(Experimental Futures) Dimitris Papadopoulos - Experimental Practice - Technoscience, Alterontologies, and More-Than-Social Movements (2018, Duke University Press) PDF

EXPERIMENTAL
PRACTICE
EXPERIMENTAL
FUTURES

TECHNOLOGICAL LIVES,
SCIENTIFIC ARTS,
ANTHROPOLOGICAL VOICES
A series edited by
Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit
EXPERIMENTAL
PRACTICE
TECHNOSCIENCE,
ALTERONTOLOGIES,
AND
MORE - THAN - SOCIAL

MOVEMENTS
Dimitris Papadopoulos
Duke University Press

Durham and London 2018

© 2018 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on

acid-free paper ∞

Designed by Matthew Tauch
Typeset in Warnock Pro and Trade Gothic LT Std by
Westchester Publishing Ser vices

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Papadopoulos, Dimitris, author.
Title: Experimental practice : technoscience, alteron-
tologies, and more-than-social movements / Dimitris

Papadopoulos.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. |
Series: Experimental futures | Includes bibliographical

references.
Identifiers: lccn 2017060623 (print)
lccn 2018000305 (ebook)
isbn 9781478002321 (ebook)
isbn 9781478000655 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9781478000846 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: lcsh: Social movements. | Technology—Social

aspects. | Discoveries in science—Social aspects. |

Philosophical anthropology. | Financialization—Social

aspects.
Classification: lcc hm881 (ebook) | lcc hm881 .p354
2018 (print) | ddc 303.48/4—dc23

lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060623

Cover art: Thomas Jackson, Straws no. 4, Mono Lake,
California, 2015.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1

The Two Beginnings › Autonomy after the Social › Baroque Fieldworking › Escaping

Humanity (Overview)
01. DECOLONIAL POLITICS OF MATTER 11

Ontological Politics › The Frontier of Matter › Coloniality and Productionism › Matter

and Justice › Alternative Forms of Life › Decolonizing Craft
PART I: MOVEMENTS
02. BIOFINANCIALIZATION AS TERRAFORMATION 27

Geocide and Geoengineering › The Universalizing Matrix of Financialization › The Culture
of Valuation › Biofinancialization › Embodied Value Production › Postliberalism ›
The End of the Refusal of Work › Performing Biofinancialization › Assetization and
Rent › Social Science Fiction › Terraforming Earth™ › Material Articulations
03. ONTOLOGICAL ORGAN IZING 49

Transmigrants’ Mobile Commons › Labor and Mobility › Differential Inclusion Is Citi-

zenship Is Control › The Impossible Citizenship › Autonomy of Migration Revisited ›
“I Work Only for Papers” › Imperceptible Ontologies › The Gift Economy of Migration
› Intelligences and Infrastructures of Mobility › Informal Economies and Communities
of Justice › The Nexus of Care › “There Is No Love Here!”

PART II: HISTORY REMIX
04. ACTIVIST MATERIALISM 79

1844: Species-Being › 1908: Ontological Dualism › 1980: Cultural Materialism › 1987:

“The Only Enemy Is Two” › 2000: Desire › 2016: The Loss of Minor Science

05. INSURGENT POSTHUMANISM 94

1871: Assembling the State › 1824: Vagrancy › 1680: Swamp and Forest › 1791: Eco-

commoning › 1966: Embodying Politics › 1987: Borderdwelling › 1921: Justice/Jetztzeit
› 2016: Postanthropocentric History
PART III: ALTERONTOLOGIES
06. BRAIN MATTER 117

Recombination as Liberation › Speculative Brain Politics › Visions of the Body › From
Cognitivism to Connectionism › Experience and Embodiment › The Hackable Brain ›
Self-Reproducing Machines › Epigenesis and Ecomorphs › Autocreative Brain Matter

07. COMPOSITIONAL TECHNOSCIENCE 138

aids Activism › Regions of Objectivity › Expertise and the Liberal Predicament › Par-
ticipation and the Limits of Institutions › Networks and the Ignorance of Governance ›
Situatedness and the Indeterminacy of Experience › The Time of Composition › Emer-
gency Care › Alterontological Politics
08. CRAFTING ONTOLOGIES 160

Stacked Histories › Maker Culture › Ethnocentric Material Creativity › Provincializ-
ing Making › Indigenous Temporalities › From Pluriverse to Movement › Commensal-
ity, Composition, and diwy › Distributed Invention Power › Ecological Transversality
› Ethopoiesis and the Blackmail of Precarity › Rentier Technoscience › Commons and
the Fold › Uncommons › More-Than-Social Movements › Material Literacy › Gener-

ous Infrastructures › Give Me a Kitchen . . .

ACKNOWL EDGMENTS 209 REFERENCES 257

NOTES 211 INDEX 323

INTRO
DUCTION
THE TWO BEGINNINGS
This book has two beginnings. The first one is the decentering of the
human in its relations to other species, machines, and the material world.

What matters for this project is that the early twenty-first century saw the

vision of “a more-than-human world,” of “humans no longer being in con-

trol,” and of a human-nonhuman continuum becoming slowly part of how

we (some humans, that is) imagine ourselves (the human species) in the

future. Let’s hope that our species-being will be forever marked by this

realization—although it may be too late.1 I use the term posthuman culture

to refer to this decentering of the human (and the humanist subject and its

politics) into its relations to other living beings and the material world as
well as the wider cultural realization of this decentering.2 Technoscience
has been the main force shaping posthuman culture: the continuous fold-
ing of science, technology, and the everyday into each other. Rather than
the focus of this book, the histories and current formations of techno

science and posthuman culture constitute its first beginning, the stage on
which its arguments are played out.
The second beginning is an affect rather than a phenomenon. A com-
mitment rather than a thought. An obligation rather than an interest. A
feeling of urgency to grasp the incapacity of the extraordinary social mobi-
lizations that took place in countries across the North Atlantic and beyond
since 2006 to instill social change.3 Seasoned social movements analysts
tell us that social movements have a longue durée—their effects are not

clearly visible immediately, and what they achieve is often transposed in

time and in di erent, often remote, fields of life. However true this may be,
ff

it is difficult not to feel that the mobilizations, struggles, and uprisings of

the last ten years changed so many things and yet the transformational po-

tential of these movements toward a materialization of socioeconomic and

ecological justice was not accomplished. A map of this cycle of struggles

would have many action points, sites of conflict, squares and plazas, link-
ages, transnational exchanges, alliances, and virtual meeting spaces,4 but
I barely can count any broad effects in the direction of what these move-

ments hoped5—knowing that it may be too early to look for these or to

even have the conceptual tools and perceptual skills to see and grasp them.
However, neither these mobilizations nor the eclipse of their claims for

justice are the target of my analysis in this book. These social movements,

their efforts, and their achievements shape the intellectual background
and affective tonality of this book. I am gambling on a feeling with this
second beginning.
This feeling tells me that there is a connection between the limited

range of transformations that these movements have achieved and the

displacement of the human and of human politics in posthuman culture.

Experimental Practice attempts to investigate this connection. Consider,
for example, the 2011 riots in Britain. They came unexpectedly. Speaking
shortly after they happened, Paul Gilroy (2011) concluded by highlight-

ing that many black communities drawn in the vortex of privatization and
the intense neoliberal disintegration of British society are fragmented and
often unable to defend and organize themselves.6 Later Gilroy (2013) ex-

panded his analysis of the 2011 riots and attempted a comparison with the

1981 riots, emphasizing the very limited effects that the 2011 events had.
The cry for change vanished soon after the riots stopped. They did not

transform British society in the way this happened in the 1980s.7
I take Gilroy’s diagnosis seriously and translate it to my words: these

recent struggles show that there was no infrastructure that could hold

together and protect the communities and perpetuate and multiply the
effects of their actions. How can an ontology of community and infra-
structures of communal connectivity be created?8 I am aware that the
term ontology may be unexpected here. A notion of ontology will unfold

across this book, but for now I mean the shared, durable, open material
spaces—tangible and virtual—that can be inhabited autonomously by these

communities.
2 Introduction

AUTONOMY AFTER THE SOCIAL

Ontology and infrastructure are about something much greater than social
relations. There are many social relations in our lives, probably more than

enough, but there are not many material spaces where social and political

autonomy can be performed. My bet in this book is that creating spaces
of political autonomy and self-organization is not just a social affair. It is a

practical and ontological affair that goes as far as to change the materiality
of the lived spaces and the bodies, human and nonhuman, of communi-

ties. In fact, we may need to disconnect9 from the ubiquitous networks
of social relations in order to create these autonomous material spaces of

existence. If this is what needs to be done, then what is social movement
politics today? What if we approach social movement action not as tar-

geting existing political power but as experimenting with worlds? What if

we see social movement action not as addressing existing institutions for
redistributing justice but as the creation of alternative forms of existence
that reclaim material justice from below? And, what if this becomes pos

sible not when social movements engage in resistance to power but when

they experiment with the materiality of life?
Experimental practice in this sense is about modes of intuition, knowl-
edges, and politics that trigger intensive material changes and mobilize
energies in ways that generate alternative and autonomous spaces of exis-
tence.10 Autonomy is meant as autonomous politics here, not as the mod-
ernist humanist value of individual independence and the seclusion of the

personal and the private. The opposite is the case: autonomous politics
requires material interconnectedness, practical organizing, everyday co-

existence and the fostering of ontological alliances. And these are always

more than human, more than social. They entail interactions, ways of

knowing, forms of practice that involve the material world, plants and the
soil, chemical compounds and energies, other groups of humans and their

surroundings, and other species and machines.
The notion of experimental practice emerged as I was exploring if/
where the two beginnings mentioned earlier meet. Bringing technoscience
into the picture by retrieving the posthuman experimentations that are
an undisclosed part of social movement action shows their politics under

a new light: as more-than-social movements. I mean, as movements that

do much more than just targeting visible and recognized social institu-

tions; as movements that immerse into the human-nonhuman continuum

and change society practically by engaging with both the human and the

Introduction 3

nonhuman world. And they can do that only to the extent that they involve
some part of technoscience. This is the ideal formula that this book seeks
to advance: the metamorphosis of social movements to movements—

that is, movements of matter and the social simultaneously. Movements

of ontology. The book investigates this alternative perspective by slowly

weaving the posthuman and technoscience into social movement politics
and, the other way around, by weaving social movement politics into the
practices of technoscience.
These arguments prolong work developed with Niamh Stephenson and

Vassilis Tsianos in two previous books that attempted to show that cre-
ative social transformation since the 1960s and 1970s has been rarely the
outcome of pure resistance or of opposition to power but of the remak-

ing of everyday existence below the radar of control in mundane and yet
unexpected ways.11 Following the autonomous social movements at that
time, we described how social conflict and social mobilizations drive so-
cial transformation instead of just being a mere response to (economic
and social) power. In Analysing Everyday Experience: Social Research and
Political Change (2006) we tried to show how this is possible at the level

of individual subjectivity and experience. In Escape Routes: Control and
Subversion in the 21st Century (2008), we tried to reconstruct this type of

politics at a collective and community level. Experimental Practice closes
the trilogy and addresses the same question on the level of matter. Experi-

ence, community, matter. The book seeks to put forward a form of politics

that addresses these three aspects of our lives simultaneously: experimen-

tal practice.
BAROQUE FIELDWORKING
Making the case for an experimental practice of more-than-social move-

ments is both empirically grounded in today’s realities of social movement

politics and simultaneously a deeply speculative undertaking. It is empiri-

cally grounded because it follows developments in the actions and politics

of social movements that are already happening now. However, my aim is
not to just follow and describe current social movements but to magnify
specific aspects of their actions that can foster an experimental view of
politics and point toward its transformative potential. Although all chap-

ters attempt to contribute to this objective, they are all located in di erent
ff

fields and debates, have their own internal logic and argumentation, and
4 Introduction

engage diverse methodologies and data. Introducing such a varying set
of materials and methodologies allowed me to find a path for navigating
the terrain that the mingling of the two beginnings mentioned earlier has
created. As I look back to the years of work since I started doing research

for this book in 2010, I feel that the methodologies I worked with and the
materials I gathered and analyzed were almost imposed by the nature of

the terrains I was delving into and the questions I was confronted with as
I was moving through them.
Two of the chapters (3 and 8) present fieldwork studies: one is based

on empirical materials from my long-standing engagement with migration
and precarious work politics up to the end of the 2010s as well as fieldwork
materials that were collected between 2009 and 2012 with my collaborator

on this project, Vassilis Tsianos. The other one is based in my involvement

in the maker and hacker communities across the East Midlands in the
UK, primarily in Leicester and Derby and with di erent hacker and maker
ff

groups or activist groups that engaged with technological and ecological
issues across the world. Chapters 6 and 7 present case studies that expand

on the ontological and experimental implications of two cases of embod-
ied technoscience that I have been investigating for several years now; the
first one is on neuroplasticity, epigenetics, and the embodied brain, and

the second discusses aids activism in the 1980s. Finally, the remaining four

chapters collect and mix di erent materials: films, magazine and book
ff

covers, advertisements, historical accounts of specific events from second-
ary sources and di erent types of images, theories, Internet sites, scholarly
ff

texts, concepts, and science fiction literature.12

This approach allowed me to put together a speculative vocabulary of
di erent experimental practices. Compositional politics, decolonial poli-
ff

tics of matter, and alterontologies are some of the concepts I use to describe

aspects of experimental practice from di erent angles. I would call the
ff

underlying methodological approach baroque fieldworking, a mix of politi

cally engaged research, speculative historiography, and social science fic-
tion. Although much of the work presented here is the outcome of di erent

ff

combinations of research and activism, this book is not an ethnographic
account of this political participation. Rather, it is a theoretically motivated

project grounded in sustained and lengthy political involvements as a com-

mitted practitioner and activist. Through these activities, the problems that

I discuss in the book were presented to me and then took shape and form.

One could even say that the whole book is an attempt to negotiate prob-

lematics that arose through these practical and political involvements.13

Introduction 5

One of the aims of this book is to explore di erent narratives of emer-
ff

gence of experimental practice. This necessitates engaging speculatively
with the historicity of the topics and events that are central for my argument:
I bring together di erent, often discrepant, historical events, artifacts or
ff

chronotopes in order to re-create a possible historical trajectory that un-

earths a present phenomenon that has not fully emerged yet. I try to explore

the otherwise, the not yet fully materialized, the unknown from significant

proximity. I am less interested in exploring the unknown from distance or
even in exploring the known by creating (critical) distance through a prede-
termined methodology. I am drawn to getting as close as possible to some-

thing that is already there and yet has not fully emerged. And this involves

getting as close as possible to its past by unlocking its speculative potential

in order to reconstruct promising alternative histories and virtual futures.

The combination of empirics and theory and the development of a
speculative historiography are part of my attempt to emphasize the fic-
tional side of social science writing. I discuss this in length in chapter 2 but
for now it may be important to say that rather than trying to bring fictional

tropes, contents, and genres into social science, the social science fiction
I am pursuing here attempts to write social science itself as fiction. That

is, the objective is to write social science in a scholarly social science and
social theory fashion (by following standard citational and stylistic con-
ventions and by docking onto existing debates) and to incorporate in it, al-
most imperceptibly, the fictional and speculative dimensions that emerged
through my political and practical engagements.

Social science fiction helped me to elevate something that is happening
already but is still not a defining moment of social movements—that is, ex-

perimental practice—to a form of politics that is forcefully present in our

realities. I see social science fiction as 100 percent empirically grounded

and 100 percent fictional. It is both at the same time. It is almost as if there

is a spiritual dimension in experimental practice, a “material spirituality”
(Puig de la Bellacasa, 2014a), that this process tries to reveal in our reali-

ties. The implicit philosophy of this project is therefore neither realist nor

social constructivist, neither critical realist nor a constructivism without
adjectives either. It is an approach as experimental as the worldings it en-

gages with require it to be.14 Thus, despite the intensive engagement within
the fields I was involved in, I did not have a predetermined methodology
and I did not do fieldwork. Rather, I was, as are many other humans, politi

cally active in these fields for reasons that are far greater than this study. I

was (and still am in some cases) fieldworking.
6 Introduction

Instead of trying to create some unity and permanence while putting
together the materials, concepts, and ideas that I gathered while fieldwork-
ing, I have developed a baroque piece containing a transitory, often ex-
pressively dissonant and extensively ornamental main text folding into an
infinitely cavernous, continuously curvilinear and often disjunctive set of
relations to other texts and thoughts presented in the notes of the book.15
In this sense, I constructed a transfigured objective baroque world where
speculative occasions, spiritual meanings, empirical materials, and social
research have equal place.16 The aim of baroque fieldworking and social
science fiction is to present a world of abundance—and I see this not only

as a stylistic attempt but as a political obligation of the text.17 Instead of

dearth, which is the outcome of traditional management and control, I
looked for abundance as the outcome of material self-organization and

autonomy and, of course, of experimental practice.
ESCAPING HUMANITY (OVERVIEW)
I trace experimental practice in di erent fields of life and through di erent

ff

ff

cases and occasions. In all of them I try to retain those aspects that allow

me to understand the material practices of social movements in their quest
for justice. These practices that fuse justice and ontology will allow me

to unearth the more-than-human and more-than-social aspects of social

movements and their slow path to become movements. I start this journey
in chapter 1, “Decolonial Politics of Matter,” which serves as the theoreti-

cal introduction to the book and provides a conceptual diagram of its key
questions and arguments. The chapter argues that in order to be able to ad-
dress questions of justice, social movements engage in a decolonial politics
of matter: they learn and experiment with changing—literally—the mate-

rial composition of life in ways that delink from the Western epistemic
appropriation of matter as an open frontier for exploration and enclosure.

Chapter 2, “Biofinancialization as Terraformation,” and chapter 3, “On-
tological Organizing,” make up the first part of the book and attempt to

grasp the role of these experimental material practices in contemporary

social movement politics. Chapter 2 aims to establish why the experimental
moment in social movement politics is necessary and, indeed, unavoid-
able. The chapter describes the ascent of financialization since the 1980s,
which brought with it a culture of valuation that spread well beyond
financial markets and came to pervade everyday activities, subjectivity,
Introduction 7

ecology, and materiality—biofinancialization. I argue that the assetiza-

tion of life and the financialization of bios has made the current regime
of production and accumulation untouchable in political terms. This, of

course, poses significant challenges to traditional politics, including social
movement politics, because it interrupts established channels for social

change through existing political institutions. The question then is how to

imagine the autonomy of politics when biofinance becomes molecularized
in code and in matter.

Chapter 3, “Ontological Organizing,” approaches social movement ac-

tion from the reverse perspective: from the practices of movements on
the ground. In this chapter I work with materials from a long fieldwork
study of migration activism and migration movements developed and
analyzed with my collaborator Vassilis Tsianos. Here we argue that many

social movements today, and certainly the migration movement, increas-

ingly change the ways they perform politics. They avoid targeting directly
institutions of power and organize outside existing political channels by

setting up alternative ways of being that support their aims. In the case
of migration, this means the creation of imperceptible but durable infra-
structures and ontologies of existence that facilitate the freedom of move-
ment of migrants. The sovereign regime of mobility control is displaced

on the level on which it attempts to take hold: the everyday movements of
transmigrants. The securitization of borders and spaces is challenged by
organizing common ontologies of existence below the radar of pervasive

political control and by creating alternative everyday worlds: the mundane

ontologies of transmigration, the mobile commons of migration.
Chapter 4, “Activist Materialism,” and chapter 5, “Insurgent
Posthumanism”—the second part of the book—mix and remix di erent

ff

historical incidences, conceptual resources, and perceptual strategies
in ways that allow me to trace the experimental dimension in historical
forms of political mobilization and social movement action long before

anything like posthuman culture and technoscience existed. Chapter 4
specifically discusses the adventures of the concept of materialism and its
uneasy relation to political activism. Here I explore possibilities for en-

acting activist interventions in conditions where materialist politics is not
primarily performed as a politics of institutions but as the fundamental
capacity to remake and transform processes of matter and life. What is

activism when materialism is not about a politics of history but a politics
of matter? What is materialism when it comes to an activist engagement
with matter itself?
8 Introduction

Chapter 5, “Insurgent Posthumanism,” traces experimental practice as
the posthuman making and remaking of alternative material conditions of
existence in di erent historical cases of social movements and theoretical
ff

accounts of politics. But coupling politics and experimental practice and
fusing social movements and the posthuman defies much of posthuman-
ism’s current assumptions as well as many of the theoretical presupposi-
tions of the politics of social movements. The chapter gradually weaves
together politics and posthumanism along three distinct experimental
practices: the making of common material worlds (not just a common
humanity); the embodiment—literally—of radical politics; and, finally, the

enactment of justice through a materialist, nonanthropocentric history.
Chapters 6, 7, and 8 constitute the third part of the book. They bring
back the discussion of experimental practice to the present by performing

the rapprochement between social movements and the more-than-human

worlds of technoscience. How do we perform experimental practice today?

If the experimental cannot be thought independently of technoscience,

the aim of this third part of the book is then to explore di erent ways to
ff

conceive politics in technoscience. As I argue throughout this part, the

experimental practice of more-than-social movements is enacted with,

within, and occasionally against, but never outside, technoscience.
Chapter 6, “Brain Matter,” is a case study of the notion of neuroplasticity

and the emergent epigenetic nature of the brain. At the heart of the vision

of plasticity circulating equally in popular culture and in the sciences of the

brain lies the possibility of recombining brain matter and understanding

the making of ecologically dependent morphologies in a nondeterminist
manner. But plasticity as recombination is not only a radical challenge to
predominant determinist assumptions of the brain, it becomes also one of
the major avenues through which politics becomes articulated within neu-

roscience. The chapter explores di erent prevalent versions of such politics
ff

related to neoliberal markets, processes of governance, and traditional vi-

sions of social liberation. Engaging with these di erent forms of politics al-

ff

lows me to explore their specificities and, indeed, limitations in establishing
questions of justice in the relation of humans to their brain. Here I ask what

an experimental practice of the brain is or would look like and introduce
the notion of composition as a key feature of experimentation with matter.

Chapter 7, “Compositional Technoscience,” picks up the idea of compo-
sition and proposes to reexamine how politics has been conceived within
science and technology studies: the politics of credibility and expertise,
institutional participation, the governance of human-nonhuman relations,

Introduction 9

and the inclusion of marginalized experiences. I debate these di erent ap-

ff

proaches to politics through a case study of aids activism in the 1980s and
show that more than an organized response of the gay community target-

ing inclusion in existing institutions and expert committees, aids activism
was the product of the community’s efforts to survive the epidemic and
the prevalent social hostility. In fact, the community did not preexist
these efforts, it became a community only by engaging in an extremely wide

spectrum of everyday material experimental practices that made its very
existence possible. I refer to these experimental practices as compositional:

the creation of alternative forms of life that primarily allow a certain actor
to be able to exist, to articulate with other actors and forms of life, and to
address questions of justice by changing its everyday material conditions.
The last chapter of the book, chapter 8, “Crafting Ontologies,” pres

ents a larger fieldwork study of the maker and hacker culture in the Brit-
ish East Midlands and beyond. The main thesis of the chapter is that the
achievement of invention in technoscience takes the form of dispersed ex-
perimentation within more-than-human and more-than-scientific worlds:

distributed invention power. In maker and hacker spaces, the focus of this
chapter, we can trace how distributed invention power is organized: the

topological stacking of materials and processes; ecological transversality

and the emergence of new compositions of code and matter; the prolifera-

tion of commensal relations between the participating actors; the complex
traffic between instituted and community technoscience; the involution
of human, animal, and inorganic actors; the centrality of craft and experi-

mental labor in makers’ ethopoiesis; the precarization of work and multi-

plication of free labor; and, finally, the continuous folding of the commons

and the private and public spheres into each other. What is constitutive
of these diverse practices of making and other movements of community

technoscience is that they change the conditions of knowledge produc-
tion by recomposing the fabric of everyday life: the stacking and forking of
worlds into alternative ontologies. What is at stake here is not just tech-

noscience itself but the ontological constitution of life and the attempt
to defend it. In posthuman conditions, traditional politics and the cor-

responding social movements can support us in this endeavor only to a
limited extent. The alterontologies of more-than-social movements do not

just represent a new form of political organizing. Something else, some-

thing existential is at stake here: alterontological politics is a possible way to

survive a world that is disintegrating through human action. Alterontolo-

gies may be a way to escape humanity.
10 Introduction

01
DECOLONIAL
POLITICS
OF
MATTER

ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS
The rise of technoscience in its contemporary configuration since the

1960s and 1970s resonates with a cultural imaginary marked by the idea
that social transformation is primarily driven by material transformation.1
Technoscience creates new ontologies; it is world-making and history-

making.2 The simultaneous production of society and ontology is often de-
scribed as ontological politics: there exist multiple ontologies rather than

just one, and these di erent ontologies are enacted by the actors involved

ff

in them.3 As I discuss later in the book (especially in chapters 7 and 8),

this is not an epistemological question, it is a practical one. Depending on
the specific actors involved, ontologies are practiced differently and thus
are materially di erent as such. This is a “multinatural” world.4 And it is
ff

ultimately a political question which ontologies a certain actor partici-

pates in, and how. Politics here means that by performing ontology in a

single concrete way rather than any other, we change the very constitution
of being and its material organization in a specific direction. Ontology is not

a description of the state of things, but of ways of being that include alterna-

tive possibilities of world-making.

What absences and what silences are produced when we conceive our
engagement with and within technoscience as ontological politics? And
what ways of being and acting, what voices does this understanding of
technoscientific politics privilege? Along with Boaventura de Sousa San-
tos (2001) I am interested in the study of absences. Rather than exploring
what ontological politics is or how it is theorized, I aim to discuss what
ontological politics actively produces as absent and nonexistent.5 Is the

politics of (more-than-social) social movements that I mentioned in the in-

troduction a form of ontological politics? If not, what are the alternatives?
As de Sousa Santos (2004, p. 178) writes, “There is no single, univocal way

of not existing. The logic and process through which hegemonic criteria

of rationality and efficiency produce the non-existence of what does not

fit them are various. Non-existence is produced whenever a certain entity

is disqualified or rendered invisible, unintelligible, or irreversibly discard-
able. What unites the di erent logics of production of non-existence is
ff

that they are all manifestations of the same rational monoculture.” With
Susan Leigh Star (1991) we can think of the production of the nonexistent

as an accumulation of residuals created in the process of making the world:

residuals produced though work that has been invisibilized. What are the
absences, the residues, the invisibilized labors that cannot be considered

in ontological politics? What is rendered silent in the process of perform-

ing ontological politics?
THE FRONTIER OF MATTER

In ontological politics, matter is not just raw material for other social or

political ends; rather, matter itself is opened up as a space of expansion.6

Matter in all its expressions and formations is not a substance with fixed

qualities and given potentials; matter is active and creative, complex and
enlivened. The shift to the ontological denotes an interest in immersing
into this process of self-ordering and in co-acting within it—to let other

possible ontologies emerge.

Consider, for example, the nascent field of epigenetics. Over the past

decade, a new set of theories and experiments exploring the unpredictable

dynamics of gene expression has begun to take center stage in genetics

research. The epigenome describes the overall state of a cell in flux, each
point in time yielding multiple cascading possibilities for divergence of
individual phenotypes. The inert genome is thereby supplemented by
12 Chapter One

a softer, more adaptable, epigenome, incorporating mechanisms capable
of responding to the environment, sensing “time” and retaining “memo-
ries” that regulate subsequent development. Within myriad microscopic
epigenomes, the effects of the wider social and physical environment are

translated via biochemical interactions to become an integral part of a
fluctuating landscape of gene expression.
I discuss epigenetics in chapter 6 (for an extensive discussion, see the

work with my collaborators on this project, Emma Chung, John Cromby,

Chris Talbot, and Cristina Tufarelli)7 but for now I want to highlight that
the epigenome as an emerging object of study as well as a theoretical
framework (epigenetics) could be described as a set of alternate ontologies

that are made by a multiplicity of actors who contribute to the field from
many di erent and often conflicting perspectives and positions. Their spe-
ff

cific ways to do research are not primarily shaped by their commitment

to some external politics to the field (such as left or right, liberal or eman-
cipatory, or conservative or progressive), not least because many of the

actors involved are nonhuman others and do not have such politics. The

politics that one can find are intrinsic to epigenetic research, yet their con-

nections go far beyond the field of epigenetics and address broader ques-

tions of politics and justice.
I wonder what the ontologies of the epigenome will look like in the next

decade when this nascent field will start to take a more definite shape.

Which ontologies of the epigenome will develop further, and what will

they look like? Which will disappear? How and why? Ontological politics

captures this process. Performing ontological politics means to open up

matter as a field of exploration, experimentation, and, ultimately, appro-

priation. Ontological politics conceives matter as a frontier. In every fron-

tier, expansion takes place as inclusion of new territories and entities in a
process of continuous creation of new worlds.

COLONIALITY AND PRODUCTIONISM
Every frontier has a promise: to liberate the one who moves into the open

space from the limitations that preoccupy life before the frontier opens.
The promise of the new frontier of matter is to liberate material action

from being dominated solely by social imperatives—class, sexuality, race,

power, religion, culture, inequality—and to develop a radical commitment

to matter (and to its multiple expressions). But simultaneously every

Decolonial Politics of Matter 13

frontier has a secret: in order to expand and include new spaces, enti-
ties, and actors, it needs to exercise power over them and silence or
oppress some of them in order to make them fit. Ontological politics
on the one hand expresses this liberating move— that is, the openness

of ontology to co-action of all actors involved and to the multiple pos-

sibilities within it—and on the other hand administers its secrets: How

many actors can be included? How? What is going to happen with the

rest of them?
Every moving frontier is contemporaneous with a form of liberation,
and simultaneously it enacts oppression. In the American frontier, the

laborers who escape the wage labor market of British America to become

independent peasants and artisans from the seventeenth century onward

move into the frontier to the West only to bring savagery, destruction, and
the dispossession of land.8 In the Eastern Cape frontier of South Africa,
the opposition of the Afrikaners to British colonial power and their sub-
sequent migration came only to consolidate militarized white supremacy
and extreme nationalism.9
The frontier opens as moving people (most often violently) appropriate

new territories and then include and integrate them into their realities.
And as people move, the new territories absorb them into their workings

and transform them. The logic of every frontier is the logic of inclusion, the

colonial inclusion of hinterland and the outside into some form of control
that spreads well beyond the actual frontier itself. The term coloniality of

power describes an order of power that emerged as a result of colonialism
and colonial administrations but survived their later demise to structure

culture, knowledge, economy, and our ways of being.10 Colonialism shaped

modernity to such extent that modernity itself would be impossible with-
out it: modernity/coloniality. And with it also our epistemic practices
and systems of knowledge are constituted by the modernity/coloniality
nexus. The frontier of matter, this newly opened frontier that operates as an

epistemic appropriation of matter, exists within the practical logic of the

coloniality of power. The frontier of matter operates within “modernity’s

epistemic territory,” inescapably.11
In the movement of the frontier, territory is considered to be a space on
which nobody has property rights and therefore it is open for appropria-
tion, terra nullius.12 It is only because of this rendering of the territory as

unclaimed that the frontier legitimizes its moves and the erasure of already
existing systems of knowledge, local epistemic traditions, and the com-
munities that sustain them. In modernity’s epistemic territory, mapping
14 Chapter One

space, representing its entities, and shaping new political institutions in

order to include these entities (and exclude and, often, erase others) is the

way the frontier expands. Through these processes the frontier is turned

productive, in a double sense: the space of the frontier is turned into a
space of production, that is, a space that is produced through relations of
forces and power as well as a space that is gradually docked to existing sys-
tems of the production of goods, knowledge, and commodities.13
The appropriation of the frontier is a double act of organization: it is

organized as a political space through processes of representation, and it

is organized as a productive space by turning it to an accumulation system.

Inclusion is about enclosing the new spaces into a regime of representation

and a regime of accumulation that sustains the power of coloniality.14 So
also in our case: when matter becomes a frontier, the attempt is to make

it productive—politically productive—as well as render it compatible with

the existing mode of production. Ontological politics are these specific

practices that perform the inclusion of new formations of matter into the

accumulation regime of current economies; I discuss specific ways that
this happens in chapter 2 and again in chapter 7. As the frontier of matter

moves, its political institutions also move. This necessitates the creation

of new political forums to accommodate these emerging formations. In-

cluding nonhuman actors into polity is about rendering them amenable to
being represented;15 as they become representable, that is, as they become
identifiable within the coordinates of an existing mode of political organ

ization, they pressure existing political institutions to change and to ac-

commodate these new actors.

Ontological politics is a description of practices that portray how
the frontier of matter advances and that unfold within spaces marked by

colonialism. I am not saying that ontological politics is a colonial enter-
prise (although this may be true in many cases). What I am saying is that
ontological politics exists within the modern epistemic territory that is
constituted by its coloniality: ontological politics makes the frontier of
matter, modernity’s ultimate frontier, move. Thinking politics in techno-

science with ontological politics allows us, as I discuss in chapter 5, to chal-
lenge widespread anthropocentric understandings of what matter is and to

introduce the idea of the coexistence of multiple contingent possibilities
that emerge in the process of movements of matter. Ontological politics

describes the forces exercising pressure on the outer limits of constituted
political institutions to differentially include more human and nonhuman

actors, relations, and ontologies in a given political configuration in order


to allow for these ontologies to emerge and become embedded in our so-

cial and material worlds.
The epigenome, a neuron, an mri scanner, or a new subsea fiber-optic

cable are not just actors that are differentially enacted by existing social
institutions and people to create new forms of existence and new ecologi-

cal configurations; they are also embedded in actual epistemic and value

production processes that maintain the existence of the frontier.16 In

other words, ontological politics is politics performed in order to keep the
frontier of matter moving by activating new material processes, allowing

multiple possibilities, including new material actors, representing them,
assigning them specific rights and positions, inserting them into the po

litical sphere, extracting value from them, and speculating on their value to

multiply financial yields. Ontological politics is not just a theoretical tool
depicting politics within technoscience, but also the modus operandi of
rendering matter productive, in the double sense of productionism: politi

cally representable as well as creating value and innovation.17
MATTER AND JUSTICE

What would it mean to question the implicit coloniality of the frontier
of matter? To what extent can material actors object to their enlisting in

the productive machine of the frontier? Is it possible to think of actors

escaping modernity’s epistemic territory? How can the epigenome object
to specific meanings and functions that it is expected to perform in the
emerging research on epigenetics? Can a transatlantic fiber-optic cable

challenge its specific use by a certain consortium of companies that main-
tain it and exploit its labors? What labors do these actors do that remain

nonexistent, absent, invisible while many other of their labors are fully ab-

sorbed in the productive regime of the frontier? As I argue throughout this
book, in order to be able to start looking for answers to these questions we

will need to challenge the assumption that the inclusion of these actors in

constituted political institutions will securely bring their absent voices and

their invisibilized work to light.
With Star (1983, 1991) I am interested in the organization of the invisible

and erased work that remains hidden when ontological politics is performed,
rather than the organization of visible work as such (and this pertains to

human and nonhuman actors alike, as I discuss later in the book). Erasure

and inclusion coexist in the modern/colonial epistemic territory. Rather
16 Chapter One

than inclusion, then, in the chapters that follow I aim to explore alternative
political practices that attempt to disconnect and redraw the conditions

and terms of this epistemic territory, “a delinking that leads to de-colonial

epistemic shift and brings to the foreground other epistemologies, other
principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other econ-

omy, other politics, other ethics” (Mignolo, 2007, p. 453).
Following Jacques Rancière (1998), my starting point is not inclusion
but the emergence of the invisibilized and the imperceptible, of those who

have no place within existing normalizing political institutions. I under-

stand politics here as a deep dispute over the existence of those who have

no part in constituted institutions or even of those who refuse to participate

in them.18 And this form of politics within the frontier of matter happens

when those who have no part change the material conditions of existence

in a way that cannot be overheard or simply included in existing political

institutions.19 In chapter 3, for example, I discuss this in the case of people’s

migration and in chapter 7 in relation to aids activism. I am thinking with
Starhawk (2002) of a form of politics that is not exercised as the power over
a territory or simply a power that appropriates what is within it; rather it
is politics as power with, the power of creating alternative common forms
of life that reorder the language and practices of existing political arrange-

ments of constituted power.
Instead of asking questions such as “How can we include di erent
ff

humans and nonhumans in our institutions?” “What is matter in itself?” or

“Who is not included?” I focus on how actors create alternative ecologies
of existence that become inhabited by these silenced and absent others, by

those who have been rendered residual and invisible.20 Rather than explor-

ing with ontological politics the making of di erent ontologies, I am inter-
ff

ested in a decolonial politics of matter: politics that, by instituting direct

changes on the material level of existence, challenge existing conditions
of inclusion and the idea of inclusion that rests on epistemic coloniality.
Deleuze in his homage to François Châtelet points out: “No science, but
rather a politics of matter, since man is entrusted with matter itself ” (De-

leuze, 2005, p. 717). This is a politics of matter not because humans are in

charge of matter but because certain groups of humans and nonhumans

can continue to exist only to the extent that they develop other alternative
entanglements with matter. Matter is hope. Ontology is desire (see chap-

ter 4 for further discussion).21
Beyond ontological politics as a general description of politics within
the frontier of matter, I want to think of a decolonial politics of matter


as a committed politics to make alternative worlds of existence with and
against and outside the productionist moves of the frontier. But unlike tra-
ditional decolonial approaches that I discussed earlier in this chapter and
throughout this book, my approach here is not primarily the epistemologi-

cal unsettling of modern/colonial knowledge production. The unsettling
of the frontier of matter can only take place on the material level, and it

can only be a practical ontological question. I am less interested in how
many ontologies exist and whether it is possible to create a pluriversal

world (something that I discuss in length in chapter 8); I aim to explore
practices that destabilize, delegitimize, and, ultimately, decolonize the
frontier of matter through the alternative production of materiality: al-

ternative ontologies. This decolonial politics of matter attempts to restore

justice step by step through everyday practice (something that I discuss in
chapter 5). In politics of matter, justice becomes ingrained in the materiality

of being: in the soil, in the water, in our bodily tissues, limbs, organs, cells,

genes, and molecules. Decolonizing settler land is one thing; decolonizing

matter is another (even if they are tightly connected).

Material justice is a form of justice that happens even before its epis-
temological representation and political inclusion into constituted gover-

nance has taken place. This creation of alternative ontologies characterizes
the actions of what I refer throughout this book as more-than-social move-

ments: those that, rather than aiming at social and political power, primar-

ily change the immediate ontological conditions of life. This book provides
di erent materials—historical (chapter 4 and 5), empirical (chapter 3 and 8),
ff

and conceptual (chapter 2, 6, and 7)—that allow us to grasp how classic

social movements can be conceived as more-than-social movements.

We are somewhat trained to believe that inclusion comes first: that in-
clusion in structures of social power is what politics is about. It is prob

ably the other way around: politics is when certain actors, imperceptible
actors, emerge in the political scene and change the very constitution of

being by—literally—materializing ordinary relations of justice; inclusion

can only follow this move. Instead of prescriptive justice, I am searching
for material, processual, and generative justice,22 which, rather than being

focused on normative issues, is concerned with fusing justice and matter:

practical justice, thick justice.
18 Chapter One

ALTERNATIVE FORMS OF LIFE
How does thick justice materialize? How can justice be installed through
bodies, with other animals, things, and matter? How can we think matter

and justice in a nondualistic manner? Let’s turn upside down Clifford
Geertz’s “thick description” (1993): thickness for Geertz is semantic, let’s
seek material thickness; practice for Geertz is text, let’s read practice as
the material worlding of existence. Thick justice is about reclaiming ma-
terialist politics in the age of technoscience by making alternative ontolo-
gies: alterontologies (a concept that I discuss throughout this book and in
particular in chapter 7). When ontological politics goes to formal institu-

tions, politics of matter goes to the everyday: the space where alterontolo-

gies are crafted. Alterontologies = alternative forms of life.

I borrow the term forms of life from Langdon Winner (1986, especially
chap. 1), who traces it back to Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as to Karl Marx.
In forms of life we encounter a reweaving of the social and the material
through the development of new practices, knowledges, and technologies.
A practice, a set of practices, a device, a new form of connection becomes
part of a form of life by changing it. There are no users, no tools, no sym-

metrical representations, no assemblages, no networks. There are just

forms of life that set up the material constraints to what we are, what we
can become, and how we co-construct each other. Wittgenstein (1958,

p. 226) writes: “What has to be accepted, the given, is—so one could say—

forms of life.” I understand this as the making and sustaining of forms of
life that have to be accepted because they transform the material order

in ways that cannot be bypassed or neglected. Every social context, every

sociotechnical environment, every ecosystem has enough space for al-

terontologies: conflicting alternative forms of life.
In previous work we called the politics of these social movements im-

perceptible.23 Imperceptible politics are not invisible, yet they neither aim
for their inclusion in constituted institutions nor claim visibility in the ex-
isting regimes of polity; rather, they transform the immediate conditions
of existence without having as their central target their own representation

in main political institutions. Imperceptible politics is the creation of new

speculative figurations, new deliberate actual constructions, which put us

right in the heart of new material and experiential forms of life. Günther
Anders’s call to train our capacity for “moral fantasy” and Walter Benja-
min’s “speculative experience” are behind these ideas. Anders discusses

the inadequacy (what he later develops as a philosophy of discrepancy)


between our feelings and the unforeseeable effects of things and demands

that we train the elasticity and capacity of our imagination (Anders, 2002,
p. 271ff ).24 Benjamin (1996b) discusses also the magical and spiritual lan-
guage of things and develops the idea of speculative experience as a means

of recognizing the wholeness of life beyond a naïve utopian idealism or

blunt versions of materialist dialectics (I discuss this in chapter 4).
The quest, then, is how speculative experience becomes materialized
in the making of alternative forms of life and simultaneously escapes the

pressures of productionism—in its double sense as discussed earlier: in-
clusion into the political representation and into the current regime of

accumulation. Instead of seeing technoscience as the instance against

which claims need to be addressed and instead of seeing that claims of
justice need to be imported from outside into technoscience, the aim is to,
literally, craft alternative words. Crafting—that is, the everyday making of
alterontologies—is one of the main themes that this book tries to explore.
In chapters 4 and 5 I discuss di erent historical instances of making
ff

alternative ontologies of existence, and in chapters 6, 7, and, in particu

lar, chapter 8 I collect di erent aspects that delineate crafting within con
ff

temporary (more-than-)social movements.

DECOLONIZING CRAFT
Craft is the result of a skill developed to such a degree that what matters

is not the skill itself but the very moment of making. Craft is an excess of
practice, “the desire to do a job well for its own sake,” as Richard Sennett
(2008, p. 9) writes. Craft and artisanal production were always in the heart

of making things; indeed, they defined the birth of modern science until

its gradual absorption into big science.25 Craft in this picture becomes a
necessary prerequisite and the absent mediator of what Barad (2007) calls
an intra-active relation with matter. However, this tight interconnection

between craft and the modern epistemic territory reveals also its limits, the
need to approach craft from a decolonial perspective. Craft and artisanal
skills are the invisibilized labors, the erased residuals that sustain any situ-

ated relation to matter. Simultaneously, craft is inescapably located within

the frontier of matter. This specificity of craft defines the approach to de-

colonization that I use throughout this book. It is not primarily about the
decolonization of seized lands, ways of being, and Eurocentric epistemolo-
gies or the creation of a pluriversal world. All of these are surely important

20 Chapter One

parts of the decolonial project. But my attention is on something less cen-

tral but crucial for my specific project here: the decolonization of our rela-

tion to matter and materiality from a position situated in northern Europe,

where I live and I am politically active.

This relation to matter and materiality within northern Europe and

more broadly the North Atlantic is one that is mediated in multiple ways
through technoscience, the contemporary inheritor of scientific practice

of the modern epistemic territory. Decolonizing matter means, then, de-

colonizing technoscience and its absorption into the frontier of matter.

However, I approach this decolonizing project not by deconstructing

technoscience from a perspective that would, for example, reveal how
technoscience helps to perpetuate the coloniality of power—how it is

used to sustain coloniality in geopolitical relations, how infrastructures

maintain social power over indigenous communities, or how technoscien-
tific knowledge reproduces colonial relations by other means, to name just
few examples. Instead of approaching technoscience from the outside as
an object of study—and eventually as an object of critique—in this book

I rethink the practices of technoscience itself, hoping that this investiga-
tion will contribute to such broad decolonial projects. To what extent is it

possible for social (or more-than-social) movements to abandon the split

between politics, justice, and technoscience that pervades the ontological
politics of the frontier of matter? I interrogate craft as the moment where

the bifurcation between technoscience and politics, matter and justice can

be potentially abolished. Inasmuch as craft is an inheritor of the colonial
architectures of the modern epistemic territory, it is also a practice that
can contribute to its destabilization.
Consider, for example, how grassroots ecological activism has con-
tested the externalization of the costs of production to the environment
by crafting a multiplicity of alternative forms of life (even if the relations
between these di erent forms of life may conflict at times): repatriations

ff

of indigenous land, revegetation, biodynamic principles of farming, water

conservation, inner-city food gardens, recuperation of traditional and

indigenous systems of land use and land care, cooperative production,
organizing against extractivism and the agroindustrial frontier, creation of

alternative seed banks, permaculture activism, soil regeneration, whole-

farm organization, urban gardening, ecofeminist advocacy, bioremediation

projects, disruption of agribusiness, open-source agriculture, experimen-

tation with biofuels, reclaiming of dispossessed spaces, production of
alternative research, making of alternative collectives, setting up local

systems of exchange and transactions, the early years of Seeds of Change,

Earth Activism—all examples of crafting alternative material-ecological

justice on the ground, multiplying livable worlds, or making alterontolo-
gies. The political organization of social movements here does not pre-

exist the making of alternative forms of life; rather, political organizing

is the crafting of alterontologies. Ontological organizing matters within

social movements (I discuss this in detail in chapter 3). Ecological activism
of the kind I describe here has addressed ecological destruction and the

ontological politics of technoscience not primarily by opposing it or by
exposing its connections to big agribusiness but also by occupying its very
activity, by practically democratizing knowledge, and by organizing with

technoscience for alternative worlds of ecological life.
But one could object here that craft as effective political organizing

seems to be untenable when scale is at stake. How can alterontologies work
with regard to the vast magnitude and impact of mainstream research in
technoscience? How can alterontologies contribute to a decolonial politics
of matter that develops alternative practices of justice within and against

the frontier of matter? Following the earlier example, can grassroots eco-

logical activism ever develop a viable alternative to big agribusiness and

the technologies that it deploys? Infrastructural changes or large techno-
scientific projects require extensive mobilization in order to be open to

democratic politics, and craft seems to be unable to achieve that; big sci-

ence is too big to change under the pressure of alterontologies, as the argu-

ment goes. But is not the question about scale-making26 the real issue here,

rather than the entrancing size of technoscience? Craft is about rescaling
the geographies of technoscience in ways that matter.

Consider the free software movement.27 What mattered in the birth

of the free software movement was not primarily the question of scale

in terms of its size (that is, if free software could become so widespread

as to potentially challenge the domination of proprietary software) but
the attempt to change the conditions in which software was made. The
primary goal of the movement was to allow for alternative forms of soft-
ware creation to emerge: How is software owned (or not owned)? How
can software become freely distributed? How can it efficiently engage a
large number of actors in the global virtual space? How can peer-to-peer

nets be set up? How can the gift economy of cyberspace be defended and
maintained?—all questions that indicate that crafting new code and new

forms of cooperation was not a strategy to attack proprietary software but
to create livable digital worlds. The creation of alterontologies is not pri-
22 Chapter One

marily about size but about remaking the scale, not only crafting objects
and processes but crafting scales too—that is, changing the values that

a scale measures and not just its ratio, or else changing the scale itself.

Scale-making in alterontologies is a minoritarian move: it focuses on the

intensity of the actual moment of crafting rather than the extensity of the

critique of mainstream technoscience. And as I discuss later in this book

(in chapter 4 and in particular chapter 8), the relation between mainstream

technoscience and alterontological practice is not clear-cut and opposi-

tional, but characterized by multidirectional traffic, arduous exchanges,
and endless collaborations and conflicts.
If a decolonial politics of matter is possible, then craft and artisanal

skill lies in the ability to recognize the constraints of a situation, where to
stop, and how to stop. Craft is about caring for the worlds we live in by act-
ing in accordance with the intensities and the limits that matter imposes

in each concrete situation. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) approaches
care not as a moralistic stance but as a practical everyday engagement
with the mundane worlds we inhabit that seeks to create more just and
livable worlds. This is a generic notion of care: it can shape di erent orga
ff

nizational ontologies, but it is not universal. It needs to be materialized
anew in each situation. In fact, the one who crafts alterontologies knows
what the constraints are, where to stop, and how to leave himself or herself
behind. Craft is not about diy, but about diwy: do it without yourself.

Craft at its core is not about making things or producing relations but

about leaving yourself aside for the sake of viably coexisting with other
things and beings.


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I. MOVEMENTS
02
BIOFINANCIAL
IZATION
AS
TERRA
FORMATION
GEOCIDE AND GEOENGINEERING
Politics is a human affair. It sits uneasily with other forms of life and

movements of matter. But there are reasons for extending the reach

of politics; the most compelling one is to challenge the stubborn persis

tence of humanist universalism in more-than-human worlds. Consider

the Anthropocene narrative:1 We have changed the planet irreversibly! We

have been terraforming Earth by changing its ontological constitution.
Terraforming is extraterrestrial geoengineering, but the extent of human

impact on Earth is so extensive that we could say that we are now terrafor-
ming our own planet.
But who is this “we”? Is it human beings, is it the human species, is it

groups of humans? We know that human action is as unified as the ac-

tions of any other species; which means that it is not. Would someone
claim seriously that cyanobacteria acted in a conscious and concerted way
when 2.3 billion years ago they oxygenated the atmosphere, caused a vast
mass extinction, and changed organic life irrevocably? A particular species

never acts as a unified subject by intention. The individuals of a species act
according to relations each one of them establishes with other members,
the environment, and other individuals from other species. They form
populations and interspecies communities not by design but by chance,
contingency, and involvement.
And as if this “we” is not problematic enough, it suddenly takes even
more dangerous proportions: the fantasy that we can act rationally and
become the guarantor of Earth’s future. Cyanobacteria did not know that

they are changing the planet, but we do. What follows is that humans have

damaged Earth so badly that we need to terraform it. Humans the destroy-

ers, humans the saviors; both combined elevate humans to the makers of

one unified single world, a grand universalism of a terraformed world. Ter-

raformation appears to be the source of destruction and the remedy simul

taneously. Geocide and geoengineering.

This combination—terraformation as changing the planet to such an

extent that it can be codified as a new geological epoch, and terraformation
as a futuristic enterprise that can supposedly save the planet—captures a

salient moment of contemporary technoscience. How is it possible at all to

think of our past and current actions as well as future solutions as being on

one unified linear trajectory? How it is possible to combine the destruction

of Earth and the imaginary of catastrophe—geocide—and the promise of

redemption in a single matrix?
THE UNIVERSALIZING MATRIX OF FINANCIALIZATION
What underlies the universalizing matrix of terraformation is, as discussed

in the previous chapter, the making of matter as a frontier: the belief that we

are able to make matter, to the extent that it becomes part of our existing

systems of political representation and of the production process of cur-

rent economies in the Global North. As discussed in the previous chapter,
production here has a double sense: the construction of new ontologies and

the insertion of these ontologies into scales of value. How is it possible to

conceive the production of matter and its value in one conceptual frame-

work? This chapter explores how the financialization of everyday life, subjec-
tivity, ecology, and materiality—biofinancialization—provides this framework

for unifying the double meaning of productionism in engagements with
matter. However, I do not discuss financialization as such but the implica-

tions of this universalizing approach to life and matter for politics.

28 Chapter Two

The current financialized regime of production has become so embod-
ied in the ontology of our everyday lives that even social groups that can
challenge its legitimacy cannot do so without challenging their very exis-
tence. This is more than a mere intellectual problem, or an issue of (lack

of ) parrhesia, courage, and responsibility; biofinancialization is an issue
that poses questions about how can we engage with questions of political

power and justice and what are alternative political scenarios.2 In other

words, it raises questions about social movements, the nature of their poli-
tics, how they are constituted, and what they try to achieve.
Biofinancialization has propelled the engulfment of large segments of
Global North societies into a mode of existence that has changed the con-

ditions for the articulation of possible political alternatives. Despite the

predicament of politics that we are experiencing in the Global North and
despite the powerful mobilizations3 that have shaken many countries since

the economic crisis of 2008, a turning point seems almost impossible. “We
have a situation here”4 that is defined not only by economic and political

exigencies but also by the fact that alternative forms of politics that were

put in motion in many Global North societies by broad autonomous social

campaigns and social movements of the past decades seem unable to cre-

ate fertile conditions for social change.
I focus my discussion on these mobilizations and briefly discuss what

came to be called autonomist politics. However, I do not introduce au-
tonomist politics as such5 but describe the starting point of the argument
that I will develop in the rest of this book: The more-than-social becom-

ing of social movements is a response to the closure of current forms of
autonomous politics. Biofinancialization—the entanglement of everyday

existence, socioeconomic life, and the frontier of matter—has made this

closure tangible and has created conditions that can no longer be ad-
dressed by current social movement politics. In the following sections I
reconstruct this argument by discussing the emergence of biofinancial-
ization and how it has neutralized traditional autonomist political practice

in the Global North. Traditional autonomist politics gravitate around
questions of class and labor, and I retain this line of thought in the next

sections, but I also open up these debates to an alternative understanding

of autonomism that could contribute to the decolonial politics of matter

in the Global North that I discussed in the previous chapter: the capacity
of social movements to become movements in the material sense and to
promote alternative ontological configurations of life. This is the magic
formula of this book:6 terraformation from below.
Biofinancialization as Terraformation 29

THE CULTURE OF VALUATION
Biofinancialization has its roots in the ways the unruly social and politi

cal movements after the 1960s were gradually reinserted into the current

regime of accumulation. The contentious mobilizations of the working
classes7 and subaltern populations that started in the 1960s and 1970s put
an end to the Fordist-Keynesian accumulation regime by challenging the

cultural, racial, and sexual organization of labor on a local and global scale.

These struggles transformed gradually and diversified through the 1980s

and 1990s to a multiplicity of social mobilizations and conflicts across the
Global North that forced social regulation to reorganize itself in order to

capture the new exiting subjectivities: antiracist and migrant mobiliza-

tions, feminist struggles and social rights mobilizations, the anticolonial

and alter-globalization movement, and ecological movements.8

These contentious politics intensified with the relocation of production

outside the Global North and with the elevation of financial markets to one
of the primary engines for economic recovery after the economic crisis of

the 1970s.9 This crisis never ended in the destruction of value or in the
creation of a new system for the invigoration of demand by changing the
living conditions of the populations through a new “New Deal.”10 Rather,
Global North societies entered into a perpetual crisis11 that paradoxically

became the cause as well as the consequence of a new regime of social pro-
duction dominated by stagnant wages, underemployment, and the flexi-
bilization of labor markets12 as well as of finance-led accumulation13 with

the introduction of securitization and increased consumer14 and corporate
lending.15 Financialization on the one hand and the deregulation of labor

markets on the other became the key features of the neoliberal turn after

the 1970s.16
A crucial point in this chapter is that these transformations are not mere

instruments for social regulation or economic tools for counteracting the
socioeconomic troubles that took place after the 1970s. Their effects are far

more important than their economic performativity. In other words, the

economic quandaries were not primarily resolved through financial means

but through social, cultural, and technomaterial transformations (which
were enhanced by new economic devices and accounting techniques).

The virtualization of the economy that dominated the post-1970s crises
was not just an economic strategy and a new regime of accumulation. It
is culture. Financialization is culture, not only because it came to pervade

society and the everyday, as Randy Martin (2002) has described,17 but also
30 Chapter Two

because it contributed to the consolidation of an ever-expanding culture

of financial valuation of goods and ser vices.18 This is the tendency to trans-

late disparate judgments about value to financial measurements that in-

troduced a culture of valuation into everyday life. Any and all aspects of
sociomaterial life and the environment enter into this indeterminate and
unstable process of evaluation that feeds the movements of financial mar-

kets and financialized societies.

The underlying logic of the culture of (financial) valuation is that the

worth of goods, things, activities, spaces, and other species can be essen-

tially translated into financial evaluations.19 Although di erent scales of
ff

evaluation are by definition incommensurable,20 the culture of valuation in
Global North societies presupposes that the worth of almost everything—

including the present and future appreciation of assets, goods, ser vices,

intangibles, the health and subjective capacities of individuals, the physical
environment, human artifacts, animals and plants, and urban space—is

transferable into one logic of financial value that is potentially tradable
in the market; this is biofinancialization.21 Neither valuation as such nor
the cultures of valuation are novel and distinctive features of the current
world; what is distinctive, however, is that the di erent forms of value—
ff

and, indeed, radically divergent values—are imagined as convertible into

the universalizing matrix of financial value. Financial value is used here to

express the primacy of investment value over other values (aesthetic, use,
moral, ecological, material, cultural) that predominantly assess the future

monetary profit to be gained from potentially any field of life or the envi-
ronment. The principle of investment value hinges on the belief that the

future is universal and exploitable.

BIOFINANCIALIZATION
The imaginary of measurable future value lies at the heart of the current

culture of valuation that traverses many fields of life. For example, we have
studied how young precarious workers “invest” in themselves by shaping
their activities according to possible future gains in unstable labor mar-

kets;22 consider also how biomatter is evaluated according to future mon-

etary gains from its potentially scientific or commercial exploitations,23 or
Joe Dumit’s (2012) remarkable study of treating possible future biomedical

risks instead of diseases. These are just few examples; I discuss more later

in this chapter and in the notes. What is crucial here is that value becomes


an intrinsically indeterminate magnitude that has to be calculated by cre-
ating appropriate measuring tools24 and then defended and negotiated

between experts in designated public spaces or in the secluded spaces of
the markets.25 Future value is by definition unpredictable, and in order

for it to be realized, the actors involved need to experiment, to manage
conflicting information, and to create knowledge in action.26 Future value

and investment value are recombining other forms of value into a process

of uncertainty. These valuation clashes and the frictions between di erent

ff

systems and scales of values constitute the emerging culture of valuation
in biofinancial societies.

The ascendance of biofinancialization and the concomitant culture of
valuation goes hand in hand with another major response to the social
conflicts and the crises of the 1970s and 1980s: the deregulation of labor

markets and the changes in the process of value production. Despite the

general slowdown of the economy27 and the turbulences of the profit rate,
the levels of labor productivity remained high after the crisis of the 1970s.28

In fact, productivity of labor per hour has risen steadily at an average of

about 2 percent every year for more than one hundred years.29 Deregula-

tion of labor markets, the retreat of organized labor, the collapse of Ford-

ism, deindustrialization, the steep increase of the ser vice and retail sector

over the steady decline of manufacturing,30 and the proliferation of atyp

ical and precarious labor31 all become core features of the decline and

transformation of industrial production in Global North societies into

what many authors have described as a third stage in the development of
the system of production.32
Industrialism in the Global North became increasingly hybridized by
the expansion of the ser vice sector (professional, high-skilled work as well

as low-paid, nonstandard, and insecure work),33 the rise of the knowledge

and culture economy, the expropriation of goods and resources from coun-
tries outside the Global North, the accumulation of wealth through the
production of intangible goods, and the extraction of surplus value from
consumption, communication, and social reproduction. The biofinancial-
ized regime of accumulation relies on a double architecture of produc-
tion. On the one hand, it mobilizes the existing system of value production
in its industrial formation in order to regulate the immediate labor pro

cess (through the traditional system of wage labor and remuneration); on

the other hand, it relies on the appropriation of broader aspects of social

and material life, everyday activities, resources of cooperation, working
people’s general skills, and subjective capacities that are not strictly in-

32 Chapter Two

volved in the immediate labor process. There is no comprehensive re-

search about how these two dimensions of the accumulation regime con-

tribute to value production in Global North societies.34 But many studies35

have highlighted that the architecture of value production in biofinancial
accumulation extends beyond the workplace and relies on the expropria-
tion of res communes: the commons, common pool resources, and com-
mon forms of sociality.36
The commons here not only refers to a possible social force that could

resist its own expropriation, as broadly used in social movements, but
also constitutes the underlying system of production of biofinancial accu-

mulation. Biofinancialization—the financialization of life and matter—is

here specifically used to describe how the commons becomes the ground

and the material substratum on which biofinancial accumulation thrives.
Openly and commonly used infrastructures (information and commu-
nication technologies, collaboratively produced knowledge, and cultural
networks); the material and ecological commons (within the Global North
but most importantly the often violent extraction of value from outside);
and structures of cooperation, everyday sociality, and exchange between
producers and consumers make up some of the main sites of value produc-
tion. Biofinancialization flourishes because it extracts value from repro-

duction, distribution, and consumption as well as other activities that do
not directly belong to the immediate sphere of production; this is possible

because exploitation in the workplace is organized through the specifici-

ties of the lives of working people beyond the workplace itself.37

EMBODIED VALUE PRODUCTION
The externalization of production from the workplace to the social and

the material does not mean that the site of value production is transferred
“outside” living labor. Duration of the working day and intensity of work

are the main dimensions that define the degree of exploitation of living
labor.38 But this intensification of exploitation affects—and to a large ex-

tent entails and necessitates—a wider set of activities that extend beyond

immediate work-related activities. One could say that the supposed in-

tensification of exploitation is complemented by its extensification. Value
production expands across the existential conditions of living labor in the

Global North; the lines of fight and control multiply and traverse di erent
ff

domains of life.

Activities that people perform as part of their nonwork life or second-

ary activities of their work life become directly productive.39 Beyond that
it also means that working people mobilize multiple social and personal

investments in order to remain in the labor market (such as social rela-

tions, general skills, informal networks, ideas, their subjectivity, their mo-
bility, their health, their self-organized structures for cooperation, their

potential for development)40—some of this is entailed in the “final product”

of their labor, but much remains outside it. The epicenter of value pro-

duction is the workplace, but it is only the epicenter. If we focused on the
workplace only, we would miss the important and sometimes defining

broader conditions in which work and employment take place.41 However,
the extensified mode of value production does not mean that work becomes
simply dispersed and socialized, that it moves “outside” the singular worker.
Rather, it means that value production becomes embodied: it becomes an
indissoluble characteristic of the whole situated existence of each worker.

The situated and embodied quality of work includes all things and artifacts

that constitute the worlds in which we exist, our social relations as well
as the broader networks of the commons—material commons, ecological

commons, social commons, informational commons—that we rely on to

maintain everyday life.
The separation of labor power and living labor, which was possible in

the system of production of industrialism, becomes the major source of
conflict in biofinancial societies, simply because living labor in its embodied

and situated wholeness is the source and vehicle of labor power. Control

over embodied production is taking place along several lines that attempt
to cut across and appropriate the existential continuum of people: first, the

attempt to measure labor power and to quantify it despite the fact that it

mobilizes the whole embodied conditions of life;42 second, the expropria-

tion of the infrastructures of cooperation through property rights, patents,
rent, extractivism, and the reprivatization of access to and circulation
of information and material objects;43 third, the individualization of the
costs of social reproduction and privatization of forms of social reproduc-
tion that cannot be taken up by the individual;44 and fourth, the transfor-
mation of citizenship to a tool for creating various tiers of working people

whose degree of exploitation depends on their varied access to citizen-
ship rights.45 One could say that all these lines break the horizontal and

continuous lived experience of working people and create some form of

separate vertical segments that are the productive motor of the biofinan-
cial regime of accumulation.46 Vertical life. Walls of value.
34 Chapter Two

POSTLIBERALISM
The attempt to impose a separation between product of work and process of

work, of cooperative ownership and proprietary ownership, of production

and social reproduction that is, in other words, an attempt to impose the law
of value and the system of wage labor constitute the fault lines of embodied

value production. The tensions on these lines is multiplied as financializa-

tion enters every aspect of work: through the financialization of everyday life

(debt) as workers substitute falling or stagnant wages and the dismantling
of welfare provision with lending; through the extensive valuation of work
outputs; through the exploitation of one’s own future in postcontractual em-

ployment;47 and finally, as discussed earlier, through the transformation of

the nonwork spheres of life into value-producing activities.

The main conflict is between an extended process of value production

that is experienced as indissoluble from everyday existence and the attempt to
control, organize, and remunerate this system according to the immediate

labor needed for the production of value. In other words, the conflict lies

in the fact that value production is embodied but is treated as if it is exter-
nal to the worker. This conflict—which threatens to erupt anytime and to

throw the balance of power into disorder48—is not the result of the uncon-
trollable economic forces that emerged with the turn to financialization;
rather, it is the result of the deep social conflict that traverses embodied
value production as a whole.

The instability of biofinancial societies “has nothing to do with any pre-

sumed instability per se of the mechanisms of the financial system; quite
the contrary, the ambition of those mechanisms is precisely to absorb

shocks and to smooth out discontinuities in the economic cycle” (Moulier
Boutang, 2011, p. 152). Here is where the culture of valuation described

earlier in this chapter meets the production of value in today’s conditions.

The culture of valuation not only underpins the system of finance-led ac-

cumulation but also absorbs the shocks of the social conflicts that traverse
embodied value production. Thus the instability and the conflicts that lie
in the heart of value production are not intensified by the indeterminacy of
the culture of valuation, but rather the opposite is the case: the culture of
valuation that comes to dominate the sociomaterial regime of accumula-
tion is the main tool through which conflict in value production is regulated
(and potentially also contested, as I discuss later).

The pervasiveness of the culture of valuation with the crucial indeter-
minacy of value that lies at the core of this culture is the main way to

control the outputs of work in the extensified mode of production and
is the means that working people themselves use to modify and change

their position in the social nexus. Financialization turns “bio” not only
because it is actively embedded in people’s lives, bodies, and environments

but also because this embeddedness, this becoming fleshly of financial-

ization, comes to constitute anew how social conflict unfolds and social
struggles are performed. As financialization becomes an integral part of

value production, it becomes also the vehicle for articulating social de-
mands and political claims; it becomes a tool for creating and maintaining

social hierarchy. Financialization is culture because it has come to dominate

our imaginary to such an extent that even social justice can be fought for
with financial means. Financialization is not ideology; it is as real as some-
thing can be, ingrained in the everyday ontology of life.
Biofinancialization not only created the ground for a new phase of ex-
pansion (and crisis) but also, with the culture of valuation, created a tool for
managing the conflicts that traverse embodied value production. Through
biofinancialization and more broadly the culture of valuation, specific seg-
ments of the elites and the middle classes maintained and strengthened

their position in the social order over the past forty years. The ascent of
managerial and professional classes and their privileged access to educa-
tion and sociocultural capital have contributed to the expansion and con-
solidation of the middle class in the postwar period.49 While the middle

class became a global phenomenon,50 it has also been under increased

pressure in the societies of the Global North, and definitely since the 2008

financial crisis.51 And this pressure, the fear of falling that Barbara Ehren-
reich (1989) diagnosed almost thirty years ago, reinforces today’s increas-

ing reliance of the middle class on the culture of valuation to maintain

their social mobility and sustain their class position.
The reluctance to challenge the architecture of the financial system after

the 2008 crisis is not only imposed but also desired by a broad social co

alition that includes the elites and middle classes (and certain segments of

the emergent working classes and ser vice workers). But at the same time,

this acceptance of the predominance of the financial system challenges the

Global North’s liberal democratic principles. Paradoxically, biofinance is

the outcome of extreme liberalism and simultaneously signals its demise.

