More-Than-Human Choreography: Handling Things Between Logistics and Entanglement 9783839464502

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Moritz Frischkorn More-Than-Human Choreography

Critical Dance Studies Volume 65

Editorial The series is edited by Gabriele Brandstetter and Gabriele Klein.

Moritz Frischkorn is a choreographer, performer, and researcher based in Berlin. His artistic and academic practice deals with non-human choreographies and their socio-political effects. He produces research-based live performances, writes, curates, and teaches at Universität Hamburg, a.pass Brussels and Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle, among others.

Moritz Frischkorn

More-Than-Human Choreography Handling Things Between Logistics and Entanglement

This book was first presented and defended as a PhD thesis entitled ‘More-ThanHuman Choreographies. Handling Things between Logistics and Entanglement’ at HafenCity University, Hamburg in March 2021.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-n b.de

© 2023 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: © Robin Hinsch, from the series ‘Wahala’ (2022) Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839464502 Print-ISBN: 978-3-8376-6450-8 PDF-ISBN: 978-3-8394-6450-2 ISSN of series: 2747-3120 eISSN of series: 2747-3139 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

Acknowledgements .......................................................................7 1. More-than-human choreography on a broken planet ................................ 9 1.1 Introduction .......................................................................... 9 The Artificial Nature Project (Mette Ingvartsen) ............................................ 27 1.2 Context: What is ‘expanded choreography’? .......................................... 38 1.3 Method: describing the consistency and choreographic logic of assemblages.......... 58 1.4 Outline of the argument.............................................................. 64 2. Barricades as entangled things ..................................................... 71 Rainforest (Merce Cunningham) and Barricade Ballet (Tools for Action) ...................... 71 2.1 Things that gather and resist ........................................................ 78 2.2 Things at hand: relational, but concealed ............................................. 80 2.3 Things that run and fly............................................................... 87 Barricades and Dances (Moritz Frischkorn) ................................................ 95 2.4 Turbulent flow: barricades as choreopolitical operators............................... 101 2.5 Composing things as barricade: hesitation .......................................... 106 2.6 Barricades as spaces of attunement ................................................. 114 3. Assemblages as more-than-human performances ................................. 117 Homage to New York (Jean Tinguely) ..................................................... 117 3.1 Territorialization and deterritorialization: degrees of cohesion ........................ 121 3.2 The performative enactment of assemblages........................................ 128 Polyset (Vladimir Miller).................................................................. 139 3.3 Assemblages as fields of action and spaces of circulation: ‘preferred articulations’ ....146 3.4 The choreographic diagram of assemblages: ‘to follow the flow of matter’ ............ 156 4. Logistics as socio-material choreography ........................................ 165 We Love Logistics (UPS) and We are Maersk. We move mountains (Maersk) ................. 165 4.1 Contemporary logistics and its choreographic logic...................................178 4.2 Colonial logistics and the onto-epistemic violence of transport ....................... 191

4.3 Algorithmic governance: emergent choreography ................................... 203 African Terminal (geheimagentur)........................................................ 208 4.4 Unframing the stage, shifting agency, recalibrating the movement of people and things .................................................................218 4.5 A general realm of ‘logisticality’ ..................................................... 225 5. Attunement: a more-than-human choreography of care ...........................231 Literature .............................................................................. 243

Acknowledgements

I would like to honor the following people whose presence, knowledge, and love have been essential to the writing of this book: I thank Mirjam Schaub and Sibylle Peters for their invaluable support, their constructive feedback, and their steady encouragement throughout the writing process. I am grateful to all of my artistic research collaborators, namely Verena Brakonier, Heike Bröckerhoff, Bakary Camara, Harriet von Froreich, Abou Jabbie, Katharina Pelosi, Leon Ferdinand Lechner, Vladimir Miller, Daniel Ousman, Janto Djassi Rössner, Lars Unger, Luisa Wandschneider, and Jonas Woltemate. I would especially like to thank Heike Bröckerhoff, Harriet von Froreich, Vladimir Miller, and Thomas Pearce for valuable discussions and important feedback on this work, and André Lepecki for important suggestions and advice offered at the very beginning of my research journey. Furthermore, I am grateful to Robin Hinsch for allowing me to use his image on the title-page. Beyond the scope of academia and the arts, I want to thank my family and friends for supporting me while working on the book, for handling my moods, for enduring my occasional despair and frustration, and for sharing the mountains, hills, and valleys of my time spent thinking, experimenting, and writing. Last but not least, I thank Sean O’Dubhghaill for his careful editing of the book, Simon Zirzow for helping with the manuscript, and Gabriele Brandstetter and Gabriele Klein for their kind invitation to publish the book within the ‘Critical Dance Studies’ series at transcript.

 

 

 

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Image 1: The containership Ever Given blocking the Suez Canal, March 23–29, 2021.

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1.1 Introduction An encounter is a wound. A wound that – in a way is both delicate and brutal – widens the possible and the thinkable, signaling other worlds and other ways of living together, as it subtracts past and future by way of disruptive emergence. […] An encounter can only take place – can only stop emerging and start to happen – if it is noticed and consecutively counter-effectuated, this is to say, assisted, handled, cared for, each time (re)made as never-ending. Fiadeiro/Eugenio 2013: 17 What would a general strike against the solo be? Moten 2018a: 252

Things have to stay in motion. They must remain in flux. They cannot stop, stand still, or rest. Things need to keep moving; this simple phrase seems to be one of the main imperatives of our times, its inner logic. But what does it mean? Which kind of things have to keep moving and for what purpose? During the spring of 2020, when the world had just started fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, variations of this phrase appeared with renewed urgency: “We need to secure the stability of supply chains.” Or: “Closed borders should not affect

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economic collaboration.”1 The movement of consumer goods and their components, we learned, must not be interrupted if we want to be able to purchase food, toilet paper, or construction materials. Our lives depend on the efficient, extensive, and fluent movement of all sorts of things; they depend on national and international supply chains and on what I will term socio-material choreographies. Things needed to keep going, they needed to stay in motion, even while whole populations were told to stay at home, had to restrict their movements, and were forced to re-design their daily routines. Things need to keep moving; this simple imperative may, thus, be read as an expression of modern regimes of mobilization of matter2 that culminate in what is called ‘Great Acceleration’ – an extreme growth of human-related activities and ever faster, all-encompassing systems of mobility that are based on fossil fuel and superextended technical infrastructures (cf. Scherer 2020). This process started around 550 years ago with the so-called primitive accumulation of capital (both human and non-human) in places that were later going to be named and then brutally subjugated as colonies.3 It also meant that things were violently mobilized.4 This imperialist, colonial modality of acceleration exploded with the invention of the steam engine and the massive exploitation of carbon energy.5 Today, things – be it con1

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Today, almost three years after writing these lines, nothing much has changed in this respect; instead, the problem of keeping up global supply lines have aggravated due to more warfare, further political and social conflict, weather catastrophes, and more-than-human technical errors as the one shown above. Within this work, I use both the notions of material and matter. I prefer the notion of matter, given that it refers both to materiality and its potential significance. As feminist physicist Karen Barad repeatedly reminds us: it is important “to understand how matter comes to matters” (Barad 2003: 192). The notion of material, conversely, carries associations to the idea of a formless substance onto which form needs to be applied. This ‘hylomorphic’ model of matter shall henceforth be avoided, where possible. I refer to Kathryn Yusoff’s timeline who, citing Sylvia Wynter, “suggests that we should in fact consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantation on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the ‘sugar-complex’–a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people” (Yusoff 2018: 33). Mobilization is often positively connoted within dance studies, notably in Randy Martin’s project who defines it as “capacity for movement” rather than movement itself (Martin 1998: 4). I use the notion in a much more neutral way, often to denote a process in which some thing is violently mobilized, (i.e., forced to move). Accordingly, Gerald Siegmund writes, in relation to Martin, that “mobilization is something that precedes mobilization’s usage.” (Siegmund 2016: 28). Kathryn Yusoff also reminds us that the extraction and use of carbon energy is a direct successor to slave labor. She writes: “The complex histories of those afterlives of slavery continued in the chain gangs that laid the railroad and worked the coal mines through to the establishment of new forms of energy, in which, Stephanie LeMenager comments, ‘oil literally was conceived as a replacement for slave labor.’” (Yusoff 2018: 6)

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sumer goods or resources – have never been moving as much as they do, and they cannot be stopped. However, they are primarily moved in order for human subjects to exercise their apparent freedom of movement. They are, thus, being moved as objects, not as things – a distinction I will elaborate below as it is key to making my argument. This all changed when COVID-19 arrived on the scene. While objects had and have been kept moving – as containerized consumer goods within supply networks, as antibiotics running through our veins, and as cattle reproducing on a gigantic, industrial scale – human bodies were not anymore allowed to do likewise. Instead, their freedom of movement was restricted severely. Populations were forced to stay at home, in a perfect example of what Foucault has termed ‘biopolitics’ (cf. Latour 2020), while governments enacted their cyber-technological measures of smart containment based on real-time tracking (cf. Preciado 2020). In short: Important aspects of what has been termed a modern ‘social choreography’, which is foundational for our ideas of subjective expression and freedom, were either disabled or significantly altered.6 In addition, those people who were responsible for making objects move, rather than looking for self-expression within movement, were still required to leave their houses and had to expose themselves to the risk of contracting the virus. Workers in the meat industry, logistics workers, construction suppliers, cashiers at the supermarket, truck drivers, as well as teachers, nurses, doctors, and care-workers were all required to continue treading the mill. Jobs related to human physical well-being, to education, but also linked to keeping objects in motion, were suddenly valued as being essential. Thus, the following interdependency became visible, at least momentarily: modern subjectivity has always been predicated on the fantasy of autonomous movement choices, while at the same time controlling, regulating, and managing the movement of those being excluded from the realm of the fully human. We would not live the lives we live,7 if the movement of cattle was not managed within gigantic food-production chains, the movement of labor was not regulated in Amazon warehouses or assemblages of managing migration and the movement of resources was not administered within mines, factories, and supply chains. While things need to keep moving, they do so according to the imperatives and choices 6

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The notion of ‘social choreography’, as coined by Andrew Hewitt (Hewitt 2005), is central to my formulation of a socio-material notion of choreography. ‘Social choreography’ elaborates the view that movement within social space is both bound and constricted by implicit norms and regulations that are enacted on the level of bodily behavior. Hewitt, thus, recovers the working of ideology on the level of the aesthetic, in as much as it is embodied. For a more detailed analysis of this notion, see chapter 1.2 ‘What is ‘expanded choreography’? The ‘we’ I here interpellate, is one that refers to Western subjects and their history of colonialism. It indicates the necessity to confront and mourn an inheritance of violence and hate towards human and non-human others.

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of so-called subjects. The apparently free movement of subjects, in turn, is based on the management of the movement of objects. In other words: The movement of subjects depends on reducing ‘things’ to mere ‘objects’, notably by controlling their movement. The pandemic laid bare this imbalanced freedom of movement by inverting it; it seemed, as if the movement of objects was suddenly less restricted that the movement of their human counterparts. Though this did not mean that the movement of objects had been freed from human control, it did imply that their movement needed not only to be controlled, but also to be cared for. We suddenly felt our dependency upon the movement of things. In fact, this perturbed relationship of objects and subjects yielded an understanding of the deeply entangled choreographies of both humans and things. Or, at least, it should have. Some definitions may then be needed. Firstly, the difference between things and objects is fundamental to this work. Objects only exist in dependence of subjects (i.e., as objects of perception, knowledge, or use within the hands and minds of human beings). Thus, the realm of objects is, as André Lepecki writes: “ontologically tied to instrumentality, to utility, to usage” (Lepecki 2012: 77). Things, as relational arrangements which exist in their own right (i.e., beyond human knowledge, use, or reflection) are defined as material relationalities that escape being fully known, managed, handled, or choreographed. Their material recalcitrance (Latour 2004a: 82/83) and inherent fugitivity (Moten 2008) constitutes an alterity that cannot fully be incorporated into either human action or knowledge. This is, notably, because of their fundamental and generative ‘entanglement’ with one another – a notion that has most prominently been described by Karen Barad (cf. Barad 2007) and Ian Hodder (cf. Hodder 2012). Most importantly, things carry agentic capacities themselves (Latour 2005a, Bennett 2010). It is informative to remind ourselves, thus, that the entire shift of movement patterns described above – human subjects having to staying at home while objects had to continue moving – was itself due to an entity that resided at the edge of life and might either be either termed less-than-animal or more-than-object: a virus. Indeed, COVID-19 reminded us that things can act upon us in much the same way that we can act upon them. As COVID exemplified, realms and entities that had previously been termed ‘nature’ or ‘wildernesses’, and which had been seen as immobile and passive, spoke back to and acted back at us. In that sense, the virus may well have been a ‘representative’ of the ongoing climate catastrophe. We could always have credited things with agency, collaborative powers, force, and even wit. Yet, the pandemic may have made more-than-human entanglements more evident than ever and on all levels: economic, social, political, and ecological. Bats that live in quasiurban density within caves hosted and spread viruses, while global agricultural politics shifted the border between cultivated and non-cultivated land, thereby allowing for the virus to find its human host much more easily. In turn, Chinese food-mar-

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kets became entangled with fashion ‘Made in Italy’ (as one hypothesis for how the virus came to Europe first goes), with skiing resorts (another potential hot-spot), the global production of oil, its negative price, Afro-American lives in inner city districts (who were affected more severely than the rest of US population), global pharmaceutical markets, technical prosthesis such as respirators, human m-RNA, and so on and so on. People and things have worked together in manners that are quite impossible to disentangle. In all of these cases agency was distributed between both people and things. With Fred Moten, I then argue that the notions of subject and object are a merely fantastical binary opposition that is not based on any earthly set of differences (cf. Moten 2018a: 244). Therefore, I rather speak in terms of human and non-human, as originally proposed by Bruno Latour (cf. Latour 1991).8 All the while, I want to keep in mind that many of the notions used to describe matter – object, thing, material, the inhuman, etc. – have often been used to violently categorize and separate the flesh of the world and to turn parts of it into passive lumps or bare entities. The category of the ‘inhuman’ commonly served as a legitimation to violently mobilize and relocated both human and non-human entities that were considered objects. As geologist Kathryn Yusoff writes: “The human and its subcategory, the inhuman, are historically relational to a discourse of settler-colonial rights and the material practice of extraction, which is to say that the categorization of matter is a spatial execution, of place, land, and person cut from relation through geographical displacement (and relocation through forced settlement and transatlantic slavery). That is, racialization belongs to a material categorization of the division of matter (corporeal and mineralogical) into active and inert. Extractable matter must be both passive (awaiting extraction and possessing of properties) and able to be activated through the mastery of white men. Historically, both slaves and gold have to be material and epistemically made through the recognition and extraction of their inhuman properties. These historic geologic relations and geo-logics span Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia through the movement of people, objects, and racial and material categories.” (Yusoff 2018: 2/3)

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Even if the Latourian notion of non-human wants to overcome subject-object binaries and their inherent violence, we still need to acknowledge that this very binary, even if ungrounded and fantastical, still carries and effectuates enormous violence. Throughout this work, I question aesthetic and practical ways of undoing subject-object binaries; these binaries, as I propose, become effective in the practical handling of both materials and their discursive framings. I also acknowledge that the opposition of human vs. non-human still carries some risk of valuing one more highly than the other. Ideally, we would speak of different living and non-living entities, or, better still, of differently positioned and (en)abled members of ecologies.

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Where Yusoff speaks about the globalized colonial movement of people and objects in the above citation, she seems to point to modernity’s specifically choreographic quality. It is, I will argue in this book, within capitalism’s choreographic channels that the division between humanity and inhumanity, between subject and object, was and continues to be enacted. The enactment of these categories is a performative process, I claim, and one I will analyze in detail. In so far as they come to bear meaning performatively, in our daily interaction with things, the notions of ‘subject’ and ‘subjectivity’, thus, continue to haunt our relations to things. As Fred Moten writes: “The experience of subjectivity is the would-be subject’s thwarted desire for subjectivity, which we must keep on learning not to want, which we have to keep on practicing not wanting, as if in endless preparation for a recital that, insofar as it never comes, is always surreally present. Meanwhile, the subject, which was never here, cannot then disappear; it can only haunt.” (Moten 2018a: 244) It may then be an almost hauntological fact that the virus did not actually redefine socio-material choreographies by itself. In fact, its thingly powers largely depended upon those movement channels that had been established to control the movement of objects. After all, the virus itself could only spread as fast as it has been doing precisely because of an expanded global regime of mobility within the channels of capitalist production and logistics (cf. Scherer 2020). It became powerful only in concert with our contemporary world’s diverse socio-technical assemblages: airplanes, skiing resorts, churches, border regulation, and market dynamics. Its agency, like any agency, is distributed among a field of cooperating, interdependent beings. Yet, the virus’s accelerated spread within capitalist channels of movement control may indeed be deemed hauntological, in so far as the choreographic violence which subjects normally exercise against objects was, in this case, turned against these very subjects themselves. It may have seemed, for a brief moment, that there were other forces at play, themselves regulatory to some degree, and that an undead entity at the border of life reflected an image of our contemporary lifestyle back to us. While we had previously believed that resources were endless, that mobility was limitless, that care work neither needed to be recognized nor paid for, that we could invade ever more wilderness, erect ever more infrastructure (ports, pathways, highways, data cables, switches, roads, pipelines, warehouses, stations, lockers, routes, and so on), colonize and objectify ever more beings, expand the realm of human mastery, human governance, human handling – as I will claim concerning the realm of socio-material choreographic governance – that our history of colonialism and the ongoing eco-genocide which it brought upon earth would level out, could be forgotten and that the witnesses could be silenced, the voices made unheard, the chatter and the noise ignored, we could henceforth have known better. An entity at the edge of life

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– which in its un-manageable, unpredictable movement through bodies and space cannot be defined as an object, but qualifies as a thing – hacked itself into global capitalism’s extended socio-technical assemblages that had originally been designed to manage the movement of objects, not unruly things, and thus deeply perturbed our daily movement patterns. It made apparently autonomous would-be-subjects stay at home, while consumer goods, and all sorts of objects, had to keep moving all around the globe. Though it was weird, and extremely sad and unfair in many cases, it also felt liberating as an interruption of human-centered routines. For a moment, it felt like life as we knew it was grinding to a halt, or was at least becoming decelerated. Some of the all-too-global supply chains were interrupted, dolphins returned to the Venice lagoon, and sea lions re-appropriated German waters. It felt like stillness and contemplation, the slow pace of inner growth, of vegetal being, was making itself felt. However, and quicker than we had anticipated, things had to go back to normal. In fact, objects had to be kept in motion, as mere commodities supplying the lives of their human subject-masters. Yet, what remains is the sense that the human hubris of trying to control and manage each and every movement across the globe has turned against itself. As a dance of entanglement, the virus perturbed the globalized socio-material choreography of controlling objects and people, highlight its every weakness. As a regulatory agent, it laid the violence of sorting lives according to how much they are worth to global capitalism bare. It rendered visible our fundamental dependency on materiality, on food, on healthy socio-material relations, and on the movement of things. Hence, it urged us to question these dependencies and to start looking for possible alternative approaches: Do we need to develop a different perspective on thingly movement? And what does it mean, anyway, for things to keep moving? Should they be allowed to take trajectories of and on their own, to become liberated from human imperialist rule, or will they eventually do so by themselves? To what extent were they truly ever really captured? If things need to keep moving, then how can we learn to coordinate our movement to theirs, how do we move in concert, in finely attuned, emergent, and co-choreographed ways? And why ask these questions today? I have, in what has been outlined above, repeatedly invoked the notion of choreography to describe movement trajectories and patterns of both human and non-human entities. I am interested in these phenomena from a double perspective: both as a theorist from the field of Performance Studies and as an artist who has choreographically worked with everyday objects and things himself. My central questions, as both an artist and as a researcher, thus are: How can one choreographically handle things without reducing them to the status of objects? Are there ways of moving together that do no enact the fantastical opposition of subjects and objects? Or, formulated differently: How do we move as a thing among other things?

