Micro Politics

From Noun to Verb: The Micropolitics of
Making Collective
Interview between Nasrin Himada and Erin Manning, July 2009
NH: I think changing the concept from a noun to a verb, from collective
to, as you suggest, making collective opens up potential for new ways to
think and do collaboratively. To think the concept of the collectivea
comingtogether of bodies that initiate a process of collaboration,
participation, extension, and sharingis to think and practice a politics of
collective assemblages. This provokes a new ethics of practice that is not
based on the idea of the common, but on the idea of technicity, and
raises the question of the relation between theory and practice. How is it
that from practice and experimentation concepts emerge? How do we
create the conditions for this relation to take place?
EM: You raise a number of interesting issues. I think the question of

technicity is key, and its an issue that comes up, in one way or another, in
all the interviews in this issue. Bruno Latour talks about techniques with
respect to the singularity of the project. Techniques, as each of the texts in
this issue underline, are modes of existence that create nodes of
importance, in the Whiteheadian sense. Brian Massumi calls them
performed transition mechanisms, referring especially to what we, at the
SenseLab, have been calling techniques of relation.
The danger of the idea of the common which only begins to become
interesting if we move it toward the notion of the commons is that there
is a presumption that the project preexists the problematic. The common
claim is to know in advance what is at stake. To predefine the project in
this way subverts any potential for creating a new set of problems. The
project, in these terms, can only be deciphered, categorized, judged
within the frame of its preexistence. Techniques, on the other hand, are
always immanent to the event in its unfolding. They are not equal to all
tasks and must therefore be reinvented each time. Techniques are neither
specifically political nor artistic nor ethical. They move across, emphasizing
points of emergence or singularization. Techniques thus potentially create
conditions for a singular unfolding of the event.
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Micropolitics: Exploring EthicoAesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for ResearchCreation. Vol 3, September
2009. www.inflexions.org
Adam Bobbette gives a nice example of technique in an artisticopolitical
context. In his description of the cocoons he creates, he mentions that
they were originally built for squatters in New York City. The cocoon was
thought as a makeshift shelter that could act as a mobile home free to
move from surface to surface (from the ground to the tree, for instance).
The technique, as he points out, is not the cocoon as such. Its the
makingmobile of the idea of home or shelter or even simply momentary
safety. It could be used for anything, he writes, and it could be made
from just about anything. The flexibility of the cocoon is part of its
technicity. What emerges through the cocoon emerges across the
modalities of its deployment. As he says, it's really a very flexible object.
This idea of flexibility is key to micropolitics. Flexibility is not a moral

standard. As Maurizio Lazzarato points out, debt is a technique used by
governments to promote an individualization of society through a
resubjectification of the individual. Debt is a pliable technique which is
indefinitely flexible, its flexibility key to its deployment by techniques of
governmentality as weve seen in the 20082009 economic crisis.
Maurizio Lazzarato talks about debts flexibility in terms of how debt
creates and is used to mobilize regimes of subjectivity. [Debt], he says,
is an economic technique and a technique for the production or the
control of subjectivity. Its important to underline this mutability of
technique, I think, to make it clear that the micropolitical is neither the
smaller version of the political, nor its moral standard. The micropolitical
passes through the political at different levels with different effects. It is, as
Brian Massumi says, a perception of a qualitatively different kind.
To come back to your question, then, I think we create the conditions for
ethicoaesthetic practices at the micropolitical level through a close
attention to techniques. As weve seen in our work at the SenseLab, this
requires flexibility and the ability to allow a project to fail. Each project
creates its own conditions for experimentation and proposes its own
techniques. But without attentive development of the potential of these
openings, a project can easily fall flat. Thats why we spend so much time
in the preparation of each event. Each event is its own fine balance
between choreography and improvisation. What we seek to do as
weve done for our recent event, Society of Molecules is to facilitate
crossings and openings by creating limits on how the event can come to
expression. In the case of Society of Molecules, these constraints were
meant to enable certain precise ways of creating affective tonalities
between and across different local constituencies, giving rise to specific
techniques mobilized at the local level.
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The documentation in this issue of Society of Molecules makes apparent
how differently each molecule responded to the problematic of creating
a distributed ethicoaesthetic political event. Each molecule was asked to
engage directly with local concerns. One of our techniques was to not
seek to create a contentbased continuity between the molecules. This
meant that we were also expecting to know little about the subtle
differences between molecular undertakings in say, Sydney, Australia,
and Naples, Italy. But we also did not want each molecule to function
completely separately. So we had to come up with a technique to keep
them affectively connected. With 15 molecules in 9 countries and 14
cities, the challenge was to develop a technique which would allow the
molecules to resonate across local spacetimes without requiring their
comingtogether to be based on their singularly local content. Our
experience from past events is that content is not easily translatable and
generally loses its affective intensity in the primarily languagebased
mutation from one locale or event to another. The techniques we
invented therefore had to be focused on affective linkages. As with all
techniques, some were more immediately successful than others. For
instance, each molecule had an emissary they sent to another molecule,
either actually or virtually. This really worked, I think: it generated
excitement in a 3way network (since all molecules received and sent an
emissary). Another technique was for the emissary to leave a seed behind
and then, postevent, each molecule was asked to document the growth
of that seed. It may be too early to tell, but my sense is that in many cases,
this technique was too distanced from the affective tenor of the event
and so may have lost its potential force. Documenting the seeding
process was meant to offer a method for pursuing local molecular
interventions by bringing the molecule back together postevent in a way
that connected to other molecular processes. The seed was thought as a
kind of affordance for the transmutation of one molecular process into
another. We were looking for a technique that would propose a form of
communication that did not evolve through the description of a past
event but instead engaged with an ongoing process that was fed by an
existing collaborative project. Our hope was that this documenting
process would subtly call forth aspects of the molecular interventions
well see how it evolves.
Earlier, I mentioned the necessity to accept the possibility that things

might fail. What I meant by this if we take the question of the seed, for
instance is that you have to be willing to allow things not to take the
shape you imagined. The work of micropolitics the creation of
techniques for collaboration is arduous. It involves a lot of
experimentation and patience, and especially, I think, it involves an
openness toward a new way of working together. It has to fall on fertile
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ground. As you know, at the SenseLab, weve always emphasized,
following Guattari, that the modes of encounter for collaborative
micropolitical exploration are not based on a personalized understanding
of subjectivity. We are not working out of a preestablished notion of
friendship, for instance. It is the project, the event, the technique that
moves us to work together. Without the project, there is no group
subjectivity, and therefore no collective process.
NH: In the interview with Adam Bobbette he talks about the relation
between politics and art as having to do with perception, and I think this
links well to the relation between thought and practice. He says, What I
have been learning from Smithson, and which you find taken up by so
many others (including Deleuze and de Landa) is that politics is always
enacted through perception. It must allow particular kinds of worlds to be
sensible while foreclosing others. Here then, politics crosses the threshold
of aesthetics. And so what then might it be to practice on perception,
what other kinds of worlds become perceptible? How do you think we
might engage with this idea of the relation between politics and
perception in the context of a micropolitics?
EM: Brian Massumis interview addresses this question in some detail and
raises some issues I think would be interesting to discuss in the ethico
aesthetic context of collective micropolitical intervention. The
micropolitical, he says, never registers consciously. In this sense, it is akin to
microperception, which registers only in its effects. This does not mean
that micropolitical interventions cannot be planned, that precise and
rigorous techniques cannot be invented. It means that what is
micropolitical about the event will never be known as such. It will be felt, it
will have an effect, but it wont be in the strict sense of the term. Massumi
calls this a something doing: There is always a somethingdoing cutting
in, interrupting whatever continuities are in progress. For things to
continue, they have to recontinue. They have to rejig around the
interruption. At the instant of rejigging, the body braces for what will
come. It inbraces, in the sense that it returns to its potential for more of life
to come, and that potential is immanent to its own arising.
Politics and perception come together in this nonconscious rejigging. It is

nonconscious in the way that affect is, working not on the preconstituted
body, but on the inbracing of the bodybecoming. In this betweenness of
feeling and doing, there is no content as yet. In Massumis words: That
affective quality is all there is to the world in that instant. It takes over life,
fills the world, for an immeasurable instant of shock. Microperception is this
purely affective rebeginning of the world.
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Micropolitics, it seems to me, functions on a similar spectrum, activating
the affective potential of the interval between feeling and doing. For
some, this may make it sound like a soft politics, but its quite the
opposite. What is usually constituted as the real thing Politics with a
capital P is far less rigorously inventive, precisely because it operates in
the sphere of representation where precomposed bodies are already
circulating. The micropolitical is that which subverts this tendency in the
political to present itself as already fully formed. All politics is infested with
micropolitical tendencies. This is what makes the political an event. In my
opinion, much of political theory continues to invest too heavily in the
alreadyarticulated capital P Politics. The reason for this is simple: it is
extremely challenging to speak of what has not yet fully taken form. Like
the microperception that tweaks the event of perception, the
micropolitical is the force of the political event that potentially unmoors it.
Gina Badgers project The Little Dig is a nice example of how micropolitics
works microperceptually. The Little Dig, as you know, is a temporary non
monetary economy based on the exchange of dirt. Between May 1116
2009, Badger deployed The Little Dig in Boston's financial district: she put a
pile of dirt on the grass in front of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston,
proposing a new kind of exchange and creation of value. At the surface,
the project is already compelling, and certainly, in many regards
micropolitical: it addresses consumerism, for instance, in a generative
way, proposing a different model of value. But, as she points out, what
really make up the project are the techniques that underlie its political
potential. These techniques predate the dissemination of the project and
include a long and bureaucratic process that involved specialists at the
MIT Insurance Office; the Environment, Health, and Safety Office; her MIT
programs administrative staff; the programming coordinator at the Rose
Kennedy Greenway, her collaborators; her housemates; friends; and
people from craigslist who provided and then took away the dirt. This
collaborative network was held together, it seems to me, by a
micropolitical proposition that made a political promise that could only
be felt in its effects. Her project was not a metaphor for money, it was a
material way of feeling and doing the exchange, where the exchange
happened just as intensely at the level of the project itself (on the grass in
front of the Federal Reserve Bank) as it did in the complex mobilized
networks of bureaucracy, friendship, etc. The project is the techniques
deployed for bringing to thought the various levels of engagement key to
developing a micropolitical process. This micropolitical process, as it
develops into an artwork, brings perception to the fore, making felt the
complex inadequacies and paradoxes of our current modes of
exchange.
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Again, what seems important is to remember that the micropolitical is not
in itself a modality for positive change. Micropolitics is not situated
squarely on the political spectrum in terms of right or left. It moves
across, transversally. Brian Massumi and Maurizio Lazzarato both make this
very clear. Speaking about the Bush regime in the United States, Massumi
emphasizes the politics of threat that coursed through the population
during Bushs 8year tenure. Politics that operate through their effects are
micropolitical: they work on many levels and at many rhythms of bodily
priming to ensure a relative success. Such techniques are seen
everywhere in the American war machine, and although they are less
mobilized in the Obama administration, there certainly remains a reservoir
of micropolitical potential from Bushs tenure. This potential remains open
to reclaiming by the right and the left reclaiming has always been a
part of the active passage between the micro and macro on the political
spectrum but this excess of micropolitical potential might just as well
open onto new forms of collective community organizing as mobilizing
itself in affective politics of fear. We saw the potential mobility of the
affective within the micropolitical in the Obama electoral race: Obama
deployed many of the affective strategies we had seen during the Bush
regime, but instead of tweaking them toward fear, he tweaked them
toward hope.
For a micropolitics of collective enunciation, it seems that what is required

is a grasping of the potential before it can be regulated within the
dominant system of the day. The notion that the micro and the macro are
always intertwined something Lazzarato explains beautifully in his
interview is what makes the concept of the micropolitical so generative
for me. The generative potential of the micropolitical is strengthened, I
think, by its capacity to be captured by the macropolitical and deployed
within various universes of value. This allows it to remain mobile and resist
becoming didactic. Its potential, as Massumi points out, is immediately
collective. Its not a mere possibility, its an active part of the constitution
of that situation, its just one that hasnt been fully developed, that hasnt
been fully capacitated for unfolding. This means that there are potential
alterpolitics at the collectively inbraced heart of every situation, even
the most successfully conformist in its mode of attunement.
It would be interesting to explore further the more negative reactions to

the micropolitical expressed in both Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latours
interviews. Isabelle Stengers prefers to think the potential of the between
what we would call the micropolitical as the mesopolitical , emphasizing
the milieu. For her, there remains a coefficient of polemic truth
associated to micropolitics. For me, Stengers concept of the meso is
very much in line with how I understand the micropolitical. This suggests
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something quite interesting: that how the micropolitical has been
mobilized within the particular FrancoBelgian academic/political scene
in which Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers circulate may have undone it
of its potential. The micropolitical as the thought of the milieu has been
reinscribed into the valuebased micro/macro dichotomy. From the
thought of the middle, the micropolitical has become the edge of a
spectrum that demonizes the complex interweaving of different political
regimes. It has lost its capacity to move across and through.
In its place a new concept is born the meso which Stengers defines as
the locus of invention where the pragmatics of the question are far more
alive, lively, more difficult to forget than the micro or the macro, between
which the game of truth is always at stake. Perhaps what we can learn
from this conceptual drift can be linked to how we might think perception
in the artworld. Concepts must redeploy themselves, making themselves
felt, activating present conjunctions. While the micropolitical for me does
express potential in and for the milieu, for Stengers and Latour, it is the
meso which is creative of difference and potential. It is the meso which
affirms its copresence with/in a milieu. And it is the meso which is most
pragmatically material. As Stengers says, All material is in relation to a
milieu.
NH: And Guattari says, Any micropolitical approach consists precisely in

the attempt to assemble the processes of singularization on the very level
from which they emerge.
I think that the military, for example in both the U.S. and Israel, has an
understanding of how the micropolitical works in relation to a milieu.
What I mean by this is that the military has come up with very
sophisticated techniques in relation to how war affects and infects
technologically, architecturally and cartographically (take for example
Eyal Weizmans work on the architecture of occupation in Palestine and
also how much that influenced the architecture of occupation in Iraq, or
for example the Arab simulation villages that have been built in the
deserts of Nevada and the infamous Chicago base in Israel), and
academically (take the RAND corporation for example, the not for profit
institution for research and development playing a key role in
implementing and influencing policies and decision making for the US
government). We see how the micropolitical in this case is working
intensely with the macropolitics of warfare. We really see how the
micropolitical and macropolitical are in constant relation, composing the
becomingwork of politics.
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I am just wondering how we can make the lines of relation more visible
between how the micro and macro function in relation to each other but
in the context of activist work. And I think this is really relevant to Barbara
Glowczewskis work.
And from there maybe we can go back to this question of why the
micropolitical is valuable as a point of departure for a new politics. I am
thinking here in particular of how Guattari takes up micropolitics as " a
question of making a new kind of pragmatics enter these fields: a new
kind of analysis that actually corresponds to a new kind of politics."
EM: As you point out, collaborative work must pay attention to the point
of inflexion where singularities appear. We see a nice example of this in
Barbara Glowczewskis discussion of the film she made during her first stay
in the late 1970s in the Aboriginal community of Lajamanu, Australia.
The important lesson Glowczewski learned through the process of making
art in a different cultural context was that one aesthetic system could not
be simply superimposed onto another. Explaining her rationale of using a
jumpy, spedup editing style, she says: For the film I made in Lajamanu in
1979, I thought to use that technique because of a stupid analogy: I
thought the use of time condensation through rhythmic cuts would be like
the condensation in dreams. Dreaming is so important for Aboriginal
people, and I thought if we condense a lot of visual information into one
image it should sort of explain visually what the dream is about. Despite
Glowczewskis best intensions, the Aborigines were confused about the
representation of their dancing in her film. They thought it undermined
their dancing ritual and made them look stupid. Their response to the film
made clear that the representation in time of their movement was a key
aspect of the content of their ritual. For them what was important was the
real speed of the performance, of the enactment, of the dance because
the speed at which you enact the traveling from one place to another
itself carries information. As I think Glowczewskis example makes
apparent, processes create their own singularities. As Glowczewskis
artistic practice evolved within Aboriginal communities, so did her
capacity to attend to the singularities as they emerged and to find modes
of retelling that sought less to represent their practices than to
collaborate with them.
When Glowczewski returned to France in the early 1980s, she became

close with Felix Guattari, who in turn became a strong influence on her
work. One of her key insights of that period came from Guattaris
insistence on the singularity at the heart of micropolitical interventions. It
was Guattari who pointed out to her that there was an important
difference between singularity and essence. This changed a bit after a
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discussion with Felix Guattari who told me to be careful. He suggested
that there might be a difference between a singularity and an essence,
pointing out that everything I had written was underlining the complex
singularities at the heart of aboriginal culture. So I started to pay attention
to the relation between singularities and politics. This new approach also
followed from Guattaris ideas about micropolitics.
Essence is a macropolitical concept. It engages at the level of fabulation,

creating an ideal milieu with a retrospectively continuous history. Through
essence, we come to the vocabularies that define, that situate the
absoluteness of a concept such as native, woman, national etc.
Singularities, on the other hand, are unique convergences that appear as
remarkable points. This appearance is brief and completely depends on
the conditions of the convergence. When it perishes it can never be
resuscitated, and yet, similarly to Whiteheads subjective form, it can have
an effect on future singularities.
In the context of Australian Aboriginal culture, the convergences of

singular effects regularly move transversally between the micro and the
macropolitical. As Glowczewski points out in her discussion of the death
in custody issue, when Aboriginal research groups came together to
propose recommendations for macropolitical dissemination, their way of
working together was micropolitically motivated. She explains: it was
absolutely incredible working in an environment of Aboriginal people of
different generations with different experiences [] and watching them
invent answers to all the constraints that the state was bringing to them. In
the end the process didnt restrict itself solely to the theme of death and
custody: they were rebuilding everything, education, health, justice
system, police, housing, environmental issues. And they proposed this
incredible sort of weaving, throughout the continent, of more than 360
recommendations, which were given to the parliament and voted by the
parliament and out of 360 recommendations maybe only 30 were
applied ten years later. What stands out here is that in order to address
one particular law, a mode of collaboration had to be put into place. This
mode of collaboration had to be sensitive to different modalities of
thinking and speaking, writing and disseminating information, crossing as it
did a population with different oral and written skills including many
elders who never learned to read and write but whose views on the
matter were of the highest importance. This sensitivity to a collective
process resulted in much more than a bureaucratic decision concerning
one specific problem. It became the cultivation of a process that opened
itself up to the wider effects of the death in custody issue. Creating a
kind of collective subjectivity, the discussions became focused on the
wide web of convergences this particular law could bring into focus. Their
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concerns were as micropolitically oriented as they were macropolitically
inclined. For instance, they became concerned with environmental issues
that cross different communities in different ways. These are issues that
have macropolitical effects they bring with them global environmental
consequences as well as national ones that in turn affect the governance
of different milieus of Aboriginal culture. They are micropolitical because
they emerge from the milieu. They become macropolitical when, for
instance, they bring forth new laws at the national level that effect the
governance of communities and territories. Take mining, for instance.
Criticism has been voiced that in view of new mining operations
Aboriginal Dreamings (Jukurrpa) have had a tendency to spring up
that werent considered constitutive to a particular aboriginal community.
The Dreaming here refers in part to a spiritual ancestor who resides within
specific landscape affordances. To talk of these Dreamings as though
they could be owned by certain groups at the expense of others is to
misunderstand the strong rhizomatic quality of Aboriginal culture where
land does not standin for parsedout territory. Although Aboriginal
communities do have direct influence over very specific sites (and/as
Dreamings) these Dreamings can only exist in a network of emergence
that gives life to the present of collective becoming across groupings. To
take over a part of land as though it were not in some way connected to
another is to cut across a system of life. This of course has both micro and
macropolitical consequences. In the case of holding back transnational
mining projects it may affect both the national position in a global market
and in that sense effect macropolitical change. On the local level, the
funds used by mining might have been mobilized for community projects
that could have given the community a certain independence. Either
way, the convergence of macro and micropolitics instantiates new
debates about land ownership and territoriality that in turn in some sense
alter the field of the political. This is what I mean by the macro always
being infested by micropolitical effects.
This ease of passage from the micro to the macro is key to understanding
the concept of the Dreaming. The Dreaming which can also be
translated as law directs contemporary everyday life as much as it tells
the history of Australian Aboriginal culture. The story it tells is both
absolutely singular it is carried through the ages as a specific iteration of
the serial continuity between land, spirituality, space and time and it is
prone to a certain degree of continuous mutation. This paradox of
representation and movement can be seen in contemporary paintings by
Aboriginal artists. Rather than representing the Dreaming as this or
that, these paintings create new conditions for living the Dreaming
today. These conditions are as visual as they are spatiotemporal. They are
ways of moving, ways of thinking and becoming as much as they are
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ways of remembering. This flexibility between memory and movement is a
reminder, I think, about how necessary it is to keep the flow between the
micro and the macro, between that which is in creation and that which
exists more concretely and can be represented. It is a reminder that even
that which seems to represent carries within it the seeds of its own
potential subversion. In this sense, we cannot think outside the vocabulary
of singularities as serialities. Everything that is experienced is micropolitical
in one way or another. How we speak of it or write about it or use it
politically may have a macropolitical orientation, but any fissure, any
opening always speaks of renewed micropolitical potential.
This paradox is beautifully addressed in the Sydney molecules

Generating Thought Experiment one of the micropolitical interventions
that was part of the SenseLab event, Society of Molecules. Taking as a
conceptual point of departure Suely Rolnik and Felix Guattaris Molecular
Revolution in Brazil, Mat WallSmith, Anna Munster, Andrew Murphie, Gillian
Fuller and Lone Bertelsen take on the very idea of form and representation
through the prism of learning, research and thought across institutions.
One of the mandates of Society of Molecules was to try to think with,
against and across institutions. The idea was to create techniques that
might enable an undoing of the strict micro (ethicoaesthetic) /macro
(institution) perspective, since this strict dichotomy leaves us paralyzed in
the face of institutions. To demonize the institution, as Bruno Latour and
Isabelle Stengers point out, does not give us the tools with which to
subvert it or to open it to its micropolitical potential.
Generating Thought Experiment is an instruction manual that invites us

to learn/think/collaborate differently: In the end it was decided that our
aestheticopolitical event would take the form of a micropolitical
resistance to what Guattari may have called a pseudoscientific
enslavement of thought and learning. Seeking to go beyond
benchmark culture the endless measuring, aligning and evaluating
that has become synonymous with academia the Sydney molecule
created a manual for thoughtgeneration through a finetuned list of
microbehaviours/contagious comportments. These microbehaviours
include taking on someone elses microbehaviours by differentially
attuning to them, modulating the contagion that results from these new
thought processes, thus creating a patchwork existential territory with
which you feel comfortable, but which gives you new powers. The
Sydney molecules instruction manual depends on a continuous flow
between micro and macropolitical contexts and reminds us that the
micro taken as didactic becomes a representation of itself (dont so
much imitate it certainly dont mimic it). Its not so much that we must
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act micropolitically. Its that we must invent across practices and
behaviours.
Nasrin, when you ask about how micropolitical practices are necessary to
a rearticulation of the political, quoting Guattaris statement that links the
micropolitical to the pragmatic, I think that what you are getting at is
perhaps that we must start from the middle. Its not enough, as you point
out with the example of the military to reside in a micropolitical
territory (if there were such a thing). We must generate vocabularies
across. This is what Stengers means, I think, when she talks about the
necessity to create concepts that take off from a singular political event.
She explains: To paraphrase Deleuze paraphrasing Artaud, I try to think
before the uncountable victims of this mania of oppositions [such as the
macro and micro], to create concepts that include protections, modes of
deception that do not cease to return and that dont pay attention to
warnings. For Stengers, the danger of the macro/micro opposition is its
potential to regulate the passage between their inherent tendencies to
reterritorialize. Despite Stengers unease around the concept of the
micropolitical, I think she would agree that no matter what we call it, we
must become sensitive to the modes of crossing that activate and
emphasize certain political tendencies and in turn mobilize certain
specific responses. Important is to become aware of how these
transversal passages occur and where they might lead to. Stengers
speaks of this in terms of 2 (his)stories [histoires]: we are in suspense
between two (his)stories. The first history involves a mode of capture that
insists on continuous evolution while it distributes both the possible and the
impossible. We might call it capitalism. The second history is that of an
intrusion or a countercapture. It cannot be anticipated nor prepared for;
it cannot be desired in advance. It must be created.
Your own work has been taken over by the thought of the middle through
this idea that thought must be created, that activism is as much a form of
thinking/writing as it is a mode of action in the physical sense of the term. I
wonder whether you could say more about how the IsraeliPalestinian
border has become a leitmotif in your thinking about the micropolitical
and where you situate this leitmotif in terms of your own activist practice.
As you pointed out earlier, there can be no micropolitical intervention in
the Palestinian context that does not at the same time engage with the
macropolitics of militarization, global financial interests, the demonizing by
America of Arab culture etc. I find it very interesting how exploring the
micropolitical practices that have emerged in both Israel and Palestine as
ethicoaesthetic responses to the wall and militarized borders has led you
toward local questions concerning the relationship between architecture,
politics and activism and also to the very concrete task of developing a
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mode of writing that would itself be a form of activism. This physical
distancing from the Palestinian border is, I think, a micropolitical act on
your part that is very much in line with the Society of Molecules project.
The singularities of micropolitical interventions are lived and disseminated,
it seems to me, on a local level. While you can learn from global
examples, there is always the danger that you will fetishize the
micropolitical tendencies from afar without being able to take into full
consideration their macropolitical captures. Do you think working locally
facilitates a kind of micropolitical activist practice that remains sensitive to
macropolitical countercapture?
NH: There are a lot of local activist groups here in Montreal (if thats what
you mean by locally) that do a lot of important and necessary work.
Tadamon! is one example of this. A collective concerned with issues in the
MiddleEast and right now focusing on issues concerning Palestine and
Lebanon mostly, and also involved in the BDS movement (boycott,
divestment and sanctions), which is another very influential and important
movement that has emerged as a response to resisting complicity with
the Israeli occupation on an international level. Tadamon! has also been
advocating for the Bilin case here in Montreal. Bilin is a village in the
occupied West Bank that has been, for the last four years, organizing
protests against the building of the wall across its lands. Also, the people
of the town of Bilin are suing two Quebecois companies that are involved
in the building of settlements and other types of residential buildings on
Palestinian land. Under the Geneva international convention it is deemed
illegal to build on occupied land, and so for the first time we see a push
toward holding foreign companies responsible for how theyre also aiding
in the occupation. For me, the BDS movement and the Bilin case trials are
two important examples of how to think the local and the global
together. What is important is not to think these separately the local and
global but to know how to cut across them, which in these two
examples we see taking place.
EM: I think the point you are making here about the local is very
important. In the same way that its false to consider the micropolitical as
the smaller version of the political, it is equally important, I think, to allow
the local to proliferate. Within the vocabulary of the micropolitical, the
local is the milieu. It is the force of the event around which wider concerns
converge. In this regard, the local is both absolutely singular and infinitely
expansive or serial. Singular in the sense of happening here and now
under these specific set of conditions. Expansive in the sense that its
effects can be felt in other subsequent and simultaneous localities. How
do you activate this complexity of the local in your work?
13
NH: My own work is not specific to Palestine or Israel but to a politics of
warfare and capitalism, and how these intersect in writing through the
example of Palestine. I often ask myself how I can make these lines
visible, depending on the context, asking how can these processes be
connectednot superficially but rigorously as a way to think through the
ways in which these practices (of occupation) have an effect elsewhere.
Language is important here, as you mentioned, to create a vocabulary
that expresses the complexity of what were dealing with, and
communication is important, in terms of how we can make these thoughts
graspableMalcolm X is very inspiring in this regard.
As well as the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman. Weizman recently

wrote an article called Lawfare, which he wrote in March of 2009
shortly after the assault on Gaza in December 2008January 2009.
This piece illustrates how the micropolitical works macropolitically.
And yes, as you mentioned earlier, micropolitics is not something to
simply idealize or fetishize, and Deleuze and Guattari have warned
us of this that micropolitics has the tendency to become
microfascist. Weizmans article brings this to light in some way.
According to Weizman, the attack on Gaza was not only the worst and
most violent attack that Israel conducted on the Palestinian people, but it
was also one in which Israeli experts in international humanitarian law
the area of law that regulates the conduct of warwere most closely
involved.1 Weizman calls this lawfare, the use of law as a weapon of
war as one American judge put it.
Lawfare operated here at many different levels. First, the Israeli military
was concerned with how to legalize largescale destruction so that they
could conduct highly destructive military operations lawfullythus
legalizing what would otherwise be illegal in the language of IHL, and
avoiding accusations of war crimes. For example, humanitarian
munitions was a term often used to describe the function of highly
advanced military weaponry that they claimed had a smaller killratio
minor collateral damage. What is important to think about here is how
language is being used and by whom. How few are fewanddoes not
every life count?
Second, Weizman also mentions in this article the technologies of

warning. The Israeli military dropped leaflets warning Gazans to leave or
evacuate (we saw this image often in the news). The Israeli army used this
technique in the assault on Lebanon (2006) as well but in Gaza something
1
To read Eyal Weizmans article, see
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/legislativeattack
14
different happened. Not only did the dropping of the leaflets serve to
warn people to evacuate as it had in the past. Now, the leaflets also
had a legal component: if the civilians chose not to evacuate they were
considered to have opted for the fight. To stay behind, to go back to your
house to protect it, meant, according to an international law division
officer, that you were a legitimate target. In this case, lawfare doesnt
humanize war, as these experts claim it does (whatever this means
anyway), but proliferates and justifies it. The range of violence and
destruction becomes elastic in the context of how law, in this case,
becomes malleable.
Gaza became the object of an experiment in lawfare, not only in regards

to weapon testing (such as white phosphorous and DIME we saw in the
many images disseminated) but also specifically in direct relation with the
regulations of IHL. This is important to think about because not only do we
see how language plays an important role in how its utilized to evoke
humanitarian violence, but we also see how the military is working
strategically to change regulations and laws, and work them from within
their limit. What the military does here is work micropolitically at a
macropolitical level, seeing how far the limit can be pushed. This doesnt
just have consequences for Palestinians.
And what is so disturbing and disconcerting is that were always, in effect,

not feeling the distance enough. Even though we know that this is
happening, we know its happening to others, and it is happening
somewhere else. But we need to force the incommensurable distance
into activation, and this goes back to Guattaris plea as well in Remaking
Social Practices, where he says that the challenge is to make these lines
of relations felt, and make them visible. Its hard to make felt the urgency
of action for change the urgency in life when were so comfortable, or
comfortably far away.
I have a problem with the idea of everyone picking their own

battleground and fighting for it. I think this is a strange approachactivism
in fragments. I think what is important, and what I think is difficult and
most challenging, is what Guattari adamantly calls for when he asks how
can we become united and increasingly different?
What connects Palestine to Iraq, and how do we deal with that in relation
to the shooting of Freddy Villanueva in MontrealNorth? I dont mean we
need to identify each solitary event and try to figure out some kind of
common ground to connect the situations. I am suggesting that we need
to work from a politics in contextwere living in a time where we see the
lines of connection between capitalism and warfare getting blurrier and
15
blurrierand to go back to Stengers concept of mesopolitics, we need
to begin from the middle, and to rebegin, as Massumi also suggests.
The building of walls is a good example of how events in one place are
intrinsically connected to those in other places how the local meets the
global. Walls can be thought of as systems of thought/systems of power
that are perpetually creating the have nots of the world, isolating and
containing them. For example, the Israeli wall is not just a Palestinian
problem. Of course, its specific to Palestine and the occupation, but its
also proliferating similar initiatives all over the world. Mike Davis brings
attention to this. New walls are being built in Saudi Arabia at its border
with Yemen, in India at its border with Kashmir and Bangladesh, Bhutan is
walling its border with India, Botswana is building an electric fence
alongside its border with Zimbabwe, Costa Rica has walled its border at
Penas Blancas, and then there is the long fence along the Mexican
America border, some of it still unbuilt, but all of it very much a part of the
MexicoAmerica divide. The significance of this is overwhelmingnot
because its new, its not, weve seen this happen elsewhere and in
different forms, with gated communities, and new urban development
strategies. But what is significant about this particular set of wall
construction is that the walls are emerging from the context of the global
economy of warfare and occupation.
So, how can we create a vocabulary that can speak to the complex
relations between these vast landscapes of difference? How do we get at
the problem of inarticulation to what is in actuality ungraspable? I think
we have a lot to learn from fiction and poetry. And Foucault has a
beautiful quote that I keep going back to when confronting this problem
in my own writing. Foucault, speaking of Blanchots work, writes, Fiction
consists not in showing the invisible, but in showing the extent to which the
invisibility of the visible is invisible.
EM: Perhaps an event such as Society of Molecules is a starting point. I

mean this in the sense that Society of Molecules as a concept and as a
distributed micropolitical event can never contain the meaning of its
political activity. It is a call, a proposition. Its potential will only be known in
its continued becoming. In this sense, there is no full visibility of its politics,
no making sense of it across or beyond existing political constituencies.
Society of Molecules is a call for the makingapparent of an already
existent commotion at the micropolitical level. Harnessing this commotion
may be another way of embracing the urgency in life you speak about.
Urgency in life is a call to create again, from the middle. It is a call to
invent techniques for the making perceptible of transversal operations,
16
and to tweak these techniques as they are captured and reified. As
Nietzsche said: Was that life? Well then! Once More!2
2
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All , trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Penguin Books, 1966) p.157.
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Plants Dont Have Legs
An Interview with Gina Badger, 30 January 2008 & 3 June 2009
Gina Badger is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Visual Studies at MIT.

She holds a degree in Art History and Studio Art from Concordia University in
Montral.
I had the pleasure to speak with Gina about her work in detail and its political
implications.
Gina Badger: GB
Nasrin Himada: NH
NH: How do you think about process as either a concept and/or a practice, or
how do you see these two connect, specifically using some examples from your
recent work?
GB: There have been a couple of different ways that my work develops,
involving different relationships to process. Most recently, I've been pretty
committed to thinking about work as process that doesn't end in a product, that
doesn't think about audience in any kind of traditional sense. I've been going
back to Alan Kaprow's writing, and trying to get a real sense of what he meant
by "experimental art," and what it would look like today. This is an art that doesn't
care whether it's art or not. It draws inspiration from recent critical debates
surrounding art, and is relevant to them, but cannot comfortably be called art
itself. I've just royally frustrated my supervisors [at the MIT Visual Arts Program] by
insisting that my final project didn't have an audience. The project is called The
Little Dig, and I've been describing it as a temporary non-monetary economy
based on the exchange of dirt. In a sense The Little Dig happened from May 11-
16 in Boston's financial district, when I actually had this pile of dirt sitting there on
the grass in front of the Fed [Federal Reserve Bank of Boston], but the real Little
Dig started in February, and it was this long and very bureaucratic process that
involved specialists at the MIT Insurance Office; the Environment, Health, and
Safety Office; my programs administrative staff; the programming coordinator
at the Rose Kennedy Greenway, Kate Miller, who was so involved she basically
became a collaborator; a couple of my housemates and a bunch of friends;
1
Micropolitics : Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. No. 3. October 2009.
www.inflexions.org
and people off of craigslist who provided and then took away the dirt. My
supervisors, if I understand them right, basically want me to say that these
people were my audience. [My supervisors] have spent their careers working on
opening up really challenging questions about publics and audience - work that
I am totally indebted to. But I want to get into the process of work in a radical
way that actually denies the possibility of an audience. The Little Dig makes
meaning through the social relations that it generates, which are based on
exchange and the creation of value, and not on the way that an audience
perceives all of it.
NH: This hasn't always been the case though, has it? There are other examples of
your work that have a more clear relationship to an audience, and I wonder
whether you might talk about them, which might allow you to talk about other
kinds of processes too. And maybe we can backtrack a bit and talk about your
first project at DARE-DARE [Centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire de
Montral].
GB: The basic structure and trajectory of that project, called Scatter, came
about from a couple of different research interests. One of which was the
question of how it is that plants move, which is seemingly simple. Its about
weeds, movements of winds, animals, berries, and eating, digestion, and shit.
These are all of the seemingly natural ways that plants move around using their
seeds. Plants dont have legs, they move in other ways. But of course, plants
dont live in the world alone with just animals, they live with people. In the
beginning, this project was going to be called Leggy because I wanted to
emphasize the movement as well as the ways that humanseven though we
think that we are following our own economic and political motivationscan
end up acting as prosthetics for other things in the world, in this case, plants. So
the question of how plants get around is tangled up with these huge
movements of imperialism, colonialism, tradeacross human history. This is an
amazing and complicated relationship, in economic, cultural, and ecological
terms. I became really interested in trying to tell those two histories together
human migrations based on economic and political motivations, specifically
European settlers arriving here in Canada, and the migrations of plants that
accompany and inform the human movements. I was reading Gananath
Obeyesekere on Captain Cook, who traveled with a shipful of plant seeds and
domestic animals, and whose project of colonization included domestication in
terms of ecologies. In retrospect, after having worked a lot more with these
ideas, I would describe this as an ecology of colonization that considers
colonization as a holistic process, one whose violence can be complicated and
subtle, messed up somewhere between cultural and environmental.
NH: Did your investigation start with one plant in particular?

