Inoperativity and Infrastructure as Material Politics and Manifest Vulnerability

For Butler (2015), thinking of infrastructure as intrinsic to politics arises from the embodied—and therefore vulnerable, exposed, dependent, and relational— character of being human, which includes vulnerability and exposure to, dependency on, and relationship with a multitude of non-human things. As she writes, “we cannot understand bodily vulnerability outside this conception of its constitutive relations to other humans, living processes, and inorganic conditions and vehicles for living” (p. 130). The vulnerability that structures our relations to these others is exposed in moments of infrastructural lack or failure, but Butler’s (2016) key insight is that the condition of being vulnerable precedes these moments and persists after them. As she puts it in a later essay, “It was not as if we were, as creatures, not vulnerable before when infrastructure was working, and then when infrastructure fails, our vulnerability comes to the fore” (p. 13). Vulnerability attaches to the relational, performative, dependent quality of being human in the world. Infrastructure is not the cause of this vulnerability but one of the names for it. According to Butler (2016), “relationality includes dependency on infrastructural conditions,” and it calls for “theorizing the human body as a certain kind of dependency on infrastructure, understood complexly as environment, social relations, and networks of support and sustenance by which the human itself proves not to be divided from the animal or from the technical world” (p. 21). Butler is neither first nor alone in thinking about deep relationality as intrinsic to being human, nor in extending this relationality to a broad range of non-human others, including the animal, organic, inorganic, and technological others whose agency we are vulnerable to and who are vulnerable to ours. The list of thinkers following this line of thought and exploring its implications is very long (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 2016; Peters, 2015; Tsing, 2015). It includes, significantly, a number of Indigenous thinkers, who teach us about relational ontology as it exists across a broad and diverse range of Indigenous philosophies, cultures, and practices, both historically and contemporarily (TallBear, 2018; Todd, 2016; Watts, 2013; Whyte, 2016; see also de la Cadena, 2015; Kohn, 2013; Viveiros de Castro, 2015). It includes many thinkers who see this orientation and the ethics arising from it as crucial to the possibility of ecologically viable futures (Alaimo, 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Some have explored the question of whether and how these relations might be understood specifically as political relationships, a proposition complicated by customary associations of political action with reasoned speech and deliberation, and by the fact that the non-human others with whom we might otherwise have a political relationship typically do not speak (or, at least, do not speak typically) (Baker, 2020; Bennett, 2010; Connolly, 2017; Latour, 2004; Povinelli, 2016; Stengers, 2010). This is where Butler’s (2016) intervention becomes particularly generative, in that it suggests the possibility of infrastructure as the form such a politics might take. As she describes, it is commonplace to cast vulnerability and political agency 236 Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 46(2) as opposites and “to assume that vulnerability is disjoined from resistance, mobilization and other forms of deliberate and agentic politics” (p. 22). This opposition relies on an account of politics as a conversation between autonomous, self-determining, sovereign subjects that feminist thought has long since exposed to be a masculinist fantasy. Politics takes place under the sign of heteronomy, a response to the inescapable experience of being acted upon by others. It is not the expression or assertion of our autonomy—it is the mediation of our ongoing and shared vulnerability. As Butler (2016) avers, if we reject the binary between vulnerability and political agency, and understand them to be complementary rather than opposed or mutually negating, we can think about politics in new modes. These are modes in which “vulnerability is still there, but only now assuming a different form” (p. 23). Butler does not make this argument but infrastructure can itself be understood as a mode of politics under these conditions, a material response to the experience of shared vulnerability between humans and non-humans alike. Infrastructure is not only a name for this shared vulnerability but the very form that politics between and among these beings takes—with politics understood as the mediation of their mutual dependency. In her essay “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times,” 

Lauren Berlant (2016) suggests that “one task for makers of critical social form is to offer not just judgment about positions and practices in the world, but terms of transition that alter the harder and softer, tighter and looser infrastructures of sociality itself” (p. 393). The political subject of infrastructure is not just the subject for whom infrastructure is an instrument of various violent and failing sovereignties, or the site for contesting them. This subject is also a maker of critical social form (not just arguments), a carrier of the destituent powers of building, repairing, caring, provisioning, planning, and kin-making. These are the powers of “non-sovereign relationality” that Berlant (2016) describes as “the foundational quality of being in common” (p. 394). Enacting these powers takes the material form of infrastructure, not speech. Infrastructure is the form that politics takes in troubling times, under conditions where existing political economies become or are rendered inoperative, a way of mediating relations between humans, and between humans and the non-speaking others they depend on and who depend on them. Under these conditions, “the question of politics becomes identical with the reinvention of infrastructures for managing the unevenness, ambivalence, violence and ordinary contingency of contemporary existence” (Berlant, 2016, p. 394, emphasis added). Infrastructures become the means, or staging ground, for “the nonreproductive making of life”—for making lives that do not simply reproduce the relations that structure the present, ad infinitum. In this sense, Berlant (2020) has recently described herself as “an infrastructuralist”: “I am interested in the build. I am interested in how we build out difference from within the world we are living in … trying to build out infrastructures for collective life that refuse the one we are living” (n.p.). Here, infrastructure names the collective practice of literally making a difference.

[...]

A similar orientation toward infrastructure and politics is evident in Métis scholar Michelle Murphy’s (2018) stirring account of the politics of “alterlife,” the politics of anti-racist, queer, and decolonial reproductive and environmental justice: Alterlife resides in ongoing uncertain aftermaths, continuingly challenged by violent infrastructures, but also holding capacities to alter and be altered—to recompose relations to land and sociality, to love and sex, to survival and persistence, to undo some forms of life and be supported by others, to become alter-wise in the aftermath of hostile conditions, to surprise. (p. 117) The surprises of alterlife take infrastructural forms. Alterlife politics attend to “what relations should be dismantled, refused and shunned … and which kinships, supports, structures, and beings get to have a future” (p. 110), questions whose answersinvariably take the form of infrastructural dismantling and making, respectively. In particular, this politics takes the form of dismantling infrastructures that reproduce the separation of certain human bodies from others, and from lands, waters, air, and non-human beings to enable the extraction, exploitation, and exhaustion of the latter for the benefit of the former. And it takes the form of building and supporting infrastructures that materialize being otherwise, in ways that enable life chances and careful, responsible relations, instead of selectively and unequally disabling and destroying them.

- Barney, Infrastructure and the Form of Politics

Infrastructure, Design, Architecture

The term infrastructure is an ambiguous and drifting signifier. This ambiguity has led to several key challenges for scholars of the built environment. The first challenge has to do with the ambit of the word itself. Nineteenth-century French engineers coined the term to refer to the substrate of support for rail lines—the structure beneath the structure.1 The term spread through transatlantic and colonizing networks, particularly among civil engineers engaged in road building and water projects, as well as military officers concerned with defense works and territorial control. Gradually it came to refer not only to structures below, but also between—physical networks connecting one node or place to another in a system. Today, we regard infrastructure as both visible and invisible, below and between, material and immaterial. It is no longer just the packed gravel substrate under the train tracks, it is also the train tracks themselves, and it is the switches, signals, chronometers, sheds, rotundas, terminals, and operational standards that comprise the system of rail transit, and it is the bodies, social relations, and visions of the world remade by high velocity travel.2

[...]

