Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „Ethico-political practices”

This article seeks to further the discussion of mimesis in the current new materialist philosophies that are charged with doubts about the potential of mimetic practices, i.e., practices of reflection, and propose a more differential /diffractive notion of mimesis. It argues that the concept of mimesis and performative approaches to knowledge making can be compatible. The figures of mimesis appear in the conceptualizations of both reflective and diffractive practices, and if mimesis is considered rather as a diffractive operation, it could be seen as having a different efficacy and ethico-political function. Drawing on Karen Barad’s and Isabelle Stengers’ arguments, I start by showing why in the representationalist view of knowledge making, the tool of mimesis is dysfunctional—it is a way of separating and classifying copies of reality. Then, I introduce a diffractive notion of mimesis in line with the mimetic re-turn in posthuman studies. From the perspective of relational understanding of knowledge making supported in Barad’s and Stengers’ ethico-political proposals, mimesis can be perceived as a tool for provoking change and thus, imply a need to do it carefully.

Written roughly a year before the end of his life, Guattari’s ‘The Ethico-Political Foundations of Interdisciplinarity’ elaborates an account of transdisciplinary research processes closely informed by his conception of transversality. Tacitly critiquing institutions of research that separate it from the political practices associated with the reinvention of democracy, the paper explores in particular the possibilities of conducting transversal research into urban life, and speculates on the value of information technology.

Abstract Foucault is critical of the tendency to reduce all social and political problems according to predetermined ends and verifiable procedures. For Foucault, philosophical activity is a condition of possibility for the articulation of the question of the self. Inspired by his work on the desiring subject, Foucault begins to explore the ethical and political implications of self-care for modern day concerns. He presents an account of self-care that centres on developing an attitude that questions the personal relationship to truth, and puts to test those ideas and truths held most dearly. Processes of self-care evaluate the consistency between those truths a person regards as necessary and a person’s actions in the world. Interested in the ways in which people see themselves as subjects, Foucault directs his attention to the connection between systems of knowledge, power, and practices of the self. Crucial to Foucault’s process is the recognition that the self-subject is not given and does not have ontological precedence, and that subjectivity is transformable. By finding the lines and fractures in external and internal modes of objectification Foucault hopes to open up the space of freedom to bring about transformative events. The care of the self serves as a form of critique and resistance where it is both a way of living and acting in the world, and a critical response to a particular time and place.

This is a book review of Fuyuki Kurasawa's, TheWork of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices.Fuyuki Kurasawa is an associate professor of sociology, political science and social and political thought at York University in Toronto. Professor Kurasawa has a particular interest in human rights and global justice through the exploration of the theoretical underpinnings of global justice projects. Kurasawa proposes a theoretical model that strikes a balance between normative universalism and empiricism. This leads to a vision of an alternative globalization marked by radical redistribution of economic and political power. The work of global justice is largely the emancipation of those who are systemically barred from justice, through five modes of ethico-political practice: bearing witness, forgiveness, foresight, aid and solidarity. This book review is a critical look at this theoretical model and his vision of an alternative globalization.

AbstractCritics of artificial intelligence have suggested that the principles of fairness, accountability and transparency (FATE) have been used for ‘ethics washing’, in order to appease industrial interests. In this article, we develop this relational and context-dependent analysis, arguing that ethics should not be understood as abstract values or design decisions, but as socio-technical achievements, enacted in the practices of students, teachers and corporations. We propose that the ethics of using AI in education are political, involving the distribution of power, privilege and resources. To illustrate this, we trace the controversies that followed from an incident in which a student was misclassified as a cheat by an online proctoring platform during the Covid-19 lockdown, analysing this incident to reveal the socio-technical arrangements of academic integrity. We then show how Joan Tronto’s work on the ethics of care can help think about the politics of these socio-technical arrangements — that is, about historically constituted power relations and the delegation of responsibilities within these institutions. The paper concludes by setting the immediate need for restorative justice against the slower temporality of systemic failure, and inviting speculation that could create new relationships between universities, students, businesses, algorithms and the idea of academic integrity.

Compassion is a key moral emotion of liberal modernity. Traditionally, it is seen as an unproblematic moral compass, both theoretically and ethico-politically. This applies especially in the case of humanitarian action, which hinges on the compassionate impulses of individuals – to care, to give and to act – in the face of distant suffering. The article takes a critical approach to compassion. It argues that humanitarian action is incomprehensible outside of a general theory of how compassion structures the encounter between the suffering object of relief and the caring public. It does this by elaborating a pragmatist and eclectic approach to compassion in which seemingly internal affective responses have a socio-political existence and are already enabled by productive power, in particular by socially circulated and embodied narrative frames. By engaging a representative sample of NGO imagery related to the 2010 post-earthquake response in Haiti, the article illustrates not only how specific narrative frames seek to both elicit and govern the ways of feeling compassion, but also how these aesthetic and emotional practices are ethico-politically problematic in portraying distant sufferers and facilitating action. As a result, the benevolent self-image of compassion becomes circumspect. The article concludes by exploring two alternative avenues for compassion and caring.

AbstractThis article deploys a historical analysis of the relationship between law and imperialism to highlight questions about the character and role of international law in global politics. The involvement of two British international lawyers in practices of imperialism in Africa during the late nineteenth century is critically examined: the role of Travers Twiss (1809–1897) in the creation of the Congo Free State and John Westlake’s (1828–1913) support for the South African War. The analysis demonstrates the inescapably political character of international law and the dangers that follow from fusing a particular form of liberal moralism with notions of legal hierarchy. The historical cases raise ethico-political questions, the importance of which is only heightened by the character of contemporary world politics and the attention accorded to international law in recent years.

This article explores the ways through which care manifests in everyday food waste reduction practices. The article is positioned within a more-than-human approach, which emphasises blurred ontological and epistemological boundaries among and across (assemblages of) humans, nonhumans, things and issues (re)forming sociomaterial worlds. Drawing empirical insights from (n)ethnographic materials that have been generated in an ongoing research project focusing on consumers as active reducers of food waste, the article discusses three overlapping ways (labour/work, affect/affection and ethics/politics) through which we care for and live with food waste in both research and everyday life. Labour/work entails hands-on relations with food (waste), wherein food is understood as an active participant in the reduction practices. In affective practices, food waste reduction is closely attached to our bodies (and other bodies) as well as the senses of sight, touch and smell. Through ethico-political doings, food waste reduction becomes a collective issue, encompassing, for instance, gendered division of labour. The article argues for understanding food waste as a matter of care and maps out the consequences of such understanding for environmental-political agency.

The article examines critique in relation to current theories pursued and addressed in contemporary art and activism. The conception of a “partaking critique” seeks to conceive critique beyond universalising abstractions and totalising gestures. By reformulating critique as a partaking practice, we set ourselves in relation to the current demands and urgencies of a world that must confront the challenges of climate change, migration flows, inequalities between the global north and south, and the mistrust of democracy. We find it important that critique results not merely in a judging and condemning analysis and the division between correct and false. A “partaking critique” deals with historical conditions and traditional formulations of critique. Critique as a partaking practice is situated, local, transversal, and reparative, and thus mobilises dispositions to act in a panorama of neo-liberal mechanisms of paralysis and paranoia. We developed our understanding of critique based on our engagement with critical examples at the crossroads of artistic and activist practices, such as Colectivo Situaciones, which in the scope of this article can only be briefly presented. We queried, shifted and transformed the concept of critique employing discourse analysis and a close reading of critical (queer)feminist concepts of the late 1980s. The perspectives taken by Donna Haraway and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick allow us to place the focus not on negative critique but on instituent and transversal processes, and thus on rethinking the transformative potentials of ethico-aesthetic practices. The current socio-political and ecological challenges require a thinking that transverses and queers traditional valorisations of critique: we do not offer a universal, objective and strong theory, but instead favour categories of partiality, situatedness and responsibility. Critique as a practice of partaking is communicated not as the judgement of a critical subject, but in, through and with instituent processes as well as in materialities.

Migration Management, a regime of radical differentiation and exclusion, renders many people illegal because they violate the laws of access across geopolitical borders. Migration Management further disappears some of these illegal people outside of the external boundaries of the Global North. Recently, however, discursive moves to mobilise the concept of the ‘missing person’ in the context of illegal migration have been introduced when discussing Mediterranean migration in particular. This article offers an ethico-political evaluation of such conceptual innovations. The article asks if a reconceptualisation of the illegal migrant as ‘missing person’ is able to destabilise Migration Management and concludes that this is unlikely. The article illustrates how this reconceptualisation cements the more radical practices of exclusion whilst the boundary-drawing is reformulated as one between dead and living migrants.

This article is concerned with the historical trajectory and legacy of British liberal internationalist ideas in the opening three decades of the twentieth century. Despite this body of ideas being a major force behind the establishment of International Relations (IR) in Britain following the Great War, only scant attention is paid to its pre-war configuration. The article attempts to remedy this gap by focusing on internationalist thought prior to and during the war. It is argued that internationalist ideas during the Great War accelerated a drift towards institutional arguments, which are herein distinguished from moral arguments, and that the concept of anarchy played a major role in this shift in internationalist ideas. While the transformation of liberal internationalist ideas during the war constitutes a central backdrop to the early practices of British IR, it should not overshadow the powerful, underlying continuity in ethico-political convictions entertained by internationalists before and after the Great War.

This article explores the transformational character of solidarity economy network communication in Portugal and Catalonia, focusing on the first two months of the crisis brought on by COVID-19. We assume that what these networks choose to convey (or remain silent on) in their public communications reflects their positions in the fields of action and values and their theoretical alignment, establishing an ethico-political orientation. Through the analysis of virtual content conveyed by solidarity economy organisations, we analyse the topics covered, the types of content and sources cited, and the level of demand in the discourse, as well as their individual, institutional and collective character. The results reveal very different communicative approaches in each of the cases analysed: from silence or total absence of communicative practices to what can be considered a transformational praxis communication, based on collective action challenging the structures of power and domination and pointing out ways to overcome them. The article proposes a transformative communication radar linking Habermas’s theory of communicative action and Fuchs’s Marxist-inspired praxis communication concept, as a way of distinguishing merely instrumental communicative approaches from those guided by communicative and cooperative rationality driving new agreements and societal transformations.

Purpose – This paper aims to highlight secular and Islamic feminist approaches to entrepreneurship as potential means to challenge gender inequality in the Turkish context. In Turkey, gender equality remains elusive in a nation where secular and Islamic ideologies compete and produce different solutions to ongoing economic, socio-cultural and political issues. Women’s entrepreneurship has emerged as an important solution toward gender equality and economic development. Design/methodology/approach – Using two women’s organizations that exemplify secular and Islamic feminist ideologies, the author examines whether the entrepreneurship activities they promote give way to challenging patriarchal norms, values and practices widespread in Turkish society. Findings – Through their distinct practices and engagement with entrepreneurship, both secular and Islamic feminist positions allow for praxis and represent an ethico-political commitment to dismantling neo-liberal development ideologies in the Turkish context that perpetuate gender inequality. Social implications – Secular and Islamic feminist practices and entrepreneurship practices have different implications for achieving gender equality including changes in gender norms, economic development policies and women’s empowerment in a Muslim-majority country. In addition, it raises questions around the popular notion of “entrepreneurship as women’s empowerment”. Originality/value – This paper is of value to scholars who want to understand secular and Islamic feminisms and their implications for challenging gender inequality. The Turkish context with its traditional and modern societal norms and values provides a rich case study to examine these issues through the exemplars of entrepreneurship. It is also of value to scholars who want to understand structural constraints associated with gender equality beyond individual-level challenges.

Many films, both narrative and documentary, explore the relationship between history and politics or ethics. This may be accomplished when fictional narrative films enact ethical arguments regarding history in cinematic form, when documentary films explicitly seek to uncover lost histories of political oppression, or films may experientially and aesthetically stage ethical experience with respect to historical meanings and contexts. There are some cases where such ethical-historical experience is explored through the specific aesthetic form of the film in relation to its narrative. Ask This of Rikyū (Rikyū ni tazuneyo, Tanaka Mitsutoshi, 2013) is one such example. In this paper, I will suggest that film can explore the relation of aesthetic experience to the ethico-political character of history, opening up ways of responding aesthetically to concrete political conditions. Ask This of Rikyū accomplishes this by interrogating the possibility of a wabi-cinema, established with respect to its title character, his individual aesthetic practices, and his personal political circumstances. I will draw upon the work of Gilles Deleuze alongside Kyōto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō in order to articulate the way in which Ask This of Rikyū explores the relation of artistic activity and aesthetic experience to the general ethical and political forces that feed into history.