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GB: No. Initially, it started a little further back than Scatter, with another project
called Desire and Conquest that looked at the colonial spice trade and the
movements of plants involved. I was just having the surprising realization that
food and spices are plants. It might seem obvious, but the food we eat is so
often divorced from its production process that it can take a while to see that.
Realizing that something like a powdered spice originally came from the seeds
of a tropical plant was really huge for me. At the same time, I was also
beginning to learn field botany. The distinctions between indigenous and non-
indigenous plants set off some trips in terms of the linguistic similarities between
botanical and human social descriptors. The language of alien or invasive
versus indigenous has pretty eerie undertones when compared to xenophobic
language, not to mention that it betrays a pretty impoverished way of thinking
about ecosystems. This obviously brought me to the set of questions that make
up Scatter, which was meant to engage a more dynamic sense of ecologies in
which humans and nature are not separate, and where it's obvious that
ecosystems are always changing over time.
Scatter began with a series of workshops, kind of personalized, domestic

workshops in peoples' homes, which reminds me that there was a subtitle to this
project, something like a Domestic Garden. I dropped that, which is maybe
relevant because a lot of this process hasnt made it into the public presentation
of Scatter, largely because its complicated in a way that feels distracting, but
maybe I can talk about that later on. For the workshops, I would go over to
peoples houses with a collection of seeds
NH: And these were people you knew?
GB: Yes. I sent out a casual invitation to people I knew. Over a couple of weeks
time, I would go over to their houses and we would go through the process of
how you start seeds: whats the growing medium, how moist do they need to
be, how much light do they need, all these sorts of questions. Throughout this
time I also had seedlings starting in my bedroom.
This first part of the plants moving was a kind of social map of relationships
distributed throughout a neighborhood. In this case, a desire for knowledge is
another part of the reason plants movebecause we wanted to learn
something and [the plants] get tangled up in our process. The plan was for
seedlings from all of the different houses to converge in the garden at DARE-
DARE about a month later. What really interested me is that the garden was to
be situated in this wild field full of similar weeds, but with much less variety that
was going through this process of succession. Mostly, at the time, there was
mugwort [Artemesia vulgaris], goldenrod [Solidago spp.] and vetch [Vicia
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cracca]. I was thinking about the field where Scatter would be as a site where I
could intervene in and observe micro-ecological processes. I was asking
questions like who are the first plants to arrive when soil is really messed up, and
what are they doing to the soil when theyre there? Succession is the process by
which ecologies shift over timeplant communities come and go, as they die at
the end of a season they decompose and actually create topsoil so that there is
more humus for the next seasons plants, or the plants that were there before
have slowly changed nutrients that are in the soil because they have symbiotic
relations with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, maybe some of them have facilitated
chemical processes in the soil that prevent contaminants from remaining
bioavailable. Situating this planned garden, as an embodiment of human
desires in a way, was an intervention into the process of succession. In order to
really see that part of the process, though, you have to be willing to wait for a
couple of seasons to see if the plants I put there had started to escape the
boundaries of the garden. And it did, the plant community has really changed
since the garden has been there. And so
NH: You mean it changed the actual space of where DARE-DARE was located?
Under the overpass?
GB: Yes, definitely, but it would be ridiculous of me to claim responsibility for it.
At one point when I had just planted this garden, I did a full survey of all the
plants that were on the site, and there were many different species, but
predominately the three I listed before. I was visiting this week, and now there
are a bunch of plants that I didn't see in the beginning: dandelion [Taraxacum
officinale], chicory [Chicorium intybus], mullein [Verbascum thapsus], lots more
red clover [Trifolium practense] than before, milkweed [Asclepias syriaca], silvery
cinquefoil [Potentilla anserina]. I'm pretty sure that the mullein is there because
of the ones I planted in Scatter. Its not a controlled experiment, so its really
hard to say for sure what happened. Mullein is a bi-annual, so its only this
summer that they've turned up. One of the reasons I wanted to put mullein there
was that it produces these tiny little seeds, thousands and thousands of them, so
there is no way you cant infect the space when you plant a plant like that.
There was a clearer cross-contamination in the other direction thougheven
after the first season. There were goldenrods growing inside the garden that I
didnt plant there. There was a circular section at the bottom of the garden that
I left totally empty, and two sumacs [Rhus typhina] self-seeded there. Now
they've both grown into little shrubs.
NH: When you plant like this how do you think about ethics? How are you
changing a space? You cant pre-determine this but you know that something
is going to happen in the next little while or so. How do you ecologically think
about ethics in that way, but also in terms of your own practice in coming into a
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space like this and changing it?
GB: I will try to answer that in two ways. First, Ill address the complexity of the
process and explain why it is I dont usually talk about the private workshops that
preceded Scatters planting, and then I will address more directly the question
of ecological ethics. Its about experimentation and control in both instances,
and the ethics of this are really not clear. Its important to think about the ethics
of what were doing before we begin, but its also really important to be ok
about things happening maybe even if they seem like theyre disruptive or
detrimental at first
NH: Right, because its an ethics-in-the-making, I mean in terms of how youre

going about doing it. So you dont know whats going to happen.
GB: Exactly. So, the first part, I can address that very clearly. The intention of
doing these kinds of private workshops was to share a kind of learning
experience.
NH: And the private workshops were about how to get going, get the seeds
growing?
GB: Yes, and they turned up a totally unexpected result that seemed at first like
a total bust. But in the end, I loved the way that it turned out. I think that's
because it offset one of the things I am consistently insecure about when it
comes to working with plants, or working with an ecological thematic. It seems
to people that this has some kind of do-gooder type of ethics a feel good,
optimistic idea about nature, about the environment, about our relationship as
people with the environment. One of the ways I can separate myself from some
banal assertion of 'nature as good,' is through more nuanced, maybe amoral
ethics, through the clear possibility of failure, and disappointment and death.
And this risk that I describe was definitely present with the workshops, because it
was spring and here I was going over to my friends' houses to plant seeds, and
also sharing this learning process with them, you know its kind of loving and
intimate, as I said before. These things seem to suggest that there is something
wholesome and enriching about our encounters with plants and nature. But
what ended up happening, partially because I didnt know what I was talking
about, and partially
NH: Because youre learning this too as you go along, right?
GB: Thats right. And partially, because its actually complicated and difficult,
and having a tiny little seedling living in your house was kind of like having a
baby anything, you cant just not come home one night because it will die. So,
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what ended up happening in the weeks after these little workshops was that
everyones seedlings died. It was really opposite to my original intention; it
became an exercise in failure and disappointment. Initially, I was horrified that I
had caused that to happen but in retrospect I am really happy to say that that
was a totally fine outcome, and the ethics of it are complicated, because
instead of people having a nice learning experience, what I gave them was this
awful feeling of trauma and guilt. When you kill something, even if it is a tiny
seedling, theres real disappointment and a sense of having done something
wrong. The failure of the workshops almost becomes a separate project, and
maybe thats why I dont talk about it so much when I talk about Scatter, which
is really the garden. Scatter, which is like le jardin en movement, to steal the
term from Gilles Clment, has really become about creating an intervention into
a living system and then just observing the long-term effects of that intervention.
Which brings us to the second part of the question about ethics, concerning the
health of ecosystems and ideas about how they do or should change, and the
whole alien/indigenous distinction comes up again. There are definitely clear
examples of introduced species causing a bunch of ecosystem damage. Plants
like purple loosestrife [Lythrum salicaria], Japanese knotweed [Polygonum
cuspidatum], or garlic mustard [Alliaria petiolata], which have adaptations that
give them a serious competitive edge in a given microclimate, and they are
able to establish themselves so well that they choke out other species.
At the time of Scatter, I was only just being exposed to ecologists for the first
timetalking with people who work in nature reserves, real conservationists,
whose goal is to preserve nature at a certain point in historical timeand to
these people invasive weeds are definitely the worst enemy. While I am not
going to argue that wiping out species diversity is a good thing, the
conservationist idea that nature should more or less stay the same has always
been very problematic for me. A big part of the reason I dont want to
associate with the mainstream discourse of sustainability is because arguing that
the way to have a good relationship with the earth is to do as little as possible to
it, is to make reductionist and teleological claims about what nature is and how
its supposed to work. And to me thats not a satisfying way to be a human in
the world. I have been trying somehow, over the past couple of years starting
with Scatter, to develop a more nuanced sense of what it means to be in the
world, to be part of the natural world, to know that its impossible to not leave a
trace, so instead the traces that are left have to be deliberate and loving, which
is not to say that we might not classify them as harmful. There's no way that I'm
advocating a new purple loosestrife; I am absolutely not talking about that
scale of disruption. But once these plants are here, it might be better to try
thinking about them in a different way. For example, for the most part Japanese
knotweed is considered an invasive that needs to be wiped out, and in a way
its kind of true because it messes with the diversity of urban plant life. It
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reproduces rhizomatically and grows in these massive, dense thickets that block
out the sun and prevent other plants from growing in its understory. In another
way, ecologists who are more into something like disturbance ecologythat's
Peter del Tredici's term for an ecology that takes the urban context and human
presence into account and doesnt try to make equations about what an
ecosystem should look like based on the absence of human interventionwill
argue that knotweed is great because you can eat it like asparagus in the
spring, and it tastes like rhubarb in pies, and even if its a difficult plant to
eradicate it still performs ecological functionsits still absorbing carbon dioxide
and exhaling oxygen, and its still providing a habitat for bugs. In an urban
context, where were still struggling to find a roster of green inhabitants that are
going to help the city become a healthier place, knotweed is not so bad, and
maybe we can figure out a way to live with it. Anyway, the plants that I work
with, as much as they are really aggressive and have pretty impressive capacity
to reproduce and move around and sort of colonize areas, already exist in this
city, theyre pretty common. Theyve been here for hundreds of years for the
most part.
NH: And those plants are mullein
GB: Mullein, burdock [Arctium lappa], goldenrod, yarrow [Achillea millefolium],

stinging nettle [Urtica dioica], bee balm [Monarda fistulosa], dandelion, red
clover, raspberry [Rubus idaeus], plantain [Plantago major], violet [Viola spp.]...
NH: Workshops have been part of your practice, either indirectly or directly. I
know youre interested in practices of pedagogy, and I know you had
mentioned this once before, that the workshop format for you is very important
in terms of how you learn, and how you can also extend yourself to others who
want to learn with you. I dont know if you have any more thoughts on this, but if
you do I want to talk about some of the techniques you have experimented
with, or just general thoughts on how you connect pedagogy to your artistic
practice. Are they connected? And in some cases if they are, what was the
experience of that? Was it a productive outcome?
GB: The format of the workshop, which I understand to more or less explicitly
acknowledge the phenomenon of collective knowledge production, is
something that Ive only just begun to see as an important part of how I present
work. Thats been the case, I would say, basically ever since I started studying
plants. I think thats largely because the system of learning plant medicine is
significantly less formal here [in the US and Canada], as compared to
institutionalized university education. Not to say that the people Ive studied with
werent incredibly experienced; for the most part theyve been practicing
herbalists for years, and have a huge body of knowledge that combines
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traditional smarts and centuries of practice with modern scientific data. At first, I
studied with Valrie Lanctot Bdard, from an herb school in Montral, Flora
Medicina. They run this amazing week-long field botany course that combines
taxonomy and identification skills with a basic introduction to plant medicine.
Its really special because you are outside in the forest. Thats when I learned
about a really important teaching form for herbalists: the plant walk. I started
learning about plants in these kinds of informal outdoor situations, and I think
that this process of hands-on learning acted as a kind of initial enabling force to
start doing a similar kind of thing. Plant walks are personalized and
improvisational, you combine the knowledge youve gained over time with
things that come up as you go, mixing in anecdotes and so on, and its assumed
that the people who are attending also have something to contribute. It ends
up being conversational a lot of the time. It made sense to use Scatter and the
Parc sans nom as a teaching tool for this kind of group learning exercise.
Another project, called Plants in Your Pants, which started off as a guerrilla
poster installation, eventually turned into a workshop series by the same name,
which was an introduction to DIY herbal gynecology. This project was pretty
close to my heart, because this area of plant medicine was really what got me
interested in botany in the first place. It was pretty clear to me at the time that it
could be a sketchy thing to be teaching people something that I was only just
learning myself, and so there was a real impetus to try and re-define the
question of learning and teaching. Rather than framing myself as an expert, I
would explicitly acknowledge that I was learning too, and that rather than give
rigid instructions, I was trying to essentially infect people with a kind of curiosity
and drive to learn and teach themselves through this extended process of
research and experimentation. In herbal medicine, its clear from the start, even
or especially with experienced practitioners, that even if you know your plants
inside out you are always going to have to experiment when it comes to
individuals and their particular conditions. More than rules, this system of
knowledge is about observation, attention to detail, and experimentation. So
with something like herbal gynecology, the point is not to give people a final
solution to their yeast infection, but to offer an alternative to allopathic
medicine, which doesnt have a whole lot to say about chronic conditions.
The best outcome with these workshops would be to initiate a different way of
thinking about health and bodies, and about our own ability to be engaged in
and responsible to that in a really personal and hands-on way. Besides Plants in
Your Pants, there have been other projects that utilized written instructions as
way to illicit participation, like In the Fall We Plant Bulbs, where the actual
material of the project was a little seed envelope with a clove of garlic inside
that comes with instructions on how to plant the bulb. I wanted to take up the
form of instruction, not necessarily as a way to create a relation of power, but as
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an invitation to engage in a learning process. I see this, along with the workshop
format, as constituting elaborate invitations to engage. One of the things about
an invitation is that its quite polite; its quite formal and easy to say no to.
Recently, Ive started to think about that critically, in terms of whether it actually
works in the way I want. In fact, I am interested in being a little more forceful, in
trying to figure out different strategies to get people involved. The form of the
invitation is limited because people can chose to take it up or not, and maybe
its too polite or too complete in itself to be as compelling as I want. By
complete I mean that the invitation is received as an idea or a concept that is
enough on its own. It doesnt need to be taken up because it seems like you
already get the point. I am interested in trying to find more forceful methods to
illicit participation or engagement, because since this work is about process and
not just ideas, I really want people to engage with me in following through.
NH: How would you re-think the invitation in relation to something that would
initiate a more forceful engagement? How forceful do you think you would
want to be in that kind of situation? Because when you were talking about the
invitation being a kind of polite formality you leave space there or room to say
no, to have the choice to say no, or to not provoke too much a certain type of
pre-determined direction, but really take it up in terms of how you want to go
about experimenting with what you give. Again, I think thats really important to
think about in terms of ethics, and its something Ive been struggling with in
terms of pedagogical practice, how do I foster an environment where
participation is necessary for something to take place but being careful about
how I am also creating a relation of power.
GB: Now Im trying to go back over my earlier comment about leading

workshops when I described trying to initiate a process of co-production of
knowledge, trying in that instance to create a situation where there is not a
clear pre-determined relation of power between myself as the facilitator of the
workshop and the people who are participating. And that is a really valuable
thing to try and figure outhow to create and foster a situation where we can
acknowledge that someone has special skills or special knowledge that we
want to learn, but to have that not necessarily determine a relation of power
thats going to then limit what each party can get from the interaction. I dont
want to undermine the importance of that because the larger goal is to disturb
habitual power relation between teacher and learner. It is profoundly
challenging to authority in institutions of learning to pursue that type of
knowledge production, and it is really essential as a kind of ethics. Im not alone
in its pursuit, obviously, thats the goal of student-led education in free-schools,
and of anarchist-initiated skillshares, or Rancires Matre ignorant. But thats a
different kind of experiment than this thing I was just talking about with the
formal invitation. I want to draw out why I think the invitation can fail. I will just
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talk quickly about an aspect of the In the Fall We Plant Bulbs project, the garlic
project. In a way, it shares the same problems with another project, which is
called What Kinds of Questions Do Seeds Ask?, which is a more recent project. In
both instances, with both Seeds and Bulbs, there is a pretty tidy little invitation
that I present my potential audience with. Bulbs asks people to think about what
it is about the city that they love, and to go there, and to be there in a kind of
messy, dirt-under-the-fingernails kind of a way. When I hand you the package
thats what Im asking you to doto go get dirty, not just think about it!
In the case of Seeds, its a similar format, using the invitation, made up of a set of
instructions, as well as an object, and thats the starting point. But in this case, I
am asking people to consider how this seed bomb, this little caked up ball of
clay-powder and compost and seeds, how it is a technology, and how does an
engagement with technology change, in a pretty fundamental way, our own
spatialized movements and desires. Having a technology like a seed bomb in
your hand enables you to do something different in the city. It not only provides
the trajectory of throwing the seed bomb, but it makes you think like a plant,
maybe even affecting in a basic way how is it youre seeing the city youre
engaged with. In both instances, I would say, those invitations have been far less
successful than I would have wanted them to be and its partially because the
invitation was too polite, and it seems that as an idea it does enough. If people
are going to jump in further, the invitation needs to be really sexy, or you need
to be trickier. The fact that its an invitation can make it too easy to say no.
In these two specific instances, I think that is also directly connected to the fact
that I presented both Seeds and Bulbs in an art context, where there is this
tradition of object creation, and fetishization, artists multiples and free art. And
so I am handing out these little packages with bulbs of garlic in them, and
theyre nice little objects, you know I put time and effort into them, into the way
that they look, and in the seed bombs are pleasurable objects that have a
good weight, and color, and texture. In both instances people were in love with
the ideas to some extent, and theyre also attracted to the object, so it
becomes something to hang on to it passes for an art object in its own right.
So, in a way it doesnt offer enough and in a way it offers too much of the wrong
thing. I would say those failures seemed more serious than failure of the dead
seedlings in Scatter; with the failed invitation the problem is that nothing
happens. And so in trying to sort through how to move forward with these
projects Ive got a few thoughts, and two of them are still in their infantile stages
and I am not sure how theyre going to work themselves out. One of which is the
question of how to make these invitations appear as objects that people dont
want to hold on to; how do I make an object that people dont want to keep,
thats kind of a repulsive object. In a way, with the seed bomb the answer to
that is to go with an earlier prototype that has really stinky pelletized chicken
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manure in it, so you dont want that sitting on your desk or anywhere around
you, it smells terrible. And so, those kinds of offensive strategies are a sort of
possible way to go. The second of which is an entirely different strategy toward
eliciting participation which I have started to fool around with a little bit, and just
as a concept, not as a methodology, sort of around the same time as the
invitation, which is the idea of contagion. I had the pleasure of working with a
woman named Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, she was also pursuing a research
project about the question of contagion and specifically as a sort of
participatory and group social phenomenon
NH: Are you talking about contagion as affect or what kind of a contagion are
you talking about?
GB: I will just keep talking about Jacquelines project and hopefully that will
clarify it a little bit, if not let me know. She was thinking about group
experiencesthe example she uses is contagious laughterwhere you cant
refuse. Youre swept up in this experience, which you experience subjectively as
yourself, but it is a different kind of subjective experience because your capacity
to choose has been removed. Our capacity to make choices for ourselves is
what defines us as individuals in a liberal sense. So this messes up that idea of
individuality and subjectivity and creates a kind of exploded sense of
subjectivity where youre at once experiencing something as a group but
always through your own sensual experience as an individual. Jacqueline was
using the physical phenomenon of laughter as a way to talk about that kind of
subjectivity, an infectious hybrid of collective individual-collective subjectivity. I
was really taken by the project, and it helped along my own ideas around
contagion, which are still incubating. Conceptually, its always been important
in terms of seeds and weeds and uncontrolled growth and all that, but Im still
not sure how to incorporate it as a methodology. In a way, pretending that my
projects are just polite invitations is just pretending anyway. Because in fact I do
want to people to at least begin engaging in a specific way. The point about
being more forceful is just more honest, because pretending to be polite is
maybe just obscuring the fact that I am asking that we begin on my terms. In this
case, there is a power relation and paradoxically the ethics of it make more
sense when its more extreme. That seems like an important strategy, but not
instead of the more open participation of workshops and group knowledge
production. They both seem really important to me as ways to move out of the
failure of the invitations.
NH: Just to continue from that and to go back to the first comment that I made
about your practice being about process, I also think that your art practice in
itself too is about experimentation. Youre really investing a lot in experimenting
in these creative acts that also involve the public in some way, you really take
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risks in terms of what youre trying to make happen in a certain context. And so I
was just wondering what you thought about, or how would you describe your
work as an artist in terms of how these two concepts, experimentation and
process play out.
GB: I mean I have been using the word experimentation a lot, and maybe there
is something slightly irresponsible about that, I am not really sure. But at least the
way we normally think about an experimentembedded in the disciplines of
scienceyou usually try to control it a lot more than I do, and usually try and
quantify the results, and its a little difficult to do that with this type of work. Being
at MIT, this different understanding of the meaning of an experiment has
become clear to me. In the art world experiments are allowed, or even
expected to be open-ended. Theres a different type of knowledge being
produced that isnt quantifiable. It can be quite uncomfortable, but its
necessary to accept provocation and the opening of questions and desires as
the actual work that were doing as artists, and to not instrumentalize that
process in the service of more conclusive knowledge. And this points to a
question that comes up a lot actually, when I am talking to people about these
projects, both Seeds and Bulbs, people always ask questions like, oh do you ask
people to report back to you where they planted them? or do you ask them to
take pictures?, or if you could, would you want to put a GPS inside the seed
bombs so you can map everything out?, and the answer to all of those
questions is absolutely no. The key question of Seeds how does technology
change our desires? is mapped out by the tossing of the bombs, if and when
that happens. And one of the things that I love about it is that the map is
invisible. The map is something that does exist but its not something that anyone
can see, and its absolutely not something that can be quantified. So it requires
a certain act of faith. I have been calling these projects failures because I
suspect that its too easy to ignore the invitation, but in truth I have no idea,
each one of them could have been tossed. Maybe your question about
experimentation is also really crucially linked to invitation and failure, and
figuring out how to balance these things a bit. Without needing to know
everything, or make final conclusions. I think this work will go further not just by
adopting contagion as a methodology or developing more workshops, but also
learning more about how to observe the long-term of the process, as was
possible with Scatter. I still dont know precisely what happened there, or what I
was responsible for, but I can continue to have a relationship with it as the
process unfolds, and this keeps creating opportunities for engagement and
learning.
NH: This will be our last question. Do you think your work is political and how
would you define politics in the context of your work? How do you think about
your work as political work?
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GB: Every negotiation of ethics is totally political, and most of what weve talked
about today touches on that in one way or another. With ethics, as with
ecology, Ive consistently tried to make work that denies fundamental
separations between humans and nonhumans. There are probably two
consistent political projects through all of the work weve been discussing. The
first is the development and articulation of a radical ecology that incorporates a
much more nuanced, much more honest way of thinking about human
engagement in the world. The second project is summed up by the moment of
being explicit about not totally knowing, in which its possible to recognize the
power of being a learner, and to find ways to share the process of learning in
such a way as to create more positions of power.
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Becoming Apprentice to Materials
An Interview with Adam Bobbette, June 2008
I interviewed Adam Bobbette one night in June of last year. At the time, Adam
had just finished working as curator at the Canadian Centre of Architecture
[CCA] in Montral. He also had just completed an artist residency at Eyebeam
in New York City. I wanted to talk to him about his experiences there, what he
was producing at the time, and how his practice as artist, curator, and
researcher converged and influenced one another.
Currently, Adam is working towards a Master of Landscape Architecture at the

University of Toronto in the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape
and Design.
The interview began from the middle of a conversation.
Adam Bobbette: AB
Nasrin Himada: NH
AB: I was writing my thesis [Adam did his first MA at McGill University in the Art
History and Communications Department], and I was writing about trash housing
in the South Western USA, which then got me thinking about garbage, waste,
and excess, generally. So I started doing this work as a kind of "mode of
investigation not to make "art works. That wasnt really my concern.
NH: How would you go about investigating? From just walking around?
AB: Yeah, and from being around a lot of garbage. Something I was going to
say earlier is that I was getting really excited about this notion in [Manuel] de
Landa, which is incorporated from Deleuze, about becoming an apprentice to
materials as a way of relating to materials. The example that de Landa uses,
which I really like, is the metal smith. The metal smith enters into a conversation
with metal by burning and melting it and pushing it to its limits as a bounded
material. You know, you take silver out of a mine, at first you have a discreet
object, and then you put it in flames and you burn the shit out of it and you
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hammer it until it gains fluidity, then you can bend it, twist and turn it into a tool.
But that takes experimentation, working with the material to push it and see
what it can do, where it can go, which is not just about you imposing your
preconceived plan on the material but it is actually entering into a conversation
with the material.
NH: I feel that you took this concept of experimentation further when you began
your practice and residency at Eyebeam. When you began the residency is that
when you started to think about specific projects?
AB: Yes, somewhat on a whim my friend Steve Helsing and I decided to apply
for the residency. Anything that I had done up to that point was always out on
the street, with other people, or on walls (I was doing a lot of graffiti then). I'd
never had an art show or really cared to, nor really cared to see them either
the world of art was pretty distant and not appealing. So without any officially
recognizable experience I made up a bunch of official shows, which really just
meant to account for the stuff we were doing in back alleys and parks and
what not. And we got the residency at Eyebeam. Then it was like, I gotta make
art (laughs). I dont know how to make art, Ive never made art before and
then Steve dropped out of the project and I really had to figure out how to
make art now that I was working alone.
NH: So did you guys collaborate together on projects first before he dropped
out and you started doing your own projects?
AB: Sort of, we had lots of speculative projects. We would sit around a lot and
imagine the things we would like to build, and we co-wrote the proposal, but it
took a turn after it was just myself.
NH: How did it take a turn? What did it enable you to do?
AB: I started working on my own stuff but I also met Jerry Juarez and we had
similar interests. So we started working together and eventually started talking
about our projects as Forays. Our work was really more like experiments, and we
were attracted to amateur naturalists who would go on Sunday "forays" with
their note books, eyeglasses and drawing pads. We started calling our work
Forays which was eventually turned into a group name by other people. People
love proper names.
NH: What was your first project at Eyebeam?
AB: I was shoving light tubes in empty holes in a wall at street level. Sometimes in
a building there would be an old pipe that would go into the building from the
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outside in like a water pipe or a gas pipewhen the pipe is removed, a hole
is left in the brick. It is really common but it is never something that we pay any
attention to. Typically when we look at a wall we complete it, smooth it out, or
fill in the holes. So I inserted plexie tubes into the holes and inside the tube there
would be lights or at the end there would be an image where there could be all
sorts of objects, like kaleidoscopes for instance. As youre walking you see this
little glow coming out of the wall and you might go take a look inside. It's a very
simple way of giving depth to something we might experience as a flat surface.
But if you want a continuation of the garbage theme, one of the projects I did
at Eyebeam was to harvest wild yeast from the air. I built these elaborate traps
that I would stick on the roof at Eyebeam in Chelsea. Basically, a condition is
created inside these traps that lure the yeast in (really it's just sweetened water)
and the yeast gets in there, is activated, and starts to reproduce and turns into
an active yeast culture. From that yeast you can bake bread, which I never
ended up doing. But the initial plan was to bake bread in a solar oven, also on
the roof. So it was this way of turning the air into bread using only the elements
which are immediately present, which was a continuation of the theme of my
interest in garbage. How, for instance, do you work with materials close at hand
and how do you push those materials in such a way as to actually produce
some kind of new condition or innovation.
NH: When you wrote the proposal for Eyebeam did you write about a specific
project you wanted to do?
AB: We were going to work with steam coming out of the ground from the
network of the steam pipes that heat a lot of Manhattan. We were going to
build this crazy mobile shadow theatre that was powered by the steam. Again,
our proposal was to work with the elements that are immediately there.
NH: At the same time you were doing this residency at Eyebeam you also
began working as a curator for the CCA. What did you do at the CCA and did
you find affinities between the two projects, the one for Eyebeam and the one
for the CCA? How did your work between these two places coincide?
AB: Yes, certainly. One was a historical practice, working with archives and
libraries which is its own kind of trajectory, and the other is building and working
with a whole set of different materials. A lot of the research I was doing for the
CCA was based on the initial research I had done for my thesis though it
expanded on the theme of energy in relation to housing. So at the CCA, I was
working on the history of energy, especially during the oil crisis and the
architectural response to the oil crisis, for their large scale exhibition 1973: Sorry
out of Gas. While in New York, I was working with ambient energy, trying to think
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about energy and what the hell it is; at the same time, I was also trying to
distance myself from certain bad kinds of sustainability and nefarious
environmentalisms.
NH: How did you want to distance yourself? Or can you explain the difference
between what you wanted to do or think about and experiment with versus
what you just referred to as nefarious environmentalism?
AB: At the CCA we were looking at the effects of the 1973 oil crisis on the built
environment. This research really helped me formulate critical questions for the
present. When oil prices sky rocketed in '73 in Europe, North and South America,
a really interesting opportunity opened up. The basic infrastructures that made
everyday life possible were suddenly under threat of total collapse. Unique
things started happening: people riding their bikes on the interstate, pedestrians
crowding down-towns, people pulling out the old horse and carriage to ride to
work. The basic separation of functions that determined post-war urbanism
came under threat. Moreover, people re-discovered solar panels, wind power
and the insulating properties of the earth. There emerged what seems to us like
a tremendously exciting moment of experimentation with alternative
infrastructures. This experimentation cut across numerous sectors of society: from
homesteader DIY'ers, universities, the architectural profession, even to President
Carter propping up a solar panel on the roof of the White House. I had to start
asking, what is all of this change for? Superficially, these experiments often
encountered the crisis as a technological problem to be over come. When
you leave the level of questioning here it all seems quite straightforward, and
also optimistic. We can simply produce technological solutions to what are
ostensibly technical problems. Architecture, as a discipline, is so often mired in
this naive optimism the disciplines myopia. It became clear to me that there
were other forces driving technological experimentation. For instance, people
started shoving their suburban homes underground in order to save on heating
bills. The temperature below the surface of the earth is much more constant
than above, eliminating the drastic temperature swings brought by seasonal
changes. There were plans for entire suburbs built underground. A number of
these houses were built (and still exist today) especially in the Midwest.
Moreover, there were plans to build town house complexes, subsidized housing,
prisons, offices, universities, all shoved underground. In one sense this is a radical
gesture. For instance, the formal arrangement of the landscape would be quite
different, but they are still prisons, suburbs, and hospitals. This was precisely what
was fascinating to me: what motivated so much "experimentation" during the
oil crisis were forces seeking to find more economical means to preserve already
existing and dominant social forms. So in reality, technological and formal
inventiveness in this crisis is put in the service of conservation, the suburbs remain
the same, the social organization of the suburban house remains in tact: two,
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three or four bedrooms, kitchen, living room, tv room, garage. People can
afford to drive to work now because they have no heating bills. The suburb
remains an enclave of middle class reproduction. The oil crisis is exemplary for
displaying the voracious ingenuity of middle class suburban self preservation.
This has informed my own scepticism towards sustainability; there is a re-

emergence of discourses of crisis along side technological triumphalism, but
what is actually going to change, or what social relations are we trying to
maintain when we ask for technological and infrastructural change? Finding
cheaper and renewable sources of energy so that we can recharge our cell
phones, drive cars, watch television, and keep buying cheap stuff, is nothing
interesting; it transforms infrastructural organization without touching social form.
This is why Forays has been interested in the end of the world, as a way to
imagine and live through a real crisis that opens up the possibility of
experimenting with social form.
NH: Following on that, I think a good example that illustrates well what you are
just describing is the hot dog oven at Eyebeam. I am interested to know about
how it was made and about the process.
AB: It was a continuation, obviously, of these themes. The hot dog oven is
basically a small oven, six by six inches square and two feet long, made of sheet
metal and dryer tubing from home depot. You connect it to a man hole cover
where the steam is coming to the surface and the oven simply captures that
steam and in it you can cook basically whatever you like. I did it in Grand
Rapids, Michigan for a show that was there, and I did it as part of a
collaborative project with Jerry. Jerry and I had cooked using steam before on
this night that we camped in Manhattan on New Years Eve. It was for this end
of the world project that we did and for which we had made a more basic
prototype of the steam oven out of the light bulb cages used on construction
sites. We filled it in with foil and put a hot dog in it, then you dip it into the cone
(in Manhattan they have these cones that stick up 8 or 9 feet to keep steam
away from street level so people dont walk through and get burnt). So we had
a rod, it was almost like a fishing thing, and then we dipped it into the steam.
The steam oven was a slightly more sophisticated version than that but ran the
steam directly from the ground into the oven. So I cooked hot dogs in it. On top
of the oven there is a glass container that when a steam goes in it re-condenses
on the top
of the container and then drips back down as water into a cup. And then you
can make tea.
NH: Can you talk more about the location. Where it was set up exactly or why
you chose that location?
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AB: For Pragmatic reasons. Forays was invited to show in Grand Rapids. I was
there and the plan was to do a new piece. Jerry and I had a bunch of ideas
we were working with and werent sure exactly what to do, and we decided to
go with the steam oven largely because Grand Rapids has a really extensive
steam network or steam infrastructure which is pretty rare for American cities. It
runs through all of downtown and heats buildings, but also restaurants use it for
hot plates in the kitchen. Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes, the steam
is actually generated in Grand Rapids by burning garbage. So the incinerator
and the steam, the garbage incinerator, and the steam are connected. They
put all this garbage in there and burn it, and the heat from the burning garbage
boils the water and sends the steam running through the whole city. But there
are these certain low points in the steam network where water collects, and at
these points the water gets shot out of the system and re-converted into steam
when it hits the air. Thats why it's coming out of the ground.
NH: What other projects did you work on with Jerry?
AB: We collaborated before the steam project on the cocoon project.
NH: What is the cocoon project?
AB: Well, the cocoons were these portable sleeping devices, basically
hammocks that were built out of stolen material, hacked from construction sites.
Jerry and I were talking about the re-purposing of infrastructures, like steam, and
the re-purposing of materials. And this again, is also related to de Landas
concept of the becoming apprentice to materials, which means entering into
an experimental relationship with it. Also, we were into exploring open-source
architecture, or what it would mean to create open-source architecture. For us,
that meant things like hacking, stealing, and thieving, breaking and entering
basically, transgressing notions of private property and real estate. The cocoons
were made out of a bunch of materials through different iterations. One of
them was postal envelopes, which you can get for free from post offices in the
US and theyre made out of Tyvek. Tyvek is really an amazing material, and its
generally really expensive. The postal envelopes are free and you can go and
take however much you want. Jerry would go and take piles and piles of these
envelopes and we would open them up and flatten them out and sew them
together. Jerry was also making dresses out of them and we made a cocoon
out of them. So a cocoon is a one person sleeping arrangement that can hang
from basically anywhere and that will hold your weight. We used Tyvek, but also
construction netting, which is what they put on scaffolding on construction sites
to keep the dust down. We would just climb into the scaffolding at night and
hack out a chunk. We also made them out of one dollar beach mats that you
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can get in any Chinatown shop, and theyre plastic. Because we were
interested in pushing materials it also then turned us to process. We started
thinking about process and less about objects. Creating an aesthetic object
something that is pretty or appealing, or anything like thatstopped mattering.
It was less interesting. What did matter was where materials take you. Where do
you go to find them? Who do you meet? What kinds of situations do you get in?
You enter into this creative relationship with the infrastructure of the city. It takes
you to places like post offices, constructions sites, abandoned buildings, or
websites where people give stuff away. So Jerry ended up in these interactions
with people in midtown, talking with crazy old ladies because theyre giving
away cotton batting, tons of cotton batting, so she actually enters into a
relation with somebody that otherwise she never would by virtue of trying to
escape a commodity relationship, or a relationship based on monetary
exchange. As were thinking more and more about process and where the
material is taking us, where are we going to find the material, we really start
orienting our projects around that to the point that when we show projects we
would try to even shrink away from showing objects and just show process.
When we showed the cocoon project at Eyebeam, we had the cocoons but
they were rolled up and mostly hidden, otherwise it was photographs and a
map of every step that we took to create themevery place we went to, every
material we used, the knots that we used to tie the ropes, all that just to show
that this is a process, and to open up that process to people.
The cocoons were for different purposes. Initially, they were built for squatters in
New York City who were protecting community gardens that were going to be
destroyed by the city, and the cocoons made an easy way to get up and into
tree-sits, so that if the city was going to demolish a park somebody with a
cocoon could climb up into a tree, pull it out, sling it up, and then youre in a
tree and the city cant bulldoze anything because youre in the tree. But it was
also used to sleep in construction sites, scaffolding it could be used for
anything. And it could be made from just about anything. It's really a very
flexible object. The materials that we chose, the sites where we installed it,
emerged from our own interests but in no way are meant to dictate any future
iterations of the cocoons. Tree squatters could use them but also someone
might be more interested in the techniques of shoplifting, or putting on a harness
and scaling a building or a tree. Someone else might use a different material
entirely, a tarp for instance.
This is the reason why we began thinking of them as cocoons in the first place. A
cocoon by nature is an organism in an intense state of transformation, in a deep
state of transformation. The whole structure of this bugits bodyis liquefying as
it is re-configuring into a new form. The new form it is going to take is not
determined but is quite open. We know that a butterfly is going to come out but
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we dont know what the butterfly is going to look like, how many spots its going
to have on its wings, the exact place of its legs. It is in a state of transformation,
an open state of transformation.
NH: Did you have people, strangers,, want to try and cocoon themselves, go
cocoon in the trees? Did anyone approach you and ask questions about what
you were doing?
AB: Well, I mean New York City is fucked up and doing something like that in the
park you dont get people wanting to try it but you do get people taking
pictures; people feel like there is something arty going on, or some kind of
event, so theyll take out their iPhones and snap a photo of it, and if they see it in
the paper the next day theyll be like I was there. The intention behind it was
to build it as a tool that can be spread to other people, and it was like look, we
found out this way to do this, we've used these methods, they are not perfect,
but they open some exciting possibilities.
NH: So you gave them
AB: We didnt actually end up giving them to people, but I mean thats part of
the problem were not great technologists[ laughs]not yet.
NH: Talk a little bit more about what Forays is doing now?
AB: Well, after we cooked stuff in the oven, we did a project about dumpstering.
We created an iconthese stickers that label edible trash or edible excess. We
would go out and put these stickers on sites where there was edible food and
we would put the stickers there so that the sites were identifiable by foragers.
And yeah, there were a whole bunch of things afterwards. But weve been in a
state of wondering where our practice is at right now. But something that were
working on now has to do with real-estate but its a bit too premature to talk
about.
NH: I am wondering what the collaboration is like or how do you guys work
together?
AB: Good question.
NH: I guess it depends on the project too
AB: Yes, it does depend on the project
NH: And how it changes.

