merely ‘are’ but they emerge; they through radical anthropology, one can
are active realities, which resist stable typo- summon a wide range of alternative meta-
logies of being. Haraway draws on A.N. physics to understand the contemporary
Whitehead’s process philosophy and the condition of mutation of understanding
active verb form: the world is formed of culture and technology but also the
through prehensions (ibid.: 6), an insight multinaturalism (see Castro 2015).
that forms Haraway’s understanding of the Besides its own conceptual power,
world as knotted. This is where it becomes naturecultures allows us to think of medi-
clear that the concept is driven by situated anatures, a concept which builds on the
practices that take into account feminist new materialist emphasis on the connec-
knowledge, which refuses handed-down tedness of material-semiotic (Haraway)
categories. It also draws from the reality and discursive-material (Barad) by way of
of postcolonial situations that inform a specific media cultural and technological
Haraway’s examples. Indeed, it is also the focus. Similarly, as mediation happens
anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s work across a whole spectrum of material realit-
that becomes an important reference point ies (Grusin 2015; Cubitt 2014a; Parikka
in thinking outside the dysfunctional 2015) irreducible to the media devices,
dualism of nature or culture. Instead, media itself can be seen to consist of an
Strathern’s fieldwork in Papua New Guinea assembly of elements of nature (Peters
contributes to Haraway’s concept in terms 2015).
of offering the idea of partial connections Instead of thinking that there is a
that are not determined by ‘wholes nor historical disconnection between media
parts’ (ibid.: 8). It is instead a relational culture and the natural formations that
nexus that one could also understand historically precede the modern technical
through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s media, medianatures works to illustrate
(1987) emphasis on molecular realities the specific and situated material interac-
that work under and across the visible, tions that underpin media technological
formed molar identities. practices. Media technology itself is mater-
Naturecultures is a way of addressing ial; it is composed of a variety of geological
the world of intra-actions and co- material and geophysical forces. It needs
becomings in which the significant others metals and minerals to summon its worlds
– dogs, bacteria and a multiplicity of non- of audiovisuality, colour, speed, processing
humans – are accompanying the so-called power and storage. Such processes of tech-
human. This sort of agenda contributes to nical quality are made of seemingly odd
the possibility of thinking outside the indi- elements such as lithium, coltan and rare
vidual (Haraway 2008: 32–3) and other earth minerals, while not forgetting the
similar concepts that misplace concrete- massive energy consumption of the
ness (in Whitehead’s sense) on the stability devices and the networked cloud services.
of the form (such as Nature). There would This assembly that we call media techno-
be a lot to be unfolded as to the philosoph- logy is reliant on massive global networks
ical genealogy of this sort of an account of energy and supply chains that them-
that – in addition to the already-mentioned selves are linked to a geography of media

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METADATA SOCIETY 253

materials from African, Chinese and South always about place and placement, of use
American minerals, to various pipelines and uselessness, of the work of material
and power plants that provide energy (see sciences and the ancient, prehistoric Earth
for example Hogan 2015), to the labour materials such as fossil fuels firing up our
conditions and practices that make these computers. It is a philosophical concept
materials move (see Wark 2015a on the but sustains the energy of Haraway’s
metabolic rift). It is a massive ecological naturecultures in that also medianatures
operation that sustains the fact that we are to contribute to liveable politics and
have a communication sphere of digital politics of global life of media products in
information that seems immaterial when it their prehistory and their afterlife – as well
comes to the speed of retrieval of a web as the various people exposed to media
page, the reliability of the cloud-stored before, and after, they become media for
image and the instantaneous feeling of the the consumer sphere.
intimate chat services that run, in most
See also Digital Rubbish; Earth; Four
cases, through corporate servers. To talk of
Elements; Naturecultures; Neocolonial;
medianatures illustrates this double bind:
Neo/New Materialism.
on the one hand, media offers our epistem-
ology, and is instrumentalized in the
Jussi Parikka
intensive mapping of the planet for its
resources, materials and energy. And it is
these resources, excavated often in places
inhabited by indigenous people or in METADATA SOCIETY
environmentally vulnerable areas like the
Arctic, that place special emphasis on Metadata Society is the name given to the
locality (see Cubitt 2014b). The epistemo- technopolitical form that emerges along-
logically misplaced dualism of media and side and within the network society
nature gives way to the intensive ties and (Castells 1996) due to the growth of corpor-
individuations that bring about media ate and state datacentres since the late
culture as a formation that consists of 1990s. Datacentres accumulate ‘big data’ –
ecologies of materiality as well as labour. In vast bodies of information about the world’s
addition to the construction of technolo- climate, stock markets, commodity supply
gies, issues also reach out to the discarded chains and the phone communications and
technology that is an e-waste hazard and social networks of billions of people for
becomes another disposed zombie media example. The establishment of these large
(Hertz and Parikka 2012) object in rural datasets as primary source of cognitive
locations outside the main centres of capital and political power marks the birth
consumption. They end up in regions such of the metadata society, being precisely the
as west Africa (Nigeria and Ghana), China meta analysis of data – mapping and inter-
(Guiyu), Pakistan and India where the preting their patterns and trends, and fore-
opening up of dead media technologies for casting their tendencies – and not their
their scrap metals is seemingly worth the brute accumulation that makes datasets
time despite the massive health risks meaningful and valuable. If the network
involved. society was a ‘space of flows’ (Castells 1996)
Hence, medianatures is a concept that that was based on the horizontal exchange
speaks to the materiality of media techno- of electronic information, datacentres
logies. But it does it in ways that are also incarnate the vertical accumulation of

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
254 METADATA SOCIETY

information about information, that is not apparent in Manovich 1999’s essay

metadata. ‘Metadata represent the shift to a ‘Database as Symbolic Form’). The political
different and higher dimensional scale in space of data emerges as an extension of
relation to information: they disclose the previous institutions of knowledge and
collective and political nature that is power, although now under the complex
intrinsic to all information’ (Pasquinelli and heavy rule of information sciences
2015b). Metadata describe also the abstract and mathematics. ‘Datascapes’ were born
coordinates of a new posthuman condition in the registers of the ancient archives as
that is the matrix of dividuals that compose simple squared grids: horizontal lines with
the superject in the society of control the person’s name and vertical lines carving
(Deleuze 1992b). out and ordering political data: age, gender,
class, disease, crime, etc. The register’s grids
expanded their territories with the bureau-
History cracy of the modern state (Desrosières
The topological origin of the datacentre 2002). The US census in 1890, for instance,
hegemony can be identified in specific was possible thanks to the introduction of
bifurcations of the network society, in punched cards by the Tabulating Machine
which particular nodes started to record, Company (that in 1924 would change its
map or wiretap all the information name to International Business Machines,
exchanged through the network. As soon or IBM ). The 1890 census already made
as the World Wide Web became a popular clear how information technologies were
medium across the 1990s, the problem of contributing to processes of segmentation
its cartography was given. The cleverest and racialization of US society. After the
solution to the navigation of the WWW Second World War the encounter of stat-
came from Google’s PageRank algorithm. istics with the first mainframe computers
The first datacentre set up by Google generated the database as political form.
in 1998 (known as ‘The Cage’) can be The database depicts mathematically
considered the milestone of the birth of the the formations of power that Foucault was
metadata society, as it was the first data- used to recording institutionally. Today the
centre to start mapping the internet on a category of ‘asocial behaviour’, for instance,
global scale via vectors of ranking. In 2013 is computed by an algorithm in real time:
Edward Snowden revealed NSA’s massive there is no longer the need for a stable
clandestine surveillance programme taxonomy codified by the disciplines of
PRISM to the newspaper The Guardian psychology or criminology. If a Foucault of
(Greenwald and MacAskill 2013), initiat- the twentieth century could speak the same
ing a big debate on metadata surveillance language of the institutional archive, a
(Cole 2014). Thus the period between 1998 Foucault of the twenty-first century would
and 2013 can be roughly identified as the require considerable technical training to
consolidation of the technopolitical form access the digital one. According to such an
of the metadata society. epistemic divide, Manovich rightly identi-
fies three ‘data classes’:

Genealogy The explosion of data and the emergence

of computational data analysis as the
As a symbolic form of the information key scientific and economic approach in
society, the database is also the new form contemporary societies create new kinds
of the archive of power (yet this aspect is of divisions. Specifically, people and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
METADATA SOCIETY 255

organizations are divided into three societies. But the machines don’t explain
categories: those who create data (both anything, you have to analyze the collect-
consciously and by leaving digital foot- ive arrangements of which the machines
prints), those who have the means to are just one component.
collect it, and those who have the expert- Deleuze 1990
ise to analyze it.
2012
In his famous ‘Postscript on the Societies
of Control’ Deleuze envisioned a form of
Interestingly, William Gibson’s original power that is no longer based on the
vision of cyberspace was also about an production of individuals but on the
‘infinite datascape’ rather than realistic modulation of dividuals. Individuals are
spaces of virtual reality or hypertextual deconstructed into numeric footprints, or
networks: ‘A graphic representation of data dividuals, that are administrated through
abstracted from the banks of every ‘data banks’: ‘We no longer find ourselves
computer in the human system. Unthinkable dealing with the mass/individual pair.
complexity. Lines of light ranged in the Individuals have become “dividuals”, and
nonspace of the mind, clusters and constel- masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks”.’
lations of data. Like city lights, receding’ (Deleuze 1992b)
(Gibson 1984). Gibson’s intuition of the The dividual mirrors and follows the
cyberspace was already about the problem idea of objectile that Deleuze discusses in
of meta-navigation of vast data oceans. The Fold (1993). The dividuals do not
Deleuze registered a similar shift, that is simply describe an atomized subject but
from Foucault’s disciplinary society based make possible the posthuman consolida-
on the production of the individual to the tion of collective agents as condividuals, or
society of control whose power would be as superjects. As Deleuze says, following
based on ‘data banks’ and the modulation Whitehead: ‘Just as the object becomes
of flows of communication. objectile, the subject becomes a superject’
(1993: 21).1 At least in the domain of the
We’re definitely moving toward ‘control’ digital, data and metadata can be
societies that are no longer exactly discip- considered the dividuals that are used to
linary. Foucault’s often taken as the theor- compose new superjects, as when data-
ist of disciplinary societies and of their bases are used to map social patterns and
principal technology, confinement (not
forecast social trends. As Savat (2009)
just in hospitals and prisons, but in
rightly observes, regarding the new tech-
schools, factories, and barracks). But he
niques of modulation within the society of
was actually one of the first to say that
control, ‘the newly emerging mode of
we’re moving away from disciplinary soci-
eties, we’ve already left them behind. We’re observation is pattern recognition.’
moving toward control societies that no
longer operate by confining people but Politics
through continuous control and instant
communication . . . One can of course see Placing too much stress on the definition
how each kind of society corresponds to a of the control society might not leave space
particular kind of machine – with simple for political imagination and posthuman
mechanical machines corresponding to trajectories. Deleuze was wondering about
sovereign societies, thermo-dynamic the political outcomes of Foucault’s notion
machines to disciplinary societies, cyber- of biopolitics, ‘had he not trapped himself
netic machines and computers to control within the concept of power relations?’

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
256 METAMODERNISM

(1988a: 94). As a matter of fact, the same See also Anthropocene Observatory;
question could be addressed back to Algorithm; Altergorithm; Digital
Deleuze. The paradigm of control (as it Citizenship; Networked Affect; Leaks and
emerged also in the Heideggerian activism Stings
of Tiqqun, for instance) can be easily
transform into a paradigm of victimiza-
tion and victimizing posthumanism.
Notes
As Wendy Chun recognizes: 1. The terms condividual and condividuum
originate from Deleuze and Guattari’s
Deleuze’s reading of control societies is dividuals. They were first introduced and
persuasive, although arguably paranoid, employed by the project of cultural
because it accepts propaganda as techno- jamming Luther Blissett in 1995. See
logical reality, and conflates possibility Marco Deseriis, Improper Names:
with probability . . . This is not to say that Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites
Deleuze’s analysis is not correct but rather to Anonymous (Minneapolis: University
that it – like so many other analyses of of Minnesota Press, 2015). For a genea-
technology – unintentionally fulfills the logy of the concept of dividuum see also
aims of control by imaginatively ascribing Gerald Raunig, Dividuum: Machinic
to control power that it does not yet have Capitalism and Molecular Revolution (Los
and by erasing its failures. Thus, in order Angeles: Semiotexte, 2016).
to understand control-freedom, we need 2. See for instance the project PATTRN by
to insist on the failures and the actual Forensic Architecture (http://pattrn.co):
operations of technology. We also need to ‘data-driven, participatory fact mapping
understand the difference between for conflict monitoring, human rights,
freedom and liberty since control, though investigative journalism, research and
important, is only half of the story. analysis’ [accessed 18 April 2017].
Chun 2008: 9

The notion of metadata society aims to Matteo Pasquinelli

leave the potentialities open and to suggest
alternative and more complex architec-
tures of knowledge. Such infrastructures of
metadata can be used against political METAMODERNISM
control in a different way.2 As Guattari
wrote in his 1989 classic Cartographies A term with a long and surprisingly
Schizoanalytiques: heterogeneous history (Vermeulen and
van den Akker, 2015), I develop metamod-
With the temporality put to work by ernism here along the lines Robin van den
microprocessors, enormous quantities of Akker and myself have suggested since the
data and problems can be processed in
late 2000s (2010, 2011): as a heuristic label
minuscule periods of time, in such a way
– as opposed, emphatically, to a programme
that the new machinic subjectivities keep
or philosophy – to describe the ‘structure
on jumping ahead of the challenges and
stakes with which they are confronted.
of feeling’, to borrow Raymond Williams’
Guattari 2012: 11 terminology (1977), trailing in the slip-
stream of the return of History – the whole
Control is not the only possible episteme gamut of geopolitical, financial, technolo-
of the dividual – the episteme of the post- gical, demographic and perhaps especially
human condividual is yet to be invented. ecological upheavals that have occurred at

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
METAMODERNISM 257

the onset of the twenty-first century. My culture. Others, like Nicolas Bourriaud
concise account here consists of three (2009), locate it in the creolization of the
parts: the end of postmodernism; post- arts. Gilles Lipovetsky’s suggestion for why
postmodern expressions in arts, culture postmodernism is out of vogue is hyper-
and politics; and the metamodern turn. consumption (2005). There are those who
Though, judging from the textbooks, point to 9/11 and those who focus on the
there is still little consensus about what financial crisis, those who single out climate
postmodernism entails, exactly – the change and those who look at post-coloni-
cultural logic of late capitalism, an eman- alism, object-oriented philosophy and the
cipatory program, a stylistic register char- New Sincerity, the birth of the cyborg and
acterized by eclecticism, parataxis and the afterlife of humanism. In some cases,
pastiche, a philosophical debate calling postmodernism is considered old hat
into question the universalizing truth because culture has changed beyond recog-
claims of nineteenth-century academia, or nition; in others, it is said to be inadequate
a fashion fad, among many others – many because its tropes have intensified (see for
now believe that the conceptual category instance Nealon 2012). Many scholars
describes a phenomenon of the past. From reject the notion of the postmodern enthu-
Josh Toth’s The Passing of Postmodernism siastically (because they take issue with its
(2010) to Alan Kirby’s ‘The Death of supposed moral relativism, or with pastiche,
Postmodernism and Beyond’ (2006) to the or with poststructuralism; see Eshelman’s
V&A’s 2012 obituary Postmodernism: Style plea for performatism (2008), as well as,
and Subversion, 1970–1990, there is a sense more recently, the programmatic philo-
that the postmodern idiom, if not entirely sophies of speculative realism and accelera-
outdated, is no longer sufficient to describe tionism), but there are also plenty who
contemporary culture. As Linda Hutcheon, abandon it grudgingly.
one of the most prescient critics of the The notion of metamodernism has
postmodern, wrote in the postscript to been developed – neither reverentially nor
The Politics of Postmodernism, ‘Let’s face it: reluctantly – in dialogue with Fredric
it’s over.’ Jameson’s definition of postmodernism as
the cultural logic of late capitalism (1991).
The postmodern moment has passed, Here, what is meant by postmodernism is
even if its discursive strategies and its the ‘senses of an end’ that by the late
ideological critique continue to live on –
eighties had come to permeate (western)
as do those of modernism – in our
politics and culture, from Thatcher’s
contemporary twenty-first-century world
TINA to punk’s ‘no future’, from Andy
. . . historical categories like modernism
and postmodernism are, after all, only
Warhol’s obsession with surfaces to
heuristic labels that we create in our Foucault’s dismissal of psychoanalysis, the
attempts to chart cultural changes and eclecticism of Robert Venturi’s architec-
continuities. ture to Fukuyama’s End of History, Body
2002: 165–6 Heat’s pastiche to the disintegration of
the Cartesian subject. In this context, the
Given the confusion around the notion of metamodern structure of feeling can be
the postmodern, the reasons for its described as the belief that this ‘end’ was
perceived outdatedness depend on whose called all too hastily and/or opportunistic-
account you read. For Kirby (2009), it ally. Ranging from the popularity of David
should be sought in the digitization of Foster Wallace’s essays on earnestness to

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
258 METAMODERNISM

the prevalence of manifestos in the arts, suggested to describe this epistemological

from the hopefulness of the Arab Spring contradictio in terminis is ‘as-if ’, a compar-
and the Indignados to the radicalization of ison (as) with a conditional (if), which most
right-wing politics, from book titles like scholars, foremost among them perhaps
the Rebirth of History (Badiou 2012) and Eva Schaper (1964–5), have ascribed to
The Revenge of History (Milne 2015) to Kant, specifically to his third critique and
sustainable architecture, the so-called writings on history but which applies to
‘quirky’ cinema (MacDowell 2012) to spec- his whole oeuvre: the interpretation of
ulative realism, there is a widespread phenomena as if they were x, even though
feeling that this farcical play we call the the interpreter understands they may well
human condition has not even finished its be, and must indeed allow for the possibil-
first act – even if no human subjects are to ity that they are y or z. In other words, the
participate after the interval. modernisms postmodernism responds to
A contraction of metaxy (the word Plato are not necessarily, or ever, representative of
uses to describe the ontological irreconcil- all modernisms – in any case, as Lyotard’s
ability of Eros, who was part mortal, part later writings also imply, they refer rather
divine)1 and modernism, metamodernism more often to Hegel’s Indikativ than to
can be situated at once beyond, with and Kant’s Konjunktiv II . Metamodernism, by
betwixt modernism and postmodernism. questioning whether history, art or what-
The argument is that the positions taken by ever can with certainty end at all, given that
the likes of Foster Wallace, the Indignados they may have always already been y or z,
or speculative realism oscillate between appears to infer, appreciatively or critically,
strategies we often associate with the the modernism of the latter.
modern – such as ideology, Reason and the Though by all accounts trailing in the
subject but also Bauhaus – and tactics slipstream of the technological revolutions,
linked to the postmodern – the end of the geopolitical instability, financial crises and
meta-narrative, relativism and eclecticism; ecological devastation shifting gears in the
they hark back to past notions of futurity so mid-2000s, the metamodern sensibility
as to rehistoricize the posthistorical present. was not powered by these historical kick-
It would be a mistake therefore to describe starts – accelerated, definitely; sustained,
metamodernism simply as either an uncrit- presumably, but not necessarily powered.
ical continuation of the modernist project Indeed, many of the practices and phenom-
or an indiscriminate rejection of post- ena considered metamodern preceded
modern positions; rather it is a pendulum these events by years or even decades, the
swinging back and forth between the two, consequences of individual, regional or
one that sways increasingly erratically, generational impulses more than anything
increasingly uncontrollably: a tragic desire, else.
an informed naivety, a pragmatic utopian-
See also Art; Contemporary, the; Ecopathy;
ism, or, in the case of much right-wing
Gaga Feminism.
extremism or indeed social media mobs,
a relativism that is also, simultaneously,
absolutist, occupying regardless whatever Note
position is opportune on the day but with 1. See Eric Voegelin (1989) for a thorough
the ideological certainty (and moral self- analysis of the notion of metaxy.
righteousness) of the fundamentalist. The
concept van den Akker and myself have Timotheus Vermeulen

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
METASTABILITY 259

METASTABILITY relative permanence was that, as Simondon

explains, they did not have an appropriate
The philosophy of Gilbert Simondon physical paradigm to help them make
(1924–89) is a key resource for current sense of such states. ‘In order to define
theorizing that questions the idea of the metastability, it is necessary to introduce
human as a privileged and stand-alone the notion of the potential energy residing
entity. By offering an altogether new theory in a given system, the notion of order and
of what constitutes an ‘individual’, he that of an increase in entropy’ (ibid.: 302).
effectively challenges the basic tenets of Only then is it possible to get a firm grasp
Western logic and metaphysics, and with of the becoming of being ‘as it doubles itself
that, commonly assumed ideas about unity and falls out of step with itself [se déphaser]
and identity. At the same time, Simondon’s in the process of individuating’ (301).
philosophy has inestimable value as a Simondon’s notion of the individual
corrective to contemporary approaches challenges established ideas about oneness
that, taking inspiration from cybernetics and sameness in two respects: first, the indi-
and information theory, tend to conflate vidual is never completely one with itself,
living being and technical being on the and second, it is not the whole being but
assumption that there are no significant merely a phase in the ongoing genesis of
differences between humans and other being. The individual, therefore, has only a
intelligent systems such as machines. relative reality; there is always more to being
Instead of talking about substance, than what is made to appear in a single act
matter and form, Simondon conceives of of individuation. To come to terms with this
the individual in terms of systems and ‘more’, the non-identity of the individual
states – with special emphasis on the with itself, Simondon introduces the notion
notion of ‘metastability’, which he borrows of the ‘preindividual’. The idea that becom-
from thermodynamics. The problem with ing happens in phases, and that the indi-
the received ways of conceiving the indi- vidual has only a relative existence as an
vidual, whether from the substantialist expression of one of these phases, presup-
viewpoint or from the hylomorphic view- poses the existence of a preindividual state.
point, is that there is no proper place for As Muriel Combes succinctly puts it:
the process of individuation; that is, for the
genesis of the individual. Classical notions Before all individuation, being can be
of unity and identity, which conceives the understood as a system containing poten-
individual either as a self-identical entity or tial energy. Although this energy becomes
as a conjunction of form and matter, active within the system, it is called poten-
tial because it requires a transformation
prevent us from understanding ontogen-
of the system in order to be structured,
esis, the becoming of being. As Simondon
that is, to be actualized in accordance
points out, the ancients, who in their theor-
with structures. Preindividual being, and
izing recognized nothing but instability in a general way, any system in a meta-
and stability, movement and rest, had no stable state, harbors potentials that are
clear conception of metastability. For them, incompatible because they belong to
being excludes becoming because ‘being heterogeneous dimensions of being.
was implicitly presumed to be in a state of Combes 2013: 3–4
stable equilibrium at all times’ (1992: 301).1
The reason why the ancients failed to This is why preindividual being – conceived
recognize the existence of states with as a metastable system rife with potentials

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
260 METASTABILITY

– is ‘more-than-one’ (Combes 2013: 5). A them compatible. The resulting individual

paradigmatic example of a preindividual does not exhaust the potentials in the
regime that goes beyond unity is found in preindividual state. Instead, and due to
quantum mechanics, with the wave-particle the sustained potentials, the individual
duality, which Simondon understands as contains an inheritance of preindividual
‘two ways of expressing the preindividual reality. This means that even individuated
state by means of the various manifesta- being retains the characteristic of being
tions exhibited when it appears as a prein- more-then-one: ‘The preindividual nature,
dividual’ (1992: 304). In contrast to a stable which remains associated with the indi-
equilibrium, a metastable equilibrium is vidual, is a source of future metastable
conflictual – but the ‘conflict’ in question is states from which new individuations
a productive one: it is the incompatibilities could eventuate’ (1992: 306). The indi-
and tensions in the preindividual state that vidual, in other words, retains its capacity
make individuation possible, by inducing to fall out of step with itself, and to undergo
modifications in the system parameters a development that proceeds by ‘quantum
that break the equilibrium and allow the leaps through a series of successive [meta-
system to dephase (that is, to change its stable] equilibria’ (ibid.: 301).
state). Simondon expands on the conflic- Simondon’s theory of individuation,
tual nature of metastable systems: with its emphasis on conflictual systems and
their discontinuous progression through a
Individuation must therefore be thought series of metastable states, allows for a new
of as a partial and relative resolution understanding of unity and identity that
manifested in a system that contains latent
breaks with the classical laws of thought,
potentials and harbors a certain incom-
first by granting pre-eminence to the
patibility with itself, an incompatibility
process of individuation over the individual,
due at once to forces in tension as well as
to the impossibility of interaction between
and second by recognizing that individu-
terms of extremely disparate dimensions. ation produces more than the individual.
Simondon 1992: 300 There is a unity that is more than one, and
there is an identity that incorporates
Individuation, then, is conceived as process elements other than itself. The individual as
of mediation that brings into communica- Simondon conceives it is not opposed to
tion disparate elements that, in the prein- difference but is born out of tensions and
dividual system, belonged to ‘different sustained by tensions – it even evolves
orders of magnitude’. Simondon explains: thanks to these tensions. As Simondon
conceives it, being has a ‘transductive unity’
At the same time that a quantity of potential (1992: 311). ‘Transduction’ is at once a meta-
energy (the necessary condition for a higher physical and logical notion, which expresses
order of magnitude) is actualized, a portion
the sense of physical, organic and psychic
of matter is organized and distributed (the
processes, and beyond that, within the field
necessary condition for a lower order of
of knowledge, ‘the actual course that inven-
magnitude) into structured individuals of a
middle order of magnitude, developing by
tion follows’ (replacing here the notions of
a mediate process of amplification deduction and induction) (ibid.: 313).
1992: 304 This, however, should not be taken to
mean that all these processes are the
Thus understood, individuation is a ‘same’ (in the old sense of ‘sameness’ that
process that sustains potentials by making excludes significant differences). Rather, he

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
MONSTER/THE UNHUMAN 261

approaches these processes in an ‘analo- the unresolved system becomes an organiz-

gical’ manner, maintaining that transduct- ing dimension in its resolution’ (1992: 311).
ive operations are at play in all of them. Yet In conclusion, to return to the issue of
there are differences. Whereas physical the relation between humans and intelli-
individuation is ‘concentrated at its bound- gent machines, an idea could be not to
ary with the outside world’, there exists understand this relation by reducing one
within living being ‘a more complete regime to the other, but rather, to understand this
of internal resonance requiring permanent relation as an amplifying coupling of tech-
communication and maintaining a meta- nics and life in Simondon’s sense, that is, as
stability that is the precondition of life’ a mediation across disparate dimensions
(1992: 305). Living being, therefore, ‘is not that releases new potentials.
only the result of individuation, like the
See also AI (Artificial Intelligence);
crystal or the molecule, but is a veritable
Naturecultures; Negentropy; Ontological
theater of individuation’ (ibid.). Moreover,
Turn; Posthumanism; Process Ontologies;
even if Simondon, in his consideration of
Technicity.
technical individuation (see Technicity),
maintains that technical being evolves
through a process of ‘concretization’ where Notes
it gradually loses its artificial character and 1. From the English translation of the intro-
becomes more and more like a living being, duction to Simondon’s doctoral disserta-
he criticizes cybernetics by dismissing their tion, L’individuation à la lumière des
‘initial postulate about the identity between notions de forme et d’information, which
living beings and auto-regulated technical develops his theory of individuation.
objects’ (Simondon 2012: 59).2 For, even if While defended in 1958, the dissertation
technical objects tend toward concretiza- was published only in 1964 (the first part)
tion, they differ from living beings that are and in 1989 (the second part). Both parts
‘concrete from the start’.3 Living being is are published in Simondon (2005).
‘not at all the machine to which it is assim- 2. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des
ilated functionally by the model of cyber- objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 2012), p. 59:
netic mechanism’ (1992: 306). In a similar ‘postulat initial de l’identité des êtres vivants
vein, he refuses the reductionism implied et des objets techniques auto-régulés’. This
in the probabilistic notion of information: work is Simondon’s seminal treatise on
technology, which was published as a
[T]he notion of information must not be complementary thesis to his main doctoral
associated with that of the signals or thesis. First published in 1958.
supports [supports] or vehicles of inform- 3. ‘concrets dès le début’.
ation, as the technological theory of
information tends to do, derived by Aud Sissel Hoel
abstraction as it is in the first instance from
transmission technology.
1992: 316
MONSTER/THE UNHUMAN
Simondon, in contrast, sets out to save
information as meaning, which for him has
to do with expression of being as conceived
O Monster, Where Art Thou?
in his theory of individuation. Information The monster or the unhuman is not a
is ‘that by which the incompatibility within negation but a non-relation, which is not

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
262 MONSTER/THE UNHUMAN

to say that it is immune to situational inter- imprisonment of subject formation by

action or relationality, but instead to high- congealing a concrete form dubbed Man,
light that the monstrous is a rejection of marked by involuntary permanence, ‘so
the stifling non/human binary entrap- the State betrays its enmity to me by
ment.1 The monster is not an abstract demanding that I be a man . . . it imposes
conceptualization, but an instantaneous, being a man upon me as a duty. Further, it
enacted entanglement. It is a transitory desires me to do nothing along with which
enmeshed alignment situated in the imme- it cannot last; so its permanence is to be
diacy of praxis. The monster is thus a sacred for me’ (Stirner 1845b). The creation
continuous, unstable project of both disas- of State-based communities, with moral,
sembly or ex-figuration and of unsanc- civic subjects constitutes an immobile
tioned coupling; concrete and relational, it fettering which denies entities the possib-
is a practiced hybridity of form which ility of fostering a personalist self-
eludes conceptual formalization, existing actualization, that is to say egoism, ‘the
as it does as a state of contestation and State is a society of men, not a union of
troubling – shifting, adjusting, and dissolv- egos . . . therefore we two, the State and I,
ing at whim. are enemies. I annihilate it, and form in its
The essentialist spell of subject forma- place the Union of Egoists’ (ibid.). The
tion is undone not merely by the bringing union of egoists thus consists of free inter-
to the fore of its latent foil, the anti-human, active agents who voluntarily decide to
its malingering other without which the engage with, or conversely abstain from,
liberal subject, the (hu)man, would be one another, as juxtaposed with State-
unable to constitute itself, but through a borne subjects, Men, whose very creation
destabilization of the entire notion of and engagement is modulated by dictated
congealed subject-formation in the first designation inscribed in legal and social
place via a repudiation of its inescapability. codas.
The unhuman is thus not a simplistic nega- As Stirner points out, however, the
tion of the human, but a polymorphous, creation of a standard idea of ‘Man’ in turn
monstrous aberration of the unitary, logically implies the existence of its nega-
humanistic and anthropocentric subject tive, the un-man (e.g. ‘man stands against
form in its entirety. Let us now turn to a men, or, as men are not man, man stands
brief analysis of how the monster mani- against the un-man’ (1845b)). This latter
fests itself in the dissident writings of Max figure being that which looms at the edges
Stirner, before examining a case study of a of civilized society, which must always be
modern-day monster: the data pirate. reined in and kept at bay via the imposi-
tion of State/Church-sponsored moralism,
as manifested through the threat of
Monstrous Unions demonic forces in the church or the ruth-
A union of egoists – a free-form, self- less law breaker by the State. The spell of
constructed, voluntary relationality essentialism is thus here undone by bring-
formed amongst cognizant actants – is a ing to the fore its latent foil, its malingering
notion introduced in the nineteenth other without which the liberal subject,
century by Max Stirner via its juxtaposi- Man, would be unable to constitute itself.
tion to the liberal project of subject Stirner’s active introduction or forefront-
construction. The State and the Church, for ing of the unman into the discourse of
Stirner, are both interested in imposing the subjectification serves to destabilize said

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
MONSTER/THE UNHUMAN 263

subject formation via a repudiation of its the stifling dichotomy of State-produced

inescapability; or in other words, the subjectivity itself.
unman offers a way out of the confines of
humanist subject formation (Newman
Realization, not Conceptualization
2001a: 67, 2001b: 309–30). That this simple
logical foil exists as a latent shadow in But how, concretely, could monsters and
every discussion of the liberal subject is their unions come about? A common
also what creates the possibility of a rejec- critique of Stirner made both in the nine-
tion thereof. teenth century (Stirner 1845a) and in the
And yet the monster is not mere nega- twentieth (Newman 2010a: 160, 2010b: 43),
tion, for a negation functions via, and thus is that the underlying conceptualization of
is dependent on, the invocation, implicit or monstrous couplings is left unsatisfactorily
otherwise, of its dialectical converse – Man vague. A notion of egoist monsters
(Stirner 1845b). Instead, as Feiten points congregating and enacting realities disjoin-
out (2013: 129), Stirner ultimately rejects ted from State-sanctioned subject forma-
the un/man binary altogether: ‘[I] shall not tions is tantalizing indeed, but how may it
ask henceforward whether I am man or actually be manifested? Stirner is tentative
un-man in what I set about; let this spirit on the matter, albeit precisely to preclude
keep off my neck’ (1845b)! In place of the the very trap of a priori conceptual congeal-
un/man, Stirner postulates the egoist; and ment which the monster strives to escape;
in place of the State, composed as it is of that is to say, Stirner intentionally avoids a
men, there is the union of egoists. For prolonged blueprinting of the union of
Stirner, the figure of the egoist functions as egoists precisely to avoid the possibility
a signifying other which serves to high- of the monsters’ entombment into a pre-
light the possibility of things not as they scriptive and oppressive enclosure of
are, of the existence of other formulations premeditated form and function.
of social cohesion aside from the State, In lieu of a conceptualization of the
namely a union of egoists freely interact- monster, Stirner instead points to the fact
ing as self-construction as opposed to that hundreds of potential monstrous
those under the weight of imposed unions happen daily, citing a myriad of
subjectivity, the oppression brought on by examples ranging from children coming
being moral men. together on the street to engage in an
Going further, however, it is here pivotal impromptu round of play; to falling in love
to elucidate that the term Stirner uses (1845a). Thus we here see the union of
for what is literally translated as the egoists identified as a lived experience, char-
‘unman’ – unmensch – also means monster acterized by the underlying facets of volun-
(Landstreicher 2011). The egoist is thus tary association and self-organization: ‘the
not a simplistic negation of the (hu)man, union of egoists is not a concept but a name
but a polymorphous, monstrous aberra- used to refer to each of the particular
tion of the subject form. Crucially, Haraway instances of individuals acting together’
deploys a similar vocabulary, observing (Landstreicher 2012). We can therefore read
that ‘[c]yborg unities are monstrous and the union of egoists not as a concrete
illegitimate’ (1991), further situating conceptualization, a recipe for congealment
Stirner as partaking in the tunnelling of subjectivity, but as a relational actualiza-
towards the posthuman. The ‘un-man’ is tion, or an assemblage. The monstrous union
thus no mere negation, but a disruption of of egoists is neither a theoretical tool nor a

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
264 MONSTER/THE UNHUMAN

conceptual model for subject construction alone. Data pirates come together to engage
and interaction, but a practised hybridity of in the free promulgation of said data due to
form which eludes conceptual formaliza- an explicitly expressed interest in unshack-
tion, existing as it does as a bit of poly- ling the fetters of intellectual property – that
morphous code; shifting, adjusting, and the interest may be expressed in action as
dissolving at whim, predicated upon an opposed to via ancillary written pronounce-
imminent potency of dissolution, an always- ment thereof is irrelevant to the fact that
unbinding impermanence (Stirner 1845b). said tacit proclamation is always-already
self-contained in the act alone.
Adopting ever-new means of data
Piratical Monsters dispersal and modes of content protection
Monstrous couplings, in their rejection of circumvention, once discrete acts of piracy
State-sanctioned subjectivity, pave the way are complete, pirate bands may then
for the potentiality of ‘bringing disparate disband, while other groups coalesce in
groups together to “unionize” on a founda- their own turn, and so on. Given that any
tion of shared criminality’ (Antliff 2011: number of release groups – temporary
162). One such modern-day manifestation conclaves of data pirates – engaging in
may perhaps be observed in situational their monstrous unions to freely dissemin-
data piracy – those monsters who come ate cultural knowledge exist at any given
together to engage in the contestation of time, monsters are hence not merely all
so-called intellectual properties by enga- around, but the piratical monster is instead
ging in the illicit unbridled dissemination an all-pervasive permeation which satur-
of information via the unauthorized digital ates and violates the coercive operation of
distribution of various outputs of cultural statist subject-formation. Unions of pirat-
production. ical monsters, in other words, constitute an
Notably, there is no singular, monolithic ever-ongoing, multifarious project of both
figuration of the data pirate; instead, ‘greatly disassembly and unsanctioned coupling,
varied and contrasting environments create eschewing the stagnation of stasis at all
very different types of pirates and many costs in favour of unbridled dissemination.
different piracy scenes’ (Craig 2005: 160). Enacted as a practice of relation, that
There is thus a plurality of piracies, span- encompasses its resistance in the act itself,
ning geo- and cyber-spatial localities and the monstrous, unhuman coming together
interactivities, with ‘piracy itself [being] of the union of egoists or data pirates are
difficult to pinpoint’ (Lechner 2015: 21). thus marked by monstrous indeterminacy,
Monstrous pirate unions are formed of and thus by a vibrant potentiality that is
those who – notably through their actions, devoid of prescribed modes of subjectivity.
not through abstract conceptualization –
See also Bodies Politic; Critical Posthuman
reject the authoritarian designation of the
Theory; In/Human; In-Human; Zombie.
author function as enforced via the techno-
logically-mediated and State-backed enact-
ment of various intellectual property laws. Note
Hence, the self-actualization of the monsters 1. Portions of this entry have previously
composing these unions need not come appeared in the author’s doctoral disser-
from developed manifestos writing about tation (Mazurov 2015).
their disdain for said strictures, for it instead
stems from the enacted practice of piracy Nikita Mazurov

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
MULTISPECIES 265

MULTISPECIES and endanger the entire planet, others are

turning to the topos of territory, soil and
Rather than simply celebrate the fact of city. Multispecies ethnographers and
multispecies mingling, it is better to begin artists are following Donna Haraway,
with the question: cui bono (who benefits) who insists: I am a creature of the mud, not
when species meet? Creatures once the sky. Agitating against Anthropocene
confined to the realm of zoe, or bare life discourse, multispecies studies involves
which is killable – have started to appear writing and making culture in a mode that
alongside humans in the domain of bios, is less anthropocentric than prevailing
with legible biographical and political lives trends. In blasted landscapes that have
in the social sciences and the environ- been transformed by multiple cata-
mental humanities. Rather than make other strophes, ethnographers and artists are
kinds of critters count only as conscious illuminating modest sites of biocultural
agents, networked actors, intentional hope.
communicators or ethical subjects, the field Timothy Ingold has recently suggested
of multispecies studies assumes that other that we abandon the multispecies idiom
organisms do not have to show their human since the notion of species itself is a human
equivalence. The notion of the ‘non-human’ construct. ‘Only in the purview of a univer-
is like ‘non-white’ – implying the lack of sal humanity’, he maintains, ‘does the world
something. of living things appear as a catalogue of
Departing from ‘the question of the biodiversity, as a plurality of species’ (2000:
animal,’ the polemic by Jacques Derrida 217). Paying clear attention to the ebb and
arguing that ‘the human–animal distinc- flow of agency in multispecies worlds
tion can no longer and ought no longer be reveals that humans are not alone in our
maintained’, the field of multispecies practices that group kinds of life on the
studies also engages with ‘the question of basis of similarity and divide others on the
the fungus’ and ‘the question of the plant’ basis of difference. Diverse organisms
(Derrida 2008). Fungi illustrate ‘practices engage in processes of recognition, differ-
that thrive in the “gap” between what is entiation, and classification – bringing
taken as wild and what is taken as domest- themselves and others into being as
icated,’ according to the Matsutake Worlds ‘species’. In other words, species emerge as
Research Group (2009). ‘Thinking like a entangled agents become with one another
fungus’ opens up questions like: ‘Who is in common worlds. As beings rediscover
doing the domesticating? And to what each other in intergenerational dances,
end?’ Plant-Thinking, the recent book by species persist across time and space.
Michael Marder, regards plants as ‘collect- Species also sometimes become beside
ive beings,’ as ‘non-totalizing assemblages themselves, to paraphrase Brian Rotman
of multiplicities, inherently political spaces (2008), they are intermittently present to
of conviviality’ (2013). themselves, becoming multiple and paral-
Multispecies studies involves practising lel, with glee and dissolution.
the art of noticing; it involves passionate Species involve a multitude. Emerging
immersion in the lives of others. In an era findings about microbial companion species
when many posthuman thinkers have give a new twist to Annemarie Mol’s
turned their attention to global climate suggestion that bodies are ‘an intricately
change, an era when the agency and action coordinated crowd’ (2002: viii). If species
of anthropos has been scaled up to embrace sometimes appear to be in isolation, perhaps

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
266 MULTIVERSE

it is just because of the limits of our own we are part of; it entails that matter, while
epistemologies and practices. Joe Dumit’s constituting this universe, would also be
microbiopolitical dictum states: ‘Never think actualizing an indefinite number of other
you know all the species involved in a universes, in a process of both relationality
decision. Corollary: Never think you speak and autonomy. As a metaphor and a
for all of yourself’ (2008: xii). thought experiment, the notion of the
multiverse greatly expands a speculative
See also Biological Arts/Living Arts;
perception of the self, by relating the indi-
Animism (Limulus); Epigenetic Landscape;
vidual to other realms of existence which
Non-human Agency; Anthropocene and
may go beyond a one-dimensional analysis.
Chthulucene; Kin; Symbiogenesis.
The notion of the multiverse can also be
approached from a scale perspective of
Eben Kirksey
bodies within bodies: for instance, from the
microscopic level of the bacteria living in
our internal organs, the human body itself
MULTIVERSE can be seen as a universe; that specific
human body, within the context of the
The multiverse is a crucial notion in the human species, can be considered a
frame of posthumanism and new material- universe within a multiverse.
ism, representing, symbolically and mater- Here, it is important to note that, even
ially, the ultimate decentralization of the though the notion of the multiverse radic-
human. Its relevance consists in decon- ally deconstructs any dualistic paradigm,
structing the possibility of any epistemolo- the current scientific perceptions of the
gical or ontological centre, not allowing for multiverse are actually conceived through
any type of centrism (from anthropo- the self/others, here/there analogies, in an
centrism to universe-centrism). On one approach which resonates with traditional
side, it stands as the next step in the human humanism, based on the necessity of the
revision of its spatiotemporal location, others as reverse mirrors of the self. On one
which, in the Western history of Astronomy, side, these other universes are depicted to
first posed the Earth at its centre, according be so far that they will never be reached
to the Ptolemaic geocentric model. Then, (Tegmark 2010); on the other, they are
shifting to the heliocentric model based on investigated through the anthropocentric
the contributions of Nicolaus Copernicus desire of postulating different worlds with
(1473–1543), it located the Sun at the ‘people with the same appearance, name
centre, to later realize that our solar system and memories as you’ (ibid.: 559). The
is part of a galaxy, and that this galaxy is double is often contemplated as a possibility
one among many, in a universe which, within the scientific literature related to the
according to current scientific research multiverse and is at the very core of Hugh
(from quantum physics to the fields of Everett’s proposal of the many-worlds inter-
cosmology and astrophysics), may be part pretation (1956), which focuses on the
of a multiverse.1 The notion of the multi- human-centric fascination with the idea of
verse can be approached both as a meta- universes in which there might be other
phor and as an actual configuration of versions of ‘me’, in a re-inscription of the
matter (Kaku 2005; Greene 2011). As a multiverse within the frame of egocentric
material hypothesis, it may unconceal a assimilations, instead of a situated acknow-
possible physical make-up of the universe ledgment of ontic differences.

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MULTIVERSE 267

If the scientific perception of the multi- themselves are feasible to sustain the ontic
verse does not fully represent the posthu- terms of the posthuman multiverse; both
man understanding of it, a historical should be listed in order to disrupt the
outlook on the notion of the multiverse in dualism one/many, thus avoid turning this
philosophy may offer some other perspect- discussion into the problem of the origins
ives. The term ‘multiverse’ itself was coined (is it a monism before being a pluralism,
by philosopher William James (1842– or a pluralism before being a monism?).
1910), in his essay ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ The rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1980)
where he stated: ‘Visible nature is all plasti- offers numerous insights for a posthuman
city and indifference, a [moral] multiverse development of the multiverse, even
[my italics], as one might call it, and not a though philosophically the two notions
[moral] universe’ (1895: 10). As an extens- cannot be assimilated. For instance, the
ive frame,2 the multiverse can be traced in posthuman multiverse does not necessar-
ancient philosophy, for instance, in the ily exclude the notion of a structure, but
cosmological approaches of the Atomists approaches it in a process-ontological
and the Stoics (Rubenstein 2014). Within way.6 In the frame of the multiverse,
the context of modern philosophy, the humans, as any other manifestations
notion of possible worlds dates back to the of being, can be perceived as nodes of
work of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz becoming in material networks; such
(1646–1716), specifically his ‘Essays of becomings operate as technologies of the
Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the multiverse, as modes of ‘revealing’
Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil’ (Heidegger 1954), thus re-accessing the
(1710), where he claimed that the actual ontological and existential significations
world is the best of all possible worlds.3 of technology itself. In such a frame, the
Such a view, which does not necessarily multiverse can be perceived as a material
imply the actual existence of other worlds, and metaphorical path of self-discovery,
has important antecedents in the reflection once the self has been recognized as the
on possible worlds found in medieval4 others within.
theories of modality5 (cf. Knuuttila 1993).
See also Earth; Mattering; Ontological
Within contemporary philosophy, the first
Turn; Process Ontologies; Posthuman
thinker to fully revisit the notion of the
Critical Theory; Terrestial; Planetary.
multiverse was David Lewis (1941–2001)
who, in ‘On the Plurality of Worlds’ (1986),
advocated for a modal realism according Notes
to which this plurality of worlds have no 1. It should be clarified that, in the words of
relation with each other, neither spatial, cosmologist Max Tegmark, the multiverse
temporal nor causal. ‘is not a theory, but a prediction of certain
Instead of parallel dimensions ontically theories’ (2010: 558).
separated from each other, the posthuman 2. Here I would like to note that, within this
understanding of a multiverse (Ferrando frame, the multiverse includes, but it is
2013) can be envisioned as generative nets not limited to, notions such as ‘parallel
of material possibilities simultaneously dimensions’, ‘parallel worlds’ and ‘alternat-
happening and coexisting, in a material ive realities’.
dissolution of the strict dualism one/many, 3. Such an optimistic view was famously
in tune with a relational ontology (Barad satirized by Voltaire (1694–1778) in his
2007). Neither monism nor pluralism by Candide: or, The Optimist (1759).

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
268 MULTIVERSE

4. For instance, Tim Wilkinson, in his article 6. In this sense, the specific vibrations
‘The Multiverse Conundrum’ (2012), notes which, according to the String Theory
that during medieval times the question of (Randall 2005; Susskind 2006), would
whether God had created many worlds allow the coherence of each dimension
was sufficiently relevant for the Bishop of of the multiverse, could be seen as a
Paris, Étienne Tempier, to issue a series of type of vibrational structure, even if
condemnations in 1277 ‘to explicitly not a definitive nor an essential one. It
denounce Aristotle’s view of there being is important to note that, currently,
only one possible world, which he thought String Theory is a mathematical model
to be at odds with God’s omnipotence’. not yet supported by experimental evi-
5. Within this frame, the idea of possible dence, and so it has been criticized for its
worlds can be found in the works of Al- lack of falsifiability (Woit 2007; Smolin
Ghazali (1058–1111), Averroes (1126– 2006).
98), Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1149–1209)
and John Duns Scotus (1267–1308). Francesca Ferrando

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
NATURECULTURES 269

N
NATURECULTURES from an agnostic standpoint (cf. Latour
and Woolgar [1979] 1986).
The concepts of ‘naturecultures’ and Haraway (2003: 2) writes in the opening
‘natures-cultures’ both denote the ontolo- section of The Companion Species Manifesto:
gical priority of relatings over related ‘In layers of history, layers of biology, layers
beings and domains of being. Prioritizing of naturecultures, complexity is the name of
relatings entails a perspective on the our game.’ And in addition to complexity,
coming into being of bounded subjects, naturecultures are about emergence. The
objects and domains such as the natural complexity of naturecultures points at the
and the cultural. Priority is given to study- impossibility of separating domains such as
ing how, where and for whom boundaries history and biology in technoscience and
are drawn. Bounded domains of being as everyday life alike. Any biological question
well as the beings within them are said to be has an immediate historical dimension and
end results of complex relatings. In these any historical issue is entangled with bio-
relatings both boundaries between separate logical processes and phenomena. The
domains and individual beings come about Companion Species Manifesto explains this
as well as the relations among domains and state of entanglement through the example
the relations among beings emerge. More of how dogs and humans relate on the West
often than not such relations emerge as Coast of the United States. Both dogs and
hierarchical. Therefore, nature(s-)cultures humans have played their part in histories
have to do with ontology, epistemology and of colonization and colonizing processes
ethics. have affected dog–dog, dog–sheep, dog–
The genealogy of the concept of nature- human, human–human and many other
cultures differs slightly from the genealogy relatings. All of these are still ongoing on
of natures-cultures. The first concept the many entangled layers of history and
(naturecultures) is Donna Haraway’s and biology in the twenty-first century (cf.
stands in the tradition of feminist and DeLanda 2000).
anti-racist scholarship into technoscience We Have Never Been Modern presents
and (or: as) everyday life. The term features Latour’s theory of modernity as a process
prominently in The Companion Species whose ‘textbook version’ has never
Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant happened in actuality. In actuality, any
Otherness (Haraway 2003). The second process of modernization is at least double:
concept of natures-cultures comes from
Bruno Latour’s book We Have Never Been Modernity is often defined in terms of
Modern ([1991] 1993) and is based in humanism, either as a way of saluting the
science and technology studies as the birth of ‘man’ or as a way of announcing
anthropological study of ‘laboratory life’ his death. But this habit itself is modern,

269
270 NECROPOLITICS

because it remains asymmetrical. It words, ‘All collectives are different from

overlooks the simultaneous birth of one another in the way they divide up
‘nonhumanity’ – things, or objects, or beings, in the properties they attribute to
beasts – and the equally strange begin- them, in the mobilization they consider
ning of a crossed-out God, relegated to acceptable. These differences constitute
the sidelines. countless small divides, and there is no
Latour [1991] 1993: 13 longer a Great Divide to take one apart
As an anthropologist of science and tech- from all the others’ (Latour [1991] 1993:
nology, Latour is invested in the study of 107). The modern assumption of the Great
the culture of technosciencelabs. This Divide between nature and culture was not
culture purifies its laboratory life as only ontologically false but also wrong-
pertaining to the natural domain only. doing in its gendered, racialized and
Latour demonstrates that this purification colonizing effects.
is a consequence of what his and Haraway’s
See also Cosmopolitics; Ecosophy;
colleague Sharon Traweek (1988) calls a
Econtology; (Material) Ecocriticism;
‘culture of no culture’, the assumption that
Ecomaterialism; Medianatures; Terrestial;
objectivity is at work and that gender,
Symbiogenesis.
racism and other power dynamics are
henceforth (or: naturally) kept at bay. Iris van der Tuin
Laboratories are assumed to be quintes-
sential ivory towers. The point is, however,
that ‘All natures-cultures are similar in that
they simultaneously construct humans, NECROPOLITICS
divinities and nonhumans’ (Latour [1991]
1993: 106). In order to come up with a fully As Michel Foucault (2003, 2008) outlined
bounded human subject (the lab scientist), in his seminal work on biopolitics, the late
one needs to assume the messiness of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of
nature studied. And in order to study and biopower, a new political economy of
capture messy nature as consisting of governmentality that included strategies
purely physical processes and phenomena, focused on the systemic monitoring and
the scientist has simultaneously to assume regulation of living organisms. These
a God’s eye view and to rule out the included both human and non-human
processes and phenomena being of divine life-forms (see for instance agricultural
(i.e. immortal and uncapturable) nature. techniques, water management and animal
Both Haraway and Latour study how husbandry) and the management of popu-
nature and culture as bounded domains lations through demographics, health and
and the natural and cultural beings within hygiene and modernized policing tech-
these domains come into being and how niques. The bio-political management of
this process is ‘never finished, whole, early modern times was simultaneously
simply there and original’ (Haraway 1988: pragmatic and instrumental. It introduced
586). Domains and beings do not pre-exist significant innovations into the notion of
in nature(s-)cultures. What pre-exists in ‘making live and letting die’, which had
nature(s-)cultures are local ‘collectives’ been operational in the political economy
(Latour [1991] 1993: 107), and the collect- of sovereignty since medieval times. Bio-
ives as well as the relatings within them are political governmentality marked a signi-
nothing but partial and temporal. In other ficant shift from the exercise of absolutist

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NECROPOLITICS 271

power to ‘let live and make die’ by a Is the notion of biopower sufficient to
singular sovereign over the hierarchically account for the contemporary ways in
organized people. As Foucault put it, this which the political, under the guise of
new governmentality brought into being war, of resistance, or of the fight against
a modernized notion of the social body terror, makes the murder of the enemy its
and of the subjects that embodied it. Bio- primary and absolute objective? . . . What
politics exerts social and political power place is given to life, death, and the human
over a new type of social body: body (in particular the wounded or slain
body)? How are they inscribed in the
not exactly society . . . nor is it the indi- order of power?
vidual-as-body. It is a new body, a multiple Mbembe 2003: 12
body, a body with so many heads that,
Life and death can, of course, not be separ-
while they might not be infinite in
ated and Foucault is the first to recognize it,
number, cannot necessarily be counted.
Biopolitics deals with the population,
going so far as to coin the term ‘thanatos-
with the population as a social problem, politics’. In contemporary critical theory,
as a problem that is at once scientific and biopolitics and necropolitics are not oppos-
political, as a biological problem and as ites but rather two sides of the same coin
power’s problem. (Braidotti 2007; Mbembe 2003). They func-
Foucault 2003: 245 tion like bifocal lenses that allow us to
analyse power relations and examine the
This population as the target of bio- inextricable politics of life and death.
political management includes human and Moving away from Foucault, necropolitics
non-human agents, which in turn require as a theoretical paradigm of analysis is
modes of governance that combine the concerned with how life is subjugated to the
production of knowledge, the gathering of power of death (Mbembe 2003: 39). It asks
information and the invention and imple- who gets to live and who must die (or who
mentation of updated forms of monitoring must live and who is let die), in the contem-
and control. It is a mixed political economy porary political economy, thereby putting
where discourse and/as power produces a forth a different hypothesis from classical
new type of social subject: the informed bio-power. Necropolitics uncovers the
and willing citizen who self-implements mechanisms whereby certain bodies
the basic rules of law. nowadays are ‘cultivated’ or grown for the
Now more than three decades after this purpose of enhancing life and (re)produc-
insightful analysis, it remains ‘urgent to tion, while others are marked for or
assess the state of the theoretical debates neglected into death. This shift of priorities
on bio-power after Foucault, especially in constructs a new political economy based
terms of its legal, political and ethical on constantly shifting boundaries between
implications’ (Braidotti 2007). In a postco- ‘legitimate’ subjects, indexed on life, and ‘ille-
lonial, neo-imperial, neoliberal era in gitimate’ non-subjects, indexed on death.
which technologies of destruction are not Mbembe developed the concept of
only more ubiquitous but are also more necropolitics to account for contemporary
tactile (Mbembe 2003: 34), how to account warfare and the various ways in which
for death and dying? Here, Achille ‘weapons are deployed in the interest of
Mbembe offers a supplement or corrective maximum destruction of persons and the
to Foucauldian notions of biopolitics in creating of death-worlds, new and unique
asking: forms of social existence in which vast

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
272 NECROPOLITICS

populations are subjected to conditions of whose bodies are marked by racialized and
life’ (Mbembe 2003: 40). These death- sexualized technologies and produced
worlds, which denote not only physical through the dispositifs of race and sexuality
death but also social and political death, for death, including social death’, queerness
affect entire populations, ‘conferring upon has the potential to disrupt power structures
them the status of living dead’ (Mbembe and necropolitical networks (ibid.).
2003: 40). Similarly, slow death (Berlant Countering a focus on identity categories
2007: 754), and slow violence (Rob Nixon, that might fall under the LGBT umbrella
2011), that is to say the physical exhaustion and challenging heteronormative,
and diminishment or elimination of homonormative and transnormative
certain human and non-human popula- assumptions and privileges, queering necro-
tions, is a defining mark of the contempor- politics illuminates the ways in which
ary era. normativity is linked to neo-colonial and
More recently, this theoretical lens has neo-imperialist processes and how the
been cogently applied within queer studies. biopolitical and the necropolitical continue
Jasbir K. Puar (2007) made significant to exert life- and death-giving forces that
inroads into this now-growing field of have gendered and racialized dimensions.
queer necropolitics, interrogating which Here, ‘queer necropolitics’ serves as a
queer lives can reproduce life and which concept-metaphor to illuminate ambival-
are left to die or are actively targeted for ent processes of exclusion and inclusion,
killing. In their recently published volume signifying how inclusion itself can also
Queer Necropolitics, Jin Haritaworn, Adi be viewed as deadly. As Haritaworn,
Kuntsman and Silvia Posocco have pushed Huntsman and Posocco incisively ask, ‘If
this paradigm further to show how the modern genders and sexualities (both
necropolitical can be read as ‘a tool to dominant and subordinate) have been
make sense of the symbiotic co-presence formed against constitutive Others whose
of life and death, manifested ever more primitivity is signified as perversity – and
clearly in the cleavages between rich and as a failure to perform proper gender
poor, citizens and non-citizens (and those binaries – what is at stake in seeing inclu-
who can be stripped of citizenship); the sion through or into these identities?’
culturally, morally, economically valuable (2014: 3–4). A queer take on necropolitics
and the pathological; queer subjects further bolsters a framework for analysing
invited into life and queerly abjected popu- life and death in an ever-increasingly
lations marked for death’ (2014: 2). In this neoliberal environment that folds in some
volume, Foucault’s and Mbembe’s founda- previously othered others while marking
tional thinking around biopolitics and other others for social extinction and
necropolitics form the frame for deeper social death (Patterson 1982), particularly
and more inclusive theoretical engage- those who experience intersecting forms
ments, even as they are indeed queered. of oppression, including racism, sexism,
Posocco underscores the connection xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia,
between ‘queer’ and ‘necropolitics’: ‘A poverty, ableism and criminalization.
consequence of the shift to a biopolitical
and necropolitical theoretical register is See also Bios; Bodies Politic; Geopolitics;
precisely the detachment of “queerness” Lampedusa; Neocolonial; War.
from one of its key referents, i.e., “gay and
lesbian”’ (2014: 84). In connoting ‘those Christine Quinan

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
NEGENTROPY 273

NEGENTROPY upon will or intent, natural forces are

working determinably and gratuitously.
‘Thought interferes with the probability of We can formulate the analogue of this situ-
events, and, in the long run, therefore, with ation in terms of thermodynamics, insofar
entropy’ (Watson 1930: 220–2, cited in as the conversion of heat into energy, or
Gleick 2011). The term ‘negentropy’ is born energy into work, leaves the amount of
from this very situation. It was introduced heat (in this analogy playing the corres-
by Schrödinger to distinguish biological ponding role to the nature of thought’s
systems from physical systems, and then object) unaffected: the total heat in a
generalized by Léon Brillouin into the system remains constant, it merely passes
domain of information theory. The from a hotter body to a colder one. At the
perspective from which it will be discussed same time, the second law of thermody-
here situates the term in a certain prob- namics states that we cannot maintain an
lematic: the central paradigm of empirical identity between heat and energy: ‘No
experiments for science, and how the matter how much energy a closed system
algebraic encryption of quanta in quantum contains, when everything is the same
physics interfere with non-probabilistic temperature, no work can be done. It is the
practices of measuring and counting in unavailability of this energy that Clausius
this paradigm. It is only by means of wanted to measure’ (4323). If heat is
computations performed upon cyphers, regarded as the manifestation of energy in
the mathematical way of articulating a system, what is needed is a distinction
naught, nothing, and the equational between energy that is available for work,
manners of balancing and completing by and energy that is not: the total amount of
involving an encrypted negativity to all heat in a system may be constant, but it
countable and measurable positivity, that cannot be transmitted (from a warmer to a
probabilistic procedures are applicable: for colder body) without some work being
it, the amount total of possible cases that executed. Thus, the work done by natural
are said to happen with probabilistically forces in the thermodynamic setup cannot
determinable likeliness must be finite and be regarded, after all, as ‘gratuitous’ in the
countable. Negentropy, in accordance with same manner as it is in classical physics.
this, means negative entropy; it quantifies Thermodynamic processes introduce a
and makes countable the symmetrical certain irreversibility into how we think of
negative of what the term entropy quanti- the conversion of energy from one form to
fies and makes countable. And entropy was another – ‘Time flows on and never comes
introduced by Robert Clausius in want of back’, wrote Léon Brillouin (1949: 93) –
‘a word for measuring a quantity that is which in the classical formulation of
related to energy, but that is not energy’ natural laws does not exist. When the
(Gleick 2011: Kindle position 4313). modern paradigm for experimental
The problem that triggered postula- science builds on the assumption that
tions of an interference between thought thought leaves the natural object it tries to
and this particular quantity, entropy, must conceive untouched, we can see now that it
be understood before the background of is exactly this assumption which appeared
the modern assumption that thought to break down – if physical processes
cannot affect the nature of its object, that it involve a certain irreversibility, then the
only affects the subjective understanding thinking that guides experiments plays
of this nature. While subjectivity depends in a manner that cannot so easily be

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
274 NEGENTROPY

disregarded (Brillouin 2013 [1956]: Kindle perennial kind of motion that began
position 2766).1 In thermodynamic to be linked up with an interest in ‘A
processes, energy is not lost, but it dissolves, perfect experiment’ as one that is liberated
it becomes ‘useless’. This is the so-called from reasoning biased by the imperfect
‘expense problem’ related to the irreversi- human faculties and their limitations (see
bility that applies to thermodynamics: the Maxwell’s Demon), and that arguably still
total amount of entropy (unavailability of haunts todays discourse on Artificial
energy for work) in all physical systems Intelligence.2
that can be studied empirically, experi- Let us jump now to the introduction
mentally, necessarily seems to increase. of the negative entropy term. Erwin
There is hence a source of disorder that Schrödinger introduced it in What is Life?
applies to systems which ‘seemed strangely Mind and Matter (1944) as a term that
unphysical’, that even ‘implied that a part of allows us to expand the thermodynamic
the equation must be something like view from physics to biology, and thus also
knowledge, or intelligence, or judgement’ to relativize the implications of the phys-
as James Gleick puts it in his recent study ical view on the entropic universe. His
Information: A Theory, A History, A Flood point of departure is that animate systems
(2011). He continues: ‘Dissipated energy is are capable of metabolizing – of binding
energy we [emphasis added] cannot lay and incorporating temporarily – a kind of
hold of and direct at pleasure, such as the energy which he called ‘free’ in the sense of
confused agitation of molecules which we ‘available’, or ‘unbound’. Negentropy came
call heat’ (Gleick 2011: 4355). Heat, it to mean for Schrödinger a term that allows
began to be clear, cannot be regarded as for quantifying life (but is not life) similar
a force nor as a substance; it was not equi- to how, for Clausius, entropy had come to
valent to energy. In the course of these mean a term that allows to quantify energy
developments, order – as the epitome of (without being energy). What used to be
objectivity – acquired a certain amount the energy-expense problem of work for
of subjectivity; it entailed the eye of an Maxwell turned henceforth into a veritable
observer: ‘It seemed impossible to talk economy in terms of import and export at
about order or disorder without involving work in the biosphere-world of thermody-
an agent or an observer – without talking namics – organisms import negentropy
about the mind.’ The above-used formula- (quanta of life), as Schrödinger put it, and
tion, ‘necessarily seems to increase’, the more they do so the more they rid
expresses the controversiality of the second themselves of entropy (quanta of physical
law as properly a law: it is based entirely on entropy now conceived as disorder, vis-
observation. Its philosophical or even à-vis an organism’s temporary order/
cosmological implications, if it indeed is organization). The biological paradigm
a ‘law’, are immense: it introduces the hence seems to contradict the second law
inevitable (however distant) doomedness of thermodynamics, and instead suggests
of all life on earth. Lord Kelvin was not that the metabolisms that make up the
the only well-established scientist who biosphere were in fact capable of decreas-
began to consider the consequences of ing rather than increasing the universe’s
the Universe’s ‘heat death’, as this doomed- entropy (the amount of work unavailable
ness was often referred to, for science. in the thermodynamic universe). The com-
Resolutions to this problem began to be peting paradigms contrast like this: while
discussed in terms of the possibility of a thermodynamic physics relates the notion

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
NEGENTROPY 275

of the universal to the universe (as, ulti- work on a mathematical notion of inform-
mately, one generic nature), biology relates ation and their dispute with regard to
universality to the specific natures of life whether information can be measured in
forms. The physicalist notion of entropy, terms of the experimental entropy notion
which in physics started out as denoting applied to physical systems (Shannon), or
not the absence of order but the virtual whether it needs to be accounted for in
presence of order in any of its possible vari- Schrödinger’s terms of negentropy import
ations, appeared, from the light of how in biological systems,4 Brillouin fore-
biology’s operational term of negative grounded the role of ‘code’ in such ‘intelli-
entropy can quantify life, as the relative gent’ computation and applied a double
absence of possible variations of order, or notion of negentropy and entropy – one to
as the relative absence of order, or, in short, energy, one to information, under the
as ‘disorder’. assumption that both are linked by code:
It is this dilemmatic impasse between a free (entropic) information to him is the
certain monism and its pluralist counter- maximum amount of a priori cases formu-
point that the introduction of ‘information’ lated in a code (any finite system of ordered
into the thinking about thermodynamic elements like the Morse code, or the
processes managed to abstract from, and Roman alphabet, the periodic table in
to open up. I can only point briefly here Chemistry or the DNA in molecular
to how this converting between informa- biology); the a priori cases can be computed
tion and energy works (see Brillouin by combinatorics, and in entropic inform-
2013 [1956] for an extensive and detailed ation each of them must be regarded as
discussion). My core reference is the equally likely to be actualized. Bound
quantum physicist Léon Brillouin’s (negentropic) information is empirically
adoption of Schrödinger’s term of negative measured information (in experiments
entropy in a manner that adds an with any particular manifestation of such a
algebraically quantized (cryptographic; code). This inclination in the measurement
see Equation) notion of information to of information allows for thinking of
this competition (between physics and information as a kind of currency – an
biology). Brillouin conceived of informa- operator capable of establishing general
tion as a kind of currency that circulates in equivalence, equivalence between observa-
energetic expenditure (the import and tion and object – that circulates in the
export between systems), such that ‘all physical expenditure of energy in executed
these [macrological, quantum physical, work as well as in the economy of import
VB ] unknown quantities make it possible and export in a biological system’s meta-
for the system to take a large variety of bolism. ‘We cannot get anything for
quantized structures, the so-called Planck’s nothing, not even an observation’,
complexions’.3 With this, he began to Dennis Gabor famously maintained
postulate information science as the (Dennis Gabor, MIT Lectures, 1951 cited
proper domain for quantizing how phys- in Brillouin, ibid., position 3805). This very
ical entropy (the virtual presence of any- important law is a direct result of our
order) and biological entropy (the absence general principle of negentropy of inform-
of order, disorder) relate to one another ation, Brillouin elaborates, and ‘[I]t is very
without subjecting one to the other. surprising that such a general law escaped
Familiar with Turing’s (1936, 1952), attention until very recently’ (ibid.). The
Shannon’s (1948) and Wiener’s (1948) acquisition of information in measurement

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
276 NEGENTROPY

not only has a price, it also yields some- dynamics, which states the necessary
thing: an increase in operational power; increase in entropic energy, is itself univer-
an idea that lends itself to develop a sal – even though it is only a ‘Law’ based
theory of how to quantize and hence on experience? His answer is: ‘Yes, but not
quantify in like manner to energy quite in the manner of Newton. It [the
(Clausius) and life (Schrödinger) some- second law] is [universal], if I may say so,
thing like ‘power of abstraction’ (see in non-continuous manner, from region
Invariance). It is this very idea, that inform- to region. There are archipels, here and
ation and energy articulate each other in there, between them, islands of negen-
tropy. In the limit case we have to deal
an evolutionary dynamics and in mutually
with an antinomy in the Kantian sense,
reciprocal manner, that the assumption
when one assumes for that instance the
of a perennial motion is no longer needed
universe as being either open or closed. In
in order to proceed with the experimental any case, it is universal in its negation or
paradigm in science. With Brillouin’s better: in that which it excludes: perennial
quantum-cryptographical theory of motion’ (Serres 1992 [1974]: 80; author’s
information, information can be trans- own translation).
formed into energy (as electric current), 3. Brillouin: ‘There is no continuity at the
and the other way around (through study- atomic level but only discrete stable (or
ing distributions of heat). metastable) structures, and the atomic
system suddenly jumps from one struc-
See also Artificial Intelligence; Architectonic ture to another one, while absorbing or
Disposition; Invariance; Maxwell’s Demon. emitting energy. Each of these discrete
configurations of the quantized physical
system was called a “complexion” by
Notes
Planck’ (2013 [1956]: 2762).
1. In the measurement of any physical 4. Shannon discusses the term negative
system, there are macroscopic and micro- entropy, but considers its distinction
scopic variables to be taken into account. negligible for information as a mathe-
The former refer to those quantities that matical quantity notion. It was Norbert
can be measured in the laboratory, but Wiener, who via the work by John von
they do not suffice to define completely Neumann, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon
the state of a system under consideration. and Leo Szilard maintained against
Once a system is also considered in Shannon that negentropy is in fact
quantum terms of its radiation and crucial, rather than negligible for a math-
absorption, there is an enormously large ematical theory of information; it is
number of microscopic variables to be largely due to this dispute that up until
taken into account as well – and these today, different notions of mathematical
one is unable to measure with accuracy information are in usage: (1) informa-
as they regard positions and velocities of tion as a measure for order in terms of
all the individual atoms, quantum states entropy, and (2) information as a
of these atoms or of the molecular struc- measure for order as negentropy; while
tures, etc. ‘Radiation is emitted when a both speak of information as a measure,
physical system looses energy,’ Brillouin and hence capable of establishing order,
explains, ‘and absorbed when the system the two concepts of order are actually
gains energy’ (2013 [1956]: 2776). inverse to each other: order as negen-
2. In other words, as Serres asks, can we tropy means minimal entropy (maximal
maintain that the second law of thermo- amount of bound energy, minimal of

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
NEO/NEW MATERIALISM 277

free or available energy in Schrödinger’s So, the new materialisms are mainly a
terms), while order as entropy means research methodology for the non-dual-
minimal negentropy (maximal amount istic study of the world within, beside and
of free and available energy, minimal among us, the world that precedes, includes
amount of bound energy in Schrödinger’s and exceeds us. The effects of putting one’s
terms). Much confusion in the under- scholarly trust in dualisms such as matter–
standing of ‘information’ arises from this meaning, body–mind and nature–culture
still today. Cf. Gleick 2011, around posi- are reductivizing as the environment (of a
tion 3956, although, it must be observed, scholar) is never neatly organized or classi-
Gleick does not seem to be aware of the
fiable. Neo-materialist researchers want to
implications of the issue at stake.
know how dualisms emerge, in natural
environments (from wilderness to city
Vera Bühlmann
parks), in society at large (politics, the
economy), in art and in media, and in
activisms. Just like that, neo-materialist
NEO/NEW MATERIALISM researchers want to know, in the tradition
of science and technology studies, how
The first explicit mentionings of ‘neo- conclusions are drawn. At the end of the
materialism’ can be found in the work of day ‘conclusions’ are a dualism of before
Rosi Braidotti (2000) and Manuel DeLanda and after, whereas life itself is – in the
(1996). The Italian-born French feminist terms of the French philosopher Henri
philosopher Braidotti and Mexican– Bergson ([1907] 1998) – an unstoppable
American writer, philosopher and artist creative evolution.
DeLanda are both heavily influenced by New materialism is known for its
the French philosophy of Gilles Deleuze dismissively critical response to the
(and Félix Guattari). This does not make linguistic turn in the humanities and the
the new materialisms a strictly ‘Deleuzean’ social sciences. This image is, however,
or ‘Deleuzo-Guattarian’ field of interest based on a reductive understanding of the
and scholarship. The work of Deleuze (and neo-materialist movement in thought or
Guattari) is not to be followed or copied. one that leads to misleading interpreta-
What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari tions of new materialist scholarship.
[1991] 1994) calls precisely for its readers Examples of both the foregoing statements
to create concepts in a geophilosophical may serve as an introduction to the new
sense. That is, in a state not of the armchair materialisms and to how they have come
or the ivory tower, or of the agora (the about.
marketplace of humanist ideas), but of an The example par excellence of the new
environmental position. Environmentalism materialisms not having their origin in a
traditionally embraces care for the planet dismissively critical response to the
and for future generations. The geophilo- linguistic turn is comprised of the work of
sophy of What is Philosophy? proposes that Australian sociologist Vicki Kirby. In her
and more, because not only are the earth 1997 monograph, Telling Flesh: The
and its inhabitants affirmed but the book is Substance of the Corporeal, Kirby develops
also comprised of an affirmation of the a neo-materialist theory of embodied
past and the future (as yet unknown). Such subjectivity by closely reading the ambigu-
a philosophy cannot but be research-based ous science of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand
and inter- and transdisciplinary in nature. de Saussure. Her 2006 book-length

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
278 NEO/NEW MATERIALISM

commentary on Judith Butler develops a form of cultural representation. The

new materialism by zooming in on the ubiquitous puns on ‘matter’ do not, alas,
productive tensions in the oeuvre of the mark a rethinking of the key concepts
American feminist and queer philosopher (materiality and signification) and the
Butler whose work is generally seen as the relationship between them. Rather, it
keynote of feminist postmodernism. seems to be symptomatic of the extent to
Finally, in her 2011 monograph, Quantum which matters of ‘fact’ (so to speak) have
Anthropologies: Life at Large, Kirby initi- been replaced with matters of significa-
ates a distinctively Derridean new materi- tion (no scare quotes here). Language
matters. Discourse matters. Culture
alism, which can only be a contradiction in
matters. There is an important sense in
terms if the new materialisms are truly and
which the only thing that does not seem
canonically anti-linguisticist. Kirby writes
to matter anymore is matter.
that ‘if “there is no outside of text”, as (the Barad 2003: 801
Algeria-born French philosopher Jacques)
Derrida suggests, then it is in “the nature of In spite of the argument that unfolds in
Nature” to write, to read and to model’ (V. Barad’s article (an argument about the
Kirby 2006: 84). In other words, Derrida’s entanglement of matter and meaning),
‘there is no outside of language’ should be Ahmed reads Barad’s take on the overem-
rewritten as: ‘there is no outside of Nature’ phasis on language as a dismissal of
(Kirby 2011: 83). everything linguistic. Ahmed’s evaluation
The new materialisms can only be treated of the work of Barad is not only an exag-
in a most reductive manner when their gerated response (see, e.g., Davis 2009, van
baseline is interpreted as anti-linguisticism. der Tuin 2008). It has also created schisms
A clear example of this train of thought can in feminist academic communities (Irni
be found in the work of London-based 2013a). First, in Ahmed’s article itself, a
Australian feminist, queer, and anti-racist schism is created between the new materi-
theorist Sara Ahmed, whose heatedly alisms and the foremothers of feminist
debated article ‘Imaginary Prohibitions: science studies: feminist biologists of the
Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding 1970s. Second, the debate spurred by
Gestures of the “New Materialism”, published Ahmed’s article has generated – next to
in 2008, suggests that the work of Kirby’s US responses of Noela Davis, Sari Irni and
colleague, the feminist science studies myself – a following of critics of the new
scholar and theoretical particle physicist materialisms: the young cultural theorist
Karen Barad, invites for a thorough dismissal Dennis Bruining (2013), for instance, and
of the linguistic turn. Ahmed meditates on his academic tutor Nikki Sullivan (2012).
the opening lines of Barad’s article A damaging result of all this is the disjunc-
‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an tion between Sullivan’s somatechnics – a
Understanding of How Matter Comes to theory of the impossibility of separating
Matter’, an opening sequence that reads as (questions of) the body and (questions of)
follows: technology – and the new materialisms. It
Language has been granted too much is certainly more productive for the
power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic academic and societal impact of feminist
turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural scholarship as well as the burgeoning
turn: it seems that at every turn lately schools of thought of somatechnics and
every ‘thing’ – even materiality – is turned the new materialisms (and the environ-
into a matter of language or some other mental humanities and the medical

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
NEOCOLONIAL 279

humanities and object-oriented ontology also dismantles simple centre–periphery

and speculative realism and materialism) divides – north and south, First World and
to cooperate and share bibliographies, Third World – re-articulating power struc-
publications and scholarships. tures within flows and nodes that can be
either local or global (Appadurai 1996;
See also Posthuman Critical Theory;
Castells 2007). Neocolonialism obfuscates
Ecosophy; Feminist Posthumanities; Mat-
and complicates clear-cut divides, produ-
tering; Object-oriented Ontology; Proc-
cing more oblique and insidious structures
ess Ontologies; Quantum Anthropology;
of transnational dependency. Issues of
Material Feminisms.
nation, gender, race, ethnicity, class, reli-
gion and sexual orientations are reorgan-
Iris van der Tuin
ized, not only in relation to the colonial but
also to neoliberal formations, in which the
‘economization of everything’ corrodes
NEOCOLONIAL public institutions, social justice and demo-
cracy itself (Brown 2015).
The neocolonial indicates conditions that The issue of capitalism is central to the
resuscitate, or re-enact, colonial dynamics. debates on neocolonialism (see Capitalocene
Therefore the term ‘neocolonial’ is clearly and Chthulucene), as the investment of
connected to the notion of postcolonial- foreign capital is seen to be used not for the
ism. But rather than marking the overcom- purpose of the development of former
ing of colonial dominations (through colonies, or underdeveloped countries, but
decolonization, independence and cultural as a new form of domination, control and
autonomy), it indicates an ongoing persist- subjection. The economic and financial
ence of colonial traces as well as new power of more advanced countries is
hegemonic formations. These are not seen as protracting the impoverishment of
necessarily related to territorial domina- less developed countries, or of promoting
tion; rather they are linked to more diffuse biased notions of development and
forms of economic, military, financial, progress. There are many instances of
environmental, cultural and technological humanitarian aid (Chouliaraki 2014;
supremacies (see Planetary). Grewal 2014), development interventions
It could be argued that the term ‘postco- (Enloe 1989) and peacemaking missions
lonialism’ has emerged not only to contest (Henry 2015) that support the export and
past imperial legacies but also to account imposition of neocolonial models of
for current neocolonial formations, which economic growth and political democracy,
continue modes of imperialist actions and that thwart the efficacy of grassroots
and ideologies in contemporary global organizations and movements. This
contexts (Huggan 1997). This implies that contributes to a renewed form of control
the colonial era is not over but also that and influence under the guise of solidarity,
colonial ‘remains’ (Stoler 2008; Amin 2010; charity campaigns and human rights activ-
Young 2012) have impacted beyond ism, contributing to a protracted represent-
civilizational terms and are intrinsic to ation of victimhood and backwardness
the combined and uneven developmental versus the homogenous and universal
logic of the modern world system (Spivak proposition of a common humanity and
1991, 1999; Dirlik 1994; Wallerstein 2004; happiness (Mohanty 1984; Benhabib 2002;
Lazarus 2011). The term ‘neocolonial’ Berlant 2011).