Given that design is a fundamental human capacity, architecture, as the design of built form, is a practice broadly shared within and across cultures. In popular lexicon, architecture is often used to refer to unique, geospatially fixed buildings designed by professionally credentialed architects—the grand edifice, the monument, the iconographic structure. Likewise, definitions of architecture by architects tend to re-enforce their status as creative geniuses responsible for transcendent works of art. As Jay Pritzker famously declared, “architecture is intended to transcend the simple need for shelter and security by becoming an expression of artistry.”9 Such a definition implies that shelter and security are “simple needs,” rather than immensely complex and creative human endeavors, and that the development of human habitat is devoid of artistry unless it involves the work of an architect. While great monuments and edifices certainly count as expressions of architecture, architecture itself is not reducible to such objects; rather, it instantiates through generative practices of form making, temporal marking, and aesthetic expression grounded in human social relations. These practices unfold along continuum from professional to untrained, fixed to mobile, unique to repetitive, integral to modular and permanent to momentary. Architecture emerges from and reflects constant negotiation among people over the production of space, the terms of exchange, the vectors of mobility, and the making of lived worlds.10 The task of architectural history is to account for these negotiations over time, and the artifacts, spatial forms, and social relations that they engender.

 [...]

Nevertheless, as Stephen Parcell has ably demonstrated, while architecture changes over time, so do our definitions of what constitutes architecture.11 In the mid-nineteenth century a powerful discourse took hold around the notion that the locus of authority to design inheres in the credentialed professional. This conceptualization of design as specialized knowledge acquired through the rigors of training parallels the broader emergence of institutional and discursive practices that codified expertise in fields from medicine to public health, social welfare, education, civil engineering, and planning. The professions gained organizational strength as gatekeepers in the production of scarcity around knowledge, and as managers of the complexity of a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing society.12 As such, they not only served the interests of powerful state and market actors, but also their own interests as a middling class, with narratives constructed to justify their existence. And indeed, who does not want to traverse a bridge designed by an engineer, or send their children to learn from a qualified teacher?

- Jospeh Heathcott

Experimental Politics Depends on an Ability to Inlcude the Basic Needs and Limits of Those Things and Beings on Whom Life Depends

"Other common illustrations of absolutising god-views and universalising projections relate to, for instance, mystical relationships with sentient river beings; ways of knowing nature through a direct connection with it; and listening to the voices of the fish, amongst other examples. We do not deny the existence and importance of these (highly diverse) onto-epistemologies. Our point is that grassroots, indigenous, and campesino organisations often mobilise their vernacular, historically-rooted, and more-than-human onto-epistemologies in conjunction with consciously and strategically designed more-than-human socio-natures. The latter is a legitimate and understandable political-strategic tool for empowerment and self-defence. But it should be recognised as a specific politically devised entrance to interpreting, re-presenting, and ordering the real. By generically framing such specific representations and ways of knowing as objectified 'onto-epistemological facts' and 'truthful realities', engaged academics and activists fail to understand this political practice. Such failure is problematic.

One illustration of this failure is how the Universal Declaration of River Rights (just like numerous NGOs and academia) refers to 'factual' grassroots worldviews while stating and proclaiming generically that "(…) rivers in particular are sacred entities possessing their own fundamental rights (…)" (GARN, 2024). In multi-diverse everyday realities, however, river communities may often dynamically shape a 'strategic nature'. We would like to raise the alert against interpreting these complex onto-epistemological realities in a reductionist and de-politicised manner (cf. Li, 2013). As we ourselves have also often witnessed (in over three decades of long-term action-research collaborations with grassroots communities), strategic river representations sprout from inventive contextual struggles. Herein, sentient rivers are often purposefully mobilised as apolitical divine agents by local villagers. They "(…) resignify 'nature' itself as an anchor for social justice and collective ethics. They believe that incorporating [mountain deities] and [sacred sites] into their local environmental movements offers the only viable strategy for counteracting the power of extractive industries" (Bacigalupo, 2022: 181; see also Dukpa et al., 2019)."

 

Yes they are all fictional constructions and should be left to local contingencies. However, the thing that makes the truly about justice is the techniques through which they are able to directly involve the rhythms, limits and needs of those other codependent beings and forces, into politics. This is the only ‘real’ that can be spoken of, a real that like the movement of planets and stars is never fixed or stable and changes given a shift in vantage temporal or spatial vantage point, but nonetheless has a rhythm and balance which can only be radically ignored by those world building practices, with disastrous consequences for life. This by no means suggests that there can ever be a truth in social constructs of relation, and by no means suggests that the rhythms of nonhumans and cosmic bodies for example, are ever deterministic of the political, but any way of ordering the social must attune itself to and involve those rhythms, less it be very short lived – which might also be fine!

llustrative of this danger is the colonialism-born myth that indigenous peoples would generically disavow (collective or individual) land and water rights. Combined with the ecocentric RoN slogan 'Nature has no owner but itself', this may deeply compromise the everyday livelihoods of peasant, indigenous and fisher communities. It does not help to redress historical land dispossession and water theft and may deny them legitimate property rights. The granting of personhood rights to the New Zealand Whanganui River and Te Urewera territory has received international praise. However, as Coombes (2021: 38) explains, land restitution and territorial ownership were indigenous key claims, "so tribal members were surprised that their claims were later translated into deliberations about rights-of-nature". Many Māori associated nature’s personhood policies with "diversionary tactics intended to bypass our ownership claims (…). They divert attention from a long history of Māori activism to recover ancestral lands" (Coombes, 2021: 44, 51).

It is certain that mystifying, essentialising, and functionalising indigeneity is a common practice in state-centred and neoliberal recognition politics (Hale, 2004; Li, 2010), allowing "compatible identities and claims" while opposing transformative and redistributive reforms. This is a litmus test for RoN and RoR strategies, too. Coombes says, "Attempts to discredit indigenous ownership claims are an important context for the sudden appreciation of personhood approaches (…) any gains from award of personhood are at the expense of aspirations to repatriate homelands" (2021: 36). 

Must be about common land – not RoN that can be an elite trojan horse to circumvent ecosocial justice, or worse dispossess campesinos of riverine environments. The issue is when any of these instruments are used as mechanisms of exclusion in any form. The goal is never exclusionary protection, but must instead be based in the establishment of commoning substantiated by enforceable law. 

Second, Roth et al. (2015) and Boelens (2015) have pointed out that re-cognition means "knowing again but reinterpreting within a particular ontological framework" – the ontological framework of the recogniser. When related to nature, such recognition therefore implies un-recognising nature as an object and defining it as a subject. The definition of such a specific 'nature subject' is intrinsically accompanied by strategies aimed at governing, steering, and protecting this same subject and its defined characteristics. More than just the acknowledgement that nature is to be addressed as a subject, it deals with the fundamental issue of what kind of subject nature is (or is projected to be), according to whom, why, and with what impacts. This opens the field of subject-making or 'subjectification' (Foucault, 1982, 2008), which is not new but part of a long tradition. Throughout history, state bureaucracy, scientists, policy institutes, and other influential actors have ontologically and socio-technically constructed their objects and subjects to be imagined and governed (e.g. Hommes et al., 2020; Mills-Novoa et al., 2020; De Jong et al., 2024). For this, they have named, normed, and naturalised nature, water, rivers, rights, identities, and organisations, turning them into foci of governance.

Architectures for Losing the World

Non-typological architecture is this phenomenon of when infrastructure or architecture—its prescribed functions, its designed functions, its programme—and in the case of architects, a driven rejection of typology, of the dominant spatial programmatic configuration, of composition in architecture—is rejected or disappears.

And this kind of, hey, this non-typological architecture emerges from the failure or rejection of an architecture and infrastructure driven by economic reason—its ability, their ability, to capture life and contain it in very, very specific forms.