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Within this artistic-research project, I understand choreography primarily as the organization or structuring of movement in both time and space (cf. Klein 2013). At the limit, this conception of choreography includes the iterable and rhythmical movement trajectories that are responsible for the momentary, self-structured existence of things themselves (Klien/Gormly/ Valk 2008, Lefebvre 1992). Still, it is important to mention that “the formation of choreography” is “a peculiar invention of early modernity” (Lepecki 2006: 6). Originating in France in the 16th century, choreography delineates the act of writing and archiving dances, thereby prescribing their conditions of visibility and potential meaning. It has, therefore, also be described as a ‘system of command’ that aims at regulating movement itself (cf. Lepecki 2007). As such, choreography has, until today, most often been aligned with majoritarian forces in society (i.e., the state, military, and capital) and has become, at least by tendency, a knowledge formation that governs movement at diverse socio-political levels (cf. Lepecki 2007, Allsopp/Lepecki 2008).9 Its capacity to structure movement in social space and on the level of embodied behavior has been described as ‘social choreography’ (Hewitt 2005). More recently, the notion of ‘expanded choreography’ is being used to describe choreographic practices beyond the framework of the stage (Laermans 2008, Cvéjic/Vujanović 2015: 72, Laermans 2015, Ingvartsen 2016). This expanded notion of choreography suggests that choreography may be regarded as a disembodied, generic faculty of governing movement, one that neither bound to the human body nor to dance (cf. Spånberg 2012). Throughout all of these reflections, the central questions remain the same, as far as I am concerned: Is choreography

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Henceforth, I speak of choreography as ‘governance’ rather than as ‘apparatus’, both notions of which relate to Michel Foucault’s work. While the notion of apparatus (or: dispositive) still indicates a somewhat stable spatial pattern of human or non-human entities (cf. Schaub 2017), the notion of governance relates to shifting constellations in motion. In relation to Foucault, I understand governance as the ‘conduct of conducts’ (cf. Foucault 2007, Lemke 2010), as a formation of knowledge, technique, and materiality, thus, that comes to be in order to establish and regulate smooth ‘spaces of circulation’ (cf. Foucault 2007: 325, see also Lepecki 2013a). The notion of governance, furthermore, implies that components or entities participate in these regulated spaces of circulation somewhat voluntarily (i.e., they at least partly regulate their movement patterns themselves by identifying with the implicit systemic rules of conduct, cf. Deleuze 1992). It can also incorporate algorithmic procedures in which movement tendencies and emergent, adaptive patterns are emulated in order for a system to govern itself (cf. Parisi 2012). This usage of the notion of governance also refers to recent theoretic literature from the field of Performance Studies. In his analysis of choreographic assemblages, theorist Rudi Laermans writes: “The verb ‘governing’ is indeed appropriate here. In fact, choreography always necessitates the exercise of power in a Foucauldian sense: not only a forbidding of statements or a repression of movement but first and foremost a strategic acting on possible actions and their mutual coupling into a composed series of events.” (Laermans 2015: 234, cited after Ruhsam 2021: 130)

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applied from the outside, or are systems allowed to govern their movements themselves? What are the logics of choreography that are operative? And can we think of choreography beyond its history of violence, as more-than-human acts of carefully attuning to one another? Curiously, even though choreographers started to speak about ‘expanded choreography’ from about 2012 onwards, the notion of choreography had already begun to appear in other societal fields, such as the natural sciences, diplomacy, and – notably – logistics, prior to that time.10 The business field of logistics has sometimes taken recourse to the metaphor of choreography itself (cf. UPS 2010, DHL 2012), both to mediate its virtuosic complexity and to beautify its ideology of turning material and bodies into mere resources, or objects, which can and have to be mobilized and disposed of within smooth spaces of circulation and capitalization. Here, choreography appears to name the (self-)governance of complex systems of movement that include human and non-human components alike. It is to this use of the term that I alluded when describing the movement of consumer goods, labor, or animals as choreography above. In this version of choreography, its expansion towards the non-human realm may be regarded as a dangerous, imperialist gesture – as a gesture of taking hold of new territories. While choreography, both as practice and knowledge formation, was founded in relation to human movement as a tool to write, prescribe, and archive the practice of dance, delineating its modes of visibility and what it may signify, the term is often used in relation to complex patterns of movement organization in areas as diverse as biology, programming, network design, logistics, or business management from about 2000 onwards, rendering it a form of disembodied “operative reason” (Cvéjic/Vujanović 2015: 17). As socio-material governance, choreography no longer wants to be constricted to the realm of dance and claims control over ever more and other bodies. One may then ask: To what extent has the nature of choreography changed due to its expansion? What is at stake when other bodies become the object of choreographic governance? And did choreography, since its inception at the beginning of modernity, not always already control and regulate bodies and movements beyond the realm of the human? As mentioned above, I operate on two levels within this book, due to my double role as researcher and artist: one level concerns an analytical approach while the other concerns an experimental approach that deals with the questions outlined here in actual artistic practice. On the level of analysis, I thus describe contemporary logics of the choreographic in so far as it surpasses human movement and activates, mobilizes, captures, and prescribes other(ed) bodies and flows, be they material, financial, logistical, or climatic. It is in this regard that I will henceforth speak of so10

Indeed, different authors have used the label of choreography to describe logistics (cf. Lecavalier 2012, Easterling 2012, Lyster 2016).

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cio-material choreography. I want to sketch the outlines of the enlarged, expanded, and entangled field of activity that choreography has begun to administer, rather than giving a rigid definition of what the choreographic may be, or what it might become tomorrow. If logistics, today, imagines its activity to be choreographic, this use of the notion indicates both a rupture in relation to what we have imagined choreography to be to date and a repetition of what it has always been. When speaking about logistical assemblages such as an Amazon warehouse, there are certainly different desires at play, other power structures implied, other objects handled and manipulated than when describing a French court dance of the 16th century, in relation to which the notion of choreography was first invented. And yet, the notion of choreography was coined in close temporal proximity to the establishment of early colonialist logistical assemblages. In fact, the knowledge formation of choreography emerges around the same time that early capitalist-colonialist practices of violently abducting human bodies seems to mark one possible beginning of a modern kinetic-choreographic imperative to govern all matter.11 The usage of choreography as socio-material governance of both human and non-human bodies, thus, merely resurfaces today, at a time in which contemporary logistics incorporates a shift from disciplinary societies to modes of controlling and analyzing less ‘contained’ movement patterns. If constricted, clearly scored (i.e., synchronized and directed) social choreographies were important in the practical making of human subject positions within a disciplinary architecture of societal institutions today (cf. Deleuze 1992, Hewitt 2005, Klein 2011, Cvéjic/Vujanović 2015), today, we need to confront choreographies that are embedded in and conditioning neoliberal networks of flows of apparently or forcefully free(d) entrepreneurial-consumer bodies, of post-human materials, affects, and capital (cf. Lepecki 2016: 1–5, Cowen 2014, Mezzadra/Neilson 2013a, Mezzadra/Neilson 2019). While the degrees of mobility within our lives have steadily grown (prior to the pandemic, at least), while automated vehicles deliver food or algorithms make markets tumble within seconds, this does not mean that no sociomaterial choreographies were implied. On what level might we critique these totalizing and ‘disembodied’ choreographies, I want to ask. And what role does a re11

In his ‘Exhausting Dance’, André Lepecki dates the beginning of choreography to Thoinot Arbeau’s famous dance manual entitled ‘Orchesographie’ from 1589 (cf. Lepecki 2006: 25). This is not so far from another date that critical geologist Kathryn Yusoff cites as one possible way to date the beginning point of what is today termed the ‘Anthropocene’ (i.e., the year of 1610). She writes: “The earliest suggested date in the history of material exchanges is the 1610 thesis (Lewis and Maslin 2015), dating the Anthropocene’s start to the European invasion of the Americas, or ‘New World’, and the so-called exchange in flora and fauna.” (Yusoff 2018: 29) This book is not based on a strictly historic hypothesis, but I want to name and analyze two processes that move alongside: The invention of the discursive formation of choreography, as described by Lepecki, and the mobilization of human and non-human bodies and resources within colonial and neo-colonial channels of exploitation and accumulation.

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current interest in material infrastructures, political things, design thinking, or object-oriented-ontologies play? Indeed, I want to argue that it is the question of how to move (with) things (i.e., the question and problem of objectification), that occupies the heart of choreography’s faculty from its modern beginnings to present. Yet, both the colonial and infrastructural dimension of choreography have often been neglected for political as well as aesthetic reasons. To think about socio-material choreographies also opens up possibilities for practicing alternative ways of moving with or alongside things. If the recent pandemic has shown the extent to which social choreographies are fundamentally dependent from, and entangled with, the realm of thingly movement, as I claim, then the question of how to move in concert with things seems to become unavoidable. To speculate about alternative modalities of moving with the material world is both necessary in relation to our wounded earth, but also, I argue, as a form of grief work, given that it relates to a history of violence: Within the history of modernity, as I have already argued above, attempts at governing movement have never only been applied to so-called human bodies; they have also always been applied to bodies that were not assumed to be fully-human, as well as to any non-human entity that seemed valuable enough to transport, alter, redesign, and mobilize according to capitalist imperatives. If, historically, the alleged auto-mobilization of human subjects always depended upon, and was entangled with, the brutally prescribed alter-mobilization of its objectified other, then one might then ask: What are the ways in which humans and non-humans may move in concert with one another? What would emergent, non-violent choreographies of both humans and things look like? It is in this sense that I henceforth speak of more-than-human choreography (i.e., of choreographies beyond the position of a former-subject who was presenting, or ‘presencing’, itself and reveling in virtuosic movement).12 To do so is to relate, thus, in both critical and

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Within this work, I speak of more-than-human choreography in relation to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s book ‘Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More-Than-Human Worlds’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). I prefer the notion of ‘more-than-human’ to the label ‘post-human’ because it indicates a de-centering of the notion of the human without claiming that one could necessarily overcome it, as the latter label suggests. The term ‘more-than-human’ also does not carry the techno-celebratory resonances that the notion of ‘post-human’ sometimes summons up. Where I use the adjective ‘post-human’, it henceforth indicates the technological fantasy of overcoming the embodied conditions of the human (understood as a species rather than as group of Western subjects). Furthermore, it is beautiful to note that performance scholar Martina Ruhsam, in her recent publication on thingly choreographies, also ends her reflection with regards to Puig de la Bellacasa. She writes: “Following Bellacasa, I consider (yet to be developed) forms of ecological care (and not just interest) to be extremely important in terms of the personal-collective within entangled ecologies, especially within the context of a culture that is fixated on autonomy and self-sufficiency.” (Ruhsam 2021: 292, my translation)

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emphatic ways to the possibilities of choreographic thinking beyond the category of Man (cf. Wynter 2003). Indeed, these questions also resonate with recent theoretic endeavors within the field of Performance Studies. In her newly published book ‘Moving Matter’, to which I will come back below, Martina Ruhsam formulates an expanded notion of choreography that wants to attend to matter differently: “Such choreography rejects the prevailing tendency in dance to focus attention exclusively on human actors. Non-human elements and beings – be they things, digital images, animals, texts, light waves or sounds – do not merely have the function of underpinning, explaining, or framing the movements of human subjects; rather, they are part of the choreographic fabric, for such a choreography no longer relies on the phantom of a coherent and self-contained subject at the center of the scene (...).” (Ruhsam 2021: 129, my translation) Here is where I must intervene as a practitioner. If, as I propose, there is something fundamental to be practiced and learned from our pragmatic encounters with non-human materials, actual performance work and its careful attempts at handling things differently might well be a good place to look. Ironically, as I will explain, it is their specific attention to logisticality – the way in which a specific handling of material founds ways of moving together – that renders specific performance practices propositional in this respect. Logisticality is a notion that was proposed by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in the essay ‘Fantasy in the Hold’ (cf. Harney/Moten 2013: 92–97).13 It is conceived as a counter-notion to the efficient, and often exploitative, socio-material choreography of logistics. Logisticality is the realm of constant intra-action between human and non-human entities, the ongoing planning, arranging, and borrowing of capacities, agencies, and resources that allows for the sustenance of assemblages. It is concurrently conceptualized as a relation of fundamental indebtedness, in which any take-over of agentic capacities is reliant on a field of cooperating socio-material others (cf. Frischkorn 2018). Within this book, I will thus unfold and describe three different choreographic practices of handling things in which I have participated as a choreographer and artist in varying roles: my own dance-performance Barricades and Dances, which is the center-piece of the artisticresearch that this work proposes, the artistic research environment entitled Polyset by Vladimir Miller, and the performative intervention African Terminal. All three of these works, as experimental set-ups within the artistic field of contemporary performing arts, produce potent questions about the choreographic handling of things, but also – and even more importantly – they themselves propose alternative choreographic principles of how to do so. This book’s task is to highlight the extent to which, and on the basis of what kind of more-than-human entanglements, these works are able to produce alternative modes of handling things. As I aim to show, all three of 13

For a more detailed analysis of the notion, cf. chapter 4.5 ‘A general realm of ‘logisticality’’.

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these case-studies create conditions in which different forms of ‘attunement’ to nonhumans become enabled (cf. Despret 2004, Morton 2018).14 A few words, then, about my general motivation for writing this book: My attempt to unfold the modality of handling things that these performative practices propose is based on the assumption that there exists, with regards to more-thanhuman choreography, what Andrew Hewitt has named an “aesthetic continuum” (Hewitt 2005: 17–36): Modes of handling things as practiced on stages of contemporary dance exist, I claim, on a continuum with practices of handling things in our daily life, but also with practices of handling things within supply chains or a logistical network. All of these practices are based on what I will henceforth call ‘choreographic principles of handling’.15 These principles can be applied at different scales and to varying degrees, and they constitute my central analytic tool for describing more-than-human choreography. They are circumscribed by two central questions: How are things handled? And why are they handled? They thereby unfold both the modality and finality of socio-material or more-than-human choreographies. Together, they define what I will term the choreographic logic of specific assemblages. My hypothesis is that these performative practices (i.e., my choreographic and performative case studies), but also other forms of more-than-human choreography, always already propose varied modes of relating to matter, thereby opening up questions of human to non-human relations, or – more generally speaking – questions about a (more-than-) human position within ecologies of practices. Within the choreographic handling of material, I will argue, the distribution of agency between humans, but also between humans and non-humans, is being negotiated. Morethan-human choreography, thus, enacts what feminist scholar Karen Barad calls

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The concept of attunement will become the central denominator for the practical proposals of more-than-human choreography that this work explores. While it is used within Kant’s aesthetic philosophy (in relation to the notion of the sublime, for example, cf. p. 103 of this work), I here relate to more recent formulations of the notion within animal studies and new materialist philosophy (cf. Despret 2004, Morton 2018). Within the last chapter of this dissertation, the choreographic principles of handling that my case studies propose will thus be gathered and re-formulated in relation to the notion of ‘attunement’, cf. chapter 5. ‘Attunement: a more-than-human choreography of care’. The notion of handling, as I use it, does not stem from existing literature. In a way, I borrow the term from the field of logistics in which it is used to denote the act of moving material within logistical infrastructure, such as a port. As a form of re-appropriation, I use the term in the following sense: For me, handling denotes any act of touching and moving material bodies. At the limit, it might encompass acts of simply perceiving or observing matter in so far as both parties (i.e., the human observer and the material other), which are being observed, are somewhat altered in the act of handling. Thus, I understand handling as a form of ‘intraaction’ (a term I borrow from feminist physicist Karen Barad, cf. Barad 2007) and as a process in which both parties, handler and handled, are transformed or altered.

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‘agential cuts’ (cf. Barad 2007: 141–147), continually allocating positions within complex, assembled ecosystems. In other words, handling things is a choreographic process of ‘worlding’, of iteratively re-configuring more-than-human worlds (cf. Barad 2007: 148/149). More-than-human choreography, therein, consists of iterated, embodied, and felt acts of relating to non-humans in situated instances of intra-action (to use Karen Barad’s term here, which indicates the structural entanglement of human and non-human agencies and of any entangled agencies more generally, cf. Barad 2007), in which ideologies of how to place oneself within ecologies are actualized and become effective.16 In this book, I formulate my own theoretic model of more-than-human choreography based on my case studies, before analyzing the realm of socio-material choreographies by closely looking at the business-field of logistics: The choreographic handling of matter, I claim, is a performative process that takes place within assemblages, a notion I borrow from Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze/ Guattari 1987), thereby constantly re-making them at the same time. I will, thus, develop a performative understanding of assemblages as ‘spaces of circulation’ (Foucault 2007: 325) and as ‘fields of action’ (cf. Bourdieu 1993; Hilders/Mangez 2014) that are always based on ‘preferred articulations’ (cf. Hall 1980; Weheliye 2014). Within these assemblages, human and non-human bodies move together and enact their agentic capacities of collaboration. Choreography, finally, comes to name the virtual, diagrammatic structure of these assemblages and is performatively enacted in iterated acts of handling things. Evidently, the artistic practices that I consider here as case studies do not stand alone. The last fifteen years have borne witness to a prolific number of choreographic works that put non-humans, in the form of consumer goods, waste, theater machinery, or even shapeless materials, at the center of attention.17 The fact that that

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Martina Ruhsam’s book, that I have cited above, tries to formulate a conception of choreography based upon Karan Barad’s philosophy of ‘agential realism’. I will come back to Ruhsam’s reflections through this book (cf. Ruhsam 2021). As Gerko Egert conceded in 2016: “In recent years, more and more choreographies have begun to focus on non-humans on stage.” (Egert 2016b: 69) André Lepecki already claimed in 2012: “If there is a distinguishing trait of recent experimental dance, it is the noticeable presence of objects as main performative elements.” (Lepecki 2012: 75) Works of this kind include, among others, Maria José Arjona Unitled (White Series) (2008), João Fiadeiro’s Este corpo que me ocupa (2008), Trajell Harrell’s Tickling the sleeping giant (2008), Aitana Cordero’s Solo...? (2008), William Forsythe’s infamous Choreographic Objects, Mette Ingvartsen’s The Artificial Nature Series (2009–2012), Kate McIntosh’s worktable (2011) and In many hands (2016), Clement Layes’ things that surround us (2012), Petra Sabisch’s relations (2013), Eva Meyer-Keller’s Pulling Strings (2013), Things on a Table (2016) and Living Matters (2019), Simone Aughterlony’s Supernatural (2015), Maria Yerez’ JABBA (2017), Saskia Hölbing’s things (2018), and many others.

