political matter

This page intentionally left blank

Political Matter
Technoscience, Democracy,
and Public Life

Bruce Braun and

Sarah J. Whatmore, Editors

University of Minnesota Press

minneapolis . london
A version of chapter 2 was previously published as Jane Bennett, “The Force
of Things,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (2004): 347–72. Copyright 2004 Sage
Publications.
Chapter 3 was published as William Connolly, “Materiality, Experience,
and Surveillance,” in New Materialisms, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha
Frost (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). Copyright William E.
Connolly. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Chapter 6 was published as Nigel Thrift, “Halos,” in Mobile Nation: Creating
Methodologies for Mobile Platforms, ed. Martha Ladly and Philip Beesley
(Waterloo, Ont.: Riverside Architectural Press, 2008).

Copyright 2010 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

“Materiality, Experience, and Surveillance” copyright William E. Connolly
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Political matter : technoscience, democracy, and public life / Bruce Braun and
Sarah J. Whatmore, editors.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7088-8 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-7089-5
(pb : alk. paper)
1. Political science. 2. Technology—Political aspects. 3. Materialism—
Political aspects. I. Braun, Bruce, 1964– II. Whatmore, Sarah J..
JA80.P63 2010
320—dc22
2010019695

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
The Stuff of Politics: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Bruce Braun and Sarah J. Whatmore

Part I. Rematerializing Political Theory:

Things Forcing Thought
1. Including Nonhumans in Political Theory:
Opening Pandora’s Box? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Isabelle Stengers
2. Thing-Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Jane Bennett
3. Materiality, Experience, and Surveillance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
William E. Connolly

Part II. Technological Politics:

Affective Objects and Events
4. Materialist Politics: Metallurgy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Andrew Barry
5. Plastic Materialities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Gay Hawkins
6. Halos: Making More Room in the
World for New Political Orders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Nigel Thrift

Part III. Political Technologies:

Public (Dis)Orderings
7. Front-staging Nonhumans:
Publicity as a Constraint on the
Political Activity of Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Noortje Marres
8. The Political Technology of RU486:
Time for the Body and Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Rosalyn Diprose
9. Infrastructure and Event: The Political
Technology of Preparedness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Andrew Lakoff and Stephen J. Collier
10. Faitiche-izing the People:
What Representative Democracy
Might Learn from Science Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Lisa Disch

Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301
Acknowledgments

T he conversation between science, technology, and society

scholars and political theorists staged here began life as a work-
shop convened at the University of Oxford in December 2006. The
chapters in this volume are the products of a workshop format in
which their earlier incarnations were generative intermediaries in
conversations that centered not on author presentations but on com-
mentaries and exchanges organized around paired papers through
which new and sometimes difficult connections, associations, and
contentions emerged. We are extremely grateful to our authors for
submitting to having their work forced through this mangle and have
been reassured by those who stuck with the long revision process that
they found the device as productive as the other participants.
We also acknowledge the participants in the workshop whose
various contributions helped to shape our conversations but do not
appear in this collection: Karen Barad, Mark Brown, Gail Davies, Paul
Giles, Chris Gosden, Beth Greenhough, Dan Hicks, Steve Hinchliffe,
Lois McNay, Derek McCormack, Annemarie Mol, Valérie November,
and Steve Woolgar. We would also like to acknowledge the financial
support of Oxford University Centre for the Environment for host-
ing the workshop. We are grateful to Pamela Richardson at Oxford
and Elizabeth Johnson at Minnesota for their assistance in preparing
the manuscript for publication and to Sebastian Abrahamsson for
his assistance in preparing and recording workshop proceedings.
Finally, we thank Jason Wiedemann at the University of Minnesota
Press for his support for this project.

vii
This page intentionally left blank
The Stuff of Politics:
An Introduction
bruce braun and
sarah j. whatmore

“
T hat’s the stuff of politics.” It is a common phrase
that often denotes nothing more than the shady deals and
overheated rhetoric that we imagine constitutes political life in rep-
resentational democracies, as intimated by Sir Ivor Jennings (1962) in
the title of the third volume in his study of party politics in Britain.
Inflected thus, it speaks of the pursuit of power and all the tawdry
practices that go into attaining it. It suggests something ignoble,
even insubstantial—that’s just the stuff of politics—an emphasis
that separates politics from apparently more important or honorable
aspects of human existence. But what if the accent lay elsewhere?
What if we took the “stuff ” of politics seriously, not as a shorthand
phrase for political activity but to signal instead the constitutive
nature of material processes and entities in social and political life,
the way that things of every imaginable kind—material objects,
informed materials, bodies, machines, even media ecologies—help
constitute the common worlds that we share and the dense fabric of
relations with others in and through which we live? What happens
to politics—indeed to the “political” as a category—if we begin to
take this stuff seriously?
This volume brings together science studies scholars and politi-
cal theorists in an effort to address these questions and thereby to
draw the insights of science and technology more fully into political
theory and to bring political theory to bear more consistently on our

ix
x BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

understanding of scientific practices and technological objects.1 Our

objective is to sketch out a more fully materialist theory of politics,
one that allows a place for the force of things and opens new possi-
bilities for imagining the relationship between scientific and political
practices and orderings. The absence of such a theory, we argue,
leaves us unable to make sense of the collectivities in which we live
and to respond adequately to the technological ensembles that are
folded through social and political life. Without these conceptual
tools, the profusion of complex materials with and through which
we live too often leaves us oscillating between fearful repudiation and
glib celebration. Such swings get in the way of creatively exploring
new corporeal capacities or reflecting seriously on how we might
have been, or could be, different than we currently are.2 In conven-
ing this volume we thus set out from a simple premise: that science
studies and political theory had much to offer such a project as well
as each other.
This may indeed be a propitious time for such an endeavor. As
we explain later, recent developments in science studies and political
theory have resulted in the fields’ convergence around a number of
common questions, including the question of the company assembled
in the name of the common itself.3 Concurrently, the potency of
technological objects and more-than-human agents in the fabric
of political association and social conduct has become increasingly
evident, and their force has registered more widely in academic and
public life. From cell phones to stem cells, stuff of all kinds increas-
ingly makes us what we are. Indeed, as many of the contributors to
this volume attest, this materialization of the political has brought
into view an ontological alliance between interests in the material
propensities, affordances, and affectivities of nonhuman phenomena
and the amplification of embodied human activity. The matter of
politics and the politics of matter have never seemed so thoroughly
entwined.
Yet, while science studies and political theory have much to of-
fer each other, it seemed to us that their points of common interest
had been left mostly implicit rather than directly engaged or closely
interrogated. Examples of missed opportunities abound. For example,
leading writers in science, technology, and society (STS), such as Brian
 Introduction xi

Wynne (2007), have repeatedly critiqued the peculiar tendency for

scientists, often encouraged by public policy agencies, to treat the
public as a homogeneous, preconstituted collective that can be more
effectively mobilized or enrolled into scientific agendas by means of
improved pedagogic or deliberative methods of engagement. But such
critiques have not led to the wide-ranging or sustained exploration of
political theories needed to help unshackle the notion and practice of
public engagement from the dominant Habermasian (1996) model
of deliberative democracy, in which speech is the only (and perfect-
ible) medium of politics.4 Despite their sophisticated posthumanist
accounts of agency in laboratory life, far too many STS scholars
remain stubbornly attached to humanist understandings of agency
in public life. For their part, many political theorists (particularly,
but not exclusively, those with environmental credentials) have had
little difficulty in ascribing importance to technology as a political
imperative for contemporary democratic practice—as something
that ominously threatens the polis and that thus demands to be
controlled.5 However, by casting technology outside political life,
they have had little to say about everyday technological practices or
the lively materiality of technological objects within the collectivi-
ties in which we live. From this perspective, science and technology
remain objects of politics—something we talk about—rather than
something that inheres in and precedes the collective (and discourse),
and thus something that challenges how the category of the politi-
cal is itself conceived and where and in what it is articulated.6 In
similar fashion, the distinction between zoe and bios found in recent
discussions of biopolitics (e.g., Agamben 1998; Esposito 2008) too
rarely takes into account a third term—technē—without which the
“becoming political” of our biological existence can hardly be con-
ceived. Divorced from the things that constitute human life as such,
biopolitics instead comes to be cast in ahistorical and metaphysical
terms, unable to account for the retinue of objects and technical
knowledges that condition the vitality of bodies and avail them to
political calculability.7
Though it is tempting to claim that there is thus a yawning gap be-
tween science studies and political theory that this volume would then
promise to fill, our intentions are somewhat different; our endeavor
xii BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

takes its inspiration from that extraordinary exhibition-compendium

Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Latour and Weibel
2005, 15) and its eclectic exploration of how “objects . . . bind all of us
in ways that map out a public space profoundly different from what
is usually recognized under the label of ‘political.’ ” This is to say that
we are less interested in finding a middle ground, or incorporating
insights from one field into another, than we are in harnessing the
frictions generated by the thinking of leading scholars in STS and
political theory, and philosophers working at their interface, to
spark new ways of understanding political matters and the matter of
politics.8 The objective of this volume, then, is to be inventive rather
than integrative, to multiply the ways in which political technologies
and technological politics are consequential in terms of what moves
us to interrogate, contest, and engage with the force of things—in
short, to become political.
What, we hear (some of) you ask, would move two geographers
to instigate such an enterprise, and how, if at all, does it bear our
disciplinary mark? The most ready answer is geography’s historical
insistence on understanding human life in relation to its material
environments, a hallmark of the discipline that has given it its dis-
tinctive place in the academy (Braun 2007). More than this, however,
geographers have had a keen eye for the significance of nonhuman
entities and energies in the spatiotemporal arrangements of human
life in terms of such persistent, if variable, practices as identity and
memory, mobility and territoriality, and the shaping of proximity
and distance (e.g., Massey, Allen, and Sarre 1999; Thrift 1996). In
other words, though it has not been immune to the intensification
of intellectual divisions of labor between the social and natural sci-
ences, geography has never been comfortable with such divisions—a
discomfort that has nourished a sustained insistence on and interro-
gation of the “more-than-human” fabric of social life and geopolitics
(Whatmore 2002).
In this, geography shares much with kindred disciplines forged in
the image of the human sciences that had purchase in the nineteenth-
century academy before the bifurcation between social and natural
science gained ground. With their shared focus on material culture,
landscape, and human–environment relations, anthropology and
 Introduction xiii

archaeology also have continued to insist on the importance of

“things,” whether in terms of the symbolic dimensions of materials
or their operational aspects, and on the ontological divisions and
malleable relations between objects and subjects in diverse human
cosmologies (e.g., Vivieros de Castro 2004; Gosden and Larsen 2007;
McLean 2009). As the wider humanities and social sciences have
(re)discovered an interest in the force of things in human affairs, so
these more established disciplinary literatures have addressed them
with new vigor (e.g., Oguibe 2004; Miller 2008) as well as the occa-
sional complaint that their sustained body of work on this topic has
not always been fully acknowledged (see Strathern 1996). It should
come as no surprise, then, that geography too, particularly the kinds
of cultural geography in which we are both invested,9 has proved
readily conversant with key STS concepts—like actant–networks,
assemblages, and intermediaries (e.g., Thrift and Whatmore 2004;
Anderson and Braun 2008)—while contributing to wider posthu-
manist currents in the social sciences and humanities (see Castree
and Nash 2004).10
A more immediate (and personal) answer to the question of how
our disciplinary location as geographers shapes this enterprise is that
the profile of scholars that we have drawn into conversation here
reflects the ideas and literatures that have been most influential for
our own working through of the intersections between the practices,
concerns, and intellectual resources of STS and political theory. We
have found that each field offers much to such an undertaking. Sci-
ence studies scholars, for instance, have increasingly taken as their
concern the public life of science and technology.11 Through detailed
empirical studies, often ethnographic in method, these scholars have
explored the composition of social, biological, and technoscientific
assemblages—in sites as diverse as laboratories, law, and media—
and insisted that we understand these assemblages to constitute
dynamic conditions within which new understandings of the hu-
man, citizenship, and politics emerge. In part, this has meant taking
nonhumans—energies, artifacts, and technologies—into account
in the analysis of how collectivities are assembled, understanding
these less as passive objects or effects of human actions and more
as active parties in the making of social collectivities and political
xiv BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

associations. This scholarship has also raised important questions

about the spaces of scientific practice, the position of scientists
as “representatives” of nonhuman constituencies, and the role of
“experts” in making public policy. Much of this work has carried a
sense of urgency, as scientific knowledges and technological objects
have become increasingly controversial in public life and as science,
technology, and politics appear to be ever more tightly intertwined
in the everyday experience and social governance of processes as
varied as biotechnologies, digital communications, and intelligent
environments. Yet, though citizenship, democracy, representation,
and politics are constantly invoked in this literature, it is not always
clear to what these terms refer, which traditions in political theory
inform them, or where these traditions might need revision.
Since its inception, political theory has also concerned itself with
the composition of collectivities, or political association, whether
understood in terms of sovereigns and citizens, publics and parlia-
ments, or communities and nations. In its own accounts, however,
political theory is often said to begin with (and as) an active purifi-
cation of human society from the material world, in which the idea
of humankind’s removal from a state of nature marks the threshold
of civilization and the possibility of political order—an idea pros-
ecuted with vigor through projects of empire (e.g., Locke 1690; de
Vattel 1760). In such stories the polis may well be understood as a
place of lively public debate and its future understood as radically
open to the play of political forces, but it consists solely of humans
among themselves. The idea that “things” might condition politi-
cal life is seen to return us to a primitive state, attributing magical
qualities to inanimate objects. Despite this, we believe that modern
political theory provides many openings to imagine the matter of
politics differently. At least since Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spinoza,
it has understood collectivities—nations, peoples, and the state, or
the relation between sovereign and multitude—in decidedly mate-
rialist terms, as a question of their ongoing assemblage rather than
as primarily theological or philosophical questions. Such a point is
stressed by Antonio Negri (1991, 1999), for instance, who locates in
Machiavelli’s virtu and Spinoza’s multitudo the material conditions and
conjunctive syntheses that enable political action (see also Althusser
 Introduction xv

2006). From such a perspective, citizenship, publics, state institu-

tions, constitutions, and democratic assemblies are understood to be
contingent outcomes and are to be studied as such; their formation
is immanent rather than preordained. We find inspiration in such
work, yet it is precisely here where we feel more needs to be done,
for despite placing emphasis on political community as an emergent
effect, modern political theory often imagines such associational
achievements to be brought about by means of a social contract that
binds individuals to one another by the force of words alone (e.g.,
Hobbes, Rousseau). Even approaches that emphasize preindividual
or transindividual fields that precede the individual (e.g., Balibar
1994, 1997) tend to imagine these in anthropocentric terms. The
effect has been to cast anything nonhuman out of the political fold
or to relegate it to the status of resources or tools, entering political
theory only to the extent that it has instrumental value but not in
terms of its constitutive powers.12 Science studies, we believe, has
much to say to political theory about the everyday technoscientific
practices and nonhuman objects that are party to the assemblage of
common worlds, even as it has had far less to say about key concerns
of political theory: sovereign power, political legitimacy, democratic
citizenship, and public life.
Set out this way, we asked contributors to entertain a number of
common questions as a starting point for a posthumanist political
theory:

ƒ Of what are collectivities and collective actions made? At

what sites, through what practices, and by which actors? How
do material and technoscientific objects contribute to such
associative events and to their transformation?
ƒ How is the more-than-human company involved in the reas-
semblage of social and political life to be addressed in theory?
How do we register the affectivity of nonhumans in political
life? What effect might this have on how we understand the
category of the political?
ƒ How is that which becomes included or excluded from col-
lectivities determined? What sorts of institutional forms
and political practices might be imagined to bring science
xvi BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

and technology into democracy, itself a contested term?

Conversely, is democracy something that must account for
“things,” or are things there from the beginning?
ƒ How is technology part of the art of government? Conversely,
how should we think about governing technology?
ƒ What is the relation between technoscience and its publics?
Does the traffic between them only move from the laboratory
into public life, or are publics active in the making of science
and technology? If so, how and with what consequences for
the politics of knowledge?
ƒ What theoretical and philosophical traditions best provide
intellectual resources for thinking the composition of com-
mon worlds?

The essays that follow do not directly answer each of these

questions; indeed, some of the essays challenge their terms. Each,
however, explores a specific aspect of what it means to conceptualize
political matters in such a way as to include the matter of politics;
taken together, they begin to articulate a new conceptual vocabulary
for a more vital, and, it is hoped, more relevant, materialist political
theory. Our task in the remainder of this introduction is to introduce
some of the key concepts, issues, and questions that are put to work
in the essays that follow.

Originary Technicity: The Becoming–Being of the Human

To call attention to the stuff of politics immediately brings us to a
series of questions. What is this stuff about which we speak? Why
is it important to ask after this stuff now, at this historical juncture?
Finally, why should we imagine that our understanding of the political
as a category might change if we attend to these matters? Answers
to the first question will emerge in the book’s individual chapters,
populated as they are by pills, metals, plastic bags, vital systems,
halos, and long-life bulbs. Let us concern ourselves here only with
the others. Why inquire into the stuff of politics now? How should
we name this juncture in which the question of the materiality of
politics comes into focus? The most immediate and perhaps most
self-evident answer lies in the sheer density of things that suffuse and
 Introduction xvii

shape everyday life: from simple tools and foodstuffs to smart cars,
transgenic mice, new media, and pharmaceuticals. In such a context
it is perhaps no longer possible to imagine either the human as a
living being or the collectivities in which we live apart from the more-
than-human company that is now so self-evidently internal to what
it means to be human and from which collectivities are made.
But is this merely an effect of modernization, whereby life comes
to be ever more mediated by things and thus ever further distanced
from its biological or intersubjective constitution? In other words,
is the story to be told that of the ever-increasing colonization of
lifeworlds by an alien technology that threatens our individual and
social autonomy? And is the relation between politics and techno-
science, then, one in which the former names a realm in which
we seek to come to grips with the threat of the latter? Though it is
tempting to think so, and to imagine that globalization has spread
this apparently modern condition to far-flung corners of the globe,
the contributors to this volume categorically reject the idea that we
have entered a novel historical period in which nonhumans, by sheer
dint of numbers, now need to be included within our accounts of
social and political life or in which what it means to be human is
suddenly under siege by a world of scientific and technical artifacts
that have come to shape who we are and what we may become. This
is because they question human autonomy and self-sufficiency from
the outset. Indeed, one of the arguments shared by all contributors,
and perhaps the most significant point of departure for this volume,
is that technicity—whether understood in terms of language, equip-
ment, or machine—is not merely a supplement to human life; rather,
it is originary.
This claim merits further discussion. What does it mean to say
that human life is marked by an originary technicity? For Adrian
Mackenzie (2002), originary technicity is a quasi-concept that helps
us see that the association of humans and technical artifacts is more
than just an external linkage by which the one comes to be connected
to the other. The adjective originary, he explains,

is one way to describe something more unnerving and unlocatable

than merely strapping on, implanting or even injecting gadgets into
xviii BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

living bodies. By now, “originary” has become familiar shorthand

for the deconstructive logic of the supplement. The logic of the
supplement describes all those situations in which what was thought
to be merely added on to something more primary turns out to be
irreversibly and inextricably presupposed in the constitution of what
it is said to be added on to. (7)

In other words, it is a mistake to posit humanity as somehow

separate from and existing prior to the world of things; rather, as
thinkers as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway,
Gilbert Simondon, and Bernard Stiegler have explained, the human
comes into being with this world.
Such a view necessarily challenges how we think about the stuff
that we consider properly technological, such as tools or machines,
and the bodies that such entities are thought to supplement. Our
stories often script technical objects as merely extensions of a pre-
existing body—the hammer, for instance, as an extension of the
hand, which exists with an already formed capacity to hammer—
rather than as objects that actively give shape to bodies and their
capacities. Is it correct to see technological entities merely as a
toolkit employed by a preexisting body, regardless of whether that
body is an individual or a collective? Does it make sense to posit
a fully formed hand with innate capacities apart from the objects
that in a sense shape such a hand or afford it its capabilities, even
if these objects are such basic things as sticks and stones? Drawing
on the work of Gilbert Simondon and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Mark Hansen (2006) argues that body schemas—the operational
capacities of the embodied organism—necessarily involve the body’s
coupling to an external environment, a coupling that has always
been accomplished through technical operations. Indeed, it is only
from such embodied actions and encounters, he suggests, that a
body image—a representation of the body—is secreted. As he puts
it, “the noetic, representational body image is a derivative of—an
emanation from—a more primitive, prenoetic bodily activity” (51).
The natural or originary body that we take to be the starting point
for political life is thus neither self-contained nor self-identical; to
borrow the language of Derrida (1994, 141), when it comes to the body,
 Introduction xix

we must always account for the différance of the technical apparatus.

In his discussion of body schemas and body image, Hansen’s
insight is not simply that the cognitivism that dominates the social
sciences is misplaced, along with the privilege it accords to vision;
rather, it is that the human body comes into being as such only in
relation to the world. There is no moment at which humanity comes
to be contaminated by technical objects and practices—no fall into a
world of things—because there can be no human without them. The
history of the human animal—and indeed the history of culture—is
thus necessarily the history of the stuff that is, from the beginning,
part and parcel of human life. Our embodied relations with things are
not something that comes to be “added to” human life. The human
body and its capacities emerge as such in relation to a technicity that
precedes and exceeds it: there is no body, no original body, no origin
outside this relation; no thinking, no thought, no logos, without that
which forces thought. As we use the phrase, then, technicity refers to
an exteriority that is necessarily also an interiority, or what various
authors have discussed in terms of transduction, the coupling of em-
bodiment and technics by which humans and nature interpenetrate
(see Simondon 1992; A. Mackenzie 2002).
Crucially, if originary technicity makes sense in these terms, it also
makes sense to understand it in universal terms. We do not mean by
this that the history of technicity can be told everywhere in the same
way, nor do we advocate a historical determinism that sees technology
as the hidden hand directing the course of all human history. This is
not universal history in a Hegelian mode; rather, to insist on a uni-
versal history of technicity is to insist that nonhuman and technical
objects are an irreducible part of all stories of the becoming–being
of the human, both individually and collectively, and that this could
not be otherwise. It is to insist that the genesis of the individual (and
here we understand the individual to mean groups and not simply
organisms) is necessarily also a technogenesis.
Here it may be helpful to circle back to a previous question.
Though the proliferation and potency of nonhuman objects in so-
cial life today may indeed render questions concerning the stuff of
politics more intelligible than previously, we feel it is important to
underline that the present context in which we ask the questions that
xx BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

shape this volume is not solely a scientific, technological, or social

one; rather, it is also one that we might still wish to call ideological.
The continuing difficulties that scholars face when writing from the
perspective of an originary technicity suggest that humanism retains
an extraordinarily powerful hold on the imaginative resources and
analytical practices with which human life is thought. Most obvious,
perhaps, is the stubborn attachment of many scholars—liberal and
radical alike—to a humanism that finds ever new ways of positing the
nonhuman as “out there,” as Cary Wolfe (2010) puts it, rather than “in
here,” at the very heart of human becoming, and to a liberalism that
continues to posit intention and action as attributes of autonomous
individuals, rather than locating individuals and their capacities in
relation to a larger transindividual field that precedes the individu-
ation of singular things (Simondon 1992; Esposito 2008).
This humanist inheritance is compounded by the additional
problem that specific disciplines have taken up the challenge of the
posthuman or, as we would prefer, the more-than-human, in dramati-
cally different ways. If geographers, anthropologists, science studies
scholars, and philosophers have explored the question with renewed
intensity, other fields have done so with far less enthusiasm. Arguably,
political theory and economics can be counted among the latter. To
the extent that political theory continues to assume that politics is
something that occurs between humans alone, and economics holds
on to the idea that the economy functions solely through the interac-
tions of rational human actors, questions of science and technology,
and the nonhuman more generally, necessarily remain a lacuna in
both and continue to hinder our ability to understand how it is that
our heterogeneous worlds are composed.13

The Performances of Things

From the concepts of originary technicity and technogenesis, it follows
that we must be willing to speak of the performances of things and
not just the actions of humans. Here we both draw on and depart
from recent work in anthropology, art history, geography, and phi-
losophy that has sought to understand “evocative objects” (Turkle
2008) or “things that talk” (Daston 2004). While we certainly agree
with Sherry Turkle that material culture carries emotions and ideas of
 Introduction xxi

“startling intensity”—or that we think with things and not just about
them, or even that self-creation occurs in and through our intimate
relations to objects—there remains a surprisingly passive nature to
the way such things are conceived. Daston is somewhat better in this
regard, approaching things in a way that goes beyond examining their
cultural meanings or their roles in subject formation. For Daston,
things are not merely instruments for recording or playing back the
human voice; they “talk,” by which she means that they at once enable
and constrain meaning: the language of things “derives from certain
properties of the things themselves, which suit the cultural purposes
for which they are enlisted” (15). This is an important insight that
challenges what Daston describes as a Manichean metaphysics that
asks us to choose, on one hand, between the “brute intransigence”
of matter that is “everywhere and always the same” and its accom-
panying “positivist historiography of facts” and, on the other hand,
“the plasticity of meaning” bound to specific times and places and its
corresponding “hermeneutical historiography of culture.” In an effort
to think beyond this dichotomy, Daston argues that things must be
approached as “simultaneously material and meaningful” such that
matter “constrains meaning and vice versa” (16).14
Though we agree with Daston’s critique of positivist and construc-
tivist approaches to material things, our point is a somewhat different
one: things are not just simultaneously material and meaningful; they
are also eventful.15 This political point needs to be unpacked further, for
it is not enough just to say that things are lively and potent rather than
dead or inert; rather, we wish to underline that things—and especially
technological artifacts—carry with them a margin of indeterminacy.
Their technicity is such that they can be combined and deployed in
relation to countless other elements, gestures, practices, and institu-
tions. Far from deterministic, technological artifacts temporalize,
opening us to a future that we cannot fully appropriate even as they
render us subject to a past that is not of our making. We are thrown
forward into a future that cannot be foreseen, a future that “comes
from behind” and thus challenges technocratic faith in our ability to
know and control what is to come (see Stiegler 1999; A. Mackenzie
2002; Wills 2008; Diprose 2002; see also chapter 8).16 It is precisely
for this reason that new technologies are simultaneously celebrated
xxii BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

and feared, for they can carry with them at one and the same time
the promise of a glorious future and the threat of a catastrophic end.
As geographers, we would of course stress that objects do not
only temporalize but that they also spatialize. In other words, it is
not only that the technicity of the human opens us to a future that we
cannot fully appropriate, it also brings about new assemblages and
generates new spatial relations that at once contribute to this charge
of indeterminacy and shape what is actualized at any given moment.
Temporality and spatiality are thus intricately interwoven (Massey
2005). This is easily illustrated by way of something as ubiquitous
today as the cell phone. It is relatively simple to see that its introduc-
tion opened being to becoming in new and unexpected ways. At the
moment of its introduction, who could have fully known its effects?
But if the cell phone temporalized, it did so because it radically
transformed the topologies of everyday life—where and when we
are reachable, dramatically redefining the capacity to be “in touch,”
with unforeseen consequences and possibilities for everything from
relationships and work to politics and community. Indeed, one of
the reasons that technologies temporalize is precisely because they
spatialize, reordering our relation to other technical elements and to
each other, regardless of whether these objects are light and mobile,
like cell phones, or massive and immobile, like hydroelectric dams
(Mitchell 2002; Massey 2005).

Political Matter(s) and the Matter of the Political

It is this excess of technogenesis that brings us to some of the central
concerns explored by contributors to this volume. On one hand, the
excess of technogenesis challenges our conception of the political as
a category. If technological objects are objects that temporalize, then
it hardly makes sense to locate them outside the political, if by this
category we mean the practices by which our political associations
and social life are constituted. Technologies are not just objects of
political deliberation; they add their own dynamics to the differen-
tial relations that constitute social and political life. Nor can they be
reduced to things on which decisions are made in the political realm
because they are part and parcel of that realm from the outset. And
they cannot be understood in terms of a future that is transparent
 Introduction xxiii

and predictable because they are part of the reason that such futures
cannot be known in advance. As many of the contributors to this
volume show, the baroque nature of embodiment and technics, its
folds and involutions, necessarily places us in the middle of things,
without the certainties of humanism with its autonomous humanity
or positivist science with its mechanistic matter. We are faced, then,
with a confounding question: what, and where, is the “political” when
emergent properties cannot be predicted, when all the actors cannot
be known in advance, and when immanent causality necessarily
bedevils political calculation?
Political theory has not been entirely silent on these questions. It
is true that its contemporary paradigms have often privileged speech
and human action or imagined that society is held together by a
social contract that binds people together by force of words alone.
We have already noted the problems associated with the deliberative
democracy of Jurgen Habermas, which has been so influential on
research efforts to operationalize deliberative modes of public engage-
ment with science. But the problem is not limited to Habermas. The
conceptual imperative of disagreement central to Jacques Ranciere’s
(1999) theory of democracy, for example, has been subject to related
critiques (see Dillon 2003; Bennett 2005). Such understandings of
political community have increasingly become frayed as political
theorists have confronted the materiality of political life. We can see
this already in the work of ecocritics like Thom Kuelhs (1996), who
draws on the science of ecology and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
to explode the bounded spatial imagination of the nation-state. For
Kuelhs, our entanglements with biological life produce a complex
topology that cannot be properly contained in an international system
of nation-states. So, too, the philosopher Michel Serres (1995, 39)
has addressed the consequences of the “exclusively social contracts”
through which “we have abandoned the bonds that connect us to the
world” and reworked the contractual polity toward an understanding
of “the things of the world” and the “forces, bonds and interactions”
in which they “speak” to us.
Of more immediate relevance has been the work of a number of
scholars prominent in efforts to rethink the matter of politics across
the social sciences and humanities and whose influence here is
xxiv BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

reflected in the chapters that form the opening section of this volume.
These are the political theorists Jane Bennett (2001, 2005) and William
E. Connolly (2001, 2007) and the philosopher Isabelle Stengers (1996,
1997). Each provides us with new conceptual vocabularies and think-
ing devices that, differently, articulate and extend the terms of a more
fully materialist politics attuned to the “force of things” and capable of
articulating those “things which force thought” in/as political practices
through the convergent registers of affectivity, assemblage, and event.
Bennett achieves this through a close and sustained engagement with
the vitality of matter, particularly, but not exclusively, biological ma-
terials and bodily metabolisms, and by tracing out the ramifications
of her “vibrant materialism” for political theory. Connolly does so
through a focus on the affective power of things, particularly sen-
sory media, to move us and shape our collective attachments and
the political import of the ways in which this power is engineered
and harnessed. From the very different trajectory of her demanding
interrogation of scientific practices that succeed only insofar as the
questions they raise are at risk of being redefined by the phenomena
mobilized by an experiment or theory, Stengers extends this experi-
mental ethos to elaborate an understanding of, even a test for, an
adequate political theory (and practice) as one in which the things that
force thought and attachment are active parties in political disputes.

Matters of Concern: Sparking Publics

Yet it is nothing other than the excess of technogenesis—its tempo-
ralizing dimension—that incessantly presses on us as a matter that
cannot simply be cast aside, for it opens us to a future that is not
known and cannot be anticipated. It is for this reason, rather than
some sort of nostalgia for a non- or pretechnological humanity, that
technological objects consistently emerge as “matters of concern” in
public life. Latour’s (2005) “matters of concern” refigure the political
as an eventful technogenesis or, as he would doubtless prefer, Ding-
politik, amplifying the res of the res publica such that “the matters
that matter in the res . . . create a public around it,” triggering “new
political occasions” (16). This returns us to Stengers’s experimental
“test” for scientific (and political) practice alluded to earlier, which
demands that
 Introduction xxv

if we take seriously those nonhumans that are best characterized as

forcing thought . . . what we need to think about and address is not
the empty generality of humans as thinking beings but something we
usually reserve for expertise, the correlate of the classical definition
of political agency: humans as spokespersons claiming that it is not
their free opinions that matter but what causes them to think and
to object, humans who affirm that their freedom lies in their refusal
to break this attachment. (chapter 1)

Even if these technological futures are not ones that we can fully
appropriate, they are nevertheless ones that we cannot not enter
into. How and why publics form as they do around such “matters
of concern” is one of the questions that we seek to explore (Marres
2005; see also chapter 7). These include concerns for forms of hu-
man life, but crucially they also include concerns for what used to be
considered the “outside” of human life—nature—but which is perhaps
better thought of in a broader sense of geophysical and biochemical
materials, entities and processes with which humankind and social
lives are intertwined. This latter point is too often pushed to the side
in posthumanist literature, which, somewhat ironically given its
displacement of the “human” from the center of its ontology, often
continues to proceed in terms of a decidedly humanist ethics, where
it is human life and its possibilities that are taken to be paramount.
Even work by materialists who seek to suspend the premises of liberal
humanism—Negri, Balibar, and their collaborators, for example—
still tends to give us a “multitude” that is decidedly humanist (as a
collection of singularities whose individuation occurs in a “social”
world). One of the goals of this volume is to begin to think through
the terms of what Bruno Latour (2004a) calls “learning to be af-
fected” and Donna Haraway (2008) speaks of as “response-ability,”
the kind of political and ethical thinking that is called forth by the
capacity of all manner of things, human and nonhuman, organic and
nonorganic, to affect and to be affected by others. To do so means
understanding things of all sorts as forceful and to begin to consider
what it means to represent this forcefulness in ethical deliberation
and political practice.
Stengers’s (2005) ethos of experimentation takes up this challenge
xxvi BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

by proposing a triple helix of representational moments in the practice

and politics of mapping phenomena into knowledge. Here objectiv-
ity is a distributed (and by no means guaranteed) achievement that
correlatively frames a phenomenon in ways that enable it to act as a
reliable witness (object) to its experimental definition and produces
experimental scientists as this phenomenon’s reliable (objective)
spokespersons. Each of these facets of representation relies in turn
on a third, an experimental apparatus that exhibits a phenomenon
in a reliable way and thereby both extends the potential company of
witnesses and spokespersons and multiplies the trials to which their
collective objectivity is subjected. Suspended thus in the weave of this
delicate distribution of representational powers, the political charge
of “things” becomes suggestive in a number of ways.
First are a set of questions about the experimental cast of the
politics of knowledge and technology at work here. Its materialist
insistence that the produced-ness of knowledge is something made—
of stuff—as well as something made up or storied in particular
ways introduces an interesting third party to the repertoire of re-
presentation. Both Stengers and Latour rely, as Lisa Disch (chapter
10) argues, on an intermediary device between the force of the world
and the power of words—that of an indexical sign that transposes the
force of a phenomena staged in an experimental event into a signal
that does not gain its charge in relation to other signs but rather
from the force it registers (e.g., a thermometer) and articulates. If
such a material semiotics underpins the practices of experimenta-
tion, what are its implications for those scientific knowledge claims
based on field- or model-based practices or, just as important, for
the wealth of experiential or vernacular knowledge that informs the
public reception and political contestation of the objects of science?
Here we pick up a second set of questions concerning the political
amplification of the force of things that centers on the relationship
between what some-thing can do and what it can be shown to do, or
how it can be made present again, beyond the experimental event.
These issues have been addressed most directly by Noortje Marres
(2005; also chapter 7), who, working with Dewey’s (1927) notion of
material publics, insists that the power of things to spark new publics
into being and thereby to generate new political demands requires
 Introduction xxvii

closer attention to the mediating devices through which they become

affective. What are the registers and practices of public-ity—what
Matthew Fuller (2006) calls media ecologies—that, in particular, tech-
nopolitical contexts amplify the power of things to move us and/or
force thought among scientists and nonscientists alike? Film, plastic,
computer games, and pharmaceuticals are among the answers that
other authors in this volume explore (e.g., chapters 5, 6, and 8).
Finally, learning to be affected or to think response-ability also
poses important challenges for scholarly thinking practices and is
one of the creative tensions in the contributions to this book. In other
words, the arguments that we have elaborated in terms of reworking
political theory through an originary technicity imply a refiguring
of political thinking through an ethos of practice. Though we would
depart from Latour (2004b) in acknowledging that critique can be an
inventive form of scholarly intervention, the onus of the contributions
to this volume shares his insistence on the importance of multiply-
ing styles and practices of scholarship into more diverse forms of
political intervention and public engagement (see also Hinchliffe
and Whatmore 2006). As we observed at the outset, critiques by STS
scholars of prevailing “deliberative” modes of public engagement in
the knowledge practices of (natural and social) scientists too rarely
generate more inventive interrogations of political theories with which
to experiment with other modes of public-ity. Contributions to this
volume variously exemplify and/or signal a redirection of research
energies and resources toward more constructive partnerships in the
staging and practice of experimental knowledge polities in terms of
the fora, media, and devices in and through which technoscientific
objects are rendered affective and amenable to effective political
interrogation. Some such experiments are under way in the guise of
collective efforts to develop new research or pedagogic methods with
which to interrogate, and intervene in, “knowledge controversies”
of various kinds. One such involves an international collaboration
between several universities17 to operationalize Noortje Marres and
Richard Rogers’s (2005, 922) “recipe for tracing the fate of issues and
their publics on the web.” Another is a research project concerned
with the knowledge practices and controversies associated with the
science and politics of flood risk.18 The project includes two trials
xxviii BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

of a method of collaborative research in which scientists (social and

natural) and people who live with flooding and flood risk in the
United Kingdom work together over a sustained period of time to
generate new collective knowledge claims and competencies. Cen-
tral to the working ethos and practice of this method (provisionally
called competency groups) is “thinking with things,” both in terms of
interrogating the knowledge practice/technology of flood models as
a key intermediary between flood science and politics and making
a collective intervention in the public controversies associated with
flood risk management in the areas in which the research is being
conducted (Whatmore 2009).

What Comes Next?

The book is organized in three parts. The first sets out some direc-
tions of travel invited by prominent figures in the fields of philosophy
of science and political theory whose work here, and elsewhere, is a
reference point for many of the other contributions to this volume,
including our own. This is followed by an arrangement of chapters
designed to amplify a generative tension implicit in what we have
discussed thus far between the register of technological politics in
which the micropolitics, or minoritarian moments of civic contesta-
tion and innovation gathered in technological events, is the focus
and the register of political technologies in which the macropolitics,
or majoritarian moments of governmentality and political ordering,
comes to the fore.
Part I, “Rematerializing Political Theory: Things Forcing Thought,”
contains essays by Isabelle Stengers, Jane Bennett, and William E.
Connolly. Stengers, in chapter 1, opens the collection by arguing that
including nonhumans in political theory is less a gesture of inclusive-
ness and more a recognition that nonhumans were never cast out of
the political fold but rather that the very opposition between humans
and nonhumans is itself witness to the idea of human exceptional-
ism to which political theory has been party. In other words, the
problem of the inclusion of nonhumans in political theory carries
with it the corollary demand to decenter political theory from the
abstract concept of “humans,” the consequences of which she goes
on to explore. In the process, Stengers provides a rich grammar of
 Introduction xxix

minoritarian practices for refiguring knowledge controversies, like

genetically modified (GM) technology, as experimental political
events that gather the power that humans could not produce for
“themselves” to achieve new collective thinking and invention. In
chapter 2, Jane Bennett elaborates her concept of “thing-power” as
a device to shift the political register of things, as congealments of
matter–energy, from the epistemological terms of that which we
cannot know to the ontological terms of agentic capacity or vital
materiality. Making this journey with three companion-guides (a
dead rat, a plastic cap, and a spool of thread), she harnesses diverse
philosophical resources from Spinoza and Merleau-Ponty to Kafka
and Margulis to work toward an event ontology that moves the project
of a materialist political theory beyond the dialectical materialisms
of Adorno and Althusser. Closing out part I in chapter 3, William E.
Connolly works with the philosophical resources of Merleau-Ponty,
Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari toward an immanent materialism.
Working through the consequences for a range of experiments and
techniques that amplify the interinvolvements of sensory experience
and perception, especially visibility, he elaborates an affective political
modality largely ignored by political theory and practice.
These chapters raise a number of questions, which the chapters
in subsequent parts of this volume pick up and take forward in
theoretically and empirically diverse ways. How does their shared
focus on originary technicity, the affective capacity and eventful-
ness of things, and their temporalizing political effects change our
definition of the political? By opening up various possibilities for
refiguring the political as the work of constitution or assemblage in
which things force thought, association, and attachment, they provide
rich resources for a posthumanist political theory that challenges
the sway of the liberal subject as always already social or preceded
by language by insisting that agency is distributed from the off. By
the same token, they pose questions of their own, not least of which
asks what is to be gained or lost through the vitalist tropes that writ-
ers like Bennett deploy. What, for example, do the metals, plastics,
and halos with which authors work in part II of the volume suggest
for the ways in which matter matters? Is more to be gained from a
closer attention to the specificity of the matter at hand, as opposed to
xxx BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

a generic analogy to “life” that could be described as a metaphysics?

Part II, “Technological Politics: Affective Objects and Events,”
is made up of three chapters that share, as intimated earlier, a com-
mon strategy of working their contributions to the questions raised
by the “stuff of politics” through particular kinds of materiality. To
this extent, they attend to the affectivities and affordances of specific,
if mutable and indeterminate, things and the political events and
practices to which these technologies give rise. In chapter 4, Andrew
Barry explores the ways in which the informational enrichment of
materials becomes a political matter. Using the example of metals, or
more precisely, metallurgy, he interrogates the failure of a metal coat-
ing used in the construction of the Baku-Tiblili-Ceyhan oil pipeline
as a political event through which parliaments and pressure groups
are convened in a collective controversy across European borders.
Working with the theoretical resources of Michel Foucault and Gabriel
Tarde, he demonstrates how metals are far from docile objects and
that metallurgists, as good materialists, expect the specific properties
of metals to make a difference. However, he is equally insistent that
there is nothing inherently political about them; rather, they acquire
political agency only through their relations with others occasioned
by particular contexts.
In the following chapter, Gay Hawkins turns our attention to that
most ubiquitous of materials: plastic. More specifically, she traces
three moments in the affective politics of plastic bags that afford very
different kinds of political subjectivity and practice. Her goal is to
interrogate how plastic bags come to matter without recourse to a
materialist essentialism, arguing that their capacity to disturb and,
in Connolly’s terms, to compose new sensibilities is an associational
achievement that complicates their political force and ethical practice.
The final chapter in part II is by Nigel Thrift, who is concerned above
all with the temporalizing effects of technicity as a necessary dimen-
sion of making room for the possibility of new political orderings.
Using the conceit of the halo, he explores the multivalent political
charge of things, complicit not only in the imaginative achievement
of political orderings and associations but also in the articulation of
alternative possible worlds, as well as to the powers with which both
are resisted. Thrift works these concerns through three manifestations
 Introduction xxxi

of the halo to exemplify the diversity of its affective grip on political

imagining: the illuminated face of hallowed figures in Christian ico-
nography, the interactive design spaces of the Halo computer game,
and the occasional optical phenomenon of galactic halos.
All three chapters in part II place considerable emphasis on the
capacity of things to interrupt political orderings and to open col-
lectivities to new configurations. The four chapters making up part
III of the book, titled “Political Technologies: Public (Dis)Orderings,”
share a different tack. The onus here is on the generative force of
things in the assemblage and practices of political orderings and on
the emergent publics and constituencies that exceed or challenge
them. The chapters take up and interrogate the purchase of the “event”
ontology entailed by political concepts like “matters of concern” and
“situations” in terms of how this changes our grip on the techniques
and forms of political association, mediation, and representation. Of
particular importance here is a shared interest in the technological
intermediaries that are party to the accomplishment of political (dis)
order. In chapter 7, Noortje Marres derives conceptual resources from
a close reading of John Dewey’s formulation of the “public” to inter-
rogate the import of “green technologies,” such as long-life bulbs, and
energy-efficient domestic appliances as political mediators, both as
technologies of green governmentality and of inventive civic prac-
tices. She argues that Dewey identifies the rupture of everyday habits
affected by intimate threats of material harm as critical events in the
formation of publics that do not map onto existing social groupings.
Moreover, for emergent publics to take hold, the material effects that
call them into being require public-ity devices and techniques, such
as electricity meters or energy standards, to render them widely
observable and hence associative intermediaries.
In the following chapter, Rosalyn Diprose combines the resources
of Foucault and Agamben’s formulations of biopolitics with decon-
structive phenomenology’s concern with temporality to interrogate
the synthetic steroid mifepristone (RU486) as a politically charged
reproductive technology in the Australian body politic. She cites its
capacity for political innovation in the tensions between its disci-
plinary effects in efforts to govern the reproductive (female) body
and its temporalizing effects, refiguring the relationship between zoe
xxxii BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

and bios by opening up the disjunction between gestation (which

involves a lapse of time) and birthing (giving time). Her chapter
provides an important feminist interrogation of the relationship
between zoe, bios, and technē such that the category of the political
has to be reconceived through the differentiation of its body-subjects.
The third chapter in part III is by Andrew Lakoff and Stephen J. Col-
lier, who turn our attention to biotechnologies and to the intricate
alliance between techniques of publicity and political technologies
that articulate more obviously than most the reach of the state: infra-
structure. More specifically, they are interested in the ways in which
so-called vital systems (water, energy, transport, communications,
etc.) foster new forms of vulnerability and have become objects of
knowledge for security experts and civil defense agencies in the
United States, a phenomenon they describe as a “political technology
of preparedness.” This is a political technology characterized not by
the calculation of probabilities but by the imaginative enactment of
events effected through various visualization techniques and prac-
tices of “mapping vulnerability.” In the final chapter in the volume,
Lisa Disch performs an original and exacting reading of the work of
Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers and their efforts to remedy the
dire representational consequences of the modern cleavage between
science and politics and the settlement that this sets in train between
the world and the word, mute things and speaking humans, facts
and values. Her interrogation centers on the ways in which they
set about redistributing the capacity for “speech” and the license to
“speak for,” arguing provocatively that they take their conception of
representation from the assembly (the political spokesperson) but
their practice from the laboratory (the experimental staging). Though
she exposes flaws in the transposition of this “experimental” mode
of representation to the political arena, she concludes that it should
be possible for the represented to have a dialogic relationship with
those who claim to represent them in both science and democracy
based on openness to risk.
The final chapters return us to a generative tension that runs
throughout the volume between two registers of technological politics
and two ways in which the force of technological events in political
life might be registered. For some contributors, technological politics
 Introduction xxxiii

are notable precisely because they signal an excess to political order

and gather within them the possibility for minoritarian movements
of civic contestation and innovation. For others, technological politics
are part and parcel of majoritarian movements in which political
subjectivities and orderings are actively constituted. What all chapters
share, however, is a refusal to imagine technology as something that
encroaches on political life from the outside. From their varied per-
spectives, the life of the polis must never again be thought of merely
as humans gathered together without their myriad attachments. The
“stuff ” of politics is there, from the beginning.

Notes

1 The essays appearing in this volume were first presented at the

Stuff of Politics workshop at the University of Oxford in December
2006.
2 This is a consistent refrain in the work of Adrian Mackenzie (2002)
and Bernard Stiegler (1999).
3 Here and in what follows, we understand the common or common
world as a contingent unification of bodies and things that provides
the basis for various forms of life, both human and nonhuman. For
writers like Antonio Negri (2003), the common is always beyond
measure, always in a progressive process of formation that exceeds
its capture in any fixed or final form. For Bruno Latour (2004c), the
common world is a pluriverse rather than a universe, comprising a
multiplicity whose assemblage is always provisional. Defined thus,
the common cannot be reduced to the actions of humans alone.
4 Critiques span radical democrats like Laclau (2005) and Mouffe
(2005), feminist political theorists like Benhabib (1996), and theorists
of science and technology like Latour (2005) and Stengers (2005).
5 These include post-Foucauldian approaches to the politics of tech-
nology that acknowledge the capacity of objects to mediate political
relations without attributing them political agency (e.g., Winner’s
[1986] “Do Artefacts Have Politics?”) or that elaborate what Rose
(1999) calls “technologies of citizenship” in relation to theories of
environmental politics (e.g., Dobson and Bell 2006). For a critique
of these, see chapter 7.
xxxiv BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

6 Thus, e.g., theorists of environmental democracy imagine a realm

of democratic deliberation separate from the technological objects
over which deliberation is said to occur. Indeed, the relation between
technology and politics is oddly occluded in much environmental
political theory (see, e.g., the collection by Dobson and Eckersley
[2006]).
7 Here accounts of biopolitics might profit from the conjunctural
analysis offered by writers such as Althusser (2006) and Read
(2005).
8 A further dimension to the generative frictions that we sought to
harness in the workshop were the differences in academic training
and political culture between scholars in these traditions variously
situated in Europe, North America, and Australia.
9 While interest in and contributions to the development of these
ideas have been most intensive in cultural geography, they are not
confined to cultural geography. For example, economic geographers
have become interested in the ideas of actant–network, assemblage,
and intermediaries through an engagement with the work of eco-
nomic sociologists like Callon (1998) and Mackenzie (1996) and,
more recently, political geographers like Featherstone (2007) and
Routledge (2008).
10 There are multiple, diverging currents in this posthumanist turn
in the humanities and social sciences (see, e.g., Halberstam and
Livingston 1995; Hayles 1999; Wolfe 2003; Badmington 2004).
11 Outstanding examples in a large literature include Mackenzie’s
(1996) Knowing Machines, Barry’s (2001) Political Machines, and
Mitchell’s (2002) Rule of Experts.
12 The work of Louis Althusser, and especially his discussion of “mate-
rial ideological apparatuses,” stands as an important early exception
(see Althusser 1971, 1996). Recent writers who have gone beyond
this include William Connolly (2001), Jane Bennett (2001), and
Timothy Mitchell (2002). See also the work of the geographer Vinay
Gidwani (2008).
13 The work of Karl Marx stands as an obvious exception. There is no
absence of things in Marx’s vast writings; inorganic nature, after all,
is viewed as man’s external body, and for Marx, society appears, at
least on the surface, as a vast collection of commodities. But though
Marx provides countless openings for a more robust materialism,
things are not “eventful” for Marx; rather, they embody human
 Introduction xxxv

desires, intentions, and actions—they exist as “fetishes,” as the ex-

pression of the inner logics of capital (i.e., the machines that replace
human labor but that cannot themselves create value) or, finally, as
the waste produced through capitalism’s uneven development.
14 Bruno Latour (1999) makes a similar point in his essay “Circulating
Reference” about the series of translations between “material” and
“meaningful” involved in the mobilization of soil in the knowledge
practices of soil scientists.
15 It may not be merely an accident, then, that objects and things
are confused in her title. For Daston (2004), things are primarily
objects.
16 Derrida speaks of this in terms of an “infinite responsibility” located
between the “inheritance” and the “to-come” of a present that can
never merely be itself.
17 See http://www.demoscience.org/.
18 See http://knowledge-controversies.ouce.ox.ac.uk/.

References

Agamben, Georgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, 127–88.
New York: Monthly Review Press.
———. 2006. “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the En-
counter.” In Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978–1987,
ed. Francois Matheron and Oliver Corpet, trans. G. M. Goshgarian,
163–207. London: Verso.
Anderson, Kay, and Bruce Braun, eds. 2008. Environments: Critical Es-
says in Human Geography. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate.
Badmington, Neil. 2004. Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within.
London: Routledge.
Balibar, Etienne. 1994. Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and
Philosophy before and after Marx. New York: Routledge.
———. 1997. “Spinoza: From Individuality to Transindividuality.” Me-
dedelingen vanwege het Spinozahuis 71: 3–36 (Delft, Netherlands:
Eburon).
Barry, Andrew. 2001. Political Machines: Governing a Technological
Society. London: Athlone Press.
xxxvi BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

Benhabib, Seyla. 1996. Democracy and Difference. Princeton, N.J.: Prince-

ton University Press.
Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments,
Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
———. 2005. “In Parliament with Things.” In Radical Democracy: Politics
between Abundance and Lack, ed. Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen,
133–48. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press.
Braun, Bruce. 2007. “Theorizing the Nature–Culture Divide.” In Hand-
book of Political Geography, ed. K. Cox, M. Low, and J. Robinson,
189–204. London: Sage.
Callon, Michel, ed. 1998. The Laws of Markets. Oxford: Basil Black-
well.
Castree, Noel, and Catherine Nash, eds. 2004. “Themed Essays and
Responses on Posthumanism: An Exchange.” Environment and
Planning A 36, no. 9: 1341–63.
Connolly, William. 2001. Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Connolly, William. 2007. Democracy, Pluralism, and Political Theory.
London: Routledge.
Daston, Lorraine. 2004. Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and
Science. London: Zone Books.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work
of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New
York: Routledge.
de Vattel, Emmerich. 1760. The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural
Law. Repr., Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institute, 1916.
Dewey, John. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. Athens: Ohio University
Press.
Dillon, Michael. 2003. “A Passion for the (Im)Possible: Jacques Ranciere,
Equality, Pedagogy and the Messianic.” European Journal of Political
Theory 4, no. 4: 429–52.
Diprose, Rosalyn. 2002. Corporeal Generosity. Albany: State University
of New York Press.
Dobson, Andrew, and Derek Bell, eds. 2006. Environmental Citizenship.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Dobson, Andrew, and Robyn Eckersley, eds. 2006. Political Theory and
the Ecological Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
 Introduction xxxvii

Featherstone, David. 2007. “Skills for Heterogeneous Associations: The

Whiteboys, Collective Experimentation and Subaltern Political
Ecologies.” Environment and Planning D 25: 284–306.
Fuller, Matthew. 2006. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and
Technoculture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Gidwani, Vinay. 2008. Capital Interrupted: Agrarian Development and
the Politics of Work in India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Gosden, Chris, and Frances Larsen. 2007. Knowing Things: Exploring
the Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884–1945. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Habermas, Jurgen. 1996. “Three Normative Models of Democracy.”
In Democracy and Difference, ed. S. Benhabib, 21–30. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Halberstam, Judith, and Ira Livingston, eds. 1995. Posthuman Bodies.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hansen, Mark. 2006. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with New Media. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago, Ill.:
University of Chicago Press.
Hinchliffe, Steve, and Sarah J. Whatmore. 2006. “Living Cities: Towards
a Politics of Conviviality.” Science and Culture 15, no. 2: 123–38.
Jennings, Sir Ivor. 1962. The Stuff of Politics. Party Politics 3. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kuelhs, Thom. 1996. Beyond Sovereign Territory: The Space of Ecopolitics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso.
Latour, Bruno. 1999. “Circulating Reference.” In Pandora’s Hope: Essays
on the Reality of Science Studies, 24–79. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
———. 2004a. “How to Talk about the Body? The Normative Dimension
of Science Studies.” Body and Society 10: 205–29.
———. 2004b. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of
Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Enquiry 30, no. 2: 225–48.
———. 2004c. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democ-
racy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
———. 2005. “From Real Politik to Dingpolitik: or How to Make Things
xxxviii BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

Public.” Introduction to Making Things Public, ed. Bruno Latour and

Peter Weibel, 14–41. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. 2005. Making Things Public: At-
mospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Locke, John. 1690. Two Treatises on Government. Repr., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Mackenzie, Adrian. 2002. Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed.
London: Continuum.
Mackenzie, Donald. 1996. Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Marres, Noortje. 2005. “Issues Spark a Public into Being.” In Making
Things Public, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 208–17. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Marres, Noortje, and Richard Rogers. 2005. “Recipe for Tracing Issues
and Their Publics on the Web.” In Making Things Public, ed. Bruno
Latour and Peter Weibel, 922–35. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. London: Sage.
Massey, Doreen, John Allen, and Phil Sarre, eds. 1999. Human Geography
Today. Cambridge: Polity Press.
McLean, Stuart. 2009. “Stories and Cosmogonies: Imagining Creativ-
ity beyond ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’.” Cultural Anthropology 24, no. 2:
213–45.
Miller, Daniel. 2008. Materiality: Politics, History, and Culture. London:
Routledge.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Moder-
nity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political: Thinking in Action. London:
Routledge.
Negri, Antonio. 1991. The Savage Anomaly. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
———. 1999. Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State. Trans.
M. Boscagli. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2003. “Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo.” In Time for Revolution,
170–81. London: Continuum.
Oguibe, Olu. 2004. The Culture Game. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Ranciere, Jean. 1999. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Read, Jason. 2005. “The Althusser Effect: Philosophy, History and Tempo-
 Introduction xxxix

rality.” Borderlands 4, no. 2. http://borderlands.net.au/vol4no2_2005/

read_effect.htm.
Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Theory.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Routledge, Paul. 2008. “Acting in the Network: ANT and the Poli-
tics of Generating Associations.” Environment and Planning D 26:
199–217.
Serres, Michel. 1995. The Natural Contract. Trans. E. MacArthur and W.
Paulson. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press.
Simondon, Gilbert. 1992. “The Genesis of the Individual.” In Incorpo-
rations, ed. J. Crary and S. Kwinter, 296–319. Cambridge, Mass.:
Zone Books.
Stengers, Isabelle. 1996. Cosmopoliques. Paris: La Decouverte.
———. 1997. Power and Invention: Situating Science. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press.
———. 2005. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal.” In Making Things Public,
ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 994–1003. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.
Stiegler, Bernard. 1999. Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus.
Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1996. “Cutting the Network.” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Society 2: 517–35.
Thrift, Nigel. 1996. Spatial Formations. London: Sage.
Thrift, Nigel, and Sarah J. Whatmore, eds. 2004. Cultural Geographies:
Critical Concepts. 2 vols. London: Edward Elgar.
Turkle, Sherry, ed. 2008. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Vivieros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. “The Transformation of Objects
into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies.” Common Knowledge 10,
no. 3: 463–84.
Whatmore, Sarah J. 2002. Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces.
London: Sage.
Wills, David. 2008. Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and
Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Winner, Langdon. 1986. “Do Artefacts Have Politics?” In The Whale
and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology,
19–39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of
xl BRUCE BRAUN AND SARAH J. WHATMORE

Species, and Posthumanist Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.
———. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press.
Wynne, Brian. 2007. “Public Participation in Science And Technology:
Performing and Obscuring a Political–Conceptual Category Mis-
take.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 1, no. 1: 99–110.
 part i

Rematerializing Political Theory:

Things Forcing Thought
This page intentionally left blank
 1 Including Nonhumans in
Political Theory: Opening
Pandora’s Box?
isabelle stengers

How to Define Nonhumans?

L et us start with the obvious problem—the impossibility of

giving an adequate definition of the term nonhumans. I will
present three obstacles that stand in the way of such a definition.
The first obstacle is that the negative, non, does not correspond
to any unifying category because we cannot use any longer the
category of object. Objects, as opposed to subjects, will necessarily
lead us back to problems of knowledge, whereas we must deal with
nonhumans as existents.
It is true that theories of knowledge and of existences were con-
flated when existence was derived from a divine creation, with the
human mind created as the image of the creator God. However, with
modern philosophy, the theory of knowledge has been redefined with
the finite subject as its organizing center. As Whitehead (1968, 74)
lamented, “the question—‘what do we know?’—has been transformed
into the question, ‘what can we know?’” this last question being that of
a censor, or a judge, whose first concern is to respect a divide between
legitimate objects of knowledge and fanciful speculations. Among
those fanciful speculations is the claim that one way or another we do
know that nonhumans have an existence of their own, an existence
that demands to be addressed and that may impose on us obligations
and duties. Duties and obligations belong to the realm of what Kant

3
4 ISABELLE STENGERS

called practical reasons, restricted to human subjects. Subjects, Kant

stated, should never be used as means for our ends, the reciprocal,
implicit statement being that we should never consider nonhumans
as anything other than just such means.
However, as soon as we deny this grand divide, we are confronted
with a disparate multitude. How to unify the Web; the AIDS virus;
oil-devouring cars; hurricanes; neutrinos; the climate; genes; psy-
chotropic drugs, be they legal or illegal; the great apes?
The second obstacle is that we may have to face the eventual
demands of beings that were comfortably put away as creatures of
human imagination. Pandora’s box is open indeed. Beings that were
excluded as speculative make their comeback, and we no longer
have the appetite or the criteria of the censor to keep them at bay.
Gods and goddesses, djinns and spirits are not objects for positive,
factual knowledge; they do not even have the power to persuade all
of us that they exist, in the way that Hurricane Katrina did—forcing
even Bush to stop his vacations. However, to claim that the AIDS
virus, neutrinos, or genes have such a power would put experimen-
tal sciences in the place of the old philosophical censor. When we
do not deal with earthquakes, hurricanes, or tsunamis, which have
the power to force unanimous recognition, only that which has ac-
quired experimental recognition, that which has been able to satisfy
experimental demands and to resist experimental tests, would be
deemed truly to exist.
Accepting such a halfway solution would doom political theory.
It would be forced to open itself to the question of living together
with the creatures of technoscience that are put into action by those
beings that have been accorded experimental existence. But it would
leave outside the concerns of all humans, both individuals and popu-
lations, who do know that Gods, djinns, or the Virgin Mary matter.
Those nonhumans would remain a matter of belief, protected by
constitutional freedom to believe whatever you wish but asked to
remain in the realm of private lives, with no public voice.
The third obstacle to defining the term nonhumans is that in the
process we may well also lose the definition of the human as such.
Indeed, if we admit the Virgin Mary, we may well have to admit also
those existents we reduced previously to the status of human ideas. I
am not speaking about the chimera we can deliberately forge. When
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 5

a philosopher discusses the good criteria for excluding the unicorn,

for instance, she is unlikely to confront anybody claiming that the
unicorn exists; there is no spokesperson for the unicorn, and it is just
an ingredient in the answer she is constructing to a philosophical
problem. However, this same philosopher will claim that the problem
demands a solution nonetheless. The unicorn is an indifferent case,
but the problem has an existence of its own because it has the power
to demand a solution. Such a power has for its best witnesses those
mathematicians who attribute some sort of a Platonic existence to
mathematical beings, with theorems expressing what they are able
to force us to attribute to them.
If we take seriously those nonhumans that are best characterized
as forcing thought rather than as products of thought, the idea that
the mathematician at work is a human is not false, obviously, but it
is a rather poor idea, deserving only a quick “yes, of course.” What
we need to think about and address is not the empty generality of
humans as thinking beings but something we usually reserve for
expertise, the correlate of the classical definition of political agency:
humans as spokespersons claiming that it is not their free opinions
that matter but what causes them to think and to object, humans
who affirm that their freedom lies in their refusal to break this at-
tachment, even in the name of some common good.
Let us indulge here in a quick connection with Karl Popper’s
third-world creatures. Popper’s idea of three worlds may have been
a bit simple, too directly bound into his primordial concern with
disentangling what he called objective knowledge from the question
of subjective beliefs, however well founded. But this concern has
the power to induce a true philosophical jump, daring a connection
between ontology and the pragmatic demand for relevance. If the
questions that follow a definition of objective knowledge in terms of
beliefs are not relevant, if they confine philosophers in a labyrinth
of dreary paradoxes while the producers of such knowledge seem
free of such difficulties, no compromise should be accepted. We do
not “believe in” the truth of a theorem; the theorem has the power
to have mathematicians accepting it and working with it.
However, well before Popper, Alfred North Whitehead led us
back, on a similar topic, to a rather original version of Plato. Plato,
he claimed in Adventures of Ideas, proposed a definition of humans
6 ISABELLE STENGERS

on which every philosopher has implicitly agreed, whatever her

claims, when engaging a philosophical practice. Humans would be
those whose souls are moved by the erotic power of Ideas, a power
to be distinguished from coercive force. Even those contemporary
so-called naturalist philosophers, who ask us to accept that thought
can be reduced to blind neuronal configurations, are witnesses for
this power of Ideas because they trust that they can convince those
they address, whose neuronal configurations are apparently sensitive
to their arguments.
Plato’s ideas are, as we know, part of an antidemocratic move,
claiming that ideas are not ours to create and freely discuss. They
rather authorize a measure of value by proximity and faithfulness,
with philosophers who contemplate them at the head of the city,
guiding those who live in the famous cave where they have only
access to distorted reflections producing confusion and discord.
However, we have also to recall that those who were allowed to
take part in political debates in the Athenian democratic city were
never humans as such, but citizens. Plato’s proposition, even if it was
meant to denounce democracy, is about humans and not citizens.
In this, it can be understood as the ancestor of what would be ac-
cepted now as a consensual truth, that there is a defining feature that
unites humans beyond our diverging cultures and opinions and that
opposes us, as humans, to everything else. From this perspective,
Whitehead’s version of Plato’s proposition has interesting, humorous
consequences. What makes us human is not ours: it is the relation
we are able to entertain with something that is not our creation. It
should rather be said, following Whitehead’s Plato, that those who
now call themselves humans are thinking under the power of what
can indeed be called an Idea, an Idea that causes them to define
themselves as humans.
As Donna Haraway emphasized (in a joint seminar in Stanford,
California, in April 2006), the sixth day of creation as told in Genesis
1:24–31 is also a story about human exceptionalism. During the same
day God created not only Adam and Eve, in his own image, but also
beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle according
to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to
its kind. These creatures are defined not as individuals but according
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 7

to a “kind” that prepares them for use and classification by Adam and
Eve. The very definition of the creation act prepares and justifies the
dominion given to humans over everything else on earth.
I think we are allowed to conclude from these three obstacles
that including nonhumans in politics cannot be reduced to tak-
ing an explicit account of the role they would already play in the
fabric of political association and public life. I would claim that
nonhumans were never cast out of the political fold, because this
political fold mobilized the very category of humans, and that this
category is anything but neutral as it entails human exceptionalism
at its crudest—reducing (against Plato and the biblical God) what
causes humans to think and feel to human productions. From this
standpoint, the very drastic opposition between humans and non-
humans would then itself be the witness of the unleashed power of
this (nonhuman) Idea that made us humans, as it allowed us to claim
exception, to affirm the most drastic cut between those beings who
“have ideas” and everything else, from stones to apes.
I will now come back a second and last time to Karl Popper,
who both related Plato to a totalitarian society and came to affirm
the need for a pluralist ontology, with his third-world creatures
transcending human opinions and convictions. The twist Popper
gave to Plato’s ideas is rather interesting, as the power of his third-
world creatures is not that of a model warranting the possibility of
human agreement without political debates but that of problems able
to have humans going against their convictions and most plausible
opinions. In both cases, mathematics was a privileged example, but
the example plays two diverging roles. For Plato the mathemati-
cal demonstration exemplifies the ideal to be generalized, that of
certainty forcing agreement, while for Popper it is the mathemati-
cal problem who (and the “who” here is important as it relates to
the problem as an individual being) has the power to cause human
thought to invent, for instance, irrational numbers or complex
numbers. This corresponds to two different images of thought, as
Gilles Deleuze would say, and this difference may be useful as I turn
now to another aspect of the problem: Bruno Latour’s proposition
that we should treat humans as well as we are treating nonhumans.
8 ISABELLE STENGERS

Mistreating Humans
Such a proposition may seem a bit paradoxical if we remember cattle
or the famous brevetted oncomouse, with whom Donna Haraway asks
us to think: she who was fabricated to suffer cancers and be an object
of biomedical experimentation for the eventual well-being of human
women in rich countries. The paradox, however, gets clarified if we
understand that Latour was addressing social scientists and that he
was contrasting the way they deal with humans to the way experi-
mental sciences deal with their nonhumans—molecules, electrons, or
neutrinos. He would probably agree with my proposition to exclude
from those experimental sciences most of biomedical research and
to include among those who treat nonhumans well those scientists
and nonscientists who engage in adventures of co-becoming together
with apes, dogs, or crows. The best witness for such a co-becoming is
again Donna Haraway, who now thinks together with her dog Cay-
enne, with whom she practices agility sport and because of whom,
she claims, she learned more about herself, and about power, love,
and ethics, than ever with human partners (Haraway 2008).
What is the common feature uniting let us say, for instance, an
experimental physicist coming to the Nobel-prize winning conclu-
sion that neutrinos have a mass, and Haraway experimenting with
what it takes to become a partner with Cayenne and her achieving
a performance that a (human) jury will assess? It may be that some
social scientists would say “social recognition,” and this is where the
problem begins, because this would be an insult against both the
physicists and Haraway—even if, as she says, Cayenne manifests
pride and elation after a good run.
Social recognition is one of those blanket categories the use of
which is the reason why Latour talks about social sciences mistreat-
ing humans. Obviously, when physicists got the Nobel Prize for their
now massive neutrinos, this recognition was important for them,
and we are familiar with the nasty quarrels that can be generated by
authorship priority or due credit not being given to a colleague whose
work had been an ingredient in a published argument. However,
though physicists were not insulted by the Mertonian sociology of
science, readily accepting the importance of social recognition, they
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 9

would feel insulted if this were to become the social explanation for
their involvement.
The outrage of scientists (remember the so-called Science Wars)
is not exceptionalist or, at least, need not be. If a deconstructionist
social scientist described a football game as no more than a matter
of winning, with no difference between a beautiful collective move
that results in scoring a goal and the corruption of players in the
opposing team, he would be well advised to avoid sharing his “sci-
entific” point with players and fans. Similarly, Donna Haraway tells
us that those who judge or participate in agility sports will be pitiless
in their opposition to those participants who would use punishing
methods to train their dog.
Furthermore, in all these cases, the difference between the means
is not, or not only, a matter of following rules if we associate rules with
arbitrary connotations such that they could just as well have been
otherwise. Nor is the difference a matter, or not only a matter, of obey-
ing norms if we associate norms with ideally fixed values qualifying
human behavior. Both rules and norms suppose that each particular
case should be characterized in terms of conformity, whereas what
I am trying to suggest is that the difference between the means is a
matter of accomplishment—referring to an eventual achievement.
Such an achievement does not designate a human being as such but
as engaged with something else. When Donna Haraway learns how
to address Cayenne, it is also and indissociably an achievement for
Cayenne. As for the football player scoring a goal, he cannot be
disentangled from an ever-changing relation with the other players
and with a moving ball in a space put under tension by its limits, the
goal line, and the goalmouth (Massumi 2002).
It is because an achievement is at stake that it is relevant to speak
about the eventual reaction “we are insulted—this is war.” To come
back to what have been called the Science Wars, it did not surprise
me. In fact, I had described it already as bound to happen in my
Invention des Sciences Modernes, which was published in 1993. I
knew that the sociological and cultural debunking of objectivity
and its conclusion that objectivity was a matter of human agreement
(with reality remaining mute, unable to make the imagined differ-
ence), whatever the experimenters claimed, was bound to be felt as
10 ISABELLE STENGERS

a hostile attack. In itself such a claim was not something new—if

you read Quine, you will find him concluding that as a philosopher,
he is unable to define any intrinsic difference between the entities
of physics and the gods of Homer. But Quine was defining himself
as a philosopher who respects scientists, not as someone engaged
in a demystification enterprise. In 1993 a derisive but rather cool
Stephen Weinberg would write in his Dreams of a Final Theory,
“To tell a physicist that the laws of nature are not explanations of
natural phenomena is like telling a tiger stalking prey that all flesh
is grass. The fact that we scientists do not know how to state in a
way that philosophers would approve what it is that we are doing in
searching for scientific explanations does not mean that we are not
doing something worthwhile. We could use help from professional
philosophers in understanding what it is that we are doing, but with
or without their help we shall keep at it” (21–22).
My position, as I developed it in The Invention of Modern Science
(Stengers 2000), is in complete agreement with this quotation from
Weinberg, including his analogy with the stalking tiger. Rather than
a question of norms, what we are dealing with here is the question of
what makes both the tiger and the physicist “in their element” when
stalking what they trust may be captured.
The irony of the problem is that the debunking urge and critical
claim that a general statement about a matter of fact cannot be any-
thing else than a human interpretation is as old as Galileo himself.
It can be found in his Discorsi, at the beginning of the “third day
discussion,” when Galileo-Salviati will introduce the most famous
definition of the “naturally accelerated motion.” And it is voiced by
Sagredo, who here as everywhere acts as a foil, at the service of Galileo’s
claims. Galileo needs this objection to promote the exceptionality
of his definition of the motion of falling bodies. While all abstract
definitions may well be arbitrary, produced by a human author, he
will show that his definition is not: it is the definition of the natural
motion of the falling bodies. In this case, and because of what I would
call the first intervention (intervenire, “to come between”) of an ex-
perimental device—the inclined plane—facts have been given the
power to make a difference that no rival interpretation can explain
away. From this point of view Galileo and the debunking critique are
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 11

twins. Indeed, Galileo developed an exceptionalist rhetoric, proposing

to put everything in the same bag as nondecidable human fiction,
except that which can be decided through facts. The critiques just
add to this same bag the “objective knowledge” that Galileo and his
successors claimed to be the exception to the skeptical rule.
However, Weinberg’s stalking image is not part of this rhetoric.
His is a cri du cœur that situates him in the theoreticoexperimental
history initiated by Galileo, when it was discovered that it may be
possible to achieve a framing of natural phenomena that gives them
the power to act as reliable witnesses for the way they should be de-
fined. Just as the stalking tiger does not have a “neutral” definition
of the prey it has in its sights and, eventually, in its clutches, so the
experimental definition is obviously not the definition of the “phe-
nomenon in itself ”; rather, the experimental achievement (verified
by colleagues) is to attribute to the phenomenon responsibility for its
definition, correlatively producing the scientist as the phenomenon’s
reliable, “objective” spokesperson. Weinberg’s cri du cœur does not
express the confidence that this achievement is fated to happen, that
experimental achievement is somehow a “right of reason.” It expresses
the trust that it can, and may, happen. I would claim that this is the
trust that gathers physicists, just as it is the trust that there is fleshy
prey to catch that is the very life and soul of the tiger.
However, the stalking image is not relevant for agility sports as
practiced by Haraway and Cayenne, and it is dangerous for any of
those scientific practices that must proceed out of the lab because,
in the field, facts are important as eventual clues but are usually not
decisive as such. Indeed, the naturalist’s field achievement does not
have the power of a definition in terms of well-determined variables.
It is rather a narrative with no guarantee that it will keep its relevance
in other apparently similar cases.1 And it cannot enter into techno-
scientific tales in which reproducibility is conquered and measuring
devices, industrial procedures, and everyday artifacts eventually
follow from an active networking activity connecting experimental
labs to their many outsides.
The stalking image, furthermore, is quite interesting because it
exhibits the disaster that follows when the experimental achievement
is turned into a normative method after the Galilean rhetoric—
12 ISABELLE STENGERS

a data-based method that would be a general definition of the sci-

entific approach as opposed to mere subjective opinion. When La-
tour asks that social scientists treat humans as well as experimental
scientists treat neutrinos or falling bodies, the point is not to treat
them in the same way; quite the contrary. If neutrinos or falling
bodies can entertain an analogy with the prey of the stalking tiger,
it is because catching them is an event, an achievement: the experi-
mental achievement demands its prey to be recalcitrant. “Catching”
humans, for scientists, is not an achievement if they are too ready to
answer the scientists’ questions and accept the setting they propose.
Furthermore, a true experimental setting enhances the abilities of
nonhumans as actors (see, e.g., Latour 1999a) in a demonstration,
while human scientists too often produce settings that play down
this ability because their first ambition is to produce data that avoid
the accusation of having been suggested by the setting. Humans as
such lack recalcitrance, and any method that mimics experimenta-
tion is thus mistreatment.
But mimicking experimentation is not the only possible mis-
treatment. Physicists felt insulted by the blanket categories used by
sociologists to critically interpret scientific agreement and objectivity,
and they manifested public recalcitrance. This reaction can surely be
avoided by “soft” qualitative methods that would never risk insult-
ing anybody. But these methods also profit from the human lack of
recalcitrance as they require confidence and goodwill. In contrast,
Bruno Latour’s proposition—that humans are to be treated as well
as nonhumans—entails learning from this recalcitrance as it offers
the chance to learn from the physicists how to treat them well. This
does not mean at all treating them the way they ask to be treated
but rather accepting this recalcitrance as a challenge. Accepting
also that the lack of recalcitrance against sociological interpretation
by other groups is a matter of serious concern, it may well be that
sociologists have the rather dubious habit of taking advantage of a
“scientists know better” submission. How else explain that they think
it is normal for people to accept and try to answer any question they
ask—even those that de facto define them as easy prey for insulting
blanket categories?
My understanding of Bruno Latour’s proposition thus reinforces
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 13

my first remarks about the need, correlative to the problem of the

inclusion of nonhumans, to decenter political theory from the abstract
concept of “humans.” As I already emphasized, humans have nothing
to do together with nonhumans because their very definitions oppose
them. But “human sciences,” when they methodologically mimic
the kind of objectivity that results from the event of an achievement
in experimental sciences, demonstrate that the “denuded” humans
required by their questions to provide access to “what is human in
humans” are, above all, weak: complacently accepting to play the
proposed role in the service of science. Are they not also playing a
role, this time at the service of the functioning of democracy, when
they fulfill their part through elections, for instance?