Now, the mounting, intersecting crises—socio-ecological, political crises, of depression, anxiety, etc.—today essentially all derive from one foundational idea or situation. And that is not only historically situated in the dispossession of common lands, common waters, and more fluid techniques or ways of inhabiting that were very much contingent, situated, embodied…

But also from the ongoing dispossession that entails ways of seeing, knowing, relating, and living that are always in a process of transformation, and cannot be reduced to the abstract logics of economy, technology, and so on.

So, the source of both the malaise and the crisis—both historically and as a historical opening—in the sense that perhaps there has never been such clarity about this situation. Though, we would dispute that from the angle of non-modern peoples, who were or are kinds of mystics, and who can entirely stage the loss of their world. The have architectures for losing the world. 

But this condition generally is ambivalent, in the sense that we’re having this conversation because of this complete destruction of world and crisis that has been precipitated by instrumental reason and rationality—which, of course, finds its clearest manifestation in architecture. That is, in the separation of categories like nature, culture, politics, architecture, infrastructure.

And in the way that dominant social types—which are always constantly being destroyed, like the nuclear family, by economy itself—are also constantly being reterritorialized into these dominant compositional logics.

So when infrastructure and architecture—dominant forms and typologies of infrastructure and architecture—fail, or are rejected… when they fail to fulfil their promise of progress, security, or even basic sustenance, or when they are rejected because they abstractly reduce life and alienate it from relationship, from the power of creation, from our relations with those around us—human and non-human, human and more-than-human…

That’s the condition we call non-typological architecture.

And it’s the most defining condition of our time.

The Ceremonial Compulsion of Forces

 “When one rows, it is not the rowing that moves the boat, but rowing is only a magical ceremony by which one compels a daemon to move the boat” 

- Nietzsche, 1906

Non-typological Architecture, Infrastructure and Technology

Nontypological architecture here refers to a tendency in architectural form to gravitate toward blank, empty space—devoid of subdivisions or features that might anchor it to specific functions or representations. Rather than acting as an exoskeleton that molds specific forms of labor subjectivity, domesticity, or modes of life and production, nontypological architecture tends toward a kind of inoperativity. This condition was already visible in the industrial factory, where innovations in production techniques cleared out preconfigured interior spaces and stripped exterior facades of representational content. The acceleration of technological change has now outpaced any capacity to represent, stabilize, or anticipate future spatial arrangements. As a result, architecture tends to lose its predictive and organizational authority, becoming a kind of fluid infrastructure rather than a symbolic or typological enclosure.

Yet this movement toward fluidity is not purely liberatory. It is accompanied, in equal and opposite measure, by a reterritorialization of forms and representations that reproduce familial, familiar, and functional motifs. These serve to ward off the psychic and social dislocation that might otherwise emerge—a kind of nihilism that could threaten the ontological foundations of the economic order. This economy, understood in its classical sense as oikonomia, is not merely a system of material distribution, but a metaphysical regime rooted in divine order and sovereign exception—a structure that preserves the imagined sanctity of the household in which gods and subjects dwell.

This nontypological tendency is particularly pronounced in post-Fordist architectural environments, such as those of the creative and knowledge economies—visible in the Bürolandschaft model and the sprawling, flexible headquarters of corporations like Meta. Open-plan offices and temporary workspaces visually erase the spatial codifications of traditional labor relations. Yet this erasure is not a neutral gesture. It activates one of the most deeply rooted human faculties: adaptation. The ability to navigate indeterminate spatial and temporal environments becomes a tacit expectation of subjectivity. In this way, spatial formlessness becomes a new kind of disciplinary apparatus—an expression of oikonomia—that harnesses the subject’s pliability in the absence of rigid institutional frameworks.

At the core of this transformation lies a dominant metaphysics: technic. This term, as articulated by Bernard Stiegler and others, refers not merely to tools or machines, but to a foundational mode of world-disclosure and ontological ordering. Technic emerged in ancient proto-states as a mechanism for temporal control, spatial partitioning, and the reproduction of hierarchical power. Today, it has expanded to occupy the totality of temporal and spatial existence. The architectural condition it produces is not one of emancipation, but of paradox: a simultaneous opening of space and closure of possibility. While technological systems extend spatial reach and connectivity, they also constrict the capacity to imagine or enact alternative forms of life beyond dominant economic and logistical imperatives.

This paradox is sustained by the massive development of technology, infrastructure, and spatial distancing—conceived as the micro- and macro-scaling of circuits that reproduce specific relational and productive formations, think microships and think supply and assembly lines that span the entire earth. These circuits do not merely constitute logistical frameworks; they instantiate a broader metaphysics and ontology of extractivism. Within this worldview, all entities—human and nonhuman—are positioned as resources to be used, exploited, and ultimately exhausted. Importantly, this extractive logic persists even as it renders increasingly obsolete or archaic visible disciplinary forms—factories, schools, prisons—that once at the apex of producing and reproducing ontological and social separations and hierarchies.

Under this condition, technology and infrastructure themselves become the dominant form of “architecture.” Not in the conventional sense of visual or aesthetic form, but as the crystallization of the economy’s specific mode of enframing—to draw on Heidegger’s concept of Gestell. These infrastructural forms not only orchestrate production and logistics; they also continuously reproduce subordinated subject and object positions. Those who fall outside these optimized circuits—whether migrant laborers, ecological systems, or precarious populations—are rendered uncared for, unprotected, and unacknowledged as essential to life. In this state of ontological neglect, they are subjected to ongoing cycles of exploitation, depletion, and abuse.

Artifice of Binaries

Binary	Challenged in Indigenous Epistemologies	Challenged in Philosophical Critique of Abstraction
Animate / Inanimate	All beings are relational and potentially sentient (volcanoes, rivers, stones)	Posthumanism and new materialism contest passive matter (Barad, Latour)
Nature / Culture	No divide—landscapes are cultural and spirits are ecological	Latour (We Have Never Been Modern), Descola
Transcendent / Immanent	The sacred is embedded in place, not outside it	Nietzsche, Spinoza, Agamben on immanent theologies
Economy / Politics	Economy embedded in kinship, ritual, land-use; not abstract	Foucault (governmentality), Agamben (oikonomia)
Sacred / Profane	No strict division—ritual life pervades all relations	Bataille, Durkheim, Asad (sacrality as constructed)
Legal / Illegal	Law is oral, customary, embedded in land; not code-based	Benjamin, Derrida (law’s violence, exception)
Wet / Dry	Binary collapses in multispecies ecologies (e.g., seepage, humidity)	Haraway (response-ability in fluid boundaries)
Inside / Outside	Places are porous, interwoven; community is processual	Nancy, Butler (subject formation is relational)
Land / Water	Often indivisible in cosmologies (e.g. water-spirits in land)	New geographies of fluid territories (Massey, Steinberg)
Cosmology / Economy	Intertwined: labor, ritual, and meaning are not separable	Federici, Agamben, Stengers (cosmopolitical critique)
Mind / Body	Knowledge is embodied, sensed, danced, dreamt	Merleau-Ponty, Grosz (embodied cognition)
Reason / Emotion	Affect is epistemic; animals and weather are felt knowers	Ahmed, Lugones (emotional knowledge, decolonial feeling)
Universal / Particular	Place-based universals (e.g., land as teacher)	Haraway (situated knowledges), Dussel (transmodernity)
Subject / Object	Subjectivity distributed across beings and relations	Derrida, Barad, Latour (object-oriented agency)
Living / Dead	Ancestors are alive in land, water, volcano	Mbembe (necropolitics), Indigenous metaphysics
Past / Future	Time spirals or dwells in place; future emerges from land memory	Benjamin (non-linear time), Bergson
Public / Private	Commons ethics collapse this binary; stewardship over ownership	Arendt, Federici, Fraser
Myth / History	Myth is geographic truth; history is storied place	Anzaldúa, Benjamin (history as montage, mythopoetic)
Reality / Representation	Maps, stories, and rituals constitute reality	Baudrillard, Butler (performativity of the real)
Secular / Sacred	No such divide; spirits inhabit all domains	Asad (secularism as a mode of power), Deloria
Individual / Collective	Identity is co-constituted with kin, land, beings	Nancy (being-in-common), Moten
Fixed / Moving	Place is migratory, seasonal, rhythmic	Massey (space-time as eventful)
Disaster / Ceremony Water/Fire	Volcanic eruptions can be cosmological negotiations	Stengers, de la Cadena (event as cosmopolitical rupture)

