Principles of Practice

1. CRISIS SUSPENDS THE NORM
   Crisis is not simply infrastructural failure. It de-universalises the systems we take for granted and temporarily suspends distinctions between architecture and infrastructure, ecology and technology, domestic and territorial, ritual and technical, nature and culture—revealing that these separations were constructed in the first place.

2. MAKING THE REAL EXPLICIT
   We do not invent or idealise entanglement. Water, land, labour, bacteria, forests, weather, law, pipes and households already coproduce one another. Dominant infrastructures obscure, distance and silence these relations. Architecture can make materially explicit what is already real.

3. INFRASTRUCTURE IS THE IN-BETWEEN
   Infrastructure is both a thing and the relationship between things. It is the material, spatial, legal and technical interface through which relations acquire particular forms: between house and spring, kitchen and farmland, city and river, body and energy system.

4. TYPE IS DEEP STRUCTURE OR FORM OF RELATION
   Types are not simply formal models. They crystallise repeatable ways of seeing, relating, governing, working and living. We study types closely in order to understand the relations they reproduce—and how they might be misused, hybridised, loosened or made otherwise.

5. CRISIS IS A CRISIS OF SEPARATION
   The problem is not only that extraction exhausts resources. Crisis is intensified by producing impermeable separations between beings and forces whose reproduction depends upon one another. Abstraction silences the rhythms, needs and limits operating across relations of dependency.

6. FROM SECURITY TO NEGOTIATED VULNERABILITY
   Modern infrastructure promises security through distance, enclosure and the elimination of uncertainty. We seek neither insecurity nor exposure for its own sake, but forms of shared and negotiated vulnerability in which dependencies become perceptible and can be worked on collectively.

7. INFRASTRUCTURE → INFRASTRUCTURING
   Infrastructure should not be understood as a finished object delivered by experts to passive users. Infrastructuring is the continual practice of maintaining, negotiating, repairing, governing, enjoying, ritualising and transforming the relations upon which life depends.

8. BRINGING OTHER RHYTHMS INTO POLITICS
   A cosmopolitical or sympathetic architecture attends to the rhythms, desires, needs and limits of the beings and forces upon which we depend. Rainfall, wind, water levels, migration, growth, fertility, decay and human desire are not simply external variables to measure and control, but presences capable of altering the terms through which a problem is understood and negotiated.

9. SLOWING DOWN / CONFOUNDING REASON
   We do not oppose reason, science or expertise, but resist their capacity to prematurely close a situation. Following Isabelle Stengers, cosmopolitics seeks to slow down reasoning: allowing what appears irrational, irrelevant, uncertain or outside the problem to confound its established terms. Architecture can construct situations of hesitation in which no single expert, category or world is authorised to decide in advance what matters, what is real, or what the problem and its solution are.

10. SYNCRETISM WITHOUT SYNTHESIS
    Syncretism places radically different ways of knowing and relating into contact without requiring one to subsume the others. Scientific, ritual, ecological, legal, technical and embodied realities can coexist, hybridise and contest one another without resolving into a universal truth.

11. KEEPING WORLDS IN AGONISM
    Difference should not automatically be reconciled through consensus. Architecture can construct situations in which incompatible worlds remain in political confrontation, forcing each to encounter the limits of its own categories and opening space for negotiation and transformation.

12. CULTIVATING DIVERGENCE
    Schismogenesis complements syncretism. If syncretism concerns entanglement, schismogenesis concerns the capacity to differentiate—to develop forms of life from within and against dominant systems without being assimilated by them.

13. ALLYING WITH CHANGE, NOT PRESERVATION
    We are not interested in preserving stable architectures, cultures or ecologies against transformation. We ask how architecture might become allied with water, melt, movement, fire, collapse, erosion, regrowth and other forces that can be destructive, generative and life-giving at once.

14. BEGINNING WITH WHAT IS ALREADY EMERGING
    We do not begin by inventing alternative worlds in the studio. We learn ethnographically from people already experimenting with different ways of maintaining, governing, celebrating and negotiating their dependencies.