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AB: I cant speak for both of us at all, in this, but collaboration is reallyI dont
really know about collaboration. I am always torn about whether its a lie or not,
in the sense of an ideal sense of true collaboration. Where does collaboration
actually happen? Is it a matter of some kind of Platonic union between two
souls, the creation of a unity, helping out, skill sharing, etc? Sometimes it resolves
pragmatic issues; if somebody has got time to do something that person does it.
It's helpful working on large scale projects, a project that requires people with
different skills, because we obviously work across media, from building structures
to doing design to graphics, were totally all over the place with materials. We
both have different skill sets, and sometimes its like if you can do this you do it
because I cant do it as well. It also includes sharing ideas, pushing each other,
getting stoked about what we each care and think about and sometimes
calling each other out on their shit. You know, perhaps the most interesting
thing about collaboration is conflict, how the fuck to deal with conflict, and how
do you think about conflict or what conflict is. What we might naively think of
as collaboration is often actually the honeymoon phase of collaboration, where
its like two people, three people, etc, who are really excited about working
together and everybody is really totally willing to compromise its not even a
question of compromise, it just works, as you are like new lovers, and all excited
to touch each other, and so you hop right into it. And then you get over this
honeymoon period, and then its like ugh, I dont want it that way, but, I do,
and then well, what do we do, what do we do about that? Thats precisely
when collaboration gets interesting and really difficult and often is the point
where I think to my self, theres no such thing as collaboration, its bogus.
NH: How do you think about politics in relation to your work? Do you consider
your work to be political?
AB: Well, I feel on the one hand there is something that you might call a political
content thats really clear and sort of easy to talk about, you know, there is the
politics of open source technologies or the politics of open source architecture,
or the politics of grass roots architecture, even the politics of a certain
conversation with materials or how to understand a relationship between
yourself and materials. Thats all kind of easy. But what is more interestingand I
should say its more interesting because its difficultis understanding what the
fuck it is to do politics in the context of art, which is not something I have an
answer to and that I am always torn about, and feel sometimes like what the
fuck, this is just representation, that what I do in my practice is basically a way
for me to think through problems that I will then realize in a political sphere,
which is the classic model, right. Its like you do drawings about warfare and
how terrible warfare is and that mobilizes a political action outside the sphere of
art, in the sphere of politics. And then you get wrapped up feeling like art is
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always subsidiary to politics, where the real action is. Conversely, I also think that
art is this really special place where you can manipulate certain structures, if
youre smart enough about it, to make certain things possible which are
otherwise not. And you can use your privilege as an artist to manipulate certain
things. Like the group Wochenklausur who used their position as artists to create
a mobile health clinic for homeless people and street workers in Vienna. They
use their funding and resources as artists-in-residence to fill a need and a service
thats not being met by the state. And their position is that people can call it art
if they want to, but they don't really care as long as it is meeting enough
protocols of the art system to keep them receiving funding so they can do their
projects; in that case, they'll continue to call themselves artists. What they care
about is using their positions as artists to get something done that wont
otherwise get done.
Forays has also been interested in these basic concerns. I think that anybody
whos been involved in DIY culture for awhile has in a sense grown up with a
commitment to skill sharing and mutual-aid models: showing someone how the
fuck you did something, teaching people how to get away with stuff, how to
steal stuff, how to rip stuff off. You spread knowledge because we got it from
other people and we need this kind of sharing in order to help us find ways to
get along with the lives we want to live. And this is precisely the principle of
open-source. But then there is this whole conflict when this methodology enters
the art world. There is a conflict between the art world which stresses originality
and novelty (which is precisely why this kind of work instruction based work
often ushered in under the rubric of relationality is hip right now, because it's
novel) and you end up with situations where you are showing instructions on
how to steal something and people respond by saying what an interesting
work of art. And you cant necessarily reproduce it because if you are an artist
you are demanded to make something that is yours, unique to you. So it's
no longer an environment where these instructions can actually flow around.
But you know, what is striking about this is how all of these questions resonate so
strongly with the instruction based conceptual work of the 1970's where these
same tensions over originality were being taken up. Now I am realizing that
punk rock culture and activist culture have been good friends with Sol Le Wit for
a while now.
NH: How?
AB: Well, the ethics of DIY and Punk Rock culture actually share concerns with
the minimal and conceptual practices of the 1970's and 80's. The DIY or
instruction manual is about destroying the cult of the author, a central pre-
occupation of post-structuralism as with conceptual art. Where you have it
theorized and historicized in post-structuralism you have it played out in a
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different form by artists. Sol Le Witt is probably the most obvious example, his
wall drawings that are completed by other people according to instructions he
sent out. His interest was not in other people completing his work but in how
instructions actually produce conditions for unexpected insertions of originality,
how the instruction is never carried out exactly as described, there are always
divergences and re-appropriations. This is precisely how authorship is contested,
through the little openings that allow for re-appropriation.
Punk culture (at least the one I grew up with) did not produce the same kind of
experiments but at base is concerned with the death of the author and
experimenting with the constitution of other collective infrastructures.
Lately, I have been re-reading Robert Smithson and he is helping me a lot with
the relation between "artistic" production and politics. He is turning me much
more to questions of perception: how we see, hear, feel, taste and talk about
the world, how are these material processes and how are material
arrangements always already political. Distorting, re-arranging, or undermining
the material processes that produce our sense of the world is a deeply
political process. What I have been learning from Smithson, and which you find
taken up by so many others (including Deleuze and de Landa) is that politics is
always enacted through perception. It must allow particular kinds of worlds to
be sensible while foreclosing others. Here then, politics crosses the threshold of
aesthetics. And so what then might it be to practice on perception, what other
kinds of worlds become perceptible? I dont know. Does that make any sense?
NH: Yes.
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Micropolitics in the Desert
Politics and the Law in Australian Aboriginal Communities
Interview with Barbara Glowczewski, 27 November 2008
Barbara Glowczewski: BG
Erin Manning: EM
Brian Massumi: BM
EM: I would like to begin with the question of transpositions of cultures as you
experienced it when you lived in Lajamanu in the late 1970s. This is
exemplified in the story you tell about coming to Lajamanu and wanting to
make an experimental film about dreaming practices within the community.
Once your film was made and viewed in the community, however, you were
surprised to find that Aboriginal people in Lajamanu took umbrage and asked
you why you made them look stupid. They key problem seemed to be a
disconnect between different aesthetic practices and uses of cuts to create
rhythm. I thought we might begin by talking about that experience and then
bringing into it the current experience of the multi-media work that youve
done in and across Aboriginal communities in Australia to foreground spiritual
and creative practices within communities.
BG: The film was cut in quick succession and played with superimposition and
jumps, foregrounding rhythm. This was before we were accustomed, in
popular culture, to quick cutting techniques, superimposed images and
rhythmic play. At the time in 1979, Aboriginal people in central Australia, in
the desert, the Warlpiri people I went to live with, had never seen images like
that and neither had non-Aboriginal people because it was not developed
like it is now. So today if you ask a Warlpiri man or woman, who have seen
such images for many years now, if they like to be represented that way they
would say immediately that its not a problem, in fact they produce
themselves on clips in that way. But in those days all the images that they had
seen were films like Westerns, maybe Kung-Fu films which were shown by the
missionaries in the open-air cinema in the old reserve which they had just
started to govern themselves through Aboriginal council.
I was doing experimental films in France before I went into the field, when I
was 18-20, and those films were made frame by frame, playing on different
kinds of perceptual sensations. For the film I made in Lajamanu in 1979, I
thought to use that technique because of a stupid analogy: I thought the use
of time condensation through rhythmic cuts would be like the condensation
in dreams. Dreaming is so important for Aboriginal people, and I thought if we
condense a lot of visual information into one image it should sort of explain
visually what the dream is about. The second reason was not just conceptual;
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I did not have much film stock and so I thought I am going to use the film like
a fixed frame camera and then well see what happens!
Ritual life was extremely intensive when I arrived in 1979. Day after day the
women were doing their own ceremonies, dancing and painting their bodies,
singing. This was a 16 millimeter camera, which was still mechanical, where
you had to rewind it manually every 30 seconds, and no sound, so it was
already an experiment in itself. Anyway, I was able to process this film, show it
to the women, and they said, as you mentioned, Why do you make us look
as mad, why? Their dancing its not the only kind of dance often involves
jumping on two feet as if making a track, a parallel track, in the sand. They
dont jump very high, they just jump a little bit so it creates a sort of a curve in
the sand and they do it in lines. This creates different designs on the ground
which represent in a way the traveling of the ancestors that they embody
during their rituals, and the crossings of the lines, which are left by those
different ancestors on the land. With my camera, I was filming the dancing
with small frames that, in translation, made the dancing look like
discontinuous, rather than seamless movement. It made it look like the
Aboriginal women were in more than one place at once, moving at a very
fast speed. Their response to the film made clear that the representation in
time of their movement was a key aspect of the content of their ritual. For
them what was important was the real speed of the performance, of the
enactment, of the dance because the speed at which you enact the
traveling from one place to another is itself carrying an information.
Take, for instance, the rainy season. During the rainy season you can travel
very slowly because you will find water holes in many places, which are full of
water because the rain has brought water in places where there are not
permanent water holes. Now if its the dry season and theres no water left,
for the same distance you have to travel very fast, otherwise you will die. This
means you have to dance the ritual fast. Dancing is a way of carrying the
message of survival to the people who participate in the dance and who
watch the dance. All these meanings are inside the performance itself and
its through rhythm that you can learn these things without it being explicit.
EM: Fascinating. Later, when you were designing the multi-media DVD
Dream Trackers were you thinking a lot about rhythm in the design itself?
BG: At the time, the issue was a little bit different because in the meantime I
had filmed the women at normal speed (24 frames for a second), so I had the
proper rhythm for the ceremonies but what was more important, what was
very striking for me, was the fact that the whole system of knowledge of the
Warlpiri people and other Aboriginal people in the desert, has its own system
of multi-media. So along with the development of multi-media technology in
the West, I wanted to foreground and enhance what might be called
Aboriginal multi-media technologies networked forms of thought and
rituals to create a conjunction of the two systems. My goal was to use new
technology to foreground already existing crisscrossing lines and hyperlinks
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active within Aboriginal culture. I found the two technologies, or modes of
thought, very compatible.
For the interactive CD-ROMS, I created an interactive map which I called a

cognitive map, or a mental map, which would show just a selection of a few
Jukurrpa (Dreamings), a few sacred sites for the Warlpiri people (they have
hundreds of places which are named, but I only chose a small sample of 70
places). I wanted to show how these places are connected. Many of them
are connected through a line, which the Warlpiri call Jukurrpa, but also the
different lines are crisscrossed in some places, which are the meeting places
of the different heroes who create those lines by leaving different features of
their bodies in the landscape. The main point was to let the user create his or
her own rhythm by traveling on those lines, changing the voyage and arriving
at a specific place, moving to another story, another ritual, another song,
another film.
BM: The way youre re-thinking the role of the anthropologist in relation to this
project, you describe as an approach of anthropological restitution. I was
wondering if you can talk about that concept?
BG: Yes, it was a challenge when arriving in the field in 1979 in the 1980s to
hear Aboriginal people saying: What are you here for? We constantly have
anthropologists who come and ask questions, many books have been written
on us, but for our own advancement in relation to justice, to self-government,
to recognition to our rights to the land, to recognition for our spirituality, all this
work doesnt seem to be necessary. Very recently, the Warlpiri have had
some happier experiences with anthropology because they won some of
their land back going into a specific tribunal to claim back their land and
there anthropology was used partly to justify those links even though most of
the evidence was coming from the people themselves. The danger was that
testimony of Aboriginal people could be questioned by anthropological
books, which were not saying the same thing as the Aboriginal people in
court. People who were using those books were not the anthropologists, but
some of the lawyers who were representing the state, mining companies, or
any other conflicting interest who would want to take the written word
against the live, oral word. My position as an anthropologist in this situation
was to criticize the old books which are stating things which are not just for
the paper or for intellectual debates, but which have a huge consequence
for the life of the people today. For instance, Radcliffe Brown who was the
founder of Social Anthropology and the first Chair in Australia, has said
through his work that most of the Aboriginal people have a patrilineal system,
where land goes through the father-line. So, today if a group is claiming land
and there are lots of women who have children for instance with non-
Aboriginal men, does it mean that these children are not Aboriginal anymore
and they have no right to the land? Now, it has been shown through lots of
studies that in fact this patrilineal sort of dogma was biased and that relation
to land, transmission and heritage was much more complex and when the
first land rights issues started very often in court Aboriginal people said: Yes,
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we can have responsibility for fathers land, but we also have responsibility for
our mothers land and for our spouses land. So the judge would say Yes,
but you have to choose: which land do you claim? This bring us back to the
mapping of the Dreamings because we can easily understand visually that
lands criss-cross we can question the point, does it belong to line A or line B?
Well in some cases its A, in some cases its B, in some cases, its both. Now our
Western relation to landownership doesnt accept this way of thinking. In the
West we have a very exclusive way of considering property : it either belongs
to A or to B and between A and B there is a boundary. What Aboriginal
people say is that ownership depends on the context and its negotiable.
Again, if we are in a time of easy climate, then everybodys got their land
and they have to use the resources of their land. But when the drought
comes, which can happen every year, or when something extraordinary
happens, lots of people will have to come to the same water hole and theyll
have to negotiate their rights. And how do they negotiate them? They will do
so through very complex references lived and reenacted through Dreaming
rituals which are inherited but can also be re-developed. They can be dreamt
through new interpretations and its this dynamic side which is very important.
So to answer your question, restitution for me was two things.
First, it was to criticize the old data, to say that what has been written is not
fixed and that oral testimony today is not re-inventing tradition, but is an
example of a dynamic system where people always have to survive to
negotiate and re-interpret. Within Jukurrpa there is always both inheritance
and change. There are things which dont change, but what is not changing
is more a feeling rather than the shape it takes. In dreams there are certain
shapes, which are constant. There are different ways of combining them and
different ways of interpreting them, but there are some basic elements which
are fixed. There is a language in the shapes, which is used, but the way its
connected and interpreted is almost infinite.
Beyond what makes you recognize this language or that language, or this
group or that group, there is a system of connection which I would say is
human, but is not given to everybody to use. In the Western world, its the
same thing. We can connect things, but not all of us do it, or not in all
circumstances. Now of course there are some philosophers who prefer that
way of doing rather than other ways of doing, so there is a familiarity, a
system of recognition of the way it works, a pregiven way of connecting.
This links back to the CD-Rom project. When I was conceiving a way of
speaking transversally across cultures, I wanted to find modes of connection
which might open up new ways of seeing and thinking. I wanted to bring
forth a whole cosmology, a mapping of the knowledge of place as
connected by stories. I wanted to find a mode for making apparent the way
the Dreaming works as both a site and a mode of recombination. This is why I
chose multi-media, a way of seeing which in my opinion was very close to the
mode of living of Aboriginal cultures in Australia.
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The restitution through the CD-Rom had two objectives. One was to give
access to the Warlpiri people what had been collected about them by
anthropologists some of the interpretations that I presented through my
publications.1 There is, for instance, a section which is called The Field Notes
where I give my interpretations, excerpts of what I wrote as an anthropologist.
Second, there is a sort of mental infrastructure, which is constructed strictly
based on the recordings that I have done of stories, dream stories, songs, and
rituals. This has been used in Warlpiri schools since 1998. The second objective
was therefore to create a curriculum to be used at once by children and by
those who dont read and write but were happy to have the CD-Rom as a
form of patrimony.
Now the question was Well, this is a fixed work. So what sort of restitution is it?
Life has been mapped and frozen. How can this be a cartography of the
culture and the knowledge of a society which is constantly moving? I see this
as the problem of the archive. All archives are just an instant in time, while
what makes a feeling of culture is how it connects to other archives and how
you use it in the present. Which is exactly what the Warlpiri people do now
when they re-appropriate these kinds of images and produce new usages
through them and new discourses, not just in school but in their daily lives. This,
for me, was one way of thinking restitution. The other restitution is for non-
Aboriginal people, or Aboriginal people who dont live in the central desert of
Australia. This project provides them with an opening to Aboriginal culture.
The challenge of this multi-media project was to say that if you go inside the
local knowledge and try to withdraw from it its mode of thought, you provide
the opportunity for creating new modes of connection rather than imposing
some sort of universal model and then trying to fit a local situation within this
framework.
BM: I just wanted to pause for a minute around the question of the dreaming
because I think its easy for a Western audience not familiar with Australian
Aboriginal culture to misunderstand the term by taking it as one of those
universals, like its mythology, or a system of symbolism. Dreaming also means
law and youve been talking about how its negotiated and brought forth.
When you talk about the dreaming, you often describe it as a virtual space-
time and you emphasize how there are these negotiated practices bringing
into actualization. That means its a living and changing set of practices and
ideas. Could you go into this a bit more?
1
For the Dream trackers CD-Rom go to http://portal.unesco.org/science/en/ev.php-
URL_ID=3540&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
It will soon be republished as a DVD-ROM with one hour and a half of my film archives of
1979 and 1990s. Go to:
http://www.archivesaudiovisuelles.fr/FR/_video.asp?id=849&ress=2748&video=96828&for
mat=68
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BG: I used to explain to students that the dreaming is a bit like a science-
fiction matrix. So its virtual in the sense that everything is already given, in the
dreaming, in terms of possible combinations which are not yet imagined but
where all the elements are there. It doesnt mean that its a finite world. The
elements are there and when you dream, for a Warlpiri person, man or
woman, those elements will be connected into new forms. Now, these new
forms can resonate with forms which are transmitted through the tradition
and repeat a motif which has already been interpreted many many times, or
they can resonate slightly differently. But no matter what there a this feeling of
resonance or recognition as being something that belongs to a story of which
you are part. The Dreaming is both about recognition and sharing, and about
co-creating. Any new Dream will pick up indexes in relation to your life as
Dreaming spirit (a spirit child you embody which comes from a specific place
in the land) that will be interpreted collectively it in such a way that other
people recognize it too. This is often misunderstood, leading people to
accuse Aborigines of inventing new Dreaming when it suits them, such as by
suddenly suggesting that a mining site has always been a sacred site.
What is misunderstood here is that everything in the landscape is meaningful.

Interpretation is not simply built on what has been actually transmitted.
Interpretations change because actual and virtual alliances change. Lets
take an example. In the heart of the Tanami desert there is a place where
from the beginning of the colonization there were strong clashes because of
the gold rush. Somebody found some gold and immediately lots of white
people came and this was a very violent contact for the Warlpiri people at
the turn of the 19th to 20th century. The, both the gold and the people
disappeared. When the Warlpiri got their land back in 1978 immediately big
multinationals came, and 12 big companies signed contracts with the Warlpiri
to explore, digging much deeper for gold with new technologies. And in that
specific case around the Granites there was gold. Only some Warlpiri groups
were initially concerned for this site, but because it was a place of contact
where lots of people had contacted them previously, including Europeans
when they came for the first gold rush, and because it was a place where lots
of people knew there was permanent water, the place was also, in some
sense, a site of multiple crossings and allegiances. Now that there was to be
permanent income from mining, almost all the Warlpiri laid claim to the site,
which raised many debates and conflicts. In the end many groups got a
share in that place and royalties were balanced between the different
groups.
EM: I would like to continue with the question of micropolitics. I understand the
micropolitical as stemming in large part from Flix Guattaris idea of the three
ecologies, where the political surfaces in a relational network or relational
context that is never given in advance. I would be interested to explore with
you how the movement through and with Lajamanu has affected your
politics. It seems to me, in reading your work, that you begin as an invested
young person, on the cusp of becoming an anthropologist, and you emerge
as an activist. Perhaps you can talk about the transversal linkages that move
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you and your politics and allow you to continue learning as an artist, activist
and thinker in an ecology which is itself always changing.
BG: Well, certainly my first meeting and sort of bath inside camp life in
Lajamanu changed my life. But at the same time, I remember having the
feeling, when I was walking in the desert after a bush fire with the women on
a day of big heat with lots of flies, that I had been in this place before. Now
what was that feeling of dj vu? Well, it was a mental image. It was that
image I had had three or four years before, no, I think I was seventeen so it
was more than that, six years before, when I was in the south of France in a
specific landscape and I had taken LSD, and under LSD the whole landscape
had transformed and was elastic. This is a very classic vision when youre
under LSD, but everything was connected by lines, colourful lines which were
breathing, and every step I took was making the environment breathe and
there was a continuity between my body, the land, the sky, and there was
also a very strange sound which I recognized later as the flies in the desert,
which was what brought back the association with the landscape. And here I
was walking in the heat looking at my feet, because its the only thing that
you can concentrate on when youre really hot, and there was this beautiful
red earth and small, little dots of black, the grass being burned, and already
sprouting in some little spots very bright green grass, the new grass coming in,
and I was thinking about this elasticity of the landscape, and its exactly that
feeling that I was also feeling when I was sitting with the women in
ceremonies and all the women would touch each other to paint their bodies
and I was squeezed between two big breasts with my camera and I was
trying to film and everybody was speaking in Warlpiri, and I was trying to
understand. Even in the beginning I had the feeling that my body, although it
was white and the women were black, was part of a touching, elastic,
collective body.
And then I came back to France, in the early 80s, and there was a big
feminist movement and lots of things going on, with many people questioning
what is it to be a woman, trying to define feminine essentialism, and it was a
big shock for me. I showed those ceremonies that I had filmed of the women
to an audience and the reception from the more essentialist type feminists
was to say that they could not recognize themselves in the women with their
big painted breasts dancing and holding big sticks which look like phalluses;
its not us. And I was saying well, it was me when I was in the field so am I
going native?? No I am not! My activism stems from learning with Warlpiri
women, with whom I felt something which I think is very fundamentally human
and has to do with the experience of sharing a collective body. This is what
Flix Guattari is referring to when he talks about agencement collectif and
territoire existentiel. It became a sort of mission, an intellectual mission for me
to prove that what the Aboriginal people had to say today was very
contemporary.
Soon afterwards a huge spread of Aboriginal paintings started being

recognized through the market of contemporary art. I was active in France in
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that period, promoting of the Aboriginal paintings through exhibitions and
conferences and films and so on but even more so I was concerned with the
issue of land and the question of the legitimacy of Aboriginal politics. What
struck me was that it was OK to take paintings because they look beautiful
and they make us dream, but not to take with them the message which is
that these people are anchored somewhere. The answer was: well, too
bad, they were anchored and now they will have to move because the
whole world is moving. After all, no one can stay in one place and all this
discourse of indigeneity is no good if its essentialist.
Now, I wrote a bit about that and at the time, in the 80s, I had no real
problem with the notion of essence. This changed a bit after a discussion Flix
Guattari who told me to be careful. He suggested that there might be a
difference between a singularity and an essence, pointing out that
everything I had written was underlining the complex singularities at the heart
of aboriginal culture. So I started to pay attention to the relation between
singularities and politics. This new approach also followed from Guattaris
ideas about micropolitics.
In the 90s I married an Aboriginal filmmaker, composer, singer and musician,

who was one of the activists who was at the tent embassy in the 70s as a very
young man. We had two children and got very involved in the promotion of a
different way of performing culture to make it exist on the global scene as
well as locally in Australia. We worked with lots of festivals where different
language groups met and re-designed ceremonies for the public. Also here in
France and in Europe we organized many events not just art in galleries but
also stagings of art in its relation to political discourse.
So this was the 90s, and then in 2000 I found myself in another region of
Australia, in Queensland. During the 1990s there was a royal commission on
death in custody which was organized with workshops held in many
Aboriginal communities and in many cities. I took part in some of these events
including the day before my first daughter was born in Derby.
It was incredible to be in those workshops on death in custody because I was

actually witnessing a whole rhizomatic way of building a new idea of society
a society which would have a place in the Australian state. And it was
absolutely incredible working in an environment of Aboriginal people of
different generations with different experiences with the generation of the
elders not knowing how to read and write, and others who did do schooling
but not much because in those days, in the 90s, not many Aboriginal people
had finished university or anything, and watching them invent answers to all
the constraints that the state was bringing to them. In the end the process
didnt restrict itself solely to the theme of death and custody: they were
rebuilding everything, education, health justice system, police, housing,
environmental issues. And they proposed this incredible sort of weaving,
throughout the continent, of more than 360 recommendations, which were
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given to the parliament and voted by the parliament and out of 360
recommendations maybe only 30 were applied ten years later.
I just happened to be in town in Queensland in 2004, invited by James Cook

University and there was a scream on the radio, and I learned through that
scream, that some 20 minutes by plane, or two hours by boat from Townsville,
on an island called Palm Island, the whole population was in turmoil because,
again, there has been a death in custody. One week after the death, the
population was told that the man was found with his liver cut in two and with
four broken ribs. And apparently there was not going to be any inquest. This
was common practice: there had never been any charging of police for all
the other deaths in custody. The last statistics, its hard to have official statistics
in Australia, but the last official statistics were 343 deaths in custody and jail in
15 years, which is a lot. And never a policeman was arrested. These people
who die in custody, Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal, there is more Aboriginal
people who die but there is also non-Aboriginal people who die, never has a
policemen been charged for any violence. But this time there was an inquest
because it was the right time for a wide protest across the country and even
overseas. I got involved in that whole issue doing my own research with some
families of Palm, analyzing the process of the court evidence and media
reports. A policeman was charged but only two years and a half after the
campaign. And well, two steps forward one step back, he was acquitted
during his trial in June 2007.
EM: And it seems to me, Ill let you tell us the story, but it seems to me what we
end up with in 2008, is a real schism between the pragmatic reality of a
collective body that is working through issues collectively, not necessarily
straightforwardly, but still collectively on the Aboriginal side, and a western or
white system of law which still wants to give the responsibility to an individual
which has a result of a new incarceration of a black man. Maybe you could
talk about that a little bit.
BG: Yeah well, what happened was that the population on Palm Island was
very angry when received it received the diagnosis of the autopsy. The
population of Palm Island is about three thousand people. After the results of
the autopsy a few hundreds walked toward a police station and there was a
violent exchange of words and stones thrown at the building and it ended up
being burned after the policemen were asked to leave the place. Now
nobody really knows who set the fire to this building. There are actually even
rumours that maybe there was help to burn this building. Anyway, it was the
first time that Aboriginal people manifested in such an open way without any
weapons. I mean, the media at the time talked about weapons and showed
an image of one man called Lex Wotton carrying a shovel. But are we really
to believe that weapon signifies shovel? This is the kind of rumours that
were carried out.
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The fact that Aboriginal people were shown as resisting news that they did
not agree about, was enough to create a shock. Because of the threat of
terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11 the Palm Island resistance was responded
with special emergency intervention squad. The squad was sent to Palm
Island to deal with a national security threat.
During the night, seventeen men were arrested very violently with tasers
pointed on them, their families asked to lie down on the ground. The wife of
one of the men who was arrested had a premature baby, and many still
suffer from that experience. These things done illegally in the name of police
were told in the aboriginal court case. But they were not very well presented
in the media as a result of which, later, when the policemen were finally on
trial, none of this data was put forward. For instance, the famous video made
in the cell of the prisoners death was not used at the trial, was not shown to
the jury. The pretext was that you dont show dead peoples images within
Aboriginal culture. But was this just a pretext? Had the jury seen those images
which did shock lots of people when they were shown at the inquest in
Townsville two years before if the jury had seen the images, perhaps the
result would have been different.
In the end, it became a battle where on one side you had the police
defending the system so called justice and democracy and on the other
side were those who threaten it. For many years, Aborigines have been
depicted as being a threat to peaceful democracy and this trial supported
this view. The irony is that in this case the tools for self-expression were the
tools of so-called democracy: a protest in the street, a petition, a call for
justice.
To turn the case into what it became, it was necessary to depict Lex Wotton
as a danger to the state. Here is a man, walking with a shovel, not drunk, not
violent. Observed closely, the image that Wotton represents does not
correspond to the stereotype that has been built about what an Aboriginal
person is supposed to be today. So not being this image that is expected, he
becomes a double threat because I dont think Australian media are
prepared for this kind of complexity within Aboriginal culture.
Of the many trials that took place over the following two years, many were
freed of charges. But not Lex Wotton, who ironically was seen by the
community as a man who had tried to negotiate with the police, and who
was filmed calming the crowd asking them to stop throwing stones on the
shelter. Yet, only two weeks ago (October 2008), he was declared guilty and
prosecution demanded twenty years of jail because of the image that he
represents. The judge later on gave him 6 years.
At the time, what really shocked me was the reaction of the media. The
same newspapers, like The Australian, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, who
covered the initial trials seemed suddenly to have no memory of the events.
So I was wondering, whats the issue there? Why is it that there is such a short
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memory? This reminded me of Australian novelist Gail Joness book Sorry
(2007). Her main character is a little girl, who, when shes twelve, starts to
stutter and eventually is shamed into complete silence. The whole book
unfolds as the story of what made her stop talking. It turns out that the
memory she has repressed is of killing her father when she catches him raping
her best friend, who is Aboriginal. And when she finally manages to remember
- toward the end of the book, her Aboriginal friend is in jail and she tells her
now I remember, why didnt you say? Nobody would have believed me is
the Aboriginal girls response. I think this book is a very nice way of trying to
say sorry for the amnesia of Australian history and politics, which is a collective
one.
EM: I wanted to finish on a last closing and opening question, which would
return us to the question of singularities. I want to propose three different ways
to think about the micropolitical in the context of what youve told us. You
might want to comment on one or more. One of them it seems to me, is an
interesting singularity that has to do with the complexity of the collective body
that includes other bodies, including your body. It seems to me that in a
politics to come that would radically take seriously the kind of political
initiatives brought forward by the Aboriginal people, there would also have to
be a taking the temperature of these new singularities (bodies in process)
rather than lumping all Aboriginal people in one box. That would be one
singularity. The other singularity would be to do with the issue of memory. It
seems to me that the Aboriginal cultures that I have looked into have a very
important way of thinking spacetime where memory is not conceived as a
simple linear passageway to a discrete past and a proposed future but is
thought instead as a complex nonlinear topological field with transversal
linkages. And the third singularity you might comment on would be a
gesturing toward the global politics to come through the election of Obama
with respect to the fear that I think a lot of left-leaning political groups have
that people might perceive that with Obamas election the important work
has been done: We have now elected a black president. We have done our
work. So there isnt more work to come in any of those registers.
BG: I agree absolutely with what you say and those three levels. Just on
Obama, I think the same thing happened in Australia when the new
government was elected, last November, from Liberal to Labor. And Kevin
Rudd, for the first time after many years of public pressure accepted to give
an official apology to the Aboriginal people. This was done last February. It
was like you say, like in USA: a black man is elected and it is done. And here
the apology was done, which means the Aboriginal issue is sorted out. Well
today, we know it is not the case. Immediately after Obamas election there
have been people saying: dont forget, this is just the beginning, there is more
to do. And it is actually giving hope to a lot of people, who think that the fact
of being black opens a huge Pandoras box which is giving them a new
stage to act. And in Australia it is the same. Lex Wotton was sentenced on the
7th of November, just around the elections. And every article pointed to the
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irony that it remains possible to sentence a black man who did not kill while a
white man who killed goes free, even while we elect the first black president.
There is still much work to be done.
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Of Whales and the Amazon Forest
Gabriel Tarde and Cosmopolitics
Interview with Bruno Latour, 24 November 2008
Bruno Latour: BL
Erin Manning: EM
Brian Massumi: BM
BM: We would like to start with the question of the economy and the
concept of value and evaluation in the work of Gabriel Tarde, a concept
you address in Gabriel Tarde : The End of the Social "
BL : This is Tardes first and oldest idea. Its the concept that kept him going
throughout and right away in his second article the year after he
applies it to the economy. His second article is on the economy. Hes
always worked with this idea that the economy is a bit like the amazonian
forest: when people arrive in the amazonian forest, they think the forest is
very rich and deeply rooted in the European way, while in reality, as
pedologists have shown, the amazonian forest is hung on the sky in a
certain sense. It is almost ungrounded it hangs from the top through a
rapid water circulating system, the circulation of nutrients, of organic
products. If you cut the forest, the ground immediately disappears and
you find that the forest is attached by its branches to the sky and not
rooted into the ground. The economy for Tarde is the same. This is a
metaphor but Tarde saw right away that the economy was in fact
inversed. We plunge it into what we think of as material infrastructures
when it is in fact attached or connected to what he calls passionate
interests, that is, evaluations of belief and desire.
This is the concept I depart from in my preface on Tarde, which has

become all the more apt now since we have begun to hear that as
regards the economy, everything rests on confidence. It may be the
case, but were we speaking of this before the economic crisis? And if its
true that it was always a factor in production, perhaps we should have
put it before the definition of factors of production Its strange because
its really a rematerialization to ground the economy in the passions and
balancing acts, as Tarde says, the constant logic duals that we are all
engaged in on the subject of desire and belief. This is a rematerialization
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Micropolitics : Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. No. 3. October
upside down, so to speak. If its true that Marx put Hegel back on his feet,
then Tarde puts Marx back on his feet. He turns the economy upside
down. What is really quite extraordinary is that we still do not know where
to situate the economy.
EM: Through Tarde, you bring back the question of quantity. Its an
interesting problem, a complex problem for us, since where you situate
the concept of quantity via Tarde, I would often replace it with quality or
James radical empiricism. I was wondering, if we return to the context of
the economy, where were at when the economy becomes purely
speculative, when there is little or no quantity as such. In such a context,
how would you situate the concept of quantity as Tarde understands it?
BL: For Tarde there are quantities but we must always attend to the
difference between measuring measure and measured measure. These
are real quantities. That is to say that measured measures quantify: each
monad quantifies from the moment that it evaluates and evolves as more
or less. The problem is that afterwards you have to see what you can do
with this real quantification. And Im speaking here of measuring
measures that which affects the judgments of others. The very nice
example that Tarde uses is that of the advent of the printing press now
we would say before Google before the advent of the press we
didnt know how to measure value, how to assess the respective glory of
literary writers, novelists, etc. Once the printing press comes into existence,
we become capable of making this judgment, which obviously does not
mean that we measure the reality of what literary glory signifies
measured measure which continues to count but in the form of a
plurality of dual logics, specific to those for which there is no simplification
or unity.
This is quite a paradoxical argument. On the one hand, Tarde says the
monads always quantify. But since there are millions of monads that
quantify tons of things, he admits that we will never fully be able to fully
quantify due to the lack of adequate instruments. But on the other hand,
when we have a measuring measure, the potential for descriptability and
the judgment of others increases. For example, when my economist
colleagues want to hire someone, they no longer speak about what this
person does. They go instead to Google Scholar to check the publish
and perish site and see what this persons score is. This is exactly what
interested Tarde. They grasp a tiny bit of the measure which in turn
simplifies judgments, even more so due to current standardizations. This
then allows for an understanding between people, which leads toward
what Michel Callon calls a performative economy (Tarde does not use this
2
term). This is what it comes down to: quantity grasped as a block allows us
to describe the real.
I was talking to an economist this morning who was telling me: its
wonderful I spent 2 weeks in Indonesia and now I really get the
Indonesian economy. He was obviously not saying that he had
understood everything this would be arrogant. He was saying that
because of economization, the Indonesian economy has become
susceptible to description for someone from the outside. This is what
measured measures refer to they simplify judgments, creating effects of
coordination. We no longer have to go into the details of what really
constitutes an economist we just have to say what their score is on
Google and thats it. The fundamental point Tarde makes is that this is a
quantification of the qualitative, which would be a kind of classical
version of an economic critique which would purport that the economy
calculates while our passions are incalculable. Tarde, on the contrary,
says that our passions are quantifiable and you economists can only
quantify a very small fraction of them.
BM: Does this mean there is a third term? Measured measure, measuring
measure, but also the measurable? A term that would perhaps escape
measure since it represents an activity of appetition that is always already
elsewhere, like a kind of force
BL: Yes but Im not sure that I mean if we are speaking of Tarde
BM: No, now were speaking of you
BL: Tardes argument wait, you were saying unmeasurable or

measurable?
BM: Measurable. Like something that escapes each measure since as you
say it can only be grasped in a small way, which means that there is a
reserve or, as you say, a part that escapes and that returns to this coming
together of belief and desire and returns as well to measure, to structure.
BL: Yes, right, but I think its measurable in the sense of measured measure.
In principle these are quantifications, they are vectors more than and
less than. Theres a very nice passage where Tarde says that the best
situation is an economy of war; or, in an economy of war that is well
organized, there is also continual chaos. (Remember, this is written in 1902
imagine saying this of Marxism and in this period!). This doesnt mean
that its due to the qualitative there are many quantifiables, much that is
measurable. This is a very clear argument that seeks to avoid the idea of a
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simple economic critique that would objectify human passions. For him its
just the contrary. He wants to found an economic science that is
quantitative, but operates in the good quantities. The economy is about
taking the right measures
EM: This reminds me of the difference that Whitehead traces between

