Louis, Édouard (2014): *En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule*, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Massumi, Brian (2010): "On Critique", in: *INFLeXions. Transversal Fields of Experience*, vol. 4, p. 337-340.

Probyn, Elspeth (2010): "Writing Shame", in: Gregg, Melissa/Seighworth, Gregory J. (eds.): *The Affect Theory Reader*, Durham/London: Duke University Press, p. 71-90.

### **Dissident Participation and its 'post\_colonial' Implications**

### An Exploration of Positionalities of Critique Considered Regarding the Institution of Higher (Arts) Education

*Sophie Vögele*

How is it possible to criticize predominant structures and institutionalized processes in order to achieve transformation? What are dispositions of critique and their specific positionalities? How, while theorizing critique, can we take account of current power relations that are grounded in a colonial legacy? These are the main questions I would like to touch on and partly tackle in this chapter. My focus thereby is on the workings of tertiary education and modes of intervention into these institutionalized settings. In the first section, I consider how critique contributes to the functioning of institutions. I am interested in the relationship between structures and institutions that define the normative order and the positioning of critique as well as their potential for transformation. In my second section, I look into dissident participation as a mode of critique. In my third section, I briefly question challenges to specific positionings. The fourth section draws on my earlier and ongoing research on in- and exclusion within Higher Arts Education to introduce a perspective anchored in empirical considerations. In my last section, I highlight the significance of introducing a post\_colonial1 perspective to the discussion and considerations of dissident participation and theorizing critique in general.

1 Notation of post\_colonial with the underline represents the complex entanglements and historical contingencies that bind the colonial past to the present. Furthermore, the critical epistemology that questions colonial patterns of discourse in public, arts, and in science is emphasized (also see Hostettler and Vögele 2016).

### **How critique contributes to the functioning of institutions**

In his work *On Critique* Luc Boltanski explains institutional structures to produce a specific norm, entity, and continuity (2011). Thereby, the structures not only confirm a value but contribute widely to the value's creation (Boltanski 2009: 122). He writes: "Far from being limited to confirming a value, in large measure they help create it." (2011: 78) Thereby, normative structures and their value systems are set. Boltanski explains that by transforming small gaps of differences into distances and thereby categorizing individuals and social groups, differences loaded with significance initiate a powerful multiplier effect in demarcation. Moreover, institutions must continually be subjected to a process of re-institutionalization to maintain their form and prevent them from 'unraveling' (ibid.: 80). Beyond their reproduction, they primarily have the function of self-justification (Bogusz 2010: 139f). This has the effect of naturalizing the occurrence of institutional structures and concealing their continual reproduction. The working of institutions enables the reidentification of abstract authorities and hence also their stability through time and space. This is the main reason for them to appear attractive and to re-enforce adherence to the existing structures (Boltanski 2011: 78). Institutional structures are also simultaneously a source of experienced power-relations and violence. According to Boltanski, critique must therefore be positioned from the vantage point of denouncing the institutions' power and symbolic – or epistemic – violence. The existence of symbolic violence is the main justification of critique, whose first move is to unmask and denounce the violence concealed in the folds and interstices of the institutional structures. Critique has the task to re-describe the mechanisms of institutional confirmation by rendering visible the violence held within it (ibid.: 96). Critique, in Boltanski's understanding, actually is inscribed in the tensions contained in the very functioning of institutions: "My main argument is that the tension incorporated by institutions harbours the possibility of critique, so that the formal genesis of institutions is inextricably a formal genesis of critique." (2009: 152, 2011: 98) In addition, Boltanski views critique as potentially taking on similar modes of domination that institutional structures themselves employ: "Modes of domination are necessary to the extent that institutions themselves are more strongly associated with the perpetuation of the asymmetries and forms of exploitation at work, and/or that the voice of critique makes itself more loudly heard." (2011: 117)

Judith Butler's discussion of Michel Foucault's text *What is Critique* (1978) adds a further dimension to the understanding of how critique contributes to the functioning of institutions in general. She too explains critique as always being of an embedded practice (2001: 1). The moment in which it is abstracted from its operation and made to stand alone as a purely generalizable practice, critique loses its character: critique only exists in relation to something other than itself. In a general sense, Butler notes that according to Foucault, critique is a practice in which we pose the question of the limits of our most sure ways of knowing. This is guided by the inquiry into the relation of knowledge to power that produce epistemological certainties. These turn out to support a way of structuring the world that forecloses alternative possibilities of ordering (ibid.: 2). Critique, thus, is to unveil other and new realities by leaving established grounds of validity. However, as Butler points out, this is particularly risky: "The problem with those grounds is precisely that they seek to foreclose the critical relation, that is, to extend their own power to order the entire field of moral and political judgment. They orchestrate and exhaust the field of certainty itself." (Ibid.: 6) The position of critique seems to be located in the task of constantly risking the denunciations of those who naturalize and render hegemonic the very moral terms put into question by critique itself. Butler explains that in the understanding of Foucault, critique is a multiple act in that is the stylized relation to the demand upon it, and that, within a specific stylization of critique, a subject is produced that is not readily knowable within the established structure. (Ibid.) In this context, Foucault talks about *desubjugation*; whereby, a desubjugation from the established grounds occurs when a mode of existence is risked – a process of self-making through disobedience. The self is compelled to form itself within practices that are more or less in place – a process characterized as modes of *subjectivations* (ibid.). Foucault's understanding of critique thus suggests that critique also means re-composition and invention (ibid.: 1). However, as Butler further emphasizes in her text *Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity* (2012) "critique has something to do with a disposition of the subject." (Ibid.: 18) This entails questioning the basis of critical inquiry. Butler concludes that critique is a political dissent. It is a way of objecting to illegitimate claims of public and governmental authority that "cannot be sustained without institutional supports." (Ibid.: 20) Now, if critical practice opens up this new possibility for elaborating the subject as Butler demonstrates, how can we understand this process and the disposition necessary for the positioning of dissidence? As this consideration seems to suggest, subjectivity that occurs in self-making through disobedience is sustained through institutional structures. Dissent relates to modes of knowledge that articulate modes of governmental authority (ibid.: 24). By stating that dissent is established inside the purview of the polity and simultaneously as the principle by which a departure from an established polity can take place (ibid.: 25), Butler suggests that dissent is located both inside and outside of the very grounds it questions.

### **Terms and conditions for dissident participation**

In the first section of my chapter, my aim was to sketch out how critique relates to the established structures and institutions. However, the question of how critique and dissent can be transformative despite their embeddedness remains. Posed the other way around: which context enables critique to have the potential of re-composition and invention as Foucault terms it? What further, additional, or even contradictory ways of understanding and conceptualizing critique are necessary to contribute to an understanding? To start tackling these questions, I am particularly interested in investigating if critique can be articulated from a positioning within. Thereby, I mean to ask, in what terms embeddedness allows for which degree of radicality in critical inquiry or, on the contrary, renders certain lines of questioning impossible. How transformative, re-composing, and inventive can critique be? What kind of not-knowable subject can possibly be produced within the established structure?

To at least address these questions partly, I would like to look into *dissident participation* as a form of critique. I thereby assume that the positioning of dissident participation is a less risky form that does not imperil its existence, but remains in acceptance of the structures, partly embracing them as they sustain one's own position. To tackle dissident participation, I will confine the discussion to the realm of Higher Education and thereby predominantly refer to Sabine Hark's extensive study (2005), in which she discusses the position of feminist and gender studies in the field of academia. Hark interrogates the potential of a critique from within academic structures, and states that inclusion into the structures subject to critique is a necessary condition for producing findings and understandings outside the hegemony (ibid.: 68). She writes:

"To change a field means to first of all change the rules of the game. The transformation of the rules, however, does not only demand a certain degree of virtuosity in understanding and navigating them, but it asks for – and this is precisely where the challenge and precarity of an ascertained critical project is located – the *acceptance* of the rules – and be it out of pragmatic necessity." (Ibid.: 70, translation S.V.2 ).

2 Original quote: "Denn ein Feld zu verändern bedeutet vor allem, die Regeln des Spiels zu verändern. Die Transformation der Regeln setzt allerdings nicht nur eine gewisse Virtuosität im Umgang mit den Regeln voraus, sie verlangt zunächst – und genau hierin besteht die prekäre Herausforderung für das sich herrschaftskritisch verstehende feministische Wissensprojekt – deren Akzeptanz –, und sei es aus pragmatischen Gründen."

Thus, we must inevitably acknowledge the very structures subject to critique as entry into them is necessary to developing ground-breaking critique and achieving change. Hark subsumes this as a "dissident participation":

"Dissidence and participation are, in other words, intricately enmeshed: participation, and yes, acceptance of the reigning rules of the game is the paradoxical premise for achieving change. […] we actually (would like to) object the powers from which our being is dependent." (Ibid.: 73, translation S.V.3 ).

Abolishing the structures is therefore not the primary goal of dissident participation. Rather, in Hark's understanding, we are forced to work within the structures if we are to understand and develop effective possibilities of critical practices of knowledge. It is, then, a task of dissident participation to uncover the workings of institutional structures and systematic obscuring of their reproduction, and search instead for ways that offer other dealings with these structures (ibid.: 392).

In Hark's terms, attaining power *within* the structures requires a specific anchorage into them. Although such a positioning within participation admittedly seems to enable a better access to the structures subject to change, the problem of the blind spots remains. They are not lapses but inevitably form part of the strategy by allowing a more enabled participation within the dominant discourse (Thompson 2004:39). Through participation, the intervention into the structures becomes more effective, but it is very likely that the ability to question power relations and privilege diminishes. This recalls Boltanski's understanding of critique in which the back and forth between effective intervention and lessened critique is essential to the existence of institutions – thus benefitting the normative structure. Boltanski's and Foucault's explanations suggest that critique, especially if accepted by the structures, always remains tied to the institution it criticizes – and is governed by its hegemonic structures, eventually optimizing it in Boltanski's terms (2009: 156). This observation allows the understanding that dissident participation (in the realm of Higher Education) renders palpable the proximity of affirmation and dissidence, participation and transformation, subversion and normalizing, and critique and regulation. It reveals how dissident participation is challenged to constantly be aware of its own immanence, privilege, cooption, and blind spots (Hark 2005: 250) – while navigating these contradictory dimensions and believing in its own critical and transformative agency. The work by Sara Ahmed *On Being Included* (2012) is a very conclusive account of the proximity between the endeavor to fight discrimination within institutional structures of Higher Education that ultimately

3 Original quote: "Dissidenz und Partizipation sind, mit anderen Worten, unauflöslich verknüpft: Teilhabe, ja Akzeptanz der herrschenden Spielregeln ist die paradoxe Voraussetzung für Veränderung. […] dass wir nämlich gerade den Mächten widersprechen (wollen), von denen unser Sein abhängig ist."

enforce institutional racism. Hark, in her account, suggests locating oneself on the margins between the inside and the outside of the institution to acquire the structures rather than being subjectivated. To be able to take on this defiance an oscillation between scientific and activist positions is necessary. This could come close to the undoing of structures in Athena Athanasiou's understanding.4 She states that critique takes a side insofar as it always also is undoing the structures subject to its inquiry. At the same time, she endorses that dissent has to be understood as *refusing* to take a side; that dissent is *against*. She says: "Taking on a side/site refers to disciplinary bonding and is strongly linked to boundary. It can be very normative. But it also entails dissent: critical agency refuses to be complicit with the structures."5 She explains that the dissent entails contradicting by participating and that it has to perform doubly in a dissonant temporality that conquers rather than preserves the futurity. It is about transforming and appropriating the structures rather than abolishing them. This could possibly relate to the process of selfmaking in disobedience by Butler discussed above.