Elsewhere we have called this condition postliberalism: the condensation
of segments of the state together with specific private interests, segments
of social classes, groups, or subjectivities into large formations that co-
alesce along an imagined commonality of social domination.52 In postlib-

36 Chapter Two

eralism we have formations of vertical aggregates of power reassembled
from parts of the fragmented society that was the outcome of forty years
of neoliberal policies. And the devices that are deployed for erecting and
maintaining these postliberal aggregates vary; we can see the reemergence

of strong nationalisms, territorial aggression, escalation of geopolitical

conflicts, and the resurgence of traditional conservative ideologies and
values.
THE END OF THE REFUSAL OF WORK
This political situation is defined by a deep immanent conflict: the vertical-

ization and appropriation of the commons and everyday life (as discussed
earlier, through measure, proprietary regimes, the individualization of so-

cial reproduction, and the transformation of citizenship into a tool for the
regulation of labor markets) undermines working people’s everyday lives

and the flow of embodied value production; at the same time, the verti-
calization of the commons is the condition for maintaining the current
sociomaterial regime of accumulation as well as the balance and stability
of political power in biofinancial societies. The main political responses

to this situation are guided by some form of revival of autonomous po

litical practices that played a role in the 1970s and 1980s (and offered the

framework for the analysis that I presented in the previous sections), in

particular the politics of the refusal of work and the self-organization of

social reproduction: an exit from work toward activities that lie outside

capitalist valorization and the organization of immediate social life outside

formal public ser vices or private provision.53 But when value production

becomes embodied in the existence of working people, as argued earlier,

these political alternatives seem almost impossible. Production no longer

operates through an externality between the subject and his or her work
but through accumulation of the embodied totality of one’s own biofinan-
cialized existence. Equally, large-scale self-organized social reproduction

in the sense that has been described in places outside the metropolises of
the Global North54 seems an untenable political scenario simply because it

is impossible to give up work in its embodied configuration in order to free

space for self-organizing social reproduction.55

Bifo Berardi delivers an intriguing description of the mixture of every-
day life and the biofinancial regime, but his vision that “autonomy is the
independence of social time from the temporality of capitalism” (Berardi,


2009, p. 75) does not seem to hold against the carnal orgy of contemporary

biofinancialization’s feasting on the commons and everyday life. One can-
not say as an expression of autonomy today, “I don’t want to go to work

because I prefer to sleep.” The refusal of work is impossible not only de

facto—that is, because work is indissoluble from the body of working

people, animals, and things—but also because it is not desired: vertical-

ized value production has become the condition for maintaining everyday
existence within the social order.
We can exist and make a life only through the biofinancialized bodies
we have. One can only say “I no longer can work” and be punished, as
Berardi so aptly describes, with stigma, panic, depression, and the deacti-
vation of one’s own capacity for empathy (Berardi, 2011). But neither can
empathy be infused to the social body nor panic and stigma just simply
extracted from it, as if they are external to it; neither Prozac nor poetry,
neither Ritalin nor mindfulness are enough to do this—they inhabit the

social body and when they move from one singular body to the next, they
leave their traces on them; they mark life forever.
Jackie Orr’s (2006) work shows how panic became institutionalized
through its systematic use for “preparing” citizens for national emergen-
cies after the 1950s and 1960s. And along with its institutionalization,

panic also became individualized by entering the psychiatric diagnostic
manuals as “panic disorder,” which later came to be also a medical disorder

as blockbuster pharmaceuticals entered into the lucrative battle for com-

mercializing its medical treatment. “Psychopower”—that is, “technologies

of power and techniques of knowledge developed by a normalizing soci-
ety to regulate the psychological life, health and disorders of individual
and entire populations” (Orr, 2006, p. 11)—transforms materially the very

being of societies and bodies. It becomes incorporated in us; it flows in

people’s blood and across the social tissue in an era of extreme medical

“treatment maximization” (Dumit, 2012). Biofinancialization becomes an
embodied “psychopolitics”; it shapes perception, affects, desires, and our
self-crafting (Orr, 2012). Biofinancialization is in us and in our ecologies.

We live from it and it lives from us: a carnal feast.
Thus, cultures of valuation are inextricably linked to everyday life and
the creation of value, while many of the alternative political analyses and

responses mentioned earlier are trapped in the increasingly exceeded logic
that value is primarily created in a system of wage labor that is supposed

to be external to the broader conditions of people’s everyday existence.

Even approaches that try to resuscitate some form of subtraction from
38 Chapter Two

labor toward self-organized alternative productive activities56 neglect the

fact that these activities sustain the broader system of embodied value

production even if they are not directly implicated in market activities.
In biofinancialized societies value is not only created in the production

process and even less only through labor. The culture of valuation shifts

the site of value creation to a multiplicity of activities that overdetermine
the practice of labor. Labor does not cease to be one of the major sites of

value production; rather, labor and value production cannot exist without

all these practices that contribute in complex ways to sustain a form of

existence that is governed by an intense culture of valuation connecting
di erent aspects and activities of one’s life. In the same way that political
ff

economy (whether traditional, critical, or autonomist) as we know it does

not offer adequate concepts to grasp this political impasse, the refusal of

work does not offer a political alternative to biofinancialized existences. In

order to establish how alternative political responses to biofinancialization

have been rendered obsolete, it is important to explore how the culture of

valuation came to permeate the ontological constitution of life.
PERFORMING BIOFINANCIALIZATION
A possible way to start thinking about the political impasse of biofinan-

cialized societies is offered by the analyses of social studies of finance that

investigate clashes over the valuation of circulating financial objects and
reveal that these objects are active agents that shape the institutions, mar-

kets, and social spaces in which they operate.57 Their valuation is not a
straightforward process. Social studies of finance allow us to understand

that these phenomena cannot be approached with the means of political econ-

omy because their technoscientific ontology,58 their very semiotic-material

existence, creates worlds in which pricing cannot be simply imposed from an
“outside” (be it political power or an instance of capital); rather, valuation is

the outcome of a complex set of intra-actions inside the worlds in which

the clashes of valuation unfold. In The Laws of the Markets, Michel Callon
(1998, p. 10) describes this process: in situations of extreme uncertainty,

actors do not perform their calculations (and subsequently recognize
opportunities) by getting help from outside the networks in which they op-
erate but use their connections and knowledge to arrive at the best possi

ble calculations.59 Economics is just one of these calculative tools. In other

words, economics does not describe markets but performs, modifies, and

revises ways to judge in the markets. In the culture of valuation, di erent
ff

calculative agencies operate alongside other social institutions to econo-
mize the world and make it tradable.
Central to this argument is that every tangible or intangible object or

activity can be potentially valued. What it takes to realize this potential is
the design of an appropriate technology of counting and measuring that

ensures the comparability of values. Measuring technologies are essen-

tially technologies of temporality. Cultures of valuation are sustained by
technologies for appropriating the future. Social studies of finance weave

temporalities, technologies, social interactions, and market uncertain-
ties60 into stories about managing ontological contingency that defy both
neoclassical economics and the received stories of critical political econ-

omy. Calculative agencies are not an instrument of control “in the hands
of capital,” as critical political economy would assert, nor are they mere

instruments for achieving and maintaining perfect markets, as neoclas-
sical economists would assume. Calculative agencies and the resulting
contingency are “ontologically real” (C. W. Smith, 2011, p. 278); they are
embedded in the everydayness, the materiality of current societies, and

the systems of reproduction and production of the Global North. The
fact that contingency is ontological means that it is before the actors that
engage with it.61 What one can take from social studies of finance before
moving ahead, then, is that our semiotic-ontological access to the world

is organized through cultures of valuation to such extent that one can-

not simply withdraw from these cultures without dismantling one’s own

existence.
Although social studies of finance have provided vivid accounts of the
inner life of financial markets, their self-proclaimed view that they provide

a better insight62 into how financial markets and the involved actors work,
think, and act, or that they provide even better explanations of the recent
crises and the uncontrollability of those markets, is misleading.63 Instead

of explaining biofinancialization, a social approach to finance constitutes
one of the components that perform it. Social studies of finance are not just a
response to the proliferation of complex technologies of valuation and their
inherent instability but a continuation of them. The attempt to investigate
and understand finance as a social activity also performs and reproduces
biofinancialization, the mode of existence that made social finance possi

ble. But because of that we find ourselves in an impasse: the ontological

contingency and indeterminacy of valuation does not allow us to fall back
on Marxist, autonomist, or post-Marxist political economic analyses of

40 Chapter Two

value production. Simultaneously, in political terms, we can also not remain

within the realist preoccupation of social studies of finance that is trans-
fixed on delivering neat accounts of the intricacies of pricing and valuation
without providing a political analysis of the social and material conflicts

traversing biofinancial societies. So, what is the meaning of politics when

it comes to grasp a situation in which a specific mode of existence, finan-
cialization, has been ingrained into the ontologies of existence? Is there a

possibility to develop an autonomous politics in these conditions?

ASSETIZATION AND RENT
Autonomy refers to the idea that social conflicts and social movements
drive social transformation instead of just being a mere response to (eco-
nomic and social) power.64 Böhm and colleagues (2010) discuss how au-
tonomous politics in various configurations—for example, autonomy as

a self-valorizing process of one’s own labor from capital, autonomy as a

negative relation to state power, or autonomy as independence from global

hegemonic development policies—are often implicated in reproducing the

conditions that they seek to challenge. On the other hand, though, au-
tonomy produces an excess65 of practices and social spaces that “opens up
frontiers of resistance and change toward radical practices, an equal soci-

ety and self-organization” (Böhm et al., 2010, p. 28). How can this excess

be conceived when biofinancialization becomes both ever present and un-

touchable? How can autonomy be practiced when financialization changes
the ontological tissue of our everyday lives?
As argued earlier, the core characteristic of biofinancial accumulation
is neither immaterial production, nor the infrastructures of information
technologies and algorithmic valuation, nor the underlying networks of

social cooperation, but rather that biofinancialization becomes molecular-
ized in flesh, in code, and in matter. It alters the composition, the mate-

rial infrastructure, of bodies and forms of life. Biofinancialization becomes
fleshly, more than just the exercise of command over life and flesh; bio

financialization becomes the ecology of a terraformed existence, more so

than just a system for accelerating accumulation.
hbsc analysts and marketeers tell us in one of the advertisements of
their “In the Future” campaign that “in tomorrow’s global economy, every

resource will be counted.”66 We see a salmon against an aseptic white

background with a barcode imprinted on its skin. “In the future, the food


FIGURE 2.1 — HSBC / J. Walter Thompson London. In the Future. Supply Chain.

Photograph by Andy Rudak. Reprinted with permission.

chain and the supply chain will merge.”67 This future starts today. It is a

future where nature-cultural creations will become ser vice providers and

resources: “local demand,” “global supply,” the postindustrial assetization
of the whole planet. Not only does biofinancialization rely on speculating

on the profit extracted from production, but it is also the rent-generating

assetization of life and ecology. Biofinancialization is not only “the be-

coming rent of profit” (Vercellone, 2010) and “the becoming rent of rent”
(Marazzi, 2010) but also the becoming rent of Earth beings: animals,
plants, and ecosystems.68 As I discuss in chapter 8, technoscience plays
a pivotal role in this process of turning Earth beings to assets to rent—a

terraformed planet.
SOCIAL SCIENCE FICTION
Biofinancialization is materially ingrained into the affects, the muscles,

the sociability, the desires, the lifeworlds of working people, nonhuman

others, and things. It is impossible to think of autonomy in these condi-

tions as independence from capital, state power, and hegemonic globaliza-

tion; autonomy can only mean organizing, experimenting, and inventing

new forms of life that attempt to create livable worlds. Autonomy in this
sense is less about independence from social institutions and more about

recombining materialities that instigate social and ecological justice. Au-
tonomy here means, paradoxically, organizing interdependences that allow

for creating ways of being—other forms of life—that divert existing modes

of existence in unexpected directions.
When cultures of valuation and value production fuse onto the
ontological fabric of life, novel ways of organizing and alternative world-

making practices start to emerge. What is an adequate way to conceive
these emerging alternative forms of political organization? Rather than a

political economy of autonomy or a social studies of finance and valua-

tion, I am thinking here of social science fiction as a way to grasp the au-

tonomy of the political in biofinancial societies: a hybrid of social science

and science fiction that allows for alternative concepts, tropes, and meth-
ods to evolve in order to conceive how other forms of life can be created.
Social science fiction has a long tradition in science fiction itself; Ursula
Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick, and Kim Stanley Robinson, for
example, deconstruct present social order by creating alternative and pos

sible future societies.69 Social science fiction uses not only technoscientific


FIGURE 2.2 — HSBC / J. Walter Thompson London. In the Future. Global Supply.

Photograph by Andy Rudak. Reprinted with permission.

knowledge and natural science but also social science to interrogate the

limits of current social organization and social relations and experiment

with creating an immediate experience that allows other alternatives to
be imagined as possible.

By expanding on these works that bring social science to speculative

fiction (social science fiction), I am moving in the other direction: to infuse
speculative thought into social science research (social science fiction) in
order to fabulate70 about the autonomy of politics. Fabulation is more than
the cultivation of visions of future societies; it is about experimenting with

alternative tropes of enunciation and about putting in motion alternative
worlds of existence. Social science fiction as I am using it here is about

changing the conditions of experience in order to make alternative futures

possible. The future is here. Biofinancialization is not just a mode of accumu-

lation but a universalizing ontological machine of terraformation, one
that changes all forms of life. Social science fiction is about doing scholarly

theoretical and empirical research to mobilize fictional alternatives to a
terraformed planet. Already in the introduction I have mentioned that the
methodology of this book brings together research and speculative thought,
and I use social science fiction to do this, not by introducing fiction into
the stories told in this book but by telling theory in a way that could evoke
and potentially contribute to make fictional worlds, which could always ir-
rupt into our everyday lives. Social science fiction is social research, social
analysis, and social theory told as fiction.

TERRAFORMING EARTH™
Semiocapital, biocapital, infocapital, neurocapital—it is inherent to pro-

ductionism to seek and open new frontiers: endocoloniality.71 The frontier
of matter in biofinancial societies is not the same as the colonial appro-

priation of natural creations. Biofinancialization is not about conquering

ecological resources that are necessary to sustain life; rather, biofinancial-
ization is an experimental project entailing the constant remixing of the

cultural, the biotic, and the abiotic. Bios in biofinancialization is not nature,
it is flesh and matter. It refers to the fusion of code and matter. When this

fusion touches on the very materiality of human and animal bodies and

the geobody, it no longer seems to be able to be sufficiently described by the
term enclosure of the commons.72

When the digital and the material, information and life are intrinsically
imprinted onto each other, matter as such and the biota more specifi-

cally do not lie outside the process of biofinancialization. The commons

are not external and against their enclosures, but neither can one say that
there are degrees of enclosure; it is untenable to assume that some things

are fully enclosed in the system of accumulation, while others are fully

outside it and in between are things that are only partly enclosed (such as

air, water, Internet, culture). When matter in its ontological composition

is a frontier, both the commons and their enclosures exist inside each other.
There is no commons versus biofinancialization but biofinancialization

in the commons.73 The subjectivity of working people, the body of the

commons, and the ecobody of Earth are not separable from the current
architectures of accumulation. Everything belongs 100 percent to the res

communes and 100 percent to the current regime of biofinancial accumu-

lation: terraformation.
The idea of terraformation, since its first appearance in the 1930s and
1940s, is not only a common science fiction theme.74 It is also used to de-
scribe the science of remodeling and remaking the biosphere of a plan-
etary body in order to make it hospitable to humans and to enable it to

support life.75 Terraforming in science fiction speaks to a territory—outer

space—that is currently more desired and disputed than the Antarctic or

the high seas of Earth.76 Terraformation is as much about science fiction,
technoscience, and colonization77 as about geopolitics, value production,
and the valuation and financialization of space.78 Terraformation is not the
vision of extraterrestrial geoengineering but a “local” project of controlled

manipulation of Earth’s ontology: Terraforming Earth, a vast capital enter-
prise whose primary actors, however, are not spectral entrepreneurs that
apparently move and shape the world for the rest of us, but the processes

that measure and evaluate Earth’s spaces and matter.79 Terraforming Earth

is much closer to our realities than even its most dedicated believers,
probably some nasa technocrats, would have thought. It is as close as

the worlds that science fiction has morphed into our experience: social
science fiction.
But unlike the vision of terraforming other planets, Terraforming Earth
does not have a blueprint for action. Terraforming Earth does not have a
preconception of what “Earth” is or can be. Earth is terraformed without a
prototype and a plan. We don’t know what Earth as such is or was or even

what it is able to do or become as a precondition for terraforming it ap-
propriately. Rather, Terraforming Earth is a simulacrum of itself; it is the
46 Chapter Two

opening of the frontier of matter, a practice of immersion in material ex-

perimentation, rather than of agency. Terraforming Earth is the outcome
of the multiplication of climate change, acid oceans, the sixth extinction,
synthetic biology, chemical pollution, extractivism, nuclear power, virtual
space, big science, and the biofinancial logic that underlies social-material

encounters.
MATERIAL ARTICULATIONS
Terraforming Earth has no master plan, only effects, that can be purport-
edly measured and their future impacts evaluated. The algorithmic moves

of biofinance described in this chapter are only graspable as global motions
on another planet as close as ours. On a planetary scale, Terraforming
Earth unfolds without unified agency. As argued earlier in this chapter,
humans as a species do not act as a subject by intention but by immersion,

contingency, and involvement. This is the point where an understanding
of an autonomous politics as the creation of alternative ontological inter-
dependencies starts.
When ecologies of existence become terraformed, ontology returns
to politics: reclaiming everyday materiality by actively recomposing and
rearticulating it. I take inspiration here from Clifford’s (2001, 2004, 2009)

work on indigenous politics as rooted articulations (and disarticulations)
of variously scaled histories, traditions, and practices on the uneven and
variegated terrain of global space and time. But here I want to think of

articulation beyond cultural practice and semiosis.80 I am thinking of a
practical process of articulation that operates on the level of matter, prac-

tices that disarticulate and rearticulate matter into unexpected organic

and inorganic ensembles grounded in the material constraints of biofinan-
cial life: How can the commons be expanded when they are fused with
biofinance? How can terraformation become deuniversalized and matter

decolonized?
Octavia Butler offers an alternative vision of organizing life in Xeno-

genesis (2000): ontological organizing, the creation of new couplings with

other beings and things and new kinds of life able to respond to altered

environments and to create livable words. If one wants to talk about au-
tonomy in biofinancial societies, then this is about reciprocal becomings

with other things, materials, and living organisms that let alternative ontolo

gies of existence emerge. In Haraway’s (2013) words, it is about creating “a

seed bag for terraforming with earth others”: terraformation from below.

In the beginning of this chapter I borrowed the idea of terraformation to
describe the current moves of finance as it opens the frontier of matter

and appropriates bios. I described the material workings of biofinance and
how it resides within the current socioeconomic nexus in order to ques-
tion the reach of traditional autonomist politics that attempts to evacuate
these conditions. My argument in this chapter and the departure point

of this book, then, is that traditional forms of autonomous politics as we
know them are unable to respond to the universalizing system that biofi-
nance has inserted in our everyday life and material surrounds. Starting
from this assumption, in the chapters that follow I develop an approach to
autonomy as a practice that lies in compounds of algorithmic code, mate-
rial processes, and bodies, not outside or against them but in the remaking

of alternative ontologies and the reclaiming of their materiality. This is social
science fiction, a set of empirical analyses and theoretical concepts that can
allow us to modify our experience so that we can adapt and re-adapt politics

and autonomy to conditions where there is no prior state of being to fall back

or no “future wholeness which may yet save us” (D. B. Rose, 2004, p. 24).

48 Chapter Two

03
ONTOLOGICAL
ORGANIZING
Do I use Facebook to stay in contact with my family?—No, all you need is a mobile

phone. At home, up there, they don’t have anything except mobiles. Sometimes you

just beep them so that they can see from your area code, where you are and that
you’ve done a step further. In Facebook I have recovered some friends that I have

lost for years—now they live in Paris. Last year, after the Pagani camp I wanted to

continue to Germany together with a friend. We traveled through Macedonia and
Serbia until Hungary, where we split. We prepared everything, we had every part

of the route as a copy from Google Earth with us, printed in Internet cafes. And we
used gps on our mobiles. My friend took a train to Germany, but he fell asleep and
had to drop out in Vienna where they caught him. I was arrested in Hungary and
brought to a camp for six weeks. They threatened me to remain detained for years
if I wouldn’t want leave the country voluntarily. So I decided to return to Greece. In

Serbia the police stole all of my money and my mobile phone and together with many
others I was brought to a cell. Such a thing I didn’t ever experience in Greece. When

I finally arrived in Macedonia the police asked me if I was on my way to Serbia or to

Greece. They showed me the path and even gave me some coins to make a phone call.
I already spoke on the phone with a friend who through Evros came to Athens where
he now lives. He tells me that actually it is very cheap in Evros, only $400. And this is
certainly linked to the fingerprint questions. If you try to make it through the islands
it is much more difficult without being fingerprinted. That’s why it is more expensive.
In Evros you can pass without much money and without fingerprints.
— interview with sapik, lesbos, greece, september 7, 2010

TRANSMIGRANTS’ MOBILE COMMONS
When we think of autonomous social movements, we rarely understand

them as forms of action that attempt to reorganize the material conditions

of everyday life and the mundane ontologies in which they operate. Social
movement politics are usually conceived as a form of oppositional political

organizing that attempts to evacuate and/or challenge the policies of estab-

lished institutions. In the previous chapter I argued that despite the central-
ity of such politics in social movement action, they seem to be unable to
provide an alternative to the forceful permeation of everyday life and the
environment by the universalizing system of biofinance. In this chapter I
make the same case for an autonomous political practice that organizes

alternative ontologies of existence from the perspective of social move-
ment action. The previous chapter discusses how autonomous politics is
related to current forms of control; this chapter approaches the emergence
of alternative understandings of autonomy from inside current practices
of social movements. To what extent can we approach social movement
action as the practice of changing the existing material conditions of exis-
tence? How far can we go with the idea of ontological organizing?1
I turn to migrants’ mobility as a site where such processes of organizing

can be explored. The shared knowledge, affective cooperation, mutual sup-
port, and care between migrants when they are on the road or when they

arrive somewhere constitute di erent practices that let organizational on-
ff

tology emerge. I describe these flat mundane ontologies of moving people

as the mobile commons of migration.2 Sapik, in the interview extract at
the beginning of the chapter, reminds us what it means to cross the bor-
ders into Europe. Once one is in Europe an even more brutally patrolled

border stands in the way: European citizenship. Is it possible to challenge

the existing political institutions of citizenship by organizing ontologically

rather than by challenging constituted European social policies of citizen-

ship? The ideas that I present here do not attempt to question citizenship

and its possible importance in certain situations but rather to open, as

Peter Linebaugh wrote, a chink in the wall and explore the possibilities
that lie behind the horizon of politics that solely focus their action toward

constituted political institutions.

For many, citizenship appears as a wall indeed. Citizenship is hard
fought between those who try to restrict it and those who invest in the

efficacy of citizenship as a potential guarantor of rights, justice, and lib-
eration. Such critical investments can be found in the idea of citizenship
50 Chapter Three

FIGURE 3.1 — Julie Okmûn / Contre-Faits. No Land’s Men, the Struggle for Calais.

Reprinted with permission.

beyond sovereignty and the state, which are discussed later, or in ideas of

local citizenship, citizen labs, transnational citizenship, global citizenship,
or acts of citizenship.3 But however citizenship is defined, it can operate as
a wall if it represents the ultimate horizon of political practice and social

analysis. One could respond to the increasing securitization and abjection

through citizenship with the introduction of another qualifying adjective
to the concept of citizenship. But this is not the aim here. Rather, the meth-

odological principle guiding this work is to see through the chink in the

wall, to cultivate an imaginary and a practical sensibility to what lies before
any claims for citizenship can be articulated and, most importantly, what
lies after citizenship. What is an effective practice for challenging current

forms of citizenship in Europe, the place in which this study of migrants on

the ground and on the road—transmigrants—is located?

Throughout this chapter I argue that the efficacy of autonomous poli-
tics lies in the capacity of mobile people to bring to life mundane orga

nizational ontologies of existence. In order to develop this argument, in
the following four sections of the chapter I approach migration as a form
of autonomous transnational mobility unfolding against the current re-
gime for the control of movement. Then, in the last four sections I describe
how this autonomous approach to mobility is practiced on the ground: the
Ontological Organ izing 51

organizational ontology of the mobile commons. Seven photographs by

Julie Okmûn accompany these thoughts.4 I saw these photographs for the

first time in 2009 in an exhibition of Julie’s work that No Borders South
Wales organized at the Oriel Canfas gallery and the Chapter Arts Centre in

Cardiff, Wales. Julie’s photographs convey a sensibility that is central to the

argument of this chapter: the importance that the immersion in everyday
transient lifeworlds and the involvement in the creation of mundane on-
tologies of life have for autonomous mobility and for making autonomous
spaces of existence.
LABOR AND MOBILITY

For almost forty years now the response of established European politics to

migration was to exclude mobility from the constitution of polity. Mobi

lity was also seen as external to labor, which underlies most of the debates

about migration politics; social position and class was thought independent

of movement. But migration not only brings the current political system

into turmoil, it also destabilizes class and recomposes what it is. The ques-
tion of the past decades was how to tame and assimilate the supposedly alien

migrants into polity. Now this question is rendered obsolete by the fact that

as people did not stop moving, creating new lives elsewhere, mixing with

the native working classes, and hybridizing everyday culture, they become
effectively unassimilable. We are facing a di erent situation, one that is not
ff

concerned with how to immobilize migrants but with how to institutional-

ize mobility: that is, how to codify mobility, how to make it productive and
sustainable, and how to combine it with the decline of sovereignty.
This is a moment when the cards of labor, mobility, and sovereignty are

mixed and redistributed again. We used to think of mobility as a move-
ment through space. And this is of course still true: migration is applied
geopolitics on the ground. This spatial approach focused on the idea of
territoriality in conceptualizing mobility. Consider the strategies of terri-
torialization in the workhouse, which attempted to capture the wandering

mob in Europe of the late Middle Ages,5 or the first foreign worker hostels

of the Gastarbeiter era,6 to name just two examples. The governance of
mobile populations is an important site for the exercise of control and the

genesis of biopower.7 The recurring pattern was the attempt to suffocate
mobility by terminating it. Mobility-immobility was the driving conflict. In

52 Chapter Three

these conditions immobility is associated primarily with territoriality, doc-

ile labor, becoming native, and integration within the local culture; mobil-

ity is conceived as sabotage, insubordination, escape, untrained work, and
multiple belongings. Nation-state/territory/people is the golden triptych

of modern sovereignty. But in conditions when mobility becomes a perma-
nent and structural aspect of sovereignty, a new perspective on mobility
emerges: mobility as a movement in time.
When migration becomes tightly entangled with production and social re-
production,8 the role of control is not to suppress mobility. Rather, it attempts
to render the speed of absorption into the local labor markets compatible

with the speed of flows of mobile populations. Migration control is about
speed and its regulation. It works as an equalizer between labor markets, po

litical opinion, and migratory movements. For example, detention and de-

portation camps are less a form of blocking the circulation of mobility; they
reinsert irregular migration back into the productive logics of Global North
societies by making out of irregular mobility either controllable populations

or illegalized people.9 Camps are speed boxes of migratory movements.10

From forced migration to managed migration during the 1950s and
1960s, mobility was governed productively by territorializing movements
and inserting them into the spatial regulation of working bodies.11 As we
move to the temporal regime of mobility control, the main concern is to
transform ungovernable streams to governable subjects of mobility that
adjust to the needs of local labor markets and local demographics. These

needs are not “natural”—pure numbers depicting how much workforce

each market can absorb—but they are politically overdetermined by issues

related to security, nationalism, populist gambling of mainstream political

parties, labor policies, and so on. This is what the border regime does: it

is not there to block migration; it tries to institutionalize it by controlling

its speed and magnitude.12 The temporal control of mobility is effectively
surpassing the sovereign governance of territories. As much as power over
a territory and the control of borders are considered the pillars of sov-
ereignty, today’s practices of mobility reveal that secure borders do not

and cannot exist. Sovereignty is the futile attempt to regulate the porosity
of borders: porocracy.13 Even the heavy militarization of the US-Mexico

border after the 1990s proves “the incomplete, tenuous, and unstable na-

ture of US dominion,” as Gilberto Rosas (2012, p. 76) suggests in his powerful

ethnography of Barrio Libre, groups of young people who inhabit the sewer

system under the border of Nogales (Sonora/Arizona).




The turn to a temporal understanding of migration is crucial for the
approach I develop here: migration cannot be stopped or fully territorialized;

rather, it is a permanent and indispensable feature of Global North socie

ties. Institutionalizing the temporal intensities of mobility is necessary in
order to insert migration into labor in conditions in which spatialization

has proved to be increasingly ineffective. Legal or illegal, regular or ir-

regular, managed or unauthorized migration is directly entangled to pro-
duction, labor, and its local contingencies.14 So, in order to understand

migration we need to rethink the changing forms of value production
described in the previous chapter: the transition from the intensification
of labor—that is, the duration of labor and the intensity of labor15—to the

extensification of labor appropriation that involves the whole existence

of the worker. Mobility is probably one of the most important and wide-

spread factors of labor extensification: extracting value from the fact that

bodies can become mobile in the most averse circumstances. Value pro-
duction becomes, as argued earlier, embodied. This happens by creating
di erent regimes and types of labor in order to differently insert specific
ff

segments of the mobile classes into diverse labor markets. Differential

inclusion means that di erent modalities of entry into a country and dif
ff

54 Chapter Three

ferent residence statuses—primarily through immigration controls and

legal requirements—create di erent subjects of labor.16

ff

DIFFERENTIAL INCLUSION IS CITIZENSHIP IS CONTROL
The differential inclusion of mobile populations points always to the way

labor, mobility, and securitization are all directly connected with the

machinations of sovereignty. The toll to govern this tripartite relation-
ship is citizenship. Of course, the process of differential inclusion is not

exclusively related to the modern politics of citizenship. On the contrary,
differential inclusion accompanies multiple forms of belonging across
di erent historical periods. The inclusion of the poor in the European
ff

medieval city; the temporary enslavement of white laborers in the British
colonies; the freed black slave owners in the American South; the thin

line between free and unfree as well as between waged and unpaid labor,

which varies historically, socially, and culturally and produces di erent
ff

forms of social stratification; the di erent racisms that were mobilized
ff

to fragment black people and include them in variable positions in pol-

ity: all of these are just examples showing that differential inclusion is a

contingent historical phenomenon.17
Thus, I use the idea of differential inclusion not to highlight its historical
novelty but rather to argue that the specificity of today’s differential inclu-

sion functions through citizenship; the term citizenship is used here as a

specific form of governance that regulates the relation between rights and
representation. This double-R axiom appears as the foundation of modern

polity.18 Rights are considered crucial for governing migration (who is sub-
ject to rights and who is not is the primary way to create di erent segments
ff

of citizens). But representation has increasingly played a role in defining

who is entitled to have rights and what kind of rights one is entitled to
have. The cultural identity and the collective feeling of belonging of mobile
or marginalized populations lead to the construction of an ad hoc social
subject that then can become a subject of rights. Only through representa

tion are rights possible. Citizenship is the form of governing this unstable

and dangerous balance of the double-R axiom. Too much representation

of a certain group (for example, Sans Papiers) without rights can create a
potential explosive social situation because this particular group is socially

active without having any legal, social, or political rights. A too-restricted


representation of a social group makes exclusion and structural racism ap-

parent (as, for example, the 2005 Banlieue uprising in France showed).
Imagine a scale where we have on the one pole full rights and on the
other complete illegalization and invisibility. A cut is placed somewhere
between these two extreme poles. This cut is citizenship. Where the cut is

placed is a political question (for example, in the current conditions affected

by the 2008 economic crisis and a broader conservative backlash across
many European societies, the cut moves toward illegalization and invis-

ibility). Citizenship is this toll of sovereign governance that regulates the
balance between rights and representation and renders certain populations

as legitimate bearers of rights while other populations are marked as inex-

istent. For example, Imogen Tyler (2010) discusses how selective British
citizenship is by showing that the 1981 Nationality Act was designed to ex-
clude the peoples of the ex-colonies by protecting only the right to British

citizenship by those who had a lineage to someone born on the British isles.

We can think of the 1981 Nationality Act as a cut (that is, a particular

configuration of citizenship) on this scale, which has on the one pole full
rights and on the other complete illegalization in conditions of Thatcher’s
1980s Britain. Once the cut is positioned, certain groups have di erent
ff

tools for changing the place of the cut, most importantly demonstrations,
uprisings, social mobilizations, and protests (and sometimes academic re-
search can contribute to this too). The Brixton riots of 1981 and the broader
civil unrest of that period can be read as a response to the exclusionary
design and function of the 1981 Nationality Act. More generally we can say
that it is through all these struggles that sovereignty is pushed toward the

pole of full rights. And there are always long periods of backlash when there

is a growing anti-immigrant sentiment and the cut is pushed back toward

the pole of illegalization. So far I have established that the temporal regime
of mobility control reveals that migration is an inseparable feature of sov-
ereignty and that it is through citizenship that the temporality of mobility
is controlled and the speed of inclusion/exclusion in the sociopolitical

system of a certain society is managed.
THE IMPOSSIBLE CITIZENSHIP
There is a paradox in this function of citizenship as the regulatory mecha-

nism of inclusion and exclusion: the more a society moves toward citizen-

ship, the more it creates the conditions for its disappearance as a form of
56 Chapter Three

governance.19 If you include everyone and if you assign rights to everyone,

citizenship becomes obsolete. “Citizenship for all” is an impossible term;
it is always “incomplete” (van Gunsteren, 1998). Or else, imagine a society

that assigns citizenship to everyone. In this fictional society citizenship is

not connected to rights or any other legal status; it is a mere social ritual.

Citizenship would be granted automatically to every denizen, and to the

extent that, as in any society, rituals for social cohesion are important,

everyone who wants to demonstrate a strong sense of belonging to this

society can buy in almost every convenience shop a Home Office Citizenship

Medal for £8.99. You can wear it every day or just forget it in a drawer or

lose it. This fictional society would be very di erent, of course, than the
ff

societies we know. But probably the most important difference is that

this society would not have borders. To think this the other way round:
citizenship coexists with borders. Citizenship coexists with the exercise
of sovereign control, as Bridget Anderson, Nandita Sharma, and Cynthia
Wright (2009) show in their research. The more we talk about security, the
more we talk about citizenship. This is the predicament of citizenship. It
feeds from the power of sovereignty to erect and maintain borders, bor-
ders that it cannot ultimately control. Citizenship cannot be thought to be
outside sovereignty and control.
Julia O’Connell Davidson’s (2010) work on trafficking exemplifies this
function of citizenship from another perspective, namely how in the
name of protecting human rights and liberal citizenship, sovereign control

promotes a tougher take on the freedom of mobility and leads to the in-
troduction of restrictive migration measures as pro–human rights poli-

cies. In this sense we can think of citizenship as a form of governance
that performs explicitly exclusion (alongside with its differential inclusion

function). Whatever qualifying attribute we add to citizenship—activist,

irregular, imperfect, biological, sexual, unrecognized20—it cannot avoid an
optic that looks at people’s movements from the perspective of control.

The vision that citizenship is inherently liberal can be historically revealed
as a fiction. There is no global unified citizenship because citizenship ex-

ists only as one of the tools that are deployed to maintain national sov-
ereignty. It is thus limited to the territorial space of the nation-state and

stops where the borders of a country stop—while the rest of a country’s

activities (such as capital movements, trade, circulation of elite popula-
tions, and war) can extend beyond its borders. The limits of citizenship
are the limits of sovereignty. But liberal citizenship is problematic not only
because it excludes by design everyone who is outside its borders and




differentially includes the denizens inside its borders but also because

there is a long history of actively “denationalizing” dangerous or unwel-

comed citizens—citizenship here can be viewed as “accidental” (Nyers,

2006) or “reversible” (Tsianos and Pieper, 2011). Elsewhere we used the
term postliberalism to discuss how these ambivalences of citizenship

push liberal democracies to their limits (Papadopoulos et al., 2008; see
also chapter 2).21 In postliberal conditions citizenship is not defined by
its values but by its reach: it has to be always protected from expanding
too much and including people who in certain political conditions can-

not be considered citizens.
Thus, understanding and theorizing migration in terms of differential
inclusion and citizenship is an important tool for creating possibilities for

certain groups to be included in polity. But it can never respond to the
question that migration poses to sovereignty: what about those who are

mobile and cannot be included—that is, the majority of transmigrants?

Here the relevance of my discussion of migration and citizenship becomes

apparent for the argument of the book. If politics that addresses primar-
ily social power becomes increasingly entangled in what it contests and
fails to create social transformation, then an alternative view of politics
emerges: politics as ontological organizing.

58 Chapter Three

AUTONOMY OF MIGRATION REVISITED
How is it then possible to shift our perspective from the order of sovereign

control to the primacy of migrants’ mobility—that is, to read the current

regime of production through migration and to understand sovereignty
through mobility, rather than the other way around? This shift represents
probably the most important insight of the autonomous approach to mi-

gration: the attempt to see migration not simply as a response to political

and economic necessities but as a constituent force in the formation of
polity and social life.22 Yann Moulier Boutang (1998) has offered an impres-
sive account of this movement historically. The autonomy-of-migration

approach foregrounds that mobility is not primarily a movement that is
defined and acts by making claims to institutional power. It rather means
that the movement itself becomes a political movement and a social move-

ment. The autonomy-of-migration thesis highlights the social and subjec-

tive aspects of mobility before control. It rejects understanding migration
as a mere response to economic and social malaise.23 Instead migration is
autonomous, meaning that it has the capacity to develop its own logics, its
own motivation, its own trajectories that control comes later to respond
to—not the other way round.24 Of course, this does not mean that mobil-

ity operates independently of control. Very often it is subjected to it and

succumbs to violent state or private interventions that attempt to tame it;

probably the politics of detention and deportation is the best example of

such violence that shows how migrant mobility can be halted and brutally

controlled.25
There is no space for romanticization of nomadism and mobility in

the autonomy-of-migration approach. Migration grapples with the harsh,

often deadly, realities of control. However, migration is not just a mere
response to them. Rather it creates new realities that allow migrants to

exercise their own mobility with, against, or beyond existing control. In
this sense, the autonomy-of-migration thesis is about training our senses

to see movement before capital (but not independent from it) and mobility

before control (but not as disconnected from it). One of the most common
critiques26 of the autonomy-of-migration approach is that it substitutes all

these di erent migrant subjectivities and the diverse concrete spatialities

ff

of movements into a new big narration of migration. The term migration
supposedly homogenizes and effectively erases the diverse lived experiences
of migrants vis-à-vis the state. Of course, migration encompasses a broad

spectrum of practices of mobility: humanitarian, forced, war, environmental,

cultural, economic, circular, seasonal, internal migration—all these are

radically di erent types of mobility. However, all these mobilities are not
ff

neutral definitions of migrational movements.
Mobility is often polyvalent, complex, and open to di erent classifi-
ff

cations depending on the perspective from which it is approached.27 For
example, where and how a young transmigrant can be classified as an un-
accompanied refugee minor or as somebody who circulates between the
country of origin and the current country of destination or as an economic
migrant is less self-evident than it appears in the first instance.28 Subsum-

ing all these di erent types and cases of mobility under the concept of

ff

migration does not mean flattening out their differences; rather it attempts
to articulate their commonalities, which stem from all these di erent

ff

struggles for movement that confront the regimes of mobility control. The

supposedly abstract and homogenizing category of migration does not at-
tempt to unify all the existing multiplicity of movements under one logic

but to signify that all these singularities contribute to an affective and ge-

neric gesture of freedom that evades the concrete violence and control of
moving people. Migration in the autonomy-of-migration approach refers

to a kind of politics that entails neither uniformity nor abstraction; rather, it
relies on struggles for movement that escape and subsequently delegiti-

mize and derail sovereign control.
The first meaning of the autonomy-of-migration approach is an empiri-

cal one: the real struggles, practices, and tactics that escape control. This

approach to migration highlights the heterogenizing practices of state
regulation of mobility: sovereignty breaks the connectivity between mul-
tiple mobile people in order to make them visible and render them gov-

ernable subjects of mobility. And it does this through operationalizing
the category of citizenship in order to create di erent classes of citizens.
ff

The heterogenizing effects of power should not be confused here with

the multiplicity of mobile subjectivities and struggles. These are effaced

at the expense of making clearly defined heterogeneous objects of gover-

nance. The second meaning of the autonomy-of-migration approach is an

affective one: migration nurtures the belief in the possibility to be free to

move. This second meaning of migration in the autonomy-of-migration

approach is speculative. It is a speculative affect that embodies a virtuality
as secure, free, and warm as it can get in the harsh conditions of sover-

eign control. Migration in this second sense is more related to an affective
imaginary; it exists as potentiality and virtuality that becomes actualized
and materialized through the diverse movements of people.

60 Chapter Three

“I WORK ONLY FOR PAPERS”
Having established the current temporal regime of mobility control vis-

à-vis the autonomy of migration, I discuss in the remaining sections of

this chapter how autonomy is claimed, practiced, and sustained. This can
be best exemplified in an emblematic type of mobility: illegalized border
crossing. When migrants are considered irregular citizens, they are com-

monly conceived either as criminals or as being forced to move, not as ac-

tive creators of the realities they find themselves in or of the realities they
create when they move.29 This constructs them as irregular or unauthor-
ized subjects. It is not primarily the legal context that creates the category

of the illegal migrant, but rather a specific political and theoretical view

that does not allow for agency that is not driven by external necessities; the
legal context only consolidates this perspective. Irregularity is a practice of

governance that illegalizes migrants in order to control them through the

current arrangement of borders and citizenship.
In conditions where illegalized migration has become one of the primary
migration routes to Global North societies,30 citizenship effectively limits

freedom of movement by creating a minority of migrants eligible to access

citizenship and a majority of abject and superfluous foreign aliens. Clan-
destinity then becomes a means to maintain the possibility of movement
in conditions in which migrants are illegalized through the temporal order

of sovereignty and the governance of citizenship. This raises an enormous
political issue when we are confronted with migration today: the more

one tries to support rights and representation through citizenship, the

more one contributes to the restriction of movement. This dilemma is well
known to activist organizations that engage with migration and radical

border politics.31 The politicization of irregularity effectively contributes
to its enforcement. From the perspective of mobile people, confronting

illegalization is not an intended (or even unintended) political act.

The dilemma is that migrants do not usually get involved in political

mobilizations about migration as such. Migrants tend to become invisible,

to disappear, to dis-identify themselves.32 When migrants mobilize politi

cally within traditional established political institutions, they do it only in

a strategic way to challenge a particular and direct form of discrimination

in a concrete situation. Many of the transmigrants in the camps of Pagani
and Igoumenitsa in Greece—where most of the empirical materials that

underlie the arguments presented in this chapter were gathered—used di er

ff

ent versions of the phrase “I work only for papers.” Initially it was difficult



to understand this phrase: On the one hand we know that a lot of them
work in the worst possible conditions, without being documented and, of

course, for money. On the other hand, “papers”—that is, the documents

that one needs in order to make it to the target destination—are not some-

thing that you “work for”; rather, we think of “papers” as something that
one is legally entitled to (or not). But these transmigrants challenged two

of the most widespread assumptions of what a migrant is: first, that mi

grants are only workers where their subjectivity is defined by their capac-
ity to offer their labor power in “foreign” labor markets, and second, the

distinction between legality-illegality by questioning the dualism between

those who are legal subjects of citizenship (if they have “papers”) or illegal

subjects outside citizenship (if they don’t).

These transmigrants turn both of these assumptions on their heads: not

only is work secondary for their subjectivity, but they see that the actual

work they do is the work for acquiring “papers”—something that Ellie

Vasta (2011) describes as “irregular formality” and the “paper market” to
articulate the fluidity between irregular and regular statuses from the mi

grant point of view. This is a double blasphemy against the logic of labor

as well as the logic of citizenship. In fact, these transmigrants do not even

intend to play the game of political participation in our established institu-

62 Chapter Three

tions or engage in acts of citizenship through mobilizing their subjectivity
as citizens or as workers. Or we could even say that they would engage in
any act of political participation if this would help them get the “papers”

that they need.
IMPERCEPTIBLE ONTOLOGIES
The forms of political action that migrants engage cannot be confused

with a mobilization that resembles the action of a collective political sub-

ject. The conditions of current migration defy the possibility of construct-
ing a viable intentional and permanent political subjectivity, whether it is

a liberal governmental subject or a radical subject of social change. To the
extent that one cannot build liberal societies with migration, one cannot
do traditional left politics with it. It is impossible to adapt and incorporate
migration into our own typical representational political projects be they

right, left, liberal, or radical left. And if this happens it will only be for a

short period of time, until a specific group of migrants have achieved their

strategic political goals for a certain issue, until the new migration wave

arrives, until new relations of care between mobile migrants are built on

the ground, or until new transnational mobile communities emerge that

undermine any permanence of classical representational politics.

The specter of migration will never become a new “working class.” It

will always remain a specter, which comes in the night through the back

door of your nation on a smuggled vessel; by using false papers; by crossing
hundreds of miles of mountains or deserts; by changing one’s own iden-
tity; by destroying the skin of one’s own fingertips with acid and a knife
to avoid identification; by overstaying a visa, an au pair contract, or the
regular tourist period of stay. The specter of migration will always remain

a specter, though one that is much more present than any of the political

ghosts summoned in the history of political thought and political struggle

in order to satisfy nationalist sentiment and fulfill the desire for securi-
tization or revolution alike. The specter of migration will always be with

us, among us, more real than anything else: cleaning your home, cleaning

your office, cleaning your roads, cleaning your buses, taking care of your
children, developing the software of our devices, repairing your devices,

fixing your car, providing sex, providing babysitting, providing care, ironing

your shirts, answering your phone calls, doing your gardening, building

your house, collecting your strawberries, working in the abattoirs, living in


the flat next door. Migrants do not hold the place of a historical or a politi

cal subject as such; rather, they tend to become imperceptible to history.33
But the more they do this, the more they change history by undermining
the sovereign pillars of contemporary societies.

The approach presented here breaks with the dominant integrationist

canon of migration studies, which maintains the fundamental assumption
that migrants’ practices become political only if they become integrated

into an existing political order—be it in the country of origin, the country

of destination, or one of the countries through which transmigrants pass.
The cohesion of this polity is taken for granted, and migrants’ political

practices are considered political only if they address and operate in it.34

So, what kind of politics do migrants do if it is not gravitating around in-

tegrationism? What are the politics of migration when they cross borders?
What kinds of politics are performed when people become mobile despite
the restrictions of migration controls? What kind of politics characterize
all these migrant practices that attempt neither to integrate people into an

existing polity nor to systematically resist this polity?
Following Rancière (1998), migrants’ political practices could be con-

ceived as attempts to create a new situation that allows those who have no

part to enter and change the conditions through which social existence is
perceived, conceptualized, and experienced. How else can we understand

the silent and mundane transformations that happen when migrants who

clandestinely defy the borders that block their future expose the limits of

liberal citizenship without ever intending it?35 These politics transform the

political without ever addressing it in its own terms and practices. Mi

grants’ politics develop their own codes, their own practices, their own
logics that are almost imperceptible from the perspective of established
political practice: first, because we are not trained to perceive them as

“proper” politics, and second, because they create an excess that cannot

be addressed in the existing system of political representation. But these

politics are powerful enough to change the conditions of a certain situa-

tion and the conditions of existence of the participating actors. These are

politics of ontological change, a politics that bypasses existing constituted
politics to de facto transform the materiality of existence.
Migrants’ politics of ontological change are in this sense nonpolitics

(that is, nonrepresentable in the dominant existing polity). With Asef Bayat
we could call them “social nonmovements.” In his work on social and po

litical mobilizations in the Muslim Middle East in the 2000s, Bayat (2010)

describes the invisible everyday activities that prepared all these radical

64 Chapter Three

transformations—nonmovements because for years they were sustained

and nurtured silently through making invisible alternative spaces, through
changing everyday life, through seemingly nonpolitical experiences and

actions of people. When these nonmovements were confronted with the

brutality of the state, they crafted a nonidentitarian collectivity of insur-
rection. In a similar vein, Raúl Zibechi (2011) describes the struggles of the

urban poor and the indigenous movements in South America as antirepre

sentational politics. Their aim is to appropriate and self-organize social

territory in cities or rural areas in the midst of a strict and immovable
order of political and social power. These struggles create, in the words of

Zibechi, postcapitalist “societies in movement.”

The mundane gestures of sociality that nurture people when they are on

the move or arrive and try to settle in a new place, these “societies in move-

ment,” are imperceptible from the perspective of an existing polity. The
more migrants become imperceptible and the more they disidentify from

their externally assigned identity as (illegalized) migrants, the more they

become like everyone. Becoming everyone is the end of citizenship.36 The

moment when you buy your Home Office Citizenship Medal for the price
of £8.99 in every corner of the country will be the moment in which free-

dom of movement will be a reality. But becoming everyone is not an event

to come. It is not secular rapture awaiting, it is a generic strategy of mobility
when it moves through places and continents and even when it becomes
clandestine and passes through the biopolitical controls of sovereignty. Bri-

gitta Kuster (2016) offers an impressive account of di erent modes, figura-
ff

tions, and techniques of disidentification, of becoming imperceptible and
everyone in Mediterranean border crossings. Becoming everyone is a mag-

ical moment of transformation of the securitized objectivity of the present.

It is a move based on respect and care of the worlds we are creating when

we leave behind marked social positions and selves; becoming everyone is

a necessary strategy of everyday survival for migrants on the road and for

migrants facing racism when they try to settle in a place.

Crossing Calais—the last European border before entering the UK—for

example, can be seen as an “act of citizenship” (Isin and Nielsen, 2008)
only to the extent that the moment of hiding in a lorry is an illegalized ac-
tivity. From the perspective of migrants, this is an act of immediate justice

for sustaining their everyday life.37 Let us put it in a di erent way: to the
ff

extent that migration undermines the securitization of sovereignty by its
very existence, it also undermines the conservative, liberal, left, or radi-
cal left political projects and announces—together with many other social


movements, of course—a di erent form of politics. This sounds perhaps

ff

disappointing for some, but there are many reasons to celebrate.

Migration is forcing us to repudiate the implicit avant-gardism of ear-

lier versions of the autonomy-of-migration approach38—an avant-gardism

that by attempting to improve citizenship and change governance tries to
realign migrants with the working classes (as in the motto “Migrants and

precarious workers together!”) and to resurrect a new social protagonism
of migration. Of course, there is a growing proximity between migrant

labor and precarious labor, since migrant labor becomes increasingly pre-

carized (especially after the 2008 economic crisis) and precarious labor

becomes increasingly mobile. However, if there is a potential for transver-

sal politics between the worlds of migration and precarity, this is not in
a form of solidarity or in the creation of a new hybrid political subject.39

Rather, I believe that where migrants and precarious workers meet is in the

fact that they share the same spaces—urban spaces, material space—and

that both of them, from their di erent positions and with di erent aims,
ff

ff

participate in the metropolitan uprisings of European cities that remake

the everyday ontologies of our lives.40
THE GIFT ECONOMY OF MIGRATION
On August 27, 2009, together with an Amnesty International represen-

tative, a meeting was organized with five young transmigrants in one of

the central café snack bars of Mytilene, the capital of the island of Les-
bos (Greece). Lesbos was at this time (and is even more at the time of
writing this chapter) a heavily used route for crossing from Turkey into

Greece. As a result the detention camps were overcrowded. In response

to this situation, a no-borders mobilization was organized on the island

in August 2009 and resulted in the closure of the main camp.41 Many of

the detainees escaped the camp without being registered and having their
fingerprints entered into eurodac, a centralized Europe-wide database

of fingerprints of asylum applicants and illegalized immigrants.42
All five migrants in the meeting that afternoon were women in their

twenties coming from di erent cities in the Horn of Africa. They said
ff

that some of them had previously worked as domestic carers and work-
ers in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. The working conditions there were very

bad, so they decided to migrate again, this time to Canada because rela-

tives and friends told them that they had better experiences as domestic
66 Chapter Three

workers. They used di erent routes to arrive in Turkey and then eventu-
ff

ally crossed the EU border to Greece on a boat. They were intercepted by

Frontex patrols, the European border security agency, and had to destroy

their boat so that they would be transported as shipwrecked asylum seek-
ers to a camp in Greece. They preferred this because they were confident

that they would be able to meet other people on the move in the camp

and check possibilities to continue their journey, rather than simply be ar-
rested and returned immediately back to Turkey.43 They were interned in

the Pagani camp. The Amnesty International representative explained that
they would be released after thirty-eight days with no formal procedure for

claiming asylum but on the condition they leave the country voluntarily
and return to their countries of origin.44
The most striking aspect of this encounter was that none of these five

migrants looked or behaved in a way that would fit the image of the typi-

cal illegalized victim circulating in media and mainstream politics. They
protested against detention and complained how they were treated by the

border police, but one could not see the picture of misery, exploitation, and
oppression that they had suffered while they were interned in horrendous

conditions in the Pagani camp. Rather they looked tired, calm, decided,

and optimistic. When they were asked how they were going to spend the

rest of the day, they replied that they did not know, but the next thing they

were going to do was to go to a cybercafé to check email and their Face-

book accounts: “Making connections. Making our route,” they said before
leaving. (Later my collaborator on this project learned that some of them

are working not in Canada, as they had originally planned, but in Norway.)
In the same way that “migrants as agents” do not do the politics we

expect them to do, “migrants as victims” do not behave as victims should.

Rather than being isolated, individualized victims, these young women

appeared to negotiate the difficult and dangerous lives they live through con-
tinuous recourse to the idea of “social connections” that would help them
move on and continue their journey. In a strange way there was a feeling that

when they were talking they were referring to a “we,” without ever describ-

ing it, a “we” that had the potential to recode or even interrupt the logic
of the border control and detention. Virtual spaces such as chat rooms,
Facebook, emails, and encrypted communications as well as the spaces
of the camps and of migrant neighborhoods help one stay mobile, collect

information about routes and possibilities for survival, and learn tactics of
existence.45 This knowledge and affective reservoir offers vital resources
and energies to migrants on the road or when they arrive in a new place. In


this chapter, I refer to this as mobile commons: a shared affective, informa-
tional, technological, financial, cultural, material place that does not exist
as a given but needs to be continuously updated and extended; the innu-
merable uncoordinated but ontologically transformative actions of mobile

people contribute to its making.

People on the move create a world of spaces for rest and recovery,

knowledge, information, tricks for survival, mutual care, social ties, ex-
change of ser vices, solidarity, and sociability that can be shared and used

freely. This world facilitates Sapik’s movements as described in the inter-
view excerpt at the beginning of this chapter. This world is both analog and
digital, technoscientific and low-tech, actual and virtual, infrastructural

and cultural—all mixtures of knowledge, technology, materiality, and af-

fect that sustain the mobile commons. However, not only does Sapik use
all these invisible resources to remain mobile, but by doing so he expands

and circulates this intelligence for other mobile migrants. This contri-

bution is related neither to the good intentions of those who participate

nor to a presumable solidarity “reflex” between migrants. Mobility is by

definition a process that relies on a multitude of other people and things.

This extreme dependability can be managed only through reciprocity, and
reciprocity between migrants does not mean exchange; rather, it means to

multiply access to mobility for other transmigrants. Multiplying access is the
gift economy of migration. This is the world of the mobile commons. This
is a second world, World 2, beyond the world most of us experience as
subjects of rights, as citizens, as political activists.46 World 2—the world of

transmigrants whether they are on the road, in a new country, or in a new

neighborhood, whether they are settled, are clandestine, have refugee status,

or are documented workers—is always a world in the making.47
INTELLIGENCES AND INFRASTRUCTURES OF MOBILITY
The autonomous politics of organizing the common worlds of migration

goes beyond the traditional question of mobilizing migrants in existing

institutions such as trade unions, civil society organizations, or traditional

social movements against their oppression and for social rights.48 Rather,
the movement of migrants becomes a social movement when it creates

alternative everyday forms of existence that facilitate people’s freedom

of movement. Migration becomes a social movement when it extends its
own possibility through the multiplication of the mobile commons. This
68 Chapter Three



process of multiplication, augmentation, and circulation of the mobile

commons is ontological through and through—that is, it entails several

activities and practices that change the immediate material conditions of
people’s movement: the circulation of intelligences of mobility, infrastructures

of connectivity, informal economies, communities of justice, and, finally,

the nexus of care. I rely on the research presented earlier in this chapter,
my collaboration with Vassilis Tsianos and the work of Gabriella Alberti
(2011), Hywel Bishop (2011), Margherita Grazioli (2017b), Martina Mar-
tignoni (2015), and Fredy Mora-Gámez (2016), who all have taught me a

lot about the incredible multiplicity and variability of the practices that
sustain the mobile commons and the lives of migrants.49

The intelligences of mobility that circulate between people on the move

comprise a diverse set of embodied as well as codified knowledges of each
migratory route: conditions of border crossing, shelters, meeting hubs, es-
cape routes, and resting places. Clandestine people depend on the experi-

ences of migrants who “walked the route” to learn about the specific forms

of policing in di erent areas, ways to defy control, strategies against bio-
ff

surveillance, and places to get updated information and help. Also, trans-
migrants attempting to settle in a place rely on mobile knowledges about

local communities and their specific customs, available modes of social

support, educational resources, access to health, housing, ethnic networks,
microbanks, and so on. Knowledges of mobility involve not only the cir-
culation of contents but also ways to capture, transfer, and share all this
wealth of collective and distributed intelligence. Such knowledges of mo-
bility can be found condensed in certain places more than others. I already

mentioned that detention and deportation camps often condense large
amounts of such intelligence and ways to accumulate, store, and distribute
it. Certain mobile people often carry the wisdom of mobility—sagacious

people such as Sapik mentioned in the beginning of this chapter—but also

text messages, encrypted chats, maps, or hidden Internet pages. Knowl-
edges of mobility exist as long as they are embodied within diverse, lively
infrastructures.
Infrastructures of connectivity maintain the circulation of collective in-
telligences of mobility but also facilitate the technological means, practical
logistics, and material resources of support to stay mobile or to settle in a

specific place. These infrastructures allow the setting up of secure spaces

for collecting, updating, and evaluating knowledge by using a wide range of
technological and informational platforms and media—from the mouth-

to-mouth traveling of embodied knowledge to locally organized exchange

hubs to social network sites, geolocation technologies, alternative data-
bases, and communication streams. Infrastructures of connectivity are
ontologically present and ontologically transformative as encrypted web

platforms or as simple Facebook pages; as secure communication channels

by using Tor; as whispers across barbed wires; as cafés, squares, or rented
flats; as elaborated maps, or as traveling story lines, all passing through the
hypersurveilled European space. Grazioli (2017a, 2017b) in her study of

housing rights movement in Rome has investigated how squats empower
autonomous politics in the postwelfare metropolis. As people, many of

them migrants, reclaim abandoned or empty buildings they also reclaim

their right to the city. And this happens as they remake the ontological
fabric of everyday life in the squat and in the neighborhoods around it. A
squat becomes a prolonged act of reappropriation: an autonomous infra-
structure, a childcare facility, a subsistence garden, an infopoint, a space

for support, a hub for exchanges of all sorts, an experimental art space, a
production site, a place for sociability, a home. And it also extends beyond
its own limits by changing the communities around it. Many squats create
networks with other local grassroots associations, citizen initiatives, en-
vironmental campaigns, social rights struggles, and grassroots redevelop-

ment projects. As autonomous infrastructures multiply, squats become

70 Chapter Three

ontologically embedded in their local surroundings by attracting new mi

grants and becoming hubs for the distribution of intelligences of mobility,
by changing how public space is used, by contributing to the construction
of new communal facilities, by changing how basic ser vices such as access

to water and electricity are managed, and by remaking the physical and

social environments in which they exist.
INFORMAL ECONOMIES AND COMMUNITIES OF JUSTICE
Another form of activity that becomes visible in these squats and in simi-

lar spaces mentioned throughout this chapter are the informal economies
that emerge within them. These comprise all the economic activities and

services that cannot be easily accessed through the public sector or even

privately: how to find (and let alone pay) a doctor or a lawyer; how to find

short-term work or more permanent working arrangements; how to send

and receive money; how to communicate with friends, family, and fellow

travelers; how to make it through the economies of smuggling, get the nec-
essary papers for your move, or pay your rent. These economies facilitate

access to formal means of exchange such as money or credit but also deploy
alternative exchange systems, barter, or nonreciprocal support. Mobility as
well as the attempt to settle in a specific place can be sustained only through

such informal economies spread along migration routes. These economies,

although unregulated and often invisible, do not exist outside existing rela-

tions of production and reproduction. As much as they perpetuate existing
modes of exploitation, they also sustain migrants who are unable to access

formal employment or commonly used systems of exchange.
Political campaigning within the mobile commons is organized within

transnational communities of justice. Such communities are built through
alliances and coalitions of often very disparate groups such as the migrants

themselves, local governments, political organizations, ngos, activist net-

works, and civil society organizations. They engage in a range of activities,

from organizing protest camps or support actions for migrants to formal

political campaigning within established institutions. The port of Calais,

the closest point between the UK and continental Europe and a primary

hub in the migration route to Britain, provides a good example of how
such communities of justice emerge and change over time. The beginning
of political campaigning in Calais was about providing overnight shelter and

food to immigrants. Initially, coalition building involved the local population,


local charities, and in some rare cases the city council. As the tensions
between municipal government and the migrants intensified toward the

end of the 1990s and in the 2000s, Calais became a so-called humanitarian

issue50 and several larger charities became active, such as the Red Cross,
which for a long time provided food and more formal accommodation (for
example, in the Red Cross center near Sangatte).
When this and other similar accommodation centers were closed down,

migrants self-organized to create their own makeshift shelters within what

came to be called the “jungle villages.” The Calais “jungle” is one of these

ontologies created by transmigrants that has changed irrevocably what is
migration politics in northern Europe. Its sheer presence has certainly de-

fined debates about migration, public opinion, and migration activism in
the UK in the 2000s and 2010s. The intense political struggles around

the “jungle” created new tensions and a new phase of mobilization with the
participation of numerous charities (such as Association Salam, La Belle
Étoile, L’Auberge des Migrants), civil society organizations, and activist

networks such as Calais Migrant Solidarity and the No Borders network.

The local police have fully or partially destroyed the “jungle” several times
in the past fifteen years, and at the time of this writing there is a major plan

to clear the camp completely. The precariousness of the migrants in these

conditions has attracted a series of di erent “borderworkers” (Rumford,
ff

2008) and “border activists” (Walsh, 2013), nonstate actors that maintain
life along the ever- proliferating borders within Europe. Borderworkers

and activists carry out many di erent activities: providing medical advice,
ff

legal advice, asylum application support, and English language classes as

well as engaging in direct political activities such as challenging the deci-

sions of the mayor of Calais and the local police, demonstrations, occupa-
tions, camping in front of the “jungle” to protect its occupants from police
raids, and media work. Communities of justice are ad hoc assemblages
of traditional, radical, and experimental politics that seek to translate the
ontologies of migrant life to forms of social action.

THE NEXUS OF CARE
Relations of care appear as a continuous thread weaving all these activities

and spaces together—intelligences of mobility, infrastructures of connectiv-

ity, informal economies, communities of justice. The nexus of care implies
care as the generic practice of caring for others51 as well as the immediate

72 Chapter Three



everyday practices of care. Bishop (2011) in his work on the politics of care
and transnational mobility investigates how all these neglected, marginal-

ized, almost invisible instances of care between migrants on the move or

in a given location become indispensable for holding together all other di-
mensions of the mobile commons. Mutual cooperation; friendships; favors

that you never return; affective support; trust; taking care of other people’s

children, relatives, and the elderly; informal arrangements of social repro-

duction such as ad hoc nurseries; mutual support replacing lack of access
to welfare ser vices; transnational care chains; remittances; togetherness

across geographical space; the gift economy between mobile people—the

nexus of care holds the ontologies that transmigrants erect together.
As much as the mobile commons—intelligences of mobility, infrastruc-

tures of connectivity, informal economies, communities of justice, the
nexus of care—is imperceptible for most people in European societies,

it is not abstract. The mobile commons is concrete and practical. It exists
only as much as it helps to install relations of justice (as discussed in
chapter 1) in the midst of sovereign control. From the perspective of
migration, justice is the making of the mobile commons—all these daily

social relations, connections, and conditions that evade the control of
mobility. Justice here resembles an affective index that designates how


appropriate are the means used to arrive somewhere and the limits of
what one can endure throughout this journey, and, most importantly, it
indicates what is just and unjust in conditions that are by design outside
formalized law. The justice of the mobile commons is the moral econ-
omy of migration. It is similar to E. P. Thompson’s (1971) moral economy
of the poor: the immediate feeling and judgment of the crowds about
what is just and what is unjust in relation to the everyday conditions
of existence, such as the price of food or the prohibition of using the
commons. From the perspective of migration, justice cannot be achieved
only through the assignment of rights and citizenship or through at-
tempts to organize migrants in unions, political parties, or civil society

organizations (however important and indispensable this might be in

certain conditions). For transmigrants justice is achieved by changing
the ordinary ontologies of existence in a way that allows people to move

when they want to or need to and to maintain a livable life when they
reside in a certain place.
Throughout the chapter I used the term ontology to refer to a form of
organizing that is about the creation of thick everyday performative and

practical justice so that everyday mobility, clandestine or open, becomes
possible. I know that the question of ontology sits uncomfortably with mi-

gration and other social movements more broadly: migrants and social

movements, if at all, change society, not ontology. In chapter 2 I tried to re-
verse this perspective and to argue that the current configuration of social
and political power creates the conditions to approach social movements

as ontological organizers. In this chapter I have reconstructed this argu-
ment from within the social movement of migration. But one can still ask:
why is the mobile commons ontological and not social? It is ontological
because migration in today’s Global North changes society only to the ex-

tent that it changes the material conditions of existence so that people can

cross borders, remain mobile, survive the violent pressures of sovereignty
and the arbitrariness of borders, and arrive at their preferred destination.
It is ontological because as it passes through borders and traverses territo-

ries, it remakes ecologies of existence in ways that defy the ever-increasing

geosurveillance.52 But again, the ideas of “material conditions” and “ecolo-
gies of existence” here can have di erent connotations: they can refer to a

ff

politics of matter, as discussed in chapter 1, or to some form of materialist

politics. In the next chapters I discuss this tension between materialism
and a politics of matter, exploring how they increasingly come together to

reveal that social movements are fabricators of ontologies.
74 Chapter Three



“ THERE IS NO LOVE HERE!”