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these works do not treat non-humans as mere props or scenery, but as central elements, sometimes even as actual performers endowed with agency and with the ability to autonomously produce affect, has given rise to a number of different conceptual framings. On the whole, these choreographic works are often subsumed under the rubric of an ‘expanded choreography’, mentioned previous, because the human body is not the only thing conceived of as a moving element endowed with agency within these works. In relation to these works, some of which I will also touch upon, my central question is: What are the choreographic proposals of how to handle things and what are the political and ethical choices which are implied within these choreographic modes of handling things? Let me then specify the following: Because my proposal is organized around a specific set of questions, it necessarily leaves others aside. Speaking from the position of an artist who was involved in the creation of choreographic work that actually and practically moves, touches, interacts, and works with materials, I am not directly concerned with questions concerning the aesthetic representation of things. Or, formulated differently: I think of aisthesis (sensual data) as organized within the actual intra-action, the act of handling. I also do not specifically focus on works that highlight the extent to which humans are controlled by things, especially the mass of consumer goods that populate our lives. Even if I believe in the fact that we are very much influenced, directed, and fundamentally dependent on things, its reductio ad absurdum (i.e., of humans being subjected to material apparatuses from which they cannot escape) is not my interest here. I am also neither primarily interested in work in which choreographers or performers opt to be alongside material without handling it at all (for an analysis of those, see Lepecki 2012). Although the gesture of an erasure of choreography as a founding ground for another relation to matter does have a certain emotional resonance with me, I do not believe that it will be able to productively reconfigure our relation to the realm of things on a political level. Just as much as ‘we’ are not able to simply pass on our privileges, but need instead to find modes of undoing them step by step by analyzing the historical and political mechanisms that have put them into place, we will also have to assume some form of agency ourselves, even if we want to shift modes of distributing agency within morethan-human assemblages. It is through this lens, and with the aim of uncovering the possibility of such undoings, that I approach the three case study choreographies around which this work will be centered. What this work aims at, thus, is to carefully intervene into a highly charged field of action; namely, the choreographic mobilization of matter. I propose that moving with things, and being moved by things, may be a place from which it is possible to tentatively train a different form of bodily experience, one that allows for constant attunement to non-humans, a practice of movement that aims to take the many ways in which we are always already entangled with and fundamentally dependent on a wide range of other bodies into account.

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With these analytical reflections and artistic experiments, my work is situated in a broad spectrum of academic and artistic work that deals with the distributed agentic capacities of humans and non-humans and asks questions such as: How do we look for and practice, as a species, a humbler position within manifold ecologies? What are the skills that we would need for this endeavor? And what would we need to give up, in terms of affect, concept, and ideology? These questions are widely discussed across various disciplines (cf., for example, Tsing 2015, Haraway 2016b, Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). There are certainly different reasons for the remarkable theoretic turn towards things, objects, and materiality in the recent decade: On the one hand, capitalist mass-production keeps on bringing an unprecedented and neverending flood of (mostly cheap) industrial products into our lives (cf. Baudrillard 1996, Agamben 2009); on the other hand, we are experiencing acutely, within this abundantly furnished landscape of our daily lives, how dependent we have become on the material structures and settings that we inhabit and are.18 We may have thought ourselves masters of our production, our employees, our prisoners, our assembly belts, and, most obviously, the territory and environment that surrounded and fed us in fully subordinate passivity. Yet different theoreticians have argued that we can no longer act, as if we were in full control of both the material objects that we produce and, on a larger scale, the environmental surrounding that we had thought of as a ‘mute’, limitless, passive outside, and endless resource of capitalist exploitation (cf. Bennett 2010, Latour 2010, Hodder 2012). Our lives’ thingly and material settings exercise control over our actions and gestures in quite unpredictable ways in both the ‘ecological crisis’ and during the recent pandemic in specific. As I have argued above, the radical distinction between human and thing, subject and object, has always been a fantasy that relies on brutal logics of both exclusion and integration. This history of violence constitutes a complex landscape of contemporary investment into material: On the one hand, nothing is excluded from being turned into just another bare object – one can here also think, for example, of Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ becoming the mere object of bio-power (cf. Agamben 1998), of Gayatri C. Spivak’s question about whether the subaltern can speak for themselves, which in the end may apply to any ‘mute’ or ‘muted’ thing that is expressive, but not heard (cf. Spivak 1999), or finally of the Marxist notion of reifi-

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Giorgio Agamben describes these infrastructures in relation to Foucauldian notions, claiming a “boundless growth of apparatuses” (Agamben 2009: 15), and explicitly includes material objects in this category: “I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth […], but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and—why not—language itself […].” (Agamben 2009: 14)

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cation (cf. Diederichsen 2012).19 On the other hand, those mere things that are supposedly devoid of voice or representation are now found to constantly feedback into our lives in an unforeseen fashion. Today, these problems often take on the name of Anthropocene,20 or simply of the man-made climate crisis. These names, which in one way or the other are all directly linked to economic practices and ideologies of modernity and capitalism, as Bruno Latour has shown (cf. Latour 1991), all indicate the following: Humanity has, with ever accelerating speed and impact, intervened into cycles and patterns of non-human movement to such an extent that it has significantly and irrevocably altered the face of the planet. It will have to deal with the consequences, but seems incapable of doing so. The ideological groundwork for this massively destructive choreographic intervention (i.e., Euro-enlightened frameworks of rational subjectivity), is, as Fred Moten reminds us in a recent talk (Moten 2019), based on the regulatory exclusion and subsequent incorporation or violent integration of whatever was and still is not allowed to be part of the realm of white, European, male humanity: other races, other genders, one’s own body, animality, and everything else. Things and people, in as much as they are conceptualized as a resource, instrument, commodity or tool – there to extract, to accumulate, to manipulate, or capitalize – are relegated to the realm of objects. As such, their movement has to be controlled, channeled, monitored, and optimized. Modernity, to put it shortly, is based on the choreographic governance of matter, of both people and things. Marx, in Vol. I of his ‘Capital’, claims that capital is but “a social relation between persons which is mediated through things” (Marx 1977: 932). One way of creating this relation, at least today, is via the production and transport of more and

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As a Marxist notion, reification originally delineated how decidedly social entities and relations could be turned into things: It describes the objectification of the social – people and their needs are turned into mere objects of instrumental reason. The notion became prominent in Lukács’ chapter on ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, which was part of his book ‘History and Class Consciousness’ (Lukács 1971), in which he treats reification as a problem of capitalist society related to the prevalence and sheer massive presence of commodities. Reification is defined by Gajo Petrovic as: “The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man-produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life. Also, transformation of human beings into thing-like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thingworld. Reification is a ‘special’ case of ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist society.” (Petrović 1983: 411–413) I henceforth speak of objectification, rather than reification, because reification has a connotation of fixing both relations and materialities in place, thereby somehow petrifying them. I understand reification as one possible form of objectification. This also refers to any of its derivates: from Capitolocene to Plantationocene to Chthulucene (Haraway et al. 2015, Haraway 2016a) to Neganthropocene (Stiegler 2018). For a fundamental critique of the notion of Anthropocene, which I explicitly relate to in this work, cf. Yusoff 2018.

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more consumer objects, based upon socio-material choreographies and the serial exclusion, displacement, and exploitation of merely “logistical population(s)” (Harney/Moten 2013: 91). Indeed, the choreographic governance of people and things are deeply entangled, and they are productive of socio-material worlds – worlds in which we live, work, and love. Within their essay ‘Fantasy in the Hold’, Harney and Moten claim that the movement of people and things as objects, which originated within the transatlantic slave trade, is “not just the origin of modern logistics, but the annunciation of modernity itself, and not just the annunciation of modernity itself but the insurgent prophesy that all of modernity will have at its heart, in its own hold, this movement of things, this interdicted, outlawed social life of nothing” (Moten/ Harney 2013: 93). I, thus, want to understand both the choreographic principles on which this totalizing modality of governing material movements is based, and how it is always already countered and counter-effectuated by (ana-)choreographic, morethan-human practices. Within this endeavor, I subscribe to lineages of thought that fundamentally call into question the prevalence of notions such as subject, person, or citizen. I believe, alongside Fred Moten and others, that these categories are expressions of Western privilege and are fundamentally linked to racist and sexist practices of exclusion that continue to shape our feelings and experiences today (cf. Moten 2008, Moten/ Harney 2013, Esposito 2015). How can we abolish notions such as subject, person, and citizen, I want to ask, while inventing different modalities of negotiating power and movement possibilities. Because these places, fraught with their history of exclusionary violence, of brutal relegation of any other to the realm of non-humanity, were historically conceived of as possible sites of resistance. To become a person, historically, meant to be able to resist the will of either nobility or the church, of either the state or the judiciary. These possibilities to resist, to speak up against, to hold accountable and put into perspective, which were once given to those few that have (like myself) been able to call themselves a person, a subject, or a citizen, need to be transferred, transmitted, translated into other forms and protocols of resistance and counter-power. Yet, in order not to fall back onto well-rehearsed models of (im)possible resistance, we need to keep in mind that the form of regulatory violence that presumably divides would-be-subjects and always-more-and-less-thanobjects is one that is enacted in everyday action, in practical handling, in touch, and composition. It manifests in the movements of our hands and bodies with and within things in daily life. It is a form of choreography, I will claim, a form of moving-with and alongside things, often abusing them as objects, that performatively produces the very onto-theological differences that our broken planet rests upon. What does it mean to abuse a thing? How is moving with things possible, in ways that does not presume there was an end to their becoming? Can we develop a practical choreography, or – more accurately – a more-than-human choreography of care, of attunement that does not rely upon the assumption that it was us – us humans,

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whatever that still means – who can circumscribe the terms and conditions of these moving encounters, these (non)-performances (cf. Moten 2018)?21

The Artificial Nature Project (Mette Ingvartsen) Confetti falling from the ceiling. Confetti flying around. Silver-golden confetti unfolding into shapes of all sorts. Material clinging onto black clothes. Masks covering faces. Confetti covering the floor, shining in the white light like an atomic ocean, like the surface of the moon or post-apocalyptic soil on which mushrooms grow.22 Confetti impeding sight. Confetti suddenly affording the imagination of water-falls, of frozen ice, and of long-gone eras of climate stability. Confetti being animated, becoming animated, becoming animal. Performers carefully carrying around confetti some of which falls out of their hands. Leaf-blowers howling like a pack of wolves. Rescue blankets hanging in the air, suspended like in a futuristic emergency scenario. Heavy machines whirling around small particles of silver plastic, myriad trajectories, storms of fire and ice, meshing up the boundary between what is human and who is non-human, what is animating and who is being animated. There is an Artificial Nature of sorts in the performance of the same name by Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen. The performance starts with a complete black-out that is about three minutes in length.23 Cosmic silence focuses the viewer’s attention. In darkness, silver-golden

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Following Fred Moten, I will repeatedly use the notion of ‘(non-)performance’ in this work in order to indicate that performance neither necessarily carries emancipatory value, nor is it based within the self-presence of an autonomous subject that is capable of expressing itself. Rather, it always reproduces a complex matrix of conditions, norms, and modes of delegation. The fantasy of emancipatory speech (with world-making power), which constitutes both performativity and subjectivity, is, in fact, founded on exclusionary notions of (self-)presence and personhood. Chinese American anthropologist Anna Tsing describes vibrant assemblages that unfold around the Matsutake mushroom that signal the end of capitalist progress as destruction of socio-material worlds in her book ‘The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins’ (Tsing 2005). Her focus is on material and social agencies, as well as their entanglements. Thus, she is interested in contingent and varied responses to modernity’s eco-genocidal choreographies as they have been described in the introduction to this work. I will return to Tsing’s notion of assemblage within chapter 3. ‘Assemblages as more-than-human performances’. My description of the performance refers to a video recording of The Artificial Nature Project taken in Amiens on Feb 1, 2013. This recording was made available to me by the friendly and generous support of Kerstin Schroth and Mette Ingvartsen. In addition to studying the video recording, I have attended the performance thrice, in Berlin in March 2013, in Stockholm in September 2013, and in Bremen in May 2014.

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confetti are being distributed from a machine at the top-front of the stage and falls down onto the stage slowly, lit by very dim light from both sides of the stage. Light beams reflected by the falling confetti create an ever-changing, kaleidoscopic image. It is a mesmerizing sight, as if one was looking at extra-terrestrial rain. “[…] a whole shower of sparks,” as dance scholar Gerko Egert writes (Egert 2016b: 70). After a little more than ten minutes, the stage itself is lit by a rectangle of neon lights placed next to each-other on the floor, thereby creating an artificial space of experimentation. Seven performers, dressed in black hoodies and protective masks, have been present on stage throughout the entirety of the beginning of the performance; one can only see them now. Are they dancers, workers, experimenters, or cleaners? They start interacting with the material, carefully carrying it around, letting it fall from their laps as if testing its properties. After around twenty minutes, all of the performers disappear behind an animated, multi-headed confetti-creature resembling a strange kind of many-shaped, super-organic sandstorm. In the hands of the performers, the confetti seem to become little monsters – monsters to be taken care of. They then split in groups, creating smaller fountains by repeatedly lifting the confetti up and letting it fall from their hands. It is as if they were sowing and watering an artificial, post-apocalyptic garden. After a while, the confetti are spread evenly over the whole scene and the dancers leave the stage one by one. Once the stage is empty, it presents itself as a shimmering, shining plateau, vibrating self-animatedly in the audience’s eyes. After the confetti’s two-minute-long solo performance, the dancers re-enter the stage one by one. This time they are equipped with earmuffs and leaf-blowers. They induce air currents into the confetti, blowing it up and letting it fall in various mutating shapes and itineraries. It is as if one studied thousands of trajectories, all at once. Lines of flight or lines of life? The sound of the heavy machines is very present.24 All of the blowers are aimed at a spot slightly left of center-stage from different angles; a big fountain of confetti flying up into the air appears, suddenly lit by red light. It is a gigantic fountain of oil, fire; it is a sci-fi explosion of sorts. Shortly afterwards, rescue blankets appear on stage, being pulled out from underneath the confetti and neon lights. The scenery becomes more and more unquiet, actions overlap and intertwine, the lights flicker. Is this some sort of post-catastrophic emergency operation? Finally, the confetti are blown to the back of the stage and one last image of a gigantic dragon-animal made from flying rescue blankets appears. After a little more than an hour, the scenery calms down. Only the neon lights at the back are left

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Throughout the whole performance, while the materials on stage themselves make sounds (the falling of the confetti, the crackling sound of rescue blankets folding and unfolding, the machinic sound of the leaf-blowers), they are accompanied by an artificial soundtrack that is reminiscent of water-pipes, hoovers, heating tubes, and ventilation systems.

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alive, before the performers manually cover them with rescue blankets, one by one. The performance ends after approximately one hour and seven minutes.

Image 2: The Artificial Nature Project by Mette Ingvartsen.

Foto: © Hans Meijer

The Artificial Nature Project is the last piece in a series of four choreographic works by Mette Ingvartsen, in which she attempts to stage perceptions and sensations of

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nature.25 It premiered at ‘PACT Zollverein’ in Essen on November 2, 2012. As described above, the performance manages to create strong, affective imagery that is often reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic scenario. It has been read as an attempt at ‘Choreographing the Weather’ (cf. Egert 2016b), a reaction to more and more extreme climatic circumstances, and to the man-made destruction of the planet. In his article about the performance, Gerko Egert writes: “Clouds, fog, rain, and storm turn The Artificial Nature Project into a series of weather scenarios, catastrophes that evoke our contemporary situation of dramatic climate change. These dances, in their complex ecology of movement, produce meteorological choreographies […].” (Egert 2016b: 70) Ingvartsen herself describes the initial starting point for the creation as follows: Soon, she imagines, only theater will still be able to provide for an artificial experience of nature, if the ongoing destruction of our planet under the rule of late capitalism continues (cf. Ingvartsen 2016: 4). Thus, her work may be read as a choreographic attempt at relating to the current moment of climate emergency (i.e., to this moment in time when human mastery seems obsolete, once and for all). The performance seems to uncover some of the evident reasons for the destruction of the planet (i.e., the ongoing extraction of resources, paired with a century-long process of acceleration, in which people and things are mobilized within capitalist channels of exploitation and commodification of matter) both in its imagery and its choreographic concern for material. Yet, to what extent does the performance go beyond representing disaster? What does it mean for choreography to become meteorological? Is The Artificial Nature Project about making the weather, or can one possibly discern an underlying concern for logistics? The Artificial Nature Project has been labelled as a “performance of material” (Schaefer 2014: n.p.). Materials of all sorts, most prominently confetti, may be perceived as performers in their own rights; they do not simply qualify as props or scenery. In fact, the choreography is made from movements of confetti and rescue blankets, rather than from human gesture and action. In turn, the human movements on stage cannot be described as dance in a conventional sense; they are merely functional, rather than stylized, virtuosic, or expressive gestures. The 25

The Artificial Nature Project is choreographed and based on a concept by Mette Ingvartsen; the credits name Franziska Aigner, Sidney Leoni, Martin Lervik, Maud Le Pladec, Guillem Mont De Palol, Manon Santkin, and Christine De Smedt as dancers (replacements: Ilse Ghekiere, Jaime Llopis Segarra, and Sirah Foighel Brutmann). The lighting design was created by Minna Tikkainen, the sound design by Peter Lenaerts, and Bojana Cvejić is credited as the project’s dramaturge (cf. https://www.metteingvartsen.net/performance/the-artificial-nature-proje ct/, last accessed on Dec 14, 2020). The series also includes evaporated landscapes (2009, steierischer herbst, Graz), The Extra Sensorial Garden, in collaboration with Manon Santkin (2010, Tanz im August, Berlin), and The Light Forest (2011/2012, Salzburg).