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
280 NEOCOLONIAL

However, the traditional alignment just in global terms but also in planetary
between the developed world and the terms (Heise 2008) requiring a ‘more inte-
underdeveloped world has shifted and new grated and conceptually sensitive approach
powers have emerged, such as the BRICS to environmental issues’ than has often
(Brazil, Russia, India, China and South been the case to date (Rose et  al. 2012).
Africa), who control new regions of the Environmental disasters are not always
world, at times overlapping with former obvious or visible, or capable of being spec-
Western colonies or the Third World but tacularized by the media; they can also be
also new areas. There is also a ‘new’ neoco- part of a continuing, slow violence, imper-
lonialism going on. For example, China has ceptible and unmitigated, that threatens the
authorized loans to African governments in livelihood of minorities and indigenous
exchange for access to natural resources in groups (Nixon 2011).
order to support its skyrocketing economic Equally, neocolonialism impacts on
growth. China is now Africa’s largest forms of securitization in unequal ways,
trading partner, but it is not the local using systems of surveillance and control
African economies that benefit from this. of the ‘other’ (migrant, refugee, alien) as a
The benefits are for the Chinese enterprises potential threat to Western democracy and
that systematically import cheap Chinese therefore monitored through databases
labour to staff their construction projects, (Frontex, Eurosur) and biometrics
offering very little opportunity for develop- (Broeders 2009) in order to link national
ment in the African unskilled labour force. security to migration and international
This is a new form of neocolonialism that terrorism. Therefore the digital revolution
creates African dependence upon Chinese did not do away with unequal power rela-
investments without leading to sustainabil- tions, in the name of the democratization
ity and development (Tiffen 2014). of information and access to technological
These new forms of neocolonialism advancement. Not only is the question of
can involve multinational corporations the digital divide a matter of urgency in
continuing to exploit the (natural) resources relation to issues of use, access and
of former colonies (material resources or literacies (Graham, Hale and Stephens
indigenous know-how), or new areas of 2012) but the internet itself is menu-driven
influence, the implications for labour and according to standardized, default identit-
refugee migrations, the policies of interna- ies, as Nakamura theorizes with her notion
tional funding agencies such as the IMF of cybertypes (2002), in a way that recon-
and World Bank, the outsourcing of labour firms the structure of inequality and
forces, the chain of love in the care sector racism online. Furthermore, neocolonial
(Parreñas 2003), technological surveillance patterns are present in the way digital
and environmental imperialism (see communications are structured online,
Anthropocene). which, despite the mantra of participatory
The continuing histories of ecological culture (Jenkins 2006), exploits free digital
imperialism, for example, are linked to the labour, uses profiles gathered via social
nagging persistence of environmental networks for commercial and marketing
racism in the context of contemporary aims, and repurposes the internet for
climate change. Political and environ- capitalistic gains that lead to digital neoco-
mental justice contests neocolonial takes by lonialism. As Stuart Hall said in an inter-
suggesting that new contemporary environ- view, ‘The whole internet, the whole digital
mental problems must be reframed, not world, is currently financed by using this

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
NEOCYBERNETICS 281

information as a commodity . . . This mid-twentieth century, the metadiscipline

information is operationalizing knowledge of cybernetics gathered physics, mathe-
about what the popular is, making it more matics, biology and engineering into a
empirically precise, giving it demographic conceptual synthesis freeing research from
location, giving it place, situation, etc.’ (Hay, the old Romantic essences of the mechan-
Hall and Grossberg 2013: 23). ical and the organic: ‘the operation of the
While new digital applications consume living individual and the operation of
vast amounts of energy and produce CO 2 some of the newer communication
to safeguard digital storage and mainten- machines are precisely parallel’ (Wiener
ance, there is also the issue of labour 1950: 15). This is because they may both be
outsourcing for the digital assembly lines, observed to incorporate negative feedback
the role of remote call centres and e-waste, to self-regulate their respective operations.
the waste disposal of obsolete technologies In its evolution to the present moment,
in non-Western countries (see Obsolete cybernetics has also self-incorporated its
Technologies) that are harmful and toxic own feedback, producing significant philo-
because of the metals and chemicals that, sophical responses altering its original
once released, lead to long-term illnesses technoscientific premises. Neocybernetics
and impairments. Greening the media is denotes this newer line of self-referential
therefore a plea made by scholars such as systems theory and yields a discourse of
Maxwell and Miller in order to unveil the neocybernetic posthumanism.
environmental practices and impacts of Since the 1970s one may distinguish
electronic media corporations, countering between first-order and second-order
the idea of information and communica- cybernetics. ‘First-order’ is a back formation
tion technology as clean and ecologically for the original cybernetic logic centred on
benign (Maxwell and Miller 2012). operational circularity in natural and tech-
To conclude, even though the term nological systems (Rosenbleuth, Wiener
‘neocolonialism’ can become too flexible and and Bigelow 1943), in which, for instance,
all-purpose, it still connotes in its essence output effects are fed back into causal
new, unequal distributions of human, finan- inputs, thus superseding a strictly linear
cial, environmental and cultural resources description. Nonetheless, first-order cyber-
that put countries, peoples and subjects into netics maintained traditional scientificity in
positions of subalternity and protracted its stance of objective detachment toward
dependence. the systems it designed and observed.
‘Second-order’ cybernetics arose when
See also Anthropocene; Capitalocene and
the philosophically minded cyberneticist
Chthulucene; Obsolete Technologies;
Heinz von Foerster forged a ‘cybernetics of
Planetary.
cybernetics’ by turning the logic of opera-
tional circularity upon itself (von Foerster
Sandra Ponzanesi
2003). Recursion was now explored in its
own right as formal self-reference in those
systems capable of rising to cognitive
NEOCYBERNETICS operations, to wit, ‘observing systems’ (von
Foerster 1981).
Developments in cybernetics and systems Living systems came to the fore in this
theory have been prime movers of contem- description, followed by social systems.
porary posthumanism. Arriving in the Working closely with von Foerster,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
282 NEOCYBERNETICS

biologists Humberto Maturana and “man” has been done away with. It is clear
Francisco Varela instantiated second-order here, if anywhere, that “constructivism” is a
cybernetics in the concept of autopoiesis. completely new theory of knowledge, a
At its inception, the theory of autopoiesis posthumanistic one’ (Luhmann 2002: 147).
provided a formal blueprint for biological Where the Derridean critique of Western
systems’ self-referential maintenance of metaphysics observes the privileging of
material membranes, self-produced speech over writing, the neocybernetic
boundaries between internal operation critique of dialectics observes the priv-
and external environment. In an autopoi- ileging of phenomenology over sociology,
etic system, cognitive self-reference takes prioritizing mind over society, conscious-
the form of operational self-production ness over communication. Second-order
maintained by an organizational closure, systems theory dissolves phenomenological
not of the system tout court, but of the notions of intersubjectivity because psychic
autopoietic process internal to it. In the systems and social systems cannot merge.
living cell, autopoiesis is cognition Nonetheless, they coevolve, either system
(Maturana and Varela 1980). Sociological taking the other as its immediate and indis-
systems theorist Niklas Luhmann then pensable environment. Luhmann’s conten-
lifted autopoiesis out of its biological tion that ‘humans cannot communicate’ is
instance for a general theory of self- a deliberate provocation disarming high-
referential self-producing systems encom- humanist presumptions of subjective
passing but also enclosing psychic and prerogative with the posthumanist dictum
social levels of operation. One could now that ‘communication constructs itself’
operationally dissociate the separate (Luhmann 2002: 176–7). In other words,
autopoieses of consciousness and commu- once social systems are observed as consti-
nication (Luhmann 1995; Clarke 2014). tuted by the recursive re-production of
Neocybernetics disarticulates the spuri- communicative events, human beings
ous unity and universality of the humanist (along with their streams of consciousness)
subject to redistribute its virtual multi- properly reside in the environments of
plicity within a worldly nexus inter- communication systems. To avail them-
embedding semi-autonomous systems selves of those operations, to ‘participate in
and their respective environments. Co- communication’ (ibid.: 169–84), persons
evolutionary self-referential systems must couple through material media to
construct complex co-dependencies and ahuman, supraindividual systems:
co-observances. The different kinds of ‘Luhmann’s handling of systems theory
autopoietic systems possess operational accomplishes just the sort of “conservation”
concurrence: living, psychic and social of the logic of the gramme that Derrida calls
systems all exhibit the autopoietic, self- for, a conservation that is crucial to any
referential and self-producing form, but posthumanism whatsoever’ (Wolfe 2010: 8).
without overriding operational unity. Each Neocybernetics immerses the human
kind of autopoietic system produces only once more into the coupled multiplicities
its particular mode of cognition – life, of living and non-living systems and their
consciousness or communication, as the environments. Steeped in these seas of
case may be. Luhmann speaks to this oper- operational sentience, this welter of
ational heterogeneity in the epistemological autopoietic cognitions – whether these are
constructivism of neocybernetic theory: metabolically registered or technically
‘the traditional attribution of cognition to inscribed, consciously immediate or

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
NETWORKED AFFECT 283

socially delayed – writing itself emerges as As the capacity of bodies to affect and
the semiosis that perfuses the natural be affected by one another (e.g. Spinoza
world. Communication is re-described 1992; Massumi 2015a), affect cuts across,
here as an emergent evolutionary process and joins together, bodies human and non-
shared out whenever social autopoieses human, organic and machine, material and
chance to happen. As we continue to learn, conceptual – across bodies of flesh and
these processes are in no way exclusive to those of thought (Deleuze 1988b: 127;
human beings. They occur as not only Gatens 2000). Following Spinoza (1992),
among non-human animals; they also go bodies and their capacities are constantly
all the way down to the microbes (Ben- shaped and modified in their encounters
Jacob et  al. 2004). ‘Nearly all our prede- with the world and the other bodies inhab-
cessors assumed that humans have some iting it. Such encounters may then increase
immense importance, either material or or diminish, affirm or undermine their life
transcendental. We picture humanity as forces and potential to act. The notion of
one among other microbial phenomena’ networked affect (Paasonen, Hillis and
(Margulis and Sagan 1997: 18–19). The Petit 2015) is a means to address these
signature gesture of neocybernetic post- interconnections as the circulation and
humanism is to change our prior notions oscillation of intensity in the framework
about human priority by adjusting worldly of online communication that involves a
relations between the human and the non- plethora of actors. These include individual
human in a manner that honours their co- users, more-or-less emergent collective
dependent autonomies. bodies, human and non-human and thus
also devices, platforms, applications, inter-
See also Extended Cognition; Non-Human
faces, companies, files and threads.
Agency; Posthumanism; Technicity.
Addressing affect as being networked
results in positioning it as always already
Bruce Clarke
in-between different bodies. It is some-
thing that emerges in encounters between
them, that shapes these encounters and
NETWORKED AFFECT animates the bodies involved. Instead of
being articulated as an issue of individual
Counter to rationalized conceptualizations capacity or property, affect, understood
of network media as an issue of informa- as networked, is that which makes
tion management, retrieval and exchange, things matter and gather attention.
online communications are not merely Additionally, it possibly adds to the indi-
about storing and sharing data but also vidual sense of liveliness as intensity that
about the spread, attachment, amplifica- reverberates with personal embodied
tion and dissipation of affective intensities. histories, orientations and values (Ahmed
Network media help to shape and form 2004; Cho 2015). Such a framing does
connections and disconnections between not situate networked affect as either
different bodies, both human and non- visceral gut reactions specific to the
human. These proximities and distances, human or as nonhuman pre-personal
again, may intermesh and layer with the potentiality. Rather, it allows for an exam-
bodily intensities of sexual titillation, polit- ination of how intensities shape our
ical passions or their abstraction in the ubiquitous networked exchanges, how
creation of monetary value alike. they circulate, oscillate and become

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
284 NETWORKED AFFECT

registered as sensation by bodies that pass experiment involved the news feeds of
from one state to another. 689,003 Facebook users, and analysis of
As Jodi Dean (2010, 2015) argues, the some three million posts consisting of 122
uses of social media are driven by a search million words, without the users’ explicit
for affective intensity that orients and informed consent (Kramer, Guillory and
provokes the interest and curiosity of users Hancock 2014). The research team tweaked
as they move across platforms, click on the algorithms selecting the content visible
links, share and comment, searching for a in users’ news feeds and manipulated them
shiver of interest, amusement, anger or to show more or less positive or negative
disgust. Intensity, or what Dean discusses posts. The overall aim was to assess how this
as ‘the drive’, is that which drives the move- affected the users’ emotional states. Their
ments across sites and applications. What hypothesis – and finding – was that
the users encounter on social media plat- ‘emotional states can be transferred to others
forms, however, are not only other people via emotional contagion, leading people to
but equally image and video files, animated experience the same emotions without their
GIF s, emojis, comments, algorithms, awareness’ (Kramer et al. 2014: 8788).
information architecture and routines of Without further unpacking the limita-
data mining. Although their parameters tions or conceptual nuances of this specific
are of human design, these non-human study here, it points to the centrality of
factors curate the shapes that our sociabil- affective modulation in and for the operat-
ity may take, what we can see and in what ing principles of much commercial
kinds of constellations on these platforms network media – from social networking
– and, perhaps to a degree, how we may sites to online newspapers and clickbait. In
feel about these interactions. Sarah Kember other words, affective modulation is in-
and Joanna Zylinska therefore argue that ‘It built in, and central to, the production of
is not simply the case that “we” – that is, value as ‘dependent on a socialised labour
autonomously existing humans – live in a power organised in assemblages of humans
complex technological environment that and machines exceeding the spaces and
we can manage, control, and use. Rather, times designated as “work” ’ (Terranova
we are – physically and ontologically – part 2006: 28). As forms of affective labour, this
of the technological environment, and it value production involves the manipula-
makes no more sense to talk of us using it, tion of affects, social networks, and forms
than it does of it using us’ (2012: 13). of community alike (Hardt and Negri
Tero Karppi (2015: 225) points out how 2000: 293; also Coté and Pybus 2007). This
Facebook, the currently dominant social is an issue of ‘the corporeal and intellectual
networking site, aims to cater for ‘happy aspects of the new forms production’
accidents’ through its algorithms that are set where ‘labor engages at once with rational
to render visible things that users may not intelligence and with the passions or
expect or actively search for. Similarly to the feeling’ (Hardt 2007: xi). Not only do social
‘like’ buttons, such designed serendipity media ‘produce and circulate affect as a
aims at affective modulation, or amplifica- binding technique’ (Dean 2015: 90) to
tion (Massumi 2015a: 31) in the positive attract returning and loyal users, but affect-
register. The controversial Facebook ive stickiness is also intimately tied to the
emotional manipulation study of 2012, production of monetary value.
conducted by a team of psychologists from Network media involves both personal
Cornell, encapsulates much of this. The and collective affective economies (Ahmed

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
NEURONAL AESTHETICS 285

2004) linked to memories, feelings, attach- bringing scientific knowledge about the
ments, monetary value, politics, profes- brain to a larger and more popular audi-
sions and fleeting titillations. Explorations ence. Neuroscientific knowledge left the
of networked affect as the fuel for action lab and has travelled into the world and
help in mapping out how online platforms, into the domain of aesthetics, a field with
exchanges and devices matter, as well as strong humanist roots. ‘Neuroaesthetics’
that which they affect – the purposes they is not uncontested but should neverthe-
are harnessed to and the outcomes that less be connected to the posthuman. A
they facilitate. Here, any clear binary neuronal approach of aesthetics enfolds a
divides between the rational and the affect- double danger of alienation. In the first
ive, the human and the non-human or the place there is a risk of too rigorous a reduc-
user and the instrument used are guaran- tionism of aesthetic experience to bundles
teed to break down. of axons and dendrites, and of forgetting
an entire humanities tradition of sophist-
See also Affective Turn; Algorithm; Body
icated reflection on aesthetics (and other
Without Organs; Post Internet; Non-
branches of philosophy). As Oliver Sacks
Human Agency; Political Affect.
acknowledges in Musicophilia, ‘There is
now an enormous and rapidly growing
Susanna Paasonen
body of work on the neuronal underpin-
nings of musical perception and imagery
. . . but there is always a certain danger that
NEURONAL AESTHETICS the simple art of observation may be lost,
that clinical description may become
At the beginning of the twentieth century perfunctory. And the richness of the
Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s Nobel Prize- human context ignored’ (2007: xiii–xiv)
winning discovery of the structure of Moreover, the neuroturn cannot be
neurons as separate cells which communic- uncoupled from the digital turn, which has
ate via synaptic connections counts as one extended the idea of human knowledge
of the founding moments in neuroscience and experience in significant ways beyond
(Ramón y Cajal 1906); the 1950s discovery the borders of the autonomous subject
of the DNA and molecular biology was into a networked man-machine sphere.
a second step in the establishment of Neuronal aesthetics therefore symptomat-
modern neuroscience (Shepherd 2010), but ically carries the double dangers of, on the
in the posthuman era knowledge about one hand, reductionism of the human
and consciousness of the brain has taken experience to the microbiology of our
on an entirely new dimension. As Rose and neurons, and on the other hand the dissol-
Abi-Rached have demonstrated in their ution of human agency into computated
book Neuro, a ‘neuromolecular style of networks. But there are also opportunit-
thought’ has modified many basic and ies for multi-layered and networked
behavioural sciences by the prefix ‘neuro-’ approaches to aesthetics and experience
in neurochemistry, neuropathology, that may offer insights into important
neurophysiology, neurobiology, neuropsy- aspects of the posthuman condition as
chology, etc. (2013: 41–3). embodied, extended and networked forms
Jean-Pierre Changeux’s book The of agency.
Neuronal Man, published in France in The term ‘neuroaesthetics’ is of fairly
1983, contributed in important ways to recent date and was coined by Samir Zeki

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286 NEURONAL AESTHETICS

(2002; Chatterjee 2010). Neuroaesthetics (Changeux 1983). So once neuronal

as an emerging field of interest in neuros- aesthetics is defined from these multiple
cience aimed at finding the neural basis of perspectives and multiple disciplines that
the creation and perception of art works. each keep their own method and level of
As such it is entirely defined by scientific investigation, we can get a more integral
experiments discovering laws of beauty perspective on the various levels of mater-
and aesthetic perception in the brain. ial and immaterial aspects of experience
Principles of amplification (peak shift), that can neither be reduced to the intric-
symmetry, isolation, grouping and contrast ateness of neuronal organization nor be
are among the perceptual principles of the completely cut away from the material
brain that distinguish normal perception conditions of life. Neuronal aesthetics in
from aesthetically organized perception that sense would be a new materialist
(Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999). Also approach of aesthetics that calls for a
phenomena such as abstraction (parsi- revival of the salons of the early twentieth
mony), synaesthesia and the emotional century where artists, writers, physiolo-
response to art are areas of neuroscientific gists, medics and philosophers came
investigation (Hasson et al. 2008; Changeux together to discuss their findings and
2012). These insights are important but investigations into the interiors of the
cannot tell the entire story of art and human body, brain and mind, such as the
aesthetics. It has to be said that certainly Zuckerkandl salons in Vienna around
not all neuroscientists make this claim. 1900, recalled by Eric Kandel in his book
Following an experimental methodology, The Age of Insight (2012).
they point out some of the material under- The second danger connected to ‘neur-
pinnings of aesthetic experience. However, onal aesthetics’ has to do with the close
given the overwhelming emphasis on the connection between the brain, the
brain sciences, it is important to emphasize computer and cybernetics. Very concretely,
that art cannot be reduced to the neurobi- the rise of contemporary neuroscience co-
ological laws that guide them, and to keep evolved with the rise of digital technolo-
in mind that art is also a form of investiga- gies that allow visualizations of the brain
tion itself. As Alva Noë has argued, art is a via non-invasive scanning techniques
‘strange tool’, an engagement with the such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging
world and our technologies, and ultimately (MRI ) and Computational Tomography
a way to understand the way we organize (CT ). On another level, the co-development
and re-organize ourselves. (2015: xiii). Art of knowledge about the brain and compu-
therefore proposes its own manner of tation has rapidly transformed into
investigation and its own legitimate source networks of human and non-human
of knowledge that goes beyond under- actors which interrogate many traditional
standing the neuronal laws of beauty. assumptions of the autonomous human
Just as importantly, art and culture are being. In My Mother was a Computer
in constant communication with the brain. Katherine Hayles (2015) argues that the
The brain is not a fixed and completely posthuman has entered the ‘Regime of
genetically determined entity. Precisely Computation’, whose brain is extended in
because of the now largely acknowledged a ‘global cognisphere’: ‘Expanded to
plasticity of the brain, there is a very include not only the Internet but also
large role for ‘epigenetics’ determined by networked and programmable systems
the environment, culture and education that feed into it, including wired and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
NOISE 287

wireless data flows across the electromag- NOISE

netic spectrum, the cognisphere gives a
name and shape to the globally intercon- The contemporary understanding of noise
nected cognitive systems in which humans straddles two worlds: on one side is qualit-
are increasingly embedded’ (Hayles 2006: ative sensation and subjective judgement;
161). Humans are no longer the only ones on the other is the quantitative calculation
that that think; our machines are smarter of objective probabilities. The former is
and more cognitive than ever before. They highly context-dependent and may
perform many thinking and perceiving concern unwanted sound or information
operations for us, and thus the incorpora- extraneous to a certain end; the latter is
tion of artificial intelligence and augmen- also relative to the analytic framework.
ted intelligence into our daily lives There are a number of different quantita-
questions the classical sense of human tive conceptions of noise relating to
subjectivity, and the autonomy of randomness, including low-resolution
consciousness that seem to be absorbed in transmission, information theoretic and
this extended cognisphere. As if the world psychoacoustic models, the analysis of
becomes one giant computated brain. noise into various colours corresponding
As Hayles points out, computation as a to generic spectral densities in frequency
relational process that can run in the brain distribution, chaos theoretic conceptions
as well as in other media is more than a of nonlinearity, perturbations below the
metaphor. Or rather, the computational threshold of measurement, stochastic
metaphor is so powerful because if the resonance and turbulence.
technology for fast networked processing In information theory noise is
did not exist there would be no metaphor. conceived as the level of interference in
And so ‘means and metaphor are dynamic- the communication of a message, or the
ally interacting’ (ibid.: 163). What is amount of information available at the
important again is to see that the prevail- receiver that did not come from the sender.
ing knowledge of the brain and the Though transmission noise cannot be
computer are supported by data provided entirely eliminated, Shannon’s innovation
by the empirical evidences of the sciences was to show that a certain degree of
but just as much by cultural and artistic redundancy allows the receiver to discrim-
models that propose the organization and inate between information and noise. The
re-organization of our transforming cybernetic conception of noise is defined
conditions on another level, on the level of as the forces that disrupt the organiza-
experience and understanding organized tional coherence of the system or hinder
in aesthetic forms (narratives, images, the attainment of its goal state. The confu-
music, performance). Again, we have to sion between these various uses of the
understand neuronal aesthetics as a multi- term noise is compounded by three differ-
layered, embodied and embedded form of ent specifications of the technical term
aesthetics of the posthuman condition as a entropy in thermodynamics, information
computated brain. theory and cybernetics.
We are thus presented with several
See also Alienation; Plasticity; Neo/New conceptions of, or formulas for, the relation
Materialism; AI (Artificial Intelligence). between noise and information that are
highly divergent. In popular usage, noise is
Patricia Pisters deemed meaningless by choice – its

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
288 NOISE

information content is considered irrele- information scarcity or an inadequate

vant and intrusive according to personal conceptual framework for modelling. A
taste. In information theory, noise is multi-scale, meta-contextual understand-
described as an information-rich, observer- ing of noise is therefore necessary. Noise
dependent interruption of a message, and is a crucial aspect of signal transmission
is objectively determinable according to systems, by which we mean not just
impersonal criteria; since information language and gesture as we know it, but
theory suspends or brackets the analysis of distributed information processing
meaning noise is neither meaningful nor systems manifesting at various ecological
meaningless. In cybernetics, noise is char- and evolutionary scales.
acterized both as an indeterministic chaos A thermodynamic system at equiprob-
that is the opposite of information and ability is highly symmetric, has high
must be kept at bay through the negen- Boltzmann entropy and can perform no
tropic maintenance of order and as inter- work; an equiprobable signal such as white
ference to information processing or noise is also highly symmetric, with high
obstruction to program execution. Shannon entropy and high information
Any talk of randomness or noise content, but can convey no message
presupposes the definition of an analytic (Juarrero 1999). Information-processing
context, and a language or means of repres- systems, particularly complex evolved
entation. This follows a negative definition non-linear information processing systems
of randomness, as what exceeds simulation such as humans, must always discriminate
or formal description (Thom and between signal and noise, since they
Chumbley 1983). The capacity to describe cannot evade the necessity to abstract
noise is relative to a certain scale of obser- and compress information. Abstraction
vation; this is particularly true for the and approximation are not the deficits
analysis of complex hierarchically organ- of rationality or of the technoscientific
ized systems operating at many scales. instrumentalization of the environment,
Noise is thus relative to the form of they are the principal tools of practical and
analysis; however, it does not follow that it theoretical reason. Identifying regularit-
is either subjectivist or ‘relational’, as many ies,  quantifying probabilities, exploiting
humanities texts would have it. Space and uncertainties and accounting for noise
time are also relative to a frame of refer- according to deviations from expecta-
ence but are nonetheless objective. For any tion  are all intrinsic features of rational
context-specific or scale-relative appear- cognition.
ance of randomness and noise, there are no If we think of a logical proposition as
a priori limitations to its description or the program of a system in the cybernetic
scientific understanding at another scale. sense then defeasors are noise to the
One might argue, then, that noise exists system. For example, a robot might be
(has an objective ontological status), but programmed to destroy all mammals, and
only as an effect of information-processing to recognize mammals by their warm
dynamics and multi-scale complexity. blood. Naked mole rats would be noise to
Noise should also be thought of in the such a system since they are mammals but
temporal dimension: recognition and not warm-blooded. In complex environ-
prediction are key to the conceptualization ments, where defeasors are likely to be
of noise. Noise is often caused by informa- plentiful, sticking to monotonic rules of
tion excess, but can also be the result of deductive inference is not the best strategy.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
NOISE 289

Abductive inference and heuristics offer less compact description that is more error
‘fast and frugal’ solutions for the naviga- tolerant is relative to the pragmatic situ-
tion of noisy environments (Bechtel and ation, and this depends on the speed at
Richardson 2010). The extreme effective- which pattern recognition is required, the
ness of the non-monotonic character of risks associated with failure, and to cognit-
abduction in cognitive systems is based ive resource allocation problems in general.
on the long evolutionary development of In effect, the sensory experience of biolo-
intelligence, and its error-tolerance or resi- gical organisms is a highly evolved mech-
lience to noise is not as yet replicable by anism for pattern recognition whose lossy
algorithmic procedures or artificial intelli- compression rate allows for a significant
gence (Magnani 2009). quantity of noise. The payoff is a reduction
Noise is generally deemed an impedi- in cognitive processing cost allowing for
ment to successful interpretation of data, rapid response times.
and attempts are made to reduce or cancel The concept of noise is related to the
it. However, it is just as often sought out as causation-correlation problem in statist-
significant in its own right. This is particu- ical probability. Variables that are correl-
larly evident in science, where the presence ated appear as a signal of their causal
of noise may be an important indication of connection. When a causal connection is
the theoretical inconsistencies and prac- inferred but the correlation is merely
tical deficiencies of the investigation or contingent then the inference is a false
procedure. There is a wide range of positive: what was taken for signal was, in
examples where noise is purposefully fact, noise. Conversely, correlated variables
incorporated into the system as a benefi- may be taken to be only contingently
cial effect or as a functional aspect of its related and ignored as noise. In such a case,
operation. For example, sensitivity to if in fact there is a causal connection then
signal detection can be increased by the what was understood as noise was actually
addition of a certain quantity of noise. signal; a false negative.
Both conscious and unconscious The discrimination between signal and
processes are much better equipped for noise can be modelled according to the
noticing deviations from the regularity of Bayesian calibration of a decision criterion
patterns than they are for plotting all its on a probability distribution, known in
details. If patterns are regularities that the signal detection theory as the ‘receiver
organism is habituated to, then it is to operating characteristic’ (Proust 2013).
perturbations of this regularity that its The discovery of patterns in random audit-
attention is directed, and that its uncon- ory or visual noise is a phenomenon called
scious neuro-computational mechanisms pareidolia, which is part of a wider class of
are primed for anomaly detection (Bouwer probability estimation fallacies called
and Honing 2012). The pattern-governed apophenia (including the gambler’s fallacy,
organism is primed to react to noise. This overfitting of statistics, etc.).
is evident in tests on auditory pattern Some theorists have applied the
resolution in fMRI scans, showing neur- conception of noise to the analysis of
onal activation potential spikes, or complex adaptive systems such as evolu-
‘mismatch negativity’ responses, to highly tionary ecologies and financial markets.
complex patterns (Näätänena 1990). However, it can be argued that random-
Whether a highly compressed descrip- ness is such an intrinsic part of the func-
tion with a high noise ratio is better than a tional organization of such systems that it

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
290 NOMADIC SENSIBILITY

cannot be considered noise in the sense of symbols of Roma histories; that of

interference (Felin et  al. 2014). What has nomadism. It is not the actuality of
previously been understood as neural nomadism that is meant here but a legacy
noise is likely to be just the entirely func- of nomadism that I refer to as a nomadic
tional two-way dynamic projection of sensibility – a sensibility through which
counterfactual possibilities, only a portion Roma maintain an inherent understand-
of which are given to phenomenal experi- ing of the vagaries and contingencies of life
ence (Metzinger 2004: 51). It is important on the move. This gift of a nomadic history
to stress that this is not noise, but a and its enduring sensitivity has been
highly canalized randomness continually passed down through generations to
modulated by bottom-up and top-down today’s Roma, and persists to inform the
processes of coordinated constraint main- Roma worldview – a worldview which has
tenance and propagation. set Roma groups apart from, and often in
Randomness, noise and uncertainty are opposition to society at large.
often posed as undermining reason or There has long been potential for the
representation. On the contrary, we must Roma cultural model to inform innovative
think of the elaboration of the former as thinking, but any clear awareness of this
the outstanding achievement of the latter. has been obscured by pervasive prejudice.
Reason is not opposed to noise, rather it As a community that maintains a robust
thrives on the discovery and explanation sense of self while facilitating adaptation,
of noise, the prediction and control of Roma would seem to present an appealing
random processes. Noise is intrinsic to proposition for nations in flux. We know
cognition, to reason, and to the revision- the Roma model (Baker 2013) of existence
ary-constructive elaboration of freedom. to have greatly influenced the artists and
thinkers of the avant-garde (Sell 2013).
See also AI (Artificial Intelligence);
Any web search for the term ‘bohemian’1
Metadata Society; Anonymity.
will deliver definitions that conflate creativ-
ity, unconventionality and Gypsiness – here
Inigo Wilkins
art, lifestyle and ethnicity are simultan-
eously combined in a single concept. A
reminder of the concept of bohemianism
NOMADIC SENSIBILITY is relevant today because it gives us a way
of articulating and quantifying the value of
The enduring sense of Roma as a people Roma culture and of its people. It also
spread across territories without historic offers a counter narrative to the ‘Roma
attachment to any concrete place of origin problem’. thereby perhaps increasing the
seems almost unique amongst cultural possibilities for Roma emancipation and
collectivities. This absence of a point of equality.
departure, in effect a diasporic community During times of political, economic or
with no strong idea of where the journey social upheaval the possibilities offered by
began, presents a new way of imagining communities perceived to embody alter-
community that privileges social connec- native value systems again become of
tion over geographic belonging – and the interest to contemporary thinkers. The art
consistent, territorial and thus humanist world is regularly first to pick up on such
basis it depends on. To explore this idea possibilities, but where art leads, society
further let us consider one of the enduring often follows. Recent art initiatives have

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
NOMADIC SENSIBILITY 291

been helping to move the image of Roma inhuman treatment they received: economic
beyond the notion of a culture in constant and legislative pressure towards assimila-
crisis toward the idea of Roma life as valu- tion and expulsion – although not without
able rather than objectionable (including hardship and serious instances of oppres-
Baker and Hlavajova 2013). This shift in sion. That same pressure to conform contin-
perception is long overdue, but the ues to be withstood through acts of living
conscious attempts by Roma cultural that operate across social, cultural and
actors and supporters2 to present new aesthetic boundaries to enact and symbolize
narratives about our community are the creative possibilities of mobility and
perhaps the beginning of a re-evaluation. diversity. By productively challenging such
New representations of Roma culture boundaries – precisely by constituting
through artistic practice are not only chal- themselves across them – Roma recognize
lenging perceptions of Roma but also ideas the danger of exclusion at the cost of mean-
about the way we all live today. By aiming ingful connection. Yet that same willingness
to be social rather than socially engaged – to interrupt established convention, whether
arising as it does from the material neces- territorial or aesthetic, that reflects the
sities of survival founded in the cultural humanistic principle of unity of time and
urgencies of the Roma social group – the space and turn it into a crucial building
nomadic sensibility recognizes equality block for citizenship, contributes toward
across the practices of life and art; a Roma being cast as a threat to society – a
humanistic gesture that positions us all as deep-seated suspicion of Roma that contin-
artists – and equally none of us. ues to fuel anti-Roma feeling today.
A history of nomadism and the collect- The nomadic sensibility has by neces-
ive experience of life at the edge of state sity encouraged the integration of Roma
control has resulted in the development of artistic practice within the social realm.
Roma’s innate understanding of the value This co-dependence of the social and the
of the makeshift and its associated qualities artistic is implicit within Roma visuality –
of movement, transition, simultaneity and or the collective qualities embedded in
adaptability; qualities that have performed objects and artefacts that originate from,
an important role the development of the or circulate within Roma communities.
Roma aesthetic to produce a set of values These include objects made by and/or
that are routinely played out through visual admired by Roma such as tools, textiles,
and sensory markers. The reasoning behind décor and other ephemera of everyday life.
Roma’s emphasis on aesthetic modes of The shared qualities found within these
acculturation becomes clearer when we objects could also be described as a Roma
consider the historic absence of a literary ‘style’ which, when extended beyond the
tradition within Roma culture; a factor realm of the visual to include wider
which in itself has required the develop- sensory perception, forms the foundations
ment of a complex visual vocabulary. of a Roma aesthetic – a visual sensibility
The pragmatism inherent within the developed in part as a response to the
nomadic sensibility stems from an adaptab- pragmatic demands and consequent values
ility and resilience learned through shared of Roma life and the principles and urgen-
histories of movement and cultural narrat- cies of Roma experience.
ives shaped by life on the outskirts of society. A pervasive ambiguity is evident
These qualities have historically equipped throughout Roma aesthetics and Roma
Roma with the facility to resist the often social relations. Roma have long existed

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
292 NON-HUMAN AGENCY

within societies that they continue to remain common to many Roma artefacts – their
apart from; a paradoxical position whose multiple functions requiring multiple
underlying conditions of contingency and performances in spontaneous response by
provisionality characterize the simultaneity the user. Such ambiguity highlights the
implicit within a nomadic sensibility. With conditional character of the Roma aesthetic
this in mind it becomes apparent that Roma and the contingent nature of Roma life;
artistic practice and Roma life are both states of provisionality that reflect a
invested in the display and enactment of nomadic sensibility rooted variously in
conditionality – a quality exemplified by a historic, recent and, in some communities,
resourceful versatility that encourages the current itinerancy.
concurrent performance of multiple posi-
See also Art; Expulsions; Occupy (after
tionings – and which elicits equivalent
Deleuze); Resilience; Terrestrial.
outcomes throughout each corresponding
milieu, whether artistic or social. This
accordance of affect takes us further towards Notes
the idea that, in terms of the social agency 1. Oxford English Dictionary: ‘A socially
that they distribute, Roma aesthetics and unconventional person, especially one
Roma experience are mutually influential. who is involved in the arts. Mid-19th
The transgressive possibilities of the century: from French bohémien “Gypsy”
nomadic sensibility continue to fuel wide- (because Gypsies were thought to come
spread mistrust of Roma; a mistrust wedded from Bohemia, or because they perhaps
to the notion of Roma as unfixed, unrooted, entered the West through Bohemia).’
and – more significantly – unaccountable. 2. Including: European Roma Institute,
The very qualities which mark Roma as Budapest, Hungary; Gallery8, Budapest,
suspect, at the same time represent a Hungary; Galerie Kai Dikhas, Berlin,
compelling potential to challenge existing Germany; Romani Cultural and Arts
boundaries towards new ways of under- Company, Cardiff,Wales, UK; RomArchive,
standing ourselves, both Roma and non- Berlin, Germany.
Roma, and our lives together.
Having developed in response to life on Daniel Baker
the move, the Roma aesthetic can be seen as
an expression of Roma’s historic nomadic
sensibility, a sensitivity within which art has NON-HUMAN AGENCY
no place, unless as part of lived experience.
Roma artefacts often stimulate the viewer, We have always known that things can do
or user, to action. For example ornamented things, and even that things often conduct
tools, toys, textiles and weapons can gener- their thingy activities regardless of our
ate feelings of admiration, contemplation, human expectations or intentions. Why,
revulsion or envy, whilst at the same time then, is an entry on non-human agency in
encouraging acts of play, work, comfort or a posthuman glossary necessary? The bulk
violence. Consequently the user is given the of the reason is that the concept of agency
opportunity to perform a variety of roles within literary critique, and more generally
through their interaction with the artefact. the Humanities, has long been associated
The resulting physical and perceptual with notions of intentionality, rationality
effects generated by the dynamic dealings and voice; in short, agency has tradition-
of material, meaning and action are ally been intricately tied to extremely

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
NON-HUMAN AGENCY 293

limited notions of subjectivity and power, devastating ecological effects (2010: 143).
or, as Stacy Alaimo rightfully acknow- Here, Alaimo furthers Donna J. Haraway’s
ledges, ‘within the province of rational – argument that ‘to be one is always to
and thus exclusively human – deliberation’ become with many’. where becoming
(2010: 143). Even in the ‘beyond the recasts being as an active and constant
human’ anthropology of Eduardo Kohn, state of relationality (2008: 4). Trans-
where it is argued that the subject of ethno- corporeal becoming could possibly enfold
graphic investigations must be opened to a a plurality of non-human forces and agents
multitude of other-than-human beings, into an expanded natureculture collective
agency remains explicitly linked to limited and give voice to the multiplicity of ‘things’
conceptions of ‘subjecthood.’ Kohn expli- that can and do, in fact, act on their own
citly claims that ‘selves, not things, qualify and within their own terms; or, as Jane
as agents’; the term ‘selves’ representing Bennet suggests, may be able to ‘expose a
Kohn’s attempt to reconfigure a multi- wider distribution of agency’ within
plicity of possibilities for subjecthood, human-nonhuman assemblages (2010:
including both vegetal and non-human 122). Similarly, Latour argues that ‘the
animal life (2013: 92). Thus, Kohn fails to point of living in the epoch of the
recognize the non-living as any sort of Anthropocene is that all agents share
possible agent in his ‘beyond the human’ the same shape-changing destiny, a destiny
ethnographic account, which is a limita- that cannot be followed, documented, told,
tion that many working in the field of post- and represented by using any of the older
humanism seek to overcome. traits associated with subjectivity or
In response to these humanist associ- objectivity’ (2014b: 17). Articulating this
ations, the development of a profoundly multiply constituted throng of becoming is
expanded notion of agency that can a prime goal of the posthuman project.
accommodate the multiple non-human Recognizing the plurality of non-human
‘actants’ with whom we share and co- agencies with which we are in constant
constitute our common world1 has become ‘intra-action’, to borrow Karen Barad’s
a chief concern among many posthuman- term, entails a reconfiguration of our rela-
ist writers. Perhaps most notably, the new tionship with the world. Barad suggests
materialists are attempting to articulate a that we must understand these ‘intra-
reconfigured vision of the human located actions’ as ‘the mutual constitution of
within a constant flux of material flows entangled agencies’ (2007: 33, original
that enable uncertain becomings with (and emphasis), in which individual entities do
within) a lively and agential more-than- not exist outside of their relationships, if
human world. For instance, Alaimo we are ever ‘to come to terms with the stag-
outlines a theory of ‘trans-corporeality’ gering transformations we are witnessing’
in which bodies are reconfigured as in the continually emergent age of the
permeable and porous sites in a state of Anthropocene (Braidotti 2013: 96).
constant relation, claiming that ‘reconsid- As non-human agencies continue to
erations of materiality . . . must grapple . . . affect our current and continuing modes
with the question of material agency, since of becoming, the creation of new and
the evacuation of agency from nature vastly more inclusive ethical frameworks
underwrites the transformation of the that can attend to the non-human agents at
world into a passive repository of resources work in collaboration with our own human
for human use’, which of course has had activities in bringing about possible futures

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
294 NON-HUMAN AGENCY

is (or should be) a prime aim of the post- forces and beings with which we have
humanist project.2 By not recognizing the always already been in constant intra-
lively forces that intra-act in becoming- action during our overzealous forays into
with(in) our more-than-human world, the previously deemed separate ‘natural’
human hubris fuelled notions of human- world, which we have up until now failed
kind’s ability to transcend its ‘natural’ to recognize. It forces us to reconfigure
limits, control its surroundings and and ‘reterritorialize’ the human within a
conquer the entire material world in the volatile mix of agencies, beings and forces,
name of comfort, technology and progress, where the human is only one among a
in reaction, rather than response, to multiplicity of agents who are active in
perceived needs or, more accurately, fleet- determining and enacting our (human or
ing human yearnings. As the posthuman not) future possibilities.
project gathers momentum, this restricted As Western human exceptionalism has
and definitively humanist understanding led to the many agential assemblages that
of agency must be interrogated for its tran- now plague our troubling ecological times
scendent proclivities, in search of a much – manifesting as super-storms, environ-
more mundane, material sense of what it mental decay, toxicity, and mass species
means to act or to intervene and produce extinctions (to name a few) – the umbrella
sometimes unforeseeable effects, in a lively term ‘the Anthropocene’ forces us to recon-
and agential more-than-human network sider these massive affective non-human
of relationality. agencies that we have unleashed, or at the
As posthumanist thinkers continue to very least helped to intensify. With the
attempt to dethrone, decentre or deterrit- imposing figure of climate change,
orialize, what Western philosophy has constantly surprising/shocking us with its
called the autonomous human, with its diverse embodiments and affects, a rene-
hubristic and overconfident connotations gotiation of the human’s place in the
of exceptionalism and transcendence – material world is necessary and demands
what has been considered the measure of that the agential materiality that has always
all things, for far too long (Derrida 2008: played an intricate role in our becoming
135) – the Anthropocene in many respects with(in) the world be not only acknow-
seems to undermine these movements, by ledged, but considered on equal ontolo-
reaffirming the central role that human gical grounds. This renegotiation will
activity has played in creating our current entail a new understanding of what it
and continuing ecological conditions. means to be agential, where agency is
Deleuze and Guattari suggest that all consider as a collaborative action or ‘an
deterritorializations are always intricately enactment, not something someone or
involved in reterritorializations: ‘the two something has’ (Barad 2007: 178). Yet, as
becomings interlink and form relays in a Barad points out, ‘the acknowledgement of
circulation of intensities pushing the “nonhuman agency” does not lessen
deterritorialization ever further’ (1987: human accountability’ (ibid.: 219). Rather,
10). Thus, a recognition of non-human this acknowledgement should force us to
agencies as entwined participants in our become more accountable than we ever
becoming further allows us to curb our have been before, to the diverse muddle of
transcendent inclinations. Moreover, what other-than-human agencies with whom
the Anthropocene actually does, then, is we compose our common world. Alaimo
call attention to the many other agential contends that ‘the interacting material

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
NON-HUMAN AGENCY 295

agencies provoked by the staggering scale be taken seriously as the world-building

and fearsome pace of human activities will forces that they also have always already
no doubt bring about unknown futures’ been.
(2010: 563). Yet it seems that these
See also Anthropocene; Critical
unknown futures are already here, and
Posthumanism; Posthuman Ethics; Neo/
seemingly have been and will be for the
New Materialism; Trans-corporeality;
unforeseeable future of the planet (hence
Naturecultures.
the dawning recognition of the
Anthropocene). These uncertain pasts,
presents and futures, born from the intra- Notes
activity of entangled human and non-
1. Bruno Latour, ‘An Attempt at a
human agencies, are constantly becoming
“Compositionist Manifesto”, New
anew and changing the ways in which we
Literary History 41, no. 3 (2010): 471–90,
become-with them. Thus, the quest to 484. Building on his work in We Have
recognize the many other-than-human Never Been Modern, ‘consequences over-
agencies that intra-act in our becoming- whelm their causes, and this overflow
with(in) the world, an important aspect of has to be respected everywhere, in every
the posthuman project, may be a crucial domain, in every discipline, and for
step in crafting more open and cooperative every type of entity,’ all of which he terms
approaches for attending to our (human or ‘actants’.
not) possible futures, where perhaps all life 2. In addition, Braidotti suggests that
may be able to continue and flourish in the posthumanism, as a crtitically ‘generative
continuing age of the Anthropocene. If we tool’, must seek new frameworks which
are to construct new ethical parameters, can teach us ‘to think differently about
appropriate to our continuing anthropo- ourselves’.
genic times, for the interventions we seek
to enact, then non-human agencies must Jeffrey Scott Marchand

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
296 OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY (OOO)

O
OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY as much as Husserl), it differs from each in
a crucial respect. On the one hand, it
(OOO)
rejects the classical notion that only those
What do ‘diamonds, rope, neutrons . . . objects that persist in space and time are
armies, monsters, square circles, and leagues true substances (e.g. including transient
of real and fictitious armies’ (Harman events, mathematical objects and fictional
2010b: 5) and ‘plumbers, cotton, bonobos, characters); on the other, it refuses the
DVD players and sandstone’ (Bogost 2012: phenomenological gesture of reducing the
6) have in common? The shallow answer to ontological structure of objects to the inten-
this question is that they all belong to the tional structure of our consciousness of
curious menagerie of real and imaginary them (e.g. allowing that there is more to
things marshalled by object-oriented onto- fictional objects qua fictional objects than
logy (OOO ), but the deeper answer is how we think and talk about them).
precisely what OOO aims to discover: what Prima facie, OOO’s peculiarity lies in
can be said of each of these objects of this attempt to combine the descriptive
thought and talk, and indeed, of every such scope of phenomenology with the speculat-
object, merely in virtue of the fact that it is ive depth of metaphysics. However, there
an object? What are objects qua objects? are also a number of positive claims about
OOO is neither the only, nor the first the nature of objects that unite the differ-
philosophical approach to concern itself ent variants of OOO and distinguish them
with this question. On the one hand, begin- from other forms of contemporary meta-
ning with Aristotle, the metaphysical tradi- physics with similar concerns. We will
tion has pursued the study of objects qua focus on three core ideas: withdrawal, flat
individual substances – the basic building ontology and vicarious causation, explain-
blocks of reality in which accidents inhere ing them by returning to the origins of
(e.g. a man who may at different times be OOO in the work of Graham Harman,
either wise or foolish, running or sleeping); and addressing the work of the main OOO
on the other, beginning with Husserl, the theorists influenced by him – Levi Bryant,
phenomenological tradition has pursued Ian Bogost and Timothy Morton – as it
the study of objects qua intentional objects becomes relevant.
– the fundamental units of consciousness Harman’s object-oriented philosophy
through which qualities appear (e.g. an (OOP ) is the original form of OOO from
apple that may at once appear red, shiny, which other variants descend. OOP has
and even sweet and juicy). However, numerous influences beyond those already
although OOO is influenced by both clas- mentioned (e.g. Whitehead, Latour, Lingis),
sical metaphysics (Leibniz as much as but it originated in Harman’s interpretation
Aristotle) and phenomenology (Heidegger of Heidegger’s tool-analysis (Harman

296

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY (OOO) 297

2002). Harman finds in this phenomenolo- trend that Meillassoux (2008) identifies
gical description of our encounters with as ‘correlationism’. Correlationism takes
broken tools a general model of relations many forms – from its origins in Kant’s
between objects: one object can rely on transcendental idealism, to phenomeno-
another (e.g. a person using a hammer, an logy, deconstruction and social construct-
animal depending on atmospheric oxygen, ivism – but it is characterized by the idea
a bridge incorporating girders), but it does that the world (and its objects) cannot be
not thereby exhaust the underlying capacit- thought outside of its relation to thought
ies on which it depends (i.e. there is more to (and its subjects). This results in a prohibi-
hammers, oxygen and girders than their tion on speculation concerning the world
roles in construction, respiration and archi- as it is in itself, and a reorientation towards
tecture), at least insofar as they can disrupt critique of the conditions under which the
these relations (e.g. the hammer breaking, world appears for us (e.g. consciousness,
the oxygen igniting, the girders warping). language, culture, etc.). However, the realist
He holds that, if we analyse the moment of opposition to correlationism can be framed
breakdown, we can see that what appears to in either epistemological or metaphysical
us as broken (the tool as present-at-hand) is terms: epistemological realism objects to
something other than the executant reality its scepticism, aiming to demonstrate that
we were relying upon (the tool as ready-to- things can be known in themselves,
hand). This forms the basis of Harman’s whereas ontological realism objects to its
distinction between the sensual objects we anthropocentrism, aiming to demonstrate
encounter in experience and the real objects that things can exist in themselves (Bryant
that hide behind them (Harman 2010b: 2011: 13–20).
20–50). The major innovation underlying The thesis that objects withdraw from
Harman’s subsequent work is the addition one another has its origin in Harman’s
of a further axis of distinction between initial separation of the sensual and the
objects and qualities (e.g. between the man real. It is articulated slightly differently
and his wisdom, the apple and its redness), across the variants of OOO, but we can
producing a fourfold schema that also identify two essential components: first,
includes sensual qualities and real qualities. that every object exceeds the ways in which
The relations between these four poles then it is presented to other objects; and second,
constitute a system of ten categories (e.g. that every object is independent of every
space, time, essence, eidos) that supply the other object. Excess constitutes OOO’s
technical infrastructure of Harman’s meta- rejection of epistemological realism, insofar
physics (ibid.: 95–135). as it ensures that there every object has
The emergence of OOO out of OOP hidden depths that can never be grasped by
was largely spurred by Harman’s associ- knowing subjects. Bryant’s onticology inter-
ation with ‘speculative realism’ (SR ), along- prets these depths as unactualized potential
side Quentin Meillassoux, Iain Hamilton – or virtual proper being (Bryant 2011: 87–
Grant and Ray Brassier (Bryant, Srnicek 134). Bogost’s alien phenomenology inter-
and Harman 2011: 1–18). There are ques- prets them as subjective interiority – or
tions regarding the extent of the common- what it is like to be them (Bogost 2012:
alities between these thinkers, and thus the 61–84). Though these theories are distinct,
supposed unity of SR (Brassier 2014a), but they can be seen as engaging different
the most obvious point of contact is their aspects of Harman’s theory of real qualities
opposition to the pervasive philosophical (Wolfendale 2014: 135–62). By contrast,

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298 OBJECT-ORIENTED ONTOLOGY (OOO)

Morton’s main contribution is his account subjects and objects that sets OOO apart
of hyperobjects: highly complex, massively from them. Conversely, the same univer-
distributed and extensively entangled salization of subjectivity creates an affinity
phenomena (e.g. supermassive blackholes, with panpsychists, vitalists and new
global warming and evolution) that mani- materialists not committed to ontological
festly transcend our everyday understand- liberalism (e.g. Deleuze) or substance
ing of things (Morton 2013b). Independence metaphysics (e.g. Jane Bennett). However,
underwrites OOO’s defence of ontological what makes OOO unique is its peculiar
realism, insofar as it ensures that no object synthesis of epistemological and ontolo-
is constituted by its relation to a knowing gical humility: we can’t know anything in
subject. It also forms the basis of OOO’s itself, but we aren’t special in this regard,
revival of substance: prioritizing individu- and so things in themselves can’t know
ality and discreteness over relationality and each other (Wolfendale 2014: 341–74).
continuity, in opposition to many strands Finally, the theory of vicarious causation
of contemporary metaphysics (e.g. actor attempts to reconcile the thesis that objects
network theory, process philosophy and withdraw from one another with their
related new materialisms) (Shaviro 2011). obvious ability to interact with and thereby
The commitment to flat ontology is also change one another, by explaining how
interpreted in different ways, but can their sensual facades mediate between them
equally be broken down into two com- (Harman 2007). Harman does this by
ponents: first, the liberal principle that modelling causation on the deliberately
everything that can be taken to exist indirect allusion to an object provided by
should be taken to exist (e.g. Popeye, the metaphor (e.g. ‘the cypress is a flame’) as
East India Company, the empty set); and opposed to the supposedly direct know-
second, the egalitarian principle that ledge provided by literal description (e.g.
everything exists in the same sense, or that ‘the cypress is coniferous’). He holds that in
no objects should be granted special onto- such encounters the allure of the sensual
logical status (e.g. no ultimate cause, no object grants us indirect access to the real
fundamental atoms, no absolute totality). object, insofar as it enables the latter to
Ontological liberalism is most emphasized affect us. He thereby proposes a theory
by Bogost (Bogost 2012: 11), and is essen- of indirect causation understood in terms
tially just the concern with descriptive of the emotional intensity produced by
scope discussed earlier. Ontological egalit- aesthetic experience (Wolfendale 2014: 97–
arianism is most emphasized by Bryant 105). Bryant develops an alternative theory
(Bryant 2011: 279–90), and is responsible based on systems theory and the idea that
for the anti-anthropocentrism behind objects translate external perturbations into
OOO’s ontological realism, insofar as the internal information (Bryant 2012: 153–
possession of a unique capacity to know 62), but Bogost and Morton each subscribe
other objects is seen as an illegitimate to Harman’s approach. Furthermore, though
ontological privilege. These concerns with Harman uses his theory to motivate the
treating every object equally and every claim that aesthetics is first philosophy
object equally are shared by other contem- (Harman 2007), it is Morton who pursues
porary metaphysicians (e.g. Markus this idea furthest, proposing an expanded
Gabriel and Tristan Garcia), but it is the aesthetic theory of causation as ‘magic’
conclusion that relations between objects founded on a rejection of the principle of
should be modelled on those between non-contradiction (Morton 2013a).

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OBSOLETE TECHNOLOGIES 299

See also Animism; Neo/New Materialism; classed and gendered schemes of classifica-
Posthuman Critical Theory; Ontological tion. The values embedded in technological
Turn; Speculative Posthumanism. design reflect exclusionary normative
ideals about such subjectivity, and so in this
Peter Wolfendale entry we develop an account of obsolete
technologies from the perspective of femin-
ist science and technology studies in order
to link the concept of the posthuman with
OBSOLETE TECHNOLOGIES the unproblematized and often celebrated
social death of various technologies.
How and why do technologies die? Why Specific artefacts considered fall under
have users come to accept the short lifespan three broad categories: 1) planned obsoles-
of hardware and software? Technological cence, e.g. Apple’s hardware and software;
obsolescence prompts the question of how 2) celebrated inventions that never became
technologies, as socio-technical assemblages, widely adopted, e.g. Google Glass; and 3)
grow less relevant – a question that becomes mass technological fads that quickly died
increasingly important as technological life- out, e.g. the XO laptop. In each of these,
cycles seem to speed up according to the obsolescence serves as a rupture that opens
logics of exponential progress. Moore’s law, up onto the ideological substrates of design
for example, posits that computing power while also informing our imaginaries of the
doubles roughly every two years, implying posthuman.
a continual acceleration of technological Most connected to economic rather
obsolescence. But obsolescence in practice than technical constraints, the concept of
outstrips such a deterministic reduction, planned obsolescence became common-
especially since it is often explicitly designed place in modern US industry throughout
into technological artefacts as an economic the twentieth century, especially in the
imperative of accelerated consumption. postwar years as a means of accelerating
Illustratively, as a result of excessive consumer demand (Cohen 2003: 293).
consumption, the global quantity of elec- Despite critiques of planned obsolescence
tronic waste (e-waste) produced in 2014 that highlighted the artificiality of such
was 41.8 million tons, only 6.5 million of demand and its attendant wastefulness (e.g.
which was collected by official take-back Packard 1960), both obsolescence in terms
channels in nations across the Global North of the desirability or coolness of a product
(Baldé et  al. 2015: 20–5). The remaining as well as obsolescence in terms of its
flow of e-waste is processed in informal, lifespan or functionality continue to be
unsafe and environmentally unprotected used in contemporary industrial design of
settings, largely across locations in the consumer goods. One of the more notori-
Global South (LeBel 2012). ous firms in this regard is Apple, the
Analyses of planned obsolescence thus company at the vanguard of portable tech-
offer a broader critique of consumer society nologies that construct and market posthu-
that position our desire for the new within manism as a mass phenomenon. In order
a series of late capitalist power dynamics to maintain demand levels for its products,
that shape contemporary subjectivity. The which saturate the market, Apple engages
new is defined against slower, dumber, in planned obsolescence at the functional
backward, dirtier, noisier and/or uncool level through the relationship between
technologies which often reflect racialized, hardware and software upgrades. Each

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
300 OBSOLETE TECHNOLOGIES

year’s release of the new iPhone model, for 2006: 385). Moreover, as a rejoinder to the
example, brings an attendant software more liberatory framings of posthuman-
upgrade that tends to render older models ism, especially for women, Audrey worked
exceedingly slow (Rampell 2013). So, in to obscure the ways that internet technolo-
addition to demand generated through gies have covertly piled more work onto
marketing appeals to coolness and women’s domestic ‘second shift’. Gendered
increased functionality, Apple’s profitability constraints of devices like Audrey and
benefits from demand generated at the Google Glass show how technological
level of design. Automatically scheduled to obsolescence can emanate from design
become trash, iPhone design decisions add that inflects posthuman ideals with
to the estimated three million tons of ‘small gendered stereotypes.
IT ’ e-waste produced annually (Baldé et al. Posthuman subjectivities shift accord-
2015: 24). ing to differential axes of identity, thus
The blockbuster success of Apple’s implicating differing modes for technolo-
iPhone marks a contrast from another type gical obsolescence. A final key narrative
of obsolescence: those widely publicized around obsolescence of posthuman tech-
inventions in posthuman technology that nologies concerns the neocolonial develop-
never approached wide consumer adop- ment paradigm where Western ingenuity
tion. Google Glass, for example, has promotes itself as the utopian panacea to
remained a niche device, despite the endemic poverty in the Global South.
posthuman potential contained within its Within ten years of its founding in 2005,
wearable, augmented reality capabilities. the One Laptop per Child programme
Much of the analysis of Google Glass’s evidenced the boom and bust cycle often
failure to reach a mainstream audience attendant to such utopian development
beyond the tech-savvy elite centred around technologies that usually remain clouded
its noted gender bias. This bias is starkly in the mythical discourse of the technolo-
manifested in humour blogs devoted to gical sublime (Mosco 2004; LeBel 2012).
‘White Men Wearing Google Glass’ and in The fanfare that accompanied the
critiques of the primacy of the (male) gaze programme’s rollout of easy-to-use, open-
in its human–machine interface designed source, $100 XO laptops to impoverished
by Western white men (Segan 2013). children in developing contexts in South
Google Glass’s race and gender bias reveals America, Africa and elsewhere became
how obsolescence can thus be a function progressively dampened with each success-
of design that fails rather than succeeds. ive report showing the ineffectiveness of
Many such examples predate Google Glass, the laptop to achieve its goal of dissemin-
as is apparent in a longer tradition of ating digital citizenship. The obsolescence
domestic technologies designed for of the XO laptop highlights the ways that,
women by men. The ‘Audrey’ personal rather than affording universal legit-
technology device was marketed toward imacies, posthuman fantasies actually
busy mothers as a kitchen computer that inhabit specifically located socio-technical
would organize family members’ hectic assemblages. In the developing regions
schedules. Designed according to tradi- where the XO was deployed, constraints of
tional gender scripts, Audrey worked to basic infrastructure (water and electricity),
re-entrench limiting ideologies about a technical support (software and hardware
woman’s place in the family’s gendered upgrades), cultural bias (Western ideals of
divisions of labour (Rodino-Colocino childhood) and educational resources

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
OCCUPY (AFTER DELEUZE) 301

(teacher training, school buildings), along- Materialism; Neocolonial; Static Glow;

side those of the technologically determin- Wearable Technology; Youth.
istic framing for the laptop, rendered its
actual usage in local contexts remarkably Tamara Shepherd and Koen Leurs
complex (Ames 2013). The multiple inter-
faces between the technological artefact
and human subjectivity in the case of the OCCUPY (AFTER DELEUZE)
XO evidence how posthuman imaginaries
get complicated by material practices of In a short text, published near the end of
the socio-technical that often lead to his life, Gilles Deleuze (2006) pays atten-
obsolescence rather than saturation. tion to ‘occupation’. Though it is a concept
To conclude, in all three of its incarna- that he used (albeit rarely) throughout his
tions reviewed here – planned obsoles- career, it is in this small text (in which he
cence, inventions that were never widely talks of the relation between the composer
adopted and utopian fads that failed – Pierre Boulez, the writer Marcel Proust
obsolescence can be positioned as a point and the concept of time) that it becomes
of rupture that both captures the ideolo- clear that ‘to occupy’ is actually the greatest
gical substrates of design and illuminates power of art. For it is in occupation that
the contours of posthuman imaginaries. great art is able to reveal another world.
Bringing a feminist science and techno- And it is only great art that holds the capa-
logy studies approach to bear on the city to realize this ‘wholly otherness’ both
question of obsolescence interrogates its materially and mentally. Traversing the
intersection with posthumanism through dualist oppositions between nature and
a number of questions, including: who are culture, between technology and the earth,
the designers of posthuman technologies? between human and non-human, between
What are the (non-universal) values the mind and the body, as they have been
designed into such technologies? How is organizing the surfaces upon which we live
the interface between devices and users’ for so long, great art embodies the creative
bodies and agency imagined? These ques- power to break through every reality and
tions further invoke the perspective of its organization of life.
media archaeology to add a historical In his text, Deleuze talks of the French
attention to the celebratory rhetoric composer (and conductor) Pierre Boulez,
around ‘sublime’ new technologies (e.g. who had always considered himself very
Gitelman 2006; Mosco 2004; Marvin much inspired by poets and writers such as
1997). Accordingly, when speculating on Michaux, Char and Mallarmé. But his rela-
possible interventions into the perpetual tionship to Marcel Proust was of a different
cycle of newness that ideologically colours kind. To think the special relationship
technological obsolescence, one direction between the composer Boulez and the
to look is backward, corresponding with author Proust, Deleuze uses occupation in
the Surrealist provocation to resuscitate the following way: Boulez ‘occupies’ Proust,
‘the outmoded’ as a way of disrupting the he claims. Noting how Boulez grasped
official narratives of history and suggesting Proust musically with such apparent ease
alternative futures (Foster 1993). or tactic, Deleuze concludes: ‘[I]t is as if he
[Boulez] knew him [Proust] by “heart”, by
See also Digital Rubbish; Extinction; will and by chance’ (2006: 40). More in
Feminist Posthumanities; Neo/New particular, Boulez occupies Proust in his

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302 OCCUPY (AFTER DELEUZE)

notion of time, Deleuze claims, on the type a world (an entire, extremely diverse and
of duration that is at work in Proust’s novel unlimited world) is revealed in the abstrac-
A la recherche du temps perdu, and in tion, in the composition, in the occupation
Boulez’s compositions. Boulez later referred itself. Thus a great artist is interested in
to this duration as time ‘in its pure state’ how music includes the unheard, in how
(Campbell 2010: 152). But let us focus on painting shows us the unseen and how the
this ‘act’ of occupation in general for now. written word reveals to us the unwritten.
How does it work? The great artist is always already beyond
Two remarks need to be made concern- the subject and the object, beyond any
ing Deleuze’s emphasis on occupying. humanism, beyond any perspective. The
Firstly, to occupy is ‘not connective’, as twittering birds from Olivier Messiaen or
Brian Massumi calls it (2011: 21). To Eric Dolphy, as well as those from Paul
occupy is not about ‘being connective’, not Klee, have nothing to do with ‘the beauty of
about a world possibly coming into an nature’, with subjectivity, and not even with
existence. No artwork needs any object one another. Rather, they reveal a world we
outside of itself (the book, the composi- have been radically blind and deaf to, as
tion) to refer to, nor does it need subjects Michel Serres (2010) put it recently, a
(authors, readers, listeners) to code and wholly other nature that we have just never
decode the world it holds (see also Deleuze ‘been in’ before.
and Guattari 1987 [1980]: 23): there is in Secondly, Deleuze’s use of occupation is
the end no-thing being occupied. Or to put monist, id est, necessarily both mental and
it in more formal terms: in great works of physical. The revelation of a world is not
art there is no difference between content imaginary or idealist, nor involves a
(for instance a Proustian world) and form perverse realism. The world given rise to is
(la recherche). This – of course – follows revealed as both a new material assemblage
from the fact that art is never ‘about’ some- and as the idea that belongs to it. This
thing. It is something itself, as Samuel necessarily doubled power of the arts is
Beckett said (in Dearlove 1982: 123). It is explained by Deleuze in terms of theatre,
itself an event, an occurrence, indeed an as he concludes: ‘Theatre is real movement,
occupation. Art is not about an object, not and it extracts real movement from all the
about a subject. It is a transversal force that arts it employs. This is what we are told:
‘happens’ to everything. this movement, the essence and the interi-
Thus, when occupying Proust, an ority of movement, is not opposition, not
artwork is by no means revealing the mediation, but repetition’ (1990 [1969]: 10,
beauty of its ‘original’. Knowing it by heart, italics in original).
by will and by chance, the genius writers, The importance of art for any kind of
composers and other artists are not inter- activism, for the well-being of our planet,
ested in copying anything. When art for love, cannot be underestimated. We
reveals a world this is never about reveal- should therefore push the argument even
ing ‘the beauty of nature’ in the Kantian further: the revelation of another world is
sense. Deleuze concludes that the Kantian written, painted, sculpted, composed and
aesthetic dictum tells us that ‘he who leaves created exclusively by and solely within art.
the museum to turn towards the beauties This is what Deleuze means when he
of nature deserves respect’ (1984 [1963]: claims that ‘It is only on the level of art that
56), which is not something that our essences are revealed’ (2000 [1976]: 38).
analysis could agree with. On the contrary; Deleuze’s inclusive, or rather intensive

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
OCCUPY (AFTER DELEUZE) 303

experiments with art, are not interested Proust (jealousy, memory, etc.), Boulez,
in identifying the locus (the origin) of with great love, feels how all the virtual
creativity within the artwork (or the artist, differences had already liberated them-
or the mind of the receiver), but rather selves from the characters involved, giving
start from sense, sensation and intra-active rise to his timely composition. In loving-
creativity. Battling chaos, battling opinion, to-read Proust so intensely a transposition
battling the hard classifications that suffo- takes place that was ‘playing the positivity
cate our environments, it is the revolt itself of difference as a specific theme of its own’
(the chaosmos as Joyce calls it) that reveals (Braidotti 2006a: 5). Thus the words and all
essences. Or, as Deleuze puts it: ‘What is an the unwords of Proust resonate into some-
essence as revealed in the work of art? It is thing wholly other: another world. The
a difference, the absolute and ultimate music, with meticulous precision, was
Difference. Difference is what constitutes creating-while-liberating a block of dura-
being, what makes us conceive being. That tion, or, a type of time, that was always
is why art, insofar as it manifests essences, already there (in the text). Occupying
is alone capable of giving us what we Proust, to Boulez, was about opening up a
sought in vain from life’ (ibid.: 41). Proust new perceptual field (expressing itself
continues the argument by claiming that musically) and revealing, as Beckett told
this absolute, ultimate difference is ‘a qual- us, the ‘androgynous doubled earth on the
itative difference that there is in the way the other side’, making apparent an unheard
world looks at us, a difference that, if there and an unforeseen in Proust in music.
were no such thing as art, would remain Deleuze uses ‘to occupy’ thus not
the eternal secret of each man’ (ibid.). primarily as a socio-political term but as
But why the urgency, which is obvi- central to what we may call the creative act.
ously imposed upon us when Deleuze It signals how art itself, rather than the
stresses the necessity to occupy? Why this artist/activist, as an event, has the power to
activist need to reveal another, a wholly give form anew. The creative act never starts
other world, through the arts? Surely as a political act or as social engagement, yet
because there is a necessity involved. it concerns an affirmative power so strong
Again, two remarks need to be made that it always already reveals another polit-
regarding this. First, contrary to current ics, another ecology and another sociology.
political ideology, to occupy is not about But ‘to occupy’ does not start as a rational
critiquing (or opposing) that which is being act either. Rather, its power sets about creat-
occupied (it is not about re-cognizing an ing or materializing a new environment in
opposition), but rather about fully affirm- which objectivities and subjectivities take
ing (or absorbing) it. Instead of occupying shape. To occupy is then not an activity
‘something’ (an outside object) we are now which has to start with human activity. On
asked ‘to be occupied with something’ (the the contrary: it is creativity itself and its
revelation of a world). It turns a passive, ability to involve others (and the way these
subjecting force into an active and creative others, like humans, allow themselves to be
one. At the same time the occupation is not involved with it) that mobilizes the true
limited to a presence but is equally inter- revolution. In other words: it is not the
ested in those matters that are not there activist, the composer or the writer who
(yet). To occupy is then not a response to ‘occupies’. It is art that occupies, that never
re-pression, it is not a re-sistance. Fully stops releasing the suppressed (the unheard
absorbing every relational movement in and the unseen) and thus has the power to