appearance and reality. Appearance for Whitehead is the limited
prehension, while reality is always there in its totality but cannot be
submitted to (or directly prehended) since it is unmeasurable, virtual.
Would there perhaps be a link?
BL: Isabelle Stengers doesnt like us to say that there might be a link
between Tarde and Whitehead since she finds Whitehead wonderful and
Tarde banal The argument is that the whole is always inferior to the
parts. Its simply that since the whole is not a superior being this is Tardes
argument against Durkheim the whole is an abstraction, an extraction.
To facilitate this extraction, we have measuring instruments that simplify
judgment and make the social readable to itself. Its a question that really
interests Tarde, the press. He would have been fascinated by Google and
the Internet, he would have jumped for joy, since all the elements that
make the social readable to itself, including glory, reputation, appetition,
purchasing are there He would have spent hours on Amazon trying to
understand why Amazon tells you to buy this or that, making the social
traceable. This is really part of Tardes argument.
EM: We read Didier Debaises article on Tarde1, perhaps you know it. He
has a nice quote from Tarde. To the question what is a society, Tarde
responds with extraordinary simplicity: reciprocal possession through
extremely various forms of all for all. This reminds me a bit of what you are
saying what do you think of this idea of possession
BM: This also brings up the question of ecology that in your work comes
together with the question of the environment.
EM: So the question of possession. It seems to me that when I think of

possession, religion immediately comes to mind. We think of exorcism:
when we are possessed, we are possessed by a force that undermines the
notion of the subject, of the self as such. Is this the idea of possession we
find in Tardes work?
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Debaise, Didier. 2009. 11. The dynamics of possession: An introduction to the sociology of Gabriel
Tarde. In Mind that Abides, Skrbina, David (ed.), 221230.
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BL: No, no, I dont think so. Not at all. There is nothing religious in Tarde.
Hes just not interested in it. He uses possession in a very technical sense, a
way that fascinated Deleuze, as it does Debaise. Its based on the
argument that having is much more interesting than being for the
excellent reason that when you say I have, you are linked to the thing
you have, whereas when you say I am you are cut off, you are defining
your identity as a subject, separately. Thus the whole argument on
possession and property is important since he says that the equivalent of
identity is property, what I have. Give me your properties and I will tell
you what you are. The notion of property in everyday language is at once
what we possess and what we are, our identity. This is the paradox. To
have is stronger than to be. To have is to have property, so we also have
being. When we have being alone, we have nothing. This is a nice
reversal. He has this famous sentence: philosophy would have been
wholly other had it worked with the verb to have rather than the verb to
be. Because the had and the having are linked while being and non-
being are separate. So I imagine the history of philosophy with Parmenides
asking himself not to be or not to be but what is the relation between
the had and the having. With the had and the having we would have a
completely different history of philosophy. This must have really amused
Deleuze also the notion that to exist is to differ.
BM: I wanted to return to the question of quantity since you also lay claim
to James radical empiricism and his idea that relations are as real and
primitive as beings. In this thought of quantification that you were
speaking about just now, where do you place the relation? Could you
bring together this Tardian way of thinking the economy with relation in
the radical empiricist sense?
BL: Tarde is a sociologist, he is trying to understand, he is very interested in

the social, contrary to Durkheim, his opponent, for whom society is
foremost a religious and moral argument. The link I see with James
concerns radical empiricism, this extraordinary notion, as you just pointed
out, that relations are in the world and not in the human mind and then
added to the world. Obviously in the case of evaluating monads, this is a
general property, a property of the world. Valuation is a property of the
world. My argument that follows on this, if you allow me, is based on the
idea that if relations are given in the world, we must be able to
differentiate them. So lets differentiate these relations this is what I call
the enunciative regime or mode of existence and we will find the
economy but in a completely different form. James argument is a radical
argument in fundamental metaphysics that probably would have
interested Tarde, but I dont know what he would have done with it other
than say yes, obviously, monads evaluate and are related by desire and
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belief, thus relations are part of the world. In this sense, yes, they have
something in common. But the specialist on these questions is Debaise, its
he you should ask.
BM: Is there a philosophical movement that links these major philosophies

of the economy ecology as cosmopolitics?
BL: For Tarde, economy as a science is not the house, the oikos, where we
live. Our house is another oikos, the ecology. But the passage from one to
the other house is difficult. First because the economy, by definition, has
externalized too much and internalized only a very small proportion of the
beings to be taken into account and, whats more and here were
back to the problem we were discussing before we are limited to the
capacity of the instruments to measure what is measurable, in the sense
this time of bottom line and red ink. We are missing the instruments
that would permit us to take good measures.
Its evident that the economy is at the interior of ecology as an instrument

of measure in the inside of the house, so to speak. So the economy is not
the world where we are, we dont live in the economy this is one of
Whiteheads arguments any more that there are Galilean objects in a
Euclidean space. Locally, yes, there are Galilean objects in Euclidean
space, but they dont interweave. It is therefore incumbent on us to find
the intellectual tools to understand what becomes of the measuring
instruments of the economy in the house of ecology.
Economics and economy are two completely different things. Actually we

know very little about economies. Precisely because of the arguments
concerning measuring measure, we know a lot of things about
economics since that is what we measure. There is the whole issue of the
immersed continent of the economy, economy-thing, in opposition to
economy as a discipline. And we know very little with the exception of
some writing by anthropologists and of course our own experience as
consumers, buyers, the homeless which is very difficult to decipher,
precisely because we only have the language of economy as a
discipline, of economics, which in the end is not that interested in the
economy-thing since it formats and organizes it. In the end, what we
called nature in modernism is economy, much more than biology or
physics. As soon as you look a little further in biology it begins to proliferate
in all directions. This is a little less true in chemistry, less true in physics, but
this is not from whence the danger of the notion of nature emerges. The
danger, the poison in the notion of nature, is really an idea that comes
from economists. And the question of ecology is fascinating: will ecology
6
be capable of comprehending economy, in the sense of absorbing it, of
including it?
EM: To continue with the question of ecology, there is a quote from your
work: Ecology is not the science of nature, but the reasoning, the logos
about how to live together in livable places. Could you say more about
livable spaces?
BL: What is it to live together? Do whales belong to the commons?

Perhaps yes, perhaps no. But suddenly everyone is asking themselves
political questions about all kinds of beings externalized up until now.
These are really fundamental questions and, certainly, the language of
economy does not deal well with them. But if we say that economics are
measuring instruments, the performers for Callon what he calls
calculative devices then we can situate them in the interior of the
political house of ecology. And behind, or beyond, or this side of it, there is
the immense continent of that which we must be able to study by other
methods, the economy-thing, in the sense of the uncountable relations of
evaluation between subjects, between goods and words its an
immense continent. It is the reversal we were speaking about earlier: the
economy is like the amazonian forest, it has its roots in the sky, and so the
earth is not very well known, it is evaluated very badly.
EM: What concerns us these days in our own milieu at the SenseLab, is the
question of what the potential of the political is at the level of
collaborative practices. How can we work at the level of the
micropolitical such that it may have global effects?
BL: Yes, but the political has always been cosmopolitical so The work
around the question of the political is another undertaking. This work
requires many successive operations. First, we need to liberate the
political from science, separate science from the State, as the good
Feyerabend would say. The political idea is very influenced by
epistemology. Its an enormous work because we always come back to
the idea that we cannot found the political without turning to
epistemology as a crutch. And since this dates from Plato, it wont be
transformed quickly. So, this is a first point. To detach, in a sense, the
conditions of enunciations proper to the existence of politics which are
very particular, of a foundational dream based on economic science, a
historical science read rhetorical that remains a very strong aspiration
for a whole slew of rationalists in every sense of the word rationalist.
And then the problem becomes even more complicated because we

need to characterize the very specific curve of the political. And here the
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ecologists up until now have not been particularly useful, and Im
speaking of professional ecologists since in the end we have here a
bizarre mix of a very classical technical dream, a very modernist expert-
based approach that is even apocalyptic if not religious. How to detach
from this a political space, where politics no longer means a politics that is
founded on nature as its ground? And not a simple critique or a
deconstruction. So, a definition of the political as the composition of a
commons that has not yet been achieved. I think my position is quite easy
to validate now in any case, my argument holds. We cannot continue
to attempt to found politics in reason, saying the commons is already
there, its the universal, the rights of man, its a whole series of values, its
the economy, its modernization, in any case things that are already there
and that politics will sort out This is the idea of cosmopolitics in the
sense criticized by Stengers and used in David Held, for instance, its
exactly that cosmopolitical principles are born universals in a certain
way.
So here we reverse the idea. We say that the composition of the

commons is not there yet, we have to create it, we have to compose it.
And this is the cosmopolitical in the sense of the politics of the cosmos that
Stengers proposes, where the political is there to prevent that cosmos
become nature and cosmos is there to prevent that politics be
occupied only by humans. In this sense, the cosmopolitical takes over the
place usually occupied by nature. There is no longer any nature as such
but instead a political debate about nature.
Who are the ecologists who have taken up this argument? I dont know.
Its a very complicated problem. But the main difficulty is that having
undone ourselves of the question of nature, having deepistemologized
politics, we now have to characterize this particular curve which is
political enunciation. And this curve is very strange. We constantly
rationalize it even though its impossible to rationalize. Or, rather, it is
rational but in the sense of working within conditions that are extremely
demanding. And so, we lose it all the time we think we have it and we
lose it.
EM: When you speak of your project, you seem to be speaking of a

project that cannot be situated as such. Is it an instaurative (instauratif)
project?
BL: For me the term project has a very precise meaning. It is what allows
us to think technique not as an object but as a project. This is a key
element in my philosophical thought. I define project as a very particular
mode of existence. We need to try to understand why technology,
8
technique has everywhere been so badly understood by philosophy with
the exception of a few rare cases which can be counted on one hand.
The word project is a way of trying to avoid the notions of object,
subject etc. its a way of trying to make apparent an interest for
technicity. As Bergson says, all philosophy is the realization of a unique
project, a unique intuition.
BM: You referred earlier to the curve of politics and its complexity within
your thought. It emerges from an encounter with the non-human and
then there are all the vicissitudes of capture, the developments, that raise
problems for the public, all of which ends up creating a certain commons
that is never beyond contestation. As a result there is a repoliticization of
already closed questions. The question this non-disciplinarity of philosophy
raises concerns the fact that this encounter with the non-human remains
external to or infra to these captures by the disciplines. So if philosophy is
indeed the non-discipline of thought, are there political practices,
assemblages, techniques which can target the pragmatic level of
philosophy?
BL: Its a complicated question. There is perhaps a misunderstanding with

respect to the human/non-human. Saying that this sociology or this
philosophy is interested in human or non-human relations is not enough to
bring non-humans into political thought. Relations between humans and
non-humans are found as much in art as in science, in techniques
obviously, in the economy, in religion. What is odd is the modernist version
where the relation subject-object creates the dichotomy human/non-
human. The originality of the argument does not rest in the idea that in
politics we are interested in the non-human. The originality rests in making
strange or unthinking, retrospectively rendering almost incomprehensible,
even monstrous, the fact that humans and non-humans have been
related only as subject-object.
And here the argument is uniquely critical. This is to say that there is no
sense in creating a modernist story by saying that this is the story of the
relations between subjects and objects. Once we have seen that there
are millions of different assemblages of the human/non-human relation
which is evident today we arrive at a wholly other description of the
world, which I summarize for my students by saying that rematerializing is
resocializing, resocializing is rematerializing.
All of this is a massive argument, and valid, I think. But then there is a
whole necessary operation for the isolation or the extraction of one of the
relations which would be the political relation. And this political relation is
not the same one that I might call economic or organizational etc. The
9
political relation is very specific. One of the aspects that interests me
concerns defining this particular specificity. It is specific for the simple
reason that it is the political relation that constitutes the aggregates, the
identities mobile as they may be and one of the elements of what we
call representation the notion of speaking for someone or something
else.
Its going to be a very different endeavor if you engage the political

relation in a technical project, or in an artistic one, in the creation of a
market or an institution. As regards the moral question, there will
necessarily be a link between humans and non-humans, but the political
question, the isolation of a mode of existence that is properly political, this
is a complicated question that demands close attention. If you take
Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy, you find that politics is not
conceived as a singular mode. But you do find philosophy considered as
such (this is difficult for me to understand, but this is another question). It
would be interesting to use this same kind of approach to explore what is
the proper being of the political. As they do for philosophy in this case
its the concept and for science where its the functive. We must
define this proper being of the political, no matter whether we position
ourselves on the right, the left, the micro, the macro, the meso etc. We will
always need to be able to define something that circulates.
And so I engage in this search for the being of politics and I do this by
focusing, as I often say, on the adverbial contrast between speaking of
politics and speaking politically. Its not the content of the proposition
but a certain twist, a certain spin that defines the political and permits us to
say there something is going and it really is political.
EM: You say: Make politics turn around topics that generate a public. I
really like this idea that there is not yet a public that preexists the political.
BL: Yes, this is the fascinating argument I take on from Lippmann. No issue,
no politics this is an expression from Noortje Marres. The trajectory and
natural history of issues, the way in which they circulate, recombine,
transform, would be a mode of reinterpreting the question of the content
of politics. I was speaking recently for instance of pixilation the political is
the image, but if you isolate each pixel, then you have an issue, an affair,
a concern. Each issue begins with a certain attachment, a passion, a
certain type of representation. This is a somewhat bizarre metaphor but
political science extracts from all issues a certain number of common
elements that they name the problem of representation, the problem
of institutions, the problem of governance and in a generally
unrigorous way, even the question of revolt, isolating what each of these
10
have in common. I find interesting in the turn toward objects (what I call
the politically-oriented-object) this idea of give me your issues and your
movement and your navigation and I will know something about politics.
Here the Web becomes interesting, since the Web is a good mechanism,
in this regard, for measuring measure, a good way of following the
development, the deployment, the confusion, the isolation and the
disappearance of issues. This goes pretty well with Tardes early argument
made long before the Web at the epoch of newspapers and the
beginning of public opinion and even the very concept of the public. In
the end perhaps I am redefining what you call the micropolitical?
BM: I am trying to think of an example of a meeting with the non-human

and what comes to mind is whale song. The interest in whale song
erupted at a certain moment in the 1960s and was taken up and
recontextualized by a number of different disciplines and domains. There
were artistic engagements, mystical ones, quasi-religious responses,
biological experiments, and all kinds of mobilizations and political or
pragmatic position-taking all of which emerged from this same point of
encounter. For us, the micropolitical or transdisciplinarity are conceived as
points of emergence or irruption that differentiate themselves through
different modalities, bringing with them a plurality of new problems for the
public, new issues, thus becoming nodes for negotiation and
contestation. In the end, they are regulated, but only to eventually be put
back into question. This is the idea of instauration. Could we imagine a
technique, an activity, that would correspond to this? Would this be a
pragmatic philosophy? A micropolitics? An aesthetic practice in a larger
sense?
BL: When you speak of micropolitics, are we speaking of the microphone

that registers whale song? Just kidding. Whale song is interesting. First, the
dimension of the problem of whales is not defined. It changes with respect
to the public. So its not particularly micropolitical. For the Japanese, for
instance, its an essential problem of identity, so for them its not micro.
Speaking of which, last week the campaign for whaling took off again, so
its not micro at all. What concerns me about micropolitics is that it is
always in rapport with the institution that would be invested in the politics
of what we call macro. What we absolutely have to avoid is that the
micro position itself against the political institution, when the real question
is how to deal with the political institution at all its levels.
Its a problem of political positioning this time in the classic sense of the
term as Deleuze uses it. We have to be careful. For me the question is, is it
politically-oriented-object politics? Because if it is, if its object-oriented,
whether this be revealed by artists or militants who want to hear whale
11
songs, or be it scientists who want to create sonar technology to register
the sound for the first time, it doesnt matter. The only way to follow this
kind of thing is not to become obsessed with which position is the artistic
one, the scientific one, the political one its to follow the whale song.
So this is really a good example of politically-oriented-objects, but not

because its particularly micropolitical. Here we see a new composition or
a new being. Now the whales singing become part of what needs to be
absorbed into the commons. We see here if instauration means the
entry of a new being into the ensemble of what it means to co-inhabit in a
livable world a nice example of instauration.
Just yesterday I read in the Greenpeace journal that this year they are no
longer attacking whaling boats. The reason is interesting: what matters,
says Greenpeace, is to convert the Japanese. Boat attacks create such
negative reactions, and what interests Greenpeace is to make the
Japanese think as they do. Here we see the proper being of politics in
motion. Before we wanted to create an issue, to create an affair through
acts of provocation and opposition. Now we enter into another phase:
we must convince and turn Japanese opinion in our favour. These are
moments of one and the same cycle, of the same curve. I am
reconstructing Greenpeaces position, which seems quite subtle to me.
We needed to make visible the insanity that was the scientific pursuit of
whales, and we had to make ourselves seen in the media, but now we
have to do something different. We see the issue in motion, and we see
the positions of those who want to move the issue change. The issue is
transforming itself. And this is very interesting because its a mode of
recharging in a certain way the definition of politics, in the banal sense of
the term. I am adding a pixel in the definition of the commons, in a certain
sense. The important difference for me is first is this object-oriented or not
(is there objective content in some sense) and secondly, does the curve
of politics, what I call the circle of the political, tie itself around this object.
Its here that politics becomes really interesting.
BM: What makes visible this project of constriction and forces different
domains to come into relation, at more than one level? Would it be
possible to provoke conditions for a point of irruption (as the whale song
did), or are these always aleatory events? Is there a term that I could use
to describe this activity, or does this activity not have a status in the world
of practices?
BL: Abundance Its the pragmatic problem. The multiplicity of beings

that are asking questions, this is not what is lacking right now. What is
lacking are artists, political thinkers, scientists, militants, capable of listening
12
and articulating. The problem is not a deficit of emergent or instaurated
beings, the problem is that our academic organization is so poor, so
unwell that we have enormous difficulty representing the beings with
which we must pose the questions and compose the world.
In the end whale song is an explanation of something we already knew,

something we chose to ignore and the connection, the rhizome, between
the sound engineer, the researchers, the artist, the militant, the political
thinker make it present to our common consciousness. The question is not,
it seems to me, how to do it, but rather how is it possible that we know so
little. And so, the connection: how is it possible that we have such difficulty
making links between artists and the social sciences? Artists are always
expressive of an extremely rich mode of being, one that is sadly too often
themselves! Whereas social sciences too often believe that they must
imitate the hard sciences despite the fact that the hard sciences engage
the concept of objectivity in quite a different manner. The problem is the
extraordinary archaism of the intellectual-political tools, and this is what is
really alarming. We are completely unadapted, and the problem is not
the beings we need to represent, the problem is that we live an extremely
limited intellectual life.
EM: This reminds me of a sentence where you say that for Etienne Souriau
what is important is to grasp the work to become work (faire oeuvre)
while avoiding the question of what comes from the work and what
comes from the artist.
BL: This is the problem: in all these questions of projects, of works, the
problem is the institution. The question is how to transform the notion of the
institution into a positive concept. And evidently how to create an
institution capable of becoming-work (faire oeuvre) and this is
altogether another challenge. Anti-institutionalism doesnt help... We must
also somehow manage to rework the notion of the institution at a political
level, to link instauration and institution. There is a link but to my knowledge
it hasnt been thought for a long time.
BM: You spent your career of engaging in critique in the name of

constructivism. Now you seem to be replacing the issue of construction
with the idea of instauration. Could you say a bit about the reasons you
find it necessary to distance yourself a bit from the notion of construction
or constructivism?
BL: Constructivism We tried everything with constructivism. Construction,

deconstruction, reconstruction, and we never even arrived at that
concept you mentioned just now from Souriau. The advantage of
13
instauration is that we leave the lexical field of critique where the notion of
construction is completely immanent. Isabelle Stengers has made a great
effort to speak of constructivism in a positive way. I completely failed at
this perhaps because I tried to do it in the sciences, which is precisely the
place where it is most forbidden to speak of constructivism. Afterwards I
tried to upset the balance by saying that the important question was to
engage the well and badly constructed to replace the opposition
between the constructed and the not-constructed. Here, it starts to look
like instauration.
I am a militant constructivist, convinced, yet I no longer use the concept,

its true. Instauration is a way of giving sense to the idea of construction
and creation This is why Souriau does all this work: he finds in the
aesthetic realm the only place that has not been contaminated by the
constructed/non-constructed opposition. In the sciences of the time this
would probably have been impossible he speaks very little about
science, or religion. After all, he is writing in the 1930s
This is my experience: I tried everything with construction, all the possible

combinations for thirty years, so I have a long experience with the
concept and still I never managed to make it stick. And every time I fell
into the same trap, so to speak. If I had been engaged in aesthetic issues,
aesthetic philosophy, as Souriau was, it would not have been such a
problem. The problem is that doing constructivist work on the sciences
where the distance between the constructed and the non-constructed is
more vast its obviously more difficult.
BM: And also in politics?
BL: In politics, you see, its the inverse: everyone is a deconstructionist. So

you have to be nave in politics. You have to say yes, the representation is
faithful, but only on condition that you understand this very strange curve
that is the political. The obsession of the political is truth, it is to tell the truth.
But if you say this, you look extremely nave since you are forever speaking
to people who have deconstructed in advance any confidence we
might have had in the political. This is what we undertook, for instance, in
Making Things Public. We tried to recharge the political through
mediations. According to the domain, you have to be differently
constructivist. In science, I am still a militant constructivist, since it is
necessary to keep fighting against the same old stupidity its a domain,
in France at least, where ideas do not move an inch. In this case, you
have to be insufferable, unpleasant, you have to bark, to bite, as I did
when I was thirty. But not at all in politics. In politics you have be
completely different, there you have to be nave. To each domain its
14
constructivism, its mode of existence, its own instauration, what Souriau
calls its anaphoric path -translated by Erin Manning
15
Grasping the Political in the Event
Interview with Maurizio Lazzarato, 27 November 2008
Maurizio Lazzarato: ML
Brian Massumi: BM
Erin Manning: EM
BM: I thought I would take as the point of departure a recent article I read
in the New York Times (2008), where a certain kind of rhetoric seen
everywhere these days was mobilized. This was an article about Morgan
Stanley, one of the large financial institutions, which stated that the
problem is that we consume too much. We are dying of consumption. The
economic crisis was caused by an excess of consumption, and its the
fault of individual consumers who got themselves too indebted: its a
personal moral fault. You speak of debt as a technique that is an aspect
of an ensemble of governmental assemblages. Could you elaborate on
and react to this idea that the crisis was caused by the individual
behaviour of consumers?
ML: I think that the financial crisis brings to the fore the governmental
technique which is debt. I think that debt, therefore credit, is a
governmental technique that is more widespread in the US than it is here
in France. It is at once an economic technique and a technique for the
production or the control of subjectivity. These things go together. Its
interesting to see how governmentality produces itself at the crossing of
different assemblages: the production of subjectivity and the economy.
We can see very clearly what was the neo-liberal project: generally
speaking we can say that finance was a machine to transform rights into
credits. Instead of getting a raise in salary, you would get a credit. Instead
of having a right to retirement, you would get an individual life insurance.
Instead of having a right to lodging, you would get the right to a
mortgage. These are techniques of individualization.
Effectively rights are collective and must be recognized socially. Now

there is individualization. Two mechanisms that seem contradictory have
crossed: on the one side, we see a reduction of culpability of the
individual with respect to debt. I am turning to Nietzsche here, from The
Genealogy of Morals. At the beginning of The Genealogy of Morals,
1
Nietzsche underlines that debt and fault, in German, are the same thing:
culpability (Schuld). To render the individual blameless with respect to
individual debt is to render the individual culpable with respect to
collective debt since effectively the people are responsible, as Nietzsche
says, of all accumulated debt. We are trapped as Deleuze and Guattari
say in Anti-Oedipus in an infinite debt: we are never finished with debt in
capitalism.
This transformation of rights into debt or credit is absolutely contradictory

because on the one hand neo-capitalism impoverishes people it blocks
salaries for years and reduces social services and at the same time, it
produces the illusion of enriching them through credit. Its completely
crazy. Its a way of pretending to enrich people without changing the
relation to property. This is somewhat the gist of the problem, I think. The
political domain has effectively become a question of how to enrich
people through access to credit. And so, the inflation that was previously
tied to consumer goods has been transformed into finance itself.
We blocked salaries and destroyed public services, but we opened credit.

Therefore its not an individual crisis, its a crisis of the political model that
put this system in place, I think. As Bush used to say, this is the society of
owners, of private property. This idea that everyone has to have individual
property reaches a limit because the only way to make it come to fruition
is to give access to credit. And then you have a veritable economic
problem. In reality, it cant work for everyone to become a small property-
holder without changing the concept of property its contradictory. So
there is no real separation between real economy and financial economy
because the real economy is the one that will end up blocking salaries
and social services: they go together.
Since Marx, we know that finance is one of capitals metamorphoses, and

the most important one because its the most deterritorialized. What is
new, I think, is that in this phase we have generalized access to credit.
Human capital, as they say, refers to someone who has access to all the
credit: credit for consummation, credit to be able to create oneself. In the
US, there is always individual credit. So its this system that is in crisis.
From an economic point of view, from the point of view of the production
of subjectivity, we know since Nietzsche that debt is effectively the
capacity of making a promise and therefore guaranteeing the fact that
you will reimburse. It is the construction of memory, the construction of
responsibility. And so it works profoundly on subjectivity since its a
mechanism of subject construction. What is credit? Credit is a promise of
prosperity, capitals way of making/taking time. Time is stolen, not the
2
productive time of work, but social time. You indebt yourself today for 30
years, a debt for the house, for the car, for health insurance, etc. This is a
technique that is present all the time that is not intermittent. When you
have a debt, you get up every morning, as the American student I cite in
Le gouvernement des ingalits1 says, living all the time with the
problem of debt. I have to adapt my life all the time to the fact that I
have to reimburse this debt. So I have to count, to see how much I am
spending on the bus, how much I am spending for food. I have to
calculate. So debt is a technique for the control of subjectivity which is
very impersonal, that in actuality forces you to a whole other level of
control because its yourself that you need to control once youre in debt,
its yourself who needs to reorganize your life and all your spending with
respect to the debts you have to pay back. These things go together
perfectly control of time, control of subjectivity, a projection into the
future that is in a certain sense recuperated or captured by the debt. Its
a mechanism that does not create what it seeks to create. And therefore
it leads to a crisis. Its a story of the transformation of rights since, with
Welfare, with Roosevelt, rights were distributed. And now, with this attempt
to transform rights into credits I think this is the deep logic of what is
happening we reach a limit.
BM: We say that debt is a technique of time. You say that its a bridge
between the present and the future. Its a line of continuity of time that is
nonetheless broken by moments of doubt. You cite Deleuze and Guattari
who speak of a macropolitics of society for which the inverse would be a
micropolitics of insecurity. The rhetoric of the financial crisis revolves
around security, investment, financing. Could you say a bit more about
the production of insecurity by the mechanism of security?
ML: Now this is quite complicated, but I think that the term we have heard
most, is confidence. We must re-establish confidence, and thats
interesting. I think the financial systems transform confidence into security
and substitute the problem of confidence with security. What does this
mean? Marx says something very important about this, that effectively we
have the impression that credit functions against the grain of the market
and of the right to merchandise and the organization of work. Why is it
that it functions at counter-current? Because, effectively, in the
organization of work, in the market, relations between people pass
through merchandise. Effectively the relation between people passes
between objects. And so people are separated from themselves and
from others through this Marxian dialectic. On the other hand, we have
1
Maurizio Lazzarato Le Gouvernement des ingalits : Critique de l'inscurit nolibrale. Amsterdam :
ditions Amsterdam : 2008.
3
the impression today that it is no longer this type of relation that is in place
since credit is founded on the promise I make to reimburse you, therefore I
have confidence in you. We have the impression that there is a direct
rapport, while its the inverse.
And so here, we have the impression that we find ourselves in a world

where we have confidence in each other, and where we must have
confidence in those to whom we lend money. As though we had left the
sphere of economic production and entered into the sphere of the
production of values. Marx says that in fact confidence is the strongest
mistrust and defiance. It's egotistical interest and individual interest at its
best. As soon as we enter the sphere where people are no longer
separated from one another through the assemblages of the market and
merchandise, we are confronted with the human-as-such because we
have to have confidence in him/her. In reality, this is the utmost defiance
since debts circulate due to egotistical interests. So effectively the market
itself produces insecurity since what we are facing is always a rival, always
someone who is in some sense our enemy.
We have to limit. I have to limit my freedom, I have to limit my potential for

action, I have to limit my capacity to act because effectively you are my
enemy. You are my enemy, not my warring enemy, but a potential
adversary. If we are moved by self-interest, the only way to gather and
coordinate these egotistical interests is to introduce principles of security.
And this is what happens. What Marx says is that we substitute confidence
for mechanisms of security that are put into place even at the financial
level.
EM: And if you went even further? I dont know if youve managed to
think of how to continue this logic in a mode where what is happening
with debt, borrowing, etc would be happening at a super-speculative
level as we are now seeing on the global market. Its true that at a certain
level, there is individual debt and borrowing from the bank, but there are
also many levels of borrowing where it seems to me that the networks of
the speculative movements of money are even more widespread. I dont
know if you have thought about this at all in the context of the current
economic crisis (2008).
ML: No, I havent thought about this very much since it seems everyone
else is focusing on it. I wanted to see what were the social relations at the
origin of the crisis. Because everyone says its speculation and all that. But
in reality the origin of the crisis was not based on chance. The individual
house is the symbol of individualism. Individual property is the house. Even
symbolically, its based on this. But effectively capitalism once its put
4
into place this mechanism only works if this rapport is expansive. It has to
be infinitely expansive. And thats why, according to me, its all falling
apart now. First, because its an illusion to transform everyone into a small
proprietor. Once this process is underway, it multiplies, since capitalism
functions by enhanced reproduction, never by simple production. Its
infinite deterritorialisation, as Deleuze and Guattari would say.
Everyone focuses attention only on the speculative mechanism, if you like,

but this speculative mechanism, I think its more useful to link it to
reproduction. The enhanced reproduction of this mechanism refers to the
enhanced reproduction of government, of its relations of power. And the
incapacity of capital to develop this kind of government is what causes
the system to go into crisis, I think. Everyone says that its a problem of
speculation, so once we regulate, everything will move back into order. I
dont think that is the problem.
BM: They say that its the end of neo-liberalism.
ML: But its not at all the end of liberalism. What we see are all measures
that are in reality neo-liberal. Everyone is speaking of the return of the
State, but the State has always been there. We cant separate liberal
policies from State intervention. They emerged together, its banal to say.
EM: Would you say that what is happening today at the level of the
economy and debt is impossible to understand rationally: that there is
no preconceived logic? That we are moving from speculative debt to a
speculative logic?
ML: What we are seeing emerge, if we come back to what weve seen, is
that there are three kinds of debt that are functioning. There is private
debt, sovereign debt and social debt. This is what I tried to explain with
Foucault. He says that liberalism is trying to solve the contradiction or the
heterogeneity, rather heterogeneity since he does not use
contradiction, heterogeneity between the economic assemblage
and the political assemblage. He says that we need a third element, and
its the social. And now, we see the same problem. We have private debt
effectively the economy of entrepreneurs, and sovereign debt, the
debt of the State, the State being the sovereign. And we need a third
debt, the social debt, and its through this social debt that we manage
the Welfare State. The story that says capitalism that passes through the
social to make different logics compatible economic logic and political
logic through the social we find it again at the level of debt: private
debt, sovereign debt and social debt. It plays itself out through different
5
types of debts, but always in a logic of debt that allows for an economic
management as well as the management of subjectivity. This story of the
mobilization of the three types of debt, I find very important. Today, I think,
they will use the social debt once more but in a neo-liberal logic rather
than a socialist one.
EM: Can you say more about what you understand by the neo-liberal?
ML: Lets take a look at what happened historically: there was a large
phase of globalization that went from the end of the 19th century and
open onto WW1. This is a very important phase of globalization, almost as
important as the one that we lived until the 1980s. The level of socialization
of the economy was lower than what we had achieved before WW1.
And this led to the catastrophe of WW1, after the civil war in Europe, the
Russian revolution, all this chaos. After there was the crisis of 1929, the crisis
was resolved because elements of socialism were integrated into the
politics of the state. At the time, even liberal thinkers were poised for an
inevitable crisis and were convinced of the possibility of the success of
socialism. And the crisis was resolved through the social debt that
integrated elements of socialism and transformed what was a non-State
common into a public State. Its the integration of the State, in moments
of socialization, moments of becoming-common, moments of
coordination that were outside the State. All these forms of solidarity, of
mutuality that the workers movement had developed, were integrated
into the public State. And the great revenge of liberalism was to destroy
this same modality of capture of the social and of socialism that Welfare
had integrated. So all these politics are politics of destruction of what was
achieved in terms of rights: the rights to social security, the right to
unemployment insurance. And thats what happened through the basic
transformation of individual property rights: fundamental transformation of
all into shareholders, fundamental transformation of everyone into small
property owners.
BM: In France, you note the arrival of the force of neo-liberalism through
the transformation of the consumer into shareholder during the 1970s
through the government reform of pension funds. And you take a position
that you call schizophrenic whereby you note that people, at one and
the same time, are selling themselves on the work market and are
shareholders in human capital, entrepreneurs of themselves. You also say
that everyone, as entrepreneurs of themselves, become like molecules of
capital. But given this rift and this becoming-capital of the individual, we
must reformulate what we mean by self-interest. And its wrong to
understand neo-liberalism as that which predetermines interests. It is the
market which responds to self-interest. Could you say something about
6
the anti-naturalism of neo-liberalism and about this complication in the
concept of interest? It seems to me that we find here one of the entry
points into creative and contestatory practices, in the mutation of what is
interest.
ML: The history of schizophrenia is not difficult to understand since

effectively we are at once a wage-earner and a shareholder. This
introduces a schizophrenia since we are at the same time exploited and
interested in exploitation. This schizophrenia moves through the interior of
each individual since he/she is both at the same time. Its more
complicated than earlier where effectively there was a scission between
a proletarian and a capitalist. Today, in part, this is illusory, and in part it is
the case, especially in the US where this process is far more advanced
than it is in France. In the US, its very evident that all these things are more
widespread. This schizophrenia poses a problem of subjective
mobilization. What does it mean where one is at the same time a wage-
earner therefore in a business and one is in a situation of exploitation as
Marx would say at the same time, one is a shareholder in the same
business. How do we mobilize? I think this is one of the forces of liberalism.
The only way to accede to our rights was to organize, to have a social
and collective dimension. Now we tell the worker/entrepreneur that this
isnt it, it wont work; it has to go through an individual relation. We must
no longer have confidence in collective action, we must have
confidence in the market. This is an important subjective transformation
that took a long time to come to fruition. But how do we destroy
confidence? By saying: you must invest! Dont expect the right to
retirement from your political and social action in the union you can get
it from the market. This is a very important epochal shift that destroys the
belief in collective action.
This has important effects at the level of mobilization. As regards to

interest, there is indeed no natural interest since interest is like everything
else in neo-liberalism, constructed. Liberalism is constituted on the basis of
the presupposition of natural interest. And the problem was to defend
individual rights against all State intervention. Now, I think that is no longer
the problem, its the construction of human capital. Human capital is not
something that is already there, but something that must be constructed.
It must be constructed with different assemblages, we must invest:
individual investments, training, insurance. You are the one who must do
it. Its your responsibility, and this depends on how you construct and
mobilize these different things. Therefore, interest is constructed through a
multiplicity of techniques that make you employable. To be employable,
you have to be well-trained. To be well-trained, you have to follow good
7
courses. You have to make good investments. You are responsible for your
human capital. This is another important dimension of subjectivity.
How do you transform wage-earners into capitalisms responsibility, how

do you make them molecules of capital? Its a recuperation of the whole
entrepreneurial side given over to the individual. In a certain way, there is
a transformation from a passive to an active individual. It is an activation,
but within the limits of a capitalist logic. The interest is not pre-constituted,
it is constructed. It is constructed through this multiplicity of assemblages.
Now this is really a micropolitical assemblage. And this is new. We didnt
understand Deleuze, Guattari and Foucaults analysis in the 1960s and 70s,
when they spoke of microphysics on the one hand, of power on the other,
of micropolitics. This was a real grasping of the new configuration of
capital. It was really techniques of power that were changing radically.
EM: When we began these interviews, we noticed that the concept of

micropolitics has become problematic for some. For Isabelle Stengers
and Bruno Latour, the micropolitical seems to remain too strongly linked to
the macropolitical, instituting a dichotomized relation from the smaller to
the larger. You, on the other hand, continue to mobilize this concept
through Foucaults and Deleuze and Guattaris thought. You raise the
issue of the micropolitical, for instance, in the 2nd chapter of Le
gouvernement des ingalits. You speak of the loss of institutional power
in the context of how political parties and unions are no longer capable
of problematizing what is happening to society, to our everyday situations,
to our social groups. According to you, they have lost all power of
institution and limit themselves to defending and managing what
already exists, what has always been instituted. Could you say more
about forms of resistance at the micropolitical level?
ML: Its a question of how you think the micropolitical if you think politics,
on the one hand, as more power and all that, or if you think politics as the
capacity to ask new problems by making new subjects and objects
emerge for politics. I think that classic political parties dont have this
capacity for problematization, of creating and addressing new problems.
We are still very tied to how things were problematized in the 19th century.
The left is still tied to that kind of problematization; the problem was
effectively the battle of the classes at that time. And afterwards, we lost
the capacity for problematization.
This question of the relation between macropolitics and micropolitics is a