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dancers’ role is shifted to workers, experimenters, or disaster control personnel. Throughout the performance, they animate material in weird ways – ways that shift between care work, experiment, and cleaning activity. Therefore, one might ask whether they are working on or with the confetti. Ingvartsen describes her work as a form of ‘expanded choreography’, a choreography that has shifted focus from human dance to material agency. The Artificial Nature Project is one of the central elements of her artistic PhD project entitled ‘Expanded Choreography: Shifting the Agency in The Artificial Nature Project and 69 Positions’, which was submitted in 2016. Within the performance, and the PhD more generally, Ingvartsen aims to formulate a notion of ‘expanded choreography’ as careful, yet productive, engagement with non-humans. She describes nonhuman choreography as: “[…] a principle that attributes to nonhumans the capacities to act, express and affect those who are paying attention. A principle where human bodies move with and through the nonhuman world, not for the sake of one’s own survival, nor to feel one’s own body moving, but to start practicing movement as a relation to external environments and non-human actors.” (Ingvartsen 2016: 3) Ingvartsen claims that one may train a different perception of the material world by expanding choreography to the non-human realm. Non-human choreography, as she describes it, goes against the grain of greedy consumerist politics of extraction, the destruction of natural habitats, and of global warming. Ingvartsen’s focus is practice-based; her main question concern theatrical production and audience engagement. That said, she states that her practice concerns “the vibrancy of matter, the agency of things, the capacities of materials, light and sound” (Ingvartsen 2016: 1). She insists on the ethical implications of her practice by conceiving of non-human choreography as a mode of composing and arranging material that allows for their independent agency and autonomous affect (cf. Ingvartsen 2016: 9). Non-human choreography, thus, is charged with the ethical imperative to enable a different relation to the material world, while transforming “the understanding of our own bodies by entering into composition with non-humans in ways that also challenge our sense of self” (Ingvartsen 2016: 4). Ingvartsen claims that one can no longer conceive of the body as a clearly defined object within non-human choreography. Rather, one has to assume an ongoing exchange of information and material between body and surrounding, in which both sides constantly inform and influence one another.26 Therefore, one has to redefine how one looks at, perceives, and

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Gerko Egert has described a similar imperative for works by Meg Stuart and William Forsythe. He writes: “Both Forsythe’s White Bouncy Castle as well as Stuart’s Blessed decenter the human agent and his/her touch in their work. Both works create an assemblage of touch that cracks open the dichotomy of subject and object, human and non-human, and consists of the touch-

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handles objects more generally. They vanish, at least as clearly bounded elements of instrumental use. Accordingly, Gerko Egert proposes: “[…] The Artificial Nature Project is a weather-world, a ‘world without objects,’ full of movements of raining, of floating, of blowing, and of bubbling.” (Egert 2016b: 71, emphasis mine) Ingvartsen’s attempt at shifting agency towards non-humans may be read in relation to Rudi Laermans’ notion of ‘dance in general’. Laermans, in relation to artworks by Brussels-based artist-collective ‘deepblue’, looks for modes of choreographing “human movements as well as non-human actions or operations in a symmetrical way” (Laermans 2008: 10), that is, by giving up hierarchies between human and thing, performer and material. A suchlike ‘expanded choreography’, he claims, often places emphasis on other media, so that: “[…] not only the human body but also sound, imagery or light are treated as media of dance, as having the potential to produce a variety of movements and poses” (Laermans 2008: 10). The concept of ‘dance in general’ is coupled with the respective art of creating morethan-human dances named ‘choreography in general’. Laermans describes ‘choreography in general’ as: “[…] the art of making and modulating – of governing – heterogeneous assemblages” (Laermans 2008: 13), and formulates a similar ethical goal to Ingvartsen’s. The choreographer’s central task is to treat or include nonhuman performers in a such a way as to create “a non-hierarchical performative network that is the actual medium of the performance, even its main performer” (Laermans 2008: 13). This expanded formulation of choreography insists on ‘nonhierarchical’ relations between humans and non-humans by conceiving of all of the material entities involved in a choreography as ‘somehow equal’, or at least equally valuable to the outcome. How exactly we might go about attaining symmetry or non-hierarchy is specified by neither Laermans nor Ingvartsen. Laermans reverts back to Deleuzian and Guattarian formulations, citing the ‘plane of consistency’ as a central measuring device for determining whether the performance deals with its non-human components as equals in order to further describe the desired ‘making of assemblages’. On this plane of consistency (i.e., an ontologically flat space of apparition), any thing (a gesture, a piece of confetti, a ray of light) wants to exist as singularity in its own right. Therefore: “[…] every singularity is also an intensity, since it acts as a force that affects other singularities but is simultaneously affected by them (and partly derives from this being-affected its own capacity to affect)” (Laermans 2008: 12). Laermans here formulates the fantasy of an a-subjective, collective machine that generates effects. Similarly, Gerko Egert insists on the work’s a-personal overall performativity by describing Ingvartsen’s work as ‘meteorological’, as a form of “atmospheric choreography” (Egert 2016b: 79). Furthermore, he frees it from all representative ings themselves – their autonomy, their processuality and their relationality.” (Egert 2016a: 242, translation mine)

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charge, thereby likening the choreography to what might be considered to be the most paradigmatic example of fluid, ever-changing assemblages – weather itself. But how are degrees of influence and the modality of distributing agency within the performative machine to be evaluated? How exactly, and to what degree, is agency shifted away from the human? Did Ingvartsen herself not produce and prescribe the dancers’ movements as much as of the confetti, looking for specific images that she evaluated according to how affective they seemed to her – and probably not to the confetti itself? Indeed, while the performance can no longer be described as a conventional dance piece, it remains choreographed to the minutest detail. Does that not imply that the materials that she used are reduced to the status of subservient objects, because they are functionalized for the production of specific images? Bearing in mind that manufacturing the weather is one of the technical fixes often summoned up as a means to fight climate catastrophe (cf. Buck 2019), I thus want to ask: What are the practical procedures that might turn choreography into a form of weathering and how can it attend to non-humans differently? The question may not be answered easily by The Artificial Nature Project. Ingvartsen insists on the materials’ ability to produce autonomous affect (cf. Ingvartsen 2016: 3). As the work operates within a conventional stage set-up, the question must be answered at least partly on a visual level, given that visual imagery affects the viewer. In that respect, Egert, in his reading of Ingvartsen’s work, charges it heavily. According to him, the main material performer (i.e., confetti) is allowed to change status and shape within the performance: “[…] confetti become raindrops by the movement of falling; it transforms into sparks by flying across the stage. The mounds of confetti become as heavy as a sand dune by drifting along the ground, and they become light as leaves by whirling through the air.” (Egert 2016b: 71) But I want to ask if that is really the case. The confetti may look like it becomes water or fire, heavy as sand or light as leaves, but it does not actually transform itself within the performance. It seems as if Egert misjudges visual effects for concrete transformation. One might argue that he uses metaphorical language to describe how the material affects the viewer, but why trust metaphors when one wants to actually shift the power-dynamics and hierarchies between humans and things? The question, thus, remains on the level of visual affect, rather than insisting on the actual handling of objects on stage, the logisticality of how the stage work unfolds, the way the material is used, touched, and cared for on stage, or bought, crafted, or recycled after the performance. While The Artificial Nature Project clearly subscribes to what Jane Bennett names ‘thing-power’, a force intrinsic to material as a “some-thing that is not an object of knowledge, that is detached and radically free from representation” and that “refuses to dissolve completely into the milieu of human knowledge” (Bennett 2010: 3), and

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that wants to attend to it on the level of perception, one probably has to concede that the confetti becomes self-animated only in the audience’s eyes and not within the assemblage of the performance itself. Is the performance, thus, not essentially representing notions of ‘vibrant matter’ (cf. Bennett 2010), ‘intra-action’ (cf. Barad 2007), and a turn towards a ‘symmetrical approach’ (cf. Latour 1991) rather than practicing them itself? 27 Is that not a contradiction, given that Bennett argues that thingpower “is detached and radically free from representation” (Bennett 2010: 3)? The Artificial Nature Project thus points towards a fundamental paradox involved in handling things within the theatre: No matter how one interacts with them, they will always be, on some level, reduced to objects, for it is human hands and decisions that interfere with their own processes of becoming. In his article ‘Moving as Thing: Choreographic Critiques of the Object’, André Lepecki surveys a number of performance-works from the last ten years that practice yet another way of dealing with the aforementioned paradox. Lepecki is actually looking for choreography that “bring(s) stuff onto stages and into rooms and galleries” only to then leave it alone. Just letting an object be and “opting not to manipulate it” (Lepecki 2012: 76), Lepecki insists, is already a provocation. This is, as he proposes, due to the ontological divide between object and thing. The concept of objects is always linked to concepts of instrumentality, utility, usage, and toolbeing. Objects are formed in an asymmetric relationship to subjectivity (i.e., in dependence of the subject that manipulates and uses them). Things, conversely, belong to an a-personal, subject-less realm of non-instrumentality: “[…] a field of nonhierarchical, horizontal interactions” and relations that is “removed from the realm of instrumentality” (Lepecki 2012: 77). In relation to objects, Lepecki thus asks: “Isn’t letting be already a move toward de-objectifying the object, a move that turns the object into a mere thing […]?”28

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I should add that Latour himself has relativized his infamous ‘principle of symmetry’. In ‘Reassembling the Social’, he writes: “ANT is not, I repeat is not, the establishment of some absurd ‘symmetry between humans and non-humans’. To be symmetric, for us, simply means not to impose a priori some spurious asymmetry among human intentional action and a material world of causal relations.” (Latour 2005a: 76) Lepecki’s notion of thing is heavily influenced by Mario Perniola (Perniola 2004) and, by extension, by Martin Heidegger (Heidegger 1971a, Heidegger 1971b). It may be interesting to think about the effects of that conceptual lineage in Lepecki’s somewhat anti-choreographic theory of thingliness. Heidegger argues in favor of the ‘concealedness’ and in-attainability of things. As I will show in what follows, Lepecki, in turn, argues for an almost total surrender of choreography, rather than for a productive, albeit risky, engagement with non-humans. Indeed, I want to suggest here that it might be difficult to formulate ideas about the (always problematic and ethically charged) interaction with things on the basis of a specific reading of Heidegger’s philosophy. Things, in his thought, are so charged that one might prefer to leave them alone or – at the limit – paint them, as Van Gogh does (cf. Heidegger 1971a). For

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Lepecki formulates a similar imperative to Ingvartsen, in so far as her aim is to free material from its subordinate position of object by handing back agency to the material itself. Yet, the choice of strategy that he describes is different. While The Artificial Nature Project is a highly choreographed performance (i.e., a complex spatiotemporal composition that wires up an array of different elements, from confetti to sound-technique), Lepecki is especially interested in works that question both the choreographer’s competence as master of arrangements, thereby continuing his reflections on ‘still-acts’ from ‘Exhausting Dance’ (cf. Lepecki 2006: 15/16). In order to attain non-hierarchy and horizontality, Lepecki refers to dance and performance work of Trajal Harrell, Yingmei Duan, João Fiadeiro, and Aitana Cordero where performers suspend their ‘usual’ activity, in order to attain a state of ‘alongsideness’ or proximity to objects as things. Lepecki’s interest is in reaffirming “a proximal yet nonrelational mode of being with things” (Lepecki 2012: 80) that questions the motivation for choreography as such. Choreography has to involute onto itself, Lepecki claims, and has to give up on its competence of manipulation of objects (including human dancers), something which was so important in its history. Therefore, performance literally becomes an act of either sleeping (as is the case in Trajal Harrell’s work Tickling the Sleeping Giant #9, cf. Lepecki 2012: 81–83) or ‘ghostly’ non-action (cf. Lepecki 2012: 78). In relation to Mario Perniola’s reflection on the ‘Sex Appeal of the Inorganic’, Lepecki describes dance as the formation of an ‘impersonal movement’ that displaces the subject both from its dominance over and from its dependency on the world of objects or commodities (cf. Lepecki 2012: 90). If the human being founds its subjectivity by handling objects, then fully giving up on the gesture of arranging and composing them means anti-choreographically renouncing one’s own agency and desire. As Mario Perniola writes: “The discovery of the essence of things goes hand in hand with the dismissal of any desire and individual cupidity.” (Perniola 2004: 109) Both choreographer and dancer, therefore, must give up their conventional roles. Lepecki writes that choreography thus relinquishes its “authorial function in dictating steps, controlling gestures, and directing moves to the minutest detail”, while the dancer is freed from the imperative to function as: “[…] the immediate (or sometimes even unmediated) expression of a choreographer’s will” (Lepecki 2012: 77).29

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a more thorough reading of Heidegger, cf. chapter 2.2 ‘Things at hand: relational, but concealed’. Returning to Yvonne Rainer (cf. Rainer 1968) and her claim that there is a need for dance to be moved by ‘some thing’ rather than by ‘oneself’, Lepecki instigates a quest for dance that aims at liberating the dancer from his traditional role of means and instrument, of an object thus in the hands of the choreographer, and maybe of choreography as such (cf. Lepecki 2012: 77).

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While both Lepecki and Ingvartsen seem to look for the potential of dance to become an a-personal capacity or force (of affection) that is not structurally bound to the subject (i.e., the choreographer’s authorial function), Ingvartsen trusts in choreography’s capacity to actively make space for material to become affective itself, a paradoxical gesture of human choreography in the name of ‘thing-power’. Lepecki, conversely, is more radical: He opts for a relinquishment or surrender of choreography30 in order to become more-than-human. He wants choreography to give up on its innermost core, the act of manipulation. Yet, how might we think choreography without choreography? Lepecki does not, ultimately, answer that question. Nonetheless, his reflection can serve as a base from which to re-assess Ingvartsen’s work. After all, it is clear that The Artificial Nature Project is incessantly involved in the planned manipulation of material, thereby affirming its status as subservient object. Ingvartsen herself points to this contradiction when describing the choreographic works within the Artificial Nature. All of them, she says, were “produced by using mechanical and technological extensions. Machines that were obviously created by humans.” (Ingvartsen 2016: 9) It seems as if Ingvartsen cannot fully suspended the logistics of moving things as objects, either in rehearsals or on stage. As both an author and witness of performative practices, I am thus faced with a fundamental dilemma or paradox: On the one hand, The Artificial Nature Project subscribes to the label of an ‘expanded choreography’, or non-human choreography, and to the high ethico-political standard of thingly ‘non-hierarchy’. On the other hand, it needs to handle and manipulate material, both on its inside, as on its outside. As a staged work, it tries to prescribe the confetti’s trajectories and rescue blankets in order to produce specific images. It choreographs effects and, in so doing, objectifies material. In order to become effective, it concurrently relies on an external logistics (i.e., materials need to be bought, used, packed, and discarded), thereby also being relegated to the realm of commodity or object. The problem is clear: How might we produce, choreograph, sell, and ship a choreography that does not want to handle things as objects, that does not want to subjugate them by choreographic or logistical means? Formulating this question allows me to somewhat transpose the problem: Henceforth, I want to focus on the actual handling of material, both on and off stage. How is material taken care of within staged choreography and how does the stage-work support itself logistically? I want to argue, in what followings, that the ways in which artworks are produced and circulated is itself premised on a form of socio-material choreography, both eminently political and very much within the realm of material movement – that of logistics. Instead of focusing only on what happens on stage, one should rather consider the general logisticality of 30

I am reminded of the double meaning of the German word ‘Aufgabe’ as both task and relinquishment in Walter Benjamin’s famous ‘The Task of the Translator’ (cf. Benjamin 1968).

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making choreographic work and the actual practices of ‘handling’ material which it proposes, both on and off stage. This shift is important, I claim, if one wants to attend to the more-than-human choreographies that contemporary performance practices both propose and perpetuate. And is not The Artificial Nature Project itself already aware of the paradox and problem that I have outlined here? In fact, one could possibly, albeit speculatively, re-read the whole performance as a reflection on logisticality, in so far as the performance presents itself is as a violently efficient apparatus of directing and guiding, thereby clearly controlling both confetti and rescue blankets. This becomes even more obvious in the second part of the performance when the confetti and rescue blankets are no longer handled by human hands, but by heavy machinery (i.e., leaf blowers). While Ingvartsen is interested in reconfiguring the dancer’s function as worker – away from the beautiful, able body of ballet or modern dance – its new look reveals a specific relation to materials: The dancers actually look a bit like modern scavengers, processing waste and dirt. On a second, speculative level, Ingvartsen’s performance presents itself as a gigantic, albeit evidently abstracted, waste treatment or recycling plant in which shiny material objects, that clearly pertain to the category of cheap, single-use throwaway consumer goods, are violently shoveled around, without ever being able to leave the stage. The images that The Artificial Nature Project produces are apocalyptic; however, the machinery that is used to produce the piece is equally violent: The sound of the leaf-blowers fills the room and their power to manipulate material is very present. Does the performance speak about a condition in which humanity no longer seems to be able to deal with all of the stuff it produces in an excessive, highly destructive consumer culture? In this reading, Ingvartsen’s work opens up a totally different set of questions. First of all, it wants to attend to material as thing (i.e., as matter that exercises affect in its own right). It exposes different modalities of handling material, showcasing both the act of caring for material and of violently manipulating it. But the piece also initiates a reflection on its own logisticality through the use of heavy machinery and cheap plastic material and by means of its catastrophic undertone: While the materials at hand may be allowed to produce affect, they are also shoveled around by heavy machinery and are, thus, violently objectified. Therefore, one may easily think about the ways in which material is handled beyond the stage, in waste-processing plants, in a human garden, and as a resource. It seems as if The Artificial Nature Project asks us: How does one possibly care about the encounters with things beyond the temporally and spatially delimited frame of the stage? How can the ethical imperative of an alterity of things be taken further than aesthetic representation? How might we handle things on stage beyond the opposition of functionality vs. in-attainability? Under consideration here is the formulation of more-than-human choreographies as precarious, risky engagements with matter in which choices have to be made regarding micro-hierarchies within assemblages, the problem of

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infinite agentic debts, and the impossible advocacy and hospitality towards ambivalent more-than-human others; these others’ entanglements, potential futures, and necessary relationalities can never be fully known or understood. All the while, these questions may also function as an implicit critique of Lepecki’s argument. His own ethical questions become vague, because he seems to argue for an almost impossible ‘nonrelation’ to the realm of things, a completely disinterested form of proximal ‘alongsideness’ (i.e., the extreme act of giving up on choreography as such). If the alternative is either to co-opt objects into submission or to not handle them at all, then all practical and political aspects of an ‘expanded choreography’ are actually excluded. In short: Is there an ethics of using things? How might we situate ourselves within assemblages in which one’s actions necessarily produce constraints and work as affordance for other materials? How can choreography, as an ‘expanded practice’, become a place from which to question presumptions about ‘handling’ stuff – both concretely and in action? These questions matter because practices of handling objects, modalities, and ideologies of producing, shipping, selling, using, exercising, typing, working, traveling, and thus moving with, on, inside and alongside objects, often exercised under the label of logistics, are at the heart of the contemporary condition, whether it be called the Anthropocene or late capitalism. Most of our daily actions, if understood as a socio-material choreography of handling objects, could then be re-evaluated. Most of this book, therefore, is a reflection on the problems one encounters when handling things and on possible tactics of doing so without iterating the violence linked to the instance of the subject. Any such attempt, as stated above, will be called more-than-human choreography. In order to look for the precarious modes of existence of more-than-human choreography, I first need to rephrase the notion of ‘expanded choreography’ in light of existing literature from the fields of Performance Studies and Critical Dance Studies.