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
304 ONTOLOGICAL TURN, THE

stage another world. Art realizes occupation ontology privileges apposition and conjunc-
as it thinks through involvement. It is the tion over opposition and hierarchy.
archetypal ‘persona’ that involves the flows The phrase ‘ontological turn’ is most
of matter (from paint to the hand of the familiar from anthropology, where it desig-
painter) and the network of ideas linked to nates a disciplinary movement away from
it (from fear to jealousy, from subjectivity to a focus on writing and text-making. Instead
objectivity). of exploring what phenomena and objects
represent or symbolize within a given
See also Art; Commons; the; Sensing
cultural system, anthropological work
Practices; Critical Posthuman Theory;
aligned with the ontological turn investi-
Posthumanism.
gates the multifarious actions of objects
Rick Dolphijn and people, the networks that enable agency
to unfold and for facts to become cogent.
Bodies (human and animal), plants, weather,
tools, affordances, imaginary beings and
ONTOLOGICAL TURN, THE elemental materialities might all be
considered on the same existential plane,
‘Ontology’ holds a precise meaning in equally necessary to make reality real. Such
philosophy, designating a branch of meta- investigation does not presuppose progress
physics that investigates the nature and narratives or historical development. A
categories of being. Within informational scientific culture intent upon explaining
science, ontology examines formal naming global warming is just as much an alliance of
practices and taxonomy. The term’s signifi- objects and peoples as any other culture in
cations are, however, more flexible and human history. This refusal to privilege
thereby rather difficult to articulate contemporary epistemic modes over indi-
precisely in anthropology, gender studies, genous sciences or supposedly outmoded
the new materialism, ecocriticism, queer historical knowledge resonates profoundly
theory and the posthumanities (among the with the aims of postcolonial studies, envir-
many overlapping fields that have embraced onmental justice and critical race studies –
the ontological turn). Ontology offers a though such disciplines have not as yet
critical shorthand for investigation of the necessarily been well represented. ‘The onto-
characteristics of being, with the implicit logical turn’ gained wide currency through a
notion that lively traits may be found equally panel held under that name at the annual
in humans and non-humans. Often meeting of the American Anthropological
deployed as a flattening device, ontology Association in 2013, at which the French
may open the door to posthumanism sociologist of science Bruno Latour was one
by refusing anthropocentric schemes for of the featured speakers.
ordering the universe. Flint pebbles, matsu- Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT )
take mushrooms, elderberry shrubs, barn emphasizes non-human agency and insists
owls, global corporations like Disney and that ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are not pre-existing
stories all possess distinct ontologies, and or self-evident realities. Both therefore lack
are all therefore equally worthy of study, explanatory power. An object like a laborat-
especially through the assemblages they ory flask enters into multifold relations with
form to act in the world. Catalogues like the other entities, creating through these
one I just formulated often structure onto- connections hybrid or quasi objects that are
logical rumination in the humanities, where composites of human and non-human

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ONTOLOGICAL TURN, THE 305

elements (ontology becomes distributed not recalcitrant, for to describe it thus is

and shared). Objects are best understood in only to narrate the world anthropocentric-
action, where their agency becomes palp- ally. All materiality is inherently lively,
able. A rock palmed along the shore is a exerting agency regardless of human alli-
participant in an inestimable history of ance or intention. This omnipresent but
subterranean forces, primordial volcanoes, often unobserved vitality invites a dis-
the ceaseless rhythm of waves, fleeting use anthropocentric ecology and a more com-
as a gull’s hammer or warrior’s arrowhead. plicated worldedness, one in which matter
An object is nothing more than the alli- cannot be reduced to resource. Even more
ances it can support, defeat, foster or resist than Latour and Harman, Bennett
– and like any actant cannot be reduced to a describes a world enchanted by the viva-
play of deeper structures, especially not city of its non-humans, a dance of bodies
linguistic ones (language too often gets and objects that requires an ethics of
dismissed as immaterial; it is not). ANT is a wonder and cautious regard.
movement-based, detail-oriented analytical If the ontological turn has a downside, it
mode that proceeds slowly, tracing the is that important human differences (espe-
tangle of threads that form the networks cially race and gender) tend to vanish from
connecting things to each other. attention. When things are examined as
If ANT has a downside, it is a tendency they exist for themselves, within secret
to think of objects as being wholly absorbed solitudes, they can seem to exist beyond
into the networks in which they participate. feminism, critical race studies, environ-
They give themselves over completely, mental justice, history. No man is an island,
holding nothing back. The philosopher but after the ontological turn every object
Graham Harman argues that no two objects might be. Perhaps such isolation is the
can really touch each other (all touch is necessary consequence of movement
mediated), and that objects withhold a part beyond critical anthropocentricism. Yet
of themselves from every relation (we can withdrawal into mystery extracts objects
never know an object in its entirety). This from the urgent human stories in which
approach is often called speculative realism, they participate as props and actors. Object-
and in Harman’s case more specifically oriented ontology, for example, is not about
Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). The gender (too anthropocentric), yet as a mode
particularity of objects is emphasized by of inquiry is often quietly gendered by the
Harman, so there is little room for objects of its inquiry: tools, especially
taxonomy. Stone enters into relations as a hammers; consumer products, especially
stone – that is, as a particular pebble or electronics (toasters, cars, computers); and
boulder, a singular entity rather than a phenomena that are really big, like icebergs,
plural and generic substance. OOO grants plutonium distribution and the ozone layer.
objects their strange autonomy. They will Room certainly exists for queer ecologies:
always evade full apprehension, will always Timothy Morton composed an essential
hold in their depths inexhaustible mystery. essay with just that title (2010a). Objects are
Jane Bennett’s vibrant materialism active in the making of gender and race,
shares much with ANT and OOO, but her albeit unreliably, and that production is en-
work embeds an ontology of the non- abled through human–non-human alliance,
human within ethics and politics, giving it through networks that intermix ontological
an activism the others lack. In Bennett’s distinctions. To ensure that the ontological
account a rock or similarly dense object is turn does not turn away from human

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
306 ORGANIZATION IN PLATFORM CAPITALISM

difference, it is important to acknowl- advice of their minders, assuming the pulse

edge that the turn to ontology builds upon a of the masses can be aggregated and calib-
material turn of long duration, which itself rated back into policy-making. Oversight
has been an enduring feminist enterprise. of this cybernetic machine is also pursued
The new materialism is a feminist mode by humanities and social science research-
of inquiry that emphasizes not gulfs and ers invested in digital methods that index
separations but permeability and inter- the inputs of civil society in participatory
penetration, elemental intimacies over with- mode. Against this managerial model of
drawn mystery, what Stacy Alaimo has governance and knowledge production,
called trans-corporeality. Like Bennett’s the question of correspondence between
vibrant materialism, the new materialism data and the world of objects and things
resonates profoundly with non-modern remains elusive as long as schemas of intel-
modes of apprehending the agency of ligibility command institutional, epistemo-
matter and objects, as well as the entangle- logical and political hegemony.
ment of bodies, matter and things within The fantasy of government through
their generative environments. Some of cybernetics was trialled at the prototype
the richest work in the new materialism level in Stafford Beer’s experiments in
has been conducted under what Serenella data-driven socialism in Allende’s Chile in
Iovino and Serpil Oppermann call mater- the 1970s (see Medina 2011). Such a model
ial ecocriticism, examining how all matter was revived in recent years with the
is storied, full of narratives that may or attempt by the P2P Foundation, along with
may not involve the human, but that do fellow travellers such as Bernard Stiegler’s
not leave human particularity behind. L’Institut de recherche et d’innovation
The ontological turn is, admittedly, a (IRI ), to install peer-to-peer models of
rather nebulous term – and perhaps its socio-economic production and education
strength lies in its vagueness. With its in Ecuador. The attempt to implement a
emphasis on a non-human-centred cosmos, counter-hegemonic system in this instance
however, this turn (or veering) offers an failed primarily because of a struggle to
essential catalyst to posthuman environs. find a common language. This is not a
problem of what Naoki Sakai terms ‘homo-
See also Commutation Ontology;
lingual translation’ so much as a problem
Ecomaterialism; Econtology; In/human;
of making a concept quantitatively jump
Mattering; Material Feminisms; Posthuman
into the form of a meme that penetrates
Ethics; Object-Oriented Ontology.
and infects institutional mentalities.1
As much as the free software and creat-
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
ive commons movements hit the main-
stream they have paradoxically remained
in the margins of the power of the stacks,
ORGANIZATION IN PLATFORM otherwise known as platform capitalism.
CAPITALISM In earlier times there was either the main-
stream or the margin. You could exist in
In an age of algorithmic governance and one but not both. Within a near universal
pre-emptive action, the prevailing schem- condition of a mainstream without
atic of politics is orchestrated around data margins, the capacity to devise and unleash
analytics of social media. Politicians gravit- the power of critique is consigned to the
ate toward Facebook and Twitter on the trauerspiel of modernity. Immanence

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ORGANIZATION IN PLATFORM CAPITALISM 307

without an outside is submission with istic vision to be realized by whatever

occasional resistance whose only effect is geopolitical elite invested in the global
to supply data-driven capitalism with a redistribution of wealth and resources, the
surplus of records and related metatags. question of organization without sover-
For all the attempts to establish a crit- eignty remains to be addressed.
ical mass for alternative practices in the Organization aimed at clutching power
age of the Anthropocene, which manifest from above will do nothing in terms of
as networks of organic food suppliers, forging a global grammar able to design
hipster maker economies, co-working concepts that critique and direct debates
spaces, urban gardening and renewable on issues and conditions in order to regain
energies, there remains a dependency on the initiative. Cognitive capitalism obtains
mainstream architectures from global power, in part, because of its binding capa-
logistics to data centres and the perpetu- city (see Moulier Boutang 2011). It is able
ation of an international division of labour. to distribute and implement a coherent
There is no visible prospect of these core message across a vast range of institutional
planetary systems being overhauled or and organizational settings. In other words,
replaced. Despite the proliferation of these cognitive capitalism holds an elective affin-
sort of alternative practices, the decline in ity with technologies of mediation. Rituals
global working standards and employment of organization are required to galvanize
opportunities is inseparable from the sociality in coherent rather than perpetu-
penetrative force of financial capitalism. ally dispersed forms and practice.
However much the possibility of think- Where are the forms of organization that
ing the Hegelian totality remains as a regenerate the collective confidence that
utopian position from which to overcome typified the historical avant-garde? Can new
the fragmentation and dissipation of modes of organization function in a centri-
material life caused by identitarian politics, fugal manner to escape the sectarianism
the digital architectures that operationalize of the group dynamic? A decade ago we
the world increasingly withdraw from the proposed the concept of organized networks
grasp of the human. Even those such as as a new institutional form in response to
Yanis Varoufakis, who have glimpsed the the ‘walled gardens’ of social media. We
inner workings of the technocratic elite, foregrounded the need for a strategic turn
are unable to manifest proposals for a that could address the problem of sustain-
movement of the disaffected. The network ability of social organization. Neighbouring
imaginary cannot on its own perform the concepts such as ‘platform cooperativism’
work of implementation. Why? Because and the many experiments in social centres
the stacks reign supreme. and educational infrastructures such as
The consolidation of resignation is one ‘freethought’ are strong examples of how the
option. The ongoing agenda of the Mont work of invention is manifesting as new
Pèlerin Society is another. The regional organizational forms.2
geopolitical giants in Putin’s Russia or the A distributed laboratory of thought is
Beijing Consensus may, for all we know, needed that fuses intellectual and political
deliver the path to restoration for a global invention without the clientelism of the
future able to withstand the ravages of capit- think-tank model. A praxis that dispenses
alism in ways not reliant on Silicon Valley’s with the misguided sentiment of post-
engineering logic of techno-solutionism. capitalist economies and all the privilege
But unless we wish to commit to a paternal- that entails. The format of this glossary itself

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
308 OTHERWISE EMBODIED OTHERS

is part of the cataloguing of concepts, prob- 2. See Trebor Scholz, 2014, and the related
lems and conditions that experiment with event, ‘Platform Cooperativism: The
the organization of thought not consigned Internet, Ownership, Democracy’, The
to the affirmation of the transcendent. How New School, New York, 13–14 November
to unleash concepts that organize totality as 2015, http://platformcoop.net/. See also
a distributed architecture is key to the form- freethought, ‘a collective formed in 2011
ation of autonomous infrastructures able to by Irit Rogoff, Stefano Harney, Adrian
withstand the monopoly on decision gifted Heathfield, Massimiliano Mollona, Louis
to algorithmic capitalism. Moreno and Nora Sternfeld’, http://
freethought-infrastructure.org/ [both
See also Algorithm; Algorithmic Studies; accessed 19 April 2017].
Commons, the; Digital Citizenship; P2P
(Peer to Peer) Economies; Gulf Labor; Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter
Metadata Society; Hypersocial.

Notes
OTHERWISE EMBODIED OTHERS
1. On the distinction between ‘homolin-
gual’ and ‘heterolingual’ translation, see Detail of Pierre Huyghe’s Untilled (2011–
Sakai 1997 and 2006. 12) at dOCUMENTA 13, an installation

Pierre Huyghe, Untilled, 2011–12. IMAGE COUR TESY OF THE ARTIST, ESTHER SCHIPPER, BERLIN, HAUSER & WIRTH AND
MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY, NEW YORK.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
OTHERWISE EMBODIED OTHERS 309

within the composting site of Kassel’s enveloped the head of a sculpture of a

Karlsaue Park. Various entities – many of reclining nude, in the middle of a muddy
them living – formed a biotope, one of the clearing. A staged performance, of which
most remarkable inhabitants being its actors’ countless interactions over the
Huyghe’s pink-legged dog called Human. course of three months couldn’t have
Amidst masses of soil, piles of bricks been composed, nor registered by human
and broken pieces of asphalt, she shared eyes.
habitat with at least two puppies, stacks of See also Animism (Limulus); Body Without
concrete slabs and muddy pools around Organs; Forests; Multispecies; Postglacial;
and from which various psychotropic Multiverse.
plants grew and multiplied, their pollen
transferred by bees whose large hive Pierre Huyghe

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
310 P2P (PEER TO PEER) ECONOMIES

P
P2P (PEER TO PEER) Global South, they are everywhere under
stress of further enclosures and other pres-
ECONOMIES
sures that endanger their vitality.
The notion of ‘commons’ has been defined With the emergence of the internet and
in a manifold manner: first, as a combina- the Web, a new sphere of commons has
tion of a shared resource where each been gaining ground in economic develop-
stakeholder has an equal interest, i.e. the ment in the form of peer to peer economies.
commons as an object; then as a commu- This new form includes a shared resource
nity that maintains or co-creates it, i.e. the produced by and for user communities and
activity of commoning; and also as the governed by these communities. It has a
commonly created model of governance distinct feature, which is its ‘abundant’
(Bollier 2009, 2014). The commons sphere nature. This abundance is the result of the
entails human and non-human actors and near zero marginal cost of its reproduction,
can include natural gifts such as air, water, once a first copy has been produced. Thus,
the oceans and wildlife, and shared assets the user community of a digital commons is
or creative work like the internet, the non-territorial and can in theory reach a
airwaves, the languages, our cultural herit- universally distributed status, only limited
age and public knowledge which have by the lack of connectivity, language, user
been accumulating since time imme- skills or interest, of its potentially global
morial (Bollier 2009). The environmental user community. Such digital commons
or natural commons, extensively studied have taken the form of knowledge commons,
by Elinor Ostrom (1990), has generally for example the free encyclopedia Wikipedia,
been part of the economic life since pre- or the myriad of free and open-source soft-
capitalist era, by providing vital resources ware projects. Moreover, through global
for the majority of human and non-human open design communities, digital commons
populations. However, modern economic can be linked to distributed manufac-
systems, like capitalism or state socialism, turing that expands the domain of shared,
have often enclosed the commons. While common production, as is the case with the
capitalism has generally attempted to Wikispeed open-source car, or with the
commodify the commons, state socialism WikiHouse open platform for sustainable
has frequently turned them into state- building and construction.
public property. Nevertheless, in both cases Yochai Benkler (2006) coined the term
the enclosures of the commons were meant ‘commons-based peer production’ to
to bring these resources into the orbit of describe a new model of economic produc-
the dominant economy and its model of tion, different from both markets and
accumulation of surplus value. While many firms. In commons-based peer production,
traditional commons survive, mainly in the the creative energy of autonomous

310

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
P2P (PEER TO PEER) ECONOMIES 311

individuals is organized in decentralized, but it relies on the exchanges between

peer-to-peer networks. It is co-ordinated peers in a network. Hence, Uber monetizes
into meaningful projects, largely without ride-hailing without producing cars, or
traditional hierarchical organization or, Airbnb monetizes rentals without produ-
often, financial compensation (Benkler cing physical assets for hospitality.
2006). In addition to this, Jeremy Rifkin This externalization of production costs
(2014) has argued that such abundant is one of the factors in their competitive-
commons will not limit themselves to ness vis-à-vis traditional players, such as
digital commons, but will also emerge in taxis and hotels, which are not able to
physical economies; for instance, in the externalize such costs and are also subject
field of renewable energy or even in generic to more stringent regulations due to their
physical production, through the com- intensive use of salaried labour. The
bination of desktop manufacturing/digital extractive nature of these business models
fabrication technologies and renewable/ makes the commons economy problematic
biodegradable material resources. under the dominance of capitalist econom-
Arguably, the emergence of these digit- ics. Making use of the particular entangle-
ally produced commons also creates an ment of technologies involved in the digital
important change in capitalism itself. commons with forms of interaction, such
Michel Bauwens (2012) has defined this cases of netarchical capitalism – or for
new form of capitalism as netarchical instance the so-called ‘sharing economy’ –
capitalism, with ‘netarchy’ meaning the find new contours in the enclosure of
hierarchy of the network. Netarchical activities of cooperation, sharing and
capitalism could be said to come in two (or informality previously considered outside
more) complementary forms. First, in the of capitalism. Thus the sharing economy
commons economy where commons are may be said to create a ‘value crisis’
actually produced at the heart of the busi- (Bauwens and Niaros 2016). The value
ness model. In this case, netarchical firms crisis can be defined as a process whereby
create business models by developing global user communities are increasingly
added services around the commons, able to produce use value through mutual
which are produced by the user communit- co-ordination in networks, potentially
ies. Firms reap the benefits of the human growing in an exponential manner, while
cooperation at the heart of commons the monetization only grows more slowly
production, and get the benefit not just of and linearly at the margins, and is captured
their own investment, but also of the almost exclusively by the owners of private
investments of the whole entrepreneurial platforms. This form of the sharing economy
coalition which has invested in the same can only create a crisis of increasing precar-
commons, and of the substantial amount ity, and could be interpreted as a form of
of free labour. Thus we have firms like hyper-neoliberalism, relying increasingly
Google which monetizes search without on free or increasingly cheaper precarious
producing any content, or Facebook, which labour.
may not rely on a commons in the strict At the same time, we are observing
sense, but monetizes the human interac- the emergence of alternatives, marked by
tion in social media. The second form of generative business models instead of
‘netarchical’ capitalism creates platforms extractive ones. To understand their logic,
that enable peer-to-peer exchanges, where it might be useful to look at the institu-
again no commons is necessarily produced, tional structure of the economy of the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
312 PILL, THE (POSTHUMAN ICON)

commons. In short, the open productive open value systems that can distribute
communities, which create and add value value fairly in contribution-based systems.
into the shared resource pools, are at the Further, the great potential of this emer-
core of such an economy. Moreover, the gent system arguably lies in the four
entrepreneurial coalitions, which create characteristics of its production methods
added value for the market, are around the (Kostakis, Roos and Bauwens 2015; Kostakis
digital commons. Further, the infrastruc- et al. 2017). First, by avoiding planned
ture of cooperation is often managed and obsolescence in the design of the product;
maintained by for-benefit associations, second, by sharing its technical and scientific
such as the free and open-source software knowledge for open innovation; third, by
foundations. Changing the relationship mutualizing physical infrastructures for
between the creative communities and manufacturing and relocalizing produc-
the market players is arguably key for an tion through distributed microfactories/
alternative, sustainable model for the makerspaces; fourth, by using open
commons economy. supply chains and open accounting mech-
In this new alternative model, the anisms for mutual coordination of prod-
extractive nature of netarchical capitalism user communities; an open source circular
is replaced by ethical entrepreneurial coali- economy may emerge which could contrib-
tions. The latter create livelihoods around ute to the fight against climate change and
the commons in ways that enable contrib- ecological destruction. At the very least, this
utors and these firms to co-create commons. activity makes an important contribution to
‘Open cooperatives’ have been proposed the ongoing dialogue on the potential chal-
as a generic concept for different forms lenges for the incumbent system by provid-
of ethical businesses that are mission- ing a commons-oriented vision for radical
oriented, multi-stakeholder governed, change emerging from the bottom.
and are committed to the co-creation of
See also Capitalocene and Chthulucene;
commons (Bauwens and Kostakis 2014).
Commons, the; Digital Citizenship; Digital
Such post-corporate entrepreneurial forms
Philosophy; Hacking Habitat; Resilience
are also sometimes called ‘phyles’, i.e.
business eco-systems which sustain
communities and their commons. Amongst Michel Bauwens and
the examples that can be cited are the Vasilis Kostakis
Enspiral network based in New Zealand;
the Las Indias community based in Spain;
the Sensorica open scientific hardware PILL, THE (POSTHUMAN ICON)
community based in Canada; Ethos in the
UK ; and Fora do Eixo in Brazil. These new We propose the oral contraceptive pill as
coalitions are often marked by a desire one of the posthuman icons of the twenti-
to combine three characteristics, i.e. the eth century. It may be easy to forget in
sharing of knowledge (openness), the contemporary times, where young women
sustainability of their physical production in the West have not lived with the fear
processes, and the fairness of the reward of unwanted pregnancies, but the classic
systems. Therefore, these new forms of the metal strip supplying three weeks of
commons economy are inventing not only tiny white pills has had and still has a
new practices which do not enclose know- revolutionary impact on women’s lives all
ledge (open business models), but also over the world. In fact, this small piece of

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
PILL, THE (POSTHUMAN ICON) 313

technology was so successful that it is devote a substantial part of her family

simply known as ‘the Pill’. For the first time fortune to subsidize the bio-medical research
in human history the Pill made it possible necessary to develop the first birth control
for women to separate sexuality from pill. The research was carried out through-
reproduction, allowing them to find a out the 1950s by biologist Gregory Pincus
sexual freedom that had never existed and was eventually finalized, patented and
before. Without fear of unwanted pregnan- sold under the name of Enovid.
cies, a large number of children, or worse, From the very beginning of its mass
death in childbirth, women could now adoption, the Pill became one of the major
enjoy and explore sexuality in ways that symbols of second-wave feminist move-
were impossible before. Its invention in the ments in the West. The control of repro-
1950s consequently helped push and shape duction was seen as a vital means to restore
the sexual revolution of the 1960s. women’s ownership over their own bodies,
The oral contraceptive pill, a combina- to freely enjoy sexual relations, and to
tion of oestrogen and progesterone, cele- improve their social status. Liberal femin-
brated its fiftieth anniversary in 2010. ist Betty Friedan – co-founder in 1966 of
Since its official approval by the American the National Organization of Women and
Food and Drug Administration in 1960 author of The Feminine Mystique (1963) –
the Pill has achieved global endorsement was a passionate campaigner for women’s
as the most widely used drug in the history access to free and full contraceptive rights.
of medicine. And although there have been Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, in
critiques of the Pill, it still caters to millions The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist
of women across the globe as a popular Revolution (1970), highlighted the role of
means of controlling fertility, regulating reproductive freedom and the struggle for
menstruation, detecting or terminating free contraception in the liberation of
pregnancies and managing female meno- women. Anticipating later developments,
pause. Firestone argued that a shift of social
The discovery and development of the priorities from reproduction to contracep-
anti-conception pill and its subsequent tion and the full development of repro-
adoption was due to sustained efforts on ductive technologies constituted the core
the part of feminists. Following up on the elements of a feminist revolution.
efforts of the first feminist wave to achieve Politically, the most important contribu-
birth control at the end of the nineteenth tion of the Pill was to materialize and
century, for example by introducing the represent publicly the categorical distinc-
diaphragm, feminists reinforced their tion and separation of sexuality from
search for safer and more reliable means of reproduction. Instigating twentieth-century
birth control after the Second World War. sexual liberation movements in the West,
Pioneer of women’s reproductive rights, the Pill de-naturalized reproduction and
Margaret Sanger, helped found the Inter- enabled women to become heterosexually
national Committee on Planned Parenthood active without the danger of unwelcome
as early as 1946, which was to evolve into the pregnancies. Moreover, as a form of contra-
world’s largest non-governmental interna- ception it offered many advantages over
tional women’s health, family planning and previous methods: it was convenient, highly
birth control organization. In the early 1950s, effective, female-controlled, separated from
Sanger encouraged philanthropist, suffra- the act of intercourse, and it did not require
gist and biologist Katharine McCormick to the consent – or even awareness – of a male

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
314 PILL, THE (POSTHUMAN ICON)

sexual partner (Gordon 2007; Kline 2010; bodies into institutionalized practices of
Oudshoorn 1994). both liberation and control (Warren 1994).
The isolation and synthesis of female Following Foucault’s bio-political analysis
sex hormones that led to the development of the management of reproduction and
of the contraceptive pill also prepared the sexuality in the 1980s (Foucault 2003, 2010),
ground for modern reproductive tech- the radical feminist claim of liberation via
nologies such as in vitro fertilization. technology was disputed. Throughout the
Moreover, by opening the possibility of 1990s feminist studies of science and tech-
motherhood to single and lesbian women nology pointed out the dangers as well as the
(Rich 1995), the Pill paved the way for the advantages of working within bio-political
rejection of compulsory heterosexuality systems of hormonal, bio-chemical and
through the promotion of alternative genetic management of bodies in a social
kinship systems outside the patriarchal order based on disciplining and punishing
constraints of the nuclear family. (Oudshoorn 1994; McNeil and Franklin
The radical sting of the Pill is that, by 1991; Haraway [1985] 1991; Roberts 2008).
making it possible for women to choose Queer critiques of naturalized and
whether to have children or not, it facilit- essentialized gender identities and norms
ated their rejection of traditional family radicalized these critiques. On the one
structures (Diepenbrock 1998). Domestic hand Preciado (2013) emphasized the
life in the patriarchal family presents clear normalizing power of the Pill that builds
disadvantages for women by confining upon and endorses the underlying
them to the role of caretaking in the private hormonal and endocrinological design of
sphere at the cost of exclusion from the ‘normal’ female bodies. In this framework,
economic sphere. It isolates men from the the Pill is taken as a ‘chemical panopticon’,
lives of their children, and institutes a that is to say a micro-instance that reflects
gendered economy that segregates repro- macro-power formations – such as
ductive labour and family life from wage medical-legal institutions, the nation-
labour (Labora Cuboniks 2015). The Pill states and global networks of bio-genetic
supports a radical sexual politics for capitalization of life (Cooper 2011). On the
alternative family arrangements. This has other hand, with the privilege of hindsight,
not escaped the attention of organized reli- it has become manifest that the hiatus
gions and conservative political parties, between reproduction and sexuality that
which have waged an all-out war against it. was introduced by the Pill in the 1960s
Up until today, the Pill is not easily avail- marked not only a scientific change of
able in Catholic countries or in countries paradigm, but also a profound fracture
with a strong Christian fundamentalist within patriarchal family power forma-
presence. tions and the perpetuation of compulsory
The Pill’s detractors have historically heterosexuality. It was, therefore, a water-
offered counter-arguments to stress its shed moment for the feminist movement.
mixed blessings. In the 1970s eco-feminists In the light of this rich and complex
adhered to authentic notions of female history, of all the advantages and chal-
nature resulting in the rejection of any lenges it represents, as well as its huge
scientific manipulation of female bodies. impact upon the lives of millions, we
This resistance evolved into the idea that wonder why the Pill is not more widely
bio-chemical contraception is politically celebrated as the icon of a posthumanist
dangerous, because it inserts women’s subject position that emancipates women

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from a naturalized regime of subjugation. body, the foetus, in immunological terms.

Why are other images so hastily embraced The placenta splits the subject from within,
as posthuman icons, like the destructive in a non-dialectical process of internal
image of the mushroom cloud of a nuclear differentiations that predicates the primacy
bomb, for instance, or the over-exposed of the ‘other within’. Yet, this highly signi-
mix of metal and wires in robotics? Instead ficant configuration has remained unrep-
of these rather overbearing images we resented within phallo-logocentric logic.
suggest the humble Pill as one of the Therefore, I suggest moving placenta
posthuman icons. The more modest politics centre stage, but into a different
‘wetware’ of the Pill should be recognized theoretical direction. Firstly, placenta polit-
for its revolutionary impact: it is a frontal ics upholds an affirmative and non-aggress-
attack on the naturalization of gender ive bio-politics that opposes the military
inequalities. The Pill testifies to the visceral terminology and concepts that are custom-
call that, if nature is unjust, then we must ary in scientific discussions of immunology.
change nature (Xenofeminist Manifesto The immunization process is usually formu-
2015). lated in terms of the individual and collect-
ive bodies’ struggle for homeostatic stability
See also Bodies Politic; Geo-Hydro-Solar-
and protection against external aggressive
Bio-Techno Politics; Pregnant Posthuman;
forces. Secondly, this approach to immuno-
Xenofeminism; Placenta Politics.
logy has been taken as an analogy for polit-
ics and governance. For instance, Esposito’s
Anneke Smelik and Elisa Fiore
work on bio-politics (2008b) explores the
immunological political economy of hospit-
ality and hostility. I find it disappointing that
PLACENTA POLITICS what was originally a politics of life – bio-
politics – which also included a reappraisal
Placenta politics is a term that I coined of the politics of dying and letting die, has
to indicate the materialist feminist bio- become almost exclusively focused on
politics of the relation between the mater- thanato-politics, to use Foucault’s term
ial maternal body, the placenta and the (1977). In contemporary discussions, this
foetus. I transpose this maternal-placental- issue blends with necro-politics (Mbembe
foetal connection into a nomadic frame so 2003), that is to say extermination and
as to argue that it composes a generative extinction. Bio-politics should not position
assemblage. The placental assemblage life only on the horizon of death, but also as
raises key issues of relationality, immunity the generative force of both human and
and auto-immunity, which are best served non-human organisms (Braidotti 2006b). In
by a neo-materialist philosophy of becom- terms of the immunological debate this
ing and affirmative ethics within a monistic means that the question is not that and how
understanding of matter. I draw on the the organism is capable of self-preservation
work of French feminist biologist Hélène at the expense of some of its weak or
Rouch (1987), who was inspired by the diseased parts, but rather that in most cases
philosopher Luce Irigaray (1985a, 1985b) it actually does not attack them. And I would
and by Lacanian psychoanalysis to propose like to add that, specifically in pregnancy,
the biological entity of the placenta as a the organism does usually not expel
third party that redefines the relationship the foetal other, but rather hosts it and
between the maternal body and the other nurtures it.

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Wolfe (2010) explores the immunolo- birth has taken place. This is a far cry from
gical paradox with Derrida’s notion of the the thanato-political or necro-political
pharmakon. This refers to the process by discourse of the tactical expulsion of alien
which poison is injected so that the pres- elements or the aggressive elimination of
ence of what Nancy (2000) would call ‘an the alien other. The paradigm of placenta
intruder’ is registered by a constituted politics presents instead a model of gener-
system. That encounter, which triggers the ative relationality.
infection or the disease, also creates a first In feminist materialist terms the
line of defence against it. The first line of mother-placenta-fetus assemblage can be
auto-immunological defence gestures read as a state of pacifist cooperation and
towards a cure or to secure immunity from co-creation between organisms, in a
the very disease that is triggering the specific relational frame that facilitates
composition of the encounter. The auto- their co-existence, interaction and growth.
immunological principle is that the patho- The placenta stresses the notion of evolu-
gen that is injected in controlled doses into tion through mutual cooperation. I argue
the body does not destroy the entirety of the that the placenta is a powerful figuration –
organism, but helps the immune system to Deleuze (1994) would call it ‘conceptual
learn how to defend itself. Derrida’s ethics persona’ – for a co-creative and collaborat-
of immunity proposes not the exclusion, ive model between separate yet related
but the incorporation and vicarious substi- organisms, agents and living matter:
tution of the vital/lethal other. maternal, placental and foetal. Placenta
None of these bio-political thinkers, politics is about affirmative ethical
however, ever take the maternal body and encounters – it is the original form of trans-
the placental assemblage into considera- corporeality.
tion, which makes Rouch’s work all the I want to argue further that the placenta
more significant. Thus, they miss a crucial is the perfect figuration for thinking both
dimension of the immunity process. In my unity and diversity, specificity and differ-
view, placenta politics is necessary to ence within a monistic frame. It fore-
understand the specific form of auto- grounds nomadic difference as a process of
immunity that is the maternal-placental- differential modulations by organisms that
foetal assemblage. Pregnancy foregrounds define themselves by mutual relations
the crucial idea that the immune system within a common matter. By extension it
does not always attack what has been allows us to rethink political and ethical
injected into the body. If we focus on interaction on the basis of a materially
insemination, gestation and birth, the grounded understanding of subject-form-
question shifts to another plateau: what are ation. Becoming subject is an embedded
we to make of the fact that the female body and embodied, relational and ethical
actually hosts and cares for the egg, then process framed by multiple encounters
embryo, then foetus, then baby? The with both human and non-human factors
placenta is the operative factor of immun- and agents.
ologically compatibility: it is formed by the In order to conceptualize this vision,
extension of the maternal body’s blood the best theoretical allies are the ontologic-
vessels into another tissue that both ally pacifist theorists, inspired by critical
connects and separates the embryo from Spinozism, like Deleuze (1988b; 1992a). A
the maternal organism. It is ejected as an monistic philosophy allows us to theorize
extra entity about thirty minutes after the organic processes of collaborative growth,

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PLACENTA POLITICS 317

inserting complexity at the heart of philo- genetic elements, including the multiple
sophical thought. In this context, the hormonally loaded, contraceptive-pill
maternal-placental-fetal assemblage can driven, technologically mediated extended
be understood as a figuration of affirmat- mother-machines (Roberts 2016). The
ive relationality and multiple becomings. toxic pharmacological aspects of contem-
The placenta functions as an interface of porary reproduction (Preciado 2013)
multiple particles and components that expose the gender system as a machinery
jointly sustain the dynamic process of that is currently multiplied, pulped, upheld,
forming new organisms. This living hacked, re-constructed and abolished on a
process enacts a complex dynamics and daily basis. Both gene-editing and gender-
expresses an affirmative vision of life as a editing have become part of our vocabu-
cooperative effort. Placenta politics so lary and our social as well as technological
defined expresses the vital force of the practices.
multiple agents and forces that co-exist It follows that we need more studies of
through transformative encounters. Thus placenta politics and the immunological
it is not only the case that the bio-political paradigm within the feminist framework
and the thanato-political relations exist in of bodily neo-materialist posthuman
a continuum – in keeping with Foucault’s thought. By extension, it is also important
original insight – but also that they are to re-frame the maternal body. Where
constituted by heterogeneous assemblages placenta politics offers a new line of
of diverse components. Placenta politics thought for bio-politics and thereby a new
can be fully situated within the contem- possibility for critical reflection on both
porary posthuman landscape. relational ethics and reproductive labour,
This has a number of implications also the category of the pregnant posthuman
for contemporary posthuman feminist (see Pregnant Posthuman) posits the
politics (Braidotti 2016a). Firstly, knowing maternal body as a subject, which supplies
that contemporary nomadic or ‘dividual’ us with a figure as a starting point for
posthuman subjects are constituted critique, for re-thinking itself, and for
through processes of mutual specification developing and defending a different,
and differential modulation, we can define sexuate ethics.
sexual difference as one of the motors of Cyberfeminism and Xenofeminism
multiple differing within a common argue that the maternal body – technically
matter. The binary gender system is just female (see Xenofeminsim) – is not one.
a mechanism to capture this sexed multi- The myriad of technologically mediated
plicity, which aims at reducing and dis- practices and socially differentiated modes
ciplining the infinite modulations and of mothering, ranging from surrogacy to
the ‘thousand little sexes’ (Deleuze and the recently approved three-parent family,
Guattari 1988: 277), which constitute our are the result of the pervasive impact of the
virtual embodied and embedded, affective apparatus of reproductive technologies and
and relational structure. socio-economic practices. The explosion of
Secondly, we need to consider the high the alleged linearity of the reproductive
level of technological mediation – both process also introduces new actors, from
bio-genetic and informational – that external donors to internal gene-editing
surrounds sexuality and reproduction practices, all of them reliant on technolo-
today. Contemporary bodies are shaped by gical mediation. Placenta politics respects
a complex interaction of social and bio- this complexity while foregrounding the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
318 PLANETARY

specificity of the maternal-placental-fetal See also Pill, the; Pregnant Posthuman;

assemblage. Joy; Bios; Material Feminisms; Feminist
A posthuman theory of the subject Posthumanities; Trans-corporeality;
emerges therefore as an empirical project Trans*; Feminicity.
that aims at experimenting with what
contemporary, bio-technologically medi- Rosi Braidotti
ated bodies are capable of doing. These
non-profit experiments with contempor-
ary subjectivity actualize the virtual PLANETARY
possibilities of an expanded, relational self
that functions in a nature-culture The planetary can be taken as a critique
continuum and is technologically medi- of the profit-minded logic of globaliza-
ated. Not surprisingly, this non-profit, tion. The image of the ‘blue planet’, in
experimental approach to different prac- particular the photo taken of the Earth
tices of subjectivity runs against the spirit rising above the Moon by the Apollo 8
of contemporary capitalism. The perversity crew in 1968, along with the ultimate ‘blue
of this system, and its undeniable success, marble’ photo taken four years later,
consists in re-attaching the potential for allowed the planet to be perceived visually
experimentation with new subject forma- for the first time in its entirety. Looking in
tions, back to an overinflated notion of on our world from the cosmic ‘outside’
possessive individualism (Macpherson represented a new stage in human self-
1962), fuelled by a quantitative range of consciousness. It functioned like a
consumers’ choices. This is precisely the Lacanian mirroring – both fragmented
opposite direction from the non-profit and harmonious – that brought awareness
experimentations with intensity, which I of the unity but also the finitude of the
defend in my theory of posthuman Earth. At a time in which the world was
subjectivity. riven by the ideological divides of the
A neo-materialist nomadic approach Cold War and living in fear of nuclear
allows us to analyse and re-think this catastrophe, the image projected both a
posthuman ‘exploded maternal body’ thor- reassuring vision of harmony and a pre-
oughly and to situate ‘feminicity’ (see sentiment of environmental risk. With its
Feminicity) in an ethically accountable associations of a sublime, interconnected
framework. The impact of the fast-progress- and fragile biosphere, the symbolism of the
ing reproductive technologies upon the blue planet countered the utilitarian, tech-
complex maternal assemblage is best nological and economic logic of the global,
addressed within a neo-materialist nomadic with which planetary consciousness has
philosophy of becoming geared to an been forced to compete since the outset.
affirmative relational ethics. The emphasis The meteoric rise of economic globaliz-
on monism casts a new light on explora- ation in the wake of the signing of world
tions of the shifting boundaries between life trade deals in the post-Cold War era created
and death and on the ethical and political a major obstacle to efforts to tackle climate
implications for posthuman thought. change on a global scale, while unpreceden-
Placenta politics expresses not only a new ted levels of economic growth have further
immunological paradigm, but also the fuelled carbon emissions. The legal and
posthuman politics of affirmation of life as policy framework enforced by the WTO
radical immanence. guaranteed the rights of multi-national

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
PLANETARY 319

corporations to escape social regulation, Responding to the crisis of anthropo-

take advantage of cheap labour and centric criticism, Gayatri Spivak in Death
negotiate major tax breaks. It also created a of a Discipline raised the question of what
political constituency that has successfully it would mean to ‘imagine ourselves as
blocked measures to come up with an planetary subjects rather than global
effective international response to global agents’ (2003). For Spivak, the critical
warming. The rationale of globalization, potential of planetarity lies primarily in
which views the Earth as a resource to be offering a mode of identification that does
competitively exploited for maximum not define itself in opposition to the Other,
profit, can be contrasted with the planetary and only obliquely in the ecological sense
ideals expressed in Bolivia’s 2010 Law of of being ‘custodians of our very own
Mother Earth, which granted nature equal planet’. As a strategic choice of termino-
rights to humans and defined the Earth as logy, the notion of the planetary allows us
‘a unique, indivisible, self-regulating com- to sidestep the impasse between advocates
munity of interrelated beings’. of a cosmopolitan identity as an alternative
Tension between the ethos of the plan- to ethnicity and nation-based forms of
etary and the globalized mindset can also collective belonging, and those in favour
be felt in theoretical spheres. Writing of retooling national identity as a mode of
on the accelerating ‘planetary crisis of resistance to the economic imperialism
climate change’ in 2009, historian Dipesh of globalization. From the point of view of
Chakrabarty made the significant admis- the current sense of urgency regarding the
sion that two decades of studying ‘theories need for a collective response to ecological
of globalization, Marxist analysis of capital, crisis, however, Spivak’s original question
subaltern studies, and postcolonial criti- could be reformulated more assertively to
cism’ had not prepared him for the ‘planet- ask what it would mean to see ourselves as
ary conjuncture within which humanity ‘planetary agents’, acting on behalf and in
finds itself today’. In a world transfigured the name of the planet, rather than as
by ecological crisis, on the brink of mass ‘global subjects’, passively accepting the
extinction and facing irreversible changes rules of the game of globalization.
to oceans and atmosphere, critical theory While the global features both as a
is also in the midst of a paradigm shift. The timeless abstraction and as a delimiter of a
general neglect within historical critical discrete period of human history, whose
theory of environmental issues, symbol- beginnings are traced back either several
ized by Michel Foucault’s infamous expres- decades to the communications revolution
sion of his ‘detestation of nature’ by literally or centuries to the medieval roots of world
turning his back on the landscape, was trade, the planetary inhabits a more exten-
based on the rejection of attempts to see ded temporality that both exceeds the
the world as an ecological totality as irre- human and has its own specific historicity.
trievably essentialist and denial of the It implicitly acknowledges the fact that
existence of nature as anything other than during the ‘deep time’ reaching back
a self-referential linguistic category. By millions of years before the advent of
contrast, signs of an incipient planetary humanity, the Earth had its own history
turn can be recognized in materialist posi- that was as eventful and unpredictable as
tions of Speculative Realism and object- human history. Attention to the deep
oriented ontology, as well as in the wider history of the Earth contextualizes the
theorization of the posthuman. activities of our species, reminding us of

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
320 PLASTICITY

the contingent nature of anthropocentric dominance of one ideology or system over

assumptions and making it possible to another, but rather articulates a political
imagine ‘the Earth after us’. The moment- agenda in which the Earth’s inhabitants are
ous of the changes made by humans to connected by a planetary ecosystem that
the life of the planet is in fact condensed surpasses man-made borders. To speak of
in the realization that long after we are the planetary automatically includes both
gone the effects of anthropogenic climate non-Western cultures and the non-human
change will still be felt through the likely inhabitants of the earth, but also the mater-
suppression of the next two geological ice iality of the biosphere, from the atmo-
ages, due fifty and a hundred thousand sphere and oceans to the planetary crust,
years from now. life forms and phenomena that are unre-
A self-contained version of planetary flectingly omitted from the global. A vision
thinking, criticized for its maverick science of planetary citizenship, based on what
but influential for the environmental Ursula K. Heise describes as ‘the environ-
imagination, can be found in James mental imagination of the global’ (2008),
Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. Formulated in also holds out the prospect of sidestepping
the 1960s and 1970s, Gaia is based on the the impasse between nationalism and
claim that there is an all-encompassing, cosmopolitanism that characterized the
non-human agency operating on the level era of globalization, and points towards a
of the planet and directed towards the geopolitical project based on the values of
maintenance of equilibrium through self- interspecies solidarity and environmental
regulating changes to the oceans and justice.
atmosphere. Like the notion of deep time,
See also Anthropocene; Cosmopolitics;
the Gaia hypothesis removes humans from
Earth; Ecosophy; Object-Oriented
the centre of the story, relegating our
Ontology.
species somewhere below microbes on
the scale of importance to the Earth’s
Maja and Reuben Fowkes
processes. Lovelock was convinced that
although technological developments
might eventually prove fatal for the human
species, their chances of endangering PLASTICITY
the life of Gaia as a whole were ‘very
weak indeed’. Today, awareness of the scale As used in the work the French philo-
of anthropogenic changes to the planet sopher Catherine Malabou, the word ‘plas-
raises the spectre of humans overpowering ticity’ derives from the Greek plassein,
even the mighty Earth goddess Gaia, which has a dual meaning: 1) to receive
crashing her self-regulating cybernetic form (like clay is plastic); and 2) to give
system to reach a point of no return to form (like surgery can be plastic). Malabou
equilibrium. adds a third meaning, which is especially
As a nascent political project, the appeal suited to philosophical use: 3) plastic in
to the planetary responds to the obligation reference to the annihilation of form (as
in an age of ecological crisis to transcend in plastic explosives).
the uniquely human concerns of the global. Strictly speaking, this versatile notion
It is an attempt to conceive of the conscious- of plasticity is put forward in line with
ness of the planet as a whole, where a plan- contemporary interpretations of G. W. F.
etary geopolitics reflects not the global Hegel, which try to elaborate a Hegelianism

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
PLASTICITY 321

that is up to the task to carry out progress- Malabou’s thought. In the attempt to
ive socio-political analysis (this attempt adhere to a plastic ‘absolute’, she impreg-
naturally allies Malabou with Slavoj Žižek, nates Hegel’s two senses of plasticity with a
Judith Butler and Adrian Johnston). third: a plasticity of destruction or decon-
Ultimately, Malabou seeks to develop a struction.
materialism that functions as the basis of a While it can be said that Malabou’s
new philosophy of spirit. (Malabou 2012b: notion of plasticity is to some degree a
212) Since her dissertation, The Future of return to Hegel, she also believes that her
Hegel, Malabou has been concerned with a own version of the concept is uniquely of
Hegelianism that is able to have a sense for our own time in two key fields: in terms of
the future, despite Martin Heidegger’s philosophy it is able to overcome the key
claims to the contrary (Malabou 2004: 5). concepts of the previous epochs, thus
In order to address this question, she placing philosophy in a position of (once
adapts the Hegelian concept of plasticity, again) being uniquely of its time, and in
in a strategy which, following a classically terms of science plasticity offers, in
deconstructionist methodology, accords Malabou’s view, the best account of neuro-
a relatively insignificant element of Hegel’s biology, which opens up the possibility of
argumentation a power which is able a new materialism. She believes that
to, avant la lettre, deal with latter-day plasticity is the ‘dominant formal motif of
Heideggerian concerns regarding time. interpretation and the most productive
Where Malabou resolutely differs from her exegetical and heuristic tool of our time’
dissertation supervisor Jacques Derrida is (Malabou 2009a: 57). It is with regard to
in the fact that she aims to use this concept this claim that Malabou finds an expres-
to vindicate the use of dialectics as a sion of her own notion of plasticity in the
method of philosophical and social capacity of brain damage to completely
analysis, rather than completely destabilize destroy someone’s personality, while
it. Although Hegel did not intend the third retaining the option for a new personality
meaning of plasticity (explosive plasticity), to emerge (through the other senses of
it is an essential part of Malabou’s project plasticity). She then points towards the fact
to read back into Hegel this explosive side that this kind of capacity, that is inherent
of subjectivity, which she believes Hegel to the brain synapses, lies radically outside
anticipated in some respects (Malabou of the psychoanalytic mode of explanation
2009a: 9). (although Freud localizes this externality
In terms of her central problematic, in the possibility of trauma, in the epitomic
Malabou professes a fascination with ‘beyond’ of the pleasure principle)
notions which allow for an amplification (Malabou 2007: 79). Since the psychoana-
of their ontological scope (such as time lytic ability to explain is, like its idealist and
in Heidegger and writing in Derrida) phenomenological predecessors, strictly
(Malabou 2009a: 13). She believes that it is dependent on what psychic reality allows
a certain historical tendency that enables us access to, Malabou attempts to develop
these notions to come forth in their the topology of the brain wound as a
respective epochs. In her insistence on this plastic way of relating to a realm of mater-
historicity, all the while still clinging to the iality that is independent of the subjectiv-
meta-applicability of her own notion of ism involved in avenues of research which
plasticity, it becomes abundantly clear that are dependent on a psychic reality (recent
Hegelianism really lies at the core of research in biology and neurology also

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
322 PLASTICITY

speaks of plasticity in topological models). of Malabou’s argument is the fact that the
In Malabou’s view, plasticity provides a popular conception of neurobiology is
‘deconstruction of the real’, which ‘organ- articulated solely in terms of flexibility,
izes the real after metaphysics’ (Malabou thus creating the impression amongst
2009a: 57), which thus engenders a new those subscribing to the ideology of flexi-
materialism that allows us to ‘momentarily bility that they are merely bringing the
characterize the material organization of management of labour and mental health-
thought and being’ (ibid.: 61). care in line with the scientific facts regard-
The characterization of the brain as ing our neurological needs.
plastic allows Malabou to leave behind the The obvious implication of Malabou’s
discussions on the determinism brought line of reasoning here is that we have, no
up in connection with neurological doubt with the best of intentions, manu-
descriptions of the brain. Since the brain is factured a new normalcy, which repro-
plastic, can be moulded and is continually duces all the old models of exclusion along
changing in response to our experiences, it the vectors of mental illness and poverty.
is instead fundamentally free (Malabou Against flexibility, Malabou maintains that
2009b: 11, 21). In part, ‘our brain is what we we must increase our consciousness of
do with it’ (ibid.: 30) and as such, Malabou the brain, in the service of emancipatory
is attempting to stimulate a culture of political understanding (53). Evidently,
‘neuronal liberation’ rather than a biolo- although she does not articulate why,
gical determinism (ibid.) She thus objects Malabou believes that this type of
to models of the brain as centralized consciousness is more effective than what
machines or simple computers, because philosophers typically advocate; the educa-
these do not capture the plasticity of the tion of the people through unrestricted
brain, especially in the sense of the capa- conceptual thought, which in this case
city for destruction and subsequent would typically start from the fact of
reformation (33–5). However, Malabou inequality. What Malabou advocates
warns that plasticity should not be instead is to start public awareness from
considered to be completely coterminous the notion of the plasticity of our brain in
with freedom and should not be confused relation to our individual and social poten-
with the ability to act (48). Offering some tial. In essence she proposes a redefinition
social critique, Malabou objects to the of the self, in which brain plasticity func-
ideology of flexibility that is currently tions as universal in terms of a potential
prevalent in management of labour, which that is radically differentiated at the indi-
leads to the belief that those who are not vidual level. This reopens the door to
deemed flexible, or rather ‘immobile’, are psychoanalysis, which stresses the fact
relegated to poverty (51). According to that, although we may all be radically
Malabou, this ideology has also penetrated different, we share some initial structures
into mental health care, ensuring that at the start of our personal histories (in the
mental illness will be treated solely with form of childhood) which can be treated
the aim of the restoration of flexibility, in in a universal way. It is indeed on this
the terms dictated by flexible labour, under ubiquitous filial structure that Malabou
the auspices of returning the patient to proposes that a general theory of trauma
society (medication being one of the should be built (2012b: xix). From this
means employed by this ideology of perspective, the event of cerebral trauma,
‘restoring action’) (51–2). An essential part an accident leading to a wound, presents a

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POLITICAL AFFECT 323

unique type of trauma, which provides a F. M. van Helmont described Leibniz’s

special insight into the destructive aspect monads as ‘vis plastica’. William Harvey
of cerebral plasticity, much in the same used ‘vis plastica’ to describe epigenesis,
way as filial trauma provides insight into and his work was in turn used for a popular
its developmental aspects (ibid.: 11). explanation of fossils, as the spontaneous
Finally, Malabou draws parallels between results of the plastic latency of the earth.
brain trauma and social trauma (terrorist This long tradition of plasticity curiously
attacks, sexual abuse, oppression and shows the interconnection of plasticity
slavery) in terms of the destructive aspect and nature, which Malabou ultimately re-
of plasticity; in both cases, a violence cuts inserts into Hegel’s notion. In a certain
the subject off from its accumulated sense, Malabou restores the original spir-
memories (213). itual materialism of the term.
There is then a resolutely normative
See also Critical Posthuman Theory; Neo/
component to the study of brain plasticity,
New Materialism; Neuronal Aesthetics.
because Malabou seeks to determine what
we should do with our brain, instead of
Tom Giesbers
what we are doing with our brain. She does
not simply present a thesis about radical
subjectivity, but rather a reflective concern
about the way our understanding of the POLITICAL AFFECT
brain has been utilized by capitalism, in
the form of the ideology of flexibility, The ‘affective turn’, by reacting against the
which obfuscates our consciousness of the previous ‘linguistic turn’, has brought bodies
plasticity of our brain (2009b: 12, 33). For to the attention of cultural studies, human-
Malabou, any study of our cerebral powers ities and social science scholars, not merely
immediately implies a political dimension, as sites for the inscription of power rela-
since it aims to define what we can and tions by transcendent institutions, but as
cannot do (ibid.: 32). Where Malabou sites whose immanent potentials allow for
departs from (and attempts to correct) relations with other bodies that participate
both the ideology of flexibility and the in fluctuating power relations. With the
accounts provided by neurologists is in the affective turn, bodies have thus moved from
fact that she maintains that destruction is a blank slate to living beings, from clay to be
an essential part of cerebral plasticity, moulded to creatures feeling their way
which restores its dialectical nature: ‘if we through ever-changing worlds. The affect-
didn’t destroy ourselves a bit, we could not ive turn has two modes: a neurological one
live’ (74). to which the name Sylvan Tomkis (thanks
The notion of plasticity has deeper and mostly to Sedgwick and Frank 1995) is
more surprising roots than Malabou attached, and a Deleuzean-Spinozist one,
propounds. Although she frequently exemplified by Brian Massumi (2002).
claims that Hegel’s use of the term in 1807 While Tomkins posited nine neurobiolo-
was unique, it is likely that he adopted the gically hardwired and recombinant affects,
notion from F. W. J. Schelling, who often affect for the Deleuzo-Spinozists is twofold:
used it as a way to describe nature (out of the change in the material relations of an
which subjectivity emerges). J. W. Goethe affected body and the concomitant change
referred to the plastic nature of man and, in the interactive potentials of that body
in the seventeenth century, the alchemist (its ‘power’). Intertwined with Deleuze’s

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
324 POLITICAL AFFECT

virtual/actual distinction, this scheme the production of affect-laden intuition is

enables affect to be ‘an entire, vital, and dependent on the state of one’s body at any
modulating field of myriad becomings one time (Haidt briefly refers to Damasio’s
across human and nonhuman’ (Gregg and ‘somatic marker theory’ (Damasio 1995) at
Seigworth, 2010: 6). The embodied, bio- this point in his essay), we see something
logical, drive mode (Tomkins) and the of the same basic insight as affect theory,
boundary-crossing, assemblage-producing a general relegation of cold, rational
transversal mode (Deleuze-Spinoza) do not consciousness to a subordinate or perhaps
exhaust the affective turn, however. Gregg even fully epiphenomenal status, the limit
and Seigworth see a number of other case of a cooling of affect to its minimal
approaches in contemporary affect theory: intensity.
various elements of bodily scaffolding with Political affect is among several formu-
technological objects, as in ‘extended lations of affective theory that are criti-
mind’ discourses; cybernetics; ‘processual cized by Linda Zerilli in a recent article
incorporeality’ or Spinozism; bio-cultural (2015). Zerilli takes up the deflationary
interweavings or socialized desire; investig- account of conceptual/propositional
ations of the felt and lived experience of knowledge developed by Jason Stanley
marginalized peoples; the biological, neuro- (Stanley and Krakauer 2013; Stanley 2011)
logical and cognitive sciences; sociological in which propositional knowledge need
and philosophical work on the emotions; not be linguistically articulable to count
and science studies (Gregg and Seigworth as knowledge. This deflationary account is
2010: 6-8). then set up as a third option to supposedly
Political affect (Protevi 2009) is a non-conceptual affect and what Zerilli
rough-and-ready connection of the sees as the hyper-intellectualist account of
Tomkins and Deleuze-Spinoza modes – an conceptual/propositional knowledge that
acknowledgement of the bio-cultural would require linguistic articulability. The
reality of human nature, the way in which deflationary account would then avoid the
our biology is such to be open to our binary set up between the intellectualists
culture, our nature is to be open to nurture. and the affective non-conceptualists such as
We are hard-wired with regard to the Dreyfusian phenomenologists, Deleuzian/
patterns of basic affects, but their triggers Spinozist affect theorists, and Damasio,
and thresholds are experientially formed Panksepp, LeDoux and other affective
as we move in and out of bio-social- neuroscientists. For Zerilli, the affective
technical assemblages. All in all, it’s a schools are caught in a mirror-image
roughly Nietzschean outlook: our binarism with their hyper-intellectualist
consciousness is shaped by our (inter-) opponents with whom they share a ‘layer-
corporeal natures, which make themselves cake’ ontology (linguistically articulable
known in affective pushes and pulls, highs knowledge resting on a not-just linguis-
and lows. Political affect also takes account tically articulated but thoroughly non-
of Jonathan Haidt’s prominent article, ‘The conceptual layer of engaged coping, virtual
Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail’ feeling, or neurological firings). Zerilli’s
(2001). For Haidt, moral judgement mostly challenge is to avoid a position that would
follows intuition, the sudden appearance ‘turn judgment into a kind of post hoc
in consciousness of an awareness of what rationalization of primed responses’.
is the right thing to do in a situation. Such Political affect avoids the hyper-
intuitions are affect-laden, and insofar as intellectualist conceptuality versus

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POLITICAL AFFECT 325

non-cognitive affect opposition Zerilli phor is used guardedly’ (2002: 35; italics in
posits by its incorporation of the notion of original). It is the feeling of change in the
‘affective cognition’. This takes both elements relation of bodies politic: the feeling
all the way down, in keeping with Evan of the change in the first-order body politic
Thompson’s ‘enactivism’ position in his in the encounter with another body politic
Mind in Life (2007). Enactivism holds to a (thus not an introspective perception of an
notion of sense-making, which is found isolated body, but a feeling of the body
even in single-celled organisms. So polit- in relation), and the feeling of how the
ical affect does not hold to a layer-cake present feeling might vary in relation to
ontology: affect and cognition are partners what might happen next in a variety of
all the way down. It’s certainly true that futures. Affect then is a resolution of a
almost-completely-desubjectifying experi- complex differential field, relating changes
ences of rage and panic exist, but they are in bodies politic, or more precisely, the
rare episodes of approaching a limit that changes in the relations among changing
activates ‘affect programs’ (Griffiths 1997). first- and second-order bodies politic.
Affect provides salience (draws cognitive Now in some cases, situations are ‘well in
attention) but doesn’t overwhelm/under- hand’, and affects collapse into emotions
mine cognition, though when we get close having something of a representative func-
to the limit of desubjectification our qual- tion: they show us how things actually are
itative analyses should change. and how they will evolve. But this is
To pick up the positive formulation of emotion as subjective capture of affect. In
political affect as sense-making, the differ- some other cases, the situation exceeds our
ential relation in the sense-making of ability to make sense of it; affect extends
bodies politic is that between potentials for beyond the body’s ability to emotionally
becomings or assemblage formations represent the situation; we are over-
which vary as the members of the encounter whelmed and thrown out of kilter.
make a ‘move’ in the social game, moves in Here we are at the limit of faculty of
which someone offers, commands, cajoles, sensibility: these situations cannot be
persuades, pleads and so on. The possible sensed from an actualized point of view of
moves of a situation are the moves allowed recognition and common sense (‘it makes
by embodied competences. But these no sense’), but can only be felt, that is,
possible moves are themselves taken up in ‘sensed’, as pointing to a differential field
relations of change: what Deleuze and beyond ‘normal’ sense-making as recogni-
Guattari call ‘de-territorialization’ (leading tion, as conceptual-emotional capture and
to what would be unexpected, because processing. In other words, an intensive
changing the allowable patterns of the encounter outside normal/actual affective
game) and ‘re-territorialization’ (settling cognition habits (modelled as a move
back into an old game, or setting forth the outside the basin of attraction, or better,
potentials of the new game) (Massumi outside the normal attractor layout as
2002: 71-80). habitual response capacities), provides
Political affect is the feeling for this access to the virtual. This access is experi-
variation; it is the intensive as opening up enced as a strange feeling, a feeling of
access to the virtual, to the differential being out of step with your normal habits;
field, idea, or multiplicity of the situation. in this strangeness lies the potential to
As Massumi puts it: ‘Affect is the virtual open an adaptive response as creative
as point of view, provided the visual meta- event throwing up a new attractor layout,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
326 POST INTERNET

giving new options to the system. Finally, expression of the gendered, and racially and
and quite simply, adopting a direction for geographically grounded infrastructures,
action is actualization, the selection of a rare-materials and subjectivities at work on
path from the options laid out by significa- the internet (Nakamura and Chow-White
tion; such a decision is modelled as falling 2012; Sanderson 2013). Thus, critical atten-
into a basin of attraction. tion to all these factors brings to the fore the
attendant radical redefinition of the geo-
See also Bodies Politic; Affective Turn;
politics (Bratton 2016) and the economies
Networked Affect; Insurgent Posthumanism;
that sustain and structure them. This
Precognition.
ongoing ‘cultural condition’ tessellates with
historic models of the posthuman, which
John Protevi
stressed theories of embodiment so as to
counter the growing abstraction of inform-
ation (Hayles 1999). It also contains,
POST INTERNET however, important implications for recent
theorizations of a post-anthropocentric
And the Space Formerly Known sensibility and the necessity of an evolution
of ethical awareness under advanced capit-
as Offline alism (Braidotti 2011a).
Post Internet incorporates many histories, Since the early millennium, artists asso-
but the term first emerged around 2008 ciated with Post Internet engaged in a
(Olson (2006) in Connor 2013), to describe partially coherent, often fragmentary
a discrete, critical artistic enquiry into the artistic dialogue that examined, appropri-
‘impacts of the Internet on culture at large’ ated, re-performed and re-distributed the
(Olsen 2008). The practice began through images and objects of social media, advert-
the sharing, re-working, production and ising and corporate culture: often through
display of the images, text, activities and the platform-specific spaces and communit-
economies that were found online. ies (on Tumblr for example) it took to be its
Subsequently, following the particularities subjects. This Post Internet approach was
of a highly heterogeneous set of art prac- characterized by a focus on questions about
tices – from the sculptural theatres of Ryan the construction of subjectivity; the
Trecartin to the image networks of Kari performance of (multiple) identities online;
Altman to the mutated corporatism of the corporatization of the internet; the
Timur Si-Qin (for instance) – the term has reproduction of labour in the digital
become more nebulous, referring adject- economy; its relationship to emergent
ively to a broad ‘cultural condition’ (Archey forms of materialism, image circulation;
2012). Understood in art through the exper- and theories of locality, nationality and
ience and appearances of the user-focused geographic drift. Distinguishing itself from
interfaces of Web 2.0, these critical artistic earlier subversive concepts such as ‘cyber-
enquiries showed the internet to be far from space’, ‘the virtual’ or ‘Net art’ (though these
an autonomous site of user-agency. The distinctions have, of course, always been
term’s usage as a ‘cultural condition’ indic- contested), a relatively closed network of
ates how the surface layer is increasingly participants worked transversally across
seen through the non-linear and protocol- what was known as ‘online’ and ‘offline’.
defined set of relations and affects (Galloway From documentation (in place of the ‘actual’
and Thacker 2007). These are in turn the artwork), to the use of shared, low-cost or

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POST INTERNET 327

‘poor’ images (Steyerl 2009, 2012), to complexify and further enmesh Post
networks or systems of art-making that Internet with the social, as the social.
necessarily comprise both online and Through mobile, Wi-Fi and cloud comput-
offline elements (Vickers in Scrimgeour ing, the processes of sensory embodiment
2014), what is central to Post Internet art’s (how these technologies help users experi-
initial assembly of definable works was its ence their environment) erase previous
challenge to the established cannons of art, distinctions such as those between produ-
internet discourse and, crucially, to the cer, consumer and distributor (Farman
primacy of the physical gallery space and 2012; Hu 2015; Easterling 2014) – blurring
original artwork (Vierkant 2010). In part, these into the increasingly homolingual
eliding distinctions between real and virtual figure of the user (Wright 2013): a user
reclaimed the formation of subjectivity who, as bots, the internet of things, and
from the sort of Cartesian dualism that had composite Post Internet artworks attest
separated the mind from ‘meatspace’ (as in to, is no longer necessarily human. This
John Perry Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the rebirth as a condition defines a quantitat-
Independence of Cyberspace’ (1996; Berry ive shift in the ontological treatment of
1998), but it also posed the embedding of digital-non-digital technological hybrids
the internet in the everyday as a given on both sides of the posthuman ambival-
(Novitskova 2010; McHugh 2011). ence. This includes interleaving with, and
While a difference in degree – being de-centring, difference through connec-
on/offline – constituted the core difference tions to previously out of reach global
in kind for Post Internet art, the Internet otherness on the one hand (Nakamura
has by now become so dissolute, more and Chow-White 2012), and the use and
cloud than web, that it dissolves any partic- reproduction of dominant, standardized
ular traction or rupture that the notion of distribution, production platforms and
Post the internet once may have had. As protocols which redefine much of the space
artist Jesse Darling put it, ‘every artist formerly known as offline (Galloway and
working today is a Post Internet artist’ Thacker 2007; Abreu 2015), on the other.
(2014). Further, the fluid and evasive The term Post Internet’s generational
techno-politics of the internet, meshing specificity and genesis among the institu-
war and surveillance with the technologies tions of art (Archey 2012) remains
of vision and image (Braidotti 2013: 8; nonetheless of great importance.
Schuppli 2014a; Steyerl 2009, 2012), and Condensing varied practices into a discrete
the hybrid sovereignty of data, users and movement (Vickers 2013; Chan 2014), Post
their participation with the ‘necropolitcs of Internet art came to be criticized for its
the cloud’ (Hu 2015), can be said to have apparent complicity with a globalized art
been eclipsed by Post Internet art in a market, and inability to negate the privilege
machinic-social continuum that bends of the gallery (Vickers 2013; Droitcour
Post Internet around the posthuman 2014a, 2014b; Vickers in Scrimgeour
condition. Uneven, yet ideologically 2014);1 and ultimately for being unable to
universal connections between devices, separate itself from the discursive and
social media profiles, (in/non/human) structural privileges (leisure-time, master’s-
users and conceptually integrated stacks of level art education and access to expensive
interfaces, protocols and architectures technologies) it often relied on (resistances
(Srnicek 2012; Galloway 2012; Bratton to these privileges and structural condi-
2016) come together to diversify, tions notwithstanding) (Quaintance 2015;

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
328 POST INTERNET

Chan 2014). Yet, articulated in the after- tion, re-circulation and performance,
math of the financial crisis of 2008 the which produce the generative events of
bifurcation of Post Internet art as cultural information – do not separate it from an
condition became paired with the generat- economy in which the circulation and
ive effects of the same information that regulation of new information is control
sparked that crisis in the first place. This (Dean 2005; Malik 2014), but rather bring
situation speaks of an entanglement that contemporary art closer to it.
goes beyond the capacity of Post Internet The proximity of Post Internet art to
art to remain autonomous. Web 2.0 had enabled it to proceed with the
As Suhail Malik has argued, systems authority of speaking from, and not for the
such as computational finance, contem- internet; and as a condition Post Internet
porary art – and I would add social media has come to be increasingly suggestive of
and Post Internet art – are comparable the overlapping entanglements of state,
insofar as they operationalize a notion of post-state and technological interfaces with
information as an event – one that updates the figures of the non/in/post/human. Yet
what was ‘known’ before it (Chun 2011a), as fewer artists mobilized the term as a
what cyberneticist Gregory Bateson would point of reference, and Post Internet started
call a ‘difference which makes a difference’ taking on more of contemporary art’s post-
(Malik 2014). No longer fixed to the modern characteristics and physicality
aggregation of knowledge, here additional (Archey 2012), things changed. Indicated
information instead updates the current by a sort of ‘torsion’ occurring at the heart
picture, rendering the existing one redund- of Post Internet art, the Post Internet as
ant and useless. In contemporary art condition could be said to re-shape itself –
producing such difference pluralizes Janus-like – as a challenge to a liberal,
history or the social – converting them autonomously grounded presentation of
into subjectively and experientially differ- the posthuman condition. This brief (and
ent events (views) or objects (artworks). partial) look at Post Internet art, and the
While in contemporary art this difference flows of information it sought to represent
might aim to puncture the hegemony of and (in varying degrees) to resist (Kinsey
the canons, institutions and narratives of 2014), therefore allow us to identify three
(westernized) modernity that preceded contradictions that structure the messy
and haunted it, it also more generally proximity to and complicity of Post Internet
creates a risk that can be gambled against with the posthuman as networked predica-
(Malik 2014). Whether we take the finance ment. The first is the implicit and deliberate
industry – or for instance the speculative failure to disassociate itself from the struc-
planning and rhetoric of health, economic tural conditions that enable it; the second is
or migration policy (Mitropoulos 2012) – the development of an aesthetic style that
the scope, scale, granularity, social or polit- characterized this condition as given; and
ical weight (etc.) of the disruptive event of the third is the synthesis of Post Internet
information made possible by the distrib- with a wider malaise of contemporary art
uted computational infrastructures of the (Malik 2015), which equates the market
Post Internet condition, has converted this with information that is, if not entirely
very event into a structural relation in freed from, at least not completely fixed to
itself (Wark 2015a). Thus in this sense, bodies.
the essentially postmodern strategies of The extent to which Post Internet art
contemporary art – appropriation, repeti- remains situated at the structural and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTANIMALISM 329

conceptual boundaries of the Post Internet which de-centred narratives, knowledges,

condition cannot but illustrate and languages and subjectivities are brought
intensify the contradictions that mark into dialogue with each other so as to redis-
such a messy position. Viewed from the tribute and destabilize the narrow and
perspective of the effects of this situation recursive origin-narratives (Haraway 1986)
upon the subjects and objects involved and the economic parameters implied by
(rather than focusing only on the agency it the false unity of being post the Internet.3
might or might not afford them) however,
See also Art; Capitalocene and
the Post Internet condition maps art onto
Chthulucene; Hypersocial; Metadata
the overlapping conjunctions that connect
Society; Metamodernism; Networked
subjectivity, infrastructures and linguistic
Affect.
modes around each ‘user’.2 Hence, the
affirmative, critical position to be drawn
for art practices that maintain a grounded Notes
and situated critique of the internet, 1. Interesting examples of this move ‘back’
whether intended or not, concerns how the into the economy materiality of contem-
entanglements of the posthuman ‘nill’ porary art include the Paddle8 auctions,
(willing in the negative sense) the torsions 89+ project and 2015 New Museum
of Post Internet as a critical navigational Triennale ‘Surround Audience’, not to
tool of the posthuman predicament. mention gallery representation for many
As an ambivalent case study for the Post Internet Artists and much art
posthuman, therefore, Post Internet art historical writing on these practices from
might also then lay the ground for art’s alongside and among those networks:
engagement with the posthuman predica- this kind of text included.
ment ‘non-representationally’. As Wendy 2. A point made by many of those who
Chun comments in reference to Frederic chose to exit it was that, as indicated in
Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping: the first contradiction, Post Internet art
‘Could it be that rather than resort to maps, missed, erased or normalized the highly
we need to immerse ourselves in networked contingent construction of this mapping.
flows?’ (Chun 2011b). Tangled as it is in the 3. Thank you to Cadence Kinsey and
posthuman predicament qua the Internet, Eleanor Ivory Weber.
the troubled entanglements of Post Internet
art could also be thought of as the pre-
Tom Clark
figuration of an alternative infrastructure
in the circulation of ‘information as the
social’. In its inadequacies, there has ‘always POSTANIMALISM
already’ been a social and political
remainder with Post Internet art’s constitu- In discussing the relationship between
ent relation to being on and offline, and man and animal, Gilbert Simondon states:
this trans-platform trace continues. Taking From Aristotle to Descartes, from
this forward, thinking of artworks as Descartes to contemporary notions of
underlying, but not reducible to, a critical instinct, biological notions of instinct,
or transformative practice, it might be there is truly a relationship between thesis,
possible to think of the art-infrastructures antithesis and synthesis: Cartesianism
produced by post-Internet practices as an constituting the antithesis of the theory of
additive and capacious framework through Antiquity, according to which human

