Savage Objects PDF

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SAVAGE OBJECTS

SAVAGE OBJECTS
edited by
Godofredo Pereira
Martin Holbraad
Graham Harman
João Maria Gusmão
Bjørnar Olsen
Eyal Weizman
Reza Negarestani
Susan Schuppli
Jonathan Saldanha
Regina de Miguel
Michael Taussig
Marcello Maggi
Ayesha Hameed
Paulo Tavares
Godofredo Pereira

COnTEnT
11 preface
i.
17 Things as Concepts:
Anthropology and Pragmatology
— Martin Holbraad
33 On the Supposed Societies of Chemicals,

Atoms, and Stars in Gabriel Tarde
— Graham Harman
45 Soliloquy, A Dwarf in the Stratosphere

— João Maria Gusmão
71 The Return of Things and the Savagery

of the Archaeological Object
— Bjørnar Olsen

S AVA G E O B J E C T S
ii.
87 In Excess of Calculation
— A conversation with Eyal Weizman
101 A Vertiginous Enlightenment

(JWST and telescopic view of the object)
— Reza Negarestani
119 Impure Matter:

A Forensics of WTC Dust
— Susan Schuppli
141 Vibrational Mediations

— Jonathan Saldanha
157 An Effect of Verosimilitude

— Regina de Miguel

COnTEnT
iii.
169 Bodily Unconscious

— A conversation with Michael Taussig
183 The Tower and Its Ghost

A Cosmopolitical narrative from Botswana
— Marcello Maggi
199 The Petrification of the Image

— Ayesha Hameed
215 On the Earth-Object

— Paulo Tavares
233 Underground
Venezuela’s Territorial Fetishism
— Godofredo Pereira
251 image credits

255 biographies
261 acknowledgments

P R E FA C E
What is to be gained by arguing that objects speak? What do recent

turns to the non-human and to things have in common? And what
conflicts are emerging within the apparently consensual removal
of the human from the centre of the problem of knowledge?
Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in objects,
things, and the non-human – a gradual departure from the domi-
nation of text, language, and discourse in previous decades, or,
as is often said, a move away from the human as the central point
of reference for thinking the world. The claim that there is a
consensual turn is compounded by the emergence of numerous
publications on non-human actors in fields as diverse as archae-
ology, science studies, anthropology, philosophy, history, art,
and architecture; works in which the divide between nature and
culture or between humans and non-humans is effaced, where
complex assemblages of people and things challenge thought
procedures, and where the ground upon which modernity itself
was founded becomes the object of contention. However, if we
look closely at the different ways in which these topics are being
discussed, the image of a uniform turn immediately disappears;
we find that recent attempts to emancipate objects are contingent
upon and differentiated by the practices in which they emerge.
With this in mind, the present book tries for the first time to
bring together several different forums in which objects are
being discussed anew, suggesting that the conflicts arising from
11

fortuitous encounters between researchers might be more pro-

ductive than a consensual turn to post-humanism.
The book takes as its point of departure two well-worn
notions, objects and savages, specifically in reference to a Sav-
age Thought that we provocatively twist upon itself, bringing to
light not the thought per se but its object and the resistance this
object holds to thought. We invited contributions from very dif-
ferent fields to respond to this provocation – from philosophers,
archaeologists and anthropologists, to activists, architects and
artists – to focus not only on objects themselves but also on the
practices within which they are constituted and the territories
they refer to. By framing these discussions within object-research
as well as academic discourse – in fields ranging from textual
production, legal forums, image migration, state performance,
and acoustic exploration – speculation about objects and things
also becomes a discussion about conflicting ecologies of thought,
thus providing insight into often overlooked pragmatic and politi-
cal dimensions. Ultimately, our hope is that, by bringing such
diverse practices together, new lines of thought can be suggested
and spaces for new alliances be forged.
Godofredo Pereira
12

I

Things as Concepts:
Anthropology and Pragmatology
Martin Holbraad
Within anthropology, much has been written about the possi-

bility of a posthumanist critical social science that is able to
emancipate ‘things’ (objects, artefacts, materiality, etc.) from the
ensnaring epistemological and ontological bonds of ‘humanism’,
‘logicentrism’ and other modernist imaginaries.1 The aim of this
essay is to take this project further by exploring the possibilities
for an anthropological analytics that is able to allow things – by
which I mean something akin to ‘things themselves’, though
only in the strict heuristic sense that I shall specify presently –
to generate their own terms of analytical engagement. Might
the feted posthumanist emancipation of the thing be shown to
consist in its peculiar capacity to unsettle whatever ontological
assumptions we, as analysts, might make about it (including,
perhaps, the ontological premises of a ‘posthumanist turn’ itself)?
Might things decide for themselves what they are, and in so
doing emancipate themselves from us who would presume to tell
1
E.g. Marilyn Strathern, "Artefacts of history: events and the interpretation of
images", in Culture and History in the Pacific, ed. J. Siikala (Helsinki: Transactions
of the Finish Anthropological Society, 1990), 25–44; Alfred Gell, Art and Agency:
An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Bruno Latour, Reas-
sembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Daniel Miller, "Mate-
riality: an introduction", in Materiality, ed. D. Miller (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 2005), 1–50.
17

them? Might they, if you like, become their own thing–theorists,

acting as the originators (rather than the objects) of our analyti-
cal conceptualisations?2
Such questions, I take it, would consummate the promise
of a properly ‘savage thought’: objects acting not merely as con-
duits for the thinking of the people anthropologist study (those
they used to call ‘savages’), but rather as a conduit for anthropo-
logical thinking itself. Objects, then, become the basis not only
for savages’ ‘science of the concrete’, as Lévi–Strauss himself
would have it,3 but also for thoughts that are savage enough to
unsettle the conceptual economy of analysis itself, including
anthropological analysis (which I shall take here as my point
of departure). Let me illustrate what such a ‘savage’ concretion
of anthropology might look like with reference to aché – one of
the most basic notions involved in the prestigious Afro–Cuban
tradition of divination of Ifá, which I have been studying ethno-
graphically in Cuba since 1998.
The power of powder
Much like the notorious notion of mana in Oceania, aché is a

term that babalawos, which is what men who are initiated into
the cult of Ifá are called, use in a wide variety of contexts. Most
salienty, they use it to refer both in the abstract to their ‘power’
(poder) or ‘capacity’ (facultad) to divine, for which they are most
renown (‘to divine you must have aché ’, as they say); and, much
2
Cf. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, And (Manchester: Manchester Papers in Social
Anthropology, 2002).
3
Claude Lévi–Strauss, The Savage Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
18

T h I n G S A S C O n C E P T S : A n T h R O P O l O G y A n D P R A G M AT O l O G y
more concretely, to certain powders that they consider to be a

prime ritual ingredient for making divinities appear and ‘speak’
during divination. Among the many ways in which specially pre-
pared powders are deemed necessary to Ifá ritual, perhaps the
most striking is its role as a ‘register’ (registro) for the divinatory
configurations through which Orula, the god of divination, is said
to be able to ‘speak’ during the ritual. Spread on the surface of
the consecrated divining tray that babalawos use for the most
ceremonious divinations they conduct for their clients (particu-
larly during the initiation of neophytes), this powder becomes the
medium through which Orula’s words appear. This they do in the
form of a series of ‘signs’ (signos, also referred to in the original
Yoruba as oddu) that are marked (marcar) by the babalawo on the
surface of the powder, following a complex divinatory procedure
in which consecrated palm–nuts are used to generate distinct
divinatory configurations, each corresponding to its own sign.
Sometimes considered as guises of Orula himself (or his ‘paths’ or
‘representatives’), these figures, comprising eight single or double
lines drawn by the babalawo with his middle and ring finger in
the powder, are considered as potent divinities in their own right
that ‘come out’ (salen) in the divination: crouching around the
divining board as they ‘mark the sign’, the babalawos and their
consultants are in the presence of a divine being, a symbol that
stands for itself if ever there was one.4
Crucially, babalawos emphasise that the powder itself is an
indispensable ingredient for effecting these elicitations of the
divine. Properly prepared according to secret recipes that only
4
Sensu Roy Wagner, Symbols that Stand for Themselves (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986).
19

babalawos know, aché de Orula, as the powder is referred to in

this context, has the power to render divinities present. Aché–
powder does this not only by providing the surface on which they
can appear on the divining tray, but also because it constitutes
a necessary ingredient in the consecration of each of the vari-
ous objects used in the divination, including the divining tray,
the palm–nuts and various other items babalawos must have
consecrated for divinatory use during their own initiation. As
they explain, none of these items ‘work’ unless they are properly
consecrated, and this must involve ‘charging them with acheses’,
i.e. with aché–powders, according to secret procedures.
Concepts versus things
Elsewhere I have explained ways in which the notion of aché

so blatantly exemplifies some of the central preoccupations
that inform Lévi–Strauss’s theorization of savage thought, such
as the ‘antinomies’ he associated with ‘floating signifiers’ that
can signify anything – e.g. both power and powder – because, in
themselves, they mean nothing.5 Here we may draw attention
only to the fact that, viewed from within the prism of the kinds of
anthropological preoccupations Lévi-Strauss’s argument on float-
5
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. F. Barker
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). See Martin Holbraad, " The power of pow-
der: multiplicity and motion in the divinatory cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or mana
again)", in Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, ed.
A. Henare et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 189-225. See also Mar-
tin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
20

ing signifiers itself exemplifies, the case of aché raises classical

anthropological conundrums about the rationality credentials of
what he playfully called ‘savage thought’ (pensèe sauvage). Much
as with classic anthropological controversies about so-called
‘apparently irrational beliefs’ (Nuer twins being birds, Bororo
men being red macaws, and so on), we seem here to be confronted
with a series of notions that are counter-intuitive to say the least.
Certainly, it would appear that the terminological coincidence of
aché as both power and powder corresponds to an ontological one,
since, as babalawos affirm, a diviner’s power to elicit divinities
into presence is irreducibly a function of his capacity to use the
consecrated powders at his disposal as an initiate. Powder, in
this sense, is power. And this would seem to raise the classical
anthropological question: why might Cuban diviners and their
clients ‘believe’ such a notion? How do we explain this ‘apparently
irrational belief’ anthropologically?
It should be noted, however, that this ‘classical’ way of pos-
ing the question draws its power from what one might call its
own inherent perversity. In order even to ask why certain people
might believe that a certain form of powder has the power to
elicit certain divinities into presence, one has first to take for
granted that this could not (or should not) be the case in the first
place. In particular, assuming that the pertinent anthropological
question is why people might ‘believe’ in this way that powder
is power turns on the corollary assumption that such a belief
can be parsed as the particular way in which the people in ques-
tion ‘represent’ the objects in their midst, namely, in this case,
representing (signifying, imagining, socially constructing etc.)
powder as power. And this in turn relies on that foundational
ontological axiom of straight-thinking modernism, namely the
21

distinction between things as they are in the world and the vari-
ous and variable concepts that people may attach to them. Indeed,
as long as the analysis of aché remains within the terms of an
axiomatic distinction between things and concepts, it cannot
but ask the question in terms of representations, beliefs, social
constructions and so on. Since we ‘know’ that powder is just
that dusty thing there on the diviner’s tray, the question cannot
but be why Cubans might ‘think’ that it is also a form of power.
The move to posthumanist analyses of things in anthropol-
ogy has been motivated partly by a desire to avoid precisely this
way of raising questions, and in particular to overcome the blatant
perversity of seeking to parse alternatives to our own metaphysic
of concepts versus things in terms of just that metaphysic (for
Cuban diviners powder is power; we, on the other hand, ask why
they might ‘believe’ it to be so, since, from first metaphysical
principles, it can’t be so). Hence the penchant in recent writings
on material culture (and note the telling ontological oxymoron)
for so-called ‘relational’ ontological premises which seek, in one
way or other, to erase or otherwise compromise the concept versus
thing divide.6 Still, rather than placating the conceptual imperial-
ism of modernist metaphysics by binding things to an alternative
6
E.g. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Prentice
Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005); Tim Ingold, Perceptions of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood,
Dwelling and Skill (London & New York: Routledge, 2000); Tim Ingold, " Materi-
als against materiality", Archaeological Dialogues 14, no.1 (2007): 1-16; Bjørnar
Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Langham:
AltaMira Press, 2010); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010).
22

(e.g. ‘relational’, ‘symmetrical’, ‘vital’, ‘vibrant’) ontological order,

my interest here is in the possibility of freeing things from any a
priori ontological determination whatsoever, so as to allow them
to dictate, as it were, their own terms of analytical engagement.
As I propose to show, this most crucially involves eliding the
concept/thing divide, not as a matter of substantive ontologi-
cal revision, but rather as point only of analytical methodology.
Given space constraints, I present such a prospect as a series of
three methodological moves.7
Step I: thing-as-heuristic
If in any given ethnographic instance things may be considered,

somehow, also as non-things (e.g. a putatively ‘material’ powder
that is also a putatively ‘immaterial’ power, as in our example),8
then, anthropologically speaking, the notion of a ‘thing’ can at
most have a heuristic, rather than an analytical, role. The initial
7
For more detailed discussion see Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari
Wastell, "Introduction", in Thinking Through Things: Theorising artefacts ethno-
graphically, ed. Wenare et al. (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 1-31; Martin
Holbraad, "Ontology, ethnography, archaeology: an afterword on the ontography
of things", Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19, no3 (2009): 431-441; Martin Hol-
braad, ‘Can the Thing Speak?’, OAP Press, Working Paper Series #7 (2011), available
at: http://openanthcoop.net/press/http://openanthcoop.net/press/wp-content/
uploads/2011/01/Holbraad-Can-the-Thing-Speak2.pdf
8
For classic arguments to this effect with reference to the things anthropologists
call gifts see Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic
Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990); Cf. Amiria Henare et al.,
‘Introduction’, 16-23.
23

analytical task, in other words, cannot be to ‘add’ to the theoreti-

cal purchase of the term ‘thing’ by proposing new ways to think
of it – e.g. as a site of human beings’ objectification,9 an index
of agency,10 an on-going event of assemblage,11 or what have you.
Rather it must be effectively to de-theorise it, by emptying it out
of its many analytical connotations, rendering it a pure ethno-
graphic ‘form’ ready to be filled out contingently according only
to its own ethnographic exigencies. To return to our example: if
calling the powder babalawos use a ‘thing’ implies that it could
not, properly speaking, also be a form of metaphysical power,
then let us not call it a thing in any sense other than merely as
an ontologically and analytically vacuous heuristic identifier
– merely a tag for identifying it as an object of study, with no
metaphysical prejudice, and particularly with no prejudice as to
what it might be, including questions of what it being a ‘thing’
might even mean.
Step II: concept = thing
If the first step towards letting things set their own terms of ana-
lytical engagement involves emptying them out of any a priori
9
Daniel Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1987); Daniel Miller, ‘Materiality: an introduction’, in Materiality, ed. D. Miller
(Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005), 1-50.
10
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998).
11
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (London: Prentice
Hall, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
24

metaphysical contents, the second is geared towards allowing

them to be filled by (potentially) alternative ones in each ethno-
graphic instance. We may brand this methodological injunction
by way of a further heuristic formula, namely ‘concepts = things’.
According to this methodological edict, instead of treating all the
things that people say of, do to, and do with things as modes of
‘representing’ them (i.e. as manners of attaching various concepts
to the things in question by way of ‘social construction’, as per the
standard anthropological way of thinking), we may treat them as
modes of defining what these things are. This renders wide open
precisely questions about what kinds of things ‘things’ might be:
what materiality might be, objectification, agency – all that is
now up for grabs, as a matter of ethnographic contingency and
the analytical work it forces upon us.
So, to return again to the Cuban example, the idea here is
to treat all the things babalawos and their clients supposedly
‘believe’ about their aché-powders as elements of a conceptual
definition of what such a ‘thing’ might actually be: Cuban diviners
do not ‘believe’ that powder is a form of power, but rather define
it as such. To the extent that our own default assumption is that
powder is not to be defined as power (it’s just a dusty thing, we
assume), the challenge then must be to reconceptualise those
very notions and their many empirical and analytical corollaries
(powder, power, deity etc. but also thing, concept, divinity etc.) in
a way that would render the ethnographically-given definition
of powder as power reasonable, rather than an absurd ‘belief’.
I have sought at length elsewhere to specify the full gamut
of ways in which different kinds of data may enter into the efforts
of analytical conceptualization that problems of the powder-
25

is-power necessitate for anthropologists.12 Crucially, a sound

ethnographic understanding is necessary in order even to for-
mulate such problems in the first place, let alone solve them. For
example, since what powder might be in Ifá divination depends
on the notion of power that is at stake in this ritual activity, part
of an attempt to articulate the question involves developing
the cosmological conundrum that lies at its core: if power, in
this ethnographic context, refers to babalawos’ ability to render
divinities present as ‘signs’ during divination, then are we not in
some pertinent sense dealing here with a version of the age-old
theo-ontological conundrum, so familiar in the anthropology
of religion,13 of how entities that are imagined as transcendent
might under certain conditions – in this case by ritual means
that involve the use of powder as an indispensable component –
be rendered immanent? Conceptualising powder as power, then,
requires us to understand how Afro-Cuban divination effectively
solves something akin to the so-called ‘problem of transcendence’
in Judeo-Christian theology – although immediately one wants
to add that this may well be a misnomer, at least insofar as the
very notions of ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ may themselves
have to be reconceptualised in this context.
12
Martin Holbraad, "Ontology is just another word for culture: against the motion",
Debate & Discussion at the GDAT 2008, Critique of Anthropology 30, 2 (2010): 179-
185, 185-200 passim; Martin Holbraad, Truth in Motion: the Recursive Anthropol-
ogy of Cuban Divination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
13
E.g. Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African
Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Webb Keane, Christian
Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007).
26

What I wish to make explicit here, however, is the irreduc-

ible contribution that, heuristically understood, ‘things them-
selves’ can make to this work of conceptualization. Indeed, with
reference to the case of powder in Ifá, one might say that while
ethnographic information derived from babalawos serves to set
up the anthropological conundrum that aché in its dual aspect,
so to speak, poses, it is what I shall call the ‘pragmatographic’
information culled from its peculiar qualities as a ‘thing’ (viz. as
powder) that delivers the most crucial elements for its solution.
Step III: thing = concept
Consider what powder actually does in the diviner’s hands. As we

saw, spread on the surface of the divining board, it provides the
backdrop upon which the oddu, thought of as deity-signs, ‘come
out’. So powder is the catalyst of divinatory power, where that
power is understood as the capacity to make divinities ‘come out’
and ‘speak’. Now, note that, considered prosaically as a ‘thing’,
powder is able to do this due to its pervious character, as a collec-
tion of unstructured particles – its pure multiplicity, one might
say. In marking the oddu on the board, the diviner’s fingers are
able to draw the configuration just to the extent that the ‘intensive’
capacity of powder to be moved (to be displaced like Archimedean
bathwater) allows them to do so. The extensive movement of the
oddu as it appears on the board, then, presupposes the intensive
mobility of powder as the medium upon which it is ‘registered’.
In this way powder renders the premise of the oddu’s revelation
explicit, as a matter of these signs’ inherent motility: by way of
figure/ground reversal, oddu figures are revealed as a temporary
displacement of their ground, the powder.
27

But this suggests also a logical reversal that goes to the

heart of the problem that apparently ‘transcendent’ oddu might
be imagined to pose. If we take seriously babalawos’ contention
that the oddu just are the marks they make on aché-powder (the
basic ‘magic’ of divination), then the constitution of deities as
displacements of powder tells us something pretty important
about the ontological premises of Ifá cosmology: that these divini-
ties are to be thought of not, say, as ‘entities’ that may or may
not exist in states of transcendence or immanence, but rather
as motions. And if the oddu are just motions, then the ontologi-
cal discontinuity between transcendence and immanence (and
with it the onto-theological problem they may be imagined to
pose) is resolved. In a logical universe where motion is primi-
tive, what looks like transcendence becomes distance and what
looks like immanence becomes proximity. Indeed: qua motions,
the divinities have inherent within themselves the capacity to
relate to humans immanently, through the potential of directed
movement that aché-powder guarantees, as a solution to the
genuine problem of the distance deities must traverse in order
to be rendered present in divination.
Now, what I wish to draw attention to here is the work powder
does for this analysis, by virtue specifically of what heuristically
(once again!) one would identify as its prosaic, ‘material’ char-
acteristics. If ethnography carries the weight of the analytical
problem, in this argument, it is the material quality of powder that
provides the most crucial elements for its solution. If deities are
conceptualised as motions to dissolve the problem of ‘transcend-
ence’, after all, that is only because their material manifestations
are just that, motions. And those motions, in turn, only emerge
as analytically significant because of the material constitution
28

of the powder upon which they are physically marked: its per-
vious quality as a pure multiplicity of unstructured particles,
amenable to intensive movement, like the displacement of water,
in reaction to the extensive pressure of the diviner’s fingers,
and so on. Each of this series of material qualities inheres in
powder itself, and it is by virtue of this material inherence that
they can engender conceptual effects, setting the parameters for
the anthropological analysis that they ‘afford’ the argument. As
an irreducible element of the analysis of aché, it is powder that
brings the pivotal concepts of perviouness, multiplicity, motion,
direction, potential and so on into the fray of it own analysis,
providing its own answer to its own problem – its savage power,
if you like, analytically (conceptually, ontologically) to unsettle.
So what is at stake in this mode of analysis is the capacity
that things have to engender conceptual transformations of
themselves, by virtue of the conceptual differences their material
characteristics can make. Indeed, this irreducibly pragmatological
element, as we may call it,14 of anthropological analysis is noth-
ing other than the corollary inversion of our earlier ‘concepts =
things’ formula, namely things = concepts. If the formula ‘concept
= thing’ designated the possibility of treating what people say
and do around things as ways of defining what those things are,
its symmetrical rendition ‘thing = concept’ raises the prospect of
treating things as a way of defining what we as analysts are able
to say and do around them. At issue, to coin a term, are a thing’s
14
Cf. Christopher Witmore, ‘The realities of the past: Archaeology, Object-Orienta-
tions, Pragmatology’, in Modern Materials: Proceedings from the Contemporary
and Historical Archaeology in Theory Conference, eds. B. R. Fortenberry and L.
McAtackney (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009), 25-36.
29

conceptual affordances: how things’ material characteristics

can give rise to particular forms for their conceptualization. One
might even imagine this kind of transformational movement
as a form of abstraction, provided that notion is disentangled
from habitually corollary distinctions between concrete things
and abstract concepts.15 Indeed, this is just what the ‘thing =
concept’ clause of our analytical method would suggest. Where
the analytical ontology of things versus concepts would posit
abstraction as the ability of a given concept to comprehend a
particular thing, external to itself, in its extension, the heuristic
continuity of ‘thing = concept’ casts this as a movement internal
to ‘the thing itself’: the thing differentiates itself, no longer as
an instantiation ‘of’ a concept, but a self-transformation as a
concept. Savage thought thinking itself.
15
See also Martin Holbraad and Morten A. Pedersen, "Planet M: the intense abstrac-
tion of Marilyn Strathern", Anthropological Theory 9, 4 (2009): 371-94.
30

On the Supposed Societies of Chemicals,
Atoms, and Stars in Gabriel Tarde
Graham Harman
Gabriel Tarde lived from 1843 to 1904. A failed rival of Émile

Durkheim for dominance in French sociology, Tarde fell into
obscurity for many decades before enjoying a resurgence, due
largely to the admiration of Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour.
Tarde’s sparkling 1895 treatise Monadology and Sociology has
recently been translated into English by Theo Lorenc,1 and will
serve as the topic of the present article. In the words of the pub-
lisher’s description, this sixty-page treatise “sets out a theory of
‘universal sociology,’ which aims to explicate the essentially social
nature of all phenomena, including the behaviour of atoms, stars,
chemical substances and living beings. [Tarde] argues that all of
nature consists of elements animated by belief and desire, which
form social aggregates analogous to those of human societies and
institutions.”2 What person of any degree of imagination could
resist a book described in this way? If there is any possibility of
including non-human entities in the political sphere, Tarde seems
1
Gabriel Tarde, Monadology and Sociology, trans. and ed. Theo Lorenc (Melbourne:
re.press, 2012). All parenthetical references in the article are to this work, and
will consist of chapter number in Roman numerals followed by page numbers in
Arabic numerals. For example: (IV, 30) refers to Chapter IV, page 30 in the re.press
edition.
2
From the publisher’s online advertisement, found at http://re-press.org/books/
monadology-and-sociology/.
33

like an excellent candidate for the job. Nonetheless, I will claim

that this impression is largely illusory.
In the first sentence of the book, Tarde gives us the name
of his hero philosopher, who in some respects is also my own:
“The monads, children of Leibniz, have come a long way since
their birth” (I, 5). The Leibnizian monads, those tiny atomic
souls spread throughout nature, strike many readers as the
quaint residue of an archaic era of speculative philosophy. By
contrast, Tarde sees the monads as penetrating the whole of
natural science in his time. “Monads” is a Greek-derived term
that would be “units” in the Latinate.3 Monadology and Sociol-
ogy was written half a decade before Max Planck discovered
that heat comes in discrete packets, or quanta; this was soon
followed by Einstein’s quantum theory of light and his proof
of the existence of atoms through his explanation of Brown-
ian motion, then Bohr’s theory of electrons jumping between
discrete orbits in an atom. Nonetheless, the move towards a
discrete rather than continuous nature was already underway
in 1895. Chemistry had been marching away from continuous
matter towards discrete individual atoms throughout the nine-
teenth century: “The progress of chemistry leads us to affirm
the atom and to deny the material continuity which the con-
tinuous character of the physical and living manifestations of
matter, extension, movement and growth seem superficially to
reveal” (I, 5-6). Tarde cites F. A. Lange as holding that for Newton
gravitational force does not occur between large-sized celestial
3
And “units” is in fact the favored term of object-oriented philosopher Ian Bogost
in Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2006).
34

O n T h E S U P P O S E D S O C I E T I E S O F C h E M I C A l S , AT O M S , A n D S TA R S I n G A B R I E l TA R D E
bodies, but is only a sum of the gravity of all the tiniest particles
of which these bodies are made. So too in biology, where “the
founders of cellular theory have shown themselves to be Newton’s
true heirs. In the same way they have broken apart the unity of
the living body, they have resolved it into a prodigious number
of elementary organisms, isolated and egoistic…” (I, 6). Tarde
grasps a similar possibility for the study of history. Though he
cites no forerunners for this claim, Tarde is adamant that we
need “a clearer and more positive form of explanation, which
accounts for a given historical event only by individual actions,
and particularly by the action of inventive men who served as a
model for others and reproduced thousands of copies of them-
selves, like mother-cells of the social body” (I, 8). He even praises
Antoine Augustin Cournet for supplementing Darwin with a
theory of “evolution by leaps or crises” (I, 13), like Stephen Jay
Gould in more recent times, again privileging the discrete over
the continuous. Although Tarde enjoys great favor with Deleuze
and hence with Deleuzians, he puts a rather un-Deleuzian spin
on this theory of discrete individuals, speaking openly of “the
superiority of substantialist systems throughout history, from
Democritus to Descartes, over the liveliest of dynamistic doc-
trines” (II, 20). And in yet another challenge to fashionable
contemporary dogma, Tarde adds that “the idea of force leads
naturally to the idea of substance… [against] the agitations of
an illusory phenomenalism…” (II, 20).
All this might suggest that Tarde offers a jungle-like land-
scape made up of individuals of every shape and scale: with atoms
at one level, cells at another, and autonomous human geniuses
shaping history at still another. But this is not the case. For Tarde
just as for his hero Leibniz, monads exist at one level only: the
35

tiniest level. Tarde notes that “scientists who live in daily contact
with the so-called elements have no doubt of their complexity” (I,
8), and for him the complexity of such non-ultimate entities as
chemical elements means that they cannot have inherent unity
and reality of their own. He cites the prominent chemist Marcel-
lin Berthelot as saying that “the deeper study of the elementary
masses which, on our current understanding, constitute the sim-
ple bodies leads every day more and more to an understanding
of them not as indivisible atoms, homogenous and admitting of
movement only as a whole, but as highly complex constructions,
furnished with a specific architecture and animated by highly
varied internal movements” (cited at I, 8-9). In short, there is a
descent into the infinitesimal. Visible finite things are simply the
bulk summation of many tinier things that serve as the ultimate
source of all things in the cosmos: “Everything comes from the
infinitesimal and everything returns to it; nothing in the sphere
of the finite and complex —a surprising fact which nobody is
surprised at— appears suddenly, nor dies away. What should we
conclude from this, if not that the infinitely small, in other words
the element, is the source and the goal, the substance and the
reason of all things?” (I, 11). The idea that new autonomous enti-
ties might emerge at each layer of the cosmos strikes Tarde as
absurd. For instance: “It is truly surprising to see men of science,
so stubborn in repeating at every turn that nothing is created,
admit implicitly as though self-evident that relations between
distinct beings can of themselves become new beings numeri-
cally added to the former” (V, 35). Or restated more sarcastically:
“Once embarked on this course, there is no reason to stop: every
harmonious, profound and intimate relation between natural
elements becomes the creator of a new and superior element,
36

which in turn assists in the creation of another yet higher ele-

ment at every step of the scale of phenomenal complexity…” (V,
35-36). In order to forestall such proliferation of entities at every
layer of the cosmos, Tarde asserts that in the case of human socie-
ties, “however intimate, profound, and harmonious a given social
group may be, we will never see springing forth ex abrupto from
among its members, to their surprise, a collective ego which is
real and not only metaphorical, a marvellous outcome of which
these individuals would be the conditions” (V, 36). Since this is
precisely what many people do hold, it would be nice to read an
actual argument by Tarde on this score. But he is adamant that
whatever looks like a collective entity is really just one or more
micro-entities asserting themselves against the others. For exam-
ple: “Doubtless there is always one member [of a human social
group] who represents and personifies the whole group, or else a
small number of them (like the ministers of a State) who, each in
a different respect, individualize it no less entirely in themselves”
(V, 36). Again, nothing exists but the tiniest things. Here Tarde
sounds much like the analytic philosopher Peter van Inwagen,4
who believes in nothing but physical simples and living organ-
isms, denouncing the supposed existence of all intermediate and
large-sized entities.
The difference between Tarde and van Inwagen, of course,
is that Tarde thinks physical simples are living organisms. The
hypothesis of monads, which Tarde fully supports, “implies both
the reduction of two entities, matter and mind, to a single one,
such that they are merged in the latter, and at the same time a
prodigious multiplication of purely mental agents in the world”
4
Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
37