1.2 Context: What is ‘expanded choreography’? The notion of ‘expanded choreography’, as employed by Ingvartsen, has circulated widely within the field of contemporary performing arts since 2012. It is an open and vaguely defined notion that has been used by different practitioners to describe various aspects of their practice. All the while, it has also been framed as a theoretic notion, thereby indicating a wider field of applicability of choreographic expertise. Broadly, it carries the meaning of expanding choreographic practice beyond the human body, the frame of the theatre, and the action of making dances. In the wake of conceptually driven forms and practices of choreography, often either referenced as conceptual dance, experimental dance, or (in the French context, as) nondance, dance practitioners and choreographers started to use the notion in order to

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indicate that they apply choreographic thinking and methods to different aspects of their practice and artistic work beyond ‘merely’ creating dances (i.e., to thought and writing processes, the composition of speech and narration, diverse forms of social interaction or cooperation within the work environment or beyond the stage, or even complex organizational processes more generally).31 In recent years, choreographers have made people narrate stories in gallery spaces (as is the case with Xavier LeRoy or Tino Seghal), they have experimented with foam (as is the case with Mette Ingvartsen or Mirjam Sögner), they have developed diverse writing practices (as is the case for Pavle Heidler), they have conceived of thinking as choreography (as does Sarah Vanhee in Turning Turning), or have made film work (as is the case with Sidney Leoni). All of these artists partake in practically expanding the frame of what choreography is and where and how it appears. As Danjiel Andersson, ex-director of MDT theater in Stockholm, states: “We work with choreographers, they propose projects and sometimes they dance.” (Andersson 2017: 347) In a way, ‘expanded choreography’, as a successor of the label ‘conceptual dance’, serves as a notion that still frees experimental choreographers from some of modern dance’s heavily technique-driven aesthetic imperatives in which choreography was necessarily framed as the “art of making dances” (Spånberg 2017: 358) and dance was framed as abstract movement (cf. Lepecki 2006: 4). On this level, the notion may be understood as a discursive tool by which to legitimize a further widening and decentering of the multiple artistic practices that conceptual choreographers have been developing since the 1990s, especially when it comes to tearing down boundaries with other artistic disciplines. One could, concurrently, read it as a reflection of working conditions: It does strategically make sense to define all ‘other’ activities in which choreographers are involved, such as writing, thinking, drawing, and so on, as forms of choreography because choreographers are forced to constantly perform their artistic self, to write applications, to produce discourse surrounding their work, and to function as managers of their own lives and working environments (cf. Kunst 2015). ‘Expanded choreography’ here resonates with the overall logistics of working as a freelancer. Interestingly, while different choreographers started to speak about their practice as forms of ‘expanded choreography’ from 2012 onwards, the notion of choreography had already begun to circulate more widely in the social and natural sciences and to other societal fields prior thereto. As performance theorists Cvejić and Vujanović notice, the notion appears in fields such as molecular biology, business management, and diplomacy as a metaphor for the organization of complex, time-based

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For a good summary on discourses concerning the notion of the ‘conceptual’ within European dance from the 1990s onwards, cf. Burt 2017: 1–30.

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processes based on emergent, adaptive procedures.32 Within these fields, the notion of choreography often “designates dynamic patterns of the complicated yet seamless organization of many elements in motion” within contemporary neoliberal societies governed by efficient procedures, thereby constituting what the authors term “a kind of operative reason” (Cvejić/Vujanović 2015: 72).33 If the notion of choreography was becoming used more broadly beyond the artistic field from 2000 onwards, it therein becomes a metaphoric stand-in for the formulation of adaptive, efficient procedures of governance, often based on algorithms, I want to claim. The expansion of choreography to other fields of society may, thus, be read as a reflection both of neoliberal ideology’s global success and of the creation of an allegedly global market, in so far as societal boundaries were put in motion from the 1970s onwards; from this time forward, mobility and the ability to control and steer movement within ever more global systems of transportation in sectors such as tourism, trade, and logistics became a priced concept as such.34 It is, as if the so-called ‘end of history’ marked the beginning of a total expansion of choreography as operative reason (cf. Fukuyama 1992). Choreography’s nature and scope as such are in question. To what extent does it refer to an aesthetic event or experience, or can it be more broadly organizational in nature? If one concedes a significant contemporaneity at play here – choreographers 32

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Cvejić and Vujanović refer to ‘Choreography: Webster’s Timeline History 1710–2007’ by Philip M. Parker, which traces all of the published uses of the word ‘choreography’ in both print and news media. They find that the notion becomes more prevalent in fields remote from dance from 2000 onwards, mostly in molecular biology, information technology, and diplomacy. Some examples they provide include references to ‘quantum choreography’, ‘chromosome choreography’, or ‘process choreography’ (cf. Cvejić/Vujanović 2015: 17). Rightly so, Cvejić and Vujanović argue that the notion of ‘procedure’ is not a neutral one. Its supposed neutrality, they claim, needs to be criticized because it “entails a shift from the body and embodiment to procedures”. In so far as procedures “define actions and attitudes in general”, the authors thus insist that we “treat them as a thinking model, an ideological apparatus” (Cvejić/Vujanović 2015: 72). They also claim that a “current, theoretical, self-reflected obsession with methods, procedures, formats, and scores” (Cvejić/Vujanović 2015: 72) within contemporary performing arts resonates with the rise of a generic operative reason of process management that is implied in the metaphorical transfer of choreography to other societal fields. As Gabriele Klein notes: “With the advent of the globalized society, this basic kinetic principle of modernity was staged as a ‘spectacle of innocence’: the free movement of data-streams, the unlimited flow of capital, new waves of migration, the fall of political walls and symbolic borders permitted the emergence of a philosophical idea of openness. […] from a pragmatic point of view, it was the promising set phrase ‘everything is possible’, which became the ideology of a society that had lost its political perspective on the future and had pilloried the fundamental possibility of a political utopia with the fall of the Berlin wall and the disbanding of confrontational social systems. On the other hand, this society also began to suffer amnesia and a loss of history as part of its growing medialization” (Klein 2013: 19).

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think of expanding choreography at somewhat the same time as societal discourses on the efficient (self-)steering of time-based processes appropriate the notion – one might also ask: What is the necessity and political signification of this metaphoric transfer? What are its political implications? Does the aesthetic notion of choreography simply mask the social, environmental, and human costs of ever more extended capitalist apparatuses of global mobilization of people and things? To what extent does governmental control become choreographic in nature? And what does this shift in the nature of governmentality mean for choreographers, given Mårten Spånberg’s claim that “the twenty-first century is the century of the one who has competence in movement, namely the choreographer” (Spånberg 2016: n.p.)? Is choreography’s expansion simply celebrated, or can the discursive or metaphoric appropriation of choreography within contemporary Western societies be criticized within artistic discourse and practice? My specific interest in the notion of ‘expanded choreography’ has to do with nonhumans, both in relation to artistic practices of handling things and in relation to logistics. As I have outlined above, my questions revolve around practices and forms of actually using material. I need to establish the degree to which forms of practical use and interaction with non-humans can be called choreographic, therefore. More generally, I want to understand what the ideological and political problems are when expanding choreography to the non-human realm. Can one deduce, from the history of thought about choreography, principles, and questions that account for acts of moving things? What does it really mean to dance with things? To that end, I also follow an intuition that an alleged expansion of choreography into the non-human realm reflects societal tendencies. Choreography’s detachment from the limitations, situatedness, gravitational pull, passion, idleness, and defiance of human bodies may be a chance and a threat at the same time, opening vectors towards nonanthropocentric relations to non-humans, but also towards totally efficient, algorithmically driven forms of governance of all material bodies in the name of capital, thereby making an all-encompassing operative or instrumental reason of choreography. I, thus, need to revisit formulations of the notion of ‘expanded choreography’ by Andrew Hewitt, Mårten Spånberg (as a collaborator of Xavier LeRoy), Michael Klien, and others and link them to general questions surrounding choreography and to the practices of moving things. Both Klien and Spånberg insist on making more general statements about the notion and faculty of choreography, rather than simply widening the frame of their own artistic practice. They claim that choreography is able to attend not only to social situations more generally (i.e., beyond the frame of the theatrical stage), but also to other materials, to non-human agents, to the technological conditions of Western live-styles, and even to the environmental crisis of planet earth. The notion of ‘expanded choreography’ exists here, broadly speaking, in two different, but intimately linked discursive versions: While Mårten Spånberg – who

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claims to actually have coined the term ‘expanded choreography’ in 2012 – insists that choreography can be defined as a generic capacity of administrating diverse socio-material formations, whether they be centrally steered or more emergent in nature (cf. Spånberg 2012, Klein 2013, Cvejić/Vujanović 2015: 55–76, Spånberg 2017), 35 Michael Klien and collaborators, conversely, conceive of choreography as the emergent pattern language of all natural and social processes as long as they are based on iteration and exhibit rhythm and coherence (cf. Klien/Valk/Gormly 2008). In short, and largely vulgarized, choreography takes two interlinked pathways when it leaves the human body – turning, on the one hand, towards the organization or governance of more complex social situations, beyond the frame of theatrical representation and, on the other hand, and somewhat concurrently, towards the non-human domain, thereby opening up reflections on how to move with things. Here is, also where I discern a research gap: While there is quite some literature within Performance Studies that examines non-human choreography on theatrical stages or within artistic contexts (cf. Lepecki 2012, Kramer 2015, Lepecki 2016: 26–54, Birringer/Fenger 2019, Ruhsam 2021), to my knowledge, there is few analytical reflections on what I will call socio-material choreography (i.e., choreographic governance of matter beyond the stage). The one exception is Gerko Egert’s reflections on ‘Operational Choreography’ that I will engage with below (cf. Egert 2022). This is, ultimately, where my interest lies: If choreography comes to name an abstract organizational faculty that shapes complex arrangements of interacting elements, how and where are things involved? What are ways of co-choreographing movement with things, rather than applying movement choices from the outside?

Social choreography One central reference point for the formulation of an expanded notion of choreography is Andrew Hewitt’s seminal book ‘Social Choreography’. Hewitt made an important contribution to the field of Performance Studies by linking choreography to capitalist modes of social and economic organization. Hewitt regards choreography as a material enactment of ideology and endows it with a socio-productive quality. His study is centered “on the late bourgeois era” (Cvejić/Vujanović 2015: 56) and includes, a.o., discussions of Nijinsky and the Tiller Girls. He begins his analysis with a citation from a letter by Friedrich Schiller, written in 1793: “I can think of no more fitting image for the ideal of social conduct than an English dance, composed of many complicated figures and perfectly executed. A specta35

He does so in an interview with the online journal contemporaryperformance.com: “After International Festival, I introduced a term we stole from Rosalind Krauss: choreography as expanded practice. This was all a matter of saying that choreography could be other than a dance. It’s a mode of production.” (Spånberg 2016)

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tor in the gallery sees innumerable movements intersecting in the most chaotic fashion, changing direction swiftly and without rhyme or reason, yet never colliding. Everything is so ordered that the one has already yielded his place when the other arrives; […].” (Schiller 1967: 300, after Hewitt 2005: 2) According to Hewitt, while Schiller explicitly argues for dance’s representative function, as an ‘image of social conduct’, it not only functions as a “privileged figure for social order”, but concurrently serves as a place for the “enactment of social order” (Hewitt 2005: 2). While dancing, one repeatedly rehearses social norms and rules of conduct. The English dance described by Schiller works as a ‘model’ for social procedures, Hewitt insists, and not just as a representation thereof. This idea manifests in his notion of ‘aesthetic continuum’: If it is the same body that one takes to the kitchen table, to the public sphere, and to the dance hall, then all ways of rehearsing and performing embodied behaviors and gestures with and by means of that body exist on a continuum, Hewitt claims. Diverse modes of moving and physically behaving, not only on stage, (i.e., in the form of dance), but also within the social sphere more generally, are thus termed performative enactments of social order and as such qualify as forms of choreography: “[…] choreography is not just another of the things we ‘do’ to bodies, but also a reflection on, and enactment of, how bodies ‘do’ things and on the work that the artwork performs. Social choreography exists not parallel to the operation of norms and scriptures, nor is it entirely subject to these scriptures: it serves – ‘caracritically’, we might say – to bring them into being.” (Hewitt 2005: 15) Following Hewitt, all sorts of movements within the public sphere or in private can be productively viewed as choreographic, whether it be the way that pedestrians cross a street at a traffic light, the manifestation of many bodies in the street within social protests, but also the routinized daily meetings within an institution.36 Movement and choreography thereby become a ‘privileged’ place of negotiating physical behavior within shifting social orders. Furthermore, dance gains a special status because it is within the realm of ‘choreographed movement’ (on and off stage) that norms and ideology become effective by being rehearsed and enacted. The art form

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As Gabriele Klein formulates: “Choreography is here understood as a performative structuring of body practices in time and space, as an analytical category that allows reflection of the social, as well as exposing the relationships between the aesthetic and the political, both in art and politics.” (Klein 2013: 198) As I understand the discussion, whether social choreography refers to specific aesthetic and social phenomena within the regime of modern art and bourgeois society or if it is a concept that can be generalized to encompass all sort of social movement(s) remains an open question to date. In my argument, I follow Klein in so far as she argues that social choreography is indeed a structural phenomenon that can be traced in different societies and contexts.

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of dance comes to be what Hewitt calls “a performative reflection on social choreography in the broad sense” (Hewitt 2005: 17), and can then serve as a place for selfreflectiveness: “In other words, if the body that I dance with and the body I work and walk with are one and the same, I must, when dancing, necessarily entertain the suspicion that all of the body’s movements are, to a greater or lesser extent, choreographed.” (Hewitt 2005: 17). Hewitt, thus, recovers a “historical agency” (Hewitt 2005: 2) of the aesthetic, rooted directly in bodily experience and expression. As Cvejić and Vujanović summarize: “[…] ideology – in the form of social choreography – operates aesthetically and performatively at the base of the relations of production” (Cvejić/Vujanović 2015: 57). Hewitt allows us to think of diverse forms of movement in social space as choreographies by linking the societal structuring of behavior, via the notions of embodiment, rehearsal, and enactment, to the physicality of bodily action. The choreographic, in turn, is marked as an open realm of implicit or virtual movement orders of an ideological nature that are enacted or embodied by the members of a specific social group or society as such. Hewitt himself thus works on expanding the notion of choreography: It no longer applies to staged or social dances only; instead, it takes on the function of ideologically ordering social behavior in as much as its medium is bodily movement, rather than written principles, laws, or regulations. Ideology, in turn, runs through both movement in social space and dance.37 The question, thus, becomes: How to describe the ideological nature of choreographically governed systems of movement? For, within his model of ‘social choreography’, Andrew Hewitt endows choreography with the faculty of governing movement in social space. If Foucault specifies the mode in which power is exercised within modern society as governance – the ability of ‘conducting conducts’ (cf. Foucault 2007) – one may, thus, name the actual implementation of these modes of governance as choreographic in much the same manner as Hewitt. Foucault himself does not speak of choreography; rather, he

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A similar idea of societal production of bodily behavior had already been conceptualized by Marcel Mauss in 1934 in what he terms ‘techniques of the body’ (Mauss 1973). Mauss insists on the fact that specific daily practices (like sitting, swimming, eating) differ from society to society, thereby seeming to be somewhat entrained onto the individual by societal contexts, rather than being naturally learned by the individual. Within a learning process, similar to the notion of rehearsal or embodiment in Hewitt, individuals take on specific practices or behavioral patterns. While Mauss does not speak of choreography, it becomes clear that there are specific forms of organizing everyday movement that have to be repeatedly rehearsed in order for the individual to successfully embody them. These orderings, similar to a Foucauldian model of governance, include everyday gestures (both in private and public), movement patterns within the built environment, bodily and physical rules of conduct within social situations, but also the physical, affective bodily states and the production of pleasure, lust, or shame that come with those.

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speaks of circulation. His analysis of modern governmentality moves in relation to the invention and development of what he terms ‘police’, (i.e., a general state-bound faculty of guaranteeing and controlling its subjects’ well-being). Foucault specifies that the police’s function is one of controlling circulation. He writes: “[…] the space of circulation is a privileged object for police. But by ‘circulation’ we should understand not only this material network that allows the circulation of goods and possibly of men, but also the circulation itself, that is to say, the set of regulations, constraints, and limits, or the facilities and encouragements that will allow the circulation of men and things in the kingdom and possibly beyond its borders.” (Foucault 2007: 325) As Thomas Lemke specifies, governmentality, in Foucault’s sense, implies both techniques of governing the self as well as governing others (cf. Lemke 2010: 49/50). Indeed, both modalities, which are closely intertwined for Foucault, fall under the category of the choreographic: ‘Social choreography’, as a form of governance, involves both the state-led management of populations within specific spaces of circulation (within the urban fabric, for example), as much as it involves the auto-management of individuals that identify with specific modes of conduct. Both shape the way we move in social space. In Performance Studies, examples of so-called ‘social choreographies’ include locomotion in urban space, protest movements, affective gestures, and bodily modes of subjectivation more generally.38 Importantly, within contemporary society of control rather than discipline (cf. Deleuze 1992), the mode of enactment of these choreographies is one of voluntary participation, in which all of the subject’s affective capacities are invested. As dancer and dance scholar Paz Royo claims, supposedly neutral, fluid, and expanded social choreographies can and have been framed in relation to capitalist production of value. They produce a totalized system in which moving bodies (be it human or non-human) are subjected to a

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Cf. also Gabriele Klein’s analysis of social protest as a real-time-composition, in which subjects freely associate within social choreographies of protest: “As choreographies, which produce ephemeral systems of order, the protest movements demonstrate a contemporary understanding of choreography that seeks to define choreography not as a predetermined system, but as a collaboratively generated process in which all participants take part. Choreographed protest can be read as real-time-composition, as a rule-governed improvisation, created performatively as a form of choreographic order in the moment of performance. Due to the unpredictability of political protest developing as real-time-composition, the situational decisions made by the participants and their ability to act creatively under time pressure in a politically charged situation, while simultaneously taking into account the movements of the others and interacting with them, all become especially significant.” (Klein 2013: 197/198) Klein’s article also reflects on social choreography within the context of contemporary societies of control governed by performance, an ideology of care for the self, and entrepreneurial subjectivity.

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choreography “from which it is impossible to escape the promise of economic value and our potential for sale” (cf. Royo 2019). In the following, I will adapt Hewitt’s notion of ‘social choreography’ and his conceptual tool of an ‘aesthetic continuum’ and will apply it to the realm of things (i.e., both humans and non-humans). I wish to claim that there is an aesthetic continuum between modes of handling things in daily life, of handling them on stage, and within larger societal frameworks of mobilizing matter, such as logistics and global trade. All of these acts of handling things (on different levels of analysis and within assemblages of shifting size) are regarded as performative enactments of choreographic principles of intra-acting with matter that determine how one places oneself within more-than-human worlds. In order to do so, I need to revisit a very different formulation of ‘expanded choreography’.