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
330 POSTANIMALISM

reality and animal reality are in continuity. from Cartesianism and propose new ways
Descartes affirms they are not in continu- of thinking man, animal, and above all
ity. Finally, the contemporary thesis once their relationship.
again reaffirms they are in continuity, not Believing that the animal essentially
merely by the reversal of Cartesianism, exists as a series of mechanical procedures
but in saying what is true about the animal that in their togetherness create a type of
and what is true about man. behaviour (see also Technoanimalism),
2004: 59 Descartes opposed the dominant ideas on
It is remarkable that Simondon, in two the animal of Antiquity, yet at the same
classes he gave as part of a general intro- time built upon a long tradition that more
duction to psychology – he offered this to or less started with Plato’s idea that man is a
(first year!) students until 1967 – gives us superior animal, with the important addi-
an overview of the Grand History of what tion that the human superiority, as we find
we call Animal Studies today, where the it in Platonism and especially in Christianity,
last phase he distinguishes, the phase in turns into a human exceptionalism with
which the animal is released from (or Descartes. Think of the earliest Apologists
emancipated from) its anthropocentric (around AD 300) and the Church fathers
rule, marks the way in which animal that followed, many of whom at least anti-
studies so vividly enters all parts of the cipated a dualism in which the animal
humanities at the start of the twenty-first turned into a (human) myth since animals
century. Or to phrase this differently: what did not have a direct recognition of God,
is true for man today exceeds our modern as humans did (Simondon 2004: 66).
idea of the human whereas what is true for Interestingly enough, this form of human/
the animal, maybe even more urgently, Humanist exceptionalism did not exist in
exceeds the idea of the animal as it has Presocratic thought, and when Simondon
been dominated, domesticated (d’homme- talks of Antiquity he particularly draws our
esticated, as Lacan would put it) by modern attention to Presocratic thinkers like
man. Cartesianism had been dominant in Pythagoras and Empedocles, who work
thinking the animal during the nineteenth with the ancient doctrine of metempsy-
and twentieth century through this very chosis, which claims that the soul is not
simple formula: the animal is part of the so much attached to matter, but rather
res extensa (corporeal substance) whereas traverses it, ‘lives it’ and moves on.
man’s existence (which has ‘doubt’ as Empedocles beautifully captures this idea
its essence), can only be defined as res with the phrase: ‘I was in other times a boy
cogitans (mental substance). This dualist and a girl, a bush and a bird, a silent fish in
opposition, which marks what we can refer the sea’ (Simondon 2004: 33, note 2).
to as Modern thinking, was not of import- As early as Lucretius (in his epic de
ance in Antiquity and lies at the heart of Rerum Natura written in the first century
how Animal Studies today is emancipating after Christ) Pythagorean Metempsychosis
the animal from our anthropocentric is severely critiqued and replaced with an
viewpoint. Simondon’s overview reminds idea that all souls are as mortal as those
us that our posthumanist endeavours (see bodies that give rise to them (an idea that
Posthumanism) must always already be only returned to academia after the
accompanied by a postanimalism, as only Renaissance – when his text was redis-
together – in continuity with one another covered – and lived on in the writings of
– can these new areas of thought release us Montaigne, Shakespeare, Bruno and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTANIMALISM 331

Spinoza). The domination of Christianity vitalist) traditions (rarely discussed in the

(transcendental Platonism) and Cartesian Christian and modern literature on the
dualism, however, made sure that the animal), appear to have long and fascinat-
animal only up until very recently received ing histories. The practice of ‘mumming’, for
serious attention from the History of instance, coming from the Greek mummo
Thought. Metempsychosis itself only knew (denoting a child’s bugbear, or a frightening
a short revival in nineteenth century (it has mask), was a folk tradition absorbed in
been discussed in the writings of Melville, Italian masquerade (and hence in other
Joyce, Pynchon and Proust, among others), courtly entertainment known as masque)
where it was experimented with but more from the sixteenth century, but has a much
often ridiculed. longer history (stretching out until today)
Simondon is right when he uses outside of Christian High Culture.
dialectics to analyse this history of man and Originally, mummers were bands of masked
animal, but contrary to the traditional persons who during winter festivals in
Hegelian use of the term (dialectics), which Europe paraded the streets and entered
is concerned with a positive development, a houses to dance or play dice in silence.
more fragmented dialectical analysis would In relatively new fields like Nordic
make more sense. And this especially Studies, there is particular interest in how
concerns the synthetic position which, as local traditions and customs survived at the
Simondon himself noted above, cannot be margins of Christianity, in particular on
seen as a grand conclusion, but concerns those remote islands where the res extensa
a much more modest search for the possi- of mythology and magic was less under
bilities of animal (and human) life. Thus, pressure. Terry Gunnell stresses the import-
like posthumanist theories of today, post- ance of mumming in these communities, as
animalism too has a speculative nature. it stressed the powers of the seasons, of the
For postanimalism this means that environment (the sea especially), revealing
thinking in terms of ‘kinds’ and of qualities them what Muensterberger famously called
ascribed to these kinds, is long left behind. their ‘semi-human reality’ (Gunnell 2007:
Thus, postanimalism is in particular 28). The extensive use of masks, of cross-
concerned with the revitalization of the dressing, in many ways practices an idea of
long history of human-and-animal/animal- humanity that is far from modern, that
and-human relationships as it has been does not position itself as opposed to the
developed in the minor non-Christian animal and to the world but that seems to
histories (and folk tales), that have survived be in search for situating a series of bonds,
modernity, as they had survived Christianity. knots and connections between all of the
Rediscovering these strong but often things that matter in the here and now.
neglected traditions in the reality of today, As one of the core founders and part of
and thus rewriting them into the Grand the curatorial team I’ve set up the Papay
History that had no place for them before, Gyro Nights Art Festival (co-founded and co-
the micropolitics of postanimalism doesn’t curated with Ivanov), organized every year
synthesize the History of Man and Animal in the heart of the dark and cold winter on
at all; it excavates it, hollows it out, replacing the remote island of Papa Westray (locally
Major History with a series of situated known as Papay), in the far north of
narratives. Scotland. The aim of this festival was to
It is interesting to find out that quite a create a stage where this discovery and
few of these non-Christian (pagan, animist, rediscovery of the strong postanimal and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
332 POSTDISCIPLINARITY

posthuman (id est, post-Cartesian) revival in (performance art, cinema, installation)

the contemporary arts and in thought, could that realizes a site-specific thinking, creat-
be experienced/experimented with. The ively putting the relations between post-
name of the festival captures these interests: human, postanimal and perhaps even
Gyro (aka Grýla and grýlur) – is the name of post-environmental entities at stake. What
a threatening female orgress figure; a giant- they synthesize, to come back to Simondon
ess, who is well known throughout the again, is then not so much the History of
region. The Gyro is a mumming figure that the Animal or of the Human. On the
during wintertime comes from the sea, is contrary, what this realizes is a multiplicity
dressed in seaweed and demands offerings of minor histories, coming to us (through
(food but also little children) before she speculation) from the future, from an
returns to the sea again. Known under animal, a human and an earth that is not
different names throughout the North here yet. And thus these festivals have a
Atlantic (from the Orkney Islands to the very strong and powerful political message
Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands and that extends well beyond the doctrine of
Iceland), the Gyro also appears in many metempsychosis; they situate what it is like
different forms. In our days the Gyro lives on to be a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird, a
the island again when Hong Kong’s well- silent fish in the sea, in the here and now.1
known performance artist Frog King roams
See also Animal; Animacies; Animism
the island in his objet trouvé coat (with
(Limulus); Bios; Food; Technoanimalism.
froggy eyes). Famous for his solo exhibition
at the 2011 Venice Biennale (entitled
Frogtopia, Hong-Kornucopia) where one Note
pavilion contained over nine million of his 1. The author acknowledges the assistance
artworks, his un-human performance was of Ivanov, Director of the Papay Gyro
all about littering the island, and the capital- Nights Art Festival.
ist and humanist sentiments that rule it, with
an overwhelming earthly wit. But the Gyro Tsz Man Chan
also returns in the sound art installations of
Signe Lidén (played by the strong winds that
always haunt the island), in the cinematic
chaosmotic reflections (of the northern POSTDISCIPLINARITY
light) by Japanese avant-garde film-maker
Takashi Makino and in the ancient folk tales While the concepts of multi- and interdis-
that for instance tell us about the love of ciplinarity are often used to signify cross-
selkies for the girls of the island (as told by disciplinary activities that thrive even in
Orkney storyteller Tom Muir). universities with disciplinary hegemonies,
Asking ourselves what forms of life the postdisciplinarity implies more radical
island (and the sea), at full moon in transformations of current knowledge
February, allows for, what kind of new production. Multi- and interdisciplinarity
creatures it creates, is at the core of what signifies collaborations across disciplines
this festival (and many other small cultural on problems or issues of common concern,
festivals that are increasingly popular in basically addressed by theoretical and
the art worlds today). It is especially about methodological approaches, developed
the bringing together of local storytellers, within the framework of disciplines which
archaeologists, philosophers and artists enter into new synergetic relationships

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTDISCIPLINARITY 333

with each other. However, in multi- and of transversal conversations and transgres-
interdisciplinary knowledge production, sions of current academic boundaries
the disciplines perform as prerequisites and between production of knowledge on the
taken-for-granted points of departure for ‘human’, the ‘social’, the ‘natural’, the ‘tech-
the cross-disciplinary work. By contrast, the nical’ and the ‘medical’ worlds.
concept, postdisciplinarity, refers to more Postdisciplinary transgressions of
transgressive ways of producing academic humanities and natural sciences are for
knowledge which destabilize, deconstruct example a methodological corollary, when
and disrupt the hegemony of distinct Karen Barad (2007) argues for entangle-
disciplines and the classic academic divides ments of space–time-mattering and
between human, social, technical, medical meaning making, when Donna Haraway
and natural sciences. Scholars gathering (2008) encourages us to look at naturecul-
under the banner of posthumanities, enga- tures, when Rosi Braidotti (2006a) calls for
ging with the figurations of the posthuman, an ethics founded in the inhuman dynamics
defend different kinds of postdisciplinarity, of zoe, or when Stacy Alaimo (Alaimo and
oftentimes also reflected under the umbrella Hekman 2008) draws attention to the
term transdisciplinarity. transcorporeal. Scholars of somatechnics
Scholars of posthumanities have (Sullivan and Murray 2009) explore how the
academic trajectories in a diversity of somatical and the technical are implicated
disciplines as well as interdisciplines or in each other, while science and tech-
‘studies’ such as for example feminist nology studies scholars investigate material-
studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, semiotic co-constructions (Haraway 1992a).
critical dis/ability studies, science and These are examples among many. They
technology studies, environmental studies, illustrate how posthumanist conceptual
cultural studies, animal studies etc. But frameworks make postdisciplinary trans-
across this diversity, shared grounds are gressions of disciplinary boundaries neces-
often found in disidentificatory relations sary. None of the issues addressed here can
to the disciplining forces of the classic be contained within conceptual boundaries
academic divides and the compartement- that separate the ‘human’ and ‘social’ from
alization of knowledge production into the ‘natural’, ‘medical’ and ‘technical’ world.
distinct disciplines, each holding on to Postdisciplinarity requires new modes
their canons. Most scholars of posthuman- of organizing as well as new methodolo-
ities today have to recognize their points of gical tools. Transgressive and transformat-
departure in disciplines or interdisciplines ive methodological frameworks are not
as far as formal credentials in terms of created out of nothing. They need to unfold
degrees and affiliations are concerned. But in transversal conversations between differ-
still they tend often to disidentify with the ent approaches to matters of common
mainstream of their disciplines or interdis- concern, defined through what Barad
ciplines due to critical stances vis-à-vis the conceptualizes as provisional and moment-
onto-epistemologies, on which the discip- ary – non-universal – cuts between subject
lining and compartmentalizing dynamics and object (Barad 2007). To establish such
of modern academic knowledge produc- transversal conversations beyond disciplin-
tion are commonly founded. Many of ary boundaries, postdisciplinary collabor-
these scholars criticize the academic ative spaces are needed, i.e. spaces where
divides and disciplinary structures as inap- collaborative efforts between differently
propriate compartmentalizations in favour situated researchers can unfold without any

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
334 POSTDISCIPLINARITY

discipline having an exclusive, taken-for- production of the phenomena under scru-

granted right to set the academic agenda tiny as well as the potential interference
and police the borders of the specific kinds patterns, transformations and possibilities
of knowledge production to be set in for mutually troubling or enriching ontolo-
motion. Collaboration is important in gizing gestures and worlding practices of
postdisciplinary work, since all knowledge these performative apparati are taken into
production is considered partial, and no account. It should be noticed that diffract-
one therefore can have a full overview, i.e. ive readings are not to be collapsed with
play ‘the godtrick’ (Haraway 1991: 191). readings creating a Hegelian synthesis from
Conceptual tools which can perform as binary oppositions. The purpose is neither
helpful thinking technologies in terms of to iron out differences, troubling clashes or
establishing transversal postdisciplinary tensions between theoretical stances and
conversations have been developed by worlding practices, nor to end up in a stale-
different scholars of posthumanities. An mate between opposing binary claims,
example is Haraway’s and Barad’s sugges- competing for a hegemonic position in the
tions about using the optical phenomenon analysis. The point is to undertake well-
of diffraction as a metaphor for a critical prepared moves beyond the comfort zones
thinking technology, which makes up an of differing theoretical stances, and to bring
alternative to the more conventional meta- these stances into productive, mutually
phor of reflection. A reflexive methodo- enriching and open-ended and world-
logy uses the mirror as a critical tool, making conversations.
Haraway notes (1997: 268), pinpointing Other examples of thinking technolo-
that this analytical strategy has its limita- gies, used by posthumanist scholars, to
tions when it comes to making a differ- establish postdisciplinary conversations
ence. The mirror as critical tool does not which blur, disrupt and deconstruct discip-
bring us beyond the static logic of the linary boundaries and hegemonies are
Same. In a mirror image, foreground and methodologies, conceived along the lines
background remain the same. By contrast, of Deleuzian philosophy such as nomad-
diffraction is a dynamic and complex ism  and rhizomatics. Methodological
process, implying a continuous ‘produc- consequences of nomadic rhizomatic
tion of difference patterns in the world, not approaches are for example carved out by
just of the same reflected – displaced – Rosi Braidotti, who underlines the import-
elsewhere’ (ibid.). ance of analytically ‘going in between differ-
The methodology of what along these ent discursive fields, passing through diverse
lines has been termed ‘diffractive reading’ spheres of intellectual discourse’ and be
can be illustrated by Barad’s reading of aware of how ‘theory today happens “in
quantum physicist Niels Bohr’s onto- transit”, moving on, passing through, creat-
epistemological theorizing of the apparati ing connections where things were previ-
for deciding on the phenomenon of light ously disconnected or seemed unrelated,
(as particle or wave) through Judith Butler’s where there seemed to be “nothing else to
theorizing of the performativity of language see”’ (2002: 173). Brought to bear on postdis-
and discourse, and vice versa, resulting in ciplinary work, this pinpointing of transit
a new discursive-material framework of and movement can be read as an encour-
posthumanist performativity (Barad 2003). agement never to rest in a disciplinary
A diffractive reading implies that the comfort zone. As discussed by Rebecca
conceptual-technological apparati of Coleman and Jessica Ringrose (2013), this

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTDISCIPLINARITY 335

approach is more and more being taken to from critical feminist perspectives and
bear on empirical research, including social work beyond them. I have also suggested
research. Here it implies that conceptual a distinction between post- and transdis-
frameworks should not be applied as discip- ciplinarity (Lykke 2010, 2011), based on
linarily canonized grids to be imposed on the ways in which the two terms have been
the material. While methodologies are used in some scholarly contexts. While
considered as performative and world- transdisciplinarity often signifies modes
making (Coleman and Ringrose 2013: 1), of working with knowledge production,
the material should be approached in such postdisciplinarity more often refers to
open-ended ways that what Deleuze calls modes of organizing this production.
‘non-preexistent concepts’ (Deleuze 1987: Sue-Ellen Case provides an example here,
vii) can be extracted from it (Coleman and when she uses the notion of postdisciplin-
Ringrose 2013: 10). arity to suggest ‘that the organizing struc-
In terms of conceptual genealogies, tures of disciplines themselves will not
postdisciplinarity has been less commonly hold’ (Case 2001: 150), comparing the
used than transdisciplinarity. However, discipline-disruptive potentials of inter-
some feminist scholars have, for example, sections of feminist theory and perform-
found it appropriate to signify a wished- ance studies.
for transformation of the disciplinary
university with the concept of postdiscip- See also Diffraction; Feminist Post-
linarity. I have argued for feminist studies humanities; In/human; Naturecultures.
as a post-discipline due to its radical claims
to deconstruct all disciplinary canons Nina Lykke

Thoughts reconfigure to engage the changing ecology.

Subatlantic, Ursula Biemann, 2015, video still

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
336 POSTGLACIAL

POSTGLACIAL She makes efforts to attune her eyes

to see underwater and fuse with
Annotated video script of the swarming Sea where the tiniest of
microbes operate on an inter-oceanic
Subatlantic
scale.
Westerly winds determine the climate on
the Island. Fog seeps into the mind’s corridors (1) The science fictional video narration
and the sea enters every fissure. She is in of Subatlantic (2015) follows a she-scient-
ist who is making instrumental observa-
charge of measuring fluctuations and send-
tions about a changing environment
ing the data to the lab on the coast. Logging
around the time of the last glacial
the freezing and melting, she minutely
melts 12,000 years ago, when the oceans
records her encounters with difference. All
rose 100 meters, through to the present
seems to follow a dynamic order: The winds, thawing of the Greenland ice sheets.
the streams, the birds, the sky. The scientific figure inhabits multiple
The faintness of change made it hard to temporalities spanning across eons.
detect, but the rocks witnessed a steady Spoken off-camera from a sub-Atlantic
rise of the Sea until one day all technical position, the post-glacial, pre-modern
equipment had to be moved further inland. narrative unfolds across the Subatlantic,
The coast sank into the Ocean for a thou- the latest climatic phase of the Holocene
sand years. The lab now lies submerged at we are currently experiencing. The
the bottom a hundred yards deep, together posthuman condition reconnects us to
with other dwellings of the Islanders. To do infinitely larger, untameable forces that
her science, she had to become a diver, animate extra-historical dimensions,
measuring a sinking contracting world. plunging us humans into deep time where
Only the Oceans are expanding. we have to index ourselves anew.

Underwater passages accumulate impersonal intelligence.

Subatlantic, Ursula Biemann, 2015, video still

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTGLACIAL 337

Ocean currents gather in the Caribbean ant processes are occurring between
swirling eastward and upward. The warm locations and invisible to our eyes. They
streams plunge Northern Europe into mild reference what Timothy Morton calls
winters. Reaching the Arctic Sea, the dense hyperobjects – very large diffused objects
salty water sinks to the deep-ocean floor that are permanently present but not
where it flows back to tropical regions. This localized in a material sense (global
process animates the global Ocean streams. warming, financial markets). Since hyper-
Circulation is dense in the submarine objects occur in much vaster temporalit-
rivers, and thick with nutrients. ies, they phase in and out of the shorter
human timeframe of perception and
The massive influx of arctic meltwater
withdraw from our visibility. They only
dilutes the salinity and impedes the sink to
exist in unpresentable dimensions, both
the Sea floor. First, the Ocean streams will
mathematically and allegorically. And yet
slow down before they stop altogether. Will they urgently need to enter the collective
England’s climate resemble Labrador’s? imaginary. The imaginary capacity is
There is questioning in the water. experiencing a significant expansion in
posthumanism. Along those lines, the
(2) Widely dispersed locations filmed on she-scientist’s examination is directed not
the Shetland Islands, Greenland’s Disco only to the physical world and atmo-
Bay and a tiny Caribbean Island are sphere that is engulfing her, but also to the
connected through the invisible Ocean thoughts that are formed, reconfigured or
streams, which determine the tempera- released under the changing conditions.
tures in the North Atlantic, sea and land. Excursions into the fold of these entangled
The magnitude and sensitive correlation landscapes produces a critical location
of these planetary processes are hard to that puts thought and imagination in
grasp, all the more so as the most signific- movement.

Ideas rush by like weather events.

Subatlantic, Ursula Biemann, 2015, video still

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
338 POSTGLACIAL

On board Explorer II she joins the bio- solidified an understanding of an abso-

prospecting team in search of marine lute, measurable materiality. A science of
genetic resources. She brings in the direct- the virtual, however, must be a science
ives for inter-species communication. The of intensities, as practised by the she-
International Seabed Authority is keen to scientist who explores the quality of
bring within the Oceanic Constitution any energies, waves, temperatures and pres-
new genetic materials extracted from deep sures. The posthuman condition with its
below. Particularly these extreme methane- volatile atmospheric climate is no longer
eating organisms. firmly placed in absolute matter; it flows
along formless virtual planes arising from
She practises a science of intensities.
unmeasurable, exhalable and constantly
Out in the weather, she studies the self-
reconfiguring qualities.
organizing flows of matter and energy and
the thresholds at which sudden phase Masses of microorganisms have been
transitions occur in physical systems, for trapped in the polar ice sheets for longer
instance from a solid to a liquid state. This than human time. Locked in frozen layers,
process involves divers, videographers and a universe of ancient creatures awaits
metaphysicians. another chance at life. Some are 400,000
years old and still alive. Rumours say they
(3) Here in the vicinity of Manuel
have been involved in some lateral trans-
DeLanda, the scientific analysis of the
actual and the virtual introduces us to the genetic activities, and are now floating
idea of moving between a multiplicity of outside of history.
states that adhere to different models of From the dissolving icescape, tons of
thought. Whereas the actual is extended microbes make their way back into the
in metric space and linear time, the virtual liquid environment, reshaping the chem-
is intensive and formless. Out of conveni- istry of the oceans and the atmosphere.
ence, science has long focused on and The meltwater bears new genetic material

Incubating ideas are finally released from the binding force of the pack.
Subatlantic, Ursula Biemann, 2015, video still

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTHUMAN CRITICAL THEORY 339

that the world hasn’t seen. Released from philosophical critique of the Western
the deep-freeze, they begin to assemble Humanist ideal of ‘Man’ as the allegedly
genetic futures. Apprehension flushes into universal measure of all things, whereas the
the cold water and blends with new matter, latter rests on the rejection of species hier-
intensely communicating with fragile archy and human exceptionalism. They are
marine systems. equally relevant discourses, but they refer
to different theoretical and philosophical
(4) With the melting of the Arctic ice genealogies and engender different polit-
comes the steady release of massive new ical stances. Their convergence in posthu-
genetic materials with which humanity is
man critical thought produces a chain of
not acquainted. The ice allows microbes
theoretical, social and political effects that
to enjoy a sort of immortality, allowing
is more than the sum of its parts and points
creatures that have long disappeared from
the planet to someday return. With the
to a qualitative leap in new conceptual
Earth’s sixth mass extinction under way, directions (Braidotti 2013).
the logic of this evolutionary strategy The relevance of posthuman critical
becomes comprehensible: preserving theory is enhanced by the contextual
genetic blueprints by storing them in urgency of the Anthropocene condition,
deep-freeze for a future re-entry. which, read in the light of Felix Guattari’s
Evolutionary biologists estimate that the Three Ecologies (2000), becomes an envir-
total biomass of the microorganisms in onmental, social-economical, as well as
and beneath the ice sheet may amount to affective and psychical phenomenon of
be a thousand times that of all the humans unprecedented proportions. The combina-
on Earth. To be posthuman increasingly tion of fast technological advances on the
means to relocate in a new genetic planet- one hand and growing economic and
ary milieu. Rather speculative than social inequalities on the other makes for
predictive, the she-scientist – become a conflict-ridden landscape marked by
diver, videographer and metaphysician – violent and inhumane power relations.
engages in the inevitable transformation There are many challenges for post-
of the chemical and genetic composition human critical theory: the first one is to
of the earth by reconfiguring its historical acknowledge that subjectivity is not the
terms, reworking its tempi, resetting its exclusive prerogative of Anthropos. This
landmarks, and rerouting its premises.
means that it is not linked to transcen-
dental reason and that it is unhinged from
See also Animism (Limulus); Ecosophy;
the dialectics of recognition. Secondly, the
Naturecultures; Hypersea; Planetary;
challenge is to develop a dynamic and
Speculative Posthumanism; Vertigo Sea.
sustainable notion of vitalist materialism
Ursula Biemann that encompasses non-human agents,
ranging from plants and animals to tech-
nological artefacts. Thirdly, it means to
enlarge the frame and scope of ethical
POSTHUMAN CRITICAL THEORY accountability along the transversal lines of
post-anthropocentric relations. In other
Posthuman critical theory unfolds at the words, the challenge is to create assemblages
intersection between post-humanism on of human and non-human actors.
the one hand and post-anthropocentrism To meet these manifold challenges
on the other. The former proposes the posthuman critical theory draws from

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
340 POSTHUMAN CRITICAL THEORY

two sources: feminist theory and Deleuze Posthuman critical theory consequently
and Guattari’s neo-materialist philosophy. embraces the eco-sophical co-creation of
The combination of feminist and neo- the world – our terrestrial, grounded loca-
materialist philosophies allows for an tion – by recognizing the specific abilities
anti-humanist and post-anthropocentric and capacities of anthropomorphic and
stance, which can innovate and invigorate non-anthropomorphic beings alike. The
discussions of naturalism, the environ- expanded definition of life also allows for
ment, ecological justice and the shifting the inclusion of and interaction with tech-
status of the human. This results in the nological artefacts and thus accounts for
rejection of dualism. It is important here to technological mediation (‘machinic
emphasize the feminist notion of embod- autopoiesis’). This idea discards the
ied and embedded locations, which I take nature–culture divide and replaces it with
as the original manifestation of the concept a philosophy of relationality and multiple
of radical immanence. The encounter of interconnections. The embrace of the tech-
feminist theory with neo-materialist philo- nological realm resists the over-coding of
sophy (sometimes called neo-Spinozist technology by the financial profit prin-
materialism) results in the reappraisal of ciple, which is the axiom of advanced
the notion of immanence, as opposed to capitalism.
transcendental universalism (Deleuze If it is a challenge to acknowledge that
1988b; 1990; Braidotti 1991, 1994; Gatens subjectivity is not the exclusive prerogative
and Lloyd 1999). Posthuman critical of the human, then a posthuman theory of
theory can thus be described as vital- the subject emerges as an empirical project
materialist, embodied and embedded, and of experimenting with what contemporary,
immanent. Elsewhere, I have described bio-technologically mediated bodies are
this way of thinking as ‘nomadic’ (Braidotti capable of ‘becoming’. The pursuit of one’s
2011a, 2011b). freedom to become is framed by a neo-
The defining features of posthuman Spinozist ethics of joy or affirmation, which
critical theory are then that it rests on a indexes the processes of becoming onto a
neo-materialist philosophy of immanence, relational bond to a multiplicity of others
which assumes that all matter is one whose well-being affect one’s own.
(monism); that matter is intelligent and Posthuman critical theory supports the
self-organizing (autopoiesis); that the composition of nomadic subjectivities
subject is not unitary but nomadic; and whose relational capacities are multifold
that subjectivity includes relations to a and open to non-anthropomorphic
multitude of non-human ‘others’. In this elements. The ethics of the posthuman
framework ‘life’ is not only defined as bios, subject is zoe-centred egalitarianism, based
but also as a zoe-centred, non-human on respect for the non-human, as the vital
process (Braidotti 2006b). Posthuman force that cuts across previously segregated
critical theory celebrates the diversity of species, categories and domains. Neo-
life – as zoe – as non-hierarchical matter, materialist immanence requires a collabor-
which recognizes the respective degrees of ative morality in the sense of ethical
intelligence and creativity of all organisms. accountability for the sustainability of these
This implies that thinking is not the relational assemblages or nomadic compos-
prerogative of humans alone, which allows itions of posthuman subjectivity (Braidotti
for a form of relational and collaborative 2002, 2006a). The non-profit experiments
ethics. with intensive modes of posthuman

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTHUMAN CRITICAL THEORY 341

subjectivity actualize the virtual possibilit- Methodologically, posthuman critical

ies of a nomadic, relational self that func- theory rejects any form of nostalgia for
tions in a nature–culture continuum and is humanism, that is to say the vision of the
technologically mediated. Not surprisingly, human as the enlightened ‘Man of reason’
this non-profit, experimental approach to (Lloyd 1984). Both in Deleuze’s philosophy
different practices of subjectivity runs and in feminist epistemology, the non-
against the spirit of contemporary capital- nostalgic approach is cultivated through the
ism, fuelled by a notion of possessive indi- method and the pedagogical tactic of anti-
vidualism based on quantitative options oedipal de-familiarization. This entails un-
(Macpherson 1962). The theory of posthu- learning old habits of thought, and the
man subjectivity runs precisely in the forms of masculinist and Eurocentric
opposite direction towards non-profit representations they sustain. Such a meth-
experimentations with intensity. odological process goes hand-in-hand with
As a consequence, the task of critical the analysis of power relations, through the
thought is defined as both critical and cartographic politics of location mentioned
creative. The critical side is operationalized above. The point of cartographies is to
through cartographies of the power account for and learn to relinquish unearned
(potestas) relations at work in the produc- privileges and implicit power privileges. The
tion of discourses and social practices, method of dis-identification from the famil-
with special emphasis on their effects upon iar is one of the most productive points
subject-formation. The creative side enlists of contact between neo-materialism and
the resources of the imagination and feminist theory (Braidotti 2016a). Keeping
proposes a new alliance of critique with firmly in mind the nomadic aim of speaking
creativity, philosophy with the arts, for the truth to power and of de-territorializing
purpose of learning to think differently, philosophy from the despotic machine that
inventing new concepts and actualizing has coded it over time, posthuman critical
alternatives to the dominant humanistic theory emphasizes the importance of learn-
vision of the subject. ing to think differently about what we are in
Neo-materialist nomadic thought the process of becoming.
proposes the parallelism of philosophy, art The meta-methodological angle is
and the sciences, by arguing that thinking crucial to posthuman critical theory
is the counterpart of the embodied subject’s which, being a practical philosophy, pays
ability to enter into multiple modes of rela- special attention to the criteria needed to
tion. ‘Thought’ is consequently the expres- set up experiments with both virtual and
sion of ontological relationality, that is to concrete applications. The general concepts
say of the power (potentia) to affect and get operationalized in a series of methodo-
be affected (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). logical guidelines. The first guideline is a
Furthermore, thinking is about the creation practical, problem-oriented approach to
of new concepts in that it pursues the actu- philosophical thinking, which is open to
alization of intensive or virtual relations. non-human agents and factors, including
Posthuman critical thought can thus be technological mediation. Secondly, we
understood as a multi-directional philo- need non-linearity or nomadic thinking
sophy of relational ethics. In other words, which entails both putting the creative
posthuman critical theory foregrounds a powers of the imagination to work and
relational ethics of joy and a politics of the strategy of de-familiarization
affirmation. (Braidotti 2013). Thirdly, a trans- and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
342 POSTHUMAN DISABILITY AND DISHUMAN STUDIES

supra-disciplinary approach to the produc- POSTHUMAN DISABILITY AND

tion of knowledge is necessary. Such an
approach is nomadic in relation to discip-
DISHUMAN STUDIES
linary power and devoted to experimenta- In a recent paper by Goodley, Lawthom
tion rather than the repetition of tradition. and Runswick-Cole (2014) we asked: what
Fourth comes cartographic accuracy, with does it mean to be human in the twenty-
the corollary of ethical accountability. first century and in what ways does disabil-
Finally, posthuman critical theory ity enhance these meanings? In addressing
embraces the combination of critique with these questions we found ourselves
creativity, including a flair for paradoxes working through the entanglements of
and the recognition of the specificity of art nature, society, technology, medicine,
practices. biopower and culture, particularly inspired
Politically speaking, posthuman critical by Rosi Braidotti’s work on the posthuman
theory is a practical philosophy that aims condition (Braidotti 2003, 2006b, 2013).
at composing a ‘missing people’, that is to But how does disability speak to the
say it creates a plane of encounter for posthuman (and vice versa)? We under-
subjects who share concerns and desires. stand disability as a political category, an
Critical thinking needs to construct its identity and a moment of relational ethics.
community around the shared affects and Our community of scholars and activists –
concepts of collectively drawn cartograph- critical disability studies – are, we believe,
ies of power. The plane of composition of perfectly at ease with the posthuman
‘we’ – a community of nomadic and because disability has always contravened
accountable scholars – constitutes the the traditional classical humanist concep-
shareable workbench of critical posthuman tion of what it means to be human (see
scholars. It expresses the affirmative, Goodley, Lawthom and Runswick-Cole
ethical dimension of becoming-posthuman 2014). But, we argue, disability also invites
as a gesture of collective self-styling. It a critical analysis of the posthuman (and
actualizes a community that is not bound for that matter humanism). We draw on
negatively by shared vulnerability, the guilt one of Braidotti’s posthuman themes
of ancestral communal violence, or the developed in her 2013 text: life beyond the
melancholia of unpayable ontological self. We illustrate the ways in which disabil-
debts, but rather by a collaborative ethics ity epitomizes a posthuman enhancement
of becoming. Posthuman critical thinkers of the self while, simultaneously, demand-
are bonded by the compassionate acknow- ing recognition of the self in the humanist
ledgment of their interdependence register. This leads us neatly to our recent
with multiple, human and non-human, work in which we have started to develop a
others. theory of DisHuman Studies (see Goodley
See also Critical Posthumanism; Anthro- et  al. 2014; Goodley, Runswick-Cole and
pocene; Transhumanism/Posthumanism; Liddiard, 2016) which, we contend, simul-
Insurgent Posthumanism Feminist Post- taneously acknowledges the possibilities
humanities; In-human; the Joy; Monster/ offered by disability to trouble, reshape
the Unhuman; Neo/New Materialism; and re-fashion the human (crip and
Process Ontologies. posthuman ambitions) while at the same
time asserting disabled people’s humanity
Rosi Braidotti (normative and humanistic desires).

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTHUMAN DISABILITY AND DISHUMAN STUDIES 343

Humanism and the Posthuman being of our present ethno-class (i.e.

Condition Western bourgeois) conception of the
human, Man, which over-represents itself
The human is a self-aggrandizing, abstract as if it were the human itself, and that of
ideal and symbol of classical humanity that securing the well-being, and therefore the
was born in Europe ‘predicated on eight- full cognitive and behavioral autonomy of
eenth and nineteenth-century renditions the human species itself/ourselves’ (ibid.:
of classical Antiquity and Italian 260). We read Wynter’s response here as
Renaissance ideals’ (Braidotti 2013: 13) and deliberately humanistic and in concert
shaped, more recently, through modernist with the new humanism that Frantz Fanon
and capitalist mouldings. ‘Humanity’, (1993) had in mind: an expansionist
Braidotti notes, ‘is very much a male of the reclaiming of the category of the human.
species: it is a he’ (ibid.: 24). Moreover, ‘he A political and practical response to this
is white, European, handsome and able- over-representation has involved excluded
bodied’ (ibid.), ‘an ideal of bodily perfec- others of the empirical human world
tion’ (ibid.: 13), ‘implicitly assumed to be seeking recognition through the normative
masculine, white, urbanized, speaking legal frameworks that respect the right to
a standard language, heterosexually live as a human being and pan-national
inscribed in a reproductive unit and a full declarations cherishing this phenomenon
citizen of a recognised polity’ (65), ‘a called the human. We could cite here, for
rational animal endowed with language’ example, the opportunities for humanist
(141). And to this we would add, the valued recognition offered by the United Nations
human of our times is a neoliberal-ableist Convention on the Rights of Persons with
citizen, able and willing to work (Goodley Disabilities. We agree with Braidotti (2013)
2014). This narrow humanist conception of that these frameworks continue to offer
the human has historically excluded many. powerful forms of recognition and appar-
For the postcolonial writer Sylvia Wynter atus for agitation for many people who
(2003: 260) this category of excluded Other understandably seek to be included in the
includes refugees, economic migrants, the humanist human category.
criminalized majority of Black and dark- Posthuman analyses appear to inter-
skinned Latino inner-city males and the vene in rather different ways in response to
ever-expanding global, transracial category the dominance of humanism. One charac-
of the homeless and jobless. To Wynter’s list ter trait of posthuman analyses is the
of outsiders we would add disabled people. rejection of the human category as an old-
Wynter argues that the human category, fashioned, elitist and narrow phenomenon
forged as it is in the industries and and, in its place, an opening up of new
foundries of Western modernity, is actually forms of subjectivity, relationality and
a ‘central over-representation’ that ‘enables sociality associated, for example, with post-
the interests, reality, and well-being of the human conceptions such as the cyborg
empirical human world to continue to be (Haraway), rhizomes (Deleuze and Guattari),
imperatively subordinated to those of the animal-human fusions (Chen), and non-
now globally hegemonic ethnoclass world human monsters and chimeras (Shildrick).
of ‘Man’, (2003: 262, italics added). This Similar responses can be found in the
leads Wynter to describe the struggle of our disability community. The developments of
new millennium as the ‘one between the crip theory, activism, art, community and
ongoing imperative of securing the well- politics (see McRuer 2006) celebrate the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
344 POSTHUMAN DISABILITY AND DISHUMAN STUDIES

disruptive anti-humanist potential of the self as an extended, distributed, inter-

disability to create new ways of living, connected and relational entity ‘embodied
loving and labouring. Disability is recon- and embedded’ (ibid.). A posthuman
ceived as a place – and a crip space – to subject embraces ‘affirmative politics’ which
contemplate the ways in which the human combine ‘critique with creativity’ in the
being is being reshaped through processes pursuit of alternative ways of living with
of culture, technology, politics and glob- one another (ibid.). This notion of the
alization. Disability is a quintessentially extended self recalls Braidotti’s (2006b)
posthuman condition because of its crip process ontology. Rather than conceptual-
potential. izing ontology as an internalized
It would appear that the politics of phenomenon of an individual subject,
disability enjoys a complex relationship we are asked to think of the kinds of con-
with humanism and the posthuman. We nection between and within one another
have come across this tension before. We that create a relational ontology. Such con-
are struck by (and share) the ambivalence nections can be found in the disability
that Braidotti’s posthuman positionality movement, where disabled activists have
demonstrates in relation to the humanist developed their own disability commu-
human. In her 2006 paper (2006b) and nities and forms of resistance that have
2013 book she necessarily, we believe, created new posthuman assemblages of
leaves a space for claiming the human- crip collectivity, identity and resistance.
ist human (for example, the power of Similarly, people with the label of intellec-
human rights discourse as a framework tual disabilities (who would previously
of recognition) whilst always celebrating have been labelled as mentally retarded)
our posthuman qualities (for example, explode this pathological label through
the merging of human, animal and envir- their collective politics of self-advocacy
onmental politics as a post-social imper- that contests their marginalization and
ative). We view this as a disavowal of problematizes professional and institu-
the humanist human – in the classic tional deficit knowledge. The global self-
psychoanalytic sense – of simultaneously advocacy movement captures an emerging
desiring and rejecting the human. This posthuman assemblage of disability politics
act of disavowal resonates with those of – a political commons that stretches across
us in the critical disability studies and national borders – forming a global multi-
disability politics. tude (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004). Just as
the self is extended so too the self is desired.
The British organization of disabled people
A Posthuman Theme: Life Beyond – Disabled People Against the Cuts (DPAC )
– appeal in their campaigns againt the
the Self
human rights violations of the British
In The Posthuman, Braidotti (2013) devel- government’s austerity policies. Disabled
ops the first of a number of posthuman activists have fundamentally shifted,
themes. The first, life beyond the self, seeks shaped and changed the policy landscape
to develop a new theory of the human in the UK to ensure that anti-discriminatory
subject that ‘takes stock of the posthuman legislation is in place. These examples of
turn and hence acknowledges the decline activism draw upon humanist discourses
of Humanism’ (2013: 51). This decline of universal rights and self in search of
should be celebrated because it opens up recognition. Indeed, thinking back to the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTHUMAN ETHICS 345

politics of self-advocacy of people with ● keeps in mind the pernicious and

intellectual disabilities, many groups adopt stifling impacts of ableism, which we
the moniker of People First, which is a very define as a discriminatory processes
humanistic title. Disability politics work the that idealize a narrow version of
edges of posthuman and humanist politics. humanness and reject more diverse
forms of humanity;
● seeks to promote transdisciplinary
Conclusion: A DisHuman Manifesto forms of empirical and theoretical
Posthuman disability studies seek to enquiry that breaks disciplinary
capture the disruptive and affirmative orthodoxies, dominances and
interventions of disability. Our sense is boundaries;
that the conditions of disability and the ● foregrounds dis/ability as the complex
posthuman necessarily share a disavowal for interrogating oppression and
of the human. This has led us to develop furthering a posthuman politics of
DisHuman Studies which, we contend, affirmation.
simultaneously acknowledges the possibil-
To join our assemblage, please visit www.
ities offered by disability to trouble, reshape
dishuman.com.
and re-fashion the human (crip and
posthuman ambitions) while at the same See also Joy; Process Ontologies; Non-
time asserting disabled people’s humanity Human Agency
(normative and humanistic desires). We
finish, therefore, with our DisHuman Dan Goodley, Rebecca
manifesto, which we hope captures the Lawthom, Kirsty Liddiard and
potential of a posthuman disability studies. Katherine Runswick-Cole
DisHuman studies:

● unpacks and troubles dominant

notions of what it means to be human; POSTHUMAN ETHICS
● celebrates the disruptive potential of
Posthuman Ethics develops from a stream
disability to trouble these dominant
of philosophy along the trajectory of
notions;
Spinoza’s ethics, Nietzsche’s concept of will
● acknowledges that being recognized as as liberative freedom from institutes of
a regular normal human being is power and poststructural continental philo-
desirable, especially for those people sophy’s expansion of these theorists. The
who have been denied access to the basic premise, from Spinoza, sees the world,
category of the human; expansive into the entire cosmos, as inter-
● recognizes disability’s intersectional connected. Individuality is understood as
relationship with other identities that dividuation where each entity exerts force
have been considered less than human or expression that affects other entities and
(associated with class, gender, sexuality, is simultaneously affected by the expressiv-
ethnicity, age); ity of other entities. The nature of these
● aims to develop theory, research, forces of expression and affection is not
art and activism that push at the known in advance. This emphasizes that
boundaries of what it means to be each entity is entirely unique to itself based
human and disabled; on the quality of its specific expressions and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
346 POSTHUMAN ETHICS

the reception of these is a comingling of the ism, anti-racism, queer theory, diffability
expression’s uniqueness with the absorbency theory and animal abolition theory, among
and capacity for and nature of affectation of others, which is currently known as inter-
the other. This always happens within a sectional politics. However, ultimately
mesh so is neither monodirectional nor posthuman ethics seeks relations based on
oppositional between only two entities but imperceptible and infinite difference, that is,
is always multiple and multidirectional. not based on anything in advance and based
Similarly an entity may be part of a whole, a on all possible expressions and affects.
whole or a collection of individuals. Posthuman ethics knows only difference
Relations, phenomena and thus ‘life’ occurs and differentiation so both the human
not based on the ontological definition of template for life and human discourse’s
what a thing is, nor what its value is within capacity for measuring life are made
an arboreal hierarchical structure of ‘living redundant. In this sense it is also an ahuman
things’, which the humanities and life project as it refutes the privilege of human-
sciences seek to empirically and exhaust- ity and like ahuman theory advocates for
ively know, but occurs between things as an human extinction and abolition of use of
event of relations. Via Deleuze’s work on non-humans. However, unlike many uses of
Spinoza, Guattari’s work on ecosophies and the word posthuman and ahuman, posthu-
Serres’ work on nature, posthuman ethics man ethics is not a temporal project toward
disavows the fetishization of technology a future, be it dystopic or utopic. It also seeks
and cyborgism, which overvalue human life to address the past as a collective of minor-
as a concept over lived realities of all earth itarian memories in tandem with mono-
occupants, seen in transhumanism. lithic majoritarian history to evince that we
Posthuman ethics explores and exploits the have always been confronted with the capa-
radical manifestations of difference already city for posthuman ethical interactions in
(and possibly always) manifested within all relation to dominance and difference.
lives, human, animal, vegetal and ultimately Posthuman ethics can be applied, in seeking
cosmic in that each interaction between activist modes of interaction, to both imme-
entities is absolutely specific and has diate, historically passed and projected
concrete effects on both the formation of futures in constant experimentation with
lived reality and its future expressions. For alternate ways of relation that allow us to
this reason posthuman ethics does not rethink memory and futures. This experi-
differentiate between discourse and materi- mentation is crucial to the project in that
ality as the powers of expression of both are posthuman ethics are creative, imaginative
actualized in the lives of all, human and require a certain kind of frightening
and non-human. Towards an ethical post- and hopeful good faith as definite outcomes
humanism, activism and actions which seek and so also power driven hypotheses are
to open access for the other to express freely not viable as they presume the nature of
are sought, which address and allow to relations and their involved entities in
flourish the difference between entities. This advance.
refuses the tendency in human discourse to
allow freedom through equivalence, See also Ecosophy; Feminist Post-
subsumation, comparison or fetishization humanities; Planetary; Posthuman Critical
of difference. In this regard posthuman Theory; Posthumanism.
ethics begins with drawing together minor-
itarian political movements such as femin- Patricia MacCormack

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTHUMAN LITERATURE AND CRITICISM 347

POSTHUMAN LITERATURE AND The idea of memory as creation under-

stands literature as an agent of conceiving
CRITICISM
new conceptual personae defined by their
The posthuman condition is marked by relationality and outward-bound intercon-
rampant outsourced, offshore exploitation nections, in particular with non-human
of labour, invisible ecological degradation others, including the species-other
that unravels over decades and even (McHugh 2011), nature (Mentz 2015b),
centuries in lands distant from most of the and landscape (Allewaert 2013). Given the
consumers of extracted natural resources, particularity of our location and know-
and a growing number of displaced ledge production, our understanding of
persons and diasporic populations. The literature is always partial and limited.
rippling repercussions of these pressing Universalism and liberal individualism
challenges are of a planetary scale. This promoted by a canonical, humanist tradi-
puts into question the adequacy and rele- tion of literary arts therefore do not stand.
vance of humanist representational and As the subject is now understood in terms
structural conventions in literature and of its relation with multiple others, it
criticism. involves uplifting the once stable and com-
Posthuman literary criticism (Taylor placent subject from the familiar in a pro-
2013; Clarke 2008; Thomsen 2013; cess of dis-identification. Dis-identification
Badmington 2011; Lee 2014; Sheehan refers to an active distancing from familiar,
2015; Dinello 2005) is an exercise in trans- conventional ways of thinking and repres-
disciplinarity. It introduces to critical entation. It also calls for a revision of
inquiry monistic vitalism that celebrates normative values, such as sexual and racial
the act of thinking as a creation of new differences stipulated and enforced by
concepts. The interspersing of disciplines dominant institutions. Dis-identification
depends on de-familiarization with accus- can be a painful process of fear, insecurity
tomed habits of thought under the current and nostalgia as it involves the ridding of
disciplinary split in the humanist academy. cherished habits of thought and represent-
Literature is crucial in this joining of ation. But it can be productive in the spirit
disciplines as it complements scientific of endurance and creation in affirmative
inquiry less prone or open to processes of ethics.
becoming or differentiation in a Deleuzian In the tradition of Barthes’ poststruc-
monistic ontology. turalist thought, the task of criticism is to
In posthuman literary criticism, creativ- go beyond flat repetition and slavish fidel-
ity and critique is a concurrent, dynamic ity to the text in the search for its ‘Truth’
practice that activates, de-territorializes (Barthes 1975). Rather, criticism should
stable identities, and forms affirmative and enact processes of subject formation
alternative subjects. It rejects linearity and through strategies of dis-identification
questions the existence of Truth and cent- and defamiliarization. This differs from
rality of Man in the text. Linearity in the criticism of power locations in the tradi-
form of blind deference to the authority of tion of negative dialectics. Critique and
established narratives of the past prevents creativity becomes praxis that actualizes
the creation of new conceptual personae the formation and realization of alternat-
and figurations. This calls for a non-linear ive, affirmative figurations that counter
vision of memory as imagination, creation dominant, majoritarian representations of
as becoming. the subject.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
348 POSTHUMAN LITERATURE AND CRITICISM

Posthuman literary criticism engages To Deleuze, the majoritarian view of

strands of critical inquiry in New the scientist remains confined in the
Humanities as a response to the intercon- outmoded model of the ‘Man of Reason’ in
nected global challenges of ecological crises, the Enlightenment tradition of ‘Royal
gender and racial inequality, and conten- science.’ In first-world Western nations,
tious findings and experimentations in life this prototype doubles as the characteristic
sciences, biomedicine, energy sciences and of the quintessential citizen. The formation
digital technology. The growing body of of a new vision of subjectivity is thus an
scholarship in the theorization (Nixon issue of generational responsibility and
2011; Huggan and Tiffan 2015; Feder 2014; accountability that answers to the chal-
Westling 2013) and practice of ecocriticism lenges of social injustice in the posthuman
(Buell 2009; Heise 2011; Thornber 2012) age of technological capitalism. Ultimately,
responds to the current ecological crisis it involves the revision of the role of the
aggravated by neoliberal capitalism. It also scientist and his practice, and the public
examines literary works (Atwood 2013; O. perception and reception of his work.
Butler 1993; Ozeki 2004) that depart from Deleuze and Guattari delineate the
anthropomorphism to develop imminent differences of ‘Royal’ and ‘minor’ science as
forms of identification of becoming-earth methodology in A Thousand Plateaus:
or becoming-imperceptible. Moreover, it
studies fictional works that explore the In the field of interaction of the two
ethics of interaction between humans and sciences, the ambulant sciences confine
themselves to inviting problems whose
non-human others (Coetzee 2004; Martel
solution is tied to a whole set of collective,
2003; Graham 2009). The posthuman
nonscientific activities but whose scientific
subject is then a collective assemblage of
solution depends, on the contrary, on
multiple figurations in the spirit of collect- royal science in the way it has transformed
ive endurance in times of global environ- the problem by introducing it into this
mental devastation. theorematic apparatus and its organiza-
Under the framework of posthuman tion of work.
critical theory, feminist and postcolonial 1987: 413
literary criticism of the poststructuralist
tradition are updated (Ponzanesi and Posthuman literary criticism proposes a
Merolla 2005; Minh-ha 2012; Franklin feminist, postcolonial, third-world ‘minor
2014) especially in relation to the rise of science’ (Chen 2010; Harding 2008; Tsing
global, digital citizenship in the financial, 2011) as an ethically transformative
algorithmic and technologically mediated inquiry which is not bound to economic
capitalism today (Eggers 2013; McCarthy imperatives or coercions of advanced
2015). A posthuman variant of feminist capitalism and its cognitive market inter-
and postcolonial criticism studies literary ventions into living matter. The concept of
works that reflect on how technology ‘minor science’ can be borrowed to read
prompts or hinders subject revision and works of fiction (Ghosh 2001; Ondaatje
formation, and the extent to which it 2001; Kincaid 2001; Kingsolver 2008) that
encourages radical dis-engagement from reflect on imperialist and patriarchal
dominant gender and racial assemblages implications of majoritarian science. Such
and categorical differences (Okorafor fictional works (Thayil 2012; Ishiguro
2015; Adichie 2013; Shteyngart 2010; Diaz 2006; Barnes 2007) also propose new
2008; Cole 2012). definitions and delineations of the normal

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTHUMAN MUSEUM PRACTICES 349

and pathological, and the reconfiguration human imagination; they are also the
and imagination of the human body. emergent effects of contingent and hetero-
geneous enactments, and performances
See also Joy; Earth; Ecohorror; (Material)
comprising both human and non-human
Ecocriticism; Neocolonial; Literature of
actants (see Hodder 2012). To illustrate the
Liberation.
potential for the re-framing of human
subject approaches and their translation
Carolyn Lau
into ontological and posthuman curatorial
frameworks, I use by way of example a
green plastic bucket, an item from Museum
Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfire collec-
POSTHUMAN MUSEUM tion to eloquently perform this task
PRACTICES (Hansen and Griffiths 2012). The Black
Saturday bushfires in Victoria on 7
In a more-than human world, museums February 2009 were Australia’s worst
as custodians of cultural memory and as natural disaster.
trusted information sources are ideally The green bucket is framed around Bill
placed to concretely re-work human Putt’s autobiographical accounts of
subject positions and frame and promote survival where the bucket is used to recall
posthuman theories and practices of life and recite his last-ditch attempts to save
(Cameron 2015) through curatorial prac- his house from the impending furnace.
tice. Natural history and history museums The collections record describes the object
for example frame specific subject posi- as a ‘green plastic garden bucket, melted on
tions and relations between humans, one side and missing the handle. The spout
human others, non-humans and techno- is still visible. Traces of dried mud adhere
logy through exhibition and collections to the surface.’ While the bucket’s cura-
work that enact particular ways of concep- torial interpretation acknowledges the
tualizing and acting in the world. While subjectivities of this event and its descrip-
these patterns and practices are reconstit- tion gestures towards its materiality and
uted over time as different ontologies mix form, these human subject-orientated
and merge, object concepts, modes of frames promote the bucket as a static
collecting, ordering and exhibiting are representation in service of the human
principally understood in terms of human social. In doing so its curatorial framing
subject/object relations (with the exception denies the other material, discursive, tech-
of Indigenous collections as a consequence nological, biological and non-human
of Indigenous curatorial agency). aspects of the green bucket agential status.
Social history collections, for example When we begin to see our world differ-
when placed within museological frame- ently as entangled with other people and
works, advance human-centred interpret- animate, inanimate things, these human
ive approaches that focus on the social, subject/object-based museum practices
ideological and cultural constructions of appear incongruous, even deceptive.
the human subject (identity, cultural signi- Untying human subject-based under-
ficance, historical events and social standings of the bucket as a bounded ‘object’
biographies; Felder, Duineveld and Van and as ‘artefact’ requires its re-ascription in
Assche 2015). Collections, however, are posthuman terms as ‘thingness’ and as
much more than just products of the ‘composition’. The attribution of thingness

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
350 POSTHUMAN MUSEUM PRACTICES

Bucket – Strathewen, 7 February 2009 (Bushfire Damaged). COPYRIGHT MUSEUM VICTORIA/ CC BY

(LICENSED AS ATTRIBUTION 4.0 INTERNATIONAL).1

is reminiscent of Heidegger’s (1971) propos- discursive, social, scientific, human, non-

ition that our being in the world is of a human, natural and cultural factors (see
thingly nature where things are not separate Barad 2007). The first task in its ontological
from us, rather things all function in rela- refashioning is to re-work the humanisms
tion to each other (Hodder 2012: 28). I, that hold the bucket’s objecthood and inter-
however, re-work Heidegger’s thingly world, pretation in place. Disrupting these norm-
to that of ‘thingness’ to refer to the object as ative humanisms and the agential relations
an extended and dispersed spatial and organized around Bill, his experiences and
temporal thing made up of conative and actions that currently underlie our under-
ontologically diverse vital elements that standing of the green plastic bucket neces-
includes the non-human. I also reframe the sitates the disassembling of these relations
object as ‘composition’ to refer to its distrib- and their reconstitution into and through a
uted performativity incorporating material, metanomically diverse list that represents

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTHUMAN MUSEUM PRACTICES 351

the bundles of material, technical, concep- new materialisms (Bennett 2010) and
tual, ecological, social and emotional relevant technical, scientific and historical
components that make up its distributed information. The plastic of which the
assemblage. This assortment of conative bucket is made comprises a series of tight
things comprises not only human bodies interdependences from its historical gene-
and the human subject, Bill Putt, his bodily alogy in respect to the development of
actions and his stories; but also its other plastic, its human actants such as civil
multifarious elements: the bucket’s engineers, and its sequences of production
processes of production, its geographical from its materials (carbon, oil, polymer) to
location, its extended histories from the molten plastic, pressure and injection
deep past to its museological ascription, and moulding. By gathering together the
its material and non-human features and actants that make up the ‘composition’ and
form. To this end, the list comprises plastic, re-assembling them in new types of rela-
carbon, hydrogen, oil, coal, polymers, mud, tions we can consider the performative
fire, moulds, digital code, climate change, effects of their interdependencies and
temperature, wind speed, Strathewen, affordances overall as a distributive agency
Victoria, 7 February 2009, mud brick house, (see Bennett 2010: viii). With the primary
failed water pump, curators, collection agency of fire, for example, its affordances,
managers, documentation procedures and including its physical and chemical proper-
so forth, some of whom were previously ties, refer to a series of tight interdepend-
invisible in its formal object description. ences that exhibit different temporalities,
From this ontologically diverse list of conat- clusterings, tautness and enabling effects
ive elements, Bill and his subjectivities that cohere in certain ways around the
therefore become just one of many actants bucket. For example, temperatures above
that intermingle with the other components 40 degrees Celsius, climate change as an
of the composition. In doing so I draw agency afforded by humans, interacted
inspiration from the argument of Olsen with other affordances such as wind speed
et al. (2012) that people, objects, materiality and the rapid oxidation of the Australian
and the discursive do not operate in ontolo- bush in the exothermic chemical process of
gically distinctive realms. combustion, releasing heat, light and
The list also operates as a mechanism smoke that enabled the Kilmore East fire to
for re-ascribing each of its components as emerge and converge on Bill Putt’s prop-
‘actants’ (vital subjects). This task re-works erty and the bucket. This sequence is locked
agency away from the human to acknow- into a series of other folded, entangled and
ledge the bucket’s multiple agencies includ- embedded relations (organic and non-
ing its materialities, physical form and organic vitalities, discourses and material-
multifarious discursive and affective ities), a failed water pump, the bucket’s
framing (i.e. scientific, historical, cultural, form and spout as an affordance to hold
ideological, thoughts, desires). and pour water, the chemical composition
In order to attribute agencies and of plastic combined with radiant heat and
affordances to each of the bucket’s elements its molten effects, Bill’s fear of loss, dying
(for example biological, elemental, ecolo- livestock, burning buildings and the act of
gical processes, technical and technological running. As a ‘composition’ the green
processes, human actions, thoughts, bucket is no longer a static thing; rather it
desires), I draw on literature in the post- emerges through multiple locations, and as
humanities (Braidotti 2013; Hodder 2012), the effect of its distribution across many

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
352 POSTHUMAN RIGHTS, A MICROPOLITICS OF

diverse actants as part of more diverse, animate and inanimate things (Braidotti
dynamic social collectives and extended 2013), nourish new forms of interspecies
networks (cf. Hodder 2012). Its solidity acts connections and intercultural relations,
as a stand-in for its distributed actants and and other modes of thought and concepts
the agencies that make up the bucket (cf in ways that more closely approximate the
Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010). In complexities of life itself.
considering the bucket as ‘thingness’ and as New posthuman collections research
‘composition’, and the description of its and documentation procedures have the
elements, materials and stories attributed potential to support the analysis and
to it as ‘actants’ and as ‘agency’, and the term description of objects as thingness and
‘performativity’ to describe the interaction as socio-material compositions. These
of the actants as part of the extended, practices therefore involve: (1) the detail-
networked composition, allows us to move ing of actants that make up the extended
beyond the social construction of the composition in the field; (2) their multiple
‘object’, ‘artefact’ and ‘collection’. Where agencies, sequences, independences,
conventional terms promoted a sole focus entanglements, interactions, spatial and
on social and cultural conventions of temporal dimensions; and (3) the carto-
language, describing, naming and narrat- graphic mapping of the movement of these
ing histories and personal accounts as actants as representative of their perfor-
bounded objects, these new terms gesture mativity as emergent processes.
towards their relational re-configuration Bill did indeed save his house and his
that take account of the active and life, but he lost livestock and several
entangled life of all its components. outbuildings on his property to the fire.
The shift of social subjectivity from the
See also Art in the Anthropocene; Critical
human to include the non-human world
Posthumanism; Non-Human Agency;
through the attribution of each of the
Ontological Turn; Posthumanist
objects’ elements as actants, and the many
Performativity.
ways these relational subjects are entangled
and folded together, better illustrate the
agentic or animated relationships we have Note
to life in general. The interaction of these 1. Museums Victoria Collections, http://
multiple relational subjects also constitutes collec tions.museumvictoria.com.au/
collective forms of social agency which items/1712046 [accessed 9 November
will promote new understandings of 2016].
history as emergent from within these
more-than-human collectives. The Fiona R. Cameron
composition also promotes new forms of
human civic life and sociality to include
animate and inanimate things comprising,
variously, technology, materiality, trees, POSTHUMAN RIGHTS,
climatic systems, humans and discourses, A MICROPOLITICS OF
each as relational subjects and together as
collective forms of agency. This more In this entry I examine the possibility of a
inclusive vision of a shared world has the micropolitics of posthuman rights which
potential to promote and enhance respect subverts the majoritarian model of human
and ethical concern for diversity of both rights, figured as a certain kind of thinking

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTHUMAN RIGHTS, A MICROPOLITICS OF 353

of the human (constructed as a white From Human Rights to Post-Human

neoliberal male). Such a contestatory Rights
micropolitics of rights is one which is
practised by embodied beings who act to In her book Transpositions Rosi Braidotti
reshape their position in relation to both critiques Peter Singer’s utilitarian liberal
law and biopower. Such legal and political model of animal rights. This critique allows
challenges are initiated by assemblages of us to open up a minoritarian thinking of
individuals acting in concert to use rights rights as posthuman. In her argument, she
discourse in a manner which would notes that Singer’s model of animal rights is
empower them. Such a creative bottom-up tantamount to a becoming-human of
employment of rights as political weapons animals (Braidotti 2006a: 107). According
allows us to glimpse what Gilles Deleuze to Braidotti, Singer’s model contains the
called the creative and collective praxis of same flaws as those of the traditional liberal
jurisprudence. For Deleuze it is jurispru- model of rights as applied to humans, i.e. it
dence ‘that truly creates law/right’ (Deleuze is a majoritarian model of rights informed
1997a: 169). by a notion of social relations which
Jurisprudence for Deleuze is not the valorizes male power and capitalist social
abstract conceptulizaion of law or legal organization. In such a model animals can
theory but rather an active mode of resist- only hope to have rights if they become
ing established legal concepts and chan- human or almost human. This becoming
ging and troubling the law through the human of animals fails to recognize the
collective action of singularities. For singularity of animals as such, just as the
Deleuze, it is not ‘established and codified liberal rights model, more generally, fails
rights that count, but everything that to see the singularity and differential nature
currently creates problems for the law and of human beings. Thus, in order to be
that threatens to call what is established included within the protective clothing of
into question’ (Deleuze, 1995: 153). In liberal rights protection one must first
reflecting on Deleuze’s thinking on and divest oneself of one’s singularity and
about law and human rights, Paul Patton become human, where human is figured as
observes that for Deleuze: the abstract and always already male subject.
The alternative model proposed by Braidotti
jurisprudence was always a matter of polit- is premised on philosophical nomadism
ics, in the broad sense in which he under- and holds that ‘no qualitative becoming can
stood the term . . . Jurisprudence involves be generated by or at the centre, or in a
the creation of new laws but also the dominant position. Man is a dead static core
creation of the rights that are expressed in of ego-indexed negativity’ (ibid.). It is the
these laws . . . in so far as jurisprudence is
becoming animal of the human, rather than
also a matter of politics, it involves the
the becoming human of animals that helps
processes through which new ways of
us to move beyond the trap of making
acting or being acted towards become
rights discourse another form of subjection
established (or old ways disestablished),
Patton 2012: 20–1 under the guise of emancipation. Braidotti’s
model assists us in transforming the default
As such our posthuman version of rights setting of liberal rights discourse into a rela-
is similar to what Patton terms a ‘non- tional notion of rights which takes account
transcendent, immanent conception of of our relation to other citizens, animals and
rights’ (ibid.: 15). the environment.

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354 POSTHUMAN RIGHTS, A MICROPOLITICS OF

In seeking ‘a micro-politics of becom- the many competing interests involved.

ing and an ethics’ (Braidotti 2006a: 142), Indeed, having worked on the self:
Braidotti’s nomadic ethics bears relation to
You continue to affirm . . . a teleological
what William Connolly calls an ‘ethos of
conception of nature in which the
engagement’ with existing social givens, meaning of death is set, but now you
which may bring about unexpected acknowledge how this judgment may be
consequences or transformations. more contestable than you had previously
Connolly calls this ‘an ambiguous politics appreciated . . . What was heretofore non-
of becoming by which a new entity is negotiable may now gradually become
propelled into being out of injury, energy rethinkable. You now register more
and difference’ (Connolly 1999: 160). actively the importance of giving
Connolly argues that rights cannot be presumptive respect to the judgment of
created by a top down ‘molarpolitics of the sufferer in this domain, even when the
public officials’ (ibid.: 147), but comes cultivation of critical responsiveness to
instead from a mobilization of self-styling them disturbs your own conception of
selves, ‘the molecular movements of micro- nature, death, or divinity.
politics’ (149). This molarpolitics blocks Connolly 1999: 147
the dialogic political process and creates Connolly’s notion of micropolitics allows
stasis. us to rethink the relation between rights
In discussing the concept of micropolit- and bioethics. It allows us to focus on the
ics, Connolly uses the analogy of how an actual desires and interests of the indi-
individual in working out her position on vidual who claims a right in the biomed-
bioethical issues is confronted with differ- ical context. Similar to Braidotti’s nomadic
ing views both outside and within oneself. ethics this critical responsiveness leads to
He gives the example of the right to die a transformation, thinking about how
and of an individual who believes that rights may emerge in such instances and
death must only come when either God or their relation to individual freedom and to
nature brings it (Connolly 1999: 146). This community. Connolly’s notion of an
person is shocked by movements who call ambiguous politics of becoming assists us
for a right to doctor-assisted death for in bringing Braidotti’s nomadic ethics to
those in severe pain as the result of a bear on a reimagining of rights, figured as
terminal illness. However, once the initial posthuman rights, that is, an active mode
shock of this claim dissipates, the person of using rights discourse in a subversive
begins to think of the suffering of termin- manner to undo accepted models of
ally ill individuals in a world of high tech subjectivity, community, identity, law and
medical care. In such a case, Connolly politics.
claims, ‘one part of your subjectivity now
begins to work on other parts. In this case
your concern for those who writhe in
agony as they approach death may work on
Conclusion
contestable assumptions about divinity or Such a praxis of rights as posthuman cele-
nature already burnt into your being’ (ibid., brates the creation of a new thinking and
emphasis in original). Connolly highlights praxis of rights, one which is cut loose
the uncertainties and tension within the from the ordered and majoritarian think-
individual self on the issue of a right to die, ing of rights in neoliberal modernity.
after such an individual starts to weigh up Posthuman rights embody the claims of

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTHUMAN SEXUALITY 355

transversal assemblages of individuals sexuality is more or less relevant to the

who do not see a binary cut between politico-aesthetic subject identities (in flux
thought and action, life and death, envir- or as a standpoint identity) and the extent
onment and humanity, or animality and to which posthuman identities and their
humanity. This is a similar process to what relationship with sex and sexuality, and
Braidotti terms the practice of ‘defamilar- indeed their very definition of ‘sex’, is
ization’ in which ‘the knowing subject contested. After Foucault’s deconstruction
disengages itself from the dominant of sexuality as a social genealogical project
normative vision he or she had become of social control of bodies and pleasure,
accustomed to, to evolve towards a post- feminism took up sexuality as isomorphic-
human frame of reference’ (Braidotti 2013: ally annexed to male pleasure and the
167). This allows us to think of a micro- phallus, both projects showing there has
politics of life as zoe (as material embodied never been anything biological or natural
singularity) which contests the ordering about sex. Foucault forsook the term for
molarpolitics of Life as bios (understood as ‘pleasure’, Deleuze and Guattari for ‘desire’
transcendental and always already male). and feminists such as Irigaray and Kristeva
This micropolitical encounter with the law for ‘jouissance’. All three share a configura-
undoes the imposition of a biopolitical tion of a designified and deregulated body
ordering on individuals and allows them, where no part of the body stands as the
through their own continuous interven- dominant signifier of either sex or gender
tion in the domains of law and politics, to (formerly the phallus but also the
perform an active and contestatory form proscribed licit and illicit sexual operations
of citizenship. of all body parts in relation with each
other). They also share a refusal of act
See also Bodies Politic; Geo-Hydro-Solar-
producing subject so the overarching
Bio-Techno-Politics; Posthuman Critical
binary of heteronormativity and homo-
Theory; Critical Posthumanism; (Un)
sexuality and its modern history from
Documented Citizenship; Posthuman
criminal aberration to equal normalized
Disability and DisHuman Studies.
subject position is defunct. Salient to this,
posthuman sexuality is entirely extricated
Patrick Hanafin
from reproduction’s relationship with sex;
because it renormalizes gendered roles
within reproduction, because it is antagon-
POSTHUMAN SEXUALITY istic to posthumanism’s celebration of the
hybrid and hybrids are sterile, and due to
It is not sufficient to liberate sexuality; it is the ahuman’s advocation of human extinc-
also necessary to liberate ourselves from the tion in the face of overpopulation.
notion of sexuality itself. Posthuman sexuality values connectivity
Foucault 2000: 245 between entities which could be two, or two
Posthuman sexuality questions the utility parts within one, or two assemblages, to
of the very concept of sexuality itself and create imaginative flows of desire, and two
for this reason ranges across a disparate simply marks the overthrow of the domin-
number of terrains including feminism, ant singularity of the phallus, but posthu-
LGBTQIA theory, therian and becoming- man sexuality is not limited to two. In this
fabulated subjectivity among others. These sense ‘two’ simply indicates more than and
terrains overlap in the extent to which less than one, a position to which the

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356 POSTHUMANISM

so-called castrated female has been releg- Queer theory attempted this address – in
ated in psychoanalysis. Posthuman sexual- its post-USA incarnations via Continental
ity also values the space between the two as philosophy queer went further than sexual
an ethical site of desire, what Irigaray calls alterity to become a refusal of heteronorm-
the ‘mucosal’, whereby the model of the ative gendering and sexuality and subject-
vulva as two sets of two lips shows self- ive categories entirely. However, the issue
touching, desire without binaries of remains a contentious one and the activist
mastery and submission, and proliferative question facing posthuman sexuality now
parts indicate both the limitless nature of is ‘if we have rid ourselves of all sex, gender
sexuality and, as lips, the discursive regula- and sexuality, how do we continue to fight
tion the speaking of sexuality operates. against the oppression of what are still
This is why Foucault and Lotringer both considered minoritarians based on their
claim we speak too much about sexuality. relationship with sex and gender?’ This is a
Our society is saturated with sexuality but question which continues to be addressed
actual bodies, pleasures, intensities and within posthuman sexuality.
what constitutes the sexual have been
See also Feminicity; Trans*; Feminist
largely annihilated due to the overemphasis
Posthumanities; Posthuman Ethics.
on description and the commodification
and marketability of sexuality as a concept
Patricia MacCormack
abstracted from bodies and pleasure in
the training of docile consumers. Both
theorists advocate silence as a response
to the question of sexuality, while feminists POSTHUMANISM
often utilize play with language (via
poetry and art) to reflect the playful My work on this topic begins with an insist-
experimentation posthuman sexuality ence on distinguishing between ‘the posthu-
advocates. man’ and ‘posthumanism’. Many of those
Posthuman sexuality raises an ethical who aspire to, or imagine the inevitability
conundrum, however. Subjectivity has of, what is often called a ‘posthuman’ condi-
mistakenly collapsed gender and sexuality tion – I am thinking in particular of figures
(whether due to dimorphism creating such as ‘transhumanist’ Ray Kurzweil (of
gender division or both as corporeal regu- The Singularity is Near fame) and philo-
lated sexual systems). This means there is a sopher Nick Bostrom – are, philosophically
history and present need for activism speaking, rather traditional humanists.
involving minoritarian subjects, particu- Bostrom’s version of the posthuman derives,
larly women but also those addressed as he freely admits, from ideals of rational
under the acronym LGBTQIA (lesbian, agency and human perfectibility drawn
gay, bisexual, trans-, queer, intersex, directly from Renaissance Humanism and
asexual), itself an acronym which indis- the Enlightenment, and its guiding lights
criminately collapses sexuality with are (among other pillars of philosophical
gendered identity. Similarly the contem- humanism) Isaac Newton, John Locke,
porary debate between some trans persons Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant.
and so-called ‘terfs’ (trans exclusionary This ‘humanist posthumanism’ (as I
radical feminists) is in one sense more label it in What Is Posthumanism?) (Wolfe
about the debate between whether we 2010) is problematic for at least a couple of
should have gendered categories at all. reasons. First, it encourages us to think

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POSTHUMANISM 357

that the full achievement of that thing we the ontological hierarchy just outlined. It is
call ‘human’ must be predicated upon over- posthumanist, that is to say, in its opposi-
coming and finally transcending not just tion to anthropocentrism and to the
our ‘animal’ origins (in the name of a assumption that the subject worthy of
rational manipulation and optimization of ethical recognition, in any way coincides,
the human condition) but also the fetters prima facie, with the taxonomic designa-
of materiality and embodiment alto- tion ‘human’. But it is humanist, and in a
gether. The clearest symptom of this very debilitating way, in how it mounts this
old humanist philosophical desire is argument philosophically. Whether in
transhumanism’s prediction that we will, Regan’s neo-Kantian version or Singer’s
someday soon, be able to overcome all utilitarian version, what secures ethical
diseases and infirmities, eventually achiev- standing for the animal is a set of charac-
ing radically extended lifespans, and even teristics, qualities and potentialities that
immortality. Leaving aside the practical ends up looking an awful lot like us. And
and pragmatic questions that accompany so animals are accorded standing because
this claim, I merely wish to point out that they embody, in diminished form, some
the achievement of the fully ‘human’ condi- normative concept of the ‘human’. And that
tion by the killing off, transcendence, would seem to be at odds with the ethical
repression or overcoming of the ‘animal’ commitment that got the whole enterprise
body is a very old and very familiar hall- of animal rights philosophy up and
mark of humanism – and, historically running in the first place – namely, the
speaking, a very dangerous one, as recent desire to recognize the ethical value of
work in biopolitical thought by Michel different, non-human ways of being in the
Foucault, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, world.
Donna Haraway, Giorgio Agamben and What all of this means is that the nature
others has made clear. The introduction of of thought itself, and not just the object of
such an ontological hierarchy between the thought, must change if it is to be posthu-
‘human’ and the ‘animal’ (and the animality manist. More precisely, the ‘human’ can no
of the human) has been, as these thinkers longer be considered either the origin or the
remind us, one of the key discursive tech- end of thought, and in at least two senses.
nologies for rendering not just animal First, the ‘human’ is not an explanans but an
populations, but various human popula- explanandum, not an explanation but that
tions, ‘killable but not murderable’. which needs to be explained. To put it
A second reason that this ‘humanist another way, the most philosophically
posthumanism’ is problematic is that even complex and pragmatically robust accounts
when it does not indulge in such familiar of what constitutes the specificity of this
strategies – indeed, even when it opposes thing we call ‘human’ are accounts in which
them – the humanist mode of thought in the idea of the ‘human’ as we’ve inherited it
which such opposition is mounted under- from the Western philosophical tradition
cuts what may be quite admirable ethical, actually does no heavy lifting. For example,
political or other impulses that we share many people would argue that part of what
with humanism. For example, animal makes humans ‘human’ is a unique relation-
rights philosophy as articulated by its two ship between language and cognition. But
most important founding philosophers – to really understand what is going on in that
Tom Regan and Peter Singer – is certainly relationship – to really explore the relation-
posthumanist in the sense that it opposes ship between the neurophysiological

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358 POSTHUMANISM

wetware of the brain, the symbolic processes human beings are prosthetic beings. What
that shape that wetware, and the evolution- we call ‘we’ is in fact a multiplicity of rela-
ary processes in and through which both tions between ‘us’ and ‘not us’, ‘inside’ and
have co-evolved – we have at our disposal ‘outside’, organic and non-organic, things
all sorts of conceptual tools not available to ‘present’ and things ‘absent’.
Descartes or Kant or Aristotle, tools that What all this means is that posthu-
allow us to explain how the ‘human’ is the manism distances itself from the trans-
product of processes that are, strictly speak- humanism discussed above most decisively
ing, inhuman and ahuman. How do we by reconceiving the relationship between
know? Because we now know that the very what we call ‘the human’ and the question
same processes produce similar products in of finitude – not just the finitude that
non-human beings as well, as well-known obtains in our being bound to other forms
experiments with great apes (such as those of embodied life that live and die as we do,
conducted by scientist Sue Savage- that are shaped by the same processes that
Rumbaugh with the bonobo, Kanzi) have shape us, but also the finitude of our rela-
shown (see Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin tionship to the tools, languages, codes,
1996). maps and semiotic systems that make the
Moreover – and more radically – not world cognitively available to us in the
only is the line between human and non- first place. If ‘the map is not the territory’
human impossible to definitively draw (as Gregory Bateson (1988) once put it,
with regard to the binding together of borrowing a phrase from Alfred
neurophysiology, cognitive states and Korzybski), then this means that the very
symbolic behaviours, the line between maps that make the world available to us
‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘brain’ and ‘mind’, is also make the world, at the same time,
also impossible to draw definitively. For unavailable to us. While this may sound
the ‘human’, what makes us ‘us’ – whether paradoxical, it is in fact common-sensical.
we are talking about cultural and anthro- For example, were we to seek the most
pological inheritances, tool use and tech- empirically, scientifically exhaustive
nologies, archives and prosthetic devices, description of a particular piece of land,
or semiotic systems of all kinds – is always we would find ourselves, very quickly,
already on the scene before we arrive, consulting a host of experts in various
providing the very antecedent conditions fields: geologists, hydrologists, botanists,
of possibility for our becoming ‘human’. In a zoologists and so on. And what we would
fundamental sense, then, what makes us find is that the more we empirically scru-
‘us’ is precisely not us; it is not even ‘human’ tinize the object of analysis, deploying all
– a fact that is particularly clear in the the forms of expertise and types of know-
various prosthetic technologies that ledge that we can possibly muster, the
human beings use to offload and exterior- more complex and multi-dimensional that
ize memory and communication, which in object becomes. From this vantage, the
turn reshape the anatomy and physiology ‘territory’ being studied becomes a ‘virtual’
of the brain. And what is true of those space, but for this new mode of thought
technologies is true of all semiotic systems called ‘posthumanism’, ‘virtual’ here doesn’t
and codes, of even the most rudimentary mean ‘less real’, it means more real.
type. In short, dating back thousands Now all of this might seem merely a
of years to the advent of tool use and, later, matter of taste, but if we believe sociologist
symbolic systems of communication, Niklas Luhmann (1995), this new form of

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTHUMANIST PERFORMATIVITY 359

thought, this constitutively paradoxical ated only by scientific knowledge in its

form of reason, is in fact a hallmark of multiple representational forms. This
modernization and of modernity itself, model is so entrenched within Western
understood as a process of ‘functional culture that it has taken on a common-
differentiation’ of society into discrete sense appeal. And with it, the inertness of
autopoietic social systems, each with its nature as a timeless and ahistorical entity
own governing codes of knowledge and awaiting/inviting representation goes now
communication (what is sometimes called, mostly undebated (Barad 2003).
more moralistically, ‘fragmentation’ or The taken-for-granted ontological gap
‘specialization’), each struggling to manage between words and things upon which
and reduce the increasing complexity of a modern Western science rests has gener-
larger environment that they themselves ated questions around the accuracy of
help to produce, in fact, in deploying their representations, especially among feminist,
own specialized discourses. From this poststructuralist, postcolonial critics and
vantage, the contingency of the various queer theorists (Butler 1993; Foucault
codes and ‘maps’ that we use to make sense 1973, 1972, 1977, 1980; Haraway 1991,
of the world around us is in fact a reservoir 1992a, 1997; Latour 1991). Their search
of the very complexity those codes and for alternatives to the static relationality
maps attempt to reduce. Posthumanist model proposed by representationalism
thought, in this sense, is both an index and has brought forward performative under-
an agent of complexity. standings of the nature of scientific prac-
tices that shift the focus from linguistic
See also Anthropism/Immanent Humanism;
representations to discursive practices, i.e.
Posthuman Critical Theory; Critical
from questions of correspondence between
Posthumanism; Insurgent Posthumanism;
descriptions and reality to matters of
Ontological Turn.
practice/doings/actions.
Michel Foucault was the first to theorize
Cary Wolfe
discursive practices as the local sociohistor-
ical material conditions that enable and
constrain disciplinary knowledge practices,
POSTHUMANIST and produce – rather than merely describe
PERFORMATIVITY – the ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ of knowledge
practices. More recently, queer theorist
Theories of scientific knowledge and liberal Judith Butler (1993) drew on Foucault’s
social theories owe much to the represent- suggestion that the repetition of regulatory
ationalist belief that there is perfect corres- bodily practices produces a specified mater-
pondence and, consequently, ontological ialization of the body to link her notion of
distinction between linguistic descriptions gender performativity to the materializa-
and reality. Representationalism, in par- tion of sexed bodies. As a result of these and
ticular, postulates that that which is other efforts towards a performative under-
represented is held to be independent of standing of identity, matter loses its tradi-
all practices of representing. This system tional connotation as passive blank slate of
of representation is often theorized as a culture to emerge as ‘a process of materializ-
tripartite arrangement that places the ation that stabilizes over time to produce
(human) knower in a relation of absolute the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we
externality to nature and the world, medi- call matter’ (Butler 1993: 9).