Cosmogony and Domino, Dominion, Domination

Typologies of the household extend far beyond mere physical arrangements or economic units; they operate at the level of ways of seeing, knowing, and saying what exists and what does not. Households organise knowledge of reality itself: determining what constitutes existence, what tasks and duties are assigned, what origins and destinies are imagined, and how beings—human, nonhuman, animate, inanimate—are situated within broader hierarchies and thus structures of domination and subordination whereby 'desired' effects can be produced and extracted. As such, the household is not only a site of material and social reproduction, but also a site of metaphysical, epistemological, ontological, and political-economic re/production. Through households, concepts of value, duty, kinship, cosmology, and political order are generated and maintained—or sometimes, disrupted and transformed. In this sense, the household is a fundamental unit of world-making.

Beings are Verbs, Life as the Becoming of Entangled Relationships

According to a long-established convention, animism is a system of beliefs that imputes life or spirit to things that are truly inert. But this convention, as I shall show, is misleading on two counts. First, we are dealing here not with a way of believing about the world but with a condition of being in it. This could be described as a condition of being alive to the world, characterised by a heightened sensitivity and responsiveness, in perception and action, to an environment that is always in fl ux, never the same from one moment to the next. Animacy, then, is not a property of persons imaginatively projected onto the things with which they perceive themselves to be surrounded. Rather — and this is my second point — it is the dynamic, transformative potential of the entire fi eld of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence. The animacy of the lifeworld, in short, is not the result of an infusion of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically prior to their differentiation.

One man from among the Wemindji Cree, native hunters of northern Canada, offered the following meaning to the ethnographer Colin Scott. Life, he said, is ‘continuous birth’ (Scott 1989: 195). I want to nail that to my door! It goes to the heart of the matter. To elaborate: life in the animic ontology is not an emanation but a generation of being, in a world that is not pre-ordained but incipient, forever on the verge of the actual (Ingold 2000: 113). One is continually present as witness to that moment, always moving like the crest of a wave, at which the world is about to disclose itself for what it is. In his essay ‘Eye and Mind’ the philosopher Maurice Merleau- Ponty attributed precisely the same kind of sensibility — the same openness to a world-in-formation — to the painter. The painter’s relation to the world, Merleau-Ponty writes, is not a simple ‘physical-optical’ one. That is, he does not gaze upon a world that is fi nite and complete, and proceed to fashion a representation of it. Rather, the relation is one of ‘continued birth’— these are Merleau-Ponty’s very words — as though at every moment the painter opened his eyes to the world for the fi rst time. His vision is not of things in a world, but of things becoming things, and of the world becoming a world (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 167– 68, 181). The painter Paul Klee made much the same point in his Creative Credo of 1920. Art, he famously declared, ‘does not reproduce the visible but makes visible’ (Klee 1961: 76). 

The animic world is in perpetual flux, as the beings that participate in it go their various ways. These beings do not exist at locations, they occur along paths. Among the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic, for example, as the writer Rudy Wiebe has shown, as soon as a person moves he or she becomes a line. People are known and recognised by the trails they leave behind them. Animals, likewise, are distinguished by characteristic patterns of activity or movement signatures, and to perceive an animal is to witness this activity going on, or to hear it. Thus, to take a couple of examples from Richard Nelson’s wonderful account of the Koyukon of Alaska, Make Prayers to the Raven, you see ‘streaking like a flash of fire through the undergrowth’, not a fox, and ‘perching in the lower branches of spruce trees’, not an owl (Nelson 1983: 108, 158). The names of animals are not nouns but verbs.

- Tim Ingold

To Seem is to Be: The Paradigm

 It is possible that to seem, it is to be. And the sun is something seeming, and it is. The sun is an example. What it seems, it is. And in such seeming all things are.

Wallace Stevens 

Technodespotism

"The automatic machinery of a big factory," he writes, "is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been...If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, insofar as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organization. "

Friedrich Engels, On Authority

"Modern Industry sweeps away by technical means the manufacturing division of labor, under which each man is bound hand and foot for life to a single detail operation. At the same time, the capitalistic form of that industry reproduces this same division of labour in a still more monstrous shape; in the factory proper, by converting the workman into a living appendage of the machine ...."

Karl Marx, Captial Volume 1

Syncretism as a method

The method involves binding the familiar, sacred, and formalised-procedural and thus emphatic to those "things" perceived as profane, inanimate, purely made of material substance but also the source of fascination, fear, danger and mystery whether they be a mountain, a river, the sea, a forest, plants and animals, but also the community. It is well know that for many indigenous peoples, and likely due in large part because they have lived in close proximity with the consequences of their actions, rivers, mountains, and other natural formations are sacred because they are not “things” but relations, often kin, and living entities with spirits, memories, and responsibilities.

The form of our relationship to, not to mention our very knowledge of and ability to make relationships to these kinds of entities (themselves beings constituted by webs of relationality) has been depoliticised, and dispossessed by law, technology, distant political institutions, high-speed transportation and communications infrastructure and so on. 

Capitalist Extraction as a Religion

Copper floatation process, Rio Tinto, Mongolia

The techniques involved in extracting and processing copper reminded me of how, amidst the surge in diseases and threats to the increasingly mono cropped and genetically uniform banana species grown for most of the world's consumption, people have had to adopt meticulous practices to maintain these crops. Workers now wear full protective suits, spray themselves, and follow strict behaviors, walking on narrow paths.

Similarly, the extraction of copper from raw materials involves complex technologies, machines, and intricate processes—one of which is froth flotation, which the speaker referred to as "magic." This seemingly innocent and provocative statement has deeper implications, particularly when compared to the religious or ritual practices that anthropology has often labeled as "magic." For instance, the Tohono O'odham's rain ceremonies or the Pueblo sun races are considered forms of sympathetic magic.

I propose that, although indigenous and modern practices stem from entirely different metaphysical frameworks, they are not so different in some crucial ways. In this context, magic is not a superstitious attempt to influence weather patterns or animal behavior unscientifically. Instead, these practices were essential socio-political-cultural-technological processes through which people produced and reproduced the fabric of their culture and reality.

Copper mining, on the other hand, differs in key ways. It does not operate within a network of entangled relationships and dependencies in its environment, as indigenous practices do. Instead, it feeds the accelerating demand for surplus energy production. It is well known that the average American household consumes energy at a rate that would require 5.1 Earths, or 8.1 global hectares, to sustain if everyone lived that way. These numbers are even higher in the suburbs of Arizona near the Resolution Copper mine. However, the immense burden this lifestyle places on life, land, and water cannot be easily seen or heard—it is outsourced, much of it to the Global South, and much of it to China.