‘Expanded choreography’ as pattern language In a small publication entitled ‘Book of Recommendations – Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change’ by Michael Klien (then director of the Daghda Dance Company), Steve Valk (ex-dramaturge of William Forsythe), and Jeffrey Gormly, the authors tentatively develop a definition of ‘expanded choreography’ that encompasses the non-human realm. They conceive of choreography in the broadest possible sense, as any form of “order observed, exchange of forces; a process that has an observable or observed embodied order”. Klien, Gormly, and Valk want choreography to incorporate any kind of material ordering processes, rather than simply looking at social relations. Like “pattern language”, choreography can, according to the authors, account for “dynamic constellation(s) of any kind, consciously created or not, self-organising or super imposed” (Klien/Valk/Gormly 2008: 7).39 In this broadly expanded definition, all sorts of movements of the material world can productively be described as ‘choreography’ in so far as they reveal some form of repetitive structure, both in terms of rhythm and spatial pathways: “Routines, solar systems, ordinary days and conversations – all governed by patters of some sort… the patterns we live by. This is a search for patterns, that, as Gregory Bateson reminds us, connect the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all of them to you and me and me to you” (Klien/Valk/Gormly 2008: 11). Patterns crystallize or concretize into what the authors term arrangements, constellations, and

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In formulating their notion of choreography, the authors implicitly cite architectural theorist Christopher Alexander and biologist and systems theorist Gregory Bateson (cf. Alexander 1977, Bateson 1979).

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ecologies.40 Choreography is implicit in these meta-orderings of patterns, but it can also signify the act of “interfering with or negotiating such an order” (Klien/Valk/ Gormly 2008: 7). Klien, Gormly, and Valk do not really analyze any such patterns, but instead reformulate the notion of choreography as a general faculty of iterative, rhythmic (self-)structuring of embodied, lively patterns. Henri Lefebvre, on the other hand, has given many examples of repetitive spatio-temporal structures including humans and non-humans, proposing what he terms ‘rhythmanalysis’: day and night, the repetitive rhythm of cell-renewal, the daily meetings within an institution, the beat of our heart, music, and so on (cf. Lefebvre 1992). Choreography, thus, comes to name the underlying structure that is immanent in iterable intraactions, even if it may not be apparent, visible, or man-made: “Patterns are everywhere. They are real. In between, ephemeral but real. That’s why I refer to choreography as the invisible art, art of the invisible. After all, it is immanent in relations, force-fields, attractors of all sorts, not frozen into any subject or object. Choreography is everywhere, always, in everything” (Klien/Valk/ Gormly 2008: 24). If choreography is everywhere, anyhow, this also means that human bodies and societies are always entangled with (proto-)choreographic patterns of matter. Indeed, humans constantly try to both analyze and to re-structure them. In that sense, a human practice of choreography always cuts the lively flow of matter that is conceived as manifoldness. Humans interfere with, and thereby re-phrase and re-phase, the repetitive cycles of life itself, thereby altering their already choreographic nature. In some ways, this definition of choreography is close to the one that Martina Ruhsam gives in her recent book on ‘Moving Matter’ (cf. Ruhsam 2021). To her, too, choreography is not only the inscription of movement in space, but rather “the invention and construction of systems and situations of emergence” (Ruhsam 2021: 128, translation mine). Ruhsam insists that this practice of choreography is linked to a “re-politization of bodily and embodied practices” (Ruhsam 2021: 129, translation mine). Within the frame of the dance house or theatre, she claims, there is the possibility to actively experiment with “parameters and conditions, that allow for the emergence of specific forms of movement and intra-actions” (Ruhsam 2021: 130, translation mine). To claim that all human and non-human activity is choreographic in nature, as Klien, Valk, and Gormly do, is to formulate a maximally expanded notion of what it means to always be implied in and actively altering ever-shifting, fluid environments. Their notion of ‘expanded choreography’ is indeed open to a degree that no longer allows us to describe processes of handling things specifically. The question, 40

Implicitly, as I would claim, this is a reference to the notion of ‘assemblage’ by Deleuze and Guattari. This notion will be dealt with in detail in chapter 3. ‘Assemblages as more-thanhuman performances’.

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as I have already mentioned above, is one of practical action. How do more-thanhuman choreographies unfold and how do they structure assemblages? Are they governed from within, or externally? And what kind of practices would allow us to co-choreography with things, without declining their agency and potential? In handling things, political ideologies are iteratively re-instated, as Ruhsam reminds us (cf. Ruhsam 2021: 129). I want to understand how. Yet, what I retain from Klein et al. is their intuition that acts of interaction with material at the level of everyday practice both alter and reveal of more-than-human choreographies: There are those multiple intra-actions with one’s mobile phone that structure and orientate one’s behavior throughout the day, while reproducing and necessitating specific modalities of exploiting and transporting resources and the labor force. There are everyday interactions with the cycles of growth of plants and animals into which humans heavily interfere. There are those procedures that take plants and foods apart and reassemble them, thereby turning them into food items, which in turn need to be transported to the supermarket so they can be sold, eaten, and digested. There is the cycle of creation, design, production, and decay of myriad consumer objects. There are also the proto-choreographic movements within human bodies, cycles of sleep and wake-time, of recreation of bone material, the cycle of breath and the flow of blood and organic matter through the body, to name just a few. All of these, according to the authors, constitute an expanded level of choreography in which human acts of handling interfere. Following Ruhsam’s reflection on nonhuman choreography, who analyzes choreographic works of, a.o., Clement Layes, Kate McIntosh, Unknown Fields Division and Sarah Vanhee (cf. Ruhsam 2021), I want to attend to more-than-human choreographies while widening the scope of analysis. It is where theatrical production and larger socio-material choreographies interface, I claim, that a potential for differently handling things resides.

‘Expanded choreography’ as generic productive faculty In order to address this generically productive nature of choreography (i.e., its potential to generate assemblages), I will now turn to another important formulation of ‘expanded choreography’ by Mårten Spånberg, given at a conference of the same title (convened on the occasion of Xavier LeRoy’s ‘Retrospective’ at the Fondació Tàpies in Barcelona in 2012). Indeed, as far as I can reconstruct, this conference seems to be the first major appearance of the notion of ‘expanded choreography’ within the field of contemporary performing arts.41 Spånberg’s main idea, in his introductory remarks to the conference, is that the harmonic union between choreography and 41

Michael Klien et al. do not speak of ‘expanded choreography’, yet. As mentioned above, Spånberg claim authorship of the notion. Evidently, the action of ‘expanding’ an artistic field is

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dance ought to be undone, for it is an inbred model that has run empty. Here is how Spånberg reframes his main argument five years later, in 2017: “There is a common understanding that choreography and dance is causally related, meaning that choreography is the means and dance the end. This is epitomized in the American choreographer Doris Humphrey’s book ‘The Art of Making Dances’ from 1958, in which Humphrey sets out to comprehensively lay out choreography as a craft. Here, which that title makes evident, she proposes something like: The art of making dances is called choreography and dance is made out of choreography” (Spånberg 2017: 358). This requires us to ask, therefore, whether choreography is structurally bound to the expressive form of dance or if it can be more broadly organizational in nature; Spånberg’s desire is for choreography to become: “a generic cluster of tools that can be used in productive and analytical manner for whatever” (Spånberg 2012: n.p.). He conceives of choreography as an abstract faculty, a generalizable way of observing, analyzing, and producing fluid, time-based processes. Its capacity appears in overviewing and planning, in constantly changing moving trajectories (i.e., in the spatio-temporal composition of moving elements, their pathways and interlinks, crossings, and collages). Importantly, choreography is not only the act of structuring processes, but it may also name the evolving structure: The notion of ‘expanded choreography’ can, thus, account both for the act of producing a complex movement procedure of any kind, but may also name the actual moving arrangement that one can either see or follow as it unfolds. Thus, choreography takes on the meaning of generating complex moving arrangements, both on a spatial and temporal level, while time becomes the main structuring parameter and space is being conceived of as somewhat fluid unfolding, as Spånberg explains: “Architecture erects structures that coagulate space in respect of the dynamics of time, whereas choreography instead produces structures that enables times movements in respect of the stability of space” (Spånberg 2017: 362). Space is seen as secondary to the changing nature of time passing, rather than as a container that either holds or frames the passage of time.42

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more common, cf. Rosalind Krauss’ essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (Krauss 1979); this is a text to which Spånberg himself refers. It should not come as a surprise that choreography, as an expanded notion, has gained importance at a moment within the history of late capitalism during which the global entanglement of trade and commerce has been developed to a level of complexity that makes more and more time-critical steering and ordering of movement of diverse elements (goods, financial transaction, management of migration, and so on) a mere necessity. Thereby, ‘expanded choreography’ also seems to inherit some of the charge of relational theories of space that have recently gained prominence in both the social sciences and in the humanities. Where one conceives of the ‘production of space’ as a collective practice (cf. Lefebvre 1991), an ex-

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If choreography is defined as an abstract capacity, Spånberg notes, then it “needs to attach to some kind of expression to gain entry into the world” (Spånberg 2017: 361). While that expression has historically often been dance and the human body, that no longer needs to be the case. Prevalent examples of fields that apply choreographic knowledge include urban planning, the design and production of social situations more generally (within the art context, that would potentially be encounters in gallery spaces), but also according to Spånberg: “[…] business processes, even populations, or anthropology in general” (Spånberg 2012: n.p.). Why Spånberg refers to Hewitt is clear, then, given that his model is similar to what the latter had already proposed: Any process, mostly framed as embodied social interactions in the examples above, can productively be viewed as choreographic, as long as it is based on some form of (ideological) structuring. As Spånberg claims: “In other words, choreography is a matter of structuring. It goes without saying that structuring does not necessarily imply tidy, ordinary, or formal. Structuring though implies the existence of some kind of system, code, or consistency” (Spånberg 2017: 360). Importantly, socio-material processes may also be called choreographic in so far as there is some form of structuring that has been applied to both human and non-human movement patterns. Spånberg even conceives of population control or generic management-processes as choreographic. His definition of ‘expanded choreography’ is, therefore, very close to what Cvejić/Vujanović term “operative reason” (Cvejić/Vujanović 2015: 72). He confirms a perspective mentioned previously concerning the working of power on the level of governance, of hygienic and institutional protocols, modes of inclusion and exclusion, movement of people within the urban fabric, social segregation, sexuality and reproduction, and so on (i.e., panded notion of choreography may help to examine shifting spatial relations over time. Kirsten Maar, for example, has been working on a notion of choreography as a fluid, shifting construction of relational space in and by movement and gesture in relation to a series of choreographic objects by William Forsythe, thereby rephrasing discourses on the presentation of dance within the white cube of the exhibition space. In this way, choreography comes to be defined as the production of a strictly local, relational space, a form of processual, provisional writing of space (topo-graphein) which, in turn, highlights the fact that space needs to be constructed and cannot be taken as given in the form of an abstract Euclidean container (cf. Maar 2019: 25/26). Maar, thus, describes choreography as a topographic practice in which tangible, non-linear, and relational spaces come to be, thereby also linking choreography to the practice of architecture. Here, at the extreme end, space is just the relict of moving bodies (human and non-human, I want to add), and concurrently functions as a prescription to those bodies. Yet, as such, it needs to actualized, experienced, and remade by and within movement. Maar’s theory of the becoming choreographic of architecture, where architecture may be likened to a flow of space in time, will be expanded even more in the third chapter because – as I want to show – logistics, as pre-emptive computation, stretches the limits of topology, operating on the level of spatio-temporalities of potential relation, rather than within actualized spatial relations exclusively.

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the overall movement-based interaction of people within social space that Michel Foucault has analyzed in detail, cf. Foucault 2007, Foucault 1997). Accordingly, and at the same conference in Barcelona in 2012, Luciana Parisi proposed thinking of ‘expanded choreography’ as a form of governance, which she defines, in relation to Foucault, as a scheme that prescribes the concrete arrangement of relations of moving objects, thereby producing spatio-temporalities, actual locations, and in the most abstract sense, defines the actual objects that exists within the moving structure (cf. Parisi 2012). Following Hewitt, Spånberg, and Parisi, ‘expanded choreography’ thus accounts for choreographies beyond the theatrical stage and for more expanded societal processes of governance alike. In so far as it includes non-humans, ‘expanded choreography’ as governance of movement in social space exists, I thus claim, on a continuum with practices of both handling things in daily life and on theatrical or non-theatrical stages alike. In his recent text “Operative Choreography: Dance and Logistical Choreography”, Gerko Egert has made an important contribution to our understanding of this type of ‘expanded choreography’. In defining what ‘operative choreography’ is, Egert insists on the fact that this type of choreography operates from the inside of assemblages: “[…] it controls movement from the inside, regulating and modulating it by its very own logic” (Egert 2022: 98). For Egert, who follows Brian Massumi in his argumentation, operations are defined by two sides: Firstly, they offer a solution to a problem they themselves raise, and secondly, they are defined by specific “modes of production” (Egert 2022: 100). Interestingly, Egert proposes logistical capitalism as a central field of experimentation for ‘operational choreography’. Within this business field, that today covers and connects the whole globe, Egert claims, the “[…] first side of operations [is] the ‘production of flow.’” (Egert 2022: 100). This imperative of smooth and uninterrupted flow drives contemporary capitalist production. Its product, Egert states, are smooth spaces of circulation: “Circulation (in the logistical sense of a value-producing movement) is the quasieffect of logistics. To produce circulation, multiple events of movement have to be synthesized. Without the operation of synthesis, movement would just exist in a bubbling field without any direction or causality. By capturing these movements and making them operational, the logistical regime creates causality, making it possible to produce, ship, and trade goods and create value—value by and of movement. What we call movement in its usual sense and what here is called circulation is the synthesis of multiple movements in their nascent state actualized and ordered into causality by logistics’ operational logic.” (Egert 2022: 101) Here, Egert points to a specific form of posthuman choreography that structures many aspects of contemporary life, namely logistics. His claim (i.e., thinking of logistics as a form of ‘operative choreography’ that governs assemblages from the inside) shall be spelled out later on in this book. His remarks also resonate with

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thoughts on the matter of logistics and its choreographic nature that André Lepecki offered within a recent book. In the introduction to ‘Singularities’, he states, echoing Moten and Harney, that the co-evolution of capitalism and colonialism are bound by the ‘necropolitical’ invention of the “slave, the commodity who speaks” (Moten/Harney 2013: 92, in this case after Lepecki 2016: 4). As such, and according to Lepecki, the logistics of slavery are a racist “bio- and necropolitical technology of subjectivation” operating with “capitalist-colonialist assemblages” (i.e., allegedly technical, but always partial and political confederation of different bodies). Following Harney and Moten, he directly links early choreographic assemblages of modernity to the field and faculty of logistics, when he writes: “The kinetic interface between colonialism and capitalism emerges in what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have called ‘logisticality’, the management and control over the movement of objects and subjects within the channels of capitalism’s kineticism” (Lepecki 2016: 5). Lepecki here seems to suggest that there is a choreographic dimension to both colonialism and capitalism that converges in the faculty and practice of logistics. Within ‘capitalism’s kineticism’ (i.e., the movement channels established by capitalist intercontinental trade routes), both subjects and objects are moved and controlled. Yet, Lepecki does not specify the extent to which logistics is choreographic, or how exactly it works. In order to understand more about the interlink between capitalism, colonialism, and choreography, I will take a closer look at the business field of logistics, its movement imperatives, its history, and ideology towards the end of this book. The ways in which choreography can be regarded as the very faculty of steering movement that actually instantiates and dictates the division between subject and object, and produces these categories within the very process of moving entities, will then become clear. If, as Lepecki and Egert concede, logistics is the interface between colonialism, capitalism, and choreography, then a better understanding of its actual principles and choreographic ideology is needed.

The double vector of ‘expanded choreography’ Let me review the conceptions of ‘expanded choreography’ outlined thus far: Choreography is endowed with a productive as much as subjecting quality both in the formulation of Hewitt and of Spånberg. In both of the authors’ works, choreography is aligned with majoritarian formations within society and, therefore, becomes oppressive. Now, while Spånberg seems to somewhat celebrate the expansion of choreography in his public lecture in 2012, he is also much more critical of choreographic power and asks whether it could be redefined as a non-teleological technology or knowledge-formation, at least in the following publications. In his 2017 text for the publication ‘Post-Dance’, for example, he insists that choreographers “fear move-

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ment and therefore organize such. Choreography, like architecture, is a matter of domesticating or taming movement. Choreography organizes movement” (Spånberg 2017: 360). In so far as social and ‘expanded choreography’ are conceived of as subjecting or orientating faculty, I propose that their definitions implicitly relate to a definition of choreography as an ‘apparatus of capture’ as proposed by André Lepecki. Lepecki centrally develops this definition of choreography in a short text entitled ‘Choreography as an Apparatus of Capture’ from 2007 which explicitly relates to his book ‘Exhausting Dance’ from 2006. Essentially, he defines choreography as the “mechanism that simultaneously distributes and organizes dance’s relationship to perception and signification” (Lepecki 2007: 120). Choreography, thus, takes charge of the evolution of dance, notably in the act of writing and thereby of archiving certain dances. The choreographic project of “defining, fixing, and reproducing what should be valued as dance” (Lepecki 2006: 4) finds its final form within abstract modern dance, as Lepecki argues, where dance is nothing more than pure movement or constant flow.43 The entangled origin of choreography and modernity become apparent therein because both tend towards full mobility. Processes of subjectivation, in which subjects come to define themselves as ample by means of moving over flat, bulldozed land, thereby erasing all “ecological catastrophes, personal tragedies, and communal disruptions brought about by the colonial plundering of resources” (Lepecki 2006: 14) are mirrored in choreography, which is defined as a disciplinary project of producing versatile movers executing spectacular, abstract movement on stage. As Lepecki states: “Dance and modernity intertwine in a kinetic mode of being-in-the-world” (Lepecki 2006: 7). Movement itself, and mobilization, can thus no longer be characterized as either critical or progressive. The question instead becomes: How does the dominant move?44 In that regard, Lepecki and Ric Alsopp concede a hyperkinetic activation of movement for industry, capital, and the military (cf. Alsopp/Lepecki 2010). Their argument is a historic one because, as the authors claim, the acceleration of people and things within early capitalism moves parallelly to the invention of choreography. Therefore, as Lepecki and Alsopp write:

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Lepecki identifies “a whole ontology of dance that can be summarized as follows: dance ontologically imbricates itself with, is isomorphic to, movement” in relation to discourses around conceptual dance and its critique (Lepecki 2016: 2). Cf. Lepecki: “In Randy Martin, in Deleuze, and in Guattari movement seems to be associated positively as that which will always apply its force towards a politics of progress, or at least towards a critical formation that could be considered progressive. […] But given that I have just posited that the condition of modernity is that of an emblematic motility, the question becomes of finding out where ‘the fixity of what is dominant’ might be. The question is to know if and how the dominant moves” (Lepecki 2016: 12).