Diverging Minorities
What I call human Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), in A
Thousand Plateaus, define as a “standard” (in French, an étalon,
which means both a “standard” and a “stallion”: meanings enjoined
in the white, male, middle-class husband and father citizen). The
standard hu-man has the power to define everybody else in terms
of a deviation from what then becomes taken as normal. Yes, when
submitted to the standard methods of social sciences, physicists were
insulted, but it is because they are physicists. Yes, this one refused to
answer my questions and even endeavored to criticize them, but it is
because she belongs to that ecological group, and so on.
Marketing is already escaping such reasoning, using profiling
techniques to target offers and information. However, what was
interesting to Deleuze and Guattari was not the proliferation of
microstandards but the positive, nonnumeric contrast between the
majority and minorities.
If you accumulate specifications, whether targeting ten persons or
one, you are still thinking in standard terms because you know that
if you progressively suppress specifications, your group will become
larger and larger: at the end comprising maybe the whole human spe-
cies, with only deviant mavericks not joining the unanimous answer
to questions such as “Would you choose to be rich and healthy rather
than sick and poor?” In contrast, you are not free to define minori-
ties and to ask them questions of your (methodological) choice: they
14 ISABELLE STENGERS

define themselves together with the questions that matter for them.
And they never dream that those definitions and questions are the
“normal ones” but rather experience their irreducible entanglement
in the process of their own becoming a minority group.
In short, the Deleuzian difference between majority and minority
plays on the two distinct meanings of the term ensemble in French:
“set,” in the mathematical sense, and “togetherness.” A mathematical
set can be defined from the outside; all its members are interchange-
able from the point of view of this definition and, as such, may be
counted. But those who participate “together” in a minority group
cannot be counted, as participating is not sharing a common feature
but entering into a process of connections, each connection produc-
ing, and produced by, a becoming of its terms.
The examples Deleuze and Guattari use of minorities were all
“dissidents,” threats against public order. My use of the concept of
minority may be seen as a betrayal, as I wish to downplay the original
oppositional connotation and affirm its relevance for the together-
ness of what I call “practices,”2 whose members can be described
as “attached” to something that none of them can appropriate or
identify with—a nonhuman—but that causes them to think, feel,
and hesitate.
Physicists as practitioners certainly do not present themselves
as a threat to public order. They even present objective science as
what separates society from the rule of might. However, like the
Proustian Baron de Charlus, I would say to them, “You do not really
care about society, do you—little scoundrels!” What they really care
about, as physicists, is rather what Bruno Latour called Knots and
Links (Latour 1999b): Knots achieved with what they address and
interrogate, Links with colleagues whose role is to put the Knot to
the test (to try to part what has been connected) but who will also
produce consequences for the eventual achievement by connecting
it with their own questions, making it an ingredient of new Knots.
What Bruno Latour calls the Allies—those who have to be interested
in scientific production for it to get both the means to proceed and
the possibility to have consequences “outside”—know rather well
that scientists are not very loyal partners, always prone to divert the
resources they have obtained for aims of their own or to distract
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 15

grounded interests in favor of speculative possibilities. As long as

today’s so-called new knowledge economy does not dissolve what
links and gathers these scientists by putting each of them directly at
the service of some partner’s own priorities (as begins to be the case
in biotechnology), the role scientists claim to play in the maintenance
of public order will be a partial lie.
The concept of minority is relevant to affirm that any practice
lies when it defines itself at the service of “human” needs or priori-
ties. Correlatively, I would emphasize that if it indeed happens that
minorities appear as a threat to public order, they are not defined by
the desire to be such a threat, as would be the case with classical radi-
cal militant groups. What would rather define them is that they are
threatened by the demands, rules, and priorities of public order.
I would define a practice through an attachment to a nonhuman
in the enlarged sense (it could be a Popperian third-world creature,
a river, or the Virgin Mary as the aim of a collective pilgrimage), an
attachment that is not sentimental or habitual—I count on Thalys
to go to Paris—but that has the power to make practitioners think,
feel, and hesitate. Similarly, when Bruno Latour speaks of matters of
concern, this does not just mean “to be concerned” by something.
I may be concerned by a railway workers’ strike if I intend to go to
Paris, or by the AIDS epidemic, or by river pollution, but I know that
my concern is about the same as anybody else’s in a similar situation.
As a philosopher, however, when I was working with the physicist
Ilya Prigogine, our matters of practical concern were distinct. His
was his struggle to produce a mathematical-physical formulation
that would compel his colleagues to recognize that the arrow of time
was to be accepted at the “fundamental level of physics.” Mine was to
become able to characterize the demanding, passionate character of
his struggle without giving it a “metaphysical” character. You need
to be a theoretical physicist for the arrow of time to be a problem,
and as a philosopher, my problem was not this arrow. It was not to
reduce the arrow of time to a “problem for physicists” either. It was
rather to understand theoretical physics starting from the fact that
this practice has given to the arrow of time the power to have its
practitioners thinking and hesitating.
To develop the idea of practices, not in a descriptive way but
16 ISABELLE STENGERS

as actively linked with the concept of minority, the importance of

“hesitation” will be my starting point, and it will be connected with
nonhumans through the concept of “obligations.” This will lead to a
thesis that will bring me back to a question of political theory: practices
diverge, and their divergence, not to be confused with contradiction,
makes them recalcitrant to any consensual definition of a common
good that would assign them roles and turn them into functional
parts of public order, whatever its claims to excellence.
Hesitation is what differentiates a practice from a normative or
rule-following activity. This does not mean that practices are free
from rules or norms; rather, in cases that matter, practitioners have
to wonder if those rules or norms are not called into question be-
cause there is something more important than conformity. What is
more important depends on the practice, but the concept of practice
I introduce generically demands that nobody is able to set the rule,
to appropriate the norm, and to a priori silence hesitation.
If hesitation gathers practitioners, it is because rules and norms
are discursive expressions tentatively formulating something that
has no definitive, authoritative formulation and hence does not com-
municate through obedience—which I call “obligations.” Obligations
communicate with the possibility of their betrayal. If ever a practice
exhibited this possibility, it is that of the Quakers, who, as we know,
did not quake in front of their God but in front of the menace of
silencing what was asked of them in a particular situation, answering
it in terms of preset beliefs and convictions. I was also impressed by
the active and explicit “culture of hesitation” implied by the so-called
consensus techniques experimented with by nonviolent activists
in the United States. In all cases, the betrayal of obligations means
that the situation has not gained the power to have those it gathers
thinking, feeling, and wondering. Such a power is denied as soon
as a situation is considered as covered by generalities authorizing
recognition or as rule governed.
I have already used the formula “what causes them to think and
feel,” and I hope it was obvious that cause does not here relate to a
cause–effect reasoning of the type “this caused that.” What is rather
implied is that as a rule, situations do not have the power to make
us think and feel, and this was why Popper saw fit to affirm the
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 17

irreducibility of his third-world beings to habits, convictions, conven-

tions, and customs that all allow us to recognize how to deal with a
situation without having us thinking or hesitating.
Situation is meant to be a neutral term, and it is now important not
to use any word—such as the Popperian problem, for instance—that
would privilege thinking as an intellectual business. In La Vierge et
le Neutrino (Stengers 2006), I gave as an example of practice collec-
tive pilgrimages toward a place where the Virgin Mary is reported to
manifest herself. This “situation” includes no theological discussions
but rather pilgrims “preparing” themselves during the trip—that is,
praying together, telling each other about their suffering and hope,
and learning to tell it in the perspective of the eventual encounter
with Mary. How to become able to receive and experience the grace
associated with the presence and gaze of Mary is what the pilgrim-
age is about.
It is obvious that such an experience cannot be a reliable witness
for the existence of Mary in the experimental sense as it is not meant
to resist objections and counterpropositions. But in both cases my
thesis is that we must resist the temptation to understand the achieve-
ment in terms of general categories. When “thinking” is related to
a cause that forces thinking and feeling, it is not to be characterized
in general terms, as a human production. Obligations express what
a nonhuman, be it Mary or neutrinos, demands for a Knot to be
created. About those Knots themselves, only one general statement
can be made: those who enter into such a Knot, or trust that they
may do so, will be insulted if a description reduces such a Knot to a
human production, not allowing for nonhuman intervention.
Mary and the neutrinos entail divergent obligations but not
contradictory ones as a contradiction implies a homogeneity of the
terms, that is, in our case, a general, insulting reduction of all practices
to human social activities, described by the same categories. More
technically, if practices never contradict each other, it is because
contradictions exist only between discursive formulations, whereas
obligations may well be tentatively expressed through discursive for-
mulations but they are not defined through such formulations. Mary
and neutrinos, as “causes” (again, not as a cause that would define its
effects and be defined by it!), refer to the possibility of a Knot that
18 ISABELLE STENGERS

may eventually be achieved, that is, to an achievement that requires

what humans “as such” have not the power to produce. Obligations
communicate with the possibility of this achievement, with the trust
that it may eventually happen. This is why obligations primordially
entail hesitation—bearing on “how” one is obliged, and communi-
cating with the possibility of their betrayal—and this is why, when
obligations are concerned, no discursive formulation may be final:
such a claim would suppress hesitation and give a purely “human”
definition, or reason, to the achievement.
The “how” is a question that exposes, and puts at risk, those who
are obliged. This also means that only those who are obliged may
take the risk of experimenting with changes in the formulation of
their obligations, because only they are exposed by the question of an
eventual betrayal, leaving them soulless and lifeless as practitioners,
like a captive tiger for whom the difference between live prey and
chunks of meat would no longer matter.
My approach aims at activating the feeling that we live in a cem-
etery of already destroyed practices that have been unable to defend
their obligations against the “outside,” be it because of persecutory
violence (remember witch hunting, for instance); soft pressure to
conform to the demands of public rationality; deconstructive hu-
man sciences relaying in the name of science a consensual climate
of derision; or direct capitalist redefinition in the name of progress
(think of the so-called economy of knowledge and the already in-
stituted techniques of assessing academic “quality”). Vulnerability,
the definition of their environment as problematic and sometimes
threatening, is a common feature of practices, and that which escapes
this vulnerability, through defining itself against its environment,
we call sects.
If practices answer to diverging obligations, their convergence
as demanded by a politically defined “common good” is part of
what threatens them. Scientific communities’ traditional claims for
autonomy can be contested, and legitimately so, as the claim ob-
scures the dense connections with Allies and networking activities.
Moreover, it is a claim that demands exceptional privileges, thus
happily ratifying the destruction of other practices. And finally, it
entails such niceties as the distinction between sciences that serve
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 19

the technoscientific exploitation of the world (so-called applied re-

search) and those that would serve humanity’s true needs (so called
blue-skies research). However, this claim must still be heard as it
speaks to the vulnerability of practices; the way their environment
may destroy them if its demands, whatever the intention, threaten
to deny or dissolve their obligations. As such, practices put political
theory at a bifurcation between two asymmetrical branches, a realist
one and a speculative one.

Political Theory at the Crossroads

What I call the realist branch is realist because it ratifies what is
the case anyway—that is, the process of destruction of what I call
practices. It is even possible to define technology (a very difficult
term to define) as requiring such destruction. Technology is not
to be confused with interconnected technical practices. The logos
is rather something that “happens” to practitioners, a networking
operation that binds them and even commits them to the destruction
of their own practice. This is obvious, for instance, with information
and computing practitioners: what we call technology here charac-
teristically demands of its practitioners that they work in ways that
diminish themselves by producing procedures that make possible
a chain of command to be faithfully executed. We can also think
of genetically modified (GM) technology. Not only are genetically
modified organisms (GMOs) not the crowning application of biology,
they are the result of a rather poor molecular biology with inflated
ambition (wait for the second generation!). Moreover, they herald
the direct mobilization of biologists through the so-called economy
of knowledge such that intellectual property rights are already a
constitutive part of experimental research, including public research,
with the power to stabilize the gene-oriented framing of biologists’
questions. The point is not that scientific research would be in the
process of being dissolved into engineering, because engineering itself
is redefined in such a way that the difference between a technical
achievement and a means for something else entirely is becoming
radically undetermined.
In other words, the realist stance would be to conclude that all
this business of practices and of nonhumans as what causes thought
20 ISABELLE STENGERS

and feeling is part of the past and cannot have the power to force
political theorists to think. It could be all the more plausible as the
authority invested in “theory,” when we speak of political theory,
which may well rest on following already paved ways and ratifying
the process of destruction of what does not recognize the supremacy
of public language and majority reasoning. I would just emphasize
that ratifying the process that destroys practices is also ratifying
the impossibility of including nonhumans as this same process is
depriving them of their spokespersons. From the standpoint of
“technology” (as I have characterized it), there are no longer any
spokespersons, only stakeholders with no obligations. We deal no
longer with politics but with governance—with situations deprived
of the power to force thinking as they are defined by stakeholders’
vested interests.
The second branch I discern is speculative. Part of the question
here is to turn the consequences of technology, which are usually
reduced to a question of necessary adaptation, into a political prob-
lem. Although we are beginning to take account of the destruction of
biodiversity and the loss of traditional materials and spiritual cultures,
we have yet to learn how, politically, to address the process of the
destruction of our own practices! Indeed, the technologies associated
with ranking or productivity evaluation at all levels today, which
are characterized by experts who (unlike referees in the traditional
sense) are no longer meant to read and think, are in the process of
blindly modernizing research practices, that is, of destroying research
communities. As with all practices, academic ones were in a state
of “just surviving.” To emphasize this point is not to give a special
importance to our own destruction. The speculative challenge con-
cerns the difference that could be produced if scientific communities
were to succeed, in this time of need, in addressing different allies
than the traditional ones—the State and Industry—which have now
betrayed this alliance. To succeed, a prerequisite is that they learn
how to present themselves in nonmajority terms.
However, the speculative challenge also concerns the question
of new forms of political activism that are part of what brings non-
humans into the political fray. New spokespersons are making their
presence felt, and where technology is concerned, I for one would
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 21

gladly present myself as a daughter to what I do not hesitate to call the

GMO event in Europe. Naming what happened with GM as an event
signals both an unpredictability (it failed to happen in the United
States) and a capacity to transform present perspectives on both
the past and the future. My standpoint would be that of a witness to
what I learned because of this event, as having shared the collective
transformative learning trajectory that made it an event.
The contestation of GMOs turned into an event when, far from
isolating the mobilized opposition groups, the tentative answers of the
public authorities served as both fuel and opportunity to extending
the debate about expertise; the lack of reliable knowledge about con-
sequences; the absence, or silencing, of field specialists; the limitations
of the precautionary principle; and so on. As we know, this produced
a reframing of GMOs themselves. Today they are no longer seen
as worthwhile innovations whose risks should be accepted despite
some possible problems. For many they are vehicles for intellectual
property rights, the synonym of a capitalist expropriation strategy
and of the unsustainable development that follows.
I would also present myself as a daughter of the possibilities
associated with what I would call minority techniques. Those tech-
niques are called empowerment techniques, but to resist the hijacking
of empowerment by governance theory, it is important to empha-
size that the stake here is emphatically not the empowerment of
stakeholders but rather the empowerment of a situation: giving a
situation that gathers the power to force those who are gathered to
think and invent.
A situation, when defined in terms of the stable, vested interests
of stakeholders, is always defined in majority terms, but when this
situation gains the power to cause thinking, it induces a becoming
that we may associate with the production of a minority—as none
of the relations, knowledge, or agreements so generated can hold
“in general” without this power. Stakeholders’ gatherings can easily
be assimilated by normalizing and normative procedures because
they produce agreement and conventions that have the stability of
the gathered interests. In contrast, empowering minority techniques
are needed when this normalizing procedure is defined as a trap to
be avoided because what matters then is a collective becoming that
22 ISABELLE STENGERS

humans could not produce “by themselves” but only because of the
situation that generated the power to make them think.
We are used to associating techniques addressed to humans with
manipulation, implicated in the exploitation of human weaknesses
and suggestibility. This is part of the human–nonhuman divide and of
the correlative ideal that politics should be the affair of autonomous
citizens, free of manipulation and gifted with personal convictions
and ideas. I am personally very interested by these empowering tech-
niques, and especially by those that dare to include nonhumans as a
necessary ingredient of the collective becoming they experiment. For
instance, when the U.S. neopagan witch Starhawk (see, e.g., Starhawk
1997) writes about the Goddess as an empowering presence, and
about rituals as a matter of experimentation3 by which to learn how
to invoke and convoke Her in different situations, or about magic
as a craft for transforming conscious awareness, the point is clearly
not a matter of belief in some supernatural power—just as neutrino
physicists do not need to believe that there exist massive neutrinos
waiting to be characterized. In both cases, the point is an achieve-
ment that cannot be reduced to general, purely human, categories,
an achievement which demands that humans do not feel themselves
as masters of the situation, as responsible for what is achieved.
The challenge for political theorists may then be to learn how to
situate themselves in relation to such “empowering” experimenta-
tions, the role and importance of which can easily be dismissed or
assimilated into the background noise, unable to seriously disturb
established power relationships or, equally, to be misrepresented as a
model embodying a new ideal of democracy. What theorists have to
learn is how to relate to something that involves true experimenta-
tion on its own ground—experimentation in the actual possibility of
laypeople taking part in the construction of knowledge, questions,
and choices about the future, that is, becoming able to appropriate
or reclaim the role that is formally theirs in a democracy.
It should be taken for granted that the outcome of this kind of
experimentation is uncertain and that the business of political theory
is not to predict the outcome—prediction is about plausible develop-
ments, not speculative possibilities. What may be a matter of relevant
concern for political theorists is the way activists’ experimentations
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 23

and actions are relayed; the irrelevant demands that may pervert them
(do you have a program?); the irrelevant evaluations that promote
them as “the voice of the civil society” or deride them as incapable
of entering into a true confrontation with the real powers. The way
theorists characterize such experimentations is part of this aspect
of the question. There is no neutral position here. Critical thought
that highlights the ways in which users’ movements can be diverted
into stakeholders’ positions or tells disenchanted stories about the
abandonment of local initiatives following the creation of procedures
that required empowered participation has something redundant
about it insofar as it relays and ratifies the general judgment that
failure is the norm and that democracy is bound to remain formal.
We face here the same challenge as the one imposed by what I called
practices—approaching them from the point of view of their eventual
particular achievement and what we can learn from it, not in the
general terms a failure authorizes.

A Political Proposition
My proposition about political theory and the challenge it would face
is not a neutral one. It is a way of relaying Gilles Deleuze’s answer to
the question of the distinction between right and left on the political
scene. He gave this answer in 1985, at a time when the fashion was
neither left nor right, and he resisted the fashion. For Deleuze the
difference was not of degree, which would mean a common measure,
it was a “difference in nature” (différence de nature). La gauche, he
affirmed, vitally needs people to think, and this is not a problem
at all for la droite, which rather needs people to accept situations,
questions, and prospects as they are already framed (Deleuze 1997,
174). Indeed it is amusing that right-wing politicians loudly protest
when it is recalled how their forerunners opposed now consensual
laws and regulations, limiting, for instance, the exploitation of work-
ers. In a way, their protests have some justification because of the
difference in nature between the past situation, when workers were
thinking and fighting, and the present one, when what they have
conquered has been assimilated and incorporated into the normal
state of affairs. As a result, Deleuze emphasized that la droite has a
normal relation with state power and, when in power, will never be
24 ISABELLE STENGERS

accused of betrayal, whereas la gauche, if it achieves political power,

is by definition torn between the responsibility associated with the
State and the proliferating questions and demands it should relay and
take into account. This difference may be related to that between the
majority and minorities, because when people are engaged in what
Deleuze calls thinking—that is, not accepting the state of affairs in
the (majority) proposed terms—it always means the emergence of
diverging minorities.
Deleuze’s proposition opposes any prospect corresponding to
a reconciled society in which everybody will feel free to indulge in
her own affairs and personal development under the benevolent
care of the State, with some nice intersubjective debates between
well-disposed citizens about priorities and values. Opposing such
a prospect does not mean having insuperable conflicts become the
dark truth that this nice order would obscure or repress. It is again
a question of a difference of nature, this time between two images
of collective thought (and for Deleuze and Guattari, any thought is
always collective), the tree and the rhizome. The tree is the State ideal
because it is the image of problems ordered from the more general
to the more particular: a “leaf ” question will never cause a “trunk”
agreement to be contested. It is also the figure of discursive logic: if
we agree on such and such, then only this or that remains open to
discussion. In a rhizome, any two points may get connected with-
out hierarchy, without the irreversible if x, then y, and nothing, no
signification, can be characterized as settled. However, the rhizome
is not a figure of sheer anarchy: for Deleuze and Guattari the brain
itself functions as a rhizome, and there is no question but that it is
functioning. If nothing is settled in a rhizome, if we have to follow
and not deduce, it is because connections are not redundantly fol-
lowing an order that they merely make explicit: new connections
may add dimensions and transform the very pragmatic identity of
what gets connected. A connection is an event, never a derivation.
I would propose that including nonhumans in the guise I have
characterized—that is, as causes for thinking—both leads to a rhizom-
atic situation and protects the rhizome image against any assimilation
with a network, such as a technological one, when each connected
term has for its only identity the way it is connected with others.
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 25

The production of rhizomatic connections must be characterized as

events, and to do so, I will try to situate it in the frame of an ecology
of practices. Using the term ecology means that practices are to be
characterized in irreducibly etho-eco/logical terms—that is, in terms
that do not dissociate the ethos of a practice and its oikos, not only
the matter-of-fact environment but the way it defines its relation with
other practices and the opportunities of the environment. From this
point of view, new connections or a changing connection, or a change
in the environment, are events indeed, a possible transformation
of what we would have been tempted to accept as the identity of a
practice. From this point of view, also, scientific practices, when they
present themselves in majority terms, correspond to the simplest
case of ecology—that of predator–prey. All scientific practices agree
to define what is not scientific as prey, but each is potential prey for
another that can claim to be more objective (chemistry has been
defined as “applied physics only”) and a predator for other, so-called
weaker ones (neurosciences define in predatory terms the domain of
human sciences). Connecting events, on the other hand, must not
be characterized as a matter of goodwill but as achievements, the
creation of new possibilities and new questions for the concerned
parties. Finally, the idea of an ecology of practices entails that each
practice has indeed its own recalcitrant, diverging manner of defining
what matters, what I previously characterized in terms of obligation.
The point is that there is no direct connection between such manners
and the definition of a well-defined ethos. The ethos may be defined
only in relation with its oikos. In other, Spinozist, terms, “we do not
know what a practice can do.” Such an idea is not a ready-made politi-
cal program, for sure, because it addresses practices as if they were
recognized in their guise of recalcitrant minorities. This is a very big
“as if,” indeed, which links ecology of practices with political fiction
or speculation. However, as such, it may serve as a tool for thought,
a tool to orientate thought, propose constraints, and help to resist
some utopian dreams—in this case, dreams that would presuppose
the taming of nonhumans and the freedom of humans to decide how
to live together through intersubjective communication.
The idea of an ecology of practices openly refers to the wisdom
of naturalists who have learned to think in the presence of ongoing
26 ISABELLE STENGERS

indicators of the past destruction of living species and will never

accept any justification of such losses as the (unhappily necessary)
price or condition for the progress of life on this earth. In other words,
the ecology of practices openly refuses Capitalist, Marxist, and com-
monsense judgments about “practices condemned by History.”
However, the ecology of practices is not a naturalist idea but a
speculative one, because the very term practice is not descriptive. It
does not address practices “as they are”—physics as we know it, for
instance—but as they may become in different surroundings, when
the analogy with interacting living species would become relevant in
two senses: first, that belonging to a species means having a particular
standpoint on one’s environment, which means, for instance, that
practitioners would be derided if they were to claim the privilege
of speaking in the name of a general, transcending cause (human
progress, common good, reason, the laws of nature, etc.); second,
that in the absence of any general relations, nothing produced in a
particular practical setting can be attributed a meaning or a value that
would logically or consensually impose itself outside this setting.
For the analogy not to be a naturalizing one, it must be empha-
sized that even in natural ecology, the identity of a species is only
a first approximation of the ethos of those belonging to a species;
what they need, how they relate with each other, and their environ-
ment have no biologically grounded specific definition. Belonging
refers to constraints, and each new variant ethos creates a new
meaning for these constraints. Because of the passionate work of
experimental ethologists exploring, for example, what kinds of
active environments great apes require to learn, we even have to
include into the contemporary definition of what an ape ethos may
be those relational habits researchers call “speaking.” As for the
agility sport practiced by Haraway and Cayenne, it attests to a long
story of co-learning entailing new kinds of ethos on both parts.
An ecology of practices is speculative because the whole point of
it is the difference between belonging and identity, or the difference
between obligations and fixed rules or norms that I have linked to the
questions nonhumans impose on their practitioners. Obligations are
constraints; they entail that a new practical ethos, with transformed
relations with the environment, is a creation, not a change, that would
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 27

be a function of the environment. Such an ecology of practices takes

as its motto a practical version of Spinoza’s famous dictum about the
body: we do not know what kind of relation their obligations make
practitioners able or unable to entertain with their environment.
For the concerned practitioners, however, it is not a matter of
knowing or not knowing. What is at stake is an event—an event
that puts into question what Bruno Latour (2004), in his Politics of
Nature, distinguishes as essence and habit. This distinction is never
settled, and each time it is in question, settled habits, what makes
the identity of practitioners, are bound to protest with the essential
cry, “If you try and modify us, you kill us.” I would propose that a
crucial speculative point in the proposed ecology of practices is what
might be called a culture of hesitation that enhances the distinction
between obligations and rules or norms, or between essence and
habits. The point would not be to denounce habits and rules but to
define as important, as worth the positive attention of practitioners,
the amplification of this distinction.
However, such an amplification does not imply a general reflexive
stance. To be related to the possibility of an event, hesitation must
be concrete, bearing on the possibility of new or modified connec-
tions of practitioners with their outside. This is why, for instance,
the ecology of practices will never be concerned with a change in the
relation between science and the public, two abstractions that are
made to meet only through generalities (information, miscompre-
hension, goodwill, pedagogy). The point would rather be the relation
of instituted, hardwired practices (sciences, law, medicine, etc.) with
empowered minorities who have become collectively able to object,
question, and impose as mattering aspects of situations that would
otherwise be mistreated or neglected.
The idea of ecology entails another consequence: the refusal of
any transcendent standpoint. No definition of the common good, no
appeal to reason, and no ideal of peace can authorize an arbiter when
conflicting demands clash. This, however, does not mean blind clash
or insuperable contradiction. As I already emphasized, divergence is
not contradiction. It just means that any agreement has the character
of an event, which may well be an answer to a common matter of
concern but without the concern having the power to define its even-
28 ISABELLE STENGERS

tual practical consequences. Correlatively, eventual agreements will

always be local agreements between parts that keep diverging: a pact,
not a convergence with a common aim overcoming the divergence.
In other words, we deal here with rhizomatic connections, which
cannot authorize a treelike representation with the trunk standing
for what diverging practices would have recognized that they have
in common—for instance, as human practices.
As Deleuze wrote, an idea always exists as engaged in a matter—
that is, as “mattering” (we have an idea in music, or painting, or cin-
ema, or philosophy, or . . . ). A problem is always a practical problem,
never a universal problem mattering for everybody. If the ecology
of practices entails that we do not know what kind of relation their
obligations make practitioners able or unable to entertain with their
environment, it also entails learning about it. And learning here is
always local because the rhizomatic connections practitioners are
able or unable to forge do not obey general rules or reasons. I have
named as diplomats those practitioners whose obligations designate
the possibility of generating rhizomatic connections where conflict
seems to prevail.

The Art of Diplomacy

The art of diplomacy, in contrast to what prevails today, presupposes
that the affronted parties must be defined in terms of forces that all
decide to “give peace a chance,” that is, that all agree on a slowing
down of all the good reasons everybody has to wage a justified war.
This excludes negotiated surrender, the aim being in this case not to
envisage the possibility of peace but rather to envisage the economy
of costly military operations. It may well be that this art is no longer
relevant for international relations, but it still relevant to introducing
the challenge of an ecology of practices.
To speak about diplomacy is to speak about borders and the pos-
sibility of wars. Borders do not mean that connections are cut but
that they are matters of arrangement. Reciprocity itself, if it exists, is
part of an arrangement, with different risks and challenges for each
involved party. Free circulation and general equivalency, that is, the
disappearance of the need for diplomacy, mean devastation in the
terms of an ecology of practices. But the imposition of the rules of
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 29

public language for a protest to be taken into account also means

such devastation as public language defines all speakers as ideally
interchangeable.
As such, the art of diplomacy does not refer to goodwill, togeth-
erness, the sharing of a common language, or an intersubjective
understanding. Neither is it a matter of negotiation between flexible
humans who should be ready to adapt as the situation changes. It is
an art of artificial arrangements that do not exhibit a deeper truth
than their very achievement—the event of an articulation between
protagonists constrained by diverging attachments and obligations
in situations where contradiction seems to rule, a rhizomatic event
without a ground to justify it, or an ideal from which to deduce it.
Such events have nothing to do with heartfelt reconciliation;
neither are they meant to produce mutual understanding. Indeed,
they are such that each party may entertain its own version of the
agreement, just as in the famous example given by Deleuze of the
noce contre nature (marriage against nature) of the wasp and the
orchid. We get no wasp–orchid unity, he emphasizes, as wasps and
orchids give each other quite another meaning to the relation that
takes place between them.
This is why the art of diplomacy is usually despised as an art of
hypocrisy and artificiality. Heartfelt reconciliation is then glorified
as the only true way to achieve peace, against artificial constructions
and arrangements. The rejection of what is despised as artificial is
part of a very old legacy. The Christian faith in the saving power of
truth—come and you will be free—as it is turned into the war cry of
missionaries battling against “fabricated idols” testifies to the power
of truth as defined against artifacts. Diplomacy is much older than
Christianity, and it celebrates another conception of truth, a fetish-
ist one, to refer to Bruno Latour’s (1999c) very important analysis
of our inveterate antifetishism as one version of the Great Divide.
The condition for diplomacy—that affronted parties slow down—
means that they accept the possibility that a diplomatic proposition
may eventually result in an arrangement, articulating what was a
contradiction leading to war. But acceptance of this possibility does
not mean acceptance of the proposition issued from the diplomats’
encounter. This is why a diplomat will never say to another diplomat
30 ISABELLE STENGERS

belonging to the opposing party, “Why don’t you just agree with
this or that proposal” or “In your place I would . . .” Diplomats, if
true to the art of diplomacy, know that they are all at risk and that
they cannot share the other’s risk. Will the kind of modification on
which may depend the possibility of the peace they are negotiating
be accepted by those people each diplomat represents? Or will the
diplomats be denounced as traitors when they return home?
Thus another condition for the art of diplomacy is what I call a
culture of hesitation, the capacity for the protagonists not to confuse
belonging and identity, that is, not to take as a betrayal or a mani-
festation of weakness the acceptance of a proposition that implies
a modification of their habitual formulation of who they are. As we
know, radical direct democracy is often associated with the idea of an
imperative mandate and the disavowal at any time of a representative
who would betray it. This is an interesting and challenging proposal
if, and only if, representatives can trust that those they represent
will be interested in their account of the situation and know how to
hesitate and consult before concluding that the mandate has been
betrayed. If the notion of imperativeness excludes hesitation about the
way the imperative is to be satisfied, the representative is a hostage,
and the proposal is self-defeating.
Diplomats are not theorists, and they speculate little about the
potential role of political theory for the practice of their art. However,
it may be that the idea of an ecology of practices, and the correlative
art of diplomacy, may serve as an active test for the very idea of a
“political theory.” The recalcitrant groups experimenting with what
it takes not to be wiped out by the normative leveling of divergences
may well be considered as producing something that should matter
for political theorists, as the very nature of a political problem may be
transformed if those who are concerned by this problem produce the
ability to play an active part in the way it is formulated. But the active
test is that political theorists must also accept that they themselves are
part of the always problematic and often threatening environment of
those experimentations. The art of diplomacy may be enlightening
here because it is an art of divided loyalty, binding diplomats both
with the group they represent and with other diplomats, whose
loyalty is also divided. In the political theorists’ case, the point is
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 31

not to represent, or to become, spokespersons. Yet divided loyalties

remain necessary to sustain both the possibility that is concretely
risking its actualization in such groups and the matters of concern
that make the theorists themselves think. Such a position for theorists
is not paradoxical. In fact, it already characterizes the cooperative
symbiosis that exists between theoretical and experimental practices
in sciences like physics and chemistry. Symbiosis is always between
heterogeneous beings: theorists and experimenters need each other,
but their practice entertains diverging constraints and obligations,
which means that an achievement, or an interesting failure, entails
different consequences for them. Symbiosis is about a culture of
divergence, avoiding, for instance, what I would call theoretical
voyeurism, when theorists do not respect the necessary distance
and propose interpretations, the production of which is part of the
experimentation and not the business of the theorist.
Such a distance has nothing to do with a form of neutrality. It is
produced by the divergence of practices. However, for such a sym-
biotic culture of divergence to exist, both parts have to diverge. The
question, then, is what causes political theorists to think and diverge
for their own sake and, by the same token, what makes them account-
able and in relation to what? This is the question of the obligations
proper to their practice, and it may well be that it is in learning the
demands of symbiotic relations with recalcitrant groups that such
questions, which become vital in this case, may find the empowering
beginning of an answer.
32 ISABELLE STENGERS

Notes

This text is an attempt to take seriously one of the questions addressed

to the participants of the Stuff of Politics workshop from which this
volume arose: what challenges does the inclusion of nonhumans hold
for democratic theory? This is why it takes for granted, right from the
beginning, that such an inclusion may be a matter for serious thought—at
the risk of sounding like speculative (political) science fiction.

1 See about this Gould (1990). Gould compares the eventual achieve-
ment of coherence by the puzzled naturalist facing many disparate
eventual clues with the “integrative insight” of Lord Peter Wimsey
and not with the logical, deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes.
2 I began working with this term in Cosmopolitics (Stengers 1996–97)
and it is at the center of La Vierge et le Neutrino (Stengers 2006).
3 That the same word, experimentation, is used for experimental sci-
ences and for those minority techniques highlights two proximity
points. The first point is that it is again a matter of Knots and Links:
of the reciprocal causality between Knots created with a nonhuman
and Links created among those who face a particular situation. The
second point is that in both cases, we do not deal with beliefs, or
revelation of a hidden truth, but with a deliberate pragmatic of the
artificial, the truth of which rests in the contract between achieve-
ment, or efficacy, and failure.

References

Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. Negotiations 1972–1990. New York: Columbia

University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans.
Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gould, Stephen J. 1990. “Triumph of a Naturalist.” In An Urchin in the
Storm, 157–68. New York: Penguin Books.
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1999a. “From Fabrication to Reality.” In Pandora’s Hope,
113–44. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
———. 1999b. “Science’s Blood Flow.” In Pandora’s Hope, 80–112. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
 Including Nonhumans in Political Theory 33

———. 1999c. “The Slight Surprise of Action.” In Pandora’s Hope, 266–92.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
———. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy.
Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. “The Political Economy of Belonging and the
Logic Of Relation.” In Parables for the Virtual, 68–88. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press.
Starhawk. 1997. Dreaming the Dark. Boston: Beacon Press.
Stengers, Isabelle. 1996–97. Cosmopolitiques. 7 vols. Paris: La Décou-
verte.
———. 2000. The Invention of Modern Science. Trans. Daniel W. Smith.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2006. La Vierge et le Neutrino: Les scientifiques dans la tourmente.
Paris: Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond.
Weinberg, Stephen. 1993. Dreams of a Final Theory. London: Vintage.
Whitehead, Alfred N. 1968. Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press.
This page intentionally left blank
 2 Thing-Power
jane bennett

I must let my senses wander as my thought, my eyes

see without looking. . . . Go not to the object; let it
come to you.
—Henry Thoreau, The Journal of Henry
David Thoreau

It is never we who affirm or deny something of a thing;

it is the thing itself that affirms or denies something
of itself in us.
—Baruch Spinoza, Short Treatise II

I n the wake of foucault’s death in 1984, there was an

explosion of scholarship on the body and its social construction,
on the operations of biopower. These genealogical (in the Nietzschean
sense) studies exposed the various micropolitical and macropolitical
techniques through which the human body was disciplined, normal-
ized, sped up and slowed down, gendered, sexed, nationalized, global-
ized, rendered disposable, or otherwise composed. The initial insight
was to reveal how cultural practices produce what is experienced
as natural, but many theorists also insisted on the material recalci-
trance of such cultural productions.1 Though gender, for example,
was a congealed bodily effect of historical norms and repetitions,
its status as artifact does not imply an easy susceptibility to human
understanding, reform, or control. The point was that cultural forms

35
36 JANE BENNETT

are themselves powerful, material assemblages with resistant force.

In what follows, I too will feature the negative power or recalci-
trance of things. But I will also seek to highlight a positive, productive
power of their own. And instead of collectives conceived primarily as
conglomerates of human designs and practices (“discourse”), I will
highlight the active role of nonhuman materials in public life. In short,
I will try to give voice to a thing-power. As W. J. T. Mitchell (2005,
156–57) notes, “objects are the way things appear to a subject—that
is, with a name, an identity, a gestalt or stereotypical template . . .
Things, on the other hand, . . . [signal] the moment when the object
becomes the Other, when the sardine can looks back, when the mute
idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny and
feels the need for what Foucault calls ‘a metaphysics of the object, or,
more exactly, a metaphysics of that never objectifiable depth from
which objects rise up toward our superficial knowledge.’ ”

Thing-Power, or the Out-Side

Spinoza ascribes to bodies a peculiar vitality: “each thing [res], as far
as it can by its own power, strives [conatur] to persevere in its own
being” (Spinoza 1982, pt. 3, proposition 6). Conatus names an “ac-
tive impulsion” (Mathews 2003, 8) or trending tendency to persist.
Although Spinoza distinguishes the human body from other bodies
by noting that its distinctive “virtue” consists in “nothing other than
to live by the guidance of reason” (Spinoza 1982, pt. 4, proposition 37,
scholium 1), every nonhuman body shares with every human body
a conative nature (and thus a “virtue” appropriate to its material
configuration). Conatus names a power present in every body: “Any
thing whatsoever, whether it be more perfect or less perfect, will
always be able to persist in existing with that same force whereby it
begins to exist, so that in this respect all things are equal” (Spinoza
1982, 154). Even a falling stone, writes Spinoza (1995, epistle 58), “is
endeavoring, as far as in it lies, to continue in its motion.”2 As Nancy
Levene (2004, 3) notes, “Spinoza continually stresses this continuity
between human and other beings,” for “not only do human beings
not form a separate imperium unto themselves; they do not even
command the imperium, nature, of which they are a part.”3
The idea of thing-power bears a family resemblance to Spinoza’s
 Thing-Power 37

conatus as well as to what Thoreau called the Wild or to that uncanny

presence that met him in the Concord woods and atop Mt. Ktaadn
and also resided in/as that monster called the railroad and that alien
called his Genius. Wildness was a not-quite-human force that addled
and altered human and other bodies. It named an irreducibly strange
dimension of matter, an out-side. Thing-power is also kin to what
Hent de Vries (2006, 42), in the context of political theology, called
“the absolute” or that “intangible and imponderable” recalcitrance.
Though the absolute is often equated with God, de Vries defines it
more open-endedly as “that which tends to loosen its ties to exist-
ing contexts” (6). This definition makes sense when we look at the
etymology of absolute: ab (off) + solver (to loosen). The absolute is
that which is loosened off, on the loose, on the outside. When, for
example, a Catholic priest performs the act of ab-solution, he is the
vehicle of a divine agency that loosens sins from their attachment to
a particular soul: sins now stand apart, displaced foreigners living
a strange, “impersonal life” of their own. When de Vries speaks of
the absolute, then, he tries to point to what no speaker could pos-
sibly see, that is, a some-thing that is not an object of knowledge is
detached or radically free from representation and thus is no-thing
at all—nothing but the force or effectivity of this detachment.
De Vries’s notion of the absolute, like the thing-power I will seek
to express, seeks to acknowledge that which refuses to dis-solve
completely into the milieu of human knowledge. But there is also a
difference in emphasis between De Vries and me. De Vries conceives
this exteriority, this out-side, primarily as an epistemological limit:
in the presence of the absolute, we cannot know. It is from human
thinking that the absolute has detached; the absolute names the limits
of intelligibility. De Vries’s formulations thus, naturally enough, give
priority to humans as knowing bodies, while overlooking things and
what they can do. The notion of thing-power aims instead to attend
to the it as actant; I will try, impossibly, to name the moment of in-
dependence (from subjectivity) possessed by things, a moment that
must be there since things do in fact affect other bodies, enhancing
or weakening their power. I will shift from the language of epistemol-
ogy to ontology, from a focus on an elusive recalcitrance hovering
between immanence and transcendence (the absolute) to an active,
38 JANE BENNETT

earthy, not-quite-human capaciousness (vital materiality). I will try

to give voice to a vitality intrinsic to materiality, in the process ab-
solving matter from its long history of attachment to automatism
or mechanism.4
The strangely vital things that will rise up to meet us in this
chapter—a dead rat, a plastic cap, a spool of thread—are characters
in a speculative onto-story. The tale hazards an account of material-
ity, even though it is both too alien and too close to see clearly and
even though linguistic means are inadequate to the task. The story
will highlight the extent to which human being and thinghood
overlap, the extent to which the “us” and the “it” slip-slide into each
other. One moral of the story is that we are also nonhuman and that
things, too, are vital players in the world. The hope is that the story
will enhance receptivity to the “impersonal life” that surrounds and
infuses us, generate a more subtle awareness of the complicated web
of dissonant connections between bodies, and enable more strategic
interventions into that ecology.

Thing-Power I: Debris
On a sunny Tuesday morning on June 4, in the grate over the storm
drain to the Chesapeake Bay in front of Sam’s Bagels on Cold Spring
Lane in Baltimore, there was

ƒ one large men’s black plastic work glove

ƒ one dense mat of oak pollen
ƒ one unblemished dead rat
ƒ one white plastic bottle cap
ƒ one smooth stick of wood

Glove, pollen, rat, cap, stick. As I encountered these items, they

shimmied back and forth between debris and thing—between, on
one hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human
activity (the workman’s efforts, the litterer’s toss, the rat-poisoner’s
success) and, on the other hand, stuff that commanded attention in
its own right, as an existent in excess of its association with human
meanings, habits, or projects. In the second moment, stuff exhibited
its thing-power: it issued a call, even if I did not quite understand
 Thing-Power 39

what it was saying. At the very least, it provoked affects in me: I was
repelled by the dead (or was it merely sleeping?) rat and dismayed by
the litter, but I also felt something else: a nameless awareness of the
impossible singularity of that rat, that configuration of pollen, that
otherwise utterly banal, mass-produced plastic water-bottle cap.
I was struck by what Stephen Jay Gould (2002, 1338) called the
“excruciating complexity and intractability” of nonhuman bodies.
But in being struck, I realized that the capacity of these bodies was
not restricted to a passive “intractability” and also included the ability
to make things happen, to produce effects. When the materiality of
the glove, the rat, the pollen, the bottle cap, the stick started to shim-
mer and spark, it was in part because of the contingent tableau that
they formed with each other, with the street, with the weather that
morning, with me. For had the sun not glinted on the black glove, I
might not have seen the rat; had the rat not been there, I might not
have noted the bottle cap; and so on. But they were all there just as
they were, and so I caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside
each of these things, things that I generally conceived as inert. In
this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is, as vivid entities
not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set
them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics. In my encounter
with the gutter on Cold Spring Lane, I glimpsed a culture of things
irreducible to the culture of objects.5 I achieved, for a moment, what
Thoreau had made his life’s goal: to be able “to be surprised by what
we see” (Dumm 1999, 7).6
This window onto an eccentric out-side was made possible by
the fortuity of that particular assemblage but also by a certain an-
ticipatory readiness on my in-side, by a perceptual style open to the
appearance of thing-power. For I came on the glove-pollen-rat-cap-
stick with Thoreau in my head, who had encouraged me to practice
“the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen” (Thoreau 1973,
111),7 with Spinoza’s (1982, proposition 13, scholium 72) claim that all
things are “animate, albeit in different degrees” and also with Merleau-
Ponty (1981), whose Phenomenology of Perception had disclosed for
me “an immanent or incipient significance in the living body [which]
extends, . . . to the whole sensible world” and which had shown
me how “our gaze, prompted by the experience of our own body,
40 JANE BENNETT

will discover in all other ‘objects’ the miracle of expression” (197).

As I have already noted, the items on the ground that day were
vibratory, at one moment disclosing themselves as dead stuff and at
the next as a live presence. Junk then claimant, inert matter then live
wire. It hit me then in a visceral way how American materialism,
which requires buying ever-increasing numbers of products pur-
chased in ever-shorter cycles, is antimateriality.8 The sheer volume
of commodities, and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking
them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter. In
The Meadowlands, a late-twentieth-century Thoreauian travelogue
of the New Jersey garbage hills outside Manhattan, Robert Sullivan
describes the vitality that persists even in trash:

The . . . garbage hills are alive. . . . There are billions of microscopic

organisms thriving underground in dark, oxygen-free communi-
ties. . . . After having ingested the tiniest portion of leftover New
Jersey or New York, these cells then exhale huge underground
plumes of carbon dioxide and of warm moist methane, giant stillborn
tropical winds that seep through the ground to feed the Meadow-
lands’ fires, or creep up into the atmosphere, where they eat away at
the . . . ozone. . . . One afternoon I . . . walked along the edge of a
garbage hill, a forty-foot drumlin of compacted trash that owed its
topography to the waste of the city of Newark. . . . There had been
rain the night before, so it wasn’t long before I found a little leachate
seep, a black ooze trickling down the slope of the hill, an espresso
of refuse. In a few hours, this stream would find its way down into
the . . . groundwater of the Meadowlands; it would mingle with
toxic streams. . . . But in this moment, here at its birth, . . . this little
seep was pure pollution, a pristine stew of oil and grease, of cyanide
and arsenic, of cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, silver,
mercury, and zinc. I touched this fluid—my fingertip was a bluish
caramel color—and it was warm and fresh. A few yards away, where
the stream collected into a benzene-scented pool, a mallard swam
alone. (Sullivan 1998, 96–97)

Sullivan reminds that a vital materiality can never really be thrown

“away.” For it continues its activities even as a discarded or unwanted
 Thing-Power 41

commodity. For Sullivan that day, as for me on that June morning,

thing-power rose from a pile of trash. Flower Power, Black Power,
Girl Power. Thing Power: the curious ability of inanimate things to
animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.

Thing-Power II: Odradek’s Nonorganic Life

A dead rat, some oak pollen, and a stick of wood stopped me in
my tracks. But so did the plastic glove and bottle cap: thing-power
arises from bodies inorganic as well as organic. In support of this
contention, Manuel De Landa notes how even inorganic matter can
“self-organize”:

inorganic matter-energy has a wider range of alternatives for the

generation of structure than just simple phase transitions. . . . In
other words, even the humblest forms of matter and energy have
the potential for self-organization beyond the relatively simple type
involved in the creation of crystals. There are, for instance, those
coherent waves called solitons which form in many different types of
materials, ranging from ocean waters (where they are called tsunamis)
to lasers. Then there are . . . stable states (or attractors), which can
sustain coherent cyclic activity. . . . Finally, and unlike the previous
examples of nonlinear self-organization where true innovation cannot
occur, there [are] . . . the different combinations into which entities
derived from the previous processes (crystals, coherent pulses, cyclic
patterns) may enter. When put together, these forms of spontaneous
structural generation suggest that inorganic matter is much more
variable and creative than we ever imagined. And this insight into
matter’s inherent creativity needs to be fully incorporated into our
new materialist philosophies. (De Landa 2000, 16)

Here I would like to draw attention to a literary dramatization of

this idea: to Odradek, the protagonist of Kafka’s short story “Cares
of a Family Man.” Odradek is a spool of thread who/that can run
and laugh; this animate wood exercises an impersonal form of
vitality. De Landa speaks of a “spontaneous structural generation,”
which happens, for example, when chemical systems at far-from-
equilibrium states inexplicably choose one path of development
42 JANE BENNETT

rather than another. Like these systems, the material configuration

that is Odradek straddles the line between inert matter and vital life.
That is why Kafka’s narrator has trouble assigning Odradek to an
ontological category. Is Odradek a cultural artifact, a tool of some
sort? Perhaps, but if so, its purpose is obscure:

It looks like a flat star-shaped spool of thread, and indeed it does

seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, these are only old,
broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most
varied sorts and colors. . . . One is tempted to believe that the creature
once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-
down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; . . . nowhere
is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of
the kind: the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way
perfectly finished. (Kafka 1983, 428)

Or perhaps Odradek is more a subject than an object—an organic

creature, a little person? But if so, his/her/its embodiment seems
rather unnatural: from the center of Odradek’s star there protrudes
a small wooden crossbar, and “by means of this latter rod . . . and
one of the points of the star . . . the whole thing can stand upright
as if on two legs.”
On one hand, like an active organism, Odradek appears to move
deliberately (he is “extraordinarily nimble”) and to speak intelligibly:

He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance
hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has pre-
sumably moved into other houses; but he always comes faithfully
back to our house again. Many a time when you go out of the door
and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the
banisters you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, you put no
difficult questions to him, you treat him—he is so diminutive that
you cannot help it—rather like a child. “Well, what’s your name?”
you ask him. “Odradek,” he says. “And where do you live?” “No fixed
abode,” he says and laughs. (Kafka 1983, 428)

And yet, on the other hand, like an inanimate object, Odradek’s

so-called laughter “has no lungs behind it” and “sounds rather like
 Thing-Power 43

the rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the con-
versation. Even these answers are not always forthcoming; often he
stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance” (Kafka
1983, 428).
Wooden yet lively, verbal yet vegetal, alive and inert, Odradek is
ontologically multiple. He/it is a vital materiality and exhibits what
Deleuze described as the persistent “hint of the animate in plants,
and of the vegetable in animals” (Deleuze 1991, 95). The Russian sci-
entist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863–1945), who also refused
any sharp distinction between life and matter, defined organisms
as “special, distributed forms of the common mineral, water. . . .
Emphasizing the continuity of watery life and rocks, such as that
evident in coal or fossil limestone reefs, Vernadsky noted how these
apparently inert strata are ‘traces of bygone biospheres’” (Margulis
and Sagan 1995, 50). Odradek exposes this continuity of watery life
and rocks; he brings to the fore the becoming of things.

Thing-Power III: Legal Actants

I may have met a relative of Odradek while serving on a jury, again in
Baltimore, for a man on trial for attempted homicide. It was a small
glass vial with an adhesive-covered metal lid: the gunpowder residue
sampler. This object/witness had been dabbed on the accused’s hand
hours after the shooting and now offered to the jury its microscopic
evidence that the hand had either fired a gun or been within three feet
of a gun firing. The sampler was shown to the jury several times by
expert witnesses, and with each appearance it exercised more force,
until it became vital to the verdict. This composite of glass, skin cells,
glue, words, laws, metals, and human emotions had became an actant.
An actant is Latour’s term for a source of action; an actant can be
human or not, or, most likely, a combination of both. Latour defines
it as “something that acts or to which activity is granted by others.
It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of
humans in general” (Latour 1997). An actant is neither an object nor
a subject, but an “intervener,” akin to the Deleuzean idea of a “quasi-
causal operator” (De Landa 2003, 123). An operator is that which, by
virtue of its particular location in an assemblage and the fortuity of
being in the right place at the right time, makes the difference, makes
things happen, becomes the decisive force which catalyzes an event.
44 JANE BENNETT

Actants and operators are substitute words for what, in a more

subject-centered vocabulary, are called agents. Agentic capacity is now
seen as differentially distributed across a wider range of ontological
types. This idea is also expressed in the notion of “deodand,” a figure
of English law from about 1200 until it was abolished in 1846. In cases
of accidental death or injury to a human, the nonhuman actant, for
example, the carving knife that fell into human flesh or the carriage
that trampled the leg of a pedestrian—became deodand (literally,
“that which must be given to God”). In recognition of its peculiar
efficacy (a power that is less masterful than agency but more active
than recalcitrance), the deodand, a materiality “suspended between
human and thing” (Tiffany 2001, 74),9 was surrendered to the Crown
to be used (or sold) to compensate for the harm done. According
to William Pietz, “any culture must establish some procedure of
compensation, expiation, or punishment to settle the debt created
by unintended human deaths whose direct cause is not a morally
accountable person, but a nonhuman material object. This was the
issue thematized in public discourse by . . . the law of deodand”
(Pietz 1997, 97).
There is, of course, a difference between the knife that impales
and the man impaled, between the technician who dabs the sampler
and the sampler, between the array of items in the gutter of Cold
Spring Lane and me, the narrator of their vitality. But I agree with
John Frow that this difference “needs to be flattened, read horizontally
as a juxtaposition rather than vertically as a hierarchy of being. It’s a
feature of our world that we can and do distinguish . . . things from
persons. But the sort of world we live in makes it constantly possible
for these two sets of kinds to exchange properties” (Frow 2001, 283).
And to note this fact explicitly, which is also to begin to experience
the relationship between persons and other materialities more hori-
zontally, is to take a step toward a more ecological sensibility.

Thing-Power IV: Walking, Talking Minerals

Odradek, a gunpowder residue sampler, and some junk on the street
can be fascinating to people and can seem to come alive. But is this
evanescence a property of the stuff or of people? Was the “thing-
power” of the debris I encountered but a function of the subjective
 Thing-Power 45

and intersubjective connotations, memories, and emotions that had

accumulated around my ideas of these items? Was the real agent of
my temporary immobilization on the street that day humanity, that
is, the cultural meanings of “rat,” “plastic,” “wood” in conjunction
with my own idiosyncratic biography? It could be. But what if the
swarming activity inside my head was itself an instance of the vital
materiality that also constituted the trash?
I have been trying to raise the volume on the vitality of mate-
riality per se, pursuing this task so far by focusing on nonhuman
bodies, by, that is, depicting them as actants rather than objects.
But the case for matter as active needs also to readjust the status of
human actants: not by denying humanity’s awesome, awful powers
but by presenting these powers as evidence of our own constitution
as vital materiality. In other words, human power is itself a kind of
thing-power. At one level, this claim is uncontroversial: it is easy
to acknowledge that humans are composed of various material
parts (the minerality of our bones, or the metal of our blood, or the
electricity of our neurons). But it is more challenging to conceive of
these materials as lively and self-organizing than as the passive or
mechanical means under the direction of something nonmaterial,
that is, an active soul or mind.
But perhaps the claim to a vitality intrinsic to matter itself be-
comes more plausible if one takes a long view of time. If one adopts
the perspective of evolutionary rather than biographical time, for
example, a mineral efficacy becomes visible. Here is De Landa’s ac-
count of the emergence of our bones:

Soft tissue (gels and aerosols, muscle and nerve) reigned supreme
until 5000 million years ago. At that point, some of the conglomera-
tions of fleshy matter-energy that made up life underwent a sudden
mineralization, and a new material for constructing living creatures
emerged: bone. It is almost as if the mineral world that had served
as a substratum for the emergence of biological creatures was reas-
serting itself. (De Landa 2000, 26)

Mineralization names the creative agency by which bone was

produced, and bones then “made new forms of movement control
46 JANE BENNETT

possible among animals, freeing them from many constraints and

literally setting them into motion to conquer every available niche in
the air, in water, and on land” (26–27). In the long and slow time of
evolution, then, mineral material appears as the mover and shaker,
the active power, and the human being, with his much-lauded ca-
pacity for self-directed action, appears as its product.10 Vernadsky
seconds this view in his description of humankind as a particularly
potent mix of minerals:

What struck [Vernadsky] most was that the material of Earth’s crust
has been packaged into myriad moving beings whose reproduction
and growth build and break down matter on a global scale. People,
for example, redistribute and concentrate oxygen . . . and other
elements of Earth’s crust into two-legged, upright forms that have
an amazing propensity to wander across, dig into and in countless
other ways alter Earth’s surface. We are walking, talking minerals.
(Margulis and Sagan 1995, 49; italics added)

Kafka, De Landa, and Vernadsky suggest that human individu-

als are themselves composed of vital materials, that our powers are
thing-power. These vital materialists do not claim that there are no
differences between humans and bones, only that there is no need to
describe these differences in a way that places humans at the onto-
logical center or hierarchical apex. Humanity can be distinguished,
instead, as Jean-Francois Lyotard suggests, as a particularly rich and
complex collection of materials: “humankind is taken for a complex
material system; consciousness, for an effect of language; and language
for a highly complex material system” (Lyotard 1997, 98). Richard
Rorty similarly defines humans as very complex animals rather than
as animals “with an extra added ingredient called ‘intellect’ or ‘the
rational soul’” (Rorty 1995, 199).
The fear is that in failing to affirm human uniqueness, such views
authorize the treating of people as mere things, in other words, that a
strong distinction between subjects and objects is needed to prevent
the instrumentalization of humans. Yes, such critics continue, objects
possess a certain power of action (as when bacteria or pharmaceuticals
enact hostile or symbiotic projects inside the human body), and yes,
 Thing-Power 47

some subject-on-subject objectifications are permissible (as when

persons consent to use and be used as a means to sexual pleasure),
but the ontological divide between persons and things must remain
lest one have no moral grounds for privileging human over germ or
for condemning pernicious forms of human-on-human instrumen-
talization (as when powerful humans exploit illegal, poor, young, or
otherwise weaker humans).
How can the vital materialist respond to this important concern?
First, he can respond by acknowledging that at times the framework
of subject versus object has worked to prevent or ameliorate hu-
man suffering and to promote human happiness or well-being, and
second, by noting that its successes come at the price of an instru-
mentalization of nonhuman nature that itself can be unethical and
undermine long-term human interests. Third, he must point out that
the Kantian imperative to treat humanity always as an end in itself
and never merely as a means does not have a stellar record of suc-
cess in preventing human suffering or promoting human well-being:
it is important to raise the question of its actual, historical efficacy
to open up space for forms of ethical practice that do not rely on
the image of an intrinsically hierarchical order of things. Here the
materialist speaks of promoting healthy and enabling instrumental-
izations rather than of treating people as ends in themselves because
to face up to the compound nature of the human self is to find it
difficult even to make sense of the notion of a single end in itself.
What instead appears is a swarm of competing ends being pursued
simultaneously in each individual, some of which are healthy to the
whole, some of which are not. Here the vital materialist, taking a cue
from Nietzsche’s and Spinoza’s ethics, favors physiological (healthy
and enabling) over moral terms (dignity, purposiveness, divinity)
because she fears that moralism can itself become a source of un-
necessary human suffering.11
We are now in a position to name that other way to promote
human health and happiness: to raise the status of the materiality
of which we are composed. Each human is a heterogeneous com-
pound of wonderfully, dangerously vibrant matter. If matter itself is
lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects
minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is
48 JANE BENNETT

elevated. All bodies become more than mere objects, as the thing-
powers of resistance and protean agency are brought into sharper
relief. Vital materialism would thus set up a kind of safety net for
those humans who are now, in a world where Kantian morality is
the standard, routinely made to suffer because they do not conform
to a particular (Euro-American, bourgeois, theocentric, or other)
model of personhood. The ethical aim becomes to distribute value
more generously, to bodies as such. Such a newfound attentiveness to
matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploita-
tion or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to
which all bodies are kin in the sense of being inextricably enmeshed
in a dense network of relations. And in a knotted world of vibrant
matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm
oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is
good for humans. A vital materialism does not reject self-interest as
a motivation for ethical behavior, though it does seek to cultivate a
broader definition of self and of interest.

Thing-Power V: Thing-Power and Adorno’s Nonidentity

But perhaps the very idea of thing-power or vibrant matter claims
too much: to know more than it is possible to know. Or, to put the
criticism in Theodor Adorno’s terms, does it exemplify the violent
hubris of Western philosophy, a tradition that has consistently failed
to mind the gap between concept and reality, object and thing? For
Adorno, this gap is ineradicable, and the very most that can be said
with confidence about the thing is that it eludes capture by the concept
that there is always a “nonidentity” between it and any representation.
And yet, as I shall argue, even Adorno continues to seek a way to
access—however darkly, crudely, or fleetingly—this outside. One can
detect a trace of this longing in the following quotation from Negative
Dialectics: “What we may call the thing itself is not positively and
immediately at hand. He who wants to know it must think more, not
less” (Adorno 1973, 189). Adorno clearly rejects the possibility of any
direct, sensuous apprehension (“the thing itself is not positively and
immediately at hand”), but he does not reject all modes of encounter,
for there is one mode, “thinking more, not less,” that holds promise.
 Thing-Power 49

In this section, I will explore some of the affinities between Adorno’s

nonidentity and my thing-power and, more generally, between his
“specific materialism” and a vital materialism.
Nonidentity is the name Adorno gives to that which is not subject
to knowledge but is instead “heterogeneous” to all concepts. This
elusive force is not, however, wholly outside of human experience,
for Adorno describes nonidentity as a presence that acts on us: we
knowers are haunted, he says, by a painful, nagging feeling that
something is being forgotten or left out. This discomfiting sense of
the inadequacy of representation remains no matter how refined or
analytically precise one’s concepts become. Negative dialectics is the
method Adorno designs to teach us how to accentuate this discom-
forting experience and how to give it a meaning. When practiced
correctly, negative dialectics will render the static buzz of nonidentity
into a powerful reminder that “objects do not go into their concepts
without leaving a remainder” and thus that life will always exceed
our knowledge and control. The ethical project par excellence, as
Adorno sees it, is to keep remembering this and to learn how to
accept it. Only then can we stop raging against a world that refuses
to offer us the “reconcilement” that we, according to Adorno, crave
(Adorno 1973, 5).12
For the vital materialist, however, the starting point of ethics is
less the acceptance of the impossibility of “reconcilement” and more
the recognition of human participation in a shared, vital materiality.
We are vital materiality, and we are surrounded by it, though we do
not always see it that way. The ethical task at hand here is to cultivate
the ability to discern nonhuman vitality, to become perceptually
open to it. In a parallel manner, Adorno’s “specific materialism” also
recommends a set of practical techniques for training oneself to
better detect and accept nonidentity. Negative dialectics is, in other
words, the pedagogy inside Adorno’s materialism.
This pedagogy includes intellectual as well as aesthetic exercises.
The intellectual practice consists in the attempt to make the very
process of conceptualization an explicit object of thought. The goal
here is to become more cognizant of the fact that conceptualiza-
tion automatically obscures the inadequacy of its concepts. Adorno
50 JANE BENNETT

believes that critical reflection can expose this cloaking mechanism

and that the exposure will intensify the felt presence of nonidentity.
The treatment is homeopathic: we must develop a concept of noniden-
tity to cure the hubris of conceptualization. The treatment can work
because, however distorting, concepts still “refer to nonconceptuali-
ties.” This is “because concepts on their part are moments of the reality
that requires their formation” (Adorno 1973, 12). Concepts can never
provide a clear view of things in themselves, but the “discriminating
man,” who “in the matter and its concept can distinguish even the
infinitesimal, that which escapes the concept,” can do a better job
of gesturing toward them (45). Note that the discriminating man
(adept at negative dialectics) both subjects his conceptualizations
to second-order reflection and also pays close aesthetic attention to
the object’s “qualitative moments,” for these open a window onto
nonidentity (43).
A second technique of the pedagogy is to exercise one’s utopian
imagination. The negative dialectician should imaginatively re-create
what has been obscured by the distortion of conceptualization: “the
means employed in negative dialectics for the penetration of its
hardened objects is possibility—the possibility of which their reality
has cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one”
(Adorno 1973, 52). Nonidentity resides in those denied possibilities, in
the invisible field that surrounds and infuses the world of objects.
A third technique is to admit a “playful element” into one’s
thinking and to be willing to play the fool. The negative dialecti-
cian “knows how far he remains from” knowing nonidentity, “and
yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings him to
the point of clowning. He must not deny his clownish traits, least
of all since they alone can give him hope for what is denied him”
(Adorno 1973, 14).
The self-criticism of conceptualization, a sensory attentive-
ness to the qualitative singularities of the object, the exercise of an
unrealistic imagination, and having the courage of a clown: by means
of such practices, one might replace the rage against nonidentity
with a respect for it, a respect that chastens our will to mastery.
That rage is for Adorno the driving force behind interhuman acts
 Thing-Power 51

of cruelty and violence. Adorno goes even further to suggest that

negative dialectics can transmute the anguish of nonidentity into a
will to ameliorative political action: the thing thwarts our desire for
conceptual and practical mastery, and this refusal angers us; but it
also offers us an ethical injunction, according to which “suffering
ought not to be, . . . things should be different. ‘Woe speaks: “Go.” ’
Hence the convergence of specific materialism with criticism, with
social change in practice” (Adorno 1973, 202–3).13
Adorno founds his ethics on an intellectual and aesthetic attentive-
ness that, though it will always fail to see its object clearly, nevertheless
has salutory effects on the bodies straining to see. Adorno willingly
plays the fool by questing after what I would call thing-power but that
he calls “the preponderance of the object” (Adorno 1973, 183). Hu-
mans encounter a world where nonhuman materialities have power,
a power that the “bourgeois I,” with its pretensions to autonomy,
denies.14 It is at this point that Adorno identifies negative dialectics
as a materialism: it is only “by passing to the object’s preponderance
that dialectics is rendered materialistic” (192).
Adorno dares to affirm something like thing-power, but he does
not want to play the fool for too long. He is quick—too quick from
the point of view of the vital materialist—to remind the reader that
objects are always “entwined” with human subjectivity and that he has
no desire “to place the object on the orphaned royal throne once oc-
cupied by the subject. On that throne the object would be nothing but
an idol” (Adorno 1973, 181). Adorno is reluctant to say too much about
nonhuman vitality, for the more said, the more it recedes from view.
Nevertheless, Adorno does try to attend somehow to this reclusive
reality by means of a negative dialectics. Negative dialectics has an af-
finity with negative theology: negative dialectics honors nonidentity as
one would honor an unknowable god; Adorno’s “specific materialism”
includes the possibility that there is divinity behind or within the real-
ity that withdraws. Adorno rejects any naive picture of transcendence,
such as that of a loving God who designed the world (“Metaphysics
cannot rise again” after Auschwitz), but the desire for transcendence
cannot, he believes, be eliminated: “nothing could be experienced
as truly alive if something that transcends life were not promised
52 JANE BENNETT

also. . . . The transcendent is, and it is not” (404, 375).15 Adorno

honors nonidentity as an absent absolute, as a messianic promise.16
Adorno struggles to describe a force that is material in its resis-
tance to human concepts but spiritual insofar as it might be a dark
promise of an absolute-to-come. A vital materialism is more thor-
oughly nontheistic in presentation: the out-side has no messianic
promise.17 But a philosophy of nonidentity and a vital materialism
nevertheless share an urge to cultivate a more careful attentiveness
to the out-side.

The Naive Ambition of Vital Materialism

Adorno reminds us that humans can experience the out-side only
indirectly, only through vague, aporetic, or unstable images and
impressions. But when he says that even distorting concepts still
“refer to nonconceptualities, because concepts on their part are
moments of the reality that requires their formation” (Adorno 1973,
12), Adorno also acknowledges that human experience nevertheless
includes encounters with an out-side that is active, forceful, and
(quasi)independent. This out-side can operate at a distance from
our bodies, or it can operate as a foreign power internal to them, as
when we feel the discomfort of nonidentity or hear the nay-saying
voice of Socrates’ demon or are moved by what Lucretius called that
“something in our chest capable of fighting and resisting,” a thumos
“brought about by a tiny swerve of atoms” (Lucretius 1995, 128).
There is a strong tendency among modern, secular, well-educated
humans to refer such signs back to a human agency conceived as its
ultimate source. This impulse toward cultural, linguistic, or histori-
cal constructivism, which interprets any expression of thing-power
as an effect of culture and the play of human powers, politicizes
moralistic and oppressive appeals to “nature.” And that is a good
thing. But the constructivist response to the world would also tend
to obscure from view whatever thing-power there may be. There is,
then, something to be said for moments of methodological naivete,
for the postponement of a genealogical critique of objects.18 This delay
might render manifest a subsistent world of nonhuman vitality. To
“render manifest” is both to receive and to participate in the shape
 Thing-Power 53

given to that which is received. What is manifest arrives through

humans but not entirely because of them.
A vital materialist will try to linger, then, in those moments
when she finds herself fascinated by objects, taking them as clues
to the material vitality that she shares with them. This sense of a
strange and incomplete commonality with the outside may induce
her to treat nonhumans—animals, plants, earth, even artifacts and
commodities—more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically.
But how to develop this capacity for naiveté? One tactic might be to
revisit and become temporarily infected by discredited philosophies
of nature, risking “the taint of superstition, animism, vitalism, an-
thropomorphism, and other premodern attitudes” (Mitchell 2005,
149). To this end, let me make a brief foray into the ancient atomism
of Lucretius, Roman devotee of Epicurus.
Lucretius tells of bodies falling in a void, bodies that are not
lifeless stuff but matter on the go, entering and leaving assemblages,
swerving into each other:

at times quite undetermined and at undetermined spots they push

a little from their path: yet only just so much as you could call a
change of trend. [For if they did not] . . . swerve, all things would
fall downwards through the deep void like drops of rain, nor could
collision come to be, nor a blow brought to pass for the primordia:
so nature would never have brought anything into existence. (Lu-
cretius 1995, 216)19

Althusser described this as a “materialism of the encounter,”

according to which political events are born from chance meetings
of atoms (Althusser 2006, 169).20 A primordial swerve says that the
world is not determined, that an element of chanciness resides at the
heart of things, but it also affirms that so-called inanimate things
have a life, that deep within is an inexplicable vitality or energy,
a moment of independence from and resistance to us and other
bodies—a kind of thing-power.
The rhetoric of De Rerum Natura is realist, speaking in an authori-
tative voice, claiming to describe a nature that preexists and outlives
54 JANE BENNETT

us: here are the smallest constituent parts of being (“primordial”),

and here are the principles of association governing them.21 It is easy
to criticize this realism: Lucretius quests for the thing itself, but there
is no there there—or, at least, no way for us to grasp it or know it,
for the thing is always already humanized, its object-status arises the
very instant something comes into our awareness. Adorno levels this
charge explicitly against Heidegger’s phenomenology, which Adorno
interprets as a “realism” that “seeks to breach the walls which thought
has built around itself, to pierce the interjected layer of subjective
positions that have become a second nature.” Heidegger’s aim, that
is, “to philosophize formlessly, so to speak, purely on the ground of
things” (Adorno 1973, 78),22 is for Adorno as futile, and it is produc-
tive of a violent “rage” against nonidentity.23
But Lucretius’s poem, like Kafka’s stories, Sullivan’s travelogue,
Vernadsky’s speculations, and my account of the gutter of Cold
Spring Lane, does offer this potential benefit: it can direct sensory,
linguistic, and imaginative attention toward a material vitality. The
advantage of such tales, with their ambitious naiveté, is that though
they “disavow . . . the tropological work, the psychological work, and
the phenomenological work entailed in the human production of
materiality,” they do so “in the name of avowing the force of questions
that have been too readily foreclosed by more familiar fetishizations:
the fetishization of the subject, the image, the word.”24
There is a rich archive in Euro-American political theory for
thinking about materiality, from Plato’s depiction of the ghostly
objects in the Cave to Marx’s invention of a distinctly historical
materialism to twentieth-century feminist theories of the body. In
many of these sources, there is, quite naturally, a focus on the power
of humans—their minds, their bodies, and the interactions between
the two powers. To the extent that politics is figured as a human
field of action, the technophysical “stuff ” of politics has tended to
register in political theory as a set of (enabling or constraining)
material conditions for what is imagined as the ultimate stuff of
politics: humans acting in concert. I have in this essay drawn on
some (quasi)canonical writers, in particular, Spinoza, Kafka, and
Adorno, to emphasize, even overemphasize, the agentic contributions
 Thing-Power 55

of nonhuman forces (operating in “nature,” in the human body, and

in human artifacts). Such over-emphasis, it seems to me, is needed
to counter the powerfully narcissistic reflex of human language and
thought. To think more carefully about the stuff of politics, then, a
bit of anthropomorphism—the idea that human agency has some
echoes in nonhuman nature—may be useful. Politics does involve
humans acting in concert, but in concert with quite an ontologically
diverse range of actors.

Notes

A version of this essay also appears as chapter 1 of Jane Bennett, Vi-

brant Matter (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–19. The
version printed here originally appeared as Jane Bennett, “The Force
of Things,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (2004): 347–72. Copyright 2004,
Sage Publications.

1 There is too much good work here in feminist theory, queer stud-
ies, and cultural studies to cite. The three volumes of Michel Feher
(1989) offer one map of the terrain. See also Butler (1993, 1998),
Brown (1995), Ferguson (1991), and Gatens (1996).
2 Spinoza links, in this famous letter, his theory of conatus to a critique
of the notion of human free will: “Now this stone, since it is conscious
only of its endeavor [conatus] and is not at all indifferent, will surely
think that it is completely free, and that it continues in motion for
no other reason than it so wishes. This, then, is that human freedom
which all men boast of possessing, and which consists solely in this,
that men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes
by which they are determined” (Spinoza 1995, epistle 58). Hasana
Sharp (2007, 740) argues that the analogy between humans and
stones “is not as hyperbolic as it seems at first glance. For Spinoza,
all beings, including stones . . . include a power of thinking that
corresponds exactly to the power of their bodies to be disposed in
different ways, to act and be acted upon. . . . Likewise every being,
to the extent that it preserves its integrity amidst infinitely many
other beings, as a stone surely does, is endowed with . . . a desire
56 JANE BENNETT

to . . . preserve and enhance its life to the extent that its nature allows.”
3 Yitshak Melamed goes further to say that “since the doctrine of the
conatus . . . provide[s] the foundations for Spinoza’s moral theory,
it seems likely that we could even construct a moral theory for
hippopotamuses and rocks” (Melamed 2010, n59).
4 De Vries (2006) seems to affirm this association when he wonders
whether Spinoza’s picture of interacting, conatus-driven bodies could
possibly account for the creative emergence of the new: “it would
seem that excess, gift, the event . . . have no place here” (22). Why?
Because the only plausible locus of creativity is, for de Vries, one
that is “quasi-spiritual,” hence Spinoza’s second attribute of God/
Nature, i.e., thought or ideas. But what if materiality itself harbors
creative vitality?
5 On the effectivity of trash, see Tim Edensor’s (2005) fascinating
work.
6 See Dumm (1999, 7) for a subtle reckoning with the “obscure
power of the ordinary.” My attempt to speak on behalf of “things”
is a companion project to Dumm’s attempt to mine the ordinary
as a potential site of resistance to conventional and normalizing
practices.
7 Thoreau (1949, 313) trained his gaze on things with faith that “the
perception of surfaces will always have the effect of miracle to a
sane sense.”
8 For a good analysis of the implications of the trash-and-waste culture
for democracy, see Buell and DeLuca (1996).
9 Tiffany (2001) draws an analogy between riddles and materiality
per se: both are suspended between subject and object and engage
in “transubstantiations” from the organic to the inorganic and the
earthly and the divine. In developing his materialism from out of
an analysis of literary forms, Tiffany challenges the long-standing
norm that regards science as “the sole arbiter in the determination
of matter” (75). He wants to pick “the lock that currently bars the
literary critic from addressing the problem of material substance”
(77).
10 Though, it is more accurate to say that this efficacy belongs less to
minerals alone than to the combined activities of a variety of bodies
and forces acting as an agentic assemblage.
11 The efficacy of moralism in addressing social problems is overrated.
 Thing-Power 57

The antimoralism that is one of the implications of a vital materi-

alism is a dangerous game to play and not one I wish to play out
to its logical extreme. I aim not to eliminate the practice of moral
judgment but to increase the friction against the moralistic reflex.
12 Romand Coles offers a sustained interpretation of Adorno as an
ethical theorist: negative dialectics is a “morality of thinking” that
can foster generosity toward others and toward the nonidentical
in oneself. Coles argues that Adorno seeks a way to acknowledge
and thereby mitigate the violence done by conceptualization and
the suffering imposed by the quest to know and control all things
(Coles 1997, chap. 2).
13 Adorno (1973) also describes this pain as the “guilt of a life which
purely as a fact will strangle other life” (364). Coles (1997) calls it the
“ongoing discomfort that solicits our critical efforts” (89). Adorno
does not elaborate or defend his claim that the pain of conceptual
failure can provoke or motivate an ethical will to redress the pain
of social injustice. But surely some defense is needed, for history
has shown that even if the pangs of nonidentity engender in the
self the idea that “things should be different,” this moral awakening
does not always result in “social change in practice.” In other words,
there seems to be a second gap, alongside that between concept and
thing, that needs to be addressed: the gap between recognizing the
suffering of others and engaging in ameliorative action. Elsewhere
I have argued that one source of the energy required is love of the
world or enchantment with a world of vital materiality; Adorno sees
more ethical potential in suffering and a sense of loss. He “disdained
the passage to affirmation,” contending that the experience of the
“fullness of life” is “inseparable from . . . a desire in which violence
and subjugation are inherent. . . . There is no fullness without biceps-
flexing” (385, 378). Nonidentity is dark and brooding, and it makes
itself known with the least distortion in the form of an unarticulated
feeling of resistance, suffering, or pain. From the perspective of the
vital materialist, Adorno teeters on the edge of what Thomas Dumm
(1999, 169) described as “the overwhelming sense of loss that could
swamp us when we approach [the thing’s] unknowable vastness.”
14 “Preponderance of the object is a thought of which any pretentious
philosophy will be suspicious. . . . [Such] protestations . . . seek to
drown out the festering suspicion that heteronomy might be mightier
58 JANE BENNETT

than the autonomy of which Kant . . . taught. . . . Such philosophical

subjectivism is the ideological accompaniment of the . . . bourgeois
I” (Adorno 1973, 189).
15 The gap between concept and thing can never be closed, and ac-
cording to Albrecht Wellmer, Adorno believes that this lack of
conciliation can be withstood only “in the name of an absolute,
which, although it is veiled in black, is not nothing. Between the
being and the non-being of the absolute there remains an infinitely
narrow crack through which a glimmer of light falls upon the world,
the light of an absolute which is yet to come into being” (Wellmer
1998, 171; italics added).
16 Thanks to Lars Toender for alerting me to the messianic dimension
of Adorno’s thinking. One can here note Adorno’s admiration for
Kant, who Adorno read as having found a way to assign transcen-
dence an important role while making it inaccessible in principle:
“What finite beings say about transcendence is the semblance of
transcendence; but as Kant well knew, it is a necessary semblance.
Hence the incomparable metaphysical relevance of the rescue of
semblance, the object of esthetics” (Adorno 1973, 393). For Adorno,
“the idea of truth is supreme among the metaphysical ideas, and this
is why . . . one who believes in God cannot believe in God, why the
possibility represented by the divine name is maintained, rather, by
him who does not believe” (401–2). According to Coles, it does not
matter to Adorno whether the transcendent realm actually exists;
rather, what matters is the “demand . . . placed on thought” by its
promise (see Coles 1997, 114).
17 There is, of course, no definitive way to prove either ontological
imaginary. Morton Schoolman argues that Adorno’s approach,
which explicitly leaves open the possibility of a divine power of
transcendence, is thus preferable to a materialism that seems to
close the question. See his Reason and Horror (Althusser 2001).
18 In response to Foucault’s claim that “perhaps one day, this century
will be known as Deleuzean,” Deleuze (1995, 88–89) described his
own work as naive: “[Foucault] may perhaps have meant that I was
the most naive philosopher of our generation. In all of us you find
themes like multiplicity, difference, repetition. But I put forward al-
most raw concepts of these, while others work with more mediations.
I’ve never worried about going beyond metaphysics. . . . I’ve never
 Thing-Power 59

renounced a kind of empiricism. . . . Maybe that’s what Foucault

meant: I wasn’t better than the others, but more naive, producing
a kind of art brut, so to speak, not the most profound but the most
innocent.” My thanks to Paul Patton for this reference.
19 There are no supernatural bodies or forces for Lucretius, and if we
sometimes seem to have spiritual experiences, that is only because
some kinds and collections of bodies exist below the threshold of
human sense perception.
20 “Without swerve and encounter, [primordia] would be nothing but
abstract elements. . . . So much so that we can say that [prior to] . . .
the swerve and the encounter . . . they led only a phantom existence”
(Althusser 2006, 169).
21 Lucretian physics is the basis for his rejection of religion, his pre-
sentation of death as a reconfiguration of primordia made necessary
by the essential motility of matter, and his ethical advice on how to
live well while existing in one’s current material configuration.
22 For Adorno (1973, 78), Heidegger, “weary of the subjective jail of
cognition,” became “convinced that what is transcendent to sub-
jectivity is immediate for subjectivity, without being conceptually
stained by subjectivity.” But it does not seem to me that Heidegger
makes a claim to immediacy (see Heidegger 1967).
23 For Marx, too, naive realism was the philosophy to overcome. He
wrote his doctoral dissertation on the “metaphysical materialism”
of the Epicureans, and it was against its naive objectivism that
Marx would define his own “historical materialism.” Historical
materialism would not focus on matter but on human-power-laden
socioeconomic structures.
24 This is Bill Brown’s account of Arjun Appadurai’s (1986) project in
The Social Life of Things. See Brown (2002) for a useful survey of
different approaches to the thing.