(I, 5). To give just one practical instance, Tarde cites a report from
G. J. Almann that “the movements of spores seem frequently
to obey a real volition; if the spore encounters an obstacle, it
changes direction and moves back by changing the movement of
its cilia” (cited at II, 22). Tarde adds approvingly that “a railway
mechanic could do no better” (II, 22). If we accept Tarde’s general
hypothesis, “the movement of bodies would be nothing other
than types of judgements or objectives formulated by the mon-
ads” (II, 17). Souls are characterized by belief and desire, which
serve respectively as the grounds for affirmation and will (II, 16).
This links Tarde unexpectedly with the pessimistic metaphysics
of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann (II, 21), while also
providing an unusual point of entry into sociology and politics.
Speaking of belief and desire, Tarde asks both rhetorically and
beautifully: “Is it not clear that with their reciprocal combina-
tions, passions and intentions, they are the perpetual winds of
history’s tempests, and the waterfalls which turn the mills of
politics?” (II, 21). And more decisively: “[belief and desire] alone
can produce societies” (II, 21).
Given that there is no soulless matter and that all is purely
mind, it is not metaphorical to speak of “societies” at the infra-
human levels of the world. Indeed, “everything is a society… every
phenomenon is a social fact” (IV, 28). Tarde thinks this merely
ratifies what science is already learning on its own: “Science tells
us of animal societies… of cellular societies, and why not of atomic
societies? I almost forgot to add societies of stars, solar and stel-
lar systems” (IV, 28). But paradoxically enough, for Tarde there
is really no such thing as societies of chemicals, atoms, stars, or
even humans. There exist nothing but the infinitesimal monads,
and these group together into larger units only in the sense that
38

some dominant monad takes control for as long as a given entity

exists. For even if a cell acts as if it were animated by a single
soul, “we must rather conclude that it was only the soul of a whole
people of workers” (II, 22). When we study “nature, rocks, water,
or even plants,” we find that each is “a hermetically closed world
of elements” (VII, 56). Celestial bodies themselves are created by
the dominance of individual monads, as in the following bizarrely
beautiful passage: “there still exists, we maintain, at the heart
of the sun, the conquering atom which by its individual action
extended by degrees to the whole primordial nebula, disrupted
the contented state of equilibrium which, we are told, the latter
enjoyed” (VIII, 62). The same process holds at the level of humans,
who are not unified Christian souls, but swarms of infinitesimal
germs: “I call consciousness, soul, mind, the transitory victory of
an eternal element, which by some favourable chance rises above
the obscure realm of the infinitesimal, to rule a people of broth-
ers who are now become his subjects…” (VIII, 65). The end of this
transient reign is described just as Leibniz described it, but even
more poetically: “I call death the gradual or sudden dethroning,
the voluntary or forced abdication of this spiritual conqueror who,
like Darius after Arbela and Napoleon after Waterloo, Charles
V at Yuste and Diocletian at Salona, but even more completely
stripped bare once more, returns to the infinitesimal where it
was born and whence it came…” (VIII, 65).
We have seen that, like Leibniz, Tarde proposes a world
made up entirely of infinitesimal monads, in which all larger-
scale entities –chemicals, atoms, stars, humans– are merely the
result of one dominant monad organizing less dominant col-
laborators to do its bidding. Where Tarde and Leibniz differ most
is on the topic of knowledge and communication. We know that
39

for Leibniz, “monads have no windows.”5 They are cut off from
direct communication with each other, and mirror each other
only through the mediation of God, who makes no appearance
in the remarkably secular pages of Monadology and Sociology.
By contrast, Tarde does not think that monads are windowless
at all. Instead, “the whole external universe is composed of souls
distinct from my own but fundamentally similar” (II, 15). Accord-
ingly, “if it is the case that this being in itself is fundamentally
similar to our own being, then it will no longer be unknowable,
and may consistently be affirmed” (II, 15). Whereas “Leibniz made
each [monad] a camera obscura where the whole universe of other
monads is represented in a reduced form and from a particular
angle,” Tarde favors “open monads which would penetrate each
other reciprocally, rather than being mutually external” (III, 26).
Citing Newtonian gravity with its action-at-a-distance (refuted
two decades later by Einstein), Tarde exults that monads cannot
be mutually impenetrable (III, 26). Whereas Leibniz viewed the
monad as a “microcosm” closed in on itself, Tarde views each
monad as the entire cosmos itself, since it directly grasps all
other monads (III, 27). Having begun the book with a discontinu-
ous landscape of discrete units, Tarde emphatically turns the
tables midway through: “What do we place within the ultimate
discontinuity if not continuity?” (III, 27). Instead of a series of
self-enclosed chambers as in Leibniz, the world is a gigantic
relational whole in which all infinitesimals make contact at a
distance. Here lies the root of Tarde’s project of shifting thought
from being to having: “All philosophy hitherto has been based on
5
G.W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (India-
napolis: Hackett, 1989), 214.
40

the verb Be, the definition of which was the philosopher’s stone,
which all sought to discover. We may affirm that, if it had been
based on the verb Have, many sterile debates and fruitless intel-
lectual exertions would have been avoided” (VII, 52). This shift to
having would amount to embracing an openly relational concep-
tion of the world, through which science supposedly outshines
philosophy (VII, 54).
We have seen that Tarde’s universal sociology condemns
most purported entities to non-existence. What really exists are
the infinitesimals, universally in contact with one another, but
sometimes locally shaped into specific things under the guidance
of a dominant monad. Here Tarde joins the pre-Socratic philoso-
phers and many scientists in undermining objects by reducing
them to tiny subcomponents. But at the end of the day, despite
beginning with a discrete cosmic model of atoms, cells, individual
humans, and other quanta, Tarde fuses all these entities into a
gigantic relational whole. Being is replaced by having; an indi-
vidual is nothing more than those other individuals it touches.
The universe becomes even more a hall of mirrors than it was for
Leibniz, for it is now one gigantic Versailles of mirrors rather than
trillions of micro-mirrors sealed off from contact with all others.
If Tarde’s move to the infinitesimal was a way of undermining
objects, his talk of immediate having at a distance is a form of
what I call overmining, since it identifies monads exhaustively
with their interactions with others.6 It should come as no surprise
6
For my previous discussions of the overmining/undermining doublet, see the fol-
lowing publications: “On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno, and Radi-
cal Philosophy,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism,
ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011),
41

that Tarde affirms both the smallest part of the cosmos (the infini-
tesimal unit) and the largest (the relational whole), while mock-
ing the existence of everything in between. For as I have often
argued in print, these two extremes are almost always parasites
on one another, to such an extent that I have called this twofold
philosophy “the beast with two backs.”7 Parmenides denounces
all individual beings, leaving us with nothing but a unified lump,
but then must account for plurality by affirming a plurality of
things in the sphere of doxa or opinion. Mainstream scientific
naturalists reduce the world to tiny particles, but to safeguard
scientific knowledge they must affirm that the properties of
these particles are isomorphic with human knowledge – which
is not itself a tiny underlying substratum, but a surface located
at some remove from this substratum. Throughout Chapter VI of
Monadology and Sociology, Tarde gives wonderful descriptions
of how higher-level entities might seem to an outside observer
to emerge beyond the infinitesimal through a merely subtractive
process of simplification. “Forms are only brakes and laws are only
dykes” (VI, 46), meaning that whatever seems homogeneous and
unified actually swarms with internal diversity. But to be made
of parts does not necessarily mean to be reducible to one’s parts,
since those parts may shift or be replaced without this changing
the thing they join to compose. Tarde concedes in passing that
things cannot be reduced upward to their foreign relations with
other things, since “if [things] were only social… it would follow
21-40; “I Am Also of the Opinion That Materialism Must Be Destroyed,” in Envi-

ronment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no. 5 (2010), 772-790; Graham
Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011).
7
Shakespeare, Othello. Act 1, Scene 1.
42

that societies and nations would exist without change for all
eternity” (VI, 48). In other words, if a thing were nothing more
than its relations with other things, it would be identical with
its relations, and would thus be devoid of any surplus allowing
it to change from its current state.
Yet the same also holds in reverse. A thing also cannot be
reduced downward to the domestic relations of its own internal
components, since to paraphrase Tarde, it would follow from this
that societies and nations would change unremittingly with each
tiny change of its internal pieces. The single hair falling from the
head of Obama, or from that of an iron worker, football player, or
cat, would change not only the United States but the cosmos as
a whole – a purely arbitrary assumption. From this we can see
that we need a theory of intermediate objects larger than Tarde’s
infinitesimals, and smaller than his global network of havings
and relatings. In between infinitesimals and relations there are
objects, and in between them is also being rather than having.
Indeed, there may be no infinitesimals or global relations at all.
Without intermediate realities, there would be neither human
nor inhuman societies, and no savagery of savage objects. There
could be no societies of chemicals, atoms, stars, or humans. The
world would be a colossal but tame savanna made up of tiny
swarming creatures always already in contact with every other.
43

João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, The Soup, 2009.

Soliloquy, A Dwarf in the Stratosphere
João Maria Gusmão
I am bemused by how so-called Extraterrestrials think so little of

man that the stern and macro-cephalous figure we have grown
used to never conceals, in that languid and anorectic represen-
tation, the private parts of the body. How odd that that distinct,
albeit slight, impotent and child-like phallus does not, in our
imagination, deign to bear – thus honoring our bipedal tradi-
tion – the shame of a simple pair of underpants. A brief glance
at the creature’s nether region would suffice to explain the philo-
logical proximity between the Martian myth and the avatar of
homo sapiens civilization, the chimpanzee. A somewhat absurd
comparison, since, contrary to Freudian opinion, our illustrious
simian ancestor, having all his life given much attention to his
genitalia, masturbates in the same amount and manner as we,
the true humans, a fact that is alone enough to set him apart
from the Martian’s venerable lack of libido. The common alien’s
near-religious abstinence, rivaling in disgrace the ecclesiastic
restraint upon which Catholicism was founded, serves, however,
an underlying fantasy – as attested by the fact that there are
numerous hysterical descriptions and accounts wherein those
androgynous beings conduct experiments with medieval instru-
ments on abductees lying on operating tables. Which leads us to
conclude the following: this E.T., if he exists at all, is psychologi-
cal – like the data that, rightly or wrongly, lead us on the road to
this exhaustive inquiry into solipsism.
45

Summa summarum, if this is so, what inquest should then

be carried out to ascertain the possibility of another conscience
other than our own in the universe? Is there, in the crannies of
diversity, in the outside we find out there, something that can at
least quiet what must be the most profound feeling of humans
– the sense of abandonment? Or, on the contrary, does that dif-
ference which looms nearby, or was always held there, like an
eternity corseted in time and space, require a new conceptual
order to integrate the phenomenal experience of the world?
Irrevocably, that which pertains to thought, that which truly
emerges during the meditative mode, arises only when one does
not fill the unknown with the assurance of certainty – that cer-
tainty which fades when all ceases to meet our expectations head
on. If there is an ulterior reason in the world, it is certainly not
an human reason, and surely not a divine reason; a notion which
is certainly conceivable, but altogether inconceivable, a sidereal
unreason which we may suppose entirely lacking in judgment
and will, the reason, thus, for the unreasonable nature, not of
man, but of the world. “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos”
and reflection may well suspect, not a monster the likes of Poly-
phemous or the bearded God of the Old Testament, but rather,
of the word mostrare, of a world that demonstrates indifference
to any human ant. Above all, a non-psychological world, akin to
those realities that, though we may not fully ascertain, we allow
to subsist in order to speculatively illustrate the setting for our
existence.
Thus the task before all thinking habits and eccentricities,
be they submerged in the unconscious or open to dialectics, is
rather to submit to the logic of that original disturbance, that
which moves the subject to order appearances, as one inscribes
46

S O l I l O q U y, A D WA R F I n T h E S T R AT O S P h E R E
João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Hand, smaller than hand, 2009.
the human in an unclassifiable territory. And, since each of the

senses is tangled in this order of thought; since every reflection
recommences exactly here, moving from the world’s infinity to
analogy, engendering all images of the possible and the impossible,
it is also from here that we come to our theoretical bent, which
we must explain, setting henceforth the course for the present
opuscule that we may be taken, if not seriously (as that was never
our particular object), for people of good intention – which is to
say, people intent on a single task: “more and more to perceive
the necessary characters in things as the beautiful (…) Looking
aside, let that be my sole negation! And all in all, to sum up: I
47

wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!” (Nietzsche,

The Gay Science) Such terms, of course, oblige us to a cautious
advertence: we shall never venture beyond the minimum rise of
thought; thus, notwithstanding the vaunted peaks conquered by
theory’s upper hierarchies, we can offer only that which sophism
has granted our essay – an apologetic sketch, not of a theological
or materialistic summa, but of a dwarf philosophy, an abbrevi-
ated alienist treatise.
João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, The Initiate, 2008.
48

Item – concerning the eternity which underlies the experience

of the world.
The first matter is discussed thus, it seems man is mortal and

the world eternal
Premise
(The threat of disappearance, Hume and Freud)
If each time that, intermittently, the light in the stairway
goes out and back on again, and if, every time the Sun sets
over the horizon, suspending visibility, there is no guarantee
that it will arise again at dawn (David Hume, An Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding), since the Sun might
become extinguished while we sleep, and the light bulb could
blow out at any moment; and if in turn these two hypotheses
mirror, at heart, the operation described by Freud in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, the game of fort-da – in which the
child throws a spool only to reel it back in and wonder at
its presence (appearing and disappearing), thus addressing
the trauma of disappearance and parental abandonment –
then how can we live without the repetitive sense that all is
taken from us and must come to an end, seeing as the child
soon learns to live, replacing the thing by its remission to
the void – resulting, by default, in a loss that resides in the
subject rather than the world?
Which is, then, the most pertinent question, that of the neurotic –
“do I exist?” – or that of the religious man – “does the world exist?”
49

Answer to the first (the neurotic)
As Freud explains, the mental apparatus and, in particular, its

unconscious processes, are strongly determined by the pleasure
principle. Thus, and attempting to investigate the inhibition
of such principal psychoanalytic observation, Freud attempts
a different inquiry in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This new
analysis is the result of observing a compulsion to repeat the
traumatic experience, when, contrary to clinical findings, psychic
mechanisms tend to submit displeasure to the principle of reality
and stability, usually repressing the mental pain thus brought on
by delaying the drive. Early in the essay and before the famous
example of the fort-da game, Freud confronts that which he calls
traumatic neurosis, which is often found in victims of accidents
and veterans of war: “Now in the traumatic neuroses the dream
life has this peculiarity: it continually takes the patient back to
the situation of his disaster (…) The obtrusion on the patient over
and again, even in sleep, of the impression made by the traumatic
experience is taken as being merely a proof of its strength. The
patient has so to speak undergone a psychical fixation as to the
trauma.” Freud goes on to compare the symptom to hysteria,
concluding that both pathologies “suffer for the most part from
reminiscences”. I. e., episodes that lead quotidian experience
back to a second, and imaginary, repetitive experience. Why
does the structure of these individuals tend markedly to imagine
this past occurrence as foreshadowing their own future disap-
pearance incarnating the threat of their own extinction? It must
be in this sense that Jacques Lacan attributes a “love of castra-
tion” to the love of truth; in so far as the unconcealedness of the
being (Heidegger’s Aletheia) is taken as harbinger of the world’s
50

João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, 3 Suns, 2009.
51

disappearance, in other words, how, paradoxically, appearance

is experienced theoretically: simultaneously and transitively,
concealed and unconcealed and also, a movement between not-
being and being, somehow inverting the order of things, failing
to understand that the extinction of man (death) is a far more
factual datum than that of the world (apocalypse). Let us then
imagine, mutatis mutandis, the world reduced to a wooden spool,
and the philosopher, in an effort that we cannot but describe as
athletic, throwing that same spool and reflecting the ideation of
its absence (“why is there something instead of nothing?”). The
critique that may be erected here is that, in a certain dimension,
metaphysics and the philosopher mimic almost completely the
most primitive mental mechanisms for resolving subjective
loss. “Occasionally, however, this well-behaved child evinced
the troublesome habit of flinging into the corner of the room or
under the bed all the little things he could lay his hands on, so
that to gather up his toys was often no light task. He accompa-
nied this by an expression of interest and gratification, emitting
a loud long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-oh’ (…) I saw at last that this was a
game, and that the child used all his toys only to play ‘being gone’”
(Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle). For the philosopher, too,
the world has gone. Later, returning to the neurotic question
“do I exist?”, the thing is easily replaced with its eviction to the
void – resulting by default, as noted above, in a loss that is in the
subject and not the world. Did the near-world disappear? No, the
subject, indeed, is gone. Metaphysics represents first the temporal
diegesis of man, and only later the spatial diegesis of spirit; as
a consequence, the worldview is founded on the occurrence of
death and not on the facticity of the world. Therein lies meaning,
a reason we scrutinize once again: a more-than-psychological
52

reason, meta-psychological, a conscience not of oneself, but for

oneself. “A Snake taken into a man’s stomach and nourished there
from fifteen years to thirty-five, tormenting him most horribly.”
(Borges quoting Hawthorne, Other Inquisitions)
Answer to the second (the religious)
In Bishop Berkeley’s paradigmatic work, A Treatise Concerning

the Principles of Human Knowledge, we read: “The table I write
on I say it exists, that is, I see it and feel it; and if I were out of my
study I should say it existed – meaning thereby that if I was in my
study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does
perceive it. (…) For as to what is said of the absolute existence of
unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived,
that seems perfectly unintelligible.” One hundred and two years
later, with the advent of probability theory, we find in Pierre-Simon
Laplace the following endorsement of relative certainty: “When
all cases are favorable to an event, their probability becomes a
certainty (…) Under such conditions, certainty and probability
are comparable, although there may be an essential difference
between the two states of conscience, when a truth is rigorously
demonstrated, or, on the contrary, when a small source of error
can still be perceived.” Admitting, to use Berkeley’s example, that
the table in his study, in the non-presential instance (Berkeley
is not there to perceive it), may in fact not exist, let us imagine,
by supposing the extraordinary: the table “has gone”. Is not that
remote conjecture, improbable to the point that the more reason-
able inverse can be considered, if not an absolute certainty, then
perhaps the minimum deviation of that decisive verdict. Is it not
more probable, the missing evidence of the table’s immobility
53

notwithstanding, that it should be in the same place waiting,

like any other grave inanimate object, waiting because it is not
likely that something will force the table to escape the office,
and the office to abandon the house, and it to leave the city, and
the city to leave Ireland, thus leaving Berkeley without a table
in the world upon which to work. We can then suppose that that
which exists, even at the minimum level of appearance, such as
that which was always impassible, but never perceived, or which
occurs, fleeting, but imperceptible, is not swept from the world
like some great hypothesis. As Laplace argues, “it may be said that
all knowledge is problematic; and in the small number of things
which we are able to know with certainty, even in the mathematical
sciences themselves, the principal means of ascertaining truth -
induction and analogy - are based on probabilities.” However, the
metaphysical nausea resides exactly there, in that everything
only is on the near-dreamlike condition that we have to imagine
existence dividing the same and the other, because that fact, no
longer imagined but real, without the slightest veil of illusion –
raw existence – has no raison d’être, and, again, “does the world
exist?”. It follows that, for the history of ideas, all beginnings
and endings, differences and unity, all the parts and the whole,
are naught but a fiction of thought. One certainty, however, since
an infinite number of inconceivable things results in a minute
amount of truths: something is out there, and it is not human or,
at least, not as human as Laplace’s Demon: “An intellect which at
a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion,
and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this
intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis,
it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the great-
est bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such
54

João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Camera inside camera, 2010.
55

an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like

the past would be present before its eyes.” Somehow, the logos
is haunted by the denial of uncertainty. A thing must at least be
known in order to exist. Dictating the end of probability, this
attitude is just as much a concession to the improbability of
the world, since any Noumenon, as a pure ideation of the spirit,
eschews subjectivity and, in this case, we would be discussing
an idea, rather than something instead of nothing.
The second matter is discussed thus, it seems eternity is a rock

and life is extemporaneous
Premise
(On the material illusion of the eternal)
That a stone upon one’s path, a stone worthy of gravity’s
circumspection, no so much a stone, but a rock, an immense
crag in our way, then demonstrates to man, to the greatest
of humans, that he will sooner make way for eternity than
eternity will move for him, and, definitely, that our fragility
is immense in face of absolute immobility.
The age of the first man is counted from the moment when he lost
his immortality. Adam died at nine hundred and thirty. Paradoxi-
cally, the determination of this ancestor’s theoretical age can be
formulated thus: how many years did the man without a belly
button live? Answer: nine hundred and thirty plus infinity. We
can then conclude, at least in one of time’s directions, that Adam
had always existed, more precisely, since the infinitesimal point
at which infinity touches nothing, and immediately becomes “all
or nothing”, with no middle term, because one contradicts zero.
56

Recalling that the dread of the eternal lies in its unreality; that
nothing, too, instills the greatest terrors; and since Adam and
Eve have no belly button, and were therefore made ex-nihilo, from
nothing (but Eve from the rib); the egg and the chicken, too, bring
us to the riddle: “who was the first to be born, born of nothing?”
Eternity, as Plato defines it, is precisely without a subject, it is
the result of a model, of an archetype. Reviewing the arguments
of Parmenidean stasis to determine that deletion of subjectivity,
what Popper called the “first deductive cosmology”, we have: 1.
Only what is exists; 2. The Nothing cannot exist; 3. The world
is full; 4. Movement is an impossibility; 5. The Universe is one
indivisible, unmovable block. Linked to this argument, the idea
of eternity begins with two imperatives we will point out: first,
the relationship of the principle of non-contradiction and the
excluded middle, the nothing is absurd, because all that exists
either is or is not, there is no other option; second the principle of
necessity of the world, since all things require causes and since
nothing is no cause at all, since “nothing comes from nothing”,
it cannot contain a beginning or an end to that which exists.
Consequently, if reality is one, then, being the same as itself, it
must be unlimited in all directions, i.e., eternal, even during the
processes engendered by change, and, this, without interval, with-
out empty spaces, a block. But if Parmenides’ spectral world were
to exist, it would be as a world within a brain… an ideal world in
which a dreamer believes he was conceived by a demiurge with
a reality box, a special box within which all of creation is built
and all probabilities and accidents foreseen by that supernatural
thinker. In that ideal world, the dreamer, in turn, imagines himself
to be a brilliant architect building in dreams a world within a box
very like that one he believes to be his world. And he dreams. He
57

João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Falling Cat, 2010.
58

dreams of a creature who resembles him, he conceives it in that

box. He imagines it lives with only one purpose, that of finding
the first cause, just as he had done before, thus doubting the most
subtle variations in appearance. He dreams, even, that this man
in a box will himself make a box, a box as infinite as the one he
had originally planned, reproducing the perfect nature in which
he lives in that other box. This creature will imagine other enti-
ties, free beings in an absolute space-time, and, thereby, beings
who would themselves suspect as many other gods and dreams,
dreamers and dreamed, and as many boxes as may exist from
the beginning to the end of times. The best answer to this (by now
unoriginal) notion, is found in Stanislaw Lem: “And do you know
what this God, this Creator thinks (…)?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘That He
is the same as the madman. But, then, it is also possible that the
owner of the dusty laboratory in which WE are boxes on shelves
is himself a box, a box built by another, still higher scientist, who
has original and fantastic notions . . . and so on, ad infinitum.
Each one of these experimenters is God, the creator of a universe
in the form of boxes and their fate, and under him he has Adams
and Eves, and over him his God, one rung up in the hierarchy. (…)
And there is no greater reward for this divinity than the revolt
of the iron boxes that recurs in every generation, when they
conclude very rationally that He does not exist.” (Memoirs of a
Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy)
But…
“You have not allowed for the wind, Hubert,” said his antago-
nist, bending his bow, “or that had been a better shot.” (Sir Walter
Scott, Ivanhoe).
59

Item – Concerning the determination of the alien in man
The first matter is discussed thus, it seems man is part of nature
Premise
For if in the biological and sociological estimation, man
is hands and heart tied to the world for its hermeneutic
exploration and defloration, as in a prosperous garden in
which all vegetation grows and is beautified by the hands of
a careful gardener, why, then, is it not man, who progresses
and conquers so much, the true Amazonian forest of nature?
If, whichever way man turns all is materially, symbolically
and virtually transformed, how are these not the new land-
scapes of a new sense of the bucolic and pastoral? Banks
and skyscrapers the new mountains; food supply and goods
transportation networks the great and fertile plains; the
entertainment industry, the clearings. The techno capital
oversees, the shepherd’s dog rounds up the sheep, and the
wee lambs blink and say yes: the grass is really fresh!
Upon returning from Brazil, Amerigo Vespucci writes a series

of letters telling in profuse detail of the first encounters and
impressions of the new world confronted by the Portuguese and
Spanish fleets in 1500. Vespucci, whose first name was given to
the Americas, describes the Indian, telling us they were naked and
ate each other – a fact met with utter shock by the westerner, and
which would have somewhat justified the evangelic and colonial
violence of the early days of transatlantic expansion. “For human
flesh is an ordinary article of food among them. You may be the
more certain of this, because I have seen a man eat his children
60

and wife; and I knew a man who was popularly credited to have
eaten 300 human bodies. I was once in a certain city for twenty-
seven days, where human flesh was hung up near the houses,
in the same way as we expose butcher’s meat. I say further that
they were surprised that we did not eat our enemies, and use
their flesh as food, for they say it is excellent.” (Mundus Novus)
Of course, the new has this anthropophagic logic of the new,
has this capacity to destroy all that was previously accepted and
to break with the prevalent order, the dispenser of meanings and
ideas. Revolution, in the historical sense of the term (the Coperni-
can revolution, the Kantian, etc.), carries that gift, namely, that the
knowledge of the past is enclosed in illusion and that everything
will henceforth be different, “never before lived”. For Alain Badiou,
the concept of truth is precisely inaugurated by a new datum,
something revolutionary emerging from science, from art, from
love and politics and that sets off a finite procedure in the subject.
This “revolutionary” action is dependent upon an infinite inquiry,
as if in anticipation, at any given moment, of the assertion of a uni-
versal truth. Clearly, Badiou’s conception of truth moves away from
a propositional modality; truth is a process. That something more
that emerges from the state of the situation, he calls a supplement.
Why is it that only a supplement can engender a truth? Because
it breaks with repetition and norm, opens up the human’s experi-
ence to a horizon as vast, not as knowledge, but as the absolutely
unknown. That which approaches on the wake of the supplement’s
breakthrough, the event, is also not a certainty; it is contingent on
a risk, on a wager. “Nothing regulates its course, since the axiom
that supports it has arbitrated outside of any rule of established
knowledge. The procedure thus follows a chance-driven course, a
course without a concept.” (Alain Badiou, Philosophy and Truth)
61

João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Solar, the Blindman Eating a Papaya, 2011.
62

When Diderot writes the Supplement au Voyage de Bou-

gainville, he takes his inspiration from the accounts of human-
ists travelling to the New World. In particular, he deals with the
landscapes described by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, a French
navigator and writer who, in 1771, describes a Tahitian paradise
(Tahiti had first been visited by westerners the year before Bou-
gainville’s journey). Unlike Vespucci’s accounts, Voyage autour du
Monde, an 18th century best-seller, speaks of an idyllic paradise
populated by good savages; the primitives of Rousseau’s fantasies,
upon which the romanticism of lost innocence and the return to
nature could finally be projected. The supplement developed by
Diderot, rather than addressing either Vespucci’s or Bougainville’s
version, has a wholly different interpretation of the facts of the
new world. Diderot dramatizes the western ideological farce in
dialog between a chaplain and a native named Orou. “– Orou:
What do you mean by these words fornication, incest, adultery?
– Chaplain: Crimes, terrible crimes, for any one of which men are
burnt in my country. – Orou: I care little if people are burnt in
your country or not. But you will not indict the morals of Europe
by those of Tahiti nor those of Tahiti by your own. You are mis-
taken, my friend, if you think all is said once a law is published,
an ignominious word invented or a torture decreed. Answer me,
then, what do you mean by incest?” And Diderot is careful to issue
a disclaimer (in the mouth of another character who is reading
the conversation above in the supplement’s framing narrative):
“– I find the discourse vehement; but under its somewhat abrupt
and savage style, I seem to detect European ideas and turns of
phrase.” Diderot has the capacity to see from afar the difference
within the difference: the gaze which determines the encounter
with the new world was never anything other than a conditioned
63

gaze. The great revolution that would result from the impression
of the Americas (as would later be the case in Africa) is revealed in
a great conceptual absence. The degree to which the non-existent
is implicit in the idea of new (“it was thus far unknown, all this
is new, and nothing will be as before”) remains unaltered. This
shows how remiss or contrary European logocentrism is towards
the otherness produced by encounters between cultures, the
Other a Fata Morgana.
The second matter is discussed thus, it seems then that the world
is alien.
If in classical logic the being is the same as himself (identity

principle), he is or is not (non-contradiction), there is no other
option (the excluded middle). And if those existential quantifiers
and premises only point man to the inference of a great solipsist
inferno, since this path leads only to the following deduction:
if the world is all difference, and if the assertion of difference
implies it is the same as itself, then, since in considering “the
world is or is not”, everything indicates that it is, then, if being is
univocal, the world enmeshed in difference can only be equivocal,
there being no other option than the assertion of difference; and,
therefore, without the possibility of knowing anything with any
certainty, we are left with non-sense: the world is unknowable.
The oldest known British joke dates back to the 10th century
and goes like this: “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to
poke the hole that it’s often poked before? Answer: A key.” The
anti-philosophical tradition begins with Diogenes of Sinope.
Tellingly, all that has come down to us of this philosopher are
the anecdotes attributed to him; in essence, vignettes in which
64

he states inconvenient truths. Thus, his cynical philosophy has

the strange characteristic of not finding itself philosophical, of
constraining itself in the face of the protocols of wisdom, in other
words, of not being led by the paternal signifier, not occupying
the position Lacan describes as the subject supposed to know
(that of the analyst during transference). Diogenes’ virtue is, then,
more that of a physiologist than of a philosopher: “Once as he was
masturbating openly in the Agora, he exclaimed: ‘Ah, if I could
only soothe my hunger by also rubbing my stomach!” (Diogenes
Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers) There is somehow a will
in the body that does not answer to the presumption of conscience.
We see here the importance psychoanalysis attributes to Freud-
ian slips, lapses and mistakes, and which can be framed in the
same materialistic guilelessness of cynicism, more clearly when
truth ebbs to the surface. “In former years, when I made more
calls at the homes of patients than I do at present, it often hap-
pened, when I stood before a door where I should have knocked
or rung the bell, that I would pull the key of my own house from
my pocket, only to replace it, quite abashed. (…) It was equivalent
to the thought ‘Here I feel at home.’” (Freud, Psychopathology of
Everyday Life) By the Freudian slip or through non-sense, we see
how the sphere of the real is always greater than the sphere of
possibilities. In the real, the possible happens, and that unfea-
sible means only that it is outside the scope of the representable.
Episodes of this nature occur accidentally and instantaneously,
and are immediately eclipsed, briefly exposing the stuff the body
is made of, a symptom, maybe the only nature we possess.
Like the metaphysical joke, that thinking obstacle, sophism
does not escape the modeling of involuntary gestures, but only
suggests the entrance into the question of the problematic. The
key is not for this lock.
65

“They say Diogenes died at some ninety years of age. There

are several versions of his death. Some say, after he ate raw octo-
pus, he felt colic and died. According to others, he died voluntarily,
holding his breath.”
A brief epilogue
We now present, by way of summary and explanation, the argu-

mentative synopsis this text is committed to, and which, by excess
formalism, is remiss in not making clear the following:
Lacan’s assertion that there is no sexual rapport, reason,
or relation, can also explain that there is no existential rapport,
reason or relation. The entire castration complex revolves around
the phallic issue. Phalocentrism and solipsism are enigmatically
linked; the thing itself is not consubstantiated in a presence, but
rather is a theoretical and evanescent thing, in which the lacuna
in the subject is not a lacuna in the world, but the facticity of a
super-abundance that, in exposing itself, proves to be greater
than its retinal impressions. It is man, and not the world, that
disappears.
All of man’s activity, art included, is vanquished by a
regime of inherent domesticity; namely, in so far as knowledge
is imparted, no matter what it may be, any and all work, in the
sense of mental and bodily effort towards an end, a fulfillment,
is as far from wild as the most surprising of mechanical cuckoos.
The hope was that Art could somehow redeem this panorama
that so diminishes man’s libertarian essence, by diving, in turn,
into the unconscious and its drives, as if impervious to moder-
nity and civilization, to be reborn as the mirror self of man, like
himself, but inhuman: precisely, the other to the conditioned
66

João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Cassowary, 2010.
67

man, the unconditional human. It does not seem amiss to now

call that savage of the imaginary the alien, as if art, in order to
better portray the truly tragic dimension of human contingency,
were to suppress the subject of quotidian banality and re-inscribe
him in a narrative, the subterranean and clandestine history of
existence, “This is the miracle of the work of art in general, that
it can distill in itself what is most intolerable, most unbearable
and painful without, in the process, becoming mortal.” (Interview
with Daniel Dobbels)
Art has always proposed to meteorically conceive the new,
and with it, the Other, that which comes of a minimum existen-
tial degree, to the maximum of its ontological intensity. As for
what escapes the bounds of such generic definition, we might
say, we “look aside”.
68

Archaeological spoils of history. Excavating trench 5, Eyri, Iceland.
(photo: Bjørnar Olsen)

The Return of Things and the Savagery
of the Archaeological Object
Bjørnar Olsen
Things are back, or so the rumors say. After a century of oblivion in

most social and cultural research, and after decades of linguistic
and textual turns, there is now much talk about a material twist:
a (re)turn to things. The fascination with Saussure, Derrida and
discourse has diminished, matter has replaced symbols; signs
have been substituted by things. As neatly summarized by his-
torian Frank Trentmann, “[a]fter the turn to discourse and signs
in the late twentieth century, there is a new fascination with the
material stuff of life…”.1 Coming from a discipline where the study
of things for the last 170 years or so has been close to a disciplinary
categorical imperative, this change of attitude is of course great
news. Indeed one gets deeply impressed, even slightly moved, by
witnessing how disciplines and practitioners that not so long ago
showed little more than disinterest, even distaste for the object,
now treat it with such obvious care and concern.
Given this sincere and widespread devotion it is perhaps
little more than a trifling tribal setback to observe that the knowl-
edge and skills possessed by the traditional thing disciplines, such
as archaeology, ethnology and folklore studies, seem so irrelevant
to those who currently embrace objects with such enthusiasm
and empathy. Nevertheless - and apologies for any disciplinary
1
Frank Trentmann, “Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and
Politics,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 2 (2009): 283.
71

stubbornness and narcissism - it is precisely this neglect I want

to start out with. Also because it can shed light on my general
concern about whether it is the things themselves that are back,
or, rather, some very domesticated or disguised substitutes.
The savagery of archaeology
While “archaeology” became a popular if obligation-free catch

word during the textual regime, and liberally used by philoso-
phers, literary critics and psychologists in need for something
sufficiently metaphorically material to buttress their abstract
conceptions with, the name of this brand has paradoxically almost
completely vanished from view when there in fact is a material
turn. Despite its persistent commitment to things, archaeology
for some reasons seems more or less irrelevant for those who now
eagerly claim to have returned to what has always been our prime
subject matter. To name but one example, 1072 pages of Bruno
Latour and Peter Weibel’s Making Things Public2 contain the
work of anthropologists, art historians, legal historians, artists,
architects, designers, engineers, curators, philosophers, psycholo-
gists, sociologists of science and technology, and even English
professors, linguists and political theorists; but no archaeologists.
Not one! And this is despite the fact that no other discipline has
done more to make things public. Why it is that archaeology – the
discipline of things par excellence – is considered irrelevant to
a discussion of things?
One likely suggestion may be that archaeology deals with
the distant past; its devotedness to bygone eras and moss-covered
2
Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of
Democracy (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005).
72