Settler Colonialist and Indigenous Land Ontology

SETTLER COLONIALISM AND CAPITALISM

Recent scholarship in Indigenous studies offers insight into the imbrication of these forms. Glen Coulthard (2014) uses Marx’s notion of “primary accumulation” to analyze settler colonialism, but he suggests three important modii cations: a temporal reframing that sees primary accumulation as ongoing rather than something relegated to a “stage” before capitalist accumulation (Harvey 2003; Sanyal 2014); a release from the developmentalism and economic reductionism of orthodox Marxism; and a shit of framing from capitalist to colonial relations. h is last move enables Coulthard to critique the liberal settler state’s emphasis on recognition as the basis for negotiation over land claims and self-governance. Coulthard shows that primary accumulation accomplished through violence is largely replaced in contemporary times with discursive regimes and other ostensibly benign structures, which are in reality imbued with relations of power and domination that further entrench settler colonialism and the extraction of capital from Indigenous lands. Claims to land are ot en established through the doctrine of terra nullius, or empty land, a concept that is still deployed in extant struggles for environmental justice (Kosek 2006; Moreton-Robinson 2004; Voyles 2015; Whyte 2013). Labor is largely ancillary to this endeavor, in which land is remade into property amenable to extracting economic value (Coulthard 2014; Wolfe 2009). Law plays an important role in these transformations, reinforcing a racialized and gendered white settler sovereignty over property that enables Indigenous dispossession, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) explicates in her examination of settler claims in Australia and other Anglophone settler states. Under these regimes, human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship between owner and property.4 Coulthard argues that political recognition of Indigenous peoples in Canada obscures the ongoing settler colonial project of primary accumulation— the drive toward dispossession of Indigenous lands while extracting further sur60 _ Paul Berne Burow, Samara Brock, and Michael R. Dove plus value through resource exploitation—and that any attempt to transcend these structures of domination requires the resuscitation of relationships of mutual obligation between land and people as opposed to deeper engagement with settler-state institutions. Carroll, writing about the Cherokee Nation, also remarks that Indigenous environmental governance represents a dif erent, “relationships-based approach” that allows for “agency of nonhuman beings and the maintenance of relationships with them” (2015: 8). 

It is important to rethink the ontology of land in any context of decolonization. Canadian First Nations’ land claims negotiations are oriented around maintaining access to land and resources for capitalist development. But this may run counter to reliance on that same land for spiritual and material sustenance of varied kinds, including those in opposition to the forces of extractive capital. Shifting subjectivities in relation to land are also addressed by Coulthard’s discussion of the land claims process in Canada. Land is not just a material object but a “way of knowing, of experiencing and relating to the world and with others” (2014: 61). Conceptions of land configure how one relates, not just to land, but to many other actors—human and nonhuman— in the broader community (Nadasdy 2003, 2007). In accepting colonial recognition of their rights to land, Indigenous nations can end up undermining their reciprocal relationships to that land.5 

Although land is central to understanding settler colonialism, it is not the only register of domination (Simpson and Smith 2014). Taiaiake Alfred (1999) calls on Indigenous leaders to turn toward traditional modes of governance and not emulate settler state regimes of recognition that reinscribe settler modes of domination. Indigenous studies scholars also highlight the genealogy of racial categorizations that serve to obscure the territoriality of conquest by creating a homogenous Indigenous space and population (Byrd 2011). The exclusion of nonpropertied and racialized labor in settler states also works to reproduce inequalities, ot en under the guise of environmental stewardship (Cattelino 2015). Relatively little of anthropological literature attends deeply to both the ontologies of land and the politics of those ontologies, despite work in Native American and Indigenous studies that examine ontologies of land within a political context of settler colonialism and dispossession. Vine Deloria (1999, 2001) contrasts settler aesthetic connections to land with ones that are set in a history of “prolonged occupation” in which situated experience is essential to an understanding of sacredness, noting that a sense of respect for land is not the result of an intellectual process, but rather something cultivated through experience. Deloria looks at ceremony and sacrii ce as forms of reciprocity, which challenge settler society to move beyond modes of conservation focused on human use to one that looks at all forms of life and existence.6 In contrast to the unexamined presupposition of much postcolonial theory, settler colonialism is not relegated to the past but instead represents an ongoing structure of dispossession and violence (Wolfe 1999). It challenges the narratives liberal democratic states tell about themselves as inclusive, democratic, and multicultural (Simpson 2014). 

This conventional narrative occludes the fact that many Anglophone states of the Global North were built on a foundation of violence and dispossession. Indigenous inhabitants of these states were removed from the land through genocidal policies that sought forcible assimilation or outright elimination of Indigenous peoples. Wolfe (2011) argues for a genealogy of “post-frontier” strategies for enveloping Indigenous nations into settler states—not just a historicized story of dispossession. These “techniques of settlement” are an important part of how structures of settler colonialism are sedimented into the state, as exemplified by the General Allotment Act of 1887. Wolfe points out that Indigenous peoples are at first violently subjugated— a suppression of Nativeness in all its forms—to the liberal settler state mode of governmentality, which facilitates subsequent assimilationist policies. For example, the undermining of tribal patrimony through the allotment of lands into individually owned plots made property easier Unsettling the Land _ 61 to circulate into the hands of white settlers. Wolfe challenges the idea that removal and assimilation are opposing approaches to governing Native Americans but sees it as dispossession by other means. Allotment is notable for how it disembeds people from their land and removes aboriginal title. here is a double move here in which freed land is acquired by the state, and then the cheap labor of the newly dispossessed is requisitioned in emergent capitalist relations. h e diminution of Indigenous homelands forced many into wage labor as subsistence practices became untenable. Political ecology, especially Indigenous political ecology, can illuminate how subjectivity is linked to the control and dispossession of land.

Unsettling the Land

Indigeneity, Ontology, and Hybridity in Settler Colonialism

Paul Berne Burow, Samara Brock, and Michael R. Dove

Divergent Worlds

Petros Koublis, Tierra, Landscape series

Nonrepresentational, affective interactions with other-than-humans continued all over the world, also in the Andes. The current appearance of Andean indigeneity—the presence of earth-beings demanding a place in politics—may imply the insurgence of those proscribed practices disputing the monopoly of science to define “Nature” and, thus, provincializing its alleged universal ontology as specific to the West: one world (even if perhaps the most powerful one) in a pluriverse. This appearance of indigeneities may inaugurate a different politics, plural not because they are enacted by bodies marked by gender, race, ethnicity, or sexuality demanding rights, or by environmentalists representing nature, but because they bring earth-beings to the political, and force into visibility the antagonism that proscribed their worlds. Most importantly, this may transform the war that has ruled so far silently through a singular biopolitics of improvement, into what Isabelle Stengers calls a cosmopolitics: a politics where “cosmos refers to the unknown constituted by these multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulation of which they would eventually be capable” (Stengers 2005:995).

An Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond “Politics” 

- Marisol de la Cadena 

Syncretism as a Method

Ilustración de la crónica de Martín de Murúa que muestra al inca Pachacútec en el Coricancha.

It’s inconceivable that in the 21st century,God still has to be defined according to the European standards. . . . We think the life of Jesus is the Great Light coming from Inti Yaya (Paternal and Maternal Light that supports it all),whose aim is to deter anything that doesn’t let us live in justice and brotherhood among human beings and in harmony with Mother Nature. . . . The Pope should note that our religions NEVER DIED, we learned how to merge our beliefs and symbols with the ones of the invaders and oppressors.

—Humberto Cholango, May 20071


How can we present a proposal intended, not to say what is, or what ought to be, but to provoke thought, a proposal that requires no other verification than the way in which it is able to “slow down” reasoning and create an opportunity to arouse a slightly different awareness of the problems and situations mobilizing us?