References

Adorno, Theodor. 1973. Negative Dialectics. New York: Continuum.

Althusser, Louis. 2001. Reason and Horror. New York: Routledge.
———. 2006. “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the En-
counter.” In Philosophy of the Encounter, trans. François Matheron,
Oliver Corpet, and G. M. Goshgarian, 163–207. London: Verso.
60 JANE BENNETT

Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The Social Life of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.
Brown, Bill. 2002. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1: 1–22.
Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Buell, John, and Tom DeLuca. 1996. Sustainable Democracy: Individuality
and the Politics of the Environment. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge.
———. 1998. “Merely Cultural.” New Left Review 227: 33–44.
Coles, Romand. 1997. Rethinking Generosity. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press.
De Landa, Manuel. 2000. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New
York: Zone Books.
———. 2003. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Con-
tinuum.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books.
———. 1995. Negotiations. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia
University Press.
De Vries, Hent. 2006. Introduction to Political Theologies, ed. Hent de
Vries and Lawrence Eugene Sullivan. New York: Fordham Univer-
sity Press.
Dumm, Thomas L. 1999. A Politics of the Ordinary. New York: New
York University Press.
Edensor, Tim. 2005. “Waste Matter: The Debris of Industrial Ruins and
the Disordering of the Material World.” Journal of Material Culture
10, no. 3: 311–22.
Feher, Michel, ed., with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi. 1989. Fragments
for a History of the Human Body. New York: Zone Books.
Ferguson, Kathy. 1991. The Man Question. Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press.
Frow, John. 2001. “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man.” Critical Inquiry (Au-
tumn): 270–85.
Gatens, Moira. 1996. Imaginary Bodies. New York: Routledge.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 2002. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1967. What Is a Thing? Trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and
Vera Deutsch. New York: Gateway.
Kafka, Franz. 1983. “Cares of a Family Man.” In Complete Stories, ed.
Nahum N. Glatzer, 427–29. New York: Schocken.
 Thing-Power 61

Latour, Bruno. 1997. “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications.”

CSI-Paris. http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9801/
msg00019.html.
———. 2004. The Politics of Nature. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Levene, Nancy. 2004. Spinoza’s Revelation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lucretius. 1995. De Rerum Natura. In The Epicurean Philosophers, ed.
John Gaskin, 78–304. New York: Everyman.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1997. Postmodern Fables. Trans. Georges van den
Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. 1995. What Is Life? Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Mathews, Freya. 2003. For Love of Matter. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Melamed, Yitzhak. 2010. “Spinoza’s Anti-humanism.” In The Rational-
ists, ed. Carlos Fraenkel, Dario Perinetti, and Justin Smith. New
York: Springer.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1981. The Phenomenology of Perception. New
York: Routledge.
Mitchell, W. J. Thomas. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and
Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pietz, William. 1997. “Death of the Deodand: Accursed Objects and the
Money Value of Human Life.” Res 31: 97–108.
Rahman, Momin, and Anne Witz. 2002. “What Really Matters? The
Elusive Quality of the Material in Feminist Thought.” Paper presented
to the annual congress of the Canadian Sociology andAnthropology
Association, Toronto.
Rorty, Richard. 1995. Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to
His Critics. Ed. Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt
University Press.
Sharp, Hasana. 2007. “The Force of Ideas in Spinoza.” Political Theory
35, no. 6: 732–55.
Spinoza, Baruch. 1982. The Ethics with the Treatise on the Emendation of
the Intellect and Selected Letters. Trans. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis,
Ind.: Hackett.
———. 1995. Spinoza: The Letters. Trans. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis,
Ind.: Hackett.
Sullivan, Robert. 1998. The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures on the
62 JANE BENNETT

Edge of the City. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.

Thoreau, Henry. 1949. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Vol. 4.
Ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. New York: Houghton
Mifflin.
———. 1973. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon
Shanley. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Tiffany, Daniel. 2001. “Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and
Poetic Obscurity.” Critical Inquiry 28: 72–98.
Wellmer, Albrecht. 1998. Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Moder-
nity, trans. David Midgley. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
 3 Materiality, Experience,
and Surveillance
william e. connolly

Nature, Culture, Immanence

I seek to come to terms with the materiality of perception by

placing Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze into
conversations with each other and neuroscience. Such a conversation
has been obstructed by the judgment that Merleau-Ponty is a phe-
nomenologist whereas the latter two are opposed to phenomenology.
My sense, however, is that there is a phenomenological moment in
both Foucault and Deleuze. Moreover, the conception of the sub-
ject they criticize is one from which Merleau-Ponty progressively
departed. He also moved toward a conception of nonhuman nature
that, he thought, was needed to redeem themes in the Phenomenology
of Perception. This double movement—revising the idea of the subject
and articulating a conception of nature compatible with it—draws
Merleau-Ponty closer to what I will call a philosophy of immanence.
Whether that migration was completed or punctuated by a moment
of transcendence is a question I will not answer here.
By immanence I mean a philosophy of becoming in which the
universe is not dependent on a higher power. It is reducible neither
to mechanistic materialism, dualism, theo-teleology, nor the absent
God of minimal theology. It concurs with the last three philosophies
that there is more to reality than actuality. But that “more” is not
given by a robust or minimal God. We bear no debts or primordial
guilt for being, even if there are features of the human condition that

63
64 WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

tempt many to act as if we do;1 rather, there are uncertain exchanges

between stabilized formations and mobile forces that subsist within
and below them. Biological evolution, the evolution of the universe,
radical changes in politics, and the significant conversion experiences
of individuals attest to the periodic amplification of such circuits of
exchange.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari state the idea this way. First,
they challenge the idea of transcendence lodged “in the mind of
a god, or in the unconscious of life, of the soul, or of language . . .
always inferred” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 266). Second, they af-
firm historically shifting “relations of movement and rest, speed and
slowness between unformed elements, or at last between elements
that are relatively unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds”
(266). Such a philosophy of “movement and rest” does not imply
that everything is always in flux, though its detractors often reduce
it to that view.2 It means that though any species, thing, system, or
civilization may last for a long time, nothing lasts forever. Each force
field (set in the chrono-time appropriate to it) oscillates between
periods of relative arrest and those of heightened imbalance and
change, followed again by new stabilizations. Neither long cycles of
repetition, nor linear causality, nor an intrinsic purpose exist in be-
ing, but, as the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Ilya Prigogine (2003,
65) puts it, “our universe is far from equilibrium, nonlinear and full
of irreversible processes.”
There is no denial that we humans—while often differing from
one another—judge the new outcomes to which we are exposed or
have helped to usher into being. What is denied is that the judg-
ments express an eternal law or bring us into attunement with an
intrinsic purpose of being. For immanent materialists deny there
is such a law or intrinsic purpose. We anchor our ethics elsewhere
and in a different way. Immanent materialism is defined by contrast
to mechanistic materialism, too. Many causal relations are not sus-
ceptible to either efficient or mechanical modes of analysis. There
are efficient causes, as when, to take a classic example, one billiard
ball moves another in a specific direction. But emergent causality—
the dicey process by which new entities and processes periodically
surge into being—is irreducible to efficient causality. It is a mode in
which new forces can trigger novel patterns of self-organization in
 Materiality, Experience, and Surveillance 65

a thing, species, system, or being, sometimes allowing something

new to emerge from the swirl back and forth between them: a new
species, state of the universe, weather system, ecological balance, or
political formation.
Merleau-Ponty traveled from his early work on perception to an
image that draws humanity closer to the rest of nature than dominant
philosophies of the past had proposed. A certain pressure to pursue
that journey was always there: a layered theory of human embodiment
faces pressure to identify selective affinities between the capacities of
humans and other living beings and physical systems.
Consider some statements from Nature, a collection of lectures
given by Merleau-Ponty just before his untimely death:

Thus, for instance, the Nature in us must have some relation to Nature
outside of us; moreover, Nature outside of us must be unveiled to
us by the Nature that we are. . . . We are part of some Nature, and
reciprocally, it is from ourselves that living beings and even space
speak to us. (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 206)

Here Merleau-Ponty solicits affinities between human and nonhu-

man nature. Does he also suggest that once preliminary affinities have
been disclosed, it is possible to organize experimental investigations
to uncover dimensions of human and nonhuman nature previously
outside the range of that experience? And that these findings might
then be folded into an enlarged experience of ourselves and the world?3
If so, when the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, using magnetic
imaging and other technologies of observation, exposes body–brain
processes in the production of phantom pain exceeding those as-
sumed in Merleau-Ponty’s experiential account of it, those findings
could be folded into the latter’s account along with the techniques
Ramachandran invented to relieve such pain4 (Ramachandran 1998).
Here experimental and experiential perspectives circulate back and
forth, with each sometimes triggering a surprising change in the
other. Consider another formulation:

All these ideas (vitalism, entelechy) suppose preformation, yet

modern embryology defines the thesis of epigenesis. . . . The future
must not be contained in the present. . . . It would be arbitrary to
66 WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

understand this history as the epiphenomenon of a mechanical cau-

sality. Mechanistic thinking rests upon a causality which traverses
and never stops in something. (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 152)

“The future must not be contained in the present.” Just as the

future of human culture is not sufficiently determined by efficient
causes from the past, in nonhuman nature, too—when the chrono-
periods identified are appropriate to the field in question—the future
is not sufficiently contained in the present. Now mechanical causality,
vitalism, and entelechy, on Merleau-Ponty’s reading of them at least,
bite the dust together.
But if the future is not sufficiently contained in the present, what
enables change over short and long periods? Here Merleau-Ponty
approaches an orientation now familiar in the work of scientists such
as Ilya Prigogine in chemistry, Brian Goodwin and Lynn Margulis
in biology, Antonio Damasio and Ramachandran in neuroscience,
and Stephen Gould in evolutionary biology:5

The outlines of the organism in the embryo constitute a factor of

imbalance. It is not because humans consider them as outlines that
they are such but because they break the current balance and fix the
conditions for a future balance. (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 156)

The “imbalance” noted by Merleau-Ponty is close to what Gilles

Deleuze calls the “asymmetry of nature,” an energized asymmetry
that periodically sets the stage, when other conditions are in place,
for old formations to disintegrate and new ones to surge into being.
It bears a family resemblance to Prigogine’s account of systems that
enter a period of “disequilibrium” and to the behavior “on the edge
of chaos” that Brian Goodwin studies when a species either evolves
into a new, unpredictable one or faces extinction. Merleau-Ponty,
in alliance with these thinkers, does not shift from a mechanical
conception of natural order to a world of chaos. He suggests that in
each object domain, periods of imbalance alternate with those of new
and imperfect stabilizations. I take these formulations to support the
adventure pursued here.
 Materiality, Experience, and Surveillance 67

The Complexity of Perception

Visual perception involves a complex mixing—during the half-
second delay between the reception of sensory experience and the
formation of an image—of language, affect, feeling, touch, and an-
ticipation.6 This mixing is set in the memory-infused life of human
beings whose experience is conditioned by the previous discipline
of the chemical-electrical network in which perception is set and
the characteristic shape of human embodiment and motility. Hu-
man mobility is enabled by our two-leggedness and the position of
the head at the top of the body, with two eyes pointed forward. This
mode of embodiment, for instance, encourages the production of
widespread analogies between a future “in front of us” and the past
“behind us.” Most important, the act of perception is permeated by
implicit reference to the position and mood of one’s own body in
relation to the phenomenal field (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 100). Experi-
ence is grasped, says Merleau-Ponty (1962, 52), “first in its meaning
for us, for that heavy mass which is our body, whence it comes about
that it always involves reference to the body.” My “body appears to
me as an attitude directed towards a certain existing or possible task.
And indeed its spatiality is not a spatiality of position but a spatiality
of situation” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 100).
We also need to come to terms with how perception is intersensory,
never fully divisible into separate sense experiences.7 For example,
visual experience is saturated with the tactile history of the experi-
encing agent. The tactile and the visual are interwoven in that my
history of touching objects similar to the one in question is woven
into my current vision of it. A poignant example of this is offered by
Laura Marks as she elucidates a film scene in which the composition
of voice and the grainy visual image convey the daughter’s tactile
memory of her deceased mother’s skin (Marks 2003).
Similarly, language and sense experience are neither entirely
separate nor reducible to one another. They are imbricated in a way
that allows each to exceed the other in experience: “the sense being
held within the word, and the word being the external existence of
the sense” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 183).8
68 WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

Continuing down this path, Merleau-Ponty indicates how the

color of an object triggers an affective charge. People with specific
motor disturbances take jerky movements if the color field is blue
and more smooth ones if it is red or yellow. And in so-called normal
subjects, too, the visual field of color is interwoven with an experience
of warmth or coldness that precedes and infuses specific awareness
of it, depending on whether the field is red or blue (Merleau-Ponty
1962, 209, 211). This field of interinvolvement, in turn, flows into that
between color and sound, in which specific types of sound infect
the experience of color, intensifying or dampening it (228). Words
participate in this process, too, as when the “word ‘hard’ produces a
stiffening of the back or neck.” Even “before becoming the indication
of a concept the word is first an event which grips my body, and this
grip circumscribes the area of significance to which it has reference”
(235). The “before” in this sentence does not refer to an uncultured
body but to a preliminary tendency in encultured beings. To put
the point another way, the imbrications between embodiment, lan-
guage, disposition, perception, and mood are always in operation.
A philosophy of language that ignores these essential connections
may appear precise and rigorous, but it does so by missing circuits
of interinvolvement through which perception is organized.
These preliminary experiences vary across individuals and cul-
tures, and those variations are important to an appreciation of cultural
diversity. The key point, however, is that some series of interinvolve-
ments is always encoded into the preliminary character of experience,
flowing into the tone and color of perception. Phenomenologists,
Buddhist monks, corporate advertisers, cultural anthropologists,
neuroscientists, TV dramatists, Catholic priests, filmmakers, and
evangelical preachers are attuned to such memory-soaked patterns of
interinvolvement. Too many social scientists, analytic philosophers,
rational choice theorists, deliberative democrats, and “intellectualists”
of various sorts are less so. An intellectualist, to Merleau-Ponty, is one
who overstates the autonomy of conceptual life, the independence of
vision, the self-sufficiency of reason, the power of pure deliberation,
and/or the self-sufficiency of argument.
Perception not only has multiple layers of intersensory memory
folded into it, it is suffused with anticipation. This does not mean
 Materiality, Experience, and Surveillance 69

merely that you anticipate a result and then test it against the effect
of experience. It means that perception expresses a set of anticipa-
tory expectations that help to constitute what it actually becomes.
The case of the word hardness already suggests this. A more recent
experiment by neuroscientists dramatizes the point. The body–brain
patterns of the respondents were observed through various imaging
techniques, and the subjects were asked to follow a series of pictures
moving from left to right. The images at first glance look the same,
but on closer inspection, your experience shifts abruptly from that of
the bare head of a man to the nude body of a woman as you proceed
down the line of images. People vary in terms of the point at which
the gestalt switch occurs. More compellingly, when asked to view the
series a second time from right to left, almost everyone identifies the
shift from the nude woman to the man’s face further down the trail
than she had in moving from left to right. The authors contend that
the body–brain processes catalyzed by this series engender dicey
transitions between two embodied attractors. The first attractor re-
tains its hold as long as possible; the second, triggered as you move
from right to left, is retained until pressed to give way to another.
The suddenness of shift in experience correlates with dramatic shifts
in observable body and brain patterns:

By placing electrodes on the appropriate muscles to measure their

electromagnetic activity, Kelso could clearly measure the sudden shift
from one pattern to another. The underlying idea in Kelso’s studies
was that the brain is a self-organizing, pattern forming system that
operates close to instability points, thereby allowing it to switch
flexibly and spontaneously from one coherent state to another. (Sole
and Goodwin 2000, 142–43)

The “imbalance” that Merleau-Ponty identifies in embryos also

operates in the perception of mobile human beings who must respond
to rapidly shifting contexts.9 Perception, to be flexible, is organized
through multiple points of “instability,” through which one set of
memory-infused attractors gives way to another when the pressure
of the encounter becomes intense enough. Each attractor helps to
structure the actuality of perception.
70 WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

Perception could not function without a rich history of interin-

volvements between embodiment, movement, body image, touch,
sight, smell, language, affect, and color. The anticipatory structure of
perception enables it to carry out its functions in the rapidly changing
contexts of everyday life; it also opens it to subliminal influence by
mystics, priests, lovers, politicians, parents, military leaders, film-
makers, teachers, talk show hosts, and TV advertisers.
Another way of putting the point is to say that the actuality of
perception is “normative,” where that word now means the application
of a culturally organized attractor to a situation roughly responsive to
it. A visual percept, for instance, contains the norm of a well-rounded
object, compensating for the limitations of the particular position
from which it starts. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “the unity of either
the subject or the object is not a real unity, but a presumptive unity
on the horizon of experience. We must rediscover, as anterior to the
ideas of subject and object . . . that primordial layer at which both
things and ideas come into being” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 219; italics
added). The import of this presumptive unity becomes more clear
through the discussions of depth and discipline.

Visibility and Depth

Merleau-Ponty concludes that we make a singular contribution to
the experience of spatial depth, even though, as Diana Coole (2000,
132) says, “the depth and perspective that permit visual clarity belong
to neither seer nor seen [alone], but unfold where they meet.”10 The
experience of depth, you might say, incorporates different possible
perspectives on the object into the angle of vision from which it is now
engaged. The experience is ubiquitous. If you draw a Necker cube on
a flat piece of paper, depth will immediately be projected into it. On
viewing the image for a few seconds, the image becomes inverted so
that a figure in which depth had moved from left to right now flips
in the other direction. On learning how to produce the flips—by
focusing your eye first on the bottom right angle and then on the top
left angle—it becomes clear how difficult it is to purge experience of
depth. The short interval between the switch of gaze and the flip of
the angle also testifies to the half-second delay between the reception
of sensory experience and cultural participation in the organization
 Materiality, Experience, and Surveillance 71

of perception. It teaches us that perception must be disciplined and

draws attention to the fugitive interval during which that organiza-
tion occurs. René Magritte dramatizes the vertigo that arises when
anticipation of depth is stymied in The Blank Signature. A woman is
riding a horse in the woods. But the lines of visibility and invisibility
in the painting confound those we anticipate. The horse’s back left
leg curls behind a tree trunk in front of its torso, and just where the
scenic background should slide behind the horse, it appears in front
of one part of its torso. Now you have a strangely familiar scene in
which it is impossible to redeem the depth experience solicits. The
painting dramatizes how the visible, set against a field of the invisible,
ordinarily helps to set the place, import, and depth of an image. The
power of depth to insist is further emphasized when you discern how
the anticipation of it is realized to the immediate left and right of
the woman on the horse. But what enables the experience of depth
when perception is unencumbered by such contrivances?
Perception depends on projection into experience of multiple
perspectives you do not now have. This automatic projection into
experience also makes it seem that objects see you as you see them.
Merleau-Ponty (1968, 13; italics added) puts it this way: in this “strange
adhesion of the seer and the visible . . . I feel myself looked at by the
things, my activity is equally a passivity.”11 To have the experience of
depth is to feel things looking at you, to feel yourself as object. This
self-awareness is usually subliminal, but it becomes more apparent
when you shift from the process of action-oriented perception to
dwell in experience itself. The result is uncanny: to see is to experi-
ence oneself as an object of visibility, not simply in that you realize
someone could look at you because you are composed of opaque
materiality but also because the very structure of vision incorporates
into itself the projection of what it would be like to be seen from
a variety of angles. This experience codifies, in the anticipatory
structure of perception, potential angles of vision on you and what
it would be like to touch, hold, or move the object from different
angles. The codification of operational angles of possible action and
the background sense of being seen combine to produce depth.
That codification, however, cannot be reduced to the sum of all
angles, to a view from nowhere. It cannot because each potential angle
72 WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

of vision fades into a diffuse background against which it is set. The

codification, then, is closer to a view from everywhere, a view projected
as a norm into an experience that depends on implicit reference to it.
In an essay on Merleau-Ponty, Sean Dorrance Kelly pulls these themes
of anticipation and perspective together. First, the experience of a
particular light or color is normative in the sense that “each presenta-
tion of the color in a given lighting . . . makes an implicit reference
to a more completely presented real color . . . if the lighting context
were changed in the direction of the norm. This real color, implicitly
referred to . . . is the constant color I see the color to be.” Second,
“the view from everywhere” built into the experience of depth is not
a view you could ever actually have, separate from these memory
soaked projections, because there is no potential perspective that could
add up the angles and backgrounds appropriate to all perspectives.
Backgrounds are not additive in this way. The experience of depth is
rather “a view . . . from which my own perspective is felt to deviate”
(Kelly 2005, 85, 92). The perception of depth anticipates a perspective
from which my actual angle of vision is felt to deviate. Perception
thus closes into itself as actuality, a norm it cannot in fact instantiate.
Perception is anticipatory and normative. The only thing Kelly omits
is how the perception of depth is also one in which “I feel myself
looked at by things,” in which my activity of perception “is equally a
passivity.” That theme has consequences for contemporary politics.

Perception and Discipline

It might still seem that the gap between Michel Foucault and Merleau-
Ponty remains too large to enable either to illuminate the other. Did
not the early Foucault argue that because of the opacity of “life, labor
and language,” the structure of experience cannot provide a solid base
from which to redeem a theory of the subject? Did he not say that
the transcendental arguments that phenomenologists seek—whereby
you first locate something indubitable in experience and then show
what conception of the subject is necessarily presupposed by that
experience—cannot be stabilized when the “doubles” of life, labor,
and language fade into obscurity? Yes. But those strictures may be
more applicable to Husserl than to Merleau-Ponty, particularly in
the latter’s later work.
 Materiality, Experience, and Surveillance 73

Foucault speaks of “discipline” as a political anatomy of detail that

molds the posture, demeanor, and sensibilities of the constituencies
subjected to it, “in which power relations have an immediate hold on
[the body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry
out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to enact signs” (Foucault 1977,
25). We note already a difference in rhythm between the sentences
of Foucault and those of Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s sentences
convey an implicit sense of belonging to the world, whereas Foucault’s
often identify or mobilize elements of resistance and disaffection
circulating within modern modalities of experience. The initial con-
nection between these two thinkers across difference is that both see
how perception requires a prior disciplining of the senses in which
a rich history of interinvolvement sets the stage for experience. The
critical relation between corporeocultural discipline and the shape
of experience is emphasized by the fact that adults who have the
neural machinery of vision repaired after having been blind from
birth remain operationally blind unless and until a new history of
interinvolvements between movement, touch, and object manipu-
lation is synthesized into the synapses of the visual system. Only
about 10 percent of the synaptic connections for vision are wired
in at birth. The rest emerge from the interplay between body–brain
pluripotentiality and the history of intersensory experience.12
Let us return to Merleau-Ponty’s finding that to perceive depth
is implicitly to feel yourself as an object of vision. In a disciplinary
society, this implicit sense morphs into a more intensive experience
of being an actual or potential object of surveillance in a national
security state. That latter experience was amplified in the United
States after the al-Qaeda attack of 9/11, the event in which Osama
bin Laden invited George W. Bush to organize the world through
the prism of security against a pervasive, nonstate enemy, and the
cowboy eagerly accepted the invitation. The indubitable experience of
self-visibility now swells into that of being an object of surveillance.
Everyday awareness of that possibility recoils back on the shape and
emotional tone of experience. Traffic cameras, airport screening
devices, the circulation of social security numbers, credit profiles,
medical records, electric identification bracelets, telephone caller ID,
product surveys, National Security Agency sweeps, telephone records,
74 WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

license plates, Internet use profiles, Internal Revenue Service audits,

driver’s licenses, police phone calls for “contributions,” credit card
numbers, DNA records, fingerprints, smellprints, eyeprints, promo-
tion and hiring profiles, drug tests, street and building surveillance
cameras: several of these are used on, in, or at work, voter solicita-
tion, the school, the street, job interviews, police scrutiny, prison
observation, political paybacks, racial profiling, e-mail solicitations,
church judgments, divorce proceedings, and the publication of sexual
proclivities. As such devices proliferate, the experience of potential
observability becomes an active element in experience:13

A whole problematic then develops: that of an architecture that is no

longer built simply to be seen . . . or to observe the external space . . .
but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control—to render
visible those who are inside it . . . an architecture that would operate
to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to provide a hold
on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to them, to make
it possible to know them, to alter them. (Foucault 1977, 172)

True, Foucault’s description of disciplinary society does not deal

adequately with differences in age, class, and race. There is today
an urban underclass that is subjected to general strategies of urban
containment and impersonal modes of surveillance in stores, streets,
public facilities, reform schools, prisons, and schools. There is also a
suburban, upper-middle, career-oriented class enmeshed in detailed
disciplines in several domains, anticipating the day it rises above
them. And there are several other subject positions, too, including
those who rise more or less above generalized surveillance.
Watch out. Are you a war dissenter? Gay? Interested in drugs?
An atheist who talks about it? A critic of the war on terrorism, drug
policies, or government corruption? Sexually active? Be careful. You
may want a new job someday or to protect yourself against this or that
charge. Protect yourself now in anticipation of uncertain possibili-
ties in the future. Discipline yourself in response to future threats.
In advanced capitalism, where the affluent organize life around the
prospect of a long career, many others look for jobs without security
or benefits, and others yet find themselves stuck in illegal, informal,
 Materiality, Experience, and Surveillance 75

and underground economies, the implicit message of the surveillance

society is to remain unobtrusive and politically quiescent by appearing
more devout, regular, and patriotic than the next guy. The implicit
sense of belonging to the world that Merleau-Ponty found folded
into the fiber of experience now begins to ripple and scatter.
Neither Foucault nor Merleau-Ponty, understandably, was as alert
to the electronic media as we must be today. This ubiquitous force
flows into the circuits of discipline, perception, self-awareness, and
conduct. It is not enough to survey the pattern of media ownership.
It is equally pertinent to examine the methods through which it
becomes insinuated into the shape and tone of perception.
Here I note one dimension of a larger topic. To decode electoral
campaigns, it is useful to see how media advertising works. Accord-
ing to Robert Heath, a successful ad executive and follower of recent
work in neuroscience, the most effective product ads target viewers
who are distracted from them. The ad solicits “implicit learning”
below the level of refined intellectual attention. It plants “triggers”
that insinuate a mood and/or association into perception, called
into action the next time the product is seen, mentioned, smelled,
heard, or touched. Implicit learning is key because, unlike the refined
intellectual activity into which it flows, “it is on all the time.” It is
“automatic, almost inexhaustible, in its capacity and more durable”
in retention (Heath 2005, 67).14
The link to Foucault and Merleau-Ponty is that they, too, attend
to the preconscious, affective dimensions of discipline and experi-
ence without focusing on the media. Today, programs such as the
Hannity-Colmes Report, Crossfire, and The O’Reilly Factor infiltrate
the tonalities of political perception. As viewers focus on points
made by guests and hosts, the program is laced with interruptions,
talking-over, sharp accusations, and yelling. The endless reiteration
of those intensities secretes a simple standard of objectivity as the
gold standard of perception while insinuating the corollary suspi-
cion that no one actually measures up to it. As a result, resentment
and cynicism now become coded into the very color of perception.
The cumulative result of the process itself favors a neoconservative
agenda. For cynics typically ridicule the legacy of big government
in employment, services, and welfare while yearning for a figure to
76 WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

reassert the unquestionable authority of the “nation.” A cynic is an

authoritarian who rejects the current regime of authority. Cynical
realists experience the fragility and uncertainty that help to consti-
tute perception. But they join that experience with an overweaning
demand for authority, and they accuse everyone else of failing to
conform to the model of simple objectivity they claim to meet. Jus-
tification of this model is not sustained by showing how they meet
it but by repeated accusations that others regularly fail to do so.
Cynical realism is one response to the complexity of perception.
Another, in a world of surveillance, is self-depoliticization. You avert
your gaze from disturbing events to curtail dangerous temptations
to action. The goal is to avoid close attention or intimidation in
the venues of work, family, school, church, electoral politics, and
neighborhood life. But of course, such a retreat can also amplify a
feeling of resentment against the organization of life itself, opening
up some of these same constituencies for recruitment by the forces
of ressentiment. Such responses can be mixed in several ways. What
is undeniable is that the circuits between discipline, media, layered
memories, and self-awareness find expression in the color of percep-
tion itself. Power is coded into perception.

The Micropolitics of Perception

Sensory interinvolvement, disciplinary processes, detailed modes
of surveillance, media practices of infiltration, congealed attractors,
affective dispositions, self-regulation in response to future suscepti-
bility—these elements participate in perpetual circuits of exchange,
feedback, and reentry, with each loop folding another variation and
degree into its predecessor. The imbrications are so close that it is
impossible to sort out each. The circuits fold, bend, and blend into
each other, inflecting the shape of political experience. Even as they
are ubiquitous, however, there are numerous points of dissonance,
variation, hesitation, and disturbance in them. These interruptions
provide potential triggers to the pursuit of other possibilities. A past
replete with religious ritual clashes with an alternative representa-
tion of God in a film, church, or school; an emergent practice of
heterodox sexuality encourages you to question established habits
in other domains; the interruption of a heretofore smooth career
 Materiality, Experience, and Surveillance 77

path solicits doubts previously submerged in habits of anticipation;

a trip abroad exposes you to disturbing news items and attitudes
seldom allowed expression in your own country; neurotherapy fos-
ters a modest shift in your sensibility; a stock market crash disrupts
assumptions about the future; a new religious experience shakes
you; a terrorist attack folds an implacable desire for revenge into
you; a devastating natural event shakes your faith in providence.
The anticipatory habits of perception are not self-contained; rather,
dominant tendencies periodically bump into minor dispositions,
submerged tendencies, and uncertain incipiencies. The instability of
the attractors and conjunctions that make perception possible also
renders it a ubiquitous medium of power and politics. What might be
done today to open habits of the anticipation of more constituencies
during a time when media politics diverts attention from the most
urgent dilemmas of the day?
Television could be a site on which to run such experiments. A few
dramas do so. I would place Six Feet Under on that list, as it disrupts
a conventional habit of perception and occasionally works to recast
it. But the closer a program is to a “news program” or a “talk show,”
the more it either enacts virulent partisanship, adopts the hackneyed
voice of simple objectivity, or both. What is needed are subtle media
experiments, news and talk shows that expose and address the com-
plexity of experience in a media-saturated society. The Daily Show
and The Colbert Report take a couple of steps in the right direction,
calling into question the voice of simple objectivity through exag-
geration and satirization of it. But much more is needed.
Mark Hansen, in New Philosophy for New Media, pursues this
issue. In chapter 6, he reviews Skulls, an exhibit presented by Robert
Lazzarini at the Whitney Museum in 2000. Lazzarini’s sculptures are
uncanny. They seem like skulls, but you soon find that however you
tilt your head or change your position, it is impossible to vindicate
the anticipation of them. Lazzarini has in fact laser scanned an actual
human skull, reformatted it into several images, and constructed a
few statues from the reformatted images. Now no three-dimensional
image can be brought into alignment with the anticipation triggered
by its appearance. “At each effort to align your point of view with the
perspective of one of these weird sculptural objects, you experience a
78 WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

gradually mounting feeling of incredible strangeness. It is as though

these skulls refuse to return your gaze” (Hansen 2004, 198).
The sense of being seen by the objects you see is shattered by
deformed images that refuse to support that sense. You now feel
“the space around you begin to ripple, to bubble, to infold, as if
it were becoming unstuck from the fixed coordinates of its three
dimensional extension” (Hansen 2004, 198). Skulls, when joined to
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, heightens awareness
of the fugitive role we play in perception by making it impossible
to find an attractor to which it corresponds. These sculptures also
dramatize the role that affect plays in perception, as they jolt the tacit
feeling of belonging to the world that Merleau-Ponty imports into
the depth grammar of experience. The implicit sense of belonging
to the world is transfigured into a feeling of vertigo. Do such experi-
ments dramatize a condition that is already lurking within experi-
ence in a new world marked by the acceleration of tempo and the
exacerbation of surveillance? Or do they show how that sense is still
secure when not disrupted by disturbing experiences? That is a key
question. At a minimum, in conjunction with the work of Merleau-
Ponty and Foucault, they sharpen awareness of the memory-soaked
imbrications between affect, tactility, and vision in the process of
perception. You now call into question simple models of vision and
better appreciate how a disciplinary society inflects affect-imbued
perception. You might even become attracted to experimental strat-
egies to deepen visceral attachment to the complexity of existence
itself during a time when the automatic sense of belonging is often
stretched and disrupted.
None of the preceding responses is automatic. A door merely
opens. Walking through it, more of us may face the complexity of
experience and resist the drive to existential resentment that often
surges up when it is confronted. How could such a temper be cul-
tivated?
As a preliminary, consider some processes and conditions that
disrupt the implicit sense of belonging to the world. They include
the acceleration of speed in many domains of life, including military
deployment, global communication systems, air travel, tourism,
population migrations, fashion, economic transactions, and cultural
 Materiality, Experience, and Surveillance 79

exchanges; a flood of popular films that complicate visual experi-

ence and call the linear image of time into question; publicity about
new discoveries in neuroscience, which include attention to that
half-second delay between sensory reception and the organization
of perception; greater awareness of work in several domains of sci-
ence that transduct the Newtonian model of linear cause into the
ontological uncertainty of emergent causality; scientific speculations
that extend the theory of biological evolution to the unfolding of the
universe itself; increased media attention to events that periodically
shock habitual assumptions coded into perception; media attention
to the devastation occasioned here or there by earthquakes, hur-
ricanes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis; and a vague but urgent
sense that the world’s fragile ecological balance is careening into
radical imbalance.
The signs that these disruptive experiences have taken a toll
are also multiple. They include, on the aggressive/defensive side,
the extreme levels of violence and superhuman heroism in action
films, as they strive to redeem the simple model of objectivism
under unfavorable circumstances; the intensification of accusatory
voices in the media in conjunction with righteous self-assertions
of objectivism; new intensities of apocalyptic prophecy in several
religious movements; the virulence of electoral campaigns; and the
desire for abstract revenge finding expression in preemptive wars,
state regimes of torture, massacres, collective rapes, and the like. Do
those actions express covert drives to take revenge against the very
terms of modern existence itself?
The obverse side of those responses is discernible in other pres-
sures and constituencies. Today more people are less convinced of the
simple model of perception as they seek to consolidate attachment
to a world populated by sensory interinvolvements, attractors, the
complexity of duration, time as becoming, and an uncertain future.
Take, for instance, the receptive responses to minor films such as Far
from Heaven, I Heart Huckabees, Time Code, Blow-up, The Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Memento, Waking Life, Run Lola Run,
and Mulholland Drive.
These films focus on the role of duration in perception, scramble
old habits in this way or that, highlight sensory interinvolvement,
80 WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

challenge simple objectivism, and call the self-certainty of the linear

image of time into question. Some take another turn as well. Going
through and beyond the anxiety fomented by Skulls, they encourage
an awakening that is most apt to emerge after such anxieties have
been tapped. To take one example, I Heart Huckabees hints at multiple
modes of human and nonhuman agency in a pluralistic universe as it
embraces practices it first subjects to mockery, including “existential
detectives,” ecological movements, media advertisements on their
behalf, and micropolitics to increase our attachment to the new
world. The humor is folded into the attachments. It is practiced on
behalf of human self-modesty in a world in which temporality may
be open, human efficacy is fragile, perception is complex, and the
myths of providence, intellectualism, and world mastery are open
to challenge.15
This is the juncture at which the experimental engagements with
film by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2 can be placed into engagement
with Merleau-Ponty on the complexity of perception and Foucault
on modern modes of surveillance. The stage is set for the theme
of chapter 7 in Cinema 2 by discussions of flashbacks that expose
moments of bifurcation in experience, comedic figures who enact
exquisite sensitivity to movements of the world, irrational cuts that
scramble the action image, crystals of time that enact the complexity
of duration, and engagements with “powers of the false” that open
up old patterns of incipience during the organization of perception.
The suggestion is that most of us have already been infected by such
experiences in daily life and by films that dramatize and extend them.
Such dramatizations can, of course, amplify existential resentment,
magnetize drives to reassert the simple model of objectivity, or en-
courage a retreat from public engagement. But Deleuze challenges
all these responses. He encourages tactics to deepen attachment to
the complexity of this world itself so as to challenge bellicose mas-
tery, passive skepticism, and authoritarian cynicism at their nodal
points of inception.
By “this world,” he does not mean the established distribution
of power and political priorities. He means affirmation of the larger
compass of being in which humans are set as opposed to existential
resentment of it or resignation about it. He realizes that people bring
 Materiality, Experience, and Surveillance 81

different interpretations of “the larger compass of being,” but he

also contends that the quality of existential temper insinuated into
those different beliefs makes a difference to the shape and direction
of political life. As he puts it, “whether we are Christians or atheists,
in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this
world” (Deleuze 1989, 172).
In his usage, the term belief cuts deep into incipient dispositions
that infect the color of perception. This is the zone that prophets tap,
and one the media engages too through the interplay of rhythm,
image, music, and sound. Belief touches, for instance, the tighten-
ing of the gut, coldness of the skin, contraction of the pupils, and
hunching of the back that occur when a judgment or faith in which
you are deeply invested is contested or ridiculed. It also touches
those feelings of abundance and joy that emerge periodically when
we sense the surplus of life over the structure of our identities. That
is the surplus Deleuze seeks to mobilize.
It may be important to follow Deleuze’s lead, in part because the
mode of belonging embraced by Merleau-Ponty has been shaken by
the acceleration of pace in many zones of culture and the pervasive
role of the media in everyday life.16
Wider negotiation of attachment to the most fundamental terms
of modern existence would not sanction existing injustices, nor would
it suffice to spawn the critical politics needed today (though some
intellectualists will project both assumptions into this essay). Such
energies, rather, must be cultivated more widely and inserted into
larger circuits of political action. For we no longer inhabit a world
where a sense of belonging is securely installed in the infrastructure
of experience, if we ever did. Nor is it likely that a single religious faith
can be drawn on to repair the deficit, at least without introducing
massive repression into a world where minorities of many types now
inhabit the same territorial spaces. The issue is fundamental.
Let us tarry on the question of existential ethos a bit. My ex-
perience is that many on the Left who point correctly to the insuf-
ficiency of such awakenings move quickly from that point to assert
its irrelevance or to announce its foolishness. They do not want to
seem soft or feminine. Those are the judgments I contest. Work on
the infrastructure of perception is crucial in close conjunction with
82 WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

other modes of politics. To ignore the first dimension is to forfeit

too much to the radical Right as it works to fold dispositions to
fear, anger, and revenge into the very texture of experience. It first
promotes the modes of incipience it seeks and then harvests the dis-
positions it has fomented. So media and film experiments that incite
attachment to a world in which things move faster than heretofore
are not to be demeaned. They do their part. They provide triggers
and catalysts to a more radical, pluralist, and egalitarian politics.
These catalysts are comparable, in their way, to the televangelism
of right-wing preachers and Fox talking heads who incite a will to
revenge as they discount our responsibility to the future of the earth.
The difference is that the preachers inject resentment of this world
into the circuits of perception, whereas the need is to solicit a more
profound attachment to the future of the earth.
Right-wing politics is paradoxical. It resists academic studies
of how perception works but is highly attuned to the operational
politics of perception. That combination forms a powerful political
formula as it poses a threat to a democratic future. The habits of
intellectualism, still haunting the left, take a toll on efforts to forge
a counterpolitical formula, one that infuses care for this world into
militant critiques of current priorities and carries both into a positive
political agenda active on several sites.

Notes

1 You could speak, as Merleau-Ponty occasionally does, of transcen-

dence without the Transcendent. But such a formulation tends to
blur the contestation between alternative faith and philosophies
that needs to be kept alive.
2 In the introduction to Problems and Methods in the Study of Politics,
Shapiro, Smith, and Masoud (2004, 11) reported me to say “that the
world is in a state of constant and unpredictable flux.” That signifies
to me that awareness of one side of my position has been blocked
by the shock of meeting the other.
3 The formulation in fact suggests the doctrine of parallelism intro-
duced by Spinoza in the seventeenth century. For a fine study in
neuroscience that draws on both Spinoza’s philosophy of parallelism
 Materiality, Experience, and Surveillance 83

and his idea that affect always accompanies perception, belief, and
thinking, see Damasio (2003).
4 Some implications of this research for cultural theory are explored
by Connolly; see Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed, chapter 1.
5 See, besides the preceding references to Damasio, Prigogine, and
Ramachandran, Brian Goodwin (1994). In The Structure of Evolu-
tionary Theory, Stephen Jay Gould (2002) emphasizes how close his
revision of Darwinian theory is to the notion of genealogy developed
by Nietzsche.
6 The phrase “the half-second delay” comes out of work in neurosci-
ence pioneered by Benjamin Libet. Merleau-Ponty was certainly
aware of a time lag, however. An excellent discussion of the delay
and its significance can be found in Brian Massumi (2002).
7 This theme is increasingly accepted in neuroscience today. See “Why
You Have at Least 21 Senses,” in New Scientist (2005). The authors
of this article agree, too, that the senses are interinvolved.
8 Such a pattern of interinvolvement will only seem impossible to
those who are captured by the analytic–synthetic dichotomy, in
which every connection is reducible either to a definitional or an
empirical (causal) relation. Once you break that dichotomy, you can
come to terms with the series of memory-infused interinvolvements
through which perception is organized. You are also able to consider
models of causality that transcend efficient causality.
9 In fact, Henri Bergson is better than Merleau-Ponty at focusing at-
tention on the role that the imperative to make perceptual judgments
rapidly as you run through the numerous encounters of everyday
life plays in creating the subtractions and simplifications of opera-
tional perception. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore
the comparative advantages and weaknesses of each perspective.
But if I were to do so, the preceding limitation in Merleau-Ponty
would be balanced against his reflective appreciation of the numer-
ous sensory “interinvolvements” that make perception possible. The
starting point to engage Bergson on these issues is Merleau-Ponty
(1962).
10 This book prompted me to take another look at Merleau-Ponty
in relation to Foucault and Deleuze. Some will protest her asser-
tion, saying that priority must be given either to the subject or to
the object. But they then have to come to terms with the multiple
interinvolvements elucidated by Merleau-Ponty and his judgment
84 WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

that you cannot unsort entirely—once these mixings and remixings

have occurred—exactly what contribution is made by one side or
the other. Even the painter, alert to his powers of perception, is not
“able to say (since the distinction has no meaning) what comes
from him and what comes from things, what the new work adds to
the old ones, or what it has taken from the others” (Merleau-Ponty
1964, 58–59).
11 That text also deepens our experience of the “flesh” in ways that
extend all the points made about the sensorium discussed earlier.
But we cannot pursue that pregnant topic here.
12 For a review of the neuroscience literature on bodily and cultural
elements in the formation of sight, see Adam Zeman (2002, chapters
5 and 6).
13 In April 2005, the Johns Hopkins Gazette released the following
bulletin: “Continuing its efforts to enhance the security of students,
faculty and staff, the university has installed . . . a state of the art
closed-circuit TV system. . . . The system can be programmed to
look for as many as 16 behavior patterns and to assign them a pri-
ority score for operator follow-up. . . . The cameras are helping us
to make the transition to a more fully integrated ‘virtual policing’
system.”
14 Heath is not speaking of subliminal inserts here; he is talking about
advertisements that distract attention from themselves and encourage
the viewer to be distracted too as he inserts connections between
affect, words, and images.
15 It is pertinent to emphasize that the “attachment to this world” spo-
ken of here is not to existing injustices, class suffering, dogmatism,
repression of diversity, and the like but to the human existential
condition itself as it finds expression in a world in which some zones
of life proceed at a rapid tempo. The wager is that the enhancement
of attachment to this world increases the energy and will to oppose
the dangers and injustices built into it.
16 I review strategies, both individual and collective, to rework dis-
positions to perception and sensibility in chapters 4, 5, and 6 of
Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Connolly 2001) and in
“Experience and Experiment” (Connolly 2006).
 Materiality, Experience, and Surveillance 85

References

Connolly, William E. 2001. Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2006. “Experience and Experiment.” Daedalus 135, no. 3 (2006):
67–75.
Coole, Diana. 2000. Negativity and Politics. London: Routledge.
Damasio, Antonio. 2003. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling
Brain. New York: Harcourt.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema II: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlin-
son. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans.
Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan.
New York: Pantheon Books.
Goodwin, Brian. 1994. How the Leopard Changed Its Spots. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Gould, Stephen J. 2002. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hansen, Mark B. N. 2004. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
Heath, Robert. 2005. The Hidden Power of Advertising. Henley-on-
Thames, U.K.: Admap.
Kelly, Sean D. 2005. “Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Mark Hansen, 74–110. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Marks, Laura U. 2003. “The Memory of Touch.” In The Skin of the Film,
122–93. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
———. 1964. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” In Signs,
trans. Richard McCleary, 39–83. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press.
———. 1968. The Visible and Invisible. Trans. Alfonso Lingis. Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
———. 2003. Nature: Course Notes from the College de France. Trans.
Robert Vallier. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
86 WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

New Scientist. 2005. “Why You Have at Least 21 Senses.” January 29.
Prigogine, Ilya. 2003. Is Future Given? Hackensack, N.J.: World Scien-
tific.
Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. 1998. Phantoms in the Brain. New York:
William Morrow.
Shapiro, Ian, Rogers M. Smith, and Tarek E. Masoud, eds. 2004. Prob-
lems and Methods in the Study of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Sole, Ricard, and Brian Goodwin. 2000. Signs of Life: How Complexity
Invades Biology. New York: Basic Books.
Zeman, Adam. 2002. Consciousness: A User’s Guide. New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press.
 part ii

Technological Politics:
Affective Objects and Events
This page intentionally left blank
 4 Materialist Politics:
Metallurgy
andrew barry

H ow might one conceive of the relation between materials

and politics? As is common enough in science and technology
studies, this chapter centers on a case study: the field of metallurgy
and the materiality of metals and other inorganic matter. The danger
of using a case study, of course, is that the case simply becomes an il-
lustration of an idea or principle that has been formulated somewhere
else—that which we already know, and that which we simply want to
make clear—whereas what we would like from a case study is that it
is something more than an example, that it tells us something that we
do not know or creates an effect that is somehow unanticipated. The
case should be placed in a setting where it can resist our explanations
of it in some ways. There should be some irreducibility to the case.
In other words, the case must make a difference.
There are, nonetheless, good reasons to use metals and metallurgy
to think about the relations between materiality and politics. One
reason is simply that there is something of a neglect of the politics
of metals today, whether in terms of their extraction, manufacture
or use, or repair. If the malleability of metals was once viewed as an
index of the transformative capacities of capitalism, today metals
seem to have disappeared from view. We live, according to many
theorists, in a world marked by flows of knowledge and information,
but materials are no longer of much interest. Where once they lay
at the heart of social theory, metals appear to have been relegated
to the backstage. In what follows, however, I am not concerned

89
90 ANDREW BARRY

with the social shaping of metals; rather, I put forward a different

thesis to the classical one, namely, that part of the political interest
of metallurgy derives from its concern, as a form of field science,
with the specificity of the case and the micropolitics of materials.
My method is, to use Marilyn Strathern’s (1995) term, holographic.
Through a study of the politics of a field science that is concerned
with the specificity of the case, I seek to illuminate why a concern
with the specificity of the case is important for those concerned with
the study of politics.
The chapter develops two arguments. One is that metals are not
the hard, inert objects that they are often thought to be. Metals form
part of dynamic, informed assemblages in which the expertise of
metallurgists and other material and social scientists have come to
play a critical part. They have become “informationally enriched,”
and part of the driving force for this informational enrichment comes
from growing efforts to regulate the properties of the materials and
the actions of those who develop and use them. The informational
enrichment of materials, in short, has become a political matter. The
second argument is that part of the political importance of metals
and other inorganic materials derives from a sense that they have an
objectivity and an immalleability that cannot be explained away as
an expression of political ideology or economic interest. Defects in
metals or accidents that derive from or lead to the failure of metallic
and other material structures cannot easily be denied and cannot
simply be viewed as a projection of the imagination of those who
point to their occurrence. It is commonplace to stress the micropo-
litical importance of forms of creative, artistic, and inventive activity.
Yet there is also a way in which natural scientific expertise, and its
public performance, may also disrupt earlier certainties, fostering the
emergence of new objects and sites of contestation. Through their
expertise in the failure of metals and material structures, material
scientists and metallurgists may themselves play an unexpectedly
political part, turning the apparently mundane properties of specific
materials and material structures, such as their fragility or toxicity,
into issues of wider significance. The second part of this chapter fo-
cuses on an example in which a defect in a material structure, an oil
pipeline, is understood to be an index of a much wider set of defects
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 91

in corporate capitalism and its regulation. In this case a critique of

the relations between corporate capital and government relied on the
demonstrability of facts about the properties of specific materials.
If political action often involves the staging of a particular issue as
a matter of collective importance, then nonhuman materials rather
than human subjects were, in this instance, placed firmly center stage
(cf. Rancière 2004a).1

Metals
To begin, it would be a mistake to think that metallurgy is simply
a branch of physics. Indeed, from the point of view of the metal-
lurgist, the properties of metals cannot simply be deduced from
fundamental physical principles.2 Alloys cannot be understood as
combinations of pure substances, and the behavior of metals in the
conditions encountered in power stations or aircraft is quite differ-
ent from any laboratory setting or simulation. Moreover, it would
be a serious mistake to think that physics can simply be applied to
the study of metals: or only if we take the word application to imply
the need for a process, the path, the deviation, of translation (Cal-
lon and Latour 1981). One of the preoccupations of the metallurgist
(and I use the term very broadly in this chapter to include all those
concerned with the technical existence of metals and their relations
to other substances3) is to be concerned with the specificity of the
case rather than account for the case in terms of general principles.
General principles are important, of course, but only so far as they
are not applied in any generalized way and are acknowledged to be
inadequate to the task at hand. The metallurgist expects that materials
will be opaque, that the case will make a difference. In this way, the
metallurgist is a good materialist, aware that materials will always,
in some way, be resistant to external forces and will generate their
own effects (Stengers 1997). Although not all may agree with this
proposition, the socialist historian of science and crystallographer
J. D. Bernal, writing in the early 1950s, reckoned that following the
development of X-ray crystallography, it would be possible for metal-
lurgists and other scientists to begin to take “rational control” over
the internal structure of metals:
92 ANDREW BARRY

The structural studies [following the development of X-ray crystallog-

raphy] . . . explained the primary, economically valuable properties
of metals—their plasticity and hardening, the means by which metals
can be forged, rolled and drawn—and made possible the beginning
of a rational control of these processes. (Bernal 1969, 796)

Though X-ray crystallography played a critical role in the develop-

ment of molecular biology and solid state physics in the immediate
postwar period, Bernal was overenthusiastic about the possibility of
turning metals into what we might call, following Foucault, docile
objects. After all, X-ray crystallography is a technique that can only
be used to determine internal structural features of carefully pre-
pared specimens in a well-equipped laboratory. It cannot be applied
directly to the study of metals in use, or in the field, where it is likely
that they will be subject to variations of stress or temperature and
the effects of chemical action.
Insofar as metallurgy addresses the question of the relation
between the transformation of metals and features of their exter-
nal environment, it addresses a central problem for science and
technology studies (STS). For STS was, of course, for a long time
puzzled about the relation between external (economic and social)
forces and the shape of technologies. In this way, STS rediscovered
a classical problem (D. MacKenzie 1996). In a remarkable passage,
Marx formulated the relation between the historical development of
capitalism, the division of labor in manufacture, and the structure of
metals, precisely in terms of their shape: “manufacture is characterised
by the differentiation of the instruments of labour—a differentiation
whereby tools of a given sort acquire fixed shapes, adapted to each
particular application—and by the specialisation of these instru-
ments, which allows full play to each special tool only in the hands
of a specific kind of worker” (Marx 1973, 460).
Contemporary metallurgy does not confine itself to external
form and shape, however; rather, one of the preoccupations of the
metallurgist is with the question of how external forces and events
become translated or absorbed at the level of molecular structure, and
conversely, how molecular structure is mediated in transformations of
external form. As Roux and Magnin argue, metallurgy is not so much
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 93

the science of the microscopic or the macroscopic but a mesoscopic

field that mediates between scales and spaces and between different
forms and techniques of analysis (Roux and Magnin 2004, 11). The
metallurgist is an expert who is capable of bringing different spaces
and objects of analysis simultaneously into view, moving between
observations of external and internal structure; between quantum
physics, thermodynamics, corrosion chemistry, crystallography, and
management strategy; between idealized atomic models and phase
diagrams and materials in use; and between the human and nonhu-
man elements of assemblages (cf. A. MacKenzie 2002, 16).
From the point of view of contemporary metallurgy, metals are
sites of transformation. Internally, they contain features, such as grain
boundaries, regular lattice structures, impurities, dislocations, and
catalytic sites, that provide the basis for both stability and rigidity
and movement, elasticity and flow, and changes in intensive and
extensive properties. They are spaces within which minute changes
occur routinely, and catastrophic failures may represent the crystal-
lization of a series of infinitesimal movements rather than the im-
mediate impact of an external force (cf. Tarde 2001). It is common
enough in social theory to draw an opposition between the static, the
bounded or the rigid, and the fluid or the mobile. Indeed, for some,
speaking of boundaries and rigidities at all is simply thought to be
passé. But it would be wrong to oppose the solidity of metals with the
fluidity of fluids or boundedness with flow; rather, it is a question of
recognizing that solidity may itself be the product of a certain form
of fluidity. After all, metals are extraordinarily fluid—full of local
sources of transformation and instability—actually more fluid than
fluids. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari took the insights of the metal-
lurgists to be an argument for vitalism: “what metal and metallurgy
bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such,
a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily
hidden or covered, rendered unrecognisable” (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 411). The metallurgist is not just concerned with the shape or
mold within which metals are formed, or with their malleability, but
with what can be termed the continuous modulation or variation of
metals (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; see also Deleuze 1979).
So metals flow, and they share certain properties with living
94 ANDREW BARRY

materials; it is just that they often flow more slowly, and from the
point of view of the metallurgist, more profoundly and irreversibly
than fluids. They can contain historical records of their past in a
way that most fluids cannot. They have surfaces, but their surfaces
are sites of transformation, such as corrosion and friction, as well as
functioning as boundaries (Bowden and Tabor 2001). Metals’ capacity
to continue to exist over years and decades depends on fatigue and
creep: the minute internal transformation of metals under fluctuat-
ing conditions of stress and temperature. So metals are quite unlike
glass (which may shatter under the impact of an external force) or
many fluids (which may simply move to another place, adapting to
the shape of the container in which they are placed). Metals have
the capacity to render external energies into novel internal forms,
“modifying [themselves] through the invention of new internal
structures” (Simondon 1992, 305). Metals are solid and hard and (for
a period) can endure without ever remaining the same.4 Their stabil-
ity as material forms is intimately associated with both their internal
transformation and their fragility (Roux and Magnin 2004).
But if metals have something of a metastable existence, passing
slowly between states, they also come to exist in other forms gener-
ated through the work of metallurgists and the demands of regula-
tors. In Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers’s account of the History of
Chemistry, instead of merely imposing a shape on matter, chemists
proffer a “different notion of matter”:

Whether functional or structural, new materials are no longer

intended to replace traditional materials. They are made to solve
specific problems, and for this reason they embody a different no-
tion of matter. Instead of imposing a shape on the mass of material,
one develops an “informed material” in the sense that the material
structure becomes richer and richer in information. Accomplishing
this requires detailed comprehension of the microscopic structure of
materials, because it is in playing with these molecular, atomic and
even subatomic structures that one can invent materials adapted to
industrial demands and control the factors needed for their repro-
duction, whether they are new or traditional. (Bensaude-Vincent
and Stengers 1996, 206)
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 95

The same observation applies to metallurgy. The product of the

contemporary metallurgist’s labor is not necessarily a new metal; it
is likely to be the “informational enrichment” of materials, multi-
plying their forms of existence. Through the work of metallurgists,
metals acquire multiple lives: in simulations, micrographs, as X-ray
crystallography, and samples taken from materials in use. In each of
these settings, metals exist in different forms (more or less prepared,
more or less purified, more or less isolated from other chemicals),
which depend on particular informational–material practices of
experiment and field research (cf. Mol 2002, 6; Barry 2005). Metals
not only have a lively existence, their forms of existence increasingly
depend on the informational–material assemblages through which
they circulate. Moreover, although metallurgy might not provide the
basis for the level of control of the properties of metals envisaged
by Bernal, it nonetheless plays a critical role in their management
and government. Consider, for example, the importance of the tests
and measurements that are routinely carried out on systems such as
power stations, aircraft, and oil platforms to ensure their integrity
and safety. Such measurements are governmental acts: they are in-
tended to manage the potentially unruly conduct of sociomaterial
assemblages, aligning them with broader economic and governmental
objectives. Just as the regulation of drugs demands the multiplica-
tion of their forms of existence as informed materials (through in
vivo and in vitro investigations and through clinical and preclinical
trials), metals are also subject to a series of commercial and regula-
tory tests, the results of which may or may not be made public (cf.
Barry 2005; McGoey 2007).
Metallurgy might be described as something of a social and politi-
cal science, if we understand the notion of the social in the sense given
to it by the sociologist, Gabriel Tarde. For Tarde it was possible to refer
to atomic or molecular societies as well as human societies, and he
argued that the same concepts could refer to the societies described by
the physical and life sciences as much as those analyzed by sociologists
(Tarde 1999). The metallurgist might follow Tarde in acknowledging
that there is no discontinuity between the realm of the social and the
natural, the human and the nonhuman, or between the informational
and the material, the living and the nonliving (Whatmore 2006; Barry
96 ANDREW BARRY

and Thrift 2007; Thrift 2008). Whereas Bernal imagined that metal-
lurgy would make it possible to establish something like a socialist
administration of metals, resulting in a direct alignment between
the internal structure of metals and economic need through the use
of techniques such X-ray crystallography, contemporary metallur-
gists pursue a more flexible approach. For metallurgy assumes that
there could be no correspondence between material and social and
economic structure; rather, the metallurgist multiplies the forms
in which metals exist, while recognizing that complete knowledge
and control is impossible. Metallurgy is an interdisciplinary disci-
pline, concerned with the study of systems, platforms, or processes,
assemblages of which metals and other materials are only a part.5
Metals and metallurgy provide then a particularly good case
study for thinking about the properties of materials. They clearly
illustrate the principle of irreducibility: the behavior of metals resists
any reduction of their properties, whether to their external (social)
environment or to the fundamentals of physics. Metallurgists are
mediators between the form of economic calculation, government
regulation, and the analysis of material properties (cf. Osborne 2004).
Moreover, metallurgy, like agricultural research, zoology, anthropol-
ogy, and geography, is reliant on field research, a form of artisanal
and itinerant practice (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 411), and not just
laboratory experimentation (Schaffer 2003; Livingstone 2003). As
a field science, metallurgy should be, in principle, attuned to the
specificity of the case. It is attentive to the general problem of how
to address the study of the particular. Whereas many physicists, for
example, may be preoccupied by the problem of how to represent the
particular in terms of the general, metallurgists are often confronted
by a rather different question, namely, how is it possible to understand
and manage the properties of objects that exhibit general problems
(such as fracture, conduction, phase transition, creep, or corrosion),
but in specific ways and in very different settings and locations?

Politics
For Bernal the development of X-ray crystallography promised the
possibility of a direct alignment between molecular and economic
structures: the internal structure of metals would come to reflect
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 97

economic needs. But how might we envisage the relation between

failures of metals, or better, of specific sociomaterial assemblages,
and more systematic failures in the economic and political order?
This question is not hypothetical. In the recent past, the cases of
Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, BSE and CJD, Brent Spar, GM
crops and Bhopal, have come to be seen by many not just as accidents
but as indices of more systemic failures. Failures in sociomaterial
assemblages have been viewed as signs of the existence of a wider
series of problems concerning the relations between science and
politics and between governments, corporations, and citizens (e.g.,
Beck 1992; Berkhout et al. 2003). Their occurrence has demanded,
according to many, a new politics of science and a new politics of the
environment, science, and risk.6 Particular accidents have come to
be understood as markers of general problems and as specific cases
that demand general solutions and wider forms of political action. In
short, particular failures have been constituted as political events.7
In these circumstances, how might one envisage the relation
between metallurgy, metals, and politics? If metallurgy is an example
of a field science, an itinerant practice itself entangled with the
study of the particular in its environment, then how do the insights
of metallurgists come to have more general significance? What is
the relation between the claims made by metallurgists about the
specificity of the particular and the claims by those with an interest
in politics concerning the relations between particular occasions
and collective issues and concerns? In what follows I focus on an
example of an occasion in which metallurgy plays a remarkable and
unexpected role. The case raises two questions. The first concerns
the relation between the properties and behavior of metals and the
organization of political and economic life. How can particular mate-
rial processes, including accidents, come to be constituted as events
of general significance to others? And in what circumstances are they
not? Second, why might political controversy focus on the behavior
of metals and other nonhuman substances rather than the behavior
of humans? And how can the work of metallurgists be made to have
such potent political agency?8
The case in this chapter is an enquiry by Parliament’s House of
Commons Select Committee on Trade and Industry into the activities
98 ANDREW BARRY

of the U.K. government’s Export Credit Guarantee Department

(ECGD) in 2005. In particular, it focused on the operation of the
department’s Business Principles, which were expected to govern
the relation between the department and the companies to which it
provided financial assistance. Yet although the enquiry had a very
specific focus and examined the activities of particular and arguably
minor government agencies, these activities raised, according to
critics, wider questions. Did the government exercise control over
the behavior of corporations in other countries, or does the govern-
ment primarily act to facilitate corporations’ activities? What is the
character of relations between the government and multinational
corporations? Or, even more broadly, are the Business Principles of
the British government simply particular features of the operation
of neoliberalism or the “neoliberal state” (Harvey 2005)?
Though the remit of the select committee was to address the
implementation and effectiveness of the Business Principles by the
ECGD, it nonetheless came to focus on a particular example of the
implementation of these principles. This was the financial support
given by the ECGD, in conjunction with the International Finance
Corporation (IFC) and the European Bank for Reconstruction of De-
velopment (EBRD), for the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan
(BTC) oil pipeline, one of the largest single construction projects
in the world in the early 2000s.9 The development of the pipeline
had been promoted in the 1990s by both the Turkish government
and the U.S. Clinton administration as a way of bringing oil from
the Caspian Sea along a route, through Azerbaijan, Georgia, and
Turkey, that avoided both Iran and Russia. At the same time, this
explicitly geopolitical investment would serve to bring Azerbaijan,
and possibly other Turkic-speaking republics of the former Soviet
Union, into the U.S. or Turkish sphere of influence. The involvement
of the IFC, EBRD, and ECGD in the project was intended to reduce
the financial risk to investors but also helped to ensure that the U.S.
and U.K. governments, in particular, would have a direct interest in
the completion of the project.10 Oil companies were willing to be
submitted to the greater scrutiny that the receipt of public finance
would entail, in part because it would ensure that Western govern-
ments would have this interest.
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 99

However, even within this restricted focus on the financial support

of the ECGD for the BTC pipeline, the select committee channeled
its critical scrutiny still further. Prompted by the work of a coalition
of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), critical of the work of
the ECGD, the committee devoted considerable time to the failure
of a particular coating material used on joints between sections of
the pipeline.11 More precisely still, it was concerned with the very
specific issue of what the ECGD knew about the procurement and
use of this coating material in late 2003, during the period when the
department was considering whether to support the construction of
the pipeline. Indeed, the case of the coating material was the only is-
sue related to the BTC pipeline discussed in the House of Commons,
with the exception of a brief discussion of the case of the Kurdish
nationalist activist Ferhat Kaya, who was allegedly tortured in the
police station in the Turkish town of Ardahan, near the Georgian
border, on account of his criticism of the BTC project (Bakuceyhan
Campaign 2004; House of Commons 2005b, 52).
The centrality of this particular coating material to the concerns of
British members of Parliament is moreover surprising when viewed
in relation to debates elsewhere. For a time, during 2003–5, the pipe-
line acquired a remarkable political geography. In Washington, D.C.,
in particular, BTC came to have a very different significance. The
offices of the ombudsman of the International Finance Corporation
on Pennsylvania Avenue, for example, investigated a series of specific
alleged violations of bank guidelines by the BTC company in Geor-
gia, following representations made by the Georgian environmental
NGO Green Alternative (2004). These concerned, for example, the
alleged failure of the BTC company to ensure adequate compensa-
tion to villagers whose houses had been damaged by subcontractors.
Elsewhere in Washington, the State Department was forced to inter-
vene following the decision of the Georgian government of Mikheil
Saakashvili to temporarily halt construction of the pipeline in July
2004, and the issue was discussed in meetings between Saakashvili
and Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld.12 Moreover, the failure of
the coating material described by the metallurgist had not led to any
oil leak or effect on the environment. There was no specific accident
to which anyone could point, although NGO critics described it as
100 ANDREW BARRY

an “environmental time bomb” and linked it, by association, to a

series of events involving BP, including connections between the
oil company and Colombian paramilitaries (House of Commons
2005b, 105). Nor did the problem have any discernable impact on
the complex geopolitical situation within which the pipeline was
embedded. The failure of the coating material was not considered of
particular importance by villagers living near the pipeline route, who
were incensed by their failure to receive compensation that they had
expected to receive because of the presence of oil industry construc-
tion work near their homes.13 In a meeting with Georgian workers
and residents in the city of Rustavi nearby to the pipeline route, I was
told that up to fifty kilometers of pipeline had to be relayed.14 But
this was of little concern to the workers, who were angry about low
pay, long working hours, and poor food, and who had been engaged
in unofficial strike action in the same period. However, the issue of
working conditions and wages was not considered by the select com-
mittee, even though it might reasonably have done so. After all, the
working and wages of the Georgian pipeline workers were governed
by the Host Government Agreement between the BTC company
and the Georgian government, which allowed for the pipeline not
to be governed by some of the conditions of Georgian labor law.
This agreement appeared to violate the terms of the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Guidelines
on Multinational Enterprises, which stipulate that multinationals
should not seek or accept exemptions from the provisions of local
law (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
2000, 19). It was, potentially, a good example of neoliberal govern-
ment in practice. The question of this particular exemption from the
guidelines, however, was not considered an issue, in public at least,
either in London or Washington, D.C.15
Why, then, should this committee, prompted by NGOs cam-
paigning against the pipeline, take such particular interest in these
cracks and the specific issue of pipeline coating material rather
than the working conditions of Georgian pipeline workers or the
partial exemption of BTC from the terms of Georgian labor law, for
example? Why was the politics of an “informed material” considered
more significant than the politics of class (Gibson-Graham 2006)? If
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 101

politics, as Rancière suggests, involves making objects and problems

visible, why were the failures of material objects rather than the
working conditions of laborers rendered visible to the committee
(Rancière 2004b, 226)? Why should defects in materials—rather
than defects in labor relations, pay, and working conditions—stand
in for wider problems between business and the U.K. government
or, more generally, between state and capital? Why, in this case, did
the properties of materials come to have such political significance
(Barry 2001, 215)?
An answer to these questions is complex. For if metallurgy is a
form of field research that needs to address the specificity of the case,
the same is true of field research concerned with the study of politics.
An analysis of this event would involve consideration, for example, of
the critical historical role of the Green Movement in both Soviet and
post-Soviet Georgian politics.16 It would involve examination of the
particular timing of the failure of the coating material that occurred
just before the decision of the ECGD to support the development of
the pipeline. It would involve an analysis of how the question of the
reputation of oil corporations has become a focus for both manage-
ment and political action, particularly following public criticism of
Shell concerning the disposal of the Brent Spar oil platform in 1995
(Power 2007, 128–29). Crucially, it would involve an assessment of
the preoccupation with formal procedures of accountability and
transparency in political and economic life (Power 1997; West and
Sanders 2003; Best 2005). In these circumstances, the production of
information about materials, as much as the production of informa-
tion about labor relations or human rights, can in principle become
a public political matter.
The salience of the politics of materials, rather than the politics
of labor in the House of Commons, also turns partly on the legiti-
macy of particular sources of evidence. After all, the failure of the
coating material could not be denied, for everyone, including BP,
accepted that it had happened. Long sections of pipeline had to be
repaired as a consequence of the failure of the coating material. Once
acknowledged, this could not be simply explained away by any sug-
gestion that the failure of the coating material was conjured up by
the opponents of the oil company or the government for political or
102 ANDREW BARRY

financial gain. Unlike the material demands by pipeline workers that

they should work shorter hours and be paid at higher rates, claims
concerning the existence of cracks could not so easily be accused
of being self-interested or, indeed, even “politically motivated.” In
comparison to the protests of the pipeline workers, the materiality
of cracks in the pipeline coating material was less clearly entangled
in the complexities of Georgian politics in the aftermath of the Rose
Revolution.17 And unlike the demands of Georgian workers, which
were mediated by local lawyers and trade union representatives who
did not speak English, the existence of cracks was mediated directly
in London through the work of well-funded international NGOs.18
In what follows, however, I focus more narrowly on the question
of the presentation of evidence in the House of Commons. After all,
the potential significance of evidence depends on the setting in which
the evidence is presented and the audience to whom it is presented
(Shapin and Schaffer 1985). In representing evidence of the failure of
pipeline coating material in the House of Commons, radical NGOs
sought to effect a radical translation in its significance. Evidence of
the existence of material failure mattered in the House of Commons
not primarily because it involved information about materials, and
their local conditions of existence in use, but because of NGOs’ sense
of the materiality of this information in relation to the behavior of
the government and the multinational. Critics expected that evidence
presented in the House of Commons would have a quasi-legal effect,
demonstrating the guilt of the multinational and its supporters in
government in a public forum. In this setting, the particular was of
little interest in terms of its particularity, but in terms of how far it
could be seen as a manifestation of the wider forms of complicity
between corporate business and government. It provided the basis
for an empirical critique of the capitalist state, one might say, point-
ing to the existence of a network of relations between officials and
businesspeople that otherwise would be unacknowledged.19 But how
was it possible to translate knowledge of the behavior of informed
materials in a specific locality, of no obvious significance to a group
of parliamentarians, into information that was of material impor-
tance to the recommendations of a select committee? How could one
translate a (technical) fact about the failure of materials in the field
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 103

into a (quasi-legal) fact that would matter to the deliberations of a

select committee and demonstrate the guilt of the government and
the multinational (Latour 2004)?20 Critical to the NGOs’ case before
the select committee was the testimony of a metallurgist concerning
the period prior to the start of pipeline construction in 2003. This
testimony was expected to acquire political agency once presented
in the House of Commons.
In November 2003, shortly after the Rose Revolution in Georgia
that led to the end of the government of Eduard Shevardnadze, cracks
in the material that covered the connections between separate sec-
tions of pipe emerged during the construction. The BTC company
claimed that the cause of the fault was that the field joint coating
covering the connections had been misapplied as the temperature
dropped in November, but that following further investigations and
tests, the problem had been rectified. Despite the previous existence
of cracks in the coating material, the pipeline could be buried safely.
The metallurgist, himself a consultant who had offered his services
to BP, the major oil company involved in the BTC project, was in-
censed that the company had previously failed to think through the
relations between their actions in selecting this particular coating
material for the oil pipeline and the behavior of the pipeline in the
field. The metallurgist explained to the parliamentarians:

metallurgist, reading from a report commissioned by BP concern-

ing the field joint coating material: [“]The coating may or may not
be damaged in cold weather, but it will certainly not suffer the same
damage from soil stressing as the alternatives available.[”]
I cannot believe the crassness of these statements. They are saying
that they did not know if the joint coating would be damaged, or not,
during backfilling—absolutely astounding! But then of course they
could always find out “on the job,” another example of the “guinea
pig” engineering culture.
Then they say definitively that it will not suffer soil stressing as
badly as alternatives—when they did not test any of these alterna-
tives. This is the judgement of the crystal ball! It is certainly not an
engineering judgement. The fact is that had the joint been coated
with a mimic three layer system employing injection moulded PE top
104 ANDREW BARRY

coat, the field joint would actually have had a superior soil stressing
resistance. . . .
Little or no reference is made in the WP [i.e., the BP] report with
regard to in-ground performance of the epoxy yet this is fundamental
to the coating’s ability to protect the pipe in the long term.
Oil and gas pipelines are not passive, inert items, they are live,
dynamic structures that move due to ground movement and most
importantly, pressure changes within the pipe. . . . The coating has
to accommodate such movement. The operating temperature will
fluctuate with pressure changes and should the pipeline be shut down
for any time, the pipe temperature will drop down to the in-ground
ambient—estimated by BP to be –5° to +50° C. . . . How will this
affect the performance of the coating particularly at the PE/epoxy
interface . . . ? This question has been discussed throughout the whole
pipeline industry and I am yet to hear any individual say—“it will
be OK, the system is fully proven.” (House of Commons 2005b, 61)

The metallurgist argued, furthermore, that the modified epoxy

coating had been inadequately tested, that the specification for the
coating was inadequate, that documentation was unsatisfactory, and
that tried and tested alternatives were not properly considered. In
short, using SPC2888 involved a considerable and unnecessary risk:
“if you have something that does the job and these other systems have
been extensively applied and [have] a working history why change
and in particular to use this very important pipeline as a proving
ground for an experiment with a new coating system” (House of
Commons 2005b, 85). Earlier he had warned BP, “Have you con-
sidered the insurance implications of this?” (House of Commons
2005b, 81). For the NGOs and a journalist, the defects in SPC2888
embodied defects in BP itself and its relations with ECGD and the
lender’s group consultants on whom ECGD relied in their exercise
of due diligence. These consultants, according to the journalist,
were, in effect, told by the lenders to rely on the integrity of BP in
providing them with accurate information. This was a scandal: due
diligence assumed that the company could be trusted even when
there were those who were able to provide evidence to show why it
should not be. The failure to investigate defects in coating material
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 105

reflected wider defects in the activities of multinationals, banks, and

government and their all-too-intimate relations:

This statement [that the lender’s group did not want the problem
examined further] provides an extraordinary insight into the ap-
proach taken by the Lenders group [including the ECGD] after
its much vaunted due diligence procedures were exposed by the
Sunday Times. They went on to limit the investigation of the field
joint coating issue to a simple desktop study. (House of Commons
2005b, 105)

But if the metallurgist’s willingness to speak openly about his

concerns with BP provided the opportunity for radical NGOs to
demonstrate the complicity of multinationals and government, his
extraordinary statement to the House of Commons points to a very
different kind of politics, and a different form of expertise, to that
of the NGO critics. If politics partly revolves around the question of
how the particular is figured as an instance of interest to a collective,
then the metallurgist’s political concerns, and his understanding of
the relation between the particular and the general, are quite distinct.
For although the metallurgist spoke of cracks in coating materials,
he viewed these as an index of a “guinea pig engineering culture”
that failed to attend to the liveliness of materials rather than as a
sign of political complicity. Nor would he imply a link, for example,
between the oil company’s poor quality-control procedures and the
association of its activities with human rights abuse by the Turkish
police, evidenced by the case of Ferhat Kaya. For NGO critics of
the multinational, the torture of Ferhat Kaya and the failure of the
coating material, along with a whole series of other specific events
and incidents, were considered signs of the state of relations between
government and the oil business.
Although the metallurgist gave evidence, he also gave his evidence
with passion and anger. In so doing, he gave up the pretence that
his evidence was, as the evidence of a scientist might be expected to
be, dispassionate (Bennington 1994, 135). His anger derived partly
about how badly particular elements—this steel, this soil, this coat-
ing material, the skills of these subcontractors, the winter climate of
106 ANDREW BARRY

Georgia, and so on—had been assembled together. And he detailed

the reasons why this occurred, with the specificity of this case that
had so many surprising wider consequences. Metallurgy here stands
as an example of an itinerant and artisanal practice that, potentially
at least, addresses the impossibility of fully governing the behavior
of materials, taking proper notice of their differential resistance. The
metallurgist was not surprised by the failure of materials because
materials are not the dead, inert substances they are sometimes imag-
ined to be. Nor was he disinterested and unaffected. The intensity
of the metallurgist’s anger, expressed in Parliament, stemmed from
his belief that the oil company had put such a badly formed assem-
blage together. It had tried something out without having properly
checked to see if it was going to work.21 The metallurgist entered
into the unfamiliar terrain of public politics not because it was in
his interests to do so (it almost certainly was not, and he claimed to
have become ill as a result of his intervention), nor because of his
anticorporate politics (there is no reason to suppose that he had
these). His preoccupation was with the irreducibility of the properties
of metals and a defense of the autonomy of his modest expertise of
the behavior of an informed material. His was a more-than-human
politics (Whatmore 2006).
The significance of the metallurgist’s testimony was judged in a
public setting: the select committee (cf. Lynch 1998; Schaffer 2005).
Within Parliament, select committees have a particular significance.
As in the U.S. Congress, a select committee is a group of politicians,
selected from all parties, who interrogate the conduct of government
and the development and implementation of legislation in public. A
parliamentary committee is not a court of a law, for its recommenda-
tions do not carry the force of law. Nor is it a community of experts,
for although a select committee may seek expert advice and is likely
to have its own expert advisor, it does not claim any expertise itself.
Yet, like a court of law, a select committee is expected to function as
a space where matters of fact can be established and judgments can
be made on the basis of the evidence presented before it (cf. Latour
2004). Moreover, on account of the authority of Parliament, it is able
to request evidence and witnesses who may not be available otherwise
and who, with exceptions, are required to give evidence in public.
However, unlike the main chamber of the House of Commons, its
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 107

final recommendations are expected, in general, to reflect the views

of all of its members and not just the views of the governing party or
the statistical majority of the members of Parliament (Waldron 1999,
127). In this way, a select committee is potentially in the position to
claim that its views are based on consideration of evidence and, at the
same time, to be able to articulate, in principle, a nonparty political
agreement based on this consideration. Perhaps more than any other
parliamentary institution, parliamentary committees claim to be able
to act as “modest (political) witnesses”: ladies and gentlemen who
confront evidence with disinterest (Shapin and Schaffer 1985; Latour
and Weibel 2005) and yet who also represent the public interest. In
effect they are thought to perform a function, regarded as essential in
the institution of British parliamentary democracy, that it is possible
to reach an agreement, not through consensus, and despite underly-
ing disagreement, given the existence of an appropriate institutional
mechanism and the prevalence of a certain form of ethical conduct
in political life. At the same time, they were concerned to judge not
just the veracity of the metallurgist’s statement but whether it was a
matter of public concern. Should the failure in materials be an index
of a wider failure in the relations between business and government?
Should it even become an event that inaugurated a transformation
in these relations?
Despite their exhaustive preoccupation with the circumstances
surrounding the failure of SPC2888, the parliamentarians ultimately
were unconvinced about its wider significance. After all, their concern
was with the behavior of ECGD in relation to BP and its adherence to
its Business Principles, not with the conduct of BP itself. The domain
of the market economy (BP) was considered outside the domain of
politics (Barry and Slater 2005). “It was not surprising,” according to
the select committee, “that quality assurance problems occur during
major construction projects such as the BTC pipeline. What mat-
ters is that those problems are identified and addressed” (House of
Commons 2005a, 12). For the parliamentarians, the ECGD and the
government had done all they could reasonably do to ensure that
the problem of the pipeline coating was addressed: the ECGD had
taken “proportionate and consistent action” (House of Commons
2005a, 13). They had done enough to investigate the properties of
SPC2888. As MPs they were not in a position to make a judgment
108 ANDREW BARRY

about the behavior of materials, only about the behavior of govern-

ment. And they based their judgment, in the manner of a court, not
on the commissioning of a piece of independent field research on the
situation in Georgia but on the basis of evidence presented before
them (cf. Latour 2004, 101).
Nonetheless, there is no simple explanation for the parliamen-
tarians’ decision.22 To account for the decision, one would need to
consider the particular composition of the committee and its rela-
tions to government ministers, for example, and the level of trust of
parliamentarians in BP in comparison to other U.K. companies. And
one would need to examine the work of other metallurgists commis-
sioned by both BP and the ECGD and the evidence they provided.
The metallurgist’s evidence was, after all, but one of a number of
published and unpublished reports of the performance of the pipeline
that circulated between Georgia and BP and government offices in
Baku and London (cf. Bridge and Wood 2005). There is, moreover,
the question of whether a scientist, who expressed his views with
such anger, was trusted by those who listened to his testimony. But
in my reading, part of the reason why the evidence of the metallur-
gist was not thought to be a matter of wider concern is the way in
which his intervention was read too politically by both politicians
and NGOs. In effect, he was viewed as an agent or an instrument of
an explicitly political campaign against the government and the oil
company. In this way, his concern with the specificity of materials,
and the particular location and manner of their use, was understood
too readily within a given political context. His micropolitics, which
relied on his own understanding of the dynamic behavior of informed
materials, was overinterpreted in macro or molar political terms (cf.
Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 216; Barry and Thrift 2007, 514). In this
situation, the failure of materials and the metallurgist’s evidence
concerning this failure could not be made to matter beyond the
confines of Parliament.