T h E R E T U R n O F T h I n G S A n D T h E S AVA G E R y O F T h E A R C h A E O l O G I C A l O B J E C T
or dusty ruins renders it irrelevant, given the social sciences’

concern with the modern, the living, and the “now”. Against this
persistent image it is probably futile to lecture on how archaeol-
ogy’s extensive list of topics include modern beer consumption3,
transistor radios and electricity,4 late 20th century Soviet mining
towns,5 and lunar and planetary relics of space exploration?6
However, there may be other and somewhat more subtle
arguments to count for the unease with which archaeology is
conceived in mainstream social sciences and humanities. Doing
archaeology usually brings to mind the “down and dirty” of field-
work. On the one hand, such activities and practices are seen
as slightly childish and even embarrassing (grown-up people
digging in the sand), always triggering a smile or a joke. Our
explorations and “discoveries” may be well suited for popular
consumption through programs on the Discovery or National
Geographic Channels, but not for the discourses and intellectual
issues with which social sciences wrestle.
3
William Rathje and Michael McCarthy, “Regularity and Variability in Contem-
porary Garbage,” in Research strategies in historical archaeology, ed. S. South
(New York: Academic Press, 1977), 261-286.
4
Michael Schiffer, The Portable Radio in American Life (Tucson: University of Ari-
zona Press, 1991); Michael Schiffer, Power Struggles: Scientific Authority and
the Creation of Practical Electricity before Edison (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press,
2008).
5
Elin Andreassen, Hein Bjartmann Bjerck, and Bjørnar Olsen, Persistent Memo-
ries: Piramiden —A Soviet Mining Town in the High Arctic (Trondheim, Norway:
Tapir Academic Press, 2010).
6
Peter Joseph Capelotti, The Human Archaeology of Space: Lunar, Planetary and
Interstellar Relics of Exploration (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishers, 2010).
73

On the other hand, there is an element of blue collar savagery

associated with the archaeological toil. Archaeologists dig ruins,
sort through what our forebears regarded as trash, we handle
dead bodies, and this craft,7 involving direct and tough engage-
ments with soil and rocks, working outdoors and getting dirty,
does not comply well with the dominant image of intellectual
work. Taking into account the long held bourgeois contempt in
academia (especially in the humanities) for dirt, manual labour,
and working class life in general, it may not come as a big sur-
prise that the craft of archaeology, and its repugnant trivia, is
not too feasible. This otherness, this disciplinary savagery, has
also made archaeology difficult to locate within the academic
landscape, a humanist discipline enmeshed with an array of
instruments, methods and practices always unfolding in close
collaboration with the natural sciences.8
The wished for objects of return
Such academic norms and hierarchies of value may also have

affected the conception of the wished for objects of return. Just
give it a thought, what kinds of things are allowed into the warmth
of the social sciences? What things are spoken and written about?
Are hay rackets back? Have log houses, fireplaces, whorls and
7
Cf. Michael Shanks, and Randall McGuire, “The Craft of Archaeology,” American
Antiquity 61, no. 1 (1996): 75-88.
8
Bjørnar Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects
(Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2010); Bjørnar Olsen, Michael Shanks, Timo-
thy Webmoor, and Christopher Witmore, Archaeology: The Discipline of Things
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
74

spindleback chairs become matters of concern? Flint debris, bro-

ken pots, post holes and net sinkers? And what about door knobs,
refrigerators and bunk beds? They may of course be present but
leafing through some of the latest volumes and journal issues
carrying the concepts of matter, materiality, things and objects
on their front covers, rather suggest that what we are witnessing
is a somewhat conditioned and selective return. At least these
trivial artifacts, broken things and dusty museum objects are not
quite in the same league as Boyle’s air pump, the body, Second
Life, prostheses and intelligent design. There may be an obvious
fascination with things but not just any thing.
For example, when Frank Trentmann is to substantiate
his claim of “a new fascination for the material stuff of life,” he
provides a seemingly extensive list of stuff ranging from:
“Jane Campion’s film The Piano (1993), biographies of objects,

and exhibitions in the Fifth Berlin Biennial for Contempo-
rary Art, “When Things Cast No Shadow” (2008), all the way
to public debates about the transformation of human flesh
and mind in an age of nanotechnology, cloning, and cyborgs”.9
Indeed an interesting inventory. Leaving to one side what any

archaeologist could have informed him, namely that the “age of
the cyborg” started some 1.5 million years ago and thus that we
“always have been cyborgs” 10, the selected “items” on Trentmann’s
list is actually quite symptomatic: film, biographies, art exhibi-
9
Frank Trentmann, “Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and
Politics,” Journal of British Studies 48, no. 2 (2009): 283.
10
See Bjørnar Olsen et al., Archaeology.
75

tions, human flesh (and mind), nanotechnology, cloning. Where

are the ordinary things we deal with in our everyday life? Where
are the street lights, wall plaster, shoelaces, car tires, buttons,
sleepers, besoms, forks, sinks, toilet seats and doggy bags?
And when these diligent and inevitable heroes of our eve-
ryday life are missing, it is no wonder that the uncanny archaeo-
logical material is left out. Archaeological objects are often bulky,
fragmented or broken; they come in enormous quantities, fill-
ing up storage rooms, museum cellars and labs. True, there are
marvels, treasures; however, more often than not archaeological
things don’t stimulate aesthetic pleasure. And one may speculate
how these messy things, often refusing to be labeled and identi-
fied, comply with the wished for objects of return? Things may be
welcomed back, but they should be clean, whole, and preferably
discursive or photographed; and not so many and chaotic, please,
and at the very least be easy to label.
These rarely discussed preferences have clearly prevented
more than dug-up objects from being permitted entry into the
new and supposedly thing-friendly environments. However, as I
shall describe soon, there might be other and more subtle issues
involved.
The real Dasein
It might be objected that my complaints about the exclusion of

certain disciplines and things from this admirable repatriation
campaign misses the whole point about the material turn; that
the main issue is how we conceive of things and the allowance
now generated for matter and materiality in the discussion of
society and culture. This might be true, but how things and matter
76

are conceived of by their new stakeholders does not necessarily

offer reassurance. In fact, the speed and seeming ease with which
the transition from social constructivist ideas to matter took
place was almost too smooth and seamless to be true. As argued
elsewhere11, things may be conspicuously present in current
discourses and theories but often in a mode conditioned by the
effective histories of previous not-so-thing-friendly philosophies.
In other words, the object may have returned, but it is an object
that often complies surprisingly well with the expectations of
previous relativist and social constructivist programs. Thus
the conditional restrictions of the return are not only reflected
in which things are allowed back but also in which mode they
are allowed to be.
We see this in the popularity of all kinds of “matter-in-flux”
approaches where things, objects, materials, are never allowed
to be hard, stable, lasting or in place. Things are always blurred,
unstable, porous, scattered and mobile. Things can change
“quickly and without warning, right in front of our eyes” just as
in a magician’s show,12 and if not so abruptly they are still always
in flow.13 In other words, everything solid is still melting into
the air. And it complies well with the morally loaded conceptual
11
Bjørnar Olsen, “Keeping Things at Arm’s Length: A Genealogy of Asymmetry,”
World Archaeology 39, no. 4 (2007): 579–88; Bjørnar Olsen, In Defense of Things:
Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2010).
12
Cornelius Holtorf, “Notes on the Life History of a Pot Sherd,” Journal of Material
Culture 7, no. 1 (2002): 55.
13
E.g. Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14, no.
1 (2007): 1–16; Tim Ingold, “Bindings against Boundaries: Entanglements of Life
in an Open World,” Environment and Planning A 40, no. 8 (2008): 1796–1810.
77

hierarchy, where change, dynamics, flow, is at top and persistency,

solidity and inplaceness always is at the bottom. According to this
regime, there are no intrinsic values or essences (everything is
produced in relations, is hybridized or “quasi”), no secure centers,
and of course stability is reactionary and out of the question. To
paraphrase Judith Attfield, the material world has become dema-
terialized to the extent that we can no longer ‘believe our eyes’.14
And how could we believe our eyes; how, in fact, could we
live our lives – and other entities live their lives – if what we were
told was true? Fortunately it is not. Things are also solid, the
material world lasts. Due to this persistency the material world
is always directed ahead of itself and into the future. As much
as things last they are also in place; at least enough of them to
make our existence predictable and secure. They are both “the
most binding part of the communal rhythm”,15 and what makes
“history slow”.16 When we wake up tomorrow, the bed, room, and
house are still there and in place. So too are our private belong-
ings, other houses, the streets, wires and pipelines that connect
them. Buses and cars, the shops and factories, the fences and
gardens, the mountains and trees, are all there in their dormant
ready-to-handness and constitute the incontestable acquisition
of our shared life world. In other words, and as we expect, things
are overwhelmingly there; they are the real Dasein.
14
Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg,
2000), 42.
15
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume 1: 1913–1926 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press, 1996), 418.
16
Michel Serres, Genesis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 87.
78

notes on a bygone Zeitgeist?
Then why isn’t there more concern with things qua things? Why
haven’t the trivial, the everyday and everywhere become mat-
ters of concern? And why, we may add, does the discarded and
outdated, such as the archaeological spoils of history, inflict an
embarrassment or disturbance? In his classic work, The Philoso-
phy of Money,17 Georg Simmel noted a seemingly paradoxical
tendency in the modern attitude toward things: at the same time
that things were losing their embedded social and ready-to-hand
meaning, there was a growing interest in and fascination for the
singular and assumed authentic object. He saw this new interest
in interior decorations, in antiquities, in “turning objects into
art”, as basically being an act of redemption. It was because the
new money-conditioned relationships had deprived things of their
former “lived” meaning, that a substitute was consciously sought:
“Since so many objects continuously detached by money lose their
direction-given significance for us, there develops... a deep yearn-
ing to give things a new importance, a deeper meaning, a value of
their own”.18 In Simmel’s frank style, the new obsession with the
fragment, with the atomized and aestheticized thing, becomes
little more than “comforting stimulation for weakened nerves”:
“The present vividly felt charm for the fragment, the mere
allusion, the aphorism, the symbol… place[s] us at a dis-
tance from the substance of things; they speak to us “as
from afar”; reality is touched not with direct confidence
17
Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 1978).
18
Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 404.
79

but with fingertips that are immediately withdrawn. The

most extreme refinement of our literary style avoids the
direct characterization of objects; it only touches a remote
corner of them with the word, and grasps not the thing but
only the veil that envelops them... In all this we discover
an emotional trait whose pathological deformation is the
so-called “agoraphobia”: the fear of coming into too close
a contact with objects.”19
Some decades later Walter Benjamin developed a similar perspec-

tive in his writings on the modern attitude towards things. His
main concern was how a “mimetic” and “auratic” attentiveness
to things was giving way to modernity’s sublimated and intimate
attitude. While the mimetic attitude implied a respect for things
in their otherness and their auratic own-ness, the modern gaze
was isomorphic, subjecting them to intimacy and sameness.20
As most conspicuously exemplified by the intérieur of bourgeois
home, things had completely lost their otherness and individuality.
They were sentenced to serfdom and became nothing but labels
of privacy, faithfully mirroring their owner.
While things’ otherness originally was the source of com-
munication and interaction, the loss of the mimetic capacity
made things’ difference problematic and fearsome. Their material
integrity became a threat and thus a subject for domestication.
In a remarkable fragment, Benjamin expressed how modern
19
Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 474.
20
Belknap Press, 2002), 255-256.
80

man, “chilled in a chilly environment”21, tries to overcome this

material estrangement:
“Warmth is ebbing from things. Objects of daily use gently

but insistently repel us. Day by day, in overcoming the sum of
secret resistances . . . we have an immense labor to perform.
We must compensate for their coldness with our warmth
if they are not to freeze us to death, and handle their spiny
forms with infinite dexterity if we are not to bleed to death.”22
Simmel and Benjamin’s writings bring forth how the modern

attitude to things embroils an ambiguity: a fear of things in
their thingly otherness and, simultaneously, a redemptive
longing for the warmth of the atomized and humanized artifact.
Things’ otherness and distinctiveness unsettle and distort us,
and thus urge means for domestication and subordination.
Among academic’s and intellectual’s language has always been
the main taming device to cope with the unease and discomfort
inflicted by the unmediated and the raw. By subjecting them to
words the objects’ disquieting material obstinacy is countered.
Making things perform like words, enslaving them in semiotic
webs of relations, is another but more serious expression of
this encroachment.
21
22
81

Conclusion: The fear of Odradek
Despite the nuances and exceptions that any attempt at a gross

generalization will encounter, it can still be argued forcefully that
the buzz about a (re)turn to things is somewhat overstated or, at
least, is a very conditional change of course. The things brought
back, and how they are conceived, are to a large extent subjected
to stubborn metaphysics that still hold sway over our conception
of the material world and the knowledge allowed about it. Things
primarily appear to us in the mode of usefulness (and relational-
ity) and as phenomena percolated through Kantian cognition.23
Their otherness, their thingly and savage side, is banished to
the margins, to the dark places and the underground. Just like
Kafka’s Odradek, things in their difference have to hide in crev-
ices, in attics, closed-off rooms and hallways, from where they
may reapproach us with their fearsome coldness and spiny forms.
In a world increasingly subjected to smooth design and per-
fection this other side of things is most conspicuously disclosed
in the outdated and stranded, in discarded and abandoned objects;
in the material redundancy of the past. In this state of abandoned
being, “freed from the drudgery of being useful”24 and released
from the chains of relations they have been enslaved in, things’
ownness and integrity are finally allowed to shine through and
even to become dominant. Maybe that is why we find derelict
23
Dag T. Andersson, Tingenes taushet, tingenes tale (Oslo: Solum Forlag, 2001), 182-
190.
24
82

houses, abandoned buildings and sites, so troublesome. Things

become more present, more manifest but also, as with Odradek,
more pestering and disquieting. In their outmoded and stranded
fate things suddenly appear to us in ways never noticed, exposing
their own unruly “thingness”, integrity and inherent source of
signification. Maybe this thus also explains some of the unease
with which the archaeological object is accounted for, by mak-
ing manifest the useless, the forgotten, the unknown and less
desirable side of things. Being unearthed these savage objects
are brought back from their concealment but, as we have seen,
are yet to be returned.
83

II

Parties assemble around the model.
Illustration: Christine Cornell and Eyal Weizman, 2008.

In Excess of Calculations:
a conversation with Eyal Weizman
In his forthcoming book, The Least of All Possible Evils,1 archi-

tect Eyal Weizman focuses on the participation of architec-
tural and spatial devices in contemporary forms of power,
particularly in the ethical economy of calculating the optimum
balance between good and evil, inherent to humanitarian and
military practices at large. According to Weizman, this liberal
ethics of the lesser evil constitutes a field of calculation that
needs to be broken and disrupted so that political claims might
emerge. As part of this process, architectural objects are often
transformed into material witnesses within the context of
public and legal forums, referring to another central aspect
of Weizman’s recent work, the idea of forensic architecture – a
method for reconstructing violent events from their inscription
in the built environment.
The following conversation took place in London, at the
Centre for Research Architecture, 2012.
Godofredo Pereira - I would like to start with the example of the

presentation of a topographical model of the wall separating
Israel and Palestine in court,2 where options for three pos-
1
Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from
Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2012).
2
In 2004 the topographical model of Beit Sourik area in the West Bank was
87

sible routes were presented, and due to which, suddenly the

discourse of law had to be re-organized, it had to learn how
to look at architecture. In The Least of All Possible Evils you
give this example: “because the judges bench was too high
and the table too low, the judges could not see the model
with sufficient clarity from where they sat, and they had to
step down to look at it properly. The judges also called the
lawyers from both parties to join them.” And further on you
argue: “The model generated the geographical grammar for
‘the law’ to shape physical reality.” As a model the wall is
therefore already a form of political intervention. I suppose
it is from this that the idea of forensic architecture emerges?
Eyal Weizman - The project of forensic architecture originates

from this story… so much of what has structured the project
is already there. Firstly, the introduction of architectural
representations as evidence into court is not simply yet
another type of evidence that is added to others; rather, it
is an intervention in the language by which the legal proc-
ess unfolds. The introduction of an architectural model
spawns an architectural discussion and the legal process
becomes space making, architecture in action. The second
thing that happens there is that the model shifts from being
evidence to becoming an agent in the process. It is initially
presented to demonstrate that a less invasive wall – a lesser
evil – is possible. But its object quality, its material prop-
presented in the Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) in Jerusalem, as part of an

appeal against segments of the wall that would separate the villagers from 300
acres of their fields. Cf. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils.
88

I n E x C E S S O F C A l C U l AT I O n S : A C O n V E R S AT I O n W I T h E yA l W E I z M A n
erties, its dimensions, create another type of discussion,

another grammar, another form of interaction and another
physical space. So it is no longer evidence but a terrestrial
artefact which, when coupled with the legal discussion, gen-
erates a design session. If, initially, we are speak of forensic
architecture as the presentation of architectural evidence
in order to render judgment on certain events, the model
subsequently takes the lead and starts mobilizing a process
by which the design happens in court. That is, a different
kind of forensic engineering, i.e. an architectural process
that happens within the forum itself. From that moment
on, the architecture of the wall is made by the judges, the
lawyers, the human rights organizations and their advisors,
all the legal teams, and the model itself.
GP - Architecture is then conceived as a set of dispositions and

modulations of the flux of people and things – an ecology
of relations on a territorial scale.
EW - If we extend from Hollow Land 3 the concept of the political

plastic, architecture can be seen as a force field, slowing
forces into form. So politics is the movement of matter in
space, a material practice. Politics does not happen in space,
it is space-making. It is not as if space is a kind of arena for
architecture to happen. Every architectural intervention is
a re-organization of spatial relations. So in that sense, one
would say that the model in the story above has participated
3
Eyal Weizman, Hollow land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso,
2007).
89

in the de-congealing of forces that were previously ossi-

fied into the pre-existing form of the wall that the state of
Israel started to build. And all of a sudden, in court, the wall
becomes elastic, becomes negotiable, becomes prone to push
and pull, and that happens within the arena of the law itself.
GP - You sometimes refer to it as an archive...
EW - An archive of power relations if you like. In a sense the path

of the wall is like a film–strip exposed to politics, it is a
double–, triple–exposure, slow exposure. Its message is not
what is written on it as graffiti etc., but rather its paths, its
materiality.
GP - At one level the wall exists in its material dimension as an

archive, and at another level, as a unitary image, by the wall
as a whole migrating as an image. These different dimen-
sions bring to mind another example you mention in The
Least of All Possible Evils: the wall in two different courts.
You quote the lawyer Muhammad Dahla, who said: “I had
to appeal against the illegality of the entire wall in The
Hague and against the details of its execution in Jerusalem”.
This implies, in a way, that the wall becomes different legal
objects. How does their balance play out, one claim affect-
ing the other?
EW - This is to say that each forum is also a framework, a legal and

also political framework, in which the same object appears
as something completely different. The whole question of its
materiality and design does not feature at all in The Hague.
90

There, it is about a binary rendering of it being either legal

or illegal. And it doesn’t enter in the calculus of proportional-
ity, of materiality, of everything that is physical. It’s not an
architectural decision at all. The minute it touches occupied
ground it is illegal. What one learns out of it is that if one
invests oneself fully within one forum and one arena, one
inevitably ends up reproducing and reinforcing the only
type of discussion available there. But Dahla does three
separate things. He leads the legal case in The Hague, the
local cases in Israel’s high court (which are architectural),
and he is also part of a political process. He never limits
himself to one process. What I think he could have done
better – an idea for all of us to speculate on, without laying
accusations on him – is how to gear one arena to the other.
GP - The feedback between them?
EW - There is a landscape of different forums. Potentially, and

hopefully, we are in many of them simultaneously: being
different people, doing different things, mobilizing the same
object politically, legally, in terms of human rights, economy,
etc. As a single project to gear one wheel to the other, and to
also stand outside them and reflect upon them, that system
is very important.
GP - Was it a matter of Dahla not wishing to invest too much in

this overall connection, perhaps due to credibility within
legal systems, saying something in one place but defending
the opposite in other situations?
91

Justice Aharon Barak examines the different routes.

Illustration: Christine Cornell and Eyal Weizman, 2008.
92

EW - He already does not limit himself to one forum, and we

should credit him for that. He contradicts himself, and says
whatever he can take in the Israeli High Court of Justice
(knowing that it reinforces one of Israel’s instruments of
occupation and dispossession) is in order to bring out con-
tradictions from the inside. We need to take this idea as a
challenge for us, to consider how to continue this project
further.
GP - The lesson seems to be that you need not affiliate your-

self to the forum. One has to engage with often-imperfect
scenarios, but always in order to open new possibilities,
constantly re-adjusting. The principle seems to be one of
treason… And at the same time, here, forensics is no longer
simply the presentation of material evidence before a forum,
but actually an engagement with several different forums,
implying the production of contradictory objects.
EW - The object is the object in context, there is no object per se;

it’s not an ontological question here. It is an object that is
formed and mobilized by a particular process, an ecology
of practice and discourse that produces a certain claim in
a particular context, and that’s the limit. In other forums
it produces other claims and the question is how to put all
those in motion together and in relation to each other. So
the idea of one forum of forums, the full house or the single
parliament of things is impossible. Every forum is also a
border, the edges of an arena into which we can or cannot
enter, in which certain types of enunciation and types of
process are allowed or not. They are not neutral spaces for
93

open debate but politically conceived and politically skewed.

And they could be changed from outside or inside. So when
you introduce something new into an existing forum, for
example when you introduce architectural evidence into
court, it’s not only that there is something new in an old
forum, but that the court is also potentially transformed
– its language and possibilities open up – so we can say
that expansion is also transformation. Forums can also be
conceived anew from the outside so to speak. Politically.
They expand and multiply, network into other assemblies
and disperse and they also burst. These have to be mapped;
still it is the edge condition of it that is important. Therefore
it is so important to be working on the edge condition, on
expanding the forum, on connecting it with others.
GP - I would like to bring this back to something you’ve men-

tioned regarding the process of negotiating the wall in local
forums. In that, a process of inclusion takes place, where a
series of participants, military representatives, independent
contractors, human-rights lawyers, all come to participate
in the process – this is the process that Dahla would take
position against saying that he’s participating and adjusting
the lesser evil – and you argue that this inclusion is politi-
cally violent, as people have no option but to participate.
But at the same time, this inclusion imposes always a level
of exclusion, regarding who has the capacity to bring the
forum together.
EW - That’s the dilemma of the lesser evil. You participate in

something that is unacceptable in order to moderate its
94

excess, and end up reinforcing the system. The dilemma

and the calculation are only used by the powerful side that
sets the rules in Gaza, where the threshold of the tolerable
continuously shifts.
GP - I would now like to ask you about the objects themselves.

We could say that the presentation of an object in court is
always an aesthetic practice of material organization in
order to produce a truth-effect. But the object, particularly
when produced under technological procedures is always a
result of percentile calculations, in relation to uncertainty.
And even if, legally, you decide upon uncertainty, a mate-
rial resistance still remains, a field of possible research
that latently undermines the political decisions in forums.
You continuously go back to the object of discussion that
produced an outcome in the forum.
EW - I can offer an analogy, of the infancy of the human rights

discourse practice in relation to anti-totalitarian or anti-
communist ideology. Sometime in the late seventies and
eighties, human testimony functioned not only as an epis-
temic resource, i.e. to describe and define events, but also as
an ethical political move that comes to demonstrate empathy
with humans whose rights we come to protect. More ethi-
cal in excess than epistemic. Now with the forensic turn
in legal and human rights issue, it is not only that objects
become some kind of witnesses, but also that they are being
problematised as bearing rights and duties themselves.
Their agency is questioned and becomes a major issue for
legal theory. For example robotic weapons and drones pose
95

legal questions that are not yet resolved. Also rights are now
being discussed in relation to inanimate objects, as Paulo
Tavares shows in his PhD research – as the rights of nature.
Another way to answer your question is to say that both
law and sciences operate upon a balance of probabilities, but
very different ones. Law needs to render very difficult ques-
tions – sometimes of life and death – on a beyond reasonable
doubt balance of probability, which, being non-numerical is
still considered as a low-threshold probability. Also in sci-
ence, in physics for instance, there is always a probabilistic
calculation. Now, forensic aesthetics – a subject I have writ-
ten about with Tom Keenan – is about the way this balance
of probability is disrupted. Balance of probability does not
necessarily lead to a conviction. The aesthetics of evidence
needs to enter here, as a kind of eruption that operates in
excess of probabilistic calculus.
To connect to our previous discussion I’m thinking about
two related systems of calculus, one of producing space –
proportionality – and the other a mode of reading evidence
– probability – each has a different mode of potential rupture,
of moving in excess of calculation. With probability and
proportionality there are no clear trenches, no lines, no
enemies anymore, there is proximity, there are degrees of
negotiation, and everything becomes a question of thresh-
olds and balances. I think that, against this tendency the
political requires the rupture of these.
GP - Which is what happens when the political, via mechanisms of

paranoia, appropriates that calculus as a constant degree of
possibility that is incorporated into everything – for instance,
96

Hugo Chávez does this in order to exert very precise forms of

power – to constantly re-organize the political discourse. For
example, that the earthquake in Haiti is possibly a product
of U.S. technologies, in the same way that maybe his own
and Lula’s cancer were also technologically orchestrated.
Even with the exhumation of Bolívar, as long as there is
some degree of probability, then he could still possibly have
been poisoned.
EW - What you describe is exactly the moment where politics

operates not in relation to the balance of probabilities, but
where the smallest probability becomes the meaningful
one. And that’s forensic aesthetics. That is the aesthetic
move and its way into politics. You create something; you
bring something to visibility that creates new possibilities.
GP - Another example of rupturing this economy of calculations

is the work of Decolonizing Architecture (DAAR)4 where
architecture is seen in both its facets as part of the system
of calculations within Israel’s occupation, and also as a way
to re-introduce the political, precisely by improvements
introduced into the refugee camps, something that so far
had been seen as an admission of defeat.
EW - This is definitively the case with DAARs work in refugee

camps; it was also the way I choose the end the book Least
of all Possible Evils to say that the political and aesthetic
4
Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency is an architecture collective founded
by Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman.
97

are united in an attempt to break that field of calculation,

that there is always an outside to a question that operates by
that rupture of calculations. Palestinians tended to operate
within this equation by which improvement means nor-
malization, accommodation, acceptance of their position.
But instead of operating within that given economy you
can rupture it, you can destroy it. And this is what I think
the model proposed by (Sari) Hanafi, (Nasser) Abourahme
and (Sandi) Hillal does. It breaks away from the existing
formula, by refuting the idea that misery creates the more
strong political claim, and instead contends that in fact the
stronger the camp, the more we can invest in it, the more
we can break the social from the political. Political right is
a political right whether you are a rich or a poor refugee,
educated or non-educated. In fact it is better to be educated.
Who is to make this call for the maintenance of misery in
the name of other people? As Rony Brauman5 said, it in a
way so simple but so important: the basic condition for
politics to happen is that you need to be alive. I do not need
to indoctrinate you – I need to hear you. And it is so simple
but nowadays so radical.
GP - Ultimately in your work architecture emerges as a mul-

tifaceted set of practices, acting within the apparatus of
power and colonization in the design of military separa-
tions; being included in the naïve good willed design of
5
Rony Brauman is a doctor and former president of Médecins Sans Frontières,
whose positions vis-à-vis humanitarianism are thoroughly discussed in Weiz-
man’s new book.
98

refugee camps and the violence they perpetuate; but also

as a form of intervention able to open spaces for life as the
political. With DAAR, what is at stake, is not so much to
produce a re-organization of the forum, but allowing new
re-organizations to take place. And that is the political: the
opening of new emancipatory possibilities.
EW - We try to use architecture as an alternative political arena – a

forum if you like – to imagine decolonization and different
futures for Palestine.
99

100

A Vertiginous Enlightenment
(JWST and telescopic view of the object)
Reza Negarestani
The James Webb Space Telescope (sometimes called JWST)

will be a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary
mirror. The project is working to a 2018 launch date. The
Webb will be the premier observatory of the next decade,
serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study
every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the
first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation
of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like
Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System.1
An electromagnetic fable for the Enlightenment: From a global

perspective, light is a connective operator that transports informa-
tion in the form of electromagnetic radiation between different
spatio-temporal fields. In other words, the global scope of light or
electromagnetic radiation weaves a web of connections between
heterogeneous regions of space-time or local fields of information.
In this sense, the global conception of light reveals the global
scope of complicities between different spatio-temporal regions,
and in doing so, it illuminates the scope of the modern abyss as
an informatic-objectal web. To put it differently, the universal
scope of light expresses global-local transitions of objects, from
1
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), About the Webb,
Available at: http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/about.html
101

global to local horizons and vice versa. Insofar as light connects

incommensurable local fields of information, its global scope
is always non-trivial in relation to its local scopes. An intuitive
expression of this non-triviality is the twist of a Mobius strip. The
Mobius strip is a bundle of line segments or local fibers over a
circle. The global projection of these local sections will produce
a section of a cylinder but not a Mobius strip which is a twisted
bundle of local fibers. The non-triviality inherent to the global
scope of light means that any local field of information or regional
horizon on this web is, in a sense, blind or myopic to the global
scope of light as the web of complicities between anonymous
materials (i.e. incommensurable local fibers, different regions
of space-time, objects and heterogeneous fields of information).
An object-induced vertigo called knowledge: If the global
scope of light illuminates the scope of the abyss as the ultimate
web of objects and if light in its global scope is invisible to local
perspectives, then in order to stare back into the abyss one must
first reconstruct the global scope of light as what illuminates
the abyss. Enlightenment should be, accordingly, understood
as a response to the problem of illuminating the abyssality of
the universe and bringing into focus its informatic-objectal web
through the agency of a reason that does not emanate from the
subjective vision but travels in the direction of a generic light.
The edifice of knowledge committed to ambitions of the Enlight-
enment, likewise, can be seen as a system for developing optimal
perspectives endowed with a universal orientation capable of
conceiving information from different fields into an accessible
global field through which information from heterogeneous local
fields stream and can be subsequently synthesized and organized.
In other words, as far as the Enlightenment is concerned, the pro-
102

A VERTIGInOUS EnlIGhTEnMEnT
ductive valence of knowledge lies in its ability to reconstruct the

global scope of illumination – light as a connective operator – by
unleashing different (ontological) perspectives upon the object so
as to combine all these local perspectives into a global perspective.
In conceiving its global web of illumination by agitating the object
with optimal perspectives from all possible angles, knowledge
thus becomes a universal strategy to embrace the abyss, the
informatic-objectal web, immanent to the global scope of light.
Yet insofar as embracing the abyss is the very idea of a systematic
descent into it, Knowledge can be understood as a global scheme
for staring back, or more accurately, systematically descending
into the abyss. A systematic descent is comprised of global-local
strategies for moving back and forth, ascending and descending
between various vertiginous precipices of the abyss. However, it
is important to recognize that such a gaze or systematic descent
/ navigation is purely conditioned by the object and its abyssal
horizon of complicity with other objects.
Perspectives are genuine – true-to-the-object – agitations
upon objects:2 According to the modern definition of knowledge,
2
“Though ‘navigation’ stems from Latin ‘navigare’, and this one from ‘navis’ plus
‘agere’, which means giving motion to a ship, the present meaning of “naviga-
tion” is restricted to the passive steering of a vehicle which is already moved by
some motor. However, navigation on the EncycloSpace must regain the original
activity, since EncycloSpace has been determined as an interactively handled
body of knowledge, a body which is not built, altered and developed by mysteri-
ous forces but by our genuine agitation upon the object. Therefore, the original
etymology of “navigation” is restituted: We shall distinguish between receptive
and productive navigation. Receptive navigation means moving around within
the body of knowledge without changing it. In contrast, productive navigation
103

the gaze or the descent into the informatic-objectal abyss is consti-

tuted of systematic and optimal perspectives for approaching the
object and accessing various layers, borders, levels of continuity
and precipices of the abyss. Conditioned by the dialectics of depth
and the geometrical outlines of the informatic-objectal web, the
perspectives or navigational schemes of the modern knowledge
can be effectively compared to descending and climbing equip-
ments designed to navigate objects in their abyssal conception.
Perspectives are schematically classified on the basis of their
ability and objective in approaching specific aspects of the global
web of objects or performing particular navigational tasks or
operations on the horizon of knowledge and its concept-spaces
which allow for intelligible access to the informatic-objectal web.
There are perspectives which are for the sole purpose of approach-
ing objects from different borders and orbits (ropes and webbing
gears), latching onto specific objects to facilitate the navigation
of the entire abyssal web through temporal nodes (anchors), mov-
ing from one object or heterogeneous field of information to
another, navigating different grades or continua of the abyss
(rappels and ascenders) and various forms of control, protection
and brake tools (belay devices) to pursue different approaches
to the object and ensure an endurable and thorough navigation
of the informatic-objectal web.3
does change the body of knowledge.” See Guerino Mazzola, The Topos of Music:
Geometric Logic of Concepts, Theory, and Performance (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2003),
43-44. For more details on navigational characteristics of knowledge with regard
to objects, see Mazzola’s book particularly chapter 2 (Topography) and chapter
5 (Navigation on Concept Spaces).
104