### **Challenges to the positioning of dissident participation**

The discussion so far suggests that in order for a critique's radicalism to be understood and perceived as such, it has to maintain a certain relationality and to be tied into the dominant system to avoid becoming unintelligible. This leads me to the assumption that any actor or activity in critique necessarily occupies a place of dissident participation. However, although seemingly critique always is complicit with the structures it hopes to manipulate – especially within dissident participation –, contradictory and simultaneous workings of dissent do have a radical und un-known potential for transformation. The consideration I would like to briefly raise here and suggest developing further, is the one of theorizing the positioning of the dissident participant: critique being understood as relational, the positionality of dissident participation becomes a circumscribed space. Taking into account the intersectional working of societal discrimination, dissident participation in quest of a certain critique within a specific structure cannot be occupied by any person in the same way. Subjectivities marked by gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, class, body, etc. necessarily are allocated to a specific realm within the structure

4 This talk by Athena Athanasiou was entitled *Taking sides, or what critical theory can(still) do* and held during the conference *Taking Sid(t)es* on 28.–30.6.2018, in Konstanz. It was convened by the research group *Mediale Teilhabe*. For more information, refer to: https://mediaandparticip ation.com/2018/06/27/taking-sides-conference/, last access 10.24.2020.

5 This quote of Athena Athanasiou is taken from my notes during the conference *Taking Sid(t)es.* For the full argument see her chapter in this book.

and thus also to specific ways of being able to articulate dissident participation. The blind spots pointed out by Hark and briefly touched on above, decisively, probably are not random, but inherently tied to the position of a particular dissident participant. This means that a person with other blind spots cannot be there as a dissident participant. Dissident participation is tied to a specific positioning that asks for particular subjectivities and identity markers. This pertains to questions of survival such as who will be a subject and what will count as a life addressed. In reference to desubjugation by Butler (2001: 9f), she asks

"Who can I become in such a world where the meanings and limits of the subject are set out in advance for me? By what norms am I constrained as I begin to ask what I may become? And what happens when I begin to become that for which there is no place within the given [norms and structure]?" (Ibid.: 6).

Indeed, certain subjectivations are not part of the established framework of reference. How can they have access to dissident participation? And how can they avoid being jeopardized by the riskiness of critique?

Against the backdrop of these questions, it seems even more challenging to understand dissident participation with a potential for radical transformation. In her talk, Athanasiou too took up this question by asking who can this critical I be? She went on stating that it cannot be the self-willed individual of neoliberal formations. Instead, it has to refer to a performative situational subjectivation that is political, reigned by critical reflexivity, and based on responsiveness, collectively moved and moving others.

### **The Critical I and 'post\_colonial' Implications: The Case Study of Swiss Art Schools**

Two interrogations about who the critical I can be and which positionalities actually enable dissident participation, are at the center of this chapter. Questions arise such as 'who is heard through which channels?' 'who can take on what kind of positioning?' 'who can talk about what and in which way?' My assumption is that there are post\_colonial implications to the consideration of these interrogations and that engaging them with the theorizing of dissident participation is very fruitful. To start unpacking some of this, I would like to refer to the field of Higher Education and briefly touch on research about in- and exclusion in Swiss art schools.

The project entitled *Art.School.Differences* (2014-2016)6 interrogated processes of in- and exclusion in Swiss art schools with a special focus on the admission process (Saner, Vögele, and Vessely 2016).7 In a very brief nutshell, I would like to point out some of our main findings about impossible positionalities within these institutions. Our findings are embedded in research that found that higher art and design education was "a preserve of the privileged" (Malik Okon 2005). Various studies circumscribe this privilege in terms of social class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and body (Burke and McManus 2009; Guissé and Bolzman 2015; Henry et al. 2017; Kuria 2015; Lange-Vester and Sander 2016; Rothmüller 2010; Seefranz and Saner 2012; Stich 2012). In their selection processes, art schools tend to constantly re-instate privileged groups of students. Especially in their intersectional working, the social conditions of the favored maintain existing privileges and allow for the ignorance of the latter. We, in our research, mainly interrogated the processes and mechanisms through which discriminations happen. The need to select, the deliberative process of decision making, and the openness of selection criteria within juries and the admission process in general, effected the choice of a very normative student cohort in that it is very similar to those present in the institution (Saner, Vögele, and Vessely 2016, chap. 5, chap. 5.3.4). Juries chose candidates that they deemed most likely to reflect the specific values of the institution in terms of class, ethnicity, gender, and body. Our data analysis furthermore finds that the non-normative students missing from art schools are lower class, have experiences of migration, have non-normative bodies and/or genders, or are older. Class appeared to be the most decisive category in that the few students and candidates accepted from the lower class were all Caucasian. Physical ability was also a consideration concerning students' flexibility and perceived endurance for long working hours.8 Along with the predomination of bodily normativity, social competencies or a reputable network were highly valued – sometimes more than artistic practice. Within the selection process, these exclusions and discriminations remained unnoticed and their institutional anchorage blurred (ibid.: chap. 5.5). Indeed, when discrimination is recognized within such kinds of structures, it is usu-

6 Together with a team, Philippe Saner and I co-lead the project initiated by the Institute for Art Education, IAE, at the Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK. The Haute Ecole d'Art et de Design (HEAD – Genève) and the Haute Ecole de Musique (HEM Genève – Neuchâtel) were cooperating partners along with the ZHdK in this self-reflexive interrogation of in- and exclusions to art schools.

7 For more information on the research, publications as well as subsequent initiatives and projects, refer to bit.ly/a\_s\_d, last access 10.24.2020.

8 Sarah Whatley talked about the "tyranny of ability" in this regard. She proposed this very trenchant term during the conference *Disability and Performer Training – A Colloquium* offered by the research project *DisAbility on Stage*, Institute for the Performing Arts and Film (IPF), ZHdK, 10.25.2016, Zürich.

ally attributed to either individual (racist and sexist) misbehaviors of certain faculty members and employees or relegated to societal and historical events (Williams 1985:331). We termed this structurally and institutionally facilitated discrimination, and accompanying ignorance of privilege, *institutional normativity* (Saner and Vögele 2016: 202; Saner, Vögele, and Vessely 2016) in reference to research led by Ahmed, Shona Hunter, Sevgi Kilic, Elaine Swan, and Lewis Turner. Ahmed et al. found an "Institutional Whiteness" at work – meaning that institutional structures privilege white people at all levels (Ahmed et al. 2006: 73). By introducing institutional normativity, we draw attention to the fact that, alongside skin color, ability, a middle class or privileged backgrounds, and a certain gendered and ethnicized aesthetic understanding are set as the norm within institutions. Institutions reproduce and reinstate this norm beyond their student body with faculty and other members, albeit tacitly and unreflectively. I termed this the camouflage of discrimination through normalization (Vögele 2020). This institutional normativity and the camouflage of discrimination through normalization is enhanced through processes of *Othering*. We, on different occasions, encountered a great desire for the Other, more precisely an interest in being creatively inspired by someone exotically Other. Among jury members, this interest often was articulated as a great opportunity to enrich the status quo of the institution. This articulates itself as a particular case of tokenisation that is an appropriation or even usurpation of the Other. We also encountered Othering that articulated itself in the refusal of the foreign and unknown (Saner, Vögele, and Vessely 2016, chap. 5.5.3, 6.3). However, Othering as a desire for the Other is inherently hierarchized and thus enforces power relations (Hall 1997). It entails not only a denial of the Other but also the means to reinvigorate existing racist and sexist differentiations (Mecheril and Plösser 2009).

These considerations of institutional normativity and Othering clearly show that, within the art schools under investigation, an array of subjectivities are impossible: lower class, racially or ethnically marked persons, termed as disabled by majoritarian discourse, trans\*-persons, identified as queer and critical subjects, etc. These exclusions are not particular to art schools but mirror the outcomes of societal processes of exclusion present in the field of Higher Education in general. Such processes are the continuing effects of colonial power relations and thus require a post\_colonial perspective to perceive, chart, and renegotiate them (Vögele 2020). Considering this, the question about which positionalities could allow for dissident participation within the structures set by art schools remains. Or put differently: what exactly is the premise of dissident participation, and what kind of subjectivity can possibly access it? Additionally, questions arise on the ways in which historically grown power-relations grounded in colonialism with effects on current racism, classism, sexism, and ableism enable or hinder the critique of (western) institutional structures. What kind of critique can possibly be articulated in a situation of institutional normativity, Othering, and the camouflage of discrimination? What is the in-between here, and who can inhabit what kind of inbetween? How can such limiting structures be adapted in order to be less discriminating? Referring to Boltanski's perspective, we could ask: in what ways can critique go beyond re-instating the predominant structures and transform them by integrating a previously concealed perspective? Is this practice at all possible without totally abolishing the structures (of the art school)? And maybe most importantly: how can we avoid putting certain subjectivities even more in peril through critique?

### **Dissident Participation that is Political, Reigned by Critical Reflexivity, Based on Responsiveness, Collectively Moved, and Moves Others**

As I suggested earlier in this chapter, I think, it is necessary to consider the positioning of dissident participation from a post\_colonial perspective. Against the backdrop of the led considerations, the ongoing societal processes of discrimination, largely effected by power relations that were implemented through colonialism, have to be accounted for. By introducing a post\_colonial perspective to the theorizing of dissident participation, I suggest that rejection and other forms of Othering can be addressed and challenged. Decolonizing strategies have to be mobilized in order for dissident participation to deploy a simultaneous contradiction and adherence as a potential for transformation. The art seems to be performing institutions beyond interiority versus exteriority while defending them as a site of critique: critique entails the performing of institutions in a counter-institutional way.9

For this thinking, it is helpful to read Ruth Sonderegger. She exposes critical theories, as put forward by Boltanski and Foucault, to "implicitly at least, aim at a fusion of all requirements of critique." (Sonderegger 2012: 260) However, Sonderegger is critical of endorsing an encompassing conception into critique, claiming instead an inherent finitude (ibid.: 261). Thereby, she seems to suggest that theories of critique must be contradictory in order to approach their potential, a characteristic I have stressed above regarding Athanasiou. Sonderegger emphasizes that critique must endorse a collective practice in its theorizing and conceptualization. She mentions a collective perceiving, as in feeling, moving, or talking differently than our environment would predict (ibid.). Indeed, a post\_colonial perspective anchored in heterogeneous theoretical traditions and disciplines entails a critical stance, which is always a critique of both the forms of knowledge and the forms of practice that correspond to them. Furthermore, a post\_colonial perspective located at the margins to activism allows being practical and emancipatory in the sense, that it aims not only to understand but also to contribute to a transformation of the

9 Taken from my notes of the talk by Athanasiou during the conference *Taking Sid(t)es*.

social world that is already under way. Finally, post\_coloniality addresses critique as being immanent, focusing on the internal contradictions and crises of a specific social order and its social imaginary. Accordingly, it cannot be reduced to a purely normative undertaking, but involves empirical analyses. Analysis and critique are thus inextricably linked and unveil the potential, to tackle institutions in a counterinstitutional way.

#### **References**

### **Change by Changing Smartphone-Users?** The Fairphone as an Experimental Sid/te

*Isabell Otto*

### **The Virtue of Fair Smartphone Practices**

"This is not a phone. It's an opportunity to change the industry" – "The phone that cares for people and planet" – "Change is in your hand".1 With slogans like these the Dutch company Fairphone promotes their fairly, modularly produced smartphones – the Fairphone. Following the company's intention statement, this 'change', has two implications. Firstly, Fairphone B.V. is invested in transparent, pro-social production chains. They seek to make a difference by avoiding components sourced from problematic labor conditions, e.g. child labor; obtaining integrated resources like tin, tantalum, or gold from mines that are not financially entangled in civil wars or other conflicts. Secondly, the modularity of the fair smartphone means its users can repair or upgrade parts themselves by ordering and replacing each individual component.