15. ARCHITECTURE AS MAKING ALLIANCES
    Our task is not to provide solutions from outside, but to identify, bolster and intensify experiments already underway—opening existing architectures and infrastructures to new, free and common uses and giving latent forms of relation space to develop.

Cybergenetics and Sewalls

In his 1948 book, Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener presented a vision where the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine are unified. The field of Cybernetics (art of steering) was born. Predating the discovery of the structure of DNA and the ensuing molecular biology revolution, cybernetic applications in the life sciences at the time were limited. More than 60 years later, the confluence of modern genetic manipulation techniques, powerful measurement technologies, and advanced analysis methods is enabling a new area of research in which systems, communications, and control theory notions are used for synthetically regulating cellular processes at the gene level. We refer to the resulting field research at the interface between cybernetics and genetics with the portmanteau Cybergenetics.  

"As Grove puts it, cybernetics transforms an Enlightenment notion of objects in nature as discrete indexes of ‘universally valid objective truths’ and predictable rational order into the idea of things with mere situational relevance and recombinant functionality (Grove 2018: 135).16 Put differently, the modern quest for an empirically substantiated truth and predictable routine in the world is displaced by an understanding that things can be rearranged in an infinite number of ways into provisionally stable systems given to further optimization through feedback management. Accordingly, a pre-cybernetics impetus for control over the world through predictive knowledge and absolute ordering, which Grove calls a ‘will to control’, gives way to a post-cybernetics ‘will to design’ that promotes a ‘process of learning about and managing feedback-driven relations between various entities that make up complex social and ecological systems’ given to recombinant design (Grove 2018: 134–135). As the manifestation of the will to design, resilience thinking aims merely to synthesize a provisional working reality from existing conditions; its goals are strictly instrumental and short-term accommodations rather than interventions into the truths that structure underlying world views. Resilience thinking is thus about accommodating and adjusting, rather than transforming. Or, as Grove writes, resilient design aims to ‘improve the present rather than destabilize and reinvent the world’ (Grove 2018: 22).

Grove’s thesis extends far beyond questions of infrastructure design. It is also, in part, a critique of current trends in institutional knowledge production. He views the latter as promoting the synthesis of existing forms of knowledge toward provisional resolutions of conflict (a mere tweaking of systems) in place of genealogical inquiries aimed at unraveling discursive truths and generating truly transformative approaches to knowledge and practice. This critique speaks to the recent trend among universities in the US of promoting the creation of all kinds of centers for interdisciplinary synthesis at the expense of continued support of and investment in the work of discursive analysis within the conventional disciplines, and it reflects current attempts to deal with climate change through technological tweaks rather than serious interventions that could lead to a different way of life.

Insofar as Grove’s explication of a ‘will to truth’ and ‘will to design’ maps onto the logics of Disaster Prevention (bōsai) and Disaster Reduction (gensai) respectively, his schematization of a shift does not align with the resilient design logic of fortress-ification. What we see in the latter, I argue, is a kind of synthesis of truth and control—an attempt to deal with complexity itself as a truth to be managed. We might call this synthesis between truth and control a ‘will to cope’. A will to cope does not discard the modern quest for truth that Grove assigns to a will to truth. Rather, it accepts complexity as the new general truth concerning the condition of the environment while falling back on the desire to reproduce a predictable order through a synthesis of conventional and novel cutting-edge technologies for environmental management. At the same time, a will to cope takes up the provisional ethos of a will to design. To cope is to adapt enough in order to deal with a situation in a competent enough way so as to survive and carry on. To cope does not, however, imply engaging and changing the underlying conditions that made coping necessary in the first place. Coping is thus more about accepting, dealing with, and managing a given situation in a temporary way. It amounts to an attempt at adaptation in the absence of a will to transform. Fortress-ification, I suggest, exemplifies a will to cope in its concrete evocation of resilience behind walls.