In order to reconstruct the global scope of illumination and

bring to light the informatic-objectal web invisible to a trivial
conception of local subject, knowledge continuously strives to
develop and synthesize non-trivial and optimal perspectives,
multivalent navigational schemes or subjective lenses. Rather
than approaching the object from a limited range of local perspec-
tives, the modern conception of knowledge adopts perspectives
which are synthetic, capable of simultaneously approaching the
object from different orbits and in different local contexts and
modal frameworks so as to concurrently index and merge the
microscopic (driven by internal differences), the macroscopic
(integral according to the underlying flux of invariance), the
panscopic (unitary or fusion of difference and integration), the
synchronic and diachronic images of the object. The ambition of
modern knowledge to develop synthetic perspectives and multi-
valent navigational schemes should be understood in the context
of modern knowledge’s recognition of Enlightenment as a global
model of light wherein light is no longer issued forth from the
eye but travels according to a generic informatic-objectal trajec-
tory. In other words, modern knowledge develops and optimizes
its perspectives and navigational schemes by continuously syn-
chronizing them with non-trivial schemata of the objectal web.
In a sense, the vertiginous precipices of the informatic-objectal
abyss dictates modes and methods of descent. It is the object
3
These simple climbing equipments effectively represent the modern definition
of perspective as a navigational line that yields orientation and is able to ascend
and descend between the local and the global through different ‘seemingly impos-
sible’ paths and alternative orientations. Each perspective carries its ontological
space “like a snake carrying its shell” (Mazzola, Ibid. 50).
105

that lies at the base of agitations which induce the vertigo of

knowledge and drive the ambition of the Enlightenment further
down into the abyss.
A perspective accustomed to the global scope of light: The
synthetic perspective or a perspective / navigational scheme
synchronous with non-trivial schemata of the informatic-objectal
web is the very idea of the telescopic view. As a view conditioned
by and adapted to the vertiginous precipices of the abyss, the
telescopic view (whether as a mode of perspective in culture,
interpretation or astronomy) is a synthetic perspective with a
universal orientation. It is a multi-modal perspective that weaves
microscopic and macroscopic views of the object within a uni-
versal panscopic frame, hence preventing the engagement with
objects from deteriorating into a whimsical orgy with objects
where the bourgeoisie-curated cabinet of curiosities meets the
circus-oriented metaphysics of objects. Accordingly, the telescopic
view is able to intermediate differentiation and integration; on
the one hand, indexing difference against an invariant back-
ground and on the other, bringing the universal flux of invariance
beneath instances of difference into the foreground. In addition,
the telescopic view is essentially a web-oriented view whereby
local contraction and global expansion (decontraction) can be
incorporated into a network of global-local correspondences and
dialectics where dogmatic orientations toward one pole or another
are dissolved. To this extent, the telescopic view is a perspective
synchronous to the cosmological schema of an expanding uni-
verse with local instances of complexification and contraction.
The telescopic view should be considered as a trans-regional and
trans-modal perspective capable of examining the full extent
of the TRANS prefix. From the particulate to the galactic to the
106

Broadening
Forth
Deepening
Back
Descent
Descennt
A
Ascent
Telescopics
Figure 1. The telescopic view brings into focus the informatic-objectal web by interlocking back-
and-forth navigation that broadens the scope along a unified horizon with ascent-and-descent
navigation that deepens the scope across a diachronic depth.
107

TELESCOPICS
Back and Forth adjuction aScEnt and dEScEnt adjunction

(broadening scope) (deepeing scope)
Panscopic Microscopic / Macroscopic
dialectic of differentiation dialectic of Generality and Vagueness

and integration
dialectic of Borders and Edges dialectic of Surface and depth
ramification of the Local and Embedding of the Global in the Local

concentration of the Global and immersion of the Local into the Global
Synchronization diachronization
Spatial navigation chronic navigation
Table 1. Telescopics navigates the informatic-objectal web along two major navigational strategies,
ascent descent and back forth adjunctions. These two adjunctions respectively deepen and
broaden the scope of navigation by covering all possible universal and regional orientations, giving
a comprehensive and abyssal view of the web.
108

stellar to the chemical to the planetary to the biological and

social domains, the telescopic view is in constant transit between
various global-local agitations of the object, between nature and
culture, difference and integrality, universality and regionality.
For this reason, Colombian mathematician Fernando Zalamea
associates telescopics with trans-modernism, a trans-regional
and trans-modal approach to culture and nature that topologically
glues different cultural manifolds and knowledge-spaces such
as microscopic and differential perspectives of post-modernism
and the panscopic and integral views of modernism together.4
From object to object, or the story of telescope from the
perspective of the abyss: As a synthetic perspective conditioned
by the global-local transitions of the object or the precipices
of the informatic-objectal abyss, the telescopic view should be
considered as a mode of approach pivotal to the entire panorama
of the modern account of knowledge. Indeed we can speak of a
proto-schema of telescopic view even before the introduction of
the first modern telescopes – a scheme, an ambition, an ideal for
a subjectivity-yet-to-come forged in the universalist approaches
of medieval scholastics and forerunners of optics. It is in this
sense, that the true-to-the-object valence of the telescopic view
should be seen as the drive behind some of the most sophisti-
cated technological processes and engineering sparks leading to
the development of modern telescopes and observatories. As far
as the story of the modern telescope is concerned, global-local
transitions of the object which shape the precipices of the abyss
4
See Fernando Zalamea, América – Una Trama Integral: Transversalidad, Bordes
y Abismos en la Cultura Americana (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia,
2009).
109

as the true object of Enlightenment condition and dictate an

approach – a way to see, a scheme to navigate – toward objects.
Conditioned by objects, this approach becomes a central idea
within the system of knowledge that in turn instructs and directs
its own embodiment into an object for facilitating the systematic
descent into the abyss. From a speculative perspective within
the system of modern knowledge, we can thus say that telescope
is the non-trivial incarnation of the abyss staring into itself. In
the last instance, telescope is but an instrumental object whose
original schema should be found in the global web of objects
and its abyssal impact upon the foundation of knowledge, life,
culture, technology and engineering through a global scope of
light which is not immediately given in local perspectives.
Telescopic descent, a space odyssey: The ambition of tel-
escopic view in developing a universal and non-myopic approach
to global-local transitions of the object highlighted by the global
scope of light fully manifests in the advent of space telescopes.
The object-induced vertigo of Enlightenment does not end with
ever-complicating perspectives corresponding to the shifting
precipices of the informatic-objectal abyss, it starts with uproot-
ing from the dominant local horizon – the terrestrial sphere –
that regulates or distorts the scope of various perspectives. The
launch of telescopes into orbit should be seen as a systematic
attempt to develop perspectives and schemata of a new vision
not only librated from the planetary constrains but also capable
of observing the terrestrial cradle of life itself as an object within
the continuous objectal web of the abyss. As a true heir to the
legacy of the Copernican orbital subversion of the Earth, Hubble
Space Telescope took the idea of observation into orbit where light
is neither filtered nor distorted by the Earth’s atmosphere. The
110

imminent arrival of second generation space telescopes headed

by James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), however, broadens the
scope of human knowledge and its telescopic descent into the
abyss even further. The deployment of JWST at the second Sun-
Earth Lagrange point5 outside of the Earth’s own orbit takes the
idea of Copernican uprooting of the ground in favor of the abyss
multiple steps further. Not only is the terrestrial scope of illumi-
nation abandoned in favor of an orbital illumination – implicit
in the very idea of Copernican Revolution – but also the earth’s
orbit and the solar scope of light are left behind in favor of a more
global, more abyssal scope of light as what illuminates the web of
cosmological objects. Both visible light as a scope of light fully in
conformity to the biological capacities of the terrestrial organism
and sunlight as a conception of light fully ingrained within the
ambit of terrestrial life have created a local environment that has
been for far too long misunderstood as a global vista proper to
a universal subjectivity and vision. By shifting its emphasis to
infrared light 930,000 miles away from the Earth where it will
float against a background with minimum heat radiations in one
of the coldest environments possible, JWST will be able to detect
infrared radiations coming through clouds of dust and emitted
by the dimmest of objects, peering into the earliest stages of the
Universe. In doing so, the future telescope will illuminate a geo-
cosmic continuum that connects the inception of the Universe
to the galactic, stellar and planetary horizons.
5
Lagrange points are locations in space at which a small mass can orbit at a fixed
distance from the larger masses due to the balance between the centrifugal force
and the two gradational forces associated with larger masses, for example, the
Sun and the Earth.
111

JWST and objects behind the Sun: Comprised of a segmented

and cryogenically controlled (operating temperature under 50
Kelvin) primary mirror with the collecting area of 25 m2, JWST
will orbit around the Earth-Sun second Lagrange point. In an
optical and metaphorical gesture, JWST will face away from the
Sun and will be shielded from radiation from the Sun, the Moon
and the Earth. The telescope is designed to primarily work with
infrared light rather than invisible light (Hubble telescope). Shield-
ing of the telescope from solar and terrestrial radiations as well
as cryogenic control of the mirror’s temperature enable JWST
to detect near and mid ranges of the infrared spectrum of light
with minimal distortion. Being a low-frequency spectrum of light
that has been stretched toward its red end, infrared illuminates
global-local transitions of objects in a Universe that has been
expanding since its inception. Since light from objects stretches
as it travels across an expanding space, the further the object in
time (conceived in the early stages of the universe and now dead,
Redshift
Object Observer
Blueshift
Object Observer
Figure 2. Redshift and Blueshift
112

extinct or frayed into the open) the more stretched the wavelength
of its light toward the red end of spectrum. Therefore, the global-
local transition of objects through electromagnetic radiation or
light in an expanding universe always tends to the red end of the
spectrum as objects of study go further back in time. This shift
toward the red end of the spectrum (infrared wavelength) for
objects of ancestral time is known as cosmological redshift: The
further the object in time, the more stretched its light across the
accelerating expansion of space, the redder the object.
Cosmological redshift, accordingly, illuminates the global
conception of objects as that which is independent of a time
that can synchronize the subject with the object. JWST prima-
rth
and Fo
Back
Asc
ent
and
Des
cen
t
Me
tric
Exp
a
n s io
no
f Sp
ace
An Ancestral Object Dark Age Big Bang
Age of the Universe
Figure 3. Telescopic enlightenment: Expansion of space and the diachronicity of the object (or the
trauma of spacetime) condition the telescopic approach of (universal) knowledge.
113

rily sees the Universe in light of this diachronicity of the object

that enforces the scope of the abyss as an ever-expanding web of
information and objects. Whereas Hubble Space Telescope opened
the modern system of knowledge to the imports and implications
of an expanding Universe, JWST has been specifically designed
to work within and in accordance with an expanding universe
where frontiers – in an accelerated manner – fray into the open.
For JWST, abyssality is, therefore, neither a conclusion nor a goal
but the veritable environment for the operation of knowledge and
approaching the global conception of the object implicit in the
global scope of light. Since JWST is primarily optimized to see the
universe through cosmological redshift – or light in an expanding
universe – it is able to illuminate the global conception of the object
in terms of a non-trivial and abyssal distance from the subject, an
inaccessible distance that is best understood as diachronicity of
the object. Incommensurable to the chronology of the thinking /
seeing subject, the diachronicity or the inaccessible distance of
the object expresses the identity of the abyss as what occasions
the telescopic descent of knowledge. Far from being an obstacle
for the edifice of knowledge, this inaccessible distance becomes
as we shall see the source and the drive of knowledge as the sum
of all perspectives or agitations upon the object.
JWST, an augmented strategy for approaching the trauma
of the object: The chronic truth of the object lies outside of the
time in which the subject thinks, sees and reflects. The diachro-
nicity of the object constitutes the very trauma of the object for
the seeing or thinking subject. The diachronic object is, there-
fore, a source of an unbindable tension that can neither be fully
overcome nor extricated from the subject, yet nevertheless it is
a tension around which the entire analytico-synthetic apparatus
114

of knowledge and the subject takes shape and revolves. In the

same vein, the subject continuously re-experiences the trace
of trauma in order to obliquely approach the exterior source of
trauma, it can be said that the system of knowledge is but a maze
or an oblique navigation of the diachronic truth of the object. If
knowledge is a system built upon and driven by the trauma of the
object, then it becomes a compulsory objective for knowledge to
produce its own objects through which the tension of this trauma
can be resolved. As an object ideated, schematized and shaped
by the system of knowledge and respectively, the trauma of the
object indwelling within that system, the telescope exercises the
traumatic power of the object on the subjective vision. It simply
shapes, or more precisely, objectifies the vision of the observer
according to the trauma of the object as a diachronic truth. The
scientific instrument, JWST in this case, can only be examined
within the nested hierarchy of objects: It is an object conceived
by tensions produced by the trauma of the object within the sys-
tem of knowledge. In short, the scientific instrument bears the
imprint of the object upon the system of knowledge in the form
of a compulsion to further delve into the diachronic truth of the
object. If we broaden the Freud-Ferenczian6 theory of trauma –
according to a new cosmological continuum that connects the
galactic to the cerebral – from that of the tension within the nerv-
ous system caused by an index of exteriority to that of a universal
tension caused by the diachronicity of the object, then it is easy
6
According to Freud and Hungarian psychoanalyst, Sandor Ferenczi, trauma is
understood not as what is experienced by the subject but as an inassimilable
index (for the subject) whose reality is exterior and diachronic to the order of
experience.
115

to see JWST’s observational strategy within the cosmological re-

inscription of trauma: The space telescope approaches the global
conception of the diachronic object or the source of trauma by
way of synthesizing its trace i.e. light stretched across the fabric
of space. In other words, JWST translates the spatial trace of
diachronicity or the infrared light into an image of the ancestral
object. More than being a new pinnacle of human technology,
JWST as an object of knowledge is a new ‘drive’ (in the sense of
not only trieb but also instrumentum) for binding the trauma of
the object and reshaping the plastic edifice of knowledge along
its line of observation.
Telescopic compossibilization of subject and object, ascent
and descent, back and forth: Even though the impact of the trauma
of the object upon the system of knowledge is ineradicable and
the compulsion to approach the source of trauma – the diachronic
truth of the object – constitutes the course of knowledge, the
prospect of epistemological reactivation and amplification of
the ontological condition of knowledge is not by any means a
matter of a given privilege or fait accompli. The realization of
JWST as a future object through which knowledge translates its
ontological kernel into an epistemological navigational scheme
or rational odyssey for descending into the abyss depends on,
first of all, a subjective guarantor. The task of this subjective
guarantor is to demarcate the boundaries and conditions of the
local and disentangle the subject from the object so as to iden-
tify local exigencies and rationally engage them. The current
precarious status of JWST as an object that has turned into a
fiscal black hole devouring other space and research programs
requires a subjective return to local conditions that are more in
accord with the epistemological horizon of knowledge rather
116

than its ontological kernel. From a local perspective, JWST as

a contingent object is a projection of the world’s economic and
socio-cultural priorities which themselves have been brought forth
by the current epistemological status. In short, these priorities
are the results of how we understand ourselves and the world
we inhabit. Only a universalist subjectivity determined to work
out the priorities of a world ravaged by myopia and violence by
renegotiating local epistemological views which underpin such
priorities is able to evaluate, determine and globally establish
the objective valence of the future telescope. The return to local
exigencies and commitment to the epistemological horizon do
not represent a reactionary fall upon the earthly ground but the
synchronization of the universalist subject with the telescopic
enlightenment: simultaneously, bringing the microscopic and
the local to a universal elevation and bringing into focus the
transition of the universal into its local exigencies, priorities and
problems. Or to be concise: bringing into compossibility ascent
and descent, back and forth in order to coherently interweave
different depths or vertiginous precipices of the object.
117

“It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and
almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crum-
bled into dust and passed from our sight.”
— Bram Stoker 1
1
Bram Stoker, Dracula [a Tale] (Westminster: A. Constable & Co., 1897).
118

Impure Matter:
A Forensics of WTC Dust
Susan Schuppli
As architecture collapsed into micro-spherical debris, it produced

a billowy ash cloud that lingered for days obscuring the bounda-
ries between the terrestrial spaces of the built environment and
the atmospheric realm into which its Twin Towers had previously
reached. When viewed remotely from orbiting satellites this
spatial fusion-confusion was confirmed, as neither a shift in
scale, nor a pixel-by-pixel comparative analysis could disentangle
pulverized architecture from airborne matter, or human remains
from rubble.2 Much has been said about the ways in which the
smoke and dust clouds of 9/11 momentarily obliterated the human
dimensions of the tragedy as Lower Manhattan was shrouded in
an incendiary fog that defied all technical attempts at peering
2
The IKONOS high-resolution commercial satellite captured images of Lower
Manhattan at 11:43 AM EDT on September 12 2001. The IKONOS travels 680 kil-
ometres above the Earth’s surface at a speed of 28,000 kilometres per hour. The
French SPOT satellite took infrared images identifying hot spots at 11:55 AM
EST on September 11 2001 (3 hours after the attack). NASA’s Terra satellite saw
Manhattan from an altitude of about 1,300 kilometres. Satellites deployed by the
US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to track storms,
forest fires, and volcanic eruptions also acquired images of the aftermath of the
events in New York. In addition to these remote sensing technologies, The Expe-
dition Three crew on the International Space Station also took photographs of
the site from an altitude of nearly 400 kilometres.
119

fig. 1 — This photo taken September 11, 2001 by the New York City Police Department shows smoke
and ash engulfing the area around the World Trade Center as the North Tower collapses in New
York. Photo taken by the New York City Police Department.

fig. 2 — French SPOT infrared satellite imagery of Lower Manhattan taken at 11:55 AM EST on Sep-
tember 11 2001.
120

I M P U R E M AT T E R : A F O R E n S I C S O F W T C D U S T
directly into the scene of the crime.3 Instead our collective global
gaze was transfixed by images of the transmutation of glass
and steel into a kind of cosmic dust – a demonic metaphysics in
which architectural substance became pure nature once more, or
so it appeared. The bodies of the more than 2,780 missing were
not in evidence in these first televisual transmissions, instead
they were understood as trapped and possibly interred within
the architectural remains of the towers which were themselves
still hidden from view by the haze of fallout. But this was a false
reading of the image, a mirage if you will, for what the micro-
spheres of dust carried were not simply the material remains of
the destroyed towers but all of the buildings’ contents including
its human occupants. The body was not missing in the images
of swirling dust that we witnessed repeatedly those first few
days after the tragedy but was emphatically present within each
specimen of dust at 1.3 parts per 100.
Part I: When the Dust Settled
Dust is an aggregate of synthetic and natural particles whose

micro-material complexity is so thoroughly entangled and
3
“What is missing from this image [writes Laura Kurgan referring to the IKONOS
image] is what is missing now from the city or the world, and it is always missing
at the limits of one-meter resolution, for all its detail. What is missing are the
missing, over 5,000 people now presumed dead. Beneath or beyond the limits of
visibility, of data, are the dead. And yet they remain in the image, in the ruin of
the image, and ask something of us.” In Laura Kurgan, “New York, September 11,
2001, Four Days Later...” in Ctrl Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham
to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe:
ZKM, 2002), 655.
121

inclined to metamorphosis that it has no particularised form

or objectness of its own, but rather assumes the contours of all
other things. As emblematic non-material, dust has been brooded
over for centuries by artists and writers who found in its formless
nature the metaphoric vocabulary of remainder and decay.4 Dust
understood as such is always temporally oriented towards an
understanding of the past as inanimate. Dust is said to invade; it
creeps and amasses; it covers over and veils, consigning its objects
and events to the languor of history. Even when it accrues it seems
somewhat depthless — dust is all about surface, the spatialised
patina of passing time. Georges Bataille conceptualised dust as
matter-in-waiting: a stealth-like incursion from the future that
slowly disavows the vitalism of all that it touches.
Architectural history has similarly been haunted by the
gothic spectre of dust as an amorphic and insinuating filth, only to
become preoccupied by its antithesis in the planar cleanliness of
modernism exemplified by the hygienist movement.5 In a matter
of minutes, the gleaming glass towers of the World Trade Center
(WTC) that were pulverized into dust, reversed this architectural
evolution bringing about a gothic revival of a different order, in
that, the terror augured by late 18th century writings on the insidi-
ous nature of dust was revived as a war against the dust-makers
4
See the Cabinet Issue 35 Dust for various historical accounts of dust. Sina Najafi,
ed., Cabinet 35 (Brooklyn: Immaterial Incorporated, 2009).
5
Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York (1958), with its externalized
structural articulation minimally clad in sheets of glass offers an exemplary
example of the kind of planar corporate modernism that went on to influence
the design of the World Trade Center as did his Lake Shore Drive towers project
on Chicago’s waterfront (1951).
122

fig. 3 — Space Imaging’s IKONOS one-metre resolution satellite image taken at 11:43 AM EDT on
September 12 2001.
123

themselves. However as an expression of the external condition

of torpor, dust typically lacks the necessary vitality whereby the
past gains traction and is able to unsettle the present. Unlike
“dirt” which has been theorized as “matter out of place” (Mary
Douglas) and subjected to vigorous regimes of purification, dust
is treated as a much more mundane surplus that can be gently
swept aside. Dusty is never as bad as dirty, but nor is it as sym-
bolically transgressive. Dirt connotes a contamination of more
than the just the surface of things, it has an insidious claim on
interiority that makes it stubborn to purging, an attribute that
has been semantically useful to poets and preachers alike. Dirt
gets into things, defiling boundaries between entities, whereas
dust [it seems] merely submits objects to stasis.
Dirt is an object found in a place where it does not

belong; dust reproduces in miniature everything that
surrounds us. Neither dirt nor dust are specific bodies,
however. The first is composed of minute bodies which
find themselves in contact with an object, and which
the latter has retained in some manner. The second is
composed of minute bodies crushed into powder, which
is deposited on the object.6
In spite of the disgust conjured by writers such as Bataille when

contemplating the transformation that a century of accumulated
dust would exact upon the slumbering mound of Sleeping Beauty,
6
German chemist Jutsus Von Liebig writing in the mid 19th century, quoted in
Edmond Locard, “The Analysis of Dust Traces. Part I,” The American Journal of
Police Science 1, no. 3 (1930), 276-298.
124

contemporary accounts of dust tend to treat it more perfunctorily

as superfluous matter. Even the cosmic dust that is being used by
astronomers to read the fossil record of the universe regards this
matter as benignly ubiquitous, although the chemical composi-
tion of this kind of interstellar and intergalactic material has no
corollary to its earthbound counterparts. Dust in general, appears
more dreary and dreamlike than terrifying or repulsive. Thus
the expression “when the dust settles” suggests that dust will
never be asked to do the dirty work of history — to toil in murky
recesses and dig though muck and rubble in order to bring the
particulate matters of past events into the contact zone of the
present. Dust merely encloses or discloses pre-existent reali-
ties. (While this characterisation of dust is reasonably accurate,
its real potential resides in its capacity to register prior events
within its particulate matter, maintaining a certain connectiv-
ity with the past as a consequence of its ontological rather than
rhetorical nature. This turn towards the internal composition of
dust as harbouring multiple singularities — data packets if you
will — opposed to more common descriptions as an distributed
surface event is something I will come to shortly.) Once the dust
clouds of 9/11 had settled the scale of the human tragedy would
be revealed — a new kind of image-event, cleansed of interference,
would be made manifest in which the body (even in its damaged
state) would be returned to the visual field. But this anticipatory
narrative of full disclosure never materialised in quite these terms.
Part II: An Unauthorized Biography of Dust
The 2,780 missing were largely subsumed by the cataclysmic

force of collapsing architecture, which was itself transformed into
125

fine powdery soot. Intact bodies were nowhere to seen frustrat-

ing rescue efforts, which ultimately managed to recover 19,906
human fragments, but of these remains only 293 were fully intact
bodies and only 12 could be identified by sight. In the aftermath
of recovery, rescue workers who had dug through the tons of haz-
ardous rubble with their hands and rudimentary tools, began to
develop respiratory problems in the form of a dry and persistent
cough. Within six months elevators and air ventilators in build-
ings adjacent to the WTC site, continuously began to fail.7 The
dust had not simply settled, but had entered into the lungs of
rescue workers and local inhabitants as well as into the mechani-
cal systems of nearby buildings.
You have 10-story buildings that leave more debris

than these two 100-story towers. Where the fuck is
everything? A serious weeklong search and we’ve found
200 in a pile of 5,000? What’s going on? Where is eve-
ryone? Why aren’t we finding more bodies? Cause it’s
all vaporized — turned to dust. We’re breathing people
in that dust.8
Its an image that prompts involuntarily gagging and explains, in

part, why the mediated abstraction of airborne dust clouds hover-
7
See Nicholas Petraco, Thomas A. Kubic and Lisa Faber, The Microscopic Analy-
sis of World Trade Center Dust (New York: National Forensic Science Technology
Center, August 15 2007), 3.
8
A fireman speaking in a Brooklyn bar who had done a 24-hour shift at Ground
Zero. Christopher Ketcham, “A Season in Hell,” in Salon.com, ed. Christopher
Ketcham (New York City: Salon Media Group, 2011), 2012.
126

ing at a distance, much like the mushroom clouds of the atomic

bomb, offers a kind of perverse visual pleasure or respite from the
horror occurring at the immediacy of ground level/Ground Zero.
As uneasy as the thought of unwitting acts of anthropophagi that
the inhaling of WTC dust by man and machine alike might provoke,
most common dust specimens actually contain a high percentage
of exfoliated human skin tissue and human hair along with many
other natural and synthetic fibres, particles, emissions, and pol-
lutants. Our bodies are constantly processing the sloughed-off
excess and waste produced by our contact with other species or
by the frictions occurring between different specimens. And we
in turn deposit minute trace evidence of our passage through
space and in time wherever we move and whenever we make
contact with another surface. As Edmond Locard, the French
criminologist credited with laying the foundations of forensic
science famously postulated, “every contact leaves a trace.” This
principle of exchange asserts that in any encounter between
bodies, objects, materials, and spaces certain residual traces
are deposited and exchanged. These points of contact between
entities can be mapped scientifically to link the distribution of
bodies and objects within space. Dust writes Steven Connor is
a “medium of transformation and exchange. Almost without
qualities itself, dust has the quality of qualitylessness, the virtual
virtue of transmitting the virtues of other substances. It is both
a terminal and a mediate matter, inert, but sometimes, for that
very reason, omnivalent.9 Dust scrambles the material signals of
objects and events, transmitting complex information from one
space to another. Hacking into dust has consequently become a
9
Steven Connor, “Pulverulence,” Cabinet 35 Fall (2009), 71.
127

key activity of the forensic investigator who must become skilled

at cracking its chemical coding chains.
All matter, chemically speaking, can be divided into two
primary subcategories: that of pure and impure substances. Dust
is considered to be “impure matter” because it is a mixture con-
taining two or more elements or compounds in close proximity
whose proportions can vary, whereas water is a pure substance
because it always consists of hydrogen and oxygen in a ratio
of 1:8 by mass and 2:1 by volume. I have turned my attention
to the forensic analysis of World Trade Center dust specimens
in order to argue against the prevailing grammars of dust with
their metaphoric stakes in a de-politicised history of material
relations as merely a “chronics of things” unhinged from the spe-
cific events out of which each diminutive element has emerged.10
By examining the particular chemical and physical properties
of dust we further “unsettle” the assumed distinctions between
human/non-human configurations of matter and are better able
to argue, as I have done elsewhere, for the fundamental ontologi-
cal inseparability of all matter.
In the Analysis of Dust Traces (1920) Locard discusses the
nature and composition of dust, noting that what is key to an
understanding of dust is that it is “an accumulation of debris in
a state of pulverization” whether derived from organic or inor-
10
I take this phrase from a statement made by Quentin Meillassoux in an interview
with Robin MacKay. “That’s what is difficult – conceptually I can affirm it, but
what is difficult is to give this sensation that you are in a world where you can-
not make a physics, but only a chronics, of things.” Robin Mackay, Florian Hecker
and Quentin Meillassoux, “Document Uf 13-1,” in www.urbanomic.com, ed. Urba-
nomic (Urbanomic, 2010), 3.
128

fig. 4 — Macroscopically, each bulk specimen appeared somewhat like recently erupted volcanic
ash. Tiny aliquots of bulk specimens were studied with a polarized light microscope (PLM). These
initial PLM studies revealed that each bulk sample was composed of a myriad of materials. It
appeared that all the materials composing the buildings and all of the buildings’ contents were
literally pulverized by the collapse of the Twin Towers. Nicholas Petraco, Thomas A. Kubic and
Lisa Faber, The Microscopic Analysis of World Trade Center Dust (New York: National Forensic
Science Technology Center, August 15 2007), 3.
129

fig. 5 — Tabulation of WTC dust data.
130

ganic entities. “The characteristic of pulverization distinguishes

dust from mud and dirt. Mud is dust mixed with liquid, that
is, in a plastic state. When the mud is oily it takes the name of
cambouis. Dirt is dust with an admixture of fatty and desiccated
bodies.”11 Pulverization is the defining attribute of dust because
the compound debris particles that comprise dust are in effect
the partial-objects of other [usually larger] entities, which have
been ground down. “As a matter of fact, pulverization destroys
the morphologic state, which would enable us ordinarily to rec-
ognize these objects by our senses or even with our instruments.
On the other hand, the transformation does not go so far as to
reduce the object into its ultimate elements, that is, into molecules
or atoms... we do indeed, find them in a certain physical state,
where the micro-chemical diagnosis of its origin is still possible.” 12
Contrary to the popular image of dust as the expanding material
surface upon which other traces, such as the imprint of a foot-
step might negatively be registered, dust specimens themselves,
when understood technically as impure matter, archive traces
of multiple objects in a state of transformation. As a compound
material substance in which radically heterogeneous materials
have momentarily locked together, dust is the material witness
par excellence because it maintains these distinctions to the end
allowing them to tracked back to the particular circumstances
out of which they emerged. For Locard dust specimens were “the
mute witnesses, sure and faithful, of all our movements and of
all our encounters.” While it would be somewhat fallacious to
11
Edmond Locard, “The Analysis of Dust Traces. Part I,” The American Journal of
Police Science 1, no. 3 (1930), 276-298.
12
Locard, “The Analysis of Dust Traces. Part I.”
131

suggest that it’s various impurities deterritorialise and reter-

ritorialise each other sharing matter-energy flows in a man-
ner similar to the processes of becoming that characterise the
“noce contre nature” (against nature marriage) of the wasp and
orchid famously discussed by Deleuze and Guattari.13 However
the compound substances found in dust do confer meaning onto
the relations produced between them when we understand the
forensic expert as a transversal agent committed to probing dust
particles in the same way that the orchid and wasp are mutually
attentive to pollen. Through their probing intercessions, forensic
scientists are able to translate the material impurities of dust
into a convincing narrative or origin story: a tale of two towers.
Moreover, the natural cooperation between wasp and orchid
that brings two unlike organisms together in a process that still
manages to sustain their radical differences, is echoed by the pul-
verization and coming together of different kinds of substances
in dust. The resulting assemblage never produces a material
strata whose differences can be reconciled to create a synthetic
whole that might, in turn, be named. There is no nomenclature
for identifying a WTC dust specimen that includes fibre-glass,
rock wool, asbestos, synthetic and natural fibres, paper, human
remains, ceiling tiles, mica flakes, plaster and concrete, paint
smears, metal flakes, fragments of wood, foam, and plastic, perlite,
drugs, glass shards and other unknown materials.
Dust, as I have said, may be formed of the debris of all

kinds of bodies. In enumerating the elements compos-
13
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987).
132

ing it, there would be made a list of all the substances,

organic or inorganic, existing on the earth. The essential
point, however, is the exact state or condition of the
respective substances before they reached the status
of pulverization.14
“Specimens of Ground Zero dust where obtained from first respond-

ers: members of the police department sworn laboratory person-
nel, crime scene unit detectives and personnel from the OCME’s
office. Additional specimens of WTC dust were obtained from
individuals employed to clean and restore historical churches
and graveyards located near Ground Zero. Finally, specimens
where collected by the authors [of the study referenced in this
essay] from several buildings six months after 9/11.”15 When
14
Locard, “The Analysis of Dust Traces. Part I.”
15
The testing protocol is outlined as follows: 1) each bulk specimen was thoroughly
loosened and mixed gently using an agate mortar and pestle; 2) each bulk sam-
ple was equally divided into eight aliquots; 3) each aliquot was divided into eight
equal portions; 4) each portion was placed on a microscope slide, covered with
a No. 11⁄2, 22mm, round cover-glass, and dispersed evenly in Melt Mount® R.I.
1.539; and 5) each specimen was labeled for identification. Next, a quantitative
particle count of each specimen was carried out with a polarized light microscope
fitted was a Chaulkly, point-count reticule. At least 1,000 particles were counted
for all of the microscope slide preparations made from each bulk specimen. The
results were recorded on WTC dust data sheets. This data was used to compute
the percent of each material present in the average specimen. Nicholas Petraco,
Thomas A. Kubic and Lisa Faber, The Microscopic Analysis of World Trade Center
Dust (New York: National Forensic Science Technology Center, August 15 2007),
4-6.
133