This article explores ‘research-as-craft’ as a sensitizing concept for disclosing the presence of ethics and politics, as well as embodiment and imagination, in the doing and representation of scientific activity. Routinely unnoticed, marginalized or suppressed in methodology sections of articles and methodology textbooks, research-as-craft gestures towards messy, tacit, uncertain, yet rarely thematized, practices that are central to getting science done. To acknowledge and address the significance of research-as-craft in knowledge production, we show how it relates to three forms of reflexivity – constitutive, epistemic and disruptive. Through this we demonstrate the craftiness that is required when struggling with the indeterminacy that is endemic to the production and communication of scientific knowledge. By showing how empirical situations require imaginative interpretation by embodied researchers, we argue that our conception of research-as-craft facilitates appreciation of scientific inquiry as an indexical activity that involves the crafted object and the researcher in an ethico-political process of co-constituting knowledge.

This essay investigates the ways in which contemporary artistic practices have been working towards an epistemic and ethico-political decolonization of the present by means of critical examinations of several sorts of colonial archives, whether public or private, familial or anonymous. Through the lens of specific artworks by the artists Ângela Ferreira, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Délio Jasse, Daniel Barroca and Raquel Schefer, this essay examines the extent to which the aesthetics of these video, photographic and sculptural practices puts forth a politics and ethics of history and memory relevant to thinking critically about the colonial amnesias and imperial nostalgias which still pervade a post-colonial condition marked by neo-colonial patterns of globalization and by uneasy relationships with diasporic and migrant communities. Attention will be paid to the histories and memories of the Portuguese dictatorship and colonial empire, the liberation wars / the “colonial” war fought in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau between 1961 and 1974, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, the independence of Portugal’s former colonies between 1973 and 1975, and the mass “return” of Portuguese settlers from Angola and Mozambique in 1975, without losing sight of apartheid South Africa and the ways in which the Cold War played out on the African continent.

This paper seeks to indicate how and why public bureaucracy has been and remains a cornerstone of the modern state and of representative democratic governmental regimes. It does so by highlighting both the constitutive role bureaucratic practices and ethics play in securing civil peace and security, and individual and collective rights and freedoms, for example, and how attempts to transcend, negate, or otherwise 'disappear' bureaucracy can have profound political consequences. The paper begins with a brief exploration of some of the tropes of 'bureau-critique' and their historical and contemporary association with key elements of anti-statist thought. It then proceeds, in section two, to chart how attempts to detach an understanding of bureaucracy from its imbrication in critical polemic and political partisanship can be best pursued by revisiting the work of Max Weber. Weber's great achievement, it will be argued, was to provide a definitive analysis of both the 'technical' and ethico-cultural attributes of public bureaucracy without falling into pejorative critique. In so doing, Weber's work provides a useful resource for exploring the limits and pitfalls of 'bureau-critique' historically and contemporaneously. The problems identified with politically partisan and critique- oriented understandings of public bureaucracy identified in the first two sections of the paper are then illustrated in section three with direct reference to specific episodes in German, US, and British political history. The paper concludes by re-emphasising the enduring significance and political positivity of the ethos of bureaucratic office-holding, not least in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

In this essay, I will argue for the relevance of the visual production of several contemporary black women artists for the shattering of Eurocentric stereotypes and racist and patriarchal narratives, which, as legacies of the colonial and enslaving past, continue to wound the social and psychic lives of non-white people. While envisaging contemporary artistic practice as being in close dialogue with, or located within, other epistemic and cultural practices – such as the disciplinary fields of history and art history, and visual culture at large –, which have produced and reproduced racist discourses and racialized subjectivities for centuries, I will examine the ways in which black women artists break Eurocentric canons and counter racism, patriarchy, capitalism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism from within the specific field of contemporary art, in between theory and practice, and drawing on the invaluable lessons of intersectional feminism. Relevant examples will be works by Grada Kilomba (Portugal, 1968), Eurídice Kala aka Zaituna Kala (Mozambique, 1987), and Keyezua (Angola, 1988). This essay will consider the ethico-political valences of such critiques through contemporary art, while not avoiding the problems that are inherent to the ways in which neo-liberal capitalism and white privilege remain structurally at the heart of numerous artistic institutions.

Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism, we argue that it has missed out on the ethico-political function of UGC as testimonials of lives-at-risk. If we wish to recognize and act on UGC as techno-social practices of witnessing human pain and death, we propose, then we need to push further the conceptual and analytical boundaries of the field. In this paper, we do this by introducing a view of UGC as flesh witnessing, that is as embodied and mobile testimonies of vulnerable others that, enabled by smartphones, enter global news environments as appeals to attention and action. Drawing on examples from the Syrian conflict, we provide an analysis of the narrative strategies through which flesh witnessing acquires truth-telling authority and we reflect on what is gained and lost in the process. Western story-telling, we conclude, strategically co-opts the affective dimension of flesh witnessing – its focus on child innocence, heroic martyrdom or the data aesthetics of destruction – and selectively minimizes its urgency by downplaying or effacing the bodies of non-western witnesses. This preoccupation with verification should not be subject to geopolitical formulations and needs to be combined with an explicit acknowledgement of the embodied voices of conflict as testimonies of the flesh whose often mortal vulnerability is, in fact, the very condition of possibility upon which western broadcasting rests.

Introduction Since the emergence of the term “transsexualism” in the Ninth International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9), disciplines related to mental health have contributed to the perpetuation of stereotypical attitudes towards trans people. Recent years have shown the significant prevalence of mental pathology suffered by this group, and the need for specialized training to improve access to the health system. Objectives The main objectives of this research are: (a) to find and analyse the scientific evidence published which assesses the attitudes of mental health professionals towards the trans community; b) to establish the main variables that modify these attitudes, paying special attention to gender, ideology, sexual orientation and previous training or experience Methods A systematic review of the literature was conducted following the PRISMA recommendations. Results Tendency towards more positive and liberal attitudes among professionals than in the general population. Higher values for extreme prejudice among those professionals who attributed gender diversity to a psychological, ethico-moral or religious cause. Association of depathologising practices with belief in the psychosocial nature of diversity, clinical training and interpersonal contact with LGBT people. The following socio-demographic variables were related: being a woman, clinical psychologists, progressive political ideology, professionals who strive to know their own limitations and biases. Conclusions More positive attitudes than the general population but still insufficient Specific training in gender diversity and minority issues would be a key element in improving care for transgender people. The attitudes of professionals depend, in part, on the personal characteristics of the therapists. Disclosure No significant relationships.

As recent social research demonstrates, the life world is increasingly impacted by a corrosion of social bonds and aggressive habits expressed, for instance, in hate speech in the social media. Significantly, such phenomena have not been prevented from evolving within the framework of constitutional liberal states. In search of an appropriate mode of challenging the current social pathologies, we should examine Kant’s claim that, alongside the “juridico-civil (political) state”, an “ethico-civil state”, uniting human beings “under laws of virtue alone”, needs to be established and cultivated. Kant’s claim is discussed in comparison with “postmetaphysical” conceptions of morality, as maintained by Rawls and Habermas. These prove deficient owing to their contract-based approach. Important in the examination of the key idea of the “state of virtue” is Kant’s thesis that such a state “cannot be realized (by human organization) except in the form of a church”. In view of the fact that, today, in many parts of the world significant segments of the population adhere to agnostic or atheistic convictions, the focus is placed on Kant’s specific conception of “church” that is clearly distinct from “historical” creeds and religious practices, and on the way in which he addresses non-believers, since he insists on the intrinsic relation between morality and the “purely moral religion”. Based on these reflections, the relevance of Kant’s argument that it is “a duty of the entire human race” to establish a community in which people mutually support one another in the cultivation of moral sensitivity is scrutinised.

In the UK, when one is suspected of having breast cancer there is usually a rapid transition from being diagnosed, to being told you require treatment, to this being effected. Hence, there is a sense of an abrupt transition from ‘normal’ embodiment through somatechnic engagement; from normality, to failure and otherness. The return journey to ‘embodied normality’, if indeed there can be one, is the focus of this paper; specifically the durée and trajectory of such normalisation. I offer a personal narrative from encountering these ‘normalising interventions’, supported by the narratives of other ‘breast cancer survivors’. Indeed, I havechosento become acquainted with my altered/novel embodiment, rather than the symmetrisation of prosthetication, to ‘wear my scars’,and thus subvert the trajectory of mastectomy. I broach and brook various encounters with failure by having, being and doing a body otherwise; exploring, mastering and re-capacitating my embodiment, finding the virtuosity of failure and subversion. To challenge the durée of ‘normalisation’ I have engaged in somatic movement practices which allow actual capacities of embodiment to be realised; thorough kinaesthetic praxis and expression. This paper asks is it soma, psyche or techné that has failed me, or have I failed them? What mimetic chimera ‘should’ I become? What choices do we have in the face of failure? What subversions can be allowed? How subtle must one be? What referent shall I choose? What might one assimilate? Will mimesis get me in the end? What capacities can one find? How shall I belong? Where / wear is my fidelity? The hope here is to address the intra-personal phenomenological character and the inter-corporeal socio-ethico-political aspects that this body of failure engenders, as one amongst many.

Using a feminist, new materialist frame to activate ethico-political research exploring religion and gender at a community level both on Instagram and in arts workshops, we show how sharing ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, gender identities and sexualities through art practice entangles a diffraction of differences as ‘togetherness’. Such entanglement creates cross-cultural interfaith understandings and gender diverse acceptance and inclusion online. We use diffraction, intra-action and entanglement as a way of framing our understanding of this ‘togetherness’ and show that human feelings rely on more-than-human assemblages; they rely on homelands, countries, wars, places of worship, orientations, attractions, aesthetics, art and objects of attachment. The feelings of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’ that we discuss are therefore direct products of human and non-human interactions, which we explore through arts-based research. In this article, we apply Karen Barad’s feminist new materialist theories of ‘diffraction’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘entanglement’ to ways of thinking about human experience as intra-acting with aspects of the world that we classify as non-human. We use these new materialist frames to reconceptualize the human feelings of ‘community’, ‘belonging’ and ‘what really matters’ in feminist and intra-religious collaborative art practices and Instagram-based art communities. To better understand and encourage communities of difference, we argue that the feelings of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’, which are central to human subjectivity and experience, are produced by more-than-human assemblages and are central to identity. The methodologies we present are community focused, intra-active, arts-based research strategies for interrogating and understanding expressions of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’. We identify how creative methods are a significant and useful way of knowing about communities and argue that they are important because they are grounded in being with communities, showing that the specificity of their materiality needs to be considered.

This article is an interrogation of love, as it is understood, conceptualised, and practiced in the social sphere, focussing specifically on the Southbank Centre’s Festival of Love (London, UK, 2016). By drawing on Christian Lotz’s social material critique of love (2015), and Michel Foucault’s theory of governmentality (2009) I argue that the Festival of Love, whilst asserting love as celebratory and aspirational, does in fact demonstrate the governmentalised love of modern liberal governance.Following this I engage with Gillian Rose’s discussion of love in periods of social crisis (1992) in order to articulate what might be understood as the ambitions of governmentalised love, and, moreover, what is at stake in this politically. In doing so I draw out the dangers of love as a concept and practice of modern governance, so as to stress the importance of thinking love differently, as an ethico-political practice.

One of the fascinating theoretical questions posed by the spread of industrialization and today's nation-state-building process is how these originally Western and quintessentially modern institutions come to take root in other civilizations. The question becomes even more intriguing when the process of adaptation is unusually swift and successful as in East Asia. In Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, the states and peoples had scant time to learn and absorb modern practices, norms, and concepts before undertaking, or being subjected to, countless reforms and revolutions in the name of “modernization.” How, or in what terms, did the people in this “great transformation” understand and interpret what they were doing? If the as-yet imperfectly understood concepts and values could not be appealed to, what resources—intellectual and ethico-moral—were at their disposal to use to motivate themselves and persuade others to undertake or endure such massive changes?

This article lays out my process of developing an ecological and nonrepresentational approach for conducting an ethnography of family photos as objects of investigation, practices, and sites for the making and remaking of decolonizing stories and histories. It is rooted in a three-part project on family photographs: first, an ongoing project with a three-generation Indigenous family who has a history with Canada’s residential school system; second, revisiting my own family photo albums that include photos of missionary nuns in my family who had worked in Indigenous schools and communities in the 1950s–60s; and third, the development of a politico-ethico-onto-epistemological approach for viewing and analyzing family photos and narratives from and about photographs. The article focuses on the latter two parts of this project. Informed by my reading of Lorraine Code’s “ecological thinking” approach to knowledge making, I bring Code into conversation with Phillip Vannini’s “nonrepresentational ethnographies” combined with new materialist writing on performativity and vitality; selected Indigenous scholars’ writing on ontological multiplicity, knowledge making as relationship, and the making of life worlds; Margaret Somers’s approach to nonrepresentational narratives and ontological narrativity; and Annette Kuhn’s work on analyzing family photographs and cultural memory. I demonstrate this approach through the analysis of one of my family photos. I also reflect on the ethical challenges of attempting to analyze a different kind of family photo, such as photos of residential schooling that are increasingly on display in media, online, and in public venues. I argue for the need to address representational issues of social injustice in nonrepresentational approaches and a recognition that there are sites and times—especially in cases of human rights abuses, violence, or trauma—when nonrepresentational ethnographies and narratives call for strategic negotiation with representation.