—Isabelle Stengers, 2005

From INDIGENOUS COSMOPOLITICS IN THE ANDES: Conceptual Reflections beyond “Politics”
MARISOL DE LA CADENA

Mystics and Stable Presence

Late 15th or early 16th century French manuscript of The Mirror of Simple Souls, Marguerite Porete 

The mystic is the enemy of the Church and institutions of governance and extraction because they practice unification with God and thus cannot be subject to the techniques of destablisation that characterise everything from language to roles, tasks, morals, names, attributes and so on. These attributes - all derivative from original sin - are always fictional and impossible to achieve or coincide with, and therefore leave the subject in a state of constant uncertainty and instability. 

Institutions of governance, which are always institutions of existential economy, are concerned primarily with the destablising and disorienting act, but will also provide the means, through a form of economy which constantly extracts and exploits at the same time that it provides a remedy to the crisis. Often, the remedy itself is in fact the source of the crisis of stability, orientation, and presence. The latter is clear in the example of national identity, or parenthood, where one can never fully identify with, or live up to many of its supposed ideals and associations, and yet they cling to these 'refuges' or shells at the same time to get a sense of orientation and distinct presence in the world.  

Mystics are heretics because in order unify with that which is ineffable, transcendent, and thus absolutely stable, one must develop a clearly defined practice that takes them to the edge of their sense of presence or distinctness as a being. Mystics unify with, or are absorbed into god's presence, god simply being the unknowable, ineffable totality. They shed all of their offices, stations, predicates, and therefore they approach a kind of stability in emptiness and detachment, which flips into a wholeness and belonging, in a total unknowing which flips into a knowing. They thus inhabit a marriage of opposites, syncretically, where neither one nor the other can reach some kind of final state of resolution or realisation, but can only approach each other together. 

Type

Type is a form of resonance pattern, maintained by the frequency and rhythms of a specific mode of relationality. 

Theoria as contemplation beyond intellectual seeing

God's appearance to Moses in the burning bush was often elaborated on by the Early Church Fathers,[39] especially Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335 – 395),[40][5][41] realizing the fundamental unknowability of God;[39][42] an exegesis which continued in the medieval mystical tradition.[43] Their response is that, although God is unknowable, Jesus as person can be followed, since "following Christ is the human way of seeing God."[44]

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150 – 215) was an early proponent of apophatic theology.[45][5] Clement holds that God is unknowable, although God's unknowability, concerns only his essence, not his energies, or powers.[45] According to R.A. Baker, in Clement's writings the term theoria develops further from a mere intellectual "seeing" toward a spiritual form of contemplation.[46] Clement's apophatic theology or philosophy is closely related to this kind of theoria and the "mystic vision of the soul."[46] For Clement, God is transcendent and immanent.[47] According to Baker, Clement's apophaticism is mainly driven not by Biblical texts, but by the Platonic tradition.[48] His conception of an ineffable God is a synthesis of Plato and Philo, as seen from a Biblical perspective.[49] According to Osborne, it is a synthesis in a Biblical framework; according to Baker, while the Platonic tradition accounts for the negative approach, the Biblical tradition accounts for the positive approach.[50] Theoria and abstraction is the means to conceive of this ineffable God; it is preceded by dispassion.[51]

According to Tertullian (c. 155–c. 240):


[T]hat which is infinite is known only to itself. This it is which gives some notion of God, while yet beyond all our conceptions – our very incapacity of fully grasping Him affords us the idea of what He really is. He is presented to our minds in His transcendent greatness, as at once known and unknown.[52]

Saint Cyril of Jerusalem (313–386), in his Catechetical Homilies, states:


For we explain not what God is but candidly confess that we have not exact knowledge concerning Him. For in what concerns God to confess our ignorance is the best knowledge.[53]Filippo Lippi, Vision of St. Augustine, c. 1465, tempera, Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) defined God aliud, aliud valde, meaning 'other, completely other', in Confessions 7.10.16,[54] wrote Si [enim] comprehendis, non est Deus,[55] meaning 'if you understand [something], it is not God', in Sermo 117.3.5[56] (PL 38, 663),[57][58] and a famous legend tells that, while walking along the Mediterranean shoreline meditating on the mystery of the Trinity, he met a child who with a seashell (or a little pail) was trying to pour the whole sea into a small hole dug in the sand. Augustine told him that it was impossible to enclose the immensity of the sea in such a small opening, and the child replied that it was equally impossible to try to understand the infinity of God within the limited confines of the human mind.[59][60][61]

Quarrel over values

Once we throw off the evolutionary shackles that still implicitly dominate our thinking on such matters, and realize that politics has always existed, such questions become far easier to address. After all, what is politics, in the final analysis, but a collection of quarrels over contrasting conceptions of what is valuable in human life?

Risk and Insurance

is not all architecture a manifestation of risk and insurance?

insurance that manages risk at all levels, from the risk of immediate material loss, to the risk of attack, the risk of famine, to the risk of an inability to make the kinds of relationships that not only allow one to survive but to be at home in the world, to understand it, to unmake and make it, or to at least survive it. 

but for example, the risk of depression (and hence the tendency towards lack of motivation to produce and even consume) is every bit as much a product of the form of architecture and the urban, as it is mitigated by its particular forms. Architecture since the rise of industrialization has been involved in a dialectical process of increasing risk, while mitigating it at the same time.

but capitalist insurance (for profit m - i - m) assesses risks in terms of financial cost.

Distribution

Architecture and Distribution

The distribution of blackmail, power, and resources and the distribution of the surplus of the community's productive output 

What a community does with its surplus defines the community

Power, agency, the ability to cause desired effects in the other

Authority, the legitimate use of power

Resources, 'property' (if the concept exists) and surplus 

Subject matter [Sachgehalt] and Truth Content [Wahrheitsgehalt]

Benjamin illuminates this passage, in which philology and history find their most authentic connection, with a reference to his essay on 'Elective Affinities'. 7 It is worth quoting this passage at length, since it defines the relationship between the two fundamental concepts of 'subject matter' [Sachgehalt] and 'truth content' [Wahrheitsgehalt]. 

Critique is concerned with the truth content of a work of art, the commentary with its subject matter. The relationship between the two is determined by that basic law of literature according to which the work's truth content is the more relevant the more inconspicuously and intimately it is bound up with its subject matter. If therefore precisely those works turn out to endure whose truth is most deeply embedded in their subject matter, the beholder who contemplates them long after their own time finds the realia all the more striking in the work as they have faded away in the world. This means that subject matter and truth content, united in the work's early period, come apart during its afterlife; the subject matter becomes more striking while the truth content retains its original concealment. To an ever-increasing extent, therefore, the interpretation of the striking and the odd, that is, of the subject matter, becomes a prerequisite for any later critic. One may liken him to a paleographer in front of a parchment whose faded text is covered by the stronger outlines of a script referring to that text. Just as the paleographer would have to start with reading the script, the critic must start with commenting on his text. And out of this activity there arises immediately an inestimable criterion of critical judgment: only now can the critic ask the basic question of all criticism - namely, whether the work's shining truth content is due to its subject matter or whether the survival of the subject matter is due to the truth content. For as they come apart in the work, they decide on its immortality. In this sense the history of works of art prepares their critique, and this is why historical distance increases their power. If, to use a simile, one views the growing work as a funeral pyre, its commentator can be likened to the chemist, its critic to an alchemist. While the former is left with wood and ashes as the sole objects of his analysis, the latter is concerned only with the enigma of the flame itself: the enigma of being alive. Thus the critic inquires about the truth whose living flame goes on burning over the heavy logs of the past and the light ashes of life gone by.

- Agamben on Benjamin

Happiness and History

 'In considering history one can also adopt the viewpoint of happiness, but history is not the site of happiness.' Hence the emergence, in the Hegelian philosophy of history, of the sombre figure of 'great historical individuality' in which is incarnated 'the soul of the world'. 'Great men' are merely instrumental in the forward march of the universal Spirit. Like individuals, 'they do not know what is commonly held as happiness'. 'Once they have reached their goal, they sag like empty sacks.'