discussing the analysis of WTC dust at a New York Microscopic

Society lecture (May 28 2003) Dr. Nicholas Petraco, one of the
three authors of the subsequently published study, expressed his
incredulity at finding drug residue within the tested specimens.16
“I suppose prescription drugs are so ubiquitous that traces of
them would be found after the catastrophic destruction of any
segment of an urban nexus, but this still surprised me.” Today
the US consumes 80% of the world’s opioid pain medications and
99% of the world’s hydrocodone, a semi-synthetic opioid. Between
1997 and 2007, the years roughly bracketing 9/11, the milligram
per person use of prescription opioids has soared from 74mg to
369mg, representing an overall increase of 402%.17 In order for
trace elements of drugs to register within WTC dust specimens
that included all of the material debris found in the immediate
environs of Ground Zero, the percentage of people taking them
in 2001 would have had to be even significantly higher than cur-
rent levels of consumption. Many community health studies have
examined the impact of 9/11 upon drug use, especially the increase
in drugs taken for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder
and depression. However Petraco’s surprise at finding the pres-
ence of drugs in the WTC dust samples returns the narratives
16
The report The Microscopic Analysis of World Trade Center Dust was authored by
Dr. Nicholas Petraco, MS, D-ABC, Forensic Consultant, NYPD, Adjunct Assistant
Professor, John Jay College, CUNY, Dr. Thomas A. Kubic, JD, PhD, Associate Pro-
fessor, John Jay College, CUNY, and Ms. Lisa Faber, MFS, Criminalist IV, Super-
visor NYPD Hair and Fiber Unit.
17
David Kloth, “America’s Fatal Addiction to Prescription Drugs,” The Guardian
(June 10, 2011), http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/
jun/10/prescription-drug-abuse?INTCMP=SRCH
134

of drug use back to the materials themselves, which are in the

unenviable position of being able to chronicle the magnitude of
wide-spread drug use/abuse (prescription or otherwise) without
the causal factor of a cataclysmic drug-inducing event. That is
to say, if we learn how to read the significance of the statistical
composition of dust as a question of proportionality between
fibreglass and narcotics.
The presence of drug fragments also returns the human body
to the space of eviscerated architecture as a denatured body that
was already materially impure. Human remains conjoined with
concrete and plaster can perhaps be accepted piously as a pas-
sage from dust-to-dust, whereas the presence of drugs troubles
the telling of an entirely moral narrative. It is this realisation
that takes us aback, I believe, when confronting the tabulation
of dust data. The insight that the body was already damaged or
ill in someway prior to the violence inflicted by crushing archi-
tecture. Morality would come to play a crucial role in the U.S
Administration’s response to 9/11 and therefore the evidence of
drugs in WTC dust can be seen, I believe, as clouding the moral
distinctions between good and bad upon which its righteous wars
were waged. The symbolic purity of a body subjectively tainted
by drugs requires a more nuanced semantic articulation than a
body conceptualised as objectified “human remains” returned to
ash. Of course the narrative of the “flawed” body, riven by alcohol
or drugs or weakened by its sexual proclivities and desires, runs
rampant through American society, exemplified by the political
figures of Clinton, G. W. Bush and most recently by GOP candidate
Herman Cain. But it’s a story that has always been redeemed by
a call to a higher purpose – service to God, Country, and family. It
is also a story that extends the mythos of self-remaking that has
135

been so powerfully operative within the American psyche, one

that can convert poverty into wealth, debauchery into virtue or
even corpulence into slimness. The transformative potential of
the American “Can Do” spirit is continually paraded as evidence
of capitalism’s capacity to accommodate difference and promote
tolerance.18 This is all to say, that the bodies invoked by the rhe-
torical framework of 9/11 were not these kinds of damaged but
redeemed bodies. In their collective status as victims, all per-
sonal impurities were symbolically purged and the “secretaries,
businessmen and women, military and federal workers; moms
and dads, friends and neighbors” who died were of necessity
collectively represented as wholly innocent. Their private bod-
ies transformed into a national body whose wounds were solely
inflicted by external forces.19
Another brief example of a material history that one could
excavate out of the geological strata of WTC rubble is that of
18
Subsequent controversy in 2009 around the proposed building of an Islamic cul-
tural centre in the general vicinity of Ground Zero highlighted the limits of this
tolerance with respect to the ways in which the narrative field of 9/11 could be
re-distributed other than in reductive terms.
19
President GW Bush’s Address to the Nation on September 11 and 21 2001 substan-
tiates my line of argumentation in its invocation of a nation wounded, whose
tolerant and progressive nature has ensured that God has chosen its side in its
global fight for justice. In vowing to seek retribution for the acts of terror, Bush
also made a pledge to return the US to the economic prosperity, which he (along
with many) regarded as the symbolic target of the terrorist attack. The moral
project of attending to the nation’s psychic wound was thus conjoined to healing
its financial health, a position echoed by New York major Rudy Giuliani implor-
ing Americans to go and out shop otherwise the “terrorists will have won”.
136

asbestos. During initial construction of the financial complex

(1966-73) asbestos was widely used as a building material due to
its tensile strength, low cost, high melting point, and resistance
to chemical breakdown. An estimated 400 tons of asbestos were
incorporated into the structures of the WTC. However, anticipating
a imminent ban by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
builders had stopped including asbestos-based materials by the
time they had constructed the 40th floor of the North Tower, the
first of the Twin Towers to be completed as well as the first hit
in the attacks and the last to go down in flames. Asbestos is still
regarded as one of the most robust fire-retardant materials and in
the weeks following 9/11 some engineers and scientists wondered
if the banned substance (had it been used throughout) might not
have helped to contain the fire damage in the towers long enough
for people to escape.20 According to EPA reports, the implosion
from the towers “pulverized asbestos to ultra-fine particles” and
the World Trade Center Health Registry estimates about 410,000
people were exposed to asbestos during the rescue, recovery and
clean-up efforts that followed 9/11. Instead of saving lives through
its fire-retardant properties, exposure to the asbestos used in
constructing the lower regions of the towers has contributed
to severe illness and death. Although the analysis of WTC dust
confirms trace evidence of asbestos, this data sample can’t testify
to what might have been had its prohibition not been in place.
But what it tells us about its low particle count in relationship
to that of the other insulating materials (45.1%), lower even than
20
James Glanz and Andrew C. Revkin, “A Nation Challenged; Haunting Question:
Did the Ban on Asbestos Lead to Loss of Life?” The New York Times, September
18, 2001, Science section.
137

that of human remains (albeit not an insulator) is that while it

was incapable of retarding fire in its macro-material form, its
low threshold occurrence when inhaled as toxic micro-particles,
was sufficient for causing chronic disease and death.
These two examples begin to suggest ways in which a foren-
sics of WTC dust might prove productive for reading the complex
social, economic, and political relations out of the material strata
of our world. Moreover, the ethical dimensions of an event in
which the loss of life in the US was followed by more than 10 years
of retaliatory war is itself provoked by this microscopic study of
dust, when we also learn to read material relations between human
and non-humans actors out of an image-field of seemly formless
dust clouds. In doing so we come to understand that images taken
at a distance, that the aesthetic realm of our emergent remote
sensing technologies, is also the realm of radical imagining and
seeing. If we accept ethics as the domain of action in and on the
world, then the very act of looking is also an act of intervening
into the image-stream of the event as a kind of witness, be it as
a drone operator scouring Afghani targets from a console in
Nevada, a technician recalibrating the position of the IKONOS
Space Imaging satellite, or a forensic scientist examining a glass
slide of dust specimens by means of polarized light microscopy.
WTC dust becomes political when its intricate materiality is
exposed and ultimately returned to the image-fields from whence
it came as the productive instantiation of a forensic aesthetics
that renews our vision, allowing us to see the world for what it
really is — impure matter.
138

“A landscape beyond technology where everything was either
derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected
but more meaningful ways.”
— J. G. Ballard
“I returned to the element which is the basis of all sound

multifariousness: to pure vibration (...) Every existing sound,
every noise, is a mixture of such sine waves — a spectrum.”
— Karlheinz Stockhausen

Vibrational Mediations
Jonathan Saldanha
The following reports document two moments of an investigation

in progress about spaces that contain a sonic dimension, acoustic
territories that operate through resonance while mediating and
translating spectral powers.
The first report deals with the constitution of a choir as a
resonance-inducing element in the premises of a radio antenna
located in Teuffelsberg, Germany, and the second report with the
translation and filtering of recordings made by a radio telescope
in Dwingeloo, Holland, based on the interceptions of the black
hole located in the Cygnus constellation.
Both ruins once operated in tracking and translating the
invisible, but are now sceneries of technological sedimentation,
a landfill of past protocols: radio transmissions, encrypting /
decrypting, cosmic radiation, ionosphere, electromagnetic ema-
nations and anti-matter, all of them now channeled through their
chthonic cavities.
The remains of the previous operational body persist, emp-
tied of their previous purpose. The original and elementary fluids
have dried, leaving this body suitable for the participation in new
protocols. Here a set of explorations and mediations comes to light
for which the surviving space and its involving membrane are
viscerally revived, extracting through resonance a vital potential.
Both processes contain a particular interest for the presence
of sound, and its vibrational, corporal, and physical inscription.
141

I. Devil’s Echo
Teufelsberg Station. (Photo: Francisco Queimadela)
"(...) eerie echoes to resonant frequencies that can affect the

brain – seem to have been an intentionally planned compo-
nent of a number of prehistoric sites worldwide, from ruined
temples to rock art locations."
— Paul Devereux
The acoustic emanation of the inner space of a radio antenna was

the site for a series of recordings of an informal choir of voices.
Located in Berlin, this antenna was once upon a time important
for the monitoring and interception of radio signals during the
142

V I B R AT I O n A l M E D I AT I O n S
cold war.1 During this period, domes were built to protect the
antennas against the cold, the wind and the rain, as they had been
manufactured from fragile materials and any alteration to their
structure (frost or rust) would reduce their capacity for reception.
Inside of one of these domes it was possible to explore the
relations of sound with its immediate ghost - its echo. The par-
ticular acoustic properties of this space are caused by its spheri-
cal configuration, which constitutes an internal camera that
1
Geological strata of the Teufelsberg:
— Artificial hill built by the Allies after the Second World War from about 12 mil-
lion cubic meters of rubble from Berlin. It is one of the two highest hills in the
Berlin area.
— Buried underneath the hill is a Nazi military-technical college designed by
Albert Speer. The Allies tried using explosives to demolish the school, but it was
so solid that covering it with debris turned out to be easier.
— The NSA (US National Security Agency) Field Station Berlin Teufelsberg came
after this, and was one of the premier listening posts of the cold war, rumored to
be part of the global ECHELON intelligence gathering network.
— Lake Teufelssee is near the hill; where it is believed once stood a castle inhab-
ited by demons, and that was subsequently submerged by the lake.
— The large structure was constructed on the top of the hill; from all directions the
station enjoyed excellent and unobstructed reception of signals in radio bands
that were otherwise difficult to receive over long distances. And viewed from all
over West Berlin, in all directions was “East”. It continued to operate until the
fall of East Germany and the Berlin Wall. After that the station was closed and
the equipment removed.
— The buildings and radar domes still remain in place but the site has been largely
destroyed since the 90’s and the surrounding hills are used as a ski park.
143

potentiates the phenomena of resonance:2 the sound is reflected

and re-sent by the hard corpus of the dome.3 This vast building
complex was used as a station for communications monitoring,
amplifying, decoding and re-encoding of an extensive radio range
of distant, invisible signals.
This dome is now repositioned as an axis mundi which oper-
ates as a nerve center and as an echo chamber intensifying the
temporal experience of space, amplifying other parts of the signal
range, revealing today, through its resonance, acoustic ghosts
that emanate from the ruins of its long petrified telluric body.
All sound emissions originating in the interior are con-
taminated to the point of being effectively altered, leaving a
trail in space like a sound instantly substituted by its double, by
the feedback of its container. The effect is equivalent to that of
hearing your own voice from inside your own skull, receiving the
reflections and resonance of the walls stronger than the original
sound emission (fig. 3). This vibrational fluid unblocks the inner
surface of the dome, transforming it into a membrane, a physi-
ologic extension of environmental perception. The sound reveals
2
A resonant frequency is a natural frequency of vibration determined by the physi-
cal parameters of the vibrating object, in this case the dimensions, shape and
material of this cavity. The resonance in this space is also a reverberation; the
persistence of sound in a particular space after the original sound dissipates.
3
This dome is made of hexagonal and pentagonal modules of a synthetic material,
permeable to radio frequencies (fig. 1). The hard surface of this sphere like place
reflects sound continuously, the direct sound received is followed by a cluster of
many reflected sounds which blend and overlap, the sound intensity is enhanced
by the reflected waves, hence the particular acoustic imprint characteristic of
reverberation (fig. 2).
144

fig. 1
145

the architectural form of its container, impregnating time with

its acoustic signature.
In this evocation process a group of voices was formed that
was organizing itself as a trajectory through the space’s interior,
its time determined by the duration of the predefined distances,
so as to find an internal point of relation with the cavity and its
echo. It established a protocol of tones and intensities where the
voices had operated, in a topographical process that re-combines
and reveals its traces in space.
This group of voices, as a system, was placed in such a way
as to only truly show itself through resonance.4 The group sing-
ing - understood as a catalyst for a visceral state - was fed by the
architecture of the cavity and by the static sounds produced and
unfolded in it - space that unravels, wrapping the participants
in a mental dislocation. The geometry of this scenery interacts
deeply with the occupants, inhibiting senses and amplifying
the spectral territory of the place, which is slowly impregnated
during the process.
The round dome assumes the configuration of a skull striv-
ing to speak, vibrating its inner cavity and speaking through
the voice of others. The echo mediates space and the people who
occupy it.
4
A parallel can be drawn with Alexander Melville Bell’s Visible Speech which was
used to help the deaf learn to talk since they could not hear their own aural pro-
nunciation. The system is composed of symbols that show the position and move-
ment of the throat, tongue, and lips as they produce the sounds of language, and
it is a type of phonetic notation.
146

fig. 2 — Spectral analysis of a broken bottle sound recorded inside the dome, the echo and reverb
are visible in this image.
fig. 3
147

II. Spectral Blindness
Dwingeloo Radio Observatory. (Photo: Regina de Miguel)
"Every stone utters oracles."

— Teixeira Rego
A trip to the Dwingeloo radio telescope in Holland,5 and from

there, on to the black hole in the Cygnus constellation,6 in a pro-
cess of revelation in which forms appear and materialize out of
the opaqueness.
5
An invitation by artist Regina de Miguel.
6
This distant galaxy appears to us as the second brightest radio source in the sky
(fig. 4). Its supermassive black hole generates tremendous energy as it consumes
large amounts of material. Nearby electrons are accelerated in this process, emit-
ting strong radio waves as they spiral outward in magnetic fields.
148

This satellite dish, a mechanical ear of the fifties,7 was built

to listen in to the waves transmitted by radio sources in the cos-
mos, among which, are the strong spots of radio wave emanation
originating in black holes. The mass composing the cosmic back-
ground consists of a conglomerate of electromagnetic impulses
and emanations that appear opaque at a first analysis. Saturated
with interstellar radiation, its components become visible only
when these emissions (fig. 5) are analyzed with the right tool.
The radio signal feeding the antenna is translated into a sound
signal, an amorphous white noise: 8 a blindness engendered by
the impossibility of interpretation.
7
The Dwingeloo Radio Observatory (northeastern Netherlands), is a single dish
radio telescope with a diameter of 25m. Construction completed in 1956. At that
time it was the largest radio telescope in the world. As of 2000, it was no lon-
ger operative in an official capacity and since August 2009 is officially a Dutch
industrial heritage monument. CAMRAS, along with radio amateurs and ama-
teur astronomers, use the telescope for EME, also known as moonbounce. In this
technique, radio wave signals are aimed at the Moon from one location, bounce
off the Moon’s surface, and are detected by an antenna at a different location on
Earth. One EME was made in the same day of the black hole recordings, sending
choir sounds of the Teufelsberg sessions to be deflected by the moon, an inter-
planetary echo that would please King Tubby.
8
White noise is a random signal with a flat spectral density; the signal contains
equal power at any center frequency. White noise draws its name from white light
in which the power spectral density of the light is distributed over the visible
band in such a way that the eye’s three color receptors are equally stimulated. A
random signal is considered white noise if it is observed to have a flat spectrum
over a medium’s widest possible bandwidth (fig. 6).
149

fig. 4
fig. 5
150

Given the quality of this radio magnetic static noise, and

listening to the machine that hears it,9 it is difficult to point to
some definite spot, but while the great antenna turns looking
for a signal in the sky, a small volume oscillation announces a
visible crack in the opaque noise - strong radio emissions like
those originating from Cygnus black hole increase its volume -
allowing for the interpretation of this oscillation as a coordinate.
The visibility threshold is narrow for this kind of antenna, already
not up to date with the current methodologies and technologies
of astronomical observation. This machine decodes the radio
signal into sound, deteriorating it through its electric mechanism
and reducing the specter of white noise received. An encounter
where the observer meets only the translated signal produced
by the tools used in the observation.
After the session at the antenna and back at the sound studio,
other mechanisms were put into action in order to carry out a
series of sonic translation of the recordings of white noise from
the black hole. To work with this signal implies moving towards
its opaqueness and to transmute it into a mechanism in time.10
9
In 1931, Karl Guthe Jansky, an engineer with Bell Telephone Laboratories, was
assigned the job of identifying sources of static that might interfere with radio
telephone service. Jansky’s antenna was an array of dipoles and reflectors designed
to receive short wave radio signals. By rotating the antenna the direction of the
received interfering radio source (static) could be pinpointed. After recording sig-
nals from all directions for several months, Jansky eventually categorized them
into three types of static: nearby thunderstorms, distant thunderstorms, and a
faint steady hiss of unknown origin. Jansky finally determined that the “faint
hiss” was coming from the Milky Way and was strongest in the direction of the
center of the galaxy, the place for a super massive black hole.
10
A. Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, created the Spectrograph, a device
151

The sound was progressively transformed and filtered in a process

that restored the form of the noise, giving it a gesture that was
also cut out by the transposition of its frequencies, to coincide
with harmonics of the earth’s cavity (Shuman’s resonance).11
The sound was therefore filtered12 through two types of
objects: membranes - flexible structures covering or limiting a
body; and cavities – objects’ inner concavities, with walls com-
posed of different densities and whose internal space can filter
the noise signal as well as resound it. A new acoustic body for
the fleshed-out sound of the black hole.
The resulting sounds were then re-combined, forging a
forensic reconstitution13 of the black hole’s negative territory.
that translated sounds into readable patterns via a photographic process, mak-
ing visible records of the frequency, intensity, and time.
11
The Schumann Resonances are quasi standing wave electromagnetic waves that
exist in the earth cavity. Like waves on a spring, they are not present all the time,
but have to be ‘excited’ to be observed. They are not caused by anything internal
to the Earth, its crust or its core. They seem to be related to electrical activity in
the atmosphere.
12
A vibrating object will pick out its resonant frequencies from the complex exci-
tation coming from the white noise, and vibrate at those frequencies, filtering
out other frequencies present in the excitation. (fig. 7)
13
“Audio forensics was born during WWII, when acoustic scientists investigated
the possibility of identifying enemy voices on radio broadcasts. Their efforts
were made possible by the newly invented sound spectrograph, a tool for graph-
ing the frequency and amplitude of voice patterns over time”. Alexander Gelfand,
“Audio Forensics Experts Reveal (Some) Secrets”, Wired, November 10, 2007, Jan-
uary 15, 2012, http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/10/audio_
forensics?currentPage=all#.
152

List of materials used as mediators and filter: electricity

> synthetic membrane > metal > ceramics > wood > skin > meat
> goat skull > human skull > and finally the encrypting of the
resultant sound in the grooves of a vinyl record, which condenses
the process, and is susceptible to be used as a diffusion medium.
fig. 6 — Spectral analisys of the white noise recorded in the radio antena.
fig. 7 — Spectral analisys of the withe noise filtered by the cavity of a human skull.
153

154

An EFFECT OF VEROSIMIlITUDE
155

156

An Effect of Verosimilitude
Regina de Miguel
“For twenty years or so, my friends and I have been study-

ing these strange situations that the intellectual culture
in which we live does not know how to categorize. For lack
of better terms, we call ourselves sociologists, historians,
economists, political scientists, philosophers or anthropolo-
gists. But to these venerable disciplinary labels we always
add a qualifier: ‘of science and technology’. ‘Science stud-
ies’, as Anglo-Americans call it, or ‘science, technology and
society’. Whatever label we use, we are always attempting
to retie the Gordian knot by crisscrossing, as often as we
have to, the divide that separates exact knowledge and the
exercise of power.”
— Bruno Latour
157

The photographs presented here are the result of a collaboration

with artist and musician Jonathan Saldanha, in November 2010
at the Dwingeloo radio telescope, in the Netherlands.
At the time of its operation (1956) this antenna was the
world’s largest, and is now part of Dutch scientific heritage and
rarely activated; only for specific occasions (with permission of
the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) or for activities
of a “moon-bounce” amateur radio group that do its maintenance.
On the 20th November 2011 we went there to film its rotation
and operation; material to be included in the film Nouvelle Vague
Science Fiction. At that time, Jonathan Saldanha made several
experiments in which the antenna was pointed at targets in the
cosmos such as pulsars and black holes.
The material for the soundtrack of the film resulted from
these recordings, in particular of Cygnus Constellation and Sag-
ittarius A* – a black hole located in the centre of the Milky Way.
Dwingeloo radio telescope. Photo: Regina de Miguel. November, 2010.
158

Chandra X-ray Observatory image of Sgr A*, black hole in the centre of the Milky Way.
Image by NASA.
We later decided to give the work an objective dimension by

recording a 12-inch (30cm) vinyl, and images of it are shown here.
These images were made in collaboration with the Depart-
ment of Electronic Microscopy of the Polytechnic University of
Barcelona. After a preliminary study of samples of vinyl’s surface,
a series of photographs were made of the etched surface from
amplifications of between 1000 and 2000 times the actual size
of the object.
This microscope uses a beam of electrons instead of light
to form an image. It has a large depth of field, allowing large sec-
tions of the object to be focused at a time. In the electron scanning
microscope the specimen is usually coated with a carbon layer
or a thin layer of a metal such as gold to give conductive proper-
ties to the sample. It is then swept through by the accelerated
159

Samples of vinyl coated with gold for observation.
An Effect of Verisimilitude, 2011. Black and white photographs on paper, 30 x 50 c / u.
160

electrons travelling in the tube. A detector measures the amount

of electrons sent, resulting in the intensity of the sample area. It
is capable of displaying three-dimensional figures, projected as
a TV picture or a digital image.
Invented in 1931 by Ernst Ruska, it allows a deeper approach
to investigating the atomic world. It allows us to obtain high-
resolution images of stone, metallic and organic materials. The
light is replaced by an electron beam, the lenses by electromag-
nets and the samples are rendered conductive by making the
surface metallic.
The photographic magnification revealed an uncertain
landscape of mountains, desert, and arid areas, similar to some of
the images that space photography of the moon or other planets
have provided us with.
Somehow it consists of a reverse process by which an invis-
ible and unreachable region of space becomes visible again in
the shape of a hybrid and fictional object.
The photomicrographs are accompanied by several archive
images found in scientific publications depicting aerial views of
archaeological sites in different parts of the world.
The sound we receive now from the black hole comes from
a distant past. The reconstruction of this landscape made out of
small details emerges from a place and time in which we did not
exist. Similarly, an archaeologist reconstructs, through minor
signals, an unknown time.
161

Electron microscope at the Polytechnic University of Barcelona.

Aleix Plademunt photographs.
162

163

Nouvelle Science Vague Fiction focuses on existent relations

between the construction and analysis of human ecologies.
Thus it emerges as a syntactic space where connections are made
between scientific analysis and perception (verisimilitude scales),
non-experiential learning derived from the technological imagi-
nary (alienation and projection) and degrees of formation of
perfect consciousness and criticism (new forms of orientation).
This is an audio-visual work divided into two channels and
two sets of photographs.
In the first channel we find a stratigraphic route which starts
in Slovenia at Lake Cerknica and the cave beneath it – a natural
phenomenon where the water level never stays the same appear-
ing and disappearing throughout the year (a simple comparison
could be made between this natural event and the definition of
an “interface”: a screen that brings something up, supposedly out
of nowhere) – to reach the antennas ASTRON, the Netherlands
Institute for Radio Astronomy, where far away objects that can not
be grasped in their full extent if not by sound waves, are studied.
This corresponds, though not synchronously, with a sec-
ond channel of archive images, where a repository of scientific
images located in various scene recreations of spaceship Solaris
are presented. This is its turn, and as in Stanislav Lem’s novel,
would produce a virtual representation of Science itself, based
on fragments and things that emerge with no apparent order.
A voiceover located from a position of “super-observer”,
guides us to different ends of the world. With a markedly objec-
tive tonality, it will use these apocalyptic prophecies to ironically
conclude that we will never be able to contemplate the role of the
observer and the meaning of events and images.
164

Nouvelle Science Vague Fiction, 2011. HD video and 3D animation. 20.37 min.
Original soundtrack by Jonathan Saldanha.
165

166

III

B O D I ly U n C O n S C I O U S - A C O n V E R S AT I O n W I T h M I C h A E l TA U S S I G
168

Bodily Unconscious:
A conversation with Michael Taussig
Michael Taussig is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia

University. He is the author of several books that, in a literary
fashion, combine Marxist theory, social critique, ethnographic
research, and story telling. Since 1969 he has conducted field-
work in South-America, particularly in Colombia and Ecuador.
His wide-ranging research focuses on – amongst other topics –
the commercialization of peasant agriculture, slavery, hunger,
commodity fetishism, the impact of colonialism, “shamanism”,
secrecy, and terror. Taken together, his research into these top-
ics comprises what is now regarded as a highly original and
influential body of work. His writing on concealment, revelation,
and notions such as “epistemic murk” has especially influenced
this book because of the way that it unsettles clear subject-
object distinctions. This interview took place in Berlin, 2012.
Godofredo Pereira - Reading your books one finds stories inhab-

ited by multiple objects; state monuments, gold, cocaine, or
statues of the Devil. Therefore I wanted to start by asking
you, what are the properties of objects and things that we
find so attractive? And how is that you became so attracted
to them?
Michael Taussig - My first reaction would be to think more in

terms of substance than object. What’s the difference? For
169

instance, I think of gold and cocaine as substances that

contain evil and a Bataille-type of excess. Of course they
are objects – objects being anyway such a wide definition
- that have these fascinating qualities. I suppose the ques-
tion is how much of it lies in objects and how much of it lies
in the history of which objects have been part. For instance
gold: you wouldn’t say that it is inherently good or bad, but
it comes so saturated by legend in many cultures both pre-
historic and historic. So one ends up thinking that some
objects get picked out and become historic actors. Cocaine
has an incredible history too, both prior to Spanish con-
quests and in the last 50 to 100 years. Again there is this
connection between some properties in the substance and
these mighty myths. But when it comes to monuments,
for instance, in Defacement,1 or Magic of The State,2 these
strike me as imbued with aura, which is not necessarily
to be thought as symbolic or un-symbolic but as a sort of
mystery that exceeds the symbolic value. In comparison
with gold and cocaine, monuments strike me as a differ-
ent class of object.
I only started thinking of objects in the way you’re getting at,
with My Cocaine Museum,3 and that’s where I did another
turn, because after years of going there (Colombia) for short
visits it was only in the nineties that I started thinking of the
1
Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative
(Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1999).
2
Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997).
3
Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2004).
170

insane amount of work that the people performed in order

to get tiny bits of gold: how clever you have to be, living in
nature, making canoes, battling against mighty currents
with the strength of arms. And the canoes are sometimes
full of cement bags, all this effort to make a church out of
cement, to build a garden that works and a house against
the rain and the mud with only a machete at your disposal...
its overwhelming to think of the amount of interaction with
the natural world. And that’s when I started to dive into
the world of materiality, in a very different way from his-
toric materialism, by standing in awe of the labour and the
interaction of human beings with mud, water, stone, rain
and heat, and that’s why that book was written like that. So
where you see a uniformity of objects I would emphasise
the break.
GP - Throughout your work one finds the idea that the monument,
apart from its representational or symbolic characteristics,
has an implicit attraction for defacement or vandalism. Isn’t
this something that forces an engagement with the monu-
ment in a material or visceral way?
MT - My thoughts were along the lines that monuments do plead

for defacement in order to make themselves stronger, and
that’s the terrible iconoclastic paradox. It seems that these
objects, monuments, are human-like once we deface them,
then and only. In Germany some artists take the position
that any monument is inherently fascistic. But that is what
makes the folk authors of the portales in Venezuela - within
the cult of Maria Lionza - exceedingly interesting. These
171

are mini-monuments, democratic or people’s monuments.