AbstractWhile the value of early detection of dementia is largely agreed upon, population-based screening as a means of early detection is controversial. This controversial status means that such screening is not recommended in most national dementia plans. Some current practices, however, resemble screening but are labelled “case-finding” or “detection of cognitive impairment”. Labelled as such, they may avoid the ethical scrutiny that population-based screening may be subject to. This article examines conceptualizations of screening and case-finding. It shows how the definitions and delimitations of the concepts (the what of screening) are drawn into the ethical, political, and practical dimensions that screening assessment criteria or principles are intended to clarify and control (the how of screening, how it is and how it should be performed). As a result, different conceptualizations of screening provide the opportunity to rethink what ethical assessments should take place: the conceptualizations have different ethico-political implications. The article argues that population-based systematic screening, population-based opportunistic screening, and case-finding should be clearly distinguished.

WINNER OF THE SIMON HAILWOOD ESSAY PRIZE.<br>This paper discusses the problem of alienation from nature, considered through the phenomena of reification and de-objectification. I propose understanding alienation as the result of a distorted relation between the subjective and the objective and I suggest a tentative solution via the combination of two ethico-political practices: releasement and reappropriation. In doing so, I put forward a structural-ethical critique and response to our current ecological crisis.

This article examines the relevance of rhetorical analysis for the theory and practice of rights-claiming. Recent work in the field of human rights proposes that what is important about rights is not what they ‘are’ but what they ‘do’. Utilising performative theory, they suggest that rights-claiming is best understood as a perlocutionary practice of persuasion. The question is, ‘How might rights claims be most persuasive?’ This article applies insights from the field of rhetoric to investigate how practices of rights-claiming by migrants in France contest French citizenship. It argues that rights claims are ethico-political negotiations of a political situation and that such practices are persuasive when they mobilise transcendent principles embedded within particular political communities. Rhetorical analysis explains how rights can be both inventive and efficacious. In so doing, this article extends the human rights literature by providing a refined rights-claiming analytic.

This article explores the potential of describing things at the periphery of our attention. It discusses how our practices of ‘describing collaboratively’ shifted what we attended to in observations of participants in a Swedish gynaecological cancer patient organisation. We show how the care the organisation aims to promote is troubled and seemingly undermined by attending to palliative care. Our aim is to explore the ethico-political potential of describing things that ‘unsettle’ care practices. Building on Feminist Technoscience Studies, arguing that researchers should attend to ‘neglected things’ in order to care for them, we focus on affects, atmospheres and fleeting moments that are overlooked, or threaten to undermine, participants’ practices of care. We show how our descriptions that zoom in on things at the periphery and attend to the elusive, restage what gets to count as care and could support care practices that are more liveable for those concerned.

This article ponders two questions: What does “postqualitative” mean to you? Why do you think the “postqualitative” movement is important to the field of qualitative inquiry? In response, it poses a method/ology of errancy—a flipping methodology—that locates postqualitative research as an ethico-onto-epistemological political project of opening theory-practice spaces for differential matterings. Postqualitative flipping is not an individual undertaking, it is an ecology of practices, a resonation across bodies, a navigating of movement for a politics of change, in which even barely perceptible shifts possibilize new modes of thinking and unthinking, doing and undoing.

This article offers a comparative exploration of the practices of resistance Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault champion against the structures of modern power their enquiries have the merit to illuminate and contest. After a preliminary examination of their views about the relationship between theory and praxis, I shall pursue two goals: first, I shall illustrate the limitations of Adorno’s negativist portrait of an ethics of resistance and contrast it with Foucault’s more promising notion of resistance as strategic counter-conduct, which in his late ethico-political writings becomes the heart of a distinctive politics of the governed. Second, despite their dissimilarities, I shall argue that their ideas can be brought together to elaborate a ‘compounded’ account of resistance, where Adorno’s politics of suffering figures as the necessary pre-condition for the creative practices of freedom Foucault seeks to encourage.

This article theorizes the politics of responsibility—activist struggles over who will be held accountable for structural injustices like the “catastrophic” changes underway in our climate. To do so, it develops a politicized conception of responsibility, one that treats responsibility as a social construct and a terrain of contestation. Building on the work of feminist philosophers of responsibility and on the praxis of “kayaktivism,” this politicized account treats responsibility as a social practice of interrogating and contesting shared ethico-political judgments. On this understanding, taking responsibility or stepping up is a way of making responsibility—literally of (re)constructing those social practices and judgments through conscious efforts to persuade others, challenge prevailing norms and interpretations, change people’s beliefs about how the world works, revise popular expectations of social actors and institutions, and disrupt business as usual. The article highlights the centrality of norms and power to social practices of responsibility and suggests alternative perspectives on familiar philosophical worries about blame, complexity and agency, and justification.

Over the past half century, time-use studies have become a leading method for researching unpaid care work, especially in the multidisciplinary field of gender divisions of household work and care and in feminist international studies on counting and accounting for women’s unpaid work. Although attention to conceptual and methodological refinements in time-use methods is increasing, more focus on the challenges of conceptualizing and measuring care responsibilities, the limitations of measuring relational care practices with clock time, the existence of other kinds of time, and the epistemological and ontological moorings of time-use studies is needed. Two research programs inform this article: qualitative and longitudinal research with Canadian households in which parents were challenging norms, practices, and ideologies of male breadwinning and female caregiving; and the development of a feminist ecological ethico-onto-epistemological approach to knowledge making. A case study from the first program and several pivotal ideas drawn from the second—about relational ontologies, multiple ontologies, and the ethico-political dimensions of knowledge making—support three key arguments advanced in this article. First, I argue for a deeper interrogation of methodological and epistemological matters in coding, classifying, and categorizing care tasks in time-use studies. Second, I maintain that care responsibilities exist as “process time”; they can be narrated, but they cannot be measured in fixed units of clock time. Third, I maintain that it is not only possible, but politically and conceptually important for researchers to look beyond clock time, to recognize the ontological multiplicity of time, including relational and non-linear time and to embrace and use different kinds of time. This article is part of a growing call to reimagine how we think about, conceptualize, measure, and make knowledges about time, time use, and care-time intra-actions.

Social and socioeconomic interactions and transactions often require trust. In digital spaces, the main approach to facilitating trust has effectively been to try to reduce or even remove the need for it through the implementation of reputation systems. These generate metrics based on digital data such as ratings and reviews submitted by users, interaction histories, and so on, that are intended to label individuals as more or less reliable or trustworthy in a particular interaction context. We undertake a disclosive archaeology (Introna, 2014) of typical reputation systems, identifying relevant figuration agencies including affordances and prohibitions, (cyborg) identities, (cyborg) practices and discourses, in order to examine their ethico-political agency. We suggest that conventional approaches to the design of such systems are rooted in a capitalist, competitive paradigm, relying on methodological individualism, and that the reputation technologies themselves thus embody and enact this paradigm within whatever space they operate. We question whether the politics, ethics and philosophy that contribute to this paradigm align with those of some of the contexts in which reputation systems are now being used, and suggest that alternative approaches to the establishment of trust and reputation in digital spaces need to be considered for alternative contexts.

AbstractWitnessing is crucial to public engagement with war, but the remote violence of drones presents distinct challenges: its victims are largely invisible to Western publics; operations are cloaked in secrecy; and promises of precision targeting, accurate surveillance, and legal monitoring obscure the brutalities of the system. With so many barriers to witnessing, remote warfare tends to remain on the periphery of political debate and has not occasioned widespread resistance. Yet the means for witnessing drone warfare exist; the question is how they might be leveraged to make remote war more accessible and contestable. This article analyses the high-profile drone strike that killed 10 civilians in Kabul on 29 August 2021 to consider the limits and possibilities of witnessing drone strikes, alongside the database of conflict monitor Airwars and the aesthetic practice of the research agency Forensic Architecture. It argues that witnessing drone strikes requires assembling new conceptual techniques with long-standing practices of media witnessing and human rights testimony. It is not a manual or primer but rather maps four critical, analytical, and ethico-political trajectories demanded by the problem of how to witness a drone strike: lived experiences, violent mediations, infrastructural scales, and aesthetics.

The article begins with setting the South African educational context for a postgraduate early literacy research project in the foundation phase (ages 4–9). The research examines how philosophy with children (P4C) might be part of a solution to current problems in reading comprehension. The second author reports on her P4C action research with her own children as well as her observations of a Grade 2 classroom in a school near Johannesburg. The research shows how the picturebook Little Beauty by Anthony Browne opens up a philosophical space within which children are allowed to draw on their own life experiences and prior knowledge. The project reveals the depth of their thinking when making intra-textual connections between Little Beauty and the movie King Kong. The facilitated philosophical space also makes it possible for the children to make complex philosophical links between the emotion anger, destructive behaviour and the ethico-political dimensions of punishment. Central to this article are the second author’s critical reflections on how her literacy practices as a mother and foundation phase teacher have fundamentally changed as a result of this project. The article concludes with some implications for the teaching of early literacy in South Africa.

Across a range of environmental change and crisis-driven research fields, including conservation, climate change and sustainability studies, the rhetoric of participatory and engaged research has become somewhat of a normative and mainstream mantra. Aligning with cautionary tales of participatory approaches, this article suggests that, all too often, ‘engaged’ research is taken up uncritically and without care, often by pragmatist, post-positivist and neoliberal action-oriented researchers, for whom the radical and relational practice of PAR is paradigmatically (ontologically, epistemologically and/or axiologically) incommensurable. Resisting depoliticised and rationalist interpretations of participatory methodologies, I strive in this article to hold space for the political, relational and ethical dimensions of collaboration and engagement. Drawing on four years of collaborative ethnographic climate research in the Peruvian Andes with campesinos of Quilcayhuanca, I argue that resituating Participatory Action Research (PAR) within a feminist and indigenous ethics of care more fully aligns with the radical participatory praxis for culturally appropriate transformation and the liberation of oppressed groups. Thus, I do not abandon the participatory methodology altogether, rather this article provides a hopeful reworking of the participatory methodology and, specifically, participatory and community-based adaptation (CBA) practices, in terms of a feminist and indigenous praxis of love-care-response. In so doing, I strive to reclaim the more radical feminist and Indigenous elements – the affective, relational and political origins of collaborative knowledge production – and rethink research in the rupture of climate crises, relationally. The ethico-political frictions and tensions inherent in engaged climate scholarship are drawn into sharp relief, and deep reflection on the responsibility researchers take on when asking questions in spaces and times of ecological loss, trauma and grief is offered.

During the last 10 years the Science and Technology Studies (STS) community has witnessed a flourishing, intense and multifaceted engagement around “care”. While care had been addressed already before in Joanna Latimer’s The conduct of care: Understanding nursing practice (Latimer, 2000) , and in Jeanette Pols’ Good care: Enacting a complex ideal in long term-psychiatry (Pols, 2004), care seemed to be on everybody’s lips around 2010. Around the same time, the edited volume Care in practice: On tinkering in clinics, homes and farms (Mol et al., 2010) and the article Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011) were published. With akin, yet partly diverging, agendas and concerns, these two key publications drastically increased the amount of research that identify with something like an area of “care studies” in STS. This can also be seen in the publication of special issues devoted to care during the last years, notably the much-cited 2015 issue in Social Studies of Science focused on feminist technoscience interventions into the politics and “darker sides” of care (Martin et al., 2015), and the more recent on relationalities and specificities of care in East Asian Science, Technology and Society (Coopmans & McNamara, 2020). Noteworthy is also the special issue on “The politics of policy practices” in The Sociological Review Monograph, where Gill et al. (2017) discuss how policy and care are entangled, and how such entanglements could be enacted more “care-fully”. These publications have spurred rich and generative engagements about ways to attend to the affective, ethico-political and/or material layers of care, within and beyond areas traditionally thought of as related to care (such as healthcare and childcare).