Since our first meeting with Sapik in the Pagani camp in the summer of
2009, we have had regular contact on the phone or via the Internet. He be-
came a co-researcher and a research adviser. Sapik has an active Facebook

life, and his account is linked to a well-informed and useful blog about mo-

bility and transit issues relevant to his peoples. Sapik is a true commoner

in the mobile commons. Suddenly, while we were writing this, it became

impossible to contact him. We were very concerned. For many years now

there has been a steep increase in fascist and racist attacks in Greece, and

Sapik could be one of their targets since he is a well-known and active

figure in his community. Thankfully he contacted us and said that he was
doing well. He had left the island and moved to Athens.

He then said that he was very scared when he experienced the racist
riots in Athens. But he went to Athens because he wanted to understand

“what is happening in this country.” He was not hopeful that the big mo-
bilizations against the government and the imposed austerity measures in

May and June 2011 would be successful. He was proved right. His voice was
quiet. We asked him when he would go back to the island where, at least in

comparison to Athens, things were much more secure for him. He didn’t

reply; the silence indicated that we didn’t understand what he was saying.

He was in Athens in order to understand the current situation in Greece. He
said that he didn’t know when he would be able to contact us again. And

he no longer has a Facebook account. He had to close his account because

he was threatened by neofascist users. Then he said good-bye and hung up.

Very shortly after this phone call we received a text message with a new

Facebook name and a smiley.
Later, Sapik decided to leave his clandestine existence in Greece. He

said that although he was satisfied with his life there and had already built

a strong community, close links to political activists, and a stable way to

make his living, he wanted to leave behind the life without papers: “I want

to live like you,” he told us. He recently arrived in Germany and claimed
asylum. He was strongly supported through his connections in his transna-
tional community and the Europe-wide activist networks, and his lawyer is

confident that he will be granted asylum. But then suddenly he told us that

he’s preparing his illegal trip back to Greece. We were very surprised, even

horrified, when he said that he had firmly decided to leave the country and

effectively drop his asylum case despite that his application was progress-
ing well. “There is no love here!” he said. “See you in Greece.”

But Sapik didn’t leave for Greece. His asylum case was approved and he

leaves legally in Germany. He still aims to go back to Greece, though. And
amid of all that, he continues to share his knowledge, his connections, and
his life so that people can be mobile when they want.

76 Chapter Three

II. HISTORY
REMIX
04
ACTIVIST
MATERIAL
ISM
1844: SPECIES BEING

-
More-than-social movements become, as argued in the previous chapters,

transformative when they change the ontological conditions of everyday
existence. What is the historical traction of this understanding of move-
ment? To what extent can we trace the posthuman and more-than-social

character of (social) movements in past histories, theories, and mobili-
zations? Perhaps one the most prominent places to look for the mixture
of politics and posthumanism is in the history of materialism, especially
when the latter is conceived as collective direct activism on the immediate
level of social and material life.
But this articulation between materialism and activism is unstable, full
of discontinuities and breaks. In Marx and the early rebellions that took
place in the Americas, and in the communes and uprisings across Europe,

materialism first becomes directly linked to political activism: activist ma-

terialism. Since then materialism has been the target of interrogation not
only from idealist positions and various dualist ontologies but also more

recently from within the political forces of the Western post-1960s left,

which were embracing materialism in one form or another. Critiques from

the left did not position themselves outside the materialist movement and
were not first and foremost an opposition; rather, they were an immanent

movement enunciated from the core of materialism that lasted up until

the 1980s and 1990s and finally ushered a new version of materialism to

the fore. During the long history of the encounter between materialism
and activism, both of them changed meanings, and the formation of each
one influenced the meaning of the other, producing new configurations of
social practice.
Marx’s work is the most prominent and probably the first full-scale at-

tempt to connect activism and materialism on the level of everyday politi

cal practice. The Theses on Feuerbach exemplifies the articulation between

materialism and activism in a remarkable and equally unexpected way.
Thought objects and abstract contemplation are what Marx tries to defy—

that is, idealism. The movement that changes society is the movement that
opposes idealism. It is real, objective—that is, material—says Marx. Marx’s

materialism is conceived as sensuous everyday practical activity that has
the capacity to change the material conditions of existence. The moment
of transformation is the moment when, to use Marx’s term, civil society
collapses and a new sociomaterial order emerges. This modern under-
standing of activism in materialism was epitomized in The German Ideology:
here communism is not “an ideal to which reality has to adjust itself ’; it is

“the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” (Marx and

Engels, 1846/1976, p. 48).
In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1975), Marx introduces
a new definition of materialism grounded on inserting activism into the
understanding of materiality. Here he uses the concept of “species-being”

to describe the defining moment of human species as the self-making of

the species itself in a direct practical and organic relation to other species
and the whole of the “natural” world. Despite the predominance of human-

ist ideas and essentialist connotations,1 species-being is as close as one

can get to a definition of humans not based on what they are but on how

they relate and act: the self-instituted collective emancipation in which

cooperation and interaction among humans as well as between humans,

nonhumans, and the material world is the guiding force.2 For Marx the
question is to uncover both what impedes this process—for him it is capi

talist labor that alienates species-being—and what makes collective material

self-transformation possible. Who controls the process of material transfor-

mation and who participates and in which position are questions that drive
Marx’s activist reading of materialism. This materialism is activist because it

is a “life activity,” in the literal sense: life engendering life. There is no social

transformation outside the material realm.
80 Chapter Four

Marx’s early materialism avoids the pitfall of epistemology: the attempt
to distinguish between a strong materialist position that gives absolute pri-
macy to matter and a weak materialist position that puts the emphasis on

how we conceive matter. Such an epistemological approach to materialism

wouldn’t be sufficient to distinguish it from idealism because at the end what

is matter would be a question of definition. Asking such questions would

be an idealist move because it would not prevent thought from dictating

what being is.3 From an epistemological viewpoint, both positions—the

materialist as well as the idealist—are in principle tenable. Marx’s early

materialism avoids this impasse by mixing ontology and practice through
and through: there is no transformative activity that is nonmaterial. Since

activity is inherently material, matter itself cannot be conceived as an out-

side or as a mere object of human practice but as a process of change.

Species-being depends on the collective metabolic transformation of

matter including the species itself: activist materialism.

There is a monist understanding of matter here that resonates with re-

cent versions of materialism.4 The emphasis is on matter as a vital force:
inorganic matter as well as biological and social life are movements of

matter itself. Nevertheless, in terms of Marx’s early definition of material-

ism, merely highlighting the importance of materiality as an assemblage
of heterogeneous forces is not enough to account for the kind of trans-
formative political engagement that was his main concern. Marx’s monist

ontological materialism is infused with an activist dimension that takes
place in the actual everyday life of species-being: the collective capacity to

engage in material change.
Practice and matter, activism and materialism cannot be thought in

dependently. And the reason for this is not epistemological but political

and ontological: political because capital and colonial power break up the

species-being—that is, the fundamental equality between humans result-

ing from the fact that each individual of the species can exist only if it is
involved in collective material change—into exploited classes and races. A

necessary form of material political practice can reverse this destruction

of species-being. This practice is ontological because matter’s movements

are independent of humans, and only through experimentation with non-

human forces (Marx’s “nature”) can humans realize their species-being.

Human species-being is not given, and there is no final essence; it exists

because it is practiced, embodied and embedded in relation to other spe-

cies and the material world.5 Materialism without activism is not transfor-
mative; in fact, it is not possible at all. This is the quintessence of Marx’s

Activist Materialism 81

early account of a practical ontology and an activist materialism. What
happens to this configuration of materialism twenty-eight years before the

bicentennial anniversary of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts?
Marx’s and in particular Friedrich Engels’s late work offers a di erent

ff

understanding of activist materialism from the one developed in their
early writings: dialectical materialism. “Diamat”—which had a long-

standing impact on theorists of the Second International and the emerg-
ing Marxist social movements—consolidated the absolute emphasis on

matter but introduced a very di erent conception of its practical, political,

ff

and philosophical significance. Diamat foregrounded activist materialism
as a dogmatic epistemological doctrine that gradually removed the prac-
tical ontological concern with matter and subsequently transformed the

meaning of activism. Already in the early writings there are numerous in-

stances where, instead of the practical ontology described in the previous
paragraphs, we find a relation to nature dominated by the ideal of progres-
sivism and the human mastery of nature’s laws. This understanding also

changed the meaning of activism. In Anti-Dühring (1878/1987) and Ludwig

Feuerbach (1886/1990a), Engels set out a materialist cosmology that de-
fined activism as a political practice that is monocausally determined by a

set of laws extracted from nature: historical materialism. This is characterized
by both a bifurcated dualist ontology—with objective material reality and

its inherent laws on the one hand and social practice on the other—and a

reduction of materiality to human social institutions and structures. Ac-

tivism was reduced to the efficacy of changing social structures. Historical
materialism announces the erasure of the activist materialism to be found
in the early works of Marx and Engels.
1908: ONTOLOGICAL DUALISM
In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Vladimir Lenin follows this line

and conceives materialism exclusively as a theory of knowledge. He writes:
“For the sole ‘property’ of matter with whose recognition philosophical

materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of

existing outside our mind” (1908/1970, p. 260, emphasis in original). Ma

terialism here starts from the assumption of an ontological duality, two

separate entities: matter on the one hand, mind on the other. Lenin re

duces materialism to gnosiological realism, while the activist materialism
of the early Marx asserted a monist ontology: mind is matter, and the unity

82 Chapter Four

of the world is sustained by its materiality and the immanent action of
matter and mind alike. Lenin’s approach was a radical departure from a po-

sition that is concerned with bringing together practice and matter. Rather,

his concern was to develop a conceptual instrument that splits ideas in
two opposite camps. While Marx and Engels’s early activist materialism
was concerned with how matter is changing and can be changed, Lenin’s

materialism was developed as a strategic tool for the selection of the so-

cial and political forces of his time that could potentially transform to a

revolutionary historical subject.

Lenin was building a war machine. The aim was to develop a philo-
sophical conception of materialism that had no other target than to reveal

the functioning of a deep social dichotomy between the working class
and capital.6 His only goal was to submit theory to the everyday require-
ments of his political practice. With his philosophical work Lenin devel-

oped a tool to extend the social division as far it could go, to the far end
of mind and the history of ideas. In What Is to Be Done? (1902) he claims
that social conflict penetrates every corner of society, every social relation,

every idea. Nothing is untouchable by class antagonism; it takes a partisan

organization and a revolution to change it. This is partisan philosophy and

partisan practice. And it is a truly activist move; however, this particular

move enacts a di erent materialism. It is carried out in the name of mate-
ff

rialism but is not an activist monist materialism. It is one that subsumes
matter and dominates nature in the name of political power. If Marx’s early

materialism was of a kind that proclaimed the irresistibility of revolution
on the grounds of a unified monist movement of matter and activism, Len-

in’s materialism is dualist, elevating irresistibility to something completely
di erent: the will for action.
ff

“Materialism must be a form of idealism, since it’s wrong—too” (Sah-

lins, 2002, p. 6). Marshall Sahlins’s aphorism captures the post–World War II

predicament with the configuration of an activist materialism à la Lenin.
Lenin’s reduction of monist materialism to gnosiological realism had
far-reaching consequences for the philosophical scaffolding of the social

forces that found themselves entangled in the Marxist enterprise and in
the emerging working-class movements from the beginning of the twen-

tieth century up to the 1970s and 1980s. The most important consequence

was that materialism became gradually equated to the idea of changing
political power. The dimension of matter and materiality was resolutely

erased from the everyday enactment of activist practice. Activist mate-
rialism, at least in its initial version found in the early writings of Marx,

became everything but activist, quickly turning into an ideology of state

socialism and an abstract philosophical system that came to legitimize
particular forms of politics in the post–World War II period.

1980: CULTURAL MATERIALISM
The end of the 1970s probably saw a peak in the process of an immanent

critique of materialism that rendered visible its contradictions as inherited

from the previous period. Raymond Williams’s analysis of this situation is

as follows:
It took me thirty years, in a very complex process, to move from that

received Marxist theory (which in its most general form I began by ac-
cepting) through various transitional forms of theory and inquiry, to

the position I now hold, which I define as “cultural materialism.” The
emphases of the transition—on the production (rather than only the
reproduction) of meanings and values by specific social formations,
on the centrality of language and communication as formative social
forces, and on the complex interaction both of institutions and forms
and of social relationships and formal conventions—may be defined, if any

one wishes, as “culturalism,” and even the crude old (positivist) idealism/
materialism dichotomy may be applied if it helps anyone. What I would
now claim to have reached, but necessarily by this route, is a theory
of culture as a (social and material) productive process and of specific

practices, of “arts,” as social uses of material means of production.
(R. Williams, 1980, p. 243)7
During the period of the crisis of materialism that unfolded in the de

cades between 1950 and 1990, the notion of culture reordered the existing
meanings of materialism and fueled the development of a new constel-
lation of concepts and activities into the social conflicts of the postwar
period. Of course, not all of the various movements and critiques of mate-

rialism embraced the notion of culture. The point here is not to unify these

extremely diverse movements and traditions under one overarching ru-

bric. Rather, what is important is that the insurgency against the previous

materialism evolved in proximity to new everyday activities whose many
faces and actions pertain to changing sociocultural power.8 This turn to

culture thoroughly changed the way political activism is performed, mov-

ing the target away from the state itself toward power’s pervasive materi-

84 Chapter Four

alization in the whole societal nexus: in terms of gender relations, racial-

ization processes, social institutions, social and civil rights, the political

representation of excluded groups, anticolonial and postcolonial conflicts,

and so on. Many societies, many cultures, many socialisms, Raymond Wil-

liams would have said.
This remaking of materialism corresponds with the practices of new
social forces that found themselves outside the traditional organizational

forms of the working-class movement that appeared as the inheritor of the

materialist politics of the previous periods. The new politics of cultural
counterinsurgency, not least as exemplified in the new youth cultures of
the 1960s and the variously globalized events of 1968, spread across the
globe with a velocity far beyond the wildest utopian dreams that Soviet
propaganda bureaucrats and Western communist parties ever imagined

for their own materialist politics.9
But what exactly was the materialist aspect of the activism that pro-
pelled itself through cultural politics? The most likely answer is that there

was very little materialism in this “cultural materialist” politics, at least not

in the sense of an activist and practical ontology concerned with a monist
understanding of matter (as in Marx’s early version); nor was there much

of the materialism of the late Marx/Lenin period with its strong focus
on gnosiological dualism and the transformative efficacy of social forces.
Cultural politics questioned both versions of materialism and developed
along many disparate and diverse paths, all of which were, however, oc-

cupied with the centrality of representation and its critiques. Umberto

Eco’s Opera Aperta (1989) and James Clifford and George Marcus’s Writ-
ing Culture (1986) as well as the broader linguistic/discursive turn and the
interest in hermeneutics10 are examples of intellectual engagements that
marked the path to the undiscovered continent of representation. Through

the changing of meanings and the challenging of representations, the pro

cess of social activism was now being performed.
Another important path for the revision of materialism that developed

during this period came from an interest in social space as a key battlefield
for social antagonisms. How is space regulated, appropriated, and reap-
propriated by marginalized social groups? Marxist-inspired readings of

lived place, the situationist movement, and cultural geography11 all turned
to kaleidoscopic remakings of space in order to articulate an everyday,
mainly urban activism that made radical interventions in the politics of
postwar Europe and North America possible. The attention to space as

lived experience is closely related to body politics. The body becomes an

open substratum for the inscription and reinscription of social significa-
tion. In this sense signification moves from the mind itself to the body and
emerges in a process of subjective embodiment through a social context12

or in cultural-political constellations.13

This focus on embodiment resonates with the postwar period preoc-
cupation with subjectivity and difference.14 As cultural studies have so
vividly shown, subjectivity is always in the making because it entails a

nonexpressed otherness, a nondiscursified and imagined possibility of so-

cial relations.15 This is particularly important in a period where identity

politics occupies a central place in the political life of Global North socie

ties.16 Already in the 1970s and 1980s, cultural studies, feminist politics,
antiracism, postcolonial and anticolonial movements, and gender studies
identified the limitations of an activist materialism qua late Marx/Lenin
that saw social consciousness either as committed to working-class change

or as ideological.
In resonance with Louis Althusser’s take on ideology (2001), new social
movements focused on the emergence of multiple political subjectivities

that defy straightforward classification as wrong (false consciousness) or
right (transformative) according to previous conceptions of activist mate-
rialism. Crucial for this attempt was the pro cess of articulation.17 Activ-

ism here is conceived as a movement of articulation that by rethinking

Gramscian hegemony attempts to contest domination through “rendering
the symbolic increasingly dynamic, that is, by considering the conditions
and limits of representation and representability as open to significant re

articulations and transformations under the pressure of social practices of

various kinds” (J. Butler, 1997, p. 23).18 This understanding of political sub-

jectivity as subjectification and the result of articulation is what essentially
captured activist practices in this period, positioning subjectivity in the
tension between coercion by institutional mechanisms and articulation
through them.
Cultural politics challenged previous versions of materialism on the
grounds of an increasing diversification of social strata and classes. This
diversification brought a new form of activism that, rather than focusing
on materialism, was concerned with the fight for representation. In this

struggle, discourse, space, body, and subjectivity are approached as consti-

tutive of an oppositional politics of difference. Cultural studies, women’s

studies, postcolonial studies, and queer politics have all participated in and
critiqued this fight for representation.19 The importance of representation

comes from the dissolution of social class as the central actor and political

86 Chapter Four

force in society. The political order of transnational neoliberal societies

is an order that is supposed to be occupied by multiple players working
to foster alliances between themselves and to establish new relations of
power. And this form of relationality triggers the imperative for represen

tation.20 Representation enters the realm of politics as the attempt to give

voice and operative agency to social groups who have been excluded by
the politics of traditional versions of activist materialism. We can trace the
singular trajectories of these emergent oppositional subjectivities of new

diverse social groups in civil rights movements; in the events of 1968; in
feminist movements, antiwork movements, and new forms of social coop-
eration; in the 1960s cultural rebellions; and in the fight against colonial-
ism and racism.
1987: “THE ONLY ENEMY IS TWO”

However deep the break between the activist materialism of late Marx and
the cultural materialism of the postwar period might be, nevertheless a
peculiar form of continuity remains. The materialism of late Marx reduced
activism to the radical intentionality of a subject determined to reflect the
antagonistic conditions of existence. Cultural materialism retained this
reduction but introduced a differentiation with respect to the subject

itself. Instead of a unified self-identical subject there exist a plethora of

subjectivities and of possible contexts in which they are constituted. This

break implied a deep change in the way political activism was conceived:

late Marx’s activism subsumed every activity under a single social conflict

between labor and capital, while the activism of cultural politics multiplies

the fronts on which social antagonisms are encountered and fought.
Nevertheless, despite this radical break, both positions retain a strange
commitment to epistemological dualism. Representation and ideas are the

battleground on which the conceptualization of activism thrives. It is about
negotiating and transforming the conditions of thinking and feeling that
make activism possible. In a peculiar way, cultural materialism followed

late Marx’s and Lenin’s path in focusing on how to represent reality. Cultural

materialism introduced a new conceptualization of the main determinants
of representation. It is no longer the class structure of society but rather

the endless variability of social contexts that allows di erent configura-
ff

tions of representation. In this sense the question of cultural activism

becomes one of how reality is constructed in the subject itself, or “social


constructionism.” In both positions, however, practice and matter are sub-

sequent to ideas, and despite their pervasive critiques of dualism, both
retained a dualist ontology.
Deleuze and Guattari’s well-known diagnosis of this situation is as

follows: “We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We
employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that chal-

lenges all models. Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the

dualisms we had no wish to construct but through which we pass. Ar-
rive at the magic formula we all seek—pluralism = monism—via all the

dualisms that are the enemy, an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture

we are forever rearranging” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 20). In much
of their work, and most centrally in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and
Guattari introduce a monist materialism that attempts to rehabilitate
matter from its entrapment in representation. Their move is coextensive

with the (re)appearance of a form of materialism that puts the primacy of
matter on the agenda of political practice and theory after the 1990s and

creates the possibility for the emergence of a novel configuration of activ-
ist materialism. Strangely enough, the poststructuralist faction of cultural
materialism of the previous decades prepared the way for this move—in

particular feminist materialism; the attention to the body, as described

earlier; and the persistent but evasive attempts to put materialism back

on the agenda (one can only recall Althusser’s [2006] subterranean move-
ments of materialism).
But even more crucial to the reinvigoration of activist materialism is
the increasing impact of technoscientific knowledge on everyday life and
on the structures of production in the Global North that posit matter as

a self-ordering, emergent actor in a radically posthuman world. Matter

is before thinking; matter is in thinking. For Deleuze and Guattari there

is no empty space, there is always matter, and matter is always differenti-

ated. Representations are a particular form of differentiation in their own

right; they do not exist prior to or vis-à-vis matter. Representations are

movements of matter as much as genetic mutations or the lithosphere’s

plate motions are. Deleuze and Guattari’s point is not to eliminate the
distinctive importance of representations and ideas; rather, their claim is

that when representations are considered separated from matter, they be-

come strategic tools for ordering material reality. Representations are clo-

sures and reterritorializations that are used as powers to organize matter

in a particular way.

88 Chapter Four

The materialism emerging gradually after the 1990s focuses on the ques-

tion of monism instead of concentrating on the binary opposition between
materialism and idealism. This dichotomy undermines monist material-
ism. It is not about which position you take in this thinking; it is about the
very act of taking a position. For Deleuze and Guattari the real enemy of

materialist thinking is not idealism; it is dualism. “The only enemy is two”

(Deleuze, 2001, p. 95). Materialism after the 1990s is an antidualism that

gradually lets an alternative conceptualization of the relation between ac-
tivism and materialism that informed most social movements during the
late Marx period and after emerge: matter and mind, activism and materi-

alism start to fuse again into one process.

It is not a coincidence that many of the social movements of this pe-
riod and since focus on the question of reclaiming and prefiguration. The
activism of reclaiming attempts to reappropriate the immediate spaces of
existence by simultaneously transforming them through everyday actions:

reclaiming the streets, the right to the city; Earth activism and the perma

culture movement; the remaking of transnational spaces through migration
movements (which was discussed in chapter 2); radical queer activism and
the building of new social relationalities and communities; hacktivism; the
commons movements; and indigenous mobilizations, to name just a few
that emerged gradually in the 1990s and after. In all of them we encounter

an emphasis on reclaiming material spaces and relations vital for develop-
ing new alternative social and material projects.21

Deleuze and Guattari’s monist materialism captures a key moment of
this form of activism that reconnects us with the concerns of early Marx’s
activist materialism, described in the beginning of this chapter: how
matter is morphed—that is, how to live with matter and create new ma-

terial forms of existence through collective practices. However, Deleuze
and Guattari’s materialism questions how morphing matter comes into

being. The emergence of form is neither the transcendent imposition of
a preconceived plan on matter (forget the architect and the bee) nor is it

simply self-organized matter that is just represented in the mind of the

subject (forget the subject-object divisions and correlationism)—neither

external plan nor internal capability. In this sense, it is neither materialism
(as conceived until this moment) nor idealism. The position Deleuze and

Guattari try to develop is that the movement of matter itself makes both a

materialist as well as an idealist stance possible. Both the capacity to make

form and the capacity to understand the emergence of form are immanent

to existence. There is no monism if there is a dualist option; “there is nothing

that is one, there is nothing that is multiple” (Deleuze, 2001, p. 99). Deleuze

and Guattari tried to avoid thinking along the either-or of materialism and
idealism/dualism. The very possibility of thought is immanent to matter’s

movements.
2000: DESIRE
In this understanding of materialism, matter becomes the horizon and the

substratum on which an alternative to the previous versions of materialism
can emerge. Matter becomes (once again) the way to reconnect activism

and materialism. The crucial move for materialism since the 1990s is to
seek in matter an escape from a situation where the demise of the every

day transformative activist aspect of materialism became so pervasive.
Deleuze and Guattari’s move to a monist materialism is not a theoretical
choice; it is the result of a political diagnosis according to which any desire

for and any possibility of change has been vampirized by existing social
and political institutions. Even more than that, in the previous decades de-

sire itself has been transformed into an institution of capital.22 Every social

struggle is reinserted as a rejuvenating feature of the system of accumula-

tion; every social innovation is turned to a value-producing innovation.

The story of the twentieth century is not a story of revolutions; it is a story

of counterrevolutions, says Heiner H. Müller (2000), where every radical

desire has been appropriated, dismembered, and regurgitated, flattened.
The bottom line for Deleuze and Guattari’s take on materialism, as a
monist materialism based on a renewed attention to matter, is the attempt

to reactivate the transformative force of desire. Deleuze and Guattari try to
do this by breaking the link between “desire” and “desire for.” Every “desire

for” is a closure: desire for revolution, desire for mastering nature, desire
for equality, desire for recognition, desire for an identity, desire for not hav-
ing an identity, desire for desire itself. This is the political move that Deleuze

and Guattari reinsert into materialism: to disrupt the view that the creativ-
ity of people, animals, and matter can be viewed as a desire that can always

be folded back into the current forms of valorization. Every “desire for”

is captured, measured, and transformed to value: biofinancialization (as

discussed in chapter 2). This is the spell that current society casts on life.
To break this spell, monist materialism attempts to disarticulate de-
sire from its essential function as something that has a target and object.
90 Chapter Four

The diagnosis: “desire for” is the way sociopolitical control revolutionizes

itself. The radical political key to monist materialism is that it allows de-

sire to be engendered in a way that can move beyond its recoding into
the political closures of the counterrevolutions of the twentieth century.

The prominent role of matter in Deleuze and Guattari is a small gesture of

rebellion against the capture of earlier materialisms within a machine that
constantly revolutionizes control. Deleuze and Guattari perform this small
gesture of freedom by inserting indeterminacy into the way desire oper-
ates. And they do so by turning to the underlying indeterminacy of matter:

matter is primarily unformed and in continuous variation, an oscillation

between various intensities, closures, and openings. Matter is a political

exit. Matter is escape. The making of a life. Matter can break the spell.

The turn to matter becomes political when it is articulated in relation to

this understanding of desire. That is why, despite the various attempts to

read Deleuze and Guattari’s materialism in a scientistic way—that is, as a

philosophy attentive to science23—Deleuze and Guattari propose a rather

minor move, one that attempts to interrupt the appropriation of desire
by grounding it in the indeterminate movements of matter. A minor sci-

ence, as they call it (other times they use the names nomad science, itiner-
ant science, or ambulant science). In Proposition III of the War Machine
chapter in A Thousand Plateaus they describe this as a practice that fol-
lows matter’s immanent traits, confronts problems instead of applying

theorems, and pushes matter to the next threshold. Against a science of

matter or a technology to control it, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize prac-

tice as the key dimension of a minor science that knows how to surrender
to matter. Minor science is a practice that is essentially experimental; it

evolves around problematics rather than essential qualities, it is rigorous
but not systematic, it directly links activity with matter, and it cuts through

and occasionally derails big science, which Deleuze and Guattari often also
call royal, imperial, or state science.24 Here a revived form of activist mate-

rialism establishes its presence in the 1990s and 2000s.

2016: THE LOSS OF MINOR SCIENCE
Deleuze and Guattari’s minor science operates below and outside big sci-
ence and yet, as will be discussed in detail in chapter 8, it is continuously

under pressure to be included in it. “The fact is that the two kinds of sci-

ence have di erent modes of formalization, and State science continually
ff


imposes its form of sovereignty on the inventions of nomad science. State
science retains of nomad science only what it can appropriate; it turns the
rest into a set of strictly limited formulas without any real scientific status,
or else simply represses and bans it” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 362).

The unfinished story of contemporary minor science is that it can be absorbed

into the workings of big, state, royal science—that is, it can become a “desire

for” a grand theoretical system and a philosophical materialism devoid of

its activist element. Minor science and big science are inextricably bound

together even if only though conflict.
In fact, minor science exists in the core of big science. Pamela Smith has
shown how artisan production—probably the most vital aspect of minor

science—was crucial for the emergence of the rationalist objectivist sci-

entific worldview that came to dominate the Western world increasingly
after the sixteenth century and to constitute modernity’s epistemic terri-

tory (as discussed in chapter 1). The artisans’ work, an intellectual revo-
lution from the bottom up, “transformed the contemplative discipline of
natural philosophy into an active one” (P. H. Smith, 2004, p. 239).25 Later,

artisan science was appropriated and absorbed into the new disembodied
design of experimental positivist practice within big science. However, big
science never completely abolished artisanal skills and practices and still
relies on the minor science of matter to realize positivist experimental

practice. Thanks to the purported modesty of meticulous artisanal efforts
Robert Boyle’s bottom-up experimental laboratory science won out over
Thomas Hobbes’s top-down geometric science.26

This coexistence of minor and big, state, royal science—even if only an-

tagonistic—is with the rise of technoscience more ubiquitous than ever. In
experimental science, the “discovery of natural facts” and realities of matter

was a distinct procedure that preceded possible technological applications

and their spread within everyday life. Within technoscience—that is, when

science, technology, and everyday life fold into each other—discovery is in-

vention is intervention. One of the main characteristics of minor science—

its interventionist, direct, ambulant quality—becomes a dominant feature

of technoscience itself. Minor science fuels the everyday workings of con

temporary technoscience.
Scientific practices and objects are as much the result of artisanal work
as they are of the precarized labor of “industrial” scientists and of the entre-

preneurial investments of corporate and state science (see also chapter 8
for a lengthy discussion of these issues). Minor science and big science

co-constitute all these technoscientific objects that circulate in our worlds.

92 Chapter Four

Such objects make up the conditions of our actual material presence in the

world; they are “wormholes that dump contemporary travelers out into

contemporary worlds” (Haraway, 1997, p. 43). The entanglement of minor

and big science is the reality in which material existence unfolds. But where

does this leave the project of the revived activist materialism of the 1990s

and 2000s? What is the meaning of activism when matter as political exit

gradually disappears with the entanglement of minor and big science?

Activist materialism is again in turmoil. It bifurcates into two lines of
development (which, rather than being in some sort of opposition, sit un-
easily next to each other). The first and most widespread line of develop-
ment attempts to strip (again) activism from materialism: from actor-network

theory, object-oriented ontologies, neomaterialism, and neovitalism all pre-

serve key theoretical tenets from activist materialism but drop in one way
or another its activist dimension. The other line of development, probably

one that is far less prominent in the academic/intellectual sphere and more
present within political movements, consists of a series of diverse projects

that preserve and expand the commitment to activism. This second line
of development attempts to revive minor science after its loss. What is

minor science today if it is not the other to big science? I trace the political

past of this second line in the next chapter and then move to explore con

temporary versions of it in the third part of this book.

05
INSURGENT
POST
HUMANISM
1871: ASSEMBLING THE STATE
If worlding is about the making of social worlds that crisscross global space
in divergent trajectories and at variable speeds and that defy the abstract
universalisms of globalization,1 I want to extend its meaning to include the
making of material worlds that create unique occasions of mundane exis-
tence beyond the abstract registers of “nature” and the nonhuman. If, as
Chris Connery, Rob Wilson, and the work of the Center for Cultural Stud-
ies at the University of California in Santa Cruz suggest, worlding is about
enacting an opening in our thinking and practice to other values, ideas, and
ways of being, I want to think of worlding as an opening to material pro

cesses and practices and as a possibility for crafting—literally—alternative

forms of life2—alternative worlding constructions that, as Rob Wilson

(2015) says in his ecopoetics of Oceania, are about the housekeeping on

Earth (instead of the housekeeping of various social orders), about becom-

ing ecumenical: the making of translocal solidarity, place, and bioregional
worldings. Extending the worlding project from society to ecology and

matter is concomitant with introducing a posthumanist perspective into

culture and politics. But this posthumanist move bears its own problems.

Posthumanism, at least in its most widespread and mainstream ver-
sions, challenges the dichotomy between humans and nonhuman others

and the analysis of social processes based solely on the grounds of human

action and intentionality.3 But is it possible to reduce the textured re-

lations between humans to the universalizing category “human”? How

is it, after so many decades of work trying to question humanist univer-

salism, that we are now confronted with probably the worst universalism

of all: all humans as one, as if there were no divisions and alliances, di-

vergences and associations, conflicts between humans? And the problem

seems even more acute when we consider the other pole: how is it possi

ble to homogenize nonhumans to the extent of creating an otherness so
vast and uniform that even the most dedicated Orientalists could not have
conjured it up in their wildest dreams? In fact, the universalism and re-
ductionism of the category “nonhuman” may be even more dubious than
traditional humanist categorizations because it can so easily be presented

as a progressive move to include the hitherto expunged nonhuman others

into human business.

Can we develop an alternative take on this mainstream version of post-
humanism? Can we think of alternative forms of organization that chal-

lenge both humanism and the new universalisms that accompany much
of posthumanism? Can we think of an insurgent posthumanism—that is,

of a posthumanism that is explicitly political and is grounded in (social)

movements? But since many movements are primarily social—that is,
since many of them seem to be fixated on social power—we need to ques-
tion some of their key presuppositions in order to be able to detect and
strengthen their posthumanist energies. What would it mean to organize

a political posthumanism?4

As I argued in previous chapters, the politics of social movements have
largely ignored the complexity and unpredictability of the entanglement
between politics and ontology and between a deeply divided society and a
deeply divided nonhuman world. The principal avenue for social transforma-

tion passes through seizing the centers of social and political power. The

main drive of social movements, especially movements related to orga

nized labor after (the defeat of ) the revolutions of 1848 and definitely since

1871 has been to target institutional power and the state. Within this matrix
of political thinking the posthumanist moment becomes invalidated, sub-

sumed under a strategy focused solely on the political association of indi-

viduals as the locus of action that contests social power. But here I argue

that a posthumanist gesture can be already found at the heart of these social

movements, even if in most cases this gesture is involuntarily neglected
or, perhaps more commonly, eagerly erased.5 In fact, this chapter shows
Insurgent Posthumanism 95

how through this long process of neglect and erasure, movements gradually

came to be conceived as social movements, and then how in contemporary

technoscientific and more-than-human-culture, social movements can be

now understood as more-than-social. The argument that I advance in this

chapter is that more-than-social movements emerged out of a long, even if

effaced, history of posthuman struggles within social movements. In fact,

one could argue that these posthuman struggles propelled more-than-social

movements within contemporary technoscientific posthumanist culture

and questioned the politics of social movements.
From Marx through anarchism to contemporary radical post-Marxist po-

sitions, the state in its capitalist form is conceptualized both as the guarantor

of existing social relations and as the main threat to society and justice.
More precisely, the state cannot exist without cultivating the humanist sub-
ject, and at the same time the state is the humanist subject’s main enemy.6

This characteristic of the state as humanist but not humanist enough has
been the main target of social movements. The state and its humanism are
the constitutive other defining what traditional social movement politics is.
Such traditional social movement politics conceals the fact that a sig-
nificant part of the everyday realities put to work through the politics of
movements has always had a strong posthumanist character through re-
making the mundane material conditions of existence beyond and out-
side an immediate opposition to the state and other social institutions
that protected the humanist political subject. In fact, it is questionable to

what extent the state can be conceived as the state and not as a heteroge-
neous formation comprising diverse entities such as infrastructures, social
groups, institutions, archives and knowledge, and animals and plants. In
previous work we have discussed how the state cannot act as a unified
actor; rather, specific segments of the state and other social actors and
material actors create formations that become the locus of social power.7
Thus seeing the state as the state is a practical political question rather

than a question that refers to some essence of what the state is.
In what follows I excavate this posthumanist gesture from the main nar-
ratives of political struggles along three fault lines. The first is about aban-

doning an alienated and highly regulated relation to the material, biologi-
cal, and technological realms by making a multiplicity of self-organized

common worlds—a move from one world containing many enclosed and

separated spaces to the making of a plurality of ecological spaces. A sec-
ond posthumanist move questions the practice of politics as a matter of

ideas and institutions and rehabilitates politics as an embodied everyday
96 Chapter Five

practice—a move from representational politics to the embodiment of

politics. Finally, the third involves the decentering of the human subject

as the main actor of history-making. History is a human affair, but it is not

made exclusively by certain groups of humans—a move toward a post

anthropocentric history.
1824: VAGRANCY
There is a fundamental assumption behind the politics of political move-

ments up to World War II: the state is a totalizing form of power that needs
to be occupied and then stripped of its ethical and functional powers. “The
Socialist Party is the anti-State, not a party,” wrote Antonio Gramsci in

1918.8 The mantra of Marx and Engels’s refutation of Hegel’s idealism of
the state is well known.9 But Marx and Engels’s materialist reinterpretation
of Hegel’s idealist take on the state is an unfinished story. They challenged
Hegel’s understanding of the state as an ethical universal but preserved
the idea that the state is a totality emerging in the real social world. The
rationality of the state—which was a substantial element for Hegel’s under-

standing—is always actualized in the real life of society as a unity between
the objective and universal will10 and the subjective will of the citizen.

Marx and Engels exposed this unity as the ideological function of the state
but kept the idea that the state is deeply ingrained in the social world.11
This understanding was decisive for much of social and political move-

ments throughout the past 150 years.
These social and political movements conceive the state as a totality

immanent in the antagonisms that sweep the plains of society.12 Against
the Hegelian assumption that the state embodies the infinite ability to re-
solve any social contradictions within it, Marx and Engels believed that the
resolution will be the result of an act that seizes the state in order to move

to a stateless society. The departure from Hegel was never completed. By
keeping the state at the center of power, any struggle for the emancipation

of labor and other subaltern social groups was modeled on the assumption

that it should pass through the state or at least address it directly.13 Every

other possibility for radical social transformation disappears from the ho-

rizon of political action.

But these politics never came even close enough to a nonstate society.

The revolutions and uprisings have strengthened the state as a totality instead
of putting an end to it. But how is this possible? A change of perspective


can perhaps help to illuminate this situation. Rather than approaching the
state in terms of the control it engenders and how it governs society, we
can instead examine how the state is assembled and configured from many
diverse and heterogeneous entities14 in order to be able to respond to the
struggles that challenge social power in a certain moment.

If we investigate the state from the perspective of the struggles of social

movements, we find something more important in its resilience than its

supposed unified and universalizing nature: we see how the state is assem-
bled from many heterogeneous actors in order to facilitate and promote
a humanist subjectivity resulting from the then-emerging freedom to sell

one’s own labor power. The state in its current form is a response to mul-

tiple insurgent movements of di erent shapes and magnitudes that lasted
ff

several hundred years until the eighteenth century. Rather than a mono-

lithic structure, the emerging state is a changing and localized assemblage
that facilitates the firm incorporation of working people in the system of

production by guaranteeing that workers can be free and autonomous in-
dividual sellers of their labor power in an open market.

Many current social movements usually challenge the state not because

of this humanist appropriation of the workers’ freedom but because it is

not humanist enough (that is, it does not do enough to protect and expand
the autonomy of the workers as individual sellers of labor power). But this

humanism hides the fact that it is a response to a long history of nonhu-
manist struggles that were equally (but of course in very di erent ways)

ff

suppressed by specific state institutions as well as by organized politics.

The freedom to choose and to change your employer is not a fake freedom
or an ideological liberty, as classical working-class Marxism suggests, but

a historical compromise designed to integrate the released, disorganized,

and wandering workforce emerging from the fifteenth century onward

into a new regime of productivity.15 In fact, what we have here is a mass

of workers exiting indentured, forced, or slave work and reinvesting their
capacities in new entanglements with the social and material world.16
The singularities that composed the escaping, wandering mob and the
fleeing slaves were very far from the humanist individual starting to

take shape at the same moment across Europe. They were much closer to

the nonhumanist pleb traversing the countryside from the midfourteenth
and fifteenth centuries and later to the escaping slaves in the colonies and

the disorderly mobs populating the streets of European towns and emerg-

ing cities after the eighteenth century.17 This nonhumanist movement

forces a gradual displacement of the previous regime of feudal, indentured,
98 Chapter Five

and slave labor into a world in which the relation to surrounding material-

ity takes a di erent form than it did in the feudal and colonial order. This
ff

exit from the feudal labor regime and the colonial slavery matrix into a

multitude of work patterns and into a creative relation to matter gives rise

to new, shared, common worlds. Only in the name of the humanist ideal
of “man mastering nature” did the emerging disciplinary mechanisms
and enclosures after the eighteenth century as well as a multitude of mea

sures to tame and control vagrancy—such as the English Vagrancy Act of

1824—destroy these diverse ways of relating to others and to the material

world.18 Thus, many of the multiple, scattered, disorganized, ephemeral,

insurgent movements of people exiting feudal and slave labor in so many

di erent locales and geographies did not enter into the capitalist humanist
ff

regime of the labor market but embarked on a journey that allowed them

to create alternative common worlds.
Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (2004), Yann Moulier Boutang’s
De l’esclavage au salariat (1998), Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s
The Many-Headed Hydra (2000), Marcus Rediker’s Between the Devil and

the Deep Blue Sea (1987), A. L. Beier’s Masterless Men (1985), Kristin Ross’s
Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (2015),

Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden’s Free and Unfree Labour (1997), and

Robert Steinfeld’s Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth

Century (2001)—among many others, of course19—describe various inci-

dents and occasions, dispersed in historical time and geography, in which
multiple modalities of work, everyday life, and divergent forms of social
organization emerge. In these fluid conditions, self-organized relations be-

tween escaping people and land, plants, and animals gave birth to forms of

exit from oppression and to di erent social-material relations of liberty.20
ff

1680: SWAMP AND FOREST
These self-organized relations to the sociomaterial world are moments

of making common non-proprietary and non-enclosed worlds, or “com-

moning” as Linebaugh (2008) calls it. The continuation of life through
commoning the immediate sociality and materiality of everyday life is a
truly nonhumanist flight into a world where the primary condition of
existence is the immersion into the worlds one inhabits and shares with
other people and with animals, plants, and the soil.21 This is not only the

social commons but the worldly commons, an ecological commons that

emerges out of the process of commoning matter. And then this world is

collective, shared by definition, a culture mixed with nature, a material
order that facilitates the sharing of di erent commons. We can see the
ff

emergence of such relations of commoning in the communities of escap-
ing slaves and commoners both inside colonial Europe and in the colonies

across the Americas, from the South all the way to the North.

Such escaping communities relied on the local environments to facili-
tate their escape and maintain their existence. Geology has been always a
refuge for freedom. And ecology has always sustained fugitives, runaways,

and Maroons.22 As Daniel Sayers (2014b, pp. 8–9) wrote,
Marronage . . . is a complex process of a global and local nature even if

individuals who participated in it were not aware of all others partici-

pating in the same process: the phenomenon of hundreds of thousands

of individuals marooning around the globe between ca. 1500 and 1900
manifested very locally in swamps, mountains, cities, maritimes, and
in various nation-states. The Maroons of Palmares, Rio Real, Camamu,

and Cachoeira in Brazil shared something with the Maroons of Nanny
Town and Moore Town in Jamaica, Suriname, Martinique, Cuba, Mex-
ico, Colombia, Fort Mosé, Pilaklikaha, and the Great Dismal Swamp in

the now usa, Canada, and West Africa. Part of that which they shared
were similar ideas on how to go about eliminating the conditions of

thralldom that each individual experienced, through self-extrication.

Additionally, their decisions led to the formations of various social

groups in most cases of grand marronage. At the same time, each con-

text of marronage was historically contingent in nature, unique in ap-
pearance, and situated in local conditions.
From 1680, for example, the Great Dismal Swamp, located on the border

of Virginia and North Carolina in the United States, became the refuge

for escaping slaves and the habitat of hidden communities of fugitives,
similar to those found across the Americas.23 Their settlements and ways

of life evolved together with the swamp; their existence became entangled
with the fate of the swamp itself, its impenetrable subcanopy vegetation
and thick muddy wetlands but also the later attempts to drain and exploit

parts of it. These self-extricated communities, which were in complex

relations with other slaves, indigenous peoples, and colonial administra-

tions,24 established self-reliant communities as they removed themselves

from violent captive enslavement. Many of these communities developed

100 Chapter Five

di erent forms of the commons that often relied on reciprocity of their
ff

members and the local environment, plants, and animals.
This is the ecumenical nature of movements that I mentioned at the
beginning of this chapter. And this is also a decolonial practice, or per-
haps the seeds for such practice within the heart of the colonial project.

Swamps, high mountains, remote corners of infertile land, the vastness of
the ocean: all are shelters of freedom helping the worlding of movements.
An ecumenical vision of movements is practiced by those who escape as

they remain entangled. These nonhumanist movements enlarge worlds by

multiplying material and spiritual interdependencies of small or large bio-
regions as they escape colonial architectures of total global connectedness.
This is Epeli Hau’ofa’s (1993) “Our Sea of Islands” and Edouard Glissant’s
(1997) “Poetics of Relation.”
Within Europe, there were similar cases to the multiple, diverse, and radical

commons that the Maroons, fugitives, and slave rebellions created across
the Americas.25 Close to the place where I live while writing this book is

Charnwood Forest, a large area of undulating hills, 700-million-year-old

rocks, fields, and tracts of old or ancient woodland covered with dense
carpets of bluebells every spring.26 It is also the site of a long history of

conflict over the enclosure of the local commons. As E. P. Thompson (1991,
p. 104) wrote, in Britain “there cannot be a forest . . . which did not have

some dramatic episode of conflict over common right.” Long before most
of Charnwood Forest was enclosed for agricultural use, local villagers re-

volted against the increased use of the commons for raising livestock, in
particular farming rabbits, a widespread source of income at this time.27

“In 1749 a great number of inhabitants, men, women and boys of neighbour-

ing villages, including a party of colliers from Cole Orton, converged upon
the warrens. . . . In the ensuing encounter the warrens were thrown open.

The ‘rioters’ clashed with the Warrener and his party, and one of the rioters
was killed. There followed troops of dragoons, wholesale arrests, trials. Right

of common was proved for twenty-six neighbouring towns and villages,

and Charnwood Forest remained unenclosed for a further half-century”

(E. P. Thompson, 1991, pp. 105–106).28 “The Charnwood Opera,” a ballad
entertainment piece performed in the forest few years later in 1753, drama-

tizes this popular revolt against the encroachment on common land by the

local landowners and warreners. The commoners cry, “Rabbits and Popery!
Rabbits and Popery!” (Porter and Tiusanen, 2006, p. 208), and soon after

they confront the supporters of the warrener:

On yonder Hill, See, How They stand
—with Dogs—and Picks, and Spades in Hand.

By Mars! A formidable Band!
Were they enclin’d to fight

See! How they troop from ev’ry Town
To pull these Upstart Warrens down,

All praying for the Church & Crown
And for their Common Right29
The Act of Enclosure of Charnwood was passed in 1808 and trans-

formed Charnwood Forest to fields of arable farming. Most of the ancient
woods had already disappeared by the early seventeenth century because

of the demand for timber and the continuous intrusion of grazing lands
into the forest. Despite the enclosure of 1808, some lands were maintained

commonly and were planted with trees. These tree-covered lands together

with the few remaining ancient forests make up the only woods that exist
in North Leicestershire today. Far from only a story of the conflict of the

commons and its enclosures, this is a typical example of how place and
the commons fuse into each other. It is what Patrick Bresnihan (2013)
calls the “manifold commons” and Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor in their
important book Recovering the Commons call the “body∼place∼commons”

as they emphasize the “dynamic, interactive process of human and nonhuman

production and reproduction” (2010, p. 20). The commons rarely exists in
the abstract and never outside a specific ecology. But this ecological embed-

dedness is not static, it is a process of co-emergence: the commoners and the

commons, the land, the plants and the animals, the concrete ecology and
the local common rights construct each other, and when they disappear, they

often disappear in tandem.

More than just a battle between owners and users, the commons is the

outcome of the concrete practices of commoning. As Derek Wall (2014,
p. 127) writes, “Di erent forms of commoning give rise to di erent sus-
ff

ff

tainable environments.” Commoning—that is, the use and making of the

commons—is always specific: collecting underwood, foraging provisions,
cutting turf, planting crops, raising livestock, turning the soil, working with
the forest, coppicing and replanting the forest, irrigation and the manag-
ing of waters, and so on—the creation of an ecological space and a “multi

species community” (Castellano, in press). The histories of radical struggles

of commoners in England and beyond are not only histories about common

rights, they are also nonhumanist histories of ecological presence.30 These

102 Chapter Five

nonhumanist collectivities of escape and commoning across the Americas,

England, and Europe were non-unified but powerful movements that ulti-

mately forced a recomposition of the state in the nineteenth century.31 And

as the state was reassembling itself to embody humanism and liberal modes
of existence, the movements changed too. They became social.
1791: ECO COMMONING

-
Thus, just before the emergence of humanism we could say that move-
ments were not social in the way we would understand the adjective social

today: their defining moment was the nonhumanist practice of worlding

freedom through a flight to the self-organized commoning of matter. Eco-

commoning is defined as a socioecological world that of course existed
long before this flight from the feudal and colonial order happened but
now provided the ground for the articulation of a new form of freedom.
This form of freedom—as many of the works and examples mentioned in
the previous sections portray—is less concerned with compensation and
productivity and more with remaking the immediate social and material
conditions of existence outside existing regimes of control. This form of
escaping into a nonhumanist naturecultural life needed to be recaptured
and was in fact recaptured into a new configuration of social organization.

Wage labor was the device that made humanist-liberal social organ

ization possible, and it was aimed at controlling the liberties proliferat-

ing in the eco-commons. The key function of wage labor is not first and

foremost to control people’s productive capacities but to manage workers’

surplus of nonhumanist freedom. “Labor as dressage” means that discipline,

taming, and performance lie at the heart of the process of transforming

work through Protestant humanism to the core value of the markets and
busy(i)ness.32 There are, of course, many factors that contributed to the

birth of the liberal humanist subject in North Atlantic societies,33 but prob

ably one primary source of energy made it possible: the nonhumanist energies

of freedom transgressing pre- and protocapitalist colonial societies.

But this description of the rise and fall of the nonhumanist struggles

of movements does not yet cover the whole picture of the emergence of

social movements. Moulier Boutang, in his book De l’esclavage au salariat
(1998), highlights the fact that there is no historical necessity to move to the

capitalist form of wage relations; patronage, forced labor, di erent forms

ff

of serfdom, indenture, and plantation slavery have all existed in di erent
ff


modes and configurations throughout history, many until today.34 If one

thinks through the perspective of the capitalist form of social organization,

there is absolutely no economic necessity to change and reassemble the

state in its feudal colonial form. Moulier Boutang (in Moulier Boutang and
Grelet, 2001, pp. 228–229) explains:
Haiti, the island that produced half the sugar in the world, initiated a
decolonization that lasted two centuries, got rid of the whites, and abol-
ished the slave economy. Between 1791 and 1796, it was done: Toussaint
L’Ouverture defeated Napoleon Bonaparte. The plantation economy
was undoubtedly efficient; the problem was that it was unstable. If capi-

talism abandoned slavery as a strategic perspective, it is because its own

existence was menaced by the instability of the market that it put into
place: if there had not been the Jamaican insurrection of 1833, the En

glish Parliament would never have abolished slavery. The struggles of

the slaves in the two centuries of modern slavery are worth ten times
more than the struggles of the working class: they were more violent,

more virulent, more destabilizing than the workers movement.
The transformation into capitalist organization was the effect of the

struggles of movements—that is, of the disorganized and wandering work-

ing people and most importantly of the slaves seeking to escape into new

forms of nonhumanist liberty. This form of liberty is a move to a tighter,
more intimate relation between human action and material force. It is

people reclaiming their relation to the material world this commoning

of the world and of matter, not only the social world but the world as a

whole—that becomes the transformative drive to which the emergence of

capitalist forms of production is a response.

Struggles have primacy over the formation of power. However elusive

and neglected they are, these nonhumanist movements and struggles fueled

history-making on the ground. The state reassembles itself as a conglom-

erate of infrastructures, devices, and institutions that allow the appropriation
of the liberties practiced by these nonhumanist movements by preserving

only a small but crucial part of them: that work can no longer be regulated
through noneconomic violence, but only by contractual means. However,

even at this stage, as Steinfeld (2001) shows, free wage labor was not really

free since a series of nonpecuniary pressures made free labor closer to

coerced contractual work.

Only the efforts of organized labor slowly eliminated the violent en-

forcement of contracts and labor agreements in northern European coun-

104 Chapter Five

tries and the United States. So it was organized labor building on the previous

nonhumanist struggles that effectuated the slow move toward free wage

labor at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twen-

tieth. Not only is free wage labor not a historical necessity, but wherever

it happened it was not the result of a top-down structural introduction

of the capitalist labor market but the result of a long process of nonhuman-

ist and more-than-social struggles of movements.35 Free labor—that is,

the freedom to choose your employer and to exit a contract without any
nonpecuniary sanctions—becomes the elusive bedrock of both the new

form of production as well as of the emerging social movements: “striving
for freedom” in employment relations is the fundamental element of the

organization of production if it is to succeed in appropriating and canaliz-

ing the nonhumanist liberties of the movements of the eco-commons.

The reassembled state that emerges out of these struggles is neither a

superstructure nor an ideology nor a totality nor a unified tool of domina-
tion. It is an ad hoc conglomerate of diverse entities that simultaneously

guarantees the freedom of employees to sell their labor power and al-

lows the translation of this freedom into value. This contradictory mix of
freedom and exploitation is the most crucial ingredient of the sentiment
that still dominates life in Global North societies.36 Out of relative non-

humanist freedom, today’s production system forges a relative human-

ist unfreedom. And as this happened, movements transformed to social
movements and elevated the state to a universal arbitrator about the right
mix of freedom and exploitation. By making the reassembled state both
the main target and simultaneously the path for social transformation, the

revolutions and uprisings ended up reinforcing the logic of the humanist-

liberal state rather than supporting nonhumanist experimentation with
freedom. Instead of betraying the state and its order, the revolutions, one
after the other, ended up betraying the people. As Immanuel Wallerstein

(1998, p. 13) writes, “The revolutions never worked the way their propo-
nents hoped or the way their opponents feared.”
1966: EMBODYING POLITICS
What the revolutions could not achieve was achieved in a series of upris-
ings that erupted across the globe in the 1960s and 1970s.37 Common to
these was the attempt to challenge a relatively stable form of social and

political regulation manifesting after World War II. In a moment when the


“withering away of the state” seems almost impossible and when move-
ments have firmly transformed to social movements, the mobilizations
and cultural uprisings in the 1960s and 1970s changed the conditions of so-
cial movement politics again. A new cycle of struggles with strong nonhu-

manist elements has emerged. These struggles come long after humanism

vanquished the cycle of nonhumanist struggles described in the previous

sections. This new cycle of struggles can now be called posthumanist: the

attempt to depart from and challenge the by-then long-established domi-

nation of humanist politics.
The new social movements were not solely organized around and against

the state and its institutions. Rather, subversion is performed by practices that
negotiate their embeddedness in existing power under the signature of a

posthumanist escape, not under the imperative of inclusion. The mean-

ings of social and human relationality gradually mutate; many social move-

ments of that period escape into novel embodied material practices that
put their subjectivities at the forefront of doing politics. The confronta-

tion with state power and established politics comes from the fact that
these movements put forward alternative ways of life that challenge power

through their very existence: anticolonial and decolonial movements, femi-
nist movements, environmental movements, antiracist movements, cul-
tural mobilizations, sexual revolutions, and counterculture, to name just a
few.38 The 1960s profoundly changed culture, social relations, and the ma-

teriality of everyday life, and this on a global scale.39
The centrality of embodying politics in the 1960s movements is a direct
challenge to the centrality that the human body achieves as a site of control

in humanist culture: co-option and training, subjugation and usefulness

are inseparable for the operation of the modern political rationalities of

governance. But after the uprisings of the 1960s, the response was a di er

ff

ent one: not to tame the embodiment of posthumanist politics but to regu-
late and control the conflicts emerging from these exiting movements by

developing multiple ways to include them in a new reassembled state. The
slow and varied emergence of the transnational neoliberal state captures
the process that attempted to reincorporate in the state these escaping and

subversive subjectivities. Niklas Luhmann’s (1995) vision of “non-society”

is the most apt description of the workings and intricate relationalities
emerging in these conditions.40 The social and material space is seen as

fragmented, discontinuous, undecided, interconnected, relational, and
networked:41 nodes and lines, no beginning or end, assemblages of hetero-
geneous forces and entities, parties, institutions, social groups, animals,
106 Chapter Five

plants, businesses, land, science, and so on. Nodes can be constantly with-
drawn and new nodes added; the state is assembled and reassembled in
an almost ad hoc basis. The work of Bruno Latour42 appears as a typical
theorization of the networked, plural, assembling state.43
As the posthumanist movements of the 1960s were gradually included

in the networked neoliberal state, the imaginary of radical social transfor-
mation was conceived as the fidelity to an event to come that will overcome

the new plural networked capitalism (a ghostly reincarnation of the belief
in revolution that was spreading across the globe from 1848 up to the 1950s
with the Chinese and Cuban revolutions). Alain Badiou seems to express
this kind of thinking in an exemplary manner. In Metapolitics he says that
every real politics can be evaluated first and foremost on what it says about

the state. A central idea of Badiou’s political ontology is “that what the State

strives to foreclose through its power of counting is the void of the situa-
tion, while the event always reveals it” (Badiou, 2005b, p. 119).44 Here again

freedom is derived from the situation of control, more specifically from its
absent center, the void that is determining constituted power but cannot
be adequately represented by it. The obsession of the social movements up
to the 1950s with revealing the chosen historical subject of revolutionary
change reappears in the figure of the event once the posthumanist energies
of the 1960s movements fade away. The movements of the 1960s came to be
codified in social movements studies as New Social Movements (nsms),45
and, indeed, they gradually became new social movements in the way I am
using the adjective social in this chapter: they turned primarily to ques-
tions of identity, representation, and rights—that is, they turned primarily

to address the organization of the state and the governance of social life.

As this was happening, posthumanist politics become less important in

this new phase of struggles of the 1960s movements.

1987: BORDERDWELLING
Beyond this dominant conceptualization of the event that can produce a

subjectivity and a truth capable of revolutionizing social change, a sub-
jectivity that was excluded and invisible before, this understanding of the
event seems to have overshadowed another way of conceiving its nature
that was crucial for the development of new social movements in the past
decades: a tradition that with Deleuze and Guattari (and with Alfred North

Whitehead and William James) we could say attempts to think of the event

as a unique mundane and nonintentional occasion that comes to organize

an existing state of affairs differently by acting inside it.46 The event here is

not about historical subjects and revolutions or about a rupture with the
state; it is a materialist process that effectuates a divergent form of ordi-

nary organization and mundane forms of life. This is an understanding of

the event that focuses on the everyday practices of social and material ac-
tors that make politics through their very own bodies and existence.
The event as revolutionary social change neglects the immediate every

day practices that are employed to navigate daily life, to negotiate and
remake the composition of our bodies and the ecologies we are part of—all

those practices that are at the heart of social and material transformation

long before we are able to name them as such. The event is retroactive; the
power of distinction between what is and what is not is post hoc. At the
end, it is marked by sadness and fear toward designating a political mobili-

zation as being an event because it has not happened yet.47 But an event is

not a question about choice or the morality of choice but about the ethos
of practice that is by definition undecidable and comes to craft new ecolo-
gies of being and new forms of life.48 From a posthumanist feminist per-
spective we could say with Starhawk that practice is not about retroactive
choice but about the “power to act with” in the remaking and reclaiming
of the material realities of life.49 Actualization exists because “the ghost of

the undecidable” (Derrida, 1992, p. 24) dwells in every step, in every prac-

tice, in every occasion. There is no promise, no guarantee, no fidelity. The

event as the reincarnation of the fantasy of revolution seems to be irrel-
evant from the perspective of innocuous, imperceptible, everyday material
transformations that initiate social change.
What is probably most characteristic of these ordinary events is their re-

fusal to be driven by fidelity to the coming event. But their path is not fidel-
ity to the present either, but the joy of embodying and betraying it. This is

the joy of the posthumanist moment practiced by many movements of the
1960s that appear again and take new shape in the 1990s. Instead of the fixa-
tion on the event, one could think with Mikhail Bakhtin about a form of joy
that defies seriousness and makes truth erupt out of the present. This is the

joy of putting together a whole cosmos around everyday radical material

practices that are events that might never be named as such.50 In the same
way that Bakhtin is searching in Rabelais’s grotesque images of the lower
stratum of the body (food, drink, urination, defecation, sexual life) for the
forces escaping ecclesiastical and political censorship and coercion, I am

searching in the posthumanist embodiment of politics—the joy of changing

108 Chapter Five

bodily practices and of fusing the body with new ingredients and processes

of this world—for the forces that defy both the cognitivist fixation with

events and historical subjects to come and the circulation of class privileges
in the aseptic circuits of contemporary networked neoliberal societies. This

is the joy of bringing together and assembling a whole cosmos around prac-

tices that are events that might never be named as such. The laughter and
joy of those who partake in the world through remaking their embodied

existences defy seriousness, disperse fear, liberate the word, and reveal a
truth escaping the injustices of the present. This is a cosmic constellation,

not an individual act. In this feast of symbiotic eating, drinking, defecating,
and having sex, the body becomes posthuman and retraces within itself
elements common to the entire cosmos, as Bakhtin says: common to the

earth, sea, air, fire, and all the cosmic matter and manifestations.51

The practice of alternative material embodiments is the heart of this
second posthumanist dimension of the movements of the 1960s and then
again of the 1990s: with Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 book Borderlands/La Fron-
tera: The New Mestiza (and I am thinking here also of Frantz Fanon, José

Martí, Oswald de Andrade, and many others) I see how radical change

passes through the posthumanist transformation of the materiality and
social relationality of the body.52 Anzaldúa’s embodied politics is post

humanist in a very immediate materialist sense. It goes beyond cultural
mestizaje; it is not only about identity and our symbolic belongings. It in-
volves how the body mixes with other bodies: human bodies, animal bodies,

inanimate bodies. This embodied politics involves borderdwelling, existing
outside a fixed constitution of our bodies and selves, existing as malleable
bodies in a malleable world.
Los Chicanos, how patient we seem, how very patient. There is the

quiet of the Indian about us. We know how to survive. When other
races have given up their tongue, we’ve kept ours. We know what it is to

live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture.

But more than we count the blows, we count the days the weeks the
years the centuries the eons until the white laws and commerce and

customs will rot in the deserts they’ve created, lie bleached. Humildes

yet proud, quietos yet wild, nosotros los mexicanos-Chicanos will walk

by the crumbling ashes as we go about our business. Stubborn, perse-
vering, impenetrable as stone, yet possessing a malleability that renders
us unbreakable, we, the mestizas and mestizos, will remain. (Anzaldúa,

1987, pp. 63–64, emphasis in original)

It is not that borderdwelling fractures consciousness, our positions—

social, cultural, or geographical—our relations and connections. Of course

borderdwelling disassembles, disarticulates, cuts, extracts, and disposes. But
more than this, borderdwelling makes new ecologies of everyday exis-
tence, new worldings. New experience.53 See Anzaldúa (1987, pp. 82–83,
emphasis in original): “She is willing to share, to make herself vulnerable to
foreign ways of seeing and thinking. She surrenders all notions of safety, of
the familiar. Deconstruct, construct. She becomes nahual, able to trans-
form herself into a tree, a coyote, into another person.” Becoming coyote is
an event. It is not the romantic vision of joining nature nor the becoming-

animal of joining the idealized pack (such as Deleuze and Guattari’s wolf
pack). Anzaldúa’s becoming coyote is rather ethopoietic: the boundary
crossing of her coyote existence is that of an everyday transformation of
ethos required by living as an “inappropriate” body on either side of a bor-

der (between Mexico and the United States in this case). She is refash-
ioning the whole process of making her an “Other” on both sides of the

border into an embodied capacity that cannot be appropriated fully. It is
also a transformation that is required to account for all the changes that so
many fellow travelers undergo as they cross the Mexico-U.S. border to live

a clandestine life below the radar of surveillance.54 Borderdwelling is the
condition of posthumanist politics.
1921: JUSTICE/JETZTZEIT
All incarnations of posthumanist politics discussed in this chapter are not

primarily articulated through fidelity to an event that can challenge directly
and potentially supersede the assembled state and formalized politics but
through the everyday betrayal of the supposed governing powers of the
state and formal politics. More-than-social movements create alternative

forms of life that escape existing ways of existence and cannot be neglected
by social power. But traditionally this power to create conditions that cannot
be neglected or bypassed has always involved the question of violence. It is

widely believed that in social movement politics, violence as destruction is

the necessary ingredient for the making of the new. Against this purported
tight articulation of violence and transformation (primarily in the form of

violence against the state), dominant liberal humanist thinking exorcises

violence and asserts that violence starts where politics stops.55 Is it pos

sible to escape the logic that opposes the violence of destruction to the

110 Chapter Five

oppression of the state? Is it possible to avoid the perpetual recurrence

of violence that is imposed by thinking movements’ politics as the other

to the state’s violence? Is it possible to escape this dichotomy, commit to

the fundamental possibility of nonviolence, and simultaneously promote

justice and create new forms of life and alternative worlds? What is justice
when it does not involve an antithetical subjectivity?
Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence (1921) explores the possibility of

practices that can open political spaces outside the eternal cycle of law-

making (constituent) and law-preserving (constituted) violence. There is a

form of power/violence (Gewalt means both in German)56 that is neither
law-making nor law-preserving and that through its existence addresses

justice. Benjamin uses various terms to describe this form of Gewalt: revo-

lutionary, pure, or divine. He asserts that Gewalt, “when not in the hands
of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere
existence outside the law” (Benjamin, 1996a, p. 239). The reason for this is
that this kind of Gewalt can “modify legal conditions” (ibid., p. 240)—that

is, it can be a form of Gewalt that breaks the monopoly of law over power
and violence itself. When Gewalt is outside the law, it is a form of Gewalt

that is induced in a situation rather than being given in it. Gewalt that is
given in a situation is the Gewalt that the law can exercise, and this form
of Gewalt appears as fate.57 The Gewalt of the law calls for a political force

against it that attempts to establish a political order that differs from

the previous one but is equally coercive: the Gewalt of the law appears as
fate, as cyclical history, as something inescapable.
The new form of Gewalt that Benjamin tries to introduce is nonfate.
It is “pure unmediated” Gewalt (Benjamin, 1996a, p. 249) that gets rid of
the narrow-sighted “dialectical rising and falling in the law-making and

law-preserving” forms of Gewalt (Benjamin, 1996a, p. 251); it overthrows

law altogether. Within this new space of Gewalt, a “new historical epoch
is founded” (p. 252) and justice can be realized. Justice is possible here

because, following Benjamin, the new type of Gewalt that he sees emerg-

ing inserts a break in the normal social and political order that assigns

standard roles to the involved actors: those who try to preserve existing

law and those who need to challenge it and to make a new law if they

want to improve their position in it. Benjamin advocates a form of Gewalt
that allows the possibility of justice, not in occupying one of these two

positions—which would only perpetuate violence, destruction, and more

conflict—but in exiting the field of these dual options offered by law alto-

gether. That is, he advocates the opening of a certain situation to possibilities

that lie outside it: true justice can happen when options are mobilized that
bring us outside the dialectic between forces that try to preserve existing
law and those that attempt to make a new one. The dialectic of constituent

and constitutive power becomes the ground on which control operates,
and because of this it can only cause more destruction. But how is it possible

to materialize such a di erent type of Gewalt that installs true justice?
ff

How can we populate this new space of Gewalt, fill it with acts of jus-
tice before and independent of the law and of counteractions that exhaust

themselves in contesting it? This is not a recourse to clichés such as “tak-
ing justice into one’s own hands” or a blank apology for violence but a

reference to the possibility of evading the continuous cycle that restores
one new coercive form of law after the other. It is not a coincidence that

I turned earlier to Bakhtin’s Rabelais to evoke the ordinary materiality of
existence as the space where justice can be enacted. In Benjamin this is
further developed: the realization of this new form of Gewalt outside the
law is the space of the ordinary, or better, it is a space that starts from the
materiality of the ordinary. One could argue that Benjamin’s “other type of
Gewalt” resembles the practices of more-than-social movements that can

be grounded in the radical making of alternative forms of life and everyday
materialities that exist outside the law and outside the eternal cycle of state
violence and oppositional destructive violence.58

Against the perspective that sees the politics of movements as target-
ing the exceptionality of law, social power, and the state, we can trace
with Benjamin the possibility of breaking cyclical historical time and the
anthropocentric passing of history by mobilizing this other type of Ge-
walt: by enacting justice independently of law (that is, by neither turning

against the law nor following it), outside an anthropocentric view of his-
tory. Benjamin says that there are types of Gewalt that are simultaneously

violent and nonviolent, legal and revolutionary;59 it is not either/or, it is

both. Benjamin refers to the general strike as one of these types of Gewalt,

and although I am not interested in the general strike as such, I want to
use it as an example in order to trace the characteristics of this new
type of Gewalt.60 The general strike is a very plain, everyday act, and at
the same time it is a di erent form of Gewalt, revolutionary and divine
ff

Gewalt, because it is outside the law of the state. As Benjamin says, the

reason for this ambivalence is that it “reveals an objective contraction in
the legal situation” (Benjamin, 1996a, p. 240) that cannot accommodate an

action such as the general strike that breaks so radically with the way the
whole system of wage labor is organized. A protracted general strike is un-

112 Chapter Five

thinkable from the perspective of the law because it destroys the ordinary

life of society, since the workers exit from the role assigned to them by the
law. They become a nonsubject. They do not oppose anything (they do not
do anything spectacular apart from not going to work); they just withdraw

from the position assigned to them. They silently and nonviolently refuse
the symbolic order of the law. And they do this immediately, now; the gen-
eral strike as a form of Gewalt is ordinary and exists now, in the Jetztzeit.61
2016: POSTANTHROPOCENTRIC HISTORY
Justice is never given, is never here; it is something of another world,

something to come. Benjamin’s Gewalt is the termination of the deferral
of justice. Justice requires a “time-based practice of memory and histori-

cal imagination” (Orr, 2012). The question of justice is a question of tem-
porality. Justice is now, justice is against deferral; the space of deferral is
the space of law and of destructive violence.62 Benjamin’s divine Gewalt

dismantles the possibility of the deferral of justice. It is the moment when
something that is just happens just now: Jetztzeit. The possibility of justice
that happens in the moment it is needed is materialized through the reappro-
priation of matter and the entering in forms of life that instigate justice in the

present. And paradoxically this is the end of any form of violence, social

or individual. The more justice is ordinary and concrete, the more non-
violent and collective it is. The more justice happens just now, the more
“worlded” it is. I am looking for a posthuman reading of Benjamin’s divine
Gewalt. This is a postanthropocentric move in how history is conceived:
history is made neither through the perpetual succession of violence and

negotiation nor through the eternal dialectical struggle between constitu-

ent and constituted power. History is made outside the history of society;
it is made when justice is restored materially.63 When justice is ordinary
and present, it happens without mediators;64 it is a justice without inter-

mediaries and without diplomats, referees, experts, translators.65 It is a
posthuman justice, the co-construction of life with other species and ob-

jects, the simultaneous emergence of ethos and ontology.66 Gewalt is im-
mediate justice, the moment when mediation and violence stops.67

Rather than being concerned with normative issues and issues of power,
more-than-social movements attempt to alter the material conditions of

existence starting from positions marked by asymmetry and injustice (in
chapter 1 I referred to this justice as thick justice). With the rise of related

approaches in science and technology studies,68 there is a widespread as-

sumption that symmetry is required in order to move toward a postan-

thropocentric grasp of how the human and the nonhuman constitutions

operate together and how they produce new, mixed, hybrid associations.
Instead of clear-cut classifications and orderings of beings, actor-network

theory and other similar positions multiply the possibilities of how beings
can connect to each other—an argument targeted primarily to human-
ist positions that attempt to defend the exceptionality of humans in the

constitution of networks. Symmetry seems to be useful when it serves as a
rhetorical device against humanism. But it proves to be very problematic
in relation to questions of justice.69
The real question facing posthumanist politics of movements is how
to move beyond anthropocentrism and humanism by maintaining a
commitment to justice that addresses radical asymmetries that pervade
human and nonhuman worlds. Symmetry is not enough to reverse the

modern purification of humans and nonhumans and to stop imposing

our “we” (humans) on “them” (the nonhumans), as Latour argues.70 We

have never been modern, not because the purification of humans and non-

humans is impossible, but because we have never been “we,” and they—

the nonhumans—have never been “they.” The constitution of modernity

is based on a set of universalisms that have their provenance in colonial
expansionism and the spread of the colonial matrix.71 The question is to
delink from these universalisms and to introduce a form of politics that

decolonizes the practices of more-than-social movements.