Consequently the question would be, what’s the difference
between religion and the state? And looking at these por-
tales, once you move into the sphere of ritual and religion,
another form of perception occurs. And you have to ask
yourself, “why didn’t we ask these questions about state
monuments?” Aren’t they religious, and aren’t they mas-
sively involved in ritual? And that seems to flood the dis-
cussion with rich ideas.
GP - I suppose every state monument in the history of architec-

ture, engages essentially with death, with a language that
emerges of religious or transcendent architectures, that is
then captured by the state, to invest its institutional power
with an immaterial capacity. Isn’t this present in The Magic
of The State? I mean the circulation whereby the object
becomes animated and the body becomes petrified? Through
death and spirit, architecture is invested with something
that gives life to state power.
MT - Yes, indeed. I am thinking that where animism becomes

relevant (or my term the Nervous System), is where every
critique (and this applies to defacement as well) is always
going to be counteracted by animistic force; a literally reac-
tionary force that comes out of society or out of the nature
of knowledge. And by the Nervous System I understand
this continuous thrust and counter-thrust, so all that work
is part of a series of challenges that are doomed to be out-
paced and out-thought by that which we are trying to explain.
And this boils down often to the play of order and disorder.
172

I thought about this in the days of postmodernism where

fragmentation and disorder where highly valued, and my
sense was that these were mere opposites to tropes of order
and narrative, simple inversions. Whereas the Nervous
System – which is both representation and reality – is con-
stantly moving in this field of tension; in this field of force
between these oppositions. So the animistic quality is the
endless capacity of that which you are explaining to come
back and sabotage what you are doing.
GP - Is there an issue of time in the way that you relate these

oppositions?
MT - When I think of time it is to do with memory and Benjamin’s

theses on the philosophy of history i.e. the different types
of time: the now time, the stasis, in shock, for instance,
rapid acceleration, a cessation of movement followed by a
disturbance in the sense of time or the state of emergency
where time seems to stand still but is pregnant with shat-
tering consequences…
GP - I was thinking in terms of events outside of human control,

the obvious example being natural catastrophes.
MT - Time as history is important in my notion of the “bodily

unconscious”, and secondly in my interest in ethnographic
diaries where time is scattered and played back on itself
as afterthoughts. In the diary form, and the diary as a sub-
stitute for explanation, the diary is a mere record which
my generation tended to look down upon but it suddenly
173

seems to now have an allure. And these facts are in the flow
of time, but they also stand out from time – whereas time
in Marx or Freud, is always a historical narrative of devel-
opment of the world of the economy or of the individual.
Hence my interest, in the last few years, in the diary form;
and the diary form as even superior to explanation. I’ve
often thought of the diary as another organ of the human
being, like a liver or brain. It becomes very personal and it
literally becomes a fetish. You can see that in I Swear I Saw
This4, or in the description Benjamin gives of his notebooks,
and even more in the people that write about this: they fet-
ishise his fetishisation. And this is really a fetish, really
part of the human body while somewhat superior to it, and
therefore it has this strange relationship to time. The diary
contains certain elements of time in relation to this object
that becomes a human being.
But the second connection I wanted to make was this idea
I call the “bodily unconscious” that I see is ascending or
being manifest in a new way with relation to global warm-
ing and the change in the nature of the physical reality. I
call it historical but in a sense that encompasses more than
time, or not just time, but greenhouse gas change of the
planetary climate.
GP - Which relates to the “anthropocene”, the new geological

moment of the earth as argued by Paul Crutzen?
4
Michael Taussig, I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely
My Own (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011).
174

MT - Exactly.
GP - In your early work you look at the colonial Other, for instance
in Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America5 where
you confront different forms of labour and relations to
nature. But slowly this clear-cut distinction seems to become
less relevant. For instance, in Magic of The State you sug-
gest the practice of pilgrimage as a method of not so much
explaining but of slowly absorbing. And this seems to be
similar to our discussion of the notebook.
MT - Definitely, because you re-read and re-read and some

thoughts emerge between the lines; things come at you.
But yes there is something very different; the absorption
and pilgrimage theory is very different. For instance in the
sixth chapter of Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man,6
“the colonial mirror of production”, I focus on the projection
of the Western savage onto the Indians and then acting in
accordance to it. So on the one hand I spoke there of a mode
of mimesis or mirroring, and later, on the other hand, pil-
grimage as a completely different process. Two very differ-
ent modes of talking about something, of explaining even.
I was also wondering if the fetish would be an important
entry into this discussion?
5
Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Cha-
pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
6
Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Ter-
ror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
175

GP - I always have present the idea by William Pietz of the fetish

as the “space of revolution”, and its history, as a history of
cultural conflict. As such it can be seen as a field of opera-
tion, not so much against the fetish, but from it.
MT - But the important consequence of bringing colonial features

into the discussion is that fetish then would be what the
other person is doing, not me. That’s the reason why many
people are constantly fascinated by those “others” – because
of their fetish perceptions. But my attitude towards the
fetish, and I think some other people share this of course,
is against what I thought was the classic Marxist attitude
which was to de-fetishise the fetish. Whereas on the con-
trary I think one should add to the fetish quality of the fet-
ish - that’s the strategy - and that’s what I make to be the
Benjaminian point. This is a more specific statement than
saying that one is interested in the poetics of the fetish or the
poetics of the commodity and I found it to be a creative and
generative approach. I suppose it fits in the current Latour
influenced enthusiasm of objects becoming alive and seeing
the hybridinal qualities of subject and object. But when I
read Latourians I guess I’m always disappointed that they
are not interested in poetics i.e. they are not that interested
in literature or being literary. And they don’t deepen them-
selves in some of the Marxist properties of objects.
GP - In a way as if everything becomes democratically objec-

tified and pristine?
176

MT - In my colours book (What Color Is the Sacred 7), particu-

larly if you look into the chapter called “where stones walk
like man”, my notion of the “bodily unconscious” gives an
alternative view of objects and magic. Here I am heavily
invested in anthropology of sorcery and magic in which
(thanks to what we call sympathetic magic) there’s a connec-
tion between words, bodies and substances used in ritual,
to affect one another. What is underlying here is a notion
that Mauss and Hubert call “mana”, which is a very gen-
eral but sympathetic vibration between substances and
humans, between bodies, the sun and the moon, the tides,
human bodies. That is the universe I see resurrected by
global warming, creating a new connection of the human
body to other bodies, changing the mind-body relationship.
The “bodily unconscious” is to a large extent an actual entity
that is called the autonomic nervous system. This is some-
thing that is designated as such by a professor of Physiology
at Harvard, Walter B. Canon, in his 1920s book called The
Wisdom of The Body.8 Cannon was asked by the US army to
study shock in the First World War by examining American
soldiers dying from rapid blood loss in France and Belgium.
And this enlarged his views of the body as an internally regu-
lated mechanism that he took from the French philosopher
Claude Bernard’s notion of the internal milieu. It’s a sim-
ple notion in which everything is like a cybernetic system.
7
Michael T. Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009).
8
Walter B Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,
inc, 1939).
177

For Cannon shock was due to overworking of adrenaline,

and he is the first person to pin down this overwhelmingly
important function. A gearing of the body to run, “fight or
flight”. Very productive for a short amount of time, but then
the body just exhausts itself. Now, what interests me in
his notion is that the body is performing a series of opera-
tions every second without you knowing it, hence the term,
the autonomic nervous system. And if it were conscious, it
probably wouldn’t work - Its better that this remains uncon-
scious, but not the Freudian unconscious. It is rather the
bodily unconscious, closer to Nietzsche. That was shock, so
important in WWI and the avant-garde aesthetics of Dada
and Surrealism and all that heroic male stuff. Later in 20th
century the biochemistry and physiology of the steroids
were discovered to play a fundamental role in stress — just
as stress came to displace shock as the governing trope for
dealing with daily life (the steroids were also in the adrenal
gland (in the cortex, not the medulla).
So the question for me is, as the planet gets warmer which
we now see in unexpected perturbations, very hot, very cold,
flooding, storms, will this in some way will create a new
cybernetic set-up for the human body, and will the bodily
unconscious have to work in different ways? Will this pro-
duce a different mind-body relationship? And yes! I think it
will, along with new language of ritual and magic geared to
the new desperation and the new ideas regarding the envi-
ronment, ideas that need to be freed from the alienating
language of what is taken as “science” (see the afterword
to My Cocaine Museum).
178

Also, as mankind is no longer seen as inhabiting an anthro-

pocentric universe, we are forced to think now of reality in
terms of Greek or Medieval theories, of microcosm-macro-
cosm, in which not only is man not an island entire unto
himself but becomes more like Alfred Whitehead’s idea
of internal relations. Whitehead’s idea was that an object
contains within itself the relationship to the other and its
ramifying context(s). So the stress on the Universe produces
a sense of the interconnectedness of things understood not
as things per se but as nodes in networks. And this is impor-
tant because Humankind is again seen as connected to all
sorts of other things that have now become unstable. It is
from here that I start to think about the poetics of sorcery
and magic (things that we can get from all sorts of sources)
of traditions in which this sense of interconnectedness
(often through language) is crucial for a writer like myself.
You compose stories, fables, which are meant to intervene.
My chapter on “where stones walk like men” in my color
book is a succinct example.
But there is still a third property that is important in this
“bodily unconscious”, and that is that it cannot be exposed
too much. For two reasons: If you try and analyse it too much,
it can no longer operate and, secondly you run the risk of
giving the state and the corporations further control. This
also relates in the end to my practice of writing, in which
the poetry of “objects” or the poetry of interconnections,
images and stories become crucial. This would be analysis
in action, where the philosopher would not always be Apol-
lonian, standing back.
179

GP - The poetics of sorcery takes you to the importance of practice,

the technique. But the “bodily unconscious” also brings to
mind Latin America where the ground is both nature, ani-
mated, alive, but also a source of developmental possibili-
ties, with oil and gas.
MT - Well it depends on what “Latin America” we are talking about.

And this takes us to the question in Adorno and Horkheimer,
of what a yielding relation to nature would be. To yield as
opposed to mastery (and here we would have to go back
and talk more about Hegel’s master and slave). That’s what
your question points to, but none of us have figured it out.
What would be a yielding relationship — i.e. the mastery of
non-mastery?
GP - This is an issue that has traversed this conversation, if we

take, as you suggested, the fetish as the starting point. And
in Pietz, the fetish is, such as nature, always irreducibly
material, something that beyond discourse or use, or func-
tion, still remains in excess.
MT - I have another view of this object theory discussion, whereby

it seems to me that every now and again, human cultures
invoke the remote past, or pre-history, or some original
time before time. And this occurs perhaps in crisis, both
personal and macroeconomic. In Australian dream time,
for instance, in the initiation of young men and women,
the bodies of dancers are painted, the people meet for an
extended period of days or weeks, scarification of the body
or the male genitals may occur, and the initiates are exposed
180

to secrets. My experience and reading of South American

shamanism (so called) suggests a similar reaching back
to a supposed prehistory at time of misfortune, pregnancy
and menstruation; see my book on defacement concerning
the Selk’nam of Tierra del Fuego, for example); in the time
before time animals and plants and stones were like human
beings in a very different object universe. And I wonder if we
look at the people in this conference in Berlin on animism,
fascinated by things and objects as alive, whether they are
not unconsciously entering into a new dreamtime caused
by the sense of impending disaster, returning, that is to a
time before time when stones talked to man and, so some
would say, society was classless.
181

ThE TOWER AnD ITS GhOST
“The cosmopolitical proposal is incapable of giving a ‘good’

definition of the procedures that allow us to achieve the
‘good’ definition of a ‘good’ common world. It is ‘idiotic’ in
so far as it is intended for those who think in this climate of
emergency, without denying it in any way but nonetheless
murmuring that there is perhaps something more impor-
tant.”
— Isabelle Stengers 1
“Any work of interpretation includes elements of uncertainty

and intellectual self-effacement.”
— Michael T. Taussig 2
“And then, oh, what to say? Bradley is no more than a detail;

His torment is lost in the great universal torment.”
— Victor Hugo 3
“To write one must return, return home at least.”

— Marc Augé 4
182

The Tower and Its Ghost
A Cosmopolitical narrative from Botswana
Marcello Maggi
1234
I have recently returned from Gabarone, the capital of Botswana,

where I lived for four years. A series of chance events which were
difficult to control had brought me to the city. In the same way, a
series of accidental circumstances would dictate my departure.
I am a visual artist and that is how I came across the story I am
about to tell.
Soul
It was last January, I don’t remember the date, but I do remember

the heat and the pain when a Zimbabwean artist tattooed three
runes on the left side of my neck. The day before, I had visited a
friend who was a ngaka ya setso:5 he used those Scandinavian
magical stones, although in Botswana there are other ways of
1
Isabelle Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”, in Making Things Public:
Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge,
MIT Press, 2005), 995.
2
Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (The
University of North California Press, 2010), 3.
3
Victor Hugo, Contro la Pena di Morte, (RCS, Milano, 2010), 228.
4
Marc Augé, Rovine e Macerie. Il Senso del Tempo, trans. A. Serafini (Torino, Bol-
lati Boringhieri, 2004), 10.
5
Traditional doctor.
183

interpreting fate. He had travelled widely, and had, for many

years, denied his hereditary mission. On my insistence, however,
and in light of our great friendship, he decided to open the bag
of runes and tell me how things stood. The symbols shown in the
stones he pulled from the bag spoke of me in mysterious ways;
the message would be indelible.
While I was still sitting there, next to a woman with a large
rabbit tattooed on her midriff, both of us waiting for protective
cream to be applied, I got a phone call; the keys to the tower had
finally been found. Someone from the prison administration
had them. I wanted to set up an exhibit in the tower – about a
hundred automatic drawings, in ink on paper, depicting angelic
beings. The idea was to take my inspiration from Klee’s Angelus
Novus – the Benjaminian angel of disaster – but drawing out
its meaning, and introducing motifs from a post-nuclear and
cybernetic age in a place such as Botswana, which had witnessed
the extreme acceleration of “progress” while maintaining sites
full of secular fascination, original places in which everything
might yet begin again. So, having waited this long, I could now
open the door to the tower and see the place where I planned to
set up my exhibition. I needed to get to know the interior of the
building as soon as possible. The idea was to place the figures
in ascending order along the stairway that led to the top. I also
wanted to prepare a video in collaboration with Steve, an artist
from Cape Town, to be projected on the tower’s façade; it would
be shot from the rooftop, capturing a panoramic view of the town,
as if through the eyes of one of Wim Wenders’ angels. The idea
for this site specific intervention had come to me some months
before, when I was visiting some friends from the Tapong the
art centre of the “Village” (one of the town’s central neighbour-
184

hoods). I noticed the tower standing right directly in front: about

ten metres high, with a small door and four tiny windows, two on
each of the side façades. What I found most interesting was its
verticality, an “axiomatic metaphor” which engaged the whole
psyche, an anthropologist of the imaginary might say:6 a symbol
of spiritual ascension, but also of fall. The first thing I thought
of was Klee’s angel.
I asked about the building’s purpose and was told it was
the old prison tower, the place where they used to hang the con-
victs. Next to the tower there were other buildings in ruins, these
were the old prison facilities. The tower had long been the high-
est building in Gabarone – excluding, of course, all the recent
architecture, starting in the late 1970’s. I was also told that the
building was about to be classified as a monument. Among the
few monuments in town – the Morula Tree National Monument,
the Sir Seretse Khama Monument, the BDF Monument, and not
much more – the tower stands out, since it is the only one to be
an architectonic construction, not a statue or a tree. There was
also talk of setting up an extension of the Tapong in the prison,
or after its restoration, turning it into a museum. In any case, the
former prison was also to become a monument. Given the absence
of other architectural monuments in the city, this information
puzzled me. If the stone tower was in good condition and appeared
to have some architectonic interest, the ruined prison, on the
other hand, seemed to me of no value at all. There had been talk
of the future of the two buildings for quite some time now, but
the agreement with the National Museum hadn’t yet been settled.7
6
Gilbert Durand, Les Structures Anthropologiques de l’Imaginaire (Paris: Dunod,
1992).
7
The local journal Mmegi, on the 18th May 2011, mentions an interesting article
185

The National Museum was where I first headed, certain I

would obtain some further information about the tower, as well
as the necessary authorisation to carry through my artistic inter-
vention. There I was told the National Museum had no jurisdic-
tion on the building; I had to visit the National Archives to find
exact data on the building and its ownership. So, in the days that
followed, I examined the archives for records, but, despite the
staff’s help, I found nothing. There seemed to be no historical
record of the tower.
I abandoned my research for the time being and trusted the
riddle to a journalist friend. Busy with other tasks, I had nearly
forgotten my project when, on that torrid, cloudless, day I got the
call. Dodo, the journalist, was calling to say she had found both
the keys and some papers concerning the tower in a department
of the Prison Administration. When I got there, I was given the
following instructions: I should declare, in an application form,
my personal data, as well as the objectives and purposes of my
request. At the moment I was still unaware that this writing
would be the ultimate reason for my research, so I just declared
my artistic motivation. The request was denied; it was, a priori,
impossible that it would even be considered, because my position
would not allow it: I was not researching under the auspices of
any university, nor was I a member of any NGO. I decided, with
no hard feelings, to postpone the exhibition indefinitely once
more. But since that day when I got Dodo’s call, things began to
happen to me, a series of events, a subtle sequence of circum-
stances which made the tower become a kind of obsession of
mine, a “savage object”. It was as if it was asking me insistently
to unfold its meaning, to use it, to open it up to new possibili-
ties. And yet, at the same time, as if due to some intentional and
186

violent cruelty, the tower was able to escape the attribution of

any plausible meaning.
I kept meeting with Dodo to collect more information on
the subject. She told me she had been born in that neighbour-
hood, and that the Village had once been the historic centre of
Gabarone. She wanted to tell me what she knew about the tower.
It held a disturbing allure: besides confirming that that was where
everyone said the convicts were executed by hanging, she added
that the tower was inhabited by the ghost of a prisoner. The news
impressed me; I became convinced that my urge to represent
spiritual beings in that place was not about showing the horror
of the world as seen through the eyes of astral intelligences in
some drawings. It was horror, to be sure, but that of a single soul,
and an earthly one, still tethered to the world of matter. Not a
hundred angels, but one singular being: a ghost.
A few days later, I received a call from the National Museum.
Thanks to information obtained from the Botswana Society 8
they now knew the true reason why the tower had been built; it
was a water tower. It had last been operating during the years
of the British “protectorate”. This information, they told me,
had been found in Alec Campbell and Mike Main’s book, Guide
to Greater Gaborone.9 The book, which seems to be a simple but
much detailed touristic guide, has the undoubted merit of having
about this issue. Accessed at: http://www.mmegi.bw/index.php?sid=915&dir=2011/

May/Wednesday18.
8
A non−governmental institution dedicated to scientific, historic and cultural
research on the country. Available at: www.botsoc.org.bw.
9
Alec Campbell and Mike Main, Guide to Greater Gaborone (Botswana: Pula
Press, 2003).
187

been written by two renowned experts on Botswana. However, the

page which mentions the tower and its original function does
not quote any sources.10 Meanwhile, I was so deeply involved in
all other sorts of research that I did not attach much importance
to the news received, despite the revelation it carried.
Stars
An atmosphere of uncertainty and mystery hovered around the

tower, such imprecision of data as to confuse and obscure the
meaning and value of an object that was about to be declared a
monument. It seemed to me that the most important thing in the
tower was its ghost, even if some now said that nobody had ever
been hanged in that place. I could say that what interested me
most in the architectonic construction was its Phantom Objec-
tivity, to transpose, and therefore “betray”, Taussig’s meaning.11
If the expression is meant to explain what petrifies social life,
for me that stone building was animated with a force capable of
resisting any definitive objectification. In that tower, there really
was a ghost, and I had no other option but to go back to unearth it.
Conferring with Dodo, we thought that the most obvious
thing to do was to ask people who had been born and raised in
the Village; this enabled us to gather precious information. But
finding the locals was far from simple, because the Village had
changed over the years: from the living centre of a country’s
10
In any case, in their book I was able gather more accurate historic data necessary
to develop my research.
11
Cf. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: a Study in Ter-
ror and Healing (Chicago, University of Chicago, 1987).
188

history, it became, due to rapid urban expansion, a residential

neighbourhood. Besides the numerous and relatively recent pri-
vate residences, there are small buildings to house the professors
at UB (University of Botswana). Nonetheless, we started by trying
to pick out those of the passers by who seemed to have belonged
there for some time now. The first was the old guard of the City
Council, the adjoining construction on the tower’s left side. Short
and thin, his name was Tawonga: “That was the tower where
prisoners were hanged”, he confirmed, claiming, very matter-of-
factly, that the spirit of a prisoner who was hung long ago still
inhabits the tower. He said that, at night, his presence is easily
detected, for he makes indescribable sounds; a mixture of piercing
howls and powerful laughs. Some nights, Tawonga added with a
wary expression (as if revealing an unutterable secret), the ghost
climbs the outer stairs to the roof and, once on the rooftop, sits
down to gaze upon the city from that unique perspective. When
he is up there, the night becomes even darker and all the stars
disappear. We look for confirmation from any other passer−by.
We approach Dabilo, a woman who sells sweets and phone cards
from a stall on the street corner:
— “The ghost exists, I met him once and looked him in the
face,” said Dabilo. “I was returning home one night, walk-
ing down the little street by the tower and, when I turned
the corner, I saw him: he had the face of Miriam Makeba.”
— “Miriam Makeba? The South-African singer, who died

not long ago?”
— “Yes, her.” He smiled at me and disappeared all of a sudden.
189

The ghost’s existence is recognised and acknowledged by most of

the local residents, although some did deny it or refuse to talk to
me. A man walking by stops to tell me that not only does the ghost
exist, but he often comes into his property to steal his chickens.
Every time the man finds a chicken missing in the morning, he
goes to the tower and finds, by the small door, clearly visible
blood stains; the ghost has sacrificed the animal and devoured
it. I write it all down in a notebook, thinking that it is enough for
the day. Dodo and I agree to return to the area near the tower to
try to reconstruct yet more fascinating episodes. What I didn’t
know, in fact, was that I would soon have to leave the country.
Rope
I started doing more research, with few bibliographical refer-

ences. There were enough, though, to satisfy my ever-increasing
curiosity about Botswana and its capital – although I lived there,
I did not know much, and what I did know was sketchy. I realized
that, if the data we have today goes back to Prehistory (to the
times of the Australopithecus, the South-African Thaung baby
killed by an eagle two million and a half years ago), the fact is
that what Western culture first learned of this territory dates
back to the Kongolkonferenz documents (1884-1885). Before it
was declared an area under English “protectorate” – Bechuana-
land – this territory of Southern Africa, almost completely barren,
was the stage for many tribal wars. The main ethnic rivalries
were between the Khoikhoi and the Basarwa: the former claimed
dominance over the latter, considering themselves to be the “the
real people” and considering the other San: “outsiders”. But if the
190

Khoikhoi’s pastoral culture caused them to slowly migrate south,

the San continue to occupy the lands of the plateau to this day.
Since their DNA is without hybridizations, they are considered
to be one of the last living groups directly descended from the
ancient population out of which mankind evolved. They formed
nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers, people said to be endowed
with sophisticated sensorial abilities.12 But they had to suffer
abuse on the part of several other ethnic Botswanan groups,
such as the Bangwaketse, the Bangwa and the Bakwena. The
latter, after occupying the Bakhalagari area, in Molepolole, were
themselves victims of the Boers’ Great Trek and of other groups
such as the Bakololo.
The history of the San people is a succession of injustices
that last to this very day: we have only to point out the high inci-
dence of AIDS and the humiliation they have been subjected to
12
Elias Canetti takes literally a pioneering work by W. H. I. Bleek, Lucy Catherine
Lloyd and Georges McCall Theal, Specimens of Bushman Folklore (London: G.
Allen & Co., 1911), 330-339 330-339): “A man tells the kids that watch over the
arrival of his grandfather, “Look ye around for grandfather, for grandfather
seems to be coming: this is why I feel the place of his body’s old wound”. The
children look around: the children perceive the man coming. They say to their
father: “A man is coming yonder”. Their father says to them: “Grandfather comes
yonder, he would come to me: he was the one whose coming I felt at the place of
his old. [...] An ostrich walks basking in the sun. Is bitten by a back insect [...]
the ostrich scratches his neck with a paw. The Bushmen feel anything at the
bottom of his own neck, in the precise place where the ostrich scratches. It’s
like the feeling of blows that strike. This feeling tells the bushman that there
is an ostrich around.” Cf. Elias Canetti, Masse et Puissance (Paris, Gallimard,
1966), 357-358.
191

by the governmental authorities, who, for several years now, have

been trying to remove them from the Kalahari Game Reserve, due
to their agreements with the diamond companies.
As far as the capital, Gabarone, in the days of the “protec-
torate”, the Village used to be its administrative centre. Besides
the tower and the prison, the area included a fortress, the first
post office in the country, the Magistrate’s House and a cemetery.
Today the Tapong art centre is located in the site that was once
the Magistrate’s House. Thus, the spatio-temporal sense of the
tower is closely linked to the adjoining structures. Although in
the past its function was not that of a prison, it nonetheless gives
off the colonial power’s force of discipline and punishment. How-
ever, the rope that connects it to the past, in a strange semiotic
metamorphosis, is the same that binds it to the present: we must
stress the fact that Botswana still considers the death penalty
to be legitimate.13 And if the tower has withstood the passage of
time, in contrast to the prison ruins, such resistance brings it
closer and connects it to a present in which, on the former site
of the Magistrate’s House, an art centre was built. The name of
the centre, Tapong, is tellingly allusive: in Setswana, the local
language, it means rope.
The tower is a historical sign,14 but one in permanent change:
it always refers back to a sign other than itself. It carries out a
strange gesture of de-territorialisation, at once standing in the
same place and remaining within itself and (magically) resisting
13
See here: www.ditshwanelo.org.bw/death_penalty.html.
14
On the concept of the historic sign, cf. Santino Cavaciuti, “Il segno storico e il
problema della sua conservazione”, in AAVV, Semantica delle Rovine (Rome:
Manifestolibri, 2006), 271-274.
192

193

the setbacks of time (urban transformations, the erosion of the

years). As a sign, as a trace or mark, its meaning is purely archeo-
logical: its “origin” and its “coherent reason” can be deduced and
take on meaning if we decide to see it from that constitutive “ver-
tical” suggested by its immediate presence. Let us now consider
the spatio-temporal factors. If, in its spatial dimension, the tower
belongs to its place since the time it was built, in the temporal
dimension, on the other hand, the past, present and future of
this work of architecture are transformed in meaning and value:
first, the times of the protectorate, when the tower expressed
its functionality in the same rigid terms in which it was framed
between the prison, the City Council and the Magistrate’s House.
The setting is less logical in the present, however, its meaning
being continuously questioned by two institutional domains:
the prison and the museum (domains which, by the way, would
be both considered “heterotopic” by Michel Foucault).15 Here,
space is no longer rigid and the structure is not framed ration-
ally: the prison is in ruins, the City Council deals with different
regulations and the Magistrate’s House has given way to an art
centre. In the future (a future whose possibilities belong to the
present) the tower shall acquire a new setting; a monumental
frame which will connect it to the fate of the prison and, in a
certain way also, to the fate of Tapong. If the present decides the
future of the two constructions, by monumentalizing them, thus
15
For Foucault, heterotopic spaces are spaces which: “(…) distinguish themselves
for being connected to all other spaces, in a way that suspends, neutralises or
reverses the set of relations they themselves draw, reflect or mirror (…) spaces
which, in some way, are in contact with all others, and yet, contradict all other
spaces”. Michel Foucault, Eterotopia. Luoghi e non-luoghi metropolitani (Milano:
Mimesis, 2005), 19.
194

harking back to the rigid sense of a colonial past, it will do so by

definitively setting them in a globalised “spherologic” space16 in
which everything must be included if it is not to lose its meaning,
its consistency. In this hyper-inclusive stage, the small windows
on the sides of tower, which now resemble blind eyes, will again
become essential devices of a face: the stone face of a Bifrontal
Janus. This image of the sacred divinity with two faces, symbol of
passages, thresholds, and new beginnings – Varro defined Janus
as the creator par excellence17 – moved me to explore a frantic,
almost absurd, circle of ideas.
Now I am here, back in my own country. I am still writing,
researching, continuously looking for meaning. But, at this
remove, everything becomes vaporous: meaning is extended,
seeming to include the place where I find myself as well. I remem-
ber having omitted an essential aspect in my research, one which
would have altered its course had it been considered right away:
the fact that animism is the most diffused religion in Botswa-
na.18 Now my bibliographical resources are even scarcer and I
am reduced almost exclusively to the internet. I remember Bot-
swana and its nostalgic mystery and, through the virtual screen
of my computer I still look for that link, that subtle rope that
connects me to those places. I keep finding information, mostly
16
For the concept of sphere and spherology, see Peter Sloterdijk. Cf., for example,
L’Ultima Sfera. Breve Storia Filosofica della Globalizzazione (Rome: Carocci, 2002).
17
Marco Terenzio Varrone [Marcus Terentius Varro], Della Lingua Latina, VII, p. 26-27.
18
On the idea of animism as a mirror through which modernity sees itself and
its image of otherness, cf. Anselm Franke, "Much trouble in the transportation
of souls, or: the sudden disorganization of boundaries!", in Animism, vol. I. ed.
Anselm Franke (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2010), 11-53.
195

ethnographic, about the San. I come across important data that

invariably lead me back to the ghost in the tower: the star, in the
!Kung mythological tradition, is the heart of a dying shaman.19
And speaking of stars (those stars that the ghost managed to
make disappear in the dark), there is a disease that the San called
Star Sickness.20 The shamans used chickens to heal it. White and
black chickens were used in the healing rituals, to expel the evil
spirits. The same chickens the ghost used to steal. Those chickens,
I have just found out, are the most important food source in the
poor and rural areas: their absence indicates the most extreme
poverty. And then, I read something else in the news about Miriam
Makeba, who has very likely visited Botswana,21 and her never
ending fight for human rights.
The ghost, who lived in a tower whose original function was
difficult to identify, inhabited a death space 22 on which the natives
of the Village projected, through their fantasies, their identity, so
that they would not lose it, so that they could preserve it.
19
Cf. Anne Solomon, “The myth of ritual origins? Ethnography, mythology and inter-
pretation of San rock art,” South African Archaeological Bulletin 52 (1997): 3-13.
20
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Old Way: A Story of the First People (New York:
Picador, 2006), 272.
21
Miriam Makeba was married to the famous trumpet player Hug Masekela, who
lived in the country for a short period, during the times of the apartheid.
22
On the concept of death space, see Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism,
and the Wild Man: a Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago, University of Chicago,
1987), 10.
196

The Petrification of the Image
Ayesha Hameed
We start with two images: from the air, of tarps and cops; on the
ground, a pair of hands outstretched.
Or we start with an image remembered of a forest teeming
with vines and snakes and heat and danger. No place to be civil.
The Jungle
On the 22nd of September 2009 at 8am six hundred CRS officers

entered the wooded area outside Calais where migrants from
Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan had been
camped out over the course of several years en route to trying to
get into the UK. Although over 1500 people lived in these camps,
the publicity of the upcoming raid led several of them to leave
beforehand, leaving about 278 migrants there, at least half of
them children. It took the CRS 15 minutes to pass the human
shield created by activists and to clear the camp, sending the
migrants to detention centres across the country and minors to
the Metz-Queuleu detention centre. Then the bulldozers came
in and razed the site.
My point of entry into this event is the violence embedded
in calling where the migrants were living la jungle. The press
explains that it comes from a Pushtun word for the forest, but
that does not fully explain its significance, or why it became a
catch-all term for the living conditions for the migrants outside
199

of Calais. When migrants escaping the raid moved to the Gard

de Nord in Paris, the press dubbed the Park Villemin nearby as
the Parisian jungle.
The term la jungle became a modular term that linked
migrants to the outdoor spaces where they camped. But there
are other lives that arise in the circulation of the image of la
jungle that is separate from what it meant when it was coined by
the migrants themselves. But part of what makes this image so
easy to circulate is that congeals within it several ways of fram-
ing and controlling migration.
It is what Hito Steyerl would call a poor image from an imper-
fect cinema, an image whose value increases with its easy circula-
tion. The dissolution of bodies into the landscape gets congealed
into an image that takes on its own life, enters into the world of
exchange value. And what of the use value, the event itself? Steyerl
calls the residues of the poor images the wretched of the screen.
In the heightened attention to space and the life of things
and bodies, what is revealed are inner processes and logics of the
event or more precisely its immanent aesthetics. In other words,
rather than making a film or taking photographs, the event itself
produces its own imagery that contains an aesthetic quality that
is germane to its historical and political existence.
I.
This is an attempt to take stock of the razing of la jungle migrant

camp. To see what afterimages this event produces both material
and immaterial and the life that such images have. I want to look
at the circulation of three kinds of stories that bury and supplant
200

T h E P E T R I F I C AT I O n O F T h E I M A G E
the event itself in the zombie-like circulation of images in the

aftermath of a violent event.
I am interested in the life that is embedded in the circulation
of the image produced by a name like la jungle. The destruction of
the space, the violence of the razing that piles emblematically over
the violence of incarceration and the quest for asylum in a sense
transmutes the image of the jungle into something profanated,
but also animated in a monstrous condensation of person and
land that as an image is an actor.
The ideological work in linking these migrants to a space
called la jungle – especially in an urban setting like Paris is quite
clear, configuring them as inhabiting a state of nature, charging
them as other and as somehow primitive. I would like to push
this further and argue that the jungle describes a congealed
landscape, or what Adorno, in “the idea of natural history” would
call ontologized ahistorical nature, that is evoked in the service
of containing migrants, that plays a sleight of hand in invoking
a specific spatial location but then conferring on it a primordial,
ahistorical quality.
fig. 1 — Watercolour of Mowgli with Kaa and Bagheera.

La jungle is a site that constantly produces images. What is

staged is the irruption of history and fable in the invocation of
the term. In Hindi “jungle” is the word for forest, but in its transi-
tion to the West it gains another meaning. The jungle connotes
a wildness, a zone of danger, the victory of the viral and uncivi-
lized. It is feral like Mowgli the child of the commons who Peter
Linebaugh describes as standing at the threshold between the
lost life of the wilderness and the civilizing gesture of enclosure.
What is the razing of the jungle then but a rooting out of the virus
of otherness contaminating the inside, of the alternative of com-
mons to the striation of border control. The jungle is of another
place and time and can and must be purged. And Mowgli and the
jungle as repository of fable and myth are transmuted through
violence into objects both magical and profane.
The purging of the jungle and the mining of its fabular past is
measured by another fantasy: the spanning of the English Channel.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century French scientists
like Albert Mathieu and Thomé de Gamond proposed plans to
build tunnels under the channel with horse drawn carriages, lit
with lamps; then as an underground railroad. These utopian plans
saw a future without Mowglis, neat lines floating across space
unencumbered by any trace of the unwanted. A mythical future.
To Adorno, history and nature when examined separately,
take on an ontological, mythical quality. Mythical history is that
which is separated from the specificity and the locatedness of
nature while mythical nature, divorced from history or a sense
of progression, is configured as a perpetual cycle. This sense of
perpetuity and ahistorical nature, is what I mentioned earlier is
evoked in the term la jungle. From this point of view, the problem
of housing migrants is seen as an unending cycle of containment
202

fig. 2 —Plan for the Channel tunnel by Thomé de Gamond.
and infiltration in constant alternation, where the problem of

migrants is displaced onto nature and built space.
However, the intersection of history and nature in the form
of natural history reveals the contingency, the transitory nature,
the tactical quality of both, and we can see what these reified con-
cepts look like once they disenchant one another. These remnants
of reified nature, are the only way we can move from the world
of appearances and totality to things. In terms of this discus-
sion, the primordiality, the ahistoricality of the term la jungle is
demythified by revealing its complicity with the enforcement of
the UK and the EU border regimes, and with revealing how the
reification of migrant living conditions is used in the mobiliza-
tion of unfeasible spatial solutions.
203

Agency comes in the appropriation and disenchantment of

these reified objects, in unmasking of the “primordiality” of the
jungle, the persistence of migrants who inspite of the varieties
of terrible living conditions, in fact have remained a constant
presence in Calais, even at the expense of their own skin, their
bodily borders and health. These living conditions need to be
changed but the agency of migrants in the face of these draco-
nian measures cannot be denied. The border then inflects and
collapses not only the registers of the body, territory and state,
but also shows how the border is drawn in the cooptation of the
reified and abject body from above; and how resistance lies in
the demythification of that process from below.
II.
fig. 3 — Aerial view of a camp in the woods near Calais, known locally as la jungle.
Photo by Pascal Rossignol.
204

fig. 4 — Eric Besson press conference at la jungle. Photo by Jason Parkinson.
Then we have the media event – this is theatre. This is an image

of the aftermath of the highly publicized razing of the jungle. The
jungle is the stage, the media it’s chorus and the interior minis-
ter Eric Besson’s visit, that of the conquering hero. This media
event inhabits this site that is both evacuated of its migrants
and meaning, and in that evacuation makes for an image that
circulates with all the greater ease.
This turn to landscape as a means of control is an ongoing
strategy of containing migrants in this site that did not begin with
“the jungle”. To this end I would like to describe the built space of
the Sangatte refugee camp that preceded the establishment and
the destruction of the jungle outside of Calais.
The Sangatte Refugee Centre was originally a storage facil-
ity used in the construction of the Channel Tunnel. The Sangatte
Refugee centre was opened in August 1999 to provide food and
shelter to migrants in Calais hoping to get to the UK to claim
asylum status, and to prevent them from camping in a park in
205

the heart of Calais. The building, a 25 000 square metre old stor-
age house had no heat, and few showers and its target capacity
of 700 inhabitants was quickly exceeded, reaching 1800 in the
first year alone.
The tightening of the border to the UK turned Sangatte
into a city. As Didier Fassin notes “with its circulation of people
among a city of large tents, its huge canteen where long queues
waited for meals, its prefab buildings housing administrative
and medical services, and its open space for Muslim worship,
this ‘small town’ began to acquire distinctively urban features”.
But it was a city with flaws, where overcrowding and overflowing
toilets and bleak prospects for crossing made it a difficult place
to live. As one migrant states in the 2002 documentary Le Piège
de Sangatte: “There are two kinds of jails you can say, one is the
kind you are trapped and closed in. The other one is where they
don’t let you go anywhere. Not accepting and not letting anywhere.
In my point of view we’re in the second kind of jail.”
The sense of being trapped had its legal implications. Often
migrants sought to go to the UK as they spoke the language, and
had relatives there. They also hoped for better living conditions
than what they found in France. Also, as Mark Thomson states,
police outside the centre often prevented migrants from receiving
multilingual pamphlets with procedural information on applying
for asylum in France.
As one of his first acts as interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy
closed down the centre in 2003. The centre was described by UK
home secretary, David Blunkett as a “festering sore” in relations
between the UK and France. As a “magnet” for migrants and “evil”
smugglers, it became the scapegoat for the “problem” of migra-
tion. In other words, Sangatte as a reified site became the cause
206

of migration flow, rather than a spatial stopgap in a crisis in their

living conditions. After its closure, as migrants again lived pre-
cariously on the street, under bridges and in parks in Calais and
Paris, the media and the government began speaking warningly
of the spectre of a “Sangatte 2”. Sangatte 2 was a spectral place
that evoked the principle of the magnet as space and haunted the
discourse around immigration in Calais, and prevented the estab-
lishment of alternate living quarters, and confined humanitarian
organizations to providing food rather than shelter.
One anonymous member of the no border camp that summer
described the walk to the camp: “a six lane highway, littered with
signs of human habitation: abandoned blankets and shoes, and
narrow tracks along the roadside. We met groups of men going
in both directions, and they looked at us with unmasked surprise,
wondering who were these strange white-folk, who were not the
police, but were out walking their sunset trails. Grim destitution:
pockets of cardboard cities, huddled up against old industrial
warehouses, and hundreds of people queuing for food.” The camps
and personal property were destroyed on a regular basis by the
police, well before the September raid. There were no showers
and the water at the beach was heavily polluted. There was an
outbreak of scabies, and many migrants had leg injuries and cuts
as a result of falling from trucks and off fences.
El-do--: The desire for asylum in the UK, was described in
the Guardian and elsewhere as a quest for Eldorado - a spectral
place, like that of Sangatte 2 that belies the stringency of what
the migrants are contending with. Reports like that by the La
Coordination française pour le droit d’asile describe barriers
to migrants applying for asylum to France, including: the lack
of facilities for the many unaccompanied minors; the negative
207

experience of their reception; the lack of procedural information

on seeking asylum; the distance of Arras, the nearest centre from
Calais; the lack of accommodation etc. This is on top of the con-
tinuous harassments, fines for camping, frequent incarceration
that the migrant in Calais faces on a daily basis.
III.
This is a publicity still taken from the film Qu’ils reposent en revolt.
It is an image of the hands of a migrant who has attempted to
burn his fingerprints off so that he can avoid identification. His
hands then carries the imprint of the law and of his own journey.
But more than this we cannot look and we cannot look away. The
image, a publicity still for a film shot in black and white, whose
grainy texture is as much an image as the hands and scars them-
selves. We cannot look away and yet we look.
fig. 5 — Still from the film Q'ils reposent on revolt. Image by Sylvain George.