Conclusions
Radical critics of capitalism have often developed their arguments
either through an analysis of capitalism’s systemic features and/or by
making visible, through specific cases, the forms of human misery,
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 109

inequality, and exploitation that are associated with capitalism’s de-

velopment. General analyses of capitalism’s systemic features have
framed particular accounts, and specific examples have been taken as
indexes of systemic problems. In the case discussed here, the failure
of material structures was taken by radical critics as a sign of wider
defects in the relations between government and business. This was
a critical strategy grounded in a form of legal empiricism.
Yet if the behavior of materials is sometimes taken to be an index
of wider social relations, there is nothing naturally political about
metals or other materials or how they are shaped. If one common
feature of political life is that specific issues or problems are made
(for a time and in particular settings) into matters of collective or
“universal” significance (ŽiŽek 2004, 70; Runciman 2006), and
thereby become political, then there is no necessary reason why the
behavior or properties of specific materials should be considered a
political matter. To be sure, forms of critical analysis help them to
become so, yet such critical analysis can also interpret the political
significance of materials in reductive ways (Mitchell 2002, 52). It is
not inevitable that the behavior of materials should be of interest to
others or be the object of disagreement across a range of sites and
settings within which political matters are addressed, whether in
public or not. Materials acquire more-than-local political agency
only occasionally, not in general.
The political importance of metals and metallurgy arises therefore
in particular circumstances and sites. In this case, it depended on the
coincidental timing of a stage in a decision-making process (whether
to provide financial support for the construction of a pipeline) with
a material event (the emergence of cracks in the pipeline coating
material). It depended on the behavior of metals and liquid epoxy
coating materials when applied in freezing conditions. It depended
on the progressive formation of London as a center of expertise
and political debate concerning the question of corporate social re-
sponsibility in recent years. It depended on the preoccupation with
formal processes of accountability, transparency, and reputation in
contemporary political and economic life, which made it possible for
both an oil company and a government department to be accused of
failing to be transparent, and for this to be considered potentially a
110 ANDREW BARRY

matter of public political interest. And it depended on the existence

of a parliamentary political assembly which, for a period, became
interested to hear evidence of the complicity between government
and business.
In these circumstances, the analysis of political events needs to
attend to the timing and spacing of political life, the moment and
setting of politics, and the specificity of its techniques, institutions,
forms of evidence, and speech. But it should also address the ways
in which the behavior of metals and other materials plays a critical
part in politics. Metals are not the inert objects they are sometimes
imagined to be, merely shaped by social and economic forces. They are
elements of lively dynamic assemblages that may act in unanticipated
ways, serving as the catalyst for political events. Metallurgists are well
aware of the difficulty of applying the general principles of physics
and chemistry to particular cases and of the need to recognize the
unpredictability of material processes and the fragility of materials.
Metallurgy is a form of artisanal and itinerant practice that needs to
attend to the specificity of the case. These lessons are also relevant
to those concerned with the study of politics.

Notes

My thanks to Bruce Braun, Georgina Born, Alberto Toscano, and Sarah

J. Whatmore for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

1 On the constitution of nonhuman entities as political issues, see

Barry (2001) and Marres (2005).
2 In this respect, this chapter follows others that argue for the need
to overturn the conventional hierarchy of the disciplines that places
“fundamental” sciences (physics, molecular biology, and the neuro-
sciences) at the top of the hierarchy and less fundamental disciplines,
including chemistry, agronomy, metallurgy, physical geography,
and social anthropology, further down (Schaffer 2003; Stengers and
Bensaude-Vincent 2003; Barry 2005).
3 In the chapter I leave aside the question of how the relation between
metallurgy and the broader field of materials science is conceived
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 111

by actors. Metallurgy, along with materials science more broadly, is

in any case an interdisciplinary field that incorporates elements of
chemistry, physics, crystallography, and indeed management theory
(see note 3). On the broader question of the interdisciplinarity of
disciplines, see Barry, Born, and Weszkalnys (2008).
4 Whitehead uses the example of the mountain to explain endurance
as a process of transformation: “The mountain endures. But when
after ages it is worn away, it has gone” (Whitehead 1985, 107).
5 “In industry, it is rarer to see a ‘materials department,’ rather technical
departments will now tend to be identified by the product—or in
the aerospace sector as the ‘system’ or ‘platform.’ An aeroengine is
a system in this sense, and the technical team will involve materials
scientists alongside aerodynamicists, structural engineers, electrical
engineers, designers, etc. [In] university research, we are moving
slowly to this systems approach, or ‘interdisciplinary’ research
as it is more normally called in the academic sector. Many of the
modern challenges in materials are not solely about ‘new’ materials,
but rather materials integration into systems with specified overall
function” (P. Grant, pers. comm., 2007).
6 David Runciman provides an elegant analysis of the constitution of
9/11 as an event of world historical importance (Runciman 2006).
7 The constitution of an occasion or an accident as an event depends,
of course, on its mediation by others (cf. Barry 2002; Dewsbury
2007).
8 This question is posed by Timothy Mitchell (2002, 53): “[An analysis
of human agency] means acknowledging something of the unresolv-
able tension, the inseparable mixture, the impossible multiplicity, out
of which intention and agency must emerge. It means acknowledging
that human agency, like capital, is a technical body, is something
made.”
9 ECGD provided up to $150 million cover for the project (House of
Commons 2005a, 8).
10 This chapter draws on research for an Economic and Social Re-
search Council–funded project on “Social and Human Rights
Impact on the Governance of Technology” (2004–5). The research
involved officials of the World Bank, the U.K. government, and
the European Bank Reconstruction and Development, and four
periods of fieldwork in Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Georgia in 2004.
112 ANDREW BARRY

On the geopolitics of oil development in the Caspian region in the

immediate post-Soviet period, see Croissant and Aras (1999) and
Ebel and Menon (2000).
11 Cornerhouse describes itself as a group that aims to support demo-
cratic and community movements for environmental and social
justice through research and advocacy. Its approach is based on
evidence: “we try to take a ‘bottom-up’ approach, filled with ex-
amples, to issues of global significance which are often handled in
a more abstract way” (http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk).
12 “Rumsfeld Intervention Rescues $3bn BP Pipeline,” Independent,
August 9, 2004.
13 On the question of the relation between expectation and affect, see
Anderson (2006).
14 Field notes, April 2004.
15 International and national NGOs did, however, raise a series of other
issues concerning the terms of the Host Government Agreement.
However, the Georgian NGO that scrutinized the text of the agree-
ment worked with a Georgian translation and appeared not to have
noticed this particular exemption of the pipeline from the terms of
Georgian law (Abashidze 2003). Although the construction of the
BTC pipeline was subject to unprecedented levels of monitoring
and thousands of pages of documentation were published about
the environmental and social impacts of the pipeline, there is very
limited public information about workers’ wages and conditions.
By contrast, the level of detail available to Marx (1973) through the
reports of the Inspectors of Factories in the mid-nineteenth century
is considerable.
16 The Georgian Green Movement was founded as early as 1988 (Wheat-
ley 2005, 48). One of its first leaders, Zurab Zhvania, was prime
minister (2004–5) in the Saakashvili government. In comparison to
Georgia, political interest in environmental issues is undeveloped
in neighboring countries, including Azerbaijan and Turkey.
17 E.g., it was rumored that the workers’ protest was instigated by
politicians opposed to Saakashvili. Whether this was true, cracks in
materials could not so easily have been accused of being so politi-
cally motivated.
18 On the role of mediators, see Osborne (2004).
19 In this respect the strategy of the NGOs bares comparison with the
empirical critique of the capitalist state provided by Ralph Miliband,
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 113

who pointed to the existence of specific networks of relations be-

tween government and business: “the world of administration and
the world of large-scale enterprise are now increasingly linked in
terms of an almost interchanging personnel” (Miliband 1973, 112).
Miliband was famously criticized by Poulantzas for his narrowly
empirical focus on human agents, which failed to account for the
structural conditions of state action (Jessop 1990, 250).
20 As Bruno Latour notes, the word fact means something quite differ-
ent in science and the law: “rather than confuse the two, we should
sharpen the contrast: when it is said that the facts are there, or that
they are stubborn, that phrase does not have the same meaning
in science as it does in law, where, however stubborn the facts
are, they will never have any real hold on the case as such, whose
solidity depends on the rules of law that are applicable to the case”
(Latour 2004, 89). While the operation of a select committee has
some similarities to a court of law, it is a distinct form of political
assembly, the characteristics of which have yet to be investigated.
21 The work of the metallurgist is an indicator of the complex geogra-
phy of knowledge production in the oil industry, which relies on the
production of a whole series of different forms of knowledge that
may be more or less attuned to the existence of local specificities
(Bridge and Wood 2005, 206).
22 On the idea of the “decision,” see Law (2002, 143–62).

References

Abashidze, Besarion. 2003. Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan: The Legal Analysis of

the Host Government Agreement. Tbilisi: Georgian Young Lawyers
Association.
Anderson, Ben. 2006. “Becoming and Being Hopeful: Towards a Theory
of Affect.” Environment and Planning D 24, no. 5: 733–52.
Bakuceyhan Campaign. 2004. Statement of Ferhat Kaya Regarding
Arrest and Ill-Treatment Following Work on BTC Pipeline. http://
www.bakuceyhan.org.uk/ferhat_statement.htm.
Barry, Andrew. 2001. Political Machines: Governing a Technological
Society. London: Athlone.
———. 2002. “The Anti-political Economy.” Economy and Society 31,
no. 2: 268–84.
———. 2005. “Pharmaceutical Matters: The Invention of Informed
114 ANDREW BARRY

Materials.” Theory, Culture, and Society 22, no. 1: 51–69.

Barry, Andrew, and Don Slater, eds. 2005. The Technological Economy.
London: Routledge.
Barry, Andrew, and Nigel Thrift. 2007. “Gabriel Tarde: Imitation, Inven-
tion, and Economy.” Economy and Society 36, no. 4: 509–25.
Barry, Andrew, Georgina Born, and Gisa Weszkalnys. 2008. “Logics of
Interdisciplinarity.” Economy and Society 37, no. 1: 20–49.
Beck, Ulrich. 1992. The Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London:
Sage.
Bennington, Geoffrey. 1994. Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction.
London: Verso.
Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette, and Isabelle Stengers. 1996. The History
of Chemistry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Berkhout, Franz, Melissa Leach, and Ian Scoones, eds. 2003. Negotiat-
ing Environmental Change: New Perspectives from Social Science.
Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar.
Bernal, John D. 1969. Science in History. Vol. 3. The Natural Sciences in
Our Time. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.
Best, Jacqueline. 2005. The Limits of Transparency: Ambiguity and the
History of International Finance. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press.
Bowden, Frank P., and David Tabor. 2001. The Friction and Lubrication
of Solids. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bridge, Gavin, and Andrew Wood. 2005. “Geographies of Knowledge,
Practices of Globalization: Learning from the Oil Exploration and
Production Industry.” Area 37, no. 20: 199–208.
Callon, Michel, and Bruno Latour. 1981. “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan:
How Actors Macrostructure Reality and How Scientists Help Them
Do So.” In Advances in Social Theory and Methodology, ed. Karin
Knorr-Cetina and Aaron Cicourel, 277–303. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Croissant, Michael, and Bulent Aras, eds. 1999. Oil and Geopolitics in
the Caspian Sea Region. London: Praeger.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1979. “Metal, Metallurgy, Music, Husserl, Simondon.”
http://www.webdeleuze.com.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dewsbury, J. D. 2007. “Unthinking Subjects: Alain Badiou and the Event
of Thought in Thinking Politics.” Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers ns 32: 443–59.
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 115

Ebel, Robert, and Rajan Menon, eds. 2000. Energy and Conflict in Central
Asia and the Caucasus. Lanham, Mass.: Rowman and Littlefield.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press.
Green Alternative. 2004. “Complaint to IFC Ombudsman.” http://
www.cao-ombudsman.org/cases/document-links/documents/BTC-
FinalAssessmentReport_SevenComplaints_English_001.pdf.
Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
House of Commons. 2005a. Implementation of ECGD’s Business Prin-
ciples: Ninth Report of the Session 2004–5, vol. 1, Report Together
with Formal Minutes, HC 374-I.
House of Commons. 2005b. Implementation of ECGD’s Business Prin-
ciples: Ninth Report of the Session 2004–5, vol. 2, Oral and Written
Evidence, HC-374-II.
Jessop, Bob. 1990. State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in Their Place.
Cambridge: Polity.
Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science
Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
———. 2004. “Scientific Facts and Legal Objectivity.” In Law, Anthropol-
ogy and the Constitution of the Social, ed. Alain Pottage and Martha
Mundy, 73–114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. 2005. Making Things Public: At-
mospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Law, John. 2002. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Livingstone, David. 2003. Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of
Scientific Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lynch, Michael. 1998. “The Discursive Production of Uncertainty: The OJ
Simpson ‘Dream Team’ and the Sociology of Knowledge Machine.”
Social Studies of Science 28, nos. 5–6: 829–68.
MacKenzie, Adrian. 2002. Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed.
London: Continuum.
MacKenzie, Donald. 1996. Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical
Change. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Marres, Noortje. 2005. “No Issue, No Publics: Democratic Deficits and the
Displacement of Politics.” PhD diss., University of Amsterdam.
Marx, Karl. 1973. Capital. Vol. 1. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.
McGoey, Linsey. 2007. “On the Will to Ignorance in Bureaucracy.”
Economy and Society 36, no. 2: 212–35.
116 ANDREW BARRY

Miliband, Ralph. 1973. The State in Capitalist Society. London: Quar-

tet.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Moder-
nity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2000. The
OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. Paris: OECD. http://
www.oecd.org/dataoecd/56/36/1922428.pdf.
Osborne, Thomas. 2004. “On Mediators: On Intellectuals and the Ideas
Trade in the Knowledge Society.” Economy and Society 33, no. 4:
430–47.
Power, Michael. 1997. The Audit Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 2007. Organised Uncertainty: Organising a World of Risk Manage-
ment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rancière, Jacques. 2004a. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Con-
tinuum.
———. 2004b. The Philosopher and His Poor. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press.
Roux, Jacques, and Tierry Magnin. 2004. La Condition de Fragilité: entre
science des matériaux et sociologie. St. Étienne, France: Publications
de l’Université de Saint-Étienne.
Runciman, David. 2006. The Politics of Good Intentions: History, Fear
and Hypocrisy in the New World Order. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press.
Schaffer, Simon. 2003. “Enlightenment Brought Down to Earth.” History
of Science 41: 257–68.
———. 2005. “Public Experiments.” In Making Things Public, ed. B. Latour
and P. Weibel, 298–307. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. 1985. Leviathan and the Air Pump:
Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press.
Simondon, Gilbert. 1992. “The Genesis of the Individual.” In Incor-
porations, ed. J. Crary and S. Kwinter, 297–319. New York: Zone
Books.
Stengers, Isabelle. 1997. Power and Invention. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Stengers, Isabelle, and Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent. 2003. 100 Mots
 Materialist Politics: Metallurgy 117

pour commencer à penser les Sciences. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de

Penser en Rond.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1995. The Relation: Issues in Complexity and Scale.
Cambridge: Prickly Pear Press.
Tarde, Gabriel. 1999. Monadologie et Sociologie. Paris: Les Empêcheurs
de Penser en Rond.
———. 2001. Les Lois de L’Imitation. Paris: Les Empêcheurs de Penser
en Rond.
Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect.
London: Routledge.
Waldron, Jeremy. 1999. The Dignity of Legislation. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
West, Harry, and Todd Sanders, eds. 2003. Transparency and Conspiracy:
Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press.
Whatmore, Sarah J. 2006. “Materialist Returns: Practicing Cultural
Geography in and for a More-than-Human World.” Cultural Ge-
ographies 13: 600–9.
Wheatley, Jonathan. 2005. Georgia from National Awakening to Rose
Revolution: Delayed Transition in Post-Soviet Politics. Aldershot,
U.K.: Ashgate.
Whitehead, Alfred N. 1985. Science and the Modern World. London:
Free Association Books.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. Afterword to The Politics of Aesthetics, by Jacques
Rancière. London: Continuum.
This page intentionally left blank
 5 Plastic Materialities
gay hawkins

Y ou see it walking into the supermarket: an image of a

plastic bag with a big black cross over it and the words say no
to plastic bags emblazoned above. The message is clear: bags are
bad. How did it come to this? How did this flimsy, disposable thing
acquire such a shocking reputation? How did using one in public
come to mark the shopper as irresponsible? How did this humble
object come to have such a claim on us?
As the supermarket poster shows, bags have changed. They have
become contested matter: the focus of environmental education
campaigns designed to demonize them and reform human practices.
In this version of public pedagogy, there is no room for ambiguity
about the meanings or affects of plastic materiality. As scientists
discover marine life choking on bags and environmental activists
document the bags’ endless afterlife in landfills, plastic bags are
transformed from innocuous, disposable containers to destructive
matter. Say-no campaigns deploy a command morality designed to
remind shoppers that bags are now problematic, yet another thing to
register in the circuits of guilt and conscience that enfold us within
forms of rule.
But what of the bag in all this? It appears as a passive object of
reclassification. Scientific knowledge and social marketing frame it
as bad stuff to be rejected by the environmentally responsible subject.
But is this the only way in which plastic bags act on or make claims
on us? If not, then we might wish to ask a different question: how
does environmental education—and its command moralities—come
to organize ethical transactions between plastic bags and humans in

119
120 GAY HAWKINS

ways that disavow other transactions, other ways of encountering bags,

that might suggest different, and more ecologically careful, modes of
living? In many versions of environmental ethics, destructive matter
manifests what Noel Castree (2003, 8) describes as a “materialist es-
sentialism.” It is seen as having clearly definable properties that are
ontologically fixed. And as Castree (8) explains, “these properties
can, in the final instance, be appealed to by environmental ethicists
(explicitly or implicitly) to anchor claims about the who, what and
how of ethical considerability.” Despite the recognition of relational
ontologies and calls for an ethics based on “transpersonal connec-
tions,” the tendency is to demonize environmentally dangerous matter
as materially irreducible and to fall back on the ontological distinc-
tions that sustain this such as subjects–objects or nature–culture.
This tendency inevitably privileges humans as the source of ethical
awareness and action. Whereas natural matter is recognized as ethi-
cally significant and as a site of communicative vitality, destructive
artificial material is afforded no capacity to affect us in ways that
might call forth other ethical responses. Humans are not invited to
be open to the affective intensities of plastic matter; rather, they are
urged to enact their ethical will and eliminate it.
This is how ethics slides into moralism. As much as one may agree
that the world would be a better place without plastic bags, the moral
imperative to refuse them denies the complexity of contexts in which
we encounter them and the diversity of responses bags generate. It
fixes the material qualities of plastic bags and assumes to know the
affects they trigger. Catastrophic images of plastic bags as pollutants
link them to the end of nature and fuel a sense of disgust and horror.
There is no possibility that plastic bags might move us or enchant
us or invite simple gratitude for their mundane convenience. There
is no sense that they might prompt us to behave differently. Instead,
approaches to environmental ethics invoke essential characteristics
that deny the contingency of ethical constituencies and relations. In
doing so, they may also deny the affective dimensions of ethics and
the ways in which corporeal interactions with the world are always
mixed up with ethical reasoning and negotiations.
My goal is to get beyond this impasse—to examine how plastic
bags come to matter without recourse to a materialist essentialism
 Plastic Materialities 121

and without putting humans at the center of the story. By letting

plastic bags have their say, I want to open up a different line of
thinking about the relation between ethics, affect, and the environ-
ment, one that begins from the modest recognition of plastic bags
not as phobic objects ruining nature but as things we are caught up
with: things that are materialized or dematerialized through diverse
habits and associations. By refusing to situate plastic bags in a moral
framework, as always already bad, we might begin to see their ma-
teriality as more contingent and active. Bags may cease to be only
ever passive and polluting, the source of dangerous environmental
impacts, and may become instead participants in various everyday
practices in which the materiality and meaning of both bodies and
bags are fashioned. This is not to say that materiality is reducible
to relations; rather, it is to suggest that different associations make
present different material qualities and affects, and this contestabil-
ity of matter is fundamentally implicated in ethical deliberations.
The challenge is to understand the ways in which different plastic
materialities become manifest and how these reverberate on bodies,
habits, and ecological awareness.
In seeking to understand the potency of plastic bags in every-
day conduct and political association, my concern is with the per-
formativity of plastic: the ways in which its distinct materiality is
realized in diverse arrangements. This focus on performativity, or
“thing-power materialism,” as Bennett (2004, 348) calls it, makes it
possible to recognize the variety of plastic materialities beyond their
framing as environmental hazards. For Bennett, thing-power means
the specific kinds of materiality that are often obliterated by human
habits of objectification and classification. In claiming that “there
is an existence peculiar to a thing that is irreducible to the thing’s
imbrication with human subjectivity,” Bennett (348) is not arguing
for an essentialized materialism; rather, she is insisting that things
have the capacity to assert themselves, that their anterior physicality,
their free or aleatory movements, can capture humans as much as
humans like to think they have the world of things under control.
Recognizing the thingness of things is not to deny the dense web
of connections in which they are always caught up. It is simply to
be open to the powers of matter and the possibility that bags might
122 GAY HAWKINS

suggest different ways of acting with them rather than on them.

Rather than begin from the environmentally aware subject com-
mitted to eliminating plastic bags in the name of nature, I want to
investigate how plastic bags help produce this subjectivity, how they
become involved in distinct forms of self-cultivation and ethical
reasoning, and how the unpredictability of affect might be implicated
in plastic bag ethics. This means paying close attention to plastic
bag habits. For it is in the relational imprints of meaning back and
forth between the body and its environs that habits, as practical
techniques, become sedimented and confront us as a kind of sec-
ond nature. Habits have a materializing power on both subjects and
objects. They bind us to the world at the same time as they blind
us to it. And this is the problem and the possibility of habits: when
they break down, or when they are problematized, we are launched
into new relations with the world. A moralized language of habit as-
sumes that these new relations come from a virtuous subject who is
responding to the appeal of reason and reforming his behavior. My
claim is that it may well be the performance of plastic materiality, or
the transformative character of affectivity, that disrupts habits and
prompts new perceptions and ethical praxes.
To pursue these issues, I am going to use three plastic bags: the
banned plastic bag of environmental education, the plastic bag as
handy domestic container, and the dancing plastic bag from the hit
Hollywood movie American Beauty. Each of these bags manifests
distinct plastic materialities, and each can generate different affec-
tive energies. Though they share the same material qualities, the
performance of these qualities in different assemblages is evidence
that plastic materiality cannot be essentialized, and nor can ethics.
Rather than being a set of fixed principles in the name of moral
reason, these plastic bags reveal the fundamental porousness and
instability of ethics. In these examples, ethics emerges as ubiquitous,
affective, and thoroughly imbricated with corporeality. Acknowl-
edging this ethical instability does not mean an abandonment of
environmental politics but a different mode of political thinking,
less concerned with dissensus and contestation and more concerned
with speculative practices and improvisation. Each of these plastic
bags “forces thought,” to use Isabelle Stengers’s (2005) phrase. They
 Plastic Materialities 123

make themselves known in different ways, and in being open to

these different knowledges, it may be possible to enlarge the politics
of plastic bags—to imagine different modes of thinking, feeling, and
acting with them.

Say No to Plastic Bags!

Campaigns to eliminate plastic bags have become a common fixture
in countries where environmentalism is highly organized. Sometimes
run by governments, sometimes by green or activist organizations,
these campaigns focus on reducing plastic bag use by urging con-
sumers to choose more sustainable alternatives. In Australia that
alternative is, most often, a green shopping bag made out of long-
lasting polypropelene with an environmental slogan on the side. In
encouraging shoppers to voluntarily reject disposable plastic bags,
say-no campaigns are explicitly pedagogic; their intent is to reform
populations and change everyday habits. But how do they do this,
and what is the role of the plastic bag in this process? By investigat-
ing how environmental campaigns problematize plastic bags and
shopping practices, it is possible to see how these mundane objects
become caught up in new associations that organize a distinct set of
interfaces between bodily habits, materiality, and ethical reasoning,
and how, in activating techniques of conscience, plastic bags partici-
pate in fashioning an environmentally concerned shopper.
Using a range of scientific information about environmental
impacts, say-no campaigns frame plastic bags as hazardous, and in
the same moment, they invite shoppers to engage in self-scrutiny
and reflect on the everyday conduct around them. This framing is
explicitly moral. It involves fixed oppositions, such as environmentally
friendly–environmentally hazardous, and it appeals to categorical
imperatives, such as protecting nature or global ecological survival.
This is the larger scale in which minor habits and their impacts are
situated. In constituting plastic bags as a “matter of concern,” as Bruno
Latour (2005) might say, say-no campaigns activate specific aspects
of the materiality of the plastic bag: their slow process of decomposi-
tion, their tendency to trap or choke marine animals, their oppressive
ubiquity, and so on. These material qualities are not representations
or social constructions; rather, they are a particular aspect of plastic
124 GAY HAWKINS

materiality that is made present to transform the meaning of the

bag from innocuous container to polluting and recalcitrant matter.
These reframings of the bag expose its material afterlife and extend
the ethical imagination of the shopper. They reveal disposability as
a myth and establish a network of connections and obligations be-
tween ordinary habits and the purity and otherness of nature. In this
way the bag becomes capable of generating not only environmental
concern but also guilt.
Guilt is a powerful reminder of the claims matter can make on
us. Adopting new conduct that avoids plastic bags involves an accep-
tance of plastic materiality as dangerous and a willingness to change
one’s relationship to that matter out of a sense of obligation to the
environment. This new network of relations between bags, shoppers,
and nature involves practices of self-monitoring and self-discipline
that Ian Hunter (1993, 128) describes as “techniques of conscience.”
The capacity of plastic bags to make some shoppers hesitate before
they reach for one is only successful if subjects are receptive to the
ethical obligations the bag’s materiality poses to them, if they have
a conscience.
According to Foucault (1985, 29–30), conscience is a product
of a range of techniques of the self that have come to constitute
distinct styles of subjectivity. To be a subject now means cultivating
particular modes of reflexivity. It means developing special ethi-
cal techniques and capacities. These techniques and capacities are
historically variable in their form and targets. Their presence is not
evidence of a foundational interiority grounding the subject; rather,
it is evidence of shifting regimes of living and self-cultivation. Tech-
niques of conscience make the self into an object of ethical attention;
they show how subjects problematize and modify their conduct on
the basis of ethical principles to which they aspire. And, as say-no
campaigns reveal, matter can play a key role in activating techniques
of conscience. It can prompt changed practices that are justified by
appeals to various moral codes and principles. Though environmental
education campaigns, and their psychological logics, assume that
ethical agency resides in the raised consciousness or “awareness” of
the concerned individual, that individual is contextually situated, and
those contexts involve multiple interactions with plastic materiality.
 Plastic Materialities 125

Public campaigns about the hazardous materiality of plastic bags

are successful not simply because they have reeducated shoppers
but because they have animated the materiality of bags in powerful
ways. They have made the plastic bag an intermediary between an
interior reception of an ethical command and the mobilization of
the will to abide by it (Bennett 2001, 156).
Say-no campaigns run by governments or environmental non-
governmental organizations show how plastic bags have become
implicated in processes of moral self-regulation and conscience;
how circuits of guilt, self-reproach, and virtue have become enfolded
with ordinary acts of shopping; and how, in activating techniques of
conscience, the plastic bag participates in shaping an environmen-
tally aware subject. The force of matter in this process, its capacity
to prompt certain practices in particular arrangements, is evidence
of the formation of a distinct ethical constituency in which changed
interactions between bags and bodies produce new effects. These
effects are more than just reduction in use; they also involve the
formation of collectivities. For the shopper, recognition of bags’
polluting materiality is a source of ethical concern and a prompt to
reject them. When that shopper arrives at the supermarket checkout
and presents her green ecobags, the absence of the plastic bag is a
public declaration of environmental awareness. The ecobag as an
accessory becomes a marker of a nascent political community of
concerned subjects whose collective rejection of plastic bags implicitly
links them. In the same way, the shopper struggling across the park-
ing lot, arms weighed down with full plastic bags, is vulnerable to
public scorn about his bad habits. How many times at the checkout
have we heard a shopper declare guiltily, “Sorry, I forgot to bring
my green bags”?
There is no question that say-no campaigns involve differential
degrees of agency on the part of plastic materiality and that the ethi-
cal constituency formed by these campaigns is an environmentally
aware subject who encounters the bag as hazardous matter. There is
also no question that the affective energies that are generated by this
style of environmental campaign involve various registers of moral
righteousness and anxiety. However, as effective as these campaigns
have been in some places in reducing the use of plastic bags and
126 GAY HAWKINS

developing enhanced ecological awareness, their limits must also

be acknowledged.
William Connolly (1999, 195) argues that conscience and other
code-driven moral techniques are crude and blunt tools for coping
with the world. Their tendency to ground moral or political action
in law, God, global survival, consensus, or any other categorical im-
perative makes them blind to the ambiguous and disturbing aspects
of many encounters. The moral weight of codes can too easily turn
obligation into duty, guilt, and resentment: “I should do ______ because
the environment is suffering, because I am law abiding, because I
am virtuous.” This is obligation working in the interests of human
mastery and self-certainty, obligation that implicitly maintains the
stability of being. Though say-no campaigns have only been successful
because they have animated the materiality of bags and implicated
humans in new relations with them, the differential agency of the
bag in this process is disavowed. It is something to be controlled by
human will, not a participant in an emergent ethical constituency.
The logic of categorical imperatives and prohibition privileges the
concerned and virtuous shopper as the source of ethical action and
change. In this way, obligation and guilt suppress the capacity of
the bag and deny the ways in which its materiality always exceeds
moral framings.

A Sticky Plastic Bag

Consider another encounter with a plastic bag: a Monday-morning
before-school panic that it is swimming training this afternoon but
the bathing suit is wet. It cannot be put in a schoolbag because it will
make books and lunch damp. You search under the kitchen sink for
a plastic bag. They are hard to find in this house because reusable
ecobags get the shopping home each week. But then you see one
lurking in the dark recesses of the cupboard. You pull it out and hand
it to the child: “Here, put your bathing suit in a plastic bag.” The bag
is grabbed, the child tries to open it, the plastic is sticky and slightly
resistant to this gesture, and then its waterproofing and container
possibilities are revealed and the wet bathing suit is stored safely. You
feel gratitude for the humble practicality of the plastic bag.
 Plastic Materialities 127

In this ordinary moment, the bag does not simply perform utility;
it also presents its materiality as something to be experienced and
negotiated. The sticky plastic makes a polite request to the human
to be patient and persistent, to rub her thumb and finger together
to get a better grip. When the bag opens, panic is converted into
appreciation. This is a collaborative process in which the meaning
and materiality of the human and the bag shift. The bag’s plastic
presence is noticed not as a bad matter but as what John Law calls
(2004, 84) “in-here enactment.” For Law, this means the processes
whereby material presence is enacted into being in distinct relations
and practices. Presence is what is made present in particular relations.
However, at the same time, it involves manifest absence because
presence is always incomplete, always limited and contestable. The
manifest absence in this encounter is the moralized plastic bag of
environmental awareness and the virtuous identity of the ethical
consumer. In this particular web of domestic associations, the in-here
enactment of the bag generates experiential networks of obligation
that disturb neat oppositions between environmentally aware subject
and hated object. The plastic bag has become a player in a different
process; in asserting its material presence, it disrupts knowledges of it
as dangerous and destructive. Its mundane practicality challenges the
circuits of guilt and conscience that drive command moralities: say
no to plastic bags! Instead, the in-here enactment of the bag reveals a
different plastic materiality that rearranges conduct and perceptions.
Our response to the invitation from the bag to be patient disturbs
arrogant senses of human agency and mastery. This inanimate thing
is animate: it is suggesting particular actions.
In this familiar example, a different form of problematization
is in play—we could call it pragmatic problematization. The bag is
making itself known as sticky. As already outlined, say-no campaigns
involve moral problematization. In seeking to connect ethical praxis
to the survival of the planet, they have to fix the material qualities
of bags as bad. The fact that bags always exceed this framing cannot
be acknowledged because it introduces ambiguity and contingency
into a politics driven by categorical imperatives and the logic of hu-
man intervention and prohibition. Whether the target of political
128 GAY HAWKINS

change is shoppers or macroassemblages like retailers or state policy,

the aim is to eliminate the problematic bag and save nature. In a
world represented as drowning in plastic bags, a concern with how
plastic materiality is performed in various associations seems both
indulgent and grotesque. Yet this is precisely what the sticky plastic
bag does. It does not problematize nature or bad habits; it simply
makes us aware of how plastic materiality can be both resistant and
useful. This plastic materiality does not have political capabilities,
but it does have the capacity to render unstable moral certainties
and their human centeredness and to suggest that there are multiple
sites of agency in the world.
When the sticky plastic bag asserts itself, we are reminded of how
enmeshed we are with it. This bag presents itself to us as a practical
resource for being. We do things with it, leave our trace on it, but this
does not mean that it is completely subordinate to human action. It
has a life of its own that we have to accommodate in our activities.
This bag puts questions of action and practice at the center of ontol-
ogy, and what we can do with it becomes central to how we know it.
As Elizabeth Grosz (2001, 168–69) says, “the thing poses questions
to us, questions about our needs and desires, questions above all of
action: the thing is our provocation to action and is itself a result of
that action.” This is how the sticky plastic bag suggests an alternative
to a moral response to bags as bad stuff to be eliminated. By insisting
that we work with it, the bag makes us aware of the ambiguity of
intercorporeality and our complex entanglements with matter. The
need for cooperation short-circuits guilt and makes us open to the
thing-power of plastic materiality.
Pragmatic problematization suggests a different mode of political
analysis. According to Collier, Lakoff, and Rabinow (2004, 3), it in-
volves a shift from a first-order observer concerned with intervention
and repair of a situation’s discordancy to a second-order observer
whose task is to see a situation “not only as a given but equally as a
question.” This approach to problematization offers a technique for
understanding how, in a given situation, multiple constraints are
at work, but also multiple responses. This resonates with Deleuze
and Parnet’s (1987) understanding of politics as a process of active
 Plastic Materialities 129

experimentation. If discordant situations disturb and defamiliarize,

if they make trouble for previous ways of understanding and acting,
then they also create spaces of possibility where other ways of being
may be revealed. In the shift from intervention to experimentation,
the scale of politics is transformed: experimental practices are played
out between large-scale macropolitical institutions and processes and
the subinstitutional movements of affect, habit, and minor practices.
Micropolitics occurs at the level of detail, demeanor, feeling, and
response; it reveals the ways in which forms of embodiment and
sensibility shape being in the world and how the world in turn re-
verberates on bodies. Central here are the qualitative dimensions of
deviant minor practices and material habits and the ways in which
they can disrupt normativity and moral codes. For it is precisely in
these minor practices, like being responsive to the plastic bag suggest-
ing that you be patient, that matter might shift perception and invite
experiments with new practices. For Connolly (1999, 149), macro- and
micropolitics do not exist in relations of opposition, and nor should
they be ranked on a scale of importance. They are interconnected, and
“politics becomes most intensive and most fateful at those junctures
where micropolitics and macropolitics intersect.”

American Beauty: A Dancing Plastic Bag

In turning now to a cinematic plastic bag, my aim is not to do an
interpretation or reading of the scene. Though the institutional
organization of cinema is central to allowing this plastic bag to be
represented and to circulate, I am not concerned with the plastic bag
as an object of signification, nor I am concerned with an ideological
critique of the cultural messages of the film and the plastic bag’s role
in these. As with the banned bag on the say-no poster and the handy
bag for a wet bathing suit, my interest is in the relations between
performativity, materiality, and micropolitics. I want to think about
how the bag works in this particular cinematic assemblage, the kinds
of connections it establishes with the responding body, and the ways
in which a distinct thing-power materialism is put into play. I am
concerned with film technique, but not in the way this is normally
understood. By technique I do not mean the formal processes of
130 GAY HAWKINS

meaning making but rather the ways in which cinema as a complex

cultural apparatus mediates materiality and can induce responses in
the most visceral registers of the self.
Films can move, surprise, and disturb us in ways we barely un-
derstand until after the impulse has reverberated across our flesh.
Their influences can work beyond the level of consciousness and
thinking. While some might argue that this is precisely the problem
with cinema, its capacity to manipulate and distort, I take my lead
from Connolly (2002, 12–13), who argues that it is in these very mo-
ments when the body is captured by the screen, when habitual modes
of viewing are disrupted or when the powerful forces of affect are
mobilized, that cinematic technique can become implicated in the
reorganization of perception and the dynamics of micropolitics. For
Connolly, cinema is one of several key sites that reveal the complex
relations between affect, thinking, and language. Its capacity to con-
centrate and intensify images, sounds, voice, and music can affirm
the powers of the sensing body and the layered processes of thinking.
In his schema, consciousness is reframed from a self-sufficient and
disciplined zone of knowing and representing to a zone that is subject
to massive layers of sensory material and filtering. The embodied
work of thinking involves “powerful pressures to assimilate new
things to old habits of perception” (164), and it is in the interstices
of these pressures that new ideas and sensibilities might be created,
that a politics of active experimentation might surface: “these new
ideas, concepts, sensibilities and identities later become objects of
knowledge and representation. Thinking is thus creative as well as
representative, and its creativity is aided by the fact that the process of
thinking is not entirely controlled by the agents of thought” (65; italics
added). Connolly is describing the transformative power of affect
here, and this analysis is invaluable for making sense of how plastic
bags might become implicated in an expanded sense of politics.
The notorious plastic bag scene in American Beauty is both moving
and disturbing. It triggers specific geographies of affect that engulf
the viewer with the vivacity of an impression. In the structure of
the narrative, this scene has the insistent singularity of arriving out
of nowhere. It appears on the screen as part of Ricky’s home video
 Plastic Materialities 131

collection. He and Jane, the two teenage protagonists, are getting

to know each other in his bedroom. Ricky offers to show Jane his
favorite home video, what he considers to be “the most beautiful
thing in the world.” The screen is suddenly filled with a grainy digi-
cam image of a plastic bag being blown about in the wind. The bag
swoops and weaves; it is tossed about with the leaves in the gutter
against a backdrop of a nondescript brick wall on an anonymous
urban street. The setting is irrelevant; as the camera sticks to the
bag, its mobility and vitality become the center of attention: the bag
is dancing for us.
In terms of technique, the actual cinematic language of this scene
is deliberately and self-consciously singular. The logic of this sequence
is disruption: from slick, high-gloss Hollywood production values to
a sudden digicam aesthetic with its documentary and avant-garde
resonances. However, this opposition between documentary and
fiction gets nowhere near explaining the scene’s singularity. It can-
not be reduced to an irruption of the real into the fictional, nor can
it be explained by invoking referentiality or objectivity. An analysis
driven by some kind of genre fundamentalism does not get far. As
so much documentary and film theory has explained, fiction and
nonfiction inhabit each other. The nature of that bag’s capacity to
surprise, to move the viewer, comes not from the shock of genre
impurity, a little dash of documentary out of context, but from quite
different forces—specifically, the way in which the scene captures
the distinctive thing-power materiality of the plastic bag and the
affective force field that is generated by this.
What much recent writing on affect insists is that affect is, in
many senses, prior to feelings and emotions; having a feeling is not
the same as knowing it is a feeling. Being able to name a feeling,
to classify feelings within some kind of emotional taxonomy, is to
render affects available to consciousness, to make them knowable,
to recognize them. But we are in affect, participating, before this
happens. Affect precedes these kinds of classificatory and cognitive
activities. For Brian Massumi, the gap between affect and emotion
is a protosubjectivity. Affects remind us of the body’s intensities and
multiplicities, of the autonomy of experience. They are a surplus,
132 GAY HAWKINS

an excess; they are about those registers of the self that escape the
knowable, manageable subject: “the unbiddenness of qualitative
overspill” (Massumi 2000, 186).
What is valuable about Massumi’s account of affect is the way it
makes trouble for all those epistemologies that begin with a know-
ing subject ready to act on the world or be acted on. For the body
in affect is not subjectivity to the world’s objectivity; rather, it is a
body in transition, a body in relation. To respond, to have a response,
is to be in a relation. This is why Massumi argues so emphatically
that affect is relationality. Drawing on the work of William James,
he argues that relationality is already in the world, and to be in the
world and to participate in it is to be in an ever-unfolding relation.
Thinking about affect in this way means an abandonment of the
subject–object dualism. What is needed instead, according to Mas-
sumi, is a notion of continuity and discontinuity that is not framed
in terms of opposition but as a processual rhythm. This opens up an
understanding of how we are in and of the world, how being is a kind
of ontological tension between manipulable objectivity (reality and
all those things that represent it, e.g., language and documentaries)
and elusive qualitative activity: all those things that break in from the
outside, that surprise, that enliven, that introduce unpredictability—a
dancing plastic bag, for example (Massumi 2000).
Massumi’s idea of continuity–discontinuity as an ongoing proces-
sual rhythm shows that it is not so much a question of the generic
shock of a documentary moment rupturing the diegetic space of a
slick Hollywood narrative—though the bag scene obviously does
this—but is more a question of how the bag performs. It is not just
that it is real but that it is more than real; it is alive and animated. The
bag reveals the extraordinary vitality of plastic materiality: its capacity
to respond to the movement of wind, its lightness and transparency,
its shape-shifting flexibility. And this energy and beauty generate an
unexpected and intense affect that registers somatically, beneath and
before consciousness. This scene triggers a different rhythm in the
viewing body. To think about its affective force is to think about a
discontinuity in perception—not the dualism of a cinematic text and
a spectator, but an unpredictable, uncontained multiplicity, in which
the viewer is caught up with or responding to the materiality of an
 Plastic Materialities 133

enchanted plastic bag. Body and bag open to each other, crossing
over and exchanging various materialities.
The dancing plastic bag disturbs habituated modes of viewing
and existing meanings. It challenges a framing of plastic materiality
as inert rubbish. This bag does not just move us; it forces us to notice
its materiality. Though it may feel like we are seeing a plastic bag
as if for the first time, as authentic matter, as the pure thing itself,
this materiality is still a product of distinct assemblage, from the
technologies of cinema to the perceptual trainings of the audience
to everyday waste habits. This is not to reduce the plastic bag to an
effect of these technologies, a mere representation; rather, it is to claim
that the thing-power materialism in play is both real and contingent,
an outcome of diverse techniques that seek to render manifest the
force of matter and frame it in distinct ways.
In American Beauty the plastic bag does not have any narrative
function; the movie would do fine without it. It appears to be there
just to generate affect. But how does it do this? We cannot explain
this exclusively by the logic of the referent; bags are not usually that
moving. There is no question that this scene is an image of redemp-
tion, hated or ignored matter rendered beautiful and alive, but that
is not really the issue; rather, it is what cinematic techniques do to
things that is more important. As Lesely Stern (2001) argues, the ways
in which things acquire meaning and affect in the cinema have to
do with how they are captured by the camera, their mutability, and
their implication in the quotidian—the social life of things before
they are framed by the cinematic gaze.
Stern’s argument makes trouble for analyses of documentary as a
genre that captures the real; rather, she insists on the need to theorize
cinema’s relation to the quotidian, the different ways in which cinema
captures or frames everyday matter. She posits a tension between
two specific cinematic techniques, the histrionic and the quotidian,
which exist in a generative tension with each other. Cinema has
always been about ordinary things; it is what it does with them that
is important, how it conjures them and invites them to perform. In
American Beauty, there is no question that the plastic bag is perform-
ing for the camera and that, in this long, evocative sequence, while
the digicam stays on the bag, the audience experiences a suspension
134 GAY HAWKINS

of narrative, a diversion. Using Stern’s argument, we can see how, in

this diversion, narrativity and histrionic techniques are suspended in
deference to the quotidian, to a performative technique that involves
a gestural framing of the thing, highlighting it and watching it move.
We have a sense of the “world caught off guard, unposed, real” (Stern
2001, 327). As Stern says (327), “editing is deflated in deference to
the primacy of the real allowing a kind of minimal inflation of real
time.” This discontinuity creates a new rhythm, where a different
relation between temporality and affectivity is established, one that
is in the realm of emotional duration.
Cinema’s fascination with the performance of things is continu-
ally highlighted in American Beauty with references to camcorder
culture. Ricky uses his digicam to try to capture the ineffable singu-
larity of matter. He is not using the camera to mediate the world, to
separate himself from it; rather, it is a tool for trying to simultane-
ously render the material force of objects and convey the insistent
autonomy of his experience of them. Or to use another term, it is a
tool to capture affect as relationality, as a sense of being caught up
in the world rather than the center of it. Consider his narration of
the plastic bag scene:

It was one of those days when it’s a minute away from snowing. And
there’s this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it, right? And
this bag was just . . . dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to
play with it. For fifteen minutes. That’s the day I realized there was
this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force
that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever. . . .
Video’s a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember.

The technical possibilities of the portable digicam dramatically

foreground cinematic performativity: what a camera does to things,
how it conjures them up in ways that make them seem enchanted.
But at the same time, things have a life of their own. As Ricky says,
“video’s a poor excuse.”
The affective force of this scene comes from the glimpse it of-
fers of that quotidian world of plastic bags existing not as passive
objects waiting to be refused but as elusive actants: things that have
 Plastic Materialities 135

the power to capture us in new relations. And this affective force is

potentially transformative. To be moved by a bag, to feel enfolded
with its materiality, to sense a force field of unexpected energies
surface as it performs on screen, is to be caught up in completely
different habits of perceiving and responding. This surprising en-
counter undoes the circuits of guilt and obligation through which
subjects feel the pull of prescriptive moral codes. This is not a bag
to be refused in the interest of producing a virtuous identity but
rather a bag that is generating an intense entanglement, a shock of
new feelings for plastic matter and what it can do. This bag is not
appealing to conscience.1 This dancing plastic bag flattens out the
subject–object hierarchy, generating an assemblage of affective con-
nections and reverberations in which thing-power materialism, “the
recalcitrance or moment of vitality of things” (Bennett 2004, 354),
is put into play. For Bennett the affective agency of thing-power is
inextricably linked to ecological awareness:

Thing-power is a kind of agency, [it] is the property of an assemblage.

Thing-power materialism is a (necessarily speculative) onto-theory
that presumes matter has an inclination to make connections and
form networks with varying degrees of stability. Here, then, is an
affinity between thing-power materialism and ecological thinking:
both advocate the cultivation of an enhanced sense of the extent to
which all things are spun together in a dense web, and both warn
of the self-destructive character of human actions that are reckless
with regard to other nodes of the web. (Bennett 2004, 354)

The Politics of Plastic Bags

The concern in this chapter has been to understand how plastic
materiality is made present in various arrangements and to investi-
gate how this materiality exhibits differential degrees of agency. By
letting plastic bags have their say, the aim has been to challenge the
tendency of environmental ethics to material essentialism and its
blindness to the shifting processes whereby bad stuff becomes ethi-
cally and politically significant. Deploying a more-than-human mode
of inquiry makes it possible to see how plastic bags are implicated
in both fashioning and disturbing an environmentally concerned
136 GAY HAWKINS

subjectivity and how these disturbances and problematizations are

implicated in an expanded politics of plastic bags.
The capacity of plastic bags to disturb is a product of shifting
associations and interactions. While environmental awareness cam-
paigns such as say-no campaigns have been crucial in animating the
disastrous effects of plastic materiality, they involve a limited style
of address and politics. Their technique of moral problematization
makes the bag an intermediary in the relays between the interior
reception of an ethical command and the mobilization of human
will to abide by it. However, in activating techniques of conscience,
these bags explicitly fix political and moral concepts. They are always
already bad, and they amplify the mastery of humans as the source
of political change and environmental survival: say no!
The handy plastic bag generates a very different network of re-
lations. Its mundane practicality and its capacity to make humans
be patient is disturbing. This thing-power materialism reveals the
fundamental porousness and instability of command moralities.
It generates a pragmatic problematization of the bag that has the
potential to trouble and deconstruct the politics of environmental
education. In reassembling how bodies experience the bag and be-
have around them, a different micropolitics of habit, sensibility, and
perception is activated. These micropolitical responses are mixed up
with code-driven disciplines. They reveal another layer of response
flowing through the certainties of ethos and command. The handy
plastic bag and the dancing plastic bag are powerful evidence that
circulating through every dutiful or correct practice are moments
of responsiveness and affect that capture subjects in new relations
to the world. These are bags that prompt different feelings and
knowledges and that enlarge the reach of politics beyond public
reason and conflict into the terrain of the visceral, the situational,
and the experimental.
Connolly argues that disturbance and unexpected responses are
fundamental to politics because they show how affect is implicated
in the composition of new sensibilities and associations. For Con-
nolly, responsiveness is a condition of possibility; it opens lines of
mobility and difference within the self, and it is something that can
be cultivated. An “ethos of critical responsiveness” (Connolly 1999,
 Plastic Materialities 137

69), to use his term, connects political experimentation to affect

and various practices of self-modification. It involves work on the
self in the interest of recognizing the plurivocity of being and mat-
ter. Critical responsiveness decenters the human as the sovereign
source of agency and change; in recognizing multiple sites of agency
at play in the world, it invites an expanded politics attentive to how
the force of matter might participate in generating new associations
and ethics.

Notes

1 This section draws from my book The Ethics of Waste (Hawkins

2006, 36–39).

References

Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life. Princeton, N.J.:

Princeton University Press.
———. 2004. “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter.”
Political Theory 32: 347–72.
Castree, Noel. 2003. “A Post-environmental Ethics.” Ethics, Place, and
Environment 6, no. 1: 3–12.
Collier, Stephen, Andrew Lakoff, and Paul Rabinow. 2004. “Biosecurity:
Towards an Anthropology of the Contemporary.” Anthropology
Today 20, no. 5: 3–7.
Connolly, William. 1999. Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2002. Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1987. Dialogues II. Trans. H. Tomlinson
and B. Habberjam. London: Continuum.
Foucault, Michel. 1985. The Use of Pleasure. Trans. R. Hurley. New York:
Vintage.
Grosz, Elisabeth. 2001. Architecture from the Outside. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.
Hawkins, Guy. 2006. The Ethics of Waste. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and
Littlefield.
138 GAY HAWKINS

Hunter, Ian. 1993. “Subjectivity and Government.” Economy and Society

22, no. 1: 123–34.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: or How to Make
Things Public.” In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democ-
racy, ed. B. Latour and P. Weibel, 14–41. Cambridge, Mass.: ZKM
and MIT Press.
Law, John. 2004. After Method. London: Routledge.
Massumi, Brian. 2000. “Too Blue: Colour Patch for an Expanded Em-
piricism.” Cultural Studies 14, no. 2: 177–226.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2005. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal.” In Making
Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. B. Latour and P. Weibel,
994–1003. Cambridge, Mass.: ZKM and MIT Press.
Stern, Lesely. 2001. “Paths that Wind through the Thicket of Things.”
Critical Inquiry 28 (Autumn): 317–54.
 6 Halos: Making More Room in the
World for New Political Orders
nigel thrift

T his chapter represents one small part of a more general

attempt to struggle over the hill of various Western philosophies,
social sciences, and forms of politics to see a new, more open vista,
one in which, through the articulation of an ontology of achieve-
ment, different associations are able to be made and made manifest,
different togethernesses are thereby able to be forged, and different
landscapes of possibility are subsequently able to be uncovered.
To limit what is clearly an enormous number of lines of enquiry,
I have therefore fixed on just one aspect of this attempt, namely, the
politics of the imagination. However, I make no apologies for choos-
ing this topic as my touchstone, for different imaginative dispositions
and propensities might well be thought of as the basis of political-
moral authority.1 For example, it can be argued that if power means
the capacity to make somebody do what she would not otherwise
do, then whoever possesses the capacity to influence others’ imagi-
nations has a good deal of power. To put it another way, political
power is not only about controlling the means of coercion but also
about controlling the means of imagination, where imagination is
understood as the ability to express possible/play/pretend beliefs2
and emotions that might become the basis of a better world. Equally,
it is about working on so-called imaginative resistance, the possible
beliefs and emotions that we resist imagining and accepting—either
because we cannot imagine a possibility or because we do not want
to imagine it (Nichols 2006).

139
140 NIGEL THRIFT

Most particularly, I want to express the significance of this political

project through one particular unifying visual device—the halo—
which stands for a change in the nature of the spatial representation3
of imagination, through work on the way in which emancipation and
attachment are jointly framed, on the grounds that a good part of
the political consists of the establishment of an effective imaginary
(Castoriadis 1997).
I will introduce the conceit of the halo in the first part of the
chapter. The three succeeding sections of the chapter then proceed
to develop an argument through three different uses of this general
framing device: as a means of approaching affective imitation and
its ramifications, as a means of understanding the generation of se-
miotic intensity and thereby affective traps, and as the construction
of forms of community that attempt to generate affective affinity in
new ways. In each case, my purposes are political. Respectively, they
are to displace prevalent models of political activism, to understand
new forms of inhabitation and their possibilities, and to generate
new locatives.

Halos
I have had three interrelated goals in mind in writing this chapter.
To begin with, I want to trace out some of the changes in the politi-
cal contours of our time, but I will do so by understanding “social”
process as a mass of material entanglements slowly changing within
daily practices, often without intentionality: “the mass seems to move
with a life of its own. But the movement is built from the little micro-
details of life” (Hodder 2006, 258). Specifically, I will be tracing out,
perhaps in accelerated form, the further history of entanglement
with material objects, a history in which these objects come to have
greater and greater purchase on our lives, not only as the ability to
construct continuity and to initiate change but also as small things
too easily forgotten (Deetz 1996). I also have a second goal in mind,
and that is pointing to certain ways in which Western academic
thinking is fracturing, with interesting consequences. It is fracturing
because it is realigning the roles of concepts, percepts, and affects,
reworking space and time and taking on new partners (animals,
materials). The result is a different take on the human, society, and
 Halos 141

imagination that is difficult to disentangle but can perhaps be made

sense of as a generator of different kinds of “radical” politics (Tønder
and Thomassen 2005). The third goal arises out of the previous two.
I want to think about the possibilities of new creatures, understood
as new compounds of life that act in unforeseen ways, and the new
spaces in which such life can flourish, spaces that provide new
lures to feeling, new powers to force thinking and invention, new
schemes of purposefulness—or purposelessness—that can provide
different means of moving us/them. In particular, I want to think
about the kinds of model of affective agency that might be possible
and, simultaneously (since they cannot be understood apart), how
they might be fostered by speculative spaces that call to, provoke,
and invoke these agents. In other words, I want to talk about new
forms of intelligibility.
I will try to achieve these three general goals by using the con-
ceit of the halo—standing, in general, as a means of beginning the
process of considering and constructing new imaginative plausi-
bilities. I will use the framing device of the halo because it conjures
up an image which can have several kinds of grip. If I was to frame
my argument in quasi-religious terms, then what is being sought
through the agency of the halo is a device that will not so much
unite as bring into correspondence that which is different without
trespassing on that difference, and without trying to reduce what is
puzzling to a predictable encounter; rather, because “each party may
entertain its own version of the agreement” (chapter 1), the art is in
the achievement itself. To repeat my opening remarks, the conceit of
the halo is used to open up three specific dimensions of this art of
achievement,4 namely, the emergence and nurturing of infectious
relationships, the design of spaces of inhabitation as both semiotic
intensities and affective traps (Gell 1998), and the construction of
new kinds of locative community.

The First Halo: Picturing Affective Contagion

In its most familiar guise, the halo is a staple of Christian religious
iconography. Yet the halo is pagan in origin. Many centuries before
Christ, it is thought that various peoples of the Mediterranean deco-
rated their heads with a crown of feathers (Fisher 1995). “They did so
142 NIGEL THRIFT

to symbolize their relationship with the sun-god: their own ‘halo’ of

feathers representing the fan of beams splaying out from the shining
divinity in the sky. Indeed, people came to believe that by adopt-
ing such a ‘nimbus’ men turned into a kind of sun themselves and
into a divine being” (16). Various pharaohs and emperors followed
suit. Later, the halo appeared in the art culture of ancient Greece
and Rome,5 before being incorporated into Christian art sometime
during the fourth century, adorning first Christ, later angels, and
eventually saints.6 Subsequently, the halo has had a rich history as
the aureole that appears to emanate from beings of particularly in-
tense spirituality, a history with its own shifts in representation—for
example, during the Renaissance, when rigorous perspective became
essential, the halo changed from an aura surrounding the head to a
tilting disk that appeared in perspective, floating above the heads of
saints, and then to a thin ring of light.7 In later work, haloes would
often appear by allusion or insinuation—as a circular pattern that
falls behind a head or as an arc of a doorway.
In this chapter, I want to understand the halo, first of all, as
signifying the construction of new forms of empathy that are si-
multaneously acts of identification with the feelings, thoughts, or
attitudes of another and the imaginative ascription to a natural object
or a work of art of feelings or attitudes considered to be present in
oneself. The reason is that I think that something quite interesting
is happening in Western thinking of late. It is, I believe, a result of
the joining of certain strands of thought as a result of more general
changes taking place in the nature of the apprehension of space,
thus pointing the way to a new kind of political settlement, one that
might allow a different kind of spiritedness to emanate, one based on
an ethos of craftsmanship of the moment that can produce “instant”
affective communities. In making this claim, I therefore want the
halo to stand for an affective ambition that is the achievement of an
infectious relationship.
To stake this particular claim, I want to fix on the haloes to be
found in the works of one the very finest orchestrators of glances,
gazes, and stares, namely, Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337). I will start
by examining one of Giotto’s remarkable frescoes, The Meeting at the
Golden Gate.8 In this fresco, the aging Joachim and Anna, Mary’s
 Halos 143

mother and father to be, look each other straight in the eye in an
atmosphere of solidity and stability. The halo that unites them is an
expression of this atmosphere of happy encounter. Nothing could
be more different in another of Giotto’s finest frescoes, The Betrayal
of Christ. There only Jesus and Peter have haloes. Judas does not: he
remains a lonely and inner-directed subject, cut off from the affec-
tive flow. But I do not want to draw the obvious conclusions here
about Euro-American Cartesian subjectivities and the like; rather,
I want to fix on the face and how it is figured in these and other
representations.
The uncanny semaphore of the face is a crucial element in both
paintings, and it will be an important recurring motif in this chapter.
After all, “the living face is the most important and mysterious surface
we deal with. . . . Babies just nine minutes old who have never seen
a human countenance, prefer a face pattern to a blank or scrambled
one” (McNeill 1998, 4). Almost from birth, the gaze is fixed on the
face, especially the eyes, as the baby constructs joint attention and
intentional understanding (Eilan et al. 2005). In other words, the
face, like language, is an aspect of public thought.
That fact can be illustrated in three ways. First, faces are one of
the chief means by which affect is generated in the world. Their 46
separate muscles, the eyes, the mouth, the nose, and the ears allow
a range of expression that is without peer in the natural world, and
they produce or certainly enable many of the characteristics that are
most notably human. Second, there is a history of the representation
of the face. Certain facial states come to be increasingly represented
over the course of history. For example, the smile figures more and
more as a result of the increasing portrayal of the open mouth from
the eighteenth century onward because of changes in social attitude—
and better dentistry (Jones 2000)! Third, there is a technical history
of the face, perhaps best illustrated by the history of cinema and its
effects on our perception. For example, the close-up is a crucial way
station in the history of the modern face, providing new means of
attending to the face and new possibilities for relation, not least those
arising out of the close-up’s peculiar ability to generate both intimacy
and threat, not least as a disembodied affect. The face itself becomes
a frame, but it can also be located outside the subject in the world of
144 NIGEL THRIFT

technically assembled images (Hansen 2004). What seems evident is

that the face is a crucial element of politics and the political. It was
always thus, one might say. But the modern media have extended the
range of body language in ways hitherto unforeseen, most especially
by providing a set of stock affective scripts for which the face provides
both the template and the chief means of operating.9
Most important, of course, the face is our chief means for produc-
ing and scripting affective effects. Through its medium, we exercise the
capacity for mind reading that probably does most to distinguish us
from animals.10 Other creatures undoubtedly have pains, expectations,
and emotions, but having a mental state and representing another
individual as having such a state is a second-order phenomenon
that, so far as we can tell, other creatures do not have or have in an
attenuated form (Grandin 2005; Hurley and Nudds 2006). Currently
the favored explanation for mind reading is the so-called simulation
explanation, which effectively argues that

people fix their targets’ mental states by trying to replicate or emulate

them. It says that mindreading includes a crucial role for putting
oneself in others’ shoes. It may even be part of the brain’s design to
generate mental states that match, or resonate with, states of people
one is observing. Thus mindreading is an extended form of empathy.
(Goldman 2006, 4)

In turn, the phenomenon of mind reading points to the impor-

tance of what I have called the infectious relationship, founded in the
production of chains of imitation. This is a phenomenon that was
noted early in the history of philosophy and psychology. For example,
both Hume (1739) and Smith (1759) detected it in their writings on
sympathy. In particular, understanding infectious relationships means
understanding affective contagion, a central concern of turn-of-the-
nineteenth-century social science in the form of the study of imitation
and suggestibility. Imitation and suggestibility took shape as particular
kinds of object through a hypnotic paradigm that was worked out
through an interest in particular forms of psychopathology (such as
hallucinations and delusions), even an interest in spiritualist forms of
communication (Blum 2007). Imitation and suggestibility were sites
 Halos 145

for exploring all manner of issues such as consciousness, memory,

personality, and communication. In particular they signified a “taking
over” of the subject that defied normal economies of subject–object
relations. However, subsequently, a move to psychoanalytic models
of desire or to more discursive approaches to subjectivity ruled
imitation and suggestibility out of court, and they fell into disrepair
as a way of approaching social structuring.
But of late, imitation and suggestibility have been making a return,
boosted especially by the rediscovery of the work of Gabriel Tarde
on a somnambulist society and more general work on the construc-
tion of collective intelligence. Within cultural theory, viral models of
contagion have been posited as explaining the workings of a range
of phenomena, including ideology, governance, self-cultivation,
and even resistance, but often in highly speculative ways that posit a
kind of performative energetics without specifying what the source,
content, or form of that energy might be.
What do we know about affective contagion (Thrift 2007)? To
begin with, it means understanding affect as in large part a biologi-
cal phenomenon, involving embodiment11 in its many incarnations,
but a phenomenon that is not easily captured via specular–theatrical
theories of representation (Brennan 2004; Gumbrecht 2004). It brings
together a mix of a hormonal flux, body language, shared rhythms, and
other forms of entrainment (Parkes and Thrift 1979, 1980) to produce
an encounter between the body (understood in a broad sense) and
the particular event. Thus affective contagion is best understood as a
set of flows moving in a semiconscious fashion through the bodies of
human and other beings, not least because bodies are not primarily
centered repositories of knowledge—originators—but rather receivers
and transmitters, ceaselessly moving messages of various kinds on;
the human being is primarily “a receiver and interpreter of feelings,
affects, attentive energy” (Brennan 2004, 87).
This understanding points in turn to one more important aspect
of affective contagion, namely, the importance of space, understood
as a series of conditioning environments that both prime and “cook”
affect. Such environments depend on prediscursive ways of proceed-
ing that both produce and allow changes in bodily state to occur
(Thrift 2006). Changes in bodily state require understanding that
146 NIGEL THRIFT

essentially autonomic hormonal and muscular reactions are continu-

ally transferring between people (and things) in ways that are often
difficult to track. At the same time, they challenge the idea that the
body is a fixed component of humanity. Humans might be more
accurately likened to schools of fish briefly stabilized by particular
spaces, temporary solidifications of affective pulses, most especially
as devices like books, screens, and the Internet act as new kinds of
neural pathways, transmitting faces and stances and providing myriad
opportunities to forge new reflexes.
Thus concentrating on infectious relationships requires a carto-
graphic imagination to map out the movement between corporeal
states of being that is simultaneously a change in connectivity. But
only a very limited range of spatial models currently exist that can
understand flows of imitation/suggestion. Alongside familiar car-
tographic motifs from diffusion studies, these include certain very
general metaphors that have arisen from the recent emphasis in social
theory on mobility, a range of ways of staging space to conduct affect
that can be found in performance studies, a set of artistic experiments
with sites of affective imitation, often using the possibilities of modern
electronic media and various kinds of conversation maps (Abrams
and Hall 2006). However, it is also clear that certain technological
advances, and especially those to do with mobile telephony and the
Web, are making it easier to visualize flows of imitation, not least
because they are themselves prime conductors.
Now we can also add in what we currently know about imitation
and suggestibility. For imitation has become a paramount concern of
the contemporary cognitive sciences, and this work is worth exploring
in a little more detail because it contains many insights. In particular,
imitation is now understood as a higher-level cognitive function,
mirroring both the means and ends of action, and highly dependent
on the empathy generated in an intersubjective information space
that supports automatic identifications. For example, just as Hume
and Smith might have predicted, hearing an expression of anger
increases the activation of muscles used to express anger in others,
especially those muscles found in the face. There is, in fact, only a
delicate separation between one’s own mental life and that of another,
so that affective contagion is the norm, not an outlier. What differs
 Halos 147

between different cultures is rather what is regarded as the result of

agency. Thus, for Western cultures, it can be a painful realization to
understand how little of our thinking and emotions can in any way
be ascribed as “ours”; it is very hard for Westerners to accept that
broad imitative tendencies apply to themselves, both because they
are unconscious and automatic and because the preponderance of
apparently external influences threatens the prevailing model of an
agent as being in conscious control of himself.
At the same time, it is important to stress that imitation is more
than mere emulation. Imitation is different from simple emulation
in that it depends on an enhanced capacity for anticipation, so-
called mind reading (Thrift 2005). In particular, much of human
beings’ capacity for mind reading (whether this be characterized as
inference or simulation) develops over years of interaction between
infants and their environments and involves processing the other as
“like me,” and the consequent construction of high-level hypotheses
like deception; that is, it involves a form of grasping that is innately
physical and nonrepresentational because our privileged access is to
the world, not to our own minds.
What seems clear, then, is that human beings have a default
capacity to imitate, automatically and unconsciously, in ways that
their deliberate pursuit of goals can override but not explain. In
other words, most of the time, they do not even know they are imi-
tating. Yet at the same time, this is not just motivational inertness.
It involves, for example, mechanisms of inhibition, many of which
are cultural.12
So it is that imitation generates a spectrum of affective states and
most especially empathy, not only because the self–other divide can
be seen to be remarkably porous but also because across it constantly
flow all kinds of emotional signals. But this is a kinetic empathy, of
the kind often pointed to in dance, a kinaesthetic awareness/imita-
tion that is both the means by which the body experiences itself
kinaesthetically and also apprehends other bodies (Foster 2002).
Having considered the infectious relationship through the me-
dium of the face, I also want to use Giotto’s Christian iconography
of Joachim and Anna’s gentle gaze to reflect on the possibility of
forming new kinds of activists who are not the militant, even martial
148 NIGEL THRIFT

activists we have too often lighted on: those who are “self-confident
and free of worry, capable of vigorous, wilful activity” (Walzer
1988, 313). In particular, I want to get away from the remains of the
model of what Benasayag calls the “sad activist,” always intent on
configuring a center from which to think radical practices (Collec-
tivo Situationes 2005), a model that puts so many off—not just the
committed but also the uncommitted, for whom it can often appear
that activists are “know-it-alls” (Eliasoph 1998). In other words, I
want to talk about how it might be possible to face up to the world
by generating new models of the activist that are not like Walzer’s
constant hero, strong of mind and will, and that may well be more
effective in their desire to generate affective affinities that are open-
ended: emergent capacities to empower rather than fixed programs
that can be handed down.
Most particularly, I want to think about generating new moral-
political stances (using this word to point toward the political and
the spatial as aspects of each other) that express a different model
of the political subject, stances that blur the boundary between
mover and moved13 that is so crucial to prevailing models of active
agency. Among other sorties, the feminist literature (especially the
diverse literature on feminine nature) and various anthropological
investigations into fractal modes of being have both been attempting
this reengineering of the subject over many years. Such sorties raise
intriguing questions about many things we hold dear. Specifically,
does passivity have virtues as a means of seeking political change?
In the midst of current world events, this question will no doubt
sound discordant, but passivity, or so it seems to me, points to a dif-
ferent way of doing things, one that dates from early modern times
and relies on a very different model of agency and a very different
rhetoric of passions, both of which are dependent on understanding
subjects as transmitters and receivers of infectious relationships. So
far as the model of agency is concerned, it is crucial to understand
that for “new creatures,”

Agency admits of more positions than “autonomous agent.” . . . In

addition to the autonomous agent undermined by recent discourses,
an “agent” can also refer to one who acts for another. . . . This
 Halos 149

deputized “agent” is not a “sovereign ruler” but a subject licensed

by another authority to perform predetermined actions. The gap
between “agent” and “autonomous agent” is crucial to seventeenth-
century writers, who often deny “autonomy” but insist on “agency,”
both descriptively (each individual has agency) and prescriptively
(all individuals must act in the world). As “agents” or “instruments”
of another, individuals are simultaneously “acted by another,” in
Thomas Hooker’s phrase, and enabled to act in the world. “Acted
upon, we act,” summarizes John Cotton. These writers desire agency
only insofar as it differs from autonomy: they desire not “shaping
power” over their identities and actions but to be shaped by another
power. (Gordon 2002, 23)

So far as the rhetoric of passions goes, what is important in

becoming a new creature is the mobilization of passions like pride
and humility politically, “with the apparently ‘active’ vice of pride
condemned for its ineffectiveness and the ‘passive’ virtue of humility
serving the most dramatic revolutionary ends” (Gross 2006, 110). The
religious model of a radical that was prevalent in the early modern
period was connected to the practice of a feminized humility: the
agent was an instrument, “the product of humiliation, anxiety, and
soulful, feminine passivity, in the best sense of the word” (Gross 2006,
93), an agent “humiliated for collective sins past and reformed for
the time to come”: this is a “feminine” passivity, but not, I hasten to
add, in any pejorative sense. It is fragility as a precondition of grace,
passivity as a precondition of change.
What difference might this make? I am not sure. But take one
classic example of a moral–political code in which the model of a
constant, militant hero currently holds sway: courage and bravery.14
Yet such a model varies markedly from what is considered seemly
in other cultures. Our model of courage and bravery has its genesis
in Greek notions of character. For example, for Aristotle, for every
character trait, there is a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency:

Aristotle says that true excellences of character—what are called the

virtues—have in common that they strike the mean between excess
and defect. Given a particular life-challenge, a courageous person
150 NIGEL THRIFT

will act in a way that avoids the excess of foolhardy recklessness, on

the one hand, but also the defect of cowardliness, on the other. The
courageous person will in any given circumstances, be able to find
an appropriate way to behave courageously. That is what it is to strike
the mean: to find an appropriate way to behave in circumstances in
which it is possible to do too much or too little. (Lear 2006, 17)

In other words, bravery is a virtue falling somewhere between

rashness (bravery in excess) and cowardice (bravery in deficit).15 But
what constitutes bravery and what constitutes too much or too little
of it varies massively across cultures and through time. Since for
much of the time, bravery and courage are clearly forms of “thinking
without words” (Bermúdez 2003), depending very much on taking a
stance to a situation, they rely on material symbols arranged as deter-
minate spatial patterns for articulation. In other words, bravery and
courage tend to be carried in particular material cultures that both
illustrate and compound particular convictions: materials matter. I
want to highlight two particular, contrasting examples of material
cultures of bravery and courage, in which these virtues are thought
through and as particular exceptional things/spaces, to make this
point (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007).16
For the warlike North American Crow, to take one instance,
bravery was materialized in the, to us, excessive practice of counting
coup by planting coup sticks, that is, tapping an enemy with a coup
stick before killing him,17 and then counting the coup in a ceremony
after the incident in the form of a feather for each incident, which
could be worn in the hair or on a shield. But this was a particular
kind of bravery:

Obviously, the practice of counting coups valorized bravery—a trait

that was necessary for the Crow to survive. Honor was accorded to
the brave men, along with access to women, extra food, and other
material benefits. Imaginative-desiring-erotic-honor-seeking-life
was organized around this kind of bravery. . . . If the survival of the
Crow tribe as a social unit had been the primary good, one might
expect that the highest honor would go to the warrior who killed
the first enemy in battle, or the warrior who killed the most. But to
 Halos 151

count coup it was crucial that, at least for the moment, one avoided
killing the enemy. There is a certain symbolic excess in counting
coups. One needed not only to destroy the enemy; it was crucial
that the enemy recognize that he was about to be destroyed. (Lear
2006, 15–16)

Take another instance. But here, the example is passive and arises
out of a long tradition of nonviolence, or, more accurately perhaps, the
bravery of hesitation. I am thinking here, in particular, of standards
of excellence lived by and instantiated in the Quakers:

If hesitation gathers practitioners, it is because rules and norms are

discursive expressions tentatively formulating something that has
no definitive, authoritative formulation and hence does not com-
municate through obedience—which I call “obligations.” Obligations
communicate with the possibility of their betrayal. If ever a practice
exhibited this possibility, it is that of the Quakers, who, as we know,
did not quake in front of their God but in front of the menace of
silencing what was asked of them in a particular situation, answering
it in terms of preset beliefs and convictions. (chapter 1)

Just like the Crow culture of bravery, so the Quaker culture of

bravery is instituted by a material culture: the material interface is
the meeting house, which affirms the value of hesitation through
the construction of an absolutely democratic space. In particular,
the early North American meeting houses were built to a circular
plan, thus producing an egalitarian acoustic in which everyone could
be heard with the same volume wherever he spoke in the building
(Rath 2003).
These are radically different, even opposed examples. But in
combination with the previous discussion of passivity, they lead to
some intriguing questions. What should we count as bravery? Is there
a political economy of bravery? Might it be possible to reengineer
bravery toward a “passive” affective model again, so that many more
exemplary acts could be included?18 What kind of material culture
would be able to achieve this? What does bravery look like in a
conglomerate of relationships that includes all manner of material
152 NIGEL THRIFT

and animal correspondents? Whatever the answer might be, space

will be key, and so it is to space that I now turn, and especially to the
multifarious spaces being formed by various forms of contemporary
information technology, and most especially to the spaces being
formed by ubiquitous-ambient-pervasive-persistent interfaces of
various kinds, interfaces with which it is possible to have unconscious
or semiconscious relationships (Bickmore and Picard 2005).