Fairphone calls on their customers to resist the smartphone-industry and its standard, non-durable devices that are harmful to the environment, through practices of tinkering and rebuilding. The Fairphone is not only 'fair' in terms of fair trade but also because it invites users to secure a long lifespan for their phones and thereby conserve natural resources. However, these ideals are not easily achievable. Fairphone founder, Bas van Abel, has noted arising "dilemmas when you want to change an industry that you are a part of " while attempting to produce profitable products: "If you try to do things differently you run into every single wall that this system has to offer." (Garrigou 2018) The demands of customers to participate in the fair and environmentally sustainable practices of Fairphone's business model follow similar dilemmas: Users are invited to join the commodity circle by buying smartphones or phone-modules and thus securing Fairphone's profit. At the same time,

1 The first Fairphone slogan was announced in 2018 (https://web.archive.org/web/20180914145 416/https://www.fairphone.com/en, September 14, 2018), the second is part of the campaign for Fairphone 3 (https://web.archive.org/web/20190919034911/https://www.fairphone.com/en , September 9, 2019), the third is a general tag line, i.e. printed on the Fairphone's battery.

they are requested to resist the smartphone industry (including Fairphone B.V. and its profit orientation). Fairphone's business strategy shows that resistive practices and (economical) power structures are inseparable form each other. Additionally, the subject formation within and by these practices – in our case: the becoming of a 'Fairphone-user' – at the same time paradoxically endangers her subjectivation as 'smartphone-user', which I want to understand (and explicate below) as a 'hybrid actor' (Latour 1994: 33) with reciprocal bonds, or 'attachments' (Hennion 2017) between human and device.

The complex entanglement of resistant practices and subject formation is elaborated on by Michel Foucault in his late writings on "The Subject and Power" (Foucault 1982) and reflected by Judith Butler in her discussion of Foucault's concept of "Critique" as a specific form of resistance or rather: a special virtue of the subject. (Cf. Butler 2001; Foucault 1997) According to Foucault, power and resistance are so closely intertwined that, in his proposition to study power, he suggests using resistance as "a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations". (Foucault 1982: 780) Investigating resistant practices or "attempts made to dissociate these relations" can thus show, "what power relations are about". (Ibid.) Foucault is not interested in resistance to a certain authority or in an opposition to a concrete institution of power, but in withstanding a general "technique" of power "which makes individuals subjects". (Ibid.: 781)

Thus, what is brought to light by discussing Fairphone's claim for fairness? Following Foucault, it is not so much the (resistance against) power structures of the smartphone industry but the struggles of the individuum within power relations of the smartphone production cycle and accordingly the struggle with its subjectivation as a smartphone-user. The calls to change the industry are of less importance here than the demands on users to change themselves. The practice of 'critique' in Foucault and Butler's perspectives is significant for describing this change in the self: "To be critical of an authority that poses as absolute requires a critical practice that has self-transformation at its core." (Butler 2001: 5) When Foucault and Butler describe the transformation of the self in and through practices of critique, they are not simply concerned with resistance but with a certain virtue which has both ethical and aesthetical implications: an "art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability" (Foucault 1997: 47; cf. Butler 2001 5, 6) or even a performance of "self-stylization" (Butler 2001: 10), a "release from its usual discursive constraints" (ibid.: 9), which has nothing to do with a foundationally resistant 'nature' within an ontological subject.

This theoretical framework also touches questions that arise with the abovementioned dilemmas of Fairphone-users and allows positing them more precisely. How can we rethink the demand on customers to simultaneously participate and *not* to participate in the commodity circle of the smartphone industry as a specific positioning of the subject in assemblages of power? As Foucault argues, the meaning of 'subject' is twofold: "subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to [their] own identity through a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to." (Foucault 1982: 781) Resisting this form of power accompanies not only an artful attitude of knowledge and awareness of the power relations the subject is bound in; the subject also risks its "very formation as a subject", (Butler 2001: 8) because the production of the subject is bound to the very norms its attitude of critique opposes to: "[I]f the selfforming is done in disobedience to the principles by which one is formed, then virtue becomes the practice by which the self forms itself in desubjugation, which is to say that it risks its deformation as a subject". (Ibid.: 10)

In this chapter, I want to reflect on resistant practices that the Fairphone enables and demands as forms of sid/te-taking. The core of my argumentation is the attachment of smartphone and user as a subjugating technique of subject formation within the power relations of smartphone industry. Which constraints can a fair smartphone-user artfully release and what are simultaneously the risks of her attitude of critique?

### **The Site-Taking of Smart Phone Users**

The taking of public places as political resistant practice is closely linked to the visions of collectivization by mobile phones, especially in the early phase of their distribution. One of these visions is phrased by Howard Rheingold in his book *Smart Mobs* from 2002. He defines 'Smart mob' with the term "Mobile Ad Hoc Social Networks", brought up earlier by computer scientist Gert Kortuem and others (2001).2

One prime example for the potentials of a smart (phone) mob in Rheingold's argumentation is a historical event in the Philippines: "On January 20, 2001 President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines became the first head of state in history to lose power to a smart mob." (Ibid.: 157) Within one hour, after a text message with the call "Go 2EDSA, Wear blck" had been initially sent, more than a million citizens assembled on Epifanio de los Santas Avenue (EDSA), a historical site of a much earlier, peaceful demonstration in 1986. The precondition for this event was the

2 "Both terms describe the new social form made possible by the combination of computation, communication, reputation, and location awareness. The mobile aspect is already selfevident to urbanites who see the early effects of mobile phones and SMS. Ad hoc means the organizing among people and their devices is done informally and on the fly, the way texting youth everywhere coordinate meetings after school. Social network means that every individual in a smart mob is a 'node', in the jargon of social network analysis, with social 'links' (channels of communications and social bonds) to other individuals." (Rheingold 2002: 169f.)

early and large distribution of mobile phones in the Philippines and a special relationship between user and device, which historian Vincente L. Rafael calls 'manic', describing it as an over-identification with the phone:

"The 'manic' relationship to the cell phone is just this ready willingness to identify with it, or more precisely with what the machine is thought capable of doing. One not only has access to it; by virtue of its omnipresence and proximity, one becomes like it. That is to say, one becomes an apparatus for sending and receiving messages at all times." (Rafael 2003: 403)

Since the mobile phone can be "idealized as an agent of change, invested with the power to bring forth new forms of sociality" (ibid.: 402), an envisioned ability to act as part of a powerful crowd arises in the 'cell phone-user' from this manic relationship, instilling the potential to change the political system.

The observation of an intimate attachment with the mobile phone is not confined to Philippine media culture. For the western world, a similar binding was described by Sherry Turkle, with the notion of the 'tethered self ' (Turkle 2008). Along with her intimate relationship with the mobile phone, the user gets a personal address that goes hand in hand with the potentials and demands of being always and everywhere connected and available (cf. Linz 2008) – a hybridization of human and device that even intensifies through the internet connectivity of smartphones. In Foucauldian terms, one can argue that through the attachment (cf. Hennion 2017) of mobile phone and user, human individuals become subjectified as 'mobile phone-users'. They not only become tethered to their phones but are also tied into social, technical, political, and economic power relations.

Seen in this light, the imagination of the smart mob that overturns a political regime neglects this enmeshment of the mobile phone-user. It conceptualizes the phone as a powerful tool or: a handy vehicle for resistant communication that enables a revolutionary site-taking. At the same time, the 'smart mob imagination' disregards the mobile phone as a 'site', that is itself steeped in power relations. The Philippine example is especially evident here: The Philippines are among those countries providing the electronic industry with child-mined gold that is built into mobile phones and other electronic devices because of its qualities as a conductor of electricity.3 In comparing the 'smart mob' to the 'fair phone imagination' of change we can recognize the difference between political resistance and resistance as 'critique' in Foucault's terms. Political resistance concerns the mobilization of

3 The report *Gold from Children's Hands. Use of Child-Mined Gold by the Electronics Sector* (Schipper/de Haan/van Dorp 2015) states: "The quantities in each device might be small, but they add up to a large amount of gold. In 2014, more than 1.2 billion smartphones were sold worldwide, containing 37,347 kilos of gold." (10)

people using mobile phones as a dynamic communication channel. Critique concerns the subjectivation of the mobile phone-user, her own involvement in power relations and the virtue to care about herself and others in this relatedness. The 'smart mob imagination' states the mobile phone as a means, the 'fair phone imagination' challenges it as a mediator, that changes all involved entities (cf. Latour 1994).

#### **Siding with Smart Pigeons and Fair Gold Miners**

But to close the gap between Foucault's virtue of the self and Fairphone's work against oppressing labor conditions or environmental pollution we have to regard another theoretical position and another exampleUS-American biologist, philosopher of science and literary scholar Donna Haraway pleads for *Staying with the Trouble*.  'Making kin' is her slogan-like approach to the problem. What she has in mind are not the genealogical or biogenetic kinships. Instead, she calls for demonstrating, enduring, and redesigning the close relatedness of humans, plants, animals, and technologies. Haraway's books are known for their provocative, fabulous, and exaggeratedly formulated programming. In *Staying with the Trouble* she is anxious to counteract an exceptional human position. Instead, she emphasizes a "multispecies becoming-with" (ibid.: 10) that enables a mutual empowerment, a partial recovery, a revival of destroyed habitats for going on together. For this utopian-visionary draft Haraway chooses the term 'Chthulucene', which refers less to an era than to a place of time, a "thick present" (ibid.: 1). The book has an obvious activist gesture: "Living-with and dying-with each other in the Chthulucene can be a fierce reply to the dictates of both Anthropos and Capital", (ibid.: 2), Haraway says introductorily.

In her speculative fable, Haraway refers to examples from artistic and scientific activism. The Cat's Cradle becomes a guiding figure for a practice of resisting, writing, and thinking. Similar to a network of string figures that are passed from hand to hand and change in the process, people are variably connected to kindred non-human things or beings. Through this line of thought, Haraway also calls for a way of thinking that connects the most diverse elements with each other and invents new stories with open ends which can be enmeshed further and further. Thus, her book also aims at the invention of new research practices and explores them in numerous examples.

One of Haraway's cases is presented here in detail because of its similarities the 'fair phone imagination'. PigeonBlog is a project that artist, activist, and scientist Beatriz da Costa carried out in the summer of 2006 as a collaboration of racing pigeons, artists, activists, engineers, pigeon fanciers, and do-it-yourself electronics. The project is an environmental activist experiment. It aims to collect data on urban air pollution in California and publish it on the Internet. In addition, the goal is to promote resistant practices through cross-species co-production. (Cf. ibid.: 16-29; da Costa 2008) Haraway discusses PigeonBlog as a way to facilitate recovery from fundamental environmental damage. It is about repairing polluted neighborhoods and social conditions, she argues, people and racing pigeons enable each other reciprocally through an intimate connection with communication technologies. (Cf. Haraway 2016: 20) In months of development work, the pigeons are fitted with backpacks containing various modules that are also built into mobile phones, as da Costa explains:

"The pigeon 'backpack' developed for this project consisted of a combined GPS (latitude, longitude, altitude) / GSM (cell phone tower communication) unit and corresponding antennas, a dual automotive CO/NOx pollution sensor, a temperature sensor, a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card interface, a microcontroller and standard supporting electronic components. Designed in this manner, we essentially ended up developing an open-platform Short Message Service (SMS) enabled cell phone, ready to be rebuilt and repurposed by anyone who is interested in doing so." (Da Costa 2010: 35; cf. Haraway 2016: 21)

According to Haraway, the project tries to enable cross-species trust and knowledge so that the connection between birds, technology, and people can actually be fabricated. This takes time and must be done carefully, in learning processes of all participants, e.g. with "lots of fitting sessions and balance training in lofts" (Haraway 2016: 22) and overcoming objections of animal protectionists. But then, according to Haraway's positive reading of the project, arises a mutual empowerment for care and responsibility: The official apparatus for measuring air pollution in California is installed in such a way that it cannot fully comprehend the health impact on humans and other living beings. In contrast, technologically advanced smart pigeons with their "multispecies team" are able to collect data continuously 'on the fly', even at critical altitudes or near the ground. They "trace the air in string figure patterns of electronic tracks" (ibid.): The data can be published and visualized in real time on the pigeon's 'blog'. The visualization of pollution areas by the pigeon data can thus also show social inequalities in the habitation of damaged habitats.

