Experimental Practice: Technoscience, Alterontologies, and More-Than-Social Movements
344
Experimental Practice: Technoscience, Alterontologies, and More-Than-Social Movements
344eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781478002321 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/16/2018 |
| Series: | Experimental Futures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| File size: | 19 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
DECOLONIAL POLITICS OFMATTER
ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS
The rise of technoscience in its contemporary configuration since the 1960s and 1970s resonates with a cultural imaginary marked by the idea that social transformation is primarily driven by material transformation. Technoscience creates new ontologies; it is world-making and history-making. The simultaneous production of society and ontology is often described as ontological politics: there exist multiple ontologies rather than just one, and these different ontologies are enacted by the actors involved in them. As I discuss later in the book (especially in chapters 7 and 8), this is not an epistemological question, it is a practical one. Depending on the specific actors involved, ontologies are practiced differently and thus are materially different as such. This is a "multinatural" world. And it is ultimately a political question which ontologies a certain actor participates in, and how. Politics here means that by performing ontology in a single concrete way rather than any other, we change the very constitution of being and its material organization in a specific direction. Ontology is not a description of the state of things, but of ways of being that include alternative possibilities of world-making.
What absences and what silences are produced when we conceive our engagement with and within technoscience as ontological politics? And what ways of being and acting, what voices does this understanding of technoscientific politics privilege? Along with Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2001) I am interested in the study of absences. Rather than exploring what ontological politics is or how it is theorized, I aim to discuss what ontological politics actively produces as absent and nonexistent. Is the politics of (more-than-social) social movements that I mentioned in the introduction a form of ontological politics? If not, what are the alternatives? As de Sousa Santos (2004, p. 178) writes, "There is no single, univocal way of not existing. The logic and process through which hegemonic criteria of rationality and efficiency produce the non-existence of what does not fit them are various. Non-existence is produced whenever a certain entity is disqualified or rendered invisible, unintelligible, or irreversibly discardable. What unites the different logics of production of non-existence is that they are all manifestations of the same rational monoculture." With Susan Leigh Star (1991) we can think of the production of the nonexistent as an accumulation of residuals created in the process of making the world: residuals produced though work that has been invisibilized. What are the absences, the residues, the invisibilized labors that cannot be considered in ontological politics? What is rendered silent in the process of performing ontological politics?
THE FRONTIER OF MATTER
In ontological politics, matter is not just raw material for other social or political ends; rather, matter itself is opened up as a space of expansion. Matter in all its expressions and formations is not a substance with fixed qualities and given potentials; matter is active and creative, complex and enlivened. The shift to the ontological denotes an interest in immersing into this process of self-ordering and in co-acting within it — to let other possible ontologies emerge.
Consider, for example, the nascent field of epigenetics. Over the past decade, a new set of theories and experiments exploring the unpredictable dynamics of gene expression has begun to take center stage in genetics research. The epigenome describes the overall state of a cell in flux, each point in time yielding multiple cascading possibilities for divergence of individual phenotypes. The inert genome is thereby supplemented by a softer, more adaptable, epigenome, incorporating mechanisms capable of responding to the environment, sensing "time" and retaining "memories" that regulate subsequent development. Within myriad microscopic epigenomes, the effects of the wider social and physical environment are translated via biochemical interactions to become an integral part of a fluctuating landscape of gene expression.
I discuss epigenetics in chapter 6 (for an extensive discussion, see the work with my collaborators on this project, Emma Chung, John Cromby, Chris Talbot, and Cristina Tufarelli) but for now I want to highlight that the epigenome as an emerging object of study as well as a theoretical framework (epigenetics) could be described as a set of alternate ontologies that are made by a multiplicity of actors who contribute to the field from many different and often conflicting perspectives and positions. Their specific ways to do research are not primarily shaped by their commitment to some external politics to the field (such as left or right, liberal or emancipatory, or conservative or progressive), not least because many of the actors involved are nonhuman others and do not have such politics. The politics that one can find are intrinsic to epigenetic research, yet their connections go far beyond the field of epigenetics and address broader questions of politics and justice.
I wonder what the ontologies of the epigenome will look like in the next decade when this nascent field will start to take a more definite shape. Which ontologies of the epigenome will develop further, and what will they look like? Which will disappear? How and why? Ontological politics captures this process. Performing ontological politics means to open up matter as a field of exploration, experimentation, and, ultimately, appropriation. Ontological politics conceives matter as a frontier. In every frontier, expansion takes place as inclusion of new territories and entities in a process of continuous creation of new worlds.