very key problematization in Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault, in a
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completely different way. They had to do it since it was necessary to
understand power differently. Micropolitics was not simply micropolitics of
subversion, but also and first and foremost the micropolitics of how power
functions. Power functions as a network.
Deleuze and Guattari argue that micropolitics and macropolitics are

inseparable. We can never separate them because micropolitics moves
through macropolitics, and vice versa. The other day, during a meeting
about the organisation of micropolitical techniques for seasonal workers,
we discussed the fact that our everyday lives are made up of user-based
activities: we go to school, to church, to the hospital, to the
unemployment agency, we ask for help. What we are users, we are
involved differently in an administration, in relations that are micropolitical.
These rapports are assemblages that are, at the limit, heterogeneous, as
Foucault would say. They are heterogeneous because each has its own
logic. But in each of these relations, there are constraints, we are
mobilized subjectively, we are pushed away by certain forces and
attracted by others. I dont understand why this concept of micropolitics is
not taken more into consideration. Because even in wage-earning work,
there is a micropolitical dimension created by management which is quite
formidable, especially since the 1970s. What is complicated is the
mobilization of the micropolitical by the macropolitical and vice versa.
We cannot ignore this complexity. Because 90% of the politics of capital
move through the micropolitical.
EM: Exactly. The concept that Isabelle Stengers wanted to propose,

instead, is mesopolitics the emergence in and through the milieu. Its an
interesting concept, I think.
ML: Mesopolitics, can you explain what this is?
EM: For her, mesopolitics refers to that which emerges through the
engendering of a knot out of which a new political milieu is born an
instauration, as Souriau would say. The political becomes an event
through a becoming work of the milieu that creates new networks of
potential that in turn create new modes of expression.
ML: This could be true. What interests me, in the work of Foucault and
even in the work of Deleuze, is really the description of techniques. That is
what is fundamental. Techniques are specific: you have to invent and
construct them. They are not given. You have to think them each time. So
this question of techniques, of assemblages, of processes, is very very
important. We need macro techniques, but especially micro techniques.
These techniques given that its a process, and not something given,
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that the rules of the process are immanent rules generated by the process
itself you have to pay them special attention. I am fully convinced that
the production of subjectivity is a very important aspect of politics.
Afterwards there are other techniques that are macropolitical. On the
terrain of macropolitics, there are things that are still valid that come to us
from what we have learned this last century. On the other hand we do
not really know, we still have not really problematized, the micropolitical
level, I think.
EM: You speak in much of your writing of forces and of the plasticity of the
world. In the 2nd chapter of your new book (2008), you cite Deleuze and
Guattari speaking of rigid and supple segmentarities. I cite: Molecular
escapes and movements would be nothing if they did not return to the
molar organization to reshuffle their segments. A little further on, you
continue, The illusion of synthesis and the reconciliation of these different
planes underwrote the death of revolution itself. I would like to return to
these questions with plasticity in mind, or Souriaus concept of becoming
work (faire oeuvre). How do you see these concepts with respect to the
micropolitical milieu that preoccupies you (the seasonal workers, for
instance). How do you see these concepts with regard to microrevolution,
or the recasting, the creation of the political? Where are we now?
ML: Well that I dont know. The problem is that we are in a phase of
experimentation without horizon. It is a phase of experimentation, and we
cant very well see the outcome. What interests me in the case of the
seasonal workers, are their experimentations, their micropolitical actions. I
dont think we can abstract the problem itself.
EM: I can be more precise. You speak of the slogan Neither inside nor
outside. Could you say more about the techniques implied in this neither
inside nor outside? What resulted from the relations between the
seasonal workers and the institutions? How did they find it possible to
participate in the capture of events that are ontogenetic but not
necessarily outside the institution? Did they invent techniques that put
forth the plasticity of the political, the becoming work of the social?
ML: Exactly, these are techniques we use politically. This technique which
was used for the organization of Neither inside nor outside signifies being
radically external to the institution, that is to say, neither in complete
discrepancy nor in interiority. Its a political positioning that is hard to hold
onto since either you have the impression of being captured inside, or you
feel a complete lag with what is happening. Its something that cannot
be defined abstractly. You have to define it each time according to a
specific case. Its a pragmatism linked to what youre doing.
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It gave very interesting results for a whole series of things. This struggle
lasted quite a long time, I think, because normally such a conflict lasts two
weeks, a month. Here, there is an extended continuity because they
applied techniques out of the usual as well as normal techniques and
even older ones. Another of the techniques they used was to create
moments of mediation with the institution. How? Through a follow-up
committee conceived as an instrument of mediation from the inside of
the institution. What might appear contradictory wasnt necessarily so. In
reality, it puts into crisis the concept onto which politics is usually
constructed.
Say you take the union, for example. When the organizing committee
proposed to do an expert report, the union said that this expert report had
to be done by independent experts. Its necessarily for experts to come
and to lead the inquest. The others would say: no, no, the expertise must
come from us. The union felt confident in the scienticity of economists
and sociologists that would come from an outside point of view that
would be neutral with respect to the forces at play. We can see here
small shifts with respect to preconceived divisions: expert/non-expert,
scientist/non-scientist, political/ non-political. The idea was to play with the
divisions, to bring them back into question.
In order for the world to be plastic at a macropolitical level, there has to

be potential for change. In the case of the seasonal workers, change was
produced in the contradiction. This opened a space where the
micropolitical dimension could express itself. On the other hand well, its
complicated. Because normally you have the possibility of reacting on the
micropolitical terrain, each has the opportunity for recasting the field. Well
everyone so to speak, shall we say. The problem is how to think the
relation between conduct and counter-conducts, what Foucault calls
molecular counter-conduct, that is to say the relation between the
micropolitical and the macropolitical.
Lets give an example of a seasonal worker: the artist. It is artists, for

example, that use unemployment insurance. Instead of using the money
to soften the risk of being out of work, they use it to finance their artistic
work. Thus, this is a subversion of the meaning of unemployment
insurance. At the micropolitical level, everyone does this. Its a subversion
that undermines the categories work-unemployment, juridical categories
in the workplace, in the realm of social security. These categories are
shifted because unemployment cannot be translated into inactivity (that
can only be finalized/activated through the search for employment), but
as a moment of artistic activity. Thus the massage from the micro to the
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macropolitical produces a change in subjectivity. That is to say that they
play with the categories that are given, they shift them, creating an
important subjective change. These conducts are very ambiguous. It
becomes a question of how we can practically recast the code of work
and of social security.
But generally reform means that the macropolitical is redefined such

that it retroacts on the micropolitical level and closes it. This is how the
micro and the macropolitical continue to act together. The reform
closes down creative artistic spaces that had opened up, institutionalizing
the management of time. The big problem, clearly, is the political
struggle with respect to time: the plasticity of the political. We see how this
plasticity that had been created because there were conditions for which
the world could be relatively plastic, is now blocked, rigidified once more
by macropolitical institutional choices.
BM: The micro and the macropolitical are all the more linked when the
power of the security society, is no longer disciplinary. This can lead to
confusion since when we say institution, we think discipline, when we say
security society, we think surveillance, Big Brother. In fact, you describe
how macropolitical management focuses on the proliferation of small
differences, of differential normalities. And then, there is the return or the
responses of these individualities, these created differentials now
reappropriated by the system that reforms itself around the responses. You
say that the mechanism of power is not inclusion/exclusion, is no longer
the closure of the casting outside. Can you explain further the differences
with respect to disciplinary power and the ways in which it continues in a
certain way to function internally, in your theory of power?
ML: I called this form of governmentality government of inequalities

because power plays through the almost infinite production of
differences, or of inequalities rather than differences. How do we produce
these differences? We produce them in different ways.
In the past, there was the wage-earner and the unemployed. Now we
have the RMI, the unemployed, the intermittent, the part-time worker, the
wage-earner, the contract worker: there is a multiplication of statuses,
speaking of the workforce, which is almost infinite, if you like. Then, the
government decided to reduce in a major way employment assistance,
that is to say employment that earlier you find with the help of the State.
Now, with the crisis, they put them back in, and they will create a new
category. Thus they will continue to multiply the categories and no one
will be excluded or included: we are all inside, in this spectrum of
regulation. Sometimes, depending on availability, the government
diminishes one category to bring up another, according to a given
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project or else according to the conflictualities that develop in one sector
or another. But that spectrum is really very open, and very available for
the manipulation of the administration. Thus, there is no inside and
outside in a clear-cut way as we might say of the disciplinary society. Its
the continuum of differences that is modulatable. Modulation, this is the
best term. Inside this, there is the reproduction of disciplinary techniques.
And this, Foucault explains clearly. The passage from a disciplinary society
to a security society is not a replacing. It is that one system becomes
predominant with respect to others at the same time that it recuperates
the techniques of the others.
We see, for instance, that there are disciplinary techniques that are
recuperated inside the management of the unemployed. Control that is
almost disciplinary, augmented. But the general logic is not disciplinary.
The general logic is securitary in the sense that it plays with the differences
and at the limit, and in certain segments liberty is even introduced, as
Foucault would say. They introduce elements of liberty. We can play on
these differences of freedom, we can enclose them. We play at all levels,
we play the responsabilization and the injunction to autonomy.
Today, with the seasonal workers more than a million and a half of
people that are RMI and have no resources they attempt to create a
sense of responsibility, an activation of the individual. And at each level,
there is this injunction to autonomy: this injunction to autonomy is
paradoxical since on another side, they block it. Its a form of
governmentality like the one we knew as part of the disciplinary regime.
This is obvious with the seasonal workers since they are a workforce that
isnt assigned to a specific place. They work three days on a film, they
work on a play that lasts some months. They do not have a workplace as
such: this is a workforce that is entirely mobilisable. Its a real mobile
territory, and thus there is no anchoring as there was in the past for
workers who always went to the same place and had the same
employer. Now, the workplace changes all the time because the same
actor, for example, can act in a play, can do voice-overs, can work on a
film. He can change all the time. And this mobility is controlled through
micropolitical assemblages, I think.
The problem is that the micropolitical has a bad reputation. It has been
interpreted as though it were composed of techniques or assemblages
that interest only marginals the mad, the drugged. I think these are
techniques not at all mobilized by marginals. These are securitary
techniques that are very important. Especially since the micropolitical was
already present in the security society with the injunction to autonomy,
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the degree of freedom given and taken back, depending on the
situation, and all that.
EM: Id like to push this a bit further with one last question. I dont have the
impression that in the North American milieu there is this problem with the
concept of micropolitics (if there is any thought of the micropolitical at
all!). You have a sentence here, I will read it to you: Micropolitics is far
from being a call to spontaneity, a simple call to movement, a simple
affirmation of forms of life (a vitalism as Jacques Rancire or Alain Badiou
would say with disdain). Micropolitics requires a very high level of
organization, a precise differentiation of the actions and the functions of
the political, a multiplicity of initiatives, an intellectual and organizational
discipline. This is a wonderful sentence. I would like you to say more
about this idea that micropolitics may be conceived as a vitalism or a
force of life. Because just today when Brian and I were discussing
micropolitics we realized that yes, its certainly a force for life, but not a
vitalism. Maybe you could trace the difference?
ML: I wrote this sentence because too often we understand the

micropolitical as a form of spontaneity, a party, as Badiou would say. I
think that Guattari talks about it, and says that it is not a question of
spontaneity, a simplification, a collective celebration, even though
evidently it is also all these things. Micropolitics requires an organizational
rigour, and perhaps demands even more organization. For example,
every time the organization committee needed to make a decision,
needed to practice this Neither inside nor outside, this demanded
another level of internal organization, many debates and discussions, and
an increased attention with regard to what we were saying. Since nothing
was given in advance, we needed to live carefully amongst practices of
experimentation, we needed to pay close attention to the processes, the
internal processes, the external processes. With the micropolitical, you
have to analyze effectively since it is always a different case. So, its
necessary at any given moment to make a precise analysis of the forces
at play. How is it playing out on the inside? What is happening on the
outside? Each time its the analysis of a small event.
For each event, there are questions that are at once aleatory and that
you must seize right away since at the next moment they will no longer be
valid, or something will have changed. The micropolitical is a form of
organization, a subjectivisation of the spirit that requires a certain
intellectual rigour, even an organizational rigour, in order that new
political expressions be produced. In the case of the seasonal workers, we
saw this at a small scale. But this experience of organization was definitely
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not an experience of spontaneity. It was an experience of daily work,
created through each element.
BM: One last question that returns to your answer where you speak of
grasping the aleatory through very precise and constructivist techniques
to create the emergence of something at this interface where the macro
and the micro meet and exchange some of their process. This activity of
grasping the aleatory technically resembles an artistic or aesthetic
activity. I know you move toward the thought of an aesthetic paradigm,
but there are thinkers who completely refuse this path, Zizek, who says that
capitalism that feeds on this creative dynamism itself becomes artistic to a
certain extent. How would you respond to this way of thinking?
ML: I think its a terrain of struggle. Like all such terrains, given that its a
struggle between different positions, it is not predetermined, not resolved.
But we must agree on whether it is this particular locus of struggle or if it is
another. I think that what you just described, the terrain of struggle, is this
particular one and the stakes are these specific ones. So, we can
measure them, we can win, we can lose. Or perhaps the forces at stake
will make capital work better than before this is not impossible. It
depends, as it does in all struggles: there are those who win and those
who lose. What is important is to define whether the terrain is this one or
another. If its another, we must act differently, but if its this one, we must
find techniques. I follow Guattaris intuition on the aesthetic paradigm: if
the world is to be created, is becoming at the same time as it needs to
become, if the world is incomplete and if it calls for subjectivity, we must
make a transition from the scientific paradigm as was the case in
Marxism toward the aesthetic paradigm, aesthetic in the sense of the
production of the creation of something. This changes the point of view.
With Marx, it was still a scientific paradigm. Today, its an ethico-aesthetic

problem, ethico-aesthetic since the world is in the making. If we are
implicated in a certain way in this making of the world, the impasse is not
cognitive but ethico-political. How do we create this world?
Inside this world, there are powerful struggles. This wont happen without
pain. We have to choose. I think that today we are moving toward forms
of collective action and organization that will require an aesthetic
paradigm, not in the sense of an aestheticisation of the social, nor in the
sense that everyone must become an artist, but in this capacity of
grasping the political in the event.
Translated by Erin Manning
15
Cinematic Practice Does Politics
An Interview with Julia Loktev, 11 & 13 October 2008
Julia Loktev is a filmmaker based in New York City. Her first film, Moment of
Impact, won the directors award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. Her
installation work has been featured at both the Tate Modern and PS1 galleries.
Day Night Day Night (2006) is her second feature film, and has won numerous
awards, including the Youth Prize at Cannes Directors Fortnight. She is currently
working on a third feature film. I had the pleasure of interviewing Julia in New
York City in October 2008.
I spoke with Julia about the relationship between filmmaking and politics,
specifically referring to her film Day Night Day Night. The film is about a suicide-
bomber on her way to Times Square to detonate.
Julia Loktev: JL
Nasrin Himada: NH
NH: Hi Julia.
JL: Hi Nasrin. This is an attempt at an interview take two.
NH: Yes. Take two.
JL: Because we had a conversation yesterday and in some ways I came away
from it feeling like I had flunked an exam. Your friend Heather said something
very funny, she said, do you feel like youre going to go back to school and
Brian Massumi is going to retroactively change your grade for your thesis. I have
been out of an academic sphere for so long, and using academic language
can be taken for granted when youre in the midst of it, and then the
vocabulary that you use on an everyday basis sort of slips away. You realize you
no longer understand this language. Its like anything else, you know when I
havent spoken Russian for a while, my Russian gets quite rusty, and I feel like my
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academic speak is so rusty it doesnt even move at this point. I am not sure if
coffee or beer is enough to lubricate it into moving. So, in some ways I think we
have to bridge the language somehow because I dont know how to begin to
talk about micropolitics. Frankly, because I am not entirely sure what
micropolitics is, and I am embarrassed to admit that I am not sure what
micropolitics is.
NH: I felt uneasy, as well. Because I wasnt sure what my intention was in trying to
have an artist talk about her work in relation to politics. What is my intention in
doing that? Why is that important for me? Why it is important for me to think
about politics in relation to everyday practice and what do I mean by that? I
realized it was a chance for me to ask what is politics at this point, and how can
we talk about it in relation to cinema. I wanted to think about it in a way that
takes the conversation away from content, from politics as content. I wanted to
get at the question of how art does politicsas a way to experiment with
creating techniquesand how does this process of art making begin to open
up potential for a new articulation of politics that cannot be known yet but that
is based in how one practices, and that is really about process and
experimentation. What does art do in terms of enabling new thoughts for how
the political can be articulated?
JL: There are ways of finding a common vocabulary, but I do find myself slipping
back. When you talk about micropolitics, and when you explain to me what it is,
I think I understand it, and yet the minute I attempt to talk about it, I fumble and
find myself slipping back into talking about macropolitics. I dont know how to
begin to talk about this in relation to my work because then I slip back into the
larger issues, which isnt really what we should be talking about. It seems that the
minute I try to put it into language I exactly kind of defeat what its suppose to
be
NH: I wonder if thats maybe because I am trying to talk about something that
we cant necessarily talk about or describe, or thats attainable somehow in
verbal language.
JL: I mean just because I cant talk about it doesnt mean that somebody else
cant, which is something I like about making work. Its a kind of jumping-off
point for somebody else to add to it and to work from it; maybe it can give
somebody an idea even if they disagree with it, it can start something, and that
is maybe the most political thing that I can do in my work. I am not used to
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thinking about my work in a kind of direct political sense. I dont think of it as a
call to action, as a recipe for behaviour, as a staking out of a position. But for me
the most important thing is can it leave room for thought; can it leave room for
argument; can it leave room for disagreement; can somebody walk out of the
film and not be so certain of what they feel. This destabilizing is maybe the most
political thing that I can do. Because so often when we think about political
cinema it isnt necessarily about destabilizingespecially documentaries, but
also in fictionthere are a lot of very politically motivated films now that are
basically preaching to the choir. Theyre about confirming a position and
making you feel safer in your assumptions, and you see this all the time.
Just the other day (on a plane)I saw a film. I am trying to remember what
happened. There was an immigrant couple, an Arab man and an African
woman I believe, who, through complicated circumstances befriended this
white middle-class professor. The Arab guy teaches the white professor how to
drum and they become friends. Then one day, while carrying the drum on the
New York subway the Arab man gets pulled over by the cops and thrown into
immigration detention because his papers had expired. And then it becomes all
about the white guy realizing how awful immigration detention is, and lobbying
for his new Arab friends release. And, of course, everyone who works at the
detention is very rude and mean in a kind of exaggerated way, just to drive the
point home. And the people on the plane next to me were nice good-hearted
liberalswed just been excitedly talking about the Democratic Convention
who were gushing about what a wonderful movie this was. And of course, yes,
the political position is correct, but really theres something so simplistic about
this, and thats a good example of what gets considered liberal political cinema
now. You walk out of the movie feeling very satisfied that you have correct
thoughts and that others think like you. Again, I have no problem with the
position, but I think that truly political work should not make you feel satisfied
with what you know; it should make you feel a little bit unsatisfied and a little bit
unstable with some of your assumptions, a little uneasy. There is a kind of
smugness in that filmI cant remember the name, but I think there are a lot of
films now like that and there certainly have been several films about suicide
bombers where everything is very clear, and you come out feeling that
everything you know has been confirmed. Its an illusion that you learned
something, but, in fact, you learned what you already knew.
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NH: And its interesting how there is a formula in that example of the film you
talked about, a cinematic formula is constructed, right, in terms of helping you
get to that satisfaction or self-indignation.
JL: Exactly. You get that catharsis in the most traditional, conventional way. The
form is absolutely conventional, and then you walk out of the film feeling
satisfied. That feeling of satisfaction is disturbing to me. You become the
equivalent of a couch potato. Its all been thought and digested for you and
presented to you in nice easy morsels, and at no point has something that you
assumed to be true been truly confronted. And thats a lot of what constitutes
political films now.
NH: Theyre not dangerous to thought. They dont disturb what has already
been thought.
JL: We all want to believe that they are dangerous to somebody else. People
have the sense that Of course, I knew all of this, but there is somebody out
there who needed to learn it. Its the way people approach Michael Moore
filmsI am using that as a kind of very shorthand examplebecause there are
plenty of other films like that, both fiction and documentary. People say, Well
yes, of course, I knew everything hes saying, but you know those other people
needed to learn this, to them this is dangerous. But of course its not those
other people that are going to this movie. The people to whom it might be
possibly dangerous are in no position to receive it or have no interest in it. So, in
fact, the people who go to see it are the ones who feel very safe and who dont
feel the slightest bit endangered by the argument, usually. So, what does it
mean to be dangerous, and to whom? Something should be dangerous to
yourself, in some way, not to some imaginary other.
NH: I start to think about how cinema today experiments with technique. For
every new project we begin we engage with an experiment that is going to
create a set of techniques, right, depending on what the project is and
depending on the process. I was thinking, how do you then pay attention to
your own practice (in how you create your techniques) to try and do things
differently each time you make a film or experiment with an idea? How do you
think about what you want to do thats going to be different or challenging? I
dont even know if thats answerable.
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JL: I am trying to remember who it was that said something so beautiful,
something to the effect of, I set out to do what everybody else does, but it just
comes out different. So, I dont know if I set out to make it somehow different. I
try to think in terms of formal approacheshow can the sound and the image
reflect the feeling that I want to get at in a particular point. I dont necessarily
set out with a system, and yet it becomes a system. I think on some level I am a
formalist. But its always somehow a reflection of something I am trying to get
across in that particular film. In the example of Day Night Day Night, I thought of
it as two different halves. I thought here is a film about this girl where more than
half the film is spent planning and preparing, spent almost entirely in interiors, in
isolation. And then shes thrown out into the street, in the middle of Times
Square, in the middle of a crowd, attempting to carry out this action. So then, it
became a question of how do you formally reflect that inherent difference
between the two parts of the film. Shes in this vacuum of the hotel room; its the
process of planning, and everything seems very clear in a plan. Its like an
architectural drawing, its schematic. The film had to formally reflect that at that
point. There werent a lot of colours, everything was grid-like, extra details were
eliminated. The sound in this part is not really about the environment that shes
in. Shes kind of in this closed chamber, so it should be just the sound that shes
making in the world, the sound of the impact of her movement on the world
around her, I dont need to hear the neighbours TV in the room next to her, that
would be something otherits not about that. Whereas, once you go out onto
the street in Times Square, everything is coming in from all sides, so then how do
you construct the image and the sound in a way that reflects that feeling and
that sense of a girl in the midst of this crowd in Times Square. The formal decisions
also came partly out of necessityusing a very loose camera simply because it
was impossible to have rigidly framed shots in Times Square. So, then you adapt
to it, you transform a constraint into a decision.
Usually, I have some harebrained reason why I want things, and then I make up
rules for why it has to be this way. I write down all kinds of rules for myself. But it
has to be, in some way, a reflection of the places and the faces we film. I am
working on this film now. Its going to be shot in Georgia (country) and were still
working on the casting; I feel like there are things about the film that I know at
this stageI mean yes, there is a script writtenbut until I am actually in the
space with the actors, until I see the actors faces, until I know who they are,
there is a lot that I cant know. I cant get to that next phase of visualizing how it
should be because I need to flesh out these other ideasin a sense I need to
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know what the flesh is, literally. I need to find the flesh, and then figure out how
its going to be in the film because it doesnt come fully formed all at once in my
mind. I am not somebody who can visualize a film entirely beginning to end in
my head. I think if I can visualize it entirely (beginning to end)there is no reason
to make it. There are filmmakers I respect, like Hitchcock, who could visualize a
film entirely. I cant. I am simply not capable of it. I need the real world to force
me into situations and force me to come up with solutions.
NH: My question to you that I thought about just while you were talking is about
how much intuition plays into the work? I guess I am also asking that because I
am thinking so much about the kind of process youre talking about when
shooting for instance in Times Square and how it becomes about a pragmatic
intuitive process somehow.
JL: Yes, I want to be more intuitive, but I am actually by nature a very logical
and rigid person. I try to construct little logical games for myself. It forces me to
use intuition. If I create a kind of structure then within that structure I can play.
NH: Like going to Times Square with a camera.
JL: Right. You set up the rules of the game. You set up certain parameters, and
hopefully you have collaborators that are willing to play with you and be a little
bit intuitive in that moment. Thats something I always struggle withwanting to
be more intuitive.
NH: I noticed that in Day Night Day Night there were a lot of close-up shots on
gestures. For example, this occurs in the scene of the first attempt at detonation.
The intensity is felt very strongly because of how you shot it using close-ups. These
close-up shots focused on peoples hands, and the backs of their neckmicro-
gestureswhile theyre waiting to cross the street with the about to become
suicide-bomber. You didnt focus on their faces but their body movements in
parts as they stood waiting.
JL: Yes. I think a lot of the time I tend to focus on hands or on body movements
I was going to say more than face but thats not true, as much as face but more
than wordsbecause there is so much that can come across in how a hand
moves, in how a person moves their body in that moment to reflect a feeling.
Thats so much more interesting to me than what people say. I am interested in
the kind of talk that people might be having in a particular situation versus talk
thats for the audiences benefit, about explaining something to an audience.
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NH: For example, when we hear the suicide-bomber pray.
JL: She had these strange prayers that she did, which I always imagined would
be subtitled. Thats how I wrote them, to be subtitled. I thought, well, shes
speaking English, but you shouldnt talk to your object of faith in the same way
you talk to your friend; you have to have some other way of using language. It
shouldnt sound like a regular conversation. These prayers are kind of oblique.
At the same time, they were taken from real sources, from an adaptation of
things that I had come across in my research, like the prayer Everybody dies.
Some people fall from windows and die, that was taken from something Id
read about a Palestinian suicide-bomber video. In the video, he says, Some
people get run over by horses and die, some people fall off sheds... and listed
all these different ways people die, and then said I want my death to be for
you. I adapted it and I brought in a few more methods of death, changed the
methods of death, but basically worked off of that.
NH: I think I read somewhere that you also didnt want the audience to grasp
onto something she would say that would justify her act or give an explanation
for what she was about to do. And yet the prayers kind of give hints at
something, especially when she says, I want this death to be for you, this
almost hints at giving a reason for her action.
JL: Its not that I didnt want people to grasp onto some things. Its more that I
discovered once I made the film that people grasped onto the tiniest shreds. I
mean that was a kind of unintended consequence. So you would have these
situationsthere is a scene where the organizers [of the suicide bombing
mission] are going through her wallet and theyre taking her ID and they take a
photo of her little brother, and she says, Can I keep it? and they refuse. Again,
that was a little detail that I drew from an article about this girl that I researched
a lot on, a Chechen girl, who set out to be a suicide bomber in Moscow and
failed. She said she was kind of sad because they wouldnt let her take a picture
of her daughter with her. She just wanted to keep it. It was not that she was
trying to do this for her daughter, it was just that she wanted to take the picture
of her daughter with her. So, I used this detail and substituted a picture of a little
brother, and Ive had people make up elaborate narratives that its all about
the little brother. Whereas, I just thought, she knows shes going to die and she
wants to have a picture of her little brother, its not anything more than that. I
found that in a vacuum, people started attaching incredible amounts of
importance to the slightest detail. So, you almost couldnt have any personal
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details because they would be mistaken for clues. For example, I had to re-
write and re-write and re-write the scene toward the end where she calls her
parents. I assumed that this is not the type of thing that she has informed her
parents shes doing; when she calls, her parents obviously think that shes
somewhere else. Wherever she came from she cant just go back.
To me, it was just about a closed door that cant be reopened. I had to re-
record it a bunch of times to make the parents nicer and nicer, probably too
nice, because people would just go into these elaborate explanations that it
was all about the parents, and that she had a fight with her parents. The
audience is used to looking for clues that are supposed to mean something or
explain everything. I think thats one thing thats often been misinterpreted
about my intentions. It wasnt my intention to say that you shouldnt ask why, or
that the why is inexplicable, or that there is no why. No, it just happened to be
not what this particular story was about. A story is not necessarily the whole
story. You can tell a love story where you talk about how two people meet, and
you can tell a love story where you dont tell how they met and you just pick it
up at the point where theyve been married for four years.
NH: Can we talk about the ending of the film now that it has been a couple of
years. The ending was really something for me
JL: Spoiler alert. Thats what they do on IMDB, spoiler alert. I never care. I never
care if people tell me the endings of movies. I am always interested in how you
get toward something, not what happens. But yeah, we can talk about the end.
I was really only interested in making a film about a girl who sets out to be a
suicide bomber and fails. I was interested in her failure. The film wasnt about the
radicalization of this girl; it wasnt about how she came to make a decision. It
was a film about this girl who already made a decision but fails to carry it out.
NH: Ive talked to a few people who also watched the film and walked out of it
at the end feeling this bodily tension in their gut. For me, that was the case, and
for a few friends I went to see it with, for sure. Its an intensity thats felt with the
situation thats unfolding on the screen. You walk out of the film feeling, not
stressed out, but like youve carried something with you the entire time thats still
inarticulable once you leave the cinema.
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JL:Thats part of the reason why I wanted the credits to be silent, to let people
catch their breath again and to just sit with it a little bit. Its always been very
quiet when Ive done Q &As after the film and when the lights come back on.
There is always this kind of uncomfortable silence. It was like that with my other
film too, Moment of Impact. And maybe that ties back into what we started out
talking aboutwhat the political can bein thesense that the work is not
entirely finished. There is not a sense of a complete arc, something that youve
gone through and now you know exactly what you feel, Yes, I am satisfied. It
doesnt necessarily stop where you expected it to. I thought it should be
interrupted rather than concluded. So, the end can be a kind of beginning to a
conversation, and its a conversation that doesnt have to involve me and
should not involve me most of the time.
My favourite movies are the ones where I dont really know what just happened;
I dont know entirely what I just experienced; I dont know what I think about it;
theres still some work to be done; and maybe I will never figure out what I saw
but I just have that feeling from it. Those are the kind of films that I get very
excited by. Something that leaves me a little bit on edge, a little incomplete. I
hoped, going back to the endingmy thought about the ending was
NH: You filmed that yourself too, right?
JL: The last shot I filmed myself because it was supposed to be a kind of shot of
nothing that had the potential to be something. Its very difficult to shoot
nothing that has the potential to be something. Its very difficult. Its almost like
the photograph of the little brothersomething can be too overloaded with
meaning. At the end, shes looking for a sign, and I suppose a believer can see
a sign in anything, where another person might see absolutely nothing. So, I
wanted the potential of a sign but possibly the potential for no sign at all. I
would go out by myself long after we had edited the film and I would go across
from Port Authority, a block away from Times Square, and go out to shoot
nothing. I tried thirty takes of nothing and they didnt work very well, and then
finally I did manage to shoot nothing. I liked the idea of having a conclusion
that people could enter into from different positions, within faith or outside of
faith, or in completely different ways. And there is no right or wrong way.
NH: The prayers are a little bit like that too. She doesnt say God, and might not
be to a God.
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JL: Exactly. Shes not naming the object of belief, of her faith.
NH: But one is hinted at. The film plays back and forth with this kind of ambiguity,
between belief and non-belief. At times, its hard to tell what the protagonist is
feeling and its never saidshe hardly says anything through out the film. Her
facial expression and bodily movements are unreadable, but very pronounced
at the same time. Its impossible to reduce it to an emotion. The film remains
ambiguous in this way, but the ambiguity of the film is also what makes it so that
the experience of watching her is intense. Its very affective.
JL: Sometimes even if you dont know what a character is thinking you have a
sense of the rhythm of her breath, the rhythm of her physical actions in that
moment. This isnt a girl that you get to know based on knowing her back-story,
knowing where she came from, where she grew up, or knowing what shes
thinking at this moment. You kind of get to know her based on the motions of
her body and motions of her face, based on watching her breathe and being
drawn into her breathing. There was this very nice thing that somebody said to
me in Buenos Aires at a screening. This girl came to me after and she said, A
few minutes into the film and I felt like I was breathing with her." I thought that
was a nice comment. You feel inside this character and under her skin, without
ever really knowing her thought process or who she is at all, but you know what
her body is doing and how its responding to everything in terms of how shes
moving and different ways that her body reflects degrees of tension and
anxiety. All of it is very much about her body; it plays out on her body. I
remember when I was casting the girl, I had all these requirements of what I
wanted from the girl, and one of things I wrote in my notes was shes someone
that events pass through and her face is constantly registering their passing. And
then I thought its not really just her face but also her body. Sometimes, I think
you learn more by sitting there with somebody and watching them eat an egg
roll than them telling you something.
NH: In one interview I also read you said something about when people try to
recollect a traumatic event and talk about what they had just gone through
and this was something you said in the interview that struck meis the way in
which they recalled banal details. Like this one woman, who was there on
September 11th, could only recall losing one of her shoes and walking around
with a bare foot. This reminded me of the girl and her ritual of eating in the film,
which plays a role in how she grounds herself as she moves in the future and
past of whats about to happen. Shes about to blow herself up.
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JL: Exactly. Thats what you focus on. Because its these physical gestures that tie
you to the world, tie you to other people, and sometimes that is what you
remember from an event, a detail. And the main narrative is what you
remember from the retelling of the event, over and over. So you know how the
main arc goes, but its the little detail that grounds you. For me, it made sense to
focus on those things. I am very interested in gestures. In the new film I am
working on, this very dramatic event happens between this couple while theyre
travelling, and they absolutely have no way of speaking about it. So, half the
film is them going on with their trip but not speaking about the elephant in the
room. And the way that this event plays out and the ways they relate to each
otherthey do everything else but talk about it. So its how their relationship to
each others bodies changes after the event, how every gesture they make
toward each other changes, how they position themselves in relation to each
other changes, and how they attempt to negotiate this kind of intimacy of one
person approaching the other then withdrawing and taking turns doing this. But
mostly this happens through tiny physical gestures, where a moment of
reconciliation can be somebody offering you some dried apricots, or a hand
that goes into a pocket as opposed to going into your hand becomes an act of
betrayal. So its these small things that you often remember and register
because you are responding to the world in physical ways. And sometimes its
about gestures that you have no awareness that youre making and that are
much more revealing than what you intend to be doing. One of the nice things
about film is that you can focus on things that if you were watching this scene
from across the room you wouldnt notice. The movement of a hand can be the
heart of a scene, but it would be completely unapparent to somebody
watching you at a caf.
NH: We watch her, for a long time, eating this bright red candy apple as she is
walking toward her destination in Times Square. Again, it was so intense
watching her eat for so long. Did you know that she was going to eat a candy
apple?
JL: I knew that she was going to eat food that was available in Times Square,
street food.
NH: Right, there were the pretzels.
JL: Like the pretzels. And then I saw these candy apples in a store and they were
just so beautifulnot the caramel apples, not the brown ones, but those red
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glossy ones. I finally understood why they called those guitars or cars candy
apple red, thats the kind of red. I have to confess something, a little cheat. We
discovered it was impossible to buy a candy apple in Times Square. They dont
sell candy apples in Times Square. So we spent the first four hours of the morning
of the shoot going all over New York City trying to find candied apples. So
theyre not as common as you think. But it seems its the kind of thing that should
be sold in Times Square.
NH: I am going to be a total academic right now and refer to what Gilles
Deleuze, in one of his cinema books, calls an affection-image. He talks about it
in relation to a close-up; its usually a close-up, and talks about how the shot
constitutes micro-movements of expression.
JL: Talk about that.
NH: For me, from what I understand from what hes writing about in terms of
affection-images, is that its something where youre instantly affected by what
youre seeing on the screen without necessarily recognizing how its making you
feel; its pre-cognitive, operating outside what he calls spatio-temporal
coordinates. Its felt before it can be articulated or reduced to something we
can recognize in language. A lot of the time, to explain this, Ive heard people
use examples of going to see a horror film and describing this moment before it
is that you recognize youre scared; so its that moment before you can
determine the emotion as being scared;its before you can determine or define
what has just affected you. And for me, I would say that your film would be an
affection-image.
JL: I like the sound of it. I was thinking about this film I saw last week and I am still
thinking about it. I dont know how to think about it actually. I am still thinking
about the fact that I am still thinking about it but I have absolutely nothing to
think about, in the sense that I dont know how to verbally engage with it or
think about it in a specific way, or analyse it in a specific way. This is Lucrecia
Martels A Headless Woman. I am still thinking about it specifically because it
gave me some kind of a feeling but I have no idea what that feeling is; I have
no idea really how to talk about it. It wasnt the best film I saw in a long time, nor
even the best film I saw this year. But it was utterly mysterious to me. It was about
a sensation that I felt while watching it, and I still think about the fact of having
this sensation that I cant quite put into words. It strangely stuck to me more than
stuck with mean amorphous feeling that I have no way of speaking about. I
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am fascinated by that because usually I could begin to talk about something,
but here I dont really know what to say, but I had this sensation while watching
it, and to me that alone was interesting.
NH: I feel that when a work attaches itself to me its usually because I cant say
why I liked it or disliked it. So coming to interview you I was nervous because I
wasnt sure how to ask questions about a work that did just thatattach itself to
me in this sort of sensorial way. Because I feel too that once I begin to talk about
a work and try to explain why a work moved me or why I liked a work its always
going to be not exactly that. The effect of the work on me changes and it is no
longer that which I had felt once I try to explain it.
JL: Maybe we should have sat here silently and watched each other drink. In
general, its much easier for me to say why I dont like something, because
usually the things I dont like are very easy to talk about and easy to define. So
its very easy for me to just bitch. There is a clarity to it. Bad reviews are always
juicier than good reviews.
NH: Its easy.
JL: Its very easy. But to talk about why you like something becomes so much
more difficult, and then you almost dont want to. I stopped taking film theory
classes as an undergradvery traditional film studies classes where you
watched movies and analysed them. I didnt like watching movies and then
liking them and then talking about them with people that I didnt necessarily
like. I felt like I was sharing something so private and so dear to me that I didnt
want to share. I even have a hard time walking out of a movie with a friend and
talking about it. I feel like it kills it to talk about it. And at the same time, I feel that
films should be jumping-off points for discussion, not necessarily for analysis, but a
jumping-off point to talk about something else, where the film leads you to
rather than the film itself. But I do think there is something wrong about the fact
that I can talk about things I dont like better than about the things I do like. I just
told you about this film, The Headless Woman, I am really not being very
articulate. There is another film I saw this week, Violence at Noon, an Oshima
film that I got very excited by, and yet if you ask me to describe it to you I would
fail completely. I would just say go see it.
NH: I kind of had at one point convinced myself that I couldnt write a thesis
about films that I liked
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JL: But you managed quiet well
Nasrin laughs.
JL: What about a thesis on films you hate?
NH: Well, thats easy.
JL: It is much easier.
NH: And that was something I was also struggling with in terms of methodology.
To make the experience matter for myself I didnt want to do an analysis, and I
didnt want to follow a film studies methodology that is already pre-determined
in terms of structure and method of how to write about films
JL: And then again youre using the films as a kind of jumping-off point to talk
about something else which is what you were interested in.
NH: Exactly. And I should just make films. Why am I writing about them?
JL: I dont think its either-or.
NH: Yeah. Its not all or nothing [laughs].
JL: All those trite clichs.
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Of Microperception and Micropolitics
An Interview with Brian Massumi, 15 August 20081
Brian Massumi: BM
Joel McKim: JM
JM: The notion of affect has become a key concept in a whole range of current
discussions from questions of immaterial labour to theories of new media
reception. Its a concept that obviously takes many different forms. Can you
explain the particular role that affect plays within your thought?
BM: The notion of affect does take many forms, and youre right to begin by
emphasizing that. To get anywhere with the concept, you have to retain the
manyness of its forms. Its not something that can be reduced to one thing.
Mainly because its not a thing. Its an event, or a dimension of every event.
What interests me in the concept is that if you approach it respecting its variety,
you are presented with a field of questioning, a problematic field, where the
customary divisions that questions about subjectivity, becoming, or the political are
usually couched in do not apply. My starting point is the basic Spinozan
definition of affect, which is an ability to affect or be affected. Right off the
bat, this cuts transversally across a persistent division, probably the most
persistent division. Because the ability to affect and the ability to be affected are
two facets of the same event. One face is turned towards what you might be
tempted to isolate as an object, the other towards what you might isolate as a
subject. Here, they are two sides of the same coin. There is an affectation, and it
is happening in-between. You start with the in-betweenness. No need to detour
through well-rehearsed questions of philosophical foundations in order to cobble
together a unity. You start in the middle, as Deleuze always taught, with the
dynamic unity of an event.
There is a second part of the Spinozan definition taken up by Deleuze that is not
cited as often. It is that a power to affect and be affected governs a transition,
1
We would like to thank Joel McKim, Lucia Vodanovic and Jose Ossandon for allowing us to
reprint this interview from Disturbios Culturales: Conversaciones acerca de Cultural y
Movilizacion, ed. Lucia Vodanovic and Jose Ossandon (Santiago : Ediciones Diego Portales,
forthcoming)
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where a body passes from one state of capacitation to a diminished or
augmented state of capacitation. This comes with the corollary that the
transition is felt. A distinction is asserted between two levels, one of which is
feeling and the other capacitation or activation. But the distinction comes in the
form of a connection. This separation-connection between feeling and
activation situates the account between what we would normally think of as the
self on the one hand and the body on the other, in the unrolling of an event
thats a becoming of the two together.
This already yields a number of terms that can be put to use and developed.
First, the feeling of the transition as the body moves from one power of existence
to another has a certain separability from the event it is bound up with, by virtue
of its distinction from the capacitation activating the passage. What is felt is the
quality of the experience. The account of affect will then have to directly
address forms of experience, forms of life, on a qualitative register. Second, the
felt transition leaves a trace, it constitutes a memory. Consequently, it cant be
restricted to that one occurrence. It will return. It has already returned, in some
capacity. It was already part of a series of repetitions, to the extent that the
body has a past.
Thats the third point: the capacitation of the body as its gearing up for a
passage towards a diminished or augmented state is completely bound up with
the lived past of the body. That past includes what we think of as subjective
elements, such as habits, acquired skills, inclinations, desires, even willings, all of
which come in patterns of repetition. This doesnt make the event any less
rooted in the body. The past that the body carries forward in serial fashion
includes levels we think of as physical and biological, such as genetic
inheritance and phylogenesis. So theres a reactivation of the past in passage
toward a changed future, cutting transversally across dimensions of time,
between past and future, and between pasts of different orders. This in-between
time or transversal time is the time of the event. This temporality enables, and
requires you to rethink all of these terms bodily capacitation, felt transition,
quality of lived experience, memory, repetition, seriation, inclinationin dynamic
relation to each other.
If there is one key term, thats it: relation. When you start in-between, what youre
in the middle of is a region of relation. Occurrent relation, because its all about
event. Putting the terms together, you realize straight away that the relational
event will play out differently every time. In repeating, it takes up the past
differently. In taking up the past differently, it creates new potentials for the
future. The region of occurrent relation is a point of potentiation. It is where things
begin anew. Where things begin anew is where they were already present in
tendency.
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If there are two key terms, tendency comes next. The patterns of movement
through these affective transitions are weighted for a particular body or
particular situations, as more or less accessible, more or less ready to go. Theres
an activation not only of the body, but of the bodys tendencies, as they move
into and through situations. In taking account of this, you get a relational
complex, a nexus, rather than a particular definition. The base definition to
affect and be affected in a felt passage to a varied power of existence opens
a problematic field rather than ending in a particular solution. You are left with a
matrix of variation that forces you to rethink the terms involved each time. You
have to regenerate them to use them. Its not a general definition that you can
apply. Its not a structure you can presuppose. On the other hand, its also not
the case that youre starting without any presuppositions. To start in the middle is
precisely not to perform a phenomenological reduction. It is to accept the
challenge to regenerate your terms, and their cohesion to each other, at each
repeated step in your thinking through the nexus. Rather than a definition, what
you have is a proposition, less in the logical sense than in the sense of an
invitation. Starting from affect in this way is an invitation for an indefinitely
constructive thinking of embodied, relational becoming. The emphasis on
embodiment, variation, and relation gives it an immediately political aspect that
also attracted me.
JM: There are two things in your description that stand out to me as being very
useful additions to the version of Spinozas affect that is often referred to, usually
via Deleuze. One is this immediately intersubjective element that seems to bring
back into the picture Spinozas idea of common notions agreements
between bodies that allow the power of the individual body to be enhanced
through the forming of relations. The other interesting addition you make is to
include a notion of memory. You suggest that an affective experience, or the
feeling of the transition from one power of existence to another, can somehow
be reactivated in different series, in different relations. When you say that this
memory is housed in the body, youre not necessarily talking about an individual
body, youre talking about bodies of relations, of complexes. What happens
when we move into a new set of relations? Do we start from scratch or can we
bring that affective memory with us?
BM: I think there is no such thing as starting from scratch. Everything re-begins, in
a very crowded, overpopulated world. Even one body alone is pre-populated
by instincts, by inclinations, by teeming feelings and masses of memories,
conscious and nonconscious, with all manner of shadings in between. The
question is always how: how to move that crowding into a new constitution,
the constitution of a becoming. Calling affect, or that felt moment of bodily
moving on, calling that intersubjective is misleading if intersubjective is taken to
mean that we start from a world in which there are already subjects that are
preconstituted, or a pregiven structure of subject positions ready for subjects to
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come occupy. What is in question is precisely the emergence of the subject, its
primary constitution, or its reemergence and reconstitution. The subject of an
experience emerges from a field of conditions which are not that subject yet,
where it is just coming into itself. Those conditions are not yet necessarily even
subjective in any normal sense. Before the subject, theres an in-mixing, a field of
budding relation too crowded and heterogeneous to call intersubjective. Its
not at a level where things have settled into categories like subject and object.
Its the level of what William James called pure experience. When I say that it all
comes back to the body, I dont mean the body as a thing apart from the self or
subject. I mean that the body is that region of in-mixing from which subjectivity
emerges. It is the coming together of the world, for experience, in a here-and-
now prior to any possibility of assigning categories like subject or object. That
affective region we were talking about is not in-between in the intersubjective
sense. And its not intentional in the sense of already carrying a subject-object
polarity. Its a brewing, the world stirring. Its a coming event, through which such
categories will return. Their rearising depends on the event. Its not the event that
depends on their already being in place.
JM: Then what precedes the event? What gives rise to it?
BM: Shock. Thats what Peirce says. Affect for me is inseparable from the
concept of shock. It doesnt have to be a drama. Its really more about micro-
shocks, the kind that populate every moment of our lives. For example a change
in focus, or a rustle at the periphery of vision that draws the gaze toward it. In
every shift of attention, there is an interruption, a momentary cut in the mode of
onward deployment of life. The cut can pass unnoticed, striking imperceptibly,
with only its effects entering conscious awareness as they unroll. This is the onset
of the activation I was referring to earlier. Id go so far as to say that this onset of
experience is by nature imperceptible.
This is one way of understanding microperception, a concept of great