But the dynamic network of relationships has an openness that can become problematic. PigeonBlog was conceived as an environmental-activist project, but its reception has not only been understood in this sense. In the course of the great public response to her project, da Costa also received an offer from an engineer to jointly submit a research proposal to the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the development of flight monitoring devices modelled on pigeons. The great openness of the project makes it suitable even for military contexts. (Haraway 2016: 22)

What it makes instructive for me to compare PigeonBlog in Haraway's perspective with the strategies and tactics of the Fairphone is an aspect both cases have in common: the work on the technological connection between humans and other things or beings that is directed against standardized industrial default. While Fairphone invites their users to open, disassemble, repair, and reassemble the black box smartphone, Costa assembles modules of mobile phone technology and expands pigeons into partial phones. Both examples take the mobile phone as a building site, as an experimental constellation. These steps are taken before every form of resistant sid/te-taking – e.g. against the pollution of underprivileged neighborhoods or the harmful work of children in gold mines. Using Haraway's view of the PigeonBlog and the critique made by Fairphone resistance we can further clarify that: In the virtue of critique the power relations of the mobile phone are not taken for granted but contested in an experimental taking of the phone as a building site. This is not a simple opposition in the sense of a binary antagonistic gesture. The user-subject experiences itself in a confusing network of various kinships, where changing a situation can only mean to make new kin and to transform the self, likewise.

#### **Outsmarting the Smartphone?**

Let us have a closer look at the Fairphone as an experimental building site in order to better understand, what transformation of the self in this framework could mean. Opening Fairphone's black box can be described as hacking. Hacking is a practice of transformation, a reformatting of systems, structures or constellations by testing and actualizing previously only virtually available possibilities. In this respect, hacking is not an oppositional resistant practice, but a playing with possibilities and system states that have not yet been put in effect. According to media studies scholar Claus Pias, the hacker is an ambivalent figure, both subversive and state-supportive. Hacking oscillates between data theft and protective practices against governmental or corporate interference in the private sphere. (Cf. Pias 2002) Practices of hacking have been developed in historical situations of programming digital computers. However, the term 'hacking' has now been transferred – almost inflationary – to different cultural and social areas. In this broader sense, hacking generally refers to the changeability of routine processes in politics, culture, and society. (Foit/Kaerlein 2014)

Fairphone's strategies in this broader sense can be described as hacking of the smartphone industry. The production of fair and sustainable smartphones should increase the demand for these devices and thus transform the industry as a whole. What makes it plausible to describe this cooperate strategy as hacking is a circumstance mentioned by Pias: The hacker is located at the border between the visible and the invisible. Hacking shifts the boundaries of the inaccessibility of digital computers. It makes data and processes transparent, brings secrets to the public, and thereby creates new areas of secrecy. (Cf. Pias 2002: 254) This also applies to the smartphone, which is, among other things, a mobile digital computer. In this sense, Fairphone is pursuing the idea of hacking by strategically linking the transparency of production chains with the openness of the device. Fairphone reveals the blueprints of their devices as well as the source codes of their software. It is transparent both in terms of open source hardware and software and ethics. In its corporate strategies, Fairphone combines ethics with hacker ethics of open access and free information. (Cf. Levy 1984)

With this concept the small Amsterdam company literally invites its users to undertake hacker practices. Every Fairphone 2 comes with a default open operating system based on Android, originally developed by Google. The operating system Fairphone Open OS enables the users to get the so-called 'root rights' over the smartphone, that is to get almost complete access to the system. The users thus become 'superusers'. On an online platform about IT security, developer Rascal Privy demonstrates that by this makes it possible to bypass Google's default settings and, for instance, to install an Internet browser on the Fairphone via an alternative provider of software products, which protects user privacy, and does not collect any data about visited websites or online purchases. (Cf. Privy 2017) According to the blog's announcement, Privy's experience report is not only helpful for "Fairphone enthusiasts, but also for users who want to free themselves from the 'tentacles' of the big data collectors". (Ibid, trans. IO) Accordingly, a Fairphone includes the necessary tools with which its users can counter the grasps of the smartphone industry with resistant practices.

The company's request for users to repair their own Fairphone is similarly perceived by hardware hackers and electronics hobbyists as an invitation to redesign. On the site of the collaborative hardware development community HACKADAY.IO, Christoph Kirschner posts a manual entitled "Hacking a Fairphone", in which he describes how the mobile device can be extended by three capacitive keys, i.e. keys that react solely to touch, and how the access possibilities of the phone can thus be specified. The open development environment of the Fairphone is the necessary prerequisite here, too. (Cf. Kirschner 2018) The Dutch electrical appliance manufacturer Aisler publishes Kirschners do-it-yourself project in the form of an AISLER Genius Box, which includes everything hobby electronics enthusiasts need for this Fairphone extension, the key module, all other individual parts, and even a template for simply soldering the new components together. (Cf. Bouschery 2018)

Do we encounter technologies of the self in these hacker practices that are, in Foucault's sense, both critical and virtuous? There is a lot to be said against it, that

should not be omitted: The described Fairphone practices are based on the myth of a comprehensive power to act. The self-proclaimed 'hackers' present themselves as an intentionally acting human and usually male user subject who retains control over the technical object and, just like himself, can free it from the tentacles of the smartphone industry. Here in particular, the connection between hacking and Fairphone's ethically modular corporate strategy is particularly close, and they share the same problems: In their plea for sustainability, 'repair cultures', i.e. communities of repairing or handicrafts that come together in repair cafés, for example, are also shaped by the idea of self-empowerment, the ability to act and the promise of community building. Repairing produces long-lasting, reused, or recycled things from short-lived industrial products. It is to be understood as a transformative practice of material objects. The creativity of repairing can be designed – similar to hacking – as an appropriation practice of ethically correct action in order to save the planet. (Cf. Krebs/Schabacher/Weber 2018; Schabacher 2017)

Hacking and repairing in this sense are based on the idea of a positively 'abused', transformed, or extended technical function tied to a human intentionality of purposes. An idea that, to take up once again Claus Pias's (2002: 261) theses on the hacker, does not make sense for digital computers – and thus neither for the smartphone. With the instructions being so conveniently presented on Fairphone's community website in the form of clickable requests for actions, the question arises whether this is a form of activism at all.4 Comparably, in the packed and delivered Fairphone hack packages, soldering template included, activism appears rather as a customer service. Steven Levy formulated the slogan "Mistrust Authority/Promote Decentralization" in his *Hacker Ethics* already in 1984. Based on this ethic, the questions regarding Fairphone hackers are: Who is the untrustworthy authority, which center do hacker practices want to attack, and from which periphery? Hacker practices resemble more the forms of political resistance that take the smartphone as a handy (and here: transformable) tool of a subject that conceives of itself as powerful and potent. Hacking myths of outsmarting the device do not consider that the subject is interwoven in power relations and that every change in this relatedness concerns its very position as a user-subject.

4 Cf. "Welcome to the Fairphone Community, https://www.fairphone.com/de/community/?ref= header, last access 7.16.2020.

### **The Paradoxical Claim, not to be Governed Thusly**

To analyze this in a final step I want to come back to one of the introduced Fairphone slogans: "This is not a phone. It's an opportunity to change the industry." Obviously, it is advertising that is supposed to work within the industry. The company Fairphone does not take an external standpoint, but pursues change from within, which cannot avoid being shaped by at least some economic interest and can by no means completely clear itself of the grievances it seeks to change. These are not the clean hands of heroic resistance, but resistant practices with dirty hands that result from an unmanageable pluralization of possibilities. However, I am more interested in the first part of the slogan: "This is not a Phone". In the Fairphone Community Forum, one user can serve as an example for numerous users who express their despair with the problems of the device: Her Fairphone 2 has a bad battery and even after trying a new one the device does not get through the day with one battery charge.The microphone is already defective again after being replaced three times. The opening of the camera or of other apps takes a long time, apps crash and send error messages once opened. "I want to love you Fairphone but I can't!", she closes her post. A 'Fairphone Angel' writes back to her and explains in detail how the company is working on improving these shortcomings. However, he ends with the following words: "The Fairphone stands for other values: for movement and for change. It's about the idea, not the smartphone." (Fairphone Community Forum 2018)

The resistive Cat's Cradle that the Fairphone involves its users in, by working on the smartphone industry, opens – again with Haraway – "partial and flawed translations across differences" (2016: 10). It initiates new forms of relationships, a constellation of participation that imposes itself to the participants and produces all participating entities anew. In this constellation, the smartphone does not appear as a reliably functioning device that follows human intentions. Rather, it proves to be an independent and dysfunctional mediator. The complexity of the heterogeneous relations of a fair smartphone is difficult to acknowledge and to withstand: "Es ist aus"5 – that is the title of an article in the weekly newspaper *Die Zeit*, in which a frustrated user describes her failing relationship with a Fairphone. (Djahangard 2017) The Fairphone opens up a resistant medial participation in which the exclusive relationship between human and device, the intimate bond that the smartphone makes possible, is constantly at stake and the user at risk of losing herself in an unmanageable multitude of cross-species relationships. Following the threads from each part of the phone to its production conditions and the well-being of the involved actors complexifies the attachment of user and devices and accordingly the becoming of a user-subject. But it is precisely in this opening, I would like to

5 The title plays with a double meaning in German: "It is over"/"It is off".

conclude, where the resistant potential of Fairphone practices lies – where a Foucauldian form of critique can emerge. It is an uncomfortable and straining way to throw sand into the gear of the smartphone industry, that goes hand in hand with changes in the subjectivation of smartphone-users. It is a plea 'not to be governed thusly' in Foucault's sense. Not a big heroic upheaval like the smart mob or hacker utopians have in mind. But a resistance in small steps that involves the subject by paradoxically challenging its very position; a resistance that disturbs, shifts, and irritates.

### **References**

### **4. Theories of Critique**

### **Segment Introduction**

#### *Roberto Nigro, Erich Hörl*

In his well-known commentary on the Kantian Text *What is Enlightenment*, Michel Foucault writes:*"*The question which seems to me to appear for the first time in the texts by Kant […] is the question of the present, of present reality. It is the question: What is happening today? What is happening now? What is this "now" in which we all live and which is the site, the point [from which] I am writing?" (Foucault 2010: 11).

In his commentary on Foucault, Pierre Macherey (1989) has brilliantly shown that in this text by Kant we see the appearance of the question of the present as a philosophical event to which the philosopher who speaks of it belongs.The question also is: what is the present to which I belong? What does it mean to be a subject? To be subject means to belong both as an element and as an actor to a global process that defines the field of possible experiences. The subject does not exist in isolation but co-exists with other subjects and is part of a global process. According to Foucault, Kant's text speaks about the membership of the subject to a certain 'we'.

Foucault also asserts that this question about the present emerging for the first time in the Kantian text will find another example later. However, although he does not specifically name another author, one can legitimately believe there was more than one. For instance, we can imagine that Marx gave a very specific answer to this question when he showed that any form of critique of the present must also be a critique of capitalism. This is the kind of temporality to which we belong: Capitalistic relationships define the field of our possible experience. It is as if Marx suggests that it is impossible to define the ontology of the present without centering the analysis on the critique and genealogy of capitalism.

But let us now imagine that we had to answer these questions today. What could we say in this regard? What is this "now" in which we all live, and which is the site from which we are writing?

We would like to suggest a possible answer to this question. It seems that the most appropriate answer in this case would be to situate our present from within the singular plural event known as *1968*: a name and an event that entails, of course, a plurality of meanings.

1968 was a global event under whose name we can gather together different temporalities and events: "anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles, antiracist movements, feminist movements, worker revolts, various forms of refusal of capitalist discipline and control, and numerous others", if we wanted here to follow the account given by Hardt and Negri in their book *Assembly* (2017: 64).

1968 was a historical conjuncture, an encounter, a disjunctive synthesis also characterized by epistemological breaks, by the emergence of new questions and problematizations ranging from the debate on human sciences to the emergence of structuralism, from the crisis of ancient forms of Marxism to the rise of heterodox currents of Marxism, from the appearance of the *nouveau roman* to the beginning of the *nouvelle vague,* to name but a few intellectual, important changes.

Maurice Blanchot gave an interesting account of 1968, when he defined it as a happy meeting, "like a feast that breached the admitted and expected social norms" (1988: 29). For him, 1968 was explosive and spontaneous communication, an event that could affirm itself *without project*. It was *la prise de parole* in the words of Michel De Certeau, the capture but also the dissemination of different undisciplined speeches. 1968, if we wanted to refer here to an interesting formulation by Michel Foucault, was in its broader sense "the insurrection of subjugated knowledges" (2003: 7). What is quite important to note in connection with the analysis of Foucault is that the appearance of these disqualified or inferior knowledges, i.e., knowledges stemming from below, maps the emergence of multiple points of resistance and of critique: a microphysics of points of resistance disseminated throughout society.