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360 POSTHUMANIST PERFORMATIVITY

However, feminist new materialist that measurement processes are given by

scholar Karen Barad (2003, 2007) argues the meeting of the ‘social’ and the ‘natural’
that, despite these important elaborations, – they are an instance where matter and
performativity theories fail to give an meaning meet in the literal sense. This
account of the body’s historicity that relationalist ontology refuses the repres-
succeeds in bringing the discursive and the entationalist fixation for ‘words’ and ‘things’
material in closer proximity. In her view, as separate entities by putting emphasis on
the active role of the body’s materiality in the inseparability and co-constitutiveness
the workings of power is left untheorized, of materiality and meaning. Building upon
which leaves questions about the material this performative metaphysics, Barad’s
nature of discursive practices hanging in agential realism proposes a posthumanist
the air, and implicitly re-inscribes matter account of performativity that poses
as passive substance or end product of the matter as ongoing historicity, a congealing
‘social’. This failure to recognize matter’s of agency that she defines as ‘intra-action’
dynamism defrauds it of its capacity as an – i.e. ‘causally constraining nondetermin-
active factor in further materializations istic enactments through which matter-in-
and thus reinstates the supremacy of the-process-of-becoming is sedimented
culture and language as productive forces. out and enfolded in further materializa-
What is needed to understand power in tions’ (2003: 823). Hence, within this
the fullness of its materiality is to account framework, matter is not just ‘a kind of
for the ways in which matter and discourse citationality’ (Butler 1993: 15), but
entwine and co-participate in the defini- rather an active ‘agent’ in its ongoing
tion and materialization of the human and materialization.
its others, so as to account for non-human Barad’s agential realism and its notion
forms agency and matter’s implication in of posthumanist performativity provide a
its ongoing historicity. useful framework to grapple with the
Barad’s contribution towards the devel- inseparability of matter and meaning,
opment of a posthumanist understanding and ‘the material-discursive nature of
of performativity is based on a philosoph- constraints, conditions and practices’
ical account that she has defined ‘agential (2007: 152). This makes agential realism an
realism’, an epistemological and ontological ‘onto-epistem-ology’ (Barad 2003: 829), a
framework that proposes a materialist practice-of-knowing-in-being capable to
and posthumanist reworking of familiar account for the ways in which bodies come
notions such as performativity, discursive to matter. By evidentiating the red-thread
practices, materialization, agency and caus- of ethicality that keeps the world together,
ality among others. Agential realism takes agential realism takes a step towards ‘a
quantum physicist Niels Bohr’s philo- more ecological sensibility’ (Bennett 2010:
sophy-physics as an apt starting point for 10), and embraces a diverse politics of
thinking the natural and the social worlds agency capable of distributing value more
together, and gaining some important clues generously and fostering ethical and wiser
about how to theorize the nature of the interventions into such renewed ecology.
relationship between them.
See also ‘It’; Quantum Anthropology; Non-
Bohr’s epistemological framework calls
Human Agency.
into question Cartesian epistemology and
its representationalist triadic structure of
Elisa Fiore
words, knowers and things by asserting

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTIMAGE 361

POSTIMAGE specific data related to, for instance,

motion, form or color (Jenkin and Harris
Digitalization has brought a new dimen- 2009). If the cortical areas are overlapping/
sion to the ‘photographic paradigm of the interacting, at no point of this computa-
image’ (Hoelzl and Marie 2015) which was tion of visual data are there ‘stable visual
forged in the fifteenth century with the entities’.
invention of linear perspective and resul- With the concept of ‘image’ dissolving
ted in the forced convergence of vision and under the assault of neuroscientific discov-
representation based on the hypothesis of eries and advances in machine vision, there
their commensurability. On today’s digital are only two possible responses by image
screens, that is, on the level of visual theory: either to abandon the concept (and
perception, the photographic paradigm thus the discipline) or to radically enlarge
seems to remain intact, but behind the its definition/scope. Consider the second
screen, on the computational level, the option and a very large definition of the
powerful algorithms that underlie today’s image as the relation of data and of
image processing and display – such as the algorithms that are engaged in an operation,
ones used to smoothly navigate distant which involves visual data or data visualiza-
Google Street View panoramas or the tion. Let us examine this new definition of
ubiquitous JPEG decompression codec – the image in the light of robot vision.
impose a new, ‘algorithmic paradigm of the Robots, remotely controlled or autonomous,
image’ (ibid.). make use of images and imaging at many
Behind the on-screen illusion of a levels: at the level of orientation/navigation,
‘hardimage’ – a solid representation of a at the level of survey and mapping, and at
solid world – the algorithmic image that I the level of data integration and visualiza-
call ‘softimage’ is not only malleable, i.e. tion. SLAM (Simultaneous Localization
infinitely recomputable, but is itself and Mapping), for instance, allows the
program (or part of a program). In fact, the generation of a map of unknown territory
algorithmic paradigm brings with it the using odometry (position estimation using
scattering of both image and vision into a motion sensors), laser scanning and sonar
multiplicity of data. This becomes evident sensors. Hyperspectral Imaging captures a
in the current developments of machine much larger visual spectrum than tradi-
vision, where imaging is necessary to carry tional optical instruments; it allows the
out an action (think of assembly robots, building of an image constituted of as many
drones, self-driving cars, automatic border layers as frequency bands and thus, the
controls etc.) and where video cameras are characterization/classification of the objects
associated to other sensors. These sensors in the scene based on their spectral proper-
furnish various data (visuals, sound, heat, ties. Multisensor Data Fusion allows the
movement, biometrics etc.) that need to be merging of data captured by different
processed, correlated, fused and matched sensors or agents of a given system, and
with a database, before human controllers Distributed Consensus Algorithms enable
(or the control program of autonomous decisions to be reached among collaborat-
machines/systems) can take a decision/ ing vehicles operating on the ground, in
action. Likewise, in current neuroscientific the air, on the water, underwater or even
research, human vision is modelled as a in space.
process taking place along specialized In short: the robot’s eye is a complex
cortical areas, with each area computing interplay of sensors, sensor data, control

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
362 POSTMEDIEVAL

algorithms, actuators, vehicles and, until sensing is distributed yet coordinated (con-
fully autonomous systems are operative, sensus) within a given swarm, pack, herd
pilots, payload operators and image analysts, (Elkins and Fiorentini 2017; Haraway
controllers and commanders (Chamayou 2015a). Posthuman vision, on the contrary,
2015; Gregory 2011). The image, then, is is a collaborative vision distributed across
not only the relation between data and species, that is, between machines/robots
algorithms in an operation involving visual and humans/animals and any intermedi-
data or data visualization, but also the rela- ary  forms (cyborgs, biomachines etc.) and
tion between human and non-human agents the postimage comes to be defined as
of a process involving an element of ‘vision’. the collaboration of visioning humans/
But, given the rush towards autonomy animals, data/algorithms and, increasingly,
of machines we will be more and more, as autonomous machines.
Rosi Braidotti has put it, ‘confronted with a
See also Algorithm; AI (Artificial
new situation, which makes human inter-
Intelligence); Art; Computational Turn;
vention rather peripheral if not completely
Critical Posthuman Theory; Non-Human
irrelevant’ (2013: 43–4). The total
Agency; Robophilosophy; Digital
autonomy of robots endowed with sensing/
Philosophy.
imaging capacities brings into question
the fate of the image as a fundamental
component of humanity. Moreover, the Note
passage from human vision assisted by 1. Of particular relevance here is Rosi
robots to fully autonomous robotic vision Braidotti’s new materialist posthumanism
is at the core of what has been called a focusing on post-anthropocentrism
‘robolution’ or the replacement of man by (becoming animal/ earth/ machine) and
machines. ‘Vision machines’, as Paul Virilio her neovitalist concept of zoe as ‘life in its
calls them, will not only be endowed with nonhuman aspects’ (2013: 66) which
vision, but also with cognition, discern- encompasses even death. Also relevant
ment, decision, and action. They will thus are Donna Haraway’s (2008) and Brian
be intelligent and autonomous beings, Massumi’s (2015a) investigations of affect
similar to humans. Eventually, vision and animality as transversal to the animal/
machines will function as ‘a kind of mech- human, Bernard Stiegler’s concept of
anized imaginary from which, this time, ‘trans-individuation’ (2007), which he
we would be totally excluded’ (1994: 66). borrows from George Simondon (2005),
Yet there is another, more optimistic way and Simondon’s (1958) theory of the
of envisioning the future of the image, a image as acquiring autonomous agency as
future that I will call the postimage and that it is transmitted from one individual to
can be formulated only in the framework the other.
of posthuman(ist) theory where humans,
technologies and nature are no longer seen
Ingrid Hoelzl
as separate (or even antagonistic) but as co-
evolving.1 With regard to the development
of autonomous robots towards collabora- POSTMEDIEVAL
tion, I posit that the postimage is (or will be)
not an objective (photographic) or subject- In 1995, the international conference
ive (human-centred) image, but a collabor- ‘Cultural Frictions: Medieval Cultural
ative image. With gregarious animals, Studies in Post-modern Contexts’ was held

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
POSTMEDIEVAL 363

at Georgetown University in Washington in order to formulate and practice new

DC . The event was devoted to exploring ‘critical humanisms’, as well as to develop a
the ways in which medieval literary studies more present-minded premodern studies.
were being reconceived and redefined via Medieval cultural studies – also known
the models for social and cultural history as studies in medievalism or medievalism
developed in contemporary work on studies – have been concerned, in fact, with
cultural studies and postmodern theory. the reception and representation of the
One of the main aims of this conference Middle Ages across various periods, genres
was, in fact, to understand what cultural and media, as well as with all of the ways in
studies could offer medieval studies and, which the Middle Ages have been invented
more importantly, what medieval studies and constructed by writers and scholars from
could offer cultural studies. This ground- the Renaissance forward, and with the gene-
breaking event was inspired by and also alogies of the professional academic discip-
led to much significant work in medieval line of medieval studies, which is often at
studies that collectively represented pains to distinguish itself from a ‘medieval-
important forays into medieval cultural ism’ believed to not be concerned enough
studies, such as Louise Fradenburg and with a so-called ‘real’ medieval history.
Carla Freccero’s Premodern Sexualities The question of the alteritism of the
(1996), Fradenburg’s Sacrifice Your Love: medieval past is critical here because, for
Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer scholars working in the vein of traditional
(2001), Kathleen Biddick’s The Shock of historicism, the Middle Ages is always
Medievalism (1998), Glenn Burger and ‘other’ to the present, whereas for some
Steven Kruger’s Queering the Middle Ages scholars working in studies in medieval-
(2001), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Of Giants: ism ‘the medieval’ (whatever that might
Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (1999) ultimately mean) is always partly a func-
and The Postcolonial Middle Ages (2000), tion, product and effect of any particular
Carolyn Dinshaw’s Getting Medieval: present trying to grapple with the epistem-
Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and ologies of the Middle Ages as well as with
Postmodern (1999), Karma Lochrie’s its relation (or supposed non-relation) to
Heterosyncracies: Female Sexuality Before the modern and postmodern (Joy 2009).
Normal Wasn’t (2005), and Paul Strohm’s Studies in medievalism thus demonstrate
Theory and the Premodern Text (2000). the always intersecting trajectories of the
Following, and wanting to build upon, medieval, modern and postmodern and
the surge of works paving the way for the also reveal the ways in which the academic
establishment of a newly interdisciplinary field of medieval studies is itself a form of
field of medieval cultural studies, the medievalism, for in medieval studies it is
BABEL Working Group was founded in always a representation of the Middle Ages
2004. As a collective of scholars operating that is being constructed, as opposed to
primarily in the fields of medieval and delivering some sort of medieval presence.
early modern studies, but also purpose- It is in this vein that the BABEL
fully drawing in scholars from later periods Working Group and more specifically
and critical and cultural theory in North Eileen Joy founded postmedieval: a journal
America, the UK , and Australia, they have of medieval cultural studies in 2009.
since been working to develop new cross- postmedieval is a cross-disciplinary, peer-
disciplinary alliances between the human- reviewed journal in medieval studies that
ities, sciences, social sciences and the arts aims to bring the medieval and modern

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364 POSTMEDIEVAL

into productive critical relation, so as to dimension or make the Middle Ages relev-
develop a present-minded medieval ant to today (Evans, Fulton and Matthews
studies in which contemporary events, 2006).
issues, ideas, problems, objects and texts The BABEL Working Group has also
serve as triggers for critical investigations established interesting connections with
of the Middle Ages. The new journal was practitioners of posthumanism and
conceived as an attempt to help to develop posthumanities, which, despite the group’s
an inter-disciplinary, cross-temporal and continual evocation of the importance of
socially interventionist – and therefore, history and historicism in their work,
also publicly intellectual – medieval cultural have the tendency to work primarily in
studies that would bring medieval studies the modern and postmodern periods –
into mutually beneficial critical relations literary, historical, biological and otherwise
with scholars working on a diverse array – and rarely include in their projects the
of post-medieval subjects, including voices and thought of premodern studies.
critical theories that remain un- or under- The first issue of postmedieval (2010) was
historicized. Its concerted focus on the in fact devoted to the question ‘When
question of the relations between the did We Become Post/Human?’ BABEL’s
medieval and modern in different times serious investment in demonstrating
and places is seen as an opportunity to the important significance of the longest
take better stock of the different roles that possible historical perspective to contem-
history and various processes of historiciz- porary questions, issues and problems,
ing have played in the shaping of various especially those that circulate around the
presents and futures. vexed terms human, humanism and the
postmedieval takes as a given that humanities, has produced interventions
cultural studies do not comprise a unified into contemporary theoretical debates
field of approaches and objects, but rather where medieval studies is often not present.
constitute an open field of inter- and As Eileen Joy and Anna Klosowska write
multidisciplinary debate regarding the in their Introduction to BABEL’s essay
material, discursive and other relations volume, Fragments for a History of a
between cultural objects, practices and Vanishing Humanism (Seaman and Joy
institutions and the realms with which 2016), the group ‘insists on the always
they come into contact: history, society, provisional and contingent formations of
politics, commerce, religion, globalism, the the human, and of various humanisms,
body, subjectivity and the like. To develop over time, while also aiming to demon-
and practise a medieval cultural studies is strate the different ways these formations
to ask not only what longer historical emerge (and also disappear) in different
perspectives can provide to contemporary times and places, from the most ancient
cultural theories, but also how the Middle past to the most contemporary present’.
Ages – its mentalities, social forms, culture, Further, BABEL does not believe there
theology, political and legal structures, can ever be a ‘total history’ of either the
ethical values and so on – inflect contem- human or the post/human as they play
porary life and thought. It also means themselves out in differing historical
understanding that placing ‘medieval’ and contexts. At the same time, defining what
‘cultural studies’ side by side is a continu- the human (or post/human) is has always
ous provocation that does much more than been an ongoing, never finished cultural
simply give cultural studies a diachronic project.

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PRECOGNITION 365

Through postmedieval, as well as a PRECOGNITION

special issue of the Journal of Narrative
Theory devoted to ‘Premodern to Modern Precognition, also known as future/second
Humanisms’ (Joy and Neufeld 2007), and sight or conscious cognitive awareness,
also their most recent essay volume, refers to a type of extrasensory perception
Fragments for a History of a Vanishing or parapsychological ability to see future
Humanism (Seaman and Joy 2016), the events in the present. Precognition, or the
members of BABEL are concerned with anecdotal claim of ‘fortune telling’, has
making new and provocative connections occurred throughout human history and
between histories, ideas, cultural artefacts, is thought to elicit cognitive reasoning to
discourses and texts that have traditionally interpret subjective sensory inputs
been perceived to be too disparate from (Honorton and Ferrari 1989). Here, the
each other to be brought into productive individual gains reception of sensory
relation. By doing so, they engage with information through a trans-temporal
scholars working in all periods over the operation of the mind, outside of recog-
question of periodization itself and of the nized physical senses. In parapsychology
ways in which the production of disciplin- circles, precognition is more than just time
ary knowledges is bound up with historical travel. It is considered the non-inferential
chronologies and teleologies that have prediction of future events.
become sedimented over time. By prob- It is interesting that parapsychology
lematizing these teleologies and working developed in the nineteenth century out of
toward innovative modes of temporal attempts to scientifically investigate the
thinking, postmedieval is promoting the survival of consciousness after bodily death,
production of new critical theories for as precognitive processes reside on the peri-
better understanding the relations between phery of present lived experience by captur-
past, present and future. For, as Eileen Joy ing unknowable futures, or the sublime, to
and Craig Dionne note at the end of their put it in Kantian terms. In this regard, precog-
Introduction to the first issue of the nition is difficult to measure, because it is
journal, ‘What might be at stake here is mostly defined by what it is not: a conclusive
not only the future of the human itself, or scientifically verifiable phenomenon.
but also of the humanities’ (2010: 7). The Precognition, like other parapsychological
cross-disciplinarity promoted by the events, lacks scientific theory or technique to
BABEL Working Group through their support extrasensory occurrence, and as such
postmedieval journal (and other publish- is aligned with superstition, irrationality or a
ing projects that take up the themes of the supernatural or speculative causality
postmedieval) can ward off the current (Thalbourne and Storm 2012). Thalbourne
crisis of the humanities – with depart- and Storm argue that underlying precogni-
ments closed, combined or often impaired tion is a psychological trait known as
by reductions in hires, courses and faculty transliminality, or the tendency for psycholo-
lines – that is threatening to lead to their gical material such as imagery, ideation, affect
near extinction. and perception to cross thresholds into or out
of consciousness that makes one more sensit-
See also Metamodernism; Postdisci- ive to mystical experience. Transliminality,
plinarity; Critical Posthumanism. however, finds deeper resonances with the
posthuman as it constitutes both unconscious
Eileen A. Joy and environmental material.

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366 PRECOGNITION

Nonetheless, Immanuel Kant, in his onto present circumstances. However, as

reflection ‘An Answer to the Question: What Aristotle reminds us, causality exists not
is Enlightenment?’, expresses disagreement only as such, but must also be rooted in a
with an ‘inability to use one’s own under- theory of causal relationships.
standing without the guidance of another’ Following cognitive social psychology
(1991: 54). For Kant, anthropocentrism in its pursuit to access cognitive and affect-
is central and to undertake an understand- ive processes, parapsychological study uses
ing of the environment as external to one’s explicit methods, such as forced-choice
own intellect, or perceived duration, is to guessing. This field also prefers more
deny the systematic knowledge of nature indirect and subliminal stimuli to measure
and to circumvent the authority of reason. psychological responses (see Radin 1997)
In this way, modes of superstition or mysti- and to expand beyond the boundaries of
cism are in line with a self-incurred imma- anthropocentric knowledge. Many para-
turity that forecloses a more complete and psychological tests are modifications of
fulfilled human experience. As with Kant, well-established psychological effects,
cognitive scientists position the contin- administered in reverse so that test subject
gency of the parapsychological as part of a responses are collected before rather than
larger ecology of scientific knowledge yet to after the stimulus event. Instead of sever-
be discovered. ing a link between cause and effect these
Critics of parapsychology also argue tests pose new questions towards the
that investigation into the relation between methodological validity of non-repeatable
consciousness and reality is far more likely outcomes (ibid.).
to result in insights when grounded in In this way, scientific investigation of
scientific theory. For instance, James precognition is complicated by the general
Alcock (1987) writes that parapsycholo- claim of precognitive assumption: that
gical activities are unsustainable in that subjective modes of duration are abstrac-
there is no subject matter around which ted from the capacity of non-physical
science can develop a clear and reasonable, residua, as J. W. Dunne calls it, or, as he
and thus falsifiable, understanding. The explains, of precognitive dreams: ‘in every
author sees the ‘anything goes’ attitude of happening with which our sensory nerves
parapsychological activity as providing no as associated, we find, after we have
further explanation of scientific insight abstracted therefrom every known or
than the search for nonmaterial aspects of imaginable physical component, certain
human existence. categorically non-physical residua. But
This may be the case if we are to accept these remnants are the most obtrusive
that precognitive processes are not merely things in our universe’ (as quoted in
unexplained phenomena, but relate to Ikoniadou 2014: 72, emphasis in original).
conditions underlying their authenticity Here, Dunne makes explicit the
(or detection) (Honorton and Ferrari problem of anomalous phenomena, what
1989). Yet, by relying on scientific limita- he calls ‘pre-cognitions’, and the tensions
tion, the phenomena run counter to prin- that remain when the body is (dis)oriented
ciples of causality that assume essential by the nonlinearity of time and physics.
roles in making sense of the world around Although these amplifications of percep-
us. An uneasiness emerges here despite tion are believed to exist at levels of cogni-
anecdotal evidence that suggests individu- tion deeper than scientific enquiry will
als have the ability to fold future events allow, the domain of the unknowable, or in

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
PRECOGNITION 367

some cases the spiritual, is difficult to deny 2011). What precognition demands of the
(Kennedy 2005). However, it would do us body is an a-temporality, a quantum exist-
well to consider that the abstractions of ence within two simultaneous points in
our vast non-linear world are artefacts of time. This distributed body at once seems
discovery and interpretation in as much as separated from nature into the removed
they are not bound by physical laws, depths of cognition, situating the body
language, concept or limit. Instead, discov- simultaneously within the real and the
ery is generalized as a type of transfer of abstract. The one is a positioning, an empir-
sensation in the reordering of reality, not ical field of vision, in contrast to the latter
as validation of pre-constituted forms of which resides in excess of cognition –
existence. Precognition is the evaporation similar to XXXXX’s reading of Descartes’
of past, present and future into new work- search for scientific consistency and his
able modes of understanding though the confrontation with the inability to distin-
unknown. guish dreams from reality, leaving much to
More so, Daryl Bem (2011) argues that cling onto in terms of the excess of substance
foreknowledge does not just note the or the residuals of subjective experience of
process of reason, but is an anomalous consciousness (XXXXX 2006).
process of information or energy transfer Following Descartes, the tension
that is unexplained in terms of known between these modes of existence and how
physical or biological mechanisms. For we consider their relation with the future,
this reason evidentiary modes of know- past and present depends on the formula-
ledge production should be extended into tion of the problem of the real: if future
realms that are not a priori understood, but feeling can be tested or replicated then it
mediated through embodied experience. constitutes the real; and if the experience
As Bem states, anticipation of future event, alludes scientific measure then it resides in
or knowing the unknowable, ‘would be the inconsequential. Within this frame-
evolutionarily advantageous for reproduc- work the future becomes something
tion and survival if the organism could act empirically commanded or grasped. How-
instrumentally to approach erotic stimuli ever, what remains is what Ryan Bishop
and avoid negative stimuli’ (2011: 6). Yet, (2011) terms a ‘confusion of the sensorium’,
despite the statistically significant produc- or the point at which the disorientation
tion of Bem’s correlations, empirical theor- of Cartesian distinction between science
ies of the precognitive do not extend far and nature, mind and matter and so on
enough in terms of describing the embod- converges into a strata of indistinguishable
ied experience of abstraction. and incomprehensible relations that super-
In this way, precognition is not merely a sede the generalization of the real.
sensation at the level of the mental in terms Nonetheless, Brian Massumi (2002) has
of human thought but resembles a synaes- fruitfully illustrated that the conventional
thesia against commonly held divisions meaning or the content of any intersub-
between human mind and body or body jective context is never neatly placed by the
and non-human externality (Bishop 2011). quality or intensity of that experience.
What remains is an experimentation in the There is no cohesion or consistency
senses, and in the way we relate to how we between the two, and if there is, as Massumi
see the world through spatio-temporal writes, ‘it is of another nature.’ Contrary to
sensitivities. After all, believing in the world empirical assessments which require an
is ultimately believing in the body (Hughes orientation that is quantifiable as real, it

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368 PREGNANT POSTHUMAN, THE

serves us well to consider a relationship to prove the system wrong? I’ve got an
with the parapsychotic as semantically or open mind, if you want to talk about it.’
semiotically disordered. But this is not to
See also Affective Turn; Multiverse;
lay a negative foundation on the unex-
Sensing Practices.
plained, merely to state that the precog-
nitive process does not fix distinction. It Ramon Amaro
relies on its own displacement to draw
future feeling into an amplification of
present senses of reality. It connects the
indistinguishable, the unknowable, with a PREGNANT POSTHUMAN, THE
relation to the embodied experience.
However, before collapsing that which A New Philosophical Subject
exceeds measurement with a figuration of
such embodiment we must first recognize We need new concepts of the subject to
the paradox immediately revealed through devise new ethical, social and discursive
the separateness of cognition and foresight. schemes in our time of profound transform-
For while the former captures sensory ation to be able to think new epistemologies
information, the latter enables a difference in and ontologies together. We need to follow
perceived outcome. In this way, qualification the lines where specific situated subjects lead
or validation runs contrary to any concep- us in order to find new ways of being (post)
tion of embodied independence from dura- human with the world (Braidotti 2013).
tion. The human body is temporally located Here, the Pregnant Posthuman presents
within the gap of present and future (and herself – she is a subject who intuitively and
past) only inasmuch as it is a sensation, a intimately understands change and becom-
feedback, of generalizable information artic- ing, one who captures the movements of
ulated as perceived cognitive outcome. matter and the borders of life within herself.
The residual, the real meaning, of this *
process of knowing is motivated by the The bird in my chest may or may not be
precognitive, where a greater mode of mine. Something feral led her to me. A bit of
uncooked egg, perhaps, and now my body is
existence draws upon the freedoms that lie
never still . . . My sparrow’s wings brush my
within the power to decide what consti-
belly, a message meant for the sky.
tutes the problem of the real (Deleuze and
Carol Guess and Kelly Magee,
Guattari 1991; Deleuze 2013). As Deleuze
With Animal
states, the essence of this problem is no
longer reason, but thought, which is not The Pregnant Posthuman is the daughter
restricted to human entities and itself is ‘to of Donna Haraway’s cyborg and Rosi
think and create’ (Hughes 2011: 90). Here, Braidotti’s posthuman, of Lyotard’s ‘she’, the
in extent of duration is an aspect of precog- inhuman feminine philosopher, as well as
nition that defines the real through doing, Hannah Arendt’s natal subject. Being a(n)
rescripting and becoming – a methodo- (un)dutiful daughter of her mothers, she
logical tool of the subjective, captured presents herself as an image, a fiction, a
but not predetermined. Philip K. Dick standpoint, a reality. She is a singular
summarizes it best in Minority Report subject, but inside her subjectivity there is
(2002: 15) during the interrogation of his another subject growing, one that nobody
precognitive proponent turned empirical can see yet. She is in a singular plural state
victim, John Anderton: ‘Were you hoping and in intimate experience with the new,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
PREGNANT POSTHUMAN, THE 369

the relational, plurality. She is the first particular. I am an attempt at finding

philosophical subject capable of carrying, words for something plural, at finding
of giving birth. meaning within a position that is still only
With the presentation of this new producing silence, is still forgotten,
subject, there is a change in focus from the unmasked. I am a reaching-out towards
natality of the individual human being, to my reality and a trying-to-understand the
the possibility of giving birth to another world from my point of existence which I
human being. More plainly, this could also immanently exceed. I am the repression
be pointed out as a change of focus from that inscribes me and the possibilities that
the all too dominant masculine child to the I open up. I will be a site for critical reflec-
mother. Birth is the forgotten or uncon- tion and, because my child is yet unknown,
scious mark of the beginning of a linear for radical imagination.
individual life, while pregnancy, the I am here productively, producing
upcoming event of birth and the possibil- something other than myself, producing a
ity of giving birth, function as the founda- stranger in myself, producing my in-
tion of the new life in the middle of a human in myself, carefully, quietly, in a
human life, in the body of a conscious constant state of waiting, making room.
subject. With this switch in focus, the But it is not my child who is my work, it is
subject becomes intersubjective, embed- not this subjectity (Nancy and Lacoue-
ded and cyclical rather than linear, Bildung Labarthe 1992) that I am that is my work,
orientated and separated from its no, this is only ‘before’ the work, this is only
surroundings by its believed universality. If the position that sets me to work, it is this
the human condition is one of natality, the state of not knowing what is catching my
posthuman condition is one of pregnancy. breath that urges me to think. I could never
The deep relationality of this state think without a body. Never without my
captures also, or foremost, the relation to pregnancy. I talk to my child. Nobody
the yet unknown, because the promise of knows what I said – I know our dialogue
engagement of the Pregnant Posthuman to exists, but do the words?
what she is carrying is always made before I have an unstoppable wish and duty to
birth. If the humanistic subject is about interpret every kick, every movement,
being a singular progressive rationality, every sign of growth. Pregnancy isn’t a
then the Pregnant Posthuman is about moment, it is waiting until something
being two unknown differences. After all, forms within me and while I am waiting
‘singularity does not hold life in unyielding my thinking evolves and changes around
devotion to it’ (Wolfe 1929). It is about it. The growing matter determines my
being repetition of the body, to make it experience, my future, my life. Pregnancy
anew again and again within the borders of is between an act and a state, it is conscious
one body and thus immanently transgress and unconscious within an intimate
them, and this is where thought which is involvement with the world to come. Being
neither sheer rationality nor emotionality, with child is being with the always not-yet
nor only subject or object orientated, can of the world. It is the search for the world
emerge as the embodied and embedded after the promise of engagement, after the
fruit of the not-yet and the in-between. affirmative choice for the world.
* * * According to the New Materialism of
I am neither fiction nor reality, neither Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and Rosi
meaning nor silence, neither universal nor Braidotti, matter or being is not only

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
370 PREGNANT POSTHUMAN, THE

subsumed to thinking, like it still is in the Some have called it the sacred, the soul, but
work of Bruno Latour or Michel Foucault, they don’t force us to radically engage.
but epistemology and ontology are radically They don’t ask for care or carrying. They
intertwined. It is the same with me; my are not matter. They don’t surpass classic
circumstances do not only affectionate me, correlationism and the anthropocentrism
they are swimming into my belly, I am ‘a that comes with it; they confirm it. In my
folding in of external influences and a case, the in-human, the place where I
simultaneous unfolding outward of effects’ exceed myself, is the growth of the world
(Braidotti 2013). From inside my uterus inside of me, it is the growth of my child
they change my body, my blood, my whom I do not yet know but to whom I
hormone levels, my thought, my being, promise my whole being. This is the point
sometimes carefully, suddenly. The dance in my subjectity where I am absent, where
with unfolding matter takes place inside of there is only the presence of the other.
me. I am embedded, performative and being It is exactly this part that doesn’t belong
performed by. I expect, believe and affirm in to myself that makes me human. It is
a manner in which the classical subject of this carrying which enforces me to take
humanism is not able to – there is some- responsibility over the future and engages
thing that expects itself through me. There is me with the world-to-come in the depths
a tree growing inside of me, a dragon, a of my being, in the darkness of my flesh. It
whole city, global warming. Correlationism is this which resists the absurd, the suicide,
turned immanent and became my fertility. the existential fall.
I am not language yet, it has never With each child I produce, I sacrifice
bothered to capture my meaning. I will and constitute myself. I am the synthesis of
invent my words, my sentences, my difference and repetition, because my
discourse, in time. I am neither culture nor repetition, my being pregnant again, is
matter. I am a radical continuum of both. I always a differentiation of a new life. I am
rise from the alleys of humanism to claim with . . . child . . . matter . . . fish . . . crisis . . .
my part. I am the radical other of philo- failure . . . unknown . . . other . . . not-yet. I
sophy (Irigaray 1985a). I am the subject capture the movement of new materialism
who is related to everything that is uncanny right inside of me: the affectionate,
in humanism. I am the abject of human- intimate relation with matter, with objects
ism, in my bloody materiality as well as in that determine who I become, maybe even
philosophical thought where I am only a more than I am able to determine their
fleshy origin and shadow. I will never be becomings, I live inside their history as
One or a whole, but always more, always they live inside of me. It is this movement,
too much, always fragmented. It is not my this network, of trying to know and being,
aim to be the centre of the world. Because of knowing in being, that I present on the
of my pregnant state this seems not merely proud throne of my pelvis: genealogical,
an illusion but a fundamental impossibility. generational, gestational thought.
An animal is growing, or a tree, a lamp, When I produce, I wait. When I produce
an artwork, or just merely matter, some- another, I become. I am the infinite post-
where so deep that I cannot reach it, so ponement of getting to know what I carry,
personal that it has become impersonal, of getting to know the matter an sich.
something not or not-yet human. The I am plural. I care because I carry. And I
inhuman is something in the structure of am pregnant only after world, only after
the human that stretches beyond itself. desire, only after love.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
PROCESS ONTOLOGIES 371

See also Feminicity; Feminist Immanence in process ontology must

Posthumanities; In-human, the; Joy; not be confused with uniformity. Process
Mattering; Material Feminisms; Neo/New ontologies are pluralist, but not through
Materialism; Posthuman Critical Theory; a number of discrete individuals or cate-
Posthuman Ethics; Placenta Politics; gories or classes or essences. Instead, pro-
Posthumanist Performativity; Pill, the; cess ontology is a differential pluralism,
Posthuman Sexuality. that is, a pluralism of changing degrees or
intensities among many connected pro-
Rodante van der Waal cesses of becoming. For instance, different
intensities of feeling allow Whitehead to
distinguish events from one another with-
out treating them as separate substances.
PROCESS ONTOLOGIES Instead of a reality constituted by many
independent things, distributed according
Process ontologies deny the priority of to essences, substances and species, process
being over becoming, the priority of ontology describes a reality of interlinked
unchanging substance over change. They processes that cross boundaries between
claim that reality is process rather than categories.
static existence and they claim that Process ontologies are a minor line in
substances should give way to events. the history of philosophy, where the major
Process ontologies also deny the real exist- line is represented by the search for stable
ence of isolated individuals and they and self-identical substances rather than
replace them with multiplicities of flux. The archetypal thinker for the
processes. Static beings are therefore substance line is Aristotle and the most
redefined as illusions imposed over influential recent philosopher of process is
dynamic events and transformations. For Whitehead. In the following pairs of
example, for process ontologies a substance thinkers, the first represent different kinds
defined as a stable identity over time is of process philosophy, the second different
really an event defined as the coming kinds of substance and identity philo-
together of many transformations. sophy: Heraclitus–Parmenides; Leibniz–
As opposed to philosophies of tran- Descartes; Hume–Kant; Bergson–Russell;
scendence, where existence is divided into Deleuze–Quine.
different realms with one ruling over the Differences between these lines are
other, process ontologies favour the idea of philosophical and logical, based around
immanence, where all events share the same the argument that there must be some
realm. For process ontology, all real kind of enduring substance as support
processes interact with one another on the for judgements, properties and actions.
same complex plane and there are no beings Whitehead called this argument the fallacy
or processes that can claim independence of misplaced concreteness, because it
from that plane, or special dominion over it. mistakenly attributed causal efficiency to
Process ontology is concrete rather than substance, when in fact processes were the
idealist ontology, if by idealism we under- correct explanation for change. The oppos-
stand belief in an independent sphere for ition also plays out according to different
ideas. This does not mean that ideas are views of physics, chemistry and biology,
denied, but rather that they function as around whether the sciences confirm the
processes rather than as abstract entities. existence of individual entities such as

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
372 PROCESS ONTOLOGIES

atoms, or processes such as emergence. For In humanisms, boundaries are described

example, John Dupré’s process philosophy between human and animal, or human and
of biology focuses on biological processes plant life, or human and inert technology,
of stabilization and destabilization at the in order to preserve the special status of
microbial level, rather than on fixed iden- humanity. Process ontologies discard these
tities of substances, species or individuals. boundaries and emphasize the shared
American pragmatism can be included events that make for human–animal and
in the list of process ontologies and Peirce, human–technology assemblages. There are
Dewey and James have been associated different intensities of processes across the
with more familiar thinkers of process human and animal. They work together
such as Bergson. Bergson introduced the such that an exclusive humanism cannot be
concepts of multiplicity and duration into entertained. For example, Donna Haraway
process ontology. Multiplicity is a defini- describes the relation of human and animal
tion of qualitative pluralism such that as ‘a knot of species co-shaping one another
things are many due to differences of in layers of reciprocating complexity’
intensity (more, less) rather than differ- (Haraway 2008: 42).
ences between countable quantities (one, Since stability is only ever relative for
two). Duration is the definition of time as process ontologies, the idea of an inde-
continuous multiplicity rather than discrete pendent and stable human life is not
extension. When time is divided into parts, consistent with the view of interrelated
it is no longer the same as when it is processes. The idea of human finitude,
considered as a continuous duration. There important for existentialist ideas of death
is therefore a parallel in process ontologies and human specialness, is replaced by
between the opposition of beings and many processes extending beyond the
processes and the opposition of continuous limits of an individual human life, body or
multiplicities and discrete parts. mind. Many lives and processes continue
Though there are many versions of beyond each human death, extending in
humanism, the movement can be defined ways that refute theories of proper limits
generally as based upon stable and finite for human lives. Judith A. Jones describes
human individuals sharing a common idea, this Whiteheadian view of life in terms of
essence, destiny, goal, reflective self- intensity and connection: ‘A creative
consciousness or form. Humanism cannot cosmos of vibratory intensities is a
therefore be deduced from process ontolo- perpetual manifold of felt connectivity in
gical principles. This is because the an ever-changing array of worlds, and of
commonness required to identify the potential contrasts where such worlds may
human is replaced by changing and vari- be made one and rendered part of the
able multiplicities of becoming across perpetual many’ (1998: 211–12).
complex societies of interconnected trans- For process ontologies, ‘posthuman’
formations. Process ontologies are there- does not necessarily imply the abandon-
fore important for ideas of the posthuman. ment of human values or a focus on human
For example, for her study of the post- bodies and minds for ethics. Ideas such as
human, Rosi Braidotti develops process feeling in Whitehead or intuition in
concepts such as the ‘assemblage’ from Bergson allow for attention to the human
Deleuze and Guattari and Isabelle Stengers body or consciousness as processes
develops her posthumanist constructivism extending outwards, but without claiming
following Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari. an essential superiority or independence

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PROCESS ONTOLOGIES 373

for them. Process ontologies can be very ively) stable center of agency’ (2000: 15). In
close to the ethics and politics of some Rescher’s ontology, the individual human
kinds of humanism, where positive values consciousness, soul, identity, mind and
are associated with some qualities exhib- body disappear as independent entities in
ited by actual humans as they extend into favour of extended processes.
the world. This idea of extension draws Simple obser vations allow us to under-
process ontology close to theories in the stand the extent and variability of relative
philosophy of mind drawing variously on stability as megaprocess in process ontolo-
Clark, Varela and Thompson and describe gies. Take the air as it sustains you with
mind as extended, embedded, embodied oxygen, yet also introduces harmful
and enacted. pollutants; the much-filtered water you
The humanism of the great poet, drink; the ambient temperature keeping
engaged political activist, committed you alive; the clothes made thousands
reformer and investigator into humankind of miles away; the language you use,
are not closed off from process ontology. developed by the speech of millions over
Yet process ontology will also remove the thousands of years; the microbes in your
illusory basis for a strong humanism, gut keeping you healthy; the technologies
where the commonly defined and repres- of glass, silicon, threads, management,
ented abstract human being is the general distribution, drugs and prosthetics. All
foundation for exclusive and bounded are vital aspects of a relatively stable mega-
values. Process ontology can lead to a prag- process which extends your illusory human
matic anthropocentrism, though it will boundaries of body, mind, character and
always be opposed to an idealist humanism soul. You are dissolved into the multipli-
and sensitive to shared processes with city of the non-human, just as those non-
animals, plants and technology. human processes reach out and dissolve
When reflecting on process ontology, into you.
Nicholas Rescher, whose work combines
See also Commutation Ontology;
American pragmatism and process philo-
Econtology; Metastability; Ontological
sophy, explains why the ground of strong
Turn; Vibrant Matter.
humanism is taken away: ‘Based on a
process-oriented approach, the self or ego
. . . is simply a megaprocess – a structured James Williams
system of processes, a cohesive and (relat-

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
374 QUANTUM ANTHROPOLOGY

Q
QUANTUM ANTHROPOLOGY cross-chatter of these oppositions tends to
entrench and essentialize their meanings
This notion is elaborated in Quantum into a political hierarchy of difference.
Anthropologies: Life at Large (Kirby 2011). Quantum Anthropologies interrogates
As the title of the book suggests, this this opposition through a counter-intuitive
collection of essays explores the relation- strategy. I read the work of philosopher,
ship between scientific themes and the Jacques Derrida, in a way that radically
interpretive enterprise in the humanities resituates deconstruction’s implications
and social sciences. The sciences are said to and relevance. Best known for his signa-
enjoy a successful degree of access to ture aphorism ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ –
material reality; its objects and processes. ‘there is no outside-text’ (1976: 158),
In comparison, the humanities acknow- Derrida’s assertion appears to endorse the
ledge that ‘reality’ is in inverted commas hermeticism of cultural constructionism,
because it is a second order construct, a allowing us no way out. However, Derrida
subjective and culturally inflected process consistently railed against linguisticism as
of interpretation that inevitably mediates it is commonly conceived: ‘The concept of
nature as such. The common-sense belief text or of context which guides me
that sustains this opposition is that nature embraces and does not exclude the world,
is universal, enduring and relatively reality, history . . . [T]he text is not the
constant, whereas the object that culture book, it is not confined in a volume itself
discovers is perceived through the hermen- confined to the library. It does not suspend
eutics of representation that are inevitably reference . . . Différance is a reference and
mobile and contested. vice versa’ (1988: 137). In Derrida’s hands,
What is in question is the opposition ‘language’, ‘general writing’ and ‘text’ evoke
between nature and culture, as well as the the workings of an open system, and yet
cognate associations that appear to explain one whose apparent exteriority, or what it
and justify their difference. The division is appears to access, remains internal to it.
a political hierarchy that equates nature My contribution is to rework and re-
with original deficiency and culture with a direct the implications of this assertion in
later and more evolved complexity. This what could be described as a new material-
same logic is at work in the body/mind ist intervention. There are several steps in
division and its sexual and gender align- this strategy. First, we begin with writing,
ments, in the racial discriminations of which is regarded as a cultural phenomenon
black (ignorance) versus white (enlighten- because historically it arrives after speech.
ment), and even in the most foundational Unlike writing, we tend to assume that
assumptions that identify and segregate speech is a natural ability whose meanings
materiality from ideation. Importantly, the are transparently available to us. In other

374

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
QUANTUM ANTHROPOLOGY 375

words, if we are present when someone is even cognizing, albeit in involved and
speaking we feel we have understood that often unanticipated ways. Indeed, in what
person’s meaning, whereas we concede a might be described as a posthuman
level of ambiguity to the written word. performativity, where the difference
However, Derrida argues that speech is between subjects and objects are ‘intra-
always/already writing (1976) because actively’ (Barad 2007: 168–72) blurred, the
speech is as complex, as contextually alive conventional co-ordinates of reference and
and open to interpretation as writing. location are profoundly disoriented and
Derrida’s intervention is commonly diffracted.
interpreted as one that denaturalizes The resonance between aspects of crit-
speech by describing it in terms of cultural ical theory, post-structuralism and decon-
complexity, a manoeuvre that sustains the struction in particular, are envisioned as
binary with a category correction. However, expressions of Life’s literacies in Quantum
building on Derrida’s insistence that Anthropologies. Importantly, this displace-
deconstruction does more than reverse a ment of ‘who’ reads and ‘who’ authors
binary, I displace the opposition and its discovers a more comprehensive sense of
political agendas by arguing that writing sociality whose intrication (writing)
was always/already nature (complex, discover modes of being (ontology) with/in
systemically involved, entangled). In other modes of knowing (epistemology).
words, by naturalizing writing, ‘no outside- According to this view, ‘textuality’ is a
text’ becomes ‘no outside nature’, and thus systemic enfolding, always contemporary
originary complexity becomes our depar- and productively alive because never closed
ture point in a revised post-humanities. off in a past that is behind us. Consequently,
If deconstruction is not a methodology ‘texts’ are polymorphous, such that even
whose only purpose is to muddle concep- seemingly primeval organisms, indeed, all
tual integrity and to underline the human organisms, as well as apparently inanimate
condition’s solipsism (culture), then we are and lifeless entities such as a photon, or the
invited to consider a meta-physis whose behaviour of lightning, become subjects of
internal torsions have quantum implica- cognitive and agential entanglement and
tions. As particle physicist, feminist and observational intention. Quantum anthro-
philosopher of science, Karen Barad pology explores this sense of a literate
explains it: ‘Concepts do not refer to the ‘worlding’, diffracting the author/reader
object of investigation. Rather, concepts and reconfiguring the difference between
in their material intra-activity enact the subject and object, human and non-human,
differentiated inseparability that is a even life and non-life, in the process.
phenomenon’ (2010: 3). This way of think-
See also Diffraction; Feminist Post-
ing reconfigures the difference between
humanities; Neo/New Materialism;
ideation and materiality, culture and
Posthumanist Performativity.
nature, and in such a way that nature, or
reality, becomes articulate, agential, and Vicki Kirby

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
376 RADICAL MEDIOCRITY

R
RADICAL MEDIOCRITY wherever we want to go without having the
faintest idea what or where it is. In games
How mediocre have the lives and self- we can be whomever we want to be and do
consciousness of Western individuals what we always dreamt of. Our lives have
become? The suggestion that we live an been immaterialized to a great extent.
average life full of boring routines is Within this mediatized context radical
unbearable for most western individuals mediocrity is a state of mind and a state of
who are self-reflectively attuned to live being. Notwithstanding infrastructural
autonomous, unique and creative lives. Yet, immobilizations like traffic jams, terrorist
once we take the notion ‘mediocrity’ as threats, tsunamis or digital viruses, our
literally as possible in order to upscale its mobility has become part of our selves. On
meaning critically to a politico-economic a psychological level we live an ‘automo-
level, it is hard to ignore this evident fact: bilized’ life. The very essence of global
in the third millennium our posthuman consumers is not freedom to think but
condition is radical mediocrity; that is, all freedom to move around: not autonomy
kinds of media and means (medium) rule but automobility. We have become
(Greek: kratein – crity) our lives and we are Aristotle’s Demiurgos: the ultimate self
rooted (Latin: radix, radices – root) into the (Greek: autos) mover (Latin: mobilis).
world via screens and displays. We think we The instinctive rejection of the qualific-
know everything about supernovas, black ation ‘radical mediocre’ is triggered by our
holes, the genome, DNA , neurotrans- deep-rooted modern self-perception.
mitters, quarks and even the Higgs boson, Philosophically this is in accord with the
but we only deduce this from screens that Kantian definition of the subject. In his
visualize statistics and diagrams. Kids Critique of Pure Reason (1781) the
nowadays are swiping screens for about ten autonomous subject – the cogito in process
hours a day. Twitter and Facebook connect that Kant names ‘transcendental appercep-
everyone to everyone. tion’ – is self-consciously equipped with an
Life in the twenty-first century has understanding that enables the subject to
become ecstatic: we have externalized our make truthful judgements about the world
consciousness in computers. Twenty-first- in order to act rationally. This self-
century schizoid man lives in virtual times consciousness is embedded in a culture
where the time range is a split second. He that appreciates critical distance and
acts as if time and space are annihilated as autonomy. Modern education raises young
a result of an unimaginable acceleration of people to become critical citizens. Yet
processes. The economy has become spec- instead of taking distance to reflect critic-
ulative with algorithms mobilizing the ally individuals nowadays are enmeshed,
stock exchange. By satnav we can travel to embedded in networks. A radical mediocre

376

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RADICAL MEDIOCRITY 377

person is a node in a network, knotted into Why schizoid? This posthuman condi-
a web. Being a subject is the result of tion has a technological and a psycholo-
continuous folding in and extending feed- gical aspect. Man and media are fully inter-
back loops. The concept of a rational twined. Man is a techno-psychological
subject that is able to make proper choices being that by the second decade of the
and responsible decisions is the very third millennium has internalized all
foundation of the modern emancipation these mediations, reorganizing his life
of all those groups that were politically according to the possibilities that these
non-existent before the middle of the media produce. His basic needs are expo-
nineteenth century: craftsmen, labourers, nentially redefined into volatile prefer-
their wives and all those racially and sexu- ences that are directed by the market. How
ally marginalized groups that have gained does this second nature become first? In
civil rights in the past century. the western hemisphere life has become
Yet, exactly two centuries later post- very comfortable. This comfortable life,
modern, emancipated individuals have acquired in the course of 150 years, has
gone through a process of technological become first nature. An iPad or iPhone
enlightenment that has raised their life nowadays is a primary need, as is a credit
standards to a – globally speaking – dispro- card and a car. After the initial ‘shock’ that
portionate height. The average footprint of always accompanies the introduction of a
north-west Europeans is nearly four times new medium, end users learn to handle the
what the earth can produce. In the course medium. Gradually they start consuming
of modernity interactions and transactions the comfort, i.e. the affluence of ‘their’
got speeded up. In 1981, two centuries after media, internalizing it as a basic standard.
Kant’s publication, the TGV for the first For the next generation this comfort has
time transported people to their holiday become a basic disposition. That is why
resorts and business conferences in France proposing to reduce automobility and
by at a top speed of 381 km/h, the space disconnect from interactivity feels like
shuttle Columbia encircled the earth, the being asked to mutilate oneself: it is a crip-
Voyager 2 arrived at Saturn, MTV started pling, blinding or dumbing intervention. It
to broadcast video clips around the clock, is as if someone is asked to cut off a healthy
and IBM launched its first personal leg or pierce a well-functioning eye or ear.
computer. A year later, in 1982, the internet This psychological upgrading is the
protocol suite (TCP /IP ) was introduced as result of technological upscaling. New
the standard networking protocol and a media always incorporate earlier
decade later the World Wide Web, web developed media. A smartphone is neither
servers, and web browsers connect poten- a telephone nor a TV, let alone a library. It
tially everyone on Earth. Global connectiv- is a connected digital display that enables
ity, described in a rhizomatic sense by its users to be everywhere at every moment,
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A writing, speaking, browsing and acting,
Thousand Plateaus (1980), was a fact. By choosing and making technologically pre-
now every person has become a node in a determined decisions. Media produce
network. Without realizing this transform- unknown experiences, new lifestyles, and
ation, because uncritically stuck in a eventually new needs, albeit strictly in the
modern, inadequate discourse, twenty- terms of the format. The medium becomes
first-century schizoid man has become an experience in itself. It is no longer a
radically mediocre. means to an end. As Marshall McLuhan

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
378 RADICAL MEDIOCRITY

concluded in 1964: the medium is the diagnose this uncritical state of mind in
message. Giorgio Agamben reflects on this order to redirect agency and constitute
specific state of mind as sheer communic- new subjectivities. What is needed is a
ability in Means without End: Notes on second enlightenment, as Horkheimer and
Politics (2000). Adorno proposed in Dialectic of
Mediological affluence constitutes the Enlightenment (1944). I would propose to
end-user’s milieu. Lack and scarcity are label this enlightenment not a rational, but
abundantly produced in order to trigger a medial enlightenment, because twenty-
collective desire. Once the affluence of new first-century man has to readjust his
mediological conditions is internalized, proportional relation to ‘his’ media. What
needs up till then unknown are ontolo- we need is a second emancipation: not an
gized. These become primary needs. ego-emancipation but an eco-emancipa-
Autonomy has become automobility, tion. What is needed in educative terms is
freedom is experienced in speeded-up what has been addressed in UNESCO
frictionless access. Owning the newest of programs for education in the twenty-first
the newest is imperative for being acknow- century as media literacy. This literacy
ledged by the others, i.e. being recognized needs to be enhanced by what Fritjof
as a subject. Being-in-world, the Capra described as ecoliteracy.
Heideggerian option, is now being-in- The critical philosophical tools to
media, a medium being more than just an analyse this radical mediocrity in an
instrumental, kinetic connection between affirmative sense in order to make this leap
separate beings. Intention is articulated by possible are provided by philosophies that
its extensions, inner life by its prothetic ex- focus on relations instead of identities.
plicitation. The private/public opposition The deconstructivist critics of Hegelian
no longer holds since every ‘private’ dialectics are the first in line, because once
conversation is stored by the provider and the Hegelian sublation (Aufhebung) is
talking to the world via a headset is a chopped off, what is left are webs of rela-
public performance. Uncritically being-in- tions. Thinkers of difference from Derrida
media takes its users beyond history. It is at to Jean-Luc Nancy all focus on the rela-
this crucial point that a medium can tions between (id)entities, articulating this
become a harmful routine or a bad habit, in-between as ‘inter’. Derrida proposed the
measured by a shared well-being. term ‘différance’ in order to understand
The ‘incorporated’ media eventually the ongoing production of differences in
become as invisible as they are indispens- discursive practices. Referring to Rousseau
able. Yet just like a pacemaker regulating he already in Of Grammatology (1976)
well-balanced lives, media produce – and argued that the immediate is derived.
by implication control – normality. How Everything starts with the intermediary,
do we critically evaluate the post human although this is inconceivable for reason. If
condition of twenty-first-century schizoid there is a primary principle which can be
man? Is he addicted to his media? assigned of an ontological status, it is a
Addiction is not a proper qualification for productive ‘voix moyenne’. In order to
this interwoven state of being, because this clarify ‘factuality’ in Hegel: The Restlessness
concept too is deeply rooted in modern of the Negative, Nancy states that a factum
discourse. Neither is the Marxist’s aliena- as ‘the thing that gives itself ’ manifests
tion an adequate term. We need to develop itself as a becoming: ‘it is in relation’ (2002:
non-conventional analytical tools to 33). This reminds us of his ‘being-

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
RATIONALIST INHUMANISM 379

in-common’ in which Heidegger’s notion 336). It is the reconfiguration of the human

‘MitDasein’ is updated. But whatever as the object of new ‘human sciences’ that
thinker we take, what is needed to constitutes the historical break between
enlighten our present schizoid state of the classical and modern systems of know-
being is a philosophy of relations and an ledge. Though the classical rationalism of
affirmative, yet critical approach of inter- Descartes understood the world in terms
connectedness. The crucial notion in this of a knowing subject that had no place
affirmative approach is ‘interesse’ or within it, it instigated an anthropological
‘interest’. turn that, following Kant’s critique of
reason, implanted this subject in the
See also Interest/Interesse; Intermediality;
modern concept of the human: ‘a strange
Critical Posthumanism.
empirico-transcendental doublet . . . a
being such that knowledge will be attained
Henk Oosterling
in him of what renders all knowledge
possible’ (ibid.: 347). The most influential
aspect of Foucault’s analysis is its conclu-
RATIONALIST INHUMANISM sion, which suggests that this doublet is
coming undone in the same manner as the
If the concept of the human has a funda- classical concept of human nature, and
mental feature that remains more or less foresees that ‘man [will] be erased, like a
constant from antiquity to the present day, face drawn in the sand at the edge of the
it is the idea that humanity is something sea’ (419–22).
more than one species of animal amongst This prophecy has been borne out by
others. Western culture was founded upon four interacting trends: (i) the natural
myths that sever us from the animal order, sciences have progressively undermined
reinforced by their formalization in philo- the supposed uniqueness of our animality,
sophical and theological accounts of the by isolating empirical study of homo sapiens
natural order, and consolidated by their from our cultural understanding of the
elaboration in classical humanism. This human; (ii) the humanities have aggress-
supplement is articulated in various ways ively critiqued the purported universality
within the Western tradition, but it is the of our rationality, by exposing the illicit
perennial picture of ‘Man’ as the rational privileging of masculine, bourgeois and
animal that unites them in distinguishing European forms of life implicit in the asso-
us from other animals. The traditional role ciation of reason with Western civilization;
of the humanities has been to preserve (iii) technological advancement has begun
and refine the cultural self-understanding to compound these theoretical trends, by
that has formed around this picture, modifying and even threatening to recreate
supplying both descriptive and normative our cognitive capacities in artificial forms;
resources for individual and collective self- and (iv) environmental crisis has begun to
determination. catalyse the cultural consequences of these
However, as Foucault has shown, even other trends, by confronting our societies
though classical humanism wrested the with the impermanence of the natural order
study of ‘human nature’ from its religious underlying the residual vestiges of the clas-
foundations, its understanding of this sical worldview. These trends have resulted
concept ‘excluded any possibility of a in the emergence of several strands of
Classical science of man’ (Foucault 2002: posthumanism, which aim to supplant the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
380 RATIONALIST INHUMANISM

conceptual foundations of classical human- on the one hand (embracing trend (iii)),
ism and its anthropological variants. and rejecting the theological equilibrium
Transhumanism is the oldest and most presupposed by every normative appeal to
well developed of these, and is concerned nature (Brassier 2014b: 485), on the other
principally with the capacity of emerging (embracing trend (iv)).
technologies to overcome the limitations Its rationalism lies in its affirmation of
of the ‘human condition’ as traditionally those features of humanism that are
conceived (trend (iii)) and the normative consequences of the idea that humans are
implications thereof (More 2013). Critical defined by their the capacity for rational
posthumanism is an attempt to complete agency: it understands the functional
the auto-deconstruction of the humanities distinction between animal sentience and
(trend (ii)) by bringing the resources of human sapience in terms of the difference
critical theory and philosophical antihu- between reliable differential response (e.g.
manism to bear on the ‘posthuman condi- uttering ‘x is red’ in the presence of red
tion’ as a whole (incorporating trends (i), things) and conceptual competence (e.g.
(iii) and (iv)) (Braidotti 2013: 13–54). It understanding that ‘x is red’ implies ‘x is not
accuses transhumanism of uncritically green’) (Brandom 2009: 200–6), or ‘the
retaining central elements of classical capacity to engage in discursive practices’
humanism, including a cache of meta- more generally (Negarestani 2014a: 429–
physical distinctions such as mind/body 38); and it understands the normative rift
and culture/nature, and a normative focus between nature and culture in terms of
on self-determination (ibid.: 89–104). By autonomy, or the capacity for individual
contrast, speculative posthumanism takes and collective self-determination (Brassier
the residual humanism of transhumanism 2014b).
to consist in underestimating the possible Its inhumanism lies in its rejection of
differences between humans and posthu- those features of humanism that are
mans indicated by natural science and consequences of indexing these capacities
technological advancement (trends (i) and to the biology, psychology, and cultural
(iii)) (Roden 2015: 13–23). Importantly, it history of homo sapiens: it sees reason as an
rejects the contention that posthuman abstract protocol that has been function-
intelligences are bound by the constraints ally implemented by the techno-linguistic
of human rationality (ibid.: 58–82). infrastructure of human culture
Rationalist inhumanism is an alterna- (Negarestani 2014a: 452–60; Wolfendale,
tive to these positions that attempts to forthcoming); and it sees freedom as an
extract the normative core of humanism ‘insurrectionary force’ that has boot-
from its imbrication with the biological strapped itself out of evolutionary pre-
and historical contingencies of the human adaptations and reformatted the human
species (confronting trends (i) and (ii)), so species as a suitable processing platform
as to explicitly articulate and defend (Singleton 2014: 504–7; Wolfendale,
aspects of the residual humanism that crit- forthcoming). It is this attempt to locate
ical and speculative posthumanism locate an alien vector within humanism which
in transhumanism (Wolfendale, forthcom- pushes it beyond itself that calls for the
ing). It does this by exploring the connec- prefix in- rather than anti-, post-, or even
tion between the explanatory programmes trans-. It is worth examining how
of Kantian critique and artificial general Negarestani invokes Foucault in order to
intelligence (AGI ) (Adams et  al. 2012), describe this dynamic:

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
RATIONALIST INHUMANISM 381

A universal wave that erases the self- AGI lies in their concern with providing
portrait of man drawn in sand, inhuman- the most minimal description of these
ism is a vector of revision. It relentlessly capacities: a functional diagram of what
revises what it means to be human by something would have to do to be generally
removing its supposedly self-evident capable of thought and action (Deutsch
characteristics while preserving certain 2012).
invariances. The practical consequence is a form of
Negarestani 2014a: 427 prometheanism commensurate with trans-
Insofar as the concept of the human artic- humanism: ‘the project of re-engineering
ulates our cultural self-understanding it is ourselves and our world on a more
not merely subject to passive change – as rational basis’ (Brassier 2014b: 487). If
we have seen in the transitions between inhumanism treats ‘supposedly self-
pre-classical, classical and modern eras – evident characteristics’ of humanity – such
but open to active revision in accordance as vocational sociality, dimorphic sexual-
with the norm of collective self-determin- ity, or terrestrial domesticity – as concep-
ation. Inhumanism turns humanism’s tual determinations to be discarded in
commitment to self-determination upon searching for minimal conditions for
itself by elaborating the consequences of abstract autonomy, then prometheanism
this radical revisability. treats these same characteristics as empir-
The theoretical consequence is the ical obstacles to be surmounted in achiev-
dissection of the empirico-transcendental ing maximal conditions for concrete
doublet and a renewed transcendentalism: freedom. There are distinct promethean
‘rejecting not only psychologism and projects concerned with each obstacle just
historicism, but all concrete forms of the mentioned: accelerationism strives to turn
anthropological prejudice, we attempt to the emancipatory tendencies of modernity
question afresh the limits of thought, and to against the oppressive sociality of capital-
renew contact in this way with the project ism (Srnicek and Williams 2014), xeno-
for a general critique of reason’ (Foucault feminism aims to harness the artificiality
2002: 372). The ‘invariances’ that cannot be of identity by rejecting the givenness of
revised in the process of self-determination material conditions (sex) and social forms
are precisely the conditions of possibility of (gender) alike (Laboria Cuboniks 2015),
revision and self-determination them- and cosmism enjoins us ‘to consider the
selves. This dissection of ‘Man’ extracts the earth a trap’, treating gravity as one more
universal subject of classical rationalism constraint to be overcome by the ‘general-
from its empirical cladding, flaying the ised escapology’ of design (Singleton
masculine, bourgeois and European 2014). The inhumanism of these projects
specificities hidden behind its supposed lies in their embrace of alienation as a
otherworldliness from its abstract opera- positive force, transforming our progress-
tional form, and leaving nothing but a set of ive exile from a series of edenic harmonies
functions that can be realized in diverse – be they economic, sociological or envir-
material substrates and divergent forms of onmental – into an esoteric genealogy of
life: humans, animals, aliens and machines freedom.
alike can adopt the role of sapient subjects Ultimately, what differentiates critical
and autonomous agents, so long as they and speculative posthumanism from
possess the corresponding capacities. The rationalist inhumanism is that they over-
connection between Kantian critique and come ‘Man’ by renewing metaphysics

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
382 REAL COOL ETHICS

rather than transcendentalism (Foucault paucity of signification, including and

2002: 372). Critical posthumanism perhaps especially that of capital. Radically
collapses the distinction between human depersonalizing, the real of Lacan’s oeuvre
and non-human by positing a universal thwarts the dominant epistemological and
vitality – zoe – in which both partake ontological convictions of the modern,
(Braidotti 2013: 131), whereas speculative liberal episteme and its most treasured
posthumanism articulates the disconnect child, humanism. The real cannot be
between human and posthuman by posit- captured by traditional schemas of causal-
ing a category of functionally autonomous ity, grammar, temporality or the normative
assemblages to which both belong (Roden frameworks of subjectivity and objectivity
2015: 124–49). The choice between these that they subtend. It cannot be a proper
paths can be framed in terms of the peren- object of our thought or action, nor the
nial picture from which we began: do we proper force of our will or desire. Not a
unbind animality from the normative transcendental, it is also not a possible site
constraints of rationality, or unbind ration- of authority, whether prescriptive or
ality from the metaphysical constraints of restrictive. To shake an ethics out of this
animality? strange animal is, at the least, a rather queer
undertaking. But, even more queerly, it
See also In-Human; Transhumanism/
may also be a possibility that these neo-
Posthumanism; Speculative Posthumanism;
liberal times are opening, ever so obliquely.
Xenofeminism.
My route to such an ethics passes
through the provocative work on the real
Peter Wolfendale
in queer theory, especially that of Tim
Dean. For Dean, as for most queer theor-
ists engaged by psychoanalysis, sexuality
REAL COOL ETHICS is fundamentally chaotic, turbulent,
disordered and disordering. It radically
The heady days of the early twenty-first resists signification, undercutting any
century, as marked by the western calen- attempts to place a strict identity upon it.
dar, can be variously named: Anthropocene, In Lacanian terms, sexuality only registers
Capitolocene, neoliberalism, posthuman- in consciousness through the trace that it
ism and others. These various names share leaves as the limit of the symbolic order.
a profound sense of the impossibility of Formulations derived from such concepts
ethics – indeed, of living an ethical life. as sexual difference and sexual object-
With a focus on the aspects that are tracked choice disavow this turbulent, asignifying
by naming this contemporary episteme force. They domesticate sexuality into
‘neoliberalism’, I respond to this pervasive grids of intelligible identity. By reading
aporia by animating an ethics of the real these aspects of sexuality as a grounding in
that must be, in turn, grounded in the and cathecting to the real, Dean emphas-
complex phenomena of race. izes the radically depersonalizing effects of
The roots of this ethics of the real live in sexuality. Not only does this undercut
the work of Jacques Lacan, especially as heteronormativity qua normativity, it also
inflected through queer theory. Described desubjectifies and even dehumanizes the
by Lacan as that which ‘lacks the lack of effects of sexuality qua sexuality. Read as
signification’, the real functions as a kind of the real, sexuality never was and never can
repellent magnetic force that resists the become a properly human phenomenon.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
REAL COOL ETHICS 383