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“[G]eo-political and bio-political questions become essentially choreographic ones: to decide who is able or allowed to move – and under what circumstances, and what grounds: to decide where one is allowed to move; to define who are the bodies that can choose full mobility and who are the bodies forced into displacement. The end result of this politics of mobility is that of transforming the right for free and ample movement into a privilege, and the turn that privilege into a prized subjectivity” (Alsopp/Lepecki 2010: 1). Lepecki (and Alsopp) describe the beginning of a world that is constantly in motion and develops according to a capitalist-choreographic imperative of mobilization. Lepecki claims that choreography is fully identified with state power45 and co-evolves with early capitalist logistics of extracting both people and resources (i.e., their alienation, abduction, and violent transport as part of a project of colonial plundering). In so far as choreography aligns with majoritarian formations of power, it is driven, Lepecki implicitly seems to argue, by a logic of constant flow, disposability of matter (both human and non-human), a tendency towards full mobility, and a disregard for any local relationalities. As I will argue later on, these choreographic principles come to be fully embodied within modern logistics. Now, if such a model of choreography is expanded into the non-human realm, as I want to argue, then the result may be an omni-powerful form of management of both human and non-human movement, in which oppositions between those who initiate movement (steering agents, liberal subjects) and those who are forced into mobility (resources, but also human capital, whether enslaved or not) are continually reproduced. It is in this regard, thus, that I will, within this book, speak of sociomaterial choreography. Socio-material choreography does not partake in an ecological or post-anthropocentric impulse of questioning human control or domination; instead, it simply views choreography as a form of structuring movement patterns or trajectories of all of the possible bodies, not just human bodies or danced movement. As I want to propose in this book, one possible example is logistics, which puts a specific focus and keen interest on its non-human participants while continually redrawing the line between what counts as human and what does not. In chapter 4 of this book, I will, thus, analyze logistics as one possible form of sociomaterial choreography that potentially totalizes claims which had been inherent to

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Cf. Lepecki: “Let us not forget that choreographic power is genealogically majoritarian in the sense that ‘choreography’ names a very specific masculinist, fatherly, Stately, judicial, theological, and disciplinary project – a project that, moreover, removed dance from its social terrain (the communal yard) and placed it in a private (courtly) chamber, thus subordinating dance to signification, to full presence and to archiving. In other words: at a certain point in the history of Wester subjectivity, a certain social (and socializing) activity called dance fell prey to a Stately (and theological) apparatus of capture called choreography” (Lepecki 2007: 122).

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choreography as a modern invention previously (i.e., its governmental, subjecting, and controlling functions). In so far as logistics applies these functions to all possible bodies, it becomes a kind of omni-powerful, totalizing, and totally objectifying form of ‘expanded choreography’. This is the first vector of how ‘expanded choreography’ transforms itself today, a vector I have termed socio-material choreography. Yet, there is another vector of ‘expanded choreography’: Klien, Valk, and Gormly, for example, insist – in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s imperative of the itinerant metallurgist practice of ‘following the flow of matter’ (cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 409) – on an unspecific, but non-hierarchical practice of choreography: “Our premise must not be to constrain movement into a set pattern,” they write, “but rather to provide a cradle for movement to find its own patterns – over and over again; to preserve a body, whether bound by skin or habits, from stagnation; to enable lightness and primal energy, possibilities only found once relations start dancing” (Klien/Valk/Gormly 2008: 28). Their idea is for the choreographer not to impose order onto matter, but to make space whereby choreography is conceived of as an “offering of territory” or as an “opening” for dance, in fact, and for “the ones who will be dancing: a gesture of submission” (Klien/Valk/Gormly 2008: 29). If ‘expanded choreography’ manages to self-erase, in gestures and practices which have been described by Lepecki in greater detail in his article ‘Moving as Thing’ cited above (Lepecki 2012), then it could – fantastically – become a ‘neutral’ realm of morphogenesis, an enabling medium in and out of which form emerges. Within the existing literature in the fields of Performance Studies and Critical Dance Studies, this realm of the generative, transformative becoming which the authors here circumscribed here is most often not termed choreography, but rather: dance. Klien, Gormly, and Valk, for example, describe a universe in which “there is only the contingency of fluid and free-floating forces” (Klien/Valk/Gormly 2008: 16). To them, the morphogenetic creativity of manifold nature and its perpetual movement of re-arrangement and proliferation can, thus, be equated with dance (cf. Klien/Valk/Gormly 2008: 20). I have already analyzed a similar definition of dance, as a-personal movement of morphogenesis, of potential affective form, so to speak, within the discourse by Egert and Lepecki cited above (cf. Lepecki 2012, Egert 2016a). Similarly, Spånberg conceives of dance as the act of letting oneself be carried by a de-personalized flow of energy, which is not and expression of the individual or the subject in the first instance: “Dance carries the opportunity to pass agency from the subject to dance itself. To dance in this respect implies the possibility to learn from dance, instead of learning how to dance or how to be one’s self” (Spånberg 2017: 375). Dance, in these heavily post-Deleuzian discourses, is often conceived in metaphoric proximity to a potentially anarchic, free-flowing morphogenetic force, a matter-energy that Deleuze and Guattari have repeatedly termed ‘body without organs’ or ‘plane of immanence’ (cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1987).

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As such, dance is often linked to the notion of any thing and defined as an as yet unformed energy that carries heavy anarcho-political expectations. If dance is matter-energy as force, as potential form, albeit not yet actualized, but form-à-venir, so to speak, then choreography, conversely, is the potentially violent sorting or suture of this flow. While choreography is often read as governance, in the Foucauldian sense of the notion elaborated above, dance and movement are conceptualized as proto-anarchic, fluid, and endless process of transformation, becoming minoritarian, thereby evading power in the vein of Deleuze and Guattari.46 Becoming thing is, thus, heavily charged with an artistic-political desire for endless, open-ended transformation. Within this book, I want to break with that tendency. I do believe that there must be ways of interacting with matter that look for less hierarchical modalities of choreography, yet ways of intra-action that do not claim that human agency could altogether be given up in the name of an ‘endless becoming’ of unspecific sort. I will, within the following reflections, look for modes of handling things that think of themselves as constant practices of negotiation; practices, more specifically, that are conscious about their specific usage of matter (i.e., their logisticality). These practices are what I term more-than-human choreography. Within this book, I consider more-than-human choreography the second possible vector of how ‘expanded choreography’ may formulate itself. Let me then summarize: The expansion of choreography, both from within an artistic discourse, mostly driven by Marten Spånberg, and as a metaphor for timebased procedures more generally, can be read as a form of detachment from the limits and situatedness of the body, thereby rendering choreography a supposedly neutral form of ‘operative reason’ for the structuring of movement at the levels of embodied, lived socio-material relations. This type of choreography is often conceptualized as a form of governance within Critical Dance Studies in so far as it serves majoritarian formations in society. This indicates that the choreographic has become the realm of practical, embodied implementation of time-based procedures of social and material structuring in relation to modernity’s drive for mobility and capitalist modes of production. More explicitly, ‘expanded choreography’ comes to characterize the actual implementation of norms and rules regarding bodily behavior that are often performed voluntarily in contemporary neoliberalism, but will be 46

Philosopher Mirjam Schaub proposes that it is a different understanding of the notions ‘plaisir vs. désir’ that mark a final point of difference between Foucault and Deleuze in an article from 2004 (cf. Schaub 2004). What underlies that opposition, as she outlines, is different understanding of the concept of ‘force’. It may well be, then, that the difference that she unfolds is an unseen theoretical undercurrent within current discussions on ‘expanded choreography’ in Performance Studies. For more extensive surveys on discussions about whether or not choreography is disciplinary or generative in nature, cf. also Hölscher 2015 and Sabisch 2011.

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enforced disciplinarily if needed. As a conduit of power, choreography may thus be akin to a Foucauldian model of governance. In the existing literature on ‘expanded choreography’ there is little explicit consideration for non-humans, be it single consumer objects or more extended material assemblages, save for the fragments by Lepecki and Laermans, the PhD project of Mette Ingvartsen and Martina Ruhsam, and the text by Michael Klien and collaborators cited above. Following Lepecki and Egert, one potential place of elaboration (i.e., of describing how the choreographic governance of both humans and non-humans takes place today) is logistics. In their discursive fragments, logistics is clearly marked as a totalizing and fully objectifying choreography of governance. While analyzing logistics as a form of socio-material choreography, I want to avoid the dichotomy described above (i.e., between choreography as totalized governance and dance as totally non-hierarchical, peaceful place of becoming). Cementing this dichotomy of total governance versus endless becoming, I claim, will not help me to formulate a politics of concrete choreographic engagement with nonhumans. Rather, practices of handling things will always reveal some implicit political ideology. Furthermore, movement itself, and even notions such as mobilization, transformation, or becoming, cannot be the criteria for critical or emancipatory politics. As Hewitt reminds us, a vitalist conception that equates movement with life stands powerless vis-à-vis the modernist, capitalist imperative towards movement. Movement itself holds no emancipatory or critical place. Rather, the task is, as Hewitt writes, “[…] to develop a critical hermeneutic that eschews the un-dialectical ‘materiality’ of the body on the one hand, and the vitalist celebration of ‘force’ or ‘movement’ on the other” (Hewitt 2005: 10). To enter into choreographic negotiation with material, thus, has two possible vectors, one in which the human body attunes to non-human others without claiming to give up agency altogether, and another one in which the human mind, hands, and body take full operative control over the material world as such, pushing capitalism’s inherent telos (i.e., full mobilization, ever faster accumulation, total choreographic disposability, and the valorization of movement) to its endpoint. Following Egert, I claim that both of these types of choreography may be implemented from the inside of assemblages. The central question for the evaluation of choreographic assemblages thus is: What is the ‘operative logic’ at play within a specific assemblage or milieu? In order to answer this question, both with regards to my case studies as to the business field of logistics, I need to concretize how to evaluate and analyze ‘operative logics’ of assemblages. In order to do so, I claim, we need to analyze their consistency and choreographic logic.

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1.3 Method: describing the consistency and choreographic logic of assemblages This work situates itself at the intersection of three different disciplines: philosophy, Performance Studies, and artistic research. Its main questions – How might we move as thing among things? What is a possible practice and ethics of morethan-human choreographies, of handling things? – stem both from philosophical discourse (most directly from the field of New Materialism) and from the field of Performance Studies. My approach to these questions is both analytical and practiceled. On the one hand, I hope to make a contribution to theoretical reflections about artistic practices in the field of contemporary performing arts and how they problematize the notion of subject and its according violence by relating to and choreographically handling things.47 On the other hand, the graduate school ‘Performing Citizenship’ enabled me to work on questions that are central to the research as it is presented here choreographically. In addition to philosophical and critical discourses, this work’s main epistemic motor, thus, were performance practices themselves. It is within these practices, as I want to show, that problems about how to move with things, but – more importantly – new ways and principles of how to do so are experimented with and formulated. Three extensive case studies of contemporary performing arts practices are central to my argument, one of which is my own dance performance Barricades and Dances. 48 I have long-standing ties as a co-researcher to both of the other practices (i.e., African Terminal and Polyset). I have been an active member of the cultural initiative and performative intervention African Terminal from the moment of its foundation within a project of Hamburg-based performance collective geheimagentur in 2017 onwards. While Polyset is the artistic research practice by my colleague Vladimir Miller, I have taken part in his Polyset (12) in Giessen, Germany in 2017, 47

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The critique of Western male subjectivity and the societal codes and modalities of embodiment it has given rise to has occupied the heart of conceptual dance practices for the last 30 years at least, in as much as it is at the center of performance as an art-form more generally (cf. Lepecki 2013b). Within this history of performed critique and alternative enactments of subjectivity, choreographic work that puts things center stage may be regarded as a successor of works that deal with human-animal relations such as, for example, Martin Nachbar’s Animal Dances, David Weber-Krebs’ and Maximilian Haas’ Balthazar, or Xavier LeRoy’s Low Pieces (cf. Haas 2018). The dance performance Barricades and Dances and an artistic publication entitled ‘Barricades and Dances: One possible journey through The Book of All Things’ that was produces as part of this project, form my research’s central artistic part. The dance performance Barricades and Dances can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/135229015 (password: ‘agency’, last accessed on Jan 4, 2021). The publication can be accessed at http://performingcitizenship.de/data/wp-c ontent/uploads/2015/02/Barricades-and-Dances_One-possible-journey-through -the-Bookof-All-Things.pdf (last accessed on April 22, 2023).

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during which time I also conducted extensive interviews with him. I have chosen African Terminal and Polyset as case studies to accompany my own artistic research entitled Barricades and Dances, given that they touch upon questions that are central to my argument and in so far as they handle things practically. The different degrees of involvement within these practices will not only allow me to articulate their concerns and to describe their practical organization, but will also allow me to reflect upon the potentials and constraints of artistic research more generally. The view that artistic processes can be understood as one specific form of knowledge-production, as repeatedly formulated within the field of artistic research is an important methodological argument of my work (cf. Bippus 2009, Klein 2010, Peters 2013, Borgdorff 2014). The status of knowledge that is produced within artistic practice is manifold: It is often conceived of as tacit (cf. Polanyi 1966), implicit or dormant, as reliant on collaboration (cf. Blain/Minors 2020), or as situated within interdisciplinary fields constructed around a triangle of everyday experts, political questions, and artistic methods (cf. Peters 2013). Based on these reflections, my own methodological proposition is the following: In the sense given to the notion by Performance Studies scholar Bojana Cvejić (cf. Cvejić 2015), performance practices are understood as generators of problems. These problems – such as, in my case, the choreographic question of how to handle things without objectifying them – express themselves both within theoretical discourse, which sometimes also informs the making of performances, and within the practices themselves. As Cvejić writes: “[…] the problems stem from the very process of creation, as they express the thought that guides the choreographers in their decisions; and the problems are also given by the performances” (Cvejić 2015: 2). In that sense, theoretical discourse is important to my argument in so far as it uncovers the specific problems that are central to the artistic practices that I present here. Simultaneously, it is within the artistic practices themselves that the problems described theoretically are expressed and become productive. My aim, therefore, it to attend to their specific ways of problematizing our entanglement with things and questions around more-than-human choreographies, as elaborated above. I thereby go beyond what Cvejić proposes in an important sense: While she relates to performances mainly as staged events and aesthetic objects, I attend to performance practices as spatially and temporally expanded and inherently material fields of more-than-human collaboration, experimentation, and research that happen and are enacted beyond their mere presentation on stage. As explained above, I understand performance practice to involve collaborative efforts grounded in and continually reproducing socio-material assemblages of various kinds (i.e., as uneven fields of distributed agency, rather than singular aesthetic experiences). Thus, what I seek to understand is how specific modes of logisticality (i.e., of activating, using, and caring-for socio-material fields and relations), sustain the intra-action between their components or parts and generate further performative effects (i.e.,

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might be perceived as performances). Based on this notion, my central question is: How does the choreographic handling of matter produce specific performative assemblages (which might be perceived as performances or articulate themselves as performance practices), and how does that generative doing, in turn, rely on morethan-human fields of distributed agency? My attempt, thus, is to uncover within this work specific problems and choreographic principles of addressing these problems that reside in both philosophical thought and within socio-material fields of cooperating entities that generate performative effects (rather than in the mere event of the performance itself). My method is tainted by fundamental doubts about the ‘transformative power’ of performance (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2008) or its alleged ‘liveness’ (cf. Auslander 1999). As I will clarify in detail within my reading of assemblage theory, performance is not only a mode of undoing hierarchies, but also of reproducing or installing them in the first place. Equally, staged performances might seem like distilled events and, thus, as sources of affect or epistemic problems. Yet, in reality, these performances rely on manifold and often unnoticed networks of humans and non-humans alike that generate and provide for their affective or epistemic power (cf. Butler 2010). If there is no longer a subject to author or authorize them, then one needs to look elsewhere: performances are, like anything else, based on logisticality (i.e., they are indebted to the socio-material field from which they are generated) – a notion I have defined above and will work with in more detail in a later chapter of this book. Performance Studies scholar Fred Moten asks in his text ‘Erotics of Fugitivity’ (which is a recurrent companion throughout my argument): “[…] Performance Studies is embarrassed by performances, particularly if the ontology of performance is understood to have been given in performances’ serial disappearances, their supposed distance from any economy of representation or reproduction. But what if further embarrassment, which might be thought in its false but faithful translinguistic friendship with fertility, lies in the fact that when performances disappear, they go to a nonperformative or anteperfomative social field?” (Moten 2018: 245). As Moten indicates, the alleged liveness of the staged moment of performance (be it a theatrical representation or a speech-act), its being self-present as unified event which might effectuate change in the fabric of the world or affect others (the so-called viewers), has to be called into question. Rather, there is always a morethan-human socio-material field, the field of primary, generative entanglement and intra-action, from which performances (always in plural) are marked out and to which they return. In other words: The event of a performance will need to be prepared, cared for, and supported in many ways, its effects have to be equally “assisted, handled, cared for, each time (re)made as never-ending” (Fiadeiro/Eugenio 2013: 17) as performance makers João Fiadeiro and Fernanda Eugenio point out.

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Yet, in order to unfold the specific modes of logisticality that my case studies propose, I need to somewhat operationalize the concept first. I will, therefore, proceed as follows: In relation to performance practices, I understand logisticality as being constituted by two specific levels: The first level involves the socio-material consistency of the performative assemblage of a specific practice (i.e., the field of distributed agency by which the performance practice is constituted and supported). The second level is constituted by the choreographic logic of handling that that a specific performance practice employs or probes. Both levels are intertwined and co-determine one another. This means that specific modes of relating to things will only be able to unfold in so far as there is an activation of specific socio-material field; yet, at the same time, these modes of handling things re-configure, sustain, and constitute the consistency of the field itself. In my analysis of specific performance practices (rather than individual performances), I will therefore proceed according to two steps: I will first attempt to name, analyze, and unfold the socio-material fields from which they originate, by which they are supported, and to which they belong, for each of the case-studies. Henceforth, I refer to this step as description of the performative assemblage’s socio-material consistency. It is a risky act of advocacy for the social-material forces which are active with those fields, an attempt at analyzing both the logics at work in the making of these performance practices as much as the logistical networks that support them. Important factors for my analysis include: the composition of the group that initiated the practice, the site in which it takes place (i.e., highlighting the practice’s ‘situatedness’49 ) and, centrally, the arrangement, composition, and relations of the materials that are being handled. With regard to the latter, I will try to name both the composition of things that are handled, but also how and from where they were acquired. The logisticality of performance practices is effective both on its ‘inside’ (the internal working of the cooperative field) and on its ‘outside’ (the relations it sustains to other assemblages); both need to be taken into account, while also highlighting the fact that ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ continuously contaminate one another and cannot be neatly separated. I will, therefore, also reflect on the specific context in which these practices unfold, but not without, concurrently, trying to name how they shift and re-arrange it in some cases. Thus, analyzing and naming the performative assemblages’ social-material dimensions of my case studies is the first step by which I intend to uncover how they problematize our relation to matter. I will, in a second step, try to name the actual choreographic proposition that each of them puts forward in a manner informed both my theoretical research and the dense descriptions of the socio-material fields at play: Therefore, I focus on the

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Situatedness is a notion that was introduced prominently by Donna Haraway, who speaks of both situated knowledges and practices (cf. Haraway 1988).