COLONIALITY AND PRODUCTIONISM
Every frontier has a promise: to liberate the one who moves into the open space from the limitations that preoccupy life before the frontier opens. The promise of the new frontier of matter is to liberate material action from being dominated solely by social imperatives — class, sexuality, race, power, religion, culture, inequality — and to develop a radical commitment to matter (and to its multiple expressions). But simultaneously every frontier has a secret: in order to expand and include new spaces, entities, and actors, it needs to exercise power over them and silence or oppress some of them in order to make them fit. Ontological politics on the one hand expresses this liberating move — that is, the openness of ontology to co-action of all actors involved and to the multiple possibilities within it — and on the other hand administers its secrets: How many actors can be included? How? What is going to happen with the rest of them?
Every moving frontier is contemporaneous with a form of liberation, and simultaneously it enacts oppression. In the American frontier, the laborers who escape the wage labor market of British America to become independent peasants and artisans from the seventeenth century onward move into the frontier to the West only to bring savagery, destruction, and the dispossession of land. In the Eastern Cape frontier of South Africa, the opposition of the Afrikaners to British colonial power and their subsequent migration came only to consolidate militarized white supremacy and extreme nationalism.
The frontier opens as moving people (most often violently) appropriate new territories and then include and integrate them into their realities. And as people move, the new territories absorb them into their workings and transform them. The logic of every frontier is the logic of inclusion, the colonial inclusion of hinterland and the outside into some form of control that spreads well beyond the actual frontier itself. The term coloniality of power describes an order of power that emerged as a result of colonialism and colonial administrations but survived their later demise to structure culture, knowledge, economy, and our ways of being. Colonialism shaped modernity to such extent that modernity itself would be impossible without it: modernity/coloniality. And with it also our epistemic practices and systems of knowledge are constituted by the modernity/coloniality nexus. The frontier of matter, this newly opened frontier that operates as an epistemic appropriation of matter, exists within the practical logic of the coloniality of power. The frontier of matter operates within "modernity's epistemic territory," inescapably.
In the movement of the frontier, territory is considered to be a space on which nobody has property rights and therefore it is open for appropriation, terra nullius. It is only because of this rendering of the territory as unclaimed that the frontier legitimizes its moves and the erasure of already existing systems of knowledge, local epistemic traditions, and the communities that sustain them. In modernity's epistemic territory, mapping space, representing its entities, and shaping new political institutions in order to include these entities (and exclude and, often, erase others) is the way the frontier expands. Through these processes the frontier is turned productive, in a double sense: the space of the frontier is turned into a space of production, that is, a space that is produced through relations of forces and power as well as a space that is gradually docked to existing systems of the production of goods, knowledge, and commodities.
The appropriation of the frontier is a double act of organization: it is organized as a political space through processes of representation, and it is organized as a productive space by turning it to an accumulation system. Inclusion is about enclosing the new spaces into a regime of representation and a regime of accumulation that sustains the power of coloniality. So also in our case: when matter becomes a frontier, the attempt is to make it productive — politically productive — as well as render it compatible with the existing mode of production. Ontological politics are these specific practices that perform the inclusion of new formations of matter into the accumulation regime of current economies; I discuss specific ways that this happens in chapter 2 and again in chapter 7. As the frontier of matter moves, its political institutions also move. This necessitates the creation of new political forums to accommodate these emerging formations. Including nonhuman actors into polity is about rendering them amenable to being represented; as they become representable, that is, as they become identifiable within the coordinates of an existing mode of political organization, they pressure existing political institutions to change and to accommodate these new actors.
Ontological politics is a description of practices that portray how the frontier of matter advances and that unfold within spaces marked by colonialism. I am not saying that ontological politics is a colonial enterprise (although this may be true in many cases). What I am saying is that ontological politics exists within the modern epistemic territory that is constituted by its coloniality: ontological politics makes the frontier of matter, modernity's ultimate frontier, move. Thinking politics in technoscience with ontological politics allows us, as I discuss in chapter 5, to challenge widespread anthropocentric understandings of what matter is and to introduce the idea of the coexistence of multiple contingent possibilities that emerge in the process of movements of matter. Ontological politics describes the forces exercising pressure on the outer limits of constituted political institutions to differentially include more human and nonhuman actors, relations, and ontologies in a given political configuration in order to allow for these ontologies to emerge and become embedded in our social and material worlds.
The epigenome, a neuron, an MRI scanner, or a new subsea fiber-optic cable are not just actors that are differentially enacted by existing social institutions and people to create new forms of existence and new ecological configurations; they are also embedded in actual epistemic and value production processes that maintain the existence of the frontier. In other words, ontological politics is politics performed in order to keep the frontier of matter moving by activating new material processes, allowing multiple possibilities, including new material actors, representing them, assigning them specific rights and positions, inserting them into the political sphere, extracting value from them, and speculating on their value to multiply financial yields. Ontological politics is not just a theoretical tool depicting politics within technoscience, but also the modus operandi of rendering matter productive, in the double sense of productionism: politically representable as well as creating value and innovation.