importance to Deleuze and Guattari. Microperception is not smaller perception;
its a perception of a qualitatively different kind. Its something that is felt without
registering consciously. It registers only in its effects. According to this notion of
shock, there is always a commotion under way, a something doing as James
would say. There is always a something-doing cutting in, interrupting whatever
continuities are in progress. For things to continue, they have to re-continue. They
have to re-jig around the interruption. At the instant of re-jigging, the body
braces for what will come. It in-braces, in the sense that it returns to its potential
for more of life to come, and that potential is immanent to its own arising.
You can sometimes feel the in-bracing itself, most noticeably in startles or frights.
Before you can even consciously recognize what youre afraid of, or even feel
that it is yourself that is the subject of the feeling, you are catapulted into a
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feeling of the frightfulness of the situation. It only dawns on you in the next instant
that youd better figure out what might have done the catapulting, and what
you should do about. It is only then that you own the feeling as your own, and
recognize it as a content of your life, an episode in your personal history. But in
the instant of the affective hit, there is no content yet. All there is is the affective
quality, coinciding with the feeling of the interruption, with the kind of felt
transition I talked about before. That affective quality is all there is to the world in
that instant. It takes over life, fills the world, for an immeasurable instant of shock.
Microperception is this purely affective rebeginning of the world.
Microperception is bodily. There is no fright, or any affect for that matter, without
an accompanying movement in or of the body. This is the famous James-Lange
thesis. In fact, the thesis goes further, so far as to say that this bodily commotion is
what an emotion is. James calls it emotion, but at this level it is what were
calling affect. The James-Lange thesis has been widely criticized as reductive,
but this is to misunderstand it. Because the body, in this eventful rebeginning,
carries tendencies reviving the past and already striving toward a future. In its
commotion are capacities reactivating, being primed to play out, in a
heightening or diminishing of their collective power of existence. The body
figures here as a cut in the continuity of relation, filled with potential for re-
relating, with a difference. Microperceptual shock is like a re-cueing of our bodily
powers of existence. Here, the body is what Peirce calls a material quality: a
coming quality of experience that is being actively lived-in before its actually
lived out. Its lived-in in intensity, in a kind of existential agitation, a poising or
posturing for the coming event, a kind of recoil, not to withdraw from the world,
but rather to brace for it again, and for how else it will be.
The world in which we live is literally made of these reinaugural

microperceptions, cutting in, cueing emergence, priming capacities. Every body
is at every instant in thrall to any number of them. A body is a complex of in-
bracings playing out complexly and in serial fashion. The tendencies and
capacities activated do not necessarily bear fruit. Some will be summoned to
the verge of unfolding, only to be left behind, unactualized. But even these will
have left their trace. In that moment of interruptive commotion, theres a
productive indecision. Theres a constructive suspense. Potentials resonate and
interfere, and this modulates what actually eventuates. Even what doesnt
happen has a modulatory effect. Whitehead had a word for this. He called it
negative prehension. Its a somewhat paradoxical concept. It refers to an
unfelt feeling entering positively into the constitution of an experience by dint of
its active exclusion from it. The concept of affect is tied to the idea of
modulation occurring at a constitutive level where many somethings are doing,
most of them unfelt. Or again, felt only in effect. No less real for passing unfelt.
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Say there are a number of bodies indexed to the same cut, primed to the same
cue, shocked in concert. What happens is a collective event. Its distributed
across those bodies. Since each body will carry a different set of tendencies and
capacities, there is no guarantee that they will act in unison even if they are
cued in concert. However different their eventual actions, all will have unfolded
from the same suspense. They will have been attuned differentially -- to the
same interruptive commotion. Affective attunementa concept from Daniel
Sternis a crucial piece to the affective puzzle. It is a way of approaching
affective politics that is much more supple than notions more present in the
literature of whats being called the affective turn, like imitation or contagion,
because it finds difference in unison, and concertation in difference. Because of
that, it can better reflect the complexity of collective situations, as well as the
variability that can eventuate from what might be considered the same
affect. There is no sameness of affect. There is affective difference in the same
event. Reactions to fear, to that classic example again, vary wildly, and even
vary significantly at different times in the same individuals life.
JM: How does this relate to politics?
BM: Politics, approached affectively, is an art of emitting the interruptive signs,

triggering the cues that attune bodies while activating their capacities
differentially. Affective politics is inductive. Bodies can be inducted into, or
attuned to, certain regions of tendency, futurity, and potential, they can be
induced into inhabiting the same affective environment, even if there is no
assurance they will act alike in that environment. A good example is an alarm, a
sign of threat or danger. Even if you conclude in the next instant that its a false
alarm, you will have come to that conclusion in an environment that is
effectively one of threat. Others who have heard the alarm may well respond
differently, but they will be responding differently together, as inhabitants of the
same affective environment. Everyone registering the alarm will have been
attuned to same threat event, in one way or another. It is the sum total of the
different ways of being interpellated by the same event that will define what it
will have been politically. The event cant be fully predetermined. It will be as it
happens. For there to be uniformity of response, other factors must have been
active to pre-channel tendencies. Politics of conformity pivoting on the signaling
of threat, like the politics that held sway during the Bush administration, must
work on many levels and at many rhythms of bodily priming to ensure a relative
success. And again, there will be minor lines that wont be emphasized or come
out into relief or be fully enacted but that everyone will have felt in that
unfeeling way of negatively prehending. Those are left as a reservoir of political
potential. It is a potential that is immediately collective. Its not a mere possibility,
its an active part of the constitution of that situation, its just one that hasnt
been fully developed, that hasnt been fully capacitated for unfolding. This
means that there are potential alter-politics at the collectively in-braced heart of
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every situation, even the most successfully conformist in its mode of attunement.
You can return to that reservoir of real but unexpressed potential, and re-cue it.
This would be a politics of microperception: a micropolitics. The Obama
campaigns recuing of fear toward hope might be seen as targeting that
micropolitical level, interestingly, through macro-media means.
Even in the most controlled political situation, theres a surplus of unacted-out

potential that is collectively felt. If cued into, it can remodulate the situation. As
Deleuze and Guattari liked to say, there is no ideology and never was. What
they mean by that is no situation is ever fully predetermined by ideological
structures or codings. Any account paying exclusive attention to that level is
fatally incomplete. No situation simply translates ideological inculcations into
action. Theres always an event, and the event always includes dimensions that
arent completely actualized, so its always open to a degree, its always
dynamic and in re-formation. To be in effect, ideological predeterminations
have to enter the event and take effect. They have to reassert themselves, to
make themselves effectively ingredient to the event. Their effectiveness is always
an accomplishment, a renewed victory, and what needs to be accomplished
can fail. Micropolitics, affective politics, seeks the degrees of openness of any
situation, in hopes of priming an alter-accomplishment. Just modulating a
situation in a way that amplifies a previously unfelt potential to the point of
perceptibility is an alter-accomplishment.
JM: And the question of memory? Can that qualitative change, or change in
affective tonality, be remembered and brought into a different context? Can it
be transported?
BM: There are different kinds of memory. Theres a kind of memory thats directly
implicated in any perception, couched in acquired or inbred inclinations and
propensities that a body carries forward. This is a past that is not in any subjective
representation, its a past that is only in its activation. Its an enacted past,
actively present. Its not in the head, but in the middle, in rearising relationship, in
situation. Its as much like a thought as an action.
Its like a thought in the sense that it has a certain generality. A tendency or
propensity fuses, or contracts, a great number of past occasions into a readiness
for a next. A habit or a skill is acquired through repetition. But once we have
contracted it, we dont have the repetitions; we have a capacity to redeploy a
sequence of actions, including on-the-fly variations responding instantaneously
to particularities of the situation. Its the unfolding of an adaptive potential
unfolding for the situation. It comes into the present as an inheritance of the
past, but only to the extent that it is readying a future. This kind of memory is
what Whitehead calls the immediate past, because it coincides with the
immediacy of the present. Its by nature nonconscious. It takes you, before you
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have it as your memory. It catapults you into unfolding tendency before any
possibility of reflection. It might not be acted out. It might remain behind in the
inaugural commotion of the coming event. It might just agitate immanently, in
which case it remains what Bergson calls a nascent or incipient action.
On the other hand, it might well catapult you directly into action. In either case
the first making of the moment, the inauguration of the event, is that absolute
coincidence between the past and the dawning present. Not a subject thinking
or being toward the world, but the world reconstituting itself around an actively
present germ of the past. Theres already, in that immeasurable instant of
incipience, an activation of tendencies toward the future. The future has a kind
of felt presence, an affective presence, as an attractor. Because each
tendency tends toward a certain kind of outcome. It is attracted by its own end.
That end point is what James calls a terminus. Its a limit point governing the
direction of an unfolding. Again, thats like a thought, if you can consider
thinking an effective presence of what isnt actually there. By being effectively
present without actually being there I dont mean being consciously projected
on the future as a possibility. Its a pulling of the present, already pregnant with
pastness, out of itself, from within its own event. Its a force of time acting
immanently to the occurrence. Its a real, generative factor of the forming
moment. I call it a force because it has a certain kind of efficiency, a formative
power. I like to call this formative participation of the future quasi-causal,
because it is more like an attractor in chaos theory than an efficient material
cause. Whitehead insists that the future is also always active in the energizing
of the present by the past that inaugurates a coming event.
All that happens in the cut, in the instant of commotion, microshock, or welling
event-suspense. It occurs on the microperceptual level, in an interval smaller
than the smallest perceivable, to paraphrase Deleuze. It cannot be consciously
perceived. What we perceive is what unfolds from that interpenetration of
moments, as the coming event plays itself out. We perceive the trailing into the
situation of the past already tending out of that situation toward the future of
events having happened. What we experience is like a doppler effect of the
force of time. It is due to this doppler effect that we experience the moment,
that is, that we experience a duration, that we feel time to have extension. That
duration is our experience straddling those dimensions of time, as much like a
thought as in unfolding action. The duration registers with an affective tonality.
We have a primarily qualitative experience of time extension. This qualitatively
lived time is what William James called the specious present. Its specious
because its all coming out of a fissure in time, a cut in time, a shock and
suspense. The microshocks dont stop. They come in droves, all in intervals smaller
than the smallest perceivable. All cut, all the time, in infinite division. It is only
because an affective tonality envelops groupings of them, continues through or
around them, that we feel the moment as having extension, rather than feeling it
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implode into an infinitely proliferating fractal cut. It is the quality of the
experience that makes the moment. The present is held aloft by affect. This is
also something that Whitehead insists on: affect is not in time, it makes time, it
makes time present, it makes the present moment, its a creative factor in the
emergence of time as we effectively experience it; its constitutive of lived time.
Conscious memory is quite different from this kind of memory, that of the
immediate past that contributes to activating the event of lived experience.
Conscious memory is retrospective, going from the present to reactivate the
past, whereas active memory moves in the other direction, coming from the
past to energize the present. Then theres another kind of memory, a
Kierkegaardian memory. Kierkegaard talks about how we remember forwards,
but recall backwards. Recalling backwards is conscious remembering.
Remembering forwards is the feeling of the attractor, the end point or terminus,
its making itself felt as the limit-point of a tendency contracted in the past, and
now reactivated. The attractor is a futurity, but its memory-like in that it only has
futurity by virtue of contracting pastness. It pulls a contracted past through the
crucible of the present, towards itself, the not-yet of this event. I think this idea of
the terminus can be linked to what Whitehead calls an eternal object (a
misnomer if there ever was one, because it isnt an object but a potential, and it
isnt eternal in the sense of enduring through time, but rather in the sense that it
enters actively into the constitution of every moment).
So there are at least those three kinds of memory: a memory of the present,
which is the past actively contracted into the cut of the present instant (what I
call the here-and-now to differentiate it from the specious present); a memory
of the past, which is a rearview of the past from the perspective of the
consciously experienced specious present of lived duration; and a memory of
the future, which is the quasicausal force of tendency, as governed recursively
by the futurity of the terminus toward which it tends.
For the question of whether the qualitative change registering in affective

tonality is transportable, the answer would have to be no, not strictly speaking.
Everything we have talked about are generative factors of an event. Affect is
one creative factor entering in the constitution of events, even if it is a very
special one. It is not a content that can be transported from one event to
another. Like all event factors, it can be repeated, reactivated, it can rearise,
but always anew. The logic of affect is entirely bound up with the logic of serial
repetition and difference that applies to events. Its an event logic, not a logic of
transmission or communication.
JM: Part of what made me interested in unfolding a little bit these different
variations of memory is a notion you brought forward at the beginning of your
comments, the idea that the affective shift into a different power of being
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carries with it a memory. A memory that also then becomes potentially
reactivated or could change the experience of the body in another situation.
You mentioned that these shocks occur at a microperceptual level and that
theres an after-the-fact conscious duration that we experience and we hold
with us that is actually quite different than the original microperceptual shock
experience. Could the memory that this affective qualitative change carries with
it be described as a becoming sensitive to those microperceptual shocks? So
can we begin to become more aware of these affective shocks that are
obviously influencing us or having an impact on us continuously? Is that part of
the potential process?
BM: Yes, thats definitely part of the potential process. Its a way of acquiring
new propensities, which if they become embedded in our everyday life, are
habits. As they repeat themselves, we become aware that they function, even if
we are not aware of them as they function. That secondary awareness easily
wears out. Habits are ways of not attending-to, while still acting according-to.
Their nonconsciousness functioning is self-repeating, an iterative process that
can end up becoming a caricature of itself. A habit can habituate to itself. By
that I meant that it can end up not attending to the newness or difference in the
situations triggering it. When this happens, it has a tendency to make the coming
event conform to past events. It loses its powers of adaptation, its power to
renew itself, becoming a mere reflex.
The opposite can also happen. Habit can rebecome a creative force for the
acquisition of new propensities, because it makes capacities available for
enaction, and something can vary in the course of that making-available, and
then be added to a bodys repertory. To mobilize habit in this rebecoming way,
the body, as you say, has to become sensitive to whats coming. It has to feel
the priming, as a formative force, before it bears fruit. Perversely, this is a kind of
preemptive power. It is a preemptive power that is creative of a moreness to life,
what I call an ontopower. I say its perverse because I am convinced that it is the
same power mobilized by the contemporary military machine. In some of the
most affect- and perception-savvy recent texts in military theory, they call this
rebecoming-creative of habit non-recognition-based priming and sampling
the future. Its part of a colonization of the micoperceptual by the war machine
that deserves serious study.
In speaking at this level, we have to be careful. If we say, I contract habits and

then habits rule me, or We can remobilize habit for futurity, we are positing a
subject, us or me, prior to and separate from the process of event formation
habit is so central to. I do not contract habits. Habits contract to form me.
Thats taking me to be the relational matrix of reactivation that my body
carries forwardthat is my body as I defined it before. My comes before
me. Leibniz insisted on that being is in the possessive, not the first person. My
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comes before me; repetition comes before identity. And repeated difference,
Deleuze adds, always trumps identity.
JM: So, shock mastery is not what were after.
BM: Shock mastery is not at all what were after, I dont think. How can we
master what forms us? And reforms us at each instant, before we know it? But
that is not to say that were impotent before ontopower. Quite the contrary, our
lives are capacitated by it. We live it; the power of existence that we are
expresses it.
JM: How do you respond to the criticism thats been widely held since critical
theory that affective politics is inherently fascistic?
BM: I agree that the potential is there, but I dont agree that its inherent to
affective politics. The mistrust of affect seems to come from seeing affect as a
primitive stimulus-response system. I connect it instead to priming, which does not
have the linear cause-effect structure of stimulus-response, but has to do instead
with modulation, which has to do with interference and resonance, which are
nonlinear. Stimulus-response is a limit case. Its that case of a habit that has
become a reflex, lost its adaptive power, its powers of variation, its force of
futurity, that has ceased to be the slightest surprised by the world. Its a tired
habit that has come as close to being an efficient cause as a power of
repetition can get. It has let go of the quasi in its causality. There is also a sense
in the critiques of affective politics as fascist that nonconscious process is an
absence of thought. I follow Deleuze and Guattari in saying that nonconscious
process is the birth of thought. It is germinal thought, moved by the force of time
to express powers of existence in coming action.
From the critical theory point of view, I just compound the sin, because I think
that advocating affective politics is advocating aesthetic politics. Aesthetic
politics is often also thought to be synonymous with fascism. I think about the
connection between affective politics and aesthetic politics in terms of
Whiteheads idea of contrast. Contrasts are tendential unfoldings that are held
together in the same situation. They are alternate termini that come together in
the instant, even though their actual unfoldings are mutually exclusive. Their
mutual exclusiveness is a kind of creative tension. It is the contrasts between
termini that interfere and resonate, and modulate what comes. The specious
present is the drop of experience that is one with that unfolding. It is the feeling
of the resolution of the tension, as the event plays itself out, for the process to
then start all over again. If thought is the effective presence of what is not
actually present, a terminus is an element of thought. Then multiple termini
together are an intensification of thought. The specious present feels this intensity
of thinking pass into action. Normally the intensity itself is overshadowed by the
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effectiveness of the action it passes into. Whitehead defines the aesthetic in
terms of this intensity of contrasts. An aesthetic act brings this contrastive intensity
out from under the shadow of actions instrumentality or functional aim. It brings
the contrastive intensity of active potential into the specious present as such, to
stand alone, with no other value than itself. The aesthetic act extends the
creative tension of contrast that characterizes the emergence of every action. It
prolongs the suspension of the cut, the commotion of interference and
resonance, gives it duration, so that it passes the threshold of perceptibility and is
consciously felt as potential. This prevents terminus from being an automatic
feed forward to the end, like a reflex response to a stimulus. Resolution is
suspended. The termini in play remain virtual ends. Their mutual exclusivity is still
informing the situation, contributing to what it might be, but the tension doesnt
have to resolve itself to be consciously felt and thought. Aesthetic politics is
irresolute. Its the thinking-feeling of the virtual incompletion of definitive action.
JM: In what way is this political?
BM: It might not sound political, at least in the way its usually meant. But it is,
because the virtuality is of an event to come, and as we saw before the event
always has the potential to affectively attune a multiplicity of bodies to its
happening, differentially. Aesthetic politics brings the collectivity of shared
events to the fore, as differential, a multiple bodily potential for what might
come. Difference is built into this account. Affective politics, understood as
aesthetic politics, is dissensual, in the sense that it holds contrasting alternatives
together without immediately demanding that one alternative eventuates and
the others evaporate. It makes thought-felt different capacities for existence,
different life potentials, different forms of life, without immediately imposing a
choice between them. The political question, then, is not how to find a
resolution. Its not how to impose a solution. Its how to keep the intensity in what
comes next. The only way is through actual differentiation. Different lines of
unfolding bring the contrast into actuality, between them. The political question
is then what Isabelle Stengers calls an ecology of practices. How do you tend
this proliferation of differentiation? How can the lines not clash and destroy each
other? How do they live together? The solution is not to resolve the tension
through a choice, but to modulate it into a symbiosis: a cross-fertilization of
capacitations that live out to the fullest the intensity of the event of their coming
together.
JM: Its more usual to speak of politics in terms of the need for a common
language.
BM: I just dont think that the possibility of a common language exists anymore, if
it ever did. And if it did, I wouldnt want it. I dont think Id be alone. That in itself
uncommons it. It would have to be imposed. It would necessitate an exercise of
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power-over, very different from empowerment, the power-to of ontopower. I
wouldnt want it because in my way of thinking it would be inaesthetic. It would
be de-intensifying. It would flatten affect by standardizing response. It would put
politics back on the uncreative road to reflex. Consensus is always the product
of a power-over. It is a habituation to it, even if its a soft form of it. I cant
imagine a common language that is not consensus building in a de-
intensifying way.
The world is too complex to hold to that as a model. The fragmentation of

nations into sub-communities, the accompanying increase in the number of
nation-states formed from these communities, the destructuring effects of
movements of capital, the way these unchained capital flows enable or force a
constant movement of people, goods, ideas, and information across borders
all of this has created a hyper-complex situation of flow and variation over which
theres no effective oversight. Theres no vantage point from which you could
encompass it all; theres no shared perspective from which to find a common
language or build a consensus or share a rationality. The situation is constitutively
dissensual. Rather than going back to the failed project of finding a common
language, purpose, or rationality, it would seem that the complexity of that
dissensus should be the starting point for politics. Why accept as the starting
point a reduction of difference, a channeling into tired habit? Thats to start with
defeat. Taking complexity for a starting point, broadly speaking, is what
ecological means. I see affective intensity and an aesthetics of varying life
potential as the elements of an ecology of practices of the symbiotic kind called
for by Stengers, and before her by Guattari. From this symbiotic perspective, an
anti-capitalist politics begins by affirming the variability and potential for forms of
life unleashed by capitalism itself. It continues the differentiation of forms of life
already under way, but by other means, governed by other constellations of
termini and embodying other values.
JM: Weve begun a discussion of the micropolitical and maybe this is a good
point to discuss some of the ways the micropolitical and a politics of affect can
be materialized. One example is the creative, aesthetico-political events that
you and Erin Manning are organizing through the Sense Lab in Montreal. Could
you speak about these?
BM: Although the micro of micropolitical is not synonymous with small, and
although the modulations that might be effected at that level can be widely
distributed, there is no better place to start than the local context in which you
live and work every day. Macropolitical positioning operates under the illusion
that there is a neutral, higher-level vantage point allowing you to stand outside
and judge, while standing pure, correct, and unsullied. Critique, practiced in this
way, does double duty. It opposes too simplistically, I would argue. But it also
shields. To judge from outside is to ensconce yourself in an unassailable position.
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Micropolitically, critique has to come from within, in the thick of things, and that
means getting your hands dirty. There is no situation of being outside a situation.
And no situation is subject to mastery. It is only by recognizing the bonds of
complicity and the limitations that come with the situation that you can succeed
in modulating those constraints at the constitutive level, where they reemerge
and seriate. This is immanent critique. It is active, participatory critique. For me,
micropolitical action involves this kind of immanent critique that actively alters
conditions of emergence. It engages becoming, rather than judging what is.
Erin and I are both professors, so the university is the day-to-day situation we start
from, or more precisely the academic institution including its extended milieu of
publishing, workshopping, and conferencing. Erin is also in a fine arts
department, so we operate between the art and academic institutions. In both
cases theres an imperative to produce and create what is increasingly being
called, importing corporate vocabulary, a deliverable -- a valorizable product,
like a gallery-ready artwork or an article publishable in a standardized (peer-
reviewed) disciplinary journal. The emphasis is on packageable content for
transmission. Increasingly, in this environment process itself becomes product, as
when creative platforms developed by artists are seen as research contributions
feeding product development for the culture industries. IP is the new creativity.
There are very strong pressures in this direction in Canada and elsewhere, where
art has become research-creation subject, like all academic activity, to
productivity assessment. We wanted to see how far we could go, within the art
and academic institutions, toward freeing creative and collaborative process
from this tendency, while still continuing to survive within that environment, which
is the one that feeds uswe cant deny our participation in it and our
dependence on itand which is overall is not going to change any time soon.
A lot of the impetus for what were doing came from some very intense
conversations we had with Isabelle Stengers, who explained that her criteria for
a successful intellectual event was precisely that that it be an event. For
something to happen that wouldnt have happened otherwise. If heaven,
according to an old Talking Heads song, is where nothing ever happens, then
the conference is surely academic heaven. When was the last time you had a
truly new thought at a conference? When was the last time that you saw an
opinion changed by an academic discussion or debate? On the art side, the
equivalent heavens are the artists talk and the standard gallery exhibition.
Isabelle also emphasized that it is not a question of freedom, in the sense of
simply lifting constraints. Nothing happens most where there are no constraints,
because anything goes, and anything going is just nothing carried to a higher
power, heaven to the nth degree. You might avoid the conference, but where
does that get you if you end up with the kind of free-floating, free-associating
discussion you might enjoy late at night in a dormitory room? Without constraints
there are no stakes.
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Our point of departure is what we call enabling constraintssets of designed
constraints that are meant to create specific conditions for creative interaction
where something is set to happen, but there is no preconceived notion of
exactly what the outcome will be or should be. No deliverable. All process. We
started practicing what we thought of as event design, design for alternative
format art-academic events. The stakes arent defined so much by issues or
content or definable outcome. The stakes are the event happening or not,
seeing what can be done to open up new ground for exploration and invention
that reenergizes people and makes their lives in and around the institutions in
which they function at the same time more livable and more intense.
It was Erin who initially started the Sense Lab, which I then joined as a
collaborator. Looking at the milieus we were in, and between the art and
academic institutions, we thought that there are things each side could offer the
otherseeds of symbiosis. From the academic side, what could be brought into
the art world is a tendency or propensity toward rigorous verbal expression. On
the art side is a complementary propensity to invest in an object or system or
interaction an intensity that rigorously exceeds language, at least standard
denotative or referential uses of language. We wanted to bring together those
two tendencies: bringing concepts to rigorous verbal expression, and intensifying
perception and experience.
We set it up at a community-based electronic art institution, the Society for Art

and Technology, that is located between the Montreal universities in an urban
space where Montreals different language communities intermix, and where
academics, university-based artists, and community-based independent artists
can come together. We tried to think of how to create events that would bring
people together, not on a blank slate, not even on even ground, but rather from
a creative bias, from the angle of what most moved them, what moved their
work, what made it work. The first thing we did was to forbid anyone from
bringing completed work. We wanted them to bring not the work, but what
made the work the tendencies, skills, obsessions, attractions, inclinations that
drove it from within. We set up a situation that for some would be interpreted as
an artistic exhibition, for others as a conference. But it was neither. No one was
going to show anything or deliver anything. The situation wasnt recognizable,
which we knew could be disturbing and might intimidate. We had to have a
certain estrangement, but that wasnt the point. It was just one of the
enablements. We wanted to bring people together at their works constitutive
level, whereas they are used to being asked to come with it already constituted,
so to enable the event we had to disable certain kinds of expectations.
Suspend. Like a shock, but not in the macro sense, just enough to give pause
and toggle out of default settings. We thought hardby we I mean a very
dedicated collective involving students and others committed to the project
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about what kinds of spatial setup would work best, how to modulate
expectations as people entered the space, and how to break expectations but
in a gentle and inviting way. We started thinking in terms of hospitality. That
became our model. How do we create enabling constraints so that the situation
is one of hospitality, not a test and not a show-and-tell. We tried to find very
small, concrete ways of doing that, trying to anticipate the roadblocks that
traditional events throw up. The moment of entry is crucial. How people enter an
event implants all kinds of dynamics. Once theyre in, group dynamics becomes
the next challenge. Take for example the plenary. You want some whole-group
interaction, otherwise the event feels dispersed and no one leaves with a sense
that anything happened. But plenaries are deadly. People zone out. A few
people dominate. Others dont feel empowered to speak. Discussions get too
general, with the same words being used with different connotations, and no
one really connecting with what anyone else is saying. Its deadly. But if you
have small groups, how do you form them, and what do they do so that they
are not just plenaries in miniature? And if something really happens in a small
group, which is where things are most likely to happen, how do you convey that
to the other groups, or the group as a whole? These were the kinds of questions
we asked.
In answer to the question of how to form small groups, we found affective