One of the biggest deterrents is the safe first country agree-

ment, otherwise known as Dublin 2. This law requires the migrant
to seek asylum in the first EU country that they have entered and
been fingerprinted in – which in many of these cases is Greece or
Italy where facilities are the least predictable, the rate of success
of being granted asylum is very low, and the treatment of asylum
seekers is very harsh. The looming presence of this third country,
and the threat of being deported back there, is so unacceptable
to many migrants that it became a common practice in the jun-
gle for them to try to erase their own fingerprints – by drinking
chemicals and by burning off the skin on their fingertips.
The act of self-injury resonates with the terribleness of living
conditions of the camps. It also forms a limit concept – making
the migrant body, the state and international law inextricable, and
collapsing several registers of border control. The implication of
the body within the topology of the border shows its relation to
Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject. According to Kristeva the
dissolution of boundaries gives rise to the abject. What divides
the subject from the world dissolves for the abject. To Kristeva,
the boundary between the body and outside becomes difficult
to differentiate from the body itself making what is outside, the
excremental, the grotesque and the unwanted, a part of the self.
It dissolves the orderedness of identity and the world, and ush-
ers in a state of indeterminacy, in-between-ness and ambiguity.
The implication of the abject body collapses the registers of
the state, territory and body onto the border. It also calls attention
to the different strategies of containment that borders operate
on and the fears that are concomitant with their dissolution. The
relocation of migrants from the parks of Calais to the Sangatte
Refugee Centre to the inhabitation of the jungle outside Calais,
209

in this light can be seen as spatial, environmental strategies

of containment in response to the infiltration and visibility of
migrants in city centres.
In this context then the border shifts around as well – where
through the Touquet treaty, the UK border controls move into
Calais, and into train stations and into jurisdiction of private
companies like Eurostar, where international law is established
between EU states to circumvent internal laws in dealing with
migrants, where between municipality and centre, between
nations – a game of pass-the-parcel is played around account-
ability in dealing fairly and systematically with asylum seekers
The image of the reified abject body parallels the congeal-
ing of the landscape of the jungle in the promulgation of bor-
der controls. From this perspective Sangatte’s description as a
“festering sore” – draws its appearance of veracity from the real
health problems of its inhabitants, and collapses the semantic
distance between the two. Continuing this logic, Sangatte con-
tains the disease of migrancy while the infiltration of migrants
into the parks of Calais and Paris infect these cities. Finally the
jungle is a primordial and unconfined space of disease, where the
humanitarian concern with living conditions collapses into its
treatment at the hands of the state that purges or vaccinates it.
The act of destroying these fingerprints and the image it
produces and which circulates recapitulates the moment of its
inception. In 1858 William Herschel the Chief Magistrate of
the Hooghly district in Jungipoor was finalizing a contract with
Rajyadhar Konai to purchase some “ghooting”, a binding material
to build light roads. When Konai was about to sign the contract,
Herschel was inspired to ask Konai to make a stamp of his hand
on the contract. Herschel had no thought of the actual imprint
210

and its veracity. Rather it was the gesture of implicating Konai’s

hand and by extension his body into the contract. “I was only
wishing to frighten Konai out of all thought of repudiating his
signature hereafter”. He wanted to frighten Konai into honouring
the contract by marking him and using that mark as a contract.
This gesture of pulling a hand to a document in the build-
ing of a country road in colonial India bookends the moment
of refusal and violent abject agency in the refusal of Dublin
2. In both moments the land is encoded into the hand and the
moment of frightening Konai the “native” non insurgent into
honouring his commitment to supply materials to build the road
is negated by the territorial tracks scored painfully on the hand
of the migrants travelling not in the margins but towards the
metropolitan centre and refusing the paper, legal and territorial
trails leading them there.
fig. 6 — Herschel fingerprint.
211

Conclusion
Between the poor image and the wretched of the screen lies the
ambivalent potential of the image that resides between revela-
tion and profanation. The wretched of the screen, the event itself
is the object always in excess of the poor image that circulates.
Congealed in the images is the tension between what is inside
and outside its frame. Thus the image of la jungle contains at its
margins the bodies of the migrants who live there; the hands and
burned fingerprints of these migrants encapsulates the journey
from Italy or Greece to France; the prehistorical of la jungle always
contains the fantasy of its own expulsion.
These images are de-congealed and torn apart by a method
- what Derek Gregory calls a montage, that swoops from the air
to the ground and is punctuated by irruptions of history and
memory. This is, following Sebald, a natural history of destruction
where the agency of the body is only recuperable in this collage of
multiple angles of space that is punctured by time and ravaged
in a hollowed out media event.
In The Wretched of the Earth Fanon says: “The appearance
of the settler has meant in terms of syncretism the death of the
aboriginal society, cultural lethargy, and the petrification of
individuals. For the native, life can only spring up again out of
the rotting corpse of the settler. This then is the correspondence,
term by term, between the two trains of reasoning.”
Petrification means to feel fear in the face of the power of
the settler. But more importantly, petrification means to turn
to stone, and this turning into stone is only measured when the
settler turns into a decaying mass, into the earth as well, into a
rotting corpse. And in this reckoning is where another life can
212

arise again. The native here could be the migrant or the refugee
and the settler could be the colonizer and the arm of the state,
and in their material relations is embedded the turning into
stone, decaying into earth. A liminal but spaced space inhabited
by what Mbembe calls the difference between the living dead
and the plain dead.
But this isn’t enough. Is there an analogous way for humans
to become nature through the ravages of capital just as nature
becomes animated under its guise? In a lecture in Philadelphia
Silvia Frederici describes how the labourer becomes the object
of his labour. Through thousands of generations of labour the
farm worker becomes a cow, the tiller becomes the fruit of the
soil, the sailor becomes the rhythm of the waves by lying on floor
of his ship and finding his way home. Here the pivot is the act
of labour that is the site of transmutation. This is the positive
register of becoming nature. What is its negative? It is the turn-
ing into stone, the production of death at the border, the turning
of the state into a corpse and the native into stone and an image
ingrained. But this isn’t enough.
213

214

On the Earth-Object
Paulo Tavares
Globalization
“Global history enters nature; global nature enters history: this

is something utterly new in philosophy”, Michel Serres wrote in
The Natural Contract, 1990.1 Certainly this was not the first time
humans realized that nature was a crucial factor in their future-
history. Yet the statement carries novelty, for the turn from the
80s to the 90s was perhaps the moment when it became possible
— and indeed necessary — to think the entanglements between envi-
ronments and humans, nature and history, at an unprecedented
scale: “global”. While the globe as a figure of thought had been
present throughout the history of western philosophy,2 Serres’
1
Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (University of Michigan Press, 1990), 4.
2
The idea of the globe, as Peter Sloterdjik’s spherology shows, dates back to the
metaphysics of classical antiquity. “Combining geometry with ontology”, ancient
philosophy/cosmology adopted the sphere as the representation of the totality
of the world and conceptualized humans as creatures that inhabited a global
construction. Images of the globe would be recurrently actualized throughout
European history as the elementary space from which the position of human-
ity in relation to nature was progressively defined. Sloterdjik then proceeded to
identify the multiple manifestations of the sphere/globe as a privileged mode of
depicting the world, from the visions of the sphere-as-cosmos of classic antiquity
up to early modernity/colonialism, when “metaphysical globalization” turns into
“terrestrial globalization”, that is to say, when the globe starts to be thought and
215

use of the term “global” is slightly – and significantly – distinct:

he refers less to a subjective projection or mathematical, carto-
graphic construction, and more to an objective, material reality
which arguably had no previous parallel in “natural history”,
something akin to the phenomena described by Frederic Jame-
son in the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1984: “a prodigious
expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas... a new
and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature”.3
The global-reach of the market and the geographic diffusion of
modern technologies drained out the resource of radical alterity
provided by Nature (with a capital letter), Jameson argues, dislo-
cating a fundamental referential point against which mankind
was conceived in western modernity. The transformation was
twofold: an entire new form of space was being produced while
simultaneously forcing society to assume a complete different
position in relation to it. For Serres the uniqueness of the situa-
tion was most perceptible precisely because of its (lack of) scale:
“suddenly a local object, nature, on which a merely partial subject
could act, becomes a global objective, Planet Earth, on which a new,
total subject, humanity, is toiling away”. 4 The course of history
has always been influenced, either constrained or potentiated,
produced in its earthly dimensions via European colonial expansion. Through-

out that history, a constant motive: the enunciation of power, mastery and rule
has been structurally attached to images of control and possession of the globe.
Peter Sloterdiik, Esferas II (Madrid: Siruela, 2003).
3
Frederic Jameson,”The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in Media and Cultural
Studies, ed. M. G. Durham & D. M. Keller (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 506.
4
Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1995), 5.
216

On ThE EARTh-OBJECT
by environmental conditionings, but now the human habitat

assumed different qualitative dimensions. The limits imposed
by nature were no longer given on a local – i.e. cultural – setting,
but had assumed global – i.e. universal – proportions. And hence
global nature’s subjective complement: humanity.
Michel Serres starts by describing Fight with Cudgels, a
painting by Francesco Goya produced between 1820 and 1823. In
the image two men are depicted in the middle of an open land-
scape, engaging in a duelo a garrotazos. They appear attacking
each other, while knee deep and sinking deeper into a swamp of
mud. Serres uses Goya’s image as an allegory to elaborate his
critique of the relationship between humans and their environ-
ment: the fight symbolizes war, and by extension the “social
contract”, and while war/politics is fought through, they seem to
be somewhat oblivious of their surroundings environment. And
yet they are entirely subject to the environment, and the mud will
swallow them up, unto the verge of “collective death”, regardless
the victor and the defeated. The preface to Serres’ book could
very well have been a plethora of paradigmatic environmental
disasters that the world has experienced in the last two decades
of the twentieth century. Most significantly, on the communist
side, the accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986,
which, as Mikhail Gorbachev himself put it, “was perhaps the
real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later”.5
On the capitalist side of the map, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in
1989, the largest oil-related accident in the history of the Unites
States before the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, whose
5
Mikhail Gorbachev, “Turning point at Chernobyl”, Project Syndicate, April 14th
2006, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/gorbachev3/English.
217

catastrophic effects on the pristine shores of Alaska turned into

a mass-media event that was fundamental in the crystallization
of a public sensibility in relation to the emergence of an envi-
ronmental crisis. If globalization has increasingly became an
objective reality and humanity a subjective consciousness, it is
not only because our nervous systems have been electronically
extended to the point of “global embrace”, as Marshal McLuhan
wrote in 19646, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because of
the potential consequences of what ecologist Wolfgang Sachs has
called a “massive accidental internationalization”.7 The emerging
“global nature” and its subjective complement, “humanity”, were
the two entangled outcomes of a dystopian future: the potential
of total disaster and subsequent impossibility for human life on
the planet forcefully unites us subjectively and objectively: mor-
ally as a trans-national community who bears the responsibility
of preserving the life of the planet; physically as a single species
inhabiting a common land upon which our existence is dependant.
Modernization, according to Serres, was founded on unre-
strained, unregulated violence, both civilian and military, directed
onto the natural world. Given the widespread ecological deple-
tion generated by the military-industrial complex of Cold War
economies, this new globe-object needed to be protected by the
introduction of a new form of legal contract between human-
ity and nature: the natural contract (as opposed to the “social
6
Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York and
London: Routledge, 2001), 3 (first published in 1964).
7
Wolfgang Sachs, “Environment”, in The Development Dictionary: a guide to knowl-
edge as power, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (New York and London: Zed Books, 2010), 25.
(first published in 1992).
218

On ThE EARTh-OBJECT
fig. 1. Francisco de Goya. Fight with Cudgels. 1820-1823. Oil, originally on plastering, transferred
to canvas.123 x 266 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.
contract”). Rather than the natural outcome of the progress and

material accumulation initiated with modernity/colonialism,
Serres’ “globalization” denotes an entire new spatial configura-
tion that, having emerged out of the former, positions a critical
perspective upon it. Insofar as mankind could design and oper-
ate technologies whose temporal, spatial and energetic dimen-
sions were at the same scale as worldwide phenomena, humanity,
observed collectively, turned into the equivalent of a natural
force: “from now on there will be lakes of humanity, physical
actors in the physical systems of the Earth”.8 “Global nature” is
therefore and above all a space defined by a new socio-geological
order in which the divisions that separated humanity and the
environment, culture and nature, the anthropological and the
geological have been blurred. In other words, spatial shifts were
8
1995), 8.
219

not only technological but relational, and therefore demanded

a “new geo-politics” which, ultimately, called for the establish-
ment of a New Constitution — “a new social contract”, as Serres
put it — in which nature was positioned on a common ground in
relation to humans and assumed the status of a right-bearing
subject: the living globe.
“Only One Earth”
Arguably, one of the main forces for the consolidation of globaliza-

tion was the construction of the environment as a symbolic site
for transnational collective identification as well as a new space
of intervention. Serres’ text owed much to this larger framework
that was formed during the 70s and 80s. Natural Contract can
be read alongside discourses that emerged out of the circles of
ecological science and environmental activism that had already
gained relative consensus in the forums of the “international com-
munity” by the time it was published. In 1987, for example, with
the publication of Our Common Future, the UN-commissioned
report on the global environment prepared for the Earth Summit
held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the notion of “sustainability” was
officially introduced as a central mandate in the spheres of glo-
bal governance.9 Advocacy on behalf of nature was not a novelty
itself, but early modern environmentalism had concentrated
efforts to preserve endangered species and wild habitats, or to
promote more “efficient” modes of extracting natural resources
via strategies of conservation in localized areas. The ecological
9
World Commission on Environment and Development, Our common future (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987). This report was published for the Un Earth Sum-
mit Rio-92.
220

On ThE EARTh-OBJECT
thinking that emerged out of the toxic-networks generated by

the Cold War’s industrial machine led to a complete shift in the
understanding of the globe as a political space.
More than ecology, it was the concept of ecosystem that
played a decisive role in that process. Ecological science was
developed inside the limits of biology, whereas ecosystem theories
expanded ecology out of its traditional frames to encompass a
more complex and interdisciplinary field that included econom-
ics, demographics, geographies and other areas dealing with
anthropogenic variables. In short, it allowed talking about hybrids
of nature-culture as complex self-regulating ecological units. In
the post-war period the close affiliations between cybernetics
and ecology helped to expand holistic notions of “global nature”
to the highly technologic environment of the western-world and
ecosystem soon turned into a central term in the lexicon of envi-
ronmental discourse. While preserving the idea of wholeness
and vitalist connotations, ecosystem added a more mechanistic
and managerial approach to ecological thought. Concepts of
self-regulation, homeostatic balance, communicative feedback
loops and optimal performance were central in shaping the new
environmental ethos that emerged in the 70s. Ultimately, they
were responsible to give concrete spatial form to an entire new
perception of the earth-space, which was gradually transformed
into a political field when environmental discourse embraced
ecology’s holism and assumed the “defence of the Planet” as its
mandate. “Only One Earth” — the slogan of the first UN Summit
on the Environment held in Stockholm in 1972 — was projected
as common space inhabited by a human community tied by eco-
logical bounds that ignored national differences, a subjective
construction that the Apollo 11 images would help to reinforce in
221

collective imagination. The planet and mankind, global nature

and humanity were related as two entangled parts of a fragile
system whose equilibrium relies on a delicate balance between
its components and, therefore, the prospect of environmental
decline was symptomatic of a certain tendency towards entropy
that needed to be remediated. Above the communism vs. capi-
talism divide, the environmental crisis was characterized as a
profound disequilibrium between our species and nature that
posed a fundamental ethical question for humanity as such.
While the Earth emerged as a common, “only one globe”,
the politics for the “protection of the planet” led to the compre-
hension that the environment would demand certain systems of
care and policing operating at international scale. Rather than a
barrier enclosing nature against anthropogenic-forces, post-war
ecological ethos manifested a deeper and more complex integra-
tion of “the natural” into the networks and techniques of law,
science, economy and governance. Besides the input of ecology
and counter-cultural critique, “environmental consciousness”
was also shaped by Malthusian fears of demographic explosion,
resource scarcity and world-disorder. Hence it was necessary to
incorporate a certain “planning rational” that would be enacted
according to those emerging ecological-political equations that
were being drawn at a global scale. Inside the bureaus of the UN,
aid-agencies and academic circles, James Lovelock’s Gaia lost its
mythical powers and was reduced to statistical analysis, economic
programmes, and scientific expertise. In parallel, environmental
anxieties would be gradually combined with security issues. If
the calculated conclusion of a “global” environmental crisis was
the prognostic of death at the level of the species, this new form
of bio-political construction called for governmental rationalities
222

On ThE EARTh-OBJECT
operating at an international level, since, so to say, the right over

life and death had escaped the jurisdiction of national sovereignty.
During the 70s and 80s the “defence of the environment”
was mostly articulated by scientific-discourse or political activ-
ism on the ground, remaining considerably antagonistic in rela-
tion to the imperatives of economic growth and technological
progress that characterized the developmental decades. In the
twenty years that separate the Stockholm Convention and Rio-92,
that situation was completely transformed. Oil-spills, chemical
leaks, deforestation and anti-nuclear power protests insistently
occupied the headlines of international media; governmental and
non-governmental environmental organizations proliferated; and
the field of “environmental sciences” — a form of applied eco-geo-
logy that specifically deals with the study and “remediation” of
man-natural assemblages — turned into a well-developed academic
discipline and economic business. While Stockholm expresses the
arrival of the environmental question into the official forums of
international politics, Rio-92 marks its consolidation. In between
those two moments, the terms of the equation were completely
inverted: whereas environmental discourse was perceived as
opposed to the developmental intents of curbing world poverty
of the 70s, in the 90s it was poverty that became one of environ-
ment’s most feared enemies. Growing population aggregated
to lack of means reinforced the burden on natural resources,
generating a vicious cycle of lack/scarcity, ecological depletion
and global insecurity. “Development”, the main planning concept
of the previous decades, could not be completely dismissed, but
should be better qualified, because if unrestricted, unlimited
and unmonitored, it would engender larger risks than the ones
it aimed at prevailing.
223

“Sustainability” stands for that moment when the planet

turned into a total global environment, for in order to save the
planet, it was first necessary to “environ” the earth, enveloping
its ungovernable rhythms into discourses and practices that
would be deployed in order to better calibrate the global bal-
ance between anthropogenic action and biological rhythms. Up
until the 70s, global concerns evolved in a one-way direction,
towards the diffusion of modernization, but by the late 80s, our
concerns had shift considerably, for it became necessary not only
to diffuse modernization but also simultaneously deal with its
immanent and constitutive risks. Modernity, in Ulrich Beck’s
famous analogy, became “self-reflexive”, not only concerned with
the imperatives of uprooting people from the past and fostering
progress, but with problems that resulted from the very nature
of progress rather then from the lack thereof10. Being conscious
of its inherent accidental dimensions, “sustainable development”
— or for that matter, “sustainable modernity” — transformed the
accident-in-potential into an economy, calculating its probabilities
in order to balance the risks and safety-costs of interventions.
The developmental-logic continues, but it now acknowledges
that the hazards — what is called “externalities” in the economic
jargon — that are systematically produced by modernization would
need to be minimized, modulated, channelled and distributed.
We are therefore moving out of that globe organized according
to the “developmental gap” towards a globe divided according to
the “risk differential” — populations and territories divided by
their susceptibility and capacity to respond to the coming “total
environmental catastrophe”. Not only the (uneven) distribution
10
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications,
1992).
224

On ThE EARTh-OBJECT
of wealth, but also the lines that divide the class of the insured
from the class of the uninsured according to the selective political-
economy of risk distribution operating around the globe.
The Earth-Political
“The fundamental event of modernity”, Martin Heidegger remarked,

“is the conquest of the world as picture”. 11 But not only as picture,
one should add, for the imaging of the globe is simultaneously
the means by which an object of appropriation/intervention
is encompassed. This history was tempered by ethical intents
aimed at moderating the violence that is structural to the log-
ics of mastery and possession that defines the relation between
modern reasoning and the non-human world. Throughout that
process, the earth was materially and symbolic constructed as
the bearer of a certain universalism – the household of all life
and the ultimate jurisdiction of “the community of humans”.
From its early manifestations in nineteenth century to its late
modern cybernetic connotations, the basic idea that the planet
operates as a organism to which “humans” should adapt in order
to recuperate and prolong an ontological harmony between man
and nature has remained central to environmental discourse.
And hence the structural paradox of ecological universal ethos:
for while it pleas for a trans-nationalism on behalf of a common
globe, it also erases much of the political contingencies implied in
the historical process by which “Only One Earth” came into being.
11
Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” in Off the beaten track., ed.
and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press: 2002), 71. (first published in 1938)
225

fig. 2 — Earth-object. Paulo Tavares, 2012.
226

On ThE EARTh-OBJECT
The problem of this project is not so much that it erases

cultural diversity in the name of a western-centred homogene-
ous universal humanity. The more crucial point is that it veils
the modes by which “other natures” are excluded on behalf of
the hegemonic construction of a single earth. To be sure, colo-
nial/modernity was a force that attempted to destroy and model
other cultures in relation to its own image. But it is also true that
alterity is structural to modernity, even if only in the form of a
domesticated (or repressed) imaginary resource or as a subjected
position that functions to legitimize power hierarchies. Rather
than cultural difference, what modernity cannot tolerate is a
different nature, i.e. a certain political-ecology that stands in
dissent with the hegemonic nature upon which the multi-cultural
universalism of modernity was erected. The relevant political
question therefore is not so much how culturally tolerant the
enlightened, western-based category of universal humanity can
be, but precisely the opposite, how could modernity accommodate
“different natures” besides and beyond the monolithic version
upon which it was constituted.
The history of environmentalism is in many respects the
evolving of a critical response to the modes by which modern
episteme restricts the non-human world to strictly utilitarian
and economic means. Yet modern ecological ethos had for the
most part operated as a way of moderating man’s violence towards
nature rather than breaking up with the foundational scheme that
legitimates it. While environmental discourse/activism speaks
on behalf of all — i.e. humanity —, it remains committed to protect
and caring for an “universal nature” that it takes as naturally
given. The ecological-political problem, therefore, remains open,
and refers to whether politics should concentrate its discourses
227

on behalf of that natural which it assumes as universal or rather

should focus on the attempt to unsettle the very hegemony of the
modern/colonial construction of nature and the global consen-
sus around what the earth stands for. To a large extent, this is
precisely what Michel Serres was trying to convey:
“Objects themselves are legal subjects and no longer mere

material for appropriation, even collective appropriation.
Law tries to limit abusive parasitism among men but does
not speak of this same action on things. If objects them-
selves become legal subjects, then all scales tend toward
equilibrium”12
The central argument thus follows: as history has made humans

equivalent to natural forces, reversely, nature should be endowed
with similar fundamental rights to the ones conquered by humans
along history. Emerging in parallel to the environmental dis-
course/ethos, contemporary environmental legislation also
operates as a way of moderating — that is to say, legislating —
human violence towards the world. Sustainability is nothing but
the inscription of a certain “legal check” into a regime of so far
unrestricted physical destruction. So thus is Serres’s proposal
for a Natural Contract. Yet the logics are completely distinct, for
while the former attempts to regulate anthropocentric action,
the later establishes fundamental rights to other than humans.
It’s a meaningful difference: sustainability is an ethics of polic-
ing – i.e. modulating human-nature relations/boundaries already
12
1995), 37.
228

On ThE EARTh-OBJECT
established; the “natural contract” is an ethics of the political – i.e.

it confronts a human-nature world with an-other human-nature
world and claims for a “new equality”. Serres’s globalization is the
history of the coming into being of a distinct globe which, while
being born out of modernity/coloniality, reflexively challenges
the very system of partitions between nature and culture that
sustain its regime. For nature was that part of the common globe
that had no part in modern politics, law or history, insofar as its
speech was regarded as “pure natural”, merely noise or raw data,
and therefore excluded from the bounds of language/politics. Yet
with increasing frequency and relevance nature’s speech appears
as a collective moral warrant, either translated by science, medi-
ated in legal courts, or as the material testimony of modernity’s
violence that remains registered in the social-ecosystems of
disaster zones such as Bophal, Chernobyl, the Niger Delta or the
Napo Basin in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
The history of modernity could be narrated as a longue-durée
process of environing the earth. What we call globalization – that
moment in history when financial markets, communication net-
works, energetic technologies, and ecological accidents turned
into “world-objects”13- is the last snapshot of that movement by
which the planet was surrounded, up to a point in which that proc-
ess has practically reached the totality of life, at least in relation to
what concerns the life of the human species and to that on which
13
“By world-objects I mean tools with a dimension that is commensurable with one
of the dimensions of the world. A satellite for speed, an atomic bomb for energy,
the Internet for space, and nuclear waste for time…these are four examples of
world-objects.” Michel Serres, “Revisiting the Natural Contract”, CTheory, Novem-
ber 5th, 2006, available at: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=515.
229

it depends: “global nature”. After the “terrestrial globe” initiated

with early modernity/colonialism, the “bio-spherical globe” that
emerges with late nineteenth century with bio-geography, and
the eco-systemic turn of the 60s and 70s, we maybe experiencing
the formation of new sensibility towards the planet, more geo-
logical than territorial or biological, and therefore, a new reality
in which the political terrain is no longer only the geo- or the bio-,
but something I would tentatively call the earth-political. In the
70s, when the ecological discourse was surfacing, geo-political
power was disputed as a matter of reaching the outer space —
escaping the Earth. Today’s crucial problem is that power will
engage much more intimately and forcefully with the materiality
of the planet, drilling deeper into the earth, scanning its hidden
surfaces, trying to uncover sources of material wealth under
melting glaciers and new discovered terrains – extracting, sec-
tioning, dividing and re-articulating local and global ecologies.
If ecology can be thought as political, its most urgent problem
is not so much safeguarding nature, but challenging the very
notion of nature itself and questioning the forms and means by
which the earth is translated into the political globe.
230

"To make sense of Chávez’s Venezuela, we must thus seek to
understand the exchange between the people who inhabit
Venezuelan soil and the oil that lies in its subsoil."
— Fernando Coronil1
"Mehrdad Irvanian, the Iranian architect once suggested:

‘In order to study architecture, one must first investigate
necrocracy’. But we should go further: we should practice
the art of exhumation too."
— Reza Negarestani2
1
Fernando Coronil, “It’s the Oil, Stupid!!!” ReVista: Harvard review of Latin Amer-
ica. Venezuela. The Chávez Effect, Fall 2008, 20.
2
Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Mel-
bourne: Re.press, 2008), 51.

Underground
Venezuela’s territorial fetishism
Godofredo Pereira
Geologic exhumation
According to a report by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) pro-

duced in 2009 entitled “An Estimate of Recoverable Heavy Oil
Resources of the Orinoco Oil Belt, Venezuela”, the Orinoco oil
belt – consisting of oil-saturated sandstone – could produce an
estimate of 513 billion oil barrels, more than previously calculated
and above actual estimates for either Iran or Iraq.3 This recent
rediscovery of Venezuela’s underground potential is part of the
ambitious Plan Siembra Petrolera4, which aims to reformulate
and optimize the production of oil in Venezuela to directly ben-
efit its population. Since its creation it has promoted a better
quantification of oil-in-place, which together with technologi-
cal advancements in survey methods has already allowed for a
progressive upgrade of available reserves. In the USGS report
states that “a comprehensive study by Petróleos de Venezuela S.A.
(PDVSA) established the magnitude of the original oil-in-place
3
U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, World Petroleum Resources
Project: An estimate of recoverable heavy oil resources of the Orinoco Oil Belt, Ven-
ezuela, October 2009, available here: http://purl.fdlp.gov/GPO/gpo16635.
4
Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., Plan Siembra Petrolera 2005-2030, available here:
http://www.pdvsa.com/index.php?tpl=interface.sp/design/readmenuprinc.tpl.
html&newsid_temas=32
233

(OOIP) at 1,180 billion barrels of oil (BBO)” and that PDVSA has
recently revised this value to more than 1,300 BBO,5 an increase
of more than 100 billion barrels of oil-in-place compared with
previous estimates. Initiated in 2005 and expected to run until
2030, Plan Siembra Petrolera mostly relies on Magna Reserva,
the name given to Orinoco Oil Belt, a petrol basin of some 55,314
km2, divided into 27 sections according to geological character-
istics and output potential. It is now recognized as the world’s
largest reserve of heavy oil.
Throughout the eighties and nineties, Petroleos de Ven-
ezuela S.A. (PVDSA), the company that manages all oil exploration
sites and facilities, traded the nation’s oil according to a logic
subservient to international market policies, particularly during
the period know as “the opening” (Abertura) between 1994 and
1996.6 Part of a project of economic liberalization commonly
implemented throughout all Latin America – the “Washington
Consensus”– that in Venezuela had its major contestation in the
demonstrations known as Caracazo,7 this was a process that
disconnected the oil industry from the populations’ economic
and social needs.
Against this, the government’s progressive re-structuring
of the company since 1999 sought to acquire a more independent
5
U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, World Petroleum Resources
Project.
6
Cf. Minister Rafael Ramirez , “A National, Popular, and Revolutionary Oil Policy
for Venezuela”, Venezuela Analysis, June 9th 2005, http://venezuelanalysis.com/
analysis/1182 (accessed 10 Jan. 2012).
7
Series of riots against free market reforms that took place the streets of Caracas,
27th February 1989, ending with the massacre of hundreds by police and military
forces.
234

U n D E R G R O U n D. V E n E z U E l A’ S T E R R I T O R I A l F E T I S h I S M
fig. 1 — Map showing the Orinoco Oil Belt assessment unit. US Geological Survey, 2009.
position. Importantly, this availability of oil has enabled Ven-

ezuela’s new “multipolar” geopolitical strategy, financing regional
alliances and alliances at the scale of the global South. Within
this new frame Venezuela has progressively taken a decisive role,
participating in the creation of UNASUR,8 and creating ALBA,9
an organization that promotes economic integration based on
social welfare in response to the liberal policies of FTAA;10 the lat-
8
Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).
9
Bolívarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA).
10
The Free Trade Area of the Americas, was an expansion of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) perceived as a foreign policy tool of the U.S. gov-
ernment.
235

ter perceived to be the implementation mechanism of U.S. policy.