Sexuality, however, as we should know formed iterations of social difference:

from the extensive work of black feminists race, gender, sexuality, class, ability and the
of the 1970s and 1980s, is always already infamous etcetera all become cool accessor-
racialized. By reading queer theory’s work ies, little aestheticized nuggets scrubbed
on sexuality as the real in the specific geo- free of any nasty histories of violence. The
ontology of racialization, I argue we must, metric of the market flattens the different
in the neoliberal episteme, read race as the forms of social difference into wholly
real. Moreover, I argue that doing so may fungible units. Commanded to ‘celebrate
be the most promising avenue towards a diversity’, neoliberal subjects can no longer
creating a meaningful ethics in these discern the differences, for example,
dizzying times. between the increasing elasticity of gender
In Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race and expression and intransigent anti-black
Ethics (2015) I argue that a neoliberal racism. Classical liberalism’s commitments
social rationality displaces the liberal to tolerance, energized by its disavowal of
subject of desire with a new form of xenophobia, no longer cathect neoliberal
subjectivity that, again in the Lacanian subjects. The neoliberal episteme rewires
lexicon, can be aptly described as cruising our most fundamental modes of social
the circuit of the drive. The drive, unlike cathexes from xenophobia to coolness:
desire and demand, does not aim at any cruising the drive of difference, neoliberal
object of satisfaction. Structurally ateleolo- subjects are swiftly becoming way too cool.
gical, its circuitous form enlivens repeti- Bringing an ethics of the real to bear, I
tion, rather than arrival, as the form of argue one social difference is strikingly
pleasure. When read as cruising the circuit unlike all others: race. Neoliberal subjects,
of the drive, neoliberal enterprising especially in North America and Europe,
practices of consumerism are, in and of are deeply confused, if not verging on a
themselves, quite satisfying. Practices of self- kind of madness, when it comes to matters
fashioning become practices of pleasure of race. Whether uttered in mono- or
and even freedom in neoliberalism. The multiracial settings, speech about race and
infinity of the endless quest for cooler and racism sets off all kinds of psychosomatic,
cooler stuff – and cooler and cooler selves historically material and deeply suppressed
– is the field of subjectivity. For the neo- dynamics that will spin most conversations
liberal subject, the endless proliferation of into a twisted, carnivalesque funhouse.
interests stimulated by the market, writ Despite the pure excess of material evi-
quite large, is the site of pleasure, freedom dence that we are living in extraordinarily
and the self: the more you can intensify racist and violent cultures, we seem to have
your interests, the more expansive, enter- no language for it. It resists signification.
prising and interesting you are. And the Consequently, it might be fruitful to
more you can stuff your mouth!1 This understand the complex phenomena of
externally cathected, quintessentially post- neoliberal race, with its suppression of its
modern subject who glories in her superfi- roots in long violent histories of anti-black
ciality circulates happily in the neoliberal racism, as signalling and cathecting us to
world of endless images and consumption: the real. Reading race as the real offers a
she is gloriously no longer human. profound caution against falling back into
The neoliberal social rationality must identity categories to conceptualize and
feed this mouth, endlessly. Rather ingeni- talk about race. Unhinged from its location
ously, it finds perfect fodder in trans- as the objet a of classical liberalism’s core

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
384 REAL COOL ETHICS

fantasies of tolerance, the long, violent motivation and all its personalizing,
history of xenophobia that animates the internalizing effects, an ethics of the real
concept of race is now precisely that which may recathect neoliberal subjects back into
cannot enter signification in the neoliberal a meaningful language of ethics. It may
episteme. We cannot speak of it. We harbour sufficient force to rip through the
increasingly cannot even recognize it or its aestheticizing social dynamics of neo-
absence. And yet it produces a profound liberal cultures.
cultural anxiety: our anxiety about race This is not to smuggle the real back into
blows our cool. the traditional schemas of causality and
If we understand this anxiety, again temporality: we cannot wilfully bring the
with Lacan, as a signalling of the real, then real forward as an object of ethical action.
efforts to intensify our social cathexis to By reading an ethics of the real as an ethics
race precisely as a long history of violence of (endemically sexualized) race, I under-
with ongoing systemic effects may be a stand a non-causal encounter with the real
crucial route to becoming ethical. As as articulating the kind of non-agential
Alenka Zupančič (2000) explains, an ethics response to the long, intense history of
of the real involves an ontological shift, sexualized racism that makes us vigilant
iterated perhaps most saliently in subjectiv- about this violence without ascribing inten-
ity, that takes us far beyond the figure of tionality or the morality of accountability. It
the human. Elaborating an ethics of the connotes a sustained and intensified atten-
real as a Lacanian spinning of Kantian tion to the vast histories of sexualized
ethics, Zupančič elegantly shows how this racism that litter our cultural psyches. It
ethical subject is no longer attached to its forces us to find our ways back through the
pathos and thus does not fear losing it. This debris of history – still, again. We might
ethical subject does not experience the then reconceive ourselves precisely as
impossible commands of the classical posthuman so as to become attuned to the
categorical imperative as an ethics of inevitable eruptions of the real, especially
asceticism and sacrifice. Undergoing a signalled as race, in these neoliberal times.
profound transformation in the anthropo-
See also Afrofuturism; Decolonial
logy that undergirds such concerns, this
Critique; In-Human; Necropolitics;
ethical subject is no longer animated by
Neocolonial; Posthuman Ethics; Socially
desire and its vortex of ego-centrism. As
Just Pedagogies
Zupančič puts it, ‘We need have no fear
that entry into the realm of the ethical will
require us to sacrifice all the pleasures we Note
hold so dear, since this will not even be 1. The mouth, along with the ear and anus,
experienced as a loss or sacrifice – “we” will are the somatic indices of the drive for
not be the same person as before’ (2000: 8). Lacan due to their circular structures. As
Ironically, neoliberal subjects are Lacan explains in Four Fundamental
already not the same person as before. The Concepts, ‘Even when you stuff the
neoliberal subject may, therefore, be more mouth – the mouth that opens in the
obliquely prone to the kind of ethics- register of the drive – it is not the food
without-pathos that Kant-avec-Lacan that satisfies it, it is, as one says, the
articulates. Without pathos, neoliberal pleasure of the mouth’ (1999: 167).
subjects cruise the circuit of the drive,
where an ethics of the real erupts. Shunning Shannon Winnubst

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
RESILIENCE 385

RESILIENCE Systems’ (1973) represents the destabiliza-

tion of the notion of ‘equilibrium’ as the
‘Resilience’ as a quality of ‘complex adapt- core of the ecosystem concept and the
ive systems’ has flourished, moving far normal terminus of ecosystem trajectory,
beyond its original applications in the and the beginning of a major shift among
environmental sciences to become the ecologists away from the notion that there
dominant discourse in contemporary prac- exists a ‘balance of nature’ to which life will
tices of crisis management. Developed return eventually if left to self-repair.
within the field of ecology in the 1970s, Having worked for years in the field as a
complex systems theory marked a shift resource manager and conservation ecolo-
from first to second order systems thinking gist, Holling began his classic 1973 paper
and served to conceptualize the metastable on resilience by noting that:
or resilient dynamics of socio-ecological traditions of analysis in theoretical and
systems that were always more than human. empirical ecology have been largely
The concept of resilience has in the recent inherited from developments in classical
past rapidly infiltrated vast areas of the physics and its applied variants . . . there
social sciences, becoming a regular, if has been a tendency to emphasize the
undertheorized, term of art in discussions quantitative rather than the qualitative,
of international finance and economic for it is important in this tradition to
policy, in corporate risk analysis, the know not just that a quantity is larger
psychology of trauma, community and than another quantity, but precisely how
development policy, urban planning, public much larger . . . But this orientation may
health and national security. Malleable and simply reflect an analytic approach
capacious enough to encompass the human developed in one because it was useful
and non-human within a single analytics and then transferred to another where it
of power, the concept of resilience is may not be.
becoming a pervasive idiom of global 1973: 1
governance. Holling goes on to distinguish between an
The term ‘resilience’ originated in the existing notion that he calls ‘engineering
work of the ecologist Crawford ‘Buzz’ resilience’ and his alternative, a properly
Holling who in the 1970s did some of the ‘ecological’ resilience. Engineering resili-
most important work to modernize the ence, associated with the reigning mathe-
classical systems model of ecological matical ecology (Odum 1969; Lewontin
dynamics in terms of the new ‘complexity 1969; May, Levin and Sugihara 1973), is an
science’: away from mechanistic assertions abstract variable, simply the time (t) it takes
of equilibrium typical of post-war cyber- a system to return to a stable maximum (or
netics toward the contemporary ‘complex- equilibrium position) after a disturbance.
ity science’ view of ecosystems. The key The return is simply assumed, and the equi-
image of science that propelled the formal- librium state is taken as equivalent to long-
ization of economics (in the 1870s) and term persistence. What Holling seeks to
ecology (in the 1950s) was of smooth and define instead is a complex notion of resili-
continuous returns to equilibrium after ence which can account for the ability of an
shock, an image derived from different ecosystem to remain cohesive even while
vintages of classical mechanics and thermo- undergoing extreme perturbations. If
dynamics. Holling’s widely cited paper stability refers to the familiar notion of a
‘Resilience and Stability of Ecological return to equilibrium, ‘ecological’ resilience

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
386 RESILIENCE

designates the complex biotic interactions fragilization, potentially leading to the

that determine ‘the persistence of relation- irreversible loss of biodiversity. By contrast,
ships within a system’, thus resilience is ‘a Holling’s perspective seeks to open up a
measure of the ability of these systems to management approach capable of sustain-
absorb changes of state variables, driving ing productivity even under conditions of
variables, and parameters, and still persist’ extreme instability. Its ability to adapt to
(Holling 1973: 17). and deflect from particular limits derives
Holling points to the dangers of the from the fact that it has abandoned long-
management theory of ‘maximum term expectations and progressive growth
sustained yield’ (MSY ), long dominant in horizons:
industrial forestry and fisheries, with its A management approach based on resili-
claims to enumerate a fixed quantity of ence . . . would emphasize the need to
‘surplus’ cod or spruce that can be harves- keep options open . . . and the need to
ted year in year out, without undermining emphasize heterogeneity. Flowing from
the ability of the ecosystem to recuperate this would be not the presumption of
its own productivity. Holling’s argument sufficient knowledge, but the recognition
here (mirroring Hyman Minsky’s post- of our ignorance: not the assumption that
Keynesian account of financial crises) is future events are expected, but that they
that the long-term expectation of stability will be unexpected. The resilience frame-
may be inherently destabilizing. The ideal work can accommodate this shift in
of a constant yield of productivity may perspective, for it does not require a
fragilize a natural resource to such an precise capacity to predict the future,
extent that it undermines complex factors but only a qualitative capacity to devise
supporting the resilience of the system as systems that can absorb and accommo-
a whole. ‘The very approach . . . that assures date future events in whatever unexpected
a stable maximum sustained yield of a form they may take.
renewable resource might so change these Holling 1973: 21
deterministic conditions that the resilience The above passage, taken from the conclu-
is lost or reduced so that a chance and rare sion of Holling’s 1973 article, is significant
event that previously could be absorbed because it so clearly anticipates the guiding
can trigger a sudden dramatic change and ideas of contemporary complex systems
loss of structural integrity of the system’ theory and its practical applications in
(Holling 1973: 21). Holling’s perspective crisis response. Under the sign of resilience,
on resource management reflects the this is an approach to risk management
emerging critical voices which, in the early which foregrounds the limits to predictive
seventies, insisted that intensive methods knowledge and insists on the prevalence of
in agriculture and resource management the unexpected, seeking to ‘absorb and
would at some point meet inherent limits accommodate future events in whatever
to sustainability, resulting in mass extinc- unexpected form they may take’ (ibid.).
tions and intolerable levels of pollution. Holling’s later contributions to the
For Holling, the equilibrium approach was practices of adaptive ecosystem manage-
dangerously self-sabotaging: glossing over ment (1986) earned him wide professional
the unknowably complex interdependen- recognition. Following consensus building
cies of specific landscapes pressed into work with leading orthodox economists
the conditions of maximized yield, it could (Arrow et  al. 1995), Holling and fellow
all too easily accelerate the process of ecologists formed the Resilience Alliance,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
RESILIENCE 387

and conceived of an ambition to expand eous reorganization that leads to a new

the insights of the resilience perspective growth phase (α) (Holling 1992). Having
well beyond ecology. More recently, these emerged as a critical perspective on
initiatives have been brought together modernist theories of economic growth in
within the Stockholm Resilience Centre, a the post-Second World War era, resilience
high-profile think-tank which promotes theory now presents itself as an alternative
the uses of resilience theory in interna- theory of growth in non-equilibrium
tional environment and development conditions – one that is capable of explain-
projects. Emblematic in the name change ing the general dynamics of social and
of the house journal from Conservation ecological evolution in a more than human
Ecology to Ecology and Society, the Alliance world.
and Stockholm Resilience Centre was no Today, we might argue that the science
longer concerned with resilience as a prop- of complex adaptive systems has become
erty of ecosystems but of the co-evolution a theoretical reference point for the full
of societies and ecosystems as a single spectrum of contemporary risk interven-
system. This new research into ‘social- tions. Its influence is now felt in arenas as
ecological resilience’ aspires to set the diverse as psychology, education, urban
ground rules for a general systems theory planning, global development policy, milit-
capable of integrating society, the economy ary strategy, disaster and risk management,
and the biosphere in a posthuman world. social policy, central banking, financial
This totality is dubbed the ‘Panarchy’: economics, ecosystems science and
resource management. Whereas energy
the structure in which systems, including physics played a foundational role in clas-
those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans sical modernist theories of economic and
(e.g., capitalism), as well as combined
ecological organization, and the homeo-
human-natural systems (e.g., institutions
static systems of first order cybernetics
that govern natural resource use such as the
dominated the economic and military
Forest Service), are interlinked in continual
adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation,
sciences of the Cold War, complexity
restructuring, and renewal. science now serves as a source of natural-
Gunderson and Holling 2002 izing metaphors for contemporary prac-
tices of security, and functions to neutralize
There is a significant difference in scope critical inquiry into the disastrous con-
and tone between this later definition of sequences of neoliberal approaches to
socio-ecological resilience and Holling’s financial regulation, urban planning and
earlier work. Holling is no longer arguing crisis response, environmental policy and
that some socio-ecological systems development. Since the nineties, global
undergo extreme fluctuations; nor even financial institutions such as the
that all systems enter into stress conditions International Monetary Fund (IMF 1996,
under the demands of maximum sustained 2006) the World Bank (2006, 2008), and
yield; but rather that all ecosystem and the Bank for International Settlements
social-ecological system dynamics can be (BIS 2002, 2008), have increasingly incor-
approached heuristically as non-linear porated strategies of ‘resilience’ into their
iterations of an ‘adaptive cycle’, moving logistics of crisis management, financial
through the phases of rapid successional (de)regulation and development econom-
growth (r) followed by stable equilibrium ics. With the post–9/11 revolution in
(K), by collapse (Ω), and then a spontan- ‘homeland security’, resilience has become

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
388 REWILDING

a byword among agencies charged with co- so distant future of the ‘de-extinction’ of
ordinating security responses to climate species, with mammoth-like hybrids
change, critical infrastructure protection, released into the wild to reinvigorate
natural disasters, pandemics and terrorism ecosystems. Since it pertains to the effects
(cf. Coaffee, Wood and Rogers 2009; Evans of activities that took place as far back as
and Reid 2014), reorienting these once the Palaeolithic period, rewilding also has
distinct policy arenas toward a horizon of implications for society in general and our
critical future events which (we are told) relations to the natural world by opening
we cannot predict or prevent, but merely up vistas for the renewal of lifestyles made
adapt to by ‘building resilience’. In the tame by consumer capitalism.
process, we would argue, resilience theory The gathering pace of what has been
has largely ceased to operate as critique called the Sixth Extinction, the first mass
and now asserts itself as a fully fledged extinction event in geological history to be
methodology of power. triggered by the activities of a single
species, is the underlying motivation for
See also Capitalocene and Chthulucene;
attempts to deliberately slow or reverse the
Earth; Ecoontology; Ecosophy; Exclusion
collapse of biodiversity through rewilding.
Zone; General Ecology; Metastability;
As the chemistry of the oceans alters and
Negentropy; Planetary; Survival; Violence;
the stability of climate systems breaks
War.
down, those species that are not able to
migrate in search of refuge or adapt to new
Jeremy Walker and conditions are disappearing at a rate of
Melinda Cooper thousands of times background extinction,
or the rate that would be expected to occur
naturally. Rewilding holds out the prospect
REWILDING of bold action to engineer the recovery of
endangered species by rebalancing the
The concept of rewilding has rapidly equation of humans and nature, even if in
expanded to take on ever wider and more the short term resetting the natural ecosys-
metaphorical meanings in the short period tems requires unorthodox human inter-
since it established itself within the vocab- ventions that push at the distinctions made
ulary of inter-disciplinary, practice- between the activities of the human, or
oriented environmental thinking in the late culture, and those of nature or non-human.
1990s. Beginning as a technical description In its most radical form, Pleistocene
for the release of captive animals into the rewilding seeks to reintroduce the mega-
wild, it quickly took on the more general fauna, from mammoths and giant ground
meaning of the re-introduction of plant sloths to sabre-toothed cats, which roamed
and animal species to natural areas that the plains of Europe and the Americas
they previously inhabited. The defini- until they were wiped out by humans
tion also now extends to experimental 10,000 years ago. In the many cases where
programmes to restart natural processes in the megafauna in question are now extinct,
the landscapes that have been denuded of according to the principles of rewilding,
biodiversity as a result of anthropogenic the closest surviving species should be
degradation by using proxy species to introduced, even if they were never native
replace extinct animals. Genetic engineer- to the area in question. The most dramatic
ing even holds out the prospect in the not rewilding project to date involves creating

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
REWILDING 389

a vast Pleistocene Park in the wilds of George Monbiot has written in Feral:
Siberia, where the reintroduction of bison, Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers
moose and wild horses aims to transform of Rewilding (2013) about his attempts to
the waterlogged and mossy tundra into a re-awaken in himself the capacities to
diverse, grassy steppe, similar to the habitat navigate a wilder world that lie buried in
once enjoyed by mammoths. Criticism of our psychological make-up, but which are
such projects has focused on the risk that dulled by the habits of living in a modern
introducing megafauna to habitats that economy that has no need for primeval
have evolved without them for thousands mental and physical skills. The project of
of years could have a negative environ- reconnecting with suppressed, inner wild-
mental effect, while barbed warnings about ness oscillates between the revival of
the dangers of ‘Frankenstein ecosystems’ romantic individualism and questioning
highlights the survival within rewilding the alienation from the natural world asso-
of the technocratic urge to interfere with ciated with consumer capitalism. In this
nature. regard, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn in
Debates around rewilding have How Forest’s Think (2013) has challenged
revolved on the one hand over the choice assumptions about the inevitability of the
of ‘baseline’, in other words whether we separation of humans from the natural
should aim to recreate an approximation world, demonstrating that forest creatures
of a Late Pleistocene landscape or whether are able to think, represent the world, and
it is enough to set the clock back to the make meaning without language. Actions
period before the arrival of Europeans. to rewild culture and society could also be
Critics of rewilding, echoing the objection fundamental to changing the outlook of
frequently raised to the Anthropocene techno-capitalist society and combating
thesis that it unfairly displaces responsibil- the malaise of ‘ecological boredom’, a
ity for ecological crisis from capitalism and passive state of mind that may also account
colonialism to humanity as a whole, have for the widespread indifference to the
pointed out that by shifting the blame for approaching spectre of ecological disaster.
the destruction of wilderness onto pre- In place of the static, territorial
historic hunter-gatherers the enormous paradigm of the national park, wildness is
environmental impact of Western imperi- conceived by rewilders as a fluid category
alism and capitalist economics is minim- that can occur in all types of land- and
ized. Rather than overcoming the dualistic seascapes, and on a micro as well as a
divide between humanity and nature, the macro scale, while optimistic signs of
project of Pleistocene rewilding can also natural resilience are identified in cases of
be seen as the most extreme manifestation the re-colonization by animals of urban as
of the modern Western mindset that well as rural areas as humans retreat.
simultaneously idealizes the purity of lost Rewilding is also self-consciously geared
wilderness and champions scientific inter- not towards achieving the human-defined
vention to restore it. end state of ‘wilderness’, but rather aims to
In addition to revivifying entire ecosys- set in motion natural dynamics that will
tems by reintroducing the wild card of ultimately result in autonomous habitats
large predators and missing keystone and self-managing landscapes. Rewilding
species, rewilding seeks to provide oppor- could be seen as an Anthropocene notion
tunities for modern society to reconnect par excellence, since it recognizes the
with the wild. Environmentalist and writer unique responsibility of the human race

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
390 ROBOPHILOSOPHY

for the mass extinction of species and perspectives at once – it is ‘philosophy of,
destruction of biodiversity, calls for human for, and by social robotics’ (Seibt Hakli
intervention to remedy the situation, and and Nørskov 2016). The following para-
at the same time holds out the prospect graphs will describe each of these three
that in the future humans will deliberately perspectives in greater detail; however,
relinquish control and let re-wilded nature as will also become clear in the course of
be ‘natural’ again. the exposition, these perspectives form
systematically connected trajectories and
See also Animal; Animism; Anthropocene;
contributions to robophilosophy – here
Earth; Ecosophy; Extinction; Resilience.
associated for illustration with one per-
spective – which should more properly be
Maja and Reuben Fowkes
characterized in terms of locations within
a three-dimensional research space.
The first dimension, philosophy of social
ROBOPHILOSOPHY robotics, takes the reflective stance of tradi-
tional philosophical research and investig-
The term ‘robophilosophy’ stands for a ates the conceptual implications of the
fundamental systematic reconfiguration of phenomena of human interactions with
philosophy in the face of artificial social robots that act in accordance with social
agency. Unlike other systematic research norms. After a decade of empirical research
initiatives in philosophy, robophilosophy in ‘human–robot interaction studies’ (HRI )
is time-sensitive, directly motivated by there is sufficient evidence to show that
technological developments, and proact- humans accept robots as social interaction
ive. Robophilosophy is a response to (1) partners and even attribute to them moral
projections of the explosive development standing. Given that these human reactions
of the robotics market in the third decade are sincere, they are counterevidence to (a)
of the twenty-first century, and (2) to the Cartesian paradigm of subjectivity
empirical evidence that the large-scale use according to which self-consciousness,
of artificial ‘social’ agents in public and freedom, intentionality, normative agency
private spaces of human social interactions and epistemic and moral autonomy are a
quite likely will lead to profound disrup- package deal, and (b) to traditional and still
tions of economic, social and cultural dominant philosophical conceptions of
practices in industrialized societies West sociality that restrict the capacity for social-
and East. ity to Cartesian subjects, or else postulate,
The term ‘robophilosophy’ has wider with Hegel, constitutive mutual dependen-
currency in academic contexts since cies between the capacity of sociality and
the inauguration of the bi-annual the capacities associated with the tradi-
Robophilosophy Conference Series in tional model of subjectivity. Since the latter
2014.1 The term was coined by the author figures centrally in the legitimization of
in 2013, in resonance with Gianmarco moral and political authority in Western
Veruggio’s call for ‘robo-ethics’, in order to democracies, there may be far-reaching
signal that the challenges of ‘social robot- repercussions of a pervasive practical
ics’ go beyond ethical concerns and address reconfiguration of the relevant capacities
all disciplines of philosophical research. (e.g. sociality without self-consciousness,
Moreover, robophilosophy is a complex normative agency of great economic power
reconfiguration that engages three research without freedom). In short, robophilosophy

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ROBOPHILOSOPHY 391

as ‘philosophy of social robotics’ tries to West and East, philosophical reflections on

come to terms with the fact that the empir- social robotics quite naturally lead from
ical evidence collected in HRI research auto-cultural hermeneutics into cross-
goes against a built-in feature of Western cultural comparative and intercultural
thought that only humans are the kind of philosophy of technology (cf. Nagenborg
entity that can stand in social relations, and/ 2007; Funk and Irrgang 2014; Nørskov
or that standing in social relations confers 2011; Nakada and Capurro 2013).
upon humans exceptional capacities, as well The second dimension of robophilo-
as the rights and statuses adhering to these. sophy, ‘philosophy for social robotics’,
Turkle’s felicitous observation that ‘we live employs standard methods of philosophical
the robotic moment not because we have research such as conceptual analysis, method
companionate robots in our lives but analysis, capacity analysis, phenomenolo-
because the way we contemplate them on gical analysis, formal theory construction
the horizon says much about who we are and value-theoretic discussion for the sake
and who we are willing to become’ (2011: of addressing theoretical problems in the
26) addresses the ‘robotic moment’ from an research methodology of social robotics,
anthropological perspective as a turning and in order to guide the development of
point in contemporary culture, while robo- social robotics applications.
philosophy as philosophy of social robotics To begin with the foremost task of a
puts the ‘robotic moment’ into the wider philosophy for social robotics, roboticists
perspectives of human socio-cultural and and researchers in HRI (Human–Robot
political history and explores its metaphilo- Interaction Studies) currently operate in an
sophical implications as a game-changer interdisciplinary domain (in the intersec-
for philosophical research. Outstanding tion of robotics, psychology, anthropology
examples of philosophical interactions and sociology) that suffers from the lack of
with social robotics that explicitly engage a joint descriptive framework relative to
the metaphilosophical dimension are which robotic capacities, human reactions
Coeckelbergh 2012 and Gunkel 2012, who and human–robot interactions can be
relate the new ethical tasks arising with characterized in clear and precise termino-
social robotics to the deconstructions of logy. Despite some early efforts to clarify
modern subjectivity that twentiety-century and classify varieties of ‘social’ robots
philosophy developed on purely theoretical (Breazeal 2003; Fong Nourbakhsh and
grounds. Dautenhahn 2003), most researchers in
Another important task for ‘philosophy social robotics use the epithet ‘social’
of social robotics’, the reflective dimension without apparently being aware of the
of robophilosophy, is to situate the semantic commitments incurred by our
phenomena of human–robot interactions current conceptual norms that govern the
within the larger context of philosophy of meaning of this term. As philosophical
technology. As Nørskov (2015) observes, reconstructions of these conceptual norms
Don Ihde’s phenomenological classifica- make clear, however, we cannot simply
tion of ‘human–technology relationships’ relax the requirements for sociality in
must be fundamentally reworked to general without thereby effecting central
capture the peculiar complexities of the regions of our inferential space (Hakli
phenomenology of human–robot interac- 2014). Rather, we need to consider
tions. Interestingly, since robots are sociality as a gradient notion and develop
produced in high-technology societies precise, differentiated descriptions of

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392 ROBOPHILOSOPHY

human–robot interactions that can justifi- provide ‘care’ or to ‘teach’ or to ‘coach’ –

ably be said to realize various degrees and in the sense relevant in, for example,
types of sociality. Currently robotic capa- healthcare, language training or dietary
cities are described metaphorically, using assistance, respectively (Vallor 2011;
the intentionalist vocabulary of human Wynsberghe 2015)? If robots are to be
actions and social interactions – robots are ‘friends’ or ‘companions’, which behavi-
said to ‘answer’,‘recognize’,‘deliver’,‘respond’, oural routines would they need to exhibit
‘collaborate’, ‘smile’, ‘greet’ etc. At best such to be perceived as such (Sullins 2008)?
intentionalist idioms are bracketed by the These investigations are direct extensions
‘de-realization operator’ as-if : ‘We interact of familiar capacities analyses in AI of
with [a social robot] as if it were a person, human cognitive predicates; however,
and ultimately as a friend’ (Breazeal 2002: while the question whether computers
ix). Here and elsewhere the preposition as- really can ‘think’ or ‘form new concepts’ is
if is presented as the ‘as-if ’ of fictionality mainly of theoretical interest, conceptual
and pretend-play, which has motivated and phenomenological analyses of capa-
ethical criticism of social robotics as enga- city requirements for social actions and
ging humans in inauthentic social rela- roles immediately lead to ethical issues.
tions. However, fictionalist interpretations This also holds for the capacity of ethical
of the sociality in human–robot interac- reasoning itself – investigations about how
tions are incoherent; social relations cannot to implement ethical reasoning in
be ‘fictionalized’ – I cannot treat an item as machines – for instance, in military robots
if it were a person since the performance of – are tied to the question of whether to do
such a social action is constitutive for its it and thereby relinquish control (Wallach
realization (Seibt et al. 2014, 2016). Rather, and Allen 2010). In tandem with develop-
the de-realization in question should be ing a fine-grained classificatory framework
understood as the as-if of simulation, for the description of human–robot inter-
where simulation is a similarity relation on actions, philosophy for social robotics thus
processes; the latter can be used fairly must define a differentiated array of new
straightforwardly for the definition of a notions of moral and legal responsibility
fine-grained classificatory framework for for collective agency constellations that
simulated social interactions and associ- involve robots.
ated degrees and types of sociality allowing The third dimension of robophilo-
for asymmetric (non-reciprocal) distri- sophy, philosophy by social robotics,
butions of capacities among interaction represents a far-reaching methodological
partners (ibid.). This switch from the ‘as-if ’ reorientation of philosophical research. As
of fictionality to the ‘as-if ’ of simulation – mentioned above, HRI research is an
which fundamentally changes the premises interdisciplinary field operating with
for an ethical evaluation of human–robot quantitative, experimental and qualitative
interaction – is the cornerstone for a empirical research. If philosophy becomes,
comprehensive descriptive framework for as philosophy for social robotics, an integ-
the interdisciplinary field of HRI .2 ral part of HRI – as it must, due to ethical
The second task area of a philosophy for concerns – the standard philosophical
social robotics is to analyse in detail methodologies (conceptual and
specific human capacities and social roles. phenomenological analysis, rational value
For example, which kinds of functionalit- discourse etc.) lose the relative autonomy
ies would a robot need to have to able to that is traditionally credited to them. The

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ROBOPHILOSOPHY 393

research results of HRI not only force Hakli, R. Rodogno, S. Larsen, C. Hasse, J.
philosophers to rework traditional concep- C. Bjerring, M. Damholdt, C. Vestergård
tions of normative agency, sociality, moral and R. Yamazaki. The Resarch Unit for
status, responsibility, etc., they also open Robophilosophy (earlier called the
up new ways of conducting ‘experimental ‘PENSOR’ group: Philosophical
philosophy’. For example, by implementing Enquiries into Social Robotics) was the
ethical reasoning in robots philosophers first research group in Europe, and may
can investigate by construction and experi- still be the only one, to investigate philo-
ment which, if any, of the meta-ethical sophical aspects of social robotics with
wide interdisciplinary scope, combining
strategies (deontology, utilitarianism,
research competences in many discip-
virtue ethics etc.) leads to decisions that fit
lines in philosophy (ontology, philo-
with our ethical intuitions, relative to
sophy of science, epistemology, logic,
which types of agentive contexts. Similarly, intercultural philosophy, ethics, political
by varying design and functionalities of philosophy) with research competences
humanoid robots philosophers can join in robotics, anthropology, psychology,
neuroscientists in the empirical investi- cognitive science, education science and
gation into which, if any, of the extant computer science.
alternative accounts of our capacity of 2. In other words, human–robot interac-
‘mind-reading’ (theory of mind, simu- tion is not ‘a human playfully pretending
lation theory, phenomenology, mind- to perform a social action towards a
shaping) are most adequate and what this robot’ but ‘a robot simulating the
implies for the philosophical interpreta- performance of a social action towards a
tion of mental discourse. human’. This does not betoken, however,
that investigations of the ‘as-if ’ of fiction-
See also AI (Artificial Intelligence); ality are irrelevant for HRI . Larsen
Process Ontologies; Transhumanism/ (2016) shows that the contrastive
Posthumanism. comparison between discourse about
properties of fictional characters and
Notes discourse about robotic capacities is of
important heuristic value for the
1. The notion of robophilosophy as semantic regimentation of descriptions
expounded here summarizes general of human-robot interactions formulated
insights from collaborative research in with the derealization operator ‘as-if ’.
the Research Unit for Robophilosophy
(www.robophilosophy.org), with special
acknowledgements to M. Nørskov, R. Johanna Seibt

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
394 SENSING PRACTICES

S
SENSING PRACTICES across environmental, material, political
and aesthetic concerns, subjects and
If you were to outline a diagram of how milieus (cf. Stengers 2011b). From sensors
an air pollution sensor interacts with an used for environmental monitoring to
environment it would look something like collaborations with lichens to understand
this: air passing across a chemical air pollution, as well as smart infrastruc-
membrane or being drawn into an optical tures that sense and adjust to real-time
sensor either forms a chemical reaction, in conditions, the registers and practices of
the case of the membrane, or is passed sensing are shifting from an assumed
across an infra-red beam and counted for human-centred set of perceiving and
numbers of particles in the case of an decoding practices, to extended entities,
optical sensor. These sensory readings and technologies and environments of sense.
reactions cause voltages in electrical New registers of sense are becoming
circuits to fluctuate, generating signals that evident as organisms express different and
in turn can be converted into digital output dynamic ways in which environments are
to be read as data in the form of parts per changing. And many of these shifts and
million of the particular pollutant being extended registers of sense are further
sensed. Yet such a sensor might also be captured through ubiquitous computing
used as part of specific environmental that distributes sensing capacities across
monitoring undertaken by a concerned environments. Citizen sensing also consti-
citizen in order to document potentially tutes a set of sensing practices that is meant
harmful levels of pollution from industry to enable and empower people to sense for
or roadways. The unit of sense – the seem- political effect, giving rise to questions
ingly discrete organ or object through about the politics of sense, and how sensing
which sensing would occur – becomes entities transform into agents of provoca-
entangled as another entity and set of rela- tion and change (Cuff and Hansen 2008;
tions in the making through the specific Goodchild 2007).
sensing practices under way. While we focus on citizen sensing in
This example of an air pollution sensor order to develop this notion of sensing
deployed for citizen sensing practices is practices, many other practices could be
just one of many possible examples of the drawn together to elaborate this concept,
ways in which sensing and units of sense from trans-material and racialized experi-
begin to shift toward what we are calling ences of lead poisoning (Chen 2012), to
‘sensing practices’ (Gabrys 2012b; digital simulation environments for battle-
Pritchard 2013). Sensing practices refer to field preparation (Suchman and Weber
the ways in which sensing and practice 2016), to insect-plant couplings forming
emerge, take hold and form attachments particular ecologies of sense (cf. Braidotti

394

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
SENSING PRACTICES 395

2006a). With these developments in mind, understand how a myriad of pre-existing

how might it be possible to rethink and entities perform their discrete sensing
rework the practices, entities and environ- operations. While the specificity of organ-
ments of sense within this broader context isms and entities is no doubt important,
where the assumed subjects and trajector- sensing practices as a concept equally
ies of sense are shifting? How might these emphasizes the point that these are also
expanded approaches to sensing practices practices that are in transition, as James
recast engagements with experience, while (1996) suggests, or in process as Whitehead
reconfiguring explorations of practice- (1929) has elsewhere suggested. The possi-
based research (Citizen Sense 2014–15)? bilities for one particular type of lichen or
Rather than take ‘the senses’ as a fixed moss to incorporate and express registers
starting point, we suggest that sensing-as- of urban air pollution in one city could shift
practice allows for an attention to these in relation to other organisms encounter-
different articulations of sense, particularly ing these processes, the city in which the
in relation to technologies of environ- entities are located, the development or
mental monitoring, data gathered for evi- ruination under way, and a whole host of
dentiary claims, the formation of citizens, other interconnecting factors (cf. Gabrys
and more-than-human entanglements. 2012a).
Sensing-as-practice also allows for an By approaching sensing differently, not
attention to experience that does not as the senses or as a human point of medi-
concentrate exclusively on a human subject, ation, it is possible to begin to account for
but instead accounts for a vast range of the ways in which sensing practices reson-
sensing subjects, from stones to insects (cf. ate with particular entities and relations.
Whitehead 1929). William James, a philo- Sensing is not a project of a human mind
sopher who influenced Whitehead, suggests or organs decoding external substantialist
that a moment of experience ‘proliferates phenomena, as Whitehead would suggest,
into the next [moment] through transitions but rather could be understood as the ways
which, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, in which experience is expressed through
continue the experiential tissue’ (1996: 87). subjects. Yet this is also a collaborative
Sensing practices then shift attention to undertaking, and so ‘collaborative sensing’
formations and processes of experience (Gabrys 2016a) is always a key aspect of
across multiple entities within particular sensing practices. Far removed from the
milieus (cf. Gabrys 2016a). Cartesian brain in a vat, here collaborative
Such an approach to sensing practices sensing refers to the ways in which shared
clearly links this way of organizing and worlds are felt, sustained and even created
understanding experience to a posthuman (cf. TallBear 2011). If we were to return to
perspective. Within a posthuman context, the air pollution sensor discussed at the
experience is no longer confined solely to beginning of this entry, we would find that
human points of interest or inquiry. Instead, the initial delineation of a sensor detecting
experiences of more-than-humans become stimuli and converting those stimuli into
critical to rethinking how sensory relations data is a rather linear and limited configur-
form or are excluded, and the subjects – as ation of the sensing work that goes on with
well as new subjects – that concresce this technoscientific device. Sensors do not
through these processes (Whitehead 1929; merely capture environmental data, but
cf. Feminist Posthumanities; Braidotti 2006). rather they are involved in collaborative
But this is not just a project in attempting to sensing practices for parsing environments

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
396 SOCIALLY JUST PEDAGOGIES

and environmental problems, as well as of the educational project. The critical

organizing approaches for how to take pedagogies literature has largely focused on
action and generate political responses what Freire (1972) referred to as ‘human-
through particular forms of environmental ising pedagogy’ through democratic and
citizenship. sociocultural practices which focus on
Sensing practices are then differently inequalities and power relations and the
materialized in relation to the subjects importance of economic, cultural and polit-
and entities, milieus and environments, ical participatory parity (Fraser 2008).
processes and situations involved in exper- Socially just pedagogies examine who has
iencing. Distinct affective and political access to education, what sort of know-
capacities are operationalized through ledges are valued and devalued, and whose
sensing practices, where the use of an air voices are prominent in education. While
pollution sensor by a citizen sets in motion acknowledging the important contribu-
a much different political trajectory than a tions that these humanist perspectives have
forest damaged by smog. Sensing practices had on socially just pedagogies, a critical
are ways of articulating what matters, of posthuman perspective builds on this tradi-
signalling an expressive register of rele- tion, but also brings different foci to socially
vance, and affecting and being affected. In just pedagogies.
this respect, sensing practices are world- Posthumanism provides a number of
making practices (cf. Stengers 2011a). They productive and generative ways of consid-
are ways of ‘meeting in a world shared in ering socially just pedagogies. Rosi
common’ (James 1996: 79). This common Braidotti (2013), Karen Barad (2007, 2015)
world is not so much a place where entities and Donna Haraway’s (2008) works are
agree to show up, but rather is a milieu particularly pertinent in thinking about
among a diversity of milieus that is actively how posthumanism may contribute to
made through shared inhabitations and imagining socially just pedagogies, as they
experiences. all express a deep concern for social justice
and socially just practices. Braidotti’s
See also Animacies; Animism (Limulus); Body
(2013) notion of moving beyond critical
Without Organs; Ethereal Scent; Feminist
deconstruction and critique to alternative
Posthumanities; Neuronal Aesthetics.
enactments of becoming, where power is
not only seen as limiting but also as affirm-
Jennifer Gabrys and ative, has particular relevance for socially
Helen Pritchard just pedagogies. This provides the impetus
for rethinking learning as a creative and
indeterminate process rather than one
SOCIALLY JUST PEDAGOGIES which has as its objective acquisition fixed
bodies of knowledge. Furthermore,
Socially just pedagogies have grown out of a Braidotti’s (2013) embodied and embed-
critical or radical pedagogies movement, ded nomadic subject illuminates the
including pedagogical practices informed potentialities and becomings in learning
by Marxist, feminist and critical race theory environments, where experimentation in
which encouraged a critique of political, education gives rise to unforeseen but
social, economic and sociocultural issues productive and inventive processes rather
in education, whilst foregrounding the than predetermined outcomes. Creativity
importance of transgressive transformation is not an inherent property of individuals,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
SOCIALLY JUST PEDAGOGIES 397

it is an assemblage; a complexity of just pedagogies are distinctive for their

networks of human and non-human actors celebration of difference as productive
which give rise to creative learning rather rather than seeing it as alterity. The inap-
than human intentionality. Braidotti propriate/d other is an emblematic figure
(2013) also alerts us to the problematic for this affirmative stance where difference
nature of Cartesian dualisms, such as is seen as a tool of creativity rather than as
mind/body, nature/culture, human/non- an apartheid separation.
human, matter/meaning, teaching/ Haraway’s notions of situated know-
research, theory/practice, thinking/doing. ledges (particular and embodied perspect-
From a posthuman socially just perspect- ives of the knower), her companion species
ive, pedagogies would assume a holistic and significant others, her notions of flour-
and vital perspective, which includes both ishing and natureculture (1991, 2008) have
parts of these dualisms. particular relevance for posthuman socially
Barad (2007, 2015) refers to a ‘yearning just pedagogies which foreground transdis-
for connection, prolonged longing and the ciplinarity and the importance of including
sparking of new imaginaries’ (2015: 388). the natural sciences and humanities, as well
Although she is referring to lightning here, as more than human others in educational
these desires for connectivity and creative projects. Both Braidotti (2013) and
imaginaries are particularly apt for socially Haraway (2014) emphasize the importance
just pedagogies too. Continuing in this of practices of joy for socially just pedago-
vein, Barad continues ‘Lightning is a lively gies which they see as essential for living
play of in/determinacy, troubling matters in our current times, where possibilities
of self and other, past and future, life and of flourishing in the Anthropocene have
death. It electrifies our imaginations and become increasingly compromised. Desire
our bodies’ (ibid.). This troubling of self is also seen not as lack or need but as
and other is a decolonizing logic, where productive starting point in the education
difference is not seen as essentialized, process.
foreign, negative, separate, other, lack, less A posthumanist perspective allows us
than but rather as affirmative, entangled, to think about the effects of colonialism on
indeterminate, as difference within, and as pedagogies – a project which has become
multiplicities. As Barad puts it, ‘The self is increasingly urgent in southern contexts,
itself a multiplicity, a superposition of but which is of importance to northern
beings, becomings, here and there’s, now contexts as well (Mbembe 2001; Taylor and
and then’s’ (2014: 176). Haraway’s use of Pacini-Ketchabaw 2015). A posthuman
Trinh Minh-ha’s (1986/7; 1989) inappro- socially just pedagogy facilitates a playful
priate/d other which means to be ‘in experimentation and an affirmative ethics
critical, deconstructing relationality, in a of potentiality, thus providing an imaginat-
diffracting rather than reflecting (ratio) ive and creative way of dealing with
nality – as a means of making potent inequalities and forms of colonization in
connection that exceeds domination’ higher education. Posthuman socially just
(2004a: 69) is particularly apt for socially pedagogies enable us ‘to devise new, prac-
just pedagogies. The inappropriate/d other tical and ethical acts of engagement which
provokes a rethinking of difference and motivate and enact change in the material
relationality – as difference within, as well continuum that constitutes educational
as differences among humans and non- or practice’ (Taylor and Ivinson 2013: 667).
other-than-humans. Posthuman socially The concern with responsibility,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
398 SPECULATIVE POSTHUMANISM

accountability, what matters, making a in a productive way where creative and new
difference and an ethics of care emanat- concepts and ideas can be formed.
ing from new materialist/posthuman A way of thinking about socially just
approaches are novel concerns for a socially pedagogies from a posthuman perspective
just pedagogy (Barad 2015). can be summarized in Haraway’s invoca-
In posthuman socially just pedagogies, tion, using the anthropologist Marilyn
it is not possible to know beforehand what Strathern’s ideas that ‘it matters what
will happen in encounters (Massumi 2015a, thoughts think thoughts, what knowledges
2015b). In posthuman socially just pedago- know knowledges, what relations relate
gies matter is seen as vital and vibrant and relations, what worlds world worlds, it
as having agency and as being ‘mutually matters what stories story stories’ (Haraway
constituted’ with the discursive (Lenz 2014). This provocation alerts us to the
Taguchi 2013; Phillips and Larson 2013). vibrancy of matter, the material/discursive
Thus what happens in a posthuman socially and to the caution that some stories
just pedagogy is often unexpected and acts normalize other stories. A posthuman
as a catalyst for something new emerging. socially just pedagogy presents a shift from
Also epistemology, ontology and ethics are a concern with the epistemological, to one
seen as intertwined and not separate (Barad which directs our attention to an entangle-
2007). Posthuman socially just pedagogies ment of the ethico-onto-epistemological
start from the metaphysical position that (Barad 2007). This shift foregrounds
challenges the assumptions of fixed differ- matters of fact with matters of concern and
ences between human and non-human, matters of care, and a conviction that
mind and body, matter and discourses. matter matters. These concerns and those
Such pedagogies also use diffractive rather of openness, response-ability provide a
than reflective methodologies as ‘patterns generative potential for socially just
of difference which make a difference’ pedagogical possibilities ‘so that we might
(Barad 2007: 72). Diffractive methodolo- use our ability to respond, our responsibil-
gies can be seen as more socially just prac- ity, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever
tices than critique which pits one set of new possibilities for living justly’ (Barad
views against another, and which assumes a 2007: 195).
superior and exterior position, rather than
See also Diffraction; Mattering; Posthuman
acknowledging that we are all part of the
Critical Theory; Natureculutures.
world, situated in particular contexts and
unable to extricate ourselves, seeing
Vivienne Bozalek
ourselves as always and already implicated
in matters of concern. A diffractive meth-
odology sees the value of past, present and
future contributions to knowledge and is SPECULATIVE POSTHUMANISM
an ethical way of care-full reading the
details of texts, rather than a dismissive Posthumanism comes in different flavours.
putting people and their ideas down, which The most common are Critical
Barad sees as epistemologically damaging Posthumanism (CP ) and Speculative
(Juelskjær and Schwennesen 2012). With a Posthumanism (SP ). Both are critical of
diffractive methodology, it is possible to human-centred (anthropocentric) thinking.
read the insights from texts, disciplinary or However, their critiques apply to different
theoretical positions through one another, areas: CP questions the anthropocentrism

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
SPECULATIVE POSTHUMANISM 399

of modern intellectual life; SP opposes unique human capacities such as

human-centric thinking about the long-run autonomy, reason and creativity. However,
implications of modern technology. they hope to add the fruits of advanced
Critical posthumanists argue that technologies to the limited toolkit of
Western Humanism is based on a dualist traditional humanism, believing that pros-
conception of a rational, self-governing pective developments in the so-called
subject whose nature is self-transparent. ‘NBIC ’ suite of technologies1 will allow
According to Katherine Hayles and Neil humans unprecedented control over their
Badmington, the term ‘posthuman’ is appro- capacities and morphology (Bostrom
priately applied to a late stage of modernity 2005a, 2005b; Sorgner 2009).
which the legitimating role of the humanist Transhumanism is thus an ethical claim
subject handed down from Descartes to to the effect that technological enhance-
his philosophical successors has eroded ment of capacities like intelligence or
(Badmington 2003; Hayles 1999). empathy is a good thing.
Whereas critical posthumanists are SP, by contrast, is a metaphysical
interested in the posthuman as a cultural claim about the kinds of things that
and political condition, speculative post- could exist in the world. It does not imply
humanists are interested in a possibility that posthumans would be better than
of certain technologically created things. humans or that their lives would be
If CP uses ‘posthuman’ as an adjective, SP comparable from a single moral perspect-
nominalizes the term. ive. One can hold that a posthuman diver-
Speculative posthumanists claim that gence from humanity is a significant
there could be posthumans: that is, there possibility but not a desirable one (Roden
could be powerful non-human agents that 2012).
arise through some human-instigated tech- This is not to say, of course, that SP
nological process. Another way of putting lacks ethical and political implications but
this is to say that posthumans would be these become apparent when we have an
‘wide human descendants’ of current adequate account of what a posthuman
humans who have become non-human in divergence (or ‘disconnection’) might
virtue of a process of technical alteration involve. I will return to this issue in the last
(Roden 2012; 2015). part of the entry.
The term ‘wide descent’ is used to There are no posthumans (as conceived
describe this historical succession because by SP ). Thus we are currently ignorant of
exclusive consideration of biological their mechanisms of emergence. It is
descendants of humanity as candidates for conceivable that posthumans might arise
posthumanity would be excessively restrict- in many different ways, thus a philosoph-
ive. Posthuman making could involve ical posthumanism requires a mechanism-
discrete interventions into the reproductive independent account of the concept of the
process such as genetic engineering, or posthuman. For example, we should not
exotic-seeming technologies such as treat mind uploading as a sine qua non of
methods of copying and ‘uploading’ human posthumanity because we do not know
minds onto powerful computer systems. that mind uploading is possible or has
SP is frequently conflated with posthuman-making potential.
Transhumanism, but it should not be. A plausible condition for any posthu-
Transhumanists, like classical and modern man-making event is that the resulting non-
humanists, wish to cultivate supposedly human entities are capable of acquiring

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400 SPECULATIVE POSTHUMANISM

ends and roles that are not set by humans – created artificial intelligences (robots,
and that this autonomy is due to some alter- intelligent computers or synthetic life
ation in the technological powers of things. forms) acquiring human intelligence or
Given our dated ignorance of posthumans greater than human intelligence (super-
this claim captures the core of the specula- intelligence) thereby transcending human
tive concept of the posthuman. This is control or even understanding.
referred to as the ‘Disconnection Thesis’ In futurist thought, this is called ‘the
(DT ). Roughly, DT states that posthumans technological singularity’. The term comes
are feral technological entities. Less roughly, from a 1993 essay by the computer scientist
an agent is posthuman if and only if it can Vernor Vinge, ‘The Coming Technological
act independently of the ‘Wide Human’ Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-
(WH ) – the interconnected system of insti- human Era’. According to Vinge, a singular-
tutions, cultures, individuals and technolo- ity would involve accelerating recursive
gical systems whose existence depends on improvements in artificial intelligence (AI )
biological (‘narrow’) humans (Roden 2012; technology. This would come about if the
Roden 2015: 109–13). relevant AI or Intelligence Amplification
One of the advantages of DT is that (IA ) technologies were always ‘extendible’
it allows us to understand human- so that the application of greater intelli-
posthuman differences without being gence could yield even more intelligent
committed to a ‘human essence’ that post- systems. Our only current means of pro-
humans will lack. Rather, we understand ducing human-equivalent intelligence is
WH as an assemblage of biological and non-extendible: ‘If we have better sex, it
non-biological individuals, whose history does not follow that our babies will be
stretches from the world of Pleistocene geniuses’ (Chalmers 2010: 18).
hunter-gatherers to the modern, inter- Given an extendible technology, human
connected world. or human-equivalent intelligences could
Becoming posthuman, then, is a matter ‘extend’ that AI /IA technology to create
of acquiring a technologically enabled superhuman intelligences (AI +) that
capacity for independent agency. would be even better self-improvers than
The fact that human–posthuman the earlier AIs. They could consequently
disconnection would not result from a make super-superhumanly intelligent entit-
difference in essential properties does not ies (AI ++) and so on (Chalmers 2010). If
entail that it would not be significant. Just the technology in question were some kind
how significant depends on the nature of of machine intelligence, this might result
posthumans. But DT says nothing about in an accelerating exponential growth in
posthuman natures beyond ascribing a machine mentation that would leave bio-
degree of independence to them. It is thus logical intelligences such as ourselves far
multiply satisfiable by beings with different behind.
technological origins and very different The minds shot out by this ‘intelligence
natures or powers (e.g. artificial intelli- explosion’ could be so vast, claims Vinge,
gences, mind-uploads, cyborgs, synthetic that we have no models for their trans-
life forms, etc.). formative potential. The best we can do to
Nonetheless, one picture of posthuman grasp the significance of this ‘transcend-
technogenesis has had pride of place in ental event’, he claims, is to draw analogies
philosophical and fictional writing on the with an earlier revolution in intelligence:
posthuman. This is the prospect of human- the emergence of posthuman minds would

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SPECULATIVE POSTHUMANISM 401

be as much a step-change in the develop- For example, maybe all serious agency
ment of life on earth as the emergence of requires mastery of language or the ability
humans from non-humans (Vinge 1993). to participate in social practices. Perhaps
Humans might be no more able to grasp a all agents must be capable of pleasure and
post-singularity world than mice are able pain, must apply Kant’s categories or be
to grasp concepts in number theory. They Heideggerian Dasein. If so, there are limits
would be lost in a world of essentially to posthuman weirdness and the extent to
incomprehensible and unknowable gods. which posthumans can exceed our under-
But suppose a singularity is not technic- standing.
ally possible. Maybe there are hard limits on Do we have evidence for such
intelligence (in this universe at least). Maybe constraints? If we don’t, we should adopt
the scenario does not adequately nuance the an unbounded posthumanism according to
notion of intelligence. Still, Vinge’s scen- which there are no future-proof grounds
ario  raises a troubling issue concerning for viewing posthumans as agents of a
our capacity to evaluate the long-run particular kind. AUP has the discomfort-
consequences of our technical activity in ing consequence, though, that we could
areas such as the NBIC technologies. This is only evaluate the ethical perspectives of
because it presupposes a weaker, thus more posthumans by encountering or becoming
plausible, speculative claim: our technical them.
activity could generate forms of life signific- If AUP is right, humanists and
antly alien or ‘other’ to ours. transhumanists have seriously underes-
If posthuman life could be significantly timated the inhumanism our technolo-
alien or ‘weird’ then we might not be in a gical predicament (Roden 2014: ch. 7). We
position to understand it easily, making are not yet in a position to evaluate the
the evaluation of prospective disconnec- ethics of posthumanity, but we can only
tions problematic. Do we insist on adopt- do so by precipitating an event whose
ing a humans-first perspective on our consequences are incalculable this side of a
technical activity even though we, or our disconnection. AUP and DT jointly imply
wide descendants, may cease to be human? that there can be no general ethics of the
Critical posthumanism implies that the posthuman, only multiple lines of posthu-
privileging of human life is illegitimate. man becoming and experimentation with
But what if – as Vinge fears – we may be posthuman forms of life and being. At this
simply unable to understand the things we point, arguably, the perspectives of CP and
(our descendants) might become? SP converge.
Much depends, here, on the scope for
See also Computational Turn; Artificial
posthuman weirdness. Do we have an a
intelligence; Critical Posthumanism;
priori (hence future-proof) grip on how
Rationalist Inhumanism; Transhumanism/
strange our posthuman successors could be?
Posthumanism; Xenofeminism.
There are two opposed perspectives on
this: an anthropologically bounded
posthumanism (ABP ) and an anthropolo- Note
gically unbounded posthumanism (AUP ). 1. NBIC stands for ‘Nanotechnology,
ABP states that there are transcendental Biotechnology, Information Technology,
conditions for agency that humans would and Cognitive Science’.
necessarily share with posthumans in
virtue of being agents at all. David Roden

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
402 SS = SECURITY/SURVEILLANCE

SS = SECURITY/SURVEILLANCE algorithmic analytics; desire for seamless,

‘interoperable’ access to information across
Security/surveillance is rooted in beliefs all manner of im/material borders, and the
of anthropocentric mastery and control, in pre-eminence of circulation as that which
beliefs of unobstructed human access to is to be protected and a means through
and control over the ‘actual’, which is the which security/surveillance is pursued (see
starting point for outlining posthuman Amoore 2013; Massumi 2015c; Cowen
predicaments of security. There are two 2014). The spatial and temporal depth of
lines along which to map these predica- security/surveillance saturation is thus
ments. The first is a question of knowledge immense. Anticipated futures colonize the
and the de-centring of human control and present and the spaces of everyday life are
certainty. The second is a question of indivisible from such efforts to ‘connect
objects or predicaments of ‘the actual’ the dots’ of potential future events, just
subjects/objects of security pursuit. On both as attempts are made to suture gaps and
counts, histories of global north security/ cracks across borders, jurisdictions, the
surveillance could be read as describing public and private and so on (Amoore and
quickening more-than-human sensibilities. de Goede 2008). It is not simply that the de-
It is not that security/surveillance was not centring of human knowledge and control
more-than-human before, but that the are recognized but that uncertainty is the
contemporary moment finds the decent- grounds on which security/surveillance
ring of the human and human knowledge efforts are constituted – emboldening
at the forefront of official practice – inde- rather than diminishing as ever more
terminacy in human decision-making is spaces, times, subjects and objects might be
acknowledged and constitutive of security/ drawn into security assemblages.
surveillance culture (e.g. the infamous Thus, security/surveillance sights are
‘unknown unknowns’ of the war on terror often trained upon future potentials, on
announced by former US Secretary of what bodies may become capable of. This
Defense Donald Rumsfeld) and security applies across the field of data bits,
objects are constituted through complex individual identities and persons, through
and indeterminate more-than-human to complex networks and assemblages.
assemblages (e.g. digital networks, of acute Objects of security pursuit – borders,
security concern, are constituted through transport networks, non-state based terror
fibre-optic cables, data, traffic flows, users, networks, digital networks, infrastructures,
ideas, private companies, national legal pandemics, ecosystems – are engaged as
landscapes and so on). emergent, circulatory, irruptive milieu (e.g.
Most boldly, security/surveillance Elbe, Roemer-Mahler and Long 2014).
ambitions are characterized by the follow- Subjects/objects of security pursuit take
ing (and the degree to which any of these form through the capacities and potential-
characteristics are new is an open ques- ities of bodies enmeshed in and consti-
tion): a pre-emptive mandate to act early tuted in more-than-human ways. What
on imagined, speculative futures; pressure does this do to the figure of the human?
to ‘connect the dots’ of potential events Louise Amoore writes that the data-driven,
before they occur; collection and analysis risk-based, speculative frames of
of massive amounts of data often through- algorithmic modelling are ‘indifferent to
out the unfolding spaces of everyday life; the specificity of persons, places and
faith and investment in technological and events’ (2011: 30) and are rather concerned

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
SS = SECURITY/SURVEILLANCE 403

with relationships of correlation between as ‘never itself ’, as enmeshed environ-

data points. The individual, the personal mental/bodies in formation.
narrative even, recedes such that ‘the data Second, foregrounding technological
derivative is not centered on who we are, and informational advances gives too much
nor even on what our data says about us, credit to security/surveillance assemblages.
but on what can be imagined and inferred The brochures of security technology
about who we might be – on our very companies, for example, are more-than-
proclivities and potentialities’ (ibid.: 28). human masterpieces, detailing products
Given this state of affairs, particu- that ‘will’ seamlessly integrate technologies,
larly with much attention given to techno- systems, data flows, environmental and
fetishism in security and strands of post- ‘situational’ factors, human analysts and
human thought that privilege technological decision-making processes. The current
innovation and saturation, there is a buzzwords are ‘interoperability’ and ‘situ-
strong temptation to historicize the present ational awareness’, which could perhaps be
as a posthuman moment distinct from seen as posthuman terms of art, suggesting
before. But this must be complicated. as they do elegant hybrids of human, tech-
Not least because we could ask, ‘When was nology, environment. They suggest a more-
the human not inextricably entwined in than-human actor that sees all without gap
material, technological and informational or prejudice and seamlessly makes unde-
networks’ (Braun 2004: 271)? But also cidable security decisions. This is, of course,
because embracing such historicism is not the case. While not discounting the
ethically and politically problematic. depth and reach of such forces, nor the
Technological quickening and advance more-than-human constitution of security/
must be held in tension with other elements surveillance, the fissures, cracks, inabilities
of more-than-human security assemblages; and inconsistencies of such states are just as
to not do so risks reifying the powers of crucial to this constitution and to a more-
security/surveillance states. than-human understanding of becoming.
First, technological privileging risks Inconsistencies, gaps, impossibilities and
lending credence to the abdication or failures are as much a part of security
dislocation of responsibility for security assemblages as data points, satellites and
decisions. Techno-security visions enjoy intelligence agents.
claims of clean machine vision, which, it is It is crucial to ask what security/surveil-
said, does not discriminate but simply lance optics gain by embracing the fact that
analyses the data, accesses the actual truth the human was and is ‘never itself’ (Braun
of the matter through data. Decision and 2004, citing Wolfe 2003); that the human,
design are displaced in indivisible and both as security decider and locus of suspi-
inaccessible meshes of analysts, algorithms, cion, is enmeshed in multiple bodies in
secrecy, data, jurisdictional divides and so formation. It would seem that powers of
on. This creates a condition in which it security/surveillance gain quite a bit by
is very difficult to locate and contest embracing open-ended and expansive
decisions, to parse responsibility. Thus, one imaginations of becoming, at the same time
question is to ask how accountability can that obstacles to security control are inherent
be interrogated in complex material, tech- to the open-ended becoming of the world.
nological, informational assemblages? And This is the starting point for interrogating
to consider how security/surveillance the generative indeterminacy constitutive of
optics benefit from attending to the human posthuman security/surveillance.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
404 STATELESS STATE

See also Algorithmic Studies; Stateless ness in order to serve national liberation
State; War. and do away with the stultifying sense of
subservience to foreign domination (Sison
Stephanie Simon and Staal 2013: 37).
Through visual art, theatre, poetry, liter-
ature and music the cultural consciousness
STATELESS STATE of a nation under occupation is maintained;
and thus the revolutionary Filipino struggle
The concept of the stateless state emphas- simultaneously attempts to change the
izes the dual meaning of the concept of the material conditions of society, while also
state. On the one hand, the term ‘stateless’ strengthening the cultural consciousness
refers to those peoples struggling for the in preparation of a new one. The latter is
right to self-determination who are denied referred to by the Filipino revolutionaries
an independent nation-state of their own. as ‘cultural work’. Within the stateless state
On the other hand, the concept of ‘state’ of the revolutionary movement cultural
refers to a ‘state of mind’. So the first work essentially takes the form of a
addresses the concept of the state as a (temporal) alternative to the state. Whereas
construct, whereas the second refers to the those living within a recognized state
state as a condition. Assembled together, outsource the maintenance of art and
the stateless state names the condition and culture to the administrating arms of a
practice of those living without the state – given regime, within the stateless state this
either because they are denied a state of demands an ongoing process of culturaliz-
their own, or because they reject the very ation and politicization. Culture is a weapon
structure of the state all together (see also that builds the revolutionary consciousness
Staal 2014a, 2014b). necessary for a people to effectively recog-
Professor Jose Maria Sison, founder of nize and oppose its oppressors. Poet
the Maoist Communist Party (CPP ) of the Ericson Acosta, himself jailed several times
Philippines and its armed wing, the New for his cultural work, explains: ‘It’s about
People’s Army (NPA ), emphasizes the finding a way to use visual materials in
importance of the role of art and culture in union education or using songs to agitate
the context of the stateless state. The the ranks. The revolutionary movement in
Filipino revolutionary movement, born fact has a strong tradition of revolutionary
out of the resistance against Spanish and worker and peasant songs . . . The activists
US occupation, controls large pieces of immediately understood the decisive role
land throughout the country; its aim is to of art, literature, and music in building
liberate its peoples from imperialism and resistance’ (ibid.: 98).
feudalism, but at the same time it aims to We see a similar important role of art
strengthen the national consciousness of and culture in other revolutionary organ-
the peasants, working poor and indigen- izations, such as the National Liberation
ous peoples whose language, history and Movement of Azawad (MNLA ), led by the
symbols risk being erased as a result of the Kel Tamasheq (translated as ‘those who
decades of foreign occupation. In this speak the language of Tamasheq’), better
regard Sison writes that: ‘The local cultures known as the ‘Tuareg’. The MNLA is
and the developing national culture must rooted in the long history of resistance to
be cherished and affirmed and integrated French occupation of the Sahara and the
into a revolutionary national conscious- Sahel, and later on, against their forced

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
STATELESS STATE 405

integration into the state of Mali. From the music reminds us of our goal of peace.
1960 on, the year of Malian independence, In times of peace, we are reminded of the
the Kel Tamasheq rebelled in demand of revolt that laid its foundation.
their own autonomy, most recently in Assarid and Staal 2013: 42
2012, when the organization declared their In the case of the Kurdish revolutionary
independent state of Azawad in the north- movement – occupied by what the
ern part of the country, one and a half Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK ) has
times the size of France. Writer and MNLA named the ‘inter-colony’ of Kurdistan, the
representative Moussa Ag Assarid says: land of the Kurds being separated through
I have met many men and women who the countries of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and
fight for education and art, who make Iran – the notion of the stateless state as
beautiful works in the form of the calli- enacted through cultural work gains addi-
graphy that now covers our city and tional importance due to the fact that their
declares itself part of Azawad, and great struggle for self-determination has come
poets who roam the streets and speak to to reject the concept of the nation-state
the children. In the MNLA we have altogether. Co-founded by women and
women and men who make history. And men in 1978, Abdullah Öcalan and Sakine
our history is now; it is constructed day Cansiz being the best known today, the
by day. Every element, every person, each PKK grew quickly through its effective
fighter is an actor in our common Azawad. guerrilla struggle against the Turkish state
Assarid and Staal 2013: 42 into a mass movement in the 1980s.
Initially grounded on Marxism-
Similar to the Filipino leader Professor
Leninism, the PKK aimed at establishing
Sison, who famously wrote that ‘the guerilla
an independent Kurdish nation-state. But
is a poet’ (Sison 2013), Ag Assarid emphas-
women in the ranks of the guerrillas felt
izes how the revolutionary struggle is
marginalized from the struggle along the
simultaneously a cultural struggle, calling
way, due to the fact that many men did
each politicized subject in the struggle for
not recognize them as equal fighters and
independence an ‘actor’. The Kel Tamasheq
expected them to dedicate themselves to
do not fight merely with arms, but through
care work instead. Öcalan, who had been
a politicization of their own history,
the political leader of the PKK from
language and cultural symbolism that they
the start, supported the women’s move-
have had to defend over decades from
ment to develop autonomously within the
foreign occupation. In this regard, Ag
PKK in order to protect their stake in
Assarid mentions particularly the work of
the revolution.
the Kel Tamasheq band Tinariwen (trans-
Both Öcalan and the women’s move-
lated as ‘Deserts’), which consists of former
ment concluded that the structure of the
revolutionary fighters who travel the world
nation-state essentially consists of the
to narrate the history of the revolution
culmination of patriarchy and capitalist
through their own language and tradi-
imperialism. A representative of the
tional music. Ag Assarid explains:
Kurdish Women’s Movement, Dilar Dirik,
Tinariwen is . . . unique in that their music in this light rhetorically asks: ‘Could we
is passed on through cassette tapes. The have a nation-state, a concept inherently
cassettes are the weapons that make our based on capitalism and patriarchy, and
message travel: a message of revolt, but still think of ourselves as liberated?’ (In der
also a message of peace. In times of revolt, Maur, Staal and Dirik 2013: 52).

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
406 STATELESS STATE

The result of the alliance between merely important as a substitute for the
Öcalan and the women’s movement was state, but foundational in maintaining the
the emergence of ‘democratic confederal- stateless state. Nesrin Botan, vocalist of the
ism’, or what Öcalan calls ‘democracy Kurdish band Koma Botan in Rojava,
without the state’: stateless democracy explains the role of culture in the Kurdish
(ibid.: 99). It is grounded on principles of movement as follows:
self-governance, gender-equality, the right
We have an important role in the revolu-
to self-defence, cultural co-existence and
tion . . . This revolution gives us the
communal economy. Practised in large opportunity to express our culture, art,
parts of Bakûr (North Kurdistan, Turkey) and folklore that used to be suppressed.
and the total region of Rojava (West We are now working hard for our culture
Kurdistan, Syria), it has developed as a and identity. Like a musician receives
parallel structure to existing states as well education from school, our fighters learn
as fully autonomous regions under control the art of fighting in the People’s
of communes, councils and cooperatives. Protection Units [the people’s army of the
Dirik explains it as follows: Kurdish Rojava region, JS ]. Like a teacher
of art, our warriors show performance on
[Democratic Confederalism] considers the battlefield.
the question of how to build an alternat- ibid.: 242
ive to the state – for and by the people –
independent of the international order, In Botan’s words we hear the echoes of
while also taking into account the specific Sison and Ag Assarid – musical cassettes
oppressive regimes of the region. This is are weapons; the guerrilla is a poet; the
why the insistence is always on regional fighter a teacher of art . . . All of them
governments and regional autonomy, describe the artist as a worker who contri-
even though the model of democratic butes to upholding the narratives and
confederalism is proposed for the entire convictions of those who are marginalized,
Kurdish region. dispossessed and persecuted by the
ibid.: 43 occupying state. The cultural worker is an
educator, agitator and organizer, all in
Similar to the Filipino revolutionaries and order to maintain and to enact – to
the National Liberation Movement of perform – the symbolic universe of the
Azawad the role of art and culture is unacknowledged state that is not so much
prominent in the Kurdish revolutionary an administrative entity as a collective
movement. The fact that Kurdish language, condition.
literature and music was banned under the The long cultural struggles of the
regimes that occupied its lands for decades Filipino, Kel Tamasheq and Kurdish
increasingly politicized Kurdish culture peoples has created a state in itself, a
throughout the struggle. Different from detailed network of references, histories
the cases of the Filipino and Azawadian and symbols that define a people’s identity
independence movement, the Kurds no far beyond what a state could ever contain.
longer strive for a state of their own – the This is the art of the stateless state.
stateless state, in which cultural work plays
a key role, instead has become a permanent See also Art; Political Affect; Lampedusa;
condition. Even when autonomy is won, Violence; War.
there is no state to outsource one’s history
to, and thus the role of the artist is not Jonas Staal

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
STATIC GLOW 407

STATIC GLOW within historicities of ‘digital folklore’

(Lialina and Espenschied 2009).
Static Glow refers to the phenomenon by
which data persists in the network long
after the person it relates to is dead, such as Media Afterlife: An Inherent Aspect
the so-called Facebook ‘ghost profiles’;
accounts owned by the deceased that
of Media History
continue to appear in ‘Friends’, ‘Suggestions’ The history of media technology is deeply
and, somewhat more disturbingly, ‘Birthday entangled with the attribution of super-
Reminders’. natural power to communicate with or to
Example: Her static glow still lingers represent the dead. The notion of emana-
after four years. tion that manifests after excitation accounts
Static Glow became notorious with the for much of what has historically haunted
quintessential scene that presages horror media (Sconce 2000). Static Glow is also
in the film Poltergeist: a TV set hisses while inspired by the afterglow produced by
the black and white flickering static glows phosphorescence that emanates from a
in the dark room. The juxtaposition of CRT screen after the television is turned
stasis (static) and movement (glow) off. Such examples go as far back as the
reflects the tension between the desire to Shroud of Turin and Veronica’s Veil, and
remember and the necessity to forget that have bloomed since the development of
underlines the eeriness of encounters with new technologies in the late 19th century.1
our ‘undead media’ (Chun 2011b: 134). Media’s ghosts are epitomized by the prac-
Ghost profiles became a phenomenon tices of spirit photography and spiritualism,
in the early MySpace days, when the medi- both explicitly linking the afterlife through
atized violent murders of teenage girls in the medium of the emerging technology of
the US led strangers to comment on the the time. Spirits were communicated with
profiles of the tragically deceased, and through the spiritual telegraph and captured
even sometimes to create RIP tribute on a gelatin silver print.2 The experience of
profiles. Nowadays the infamous Facebook looking at a photograph or watching a film
algorithms generate ghostly encounters is described as watching and being watched
with Birthday Reminders or timely place- by spectres (Barthes 1980; Derrida and
ments of photographs of the deceased in Stiegler 1996). Media are perceived as a
our Timeline Memories. These and similar means to communicate with the opposite
phenomena are the object of what has bank of the River Styx. The tradition con-
been called digital death, digital afterlife or tinues in networked computation with
death online studies, which consider the ‘computer-based discarnate entities’ or
particular interaction and identity cyber-spirits (Collins 2004). The multiple
construction engendered by lingering data data traces every user leaves behind further
in the context of mourning (Gibson 2007; augment this ghostly anthropomorphiza-
Walter et  al. 2011; Maciel and Carvalho tion. The question might not be whether
Pereira 2013; Gotved 2014; Klastrup 2014; humans are perpetuated through networked
Lagerkvist 2016). The notion of the aban- data archives, but how that data is reused.
doned site is embedded in the inception of The profile of a dead person can be
the World Wide Web. The growing forgotten, but its remains in the database
cemetery has been indexed by the Internet may be integrated into new identity and
Archive since 1996, and is already inscribed re-branding models. A ghost’s allure, for

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
408 STATIC GLOW

Figure 1. Screenshot of Christine’s MySpace profile (circa 2007).

Figure 2. Figure 2. Screenshot of Christine’s MySpace profile (circa 2015).