The Second Halo: Engineering Affective Environments

Nowadays, the word halo means as much to a Western audience as
a best-selling series of computer games and associated comics19 and
graphic novels,20 with a fanatical—and I do mean fanatical—fan
base. On the basis of the old science fiction conceit of humans ver-
sus aliens on a halolike ring world, the Halo series first appeared in
2001, very much associated with the cooperation between Microsoft’s
Xbox and the games developer Bungie Studios, and reached Halo 3
in the last quarter of 2007. To give some indication of the popularity
of this series, Halo 2, launched in 2004, has sold more than seven
million copies worldwide so far. In all, 14.7 million copies of Halo
titles have so far been sold, and more than 800 million hours of the
online element of the Halo 2 game have been played.
Halo signifies the construction of world on world. It is a series of
terraforms, models of possible worlds. This seems extraordinarily im-
portant to me in that it presages the kind of world that is now coming
into being, one based on new disciplines like reflexive architecture,
interaction design, environment art, and various forms of gaming
that aim to redesign interaction. These disciplines allow passions
that would have been difficult to express collectively to come into
being through the design of new kinds of environments—synthetic
worlds—that both facilitate play and close it down. I think it is no
coincidence that there is currently so much attention being paid to
new, more active forms of materiality: in a sense, these are the build-
ing projects of the twenty-first century because they presage a time
when “there really is no barrier to a complete translation of every
human interpersonal phenomenon on Earth into the digital space”
(Castronova 2006, 48) with all manner of results, from new zones
of economic activity through to new forums for interaction. After
 Halos 153

all, as Castronova (2006, 69) puts it, “what happens in these worlds
is not just play, and not just communication. It is a complex thing, a
combination of real interaction and a play-like context.”
Thus, in Halo, the purpose of the game is to move the charac-
ters through vast outdoor and indoor environments that have been
imagined in great detail. Though the environments are designed by
concept artists and executed by teams of designers who want to make
these worlds “look and feel real” (Trautmann 2004, 71), they are also
open to fan feedback. The environments are themselves characters
in the game, what the designers call “silent cartographers.” Objects
are always also locations. What we see is the construction of new
fields of occurrences and the construction of new entities that can
count as events (Newman and Simons 2007).
I want to suggest that Halo stands for a particular aspect of the
modern world, namely, a shift in the nature of mediation toward
“worlding” enabled by new material cultures that allow the affective
priming of space to be systematized in ways that were not possible
before. The game is symptomatic of the new “stickiness” that is now
possible in three ways.
At one level, it stands for how modern business has moved on
from a focus on producing objects to a focus on producing worlds that
must also inevitably be spaces. Thus the business enterprise does not
create its object but rather the world within which the object exists.
As a corollary, the business enterprise does not create its subjects (as
happened in the older disciplinary regimens) but rather the world
within which the subject exists. As Lazzarato (2006, 188) puts it,

the company produces a world. In its logic, the service or the prod-
uct, just as the consumer or the worker, must correspond to this
world; and this world in its turn has to be inscribed in the souls
and bodies of consumers and workers. This inscription takes place
through techniques that are no longer exclusively disciplinary. Within
contemporary capitalism the company does not exist outside the
producers or consumers who express it. Its world, its objectivity,
its reality, merges with the relationships enterprises, workers and
consumers have with each other.
154 NIGEL THRIFT

The corporate aim is to produce and harvest what might be called

decisive moments of affectively inspired semiosis, which can be played
into through the redesign of environments. Such engrossing moments
have a deeply engrained cultural history, of course. The decisive mo-
ment was, in large part, an invention of Renaissance painters trying
to depict major turning points in history. They would build up scenes
in great detail in which the disposition of every person and object
counted as a part of a moment straining toward realization. The
motif was subsequently taken up by photographers, and especially
photojournalists. Famously, for Henri Cartier-Bresson, the decisive
moment (the title of his exhibit at the Louvre, the first photographic
show ever to be so honored) is the instant when a shutter click can
suspend an everyday event within the eye and heart of the beholder,
producing a confluence of observer and observed. It is the “simul-
taneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance
of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives
that event its proper expression” (Cartier-Bresson, 1952). Then the
decisive moment is still very much a mainstay of modern drama
and, most obviously, film. Cinema can be understood as a series of
practical meditations on summoning up decisive moments: “truth
24 times a second,” as Godard (cited in Mulvey 2006, 15) once put
it. Cinema is able to produce not just speed but delay and deferral,
preserving the moment at which the image is first registered in a
kind of extended present.
On another closely related level, I argue that this game is symp-
tomatic of the general rise of suggestible environments that can
act to concentrate and guide infectious encounter by constructing
traps for the affective flow of everyday life.21 In turn, encounter
can become specie, an insight that is drawn from the final writings
of Althusser (2006), in which he refers to the genesis of a state of
encounter, in which encounter is more and more able to be engi-
neered so that it can be thought of as a kind of currency with a face
value. But perhaps, rather than drawing on a monetary metaphor,
a metaphor of cultivation might be more appropriate. For there
seems to me to be a direct line of descent between the knowledges
of semiotic arrangement and disposition that landscape gardeners
like Humphrey Repton thought to be so crucial to their art of making
 Halos 155

fictions manifest and the games of today. These knowledges of

arrangement and disposition are currently going through a new
round of both strengthening and extension, as evidenced by, for
example, the general rise in cartographic awareness in all spheres
of life and most especially by the experimentation with new forms
of interrelation between mapping and the senses (e.g., Jones 2006),
which are allowing infectious relationships to be both represented
and engineered as never before.
On a final level, these heavily corporatized suggestible environ-
ments signify a new sense of narrative that is not linearized (Fleming
2001). A good example of this sense of narrative is provided by many
modern game-influenced movies. Take Pirates of the Caribbean:
Dead Men’s Chest:

The film has no concern with cogent storytelling, and neither do

today’s youngsters. For them, fiction, like gaming, is an eternal
present and plots a perpetuum mobile. The only narrative is to
get to the next level. So while Pirates 2 spools for older people like
a story whose reels have been muddled—a nightmare of botched
narrative—for children and young adults, up to say, 20, the film
advances to higher things on stepping stones of incremental sur-
realism. (Andrews 2006, 51)

Derrida spent a considerable period of his career considering the

way in which writing had imposed a particular form of linearization
of time and space on the world, which was, in effect, the infolding of
space and time known as “book.” But Derrida was at pains to point out
that linearization represents “only a particular model, whatever might
be its privilege,” and he notes the increasingly obvious inadequacy
of this model of arrangement to the “delinearized temporality” and
“pluri-dimensionality” of contemporary thought: “what is thought
today cannot be written according to the line and the book, except
by imitating the operation implicit in teaching modern mathematics
with an abacus” (Derrida 1998, 87). The linearization provided by
writing and its consequent inadequacy for certain kinds of thought
can be thrown into relief by writing schemes that do not deploy the
linear norm, so-called nondiscursive writings. There are many of
156 NIGEL THRIFT

these emblematic genres. For example, take the language of flowers,

an early modern schema that used a variety of somatic registers—
layout (e.g., the circumference), color, texture, smell—to display the
special indistinction between natural objects and rhetorical figures
(Fleming 2001). This language made its way into many aspects of
life as actual material objects, each of them understandable as ut-
terances, from posy rings to nosegays, in a society that associated
flowers with moral and other qualities. Viewed from our current
perspective, such schemas as the language of flowers may appear to
be inefficient codes, impoverished by a general lack of grammar and
an unregulated three-dimensional, multisensory syntax that “cannot
be further combined into a restricted and therefore consequential
utterance” (Fleming 2001, 21).
But equally, from the perspective on linear narrative that is of-
fered by some of the current developments, it is conceivable that a
new form of narrative will be generated that is very close in form
to the premodern prototype, one in which conviction is carried in
material objects and actions (rather than what today is called the
mind). Furthermore, this is a sense of the world in which nondis-
cursive writing is not readily distinguished from other human-made
or naturally recurring patterns, wherein lies the recalcitrance to full
referentiality that constitutes its particular force.22
This ambition is incarnated in Erasmus’s celebrated description of
a country house in which the walls, doors, galleries, flower beds, and
wine cups are all decorated with improving messages, an imagina-
tive development intended to move on from the extant holders and
transmitters of religious knowledge like the stained glass window to
something all-encompassing:

“Who could be bored in this house,” asks one guest, when among
so many painted forms there is “nothing inactive, nothing that is
not saying or doing something?” Writing is positioned throughout
the house and gardens to catch at the eye and activate the memory:
religious texts and images remind the host and his guests of the way
to salvation, and encourage them to pray; emblematic plants and
animals carry various moral lessons; and painted birds and other
trompe l’oeil effects cause wonder at “the cleverness of nature . . . the
 Halos 157

inventiveness of the painter, [and] in each the goodness of God.”

(Fleming 2001, 139–40)

And it has never quite left the world. As Derrida (1998, 128) put it,
the linear norm “was never able to impose itself absolutely,” not just
because acts of cognition can occur outside it but because the linear
norm is set to function as a limit and so opens the very questions
it appears to close: the contingencies of graphic phoneticism, and
the philosophical system that relies on it, depend on an imposition
that leaves in its wake all kinds of out-of-sequence gatherings that
cannot be made to fit and that might be made to remind readers of
the material practices that went into the production of the text. The
ambition was kept in gardening, in some aspects of folk design, in
parts of architecture. But there is more to this fugitive history. To
illustrate this, I want to begin with Charleston House in Sussex, the
famous home of the Bloomsbury set, notable especially for Vanessa
Bell and Duncan Grant’s rich decorative style. Inspired by Italian
fresco painting and the Post-Impressionists, the two artists decorated
the walls, doors, furniture, and garden at Charleston to the extent
that the house and garden became a living work of art in which ev-
ery surface was semiotically enhanced, thus reproducing Erasmus’s
dream of a country house that would speak out from every corner.
In doing so, Bell and Grant produced a mock-up of what the modern
world is becoming like, a space in which even the marginalia are
semiotically charged.
But whereas their house and garden was an imaginative booster
rocket that could be regarded as largely positive within its own bounds,
much the same kind of ambition can also have profoundly negative
consequences, as many totalitarian states have proved since.23 On
this dark side, what is crucial to understand is the degree to which
so much of the modern world consists of marginalia made central
by so-called reactionary modernist forces.
Of course, since the earlier part of the twentieth century, new
visual technologies have run riot, technologies that extend both
the means of representation (as in the proliferation of screens,
the wall newspapers of the twenty-first century) and the registers
that it is possible to decorate with images (as in the inhabitation of
158 NIGEL THRIFT

the precognitive domain by sigils like brands), thereby producing

something closer to an electronic version of Erasmus’s house in
which every surface gives off continuously modulated messages
such that an exchange of qualities, rather than just a transmission
of information, takes place—what Bruno (2004, 7, 12) suggestively
calls a “pandemic of images” that produces an “aggregate mnemonic
structure” that consists of multiple levels and planes of stimulation,
disposition, and recollection, all jumbled together in various living
reappropriations that constitute a kind of choreography, rising and
falling to rhythms of its own.24
There is evidence to suggest that this process is gathering pace
as a result of the intervention of large-scale parallel and distributed
computation in all its forms (Rotman 2000), which has allowed previ-
ously separate visual media—live action cinematography, graphics,
still photography, animation, three-dimensional computer animation,
typography, and so on—to be combined in novel ways, producing
what Rotman (2000) calls “rampant visualism” and Manovich (2006)
calls the “velvet revolution.” The underlying logic of this revolution,
which produces new media forms out of combination, is one of remix-
ability in which the computer simulates all media, thereby inducing
a transformation of visual language toward “motion graphics,” that
is, “designed non-narrative, non-figurative based visuals that change
over time” (Frantz, as cited in Manovich 2006, 8). What counts is
the arrangement of elements, such as size, aspect, a line of type, an
arbitrary geometric or other kind of form, and so on, into a kind of
dance: “we can compare the designer to a choreographer who cre-
ates a dance by ‘animating’ the bodies of dancers—specifying their
entry and exit points, trajectories through space of the stage, and the
movements of their bodies” (Manovich 2006, 12).25
This is, as I have tried to make clear, much more than some puta-
tive society of the spectacle, that is, an intensified deployment of the
apparatus of the production of appearances. Rather than such a state
of fallen grace, what I am trying to describe here is a reinhabitation,
one based on making the environment—a word that itself becomes a
contested one under the new conditions—into a semiotic soup, but
one in which most of the signs are nondiscursive. This reinhabita-
tion is akin to the biosemioticians’ notion that the basic unit of life
 Halos 159

is the sign (Wheeler 2006).26 It is not a direct imposition on a pas-

sive substrate of humanity but rather a reworking of what counts as
through, a processual “haptic spatiality” (Hansen 2004). In other
words, a nonrepresentational mode of writing that utilizes nonlinear
deployments of time and space is again gaining a place in the world,
with clear effects on what we regard as perception.
In turn, this change provides a pressing political task in a society
in which this rampant visualism is coming into being. It poses obvi-
ous risks—but it also provides opportunities for building new kinds
of locative community.

The Third Halo: Constructing New Affective Affinities

In its third manifestation, the halo is a standard scientific term, used
to denote various optical phenomena that appear around light sources.
It is therefore a natural term in sciences like meteorology, physics,
and astronomy. For example, the galactic halo is a region of space
surrounding spiral galaxies, including our galaxy, the Milky Way. It
consists largely of old stars, gas, and dark matter. It is believed that the
galactic halo is largely a consequence of the evolution of subgalactic
clumps seeded from cold dark-matter density fluctuations.
I want to use this image to return to the matter of imagination,
understanding materiality as a series of occasions that are always
moments of knowledge. At the same time, I also want to think about
the changing shape of knowledge itself after the onset of informa-
tion technology, as knowledge increasingly takes on a significant
nonparadigmatic halo that cannot be centered27 or made a part of
the whole, the result of not just the expansion of knowledge but its
increasing ownership by communities that have little or no relation
to formal knowledge structures. In other words, in this chapter, the
third manifestation of the halo is as a whole series of knowledges
thought to be of little or no consequence that form clumps of various
kinds, a background that turns out to be fundamental in seeding the
universe of knowledge rather than incidental. Why? Because I am
convinced that these petty knowledges are a resource that can be
tapped to form a new political genre or genres,28 one that calls to and
relies on affective contagion and that might be used to reengineer
affective qualities like bravery and courage in productive ways. This
160 NIGEL THRIFT

politics consists of clumps of like minds arranged loosely and indis-

tinctly in semidirected practices that move beyond understanding
affective contagion as simple contact toward understanding affective
contagion as a kind of fluency practiced by design. Let me make it
clear: this is not to suggest that if these practices were aggregated,
they would suddenly form a new political force, but rather that they
can form a different kind of choreographic strain, a contrary mo-
tion that both works with and against the grain of “being-toward-
movement” and that might allow us to sense and even construct
new affective strains.
Set against those who think that “our stunted imaginations have
largely lost the ability to think what a society other than capital-
ism . . . might look like” (Smith 2007, 2), I think we are living in a
time of extraordinary imaginary outbursts if only we have the nous
to touch and feel them, imaginary outbursts founded in the coop-
erative symbiosis provoked by new situations, imaginary outbursts
that force thinking by producing affective affinities. These outbursts
have already had considerable purchase on the world of mass daily
practices, but on the whole, we are not picking them up because
they are based on “discontinuities of pattern, the tiny causalities of
chance, the reparative and tender (as opposed to deadly and terrify-
ing) features of intricate connection” (Orr 2006, 18). They do not
fit the standard categories—active/passive, micro/macro, passion/
calculation, interested/disinterested, objective/belief—we use to
describe the world.
These outbursts could be named in all kinds of ways, no doubt.
But I want to draw on modern performance studies to try to describe
them in more detail. Performance has always understood the power
of affective contagion and sometimes has highlighted it. Think only
of Artaud’s alchemical theater:

What modern social science tried to make intelligible, Artaud tried

to make real: the contagion of gesture, the communicative power
of a scream, a mimetic theatre of collective seizure and frenzied
emotion, Artaud’s intent was not to start a panic but experiment
through performance with features of the social—never far from
the alchemy of the theatre—that collective terror also opens toward.
 Halos 161

“The mind’s capacity for suggestion” which Artaud identifies as one

source of theatre’s transformative power, is precisely the capacity
that modern social science locates as one source of the social itself.
(Orr 2006, 8)

I will call these outbursts “dances that describe themselves”

(Foster 2002) to give me a means of naming them and as a place
to start from, as a piece crafted spontaneously in performance—in
the moment. The phrase comes from the work of that well-known
dancer-choreographer of improvisation, Richard Bull, and his alle-
giance to thinking on your feet by choreographing while you dance,
thus producing a leaderless community. But his Dance was not just
a piece of random improvisation, worshipping “liveness.” Far from
it. It was an act of possession—and command. The premise was that
a set of dancers would come together and over several weeks slowly
tune their worldview to the presence of the Dance That Describes
Itself. This tuning was intended to unite their bodies (and, to an
extent, those of the audience)29 in the flexing, undulating mass of
the Dance:

They moved in and out of “possession,” enjoying the shift in perspec-

tive, the different sense of agency that becoming inhabited by the
dance allowed. The Dance told them what to do and they necessarily
complied, yet they also created The Dance, determining when and
how it might take control of their dancing. The contradiction between
these two selves, one possessed and one in command, opened an
ironic tension that reverberated throughout the entire performance,
a tension compounded by the fact that the dancers described, often
with clinical precision, their actions.
Typically, the act of possession entails a loss of speech and the
inability to describe during or afterwards what happened while
dancing. The Dance That Describes Itself plays upon this venerable
and ancient trope of giving oneself to the dance, becoming one with
the dance, or being free in the dance. Yet it constructs a different
kind of possession. Dancers are asked to remain highly conscious
of their circumstances and to describe their actions verbally. Rather
than serve as mute embodiment for cosmic forces, indescribable
162 NIGEL THRIFT

in their proportion and power, these dancers comment adroitly on

mundane motives, frustrations, or desires. The collision between two
incommensurate images of dance—one speechless and transcendent,
the other analytic and pedestrian—reinforces the irony inherent in
the initial proposition of being possessed. (Foster 2002, 11)

I would argue that the practices that I want to describe are akin
to this stance in that they involve a careful tending of knowingness
through the design of empowering situations based on producing
new and speculative locatives, indications of place and direction
and affinity, which privilege an openness of form that is still, how-
ever, able to shape and mold and comment on that process. At the
same time, these locatives produce new time frames, new notions
of “calendarity.”
What would these new locatives look like? The history of per-
formance undoubtedly gives us some clues, where performance is
understood as the construction of socially and technically informed
living entities, since in many ways it has been born out of an im-
pulse to remap spaces and, in particular, to escape the constraints
of enclosed theatrical spaces and the kind of conventions they abide
by: discrete physical locations exploiting particular kinds of sound
and lighting, linear manipulation of timelines through devices like
reminiscence and premonition. Indeed, Norman (2006) argues that
the vestigial geometries of these spaces and times still hamper our
ability to craft other kinds of social encounter. We keep on beating
the same bounds, often unconsciously.
Perhaps the most important step has been to get away from an
obsession with exact localization. In the early nineteenth century,
in the famous preface to Cromwell, Victor Hugo (1827) had already
pointed out the benefits of the strategy of localization in inducing
a sense of reality, but also its risks in dictating imaginative content.
The problem, of course, is that too often, the reaction to the risks
associated with localization has been to fall back on a notion of
spontaneous gatherings of individuals, along with the common
graphic vernaculars for depicting these instant multitudes—the
crowds of which various forms of the flash mob are often consid-
ered to be the latest manifestation (Schnapp and Tiews 2006). The
 Halos 163

generation of apparently primal spontaneity has had a long history

in performance, dating from at least Wagner’s “free associations of
the future,” and it has had obvious political downsides. However,
at the same time, it has also led to a very large amount of thought
about how performance works at the preindividual level and how
the performer acts as an enhanced transmitter of various forms of
sympathy, culminating in many acts of ecological theater that try to
conjure up a sentient unconscious, if that is not a contradiction in
terms, through creative engagement of the feelings of the audience
in the exploration of space (Banes and Lepecki 2006).
The tension between these strategies of localization and spontane-
ity, and the knowledges that they produce, is currently being worked
out in “postdramatic” (Lehmann 2006) artistic performances that
pull all sorts of beings into a communion of direct living perception
that develops with and within time (Zielinski 2005). In particular,
these performances explore the dynamics of affective emergence by
constructing “living organizations” out of the new locative media.
That task involves maximum experimentation across many regis-
ters of the senses (Banes and Lepecki 2006) to “feel” all the data
available in a particular universe that might belong to an emerging
entity,30 using the full range of modern locative technologies as
vital intermediaries. In turn, this task has generated what is often a
calculated indifference to where performance is meant to take place.
For example, performance can even be located in outer space, in the
domain of so-called metagestural proxemics, as in the space suit that
will be crammed with communication electronics and thrown out
of the International Space Station to burn up in the atmosphere, or
tometaxy.net’s attempt to produce a collective public sculpture to
world peace in orbit around the Earth and ultimately a moon instal-
lation or Nam June Paik’s moon. In other words,

locative media performances encompass participants and forge

identities ranging from the most intimate to the most distant; the
propensity of such performances to go global is equalled by their
aptitude to inject highly localized, often time-bound events into
overall connected fabrics. It is this tension between localized input
on the one hand and web-borne, purportedly universal resonance
164 NIGEL THRIFT

on the other, that gives mobile systems their complex social and
artistic potential. (Norman 2006, 4–5)

In practice, this means that postdramatic theater attempts to

produce performances across many sites simultaneously in what we
might call a choreopolitics that is backed up by a range of different
practices that blur the divides between what used to be known as
art, as politics, as social science method, and as information technol-
ogy, in a concerted attempt to batter down particular imaginative
resistances through a mixture of “displacement, dislocation, dis-
tribution, and disorientation” (Jones 2006, 3).31 This blurring first
occurred in the 1960s, but after a forty-year history, it now provides
a body of formal and informal knowledge of considerable sophistica-
tion, ranging from the kind of project that simply utilizes user-led
functional cartography (e.g., Michel Teran’s Life: A User’s Manual,
which tries to technologize Perec) through Jonah Brucker-Cohen
and Katherine Moriwaki’s UMBRELLA.net, and on to all manner of
projects that chart out movement (such as Teri Rueb’s Choreography
of Everyday Movement, where trails of dancers moving through the
city are tracked with GPS to obtain real-time dynamic drawings
that are then printed onto acetate sandwiched between stacked glass
plates that grow taller and more complex with each addition). One
might argue that such projects act as nothing more than twinkling
marginalia. That would, I think, be a mistaken judgment; rather,
I think they are attempts to call up the outlines of spaces that can
produce affective shifts which, though they may appear to be minor,
can have major effects, for example, spaces that administer a shock
to irritation so that it moves from a space in which overannoyance
is accompanied by insufficient anger to something more affectively
productive—such as the bravery required to actually intervene (Ngai
2005; Gallop 2006).
To end, I will fix on just two examples of this new form of mobile
acting up, examples that tap into a long tradition of artists acting as
agents provocateurs investing wider communities (Hampton 2007),
examples that aim to produce politically charged works of art that
exist outside any extant paradigm as a kind of kinetic outcropping or
even stray that exhibits no deeper truth than the achievement of an
 Halos 165

affective phase shift (Barthes 2005). But that, of course, is the point.
The first example is the Displaced Emperors project. Displaced
Emperors was the second relational architecture project. This instal-
lation used an “architact” interface to transform the Habsburg Castle
in Linz, Austria. Wireless three-dimensional sensors calculated
where participants pointed to on the facade, and a large, animated
projection of a hand was shown at that location. As people on the
street “caressed” the building, they could reveal the interiors, which
corresponded to Chapultepec Castle, the Habsburg residence in
Mexico City. In addition, for ten schillings, people could press the
“Moctezuma button” and trigger a temporary postcolonial override
consisting of a huge image of the Aztec headdress that is kept at the
ethnological museum in Vienna.
The second example is Ballettikka Internettikka. Ballettikka
Internettikka is a series of tactical art projects that began in 2001
with the exploration of Internet ballet. It explores wireless Internet
ballet performances combined with guerrilla tactics and mobile live
Internet broadcasting strategies. Its Internet guerrilla performance
has mainly consisted of invasions of particular art houses, such as the
Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow (March 2002), La Scala in Milan (No-
vember 2004), and the National Theatre in Belgrade (October 2005),
and the subsequent mounting of alternative Internet performances
within their confines, on the premise that the passions of opera can
be transferred to the “passionless” Internet, so producing radical
emotions. In 2006, the two main artists, Stromajer and Zorman,
performed a new guerrilla net ballet, this time in the men’s toilet in
the basement of Volksbühne Berlin, using a flying cow, a group of
small robots—and a toilet seat. The artists utilized low-tech mobile
and wireless equipment for the invasion and live broadcast: a public,
unprotected wireless Internet connection point, available for free at
the Rosa-Luxemburg Square in Berlin, and free RealProducer and
Live LE software for streaming video and audio live manipulation.
In one sense, interventions like these are simply the latest chapter
in the long history of trying to produce grammars of movement of the
kind to be found in the history of dance since at least the sixteenth cen-
tury. But at another level, they are embryonic political interventions,
affective utterances that, through the production of spatial and
166 NIGEL THRIFT

temporal coherences that are also new forms of imaginative assay,32

are intended to boost encounter and thereby provide new means
of animatedness and attentiveness. In particular, they are trying to
struggle out from under a notion of a place that is bounded—an
“environment”—toward notions of place as relationships with space
that are rather like the face in their ability to be expressive and to
reveal what the other is thinking: space as “the eyes of the skin,” so
to speak (Pallasma 2005). Thus space becomes richly emblazoned
with signs of thought. In a sense, space becomes face.

Notes

I would like to thank Søren Buhl, Armin Geertz, Susan Hurley, Britta
Timm Knudsen, Sally Jane Norman, and Minna Tarka for their com-
ments on this chapter.

1 Of course, the imagination has routinely been figured as something

that cannot be conventionally controlled, but there are many reasons
to think that this is only partially the case and that it can indeed be
engineered, especially in an age of manufactured vision in which
“we now know ourselves in our mind’s eye mostly by projecting a
camera’s eye view” (Warner 2006, 6).
2 Imagination actually fires in the same area of the brain as belief and
can generate equally strong affective reactions. Thus most philoso-
phers now count it as a “distinct cognitive attitude,” different from
beliefs in some respects but not others.
3 I take representation here to be able to be understood as doings
rather than a relation between an inner and an outer. Our basic grip
on the world consists not of inside out but of representing deeds:
deeds are themselves representational (Rowlands 2006).
4 And achievement of the kind that I want to describe requires
diplomacy. As Stengers (chapter 1) puts it, intent on describing
the practice of shuttling between parties that disagree, “the art of
diplomacy does not refer to goodwill, togetherness, the sharing of
a common language, or an intersubjective understanding. Neither
is it a matter of negotiation between flexible humans who should
be ready to adapt as the situation changes. It is an art of artificial
 Halos 167

arrangements that do not exhibit a deeper truth than their very

achievement—the event of an articulation between protagonists
constrained by diverging attachments and obligations in situations
where contradiction seems to rule, a rhizomatic event without a
ground to justify it, or an ideal from which to deduce it.”
5 As the Roman emperors began to think of themselves as divine
beings, they wore a crown in public to imitate the sphere of light
from the sun.
6 Here the halo could have a very detailed iconography. Thus round
halos were used to signify saints. A cross within a halo was used to
signify Jesus. Triangular halos were used for representations of the
Trinity. Square halos were used to depict unusually saintly living
persons, still bound to earth and so not able to obtain the perfection
of the circle. Allegorical figures such as the virtues wore hexagonal
haloes (Fisher 1995).
7 But it is important to point out that the halo is not confined to
Western religious history. For example, it has been widely used in
various forms of Buddhist iconography since at least the first century
a.d. to depict the Buddha or Buddhist saints, a direct importation
from the West to the East.
8 The example is taken from Sloterdijk (1998).
9 As this instance shows, the idea that a politics of radical difference
has to entail a choice between networks of signification or networks
of embodied matter seems overdone; rather, recent work argues that
embodied matter always has sign content (Wheeler 2006).
10 It is now generally accepted that the brain developed in response to
and as a function of social interaction and especially the ascription
of intention—that is, the attribution of actions, motives, intentions,
and beliefs to fellow interactants—and that what we perceive is set
up by the wiring of interaction produced by the set of most notably
human abilities that plausibly evolved together, all of which were
boosted by the enhanced communicative interaction arising from
the paraphernalia of language: parsing, turn-taking, repair, and the
like. The brain, in other words, has become an instrument of shared
activity—an interaction engine (Enfield and Levinson 2006)—rather
than an individual setting. And within broad parameters, this shared
activity is remarkably heterogeneous, aided by the fact that the brain
is in any case plastic so that particular experiences of shared activ-
ity act in particular ways, by the fact that systems of shared activity
168 NIGEL THRIFT

generate emergent properties and by the fact that cultural variation

is therefore more than just incidental but central to interaction.
11 It is important to note that in this chapter I will be taking embodi-
ment to be a linked, hybrid field of flesh and accompanying objects
rather than a series of individual bodies, intersubjectively linked. I
take the presence of objects to be particularly important because they
provide new means of linkage (Zielinski 2005)—new folds, if you like.
12 It may even be, following Tarde, that memory and habit are forms
of imitation: “engaged in either, we in fact imitate ourselves, instead
of another person: memory recalls a mental image, much as habit
repeats an action” (Potolsky 2006, 116).
13 This distinction can be traced back to Aristotle.
14 Any Web search for courage or bravery immediately produces
vast numbers of military examples, showing the centrality of this
conception of courage and bravery to our judgments.
15 Aristotle does not mean that bravery is simply an average; rather,
the golden mean is different for each person, depending on her
character and situation.
16 I could no doubt have chosen other examples—the warlike honor
code of the Pushtun comes to mind, as does the history of Gandhian
nonviolence, but these two examples seem to me to be striking
enough to make the point.
17 Counting coup could also mean taking an enemy’s weapons while he
was still alive; striking the first enemy to fall in battle, no matter who
killed him; stealing a horse tied up in an enemy’s camp; and so on.
18 I am thinking here of movements like the International Solidarity
Movement, which produced “passive” heroes and heroines like Tom
Hurndall and Rachel Corrie. “Their acts of solidarity articulate a
practical riposte to the despairing twentieth-century voices that
wanted to discredit this sort of gesture by arguing that the openness
and undifferentiated love from which it derives is tainted, ignoble,
and unpolitical” (Gilroy 2004, 90). It also points to another halo:
the HALO Landmines Trust.
19 Halo was also a fictional superheroine published by DC Comics in
the 1980s and 1990s.
20 A film is also planned for 2008, with the involvement of Peter Jackson.
21 To some degree, large cities have always acted in this way, allowing
“epidemics” of imitation to be marshaled and directed, but what I am
suggesting is something with a much greater element of design.
 Halos 169

22 This is, of course, a sense of the world that has long been familiar
to anthropologists and archaeologists in cultures where symbolism
and daily life are intertwined in a network of entanglements that
are both means of empowerment and dependencies, typified by
Hodder’s (2006) recent study of Catalhöyük with its sheer amount
of elaborate wall art, stimulated by a lime-rich plaster that needed
continual resurfacing and might be thought of as a prototype of the
constantly refreshed screen.
23 Thus Herf (2006, 274) notes the way in which Nazi Germany at-
tempted to design environments that would produce a total political
experience by using media like radio, mass meetings, print, and
especially weekly wall newspapers that “stared out at the German
public for a week at a time in tens of thousands of places German
pedestrians were likely to pass in the course of the day.”
24 As I have tried to point out, the difference with the past is that these
images are able to be interactive: their calls can produce responses
that can act on their nature.
25 Such developments arise out of new practices combining with new
outlets of expression (e.g., most recently, YouTube).
26 Indeed, I think that it is quite possible to historicize the argument
of Hoffmeyer and others that “signs, not molecules, are the basic
units in the study of life” (cited in Wheeler 2006, 123), making it
into a symptom of the present.
27 Indeed, one might argue that there is no longer a center, only a
halo.
28 E.g., it would be possible to take a leaf from the art of landscape
gardening again and suggest that what has become crucial is a
knowledge of arrangement or disposition, of finding (search), which
is currently going through a convulsion as the kinds of nonlinear,
nondiscursive thinking and representation that I outlined in the
previous section are brought back into play. Gardening may seem
an odd metaphor from which to work, but I am sure that it fits the
bill—passionate, sensuous, self-evolving, multisensory, synaesthetic,
the favorite of Klee (Harrison, Pile, and Thrift 2004; Tilley 2006),
the premier art of cultivation.
29 “As dancers open their physicalized imaginations to entertain the
possibility of any and all next actions, they also track the results of
acting upon or rejecting those impulses. As viewers watch, going
with the flow of events, they also critically engage with that going.
170 NIGEL THRIFT

Throughout the performance, both dancers and viewers ask them-

selves, what is going to happen next? And what difference will it
make to this performance’s significance?” (Foster 2002, 16).
30 The link to Whitehead’s notion of prehension is clear.
31 E.g., think of the ubiquity of Chernoff faces, which use facial features
to represent data, or the growth of “choreogenetics” (Lapointe 2005),
which uses genetic algorithms to generate choreographic sequences.
32 On another level, these performances are a part of a general tendency
to “move the mutual implication of actors and spectators in the the-
atrical production of images into the centre” (Lehmann 2006, 186).

References

Abrams, Janet, and Peter Hall, eds. 2006. Else/Where: New Cartographies
of Networks and Territories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Althusser, Louis. 2006. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings,
1978–1987. London: Verso.
Andrews, Nigel. 2006. “The Guess Men.” FT Magazine, November 11.
Banes, Sally, and Andre Lepecki, eds. 2006. The Senses in Performance.
New York: Routledge.
Barthes, Roland. 2005. The Neutral. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Bermúdez, José. 2003. Thinking without Words. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Bickmore, Timothy W., and Rosalind W. Picard. 2005. “Establishing and
Maintaining Long-Term Human–Computer Relationships.” ACM
Transactions on Computer–Human Interaction 12: 293–327.
Blum, Deborah. 2007. Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for
Scientific Proof of Life after Death. London: Century.
Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press.
Bruno, Giuliana. 2004. “Modernist Ruins, Filmic Archaeologies.” In
Free and Anonymous Monument, ed. J. Wilson and L. A. Wilson,
1–7. Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Baltic.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri. 1952. The Decisive Moment. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cam-
bridge: Polity Press.
 Halos 171

Castronova, Edward W. 2006. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture

of Online Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Collectivo Situationes. 2005. “Something More on Research Militancy:
Footnotes on Procedures and in Decisions.” Ephemera 5: 602–14.
Deetz, James. 1996. In Small Things Forgotten. New York: Anchor.
Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Eilan, Naomi, Christoph Hoerl, Teresa McCormack, and Johannes
Roessler, eds. 2005. Joint Attention: Communication and Other
Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eliasoph, Nina. 1998. Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy
in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Enfield, Nicholas J., and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. 2006. Roots of Human
Sociality: Culture, Cognition, and Interaction. Oxford: Berg.
Fisher, Sally. 1995. The Square Halo and Other Mysteries of Western Art.
New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Fleming, Juliet. 2001. Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern
England. London: Reaktion.
Foster, Susan L. 2002. Dances That Describe Themselves: The Impro-
vised Choreography of Richard Bull. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press.
Gallop, Jane, ed. 2006. “Envy.” Special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly
34, nos. 3–4.
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 2004. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?
London: Routledge.
Goldman, Alvin I. 2006. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology,
and Neuroscience of Mindreading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gordon, Scott P. 2002. The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature,
1640–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grandin, Temple. 2005. Animals in Translation. London: Bloomsbury.
Gross, Daniel. 2006. The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rheto-
ric to Modern Brain Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gumbrecht, Hans. 2004. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot
Convey. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Hampton, Howard. 2007. Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical
Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
172 NIGEL THRIFT

Hansen, Mark. 2004. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Harrison, Stephan, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift, eds. 2004. Patterned
Ground. London: Reaktion.
Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, eds. 2007. Think-
ing through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London:
Routledge.
Herf, Jeffrey. 2006. The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World
War II and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hodder, Ian. 2006. Catalhoyuk: The Leopard’s Tale. London: Thames
& Hudson.
Hugo, Victor. 1827. Preface to Cromwell. New York: French and Euro-
pean, 1989.
Hume, David. 1739. A Treatise of Human Nature. Repr., Harmondsworth,
U.K.: Penguin, 1985.
Hurley, Susan, and Matthew Nudds, eds. 2006. Rational Animals? Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Jones, Caroline A., ed. 2006. Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technol-
ogy, and Contemporary Art. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Jones, Colin. 2000. “Pulling Teeth in Eighteenth-century Paris.” Past
and Present 166: 100–45.
Lapointe, François-Joseph. 2005. “Choreogenetics: The Generation of
Genetic Mutations and Selection.” ACM GECCO 5: 366–69.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2006. “The Machine.” Transform.eipcp.net. http://
transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/lazzarato/en.
Lear, Jonathan. 2006. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Dev-
astation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. London: Rout-
ledge.
Manovich, Lev. 2006. “After Effects, or Velvet Revolution in Modern
Culture,” part 1. http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/motion_graph-
ics_part1.doc.
McNeill, Daniel. 1998. The Face: A Guided Tour. London: Hamish
Hamilton.
Mulvey, Laura. 2006. Death 24× a Second: Stillness and the Moving Im-
age. London: Reaktion.
Newman, James, and Iain Simons. 2007. 100 Videogames. London: Brit-
ish Film Institute.
 Halos 173

Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University

Press.
Nichols, Shaun, ed. 2006. The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays
on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Norman, Sally J. 2006. “Locative Media and Instantiations of Theat-
rical Boundaries.” Leonardo 14, http://www.leonardo.info/isast/
journal/.
Orr, Jackie. 2006. Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press.
Pallasma, Juhani. 2005. The Eyes of the Skin. Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley.
Parkes, Donald N., and Nigel J. Thrift. 1979. “Time Spacemakers and
Entrainment.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers
ns4, no. 3: 353–72.
———. 1980. Times, Spaces, Places. Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley.
Pettit, T. 2003. “Ritual and Performance in Theatre.” Unpublished paper.
Potolsky, Matthew. 2006. Mimesis. London: Routledge.
Rath, Richard. 2003. How Early America Sounded. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press.
Rotman, Brian. 2000. “Going Parallel.” SubStance 29: 56–79.
Rowlands, Mark. 2006. Body Language: Representation in Action. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Schnapp, Jeffrey T., and Matthew Tiews, eds. 2006. Crowds. Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 1998. Sphären I: Mikrosphärologie. Frankfurt, Germany:
Suhrkamp.
Smith, Adam. 1759. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Repr., Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1976.
Smith, Neil. 2007. “Another Revolution Is Possible: Foucault, Ethics, and
Politics.” Environment and Planning D 25: 191–93.
Thrift, Nigel J. 2005. “From Born to Made: Technology, Biology and
Space.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers ns30:
463–76.
———. 2006. “Re-inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist
Commodification.” Economy and Society 35: 279–306.
———. 2007. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Tilley, Christopher. 2006. “The Sensory Dimensions of Gardening.”
Senses and Society 1: 311–30.
174 NIGEL THRIFT

Tønder, Lars, and Lasse Thomassen, eds. 2005. Radical Democracy:

Politics between Abundance and Lack. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester
University Press.
Trautmann, Eric S. 2004. The Art of Halo: Creating a Virtual World.
New York: Ballantine Books.
Walzer, Michael. 1988. Spheres of Justice. Oxford: Blackwell.
Warner, Marina. 2006. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and
Media into the Twenty-first Century. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Wheeler, Wendy. 2006. The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics,
and the Evolution of Culture. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Zielinski, Siegfried. 2005. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeol-
ogy of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.
 part iii

Political Technologies:
Public (Dis)Orderings
This page intentionally left blank
 7 Front-staging Nonhumans:
Publicity as a Constraint on the
Political Activity of Things
noortje marres

O ver the last years, a sizeable publicity machine has been

set up by governments, energy companies, and environmental
organizations to promote reductions in domestic energy consumption
as a way for people to help “combat global warming.”1 These initiatives
have been criticized on various grounds, not in the least because of
the lack of credibility of their hyperbolic claims such as the assurance
that fixing energy-efficient lightbulbs or routinely unplugging one’s
mobile telephone charger “helps repair the planet”2—claims that
for a while were endlessly repeated on billboards, in the press, and
so on, in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Perhaps most
important, social critics have charged these media campaigns with
trivializing the ideals of citizenship and public participation. Thus it
has been pointed out that because of their focus on basic household
interventions, as a way of making it “feasible” to do one’s share for
the climate, these environmental campaigns in effect redefine civic
involvement as an atomized, isolated, and individualistic activity.
They are then seen as “privatizing” citizenship to the point that ef-
fective intervention on the part of the public actually becomes less
rather than more feasible (for a discussion, see Clarke et al. 2007).
Interestingly, however, publicity campaigns seeking to “green” the
home are equally vulnerable to almost the opposite criticism, namely,
to the charge that they promote the invasion of private places by

177
178 NOORTJE MARRES

public authorities and thus amount to a “de-privatization” of the

home. There is certainly no lack of concrete examples to support
such a claim, such as the “DIY Repairs” communications initiative
of the mayor of London, launched in June 2007, which offers free
house visits by a “green homes concierge service” to provide practical
advice on how to make your home more energy-efficient, and yes,
to help “save the planet.”3 Around the same time, the department
store M&S announced that its textiles will soon carry a new label:
“Think Climate—Wash 30 C.”4 Considering the ubiquity of such
attempts to insert environmental considerations into the fabric of
everyday life, it certainly seems important to be able to draw on
critical repertoires that allow us to question the intrusion of public
authorities into intimate places. However, it seems equally important
that such campaigns can be seen to problematize the understanding
of citizenship and the distinction between the public and the private
domain on which such critical repertoires tend to rely.
Projects that define the home as a site where people can do their
bit for the climate can be said to challenge certain classic assump-
tions regarding the proper locations and formats for public involve-
ment in politics. As Andrew Dobson and Derek Bell (2005) have
pointed out, contemporary practices of environmental citizenship
invite consideration of the special affordances of practices that are
traditionally defined as private for engagement with public affairs.
Thus they make it clear that one of the defining features of environ-
mentalism is that the sphere of “the reproduction of everyday life”
here comes to the fore as an important setting for citizenly action.
For this reason, environmental practices can seem to scramble the
neat geometry that provided the scaffolding for classic republican
conceptions of citizenship, as in the work of Aristotle and Rousseau.
The republican tradition firmly anchored civic action on one side
of the divides between the public and the private domain, between
matters of general concern and mere particularities, and between the
lofty questions of the common good to which the leisurely classes
dedicate themselves and the mundane troubles and worries that
keep working men and women busy. These distinctions can easily
start shifting around when considering environmental practices, and
more specifically, the connections that climate change campaigns
 Front-staging Nonhumans 179

establish between this global issue and domestic energy practices.

Moreover, such campaigns could be said to actively contribute to
the production of confusion regarding the distinction between the
public and the private realms. Thus it is possible to understand
green-the-home campaigns like that of the mayor of London as an
attempt to actively transform the intimate sphere of the household
into a very public place indeed, and this not only in the sense that
the home in these campaigns becomes subject to extensive atten-
tion from public entities like governments, news media, and their
audiences. As mentioned, domestic practices here also come to be
defined in terms of their impact on common goods like the global
climate and the planet, and as private practices are thus evaluated
in terms of their public effects, the former could be said to acquire
a public aspect themselves.
It may obviously be necessary to take such unsettling effects of
environmental practices on established political distinctions into
account when seeking to evaluate these practices. In this respect,
green-the-home campaigns draw attention to yet another feature
of environmental practices that may also deserve consideration: in
these campaigns, material things are placed in the forefront as crucial
tools or props for the performance of public involvement in issues.
Mobile phone chargers, thermostats, lightbulbs, and water cookers
are here presented as so many “technologies of citizenship” (Rose
1999) that may equip individuals to practically intervene in, or at
least relate to, global public affairs. These campaigns thus attribute
special affordances to domestic technologies in terms of their abil-
ity to help bridge the divide between people “in here,” in the home,
and issues “out there.” However, though it thus seems clear that the
role of domestic technologies in the performance of environmental
citizenship deserves appreciation, it is far from self-evident how we
should conceptualize their role as mediators of public involvement
in issues. The reasons for this should become clearer later, but it has
to do with the exclusion of material things from civic practices in
classic conceptions of citizenship alluded to earlier. According to the
republican tradition, material practices clearly belong in the private,
noncivic domain. Just as important, an instrumentalist explanation
of the role of things in politics, which would straightforwardly define
180 NOORTJE MARRES

domestic technologies as neutral tools for problem solving, that is,

for alleviating the causes of climate change, is not satisfactory for a
number of reasons. Moreover, postinstrumentalist frameworks that
have been developed in recent decades to account for the role of
technology in politics are equally difficult to apply to this case. As I
will discuss in this chapter, post-Foucauldian studies of the politics
of technology have importantly drawn attention to the capacity of
objects to mediate political relations, but in doing so they suggested
that this capacity is predicated on their “clandestinity,” that is to say,
on the circumstance that technologies are not usually recognized as
political agents. This requirement, however, clearly is not met in the
case of publicity campaigns to green the home, in which domestic
technologies feature as major protagonists on billboards, in the
press, and so on. In this chapter, I therefore turn to the work of the
pragmatist philosopher John Dewey to explore how to conceptualize
the relation between publicity media, material practices, and public
involvement in politics. In particular, Dewey’s concept of the public
provides a crucial conceptual resource for understanding how mate-
rial things may acquire the capacity to mediate people’s involvement
in political affairs under conditions of publicity. Moreover, such a
detour via the work of this classic pragmatist can also help to make
clear how post-Foucauldian studies of technology contribute to the
understanding of public involvement in politics.

Household Devices as Technologies of Citizenship?

Media campaigns that focus on doable interventions in the home
can partly be understood as a particular solution to the problem that
citizen involvement in climate change presents. Thus the literature on
the public understanding of climate change has put much emphasis
on the obstacles there are to the effective public communication of
this issue, such as its scientific complexity and theoretical abstract-
ness. These features have been widely understood as placing climate
change at a great, perhaps unbridgeable distance from people’s ev-
eryday concerns (Trumbo 1995; Weber 2006). Partly in response to
this problem, several authors have pointed at the capacity of visual
media to lift complex environmental affairs out of the domain of
abstract scientific calculation and to transpose them into the realm
 Front-staging Nonhumans 181

of human experience (Allan, Adams, and Carter 1999; Jasanoff 2001).

Resisting rationalist discourses that would exclude aesthetic and af-
fective modes of concern from the “proper” registers of citizenship,
these authors write affirmatively about the affordances of media like
television, newspapers, and the Internet for the cultivation of envi-
ronmental citizenship. Thus Szerszynski and Toogood (1999) have
pointed at the opportunity that visual media provide for expanding the
repertoire of civic concern with environmental problems to include
sensory and emotive forms of sensibility, which are closer to lived
experience. The focus on domestic practices as sites of environmental
involvement can be understood in the light of further elaborations
or radicalizations of such claims. Phil Macnaghten has argued that
visual imagery of natural disasters, though appealing to the emotions,
ultimately fail to inspire sustainable forms of environmental concern
in people. Though such natural events may be within the realm of
human experience, they too are distant from everyday life, and they
do not create room for personal agency vis-à-vis environmental
problems. Claiming that concern about environmental problems
begins with personal experience, Macnaghten (2003, 80–81) has
concluded that environmental publicity campaigns should “start
from people’s concern for themselves, their families and localities
as points of connection for the ‘wider’ global environmental issues.”
Moreover, in his account, such an approach should involve a focus
on feasible interventions: “people are seeking credible solutions, ‘in
bite sized chunks,’ where the material effects of individual action
become visible and enduring” (81). It seems no exaggeration to say
that organizers of recent climate change campaigns that focus on
the home have at least in some respects heeded this call. Thus the
aim of the “DIY Repairs” campaign of the mayor of London “is to
raise awareness of climate change in a positive ‘can do’ sense,” and
the organization has justified this orientation in reference to survey
findings that Londoners are most likely to be willing to do something
for the environment if this does not require much effort.5
A particular understanding of the challenge that environmental
issues present for everyday people then seems to be involved in ef-
forts to define the household as a site for the performance of “climate
citizenship.” However, the preceding sociological accounts of this
182 NOORTJE MARRES

challenge do not tell us very much about the role of material enti-
ties like lightbulbs and phone chargers in this regard. They situate
citizenship somewhere between “phenomenology” and “agency,”
between the human experience of environmental problems and the
practical opportunity to act on these problems. As Macnaghten sug-
gests, by redefining environmental citizenship in terms of practical
interventions in the lifeworld, citizenly action is displaced onto the
plane of physical practice, where interventions have “material effects.”
However, in the case of climate change, the notion of material or
physical action on environmental problems cannot be understood
in any straightforward sense. With respect to this issue, it is highly
problematic to attribute to individual interventions “direct material
effects” that are “visible” and “enduring,” to use the terms in which
Macnaghten characterized “credible” forms of environmental citi-
zenship. Climate change campaigns that promote energy saving in
the home do involve attempts to make such effects more tangible,
for instance, by providing calculations of the number of tons of CO2
in emission reductions that would be accomplished if a certain per-
centage of Londoners would “turn the thermostat down one degree.”
But the effects this would have on climate change generally remain
shrouded in silence. Still, it seems a mistake to conclude from this
that the project of establishing material or physical connections with
the issue of climate change is only marginally relevant to the cam-
paigns that focus on greening the home. It precisely seems to be one
of the distinctive affordances of household devices, in the context of
climate change, that they somehow enable people to “relate” to the
issue via material and physical linkages, that is, via the technologies
that connect them with energy infrastructures. However, it seems
difficult to account for this if we understand the recent focus on the
home as a site for civic involvement in climate change as principally
an attempt to bridge the phenomenological gap between citizens and
the environment.
The significance of domestic technologies, as material or physi-
cal objects, does become clearer when we consider the recent turn
in climate change campaigns to the domestic setting in a broader
political and economic context. Thus climate change today serves as
a major justification for large-scale projects of regulatory, financial,
 Front-staging Nonhumans 183

and industrial restructuring that are to facilitate the transition to a

“green energy economy.” In this context, the home has been singled
out as a major location in which this transition is to be undertaken.
Thus around the same time that energy companies and governmental
bodies launched climate change awareness campaigns centered on
the home, the new U.K. prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced
that the building of carbon-neutral homes would be a central policy
objective of his government.6 In this context, publicity campaigns
that articulate the home as a site for civic involvement in climate
change can be understood as part of the wider project of “preparing
the ground” for a new political–economic regime organized around
sustainable energy. More particularly, they can be understood as
helping to facilitate the emergence of the “green energy consumer,” a
subject for which there is an obvious need in the low-carbon economy
of the future. Importantly, Elisabeth Shove could argue only a few
years ago that the “energy user” did not really exist as such, as few
people approached domestic practices in terms of the consumption
of energy involved in them, and most did not pay much attention
to their electricity and gas bills (Shove 2003). From this perspective,
publicity around the “simple steps” that can be taken in the home “to
help save energy, and the environment” can be understood as an effort
to articulate situations in everyday life where (sustainable) energy
consumption takes place and where, accordingly, people may adopt
and cultivate a new identity as (green) energy consumers. Domestic
technologies like energy-efficient lightbulbs and mobile phone char-
gers may then be understood as devices that can help to make energy
consumption “legible” as part of daily life, providing the means with
which the “new” activity of sustainable energy consumption can be
performed. These devices then enable people to undertake, simply
by installing or unplugging them, their own personal transition to
becoming active and responsible subjects under the new sustainable
energy regime (Rose 1999; Shove 2007).
Such a widening of perspective brings into view close continuities
between environmental awareness campaigns and processes of the
material organization of social life. Among others, it suggests that
household technologies can be understood as material “extensions”
of technologies of publicity. With the aid of publicity media, these
184 NOORTJE MARRES

devices can be repurposed as civic technologies that practically en-

able people to adopt the identity of “low-carbon” citizenship. But an
approach that focuses on the role of “technologies of citizenship” in
the management of political economic regime change also has im-
portant limitations insofar as it favors a reductive account of civic
involvement in climate change.
Thus such an approach defines citizens as subjects that principally
exist in relation to the state, or at least to a political economic regime
of “green” governmentality, rather than in relation to issues. That is
also to say, the relations that people may seek to establish with an
environmental problem like climate change, via the home, here ap-
pear as essentially mediated by political economic regimes. Indeed,
this issue here seems to matter only to the extent that it is mobilized
as a relevant “framing” in political and economic discourses on the
transition to the low-carbon economy. Thus consideration of the
transition to a green political economy may help us appreciate the
significance of material practices for projects of civic involvement
in climate change, but it leaves unclear how material connections
might mediate people’s involvement in this issue.
Some authors have sought to develop more constructive accounts
of issues as objects of public involvement and the importance of
publicity media in this regard. Thus Andrew Barry has argued that
the mediatization of environmental issues, as, for instance, air pollu-
tion in west London, presents an opportunity for inventive forms of
civic engagement. He has pointed out that public reporting, however
much it may be geared to the stabilization of problems, solutions, and
identities, enables third parties, such as activist groups, to use the
media to open up these stable definitions for criticism (Barry 2005).
Importantly, Barry has drawn attention to the fact that such practices
of public contestation may themselves take the form of material
practices, as in the case of roadblocks undertaken by activist groups
in southern England in the late 1990s (Barry 2005). He describes how
in situ protests in this case became media events and, under these
conditions, the protestors could make use of the material setting (road
construction sites surrounded by English landscape) as an instrument
for the articulation of environmental concerns. In a review of Barry’s
work, Michel Callon has further elaborated this point by suggesting
 Front-staging Nonhumans 185

that the articulation of nonhuman entities in publicity media, like air

quality, presents an important enabling condition for public debate
about environmental issues (Callon 2004). In the view of Barry and
Callon, then, the publicization of physical and material entities in
the media should not only be understood in terms of institutional
efforts to “govern,” though this is certainly an important aspect of it.
It also presents a condition of possibility for public involvement in
issues to the extent that the publicization of entities enables people to
relate to them in their capacity as members of the “public.” Barry and
Callon thus open up a constructive approach to the mediatization of
material practices in the context of environmental politics. However,
it is also striking that in conceptualizing public involvement, Cal-
lon and Barry principally use discursive metaphors, characterizing
it in terms of debate and contestation. In this respect, their studies
cannot tell us to what extent material practices can themselves be
understood as forms of public involvement in issues.

From Clandestinity to Publicity: A “Coming

Out” for the Politics of Technology
That it is difficult to account for material practices as sites of public
involvement in issues may have to do with a broader conceptual
problem. It may have to do with the fact that, in recent social and
political theory, the relations between politics and material practice
have been understood in a way that excludes consideration of public-
ity. Under the influence of Michel Foucault, sociologists have from
the late 1980s onward turned their attention to the affordances of
material arrangements and, in particular, technologies for the pur-
suit of political projects (Winner 1986; Latour 1992). An important
assumption of this line of work has been that the success of material
politics partly depends on a circumstance that is almost the opposite
of publicization: the fact that things are not generally recognized as
significant “agents” of politics. Thus Langdon Winner’s seminal text
on “the politics of technology” focused on a relatively unassuming
aspect of the built environment, traffic bridges, which were con-
structed in the 1930s on Long Island, where they prevented buses,
and thereby black people, from visiting the peninsula. In Winner’s
account, the fact that few people would suspect bridges of pursuing
186 NOORTJE MARRES

a “racist” politics comes to the fore as an important precondition for

the production of political effects by material means. And subsequent
work in the sociology of technology, as that of Bruno Latour (1992)
on speed bumps, has equally suggested that the ability of technolo-
gies and material artifacts to intervene “politically” in the world
depends on their relative unobtrusiveness, on their clandestine
status, as active components of social and political arrangements.7
This assumption is also present in studies of the role of material
entities in the mediation of civic relations, and more particularly, of
energy technologies as devices of citizenship. Madeleine Akrich has
suggested that the installation of electricity meters in homes in Côte
d’Ivoire in the 1980s should be understood as an attempt to foster
citizenship. As the government of Côte d’Ivoire had few resources at
its disposal for involving people as citizens in the state, the national
electricity grid became an important means for implicating people
in the political order. Thus, in the very process in which people were
enlisted as consumers of electricity, Akrich writes, they were also
enrolled as subjects of a nation-state in the making (Akrich 1992).
Thus, in Akrich’s study, energy technology acquires an important
role as a technology of citizenship in a context in which publicity
media are absent.
This preoccupation, in recent literature on the politics of tech-
nology, with the clandestine production of political effects may help
to clarify why it is difficult to account for the forms it takes under
conditions of publicity. Authors like Winner, Latour, and Akrich
have done crucial work in elucidating how material practices may
serve as sites for political intervention, but their studies exclude
consideration of the role of publicity in this respect. As they con-
ceive of material politics as a form of subpolitics that plays itself out
below the threshold of public perception, their approaches do not
help to make it clear how to conceive of the role of publicity in this
context. One could say that the materialization of politics, in work
on the politics of technology, coincides with its evasion from sites of
publicity, its depublicization. A related problem with the account of
the politics of technology as subpolitics, in this regard, is that it does
not consider material politics in relation to democracy; rather, this
line of work continues to feed suspicions that a politics pursued by
 Front-staging Nonhumans 187

material means presents a non-, post-, or even antidemocratic form

of politics as it is clearly out of line with familiar understandings of
democratic politics as involving collective processes of will formation,
institutional evaluation, and public debate. Importantly, attempts to
address such suspicions in proposals for the “democratization” of
the politics of technology do not necessarily dislodge the associa-
tion of material politics with clandestine, not quite kosher, forms of
intervention. This is because such proposals have mostly taken the
form of procedural designs for events of “stakeholder participation”
and “public debate” concerning technology, and as such they sug-
gest that democratization of the politics of technology requires its
displacement away from material practices to settings of discursive
engagement (Marres 2005; de Vries 2007). In presenting discursive
processes of negotiation and debate as the principal conditions for
democracy, such proposals then leave the understanding of material
politics itself to a large extent untouched. Interestingly, however, a
number of authors have more recently begun to address questions
of the place of materiality, and the nonhuman world more broadly,
in democracy.
Sociologists, geographers, and political theorists have over the
last years drawn attention to the fact that modern understandings
of politics and democracy limit participation in it to human actors
(Latour 1993; Mol 1999; Whatmore 2002; Bennett 2001). Interested in
the potential gains of redressing this imbalance, these authors have
explored the possibility of reconfiguring concepts of political com-
munity to include nonhuman entities. Perhaps most important, they
have proposed the concept of “heterogeneous assemblages” as a way
of taking into account that physical and material entities may figure
as active elements in political configurations. In adopting concepts
like this, these theorists could be said to undertake a “Gestalt switch”
from a human-centered conception of community to the notion of
configurations of human and nonhuman entities as a notable site
where politics plays itself out. This shift has the potential to recast
many of the questions of political theory (Latour 2004a; Mol 2002;
Bennett 2001). It suspends the belief that nonhumans can be contained
in essentially passive categories like the “topics” of political debate
and the “means” and “objects” of political action; that is, it presents
188 NOORTJE MARRES

a break with the instrumentalist assumption that insofar as politics

is concerned, nonhuman entities can be principally characterized
in terms of their susceptibility, or lack thereof, to manipulation by
human actors, in their role of participants in debate, and decision
and policy makers. Focusing on heterogeneous assemblages is, then,
a way of recognizing that nonhuman entities are capable of actively
making a difference to the organization of social, political, and eco-
nomic arrangements. For this reason, these authors propose, they
must be taken into account as active elements in these arrangements.
Importantly, as this line of work is concerned with the “coming out”
of nonhumans as significant members of social and political forma-
tions, it encourages us to consider how nonhumans are articulated
as such in the realm of publicity media. However, this certainly does
not mean that the association of material politics with subpolitics is
ruptured in this line of work.
Thus some students of heterogeneous assemblages have expressed
positive appreciation for the covert status that nonhumans enjoy in the
world of politics. Thus Hinchliffe et al. (2005) have emphasized that
the relative clandestinity of nonhumans in the political realm does not
only signal their undesirable “marginalization” but has affordances
as well. Perhaps most important, it opens up a space for situated
involvements with these entities as singular beings. As nonhumans
prove resistant to assimilation into preexisting definitions of either
the subjects or the objects of policy, they must be engaged in their
idiosyncrasy. The political affordances of clandestinity have also been
stressed with respect to the role of physical entities in democratic
politics. Thus, drawing on the work of Jacques Ranciere, Jane Bennett
(2005) has argued that the location of nonhumans below the thresh-
old of discourse enables them to interfere surprisingly in political
force fields, an event that in her view is crucial to democracy. Work
on heterogeneous assemblages, then, does not necessarily dissolve
the notion that the politics of nonhumans operates primarily on the
subpolitical level. Indeed, it suggests that publicization of nonhuman
entities may hamper rather than amplify their capacities to produce
political effects. This position raises some difficult questions such as
whether the commitment to recognize nonhumans as constitutive
elements of social and political worlds does not require some kind
 Front-staging Nonhumans 189

of commitment to publicity as one of the principal instruments to

bring such recognition about; that is, one can ask whether a positive
appreciation of heterogeneous polities, on theoretical grounds, does
or should not imply an appreciation of the practical means by which
the “coming out” of heterogeneous assemblages can be realized, that
is, publicity media?8
However this may be, other work in this area has made the public
articulation of assemblages its explicit concern. Thus, in work that
has close affinities with that of Barry and Callon discussed earlier,
Bruno Latour has proposed the notion of “matter of concern” to
describe the emergence of issues in which human and nonhuman
entities prove to be intimately entangled (Latour 2004b). Drawing
on the example of the Columbus space shuttle disaster in 2003, La-
tour shows how in this event a tangled “object” was articulated, with
the aid of live media, which included an impressively wide range
of elements, from insurance companies to the gods that live in the
heavens. His account of this process of public articulation empha-
sizes that as these divergent but entangled elements came into public
view, a multiplicity of issues became subject to scrutiny all at once:
the scientific methods of monitoring spacecrafts during flight, the
economic question of the costs and gains of the implementation of
safety measures, the moral issue of whether individuals should be
held responsible for the accident, and the religious concern of how
one relates to the gods in the case of human deaths. Importantly,
this means that matters of public concern in Latour’s account are
no pure entities that would fit one rather than another concept of
the common good, but rather present messy bundles of things and
questions, of which it is still to be seen with which understanding
of “morality” or “science” they could be made to comply. However,
Latour’s suggestion that the emergence of a matter of concern involves
the simultaneous “activation” of scientific, economic, political, moral,
and religious issues raises the question of what exactly is specific about
the mode of entanglement he calls a matter of concern, and about our
way of relating to it. Importantly, Latour highlights that our relation
to these matters—whether it takes the form of attention, interest,
or involvement—should be understood in terms of attachment;
that is, to be concerned, in his view, is a matter of being noticeably
190 NOORTJE MARRES

entangled with entities that are at risk and that may well put one’s
mode of existence at risk. However, Latour’s account of matters of
concern does not sharply distinguish a mode of attachment that is
characteristic of publics or citizens, as opposed to persons, in their
capacity of scientific, mortal, economic, or private beings.
In this way, Latour’s notion of matters of concern, like other
studies of the role of nonhumans in politics mentioned earlier, to
an extent leaves undiscussed the specific features of heterogeneous
assemblages as objects of publicity, and of public involvement. In
other work, Latour does develop a conception of the public, which
he derives from the political theory of the American pragmatist phi-
losopher John Dewey (Latour 2001). In Dewey’s work, Latour finds
an important precedent for a definition of the public as an attached
being, whose concerns derive from the entanglements of everyday
life. That is also to say, Latour turns to Dewey for an alternative to the
republican conception of the public as consisting of actors who are
detached from the concerns of everyday life and concern themselves
with matters of general, as opposed to particular, concern. Dewey’s
political theory dissolves the notion of two distinct domains, the
public and the private, and indeed, in doing so, he directs attention
to something that we can retrospectively recognize as “heterogeneous
assemblages,” as one of the key sites in which political relations are
constituted. Dewey’s work thus presents a crucial point of reference for
those with an interest in developing a constructive account of the role
of nonhuman entities in politics (Bennett 2005; Marres 2005; Stengers
2006; Dijstelbloem 2006). However, his political theory may also be
a helpful guide in exploring the more specific question of how to dis-
tinguish “public involvement,” as a mode of relating to heterogeneous
assemblages, from other modes—a question that becomes crucial
when we recognize that public involvement practices are performed
in media res and not only in dedicated domains distinct from social
life. Thus I would like to suggest here that Dewey’s theory of the public
can productively inform an account of material practices as sites of
public involvement and of the importance of publicity media in this
respect. Moreover, such a reading of Dewey may also help to make it
clearer what the distinctive contribution of studies of heterogeneous
assemblages to the study of public involvement in politics consists of.
 Front-staging Nonhumans 191

John Dewey’s Heterogeneous Public

Those with an interest in the roles of nonhumans in politics are
certainly not the only ones to have turned to the political theory of
John Dewey in recent years. A wide range of authors in contempo-
rary political theory draw on his work for a variety of purposes: to
expand and strengthen the deliberative conception of democracy
as anchored in public debate (Festenstein 1997), to establish the
importance of technological innovation as an occasion for public
participation experiments (Keulartz et al. 2002), or to conceptualize
minority politics as a practice grounded in experience and not doc-
trine (Glaude 2007). However, recent readings of Dewey’s political
theory, and in particular of his theory of the public, in the light of
work on the role of nonhumans in politics offer a distinctive inter-
pretation. As they highlight that Dewey conceived of the “public” as
constituted by materially and physically entangled actors, they break
with an assumption shared by many interpreters of his work, namely,
that to participate in a public is principally a matter of participating
in discursive exchange (Marres 2007). As will become clearer later,
such differences among interpretations can, to a great extent, be
accounted for in terms of the different books, or even passages of
books, on which different interpretations focus. Thus Dewey (1927)
introduced his “heterogeneous public” in the first chapters of The
Public and Its Problems. The book opens with the outline of a specula-
tive history of the emergence of political formations, and befittingly,
Dewey develops an account of the public as emerging from the ever-
shifting relations between humans and nonhumans as part of this
historical exposé. The public, Dewey argues here, can be defined as
a particular type of distribution of the consequences of human ac-
tion: “the public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect
consequences of transactions, to such an extent that it is deemed
necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (15).
A lot is packed into this brief definition, with the noteworthy
nonhumans hiding, for the moment, in the notion of the consequences
of action that actors are harmfully, or at least disturbingly, affected
by. But it seems most useful to begin picking Dewey’s concept of
the public apart by considering how it resists reduction to another
192 NOORTJE MARRES

familiar understanding of the public, even if it bears similarities

to it. Thus Dewey’s public can in some respects be understood as
an elaboration of the liberal ideal that says the interference of gov-
ernment in private affairs should be limited to those situations in
which persons suffer as a consequence of the actions of third parties.
Dewey, one could say, transformed this regulative principle, designed
to limit state involvement in “private matters,” into a constructive
principle that can account for the empirical process of the formation
of publics—and that indeed extends the range and number of em-
pirically existing publics in comparison to other definitions. Dewey
does this by concentrating on the type of consequences that in his
view call the particular figure of the public into existence. These are
consequences that are (1) harmful or even “evil” (Dewey 1927, 17),
(2) indirect, and (3) extensive and enduring. And in focusing on
these effects, Dewey dismantles the particular opposition between
the public and the private that is central to this liberal project of
restricting “incursions” of the former into the latter. (That is also to
say, Dewey was at least as much concerned with questioning liberal
as republican concepts of the public.)
Thus, rather than presenting us with two domains, one in which
we deal with personal matters and another in which we deal with
common affairs, Dewey presents a world in which actions con-
tinuously produce actor groupings by way of their effects, some of
which will go by the name of “public.” Dewey singles out two criti-
cal features of such public-generating effects: he distinguishes first
between consequences that are direct and can thus be controlled
by those involved in their production and those that cannot, and
second between consequences that are erratic and somehow can be
accommodated as part of social life and those that produce enduring
harm. Consequences that have the latter features generate publics.
Dewey thus exhaustively defines the public in terms of a particular
chain of effects, which can be differentiated from other such chains,
but both of which proliferate across one and the same worlds. Thus,
as he situates the public in effects and affects that are continuously
produced as part of daily life, the notion that the public refers to a
domain that exists apart from private worlds loses much of its sense.
Moreover, Dewey is clear that the type of consequences that produce
 Front-staging Nonhumans 193

publics can be expected to be generated everywhere all the time. He

inferred from this that problems of democracy are in fact not likely
to stem from a shortage of publics but rather from their radical mul-
tiplication and excess (126). Thus, far from limiting the breadth and
scope of the public, in line with the classic liberal objective, Dewey
radically extends them. Furthermore, Dewey could also be said not
just to redefine the opposition between public and private but to
replace it with a different one; that is, in some respects, it makes little
sense to oppose Dewey’s public to the “private.” In Dewey’s account,
the event of “incursion,” that is, when people experience harmful
indirect effects, does not present a situation in which private actors
are threatened by an external force. It rather transforms social actors
who more or less “routinely” went about their daily lives into a public
that must take it upon itself to organize into an external force (vis-
à-vis the actions that must be intervened in, if harmful effects are to
be addressed). Thus, rather than the intrusion of the public into the
private, the central event of his account of the public appears to be
the rupture of habitual ways of doing, which results in the formation
of a public. In Dewey’s account, the state of being harmfully affected
by events beyond actors’ control requires the formation of a collective
agency and, more generally, the need to get involved in something
like politics. Dewey’s theory of the public could thus be said to re-
place the opposition between the private and public domain with
the notion of a shift from working social routines to their disruption.
Importantly, Dewey’s emphasis on the disruptive events in which
publics come into existence also sets his account apart from other
consequentialist approaches to morality and politics, such as utili-
tarianism. Dewey did follow utilitarianism by concentrating on
consequences, but he certainly did not subscribe to its conception of
politics as principally concerned with the maximalization of “agree-
able” consequences of action and the prevention of disagreeable ones.
In other work, Dewey expressed great appreciation for the fact that
utilitarianism, by focusing on the consequences of action, was able
to recognize the “empirical character” of morality and politics. But
he was extremely critical of the utilitarianist notion that it is possible
to calculate future consequences of action and also of the distinction
between means and ends on which such a calculative approach is
194 NOORTJE MARRES

predicated (Dewey 1922); that is, Dewey rejected the utilitarianist

definition of politics and morality as concerned with the determina-
tion of the proper means that will help to realize specifiable desired
ends because he could not accept the instrumentalist’s carving up of
the world into means and ends that this implied. He criticized the
role that the means–end distinction was made to play in politics and
morality by utilitarianists because of the way in which it precluded
recognition of the fact that things designated as “means” are likely
to have consequences that are not included among its “ends.” To
approach such things as “mere means” to “certain ends only” for
Dewey presented a disingenuous justification for excluding these
consequences from consideration (222–27). (This is also to say, while
Dewey called his own philosophy instrumentalism, it is clear that he
meant something quite different than the utilitarian brand of “means-
ism.”) In The Public and Its Problems, this criticism of the notion of
“mere means” also returns, when Dewey highlights the relevance for
politics of the situation in which things that are designed to function
as means of human action produce unanticipated effects. Indeed, it
is in his discussion of this situation that Dewey comes to recognize
the formative influence of nonhuman entities on the organization
of publics. Thus, in specifying the conditions in which publics come
about, Dewey directs attention to the tendency of technological means
not only to produce consequences that cannot be classified among
those that are desired but also to produce new types of consequences:
“industry and invention in technology, for example, create means
which alter the modes of associated behavior and which radically
change the quantity, character, and place of impact of their indirect
consequences” (30).
Passages like this help to make clear how a definition of the public
in terms of a particular type of consequence involves recognition of
the role of nonhuman entities in the formation of publics. First, it
highlights Dewey’s conviction that it is unhelpful to define nonhu-
man entities as mere means in the political context. Technologies,
substances, and objects play a crucial role in the formation of publics
because they actively participate in the production of the consequences
that call publics into existence. Second, it also shows that Dewey
includes, or even privileges, among the consequences that produce
 Front-staging Nonhumans 195

publics material and physical effects that have to do with activities

like manufacture, transport, and communication. Indeed, one of
Dewey’s aims in The Public and Its Problems is to direct attention to
changes in “the material conditions of life” as a crucial occasion for
the formation of publics (Dewey 1927, 44) and for the development
of democratic societies more broadly. Thus, by defining the public in
terms of adversely affected actors, Dewey suggests that we should look
for a distinctively public mode of association not, in first instance, in
features like shared membership in clubs and other social associations
or in shared discourses. We should rather focus on the social fact of
the joint implication of actors in the infrastructures, technological,
natural, and otherwise, that sustain social life. In this respect, it is
important to note that Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems is for a
large part concerned with problems of democracy in technological
societies. By defining the public as he does, Dewey in effect breaks with
the tendency in political theory to model the public on preindustrial
communities of either the aristocratic or agricultural variety. Dewey
does not, at least not initially, mold his public after a particular social
community, be it the community of notables (citizens of the polis)
or the New England village (meeting in the town hall). He opens
up the concept to the ever-shifting and complex interdependencies
that are characteristic of industrial societies.
However, Dewey’s emphasis on the material and physical con-
nections by which publics, in his view, are held together does not
entail a disregard for the importance of discourse. Interestingly, and
it could make sense to call this Dewey’s genius, he makes it clear that
the “material public” conceptualized by him needs more rather than
less publicity to sustain itself, compared with communities that are
principally held together by discursive or social bonds. The notion
of publics called into existence by material effects opens up the pos-
sibility that publics proliferate in the absence, or below the surface, of
the usual support systems that these other publics require: a shared
way of life, discourse, institutions, assembly spaces, publicity media.
But in The Public and Its Problems, Dewey utterly refuses to view this
possibility of what could perhaps be called the subpolitical mode of
existence of the public in a positive light. Instead he argues that publics
that configure around the harmful consequences of human action
196 NOORTJE MARRES

depend for their survival and their “effectivity” on publicity media.