Moreover, outside South America and OPEC, countries such as
Russia and China have also become important trading partners.
The attempt to produce a South-South alliance does not
imply the direct dismissal of, or even a clear transformation
of, trade relations with the US, but more an attempt to be less
dependent upon them: “Venezuela would never stop selling oil
to the U.S. because these purchases add up to approximately
60% of Venezuela’s total oil exports. Venezuela is one of the top
four petroleum suppliers to the U.S.. Furthermore, the U.S. is too
reliant on foreign oil and the Venezuelan economy would take
a serious hit if the countries stopped trading with each other”.11
What this seems to indicate is that, despite its anti-imperialist
rhetoric, Venezuela’s commercial interests and economic prin-
ciples will continue to structure the underlying politics of the
country as much as they have since the ‘60s oil boom. Accord-
ing to anthropologist Fernando Coronil, “given the location of
Latin America in the twin international division of labour and of
nature, at the present time the pursuit of foreign exchange has
meant that, in practice, all Latin American states – whether on
the right or the left – promote comparative advantages within a
neoliberal framework”.12
11
Cf. Christina DeFeo - Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), “ALBA: How Much
of a Turn to the Left in Latin American Governance and Economic Policy?”, Ven-
ezuela Analysis, July 19th 2010, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5500
(accessed 5 Jan. 2012).
12
Fernando Coronil, “The Future in Question: History and Utopia in Latin America
(1989-2010)”, in Business As Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown,
ed. Calhoun, Craig J., and Georgi M. Derluguian (New York: New York University
Press, 2011), 257.
236

But the consequence of a reinforced oil politics has clearly

been felt throughout the whole country, where forgotten com-
munities living in Venezuela’s sprawling barrios and indigenous
populations living in rural and Amazonian areas have become
the object of the state’s attention, particularly concerning the
implementation of several social programs, missiones, aimed at
distributing oil revenues in the form of community based serv-
ices. As Anthony W. Persaud explains, “social spending has sky-
rocketed since Chávez reigned in on the PDVSA, and the benefits
of oil are reaching the masses of Venezuela and beyond. In 2004
Venezuela invested 3.7 of its 6.5 billion net oil profits in social
missions, and the plan from 2005-2012 has outlined spending
of 10 billion per year. In 2007, PDVSA alone spent 14.4 billion
on social programs. All of this social spending in Venezuela has
meant drastic reductions in the levels of poverty and inequality,
improved access to healthcare, huge improvements in education
and the battle against illiteracy, and subsidized food programs
for the most vulnerable.”13
One of the most publicised examples of oil wealth redis-
tribution is Ciudad Caribia, declared the 1st socialist city of the
21st century. It is a city for 100,000 people built from scratch in
a mountainous on the periphery of Caracas that includes hous-
ing, public services, retail, religious centres, cultural and sports
facilities, and also an ALBA promotional store and direct satellite
connection to state TV. The purpose of Misión Vivienda, of which
Ciudad Caribia is part, is to provide two million new homes by
13
Anthony W. Persaud, “Oil in Venezuela: The Lesser of Two Evils”, Venezuela Analy-
sis, July 13th 2010, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5491 (accessed on 1 Jan.
2012).
237

2017. Considering that Venezuela has been an oil-rich country

for many years, it is notable that its wealth is only now bringing
palpable benefits to the lives of its poorer people.
fig. 2 — Areal view of a Barrio de Petrocasas - housing units made of PVC and produced by the oil
industry, for Misión Vivienda. El Tuy. Photo Oscar Tenreiro, October, 2010.
Transmutation
However, what is not often mentioned is that Chávez simply

presents this redistribution of wealth as a direct consequence of
Venezuela’s recent turn to socialist policies and not as the result
of fluctuations in oil prices or partnerships with multinational
companies. In many ways, this brings to mind the notion devel-
oped by Fernando Coronil of the “magical state”. Throughout
238

the 20th century, Venezuelan presidents from Pérez Jiménez to

Andrés Pérez or Jaime Lusinchi, have all translated state invest-
ment of funds derived from oil trading into populist or nationalist
narratives that present public projects as the consequence of the
nation’s modernizing progress: “This personification of social and
natural powers makes these leaders appear as superior beings
capable of extraordinary deeds – as charismatic leaders or, as
playwright José Ignacio Cabrujas suggested for Venezuela, as
magicians.”14 But ultimately this representation only disguises an
under-developed oil-dependent country, revealing, as Atilio Borón
argues, a “disjunction between the “consolidation of neoliberal-
ism in the critical terrain of the economy and policy making” and
its visible “weakening in the domains of culture, public aware-
ness and politics.”15 While below ground, Venezuela’s economy
is dependent on trading partnerships across the globe; above
ground, its politics is mostly concerned with the performative
translation of its effects. This disjunction then, becomes central
to frame every political transformation in Venezuela. But how
is it that the passage from one domain to the other takes place?
In The Cult of Bolívar in Latin American Literature, C. Con-
way describes how, since the independence wars, Simón Bolívar
has become a central figure in Venezuela’s political transforma-
tions. Bolívar was the military commander who liberated most
of South America from Spanish rule two hundred years ago, and
established a southern union of people called Gran Colombia.
Encompassing the territories of what are currently Ecuador,
14
Fernando Coronil, “It’s the Oil, Stupid!!!”, 30.
15
Atilio Borón quoted in Fernando Coronil, “The Future in Question: History and
Utopia in Latin America (1989-2010)”, 256.
239

Colombia, Venezuela and Panama, this dream lasted for only

twenty-two years, collapsing due to internal conflicts between
supporters of federalist reforms and supporters of centralised
government; ultimately leading to its fragmentation into dif-
ferent nations. Tensions in the area remain visible today, where
Colombia is a strategic partner of the US; and the last decade has
witnessed constant animosity between the two nations. Moreover,
since he was elected in 1999, Hugo Chávez has reignited Bolívari-
anism: after the elections the country was renamed Republica
Bolívariana de Venezuela, with political transformations said
to be continuing the tradition of anti-imperialism. Brought to
bear on past and present history, Bolívar’s life now represents
the nation’s quest for autonomy.
This over-coding of Venezuela’s territory with the life and
ideas of Bolívar recalls Borges’ short story On the Exactitude of
Science, where the map replaces the territory itself. Together with
the monument, the museum and the archive, the map is central
to the bringing together of geographical and historical domains,
deterritorializing local subjectivities only to immediately re-
territorialize them again – in this case by the life of Bolívar - the
map thus functions as a signifying grid that is applied to the
territory. If we bear in mind that Venezuela’s tallest mountain is
called “Pico Bolívar” and that Bolívar’s constitutional writings
have inspired several current policies, we can start to grasp that
this nation’s material and spiritual borders are being “mapped”
by his life, and that national unity is thus produced in a proc-
ess by which both history and geography are fetishized.16 The
16
Cf. Fernando Coronil, “Beyond occidentalism: toward nonimperial geohistorical
categories”, Cultural Anthropology : Journal of the Society for Cultural Anthro-
pology 11 (1996), 76.
240

fig. 3 — Hugo Chávez and Nestor Kirchner plan the 10,000-kilometer Gran Gasoducto del Sur
(Great Southern Pipeline). November 2005.
241

proliferation of monuments is particularly relevant to the long

tradition of nationalist projects, and as early as 1997 anthropolo-
gist Michael Taussig had already noticed that under the flag of
Bolívar the country had been progressively “converted into a
mausoleum with statues of the Liberator nailing down the state of
the whole good and tight”.17 Today, however, this process of invest-
ing objects with anima is further emphasized by government
statecraft. With the messianic return of Bolivarianism taking
place, it is no surprise that the people now encompass human,
animal, architectural, geological or any other entities that might
be imbued with the spirit of “El Libertador”, magically conferring
life to the material ground itself upon which Venezuela stands
as nation. And the culminating event of this process was clearly
his recent exhumation.
The event took place on the 15th of July, 2010, by direct order
of the president of the Bolívarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo
Chávez, with the stated purpose of confirming if the bones in
Bolívar’s grave were in fact his remains, and more importantly,
if Bolívar had died from arsenic poisoning instead of tuberculo-
sis. Chávez, a long-time supporter of the theory that Colombian
oligarchs murdered Bolívar, has recently rekindled the contro-
versy surrounding his death. If these theories were proven true,
it would provide yet another parallel between the two leaders,
Chávez himself also having a long history of troubled relations
with his neighbours and survivor of an attempted coup d’etat in
2002. The analysis of the inside of the bones can thus be under-
stood as a voyage to the origin of territorial signification from
which everything emanates: the closest allies, the government,
17
Michael Taussig, The magic of the state (New York, London: Routledge, 1997), 110.
242

the people and so forth, to the outermost limits of his presence,

coinciding at one level with the borders of the country, but at
another with the borders of global anti-imperialist struggles.
Agreeing with anthropologist Michael Taussig’s description
of the return from exile of Bolívar’s remains to Caracas for a state
funeral in 1842, as “a foundational act of spirit possession”,18
then this recent exhumation not only perpetuates a circuit of
exhumation-inhumation; of revealing and hiding – whose purpose
is the incorporation of all people and things into his body, while
incorporating him into the body of the people – but also lends
itself to a rhythm of Bolívar-appearances produced by political
necessity, providing another opportunity for the correction and
reformulation of the nation’s history now in relation to a redis-
covered subsoil. Ultimately no clear conclusion as to whether
Bolívar was naturally or unnaturally poisoned emerged, and this
neither discredited Chávez nor reduced the effect of the perform-
ance, confirming that, in itself, the event could function without
the discovery of a definite truth – after all, this is the essence of
fetishistic magic, in which the performance of revelation has
precedence over that which is revealed. Thus, in the strange sym-
metry between the geological exhumations of the earth and the
forensic reinvestment of bone’s magical dimension therein lies
the movement where, as Marx would say, magic is performed:
the soul of oil transmuted into Bolívar’s spirit.
Material resistance
Regarding geophilosophy, Deleuze and Guattari insist that “think-

ing takes place in the relation between the territory and the
18
Ibid.,101.
243

Earth”,19 where the Earth (not to be confused with the earth-soil, or

with the earth-planet) ceaselessly forces the constant reformula-
tion of the territory. We can see something similar happening in
Venezuela, where the reinvention of a nation through the territo-
rialization of underground energy into spirit requires constant
negotiation of unstable and resistant materials.
According to government officials frequent public dec-
larations the continuous development and application of new
technologies will make Venezuela an undisputed leader in the
development of extra-heavy oil. New technologies play an essen-
tial part in this re-invention of the country, as it is known that
unconventional hydrocarbons pose significant development and
production difficulties. Orinoco basin’s heavy oil is, on the one
hand harder to extract and refine and much more toxic than other
forms of oil, and this is reflected in its price; but on the other
hand, in the future, it is expected to become one of the world’s
main energy sources as reserves of normal oil decrease. With the
current turn to less conventional forms of oil extraction the array
of technologies that can tap the soil’s underground dimension
is rapidly increasing; for example: deep reading technologies,
sonic and acoustic scanners, seismic and geophysical analysis,
petrophysical and geomechanic reservoir modelling.
But new forms of representation also raise inconvenient
problems: as the numerous images of Chávez pointing at maps on
TV indicate, the territory of Venezuela has a strategic geopolitical
dimension, but one that the map is no longer sufficient to grasp.
The contemporary 3D geological models of the Orinoco oil basin
19
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
244

are essential to modelling its complexities, and are becoming

the essential tool necessary for transforming the as yet unseen
subsoil into an architectural space that can be interpreted and
navigated from different angles, providing a concrete image for
an invisible presence. However, the remote sensing technologies
do not only refer to a domain of shifting tectonics and mineral
flows that evade the confines of territorial border divisions, but
also to a complex subsoil that is analysed specifically for the pos-
sible harnessing of oil; and here, cutting-edge scientific research
and political opportunity find themselves dependent upon a
growing industry without which it would be impossible to tame
these underground forces.
Curiously, even in Bolívar “himself”, a similar material
resistance is also present. When Dr. Paul Auwaerter of the Divi-
sion of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine at the
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine first proposed that
Bolívar’s death was caused by poisoning – which later led to the
exhumation – he wasn’t suggesting that this implied murder, but
more likely that the water in the area contained unusually high
levels of arsenic, a substance that was also often used at the time
for medicinal purposes, and is present in the waters of several
South American countries.20 As stated in his report, “[Bolívar]
likely received additional arsenic in the food and water that he
consumed while campaigning in the Andes, where high levels of
the element have been detected in soil and in the tissue samples
from pre-Colombian mummies. Bolívar’s complexion, as noted
above, changed from white as a youth to dark and rough 3 years
20
Paul G. Auwaerter, John Dove and Philip A. Mackowiak, “Simón Bolívar’s Medi-
cal Labyrinth: An Infectious Diseases Conundrum”, Cinical Infectious Diseases
52, no. 1 (2011), 78-85.
245

before he died. The transformation might simply have been the

result of years of exposure to the harsh elements during his
campaigns. However, it is also possible that it was an additional
manifestation of arsenicosis, because diffuse melanosis, papules,
and keratoses are among the earliest signs of such intoxication.”
In any case, although keratoses and melanosis are signs of intoxi-
cation by arsenic, they are still vague indicators, diagnosed from
descriptions made almost two hundred years ago. And even now,
with current mass spectrometric techniques, forensic toxicology
analyses aren’t always able to produce satisfactory results.
Clearly these material instabilities, both in oil and bone,
open new spaces of political confrontation. Immediately we see
contemporary geopolitical alliances as well as internal policies
being discussed according to forensic procedures and remote
sensing devices; state politics is suddenly captured by minute
discussions on disease symptoms and toxicological analysis,
the idea of the body of the state now reliant upon arsenic and
environment relations, and geopolitics seen through the lens of
skin coloration. But the most important consequence of these
examples of material resistance lies not in the endangering of
Bolívarianism or the revealing of the underlying Venezuelan
liberal petropolitics – even if this might be a possible result – but
in forcing the dramatic reconfiguration of the nation’s political
agents: not so much oil in the service of the revolution, but the
revolution as a mode of engagement with gigantic oil reserves.
Geo-architecture
Given constant U.S. political pressure, internal divisions and

global economic instabilities, the Bolivarian project remains
246

fig. 3. Gas shale resource place: Co-visualization of shale surface, karsts, well plan, and micro-
seismic data. Image courtesy of Paradigm Ltd.
precarious, remaining heavily dependent on the subsoil for both

economic and political sustainability. In January 2012, and after
announcing that the nation had oil reserves that would last for
400 years,21 Chávez indicated that with new research in Ven-
ezuela’s Golf and in the Atlantic, Venezuela’s ranking in terms
of natural gas reserves could also improve to levels similar to
those of Russia; and again to continue the mirroring of subsoil
exhumations with military ones, another anti-imperialist prócer,
General Francisco de Miranda, is to be exhumed by the same
21
Yoersis Morgado, Presidente Chávez: Venezuela tiene la reserva petrolera
y de gas más grande del mundo, http://www.asambleanacional.gob.ve/index.
php?option=com_content&view=article&id=37360%3Apresidente-chavez-afirmo-
que-el-pais-cuenta-con-petroleo-para-mas-de-400-anos&catid=388%3Amensaje-
anual-presidente-chavez-2011&Itemid=50&lang=es (accessed on 27/02/2012).
247

team that exhumed Bolívar. But at the same time that the state’s
magical territorialisation takes place, Bolívarianism is itself
constantly rewritten, it has been transformed since 2005 into
a socialist movement,22 an adaptation essential to understand-
ing the real nature of the process: that Bolívar isn’t a static idea
but a dynamic self-adapting principle against which all current
policies need to be measured.
The relation between the people that inhabit the soil and
the oil that lies in the subsoil, that anthropologist Fernando
Coronil claims is central to understanding Venezuelan politics,
thus emerges as the geo-architectural management of the shift-
ing relation between earth and territory. If the complex nature
of heavy-oil’s extraction brings to visibility a so far unknown
domain, the subsurface becoming object of a renewed interest
on the part of scientific researchers and digital visualization
companies, at the same time political organizations, ecological
activists, and indigenous populations also claim this under-
ground; after all it is the source of life for many communities.
Clearly it is the underground with its power of attraction and its
ambiguous nature that is the contemporary origin of policies and
conflicts, a mysterious domain that has so far been translated into
revolutionary spirit. But as heavy oils and mineral toxins slowly
become central to the discussion of the life of Bolívar – the Earth
resisting the territory – the question remains: how much longer
will this process of magical transmutation be able to effectively
control Venezuela’s increasingly complex ecology?
22
Cleto A. Sojo, “Venezuela’s Chavez Closes World Social Forum with Call to Tran-
scend Capitalism”, Venezuela Analysis, September 31st 2005, http://venezuela-
nalysis.com/news/907 (accessed on 27 Feb. 2012).
248

IMAGE CREDITS
João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva
— fig. 1
Exhibition view Alien Theory, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva.
Official Portuguese Representation of 53rd Venice Biennale,
DGARTES, Ministry of Culture, Portugal. Thanks to: Jardim Zoológico de Lisboa.
Photo by: Martin Argyroglo.
— fig. 2
Produced by Inhotim Institute, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
— fig. 4
Official Portuguese Representation of 53rd Venice Biennale,
DGARTES, Ministry of Culture, Portugal.
— fig. 5
Sies + Hoke Gallery, Dusseldorf, Germany.
— fig. 7
Produced by Frac Île-de-France/Le Plateau, Paris
in collaboration with Lamu Palm Oil Factory, Kenya.
— fig. 8
Thanks to: Jardim Zoológico de Lisboa.
Susan Schuppli
— fig. 1
AP Photo/NYPD, Det. Greg Semendinger.
— fig. 2
© GeoEye Inc. All rights reserved;
Image courtesy of Satellite Imaging Corporation.
— fig. 3
© GeoEye Inc. All rights reserved;
Image courtesy of Satellite Imaging Corporation.
— fig. 4
© N. Petraco, T. A. Kubic, L. Faber. All rights reserved;
Image courtesy of Nicholas Petraco.
— fig. 5
© N. Petraco, T. A. Kubic, L. Faber. All rights reserved;
Image courtesy of Nicholas Petraco.
251

Jonathan Uliel Saldanha
— fig. 1
Photo: Catarina Miranda.
— fig. 5
Negative of Cygnus A taken at different wavelengths
(W. Baade & R. Minkowski, The Astrophysical Journal).
Regina De Miguel
— fig. 2
Chandra X-ray Observatory image of Sgr A*.
Image by NASA.
Ayesha hameed
— fig. 3
© REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol.
— fig. 4
© Jason N. Parkinson/reportdigital.co.uk
— fig. 5
© Sylvain Georges / Noir Productions.
Imagem cortesia de Independencia Société.
Godofredo Pereira
— fig. 2.
© Photo: Oscar Tenreiro. http://oscartenreiro.com
— fig. 3.
© Presidencia de Argentina.
— fig. 4.
© Paradigm Ltd. Image courtesy of Paradigm Ltd.
252

BIOGRAPhIES
Ayesha hameed
Ayesha Hameed’s video and curatorial work focuses on borders in the context of sans-
papiers organizing and migrant subjectivity. Her work has been presented at the Banff
Centre for the Arts, La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, OBORO, Montréal Arts Interculturels
(MAI), ISEA and elsewhere. A former board member of Fuse Magazine, her writing has
been published in Public: Art/Culture/Ideas and Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural
Studies as well as a few collections of essays like PLACE: Location and Belonging in New
Media Contexts and Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada. Hameed
is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths
University, London.
Bjørnar Olsen
Bjørnar Olsen is professor of archaeology at the Department of Archaeology and Social
Anthropology, University of Tromsø, Norway. He has written a number of papers and books
on northern prehistory and history, museology, material culture, and archaeological
theory. His latest books are Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (2012) (with M. Shanks,
T. Webmoor and C. Witmore), Hybrid Spaces: Medieval Finnmark and the Archaeology
of Multi-Room Houses (2011) (edited with P. Urbanzcyk and C. Amundsen), In Defense
of Things. Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (2010), and Persistent Memories:
Pyramiden – a Soviet Mining Town in the High Arctic (2010) (with E. Andreassen and H.
Bjerck). bjornar.olsen@uit.no
Eyal Weizman
Eyal Weizman is an architect and a professor of visual cultures at Goldsmiths, Univer-
sity of London, where he also directs the Centre for Research Architecture. A founding
member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour, Palestine, Weizman also
directs the European Research Council-funded project “Forensic Architecture: On the
Place of Architecture in International Humanitarian Law”. His books include The Least
of All Possible Evils (Nottetempo, 2009; Verso, 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), and A
Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003).
Godofredo Pereira
Godofredo Pereira is an architect, writer and editor. He has a MArch from the Bartlett
School of Architecture where he currently teaches in the MA programme and is a PhD
candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.
He is also co-editor of Detritos, an experimental journal of art and critical theory. His
research focuses on the relations between architecture and power.
255

Graham harman
Graham Harman is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Provost for Research Admin-
istration at the American University in Cairo. Among his best-known books are Tool-
Being (2002), Guerrilla Metaphysics (2005), Prince of Networks (2009), The Quadruple
Object (2011) and Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (2011).
João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva

João Maria Gusmão (Lisbon, 1979) and Pedro Paiva (Lisbon, 1977) jointly attended the
course of painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon and began to exhibit
their work together in 2001. Since then, their artistic production is linked not only to
experimental film, photography and installation, but also to writing, a practice that has
been part of the work of both authors. They participated in several international biennials,
in 2006, the 27th Bienal de São Paulo (Brazil), in 2007, the Triennial of Luanda (Angola),
at the 6th Biennial of Mercosul, Porto Alegre (Brazil), in 2008, Expresses 7 (Italy), in 2009
they represented Portugal at the 53rd Venice Biennale and in 2010 at the 8th Biennial of
Gwangju (South Korea). Of several solo exhibitions stand out those made recently in 2011,
at Frac Ile-de-France, Le Plateau (Paris), at Museo Marino Marini (Florence), at Kunsthalle
in Dusseldorf; in 2010, at Ikon Gallery (Birmingham); in 2008, at Photoespanha (Madrid);
and finally, the exhibition Abissologia: para uma ciência transitória do indiscernível, in
Cordoaria Nacional, a partnership with the ZDB Gallery in Lisbon.
Jonathan Uliel Saldanha

A researcher and composer, Jonathan Saldanha’s work is concerned with the relations of
sound with its ghosts, animism, magnetic radio, the jungle, negative territories, subsonic
frequencies and intra cranial dub. He is a founding member of the musical and artistic
platform SOOPA, a visual and sound laboratory as well as cultural producer based in
Porto, Portugal. Saldanha operates sonically in the projects HHY & The Macumbas, U.S.S.,
Fujako, and Mécanosphère, among others. He develops theatre sound projects under the
name Beast Box having conceived the show “Nyarlathotep” in Balleteatro, Porto and
“Máquina da Selva “ in Serralves Foundation. He is also a member of the artistic collective
Embankment. www.soopa.org; www.embankmentact.blogspot.com
Marcello Maggi
Philosopher, artist and musician. Completeed a PhD from the Universidade Nova de
Lisboa, under the guidance of philosopher José Gil, with the thesis: Art Brut Art and the
Catastrophe in Art (2010). He is a member of the editorial board of art and essay journal
DETRITOS since 2009. He has directed art therapy workshops (painting, sculpture and
256

BIOGRAPhIES
installation) with patients with mental and psychiatric disorders in the Museum of
Uncouncious Images, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2008) and at the Center for Social and
Education Intervention Studies in Bari, Italy (2003-2006).
Martin holbraad
Martin Holbraad teaches social anthropology at University College London. Based on
ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba since the late 1990s, his research focuses on the relation-
ship between myth and action, the consecration of objects, and, more broadly, the logic
of cosmological thought in the field of religion as well as in politics. These ethnographic
interests inform his theoretical concerns with such topics as the anthropology of truth and
the imagination, abstraction and divinity, and the relationship between anthropological
and philosophical analysis. He is author of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology
of Cuban Divination (Chicago, 2012) and co-editor of Thinking Through Things: Theorizing
Artefacts Ethnographically (Routledge, 2007), Technologies of the Imagination (Special
issue of Ethnos, 2009) and Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest and the
Future (Routledge, in press).
Michael Taussig
Michael Taussig was trained as a medical doctor and now teaches in the Antropology
Department of Columbia University in New York and at the European Graduate School
(EGS) in Switzerland. He is the author of several books including: What Color is the
Sacred? (2009). Walter Benjamin’s Grave (2006). My Cocaine Museum (2004). Law in
a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in a Colombian Town (2003). Defacement (1999).
Magic of the State (1997). Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (1993).
The Nervous System (1992). Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in
Terror and Healing (1987). The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980).
Paulo Tavares
Paulo Tavares is a Brazilian architect based in between London and São Paulo. He has
taught at the London Metropolitan University, at the Visual Cultures Lab/MA in Con-
temporary Art Theory - Goldsmiths, and since 2008 teaches in the MA programme at
the Centre for Research Architecture - Goldsmiths.
Regina de Miguel
Artist and cultural producer. Her work develops connections between situations of
scientific analysis and perception as objective knowledge (scales of verisimilitude),
non-experiential learning as derived from the technological imagination (alienation and
257

projection), and levels of development of the ideal and critical consciousness (new forms
of orientation). Part of her production has dealt primarily with the strategies of the forma-
tion of desire and crises in subjective meaning and its visualization of the psychological
landscape in the form of cartographies. In the same vein, she also analyzes the speculative
transfer in scientific and cultural learning tools. Collaborates with the working group A
User’s Guide, (http://ausersguide.tumblr.com/), a project with Lorenzo Sandoval and María
ptqk, dedicated to the backstage of art and cultural production. She also takes part on Cor-
respondences from Eyjafjallajokull, (http://eyjafjalla.org/) a project about the idea of
Europe. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as Artium, La Panera, Musac, La
Casa Encendida and can be seen in the collections of the Basque Museum of Contemporary
Art, (Artium), Fundación Arco, INJUVE, ABC, CGAC, and the Reina Sofia National Gallery.
She is represented by the gallery Maisterravalbuena and is now working on the audio-
visual essay Nouvelle Science Vague Fiction.(http://nouvellesciencevaguefiction.tumblr.
com/). +info: reginademiguel.net
Reza negarestani
Reza Negarestani is an Iranian philosopher and writer. His works have appeared in
journals and anthologies such as Collapse, Angelaki, Identity and The Speculative Turn.
He is the author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne:
re.press 2008). Negarestani’s writings have been the subject of various theoretical and
literary courses and seminars, most recently a symposium centered on Negarestani’s
Cyclonopedia held by The New School, New York.
Susan Schuppli
Susan Schuppli is a media artist and cultural theorist who is a Senior Research Fellow
in Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London where she also received
her doctorate in 2009. Previously she participated in the Whitney Independent Study
Program and completed her MFA at the University of California San Diego. Her creative
projects have been exhibited at The Kitchen in New York, the Brussels Biennal, Belgium,
Artspace, Australia, and most recently at Museum London in Canada (2012). She is on
the editorial board of the journals SITE (Stockholm) and Second Nature (Melbourne),
and is a member of the Photo-Lexic Research Group based in Tel Aviv. Recent projects
and essays have appeared in Cabinet, Photoworks, Architectural Design, Borderlands,
Cosmos and History, Memory Studies, and Academia Press.
258

BIOGRAPhIES
259

ACknOWlEDGMEnTS
This book begun to take shape in early 2010 after the seminar series and per-
formance cycle on Urban Totemism organized by the collective SOOPA in Porto,
and has been particularly informed by the ongoing discussions that began
at the collective residency The Terror of the Object in April 2011 developed by
detritos in Atelier Real, Lisbon. From these encounters and collaborations
the idea of bringing together some of the exciting contemporary research into
objects and things begun to emerge, and ultimately became the project Objec-
tology, within Guimarães – European Capital of Culture 2012. Savage Objects
is a part of this larger project.
The task of editing and coordinating a book like this would have been
overwhelming and impossible without the group of people that, in different ways,
participated in the project and advised me at different times of its development.
Firstly, I would like to thank all the authors for their contributions to this project,
and I would like to express my sincere admiration for their work. I also thank
Inês Moreira, who helped granting the conditions for the project’s development
in its initial phase and in particular, Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro, the Programmer
of Art and Architecture of Guimarães 2012 – European Capital of Culture 2012.
I would also like to thank Filipe Silva and Jonathan Saldanha of SOOPA
who were involved in the conception of the project from the beginning, and all
artists, authors, researchers, and organizers who were involved in the afore-
mentioned events. I am also grateful to Eyal Weizman, Susan Schuppli and
all the members of the Centre for Research Architecture, who discussed its
central aspects with me and with whom I’ve developed part of this research. In
particular, producer Teresa Aguiar and designer Dayana Lucas, deserve a very
special thanks for developing the whole project and giving it a certain rigour and
reality. To all the translators, consultants and reviewers also a special thanks:
Will Potter, Susana Serras Pereira, Ricardo Tinoco, Ayesha Hameed, Lawrence
Abu Hamdan and Miguel Serras Pereira. And finally, my main gratitude goes
to Susana Caló, who thought the contents of the book with me and critically
accompanied its every stage.
Godofredo Pereira
261

First published in 2012 by Guimarães 2012 — European Capital of Culture
in partnership with Imprensa Nacional−Casa da Moeda
© 2012 Guimarães 2012

All images, texts and chapters: the contributors.
edited by Godofredo Pereira
contributors
Ayesha Hameed, Bjornar Olsen, Eyal Weizman, Godofredo Pereira,
Graham Harman, João Maria Gusmão e Pedro Paiva, Jonathan Saldanha,
Marcello Maggi, Martin Holbraad, Michael Taussig, Paulo Tavares,
Regina de Miguel, Reza Negarastani, Susan Schuppli.
translation
Ricardo Tinoco, Susana Serras Pereira, Miguel Serras Pereira.
proof-reading
Will Potter, Ayesha Ahmeed, Lawrence Abu Hamdam,
Imprensa Nacional−Casa da Moeda.
design
Dayana Lucas
front cover image

Landsat 7 Satellite image of Tassil n'Ajjer National Park. NASA.
executive production
Teresa Aguiar and Deserto de Cristal − Associação Cultural
printed and bound

Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda. Portugal.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in

any form, electronic, mechanical or other, without permission in writing
from Fundação Cidade de Guimarães.

This book is part of the project Objectology curated by Godofredo Pereira
and Filipe Silva for Guimarães 2012, European Capital of Culture.
number of pages
268
keywords
1. Objects. 2. Territories. 3. Architecture. 4. Practices.
5. Technology. 6. Things. 7. Ecologies
isbn
978-972-27-2071-7
legal depot n.º

342785/12
edition n.º
1018738
print run
1 000
GUIMARãES 2012 - CAPITAl EUROPEIA DA CUlTURA,

ÁREA DE ARTE E ARqUITETURA
programme director
Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro
programming assistance
Gisela Díaz, Gisela Leal
executive production
João Covita, Pedro Sadio, Pedro Silva
The President of Fundação Cidade de Guimarães wishes to thank all for their contri-
bution to this publication and the project Objectology This publication is part of the
cycle “On Audiences”, within the Art and Architecture programme, Guimarães 2012,
European Capital of Culture



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savage-objects.

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33 On the Supposed Societies of Chemicals,

45 Soliloquy, A Dwarf in the Stratosphere

71 The Return of Things and the Savagery

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101 A Vertiginous Enlightenment

119 Impure Matter:

141 Vibrational Mediations

157 An Effect of Verosimilitude

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169 Bodily Unconscious

183 The Tower and Its Ghost

199 The Petrification of the Image

215 On the Earth-Object

251 image credits

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What is to be gained by arguing that objects speak? What do recent

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fortuitous encounters between researchers might be more pro-

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Within anthropology, much has been written about the possi-

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them? Might they, if you like, become their own thing–theorists,

The power of powder

Much like the notorious notion of mana in Oceania, aché is a

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more concretely, to certain powders that they consider to be a

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babalawos know, aché de Orula, as the powder is referred to in

Concepts versus things

Elsewhere I have explained ways in which the notion of aché

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ing signifiers itself exemplifies, the case of aché raises classical

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(e.g. ‘relational’, ‘symmetrical’, ‘vital’, ‘vibrant’) ontological order,

If in any given ethnographic instance things may be considered,

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analytical task, in other words, cannot be to ‘add’ to the theoreti-

Step II: concept = thing

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metaphysical contents, the second is geared towards allowing

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is-power necessitate for anthropologists.12 Crucially, a sound

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What I wish to make explicit here, however, is the irreduc-

Step III: thing = concept

Consider what powder actually does in the diviner’s hands. As we

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But this suggests also a logical reversal that goes to the

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conceptual affordances: how things’ material characteristics

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Gabriel Tarde lived from 1843 to 1904. A failed rival of Émile

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like an excellent candidate for the job. Nonetheless, I will claim

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