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
STATIC GLOW 409

example, may change with web fashion re- Eternime and ETER 9 paved the way for
design trends. Christine’s MySpace profile continuous presence through virtual
lives on, ten years after she was killed by a immortality.
drunk driver.3 In the years following her If static glow is an indication of popular-
death, the site was periodically active with ity, the highest form of emanation could be
mourning comments, and generally used the posthumous hologram, such as those
as a memorial by her parents (see Figure 1). developed by Hologram US for Patsy Cline,
Ten years later, MySpace has completely Liberace, and Whitney Houston (see
redesigned its interface, and consequently Kleinman 2015). Occasionally, these are
the face of Christine’s online posthumous developed ‘prehumously’ for such personal-
presence (see Figure  2). The result is an ities as rapper Chief Keef and WikiLeaks
uncanny presence, patches of fossilized founder Julian Assange as a means to
content with a slick new interface bearing circumvent territorially bound laws.4 Rosi
the recognizable default settings. Christine’s Braidotti has expanded Mbembe’s (2003)
static glow is ten years strong at the time definition of necropolitics to an ‘oppor-
of writing. tunistic exploitation of the life of you’
(Braidotti 2013: 123). This exploitation now
continues after death, as posthumous data
Static Glow as Commodity is also subject to commodification. From
For commercial providers an abandoned the Holy Grail to Tupac Shakur’s patented
profile is at best an inactive profile; however, hologram onstage appearance, immortality
when the amount of inactive profiles affect is a hot commodity.
the possibility to sell space for targeted With social networking sites projected
advertising, platform providers will attempt to include more dead users than live ones
to close inactive accounts. At worst, a in the not too distant future,5 could
deceased person’s profile becomes a liabil- humans be anomalies in a web of ghosts?
ity when the platform provider uses the In addition to these increasing posthum-
user-generated content for advertising ous agents, most profile or account activity
campaigns and risks becoming exposed by seems to follow the infamous 80/20 rule, or
using images of a deceased person, or when the Pareto Principle. That is to say, around
the profile is vandalized by users who are 80 per cent of profiles or accounts on the
aware of the death of the person. Reason WWW are inactive. These may be owned
enough to start regulating the digital estate. by dead people, though usually they are
As our lives started to play out online, created by people who have set up an
platforms became a growing archive for account once and never returned, or bots.
our life events. From teenage partying over For example, what surfaced through the
our first love to the birth of our children, Ashley Madison data leak (an online
and the passing of our parents and friends, dating service for married people),6 is how
these documents became archives of many of the online ‘engagers’ were actually
highly personal value. This value is being bots, programmed to engage with hetero-
monetized by companies providing sexual men (Newitz 2015).7
services to preserve our online life, luring Not only do our traces live on after we
us with a notion of an immortal memento die in databases associated with our
and promising to posthumously let us profiles and desisted accounts, but more
keep our place in the social graph of our and more data is being created and capital-
life. Pioneer vendors such as LIVESON , ized upon from interactions with bots, bots

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
410 STATIC GLOW

interacting with dead data, the recycling affected by the social graph of a person.
of our data for new identities and Fans, committed friends or a professional
interactions, and the outsourcing of our network might affect the static glow in the
communication to software applications. long run as the strength of the memory is
We also increasingly use bots to help us stronger in this group. It is also affected by
with our email conversations, or responses the contributions a person made during
to comments in our social media profiles. her life, as they can also trigger the activa-
These bots continue the conversations tion of memory. A book might be re-issued,
posthumously on our behalf.8 or works might be referenced, exhibited or
‘Necro-financialization’ and the desire presented in other contexts.
for immortality could prove to be a strong To calculate the static glow (SG ) over
motivation for such cannibalism (Samson time (t), the relation of the common group
2015). Technological infrastructure of people (a) multiplied by the exponential
embedded within commercial ecologies decline of memory (e) with the occasional
also facilitates various forms of static glow. attention from the closer group of fans,
The internet’s infrastructure of redund- friends and family (1-α)e−t/t2 plus the occa-
ancy and its propagation-oriented code sional stimulation of memory (Stim) or by
also contribute to static glow. Videos, the activity of bots (B). The entire calcula-
images and texts generated by or about the tion could be executed as shown in
user are copied, stored and re-distributed Figure  3, where Scommon and Sfan are the
beyond the user’s editorial control. There respective strengths of the memory in the
are so many ways in which traces can be common and fan group. A stronger
archived, shared, re-used, corrupted, sold, memory in this context leads to a slower
rehashed and ultimately given new life. fade of the static glow.9
Inevitably, necro-financiers will render Referring to Georg Franck’s notion of
calculable the capacity in which static glow the attention economy (1999), we can state
posthumously emanates over time. that the static glow marks its expansion
and measurability into the period after a
person has died. The static glow becomes
Measuring Static Glow the measurement for memory as it is still
Static glow could be calculated by using a kept alive on various web platforms. Social
formula for exponential decline (‘Forgetting graphs, and data generated over a lifetime
curve’, Ebbinghaus 1885). However, while online, such as achievements and contact
unattended memory does fade exponen- lists, are the basis for the commodification
tially or gradually into oblivion, the calcula- of our social life beyond the end of our
tion must include variables for incidents biological one. As Michel Serres foresaw,
of activating or refreshing memory (e.g. with these technologies death is domestic-
anniversaries). Additionally, static glow is ated, it has become cultural (2001). The

Figure 3. Static glow formula.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
STORIED MATTER 411

formula above might serve as the calculat- to assist largely autonomous in e-mail
ing model that determines the value of a conversations, scheduling of appoint-
person’s afterlife and answer the ominous ments, providing information etc. See for
question: how long will my static glow example Crystal (https://www.crystalknows.
linger? com) or Google Now (https://www.google.
com/landing/now).
See also Algorithm; Algorithmic Studies; 9. We would like to thank Gerhard Blab for
Digital Rubbish; Obsolete Technologies; his valuable advice on how to formulate
Necropolitics; Zombie. Static Glow as an equation.

Notes Mirko Tobias Schäfer and

Audrey Samson
1. Jeffrey Sconce gives a comprehensive
overview in Haunted Media: Electronic
Presence from Telegraphy to Television
(Durham, NC : Duke University Press, STORIED MATTER
2000).
2. These practices were described in an ‘Storied Matter’ is one of the conceptual
early American spiritualistic journal tools of material ecocriticism, which basic-
(c. 1850), The Spiritual Telegraph, and ally underlines the idea that matter is not
compiled in volumes under the title of only lively, agentic and generative, as it is
The Telegraph Papers. theorized in the new materialist paradigm
3. A profile was submitted to MyDeathSpace (Barad 2007; Bennett 2010; Coole and
explaining the circumstances of her death. Frost 2010; Abram 2010), but also densely
http://www.mydeathspace.com storied. It describes the idea that from its
4. A Chief Keef hologram performance deepest lithic and aquatic recesses to the
was shut down by police in Chicago atmospheric expanses, and from subatomic
(Baraniuk 2015). to cosmic realms, matter is capable of
5. See XKCD for a projection of future bringing forth a display of eloquence,
numbers concerning Facebook: https:// which can be explained as the ‘ontological
what-if.xkcd.com/69/ [accessed 21 April performance of the world in its ongoing
2017]. articulation’ (Barad, 2007: 149). Whether
6. Links were made available to download biotic or not, matter in every form is a
the data on several torrent sites. The Reddit meaning producing embodiment of the
link containing sources is at https://www.
world, or ‘storied matter’: ‘a material “mesh”
reddit.com/r/AnythingGoesNews/
of meanings, properties, and processes, in
comments/3h71ar/we_are_the_impact_
which human and nonhuman players are
team_we_are_releasing_the/ [accessed 21
interlocked in networks that produce
April 2017].
7. Findings indicated that a majority of undeniable signifying forces’ (Iovino and
the conversations on Ashley Madison Oppermann 2014b: 1–2). This means that
unfolded between bots and humans. matter’s stories emerge through humans,
Annalee Newitz, who analysed the data, but at the same time humans themselves
also shows how the latter was an integ- ‘emerge through “material agencies” that
ral part of Ashley Madison’s business leave their traces in lives as well as stories’
model. (Cohen 2015b: 36). As cosmologists Brian
8. Examples are the algorithmic assistants, Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker also
using data-mining and machine-learning observe, ‘the universe is not simply a place

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
412 STORIED MATTER

but a story – a story in which we are degree of creative expression when they
immersed, to which we belong, and out of communicate non-locally. In other words,
which we arose’ (2011: 2). In a key way, being storied is as much a trait of the so-
then, ‘life itself is made of stories’ (Wheeler called non-living matter as of biological
2014: 77) through which ‘meanings are organisms and sentient beings. As eco-
differentially enacted’ (Barad 2007: 139). In phenomenologist David Abram puts it
this process, life is continually recon- lyrically, ‘tumbling waterfalls’, ‘dry river-
figured, regularly revealing new chapters as beds’, ‘gusts of wind’, ‘freshly painted
in the case of ‘genes and fossils chronic[ling] houses’, ‘rusting automobiles’, ‘cumulous
an amazing story of life on Earth’ (Chaisson clouds’, ‘granitic cliffs’, ‘diamonds’, and
2005: 299). This amazing earthly story ‘grains of sand’ (2010: 272) are all express-
always issues from the multiple encounters ive, and thus epitomize storied matter in its
of biomes, geological and microscopic different manifestations. If we are ‘dwelling
realms, as well as cultural spaces and liter- within a community of expressive pres-
ature, which can be compellingly affirmat- ences’, as Abram claims (ibid.: 173), then
ive or unexpectedly disruptive. As a living we need to be attentive to their stories and
text with a rich narrative efficacy, matter their more-than-human meanings forged
slides through human ‘expressways’ often in matter’s storied dimension.
unnoticed but always exerting its influence Storied matter compels us to think
in conceptual and material habitats, like beyond anthropocentricity and about our
Lowell Duckert’s ‘slippery’ arctic ice that is coexistence and coevolution in the story of
‘alive, creaturely, and desiring’ (2013: 71). the earth itself. It is, therefore, important to
Ice or a stone, a fossil fragment or bacteria, acknowledge matter in its broad range of
no matter which form it takes, matter yields expressions as a ‘site of narrativity’ (Iovino
terrestrial tales of resilience, creativities, and Oppermann 2012a: 83) with ongoing
uncertainties, evolution and dissolution in configurations of signs and meanings that
non-deterministic ways. we interpret as stories. These stories come
Spread across a wide spectrum of its to matter in the form of evolutionary
organic and inorganic forms, matter’s histories, climatic narratives, biological
dynamic expressiveness is more than a memories, geological records, species
meaningful communication among living tragedies and DNA poetics. What makes
organisms, like bacteria communicating matter storied is ‘narrative agency’, which is
within and between species using ‘quorum a non-linguistic performance inherent in
sensing language’ (signalling molecules every material formation from bodies to
used for communication). Eloquence is the their atoms making them telling or storied.
defining property of all matter beyond the Whether it is a cell, a singing whale, a whis-
biological world. That is, all agencies, from pering wind, a pebble on the beach, an
subatomic particles to cosmic forces, are erupting volcano, a hurricane or a plastic
storied subjects of an ever-unfolding onto- bag, matter is encoded with meaningful
tale. Chemical substances circulating in narratives, or narrative agencies through
the biosphere, for example, or plastic bags which the world becomes eloquent.
invading the oceans and choking marine ‘Storied matter is thick with narratives,’
life, are as expressive as bacteria and more concurs Jeffrey Cohen, ‘some vivid, some
complex organisms such as plants, animals barely legible, others impossible to trans-
and humans. Even ‘lifeless’ entities like late’ (2015b: 275). Thus understood, storied
electrons can be said to have a certain matter is not a mere conceptualization,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
STORIED MATTER 413

nor is it a cultural construction to grant and meanings of a reality, but also . . .

material agencies meaningful existence. On the often unheard voices of this reality’
the contrary, it represents a new ecology of (ibid.: 48), which has today become quite
understanding the ultimate ontology of a disenchanted with catastrophic human
meaningfully articulate planet. The fossils, practices.
for example, tell stories of extinct beings Thinking about storied matter in a
captured in time. Volcanoes tell stories disenchanted world means thinking seri-
about the earth’s turbulent past. Tree rings ously about how our invasive economic
yield stories of long years of droughts and practices produce planetary cycles of
rains, while retreating glaciers transmit pollution, how our political decisions and
stories of changing ecosystems and climate, cultural meanings are enmeshed in their
blending global warming with political production, and how they all enfold into
anxieties and social changes. Since narra- one indissoluble process. The material
tive agencies emerge through their inter- stories narrative agencies convey today are
changes with the human reality – such as profoundly troubling, like the traumatic
rocks and mountains with geological tales of plastic-choked birds on Midway
records revealing stories of dynamic Island, and of countless plastic objects that
fusions with animals, plants and humans compose the infamous Great Pacific
– they all ‘tell us evolutionary stories of co- Garbage Patch. They are narrative agencies
existence, inter-dependence . . . extinctions demonstrating the dire consequences of
and survivals’ (Iovino and Oppermann the social and the natural interpenetrating
2014b: 7). That is why, when we speak of each other in the slow death of so many
‘storied matter’, we are not only using a marine species. They call for our attentive-
material metaphor, but acknowledging its ness to the stories of destruction and
narrative agencies as active co-authors that pollution, but at the same time they compel
shape this world and co-determine our us to imagine alternative stories of wind or
existence. Serenella Iovino offers a palp- water energies for a better future. In such
able example of how this mutual shaping a case, the narrative agencies of storied
of the world unfolds in the narratives, matter would be the primary authors of
bodies and landscape of Pompeii: ‘while environmental sustainability and ecolo-
the bodies . . . narrate about an almost gical sensibility, offering a better image for
forgotten complexity (the site of the the living world and a better discernment
ancient Pompeii), the lava . . . narrates of human–non-human encounters. If we
about the forgotten orographic structure read the world this way, as storied materi-
of this site, inhabited by volcanic and ality that binds all beings, forces and
seismic agencies, even though it was substances with interconnected stories, we
believed to be ‘simply’ a mountain’ (2016: can answer frequently posed questions
26). Conceived in this way, storied matter positively, such as: can storied matter assist
helps us better understand fragile ecosys- us in building disanthropocentric prac-
tems, polluted landscapes, carbon-filled tices in a world facing potentially cata-
atmosphere, acidifying oceans, changing strophic impacts from climate change?
climate, retreating glaciers, species extinc- Can it move humanity into more earth-
tions and social crises than the scientific friendly modes of thinking? Can it change
data presented in figures and numbers. our energy systems, and help implement
Simply because through these stories we policies of solar, water and wind energy in
come to know ‘not only . . . the hidden plots the near future?

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
414 SURVIVAL

If we make storied matter part of our property, the two distinct bodies of work
storytelling culture, it can play an import- exhibited employ the methods and lan-
ant role in bringing the state of the world guages of theatrical and filmic stagings
more to public awareness, and we can (Creischer) and pictorial tableaux
impart new ideas and insights about our (Siekmann).
experiences and perceptions of the planet. The installation of Siekmann takes us to
Because storied matter induces ‘out-of- the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen where
the-box’ thinking, which is exactly what the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a project set
is needed today to develop solutions to up to ‘protect’ all existing agricultural
our current problems and to build post- kernels in the world from eventual extinc-
anthropocentric discourses. Hence, giving tion, is based. We learn, however, that the
matter access to articulation by way of seed bank is financed by the very same
stories that co-emerge with the human is corporate lobbies that exercise interests
not only a way to emancipate matter from and practices that threaten crop diversity,
silence and passivity, but also to liberate our- including, among others, genetic manipula-
selves from the images, discourses and prac- tion. These entangled complicities are
tices of our own Cartesian dreamworld. uncovered through large moveable panels
with pictograms, reminiscent of the vocab-
See also Econtology; (Material)
ulary developed by science philosopher
Ecocriticism; Neo/New Materialism;
and political economist Otto Neurath in
Ecomaterialism.
cooperation with artist Gerd Arntz, who
was a part of an anarcho-syndicalist move-
Serpil Oppermann
ment in the 1920s in Cologne and Berlin,
developing graphic icons specifically for
proletarian agitations. The ordered, system-
SURVIVAL atic and meticulously structured succession
of signs, symbols and their visualized inter-
In the Stomach of the Predators connections draw an alarming relational
map of the economic and political aspects
Nature meets itself in the stomach of the of biodiversity’s transfer into private hands
predators. that so accurately defines our global present.
In the stomach it creates disasters & Creischer’s work contains a cast of a
produces demands. number of whimsical, symbolically charged
it creates disasters & produces demands; animal figures – the wolf, the hyena, the
it makes people superfluous.
bear and the jackal – each of them repres-
In the stomach it creates disasters &
entative of a particular form of monopoliz-
produces demands.
ation of what was once the common good.
It makes nature superfluous.
The animals are sent on a journey from
In the Stomach of the Predators was a two- Spitsbergen to Benin and Istanbul, during
part exhibition by Berlin-based artists, which they encounter situations that seem
curators and theorists Alice Creischer and absurd and at times outright grotesque.
Andreas Siekmann exploring the preda- Such surreal scenes are continuously stabil-
tory logic of advanced capitalism. Stemming ized, however, by an undercurrent of real
from their joint research concerning the gravity as the characters delve into the
privatization of the commons through the disquieting workings of the neoliberal
cases of seeds, land rights and intellectual condition. The creatures are emblematic of,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
SURVIVAL 415

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
416 SYMBIOGENESIS

Text and images are from the work In the Stomach of the Predators, Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, 2013.

and personify, acquisitive greed paired long-term series Future Vocabularies

with injustice and devastation; through (2014–16). The series enquires into the
them multiple scripts unfold, delivered in a possibility of art to offer a space for devel-
variety of vernaculars, at once resembling oping a variety of itineraries for envision-
the Chaplinian slapstick handlings of ing another future.
despair and the theatrical experimenta-
See also Anthropocene; Capitalocene and
tions of Bertolt Brecht. While addressing
Chthulucene; Exclusion Zone; Resilience;
the apocalyptic questions of global gene
Anthropocene Observatory; Extinction.
pool heritage, land grabbing, the devasta-
tion of natural resources and the fantastical
‘science’ of financial speculation, art itself Alice Creischer and
– and its possibility to counter systemic Andreas Siekmann
violence of such amplitude – is not spared
questioning. Though the work tests art’s
subversive potential, its complacency in the SYMBIOGENESIS
face of the flows of capital surfaces at least
as often as the paradoxical meaning of Mixotricha paradoxa was discovered in the
survival in an era of human-engineered hindgut of an Australian termite. At the
catastrophes. time the oddity of this protist or eukaryotic
In the Stomach of the Predators was microbe was its possession of both the
presented at BAK , basis voor actuele kunst, flagella that typically provide microbial
Utrecht, as part of the year-long research locomotion and a ‘coat of cilia disposed in
into the notion of ‘survival’ within the closely packed transverse bands’ that drove

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
SYMBIOGENESIS 417

it through its liquid medium: ‘In general came about by the multiple assemblies, one
appearance, and particularly in the pres- by one, of different free-living prokaryotic
ence of both cilia and flagella, this form is precursors. These entered the eukaryotic
quite unlike any described termite parasite’ consortium intact, as endosymbionts (‘living
(Sutherland 1933: 163, 165). Three decades together on the inside’), and then developed
later researchers equipped with electron obligate genetic and metabolic interrelations
microscopes determined that Sutherland with the evolving cell as a whole. In addi-
had erred in her description of the ‘para- tion, she continued, eventually a pre-mitotic
doxically mixed-up hairs’ of Mixotricha ur-eukaryote also evolved the reproduct-
paradoxa: ‘these structures are not cilia but ive machinery of mitosis, and this, too, she
adherent spirochetes. They do not move in theorized, was an adaptive outcome of the
the manner of cilia, with alternate effective symbiogenetic acquisition of spirochetal
and recovery strokes, but instead undulate, motility turned inward to conduct the
exactly as spirochetes do’ (Cleveland moving parts of the mitotic process.
and Grimstone 1964: 670–1). The earlier Chapter 6 of Origin of Eukaryotic Cells,
‘paradox’ of two distinct, seemingly ‘Symbiosis’, has a striking epigraph
redundant kinds of locomotory organelles, marshalling Mixotricha as a representative
both cilia and flagella, now yielded to for symbiosis in general with a long quota-
another conundrum. How could adherent tion from Cleveland and Grimstone’s
spirochetes – prokaryotic hitchhikers with paper focused specifically on the organis-
no phenotypic connection to their host – mal motility that arises from Mixotricha’s
arise in this instance to a state of startlingly relations with its spirochete companions.
effective locomotory co-ordination? They are not parasites, merely freeloaders.
Moreover, these authors noted, ‘The utiliza- Technically termed ectosymbionts (‘living
tion of spirochetes as a method of loco- together on the outside’), the banded
motion does not appear to have been masses of spirochetes that adhere to
reported in any other organism’ (ibid.: 681). Mixotricha form a motility symbiosis,
Absent from either Sutherland’s or propelling this large and lumbering protist
Cleveland and Grimstone’s texts is the term much more energetically than it could ever
symbiosis. However, this term is prominent muster ‘on its own’. But for all practical
in the American microbiologist and evolu- purposes of biological viability, the protist
tionary theorist Lynn Margulis’s first book, lives on its spirochetes as much as they live
Origin of Eukaryotic Cells (1970). This on it (Margulis and Guerrero 1991). The
work offered a stark challenge to an earlier symbiotic consortium of the eukaryotic
evolutionary consensus holding that the protist and half a million prokaryotic
eukaryotic or nucleated cell evolved due spirochetes is a specifiable ‘individual’ in
to an accumulation of random single- the form of what is now called a holobiont
point mutations selected for in some ur- (Margulis 1993; Bordenstein and Theis
prokaryote somehow giving rise to a 2015). In subsequent decades Margulis
nucleus binding its genome, and that the would advert to M. Paradoxa as the ‘poster
other eukaryotic organelles (mitochondria, protist for symbiogenesis’ (Margulis and
cilia, chloroplasts) then emerged by gradual Sagan 2007: 45), a general evolutionary
differentiation from that nucleus. Margulis process of speciation more fundamental
argued, instead, that through ‘serial than genetic mutation – the emergence of
endosymbiosis’ the evolution of the euka- new kinds of organic beings through the
ryotic cell along with its distinct organelles genetic binding of symbiotic partners.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
418 SYMBIOGENESIS

Rescued by intrepid microscopists and she underscores that at the end of the last
phylogenetic systematists from base century proposing symbiogenesis as a
obscurity unkempt and wearing its abject major evolutionary dynamic was still a
hybridity and ongoing symbiogenesis on its radical act. While her account of the
sleeve, and contrary to an exclusively endosymbiotic origin of the eukaryotic cell
competitive-predatory view of living rela- had achieved mainstream acceptance by the
tions, Mixotricha models nature’s good later 1980s, ‘the idea that new species arise
nature. Margulis spent the rest of her life from symbiotic mergers among members
developing this new account of evolution- of old ones is still not even discussed in
ary innovation. Acquiring Genomes: A polite scientific society’ (Margulis 1998: 6).
Theory of the Origins of Species (Margulis Things have changed in Margulis’s
and Sagan 2002) reported the fine details of favour in the two decades since that
her investigations on this research front. remark (Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 2012).
But one can get a quick fix on this topic But the residual scientific resistance to
from her memoir Symbiotic Planet. Here granting due significance to the concepts

Mixotricha paradoxa. Image MX 27–2 from the Lynn Margulis Lab, taken by
electron microscopist David Chase, year unknown.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
SYMBIOGENESIS 419

of both symbiosis – ‘the system in which put this is that symbiosis and symbiogen-
members of different species live in phys- esis stress the sociality of biological
ical contact’ (Margulis 1998: 5) – and systems. The discourse of posthumanism
symbiogenesis – ‘the origin of new tissues, foregrounds the reciprocal of this relation-
organs, organisms – even species – by the ship – the biological dynamics of social
establishment of long-term or permanent systems – once one’s view of biological
symbiosis’ (ibid.: 6) – tells us some- relations has undergone posthumanist
thing about their bona fides as posthuman- reconstruction. Margulis’s erotic vision of
ist tropes (Clarke 2015). Symbiogenesis life conduces to such revisions: living
in particular is an affront to the human- beings naturally lust for increasingly inti-
ist  ideal of an essential humanity mate proximities in increasingly outland-
composed of uniquely human individuals. ish environments. In her long evolutionary
Symbiogenesis underscores the ecological view of this process, ‘Symbiogenesis was
multiplicity of all living arrangements the moon that pulled the tide of life from
taken to their biological foundations. its oceanic depths to dry land and up into
Biological ‘individuality’ is always the the air’ (Margulis 1998: 111).
collective accomplishment of a holobiont.
See also Body Without Organs; Ecosophy;
Individuality emerges ‘from the community
Kin; Multispecies; Naturecultures; Planetary.
interactions of once independent actors’
(Margulis 1998: 10–11). Another way to Bruce Clarke

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
420 TECHNICITY

T
TECHNICITY living beings, technical objects have a
genesis, and this genesis is part of their
Posthumanist approaches challenge the being (Simondon 2012: 22). The treatise
ontology of humanity by questioning its starts out by criticizing the tendency to see
separateness. The shift to relational and culture and technics as opposites.
processual ontologies reconfigures the According to Simondon, the xenophobic
human as irreducibly entangled, and to an rejection of technical reality is based on a
increasing extent, as co-evolving with tech- misconception of the nature and essence
nology. While traditionally conceived as of machines. This failure leads to aliena-
external to being, contemporary approaches tion, or else, to technophobia, technophilia
are granting technology a new role in or intemperate technocratic ambitions,
knowledge and existence by pointing to its which are all inadequate reactions towards
involvement in processes of becoming (for machines (ibid. 9–10). Simondon, instead,
example Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, conceives the existence of humans and
Don Ihde, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, machines as correlative (ibid.: 16). Humans
Bernard Stiegler, Karen Barad and Peter- and machines are mutually related; they
Paul Verbeek). Technology’s complicity in imply and complement each other.
being is not, however, an altogether new Technical objects intervene as mediators
topic. It was famously explored by Martin between humans and nature, and humans
Heidegger, as well as by other thinkers intervene as mediators between machines.
whose works are currently being reappraised As Simondon sees it, machines are
(for example Henri Bergson, Ernst Cassirer, beings that operate (ibid.: 192). To firmly
Gaston Bachelard and André Leroi- grasp technical reality in its entanglements
Gourhan). Among the thinkers receiving with humans and nature, we need to
renewed critical attention, Gilbert consider technical being in its operative
Simondon (1924–89) stands out as particu- functioning, and not as things or artefacts
larly noteworthy, offering a genetic ontology with fixed characteristics. ‘Technicity’ for
of technical objects. Simondon has to do with the performance
Simondon’s seminal treatise on techno- or the manner of acting of technical
logy, Du mode d’existence des objets tech- objects. The ‘essence’ of a technical object
niques (1958), was published as a comple- – say, a motor – is not this or that motor
mentary thesis to his main doctoral thesis,1 but a certain ‘scheme of operation’ that
where he develops his theory of individu- remains more or less stable and recogniz-
ation. Drawing on the latter, the treatise on able through an evolutionary lineage from
technology conceives technical objects in the first motors to the motors of today (23,
dynamic terms, as something that under- 53). The current relevance of Simondon’s
goes a process of becoming. Much like work on technology has precisely to do

420

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
TECHNICITY 421

with the fact that it offers an operational conception of the way the technical object
theory of technological mediation. relates to its environment – that Simondon’s
Despite his talk about essences, operational approach demonstrates its
Simondon breaks away from substantialist true capacity to overcome entrenched
notions of identity, including the hylo- patterns of thinking. For the concretizing
morphic variety (see Metastability). First, a invention is not simply an adaptive reac-
technical essence owes its origin to an act tion to a pre-existing environment. Concre-
of invention. To begin with the technical tization, rather, is a process that ‘conditions
object is ‘primitive’ and disconnected. Yet it the birth of an environment’, which in turn
continues to be invented, to evolve in ways becomes ‘the condition of possibility of the
that are not completely foreseen by the functioning of the technical object’ (68).3
inventor(s). Second, a technical essence is In Simondon’s view, technical being is
fecund. It evolves by engendering a series of self-conditioning – but only in a very
variations or a ‘family’ of technical objects peculiar sense, since it is at once condition
(51–3). A technical object ‘exists . . . like a and conditioned. Technical being creates
specific type obtained through a convergent around itself a certain regime of natural
series’ (26)2 that, in Simondonian parlance, elements that it depends on for its func-
progresses from an ‘abstract’ to a ‘concrete’ tioning – which means that it conditions
mode of existence. A technical essence the associated environment just as much
evolves through a process of individuation as it is itself conditioned by it.
(see Metastability), which in the case of Despite his acknowledgement of the
technical objects is further specified as a constructive role of the technical object,
process of ‘concretization’. An evolved tech- Simondon maintains that the associated
nical object is more ‘concrete’ than a primit- environment is not fabricated. The associ-
ive or ‘abstract’ technical object, in that its ated environment is a ‘third’ or ‘mixed’
elements are more functionally coherent, environment that is at once technical and
approaching the internal coherence of living geographical, and that acts as a ‘mediator of
being. In addition to that, and again in the relation between fabricated technical
analogy with living being, it incorporates elements and natural elements in which the
parts of the natural world into its system by technical being functions’ (70).4 On the
entering into a relation with its environment same grounds, he claims that the technical
(milieu). Thus, through the process of operation is not arbitrary. Simondon’s focus
concretization, the technical object loses its on operations provides an escape from the
artificial character and approaches the mode dilemma of causality and finality. Certainly,
of existence of natural objects. In becoming machines are made for a purpose; but as
more concrete, the technical object comes Simondon makes clear, through the process
closer to constituting a natural system; it of individuation ‘this external finality is
‘naturalizes itself’ by incorporating parts of erased to the benefit of the internal co-
the natural world into its regime of func- herence of the functioning’ (167).5 Nor can
tioning (57). Challenging established the process of technical individuation be
distinctions, Simondon refers to the process explained in terms of causality in its ordin-
of concretization as ‘a natural technical evol- ary sense. It is the analogy with living beings
ution’ (52). that provides a way out of the dilemma.
The evolved technical object is charac- Concretization is ‘organic’ in the sense that
terized by its energetic coupling to an asso- the system tends toward internal coherence.
ciated environment. It is here – in its Technical elements integrate themselves in a

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
422 TECHNICITY

‘technical individual’ much like organs are 12).8 Thus, while a purely automatic machine
integrated in a living body. Further, like a is closed upon itself and predetermined in
living body in its environment, the technical its functioning, a perfect machine is an open
individual constitutes a system where ‘a part machine characterized by a high degree of
of the natural world . . . intervenes as a freedom in its functioning. It is only by
condition of functioning’ (56).6 The evolved virtue of this openness that a machine is
technical object constitutes a circular regime sensitive to exterior information, and hence,
of causes and effects, or more precisely, a capable of being grouped together with
system ‘in which there exists a multitude of other machines in a coherent way, constitut-
reciprocal causalities’ (23).7 Like a vault that ing what Simondon refers to as a ‘technical
is not stable until it has been completed, the ensemble’. Even in this case, where machines
technical operation maintains itself by hook up with machines, the human is not
virtue of the mutual forces of its constituent rendered superfluous: ‘the ensemble of open
functions. As a consequence, the progress machines assumes the human as permanent
of technical genesis can only be arrived at in organizer and as living interpreter of
inventive leaps beyond given reality, through machines in relation to each other’ (12).9
an internal redistribution of functions that
See also Metastability; Naturecultures;
augments the total performance of the
Non-human Agency; Ontological Turn;
system and that resolves antagonisms
Process Ontologies.
between the elements in the primitive distri-
bution. The technical object progresses, in
other words, through inventive anticipation
Notes
where, as Brian Massumi poetically puts it, 1. The title of Simondon’s dissertation is
‘the past effectively swings over into a futur- L’individuaton à la lumière des notions de
ity of functioning’ (Massumi, in De Boever forme et d’information (Individuation in
et al. 2012: 30). the Light of the Notions of Form and
To come to terms with technicity, we Information). While defended in 1958, it
need to consider technical being not only in was published only in 1964 (the first
analogy with living being but also in its part) and in 1989 (the second part).
coupling with it. Technical being requires 2. ‘existe donc comme type spécifique
living being; it requires the human in its obtenu au terme d’une série convergente’.
double capacity as a living being and as a 3. ‘conditionne la naissance d’un milieu’;
‘condition de possibilité du fonction-
being that understands the functioning of
nement de l’objet technique’.
machines (Simondon 2012: 175). It is a
4. ‘médiateur de la relation entre les
mistake, therefore, to use automatism as
éléments techniques fabriqués et les
an indicator of perfection in machines. A éléments naturels au sein desquels fonc-
machine that operates without continuous tionne l’être technique’.
input from an operator is severely limited in 5. ‘cette finalité externe s’efface au profit de
its functioning and possible uses. With a la cohérence interne du fonctionnement’.
view to achieving true technical perfec- 6. ‘une partie du monde naturel . . . inter-
tion,  reducing human intervention to a vient comme condition de fonctionnement’.
minimum is not a goal. The true indicator of 7. ‘dans lequel existent une multitude de
perfection in machines, rather, is the level of causalités réciproques’.
technicity, which ‘relates to the fact that the 8. ‘correspond . . . au fait que le fonction-
functioning of the machine harbours a nement d’une machine recèle une
certain margin of indetermination’ (ibid.: certaine marge d’indétermination’.

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TECHNOANIMALISM 423

9. ‘l’ensemble des machines ouvertes becomes all to obvious when highly complex
suppose l’homme comme organisateur animal behaviour, when executed by ‘brain-
permanent, comme interprète vivant des less’ cytoplasm, causes fierce discussions in
machines les unes par rapport aux autres’. major scientific communities, as a fairly
recent discussion in Nature (12 May 2005
Aud Sissel Hoel issue) shows. The discussion (between
Rüdiger Wehner and Dan-E Nilsson et al.)
concerned the cubozoa, also called box
jellyfish or sea wasp (though these creatures
TECHNOANIMALISM are neither of the family of the jellyfish nor
of the wasp). Cubozoa move most elegantly
Can we one day design a machine that is and rapidly and react with great refinement
indistinguishable from the animal? This is to their environment (they are fierce
the question that drove René Descartes, hunters). They have an elaborate sensory
four hundred years ago, to his widely influ- apparatus most remarkable for the complex
ential Animal-Machine hypothesis.1 This eyes that include very sophisticated camera
ethological hypothesis (ethology is the lenses that come very close to our own. But
study of animal behaviour – see Animal) the idea that these complex eyes and its
claimed that animals, like other machines, complex behaviour were possible without
were assemblages of parts and as such he there being a central, uniform nerve system
rejected the idea that animals are able to (as with us humans) seemed to exclude the
attain a degree of rationality; animals do idea that this animal could think or feel, or
not ‘think’ and their behaviour is not in any experience joy or sorrow.
way similar to human action. Nicolas Examples like the cubozoa make us
Malebranche, seconding Descartes, took wonder what this ‘machine’, as Descartes
this idea a step further, claiming that the proposes it, is all about. And what makes it
cries and groans of this animal-machine unfit to ‘think’, feel and experience, like we
point to its mechanical failures (its (humans) do? In his Discourse Descartes is
‘cogwheels’) rather than to its joy or sorrow. quite clear on this as he gives us two reasons
Built upon the idea that one needs the for this. First of all machines could not
human brain to think, this Cartesian hypo- understand language. It would probably be
thesis extends well into our time. For able to talk, Descartes already envisions,
although the life sciences and related discip- but to follow a conversation ‘as even the
lines today are very much interested in how dullest men can do’, and to give some sort of
actually all animal life pursues a ‘kind of’ an ‘emphatic’ response, seems impossible
thinking, having a brain that somehow according to him. Second, as machines only
resembles the human brain is, according to act from the disposition of their organs,
many scientists, still regarded a necessity. they are unable to make a rational choice,
Much of animal behaviour is still ascribed to interpret and to compare. It is for this
to animal instinct (innate non-reflective reason that machines, according to
behaviour), developed in its contemporary Descartes, can never be ‘creative’, can never
form by Konrad Lorenz and Nicolaas speculate and come up with ‘a new idea’.
Tinbergen in the 1950s. And this idea of Consequentially their actions, however
‘instinct’ still shows a deep Cartesian belief complex mechanically speaking, are still
in humanism: it considers animal behaviour severely limited when compared to what
still predominantly as mechanically. This the cogito (the human ‘I think’) can do.

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424 TECHNOANIMALISM

No doubt this Cartesian idea that can do, means being occupied with the tech-
machines can impossibly talk and act like noanimal. In other words: art poses many
humans do is a recurring theme in modern questions in regard to how these mechanical
thought. The ‘Turing Test’, as developed by cries and groans ‘work’, how we are affected
Alan Turing in 1936, is an imitation game by its presumed individuality and how we
which practises the Cartesian method care and perhaps interact with it.
by comparing computer intelligence to Over a longer period of time, the work
human intelligence (more or less repeated of Tove Kjellmark dealt with technoanim-
in John Searle’s Chinese Room experi- alism, giving rise to another type of anim-
ment). Also Hubert Dreyfus’ iconical book ality (see also Postanimalism), another type
What Computers Can’t Do from 1972 of nature but above all very delicately
(smartly rewritten in as What Computers playing the affects of the involved audi-
Still Can’t Do in 1979), gives a refined over- ence. Most strikingly is the video perform-
view of how the discussions on Artificial ance Naked, where we are confronted with
Intelligence (AI) are struggling with this a mechanical toy panda that most of us
(Cartesian!) idea of the human mind, (grown-ups) would not care for too much.
showing us once more that Descartes’ It makes odd sounds and movements that
humanism still dominates not only our should somehow resemble the sounds and
ideas on what human thinking is, but also movements that baby pandas make, but
why ‘the ideas’ of machines and animals these qualities have been ‘humanized’ in
are still only to be considered in relation to the sense that they are supposed to affect
the Cartesian rational mind. us humans the way our own spouse affects
At the start of the twenty-first century we us more so than resembling the baby
find ourselves living in an age in which both panda which it seems to refer to. Yet again,
the animal (through the ecological crisis) as it does not imitate its ‘original’ too
and the machine (through the digital crisis) successfully, most of us, I assume, would
force us to change our behaviour and to hardly be ‘touched’ by the toy when in a
fundamentally rethink the idea of the conventional situation (a toy shop, a child’s
human and the role it plays in the world. room).
And it is through the arts, more than That changes when the toy panda is
anything else, that we have explored the placed in a different situation in which its
possibilities of escape from the Humanism ‘life’ is ‘at stake’, as in this performance. The
that suffocates us more and more (see Art). toy shop or the children’s room, where
Challenging these extremely powerful ideas mimicking is its ultimate goal, is very
‘requires all of the resources of art, and art of different from the operation room, with its
the highest kind’ (Deleuze and Guattari knives, its medical specialists, its clean and
1987: 187). But art is not needed for white environment. The movements and
critiquing the Cartesian hypothesis, but the sounds, which seemed so banal at first,
rather for occupying it (see Occupy), by now rapidly gain in their appeal to reality
pushing it to its extreme (as Bergson would as the pathetic clumsiness of the panda all
have it), thus questioning in various ways of a sudden comes awfully close to the
our ideas of ‘thinking’, of ‘emotion’,‘conscious- unpleasantness and the fearfulness we all
ness’ and ‘otherness’, to name just a few recognize from being in the operating
important concepts at stake. Being occupied theatre. The affects produced have radic-
by what ‘the technoanimal’, as we will mater- ally changed, and only seem to increase in
ialize the Cartesian hypothesis from now on, their power as the performance continues.

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TECHNOANIMALISM 425

The surgery being carried out is all ing experience’ for him. After seeing this
about taking off the toy panda’s skin with video we are left with a seriously unpleas-
the greatest possible precision. We could ant feeling. But why?
endlessly discuss the various different After performances such as Do you
signs being created as the procedures takes Mind? or after showing the video piece Gaze
place, as the knives carefully remove the or Naked, people from the audience often
fur from the paws, the glue from the eye. show an urge to talk about their reactions.
The name of the performance, Naked, They describe how disturbed they become
nicely captures the ambiguity as it poses by their own reactions and emotional
the question at what moment the panda is responses while watching this. The most
truly naked (perhaps being liberated from disturbing thing, they say, is that they find
the skin is all about releasing the mechan- themselves reacting more strongly watching
ism from its ‘toy identity’?). Much more the mechanical panda on the operation table
urgent, however, is the ongoing and – we (in Naked) then if it had been a real person.
need to mention this again – very carefully It is at this very short moment between
carried out surgery on this toy panda that perception and the rational ‘correction’
keeps on making unpleasant sounds and that ‘the shock to thought’, which only art
clumsy movements. Even the surgeon is can give, happens. Only then the Animal-
not at all at ease with the situation. At times Machine hypothesis, as it is so deeply
he seems very nervous, even cutting engraved in our thinking, is fundamentally
himself in the glove, and actually admitted critiqued. Suddenly someone in the audi-
afterwards that this was a very ‘traumatiz- ence walks up to the artist and asks, ‘Why

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426 TECHNOANIMALISM

Some images from Naked and other installations. IMAGES COPY RIGHT TOVE KJELLMARK.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
TERRESTRIAL 427

are the rabbits so sad?’ or ‘How did you get celestial beings. In similar fashion, previ-
the elephants to group up and walk ous adjectival uses of the word, for example
together in one direction?’ The answer is in Tyndale’s 1525 English translation of
that the artist has done nothing special. the Bible, had introduced terrestrial as a
They are just moving in a very simple and reference to the earthly sphere, again in
automated pattern. opposition to the celestial sphere. Terres-
What does it say about us, Cartesians, trial is – both as noun and adjective – that
when we react so strongly and emotionally which pertains to the earth and the soil, to
to these plastic shapes that so obviously material instead of ethereal life.
move with the help of small servos and Three planes present themselves to us in
batteries? What does this say about our view of this term: terrestrial as tool to think
mechanical reactions and actions? And human existence emancipated from a divine
why do we, so easily, attribute ‘a life’ to a set order; terrestrial as tied to earth in view of
of cogwheels? Rather than defending or the immanent realm of planetary existence;
critiquing the Animal-Machine hypo- and terrestrial in the sf-mode as envisioning
thesis, experiences like these play with our terran existences – as earthly critters, and
passions and most convincingly realize the thereby disrupting the structural verticality
crisis (ecological, digital, but then also of heaven and earth and the anthropo-
capitalist) that make up our everyday lives centric fantasies of extraterrestrialism.
today. They enact these crises and their First plane: terrestrial as tool to think
consequences best, compelling us to human existence emancipated from a
rethink the same question over and over divine order. Derived from the Latin terra
again: ‘What happened . . .?’ (whose Greek precursor and equivalent is
gaia), the rising usage of terrestrial in the
See also Animal; Art; Occupy (after Deleuze);
Renaissance – of which the stress of Dante’s
Postanimalism
Divine Comedy (1305–21) on the pilgrim’s
worldly journey is one early example – is
Note not surprising. The earthly existence of
1. Réponse de M. Descartes a M. Morus. the human animal was of growing concern
1649. Œuevres, tome x. p.  204. ‘Mais le to Renaissance humanism, reaching
plus grand de tous les préjugés que nous from Dante, Erasmus and Bruno, via
ayons retenus de notre enfance, est celui Shakespeare’s dramatic anatomies of the
de croire que les bêtes pensent,’ etc. human to Vico’s birth of the new sciences,
whereby the internal, especially gendered
Rick Dolphijn and Tove Kjellmark and racialized divisions and exclusions
within the category of the ‘human’ were
crucial to this first-wave humanist concep-
tion of ‘Man’ (Wynter 2003; also Bourke
TERRESTRIAL 2011). As Erich Auerbach’s study Dante als
Dichter der irdischen Welt (1929) argued –
As a noun, terrestrial makes its first appear- and Edward Said was to follow Auerbach in
ance in English in 1602, in Shakespeare’s this (Said 2003) – Dante was an early Poet
comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor. In of the Secular World, as the English transla-
the play, it refers to a mortal, a layman, a tion renders the title of Auerbach’s study.
human being (Oxford English Dictionary) Emily Apter has noted that this translation
and it is coupled by way of opposition to is not entirely fortunate (2006: 69), as it was

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428 TERRESTRIAL

not so much the secular (as different from, tions. In Death of a Discipline, Spivak argues
yet folded onto the divine) but more radic- for a conceptual turn to the ‘planetary rather
ally the earthly (irdisch) that Dante, than continental, global or worldly’ (2003:
Auerbach and Said were interested in. Said 72) in order to imagine present-day cohabit-
argues that Auerbach’s reading of Dante ation and to ‘reverse and displace globaliza-
suggested that ‘for all of its investment in tion into planetarity’ (ibid.: 97). According to
the eternal and immutable, the Divine Spivak, especially globe (but also world)
Comedy is even more successful in repres- permits abstraction, computation and the
enting reality as basically human’ in its ‘imposition of the same system of exchange
‘earthly historicity’ (2003: xxvi). In a similar everywhere’ (72). In response to this she
fashion, Said, up until his Humanism and strives to unearth figures for this cohabita-
Democratic Criticism (2004), is invested in tion that permit thinking the ‘differentiated
thinking the ‘worldly’ as the fact that ‘all political space’ (72) of the southern and
representations were in the world and northern hemispheres, figures that allow us
subject to its numerous heterogeneous real- to reimagine alterity and collective respons-
ities’ (2004: 49), speaking also with his crit- ibilities, rework historical stratifications of
ical analyses of Orientalism and his life- power and train our transnational literacies.
long political analysis of and commitment With recourse to Cuban activist intellectual
to the Palestinian question in mind. In view José Martí, Spivak suggests that the earth
of Said’s (Auerbachian) stress on ‘worldli- (and especially the shape it takes in Martí’s
ness’, Apter speaks then of Said’s ‘terrestrial investigations of the rural and the land), as a
humanism’ (2013: 226), a commitment to ‘bigger concept-metaphor than bounded
the historical, power-bound arrangement nations, located cities’ (93), might offer a
of reality. She suggests that his emphasis, ‘paranational image that can substitute for
throughout his writings, on the ‘word international’ (95) in order to speculate and
“world” in its widest ascriptions prompts imagine planetarity. In its allusions to the
renewed philosophical investigations of earthly and to the celestial body earth,
what is irdisch, in the manner of late Kant, terrestrial – although not directly used by
who advanced some wacky yet intriguing Spivak – speaks of this need to reimagine
theories about the earth as a self-sanction- collective cohabitation and planetary
ing nomos’ (ibid.: 225). Such a ‘terrestrial’ or responsibilities.
‘irdisch human’ that Said aimed to imagine Third plane: terrestrial in the sf-mode as
may be, Apter supposes, ‘somewhat other- envisioning terran existences and/as earthly
worldly, but it is a kind of otherworldliness critters. This third plane gives another spin
that discloses states of freedom, or heresy, to the divide; it transforms the very vertical-
or sublime justice’ (226). ity of heaven and earth. The hierarchy
Second plane: terrestrial as tied to earth between heaven and earth always already
in view of the immanent realm of planetary limits the scope of terrestriality before we
existence. Although the term terrestrial rings even begin to think it, by setting terrestrial in
with allusions to the couple terrestrial/celes- opposition to a possible escape into the
tial outlined above, its reference to the earthly extra-terrestrial (Haraway [1992] 2004a,
has also begun to move it into yet other [1992] 2004b, 1997). Feminist science
orbits. In her plea for planetarity, Gayatri C. studies contexts put into question this hier-
Spivak evokes the earth(ly) as a crucial figure archically structuring framework as a neces-
in order to imagine the world-wide span of sary guide for critical inquiries. To think
contemporary, historically indebted interac- with Haraway in the sf-mode – and sf stands

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
TOLERANCES AND DURATION 429

for ‘science fiction, string figures, speculative TOLERANCES AND DURATION

fabulation, science fact, speculative feminist
and so far’ (Haraway 2012a) – enables In engineering terms tolerance refers to
terrestriality to become a kennel of thought the permissible variations within a
itself for, as Haraway specifies, ‘the history of machine’s performance, material proper-
companion species, a very mundane and on- ties and measured values. In colloquial use
going sort of tale, one full of misunderstand- it describes the limit at which something
ings, achievement, crimes, and renewable will cease to function as expected, or the
hopes’ (Haraway 2003: 5). The radical personal characteristics of a subdued
emphasis on earthly matters, attending to stoicism. Often liberal, and potentially
the always unfinished business of meaning- feminized, to be ‘tolerant’ is to be graciously
mattering processes making up terra, high- receptive but not necessarily generous.
lights the urgency to work towards account- The intersection of the mechanical and
ability in and for the violent, asymmetrically personal meanings of tolerance echoes its
bound relations ‘we’ find each other in – as political implication, and its bearing on
terran beings, and therefore entangled in the posthuman. European nation-states
human and non-human relations (Braidotti pride themselves on their tolerance of the
2013; Wynter and McKittrick 2015). Yet it differences they permit within their territ-
also stresses that this endeavour does not ory. The idea of neutrality and acceptance
only allow for that which ‘is’ – that which is is a foundational European myth and has
known in the material-semiotic hege- repeatedly given permission to expansion,
monies or that which ‘we’ are convinced to colonialism and exclusionism. Tolerance
see in front of us, i.e. that which we usually is a supposedly stable space but it has a
call ‘reality’. Inquiring in the sf-mode as fragile boundary, which if pressured too
terran terrestrials asks for a curiosity that forcefully may shatter. Tolerance is then
‘gets one into thick mud’ to envision ‘autre- a calculable preciousness rather than a
mondialisations’ (Haraway 2008: 38). Other boundless resource: compared to the
truths to be told, other stories to be heard, interiority of tolerance, duration is
and other worldings to come about is an romantically expansive. Duration and
‘otherworldly’ endeavour, yet one that is durability are notoriously hard to repres-
not in need of an ‘outer space’ or any ‘other ent because in the promise of endurance is
world’ – the old fantasy of the space race in an implicit appeal for change: where the
its colonial, phallogo- and anthropocentric persistence of change is a description of
imagination. Rather, it is a becoming-with- process. To tolerate is not to endure and so
other(s) and/as affirmation of terran condi- it is in this temporal expanse of duration
tions so that the task ‘to believe in this world’ that we could say aesthetic description
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 75) returns opens to the capacity to articulate the
non-apologetic and yet open to the yet- space, continuity even, between the
to-come. emotional and the mechanic. It’s in this
space that it is possible to make sensible
See also Capitalocene and Chthulucene; the temporalities of a politics of endur-
Cosmopolitics; Kin; Earth; Mattering; ance and so the violence of conditions of
Planetary. tolerance.
Harry Sanderson’s research-led artwork
Birgit M. Kaiser and Solid State (2014–ongoing) occupies this
Kathrin Thiele space. The caustic light sculptures freeze

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
430 TOLERANCES AND DURATION

an entanglement of labour relations, as if from nowhere. These are photo-

matter, technocratic aesthetics, the graphic representations in as much as they
temporalities of visibility, and durations of are literal drawings with light. In a tradi-
light and production in sculptural objects. tional understanding of photographic
The sculptures are icy, crystalline and practice the formal aspects of the image
beautiful. Almost invisibly incorporated become its currency and its meaning. In
into the transparent plastic slab is a subtly the caustics works the impermanence of
contoured, contingent surface that refracts the image and the foregrounded technique
the light passing through them. The undermines notions of the pictorial and
process that guided the milling machines of representation. If the image they enable
that shaped them is not commercially is anything, it is a continuous, circular
available;1 Sanderson’s algorithms compute description between the engineered plastic
the relationship between the focal object, the computational metrics edified
distances and the laws of light refraction, by its form, and the fleeting chiaroscuro it
so that under specific conditions light draws into its from and then refracts on in
bends through it and an image is cast out, light and shadow. Its tolerances are set by

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
TOLERANCES AND DURATION 431

Solid State, Rain. 2016. CNC Milled Acrylic, Torch, Steel Wire & Fittings. 56.5 × 40 × 3 cm, at
Gallery Levy|Delval. PHOTOGRAPHER: ISABELLE ARTHUIS.

the duration of time spent with them, and condition of a visibility, the politics of
the visibility it might conjure. transparency belong to a longer history
They are tricksy objects. Without prior of systems of knowledge production. The
knowledge of the engineering and optical invention of photography is concurrent
physics involved the image seems to be with and tied to European colonial expan-
conjured by magic. Magic is a process sion. The French state awarded Louis-
that obscures its own workings and in Jacques-Mandé Daguerre the patent for
Sanderson’s sculptures the technical the first fixed chemical process in the same
process is obfuscated by their superficial decade that France began its conquest in
transparency. This is the magic of techno- Algeria. Colonial expansion depends on
logy, but also the violence of the light. a perspectival logic that allows for the
While the caustics machines are the for- geometric organization of space from
mation and objectification of a specific projection. We believe the more we see, the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
432 TOLERANCES AND DURATION

more we know, the more we can act. This is light goes on to follow this surface as the
the Albertian perspective system that runs mode of production, the projection that is
through all forms of Modern Western refracted is an image whose duration
representation and links Renaissance encompasses the techniques, ideologies,
painting to cartography and the camera bodies, epistemic expectations and labours
obscura, but it is a chain of logic which is entangled in it.
under pressure in Sanderson’s work. The caustic objects are not ghosts, but
The unnoticed contours of the surface present figures in our fleshy lives – active
of Sanderson’s sculptures sediment a matter in the extension of the real through
knowledge that is tacit and tactile, and this the techniques of the image. The drive to
binding of the dual meaning of ‘caustic’ re-describe and reconstruct the visible-
activates feelings inside of technology. In temporal field is a political desire that runs
the language of physics ‘caustics’ refers to on a libidinal currency; it is the emotional
the spread of rays of light produced by a in the technological. Sanderson’s work is
curved surface. More generally ‘caustic’ hugely desiring but it comes up against the
refers to a sharp or burning feeling, a felt conditions of its own production and in
consequence and the embodied docu- that confrontation of necessity and
mentation of sensation. The projections are ambition the barriers of imagination, its
soft images of small gestures that do not tolerances, are made tangible. It is in this
belong to the graphic language we associ- image–object–duration continuum that
ate with advanced vision technologies, and the caustics-objects embodies the limits of
so they make systems of visibility more the visible and in doing so proves its edges
explicitly an issue of human inhabitation to be intolerable.
and politics. Where the CNC milling In the frame of the posthuman the
machine followed a pattern written by a caustics works move beyond representa-
process of durational computing, and as tion into a process of description. They

0.1

0.05

-0.05

-0.1

-0.15 -0.1 -0.05 0 0.05 0.1

Detail graph plot showing surface contours for Solid State,

Rain, 2016. IMAGES: HARRY SANDERSON, SOLID STATE (2014–ONGOING).
TEXT: ALEXANDRA SYMONS SUTCLIFFE.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
TRANS* 433

make manifest a version of historical and gender and sex. Such a conceptualization,
durational perspective that exceeds our stemming from the field of transgender
current ideological limits. It is a composi- studies, constitutes a certain kind of trans-
tion that is not asked to tolerate the positional and transversal methodology, a
opening up of the frame of representation; way of seeing and knowing that intersects
but one that is, like the projections spring- with other humanities, social and natural
ing from both the objects themselves and sciences’ disciplines and asks how (trans)
the very labour and abstractions that gendering is related to processes of racial-
computed and fabricated them, generat- ization, dehumanization, speciation and
ive.  In the complex relationship between animalization (Stryker and Currah 2015).
manufactured tolerances and duration the It represents ‘mattering’s vital capacity to
need to construct new methods of looking become more and other than it already is
and knowing becomes acutely apparent: through movements, connections, intensi-
and the material consequences of that fications, and refigurations that traverse
undeniable. existing material arrangements’ (ibid.:
190). The transitive, prefixial, prepositional
See also Algorithmic Studies;
nature of trans- and trans* proposes to see
Computational Turn; Process Ontologies;
transness/transing as a process, a ‘becom-
Violence.
ing with’ (Haraway 2008) that stretches
across species (Chen 2012), ecologies (Kier
Note 2010), and matter itself (Colebrook 2015),
1. The algorithms guiding these processes and allows for transgender studies to move
were developed by Sanderson with Eric beyond transgender only as an identity
Verner and Vipul Lugade at Matlab category and towards transgender as a
Geeks (http://matlabgeeks.com/), based mode of analysis – or, as Regina Kunzel
on the papers Schwartzbkurg et  al., calls it, ‘transoptics’ (2014).
‘High Contrast Caustics’, EPFL (École Even though the academic writing –
Polytechnique Féderale de Lausanne), mostly coming from the field of medical
2014, and Yue et  al., ‘Poisson-Based sciences and psychology – on ‘transgender
Continuous Surface Generation for phenomena’ has been around for a long
Goal-Based Caustics’,’ ACM Transactions time, the 1990s marked the advent of the
on Graphics, 33(3), May 2014; and use field of ‘transgender studies’ and ‘trans-
‘Ceres solver’ by Google and the gender theory’ (Stryker and Aizura 2013).
algorithm ‘Optimal Transportation’ by This emerging body of thought pointed
Quentin Merigot, Ceremade, Université out that transgender is inextricably linked
Paris-Dauphine. to questions of who gets to count as
human. As Stryker and Currah note, ‘to be
Harry Sanderson and human has meant taking a position in rela-
Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe tion to sexual difference and becoming
gendered . . . while to be forcibly
ungendered or to become transgendered
TRANS* renders one’s humanness precarious’ (2015:
189). Transgender therefore challenges the
In the most general sense, trans* denotes a humanist standard of legibility and intelli-
movement across, above and beyond, with gibility and allows for exploration of how
particular reference to (yet not limited to) the category of the human works as a

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
434 TRANS*

normative tool (Hayward and Weinstein coined the term somatechnics (Stryker and
2015) in defining what counts as animal, Pugliese 2009) to underscore the inextric-
non-human, monstrous, etc. ability of ‘the body (as a culturally intelli-
Trans embodiment has a long history of gible construct) and the techniques
being seen as monstrous and in that sense (dispositifs and hard technologies) in and
not-quite-human, not least because of through which corporealities are formed
intricate connections – both material and and transformed’ (Sullivan 2014: 188).
discursive – with the medical and pharma- Michelle O’Brien ([2003] 2013) also points
ceutical industry. In her polemical book to entanglements between matter, techno-
The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the logy and biopolitics by arguing that trans
She-Male (1979), Janice Raymond claims bodies are always already enmeshed within
that transsexuals are essentially raping the flows of biomedical capitalism, colo-
women’s bodies by reducing them to nial histories and ‘immunowars’ through
artificial constructions, with the notion their access to and use of hormonal phar-
of ‘empire’ here standing in for science, maceuticals. The latter also points to a
technology and medical discourses and cyborgian political strategy for accounting
practices. In response, Sandy Stone, taking for one’s complex position and at the same
up her mentor Donna Haraway’s notion time finding modes of resistance (in her
of the cyborg and the kind of politics of own words: ‘my survival depends on inter-
resistance that it proposes, argues that facing global capitalism, but interfacing it
while indeed the medicalization of trans improperly’ – O’Brien [2003] 2013: 63).
often leads to reinstating sexist binaries, The intersections of capitalism, bio-
the only solution is not to look for some politics and trans is also taken up in the
authentic truth beyond medical discourse work of Paul Preciado. In his book Testo
but to construct one’s own position as Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the
transsexuals (Stone 1991). Stone therefore Pharmacopornographic Era he analyses
proposes that there is a need for trans- how the pharmacopornographic regime –
sexuals to come out as transsexuals and the process of a ‘biomolecular (pharmaco)
in this way create space for their own and semiotic-technical (pornographic)
discourses. government of sexual subjectivity’ (2013:
Similarly, Susan Stryker discusses the 34) – produces contemporary forms of
metaphor of Frankenstein in relation to sexual embodiment. Preciado proposes
transsexuals as monstrous ‘man-made’ that for a movement and politics of
binary violators. In her germinal text ‘My contemporary trans-feminism it is crucial
Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the to recognize that ‘your body, the body of
Village of Chamounix’ (1994) she claims the multitude and the pharmacoporno-
that the transgender body, like that of graphic networks that constitute them are
Frankenstein’s monster, is seen as an artifi- political laboratories, both effects of the
cial experiment, thus excluded from processes of subjectivation and control
human communities. However, she also and potential spaces for political agency
resists the dialectical move of naturaliza- and critical resistance to normalization’
tion by embracing her own monstrous (ibid.: 348). The critical intersections
identity and acknowledging her ‘egalit- between trans embodiment and military
arian relationship with non-human and surveillance technologies are also
material Being’ (ibid.:240). Later on Stryker taken up in the work of Dean Spade (2011),
and her colleagues at Macquire University Toby Beauchamp (2009, 2014) and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
TRANS- CORPOR EAL ITY 435

Christine Quinan (2016). The work on ical potentials engendered in trans-/trans*

these intersections highlights that surveil- theory and embodiment.
lance is not only built into the very category
See also Animacies; Makehuman; Pill, the;
of transgender through the medical
Posthuman Sexuality; Placenta Politics;
discourse and close medical monitoring
Xenofeminism.
that transgender bodies undergo, but also
affects transgender subjects through
policies such as new security measure- Note
ments at airports adopted as part of the 1. Apart from significant work already
‘war on terror’. produced on trans and materialism (such
Another emerging field within trans as Chen 2012; Hayward and Weinstein
studies is what can be called ‘tranimalities’ 2015, Hayward 2010; Irni 2013b; Simpkins
(Kelley 2014) or ‘tranimacies’ (Chen 2012). 2016), currently a special issue of Graduate
The category of the human depends Journal of Social Science is also being put
strongly on the animal as its other in a together on ‘Trans materialities’, address-
binary mode of difference that places ing specifically the intersections between
human/man/culture in a superior position new materialism and trans studies (editors
over animal/woman/nature. In a similar Max van Midde, Olga Cielemęcka and
vein, especially in popular media discourses Vick Virtú, forthcoming July 2017).
around trans rights and life, transgender
has often been rejected as ‘unnatural’, Goda Klumbytė
belonging to neither of the binary categor-
ies, yet traversing both. This position has
been challenged, for instance, by Myra J. TRANS- CORPOR EAL ITY
Hird in her article on ‘Animal Transex’,
which shows that trans is not a ‘distinctly Trans-corporeality is a posthumanist mode
human enterprise’ (2006: 39) and should of new materialism and material feminism.
not be considered as an entirely socio- Trans-corporeality means that all creatures,
cultural phenomenon. Bringing together as embodied beings, are intermeshed
new materialism and trans scholarship with the dynamic, material world, which
Hird demonstrates that trans exists in non- crosses through them, transforms them,
human species, and proposes that trans and is transformed by them. While trans-
phenomena, if explored in a way that is not corporeality as an ontology does not
restricted to cultural explanations, chal- exclude any living creature, it does begin
lenge the nature/culture distinction itself.1 with the human, in order – paradoxically
The explorations of cross-overs perhaps – to disrupt Western human excep-
between animal and trans studies as well tionalism. The figure/ground relation
as new materialism highlight the calls for between the human and the environment
‘transing the posthuman’ (Nurka 2015), dissolves as the outline of the human is
too. Trans*/Trans- here comes to represent traversed by substantial material inter-
a line of flight or a movement of becoming changes. Mapping those interchanges
(Stryker, Currah and Moore 2008). It opens across all species and at all scales is the
a space for transgender studies to engage prelude to trans-corporeal ethics and polit-
with a broader set of theoretical questions, ics. Trans-corporeality contests the master
and for posthuman theory to consider the subject of Western humanist individualism,
kind of capacities, relationalities and crit- who imagines himself as transcendent,

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
436 TRANS- CORPOR EAL ITY

disembodied and removed from the world upon feminist theories of corporeality,
he surveys. The trans-corporeal subject is including the ‘intercorporeality’ of Gail
generated through and entangled with Weiss, which, she notes, emphasizes that
biological, technological, economic, social, ‘the experience of being embodied is never
political and other systems, processes and a private affair, but is always already medi-
events, at vastly different scales. Trans- ated by our continual interactions with
corporeality finds itself within capitalism, other human and nonhuman bodies’ (1999:
but resists the allure of shiny objects, 158). Donna Haraway’s work, starting with
considering instead the effects they have, Primate Visions (1989), has long influenced
from manufacture to disposal, while reck- my writing; her argument for ‘situated and
oning with the strange agencies that inter- embodied knowledges’ and against ‘various
connect substance, flesh and place. It does forms of unlocatable, and so irresponsible
not contemplate discrete objects from a knowledge claims’ (1991: 191) as well as
safe distance, but instead, thinks as the very her insistence on non-human agencies and
stuff of the ever-emergent world (Alaimo the material-semiotic no doubt permeated
2016). my conception of trans-corporeality.
Thinking as the stuff of the world has a Trans-corporeality is developed in Bodily
long feminist history, due to the way women, Natures by drawing upon Karen Barad’s
along with racially marked and disabled notion of intra-action (2007) as well as
peoples, have grappled with being subjects other new materialist theories of non-
often categorized and systematically treated human agency, particularly those from
as objects. Trans-corporeality, along with science studies. Bodily Natures argues that
other theoretical concepts within feminist the trans-corporeal subject emerges from
posthumanities, suggests a new figuration environmental health and environmental
of the human after the Human, which is not justice movements, which must discern,
founded on detachment, dualisms, hier- track and negotiate the unruly substances
archies or exceptionalism, and which does that move across bodies and places. Racism
not, in Val Plumwood’s terms, ‘background’ becomes materialized, in multiple and
nature (1993). Like Rosi Bradotti’s trans- interconnected ways, when, for example, in
versal subject outlined in The Posthuman Percival Everett’s novel Watershed (1996)
and other works, the ‘trans’ of transcor- the African-American protagonist reckons
poreality insists on multiple horizontal his own blood as a marker not of an essen-
crossings, transits and transformations. tialist or contained racial identity but as a
As Braidotti contends, ‘The challenge for trans-corporeal conduit marking the
critical theory is momentous: we need to history of racist medical experiments, his
visualize the subject as a transversal entity own experiences with police brutality,
encompassing the human, our genetic and the environmental racism of the US
neighbours the animals and the earth as a military against Native American lands,
whole’ (2013: 82). which may have resulted in his cross-
I developed the concept of trans- species contamination with the anthrax
corporeality while editing the collection virus. Science, medicine, history, law
Material Feminisms (2008) with Susan J. enforcement and the military are all
Hekman and while writing Bodily Natures: entangled in the racism, environmental
Science, Environment, and the Material Self degradation and epistemological quandar-
(2010). In an earlier essay about architec- ies that course through the protagonist’s
ture and environmental ethics, I had drawn very blood. (Alaimo 2010: 64–70).

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
TRANS- CORPOR EAL ITY 437

Trans-corporeality is not a mystical, actions underscores the urgent need for

spiritual, phenomenological or experiential rethinking ethics and politics in the
sense that ‘everything is connected’; it Anthropocene, an epoch in which human
requires a radical rethinking of ontologies activities have profoundly altered the planet.
and epistemologies; it involves science, Cecilia Åsberg, Redi Koobak and Ericka
science studies, citizen science, feminist Johnson contend that ‘Posthumanities as
theory, environmental theories, critical race feminist analytical practices work for us to
studies, disability studies, literature, art and re-tool the humanities so as to meet up with
everyday activism. Thinking the subject as a the on-going transformations of our worlds’
material being, subject to the agencies of the (2001: 228). Trans-corporeality grapples
compromised, entangled world, enacts an with precisely how the transformation of
environmental posthumanism. The subject the world alters – or should alter – ontolo-
cannot be separated from networks of gies, epistemologies, politics and ethics.
intra-active material agencies (Barad 2007) While trans-corporeality was not conceived
and thus cannot ignore the disturbing under the sign of the Anthropocene, it
epistemological quandaries of risk society nonetheless epitomizes the sort of posthu-
(Beck 1992). Trans-corporeality, as it manist ontologies in which there can be no
reckons with material agencies that traverse ‘nature’ outside the human. And yet the
substances, objects, bodies and environ- human is hardly the master of his domain
ments, entails reckoning with scientific but instead a site traversed by strange agen-
captures, even as the data is always already cies and immersed within entangled ethical
‘mangled’ (Pickering 1995) by social and and political relations. While toxic chemic-
economic forces. Scientific information, als, radiation, toxic e-waste from the global
produced by experts or ‘ordinary experts’, is north dumped in the global south, indus-
necessary for trans-corporeal mappings, trial agriculture, factory farming and animal
which circulate through popular culture, experimentation are often overlooked in
politicized communities and subcultures, predominant visual, theoretical and popular
such as that of people with multiple chem- accounts of the proposed anthropogenic
ical sensitivity (Alaimo 2010). geological epoch, trans-corporeality, with
Trans-corporeality discourages fantasies its attention to the disconcertingly extens-
of transcendence and imperviousness that ive effects of seemingly benign consumerist
render environmentalism merely an elect- practices, underscores that they too are
ive and external enterprise. Even though matters of concern for the Anthropocene.
trans-corporeality emerged from environ- Since trans-corporeality involves unex-
mental health and environmental justice pected transits and crossings, it may be
movements, which focus on (post)humans, fitting to conclude with a brief account of
the concept extends toward all species who how trans-corporeality has been taken up in
find themselves at the crossroads of body divergent and perhaps surprising ways.
and place. The posthuman ethics of trans- Christina Fredengren, in ‘Posthumanism,
corporeality insists that even the most the Transcorporeal and Biomolecular
routine human activities, such as purchas- Archaeology’, employs the concept in order
ing plastics, impact human and non-human to place archaeological data such as DNA
lives across vast geographic and temporal and isotope analysis ‘in a theoretical frame’
scales, extending even to the bottom of the that demonstrates ‘the entanglement
sea (Alaimo 2016). The bizarre enormity of between the skeleton, the visceral parts of
the effects of the most minute everyday the body and the environment’ (2013: 59).