- Japan’s Extreme Infrastructure: Fortress-ification, Resilience, and Extreme Nature. Michael Fisch

Cybernetics does not replace scientific inquiry into the nature of nature or its laws. Scientific research continues to seek regularities, causal mechanisms, and generalisable explanations, even where these laws are probabilistic, contingent, or non-deterministic, as in quantum physics or complex systems theory. What cybernetics displaces is not science itself, but the Enlightenment assumption that governance, control, and action must be grounded in stable, universal truths about the world. Rather than requiring a correct representation of reality before acting, cybernetic systems operate by tracking behaviour, responding to contingency, and continuously adjusting through feedback. In this shift, truth becomes operational rather than ontological: systems do not need to know what things essentially are, only how they behave under certain conditions and how outcomes can be optimised. As a result, governance increasingly proceeds without understanding in the classical sense, tolerating uncertainty, error, and instability. While science continues to pursue knowledge of nature’s laws, architecture, infrastructure, and political systems increasingly function cybernetically, privileging modulation, optimisation, and control over representation, meaning, or form.

Metaphysical Security

Threatening Rock at the Chaco Canyon complex, standing over the origin of the world. 

Is it the most decisive paradox of our time, that power legitimates itself by promising existential security while producing 'material' insecurity? The political philsopher Paolo Virno writes that humans are the animal who is permanently disoriented in the world (2004), and thus lacks any specialised insticts with which we can orient ourselves. Foucault, in his lectures Security, Territory, Population (1978), showed how security is not simply protection but a way of governing through uncertainty: states and institutions produce insecurity — scarcity, crisis, risk — precisely to justify new interventions. Power appears to secure, but in fact thrives on keeping things perpetually insecure. Zygmunt Bauman, in Liquid Fear (2006), develops this argument by showing how modern societies manufacture diffuse insecurities — precarity, ecological collapse, financial instability — while offering only illusory securities in the form of gated communities, consumer lifestyles, or nationalist identities. People trade away material security for symbolic belonging: better to be precarious but certain of who one is, than materially stable but existentially uncertain.

Anthony Giddens, in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) develops the concept of ontological security, defined as the confidence people have in the continuity of their self-identity and the constancy of their environment. When this continuity is threatened, people cling to routines, institutions, or leaders that feel stable, even if those leaders undermine their material well-being. This helps explain why people sometimes vote against their own economic interests: existential security, the sense of being grounded in a coherent world, takes precedence over material security. Judith Butler, in Precarious Life (2004), adds that vulnerability is shared by all, but societies politicize it by deciding whose lives are secured and whose are rendered disposable. People may accept austerity, war, or insecurity because they are promised recognition, belonging, or moral certainty.

From a more existential angle, Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death (1973) argues that humans accept destructive systems because they provide symbolic immortality — nations, religions, or identities that outlive individual mortality. Ernesto de Martino, in Il mondo magico (1948) and La fine del mondo (1977), likewise argued that human beings constantly risk losing their “presence,” their ability to orient themselves meaningfully in the world. Rituals and myths act as “technologies of presence,” restoring existential security in the face of ecological catastrophe or cultural breakdown. Communities may therefore accept arrangements that exploit their material base if those arrangements preserve symbolic order and restore presence. Paolo Virno, in Grammar of the Multitude (2004), reworks Kant’s concept of the sublime to argue that existential insecurity is a permanent condition of modern life. Neoliberalism exploits this insecurity as precarity, but at the same time it can produce creativity, solidarity, and common life.

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) offers a political-economic perspective, showing how capitalism generates insecurity by commodifying land, labor, and money, yet populations often support these regimes because they are promised modernization, national identity, or moral order. Anthropologists have echoed this. James Ferguson, in The Anti-Politics Machine (1990), shows how development projects worsen material insecurity but succeed by offering recognition as “modern” citizens. Arjun Appadurai, in Fear of Small Numbers (2006), explores how existential fear of being out of place leads people to embrace violent politics that undermine their material conditions while reaffirming belonging. Didier Fassin, in Enforcing Order (2013), demonstrates how policing creates insecurity for migrants and the poor, yet is broadly supported because it symbolizes order.

Taken together, these thinkers converge on a common insight. Security is never just about resources, finances, or survival: it is also about identity, recognition, and existential grounding. People are often willing to accept — even demand — systems and leaders that undermine their material well-being if those systems promise to resolve the more frightening possibility of existential disorientation. Being lost and meaningless can feel more terrifying than being poor or precarious. Thus, existential security becomes the real currency of politics: people trade away sustenance for the assurance of belonging, stability, and presence. Power, in turn, thrives on this paradox, promising to secure life while continually producing the insecurities that keep populations dependent on its order.