Decolonial movements perform a double break: they challenge the
universalism of humans and the perpetuating injustices that were set up

through colonial modernity and still split humans among themselves. The

second break is a departure from the idea that nonhumans need to enter
our polity. There will never be a liberal parliament of nonhumans, not only

because this is one of the very limited forms of politics humans have ever

invented but also because it is the most humanist of all. The quest is then to

disconnect from humanist and nonhumanist universalisms in order to be
able to practice politics in postanthropocentric ways: to create alterontolo-
gies that restore justice in the immediate ecologies that certain humans

and certain nonhumans are inhabiting. The aim is to politicize post

humanism and simultaneously to posthumanize politics by decolonizing

both of them.
114 Chapter Five

III. ALTER
ONTOLOGIES

06
BRAIN
MATTER

RECOMBINATION AS LIBERATION
Every epoch has its brain. And every epoch fantasizes a better brain than

the one it has. Today, one can see signs of a transition from a cognition-

oriented and centralized brain toward an extended, connected, embodied

and, most importantly, plastic understanding of the brain. These varied

technoscientific attempts to monitor, control, and transform processes of

the brain on the level of its material composition are entangled in shifting
cultural imaginaries and political practices in the Global North. In this

opening chapter in the third part of the book, I explore these entangle-

ments and introduce the main themes of this last part of the book on
politics in technoscience, which I then discuss in length in the remaining

two chapters.
“Today we are learning the language in which God created life,” de-

clared U.S. president Bill Clinton in his announcement on the decoding
of the human genome on Monday, June 26, 2000. As I could not but re-

call Wittgenstein’s canon at this moment—that language exists only when

it is actively used—a daunting vision appeared to me: practicing the lan-

guage of creation.1 Secular creationism is the vision that some humans will

master neurophysiological processes to the extent that they will be able to

recombine brain-body matter in order to produce new forms of existence.

Plasticity is the underlying idea to conceiving brain matter as amenable to

recombination. But plasticity is not a new concept as such; it has a long
history in neuroscientific research and traditional brain research. Today’s

plasticity starts where the gene stops: the specificity of the individual
organism. Plasticity appears when ontogenesis and epigenesis are at work:
the worldly making and remaking of the totality of an organism in the pro

cess of its development. I come back to this later in the chapter.

Rather than just the relative malleability of brain matter, plasticity

now refers to the possibility of recombining brain matter, not as a gen-

eral process of neuronal regeneration but as a process that takes place

epigenetically—that is, according to the specific and contingent realities

of each particular organism. “Genes and genius: Does everyone have the

potential to be a genius? Epigenetics offers hope for us all” is the title of

a review of David Shenk’s popularization of epigenetics in New Scientist

(March 27, 2010, p. 51).2 In the near future we will be able to create new

neurons “at will, where and when you need them” (Horstman, 2010, p. 5):

neuroplasticity as neurogenesis accessible to everyone on an ad hoc basis.

Within this inflation of promises and hopes, the brain’s plasticity is also
seen as a possibility for developing new forms of resistance and new lib-

erating visions of our neural selves.3 This emancipatory imaginary of re-
combinant plasticity could even entail the biggest fantasy of all, which is so
nicely and fallaciously described in the work of Catherine Malabou (2008).
Recombinant plasticity should go as far as to become the self-governed

process of challenging the very plasticity of our brain: “To cancel the fluxes,

to lower our self-controlling guard, to accept exploding from time to time:

this is what we should do with our brain” (Malabou, 2008, p. 79). If we only
had a new political consciousness of the brain, Malabou argues, we would

be able to steer neuroscience toward a democratic course and achieve neu-

ronal liberation. Here the imaginary of recombinant plasticity encloses the

brain in the fantasy of a grand unified historical actor who would be able

to challenge prevalent uses of our neuronal plasticity by today’s political

order and return the brain to the hands of an emancipated public. Brain
matter becomes the source of liberation and, simultaneously, its target.

SPECULATIVE BRAIN POLITICS
The vision of a public that can come to form a unified actor outside con-
stituted private or state interests and seize control of technoscience and
its objects (in this case the brain, “our brain” as Malabou calls it) resonates
with a widespread understanding of alternative politics across many dif

118 Chapter Six

ferent technoscientific fields. In the previous chapters I have problema-

tized this political vision, which seems to pertain to traditional forms of

social movement action. I have argued that the attempt to achieve control
of material processes through externally extending control on technosci-

ence has a limited reach. It implies that research can be controlled through
policy and that matter can be ultimately navigated and manipulated by

social imperatives.
In this chapter I continue this discussion in order to show how such
politics has dominated current understandings of neuroscientific research
on the brain specifically and, more broadly, technoscience itself. In the
final two chapters of the book I shift the perspective from such socially
oriented politics to the practices of more-than-social movements that

attempt to create alternative ecologies of existence: alterontologies. Spe-
cifically, in chapter 7, through a discussion of aids treatment activism, I
present a systematization of di erent forms of politics and its relation to

ff

alterontological practice, and in chapter 8, the last chapter of the book, I
describe these practices in detail.

In what follows in this chapter I collect various materials that can fur-

nish a historical reconstruction of conceptualizations of the brain from the
vantage point of its understanding as plastic and amenable to recombina-
tion. This is a speculative story in which previous conceptualizations and
visions of the brain are seen through the prism of recombinant plasticity,
a term I have modified from its original understanding in order to link
the enormous creativity resulting from the inherent plasticity of the brain
with our capacity to recombine its molecular structure and to create con-
figurations that would not other wise be found in humans. This capacity

of recombination that some humans possess poses the main problem that

this chapter attempts to engage with. Rather than a comprehensive criti-
cal history and analysis of brain research, I have weaved together di erent

ff

speculative approaches to brain matter that attempt to construct it as a

political potentiality.

The next section discusses broader cultural conceptions of the body,
and within this framework it explores how the vision of recombinant neu-
ronal embodiment came to replace other prevalent existing imaginaries of
the brain.4 The sections that follow trace the links between these imaginar-

ies and the epistemic genealogy of embodiment and recombinant plastic-
ity. I start with the move from behaviorism to cognitivism and then to
connectionism. Connectionism was crucial for preparing the ascent of
theories of embodiment. Embodiment is presented as an answer to the
BrainMatter 119

shortcomings of the sciences of the brain that have treated the brain
as a self-contained, decontextualized entity and to the shortcomings

of genocentric deterministic approaches that have neglected the role of
the environment. Embodiment is used to oppose essentialist conceptual-
izations of difference, primarily gender and race, and the untenable foun-
dationalism of related political movements. The concept of embodiment

appears to exercise an almost therapeutic function: it promises to heal the
deep discontent within “Western thought” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999).
The following sections investigate the relation of embodiment to expe-
rience and the uptake of embodiment in culture and polity in the Global
North. In the same way that cognitivism and connectionism prepared the
way for the emergence of embodied approaches, here I argue that embodi-

ment opens the view toward an understanding of the brain and body as

recombinant and plastic. The penultimate section reviews epigenetics and

ecomorphs as two manifestations of recombinant plasticity that focus on
the developmental and ecological malleability of brain matter. The con-

cluding section of the chapter reviews di erent political readings of these
ff

speculative stories of recombinant plasticity and raises the possibility of an
alternative politics in contemporary technoscience, which are discussed in

the last two chapters of the book.
VISIONS OF THE BODY
Probably the most powerful and widespread cultural imaginary of the

body is the cerebral one: the body that exists as the carrier of the intellect,

as the site of cognition. The question of the materiality of the cerebral body

is a question of secondary importance; its logic is based on taming, sup-
pressing, and canalizing brain energies and bodily feelings. Flesh has to be
controlled because it is a “source of epistemological error, moral error, and

mortality” (Csordas, 1994a, p. 8).5 The cerebral body celebrates the exuberant

production of knowledge and deploys it to control the complex processes

of its own physicality and materiality. It searches for brain modules, for
deterministic procedures, for fixed algorithms in order to identify the cen-
tral processing unit of the body.6 It assumes its existence as universalist,

normative, expansive, gender-free, and culture-free. The cerebral body

is the value-producing body, the flesh that has use value, the able body—as

opposed to the nonproductive and disabled body, whose corporeality has
120 Chapter Six

always to be continually corrected.7 Cerebral value production = cognitive

capitalism.8
A parallel vision of the body focuses on a di erent type of control: the im-
ff

mune body is obsessed with protection, with the creation and maintenance
of boundaries. The immune body is concerned with the prediction of pos

sible damages and contaminations; it concentrates on the techniques of

repair, normalization, and segregation. Within the imaginary of the immune

body, research aims to demarcate the limits of the body, its durability, its
widths of tolerance. The immune body “is a body that separates us from the
other bodies that inhabit the globe and that prohibits our fusing with other

entities. The immune body is that which determines our Hobbesian selfness
and is in potential conflict with every body” (S. F. Gilbert, 1997, p. 38). The

immune body is primarily concerned with the production of knowledge that
conserves and defends, that opposes weakness, that anticipates what is es-
sential for protection and preservation of the body’s processes.

The immune body is obsessed with the threat of sudden illness and death.
Illness and death “unbutton the world taken as normal and consequently
disrupt, question, alter and endanger common and taken-for-granted social

relations” and make us aware of the “eventfulness of embodied human life”

(Schillmeier, 2016, p. 161). Here, illness and death are not considered “natu

ral” phenomena; they are processes that can be forced from outside; they

designate the event of the breakdown of the body’s boundaries. In response,

the immune body aims to anticipate and prevent death and illness. The main
task is to preempt them. The temporal register of the immune body is the
future. A temporality open to vulnerabilities and risk, the future is the res-

ervoir of possible threats that can trigger the body’s implosion, dissolution,

and death. For example, when hiv erupted in Western gay communities in
the beginning of the 1980s, it initially triggered a moral panic, not over the
actual deaths it caused and the lack of appropriate response to the epidemic

but over what it suggested about the vulnerability of the body and of the
body politic.9 hiv became a signifier of how gay men subverted the mas-
culinist fantasy of the intact body underpinning the prevalent heterosexual
matrix:10 a fantasy that assumed that masculine bodies are immune, pro-
tected, and impenetrable11 in the same way that nation-states are assumed to

be controlled and sovereign territories. The topos of the immune body be-
came less about the negation of this vulnerability and more about anticipat-
ing how to avoid potential infection, disease, and death. The immune body
is plagued by fear.
BrainMatter 121

The only antidote to fear is to exit the materiality of the body altogether.
This is the vision of the discarnate body that provides relief from the vul-
nerability of the flesh. The discarnate body introduces the fantasy of the
pure self: incorporeal, fleshless; liberated from the passions, habits, and
weaknesses of its facticity; the fantasy of the disembodied mind (as op-
posed to the embodied brain). The discarnate body is the home of pure
ideas, clean thoughts, and uncontested intellectuality. Against the visions
of the immune and cerebral body, which concentrate on the production

of di erent types of knowledge, the discarnate body cultivates sanctity.
ff

Rather than producing knowledge to tame the body or to protect it, the
discarnate body is the site of faith. It is less about exploring and experi-
menting with its immanent functions, origins, and boundaries and more

about expressing confidence in some transcendent order and purpose of
the body. The discarnate body is oriented toward a temporality that is out-

side lived time. Its powerfulness lies with the potent effect that this infinite
temporality has on everyday practical commitments.
In the vision of the discarnate body, time is infinite while the universal
cerebral flesh is a place without time, out of time. The vision of the im-

mune body is defined by the synchronic affections between di erent bod-
ff

ies. The diachronic axis, the evolutionary history of flesh, is captured in
the vision of the hereditary body: the search for genetic algorithms, for the

ultimate code of development.12 The hereditary body is the body that is the
result of gene expression; it purports to tell the objective natural history

of the flesh. The hereditary body is the body that marks and categorizes
origins: it is a vision in which gender is constructed as sex, in which pro

cesses of racialization unfold, and it is the vision that cultivates the saga
of deep belongings (nation, language) through supposed universal body
architectures. The hereditary body is concerned with time past; it sees the
future as a continuation of its given evolutionary roots and attempts to

diminish the synchronic pressures on the brain and the body and to mini-
mize uncertainty.
What is common to all these temporal registers is that the flow of time

is external to the body. It constitutes the background against which each of
these di erent body imaginaries occurs. In all these temporal orders time

ff

is preexistent; it is a neutral trajectory that runs quasi objectively and uni-
formly independently of the actually changing body. However, if we think of

time as a creative force, not as just a neutral trajectory but as an intensive
element in body’s metamorphoses, then a di erent cultural vision of the

ff

body appears: the vision of embodiment and emergence. If we “temporal-
122 Chapter Six

ize time” itself (Sandbothe, 1998), the body becomes simultaneously the

subject and object of its own regeneration. The embodied body responds, on
the one hand, to formations of life that evolve as the time of life flows and
creates new unpredictable and novel configurations of existence. This real
lived time is the time of development: the emergent body exists in the
realm of its own developmental trajectory and actuality.13 On the other
hand, it is emergent because the creation of new forms is always limited by

the existing contingent conditions of existence.14
The embodied and emergent body is unthinkable, indeed impossible to
exist, outside the formative chronotope of ontogenesis. If the hereditary
body conjugates the notion of predisposition in di erent versions,15 the
ff

emergent body refers to how lived ecologies shape its materiality. In
this vision the brain stops being a self-contained entity and becomes—

literally—embodied, that is open to changes that occur within all the di erent

ff

systems and subsystems that constitute the body and its surroundings. The
embodied brain reminds one of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) nomadism as
an entity’s state of openness to its own construction obtained through its
own movements within concrete environments, rather than through an
externally imposed form of organization.

FROM COGNITIVISM TO CONNECTIONISM
These di erent cultural imaginaries of the body are tightly interwoven

ff

with existing epistemic languages and practices of the brain. While every

epoch has its brain, not every epoch considers the brain the seat of think-

ing and consciousness. In ancient Greece the higher parts of the soul re-
side in the heart, and similarly, traditional Chinese medicine sees the heart
as the house of the mind; René Descartes considered the pineal gland the

seat of thinking. With the rise of medicine in the middle to the end of

the nineteenth century, the brain became a systematic object of study. But

even then the brain was far from being the seat of thinking and conscious-
ness. Until the 1950s the functions and the psychology of the brain were

black-boxed through the dominance of behaviorism.

With the dispute over the ultra-positivistic Skinnerian program, the
behaviorist mechanistic stimulus-response (S-R) model comes gradually

under attack. The main task is to rehabilitate the idea of “thinking” in psy-

chological and brain research. There have been many chapters in this en-

deavor16 since behaviorism’s expulsion of thinking from psychology at the

BrainMatter 123

beginning of the twentieth century.17 Dewey’s vision of the mind as a social

process contested the behaviorist view of mind and thinking.18 In the first

decades of the twentieth century, pragmatism presented a viable and lively

alternative to the obliteration of thinking, consciousness, and experience
in dominant academic discourses. But pragmatism could not ultimately
challenge the dominance of the behaviorist model. It is only much later

that pragmatism’s approach informed research on the brain through its
influence on certain strands of connectionism and embodiment. However,
at the time, none of these endeavors precipitated a fundamental turn in

research into mind and consciousness that would later take place with the

advent of cognitivism in the 1950s.
E. C. Tolman (1954) was among those who formulated basic outlines for

this upcoming trend in research on thinking a few decades before the emer-

gence of the cognitivist movement. He introduced the idea of “intervening
variables,” which was an attempt to dissect the entire phenomenon of be

havior in order to achieve a new homogeneous synthesis. A response is no

longer seen as a direct linear correlate of the stimulus taking place after a

certain time lag; rather, it is a function of the stimulus that depends on the en-
vironment it is embedded in, the elaborate need system and the belief-value

matrix of the individual. The stimulus-response is mediated by this function,

and this mediation lies within the individual. The internal plane of human
consciousness now becomes the core center for the regulation of behavior.

Emphasizing the idea that thinking is a dedicated function highlights a
key moment for the emergence of cognitivism. For example, Jerome Bruner,
one of the protagonists of the cognitive turn, saw a possibility for derailing
behaviorist dominance in the insertion of a new middle link in the S-R pat-

tern that would allow the investigation of this internal plane of thinking. This
link was “sign-mediated-thought” (Bruner, 1967). Thinking is elucidated as

an instrument and as a device regulated by a set of rules— that is, as an

organon with specific functions. The output of a certain input is no longer
immediately predictable but is now primarily a function of thinking. How-
ever, with the suspension of prediction, the scientistic presuppositions re-
quired to assert the natural scientific character of research seem to vanish.

In the mid-1950s—a period in which significant publications (by Noam

Chomsky, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and others) and events (such as

the mit Symposium on Information Theory) in the history of cognitivism
took place19—Bruner, Jacqueline Goodnow, and George Austin (1956) pub-

lished A Study of Thinking. Through their combined efforts they asserted
that rule-based learning, categorization, and processes of abstraction

124 Chapter Six

constituted the main functions of thinking. Thinking is not only about rep-
resenting but primarily about problem solving; it is a function. The quest

then becomes how to illuminate and visualize the “invisible” domain of this
function.20 The answer to this was the idea of computationalism: cognitive
processes constitute a standard set of procedures that can be reduced to

predefined lower-level processes.21 Cognition emerges in “patterns of data

and in relations of logic that are independent of the physical medium that

carries them” (Pinker, 1997, p. 24).
Even if cognitivism is still one of the dominant paradigms of research
in the field of psychology and neuroscience, there is an increasing focus on

producing systematic knowledge of somatocognitive processes that can

be generalized without relapsing into the universalism and essentialism of
computationalism. One could read experimental neuroscience’s insistence
with mapping psychological functions and subjectivity onto the brain22
as another step in the long history of localizationism23 that attempted
to uncover how the relation between mind and brain is constituted. The
brain mapping of subjectivity through new visualization technologies that
correlate psychological functions with brain areas seems to perpetuate
a traditional abstract view of the brain as a fully formed, static modular
structure.24 But it also reveals an attempt to go beyond the use of embodi-
ment as a figural or metaphoric concept in order to sketch direct relations

between the material workings (that is, brain activity and neurobiological
processes) of the body and experiential processes and intersubjectivity.25

In the unfolding of this story, connectionism represents the next impor

tant step in the exodus from cognitivism toward an understanding of the

embodied brain. Connectionism promises the possibility of unraveling the
structural relations between perception, cognition, action, and affect by
conceiving all these dimensions of existence as linked directly on the neu-

ronal infrastructure of the brain. Connectionist research in experimental
neuroscience investigates the embodiment of the brain on the material-

neurobiological level.26 Neuronal networks depict complex assemblies of
interconnected nerve cells where certain synapses constitute central nodes
in the network while others occupy more peripheral positions. The pro

cess of ontogenetic development envisions the birth, change, and decline

in neural efficiencies, and the apoptosis of many such connectionist nets
materializes as webs of sculpted neurons.27
Connectionist modeling challenges prevalent cognitivist approaches and
their adherence to representational nativism, which assumes that the organ

ization of brain function depends solely on genetically driven cortical

BrainMatter 125

microcircuitry. Mental representations in cognitivism are the result of in-

nate neurophysiological processes that are context independent and uni-

versal in the human brain. Thinking has universal algorithmic structure

and resides in fixed neuronal architectures. Against this, “in a connec-
tionist network, representations are patterns of activations across a pool

of neuron-like processing units. The form of these activation patterns is

determined by the nature of the connections between the units. Thus, in-
nate representational knowledge . . . would take the form of prespecified

weights on the inter-unit connections” (Elman et al., 1996, p. 25).

What is crucial in connectionism is that the weighting of the nodes is
not given but emerges through learning. This is the moment when the idea
of malleable brain matter that is entailed in the emergent and embodied vi-

sion of the body described in the previous section comes into being. While
computationalism presupposes innate neuronal structures, connection-
ism presupposes semi-open, nonlinear architectures that unfold during

the process of ontogenetic development. Brain matter is simultaneously

the actor and the result of its own activity. Brain matter becomes formed

as it becomes active, but it is active only because this activity shapes the

brain into specific forms. Connectionism is a crucial move away from
the essentialism and universalism of cognitivism. The formation of brain
matter is emergent and contextual: it depends on intraorganismic and ex-

traorganismic ecosystems, and it is embodied.
EXPERIENCE AND EMBODIMENT
The embodied approach adds a significant dimension to connectionist

modeling of the brain. Embodiment is not only about the syntactic struc-
tures of meaning; it also encompasses the semantics of experience (the
production of meaning) and the pragmatics of experience—that is, body-

specific, context-dependent, and culture-dependent aspects of meaning.

Context and experience merge into the workings of brain matter. It is

not a coincidence that social, cultural, and critical psychological theo-
ries of embodiment focus on the study of the relation between brain and
body: existentialism and phenomenology,28 constructionist and discursive
intersections with the biosciences,29 critical psychology,30 and cultural-

historical psychological accounts.31 The embodiment of brain matter means

that mental functions are not formal procedures, cognition is not in

dependent of its implementation, and mind and experience are always

126 Chapter Six

instantiated in concrete material structures: in a body,32 in an environ-
ment,33 in a social context,34 or in cultural-political constellations.35 From

the perspective of embodiment there is no such thing as the brain as a fully

separate organ. We can think of the brain not as such but as part of, as em-
bedded in, as being in relation to other functions and systems of the body.
Conceptualizations of the embodied brain vary immensely in content and

scope, though.36 In its weak form, embodiment simply means that cognitive
functions take place within a physical substratum. More elaborate versions
understand the brain as a multilayered, multifunctional, self-organizing

system consisting of interacting subsystems: cognition, perception, emo-
tion, and action are not separate but interact continuously and shape our
understanding of the self and of the world. Another approach to the em-
bodied brain emphasizes its phenomenological dimensions as the existen-
tial ground of thinking: our bodily movements and orientations are the
ground on which our mental concepts and abstractions build. “No matter

how sophisticated our abstractions become, if they are to be meaningful to
us, they must retain their intimate ties to our embodied modes of concep-
tualization and reasoning. We can only experience what our embodiment
allows us to experience. We can only conceptualize using conceptual sys-
tems grounded in our bodily experience” (Johnson, 1999, p. 81). Another
widespread version of the concept of embodiment emphasizes the brain
as an active agent absorbing, modifying, and transforming social, cultural,
and symbolic forces. The brain in all these understandings is an insepa-

rable part of the human body. Many extend this approach to include the

artificial, organismoid, or humanoid body and its relations to the human

body: embodiment in these accounts refers to hybrid machines that are

able to act in real-time and real-space environments.37

All these divergent approaches and countless descendant theories of

embodiment propose that human conceptual and experiential systems are

inextricably linked to the sensorimotor and affective systems. Experience
starts with the affective-perceptual sensing of the environment and with

locomotion within it. From an intraorganismic perspective, the embodied
brain is the steadily transforming brain in a process of constant interac-

tion with the totality of the body and the brain itself. The experiences that
humans have cannot exist without a brain that represents its own state and

the state of the body in which it is embedded.38 But the embodiment of the
brain is not just about decentering the brain into the body of the organism;
it is primarily about decentering the whole organism itself, an idea that

has been already developed within cybernetics (Pickering, 2011).39 Rather
BrainMatter 127

than reducing the unit of analysis to the organism itself, embodiment re-

quires thinking through intra- and interorganismic relations and how brain

activity is “enacted” (Colombetti, 2014) within the brain-body-world con-

tinuum.40 There is no embodiment if there are no other bodies around. The

embodiment of the brain is the becoming embodied with other bodies,
and through other bodies; it is about symbiosis and mutualism rather than
the perseverance of single organisms, as Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
(2002) put it. Embodiment means relationality and co-construction.

The brain of today’s epoch seems to be characterized by its relational

architectures in an ongoing formation of brain matter. That every epoch

has its brain means that the brain it enacts becomes also the actor of its
own existential conditions. In this sense, theories of embodiment are not
just abstract immaterial representations of somato-material processes.

Rather they are active forces in the transformation of existing sociopoliti

cal and material realities; they even transform the existential conditions
of the brain itself. Hence, the embodied approach to the brain is literally
embodied; it is not monitoring reality or specific neurobiological, devel-

opmental or social processes; rather, it is the process itself: it recombines

preexisting material and creates new ways of being. Theories of embodiment
induce new modes of existence fostering combinations on all di erent
ff

levels of organization—genetic, neural, organismic, environmental/social:

combinations that were not present before.

THE HACKABLE BRAIN
As much as the emergence of the embodied brain appears to be from

today’s perspective an epistemic event, the social movements of the 1970s

and 1980s created the conditions in which everyday “body politics”41
compelled existing essentialist epistemic understandings of the brain
to reconfigure. Feminist and queer movements;42 critical approaches to
science, technology, and medicine;43 the deconstruction of disembodied
information systems and representational information technologies;44

and a multiplicity of indigenous and antiracist movements released the
idea of the body as a political potentiality.45 Making the brain permeable

to the pressures of the social movements was coextensive with contest-
ing the universality of other visions of the brain—which I discussed in

the previous sections—by infusing science and social science with social
antagonisms.
128 Chapter Six

As social movements were bringing questions of justice to the heart of

the sciences and social sciences of the brain, a new, wider cultural imagi-
nary of the brain was also emerging: the brain as self-regenerating and

perpetually improvable. The embodied brain is not just a brain that as-
sumes social justice; it is also a self-assertive brain that tries to overcome

discourses of fatigue, intrusion, death, and degeneration by viewing itself
as the all-in-one solution: it is the source, site, and target of its own re-

generative practices. Even if the vision of the embodied brain privileges
contextuality and specificity, its logic is based on an idea of neutralizing
the notion of limit and context as imposed by other brain discourses. The
embodied brain represents a powerful form of cultural universalism: it

pledges to heal not in terms of correction (cerebral body), protection (im-

mune body), or recurring to a fixed origin (hereditary body) but in terms
of its own open reconstruction and recombination: the hackable brain.
Embodiment promises to engage with the lived pains of the body: the
tamed flesh, the tortured flesh, the oppressed flesh.46 But at the same time
this promise is localized: it hinges on the belief in a recombinant individual
agent. The ambivalence of the vision of the embodied and emergent brain
is that it arose as a powerful critical practice that questions the prevalent

decontextualized and out-of-time individualism circulating in everyday

culture as well as in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and psychology/
developmental science in the Global North. But this thrust toward undoing

the individual agent was gradually appropriated by the discourse of flex-
ibility that came to destabilize the prevalent assumption of the individual
as a self-contained, cognitively fully equipped and intrinsically competent

agent.47 The flexible individual is in permanent self-modification: brain

computer-interfaces, brain boosting, and brain enhancement.48 Social,

subjective, neuronal flexibility is not just the target or the modus operandi
of self-relationality; rather, it is the condition of embodied liberal individu-

alism. Social control is embodied; it is exercised through the constant pro

cess of modifying one’s own material bodily existence.49 Individuals are in
an everlasting process of self-maintenance; one could almost say that we

never die or live but are just perpetually maintaining and working on our
brains and bodies.50 Contemporary political governance encounters the

individual as an assemblage of ideas, limbs, high-tech devices, chemical

substances, and environmental factors that is continuously creating and

re-creating itself, hacking and unmaking itself.51

The vision of the embodied brain is fractured and ambivalent: it is si

multaneously affiliated with social movements that made its existence

BrainMatter 129

possible and with liberal individualism and the entrepreneurial geoculture

emerging after the 1980s. In the embodied brain, emancipation and con-

trol reside simultaneously. Social movements have opened a space for per-

forming the brain as embodied, a space that did not exist before, a space
that came before social control and had the capacity to create new liberat-
ing conditions. The existence of new emancipatory forms of life required
control to change and reorganize itself in order to be able to respond to

and finally appropriate these movements. Even if this could be seen as a

failure, it testifies for the opposite: social movements are successful only
when they change life to such an extent that they cannot be bypassed but
need to be appropriated. Social control capitalized on the new realities
that social movements created, and the embodied brain was gradually as-
similated into a vision of the brain as self-regenerating through its own

recombination and its own making.
SELF REPRODUCING MACHINES

-
The vision of recombination is not just an abstract ideal; it is firmly located
in technoscientific developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, data
computing, and robotics.52 The recombinant, emergent brain questions
previous models circulating in these fields that attempted to duplicate

the functions of the human mind and to create an artificial quasi-human

brain. This quasi brain would be expected to execute command over the
sensorimotor subsystems and to act as a controlling device responsible
for autonomous problem solving. In this view, cognition again dominates

the circuits of action, affect, and perception.53 Theories of embodiment

attempt to change this view and link cognition directly to motion and per-
ception circuits (and also increasingly to affective systems), questioning

the necessity of the existence of a quasi brain.54
The quest is no longer to “implant” consciousness in intelligent machines.55
These machines need only simple cognitive architectures, sophisticated

sensorimotor engineering, fast hardware, and a sufficient amount of data
containing a repertoire of social-emotional skills.56 They then become active

and emergent: simple perceptions elicit bodily movements, and in turn

these organize cognition.57 Errors within this sequence of actions produce

affective states; affects intensify bodily movements and new communication
scripts, which require faster responses and new, more complicated cognitive
procedures, and so on. In the realm of artificial intelligence, complexity is
OF 130 Chapter Six

not a gift from the humans to the machines. In fact, all humans can do

is reduce complexity and simplify brain processes and body architectures.

What these new machines do is far more sophisticated than what humans

can produce: they increase complexity through learning and recombining
situated processes step by step.

Here recombination points toward biotic machines that can ultimately

reproduce themselves independent of human intervention. This dimension

of self-organized reproduction58 is central to the contemporary imaginary

of plasticity within neuroscience and popular culture.59 If every epoch has

its brain—and as I argued, today’s epoch gravitates around the embodied

brain—then every epoch fantasizes about having a better brain. Embodi-

ment and emergence open a window to the plastic brain. Recombinant
plasticity is the promise that theories of embodiment and emergence bring
with them but cannot fully realize. The Brain That Changes Itself is the title
of Norman Doidge’s (2008) New York Times best seller. Recombinant plasticity
points toward a di erent model for understanding brain-body matter, one

ff

that ultimately harbors a greater fascination for self-reproducing organic

bodies than the distributive networks, self-organized systems, and body-

environment interactions that dominate theories of embodiment.
Here plasticity refers to both the ecological-developmental plasticity

and neuronal plasticity of the brain. Environmental influences60 and in-
trinsic processes of interaction and ecological symbiosis with other bod-

ies61 define the range of potential phenotypes that can be actualized.62
The plastic brain is present to itself, “self-generating” but also creating

new forms through the incessant interactions and reconfigurations of the
di erent participating levels of organization. And at the same time it is
ff

constrained by the contingent limitations that exist in itself and in its en-
vironment.63 The interplay between plasticity and specificity, as Steven
Rose (1998) puts it, describes the condition for inserting real-life time and

real-life contexts in the body and the brain. The recombinant plastic brain

is marked by the events as they occur in the multiple interactions between
the genetic, neural, organismic, and ecological levels of existence.64 It only

exists in real-time and real-world ecologies; thus it can be only under-

stood from an ecological-developmental perspective.65 Mary Jane West-

Eberhard’s (2003) theory of developmental plasticity and Bruce Wexler’s
(2006) theory of neuroplasticity across the life span provide good exam-
ples of how phenotypic variation occurs as a diversified process depending

on a multitude of environmental factors, social and cultural conditions,

and the genetic material shaping brain matter in di erent ways.66

ff

BrainMatter 131

EPIGENESIS AND ECOMORPHS
If there is a multiplicity of intrasomatic and extrasomatic factors that affect

the development and making of the brain, then the question is how to in-
vestigate specific pathways of environmentally induced variations of brain
development. This is the turn to epigenetics.67 “Epigenetics is defined here

as those genetic mechanisms that create phenotypic variation without al-

tering the base-pair nucleotide sequence of the genes” (Gilbert and Epel,

2009, p. 12). Epigenetic factors are increasingly considered important for

conceiving how genes are (or are not) expressed in processes of develop-

ment and how environmentally induced changes of the organism can be
transmitted to the offspring.68 Epigenetic explanations of human develop-

ment attempt to grasp the multifactorial complexity involved in extrage

netic micro-organismic processes and cellular transformation as well as in

organism-environment interactions.69

The study and standardization of epigenetic factors becomes one of

the key innovations driving basic research and applications in neurosci-
ence from an evolutionary-developmental perspective.70 Consider, for ex-

ample, research on the environmental impact on fetal development71 and
on gene expression through exposure to di erent nutritional substances,72
ff

the prevalence of specific types of degenerative processes associated with

later life,73 or the influence of social experiences on phenotypic variation.74

These are just few examples; what matters here is that epigenesis opens up

the field of research on the embodied brain toward di erent scales of gene-

ff

environment configurations. Elsewhere we have examined the enormous
variations of these scales as well as how di erent epigenetic approaches

ff

conceptualize and operationalize the relation between the dna and pro-
teins, cells, the organism, and their environment in experimental research
(Chung et al., 2016; Cromby et al., 2016).75 But what is common to all of
them is that the brain is a plastic system shaped through the interplay of

epigenetic factors and our genes.

The moment of the announcement of the Human Genome Project,

which was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, was probably one of

the last instances of celebration of genetic reductionism. To the words of

President Clinton that “we are learning the language in which God created
life,” we should probably add: “Let the race for epigenetics begin!” After the

celebrations of the decoding of the human genome had faded and given

way to skepticism, Time magazine rushed to announce a new decoding:
the decoding of the human epigenome as a new major scientific discovery

132 Chapter Six

(Time, December 8, 2009). Forty years earlier the gene was an absent
reference in the widespread scientific fantasies and popular imagination

of the brain. But very quickly it became the floating signifier in the geno-
centric imaginary that dominated the end of the previous century. An-

other turn now: what only few years earlier would have been formulated
as “Why your dna is your destiny” or “Your genes, your choices” (Baker
and American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1997) today

reads: “Why your dna isn’t your destiny” (Time, January 6, 2010). Now

the task is to codify epigenetic factors, sort out substances and environ-

mental conditions that inhibit or promote specific gene expressions, and
standardize the mechanics of the environment-organism interplay and the

environment-development-gene interplay.76

The outcome of this interplay is phenotypic variation: ecomorphs,
the emergence of di erent phenotypes that is dependent on the influ-
ff

ence of the contingent ecological and relational factors within which an

individual of a species is embedded.77 I use the term here in an extended

way: ecomorphs as standardizations78 of the effects that epigenetic de-

velopmental factors (be they intraorganismic or extraorganismic) have

on a recombinant plastic organism. Ecomorphs represent stable configu-
rations of ecological-developmental influences and the genetic code, of

what Hannah Landecker (2011b) describes as the constitution of the en-
vironment and the social as a biologically meaningful signal in epigenetic

research. Reducing and classifying the environment to a mere signal that
induces drastic changes in genetic function is the crucial step in develop-

ing classifications of causal relations between the environment and the
gene. Ecomorphs can be considered, then, as classifications of the causal
coupling between certain environmental situations and a specific expres-
sion of genes. In this sense they are the smallest knowledge unit that
has biovalue in epigenetic research and underpins the image of the brain

as plastic.79
AUTOCREATIVE BRAIN MATTER

In the previous sections I told a story of brain matter from the perspective

of its capacity to recombine itself (see the plot for this speculative story
in table 6.1). The recombinant plastic brain is literally autocreative,80 in

a constant process of self-destruction and self-generation: it becomes a

powerful political agent that changes and shapes the environmental, social,

BrainMatter 133

and biochemical conditions that make it happen. The promise of the au-
tocreative brain is its capacity to be open to its own partial appropriation:
it can be enclosed in neoliberal markets, it can maintain pro cesses of

ordinary political governance, it can excite policy makers and marketeers

alike, and it can even fuel fantasies of grand political liberation.81 The

autocreative brain not only becomes a “radical challenge to Western
thought” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999), it also becomes an element for the

ultimate regeneration and actualization of Western thought, literally—the

pop story goes like this: “We’ll be able to direct changes: stimulate new

brain cells and networks where and when we need them; turn genes off
and on at will to repair brain damage, restore function, and optimize per

formance; and rewire our brains to manipulate memory and even reverse

dementia and mental retardation” (Horstman, 2010, p. 8). But as Luciana

Parisi and Tiziana Terranova (2000) remind us, every configuration of

the brain as a specific type of organism (in this case, the autocreative and
recombinant plastic organism) is the result of the conjoined action of poli-

tics, production, and technoscience in the Global North.
Autocreative brain matter has something for everyone. Despite its radi-

cal contextuality, the promise and wide appeal of the plastic brain lies in its
readiness to act as a universal brain. Probably the most apparent universal-

ist appropriation of the autocreative brain is in the politics of neurogov-
ernance: the claim that it is through the bioscientific modulation of our
brains and bodies that “we,” humans, come to construct “our” subjectivity

today. It is claimed that humans “not just in ‘the West’ but also in many

other regions” have come to develop a sense of personhood through the
language and practices of neuroscience and biomedicine (N. Rose, 2013,
p. 6). The autocreative brain manifests itself as a supposedly universal tool
of governance: the management of populations and their sense of citizen-
ship unfolds through the biomedical regulation of the malleable brains of
citizens.82 With its fixation on how human subjectivity is formed, the

politics of biosubjectification and biomedical governmentality reproduces
what it tries to problematize:83 the humanist universalism of Global North
societies—now in its postliberal arrangement. As I have already discussed

in chapter 2, forty years of deeply divisive neoliberal politics have fractured
society and given birth to postliberal enclosures of power that amalgamate
diverse fragments of Global North societies to dominant subjectivities—

and it is these subjectivities that the presumed universalism of biogovern-

mentality seem to affirm and perpetuate.84
134 Chapter Six

TABLE 6.1 — Plot for a Story of Brain Matter

BEHAVIORIST COGNITIVIST CONNECTIONIST EMBODIED AUTOCREATIVE
BRAIN BRAIN BRAIN BRAIN BRAIN
animal-human-
UNDER LYING mechanical digital autonomous

network machine

META PHOR interface computer machines
hybrids

basic animal controlled body-
distributive reproduction of

MODELLED ON physiological problem environment
processes organic bodies

processes solving interactions

FUNCTIONING stimulus- universal nodes and
emergence plasticity

PRINCI PLE response algorithms weights

ORGAN IZATION
black box centralism decentralism contextualism recombination

PRINCI PLE

SUPPOSED organism-
physiological genes and brain biotic

BIOLOGICAL neural circuits environment
processes modules machines

SUBSTRATUM assemblages

EXPLANANS determinism nativism connectivity relationality epigenesis
DOMINANT neuro

CULTURAL liberal governance
Fordist state neoliberal culture
-
POLITICAL democracies and postliberal
CONDITIONS polity
Chomskyan
workers alter-globalization movements; alterontological
liberal

SOCIAL movement; feminist and queer politics; politics;
egalitarianism;
MOVEMENTS social autonomist movements; decolonial
civil rights;
liberalism postmodern perspectivism movements
identity politics
Possibly, the underlying condition for such an appropriation of plas-

tic brain matter for the project of neurogovernance is its firm inclusion

in the system of biovalue production. Neuroscience and brain research is
concomitant with biotechnology and biomedicine and their propagation
in public health and clinical practice.85 The inclusion of brain matter in

the system of biovalue production and the proprietarization of the epig-
enome intensifies its conflictual political character. It is here that Mala-

bou’s narrative of liberation discussed at the beginning of this chapter
inserts itself. If plastic brain matter today generates itself by increasing

BrainMatter 135

late capitalist power and wealth through its biovalue, then there is surely

potential for some kind of dialectic negation, Malabou asserts:86 a total re-
versal, or better, a full-scale sublation of brain matter’s appropriation into

bioproduction—seizing plasticity for liberation.

But such a thesis assumes that plasticity is independent of brain matter.

It constructs plasticity as a strategy and a device that we can use to modify
our social and political existence. It presupposes that technoscience and

capital—disguised as nature—breathe into the brain’s neurons the breath

of plastic life. And as if this split between what the brain is and what the
brain does is not problematic enough, it also assumes that humans will be

able to seize plasticity in order to free their brains from late capitalist ap-

propriation and then, subsequently, free themselves. This is a clash of uni-
versalisms: universal brain liberation against the universalism of the brain’s
expropriation to biovalue. One cannot avoid seeing here a parallel between

the plastic brain and the seizing of the state in traditional social movement
politics. As I argued in chapter 5, in the same way that the state can no lon-
ger be controlled for the purpose of liberation, brain matter is no longer a
device that can be controlled, seized, or simply used for achieving univer-
sal freedom. As I discuss in chapter 8, matter within technoscience today is

fully privatized and, simultaneously, belongs fully to the commons. Brain

plastic matter is at the same moment 100 percent capital and 100 percent

commons. There is no total appropriation; there is no total negation. The

plastic brain does not belong to capital so that it can be fully controlled.
And as much as it does not belong to capital, it does not belong to “us,”
humans, and we cannot free ourselves by using it.

Instead of approaching plastic brain matter as this universal decontex-

tualized entity that can be harnessed by di erent political projects—be it
ff

neurogovernance, biovalue creation, brain liberation—I am looking here

for a politics that follows brain matter’s traits as emergent and embod-

ied and attempts to remain committed to the everyday experiences that
shape it. It is here that the question of alterontological politics and more-

than-social movements that I discuss in the remaining two chapters of this

book emerges. My argument in this chapter is that the type of brain that
humans believe they have today is the brain that enacts its own real ex-

istence and shapes itself. So is it possible to ontologically enact a plastic

brain that commits itself to the emergent, embodied, and contextual quali-
ties of brain matter by defying its purported universal appropriations for

imposed social or political aims—be it through its enclosure in processes

136 Chapter Six

of capitalization, or as a device to achieve some form of grand liberation,

or as a tool that facilitates neurogovernance?
Is it possible that the autocreative brain creates brain matter that can-

not be replicated and universalized? Is it possible to equip our brains with

all the capacities they need to avoid their capture for other political goals?

This would require the plastic brain to engage in a grounded experimenta-
tion with its own ontological making and to refuse that it has a universal
architecture and way of functioning. In fact, it would require delinking
from prevalent forms of brain politics by creating alternative mundane
brain ontologies: ten thousand tiny autocreative brains. This would be an
alterontological politics of plastic brain matter. Many such experiments

with alternative compositions of the brain are happening already. I cannot
explore them in this chapter—my aim here was to develop a repertoire of

existing forms of politics within technoscience, in this case brain sciences,
and to open the view toward an alterontological politics that I develop in

the last two chapters of this book.
BrainMatter 137

07
COMPOSI
TIONAL
TECHNO
SCIENCE
AIDS ACTIVISM
When, on October 15, 1982, White House press secretary Larry Speakes

responded to a question about President Reagan’s reaction to aids by
mocking the reporters and saying, “I don’t have it. Do you? . . . There has

been no personal experience here,” he declared publicly what everyone af-

fected by the epidemic already knew: aids was at that moment primarily
a cultural and political issue.1 And it certainly was: the culture and politics

of aids came to dominate medical, scientific, and social issues for most of
the 1980s.
It took another three years before Ronald Reagan would acknowledge
aids publicly2 and one additional year until the government would start

preparing a response to the devastating epidemic.3 This response was
nothing more than a (controversial) public health program for sex edu-
cation despite the widening crisis and the twenty-five thousand reported

deaths since the beginning of the epidemic in 1981. Research was still slow
and would remain so for many more years, and access to care and drugs
was insufficient. In 1986–1987 the aids Coalition to Unleash Power (act up)

was founded.
The years that followed saw the rise of aids treatment activism and its
powerful impact on society, culture, health care, biomedicine, and clinical

research.4 aids treatment activism did not only manage to contest and
change culture and public opinion on the aids crisis; it also managed
to fundamentally transform the nature of clinical trials and the relation

between patients’ movements and federal health authorities in the United
States.5 The Food and Drug Administration (fda) changed the approval
procedures of aids drugs and introduced laboratory tests and “surrogate
markers” to measure the effectiveness of drugs rather than long-term clinical

trials only.6 The first trials of combination antiretroviral therapy (art),

which began in 1992, were regarded not only as a breakthrough in the

biomedical management of hiv but also as the first serious response of
science to the demands of the aids movements for effective therapies.
art started becoming available four years later in 1996. It was just be-

fore that and, indeed, before knowing that this new class of drugs would
be available that aids activism and act up as an organization started

to decline.7
The 1981–1986 period of aids activism is considered somewhat the la-
tent phase of the movement that provided the opportunity for “making
sense” of the situation and “preparing” for the “visible period” between

1987 and 1995, which is considered the key phase for direct action and in-
tervention.8 There are di erent ways to approach the rise of aids activism

ff

and the relation between the politics of aids and the scientific production
of knowledge: as the process of activists becoming credible experts; as a

process of participation and inclusion in existing institutions; as a network

of actors (scientists, activists, pharmaceuticals, the virus itself, and so on)

where all of them contributed to the creation of aids knowledge; and finally

as an enunciative act that was based on the strong situated experiences of
people living with hiv/aids.9 Although all these approaches—their con-

ceptual underpinnings and their political implications are the topic of this

chapter and are discussed extensively later—reveal important aspects of

aids activism, they all, perhaps unwillingly, imply a teleological reading
of the movement: as something that targeted the inclusion of the move-
ment’s demands in committees and regulation, in scientific research, in
established institutions, in biomedicine, and in the cycles of recognized
experts.
I want to focus here on how aids activism became possible at all in

order to be able to effect these changes. So I want to shift the focus for a

moment to the first phase of activism, 1981–1986, in order to contribute
Compositional Techno science 139

to an understanding of the movement not solely as something that was
fought on a social level and targeted social institutions but as a concrete,
ordinary set of practices that primarily targeted the making of justice in
everyday life: embodied justice, felt justice, material justice. Such remak-
ing of the everyday led to the formation of new conditions of existence
and action that could not be ignored by existing institutions and pub-
lic discourse. The formation of act up in 1987 could be understood as
the moment when a movement that already existed could no longer be
ignored. But this formation was the outcome of a long process that ac-

counts for the emergence of this particular movement long before any

question about its inclusion in science, institutions, social power, and so
on was apparent.
REGIONS OF OBJECTIVITY
In a certain sense, such movements are practicing a “true” constructivism,

a constructivism sans phrase: the making of new sociomaterial entities
that change the conditions of possibility in a certain field. In what follows
I use the term region of objectivity to define such a field as the one in which
aids activism took place: a field that is sustained by a multiplicity of ac-
tors, objects, infrastructures, and so on. In such fields, questions about
politics and knowledge are negotiated and ultimately decided in practice.

Rather than conceiving objectivity as an epistemological question, though,
I consider it as an ontological-material and practical question.10 Objectivity

here is not an abstract epistemological concept but a practice that changes

the ontological composition of a region of objectivity.
Following the science wars of the 1990s,11 epistemology can be considered part
of the conditions of knowledge production. Scientists and their research—the

organisms, objects, processes, or populations under study; technological ap-

paratuses, methodological instruments, and epistemological debates; ethical
beliefs, cultural imaginaries, and the wider polity; interest groups and state
authorities; more-than-social movements; transnational institutions and na-

tional funding bodies; the private sector, publics, and the commons—all are

players in the same game. They all exist in the same social-ontological field

and evolve in the “mangle” (Pickering, 1995) of everyday practices that they
perform. Their co-actions establish spaces in which certain ways of thinking

and acting, and the very materiality of their existence, appear as given, or, if
you like, as matters of fact, as a region of objectivity.

140 Chapter Seven

This type of objectivity is very di erent from the objectivity that domi-
ff

nated the debates of the 1980s and earlier, as the undistorted representation

of the logic of things. As we move toward a “performative epistemology”

(Pickering, 2010) and possibly toward an exit from epistemology altogether,

a di erent conception of objectivity appears to be emerging, as knowledge
ff

now seems to be objective in a certain field to the extent that it manages to
thoroughly transform the material conditions of existence in that field. It
is objective to the extent that di erent actors in the field manage to object,
ff

transform, and remake the process of knowledge production itself. Thus,

being objective is no longer considered an abstract qualifying attribute of
knowledge, but refers instead to the efficacy of knowledge practices in object-
ing and transforming the composition of the materiality that underlies a field.
Desires, hopes, and investments in the objects under study—be they

individuals, social groups, animals, or things—mingle with the constraints

these objects impose on researchers, as well as with interest groups, ethics

and beliefs, affected social actors, and state institutions. Together, they
produce knowledge in ways that inexorably transform the immediate on-
tological composition of a region of objectivity. How do movements change
a region of objectivity? What are the compositional politics of social move-
ments? What is the particular type of politics that is performed in a region

of objectivity?
In the sections that follow, I discuss four responses to these questions

and present four corresponding conceptualizations about how politics is

considered operative in a region of objectivity.12 I start with a formalist
approach to politics, which is primarily concerned with rethinking exper-
tise and creating the appropriate procedures for considering legitimate
experts in a certain technoscientific debate. A second approach to poli-
tics, participatory politics, is concerned with the expansion of the limits of
public deliberation in a region of objectivity. The third approach focuses
on the extension of our understanding of politics beyond human actors.

A fourth emerges when actors who have been neglected in a region of
objectivity contest existing knowledge and restructure the conditions of
scientific knowledge production from the standpoint of their marginalized
experiences. In the final sections of this chapter I bring together di erent
ff

aspects of these four types of politics to construct an understanding of the

practices of more-than-social movements: the composition of alternative

regions of objectivity and the crafting of alterontologies. Here I also argue

that this compositional moment was a crucial feature of aids activism with-
out which the movement would not be possible at all.


EXPERTISE AND THE LIBERAL PREDICAMENT
The question of legitimacy of participating actors is key to how a region

of objectivity is constituted. In most cases individual or social actors in a
region of objectivity achieve legitimacy through being or becoming recog-
nized as experts. The necessary starting point of this approach is a classifi-
cation of di erent types of expertise that are essential for managing issues
ff

of credibility and for shaping public discourse and decision-making.13 Col-

lins and Evans (2007), for example, attempt to identify di erent types of
ff

expertise beyond “contributory” expertise, the highest degree possessed by
active practitioners who have a level of skill and knowledge allowing them

to participate fully in their scientific field and to contribute substantially
to its development. Here, the inclusion of legitimate experts (and subse-

quently the exclusion of nonlegitimate experts) in a formalized process

of deliberation is seen as the main way to reshape the relations between
di erent actors in a region of objectivity. Crucial in this process is then to
ff

extend expertise in a regulated way by using certain standards for identify-
ing actors who can express valuable opinions about relevant technical as-
pects in a controversial issue.14 In terms of aids activism, this would mean
seeing the long and multifaceted first period of the aids movement as the
preparation for aids activists to become credible experts and acquire a
voice in the relevant institutions.
Managing the processes of inclusion/exclusion of experts involves

distinguishing between a design phase and a political phase in every for-

malized debate within a region of objectivity. According to this distinction,
decisions about the design should be left to experts, and experts should try
to avoid influences from the broader cultural and political environment.15

This distinction challenges previous social constructionist approaches to
knowledge production. Instead of focusing on how extrascientific factors

influence the production of knowledge, studies of expertise attempt to find
out how intrascientific factors can be meaningfully regulated. This may

seem like a response by social constructivists to the science wars of the
1990s, and it is indeed a way to preserve the relative autonomy and specific-
ity of scientific knowledge. Social constructivism becomes Weberian, but
with a twist or two: not only can the credentialed “contributory experts”
make a difference in the design phase of a debate, but so can other potential
experts who lack contributory skills but hold potentially important knowl-

edge on particular topics by virtue of their experience. However, this is not

a trick used in the wake of the science wars to appease scientists enraged
142 Chapter Seven

with the debunking of their specific expertise by social constructionists;
rather, it is an attempt to preserve the specificity of scientific knowledge
production while also opening it up to contributors who had not been ac-
knowledged previously.
Using expertise as the yardstick for deciding credibility and then in-
clusion and exclusion in a region of objectivity simultaneously opens and

closes the process of knowledge production. It opens the process of le-

gitimacy by not restricting it to contributory experts, but it closes it down
again when the process of scientific knowledge production is about to im-

plode through the introduction of extrascientific interests. The opening
is performed by assigning expertise to social actors who possess relevant
knowledge without being traditionally recognized as contributory experts.
Collins and Evans (2007, chap. 3) call this crucial type of expertise inter-
actional; it allows affected social groups with sufficient experience and
knowledge to participate in a debate over a specific controversy. However,
they also exclude other types of knowledge, such as general popular under

standing or knowledge extracted from primary sources without deeper
immersion.16 This inclusion and exclusion of di erent expertises attempts
ff

to define and preserve the borders of what counts as legitimate expert par-
ticipation in a region of objectivity. In fact, the study of expertise is about
policing these borders, rather than offering substantial insights into any

particular scientific controversy.

Expertise is ultimately about a formalist type of politics in a region of
objectivity: politics is understood here not in a substantive way but by de-

fining formal rights of participation and inclusion. The definition of these

rights of participation relies on a basic agreement on the normative princi

ples that govern the workings of a region of objectivity.17 That is, it tries to
set out rules according to which all legitimate participants offer reasons for
or against certain arguments: rules that need to be followed in unforced
communications in which all participants act reasonably and are well in-
formed.18 According to the formalist approach, such principles are negated

when extrascientific politics enter into the technical phase of a debate and
dilute expert negotiations. This logic is akin to the centrality that experts
play in contemporary liberal democratic polity,19 in which well-informed

representatives and experts are assumed to settle disputes in terms of fun-

damental rules based on principles that protect everyone: a constitution

that regulates the process of decision-making.

But what happens when the structures that can be used to facilitate
informed and democratic deliberation over a particular controversy are


already permeated by the controversy itself? This was what aids treat-
ment activism was facing: an already constituted social landscape and a
hostile environment within institutions such as the fda. In the formalized
process of this region of objectivity there was no space for the position that

aids activists were defending. aids activists had to contest the constitution

of the rules in order to be able to articulate their position. The political ar-

chitecture that created the possibility for resolving the controversy did not
exist prior to the controversy itself.
The crux of formalist politics—the possibility of constituting a flaw-

less space as a starting point for communication between the participants
in the social contract—is an untenable position when viewed in real his-
torical perspective. Such a space is never given as the actual starting point.

One could say, of course, that it is exactly because of this that we need

to support a formalist approach to politics. The argument would be that
the more that such spaces of communication elude us, the more they are
necessary, and the more they are necessary, the more we should accept
their paramount value.20 However, elevating formal-regulative principles

to core values does little other than to invoke an authoritative moral code;

it does not make them work in everyday life. Formalist politics occupy the
space of the normative by vacating the space of the actual.

Like any other version of formal-regulative ethics of political engage-

ment,21 formalist politics in science and technology miss the substantial
embeddedness of communication in the deeply asymmetrical and unequal
social, cultural, and material social relations.22 Formalist politics thus miss
the fact that conflict with a region of objectivity emerges not because a

proper process of expert deliberation has not (yet) taken place, but because

it already has failed somewhere along the way. And the case for aids ac-
tivism reveals that clearly: the incapacity of the government and the rel-
evant authorities to handle the hiv epidemic and the aids crisis through

the already constituted channels of communication and action had to be
changed. The formalist approach is good at illustrating, in retrospect, how
such failure takes place and at detecting the stratified and unequal contri-
butions that each participant can make ex post facto. What it cannot do is
to engage with them in a way that changes the formal order in a region of
objectivity altogether. Formalist politics occupy the space of observation
by missing the space of transformation.
Of course, formal rules sometimes can instigate social transformation
in a region of objectivity. When rules of negotiation are derived from the
conditions of a controversy they can have transformative effects. When
144 Chapter Seven

viewed from a historical political perspective, such rules are always the

target of social movements that contest the formal structures of liberal
democracies by demanding radical changes in the norms and legislation
governing a certain field of life such as civil rights campaigns, the women’s

movement, and the gay rights movement. The problem is that changing

the rules from outside is what formalist politics deny. Formalist politics
are literally formal: the rules are not derived from a certain situation or
conflict, but are assumed to apply to every region of objectivity, to every

conflict. Formalist politics—in a Habermasian fashion23—attempt to oper-

ate as a transcendental judge in order to control procedures for deliber-
ating over the controversy. This external universalizing position can only
function as an adjustment within the constituted order in a certain region
of objectivity. But when a conflict cannot be accommodated within a re-
gion of objectivity, then a di erent form of action needs to be exercised: a
ff

compositional practice that remakes not only the rules of the debate, but
also its content, scope, and material devices through which exchange in a
region of objectivity happens. And this was what aids activism achieved.
PARTICIPATION AND THE LIMITS OF INSTITUTIONS
A second approach to conceiving politics in a region of objectivity focuses

on the conditions of participation and the processes through which lay-

people are included in debates over scientific research. The participatory
approach does not start from a “normative” or “formalist” definition of
who has the necessary credentials to be included in the deliberation pro

cess. Instead, it makes structural claims about the inclusive conditions
for shaping a region of objectivity:24 Who needs to be included? Where
and when is participation needed? How can we enhance participation and
what specific processes need to be considered?

The broad answer to the “who?” question usually attempts to develop
insight into how to facilitate the co-constructive role of the public for

shaping technological objects and scientific practices. It attempts to go be-
yond seeing the role of the public only as concerned with the applications
and consequences of technoscience.25 The public can be a highly elusive
and easily instrumentalized category, however. Attempts to concretize the
public primarily include stakeholders such as ngos, affected social groups
(usually self-organized), or other civil society organizations into the pro

cess of decision-making. They tend to emphasize user groups, patient


groups, and activist groups that organize themselves to articulate specific

claims on existing technologies.26 This form of inclusion has its roots in
the women’s health movement27 and feminist approaches to medicine,28

environmental health movements,29 and of course the organizations of

people living with hiv and aids that I referred to earlier in this chap-

ter.30 Facilitating the participation of such groups can be strengthened by
changing broader scientific research agendas themselves or more specific
science policies (such as the clinical trial procedures discussed in the case
of aids activism).
More broadly, there are calls to intervene in science “upstream,” before

applications are decided and when it is still possible to shape the compila-

tion of research agendas.31 Science policy and the governance of science
become crucial factors for shaping the framework in which such deci-

sions about research topics and agendas are designed.32 The question of
“where?” often appears in close connection to the problem of “how?”: we

find approaches that call for practices that invigorate advocacy,33 public
engagement,34 and attempts to reinforce accountability.35 There are also

broader quests for a civic epistemology36 and the setting up of an agora
as space for negotiation between scientific and social actors.37 Such po-
sitions strive to enhance inclusive procedures in decision-making38 and

deliberation.39
Participatory politics in all their variety and nuance shift the focus from
who is an expert or who is a legitimate participant in a region of objectivity
to the problem of enhancing inclusion of citizens. They are thus concerned

with changing the structures in which debate in a region of objectivity
takes place. Participatory politics differ significantly in their scope, target,
tactics, and radicalism. When I refer to participatory politics, I mean ap-
proaches that aim to reform existing institutions in order to change the
conditions of citizens’ inclusion. Other radical approaches go as far as to
question the whole institutional structure and propose a radical demo

cratic approach40 for creating grassroots initiatives, or even alternative
institutions—and aids treatment activism is a good example of this. Some

of these more radical democratic positions are discussed later, as part of

situated approaches that highlight the importance of power inequalities
and their effects on the shaping of science and technology. The form of
participatory politics that I discuss in this section is primarily concerned
with the role of social difference in science policy and with strengthening
public participation.41 Deliberative democracy, policy adjustments, and
public accountability become the tactical means deployed in participatory
146 Chapter Seven

politics to promote inclusion that changes the balance of power in a region
of objectivity.
The civic imperative of participatory politics is to construct regions of
objectivity such that civil society can be included in processes of direct

democratic decision-making. Civil society in participatory approaches

refers to actors who come together on a voluntary basis rather than as
functions of state-supported institutions, such as education and science,

or pure market forces. Civil society is seen as a counterbalance both to
strong individualizing tendencies of liberal democracies that emphasize
the rights of the single individual and to the excessive growth of particu

lar state functions and governmental institutions. Instead of focusing on
abstract and formal procedures for settling conflicts within a region of ob-
jectivity, participatory politics emphasize that sound science policy can be
achieved only if there is a system in place that relies on citizen deliberation

and engagement.
There is here a strong echo of communitarian positions42 that portray

a “community” whose members negotiate specific issues in terms of their
“horizon of meaning.” Participatory politics works on the interface be-
tween the community and existing institutional structures. Institutional
spaces broaden or narrow the accepted horizons of meaning against which
a controversy in a region of objectivity can be debated and eventually re-
solved. The keyword here is framing: appropriate formulating of an issue in

order to include public actors. Framing in this context is not a pure discur-
sive strategy;43 rather, it refers also to social spaces, practices, and relations
that enable alternative ways to frame an issue.
However, the questions of how far and how many actors can be in-
cluded in the deliberative processes of an institution is always filtered

through the existing possibilities and margins that the institution allows—
in Daniel Neyland and Steve Woolgar’s (2002, p. 272) words, the “con-
ditions of possibility for accountability.” Participatory politics—and here

I refer to mainstream participatory approaches, not to radical forms of
participation, which are discussed shortly—operate as corrective forces

to the shortcomings of existing institutions. The participatory politics of
aids activism was primarily about exposing the shortcomings of relevant
institutions of the time and forcing them to renegotiate the conditions of
participation of civil society actors that at this moment were considered

illegitimate. But if one focuses only on the main target of participatory pol-
itics, which is supposedly inclusion in institutions, something very impor

tant can be lost along the way: the broader social, material, and ecological

transformations that movements set in motion. These transformations are

not as visible as institutional transformations, but they are crucial for sus-

taining livable worlds for the affected social groups and for sustaining the
movements.
Transforming existing institutions can, of course, have far-reaching ef-

fects in democratizing a region of objectivity. Nevertheless, institutional

participation of this kind operates within existing institutional coordi-
nates that define not only a certain problem and its potential participants

but also what is irrelevant and thus disposable from the perspective of
the institution. The effects of aids activism go far beyond its ability to
transform the relevant institutions. The aids movement transformed thor-
oughly everyday life, culture, and the material conditions of existence of

so many people far beyond its institutional reach. Participatory politics is

crucial for enhancing institutional processes of democratization. However,

it needs to be extended to and complemented with politics that not only
transform existing institutions but also operate, if necessary, outside exist-
ing institutions and give birth to alternative forms of action, imagination,
and practice in a region of objectivity. Later in this chapter I refer to this

politics as compositional.
NETWORKS AND THE IGNORANCE OF GOVERNANCE
If participatory politics focuses on the inclusion of social actors in existing

political institutions, actor-network theories attempt to include non

human actors in descriptions and ways of acting in a region of objectivity.
Actor-network theories avoid thinking in terms of the sociopolitical and

the natural as divided worlds and propose an approach to the social that

complicates this bifurcation and prevents us from “counting in advance”
what society and nature are composed of.44 Rather, they seek to explore
how humans and nonhumans collectively and in emergent ways construct

a region of objectivity by being implicated in networks of connectivity.45
The main concern here is to describe these connections and to eluci-

date the appropriate assembly for dealing with particular issues: “Every

new nonhuman entity brought into connection with humans modifies the

collective and forces everyone to redefine all the various cosmograms”

(Latour, 2007, p. 813). Cosmograms are divergent and often conflicting
ways of actual world-making. Latour argues that the task is to “detect how

many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain

148 Chapter Seven

its existence” (Latour, 2004b, p. 246, emphasis in original). This is also a
formalist approach, albeit quite di erent from the one described earlier: to
ff

define the appropriate staging for each problem, so as to enable effective

processes of representation, mediation, and translation between human

and nonhuman actors.
In order to accomplish this, it is necessary to maintain symmetry be-
tween the di erent actants and explanations, since a hasty conclusion about
ff

a prevalent form of agency can trap us into “prematurely naturalized objecti-
fied facts” (Latour, 2004b, p. 227).46 Attention to symmetry reveals how new
entities are formed in the sociomaterial world and how new complex “en-
tanglements” of mutual attachments involve di erent actors and things.47
ff

Every given entity in a region of objectivity is made through its connections

with other things: “Actor-network is, has been, a semiotic machine for wag-

ing war on essential differences” (Law, 1999, p. 7). What exists is produced
and made through relations: “relations everywhere” (Strathern, 2005).
This inflationary focus on relations and connections corresponds to a
broader shift in conceptualizing politics as governance in contemporary

political theory and practice: politics as an affair of actants perpetually

adapting to and establishing alliances and networks with others. This con-

ceptualization of the political implicitly abandons the governmentality

model that has shaped much of alternative sociopolitical theory in recent

decades.48 Instead of self-activating actors and processes of subjectivation—

that is, instead of conceiving the production of subjectivities as an effect of
power49—governance is a form of a-subjective management that emerges

through connecting actors and creating alignments between them.
Power is assembled, rather than exercised. Politics is enacted through
the configuration of a network rather than through the enunciation and
subjectivation of di erent actors inside the network.50 Within this frame-
ff

work governance refers to the management of the network’s configuration,
on how specific parts of the network are assembled and put to work
together.51 Governance signifies the erosion of constitutionalism as an es-
tablished set of generally accepted principles in sovereign law. It is post-

constitutionalist; that is, in a scene populated by many interconnected and
partial actors, governance offers a common mode of effective political sta-

bility and functioning.52 Politics here does not follow predefined or abstract

principles imposed by a central authority (usually the nation-state) or the

relative balance of power between di erent political subjectivities; rather,
ff

governance describes the process that controls the search for regulating

principles in the absence of an authority that guarantees such principles.