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
438 TRANSHUMANISM/POSTHUMANISM

Dayna Nadine Scott, a legal scholar, argues means that the spatial metaphors we have
that ‘the theory of transcorporeality directs historically used to frame our bodies are
us not only towards the permeability of unable to fully account for the co-creative
the bodily boundary but also towards the relationship between bodies, whether bodies
science/experience boundary;’ thus a ‘nego- of climate, water, soil, or bones’ (2014: 566,
tiated empiricism, attenuated by transcor- 570).
poreality . . . puts forward the possibility that Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in Stone: An
experiential knowledge is robust because of Ecology of the Inhuman, also expands the
its intersubjectivity, not in spite of it’ (2015: temporality of transcorporeality in order
19, 20). Magdalena Górska takes transcor- to bring the concept further along ‘its
poreality as a ‘key analytical apparatus’ of disanthropocentric path’. Extending trans-
her dissertation, Breathing Matters, demon- corporeality to a ‘geophilic Long Ecology’,
strating how breathing ‘materializes Cohen writes: ‘stone’s intimate alterity
human embodied subjectivities as always- demands acknowledgement of more-than-
already dispersed’ as she argues for recalib- human temporal and spatial entanglement,
rating ‘feminist analytical tools as onto- so that ecology becomes Long Ecology,
epistemological’ (forthcoming, n.p.). In the an affectively fraught web of relation that
collection edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, unfolds within an extensive spatial and
Prismatic Ecology: Ecology Beyond Green, temporal range, demanding an ethics of
Robert McRuer critiques how ‘pinkwashing’ relation and scale’ (2015b: 41). With this
obscures queer trans-corporeal relations; Long Ecology, and other matters, trans-
Steve Mentz paints trans-corporeality corporeality has, rather appropriately,
brown because it suggests ‘separation itself developed beyond its origins.
may be problematic’ within the ‘brown
See also Anthropocene; Bodies Politic;
interchange of life and nonlife;’ and Cohen
Body Without Organs; Feminist Post-
reflects on the greyness of zombies, assert-
humanities; Neo/New Materialism; Post-
ing that ‘[m]onster, human, and world are
human Ethics; Non-Human Agency.
transcorporeal’ (Cohen 2013a: 70, 207, 285).
Tema Milstein and Charlotte Kroløkke
Stacy Alaimo
analyse the ‘climactic moment of encounter-
ing the embodied other’ such as that of the
‘orcagasms’ of whale watchers, which they
argue are ‘intersubjective and transcorpor- TRANSHUMANISM/
eal events’ (2012: 88). Mel Y. Chen interprets POSTHUMANISM
transcorporeality as ‘affirming the agencies
of the matter that we live among’, such that Posthumanism and transhumanism are
‘the sentience of the couch, in our meeting two movements which are often confused
and communing, then becomes my own with each other. The reason is that both
sentience as well’ (2012: 182). Astrida are contemporary philosophies sharing a
Neimanis and Rachel Lowen Walker in critical approach to the human, which,
‘Weathering: Climate Change and the far from a fixed notion, is perceived as a
“Thick Time” of Transcorporeality’, make dynamic and evolving frame; both arose as
the temporal, rather than spatial, dimen- social and philosophical waves in the late
sions of transcorporeality ‘more explicit:’: 1980s and early 1990s, but the drives
‘The claim that . . . transcorporeal temporal- motivating them are rooted in different
ity belies a phenomenology of weathering, traditions of thoughts and they should

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
TRANSHUMANISM/POSTHUMANISM 439

not be assimilated. Furthermore, posthu- fact that the notion of the human has
manism and transhumanism contemplate been mostly defined in separation from the
distinct currents within themselves, such non-human realm. Posthumanism, instead,
as Critical, Cultural and Philosophical does not grant the human any onto-
Posthumanism and New Materialism, in epistemological primacy, addressing the
the case of Posthumanism; and Libertarian human in interconnected and symbiotic
Transhumanism, Democratic Transhu- relations to the non-human (Haraway 2008;
manism, Extropianism and Singularitari- Wolfe 2010). In this sense, posthumanism
anism, in the case of Transhumanism. In is a post-dualism, stressing the hybrid and
this entry, the terms Posthumanism and relational terms of existence (Barad 2007).
Transhumanism will refer to aspects indis- The drive to reach post-humanist, post-
tinctly characterizing their inner currents; anthropocentric and post-dualistic onto-
they will be summarized in such a way as epistemologies does not characterize the
to account for their specificities in the transhuman approach. Transhumanism
larger umbrella frame of the posthuman traces its roots within the Enlighten-
(Ferrando 2014). ment  and does not reject the human-
In an extended sense, posthumanism istic tradition (More 2013); on the contrary,
can be presented as a post-humanism, a transhumanism focuses specifically on
post-anthropocentrism (Braidotti 2013) human enhancement, which explains its
and a post-dualism. Born out of postmod- symbol ‘H+’ as an acronym for ‘Humanity
ernism, it further develops the deconstruc- Plus’. The main keys to access such a goal
tion of the human started in the 1960s and are identified in science and technology, in
1970s, underlining the fact that, historically, their existing, emerging and speculative
not every human being has been recog- frames. In the progressive timeline of the
nized as such: some humans have been transhuman, the future bears unique
considered more human than others; some potentials: some humans may transcend
have been considered less than human. their actual outfit in such radical ways as to
Posthumanism, as a post-humanism, does become posthuman (Bostrom 2005a). This
not employ any hierarchical schemata in is another reason causing the theoretical
addressing the human frame. The intersec- confusion between posthumanism and
tional critical lenses of gender, race, class, transhumanism. In fact, within the
sexual orientation, ability and age, among transhuman literature, the term ‘posthu-
others, have successfully demonstrated that man’ refers to a stage which might evolve
the human is not one but many, and it shall after the current transhuman era. On the
thus be accounted in plural ways, based on other side, according to posthumanism,
the experience of embodied human beings. the posthuman can be seen as a paradigm
To this frame, posthumanism adds the shift which is already occurring by
critique of speciesism and can be thus seen approaching and performing the human in
as a post-anthropocentrism, highlighting post-humanist, post-anthropocentric and
and deconstructing the epistemological post-dualistic ways.
and ontological legacies of the Great Chain
of Being, according to which the human See also Critical Posthumanism; Critical
has been granted a special position in the Posthuman Theory; Posthumanist Perform-
Western hierarchical structure represent- antivity; Object-Oriented Ontology.
ing divine creation (Lovejoy 1936). More in
general, posthumanism acknowledges the Francesca Ferrando

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
440 (UN)DOCUMENTED CITIZENSHIP

U
(UN)DOCUMENTED CITIZENSHIP a global universally interrelated civiliza-
tion may produce barbarians from its own
One of the unavoidable questions that are midst by forcing millions of people into
raised by contemporary refugee crises, conditions which, despite all appearances,
deaths at the borders of Europe and are the conditions of savages’ (ibid.: 302).
permanent marginalization of undocu- This analysis is radicalized by Giorgio
mented refugees in the interior of fortress Agamben in his famous Homo Sacer. For
Europe concerns the relation between Agamben, the notion of human rights
citizenship and the value of human life. signals the infringement of political life
There is an influential strand in critical over biological life: ‘declarations of rights
theory which states that the refugee high- represent the originary figure of the
lights the dominance of the figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-
citizen over that of the human. Writing in political order of the nation-state’ (1998:
the aftermath of the Second World War, 75). For Agamben, human rights serve as a
when millions of stateless refugees roamed hallmark of the power over bare life.
Europe in search of juridical protection, Agamben’s analysis seems to end in a pess-
Hannah Arendt identified a paradoxical imistic prediction for the future: the figure
effect of human rights discourse. Those for of the refugee is an ‘ontological destiny’;
whom the notion of human rights was Agamben’s famous conclusion, that we are
invented, and who need them most, can all in the camps, aims to show how under-
have the most difficulty in accessing them. neath juridico-political identifications we
As Arendt writes in The Origins of are all at the mercy of naked power over
Totalitarianism: ‘if a human being loses his bare life. The triumph of juridico-political
political status, he should, according to the power over life is complete.
implications of the inborn and inalienable These conceptualizations proved to be a
rights of man, come under exactly the situ- prescient criticism of the global violence to
ation for which the declaration of such be unleashed on refugees. Indeed, now that
general rights provided. Actually the the borders of Europe can be seen as sites
opposite is the case’ (Arendt 1973: 300). where necropolitics are becoming ever
Arendt highlights that instead of one’s more apparent (Mbembe 2003), and while
humanity forcing civil treatment, civil in the interior of European nation-states
status determines who deserves humane who unanimously subscribe to the declar-
treatment. Arendt concludes her analysis ation of human rights the treatment of
of human rights – this section of the book undocumented refugees is frequently in
is titled ‘The decline of the nation-state direct violation of human rights
and the end of the rights of man’ – with a (Spijkerboer 2013), pessimism is justified.
pessimistic conclusion: ‘the danger is that Yet, as the twenty-first century progresses,

440

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
(UN)DOCUMENTED CITIZENSHIP 441

this grim diagnosis is increasingly unten- shows how the non-citizen, Arendt’s
able. There is an urgent need to not just ‘savages’ or Agamben’s ‘homo sacer’, those
critique but also to change inhumane situ- who are often associated with a position of
ations around the borders of Europe. ultimate marginalization, act from a
Emphasizing that any conceptualization of marginalized position. It is a good starting
the human is inherently bound up with point for a discussion of the value of undoc-
domination and biopower paradoxically umented citizenship. Whereas citizenship
runs the risk of enforcing rather than and documentation, in the sense of pass-
critiquing the powerlessness of those who ports, residence permits or official recogni-
are most victimized (Lemke 2005). In the tion of the right kind of refugee, seem to be
face of the plight of refugees both at the inherently connected, when we see citizen-
borders and within nation-states, this ship as a dynamic practice, it becomes
stance is woefully insufficient. possible to see citizenship enacted by those
Increasingly, scholars argue that, contra without documentation.
pessimist diagnoses as outlined above, citi- All over Europe activism of undocu-
zenship can be the site of micro-resistance mented migrants is taking place. To take a
(Papastergiadis 2006), and a rehumaniza- number of Western European examples:
tion of those who are excluded (Zembylas between 2008 and 2010 France witnessed a
2010). In his Acts of Citizenship, Engin Isin series of strikes of undocumented workers.
has formulated an alternative conceptualiz- Almost 7,000 workers occupied companies
ation of civic agency which is illustrative of and temp agencies (Kahmann 2015). This
this trend in critical theory: ‘we define acts form of activism is not only an act that
of citizenship as those acts that transform tries to reject marginalization, it is also
forms (orientations, strategies, technolo- an affirmation of the constructive civic
gies) and modes (citizens, strangers, out- presence of sans-papiers (literally: ‘those
siders, aliens) of being political by bringing without documentation’) in French society.
into being new actors as activist citizens The strike showed to what extent the
(claimants of rights and responsibilities) French economy counts on undocumented
through creating new sites and scales of workers. The name that was claimed by the
struggle’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008). activists was not ‘sans papiers’, but rather
Defining politics not as a play of actors ‘ouvriers sans papiers’ (‘workers without
with preconceived notions, but instead as papers’). There is no figure of the humanit-
processes that expand the political sphere, arian victim here, nor is there only the
claimant of rights and responsibilities, grasp of power, rather what was shown by
citizenship is seen here not as a stable the strike of undocumented French citizens
category, nor as an identification which is is that undocumented migrants are
completely at the hands of empire, but marginalized yet active and constitutive
rather as a dynamic practice. Citizenship parts of society and hence can engage in
in Isin’s sense is claimed by those actors acts of citizenship.
who claim rights and responsibilities and Similarly, the Netherlands has known a
those who create new sites and scales of protest movement that uses the slogan ‘We
struggles. Isin’s conceptualization opens up Are Here’. The slogan is simple yet effective:
civic agency to those who are usually not undocumented migrants have been
seen as claimants of it. making a life for themselves, often under
The activism of undocumented migrants extremely taxing circumstances, in the
themselves offers a good starting point. It midst of Dutch civilization. The movement

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
442 URBANIBALISM

does not ask for recognition of victim- larger metabolism of digestion and nour-
hood, it is not a plea for a humanitarian ishment. As the Manifesto cites: ‘The matter
embrace nor is it purely negative; instead it of the world is endlessly cooked and
is a courageous affirmation of presence. devoured – the stomach is the big / outside
This slogan, if affirmed by Dutch civiliza- us’ (Stanza 9). Against a pacifying and
tion, cannot but lead to a fundamental essentialist idea of ecology, Urbanibalism
reconsideration of the most foundational rejoices in the messy metabolism of nature
questions of belonging. in all its parasitic, ‘cannibalistic’ and endo-
As these acts of undocumented citizen- symbiotic relations. Its posthumanism
ship show, it is not merely a matter of inclu- resides in its antithesis to the idea of a
sion or exclusion. Undocumented citizens natural equilibrium and separation of the
are already part and parcel of political natureculture continuum: ‘We should never
communities. Indeed these acts show abandon the city in favour of a virgin
destructive marginalization and precarity, territory’, reads the very first line of the
and indeed these movements make a claim Manifesto (Stanza 1). While Urbanibalism
for inclusion and normalization of their perceives the city as a gigantic stomach, it
status in juridico-political orders, but they does this along its economical, political and
also showcase different forms of civic colonial fault lines. An important reference
engagement. The challenge is to listen to of Urbanibalism is the anti-colonial
and follow the example of these acts of ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ by the poet
undocumented citizenship. The voices of Oswald de Andrade, which is a founding
undocumented citizens confront ossified text of the Brazilian avant-garde move-
notions of humanity and civil treatment of ment tropicalismo and historical challenger
humans with creativity, courage and the of Eurocentric humanism. In the western
demand to reinvent the current horizons of world Urbanibalism addresses new forms
civic engagement. of biopolitical control as represented by
‘green capitalism’ and policies of sustain-
See also Camp; Expulsions; Lampedusa;
able development. ‘As there is no longer an
Stateless State; Violence; SS = Security/
outside, within the ideology of degrowth
Surveillance.
we have established the borders of our own
siege’ reads the last stanza of the Manifesto.
Ernst van den Hemel

Methodology
URBANIBALISM In postulating the stomach as the organ of
perception and experience of the surround-
A provocative portmanteau of the terms ing world (Umwelt), Urbanibalism turns
‘urban’ and ‘cannibalism’, Urbanibalism is upside down the dominant aesthetic and
an artistic practice and political agenda political canon that is based on the central-
initiated in Amsterdam in 2006 and encap- ity of vision and, nowadays, computa-
sulated in the terse metric of the ‘Manifesto tion. Urbanibalism deems the surrounding
of Urban Cannibalism’ (Maas and world, the Umwelt, as an ‘extroverted’
Pasquinelli 2013). Urbanibalism envisions stomach. This is posited by Urbanibalism as
the city, the environment and even the a necessary thought experiment but also as
cosmos from the point of view of the a fertile provocation for emergent posthu-
stomach, that is from the perspective of a man epistemologies. Such a neomaterialist

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
URBANIBALISM 443

approach is not completely new and ecology (see the ‘three ecologies’ by
belongs to the history and anthropology of Guattari 1989).
food and to so-called Material Culture As artistic engagement, dissensual
Studies (see, for instance, the visionary cooking and politics of experimentation,
work of the Italian scholar Piero Urbanibalism is not only committed to
Camporesi). Central to this methodology is mapping Umwelten but to connecting
the idea that gastronomy is a not a neutral them in new constellations that are called
and relaxed hobby but a cultural field which Convivia, from the Latin word for ‘feasts’
carries with it ‘the smell of the centuries’ that means literally ‘living together’ (con +
(Stanza 10), that is the redolent traces of vivere). Convivia are the final gathering of
millenary wars, colonial invasions and the Umwelten that have been discovered,
mass migrations. Both art and gastronomy explored and cooked. A communal feast
incarnate a radical antagonism against the with an always different community of
fate of nature and history. ‘Culinary art urban gastronomers that unveils the
arose from the inventiveness of the poor common dimension of any urban land-
against a matricidal nature – and never scape and metabolism.
from pauperism’ (Stanza 10). Along this
tradition, Urbanibalism can be defined as
‘materic art’ or ‘the art of living matter’.
Posthuman Ecology
These aesthetics take issue with definitions ‘Innervated by flows of energy and matter
such as food design, molecular cuisine or / the urban landscape is alive . . . buildings
bioart where a larger and adequately are liquid strata of minerals – just very
scientific notion of metabolism is missing slow’ (Stanza 2). Urbanibalism considers
or is only understood in the isolated sphere the city and the natureculture complex as a
of a laboratory setting. tangle of flows and strata ‘where the border
The stomach is indeed an organ of between organic and inorganic life blurs’
thought(!). Urbanibalism readily alludes (Stanza 3). The world is seen as a geological
to the etymology of Homo sapiens, that metabolism where strata of different
(contrary to rationalist expectations) in natures overlap: inorganic, organic, social,
the original Latin means ‘the human that economic, linguistic, iconic . . . Philosopher
has a good sense of taste’ (Stanza 8). In old Manuel DeLanda has given a good example
Latin ‘to know’ (sapere) means ‘to have of this in his description of architecture as
taste’. The methodology of Urbanibalism an exoskeleton of the human:
moves from the subjective experience of
The human endoskeleton was one of the
the world to the metabolic perspective of
many products of that ancient mineraliz-
specific forms of life: this could be a simple ation. Yet that is not the only geological
organism like a particular yeast strain infiltration that the human species has
flourishing in the air of Brussels, a histor- undergone. About eight thousand years
ical record as a war recipe book, a political ago, human populations began mineraliz-
moment like the siege of Paris, the mineral ing again when they developed an urban
composition of Berlin tap water, an old exoskeleton: bricks of sun-dried clay
Dutch still life of edible flowers, etc. Each became the building materials for their
form of life produces and absorbs its own homes, which in turn surrounded and
Umwelt of relations – a metabolic and were surrounded by stone monuments
aesthetic ecology that Urbanibalism and defensive walls. This exoskeleton
explores beyond the borders of traditional served a purpose similar to its internal

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
444 URBANIBALISM

counterpart: to control the movement of traditions) – of ‘eating the earth’, usually

human flesh in and out of a town’s walls. fine soil or clay. It has been regarded as a
1997: 27 psychiatric disease, a confined cultural
The borders Urbanibalism aims to subvert practice or a result of poverty and famine,
are situated between the definitions of the but it has precise ritual and medical
edible and edibility. To take a historical purposes and is a form of vital nourish-
example from the French Revolution: ment in a diet where otherwise minerals
‘Remember the siege of the Paris are lacking. The craving for the earth is a
Commune, when communards ate the reminder that our posthuman metabolism
animals of the zoo and so engaged in a has always preceded us.
rebellious and joyful expansion of the See also Animal; Food; Ecosophy;
edible’ (Stanza 4). Overstepping the borders Naturecultures.
of comestible/non-comestible thresholds
also occurs in the practice of geopaghia Wietske Maas and
(common to German as well as African Matteo Pasquinelli

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
VERTIGO SEA 445

V
VERTIGO SEA regions of Norway, Vertigo Sea has as its
narrative spine two remarkable books:
Film stills from John Akomfrah’s three- Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and
screen film installation Vertigo Sea (2015), Heathcote Williams’ epic poem Whale
which explores what Ralph Waldo Nation (1988), a harrowing and inspiring
Emerson calls ‘the sublime seas’. Fusing work which charts the history, intelligence
archival material, readings from classical and majesty of the largest mammal on
sources and newly shot footage, Akomfrah’s earth.
piece focuses on the disorder and cruelty
of the whaling industry and juxtaposes it See also Blue Humanities; Capitalocene
with scenes of many generations of and Chthulucene; Hypersea; Lampedusa;
migrants making epic crossings of the Nomadic Sensibilities.
ocean for a better life. Shot on the island of
Skye, the Faroe Islands and the Northern John Akomfrah

445

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
446 VERTIGO SEA

John Akomfrah, Vertigo Sea, 2015, © Smoking Dogs Films. IMAGES AND TEXT COUR TESY OF LISSON
GALLERY.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
VIBRANT MATTER 447

VIBRANT MATTER ideal of individual moral responsibility –

that the most potent actants in a group are
Vibrant Matter (Bennett 2010) aims to human beings, the book suggests that, in
enhance the perceptibility of non-human many cases, human intentions, strivings
forms of agency, where ‘agency’ refers to or deliberate activities are not the key
the capacity to inflect the direction of operators. Sometimes, that role is played by
events and to make a difference to a weather-event, or a foodstuff, chemical,
outcomes. The book tells an onto-story metal or pharmaceutical (or their sounds,
that plays with and begins to play out the smells, silent movements, rhythms and
idea that non-human things and forces momentums). To really acknowledge the
actively shape the bodies they encounter, force of these other players would be to
including the humans who never fully enhance our ability to detect with more
possess or control them. Here the figures subtlety what was, in a given case, the
of ‘thing-power’, ‘vital materiality’ and actual mechanism of a particular effect –
‘vibrant matter’ are invoked. The short such as, for example, a blackout or an oil
book also describes, and attempts to revive, spill or climate change or a gun culture.
aspects of past (Euro-American) ontolo- One important example in Vibrant
gies or cosmologies, wherein non-human Matter concerns the multiple agencies at
bodies and processes were more sharply work to produce the electricity blackout in
experienced as entering into, and enabling 2003 in North America (and later in the
and constraining, human action. year in Europe). The government and
The book draws examples from contem- industry response in the US was to seek to
porary political culture (concerning food, identify some human – some Enron exec-
abortion, energy policy, a political economy utive or energy trader – who was respons-
of extraction and waste), as well as from ible and then to punish him. Meanwhile,
the work of Spinoza, Kant, the ‘critical vital- a whole series of other relationships –
ists’ Henri Bergson and Hans Driesch, between the electricity grid as infrastruc-
Thoreau, Darwin, Gilles Deleuze and ture, the legislation deregulating energy
Bruno Latour – in order to make the case trading, the constant egging-on of the
that human agency is itself an assemblage desire to consume, desire, and the natural
of human and non-human powers. When tendencies of electricity itself remained
humans act, they do not exercise exclus- under-explored. As a result, the possibility
ively human capabilities, but express and of blackouts today remains more or less
engage a variety of other actants, which is the same. The fetish of the exclusively
Latour’s term for an entity or a process that human agent and the associated tendency
makes a difference to the direction of a to define social problems as moral failures
larger assemblage without that difference – and the implicit assumption that it is we
being reducible to an efficient cause. humans who are always in charge –
Actants collaborate, divert, vitalize, gum prevented analysts from discerning that
up, twist or turn the groupings in which the real locus of agency was an assemblage
they participate; or, as archaeologists Chris – of human and non-human actants. And
Gosden or Lambros Malafouris argue, it also prevented us from pursuing more
tools actively constitute the styles and effective forms of intervention into that
powers of human cognition and memory. specific configuration. Here the point is a
If moderns tend to default to the assump- pragmatic one: ethics and politics can
tion – often for the sake of maintaining the sometimes have more traction on material

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
448 VIOLENCE

assemblages and the way they reproduce Vibrant Matter articulates a sensibility
patterns of effects than they can have on that is sensitive to the (material) connec-
that elusive entity called the moral subject. tedness of all things, and it offers one kind
The book also took issue with a tend- of radical critique of anthropocentrism. It
ency to frame stuff or things as ‘inanimate is misleading to call it a ‘new’ materialism
objects’ that merely form the background or even a ‘post-’ humanism, for the philo-
context for our actions – in other words, to sophical perspective and the sensibility it
consider this in ways that reserve the active, advocates sit alongside a strong and lively
creative power for humans. A motivating tradition of (human) body feminisms,
premise of the book is the idea that by Marxist ecophilosophies, Merleau-Ponty’s
parsing the world into passive matter (its) phenomenology, New Left experimenta-
and vibrant life (us), we are limiting what tions with eros and an under-explored tradi-
we are actually able to sense. In other words, tion of indigenous thinking and sensing.
a strict separation between matter and life
See also Animism; Ecomaterialism; Gaga
places below the threshold of note the
Feminism; Joy; Material Feminisms; Non-
active powers of material formations,
Human Agency; Ontological Turn; Post-
such as the way landfills are, as we speak,
human Ethics; Trans-corporeality.
generating lively streams of chemicals and
volatile winds of methane, or the way
Jane Bennett
omega-3 fatty acids in a diet will alter brain
chemistry and mood, or the way indus-
trial chemicals that find their way into the
water supply are ‘endocrine disruptors’. VIOLENCE
In Vibrant Matter, human agency, like
any form of activity, is always something To think violence today requires that we
distributed across a range of diverse bodies. reposition ourselves, philosophically, legally,
When an I acts, it does not exercise exclus- politically and ethically, in the space between
ively human powers, but includes those of certain extremes, themselves built upon
its food, micro-organisms, minerals, arte- violent historical categorizations and exclu-
facts, sounds, bio- and other technologies, sions: human/non-human, subject/object,
and so on. There are, of course, differences culture/nature, physis/tekhnē, active/passive;
between a human individual and a stone, the list goes on.
but neither considered alone has real On the one hand, spectacular images of
agency. To invoke thing-power or the violent acts, for instance those produced
vibrancy of matter is not to say that non- by the media machine of so-called Islamic
human objects have agency in the strong State (IS ) precisely for our consumption,
sense: a glass of water doesn’t have inten- fill our screens on a daily basis.1 Such
tions or a will. But it does makes sense to images, be they of gruesome beheadings or
admit that it has propensities and insist- immolations, demand that we consider the
ences, maybe even a kind of striving along status of the human body as it relates to
the lines of what Spinoza called conatus. To violence in our present moment. First of
be clear: it is not that individuated objects all, in today’s ‘wars of religion’ (if we can
are wilful subjects; but they can be power- truly call them this), the ‘contemporary’
ful actants in operation with others. The must be thought through its untimeliness.
locus of agency is in practice always a Here, as Jacques Derrida writes in 1996,
human–non-human collective. but which is still of relevance, violence has

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
VIOLENCE 449

two ‘ages’: on the one hand, that which already been at work (Derrida 2007), but
appears contemporary, ‘in sync . . . with that reveals itself all the more vividly today.
the hypersophistication of military tele- Furthermore, in order to function, the
technology – of “digital” and cyberspaced revenge of the direct, corporeal act of
culture’ (encrypted communiqués and violence (for instance, in execution videos)
hellfire missiles carried by unmanned often relies upon the heightened rhythm of
aerial vehicles, for instance); and on the mediatic power as the resource that makes
other hand, a ‘new archaic violence’ that possible the media events or ‘image opera-
counters or seeks revenge against the tions’ that underlie our contemporary
‘contemporary’ and the attendant decor- aesthetics of terror (Koltermann 2014;
poralizing, delocalizing and expropriat- Monzain 2009).3 Here, images themselves
ing powers of the machinic and tele- function as hyper-effective ‘weapons’, and
technoscience (here identified with the the material substratum of the image –
global market, military-capitalistic hege- together with its means of mediatization
mony and the wholesale global export of and archivization – constitutes the event as
the European democratic model) (88–9). much as the human act (Derrida 1996;
In the latter, violence carried out in the Schuppli 2017).
name of ‘religion’ reverts as closely as At the other end of the spectrum lies a
possible to the body proper and to the violence of an altogether different speed,
‘premachinal living being’ (ibid.: 88). one that escapes the spectacle-driven
Killings are enacted by ‘bare hands’ or at corporate media and our flickering atten-
least primitive tools other than firearms, tion spans. Distinct from but related to
and the casualties and collateral damage of structural violence, what Rob Nixon terms
‘clean’ or ‘proper’ wars (fought at a distance) ‘slow violence’ – typically not even perceived
are continually supplemented by tortures, as violence – is not time-bound or body-
beheadings and mutilations. bound, but rather is attritional and of
And yet, considered through the lens of delayed effects (2011: 3, 11). This insidious
deconstruction and its rendering unstable violence, most often environmental and
of the defensive borders between the with everything to do with the ‘violent
organic and machinic, human and non- geographies of fast capitalism’ (Watts 2000:
human, present and absent, actual and 8; cited in Nixon 2011: 7–8), as well as
virtual, archaic and contemporary, these racism, elides the narrative closure of recog-
two ages, modes and impulses appear to nizable visuals of the victory and defeat of
collapse into and fold between one war, instead working its way inwards,
another.2 If there is a specificity to the ‘somatized into cellular dramas of mutation
manner in which we are to think violence that – particularly in the bodies of the poor
today, it is precisely through the contours – remain largely unobserved, undiagnosed,
of this anachrony and the violences enacted and untreated’ (ibid.: 6). In this context,
both as a response to and thanks to the most notably in the case of climate violence
impossibility of maintaining such fantas- and what Adrian Lahoud names its attend-
matic distinctions. For that which appears ant ‘weaponization of Earth’ (2014: 495),
contemporary in its reliance upon the violence must be re-thought in the absence
speed and delocalization of technoscience of a punctual act, a violent event. Unlike
is in fact but a quasi-infinite acceleration – individual acts of violence, or the industrial-
albeit more brutal – of a principle of virtu- ization of violence in modern warfare – and
ality, violence and ruin that had always with this the necropower or thanatopower

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
450 VIOLENCE

that accompanies or supersedes contem- Unlike in the beheadings videos mentioned

porary biopower – this demands that we above, where a direct line is traceable
‘imagine a crime without a criminal’, a between the figures of victim and perpet-
violence ‘without coordinates on which rator, establishing field causalities challenges
transgressions might be plotted’, in the the established model of criminal law and
potential absence of a weapon and, more- instead traces ‘force fields, causal ecologies,
over, a witness (ibid.: 496). that are nonlinear, diffused, simultaneous,
This, though, one might protest, is and involve multiple agencies and feedback
nothing altogether new: as Ann Laura Stoler loops’ (Weizman, 2014: 27). In the end, we
reminds us in her forceful work on imperial might say that in each of the two scenarios
debris and (ongoing processes of) colonial – the linear and the diffuse, the hyper-visible
ruination, critical geographers, environ- and the hyper-invisible – we are faced with
mental historians and historically inclined extreme violence.
anthropologists have been calling attention As is already becoming apparent, the
to what has now entered our lexicon as ‘slow multifaceted strategies that befit the forms of
violence’ for some time (2013: 11–12). What violence we are faced with today entail a
is relatively new, however, is the attempts to recasting of our (i.e. Western) historically
bring various fields of enquiry, including hierarchical gaze away from the primacy of
postcolonial scholarship and work of a the human, as active, sovereign agent.
posthumanist bent, into a more organic History has taught us that ‘humanity’ is a
conversation – one that might at least begin shifting index; that ‘humanism’ is inherently
to provide necessary tools for restitution violent and goes hand in hand with the
and redress, and even legal prevention – a structural violences of racism, colonialism
complex task when the legal ‘personhood’ of and patriarchy; that the biological status of
the violator, from the multinational corpor- ‘human’ is by no means the guarantor of the
ation to the state (often both), is anything legal institution of ‘human rights’. As such,
but straightforward. Here, a number of chal- contemporary investigative practices and
lenges arise: scientific, legal, political and conceptualizations, for instance ‘forensic
representational. In the realm of the latter, aesthetics’ (Keenan and Weizman, 2012;
scholars, activists and artists are called upon Forensic Architecture 2014), not to mention
to make the unapparent appear, to make more-than-human or ‘companion species’
drawn-out threats accessible to the immedi- ethics (Haraway 2003), must entail a
ate senses (Nixon 2011: 15). Aesthetic hospitality towards thinking agency as
strategy demands reconceptualization. In distributed beyond the human, including
order to render slow violence visible, speed matter and non-human forms of life
must first of all be redefined (ibid.: 13), as (Bennett 2010), and thus towards a malle-
must causal relations and assemblages. In able relation between subjects and objects.
the work of the London-based Forensic Shifting attention from the figure (the
Architecture project, for instance, ‘field human individual; be this agent, victim or
causality’ becomes the operative concept witness) to the ground (collectives, technolo-
through which conventional modes of gical assemblages or environments; as the
understanding violence are challenged, ‘backdrop’ against which a violent crime
accommodating for scenarios in which the would conventionally be considered to have
environment itself becomes the medium been committed), and as such breaking with
through which violence is carried out, and the norms of human rights work, objects
in which nature possesses a certain agency. and environments (including digital ecolo-

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
VIOLENCE 451

gies) are registered not only as the fields personhood, as a means of protections
through which violence is enacted and medi- against violence and violations, that has
ated, but also as the potentially active since the 1990s been explored under the
sensoria or indicators that might bear witness banner of ‘non-human rights’, ‘the rights of
to the (violent) crime – as soon as one learns nature’ or ‘Earth jurisprudence’ (Tavares
how to access and read the traces (Forensic 2014b; Demos 2015). Such a legal innova-
Architecture 2014; see especially the chapters tion (already practised to some degree in
by Anselm Franke and Eyal Weizman). Bolivia and Ecuador)5 entails a legal, polit-
But the non-human is not only an eviden- ical, social, cultural and philosophical
tial figure, assistant to human demands for upheaval of extreme dimensions, one that
justice; neither is the environment merely a embraces radically alternative cosmologies
passive victim of violence. Rather, war and perspectives regarding nature and
is waged against nature as if it were a criminal culture (worldviews that have traditionally
subject. This war is no longer fought merely borne the brunt of colonial epistemic and
in the name of progress, profit and security material violences) as well as the very
(i.e. modernity, colonialism, capitalism), premises through which we conceive of
but also as part of the global ‘war on terror’ violence itself (Viveiros de Castro 2015;
that has ever-intensified since the events of Franke 2010).
9/11 (burned into the USA’s psyche as the Such a project on the one hand takes us
definitive image of violence),4 bringing us back to slow violence, as this relates to
back at least tangentially – albeit in a Indigenous struggles for human rights, and
distinct speed and register – to the media environmental justice in the global South.
spectacles of violence with which we began. But it also opens up into more universal
In this context, as demonstrated by Hannah questions such as what Patrick Hanafin
Meszaros Martin’s research into the crimin- calls a ‘micropolitics of posthuman rights’,
alization of the coca plant in Colombia, the enabled by the thinking of Rosi Braidotti,
violent eradication of non-human life (for that aims ‘to subvert the majoritarian
instance, through aerial fumigation) neces- model of human rights as one premised
sarily implies the eradication of the lives of upon the human as white neoliberal male’
the humans that inhabit a given environ- (Hanafin 2014: 214). In this conception of
ment, as well as their ‘lifeworlds’. Such viol- posthuman rights that ‘embody the claims
ence is legally sanctioned in the name of of transversal assemblages of individuals
fighting the ‘war on drugs’, as this inter- who do not see a binary cut between
twines with the global ‘war on terror’ – with thought and action, life and death, environ-
both ‘wars’ serving as the smokescreen ment and humanity, or animality and
behind which states, legally or illegally, humanity’, and who do not cede to the
exert violence upon their human and demands to divest oneself of one’s singu-
nonhuman populations (Meszaros Martin larity and become ‘human’ (ibid.: 215, 218),
2015). This theatre of operations in which the challenge is to find strategies for
non-human life, here the object of ‘ecocide’ aestheticizing and narrating slow violence
(Meszaros Martin 2015; Tavares 2014a: 229; that would entail moving beyond simply
and Zierler 2011, cited in Lahoud and humanizing inaccessible violences.6
Tavares 2013), is deemed ‘terroristic’ and in
need of violent extermination, is but one of See also Naturescultures; Necropolitics;
the contexts that intensifies the need for a Neocolonial; Non-human Agency; Post-
wholesale rethinking of legal standing and human Rights; Technicity; War.

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
452 VIOLENCE

Notes slow violence more urgently visible

(2011: 13).
1. Regarding the logistical infrastructure of
5. The only international or national courts
IS , including its propaganda units, see
that currently recognize the rights of
Winter 2015.
nature are Ecuador, under the constitu-
2. For the import of Derrida’s writings for
tional provisions established in 2008, and
posthumanism, see Wolfe 2010.
Bolivia, under the Law of the Rights of
3. The ‘operativity’ of images, including in
Mother Earth, passed in 2010 (Tavares
the context of conflict and terrorism, was
2014: 558).
discussed extensively at the ‘Image
6. ‘In a world permeated by insidious, yet
Operations’ conference held at the ICI
unseen or imperceptible violence,
Berlin in April 2014, https://www.ici-
imaginative writing can help make the
berlin.org/events/image- oper a tions/
unapparent appear, making it accessible
[accessed 28 April 2017].
and tangible by humanizing drawn-out
4. Nixon speaks of the impact of 9/11 in its
threats inaccessible to the immediate
reinforcement of ‘a spectacular, immedi-
senses’ (Nixon, 2011: 15).
ately sensational, and instantly hyper-
visible image of what constitutes a violent
threat’ for efforts to make forms of Shela Sheikh

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
WAR 453

W
WAR appropriate course of action in a given
situation’ (ibid.: 5). So, for war to break out,
War is a time at which violence is legitim- a second and third stage, named ‘confront-
ized, institutionalized and deployed ation’ and ‘legitimation’ are necessary.
against a constructed enemy. Apart from ‘Confrontation’ relates to the parties
being horrific and atrocious, war is involved coming to look upon the ‘contra-
normality. It repeats and reproduces itself diction’ as somehow relevant, creating an
through imaginaries which render it antagonistic relationship. During the third
acceptable and necessary, and through stage (‘legitimation’) violence is officially
institutional forms which serve as war- sanctioned as the legitimate course of
making machinery. For Jabri, ‘War and action through the imagining of violent
violent conflict are social phenomena scenarios, what Schröder and Schmidt call
emerging through, and constitutive of, ‘violent imaginaries’. Finally, during ‘war’
social practices which have, through time violence is put into practice.
and across space, rendered war an institu- War often provides an enabling envir-
tional form that is largely seen as an inevit- onment for the accumulation of wealth,
able and at times acceptable form of social organization and institutional and
human conduct’ (1996: 4). For war to start, technological change. Contrary to propa-
it first has to become imaginable. A crucial gandistic portrayals of war as a (sports)
stage in the run-up to war is its dress game or collapse, wars are not necessarily
rehearsal in the form of ‘million repeti- about winning, or implosion and disorder.
tions’ of ‘single words, idioms and sentence Rather, war is an alternative system of
structures’ imposed on people (Klemperer profit, power and protection. As famously
1947 [2000]). Anthropologists Schröder argued in relation to the Second World
and Schmidt argue that ‘violence needs to War by Randolph Bourne, ‘war’ and ‘the
be imagined in order to be carried out’ state’ are deeply linked, and in a sense
(2001: 9). In describing the processual interdependent: ‘War is the health of the
characteristics of violent action they State’, and the ultimate act of statehood.
propose a four-stage model leading from ‘States are deeply war machines, and the
‘conflict’ to ‘war’. The first stage, ‘conflict’, is peace they make is the peace of pacifica-
seen as the socio-economic contradiction tion,’ says the Retort collective (Boal et al.
at the base of inter-party competition. 2005: 94). In return, what we call ‘peace’ is
However, organized violence (‘war’) does often sustained by highly destructive forms
not automatically result from contradic- of structural violence (Galtung 1996; Žižek
tion. ‘Wars are made by those individuals, 2008; Demmers 2017).
groups or classes that have the power Over the past decades, remoteness in
successfully to represent violence as the all its modalities (e.g. as distancing or

453

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
454 WAR

outsourcing) has become a characteristic soldiers prepare for war. The DARWARS
feature of warfare. According to contempor- Ambush! combat simulation game, for
ary military and security doctrines the only instance, was used to train soldiers bound
adequate means to contain violence is to for Iraq in military convoy operations (Bray
permanently monitor the spaces of everyday 2004). But also the Hezbollah-produced
life in ‘zones of suspicion’. We see the exten- game Special Force was allegedly used to
sion of war-like activities in areas of social train anti-Israel paramilitary troops in the
life that were previously sheltered from such Middle East (Charles 2009). At the same
intrusions. Drawing on buzzwords such as time, material warfare is increasingly
‘stability operations’, ‘integrated missions’ cartoonized. As King and Krzywinska
and ‘coordinated responses’ there is a widen- highlight: ‘devices such as head-mounted
ing of the scope of military responsibilities displays can be worn by troops, projecting
and technologies into contexts of non-war. onto their field of vision data not dissimilar
Militarization has now moved into police to some that is provided in games’
work, humanitarian relief operations, migra- (2006: 199).
tion management, economic espionage, Leading in the fictionalization of
crowd control and corporate security. This warfare is the intensifying use of armed
tendency to militarize the social is certainly drones in for instance the CIA’s assassina-
not confined to the ‘Global South’ (although tion raids in Pakistan and the Middle East.
the South is now an open laboratory for The ‘pilots’ of the armed drones are located
developing the intelligence potential of these in virtual reality ‘caves’ set up in trailers on
technologies). In the Former West as well, Air Force bases on US soil. As stated by
technologically mediated modes of sorting, Graham, here the ‘ubiquity of games and
recognition and training are becoming virtual simulations blends into the game-
increasingly sophisticated, on the one hand, style reality of very real weaponry and
and popularized on the other. From infiltra- killing’ (2010: 215). Graham describes how
tion in virtual worlds, through facial recog- arms maker Raytheon in building its
nition of car drivers nearing airports to newest drone control system deliberately
drone surveillance, state powers and corpor- used the same HOTAS (‘hands on stick
ations aim to identify, separate and target throttle’) system as a video game uses.
bodies deemed malign and threatening According to Raytheon’s drone designer
from those deemed valuable and threatened. there ‘is no point in re-inventing the wheel.
The gamification of actual warfare, but The current generation of pilots was raised
also the rise of the war games industry on the [Sony] PlayStation, so we create an
foster new questions on the interface interface that they will immediately under-
between virtual and spatial war, fantasy and stand’ (Graham 2010: 215). What stands
reality, combatant and gamer, simulation out in the debate on gamification is the
and authenticity. Discussions on the issue of ‘distancing’, the ‘sanitization’ of war,
connections between gaming and warfare and the political consequences of the blur-
often point at the use of games in military ring of boundaries between game and
recruitment and training (such as the US combat. In this respect, the First Gulf War
Army produced video game America’s is often mentioned as the first example of
Army) and the rise of the so-called ‘Nintendo warfare’. One of the leading
‘military-industrial-entertainment network’ icons of that war was a video segment
(Der Derian 2005; Graham 2010). Combat showing a smart-bomb targeting screen.
simulation games are designed to help The video places the viewer directly in

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY 455

the seat of an F-117 stealth bomber witness- The ways in which the small Serbian youth
ing in detail how a laser-guided bomb movement Otpor! engaged in discursive
descends on its target. This kind of top- practices of resistance against the Milosevic
down, abstract electronic imagery would regime in the late 1990s, mainly by means
become emblematic in later US or NATO - of symbolic inversion, satire and ridicule,
led wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the dissemination and performance of
Syria and Libya. For those not directly at ‘non-violent imaginaries’, are a miniature
the receiving end of armed aggression, example of how a dominant discourse
warfare has become play-stationized. can be ‘toppled’. The de-legitimation of
The new technologies of remote control violence, its conditions of possibility always
and technological warfare are increasingly somehow connected to transformations in
based on remote knowledge, relying political and material structures of domin-
heavily on cyber-intelligence and meta- ation, is a crucial stage in the weakening of
data (tracking the movement of individu- the war machine.
als through their mobile phone use).
See also Camp; Lampedusa; SS = Security/
Global Pulse (UN project in Africa), Nexus
Surveillance; Violence.
7 (US military counter-insurgency in
Afghanistan), Frontex (EU external border
Jolle Demmers
surveillance) and Eurodac (EU internal
control of irregular migrants) all use
geospatial technologies to map and draw
up security governance. Current surveil-
WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY
lance technologies are much more subtle
and sophisticated than ever before and rely
(Or: ‘Science Fashion’)
on selective rather than generalized forms
of control. An example of this is the way in One of the exciting new fields in the creat-
which the EU makes use of satellites with ive industry is the integration of fashion
synthetic radar equipment that are able to and technology. Wiring complex systems
trace and track immigrants long before of microprocessors, motors, sensors, solar
they have reached European borders. This panels, (O)LED s or interactive interfaces
way, fresh forms of exclusion are produced into the fabric, textile or clothing turns
which not only cut off targeted groups them into smart garments that have a
from social participation but do so in ways certain agency of their own. Designers
that are at times scarcely visible to the experiment with these ‘smart materials’ to
larger public. create examples like a dress that connects
This form of ‘permanent war’, in seeking to Twitter, a catsuit that visualizes
to normalize itself, is in constant need of emotions, a T-shirt that changes colour or
legitimation. It needs ‘weak citizenship’ trousers that measure the wearer’s vital
(Boal et al. 2005). It depends on audiences’ functions. These examples show how
passive consumption of sanitized images of ‘[t]echnology is now evolving faster than
war and the eternal evil enemy. The only fashion trends’, as designer Katrina
possibility for war to transform is if domin- Barillova claims (cited in Quinn 2002: 73).
ant imaginaries and discourses begin to Called ‘wearable technology’, ‘wearable
crumble, and doubt creeps in. Discourses tech’ or simply ‘wearables’, this new field
of war are rarely fully hegemonic: there is places fashion among the considerations
always some room for counter-realities. of the posthuman. Some also use the term

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456 WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY

‘techno-fashion’ (Quinn 2002), while constructing one’s identity. The body is not
others prefer the label of ‘fashionable tech- a given, but something to put in shape or
nology’ (Seymour 2009, 2010). Given the dress up for a ‘performance of identity’
futuristic look of many designs the term (Smelik 2011). Fashion is thus an import-
‘cyber-couture’ is also fitting (Smelik 2017). ant way of performing identity in its many
Wearable technology is versatile and facets. Identity can in this sense be likened
can therefore be quite bewildering: it to the performance of a constant dress
ranges from e-fashion, smart materials, rehearsal (Smelik 2016). Or, to put it differ-
wearable electronics, solar energy and 3D ently: our identity is ‘wearable’. Technology
printing to bio-couture and nanotechno- is indeed one of the major factors in affect-
logy. Smart materials and smart garments ing identity and changing the relation to
can be understood as protecting the body the body, and wearable technology even
or extending its physical functions. more so because of its closeness to the
Although cultural anthropology claims body. This is not entirely new because
that clothes function first and foremost as human beings have always been closely
decoration and adornment, clothes are connected to technology. The scientist
also an extension of the skin, protecting it who launched the term ‘cyborg’ in 1960,
against nature and society (see for instance Manfred Clynes, says: ‘Homo sapiens, when
Flügel 1950). Within a context of techno- he puts on a pair of glasses, has already
logy this idea derives from media guru changed’ (1995: 49, original emphasis). If
Marshall McLuhan (2002 [1964]: 129–30). this is the case for simple lensed glasses,
At the beginning of the 1960s he suggested just imagine how the human body and
that all technology is in fact an extension identity change with Google glasses; the
of the human body. In posthuman times new ‘geek chic’ (Quinn 2002: 97) that
technology is not only a bodily extension, Diane Von Furstenberg brought to fashion
but also involves physical improvement, in 2012. A few decades after Clynes coined
enhancement and expression. Wearable the term ‘cyborg’, Donna Haraway launched
technology can thus be used to control, the idea of the cyborg as a figure that typic-
improve and enhance human lives and ally embodies fluid identity, because it has
bodies. As Lucy Dunne writes, ‘Through ‘made thoroughly ambiguous the differ-
technology, garments are now becoming ence between natural and artificial, mind
dynamic, responsive, and aware; thus, they and body, self-developing and externally
are better able to express our individuality designed, and many other distinctions that
and meet our needs and wants’ (2011: 616). used to apply to organisms and machines’
By wearing them directly on the body, (1991 [1985]: 152). This is particularly
people relate intimately to technical objects relevant for wearables, since they shift and
and materials. Integrating technology into push the boundaries between body and
clothes will therefore have an impact on technology. As Fortunati, Katz and Riccini.
how humans experience their bodies and, argue, ‘the body continually abolishes the
by extension, the self. Or, as Tómicó and border between nature and technology by
Wilde put it: ‘Wearables enable the wearer converting one into the other’ (2008: 216).
to enact identities’ (2015: 1185). In understanding identity as a bodily
Dressing happens literally on the body; practice that is performed time and again,
it is an active and embodied practice wearable technology offers alternative
(Entwistle 2015). Thus the bodily practice and new ways of transforming identities.
of dressing is an important factor in Exploring the wearer’s corporeal and

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WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY 457

sensorial boundaries, wearable technolo- artisanal qualities that are imbibed in

gies enable the body to perform identity in craftsmanship bring the technologies
and through smart clothes. within the grip of our hands, making the
Today, a number of designers experi- high-tech world more human and access-
ment with the ways in which bodies can be ible. Where for Sennett it seems to be
shaped or identities performed beyond impossible or utopian for craftsmen to
our wildest dreams, for example Hussein work with the machines productively (ibid.:
Chalayan, Iris van Herpen, Pauline van 118), fashion designers are keen to combine
Dongen, Anouk Wipprecht, CuteCircuit, craftsmanship with technology; it is not a
Suzanne Lee, Olek, Helen Storey, etc. They question of one excluding the other – they
seem to have taken Haraway’s plea to heart; go hand in hand. This refers back to the
an appeal ‘for pleasure in the confusion of original Greek meaning of the word techne:
boundaries’ (1991 [1985]: 150; original art, skill, craft. The focus on craftsmanship
emphasis). Their futuristic designs blur the betrays a new interest in the materiality of
boundaries between art, fashion, science matter in a high-tech world of virtual tech-
and technology. They not only share a nologies (Barrett and Bolt 2012). While
sculptural, technological and artisanal fashion designers focus first and foremost
approach to clothes, but also a fascination on the materiality of textiles, and of the
for stretching the form and shape of the technologies involved, they are also inter-
human body and playing with human ested in the materiality of the human skin
identity. and body (Rocamora and Smelik 2016).
Recent studies in the field of wearable Moreover, they extend their fascination for
technology provide an overview of tech- matter and materiality to the technologies
niques and applications (Mattila 2006; Cho that they use; they have developed what
2010), or summarize its developments and Sennett calls a ‘material consciousness’
actors (Quinn 2002, 2010; Seymour 2009, (2008: 119).
2010), but, to date, few studies critically The issue of materiality is paramount
reflect on the socio-cultural dimensions here, because matter is precarious in an age
of wearable technology (Toussaint and of digital and virtual technologies (Bennett
Smelik 2017). Rather than giving an over- and Joyce 2010; Coole and Frost 2010). The
view of what is possible in wearable tech- notion of materiality allows a focus on the
nology, I therefore prefer to draw out some actual matter of technology and how –
principal characteristics that are relevant material – bodies relate, often intimately, to
for the posthuman: the emphasis on crafts- the technical objects that enhance clothes
manship, the importance of materiality and also the identities of the wearer. There
and embodiment, and the interplay of is no doubt that technological innovations
identity. will have a deep impact on the meaning
Fashion designers of wearable techno- and communication of clothes and fashion.
logy share an intense love for craftsman- If technologically enhanced clothes can
ship and a hands-on engagement with the measure temperatures, chemical processes
materiality of textiles and textures (Smelik or vital functions, sense movement and
2017). The renewed focus on craftsmanship position, or have expressive qualities, they
is closely connected to the technological will change the relation of the wearers
world we live in. As Richard Sennett writes, to themselves as well as transform the
‘technical understanding develops through communication to and with others.
the powers of imagination’ (2008: 10). The The fact that the garments are worn on

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458 WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY

the body increases the urgency to take into but also shift ambiguous borders between
account the body’s materiality. One of the skin and textile, organic and technological,
present challenges of wearable technology material and digital. Posthuman science
is to bring the designs from out of the labs fashion shares a futuristic outlook, opening
or off the catwalks into the streets and up a horizon beyond conventional fashion.
shops. Only then will the technology In their shared fascination for stretching
become ‘wearable’. ‘Embodied design’ (van the boundaries of the human body, the
Rompay and Hekkert 2001) may help to designers tempt the wearer to put their
take this into account more seriously, with identity at play. Fashion designers of wear-
a stronger focus on the materiality of the able technology challenge the potential
design, the experiences of the physical wearer to engage affectively with the fusion
body, and of the social and cultural context of art, fashion, science and technology,
(Hummels and Lévy 2013). Wearable embarking on a transformative process of
technology should thus develop ways becoming in the sense of Deleuze and
of integrating the body’s tactility and Guattari (1987). Science fashion is thus
sensitivity into the embodied design part and parcel of an open-ended process
(Smelik, Toussaint and van Dongen 2016). of becoming-posthuman. The strange
Wearable technology extends the shapes and forms of smart textiles and
possibilities and functions of fashion as an smart materials invite a reflection on new
embodied performance of identity. This is forms of both embodiment and human
where the futuristic designs of ‘science identity. By reshaping the human body
fashion’, as I propose to call it, can help to beyond its finite contours, science fashion
shape and change posthuman identities offers an encounter between art, fashion,
differently. Moving in-between art, fashion, science and technology, opening up to a
science and technology, fashion designers future world where smart garments
experiment with the ways in which the are merged with human skin, body and
posthuman can shape their bodies or identity.
perform their identities. Clearly, they move
out of the comfort zone or bedroom ward- See also Ecologies of Architecture;
robes into a fantasy world, where they take Mattering;Medianatures;Transcorporeality.
pleasure in confusing boundaries between
human and cyborg, or human and animal, Anneke Smelik

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XENOFEMINISM 459

X
XENOFEMINISM that it advances ‘a non-dualistic under-
standing of nature–culture interaction’
As David Roden attests, all forms of post- (Braidotti 2013: 3), the project invites the
humanism are ‘opposed to some form of reader to see it as a call to, and for, the
human-centred worldview’ (2015: 20–1). posthuman. That being said, however,
Xenofeminism – the theoretical approach the xenofeminist manifesto demonstrates
associated with the international transfem- considerable debts to some of the key
inist collective Laboria Cuboniks – is no tenets of earlier humanist thinking – not
exception. An interest in the assemblages least in its reliance upon ideas of reason,
within which social agents are embedded is rationality and the universal. This reliance
evident throughout 2015’s ‘Xenofeminism: is telegraphed at numerous points through-
A Politics for Alienation’ – a text very much out the text, from the insistence on reason
alive to the entanglement and co-constitu- as an engine of feminist emancipation, to
tion of silicon-based and carbon-based the explicit claim that ‘Xenofeminism is a
actors. It makes frequent reference to rationalism’ (Laboria Cuboniks 2015).
current technoscientific conditions, from Given the posthuman trajectory of Laboria
globalized cultures of e-waste, to the hyper- Cuboniks’s approach to gender politics,
stitional phenomenon of the stock market, readers may well question the collect-
to suggestive but embryonic advances in ive’s  use of such seemingly old-fashioned
open-source medicine. In so doing, the concepts. What is the point of running
manifesto points to some of the ways in against those influential currents of femin-
which technological alteration might gener- ist and posthumanist thinking that have
ate radical alterity. ‘Nature’, meanwhile, been so effective in problematizing the
emerges as a recurrent force in the project legacies of humanism? The utilization of
– not as a naturalizing or essentializing the idea of the universal has been one of
underpinning for gender and eco-politics, the most controversial elements of the
but as an always already technologized project, and is important in understanding
space of contestation that fundamentally much of what characterizes the xenofem-
shapes lived experiences. This is captured in inist perspective.
the manifesto’s ultimate call to action: ‘If Previous attempts to articulate a
nature is unjust, change nature!’ (Laboria universal have, as Rosi Braidotti astutely
Cuboniks 2015). reminds us, been hampered by a wilful
The subject of xenofeminism, then, is failure to be properly representative; the
neither woman nor human, if these terms universal subject is ‘implicitly assumed to
are understood as suggesting discrete entit- be masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a
ies snipped from the wider fabric of tech- standard language, heterosexually inscribed
nomaterial existence. Instead, to the extent in a reproductive unit and a full citizen of a

459

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460 XENOFEMINISM

recognized polity’ (2013: 65). The wary re-engineer the universal. This is why Laboria
response that the manifesto has received Cuboniks seeks to position the universal as a
from some quarters reflects understand- kind of ‘mutable architecture that, like open
able critical anxieties, given the problem- source software, remains available for
atic history of this concept. Critics argue perpetual modification and enhancement’
that to emphasize the generic is to go (ibid.), and why the xenofeminist project
against established intersectional practices, should be viewed as an invitation rather than
and that to engage with the universal is to a blueprint. Far from transcending the
ignore the significance of difference concerns of the social, then, the universal
(including racial difference). Xenofeminism demands to be understood as the perpetually
appreciates that intersectional methods unfinished business of the political. As
have significantly enhanced feminist theor- Dominic Fox remarks in his review of the
etical approaches, demanding a sustained manifesto, xenofeminism points to ‘the
sensitivity to ‘the possibility of compound extreme delicacy of the universal, the care
discrimination’ and privilege (Crenshaw that must be taken at every point to preserve
1989: 148). This approach has prompted its genericity, its quality of being “neither this
feminists to engage in what Kimberlé nor that and both somewhat this and
Crenshaw refers to as ‘asking the other somewhat that”’ (2015).
question’ (1991: 1245) – reflecting upon the The dominance of parochial universal-
implications of an issue in the light of ism within humanist discourse, then, is not
numerous (and often overlooked) struc- suggestive of the fundamental infelicity of
tures of oppression. Certainly, xenofemin- attempts to use the universal as a political
ism seeks to retain the myriad insights of tool. But still, the question remains: why
this approach and to apply them to emer- bother to contest for the universal at all?
ging technocultures, but it does not see the What does it have to offer this contem-
need to abandon the universal in order to porary posthuman feminism? In order to
do this. answer this question, I’d like to focus on
Indeed, xenofeminism precisely aims for two points: the first concerns the utility of
an intersectional universal – that is, a ‘politics universalism for gender abolitionism,
assembled from the needs of every human, whilst the second relates to issues of scale,
cutting across race, ability, economic stand- ambition and complexity. Xenofeminism
ing, and geographical position’ (Laboria purports to be gender abolitionist. That is
Cuboniks 2015). For xenofeminism, the to say, it seeks to unpick those naturalized
universal represents the forging of intersec- and culturally weaponized markers of
tions, slicing through particular localities identity that harbour oppressions and
(our bounded phenomenological condition) injustices. Laboria Cuboniks’s abolitionist
towards vectors of unanticipated and project is invested in ensuring that traits
constructed solidarities (formed, in part, by assembled under the rubric of gender, race
‘asking the other question(s)’). This is in or class are stripped of their cultural signi-
direct opposition to the bloated particularity ficance and of their ability to act as a
that has conventionally been passed vectors of discrimination. To be clear, the
off as the universal and which has largely text does not advocate for the abolition of
cornered the market on popular understand- identity markers themselves (an enterprise
ings of the generic since the Enlightenment. which, in its potential quashing of diversity,
The xenofeminist challenge is not simply would clearly be undesirable). Instead, it is
to reject universality, but to contest and to a commitment to an ongoing political

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XENOFEMINISM 461

struggle – a struggle that will not end of the Marxist sociologist Vivek Chibber,
until characteristics now unevenly loaded who argues that issues of scale and the
with social stigma are prevented from ‘universalizing drive of capital’ generate a
furnishing a basis for asymmetrical power particularly problematic schism at the
relations. heart of contemporary postcolonial theory
Such a project of dismantling techno- (2013: 285). Although it ‘presents itself as
political, socio-embodied matrices of the analytical framework of capitalist
discrimination is buttressed by a set of domination’, he argues, ‘it rejects the idea of
ideas about the generic. Xenofeminism is a universal theory. Hence, it is in the
quite explicit about this, recognizing that awkward position of the acknowledgment
‘the viability of emancipatory abolitionist that capitalism has been globalized, but
projects – the abolition of class, gender, and denying that we can conceive a general
race – hinges on a profound reworking of theory of its functioning or its properties’
the universal’ (Laboria Cuboniks 2015). It (2015: n.p.).
is here that the importance of politically For Chibber and Laboria Cuboniks,
refusing the parochial universal becomes rejection of the project of constructing a
particularly apparent. It is no good aspiring universal has contributed to a perceived
to abolish a range of traits that act as diminution of political agency and ambi-
leverage points for prejudicial power if tion. Many contemporary emancipatory
this abolition leads only to the trap of projects do not appear ‘proportionate to
‘bloated, unmarked particulars – namely the monstrous complexity of . . . a reality
Eurocentric universalism’ (ibid.). It is for this crosshatched with fibre-optic cables, radio
reason that xenofeminism insists upon agit- and microwaves, oil and gas pipelines,
ating for an intersectional universal, where aerial and shipping routes, and the unre-
intersectionality is understood not as the lenting, simultaneous execution of millions
‘morcellation of collectives into a static of communication protocols with every
fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but [as] a passing millisecond’ (Laboria Cuboniks
political orientation that slices through every 2015). In short, we do not have ready to
particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing hand the requisite conceptual resources
of bodies’ (ibid.). A more universal univer- for confronting capitalism, ecological crisis
sal, then, offers substantial political afford- or complex, embedded structures of oppres-
ances for emancipatory gender projects, sion. The wilful or unwitting neglect of
and is in fact a prerequisite for imagining a actions beyond the scale of the local and
post-abolition moment to come. the micropolitical leads to the treatment of
The final point that I want to make universals as absolutes, and generates ‘a
about the universal as an activist tool debilitating disjuncture between the thing
speaks to issues of scale and resistance. In we seek to depose and the strategies we
the manifesto, Laboria Cuboniks write advance to depose it’ (ibid.). If we are
that ‘whilst capitalism is understood as a going to take the risk of advancing large-
complex and ever-expanding totality, many scale, counter-hegemonic gender-political
would-be emancipatory anti-capitalist projects, xenofeminism insists, it is imper-
projects remain profoundly fearful of ative that we intercede within debates
transitioning to the universal, resisting big- about the operation and constitution of
picture speculative politics by condemning the universal.
them as necessarily oppressive’ (ibid.). Such The universal, then, is a mutable object
a position clearly resonates with the work of political contestation, positioned at the

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
462 XENOFEMINISM

heart of xenofeminism for both its scaf- . . . which is no longer that of European or
folding of gender abolitionist ambitions Eurocentric universal, rational subjectivity,
and its facilitation of counter-hegemonic but rather a radical transformation of it’
leftist projects capable of confronting (2013: 52). Note that this agenda is framed
pervasive (if unevenly distributed and as a transformation, however, rather than
differentially manifested) networks of an outright rejection. If posthumanism is
capital. Xenofeminism insists upon the to be a successful political project, the
universal not as an object but as a process xenofeminist claim is that we must inter-
– a technology always in need of assembly. sectionalize the once-parochial universal,
It is, to quote the manifesto, ‘not a universal and remake it for ourselves and for our
that can be imposed from above, but built alien kin.
from the bottom up – or, better, laterally,
See also Feminicity; Rationalist Inhu-
opening new lines of transit across an
manism; Trans*; Critical Posthuman
uneven landscape’ (ibid.). I agree with
Theory.
Braidotti when she argues that the concept
of the posthuman requires a ‘new agenda Helen Hester

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
YOUTH 463

Y
YOUTH Feminist and postcolonial technoscience
offer a corrective here in an identification of
How do young people come of age as posthuman youth as a socio-technological
posthuman subjects? How do their already assemblage, differently constituted in an
ideological and disciplined techno-bodies intersectional grid of power relations. In this
normalize and contest dominant ideas of entry we address posthuman youth by
what it means to be human? As new hard- unpacking the geopolitical micro-politics of
ware and software alter their environments four key stages in the technological lifecycle:
and everyday practices, young people manufacturing, marketing, use and disposal.
navigate the opportunities that these shifts In this way, we demonstrate how the post-
afford in their quest to stake out their human experience of youthful techno-
livelihoods and identities. In their rites bodies differs widely. Depending on specific
of passage toward adulthood, young configurations of vectors such as gender,
people can draw on new metaphors ‘race’, class and geographical location, tech-
and performances stemming from bio- nologies operate as practices of privilege or
technological advancements, including marginality.
wearable technologies, smartphones,
quantified-self applications, genetic engin-
Manufacturing
eering and neuropharmacology.
Reflections such as Bostrom’s ‘Why I First, considering the beginning of the
want to be a posthuman when I grow up’ supply chain of gadgets, it is urgent to
(2013b) illustrate the all-too-common acknowledge the precarious lives of a
teleological narrative of progress and substantial segment of posthuman youth
human enhancement. Hope is projected and children. For example, in particular
onto future generations’ accumulation of locations in the Global South, such as the
posthuman capacities. In this scenario, as conflict zones in the Democratic Republic
the human–technology, nature–culture of Congo, young people are forced to manu-
symbiosis steadily advances to completion, ally mine minerals like cassiterite, wolfram-
posthuman potentialities will actualize ite and coltan. These blood minerals are
and naturally enhance health, cognition then used in the construction of consumer
and emotional well-being and bring about electronics. Subsequently, in Foxconn and
universal equality and peace. However, Pegatron factories in China and India,
although most young people in today’s young rural migrants make up the main
world are cyborgs in some form, the labour pool. They work excessively long
deterministic and universalizing notion of shifts on the assembly line performing
posthuman youth subjectivity must be tedious, repetitious tasks assembling smart-
problematized. phones and other consumer electronics.

463

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464 YOUTH

These are then glossily packaged as the tools MinecraftEdu where game developers
of learning, work, play and socialization partner with teachers to support game-
for wealthy, predominantly white, Western based learning. What marketing materials
youth. representing these diverse contexts share is
As a counterpart to the tough physical the heady discourse of the so-called digital
labour of mineral extraction and manufac- native, the privileged child born(e) into an
ture, virtual sweatshops are another emer- environment saturated by networked tech-
gent phenomenon in the Global South. nologies alongside disadvantaged youth
In these sweatshops, labourers perform requiring charitable investment in their
basic routine work to build up credits and futures through connected devices. These
increase the virtual value of game charac- young subjects are seen as naturally skilled
ters and avatars. The Massively Multiplayer and hungrily expectant of instantaneous
Online Game (MMOG ) World of Warcraft information, constant social networking
is most well known for the emergence of and myriad opportunities for identity play
‘gold-farmers’ who gain in-game currency and exploration. At the same time, digital
sold globally for real money. Benefiting technologies are framed as leading inevit-
from global economic inequality, affluent ably to better futures, without any mention
users in the West who wish to save time made of the context in which they will be
can buy these ready-made characters to get introduced, in regions without reliable
a head-start in their gaming and move electricity, within overcrowded classrooms
up to higher levels. Nobody aspires to and underfunded schools, in tenuous
these very real and embodied instances of zones of conflict. This is because market-
contemporary posthumanity, and these ing discourses focus not on the messy real-
processes often remain invisible in domin- ities of the present, but instead share an
ant academic and corporate narratives of orientation towards the future, with young
shiny and sleek human augmentation. people framed as technologically enhanced
consumers and digitally skilled workers
in-becoming. Indeed, these devices are
Marketing positioned as the missing ingredient for
Digital gadgets, which are connected to young people destined to ride the digital
the internet, increasingly lightweight and wave towards new frontiers of connectiv-
heavily branded by major new media and ity, mobility and prosperity.
technology corporations, promise limitless
educational opportunities for young
people. Such promises span the developing
Use
world, for instance in the One Laptop Per In their everyday use of digital technolo-
Child program, where techno-utopianist gies, young people are on the frontlines of
Nicholas Negroponte’s non-profit organiz- changing definitions of self, privacy, polit-
ation sought to provide a low-cost laptop ical participation, authorship and labour.
to every child without reliable access to However, as a way of contextualizing and
education. The idealistic rhetoric about the grounding everyday use it is urgent to
cultivation of the digital student also char- consider how categories of difference vari-
acterizes the increasingly gamified Western ously configure youthful users. Young, afflu-
classroom, and can be seen in the wide- ent, white people living in urban areas in
spread enthusiasm for the construction the Global North are the main target audi-
game Minecraft, within initiatives such as ence of many social media applications and

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
YOUTH 465

hardware innovations. Default identity (Gómez-Peña 2000: 80–1). A recent

categories and dominant user norms on Independent newspaper headline aptly
platforms such as Facebook, Instagram captured the skewed debate: ‘Surprised that
and Snapchat revolve around whiteness, Syrian refugees have smartphones? Sorry to
Westernness, heteronormativity and break this to you, but you’re an idiot. You
conventionally gendered beauty standards. don’t need to be a white westerner to own
The time and energy of this target audience a relatively cheap piece of technology’
is most readily commodified as their pres- (Malley 2015). In sum, rather than a norm-
ence and selfies, cat videos and tweets ative virtual body, the category of the
provide the free virtual labour corporations posthuman user is internally diverse and
need to attract other mainstream users and combines positions of material and
to sell to advertisers. This particularly symbolic oppression and privilege.
configured ‘normative, virtual body’
(Nakamura 2011: 388) is also reflected in
the majority of dominant computer game
Disposal
avatars. At least two additional groups of Finally, considering what happens after the
users, who do not fit these norms, need to use-value of digital technologies expires –
be distinguished. Their impact on digital once technologies become obsolete by
culture differs, and accordingly they can be choice or design – invokes the typically
considered invisible and hypervisible users. invisible context of technology disposal
Invisible users are those non-normative and e-waste. The posthuman potentialities
users who do not fit the dominant imagin- of the Global North’s immaterial fetish
ary. For example, although for non-elite objects become recast as material ruins for
users like youth in internet cafes in urban the Global South. For instance, Ghana’s
Ghana the internet offers a site to imagine a e-waste dumps provide an additional
cosmopolitan self, the internet simultan- layer of material context over youth
eously remains a ‘foreign commodity’ for subjectivities in the information economy
them (Burrell 2012: 51). Many youth there (Burrell 2012). Situated just outside Accra,
struggle to decode the implicit ‘Euro- Agbogbloshie is a former wetland turned
American codes of social interaction’ and as e-waste dump that often illegally takes in
a result they are met with silence or aggres- discarded electronics both domestically
sion in their online encounters (ibid.: 5). and from Europe and North America.
Hypervisible users, on the other side of the The dump has proven to emit significant
spectrum, are noticed and questioned pollutants into surrounding land, air and
exactly because they do not fit the domin- water, in particular from the practice of
ant imaginary of the user. A case in point is burning electronics. These pollutants affect
the Autumn 2015 European media-frenzy the local flora and fauna, including humans
scrutinizing why Syrian refugees who flee and especially children, whose reproduct-
their war-torn country carry a smartphone. ive and neural development is inhibited by
Those using communication devices are the toxic chemicals emitted from burning
either depicted as bogus asylum seekers or e-waste. Moreover, such e-waste dumps
they are considered unfit to handle not only in Ghana but also in Nigeria,
advanced technologies. Such frames replic- Pakistan, India and China tend to be popu-
ate historical narratives of othering, depict- lated by the most impoverished young
ing racialized bodies as somehow ‘culturally people in those countries, often young
handicapped’ and technologically backward girls, trying to find any materials from

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
466 YOUTH

disposed electronics that can be salvaged subjects must remain balanced with a view
and resold. This secondary economy to the ‘risky opportunities’ afforded by new
around e-waste illustrates the fallacy of media. The concept of risky opportunities
promoting ‘recycling’ as a solution to the comes into even more stark relief when
proliferation of obsolete technological framing the promises for posthuman youth
artefacts. The posthuman youth working in terms of the global micro-politics of inter-
in scrap yards and e-waste dumps have sectional youth subjectivities engaged in the
their bodies penetrated by digital techno- process of becoming cyborg. In different
logies in ways that severely undermine the ways according to local economic and social
narratives supporting the development contexts, young bodies are being configured
paradigm of recycling and reusing techno- by digital technologies through the channels
logies by donating them to children in the of privilege and oppression. Youthful agency
Global South. Such donations tend to in this broader context must be reconsidered
mean more products in e-waste dumps, within local socio-technical assemblages of
more children affected by the toxicity of technologies, bodies and practices that shape
e-waste pollutants, and ever fewer the meaning of posthumanity for differential
opportunities for young people in the subjectivities.
progressive fantasy of posthumanism.
See also Neocolonial; Post Internet
Hypersocial; Wearable Technology; Obsolete
Conclusions Technology.

Speaking predominantly of white, Western

youth, Livingstone (2008) has noted that Koen Leurs, Tamara Shepherd
approaches to youth as digitally enhanced and Alison Harvey

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ZOMBIE 467

Z
ZOMBIE the Atlantic slave trade of the eighteenth
century, when numerous ships full of people
The zombie is a species within a broader kidnapped from Black Africa arrived on
category of the undead, or living dead, Haiti and other Caribbean islands. The
which also includes ghosts, vampires and complex and situated structures and systems
other creatures dwelling at the border of beliefs that these enslaved peoples from
between what we call life and what we call across the continent of Africa brought with
death or constantly crossing this border them, intermingled with elements of
back and forth. Being a unique social Catholicism and indigenous cults, has been
phenomenon and at the same time a transformed into a syncretic religion of the
universalized figure of an intense collective Haitian voodoo.1
imagination, it occupies a privileged posi- Along with voodoo priests, there were
tion in contemporary mass cultures and is bokors – malevolent voodoo sorcerers,
highly emblematic for capitalist modernity. who practised black magic. One of the
The zombie’s social ontology comprises at rituals they performed (and, as Haitians
least four stages, which we will call here the believe, still perform) was zombification,
four seasons of zombies. or transforming of someone into a living
As is emphasized by Sarah Juliet Lauro dead. According to the pharmacological
and Karen Embry in their ‘Zombie description of this practice, the bokor gives
Manifesto’, ‘The zombie is historically tied to, to his victim, an ordinary person, some
and has been read alongside, the expansion strong neurotoxic drug, made likely of
of global capitalism. The zombie is a colo- pufferfish and other elements (see Davis
nial import: it infiltrated the American 1985: 117). Poisoned by this substance, a
cultural imagination in the early twentieth person falls into a cataleptic or lethargic
century, at the time of the U.S. occupation of state and is buried alive. Upon her ‘awaken-
Haiti. We cannot take up the figure of the ing’, the person, who was not dead in a
zombie without acknowledging its appro- proper sense but who lost some basic
priation from Haitian folklore’ (2008: 96). ‘human’ capacities, such as reasoning or
Haitian zombies are the most important memory, is now only able to obey orders,
part of the whole story not only because and becomes an undead slave of a sorcerer;
they represent a mythological origin of a someone who could, for example, continue
universal cultural metaphor analysed here, working at sugar cane plantations at night.
but also because they endow it with an irre- The other hypothesis points not to the
ducible historical materiality. The first chemical, but to the psychic and social
season thus begins with the real life zombies, origin of the walking dead, the zombie.
whose history is traced back to the French Thus, before invading popular culture
colonialism of the seventeenth century and as dangerous, destructive undead corpses

467

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
468 ZOMBIE

which wander around seeking human shifts from labour and production to sheer
flash, zombies were slaves. Even now, consumption. From the proletarian, the
Haitian people are not afraid of a zombie zombie becomes consumer. It embodies the
– they are afraid of becoming one. In colo- very idea of consumption as such, a non-
nial times, the people of Saint Domingo stop devouring, a thirst which can never be
considered death as the only escape from satisfied, a desire with no subject. But the
slavery, to which they were condemned by subject matter is still the same: the zombie
life. Death meant a return to the mother as consumer remains unfree, submitted to
Africa, a passage to a second life of the soul. some external forces. Thus, in Russia, people
That’s why zombification is the worst of all call their TV sets ‘zombie-boxes’ – some-
punishments: it turns one into a slave for thing like ‘idiot box’ but with an additional
ever, without a possibility of dying prop- meaning of television as a means of mass
erly, that is, finally being set free. Slavery as zombification. In fact, the contradiction
a universal condition of being of Africans between the zombie-producer (slave or
in Haiti was thus extended to their afterlife proletarian) and the zombie-consumer is
(see Cohen 1972: 60). In today’s Haiti, dialectical: let us appreciate the fact that
to raise the dead is officially a criminal every consumer by every act of consump-
offence, and zombies, who emerge as a tion contributes to the processes of the
result of the synthesis of the black magic production of value, upon which the capit-
and the black slave market, are considered alist system is based. The civil society ruled
as victims. How can we not compare it with by money itself resembles, as Hegel writes in
the non-random fact that in ancient Egypt his Jena texts of 1805–6, ‘a life of the dead
‘killed-living’ was the name for the captives body that moves itself within itself’ (Hegel
who, instead of being destroyed physically, 1979: 249).
were killed symbolically by slavery? The zombie as a metaphor for unfree-
From here, the second season of zombies dom gives birth to the idea that everyone
arises, in which they appear not as real-life might be or can potentially become a
entities, but as a social metaphor, pointing zombie. This generates a kind of fear which
at individuals and groups of people who are contributes to the essential plot of the third
deprived of freedom or free will. Interpolated season of zombies, who now change their
by the symbolism of modernity, the zombie nature and become privileged cinematic
as an automaton which only obeys orders creatures. In contrast to real-life Haitian
remains for the proletarian, transforming zombies, contemporary Hollywood
her living labour into dead capital in the zombies are species that seems to preclude
process of alienation. The thing she produces any figure of control. Staying at the border
and elaborates does not belong to her; the between comedy and horror, they repres-
wages she gets immediately go to the repro- ent pure destruction. Cinematic zombies
duction of her function in the production represent an absolute evil that operates
processes where she is just a means. on Earth without any purpose. It is not
Structurally, for Marx, there is no big differ- poisoning, not a magic ritual, which turns
ence between a proletarian and a slave – one into a zombie, but a contagion, a virus
both are unfree, and their very human taken from another zombie or elsewhere.
essence is basically reduced to the condition Removed from their enslaved and prolet-
of the living dead (Marx 1844). In the course arian origins, which linked them to labour,
of the development of contemporary they are now figures of a pure negativity
culture, the meaning of this social metaphor and the main characters of the apocalypse

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
ZOMBIE 469

and the reality that comes after. From their in George A. Romero’s films zombies
Haitian forefathers, they caricature an acquire class-consciousness and, as the
appearance that combines staring, unsee- lower strata of the oppressed, complete
ing eyes, skin stuck to their bones, and what one might call ahistorical mission of
clumsy movements, with physical strength, the proletariat – namely, to have done with
inertness and insensitivity – making them capitalism. They do what human beings fail
invulnerable. No doubt, cinematic zombies to do. They learn how to organize a new
reflect an old millennial Christian idea of type of collective, which does not consist of
immortality of the soul. In a way, they are human individuals, but is only based on the
immortal souls. Not only their name, despair of those who have literally nothing
zombie, must derive from the Kongo word to lose: even their bodies have already lost
for the soul, nzambi, but their very exist- their integrity. Instead of any kind of hope,
ence points to the impossibility of dying: they are driven by despair, and it is in
zombies are undead souls wandering despair that they do the impossible. They
around within dead bodies which they have passed through the stage of an abso-
animate. Think about their brain: in a great lute negativity, through the end of the
many movies, one can only kill the zombie world, through death and decomposition
by destroying its brain (Lauro and Embry and through hell in order to pave the way
2008: 95). A zombie’s brain might embody for the posthuman revolutionary subjectiv-
what Christians call the soul. It is an ity; if someone does not like what it looks
afterlife of the human, whose properly like, the zombie does not care.
human characteristics have now vanished. However, before this, the ambivalence
Moreover, if we continue to consider it between the zombie as a geohistorically
within the framework of the Christian and racially produced figure, and as one
narrative, the zombie is literally the resur- formed in the alienation of production under
rected. She lost everything: her name, her modernity must also be attended to as
memories, her identity, her entire life, but one in which the history of colonialism is
something else rises up instead, when the scrubbed from the history of capitalism by
dead are awakened. this trans-historical and trans-locational
By their fourth season, zombies propose shift of the zombie from a culturally con-
an emancipatory potential. They are the tingent practice into one of a culturally
survivors – not only of the apocalypse, but produced imagination.
they are the survivors over themselves.
See also Animacies; Animism; Non-
They survived; that is, they left behind,
human Agency; Static Glow.
together with their human properties, all
of what made them dependent on some-
thing. There are no more sorcerers: post- Note
apocalyptic zombies are without a master. 1. Research into this phenomenon can be
They survived their own slavery, be it the found, for example in Davis 1985, 1988;
slavery of production or the slavery of Cohen 1972.
consumption. They went beyond humanity
with its master-and-slave dialectics. Thus, Oxana Timofeeva

POSTHUMAN GLOSSARY
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