Agamben on Hegel 

Autnomy and Opression

Ad Reinhardt, 1951

...only on the back of a material surplus can culture become autonomous. By "autonomous" I mean of course not "independent of any material context," which we can all agree is bourgeois-idealist, but something much more challenging and interesting, such as "autonomous of those subservient political and ideological functions in church, court, and state which culture had traditionally fulfilled." This can happen only when a society has the material means to support a specialized caste of professional artists and intellectuals, and when the growth of the market is such that these people can now become independent of the state or the governing class and become dependent for their livelihood on market forces instead.

Art becomes relatively autonomous of its material conditions precisely by being more firmly integrated into the economic, not by being cut adrift from it. To register both the delights and disasters of this historical moment-that is to say, to consider it dialectically, as both oppression and emancipation-requires a thinking-on-both-sides of which postmodern theory has so far proved itself lamentably incapable. Autonomy frees you [the cultural producer in particular] from being the [obviously] hired hack of the rulers, allows art to become for the first time critique, and permits the artwork itself to show forth in its very forms an autotelism which rebukes the brutal utilitarianism of its surroundings. There is also a considerably more downbeat side of the story, but one rather that is less in need of being rehearsed. The point, anyway, is that anyone who thinks that culture's historical autonomy of material functions is just a bad thing, like smoking or salt, is a moralist rather than a materialist; and that this partial, relative autonomy of material conditions is itself the effect of material conditions. It is this, not some shop-soiled doctrine about the need to relate culture to context, that is specific about the historical materialist contribution to the argument. It is this, not some shop-soiled doctrine about the need to relate culture to context, that is specific about the historical materialist contribution to the argument.

To put the point rather more luridly: only when culture is thoroughly saturated by exchange-value does it wax politically utopian. For it is then that the artifact, fissured down the middle between use- and exchange value, tries to resist the miseries of commodification at the level of the economic by a defiant autotelism at the level of ideology-by the courageous, vainglorious claim that it is its own end, ground, and raison d'etre. This, to be sure, is to make a cultural virtue out of historical necessity: in a desperate last-ditch rationalization, the work must be its own end, since it scarcely seems to have any other very salient function any longer. But this autotelism can then become an image of how men and women themselves might be under altered material conditions. Marx himself, who is a full-blooded aesthete on such questions, holds that the point of socialism is to abolish the instrumental treatment of objects and human beings so that they may delight in the realization of their sensuous powers and capacities just for the sake of it (what he knows as "use-value"), rather than be forced to justify their delight in that autotelism at the tribunal of some higher Reason, World-Spirit, History, Duty, or Utility. 

The chief interest of Goldsmith's words for my purpose, though, lies in their curious prefiguring of the Marxist base/superstructure model laws and sciences being, as Goldsmith recognizes, somehow functional with regard to property relations. And here I move at last to the main theme of my paper. I must confess first that I belong to that dwindling band who still believe that the base/superstructure model has something valuable to say, even if this is nowadays a proportion smaller than those who believe in the Virgin Birth or the Loch Ness monster, and positively miniscule in comparison with those who believe in alien abductions. Surely the Virgin Birth is about as plausible as this static, mechanistic, reductive, economistic, hierarchical, undialectical model of how it is with culture and economics?

Let me first dispel if I can one or two common false assumptions about this now universally reviled paradigm. The first concerns its "hierarchical" nature. The model is indeed hierarchical, but it is hard to see what is so sinister about that. It holds, in short, that some things are more important or crucially determinant than others, as does any human being who, in Edmund Burke's fine phrase, "walks abroad without a keeper." It may be wrong as to what it considers more determinant than what; but you really cannot fault a doctrine for holding that some things are more true or important than others, since there is no doctrine which does not. Every doctrine, for example, implicitly holds that it is itself more true than its opposite, and this includes claims like "there is no truth," or "nothing is more important than anything else."

...

Secondly, the base/superstructure model is not out to argue that law, culture, ideology, the state, and various other inhabitants of the superstructure are less real or material than property relations. It is not, in this sense at least, an ontological claim. We can all happily agree that prisons and museums are quite as real as banks. It is not a claim about degrees of ontological reality; nor is it simply a claim about priorities or preconditions. The assertion that we must eat before we can think ("Eats first, morals second" as Brecht observed) is only an instance of the base/ superstructure model if it carries with it the claim that what we eat somehow shapes or conditions what we think. The doctrine, in short, is about determinations.

- Terry Eagleton, 2000

The "Visible Personality" and the Machinery of Rational or 'Structural' Subordination

quantum computer

As this was later expressed succinctly, “objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder.” There is always a supplement. And finally, these objects and phenomena are not independent, but can only be understood in relation to other realities that constitute them. These realities include larger wholes of which they are parts (which are themselves dynamic, developing phenomena, and thus relative wholes, not closed or completed totalities), and the other elements of these larger wholes.

Dialectical social theory is thus a many-sided critique of the objectification or reification of any aspect of reality. It might seem confusing when dialectical theorists such as Hegel and Marx state that one phenomenon is “identical” with another (e.g. that production and consumption are identical). However, this has nothing to do with any “identity theory” in which particularity and difference are explained away, but quite the opposite. It is an expression of the doctrine of internal relations, the view that the “outside” is “inside’ and that there is no way of insulating a reality from that outside. It expresses the fundamental truth that “negation is determination” and “determination is negation.” It means that we must look both at systemic determination and at the repressed side of any relationship of mutual determination. This is the message of Hegel’s Master–Slave Dialectic, in which he shows that domination produces not only the master’s freedom to consume the product of the slave’s labor, but also the master’s dependence on that labor. This is also the message of Marx’s dialectical analysis of labor, in which he shows that the answer to the question “what do we produce through our labor” is not merely “the product,” but also a system of production, a system of distribution, a system of consumption, relations of production, social classes, wealth and poverty, pride and humiliation, solidarity and alienation, and, not least of all, on the

most general level, ourselves and our social world.

[people are always calculating their position within the assemblage, their advantage relative to others - it is perhaps the aspect of the asymmetrical distribution of resources, recognition, fame and so on which is most crucial to the maintenance of the present order of things]

... in dialectical theory concepts gain both universality and richness of particularity in the course of the analysis. The fundamental flaw of dogmatic theory is that it is excessively attached to certain conceptions of reality and to the material conditions that create those conceptions, and cannot let go of either.

"The center of authority in this new system is no longer a visible personality, an all-powerful king: even in totalitarian dictatorships the center now lies in the system itself, invisible but omnipresent: all its human components, even the technical and managerial elite, even the sacred priesthood of science, who alone have access to the secret knowledge by means of which total control is now swiftly being effected, are themselves trapped by the very perfection of the organization they have invented."

Advocates of the view that domination must be personal argue that there can be no domination without agents of domination. Mumford’s analysis points out the fallacy of reading too much into the need for agents in a system of domination. No one would argue absurdly that a system of social domination could exist without the presence of human beings who act socially. However, the fact that these agents must exist in no way demonstrates that the phenomenon of domination can be reduced to domination by specific agents, nor is it evidence against the existence of domination by systemic forces that do not correlate with specific agents. The actual history of domination shows that the reciprocal interaction and mutual determination between agents and system result in a degree of loss of agency in a strong sense (intentional, purposeful activity) on the part of such agents. To the extent that the system constrains both the dominant and the subordinate, and to the extent that systemic constraints are not the result of intentional acts of the dominant, the simple model of domination as a direct relationship between dominating agents and dominated subjects breaks down.