Regulating principles are developed ad hoc through intensive negotiation

between participating actants.
But if we contextualize the trope of governance in historical and geopo

litical terms, it emerges as a predominant form for regulating polity and

production in contemporary Global North societies.53 It is a mode that

renders the actants and entities participating in a region of objectivity pro-
ductive, in a double sense: first, politically productive and, second, as ac-

tive parts in the existing mode of production (see also chapter 1). There is

a preoccupation in actor-network theories with discerning how a situa-

tion comes into being and how complex assemblages evolve through the
relational actions of the participating actants. This is the political side of

networks: it necessitates the creation of new political assemblies that ac-

commodate the emerging constellations between human and nonhuman

others.54 However, the insertion into the political assembly happens in

correspondence with the incorporation of these entities into a new mode

of production, the self-valorizing assembly system of the biofinancialized

economies, as described in chapter 2.
Thinking politics in a region of objectivity in terms of networks and
governance goes hand in hand with the emergence of new forms of dis-
placement. The point here is not to distinguish between good versus bad

governance, but to explore how governance as such becomes the politi

cal algorithm of contemporary organization of control.55 What about those

who cannot or are not willing to contribute to the spaces that are regulated
through governance? The moment when aids activism came to an end in
the early to mid-1990s is coincidentally the moment of the consolidation
of governance. As governance came to dominate the stage of politics, it
shaped how the aids crisis was handled on a global scale in the 1990s and

2000s.56 And it is in the governance of global networks of hiv infections
through multinational pharmaceuticals, supranational organizations, char-

itable or private foundations (such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Founda-
tion) and the emergence of philanthrocapitalism, global public health, and
local contingent responses that one can see how the productive assemblage
of governance fails to include those who cannot act within its framework

of global governance—let alone those who are unwilling to participate it.57

What about human and nonhuman actors who betray the constituted

order of governance, who disrupt the function of networks with an in-
tractable conviction about justice, who ask inappropriate questions, who
position themselves outside the “we” of the political assemblage of gover-

nance, who create alternative spaces and bring the wrong messages? From
150 Chapter Seven

the perspective of governance this is a form of fundamentalism, and, as
Latour says, the ultimate political question is “Can fundamentalism be

undone?” (Latour, 2005a, p. 31).58 But how far can movements go if they
follow the logic that “if you cannot bring good news, then don’t bring any”?

Exploring the constitution of networks provides an insight into the intrica-
cies of more-than-human material agency, but ultimately these new forms

of agency are reinserted into the constituted order of governance.
SITUATEDNESS AND THE INDETERMINACY OF EXPERIENCE
A situated perspective on a region of objectivity presents an almost re-

verse but simultaneously also closely related account to the one just pre-

sented.59 Situatedness primarily means to articulate knowledge politics
from the standpoint of neglected experiences within a region of objectivity.60
Implicitly, situatedness challenges the invisible “we” so often assumed or
summoned in all previous approaches: the contractualist “we,” the possi-
bility of supposedly all-inclusive institutions, or the “we” of the networks

of governance. Of course, recognized experts, policy makers, lawmakers,
facilitators, observers, mediators, diplomats, and translators are all necessary
for creating the political architectures of a region of objectivity, but from a

situated perspective the most crucial viewpoint is that of the fully engaged
yet partial participants.61
While situatedness can only exist within webs of relationality (simi-
larly to actor networks), these webs are asymmetrical and unequal (which

presents an almost reverse approach to networks politics). Asymmetrical

relations between human and nonhuman others are constitutive of the

conditions of every region of objectivity, and this can be illuminated from

di erent angles: we see discussions of how technoscience contributes to
ff

domination62 and attempts to enhance social and political structures that

facilitate alternative forms of intervention,63 mobilizations of radical science
movements,64 grassroots democratic participation, and science activism.65

Many of these positions reflect radical critiques of technological, scien-

tific, and medical rationalities66 and are historically rooted in the social
movements of 1960s and 1970s—in particular feminist, antiwar and anti-

nuclear, and ecological movements67 and the new social movements after

the 1990s.68 From the perspective of situated politics, questions of credibility
(as in formalist politics), existing institutions (as in participatory politics),
or inclusion in relational architectures (as in the networked approach) are

facets of a continuous movement of social transformation that is primarily
initiated by neglected, silenced, or effaced positions in an asymmetrical and
thus antagonistic social and material order.69 aids activism is probably a

classic example: starting from their neglected (and in many cases actively
effaced) and partial experience of living with aids, activists articulated a
presence that challenged the already constituted order of a region of ob-
jectivity. The experience of life and death in the epidemic was the ground
for aids activism.
An important question has to be asked about the nature of the expe-

rience of neglected groups, human and nonhuman, that are effaced in a

region of objectivity: Can their experience be treated as given and defi-
nite?70 Does the experience of the excluded preexist the relation of ex-
clusion? While the formalist and participatory approaches seem to take
experience for granted (as a “have” or “have not” feature of an individual
actor), the actor-network approach complicates the problem of experience

by refuting its primacy altogether. Experience seems to be either reified as

a substance or eliminated and dissolved in pure connectivity.71 This im-
passe between reification and dissolution of experience also pertains to
early versions of the situated approach.
If experience is reduced to a mere reflection of the immediate given
position of the actor in power inequalities, it is also reduced to something
that is instantaneously accessible and transparent. This move undercuts
any possibility for real transformation of the actors because they are cap-

tured in an endless process of reiterating their own experience. This move

also underpinned identity politics during the postwar period in the Global
North. Although cultural studies have vividly shown that identity is always
in process, because it entails the remaking of the actors and their social

relations,72 the 1990s marked a moment at which identity politics became
increasingly unable to contribute to radical political mobilizations.73 Post-

structuralism attempted to resolve this problem by introducing an idea of

experience as discursive formation.74 This consists of two parallel endeav-
ors: it challenges both the individualistic fallacy invoked in much talk of
experience and the notion that experience is a monolithic and transparent
object of knowledge. However, this important critique of experience usu-

ally goes hand in hand with a reduction of experience to a mere sociohis-
torical incident that undercuts any possibility for agency and introduces a
disembodied form of social relationality and existence.75
To what extent does the idea of experience in situated politics chal-
lenge the pervasive logic that sees experience trapped in the binary logic
152 Chapter Seven

between reductionist essentialism on the one hand and discursive antifoun-
dationalism on the other? In order to question both, the reification of experi-
ence as well as the elimination of experience through discourse, we have to
assume that actors do not already “have” experience. They make experience
as they collectively contest existing forms of injustice. Experience in this
sense evades representation; it is processual and collectively constructed.

Elsewhere we called this approach to experience “continuous” (Stephenson
and Papadopoulos, 2006). It is a retreat from the self, from clichéd subjec-
tivities, from the oppressive reduction of experience to the discourses pre-
vailing in a certain context. Experience becomes a process that pushes itself

to change.76 Experience is all there is but it is not definite and given.

The point of departure for situated politics is not experience as such
or its representation but how experience is collectively and a-subjectively

made in webs of relations, continuously. The involved actors experience
the world by making it, in a process of co-involvement.77 aids activism

became possible as people created the ontological conditions that allowed

them to negotiate their sometimes very divergent experiences in the epi-
demic. In 1981–1986, di erent individuals, groups, and communities of
ff

people living with aids created common spaces, shared practices and lan-

guage, and di erent modes of engagement with the virus that allowed the
ff

movement to become a movement as such and to become visible after

1987 through widespread direct action and interventions. In her insightful
study on aids activism, Deborah Gould (2009) shows the complexities
and ambivalences in this process of trying to make sense of, negotiate,

and develop repertoires of action in the face of the epidemic. The move-
ment and experience are contemporaneous; none of them preexist the
other. From the perspective of situated politics, the point is not primarily
to acquire the right credentials or to participate in governance and institu-
tions but to engage with and compose alternatives to the dividing forms
of power in social, material, and ecological environments that enable a
movement to exist.78
THE TIME OF COMPOSITION
Despite significant differences and regular controversies between these

approaches, all of them describe practices that interrogate the existing
order of a region of objectivity: the definition of credible participants, the
expansion and restructuring of institutions, the inclusion of nonhuman

actors, and the inclusion of neglected voices. They seek to modify the con-
ditions of possibility within the constituted order of a region of objectivity.
But a di erent political framework is necessary if we approach a region of
ff

objectivity as an open process rather as an already constituted order that

needs to be rectified in some form or another. More precisely, I am inter-
ested in how actors constitute themselves, whether human or nonhuman,

long before they are formally recognized as such—that is, as constituted

subjectivities capable of changing a region of objectivity. This is the crucial
question of alterontological practice: how to contribute to the making of
actors in a certain region of objectivity, or even how to become one. This
question is not about the visibility or invisibility of an actor; rather, it is
about how actors become the inheritors of unchartered obligations and
the locus of change of a region of objectivity before they can be perceived
as such, even before they consider themselves actors. I refer to this politics
as compositional: the making of a sociomaterial actor on the level of every-
day existence, before negotiations about inclusion in existing institutions,
formal procedures, expert committees, networks and governance, modes
of enunciation, and so forth unfold.
Compositional politics is about creating alternative forms of life that
allow the renegotiation of a given constituted order to take place—whether

this renegotiation is about expertise, formal structures, the nature of in-
stitutions, the role of nonhumans, network politics, standpoint politics,
situated experiences, and so on. An alternative form of life acts as a set of
constraints against which actions as well as possibilities for new actions
within a region of objectivity evolve and take place. In this sense, as dis-
cussed in chapter 1, it becomes a form of life that cannot be bypassed—

not because it defines in a deterministic fashion the outcome of actions,79

but because it creates new ontologies that allow specific actors to become

actors and to intervene and interrupt or alter the constituted order of a
region of objectivity.
aids activism and the entanglements of human actors (patients, activ-

ists, researchers, fda regulators, political parties, governmental authori-

ties, and so on) and nonhuman actors (hiv virus, medications, tests for

viral loads, circulating body fluids, and so on) have been investigated using
all of the frameworks presented earlier in this chapter. One of the most
prominent examples is Steven Epstein’s (1996) important work on how the

collective of aids activists inserted itself into a biomedical region of objec-
tivity in ways that undermined and eventually changed the existing terms
154 Chapter Seven

of the debate. Epstein describes how aids activists became recognized
experts and increasingly contributed to shaping biomedical research. He
shows how aids treatment activism, once it became powerful enough to

enter existing institutions (such as the fda), changed the format of treat-
ment research, clinical trial procedures, the distribution of medications,

and so on.
But if we read aids activism only from the perspective of what it has
achieved in terms of the politics of expertise, governance, and institutions
within the region of objectivity around hiv, we are in danger of missing
all these diverse, fragmented relations, practices, and actions that made the

emergence of movement possible. Instead we would impose a teleologi-

cal view onto the actions of the movement as if it were designed from the

beginning to achieve these targets.80 Such a teleological reading fails to

pay attention to the process of the making of an actor long before its prac-

tices were recognized as a form of “effective” politics. Moreover, widely

recognized political achievements of a movement are sometimes the “by-

products” of the movement’s actions, rather than its main focus. Often
movements mobilize in order to encounter direct forms of injustice and
oppose them on an everyday level long before they develop organized

political interventions and campaigns. This is certainly the case for aids

activism between 1981 and 1986.

Teleology serves many objectives; one of the most prominent is pre-
sentism: to conceive the aids movement as a succession of events that all
constituted preparation for the activism of the late 1980s that primarily
targeted the fda and the broader process of mainstreaming aids through

its “professionalization.” Already in 1990 social theorist and activist Cindy
Patton (1990, pp. 19–20) had warned that “the amnesia surrounding the
history of activism between 1981–5 was initially a product of the emerg-
ing aids industry; but it has been reinforced by progressives who have
begun to locate the beginning of aids activism in 1987 or 1988, with the
emergence of act up.”81 Rather than what appears to be a single, unified
movement, the first phase of aids activism is a long period of composi-
tion: a multitude of di erent practices that simultaneously attempted to
ff

deal in some way or another with the devastating crisis, to make sense of
the broader social, political, and cultural situation and, most importantly

of all, to secure the material conditions that would allow the gay communi-
ties under threat to continue to exist.


EMERGENCY CARE
From very early on, gay men and their communities developed and inven

ted a multiplicity of practical engagements with an epidemic that quickly
became a devastating social and public health crisis.82 Building on the work
of Puig de la Bellacasa (2015) on the temporality of care, we can understand
these practices as emergency care.83 Here is a list of such practices (in no

particular order): challenging medical decisions; campaigning to raise

money for alternative research; organizing support, volunteer caretaking,

and extended care ser vices; creating autonomous ser vice provision (aids

ser vice organizations); setting up new community spaces and community

organizations to engage with the new challenges of the crisis; extensive

experimenting with one’s own body and (not officially approved) drugs;84
getting involved in intensive lobbying of medical associations, doctors,
hospitals, local councils, and public health officials; organizing media in-

terventions; negotiating the meaning of their own subjectivities by setting
up community meetings, educational initiatives, and debates in newspapers
through leaflets, magazines, editorials, and letters; developing new forms
of affection, intimacy, and reciprocity; educating themselves in medical,
health, legal, and policy issues; (re-)politicizing white, mostly middle-class

gay men who started to realize that their relative privileged positions were

inherently precarious;85 the activist beginnings of the “silence = death”

project; the many calls for civil disobedience and for getting “angry about

aids” (Kramer, 1989, p. 48); militant action and confrontational activist
practices such as sit-ins, traffic tie-ups, blockades, occupations, picketing,

aids walks, and rallies; being prepared to get arrested;86 holding candlelight
vigils; inventing and reinventing new sexual practices and sexual expres-
sions;87 taking direct action and holding contentious protests; defending
gay bathhouses and other sex establishments;88 trying to make sense of the

broader social, political, and cultural meaning of the epidemic;89 setting

up buyers’ clubs of illegally manufactured or illegally imported drugs;90
attempting to maintain self-respect and gay pride and navigate through

all these conflictual feelings about one’s own community produced by the

hostile social environment and the constant stigmatization and demoniza-
tion;91 negotiating the burden of shame about gay difference and fear of
social abjection created by the prevailing homophobic hysteria;92 defend-
ing gay male sexuality within the terror and panic of mysterious deaths and
diseases;93 being proud of the community’s attempt to face the crisis; and
giving love to the ill and dying.

156 Chapter Seven

Through these compositional practices, aids activism gradually took

shape and constituted itself after the start of the epidemic. Simon Watney

(1997, p. xii) says that what we could call “the” gay community “did not pre-

exist the epidemic in any very meaningful sense,” and one could add here

that aids activism did not preexist the emergence of this community. This
means that aids activism is not just a reaction to the epidemic, as if the epi-
demic remained the same since it erupted and aids activism was conceived
by a community as a full-scale strategy of response. Rather, aids activism

is the outcome of a long formation process in which thousands of gay men

and their communities tried to grapple with a devastating virus. aids activ-
ism is the outcome of an ontological encounter and an ontological conflict
between human bodies and hiv retroviruses unfolding within a hostile ho-

mophobic culture and a specific biomedical regime. This group of gay men
became a community and engaged in aids activism as a way of understand-
ing and managing this ontological encounter. aids activism is the attempt to
create a material, biochemical, medical, social, and cultural space in which
the relation of human body and hiv could be reshaped after the initial out-

break of the epidemic. And of course the first concern was to just survive
this encounter. aids activism became possible because of the everyday prac-

tices that allowed the community in the making to sustain itself.
The legacies of the previous political era of gay liberation were crucial for

developing these new forms of organizing in the midst of the epidemic. Pat-

ton (1990, p. 19), for example, highlights the liberationist roots of early aids
activism. But beyond the liberationist legacies and the integrationist realities,
most communities had to reinvent themselves in order to be able to exist in
the new conditions of the epidemic. Many di erent political trajectories and
ff

currents existing within gay communities of the 1960s and 1970s were recon-

figured in a process of profound sociomaterial experimentation: emergency

care, practical justice, reaffirmation of sexual difference, invention of novel
forms of intimacy and affectivity, creation of spaces of political and cultural

autonomy and protection, the reclaiming of confrontational politics—all prac-

tices that constituted the “new” community. This kind of dispersed, everyday,
imperceptible politics—compositional politics—enabled the emergence of

aids activism in the early 1980s94 long before it became recognizable as the
single social movement that was gravitating around act up. Compositional
politics reordered the conditions of everyday being and experience so as to
facilitate the emergence of a new social actor. One has to take literally every

word of one of the concluding phrases of Larry Kramer’s (1989, p. 49) historic
call for action, 1,112 and Counting: “we must fight to live.”95

ALTERONTOLOGICAL POLITICS
Conceiving the politics of creating alternative ontologies of existence

as compositional highlights that a region of objectivity is never given or
complete. Of course, compositional politics cannot but emerge out of the
di erent accounts of politics already existing in a region of objectivity.
ff

It draws from the politics of expertise its democratic sensibility toward

noncontributory experts, from participatory politics its bottom-up citizen
perspective on technoscience, from network politics the agency of non

humans, and finally from situated politics the collectivization of transversal

neglected experiences. However, compositional practice is much more
than the aggregation of these di erent political sensibilities: rather than

ff

being anchored in a given institution, position, network, or subjectivity, it
attempts to redraw the form and content of an existing political order. The

way a region of objectivity is constituted and the political practices of the

involved actors are two di erent things. Changes in the political practices
ff

precede changes in the constitution of a region of objectivity. The politi

cal composition comes first and shapes the institutional composition of a
region of objectivity.
Compositional politics happens when certain human or nonhuman ac-

tors, imperceptible actors, emerge by addressing questions of injustice and
by materializing ordinary relations of justice (see also chapter 5). Compo-
sitional politics is not primarily concerned with contesting given regimes
of control by introducing improvements in an existing political order—

that is, rules of equality, the codification of rights, and the establishment
of institutional structures for the articulation of public responsibility. This
may seem a paradoxical proposition since rules of equality, rights, and respon-
sibility make up a plausible part of what many of us understand as active
political engagement. And even if this form of politics is indispensable in

certain contexts, I want to argue with Rancière (1998) that politics in the
sense of composition arises from the emergence of the miscounted, those

who have no place within the given order or a region of objectivity. Politics
is a collective enterprise that exposes a given order to be limited, contin-
gent, and inconsistent by creating an alternative lifeworld inhabited by the
previously miscounted: alterontologies.
This is what aids treatment activists did years before they became po

litical subjects in their own right and constituted a social movement with

a distinct profile. Activists created an alternative objectivity, an alterontol-
ogy of existence. This new form of life is ontological not only because aids

158 Chapter Seven

activists and their communities engaged with the virus directly (for exam-
ple, by confronting existing research; by acquiring medical, epidemiologi-
cal, and biochemical knowledges; or by experimenting with novel drugs
and, perhaps most importantly, with their own bodies) but also because

they changed their own material conditions of life in order to be able to
exist with the virus. The 1981–1986 period of aids activism was the period
of learning to live, learning to die, learning to survive the virus. This period
made the visible phase of aids activism after 1986 possible, a phase that

was directly oriented toward stopping the virus. But first one had to accept

the presence of the virus itself and to find ways to ontologically negotiate
its lethal existence by materially reconfiguring everyday life. aids activ-
ism became an ontologically transformative social movement because it

changed the material conditions of existence of hundreds of thousands of
people, and by doing that it changed the course of the virus itself, how

we understand it, and how it was confronted. The experimentation with
one’s own body, the making and circulation of illegal medications, bodily

self-experimentation, the changing of forms of everyday sociability and of

sexual intimacy, the militant attacks of political institutions, the material

restructuring of urban spaces, and the reshaping of medical testing proto-
cols and scientific procedures are all ontologically transformative practices
that are simultaneously the effect and the precondition for the continua-

tion of existence of marginalized actors that redraw politics as we know it
by creating alternative conditions of existence that make just forms of life
emerge: alterontologies.

08
CRAFTING
ONTOLOGIES
STACKED HISTORIES
Where once stood the first English factory, a museum took its place, only

to disappear a few decades later and give way to a community-based ex-

perimental project space. The Silk Mill was built in 1721 and was the first

water-powered mechanized silk-throwing factory.1 It became Derby’s

Museum of Industry and History in 1974. But the museum fell gradu-
ally into disrepair: underfunded, with falling visitor numbers, and with
many exhibition cases in deteriorating condition, it was in need of a
thorough renovation. The recurring crises of the traditional public ar-
chive put many similar institutions under pressure. The museum closed

in 2011 to undergo necessary structural works and to prepare a plan for
redevelopment.
Reconstruction of the Silk Mill started in 2013. The aim was to include
stakeholders as well as the city and its people in a public consultation

about its future and its use. One of the main industrial buildings of the

fifteen-mile World Heritage Site of the Derwent Valley Mills,2 the Silk Mill

has a prominent position in the city of Derby, England, and its industrial

heritage. But against and despite the heavy historical role that this building
carries with it, it reopened completely empty, a seemingly blank site open
for public participation and experimentation. The Re:Make project in-

volves museum staff, visitors, and people from the community in a process

of redesigning and rebuilding its space and its contents.3 The goal of the
FIGURE 8.1 — The Derby Mini Maker Faire at the Silk Mill, Derby, UK. Photograph

by Dimitris Papadopoulos.
Re:Make project is to rebuild the museum’s facilities, exhibition cases, fur-

niture and fittings, research and functional rooms, and, most importantly,
collections in order to reopen as the new Derby Silk Mill—Museum of

Making.4 The Silk Mill was equipped with a purpose-developed workshop

including multifunctional devices such as a very-large-format cnc router,

3D printers, laser cutters, and designing software, which allow for the re-

construction of almost every nonstructural part of the museum. Hannah

Fox, the Silk Mill Museum of Making project director, envisions this re-

markable process as a socially embedded, participatory “co-production” of

the museum with “the people of Derby.”5

The Silk Mill’s industrial past was as turbulent as its postindustrial
present. It changed ownership many times, and following technological

advances in the silk-throwing industry and the changing composition of

the workforce, the production techniques evolved and the building was
redeveloped several times.6 After the gradual decline of the British silk in-

dustry in the second half of the nineteenth century the mill changed again

and became the chemical factory F. W. Hampshire only to be destroyed by
fire a few years later, in 1910. It was fully rebuilt and remained a produc-

tion site until the company moved to purpose-built premises in 1927. The

ownership of the Silk Mill transferred to the local electricity corporation,

Crafting Ontologies 161

which located some workshops and storage space there until the 1970s,

when it was adapted for its use as a museum.
The stone foundation arches of the Silk Mill are the same as they were

in 1721, as if they are holding an entity that changed so many times and
yet each one of its di erent material configurations live inside each other.
ff

I refer to these configurations as ontologies. The term ontology has been

used throughout this book in a rather concrete and ordinary way: an ontol-
ogy is the habitat and space of existence of various animal species, groups

of humans and things that provide specific conditions of how its materiality

can be changed.7 What defines an ontology is not its qualities, what it is,
but how it can and cannot change. By becoming a museum the Silk Mill
anticipates its ontological configuration as a large workshop that can no lon-
ger occupy valuable estate space in the historic center of a city. Equally the
workshop responds to the success of a chemical factory that produced some
of the most widely consumed pharmaceutical and health-care products in

Britain and had to move to larger production facilities. The chemical factory
emerges out of the decline of the previous silk-weaving facility, which in turn

is the outcome of the attempt to establish the first modern mechanized silk-

throwing production site. And, finally, the collapse of the museum and the

birth of the Silk Mill as an experimental space is the attempt to negotiate the
decline of the public (and publicly funded) archive by reflecting on its long
and uneven industrial history and by remaking its contents.
Each new ontological configuration of the Silk Mill is an articulation
emerging from the previous ontology. But my attempt to find how new
ontologies emerged from the previous ones defied my expectation for easy
causal explanations. Neither the archival materials nor the accounts of
the people I talked to offered any sense of planning, intention, or struc-

tural necessities. Rather, what I found is that ontological change in the Silk
Mill happened almost as a drift rather than by continuity or by sudden
rupture. Each new ontology sets constraints against which the next one
develops. But these constraints do not determine the nature of the new

emerging ontological configurations. Every development is contingent on

the frictions that happen as new ontologies emerge. But these frictions and

even conflicts never determine the outcome. And there is also a strong

element of chance in how ontologies are constituted: a bankruptcy of a

factory owner, a fire, a technological development in an adjacent mill that
forces the reorganization of production, the decline of the public archive.

Through an aleatoric drift against specific and concrete constraints, these

material configurations evolve and develop.
162 Chapter Eight

The di erent ontologies of the Silk Mill—from its inception as the first
ff

modern factory; its many transformations; the fact that it was one of the
sites where the organized trade union movement was born; and its redevel-

opment to a chemical factory, a workshop, storage space, a museum, and
an experimental project space—all are stacked temporally and materially.

Previous histories are still active in each new configuration even if each
new configuration evolved in unexpected ways. This is the paradox of
stacked histories: they remain active forces after their disappearance, but

they are unable to determine the content of the later ontologies. There

is no essentialism here. The ontological unity of the world is void in its

core. There is no common denominator, no core quality, no transhistorical

essence that holds these ontologies together. What holds them together

is that each specific material configuration permits only certain develop-
ments and precludes others. This allows us to think of the limits of on-

tologies (as well as bodies, ecologies, and places) without falling back into
naturalized boundaries and “objective conditions” or by promoting an idea

of permanent fluidity by dismissing the existence of limits all together.
MAKER CULTURE
Today’s experimental space in the Silk Mill is in a direct dialogue with its

industrial past. Jonathan Wallis, current head of Derby Museums and one
of the people who is behind this extraordinary community-driven, ex-

perimental reinvention of the museum, says that today’s Silk Mill is the

inevitable response to Derby’s long manufacturing history. Today’s experi-

mentation is necessitated by Derby’s historic position as the leading site in
advanced engineering in the UK. And although Derby is not the sole leader
in advanced manufacturing today, this powerful heritage has shaped ma-

terially and socially the city and its people. The Silk Mill will be “inspired

by the makers of the past, made by the makers of today and empower the

makers of the future.”8 But how can an experimental space for redesigning

a museum from the inside out and from the bottom up be a response to an
ontological configuration that started 293 years earlier? What is the vision
that captures the imaginaries of those involved and what is the hope?

This chapter addresses these questions through a reading of the maker

culture, which is at the heart of the reconfiguration of the Silk Mill. The
empirical materials I present here draw on four years of data collection.

In 2012 I started participating in makerspaces and hackspaces in the East

FIGURE 8.2 — Silk Mill, Museum of Making (detail), Derby, UK. Photograph by

Dimitris Papadopoulos.
Midlands in Britain and beyond. All the materials I collected, my analy

sis, and the political ecologies and ontologies I discuss here live “in a

stacked ethnographic present,” to use a phrase of Choy (2011, p. 71).

Stacking is not only a temporal and ontological condition, as argued
earlier in this chapter, but also a mode of sensibility while conducting
fieldwork. On a theoretical level the chapter relies on the growing schol-
arship about the maker culture, grassroots innovation, and community
technoscience.9
Conceptually this chapter is located within recent debates on ontology
in science and technology studies, anthropology, geography, organization

studies, and other social sciences. In the previous section I described the
specific meaning of the term ontology in this chapter: worlds of existence
in which di erent actors can change their materiality in concrete ways and
ff

not others. But how does this happen specifically? If, as Sergio Sismondo

says, ontology is “about multiplicities of practices and the ways in which
these practices shape the material world” (Sismondo, 2015, p. 441), this

164 Chapter Eight

FIGURE 8.3 — Wired.

“How to Make Stuff.”
Cover featuring Limor
Fried. April 19, 2011. Jill
Greenberg, Kevin Hand,
and Jeff Lysgaard/WIRED
© Conde Nast. Reprinted
with permission.
chapter attempts to explore, present, and conceptualize such human and

nonhuman practices and their relations.
In the first three sections of this chapter I discuss the maker culture and
various aspects that characterize material projects and ontological engage-

ments I participated in. Here I move beyond the dichotomy between the

existence of many worlds and multiple ontologies versus one world and a
single ontology and present the idea of ontological stacking as a possible

way to challenge this dichotomy and to approach ontology as a movement
rather as a structure, a state of being, or a process. Starting from this idea

in the sections that follow, I discuss specifically making as a movement in
technoscience and conceptualize some of its key features within the frame-
work of compositional politics that I presented in the previous chapter. In
the final sections of the chapter I discuss the political implications of these

diverse compositional practices of making and other movements of com-
munity technoscience, and I conclude with an attempt to understand move-
ments as more-than-social that attempt to create alternative ontologies and

forms of life.

ETHNOCENTRIC MATERIAL CREATIVITY
“If you want something you’ve never had, then you’ve got to do something

you’ve never done,” reads the first sentence of the Maker Faire Africa mani-

festo.10 It continues:
1. We will wait for no one. 2. We will make the things Africa needs. 3.

We will see challenges as opportunities to invent, and invention as a

means to proving African ingenuity. 4. We will be obsessed with im-

proving things, whether just a little or a lot. 5. We will show the world

how sexy African manufacturing can be. 6. We will hunt down new

skills, unmask locally made materials, keep our work sustainable and be
kind to the environments in which we make. 7. We will share what we

make, and help each other make what we share. 8. We will be respon-

sible for acting on our own ideas. 9. We will forge collaborations across

our continent. 10. We will remake Africa with our own hands.

Since the first maker faire in 2006, these events have spread around the

world. The maker faire as an event and as part of the broader culture of
making started in San Mateo, California. Maker faires are self-organized

gatherings that attract from a few hundred participants to hundreds of
thousands. Their main goal is for people to exhibit and engage others in

their technological and scientific innovations.11 The Make: magazine has
been in the center of this transnational development since its beginning in
2005.12 What can explain this capacity of the maker culture to travel across
the globe? What holds together a transnational movement so diverse and
so widespread?
The title of a 2014 publication of the Institute for Public Policy Re-
search captures something of the imaginary that the maker culture came
to occupy: The March of the Modern Makers: An Industrial Strategy for
the Creative Industries (Straw and Warner, 2014).13 The combination of
industry and the creative industries are the keywords here. When the

maker culture is mentioned in mainstream media, it often implies a call
to revive industrial production in the Global North. But this revival is
not just a return to some bygone days or some form of nostalgia for lost
skills. It appears as an aspiration to reaffirm material power and to assert a
stronger position in global production networks.14 From gadget fetishism
and technolibertarianism to the so-called third industrial revolution,15

the maker culture is hailed for its potential to revive the waning material
creativity that can rebalance the flight of production from the West.16
166 Chapter Eight

FIGURE 8.4 — Artwork by Brett Ryder. Used with permission of the artist. The art-

work was featured in the cover story of the Economist, April 21, 2012, on “The Third
Industrial Revolution.”
The maker culture feeds the vision of making manufacturing great and

strong again, which seems to resonate with the sentiments of large segments
of disadvantaged white working classes and lower middle classes squeezed

under the fast ascent of biofinancialization (as described in chapter 2):

the flight of jobs, stagnant or falling wages, deskilling, unemployment and
underemployment, reduced social mobility, disillusionment with the self-

perpetuating creative classes and (neo)liberal elites, and frustration with
the dominance of a financial economy over an industrial one. As much
as this could sound like a critique of current capitalism, manufacturing’s
revival turns out to be an element of a very di erent imaginary: a con-

ff

servative ethnocentric one, where the reduction of trade liberalization is

supposed to halt the loss of jobs and rapidly advance reindustrialization,
and making is seen as one of the core values for restoring a new work
ethic, skills, and capabilities inside the nation. The revival of the promise
of manufacturing in the West has become one of the elements that helped

assemble a new white nationalist identity across many Global North

countries—and making is implicated in this politics.

The promise of the new manufacturing emerging today lies in the digi-

tization of production, but the implementation of digitized manufacturing
entails the potential for revolutionizing technoculture: it can be performed
individually—that is, in small-scale environments and outside the indus-

trial shop floor. The prospect is that it can capitalize on people’s creativity—

everyone’s material creativity everywhere. The transformation of everyday

creativity to a productive asset has been extensively researched in the cre-
ative industries and new media,17 but this seems to be a new phenomenon
in manufacturing.
What characterizes this combination between creativity and manufactur-
ing is the engagement of the creator in the whole production process instead

of a specific part of it.18 In the same way that people are hailed as users today,

the promise is that we will all become makers. Of course, this creative form

of production relies on a form of social organization that is widespread in

knowledge economies and creative industries such as intense connectiv-
ity (to other makers, to materials, to environments),19 sharing,20 networked
innovation,21 abundance of free labor,22 and so on. But what genuinely dif-

ferentiates desktop manufacturing from other creative industries is the
entanglement of materiality and creativity through the skill of craft.23

One has to look back to the assertion of the situationists (and in par

ticular Raoul Vaneigem)24 that creativity—and not labor—is the driving

force of human history. But Vaneigem’s unearthing of the emancipatory

potential of creativity against the oppressive nature of labor was a sign

of a broader social transformation happening when he was making this
assertion: creativity was transforming into a genuine productive force in
the postindustrial, post-Fordist regime of accumulation.25 The artisan, a

figure combining technical skill, knowledge, insight, aesthetic innovation,
artistic presence, and practical use, starts to disappear in the passage from

the late Middle Ages to the modern period. With the industrial revolu-

tion, the figure of the artisan bifurcates into the manual worker on the one
hand and the intellectual/artist on the other, and then fades away. Mate-
rial work is delegated to industrial production and creativity to artistic
practice.26
168 Chapter Eight

FIGURE 8.5 — TechShop, Detroit, Allen Park, MI, USA. Photograph by Dimitris

Papadopoulos.
The post-Fordist reorganization of social life revives creativity by bring-

ing it back to production through digital skill, information manipula-
tion, and cognitive inventiveness. The term cognitive capitalism came to
describe this capture of creativity.27 In the maker culture we see another
second revival of creativity: now creativity returns to its supposed roots,
to material practice, to manufacturing, to life. This is, of course, a story of
origins: before the industrial split, the artisan was the figure in which all
these aspects could coexist. The artisan disappears only to be rehabilitated

now as creativity apparently returns to our material engagement:28 the im-
perative to invent. In the first maker faire in the White House (2014) U.S.
president Barack Obama declared America a nation of makers: making “is

in our dna.”29 This is a story of origins indeed, one that could signal the
ultimate defeat of Vaneigem’s emancipatory vision of creativity as the only
force that can “rid us of work.”30 In the maker culture the entanglement of
work and creativity is as strong as ever before.
In his “maker movement manifesto” the ceo of TechShop—which was,

until it declared bankruptcy in 2017, a large membership-based chain of
workshops across the United States that represented the rather entrepre-
neurial and commercial side of the maker culture and whose expansive for-
profit business model has been questioned by smaller nonprofit hackspaces
and makerspaces—repeats the same slogan: “we were born to make” (Hatch,

2014, p. 144). The location of the TechShop branch near Detroit is emblematic

of the attempt to release this miraculous “innate” potential for making and
to harness material creativity. It is located in a 33,000-square-foot facility

adjacent to Ford Motor Company’s Production Development Center and

close to its world headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan. The staff at this
branch told me that there is direct cross-fertilization between industrial

innovation in Ford and other nearby companies and the grassroots inno-
vation of TechShop members.31 “Build your dream here” is the motto of

TechShop, which calls itself “a playground for creativity.”32
PROVINCIALIZING MAKING
I am struggling to make sense of all these di erent investments in the no-

ff

tion of making: making inscribed in the dna of the people of the United

States promising to revive the core of country’s industrial economy, a proj

ect that can be linked to a vision of re-Westernizing production, of in-

sourcing industrial capabilities to the Global North and possibly also to
white backlash politics and the reemergence of nationalist protectionism.
But then I turn to Derby’s Silk Mill project, where the figure of the maker

emerges as the other to deskilling, low-wage labor, youth unemploy-

ment, and the dissolution of the social tissue of the city after the dramatic

deindustrialization of the East Midlands: a local project of communal

remaking—although it still remains unclear how far it will reach into the

disadvantaged communities of the city. And then Maker Faire Africa—

see its manifesto earlier in this chapter—implies a di erent endeavor as it

ff

mobilizes industrial and scientific creativity that is associated with Western
capitalist modernity to challenge the coloniality of technoepistemic Western

power. And across all these locations is the lived experience of makers, their

intense engagements with materiality and sociality, and their endlessly di-
verging ways of practicing material creativity in the midst of everyday life.33
Making is primarily a practice associated with concerns of Global
North societies. The social and gender composition of makerspaces, the

intense entanglement of making with Western technoscience, and its im-
plication with nationalist imaginaries are an evidence for that. This is the
dominant story of making: a story told by the Maker Faire’s red mascot
robot carrying the symbol M engraved on its chest and standing on top of

planet Earth. It is a universalist story and a masculinist story34 that pur-
ports to have discovered making in the birth of the scientific revolution
and enlightened values that propelled the ascent of capitalism through
170 Chapter Eight

FIGURE 8.6 — Ninth

Annual Maker Faire, Bay
Area, CA, USA. May 17 &
18, 2014. Flier. Reprinted
with permission. The Bay
Area is one of the flag-
ship Maker Faire events
globally. According to the
organizers, the 2014 Faire
attracted “1,100 + maker

entries, 130,000 + attendees

and 90 + sponsors.”

FIGURE 8.7 — The first

Derby Mini Maker Faire
at the Derby Silk Mill
Museum, UK. June 3, 2012.
Poster. Reprinted with
permission.
the industrial revolution. Today’s making is called to continue this legacy

and counteract industrialism’s decline. But then there is much more to

making than that: there is World 2,35 the abject spaces of Western mo-

dernity whether they are outside the Global North or inside it (such as

so many neighborhoods in the British East Midlands). Making here is

about the survival of disintegrating communities, about enhancing self-

organization, about supporting livelihoods. There is much more to mak-

ing that I want to reclaim here than the universalist story of M—not only

because making is involved in building and maintaining diverse ways of

being that radically depart from the dominant Global North maker cul-
ture but also because it seems to resonate with the political sensibilities

within more-than-social movements. It is this speculative dimension of

making that I look to unearth here.

Making can only exist through traveling, in plural, as it bifurcates and
diverges from itself. Atsuro Morita (2013, p. 236), in his study of a tech-

nology transfer project between Thailand and Japan, suggests that “rather

than finding a craft community rooted in a particular locality, what I en-

countered were the intersecting journeys of humans and nonhumans”

across di erent locales, contexts, and regions.36 Rather than a blueprint
ff

for action that can be transferred from one context to the next, making is a
practice that changes as much as the ontologies that it helps emerge differ
from each other. Writing the story of making requires assuming “plural
ways of being in the world” (Chakrabarty, 2000, p. 101), or rather plural ways
of making the world beyond the dominant version of the maker culture
and the universalist story of M.
INDIGENOUS TEMPORALITIES
Within the speculative framework that I am advancing here, making

could be seen as a contribution to a decolonial project,37 one that rejects

building or rebuilding a universal global world but attempts to construct
plural ontologies across global space. In the first chapter of this book,
I argued for a decolonial politics of matter—a politics that challenges

epistemic coloniality by transforming materially everyday ontologies of
existence. In this chapter I turn to making as one of the concrete prac-
tices that can sustain such a politics, and in the remainder of the chapter
I describe specific aspects of this politics, in order to see making as a
172 Chapter Eight

form of politics that encounters the West and Western technoepistemic
practices not just as one of the many ontologies that exist but rather as a
force that puts other ontologies in danger, ontologies that are dissimilar,
multiple, and heterogeneous. Provincializing making requires more than
a mental shift: plural ways of making the world can exist to the extent

that they disconnect from Western ontology, to the extent that a pro

cess of “un-networking” takes place that allows for other ontologies to

emerge. As much as making is about traveling and connecting, it is also
about breaking, cutting, opposing, and escaping Western technoepis-
temic universalism. It is about immersing in other existing ontologies
and in helping to create alternative ways of life. In current conditions,
a decolonial project can be only practical and ontological or it cannot

materialize.
Maker Faire Africa claims that making is always a situated project de-

pending on the specific ingenuity of the involved communities, the specific
problems that it is called to engage with, and the existing infrastructures in

a specific location within the continent.38 The maker project becomes in-

digenous and bound to each of the places to which it travels inside Africa.
In this sense, making can be neither global nor universal nor local. It could
be said that making can only be indigenous, a mobilization that starts in an
indigenous space and then comes to travel and connect to other nearby or
faraway indigenous places and projects.39

The indigenous dimension of making is not about the association
to a local environment but about practically reconnecting to the on-
tologies of the Earth, the land, and its “Earth-beings”:40 terraformation

from below, instead of the colonizing planetary project of Terraform-

ing Earth that I described in chapter 2. Coloniality is premised on ex-
traction and the dispossession of indigenous peoples’ land.41 Indigenous

resurgence—that is, indigenous people’s autonomy, self-determination,

and self-government42—cannot be achieved without reclaiming land and

reclaiming indigenous knowledges, practices, spiritualities, social rela-
tions, and ways of being and making that arise from the connection to
land and the Earth-beings that have been erased by Western technoepis-

teme.43 The creation of such indigenous forms of knowing and making
is about creating ontologies that allow such alternate connections to be
practiced autonomously. Indigenous autonomy is possible only by mov-

ing away from the Western temporal register that relegates indigenous
knowing and making to the past. As much as making is supposed to be

FIGURE 8.8 — Colectivo Pequeñas Hermanas. Costa Rica. “Autonomy! The indigenous

movement walks ahead while looking backward because our future is not what will

come but what was.” Reprinted with permission.
about creating connections, it seems that disconnection is an even more

vital dimension of making,44 because a decolonial making is an active

practice of unmaking connections, of “un-networking” (Staeheli, 2012),

of creating other ontologies and centers outside existing networks and
connection flows.
The temporality of a decolonial politics of matter is one that is not di-

rected to the future. Neither is it about a return to the past. It is a tempo-

rality that interrupts the Western domination of our imaginaries of what
will come: “Our future is not what will come.” Rather the future is the re-

claiming of the past in a move to create alternative forms of life in the pres

ent that escape the universalizing Western timeline. There is something to

this indigenous temporality that goes beyond indigenous resurgence and
the multiple struggles of indigenous movements. Indigenous autonomy

is a reconnection to the material surroundings, to Earth, to traditional
knowledges, and, as art educator, master aerosol writer, and community
organizer Lavie Raven says, it involves also a reconnection “to a global con-

sciousness that we are all related. Everyone on the planet has indigenous

roots to somewhere.”45
174 Chapter Eight

FROM PLURIVERSE TO MOVEMENT
Making cannot be approached as an epistemological issue; it is a practi-

cal one. Making is a material movement; it is about ontological practice
rather than about an abstract representation of a practice of material en-

gagement.46 And as such this movement is embedded in other previously
existing ontologies. Each of these ontologies involves di erent environ-

ff

ments, materialities, digitalities, groups of people, and more-than-human

actors. Marisol de la Cadena, Mario Blaser, Arturo Escobar, Walter Mi-
gnolo, and others refer to this multi-ontological organization of the world

as a pluriverse.47 A pluriverse does not hold together through some uni-
versal matrix or unified denominator but through relations and dialogues
between divergent worlds.
In the pluriverse of makers there is no such thing as a preexisting pat-

tern that unifies divergent engagements with materiality. What holds these

together is that each of these materialities is layered on previously existing

ontologies. It’s ontologies all the way down: ontologies that are not only
historically and temporally stacked, as I have argued earlier, but also prac-
tically and materially. They are stacked in relation to each other. Stacking
is the condition of existence of the pluriverse.
In permaculture48—a practice for ecological design of nonpolluting and

food-growing settlements—stacking means to mimic natural forest envi-

ronments, especially rain forests, in order to create food gardens.49 In for-
ests you have many layers of plants stacked in relation to each other—the

canopy of giant trees, then the tall trees and the lower trees, then vines and

climbers, then shrubs, and, finally, ground cover plants: creepers, grasses,

roots, and herbaceous plants, all of them on the same ground. Permac-
ulture mimics the forest strategy of stacking to create food forests where
di erent crops coexist in limited space and reinforce their growth.50 I am
ff

thinking of a similar form of ontological stacking here.

Stacking is about relative locations: how elements of an ecosystem co-

act as long as they are mutually dependent and are in positions that allow
them to assist each other. Ontologies are stacked together topologically:51
never simply on top of each other or next to each other but continuously
as they emerge or are related to other ontologies. Ontologies are many
and heterogeneous, but they belong to the same shared earthly world. This
understanding of the ontological organization of the world poses a crucial

question to the pluriverse project: how to deal with the implicit departure

from a monist understanding of the world? The most troubling implication

of the repudiation of monism is that debates are settled on an epistemo-
logical level: a question about di erent opinions and views of how the
ff

world is and how the split between ontology and culture came about. In
the pluriversal theoretical approach the debate focuses on whether there is

a “one-world world”52 or multiple worlds. But here I wonder, is it possible

to steer toward the opposite direction and arrive “at the magic formula we

all seek—pluralism = monism”? 53

There is no monism if there is a dualist option; “there is nothing that is

one, there is nothing that is multiple.”54 If the world is organized as stacked

ontologies rather than as a multiverse of ontologies, then the question
whether there is an “one-world world” or a pluriverse doesn’t have much

traction. As I discussed in detail in chapter 4, Deleuze and Guattari argue
that the real enemy of materialism (ontology) is not idealism (the social),

but dualism: “The only enemy is two.”55 The approach of stacked ontologies

mobilizes a monist practice of ontology and matter that does not allow for

a dualist epistemological option to emerge as a legitimate issue.
Deleuze and Guattari propose a “politics of matter” that focuses on

matter’s making rather than what matter is.56 The alternative to dualism

and the choice between a “one-world world” and many worlds is not the

development of some kind of new ontology or cosmology (the “pluriv-
erse”) but a continuous participation in matter’s movements.57 Continu-

ous materialism is the alternative creation of matter—that is, the making

of other ontologies that escape existing ones. The Zapatistas’ matrix of
a “world where many worlds fit” is neither an epistemological question
nor a plea for changing our worldview but a guidance for practice and an
invitation to a movement,58 neither the making of one single ontology nor
the making of multiple ontologies, but grounded making: the movement
of alterontologies, from alter-globalization to alterontologies, from episte-

mology to movement.
COMMENSALITY, COMPOSITION, AND DIWY
Many of my interlocutors in all the makerspaces and hackspaces I have

participated in told me that they rarely find all the tools they need in a
makerspace. Makerspaces are neither dedicated workshops nor industrial
shop floors. What matters is the potential for learning and novel articu-

lations to emerge—by exploring the possibilities of existing devices, dis-
covering new devices that are brought in by other participants, involving
176 Chapter Eight

FIGURE 8.9 — High-density polyethylene (HDPE) reprocessing. Leicester Hackspace,

UK. Courtesy of Woody Kitson.
the extended communities, sharing ideas, learning ways of handling stuff,

acquiring new habits when dealing with specific objects or organic matter,

experimenting with materials that others use or that one might have found

on a workbench by coincidence, and watching the small mundane inven-
tions of other participants.
In hackspaces there are many di erent tools, devices, things, materi-

ff

als, organisms, animals, and people stacked together—they are in relative

locations to each other so that they allow articulations of material-making

to be performed.59 As in permaculture, one can get many (and very di er
ff

ent) outputs from just one element in the forest garden. A simple item of

a specific material, a pet (polyethylene terephthalate) bottle or an hdpe

(high-density polyethylene) milk bottle, for example, can be engaged in

many di erent ways, as inspiration for inventing new ways of recycling
ff

and reuse.60 For Woody Kitson from the Leicester Hackspace, this involves
“the reprocessing (for example, melting, reforming, welding, cutting, sew-

ing, turning, milling) of the raw material,” which then can be reused in
many di erent ways: as a container; as a nonconductive spacer; as toys,
ff

tools, or tent pegs; as moldable plastic if treated correctly; as replacement
parts for broken plastic components; as materials for art projects; as one

of the ingredients of composite products; as an educational object for

FIGURE 8.10 — Polyeth-

ylene terephthalate (PET)
string. Creator Fair at the
National Space Centre,
Leicester, UK. Courtesy of
Woody Kitson.
raising environmental consciousness; as material for experimentation that

attempts to educate about the endocrine-disrupting chemicals and other

hazardous ingredients it possibly contains; as a source of durable string;
and so on.61 Objects are indeterminate and incalculable because the way

humans relate to them in each specific situation does not reveal their es-

sence or all their qualities but only a partial and specific aspect of them.
Objects are much more than their relations to humans.62 Objects exceed

what humans think of them and what humans do with them.

This immanent indeterminacy applies to all objects, even to those that

were made with a specific aim. One of the quintessential electronic devices

in many makerspaces is Arduino, an open-source and open-hardware mi-

crocontroller motherboard.63 Arduino can perform many tasks in an en-
vironment of making, as it can be easily programmed to control several
devices and sensors and link their diverse processes. The Arduino is one

example of an interface that allows unpredictable compositions of code and
matter—that is, the digitization of material processes and the progressive

178 Chapter Eight

materialization of code. Symbolically Arduino is the prototypical device
that characterizes the transition from the information age to the time of
composition. The composition of the digital and the material is defining
the era of the maker culture.64 Everyday objects are digitized and inter-
linked within the web of crafted things. Beyond the clear distinction be-

tween information analytics and material construction, the practice of
making involves a steady crossover and fusion of information and matter

into new compositional objects. Despite current data totalitarianism, big
data is only a sign of peak digitization.65 The possibility of incomputability
is always inherent in computation itself.66 But when materiality becomes
an immanent part of computational unpredictability, indeterminacy and
incomputability multiply. There will not be space for today’s all-pervasive

data positivism when code and matter will have completely fused and

compositional objects become ubiquitous.
In Sam Esmail’s television cyberthriller Mr. Robot (2015–), Elliot Alder-

son, a tech security expert and skilled hacker, teams up with a group of
anonymous hacktivists, F Society, to take down the world’s largest mul-
tinational conglomerate, E Corp, and to erase—literally—all records of

people’s debts. What is notable in the series is that hacking is never just a

question of code manipulation. Hacking is seamlessly embedded in every-
day life, in social relations, at work, in friendships, and in the physicality of
buildings, other objects, and technological artifacts. The aim of F Society
to erase all consumer debt can be achieved when all financial information
files on the servers of E Corp are rendered inaccessible. But it would not
be enough to permanently encrypt or destroy the data on the main serv-
ers; all existing backups need to be also simultaneously erased, including a

backup facility that is offline, which makes it unreachable with the means

of “conventional” code hacking. F Society hacks the security of the building
and the personal lives of the guards and gains access into the facility. El-

liot installs a Raspberry Pi67 into the climate control system of the facility,

which contains a program that overrides temperature control. This allows
F Society to physically melt all E Corp’s backup data tapes. Season 1 of
the series ends with a total reversal of biofinancialization (see chapter 2)
through biohacking: the experimental play with the indeterminacy of code
and matter composites. The materiality of hacking and the continuous

crossover between information and objects marks also the second season
of the series, which ends with conceiving the plan to hack a storage facil

ity in which E Corp is collecting all existing paper records (since all digital

records have been destroyed or made inaccessible) in order to rebuild the


FIGURE 8.11 — Dirty Electronics (www.dirtyelectronics.org). Synthesizers. Leicester

Hackspace, UK. Courtesy of Sean Clark (www.seanclark .me.uk).

database with the financial information of consumers. In order to inter-
rupt this analog-to-digital transition of information, F Society needs to

hack the building itself and physically destroy it. Only then can all financial
information and thus all debt be erased for good.
Craft and crafting becomes a key way to describe the relation to such
compositional objects. Craft becomes more of a relation, mode of thought,
and structure of sensibility than just a form of practice. Compositional ob-
jects exist independently of humans, and the only way to approach them

and understand them is through craft.68 This applies not only to quintes

sential objects such as the Arduino microcontroller but also other ad hoc

devices and objects. I am thinking, for example, of the synths that the col-
lective Dirty Electronics constructs.69 These are truly compositional objects

not only in the sense that they mix found materials with other purpose-

built or acquired equipment and that they fuse the digital and the material,
but also in the sense that the synths acquire their full potential within an
experimenting community. Social interaction, movements of the body, and
more-than-human dimensions such as gestures, temperature, and light all

180 Chapter Eight

compose what a synth is. The performance of playing the synth, the perfor

mance of making the synth on the workbench, and the shared experience of
experimenting with the synth are continuous. This continuity of experience
and materiality is a crucial dimension of compositional objects.70
The topology of things and living beings that exist in a makerspace is

always changing according to the project in which a group of actors is in-

volved. Depending on the type of activity it might involve only few specific
tools and objects or a larger array of them; it can involve automated ele

ments that do not necessarily require human presence; or it can involve

other living beings, such as bacteria or other animals and plants.71 A topol-
ogy of making is similar to an ecology72 and more specifically an ecologi-

cal guild, “a group of species that exploit the same class of environmental
resources in a similar way” (Korňan and Kropil, 2014, p. 445).73 Ecological
guilds constitute communities of support where each of the species or ob-
jects in them contributes its unique “functions”—to use the terminology
of permaculture (Mollison, 1988). But support here does not involve in-

tentionality or even mutualism (although mutualism is a crucial biological
relation between the organisms of an ecological guild).
Support in an ecological guild means to create conditions in which many
actors can share the same space without being harmed or by occasionally,
ideally regularly, benefiting from each other. Commensal interactions—that

is, benefiting from what other organisms or actors offer in an ecology without

harming or affecting them or even without reciprocating—offer a good way

to approach the interaction taking place within makerspaces. This aspect
of nonreciprocal sharing is particular useful for my attempt to understand

craft and compositionality in the maker culture. Although exchanges are
important in maker culture, exchange does not define making. Relationality

and exchange are not the ontology of craft and composition. Compositional
culture is defined by commensality: actors just leave stuff (techniques, ideas,
objects, practices, concepts, tools, and so on) around, and other actors use
them (or not). This is not an ontology of exchange, but an ontology of coex-
istence. In order to foster coexistence, actors have to reduce their presence,
their subjectivities, and leave space for other actors to exist. While exchange
presupposes a strong self that negotiates and transacts, commensality
presupposes the careful retreat of the self. Compositional culture is diwy:
do it without yourself. diy and the logic of relation and exchange are too hu-
manist to describe the posthuman relation of compositional culture. diwy
is about reducing the presence of humanity in the sociability of craft and

FIGURE 8.12 — Bill Mollison. Trees in Whole System. © Bill Mollison. Reprinted with

permission. The figure was originally published in the book Permaculture: A Designers’
Manual, by Bill Mollison (Tasmania, Australia: Tagari Publications, 1988).
compositional culture. Commensality and diwy is the drive behind the type

of innovation and invention that takes place in maker cultures.
DISTRIBUTED INVENTION POWER
In science the moment of invention is considered the outcome of a specific

type of practice, “the experimental achievement.” This key event characterizes
for Isabelle Stengers (2000) modern science: only what has passed thorough
experimental testing becomes a scientific fact. From this perspective, sci-
ence is a specific type of practice that enables scientists to challenge their
own questions and assumptions in order to achieve a level of certainty:
only the questions that have withstood their objections can be consid-
ered scientific. In other words, scientific knowledge is a distinct practice
that can be located in this specific single event of the experimental achieve-
ment. But is this the case in technoscience—cognitive science, climate

182 Chapter Eight

science, biosciences, soil science, neuroscience, informatics, biomedicine,
and geosciences, to name a few examples? And what about distributed
and mundane technoscience beyond formal institutions that happens in
spaces such as the ones I am describing here: hackspaces, makerspaces,

community labs, and so on?
In technoscience, experimental achievement and invention are medi-
ated by many di erent trajectories and actors already before it has taken
ff

place, even before it has been formulated. If we neglect this, we neglect the
invisible and indeed invisibilized labors of so many di erent human, ani-

ff

mal, and inorganic actors that contribute to the making of facts.74 In analyz-
ing Darwin’s experiments, Carla Hustak and Natasha Myers (2013, p. 106)
conclude that “it is in encounters between orchids, insects, and scientists
that we find openings for an ecology of interspecies intimacies and subtle

propositions. What is at stake in this involutionary approach is a theory of
ecological relationality that takes seriously organisms as inventive practi

tioners who experiment as they craft interspecies lives and worlds.”

In technoscience,75 what counts as invention is not primarily the indi-
vidual experimental achievement that gives coherence to traditional ex-
perimental scientific practice (although this might be sometimes part of
it); rather, it is a form of dispersed experimentation: distributed invention
power. If science as experimental achievement ever existed, this achieve-
ment of invention is now dispersed in society and matter—in a “more than

one world,” in a “more than human world,” to use de la Cadena’s (2010)

words. Technoscience is more than human and dispersed, it is more than

scientific. Knowledge in technoscience is not done by those who object but

rather by those who invent in intended and unintended more-than-human

collaborations. Technoscience is interobjectively and intersubjectively
“materialized action.”76 Consider the making of a transgenic lab animal, of
the robot Atlas, of Earth observation patterns of soil erosion, the visual-
ization of neural networks, climate simulations, synthetic molecules, new
drugs, and so on. And this does not only apply to formal instituted techno-
science. Consider makers’ projects such a kitchen bio lab, a sensor for air

pollution, a recycling machine of plastic milk bottles, a self-made quadro-

copter to inspect the condition of roofs and chimneys, or a small project

for securing energy self-sufficiency.

Emphasizing the importance of distributed invention power in the age
of composition exposes how much technoscience is mundane, informal,
and community based: hackspaces, makerspaces, traditional and alterna-
tive knowledge systems, clandestine science, community labs, amateur

science and technology, fab labs, indigenous knowledge, bio-art, activist

knowledge, self-education projects, punk science—all gradually become

an integral part of technoscience. Technoscience is done not only within
its so-called core institutions77 but in multiple ways and in many di erent

ff

mundane environments. Community technoscience is continuous with
instituted technoscience and vice versa, a continuation that unfolds across
disparate and fragmented worlds.
This extended view on technoscience allows us to capture how every

specific knowledge practice assembles around it a di erent social and mate-

ff

rial world—be it scientists, technologists, animals, materials, businesses,
social policy makers, marketeers, tools, practitioners, consumers, enthusi-

asts, activists, finance, community stakeholders. What we have here are large

ecologies of multiple actors, landscapes, and knowledges. In searching for
ways to approach, study, and engage with such communities, I am inspired
by Choy’s (2011) important work on environmental politics in Hong Kong

that shows how a diverse array of environmental actors can be thought of
less as a clearly organized political and public sphere and more as a political

ecology or even as something similar to a regional biotic community. I tried

to approach in similar ways the makerspaces and hackspaces I was involved
in (albeit with much less ethnographic subtlety): namely by drawing and con-
ceptualizing “connections between places, between species and other spe-
cies, between forms of life and their environs, between what is considered big
and what is considered small, between particulars and universals, between
particular cases of a common rule, between specificities and generalizations,

between grounded details and ambitious abstractions” (Choy, 2011, p. 5).
ECOLOGICAL TRANSVERSALITY
Distributed invention power relies on reinventing the meaning, use,

and relationalities of materials and objects that exist in a certain context.
Whether it is wood or plastic, metal or silicon, organic or inorganic, animal

or human, making always involves transversality between disparate material

registers and human or nonhuman communities of life.78

Ecological transversality mobilizes an imaginary that is very di erent
ff

from the single purpose–oriented logic of traditional manufacturing. This

imaginary supposes that each object, animal, thing or process among them

can have many effects and many purposes inside a technoscientific guild,
similar to a permaculture guild, where the yields of each element of a forest

184 Chapter Eight

garden can be multiple: providing food, burning wood, compost and fertilizer,
livestock feed, shelter, and fun.79 In the maker guild as in the forest garden,
the same elements can provide di erent yields. So each element in specific

ff

moments has di erent functions and di erent purposes.
ff

ff

In the practice of making, new materials acquire new qualities, and new
processes emerge through their continuous forking to unexpected paths:

one always relies on what existed before, and then you split, redirect. In-
novation in distributed invention power happens rarely through sudden
novelty and more through hacking, stretching, knitting, weaving, tweaking,
mending, and recombining existing processes or substances in a techno-

scientific guild.80 The maker’s craft is less about the mastery of knowledge
and more about knowing with others. “Start even if you don’t know how”

(Tremayne, 2013, p. 189) captures knowledge as practice and as involvement
with others. As much as translation is crucial for this project of ecological

transversality, it captures only a small part of the exchanges between the
communities, actors, substances, and species involved. Translation relies
on the widespread belief that communication can happen only if there is

translation of meaning between two equivalent but distinct communities.81
Communication through translation is a language-centric and cognition-

based approach to the co-action of separate communities. In the practice of

making, rather than through translation, communication happens through
involuntary infections and contingent permutations between organisms
or substances that attract each other. Not every object or organism is open

to others simultaneously. In certain conditions some objects will attract

each other and enter into a composition. Makerspaces (like other tech-
noscientific guilds) encourage objects and compounds to become acces-
sible to others. This is the gift economy of the movements of matter and

cross-species action. The makers’ worlds always contaminate each other

laterally.82 Drifting matter. “Material spirituality,” in the words of Puig de la

Bellacasa (2014a),83 is the commitment to getting involved in an exchange
without “knowing how” and without knowing the final outcome but
through trust in the other participating co-actors and the “involutionary”

process84 as such, trust in something that exceeds the situation.

Stuck in the logic of translation, we believe that everything is mediated

through language, information bits, and a mediator or operator. But in
making this is seldom the case. And even more so, objects are not things

that can be fully explained or accurately translated as if we have total access
to their essence.85 Objects exceed the capacity of humans or other objects

to fully comprehend them. Rather, objects become partially accessible to

FIGURE 8.13 — Artwork by Grady McFerrin. Used with permission of the artist. The

artwork was originally published in the book The Good Life Lab: Radical Experiments in
Hands-On Living, by Wendy Jehanara Tremayne (North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing,

2013).
other objects, animals, and humans in certain conditions while they

become unapproachable to other objects, animals, or people. Simultaneously,

animals and plants become engaged in specific types of interactions, and
humans become committed to a certain project. The combination of the ac-

cessibility of objects, the engagement of animals and plants, and the commit-
ment of humans drives each specific project in the maker culture. Rather than

all-encompassing, universal calls for embracing the potentiality of human-

nonhuman relations, multispecies exchanges, or human-machine interac-

tions, makers’ practices expose the fact that human-nonhuman relations

vary and need to be seen in their specificity. Certain objects become acces-
sible to other actors, while on other occasions the same objects hide from
these actors; similarly, we can think of how an animal or plant can be en-

gaged with some actors and not with others, and how humans become com-

mitted to a certain project while other humans can be fully disinterested.86

Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas created an experimental/educational
space within the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius where they attempted

to work with mycelium, mushroom roots, and to create building materials
and everyday objects, mycomorphs as they called them.87 Mycelium is an
extraordinary living being. Because of its specific composition, mycelium

enacts very di erent actions in di erent contexts: it can be a healer in dis-
ff

ff

tressed environments, a cultural metaphor in social theory, a source of food,

a catalyst of bioremediation in polluted spaces, an agent of decomposition
of organic materials, and in my example here a building block or an everyday

object.88 But what interests me is not the specificities of mycelium that allow
its fundamental openness but the realization of how indispensable eco-
logical transversality is in order for these specificities to thrive and for this

openness to be expressed: in each specific context an enormous amount of
attention between mycelium and the other participating species is required
in order for these enactments to emerge. When these transversal ecological

interactions are disturbed, mycelium either dies or becomes parasitic.

The mycomorph lab conducted by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas is
an experimental technology that attempts to establish a transversal ecol

ogy between individuals of two species: How clean should the air be? What
should the temperature and humidity be? Which materials are best for
the mycelium to thrive but also for creating these building blocks? Wood,

straw, something else? What about adding other materials, agents, or species?