Data desire flows through protest in the Anthropocene. Citizen science, participation in online discussion forums, documentary film production, protest selfies, glacier recession GPS photography, poster making, etc., are just some of the everyday data proliferation efforts comprising resistance to environmental degradation and destruction. These practices – visualisation, datafication, writing, sign making, archiving geological memory, etc., are, I want to argue, produced pleasurably, especially as modes of emerging as ‘subjects’ in relation to the chaos, chaotic affects, and unprecedented pace of destructive ecological events that these practices try to grasp or ‘make sense of.’ Pleasures of data production are hence closely correlated to emerging as a subject within the Anthropocene. Such pleasures function beyond individual emotion, and in relation to subjectification within chaotic events such as climate change. In this article I propose the concept data desire to map out how ‘data’ and ‘subjectivity’ co-emerge in relation to material forces and how people take pleasure in their subjectification through ‘knowing,’ datafying, and creating ‘meaning’ out of material events which are chaotic or have chaotic affects (Guattari). I take up contrasting terms of ‘pleasure’ and ‘desire’, drawing on the thought of Gilles Deleuze ("Desire"; Essays), for whom pleasure is associated with a craving of individuation in light of chaos while desire speaks to the unlimited postponement of events from being summarised. One such event, and the event I focus on in this article, is oil. Here, I think of the event, not as ‘a moment’ or a ‘happening,’ but as that which has many iterations, instances, and bifurcations, and is often distributed in space and time (Deleuze, The Fold). I draw on my fieldwork in media practices of people taking part in the oil pipeline protests in British Columbia, Canada. I give examples of three data practices, and articulate the relation between media production, generation of ‘data’ and the production of subjectivity within the Anthropocene. These practices include data generation through participation in online news’ comment forums, data created as part of citizen science, and resistance ‘selfies’ or producing oneself as data to be circulated on social media. My analysis diverts from any interest in the representational function of media, towards how pleasures of data practices and the circulation of desire that these are a part of emerge, for many people, as the only ways of becoming subjectified in catastrophic environmental events.Pleasure and desire may not be the most obvious terms to think of when one thinks of resistance, particularly against environmental degradation. While pleasure has been an important aspect of activism, social movements, and feminist politics (e.g. Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta; Sharpe), it has only recently been engaged with in relation to environmental activism, particularly by Craig, and Alaimo. Alaimo defines pleasure as an important aspects of material engagements and more-than-human ontologies marked by connection and kinship characterised by delight. Craig also calls for the recognition that pleasure is central to the everyday lived resistance found in environmental movements such as the slow food movement and urban farming that are anti-consumerist in orientation. These examples mark pleasure as part of the politics of resistance where the emotion emerges from the belief in a harmonious and symbiotic relationship to ‘nature’ and non-human matter through human emotion. Pleasure however, as I intend to show, can also be thought of beyond the individuating ‘emotion’ and as part of larger flows of desire, where ‘desire’ is conceptualised as vitality and ‘ongoing production’ (Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus). Particularly, my focus on pleasure intends to problematise how pleasure through data production emerges perhaps as a mode of ongoing ‘coping’ of ‘navigating’ or of simply ‘trying to be a part of’ or attain some sensation of ‘agency’ amongst ecological catastrophes when being political are deemed to be ineffective or even futile.Data and Desiring-ProductionI propose ‘data desire’ as a concept for thinking about the ongoing social production of subjectivity through data production in the context of the failure of representation in the Anthropocene. Gilles Deleuze ("Desire") argued that pleasure is an individualised emotion related to failures of representation: “pleasure seems to me to be the only means for a person or a subject to ‘find themselves again’ in a process which overwhelms them” ("Desire", n.p.). Such an emotion is one of the outputs of a flow of desire that is non-individual, and not only human.Desiring production “causes the current to flow” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 5) between the event of oil and the production of subjectivity, both which propagate and bifurcate, and are continuously produced anew. Desire is characterised by vitality, or the unceasing capacity of processes to continuously become difference, to continuously change, rather than ‘arrive’, ‘conclude’, or ‘be.’ In other words, to think with ‘desire’ is to note how production flows, like a current, through ‘overwhelming’ events that including oil, and through subjectification, both of which continuously emerge in new contortions and produce new affects. The pleasure that emerges through a subject being produced, or a subject ‘coming into being’ by way of producing data – summarising, visualising, representing, and trying to give ‘meaning’ to ‘the event’ – is affected by the ongoing ability of ‘the event’ to multiply and be postponed from being summarised, as it proliferates and reproduces itself in ever new human and non-human bifurcations – oil spills and leaks, protests, policies, bitumen, new movements, new rhetoric, new sanctions, new pipelines, etc.Malins for instance notes how desireis not that which a pre-existing subject has for something, nor is it motivated by individual lack or the pursuit of pleasure. It is instead best understood as a pre-subjective, pre-conscious life force or energy that flows between bodies, connecting, animating and transforming them. (2)Data desire is therefore most importantly not a feeling that emerges out of a lack of data, or a desire for data. Rather data desires suggests that data practices become modalities through which people involved in environmental resistance can continuously ‘sense’ themselves as part of the event, or gain the sensation that they ‘are’ political, even if only as a sensation and only if momentarily, and within catastrophic events that are also always changing and defy representation. Events such as oil hence require analysis of the entanglement or multiple ways in which processes of subjectification, ecology, and media practices are in themselves multiple and folded together in multiple ways, something Guattari called the three ecologies, and more recently, Murphie referred to as a catastrophic multiplicity. This orientation towards desire as production positions the analysis of the pleasure of data practices beyond that of an individual into the realm of social production.Data Desire Fieldwork in the Oil-EventMy fieldwork focussed on the data practices of residents living in oil pipeline conflicts in British Columbia. This research included examining the media practices and everyday data engagements of residents engaging with and concerned about two oil pipeline projects: Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline, which would move crude oil from Edmonton and terminate in Kitimat in Northern British Columbia, and Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain oil pipeline that also would move crude oil from the Alberta tar sands to Burnaby, British Columbia. This later pipeline already exists, although the proposed project aimed at twinning of the oil pipeline would substantially increase oil tanker traffic along the West Coast and generate new risk of oil spills, given its increased capacity. As part of my research I spoke with a total of twenty-four (24) residents, and six (6) environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) in Northern British Columbia and the Vancouver Metro Area to examine their media practices, digital strategies and other, everyday data practices in the oil pipeline conflict.Against the backdrop of an uptake in big data’s relation to ecological transformation (e.g.: Ruiz; Hogan; Maddalena & Russill), I found the displays of pleasure accompanying individuals’ ostensibly everyday ‘small data’ productions as enunciations of subjectivity and resistance in the oil pipeline movement, under-examined and intriguing. Oil pipeline resistance can be charted along affective lines of pleasure associated with data practices, as people living in oil pipeline conflicts find themselves amidst an ever-expanding flurry of directions and affects that oil takes on: #NoDAPL, the Kalamazoo oil spill, the Conservative party leadership, Indigenous law suit claims, hypocrisy rhetoric, oil pipeline decisions approved, challenged, and deferred at municipal and federal levels. Oil is hence not only a substance but an event that continues to swirl off in new directions, and encompasses and also connects with a multitude of other events, such as urbanisation, 300,000 airplanes taking off and landing on a daily basis, peak oil, and animal extinction. I therefore consider ‘events’ not as ‘happenings’ or singular image events (DeLuca; DeLuca & Peeples; McHendry; Yang) in the way they are often conceptualised within environmental communication literature, but as something that is ongoing, and often extensive beyond a single time and space. Image events may be one of the expressions of a broader and larger (conceptualised as having multiple expressions) event taking place. This section provides three examples of pleasures of emerging as subjects through data practices as political resistance to oil. These include contributing to discussions in online forums, engaging in citizen science, and proliferation of photos of authentic ‘non/environmentalists’ faces on social media.The first example of subjects emerging through practices of data desire is the production of online data, especially in online political forums or online news comments sections. Here, we might envision the pleasure of data production, in the form of writing online comments, as correlating to the individual wish to ‘count’, particularly as ‘individuals’ are seen to be peripheral to geological forces and capitalist machines of oil production, as well as to the processes of decision making, lawsuits, and municipal and regional politics. One example from this study demonstrates how residents living in oil pipeline conflict areas take pleasure in consuming and producing data. The excerpt below comes from a conversation I had with a resident living in and resisting the Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion in the Vancouver Metro Area. This resident, an avid canoer and computer programmer in his thirties, showed immense pleasure in generating data in the form of contributing to news comments sections. Below I treat the participant’s talk not as an ‘account’ in the positivist sense in which ‘interview data’ might be taken to represent ‘participants’ voices.’ Rather, I treat such expression as a flow of desire that flows through individuals, often constituting them as subjects.I love discussing these issues. I love identifying what is not necessarily of paramount concern as opposed to what is. I have a lot of conversations. I have friends involved in policy. And I read. I’ve got news alerts coming my way from—you know, I must have about twelve Google alerts coming up just regarding pipeline issues and environmental issues. It’s become such a passion for me that I almost was sad once I felt it was finally defeated. I would get up in the morning and hop on the computer to read the latest articles and, you know, respond to comments and stuff. Often what I’m more interested in than the news article is the comments because it tells me where the Overton window is at any given time. I mentioned that some people attend rallies and stuff, well I post to the comments sections and I have conversations all the time online.As seen in this excerpt, pleasure/the subject emerge simultaneously through projects of comprehension and expression. The excerpt shows how contributions to conversations are ‘productive’ not in terms of any kind of political outcome, but in terms of a sensation of emerging/becoming subjectified in the event. Pleasure manifests within projects related to constituting subjectivity by not only consuming data, but also contributing to its ongoing production. In other words, this resident living in an oil conflict area found pleasure in calculating the Overton Window of online news comments about the oil pipeline, as well as in being constituted within the event as a political ‘subject’ by producing ‘data’. His becoming ‘subject’ was concurrent to a sensation of being able to ‘summarise’ the event and its articulations under ‘a unity’ and giving some ‘meaning’ to the constantly shifting event of ‘oil’. While both ‘the subject’ and ‘oil’ keep being produced anew, the momentary emotion of ‘pleasure’ functions to give a sensation of albeit temporary coherence. Here, as Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus) argue pleasure is “an affection of a person or a subject, a way for people to ‘find themselves’ in the process of desire that exceeds them” (156). This ‘excess’ characterises the evasiveness of ecological events and objects from being ever truly graspable, comprehensible, represented, or even ‘known’ to humans. de Freitas for instance notes how matter is already mathematically monstrous, quite literally multiplying, and evasive in its capacity to be ‘calculated’ (3). Input through online comments are therefore attempts at contribution to calculations, ‘making sense’, and also to feeling ‘counted’, attempts which in themselves amount to a great pleasure.The second example of subjects emerging through practices of data desire involves citizen science as a mode of data generation. Practices such as citizen science became pleasurable activities of subjective enunciations – practices of a ‘subject’ coming into being against, or within, this chaos, through data generation. Citizen science is a prime example of residents living in oil pipeline conflicts becoming enunciated – pleasurably – as subjects in the oil pipeline conflict in BC. Citizen science, for example, can take many forms. Streamkeeping, the act of taking care of local streams, is a key form of citizen science in areas facing oil pipeline conflicts, particularly as it puts data practices front and centre as part of resistance. While streamkeeping has many aspects to it, including stream clean-ups, a key component is the production of data about ecosystems health, which including wading into water to count fish, measure construction runoff such as silt, gravel, and sediment, and create comparative archives. Measuring, noting salmon counts, documenting debris emerged as pleasurable ways of engaging in pipeline politics–emerging as a subject, by way of somehow trying to datafy the oil-event, by making it ‘meaningful.’Data production functions to mathematically calculate a course of action within a concoction of persuasive efforts of oil pipeline corporations, environmental non-governmental organisations, governments, activist, and neighbours to define what ‘political subjectification’ might look like. Science is in perpetual struggle against chaos (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?) and data generation through grass-roots citizen science becomes a tool, or an instillation of data about a changing biome through which to encounter oil, and through which to emerge as a subject in relation to oil. Production of data as part of ‘citizen science’ also functions as a way through which to assert ‘independence’ and stage some resistance within a multiplicity of other ways in which oil becomes a reason of various attempts to define ‘political subjectivity’, such as ENGO campaigns, government statements about the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ process to show resistance to the oil pipelines, and the branding of environmentalists as ecoterrorists. Perhaps data production becomes a way to effectively fold oneself into the oil event, without needing to confront a lack of other ways one could, or might resist oil pipeline development.The third example of the circulation of data desire are the increasingly common expressions of individuated pleasures associated with showing ‘faces’ of people engaged in environmentalist issues like oil pipelines, on various social media feeds that try to portray ‘real’ political subjects, in contrast to stereotypical representations of ‘activists’ or ‘environmentalists.’ Here I am specifically talking about selfies taken at environmental protests. Such productions of images of ‘authentic’ political subjects within oil movements has been a popular way to demonstrate authenticity of resistance efforts within environmental movements, particularly in relation to a struggle against accusations of hypocrisy fed by oil pipeline corporations and pundits (Piotrowski). Given the numerous social media feeds of environmental anti-oil pipeline groups that attempt to show ‘faces’ of ‘real’ political subjects, these depictions attempt to produce subjectivities, particularly with the intensifying circulation of what might be thought of as “faciality enactments” (Piotrowski, 849). Here, ‘faces’ are generated as ‘data’. The continuous production of faces/data becomes what counts, or matters, within resistance, as a way of continuously reproducing environmentalist subjectivity, particularly at a point of ‘crisis’ of environmentalist group identity. Such micro-productions and pleasures of individual faces on social media feeds or Instagram posts, are part of flows of data desire: the desire of individuals to emerge as subjects within a multitude of stereotypes about environmentalism; the desire for environmentalism to assert itself as meaningful within ecological events such as ‘oil’, and the desire of corporations to assert different rhetorics about both oil and environmentalism itself.To close, I have articulated that a subject – a subject that takes part in ‘their’ resistance to ecological degradation – is a residual one, the product of a circulating flow of pre-personal data desire. This data desire exceeds individual pleasures and undulates between the chaotic event of oil, its continuously shifting political, economic, and social affects, and ‘a subject’ also continuously trying to be enunciated and ‘individuated’ in the event. Satisfaction, or pleasure, becomes the individual expression of a larger circuit of circulating desires which shows the flows of data between the expressions of material and ecological events which generate all sorts of breakdowns in meaning about ‘the human’ and the Anthropocene, and between breakdowns of activist’ subjectivity. Desire functions as a mode of inquiry that moves thinking about pleasure beyond individuals’ emotions of ‘their’ craving for individuation and meaning within the chaos of the Anthropocene and in the anti-oil pipeline resistance. Rather than see data production as a response to a lack of information, I have shown how data desire, as a concept, can help to think about ontological production, or the production of subjects. This ontological production refers both to the event’s capacity to become continuously different and unforeseen, and the subject’s ongoing self-production through data practices. Three examples discussed here – participation in online news comments sections, citizen science, and production of activism selfies are just but some of the media practices that are part of the circulation of data desire, though there are undoubtedly more.ReferencesAlaimo, Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2016.Craig, Geoffrey. “Political Participation and Pleasure in Green Lifestyle Journalism.” Environmental Communication 10.1 (2016): 122–141.Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. New York, NY: Continuum, 1993.———. Essays Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis, MN. 1997.———. “Desire & Pleasure.” Trans. M. McMahon. Unpaginated. 1997. 1 Aug. 2018 <http://www. artdes.monash.edu.au/globe/delfou.html>. Originally published as "Désir et Plaisir" in Magazine Littéraire 325 (Oct. 1994): 59–65.———, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H.R. Lane. 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London: Athlone P, 2000.Malins, Peta. “Desiring Assemblages: A Case for Desire over Pleasure in Critical Drug Studies.” International Journal of Drug Policy 49 (Nov. 2017): 126–132.McHendry, George. F. “Whale Wars and the Axiomatization of Image Events on the Public Screen.” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 6.2 (2012): 139–155.Murphie, Andrew. “On Being Affected: Feeling in the Folding of Multiple Catastrophes.” Cultural Studies 32.1 (2018): 18–42.Piotrowski, Marcelina. “‘Authentic’ Folds: Environmental Audiences, Activists and Subjectification in Hypocrisy Micropolitics.” Continuum 31.6 (2017): 844–856.Sharpe, Erin K. “Festivals and Social Change: Intersections of Pleasure and Politics at a Community Music Festival.” Leisure Sciences 30.3 (2008): 217-234.Yang, Fan. “Under the Dome: ‘Chinese’ Smog as a Viral Media Event.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 33.3 (2016): 232–244.