mechanisms. For example, in the first event we organized we had a number of
pieces of fabric that were very furry and soft with beautiful colours and patterns.
To divide them into groups, we simply asked people to pick the pieces that most
attracted them, and then to use the fabric to make the space for their
interactionby sitting on it or around it or by wrapping themselves in it, whatever
moved them. So before the first word was exchanged in the group or the first
task begun, people were already in a little affinity-based world that had the feel
of an ephemeral home. We furred them into groups. In response to the question
of how to move from small groups to whole-group interaction, we laid down the
enabling constraint that each group had to share, but what they had to share
was their process, so that it was forbidden to report. You couldnt describe what
happened as from an outside perspective. You had to find a way to perform it
again, but in a way that was adapted to the larger numbers. You couldnt report
or even translate, you had to transduce. Inventing or improvising these transitions
became a big part of the event. Its like the events content was becoming its
form, or vice versa. Nothing was going to happen unless everyone helped make
it happen. So everybody owned the results. Everyone was actively implicated in
making the event. They didnt deliver, and neither did we. Without the
participants active involvement, nothing would have happened. Since there
was nothing on offer, there was nothing to be had, except what the group
collectively made happen. What we were reaching for was what Guattari calls
a subject-group. As with all groups of that kind, what had happened wasnt
immediately clear, because there was no assessable product separable from
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the process. What was clear at the time was only that the experience had been
intense, and collective. Afterwards, things did developcollaborations grew
that had been seeded at the event. Some are still going, three years later.
Processual seeds were sown that germinated on other soil. That led us to a
second model, of processual dissemination, which were also still working on.
The group furring and performed transition mechanisms are little examples of
what we call techniques of relation. The challenge for each event is to find the
enabling constraints and techniques of relation that tailor the event to whats
singular about that particular coming together. To do that you need to know
something about what moves the people who will come. So there are pre-event
techniques for relation that have to be in place to prepare the ground. And the
post-event collaborative developments are crucial to network, because that is
where what happened in the event really eventuates.
For us its very important that what transpires be gathered in language. Were
both writers. We both think of what we do as philosophy. So we always try to
create a real, effective presence of philosophy. But not as a master discipline
that judges other kinds of practice. We see it as a symbiosis, where practices that
are not primarily linguistic are seen to bear active conceptual force that can be
brought to explicit verbal expression, and by being brought into language can
cycle back into the practice from which they develop to spur it further.
Conversely, we approach philosophy as Deleuze and Guattari define it, as the
creation of concepts. So philosophy is seen as a creative practice in its own
right, with its own material and medium, which is language. Another challenge:
other techniques of relation have to be invented to foster this reciprocity
between modes of creative activity favoring different media. A great deal of our
thinking about and experimenting with event design is concerned with this, not
only in our special events but in the regular day-to-day functioning of the Sense
Lab group, locally as well as remote, through an itnernet grouphub.
A lot of the thinking about what were calling techniques of relation has been
done before in social movements, particularly starting in the 1960s, and in artistic
movements. We have a sense that it is something that people all over the world
are again feeling a hunger for, and taking up again on their own, in their own
home bases, in different ways, sometimes consciously in connection with
movements like the anti-globalization movement, sometimes within the smaller
confines of their own institution, with a view to making it more livable and
sustaining. There is a lot of thought and experimentation going on, many
techniques that have already been invented, many more on the way. We see
ourselves as connecting to that wider movement, just creating one more forum
for that kind of activity. Its not something we feel weve invented or in any way
own. Its in continuity with a discontinuous traditiona set of practices and
orientations that rise and subside, but always seem to rearise, because the
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hunger is always there, the need to revivify habituated, reflex-tending forms of
life. We look forward to the connections between different approaches to
participatory art-academic-political event design growing more dense and
networked and expanded.
JM: One of the things that I think is interesting about the approach is that it is
both concerned with the creative limitations required for producing an event,
and also concerned with how various events resonate with each other and
amplify each other. This seems to bring us back to the problem we discussed
earlier regarding how an affective politics may have a global presence, or work
up to a scale larger than a single event.
BM: Yes, a micropolitical event can have broad range. What qualifies it as
micropolitical is the way it happens, not the dimensions it takes. By micropolitical
we mean returning to the generative moment of experience, at the dawning of
an event, to produce a modulatory commotion internal to the constitution of the
event. Its a question of reconnecting processually with whats germinal in your
living, with the conditions of emergence of the situations you live. The idea is
then to find a mechanism to pass that reconnection forward. Not impose it, not
even suggest it as a general model. Rather, to give it as a gift, a gift of self-
renewing process. This question of event-propagation, of processual seeding as
part of a gift economy of revivifying experience, is the problem of a large-scale
micropolitics. The process itself has to be self-valorizing. It has to have a value in
itself because the situation of the world, Obama notwithstanding, is not overall
one of hope. The situation of the world is desperate. Theres no rational ground
for hope. If you look at things rationally, if you look at the increasing disparities of
wealth and health in the world, if you look at the spreading environmental
destruction, if you look at the looming disasters in the foundations of the
economy, if you look at the the energy crisis and the food crises affecting the
globe, and especially if you look at the way they interrelate, if you look at the
virulence of renascent nationalist sentiment and of the culture of war, there is no
hope. So the micropolitical question is how to live more intensely, live more fully,
with augmented powers of existence, within the limits of that desperate situation,
while finding ways to continue nevertheless, chipping away at the macro
problems.
Theres a certain incompleteness to any micropolitical event, like the events I

was talking about. A lot of things that you feel were on the verge of taking
shape didnt quite happen. Potentials that you could just glimpse didnt come
into focus. The goal is not to overcome the incompleteness. Its to make it
compelling. Compelling enough that you are moved to do it again, differently,
bringing out another set of potentials, some more formed and focused, others
that were clearly expressed before now backgrounded. That creates a small,
moveable environment of potential. The goal is to live in that moveable
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environment of potential. If you manage to, you will avoid the paralysis of
hopelessness. Neither hope nor hopelessnessa pragmatics of potential. You
have to live it at every level. In the way you relate to your partner, and even your
cat. The way you teach a class if youre a professor. The way you create and
present your art if youre an artist. If you participate in more punctual events like
the ones I was describing, this will provide a continuous background for what
comes of those events to disseminate into and diffuse through. A symbiosis of the
special event and the day-to-day, in creative connivance.
This is not to say that operating in a more macro, top-down manner, is wrong or
should not be undertaken. Its just to say that if its done to the exclusion of
micropolitical activity its mortifying, even when its done for survivals sake.
Sometimes there is no alternative but to centrally impose certain enabling
constraints. For example, Id be very happy if the transition to a renewable
energy future or a global redistribution of wealth or a non-growth paradigm
were imposed on the capitalist system. But high-level solutions of that kind are
only part of the political equation, and its not the part that the affective politics
weve been talking about specifically addresses. Micropolitics is not
programmatic. It doesnt construct and impose global solutions. But it would be
nave to think that is separate from that kind of macro-activity. Anything that
augments powers of existence creates conditions for micropolitical flourishings.
No body flourishes without enough food and without health care. Micropolitical
interventions need macro solutions. But success at the macropolitical level is at
best partial without a complementary micropolitical flourishing. Without it, the
tendency is toward standardization. Since macropolitical solutions are generally
applicable by definition, by definition they act to curtail the variety and
exuberance of forms of life. Macropolitical intervention targets minimal
conditions of survival. Micropolitics complements that by fostering an excess of
conditions of emergence. That inventiveness is where new solutions start to
crystallize. The potentials produced at the micropolitical level feed up, climbing
the slope that macropolitics descends. Micropolitical and macropolitical go
together. One is never without the other. They are processual reciprocals. They
aliment each other. At their best, they are mutually corrective. Even macro
solutions designed to curtail micropolitical activity often end up feeding it by
making it a necessity to invent new ways of getting by and getting around.
Creative variation is the only real constant of politics. Deleuze and Guattari often
made this point, for example in their slogan that that the State is built on what
escapes it.
It has become a commonplace recently to say that we are in a situation where

the end of the world is now imaginablebut the end of capitalism isnt. That is
definitely one solution that is not likely to come programmatically, top-down
given whos on top. The dismantling of capitalism is a corrective that will only
come from a breaking of the reciprocity I was just talking about between the
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macro- and micropolitical. The prevailing operating conditions of macro/micropo-
litical reciprocity should not be taken to imply that the symmetry is never broken,
that a bifurcation can never occur. The complementarity can be broken in both
directions. When macrostructures miniaturize themselves and work to usurp the
ground of the micropolitical with scaled-down versions of the dominant generali-
ties, that is fascism. When micropolitical flourishings proliferate to produce a singu-
larity, in the sense of a systemic tipping point, thats revolution. The ultimate vo-
cation of micropolitics is this: enacting the unimaginable. The symmetry-breaking
point, the point at which the unimaginable eventuates, is but a cut, smaller than
the smallest historically perceivable interval. That is to say, qualitatively different.
A moment of a different color, one you never see coming, that comes when its
least expected. Inevitably, a next micro/macro complementarity will quickly settle
in. But it will take a form that could not have been predicted, but is now suddenly
doable and thinkable. Micropolitics is what makes the unimaginable practicable.
Its the potential that makes possible.
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History through the Middle: Between Macro and
Mesopolitics
Interview with Isabelle Stengers, 25 November 2008
Isabelle Stengers: IS
Brian Massumi: BM
Erin Manning: EM
BM : Our research group works from Deleuze and Guattaris concept of

micropolitics, in the framework of the ethicoaesthetic paradigm developed by
Guattari. We try to imagine new forms of intervention in public spaces which
straddle art and philosophy. We are organizing for an event that will take place
in May 2009 which we call Society of Molecules. Today wed like to discuss the
question of micropolitics in terms of the vocabulary you use in your last book with
Philippe Pignarre, entitled La sorcellerie capitaliste. Pratiques de
dsenvotement (Capitalist Sorcery: CounterSpells). Were interested in the
fact that you developed this vocabulary of micropolitics in parallel with your
work on the constructivist ontology of Alfred North Whitehead and Etienne
Souriau. If theres time, wed also like to get to the following question: How does
the approach to the political that you develop relate to the academic milieu?
Can we talk about constructivism as an intervention in the institution of
philosophy?
IS: I will be publishing a book that is something of a sequel and a reworking of La

sorcellerie capitaliste, but which sets up the question differently. La sorcellerie
tried to deal with the question of our vulnerability to capitalism starting from the
idea that whats at issue is the hold over us a type of sorcery has, and the fact
that because we take pride in no longer believing in sorcery we have failed to
produce the necessary protections. Its an issue of dramatizing, conveying how
unprecedented are the questions raised by what we call global warming or
climatic disorder, and by all of the inconvenient truths whose common
characteristic is, precisely, to inconvenience the perspectives put in place by
this same we who pride ourselves on no longer believing in sorcery. In both
books, there is a nonacademic commitment to use a minimum of references.
The project has to stand on its own, it has to activate knowledges that are
already there, transmitting a minimum of information, to the extent the term
implies that the reader is lacking it. Instead, it has to produce new connections
with what we know, or a change in the mode of connection. When I say we
its about bringing into existence an openended we called forth by those
connections, whereas the academic mode of reference implies an exclusive
circle whose references establish that the author belongs, that he or she has
read everything they should have. This produces an aftereffect of exclusion,
often selfexclusion, of all those who will say, because I havent read this or that,
I cant understand.
EM: Perhaps we can begin, Isabelle, with your idea of micropolitics, starting
from the distinction you make in your last book between first history and second
history.
IS: Id like to start with this issue of the molecular, which was so dear to Guattari. I
originally trained as a chemist, and maybe that is why the terms micro and
macro dont work for me. I understand, but it doesnt make me think. There
are so many types of molecules. At one extreme, there is the hydrogen or water
molecule, with either two or three atoms. At the other extreme, there are the
biological macromolecules. The point isnt so much that they have more atoms.
Its that they pose entirely different problems, problems of knowledge, definite
knowledge, and problems pertaining to the relation between the molecule and
its milieu. A water molecule is complicated, but the moleculemilieu relation is
not thematized as being decisive to its understanding. With biological macro
molecules, on the other hand, the molecules folding in space becomes
important. This folding is not a theoretical question, because it occurs in an
entirely specific milieu, following entirely specific temporal sequences, with
multiple interactions. You can have the same sequence of amino acids as in a
biological molecule that is active in metabolism, but the majority of foldings of
which it is capable dont produce a metabolic molecule. In short, the folding
itself is something like a history. Its a moleculemilieu history which obliges us to
think through the middle, through the milieu (par le milieu), as Deleuze would
say. I like to bring up the biological macromolecule because I am afraid that if
we content ourselves with the opposition between the molecular and the molar
we are almost inexorably led to maniacal modes of differentiation where the
issue is always designating paths of salvation or perdition. The question of how to
go from the mode of description demanded by water molecules to the molar
mode of description, where its a question of water that we can drink or swim in,
is extremely complicated. Its an open problem, not an opposition. I know that
Deleuze and Guattari fought against antimolar neomoralism, especially in A
Thousand Plateaus which, in contrast to AntiOedipus, insists on the need for
caution, emphasizing experimentation over haste. There is a practical
divergence at this point. In La sorcellerie capitaliste and Au temps des
catastrophes (The Age of Catastrophes), I try to think through a particular
milieu that seems eager to leap with great appetite at any proposition allowing
for a differentiation between the true and the illusory to be recreated. To
paraphrase Deleuze paraphrasing Artaud, I try to think before the innumerable
victims of this mania for oppositions, and to fabricate concepts that build in
protections, ways of frustrating that which constantly rises up in defiance of all
warnings. It seems to me that the macromolecule is good protection in the
sense that implies certain delocalized interactions which require resistance to the
totality or the aggregate, but less in an oppositional way than in a way that
makes perceptible the necessity of an ethoecology, where the ethos of the
molecule, that which it is capable of, cannot be dissociated from its oikos, from
the milieu requiring this ethos. In this connection, Im more comfortable with the
idea of a mesopolitics than a micropolitics. The coefficient of polemical truth
associated with the micropolitical worries me. The idea of the meso is quite
new in physics. Microphysics is well known, its the stuff of physicists dreams. The
macro in physics is also familiar, its crystals, liquids, and bodies that can be
characterized by general, measurable properties. But the meso is neither of
these. It concerns not matter, but material. Why does glue stick? Why do metals
tend to stress and break? This is a science of the interstices and the cracks. Its a
science of defects. It is the kind of science where it is always a question of this
material, rather than Matter, and which encounters procedures, like those of
metallurgy. Why must the iron be beaten as long as it is hot? The macro is matter
in general. Gas is marvellously in general. With the meso, on the other hand, it
is necessary in each instance to redefine topically how the relations between
the micro and the macro are assembled. In other words, its about everything
that the macro does not allow to be said, and everything that the micro does
not permit to be deduced. No, the questions that must be asked are utterly
specific. Questions which bring characters into existence. What is a crack? How
does this propagate? How is that encountered? What brings this to a threshold,
where it breaks? These are questions which demand the invention of beings,
such as the crack, that are called for with a manner of being all their own, and
which enter more into narratives than into deductions. What also interests me is
that this mesoknowledge reactivates the marvel of procedures of fabrication,
as with metallurgy. Hammering, dunking the sword in cold water, all of the
metallurgists tact, all that he has an eye for, has no micro or macro meaning.
It is not for nothing that metallurgists have always had a special historical role in
relation to powers, forming initiatory clans. For me, the meso deterritorializes
physics much more effectively than quarks, the Higgs boson, or black holes,
which continue to lend themselves to the old reality/appearance opposition, or
politically speaking, to the you believe, we know. The meso is a site of
invention where the pragmatics of the question is much more alive, more vivid,
more difficult to forget than the micro or the macro, which traditionally play a
game of truth. The meso must create itself. And each time, the meso affirms its
copresence with a mileu. This sticks thats a relation to a milieu. This breaks, this
bends, this is elastic that implies an action undergone. Every material is a
relation with a milieu.
EM: And the notion of the fold? It seems to me that for Deleuze, microperception
folds into every macroperception. Isnt it the same for micropolitics?
IS: My problem is that, yes, we can say that these are folds and that
macroperception is misleading, etc. In political terms, that enables an interesting
critical relation toward the procedures of those who know nothing of Leibniz, or
James, but who take charge of our perceptions. But there is a danger of getting
blocked in the register of critical truth. There is a terrible discrepancy between
the invention of procedures of capture on the one hand, and on the other the
rare instances where procedures are invented that have to do with what
American activists call reclaiming and what I call the meso. In politics, I think
that the question is less microperceptions than procedures, practices that are
apt to produce new perceptions carrying new consequences, to produce
collective assemblages of enunciation experimenting with ways of combining
creation with an active, experimental taking into account of their milieu a
milieu that is by definition unhealthy experimenting with how to think through
the middle, through the milieu, in the way that collectives for direct nonviolent
action have done, knowing that the cops will provoke in any case. The question
of experimentation, or accountability as the Americans say, is situated at the
level of the meso. Im thinking of Haraway, and of course of Guattaris
cartographic practices. I like Etienne Souriaus concept of instauration
(establishment, institution) very much because, as regards to the artist at work, it
deploys a quite fabulous assemblage denying any power to the old conflict
between determination and freedom a conflict that Guattari still grappled
with in his struggle against structure. If a work of art can fail, as a practical
matter, then entirely other questions are raised. The question of failure and
success is eminently political. Its a meso question, because it has nothing to do
with success in the macro, sociological, sense. And it certainly requires the micro,
but without thematizing it. The contrast success/failure raises different questions,
pragmatic questions, in experimental relation with milieus. Tournier and Deleuzes
Robinson, with his molecularization of perception, is certainly not insignificant
from the political point of view.1 But Robinsons relation to politics, his becoming,
in which all of the categories of perception molecularize, that relation has to be
made. The thing is, perhaps its not the first that should be made. From my point
of view, one of the first that should be made is precisely to respect this notion of
the device ( dispositif), that is, the notion of assemblages, assemblages that are
worked on and through, and which imply artifice, and are a matter for
experimentation. This of course excludes any reference to the masses, to the
differentiation between those who know and those who must be impelled into
movement. But it also allows a distinction that concerns the political. An
assemblage is political to the extent that those who participate in it both
experiment with and experience its fabrication, finetune it and feel its effects,
and to the extent that this participation in both these senses is indissociable from
the induction of a capacity for resistance. An induction of it, not a displaying of
it. This excludes devices which respond to the game of supply, including the offer
of interactivity or relation, but also those which hypothetically display conditions
of production for things which do not occur.
I feel that Hardt and Negri inherited molecular politics, in the sense that I fear it,
with their concept of the multitude. Its a concept whose vocation is to
announce the dissolution of differentiations, of attachments, of all that gives
capitalism its grip. Its a concept that I feel is still constructed in the mode of
what I call the Marxist conceptual theater, in which it is a question of identifying
the antagonistic force worthy of its historical role. Deleuze and Guattari critiqued
the theater of concepts and the theater of pychoanalytic roles. For my part, I
critique the theater of Marxist concepts, whose crucial concern is: what is there
that is not susceptible to being compromised by capitalism, to being captured
by it? And as if by chance, what is implied always involves finishing capitalisms
work: the destruction of attachments. The typical success of a meso device
would be to confer upon a situation the power to make those who are attached
to it, in an a priori conflictual manner, think together. Not overcome the conflict,
but transversalize its terms. Careful this is not an ideal. Its an event, in which
one can recover the figure of the fold, and which cannot be discussed at the
level of its general conditions. You dont mimic attachments, and you cant
replace them with collaborationist good will. The question cant be simulated.
What it has to do with, rather, is Guattaris axiological creationism. What that
requires is a Jamesian confidence, not a detachment. My own confidence in
the event by which a situation can make people think that which concerns
them, by which a situation can escape the common destiny of being defined by
preexisting terms, by which it can make a fold, in other words acquire the
power to situate those it rallies without converting to unanimous consensus this
confidence is deeply rooted in my approach to the history of experimental
inventions. The experimental situation has the power to rally, to transform the
conflict of interpretations into a dynamic of controversy. The scientist as such is
not terribly interesting. But Im not sure that Guattari isnt throwing the baby out
with the bathwater when he announces an ethicoaesthetic paradigm against
the scientific paradigm. Objectivism is a poison that affects the sciences, just as
the art market is a poison proper to artistic practices neither more nor less. But
in a controversy in the strong sense, in the inventive sense, the term objectivity
has no purchase. The sciences are not a model. They are a very particular
exemple of an original production of subjectivity occurring when a situation
makes a fold, in other words forces those it rallies to think, imagine, create. The
sciences also provide an example of how this success gets captured. The
important point for me is that there is no success that can offer the wishedfor
guarantee of being uncapturable. This means that any success will be
condemned a priori by those given over to suspicion. Such is the fate of any
meso practice, and it is one of the reasons why the molecular is so seductive.
BM: Is second history the history of this passage through the middle, through the
milieu?
IS: So, now we come to the two histories, which Au temps des catastrophes
opens with, and where I write: we are in suspense between two histories. The
first history were familiar with, its the one that takes growth both for its slogan
and as its operator, which is an operator of capture that at the same time makes
things hold together and distributes the possible and the impossible. In our
worlds, nothing is possible without growth. Todays economic and financial crisis
belongs to this history, and as long as we talk about crisis we remain caught
within its coordinates. Recovery is then the horizon of thought. This means, of
course, that this is the history of worlds under the grip of capitalism. The other
history is basically of an intrusion. We all know that something is in the process of
intruding into our history that was neither anticipated nor prepared for, that was
wished for by no one, including of course those who have been struggling
against capitalisms hold. No one is ready for whats coming. It is beyond all of
us, its important to emphasize that. The chances are that this second history will
be one that can be purely and simply associated with open barbarism, and
those chances are all the greater to the extent that the first history makes out as
if this were only a crisis to be surmounted. It is faced with this hypothesis of
barbarism that I try to think and use the term intrusion, referring the new question
of temporality which requires a break with the messianicrevolutionary tone. This
is a break with the grand humanist perspective, in which time works for those
who are on the side of truth. And incidentally, it is a break with those who
function in the mode of I know, but nevertheless which is the degreezero
of idealism, in whose eyes any pragmatism is a synonym for betrayal. The
intrusion of what I call Gaia is a radically materialist event.
EM: Could you talk about the question of Gaia?
IS: I wanted a name for who we may associate with the notion of intrusion.
Now, it is obvious that the programmed future victims of climate warming taken
as a whole, the polar bears, and so forth, is not what intrudes. I mean, they will
pay dearly. The name I chose for what is intruding is Gaia, referring to James
Lovelock, who proposed to address the living earth as a being. For his part,
Lovelock used the word organism. But he was emphasizing precisely what is
being called into question today, namely the feedback loops stabilizing a
particular regime of existence. I abandon that, and the idea that this regime
can be equated with health, which would make us its doctors. Gaia as I stage
her is not sick. She manifests positive feedback loops that terrify those who study
her. Shes an assemblage of untameable processes whose power completely
escapes us. The name Gaia is in resonance with the divinities prior to the
anthropomorphic Gods of the City, who were honored as fearsome and as
indifferent to our maneuvers of seduction. Gaia is not nature in need of
protection. She will survive the ravages. Living things may well count on Gaia,
but what counts first and foremost are the bacteria, and they are something else
that exceeds us: an uncontrollable power upon which we depend. The
numberless people of the bacteria completely exceeds us, responding with
extraordinary inventiveness to our antibiotics, not with the logic of lineages but
rather one of the rhizome, a rhizome that traverses us. It is they, along with other
microbes, that constitute the majority among the cells comprising this body we
call our own. They are on Gaias scale, and like her, they always act and enter
into action as powerful vectors of scientific deterritorialization, undoing
disciplinary closures and the tree of life that has become the coat of arms of
darwinism. To name Gaia is to name something that does not demand a
response from us, that is utterly deaf to our repentances. We are not responsible
toward her. We are imprudent. We have been radically imprudent, which is a
totally different idea than guilt. We can be guilty in relation to the polar bear, the
Bengal tiger, and many other things besides. But in relation to Gaia the scene
Im trying to stage, the scene of intrusion, is a setting forth of a problem: there
has been a grave imprudence, and we will not get ourselves out of it in crisis
mode, like a bad moment we have to get through. What we need to do now is
learn to compose with Gaia. Even if we succeed in avoiding barbarism, we
wont be able to say that the issue is settled. Gaia will never return to being a
neutral condition in our history. She will never again be something we count on,
she will always remain something with which we will have to compose. Gaia
cannot be domesticated. She is material is the sense of being untameable by
human intentions a quite unprecedented figure of transcendence, implacable
transcendence. We could say that our epoch is under the sign of a double
transcendence, one implacable, the other irresponsible, one material, the other
spiritual. Because capitalism is irresponsible, it is not equipped for this. It takes
Gaias intrusion as an occasion for new strategies, new captures. And we can
indeed talk about spiritual captures, in the sense of a production of
powerlessness and its hold over us, and in the sense that it is a question of
destroying what counts, of bringing into equivalence what counts, in the sense
that above all else we must not hesitate, in the sense that it is a question of
seizing opportunities regardless of the consequences, etc. To speak of capitalism
as materialist is the sad complaint of monotheistic transcendence. For me, to
speak of the spiritual is to situate oneself in Guattaris ethicoaesthetic field,
and I see the deliberate use of this denigrated word as a protection against
bourgeoisscientistic triumphalism. Capitalism is a logic, and a logic is spiritual in
type. Its logic takes holds of us, it is not an object of knowledge. One can learn
to simulate the processes which compose Gaia, but it makes no sense to
simulate the capitalist logic, because all simulations feed right into it. We saw this
with the financial markets: any simulation of functioning became an instrument
for speculators, and immediately added itself to the functioning it described.
Here we have a functioning that goes so far as to make use of the productions
that describe it even Marxs. Capitalism is not responsible, because it is not
equipped for that. But it is apt to activate feelings of responsibility. Which is what
I call stupidity. This sense of responsibility, this sad thats the way it has to be,
the triumph of that, is what I call stupidity, for example the dread that can
overcome a modern man or woman at the mention of the word spiritual.
However its actually an open door for spiritualisms, superstitions, and all sorts of
regressions. Capitalism, for its part, is not stupid. Nor intelligent for that matter.
Thats what I meant in La sorcellerie capitaliste when I called it sorcery. Its a
system of sorcery, not at all in an ethnographically correct sense, but in a
pragmatic sense related to an issue: the issue of recognizing the sorcerer and
protecting oneself. So these are the two pragmatic dimensions that stage the
sorcery I am interested in: recognizing the efficacy proper to capitalism, all of its
modes of capture, and experimenting with how to protect oneself from them.
This is where there is a bizarre parallel, actually an antiparallel, between Gaias
transcendence and the transcendence proper to capitalism. It is necessary to
learn to compose with Gaia, but it is not possible to compose with capitalism. It is
not constituted in such a way that the slightest composition, the slightest
negotiation, is possible. What one can attempt to do is to demoralize those who
serve it, meaning certain people who have been captured by it, not in the sense
of converting them, but rather in the sense of creating the possibility for
interstices that give a different texture to our world, that give us a chance to live
out the challenge posed by the intrusion of Gaia in a mode that is not barbaric.
This other texture, with its capacity to slip through State apparatuses, to
demoralize those who are responsible, to create and resist in the present and not
in a messianic mode, this is what a meso pragmatic implies.
EM: How do you see Obamas electoral campaign of 2008? Did it have
mesopolitical moments?
IS: Well, I try to follow the American news a bit, but as you know here in Belgium
its somewhat infected by the French point of view. Whereas in the US, Obama
succeeded in getting across the point that it was not Blacks against Whites, in
France they immediately asked where their Blacks were. Theres no question
that European politics suddenly felt old, after having so proudly resisted Bushs
paranoia. What struck me with Obama was the part of his life in Chicago when
he was a community worker. I know that in certain US cities at the community
level there has been experimentation associated with the question of
empowerment. In France, this has been horribly translated as
responsibilization, and that translates into contracts those who are
irresponsible and must be civilized are made to sign by those who are
responsible. Seen from afar, it seems to me that these experimentations belong
to the meso level by virtue of their definition of success, in that they are not
addressed to individuals but to the idea that a certain type of collective can
render individuals capable of thinking and resisting, and in that they dont
consider that problems are transversal, but see that connections are
something that must be created and that their creation is the only antidote to
the position of powerlessness, resentment, etc this is the only way of
succeeding in creating problems rather than receiving them readymade.
This is something that has happened from time to time in France as well. There
have been neighborhood associations around issues like drugs that have
succeeded, through beautiful creations, in transforming the problem of their
neighborhoods being affected by drug trafficking. They come to the realization
that the people they ostensibly wanted to put away in prison were their own
children, and their friends children, so a collective decision was made to set up
a relay mechanism whereby when a youth from the neighborhood was put in
prison, he received a postcard every day. That is an example of a device that I
would call a meso invention. It belongs to a collective, and its something that
must selfproduce, its not the application of a project. It seems to me that in
certain cases American urban community initiatives have done this kind of thing,
and more than that, that they have learned how to do it. If Obama really did
learn that, it must be related to the type of campaign he succeeded in running,
in which he succeeded in empowering support committees to which he gave
the wherewithal to forge a role for themselves. I am not very optimistic about
what he will be able to do now that he has radically changed his milieu, but its
very interesting that he succeeded in it during his campaign.
Of course, a success of this kind can be dismembered by those addicted to

suspicion. Thats part of the unhealthy character of the milieu into which the
meso ventures. Its unhealthy as much by virtue of the interests it arouses as by
the suspicions it arouses. Its this situation of an unhealthy milieu that must be
thought politically. To celebrate the success of the campaign is not to celebrate
Obama as a savior. It is to celebrate the learning processes this success required,
and it is knowing that this is not something that is good in itself even if it means
pronouncing disappointment afterwards. The worst thing that could happen is if
everyone who put their hope in Obama found themselves disappointed and
went back into their holes saying, Nothing is possible! But it seems to me that
they are resisting this, that they understand that Obama is superexposed to an
unhealthy milieu, but that everything does not depend on him, to the contrary,
that everything he might be able to do depends in the end on them. He did not
make the serious mistake of proclaiming: You elected me. Now I will give you
the world you dream of. Instead, there is the challenge to make the relay, from
one situation to another. Meso practices must be maintained. They must always
be remade, always reinvented. Failure is when the institution produces its own
reasons for being.
BM: Obama is often presented as a character without qualities. Is this a
seduction having to do with a process of remaking connection?
IS: The interesting thing is that people see different things in him, but they are not
isolated from one another, projecting what they want on him. Instead, it puts
them in proximity where before they werent. I remember quite beautiful images
from Chicago where you saw groups of people of European heritage
congratulating groups of African heritage, sharing their joy, whereas normally,
even when one is politically correct, one doesnt know how to share joy, one
spreads guilt and feels sadness instead. Here, heterogeneous groups could each
see something in Obama, and the different things they saw were factors that
made something circulate between them. That was the success, because a
chameleon in the usual sense cannot fabricate a circulation of affects, a
circulation of joy, something that puts categorizations and distances into
becoming without erasing them in a grand movement in which everyone
becomes homogeneous under the aegis of a homogenizing one. This was
about something that puts distances into becoming, that rejigs distances, so that
something else moves across. There was joy in Chicago. Its rare, but we can call
it joy.
BM: So it was about joy as a political affect, and about mechanisms of

connection, affective transmissions?
IS: Exactly. Joy can conjoin transitivity, contagion, and lucidity. When this
happens, joy is an event. Someone I find who has spoken eloquently about joy is
Starhawk, the neopagan witch, particularly in a text in which she explains How
We Really Shut Down the WTO in Seattle. That was the first text of
antiglobalization history I received, because it was circulating on the Web.
People passed it around among themselves, which attests to its having the
power Starhawk associates with magic. I in fact felt a pressing need to translate
it into French in order to relay it. I was not the only one. There are at least four
French versions that have circulated on the Web. What she said in that essay
was that this was only the beginning, it came with no guarantees, but that it was
a beginning we should celebrate, because this kind of event is just too precious
not to take sustenance in the fact that it occurred. The idea of making joy the
marker of an ontological processuality is one of the meanings of the sorceresses
Goddess who, they say, is everywhere that joy, invention, and connection are.
When new possibilities of thinking and acting appear, it is an ontological, or
cosmological, event that we must learn to celebrate, even if its precarious, or
precisely because its precarious. Joy is immanent to a situation, and guarantees
nothing. It always surprises me that US and Canadian academic milieus dont
accord more importance to neopagan thought. For me, it is important to relay
with what is being produced by it, even if its compromising, even if it exposes
you to colleagues snickering, so you believe in the Goddess? Thats not the
point. The point is daring to recognize that their practices have made witches
capable of propositions that often seem to me to be more alive and more
relevant than our own.
An example: There is a great danger that the barbarism will take the form of a
governance by experts charged with managing scarcity in the name of
emergency. No joy in this situation, where it will be decreed what one has the
right to do, what one does not have the right to do, based on a rationality that is
arithmetically incontestable, but lethal. It will be incontestable only in the sense
that it is arithmetic. In this regard as well, Starhawk made me think more
effectively than a thousand academic texts. I dont know if youve read her
novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing, published in 1993. Its a futuristic novel that takes
place forty years from now things have indeed taken a turn for the worse,
except in San Francisco (because there has to be a place where things happen
differently, otherwise thered be no novel), where there was a critical mass
allowing for a reinvention of the city. But on the West Coast, its barbarism, the
reign of the water barons and their mercenaries, and the water barons are the
direct descendents of the expert agencies that decided who would have the
right to how much water, and that took into their own hands the life and death
of others. Dont say witches are regressive, seeking to reanimate a spirituality
condemned by history. I think that their practices make them capable of
connecting with what is unique in our epoch, including the threat of new types
of powers for which we lack a concept and have never experienced. Call into
question, instead, the absence of relay among thinkers who just speculate on
becomings and other existential catalyses. They are a far cry from William James,
who knew how to compromise and expose himself.
EM: The connection you make in your work between philosophical writing the
creation of concepts and political thinking addressed to a broader audience
could you comment on that? Is there a break between the two?
IS: There is no break. If the two werent in play together, springboards for each
other, I would never have become a philosopher. I didnt become a philosopher
to comment on concepts, to cite authors, to theorize, or to rack up points
against my colleagues, but because I discovered the effectiveness of concepts,
of certain concepts it started with Deleuze, Whitehead, and Leibniz for
dissipating the sad anaesthesia that makes people think in circles, for launching
thought into adventure. In the US I would surely have become a feminist,
perhaps a witch, probably not a philosopher. But to undertake a becoming
philosopher with authors as minoritarian as those I cited (Leibniz might well have
been a great philosopher, but he was still ridiculed for his best of all possible
worlds) is also, and inseparably, to become sensitive to the ways that
philosophical ways of thinking poison us, make us think in circles. One day Tobie
Nathan pointed out to me the ease with which statements of elevated
imperative he was thinking in particular of Lacans could be heard coming
out of the mouth of a childrens judge or a social worker justifying a child being
torn from a family judged to be unworthy. As a woman, I also refuse to forget
the ease with which the philosophers have ratified the exclusion of women. In
short, I did not convert to philosophy in general. I discovered in philosophy the
possibility of transforming a wrong that I suffered into a creation. And its not
about theoretical creations, they only have value if they can relay away from
what happened to me, if they can be relevant and can be taken up by others,
in their own situations, and can help them stop suffering from what is poisoning
them.
Deleuze said that his concepts were tools, but that doesnt prevent many of our
colleagues from contenting themselves with paraphrase, with textual
explanation. When I read this kind of text, such sophisticated texts, I feel the
poison of feeling that I am not up to level, and that feeling renews in me in the
commitment never to write texts like that. It happens to me from time to time
that I pick up a concept signed Deleuze as a tool. Its an event, it means that I
am able as you say, Brian, in your introduction to Parables for the Virtual to
extract it from its place of birth and transplant it. You have to do that. The
transplant operation that I then become capable of is, as far I am concerned,
addressed only very secondarily to philosophers. What it does is target poisons of
philosophical origin that anaesthetize capacities to think through concrete
situations. If when a transplantation has taken place I create my own concepts,
they carry with them a vocation for intervention. The concept of practice for
example is inseparable from this vocation. Its not a pure concept, as are
pre-individual singularities, or the crystalimage, or the pure form of time. No, its
always already engaged: always already taken up, as Guattari would say, in an
assemblage of constellations of values, phylums, etc., that are always displaying
their vocation to think through the middle / through the milieu. Practice
belongs to the meso, which means that its not a question of absolute
deterritorialization, only of a relative deterritorialization capable of making
practicioners think without sweeping them up into a witchs flight of thought.
That might well happen, but its not the problem that interests me. I want to
create something that others can pick up on without becoming philosophers.
And without being fascinated by philosophy. There is something formidable in
concepts signed Deleuze, formidable in the sense of the pharmakon, which can
be a remedy or a poison. Its that they can fabricate little judges, who operate in
the name of absolute deterritorialization or the body without organs, in a way
that revives that old refrain separating the elect from the contemptible.
BM: In A Thousand Plateaus, there is an insistence on the art of dosages and that
absolute deterritorialization is unsustainable.
IS: Certainly, but Im not sure that its enough to insist its maybe a little late. In
any case, what I try to do is to create concepts that compromise the people
who take them up, in the sense of preventing them from adopting the position of
little judge, I try to create concepts that dont have fascination power. In short,
concepts that display their relativity to the situation in which they could be
effective. For example, I have to address the question of the State, or of
capitalism, but I dont want to strike the pose of she who knows best, she who
owns the concept capable of rivalling those already produced. It is for this
reason that I speak of characterizing, meaning an operation that is relative to
a situation, in the pragmatic sense that one can ask what can be expected of
the character in that situation. No endall definition; instead, a great
conceptual theater. No titanic struggle that takes the situation hostage, but
rather the pragmatic of the writer who doesnt know how to define the
character she herself created and must explore that character in a mode that is
always situated: what can it become capable of in this situation?
I had this experience in a very intense fashion when I wrote a theater piece with
Tobie Nathan and Lucien Hounkpatin, La damnation de Freud. Its 1919 and
Freud finds himself hosting in his home a silent Senegalese infantryman
traumatized by war, who will later reveal himself to be babalawo, or therapist, in
training, for whom regathering his spirits at Freuds house is part of his trajectory.
So the story is about an encounter between two therapists, but how could that
come about? Characterizing Freud was not so much of a problem. But Lucien
Hounkpatin, who himself comes from a family of initiates and was working with
Tobie Nathan (at the Georges Devereux Centre for Ethnopsychiatry), kept
saying: No, no, he cant do that. He cant make Freud say that. And in fact,
there wasnt much of anything he could do in the situation, as Lucien
understood it. This wasnt a contemporary novel, it didnt revolve around an
absence, it wasnt Waiting for Godot. What made writing it interesting was the
fact of being obligated to an eminently recalcitrant character who refused to
bend to our designs, and who because of that acquired the capacity ot
reorganize the whole plot.
BM: This relates to a certain concept of obligation obligations inherent to a