In Dewey’s view, material publics are condemned to lead only an
inchoate, obscure, staggering, and unstable existence, as long as they
remain aloof from the symbolic circulations facilitated by publicity
media, and this for at least two reasons. First, the consequences that
call publics into existence are unlikely to be recognizable as such if
they are not documented in information media. This is because these
consequences, being indirect, are likely to transgress the boundaries
of existing social groupings. In industrial societies, moreover, with
their longer and more complex associative chains, these effects also
tend to be extensive, connecting actors that are separated from one
another by long distances. And they should be expected to contain
an element of novelty. From this Dewey infers that, in the absence
of attempts to trace indirect and harmful consequences with the aid
of information technologies, the formation of a public is likely to go
unobserved (Dewey 1927, 177). Second, it also follows that a public
is unlikely to recognize itself as long as the effects that call it into
being are not made widely observable. As Deweyian publics are not
likely to map onto existing social groupings, they should be expected
to consist of strangers who do not have at their disposal shared
locations, vocabularies, and habits for the resolution of common
problems (Warner 2002; Dobson and Bell 2006). From this Dewey
concluded that if publics are to “recognize themselves,” platforms
for the wide and open-ended circulation of information concern-
ing consequences must be in place. And more generally, he argued
that an extensive and developed communication infrastructure is a
central requirement for the organization of publics. It thus seems fair
to say that he was not in the least seduced by the political possibili-
ties inherent in an exclusively subpolitical form of organization for
which his concept of material publics can seem to allow. Publicity,
in his view, was an absolutely necessary condition for the endurance
or sustainability of material publics, that is, if they were to develop
capacities to “hold themselves,” as well as for any possible effective
action on the part of the public.
This brings us to a point at which Dewey’s theory of the public
at once touches most closely on questions in contemporary politi-
cal theory regarding materiality and politics and begins to recede
 Front-staging Nonhumans 197

from them. On one hand, Dewey’s concept of material publics—and,

perhaps especially, his claim that they depend for their sustenance
and effectivity on the publicization of the effects that call them into
existence—seems to contain the seeds of answers to these questions.
It suggests how a special combination of material effects, intimate
affectedness, and mediatization comes together in the figure of the
public. It distinguishes, within the wider field of subpolitical forma-
tions involving things, humans, and environments, a particularly
problematic type of entanglement of humans and nonhumans, sim-
ply and elegantly called “public,” the articulation of which requires
publicity. I will further discuss subsequently how these Deweyian
concepts can help to address a number of conceptual complications
regarding materiality and citizenship. However, on the other hand,
it should also be noted that Dewey’s claims about the dependency of
material publics on publicity media present the point in The Public
and Its Problems at which his argument starts to be less and less rel-
evant to these complications. Indeed, it seems that, partly because of
his preoccupation with the communicative dimension of the public,
Dewey was unable to fully appreciate its heterogeneous character.
Thus, once Dewey has established the importance of informational
and communicative practices in this book, his account begins to
move away from the idea that the public is constituted by human
as well as nonhuman entities. Indeed, it subsequently becomes
clear that Dewey, in certain respects, remains firmly committed
to a humanist understanding of the public.9 Thus, in The Public
and Its Problems, he eventually comes to define social and political
groupings in terms of the “conjoint activity of humans.” Moreover,
in doing so, he makes the demarcationist move of distinguishing
human communities from nonhuman ones rather than continuing
to explore their mutual imbrications. He places great emphasis on
humans’ exclusive mastery of language and symbolic communication.
Dewey thus ultimately came to define political groupings in terms
of associations among distinctively human beings, and the notion
that nonhuman entities make a difference to the political forma-
tions they help to constitute disappears from his argument. That is
also to say, Dewey at no point addresses the question whether the
participation of nonhumans in the public has consequences for the
198 NOORTJE MARRES

forms that practices of publicity may take. However, in the context

of the recent turn to material practices as sites of citizenship, this
seems to be one of the central questions raised by Dewey’s theory
of the public: once we recognize that publics are heterogeneously
constituted, must not publicity itself—the process in which publics
come to “recognize themselves” and somehow acquire the capacity
to act—be rethought along materialist lines?
Before further discussing what inferences can be made from
Dewey’s political theory regarding this question, I want to briefly
point out that, in other work, Dewey did emphasize the special af-
fordances of objects as mediators of normative engagement. Thus, in
his Theory of Valuation, Dewey (1939) developed a moral theory that,
without much exaggeration, can be characterized as object oriented.
Here he proposes that values, as well as the desires and interests that
guide their articulation, are first and foremost attached to objects,
and that they are most productively defined in terms of those objects.
Interestingly, Theory of Valuation was published in the famous series
edited by the Viennese logical positivists, The Encyclopedia of Uni-
fied Science, and its general argument can be understood in relation
to the commitments of logical positivism. Thus one could say that
Dewey, in this little book, presents an alternative to the positivist
project of purifying the domain of factual truth and excluding from it
anything “subjective,” which logical positivists famously equated with
thoughts and feelings that are merely “confused.” In sharp contrast to
this, Dewey proposed to include affectations, whether confused or
not, in the objective realm. As he puts it elsewhere, “such things as
lack and need, conflict and clash, desire and effort, loss and satisfac-
tion [must be] referred to reality” (Dewey 1908, 124). In Theory of
Valuation, he specifies this general claim by suggesting that values,
desires, and interests must be appreciated as aspects of “objective
situations.” These normativities in his view first and foremost con-
note “an active relation to the environment” (Dewey 1939, 16); they
must be stated “in terms of the objects and events that give rise to
[them]” (16); and the tendency to define them as “something merely
personal” must be resisted (16). For Dewey, the content of “values” is
then best conceptualized in terms of the specific situational objects to
which people attach them, and he suggests that processes of valuation
 Front-staging Nonhumans 199

should themselves be understood as processes in which the worth of

this type of objects becomes clear. Thus, regarding interests, Dewey
states, “When [they] are examined in their concrete makeup in
relation to their place in some situation, it is plain that everything
depends on the objects involved in them” (18). This is not the place to
examine this moral theory in detail. But I hope that this brief sketch
is enough to make it clear that Dewey’s philosophy contains further
conceptual elements to help account for, if not material, then at least
object-oriented practices as sites of normative engagement. One last
point, which Dewey derives from his object-oriented conception of
values, seems especially relevant in this respect. This conception led
him to express a strong commitment to action as the appropriate
register for the expression of value. As he put it, “the measure of a
value a person attaches to a thing is not what he says about its pre-
ciousness, but the care he devotes to obtaining and using the means
without which it cannot be attained” (27).
Thus Dewey’s object-oriented understanding of values led him
to foreground practical efforts to obtain valued things as a privi-
leged mode of moral action. He was critical, certainly not of moral
discourses in general, but of a particular tendency in the expression
of moral sentiment, one that ends up “merely wishing” that “things
were different” (Dewey 1939, 15). The problem with wishing, Dewey
points out elsewhere, is that it may all too easily entail a disregard of
the issues people are confronted by, as people “tend to dislike what is
unpleasant and so to sheer off from an adequate notice of that which
is especially annoying” (Dewey 1933, 137). For Dewey, valuation cru-
cially involved an acceptance of the practical costs of engaging what
he famously called problematic situations, those involving “lack and
need, conflict and clash, desire and effort, loss and satisfaction.”

The Particularity of Material Politics

Dewey’s philosophy is a productive one also in the sense that there
can easily seem to be no end to the connections that can be explored
between his various concepts. But I hope that the preceding goes
some way toward making clear how his theory of the public can help
to elucidate contemporary questions about the relations between
materiality and publicity. It can do so not in the least because it opens
200 NOORTJE MARRES

up a perspective on the role of materiality in politics that breaks with

the tendency, present in post-Foucauldian work on the subject, to
understand this role as antithetical to publicity. Crucially, to adopt
the Deweyian concept of “material publics” does not imply a rejec-
tion of the association of material politics with clandestinity, with the
idea of a force at work below the surface of publicized reality; rather,
Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems proposes that among the many
different types of human and nonhuman entanglements that exist,
there is a distinctive type, simply and elegantly called public, of which
the articulation requires publicity. This also means that Dewey’s work
raises a slightly different question than the one on which authors
concerned with the politics of technology have focused. The latter
were interested in the question whether assemblages of humans and
nonhumans can be ascribed a politics generally speaking (Harbers
2005). By contrast, Dewey directs attention to a specific type of as-
semblage to describe how heterogeneous assemblages may become
politically charged. Because of this, Dewey’s theory of the public also
opens up an alternative interpretation of the idea of subpolitics. The
latter notion has been criticized for suggesting that politics happens
everywhere all the time, and it has therefore been said to contribute
to the dismantling of the concept of politics (de Vries 2007). Such a
critique gives rise to the temptation to confine the politics of tech-
nology to a particular institutional domain, where the specificity of
politics can be safeguarded. In contrast to this, Dewey’s concept of
the public suggests that it is certainly not necessary to relegate politics
to a separate domain, if the point is to acknowledge its specificity.
Indeed, the project of restricting politics to an institutional domain
is precisely the kind of classic liberal move that Dewey’s concept of
the infrapublic is designed to undermine. This concept captures the
specificity of political relations by directing attention to a particular
mode of association among social actors: that of being jointly affected
by actions beyond their control.
Furthermore, though Dewey rejects the understanding of the
public in terms of a separate domain, he nevertheless emphasizes
that there is something distinctive about being implicated in hetero-
geneous assemblages as a member of the public. In his account, the
public’s position is marked by a special combination of being both an
 Front-staging Nonhumans 201

insider and an outsider to public affairs. Thus Deweyian publics are

internal to public affairs to the extent that they are intimately affected
by social problems, which put their livelihood, in the broad sense,
at stake. But they occupy an external position to the extent that the
sources of social problems are beyond their reach and control, and,
we should add, so are the resources required to address them. In this
way, Dewey makes it clear that the public’s mode of involvement in
social problems should be differentiated from those of social actors
and other particular actors like professionals. This distinction is
not always made in studies of heterogeneous assemblages, which
tend to focus on the situated involvements of various social actors
in them. Also relevant in this respect is that it is Dewey’s insight in
the singularity of the public’s position that subsequently leads him
to recognize the importance of publicity media. The location of the
public as both an insider and outsider to social problems raises the
question of how such a position can be sustained, and Dewey’s answer
is to point at publicity media. He arrives at the intriguing position
that the existence of material publics, which are called into being
by harmful consequences, depends at least partly on their articula-
tion in media. Because the effects that call publics into existence
are so obscure—that is, precisely because they present “clandestine”
formations—Dewey suggests they can only exist coherently in these
distributed, formal, artificial platforms. As I mentioned, Dewey’s
recognition of the importance of publicity media led him away from
his earlier concerns with the materialities that mediate the formation
of publics. But his initial account of their role does suggest an ap-
proach to material practices as sites for public involvement. Taking
a cue from Theory of Valuation, in which Dewey argued in favor
of practical interventions as a mode of normative involvement in
things, we can ask whether this argument cannot be extended to
the mode of involvement characteristic of the public. Thus, in the
light of Dewey’s definition of the public in terms of its state of “being
affected” by public affairs, object-oriented practices appear to have
special affordances. The Public and Its Problems makes it clear that
this state of “affectedness” cannot be adequately understood in factual
terms only but also refers to the affective states of being touched,
implicated, and indeed moved in the sense of being mobilized by
202 NOORTJE MARRES

public affairs. So how is the state of affectedness that is characteristic

of the public performed and made productive? Specific objects may
have crucial enabling features in this respect.
But before saying a final word about the affordances of material
things for the performance of public involvement in issues, I would
like to point out that studies of heterogeneous assemblages in their
turn also suggest a particular elaboration of Dewey’s theory of the
public. This is because these studies have a particular way of dealing
with critiques of “naive objectivism,” to which Dewey’s pragmatism
has been subjected. They accommodate these critiques without
letting go of the object-oriented approach that is characteristic
of Dewey’s philosophy, as has been rather more customary. Thus
Dewey’s political theory has been called historically dated, on the
ground that his objectivist approach to democracy can no longer
be maintained, for historical, epistemic, and political reasons. Shel-
don Wolin (2004) and Yaron Ezrahi (1990) have emphasized that
Dewey promoted a scientific approach to democracy that aimed to
transform politics and morality into objective practices, dedicated
to tracing, documenting, and remedying “harmful” consequences,
rather than to subjective processes of will formation and making
value judgments. Such a characterization makes Dewey’s pragmatism
seem more utilitarian and positivistic than is perhaps justified. But
it is certainly not entirely wrong. Wolin has described how Dewey’s
problem-centric understanding of democracy became problema-
tized historically: the adoption of a problem-centric approach by
progressive U.S. administrations after the Second World War did
not result in the type of enlightened, participatory form of rule to
which Dewey was committed (Wolin 2004, 518–19). Thus Dewey’s
object-oriented politics, Wolin suggests, came down in practice to a
form of technocratic government that idealized expert-driven forms
of policy making dedicated to narrowly defined ideals of “problem
solving.” Ezrahi has pointed out that Dewey’s objectivist understand-
ing of politics also became problematic toward the end of the twen-
tieth century, epistemically speaking. His belief in the traceability
of “harmful” consequences, he notes, involves a commitment to an
empiricist ideal of accountability: that is, a belief in the possibility
of documenting events and “locating the trouble” without getting
caught up in confusing complexities involving interests, obscure
 Front-staging Nonhumans 203

motives, and political games of assigning blame. This kind of empiri-

cism has become deeply problematic, if not untenable, Ezrahi points
out, as the constructivist commitment to recognize the influence of
“paradigms” and “frames” on the formulation of facts has become
widely adopted. Finally, both Ezrahi and Wolin have pointed at the
political impossibility of Dewey’s objectivist ideal of democracy. As
Wolin puts it, democracy inevitably involves the clashing of views
and interests and upheavals having to do with struggles for influence,
and Dewey’s scientific understanding of democracy failed to make
room for such events (Wolin 2004).
As mentioned, one possible response to these critiques is to point
out that Dewey was not the utilitarian or positivist that he is sometimes
taken for, designations that the preceding critiques perhaps do not do
enough to dispel. However, it seems equally important to recognize
that the preceding “problematizations” of Dewey’s philosophy tend
to result in a stalling, or even a reversal, of the objectivist turn that
he proposed. Thus Sheldon Wolin concludes his essay on the fate of
Dewey’s scientific ideal of democracy in the late twentieth century
by advocating a return to the ideal of solidarity, as it was expressed
in the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In this context, the
attempts of students of heterogeneous assemblages to adapt Dewey’s
political theory to their purposes present a clear alternative. This
line of work has been committed to demonstrating that it is possible
to address critiques of positivism and utilitarianism, while further
radicalizing the object-oriented approaches that these schools of
thought opened up. Thus the notion of heterogeneous assemblages
has been developed as part of a broader critique of instrumentalism:
it is all about recognizing the fragility, volatility, and recalcitrance
of entities, both human and nonhuman, in the face of attempts to
define them as means toward pregiven ends. However, in this case,
the critique of instrumentalism does not lead to less but rather more
attention being paid to the capacities of objects to mediate political
relations.

To Conclude
But what about the home as a site of public involvement in climate
change? Dewey’s theory of the public, when read through the lens
of recent studies of heterogeneous assemblages, suggests a particular
204 NOORTJE MARRES

approach to the role of domestic technologies in this regard, namely,

to consider them as “devices of affectedness.” We then enrich Dewey’s
definition of the public as held together by the indirect and intimate
connections that make up social problems with a decidedly postin-
strumentalist emphasis on the active role of things in the mediation
of political relations. From such a perspective, energy technologies
in the home, like thermostats and water cookers, may perhaps be
ascribed special affordances for the performance of the specific mode
of involvement in social problems that is characteristic of the public,
that of being both intimately and externally affected by issues. It is
then certainly not impossible that the little act of “turning down the
thermostat” deserves appreciation as a more or less successful attempt,
not to save the planet, but to transform the state of being affected by
the “impossible” issue of climate change into a viable practice. In the
light of the various critiques of instrumentalism discussed earlier, it
is clear that the affordances of domestic settings for the articulation
of the material and physical modes of being implicated in climate
change cannot possibly be approached in the register of facticity
as given; that is, the capacities of domestic energy technologies to
mediate involvement in climate change can only be understood, to
use Dewey’s vocabulary, as a situational achievement. The material
and technological arrangements that make up homes must then be
examined further, if we are to determine their relative capacities for
dramatizing connections between practices “in here” and changing
climates “out there.” Perhaps it is not completely anachronistic to
suggest that Dewey has made it clear that the capacity of the home
to function as a device of issue affectedness depends crucially on the
articulation of connections, between domestic practices and issues
out there, in publicity media. Whether recent publicity campaigns,
with their focus on a limited number of feasible, stereotypical inter-
ventions—washing at low temperatures, unplugging mobile phone
chargers—succeeded in mediating affective relations with climate
change, and thus in bringing the issue home, must remain an open
question here. However, to leave this question open is to consider it
a real possibility that the endless repetition of suggestions of “what
you can do” activates a different, more classic function of the home:
 Front-staging Nonhumans 205

that of a machine of disaffectedness, which has the special affordance

of providing shelter against the lures and risks of public life, not the
least of which seems to be hyperbole and thereby the loss of con-
nection with its objects.

Notes

1 The strong language was used by British Gas as part of its adver-
tising campaign “Make It Greener Where You Are,” http://www.
makeitgreenernow.co.uk/.
2 As the campaign “DIY Planet Repairs” of the mayor of London
claimed; see “Make Six Small Changes to Help Repair the Planet
Says Mayor,” press release, Mayor of London, June 6, 2007, http://
www.london.gov.uk/view_press_release.jsp?releaseid=12230.
3 The GREENhomes Concierge service, http://www.greenhomescon-
cierge.co.uk/.
4 “M&S Helps Customers to ‘Think Climate’ by Relabelling Cloth-
ing,” press release, Marks and Spencer, April 23, 2007, http://www.
marksandspencer.com/gp/browse.html?ie=UTF8&node=55319031
&no=51444031&mnSBrand=core&me=A2BO0OYVBKIQJM; see
also http://www.together.com/solutions/9.
5 Marketing Plan: Planet DIY Repairs, Mayor of London, May 2007.
6 “Brown Outlines ‘Eco Towns’ Plan,” BBC News, May 13, 2007, http://
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6650639.stm.
7 Latour and other actor–network theorists have been criticized in
the past for giving too much credit to nonhumans by effectively ap-
proaching them as “actors.” Such a critique, it seems to me, does not
sufficiently appreciate that actor-network theorists tend to limit the
agency of nonhumans to “acts” that are precisely not conventionally
defined as such.
8 Another way of phrasing this problem is that work on heterogeneous
assemblages does not always provide a clear answer to the question of
whether these assemblages are best appreciated as polities by designa-
tion only or whether the shift in perspective it proposes also invites
or necessitates appreciation of attempts at the articulation of assem-
blages as “objects of politics” in social, political, and public settings.
206 NOORTJE MARRES

9 This is also suggested by the fact that Dewey excluded natural events
from the range of actions that could bring a public into existence.
Only human deeds could in his account give rise to a political com-
munity. This limitation may have to do with Dewey’s understanding
of politics in terms of care for consequences, as an intrinsically hu-
man capability. But considering the centrality of “harmful indirect
effects” to his definition of the public, it is hard to see how Dewey
could deem it justified.

References

Akrich, Madeleine. 1992. “The De-scription of Technical Objects.”

In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical
Change, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, 205–24. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
Allan, Stuart, Barbara Adams, and Cynthia Carter, eds. 1999. Environ-
mental Risks and the Media. London: Routledge.
Barry, Andrew. 2001. Political Machines: Governing a Technological
Society. London: Athlone Press.
———. 2005. “The Anti-political Economy.” In The Technological Economy,
ed. Andrew Barry and Don Slater, 84–100. London: Routledge.
Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments,
Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
———. 2005. “In Parliament with Things.” In Radical Democracy: Politics
between Abundance and Lack, ed. Lars Tonder and Lasse Thomassen,
133–48. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press.
Callon, Michel. 2004. “Europe Wrestling with Technology.” Economy
and Society 1, no. 33: 121–34.
Clarke, Nick, Clive Barnett, Paul Cloke, and Alice Malpass. 2007. “Global-
ising the Consumer: Doing Politics in an Ethical Register.” Political
Geography 26: 231–49.
de Vries, Gerard. 2007. “What Is Political in Sub-politics? How Aristotle
Might Help STS.” Social Studies of Science 5, no. 37: 781–809.
Dewey, John. 1908. “Does Reality Possess Practical Character?” Repr. in
The Essential Dewey, vol. 1, Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, ed.
Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander, 124–33. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1998.
———. 1922. Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social
Psychology. Repr., New York: Cosimo, 2007.
 Front-staging Nonhumans 207

———. 1927. The Public and Its Problems. Repr., Athens: Swallow Press/
Ohio University Press, 1986.
———. 1933. “How We Think.” Repr. in The Essential Dewey, vol. 2, Ethics,
Logic, Psychology, ed. Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander,
137–50. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
———. 1939. Theory of Valuation. Repr. in International Encyclopedia of
Unified Science, vol. 2, no. 4, ed. Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and
Charles Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
Dijstelbloem, Huub. 2006. “De democratie anders: Politieke vernieuwing
volgens Dewey en Latour.” PhD diss., University of Amsterdam.
Dobson, Andrew, and Derek Bell. 2005. Introduction to Environmental
Citizenship, ed. Andrew Dobson and Derek Bell. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.
Ezrahi, Yaron. 1990. The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transfor-
mation of Contemporary Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Festenstein, Matthew. 1997. Pragmatism and Political Theory. Oxford:
Polity Press.
Glaude, Eddie S. 2007. In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics
of Black America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Harbers, Hans, ed. 2005. Inside the Politics of Technology: Agency and
Normativity in the Co-production of Technology and Society. Am-
sterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Hinchliffe, Steve, Matthew Kearnes, Monica Degen, and Sarah J. What-
more. 2005. “Urban Wild Things: A Cosmopolitical Experiment.”
Environment and Planning D 23: 643–58.
Jasanoff, Sheilla. 2001. “Image and Imagination: The Formation of Global
Environmental Consciousness.” In Changing the Atmosphere: Expert
Knowledge and Environmental Governance, ed. Clark Miller and Paul
N. Edwards, 309–37. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Keulartz, Jozef, Michiel Korthals, Maartje Schermer, and Tsjalling
Swierstra, eds. 2002. Pragmatist Ethics for a Technological Culture.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Latour, Bruno. 1992. “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of
a Few Mundane Artefacts.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society:
Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe Bijker and John Law,
225–58. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
———. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. C. Porter. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
208 NOORTJE MARRES

———. 2001. “From ‘Matters of Fact’ to ‘States of Affairs’: Which Pro-

tocols for the New Collective Experiments?” Paper prepared for
the Darmsdadt Colloquium plenary lecture, March 30. Original
document available at http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/poparticles/
poparticle/p095.html.
———. 2004a. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democ-
racy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
———. 2004b. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of
Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 2, no. 30: 225–48.
Marres, Noortje. 2005. “No Issue, No Public: Democratic Deficits after the
Displacement of Politics.” PhD diss., University of Amsterdam.
———. 2007. “The Issues Deserve More Credit: Pragmatist Contributions
to the Study of Public Involvement in Controversy.” Social Studies
of Science 5: 759–80.
Macnaghten, Phil. 2003. “Embodying the Environment in Everyday Life
Practices.” Sociological Review 51, no. 1: 62–84.
Mol, Annemarie. 1999. “Ontological Politics: A Word and Some Ques-
tions.” In Actor Network Theory and After, ed. John Law and John
Hassard, 74–89. Oxford: Blackwell.
———. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press.
Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shove, Elizabeth. 2003. Comfort, Cleanliness, and Convenience: The
Social Organization of Normality. London: Berg.
———. 2007. “Caution: Transitions Ahead.” Environment and Planning
A 39: 763–70.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2006. La Vierge et le neutrino: les scientifiques dans la
tourmente. Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond/Le Seuil.
Szerszynski, Bronislaw, and Mark Toogood. 1999. “Global Citizenship,
the Environment, and the Media.” In Environmental Risks and the
Media, ed. Stuart Allan, Barbara Adams, and Cynthia Carter, 218–28.
London: Routledge.
Trumbo, Craig. 1995. “Constructing Climate Change: Claims and Frames
in US News Coverage of an Environmental Issue.” Public Under-
standing of Science 5, no. 3: 269–83.
Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone
Books.
Weber, Elke. 2006. “Experience-Based and Description-Based Perceptions
 Front-staging Nonhumans 209

of Long-Term Risk: Why Global Warming Does Not Scare Us (Yet).”

Climatic Change 77, nos. 1–2: 103–20.
Whatmore, Sarah J. 2002. Hybrid Geographies: Natures, Cultures, Spaces.
London: Sage.
Winner, Langdon. 1986. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” In The Whale
and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology,
19–39. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Wolin, Sheldon. 2004. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation
in Western Political Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
This page intentionally left blank
 8 The Political Technology
of RU486: Time for the
Body and Democracy
rosalyn diprose

A public debate erupted in Australia in late 2005 when,

in an unprecedented move, four female senators from across
the political party spectrum sponsored a “private members bill” to
repeal the federal minister for health’s jurisdiction over the licensing
of RU486 (the so-called home abortion pill).1 By February 2006, the
newspaper headlines read, “No Pill Has Divided Australia Like RU486
Since the Oral Contraceptive Pill Was Introduced in the 1960s.”2 In
contrast to the global spread of the controversy over the contraceptive
pill of the 1960s, the eruption of RU486 onto the political scene in
2005–6 was peculiar to Australia. This is partly because the Austra-
lian government, in contrast to other comparable democracies, was
continuing to block the licensing of the drug despite the fact that
surgical abortion has been legally available since the 1970s.3 But the
“RU486 event” was also remarkable in terms of the internal political
context. On one hand, abortive agents like RU486 stand out from
other therapeutic drugs in being a direct site of government regula-
tion of the life of the population. Though the licensing of all other
pharmaceuticals had been under the authority of the Therapeutics
Goods Administration (TGA) since the Therapeutics Goods Act
1989, in 1996 the newly elected conservative federal government,
in one of its first legislative acts since assuming power, transferred
the administration of abortive agents to its own jurisdiction. On the
other hand, despite this early sign of the spread of this government’s

211
212 ROSALYN DIPROSE

authority over life, that RU486 in particular became the focal point
of contestation of that authority in 2005–6 was surprising. First, the
1996 amendment had had the support of both major political par-
ties in both houses of parliament, and nothing of note had changed
about the drug in the intervening ten years. Second, there had been
little sign of dissent within parliament to the government’s wider
legislative agenda up until 2005, and though there had been much
dissent outside parliament over a range of government initiatives,
the licensing of RU486 had for the most part remained under the
public radar. Through eleven years of Liberal-National (conservative)
government and increasing authoritarianism,4 many other issues had
more obviously divided the nation (harsh refugee policies, partici-
pation in the war in Iraq, draconian antiterrorism legislation, and
legislation individualizing and deunionizing the labor market). Yet
only RU486 succeeded in mobilizing a wave of defiance of govern-
ment authority sufficiently strong to push the debate in parliament
to a rare conscience vote (a free vote that suspends the allegiance to
one’s political party that is characteristic of the Westminster system)
and, even more rare, a vote that the prime minister and minister
for health lost. Perhaps heartened by the success of this expression
of dissent, others within government (and the Labor Opposition)
subsequently began to challenge other aspects of the cabinet’s con-
servative legislative agenda.
Following is an exploration of how and why such a tiny instance of
biomedical technology could come closer to reactivating democracy
than any other public expression of dissent has in recent years. What
might the RU486 event reveal about the stuff of politics beneath
the radar of much political theory, conscious intent, and public
debate? The analysis involves examining how biotechnology might
be located within two reformulations of the political: first, Michel
Foucault’s idea of political technologies of bodies combined with
his and Giorgio Agamben’s formulations of biopolitics; and second,
what we might call deconstructive phenomenological formulations
of the political developed from Hannah Arendt through to Jean-Luc
Nancy and Jacques Derrida. Both these paradigms of the political
provide insight into the relation between bodies, technology, and the
political that helps to explain the emergence of biotechnologies such
 The Political Technology of RU486 213

as RU486 as sites of domination and contest in social and political

life. Biopolitical analysis can explain why RU486 became a site for the
governance and control of life and of the Australian population in the
first place. However, by adding consideration of time and temporality
to its idea of the political, deconstructive phenomenology extends
the political beyond the concept of governance and control of bod-
ies. In ways examined subsequently, on this model of the political,
what biotechnology and democratic politics share, if understood as
“innovative” rather than instrumental, is the potential to temporalize
being(s) (human and nonhuman) and thereby maintain living being(s)
open to an undetermined future. This concept of the political can
thereby explain how a biotechnology like RU486 can emerge as a
site of contestation of government authority: understood as innova-
tive rather than instrumental, the technological and the political, in
concert with the unpredictability of biomaterial life, challenge appeals
to biological and sociopolitical determinisms that preempt a future
continuous with the past. Biotechnologies do this, most obviously,
although not necessarily, by challenging assumptions of biological
destiny; democratic politics challenges ideological (sociopolitical)
determinism by contesting control measures aimed at preserving
tradition for the sake of realizing an ideal future for a nation. View-
ing RU486 as political technology and an event that expresses the
possibility of bringing together matter, affects, and meanings in
new ways reveals this shared feature of technology and politics and
helps explain the surprising political power of RU486 peculiar to
the Australian context.
However, neither paradigm gives sufficient attention to the way
that the being(s) that are the site of biopolitical governance inhabit
a systematically inequitable playing field, and so they cannot explain
why particular biotechnologies may become a site of contestation of
government authority. Some bodies (categorized in terms of race,
sex, class, etc.) are expected to give away the time that they live to
support the reproduction and maintenance of the biological life of the
population so that others are free to dwell in the realm of potential-
ity. Biotechnologies and democratic politics also potentially redress
such inequities. Conversely, biotechnologies can become the site of
contestation of government authority when that authority perpetuates
214 ROSALYN DIPROSE

or enhances rather than alleviates these inequities. Hence the analysis

below aims to argue that RU486 in particular succeeded in reawak-
ening democracy in Australia because it exposed the reality of, and
the possibility of redressing, one kind of inequitable sociopolitical
distribution of lived time. Specifically, the RU486 event enfranchised
women’s time (labor time and maternal time) as a gift that, under a
conservative regime of biopolitical governance, has been increasingly
taken for granted without acknowledgment or recompense. Follow-
ing are some points sketched toward that conclusion.

Political Technologies of Bodies and Biopower

How RU486 became a site of governance of the life of the Australian
population without anyone really noticing is explained by Foucault’s
understanding of the relation between technology, the political, and
bodies.
First, on his account, the political is technological by analogy in-
sofar as the targets of both disciplinary power and biotechnologies
are bodies and both combine empirical and calculated method-
ologies of intervention with technical knowledge of bodies. Just as
biotechnologies intervene into bodies at the muscular, neurological,
or molecular level to reorganize corporeal processes, disciplinary
power operates at the micro level of the body’s movements, spatial-
ity, and temporal rhythms to realign the body’s forces and powers
(Foucault 1979, 136–38). It is this combination of knowledge with
technique that allows Foucault to deem disciplinary techniques
within regimes of the governance of bodies “political technologies
of the body” (26). Moreover, unlike exercises in sovereign power,
disciplinary political technologies operate with the same banality as
technology in general, that is, without a single coordinating agent
with necessarily sinister motives.
Second, and conversely, biotechnologies are political insofar as they
are mobilized within these disciplinary regimes and so participate
in the reproduction of normalized, productive, useful bodies and
compliant subjectivities that are compatible with a neoliberal political
economy. Technologies of the body are political insofar as they are
embedded within what Heidegger has called an instrumental “way of
thinking” (or a way of “enframing” biomaterial life; Heidegger 1977).5
 The Political Technology of RU486 215

Foucault explains how this instrumental regime of governance and

its disciplinary techniques impacts the biomaterial life of bodies:

Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms

of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of
obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the
one hand, it turns it into an “aptitude,” a “capacity,” which it seeks
to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy,
the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of
strict subjection. (Foucault 1979, 138)

But disciplinary power does not exhaust, or even best character-

ize, the political dimension of biotechnologies. Though technologies
such as RU486 can be coopted or rendered problematic in the service
of the disciplinary production of “useful” bodies with enhanced
“capacities” and “aptitudes,” they rarely aim at “obedience,” the other
political aspect of disciplinary techniques that Foucault notes; rather,
discourses surrounding biotechnologies would suggest that they aim
at the enhancement of life for its own sake. With respect to a geneal-
ogy of a body, whatever else, scientifically speaking, a biotechnology
does (stopping the course of pain, expelling a zygote, or speeding up
neurological events, metabolic rates, or whatever), to the extent that
technology is innovative, it is more likely to disrupt the disciplined
docile body, undo that dissociation of power and the body said to
characterize discipline, and reopen the body’s forces toward new
directions or onto what Heidegger would call potentiality (Heidegger
1962, 184–85). Prior to his analyses of disciplinary power and biopower,
and following Nietzsche, Foucault (1994, 376–78) had referred to this
phenomenon of the disruption and realignment of corporeal forces
as “emergence” or the “singularity of events”: the eruption of forces
from the “nonspace” of the interstices of corporeal and social struggles
with an attendant transformation of meaning. Though Foucault does
not put it this way, biotechnologies, along with anything or anyone
that touches a human body (including mediums of sociopolitical
meaning), participate in this reopening of forces through a retem-
poralization of the body. In any case, characteristic of emergence
or the singularity of events is diversity of corporeal temporalities.
216 ROSALYN DIPROSE

However, these technologically enhanced bodies do not escape

regimes of governance. As technologies for the enhancement of
biological life, biotechnologies enter the second political register,
besides disciplinary power, that Foucault claims is characteristic of
modern liberal democracies: biopower. Alongside the government
of anatomical bodies through disciplinary power, biopower consists
in “interventions and regulatory controls” that exercise the “power
to foster life or disallow it” in the interests of maintaining the “bio-
logical existence of a population” (Foucault 1980, 137–39). Biopower
does not aim at an individual body, rendering it compliant; rather,
biopower targets biological processes and the “life” of a “species
body.” But emergence, innovation, and diversity of human biological
existence are not the aims of this governance of life. On the contrary,
biopower aims at curtailing “random events” and “achieving overall
equilibrium” in a population, an equilibrium that reassures with the
promise of protecting “the security of the whole from internal dangers”
(Foucault 2003, 249). Biotechnologies that enhance the unpredict-
ability of the emergence of corporeal events would present as one
such danger. As Foucault later suggests, biopower is “totalizing.” Or
rather, the combination of disciplinary power and biopower, under
a political rationality that attends to the health and welfare of the
individual to ensure the health, stability, uniformity, and security of
the whole (pastoral power), is an “individualizing and a totalizing”
form of state power (Foucault 2002, 332). This multifaceted political
technology of bodies makes subjects in two senses: the individual is
subjugated, subject to relations of control and dependence, and she
assumes an identity “by a conscience or self-knowledge” in terms of
existing social norms (331).
Though Foucault teases out the workings of biopower by fo-
cusing on discourses of sexuality (in volume 1 of The History of
Sexuality) and race and racism (in Society Must Be Defended), the
analysis is especially suited to explaining the political investment in
the regulation of reproductive technologies (including the former
Australian government’s investment in controlling the licensing of
RU486) and the related connection between national security and
political intervention into the home or private sphere. A further point
about political technologies of bodies, borrowed in part from the
 The Political Technology of RU486 217

phenomenological tradition, helps to explain the connection. Ag-

amben (1998, 1–14) argues, following Foucault but with reference to
Arendt, that what characterizes biopolitics is a collapse of the classical
distinction between zoe and bios. Arendt describes this distinction in
the following terms: zoe refers to human existence as biological life
and its passive cyclic reproduction, which, conventionally, is excluded
from politics and contained in the private realm, where it is governed
by both biological destiny and force that for Aristotle characterizes
the government of the household. Bios refers to the human being as
a political subject caught up in “historical and biographical” time
between birth and death—a lived, linear temporality of duration that
presupposes a human sociopolitical world of speech and action from
which bios emerges but through which it is also contested (Arendt
1998, 96–97). I will depart from the idea that the temporality of bios
is linear and that zoe is cyclic and will return to this contestation of
cyclic (natural) and linear (historical) time. The point for now is that
for Agamben, insofar as modern politics involves an indistinction
between zoe and bios, biological life (zoe) is the target of political
power, and zoe is not just thereby included in the political as the
“principal object of the projections and calculations of State power”
but is included as “bare life” (human existence as that which can be
killed; Agamben 1998, 8–9).
Pulling back a bit from the extremity of Agamben’s characteriza-
tion of biopolitics in terms of the inclusion of zoe in the polis as the
bare life,6 his general analysis of the zone of indistinction between
zoe and bios has two consequences of relevance to the politics of
reproductive and other biotechnologies. First, government of the
population implies and depends on direct intervention into the
home, into the sphere of the reproduction of the body politic, or to
put it in biopolitical terms, increased government of the processes
of human conception and reproduction is justified in terms of main-
taining the uniformity, and security, of the population. Second,
whereas the human body has a foot in both camps of zoe and bios
(in both biological life and the corporeal potentiality that is a con-
dition of sociopolitical agency), the spread of biopower, insofar as
it aims at the homeostasis of human biological life, tends to reduce
bios, if not to bare life, at least to zoe; biopower reduces the body of
218 ROSALYN DIPROSE

emergence open to potentiality (and thus political agency) to biologi-

cal life determined by natural forces. This in turn justifies a kind of
authoritative government that would determine the future security
and uniformity of a population in terms of what the government
considers to be the biological destiny of the nation. This is the logical
extension of what Foucault describes as totalizing government or what
Arendt calls “totalitarianism”: achieving equilibrium and security by
making subjects or “mankind itself the embodiment of law,” where
law is understood to flow inevitably from “Nature or History” and
secures a future continuous with the past (Arendt 1994, 460–62). Or,
as Agamben (1998, 10) puts it, insofar as “politics knows no value
(and consequently no nonvalue) other than life,” democracy tends
toward “gradual convergence with totalitarian states.”

The Political Technology of RU486

Such an account of biopolitics and political technologies of bodies
does help to explain how the Australian government had, in the
period 1996–2007, so easily mobilized 1950s “family values” and
surveillance of bodies in the home as the basis of not just the health
of a population but also national security in general. It is in this
context of the spread of biopolitics and totalizing government that
it had maintained its control over (and effective ban on) RU486. At
stake in this accumulative spread and totalizing effects of biopoli-
tics is democratic pluralism in general, women’s agency (not all or
exclusively but in relation to reproduction in particular), and with
this, women’s bodies in the realm of bios.
First, there are many indications of the biopolitical nexus in
Australian politics between security, family values, and reproductive
technologies. The 1996 legislation that transferred control of RU486
from medical–administrative (the TGA) to government authority
was merely an early sign of the Liberal-National government’s in-
terest in regulating sexual reproduction and promoting traditional
family values. There had also been a gradual dismantling of publicly
funded child care since the mid-1990s, and as part of an explicit ex-
ercise in nation building, the government introduced a $5,000 “baby
bonus”—a cash payment to mothers on the birth of each new child
(as the treasurer puts it, he wants “one for the mother, one for the
 The Political Technology of RU486 219

father, and one for the nation”). One of many indications that the
home that reproduces the nation is assumed to be the heterosexual,
middle-class family home was the prime minister’s (unsuccessful)
attempt in August 2000 to intervene into federal antidiscrimination
legislation (Sex Discrimination Act 1984) to allow states to exclude
lesbians and single women from accessing in vitro fertilization facili-
ties.7 More successful was the attorney general’s Marriage Legislation
Amendment Bill 2004, which removes any doubt as to what kind
of family is to be reproduced here: “marriage means the union of a
man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered
into for life. Certain unions are not marriages. A union solemnised
in a foreign country between: (a) a man and another man; or (b) a
woman and another woman; must not be recognised as a marriage
in Australia.”8
Second, federal government moves that linked the reproduction
and maintenance of biological life in the home to wider matters of
health, national identity, and security included a multi-million-dollar
advertising campaign in July 2001 that, as Kane Race has analyzed,
transferred responsibility for the war against illicit drugs from govern-
ment to the home.9 With the home, and heterosexual mothers in it,
reemerging as the place from which the identity and security of the
nation could be assured, it was merely a formality that the closing
of national borders against refugees in August 2001 was justified by
an implicit appeal to family values in the children overboard affair10
(the Australian family was thereby marked as Anglo-Celtic and most
likely Christian). At the same time, the prime minister launched
his party’s election campaign ahead of its third term of government
with the (winning) slogan of conditional hospitality that assumed a
uniformity of the Australian species body: “we decide who comes to
this country, and the circumstances under which they come.” This
conditional hospitality is also a feature of the government asserting
its control over RU486: “we” (i.e., the government as the arbiter of
biological life) decide who is born and welcomed into this political
life and under what circumstances. It is also not surprising, then—as
silly as it sounds—that the government relaunched its domestic “war
against terror” in February 2003 with a fridge magnet that designated
the home as the first place from which one should be “alert, but not
220 ROSALYN DIPROSE

alarmed” about the dangers of strangers.11 This theme of political

hospitality and the link it establishes between home and nation, zoe
and bios, is central to the deconstructive phenomenological refor-
mulation of the political to which I will return.
A second theme, aside from conditional hospitality, throughout
these legislative and public relations exercises in totalizing and biopo-
litical government, is the assumption that security rests on restoring
the “natural” order of the biological life of the Australian species
body and its reproduction in the home. This appeal to nature as the
proper determinant of culture (and therefore of national identity)
effectively justifies ideological–political determinism and totalizing
government. Any appeals to a natural body or biological life as the
proper determinant of culture, that is, sociopolitical appeals to a
future determined by the assumed “natural progression” of biological
life itself, in turn risks justifying ideological–political determinism
on the basis of the assumption that (selective) elimination by law of
technologies or practices that intervene into the natural order of life
itself will restore human bodies (and the nation) to biological destiny.
This is a problem for democracy not just because ideological–political
determinism under autocratic government is democracy’s most ob-
vious adversary but also because appeals to a natural order of “life
itself,” especially with respect to those involved in the reproduction
of “nature” in the home, reduce the bios characteristic of political
agents to zoe governed by biological destiny.
In this context of government by appeal to the natural order,
reproductive technologies present a particular problem and expose
contradictions in the governance of biological life. On one hand,
they directly challenge such government by raising the possibility
of overturning nature and the biological through the technological.
As Robyn Ferrell (2006, 33) argues, viewed as assisting “nature,”
reproductive technologies “instruct us in desires that are impossible
in nature. In this way, reproductive technologies play their part in
the political imaginary, and generally in ‘biopower,’ by cultivating
the technological way of thinking in relation to reproduction, which
has hitherto been its contrast.” Though understood in terms of an
instrumental link between the political (productive) and the biologi-
cal (reproductive), between bios and zoe, reproductive technologies
 The Political Technology of RU486 221

reveal the coconstitutive relation between these realms and hence the
reproductive and political dimensions of both. Thereby, and on the
other hand, reproductive technologies, viewed ontologically, chal-
lenge the assumption that the biological, in contrast to the political, is
reproduced passively and uniformly by revealing the innovative and
excessive dimension of both the biological and the political. Under-
stood ontologically, and to adapt Heidegger’s formula, reproductive
technologies lie on a continuum of technologies that are innovative
(rather than instrumental) “ways of thinking,” where “ways of think-
ing,” including political technologies, are not reducible to reflection
and are embedded in a chiasmic relation between meaning and being,
and so reorder the world that produces them.12 In short, reproductive
technologies confront political authority based on appeals to nature
or zoe by challenging the distinctions between nature and culture,
the domestic and the political realms, by exposing all reproduction
(sexual and cultural) as both technological and political. Moreover, it
“is only as a consequence of political technologies such as ‘universal
suffrage’ and ‘sexual equality’ that these changes to reproduction
can be conceived, let alone conceived of as desirable” (Ferrell 2006,
46). The question, then, that reproductive technologies raise, and
the way they contest totalizing government, is which kind of politi-
cal technologies should govern sexual and cultural reproduction:
those that foster democratic pluralism and the diversity of emergent
life events, or ministerial authority based on faith in the biological
destiny of a nation?
This is the question that RU486 poses. In 1996 the main argument
evoked in support of transferring responsibility for the licensing of
RU486 from the TGA to the minister for health was that, as abortion
is a social and moral issue rather than a purely technical or medical
matter, any technique that frees up its availability requires the ongo-
ing scrutiny of government. The opposite argument, but utilizing
the same instrumental thinking (that the technomedical consists
of an instrumental link between the sociopolitical and the biologi-
cal), was applied in support of repealing the minister’s authority in
2006—that RU486 is about providing women with a safe medical
alternative to surgical termination, and not about the social impact
or moral status of abortion per se. However, given that surgical
222 ROSALYN DIPROSE

abortion has been legal in Australia since the 1970s and has broad
social acceptance, and given that the safety of the drug was, by 2005,
no longer in serious question, at stake in the RU486 event of 2005–6
was neither the morality nor the health hazards of technical inter-
vention into the biological. If reproductive (and other biomedical)
technologies are always both ontological and sociopolitical, what the
battle over RU486 is really about is women’s agency, in two senses:
first, in the obvious sense that from the perspective of government,
retaining ministerial authority over (and the ban on) RU486, while
not preventing women’s reproductive choice per se, is an attempt to
minimize the possibility that women could “do it themselves” away
from direct scrutiny of biopolitical regulative mechanisms. RU486
is also about agency in a second, less obvious, sense: as a technology
that simultaneously enacts a retemporalization of the body, a rear-
rangement of corporeal “powers,” and a transformation of meanings
to do with sex, conception, reproduction, and so on, RU486 maintains
the body open to potentiality or the bios. Of course, pregnancy also
effects a transformation of meaning and being. The salient issue for
human existence as bios is that whatever path a body takes, agency
rests on the condition that that path is not forced or predetermined
by appeals to a future continuous with the past, either in terms of
biology or conservative ideology. The possibility of the contesta-
tion and transformation of the meanings and arrangements that
govern us is also the precondition of democracy. The question of
who should have authority over the regulation of RU486 or sexual
reproduction in general is a matter of individual conscience, where
conscience, following Nietzsche and Arendt, is understood, not
in terms of self-knowledge, but as the expression of agency, of the
contestation of meanings that govern us.13 The regulation of RU486
would be appropriately subject to a conscience vote in parliament,
not because it is a moral issue, but because it is a political issue that
raises the wider question of individual agency and the possibility of
dissent within and outside government.
In tying the contestation of meaning and the transformation
of corporeal being to both the impact of a biotechnology such as
RU486 and the agency that is a precondition of democracy, I have
taken the analysis into the territory of a different reformulation of the
 The Political Technology of RU486 223

political—that of deconstructive phenomenology. While biopolitical

analysis goes some way toward explaining how RU486 may have
been both one of the first and then the most recent battleground for
democracy in Australia in the past decade, it does not explain why this
technology rather than any other political, social, or biotechnology
mobilized resistance to, and contestation of, totalizing governance
of life. This is in part due to a tendency in Foucauldian analysis to
equate the political with regimes of “government”—understood as
the management of the “possible field of action of others” (Foucault
2002, 341)—and to focus on the way effects of the centralization of
the government of power relations in state institutions produce nor-
malized and compliant subjectivities (341). Hence, though Foucault’s
models of disciplinary and biopower do allow for contestation of
the kind of individualizing and totalizing government he describes,
this is in terms of resistance to, or disruption of, the relatively stable
“governmentalized” mechanisms that direct the conduct of others. His
idea of “emergence” mentioned earlier, for example, is described as
an eruption of “new forces” and diverse corporeal temporalities from
a space of confrontation of the “endlessly repeated play of domina-
tions” (377). Or resistance is said to emerge from either “bodies and
pleasures” that somehow have escaped disciplinary mechanisms of
government (Foucault 1980, 157) or the idea that wherever there are
relations of power, there is also resistance or “antagonistic” “points
of insubordination” and “means of escape” (Foucault 2002, 346). In
any case, the emergence of new forces or the “singularity of events”
that would contest the status quo is, on Foucault’s account, a mat-
ter of both confrontation and accident. Though it would be right
to say that contestation of biopolitical government by RU486 was
not coordinated by anyone and so is accidental in that sense, that
this particular biotechnology thwarted government authority was,
I think, significant and not simply the fortuitous consequence of an
arbitrary eruption in a play of forces.

Political Hospitality and Its Temporal and Gendered Dimensions

That RU486 in particular became a site of contestation of biopo-
litical power in Australia might be better explained in terms of the
deconstructive phenomenological idea of the political as community
224 ROSALYN DIPROSE

devoted to the welcome, disclosure, or exposure of the new, alter-

ity, or stranger. This second reformulation of the political is not
inconsistent with Foucault’s account of biopolitics, and aspects of it
are implied in what I have said so far. It differs in offering a political
ontology that does not equate the political with governmentality.
While a Foucauldian understanding of the relation between the
political, technologies, and bodies pits the emergence of corporeal
forces and diverse temporalities against the imposition of a neces-
sary continuity and equilibrium of biological life by biopolitical and
disciplinary government, deconstructive phenomenology deems the
temporality of emergence, or potentiality, the raison d’état of the politi-
cal itself, insofar as the political is democratic. With this ontology,
human existence as bios is always more than zoe, mere biological life
or a diversity of corporeal forces. On one hand, bios is conditioned
by the sedimented world of meaningful and material relations into
which it is born; bios is thereby historical and develops a pattern of
existence that carries forward into its future a collective history or
tradition. On the other hand, the human being as bios has an impact
on this world and transforms the conditions that condition it. Through
encounters with the physical environment, biotechnologies, and
other persons, the human being as bios breaks with, or transforms,
the past. The crucial point raised by deconstructive phenomenology,
though, is that this being open to potentiality or an undetermined
future is dependent on a human world (or a space of the political)
that welcomes this impact of the new. Hence various thinkers from
Arendt through Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida describe the
political as the space of hospitality: the space of being-with-others
that is the disclosure of alterity, uniqueness, or the “singularity of
events.” In this way, rather than focusing on the totalizing, controlling,
and normalizing tendencies of liberal democracies, deconstructive
phenomenology provides a normative model of the ethical and
ontological preconditions for democracy and justice.
This ethical dimension of the political is as important as the on-
tological dimension for an analysis of the relation between bodies,
biotechnologies, and democracy. What matters for the beings that
make up a democratic polity is not so much whether bodies, with
or without the assistance of explicit bio or other technologies, are
 The Political Technology of RU486 225

disciplined to develop capacities and aptitudes that allow one to live

within a sociopolitical economy (some habit and corporeal ritual is
necessary for any kind of social life). Instead, what matters for de-
mocracy is that these bodies are valued equally in their uniqueness
(as a who rather than a what, as Arendt puts it), that they remain open
to possibilities for existence and close to decision-making processes
with regard to their fate. Providing the space for this “singularity
of events” to take place is the raison d’état of the political as much
as the governmental management and regulation of the biological
life of populations. This should also be the guiding principle of
the political regulation of the consumption of biotechnologies that
supplement the body, alter its temporal flows, and thereby enhance
(or not) one’s being-possible. As Isabelle Stengers and Oliver Ralet
(1997) point out in their analysis of the ethics of the “war on drugs,”
what matters in the democratic regulation of the consumption of
drugs, whether medicinal, recreational, and/or illicit, is the same as
what matters to democratic pluralism, that people not be reduced
to things (zoe) either through prescriptive moralism or a “purely
technical” solution badly formulated.
Following are three points that elaborate how deconstructive
phenomenology’s model of the political might conceive of the rela-
tion between the political, technologies, and bodies. Understanding
democracy as based on the principle of political hospitality provides
the opportunity to unravel the link between and coconstitution of
subjectivity, the home, the labor economy, the body as bios, and the
nation. The point of this is to argue that the body, as the nexus of
emergent corporeal forces and temporal flows that contest the status
quo, is not outside of and in opposition to the regulation of time in
public, social, and economic life; rather, it is as bodies (bios), enabled
through biomedical, social, and other political technologies, that
human beings are opened to the realm of potentiality and are both
threatened by and mobilized against biological determinism and
authoritarian government. It is when government forgets the prin-
ciple of hospitality in the regulation (or deregulation) of time that
inequities arise, bios open to potentiality is stifled, and some bodies
more than others suffer under the weight of attempting to live through
multiple and conflicting time zones. The analysis provides a clue, for
226 ROSALYN DIPROSE

example, as to why patriarchal themes will tend to dominate in times

of national insecurity, and why a failure of political hospitality will
arise such that women as potential mothers will be targeted in the
government of biological life. Inequities also arise in the partitioning
and regulation of labor and leisure time. Considering bios open to
potentiality to be dependent on political hospitality indicates that the
ban on RU486 combined with the deregulation of the labor market,
in the context of a failure of hospitality, puts sufficient pressure on
lived time both to threaten and mobilize women’s agency.
The first point to note is that in deconstructive phenomenology’s
view, the space of the political provides the temporal conditions for
political subjectivity. Understood in terms of hospitality, deconstruc-
tive phenomenology presents us with an ontology in which the
political provides the conditions that foster, not so much compliant
subjectivity, but a subject open to potentiality and thereby capable
of contesting the status quo. Unconditional hospitality, welcoming
the absolutely (unknowable) other, uniqueness, or the “singularity of
events” into one’s home or one’s political community, constitutes the
home, the self, the nation, one’s dwelling place as open to the other.
This responsiveness, this welcome, this hospitality, is subjectivity;
it is dwelling; it is the political. The temporal dimension of uncon-
ditional hospitality is this: hospitality is “desire” or “inclination”
toward the uniqueness of others (Nancy 1991, 3–4) that institutes
the “lapse” of time between a past tradition and an undetermined
future (Derrida 2000, 127). It is this welcome of singularity or the
“event,” in other words, that contests totalizing government and its
formation of compliant subjectivities discussed earlier. But, and this
is the other side of the aporetic structure of hospitality, the welcome
of the other or the “new” is not free from regimes of meaning embed-
ded in sociopolitical institutions, including those of biopolitical and
disciplinary government. Political and personal hospitality always
carries conditions given by the laws of hospitality, by the ethos and
interpretations of the culture and language the host has inherited
and through which she assesses, knows, and welcomes the other.
While neither the space of the political nor subjectivity can free itself
from tradition to effect an absolute break between past and future,
nevertheless the ethical imperative of hospitality is that in welcoming
 The Political Technology of RU486 227

the other or the new, we must continue to experience its strangeness,

its uniqueness, and allow it to interrupt and put into question our
dwelling (Nancy 2002). In both cases of political and biotechnolo-
gies of hospitality, the “other takes place,” the “singularity of events”
emerges, through the interruption of lived, historical time and an
accompanying transformation of the meanings and patterns of one’s
existence. This being-open to self-critique, prompted by expressions
of the uniqueness, opens being to the undetermined future or po-
tentiality. This is also, as Derrida suggests elsewhere, the condition
of “democracy to come.”14 At least, this is the normative force and
ethical condition of democracy on this model of the political.
Second, the political welcome of the “singularity of events” that
disrupts the imposition of a future continuous with the past is not
simply a matter of reflection, conscious dissent, or judgment. Central
to this political subjectivity, inclined toward the uniqueness of others,
is a responsive body. Arendt contributes much to the deconstructive
phenomenological understanding of the political in The Human
Condition through her account of the “web of human relations” or
the “public sphere of appearance” conceived of in terms of the space
of the prereflective disclosure of uniqueness through speech and
action that maintains human beings open to potentiality (Arendt
1998). However, she tends to leave the temporalities of bodies out of
account. She claims in The Life of the Mind, putting a Kantian slant
on Nietzsche’s idea of time, that it is critical thinking (judgment
manifest as conscience) that “breaks up the unidirectional flow of
time” between birth and death, opens a gap between the past as
tradition, mediated by remembrance, and the future, mediated by
anticipation, and propels us into infinite potentiality (Arendt 1978,
1:202–13). Since Arendt, others who have built on her account of
the political insist that political hospitality is also a condition of the
emergent, responsive body open to a world and that this body is a
condition of the thinking, self-critical agent capable of contesting
the status quo.
William Connolly, in his fine analysis of democracy and time,
explains why it is important to consider the responsive body in
calculations of the relation between the political, temporality, and
technology (Connolly 2002). Whereas conservative political forces
228 ROSALYN DIPROSE

favor a slow pace of change, the continuous progression from past

to future already discussed, the fast pace of modern life governed
by a global economy and technologies that speed up the rate of ac-
tivity can be equally conservative. Instead, a “certain asymmetry of
pace,” Connolly argues, “is critical to democratic pluralism” (143). In
an alternative reading of Nietzsche’s idea of time to that offered by
Arendt, Connolly shows that this asymmetry of pace at all levels of
life is lived by a body: accelerations in the pace of life disrupt habits,
expose people to the “contingency and fluidity in cultural identity,”
and open us to ways of living that are “experimental,” “more demo-
cratic and less fixed and hierarchical” (156). Connolly is aware of
the dangers that such “uncertain experience of mobility in society”
presents: those that resent such uncertainty may “press militantly to
return political culture to a stonelike condition” (158). I believe this
uncertainty describes the source of the conservative government of
biological life that emerged in Australia in the decade leading up
to the RU486 event. However, in articulating this point about the
responsive body from the perspective of deconstructive phenomenol-
ogy, I wish to stress the way that this body that lives “asymmetries of
pace,” and is thereby open to potentiality, is already caught within,
and somewhat at the mercy of, the governmental partitioning and
regulation of the pace of different zones of life. Particularly pertinent
to this analysis is how, in the context of government that insists on a
future continuous with the past and the severe conditional hospitality
that this involves, different bodies negotiate the differing demands of
the labor economy in relation to other demands of other time zones
through which they are obliged to live.
Emmanuel Levinas’s account of “The Dwelling” in Totality and
Infinity elaborates the relationship between time, hospitality, and
the body (Levinas 1969, 152–74). For Levinas, as with Derrida, the
dwelling or home that conditional hospitality presupposes (from
which one can welcome) is at once the place of one’s dwelling (self,
home, etc.) and the event and time of dwelling; that is, dwelling is the
ongoing event (apparent in every activity, although exemplified for
Levinas here by the activity of labor) that lifts the self, home, and so
on, above an immediate affective relation to the world by punctuating
time (or the “timeless”), thus introducing a difference between past
 The Political Technology of RU486 229

and future. It is the body that labors, acts, touches, and is touched,
that participates in and is crucial to the temporalization of time. For
Levinas, the laboring body temporalizes space/place and time in
two ways. The laboring body sets up a distance from the world on
which it works while remaining grounded within the world that is
not its fabrication. Hence there is an “equivocation of the body,” the
encumbered freedom of being “at home with oneself in something
other than oneself,” including in the world of meaningful relations
into which we are thrown (Levinas 1969, 164). And second, the body
that labors effects a “postponement” of the present and thus “opens
the very dimension of time” (165). This “ambiguity of the body is
consciousness” and “to be conscious is precisely to have time,” a past
to be remembered and a future anticipated (165–66).
The ambiguity of the body at the heart of the temporalization of
place and time is the human being as bios. As Nancy points out, this
body is already technological in the innovative sense of being open
to technē, that is, to a community of bodies, regimes of meaning,
prosthetic devices, biomedical supplements, and so on (Nancy 1993).
As such the technological body effects the spatiotemporalization of
being open to potentiality. It is not only always technological; bios
is already political or dependent on the space of hospitality or the
welcome. Hospitality, where I experience the other’s strangeness or
uniqueness, is how Nancy characterizes the impact of biotechnologies
on one’s body—his analysis of his experience of a heart transplant
describes the way biotechnologies open the body to potentiality
(Nancy 2002). But equally, hospitality operates in the other direction,
where the body open to potentiality participates in the “sharing of
singularity” or the welcome of uniqueness that, for Nancy and Ar-
endt, characterize political community (Nancy 1991; Arendt 1998).
Levinas puts this hospitality in ethical rather than political terms;
that is, the precondition to this temporalization of the place of dwell-
ing or the home of hospitality is the unconditional welcome of the
alterity characteristic of the “ethical relation”: to have a home, world,
and so on, “I must know how to give what I possess,” including my
self-possession; “I must encounter the indiscreet face of the Other
that calls me [and the concepts or laws of hospitality I embody] into
question . . . by opening my home to him” (Levinas 1969, 171). It is
230 ROSALYN DIPROSE

the encounter with the absolute other, the new, or the stranger that,
by signifying a “lapse of time” or alterity that cannot be memorialized
or anticipated, gets going the temporalization of space and time and
its disruption of presence. Or, to put this another way, the body open
to potentiality is dependent on political hospitality.
The third point to be made, however, is that it is precisely this
bios that is jeopardized by a failure of political hospitality or the
severe conditional hospitality that is a feature of conservative and
authoritarian government. Even in the best of times, not all bodies are
welcomed as expressions of uniqueness in the same way. Insofar as
zoe and bios are aspects of human life that are traditionally separated
and hierarchialized in political philosophy (a hierarchy reaffirmed in
conservative political practice even when, to follow Agamben, zoe in
the “private sphere” is included in the public as the primary object
of political power), the welcome of the new that contests tradition
and maintains beings open to potentiality relies on some people
giving time to sustain and reproduce life itself so that others can be
welcomed as expressions of uniqueness. (Traditionally, it is “women,
slaves, and barbarians” that are aligned with zoe, as Arendt [1998,
27] puts it). And those who are expected to give time in this way
often do so without themselves being given hospitality by someone
else. By accounting for the gendered dimension of the hospitality
that is said to be central to democratic pluralism, I will attempt to
demonstrate that political hospitality, as impossible as it is, gives and
takes time, but that the more that hospitality becomes conditional
under conservative political forces intent on securing the nation, the
more the time that it takes is given by, or taken from, women within
that polity. This is partly because of the way that national security is
made increasingly dependent on the assumed stability provided by
women giving time to others in the home. There is a second force at
work here: the deregulation of labor time (which includes blurring
the difference between leisure time, home time, and work time) with
the effect that even those women who have been privileged enough
to be paid to contest the concepts and “laws of hospitality” we have
inherited have little time to give—either to others in the home or
to contesting the meanings that govern us, which is the business of
democracy.
 The Political Technology of RU486 231

It is significant I think that in December 2005, when those four

female senators proposed the bill to repeal ministerial control over
RU486, two other bills were rushed through the Australian Parlia-
ment (with only minor internal dissent quashed by the requirement
to vote along party lines). One involved amendments to so-called
antiterrorism legislation, including, not only detention without charge
and orders controlling the movement of anyone merely suspected
of “terrorist activities,” but also antisedition provisions against those
inciting “disaffection against the Government” (Anti-Terrorism
Bill 2005). The second piece of legislation (misnamed “workplace
choices”) put in place a radical deregulation of the labor market
consisting in the implementation of individual work contracts with
little provision for upholding existing entitlements including national
wage scales or workplace conditions (Workplace Relations Amend-
ment [Work Choices] Act 2005). While the first directly jeopardized
political agency (but paradoxically attracted little opposition across
the political spectrum), the second did so indirectly in terms of its
potential to impact the self-management of lived labor time. Of
course, there is no obvious reason that these two forces (the shoring
up of the family home as the foundation of national security and
the deregulation of labor time) would have a more adverse effect on
women than men. But insofar as our traditional laws of hospitality are
patriarchal and both forces intersect across one person, that person
is more likely to be a woman. My guess is that the three legislative
issues of December 2005 (control of sexual reproduction, quashing
of dissent, and the prospect of further deregulation of labor time)
together is what provoked these women to move on RU486 (the issue
of governmental control over which some political leverage would
most likely be gained). All three issues, however, bear on the future of
democratic pluralism insofar as they are about the relation between
lived time, the “lapse of time” necessary for agency, and bios as the
body open to potentiality.
Both Levinas and Arendt indicate conceptually how political
hospitality depends on some people giving time to others without
equivalent support. In his account of labor (and in his account of
eros), Levinas admits to a patriarchal dimension to this supposedly
unconditional ethical welcome of the other. Before and apart from the
232 ROSALYN DIPROSE

play of unconditional and conditional hospitality is an interim and

arguably ultimate precondition—the hospitality provided by Woman
in the home. In effect, the condition of unconditional hospitality is that
women give time so that others have time for agency, consciousness,
labor, and hospitality; that is, Levinas says explicitly that “feminine
hospitality” is “the condition for recollection, the interiority of the
Home, and inhabitation” or labor, but that this welcome is not the
alterity that contests my self-possession and that is welcomed in
the ethical relation (Levinas 1969, 157). But he does not say why. I
will suggest two possible ontological reasons why Levinas insists
that this “feminine” hospitality must be a “discreet, silent absence”
rather than an “indiscreet” contestation (155). First, for dwelling to
take hold, for the body to belong to a world, as ambiguous, uncanny,
and open to potentiality as this belonging is, it cannot be entirely
under erasure from the contestation of the new, of the “indiscreet”
other of unconditional hospitality. Or, as feminist theorists have
more critically put a similar point, a capitalist economy presupposes,
without acknowledgment, that the ambiguous autonomy of the one
who labors is dependent on some stability provided by women’s (or
someone’s) care of the affective encumbered body in the home. Second,
and related to the first point, while the welcome of unconditional
hospitality cannot be reciprocated without annulling the “lapse of
time” necessary to maintain being open to an undetermined future,
the subject of that welcome must also be welcomed unconditionally
by someone else if he is not to disappear entirely into the timeless
present of immediate affectivity. That this “someone else” is Woman
(rather than what Levinas usually refers to as the sexually neutral
Third Party), at least when it comes to labor and eros, and that she
is not herself explicitly given the security of hospitality by someone
else, highlights the patriarchal basis of our tradition of hospitality.
In The Human Condition, Arendt, through her concept of natality,
indicates why, even though those who give time in the home, as a
precondition to political hospitality, do not have to be actual women
(as Levinas also insists), this is usually the case. Natality refers to the
way that the fact of birth, our own and that of others, rather than
being-toward-death, signifies a new beginning, uniqueness, or what
others call alterity or the “singularity of events.”15 As a second-order
 The Political Technology of RU486 233

signification of uniqueness, a new beginning, and the who of the

person, it is natality that is disclosed through speech and action in
political community (Arendt 1998, 178–79). Natality, then, also refers
to the way that the very appearance of the human being in a world
temporalizes time by disrupting what Arendt considers to be the
cyclic time of nature (zoe) and passive passing of linear historical
and biographical (lived) time. And this space of the political that
is the disclosure of natality is the “power as potentiality” where, in
being together, bios is opened to an undetermined future rather than
the materialization of the future in the present (201). However, this
expression and preservation of natality, which is also the principle
of democratic pluralism, also depends on women giving birth and
time. Put simply: women give birth and consequentially, women, at
least traditionally, are expected to give the time to others necessary
for natality to appear and thereby temporalize, by disrupting, space
and time. Arendt does not make any connection between giving
birth and giving time. While women give birth and time in the first
order, this seems to be forgotten in Arendt’s (and most other) models
of the political, such that the appearance of men and women in the
public world through action and speech is usually described, includ-
ing by Arendt herself, as a “second birth” (176). Apparently no one
had to give birth or time for this second birth to happen. Both she
and Levinas in different ways thus disavow any connection between
giving birth and giving lived time, and they underplay the relation
between the opening of the human being into potentiality and the
embodied living of historical time. Insofar as these connections
are overlooked, women of the bios are reduced to zoe through the
expectation that in giving birth they will give lived time to others in
the service of transforming, for others, the cyclic time of zoe into the
supposed linear time of historical patterns of embodied existence
that are then available for temporalization toward an undetermined
future within political community.

RU486 Giving Back Time and Democracy

Lisa Guenther (2006) has gone some way in reestablishing the con-
nection between giving birth and giving time in her diagnosis of the
politics of reproduction. By highlighting the way gestation postpones
234 ROSALYN DIPROSE

the arrival of the future–present, she shows how the expectant

mother gives (lived) time to allow the child to whom she gives birth
to be an expression of natality. For the expectant mother, the child
signifies natality in the sense of both the unknown future and the
stranger—“a future that does not belong [to her], but for which [she
is] nevertheless responsible” and which she welcomes into the home
(Guenther 2006, 100). It is “gestation [that] marks immemorial . . .
lapse of time” and the future welcome (99). Guenther also makes a
connection between the opening of the human being into potentiality
and the embodied living of historical time by remarking that “the
pregnant woman already inhabits a world . . . [and] into this time of
representation and consciousness, the anarchy of birth erupts” (100).
Or, to put that point another way, the maternal body is the bearer of
historical time, a lived temporality and mode of belonging to a world
that is transformed, extended, and disrupted through gestation and
birth. Without this maternal body giving lived time for “immemorial
time” and an undetermined future, birth would not signify natality
to anyone. Though Guenther does not make this point, what her
analysis also suggests is that this reproductive body is not exclusively
in a realm of zoe governed by biological destiny; it is an innovative
reproductive technology in the realm of bios. To be acknowledged as
such, however, the space of the political that maintains beings open
to potentiality and an undetermined future must include extending
reproductive choice to women. Hence Guenther concludes that even
though the mother’s gift of birth and gift of time is not chosen (“the
gift of time does not originate in me . . . rather the giving of time to
the other is made possible by the other” [102]), nevertheless, neither
giving time nor giving birth should be forced (148, 150). As Barbara
Baird argues, “withholding of the cultural and material means that
enable certain performances” such as nonpregnancy, the “prohibition
or even the limitation of abortion by law,” significantly determines
the pregnant woman’s future self (Baird 2006, 123–25). Equally, only
if potential mothers are also understood at expressions of natality
(open to possibility) is it possible to hold open the space in which
the political disclosure of natality is possible for everyone. So it
was the bodies of women, the temporality of those bodies, and the
time they give that was at stake in the battle over RU486. And it is
 The Political Technology of RU486 235

because these bodies dwell in the realm of bios that they could also
be a site of contestation of authoritarian biopolitical government.
Politics that excludes the first order of the welcome of natality from
the benefits of the mutual disclosure of uniqueness between persons
of equal value, which Arendt says characterizes the second order of
political community, puts at risk the preconditions of democratic
plurality. Though not addressing the gendered dimensions of the
temporalization of time, Arendt does explain why and how conser-
vative elements tend to close down political hospitality or at least
make it severely conditional. Political conservatism kicks in when
the “frailty of the human condition” (i.e., the “boundlessness” and
“unpredictability” characteristic of the welcome and disclosure of
natality whereby culture is contested, interrupted, and transformed)
is felt as insecurity and uncertainty (Arendt 1998, 190–91). Accord-
ing to Arendt, this is most likely to happen when the public sphere
is dominated by a science of process and predictability and when
instrumental thinking and securing the future become the principles
of government (Arendt 1998, 232). What I suggest is that under these
conditions, responsibility for reigning in the unpredictable (i.e., ex-
pressions of natality that supposedly characterize our humanity) is
siphoned off into the home. This perhaps explains why, in the worst
of times, politics would eliminate felt instability, not only through
war, border closures, censorship, and racism, but also through ap-
peal to family values and the security that women are assumed to
provide by giving time to others in the home. And second, insofar as
the deregulation of labor time and the “busy time” of bureaucracy is
accompanied by a simultaneous reassertion of the patriarchal themes
of our tradition of hospitality, only some of us (“women slaves and
barbarians”) are expected to take responsibility for this time, thus
freeing up time for others to partake in chance encounters with the
“new” and in the contestation of traditional norms from which the
new emerges.
Arendt’s concern about the domination of the political by a “sci-
ence of process and predictability” is with the way that the power
of potentiality that characterizes the political space of democratic
pluralism is reduced to force and the agent gives up her encumbered
freedom under the assumption that her actions are determined
236 ROSALYN DIPROSE

(Arendt 1998, 234). This is also a concern for us and for the women
in the Australian government and why reclaiming their agency
through repealing ministerial authority over RU486 amounted to
also enfranchising women’s time, the gift of which is increasingly
taken for granted.
To better understand why particular technologies, bodies, and
practices become sites of contest of biopolitical and authoritarian
government, it is necessary to reassert a philosophy of the body
between the biological determinism of classical materialism (that
would conceive of bodies and reproduction in terms of mere life, or
zoe) and idealism (including some models of “social construction-
ism”) that would acknowledge that human bodies are in the realm
of bios, conditioned by the sociopolitical environment into which
we are thrown, but that would have difficulty finding a way through
a political determinism that can arise from idealism and would, in
foreclosing an unforeseeable future, reduce bios again to zoe. Such a
philosophy of the body would acknowledge, along with Agamben,
a “zone of indistinction” between zoe and bios but without reduc-
ing one to the other in the service of either biological or political
determinism. This philosophy of the body would also acknowledge
that the temporality of bios is the uneven and diverse temporality
of lived rhythms and patterns of existence that are conditioned by
the material and sociopolitical meanings into which we are thrown,
but is not reducible to, or calculable in terms of, those conditions.
Furthermore, this philosophy of the body acknowledges an ir-
reducible link between this lived time of the zone of indistinction
between zoe and bios and the interruption of lived time by the new,
an interruption necessary for agency, that is, for the contestation of
both political and biological determinism. Finally, it is necessary
to stress that time can be given, possessed, spared, expanded, and
diminished because time is lived by a body, and it is in the giving of
lived time that justice and democracy take place (or not).
Being given time by others such that one has time to welcome the
new should not be considered a privilege in a democracy. However,
it is this feature of political hospitality and democratic pluralism that
is under threat by a severe conditional hospitality that is currently in
play. To counter these forces, the space of political hospitality that
 The Political Technology of RU486 237

deconstructive phenomenology imagines, the space for the preserva-

tion of the expression of uniqueness, requires supplementation by at
least two initiatives: first, this space for the contestation of the conser-
vative concepts that govern us must be extended to all throughout the
social fabric; and second, giving time to others necessary to give them
time to be expressions of, and in turn to welcome, the new must be
the responsibility of everyone, not just “women, slaves, and barbar-
ians.” RU486 is a biotechnology that has the power to facilitate such
initiatives, not because it has the “power to foster or disallow life,” in
this case the life of a particular conglomeration of cells—understood
in those terms, the decision to abdicate governmental authority
over its licensing becomes merely a decision to transfer the work of
eugenics from government to women; rather, RU486 has the power
to spread democratic participation, because along with its impact
on bodies and in concert with the democratic, feminist, and other
political technologies that spawned it, RU486 has the power to disrupt
the gift of time lived by a maternal body that would otherwise be
rendered obligatory, or at least applauded as morally worthy, under
a regime of authoritarian biopolitical government.