There is a moment in Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth devised to expose the sheer audacity of fossil fuel lobby groups in the United States. In their attempts to address significant scientific consensus and growing public concern over climate change, these groups are resorting to what Gore’s film suggests are grotesque distortions of fact. A particular example highlighted in the film is the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CPE—a lobby group funded by ExxonMobil) “pro” energy industry advertisement: “Carbon dioxide”, the ad states. “They call it pollution, we call it life.” While on the one hand employing rhetoric against the “inconvenient truth” that carbon dioxide emissions are ratcheting up the Earth’s temperature, these advertisements also pose a question – though perhaps unintended – that is worth addressing. Where does life reside? This is not an issue of essentialism, but relates to the claims, materials and technologies through which life as a political object emerges. The danger of entertaining the vested interests of polluting industry in a discussion of climate change and its biopolitics is countered by an imperative to acknowledge the ways in which multiple positions in the climate change debate invoke and appeal to ‘life’ as the bottom line, or inviolable interest, of their political, social or economic work. In doing so, other questions come to the fore that a politics of climate change framed in terms of moral positions or competing values will tend to overlook. These questions concern the manifold practices of life that constitute the contemporary terrain of the political, and the actors and instruments put in this employ. Who speaks for life? And who or what produces it? Climate change as a matter of concern (Latour) has gathered and generated a host of experts, communities, narratives and technical devices all invested in the administration of life. It is, as Malcom Bull argues, “the paradigmatic issue of the new politics,” a politics which “draws people towards the public realm and makes life itself subject to the caprices of state and market” (2). This paper seeks to highlight the politics of life that have emerged around climate change as a public issue. It will argue that these politics appear in incremental and multiple ways that situate an array of actors and interests as active in both contesting and generating the terms of life: what life is and how we come to know it. This way of thinking about climate change debates opposes a prevalent moralistic framework that reads the practices and discourses of debate in terms of oppositional positions alone. While sympathies may flow in varying directions, especially when it comes to such a highly charged and massively consequential issue as climate change, there is little insight to be had from charging the CPE (for example) with manipulating consumers, or misrepresenting well-known facts. Where new and more productive understandings open up is in relation to the fields through which these gathering actors play out their claims to the project of life. These fields, from the state, to the corporation, to the domestic sphere, reveal a complex network of strategies and devices that seek to secure life in constantly renovated terms. Life Politics Biopolitical scholarship in the wake of Foucault has challenged life as a pre-given uncritical category, and sought to highlight the means through which it is put under question and constituted through varying and composing assemblages of practitioners and practices. Such work regards the project of human well-being as highly complex and technical, and has undertaken to document this empirically through close attention to the everyday ecologies in which humans are enmeshed. This is a political and theoretical project in itself, situating political processes in micro, as well as macro, registers, including daily life as a site of (self) management and governance. Rabinow and Rose refer to biopolitical circuits that draw together and inter-relate the multiple sites and scales operative in the administration of life. These involve not just technologies, rationalities and regimes of authority and control, but also politics “from below” in the form of rights claims and community formation and agitation (198). Active in these circuits, too, are corporate and non-state interests for whom the pursuit of maximising life’s qualities and capabilities has become a concern through which “market relations and shareholder value” are negotiated (Rabinow and Rose 211). As many biopolitical scholars argue, biopower—the strategies through which biopolitics are enacted—is characteristic of the “disciplinary neo-liberalism” that has come to define the modern state, and through which the conduct of conduct is practiced (Di Muzio 305). Foucault’s concept of governmentality describes the devolution of state-based disciplinarity and sovereignty to a host of non-state actors, rationalities and strategies of governing, including the self-managing subject, not in opposition to the state, but contributing to its form. According to Bratich, Packer and McCarthy, everyday life is thus “saturated with governmental techniques” (18) in which we are all enrolled. Unlike regimes of biopolitics identified with what Agamben terms “thanopolitics”—the exercise of biopower “which ultimately rests on the power of some to threaten the death of others” (Rabinow and Rose 198), such as the Nazi’s National Socialism and other eugenic campaigns—governmental arts in the service of “vitalist” biopolitics (Rose 1) are increasingly diffused amongst all those with an “interest” in sustaining life, from organisations to individuals. The integration of techniques of self-governance which ask the individual to work on themselves and their own dispositions with State functions has broadened the base by which life is governed, and foregrounded an unsettled terrain of life claims. Rose argues that medical science is at the forefront of these contemporary biopolitics, and to this effect “has […] been fully engaged in the ethical questions of how we should live—of what kinds of creatures we are, of the kinds of obligations that we have to ourselves and to others, of the kinds of techniques we can and should use to improve ourselves” (20). Asking individuals to self-identify through their medical histories and bodily specificities, medical cultures are also shaping new political arrangements, as communities connected by shared genetics or physical conditions, for instance, emerge, evolve and agitate according to the latest medical knowledge. Yet it is not just medicine that provokes ethical work and new political forms. The environment is a key site for life politics that entails a multi-faceted discourse of obligations and entitlements, across fields and scales of engagement. Calculating Environments In line with neo-liberal logic, environmental discourse concerned with ameliorating climate change has increasingly focused upon the individual as an agent of self-monitoring, to both facilitate government agendas at a distance, and to “self-fashion” in the mode of the autonomous subject, securing against external risks (Ong 501). Climate change is commonly represented as such a risk, to both human and non-human life. A recent letter published by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in two leading British medical journals, named climate change as the “biggest global health threat of the twenty-first century” (Morton). As I have argued elsewhere (Potter), security is central to dominant cultures of environmental governance in the West; these cultures tie sustainability goals to various and interrelated regimes of monitoring which attach to concepts of what Clark and Stevenson call “the good ecological citizen” (238). Citizenship is thus practiced through strategies of governmentality which call on individuals to invest not just in their own well-being, but in the broader project of life. Calculation is a primary technique through which modern environmental governance is enacted; calculative strategies are seen to mediate risk, according to Foucault, and consequently to “assure living” (Elden 575). Rationalised schemes for self-monitoring are proliferating under climate change and the project of environmentalism more broadly, something which critics of neo-liberalism have identified as symptomatic of the privatisation of politics that liberal governmentality has fostered. As we have seen in Australia, an evolving policy emphasis on individual practices and the domestic sphere as crucial sites of environmental action – for instance, the introduction of domestic water restrictions, and the phasing out of energy-inefficient light bulbs in the home—provides a leading discourse of ethico-political responsibility. The rise of carbon dioxide counting is symptomatic of this culture, and indicates the distributed fields of life management in contemporary governmentality. Carbon dioxide, as the CPE is keen to point out, is crucial to life, but it is also—in too large an amount—a force of destruction. Its management, in vitalist terms, is thus established as an effort to protect life in the face of death. The concept of “carbon footprinting” has been promoted by governments, NGOs, industry and individuals as a way of securing this goal, and a host of calculative techniques and strategies are employed to this end, across a spectrum of activities and contexts all framed in the interests of life. The footprinting measure seeks to secure living via self-policed limits, which also—in classic biopolitical form—shift previously private practices into a public realm of count-ability and accountability. The carbon footprint, like its associates the ecological footprint and the water footprint, has developed as a multi-faceted tool of citizenship beyond the traditional boundaries of the state. Suggesting an ecological conception of territory and of our relationships and responsibilities to this, the footprint, as a measure of resource use and emissions relative to the Earth’s capacities to absorb these, calculates and visualises the “specific qualities” (Elden 575) that, in a spatialised understanding of security, constitute and define this territory. The carbon footprint’s relatively simple remit of measuring carbon emissions per unit of assessment—be that the individual, the corporation, or the nation—belies the ways in which life is formatted and produced through its calculations. A tangled set of devices, practices and discourses is employed to make carbon and thus life calculable and manageable. Treading Lightly The old environmental adage to “tread lightly upon the Earth” has been literalised in the metaphor of the footprint, which attempts both to symbolise environmental practice and to directly translate data in order to meaningfully communicate necessary boundaries for our living. The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report 2008 exemplifies the growing popularity of the footprint as a political and poetic hook: speaking in terms of our “ecological overshoot,” and the move from “ecological credit to ecological deficit”, the report urges an attendance to our “global footprint” which “now exceeds the world’s capacity to regenerate by about 30 per cent” (1). Angela Crombie’s A Lighter Footprint, an instruction manual for sustainable living, is one of a host of media through which individuals are educated in modes of footprint calculation and management. She presents a range of techniques, including carbon offsetting, shifting to sustainable modes of transport, eating and buying differently, recycling and conserving water, to mediate our carbon dioxide output, and to “show […] politicians how easy it is” (13). Governments however, need no persuading from citizens that carbon calculation is an exercise to be harnessed. As governments around the world move (slowly) to address climate change, policies that instrumentalise carbon dioxide emission and reduction via an auditing of credits and deficits have come to the fore—for example, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and the Chicago Climate Exchange. In Australia, we have the currently-under-debate Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a part of which is the Australian Emissions Trading Scheme (AETS) that will introduce a system of “carbon credits” and trading in a market-based model of supply and demand. This initiative will put a price on carbon dioxide emissions, and cap the amount of emissions any one polluter can produce without purchasing further credits. In readiness for the scheme, business initiatives are forming to take advantage of this new carbon market. Industries in carbon auditing and off-setting services are consolidating; hectares of trees, already active in the carbon sequestration market, are being cultivated as “carbon sinks” and key sites of compliance for polluters under the AETS. Governments are also planning to turn their tracts of forested public land into carbon credits worth billions of dollars (Arup 7). The attachment of emission measures to goods and services requires a range of calculative experts, and the implementation of new marketing and branding strategies, aimed at conveying the carbon “health” of a product. The introduction of “food mile” labelling (the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the transportation of the food from source to consumer) in certain supermarkets in the United Kingdom is an example of this. Carbon risk analysis and management programs are being introduced across businesses in readiness for the forthcoming “carbon economy”. As one flyer selling “a suite of carbon related services” explains, “early action will give you the edge in understanding and mitigating the risks, and puts you in a prime position to capitalise on the rewards” (MGI Business Solutions Worldwide). In addition, lobby groups are working to ensure exclusions from or the free allocation of permits within the proposed AETS, with degrees of compulsion applied to different industries – the Federal Government, for instance, will provide a $3.9 billion compensation package for the electric power sector when the AETS commences, to enable their “adjustment” to this carbon regime. Performing Life Noortje Mares provides a further means of thinking through the politics of life in the context of climate change by complicating the distinction between public and private interest. Her study of “green living experiments” describes the rise of carbon calculation in the home in recent years, and the implementation of technologies such as the smart electricity meter that provides a constantly updating display of data relating to amounts and cost of energy consumed and the carbon dioxide emitted in the routines of domestic life. Her research tracks the entry of these personal calculative regimes into public life via internet forums such as blogs, where individuals notate or discuss their experiences of pursing low-carbon lifestyles. On the one hand, these calculative practices of living and their public representation can be read as evidencing the pervasive neo-liberal governmentality at work in contemporary environmental practice, where individuals are encouraged to scrupulously monitor their domestic cultures. The rise of auditing as a technology of self, and more broadly as a technique of public accountability, has come under fire for its “immunity-granting role” (Charkiewicz 79), where internal audits become substituted for external compliance and regulation. Mares challenges this reading, however, by demonstrating the ways in which green living experiments “transform everyday material practices into practices of public involvement” that (118) don’t resolve or pin down relations between the individual, the non-human environment, and the social, or reveal a mappable flow of actions and effects between the public realm and the home. The empirical modes of publicity that these individuals employ, “the careful recording of measurements and the reliable descriptions of sensory observation, so as to enable ‘virtual witnessing’ by wider audiences”, open up to much more complex understandings than one of calculative self-discipline at work. As “instrument[s] of public involvement” (120), the experiments that Mares describe locate the politics of life in the embodied socio-material entanglements of the domestic sphere, in arrangements of humans and non-human technologies. Such arrangements, she suggests, are ontologically productive in that they introduce “not only new knowledge, but also new entities […] to society” (119), and as such these experiments and the modes of calculation they employ become active in the composition of reality. Recent work in economic sociology and cultural studies has similarly contended that calculation, far from either a naturalised or thoroughly abstract process, relies upon a host of devices, relations, and techniques: that is, as Gay Hawkins explains, calculative processes “have to be enacted” (108). Environmental governmentality in the service of securing life is a networked practice that draws in a host of actors, not a top-down imposition. The institution of carbon economies and carbon emissions as a new register of public accountability, brings alternative ways to calculate the world into being, and consequently re-calibrates life as it emerges from these heterogeneous arrangements. All That Gathers Latour writes that we come to know a matter of concern by all the things that gather around it (Latour). This includes the human, as well as the non-human actors, policies, practices and technologies that are put to work in the making of our realities. Climate change is routinely represented as a threat to life, with predicted (and occurring) species extinction, growing numbers of climate change refugees, dispossessed from uninhabitable lands, and the rise of diseases and extreme weather scenarios that put human life in peril. There is no doubt, of course, that climate change does mean death for some: indeed, there are thanopolitical overtones in inequitable relations between the fall-out of impacts from major polluting nations on poorer countries, or those much more susceptible to rising sea levels. Biosocial equity, as Bull points out, is a “matter of being equally alive and equally dead” (2). Yet in the biopolitical project of assuring living, life is burgeoning around the problem of climate change. The critique of neo-liberalism as a blanketing system that subjects all aspects of life to market logic, and in which the cynical techniques of industry seek to appropriate ethico-political stances for their own material ends, are insufficient responses to what is actually unfolding in the messy terrain of climate change and its biopolitics. What this paper has attempted to show is that there is no particular purchase on life that can be had by any one actor who gathers around this concern. Varying interests, ambitions, and intentions, without moral hierarchy, stake their claim in life as a constantly constituting site in which they participate, and from this perspective, the ways in which we understand life to be both produced and managed expand. This is to refuse either an opposition or a conflation between the market and nature, or the market and life. It is also to argue that we cannot essentialise human-ness in the climate change debate. For while human relations with animals, plants and weathers may make us what we are, so too do our relations with (in a much less romantic view) non-human things, technologies, schemes, and even markets—from carbon auditing services, to the label on a tin on the supermarket shelf. As these intersect and entangle, the project of life, in the new politics of climate change, is far from straightforward. References An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Davis Guggenheim. Village Roadshow, 2006. Arup, Tom. “Victoria Makes Enormous Carbon Stocktake in Bid for Offset Billions.” The Age 24 Sep. 2009: 7. Bratich, Jack Z., Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy. “Governing the Present.” Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality. Ed. Bratich, Packer and McCarthy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 3-21. Bull, Malcolm. “Globalization and Biopolitics.” New Left Review 45 (2007): 12 May 2009 . < http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2675 >. Charkiewicz, Ewa. “Corporations, the UN and Neo-liberal Bio-politics.” Development 48.1 (2005): 75-83. Clark, Nigel, and Nick Stevenson. “Care in a Time of Catastrophe: Citizenship, Community and the Ecological Imagination.” Journal of Human Rights 2.2 (2003): 235-246. Crombie, Angela. A Lighter Footprint: A Practical Guide to Minimising Your Impact on the Planet. Carlton North, Vic.: Scribe, 2007. Di Muzio, Tim. “Governing Global Slums: The Biopolitics of Target 11.” Global Governance. 14.3 (2008): 305-326. Elden, Stuart. “Governmentality, Calculation and Territory.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (2007): 562-580. Hawkins, Gay. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225-248. Mares, Noortje. “Testing Powers of Engagement: Green Living Experiments, the Ontological Turn and the Undoability and Involvement.” European Journal of Social Theory 12.1 (2009): 117-133. MGI Business Solutions Worldwide. “Carbon News.” Adelaide. 2 Aug. 2009. Ong, Aihwa. “Mutations in Citizenship.” Theory, Culture and Society 23.2-3 (2006): 499-505. Potter, Emily. “Footprints in the Mallee: Climate Change, Sustaining Communities, and the Nature of Place.” Landscapes and Learning: Place Studies in a Global World. Ed. Margaret Somerville, Kerith Power and Phoenix de Carteret. Sense Publishers. Forthcoming. Rabinow, Paul, and Nikolas Rose. “Biopower Today.” Biosocieties 1 (2006): 195-217. Rose, Nikolas. “The Politics of Life Itself.” Theory, Culture and Society 18.6 (2001): 1-30. World Wildlife Fund. Living Planet Report 2008. Switzerland, 2008.