Bearing in mind all of these aspects, let's now note a paradox: when people, probably for the first time with such intensity, started to speak by using their local, marginal, 'from below' knowledge ("and this is by no means the same thing as common knowledge or common sense but, on the contrary, a particular knowledge, a knowledge that is local, regional, or differential, incapable of unanimity and which derives its power solely from the fact that it is different from all the knowledges that surround it," (ibid.: 7-8)), a specular movement also started and began to denounce the loss of impetus of critique, its disenchantment, paralysis, and unraveled power. It is worth mentioning that we are still part of this movement or feeling that we can probably define as a form of critique of critique.

One could say that the two tendencies (people starting to speak, on one hand, and the denunciation of the loss of impetus of critique, on the other) do not intersect at the same level since the latter has to be interpreted as the attempt to warn against the coming dangers stemming from the beginning of the counter revolution. Counter-revolution has to be interpreted as the (long) process intended to iron out 1968. *May 68 did not happen*, or as Gilles Deleuze elsewhere also wrote: "It was a competition to see who could piss on May 68 the most" (Deleuze 2007: 144). With their article published in 1984 under the title *May 68 did not happen*, Deleuze

and Félix Guattari noted the incapacity of French society to assimilate Mai 68. A double incapacity involved in the term 'assimilate', as Étienne Balibar points out, since it implies both a lack of comprehension and the inability to swallow it (2020: 89).

However, not all discourses denouncing the loss of intensity of critique warned against the dangers stemming from the counter revolution. On another level the denunciation of the loss of impetus of critique also met and still meets the detractors of 1968. This has to do with the fact that some analyses recognize the seeds for the triumph of neoliberal rationality in the spirit of 1968. It is a widespread thesis that takes different forms in the analyses of different authors. For Slavoj Žižek, for instance, the spirit of 1968 is essentially individualist and bourgeois: hence it prepared the triumph of neoliberalism. From a different perspective, authors like Luc Boltanki and Ève Chiapello see that a large part of the critique of 1968 at work in the student's movement, in particular, has been largely recuperated and used to modernize the system of production. Even though these positions do not complement one another, they share the idea that the emergence of a neoliberal governmentality is not only the result of a counter revolution but also the deployment of seeds ingrained in 1968. Against these assumptions, one should assert the necessity to pay attention to the meaning of the idea of individualism, since it is a concept that seems to be at the root of both 1968 and its deployment in neoliberal practices. As Balibar remarks, the idea of individual freedom takes two different meanings and even opposite trajectories depending on whether it is considered from capitalist, market-oriented logic or from a working-class autonomy perspective (ibid.: 113, footnote).

As you remember, our initial point in these pages or, if you like, our thesis here, was based on the following apparent paradox: the more forms of critique spread, the more the feeling that critique is losing its intensity grows. The more different forms of critique and resistance emerge and are disseminated in different points of society, the more a feeling of melancholia pervades us.

It would be no consolation to remark that if we deserted for a moment our focus on short cycles of history to devote our attention to long periods of time, the situation would not improve.

Certainly, it makes sense to say that in order to grasp the ontology of the present, in order to understand how we have been trapped in our own history, one should equip him- or herself with bifocals, as Pierre Rosanvallon suggests: On one side, the focal length of a short history like that which began in the 1960s and, on the other side, that of a long history dealing with the modern project of emancipation (Rosanvallon 2018: 12-13).

However, despite enlarging the focal length, the sentiment of melancholia remains. It is likely that we are so accustomed to this feeling of powerlessness from before the Leviathan that we will never be rid of it. One should incidentally remark that Walter Benjamin coined the concept "left-wing melancholy" in 1931, not to indulge a negativistic quiet, but to investigate possible transformative politics.

Next, the melancholic mood took other forms in some of his fellow travelers. With Adorno and Horkheimer, for instance, we instead face a pessimistic perspective. The Frankfurt School philosophers developed in-depth studies about new forms of authoritarianism, domination, and submission of the entirety of society to the market-oriented logic of capitalism. In particular, their focus is on the subsumption of culture and social relations. They also destroy the myth and illusion that art, or culture in the broader sense, could still constitute the last bulwark against the expansion of capitalist valorization. In their account, the emergence of the cultural industry cannot but shatter this last hope since the cultural industry only subdues and closes the creativity of the artist. Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer give an interpretation of capitalist domination where its power is omnipresent and totalitarian.

If we cross the line, that is to say go beyond left-wing melancholia, we can recognize the same diagnosis in the account of other influential thinkers. Like Horkheimer and Adorno, Heidegger also maintains that the theories of progress have reached their point of exhaustion. Heidegger even enlarges the focal length by encompassing a metaphysical perspective. In that way the genealogy of capitalism and technological devastation can be retraced back to the Greek/western metaphysical rationality which began with the platonic moment. We could still include other authors in our broad account. During the 19th century different authors from very different perspectives have studied the processes of industrialization, rationalization, automation, and massification of society. From the representatives of the Hegelian left through Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Heidegger, Bloch, Sartre, and the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, to name a few, there was a keen interest in the study of the new challenges stemming from the industrialization and massification of society. These authors did not work on the same object, indeed their research had very little in common. Yet they all contributed to an understanding of the development of productive forces and the relations of production on an abstract and impersonal level. In this regard, a common point between these disparate research topics can be formulated as that they all contributed to liberating the philosophical way of thinking from metaphysical residues. By doing so, they allowed social and economic transformations to be considered in historical terms (De Feo, 1992: 347-348). This was certainly an important contribution.

However, they also completely overturned the understanding of the processes they were analyzing. Their theoretical patterns became the starting point for an ideology of totalitarian and technological domination of capital. This was also the starting point for catastrophic and pessimistic interpretations concerning the fall of critique and the disappearance of any form of resistance.

Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge that the web of misunderstandings and illusions in which contemporary thought is caught stems from its failure to register that critique only speaks the language of subjectivity and that subjectivity cannot be reduced to an *effect* of capital and technological domination. In forgetting that subjectivity is both *constitution* and *subversion*, dominant forms of contemporary thought have become entangled in the illusion that the disappearance of the subject could only lead to the fall of critique. Classical philosophy, henceforth deprived of a subject and unable to analyze new emerging forms of subjectivity, ended up hypostatizing critique in a movement that constantly address itself could not but engender the twin figures of nihilism and powerlessness.

Against this nihilistic trajectory, one should recall that critique is an *alethurgic practice* (a manifestation of truth in the broader sense given by Foucault to these terms) revealing itself through subjectivity. If one wants to recognize the new forms of critique, one has to simultaneously study the metamorphosis of subjectivity. The fragmentation and dissemination of critique today reflects the fragmentation of subjectivity. One can consider this fragmentation as the result of new modes of capitalistic production. But simply viewing life and subjectivity as invested, subjugated, managed, and controlled by capitalistic processes remains insufficient as life and subjectivity are constantly solicited, produced, and formed. In the interstices of these processes, life resists and resistances multiply. In this regard, we have also to witness that the term subjectivity as we are using it no longer refers to just a human or anthropological dimension, requiring instead the articulation of a new conception of *human*. Subjectivity is the name for the social machines. This term does no longer implies an opposition between human being and machine and does not lead to ideas of dehumanization and alienation. Gilbert Simondon recognizes that humans and machines belong to the same ontological level. What resides in machines is a human reality, a human gesture fixed and crystallized in machines. His reflections can be put in continuity with the words of Deleuze and Guattari, who in the *Anti-Oedipus* affirm that the question does not consist in comparing humans and machines but in putting them in relation. to show how humans are a component of machines In 1992, Guattari also wrote:

"It's a question of being aware of the existence of machines of subjectivation which don't simply work within the 'faculties of the soul,' interpersonal relations or intrafamilial complexes. Subjectivity does not only produce itself through the psychogenetic stages of psychoanalysis or the 'mathemes' of the Unconscious, but also in the large-scale social machines of language and the mass media- which cannot be described as human." (Guattari 1995: 9).

It is probably by pursuing this analytical trajectory that we will be able to overcome the feeling of powerlessness and nihilism and be able to grasp the powers of a nonteleological critique, even in the misery of our present time.

The following essays focus on three modalities of critique: Didier Debaise contrasts different ways of side-taking within metaphysical thinking in his contribution "Critique of Naturalist Thought: From Naturalism to Perspectivism in Contemporary Thought". He formulates a critique of the modern concept of nature that follows a bifurcation between 'real' and 'apparent' nature and subjugates the multiplicity of beings in a unified order. Following Alfred North Whitehead (and referring to Eduardo Viveros de Castro et al.) Debaise outlines a metaphysical perspectivism and thus an alternative way of inhabiting the earth and including different modes of existence. In this theory of critique every being is conceived as a subjectivity with a specific perspective, where everything that exists is viewed in the same univocal logic and all subjectivities are conceived on the basis of their possessive relations to the world.

In his critical audiovisual analysis in his contribution "Flows of People. Comments through Migration Discourse in the Video *Bibby Challenge*" Mathias Denecke discusses the close relationship between 'water' and 'migration' via concepts such as 'refugee flows' or 'waves'. Denecke is particularly interested in the political dimensions of these concepts, which migrants discursively seem to produce as 'not yet controlled'. By considering the filmic footage as well as means of sound production the chapter shows how the video *Bibby Challenge* contributes to recent migration discourse by posing the question, "what remains unheard when we speak of the refugee flow as a matter of course?" (273) Denecke refers to the history of the concept 'liquid crowed' in order to open up the metaphorical relations between people and aspects of water. The chapter shows that it is precisely the metaphorical connection to 'flow' and 'liquidity' that designs movements of people as controllable and steerable.

In his chapter "Being Lonesome Amongst the Many. Of Bloom and Multitude" Michel Schreiber concentrates the term multitude in conjunction with current modes of production and existence. He interweaves and transverses publications by Paolo Virno with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who describe "subjectivity as [an] unstable and ever changing" (281) part of production. Reading their concepts through the lens of Tiqqun, Schreiber shows "how subjectivity is simultaneously produced and neglected through a preliminary sharing" (282). In doing so he evolves a new critical analysis of the term of multitude and asks whether we encounter Bloom, who is lonesome among others and self-estranged, within the multitude? With Tiqqun he wants to step back from the "analysis of becoming, relationality, and processes and go somewhere else." (285) Bloom is outlined by Schreiber as a circular (argumentation-) figure of a schizophrenic existence, marked by a principle incompleteness, a radical insufficiency. Describing this as the base of human existence Schreiber concludes, "subjectification of the many as a singularity in multitude cannot exist without the desubjectification of the singular beings in their mode of existence as Bloom." (289)

### **References**

Balibar, Étienne (ed.) (2020): "Sur les interprétations de Mai 68", in: *Histoire interminable. D'un siècle l'autre*, Paris: La Découverte.

Blanchot, Maurice (1988): *The unavowable Community*, New York: Station Hill Press.

Hardt, Michael/Negri, Antonio (2017): *Assembly*, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Macherey, Pierre (1989): "Pour une histoire naturelle des norms", in*: Michel Foucault philosophe. Rencontre internationale Paris 9, 10, 11 janvier 1988*, Paris : Des Travaux/Seuil, p. 203-221.

Rosanvallon, Pierre (2018): *Notre histoire intellectuelle et politique 1968-2018,* Paris: Seuil.

### **Critique of Naturalist Thought** From Naturalism to Perspectivism in Contemporary Thought

#### *Didier Debaise*

I will start from an assumption: the moderns invented a concept of nature in order to inhabit the earth.This hypothesis seems to me to be a good guide for articulating a set of transformations that have taken place in recent decades concerning the variety of ways of inhabiting the earth on the basis of inter-capture operations between anthropology and metaphysics (cf. Descola 2013 and Viveiros de Castro 2014). If it is essential to question this invention of nature today, it is not only because it defines the status and function of the categories of metaphysics, right up to its contemporary iterations, even obviously when they do not have nature as their explicit object, but because the invention of nature constitutes a necessary condition for thinking about the consequences of the 'new climatic regime' (Latour 2017).