MATTER AND JUSTICE
What would it mean to question the implicit coloniality of the frontier of matter? To what extent can material actors object to their enlisting in the productive machine of the frontier? Is it possible to think of actors escaping modernity's epistemic territory? How can the epigenome object to specific meanings and functions that it is expected to perform in the emerging research on epigenetics? Can a transatlantic fiber-optic cable challenge its specific use by a certain consortium of companies that maintain it and exploit its labors? What labors do these actors do that remain nonexistent, absent, invisible while many other of their labors are fully absorbed in the productive regime of the frontier? As I argue throughout this book, in order to be able to start looking for answers to these questions we will need to challenge the assumption that the inclusion of these actors in constituted political institutions will securely bring their absent voices and their invisibilized work to light.
With Star (1983, 1991) I am interested in the organization of the invisible and erased work that remains hidden when ontological politics is performed, rather than the organization of visible work as such (and this pertains to human and nonhuman actors alike, as I discuss later in the book). Erasure and inclusion coexist in the modern/colonial epistemic territory. Rather than inclusion, then, in the chapters that follow I aim to explore alternative political practices that attempt to disconnect and redraw the conditions and terms of this epistemic territory, "a delinking that leads to de-colonial epistemic shift and brings to the foreground other epistemologies, other principles of knowledge and understanding and, consequently, other economy, other politics, other ethics" (Mignolo, 2007, p. 453).
Following Jacques Rancière (1998), my starting point is not inclusion but the emergence of the invisibilized and the imperceptible, of those who have no place within existing normalizing political institutions. I understand politics here as a deep dispute over the existence of those who have no part in constituted institutions or even of those who refuse to participate in them. And this form of politics within the frontier of matter happens when those who have no part change the material conditions of existence in a way that cannot be overheard or simply included in existing political institutions. In chapter 3, for example, I discuss this in the case of people's migration and in chapter 7 in relation to AIDS activism. I am thinking with Starhawk (2002) of a form of politics that is not exercised as the power over a territory or simply a power that appropriates what is within it; rather it is politics as power with, the power of creating alternative common forms of life that reorder the language and practices of existing political arrangements of constituted power.
Instead of asking questions such as "How can we include different humans and nonhumans in our institutions?" "What is matter in itself?" or "Who is not included?" I focus on how actors create alternative ecologies of existence that become inhabited by these silenced and absent others, by those who have been rendered residual and invisible. Rather than exploring with ontological politics the making of different ontologies, I am interested in a decolonial politics of matter: politics that, by instituting direct changes on the material level of existence, challenge existing conditions of inclusion and the idea of inclusion that rests on epistemic coloniality. Deleuze in his homage to François Châtelet points out: "No science, but rather a politics of matter, since man is entrusted with matter itself" (Deleuze, 2005, p. 717). This is a politics of matter not because humans are in charge of matter but because certain groups of humans and nonhumans can continue to exist only to the extent that they develop other alternative entanglements with matter. Matter is hope. Ontology is desire (see chapter 4 for further discussion).
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction 11. Decolonial Politics of Matter 11
Part I. Movements
2. Biofinancialization as Terraformation 27
3. Ontological Organizing 49
Part II. History Remix
4. Activist Materialism 79
5. Insurgent Posthumanism 94
Part III. Alterontologies
6. Brain Matter 117
7. Compositional Technoscience 138
8. Crafting Ontologies 160
Acknowledgments 209
Notes 211
References 257
Index 323
What People are Saying About This
“A provocative call to craft new forms of life—alterontologies—within and against the biofinancial and technoscientific enclosures of advanced capitalism. Speculative and politically engaged, yet firmly grounded in the dynamic materiality of existing worlds, Experimental Practice introduces us to social science fiction—a mode of research and writing that engages with the forces of matter to imagine new ways of being in common. Dimitris Papadopoulos gives us what we most urgently need: a guide for radical politics in the posthuman age.”
"In this insightful work of social theory, science studies, feminist theory, and autonomist thought, Dimitris Papadopoulos asks how we might conceive of the work of demanding social and political change, and how we might revamp the concept of ontological politics. This book offers a set of deeply important, thoughtfully posed, and often brilliant interventions. There is both an urgency and a thoughtfulness to Papadopoulos's work that is sorely needed at this moment.”