Syncretic Confounding

Tactically interweaving fiction with reality, Andean water communities ‘are often not what they appear to be’. They strategically fuse and confuse at once. Alternatingly, they turn to open resistance and to disguise; to speech and silence; to formal lawsuits and local codes; to difference and equality; to high-profile protest and undertow action. As multilayered entities they shield themselves under fictitious reality: they hybridize their rights as local–national–global constructs; they differentiate between in-house usage rules and external usage rules; they consciously appropriate and imitate the dominant order; they present contradictory identities as strategic self-representations; they refuse containment but defend and invest in boundaries, etc. Moreover, they bind together supra-community networks, enveloping their projects intermittently inside and outside their territories, with local water battles increasingly involving global players. Protected by their home-based undertow, they upscale their defense and maneuvering space in broader political-legal arenas.

‘Resistance as con-fusion’ involves confluence—fusion melding plurality of identities, rights, and creative resistance—as well as strategic confusion— entanglement and disorientation of formal order—to challenge both coercive and capillary forms of power and localize control over water and rights development. Notwithstanding their internal contradictions, communities actively network, con-fuse and dynamically mobilize or spring up unexpectedly from apparent invisibility through diverse real and fictitious appearances. Not to fuel normalizing powers and governance techniques, rather than going against the current (i.e. opposite to the mainstream) undertows may flow in any direction. Con-fusion is not so much based on anti-modernity or counter-rights, counter-identities and counter-discourses (directly containing heterogeneity), but on elaborating alternative orders of nonconformity. Nonconformist plurality, beyond comprising reactive weapons of the weak, actively ignores domesticating laws and modernist rights institutions: by definition, defying their actual, repetitive use (which is their sole substance and legitimization) is the greatest challenge institutions can face. This way, local user collectives aim to escape these disciplining rights and assigned identities by defying the very principles that ‘other them’. By choosing their own, multiple, disobedient directions they aim to remain outside categories that classify them, and also outside techniques and methods of classification and governance. 

Opposing forces

What is ‘the balance’? Throughout the book it has become clear that highland water-user collectives confront (inter)national policy models and intervention strategies that vehemently strive to make them and their rights ‘formal and normal’. Intentionally or not, water laws, recognition policies, expert networks and elites, from different angles, seek to disembed, tangible-ize and/or take over water rights and/or align users, rights and identities to outside control. Interestingly, while boundaries of modernist hydrosocial territories expand to ever more global levels and their vocabularies are increasingly ‘integrated’, rights definitions, truth claims and rationality boundaries become increasingly uniform and narrow. However, not all accept these individualistic, mercantile or bureaucratic standards of being ‘equal’ that file them in ‘anomalous’ or ‘backward’ categories. Not suiting policy models is often intentional. Rather than narrowing, they precisely extend the context-rooted rights definitions universe. Ongoing water-rights creation and subsurface multilayered normative repertoires’ proliferation broadens and deepens legal pluralism, inevitably questioning exclusiveness and self-evidence of State- and market-based water rules.

Water rights and identities are shaped materially and discursively in distributive strategies and recognition policies, constituting both functional tools and strategic weapons, devised and employed as control-externalizing projects’ tools and, alternatively, as arms to contest them. The most ingenious, subtle strategies—of both dominant and subordinate players—use each other’s resources and seemingly imitate and ‘recognize’ each other’s normative and political-symbolic orders. Rulers presumably accept local rights, but to secure their compliance and capture their resources; subordinates apparently conform to officialdom, but to seal off their own rights repertoires, shop in the rulers’ power factory, and capture public resources. Imitation and adaptation tactics may reinforce the ruling system’s legitimacy or serve resistance against it (moreover, the line dividing ‘mimesis’ and ‘mimicry’ is dynamic and may be quite thin). Thus, rather than just focusing on nominal expressions of water rights and identities, the fundamental question involves control over their constitution and enforcement, including the degree of conscious control over ‘imitation’ and ‘hybridization’. Therefore, beyond questions of ‘truthful representation’ or ‘academic accuracy’, Andean water rights and identities’ analysis vitally inquires about their political design, use and convenience for either supra-local rulers and interveners or for user groups struggling to defend their water territories.