How long should the process last? Which forms are better? In carefully

designed interactions, mycelium develops without destroying its immedi-
ate environment and the objects around it. Simultaneously, humans work


FIGURE 8.14 — Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas. Psychotropic House: Zooetics

Pavilion of Ballardian Technologies. Mycomorphs. Installation Detail. CAC Vilnius,

2015. Photograph by Nomeda Urbonas. Reprinted with permission.

with mycelium to replace toxic chemicals used in everyday objects and in
construction with biodegradable materials. What would it mean to grow
our houses and everyday objects instead of constructing them? ask Nom-

eda and Gediminas Urbonas (Januškevičiūtė, 2015, p. 13).
Making here has almost nothing to do with producing and constructing.

It is about cohabiting a space through engaging in ecological and interspe-
cies transversality that allows its participants to respond to the constraints
and specificities of the life of each participating species. Rather than a re-
pository of practices and tools, the mundane technoscience of making is
about composing such transversal ecologies: coexisting, connecting and
recombining, forking and tinkering, extending and preserving.
ETHOPOIESIS AND THE BLACKMAIL OF PRECARITY
If anything can be found in abundance in makerspaces, it is free labor.

This is not only a characteristic of community technoscience; it is also in
the heart of any form of technoscience. With Star we can then explore all
188 Chapter Eight

these labors that have been rendered absent and invisible in the experi-

mental achievement and in the humanist tale of making and contesting
scientific facts.89
In his illuminating study on the making of transgenic rice in experi-
mental fields in the Philippines, Chris Kortright (2013) introduces the term
experimental labor to describe how research work is always embodied and

haptic, operating in the constraints of the time and space in which the
experiment takes place, involving a complex interaction with other local
actors and the environment.90 Experimental labor is about invention, and

invention is always situated: it implies an involvement in the lives of other
living and nonliving beings. This “ethopoietical practice,” in the words of
Puig de la Bellacasa (2010), the simultaneous production of ethos and on-
tology, cultivates distributed invention power.91 Experimental labor fuses

experience, subjectivity, and materiality.92 Seeing the work of technoscience
as experimental labor reveals how many di erent types of relations, social

ff

groups, species, ecologies, interdependencies, and ways of life participate
in the making of knowledge—that is, in the making of ontologies.

Not only is the work of technoscience dispersed and more than human,

but also the specifically human forms of labor are socially distributed. In the

contemporary mode of production, invention power is the valorization of

social, cognitive, affective, and relational activities that are embodied and
situated in one’s own life.93 But embedded in the current structures of
technoscientific production, invention power becomes a highly segmented
activity. The conditions of experimental labor are distributed unequally.

Producers of knowledge are differentially positioned toward their own

labor as well as the outcomes of their labor: most of them are free laborers

when they are involved in community technoscience, while there are dif

ferent classes of researchers, scientists, and experimental workers inside

instituted technoscience (just as there are many classes of lab animals,

plants, and materials that are valued and exploited differently). Consider
the increased measurements of research activity, the existence of multiple

positions of researchers with only a few of them being in full-time employ-

ment, the precarization of research work, the multiplication of di erent tiers
ff

of academic and independent research institutions, the access to research

funding that is available only to few, the rise of the postdoc worker, the lab
as the post-Fordist knowledge factory, the exploitation of the invention

power of young researchers by senior scientists, and the zero-hours con-

tract lecturers.94 All these di erent types of technoscience’s experimental

ff

labor show how work is internally highly diversified and under the constant


blackmail of precarization.95 This blackmail of precarization is often ob-
scured by the demand to invent. Invent! The other side to precarious labor

is that it is presented as a necessary form of work in order to facilitate
unhindered invention.
The imperative to invent links community technoscience and instituted
technoscience in terms of their respective organization of the labor pro

cess. In both there is a continuum revealing di erent degrees of precariza-

ff

tion: Is the contract-dependent lab researcher or the precarious academic

closer to community technoscience or instituted technoscience? How can
we translate our everyday free experimental labor in a hackspace to an

activity that makes a living? Who has access to which type of academic
positions in instituted technoscience? What is the value of our research,
whether it is located in community or in instituted technoscience?

RENTIER TECHNOSCIENCE
In the previous sections I have tried to describe di erent aspects of the

ff

maker culture: the topological stacking of things and processes; the com-

positional nature of making; distributed invention power; the contacts and
gaps between instituted and community technoscience; the involution of
human, animal, and inorganic actors; ecological transversality; experimen-

tal labor and ethopoiesis; and the precarization of work within the broader

context of technoscience. In the following sections I discuss the political

implications of such an understanding of making. What are the forms of
political organization that all these di erent types of technoscience rely

ff

on? Which forms of political involvement do they promote and how?

It could be argued that maker culture and community technoscience
more broadly rely heavily on the free (as in freedom as well as nonpropri-

etary) circulation of shared knowledge, practices, information, materials,
and other living beings. This sphere has been constitutive of the commons
as a social form of organization and as a social movement.96 But during

my engagement with the maker culture I came to learn that it is misleading
to assume that the commons underpins the life of community technosci-
ence while publicly organized activities underpin the life of instituted state-

funded research and private entrepreneurial activities underpin private
research and development.97 The circulation of tools, materials, organisms,

knowledge, and practices between di erent types of community and insti-
ff

tuted technoscience traverse private spaces and public state-owned spaces

190 Chapter Eight

and the spaces of the commons. The commons (practices of commoning,
common pool resources, peer production, and common forms of social-
ity and relationality that are neither public nor private) that traditionally
were outside the securitized system of technoscience enter gradually into

it. Cori Hayden (2010) has interrogated the discourse of the commons as a
clear counterpart to the enclosed regimes of intellectual property and has
shown how the logic of the commons is intimately entwined with enclosed
private and state activities.
We could argue that technoscience becomes “biosecuritized,” to use Kath
Weston’s (2013) term. Biosecuritization designates a double move in which
technoscience is securitized both in terms of surveillance and control of
the actors that operate in it and in terms of the valuation and assetization
of its own processes and outputs. Regarding the former dimension, the

securitization happens through the installation of physical barriers and
complex architectures of entry requirements that regulate physical, tech-
nical, and informational access as well as the proliferation of sociolegal
measures (formal and informal rights, patents, contracts, entitlements,

codes, dispositions, and so on) that define degrees of scientific legitimacy
and power.98
The second dimension of biosecuritization refers to the entanglement
of technoscience in the biofinancial logic of current Global North socie

ties. Not only is technoscience tightly linked to the organization of current

production processes, but it is also involved in inserting di erent human

ff

and nonhuman entities into the system of biofinance—be it technoscien-
tific artifacts, apparatuses, scientific processes, ideas, concepts, papers,

materials, other animals, plants, or ecosystems. Although many of these

entities belong to a great extent to the commons, they are transformed

into assets as they are entered into prevalent processes of valuation. Con

temporary technoscience not only appropriates and mixes res publicae
(public sphere) and res privatae (private sector), it also relies heavily on

implicating the res communes in its workings through its assetization.
In chapter 2, I discussed the centrality of rent and “the becoming rent
of profit” (Vercellone, 2010) for biofinancialization.99 Technoscience and
the absorption of the commons in its workings enhances the role of rent
within contemporary societies: the becoming rent of human and more-

than-human worlds. Matter is not only value-generating in the production

process, but it is also rent-generating through its existence as an asset.

Early in 2015, the group behind the Arduino project that I mentioned ear-

lier in this chapter announced a partnership with Microsoft to create an

“Arduino Certified” Windows operating system—an announcement that

prompted angry reactions and numerous protests from the open-hardware

and open-software community.100 Not only did a free and open object of

community technoscience become linked to a proprietary ecosystem, but
also Arduino was formally turned to an asset that others—in this case,

Microsoft—could exploit for future benefit. The life of the commons—free

labor, peer collaboration, materials, cross-fertilization with other adjacent

free and open technological ecosystems, skills, practical ingenuity, the pol-

itics of open hardware, free time, and so on—that makes Arduino possible

and resides in it was turned to a resource that could generate rent for those

who could speculate on it.
COMMONS AND THE FOLD
Technoscience exists as the private sector, the public sphere, and the com-
mons fold into each other. Invisible structures of common exchange and
cooperation, organized public institutions, civil society actors, and private

interests and funding circulate through technoscience and reinforce each
other. “Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world.”101 This motto be-

longs to an understanding of science that is theorized as the experimental
achievement taking place behind the closed doors of instituted laborato-
ries. Today’s technoscience in action reveals a di erent story: Give me a

ff

laboratory and I will raise a start-up. Give me a laboratory and I will raise

a social center. Give me venture capital and I will raise a laboratory. Give

me state funding and I will raise a laboratory. Give me a social mobilization

and I will raise a laboratory. And so on.

This constant folding creates a new situation where technoscience can
no longer be considered unified nor is it given which form of practice is
defining the workings of technoscience. Increased public engagement
can no longer be considered a secure path toward the democratization

of science.102 Neither does the inclusion of scientific experts in regula-
tory procedures necessarily ensure “regulatory pluralism, reflexivity on
the science-law relationship or democratic accountability” (Bonneuil and

Levidow, 2012, p. 97). Public engagement can be seen as a mere productive
activity in post-Fordist economies.103 As Javier Lezaun and Linda Soneryd

(2007, p. 280) put it: “Technologies of [public] elicitation, and the cohorts
of experts that control their application and interpret their results, con-
stitute a veritable extractive industry, one that seeks to engage publics in
192 Chapter Eight

dialogue and generate certified ‘public opinion’ with the ultimate goal of
increasing the productivity of government.” Kate O’Riordan (2013), for ex-
ample, shows how public involvement in direct-to-user genetic providers

constructs the publics as consumers who then shape the genetic informa-

tion provided.
This continuous folding of the private, the public, and the commons into
each other creates a condition where designating one of these three domains

as the primary force behind technoscientific innovation—be it commu-

nity or instituted—becomes almost impossible. Is it big science (Shapin, 2008),

the neoliberal privatization of science (Busch, 2017; Mirowski, 2011), the
economization of science (Berman, 2013), the privatization of public in-
stitutions (Newfield, 2008), academic capitalism (Hackett, 2014), technosci-
ence rentiership (Birch, 2017b), corporate science (Sismondo, 2009), or the
increasing power of marketers (Dumit, 2012) that drives technoscientific
knowledge production? Or is it the intervention of the public though pro

cesses of deliberation and contention (Davies, 2006)? Or is it perhaps
the practices of the commons that sustain and feed technoscientific
innovation (Kelty, 2008)? A definite answer to this is almost impossible.

For better or worse, there is no single determination of technoscien-

tific knowledge, and there is no privileged location in which invention

power in technoscience takes place. Neither is there a privileged position

for controlling it.
UNCOMMONS
Inasmuch as there is no central locus of control, there is no clear separation

between these spheres. They are stacked together in relative locations: state

and public institutions, private companies, commons, and the informal
sphere exist inside each other but always in di erent configurations and in
ff

di erent modes of relations (which in many cases are hostile). Again, as
ff

argued earlier, this is not a unified world and there is no universal matrix

underlying it. And similarly, this is not a world just made out of many

di erent universes. Neither does the commons refer to a “common world”
ff

nor to a multiplicity of divergent worlds.
The difference between commons and a common world matters; com-

mons refers to actively shared worlds between those who participate in their

maintenance while the common good refers to something that is considered
common for all. Commons is about co-action while the common good is


about collective possession: commonwealth. Commons is about practices
while the common good is about belonging. Commons is self-organized,

but a common world is instituted. Commons is about care for specific
worlds while common good is about universalizing one specific worldview.
When commons becomes the common good we enter the terrain of Euro-
centric humanist universalism; when the commons is about commoning
we enter the field of processual, more-than-human worlds.

Mignolo (2013) rightly says that “uni-verality is always imperial and

war-driven.” He continues: “Pluri- and multi-verses are convivial, dialogi-

cal or plurilogical. Now pluri- and multi-verses exist independent of the

state and the corporations and it is the work of the emerging global po

litical society, e.g., the sector of society organizing themselves around

specific projects once they/we realize that neither the state nor the cor-

porations have room for multi- or pluriverses.” This third sphere of global

political activity is the commons and community self-organization or

various other struggles that have been reconstructed as struggles for the

commons later. See, for example, migration campaigns,104 the mobili-

zations that prepared the wave of unrest in the Middle East and North

Africa in 2011,105 or various mobilizations in Latin America: the rebel-

lions of Indian peoples in the 1990s, the landless movement in Brazil, the

piqueteros in Argentina, the water and gas wars in the beginning of the

2000s, and the presence of nonhuman others as active subjects in Ecua

dorian and Bolivian politics.106 These are all mobilizations that attempt

to change an increasingly postliberal world from below.107 They achieve
that by setting up social relations in the everyday that neither mirror the
state nor directly oppose it but are involved in creating alternative worlds
of existence.108
Let’s recall the 2011 Tunisian revolution, for example. This revolution that
came directly from the everyday. There were no dealers of representation;

there were no left parties, big ngos, empowerment campaigns, or external

humanitarian interventions. There were the permanently harassed street

vendors, the young academics who were ready to migrate, and the caring

culture between the people of the neighborhood, the brothers, sisters, and

friends living in transnational communities abroad: all these seemingly in-

visible connections that suddenly occupied and safeguarded central places
in cities and towns. In this sense Bayat (2010) describes how these mobi-

lizations were sustained and nurtured silently through the continuous ex-

periences of people, things, and places for years before the eruption of the

events. When these imperceptible movements were confronted with the

194 Chapter Eight

brutality of the state, they crafted a nonidentitarian collectivity of insur-
rection. But long before the eruption of the insurrection they had silently
crafted new everyday political ecologies.109 In a similar way, Brecht De

Smet (2014) has described the street politics that prepared the Egyptian
revolution of 2011 and maintained its powerful impact. He provides an

analysis of Tahrir as a radical, grassroots, prefigurative uprising that at-

tempted to install justice and freedom in everyday life. “Tahrir became a
‘freed zone’ within the belly of the dictatorship. The Square offered a min-
iature experience of political emancipation. The activity of occupation was

transformed from an instrument of liberation to a prefiguration of a free

society” (De Smet, 2014, pp. 331–332).110
Indigenous ecocosmologies represent a di erent aspect of this move-
ff

ment: they respond to the destruction of globalizing power without seeing
indigeneity as an instantiation of one global universal indigenous move-
ment.111 In fact, the global indigenous movement exists to the extent that it
is practiced as a form of divergent indigenous cosmovisions and indigenous
autonomy movements. Indigenous ecocosmologies are not given, are not
just a matter of existing traditions, but are made and remade anew despite,

against, outside, and with the universalizing processes of globalization.112

Indigenous ecocosmologies are about autonomous cultural, political, and

material articulations and the right to choose one’s own forms of organ

ization to manage land, natural environments, education, and health.113

In other words, it is a form of commoning of the Earth by creating di er
ff

ent scales, paces, and material practices. As de la Cadena (2010) argues,
such politics are often dismissed as ethnic “beliefs” or “local cultures” even
though they “express an epistemic alternative to supposedly scientific para-
digms (ecological and economic).”114 This epistemic alternative challenges
the perceived “common good (productive efficiency, economic growth, even
sustainable development)” in a certain society by promoting alternative
forms of material and interspecies commoning in di erent ontologies: as
ff

argued earlier, the difference between common good/commonwealth, on
the one hand, and commons/commoning on the other matter.

We can think of indigenous politics together with another di erent but
ff

often relevant example: projects for the alternative making of ecological

spaces: from urban guerrilla gardens to reclaiming access to enclosed
public spaces, from the waterkeepers’ campaigns to the water justice

movement,115 from antipollution mobilizations to the political ecology of

commoning air and soils. Consider, for example, community-based proj

ects to protect the corn of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas when it


became widely known in 2001 that heritage seed stocks of landrace corn in
Mexico were being infected by genetically modified crops imported from

the United States. “Sin Maiz, No Hay Pais” [No Corn, No Country] (Esteva
and Marielle, 2003)116 is a response to a much wider conflict rooted in
the turn to the “commodities consensus” in Latin America “based on the

large-scale export of primary products” (Svampa, 2015) that fueled extrac-

tivism as the dominant economic path throughout the region.117 Within
this context agricultural fields become battlefields between multinational
agroindustrial holdings and local rural, peasant, and indigenous commu-
nities.118 Marisa Brandt (2014) describes how the Zapatistas responded to
the emergency of the intrusion of genetically modified crops: instead of

engaging in a legal fight against transgenic introgression and for patenting

their own corn, they created an alterontological practice, a form of “bio-
cultural innovation” that blended strategically endorsed and locally sus-
tainable technoscientific knowledge with indigenous agroecology, a large

network of solidarity growers, and the attempt to preserve the political

autonomy of indigenous communities.119
The project’s “goal is not to separate nature and culture, but rather to

demonstrate how deeply imbricated they are—Zapatista corn performs

the biocultural link between Zapatistas’ political project and their maize

plants. By creating alternative networks for corn circulation, the project al-
lows international recipients to participate in Zapatistas’ political bioculture,

that is, to relate to seeds as potential food or plants that are deeply inflected
with the values of promoting self-sufficiency and resisting governmental

and economic dependence. Relationships bring worlds into being; ontol-
ogy is a political achievement” (Brandt, 2014, p. 876). Alterontological

commoning of corn rather than its formal protection was the aim of the
project. The practice of commoning as well as indigenous ecocosmologies

exist only as contingent relations to other people, other species, and the

material surroundings. In native American teachings one’s “relatives may
have wings, fins, roots, hooves” (LaDuke, 2010, p. 83). In Mayan ontologies
of creation, human flesh is made of corn. In the world of commoning, ex-

changes with nonhuman others exceed clear distinctions between engaged

nonhumans and the committed humans that they cooperate with. In the

water commons movements, the people, the water, and the watersheds are

not separate; they are becoming with each other, a “human river.”120

To what extent is this form of commoning possible in technoscience?

Because if as argued earlier the commons becomes folded onto the private

sector, state institutions, and the public sphere, then there is a question

196 Chapter Eight

about its ontological constitution. The “uncommoning” of the commons is
not a project to come but something that is already happening. It neither

makes the world more unified nor makes a more divergent world. It just
changes the conditions of how conflict, contention, and collaboration will

be articulated and practiced.
In technoscience one can observe how the ambivalent unequal and
conflictual relation between instituted and community technoscience
unfolds. Instituted technoscience constantly expropriates and privatizes
community technoscience whether it is grassroots innovation, free labor,

community infrastructure, indigenous and alternative knowledges, or the
multiple micropractices of commoning. Simultaneously, community tech-

noscience relies on reclaiming knowledge, technologies, and resources that
are developed in the realm of instituted technoscience. Adrian Mackenzie
(2013), for example, in his work on synthetic biology, offers a glimpse into
this ambivalent movement between “publics” that object to high-profile

Big Bio on the one hand, and “publics” that are just validating and confirm-
ing it on the other. Alessandro Delfanti (2011) offers a more complex view
of this process in which the folding of private enterprises, publics, and the

commons into each other underlies the constant, often antagonistic oscil-
lation between big enclosed science and open technoscience.121
MORE THAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

-
-
There is a long history of industrial struggle and social conflict that perme-

ates the stacked ontologies of the Silk Mill. In November 1833 industrial
unrest swept the mill factories in Derby and escalated to a lockout of the
workers for several months. This was probably the first organized action

by labor in Britain, and although it did not achieve the desired aims at that

time, it led together with a few other similar unrests to the formation of
the first union confederation in February 1834, the Grand National Con-

solidated Trades Union. Although this and other similar events shaped the

articulation of conflict and the promises that it envelops up until now, they

were rarely mentioned in the day-to-day life of today’s postindustrial Silk

Mill. They exist as movements where each wave creates the conditions for
the emergence of the next one, although none of them can anticipate the
form and practices of the subsequent movements. These movements are

more than social; they live inside more-than-human worlds, in the ontolo-

gies they help to create.

FIGURE 8.15 — Silk Trades Lockout of 1833. Silk Mill public house mural, Derby, UK.

Photograph by Dimitris Papadopoulos.

More-than-social movements do not attempt to contest power by

organizing protest; rather, they attempt to create the conditions for the

articulation of alternative imaginaries and alternative practices that bypass
instituted power and generate alternative modes of existence.122 Protest
and resistance social movements that channel all their actions to resis

tance are vocal and visible.123 But they are not the main force of movement

action.124 What constitutes movement action is the capacity to set up al-
ternative forms of everyday existence and mundane practices that later

come to force power and control in a specific field to reorganize itself and

subsequently to reengage the actors involved in the field in new and often
unexpected ways. Nikos Karfakis (2013), for example, has discussed how
the multiplicity of mobilizations of people diagnosed with chronic fatigue

syndrome target simultaneously popular opinion, social policy, workplace

198 Chapter Eight

exclusion, and relevant technoscientific knowledge. Michelle Murphy
(2012) has shown how the politicization of technoscientific aspects of re-
productive health has created alternative spaces for women’s empower-

ment, but simultaneously it has also created a complex entanglement with

racialized biopolitics and the unequal economic, social, and political logics

of the past fifty years.125 I discussed in the previous chapter how aids ac-
tivism instigated major social and material transformations beyond the te-
leological view that it solely focused on becoming included in clinical trial
panels. Or, just to mention another final example: it would be impossible
to understand the workers’ takeovers of factories in Argentina after the

2001 economic crisis and the more recent wave of worker-recovered fac-

tories and cooperatives across southern Europe after the 2008 economic

crisis merely as a form of protest or resistance.126 Rather, they are creating

alternative forms of life on the ground, and they set up conditions in which
movements, rather than just oppose power, installed alternative ontologies
of existence. Movements escape existing ontologies and contribute to the
creation of new. “Ο αγώνας γυρίζει το γρανάζι” [Luchas (struggles) turn the

cog] stands on a handmade poster of the recuperated factory of Vio Me in
Thessaloniki, Greece.127
Many of the approaches to movements in technoscience highlight pro-
test and resistance and cultivate the imaginary that movements’ action

is all about a possible inclusion of neglected publics in technoscience.128

Inclusion seems to be the ultimate horizon of action: inclusion in the her-
metic cathedrals of science and the instituted technoscience with the aim
to shape research agendas upstream and change state policies.129 And this
indeed may be the case for some of the movements in the field of techno-
science, such as the science for the people mobilizations of the 1960s and

1970s130 or the demands for participation131 in the design of science policy
as well as in defining the topics of research in the 1990s.132
But there is a plethora of other movements that did not (only and not

primarily) address demands to the institutions of technoscience in order
to be included in them but rather developed gradually alternative practices
that attempted to appropriate and reclaim technoscientific knowledge, to
participate in its production, and eventually to set up self-organized struc-

tures to produce knowledge themselves.133 The radicalization of green,
ecological, and health movements in the 1980s, many of the ecological
commons campaigns of the 1990s, and similar campaigns for alternative
energy production are just a few examples of these type of movements.

And of course community technoscience itself—in all its complexity and

ambiguity as discussed in the previous sections of this chapter—constitutes

a form of movement that in many cases has the capacity to set up alterna-
tive forms of everyday existence and material engagement.
MATERIAL LITERACY
Common to all these attempts is an understanding of what Jean-Luc

Nancy calls being-in-common, rather than belonging in an already ex-

isting community.134 Being-in-common means that every situation in

which these movements find themselves or even help to create is singu-

lar and unique.135 These movements make community by ontologically

making themselves and their own material conditions of existence: being
in the process of commoning. I encountered two main aspects of this

type of community building in many spaces of community technoscience,
and I want to highlight them here: material literacy and infrastructural

imagination.
Learning is key to community building in technoscience. In public
debates and instituted technoscience, literacy is primarily understood as
scientific literacy:136 the making of scientifically informed citizens and
of appropriate institutional structures for their inclusion. This perspective
is dominated by a classical cognitivist model of knowledge transmis-
sion: participation is the result of the enhancement of cognitive contents.
Against scientific literacy, which solely focuses on strengthening cognitive
frameworks for understanding competing arguments in a technoscien-

tific controversy, there are attempts to show that scientific literacy can

primarily be enriched only if it is connected to active processes of respon-

sibility for concrete community development, what Maud Perrier and
Deborah Withers (2016) call “collaborative (un)learning.”137 Such learning
and unlearning settings have a long history in alternative education, self-

organized learning, and informal community schools—I am thinking here

of the Experimental College of the Twin Cities138 (Dyke and Meyerhoff,
2017) as an good example.139
In many of the makerspaces and community technosciences in which
I participated, one can see a di erent form of literacy that resonates with
ff

these ideas: literacy that is focused less on the humanocentric and cere

brally organized task of creating informed citizens and more on the at-

tempt to create stable microecologies. A di erent form of literacy is
ff

200 Chapter Eight

happening here, namely material literacy: an ongoing and involuntary (in-

volution with nonhuman others and things) experimenting with matter.140

Its starting point is a commitment to engage with a problematic; its aim is
not to solve the problem but to create what Andrea Ghelfi calls an “ecology

of proximity,” spaces of dense relations, energy flows, and co-constitution

of the involved actors. In such ecologies when there is an issue, “there is al-

ways more than one solution, and this ‘more than one’ is grounded inside,
not outside, the ways in which a problem is matter related: matter works

through a pluriverse of canals, of bridges” (Ghelfi, 2015, p. 85).
Material literacy starts from an obligation to protect an ecology from

its degradation and to make it a livable place for all its participants; it is, in
the words of Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), a “matter of care.” Learning and

knowledge here starts with an obligation to engage with a specific issue,

and care serves as both the ethopoietical compass and the main aim in
the process of this engagement.141 Rather than conceiving an issue as a

problem and trying to get to the essence of the problem and to deliver

solutions, literacy here is about learning to engage with problematics:142

the dynamics between the di erent actors within an ecology and their ca-
ff

pacity to be affected by each other in order to change the conditions in
which an issue can be dealt with. The material literacy of problematics is
about shifting relations and enhancing care. And by doing that the ecology

itself shifts and transforms; often it bifurcates and forks toward other

ecologies, toward more resilient alterontologies: “thousand ecologies”

(Hoerl, 2013).
While scientific literacy preserves the securitized logic of technosci-
ence and makes publics out of citizens, community technoscience at-
tempts to radically democratize literacy through a mode of distributed

“cooperation without consensus” (Star, 1993).143 Distributed cooperation
without consensus—or else nonparticipant connectivity144—takes place as

the exploration of limits and the virtual potentials that the relations to the
materials allow. This is distributed invention power—as discussed earlier
in this chapter—in the middle of material constraints. This, of course,

is possibly a feature of knowledge production as such, but the main point is
that these constraints are freely shared and explored in collaborative ways.

My interlocutors in the Leicester Hackspace told me that the scientific lab
mystifies constraints. In the securitized space of the big instituted science
lab, constraints are what individual scientists need to protect from others

in order to be able to invent. Constraints in instituted technoscience are

FIGURE 8.16 — Leicester Hackspace, UK. Educational workshop. Photograph by

Dimitris Papadopoulos.
always a matter of secrecy,145 while in community technoscience and ma-

terial experimentation the knowledge of constraints is becoming common
property, the fuel of material literacy.
GENEROUS INFRASTRUCTURES
This co-emergence of politics and matter creates alternative spaces of ex-

istence. In fact, it creates these spaces as infrastructures. But here I am

interested less in how infrastructures are made and produced or how infra-
structures are used for social reproduction. It is much more about how in-
frastructures emerge through “traverse communications”146 (Deleuze, 1987)
between di erent involved actors. It is about the emergence of infrastruc-
ff

202 Chapter Eight

tures through “creative involution”:147 symbiogenetic world-forming, the

actuation of material alliances through the association, mutualism, and ar-
ticulation between not directly connected forms of life.148 Endosymbiosis
instead of endocolonization.149 Infection instead of property.150 Coopera-
tion instead of toxicity. Warm compost instead of acidity. Commensality
instead of contamination. This is “creative involution” rather than linear
evolution.
More- than-social movements achieve their autonomy through the

making of infrastructures. Autonomy—as discussed earlier in this book,
in particular in chapter 2—refers to the idea that social conflict and social

mobilizations drive social transformation instead of just being a mere re-
sponse to (economic and social) power. But more-than-social movements

expand this form of autonomy to engage with questions of justice in more-

than-human worlds and to highlight the importance of creating alternative

lifeworlds of existence for their practice. The quest of these autonomous

infrastructures is to restore justice step by step through everyday mate-
rial practice (see also chapters 1 and 5).151 This is a mundane material and
generative justice.152 Justice is fought for on the level of matter and through
close alliances between engaged groups of animals and plants, committed
groups of humans, and accessible material objects. The autonomous poli-

tics of more-than-social movements are relational, ontological struggles to

create alternative material articulations. An autonomous political posthu-

manism emerges in the infrastructures of more-than-social movements:

political autonomy as material interconnectedness; being in the quantum

vortex of constant interdependences; knowing and naming one’s allies;
building material communities of justice.
More-than-social movement infrastructures are autonomy made durable:

transparent, unnoticed, and persistently present spaces that incorporate

political practice in their workings. Infrastructures allow more-than-social

movements to politicize ontological practice in the absence of consen-
sus.153 These infrastructures shape political developments and life without

the need to start again and again from scratch. They become part of infra-
structural imagination:154 the capacity to transfer infrastructures beyond
a specific spatial and temporal location and to reclaim it for a di erent on-
ff

tology; the capacity to connect, tweak, and reconnect di erent infrastruc-
ff

tures; the capacity to extend infrastructures over time and to redeploy them
in the future.155 Seed bombs are good examples of such infrastructures:

they rely on complex human and nonhuman labors to exist; they are readily

transferable; they can be applied differently in varying environments; they

FIGURE 8.17 — Seed bombs. Photograph by Dimitris Papadopoulos.

carry knowledge, material potentiality, and learning within them without
imposing it as a closed system in each di erent location in which they are
ff

used; they are self-sufficient—clay protects the encapsulated seeds, and

nutrients support them in their first growth—until they melt in the soil; and

they can travel easily. Through this traffic—linkages, transfers, mutations,

and modifications—more-than-social movements’ infrastructures are sus-

tained. Infrastructures need to be understood ecologically: to “come into
being, persist, and fail in relation to the practices of the diverse communities
that accrete around them” (Carse, 2012, p. 543).
More-than-social movements create generous infrastructures: infra-

structures that allow for communities to maintain and defend the ontolog-
ical conditions of their forms of life even when instituted infrastructures
break down by failure or by intent.156 In this sense these infrastructures are

directly political. Politics (and the social) does not come on top of the in-

frastructures that more-than-social movements create. Is a self-managed

water system an infrastructure or a political campaign? Is an educational

workshop of the Leicester Hackspace an infrastructure or a tool for achiev-
ing other social goals, such as promoting hobbyism or hacker culture? Is
a cooperative farm an infrastructure of life or a political project for com-

munity empowerment? Is an open-access bike workshop an infrastructure

204 Chapter Eight

or a commitment to a di erent lifestyle? Most of these infrastructures
ff

do both at the same time. In fact, if there is a split between the material

and the political, infrastructures cease to be generous. They are no longer

autonomous, and they are appropriated for other social aims and politi

cal targets.157 They become instituted, territorial, and managed as tools.
Instead, generous infrastructures involve always the involution between
human and nonhuman others, between materiality and sociality, and only

by doing this they become an alterontological practice.

GIVE ME A KITCHEN . . .

More-than-social movements are successful to the extent that they change

the conditions of knowledge production by engaging with the actual

making of knowledge in a specific subfield of technoscience. Only when
movements produce alternative knowledge with, within, and occasionally
against specific developments in technoscience can they effectively pro-
mote change. How far can (more-than-social) movements in technosci-

ence carry us? And more specifically, to what extent is the maker culture
part of an alterontological practice? Perhaps the experiences of the free

and open software movement could be helpful here: although free and

open software continues to play an important role in digital movements,

it outpaced itself in terms of the innovation it produced and is now in the
process of being continuously folded into proprietary software and vice

versa.158 New movements are evolving out of the free software movement,

such as the movement for radical privacy, the cryptographic movement,
and the development of anonymous campaigns in the hidden net.159 In a
broader sense, the free and open software movement has inspired open

hardware and open technoscience160 that underlies many activities of
the maker culture.161 In a similar way as the ontologies they help to form,
movements do not evolve linearly from each other; rather, they operate
inside the previous movement and develop in new unexpected ways.
Stacked ontologies and stacked movements. In this chapter I have tried
to describe the ontological making of the world as temporally, materially,
and functionally stacked. And I tried to argue that this is not an epistemo-
logical perspective.162 This is not something that can be observed as a state
of the world or even as a process. Stacked ontologies exist to the extent

that di erent actors shape, change, and move them. Stacked ontologies are
ff

like the compost piles in permaculture gardens mentioned earlier in this

chapter. I am thinking here of (more-than-social) movements as the agents

that make stacked ontologies move and change: movements as the worms,
bacteria, and fungi that compost layer after layer of organic matter.163 In

the words of Bruce Sterling (2005, p. 14), “Tomorrow composts today. . . .

Technocultures do not abolish one another in clean or comprehensive
ways. Instead, new capacities are layered onto older ones. The older tech-
nosocial order gradually loses its clarity, crumbles, and melts away under

the accumulating weight of the new.”164
Rather than being a single movement itself, the maker culture pro-
vides a material framework that many di erent movements, projects, and
ff

initiatives incorporate in their practices: kitchen science, diy biology, al-
ternative experimentation with medical substances, lay engineering
projects, production of alternative forms of energy, projects of ecologi-

cal modernization from below, self-managed systems against environ-

mental hazards, alternative forms of agriculture and soil renewal, radical
patient-based campaigns, permaculture regeneration, traditional sys-

tems of knowledge, craft, embodied technoscience, punk science, health
movements, indigenous ontologies, open-source science, technology and

agriculture, clandestine chemistry, the hacker culture, ecological justice
initiatives, cross-species collaborations, bio-art, self-organized projects

of scientific literacy—all examples of reclaiming and reinventing techno-

science from within. Give me a hackspace and I will raise a laboratory.

Give me crowdfunding and I will raise a new technoproject. Give me a

community space and I will raise a laboratory. Give me a laboratory and

I will raise a community space. Give me a plot and I will raise a soup

kitchen. Give me a kitchen and I will raise a laboratory.

What is constitutive of these movements is not that they attempt to

encounter and target technoscience as such but that they change the con-
ditions of knowledge production by changing the ontological fabric of
life. This distinction is important. It implies that there is no outside to the

process of the fold described earlier in this chapter—a politics of multiple

universes can work only if it is an alterontological practice: the alterna-
tive creation of ontologies. Real political disagreement, in the words of

Rancière (1998) that I have discussed in the previous chapters, takes place
when it is performed on an ontological level—that is, as I have argued, when

it forces existing ontologies to fork and craft alternative forms of existence.
“Ontological disagreement,” says de la Cadena (2015, p. 280) in her power

ful ethnography of indigenous politics in the Peruvian Andes, “emerges
from practices that make worlds diverge as they continue to make them-
206 Chapter Eight

selves connected to one another.” Throughout this book I called experi-
mental practice all these very diverse activities and ways of being that

allow such ontological disagreements to be enacted and set in motion. I
have enlisted community technoscience as a creative ally to more-than-

social movements that experiment with our constituted polity. The trust
that an alterontological practice is possible even if we do not know how to

make it happen in the beginning—what Puig de la Bellacasa (2014a) calls

“material spirituality”—is the starting point for any experimental practice
that engages with the forces of matter, other committed humans, acces-

sible things, and engaged animals and plants. What is at stake here is not

only technoscience itself but life in its ontological constitution. Within this
process technoscience and our polity itself become a field of social, mate-

rial, and interspecies experimentation. Give me a kitchen and I will raise

a world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have contributed to this book in many di erent ways, and

ff

I want to thank all of you. The list would be far too long to include all.
Here I mention those who have offered direct comments on earlier ver-

sions of parts of this book: Antonis Balasopoulos, Marcus Banks, Wenda
Bauchspies, Stefan Beck, Dominique Béhague, Nic Beuret, Huw Beynon,
Hywel Bishop, Patrick Bresnihan, Steve Brown, Marco Checchi, Tim Choy,
Adele Clarke, Patricia Clough, Harry Collins, Nicholas de Genova, Marisol
de la Cadena, Joe Dumit, Stephen Dunne, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Dace

Dzenovska, Arturo Escobar, Rob Evans, Judy Farquhar, Andrea Ghelfi,
Margherita Grazioli, John Hartigan, David Harvie, Cori Hayden, Woody
Kitson, Michalis Kontopodis, Chris Kortright, Hannah Landecker, Joanna
Latimer, Javier Lezaun, Keir Milburn, Fredy Mora-Gámez, Michelle Murphy,

Warren Neidich, Theo Nichols, Jackie Orr, George Papanikolaou, Trevor
Pinch, Lele Pizio, Brian Rappert, Francesco Salvini, Leandros Savvides,
Debra Benita Shaw, Stevphen Shukaitis, Niamh Stephenson, Marcelo Svirsky,
Chris Talbot, Cristina Tufarelli, Imogen Tyler, Gediminas Urbonas, Nomeda
Urbonas, Tracey Warr, and Ian Welsh.
I am deeply thankful to Emma Chung, John Cromby, Simon Lilley, and
Vassilis Tsianos for our collaboration that informed work presented in
this book. In particular, Vassilis Tsianos contributed to the book in many

di erent ways, not at least through his ideas for the title. Finn Bowring,
ff

Jim Clifford, Chris Connery, Julia O’Connell Davidson, Jannis Savvidis,
and Ernst Schraube have been a constant source of inspiration, a refuge in
times of worry, and a place to share joy and ideas. I am especially thankful
to my editor at Duke, Courtney Berger, and the editors of the Experimental
Futures series, Joe Dumit and Michael Fisher, for their invaluable guidance

and constructive suggestions. This book started in conversations with Joe
Dumit and I am grateful for his rich contribution to it. Heartfelt thanks
also go to Sandra Korn and Christi Stanforth for their creative support
during the preparation of the manuscript. I am grateful to the two anony-
mous reviewers for their immensely helpful feedback and for their encour-

aging but also challenging comments and suggestions. Special thanks goes
to Fredy Mora-Gámez for his work as research and editorial assistant on

this project and for our collaboration.

My parents, Eleni Papadopoulou-Alivizatou, tireless inventor of alter-

natives, and Dionyssis Papadopoulos, maker of worlds, have both shaped

the book with their ideas, their love and empowering care and their way of
living life. Thank you. I started writing this book a year after my daughter,

Alba, was born. Three years later my son, Amaru, entered our life. This

book is variously and indelibly marked by the presence of these two won-

derful creatures. The ideas presented here have been developed with my

intellectual and life companion, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa. This book is for
her. Without her it would not exist. Many of the issues that animate this
book emerged during my involvement with migrant communities, trans-

national migrant activist organizations, and the precarious workers move-

ment across Europe as well as the East Midlands hacker communities in

Britain. I am deeply grateful to them and I hope this book contributes in
some way or another to their efforts.
210 Acknowledgments

NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1 The anticipation of an imminent and unavoidable catastrophe has, as Beuret

(2016) discusses in his excellent study of environmental social movements,
ambivalent effects: it has shaped much of the visions of current social move-

ments, but the “global scalar logic of climate change” has often disabled “effective
environmental political action” instead of promoting the mobilization of every-

day alternatives. See also Yusoff (2009).
2 I will refer to literature on the posthuman and posthumanism in relevant places

throughout this book. Braidotti (2013) and Roden (2014) provide overview dis-
cussions of the posthuman; see also Badmington (2004), Herbrechter (2013),
and C. Wolfe (2010). Within the framework of science and technology studies
I’m thinking primarily of the work of Pickering (1995).
3 Paris 2006, Athens 2008, Tunisia 2010, Cairo 2011, Madrid 2011, Athens 2011,

the global Occupy movement 2011, the 15M movement in 2011, London 2011,
Istanbul 2012, and so on.
4 My inspiration for approaching this cycle of struggles as a worlded phenom-

enon comes from the work of Connery (2007), in particular his text The World

Sixties, whose beginning I paraphrased in this sentence.
5 In particular, it is important to investigate the extent of the effects, if any, that

these movements had on the way the 2008 economic crisis was handled. Many

of these movements addressed the crisis directly but their impact was limited.

This seems to be the case also for another important social movement of that

time, at least in the Global North and definitely in Britain: the climate change
movement. Despite its extensive activity and wide composition, its effects were

also restricted—see the important analysis of Beuret (2016, 2018).

6 Gilroy’s argument is that existing social, political, and media elites came to-

gether to form a class, while black communities are internally disconnected
and often unable to organize and “act as a body.” He says: “The last week has

been an amazing class, a primer, to give us the opportunity to understand
how these things function today. You remember that party they all had, in the

Cotswolds . . . and they were all there, the Milibands were there, the Labour

people were there, the tv people were there (not the ones from David Starkey–

land but the ones from Channel Four News), and they were all there together, and

they’re telling you something when they all congregate like that. They’re telling

you that they’re a class. And they think and act and conduct themselves like

a class. They chat to each other, they marry each other, they go to the same
places. . . . And if we want to act as a body, if we want to act in concert, we have

to learn something from the way they conduct themselves, even as we chal-
lenge what they do. So the pieces I can see in this system, the role of informa-
tion, of policing, of deprivation, of inequality. . . . And we need to clarify that

we have the resources we need in our community—we just need to use them in
a di erent way. Thank you” (Gilroy, 2011).
ff

7 Gilroy (2013, p. 553): “Thirty years after that shocking, transformative erup-

tion, the same streets in England’s cities were again aflame. This time, there

was no rioting in Scotland, Wales, or Ireland, and this time, no progressive
reforms of discriminatory policing or uneven, color coded law would follow.
No deepening of democracy would be considered as part of any postriot ad-
justments to the country’s politics of inclusion. Democracy’s steady evacuation
by the governmental agents of corporate and managerial populism was too far

advanced. The market state that had been dreamed about was now a rapacious
and destructive actor, privatizing and outsourcing government functions while
managing to incorporate those who had the most to lose into the destruction

of the public institutions on which they relied.”
8 Connectivity does not necessarily mean subjective intentionality for being and

staying connected. As I discuss in chapter 8, infrastructures of connectivity
often work without consensus and intentional participation. Connectivity and
disconnectivity are not necessary opposites but strategic positions within com-
plex social relations. For an excellent discussion, see Staeheli (2012).
9 I borrow the idea of dis-connectivity and un-networking from the work of

Staeheli (2012, 2013).
10 My understanding of experimentation is primarily derived from Deleuze and

Guattari’s (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. For Deleuze and Guattari, experimenta-
tion is the answer to and the way out of a series of dualisms such as stability/
structure vs. change/flow, assemblage vs. elements, closed/fixed vs. indetermi-

nate/open. Experimentation is about the abolition of dualism (see also chapter
4) that confines practice and thought to predefined positions. “One never knows
in advance,” says Deleuze (1987, p. 47); cautious experimentation is the center of
practice (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 161). Here, experimentation goes hand in

hand with the notion of experience, creative transformation, and creative involu-
tion (which are discussed throughout this book, particularly in chapter 8). In the
field of science and technology studies I rely on Barad (2007), Schillmeier (2015),
and Fischer’s (2009) work on experimentalism and experimental systems—

developed in discussion with Rheinberger (1997).
11 More broadly, everyday life and especially the “conduct of everyday life” is the

epicenter of sociomaterial change that I explore in this book. I draw on the
212 Notes to Introduction

important work of Schraube and Højholt (2016) to understand the link be-

tween the conduct of everyday life and social transformation. In particular,

I am interested in how the conduct of everyday life often escapes and defies
other more standardized and regulated aspects of everyday life (such as con-
sumerism). What is crucial for my project is not to map or capture a definite

image of everyday life but to explore how the uncontrollable excess that is al-
ways part of our mundane practices is transforming everyday life to a space
for experimentation (Stephenson and Papadopoulos, 2006). I am interested in
the moments when, with Debord (1981), we could say that everyday life turns
against itself; that is, when unexpected, experimental aspects of everyday life
set ordinary ways of being in motion.
12 Specifically about visual materials, I use them as enactments of stories rather

than as representations of the topics discussed in the book—see the work of

Banks (2014a, 2014b). With few exceptions, rather than providing a direct
analysis of the images I let them narrate stories that I hope are di erent from

ff

but complementary to the stories I am advancing in the main text.
13 On problems and problematics, see Deleuze (1994). See also D. W. Smith (2012)

and Maniglier (2012).
14 Several ethnographic and social research texts have inspired this methodology:

Choy’s Ecologies of Comparison (2011), Fischer’s Emergent Forms of Life and
the Anthropological Voice (2003), Ford’s Savage Messiah (2011), Haraway’s Pri-
mate Visions (1989), and the debates on the politics of ethnography presented in
the volume Insurgent Encounters edited by Juris and Khasnabish (2013). My guid-
ing star has been always Clifford’s Routes (1997) and in particular chapter 12,

“Fort Ross Meditation.” A second source of permanent inspiration has been
geophilosophy and geopoetics, such as Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand
Plateaus (1987) and the works of Glissant (1997) and White (1992).
15 My approach to the baroque is inspired by de Sousa Santos (2001) and Deleuze

(1993); see also Flanagan (2009).
16 There are some possible parallels here with magic realism—Jameson (1986),

Moses (2001), Orr (2015), Selmon (1988), and Wenzel (2006) have influenced
how magic realism is mobilized in this book.
17 For di erent takes on abundance, see, for example, Bresnihan (2016a), Holm

ff

gren (2002), Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg (2014), and Hoeschele (2010).
CHAPTER 1. DECOLONIAL POLITICS OF MATTER

1 I will discuss technoscience in chapter 8. My starting point here is Haraway

(1997). See also Ravetz (2006) on postnormal science.
2 The assumption of a tight link between material transformation and histori-

cal change is not new—the reduction of a thing to an object of contemplation

and its separation from actual material activity is something that already Marx

wanted to overcome in order to establish his materialist approach to history.
However, in this conception of materiality, the manipulation of ontology was
Notes to Chapter 1 213

conceived as a possibility and as an aid to achieve other sociopolitical targets;

the most prominent of them is social liberation—an idea that is so character-
istic of Marx and Engels’s foregrounding of technology as a tool for changing
history. But if technoscience is not a tool in the hands of an actor forging
other political goals but is politics as such, then the question is what kind of

politics it is.
3 When I talk about ontological politics, I refer to the actual practice of it rather

than to its theoretical conceptualizations such as Law (1999), Marres (2009),
and Mol (1999). Ontological politics is a very specific version of the broader
debates on ontology/ontologies emerging in the social sciences that I discuss
extensively in chapter 8. Here I refer only to science and technology studies;

see, for example, the seminal work of Haraway (1989) and the works of Pickering
(1995, 2008), Star (1995), Strathern (1991), C. Thompson (2005), and Cussins
(1996). For some examples, see Mol (2002), Moser (2008), Moreira (2006), and
Law and Singleton (2005).
4 Rather than a multicultural one; see Viveiros de Castro (2004).

5 For an analysis, see Savransky (2017).

6 Matter is a multifaceted and difficult concept. I use it throughout this book

when I do not talk about specific formations of matter—the epigenome, a fiber-

optic cable, the brain, pet plastic, academic theories, the embodiments of the
hiv virus, and so on—to capture all that it exists as a creative self-organizing

process. My main references here are Barad (2007) and, primarily, Deleuze and

Guattari (1987), who provide such an approach to matter (see, for example,

Propositions VII and VIII in chap. 12).
7 See Chung et al. (2016) and Cromby et al. (2016).

8 See various accounts on the colonization of America that describe this double

movement of the frontier: Bailyn (1988), Todorov (1984), and F. J. Turner (1993).
9 McClintock (1995) demonstrates how imperial political power, imperialist

expansion, industrialism, and, finally, intimacy and the domestic space all get

mixed and transformed in the process of the colonial contest.

10 See Quijano (2007) and also Mignolo and Escobar (2010).

11 See, for example, Vazquez (2011) and Maldonado-Torres (2007).

12 See Svirsky (2010) and also P. Patton (1996, 2000).

13 This maps on the two systems of power that Quijano sees emerging with the

conquest and colonization of the Americas: the economic power of the capital

ist system of production and labor and the social and political power structured

around the idea of race (Quijano, 2000; Quijano and Wallerstein, 1992).
14 Moulier Boutang (1998) has analyzed this process in his work on the abolition

of slavery, and Pratt (1992) has shown the connection between colonial expan-
sion, travel, and systems of representation.

15 Representation as a process of constructing social groups that later can be in-

cluded in the political institutions of contemporary liberal democracies; for

further discussion, see Stephenson and Papadopoulos (2006) and Papadopou-
los, Stephenson, and Tsianos (2008).
214 Notes to Chapter 1

16 Ontological politics is not about setting up new “ontological choreographies”

(Cussins, 1996) and “dances of agency” (Pickering and Guzik, 2008) but about
embedding these ontological choreographies in the current system of produc-

tion. For example, as Vora (2009) shows, not only does transnational surro-
gate motherhood assemble new “ontological choreographies” around it, but by

doing so it facilitates the extraction of biocapital from “biological labor.” Onto-

logical politics is not an innocent description of the workings of contemporary

technoscience, but it is the modus operandi of bioentrepreneurialism. This, of
course, applies to all the examples I mentioned here—see, for example, Sta-

rosielski (2015) on the complex lives of subsea cables (which maintain trans-
oceanic Internet traffic) and their entanglements with politics, economy, and
the environment.
17 Innovation and the imaginary of productionism are tightly entangled. Both are

considered the engine of social change—see Yusoff (2013b) and L. Suchman

and Bishop (2000).
18 This form of politics is not concerned with representation and with the sym-

metrical inclusion of di erent entities in the political and productive arena of
ff

the constituted institutions, as these can exist only by erasing specific capaci-

ties of each actor in order to make them fit—see Stephenson and Papadopoulos

(2006).
19 In Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos (2008), we argue that this type of

politics has primacy over the formation of control and drives historical trans-
formation. This is the reason this politics is often called autonomous—not in

the sense that it is independent but in the sense that it is not overdetermined

by the existing system of power and control. I discuss autonomous politics in
various places in this book, particularly in chapters 2, 5, and 8.

20 The work of the Ecological Humanities Group (http://www.ecologicalhumani

ties.org) has been crucial for developing these ideas. D. B. Rose’s Reports from

a Wild Country (2004) was an inspiration for thinking an ethics of decoloni-
zation in the context of the unfolding process of colonization in the frontier

of matter. Van Dooren’s work has been important for exploring relations to

human and nonhuman others who have been made superfluous and for under-

standing “precisely how di erent communities (of humans and nonhumans)
ff

are entangled, and how these entanglements are implicated in the production

of both extinctions and their accompanying patterns of amplified death” (van
Dooren, 2011). See also D. B. Rose and van Dooren (2011).
21 And as with every desire it can unfold either as a manic and anxious chase

of something that we don’t have—Meillassoux’s (2009) obsession to grasp the

“in-itself ” seems to be an expression of this form of desire in the politics of

matter—or as a force to escape existing closures, experiment, and make novel

connections and forms of life. Like every politics, politics of matter contains

both. Here I refer to the latter while I silently presuppose the former as a

repressed version of a politics of matter.

22 See Eglash (2016).


23 See Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos (2008, pp. 71ff.). For an in-depth

analysis, see W. Smith et al. (2015).

24 See here also the analysis of Schraube (2005).

25 See the historical work of P. H. Smith (2004), which demonstrates how artisans

and artists, sculptors, locksmiths, and carpenters were key actors in the forma-

tion of modern science; see also H. Rose (1983).
26 On the centrality of scale for understanding global processes, see the work of

A. Tsing (2000) and Glick-Schiller and Çaglar (2008).

27 See chapter 8 for a further discussion of the free-software movement.

CHAPTER 2. BIOFINANCIALIZATION AS TERRAFORMATION
1 Zalasiewicz et al. (2011). For a critical discussion of the implications of Anthro-

pocene discourse for politics, see Beuret and Brown (2016).
2 Although this is not the focus of this chapter, the relation of social science/social

scientists and the crisis is an important aspect of this topic. In a special-issue

editorial on the 2008 financial crisis, Bryan, Martin, Montgomerie, and Wil-
liams discussed why extant knowledge in the social sciences failed to be attuned
to the crisis. What if this “important failure” (Bryan et al., 2012, p. 302), is not

due to inertia and lack of reflexivity but because academic research and prac-

tice has internalized the logic that sustains the socioeconomic mechanisms that
contributed to the financial crisis, to the extent that failing to see the crisis was
almost inevitable and the limited number of novel responses to the crisis even
more so. Academics and knowledge producers, as a part of the professorial-

managerial classes, are deeply embedded in a social and cultural environment
that has been formed by the ascendance and consolidation of the financializa-
tion of economy and society—Beverungen, Dunne, and Hoedemaekers (2013)

describe this situation persuasively.
3 For an analysis of such mobilizations, see chapter 8 and also Tsianos, Papado-

poulos, and Stephenson (2012). See also Barthold, Dunne, and Harvie (2017).
4 I am working here with Oliver Ressler’s piece of art We Have a Situation Here

(2011) in order to rethink possibilities for the emergence of new alternative
forms of subversion not only when established power collapses but also when
those who oppose established power collapse and leave space for new initia-

tives (http://www.ressler.at/we_have_a_situation_here/).

5 For a discussion of autonomism, see my previous work (Papadopoulos et al.,

2008) and the references included in the notes further down in this chapter.
6 I am thinking here of Harvie and Milburn’s work on affective contagion in so-

cial movements in relation to this magical transformative moment in social
movement action. As they say, activists need to be also “sorcerers” because

they “are trying to conjure up something beyond themselves, something they
cannot wholly know, something beyond the existing ‘natural’ limits of society;

something ‘supernatural’ ” (Harvie and Milburn, 2016, p. 12).


7 We encounter two types of labor struggles that put postwar social organization

under pressure: organized industrial action and the refusal of work. The de-

cline of industrial action and work refusal after the 1980s left a major gap in the

contentious politics of this period but opened up space for cross-fertilization

between labor struggles and other social movements. The effects of employers’

responses to these struggles since the 1980s are well known: deindustrializa-

tion in the Global North, outsourcing of manufacturing, and the precarization
of labor, which have become one of the targets of new labor social movements

in the past decades (see Cosse, 2008; Hamm, 2011; Mattoni and Doerr, 2007;

Murgia and Selmi, 2012; Papadopoulos et al., 2008, section V; and Tarì and
Vanni, 2005). Simultaneously, we can observe a direct intensification of strug

gles in the Global South for better wages with endless mobilizations that con-
stitute a direct pressure on capital’s flight from organized labor in the North

(Waterman et al., 2012). In addition, the working classes of the Global North
flew into the credit system in order to increase their wages and social status.
A wave of industrial action and a subsequent multiplication and hybridization
of social struggles, the fight for higher wages in the South, and the access to

higher loans in the North all characterize the various ways labor movements

contested these transformations over the past decades.

8 The other strategy for lowering the cost of production apart from the exit from

organized labor in the Global North is to lower the price of fixed capital and

to intensify the appropriation of natural resources. The multiple ecological

movements created a new consciousness about the limits of growth: environ-
mental costs cannot be externalized to society, and current growth cannot be
sustained (Wall, 1999). Of course, green development was proclaimed as one of
the vehicles that could contribute to managing the 2008 crisis. More broadly,
all these movements put an important issue on the agenda: They contested the

strategy for social growth and welfare that has been privileged by moderate as
well as radical supporters of the markets who in di erent configurations have
ff

defined the political orientation of Global North societies at least since the

1970s. These positions assert that the promotion and maintenance of social

good is a positive externality of active markets and of a wealthy private sector.
This has been questioned by calculating the balance sheet between positive and
negative externalities of the markets and by challenging the idea that the pro-
motion of social good could be a spillover effect of economic agents operating
as freely as possible in the market.

9 See the comparison of profit rates between nonfinancial and financial corpora-

tions (Duménil and Lévy, 2005).
10 However, it is probably misleading to explain recent crises based solely on the

assumption that underconsumption/overaccumulation and profitability are
their primary cause (see, for example, Brenner, 2006; K. H. Roth, 2008; this
position can be found also in Wolff, 2008). Georges Papanikolaou has made me
aware that already Engels (1878/1987) in Anti-Dühring and Lenin (1899) in the


Development of Capitalism in Russia had vehemently criticized positions that

hold underconsumption as the cause of capitalist crises.

11 Which happened as a series of crises; see, for example, Brenner (2000, 2004).

12 Among many others, two moments seem to be defining for the conditions of

labor since the 1970s: higher levels of productivity on the one hand and the

stagnation, often deterioration of the living and working conditions of the
working classes on the other (Foster, Magdoff, and Magdoff, 2008; Mishel,
Bernstein, and Allegretto, 2007; Yeldan, 2009).

13 For further discussion on financial-led accumulation, see Paulani (2009).

14 As Arrighi (2009, p. 82) puts it: “Incomes have been redistributed in favour of

groups and classes that have high liquidity and speculative dispositions; so in-
comes don’t go back into circulation in the form of effective demand, but they

go into speculation, creating bubbles that burst regularly.”

15 The background to this is a major shift in the strategy of investment in Global

North societies and subsequently in the rest of the world. Duménil and Lévy

(2004) argue that the potential benefits from the partial restoration of the
profit rate after the mid-1980s were offset by the payment of dividends and

interest. The increases of the rates of profit were redirected to debt sustained

speculation (through financialization; see Blackburn, 2008) instead of being
directed to investment.
16 See di erent approaches to these issues: Arrighi and Silver (1999), Barthold

ff

et al. (2017), Duménil and Lévy (2005), Orhangazi (2008).
17 See also Bryan and Rafferty (2006), Dowling and Harvie (2014), Langley (2008),

and Pellandini-Simányi, Hammer, and Vargha (2015).

18 D. MacKenzie (2011) has discussed the role of evaluation cultures but mainly

focused on variations in valuation of di erent financial instruments. I refer
ff

here primarily to sociological and anthropological approaches to valuation

(see, for example, Barbier and Hawkins, 2012, and Beckert and Aspers, 2011).
19 What is the financial value of a novel compound, of an equation, of our aca-

demic work, of a scientific paper, of animal tissue, of a simulation of a neural
network, of soil, of an oil spill, and what of the dying birds? As an example,

see the processes, conflicts, and resistances entailed in the financialization of

housing and urban space in Bresnihan and Byrne (2015), Byrne (2016a, 2016b),
Colau and Alemany (2014), D’Avella (2014), Garcia-Lamarca and Kaika (2016),

and Moore (2015).
20 This incommensurability and the process of imposing scales of values that are

transferable to economic ranking and ratings has been studied in many fields of
life, such as aesthetic valuation, wine markets, the valuation of knowledge and
academic research, the valuation of death, and insurance to the valuation of
the environment (for various examples, see Beckert and Aspers, 2011; Karpik,

2010; Moeran and Pedersen, 2011; Stark, 2009; Vargha, 2015; and Zelizer, 1979).
21 For di erent approaches to biofinancialization that have influenced the position

ff

presented in this chapter, see French and Kneale (2012), Fumagalli (2011),
Marazzi (2010), R. Martin (2002), and Murphy (2013).

22 This exploitation of the future is intensified by the fact that we are entering a

period where postcontractual employment is increasingly becoming common;
see the note later in this chapter, and also Papadopoulos et al. (2008).

23 See, for example, the fascinating research of Kortright (2012) on transgenic

rice and how the promise of a high-yielding crop shapes geopolitics, agrofood

investments, research, and experimental labor (see also Cooper, 2008; Sunder

Rajan, 2006). In earlier work (Papadopoulos et al., 2008, pp. 107ff.) we called
this the “formation of emergent life, that is the attempt to develop means for
the maximum control of life and to exploit life’s emergent qualities in highly
uncertain conditions.”
24 See various approaches to the construction of instruments that allow the quali-

fications of di erent values in Callon, Millo, and Muniesa (2007), Busch (2011),
ff

and Karpik (2010).
25 Social sciences have been plagued by this pressure. The science-based-research

and evidence-based-research movements came to dominate attempts to evalu-

ate social scientific research outputs and to create tools and standards for mea

suring them (Howe, 2004; Morse, 2006; Ryan and Hood, 2004). More broadly

the new culture of measuring and valuing outputs has been at the core of reor

ganizing and restructuring British higher education and universities worldwide

(Beverungen et al., 2013; De Angelis and Harvie, 2009; Edu-Factory Collective,

2010; R. Martin, 2011; Newfield, 2011).
26 For di erent accounts on these practices, see C. W. Smith (1999) and Stark

ff

(2009).
27 The story of stagnating growth appears differently when viewed from the perspec-

tive of global labor: we can observe a considerable growth of the share in the

production of the world gdp by some of the emerging countries. The emerging
economies—in particular India and China—became powerful players in the

past thirty-five years. The total share of Asia (excluding Japan, which experi-

enced a similar slowdown to that of the other Global North Atlantic economies
after 1970s) of the world gdp almost doubled from 16.4 percent in 1973 (twenty

years earlier, in 1950, it was 15.4 percent) to 30.9 percent in 2001 (A. Maddi-

son, 2003). Labor productivity was considerably higher for most of the emerg-

ing countries as well (Conference Board, 2009). The consequences of these

transformations for global labor are severe. Most of the workforce in global

manufacturing is unskilled, deskilled, or low-skilled and is exposed to intense

marginalization, exploitation, and violation of basic workers’ rights (Akyüz,
2003). The background to the rise of global productivity was the opening up
of the “periphery” to the neoliberal policies of the 1970s, a pro cess that was

initiated in a moment where investments in Global North Atlantic societies

started decreasing. Profit was instead streaming into the United States from the
“periphery” (Duménil and Lévy, 2004). Cheap loans were offered to the “de-

veloping” world. This expansive movement of financialization achieved on
the one hand the complete inclusion of the “periphery” into the new re-
gime (you can call it globalization), and on the other hand it proletarianized


the working populations of these countries (Federici and Caffentzis, 2008;

K. H. Roth, 2008). Global financialization created the technoeconomic infra-
structure of a global economy and the new transnational neoliberal system.
When toward the mid- to late 1980s interest rates went up and capital flows

were redirected to the United States, a series of countries defaulted on their

loans—a chain of regional crises spread throughout the world, and the imf

and World Bank imposed structural adjustment programs. Ironically the pe-
riphery become the center for the generation of capital profits (and simulta

neously the center of exploitation).
28 Labor productivity in western Europe almost tripled during the “Golden Age

of capitalism,” from US$5.54 per hour in 1950 to $16.21 in 1973. By 1998 it had
reached $28.53 per hour (A. Maddison, 2006). For the United States the rise is
as follows: from $12.65 per hour in 1950 to $23.72 in 1973 to $34.55 in 1998.
29 And despite the crisis of the 1970s, this rate didn’t seem to be much affected

(Nordhaus, 2004); see also Resnick and Wolff (2006, chap. 17) and Glyn

(2006, p. 151).
30 For a discussion of employees by sector in the United States see Foster et al.

(2008). These trends are similar for other developed economies and are cor-

roborated by the database for sectoral employment of the Groningen Growth
and Development Centre; see Timmer and de Vries (2007).
31 At the core of precarious labor relations is the increase of precarious contracts—

that is, nonstandard contract forms based on di erent configurations between
ff

the length and stability of the working contract (permanent contracts, fixed-term

contracts, or informal or free/unpaid labor) and the working-time arrange-

ments (full-time employment, part-time employment, or irregular working

patterns). The less stable and regular the working contract is, the higher the de-
gree of atypicality and the intensity of precarity. However, another important

additional dimension characterizes precarious labor: In conditions of struc-

tural flexibilization of labor markets (Grimshaw et al., 2001), employment con-

tracts become increasingly insecure and exploitation is maintained by breaking
the bond of the contract, rather than through the contract itself. This results
in an amplification of dependency: one is under increased pressure to ensure

that one’s future capacity to be “productive” will be compatible with the demands

of the market (lifelong learning, continuous acquisition of skills, and innova-
tion are keywords in this process). So the absence of permanent (or even long)

contractual employment increases the “exploitation of the self ” (Ehrenstein,
2006). Furthermore, one is not only exploited in the present, but also one’s

future is exploited. Exploitation of the self happens in the regime of precari-

ous labor when someone tries to anticipate and explore the future through its

dissemination into the present and to intensify their own efforts to ensure that

they remain competitive. This postcontractual form of dependency is twofold:

it is a dependency on the employer, who offers limited contracts, as well as a

dependency on oneself to increase one’s own capacity to get such contracts in

the future.


32 Following a time where industrial capitalism (1800–1970) came after a long

period of instability during the nineteenth century to replace merchant capital-

ism, which depended on the exploitation of slave labor and the territories of the

colonies. Regarding the formation of third capitalism, see broader debates about
post-Fordism in relation to work and value production (Bowring, 2002; Dyer-

Witheford, 1999; Fleming and Spicer, 2003; Gorz, 1999; Hampson, Ewer, and
Smith, 1994) as well as the various debates about cognitive capitalism (Azais,

Corsani, and Dieuaide, 2001; Marazzi, 2007; Morini, 2007; Moulier Boutang,
2011; Vercellone, 2007). Both of them define the coordinates of what here is

referred to as third, embodied value production.

33 See Heery and Salmon (2000) and Pollert and Charlwood (2009).

34 Paul Thompson, for example—arguing from the perspective of labor process

theory (see Knights and Willmott, 1990)—emphasizes that the socialization of

value production is empirically unsubstantiated and that the core site of value
production remains the workplace, be it the manufacturing shop floor, the of-
fice, or the retail space (P. Thompson, 2005). But these claims are equally un-

substantiated; there is no extensive study, to my knowledge, that would support

them either. The debates initiated by labor process theory on the socialization

of value production seem to ignore the broader transformations of the social
regime of accumulation—something that was part of its initial developments

(see also Böhm and Land, 2012; for example, Burawoy, 1985; Jaros, 2005).
35 See, for example, Moulier Boutang (2011), Bollier (2003), C. Hess and Ostrom

(2007), and de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford (2010).

36 That is, all these shared naturecultural creations that are neither public (main-

tained by the state) nor private but belong to all and in particular to every

one who contributes to maintaining a specific commons. There is a wealth of

publications on the commons; see, for example, Helfrich and Stiftung (2012),
Linebaugh (2008), Dolsak and Ostrom (2003), and Bollier and Helfrich (2012)
and the discussion in chapter 8.
37 And very often these activities do not lie outside the workplace but also lie

outside the direct sphere of capitalist organization as Gibson-Graham (2006)

describe in their work. See also Morini (2007) and K. Weeks (2007).
38 See T. Nichols (1980).

39 See, for example, Hanlon (2012, 2014).

40 The mobilization of various aspects of one’s own life in order to be able to work

has been explored in many di erent settings; see, for example, A. Ross (2009),
ff

Brophy and de Peuter (2007), and Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2011).
41 In labor process theory the workplace is examined in relative isolation from

the wider political economy (P. Thompson and Smith, 2001). This perspec-

tive can produce a wealth of insights into control and subordination in the
workplace, but it misses broader social transformations that affect the work-
place. For example, in the discussion of labor process in call centers, Warhurst,

Thompson, and Nickson (2009, p. 101) clearly say that call center workers are
not unskilled but need to have considerable social and interactive skills and

competencies. However, they refuse to discuss how these skills are acquired or

learned, how they develop, and how they are nurtured. They thus refuse to see
the social transformations that make workplace exploitation possible (see, for

example, Burawoy et al., 2000; and Rowlinson and Hassard, 2001).
42 See, for example, De Angelis and Harvie (2009).