1. A Minor Philosopher According to Guattari and Deleuze's definition, a 'minor literature' is the literature of a minority that makes use of a major language, a literature which deterritorialises that language and interconnects meanings of the most disparate levels, inseparably mixing and implicating poetic, psychological, social and political issues with each other. In analogy, the Japanese media theorist Toshiya Ueno has refered to Félix Guattari as a 'minor philosopher'. Himself a practicing psychoanalyst, Guattari was a foreigner to the Grand Nation of Philosophy, whose natives mostly treat him like an unworthy bastard. And yet he has established a garden of minor flowers, of mongrel weeds and rhizomes that are as polluting to philosophy as Kafka's writing has been to German literature (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka). The strategies of 'being minor' are, as exemplified by Guattari's writings (with and without Deleuze), deployed in multiple contexts: intensification, re-functionalisation, estrangement, transgression. The following offers a brief overview over the way in which Guattari conceptualises media, new technologies and art, as well as descriptions of several media art projects that may help to illustrate the potentials of such 'minor machines'. Without wanting to pin these projects down as 'Guattarian' artworks, I suggest that the specific practices of contemporary media artists can point us in the direction of the re-singularising, deterritorialising and subjectifying forces which Guattari indicated as being germane to media technologies. Many artists who work with media technologies do so through strategies of appropriation and from a position of 'being minor': whenever a marginality, a minority, becomes active, takes the word power (puissance de verbe), transforms itself into becoming, and not merely submitting to it, identical with its condition, but in active, processual becoming, it engenders a singular trajectory that is necessarily deterritorialising because, precisely, it's a minority that begins to subvert a majority, a consensus, a great aggregate. As long as a minority, a cloud, is on a border, a limit, an exteriority of a great whole, it's something that is, by definition, marginalised. But here, this point, this object, begins to proliferate ..., begins to amplify, to recompose something that is no longer a totality, but that makes a former totality shift, detotalises, deterritorialises an entity.' (Guattari, "Pragmatic/Machinic") In the context of media art, 'becoming minor' is a strategy of turning major technologies into minor machines. a. Krzysztof Wodiczko (PL/USA): Alien Staff Krzysztof Wodiczko's Alien Staff is a mobile communication system and prosthetic instrument which facilitates the communication of migrants in their new countries of residence, where they have insufficient command of the local language for communicating on a par with the native inhabitants. Alien Staff consists of a hand-held staff with a small video monitor and a loudspeaker at the top. The operator can adjust the height of the staff's head to be at a level with his or her own head. Via the video monitor, the operator can replay pre-recorded elements of an interview or a narration of him- or herself. The recorded material may contain biographical information when people have difficulties constructing coherent narratives in the foreign language, or it may include the description of feelings and impressions which the operator normally doesn't get a chance to talk about. The Staff is used in public places where passers-by are attracted to listen to the recording and engage in a conversation with the operator. Special transparent segments of the staff contain memorabilia, photographs or other objects which indicate a part of the personal history of the operator and which are intended to instigate a conversation. The Alien Staff offers individuals an opportunity to remember and retell their own story and to confront people in the country of immigration with this particular story. The Staff reaffirms the migrant's own subjectivity and re-singularises individuals who are often perceived as representative of a homogenous group. The instrument displaces expectations of the majority audience by articulating unformulated aspects of the migrant's subjectivity through a medium that appears as the attractive double of an apparently 'invisible' person. 2. Mass Media, New Technologies and 'Planetary Computerisation' Guattari's comments about media are mostly made in passing and display a clearly outlined opinion about the role of media in contemporary society: a staunch critique of mass media is coupled with an optimistic outlook to the potentials of a post-medial age in which new technologies can develop their singularising, heterogenic forces. The latter development is, as Guattari suggests, already discernible in the field of art and other cultural practices making use of electronic networks, and can lead to a state of 'planetary computerisation' in which multiple new subject-groups can emerge. Guattari consistently refers to the mass media with contempt, qualifying them as a stupefying machinery that is closely wedded to the forces of global capitalism, and that is co-responsible for much of the reactionary hyper-individualism, the desperation and the "state of emergency" that currently dominates "four-fifth of humanity" (Guattari, Chaosmosis 97; cf. Guattari, Drei Ökologien 16, 21). Guattari makes a passionate plea for a new social ecology and formulates, as one step towards this goal, the necessity, "to guide these capitalist societies of the age of mass media into a post-mass medial age; by this I mean that the mass media have to be reappropriated by a multiplicity of subject-groups who are able to administer them on a path of singularisation" (Guattari, "Regimes" 64). Guattari consistently refers to the mass media with contempt, qualifying them as a stupefying machinery that is closely wedded to the forces of global capitalism, and that is co-responsible for much of the reactionary hyper-individualism, the desperation and the "state of emergency" that currently dominates "four-fifth of humanity" (Guattari, Chaosmosis 97; cf. Guattari, Drei Ökologien 16, 21). Guattari makes a passionate plea for a new social ecology and formulates, as one step towards this goal, the necessity, "to guide these capitalist societies of the age of mass media into a post-mass medial age; by this I mean that the mass media have to be reappropriated by a multiplicity of subject-groups who are able to administer them on a path of singularisation" (Guattari, "Regimes" 64). b. Seiko Mikami (J/USA): World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body An art project that deals with the cut between the human subject and the body, and with the deterritorialisation of the sense of self, is Seiko Mikami's World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body. It uses the visitor's heart and lung sounds which are amplified and transformed within the space of the installation. These sounds create a gap between the internal and external sounds of the body. The project is presented in an-echoic room where sound does not reverberate. Upon entering this room, it is as though your ears are no longer living while paradoxically you also feel as though all of your nerves are concentrated in your ears. The sounds of the heart, lungs, and pulse beat are digitised by the computer system and act as parameters to form a continuously transforming 3-d polygonal mesh of body sounds moving through the room. Two situations are effected in real time: the slight sounds produced by the body itself resonate in the body's internal membranes, and the transfigured resonance of those sounds is amplified in the space. A time-lag separates both perceptual events. The visitor is overcome by the feeling that a part of his or her corporeality is under erasure. The body exists as abstract data, only the perceptual sense is aroused. The visitor is made conscious of the disappearance of the physical contours of his or her subjectivity and thereby experiences being turned into a fragmented body. The ears mediate the space that exists between the self and the body. Mikami's work fragments the body and its perceptual apparatus into data, employing them as interfaces and thus folding the body's horizon back onto itself. The project elucidates the difference between an actual and a virtual body, the actual body being deterritorialised and projected outwards towards a number of potential, virtual bodies that can, in the installation, be experienced as maybe even more 'real' than the actual body. 3. Artistic Practice Guattari's conception of post-media implies criss-crossing intersections of aesthetic, ethical, political and technological planes, among which the aesthetic, and with it artistic creativity, are ascribed a position of special prominence. This special role of art is a trope that recurs quite frequently in Guattari's writings, even though he is rarely specific about the artistic practices he has in mind. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari give some detailled attention to the works of artists like Debussy, Boulez, Beckett, Artaud, Kafka, Kleist, Proust, and Klee, and Chaosmosis includes longer passages and concrete examples for the relevance of the aesthetic paradigm. These examples come almost exclusively from the fields of performing arts, music and literature, while visual arts are all but absent. One reason for this could be that the performing arts are time-based and processual and thus lend themselves much better to theorisation of flows, transformations and differentiations. The visual arts can be related to the abstract machine of faciality (visageité) which produces unified, molar, identical entities out of a multiplicity of different singularities, assigning them to a specific category and associating them with particular social fields (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, Tausend Plateaus 167-91) This semiotic territorialisation is much more likely to happen in the case of static images, whether two- or three-dimensional, than in time-based art forms. An interesting question, then, would be whether media art projects, many of which are time-based, processual and open-ended, can be considered as potential post-medial art practices. Moreover, given the status of computer software as the central motor of the digital age, and the crucial role it plays in aesthetic productions like those discussed here, software may have to be viewed as the epitome of post-medial machines. Guattari seems to have been largely unaware of the beginnings of digital media art as it developed in the 1980s. In generalistic terms he suggests that the artist is particularly well-equipped to conceptualise the necessary steps for this work because, unlike engineers, he or she is not tied to a particular programme or plan for a product, and can change the course of a project at any point if an unexpected event or accident intrudes (cf. Guattari, Drei Ökologien 50). The significance of art for Guattari's thinking comes primarily from its close relation with processes of subjectivation. "Just as scientific machines constantly modify our cosmic frontiers, so do the machines of desire and aesthetic creation. As such, they hold an eminent place within assemblages of subjectivation, themselves called to relieve our old social machines which are incapable of keeping up with the efflorescence of machinic revolutions that shatter our epoch' (Guattari, Chaosmosis 54). The aesthetic paradigm facilitates the development of new, virtual forms of subjectivity, and of liberation, which will be adequate to these machinic revolutions. c. Knowbotic Research + cF: IO_Dencies The Alien Staff project was mentioned as an example for the re-singularisation and the virtualisation of identity, and World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body as an instance of the deterritorialisation and virtualisation of the human body through an artistic interface. The recent project by Knowbotic Research, IO_Dencies -- Questioning Urbanity, deals with the possibilities of agency, collaboration and construction in translocal and networked environments. It points in the direction of what Guattari has called the formation of 'group subjects' through connective interfaces. The project looks at urban settings in different megacities like Tokyo, São Paulo or the Ruhr Area, analyses the forces present in particular local urban situations, and offers experimental interfaces for dealing with these local force fields. IO_Dencies São Paulo enables the articulation of subjective experiences of the city through a collaborative process. Over a period of several months, a group of young architects and urbanists from São Paulo, the 'editors', provided the content and dynamic input for a database. The editors collected material (texts, images, sounds) based on their current situation and on their personal urban experience. A specially designed editor tool allowed the editors to build individual conceptual 'maps' in which to construct the relations between the different materials in the data-pool according to the subjective perception of the city. On the computational level, connectivities are created between the different maps of the editors, a process that is driven by algorithmic self-organisation whose rules are determined by the choices that the editors make. In the process, the collaborative editorial work in the database generates zones of intensities and zones of tension which are visualised as force fields and turbulences and which can be experienced through interfaces on the Internet and at physical exhibition sites. Participants on the Net and in the exhibition can modify and influence these electronic urban movements, force fields and intensities on an abstract, visual level, as well as on a content-based, textual level. This engagement with the project and its material is fed back into the database and influences the relational forces within the project's digital environment. Characteristic of the forms of agency as they evolve in networked environments is that they are neither individualistic nor collective, but rather connective. Whereas the collective is determined by an intentional and empathetic relation between agents within an assemblage, the connective rests on any kind of machinic relation and is therefore more versatile, more open, and based on the heterogeneity of its components or members. In the IO_Dencies interfaces, the different networked participants become visible for each other, creating a trans-local zone of connective agency. The inter-connectedness of their activities can be experienced visually, acoustically, and through the constant reconfiguration of the data sets, an experience which can become the basis of the formation of a specific, heterogeneous group subject. 