Notes

1 The senators involved were Lyn Allison (leader of the Democrats

and senator representing the state of Victoria), Claire Moore (Labor
Party, Queensland), Fiona Nash (National Party, New South Wales),
and Judith Troeth (Liberal Party, Victoria). According to Nash, this
is the first time in the history of the Australian Federal Parliament
that four members of different political parties have cosponsored
a private members bill in the Senate.
2 Sydney Morning Herald, February 16, 2006. RU486, or mifepristone,
is a synthetic steroid that, in combination with a prostaglandin ana-
log, provides what is widely considered to be a safe, do-it-yourself
medical alternative to surgical abortion (De Costa 2005). It was
developed in France in the 1980s and was licensed in France in 1988,
the United Kingdom in 1991, and the United States in 2000, and it
is available in many other countries such as Russia, China, Israel,
and much of Western Europe.
238 ROSALYN DIPROSE

3 The Australian government to which I am referring throughout the

chapter is the Liberal-National (conservative) government that held
power through four federal elections in 1995–2007.
4 After the Liberal-National government won a majority in both
houses of parliament in 2004 (the first time any party has held ab-
solute political power in Australia since the early 1980s), it tended to
push through particularly conservative and controversial legislation
without debate (e.g., “work-choices” legislation, which was opposed
by the Labor Opposition and 90% of the Australian population).
However, even prior to 2004, the government faced little dissent
(including from the Labor Opposition) to some equally contro-
versial legislation, despite widespread public opposition (e.g., the
refugee legislation of 2001 and the decision to enter the war in Iraq
in 2003).
5 For a detailed comparison of Foucault’s and Heidegger’s understand-
ings of technology, see Rayner (2001).
6 Agamben’s notion of “bare life” included in the polis in the “camp”
or in the form of the “exception” (as that which can be killed) fits
well with an analysis of how democratic states, under the sway of
nationalism, harbor the potential for genocide and, to a certain
extent, applies it to an analysis of Australia’s policies involving the
offshore processing and mandatory detention of refugees. But this
schema works less well for an analysis of biopolitical government
of the home and reproductive life. For an account of the limits of
Agamben’s biopolitics for the politics of reproduction, see Deutscher
(2008).
7 For a summary of the legal issues raised by this proposed interven-
tion, see Katrine Del Villar, “McBain v State of Victoria: Implications
beyond IVF,” Parliament of Australia Parliamentary Library, August
15, 2000, http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/rn/2000-01/01RN04.
htm.
8 Marriage Amendment Bill 2004, http://www.aph.gov.au/library/
pubs/bd/2004-5/05bd005.htm.
9 The overarching slogan of the campaign was “the strongest defence
against the drug problem is the family.” The campaign included a
series of TV advertisements set in the kitchens of multicultural,
middle-class Australians depicting parents discussing the dangers of
illicit drugs with their teenage children. Some advertisements were
set on the streets depicting deaths of the same teenagers who had
 The Political Technology of RU486 239

not heeded the warnings. There was also a pamphlet distributed to

every Australian household (titled “The Strongest Defence against
the Drug Problem . . . Families”) advising parents how to detect
illicit drug use by their children and showing the importance of
talking to them about the dangers of drug use. It is beyond the scope
of this chapter to discuss the plethora of problematic assumptions
underlying the campaign and possible reasons for its spectacular
failure. For one such analysis, see Kane Race (2005).
10 The policy that closed Australian borders against asylum seekers was
announced in August 2001 and targeted refugees (mainly from the
Middle East) arriving by fishing boat from Indonesia. This involved
the navy escorting these boats away from the coast of Australia,
either back to Indonesia or to detention camps on islands offshore.
To justify the policy and to shore up popular support, the minister
for immigration and the prime minister announced, in October, that
according to a report from the navy, people on one such boat were
throwing their children overboard, presumably to prevent the navy
from undertaking its mission. The announcement was accompanied
by two visual images and comments suggesting that we do not want
people with those sort of values to come to Australia. By the time
it was revealed, several months later, that the report was false, it
had had the effect that the government desired, and after several
inquiries, no one has been held accountable for what has been put
down to miscommunication. I have referred briefly to the “children
overboard affair” in one analysis of the impact of this asylum-seeking
policy on the fabric of Australian “community” (Diprose 2003). For
a full analysis of this refugee policy and its intertwining with the
“war on terrorism,” see Marr and Wilkinson (2003).
11 This advertising campaign in February 2003 was centered on the
slogans “let’s look out for Australia” and “be alert, but not alarmed,”
and was similar in character to the antidrug campaign of 2000—a
series of TV advertisements and a pamphlet (with fridge magnet)
distributed to every Australian household advising members of the
public to be alert to anything “unusual or suspicious in their neigh-
borhood or workplace” and explaining what to do and who to call
in the event that suspicions are raised. Again, the contradictions of
the campaign, including problematic assumptions regarding what
constitutes an “unusual or suspicious activity” and its connection
to terrorism, begs further analysis. The counterstrategy from those
240 ROSALYN DIPROSE

who thought the campaign ludicrous was to send the package back to
the relevant government department and to incorporate the slogan
“be alert, not alarmed” into everyday conversation in the form of
a joke. My point in mentioning the campaign is to illustrate how
comprehensive the former Australian government’s conviction was
that national borders can be secured and conditional hospitality con-
trolled through the constitution of a particular kind of “home.”
12 For analyses of reproductive technologies in support of this point,
see, in particular, Ferrell (2006) and Franklin (1997).
13 Both Nietzsche and Arendt argue that “conscience” is not a mani-
festation of judgment that adheres to prevailing moral norms or
laws but, on the contrary, is the expression of dissent—a challenge
to and transformation (or revaluation) of the prevailing juridico-
moral code. I have elaborated this idea of conscience and how its
condition is a reflexive responsive body in Diprose (2008).
14 Derrida has written often about “democracy to come,” but for his
most recent clarification of the idea, see Jacques Derrida (2005, pt.
I, chap. 8).
15 This concept of natality intervenes into an agenda set by Heidegger’s
(1962) Being and Time that would base singularity or alterity (inno-
vation in meaning, thought, and being) in human finitude disclosed
through being-toward death. For Arendt, this innovation or alterity
that disrupts tradition arises, on the contrary, in being-toward-birth
and the uniqueness this signifies.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1978. Life of the Mind. 2 vols. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt.
———. 1994. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New Edition with added
prefaces. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt.
———. 1998. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. With an introduction by
Margaret Canovan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Baird, Barbara. 2006. “The Future of Abortion.” In Women Making
Time: Contemporary Feminist Critique and Cultural Analysis, ed.
Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas, 116–51. Crawley: University
of Western Australia Press.
 The Political Technology of RU486 241

Connolly, William. 2002. “Democracy and Time.” In Neuropolitics:

Thinking, Culture, Speed, 140–73. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press.
De Costa, C. M. 2005. “Medical Abortion for Australian Women: It’s
Time.” Medical Journal of Australia 183, no. 7: 378–80.
Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites
Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press.
———. 2005. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Deutscher, Penelope. 2008. “The Inversion of Exceptionality: Foucault,
Agamben, and ‘Reproductive Rights’.” South Atlantic Quarterly 107,
no. 1: 55–70.
Diprose, Rosalyn. 2003. “The Hand That Writes Community in Blood.”
Cultural Studies Review 9, no. 1: 34–50.
———. 2008. “Arendt and Nietzsche on Responsibility and Futurity.”
Philosophy and Social Criticism 34, no. 6: 617–42.
Ferrell, Robyn. 2006. Copula: Sexual Technologies, Reproductive Tech-
nologies. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison.
Trans. Alan Sheridan. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.
———. 1980. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New
York: Vintage.
———. 1994. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Essential Works of
Michel Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 2, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemol-
ogy, ed. J. Faubion, 369–91. London: Penguin.
———. 2002. “The Subject and Power.” Repr. in The Essential Works of
Michel Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, Power, ed. J. Faubion, 326–49.
London: Penguin.
———. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collége de France
1975–76. Trans. David Macey, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro
Fontana. New York: Picador.
Franklin, Sarah. 1997. Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted
Conception. London: Routledge.
Guenther, Lisa. 2006. The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of
Reproduction. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E.
Robinson. New York: Harper and Row.
———. 1977. “The Question Concerning Technology.” Trans. William
242 ROSALYN DIPROSE

Lovitt. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays,

3–35. New York: Harper and Row.
Levinas, Emanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.
Pittsburgh, Penn.: Duquesne University Press.
Marr, David, and Marian Wilkinson. 2003. Dark Victory. Sydney: Allen
and Unwin.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor
et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 1993. Corpus. In The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et
al., 189–207. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
———. 2002. L’Intrus. Trans. Susan Hanson. New Centennial Review 2,
no. 3: 189–201.
Race, Kane. 2005. “Recreational States: Drugs and the Sovereignty
of Consumption.” Culture Machine 7. http://culturemachine.tees.
ac.uk/frm_f1.htm.
Rayner, Timothy. 2001. “Biopower and Technology: Foucault and Heide-
gger’s Way of Thinking.” Contretemps 2: 142–56.
Stengers, Isabelle, and Oliver Ralet. 1997. “Drugs: Ethical Choice or Moral
Consensus.” In Power and Invention: Situating Science, trans. Paul
Bains, 215–230. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
 9 Infrastructure and Event:
The Political Technology
of Preparedness
andrew lakoff and
stephen j. collier

A s a number of analysts have argued, contemporary citi-

zenship is simultaneously political and technical (see, e.g., Barry
1999; also contributions to Ong and Collier 2005). Thus, for example,
access to material systems of circulation—such as water, electricity,
communication, and transportation—is critical to participation in
collective life. Indeed, demands for such access are often sources of
political mobilization. This collective dependence on what we might
call “vital systems” also fosters new forms of vulnerability. Threats
to the operations of these life-supporting systems may come from
a number of sources: natural disasters, terrorist attacks, technical
malfunction, or novel pathogens. The prospect of such catastrophic
threats now structures political intervention in a number of domains.
Exemplary instances in which the failure to protect the functioning
of such systems has caused major political fallout include the out-
break of mad cow disease and the European system of food supply,
the attacks of September 11 and the system of air transportation, and
Hurricane Katrina and systems of flood management. In this chap-
ter, we describe the development of technical methods to identify
and manage these threats to vital systems. The prevalence of these
methods—and the common assumption of their necessity—suggests
one answer to the question, how are political demands materialized
today in programs of technical response? Through such methods, a

243
244 ANDREW LAKOFF AND STEPHEN J. COLLIER

range of significant “things” is internalized within political reason.

The chapter describes how critical infrastructure—and specifically
the vulnerability of critical infrastructure—has become an object of
knowledge for security experts in the United States. The production
of such knowledge, we will suggest, is one part of a political technology
of preparedness that addresses itself to a variety of possible threats.
This political technology generates knowledge about infrastructural
vulnerabilities through the imaginative enactment of a certain type
of event. By the term political technology, we indicate a systematic
relation of knowledge and intervention applied to a problem of col-
lective life (Foucault 2001).1 In this case, the political technology of
preparedness responds to the governmental problem of planning
for unpredictable but potentially catastrophic events. It works to
integrate an array of material elements—ranging from switching
stations to chemical plants to oil pipelines and network servers—into
political organization.
Such political attention to the material underpinnings of collective
life is not in itself new or surprising. Since the eighteenth century,
experts have seen “the government of things” as one of the central
tasks of state rationality (Foucault 2007). Thus current approaches
in science and technology studies (STS) that draw attention to the
salience of material artifacts to politics follow a long tradition of
technocratic thought. From the vantage of critical analysis, what
is important to specify is how, at a given moment, such technical
artifacts as electricity networks are taken up as problems of collec-
tive existence: according to what rationality, and with what aim, do
material things become political?
The chapter begins with a brief description of current critical
infrastructure protection efforts in the United States. These efforts
focus on mitigating perceived vulnerabilities to potentially disastrous
events. It then turns to a key moment in which this relationship
between infrastructure and event was developed—cold war civil
defense. Here the chapter describes how the practice of “vulnerability
mapping” worked as a way of generating knowledge about urban
life in the shadow of nuclear attack. The chapter then follows the
trajectory of imaginative enactment as a planning technique during
the cold war and shows how this method of generating knowledge
 Infrastructure and Event 245

about vulnerability gradually extended to other types of threat. In

closing, we suggest ways in which this story about recent develop-
ments in security expertise might be linked to broader discussions
of the contemporary politics of technology.

Infrastructure and the Problem of Vulnerability

In a 2003 essay on “Infrastructure and Modernity,” Paul Edwards posed
the question of how to link detailed studies of the underpinnings
of large-scale sociotechnical systems—which focus on issues such
as the negotiation of standards and the problem of interoperability
between systems—to questions raised in social theoretical discussions
that emphasize the centrality of technological systems to modern life
(Edwards 2003). He suggested that the differences between these two
scales of analysis—one emphasizing the micropractices of technical
experts in specific domains and the other making broad, general
claims about modernity and technology—should, in principle, be
reconcilable. This challenge is similar to the one posed by the editors
of this volume, who have asked contributors to “draw questions of
science and technology more fully into political theory, and to bring
political theory to bear more consistently on our understanding of
scientific practices and technological objects.” In what follows we
try to address these challenges by focusing on a specific technical
domain, but one that responds to a broad political problem.
We focus on how experts in the management of risk have addressed
the vulnerability of complex sociotechnical systems as a problem of
collective security. This problem of system vulnerability is implicit
in many current STS discussions of infrastructure. For example,
Geof Bowker and Leigh Star (1999) emphasize that infrastructure
is a fragile accomplishment and point to moments of breakdown as
sites in which the work of infrastructure suddenly becomes visible.
From a different vantage, the problem of system vulnerability is also
central to social theories of risk, as in the work of Ulrich Beck (1999)
on risk society. Beck argues that the very sociotechnical systems that
were initially built to sustain human well-being as part of modern
social welfare programs now generate new threats. Our dependence
on these vital systems—energy, transportation, communication—is,
for Beck, a source of vulnerability. His examples of threats that come
246 ANDREW LAKOFF AND STEPHEN J. COLLIER

from infrastructural dependence include ecological catastrophes

such as Bhopal and Chernobyl, global financial crises, and mass
casualty terrorist attacks. Such hazards, he argues, can cause global,
irreparable damage, and their effects are of potentially unlimited
temporal duration.
Our point in turning to Beck’s argument here is neither to endorse
nor to criticize its accuracy as a diagnosis of contemporary politics;2
rather, it is to note a striking parallel between his diagnosis and that
of a subset of contemporary security planners in the United States.
For Beck, there is a broad class of contemporary threats—catastrophic
risks—that outstrip statistical methods of management and control
because their occurrence is unpredictable and their impact is un-
bounded. Moreover, he argues, it is our very reliance on modern
technological systems that makes us especially vulnerable to these
threats. Similarly, emergency planners in the United States—and
increasingly elsewhere—now emphasize the dangers that are posed
by catastrophic events, given our dependence on vital systems.
In what follows, we describe how these security experts have
come to understand infrastructural dependence as an internal source
of threat—and the techniques they have developed to mitigate
this vulnerability. These expert practices work to make normally
backgrounded aspects of infrastructure visible—not by observing
its breakdown but by simulating its disruption. The claim of the
chapter is not, then, that our polities are more vulnerable than they
once were; rather, it is that system vulnerability has become a central
problem structuring the way that technical artifacts are integrated
into political calculation.

Critical Infrastructure Protection

Let us begin by describing current critical infrastructure protection
(CIP) programs. CIP is a major aspect of homeland security strat-
egy in the United States and has analogs in a number of European
countries (see, e.g., Dunn 2005). Explicit governmental efforts to
catalog critical infrastructure, assess its vulnerability, and mitigate
threats to it began in 1996 with the Clinton administration’s Presi-
dential Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, which was
formed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing and emerging
 Infrastructure and Event 247

concerns about the linkages created by information systems among

technical infrastructures. U.S. security planners recognized that
interoperability—the goal of much infrastructure development—was
not only a boon to efficiency but also a potential source of danger;
they argued that the interdependence of multiple infrastructures—
information, communication, finance, energy—could lead to cascad-
ing and crippling failures.
After the attacks of September 11, CIP came to the center of
homeland security strategy. The USA Patriot Act defined critical
infrastructure as “systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so
vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such
systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security,
national economic security, national public health or safety, or any
combination of those matters” (Department of Homeland Security
[DHS] 2003, 6). In 2006 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
released its long-delayed National Infrastructure Protection Program
(NIPP), which contained an impressively long list of the sectors to be
managed under the rubric of the nation’s “critical infrastructures and
key resources” (DHS 2006). These sectors included agriculture and
food, the defense industrial base, energy, public health, banking and
finance, drinking water and water treatment, chemical plants, dams,
information technology, postal systems and shipping, transportation
systems, and governmental facilities. This was the “stuff ” that was to
be made an explicit part of the new politics of security.
The NIPP contained three basic elements:

1. Infrastructure inventory. It sought to create a base of knowledge

about the critical infrastructures of the United States in their
complex interdependence by creating a “national infrastructure
inventory.” This inventory would gather “basic information
on the relationships, dependencies, and interdependencies
between various assets, systems, networks and functions”
(DHS 2006, 31).
2. Vulnerability assessment. It called for the development of
methods for analyzing risk that could guide resource alloca-
tion. These methods included vulnerability assessment—the
identification of “intrinsic structural weaknesses, protective
248 ANDREW LAKOFF AND STEPHEN J. COLLIER

measures, resiliency, and redundancies” in critical infrastruc-

ture (DHS 2006, 38).
3. Coordination and federal assistance. It defined the scope of
federal intervention in CIP. The federal government was to
play a coordinative role in the autonomous efforts of local
governments and private sector actors and would distribute
funds to state and local governments according to a “risk-
based” formula to rationalize the expenditure of resources.

Thus the basic characteristics of critical infrastructure protection

included, first, a concern with the critical systems on which modern
society, economy, and polity depend; second, the identification of the
vulnerabilities of these systems as matters of national security; and
third, the development of security interventions whose aim is not to
deter or defeat enemies but to mitigate system vulnerabilities.
Our goal here is not to evaluate whether such programs have
in fact been successfully implemented (indeed, they have not) but
rather to characterize their underlying logic. CIP is exemplary of a
distinctive form of collective security, one that emphasizes protect-
ing vital systems against potentially catastrophic threats. One of the
key features of this form of security is that it seeks to manage the
consequences of a variety of dangerous events—including terrorist
attacks, natural disasters, and epidemics. It does this through the
development and implementation of preparedness measures such
as early warning systems, contingency planning, and scenario-based
exercises.
As we have argued elsewhere, the genealogy of vital systems
security can be traced to strategic bombing theory in interwar Eu-
rope, which focused on attacking the “vital, vulnerable” nodes of an
enemy’s industrial system (Collier and Lakoff 2007). This interest
in the vulnerability of enemy systems was then internalized in U.S.
programs for continental defense both before and during World
War II. During the early cold war, U.S. civil defense planners were
especially concerned to develop techniques to mitigate these vulner-
abilities. Here it is useful to enter into some detail to see how the
problem of system vulnerability has sparked the development of a
novel security technology.
 Infrastructure and Event 249

Vulnerability Mapping
The basic elements of this political technology of preparedness were
developed during the early cold war, in response to the threat of a
surprise attack by the Soviet Union. At this stage, preparedness meant
massive military mobilization in peacetime to deter or respond to an
anticipated enemy attack. The nation would have to be permanently
ready for emergency, requiring ongoing crisis planning in economic,
political, and military arenas. Civil defense was one aspect of such
preparedness. U.S. civil defense plans were developed in response
to the rise of novel forms of warfare in the mid-twentieth century:
first, air attacks on major cities and industrial centers in World War
II, and then intercontinental nuclear war. As World War II came to
an end, U.S. military planners sought to ensure that the country did
not demobilize after the war, as it had after World War I. They argued
that the lack of a strong military had invited the surprise attack on
Pearl Harbor. Now the Soviet Union presented a new existential
threat. To meet it, the United States would have to remain in a state
of permanent mobilization.
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, conducted between 1944 and
1946, reported on the consequences of air attacks in England, Ger-
many, and Japan and the effectiveness of these countries’ civil defense
measures. It recommended shelters and evacuation programs in the
United States “to minimize the destructiveness of such attacks, and
so organize the economic and administrative life of the Nation that
no single or small group of attacks can paralyze the national organ-
ism” (Vale 1987, 58). The report pointed to the need to disperse key
industries outside of dense urban areas and to ensure the continuity
of government after attack. As Peter Galison has noted, the survey led
military strategists to envision the United States in terms of its key
weak points—to see the territory in terms of a set of targets whose
destruction would hamper future war efforts (Galison 2001).
Faced with the threat of a surprise nuclear attack in the era of
total war, military planners sought to develop a distributed system
of preparedness that would enable civilian industrial production
facilities to withstand an attack and support a viable counteroffen-
sive (Collier and Lakoff 2007). Civil defense authorities in the 1950s
250 ANDREW LAKOFF AND STEPHEN J. COLLIER

created methods for spatially mapping domestic vulnerabilities to the

threat of atomic warfare and then delegating preparedness activities to
various agencies—from local government to individual families.
The prospect of a nuclear attack raised a number of interrelated
questions for cold war national security planners: how would the
enemy conceptualize U.S. national territory as a set of targets? What
kinds of preparations were appropriate for meeting the threat of
nuclear attack? And who should be responsible for organizing them?
Civil defense authorities developed an elaborate set of planning
practices. One of these was a procedure for mapping urban vulner-
abilities. This procedure is significant in that it pointed toward the
development of spatial knowledge about what would later be called
critical infrastructure.
Vulnerability mapping generated a new form of knowledge about
urban life. As opposed to statistical knowledge about the condition
of the population, such as epidemiology or demography, this form of
knowledge was not archival—it did not track the regular occurrence of
predictable events over time; rather, vulnerability mapping produced
knowledge about events—such as a surprise nuclear attack—whose
probability could not be known but whose consequences could be
catastrophic. Such knowledge involved not the calculation of prob-
abilities but rather the imaginative enactment of events for which
civil defense services would have to be prepared and the detailed
analysis of how urban features would be affected by such events. In
the process of evaluating vulnerability, planners made the material
features of urban life an object of detailed political calculation.
Vulnerability mapping assembled a set of techniques for visual-
izing industrial facilities and population centers as targets of poten-
tial attack and developing appropriate response capabilities. This
procedure not only meant identifying likely targets of attack; it also
involved the imaginative enactment of attack to generate knowledge
of which capabilities were needed to survive and fight back.
The 1950 document United States Civil Defense outlined the process
of vulnerability mapping in schematic form (National Security Re-
sources Board [NSRB] 1950). The starting point was the identification
of “critical targets.” To identify these targets meant developing a new
way of understanding U.S. national space: through the reconstruction
 Infrastructure and Event 251

of the point of view of the enemy. Before the era of total war, knowing
the mind-set of the enemy had been important mainly for planning
theater operations. Now, the question was much broader: how did
the enemy conceptualize U.S. territory as a set of targets?
United States Civil Defense assumed that the enemy would plan
an attack based on the same principles of strategic bombing that were
at the center of U.S. air-war doctrine. As the manual put it,

The considerations which determine profitable targets are understood

by potential enemies as well as our own planners. Such considerations
include total population, density of population, concentration of
important industries, location of communication and transportation
centers, location of critical military facilities, and location of civil
governments. (NSRB 1950, 8)

According to the civil defense plan, it was the job of each local-
ity to determine its needs in preparing for attacks on critical targets
within its jurisdiction. Planning at the local level was to be conducted
through the imaginative enactment of a potential attack. Such an
enactment would enable local civil defense planners to envision
the probable impact of an attack, anticipate civil defense planning
needs, and conduct exercises that would help identify weaknesses
in their preparations.
United States Civil Defense provided a “hypothetical attack prob-
lem” as an example of how to identify civil defense needs. The
hypothetical attack problem was a scenario consisting of an “attack
narrative”: it described two atomic detonations over an imaginary
city x: one an air burst at twenty-four hundred feet and one an
underwater burst (NSRB 1950, 117). The narrative then laid out the
immediate impact of the attack: the water surge and lethal cloud of
radioactive mist from the underwater burst; the explosive impact
of the air burst and the flash fires that spread out up to a mile from
ground zero; the casualties, including fourteen thousand to seventeen
thousand from so-called mechanical injury (i.e., from the blast itself),
seven thousand to eight thousand burn cases, and one thousand
to three thousand radiation sickness cases from the air burst. The
attack narrative also indicated the damage that would be inflicted
252 ANDREW LAKOFF AND STEPHEN J. COLLIER

on communications, transportation, utilities, and medical facilities.

All this information was intended to provide planners with
knowledge of the exigencies for which they would have to prepare.
“The hypothetical attack problem,” argued United States Civil Defense,
“should be realistic in order to bring out planning requirements in
all segments of civil defense operations. The planners should accept
the assumed effects, and analyze their needs accordingly” (NSRB
1950, 114). A city’s civil defense needs could be determined as the
difference between the envisioned impact of the bomb and its cur-
rent response capabilities.
A series of technical manuals published by the Federal Civil De-
fense Authority gave local officials detailed instructions on how to
make civil defense plans in a given city. For example, a 1953 manual
titled Civil Defense Urban Analysis, guided planners in estimating
how an atomic attack on a specific part of the city, at a specific time,
would affect the structures and population of the city. The manual
provided a detailed, systematic approach to mapping urban vulner-
abilities. Knowledge of such vulnerabilities could then guide resources
toward areas of greatest need.
This manual is of interest as a scheme for the development of a new
knowledge of urban life as tenuous—in part because of its dependence
on complex technological systems. Civil defense authorities saw that
in the era of total war, the systems that had been developed to support
modern urban life were now sources of vulnerability to enemy attack.
Health facilities, systems of transportation and communication, and
urban hygiene systems—whose construction had been essential to
modern social welfare provision—were now understood in a new
light, as possible targets and as necessary aspects of any emergency
response. The material underpinnings of collective life were to be
known and managed according to a certain political rationality.
The manual’s introduction specified its aim and scope: “since
the primary purpose of a civil defense urban analysis is to provide
the tools for undertaking realistic civil defense planning, all perti-
nent aspects of the city must be considered” (Federal Civil Defense
Administration [FCDA] 1953, 1). These pertinent aspects were to be
considered in terms of their significance in the event of a nuclear
attack. The relevant urban features to be analyzed were outlined in a
 Infrastructure and Event 253

lengthy table that constituted an impressive catalog of the elements of

a city, including land use, building density, industrial plants, popula-
tion distribution, police stations, the water distribution system, the
electric power system, streets and highways, streetcars, port facilities,
the telephone system, hospitals, zoos, penal institutions, underground
openings (caves and mines), topography, and prevailing winds.
The table also indicated the “significance” of these features for
civil defense planning. Thus knowledge about land use could help
in estimating possible damage to various city functions. Industrial
plants were significant as potential targets of sabotage or bombing
and as important elements in police and fire-control planning. Water
distribution systems were a potential target of sabotage and might
be destroyed or disabled by a nuclear blast; they were also critical
to fire control plans and were needed for emergency provision for
attack victims and civil defense workers.
After identifying these features, planners were instructed to
juxtapose them against one another on a series of operational maps.
The goal of such maps was to determine which “pertinent” urban
features would actually become important in the case of an attack
and to present information that would be useful to specific urban
services in formulating their civil defense plans. Once planners had
assembled maps of significant urban features, the manual outlined a
technical method for analyzing how these features would be affected
by a nuclear attack. Given that the precise form of attack could not
be known in advance, one needed a tool for modeling an attack’s
impact that was “sufficiently broad and flexible to meet all possible
conditions” (FCDA 1953, 8).
To develop such a tool, the planner began by performing a “tar-
get analysis” to determine an enemy’s assumed aiming point. The
goal was to figure out what type of bomb a rational enemy would
use to hit the city’s main targets, and where the bomb would strike,
to calculate the overall damage it would cause. To find the assumed
aiming point, planners were to map both the area of industrial plant
concentration and the distribution of the population. One then used
a transparent acetate overlay with concentric circles indicating the
level of bomb damage at different distances from ground zero. By
placing the overlay on top of the map of facilities and population, the
254 ANDREW LAKOFF AND STEPHEN J. COLLIER

planner could estimate the point of attack that would cause maximum
destruction. This was the assumed aiming point—which served as
“a logical center for the pattern of civil defense ground organization
of the community as a whole” (FCDA 1953, 10).
The next step was to estimate the damage a given sized bomb hit-
ting a certain point would inflict. The technical manual focused this
analysis on two key features of a city: first, facilities, such as industrial
plants, public works, utilities, and services, and second, population.
In each case, the point was not simply to measure the bomb’s impact
(the number of buildings destroyed, the number of individuals killed,
injured, or made homeless) but the city’s vulnerability—the relation-
ship between blast impact and response capabilities.
In the case of structures, the factors determining damage were
the size of the blast itself and possible damage from an ensuing
firestorm. Physical damage from the blast was estimated by drawing
concentric circles moving outward from ground zero, using informa-
tion from a document that had been prepared by the Atomic Energy
Commission and the U.S. Department of Defense (1950) called The
Effects of Atomic Weapons. This document, based on data gathered
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, provided tables indicating blast damage
from various bomb sizes at given distances from ground zero. Fire
damage depended on such factors as building density, construction
materials, precipitation, and wind velocity: here the key question
was whether a blast would become a firestorm by spreading among
neighboring buildings, which would obviously increase the structural
damage considerably.
The manual directed planners to look at the destruction of facili-
ties that would be important for response: “For example, one police
station may house all of the police broadcasting equipment and one
electric station may have the only available transformer which can
change voltage from a distant source of electrical power to the voltage
used for distribution through the city” (FCDA 1953, 53). The impact
of an attack on the population, meanwhile, could be estimated as
a function of the size and location of the bomb blast; the resident
population versus daytime population in a given area (and therefore
what time of day the bomb struck); and the condition of warning:
was it a surprise attack or was the population on alert?
 Infrastructure and Event 255

To map the city’s probable number and distribution of casualties,

the first step was to represent the distribution of the city’s popula-
tion in the city at the time of attack on a map based on estimates
of daytime migration patterns. This was then paired with a table
(provided by the federal authority) of the estimated percentage of
fatalities and nonfatal injuries in a zone, given the size of the blast
and the distance of the zone from ground zero. Using this table and
an acetate overlay with concentric rings extending outward from
ground zero, the planner would then “record the fatal casualties,
nonfatal casualties and uninjured as calculated for each ring and for
the various bomb sizes” (FCDA 1953, 36).
With this information, the planner could then generate isorithmic
maps: city maps plotted with curving lines indicating the level of fa-
talities in a given subsector. These maps made it possible to visualize
the distribution of casualties over the geography of the city. This tool
for envisioning blast impact was a flexible instrument for assessing
blast damage in generic terms at different points. Such maps brought
urban populations into view as a spatially distributed set of casualty
figures so that plans could be developed to provide relief in the wake
of attack such as emergency medical and housing services.
The vulnerability mapping procedure thus provided a map of the
physical damage of a likely blast, the casualties that resulted from it,
and its impact on critical facilities. But more, it was characteristic of
a way of coming to know national space—and the material features
of that space—in terms of threat, vulnerability, and response capac-
ity. This was not yet “critical infrastructure protection,” but its basic
logic was in place.

The Scenario
Over the course of the cold war, ambitious civil defense plans such
as massive shelter systems were never fully implemented because of
a lack of political will, skepticism about efficacy, and concern about
their strategic implications. Nonetheless, a subset of security planners
continued to attend to the problem of system vulnerability—still in
relation to the threat of Soviet nuclear attack. Here it is illustrative
to turn to the cold war trajectory of “imaginative enactment” as a
knowledge production technique.
256 ANDREW LAKOFF AND STEPHEN J. COLLIER

The practice of developing scenarios of nuclear attack to measure

and improve current readiness was made famous by Herman Kahn
of RAND in his 1962 book On Thermonuclear War. Kahn exem-
plified a new type of security expert distinctive to the period: not
the military strategist or the civil defense planner but the “defense
intellectual,” a civilian with expertise in a technical domain—for
example, mathematics, economics, or operations research—who
applied this expertise to advise the government on nuclear strategy
during the cold war.3
Kahn argued that for the strategy of deterrence to work, the enemy
had to be convinced that the United States was prepared to engage
in a full-scale nuclear war and had thus made concrete plans both
for conducting such a war and for rebuilding in its aftermath. He
criticized military planners for their failure to concretely envision
how a nuclear war would unfold. If planners were serious about the
strategy of deterrence, they had better be prepared to actually wage
nuclear war. It was irresponsible not to think concretely about the
consequences of such a war: what civil defense measures would lead to
the loss of only fifty million rather than a hundred million lives? What
would human life be like after a nuclear war? How could one plan for
postwar reconstruction in a radiation-contaminated environment?
In the quest to be prepared for the eventuality of thermonuclear
war, Kahn counseled, every possibility should be pursued. “With
sufficient preparation,” he wrote, “we actually will be able to survive
and recuperate if deterrence fails” (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2005, 231). Kahn
honed a method for what he called “thinking about the unthinkable”
that would make such planning possible: scenario development. Like
the civil defense attack narrative, Kahn’s scenarios were not predic-
tions or forecasts but opportunities for exercising an agile response
capability. They trained leaders to deal with the unanticipated.
“Imagination,” Kahn wrote, “has always been one of the principal
means for dealing in various ways with the future, and the scenario is
simply one of the many devices useful in stimulating and disciplining
the imagination” (Kahn 1962, 145).
Through the development of detailed attack scenarios, Kahn
envisioned a range of postwar conditions whose scale of catastro-
phe was a function of prewar preparations, especially civil defense
 Infrastructure and Event 257

measures. These scenarios generated knowledge of infrastructural

vulnerabilities and led Kahn to proposals for mitigating them. For
example, a radioactive environment could hamper postwar recon-
struction unless there was a way of determining individual levels of
exposure. Thus he recommended giving out radioactivity dosimeters
to the entire population in advance of war so that postwar survivors
would be able to gauge their exposure levels and act accordingly.

All-Hazards Planning: Toward a Generic Technology

Let us now quickly summarize the process through which the methods
of nuclear attack preparedness we have been describing became part
of a more general political technology oriented toward multiple types
of threat. Practices of civil defense were extended from nuclear attack
to other types of disasters in the 1960s and 1970s through the advent
of “all-hazards” planning. Beginning in the mid-1960s, state and local
agencies—under the rubric of emergency management—sought to
use federal civil defense resources to prepare for natural disasters
such as hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes. Despite its different
set of objects, the field of emergency management was structured
by the underlying logic of civil defense: anticipatory mobilization
for disaster. In the 1960s, state and local civil defense officials took
up a number of the techniques associated with attack preparedness
and applied them to natural disaster planning. These techniques
included monitoring and alert systems, evacuation plans, training
first responders, and holding drills to exercise the system.
Civil defense and emergency management shared a similar field of
intervention—potential future catastrophes—which made their tech-
niques transferable. Moreover, a complementary set of interests was at
play in the migration of civil defense techniques to disaster planning.
For local officials, federally funded civil defense programs presented
an opportunity to support local response to natural disasters. From
the federal vantage, given that civil defense against nuclear attack was
politically unpopular, natural disaster planning developed capabilities
that could also prove useful for attack preparedness. In the late 1960s,
this dual-use strategy was officially endorsed at the federal level.
Over the course of the 1970s, the forms of disaster to be addressed
through emergency planning expanded to include environmental
258 ANDREW LAKOFF AND STEPHEN J. COLLIER

catastrophes, such as Love Canal and Three Mile Island, and hu-
manitarian emergencies, such as the Cuban refugee crisis.
When the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was
founded in 1979, it consolidated federal emergency management
and civil defense functions under the rubric of all-hazards planning.
All-hazards planning assumed that, for the purposes of emergency
preparedness, many kinds of catastrophes could be treated in the
same way: earthquakes, floods, major industrial accidents, and enemy
attacks were brought into the same operational space, given certain
common characteristics. Needs such as early warning, the coordi-
nation of response by multiple agencies, public communication to
assuage panic, and the efficient implementation of recovery processes
were shared across these various sorts of disasters. Thus all-hazards
planning focused not on assessing specific threats but on building
capabilities that could function across multiple threat domains.
To operationalize all-hazards planning in the post-9/11 world,
the DHS developed the National Incident Management System
(NIMS). This is a system for deciding when a given event (an “in-
cident of national significance,” or INS) should trigger a temporary
recomposition of governmental structures—and for governing how
these temporary structures should operate. Multiple types of events
can trigger the system: as the NIMS states, “For the purposes of this
document, incidents can include acts of terrorism, wildland and
urban fires, floods, hazardous materials spills, nuclear accidents,
aircraft accidents, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, typhoons,
war-related disasters, etc.” This final et cetera is worth emphasizing:
it indicates the expansiveness of the category of the INS.

Contemporary Preparedness
The political technology of preparedness thus addresses a variety of
events that threaten vital systems, including natural disasters, terrorist
attacks, epidemics, and technological accidents. What these potential
events have in common is that they are considered low-probability,
high-consequence threats. It is not possible to gather knowledge
about them based on archival records of their occurrence; nor can
they necessarily be deterred or prevented. Security interventions
must then anticipate their occurrence.
 Infrastructure and Event 259

Here imaginative enactment as a way to generate knowledge

about current needs in the face of future events remains a central tool.
As an example, we can look at a 2004 Homeland Security Council
document called Planning Scenarios. This was a set of fifteen disas-
ter scenarios to be used by DHS as “the foundation for a risk-based
approach” to homeland security planning. These possible events—
including an anthrax attack, a flu pandemic, a nuclear detonation,
and a major earthquake—were chosen on the basis of plausibility
and catastrophic scale.
The scenarios were not predictions or forecasts; rather, they made
it possible to generate knowledge of current vulnerabilities and the
capabilities needed to mitigate them. As one expert commented,
“we have a great sense of vulnerability, but no sense of what it takes
to be prepared. These scenarios provide us with an opportunity to
address that” (David Heyman, director of the homeland security
program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, quoted
in Lipton 2005). Using the scenarios, DHS developed a menu of the
“critical tasks” that would have to be performed in various kinds of
major events; these tasks, in turn, were to be assigned to specific
governmental and nongovernmental agencies.
Scenarios and scenario-based exercises are widely used in gov-
ernmental and para-governmental preparedness efforts in the United
States and elsewhere. They involve enactments of varying detail and
scale, followed by reports on the performance of response. They are
often designed by policy institutes and think tanks under contract
to government agencies. In 2001, “Dark Winter” was performed,
a scenario depicting a covert smallpox attack in the United States.
This was an “executive-level simulation” set in the National Security
Council over fourteen days. Current and former public officials
played the roles of members of the National Security Council, and
members of the executive and legislative branches were briefed on
the results. One outcome was the Bush administration’s decision to
produce three hundred million doses of smallpox vaccine.
“Silent Vector” (2002) was an exercise in how to deal with the
threat of an impending terrorist attack when there is not enough
information to provide protection against the attack. The president,
played by former senator Sam Nunn, was told of credible intelligence
260 ANDREW LAKOFF AND STEPHEN J. COLLIER

indicating an upcoming attack on the nation’s energy infrastructure

but was not given any information on where or when the attack
would take place. Other examples include 2003’s simulated anthrax
attack, “Scarlet Cloud,” “Black Dawn,” which simulated a prospective
al-Qaeda nuclear attack, held in Brussels in 2004, and the biennial
TOPOFF exercises held by the DHS. TOPOFF 3 was enacted in April
2005 and included a car bombing, a chemical attack, and the release
of an undisclosed biological agent in New Jersey and Connecticut. It
was the largest terrorism drill ever, costing $16 million and including
ten thousand participants. The event also included a simulated news
organization, which was fully briefed on events as they unfolded.
In the January 2005 “Atlantic Storm,” former secretary of state
Madeleine Albright played the U.S. president in an exercise simulating
a smallpox attack on multiple nations of the transatlantic community.4
Istanbul, Frankfurt, Rotterdam, and multiple U.S. cities were hit. In a
mock summit, former prime ministers of European countries played
the role of heads of state. Questions of immediate response were posed:
what kind of vaccination approach to use? Which countries have
enough supplies of vaccine, and will they share them? Will quarantine
be necessary? After the exercise, participants concluded that, first,
there was insufficient awareness of the possibility and consequences
of a bioterrorist attack; and second, no organization or structure is
currently agile enough to respond to the challenges posed by such an
attack. Structures of coordination and communication of response
in real time must be put into place. The exercise produced a sense
of vulnerability to new threats among participants.5
The conclusions were similar to those of other such exercises:
governments are not adequately aware of or prepared for cata-
strophic events. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff
said of TOPOFF 3, “We expect failure because we are actually go-
ing to be seeking to push to failure” (DHS 2005). In producing
system failure, scenario-based simulations generate knowledge
of gaps in needed capability. These can then be the target of in-
tervention. In so doing, they forge new links—communicational,
informational—among various agencies: local and national govern-
ment, public health, law enforcement, intelligence. These exercises
are part of an effort to develop an integrated system for assigning
 Infrastructure and Event 261

priorities and allocating resources in preparation for emergency.

Thus the practice of linking possible future events to current vul-
nerabilities in vital systems is now widespread. Indeed, it is possible
to map a growing field of “preparedness expertise” that develops this
knowledge and makes recommendations for intervention. One might
look, for example, at the work of the port security expert Stephen
Flynn (2005), the public health expert Irwin Redlener (2006), or the
natural disaster specialist Lee Clarke (2005)—or at reports produced
by places like the RAND Center for Terrorism Risk Management
Policy, for instance, the recent Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic
Terrorist Attack. This report is based on a scenario in which ter-
rorists conceal a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb in a shipping container
and ship it to the Port of Long Beach, where the bomb explodes.
While the report describes the massive death and destruction such
a bomb might cause, it is mainly focused on the economic impact of
this disruption of the global shipping supply chain. The report does
not predict such an attack or calculate its likelihood. As the authors
write, “We used this scenario because analysts consider it feasible,
it is highly likely to have a catastrophic effect, and the target is both
a key part of the US economic infrastructure and a critical global
shipping center” (Meade and Molander 2006, xv).
We can make several points about this type of enactment. First, it
is not a prediction, forecast, or model of how the future will unfold
but rather an intervention in the present. Second, its purpose is not
to provoke public anxiety or militate toward an intensified war on
terror; rather, it is to generate expert knowledge about what the event
would entail: as the RAND report states, it enables policy makers
“to anticipate the types of decisions they might be called upon to
make, reflect in time of relative calm on their options, and plan well
in advance for contingencies” (Meade and Molander 2006, xviii).
And third, it does not apply only to terrorism; the technique is also
brought to bear to approach dangers such as avian flu, earthquakes
and hurricanes, and environmental catastrophe. For example, the
2006 “Strong Angel” scenario exercise in San Diego combined an
avian flu pandemic with a cyberattack, focusing on generating knowl-
edge about how to design information systems for use by military
and civilian organizations in humanitarian emergencies (Markoff
262 ANDREW LAKOFF AND STEPHEN J. COLLIER

2006). And as is well known, FEMA had contracted a private firm

to develop hurricane scenarios on the Gulf Coast prior to Hurricane
Katrina—though DHS cut the program’s budget so that the exercises
were never conducted.
This leads us to a final point: failures of response do not under-
mine the norm of preparedness but rather intensify it—as we could
see after Katrina, in political demands for better preparedness. This
is characteristic of a political technology: it defines and regulates
targets of intervention according to a normative rationality (see
Rabinow 2003). In this case, the imagined enactment of events of
a certain type—low probability, high consequence—makes it pos-
sible both to generate knowledge about vulnerabilities and develop
techniques for mitigating them.

Conclusion
Techniques for generating infrastructural knowledge that were ini-
tially assembled as part of civil defense are now applied to planning
for various types of disaster—hurricanes, floods, terrorist attacks,
epidemics—and not only by the U.S. government. In conclusion,
let us turn to the question of how attention to the ways that infra-
structure is understood and managed by experts can be related to
broader issues in the social theory of modernity.
Here it is useful to return to our earlier discussion of the work of
Ulrich Beck on catastrophic risks. Beck argues that today, the very
industrial and technical developments that were initially put in the
service of guaranteeing human welfare now generate new threats.
Our very dependence on critical infrastructures—systems of trans-
portation, communications, energy, and so on—has become a source
of vulnerability. For Beck, the danger emanating from technical
developments such as nuclear accidents and genetically modified
food shapes a more general perception that “uncontrollable risk is
now irredeemable and deeply engineered into all the processes that
sustain life in advanced societies” (Beck 2002, 39–56). Such dangers
“abolish old pillars of risk calculus,” outstripping our ability to calculate
their probability or to insure ourselves against them.
As Francois Ewald points out, the precautionary principle has
been an influential response to these novel forms of threat in Europe,
 Infrastructure and Event 263

especially those linked to the environment. In the context of pos-

sible catastrophe, Ewald notes, statistical calculation is no longer
relevant—one must take into account not what is probable or improb-
able but what is most feared: “I must, out of precaution, imagine the
worst possible” (Ewald 2002, 286). Thus a principle of precaution
in the face of an incalculable threat enjoins against risk taking—for
example, the implementation of new and uncertain technologies
such as genetically modified food. In this manner, it seeks to keep
the dangerous event from occurring.
In contrast, as we have described, a very different approach to un-
certain but potentially catastrophic threats has emerged and extended
its reach first in the United States and increasingly transnationally.
Like precaution, it is applicable to events whose regular occurrence
cannot be mapped through archival knowledge and whose probability
therefore cannot be calculated. In contrast to precaution, however,
this approach does not prescribe avoidance; rather, it enacts a vision
of the dystopian future to develop a set of operational criteria for
response. Preparedness does not seek to prevent the occurrence of
a disastrous event but rather assumes that the event will happen. In-
stead of seeking to constrain action in the face of uncertainty, it turns
potentially catastrophic threats into vulnerabilities to be mitigated.
The technology of preparedness, as exemplified in programs such
as critical infrastructure protection, thus brings a heterogeneous
set of things into political reason. It is through this technology that
experts and officials have come to see collective life as dependent on
the functioning of a series of interdependent, complex, and above
all highly vulnerable systems.

Notes

1 This use of the term political technology follows the work of Michel
Foucault, who showed that technical practices for managing life have
been central to politics since the late eighteenth century, with the advent
of biopolitics. Modern polities, he argued, are integrated not through
a community of shared values along the model of the Greek polis but
rather through a “political technology of individuals” (Foucault 1998).
264 ANDREW LAKOFF AND STEPHEN J. COLLIER

2 For critiques of the empirical validity of his claim that contemporary

technological risks outstrip private insurability, see Bougen (2003)
and Ericson and Doyle (2004).
3 For Kahn’s biography, see Ghamari-Tabrizi (2005).
4 For a summary, see Smith et al. (2005).
5 As a German official said, “For someone who has been around
in the security and defense fields in its traditional sense for many
years, this was quite a surprising and breathtaking exercise. . . . This
is something I think a very small minority of politicians in Europe
are aware of.” See http://www.atlantic-storm.org/.

References

Barry, Andrew. 1999. Political Machines: Governing a Technological

Society. London: Continuum.
Beck, Ulrich. 1999. World Risk Society. London: Wiley-Blackwell.
———. 2002. “The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited.”
Theory, Culture, and Society 19, no. 4: 39–56.
Bougen, Phillip D. 2003. “Catastrophe Risk.” Economy and Society 32,
no. 2: 253–74.
Bowker, Geoffrey, and Susan Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification
and Its Consequences. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Clarke, Lee. 2005. Worst-Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular
Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Collier, Stephen, and Andrew Lakoff. 2007. “Distributed Preparedness:
The Spatial Logic of Domestic Security in the United States.” Envi-
ronment and Planning D 25: 7–28.
Department of Homeland Security. 2003. The National Strategy for the
Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets. Wash-
ington, D.C.: Department of Homeland Security.
———. 2005. “Transcript of Press Conference with Secretary of Homeland
Security Michael Chertoff on the TOPOFF 3 Exercise.” http://www.
dhs.gov/xnews/releases/press_release_0650.shtm.
———. 2006. National Infrastructure Protection Program. Washington,
D.C.: Department of Homeland Security.
Dunn, Myriam. 2005. “The Socio-political Dimensions of Critical In-
formation Infrastructure Protection (CIIP).” International Journal
of Critical Infrastructures 1, nos. 2–3: 258–268.
Edwards, Paul N. 2003. “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time,
 Infrastructure and Event 265

and Social Organisation in the History of Sociotechnical Systems.”

In Modernity and Technology, ed. Thomas Misa, Philip Brey, and
Andrew Feenberg, 185–225. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Ericson, Richard V., and Aaron Doyle. 2004. “Catastrophe Risk, Insur-
ance, and Terrorism.” Economy and Society 33, no. 2: 135–73.
Ewald, Francois. 2002. “The Return of Descartes’s Malicious Demon: An
Outline of the Philosophy of Precaution.” In Embracing Risk: The
Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, ed. Tom Baker and
Jonathan Simon, 273–301. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Federal Civil Defense Administration. 1953. Civil Defense Urban Analysis.
Washington, D.C.: Federal Civil Defense Administration.
Flynn, Stephen E. 2005. America the Vulnerable: How Government Is
Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism. New York: HarperCollins.
Foucault, Michel. 2001. “The Political Technology of Individuals.” In
The Essential Foucault, vol. 3, ed. James Faubion, 403–417. New
York: New Press.
———. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de
France. New York: Palgrave.
Galison, Peter. 2001. “War against the Center.” Grey Room 4: 6–33.
Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon. 2005. The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The
Intuitive Arts of Thermonuclear War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Kahn, Herman. 1962. Thinking About the Unthinkable. New York: Ho-
rizon Press.
Lipton, Eric. 2005. “U.S. Report Lists Possibilities for Terrorist Attacks
and Likely Toll.” New York Times, March 16.
Markoff, John. 2006. “This Is Only a Drill: In California, Testing Tech-
nology in a Disaster Response.” New York Times, August 28.
Meade, Charles, and Roger C. Molander. 2006. Considering the Effects
of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack. Washington, D.C.: RAND Center
for Terrorism Risk Management Policy.
National Security Resources Board. 1950. United States Civil Defense.
Washington, D.C.: National Security Resources Board.
Ong, Aiwa, and Stephen J. Collier. 2005. Global Assemblages: Tech-
nology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. London:
Blackwell.
Rabinow, Paul. 2003. Anthropos Today: Forms of Modern Equipment.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Redlener, Irwin. 2006. Americans at Risk: Why We Are Not Prepared for
266 ANDREW LAKOFF AND STEPHEN J. COLLIER

Megadisasters and What We Can Do. New York: Random House.

Smith, Bradley T., Thomas V. Inglesby, Esther Brimmer, Luciana Borio,
Crystal Franco, Gigi Kwik Gronvall, Bradley Kramer, Beth Maldin,
Jennifer B. Nuzzo, Ari Schuler, Scott Stern, Donald A. Henderson,
Randall J. Larsen, Daniel S. Hamilton, and Tara O’Toole. 2005.
“Navigating the Storm: Report and Recommendations from the
Atlantic Storm Exercise.” Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense
Strategy, Practice, and Science 3, no. 3: 256–67.
U.S. Department of Defense. 1950. The Effects of Atomic Weapons. Los
Alamos, N.M.: U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Los Alamos
Scientific Laboratory.
Vale, Lawrence J. 1987. The Limits of Civil Defense in the U.S.A, Switzer-
land, Britain and the Soviet Union: The Evolution of Policies since
1945. New York: St. Martin’s.
 10 Faitiche-izing the People:
What Representative
Democracy Might Learn
from Science Studies
lisa disch

D emocratic political theory has unheralded champions

in science studies. A cadre of scholars has succeeded in calling
attention to a poignant paradox: modern democracy, which came to
be in and through the fragile but ingenious practice of representative
government, was rendered “powerless as soon as it was invented,
because of the counterinvention of Science” (Latour 2004, 71). The
idea is that the power of the laboratory was invented at the same
time as that of the Assembly, and on the basis of a shared fiction of
ontological difference. That fiction cleaves nature, as the domain of
“mute things,” from society, as the domain of “speaking humans,”
and divides the problem of representation in two (68).
This cleavage has four pernicious effects. It inaugurates (1) a
qualitative distinction between the laws of necessity and those of
ethics, (2) an epistemological difference and hierarchy between “the
truth of things and the will of humans” so that it seems easier to say
what entities are than what they want (Latour 2004, 148), and (3) a
disciplinary divide between Science, which is reputed to have the
power to specify what entities are, and politics, which is left grop-
ing for ways to say what they want. This difference between being
and wanting deals the final blow because it sets up a contest that
politics cannot win. This is its fourth pernicious effect: it pits the

267
268 LISA DISCH

laboratory, as the domain of “indisputable matters of fact,” against

the Assembly as that of “endless discussion” (223). The result is what
Bruno Latour has eloquently denounced as “the strange politics by
which facts have been made at once completely mute and so talkative
that, as the saying goes, ‘they speak for themselves’—thus providing
the great political advantage of shutting down human babble with
a voice from nowhere that renders political speech forever empty”
(Latour 1999, 140).
Political theorists have collaborated with this strange politics
insofar as we have taken it for granted that representation poses a
very different kind of problem in the Assembly than it does in the
laboratory. Because we accord the citizen-subject a monopoly on
speaking, we imagine political representation to be uniquely fraught
by the complexities and uncertainties of discussion, whereas Sci-
ence merely witnesses “mute things” morph into “speaking facts”
by the alchemical agency of the experiment (Latour 2004, 68). Our
conviction about this has produced in us an almost schizophrenic
ambivalence toward scientific expertise. We begin by putting an
overweening trust in nature to “adjudicate between claims and
facts” (Braun 2002, 223). Then we entrust Science with the power to
discover nature and so to settle disputes of policy and principle by
the “unforced force” of natural necessity. When the sciences reveal
that they cannot perform this “God trick” of nonpartisan vision,
we castigate them for passing off their own artifacts as real. Science
takes its place alongside all the other fetishes that we moderns have
smashed with the busy jackhammer of skepticism.
Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour attempt to rewrite this story
from its beginning in this bifurcation of the problem of representation
into knowing the “truth of things” and debating the “will of humans”
(Latour 2004, 148). They propose to view science and politics as
working in a single “assembly of beings capable of speaking” and to
define the “lab coats”—akin to politicians—as “the spokespersons of
the nonhumans” (64; cf. Stengers 2000, 87). Scientists and politicians
neither represent in the same way nor do the same kind of work.
But they both confront the problem posed by what Latour calls
the “ancient” political sense of parliamentary democracy where a
constituency that is an agency elects another agency to speak on its
 Faitiche-izing the People 269

behalf (Latour 2004, 41). As Stengers (2000, 61) puts it, “the same
question presents itself with regard to the person who claims to speak
for others as it does with regard to the theory that claims to represent
the facts: ‘How does one recognize the legitimate claimant?’”1
A legitimate claimant can emerge only from a “staging” or election
that is free and fair, from a system of representation that respects the
agency of both constituent and representative. The impetus behind
importing the paradigm of political representation into the labora-
tory is to counter the governmentalist fiction of facts that speak for
themselves and experts who transmit them. Stengers and Latour
together counter the fantasy of the impartial expert with a more
pragmatic picture of the scientist at work in the laboratory designing
an experimental apparatus to “stage” a phenomenon as a “reliable”
witness that authorizes the scientist to speak “in its name” (Stengers
2000, 84; 1997, 88, 139). Stengers (1997, 85) writes that for a scientist to
speak authoritatively, “it is actually a matter of constituting phenom-
ena as actors in the discussion, that is, not only of letting them speak,
but of letting them speak in a way that all other scientists recognize
as reliable.” It is in this respect that “the art of the experimenter is in
league with power: the invention of the power to confer on things the
power of speaking in their name” (165).
The beauty of this argument is that it does more than correct
the governmentalist fiction of Science. It prompts a rethinking of
political representation as well, powerfully countering what E. E.
Schattschneider ([1960] 1975, 131, 135) has criticized as the “simplistic”
notion of democracy as involving popular political participation
that is spontaneously generated “at the grass roots.” It is incumbent
on politicians, no less than scientists, to stage the forces for which
they claim to speak. Their authority depends on the capacity of the
political system to distinguish between measures of public opinion
and popular votes that are “reliable” and those that should be disre-
garded as “extorted testimony” (Stengers 1997, 141). The demos, like
the experimental phenomenon, is a “fact of art” (Stengers 2000, 84).2
Consequently, the art of the politician is “in league with power” no
less than that of the experimenter.
This is not the familiar power of the back room bargain or the
legislative horse trade. It is what Latour (2001, 315) elsewhere calls
270 LISA DISCH

“trials of force,” a public contest that puts a politician’s belief that she
speaks for a following to the test.3 In representative government as we
Westerners practice it, such trials rarely occur. Political representa-
tives are subject to the “retrospective” judgment of voters who can
vote them out of office if they are displeased with their performance
(Manin 1997, 179). As election is a punctual event, not an ongoing
process of consultation, Western democracies allow citizens only to
sanction legislators. They have no occasion to form and act on their
own political judgments. Were representative democracy designed
to stage “trials of force,” then it would be clear, as Latour puts it,
that “staging,” or “the multiplication of artifices to fabricate [politi-
cal] agents that can say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ ” is “at least as important a skill
as the construction of facts by researchers in laboratories” (Latour
2004, 144–45).
Staging, or mediation, is where Latour and Stengers propose to
connect science and politics, the laboratory and the Assembly. That
connection is by no means a fallback on animism. It is a provocation
to both fields that manages at once to extend the capacity for speech
to things while withdrawing that of voice from humans.
By making a distinction between “speech” and “voice,” I mean to
join Latour in foregrounding the work of mediation that is prereq-
uisite to speech.4 Hannah Arendt ([1963] 1984) has called attention
to this work in an oft-cited passage from On Revolution where she
emphasizes the importance of acknowledging citizenship as artificial.
She drives home this point by tracing the continuity of the modern
concept of legal personhood to the Latin word persona, which, in its
“original meaning . . . signified the mask ancient actors used to wear
in a play” (106). The function of the mask was twofold: to “replace
the actor’s own face and countenance” and to “make it possible for
the voice to sound through” (106). Just as the mask gives an actor a
role to play and a publicly audible voice, so, too, do legally prescribed
rights and duties enable a man to stand and speak before the law in
ways that must be taken into account.
There is a strong affinity between Arendt’s mask and Latour’s no-
tion of “speech impedimenta” (embarrass de parole), which he, too,
introduces to discredit the fiction of spontaneous expression. That
fiction, as dear to democracy as it is to phenomenology, grounds the
 Faitiche-izing the People 271

belief in an “authentic” general will or “people’s voice” as the ulti-

mate arbiter of competing political demands (Derrida 1973). Once
understood in the context of the critique of voice that underlines it,
it is clear that Latour’s insistence that both scientists and politicians
are spokespersons is not meant to personify things but to denatu-
ralize voice and call attention to the mediation that makes speech
possible.5 Underscoring this double move, Latour (2004, 68) writes,
“We do not claim that things speak ‘on their own,’ since no beings,
not even humans, speak on their own, but always through something
or someone else.”
This is what makes their argument so captivating: Latour and
Stengers unfold a conception of representation that takes its defini-
tion from the Assembly (spokespersonship) but its practice from
the laboratory (staging). The upshot for science studies is the claim
that scientists represent. That for political theory is that representa-
tive democracy has something to learn from experimental science.
Simply put: scientists actually do a better job of “constituting phe-
nomena as actors in [scientific] discussion” than mass democracies
do constituting citizens as participants in politics because, in Latour’s
(2004, 170) words, “we [moderns] actually know how to consult
nonhumans better than humans!” Latour explains this failure by the
fact that “politicians . . . imagine that one can speak of them in their
place and without ever truly consulting them—that is, without ever
finding the risky experimental apparatus that would allow them to
define their own problems themselves instead of simply answering
the question asked” (171). I suggest that the mythology of “voice”—
the belief in spontaneous expression and spontaneous participation
that Schattschneider so aptly criticized—has something to do with
this failure to “truly” consult.
Modern democracy, no less than science, is plagued by ambiva-
lence toward the practices of representation that make it possible.
It comes much more easily to hold political representation to the
(impossible) measure of mimesis than to acknowledge what Nadia
Urbinati (2006, 119) calls its “ideological” and “rhetorical” aspects.
Put in Stengers’s terms, Urbinati’s point is that the modern relation-
ship between representative and constituent is “staged.” This is by
contrast to the organic model of feudal times when a representative
272 LISA DISCH

was a delegate for the fixed social group to which he belonged. Ur-
binati counters that with the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth
century, “the representative is entirely constituted by and through
her political relationship with her constituency; her belonging to
the constituency is an idealized and artificial construction” (118;
italics added). For Urbinati, as for Stengers and Latour, to speak of
artificiality in this context is not to suggest that representatives are
unbound by any obligation to their constituencies but to insist that
we citizens ought not to be asking whether our representatives look
like us or act like us. We should be demanding a democratic system
that stages “risky” interrogations between politicians and publics,
Latour’s “trials of force.”
This is what it would mean to faitiche-ize the people. Recognizing
that there is no authentic “voice” of the demos, we citizens of West-
ern democracies should object when elected representatives speak
in the name of that fantasy. We should be discontent when voting
is the primary means of staging the popular will. Why should not
modern democracy, like modern science, rest its credibility on trials
of force? This would mean that the art of the politician, no less than
that of the experimenter, would consist in “designing devious plots
and careful staging that make an actant,” in this case a citizenry or
constituency, “participate in new and unexpected situations that will
actively define it” (Latour 1999, 123).

Electing Scientists as Spokespersons

Latour and Stengers propose to capture this idea of mutual con-
stitution with the term faitiche.6 This is not “fetish” (although it is
phonetically identical in French). That inescapably pejorative term
denotes a fantastic entity, one that its followers endow with a mas-
tery that no one can have but that they desperately desire someone
or something to possess. Confronted with a fetishist, the response
of the modern is to insist on a choice: “Did you make it, or is it a
true god?” (cf. Latour 1996, 16). Faitiche, by contrast, plays on the
“double etymology” of fait, the past participle of the French verb
faire (to make or do), and the French noun fait (fact) to refuse this
choice and embrace the paradox of what Latour and Stengers call
constructivism: that “facts [are] facts—meaning exact—because they
 Faitiche-izing the People 273

[are] fabricated” (Latour 2005, 90).7 The term faitiche, then, is a play
on the ambiguity of the word fait, which means “in the same breath,
that which someone has made and that which no one has made”:
“‘un fait est fait,’ as Gaston Bachelard put it” (Latour 1996, 38; 1999,
127).8 Admittedly, this does not look like much of a paradox at first. It
seems merely to echo the very familiar notion that “reality is socially
constructed,” which asserts two perfectly noncontradictory claims:
first, that there is no fact uncontaminated by cultural values; second,
that there exists no way of knowing or standpoint of knowledge that
is not implicated in social relations of power. Social constructivism
takes us straight back to the “fetish,” that instrument of domination
taken for a god, and the fetish, in turn, leads right into relativism:
there is no authority to quell the rivalry of warring gods.
Latour and Stengers distinguish their constructivism by the in-
sistence that it is possible to “talk truthfully about a state of affairs”
(Latour 1999, 114). Stengers (2000, 76) has stated adamantly that she
resolutely opposes the view that “no author of an abstract proposition
has the means to make nature a witness in order to carry the decision
concerning its truth.” Humans can speak on the authority of nature.
Human reason does have the “power to link up with the reason of
things,” although that linkage occurs neither by way of transcendent
universals nor by raw experience (77). Instead, it is Galileo, as the
founder of the experimental sciences, who demonstrated how that
link can be activated by giving us “something one believed to have
been lost: the power to make nature speak, that is the power of as-
sessing the difference between ‘its’ reasons and those of the fictions
so easily created about it” (81). Following Latour in imputing what
would typically be understood as the work of politicians to the sci-
ences, Stengers asserts that they “invent possibilities of representing,
of constituting a statement that nothing a priori distinguishes from a
fiction, as the legitimate representation of a phenomenon” (87).
Stengers manages at once to insist on the truthfulness of the ex-
perimental sciences and to refute realist ontology together with the
positivist conception of science that accompanies it. On her account,
the sciences do not research an autonomous “reality” by methods that
claim objectivity because they are fully independent of the processes
they “discover.”9 The sciences’ relationship to nature is mediated,
274 LISA DISCH

which is to say that it is a relationship in which each participant is

understood to “do something” (Latour 2005, 128; cf. Stengers 2000,
99). As Ryan Holifield (2007, 103) puts it, mediators are “actors which
transform as they translate.” This transformation, as Stengers (2000)
specifies it, involves a mutual constitution of authority. Beginning
from the postpositivist premise that the authority (or facticity) of
nature is “not a given,” she explains that whereas “scientists recognize
‘nature’ as their sole ‘authority,’ ” they know that to activate “the pos-
sibility for this ‘authority’ to create authority . . . it is up to them to
constitute nature as an authority” (93).
Her favorite example is Galileo’s inclined plane. It “represents
an experimental apparatus, in the modern sense of the term, an
apparatus of which Galileo is the author, in the strong sense of the
term, because it is . . . an artificial, premeditated setup that produces
‘facts of art’—artifacts in the positive sense. And the singularity of
this apparatus . . . is that it allows its author to withdraw, to let the
motion testify in his place” (Stengers 2000, 84). Stengers describes
a passage from author of apparatus to thing back to author of ap-
paratus. If the experiment is not sound, it will not stage an effect but
merely produce or cause it. The phenomenon will not be reliable and
capable of authorizing its spokesperson but rather will be “dictated
by the experimental conditions” (51). If the experiment succeeds, it
produces two autonomous entities.
The first of these is the phenomenon that can be counted on as
a force that exists not simply in the context of this particular experi-
mental setting but in the world. As she puts it, a successful experi-
ment transforms “a phenomena into an ‘experimental fact,’ a reliable
witness, that can discern among those who interpret it,” ultimately
“authorizing and supporting the thesis of the one who speaks in its
name” (Stengers 2003, 56; 1997, 139). This “one who speaks in its
name” is the second autonomous entity: the experimenter whom the
motion authorizes to insist that other researchers have no alternative
but to take it into account.10 Hearkening back to the political idiom,
we can say that a successful experiment endows a phenomenon
with the capacity to elect a spokesperson to represent it in the most
basic sense: to assert that it matters. For Stengers, then, it seems that
representing means not speaking for an interest but speaking of a
 Faitiche-izing the People 275

phenomenon as an interest, a proposition that must be taken into

consideration by scholars in a field of study even at the risk that it
ruins “years of work” (Stengers 2000, 95; 1997, 84).
This double passage—from inarticulate phenomenon to reli-
able witness and from experimenter to legitimate spokesperson—is
what Latour wants to mark with the term faitiche.11 He coins it to
speak about the distinctive agency of mediation, an agency that is
not localized in any particular agent but that materializes when an
activity that engages actors in an exchange of properties produces
something that “overtakes” them (Latour 1996, 46).12 The orthography
of the term, amalgamating “fact” (fait) and “fetish” (fétiche), calls at-
tention to what they share: a common subterfuge that “conceals the
intense work of construction that permits the truth” of each (44).
Whereas “the word ‘fact’ seems to throw us back on external reality,
the word ‘fetish’ to the crazy beliefs of the subject,” Latour joins the
two to debunk this symmetrical pretense (44). He does not reduce
the one to the other but, on the contrary, underscores the truth of
their shared “etymology”: both facts and beliefs are made (fait) or
worked up in practice. It is this making, working up, and working
with that generates “the robust certitude” that makes it possible to
act without thinking twice—which is to say, without agonizing over
the lack of an independent, “transcendent” ground (44).
Although it may sound like a noun, Latour goes out of his way
to define faitiche as a kind of movement or exchange—a passage or
passing—rather than as a kind of thing.13 He says it can be understood
as “that which gives the autonomy that we don’t have to beings that
do not have it either but who, from the fact [of this gift], give it to
us” (Latour 1996, 67).14 Notice that autonomy has been significantly
redefined from its typical sense as a quality, attribute, or property
that we locate in an individual whom we credit with having achieved
independence as a self-willing, self-legislating agent. As Latour (1999,
129) describes it, autonomy is not a localized capacity but a distrib-
uted agency that comes from the exchange of properties among an
author, an apparatus, and a phenomenon.15 Although Stengers has
done much to illuminate this exchange, her focus on staging privi-
leges the movement from apparatus to thing back to the author of
the apparatus. As I will show, Latour elaborates Stengers’s account
276 LISA DISCH

by insisting that the laboratory trial is not sufficient to establish the

scientist as a spokesperson. That passage is further mediated by
writing the text of the laboratory trials and then by subjecting those
trials, by the mediation of the text, to peer review. Before elaborat-
ing this notion of distributed agency, I want to ask how the concept
faitiche, with its conceptualization of representation as mutual con-
stitution and empowerment, would play among political scientists
and political theorists.

The Problem of Responsiveness

Where representation is concerned, the touchstone work in the field
continues to be Hanna Pitkin’s ([1967] 1972) Concept of Representa-
tion.16 There is an affinity to the work of Latour and Stengers in Pitkin’s
insistence that agency in representation is reciprocal. Self-evident as
it may seem, this claim allowed Pitkin to make a radical interven-
tion into the “mandate vs. independence” controversy (the question
whether a political representative should be more like a delegate or
more like a trustee). Pitkin recognized the need for independence on
the part of the representative but recognized at the same time that
the represented must be “conceived as capable of acting and judging
for himself ” (162). This is interesting for its upshot: it means that the
test of good political representation cannot be its correspondence to
something beyond politics, whether that be popular sentiment, will,
or opinion (the delegate model), or a public good that transcends
what any people may believe or say that it wants (the model of the
trustee). Representing is an activity without a model, without cer-
tainty, and—in Pitkin’s words—without “guarantee” (163).
Pitkin’s kinship with science studies is most evident in her engage-
ment with Edmund Burke’s “Speech to the Electors of Bristol,” which
is a classic defense of political representation as trusteeship. Pitkin
([1967] 1972) goes after Burke not for his elitism but for his insistence
that government does not represent persons but the public interest,
conceived as an “unattached” abstraction. This, she astutely observes,
reduces political representation to a set of epistemological problems:
what are the conditions for discovering the “right answers to political
problems”; how can these conditions be institutionalized politically;
how to ensure a twofold correspondence between the public interest
 Faitiche-izing the People 277

and the acts of representatives, on one hand, and the opinions of

citizens, on the other (170)? Once posed in such terms, the problem
of representation can be solved by precisely the sort of intervention
that Latour seeks to rule out for scientists—an appeal to expertise. As
Pitkin notes, Burke “sees interest very much as we today see scientific
fact: it is completely independent of wishes or opinion, of whether
we like it or not; it just is so” (180). Pitkin famously countered that
“representation is not needed where we expect scientifically true
answers, where no value commitments, no decisions, no judgment
are involved. . . . We need representation precisely where we are not
content to leave matters to the expert” (212). Political interests are not
transcendent and “unattached”; they are the “interests of someone
who has a right to help define them” (189). Even so, this does not
give that “someone” the right to bind or instruct her representatives.
Felling Burke’s democratic opponents in their turn, Pitkin asserts
with brisk efficiency: the “fact is that . . . in political representation,
the represented have no will on most issues” (163).
So political representation is not trusteeship because there are
no right answers to questions of political interest (Pitkin [1967]
1972, 189). But representatives cannot be delegates because on “most
issues” citizens themselves have no answer to the question what
their interests are. Would Pitkin have us give up on representative
democracy altogether?
Not at all. And this is what makes her work so interesting. She
maintains that even given the lack of appeal to a transcendent public
good or immanent popular will, it is not unreasonable to demand
that a “representative system . . . look after the public interest and be
responsive to public opinion, except insofar as nonresponsiveness
can be justified in terms of the public interest” (Pitkin [1967] 1972,
224). The trick is to understand that the public interest is not the
“input” that creates a policy “output.” Instead, it is defined in and
through the process of political representation itself. Pitkin put it
this way: “we assume that if the representative acts in the interest of
his constituents, they will want what is in their interest and conse-
quently will approve what the representative has done” (163; italics
added). This “anticipatory” (Mansbridge 2003, 518) movement not
only bears a striking affinity to faitiche but poses a similar problem.
278 LISA DISCH

If democratic self-rule is to have any meaning at all, it must be pos-

sible to acknowledge that citizen preferences and interests are made
without having to concede that they are entirely made up.
Pitkin ([1967] 1972) solves this problem by attaching a condition
to “responsiveness.” She stipulates that in a democratic regime, “the
representative must be responsive to [the represented] rather than
the other way around” (140). Her concern is to ensure that “respon-
siveness” can only go one way: “the represented must be somehow
logically prior” (140). Although Pitkin’s conception of representation
is not simply contradictory, she is at odds with herself.
She wants to remain committed to the idea of representation as
an activity, in other words, to the idea that it cannot be boiled down
to an epistemological question of accuracy or adequacy to something
that is literally prior to its representation. To assign literal priority to
the represented would reduce the representative to a mere delegate.
As she recognizes, there is something generative about representing:
“the national unity that gives localities an interest in the welfare of the
whole is not merely presupposed by representation; it is also continually
re-created by the representatives’ activities” (Pitkin [1967] 1972, 218,
italics added). Yet having conceded this, she is all the more anxious
to ensure that representatives do not shape the world according to
their own wills. Hence the uncharacteristically evasive and imprecise
wording of the phrase “somehow logically prior” and the ambiguous
ontological status to which the italicized phrases relegate “national
unity” in the previously quoted sentence. Representatives cannot
simply take national unity for granted (it is “not merely presupposed”),
but they do not make it up out of whole cloth (it is “re-created” by
their activities). She falls back on the direction of responsiveness—
the “representative must be responsive to him rather than the other
way around”—because it is the only way she can think of to ensure
that representation does not cross what she calls the “line between
leadership and manipulation” (233).
At this talk of line drawing, our champions in science studies may
well be feeling nervous—and with good reason. Even though, to her
credit, Pitkin ([1967] 1972) grants that this “line” is a “tenuous one,
and may be difficult to draw,” she nonetheless insists—as if italicizing
could make it so—that there “undoubtedly is a difference, and this
 Faitiche-izing the People 279

difference makes leadership compatible with representation while

manipulation is not” (233). What makes her so sure? She derives her
certainty from the very “basic meaning” and “correct definition”
of the term representation, which Pitkin takes to follow from what
she calls the “etymological origins” of the word: “re-presentation, a
making present again” (8). For Pitkin and the many political scien-
tists who have made her work the definitive source on this matter,
it is as if we can see from the prefix—the re- in representation—that
political representation comes after the fact, hearkening back to and
“reduplicating” something that has come before (Derrida 1973, 57).
To suggest that it could be otherwise, Pitkin ([1967] 1972) memorably
asserts, is to court the “fascist theory of representation” whereby a
leader “aligns” his followers to himself on the basis of “emotional
loyalties and identification” that “need have little or nothing to do
with accurate reflection of the popular will” (140, 108, 106). Notice
what this cold war ideology has smuggled in: a dual-world ontology
that frames the problem of political representation in terms of the
(naively realist) laboratory—as a matter of adequacy to an empirical
referent. Such an ontology is hostile to faitiche.
In a recent work that includes a short commentary on Pitkin’s
classic, Ernesto Laclau has proposed an approach to conceiving of
political representation that our champions in science studies might
find more congenial. For Laclau, as for Pitkin, political representa-
tion is an activity without “guarantee.” This means to him that the
activity of representing links political demands that are irreducible
to a common concept or material condition. This irreducibility
means that “nothing in those demands, individually considered, an-
nounces a ‘manifest destiny’ by which they should tend to coalesce
into any kind of unity” (Laclau 2005, 162). Consequently, “they
do not tend spontaneously” to come together but must be brought
together by “adding something” to the represented, an “addition
[that], in turn, is reflected in the identity of those represented”
(108, 158; italics added). Because Laclau agrees with Pitkin that
representation cannot simply presuppose the “unities” for which
they stand; he must disagree with her that responsiveness can only
go one way. He counters that there is an “essential impurity in the
process of representation” because the process of representation is
280 LISA DISCH

necessarily “two-way”: it is “a movement from represented to repre-

sentative, and a correlative one from representative to represented”
(Laclau 1999, 98; 2005, 158).
By his emphasis on movement, Laclau comes much closer to
embracing faitiche. Yet his account of movement is exclusively discur-
sive and abstract. He theorizes this “two-way” process as “naming,”
proposing that heterogeneous demands are brought together into a
relatively unified collective agency by virtue of the “social productivity
of a name” (Laclau 2005, 107, 108). A name is faitiche-like in that it
is not simply arbitrary (it must succeed as a hail or, in other words,
be taken up if it is to have any purchase politically), but neither is it
organic. It does not correspond to a common essence or need that
the various parties to an alliance actually share despite their appar-
ent heterogeneity. By contrast to Pitkin, Laclau holds nothing to be
prior to this act of representation—neither literally nor “somehow
logically.” On the contrary, he contends that “names retrospectively
constitute the unity of the object” (Laclau 2005, 163). Names are
subject to trials of force. As Oliver Marchart (2005, 9) has put it, they
bring agencies into being by a “hegemonic intervention.”
Has Laclau not just proven Pitkin’s point (and illuminated the
danger of faitiche)? Has he not demonstrated that breaking the con-
dition of unidirectionality courts fascism? To those who hold what
John Mowitt (2002, 51) calls a “romantic” conflation of agency with
the “agent” (the idea of a deliberative consciousness “fundamentally
grounded in a will that can assert itself against whatever contextual
forces might be said otherwise to constrain it”), the answer would
have to be yes. Acknowledging the “impurity” of representation
poses the problem that the agency of the represented—“except at
the level of party militancy, with all that it entails: science, organic
intellectuals, discipline, etc—is all but foreclosed” (49). What is
produced by naming “is wholly a subject (decidedly not an agent)”
and so “harbors the ultimate political danger” to democratic politics
(51; italics added). But what if one does not hold to such a “romantic”
ideal? Mowitt’s distinction between agency and agent helps me to
formulate what I believe Pitkin sought but could not say, and what
Laclau put words to but whose practice he did not theorize. This is
what Latour and Stengers explore through the concept of faitiche
 Faitiche-izing the People 281

and in the practice of the laboratory: how to talk about agency that
is not seated in a subject but rather distributed throughout a system
of representation or a field of action.