43 For further discussion see Boyle (2008), Bollier (2008), and, more broadly on

the politics of cooperation, Ratner (2015).
44 For further discussion, see K. Weeks (2011) and Barbagallo and Federici (2012).

45 See, for example, Alberti (2011) and B. Anderson (2010),

46 Verticalization creates alliances between segments of di erent classes with

ff

segments of the state and the private sector beyond democratic regulation.

The democratic deficit emerging from the verticalization of society can be

described as postliberal polity (Papadopoulos et al., 2008; Tsianos et al.,
2012). Global North states are steadily withdrawing their support and pro-
tection from their citizens, and the 2008 economic crisis seems to have been
used as a vehicle to extend this project even further than it was thinkable be-

forehand. And although we see neoliberalism triumphant in economic terms
(however, neoliberalism is a far broader and diverse project than expressed

in its economic doctrines; see Papadopoulos, 2002; Peck and Tickell, 2002),
we see also an abandonment of core liberal principles: for example, the re-

treat from the classic neoliberal doctrine of a minimal state to the support
of a strong state that openly intervenes not to defend society, ecology, and

democracy but to defend the positions of certain social classes and certain
private actors—a public-private alliance maintained by the state. Moreover,

there is a retreat from the ultimate liberal principle of state institutions as

the guarantors of individual freedoms. State authorities are now prepared to
legitimize illiberal practices in order to uphold this alliance. Consider, for
example, the denationalization of citizens (Nyers, 2010), the undermining of
personal data sovereignty, or the attacks on education as a public good (New-
field, 2008). This looks like an amplification of the neoliberal process minus

liberal democracy, a move toward postliberal polity in which less state means

less state for democracy, society, and the environment and more state for
these vertical alliances. For an extensive discussion of verticalization in the

context of postliberalism, see Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos (2008,
pp. 25–35). For further analyses of the concept, see the work of Stephenson
(2010), Kippax and Stephenson (2010), Tsianos et al. (2012), and Papadopou-
los et al. (2008).
47 See the note on postcontractual exploitation earlier in this chapter.

48 The mobilizations across many of the societies of the Global North between

2008 and 2012 show that this conflict traverses the whole of society and di-

rectly affects how politics is performed; see Tsianos and Papadopoulos (2012)
and Tsianos et al. (2012).
49 Respectively, Savage (2002) and Newfield (2008).

50 See A. R. López and Weinstein (2012) and Li (2010).


51 See Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal (2007) and Sullivan, Warren, and

Westbrook (2000).
52 See Papadopoulos et al. (2008) and Tsianos et al. (2012).

53 Originally Tronti (2005); see also Bowring (2002), Cleaver (1992), Fleming

(2012), Shukaitis (2014), and K. Weeks (2011, pp. 96ff.).
54 Such as the important movements described in Zibechi (2011).

55 The main problem with these responses is that they focus on a strategy of re

sistance. While resistance may be important in order to alleviate the immedi-

ate effects of current social conflicts, it cannot constitute a movement that can
force power to reorganize itself in a deep transformative way. Historically, what

we had is an aleatoric succession of events in which the subaltern classes at-
tempted to escape their own conditions of existence and exploitation, and capi-
tal control was responding with always-new strategies for its survival. The way

subaltern populations experience the development of capitalism is in the form
of continuously novel forms of control. And at the same time subaltern popula-
tions acted in the ever-changing conditions of capital control by instigating new

practices of escape and justice that didn’t respond to these new configurations

of control but created new forms of life and new conditions that were not easily

visible from the viewpoint of power. It is like a Beckett play—the actors coexist

on the stage and each actor’s action is the precondition for the actions of the
other, but they never respond to each other and never create a coherent dia-
logue; they simply act and change the other through the mere material effects of
their doings. The new exodus won’t be a response to the impasses of biofinancial

accumulation. It’ll be an exodus that will open something that operates on a ter-

rain that is not fully organized by the command of embodied value production

and the biofinancial regime. We have extensively discussed this thesis elsewhere
(Papadopoulos et al., 2008; Tsianos et al., 2012); see also chapter 8.
56 For example, Hardt and Negri (2009) call for a subtraction of labor power from

capital, and Holloway (2010b) suggests that our alternative doing can be out-

side and against abstract labor (labor that produces capitalist value). See also

Bowring (2004).
57 See, for example, research on the valuation of complex financial instruments

(D. MacKenzie, 2011, 2012), research on the performative capabilities of eco-
nomics (D. MacKenzie and Millo, 2003; Millo and MacKenzie, 2009), or stud-
ies in material and semiotic arrangements used for the calculation of economic
objects (Callon et al., 2007; Knorr-Cetina and Preda, 2006; Muniesa, 2007;

Pryke, 2010).
58 The main driver behind this is the computerization of financial markets—that

is, automatic trading as well as e-finance platforms.

59 This not only sounds like but also is a reproduction of neoclassical economics’

core assumptions about the subjectivity and nature of the actors involved in
markets (Papadopoulos, 2002, 2003).
60 As Rona-Tas and Hiss (2011, p. 226) write, “Measuring value as events yet to

unfold in the future, rather than as costs or labor already expended in the past


or even as subjective needs or objective scarcity revealed in the present, in-

troduces an element of fundamental uncertainty that poses a formidable chal-

lenge to valuation and price formation.” See also Beckert (2009).
61 See also Lightfoot and Harvie (2016).

62 As, for example, D. MacKenzie (2009) implies.

63 And it is also important not to forget here that social studies of finance have

willingly or unintentionally internalized some of the assumptions of neoclassi-
cal economic models in order to provide their analyses. See the critical inter-
rogation of social studies of finance in Engelen et al. (2011).
64 A position that primarily was developed in regard to the role of working-class

struggles in historical change: capital is not the driving force of change, but

instead workers’ refusal and insubordination force capital to reorganize itself

(Cleaver, 1992; Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Negri, 1988). This perspective on auton-

omy is of course limited to the relation between capital and labor, but the ques-

tion of autonomous politics exceeds this relation. In the wake of the new social
movements that emerged from the Zapatista encuentros and the Seattle mobi-
lizations in the middle to end of the 1990s, autonomy is explored in relation to

technoscience, culture, feminist and queer politics, and the struggles for the

commons (Berardi, 2009; Böhm, Dinerstein, and Spicer, 2010; G. Brown, 2007;
Dinerstein, 2010; Papadopoulos et al., 2008; Shukaitis, Graeber, and Biddle,
2007).
65 On the idea of excess, see Free Association (2011) and Papadopoulos et al.

(2008).
66 See http://www.hsbc .com/inthefuture. The series of adverts including the

advertisements discussed here were issued by hsbc Holdings plc.

67 See the work of Waterton, Ellis, and Wynne (2013) on the ambiguities and in-

tricacies of dna bar-coding of species in order to prevent biodiversity loss.

I wonder about the implications of bar-coding species for increasing market

share.
68 On rent, see Fumagalli (2011), Marazzi (2010), Negri (2010), and Vercellone

(2010).
69 In this sense social science fiction corresponds to Suvin’s influential definition

of science fiction as “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions
are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose
main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s em-
pirical environment” (Suvin, 1979, pp. 7–8). Although this definition has been
extended (see, for example, Freedman, 2000; Jameson, 2007) and challenged (for
example, see several contributions included in Bould and Miéville, 2009), I am
interested in Suvin’s idea that this estrangement is capable of prefiguring “an
alternate reality, one that possesses a di erent historical time corresponding to

ff

di erent human relationships and sociocultural norms actualized by the nar-
ff

ration. This new reality overtly or tacitly presupposes the existence of the

author’s empirical reality, since it can be gauged and understood only as the

empirical reality modified in such-and-such ways” (Suvin, 1979, p. 71; emphasis


in original). This potential for prefigurative politics (see, for example, Holloway,
2010a) is crucial for creating ontologies and material worlds alternative to our
existing empirical realities, an idea that is central to the concept of autonomy
that is discussed in several places in this book.
70 From Bergson via Deleuze, “the goal of fabulation is to break the continuities

of received stories and deterministic histories, and at the same time to fashion
images that are free of the entangling associations of conventional narratives

and open to unspecified elaboration in the construction of a new mode of col-
lective agency” (Bogue, 2007, p. 106). For a comprehensive discussion of the
concept of fabulation as it is used here, see Barr (1992) and Bogue (2010).

71 Here I expand and modify the concept of “endocolonialism” coined by Virilio

(1995, 1998) to describe not only how states colonize their own urban spaces and
their citizens’ bodies in postindustrial societies but also the process of an inward

coloniality, the coloniality of matter itself in times where geocolonialism—that

is, territorial colonialism—is exhausted (see also chapter 1).
72 Colonization from the Indies to Mars is the attempt to initially treat space—

whether it is made up of people, other species, territories, or inanimate

matter—as a resource that does not belong to anybody, res nullius, in order to

appropriate it, enclose it in private or in some rare cases public spaces (that is,
to transform it to res privatae and in some few cases to res publicae). But hardly
ever to designate it as res communes (see also chapter 1).
73 Ghelfi (2015, p. 22) describes how a widespread vision of redemption of the

commons is at the heart of current understandings of alternative politics and
many social movements. This vision sees the commons as a force “potentially
able to re-appropriate the whole (wealth produced and means of production).

Here the commons are not just the condition of possibility for the development

of the current regime of accumulation, but the commons become a singular
name, a ‘universal,’ an object of desire that can be gained through the struggles

of an antagonistic subject.” Autonomy in these widespread beliefs refers to the

potential of forming a historical subject that can resist its appropriation and
instigate radical social change (see an example in Mezzadra, 2011b).
74 Terraforming appears as a science fiction theme already in the 1930s and 1940s

in Jack Williamson’s stories. This essay is inspired by Robinson’s Mars trilogy
(1992, 1993, 1996) and Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (2000), which opened for
me an alternative vision of and multiple perspectives on terraformation. I rely
on the analyses of these works by B. Clarke (2008), Haraway (1991a), Jameson

(2000), and Leane (2002).
75 See, for example, Beech (2009) and Fogg (1995).

76 See Bell and Parker (2009).

77 “Mars has what it takes. It’s far enough away to free its colonists from intel-

lectual, legal, or cultural domination by the old world, and rich enough in

resources to give birth to a new civilisation,” says Zubrin (1994), a former
chairman of the National Space Society and a right-wing enthusiast of Mars

colonization.

78 See Collis and Graham (2009) and also discussions in popular forums such as

York (2002).
79 See Yusoff (2013a); on the public framing of geoengineering, see Bellamy and

Lezaun (2015).
80 Here Hall’s (1986; see also Slack, 1996) work is important; however, I want to

think of articulation as a practice that pertains not only to the process of coding

but also to material practices.
CHAPTER 3. ONTOLOGICAL ORGAN IZING

1 When I refer to organizing here I mainly follow the work of alternative organ

ization studies—see, for example, Parker et al. (2014), Parker, Fournier, and

Reedy (2007), and Tadajewski et al. (2011).
2 The empirical materials that underpin the ideas presented in this chapter have

been collected over a period of more than a decade in di erent political events

ff

and activism related to migration as well as in various migration transit sites

across Greece between 2009 and 2011. This work is the outcome of my collabo-
ration with Vassilis Tsianos, and many of the ideas and material developed here

are based on our common work.
3 See, for example, Isin and Nielsen (2008), Isin and Nyers (2014), and Nyers and

Rygiel (2012).
4 Julie Okmûn Rebouillat is a freelance photographer and member of the group

Contre-Faits (http://www.contre-faits.org). Between 2008 and 2012 she worked

on the issue of borders and migration and made a series of photographs explor-

ing everyday life of illegalized migrants in Calais. The photographs included

in this chapter are part of this series, titled “No Land’s Men, the Struggle for

Calais.” She has also investigated the struggles of No Borders activists and the

camps that have been organized at strategic points across Europe to demand

the opening of borders to all (such as in Calais and Brussels). Julie is currently
working on several other projects exploring life in squats, social movement

mobilizations, and carnival parades. Her approach is based on immersion and
engagement with the people that she portrays. This allows her to provide a

direct and intimate representation of daily life, as opposed to the often sensa-

tional and distanced images circulating in the mass media on similar topics. In
Calais, for example, she spent more than one month living in a migrant squat,

and she participated in several No Border camps in order to share the activists’
point of view on their practices and actions.
5 See Federici (2004) and Ignatieff (1978).

6 See von Oswald (2002).

7 See Moulier Boutang (1998) and Papadopoulos et al. (2008).

8 Demographics, aging, and boosting the working-age population are the most

crucial arguments circulating in the Global North for maintaining mobility and
accepting migrants.

9 See Kasparek (2016).


10 See our analysis of camps as technologies of temporality within global labor

markets and as regulators of porous borders in Papadopoulos et al. (2008).
11 See Castles and Miller (2003) and Karakayali (2008).

12 See De Genova and Peutz (2010).

13 See Papadopoulos et al. (2008, chap. 11).

14 See Alberti (2011, 2014).

15 See T. Nichols (1980, p. 35).

16 See B. Anderson (2010) and Bosniak (2006).

17 See, for example, Brass and van der Linden (1997), Glenn (2004), Lowe (1996),

Lucassen and Lucassen (1997), and Steinfeld (2001).
18 The idea of the double-R axiom is developed in Papadopoulos et al. (2008).

19 For an example, see Cuppini (2017).

20 See Bell and Binnie (2004), van Gunsteren (1998), Nyers (2009), and Sassen

(2004).
21 See also Buckel, Fischer-Lescano, and Oberndorfer (2010).

22 See Karakayali and Tsianos (2005), Mezzadra (2011a), Papadopoulos et al.

(2008), and Rodriguez (1996). See also Nyers (2015) and Martignoni and
Papadopoulos (2014). For a summary of some of these debates see Casas-

Cortes, Cobarrubias, and Pickles (2015).
23 As, for example, in Jessop and Sum (2006).

24 See Transit Migration Forschungsgruppe (2006).

25 See, for example, Schuster (2003) and De Genova (2010).

26 See Düvell (2006) and Sharma (2009).

27 See examples in Giordano (2014) and Martignoni (2015).

28 See O’Connell Davidson (2011).

29 For a typical example, see B. Jordan and Düvell (2002).

30 See the detailed work of Karakayali (2008).

31 See di erent approaches to this problem in Bishop (2011), De Genova (2015),

ff

King (2016), Lafazani (2012), Nyers and Rygiel (2012), Rigby and Schlembach
(2013), and Rygiel (2011).
32 See Broeders and Engbersen (2007) and various examples in Papadopoulos

et al. (2008, chaps. 11 and 12).
33 See chapters 6 and 12 in Papadopoulos et al. (2008).

34 For an extended critique of integrationism see Glick-Schiller and Çaglar (2008)

and S. Hess, Binder, and Moser (2009).

35 The so-called European migrant and refugee crisis in 2015 shows how the

movement of people has invalidated the existing European regime for the con-

trol of mobility—for a comment on this situation, see Tsianos (2015a, 2015b).

For a broader take on this issue, see De Genova (2016).
36 For an extended discussion, see Papadopoulos and Tsianos (2007b) and Tsia-

nos and Papadopoulos (2012).
37 See examples in Bishop (2011), Grazioli (2017b), King (2016), and Lafazani (2013).

38 See Bojadzijev, Karakayali, and Tsianos (2004), Mezzadra (2001), and Papado-

poulos and Tsianos (2007a).

39 As, for example, Standing (2011) sees it. For a critical discussion, see Papado-

poulos (2017), Shukaitis (2013), and Alberti, Holgate, and Tapia (2013).
40 For further discussion, see Grazioli (2017b), Lafazani (2013), and Papadopou-

los, Tsianos, and Tsomou (2015).
41 See Alberti (2010), Lafazani (2011), and the documentation of the actions from

the Welcome to Europe network: http://w2eu.net/nobordertv/pagani-detention

-center-2/pagani-detention-center/.

42 See Kasparek (2016), Kuster and Tsianos (2016), and Tsianos (2017).

43 For an extensive discussion, see the ethnographic research of Ibrahim (2010).

44 See Panagiotidis and Tsianos (2007).

45 See Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou, and Tsianos (2015b), see also Kuster (2011),

Panagiotidis and Tsianos (2007), and Kuster (2016).
46 The idea of World 2 is developed in Papadopoulos (2006).

47 As discussed by B. Anderson et al. (2009).

48 For a discussion see Bishop (2011).

49 See also King (2016) and Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou, and Tsianos (2015a,

2015b).
50 See, for example, Ticktin (2016).

51 See Puig de la Bellacasa (2012, 2017).

52 See Walsh (2010, 2013).

CHAPTER 4. ACTIVIST MATERIALISM
1 For a critical approach to the concept of the species from di erent perspec-

ff

tives, see Hartigan (2015b), Margulis and Sagan (2002), Stamos (2003), Kirksey
(2015), Mora et al. (2011), and Waterton et al. (2013).
2 See Dyer-Witheford (2006).

3 This is echoed in object-oriented ontology and other recent debates that claim

that the real exists even if we don’t know what it is, as, for example, in Laruelle

(2013), Harman (2011), and others. Of course, this proximity between the two

positions quickly disappears when Marx turns to activism, which is inherently

unacceptable for object-oriented ontology in its move to create a new grand

ontology.
4 See, for example, Bennett (2010) or Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2015).

5 This tight relation between ontology and activism, materiality, and practice is

still—more than 170 years later—present in humans’ struggle to grasp their

species being. Hartigan (http://www.aesopsanthropology.com/blog/?p = 348)

asks: “When self-reflexivity became an expectation of ethnography in the

1990s, the focus was on social diacritics, principally race, gender, and class—

the positions that informed and biased perspectives, that needed to be ac-
counted for in achieving analytical clarity. Today perhaps a second-wave of the

reflexive turn is upon us, when the diacritics are components of species-being.

What is it in my species-being that makes it so difficult for me to interact with

these plants before me? My skin and proclivity for motion, for starters. Can I


calibrate these in such a way that I can learn from a plant before my attention

wanes or my body aches to move?” See also the inspiring work of Myers (2014,
2015) on similar questions.
6 For an extended analysis of these issues, see Z. A. Jordan (1967).

7 A position that is already well developed in R. Williams (1977).

8 See J. Gilbert (2008), and Papadopoulos et al. (2008).

9 See R. Wilson and Connery (2005).

10 See Rorty (1967) and Gadamer (1989), respectively.

11 See examples in Lefebvre (1991), Debord (1981), and D. Harvey (1990).

12 See, for example, Csordas (1994b), Harré (1996), and Overton (1998).

13 See, for example, Bourdieu (1987), Braidotti (2002), and Fausto-Sterling (2000).

14 For a discussion see Blackman et al. (2008). See also Papadopoulos (2002, 2003).

15 See Hall (1990) and Papadopoulos (2006).

16 As discussed in Clifford (2000).

17 See Clifford (2001), Hall (1986), and Slack (1996).

18 See Grossberg (1986) and Laclau and Mouffe (1985).

19 For di erent approaches see J. Butler, Laclau, and Žižek (2000), Clifford (1986),

ff

Hall and Jefferson (1976), Mouffe (2000), Sedgwick (1990), Spivak (1999), and
Warner (1999).
20 See Stephenson and Papadopoulos (2006) and the important work of Pickering

(1994, 1995) for a detailed discussion and critique of representationalism.

21 Chesters and Welsh (2006), Papadopoulos et al. (2008).

22 See Holland (2005).

23 See, for example, De Landa (1997).

24 Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 367): “What we have . . . are two formally dif

ferent conceptions of science, and, ontologically, a single field of interaction in

which royal science continually appropriates the contents of vague or nomad
science while nomad science continually cuts the contents of royal science
loose.” For an extended discussion of the relation of Deleuze’s, and occasionally
Guattari’s, philosophy to science and technology, see Bonta and Protevi (2004,
pp. 12–31), Jensen and Rødje (2010), Gaffney (2010), and Pickering (2008).
25 See also Klein (2012).

26 See Haraway (1997), Shapin and Schaffer (1985).

CHAPTER 5. INSURGENT POSTHUMANISM
1 Worlding resembles, in the words of Robbins (2011, pp. 1–2), an event that “has

created its own unique local surround, a restricted time/space that replaces
and cancels out any abstract planetary coordinates.”
2 See R. Wilson and Connery (2005).

3 This chapter focuses solely on posthumanism as a problematization of the hu-

manist split between society and ecology, mind and matter, as well as culture

and nature. Transhumanism (the discourse of overcoming the human condition

and human body in order to preserve the “human”) touches only marginally (or


not at all) on these critiques of humanism and therefore is not considered here.

See Pickering (1995, 2011) and earlier notes with specific references to the type
of posthumanism that I use in this book.
4 These questions are inspired by critical organizational studies, for example,

Beuret (2016), De Cock, Fleming, and Rehn (2007), Parker (2002), and Parker
et al. (2007).
5 And this is even the case for events that marked social movements as targeting

social power—see, for example, the note on the Paris commune in chapter 8.

6 The demise of posthumanist movements is not only the outcome of the rise of

the wage labor system, as I discuss later in this chapter, but also of the broader

emergence of the humanist subject that takes mainly two forms: The first form
is the self-assertive secular subject; see, for example, Taylor (2007, p. 18). The

second form is the subject endowed with the capacity to autonomously negotiate
his or her individual morality and interiority. This is the “cult of inwardness” at
the core of the liberal humanist subject; see Renaut (1997) and Taylor (1989).
However, liberal secular humanism, although it is concomitant with the liberal
assembled state, is also in continuous tension with it, especially because of the

inherent illiberal tendencies of the capitalist state to delimit and restrict the

autonomy and rights of the humanist subject.
7 See the discussion on verticalization of society and the state in chapter 2 and

the relevant notes in the same chapter.
8 See Gramsci (1918), quoted in Pozzolini (1970, p. 76).

9 See Engels (1990b, chap. 9).

10 This ideological appearance of the state is believed to be grounded in what

Lukács (1971) described as the process of reification where social relations at-

tain a ghostly objectivity as if they were untouchable and existed always.
11 In the words of Kojève (1969, p. 67): “And this means that the transcendent

Universal (God), who recognizes the Particular, must be replaced by a Uni-

versal that is immanent in the World. And for Hegel this immanent Universal
can only be the State. What is supposed to be realized by God in the Kingdom
of Heaven must be realized in and by State, in the earthly kingdom.” See also
Avineri (1972, p. 177).
12 By opposing Hegel’s conception of the state as the sublation of pervasive social

dichotomies, Marx and Engels see the state as a tool for governing antagonisms
that is controlled by the interests of the ruling classes, the “Master-State” in the

words of Kojève (1969, p. 57).
13 The name of this path is revolution—which seizes the state in order to organize

the move to a stateless society (see Lenin, 1917, chap. 3). The revolutionary
dictatorship of the proletariat was Marx’s answer to the political dilemmas be-

tween anarchosyndicalism, on the one hand, and reformist democratic politics,

on the other. These dilemmas became widespread after 1848. After the defeat of

the Paris Commune, Marx attempted to overcome the focus on spontaneous
revolt and to form a new kind of organization, the Marxist Parties, with the

Social Democratic Party of Germany as one of the first (Marx, 1976, chap. 4).


Lenin, faithful to this militant action program, gradually replaced the dictator-
ship of the proletariat as such with the leading role of the party in this stage of
transition.
14 The important work of Carroll (2012) on science, technology, and the state

and of Mora-Gámez (2016) on rights, reparations, and statehood in Colom-

bia has been guiding me on these issues. See also Carroll (2006), Passoth

and Rowland (2010), Rowland and Passoth (2014), and the historical work of
Guldi (2012).
15 For an extensive discussion, see Papadopoulos (2008).

16 The Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology (unlike the later

Marx of The Gotha Programme) captures some of these tight interdependences

between people’s action and the creativity of the material world (of “nature”

in Marx’s words) and investigates how alienation from the capacity for self-

organized development is imposed on them by separating people into classes

(and genders and races) and alienating them from “nature,” as discussed in the
previous chapter.
17 See, for example, Hindle (2003) and Shoemaker (2007).

18 See Merchant (1990) and Starhawk (1982). This process continues today with

the multiplication of enclosures in the eco-commons—see, for example, Bollier

(2003) and Shiva (2005).
19 For a further discussion of these sources, see Papadopoulos et al. (2008, section

II) and De Angelis (2007).
20 The position described here is similar to Dyer-Witheford’s take on the commons

(see http://commonism.wordpress.com/ and de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford,

2010). It also corresponds to Harney’s approach to the history of living labor and

its capitalist capture—see Harney (2006, 2008) and also De Angelis (2007).

21 “So common rights differ from human rights. First, common rights are em-

bedded in a particular ecology with its local husbandry. For commoners, the

expression ‘law of the land’ from chapter 39 [of the Magna Carta] does not refer
to the will of the sovereign. Commoners think first not of title deeds, but of

human deeds: how will this land be tilled? Does it require manuring? What

grows there? They begin to explore. You might call it a natural attitude. Second,

commoning is embedded in a labor process; it inheres in a particular praxis of

field, upland, forest, marsh, coast. Common rights are entered into by labor.

Third, commoning is collective. Fourth, being independent of the state, com-

moning is independent also of the temporality of the law and state. Magna

Carta does not list rights, it grants perpetuities. It goes deep into human his-

tory” (Linebaugh, 2008, pp. 44–45). See also De Angelis (2017).
22 See, for example, A. O. Thompson (2006), Fouchard (1981), Sayers (2014b), and

C. J. Robinson (2000).
23 See Sayers (2014a), Baram (2012), and more broadly Orser and Funari (2001),

Price (1979), and Weik (1997). I am grateful to Patrick Bresnihan for bringing
some of these literatures to my attention and for our inspiring discussions.

24 See, for example, Bilby (2005).


25 This is an argument that Linebaugh and Rediker (2000) make in their extraor-

dinary book The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the

Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. See also A. Greer (2012) and
B. Maddison (2010).
26 See J. Nichols (1800, pp. 125ff.).

27 See Hay (1975).

28 See J. Nichols (1800, p. 131).

29 E. P. Thompson (1991, p. 105); see also Porter and Tiusanen (2006), Palmer

(1989; 1979, pp. 59ff.).
30 See some very di erent takes on the entanglement of ecology and the com-

ff

mons in Ashbrook and Hodgson (2013), Bresnihan (2016a), Cronon (1983),
Linebaugh (2008), Newfont (2012), Olwig (2013), Reid and Taylor (2010), and
Wall (2014).
31 For various approaches to commons that consider the dimension of local en-

vironments and practices of commoning in England, Wales, and Europe, see

Neeson (1993), de Moor, Shaw-Taylor, and Warde (2002), and Rodgers et al.

(2011). In the Americas, Southeast Asia, and Australia, see Chakravarty-Kaul

(1996), Cronon (1983), Newfont (2012), Strang (1997), and Wade (1988).
32 For a critical analysis, see Carter and Jackson (2005) and N. Jackson and Carter

(1998).
33 See the note earlier in this chapter for a brief discussion of some of these

factors.

34 For an extended discussion of these issues, see O’Connell Davidson (2015), Pa-

padopoulos et al. (2008), and Steinfeld (2001).
35 Furthermore, free and coerced labor coincide: they have coexisted in the same

geographical spaces and historical periods throughout the whole development

of the productive process up until today.

36 This position, of course, originates in Marx (1857/1973, chapter on Capital—

Notebook II).
37 See Connery (2007).

38 I am here less interested in the mass mobilizations of the 1960s and more in the

emergence of a lived alternative culture—see, for example, J. Savage (2015) and

Russell (2010).
39 See Connery (2006, 2007).

40 For an extended discussion, see Papadopoulos et al. (2008, chaps. 2 and 3) and

Stephenson and Papadopoulos (2006).
41 Some traces of this understanding of the state can be already found in the

work of Poulantzas (1978), who highlights how the modern state evolves as
a permanent but unstable equilibrium of compromises between di erent so-

ff

cial subjectivities and classes. The state does not have the resolution of social
conflicts—by absorbing or terminating them—as its ultimate aim.

42 For example, see Latour (2005b).

43 The logic of the network not only implies a specific way of ordering and mak-

ing society but also reorganizes the very concept of the “subject.” Latour is not

alone here. Nikolas Rose and other theorists of governmentality, for example,

attempt to grasp the production of subjectivities in neoliberal networks of
power; see, for example, Barry, Osborne, and Rose (1996).
44 See also Hallward (2008, pp. 120–121).

45 See di erent approaches: Tilly (2004), Touraine (1981), Della Porta and Diani

ff

(2006), and Welsh (2000).
46 See Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 159).

47 And with Spinoza (1994, 228) we know: the mob inspires fear when it acts,

but it acts only when it is unafraid; therefore, it has to be tamed by the state
and religion. From an activist perspective, see also the discussion of sadness in
Colectivo Situaciones (2007).
48 Derrida (1992) attacked this logic of choice by assuming that undecidability is a

permanent ingredient of any decision; the final undecidability of any process of

making and actualization should not be the ground for “sad passions” but the
necessity of practice.
49 See, for example, Starhawk (2002).

50 See Bakhtin (1984, p. 285; see also pp. 94ff.).

51 See Bakhtin (1984, p. 318; see also pp. 335ff.).

52 See also Kromidas (2014).

53 Experience in the sense developed in Stephenson and Papadopoulos (2006).

54 See Papadopoulos and Tsianos (2007a) and Kuster (2016).

55 Hypocritically, as many have argued, among them Wallerstein (1995).

56 For a discussion of the ambiguity of the term Gewalt, see Balibar (2009). In the

quotations from the English translation of Critique of Violence I will keep the

term violence as this is the term used by the translator; see Benjamin (1996a).

57 Benjamin (1996a, p. 242).

58 This focus on the ordinariness of divine Gewalt seems to run counter to many

of the usual interpretations of Benjamin’s short essay. These interpretations

can be divided into two main groups. The most prominent example of the first
interpretation is Agamben (2005). Agamben is again, as in so many of his other
writings, fascinated with the idea of catastrophe and disaster. His starting point
is the moment of exception. Not least because of this, he reads Benjamin in

connection to Schmitt’s state of exception. The legal vacuum that divine vio

lence creates is, according to Agamben, a form of exception that opposes the
legally imposed state of exception—that is, the law-created anomie. Agamben

thus ends up misinterpreting Benjamin and reentering his idea of divine Ge-
walt into the dialectic of constituent and constituted power that is between a
totalizing state and revolution, this time as a dialectic between their negations:
as a law-created anomie against the anomie of the rebellious. Agamben’s (2005,

p. 62) spectacle of power is the gigantomachy “between state of exception and
revolutionary violence,” in which their relation is “so tight that the two players

facing each other across the chessboard of history seem always to be moving a
single pawn.” We can find a good example of the second common interpreta-
tion of Benjamin’s essay in Žižek (2008). Here Žižek popularizes and moralizes


divine Gewalt in an attempt to see it as a sign of an injustice emanating as a
life force—typical Žižek you might say: sounds critical, perhaps even radical,

and there is a lot of drama too as it shows how good reasons, benign senti-

ments, and cruel deeds can all coexist in one. Benjamin’s concept of violence is

a pure “drive of life” (Žižek, 2008, p. 198) that signifies a world that is “ethically
“out of joint” (Žižek, 2008, p. 200). Žižek, who is so keen to make clear that
Benjamin’s divine Gewalt is not to be confused with either “terrorist acts” com-

mitted by religious fundamentalists or organized revolutionary terror (Žižek,

2008, p. 185), sees this violence as an event: “There are no ‘objective’ criteria

enabling us to identify an act of violence as divine; the same act that, to an

external observer, is merely an outburst of violence can be divine for those en-

gaged in it . . . ; the risk of reading and assuming it as divine is fully the subject’s

own” (Žižek, 2008, p. 200). Žižek delivers the other side of Agamben: for the
latter, divine Gewalt is always linked to the violence of state power, while for

Žižek, divine violence is “when those outside the structured social field strike

‘blindly’ ” (Žižek, 2008, p. 202). Zizek again reinforces the never-ending dialec-

tic of constituent and constituted power in the form of exclusion and inclusion.
Those who are outside the social field have the right to institute justice through

divine violence. Here Žižek misinterprets Benjamin, whose main task was to

break this vicious circle of defining violence by judging it in terms of the justice

of the ends. Agamben’s and Žižek’s otherworldly readings of Benjamin’s con-
cept of divine Gewalt as something that “strikes out of nowhere” (Žižek, 2008,
p. 202) are based on their understanding of divine Gewalt as an exceptional
phenomenon. The main argument developed in this chapter points in the
opposite direction: divine Gewalt is a radical everyday practice; the more radi-
cal it is, the less violent it is.
59 Benjamin (1996a, p. 239).

60 The political applicability and meaning of general strike is perhaps limited

today, but one could think of the mutation of the general strike into a metropoli-

tan strike; instead of withdrawing from their position as workers, in the metro-
politan strike people withdraw from their positions as citizens of a particular

polity. They use urban space in ways that are not compatible with their position
as citizens of an existing polity—see Papadopoulos et al. (2015) and Tsianos

et al. (2012). By doing this they create a vacuum that exposes the oppressive

structure of political power and challenge its legitimacy. This exit from the

position of the citizen as the fixed subject of rights and responsibilities into a
position that forces the reorganization of the political itself is the main form

of the metropolitan strike seen in the cycle of struggles and social move-

ments mobilization between 2006 and 2012 (for a discussion, see the introduc-
tion and chapter 8). Metropolitan strikes turn the materiality of metropolitan
space into something that can no longer serve the existing function of polity.
This is what happened in most of these mobilizations: a new temporality of jus-

tice emerged when people started reclaiming and experimenting with urban

space.

61 For an extended discussion of the meaning of the proletarian general strike in

Benjamin, see Tomba (2009, pp. 139ff.).
62 Munro (2004).

63 Tomba (2009, p. 140).

64 Benjamin (1996a, p. 247).

65 There is a proliferation of these figures of mediation in current theory; for ex-

ample, see Collins and Evans (2007), Latour (2004a), and Stengers (2005).
66 See Puig de la Bellacasa (2010).

67 “Just-ice takes places in the time of the stop,” as Munro (2004, p. 64) says.

68 See, for example, Latour (1987), Law and Hassard (1999), and Stengers (2010).

69 The postanthropocentric dimension of posthuman politics of movements is

neither about developing an ecological egalitarianism that considers the value
of all nonhuman beings as equal—for a critique of this type of inclusive egali-

tarianism, see Rancière (1998); see also Stephenson and Papadopoulos (2006,
chap. 6)—nor about creating the grounds for the articulation of constantly

novel connections and concerns between “us” and “them”—see Puig de la Bel-

lacasa (2010, 2011).
70 See Latour (1993).

71 As discussed in chapter 1; see also Quijano (2007) and Mignolo (2011).

CHAPTER 6. BRAIN MATTER

1 See Wittgenstein (1958).

2 See also Shenk (2010).

3 See, for example, S. Watson (1998).

4 This discussion relies on various approaches to the cultural history and politics

of the body in the original works of Bordo (1990), Frank (1991), S. F. Gilbert
(1997), Haraway (1991b), and E. Martin (1992).
5 See also Leder (1990).

6 See Fodor (1983) and Scholl and Leslie (1999).

7 See Breckenridge and Vogler (2001) and Schillmeier (2010).

8 For a discussion, see De Boever and Neidich (2013) and Neidich (2014).

9 See E. Martin (1990) and the detailed discussion of this in chapter 7 in this

book.
10 See, for example, Crimp (1988) and J. Weeks (1995).

11 For a discussion see Irigaray (1985) and Roberts et al. (1996).

12 As Dennett (1995) proposes.

13 See S. F. Gilbert and Epel (2009) and Gottlieb (1997).

14 For an extended discussion of emergent architectures, see Cooper (2008) and

Papadopoulos et al. (2008).
15 As critically discussed for example in S. J. Gould (1977).

16 See, for example, the work of Woodworth (1921, 1938).

17 See J. B. Watson (1913).

18 For example, see Baldwin (1897) and Dewey (1999).


19 See Gardner (1987, p. 28).

20 The work of McCulloch and Pitts (1943) on neural networks and the work of

Goldstine and von Neumann (1963) on flow diagrams and cellular automata
during the 1940s and the 1950s offered the visual images of neural processes

and calculations that came to later to dominate the cognitivist modelling of

thinking. See also Morris and Gotel (2006).
21 As, for example, in Churchland (1986).

22 See di erent approaches in Beaulieu (2003), Dumit (2004), and Joyce (2005).

ff

23 See Star (1989).

24 See Karmiloff-Smith (1992) and Littlefield (2009).

25 See di erent approaches in S. D. Brown and Stenner (2009), Cromby (2007),

ff

Franks (2010), and J. W. Scott (2001).
26 See examples in Liben (1999), Thelen and Smith (1994), and E. A. Wilson (1998).

27 Changeux (1997), Edelman (1989), and Edelman and Tononi (2000).

28 Heidegger (1993) and Merleau-Ponty (1966).

29 See Cromby (2004); see also Middleton and Brown (2005), Stam (1996), and

current debates on the relation of social science and biology in Meloni, Wil-
liams, and Martin (2016).
30 See, for example, Cromby (2015), Bayer and Malone (1996), Teo (2015), and

Pulido Martinez (2013).
31 Vygotsky (1987), Wygotski (1987); see also Papadopoulos (2010).

32 See, for example, Colombetti (2014), Damasio (2004), Lakoff and Johnson

(1999), Pickering (2010), and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991)
33 See, for example, A. Clark (1997), Edelman (1992), Lewontin (2000), and

S. Rose (1998).
34 See, for example, Csordas (1994b), Harré (1996), Overton (1998), and Sampson

(1996).
35 See, for example, Bourdieu (1987), Braidotti (2002), Fausto-Sterling (2000), and

Foucault (1978).
36 See Colombetti (2014) and Ziemke (2001).

37 As opposed to machines that act in virtual space or in protected, experimental

environments; see Brooks (2001) and Chrisley and Ziemke (2002).
38 See Damasio (1999) and LeDoux (2002).

39 See, for example, cybernetics, developmental systems theory, and Gottlieb

(1992), Lewontin (2000), Oyama (2000), and Pickering (2010).
40 See also Pickering (2010) and E. Thompson and Varela (2001).

41 See Blanche, Bhavnani, and Hook (1999).

42 See, for example, Alaimo and Hekman (2008), A. E. Clarke and Olesen (1999),

and De Lauretis (1987).
43 See, for example, W. Bauchspies and Puig de la Bellacasa (2009), A. E. Clarke

et al. (2010), Haraway (1991b), Latimer and Schillmeier (2009), Myers (2008),
and Rapp (2000).
44 See, for example, Hayles (1999) and Lilley, Lightfoot, and Amaral (2004).


45 As in B. Turner (1984, p. 247), for example.

46 See Duden (2002) and Scarry (1985).

47 See, for example, Papadopoulos (2003).

48 Schull and Zaloom (2011).

49 See Pitts-Taylor (2010) and the editorial in Cromby, Newton, and Williams

(2011).
50 See E. Martin (2010).

51 See E. Martin (2002) and Papadopoulos (2008).

52 Especially through the critique of cognitivist ideas within these fields; see Bal-

samo (1995) and Hayles (1999).
53 Already in the 1990s it became obvious that this perspective was untenable

in the field of robotics, especially in relation to humanoid robots; see Brooks
(1991), Hayles (1999), Pickering (2010, 2011), and Varela et al. (1991).
54 See, for example, Brooks (2002).

55 For a discussion of these developments, see A. Adam (1998), A. Clark (1998),

Kember (2003), Puig de la Bellacasa (2009), Steels and Brooks (1995), and L. A.
Suchman (2007).
56 Embodied approaches to robotics use semiopen connectionist nets to link dif

ferent brain subsystems.

57 Sonigo (2005).

58 Self-reproduction has its origins in John von Neumann’s cellular automata,

mentioned earlier in this chapter. However, this recombinant plasticity refers
not to abstract and universal criteria for self-reproducing machines but to real-

life machines in open autopoietic systems, as in Varela et al. (1991). Cybernetics
offers a similar position; see Pickering (2010).
59 See Pitts-Taylor (2010).

60 See Gottlieb, Wahlsten, and Lickliter (1998).

61 See Margulis (1998).

62 See S. F. Gilbert and Epel (2009).

63 See Robert (2004).

64 As described in Gottlieb (1992).

65 For example, see G. B. Müller (2007) and Sultan (2007).

66 See also S. F. Gilbert and Epel (2009), Huttenlocher (2002), and Jablonka and

Lamb (2005).
67 See di erent overviews in Gottlieb (2007), Robert (2004), and van Speybroeck,

ff

van de Vijver, and de Waele (2002).
68 See discussion in Calvanese et al. (2009), S. F. Gilbert and Epel (2009), and

Robert (2004).
69 See Gottlieb et al. (1998).

70 As for example in Lamb (1994) and Masterpasqua (2009).

71 See, for example, Kiefer (2007).

72 See discussion in Landecker (2011a).

73 See, for example, Bandyopadhyay and Medrano (2003).


74 See, for example, Champagne (2010).

75 For a discussion of current developments in epigenetics, see Landecker and

Panofsky (2013); about broader cultural and social implications, see Landecker
(2011a) and Niewohner (2011). See also S. F. Gilbert (2002) and Mitchell et al.
(1996).
76 For an in-depth discussion of these issues, see Chung et al. (2016) and Cromby

et al. (2016); see also Kenney and Müller (2016).
77 I borrow the concept of ecomorphs from Wainwright and Reilly (1994).

78 On standardization, see Bowker and Star (1999) and Busch (2011).

79 Maps of ecomorphs are the product of epigenetic sequencing in the same way a

map of genes in the human genome database was the product of dna sequenc-

ing. However, the number of ecomorphs will probably be far more than the

approximately twenty-five thousand human genes. Ecomorphs will material-

ize the vision of truly learning how to create life and how to efficiently remake
the brain.
80 The idea of autocreativity is inspired by Metzger’s autodestructive/autocreative

art and his 1960 and 1961 manifestos—see Metzger and Breitwieser (2005), and

for an overview, see A. Wilson (2008).
81 See also Pickersgill, Martin, and Cunningham-Burley (2015) on how the prom-

issory discourse of neuroplasticity is perceived by di erent groups of publics,
ff

and G. M. Thomas and Latimer (2015) on how values around bodies propelled
by current biomedicine seep into the everyday life of the clinic and mundane
health care environments.
82 See, for example, Abi-Rached and Rose (2010), Fitzgerald, Rose, and Singh

(2016), N. Rose (2001), and E. A. Wilson (2004). For an in-depth discussion of

such politics, see Pickersgill (2013).
83 For a broader critical discussion of governmentality, see Stephenson and Papa-

dopoulos (2006).
84 Pitts-Taylor (2010, 2016) and Thornton (2011), for example, have argued that

neural subjectification diligently reproduces and ultimately consolidates wide-
spread neoliberal social relations.
85 See the work of A. E. Clarke et al. (2010), Kippax and Stephenson (2010, 2016),

and Latimer (2013).
86 See, for example, Malabou (2008) and S. Watson (1998).

CHAPTER 7. COMPOSITIONAL TECHNOSCIENCE
1 See Eilperin (2013); see also Cohen (2001).

2 In a press conference on September 17, 1985.

3 It was on February 5, 1986, that President Reagan, during his visit to the De-

partment of Health and Human Ser vices (hhs) asked the surgeon general to

prepare a report on aids, which was published in October 1986.
4 See, for example, E. Martin (1994), Crimp (1987), C. Patton (1990), and B. D.

Adam and Sears (1996).

5 See Epstein (1996).


7 The are many reasons for this; for an extensive discussion, see the remarkable

work of D. B. Gould (2009).
8 For a discussion of these issues, see B. D. Adam (1995), C. Patton (1990), and

D. B. Gould (2009).
9 See Epstein (1996, 2007).

10 See Pickering (1992).

11 The traditional way in the philosophy of science to think of the relation be-

tween knowledge and politics was epistemology, where the content of techno-
science and the associated politics were subordinated to ways of knowing and

defining truth (Alcoff, 1998). Social studies of science emerging in the 1970s
contested this view, but their attempts to question traditional epistemology
devolved into a new cycle of epistemological disputes between proponents of
rationality and sociality (Longino, 2002). The covert politics of epistemology
culminated in the science wars of the 1990s.
12 My focus here is on debates that pertain directly to the question of politics. For

a wider analysis of di erent intellectual genealogies in science and technology

ff

studies see the work of Fischer (2009), in particular chapter 2, which broadly

discusses some of the concerns articulated in this current chapter.
13 See Collins and Evans (2007) and Lynch and Cole (2005).

14 For examples, see Edwards and Sheptycki (2009), Jenkins (2007), and Weinel

(2007).
15 See Collins and Evans (2007, pp. 8–9) and Collins, Weinel, and Evans (2010).

16 See Collins and Evans (2007, chap. 1).

17 The broader theoretical framework of this approach is contractualism—see

Rawls (1971).
18 The provenance of this approach is in Habermas (1993); see also Scanlon (1998).

19 See, for example, S. P. Turner (2003).

20 This is what Collins (2009) calls “elective modernism.”

21 See, for example, Habermas (1984).

22 See critical approaches to communication in Taylor (1986) and Wellmer (1977).

23 For an extensive discussion of the main tenets of this position, see Wimmer

(1980).
24 See Lengwiler (2008).

25 See di erent approaches to this in Irwin and Michael (2003), Leach, Scoones,

ff

and Wynne (2005), and Wynne (2005).
26 See various positions in Felt et al. (2008), Tutton (2007), Callon and Rabeharisoa

(2008), Elliott, Harrop, and Williams (2010), Epstein (1996), and de Saille (2014).
27 See, for example, Hubbard et al. (1979).

28 See, for example, A. E. Clarke and Olesen (1999) and Rapp (2000).

29 See, for example, P. Brown (2007).

30 See, for example, Epstein (1995) and Rosengarten (2004).

31 Wynne (2003) has developed this position persuasively.


32 See, for example, Chilvers (2008), Rowe and Frewer (2004), Webster (2007),

and Jasanoff (2003b).
33 See, for example, Fortun (2001).

34 See, for example, Elliott and Williams (2008).

35 See, for example, Mayer (2003), Munro and Mouritsen (1996), and Neyland

and Woolgar (2002).
36 See Jasanoff (2003a).

37 See Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons (2001).

38 See, for example, Liberatore and Funtowicz (2003).

39 See, for example, G. Davies (2006) and Hamlett (2003).

40 For a renewed interest in radical transformative approaches to institutions

within current social movements, see the debates in the journal and online
forum of the important theoretical virtual space “eipcp. European Institute

for Progressive Cultural Policies,” such as Salvini (2008), Raunig (2006, 2007),
Universidad Nómada (2008), and Virno (2007).
41 See, for example, Epstein (2007).

42 For a background debate, see MacIntyre (1981) and Taylor (1989, 1991).

43 See Leach et al. (2005).

44 See, typically, Latour (1993, 2000).

45 See, for example, Callon (1987), Law (2004), and Mol (2002).

46 See also Stengers (2005).

47 See, for example, Callon and Rabeharisoa (2004).

48 See Barry et al. (1996).

49 See Burchell, Gordon, and Miller (1991).

50 See, for example, Mol and Law (2004), Law and Mol (2008), Law and Urry

(2011), and Moser (2008). For a critical interrogation of the proliferation of
network metaphors and visual representations of networks in popular and sci-

entific cultures, see Munster (2013).
51 Governance has become one of the dominant tropes of political thought and

practice; see, for example, Castells (1997), Rhodes (1997), and Rosenau and
Czempiel (1992).
52 See di erent examples in Bevir and Rhodes (2003), European Commission

ff

(2001), and Edwards and Hughes (2005).
53 For a critical approach see Harney (2006).

54 For example, Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe (2009) propose that the posthu-

man condition can be dealt with by entering into hybrid forums of negotiation
and exchange. These forums can be described as representational arenas that

foster communication between, and transformation of, the human and non

human actors involved.
55 Various positions question the effects of governance and the underlying logic

of productionism; see Haraway (1992), Harney (2008), Negri (2005b), and Pa-
padopoulos et al. (2008).
56 See Kippax and Stephenson (2010, 2012); see also Rosengarten and Michael

(2009), Ribes and Polk (2015), and Barnett and Whiteside (2006).

57 See, for example, Biehl (2009), Kippax and Stephenson (2016), and Rosengar-

ten (2009).
58 See also Latour (2003, p. 28).

59 As in Haraway (1988).

60 This line of knowledge politics started initially with feminist standpoint theory.

It engages with di erent marginalized standpoints in a context of structural
ff

relations of power; see Harding (1991), Hartsock (1983), Hill Collins (1991), H.
Rose (1994), and D. E. Smith (1987). For an in-depth discussion, see Puig de la

Bellacasa (2013, 2014c).
61 See, for example, L. A. Suchman (2007).

62 See Feenberg (1991) and Winner (1993).

63 See Figueroa and Harding (2003) and Shiva (2005).

64 See Nowotny and Rose (1979), Ravetz (1990), and H. Rose and Rose (1969).

65 See di erent approaches in D. J. Hess (2007a), da Costa and Philip (2008), Earl

ff

and Kimport (2011), de Saille (2014), McCormick (2007), and Woodhouse et al.

(2002).
66 See di erent examples in Feenberg (1995), Illich (1979), and Marcuse (1991).

ff

67 See, for example, Kleinman (2000) and Wynne (2002).

68 See, for example, D. J. Hess (2004, 2007b), Welsh (2007), and Welsh, Plows,

and Evans (2007).
69 Although situated approaches are historically grounded in classic Marxist

positions, they also point toward a post-Marxist reading of social transfor-

mation that refuses to reduce all contradictions in a region of objectivity
to the totalizing social dichotomy and underlying dialectical antagonism

between capital and labor. Here there is no monolithic totalizing struc-

ture that determines the existence of a marginalized position (Marcuse,
1991); it is, rather, a decentered and multifaceted structure of injustice that
produces a range of different subaltern positions (Althusser, 2001; Jameson,

1981). This understanding of marginalized positions is supported by the
rejection of a unified reading of the compositsion of oppositional experi-
ence (Sandoval, 1991). Instead, there is a focus on how different autono-

mous “subaltern” social groups in certain historical moments and places
developed divergent self-organized experiences that do not simply reflect

the main social antagonisms but diffract them into new forms of social
existence.
70 Which is assumed to be a more authentic form of objectivity—see Harding

(1986).
71 For an in-depth discussion, see Papadopoulos and Stephenson (2007).

72 See Clifford (2000), Hall (1990), and Papadopoulos (2006).

73 See also chapter 4 in this book and Papadopoulos (2008).

74 See the classic position of J. W. Scott (1991).

75 See Stephenson (2003); see also Papadopoulos and Stephenson (2007).

76 Following Whitehead (1979) we developed this idea in Stephenson and Papa-

dopoulos (2006) and also in Papadopoulos et al. (2008).

77 I discuss the notion of involution and involvement in the next chapter; see also

Hustak and Myers (2013).
78 See di erent takes on these issues in Bracke and Puig de la Bellacasa (2008),

ff

Haraway (1988), G. Rose (1997), Stephenson and Papadopoulos (2006), and
Puig de la Bellacasa (2013, 2014c).
79 As discussed in M. R. Smith and Marx (1994).

80 Specifically about hiv, any parts of the history of the movement that do not

fit into this teleological history are often seen as mistakes of the actors of the

time or at least as failures. The work of D. B. Gould (2009) is a good example
of this ambivalence, as she finds it difficult to avoid judging negatively the aids
communities that struggled to form a coherent subject of action and enter into

direct action in the early stages of the epidemic.
81 See also Crimp (2002).

82 See, for example, Altman (1986) for a rich account of the gay community’s mo-

bilizations, campaigns, and efforts during the beginning of the 1980s.
83 See also Latimer and Puig de la Bellacasa (2013) and Schillmeier and Domenech

(2010).
84 See Treichler (1999, chap. 9).

85 See Hodge (2000), Stockdill (2003).

86 See, for example, M. Thompson (1994).

87 See Berkowitz, Callen, and Sonnabend (1983); see also Crimp (1988) and C.

Patton and Kelly (1987).
88 See Shilts (1987).

89 See Treichler (1999).

90 See Kwitny (1992) and Chambré (2006).

91 On the emotional aspects of the aids movement, see D. B. Gould (2009).

92 See Watney (1997).

93 Especially in the first years the epidemic had a profound impact on the com-

munity’s sense of its own existence because as C. Patton (1985, p. 6) says, even

in the most politically radical lesbians and gay men there was this lurking fear

that perhaps at the end “homosexuality is death.”

94 See Bersani (1987) and Harrington (2008).

95 For an extended discussion of the article and its impact, see D. B. Gould (2009,

pp. 92–104).
CHAPTER 8. CRAFTING ONTOLOGIES
1 See Derwent Valley Mills Partnership (2001).

2 The Derwent Valley Mills along the River Derwent in Derbyshire, UK, con-

tains a series of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century silk and textile cotton

mills. The mills are considered the birthplace of the modern factory system
and were added to the unesco World Heritage List in 2001. See https://www

.derwentvalleymills.org/.

3 See https://remakemuseum.tumblr.com/.


4 In 2015 the Re:Make project was nominated for a Museums and Heritage

Award in the category Educational Initiative. Later in 2015 Derby Museums

received substantial funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund for redeveloping
the site and reopening the new Derby Silk Mill—Museum of Making in 2020.

See https://www.derbymuseums.org/hlfsuccess/#.VbdN79Vviko.

5 See https://www.museum-id.com/idea-detail.asp?id = 523 and https://themuseum

ofthefuture .com /2014 /07 /21 /the -convincing -transformation -process -of -the

-derby-silk-mill/. Citizen participation and collaboration is probably the most cru-

cial dimension of the Re:Make project; for a discussion see the work of N. Simon

(2010) on the participatory museum (see also https://www.participatorymuseum

.org/).

6 See Calladine (1993).

7 There are considerable debates about ontology and the so-called ontological

turn in the social sciences. Although many of these debates form the back-

ground of this book, ontology as used here points toward the capacity of certain

actors (such as a group of humans or members of an animal species or processes

or certain objects, or some co-action between them) for changing the material

configuration of their space of existence. The material configurations of ontolo-
gies change always in di erent ways and can be viewed along di erent scales
ff

ff

depending on who and how one acts in them. They are never only local or only
global; they connect di erent scales and processes, and what counts is which
ff

local/global aspects they mix. What is crucial for the use of the term ontology
here is the idea that the material configuration of each ontology can change only

in specific ways. I see this ordinary use of the term ontology in continuation with
positions that promote a much more comprehensive understanding of the term
(Blaser, 2012). And although these debates have far-reaching implications for

many fields of study in the social sciences, such as anthropology (de la Cadena,
2010; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, 2007; Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de
Castro, 2014), geography (Braun, 2008; N. Clark, 2011), science and technology
studies (Fujimura, 1991; Lezaun, 2014; Pickering, 1995, 2008; Sismondo, 2015;
Woolgar and Lezaun, 2013), political philosophy (Braun and Whatmore, 2010;

Coole and Frost, 2010), literary theory (Boscagli, 2014), organization studies

(Beyes and Steyaert, 2011; Carlile et al., 2013; Knox et al., 2008; Parker et al.,
2014), and philosophy (Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, 2011), the aim of the chapter
is not to directly engage with them, nor to engage with broader discussions of
ontology in social theory; see, for example, Agamben (1998), Badiou (2005a),
Braidotti (2006), De Landa (2002), and Rabinow (1996). I will therefore try to

limit the use of the term ontology to the definition I provided earlier, namely
ontologies as spaces of existence in which matter is organized in a specific way

and not another and can be changed in specific ways and not others. See also

chapter 1 for a discussion of ontological politics.
8 See the public announcement “Derby Museums Secure Major Heritage Lottery

Fund support,” May 5, 2015, https://www.hlf.org.uk/about-us/media-centre

/press-releases/derby-museums-secures-major-hlf-support.


9 See, for example, Savvides (2018), Delfanti and Söderberg (2012), and Söder-

berg and Delfanti (2015). More broadly on the relation between social move-
ments, innovation, and science and technology, see, for example, D. J. Hess
(2007a, 2007b, 2015) and Frickel and Gross (2005); on grassroots innovation,
see Gupta (2016) and Maxigas and Troxler (2014).
10 See https://makerfaireafrica.com/maker-manifesto/.

11 The Maker Faire website says that “200,000 people annually attend the two flag-

ship Maker Faires in the Bay Area and New York, with an average of 44% of at-
tendees first timers at the Bay Area event, and 61% in New York. A family-friendly

event, 50% attend the event with children. In 2017, over 190 independently-

produced “Mini Maker Faires” plus over 30 larger-scale Featured Maker Faires

will have taken place around the world, including Tokyo, Rome, Shenzhen, Tai-

pei, Seoul, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Detroit, San Diego, Milwaukee, and Kansas
City.” See https://makerfaire.com/makerfairehistory/.

12 See Sivek (2011). Although similar to the maker culture, hacker culture devel-

oped in a very di erent context. For a genealogy of hackspaces and hacklabs.
ff

see Maxigas (2012) and Tabarés-Gutiérrez (2016); see also Stein (2017).

13 For an analysis, see Luckman (2016).

14 While the transnational and multiscalar dispersion of manufacturing process

across many regions remains the characteristic of current global production
networks (Coe et al., 2004; Henderson et al., 2002), increasing voices promote
relocation and backshoring of advanced parts of production to the West. Al-
ready in 2012 Jeffrey R. Immelt, ceo of ge and head of President Obama’s
Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, wanted “business investment and export”
to lead recovery after the 2008 economic crisis. With this investment “our

workers will prove America’s potential. People talk about the Darwinian na-

ture of markets . . . but nothing is inevitable about the industrial decline of the

United States” (Immelt, 2012). This became one of the key narratives of Donald
Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.
15 See Chris Anderson (2012) and Marsh (2012). For a popularization of the third

industrial revolution, see Rifkin (2011). See also popular coverage, from the

conservative The Economist (2012) to the liberal technoentrepreneurial Wired
(2011) featuring on its front cover open-hardware entrepreneur Limor Fried.

On the entrepreneurial dimension of the maker and hacker culture, see Irani
(2015) and Wolf and Troxler (2016).
16 In Financial Times we read, for example, that “Gadget Makers Drive US Manu-

facture Return” (March 27, 2013, https://www.ft.com/content/1445bab6-96b0

-11e2-a77c-00144feabdc0).

17 See, for example, Banks (2010), Kozłowski et al. (2014), Terranova (2004),

Lovink and Rossiter (2011), and Hanlon (2016).
18 This immersive engagement with the totality of the production process charac-

terizes holistic technologies, according to Franklin (1999); see also Malafouris
(2008).
19 See, for example, Gauntlett (2011).


20 See, for example, Bollier (2008), Kostakis and Bauwens (2014), Aigrain (2012),

and Lezaun and Montgomery (2014). For a typology of collaborative and shar-
ing platforms, see de Rivera et al. (2016).
21 See, for example, Flowers (2008) and Conway and Steward (2009).

22 See the activist research of the Precarious Workers Brigade and Carrot Work-

ers Collective (2014). See also Beverungen, Böhm, and Land (2014), Terranova
(2000), and Banks (2010).
23 From craftivism (Bratich, 2010; Bratich and Brush, 2011; Buszek and Robert-

son, 2011; B. Greer, 2014), craft entrepreneurialism (Luckman, 2016), and Lego
art (Doyle, 2013) to arts and crafts (Adamson, 2013; Thurnell-Read, 2014),

professional workmanship (Frayling, 2011; Sennett, 2008) and craft in science
(Ingold, 2013; P. H. Smith, 2004), in fabrication labs (Walter-Herrmann and Büch-

ing, 2013) in relation to design (Marti et al., 2016) and in hackspaces (Maxigas,
2012; Maxigas and Troxler, 2014).
24 See Vaneigem (1996, p. 76). Some go even further and assign to creativity onto-

logical status: creativity is the driving force for the self-making of the material

world (McLean, 2009).
25 For example, see discussion on the capture of creativity in digital labor in Bur-

ston, Dyer-Witheford, and Hearn (2010) and Dyer-Witheford (2015).

26 See the work of Raqs Media Collective (2003).

27 A transformation that is connected to post-Fordism (Bowring, 2002; Dyer-

Witheford, 1999; Fleming and Spicer, 2003; Gorz, 1999; Hampson et al., 1994)
as well as to cognitive capitalism (Azais et al., 2001; Marazzi, 2007; Morini,
2007; Moulier Boutang, 2011; Vercellone, 2007).
28 Malafouris (2010) sees “material engagement” not as a historical mode of

human practice pertaining to specific modes of human existence (such as ar-

tisanship, craft, and subsistence economies) but as an inherent transhistoric
disposition of the human brain. In chapter 6, I problematize claims about a

definite structure of the human mind and show that the way we understand our

brains in a particular historical period also shapes the material functioning of

the brain itself. Every epoch has its brain. Rather than “material engagement”

being an essential quality of the human brain, it is a particular understanding of

the brain that has material effects on its biomolecular and neural composition
and the way our bodies operate. In this sense the return of material engage-
ment to society and material life in the early twenty-first century shapes and is

shaped by the way we conceptualize our brains and bodies.

29 See https://www.whitehouse.gov/nation-of-makers.

30 See Vaneigem and Obrist (2009).

31 As Hatch (2014, pp. 167ff.) claims.

32 See https://www.techshop.ws/.

33 More broadly on the relation between technoscience, culture, and everyday

life, see Shaw (2008) and Michael (2006).
34 Masculinist not only in the sense of the gender composition of the maker cul-

ture (although one needs to be careful here because maker groups are very


di erent) but also in reproducing traditional and dominant masculinities. A
ff

critical view of the maker culture would also involve a discussion of its effects
on social and urban environments (for example, the relation between maker
culture and gentrification).
35 World 2 contains all these worlds that have been rendered invisible because of

their inability or unwillingness to participate in Western modernity (Papado-
poulos, 2006). In Chakrabarty’s (2000) words this is History 2, the other to His-
tory 1, which represents the Eurocentric story of expansion of modern capital.
36 The accounts of Clifford (1989, 1997) and Pratt (1992) on traveling underpin my

approach here. Traveling knowledges, experience, and technologies and the

transnational and interspecies traffic in technoscience have been extensively
discussed in various ways in sts; see, for example, Haraway (1997), W. Ander-

son (2002b), Turnbull (2002), Murphy (2012), and Latour (1987). For a discus-
sion of specific examples, see W. K. Bauchspies (2014), Verran (2002), Morita

(2013), Hayden (2007), Crane (2010), and Lezaun (2006).
37 See Mignolo (2002) and Grosfoguel (2007).

38 Kadri (2010). See also, for example, Lindtner (2015) and Kera (2012) on the

maker culture in China and Asia, respectively.
39 See Clifford (2013). More specifically about indigenous movements, see Blaser

et al. (2010).
40 See de la Cadena (2015); I discuss this work again later in the chapter. See also

Cameron, de Leeuw, and Desbiens (2014).
41 See Simpson (2014), P. Wolfe (2006), and Hunt (2013).

42 See Coburn (2015) and Blaser et al. (2010).

43 See Tuck and Yang (2012), Wildcat et al. (2014), and Stewart-Harawira (2013).

44 My starting point here is Staeheli’s (2013) work on disconnectivity.

45 See https://communityrejuvenation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/community-rejuve

nation-projects-latest.html. Lavie Raven was one of the artists who created a

monumental mural in East Oakland, California, with the message “Decolonize.”
It can be viewed here: https://crpbayarea .smugmug .com/Other/Decolonize

-Mural/.

46 Instead of mental representations, material engagement presupposes an em-

bedded and embodied mind; see Malafouris (2004) and Papadopoulos (2010).
47 See de la Cadena (2010, p. 345) and also Blaser (2012), Escobar (2011, 2012), and

Mignolo (2013).
48 Stacking in permaculture refers mainly to the idea of layering/multilevel func-

tions of elements and actions in each specific agricultural system—be it on a

balcony, in an urban backyard, or on a farm or a large community agricultural
system. This idea has been key in permaculture design from its beginning (Mol-
lison, 1988). The term stacking first appears as a principle of permaculture in

Mollison and Slay’s Introduction to Permaculture (1991). Stacking here means

that “all elements in the design should serve multiple functions, and all func-

tions should serve multiple elements.” The concept has developed in many

directions as a fundamental principle of design by the permaculture com-


munity. See, for example, https://theurbanfarmer.ca/resources/permaculture

-design/, where stacking refers to three design strategies: “1) All elements in the

design should serve multiple functions. . . . 2) All functions in the system should

be served by multiple elements. This principle is essentially one of planning re-

dundancy into the system so there is less fragility and more resilience. . . . 3) Stack

elements in vertical and horizontal space as well as in time.”

49 The term stack is also used in computer science and computer engineering,

where it invokes a rather static image of a vertical digital container operated
for storing data objects in a push-down list (every new object is placed on top

of all already existing objects). Against this background, cultural critics such
as Bratton (2014) and Terranova (2014) use the term stack to refer to a uni-
versal layered megastructure of software and hardware systems that englobes
all human activities and social life. As explicated here, the notion of stack that

informs this chapter comes from a very di erent context: permaculture and
ff

related ecological design practices. Rather than as a metaphor for a planetary

system of domination (the Grand Stack), it is used to designate situated and

concrete practices for creating symbiotic environments. In this sense it is more
about stacking—that is, grounded ecological making—rather than about the

stack, a dramatic universalist image of global domination.
50 See Holmgren (2002), Mollison (1988), and Mollison and Holmgren (1990).

51 See S. D. Brown (2012), Lury, Parisi, and Terranova (2012), and Parisi (2012).

52 Law (2011).

53 Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 20); see also chapter 4.

54 Deleuze (2001, p. 99).

55 Deleuze (2001, p. 95).

56 Deleuze (2005, p. 717). See also Deleuze and Guattari (1987). For further discus-

sion, see also chapter 1.
57 See chapter 1 for a discussion of matter as used here. Ingold (2013) makes the

case that matter is always moving and can never be captured in fixed repre

sentations or conceived as containing preestablished entities; rather, matter

can only be followed and this is possible by developing close, intimate, and

intense relations to matter through the skill of craft—that is, through engaging

in a trajectory of movement that resonates with the trajectory of the specific
matter one is engaged with. Ghelfi (2015) describes this relation to matter as an

ecology of canals. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), he says that crafting

is about finding a “smooth space” inside matter. Matter exists in multiple mo-

dalities and becomes a constitutive element of (human) practice. The work of

McLean (2011) is illuminating this relation between more-than-human worlds

and human practice. See also Stubbe (2016).

58 See also Sundberg (2014).

59 On articulation, see Clifford (2001), Hall (1986), and Slack (1996).

60 This includes di erent practices of repurposing, reusing, creatively misusing,

ff

renewing, and reappropriating existing things and materials that Malewitz

(2014) has called “rugged consumerism.”

61 See another example in Boym (2002). On a theoretical level, see Bogost (2012)

and Henry (2008) on approaching objects without reducing their openness.
62 See also Harman (2007).

63 See https://www.arduino.cc/. See also Ghelfi (2015).

64 See Rato and Ree (2012). See also Bratich (2010), Coleman (2013, pp. 93–122),

Puig de la Bellacasa (2009), and Stubbe (2016) on craft and embodied work in
digital technologies and software coding.
65 For a critical discussion of the politics of datafication, see Gray (2014), Liboiron

and Pine (2015), and Vis (2013).
66 See Parisi (2013).