4. Guattari's Concept of the Machinic An important notion underlying these analyses is that of the machine which, for Guattari, relates not so much to particular technological or mechanical objects, to the technical infrastructure or the physical flows of the urban environment. 'Machines' can be social bodies, industrial complexes, psychological or cultural formations, they are assemblages of heterogeneous parts, aggregations which transform forces, articulate and propel their elements, and force them into a continuous state of transformation and becoming. An important notion underlying these analyses is that of the machine which, for Guattari, relates not so much to particular technological or mechanical objects, to the technical infrastructure or the physical flows of the urban environment. 'Machines' can be social bodies, industrial complexes, psychological or cultural formations, they are assemblages of heterogeneous parts, aggregations which transform forces, articulate and propel their elements, and force them into a continuous state of transformation and becoming. d. Xchange Network My final example is possibly the most evocative in relation to Guattari's notions of the polyvocity and heterogenesis that new media technologies can trigger. It also links up closely with Guattari's own engagement with the minor community radio movement. In late 1997, the E-Lab in Riga initiated the Xchange network for audio experiments on the Internet. The participating groups in London, Ljubljana, Sydney, Berlin, and many other minor and major places, use the Net for distributing their original sound programmes. The Xchange network is "streaming via encoders to remote servers, picking up the stream and re-broadcasting it purely or re-mixed, looping the streams" (Rasa Smite). Xchange is a distributed group, a connective, that builds creative cooperation in live-audio streaming on the communication channels that connect them. They explore the Net as a sound-scape with particular qualities regarding data transmission, delay, feedback, and open, distributed collaborations. Moreover, they connect the network with a variety of other fields. Instead of defining an 'authentic' place of their artistic work, they play in the transversal post-medial zone of media labs in different countries, mailing lists, net-casting and FM broadcasting, clubs, magazines, stickers, etc., in which 'real' spaces and media continuously overlap and fuse (cf. Slater). 5. Heterogenic Practices If we want to understand the technological and the political implications of the machinic environment of the digital networks, and if we want to see the emergence of the group subjects of the post-media age Guattari talks about, we have to look at connectives like Xchange and the editor-participant assemblages of IO_Dencies. The far-reaching machinic transformations which they articulate, hold the potential of what Guattari refers to as the 'molecular revolution'. To realise this revolution, it is vital to "forge new analytical instruments, new concepts, because it is ... the transversality, the crossing of abstract machines that constitute a subjectivity and that are incarnated, that live in very different regions and domains and ... that can be contradictory and antagonistic". For Guattari, this is not a mere theoretical question, but one of experimentation, "of new forms of interactions, of movement construction that respects the diversity, the sensitivities, the particularities of interventions, and that is nonetheless capable of constituting antagonistic machines of struggle to intervene in power relations" (Guattari, "Pragmatic/Machinic" 4-5). The implication here is that some of the minor media practices pursued by artists using digital technologies point us in the direction of the positive potentials of post media. The line of flight of such experimentation is the construction of new and strong forms of subjectivity, "an individual and/or collective reconstitution of the self" (Guattari, Drei Ökologien 21), which can strengthen the process of what Guattari calls "heterogenesis, that is a continuous process of resingularisation. The individuals must, at the same time, become solidary and ever more different" (Guattari, Drei Ökologien 76). References Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Pour une Litterature Mineur. Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1975. ---. Tausend Plateaus. (1980) Berlin: Merve, 1992. Guattari, Félix. Cartographies Schizoanalytiques. Paris: Ed. Galilée, 1989. ---. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. (1992) Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. ---. Die drei Ökologien. (1989) Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1994. ---. "Pragmatic/Machinic." Discussion with Guattari, conducted and transcribed by Charles J. Stivale. (1985) Pre/Text 14.3-4 (1995). ---. "Regimes, Pathways, Subjects." Die drei Ökologien. (1989) Wien: Passagen Verlag, 1994. 95-108. ---. "Über Maschinen." (1990) Schmidgen, 115-32. Knowbotic Research. IO_Dencies. 1997-8. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://io.khm.de/>. De Landa, Manuel. "The Machinic Phylum." Technomorphica. Eds. V2_Organisation. Rotterdam: V2_Organisation, 1997. Mikami, Seiko. World, Membrane and the Dismembered Body. 1997. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://www.ntticc.or.jp/permanent/mikami/mikami_e.php>. Schmidgen, Henning, ed. Ästhetik und Maschinismus: Texte zu und von Félix Guattari. Berlin: Merve, 1995. ---. Das Unbewußte der Maschinen: Konzeptionen des Psychischen bei Guattari, Deleuze und Lacan. München: Fink, 1997. Slater, Howard. "Post-Media Operators." Nettime, 10 June 1998. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://www.factory.org>. Wodiczko, Krzysztof. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://cavs.mit.edu/people/kw.htm>. Xchange. 11 Sep. 1999 <http://xchange.re-lab.net>. (Note: An extended, Dutch version of this text was published in: Oosterling/Thissen, eds. Chaos ex Machina: Het ecosofisch Werk van Félix Guattari op de Kaart Gezet. Rotterdam: CFK, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Andreas Broeckmann. "Minor Media -- Heterogenic Machines: Notes on Félix Guattari's Conceptions of Art and New Media." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/minor.php>. Chicago style: Andreas Broeckmann, "Minor Media -- Heterogenic Machines: Notes on Félix Guattari's Conceptions of Art and New Media," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/minor.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Andreas Broeckmann. (1999) Minor Media -- Heterogenic Machines: Notes on Félix Guattari's Conceptions of Art and New Media. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/minor.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction The trope of food is often used in the humanities to discuss aspects of a culture that are customarily overlooked by a textualist approach, for food embodies a kind of knowledge that comes from the direct engagement with materials and processes, and involves taste as an aesthetics that exceeds the visual concept of the “beautiful.” Moreover, cooking is one of the most ancient cultural practices, and is considered the habit that defines us as humans in comparison to other animals—not only culturally, but also physiologically (Wrangham). Today we have entered a post-human age in which technological augmentations, while promoting the erasure of embodiment in favour of intelligence (Hayles), create new assemblages between the organic and the digital, thus redefining what it means to be human. In this context, a reassessment of the practice of cooking as the manipulation of what constitutes food—both for thought and for the body—may promote a more nuanced approach to contemporary culture, in which the agency of the non-human (from synthetic materials to the digital) affects our modes of being and reflects on our aesthetic sensibility. In the 1980s, Guy Debord observed that the food industry's standardisation and automation of methods of production and consumption have anaesthetised the consumer palate with broader political and cultural implications. Today the Internet has extended the intertwinement of food and technology to the social and aesthetic spheres, thus further impacting on taste. For instance, cultural trends such as “foodism” and “slow food” thrive on blogs and social networks and, while promoting an artisanal style in food preparation and presentation, they paradoxically may also homogenise cooking techniques and the experience of sharing a meal. This leads to questions regarding the extent to which the digitalisation of culture might be hindering our capacity to taste. Or, given the new possibilities for connectivity, can this digitalisation also foster an aesthetic sensibility associated with different attitudes and approaches to food—one that transgresses both the grand narratives and the standardisation promoted by such gastronomic fashions? It also leads to the question of how such activities reflect on the collective sphere, considering the contagious character of networked communication. While foodism thrives online, the Internet has nevertheless prompted a renewed interest in DIY (do-it-yourself) cooking techniques. As a recent issue of M/C Journal testifies, today cookbooks are produced and consulted at an unprecedented rate—either in print or online (Brien and Wessell). Taking the example of the online diffusion of DIY cheese-making recipes, I will below trace the connections between cooking, computer culture, and taste with the support of Gilbert Simondon's metaphysics of technics. Although Simondon never extensively discussed food in relation to technology, the positioning of technicity at the heart of culture allows his work to be used to address the multifaceted nature of taste in the light of recent technological development, in particular of the Network. As a matter of fact, today cooking is not only a technical activity, in the sense that it requires a certain practical and theoretical skilfulness—it is also a technological matter, for the amount of networked machines that are increasingly used for food production and marketing. Specifically, this paper argues that by disentangling the human—albeit partially—from the capitalist cycle of production-marketing-consumption and by triggering an awareness of the increasingly dominant role technology plays in food processing and manufacturing, the online sharing of home-cooking advice may promote a reconfiguration of taste, which would translate into a more nuanced approach to contemporary techno-culture. In the first part of this discussion, I introduce Simondon’s philosophy and foreground the technical dimension of cooking by discussing cheese-making as a process of individuation. In the second, I focus on Simondon’s definition of technical objects and technical ensembles to position Internet culture in relation to cooking, and highlight how technicity folds back on taste as aesthetic impression. Ultimately, I conclude with some reflections on how such a culinary-aesthetic approach may find application in other techno-cultural fields by promoting an aesthetic sensibility that extends beyond the experience of the “social” to encompass an ethical component. Cooking as Individuation: The Networked Dimension of Taste Simondon is known as the thinker, and “tinkerer”, of technics. His project is concerned with ontogenesis—that is, the becoming of objects in relation to the terms that constitute them as individual. Simondon’s philosophy of individuation allows for a better understanding of how the Internet fosters certain attitudes to food, for it is grounded on a notion of “energetic materiality in movement” (Deleuze and Guattari 408) that explains how “immaterial” algorithms can affect individual experience and cultural production. For Simondon, individuation is the process that arises from objects being out-of-phase with themselves. Put differently, individuation allows for “the conservation of being through becoming” (Genesis 301). Likewise, individualisation is “the individuation of an individuated being, resulting from an individuation, [and creating] a new structuration within the individual” (L’Individuation 132). Individuation and individualisation are processes common to all kinds of being. Any individual operates an internal and an external resonance within the system in which it is enmeshed, and produces an “associated milieu” capable of entering into relation with other individuals within the system. Simondon maintains that nature consists of three regimes of individuation, that is, three possible phases of every being: the physical, the biological, and the psycho-social—that develop from a metastable pre-individual field. Technology traverses all three regimes and allows for further individualisation via transductive operations across such phases—that is, via operations of conversion of energy from one form to another. The recent online diffusion of DIY cheese-making recipes lends itself to be analysed with the support of Simondon’s philosophy. Today cheese dominates degustation menus beside the finest wines, and constitutes a common obsession among “foodies.” Although, as an object, cheese defies more traditional canons of beauty and pleasure—its usual pale yellow colour is not especially inviting and, generally speaking, the stinkier and mouldier it is, the more exclusive and expensive it usually is—it has played a sizeable role in the collective imagination since ancient times. Although the genesis of cheese predates archival memory, it is commonly assumed to be the fruit of the chemical reaction naturally occurring in the interaction of