milieu.
IS: Being obligated by a situation, giving the situation the power to obligate you.
And without guarantees. Never the slightest guarantee, neither the judgment of
God, nor a conceptual guarantee. Its all about fighting against the demand for
a guarantee, its about compromising oneself. For instance, the characterization
of capitalism as what has made our world a cemetery of enslaved or destroyed
practices for example knowledge practices that were first enslaved and now
are in the process of being destroyed has given rise to the idea that the
destruction of those practices were a relief, a service capitalism was performing
for the future. This creates what William James would call a genuine option, a
vulnerable option. Either capitalism must be resisted with respect to this
destruction, in which case the question arises of how to address the
practicioners; or, they are judged to be unworthy of being defended, to be too
compromised, vulnerable, corporatist. This is an option in Jamess sense because
there is no position of neutrality. If we demand that a practice provide
guarantees, of the kind Marx associated with the proletariat, it will prove
incapable of giving it. But to ratify its destruction is to leave the field wide open
for capitalism, and that is all it asks for. The concepts I attempt to fabricate in
order to speak well of practices despite their vulnerability, are what I call
compromising concepts. In this sense, Im a Jamesian. For me, when there is a
fabrication of concepts, there are veritable options that are implied, so that to
describe them is already a way of engaging. In this sense, even though it was
Deleuze who made an apprentice philosopher of me, I am actually more
Leibnizian. I refuse to honor any truth that finds its grandeur in a refusal to
compromise itself with established sentiments.
EM: For us, with the SenseLab, the politicoaesthetic dimension expresses itself
most often in the creation of certain techniques regrouping affects pertaining to
events. Do you see you research group, GECo (Groupe dtudes
constructivistes), as a mesopolitical assemblage?
IS: As Deleuze said to the cinema students at FEMIS (the French national image
and sound school), So things are going badly here? For us as well. Apparently,
with you things are going better, and we would do well to learn more about your
techniques, about your modes of assemblage, about what you have learned. As
for GECo, I believe that it is at the moment below the mesopolitical threshold
that would allow it to envision intervening. It is more that it exists in the interstices
of an academic milieu undergoing a very brutal operation of redefinition. Were
very late in this regard, but were catching up with great speed, in terms of
putting into place organizational forms corresponding to the injunction to
position oneself in the academic market at large, with experts in evaluation at
every level, and with an imperative of evaluability. And the resistance within the
academic milieu is quasi nonexistent, even in France where, barring the
unforeseen, the current movement of resistance lacks the transversal power to
overcome Sarkozys opposition. At least in Belgium we have one thing that gives
us breathing room in comparison with France: no one asks us to adhere, we can
grumble and scoff. But that doesnt prevent us from having to submit, it only
avoids certain terror effects, such as the passion to eliminate what doesnt
conform. Thats what enables GECo to exist. In France, I think, wed inspire
hatred, because what we produce makes no sense, its literally imperceptible, in
relation to the evaluation tools. Our first success is also the sine qua non of our
existence: those who GECo brings together succeed at working together in a
mode that helps them avoid despair, avoid allowing themselves to be defined
by the surrounding cynicism. Thats already a lot. It also means experiencing and
experimenting with modes of working that make palpable what practices of
collective thought might demand and produce but that is on the order of the
interstitial and virtuality.
EM: Could you say more about the how of this virtuality
IS: I take the virtual in Etienne Souriaus sense, for whom it is not a chimera, not an
empty dream or unrealizable utopia, but that which demands instauration. That
is one of the meanings of the virtual in Deleuze. Deleuzes virtual has Bergsonian
dimensions, but it also has Souriau dimensions, even though Deleuze never cited
him except in What is Philosophy? This is the virtual as the work to be done
(loeuvre faire), as calling for realization. For example, it isnt the artists idea.
Its what the artist is not the author of, but which he or she puts to work.
Whitehead also held the thesis that ideas do not belong to us. In Adventures of
Ideas he writes that in The Banquet Plato invented man as sensitive to the
idea. Man does not have ideas, he is sensitive to them. Whitehead added that
Plato should have another dialogue after The Banquet called The Furies. The
Furies is what results from an imperfect reception of the idea, what happens
when the idea becomes proper to the human, when it becomes our property, or
to put it another way, when we demand of it the power to impose itself.
Souriaus thought, with his concept of instauration, also emphasizes the necessity
of not taking possesssion, and above all of not psychologizing, of not talking
about having a project, but of having a trajectory instead. A trajectory resulting
from a threeway assemblage: the work in the making, the one who puts to
work, and that which calls for its own existence, and in doing so keeps the one
who puts to work guessing not in the sense of a secret to be discovered but in
the sense of a tension between succeeding and failing, in the sense of a
situation that is questioning. That is perhaps GECos strength, that it exists only in
this immanent tension between succeeding and failing, between succeeding, or
working together in a mode that creates an experience that sustains us, and
failing, which is to say dispersing.
translated by Brian Massumi
1
NOTES
ThisisareferencetoMichelTourniersnovel FridayandDeleulzesanalysisofitinan
addendumto LogicSenseentitledMichelTournierandtheWorldWithoutOthers.
Affective Territories
Margarida Carvalho
But what can the geopolitical lens reveal, when its a matter of artistic invention?
(Holmes, 2008a)
Has the ideology of our time not become an erratic, wavering pattern of crisscrossing
footsteps, traced in secure metric points on an abstract field? The aesthetic form of the
drive is everywhere. But so is the hyper-rationalist grid of Imperial infrastructure.
(Holmes, 2003b)
1. Geopoetics.
The figure of map1, historically associated with colonial imperialism,
has gradually grown into a privileged trope of contemporary art which
articulates it either as personal cartography (singular trace)2, as an
ethnographic map of a community or institution3 - thus revealing the
1 This paper is based on my own article Mapas Imaginrios published by online

magazine Virose, section b#21, in October 2008. Available at:
http://virose.pt/vector/b_21/carvalho.html (Accessed 7 March 2009).
2 As is the case of artist Jeremy Wood and his GPS drawings. Quoting from his website:
Jeremy Wood is an artist who started GPS drawing in 2000. He maps his daily
movements with GPS to express a personal cartography, and generates new work as
he travels. Available at: http://www.gpsdrawing.com/jw.html (Accessed 24 February
2009).
3 The unavoidable reference here is to the often quoted chapter The Artist as
Ethnographer from the book The Return of the Real by Hal Foster. In Fosters own
words: These developments also constitute a series of shifts in the siting of art: from the
surface of the medium to the space of the museum, from institutional frames to
discursive networks, to the point where many artists and critics treat conditions like
desire or disease, AIDS or homeless, as sites for art. Along with this figure of siting has
come the analogy of mapping. In an important moment Robert Smithson and others
pushed this cartographic operation to a geological extreme that transformed the siting
of art dramatically. Yet this siting had limits too: it could be recouped by gallery and
museum, it played to the myth of the redemptive artist (a very traditional site), and so
on. Otherwise mapping in recent art has tended toward the sociological and the

1
complexity of the relationships within these -, or even by evoking its
constitutive power, a map of becoming that traces a people to come4.
This notion of map as an artistic trope evokes, for example, the
work of Lothar Baumgarten, a German artist whose conceptualist work is
shaped by a subtle social critique manifested in a particularly poetic and
political way of molding ethnographical and historical materials. In this
respect we recall specifically the 20015 exhibition that the Fundao de
Serralves (Porto) dedicated to this artist, titled By water brought
collected broken buried, in which the first room displayed a vast map
spread out on the floor and partially hidden by a net (Voo Nocturno,
1968-69) next to a small pyramid of blue pigment (Tetraedo, 1968).
Cartographies, photographs, names, drawings, sounds, feathers, masks
and charms populate the universe of Baumgarten, but always filtered by
a reflexive gesture: there is always a mirror, an object of daily use
abandoned in the jungle, a name beyond the code, a disorienting index
on the map which all betray the presence of the artist, of his gaze, of his
system of values. In the words of Hal Foster:
Such reflexivity is essential, for, as Bordieu warned, ethnographic mapping is

predisposed to a Cartesian opposition that leads the observer to abstract the
culture of study. Such mapping may thus confirm rather than contest the
authority of mapper over site in a way that reduces the desired exchange of
dialogical fieldwork. (Foster, 1996: 190)
Trevor Paglen, a Californian artist, refers to such a cartesian

opposition as Gods Eyethus justifying his hesitation in working from a
cartographic point-of-viewduring his conversation with Visible
anthropological, to the point where an ethnographic mapping of an institution or a

community is a primary form of site-specific art today. (Foster, 1996: 184-185)
4Such is the stance of Brian Holmes in Imaginary maps, global solidarities: My
conviction is that we need radically inventive maps exactly like we need radical
political movements: to go beyond received ideas and orders, in fact, to go beyond
representation, to rediscover and share the space creating potentials of a
revolutionary imagination. (Holmes, 2003a)
5Concerning which I wrote a short text published by the online magazine Interact, #4,
November 2001. Available at: http://www.interact.com.pt/interact4/ (Accessed 7

March 2009).

2
Collective/Naeem Mohaimen regarding the map co-authored with John
Emerson for project CIA Rendition Flights 2001-2006 (2006), and included
on the book An Atlas of Radical Cartography (Mogel, L. & Bhagat, A.,
2008)6. In fact, this fascinating Atlas, composed of ten maps created by
artists and activists, as well as an equal number of essays which query
and analyze these irreverent and unsettling cartographies, brings
together reflexivity and activist gesture and may be read in agreement
with the notion of tactical media, just as described by the Institute for
Applied Autonomy (IAA) on its short essay Tactical Cartographies,
which examines the map Routes of Least Surveillance (2001-2007) by the
IAA and Site-R. As the collective puts it:
At root, tactical media is an interventionist practice that creates disruption

within existing systems of power and control. Less a methodology than an
orientation, it is fundamentally pragmatic, utilizing any and all available
technologies, aesthetics and methods as dictated by the goals of a given
action. Tactical media are often ephemeral and event-driven, existing only as
long as they continue to be effective. They vanish into thin air once their utility
has been exhausted, leaving only traces in the form of memories,
documentation and journalistic accounts. () Extending these notions to spatial
representation, tactical cartography refers to the creation, distribution, and
use of spatial data to intervene in systems of control affecting spatial meaning
and practice. (Institute for Applied Autonomy, 2008: 29-30)
Thus, this concept of tactical cartography, which in many ways

transverses the numerous creative contributes of the Atlas, calls into play
a re-invention of territory, an heterotopic7 enunciation, in which artistic
experimentation merges with activist guerrilla, and thus the notion of
map appears in its full pragmatic breadth, re-drawing whats hidden,
suspended, repressed and denied, a geology submerged by the
voracious fluxes of neo-liberal globalization from which may,
nevertheless, emerge new networks, affections, concepts and alliances
6An excerpt of this interview can be accessed at: http://www.an-

atlas.com/contents/pag_em_vis.html (Accessed 24 February 2009).
7Crucial concept introduced by Michel Foucault at the conference Des espaces
autres which took place at Cercles dtudes Architecturales, on March 14th 1967.
Available at: http://virose.pt/vector/periferia/foucault_pt.html (Accessed 28 February
2009).

3
under the aegis of a desire for a complex social bond of solidarity8. We
may recall here the words of Brian Holmes in The Affectivist Manifesto,
where we witness an enunciation of affect9, in the deleuzian sense, allied
(implicitly) to Foucaults concept of subjectivation10:
Artist activism is affectivism, it opens up expanding territories. These territories

are occupied by the sharing of a double difference: a split from the private self
in which each person was formerly enclosed, and from the social order which
8 We are referring here to the notion of solidarity in the sense meant by Brian Holmes in
Imaginary Maps, Global Solidarities, which is: Conceived in these terms, solidarity
means something quite tangible: the very cohesion of social relations, which demand a
limitation of sovereignty (adherence to common laws and norms) as well as a transfer
of property (redistribution). Solidarity is thus a modern name for the complex reciprocal
relations, both material and symbolic, which anthropologists attempt to decipher as the
diverse elements of a single social tie. In this sense, solidarity can be conceived as a gift
for the survival and well-being of others: but a redoubtable and even dangerous gift,
one that is most often forced upon us, extorted or imposed. It remains that at the best
moments in modern society (which sometimes are almost inevitable, given the disasters
that preceded them), the solidarities prefigured in the social imaginary can be actively
reshaped, replayed in both psychic and social space, even as their concrete forms are
reinvented and more-or-less freely chosen. In this way they can give rise to a better,
more egualitarian system, a progress in civilization. Available at:
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdr/pubsfolder/bhimaginary/ (Accessed 28 February 2009).
9 Quoting Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari in Quest-ce que la Philosophie?: Laffect
ne dpasse pas moins les affections que le percept, les perceptions. Laffect nest pas
le passage dun tat vcu un autre, mais le devenir non humain de lhomme. Achab
nimite pas Moby Dick, et Penthsile ne fait pas la chienne: ce nest pas une
imitation, une sympathie vcue ni meme une identification imaginaire. Ce nest pas de
la resemblance, bien quil y ait de la resemblance. Mais justement ce nest quune
resemblance produite. Cest plutt une extreme contigut, dans une treinte de deux
sensations sans resemblance, ou au contraire dans lloignement dune lumire qui
capte les deux dans un meme reflet. (...) Cest une zone dindtermination,
dindiscernabilit, comme si des choses, des btes et des personnes (Achab et Moby
Dick, Penthsile et la chienne) avaient atteint dans chaque cas ce point pourtant
linfini que precede immdiatement leur diffrenciation naturelle. Cest ce quon
appelle un affect. ()Seule la vie cre de telles zones o tourbillonnent les vivants, et
seul lart peut y atteindre et y pntrer dans son enterprise de co-cration. (Deleuze,
G. & Guattari, F., 1991: 163-164)
10 Just as Deleuze states in La vie comme oeuvre dart: Et, conformment sa
mthode, ce qui intresse essentiellement Foucault, ce nest pas un retour aux Grecs,
mais nous aujourdhui: quels sont nos modes dexistence, nos possibilits de vie ou nos
processus de subjectivation, avons-nous des manires de nous constituer comme soi,
et, comme dirait Nietzche, des manires suffisamment artistiques, par-del le savoir et
le pouvoir? (Deleuze, 1990: 136). In an interview with Toni Negri, Deleuze notes that on
peut en effet parler de processus de subjectivation quand on considre les diverses
manires dont des individus ou des collectivits se constituent comme sujets: de tells
processus ne valent que dans la mesure o, quand ils se font, ils chappent la fois aux
saviors constitutes et aux pouvoirs dominats. Mme si par la suite ils engendrent de
nouveaux pouvoirs ou repassent dans de nouveaux saviors. Mais, sur le moment, ils ont
bien une spontanit rebelled. (Deleuze, 1990: 238)

4
imposed that particular type of privacy or privation. When a territory of possibility
emerges it changes the social map, like a landslide, a flood or a volcano do in
nature. The easiest way for society to protect its existing form is denial,
pretending the change never happened: and that actually works in the
landscape of mentalities. An affective territory disappears if it isnt elaborated,
constructed, modulated, differentiated, prolonged by new breakthroughs and
conjunctions. There is no use defending such territories and even believing in
them is only the barest beginning. What they urgently need is to be developed,
with forms, rhythms, inventions, discourses, practices, styles, technologies in
short, with cultural codes. (Holmes, 2008b)
The collective volume An Atlas of Radical Cartography reaches

into this affectivism, as Brian Holmes calls it, creating new territories of
possibilities by casting different looks into existing territories, illuminating
areas of darkness, indetermination and marginalization, but also
analytically scrutinizing the complex networks that support the
geographies of contemporary capitalism. The theme of Atlas is
introduced immediately on the cover, which shows an inverted map of
the world; subtly, ironically, its right at the surface that we plunge into an
upside down world in which an extraordinary complexity entails a
growing opacity in obvious contradiction with the proliferation of
discourses on transparency and the immediacy of the society of
information (in fact, the current worldwide financial crisis is an
unmistakable proof of this opacity).
Reminiscent of the urgent need for an aesthetics of cognitive
mapping capable of challenging the perplexity and incomprehension
of the postmodern individual in face of the complex (multinational and
communicational) networks that traverse his/hers experience
suggested by Frederic Jameson, in 1984, on his famous article, later
turned into a book, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, the Ashley Hunt map, titled A World Map: in which we
see... (2005), is perhaps, of all the maps in this Atlas, the one that most
openly takes on an analytic and didactic approach.

5
Ashley Hunt. A World Map: in which we see..., 2005. Image kindly supplied by the artist.
Ashley Hunt. A World Map: in which we see..., 2005 (detail). Image kindly supplied by
the artist.
Quoting Ashley Hunt:
A World Map In Which We See... traces our contemporary modes of power and
powerlessness, through which positions of wealth and privilege always exist in

6
connection to the work or subordination of another. (...) Primary research for the
map came from years of cultural and political work within activist and reform
movements against the United States prison system, and emerged from a
perceived need to expand the analytical basis for that work beyond the
limitations of nationally framed legal, institutional and civil discourse. Especially
after September 11, 2001, a condition of statelessness appeared to increasingly
define the nature of imprisonment and mass prison expansion (which is now a
global, albeit US driven phenomena), making the figure of the prisoner less and
less discernable from displaced figures the world over whose resources and
power are progressively seized and expropriated. (Hunt, 2008: 145-146)11
The figure of the placeless, namely the clandestine immigrant and

the refugee, is mapped by the collective An Architektur12 through a
detailed cartography of the Departure Center at Frth (a center for
illegal immigrants with no passports or similar documentation) in the
German Bavaria, as well as by visualizations of the center-mediated
relationships between the asylum seekers and the several institutions
involved (medical, juridical, law enforcement, among others), as well as
the procedures for seeking asylum in Germany.
An Architektur in collaboration with a42.org. Geography of the Frth Departure Center,

2004 (detail). Image kindly supplied by the collective.
11For more information see: http://aworldmap.com/ (Accessed 28 February 2009).

12 In collaboration with the students of the Masters Program in Architecture at
Nurembergs Fine Arts Academy.
For more information on the collective see:
http://www.anarchitektur.com/aa_news/aa_news_en.html (Accessed 1 March 2009).

7
An Architektur in collaboration with a42.org. Geography of the Frth Departure Center,
2004. Image kindly supplied by the collective.
Quoting from the Geography of the Frth Departure Center map:
Ausreisezentren, or, departure centers, are camps for refugees and migrants
that, due to missing papers, cannot be deported. Asylum seekers held in these
camps are accused by authorities of concealing their land of origin and resisting
obtaining passports. So far there are seven departure centers in Germany. (...)
Collectively, we have experimented with cartographic representation in order
to pose these questions: What kind of spaces does the German system of the
administration of migrants produce? How do political and social circumstances
appear geo-graphically? Which potential for analysis or evaluation is offered by
a spatial representation? How can a critique of exclusion be formulated by
means of mapping? How can the varying levels of state and institutional
structure be brought into relation with those of individual experience? How is
subjective knowledge transmitted by this? (An Architektur with a42.org, 2008)
In fact, and as Maribel Casas-Cortes e Sebastian Cobarrubias

point out so well on their analytical text derived from this map and titled

8
Drawing Escape Tunnels through the Borders: Cartographic Research
Experiments by European Social Movements13, the notion itself of
frontier has been changing over time to a point where the current
logic of frontier largely exceeds the geographic boundaries of the
State-Nation, fractured into internal frontiers that segregate work,
institutional and familial relationships, to name only a few, intensifying
social inequalities and accentuating feelings of mistrust and social
discrimination.
Targeting this climate of suspicion and fear that transverses the
contemporary experience by creating an ideological context for an
expansive application of surveillance devicesnamely through closed
circuit TV networks (CCTV), the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA), in
collaboration with Site-R, counterattacks in this Atlas with the ironic and
activist map Routes of Least Surveillance (2001/2007), based on the
online application iSee14developed by the collective for several cities
since 2001which displays, in real-time, maps of the routes least
exposed to surveillance cameras.
13 Its worthwhile reading the excerpt of Drawing Escape Tunnels through the Borders:
Cartographic Experiments by European Social Movements by Maribel Casas-Cortes
and Sebastian Cobarrubias derived from the map Geography of the Frth Departure
Center. Available at: http://www.an-atlas.com/contents/anarch_casascobb.html
(Accessed 1 March 2009).
14 For detailed information on the application:
http://www.appliedautonomy.com/isee.html (Accessed 1 March 2009).

9
Institute for Applied Autonomy in collaboration with Site-R, Routes of Least Surveillance,
2001/2007 (detail). Image kindly supplied by the collective.
The iSee project lays emphasis on a dynamic cartography in which

localization and route are combined into subversive maps that highlight
the creation of experimental, communal and creative strategies for
appropriation and transformation of both media and new
technologiesnamely those that are central to the current surveillance
societyas a means to enhance the sharing, creation and free flux of
signals, things, people, actions, and affections. In an interview with Erich
W. Schienke, published in 2002 by the Surveillance & Society15 magazine,
the IAA called attention to the potential of the iSee application when
combined with locative media (on which they were already working), as
the intersection between the two would eventually transform the
application into a general purpose mapping instrument, open to the
creative intervention of its users, specifically through GPS-enabled PDAs,
who would thus be able to insert multiple data and narratives onto the
maps.
2. Allegories of the Surveillance Society.
Available at: http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles1/iaa.pdf (Accessed 1

15
March 2009).

10
In fact, with the development of systems such as the Geographic
Information System (GIS), which combines geographically indexed
databases, satellite imagery, and GPS, as well as the proliferation of cell
phones, laptops, and wireless technologies, the artistic and activist
practices associated with locative media have become more prominent
within the contemporary cultural and artistic scene, suggesting a
locational humanism (Holmes, 2003b) and imagining the potential for
collective action of the smart mobs (Rheingold, 2002) of the 21st
Century. In his article Open Cartographies: On Assembling Things
through Locative Media, Michael Dieter writes:
While explicitly framed as speculative, exploratory and anarchic, the close link
established between a kind of materialist ontology and political emancipation
has become a recurring trope in the commentaries on locative media. To a
certain extent, the trend corresponds with a desire to transcend the limits of
postmodern theorization and the apparent elitism of net.art, however, a
range of competing motivations and influences have emerged in the diverse
fields that have converged around the topic of augmented reality. For
researchers Anne Galloway and Matt Ward, new archaeological techniques
developed in conjunction with photography, GPS and cartographic mapping
coincide through locative media as social platforms. This correlation is identified
with the activation of static architectures in order to restore hope through the
transformation of urban landscapes. (Dieter, 2007: 198)
The activation and rewriting of the urban landscape brought

about by the artistic practices associated with locative media must be
considered in conjunction with a tendency to develop a cinematic and
interactive architecture capable of creating a total immersion effect on
the digital set16. This urban allegorization is translated into street culture
and intervention, as is the case with the laser graffiti proposed by the
Graffiti Research Lab, L.A.S.E.R Tag (2007); narrative and playful
networked city in which space is mapped with messages recorded by
cyclists who, alone, explore the city streets in search of hideaway
places where to leave their stories and listen to those of others, in Rider
16Manovich, L. (2004). The poetics of augmented space. [Online]. Available at:

http://www.manovich.net/nnm%20map/Augmented_2004revised.doc (Accessed 25
September 2008).

11
Spoke (2007) by Blast Theory; approximations to the situacionist drive 17
as is the case with the singular traces superimposed onto the urban
cartography as those put forward by Hugh Pryor and Jeremy Wood (GPS
Drawing), and Ester Polak in Real Time (2002); conversion and activism in
the case of the Makrolab project (1997-2007) by Marko Peljhan, and the
Transborder Tool for Immigrants (2007) by artivist Ricardo Dominguez.
However, if the tendency to modify technical devices, intervening
in their purpose and liberating them from private appropriation through
an allegorization18 that layers them with new meanings, intersects these
artistic proposals, there is nevertheless an ambiguity that traverses and
surpasses them. In the words of Jordan Crandall:
What we are witnessing today, however, is not a one-way delocalization or

deterritorialization, but rather a volatile combination of the diffused and the
positioned, or the placeless and the place-coded. Perhaps nowhere has this
been more apparent than with mobile GIS and location-aware technologies.
() Tracking has played a primary role in this shift. Its landscapes of inclination-
position fuel the geospatial interfaces -- such as evidenced in Google Maps and
the C5 GPS media player -- which are becoming important modes of access to
any phenomenon. (Crandall, 2006)19
17 Quoting Sadie Plant: One of psychogeographys principle means was the drive.
Long a favorite practice of the Dadaists, who organized a variety of expeditions, and
the surrealists, for whom the geographical form of automatism was an instructive
pleasure, the drive, the drift, was defined by the situationists as the technique of
locomotion without a goal, in which one or more persons during a certain period drop
their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure
activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the
encounters they find there. The drive acted as something of a model for the playful
creation of all human relationships. (Plant, 1992: 58-59).
18 We are referring here to the notion of allegory in the sense meant by Craig Owens
and derived from Walter Benjamins Ursprung des deutschen trauerspiels (1928).
Specifically: Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery: the allegorist does not invent
images but confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its
interpreter. And in his hands the image becomes something other (allos = other +
agoreuei = to speak). He does not restore an original meaning that may have been lost
or obscured; allegory is not hermeneutics. Rather, he adds another meaning to the
image. If he adds, however, he does so only to replace: the allegorical meaning
supplants an antecedent one; it is a supplement. This is why allegory is condemned, but
it is also the source of its theoretical significance. (Owens, 1984: 205)
19 Crandall, J. (2006). Precision + Guided + Seeing. Virose. [Online]. Available at:
http://www.virose.pt/vector/x_05/crandall.html (Accessed 7 March 2009).

12
In effect, if the aesthetical form of the drive has made a strong
come back in our contemporary experience, be it under the guise of the
individual in transit, freed from geographical constrains and available for
new encounters through the always-on digital technologies, or through
the nomadic navigation on the World Wide Web, never before have
wanderings, routes and behaviors been this registered, stored and
controlled20, true to the deleuzian concept of dividual21 the current
condition of the individual when reduced to a data subject (the result
of an endless split between an individuals physical self and his/hers data
representation) 22. We may thus say that today, more than ever, the
imaginary maps, the ones that trace singular trajectories or create a
people to come, are drawn in relationship to (and in tension with) a
cartography of an overexposed territory, monitored by a gaze that
never ceases to calculate and evaluate.
20 Quoting Jordan Crandall in Precision + Guided + Seeing: While tracking is about
the strategic detention and codification of movement, it is also about positioning. It

studies how something moves in order to predict its exact location in time and space. It
fastens its object (and subjects) onto a classifying grid or database-driven identity
assessment, reaffirming precise categorical location within a landscape of mobility.
Rather than being fully about mobility on the one hand, or locational specificity on the
other, tracking is more accurately about the dynamic between. We might call this
inclination-position. () This is a landscape in which signifiers have become statistics. It is
how computers think, and how we begin to think with them. (Crandall, 2006).
21 Quoting Gilles Deleuze in Post-scriptum sobre as sociedades de controlo: Il ny a
pas besoin de science-fiction pour concevoir umn mcanisme de contrle qui donne
chaque instant la position dun element en milieu ouvert, animal dans la reserve,
homme dans une enterprise (collier lectronique). Fliz Guattari imaginait une ville o
chacun pouvait quitter son appartement, sa rue, son quartier, grace sa carte
lectronique (dividuelle) qui faisait lever telle ou telle barrire; mais aussi bien la carte
pouvait tre recrache tel jour, ou entre telles heures; ce qui compte nest pas la
barrire, mais lordinateur qui repre la position de chacun, licite ou illicite, et opre
une modulation universelle. (Deleuze,1990: 246).
22 According to Robert W. Williams in Politics and self in the age of digital
re(pro)ducibility: For Deleuze, the data gathered on us through the new technologies
did not necessarily manifest our irreducible uniqueness. Rather, the very way that the
data can be gathered about us and then used for and against us marks us as dividuals.
For Deleuze, such technologies indicate that we as discrete selves are not in-divisibles
entities; on the contrary, we can be divided and subdivided endlessly. What starts as
particular information about specific people or selves can be separated from us
and recombined in new ways outside our control. Such recombinations are based on
the criteria deemed salient by those with access to the information, be they
government officials or corporate marketers. (Williams, 2005).

13
Thus, as David Lyon notes on The End of Privacy (Lyon, 2007),
the contemporary surveillance society23where location-aware
corporations such as Digital Angel and VeriChip24 arise, along with the
omnipresence of closed-circuit TV networks (CCTV) in urban spaces and
the development of a new penology based on the prediction of risk and
on the identification and management of the categorized groups
according to different degrees of danger (Ericson, R. & Haggerty, K.,
1997)has been progressively replacing the criteria of public benefit
with that of risk minimization in what concerns the assessment of public
policies, a tendency which only gained strength since the terrorist attack
on the World Trade Center on September 11th 2001. To question this new
condition, to confront the technical apparatus, to subvert and
experiment, to rise above its time, this is what we can and should expect
from contemporary art.
In order to work, surveillance systems depend on their subjects (indeed, as

Foucault observed a long time ago, subjects become the bearers of their own
surveillance 1979). Although there is a sense in which the subjects of
surveillance become objectified' as their data doubles become more real to
the surveillance system than the bodies and daily lives from which the data
have been drawn, their involvement with surveillance systems often remains
active, conscious and intentional. People comply (but not as dupes), negotiate
and at times resist the surveillance systems in which their lives are enmeshed.
(Lyon, 2007: 55)
Faceless25 (2007), a film by Manu Luksch, is an excellent example

of this resistance to the contemporary apparatus of surveillance in that it
appropriates closed-circuit TV networks, deviating from their explicit
purpose and endowing them with an experimental, artistic and activist
dimension. Shot in Londonthe city in the world with the highest density
23 On which it would be worthwhile reading the Report on the Surveillance Society

prepared by the Surveillance Studies Network:
http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/library/data_protection/practical_applicati
on/surveillance_society_full_report_2006.pdf (Accessed 7 March 2009)
24 Suggesting the use of technologies like RFID and GPS for the purposes of monitoring,
identifying and locating people, animals and objects.

25 Available at: http://www.ambienttv.net/pdf/facelessproject.pdf (Accessed 5 March
2009).

14
of CCTVsas part of the Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers26, Faceless is
entirely made from surveillance camera footage obtained by the artist
under the UK Data Protection Act which gives the individual captured by
the CCTVs the right to request a copy of his/hers footage. In Faceless:
Chasing the Data Shadow, Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel, who
collaborated on the screenplay, state:
Faceless treats the CCTV image as an example of a legal readymade (objet

trouv). The medium, in the sense of raw materials that are transformed into
artwork, is not adequately described as simply video or even captured light.
More accurately, the medium comprises images that exist contingent on
particular social and legal circumstances essentially, images with a legal
superstructure. Faceless interrogates the laws that govern the video surveillance
of society and the codes of communication that articulate their operation, and
in both its mode of coming into being and its plot, develops a specific critique.
(Luksch & Patel, 2007: 74)
Just as in the project Video Sniffin, developed by the collective

MediaShed27, which includes the videos The Commercial (2006), Min
Olen (2006), The Duellist (2007), and Spy Kitting (2006-2007), in Faceless
the city is transformed into a permanent film set and the act of creation
becomes a gesture of appropriation and transformation of the
omnipresent gaze of the surveillance cameras. In this context to create is
to affectively populate a territory, to rescue it from the barrenness and
lethargy in which the non-reciprocated gaze of the surveillance cameras
had plunged it.
Faceless is the result of not only a brilliant conceptual intuition but
also of a subtle artistic work, manifest on the visual and the narrative ways
in which Manu Luksch appropriates the circles superimposed on the faces
of the recorded individuals, except for the artist herself, the only visible
face (an artifice legally imposed to owners of surveillance cameras, for
the screening of CCTV captured images, with the intent of protecting
the citizens privacy).
26 Available at: http://www.ambienttv.net/content/?q=dpamanifesto (Accessed 5

March 2009).
27 Available at: http://www.mediashed.org/about (Accessed 7 March 2009).

15
Still from the movie Faceless (2007). Image kindly supplied by the artist.
In this Orwellian fable the fabulous voice of Tilda Swinton narrates

the story of a strange city whose inhabitants have no face and live
immersed in an eternal present, the real time, dictated by the scrutiny of
the New Machine which has abolished the past and the future, and
along with them guilt and unrest, but also any possibility to experience
the real. Suddenly, one woman regains her face and with it the
consciousness of herself and others, rediscovering the city and its areas
of affect and freedom, just like the ones populated by the spectral
children with their colorful and clandestine dances to the sound of
which the main character will regain, for brief moments, her memories,
reuniting once more with those who are dear to her.
It is perhaps on the dance sequences (choreographed by Ballet
Boyz), which take place in several of Londons public spaces, that

16
Faceless best expresses its strangeness and poetic activism, evoking the
contradictory forces that connect us to the spaces we so often cross
and forget to inhabit.
Still from the movie Faceless (2007). Image kindly supplied by the artist.
Monitored, assessed, controlled, divided and owned: such is the

complex condition of contemporary space which may nevertheless
become our territory if traversed by affects, bodies and gestures that
inhabit it and make it communal. It is this possibility that, in different ways,
movies like Faceless, the photographs and cartographies of
Baumgarten, and the maps of An Atlas of Radical Cartography address.
In their singularity and difference, these works of art offer evidence that
the creation of this emerging territory, this labor of geopoetics, cant
relinquish a relationship with technology and the media. On the contrary:
this is a political relationship and therefore an imperative one.

17
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22

Micro Politics

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Micro Politics

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From Noun to Verb: The Micropolitics of

EM: You raise a number of interesting issues. I think the question of

This idea of flexibility is key to micropolitics. Flexibility is not a moral

Earlier, I mentioned the necessity to accept the possibility that things

Politics and perception come together in this nonconscious rejigging. It is

For a micropolitics of collective enunciation, it seems that what is required

It would be interesting to explore further the more negative reactions to

NH: And Guattari says, Any micropolitical approach consists precisely in

When Glowczewski returned to France in the early 1980s, she became

Essence is a macropolitical concept. It engages at the level of fabulation,

In the context of Australian Aboriginal culture, the convergences of

This paradox is beautifully addressed in the Sydney molecules

Generating Thought Experiment is an instruction manual that invites us

As well as the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman. Weizman recently

Second, Weizman also mentions in this article the technologies of

Gaza became the object of an experiment in lawfare, not only in regards

And what is so disturbing and disconcerting is that were always, in effect,

I have a problem with the idea of everyone picking their own

EM: Perhaps an event such as Society of Molecules is a starting point. I

Gina Badger is currently pursuing a Master of Science in Visual Studies at MIT.

NH: Did your investigation start with one plant in particular?

Scatter began with a series of workshops, kind of personalized, domestic

NH: And these were people you knew?

NH: Right, because its an ethics-in-the-making, I mean in terms of how youre

NH: Because youre learning this too as you go along, right?

NH: And those plants are mullein

GB: Mullein, burdock [Arctium lappa], goldenrod, yarrow [Achillea millefolium],

GB: Now Im trying to go back over my earlier comment about leading

An Interview with Adam Bobbette, June 2008

Currently, Adam is working towards a Master of Landscape Architecture at the

The interview began from the middle of a conversation.

NH: What was your first project at Eyebeam?

This has informed my own scepticism towards sustainability; there is a re-

NH: What other projects did you work on with Jerry?

AB: We collaborated before the steam project on the cocoon project.

NH: What is the cocoon project?

NH: So you gave them

AB: Good question.

NH: I guess it depends on the project too

AB: Yes, it does depend on the project

NH: And how it changes.

For the interactive CD-ROMS, I created an interactive map which I called a

What is misunderstood here is that everything in the landscape is meaningful.

Soon afterwards a huge spread of Aboriginal paintings started being

In the 90s I married an Aboriginal filmmaker, composer, singer and musician,

It was incredible to be in those workshops on death in custody because I was

I just happened to be in town in Queensland in 2004, invited by James Cook

Interview with Bruno Latour, 24 November 2008

This is the concept I depart from in my preface on Tarde, which has

BM: No, now were speaking of you

BL: Tardes argument wait, you were saying unmeasurable or

EM: This reminds me of the difference that Whitehead traces between

EM: So the question of possession. It seems to me that when I think of

BL: Tarde is a sociologist, he is trying to understand, he is very interested in

BM: Is there a philosophical movement that links these major philosophies

Its evident that the economy is at the interior of ecology as an instrument

Economics and economy are two completely different things. Actually we

BL: What is it to live together? Do whales belong to the commons?

And then the problem becomes even more complicated because we

So here we reverse the idea. We say that the composition of the

EM: When you speak of your project, you seem to be speaking of a

BL: Its a complicated question. There is perhaps a misunderstanding with

Its going to be a very different endeavor if you engage the political