67 Raspberry Pi is a widely used compact computer motherboard that is a much

more complex version of the Arduino microcontroller I mentioned in the pre-
ceding paragraphs.
68 For an insightful discussion of the political implications of this return, revival,

and reinvention of craft, see Bratich (2010); specifically about di erent political
ff

traditions of hacking, see Maxigas (2012) and Karatzogianni (2015).
69 See https://www.dirtyelectronics.org/.

70 See also Stephenson and Papadopoulos (2006).

71 With Hartigan (2015b, p. 5) we need to ask: “If publics are decidedly human—

self-reflexive readers, hailed by various nationally mediated cultural form—then

how do we account for the presence of so many highlighted arrangements of
multispecies life in their midst?” See also Kelly and Lezaun (2014).
72 The turn to a conceptualization of ecology as a “general” condition of existence—

which underpins my understanding presented in this chapter—is discussed in
Hoerl (2013).
73 See further discussion of ecological guilds in Korňan and Kropil (2014), Root

(1967), Simberloff and Dayan (1991), and S. E. Williams and Hero (1998).
74 See Puig de la Bellacasa (2011). More broadly, “species thinking” (Chakrabarty,

2009, p. 213) deeply upsets any notion that invention power relies on humans.

In fact, human activity and relationality more broadly cannot exist outside

practices of interspecies engagement—be it interspecies care, labor, or even ex-

ploitation and destruction, as, for example, Hartigan (2015a), Pandian (2009),
Schrader (2010), van Dooren (2014), and Kirksey and Helmreich (2010) show
in their work.
75 See Haraway (1997), Ihde and Selinger (2003), and Weber (2010). The fusion of

technology, science, and everyday life is not just another name for today’s sci-

ence; this fusion refers to something much wider, namely the acknowledgment

that technology actively shapes basic research, which is increasingly concerned
with impact on applications and the everyday. Translation and technological
interoperability in technoscience is a constitutive moment of knowledge pro-
duction directly linking technological innovation to basic research. But beyond
that, what drives technoscience is that it continuously happens inside and out-
side formal research institutions (state-funded and private)—which I discuss in

the second half of this chapter.

76 See Schraube (2009).

77 See McNeil (2013).

78 See also Papadopoulos (2014).

79 See Mollison (1988) and Mollison and Holmgren (1990).

80 For a discussion of some of these practices, see the work of Savvides (2018).

81 And this even if there are attempts to complicate the practice of translation;

see, for example, Sakai (1997).
82 See S. D. Brown’s (2013) reading of Serres’s parasite.

83 See also Star (1995).

84 See the previous section in this chapter on involution, and, originally, Deleuze

and Guattari (1987). See also Hustak and Myers (2013).
85 See Harman (2007).

86 See examples in Choy et al. (2009), Liberona and Myers (2016), and Rodríguez

Giralt (2015).
87 See https://www.cac.lt/en/other/general/15/7719. For their other relevant

works, see Urbonas and Urbonas (2008).
88 See some very di erent but excellent examples in Stamets (2005), A. L. Tsing

ff

(2015), and Choy et al. (2009).
89 See A. E. Clarke (2016), Puig de la Bellacasa (2014b), Star (1991), and Stewart

(2013).
90 See also Kortright (2012).

91 See also Myers (2012).

92 See Schraube (2013). Experimental labor is an embodied, haptic process; see

Myers and Dumit (2011) and Puig de la Bellacasa (2009).
93 On invention power, see, originally, Moulier Boutang (2011, p. 93) and Negri

(2005a, p. 268).
94 In chapter 2 I described the underlying process that supports this multiplica-

tion of di erent types of precarious labor as the fusion of work and financial-
ff

ization. This fusion takes place across di erent levels: the financialization of
ff

everyday life (through debt, for example); the stagnation or decline of wages
and compensation for this decline through lending; the increased valuation
practices that define the quality of work outputs; the importance of “exploit-
ing” one’s own future as a working subject, something that we have called post-

contractual exploitation; and, finally, the incorporation of nonwork processes

to value production.
95 There are various approaches to precarious labor; in particular, see Armano

and Murgia (2012a, 2012b), Berardi (2010), Edu-Factory Collective (2009),

Morini and Fumagalli (2010), R. Müller and Kenney (2014), and Papadopoulos
et al. (2008).
96 Many di erent perspectives on the commons and on social mobilizations

ff

gravitate around this idea (for further discussion, see Blomley, 2008; De Ange-
lis, 2017; De Angelis and Harvie, 2013; Fournier, 2013; Linebaugh, 2008). Three
di erent aspects pertain to the discussion about the commons: (1) On a politi
ff

cal level, struggles for the commons include a myriad of campaigns and actions


around the naturecultural and the informational commons (Blomley, 2008;
Bollier and Helfrich, 2012). (2) Since its (re-)introduction in the 1990s on a con-
ceptual level, the notion of the commons is mainly anchored in critical/global
political economy—either in a radical political perspective (Midnight Notes

Collective, 1990; Ricoveri, 2013) or as an alternative institutional approach to
the politics of scarcity and resource governance (Mehta, 2010; Ostrom, 1990).
This reliance on political economy brings with it severe limitations: mainly a

blunt humanism and anthropocentrism as discussed in chapter 5 (Ghelfi, 2015)
and a too-easy reduction of the commons to the management of common-

pool resources (Bresnihan, 2016a). (3) Finally, on a practical level, the notion

of the commons can have very di erent implications for political practice.
ff

Central to the notion of the commons is dispossession—that is, the private

enclosure and capitalist appropriation of the livelihoods and environments, the

means of production, and the products of work of people and their communi-

ties (Bollier, 2003; Ricoveri, 2013). Now, the practical responses to this process

of appropriation can vary significantly: a movement for refusal of the appro-
priation of work, that is, struggles engaging with the commons as the central

and underlying moment of contemporary capitalist production, an approach

inspired by the tensions that arise in the increased socialization of production
(Read, 2011; Vercellone, 2010) and the crisis of social reproduction (Barbagallo
and Federici, 2012); a movement for the creation of new commons, that is, the
subtraction from capitalist appropriation and the making of new extracapital-

ist commons, an approach mainly inspired by the multitude of social justice
campaigns in the Global South (Caffentzis, 2010; McCarthy, 2005; Ricoveri,
2013); and finally, a movement for reappropriation, that is, the organization of a

historical subject that can achieve the recovering of what has been enclosed by
capital, an approach that is aligned with traditional workerist grand narratives

of social liberation (Mezzadra, 2011b).
97 The difference between the commons and the publics is that the latter is always

in some form or another linked to the state, either as civil society operating in

the symbolic and territorial realm of the state or as social groups that are ac-
tivated by certain governmental institutions or as pressure groups that articu-
late their demands toward the state. One could go as far as to say that publics

are proactively constructed by state institutions. On the other hand, the com-
mons exist and can sustain themselves without the direct intervention of state
institutions.
98 I am thinking here with the work of D. López (2010) on issues related to the

relation between security and technology.
99 See Fumagalli (2011), Marazzi (2010) and Negri (2010). See also the work of

Birch (2013, 2017a).
100 See https://blog.arduino.cc/2015/04/30/microsoft-and-arduino-new-partnership/.

See also the discussion of Arduino in Eglash (2016).
101 See Latour (1983).

102 See, for example, Reardon (2012).


103 See, for example, Thorpe and Gregory (2010).

104

See chapter 3 for a further discussion.

105 See Bayat (2010).

106 See Dinerstein (2014), Sitrin (2012), Zibechi (2011), and Zibechi and Ryan

(2010). See also the work of Mora-Gámez (2016).

107 The principal figure of postliberalism is not the state or private interests or the

individual subject (which dominated neoliberal ideology); rather, it is an organic
clumping of certain segments of the state together with some private interests,
certain subjectivities, parts of social classes, or segments of the public. In previ-
ous work we have discussed the figure of the postliberal vertical aggregate to
describe this (Papadopoulos et al., 2008). Postliberal aggregates do not cohere
around a shared ideology. They entail an intermingling of various actors into

large formations that coalesce along an imagined commonality of social domina-

tion. Postliberal modes of control condense economic, technoscientific, politi

cal, and cultural power and control decision-making processes. They reassemble

parts of the fragmented society that was the outcome of forty years of neo-
liberal policies into vertical aggregates. The verticality here refers to segments

of state, public, or private actors that act together and form global players that
effectively go beyond the identity of each player involved. Against this postliberal
turn of control, the movements that I describe here attempt to respond and to

create open and shared alternative spaces of existence from below (Arditi, 2008).
108 Some of these ideas feature in recent debates about the prefigurative politics

of social movements, for example, Pickerill and Chatterton (2006). Prefigura-
tive politics are forms of alterontological practice that attempt to create other
workable and livable forms of life such as ecological alternatives, independent

media ecologies, feminist collectives, and autonomous learning environments
(Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010; Meyerhoff, Johnson, and Braun, 2011).
109 See, for example, the work of Mora-Gámez (2016) on the system of rights res-

titution and reparations in “post-conflict” Colombia and how armed conflict

“victims” create hybrid alternative spaces of existence within the formal infra-
structures of reparation and compensation. See also Salvini (2013), an inspiring
description of the remaking of urban space in Barcelona since the early 1980s
through the everyday social and political struggles over the right to the city—

and also studies on Athens, London, and Rome by Chatzidakis, Maclaran, and
Bradshaw (2012), Ford (2011), and Grazioli (2017a), respectively. See also
K. Ross’s (2015) study of the Paris Commune and how this radical experiment
in self-organization was not just structured by its revolutionary political aims

(Merriman, 2014) but mainly through the artisanal remaking of the everyday
conditions of life in the commune: the decentralization and diffusion into the
ordinary of questions on self-subsistence, ecology, art, social relations, and

work. This integration of experimentation in everyday life created the ex-
plosive political potential of the commune that continues long after its horrific

suppression. Finally, on the imperceptible politics of commons movements,

see Kanngieser and Beuret (2017).

110 See also De Smet (2016) and van de Sande (2013).

111 See, for example, Mander and Tauli-Corpuz (2006), Escárcega (2013), and

N. Thomas (2010).
112 See Clifford (2013) and specific studies such as Clare Anderson (2012),

N. Thomas (2010), Linebaugh and Rediker (2000), and Frykman et al. (2013).
113 And also enable the formation of “microworlds,” as Verran (2002) calls the

making of specific mundane material arrangements of collective life.
114 Provincializing formal experimental science and examining its colonial in-

volvement and postcolonial futures has been discussed widely in science and

technology studies; see, for example, W. Anderson and Adams (2007), Verran
(2001), W. Anderson (2002a), Adams (2002), A. Tsing (2005), and Turnbull
(2000).
115 See Olivera and Lewis (2004). It is also important to see how this mobiliza-

tion evolved as the fold of the commons and the state described earlier in the
chapter changed the nature and targets of the water movements. More recently,

parts of the water movement in Bolivia (Bresnihan, 2016b) and in Uruguay

(Taks, 2008) are gradually reintegrated into state governance of water by in-

cluding self-managed water committees (Zibechi, 2009) in public-private

administration of water resources. For a broader discussion, see Dupuits and

García (2016).
116 See also Fitting (2006) and Mann (2011).

117 See also North and Grinspun (2016).

118 Something that raises questions about food sovereignty within the whole re-

gion; see Altieri and Toledo (2011) and McKay, Nehring, and Walsh-Dilley

(2014).
119 Similar studies in postcolonial technoscience and indigenous knowledge dis-

cuss bioprospecting (N. Harvey, 2001; Hayden, 2003), genetic contamination

(van Dooren, 2010), and the trafficking of genetic materials (Hayden, 2007;

Kowal, Radin, and Reardon, 2013).
120 See Barlow (2008; 2012, p. 20). More broadly I take inspiration from the work

of Kohn (2013), C. B. Jensen (2015), Gow (2001), and Raffles (2002). All of them
describe di erent cases in which humans, other animal species, plants, and
ff

their riverine environments and riparian rain forests create each other and all
contribute to the making of these ontologies.

121 See also Hope (2008).

122 On traditional resistance and protest movements, see Caygill (2013), Tyler

(2013), and Douzinas (2013). When we commonly think of resistance, as in

these works, it is as the other to power. Here I propose to reverse this under

standing. When we talk about resistance as confrontation to power, then I

propose to talk about protest, opposition, or revolt, as, for example, in Tyler’s
work. In this configuration, power and “resistance” (as protest, opposition, or

revolt) are in tight and infrangible connection, one opposing the other. In
fact, one could say that “resistance” as opposition becomes part of power and enters

the nexus of existing power relations—Checchi (2015) provides an insight-


ful analysis of these di erent readings and meanings of resistance. Following

ff

Checci’s work and previous research (Papadopoulos et al., 2008) I discuss here an

alternative reading of resistance. Resistance (that is, resistance as resistance,

not as protest, opposition, or revolt) unfolds as a movement of exit and escape
from the prevalent power relation in a certain field. Resistance is not primarily

about direct confrontation but about changing the conditions in which power
operates. This is possible only by changing the ontological conditions of life in

a certain field. In chapter 3 I talked about “organizational ontology” as the prac-

tice of resisting power by organizing alternative ontologies. Organizational

ontology involves all these mundane practices that change the materiality of life

in ways that escape power (and by doing this, they force power to change). J. C.

Scott (2009, 2012) talks in a similar way about “infrapolitics,” the deliberate
attempt to remain outside (state) power (see also Chatterjee, 2004; Feigen-
baum, Frenzel, and McCurdy, 2013; Salvini, 2013; and Sitrin, 2012).
123 For a discussion, see Della Porta and Diani (2006). This is why most of social

movements theory and research has focused on the identities of social movements
(Melucci, 1996; Touraine, 1981). However, this has been criticized from many
di erent perspectives and various authors (Chesters and Welsh, 2005; Della
ff

Porta and Rucht, 2013; Rucht, 1991; Sitrin, 2012).
124 See Chesters and Welsh (2006) and Papadopoulos et al. (2008).

125 See also A. E. Clarke and Olesen (1999), Rapp (2000), Hubbard et al. (1979), P.

Brown et al. (2006), and A. E. Clarke et al. (2010).
126 See Dinerstein (2010), Kokkinidis (2014), Ozarow and Croucher (2014), Ratner

(2013), and Vieta (2009).
127 See the important work of Kokkinidis (2014). See also Sitrin’s book Horizon-

talism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (2006), which inspired me while

writing this section.

129 See Wynne (2003).

130 See, for example, Nowotny and Rose (1979), H. Rose (1983), H. Rose and Rose

(1969, 1976a, 1976b), and Ravetz (1971).
131 As discussed in the section on participation in the previous chapter, there are

two main traditions in participatory politics. The first one focuses on public
engagement, inclusion of social actors in science policy, and making scientific
institutions more accountable. The second one starts from a radical critique of
technological, scientific, and medical rationalities and is grounded in the new
social movements after the 1990s. It attempts to develop a practice of radical

democratic participation and science activism. This second one is very close to

the idea of more-than-social movements presented in the following sections.

132 See, for example, Welsh and Wynne (2013) for discussion of antinuclear move-

ments, anti-gmo mobilizations, and climate change campaigns. See also

McNeil and Haran (2013), Haran (2013), and Reynolds (2013). These debates

privilege a form of politics that attempts to create channels of communica-
tion and exchange between science and publics by facilitating deliberative

and participatory inclusion of publics in science policy. But when publics and
science implode into each other, as described in this chapter, rather than one
clear-cut conflict between science and publics there is a multiplicity of ex-

changes and conflicts that emerge as the separation between publics and sci-
ence disappears. This collapse opens di erent political possibilities beyond the

ff

modernist/humanist ideal of a potential enlightened public against authoritar-
ian science and its realignment with a possible democratic science.

133 This is the case not only for movements that directly target technoscientific issues

but also for many traditional social movements that engage with technoscientific
knowledge in their organizing practices, as, for example, the 15M movement in

Spain in 2011; see an analysis in Calleja López (2017) and Ghelfi (2015).

134 See Nancy (2000, p. 24); see also N. Clark (2011).

135 See Troutt (2006) and Nancy (1991).

136 See Claeson et al. (1996). See also Laugksch (2000).

137 See, for example, Savvides (2017) and W.-M. Roth and Barton (2004). See also

Barad (2001), Bencze and Alsop (2014), and Dreessen, Schepers, and Leen
(2016).
138 See https://excotwincities.org/.

139 See also Haworth and Elmore (2018). More broadly, on the question of par-

ticipation as a pathway for democratizing literacy, see Noorani, Blencowe, and

Brigstocke (2013).
140 Savvides (2018), for example, has done extensive research on di erent modes

ff

of learning and education within maker and hackspaces. See also Maxigas and
Troxler (2014).
141 See di erent examples in Latimer and Puig de la Bellacasa (2013), Liboiron

ff

(2016), Pérez-Bustos (2016), Sánchez Criado, Rodríguez Giralt, and Mencaroni

(2016), and Puig de la Bellacasa (2015).
142 The idea of problematics originates in Deleuze (1994) and Deleuze and Guat-

tari (1987). See also D. W. Smith (2006).
143 See also Star (2010); for a broader discussion of similar issues, see J.-H. Passoth,

Peuker, and Schillmeier (2012).
144 See Staeheli (2012).

145 See the work of Rappert (2014) and Rappert and Bauchspies (2014) on secrecy.

146 Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 238): “Finally, becoming is not an evolution, at

least not an evolution by descent and filiation. . . . If evolution includes any veri-

table becomings, it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings
of totally di erent scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation. . . . There
ff

is a block of becoming between young roots and certain microorganisms, the
alliance between which is effected by the materials synthesized in the leaves
(rhizosphere). . . . The term we would prefer for this form of evolution between

heterogeneous terms is ‘involution,’ on the condition that involution is in no way
confused with regression. Becoming is involutionary, involution is creative.”
147 See Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and earlier note; see also Ansell-Pearson

(1999), Hansen (2000), and Sterling (1977).

148 Margulis’s (1998) theory of symbiogenesis refers to the appearance of new

forms of life through the stable association of two organisms of di erent spe-
ff

cies. See also S. F. Gilbert and Epel (2009).
149 Virilio (1995, 1998). See also Krautwurst (2007).

150 See also S. D. Brown (2013).

151 See Beuret (2018).

152 See Figueroa Sarriera and Gray (2016).

153 See Star (2010); more generally, on the question of consensus in recent social

mobilizations, see Nunes (2012, 2014); on the question of infrastructures and
protest, see Feigenbaum et al. (2013).
154 See also S. J. Jackson et al. (2007) and Larkin (2013).

155 On the temporality of infrastructures, see Hetherington (2014, 2016) and

Withers (2013). See an example in the work of Withers (2015).
156 Mora-Gámez (2016) calls them “entrelazando infrastructures,” or weaving in-

frastructures, and Withers (2016) talks about “the politics of transmission.” See
also Sims (2007).
157 See Easterling (2005, 2014), Guldi (2012), and Truscello and Gordon (2013).

158 The designations “open” and “free” software account for a small difference but

of crucial importance. Free and open software are not very di erent in terms

ff

of how they are made and their intrinsic qualities, but free software is made
explicitly as an attempt to promote the value of nonproprietary software—that

is, to promote justice by challenging copyright—while open software is pro-

moting the software itself as an infrastructural tool for facilitating open infor-
mation access (Coleman, 2013; Coleman and Golub, 2008; Stallman, 2013). We
already know today that this difference, although so crucial for the develop-

ment of free/open software, has been almost lost. As Kelty (2013, p. 3) puts it,
“There is no free software. And the problem it solved is yet with us.” In this

sense there is no longer open-source software as fully separate from propri-

etary software, since both feed into each other in order to exist, and there is no

free software as distinct from open and proprietary software because it is sim-

ply contributing to the making of the same infrastructures of codes despite the
political differences and values that motivate it. See Carlson (2010), Delfanti

(2011), and Hope (2008) for similar discussions in the field of open biology.
159 My guidance on these topics comes from the work of Pizio (in preparation).

See also Infoaut (2013) and Dafermos and Söderberg (2009). The political

conditions for the emergence of these new movements is discussed in DeNar-

dis (2012, 2014). Here DeNardis shows how existing Internet infrastructures

and their technological aspects have been gradually appropriated by private
and state actors for their own economic and political interests. See also Mu-

siani (2013, 2015).
160 The practice of making technoscience, whether it is mundane or formal, has

created an alternative vision of technoscience as open. Open technoscience is a
contested terrain, not a given reality or a definite program. Depending on the

specific subfield and topic, the quest for openness addresses di erent issues and
ff


di erent levels on which technoscience is operating: (1) open research agen-
ff

das, (2) open standards, (3) open hardware, (4) open data repositories, and (5)
open access to research outputs. Not all of these take place necessarily and si

multaneously in every subfield, but technoscience is challenged from inside by

combinations of these alternative practices.

161 For example, see an open-source and commons-based technoscientific project

initiated by the Ecuadorian government: https://floksociety.org/.

162 Blaser (2012), for example, has developed a similar position that leads, however,

to a di erent conclusion that attempts to change our epistemic perception and
ff

to epistemologically accommodate the existence of the world as multiple: “The
political sensibility can be described as a commitment to the pluriverse—the

partially connected unfolding of worlds—in the face of the impoverishment
implied by universalism and potentially by the project of a common world. I

say partially connected because the idea here is that these worlds are not sealed

off from each other, with clear boundaries—they are certainly connected, yet

there is no overarching principle that can be deduced from these connections

and that would make this multiplicity a universe” (Blaser, 2012, p. 55).
163 I am thankful to Sebastian Dieterich for sharing with me his work on compost-

ing and fermentation. See also B. Turner (2014) and Abrahamsson and Bertoni
(2014).
164 This could be considered a general feature of the development of technological

systems. See, for example, Misa (2011).

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INDEX
1,112 and Counting (Kramer), 157
abjection, 51, 61, 156, 172 155; formalist politics and, 144–145;
absence, 12, 16–17, 107, 149 gay liberation era and, 157; immune
accessibility, 187, 203 body, 121–122, 129; insertion into
accountability, 147–148, 192, 253n131 biomedical region of objectivity,
accumulation, regime of, 15, 20, 30–35, 150, 154–155; time of composition,
37, 41, 168, 225n73 153–155. See also compositional
activist materialism, 79–94, 228n3; technoscience
activism makes materialism possible, aids Coalition to Unleash Power (act

81–82; cultural materialism, 84–87; up), 138, 139, 155, 157
desire and, 90–91; ontological dual- alienation, 80–81, 231n16
ism, 82–90; of reclaiming, 89; state alterontological politics, 10, 29, 137,
socialism as transformation of, 158–159, 195–196
83–84. See also materialism alterontologies (alternative forms of
Act of Enclosure of Charnwood (1808), life), 5, 10, 16–21, 25–26, 50, 94, 110,
102 141; compositional politics, 154–155;
actor-network theory, 148–151, 152 crafting, 160–207; justice and, 114;

actors, 10, 15–16, 18, 39, 139; brain organizing as crafting of, 22.

as, 128; legitimacy and expertise, See also crafting ontologies; every-
142–145; making of, 152, 154–155; day existence and practices; onto-
nonhuman others, 13, 16, 141, 148, logical organizing; technoscience

150; nonstate, 72 Althusser, Louis, 86, 88
Africa: maker culture, 166, 172, 173; Amnesty International, 66–67
revolutions, 194–195 Analysing Everyday Experience: Social
Agamben, Giorgio, 233–234n58 Research and Political Change (Ste-

aids activism, 5, 10, 17, 119, 138–40, 199, phenson and Papadopoulos), 4
242n93, 242nn80; alterontological Anders, Günther, 19–20
politics, 158–159; antiretroviral ther- Anderson, Bridget, 57
apy (art), 139; biomedical research anthropocentrism, 15, 27, 112
expertise, 154–155; decline, 139, 150; antiracist politics. See race and antira-
emergency care, 156–157; expertise, cist politics
142–145; first period, 139–40, 142, antirepresentational politics, 65

Anzaldúa, Gloria, 109–110 30–31; embodied value production,
appropriation, 13, 17, 37, 40, 90, 98, 33–35, 54; end of refusal of work,
106–107, 250n96; expropriation, 37–39; expropriation of goods and
32–33, 136, 197; of frontier, 14–15 resources, 32–33; future and, 31–32;

Arduino, 178–179, 180, 191–192 geocide and geoengineering, 27–28;
Arduino Certified Windows operating material articulations, 47–48; per

system, 191–192 formance of, 39–41; postliberalism,

Arrighi, G., 218n14 35–37; social science fiction, 43–45,
articulation, 86 48; universalizing matrix of, 28–29,
artificial intelligence, 130–131 48, 50. See also financialization
artisan production, 92, 168–169, 251n109 biohacking, 179
assemblages, 106–107, 149–150; state as bios, 8, 45. See also biofinancialization
heterogeneous, 60, 81, 96, 98 biosecuritization, 191
assetization, 8, 41–43, 191 biosubjectification, 134
asymmetry, 151–152 biovalue production, 135–136
asylum seekers, 67, 76 Bishop, H., 73
Austin, George, 124–125 black communities, 211–212n6
autocreative brain matter, 133–137, 135 blackmail of precarization, 189–190

autonomous social movements, 4, 50 Blaser, M., 256n162
autonomy, 3–4, 6, 41, 43, 203, 215n19; body: cerebral, 120, 129; cultural con-

as independence from capitalism, ceptions of, 119; geobody, 45; heredi-

37–38, 223n55, 224n64, 225n73; tary, 122–123, 129; immune, 121–122,
indigenous, 173–174; material articu- 129; politics, 85–86, 128; visions of,
lations, 47–48; mobility and, 51–52; 120–123. See also embodiment
of transmigration, 59–60 Böhm, S., 41
autonomy-of-migration thesis, 59–60, 66 Bonneuil, C., 192

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New
Badiou, Alain, 107 Mestiza (Anzaldúa), 109–110
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 107, 112 borders, 8, 53, 57, 65, 143; borderdwell-
Barad, K., 20 ing, 107–110; citizenship as, 50–51,
baroque fieldworking, 4–7 57; illegalized crossing, 61–63; virtual
Barrio libre: Criminalizing States and spaces, 67–68
Delinquent Refusals of the New Fron- borderworkers, 72
tier (Rosas), 53 Boyle, Robert, 92
Bayat, Asaf, 64–65, 194 brain: embodiment, 5, 9, 122, 126–128,
behaviorism, 123–134, 135 135
being-in-common, 200 brain (brain matter), 117–137; auto-

Benjamin, Walter, 19–20, 111–113, creative, 133–137, 135, 137; cognitiv-
233–234n58 ism, 120, 123–126; connectionism,
Berardi, Bifo, 37–38 119–20, 123–126; ecomorphs,
Bergson, Henri, 225n70 132–133, 238n79; embodiment, 5, 9,
biofinancialization, 7–8, 27–48, 150, 122, 126–128, 135; epigenesis and, 5,
179, 191; assetization and rent, 41–43; 9, 12–13, 132–133, 238n79; epochs of,
code in, 45–46; culture of valuation, 117, 123, 128, 131, 245n28; experi-
324 Index

ence and, 126–128, 136; functions, Choy, T. K., 164, 184
123–127, 130, 134, 135, 137; hackable, chronic fatigue syndrome, 198–199
128–130; imaginaries of, 119–123; citizenship, 34, 60, 64, 68; as border,
interorganismic relations, 127–128; 50–51, 57; brain as tool of gover-
neurogovernance, 134–135, 135; nance, 134; denationalizing, 58,
politics of, 118–20, 133–134, 135, 137; 222n46; differential inclusion, 54–58;
recombination as liberation, 117–118; double-R axiom, 55; impossible,

self-reproducing machines, 130–131; 56–58; metropolitan strike, 234n60;

speculative brain politics, 118–120; sovereignty and, 56–57
visions of body, 120–123 civil society, 80, 145–147, 250n97
The Brain That Changes Itself (Doidge), class, 36, 52, 86–87, 211–212n6; trans-
131 migration and, 63, 66; working-class

Brandt, Marisa, 196 movements, 83, 85, 224n64
Bresnihan, Patrick, 102 Clifford, J., 47
Britain: 1981 riots, Brixton, 2, 56; 2011 climate change, 47, 211n1, 211n5
riots, 2; English Vagrancy Act of Clinton, Bill, 117, 132

1824, 98–99 closure, 29, 90–91
Bruner, Jerome, 124–125 co-action, 14, 140, 185, 193–194, 243n7

Butler, Judith, 86 co-construction, 19, 145–148, 161

Butler, Octavia, 47 code, 8, 10; in biofinancialization,
45–46; materialization of, 178–179.
Calais, 65–66, 71–72; “No Land’s Men: See also technoscience
The Struggle for Calais” (Okmûn), cognitive capitalism, 120, 169

51, 52, 54, 58, 62, 73, 75, 226n4 cognitivism, 120, 123–126, 135, 200
Calais Migrant Solidarity, 72 Colectivo Pequeñas Hermanas, Costa

calculations, 39–40 Rica, 174
Callon, Michel, 39 Cole Orton colliers, 101
capitalism, 90, 221n32, 230n6; auton- collaborative (un)learning, 200
omy as independence from, 37–38, Collins, H. M., 142, 143

223n55, 224n64, 225n73; brain matter Colombetti, G., 128

and, 135–136; cognitive, 120, 169; coloniality, 13–16, 21, 173, 214n8, 214n13,
not historically necessary, 103–104; 225n71
species-being alienated, 80–81 commensality, 181–182, 203

care, 23, 72–74, 156–157, 201 commitment, 18, 187, 203
Carse, A., 204 commodities consensus, 196
Center for Cultural Studies (University common good, 193–195
of California, Santa Cruz), 94 commoning, 99–100, 102–103, 191,
Chakrabarty, D., 172, 246n35, 248n74 194–197, 231n21; eco-commoning,

Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales, 103–105
52 commons, 33–34, 37, 221n36, 249–
Charnwood Forest, 101 250n96, 250n97; biofinancialization
“The Charnwood Opera,” 101–102 in, 45–46; body~place~commons,
Châtelet, François, 17 102; co-action and, 193–194; com-

Chiapas, 195–196 moners, 75, 100–102, 231n21;
Index 325

commons (continued) crafting ontologies, 141, 160–207;

ecological, 99–103; enclosure, 45–46, aleatoric drift, 162; commensality,
102, 191; fold and, 192–193, 196–197; 181–182, 203; commons and the
maker culture and, 190–191; matter fold, 192–193, 196–197; distributed

belongs to, 136; mobile, 8, 49, 50–52; invention power, 182–184, 190, 201;
worldly, 99–100; Zapatista corn ecological transversality, 184–188;
commoning, 195–196 experimental labor, 189–190; mate-

commonwealth, 194–195 rial literacy, 200–202; more-than-

communication, 143–145, 185, 202 social movements, 165, 197–200;
community, 2, 147; technoscience cen- stacked histories, 160–162; uncom-
tered in, 183–184, 199–200 mons, 193–197. See also making
composition, ontological, 46, 140–141 creationism, secular, 117, 132
compositional objects, 179–181, 181 creativity, 117, 166, 168–169; autocre-
compositional politics, 5, 11, 141, 148, ative brain matter, 133–137

154–155, 157–158, 160, 163, 165; credibility, 142–143
Arduino, 178–179 Critique of Violence (Benjamin), 111–113

compositional technoscience, 9–10, Csordas, T. J., 120
138–159; aids activism and, 138–140; cultural materialism, 84–87
expertise and liberal predicament, cultural studies, 152
142–145; networks and the ignorance culture of valuation, 7–8, 30–31, 39,
of governance, 148–151; participa- 218n18, 218n20
tion and the limits of institutions, cyanobacteria, 27–28
145–148; regions of objectivity, cybernetics, 127

140–141. See also aids activism;
regions of objectivity; technoscience debt, 35, 249n94
computation, 179 decentering of human, 2, 97, 127

computationalism, 125 decolonial politics of matter, 5, 7, 11–23,

connectionism, 119–20, 123–126, 135 29, 104, 172–174; alternative forms of
connectivity, 70–71, 212n8 life, 19–20; coloniality and produc-
Connery, Christopher, 94, 211n4 tionism, 13–16; decolonizing craft,
constitutionalism, 149 20–23; frontier of matter, 12–13;

constraints, 201–202 marronage, 100–101; matter and

Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, 187, justice, 16–18, 114. See also matter

188 de la Cadena, Marisol, 183, 195, 206–207
contingency, ontological, 40 De l’esclavage au salariat (Moulier
control, 59–61, 107, 129; differential Boutang), 103–104
inclusion, 55–56 Deleuze, Gilles, 17, 88–92, 107, 176, 202,
cooperation, 34, 80, 201 212n10, 229n24, 254n146
cosmograms, 148 Delfanti, Alessandro, 197
counterrevolutions, 90–91 denationalization, 58, 222n46
coyote, becoming, 110 Derby, England, 5, 160; industrial

crafting, 94, 247n57; artisan produc- unrest, 197, 198; manufacturing his-
tion, 92, 168–169, 251n109; decolo- tory, 164. See also Silk Mill, Derby,
nizing, 20–23; as relation, 180 England

326 Index

Derby Mini Maker Faire, 161 economic crises: 1970s, 30; 2008, 29,
Derby Silk Mill—Museum of Making, 36, 199, 211n5, 216n2, 217n8, 222n46,

160–162, 164, 172, 173, 243n4 244n14
Derrida, Jacques, 108, 233n48 economics, calculative tools, 39–40
Descartes, René, 123 ecopoetics, 94
desire, 17, 90–91 ecosystems, stacking, 175
De Smet, Brecht, 195 Egyptian revolution, 2011, 195
de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, 12 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 36
detention and deportation, politics of, Elman, J. L., 126
53, 59, 66 embodiment: brain, 5, 9, 122, 126–128,
determinism, 9, 120, 225n70 135; connectionism and, 119–120;
development, 123, 129 experience and, 126–128; intelligence
Dewey, John, 124 and mobility, 70; joy of, 108–109;
difference, politics of, 86–87, 120 of politics, 105–109; recombinant
differential inclusion, 54–58 plasticity, 119–120; rehabilitation of
differentiation, 87–88 politics, 96–97; relationality and,
Dirty Electronics Synthesizers, 180, 127–128; social space and, 85–86; value

180–181 production, 33–35, 54. See also body
disagreement, ontological, 206–207 enclosure, 45–46, 102, 191, 250n96
distributed invention power, 10, endocoloniality, 45, 225n71
182–184, 190, 201 engagement, 187, 203
diwy (do it without yourself), 23, Engels, Friedrich, 82, 97, 214n2
181–182 English Vagrancy Act of 1824, 98–99

Doidge, Norman, 131 environmental politics, 184, 217n8
domination, 36, 86, 105, 151 Epel, D., 132
double-R axiom, 55 epigenetics, 5, 9, 12–13, 132–133,

dualism, 176, 212n10; Marxist views, 238n79. See also brain (brain matter)

82–90; of subject, 87–90 epigenome, 12–13, 16
Dumit, Joe, 31, 38 epistemology: body and, 119–20, 123;
epistemic alternatives, 18, 195;
East Midlands, Britain, 10, 165–166, epistemic territory, 14–18, 20–21, 92;
172 knowledge production, 140–141
eco-commoning, 103–105 Epstein, Steven, 154–155

ecological activism, 21–22 escape: from control, 60; from cycle
ecological commons, 99–103 of law and violence, 111–112; from

ecological-developmental plasticity, humanity, 7–10; posthumanist sub-

131, 133 version, 106; from slavery, 100–101
ecological guilds, 181 Escape Routes: Control and Subversion
ecological transversality, 10, 184–188 in the 21st Century (Papadopoulos,

ecologies of existence, 74 Stephenson, and Tsainos), 4
ecology of proximity, 201 Esmail, Sam, 179

ecomorphs, 132–133, 238n79 essentialism, 120, 126, 163
Economic and Philosophical Manu- ethopoiesis, 10, 188–190
scripts (Marx), 80, 82 Evans, R., 142, 143
Index 327

events, 107–108, 110, 182 food and supply chain, 41–42, 42, 44
everyday existence and practices, 4, 8, Ford Motor Company’s Production

47, 80, 198, 212–213n11; aids activism, Development Center, 170
157; brain matter and, 136; care, 23, forest stacking strategy, 175, 184–185

72–74; commoning, 99–103; culture formalist politics, 141, 143–145, 151
of valuation, 31, 38; financialization foundationalism, 120
of, 35, 249n94; justice and, 65–66, Fox, Hannah, 161
112–114, 140; mobile commons, framing, 147
51–52; nonpolitical, 64–65; North free and open software movement,

African revolutions, 194–195; politics 22–23, 204–205, 255n158
as, 96–97; technoscience, 183–184 freedom, appropriation of, 98, 105.
exceptionality, 112, 114, 233–234n58 See also labor

experience, 126–128, 136, 139; continu- Frontex, 67
ous, 194; situatedness and indetermi- frontier of matter, 12–15, 20, 28

nacy of, 151–153; speculative, 19–20 fundamentalism, 151
Experimental College of the Twin future: exploitation of, 31–32, 35,

Cities, 200 219n22, 220n31, 249n94; immune

experimental politics, 3, 72 body and, 121; “In the Future”

experimental practice, 3–10, 13, 92, campaign (hbsc), 41–42, 42, 44;
182–183, 189–90, 207, 212n10 justice and, 113–114; reclaiming
expertise, 142–145 past as, 174
exploitation, 31–33; of one’s own future, F. W. Hampshire chemical factory,

31, 35, 249n94 161–162
expropriation, 32–33, 136, 197
extensification, 33–34, 35, 54 Geertz, Clifford, 19
gene expression, 12–13
fabulation, 45 general strike, 112–113, 234n60
Facebook, 49, 67, 70, 75 genetic providers, 193

fate, 111 genome, 117, 132–133
fear, body and, 121–122 geocide, 27–28
Fear of Falling (Ehrenreich), 36 geocolonialism, 225n71
“fear of falling,” 36 geoengineering, 27–28, 46
feminist materialism, 88, 108 geology, 100
feminist movement, 30, 86–87, 106, The German Ideology (Marx), 80
128, 135, 151, 224n64 Gewalt, 111–113, 233–234n58
fiction. See social science fiction Ghelfi, Andrea, 201, 225n73, 247n57
fieldwork, 4–7 gift economy, 66–68, 73, 185
financialization, 7–8; of everyday Gilbert, S. F., 132
existence, 35, 249n94; global, Gilroy, Paul, 2, 211–212n6, 212n7

219–220n27; of social justice, 36. global consciousness, 174
See also biofinancialization Global North societies: biofinancializa-

fold, 10, 192–193, 196–197, 206 tion, 28–29; brain imaginaries, 134;
Food and Drug Administration (fda), freedom and exploitation, mix of,
139 105; governance, 150; liberal demo

328 Index

cratic principles, 36–37; maker cul- hope, 17, 118

ture and, 166–168, 172; material and Horstman, J., 118, 134
ecological commons, 33; perpetual housekeeping, 94

crisis, 30 housing rights movement, 70–71
global political activity, 194–195

Human Genome Project, 117, 132–133

gnosiological realism, 82, 83, 85 humanist universalism, 27–28, 230n6
The Good Life Lab: Radical Ex- human rights, 57, 231n21

periments in Hands-On Living Hustak, Carla, 183

(Tremayne), 186 hybridity, 114, 127, 240n54
Goodnow, Jacqueline, 124–125
Gould, Deborah, 153 idealism, 80–81, 83, 88–90, 97, 176
governance, 9, 148–151 identity politics, 86, 152
governmentality, 149–150 illegalization, 53, 56, 61–63
Gramsci, Antonio, 97 imaginaries: of body, 120–123; of brain,
Grand National Consolidated Trades 119–123; genocentric, 133–134; infra-

Union, 197 structural, 200, 203–204; transmi-
Grazioli, Margherita, 70 gration, 60
Great Dismal Swamp, 100–101 immanent critique, 84–87

Greece: Athens, 75–76; transmigrant immanent indeterminacy, 178–179
camps, 61, 66, 67 immune body, 121–122, 129
Guattari, Félix, 88–92, 107, 176, 212n10, imperceptible politics, 19, 63–66
229n24, 254n146 impossible citizenship, 56–58
inclusion, 14–18, 151, 199, 215n18;
hacking. See making co-optation, 106–107; differential,

hacking, brain, 128–130 54–58; expertise and, 142–143; par-
hackspaces, 5, 10, 164–165, 177 ticipatory politics, 145–148
Haiti, 104 incomputability, 179
Haraway, Donna, 47–48, 93 indeterminacy, 31–32, 39–40, 91, 178;
Hartigan, J., 228–229n5, 248n71 of biofinancial societies, 35–36; of

Hatch, M., 169 experience, 151–153
Hayden, Cori, 191 indigenous ecocosmologies, 195–196
hbsc advertising campaign, 41–42, indigenous politics, 47, 128
42, 44 indigenous temporalities, 172–174, 173
Hegel, G. W. F., 97 individualism, liberal, 128–130
hegemony, 86 industry, 32, 166–167, 167
hereditary body, 122–123, 129 informal economies, 71–72
Hiss, S., 223–224n60 infrastructure, 2, 8, 33–34, 255n156;
history, 112–114, 235n69; stacked, generous, 202–205; infrastructural
160–162 imagination, 200, 203–204; mobility
Hobbes, Thomas, 92 and, 68–71
Hoerl, E., 201 innovation, 90, 132, 166, 215n17
Højholt, C., 213n11 Institute for Public Policy Research, 166
Hong Kong, environmental politics, institutions, participatory politics and,
183 145–148
Index 329

insurgent posthumanism, 8, 9, Kramer, Larry, 157
94–114; assembling the state, Kropil, R., 181
94–97; borderdwelling, 107–110; Kuster, Brigitta, 65
eco-commoning, 103–105; ecologi-

cal commons, 99–103; embodying labor, 5, 217n7, 219–220n27; deregula-

politics, 105–107; justice/jetztzeit, tion of markets, 30, 32; dimensions
110–113; postanthropocentric his- of exploitation, 33–34; as dressage,
tory, 113–114, 345n69; vagrancy, 104; end of refusal of work, 37–39;
97–99. See also posthumanism experimental, 189–190; extensifi-
integrationism, 64 cation, 33–34, 35, 54; free, 10, 98,

intelligences, 68–71 103–105, 188–189, 231n35; informal
intensification, 33–34, 39, 54 economies, 71–72; intensification,
“In the Future” campaign (hbsc), 33–34, 39, 54; invisibilized, 12, 16–17,

41–42, 42, 44 20, 56, 151, 183, 188–189; mobility
invention, 10, 166; distributed invention and, 52–55; postcontractual employ-
power, 182–184; experimental labor ment, 35, 219n23, 220n31; precariza-

and, 189–190 tion of, 5, 10, 66, 92, 189–90, 220n31,
investment value, 31–32 249n94; refusal of, 37–39, 217n7,
invisibilized labor, 12, 16–17, 20, 183; 250n96; slavery, 55, 98, 100–101, 104,

maker culture and, 188–189; situat- 221n32. See also workers
edness, 151; of transmigrants, 56 labor process theory, 221–222n41, 221n34

involutionary process, 185, 190, 201, Lakoff, G., 120, 134

254n146; generous infrastructures, Landecker, Hannah, 133
203–205 Latin America, 195–196

irregularity, politicization of, 61–62 Latour, Bruno, 107, 114, 148–149, 151
Law, J., 149
Johnson, M. L., 120, 127, 134 The Laws of the Markets (Callon), 39
justice, 110–113; asymmetry of, 113–114; legitimacy, expertise and, 142–145
communities of, 71–72; everyday life Leicester Hackspace, 5, 177, 177, 201,
and, 65–66, 112–114, 140; generative, 202, 204
203; making of mobile commons as, Lenin, Vladimir, 82–86, 231n13
73–74; matter and, 16–18, 114; thick, Lesbos, Greece, 66

18–19, 74 Levidow, L., 192
Lezaun, Javier, 192–193
Karfakis, Nikos, 198 liberal democratic principles, 36–37,

Kitson, Woody, 177 222n46
knowledge production, 10, 32, 82–83, liberal predicament, 142–145
185, 201; aids activism, 139; alterna- liberation, 9; brain matter and, 117–118,

tive knowledge, 204; experimental 135–136; coloniality and production-
labor, 189–190; regions of objectivity, ism, 13–16

142–143. See also production life activity, 80
Kojève, A., 230n10 Linebaugh, Peter, 50, 99, 231n21
Korňan, M., 181 literacy, material, 200–202
Kortright, Chris, 189, 219n23 lived place, 85–86
330 Index

living labor, 33–34 materialism, 3, 8, 74, 213–214n2; cul-

localizationism, 125 tural, 84–87; feminist, 88; idealism
L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 104 opposed to, 80–81, 83, 88–90, 97;
Luhmann, Niklas, 106 left critiques of, 79–80; literacy and,
Lukács, Georg, 230n10 200–202; monist, 82–83, 88–91; not
possible without activism, 81–82;

Mackenzie, Adrian, 197 posthumanism and, 109; remaking
Make magazine, 166 of, 84–85; as theory of knowledge,
Maker Faire Africa, 166, 172, 173 82–83; transformation and, 80–84.
maker guild, 185 See also activist materialism
makerspaces and culture, 5, 10, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

163–165, 164; free labor, 188–189; (Lenin), 82–86

maker faires, 161, 166, 169, 172–173, materiality: of code, 178–179; maker
173, 244n11; nonreciprocal sharing, culture and, 168, 175; of the ordinary,
181; tools, 176 112; reclaiming, 47
making: of actors, 152, 154–155; com- material spirituality, 6, 185, 207
mensality, 176–182; compositional matter, 214n6, 247n57; commoning,

politics, 154–155; constraints, 100–103; frontier of, 12–15, 20, 28;
201–202; of matter, 176; as move- justice and, 16–18, 114; making of,

ment within technoscience, 165; 176; movements of, 81; multiplic-
mycomorphs, 187–188, 188; plasticity ity of, 15–16; as political exit, 91, 93;

and, 118; plurality and, 172–173; from rent-generating, 191–192. See also

pluriverse to movement, 175–176; brain (brain matter); decolonial

provincializing, 170–172; topology politics of matter

of, 181. See also crafting ontologies; McFerrin, Grady, 186
remaking measuring technologies, 34, 39–40, 46

Malabou, Catherine, 118, 135–136 mediation, 113, 124
manufacturing, 166–168, 167, 168 mestizaje, 109
Marazzi, C., 43 Metapolitics (Badiou), 107
The March of the Modern Makers: An metropolitan strike, 234n60
Industrial Strategy for the Creative Microsoft, 191–192
Industries (Straw and Warner), 166 microworlds, 252n113
marginalized/neglected experiences, Middle East, mobilizations, 64–65

10, 95–96, 141, 151–154, 199, 241n69 Mignolo, W., 17, 194
marronage, 99–101 migration. See transmigration
Martin, Randy, 30 minor science, 91–93
Marx, Karl, 19, 97, 213n2, 214n2, 230n13 mobile commons, 8, 49, 50–52, 68–69,
Marxism, 79–82 73–74
masculinism, 121, 172, 245–246n34 mobility, 49, 50–52; autonomous,
material articulations, 47–48 51–52; becoming everyone, 65;

material conditions of existence, 74, institutionalization of, 52–55; intelli-
80, 159 gences and infrastructures of, 68–71;
material engagement, 169, 175, 200, types and cases, 59–60. See also
244, 245n28, 246n46 transmigration
Index 331

mobilizations. See social movements neofascist social media users, 75–76
modernity/coloniality nexus, 14, 18 neoliberalism, 9, 30, 134, 222n46; net-
Mollison, Bill, 181, 182 worked state, 107, 109
monism, 82–83, 88–91, 175–176 networks, 151, 152; ignorance of gov-
Mora-Gámez, Fredy, 231n14, 251n109, ernance and, 148–151; neoliberal

255n156 state, 107, 109; neuronal, 125–126,
moral economy, 74 131, 134, 135; symmetry, 113–114;
moral fantasy, 19–20 un-networking, 173–174

moral panic, 121 neurogovernance, 134–135, 135
more-than-social movements, 3, 7–10, New Social Movements (nsm), 107

18, 79, 96, 110, 253n131; autonomy New World, 79
and, 203; closure of autonomous Neyland, Daniel, 147
politics, 29; crafting ontologies, 165, No Borders network, 72
197–200; Gewalt and, 112. See also nodes, 106–107, 126
movements; social movements Nogales border, 53
Morita, Atsuro, 172 “No Land’s Men: The Struggle for

Moulier Boutang, Yann, 35, 59, Calais” (Okmûn), 51, 52, 54, 58, 62,
103–104, 214n14 73, 75, 226n4
movement, 176; making and, 172; pluri- nonexistence, production of, 12
verse and, 175–176; struggles for, 60. nonfate, 111

See also mobility nonhumanist struggles, 98–99,

movements, 211n3; of matter, 81; as so- 101–104

cial movements, 95–96; transformed nonhuman others, 3, 15, 141, 151, 215n21,

to social movements, 106. See also 255n148; actors, 13, 16, 148, 150; brain
more-than-social movements; social and, 127; maker culture and inter-

movements species relations, 183, 187, 248n74;
Mr. Robot (television cyberthriller), mycelium, 187–188, 188; posthuman-

179–180 ist views of, 94–95; self-reproducing

Müller, Heiner H., 90 machines, 130–131; terraforming
multiplicity, 15–16, 68–69, 96; of onto and, 27–28

logies, 11, 164–165 nonmovements, 64–65
multiverses, 194, 206 nonpolitics, 64–65
Murphy, Michelle, 199 nonreciprocal sharing, 71, 181
Museum of Industry and History non-society, 106

(Derby), 160 nonsubject, 113
mutualism, 181 nonwork life, 34–35, 249n94
mycelium, 187–188, 188
mycomorphs, 187–188, 188 Obama, Barack, 169
Myers, Natasha, 183 objectivity, 141. See also regions of
objectivity
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 200 objects, 228n3; compositional, 179–181,

nationalism, maker culture and, 172 181; financial, 39; indeterminacy of,
nation-state, 57–58, 121, 149 178; partially accessible, 185–187

“natural” world, 80, 81, 231n16 O’Connell Davidson, Julia, 57

332 Index

Okmûn, Julie, 51, 52, 54, 58, 62, 69, 73, permaculture guild, 184–185
75, 226n4 Perrier, Maud, 200
“one-world world,” 176 Philippines, transgenic rice project, 189

ontogenesis, 118, 123 Pickering, A., 127
ontological composition, 46, 140–141 Pinker, S., 125
ontological organizing, 8, 22, 47, 49–76, plasticity, 9, 117–118, 126; ecological-

253n122; imperceptible ontologies, developmental, 131, 133; proprieta-
19, 63–66; informal economies and rization of, 135–136; recombinant,
communities of justice, 71–72; labor 119–120, 129–131, 237n58

and mobility, 52–55; nexus of care, pluriverse, 175–176, 194, 256n162
72–74; politics as, 58; “working political economy, 39, 249–250n96

for papers,” 61–63. See also self-
politics, 214n2; alterontological, 10, 137,
organization; transmigration 158–159, 195–196; of body, 85–86,
ontological politics, 11–12, 15, 19, 214n2, 128; of brain, 118–120, 137; embodi-
215n16 ment of, 105–109; experimental, 3,
ontological stacking, 164–165, 175, 72; formalist, 141, 143–145, 151; maker
205–206 culture, 190, 195–196; of matter,

ontology/ies: defined, 74, 162, 243n7; 17, 176; ontological, 11–12, 214n2,
as desire, 17; heterogeneous, 173, 215n16; as ontological organizing, 58;

175; limits of, 163; monist, 82–83, participatory, 145–148; rehabilitation
88–91; as movement, 165; multiple, of, 96–97; types, 141. See also activist
11, 164–165; plural, 172, 175–176; materialism; compositional politics;
stacked, 164–165, 175–176. See also decolonial politics of matter

alterontologies; crafting ontologies poor, moral economy of, 74
Oriel Canfas gallery, 52 porocracy, 53
origins, stories of, 169 postcontractual employment, 35,
O’Riordan, Kate, 193 219n23, 220n31
Orr, Jackie, 38, 113 posthumanism, 8, 94–95, 109, 211n2,
otherness, 86 229–230n3; diwy (do it without
yourself ), 181–182. See also insurgent
Pagani camp (Greece), 61, 67, 75 posthumanism
panic, 38 postliberalism, 35–37, 58, 134, 222n46,
Papadopoulos, Dimitris, 4 251n107
“paper market,” 62 poststructuralism, 88, 152
Paris Commune, 230n13, 251n109 postwelfare metropolis, 70
Parisi, Luciana, 134 power: as assembled, 149–150; colonial-
participatory politics, 145–148, 253n131; ity of, 14; power over, 17; power with,
conditions of participation, 143, 17, 108
145–148; partial participants, 151–152 practice, 19–20. See also everyday ex-
partisan philosophy, 83 istence and practices; experimental
Patton, Cindy, 155 practice
peak digitization, 179 pragmatism, 124, 126
permaculture, 175, 177, 181, 182, precarization of labor, 5, 10, 66, 92,

205–206, 246–247n48 189–90, 220n31, 249n94
Index 333

prefiguration, 89, 195, 224–225n69, reclaiming, 3, 19, 21–22, 47, 89; future,

251n108 174; housing rights movement, 70;
private sphere (res privatae), 10, 191, relation to material world, 104
225n72 recombinant plasticity, 119–20, 129–131,
privatization, 34, 136 237n58
problematics, 201 recombination, 9; autonomy and, 43; as
production: artisan, 92, 168–169, liberation, 117–118; self-reproducing

251n109; double architecture, machines, 130–131
32–33; externalization of costs, 21, Recovering the Commons (Reid and
33; of nonwork life, 34–35, 249n94; Taylor), 104
relocation outside Global North, 30; refusal of work, 17, 217n7, 250n96; end
third stage, 32. See also knowledge of, 37–39
production regions of objectivity, 140–141; aids
productionism, 13–16; double sense, activism insertion into, 150, 154–155;
15–16, 20, 28, 32, 150 alterontological politics, 158–159;
professionalization, 155 composition of, 141; expertise
proprietarization, 35; of plastic- and liberal predicament, 142–145;
ity, 135–136; of software, 22, 190, networks, 148–151; participatory
191–192, 255n158 politics, 145–148; time of composi-
proximity, ecology of, 201 tion, 153–155. See also objectivity

psychology, 123–124 Reid, Herbert, 104

psychopolitics, 38 reification, 230n10
public, 145–146, 197, 248n71, 250n97 relationality, 2, 34, 181, 183, 203;
public engagement, 192–193 embodiment and, 127–128; situated-
public sphere (res publicae), 10, 191 ness, 151, 153
Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria, 6, 23, 156, Re:Make project (Derby Silk Mill),

185, 189, 201 160–161, 243n4
remaking, 4, 47, 118, 152, 157; of materi-
queer politics, 86, 89, 128, 135, alism, 84–85. See also making
224n64 rent, 41–43; rentier technoscience,
190–192
Rabelais (Bakhtin), 108, 112 representation, 15, 28, 125–126, 214n15

race and antiracist politics, 13, 30, 55, reprocessing, 177, 177–178, 178

65, 75, 85–87, 106, 120, 122, 128, 199, res communes, 33, 46, 225n72
214n13, 228n5 resistance, 196, 198, 223n55,

Rancière, Jacques, 17, 64, 158, 206 252–253n122
Raspberry Pi, 179 revolution, 83; 1848, 95, 107, 230n13;
rationalities, 12, 28, 92, 97, 106, 239n11 counterrevolutions, 90–91; state
Raven, Lavie, 174 strengthened by, 97–98
Reagan, Ronald, 138 rice, transgenic, 189, 219n23
realism, 80, 82–83, 85 Robbins, B., 229n1
reality, constructed in subject, Rome, 70

87–88 Rona-Tas, A., 223–224n60

reciprocity, 47, 68, 71, 101, 156, 181 Rose, D. B., 48
334 Index

Rose, Steven, 131 2012, 211n3, 212n7, 222n48; Athens, 75;
Ryder, Brett, 167 autonomous, 4, 50; biofinacialization
of, 29; hackable brain and, 129–130;
Sahlins, Marshall, 83 imperceptible, 19, 63–66; limitations,
Sandbothe, M., 122–123 2; material practices of, 7, 29, 80–81;
Sapik (interviewee), 49, 50, 68, 75–76 as movements, 95–96; as organizers,
Sayers, Daniel, 100 74; social nonmovements, 64–65;
scale-making, 22–23 state targeted by, 95, 105; transmigra-

Schillmeier, M., 121 tion as, 66, 68–71; unintended, 61–63;
Schraube, E., 213n11 violence as necessary, 110–113

science, 252n114; big, state, royal, 22, social movements studies, 107
91–93; invention and practice of, social reproduction, 34–37
182–183; minor, 91–93; social con- social science, 216n2, 219n25
structionist challenges to, 142–143. social science fiction, 6, 43–45, 48,
See also technoscience 224–225n69
science wars of the 1990s, 140, 142–143 social space, 85–86
scientific literacy, 200 social studies of finance, 39–41, 224n63
securitization, 8, 30, 51, 57, 191, 201 social studies of science, 239n11
seed bombs, 203–204, 204 societies in movement, 65

self, exploitation of, 220n31, 249n94 Soneryd, Linda, 192–193
self, pure, 122 sovereignty, 52–53, 56–57, 65–66
self-organization, 6, 12, 37, 96, 127, 166 space, financialization of, 46–47,

sexuality, 13, 30, 57, 106, 108, 121, 156, 159 225n74, 225n77
Sharma, Nandita, 57 spatialization: migration and, 52, 54
Shenk, David, 118 Speakes, Larry, 138
sign-mediated-thought, 124 species-being, 80–81, 228n5

Silk Mill, Derby, England, 160–163, 161, speculation, 6, 19–20, 218nn14–15; about

172, 197, 198; as chemical factory, migration, 60; autocreative brain
161–162; maker culture and, 163–165, matter, 133–134; biofinancialization

164; Re:Make project (Derby Silk and, 43; brain politics, 118; making

Mill), 160–161, 243n4; stacked and, 172; social science fiction, 43–45
histories, 160–162. See also Derby, speed, 53, 56
England squats, 70–71

Sismondo, Sergio, 164 stacking, 10, 190, 193, 246–247n48,
situatedness, 34, 146, 151–153, 173, 241n69 247n49; histories, 160–162; ontologi-
slavery, 55, 98, 100–101, 104, 221n32 cal, 164–165, 175–176, 205–206
Smith, Pamela, 92 standpoint theory, 151, 241n60
Socialist Party, 97 Star, Susan Leigh, 12, 188–189, 201
social liberation, 9, 214n2, 250n96 Starhawk, 17, 108
social media, 49, 67–68, 75–76 state, 105, 230n10, 230n12; assembling,
social movements, 66, 224n64, 253– 94–97, 98; heterogeneous, 60, 81, 96,
254n132; 1960s and 1970s, 30, 85, 98; networked neoliberal, 107, 109;
105–107, 151, 157; 1970s and 1980s, 128; revolution strengthens, 97–98; tar-
after 1990s, 151; between 2008 and geted by social movements, 95, 105

Index 335

state science, 91–92 TechShop (Allen Park, Michigan), 169,
state socialism, 83–84 169–170
Steinfeld, R. J., 104 temporality: body and, 121–123; of care,
Stengers, Isabelle, 182 157; indigenous, 172–174, 173; justice
Stephenson, Niamh, 4 and, 113–114; stacked, 206; tech-
Sterling, Bruce, 206 nologies of, 40; transmigration and,
stimulus-response (s-r) model, 123–124 52–54

Strathern, M., 149 terraformation, 27–48, 225n74; from
strike: general, 112–113, 234n60; metro- below, 29, 48, 173; biofinancialization
politan, 234n60 and, 41, 46; geocide and geoen-
A Study of Thinking (Bruner, Goodnow, gineering, 27–28; Terraforming
and Austin), 124–125 EarthTM, 45–47, 173; universalizing
subject, 230n6, 232–233n43; dual, matrix of, 28–29
87–90; historical, 107–108 Terranova, Tiziana, 134
subjectivity, 87–88, 125, 149 terra nullius, 14, 225n72
subversion, 106 territoriality, citizenship and, 57–58
support, 181 territory, epistemic, 14–18, 20–21, 92
Suvin, D., 224n69 Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 80

Svampa, M., 196 thick justice, 18–19, 74
swampland, 100–101 “thinking,” 123–124
symmetry, 113–114, 149 third industrial revolution, 166, 167,
synthetic biology, 197 244n15
synths, 180–181, 181 Thompson, E. P., 74, 101
“thousand ecologies,” 201
technoscience, 214n2, 248n75; activist A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and
materialism and, 88; biosecuri- Guattari), 88, 91, 212n10
tization, 191; coloniality and, 21; Tolman, E. C., 124
community-based, 183–184, transformation, 4, 11, 106, 159; everyday

199–200; distributed invention existence and, 212–213n11; material-
power, 182–184; domination and, ism and, 80–84; regions of objectiv-
151; embodied, 5; free and open soft- ity and, 144–145, 147–148

ware movement, 22–23, 204–205, transhumanism, 229–230n3
255n158; instituted, 183, 184, 189–190, translation, 185
192, 197, 201–202; limitations of, transmigration, 5, 8, 227n35; asylum
119, 201–202; making as movement seekers, 67, 76; autonomy-of-

within, 165; as more-than-social migration thesis, 59–60, 66; deten-

movement, 3; open, 255–256n160; tion and deportation, politics of,
precarization of labor, 189–190; 53, 59; differential inclusion, 54–58;

rentier, 190–192; scale-making, gift economy of, 66–68; informal

22–23; social and material trans- economies and communities of
formation, 11. See also brain (brain justice, 71–72; political mobilization

matter); compositional technosci- not intended, 61–63; social media

ence; plasticity; science connections, 49, 67–68; sovereignty
technoscientific guild, 184–185 undermined by, 65–66; specter
336 Index

of, 63–64; temporal understand- violence: Gewalt, 111–113, 233–234n58;

ing, 52–54; “working for papers,” social justice movements and,
61–63. See also mobility; ontological 110–113; against state, 110–111
organizing Virilio, P., 225n71

Tremayne, Wendy Jehanara, 185, 186 virtualization of economy, 30
trust, 185 virtual spaces, 67–68
Tsianos, Vassilis, 4, 5, 8, 69
Tunisian revolution, 2011, 194–195 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 105
Turkey, migration from, 66–67 Wallis, Jonathan, 164
Watney, Simon, 157
uncommons, 193–197 “we,” invisible, 151
undecideability, 108, 233n48 West-Eberhard, Mary Jane, 131

universalism, 194, 256n162; biofi- Weston, Kath, 191
nancialization and, 28–29, 48, 50; Wexler, Bruce, 131
of brain, 126, 129, 134; formalist What Is to Be Done? (Lenin), 83
politics, 145; hereditary body, 122; Williams, Raymond, 84
humanist, 27–28, 230n6; maker Wilson, Rob, 94
culture and, 172–174 Winner, Langdon, 19
un-networking, 173–174, 212n9 Wired magazine, 165

urban activism, 85, 251n109 Withers, Deborah, 200
Urbonas, Gediminas, 187–188, 188 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 19, 117
Urbonas, Nomeda, 187–188, 188 women’s movement, 145–146, 199

US-Mexico border, 53, 110 Woolgar, Steve, 147

workers: citizenship exploited, 34; exit
vagrancy, 97–99 from feudal labor, 98–99; general

Vagrancy Act of 1824 (England), strike, 112–113, 234n60. See also

98–99 labor

valuation: performance of, 39–41. working class: movements, 83, 85,

See also biofinancialization; culture 224n64; transmigration and, 63, 66
of valuation World 2, 68, 172, 246n35
value production, 28, 31–35, 54, 90, World Heritage Site of the Derwent
221n34; biovalue, 135–136; embodied, Valley Mills, 160
33–34, 35, 54 worlding, 113, 211n4, 229n1
Vaneigem, Raoul, 168, 169 worldly commons, 99–100
van Gunsteren, H., 57 Wright, Cynthia, 57
Vasta, Ellie, 62
Vercellone, C., 43, 191 Xenogenesis (Butler), 47
verticalization, 34, 37, 222n46,
251n107 Žižek, Slavoj, 233–234n58
Index 337


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EXPERIMENTAL

Duke University Press

01. DECOLONIAL POLITICS OF MATTER 11

02. BIOFINANCIALIZATION AS TERRAFORMATION 27

03. ONTOLOGICAL ORGAN IZING 49

04. ACTIVIST MATERIALISM 79

PART III: ALTERONTOLOGIES

06. BRAIN MATTER 117

08. CRAFTING ONTOLOGIES 160

THE TWO BEGINNINGS

Making the case for an experimental practice of more-than-social move-

ESCAPING HUMANITY (OVERVIEW)

I trace experimental practice in di erent fields of life and through di erent

The rise of technoscience in its contemporary configuration since the

THE FRONTIER OF MATTER

MATTER AND JUSTICE

Decolonial Politics of Matter 21

GEOCIDE AND GEOENGINEERING

THE UNIVERSALIZING MATRIX OF FINANCIALIZATION

What underlies the universalizing matrix of terraformation is, as discussed

The externalization of production from the workplace to the social and

The attempt to impose a separation between product of work and process of

THE END OF THE REFUSAL OF WORK

This political situation is defined by a deep immanent conflict: the vertical-

A possible way to start thinking about the political impasse of biofinan-

SOCIAL SCIENCE FICTION

Biofinancialization is materially ingrained into the affects, the muscles,

Semiocapital, biocapital, infocapital, neurocapital—it is inherent to pro-

— interview with sapik, lesbos, greece, september 7, 2010

When we think of autonomous social movements, we rarely understand

Ontological Organ izing 51

LABOR AND MOBILITY

The differential inclusion of mobile populations points always to the way

THE IMPOSSIBLE CITIZENSHIP

There is a paradox in this function of citizenship as the regulatory mecha-

Ontological Organ izing 59

Having established the current temporal regime of mobility control vis-

Ontological Organ izing 61

The forms of political action that migrants engage cannot be confused

THE GIFT ECONOMY OF MIGRATION

On August 27, 2009, together with an Amnesty International represen-

INTELLIGENCES AND INFRASTRUCTURES OF MOBILITY

The autonomous politics of organizing the common worlds of migration

Ontological Organ izing 69

INFORMAL ECONOMIES AND COMMUNITIES OF JUSTICE

Relations of care appear as a continuous thread weaving all these activities

Ontological Organ izing 75

1844: SPECIES BEING

1908: ONTOLOGICAL DUALISM

In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Vladimir Lenin follows this line

It took me thirty years, in a very complex process, to move from that

During the period of the crisis of materialism that unfolded in the de

1987: “THE ONLY ENEMY IS TWO”

In this understanding of materialism, matter becomes the horizon and the

1871: ASSEMBLING THE STATE

There is a fundamental assumption behind the politics of political move-

These self-organized relations to the sociomaterial world are moments

Marronage . . . is a complex process of a global and local nature even if

Insurgent Posthumanism 101

The Act of Enclosure of Charnwood was passed in 1808 and trans-

1791: ECO COMMONING

The transformation into capitalist organization was the effect of the

1966: EMBODYING POLITICS

Midlands in Britain and beyond. All the materials I collected, my analy