milk with the rennet inherently contained in the bladders made of ruminants’ stomachs in which milk was contained during the long transits undertaken by the nomadic cultures of Central Asia. Cheese is an invention that reportedly occurred without human intervention, and only the technical need to preserve milk in high temperature impelled humans to learn to produce it. Since World War II its production is most exclusively factory-based, even in the case of artisanal cheese (McGee), which makes the renewed concern for homemade cheese more significant from a techno-cultural perspective. Following Simondon, the individualisation of cheese—and of people in relation to cheese—depends on the different objects involved in its production, and whose associated milieu affects the outcome of the ontogenetic process via transductive operations. In the specific case of an industrial block of cheese, these may include: the more or less ethical breeding and milking of cows in a factory environment; the types of bacteria involved in the cheese-making process; the energy and costs inherent in the fabrication of the packaging material and the packaging process itself; the CO2 emissions caused by transportations; the physical and intellectual labour implied in marketing, retailing and selling; and, last but not least, the arguable nutritional value of the factory-produced cheese—all of which, in spite of their “invisibility” to the eyes of the consumer, affect physical conditions and moods when they enter into relation with the human body (Bennet). To these, we may add, with specific reference to the packaging: the RFID tags that electronically index food items into databases for a more efficient management of supplies, and the QR codes used for social media marketing purposes. In contrast, the direct engagement with the techno-material conditions at the basis of the home cookery process allows one to grasp how different operations may affect the outcome of the recipe. DIY cheese-making recipes are specifically addressed to laypeople and, because they hardly demand professional equipment, they entail a greater attunement with, and to, the objects and processes required by the recipe. For instance, one needs to “feel” when milk has reached the right temperature (specifically, 82 degrees centigrade, which means that the surface of the milk should be slightly bubbly but not fully boiling) and, with practice, one learns how the slightest movement of the hand can lead to different results, in terms of consistency and aspect. Ultimately, DIY cheese-making allows the cook to be creative with moulding, seasonings, and marinading. Indeed, by directly engaging with the undiscovered properties and potentials of ingredients, by understanding the role that energy (both in the sense of induction and “transduction”) plays on form and matter, and by developing—often via processes of trial and error—technics for stirring, draining, moulding, marinading, canning, and so forth, making cheese at home an exercise in speculative pragmatics. An experimental approach to cooking, as the negotiation between the rigid axioms that make up a recipe and the creative and experimental components inherent in the operations of mixing and blending, allows one to feel the ultimate outcome of the cooking process as an event. The taste of a homemade cheese is linked to a new kind of knowledge—that is, an epistemology based on continuous breakages that allow for the cooking process to carry on until the ultimate result. It is a knowledge that comes from a commitment to objects being out-of-phase, and from the acknowledgement of the network of technical operations that bring cheese to our tables. The following section discusses how another kind of object may affect the outcome of a recipe, with important implications for aesthetics, that is, technical objects. The Internet as Ingredient: Technical Objects, Aesthetics, and Invention The notion of technical objects complements Simondon’s theory of individuation to define the becoming of technology in relation to culture. To Simondon: “the technical object is not this or that thing, given hic et nunc, but that of which there is a genesis” (Du Mode 20). Technical objects, therefore, are not simply technological artifacts but are constituted by a series of events that determine their evolution (De Vries). Analogously to other kinds of individuals, they are constituted by transductive operations across the three aforementioned phases of being. The evolution of technical objects extends from the element to the individual, and ultimately to the technical ensemble. Elements are less than individualised technical objects, while individuals that are in a relation of interconnection are called ensembles. According to Simondon, technical ensembles fully individualise with the realisation of the cybernetic project. Simondon observes that: “there is something eternal in a technical ensemble [...] and it is that which is always present, and can be conserved in a thing” (Les Cahiers 87). The Internet, as a thing-network, could be regarded as an instance of such technical ensembles, however, a clarification needs to be made. Simondon explains that “true technical ensembles are not those that use technical individuals, but those that are a network of technical individuals in a relation of interconnection” (Du mode 126). To Simondon, humankind has ceased to be a technical individual with the industrialisation and automation of methods of production, and has consigned this function to machines (128). Expanding this line of thought, examples such as the viral spreading of memes, and the hypnotic power of online marketing campaigns, demonstrate how digital technology seems to have intensified this process of alienation of people from the functioning of the machine. In short, no one seems to know how or why things happen on the Internet, but we cannot help but use it. In order to constitute “real” technical ensembles, we need to incorporate technics again into culture, in a relation of reciprocity and complementarity with machines, under the aegis of a technical culture. Simondon specifies that such a reconfiguration of the relation between man and machines can only be achieved by means of an invention. An invention entails the individualisation of the technical ensemble as a departure from the mind of the inventor or designer that conceived it, in order to acquire its own autonomous existence (“Technical Mentality”). It refers to the origin of an operative solidarity between individual agents in a network, which provides the support for a human relation based on the “model of transidividuality” (Du Mode 247). A “transindividual relation” is a relation of relations that puts the individual in direct contact with a real collective. The notion of real collective is opposed to that of an interindividual community or social sphere, which is poisoned by the anxieties that stem from a defected relation with the technical ensemble culture is embedded in. In the specific context of the online sharing of DIY cheese-making recipes, rather than a fully individualised technical ensemble per se, the Internet can be regarded as one of the ingredients that make up the final recipe—together with human and the food—for the invention of a true technical ensemble. In such a framework, praxis, as linked to the kind of non-verbal knowledge associated with “making,” defines individuation together with the types of objects that make up the Network. While in the case of foodism, the practice of online marketing and communication homogenises culture by creating “social phenomena,” in the case of DIY cooking advice, it fosters a diversification of tastes, experiences, and flavours linked to individual modes of doing and cooking, that put the cook in a new relation with the culinary process, with food, and with the guests who have the pleasure to taste her meal. This is a qualitative change in the network that constitutes culture, rather than a mere quantitative shift in energy induction. The term “conviviality” (from the Latin con-vivere) specifically means this: a “living together,” rather than a mere dinner party. For Simondon, a real technical ensemble is an assemblage of humans, machines, tools, resources and milieus, which can only be éprouve—i.e., experienced, also in the sense of “experimented with”—rather than represented. A technical ensemble is first and foremost an aesthetic affair—it can only be perceived by experimenting with the different agents involved in the networked operations that constitute it. For Simondon “aesthetics comes after technicity [and] it also returns to us in the heart of technicity” (Michaud in De Boever et al. 122). Therefore, any object bears an aesthetic potential—even something as trivial as a homemade block of cheese. Simondon rejects the idea of an aesthetic object, but affirms the power of technicity to foreground an aesthetic impression, which operates a convergence between the diverging forces that constitute the mediation between man and world, in terms of an ethical treatment of technics. For Simondon, the beautiful is a process: “it is never, properly speaking, the object that is beautiful: it is the encounter operating a propos of the object between a real aspect of the world and a human gesture” (Du Mode 191 emphasis added). If an analysis of cooking as individuation already foregrounds an aesthetics that is both networked and technical, the relational capabilities afforded by networked media have the power to amplify the aesthetic potential of the human gesture implied in a block of homemade cheese—which today extends from searching for (or writing) a recipe online, to pouring the milk and seasoning the cheese, and which entails less environmental waste due to the less intensive processing and the lack of, or certainly a reduction in, packaging materials (Rastogi). The praise of technical creativity resounds throughout Simondon’s thought. By using the Internet in order to create (or indeed cook) something new, the online sharing of DIY cooking techniques like cheese-making, which partially disengages the human (and food itself) from the cycle of production-marketing-consumption that characterises the food industry in capitalist society by fostering an awareness of the networked operations that constitute her as individual, is an invention in its own right. Although the impact of these DIY activities on the global food industry is still very limited, such a hands-on approach, imbued with a dose of technical creativity, partially overcomes the alienation of the individual from the production process, by providing the conditions to “feel” how the individualisation of cheese (and the human) is inscribed in a larger metabolism. This does not stop within the economy of the body but encompasses the techno-cultural ensemble that forms capitalist society as a whole, and in which humans play only a small part. This may be considered a first step towards the reconciliation between humans and technical culture—a true technical ensemble. Indeed, eating involves “experiments in art and technology”—as the name of the infamous 1960s art collective (E.A.T.) evokes. Home-cooking in this sense is a technical-aesthetic experiment in its own right, in which aesthetics acquires an ethical nuance. Simondon’s philosophy highlights how the aesthetics involved in the home cooking process entails a political component, aimed at the disentanglement of the human from the “false” technical ensemble constituted by capitalist society, which is founded on the alienation from the production process and is driven by economic interests. Surely, an ethical approach to food would entail considering the biopolitics of the guts from the perspective of sourcing materials, and perhaps even building one’s own tools. These days, however, keeping a cow or goat in the backyard is unconceivable and/or impossible for most of us. The point is that the Internet can foster inventiveness and creativity among the participants to the Network, in spite of the fixity of the frame in which culture is increasingly inscribed (for instance, the standardised format of a Wordpress blog), and in this way, can trigger an aesthetic impression that comprises an ethical component, which translates into a political stand against the syncopated, schizophrenic rhythms of the market. Conclusion In this discussion, I have demonstrated that cooking can be considered a process of individuation inscribed in a techno-cultural network in which different transductive operations have the power to affect the final taste of a recipe. Simondon’s theory of individuation allows us to account for the impact of ubiquitous networked media on traditionally considered “human” practices, thus suggesting a new kind of humanism—a sort of technological humanism—on the basis of a new model of perception, which acknowledges the non-human actants involved in the process of individuation. I have shown that, in the case of the online sharing of cheese-making recipes, Simondon’s philosophy allows us to uncover a concept of taste that extends beyond the mere gustatory experience provided by foodism, and in this sense it may indeed affirm a reconfiguration of human culture based on an ethical approach towards the technical ensemble that envelops individuals of any kind—be they physical, living, or technical. Analogously, a “culinary” approach to techno-culture in terms of a commitment to the ontogenetic character of objects’ behaviours could be transposed to the digital realm in order to enlighten new perspectives for the speculative design of occasions of interaction among different beings—including humans—in ethico-aesthetic terms, based on a creative, experimental engagement with techniques and technologies. As a result, this can foreground a taste for life and culture that exceeds human-centred egotistic pleasure to encompass both technology and nature. Considering that a worryingly high percentage of digital natives both in Australia and the UK today believe that cheese and yogurt grow on trees (Howden; Wylie), perhaps cooking should indeed be taught in school alongside (rather than separate to, or instead of) programming. References Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things. 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