Some aspects of these themes are developed further in the Frankfurt School’s critical theory of society, which synthesizes the Marxian idea of commodity fetishism, Weberian concepts of bureaucracy and technique, and Freudian themes of desire and the unconscious to help explain the evolution of domination in late capitalist society. The resulting critique shows that an understanding of domination today requires recognition of the central role of the culture industry and mass consumption, the growing tendency toward total administration, and the spread of instrumental rationality to all spheres of existence. In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse points out how the traditional personal and hierarchical dimensions of economic domination have declined in importance. Obviously, this does not mean that the

subjective dimension disappears within this transformed system. Marcuse himself argues that in late capitalism aggressive impulses proliferate within the subjective realm, but find few channels for expression. Lacan describe show desire and demand take on new forms in relation to the other/Other, as these are defined and generated by the dominant system, including both the Symbolic Order and the Imaginary Order that is dialectically related to it. De Certeau and Foucault show that an infinite number of more or less personal and creative tactics of power are generated in response to the system, apart from any strategies of power dictated objectively by the logic of that system. However, despite all these transformations of subjectivity, and indeed because of them, the modes of operation of the system of domination itself become more impersonal. “At its peak, the concentration of economic power seems to turn into anonymity: everyone, even at the very top, appears to be powerless before the movements and laws of the apparatus itself.”23 

Marcuse develops this idea in One Dimensional Man, where he argues that late capitalist, industrial society “alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the ‘objective order of things’ (on economic laws, the market etc.).”24 At the same time that some of the more blatant manifestations of social domination disappear and it becomes more deeply embedded in objective reality, the system also increasingly legitimates itself through consumptionist values based on the fruits of social domination and the domination of nature. The system “sustains its hierarchic structure, while exploiting ever more efficiently the natural and mental resources, and distributing the benefits of this exploitation on an ever-larger scale.”

The role of the commodity, as the primary means of allocating such benefits, becomes central to the legitimation process, displacing to a certain degree such classical mechanisms of domination as authoritarian conditioning and formal ideological indoctrination. The claims of classical ideology could to a certain degree be assessed as objectively either true or false. But when ideology is embedded in the objective order of things (as ideology invades and increasingly pervades the fabric of ethos), it ironically escapes the realm of objectivity. Adorno defines the commodity as “a consumer item in which there is no longer anything that is supposed to remind us how it came into being. It becomes a magical object.”26 In effect, you can’t argue with magic. This is the character of advanced forms of domination: they operate in ways that leave few obvious traces of their functioning. Thus, the Frankfurt School shows that we have entered a period in which domination operates increasingly through two divergent but complementary means, through values of mass consumption and the harnessing of desire (repressive sublimation) on the one hand, and through the mechanism of techno-bureaucratic control and instrumental rationality on the other. These are the two poles of the historic tendency away from traditional dominance and subordination and toward impersonal mechanisms of social domination.

A decisive step in the development of the theory of domination is the convergence of many of these themes in the situationist concept of the society of the spectacle. According to the situationist analysis, the “increasing value of the world of things” finally culminates in the spectacle, a vast system of representation with overwhelming power over a generally pacified mass of consumers and spectators. Debord contends that the principle of commodity fetishism is “absolutely fulfilled in the spectacle, where the perceptible world is replaced by a set of images that are superior to that world yet at the same time impose themselves as eminently perceptible.”27 He calls the result “spectacular domination.”28 This analysis is particularly noteworthy for the ways in which elements of the social imaginary, the social ideology, and the social ethos are fused into a unified yet widely dispersed apparatus of domination that at once intimately pervades everyday life and at the same overawes the masses as a distant and overwhelming power.29 Domination takes on its most impersonal, systemic, and mystified form, even as the techniques of control increasingly address precisely the realm of subjectivity. L’Imaginaire is most certainly au pouvoir, as the subject is controlled above all by the hopeless quest for a satisfying identity through identification with an endless stream of commodified images, the fragments of the good life. The ultimate object of desire becomes the objet petit achat.

- John Clark

Archizoom, Dream Bed

By exploring the realms of differentiated tastes and aesthetic preferences (and doing whatever they could to stimulate those tasks), architects and urban designers have re-emphasized a powerful aspect of capital accumulation: the production and consumption of what Bourdieu (1977; 1984) calls 'symbolic capital.' The latter can be defined as 'the collection of luxury goods attesting the taste and distinction of the owner.' Such capital is, of course, transformed money capital which 'produces its proper effect inasmuch, and only inasmuch, as it conceals the fact that it originates in "material" forms of capital.' The fetishism (direct concern with surface appearances that conceal underlying meanings) is obvious, but it is here deployed deliberately to conceal, through the realms of culture and taste, the real basis of economic distinctions. Since 'the most successful ideological effects are those which have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence,' the production of symbolic capital serves ideological functions because the mechanisms through which it contributes 'to the reproduction of the established order and the perpetuation of domination remain hidden.'

It is instructive to put Krier's search for symbolic richness in the context of Bourdieu's theses. The search to communicate social distinctions through the acquisition of all manner of symbols of status has long been a central facet of urban life. Simm el produced some brilliant analyses of this phenomenon at the turn of the century, and a whole series of researchers (such as Firey in 1945 and Jager in 1986) have returned again and again to consideration of it. But I think it is fair to say that the modernist push, partly for practical, technical, and economic, but also for ideological reasons, did go out of its way to repress the significance of symbolic capital in urban life. The inconsistency of such a forced democratization and egalitarianism of taste with the social distinctions typical of what, after all, remained a class-bound capitalist society, undoubtedly created a climate of repressed demand if not repressed desire (some of which was expressed in the cultural movements of the 1960s). This repressed desire pro bably did play an important role in stimulating the market for more diversified urban environments and architectural styles. This is the desire, of course, that many postmodernists seek to satisfy, if not titillate shamelessly. 'For the middle class suburbanite,' Venturi et al. observe, 'living not in an antebellum mansion, but in a smaller version lost in a large space, identity must come through symbolic treatment of the form of the house, either by styling provided by the developer (for instance, split-level Colonial) or through a variety of symbolic ornaments applied thereafter by the owner.'

The trouble here is that taste is a far from static category. Symbolic capital remains capital only to the degree that the whims of fashion sustain it. Struggles exist among the taste makers, as Zukin shows in an excellent work on Loft living, which examines the roles of 'capital and culture in urban change' by way of a study of the evolution of a real-estate market in the Soho district of New York. Powerful forces, she shows, established new criteria of taste in art as well as in urban living, and profited well off both. Conjoining the idea of symbolic capital with the search to market Krier's symbolic richness has much to tell us, therefore, about such urban phenomena as gentrification, the production of community (real, imagined, or simply packaged for sale by producers), the rehabilitation of urban landscapes, and the recuperation of history (again, real, imagined, or simply reproduced as pastiche). It also helps us to comprehend the present fascination with embellishment, ornamentation, and decoration as so many codes and symbols of social distinction. I am not at all sure that this is what Jane Jacobs had in mind when she launched her criticism of modernist urban planning.

Paying attention to the needs of the 'heterogeneity of urban villagers and taste cultures,' however, takes architecture away from the ideal of some unified meta-language and breaks it down into highly differentiated discourses. 'The "langue" (total set of communications sources) is so heterogeneous and diverse that any singular "parole" (individual selection) will reflect this.' Although he does not use the phrase, Jencks could easily have said that the language of architecture dissolves into highly specialized language games, each appropriate in its own way to a quite different interpretative community.

-  David Harvey on Pierre Bourdieu