In this game, there are only temporary balances of forces but no final outcomes. Water-rights normalization critically depends on stabilizing and reproducing political, sociotechnical networks for water governance and, though hydropolitical dream schemes are an illusion, moral modernization missions (and powerful interest groups) will forcefully continue. So will the forces of con-fusion. Water-user collectives know their existence depends on defending their water rights and rule-making spaces and will continue to create nonconformity and expand on their complexities, while at the same time trying to conquer representation and changes in policy institutes, intervention projects, and State governance networks. The latter are dominated by ruling classes but also constituting a track of social conquests, as current Andean governments’ ‘leftward shifts’ testify. Rather than simply resisting, user collectives also aim to creatively take over intervention in their water worlds. 

- Boelens, 2015

Ideal Types - Nothing is Stable and Nothing Becomes

Aqeducto de Aguila, Nerja - Peter Tjon 2023. !9th Century sugar mill water works.

Hydropolitical dream schemes

It is not just in Ecuadorian or Peruvian modernization programs that idealtype systems are implanted, based on standardized, replicable property regimes, governance structures and water-control techniques. Conventional training institutes and manuals universally promote packages combining very similar hydraulic, economic, organizational and agro-productive designs. Contextuality of water rights, cultures and peoples is made irrelevant to reshape community institutional practice in line with national (State) and international (market) frameworks. Hydrosocial engineering, ‘rational’ cropping patterns, ‘optimal’ water schedules, and ‘efficient’ water use, ‘functional’ water rights and ‘accountable’ organizations can all be manufactured. Their schemes share the dream that finely graded governance techniques, strategically interweaving legal procedures and administrative structures with hydraulic, agro-productive and organizational designs and training efforts, will persuade water users that these policy objectives, normative frameworks and system responsibilities are self evident. Their endeavors share, indeed, a sociotechnical utopia internalizing subjection: an all-inclusive, productive hydropolitical web aligning material and social can and should subject water users to a control/self-control game, playing universal, rational system norms and rules on efficient water use and modern governance upon themselves. Rather than being forced, they “want to come in from the cold”.

I am not the first to argue that such social/legal engineering of water societies is a myth. Moreover, meticulous configuration of humans and nonhumans, rules, rights and prescriptions, all working toward a convergent, predictable water-control system, is an illusion. Except for some archaic ‘deskjockeys’, even the greatest policy dreamers know that official rules and policies are profoundly mediated by ‘the stubbornness of reality’. Therefore, it is not so much the particular contents or effectiveness of these rules, rights and techniques that lead to their strong influence—it is relatively easy to discredit a substantive part of their claims to quality and effectiveness when put into practice. What matters is that, at the legal–political–technical design table, ‘hydropolitical dream schemes’ make up a coherent, potent discursive system, rationally linking individuals and micro-water control society to meso- and macro scales of governance. Hence their self-fulfilling properties: when components of the model fail, their functionality or rationality are not questioned but the very user communities, for failing to apply it as ‘rational clients’ would do. They are blamed and made to blame themselves. As the book’s illustrations demonstrate, beyond just blaming the victims (i.e. Andean water-user collectives), models often either reconstruct or erase them.5 The fact that proposals are largely unadapted to local contexts is not directly relevant: the point is not to adapt but to transform and control users’ reality. Quite aside from (also existing) powerful interests behind dream-scheme realization, there is a conviction, mostly unrelated to any wickedness, that the myth must be realized. Modernist progress thinkers’ illusion (from liberal humanists and Marxists to neoliberal modernizers) that full, overall water control is morally necessary and in everyone’s interest continues the quest to build Babylon’s Water Tower, forcing everyone to speak the same water language. Its illusiveness does not make its power illusory; on the contrary, it generates powerful contradictions in everyday practice. It may be a mission impossible, but mission it is.

- Boelens, 2015

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.

- extracts from Ontological Politics in River Defence Debates: Unpacking Fields of Contention in Eco-Centric and Non-Human Turns, Boelens, Hommes, Hoogestger

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
Posession/ Use 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.