Writing Agency
Latour’s account of distributed agency puts three modes of repre-
sentation in play: political, symbolic, and juridical. He contends that
before a scientist can represent (or speak for) the phenomenon he
has staged, she must first represent (“narrativize”) the experimental
situation and then advocate for and defend the experiment to her
peers.17 Latour emphasizes that in any experiment, two different
kinds of questions are at stake. There is the “ontological” question
whether the experiment has “conveyed” anything new “to modify
what [a scientist’s] colleagues say about him and about the abilities of
living organisms that make up the world” (Latour 1999, 123).18 There
is also the question of the “epistemological” status of the statements
to which it gives rise: is the entity a “reliable witness” to, and the
scientist a legitimate “spokesperson” for, a phenomenon, or was it
just “an amusing story” (123)?
To keep all these aspects in play, Latour (1999, 123) defines an
experiment as a “movement” of three distinct trials. Not all these
trials take place in a laboratory. Moreover, as they involve both “lit-
erary” and “nonverbal, nonlinguistic” but emphatically “artificial”
components, there is more to this than what a positivist would count
as experimentation (123–24). Latour calls the first trial “a story” of
transformation that is “similar to any trial in fairy tales or myths”
(123). The second is “a situation” composed of the apparatuses the
scientist uses to design “devious plots” to isolate the properties of
the entity and stage it to “define” itself by modifying, transforming,
perturbing, or creating other beings (123). The measure of a successful
experiment turns on the extent to which the story and situation can
be distinguished. Can the first, which possesses avowedly “literary
aspects,” be shown not to have contaminated the second, which should
pertain exclusively “to nonverbal, nonlinguistic components” (123)?
This question constitutes the third trial, the trial of peers, in which
the scientist must “convince the Academicians that [the] story is not
a story,” in other words, not just a story, that the “competence” of the
282 LISA DISCH

new entity “is its competence, in no way dependent on his cleverness

in inventing a trial that allows it to reveal itself ” (123). If the experi-
ment “withstands the Academy’s scrutiny, then the text itself will be
in the end authorized by the [entity], the real behavior of which can
then be said to underwrite the entire text” (132). The situation (the
experimental trials) detailed by the scientist will be taken to warrant
the story he has told about the phenomena.
Latour (1999) sums this up in a formulation that might well
perturb both a constructivist and a realist: “an experiment is a text
about a nontextual situation, later tested by others to decide whether
or not it is simply a text. If the final trial is successful, then it is not
just a text, there is indeed a real situation behind it, and both the
actor and its authors are endowed with a new competence” (124). An
experiment is a “text” (here the realist shudders) about a “nontex-
tual situation” (now the constructivist will twitch) tested to decide
whether it is “simply” a text or whether it has “a real situation behind
it” (sigh). Which is it? Ontological dualism? Radical constructivism?
I think neither.
Put differently, but in ways that Latour’s own terminology here
justifies, a successful experiment conveys a new fact that has the status
of an indexical sign. An indexical sign—the movement of the needle
on a barometer, for example, or the mercury in a thermometer—can
be said to carry the “force of the real” in the sense that its meaning
cannot be determined exclusively in relation to other signs.19 It is,
rather, the effect of an extralinguistic force that requires some kind
of artifice or staging to manifest itself. Whereas the meaning of a
Saussurean sign is entirely conventional, which is to say entirely
internal to a linguistic system, in the case of the indexical sign, a
device or artifice not only stages the action of something outside
that system but typically also transposes it into a linguistic system.
In the case of the thermometer, mercury indexes temperature and
enables it to be spoken about in terms of degrees. What must be
underscored is that the apparatus that are so crucial to staging are
at once “nonverbal, nonlinguistic” and signifying. In other words,
the devices whereby facts and indexical signs come to be are not just
physical apparatus like Galileo’s inclined plane; they are also (and
often at the same time) signifying systems. And then there is one
 Faitiche-izing the People 283

further step: narrativizing what went on. This suggests, as I contend

that Latour’s own reading of Pasteur’s “Mémoire sur la fermentation
appelée lactique” shows, that the devices whereby facts come to be
are experimental, rhetorical, and literary all at once.
Latour reads to Pasteur’s “Memo” not as the canonical text that
historians of science take it to be but as an autoethnography of the
laboratory. What makes it so useful to him is that it dramatizes the
distribution of agency that Latour attempts to capture with the term
faitiche. Latour contends that Pasteur establishes the “experiment as
an event” in which “the actor and its authors have been endowed with
a new competence: Pasteur has proved that the ferment is a living
thing; the ferment is able to trigger a specific fermentation different
from that of brewer’s yeast” (Latour 1999, 124). Pasteur has “given”
an autonomy to the ferment that he comes to possess himself only
by virtue of being authorized by the ferment whose movement he
staged. In effect, Pasteur’s “Memo” sums up “the mystery of the two
opposed meanings of the little word ‘fact’” (115, 127, 129). That is not
to say that it establishes the ferment as “at once fabricated and real,”
an assertion that is at once utterly banal and absolutely without drama
because it could be said of any industrially or hand-crafted object
(such as a pencil or a chair). Instead, it dramatizes that by virtue of
having been “artificially made up” by Pasteur in his laboratory, the
lactic acid ferment gains “a complete autonomy from any sort of
production, construction, or fabrication” (127). This autonomy is the
“miracle” to be explained, how it is that the “obvious immanence”
of a laboratory-made fact does not “run counter to its validity and
truth” but are the source of “its downright transcendence” (129).
There is a sense in which Pasteur’s problem and that which I
derived from Laclau are the same. From an amorphous catalog of
heterogeneous effects, Pasteur moves to a name: “lactic acid ferment.”
A positivist might insist that this entity was there all along, that Pas-
teur has merely provided a new way of looking at fermentation and
attached a new label to it. Latour (1999) would counter that, to the
contrary, Pasteur has ruled out the old way of speaking about fermen-
tation (as decay) and constrains all those who come after him to accept
that the ferment is not an inert “chemical mechanism” but a vital
“entity in its own right” (116). In Ryan Holifield’s (2007) terms, Pasteur
284 LISA DISCH

has not simply offered a “new interpretation” of fermentation; he has

“materially reassembled” the ferment. This goes beyond “naming”
to a material, practical assemblage of forces that Stengers would call
“reliable.” Speaking politically, we would say that such a force can be
“called” by name and can be trusted to say yes or no on its own terms.
If a plausible account of such a miracle is to be had, it is not to
be found by reading philosophy but by “div[ing] even deeper into
some empirical sites to see” what scientists actually do to “get out
of the difficulty” (Latour 1999, 127). This is what Pasteur’s “Memo”
allows Latour to do. Read as an autoethnography, it “beautifully il-
lustrates” what Latour calls the “very simple setup” that lets Pasteur
move between a fact as “experimentally made-up” and a fact as “not
manmade” (125). Latour observes that Pasteur does this without
giving it a second thought, putting forward in a single paragraph
what must be taken as “entirely unrelated epistemologies” (129). Pas-
teur juxtaposes a “confession of . . . prejudice”—that “facts need a
theory if they are to be made visible, and this theory is rooted in the
previous history of the research program”—against an assertion of
independent, context-transcending validity: that the “results” of his
research can be judged “impartially” to be true (129). Latour finds in
the “Memo” the answer to the question, how does Pasteur cross the
“gap between [these] two opposing sentences” (128)?
Latour (1999) emphasizes that Pasteur neither “eras[es] the traces
of his own work as he goes along” nor takes his own vigorous activities
(“extracting, treating, filtering, dissolving, adding, sprinkling, raising
the temperature, introducing carbonic acid, fitting tubes, and so on”)
to diminish the autonomous capacities of the yeast (132, 131). With
Pasteur first narrating himself in action and then narrating the action
of the ferment as if the two supported rather than competed against
one another, Latour asserts that the “experiment creates two planes:
one in which the narrator is active, and a second in which the action is
delegated to another character, a nonhuman one” (129). It then “shifts
out action from one frame of reference to another” so that agency is
distributed across both (129).20 It may be tempting to pose to Pasteur
the question by which fetishes are smashed: “Did you make it or is
it real?” But he will refuse this choice. Or Latour will refuse it on his
behalf: “Pasteur acts so that the yeast acts alone” (129).
 Faitiche-izing the People 285

Latour (1999) seems to suggest that if Pasteur himself has no

trouble moving back and forth between foregrounding his own ac-
tivity and foregrounding that of the yeast, between offering a realist
account of his actions and a constructivist one, then neither should
a philosopher of science.21 But there is a doubling of Pasteur that
Latour loses sight of. There is Pasteur the scientist who works with
the devices we would expect to find in a laboratory—“he sprinkles,
boils, filters, and sees”—and there is Pasteur the “narrator” whose
active employment of literary and rhetorical devices Latour recog-
nizes but never enumerates. On the contrary, in his analysis of the
crucial passage in which Pasteur describes the “main experiment,”
Latour occludes those devices.
Latour’s (1999) reading of this paragraph emphasizes, in keeping
with the faitiche concept, how Pasteur spotlights his own activities,
convinced that this will not compromise “the autonomy of the entity
‘made up’ inside the laboratory walls” (127). Nowhere is this more
evident than “at the very moment where the entity is at its weakest
ontological status” and “the experimental chemist . . . in full activity”
(131). Latour quotes Pasteur, italicizing the details and pronouns that
Pasteur uses to mark his actions: “I extract the soluble part from the
brewer’s yeast, by treating the yeast for some time. . . . The liquid . . .
is carefully filtered . . . one raises the temperature. . . . It is also good
to introduce a current of carbonic acid” (131). Latour sums up this
account of the “experimental chemist” at work in the lab, “extracting,
treating, filtering, dissolving, adding, sprinkling, raising the tem-
perature, introducing carbonic acid, fitting tubes, and so on” (131).
The paragraph ends with a “shifting out,” a change of time, and a
crucial move from I to we that changes the frame of reference from
the activities of Pasteur to those of the ferment: “On the very next
day a lively and regular fermentation is manifest. . . . In a word, we
have before our eyes a clearly characterized lactic fermentation” (131;
quoting Pasteur). This is Latour’s comment: “the director withdraws
from the scene, and the reader, merging her eyes with those of the
stage manager, sees a fermentation that takes form at center stage
independently of any work or construction” (131–32).
Really? Is there no “work or construction” in the shift from I to
we? Does “the reader” merge “her eyes,” or does the narrator change
286 LISA DISCH

the subject? Is there no artifice in the transitional device “on the very
next day”? Is there no rhetorical art to “withdrawal”? Did Pasteur
not attempt to absent himself earlier with his shifts from speaking
in the first person as “I,” to the third person “one,” and finally to the
abstract impersonal pronouncement “it is also good”? Certainly
there is construction involved in the very stinting of detail, as Pas-
teur offers “stylized accounts” of experiments that are not at stake
but reintroduces “human agency” with a “recipe-like description” of
the procedure for lactic acid fermentation on which he relies as the
“stabilized” procedure from which his living yeast “will be made to
appear” (Latour 1999, 131).22
What is striking about Latour’s rendering of this section of Pas-
teur’s “Memo” is that although he flags Pasteur’s rhetorical devices
at every turn, the only activities Latour describes him engaged in
are those associated with experimental chemistry. Latour recognizes
Pasteur as author. He takes note of Pasteur’s use of narrative devices
to lend depth to the text, to create within it an effect of crosscutting
from one site of action to another and from one day to the next.
He emphasizes that language does work in the “Memo” both by
employing the concept of “shifting out” and by using the term ex-
perimental scenography, which he coins to foreground the effect of
the shifts (Latour 1999, 129). Yet from the lists of activities in which
he describes Pasteur as engaged, the author–narrator disappears.
The pertinent agencies are that of the scientist as experimenter and
that of the ferment as living entity. The scientist as narrator, with
his literary devices, leaves traces everywhere, but Latour does not
mark them as activities.
Latour (1999, 127) insists that it is in the “empirical site” of the labo-
ratory that the mystery of faitiche, the handoff between realism and
constructivism, the passage between facts that are contingent on theo-
ries and facts that arbitrate among them, can be solved. His account
suggests otherwise. Pasteur smoothes this passage not just by what he
does but by the way he composes it into a story. He uses “literary tech-
nology” to compel the assent of a “virtual” witness (Shapin 1984, 491).
Shapin (1984, 483) has proposed “virtual witnessing” to account
for how experimental scientists “produced the conditions” for mo-
bilizing universal assent to “matters of fact” with the advent of the
 Faitiche-izing the People 287

“probabilistic conception of knowledge” in the mid-seventeenth cen-

tury. If knowledge were probable, not certain, it could not command
assent like a geometric proof. Henceforward, it would be validated
by being witnessed by a multiplicity of spectators. Shapin empha-
sizes that “literary technology,” the use of expository conventions to
produce “in a reader’s mind . . . such an image of an experimental
scene as obviates the necessity for either its direct witness or its
replication,” became crucial to the constitution of virtual witnesses
(491). Literary technologies recruited publics who would have oc-
casion neither to see an experiment performed nor to replicate it in
a laboratory. Such technologies include the use of illustrations and
a prose style designed to imitate mimetic representation. Complex
sentences packed with circumstantial detail “were to be taken as
undistorted mirrors of complex experimental performances” (494).
The goal of such an account was not just to produce the effect of a
text that mirrors the experiment but also to secure the more crucial
illusion of the experimental phenomenon itself as “the very mirror
of nature” (507).
Seventeenth-century rhetorical performances were opposed to
faitiche, being designed to create the “illusion that matters of fact are
not man-made” (Shapin 1984, 510).23 As Latour reads the “Memo,”
Pasteur went out of his way to resist these seventeenth-century con-
ventions. Why does Latour not more explicitly thematize the literary
technologies he employed to do so?
To show why this question is significant, let me rehearse once more
the distinction Latour (1999) proposes to characterize the measure of
a successful experiment. He contends that the scientist must convince
the Academy that the avowedly “literary” transformation “story” of
the experiment did not contaminate the “nonverbal, nonlinguistic”
components of its “situation” (123, 124). In the problematic paragraph
I quoted earlier as perturbing both the constructivist and the realist,
Latour presents this distinction between “story” and “situation” as if
it were given. Perhaps it is grounded on the representational divide
that Latour creates in separating the “literary” from the “nonlin-
guistic.” I have already noted, in suggesting that an experimental
phenomenon be conceived as an indexical sign, that such a separa-
tion is untenable. An experimental apparatus simultaneously stages
288 LISA DISCH

an action (i.e., displays a phenomenon that exists independently of

the apparatus) and transposes it into a system of signification (even
one as rudimentary as a thermometer). In light of this simultane-
ity, the difference that Latour asserts between the terms “story” and
“situation” takes on a different cast. Far from marking the distinction
between the “literary” and “nonlinguistic” elements of the experiment,
it is itself an effect of Pasteur’s narrativization of the experiment as
a story that “tells itself,” a staging that unfolds before the eyes of a
public that Pasteur’s literary technology recruits as a virtual witness
(Chambers 1984, 32).24
Latour claims that the “mystery” of faitiche can be answered by
the distribution of agency across the two planes that the “experiment
creates.” More precisely, it is Pasteur’s “literary technology” that creates
these planes. By stinting detail, changing the subject, and occupying
different positions of enunciation, Pasteur manages alternately to
foreground his own activity and that of the ferment. Pasteur’s author-
ity as spokesperson depends not only on the agency of the ferment,
as mediated by the passage of the experiment that he has made, but
also on the representation of the experiment, whose passage into
narrative he has also made. Although Latour certainly does not deny
the rhetorical and literary aspects of experimental science, he does
not explicitly mark them as activities in which Pasteur is engaged.
Perhaps to do so would be to compromise the distinction between
story and situation—a distinction to which he is as committed as
Pitkin is to her distinction between leadership and manipulation.
Perhaps Latour has something to teach Pitkin that he has not fully
accepted himself: whether science or politics is at issue, that there
is no stripping representing of its literary devices.25

Faitiche-izing the People

Is representation faitiche-ization? The sound of the word suggests
a purely symbolic politics whereby a charismatic leader puts re-
sponsiveness in reverse, remaking a people in his own image. Yet if
we follow Latour’s argument about mediation, it suggests that the
trouble with fascism does not have as much to do with the direc-
tion of responsiveness as Pitkin imagines. It has rather to do with
the fantasy of an unmediated relationship between represented and
 Faitiche-izing the People 289

representative that fascist regimes render plausible by orchestrating

consensus in a variety of settings. To give just a couple of examples,
there is the abolition of the juridical apparatus that institutionalizes
dissent (such civil liberties as freedom of speech, press, and assembly
plus a robust legal conception of privacy), and its replacement with
a surveillance apparatus that knows no bounds. Politically, there is
the dismantling of a partisan apparatus that produces legitimacy by
fostering competition for power (pluralism of political parties and
interest groups, regular contested elections) and its replacement by
public shows of unanimity: mass rallies where a people shouts and
moves in unison when cued by its leaders.
Responsiveness can go two ways so long as it is mediated in the
specific sense that Latour (2005) gives to that term. Mediation denotes
a passage that sets up a risky “concatenation” of actors, each one of
which possesses the capacity to make the others “do other things than
was expected” (59). Latour’s notion of mediation has the potential to
make a powerful intervention into contemporary efforts to reform
representative democracy. These efforts, most notably in France,
which recently enacted a law requiring gender parity on party lists,
have tended to focus on what a legislature should look like to be truly
representative of its constituency. The European Union has seen a
resurgence of support for descriptive representation, the idea that
social groups (whose composition is taken as given) should be served
by representatives who resemble them. Such demands rest implicitly
on an epistemological conception of representation as involving
accurate correspondence to a referent. The work of Stengers and
Latour lends itself to a dynamic conception of representation and a
contestatory understanding of democracy. They would not be content
with a legislature that matches the demography of its constituencies,
nor with the simple fact of congruence between a legislator’s votes
and the policy preferences of his district.26 Representative democracy
would faitiche-ize the people in the sense of distributing agency on
both sides of the legislator–constituent relationship. The U.S. po-
litical system is so far from such an arrangement that the required
changes are as obvious as they are unlikely. To begin with, consider
uprooting the electoral protections that secure the two-party system
against risk and reforming procedures of legislative districting that
290 LISA DISCH

divvy up safe seats among the two major parties. It would certainly
also be important to overhaul the campaign finance and election
system, to trust-bust the corporate media, and to tighten restrictions
on campaign advertising (or to outlaw it altogether).27 It should be
as possible for actants in politics as it is for those in science to have
a dialogic relationship with those who claim to represent them, one
where legitimacy is based on openness to risk rather than on its
foreclosure.

Notes

1 Whereas Stengers affirms the notion of scientist as representative,

she asserts a clear distinction between politics and scientific activity.
She contends that science, “as opposed to other activities that bring
people together,” has “the means of coming to relative agreement”
by virtue of the fact that the influence of a scientist depends on his
acting as a representative for a “third party,” which is the experi-
mental phenomenon (Stengers 1997, 88).
2 This is not to say that they are made up but simply that they are made.
Stengers (2000, 99) writes, “All experimental facts are ‘artifacts,’ but
because of this they give meaning to the tests whose vocation it is to
assess the difference between artifacts—tests that disqualify artifacts
that are said to be purely relative to the protocol that created them,
and accept artifacts that are said to be ‘purified’ or ‘staged’ by this
protocol,” and are durable enough to “be put to the test by other
questions.”
3 My translation. Latour’s (2001, 315) French is “épreuves de force.”
The English translation has “trials of strength,” which, though not
an incorrect way to translate force, muddies the distinction that La-
tour (1988, 210) attempts to create between force, which depends on
allies, and potency, which is an illusory property of an individual.
4 This distinction is only implicit in his work. Stengers sometimes
gestures toward it by putting “saying” in scare quotes but does not
explain why she does so (e.g., Stengers 2000, 10).
5 Schaffer (1991, 182) oversimplifies in accusing Latour of “hylozoism,
an attribution of purpose, will and life to inanimate matter, and of
human interests to the nonhuman.”
 Faitiche-izing the People 291

6 Latour (1996) presents this idea in a short monograph, Petite Reflexion

sur le Culte Moderne des Dieux Faitiches. This imprint—delightfully
named “those who prevent thinking in circles”—seems to specialize
in publishing works by academics that appeal to a broader public
audience (they have also published several works by Stengers,
including Cosmopolitiques). Although parts of this work appear in
Pandora’s Hope, neither the translation nor the edit do the original
piece justice; consequently, I will cite the French version. All transla-
tions are my own.
7 Ian Hacking (1983, 167) has underscored this point by emphasizing
the amount of making that goes into the “observation” of a fact.
Hacking notes that theories of science—under the influence of
positivism—have both misunderstood observation by conceiving
it as “reporting-what-one-sees” and exaggerated its importance in
the practice of laboratory science: “Often the experimental task,
and the test of ingenuity or even greatness, is less to observe and
report, than to get some bit of equipment to exhibit phenomena in
a reliable way” (170; italics added). Far from being a spontaneous
and unmediated relationship with a “real” world, observation as
experimental scientists understand it involves “staging” by instru-
ments and apparatus. It follows that “observability does not provide
a good way to sort the objects of science into real and unreal” (170).
Even the strictest separation between theory and observation (were
it possible, as positivism insists it must be) would not guarantee
access to phenomena in themselves because so many phenomena
in today’s experimental sciences can only be observed if they are
made visible by the elaborate stagings of expensive laboratory ap-
paratus.
8 This double etymology is not difficult to convey to someone who
has had introductory-level French. The term fait can be the past
participle or the third person singular of the verb faire (i.e., “made,”
“did,” “makes,” or “does”), which, in French as in English, is used
not only to talk about what I make or do but what I have someone
or something else do (fait faire). The full text in Pandora’s Hope
actually makes this confusing by translating fait as “fact” so that
the sentence reads “the double meaning of the word ‘fact’—that
which is made and that which is not made up” (127). It would be
difficult for a reader who was unfamiliar with basic French to under-
stand how the word fact bore this double meaning in itself, that is,
292 LISA DISCH

independently of the premise that it is being invoked to substantiate

(that facts are facts because they are made).
9 It follows, as she elaborates elsewhere, that “facts” cannot be con-
ceived as “a common material whose ideal vocation would be to
assure the possibility of a comparison or confrontation” among
rival hypotheses as in the “logicist or normative mise-en-scène”
(Stengers 2000, 50).
10 There are similarities between Stengers’s notion of an “experimental
fact” and Hacking’s (1983, 262) discussion of “experimental entities.”
Hacking contends that what makes a phenomenon real is not that it
is known for what it is but for what it does. Hacking presents it as a
commonplace of experimental science that “entities that in principle
cannot be ‘observed’ are regularly manipulated to produce a new
phenomena [sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature. They
are tools, instruments not for thinking but for doing” (262; italics
added). They qualify as instruments for doing because experimen-
tation has proven them to be reliable, and scientists have come to
accept that they must take them into account. Hacking observes that
although nuclear physicists cannot say what an electron looks like,
they know what it acts like. They have “come to understand some
of the causal powers of electrons” to the point where it is possible to
“build devices” that use electrons to stage “well-understood effects
in other parts of nature” (262). It is this capacity to use the electron
to produce reliable effects that makes it impossible to disbelieve
in its existence: the electron “has ceased to be theoretical and has
become experimental” (262).
11 For Stengers (2003, 39), the term faitiche captures a “paradoxical
mode of existence,” exemplified by the neutrino, “of all of those
beings that, at once, have been constructed by physics and exist in
a mode that affirms their independence in relation to the time of
human knowledge.” As she interprets the term, it could stand in
for her “reliable witness” or “experimental fact.” By contrast, Latour
glosses it as a term for certain “types of action” rather than as a mode
of being.
12 Pursuing the sport metaphor, think of how important passing is and
what a (rare) skill it is for a player to know when and where to pass.
Passing the ball permits an exchange of properties among players
who are endowed with various distinct skills: defense, moving the
ball, stealing it, scoring from far out, scoring at close range. The
agency resides neither in the ball nor in the players but is distributed
 Faitiche-izing the People 293

among various mediators: the players, the ball, the rules of the game,
the surface on which it is played, the coaches, and the umpires (to
name just a few).
13 Its English translation as “factish” makes it sound like an adjec-
tive.
14 He calls it “la sagesse de la passe,” an idiosyncratic expression
that is a bit difficult to translate because the verb passer has many
meanings in French (as it does in English). Literally, it would most
likely translate as “wisdom of the pass,” possibly also of “passing”
or possibly “getting by.”
15 I read the experimental setting as a comedy of manners. The author
of the apparatus defers to the motion it stages; the phenomenon
defers to the apparatus that solicits its testimony; the apparatus
defers to the experimenter who authored it. All along there are little
blunders—mistaken identity, the slamming of doors. And when the
whole story is written up—if Latour does the writing—it is done in
such a way as to emphasize the miscommunications. Autonomy is
this shy, awkward, and even apologetic passage from hand to thing
to hand to text, a comedy that is clarified by the experimental set-
ting but not unique to it. Open a door, drive a car, write a sentence,
cook a meal: with every competence there will be an exchange of
properties between hands and things and a story that either erases
or accentuates the points of resistance.
16 Nadia Urbinati’s (2006) Representative Democracy: Principles and
Genealogy is the first text in over forty years to challenge Pitkin’s
conception of representation. An original and provocative work,
Urbinati’s dynamic and rhetorical model of representing has im-
portant affinities with science studies whose elaboration are beyond
the scope of this essay, although I have tried to indicate them.
17 I am using Hayden White’s (1987) term narrativize here because I
think it best captures the way Latour sees Pasteur’s “Memo.” It is
not simply a recitation or report of facts but a transformation story
whose elements Latour characterizes as “brave and surprising” and
“defiant” (116–17).
18 Latour uses him here because he is referring explicitly to Pasteur,
not because he is in the habit of assuming that all scientists are male
or of using male pronouns to signify persons in general.
19 I am indebted to Andreas Gailus for this insight about the distinc-
tiveness of the indexical sign and the phrasing of these sentences.
20 Latour (1999, 310) provides a definition for this crucial concept
294 LISA DISCH

shifting out in his glossary as a term “from semiotics to designate

the act of signification through which a text relates different frames
of reference (here, now, I) to one another.”
21 Latour (1999, 131) observes, “In a single scientific paper the author
may go through several philosophies of experiment with relativist
or constructivist moments preceded by brutal denials of the role
of instruments and human interventions and followed by positivist
declarations.”
22 This is a variation on Barthes’s (1989) “reality effect” with two
differences. First, Pasteur aims not principally to authenticate the
experiment as ‘real,’ a direct referent of words that do no more than
describe it, but to mark a distinction between the procedures he
invents and those he can take for granted as well known and estab-
lished. Second, he achieves this aim by a stinting of detail rather
than by its superfluity.
23 Shapin (1984) does not sign on to this illusion but emphasizes that
neither the experiment nor its representation were literally mimetic.
It is “vital to keep in mind that the contingencies proffered in Boyle’s
circumstantial accounts represent a selection” (494).
24 Chambers’s (1984) Story and Situation is an illuminating discussion
of how realist narrative constitutes this distinction.
25 Bloor (1999) remarks on a different but related reluctance by Latour
to acknowledge discursive mediation in the fact that he “makes no
systematic distinction between nature and beliefs about, or accounts
of, nature. He repeatedly casts the argument, his own as well as that
of his opponents, in terms of nature itself rather than beliefs about
it” (87).
26 Since the 1960s, political scientists have taken “congruence” to be
an indicator of government’s responsiveness to the citizenry; see
Miller and Stokes (1963).
27 The U.S. Supreme Court in its first (2006–7) session under the
direction of Chief Justice Roberts has just moved in the opposite
direction, reversing an earlier ruling on the McCain-Feingold
campaign finance law to fortify the First Amendment protections
accorded to corporate- and union-sponsored campaign ads as core
political speech.
 Faitiche-izing the People 295

References

Arendt, Hannah. [1963] 1984. On Revolution. New York: Penguin.

Barthes, Roland. 1989. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bloor, David. 1999. “Anti-Latour.” Studies in the History and Philosophy
of Science 30, no. 1: 81–112.
Braun, Bruce. 2002. The Intemperate Rainforest. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Chambers, Ross. 1984. Story and Situation. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on
Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Hacking, Ian. 1983. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics
in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Holifield, Ryan. 2007. “Spaces of Risk, Spaces of Difference: Environ-
mental Justice and Science in Indian Country.” PhD diss., University
of Minnesota.
Laclau, Ernesto. 1999. Emancipation(s). New York: Verso.
———. 2005. On Populist Reason. New York: Verso.
Latour, Bruno. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Trans. Alan Sheridan
and John Law. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
———. 1996. Petite Reflexion sur le Culte Moderne des Dieux Faitiches.
Paris: Les Empecheurs de Penser en Rond.
———. 1999. Pandora’s Hope. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
———. 2001. Pasteur: Guerre et Paix suivi de Irréductions. Paris: La
Découverte.
———. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy.
Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network
Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Manin, Bernard. 1997. The Principles of Representative Government.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mansbridge, Jane J. 2003. “Rethinking Representation.” American Politi-
cal Science Review 97, no. 4: 515–28.
296 LISA DISCH

Marchart, Oliver. 2005. “In the Name of the People: Populist Reason and
the Subject of the Political.” Diacritics 35, no. 3: 3–19.
Miller, Warren E., and Donald E. Stokes. 1963. “Constituency Influence
in Congress.” American Political Science Review 57, no. 1: 45–56.
Mowitt, John. 2002. Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press.
Pitkin, Hanna. [1967] 1972. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Schattschneider, Elmer E. [1960] 1975. The Semisovereign People. Fort
Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace.
Schaffer, Simon. 1991. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bruno Latour.” Studies
in the History and Philosophy of Science 22, no. 1: 174–92.
Shapin, Steven. 1984. “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary
Technology.” Social Studies of Science 14: 481–520.
Stengers, Isabelle. 1997. Power and Invention. Trans. Paul Bains. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2000. The Invention of Modern Science. Trans. Daniel W. Smith.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2003. Cosmopolitiques I. Paris: La Découverte.
Urbinati, Nadia. 2006. Representative Democracy: Principles and Geneal-
ogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Contributors

Andrew Barry is reader in geography and a fellow of St. Catherine’s

College in the University of Oxford. He is author of Political Ma-
chines: Governing a Technological Society (2001) and a coeditor of
The Technological Economy (2002) and Foucault and Political Reason:
Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism, and Rationalities of Government (1996).
His recent research has been on the political geography of oil.

Jane Bennett is professor of political science at Johns Hopkins Uni-

versity. She is a founding member of the journal Theory and Event and
the author of Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment (1987), Thoreau’s
Nature (1994), The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001), and most
recently Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010). She is
currently pursuing a study of Walt Whitman’s materialism.

Bruce Braun teaches social theory and political geography at the

University of Minnesota. He is the author of The Intemperate Rainfor-
est: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada’s West Coast (Minnesota,
2002) and the coeditor of Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millen-
nium (1998) and Social Nature: Theory, Practice, Politics (2001). He is
currently working on the urbanization of nature and on the politics
of biosecurity.

Stephen J. Collier is assistant professor in the Program in Inter-

national Affairs at the New School. He is the author of Post-Soviet
Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (forthcoming)
and has coedited Biosecurity Interventions (2008) and Global As-
semblages (2004).

297
298 CONTRIBUTORS

William E. Connolly teaches political theory at the Johns Hopkins

University, where he is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor. His recent
publications include Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Min-
nesota, 2002), Pluralism (2005), and Capitalism and Christianity,
American Style (2008). An interview in which he discusses his
recent work and future projects is available in David Campbell and
Morton Schoolman, eds., The New Pluralism: William Connolly and
the Global Condition (2008).

Rosalyn Diprose is professor of philosophy at the University of New

South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Corporeal Gen-
erosity: On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (2002)
and coeditor (with Jack Reynolds) of Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts
(2008). Her chapter in this volume is part of a research endeavor on
“biopolitics and phenomenology,” which includes papers published
in Philosophy and Social Criticism, Hypatia, and Security Dialogue.

Lisa Disch is professor of political science and women’s studies at

the University of Michigan, where she teaches contemporary conti-
nental and democratic theory as well as feminist thought. She is the
author of Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (1994) and
The Tyranny of the Two-Party System (2002).

Gay Hawkins is a research professor in the Centre for Critical and

Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her
most recent books are The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish
(2006) and, coedited with Stephen Muecke, Culture and Waste: The
Creation and Destruction of Value (2002). She is currently working
on an international study of the social and material life of bottled
water titled Plastic Water.

Andrew Lakoff is associate professor of anthropology, sociology,

and communication at the University of Southern California. He
is the author of Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in
Global Psychiatry (2006) and editor of Disaster and the Politics of
Intervention (2010).
 CONTRIBUTORS 299

Noortje Marres is a research fellow in science and technology studies

at the Institute for Science, Innovation, and Society, University of
Oxford. She was trained in the sociology and philosophy of science
and technology at the University of Amsterdam and conducted part
of her doctoral research at the École des Mines, Paris, for a thesis
about issue-centered concepts of public participation in technological
societies. She is currently completing a monograph titled “Engaging
Devices: Participation after the Object Turn.”

Isabelle Stengers teaches philosophy at the Université Libre de

Bruxelles. Her interests center on the constructive adventure of the
modern sciences and the challenge of embedding diverging knowl-
edge practices in a democratic and demanding environment. She has
developed her taste for a speculative, adventurous constructivism in
relation with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North White-
head, and William James and the anthropology of Bruno Latour. She
writes in French, but Order out of Chaos (with Ilya Prigogine, 1984),
A Critique of Psychoanalytical Reason (with Léon Chertok, 1992),
A History of Chemistry (with Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, 1996),
Power and Invention: Situating Science (Minnesota, 1997), and The
Invention of Modern Science (Minnesota, 2000) have all appeared
in English translation.

Nigel Thrift is professor and the vice chancellor at the University of

Warwick, visiting professor at the University of Oxford, and emeritus
professor at the University of Bristol. His main research interests are in
the study of cities, spatial politics, nonrepresentational theory, and the
history of time. His recent books include Knowing Capitalism (2005),
Non-Representational Theory (2007), and Shaping the Day (2009).

Sarah J. Whatmore is professor of environment and public policy at

the University of Oxford. She has published widely on the intersec-
tions of science, law, and democracy in relation to the contestation
of environmental knowledge and rights. Her books include Hybrid
Geographies (2002) and Using Social Theory (2004).
This page intentionally left blank
Index

abortion, RU486 legislation and, engineering of, 152–59

211–37 affinities, between humans and
absolute, thing-power and, 37–38 nonhumans, 65–66
academic culture, political theory Agamben, Giorgio, xxxi–xxxii,
and, xxxiv n8 212–13, 217–18, 230, 238n6
accident, constitution of, 97–98, agency: citizenship and, 182–85;
111n7 distributed agency, 281–88;
achievement, halo as framing faitiche and, 280–81; halo
device for, 141, 166n4 as framing device for, 141;
action, plastic materiality and, humanist view of, xi; infectious
128–29 relationships and, 146–52;
actor–network theory: cultural Latour’s discussion of, 284–85,
geography and, xxxiv n9; 294n20; of mineralization,
politics of technology and, 186, 45–48; plastic materiality and,
205n7; thing-power and, 43–44 125–26; politics of metals and,
Adorno, Theodor, nonidentity 97–108, 111n8; posthumanist
concept of, 48–52, 57nn12–13 view of, xi; reproductive
Adventures of Ideas (Whitehead), politics and, 235–37; RU486
5–6 biopolitics and, 222–23; in
advertisements, discipline and sports, 292n12
perception in, 75–76, 84n14 Akrich, Madeleine, 186
affect: environmental ethics and, Albright, Madeleine, 260
121–37; facial production all-hazards planning, politics of
of, 144, 167n9; infectious preparedness and, 257–58
relationship and, 144–52; Allyson, Lyn, 237n1
plastic materiality and, 131–35 Althusser, Louis, xiv–xv, xxxiv
affective affinities, halo and n12, 53–54, 59n20
construction of, 159–66 American Beauty (film), 122,
affective contagion, 141–52 129–35
affective environments, anthrax attack simulations,

301
302 INDEX

contemporary preparedness Ballettikka Internettikka, 165–66

and, 260–62 Barry, Andrew, xxx, 89–110,
anticipation, perception and, 184–85
68–70, 83n9 Barthes, Roland, 294n22
antimoralism, vital materialism Beck, Ulrich, 245–46, 262
and, 56n11 becoming–being of human,
Anti-Terrorism Bill (Australia), originary technicity and,
231 xvi–xx
Appadurai, Arjun, 59n24 Being and Time (Heidegger),
Arendt, Hannah: biopolitics and, 240n15
212, 217–18, 222; natality beliefs: imagination and, 139–40,
concept of, 231–33, 235–36, 166n2; minority techniques
240n13; political hospitality and, 32n3; perception and,
and, 224–25, 227–28; on 81–82
speech and mediation, 270–71 Bell, Derek, 178
Aristotle, 149–50, 168n13, 168n15 Bell, Vanessa, 157
Artaud, Antonin, 160–61 Bennett, Jane, xxiv, xxviii–xix,
artifacts, scientific facts as, 269– 35–55, 121, 135, 188
72, 290n2 Bensaude-Vincent, Bernadette, 94
assemblages: cultural geography Bergson, Henri, 83n9
and, xxxiv n9; Dewey’s Bernal, J. D., 91–92, 95–96, 111n5
heterogeneous public, 190–99, Betrayal of Christ, The (Giotto
205n8; material politics and, fresco), 143
200–203; of metals, 90, 97–108; bin Laden, Osama, 73
political orderings and, xxxi– biomedical technology,
xxxii; politics of technology democracy and, 212–14
and, 187–89; power of, 267–72 biopolitics: environmental
“Atlanta Storm” simulation, 260 democracy and, xxxiv n7;
Atomic Energy Commission, political theory and, xxxii;
254–55 of RU486, 218–23; RU486
attachment, micropolitics of as political technology and,
perception and, 79–82, 84n15 214–18
Australia, RU486 and politics of bios: biopower and concept of,
technology in, 211–37, 237n1, 217–18, 220–21; political
238nn3–4 hospitality and, 224–33;
autonomy, faitiche and, 275–76, reproductive politics and,
293n15 234–37
Azerbaijan, oil politics in, 112n16 birth, reproductive politics and,
233–37
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil “Black Dawn” simulation, 260
pipeline, 98–110 Blank Signature, The (Magritte),
Balibar, Etienne, xv 71
 INDEX 303

Bloor, David, 294n25 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 154

bodies: affective contagion and, Castree, Noel, 120
145–52; film-making and, 130– Castronova, Edward W., 153
35; mineralization and, 56n10; character, courage and bravery
originary technicity and, xviii– and, 149–52
xix; political hospitality and, Charleston House (Sussex,
225–33; political technologies England), 157–59
of, 214–18; reproductive Chertoff, Michael, 260
politics and, 236–37; RU486 Choreography of Everyday
and politics of technology, Movement (Rueb), 164
211–37; social constructions, Christianity, diplomacy and, 29–30
35–36; thing-power and, cinema. See films
36–38 Cinema 2 (Deleuze), 80–82
body schema, embodied action cities, imitation in, 168n21
and, xviii–xix citizenship: artificiality of, 270;
borders, diplomacy and, 29–31 Dewey’s heterogeneous public
boundedness, of metals, 93–96 and, 197–99; environmental
Bowker, Geof, 245–46 issues and, 177–80; political
BP oil company, BTC project and representation and, 268–72;
materialist politics, 103–8 technologies of, 180–85
brain, social interaction and civil defense: all-hazards planning
development of, 167n10 and, 257–58; vulnerability
bravery, moral–political code and, mapping and, 249–55
149–52 Civil Defense Urban Analysis, 252
Brent Spar oil platform disposal Clarke, Lee, 262
dispute, 101 climate change campaigns,
Brown, Bill, 59n24 public–private notions of
Brown, Gordon, 183 citizenship and, 177–80
Brucker-Cohen, Jonah, 164 Clinton, Bill, 246–47
Bull, Richard, 161 code-driven morality, plastic
Burke, Edmund, 276–77 materiality and, 126
Bush, George W., 73 cognitive function, imitation and
business, environmental suggestibility and, 146–52
engineering and, 153–59 Colbert Report (television
program), 77
Callon, Michel, 184–85 Coles, Romand, 57n12–13
campaign finance reform, 289–90, collective life, political technology
294n27 of preparedness and, 244–63
capitalism, materialist politics collectivities, political theory and,
and, 108–10 xiv–xvi
“Cares of a Family Man” (Kafka), Collier, Stephen J., xxxii, 128,
41–43 243–63
304 INDEX

combined media, conflation of critical infrastructure protection

images in, 158–59 (CIP), 246–48
common (common world): critical responsiveness, plastic
defined, xxxiii n3; political materiality and, 136–37
theory and, x Cromwell (Hugo), 162–63
common good, political cultural geography, political
definitions of, 18–19 theory and, xii–xiv, xxxiv n9
communication infrastructure, cultural practices: bodies and,
Dewey’s heterogeneous public 35; bravery and courage and,
and, 196–99 150–52; imitation and, 146–52;
competency groups, nature and immanence and,
technogenesis and, xxviii 63–66; symbolism in, 169n22;
conatus, Spinoza’s concept of, technology and, 158–59,
36–38, 55n2, 56n4 169n25
concept, thing vs., 51–52, 58n15 culture of hesitation: diplomacy
Concept of Representation (Pitkin), and, 30–31; ecology of
276–77 practices and, 27–28
congruence, responsiveness and, culture of objects, debris as thing-
289–90, 294n26 power and, 39–41
Connolly, William E., xxiv, xxviii– cynical realism, perception and,
xxix, 63–82, 126, 129–30, 75–76
136–37, 227–28
conscience, techniques of, 124–26 Daily Show, The (television
Considering the Effects of a program), 77
Catastrophic Terrorist Attack, Damasio, Antonio, 66
261 Dance That Describes Itself, 161–
constructivism: faitiche and, 62, 169n29
273–76, 286–88; performances “Dark Winter” (simulation), 259
of things and, xxi–xxii Darwinian theory, genealogy and,
contemporary preparedness 83n5
measures, politics of, 258–62 Daston, Lorraine, xx–xxii
continuity–discontinuity, DC Comics Halo superhero,
processual rhythm of, 132–35 168n19
Coole, Diana, 70 debris, as thing-power, 38–41
Cornerhouse (NGO), 112n11 deconstructive phenomenology:
corporate culture, environment biopolitics and, 222–23;
and, 153–59 political hospitality and,
Corrie, Rachel, 168n18 223–33
Cosmopolitiques (Stengers), 291n6 DeLanda, Manuel, 41, 45–46
Côte d’Ivoire, politics of Deleuze, Gilles: xxiii, 7; on
technology in, 186 asymmetry of nature, 66; on
courage, moral–political code diplomacy, 29; film discussed
and, 149–52 by, 80–82; on Foucault, 58n18;
 INDEX 305

Merleau-Ponty and, 83n10; on disaster, politics of preparedness

metallurgy, 93; on perception, and, 243–66
63–66; on politics, 128–29; Disch, Lisa, xxvi, xxxii, 267–90
“quasi-causal operator” discipline, perception and, 72–76
concept of, 43–44; on right/ Discorsi (Galileo), 10–11
left distinction, 13–14, 23–28; discourse, Dewey’s heterogeneous
thing-power and work of, 43 public and, 195–99, 206n9
deliberative democracy: speech Displaced Emperors project,
as political medium in, xi, 165–66
xxiii–xxiv; technology and, “DIY Repairs” campaign
xxvii–xxviii (London), 178, 181–85
democracy: biopolitics and, Dobson, Andrew, 178
212–14, 222–23; Dewey’s documentary, plastic materiality
heterogeneous public and, and, 131–35
190–99, 202–3; political domestic technologies. See
hospitality and, 225–33; household devices
politics of technology and, Dreams of a Final Theory
186–90, 211–37; RU486 (Weinberg), 10
controversy and, 233–37; Dumm, Thomas, 56n6, 57n13
science and, 233–37, 267–90 dwelling, political hospitality and
depth, visibility and, 70–72 role of, 228–29
depublicization of technology,
186–89 ecological awareness, thing-power
De Rerum Natura (Lucretius), and, 135
53–54 ecology of practices: diplomacy
Derrida, Jacques: body concept and, 28–31; nonhumans and,
of, xviii–xix; “infinite 25–28
responsibility” concept of, xxxv Economic and Social Research
n16; on political hospitality, Council, 111n10
224–29; politics of technology economy, environmental
and, 212–14; on writing and technology and, 182–85
linearization, 155, 157 economy of knowledge,
deterrence strategies, politics of technology and, 19–23
preparedness and, 256–57 Edwards, Paul, 245–46
de Vries, Hent, 37, 56n4 Effects of Atomic Weapons, The,
Dewey, John: xxvi, xxxi; 254–55
heterogeneous public concept electronic media, discipline and
of, 190–203 perception and, 75–76
diplomacy: achievement and, 141, embodiment, affective contagion
166n4; ecology of practices and, 145–52, 168n11
and, 28–31 emergency management, all-
Diprose, Rosalyn, xxxi–xxxii, hazards planning and, 257–58
211–37 emergent causality, immanent
306 INDEX

materialism and, 64–66 minority techniques and, 32n3;

emotion, affect and, 131–35 politics as, 128–29, 277–81
empathy, halo as signifier of, Ezrahi, Yaron, 202–3
142–52
empowerment techniques, faces: choreogenetics and, 170n31;
practices and, 21–23 public thought reflected in,
emulation, imitation vs., 147 143–52
Encyclopedia of Unified Science, facts: faitiche and, 273–76, 291n8,
The, 198 292n9; as indexical signs, 282–
energy consumption: politics 88, 293n19
of technology and, 186–89; failure analysis: contemporary
technologies of citizenship and, preparedness and, 260–62; oil
182–85 politics and, 100–108, 112n19
environmental democracy, faitiche concept: Latour on
technology and, xxxiv n6 Pasteur and, 282–88;
environmental ethics, plastic representation and, 288–90;
materiality and, 120–37 responsiveness and, 276–81;
environmental issues: corporate scientists as spokespersons
media campaigns on, 177–80; and, 272–76, 291n6, 291n8,
oil politics and, 98–108 292nn9–11, 293n13
Erasmus, 156–59 family values campaigns, RU486
ethics: laws of, 267–72; plastic biopolitics and, 219–23, 238n9,
materiality and, 120–37; 239n11
political ontology and, 224–23 fascist theory of representation,
“ethos of critical responsiveness,” 279–81; faitiche and, 288–90
plastic materiality and, 136–37 Federal Civil Defense Authority,
European Bank for 252–55
Reconstruction and Federal Emergency Management
Development (EBRD), 98–108 Agency (FEMA), 258
European Union, 289–90 feminist theory: infectious
events: political technology of relationships and, 148–52;
preparedness and, 243–63; materiality and, 54; political
singularity of, 215, 223–27 hospitality and, 232–33
evidence, politics of materials and Ferrell, Robyn, 220–21
role of, 101–8 films: decisive moments in, 154;
Ewald, Francois, 262–63 game influences in, 155–59,
existence: knowledge and, 3–7; of 168n20; micropolitics of
metals, 94–96 perception and, 79–82; plastic
experimentation: faitiche and, materiality in, 122, 129–35
273–76, 292n10, 293n15; flowers, language of, 156
in films, 130–35; Latour’s force, Latour’s discussion of,
description of, 281–88; 270–72, 290n3
 INDEX 307

“forced thought”: plastic politics in, 98–108, 112n15,

materiality and, 122; situations 112n16
and, 17, 20–23; thing-power gestation, reproductive politics
and, xxiv, xxvii and, 233–37
Foucault, Michel: xxx–xxxii, Ghandi, Mahatma, nonviolence
35; on biopower, 215–18; of, 168n16
on conscience, 124; Deleuze Giotto di Bondone, 142–43, 147–48
and, 58n18; on discipline Goodwin, Brian, 66
and perception, 72–76, 215; Gould, Stephen J., 32n1, 39, 66,
Merleau-Ponty and, 83n10; 83n5
metaphysics of object and, governmental policies:
36; on micropolitics, 77–82; heterogeneous public and,
on perception, 63, 77–82; 191–99; infrastructure
political technology and work protection and, 248; metals
of, 244, 263n1; on politics of and, 94–96; political hospitality
technology, 185, 212–18, and, 225–33; political
223 technology of preparedness
Fuller, Matthew, xxvii and, 244–63; politics of
“fundamental” science, hierarchy metals and, 97–108; RU486
of, 91, 110n2 controversy and role of,
213–14, 219–23; science and,
Gailus, Andreas, 293n19 269–72
Galileo, 10–11, 273–74, 282 Grant, Duncan, 157
Galison, Peter, 249 Green Alternative (Georgia
gardening: affective affinities NGO), 99
and, 169n28; as engineered green energy policies,
environment, 154–59 technologies of citizenship and,
gender: as congealed bodily- 182–85
effect, 35–36; political Green Movement (Georgia and
hospitality and, 223–33. See Soviet Union, 101, 112n16
also sexuality green politics, plastic materiality
genetically modified organisms and, 123–26
(GMOs), political theory and, green technology, political theory
19–23 and, xxxi–xxxii
geography: infectious Grosz, Elizabeth, 128–29
relationships and, 146–52; oil Guattari, Félix: on metallurgy,
politics and, 99–108, 112n11; 93; on minorities, 13–14; on
performances of things and, perception, 64–66
xxii; political theory and, xii– Guenther, Lisa, 233–37
xiv, xxxiv n9 guilt, plastic materiality and,
geopolitics, of oil, 98–108, 111n10 124–26
Georgia (former USSR), oil
308 INDEX

Habermas, Jürgen, xi, xxiii preparedness measures and,

habits: of perception, 76–77; 259–62; critical infrastructure
plastic materiality and, 122–37 protection (CIP), 246–48
Hacking, Ian, 291n7, 292n10 hospitality: politics of, in RU486
halo: affective affinities controversy, 219–23; temporal
construction and, 159–66; and gendered dimensions of,
affective contagion and, 223–33
141–52; affective environments Host Government Agreement,
and, 152–59; as material object, Georgia pipeline project and,
140–41; politics of imagination 100, 112n15
and, 140; as religious symbol, household devices: environmental
141–42, 167nn5–7 publicity campaigns and,
Halo game series, 152–59 177–80; heterogeneous public
HALO Landmines Trust, 168n18 and, 203–5; as technologies of
Hannity-Colmes Report (television citizenship, 180–85
program), 75 Hugo, Victor, 162–63
Hansen, Mark, xviii, 77–78 Human Condition, The (Arendt),
Haraway, Donna, xviii, xxv; 227, 232–33
on creation act, 6–7; on humanist theory: agency in
nonhumans, 8–9, 11, 26–27 public life and, xi; Dewey’s
Hawkins, Gay, xxx, 119–37 heterogeneous public and,
Heath, Robert, 75, 84n14 197–99, 206n9; originary
Heidegger, Martin, 54, 59n22, technicity and, xvii–xx;
214–15, 221, 240n15 technology and, xxiv–xxviii
Herf, Jeffrey, 169n23 humans: becoming–being of,
hesitation, bravery of, 151–52 xvi–xx; geography and, xii–xiv;
heterogeneous assemblages: mistreatment of, 8–13; nature
household devices and, 203–5; and, 273–74; nonhumans and
politics of technology and, definition of, 4–7; politics
187–89, 200–203 of technology and, 187–90;
Heyman, David, 259 science, technology, and
Hinchliffe, Stephen, 188 society and, x–xii; thing-power
History of Chemistry (Bensaude- and vitality of, 45–48; will vs.
Vincent and Stengers), 94 truth and, 268–72
History of Sexuality (Foucault), Hume, David, 144
216–17 Hunter, Ian, 124
Hobbes, Thomas, on assemblage, Hurndall, Tom, 168n18
xiv–xv Husserl, Edmund, 72
Holifield, Ryan, 274, 282–83 hypothetical attack problem,
holographic methods, materiality vulnerability mapping and,
and politics and, 90–110 251–52
homeland security: contemporary
 INDEX 309

ideas, humans and power of, 5–6 in-here enactment, plastic

ideological–political determinism, materiality and, 127–29
biopolitics and, 220–23 instrumentalist theory: politics
imagination: affective affinities of technology and, 188–90;
and, 160–66; beliefs and, 139– technology of the body and,
40, 166n2; politics of, 139–40, 214–15; things in politics and,
166n1 179–80
imaginative enactment strategy: intellectual property rights,
contemporary preparedness economy of knowledge and,
measures and, 259–62; politics 19–23
of preparedness and, 255–57 intelligibility, thing-power and
imitation, infectious relationship limits of, 37–38
and, 144–52 interinvolvement: Dewey’s
immanence, perception and, 63–66 heterogeneous public and,
immigration policies, RU486 195–99; perception and, 68–70,
biopolitics and, 219–23, 83n9
239nn10–11 intermediaries: cultural
impartiality, science and fantasy geography and, xxxiv n9;
of, 268–72 plastic materiality and, 124–26
implicit learning, discipline and International Finance
perception and, 75–76 Corporation (IFC), 98
indeterminacy of things, xxi–xxii International Solidarity
indexical singes, science and, Movement, 168n18
282–88, 293n19 intersensory perception, 67–70
inequality, RU486 controversy invention, affective affinities and,
and politics of technology, 161–66
213–14 Invention of Modern Science
infectious relationship, imitation (Stengers), 9–10
and, 144–52 irreducibility, of metals, 96
informational enrichment,
materiality and politics and, 90 Jackson, Peter, 168n20
infrapublic, Dewey’s concept of, James, William, 132
200–201 Jennings, Ivor, ix
infrastructure: critical protection
of, 246–48; inventory, 247–48; Kafka, Franz, xxix; thing-power
political technology of and work of, 41–43, 46, 54
preparedness and, 243–63; Kahn, Herman, 256
vulnerability mapping and, Kant, Immanuel: 4; Adorno and,
249–55; vulnerability of, 58n16; political hospitality and
245–46 work of, 227; thing-power and
“Infrastructure and Modernity” work of, 47
(Edwards), 245–46 Kaya, Ferhat, 99, 105
310 INDEX

Kelly, Sean Dorrance, 72 La Vierge et le Neutrino

knowledge: affective affinities (Stengers), 17
and, 159–66; existence and, laws of necessity vs. laws of ethics,
3–7; geography of production 267–72
of, 106–8, 113n21; politics Lazzarato, Maurizio, 153
of, xxiv–xxviii; vulnerability Lazzarini, Robert, 77
mapping and politics of, leadership, representation and,
250–55 278–81
Ktaadn (Katahdin), 37 legal actants, thing-power and,
Kuelhs, Thom, xxiii 43–44
Levene, Nancy, 36
labor: oil politics and, 100–108; Levinas, Emmanuel, 228–29,
political hospitality and 231–32
deregulation of, 230–33 Libet, Benjamin, 83n6
Laclau, Ernesto, 279–81, 283 Life: A User’s Manual (Teran),
Lakoff, Andrew, xxxii, 128, 164
243–63 Life of the Mind, The (Arendt),
language: orthography of faitiche 227
and, 274–76; perception and, lifeworlds, technology and
67–70 colonization of, xvii–xix
Latour, Bruno: xviii, xxxv n14; linear narrative, 155–56
actant concept of, 43–44; on literary technology, science and,
antifetishism, 29–30; Disch’s 286–88
reading of, xxxii, 268–90; localization, affective affinities
distributed agency of, 281–88; and, 162–66
on essence and habit, 27; on Lucretius, 52–54, 59n19, 59n21
facts, 113n20; faitiche concept Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 46
and, 272–76, 291n6, 292n11,
293n14; on mediation, 289–90; Machiavelli, Niccolo, on
on minorities, 14–15, 31n3; assemblage, xiv–xv
on mistreatment of humans, Mackenzie, Adrian, xvii–xviii
12–13; on nonhumans, 7–13, Macnaghten, Phil, 181–82
189–90; on Pasteur, 282–88, Magnin, Tierry, 92–94
293nn17–18, 294n21; say- Magritte, René, 71
no campaigns and work majority, minorities and, 13–14
of, 123–24; on science vs. Making Things Public:
politics, 268–72; on sociology Atmospheres of Democracy
of technology, 186, 205n7; (Latour and Weibel), xii
“speech impedimenta” concept manipulation, representation and,
of, 270–71, 290nn4–5; on 278–81
technogenesis, xxiv–xxvii; on Manovich, Lev, 158
“trials of force,” 270–72, 290n3 Marchart, Oliver, 280
 INDEX 311

Margulis, Lynn, xxix, 66 matter: metals as, 94–96; plastic

Marks, Laura, 67 materiality and force of,
Marres, Noortje, xxvi–xxvii, xxxi, 124–26; of political, xxii–xxiv;
177–205 singularity of, 134–35; thing-
Marriage Legislation Amendment power and vitality of, 45–48
Bill (Australia), 219 matters of concern, Latour’s
Marx, Karl, 54, 59n23; on concept of, 189–90
capitalism and metals, 92; McCain-Feingold campaign
performances of things and, finance law, 294n27
xxxiv n13 Meadowlands, The (Sullivan),
Massumi, Brian, 130–32 40–41
materialist essentialism, 120–21 measurement, of metals, 95
material politics, 199–203 media campaigns: Dewey’s
material practices: affective heterogeneous public and,
affinity and, 159–66; of 195–99; politics of technology
debris, 40–41; discipline and, xxvi, 177–80; publicity for
and perception, 72–76; politics of technology, 185–90;
heterogeneous public and, RU486 biopolitics and, 219–23,
195–99; immanence and, 64– 238nn9–11; technologies of
66; micropolitics of perception citizenship and, 180–85
and, 76–82; nature, culture, mediation: fascism and absence
and immanence and, 63–66; oil of, 288–90; politics vs. science
pipeline politics and, 99–108; and, 270–72
perception and, 67–70, 72–76; Meeting at the Golden Gate,
performances of things and, The (Giotto fresco), 142–43,
xx–xxii; plastic materialities, 147–48
119–37; politics and, 89–110, Melamed, Yitshak, 56n3
199–203; politics of technology “Mémoire sur la fermentation
and, 186–89; preparedness, appelée lactique” (Pasteur),
political technology of, 243–63; 283–88, 293nn17–18
riddles and, 56n9; technologies memory, perception and, 68–70
of citizenship and, 182–85; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: xviii,
technology and politics and, xxix; on discipline and
xxv–xxx; thing-power and, perception, 72–76; Foucault
45–48; visibility and depth and, and Deleuze and, 83n10;
70–72; vital materialism, 52–55 micropolitics of perception
material publics, political theory and, 77–82; on perception,
and, xxvi–xxvii 63–70, 82n1; thing-power and
material recalcitrance, of cultural work of, 39–40; on visibility
production, 35–36 and depth, 70–72
materials science, metals and, metagestural proxemics, affective
110n3 affinities and, 163–66
312 INDEX

metals and metallurgy: materiality Nash, Fiona, 237n1

and politics compared natality, Arendt’s concept of,
with, 89–110; oil pipeline 232–33, 240n155; democracy
politics and, 101–8; physical and, 233–37
properties, 91–96; politics of, National Incident Management
96–108 System (NIMS), 258
micropolitics of perception, National Infrastructure Protection
76–82; plastic materiality and, Program (NIPP), 247–48
129–35 National Security Council, 259
Mifeprestone. See RU486 Native Americans, bravery and
Miliband, Ralph, 112n19 courage in culture of, 150–52,
mind-reading, simulation 168n17
explanation for, 144–45 nature: materiality of perception
mineralization, thing-power and, and, 63–66; science vs. politics
44–48 and, 268–72
minorities: Deleuze-Guattari Nature (Merleau-Ponty), 65
discussion of, 13–14; Latour’s Nazi Germany, as engineered
discussion of, 14–15; environment, 169n23
obligations concerning, 16–19; necessity, laws of, 267–72
practices and concept of, 15– Negative Dialectics, thing-power
19; techniques of, 21–23 and nonidentity, 48–52
Mitchell, Timothy, 111n8 Negri, Antonio: on assemblage,
Mitchell, W. J. T., 36 xiv–xv; on humanism, xv
modernization, originary New Philosophy for a New Media
technicity and, xvii–xx (Hansen), 77
molecular structure, metallurgy Nietzsche, Friedrich: 83n5, 215,
and, 92–96 222, 227–28, 240n13; vital
Moore, Claire, 237n1 materialism and, 47–48
morality: efficacy of, 47–48, 9/11. See September 11, 2001
56n10, 56n11; ethics and, attacks
120–21; heterogeneous public nongovernmental organizations
and, 198–99; infectious (NGOs), oil pipeline politics
relationships and, 148–52 and, 99–108, 112n11, 112n15,
Moriwaki, Katherine, 164 112n19
Mowitt, John, 280 nonhumans: defined, 3–7;
multinational corporations, diplomacy and, 28–31;
materialist politics and, ecology of practices and,
98–108 23–28; geography and, xii–xv;
heterogeneous public and,
“naive objectivism,” critiques of, 194–99; majority/minority
202–3 distinction and, 13–19;
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 212–14, 224, materiality and politics and,
226–27, 229 91–110; mistreatment of,
 INDEX 313

8–13; political activism and, On Thermonuclear War (Kahn),

20–23; in political theory, 256
3–31; politics of technology operators, as legal actants, 43–44
and, 187–90; rhizome O’Reilly Factor (television
imagery of, 24–28; scientists program), 75
as spokespersons for, 268–72; Organisation for Economic Co-
technical practices and, 19–23; operation and Development
technology and agency of, x, (OECD), Guidelines on
182–85 Multinational Enterprises,
nonidentity, thing-power and, 100–101
48–52, 57nn12–13 originary technicity, humanism
nonorganic life, thing-power and, and, xvi–xx
41–43 out-side, thing-power and, 36–41
nuclear attack threat: imaginative
enactment strategy and, 256– Pandora’s Hope (Latour), 291n6,
57; vulnerability mapping and, 291n8
249–55 parallelism, Spinoza’s doctrine of,
Nunn, Sam, 259–60 82n3
parliamentary government, oil
objective knowledge: Galileo’s politics and, 98–108
concept of, 10–11; Popper’s passivity, infectious relationships
concept of, 5 and, 148–49
objectivity, sociocultural Pasteur, Louis, 283–88, 293nn17–
debunking of, 9–11 18, 294nn21–22
objects: Adorno’s discussion of, patriarchy, political hospitality
52–53, 57n14, 58n18; debris as and, 226–33
thing-power, 39–41; Dewey’s perception: complexity of,
heterogeneous public and, 67–70; discipline and, 72–76;
198–99; halo as framing device micropolitics of, 76–82; nature,
for, 140–41; micropolitics culture, and immanence and,
of perception and, 77–82; 63–66; visibility and depth and,
nonhumans as, 3–7; 70–72
perception of, 68–70; politics performance, affective affinities
of technology and, 188–90; and, 160–66, 170n32
science and technology as, xi; performativity: plastic
subjects vs., 47–48 materialities and, 121–37;
obligations: ecology of practices things and, xx–xxii
and, 24–28; minorities and role personal experience,
of, 16–19; plastic materiality environmental politics and,
and, 124–26 181–85
oil pipeline construction, politics Petite Reflexion sur le Culte
of, 98–110 Moderne des Dieux Faitiches
On Revolution (Arendt), 270 (Latour), 291n6
314 INDEX

phenomenology: citizenship and, practical reason, nonhumans

182–85; perception and, 63–66; and, 4
science and, 273–76 practices: destruction of, 19–23;
Phenomenology of Perception ecology of, 24–28; minorities
(Merleau-Ponty), 39–40, 63 and relevance of, 15–19; plastic
physics, metallurgy and, 91–96 materiality and, 128–29
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead pragmatic problematization,
Men’s Chest (film), 155 plastic materiality and, 127–29
Pitkin, Hanna, 276–81, 288 pragmatism, material politics and,
Planning Scenarios, 259–62 201–3
plastic: materiality of, 119–37; preparedness, political technology
political theory and role of, xxx of, 243–63; all-hazards
Plato, 5–7, 54 planning and, 257–58;
political ontology, hospitality and, contemporary preparedness
224–33 measures, 258–62; critical
political technology of infrastructure protection and,
preparedness, 243–63, 263n1 247–48; imaginative enactment
political theory: affective strategy and, 255–57;
affinities and, 159–66; infrastructure vulnerability
basic components of, ix–x; and, 245–46; vulnerability
biomedical technology and, mapping and, 249–55
212–14; biopower and bodies preparedness expertise,
and, 214–18; materiality and, contemporary preparedness
54–55; matter of the political and, 261–62
and, xxii–xxiv; metallurgy and, Prigogine, Ilya, 15, 66
96–108; science and, 268–72; private matters: heterogeneous
technologies of citizenship and, public and, 192–99; RU486 and
180–85 politics of technology,
Politics of Nature (Latour), 27 211–37
Popper, Karl, on nonhumans, 5, Problems and Methods in the
7, 15, 17 Study of Politics (Shapiro,
positivism: performances of Smith, and Masoud), 82n2
things and, xxi–xxii; science processual rhythm, continuity–
and, 273, 291n7 discontinuity and, 132–35
posthumanism: agency and, xi; protosubjectivity, affect and,
political theory and, xiii–xvi 131–35
potency, force vs., 270–72, 290n3 public: Dewey’s heterogeneous
potentiality, reproductive politics public, 190–99; excess of
and, 234–37 technogenesis and, xxiv–xxviii;
Powell, Colin, 99 material politics and, 199–203;
power, science vs. politics and, politics of technology and,
268–72 187–90; technologies of
 INDEX 315

citizenship and involvement of, reproductive technology:

182–85 biopolitics and, 220–23;
Public and Its Problems, The democracy and, 233–37;
(Dewey), 191–201 politics of, xxxi–xxxii, 230–33
publicity campaigns, politics of Repton, Humphrey, 154–55
technology and, 185–90 resistant force, of cultural forms,
Pushtun honor code, 168n16 35–36
response-ability, technopolitics
Quakers, bravery of, 151–52 and, xxvi–xxvii
responsiveness: congruence and,
Race, Kane, 219 289–90, 294n26; mediation
racism, politics of technology and, and, 288–90; representation
185–86 and, 276–81
Ralet, Oliver, 225 risk management, infrastructure
Ramachandran, V. S., 65–66 vulnerability and, 245–46
Rancière, Jacques, xxiii, 101, 188 Roman Empire, halo in, 167n5
RAND Center for Terrorism Risk Rose Revolution (Georgia), 102–3
Management, 262 Rotman, Brian, 158
realism: practices and, 19–23; Roux, Jacques, 92–94
science and, 273–76, 286–88 RU486: biopolitics and, 222–23,
recalcitrance: diplomacy and, 240n13; development and
29–31; material recalcitrance, chemical structure, 237n2;
35–36; thing-power and, 37– legislation, biopower issues
38; of things, 36 and, 214–18; political
reciprocity, diplomacy and, 29–31 hospitality and, 226–33;
Redlener, Irwin, 261 politics of technology and,
relationality, affect and, 132–35 211–37
religion, halo’s role in, 141–42, Rueb, Teri, 164
167nn5–7 Rumsfeld, Donald, 99
representation: affective contagion Runciman, David, 111n6
and, 145–52; agency and,
281–88; faitiche and, 288–90; Saakashvili, Mikheil, 99–108,
Pitkin’s concept of, 276–81, 112n17
293n16; politics of imagination “sad activist” model of activism,
and, 140, 166n3; science vs. 148
politics and, 268–72 say-no campaigns, plastic
representative democracy: materiality and, 123–26
responsiveness and, 276–81; “Scarlet Cloud” simulation, 260
science and, 267–90 Schattschneider, E. E., 269–71
Representative Democracy: Schoolman, Morton, 58n17
Principles and Genealogy science: artifacts in, 269–72,
(Urbinati), 293n16 290n2; authority of, 274;
316 INDEX

hierarchy of, 91, 110n2 reading, 144–45

science, technology, and society situation, minorities in context
(STS) studies: agency and, of, 17
281–88; democracy and, Six Feet Under (television
233–37, 267–90; infrastructure program), 77
vulnerability and, 245–46; Skulls (art exhibit), 77–78
materiality and politics and, Smith, Adam, 144
90–110; metals and metallurgy “Social and Human Rights
and, 92–96; political Impact on the Governance of
technology of preparedness Technology” (ESRC), 111n10
and, 244–63; political theory social interaction: brain
and, x–xiv, xxvii–xxviii; development and, 167n10;
responsiveness and, 276–81; Dewey’s heterogeneous public
scientists as spokespersons, and, 195–99
272–76 social recognition, mistreatment
Science Wars, 9–10 of humans and, 8–13
scientists, in representative social sciences, mistreatment of
democracy, 268–72, 290n1 humans in, 8–13
select committee structure, oil Society Must Be Defended
politics and, 106–8, 113n20 (Foucault), 216–17
self, political hospitality and role sociomaterial assemblages,
of, 228–29 politics of metallurgy and,
self-depoliticization, perception 97–108
and, 75–76 spatiality: affective contagion
self-organization: immanent and, 145–52; complexity
materialism and, 64–66; plastic of perception and, 67–70;
materiality and, 124–26 technology and, xxii
senses, perception and, 67–70 SPC2888 failure, materialist
September 11, 2001 attacks, politics and, 100–108
111n6; critical infrastructure specific materialism, Adorno’s
protection and, 247–48 concept of, 51–52
Serres, Michel, xxiii speech: in deliberative democracy,
sexuality: biopower and, 216–18; xi, xxiii–xxiv; mediation and,
politics of RU486 and, 218–23 270–72
Shapin, Steven, 286–87, 294n23 “Speech to the Electors of Bristol”
Shell Oil, 101 (Burke), 276–77
Shevardnadze, Eduard, 103 speed bumps, politics of
Shove, Elisabeth, 183 technology and, 186
signs, as units of life, 169n26 Spinoza, Baruch: xiv–xv, xxix, 35;
“Silent Vector” exercise, 259–60 parallelism of, 82n3; on thing-
Simondon, Gilbert, xviii power, 36, 55n2, 56n4; vital
simulation explanation, for mind materialism and, 47–48
 INDEX 317

spirituality, vital materialism and, hospitality and, 229–30

52 technicity. See originary technicity
spokespersons, scientists as, “techniques of conscience,” plastic
272–76 materiality and, 124–26
sports, agency and, 292n12 technogenesis: excess of, xxii–
staging: politics vs. science and, xxiv; of individuals, xix–xx
268–72; scientific observation technologies of citizenship,
and, 273–76, 282–88, 291n7 environmental campaigns and,
Star, Leigh, 245–46 179–80
Starhawk, 22 technology: democracy and, 233–
Stengers, Isabelle: xxiv–xxviii, 37; destruction of practices
3–31, 94, 122, 166n4, 225, and, 19–23; infrastructure
290n2, 291nn7–8, 292nn9–11; vulnerability and, 245–46;
Disch’s reading of, xxxii, 268– metals and metallurgy and,
90; faitiche concept and, 272– 92–96; performances of
76, 291n6; on representation, things and, xxi–xxii; political
289–90 theory and, xi, xxii–xxiii;
Stern, Lesely, 133–34 politics of, xi, xxiv–xxviii,
Stiegler, Bernard, xviii xxxiiii n5, xxxiv n6; politics of,
Strathern, Marilyn, 90 publicity concerning, 185–90;
Stromajer, 165 preparedness and politics of,
“Strong Angel” simulation, 243–63; representation and,
261–62 157–59, 169n24; RU486 and
subjectivity: conscience and, 124; politics of, 211–37; temporality
plastic materiality and, 121–37; and, xxi–xxiii; vulnerability
political hospitality and, mapping and role of, 252–55
226–33 television, micropolitics of
suggestibility: engineering perception and, 77–82
environments and, 154–59; temporality: political hospitality
infectious relationship and, and, 223–33; RU486 and, 233–
144–52 37; technology and, xxi–xxiii
Sullivan, Robert, 40–41, 54 Teran, Michel, 164
surveillance, perception and, Theory of Valuation (Dewey),
73–76 198–99, 201
sustainability, plastic materiality Therapeutic Goods
and, 123–26 Administration (TGA)
symbolism, in daily life, 169n22 (Australia), 211–12, 221–22
Szerszynski, Bronislaw, 181 thing-power: Bennett’s concept
of, xxix, 135; debris of, 38–41;
Tarde, Gabriel, xxx, 95–96, 145, environmental ethics and,
168n12 120–37; legal actants and,
technē: biopolitics and, xi; political 43–44; materialism and,
318 INDEX

121–37; mineralization and, UMBRELLA.net, 164

44–45; nonidentity and, 48–52; unconditional hospitality, politics
nonorganic life and, 41–43; of, 226
out-side of, 36–38 United Kingdom, Export Credit
things: environmental campaigns Guarantee Department, 97–
and, 179–80; performance of, 108, 111n9
xx–xxii, xxxiv n13, 134–35; United States Civil Defense
politics of preparedness and (government document),
internalization of, 243–63; 250–52
politics of technology and, Urbinati, Nadia, 271–72, 293n16
185–90; scientific specification U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey,
of, 267–72; truth of, 268–72 249
third party representatives, utilitarianism, heterogeneous
scientists as, 268–72, 290n1 public and, 193–99
Thoreau, Henry David, 35; thing-
power concept and, 37, 39, values, Dewey’s heterogeneous
56n7 public and, 198–99
Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze/ Vernadsky, Vladimir Ivanovich,
Guattari), 13–14 43, 46, 54
Thrift, Nigel, xxx–xxxi, 139–66 visibility, depth and, 70–72
Tiffany, Daniel, 56n9 visual media, technologies of
time: perception and, 67–70, citizenship and, 181–85
83n6; political hospitality and vital materialism, 52–55;
role of, 227–28 naive ambition of, 52–55;
Toender, Lars, 58n16 nonidentity and, 48–52; thing-
Toogood, Mark, 181 power and, 45–48
TOPOFF exercises, 260 vital systems: critical
totalitarianism: biopower infrastructure protection
and, 218; as engineered and, 248; infrastructure
environment, 157–58, vulnerability and, 245–46;
169n23 politics of preparedness and,
Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 243–44
228–29 vulnerability: assessment of,
transcendence, perception and, 247–48; infrastructure and
63–66, 82n1 problem of, 245–46; mapping,
transformation, metals as sites of, 249–55; political technology
93–96 of preparedness and, 244–63;
Troeth, Judith, 237n1 practices and, 18–19
trusteeship, political
representation as, 276–81 Weinberg, Stephen, 10–11
Turkey, oil politics in, 112n16 Wellmer, Albrecht, 58n15
Turkle, Shery, xx–xxi White, Hayden, 293n17
 INDEX 319

Whitehead, Alfred North, 3, 5–6, Wynne, Brian, xi

111n4, 170n30
will of humans, truth of things vs., X-ray crystallography: materiality
268–72 and, 91–96; politics and, 96–97
Winner, Langdon, 185–86
Wolfe, Cary, xx Zhvania, Zurab, 112n16
Wolin, Sheldon, 202–3 zoe: biopower and concept of,
women’s equality: political 217–18, 220–21; political
hospitality and, 230–33; RU486 hospitality and concept of,
biopolitics and, 222–23 230; reproductive politics and,
Workplace Relations Amendment 236–37
(Australia), 231