Let us begin by taking this hypothesis in its most immediate form. By connecting nature to the question of the moderns, the hypothesis implies two fundamental displacements which clash with the current vision of nature. First of all, it mobilizes the idea that nature is historic or, more exactly, in terms that I take from Alfred North Whitehead, that it is epochal. By this we mean that nature, in the form that we have inherited it, would have had a moment of birth, a temporal origin, and that it would have developed, consolidated, and propagated throughout different spaces, within different regimes of existence, to the point of merging with all the dimensions of modern experience. We can situate in the invention of the modern sciences, on the basis of the gestures and experimental operations that began the moment at which this nature was constituted. This period has come to its limit today, to the point of toppling over.

Next, by affirming that the moderns have invented a concept of nature in order to inhabit the earth, we set forth a difference between 'nature' and 'earth'. Let us clarify the difference: the earth would be the common soil that we could inhabit in multiple ways, while nature would mark a particular way of relating to it. The confusion that we ended up taking for granted between nature and the earth is not

the result of chance or an accident external to the implementation of the concept of nature: it is one of the tendencies inherent in the concept, a tendency towards hegemony – a propensity for the concept of nature and the categories that implement it to overshadow all alternatives, even if it means annihilating other ways of relating to and inhabiting the earth. The concept of nature has thus become the site of all the political redefinitions of the moderns: a tool for the domestication of their knowledge and their practices, an instrument of the domination of others by the imposition of a single manner of inhabiting the earth.

I would like to question the way in which nature became for the moderns an operator for the disqualification of minority knowledge practices and a tool for the colonization of others.

### **The Modern Invention of Nature**

What is nature for the moderns? It is above all a matter of gestures and operations. Among the multiplicity of gestures, it seems to me that two deserve special attention. I take them from Whitehead, who evokes them for the first time without defining them in terms of gesture or operation in one of his first philosophical books, *The Concept of Nature*. They form one of the constant obsessions that run throughout his work. He calls them bifurcation and localization. Nature is the product of this double operation. What is bifurcation? In *The Concept of Nature*, Whitehead expresses it in the form of a protest:

"What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind." (Whitehead 1920: 30)

To understand this passage and its importance today, we must understand what this bifurcation operation is and what made it necessary.

It is above all an absolutely practical and essentially local question which makes it necessary. Given a natural body (physical, chemical, biological, etc.), how can we distinguish, or more exactly extract, the relatively invariant qualities which would be essential to it and which would characterize it in its own right? This question is properly posed in an experimental framework (Stengers 2000: 82) based on the techniques and formalisms that made it possible to generalize the status of the qualities of bodies. It is expressed philosophically in the great distinction that forms the constant obsession of modern philosophy, that of primary and secondary qualities. What is first is therefore the gesture of dividing bodies; what derives from it is the economy of qualities which will then determine the distinction of substances that gives rise to dualism. The great 'error' of the bifurcation and the reason for its hegemonic propensity, which is unjustified from the point of view of the operation, must not be located in the experimental practice in which it finds its origin, but in its reification. By a strange movement, the terms that issue from the local, located gesture placed on the inside of bodies, resulting from an experimental, artificial division, acquire an ontological status in their own right.

We will not cease to be astonished at this fundamental inversion in the constitution of the concept of nature: from the fact that it is always possible to extract heterogeneous qualities from bodies, we have deduced that nature was made up of distinct regimes of qualities of which bodies would be the expression. On the one hand, there would be 'real' nature with its own qualities which are expressed in terms such as matter, extended substance, etc.; on the other, 'apparent' nature, with its own regimes of existence and entities such as spirit, value, sense of importance, and aesthetics. It is a question of seeing all the operations of disqualification that are implemented behind the 'innocence' of an operation of knowledge: the exclusion of secondary qualities, that is, values, aesthetic dimensions, and subjective apprehensions referred to as 'simple psychic additions', which is to say, external to nature, and the disqualification of all knowledge practices based on these secondary qualities. The bifurcation became a veritable war machine against all forms of interested knowledge attached to beings and situations, returning them to merely subjective, superficial knowledge restricted to the perspectives of those who used it. As Isabelle Stengers writes: "We live in a veritable cemetery for destroyed practices and collective knowledges" (Stengers 2015: 98).

But this gesture of bifurcation would have been incomplete by itself, for it left an obscure zone in its wake. The whole modern experience of nature deployed within the bifurcation points to these primary qualities of bodies which are both constitutive of experience and inaccessible to it. In order to give sense to the complete scene that it produces, it cannot avoid a proper qualification of the natural bodies themselves. The obscure zone, staged, dramatized, and intensified to its maximum comprises the primary qualities. The question, left open by the bifurcation, is how to positively qualify bodies once they are dissociated from their phenomenal dimensions. In order to see how this qualification is made possible, we must understand the second great gesture of the instauration of nature, a gesture which also prejudges everything, determining the set of ontological categories that will come to give meaning to nature.

In *Science and the Modern World*, Whitehead defines "localization" as follows:

"To say that a bit of matter has simple location means that, in expressing its spatiotemporal relations, it is adequate to state that it is where it is, in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time." (Whitehead 1948: 58)

Everything occupies a point in space and time. A thing is real insofar as it is localizable in space and in time. By contrast, it will be said that a thing is unreal from the moment that we cannot locate it in a precise space and time. To the question 'what is matter?', the simplest answer that can be given is: "an expanse of space in a moment of time." But how could we localize an extension, a point in space, a moment in time, without already having at least a geometry, a determination of space, a priori, and a timeline? In other words, how can one speak of matter as it is defined by its localization without a formalism of space and time? It is this strange gesture that completes the 'bifurcation' and which provides formalism by constructing it in order to qualify what is real as a set of localizable entities.

In this sense, I agree entirely with Latour's diagnosis, in *An Inquiry into Modes of Existence*, that the fabrication of the modern concept of nature is the result of an "amalgamation" between distinct regimes of existence. He writes:

"this amalgam is 'material world,' or, more simply, 'matter.' The idealism of this materialism—to use outdated terms—is the main feature of their anthropology and the first result of this inquiry, the one that governs all the others." (Latour 2013: 98)

As with bifurcation, we are dealing here with a local gesture that finds its *raison d'être* and its consistency in the necessities and techniques of experimentation. It is not the gesture that is problematic, but its reification, the moment when the act of localizing is lost and only an abusive definition of the real as localizable matter is retained; it is the becoming-ontological of the act that is the source of the innumerable false problems inherited by the metaphysics that take up the effect of the operation and forget the cause. Now, this definition of the real as a set of realities localizable in space and in time was again at the origin of a set of disqualifications: attachments to non-localizable beings, and to the practices and rituals in which these attachments are realized. Localization was behind reducing the practices of 'others' to the simple 'beliefs', 'representations', and 'fetishisms' through which the moderns deal with reality. I see, in these two gestures and their reification, the origin of the modern invention of nature. Established on the basis of principally experimental questions, they were transposed by the corresponding operations of reification and deployed at all levels of modern experience without translation or particular attention to different domains. This is what I intend by the naturalist origin of modern metaphysics. According to the converging observations of Henri Bergson, William James, John Dewey, and Whitehead, this is what remains entangled in a multiplicity of false problems linked to the translation of operational gestures into real entities, which are then taken to be originary themselves.

### **The Perspectivist Experience**

Nature no longer seems to be able to fulfill its functions. It articulated beings at the cost of innumerable subtractions: the reduction of modes of existence to only two, the subtraction of secondary qualities, the strict delimitation of subjective experience, the exclusion of a set of knowledge practices, etc. It is this diagnosis which is at the heart of the necessities from which a metaphysics of another kind is constituted, a perspectivist metaphysics which is becoming more and more vivid (cf. Latour 2002, Despret and Galletic 2006, Viveiros de Castro 2014, Montebello 2015). I would now like to lay out some of its requirements. Above all, perspectivism intends to replace the idea of nature. The general feeling which animates it is that everything which had been excluded from nature, set aside or reduced to the status of a superficial aspect, is returning in force, imposing itself through ecological transformations and by representing the voice of new spokespeople who replace, at the heart of nature, the dimensions that had been temporarily excluded from it. Everything must be re-articulated on the basis of a new requirement: philosophy can no longer exclude anything.

This philosophical decision traverses Whitehead's speculative thought and I would like to grant it all its contemporary relevance. It is a posture that consists in placing on the same plane, on the same surface, everything that had been hierarchized and differentiated, replacing secondary qualities, a sense of importance, values, aesthetics, relationships, on the inside of beings. There should no longer exist domains founded a priori by successive bifurcations, of the real and the subjective, being and appearance, fact and value. Rather everything should be relocated within each being, in the importance of the relationships it weaves with every other. A universe specific to each being, a singular way of existing, with its tendencies, its attachments, its aspirations and its renouncements: this is the sentiment that we will call perspectivist in metaphysics. Perspectivism redoes the oppositions of naturalistic metaphysics almost term by term; it undoes the idea of nature so as to maintain only the secondary dimension, the effect of a particular mode of the arrangement of beings, a singular organization of perspectives. In short: nature is no more than a provisional economy of perspectives. Recently, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro recalled its importance as a mode of interpretation of animism:

"This double, materialist-speculative twist, applied to the usual psychological and positivist representation of animism, is what we called 'perspectivism,' by virtue of the analogies, as much constructed as observed, with the philosophical thesis associated with this term found in Leibniz, Nietzsche, Whitehead and Deleuze." (Castro 2014: 55)

I propose to establish three operations inherent to the establishment of a metaphysical perspectivism. As I am unable to avoid being too cursory on a subject which would require particular attention to the differences and variations of concepts, I would only like to indicate the elements of metaphysical perspectivism in the form of general prescriptions. First of all, make of every being a subjectivity. Whitehead expresses it very clearly when he writes in *Process and Reality* that "apart from the experiences of subjects, there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness." (Whitehead 1978: 167) It is undoubtedly this central element of perspectivism that is the most difficult to grant as the notion of subjectivity seems inevitably associated with a set of categories (intentionality, consciousness, anthropological experience) which at first glance reduce the field of its application or extension. In what sense could this concept of subjectivity be of any help in articulating all beings more broadly than the concept of nature? Is it not even more beholden than the concept of matter to the bifurcation operation which we have made the central term of modern experience? How can we understand the rejection of naturalist metaphysics when we take up a term that was so strongly associated with it as that of intentionality and affirm, in the manner of Viveiros de Castro, that "every existent is a center of intentionality apprehending other existents according to their respective characteristics and powers"? (Castro 2014: 55)

What a strange vision it is that animates perspectives and which is expressed in the obsessive questions that traverse the multiplicity of the philosophies that put it to work: what would become of intentionality if it were applied to all levels of existence? What sort of subject would emerge if one made desire (in the manner of Tarde) the very stuff of beings? More than a description, or a general conception of existence, it must be seen as a methodological decision for each category that seems to us to define human exceptionality, grant it maximum extension, and place it at all levels of existence. It is then subjectivity, in the anthropological sense of the term, which finds itself decentered as it becomes a particular mode, a singular perspective that is established within a larger logic in which it takes shape, is just one focus among many, and by no means the model or the cause. If perspectivism takes subjectivity as the starting point for a metaphysical investigation, it is not out of the desire to consolidate its form, nor because it would be the limit of all experience and the authentic foundation of any investigation in a kind of homage to correlationism. On the contrary, it is with a view towards weakening the evidence for exceptionalism is neutralized by the operation of extending the categories that set it to work.

Next, register all beings within the same univocal logic. At first glance, all perspectives are on the same level, manifest the same principles of existence, and are composed of the same fabric. As Whitehead writes, using a neologism:

"Actual entities (subject of perspective) differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space. But, though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level." (Whitehead 1978: 18)

There should be no exceptions, no leaps in principles; this is a radical rationalism as the schemas and categories of perspective must be identical everywhere, meeting the same requirements. This obviously does not mean that all perspectives are equal, that they are basically similar or that their diversity is only apparent, which would imply a kind of flat democracy of beings. As Whitehead writes, there are "gradations of importance, and diversities of function." How then are we to explain that hierarchy exists on univocal grounds? Plurality is first, but how does one subject relate to another, under what modality, how does it differentiate itself, and by what means does it impose a certain version of the universe? All of these questions can be treated within the framework of generic principles whose purpose is to highlight how the subject exists. Univocity has, as its object, the how, manners, and modes of existence.

Finally, make perspective a possessive activity. From Friedrich Nietzsche to Viveiros de Castro, via Gabriel Tarde and Whitehead, we can identify a generic feature of perspective, a veritable principle of individuation. The terms vary – taking, capture, possession, integration, or even grasping – but the features associated converge. Tarde expresses it as a 'universal fact': "Every being wants, not to make itself appropriate for external beings, but to appropriate them for itself." (Tarde 2012: 55) And he made it the program of a philosophy yet to be invented:

"All philosophy hitherto has been based on the verb Be, the definition of which was the philosopher's stone, which all sought to discover. We may affirm that, if it had been based on the verb Have, many sterile debates and fruitless intellectual exertions would have been avoided." (Ibid.: 52)

Subjects, as beings of perspectives, therefore do not precede their relations to the world; they are constituted through them. What is first, on the contrary, are the acts of possession, the taking, the whole economy of having of which Tarde speaks. How does one being capture another? By what means and with what intensity does one make the other the material of its own existence? Deleuze expressed it most clearly in the portrait he drew of Whitehead in the chapter devoted to him in *The Fold*:

"Everything prehends its antecedents and its concomitants and, by degrees, prehends a world. The eye is a prehension of light. Living beings prehend water, soil, carbon, and salts. At a given moment the pyramid prehends Napoleon's soldiers (forty centuries are contemplating us), and inversely." (Deleuze 1993: 78)

Subjects therefore extend to infinity by the step-by-step capture of all other beings; they experience themselves, their value, their importance, their aesthetic traits through their possessive activities. It is as if, by the repetition of the activity of prehension, of capture or of possession, subjects acquire an increasingly private life, an experience of themselves, a subjectivity all the more intense as it is constituted by the experience of other subjects. Thus, taking account of a subject means following the ways by which it appropriates others, translates them into its own logic and gives them a value in the image of its own type of existence.

By way of conclusion, I would like to revisit the hypothesis that I formulated at the beginning: the moderns invented a concept of nature in order to inhabit the earth. I tried to pinpoint what they thought they found there, namely the possibility of unifying the profusion of beings, entities, and things that are all more or less resistant to a unitary inscription. The moderns could only achieve this unification at the cost of multiple subtractions and abusive hierarchies. Forgetting the operational nature of their abstractions and functions, forgetting in other words their constructions, they reified their abstractions until they ended up believing that they were dealing with nature itself. Metaphysics followed suit by defining the general frameworks of being and thought, as well as the conditions of truth for these strange reified abstractions. If this diagnosis is correct, then it is without a doubt the concept of nature itself which must give way to other ways of articulating beings and instaurating new compositions (Latour 2010). Metaphysical perspectivism presents itself as an alternative to naturalist metaphysics, as another way of articulating beings and inhabiting the earth. It in no way pretends to reach a better-founded reality, a reality of which naturalism would be a distortion. We will find in perspectivism no claim to define an authentic metaphysics, no search for adequation to a presupposed reality whose features it would reveal. Perspectivism is just as artificialist, constructivist, pragmatic in its functions, and as fabulatory as naturalist metaphysics was before it got lost in its disastrous reifications. What distinguishes it radically from naturalist metaphysics is that perspectivism aims to exclude nothing: neither beings nor modes of existence.

*Translated by Tano S. Posteraro*

### **References**

Deleuze, Gilles (1993): *The Fold*, London: Athlone Press.

— (2017): *Facing Gaïa,* Cambridge: Polity.

Tarde, Gabriel (2012): *Monadology and Sociology*, Melbourne: re.press.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2014): *Cannibal Metaphysics*, Minneapolis: Univocal.

Whitehead, Alfred North (1948): *Science and the Modern World*, New York: Pelican.

— (1978): *Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology*, New York: The Free Press.

### **Flows of People** Comments through Migration Discourse in the Video *Bibby Challenge*

### *Mathias Denecke*

Designed as floating housing for people working in coastal regions or at sea, the Bibby Challenge1 is an accommodation barge that can house up to 670 people. From February 1995 to February 2003, the city of Hamburg hired the Bibby Challenge, among others, to provide accommodation for refugees, particularly from Eastern Europe.2 Adnan Softić's video includes archival photographs and footage by artist Marilyn Stroux, who filmed life around and on the Bibby Challenge.3

#### *Figure 1: Bibby Challenge*

Screenshot Bibby Challenge (TC 08:04)

1 The idea for this contribution was developed in a panel discussion on the metaphoricity of water with Adnan Softić at "Hallo-Festspiele" 2018 in Hamburg.

2 For the client list, see https://www.bibbymaritime.com/why-choose-bibby; last access 05.20.2021.

3 In addition to "high quality en suite" housing, the company Bibby Maritime Limited promotes the comfort of the Bibby Challenge with the ship's large restaurant, bar, fitness room, and "games room". See http://www.bibbymaritime.com/bibby-challenge/; and https://www.bibby maritime.com/our-fleet, last access 05.20.2021.

The video was part of an installation shown in the exhibition "Mobile Worlds" (2018) at the Hamburg *Kunst- und Gewerbemuseum*. 4 It provides the foundation for a critical reading of the recent European migration discourse in this chapter. Of decided interest is the way in which the video produces the connection between water and migration on the basis of the filmic fabrication of the *Bibby Challenge*. Here, the "audiovisual production has to be taken seriously as the 'fabrication' of a specific knowledge space within and through which something that is supposed to be *re*presented first comes into being." (Bippus/Ochsner/Otto 2016: 264-265; emphasis in original) This filmic fabrication is not to be confused with "depiction." (Ibid.: 266) Where the video visually focuses on images of people on boats in a globalhistorical context, the spoken commentary deals with metaphors associated with water. Functioning as a commentary on migration, this can especially be noted in the production level of the sound. Close analysis of the video's complex audiovisual commentary highlights issues in the discourse on migration. In particular, the relationship between the terms 'refugee flows' or 'waves' and associations with water can be critically addressed. On the one hand, these metaphorical associations are not apolitical as they are part of discursive power structures (Foucault 1982). On the other hand, this reference, i.e. the invocation of the reference to water, is itself subject to certain politics. In concrete terms the latter refers to the motivation to describe power relations that remain largely unheard through the seemingly selfevident talk of the refugee flow. Yet the images, the voice-over, and the foundfootage material from the 1990's, as well as its actualization today, explicitly point towards the historicity of migration. Therefore, I will include the metaphorical history of the "liquid crowd" (Gleich 2017) in order to contrast it with contemporary talk about refugee flow. Going beyond the 'image' of water, to take the question of control into account, elucidates a certain political agenda where migrants are discursively produced as *not yet* controlled.

Within the filmic layers as *sides* of audiovisual production, the discourse on refugee flow presents various points of view, or *sites*. Following the concept of "'medial participation'" (Bippus/Ochsner/Otto 2016: 261),5 in these sites "the conditions for in- or exclusion can change and […] the specific challenges for participants and

4 The video Schiffe mit Waren und Stoffen stoßen mit ihren Wellen die Bibby Challenge an (in short: *Bibby Challenge*) was shown as a multi-channel installation (10 min, 11 sec.). In addition to two video projections, a model of the Bibby Challenge was illuminated in a display case. Several soundtracks were included, which were only audible at certain points in the room due to their ceiling placement and focused output.

5 "By using 'medial participation' as a key concept, the research group proceeds on the supposition that participation is located in media-cultural exchange processes. This reconceptualization is founded on a process-related understanding of media, which allows the description of the relations between demand and entitlement in the assemblages of subjects, technological objects, practices and communities." (Bippus/Ochsner/Otto 2016: 261)

non-(or not yet)-participants are posed. These configurations are regarded as socio-technical power structures." (Ibid.: 262) The analysis of these sites addresses the way the talk about flows "mobilizes (discourses of) interactions between humans, practices, and technical objects." (Ibid.: 264) As Bippus, Ochsner and Otto point out, "participation essentially focuses on the addressability of future participants (and non-participants alike!) in complex socio-technical arrangements." (Ibid.: 267)

### **Audio-Visual Production of the Relationship Between Migration and Water**

Arrangements of stills separated by black screen define the first half of the video. These single images and subsequently shown film sequences focus on crossings of people over water and their temporary accommodation on boats. Archival footage of the Bibby Challenge is shown in split screen as well as in montage with depictions of overcrowded ships and inflatable boats. Historical pictures, like the raft of the grounded Medusa by Géricault6 and a section-view of a slave ship, are put in relation to the Bibby Challenge. The slave ship is directly followed by Massimo Sestini's 2015 award-winning press photography of a boat with migrating persons.7 Through this interplay of footage from the residential containers and the other images, the video marks a semantically loaded connection between water and migration. Especially the images invoke a historical and global context. Hereby, the montage puts *Bibby Challenge* into an ambivalent context of globalization and the history of people moving and being moved. Underlining this visual montage, the voice-over accompanies these pictures and claims: "This is not a boat." Commentaries, spoken by a female and a male voice, expressly take up a figurative sense of the Bibby Challenge anchored on the city docks: "We also do swim. Here, too, one has no firm ground under one's feet." (TC: 00:06:35-00:06:45) What initially refers to the prevailing living conditions in the containers can easily be understood as a reflection of an imagined observer 'on land': "Even here in this country one has neither a job nor an apartment forever. No furniture anyway. Also, very often no friends and family." Ideas of work, family or home are dynamized in connection to the figurative talk of water: "The constant of the home, the firmness of it, the habits, are not to be held tight." (TC: 00:06:48-00:07:20) Permanent floating of the housing unit sets allegedly fixed concepts in motion by transferring them metaphorically into the liquid and volatile state of water. "The fortress and everything that was fixed to it has long collapsed. The home is in crisis. Seen in this light, we are all displaced, aren't we?" (TC: 00:07:21-00:07:39). Applying non-metaphorically to the persons on

6 Théodore Géricault, "The Raft of the Medusa", oil on canvas, 1819, Louvre.

7 Massimo Sestini, "Rescue Operation", photography, 2015.

board the floating containers, this also indicates an imagined observer, who overlooks a larger history in terms of a global history of migration. What can be interpreted as an argument on permanent movement of people within the larger scope of civilization history has distinctly negative connotations: "Ships with goods and materials from all over the world bump into the Bibby Challenge with their waves." (TC: 00:09:05-00:09:13) Here, the former layers of observation merge. Migrating people are paralleled with the idea of a global circulation of "goods and materials," whose proximity to an economic logic dehumanizes them to mere items.8

Revolving around the anchored residential containers as a fixed point, the video further hones in on the relationship of water and migration. Considering the figurative sense of water and indicating its ambivalent meanings is not just an accessory to the video, but forms its core. Pointedly, the spoken comment both refers to the fact that the conveyed meanings of water render migration describable and highlights the problems that arise when notions of water are equated with migrating humans. Before discussing this equation in detail, this position is strengthened by the sound production.

### **Sound Production**

In addition to the spoken commentary, background sounds from the found footage organize the auditory level. Yet they do not correspond to ambient sound recorded on site, but are produced retrospectively. Although corresponding to a common practice in documentary filmmaking, it proves interesting here precisely because of its particular mode of production. In his performances including the Bibby Challenge Adnan Softić discloses what can be recognized by paying close attention: the sounds are all produced with cleaning utensils. A cleaning rag, wrung out into a bucket of water corresponds to light waves hitting the ship, while a window scraper imitates the screeching of seagulls. In addition, and more obviously, there are dripping tap and teeth brushing sounds (from TC: 00:03:02), as well as a slowly swelling vacuum cleaner noise (from TC: 00:06:28). Softić's video plays with negatively occupied conceptions of water conjured by the figurative sense of 'cleaning', referring to conservative ideals of 'purity', 'homogeneity' and ultimately to 'purge'.9 Marking the difference between atmospheric sounds as taken for granted and the negative connotations created through produced 'cleaning' sounds, the video addresses the seemingly self-evident meaning of the figurative sense of water. By playing with the difference between the sounds heard initially and upon closer listening, the specific production of atmospheric sounds confronts the relation of migration and

8 See also Mbembe's (2017) argument.

9 See also the texts read by Adnan Softić during performances.

the self-evident talk about flows. Considering the sound production using cleaning utensils alongside the off-commentary's problematizing of the ambivalent notions of water metaphors leads to the question: what remains unheard when we speak of the refugee flow as a matter of course? And this question can be translated into the recent discourse of migration.

Criticizing the talk of refugee flows has a broad bandwidth, ranging from online and blog entries, magazines, and newspaper articles to political speeches and scholarly debates. In turn, the criticism refers to the talk of refugee flows both in news coverage about migration and in public statements by politicians. Critical positions note that the talk of flows, waves, and tsunamis is about water metaphors that determine our perception of the so-called refugee crisis. In general, they aim for a picture-like quality: "It's the image of refugees or migrants as water, as in 'waves of refugees' or 'the flow of migrants'. It can also become a 'flood' or a place can be 'swamped' by recent arrivals." (Goyette 2016; cf. Packer 2016) It is already indicated here that water metaphors often refer to catastrophes (Albisser 2016), with which their use proves to be political (Parker 2015: 8; cf. Agnetta 2018: 19) or ideologically motivated in the discourse on migration (Mujagić 2018: 108-109; 123). "The metaphor of refugees as water tells a shrill story. Fugitives are not victims, but a threat." (Wehling 2016; cf. Parker 2015: 7) According to Eisenberg, terms such as 'stream of refugees' also imply "that we must protect ourselves against it, defend ourselves, build dams, otherwise we will sink, we will be flooded." (Eisenberg 2015: 2) Agnetta notes that the metaphor of the stream of refugees "subtly favors the description of the fugitive as a reified threat." (2018: 20) Thus, in language terms, migrating people are tailored as part of an indistinguishable, threatening mass. Kainz and Petersson argue that "the attribution to people of qualities ascribed to water runs the risk of metaphorically dehumanizing them due to the substance's lack of shape and colour and the impossibility of distinguishing one drop from another." (2017: 54) Albisser emphasizes this finding and states that "a collective reification and dehumanization takes place." (2016) According to Shariatmadari's conclusions, migrating people are 'dehumanized' by being compared with the forces of nature (2015). To the same extent, this logic fuels fears of the unfamiliar as a danger, which is why the inclusion of water metaphors in the talk of migration proves to be racist overall (Lee 2007: 3).10 "A flood is submerging and destructive, a tsunami is even deadly and destroys everything", Biermann writes. "Whoever says something like this in connection with refugees wants to stir up fear of them, wants to intensify racism and xenophobia" (2015).

According to these passages, the politics of the talk about refugee flows as the interplay of creating an 'us' and a (threatening) 'them' is unheard. What seems to be

10 Cf. Goyette 2016. For a detailed description of the interweaving of language and violence, see Krämer 2010; Hornscheidt in this collection.

taken for granted in the speech about the stream of refugees aims at catastrophic connotations of water and its consequences in connection with migration. Its use has become so engrained in the news coverage that possible negative connotations cannot be described directly and therefore are no longer the subject of discussion. Corresponding with the video, the critical positions stress the ambivalence of the figurative speech of water and its self-evident meaning. However, contrary to the video, historical references only play a minor role in the discourse criticism. Similar to the historically charged pictures in the video, the found-footage material relates to a certain history of people moving and water. Recordings of the Bibby Challenge take a material and thematic detour through their actualization in the video and therefore relate to a past tense. In the following, I connect a possible history of the relationship between people and their metaphoric description with notions of water.

### **On the History of the "Liquid Crowd"**

Sketching a history of flows, Moritz Gleich (2017) unravels the metaphor of the "liquid crowd". At the core of his analysis is the "petty door" at the entrance of the Crystal Palace, which was built by Joseph Paxton in 1851 as part of the first World Exhibition in London. This entrance mechanism forms a technical "threshold that could henceforth be crossed in one direction only, at a limited speed, and in an orderly manner." (Gleich 2017: 56)11 The flow of the crowd is inextricably intertwined with power relations. Gleich notes that this regulated entrance for large masses of visitors is exemplary in a far-reaching discussion involving "[u]rban planners, architects, and engineers" (ibid.), concerned with "the question […] of how best to control and organize the movement of large numbers of people." (Ibid.: 46) Specifically,

"the motif of 'flow' came to play a pivotal if not preeminent role in the resolution of the problem. For the numerous techniques and procedures developed for observing, controlling, and steering people in motion drew for their description – to varying degrees but almost without exception – on images and concepts of flux and fluidity." (Ibid.)

Due to its figurative character, flow is understood as metaphorical speech. Gleich argues that it "draws on the image of flowing or eddying waters to convey the

11 The "petty door" is part of an ensemble of techniques, including the "ground plan", which provides different paths. "The primary concern was to keep the crowd moving at all times so as to assure its steady and equal distribution throughout the space." (Gleich 2017: 55)

potentially *incalculable* features of a moving crowd: its dynamics, volume, and diversity." (Ibid.: 46; emphasis MD) The linguistic function of flow is not exhausted in its metaphoricity.

Using an early example of urban planning which seeks to direct 'streams of passers-by', Gleich illustrates a time-specific (non-)discursive ensemble. First, the "ever-more-regular occurrence of large human crowds in motion" especially in rising metropolises must be taken into account, which in turn is made describable via "the positively connoted image of a stream". Then, "a specific system of discursive production" is applied in which "the liquid crowds no longer represented an uncontrollable or accidental phenomenon but were raised to the status of an operable entity that could be planned, produced, and controlled by resort to the image of flow." (Ibid.: 51) Thus viewed, flow provides architects and planners with a means of making the incalculable crowd describable. And this raises the talk of flow into the "status as a regulatory discursive practice, above and beyond any merely contingent metaphorical function." (Ibid.: 52)

These efforts to perceive people and their movements as flow are united in the fact that they no longer read the stream as a metaphor. Instead the controlled crowd *is* the liquid flow: "techniques and procedures specifically directed toward the object of the moving crowd […] were rooted, technologically as well as symbolically, in an understanding of the human crowd as a fluid 'stream'." (Ibid.: 57) The disappearance of the metaphorical character of the flow provides a "strategic element". And therein lies the essence of Gleich's considerations: "it allowed the physicality and dynamism of the moving crowd to be referenced as a natural and calculable nexus" (ibid.). The transition point is at the moment where the mass becomes controllable, i.e. calculable. Gleich adds: "The formerly chaotic 'stream of people' – intimating absolute unpredictability and uncontrollability – could be seen in the motif to have been domesticated by cultural and architectural techniques and converted into a term for an organized and organizable movement." (Ibid.: 57)12 Altogether, Gleich illustrates the historical course in which the 'flowing of the crowd' becomes "naturalized". Following the metaphorology of Hans Blumenberg, it becomes "'indistinguishable from a physical proposition'" (Blumenberg quoted in Gleich 2017: 59). Importantly, the transition from flow as a metaphor to flow as the designation of a crowd moving in a controlled manner cannot be unrelated from questions of power. This is already implicit in the petty doors as they force the body to move in a particular way. Functioning as borders in order to regulate a large mass of

12 The discourse finally came to a halt around 1900. Ludwig Boltzmann "transferred the characteristics of atomistic physics to a human crowd. In applying concepts of mathematics and physics to the representation of a human crowd, Boltzmann made of the latter a calculable fluid. Thus, at the close of the nineteenth century, Boltzmann laid the discursive as well as scientific foundations for crowd descriptions through fluid dynamics." (Ibid.: 58)

persons, they are the materialization of decisions which can be grasped with the concept of "governmentality" (Gleich 2017: 49; Foucault 2005: 247-269). Therefore, the flow became "a vehicle for a system of governance that no longer sought to suppress mass phenomena but to promote, support, and optimize them by regulatory means." (Gleich 2017: 57)

### **Steering the (Migratory) Flow**

Considering the so-called refugee flow today from the point of view of a water metaphor, against the backdrop of its 'naturalization', the metaphor has reappeared. Analyzing the difference between the historical meaning of the flow of people at the end of the 19th century, including its conventionalization, and the current *analytical* readings in terms of a natural catastrophic view of refugee flows is fruitful. Once again it is stressed that the relation to water is productive and problematic at the same time. Although the flow metaphor seems to make large movements of people easily graspable, it is inevitably accompanied by negative connotations like the dehumanization of persons. Additionally, it is possible to compare where the respective moment of control sets in. The control of refugee flows starts at a different imagined point than the flow generated by petty doors. While, for Gleich, the flow of people is thus a mechanically induced effect, the refugee flow is connoted as still uncontrolled and uncontrollable. People flows controlled by the door mechanism contradict the assumption invoked by the natural catastrophic imaginary of the flow, according to which this flow must first be contained in a controlling manner (cf. Mujagić 2018: 115-121). Viewing today's flow of refugees in light of the question of control, a political agenda becomes discernible. To this end, the off-commentary of the *Bibby Challenge* video asks: "If we look at the whole thing as a transport metaphor, then what is the state? Should it be a vehicle, or a road, or a way?" (TC: 00:03:33-00:03:42) Thus, flows are not only portrayed as related to natural catastrophes, but – as Gleich indicates – also refer to a form of "governmentality" (Foucault 2005: 247-269). Contrary to the history of the metaphor, in the contemporary discourse on migration the flow is depicted as still to be steered.

The metaphor allows to describe the work of the state as the "art of steering" although the state less steers 'the ship' (Foucault 2005: 249-250; 267, note 7) than aims to control the flows. It refers to a political agenda that goes beyond a suggestive negative politicization of the migration discourse through the metaphor. The gap in between a regulated flow of people produced by petty doors and contemporary's talk about uncontrolled flows of people hints towards the violence of political measures necessary to produce a *controlled* flow. In the case of flows in the World Exhibition, mechanical doors sufficed to make the mass of people move

in a regulated manner. However, since today's flows are connotated with natural catastrophes, from a governmental perspective this requires more forceful steering. Mechanisms of regulation are applied where refugee flows are perceived as the most threatening: 'Floodgates', 'locks', and 'sluices' then find their administrative pendants expressed in demands for an expansion of border protection. Furthermore, it materializes in the development of identification techniques and the organization of fleeing people according to a *distribution key*, in specific facilities such as – specifically in Germany – *anchor centers*, as well as eventually in the attempt to *contain* so-called causes of refugee flight preventively through economic programs. Petersson and Kainz note that "metaphors depicting natural events and disasters tend to frame restrictive political action as a key element in order to retain state sovereignty and control over national territories." Seen in this perspective, "the primeval forces of nature alluded to in these metaphors locate political measures concerning immigration on a spectrum ranging from palliative measures at best to utterly futile at worst." (2017, 54; cf. Mujagić 2018, 115)

This perspective is exemplarily underscored by William Walter's analysis of the British government's document *Secure Borders, Safe Haven* released in 2002. Also, pertaining to the logic of (forceful) exclusion in order to produce and maintain an inclusive us, Walter strikingly notes that "[t]he pre-eminent task of government is to attract and channel flows of resources, whether investment, goods, services, and now flows of (the right kind of) people into one's territory." (2004: 244) In the document Walter registers the government's "political ambition […] to combine two forms of security – the imperative of economic security which now entails attracting mobile human capital, and personal and internal security." Hence, there is "the quest to make the border into a membrane, a tissue which can filter movements across its threshold." (Ibid.: 255)13 This illustrates the mechanism by which the deliberate inclusion of a specific group of people inevitably leads to signification of 'others' who are not welcome and therefore are excluded. Within this framework, the flow of refugees is degraded to a control variable that still needs to be regulated. Consequently, it makes no difference whether "goods and materials from all over the world" (TC: 00:09:05-00:09:13) or fleeing persons arrive. The orchestrated control of refugee flows appears in the residential containers anchored off Hamburg. They are the product of a political agenda according to which refugees may stay on a ship on the shore but not enter the country as a politically sovereign territory.14

13 Thanks to Milan Stürmer for mentioning this paper.