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actual choreographic logic of intra-acting with material that each of these performance practices generates, exposes, and probes. These choreographic logics will, throughout the book, also be termed principles of handling matter. The notion of the choreographic principle is not one that I take from existing literature; it is not, as I use it here, discursively charged, but it does relate to formulations from the field of choreography.50 With the notion of principle, I try to describe the organizing logics that guide the choice-making, or – more generally – the modality of relating to matter (human and non-human) within the choreographic processes of moving or of moving with things or objects. It is within this practical doing – of handling things, of getting entangled with socio-material fields of action – that the specific modality or style of each of the case studies’ more-than-human choreography exposes itself. As a brief example: In their essay ‘Fantasy in the Hold’, Harney and Moten propose one specific principle of intra-action with material that they name ‘hapticality’. Hapticality is described as a modality of feeling “through others, through other things”, to experience and acquire “a feel for feeling others feeling you” (Harney and Moten 2013: 98) which the authors tie to the experience of the hold of slave-ships, but concurrently conceptualize beyond that specific place. It may then be described as a choreographic principle of handling things in so far as it may both guide and describe a specific modality and style of how to relate to material others while moving with them. The choreographic principles of handling may explicitly guide the choices we make when moving things or moving with things. At other times, they are inherent in our relation to material, which can thus be made explicit by a description of these principles. For example, I always think of objects in my surrounding as disposable, especially in my own living space, where I supposedly own them (i.e., as ready-at-hand for my intra-action with them). The principle of disposability thus describes the fact that I allow myself to move them whenever I want, but also to discard and to destroy them, if I feel like doing that. All the while, the principle of ‘disposability’ may also shape my understanding of what a versatile dancer is (i.e., disposable to incorporating choreographic advice). The principle of dispos-

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The well-known British choreographer Jonathan Burrows uses the notion in a similar sense within his ‘Choreographer’s Handbook’, (Burrows 2010). For him, a principle is mainly a tool to take decisions. He writes: “A principle is not a rule, it’s just a way of taking care of some of the decisions […]” (Burrows 2010: 2). Furthermore, he implicitly concedes that choreographic principles may be used for other processes than merely making a dance piece, which is the case for logistics as well, by stating, at the very beginning of his book, that the initial principle for how to write it is: “to write the book the way I would choreograph a piece of dance or make a performance” (Burrows 2010: 1). It is also noteworthy that Spånberg, in his 2017 ‘Postdance. An advocacy’, claims that choreography itself is “an organizing principle” (Spånberg 2017: 383). What I propose here is that we look more closely at what this principle constitutes in practice and in relation to non-humans.

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ability, thus, describes modalities of relation to human or non-human others. It can be applied to varying degrees. My aim, within this work, is to find similar principles within my case studies. In this case, the epistemic process is both situated within the practice themselves (those who generate these practices), and in my reflexive account of it within this work (i.e., by naming them). When thinking and writing about their principles of using or handling materials, I thus necessarily look at my case studies as practice, rather than as products, and as logistical networks and practices of socio-material handling, rather than clearly bound aesthetic events. I try to become a messaging effect of the logisticality of specific performance practices and my involvement within these practices is constitutive of the epistemic process itself. There is no objective standpoint with regards to logisticality, as Harney and Moten insist. In fact, one always argues form “a standpoint of no standpoint” (Harney and Moten 2013: 93). Artistic research may then be one possible place to actually experiment with and unfold logisticalities, given that it explicitly allows for and necessitates involvement with the so-called ‘object’ of research. My approach to the practical propositions of how to handle things differently varies according to the degree of involvement with the practice. Generally, I operate on a sliding scale between ‘author’ and ‘witness’,51 both for my own practice and for that of my colleagues in which I was involved. By occupying both of these positions, I intend to undo oppositions between active and passive and generative or receptive that are often associated with them. As much as authorship involves the reception of (and responsibility for) agencies from the socio-material field into which it intervenes, witnessing itself is also a social and material act (or action), one that both intervenes in and relies upon fields of action, spaces of circulation, material infrastructures, and care-work (cf. also Lepecki 2016: 170–176). Both authoring and witnessing are modalities of attuning oneself to complex, assembled force-fields. It is in this regard that I allow myself to include a reflection on Miller’s practice of Polyset within my work. While I am not the person who originally conceived of it, and therefore do not have a total overview of its genesis and transformations, I claim from my partial voice and from my perspective to be valid within the argument that I propose, that no single voice carries authority or may be singled out as main epistemic agent within assembled fields of agency. I thereby subscribe to the notion of ‘situated knowledge’ proposed by Donna Haraway: “We seek those ruled by partial sight and limited voice-not partiality for its own sake but, rather, for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings sit51

This differentiation will become more and more problematic throughout the course of my argument because it relies on a binary opposition of active and passive. The opposition of active vs. passive is fundamentally called into question, particularly in relation to the notion of ‘attunement’, cf. chapter 5. ‘Attunement: a more-than-human choreography of care’.

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uated knowledges make possible. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individual” (Haraway 1988: 590). Finally, while the hearth of my epistemic process is formed by the performative practices of African Terminal, Barricades and Dances, and Polyset themselves, which I use as case studies for proposing principles of more-than-human choreography, this work also includes a number of analyses of other works: these consists of artistic work form the field of contemporary choreography, but also of a series of marketing films in one case. These works are treated as generative aesthetic problems and were chosen because the questions they put forward are conducive to the argument that I propose. I rely on the method of thick description when analyzing these works (cf. Geertz 1973). While I relate to choreographic work as an aesthetic object in its own right, I will, similar to the main case studies, include descriptions of the socio-material conditions from which these works were generated and which they actualize. It is these works’ logisticality that interests me as much as their aesthetic affect.

1.4 Outline of the argument Following this (admittedly very long) introduction, I will, first of all, re-evaluate the notion of ‘thing’. Relating to the work of Bruno Latour, Martin Heidegger, and Fred Moten, I develop the following definition: Things are entangled matter that we encounter in daily use, rather than as epistemic or conceptual problems. Their nature of relationality, which gather mixed human and non-human publics, makes them inherently difficult or impossible to manage. Things contain and are expressive of their entanglements and, therefore, escape procedural knowledge and management. According to Latour, they thus necessitate political debate, since they can be conceived of as divisive ‘matters of concern’. In relation to Fred Moten and Roberto Esposito, I highlight the historical violence of objectification that is inherent in our relation to things. Furthermore, Moten charges the notion of thing, which he ‘provisionally’ uses for both humans and non-humans, with an embodied quality of fugitivity (i.e., the potential to actively escape protocols of objectification). In relation to choreographic work by Merce Cunningham, the activist practice of Tools for Action and my first case-study (i.e., my own dance-performance Barricades and Dances), I describe the barricade as an entangled thing that breaks and interrupts ideologies of constant or total flow, while speculating about it becoming a place for constant re-negotiation of positions, functions, and entangled relations of things within more-than-human assemblages; it creates turbulences as a mere heap of material that intervenes into the urban fabric as a barrier. The barricade concurrently functions as a metaphor for the infinite and never-ending interdependent processes of co-becoming and affection that take place between material bodies. A

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re-reading of Latour’s work on a political ecology from the middle period of his work is linked to this reflection of the barricade. With regards to my first case-study, Barricades and Dances, I will analyze a range of principles of choreographically handling things, namely hesitation, turbulent flow, and attunement. ‘Hesitation’ is a principle put forward by Bruno Latour in his ‘compositionist manifesto’ (Latour 2010), a text that was a recurrent companion within the creation process of Barricades and Dances. It aims to postpone a kind of closure of the compositional process as it is exposed by the work. The principle of ‘turbulent flow’ creates spatial vortices in which humans and things meet. Furthermore, it allows for practices of ‘physically attuning’ to the material (i.e., the barricade’s non-human components). In the third chapter, I develop a model of performative enactment of morethan-human positions and relations within assemblages. I re-conceptualize choreography as practical and iterated enactment of specific practices of handling things within moving arrangements of elements in opposition to logistical principles of socio-material choreography, but in close proximity to the artistic practice entitled Polyset (i.e., my third case study), as it is proposed by scenographer and artist Vladimir Miller. Therefore, I characterize assemblages as forms of provisional configurations of positions and agencies of both human and non-human entities within ‘fields of action’ and ‘spaces of circulation’. The notion of ‘preferred articulations’ designates the fact that specific assemblages prescribe ways of collaboration, while reproducing imbalanced relations between their elements. Finally, practices of handling things are understood as processes in which human and non-human actors individuate, iteratively intra-act with one another, thereby acquiring agencies and capacities, all while sustaining the assemblage of which they are part. I focus specifically on the way in which planned (and unplanned, but iterable) movement concretizes and prescribes capacities. Choreography, finally, comes to name the diagrammatic structure of any assemblage that has to be performatively enacted for it to become effective. My second case-study (i.e., Vladimir Miller’s artistic research environment named Polyset), is a spatial practice that aims at undoing the logics of property and territorial stability. This attempt at questioning established protocols of handling things, of challenging the designed functionality of both tool and institution, is formulated in relation to the participants’ artistic practices. This, in turn, allows for a slow and careful study of how both territories and functionalities are established and undone within spaces of commoning. As a socio-material assemblage, its main choreographic principle of ‘in/stability’ allows participants to observe and to emotionally digest the processes of striation and stratification that the space undergoes. Therein, Polyset’s more-than-choreography acknowledges that it will always produce functionality (i.e., objectify material). It operates with openness towards its own violence and to the different degrees of objectification that it enacts. Polyset establishes a second principle that Miller calls ‘fumbling in the dark’ in relation to

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institutional codes and established affordances of material. Indeed, what can be experienced within Polyset is the fact that established functions, affordances, and the space’s rules of conduct, and in relation to the materials one handles, show itself and become actualized only in so far as one crosses borders or challenges them. In relation to Polyset, more-than-human choreography identifies the careful negotiation of many agencies and always partial degrees of agentic influence within assembled, more-than-human worlds. To choreograph, in that respect, is to carefully intervene in a field of distributed agency, one based on an always partial assessment of one’s own situated position and the power structures that are at play within that field; this is a principle that I will once again call ‘attunement’. In order to understand more about more-than-human choreography, I will finally turn towards the business-field of logistics. Logistics, for me, reflects the other possible vector of an expansion of choreography beyond the stage and human dance: As explained above, I term this vector socio-material choreography and think of it as more-than-human choreography’s problematic other. Yet, in order for me to understand what more-than-human choreography is, it seems necessary to carefully examine the capitalist logic of choreographing things that is being conceptualized and practiced within the business field of logistics. In the fourth chapter of this work, I thus analyze six choreographic principles of handling material that logistics has established, based on literature from the field of Neo-Marxist economics and critical geography. For logistics, movement is the central instance of valorization and, in turn, valorization becomes the central principle of moving matter, from which all others are derived. In the case of logistics, I will argue, a choreography of things is implemented that relies on principles of constant flow, disposability, vectorialization, and containerization. It seems important to analyze this potential totalizing vector of objectification of socio-material choreographies in order to re-formulate my critical propositions. All the while, I will argue that the socio-material choreography of logistics adopts the inherent qualities of modern choreography as such. I then take a step back and interrogate the origins of these conceptions, namely colonial logistics, in order to understand how the movement and transport of objects became the central principle and one of the main motors of processes of accumulation and valorization within capitalist channels of governing matter. With reference to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, colonial logistics is conceived of as a central place of innovation in the formation of contemporary logistics. Central to any discussion of colonial logistics is the formation of the transatlantic slave trade as a necro-political system of transport in which humans were captivated and transported as objects and which, as I argue, can be understood as a form of choreographic governance that produces and enacts onto-epistemic cuts between who and what is considered subject and who or what is objectified. Clarifying the extent to which contemporary logistics both continues and diverges from this logic is central to my argument. While the desire to rule the material world, to parcel, separate, extract from, compartmen-

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talize, dis- and reassemble, fertilize, transport, refine, produce, and capitalize matter is still in place, contemporary logistics implements a decidedly post-human ideology of total mobilization which seeks to undo the position of human subject altogether, replacing it with the position and concept of ‘human capital’. Movement processes are increasingly administered by algorithms at present (i.e., come to be choreographed by non-human intelligence). In relation to logistics, I finally analyze algorithmic, emergent choreographies of logistics that do not presuppose a human subject as choreographer. Algorithmic governance, as a central principle of logistical choreographies, no longer aims at controlling singular trajectories. In adaptive manners, it overviews the emergent movement patterns and movement tendencies of the systemic architectures that it choreographs. Logistical choreographies and their onto-epistemic effects are the field of mobilization into which my third case study African Terminal intervenes. African Terminal is a cooperative of cultural workers and people from West Africa (of which I have been a member for the last couple of years) based in Hamburg. The Terminal interferes into the field of used-goods logistics in order to highlight the colonial history of the city of Hamburg itself and the German nation more generally, and to re-appropriate the supply chain as a means of experiencing and displaying entanglement between distant places on the globe. I will first investigate the social and material dimensions of this performative assemblage in my analysis of the performance practices of African Terminal: It is an improbable collaboration between West-African refugees and German cultural workers, borrowing and misappropriating cultural money for their practical and political work of decolonization. On a material level, it deals with discarded objects (i.e., used-goods that are no longer considered valuable in Germany, sending them to West Africa where they will be re-sold). It, thus, highlights how European colonial history, contemporary regimes of management of migration, and the ongoing violence of migrants’ non-citizen status in Germany are entangled and expressive of neocolonial inequalities within global trade relations, today. In an important sense, thus, the initiative cracks open several frames (i.e., not just that of the stage setting of the actual performance events in Hamburg, but also the wider frame of civic engagement and status as such in so far as it is reliant on global supply networks and their inherent externalization of social and environmental costs). Finally, I will name several choreographic and political strategies that the initiative proposes: On the first level, it opens up the actual stage setting of performative practices, explicitly tackling and including socio-material relations (in the form of supply networks) within the picture – a principle I will use the term ‘unframing’ to describe logistics as a form of expanded socio-material choreography that holds the potential of looking at choreographic or performative work on stage from another perspective. Expanding the temporal and spatial frame of analyzing stage choreography draws both political and ecological consideration into view that might otherwise be neglected. Doing so also holds the promise of shifting agency

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towards less privileged members of an assemblage. ‘Shifting agency’ from Western subjects to Non-Western refugees without citizenship status, therefore, is the second principle that African Terminal proposes. Thirdly, as I argue, the initiative proposes a model of ‘attunement’ of diverse migratory flows, both of people and things. In so far as refugees come to access discarded consumer goods and exercise their expertise as traders, the performative intervention enacts a kind of recalibration of social and material positions within the wider societal context. At the very end of this chapter, I will come back to the notion of logisticality, which is informed by the practice of African Terminal. While logistics, including its complicated colonial history and driven by potentially totalizing choreographic principles, has become one of the central elements of capitalism’s contemporary evolution, logisticality designates another realm of need-based, desire-driven practical handling of (and being handled by) things that exist beyond the imperatives of accumulation and valorization. As explained above, the notion was introduced by Harney and Moten in their essay ‘Fantasy in the Hold’ and circumscribed as a realm of handling materials (and being handled by them) in which there is no end. It describes the practice and place of always already treating one another as a means, based on a deep understanding of interrelation, entanglement, and mutual dependency – a realm mainly of tactile relations. Logisticality bases itself on modes of handling material that are not mainly visual or design-oriented; here, things get handled. In fact, they handle one another, they use one another, and yet this is based on a conception of mutual indebtedness. Based on the analysis of my three case studies, I finally attempt to formulate a more general ethics and aesthetics of attunement, in which one’s agency consists partly in committing oneself to passivity, to being affected as much as being indebted to the many bodies with which one is in constant intra-action, contact, and exchange. I propose counter-effectuating logistical principles of handling material with the one’s that I uncover with regard to my artistic case-studies in order to undermine my analytical notion of more-than-human choreography empirically. If the overarching logistical principle of ‘valorization’ is replaced by the principle of ‘attunement’, then all of the other principles can be challenged as well. Doing so involves practically formulating an ethics of care for more-than-human worlds, as feminist Science and Technology scholar María Puig de la Bellacasa claims (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). She highlights several problems that are central to situated practices of caring: Letting oneself be affected and acting out of concern for thingly others may always imply forms of violent prescription of finalities. In so far as one tries to move with and speak for things, who will not let themselves be represented fully and who one may always misunderstand, practically handling them carries the risk of prescribing trajectories or positions that might objectify one’s entangled moving partners. The task, then, is manifold: To keep asking about who- or whatever has not been able to articulate oneself; to highlight neglected agencies (both

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human and non-human) specifically agencies, which are often simply subsumed under the rubric of infrastructure, mediation, tool-being; and finally, to work towards an ontology, practice, and ethics of consent. One must practice giving the consent one gives, especially in the practical handling of things, which is to always be more and less than one, as Fred Moten claims. The practice of choreographically handling things will, finally, be defined as an ethics of only means and mediation, of fundamental indebtedness to thingly agentic partners.

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Rainforest (Merce Cunningham) and Barricade Ballet (Tools for Action) How do things become political agents? What, in reality, is their potential for action, for political action? In order to answer these questions, the following chapter will attend to an array of things, that – for one reason or another – show up in the context of social unrest and protest. By following these things, we attune ourselves to their potential for friction, unrest, counter-action, decay, and escape; to their agentic powers. We will find out how they invite us to collaborate, yet never let themselves be fully captured: In 1968, the year that marked the culmination of intense and diverse political struggles – be it in Paris, Prague, or San Francisco – students and workers swore solidarity and built barricades in the streets, thereby resuscitating an important feature in the history of insurgent civic action. Famously, they would sometimes also align forces with bare cobblestones, shouting: “Sous le pavés, la plage!” These instances of social protest fundamentally altered the self-experience of Western societies. They also created spaces of chaotic, turbulent circulation of both bodies and things within the city; spaces in which new modes of relating to things and alternative, more-thanhuman choreographies could arise. 1968 is also the year in which Merce Cunningham choreographed his famous piece RainForest. The piece is neither an act of solidarity with those on the street in the same year, nor with the more-than-human, thingly bodies that participate in these contexts of upheaval, even if, somehow, the question of how to position oneself within more-than-human ecologies is indicated by its title. In reality, the performance refers to “Cunningham’s childhood memories of the Northwest” (Cunningham 2020: n.p.), as the official website claims. I am interested in this performance as a choreographic predecessor of the work of the activist collective ‘Tools for Action’ in specific. What will follow, within this chapter, is a reflection on the barricade as both a place of more-than-human gathering and as a space of turbulent circulation. Within the structure of the barricade, I will argue, everyday commodities are set free from their role of subordinate objects. The barricade, therefore, allows for new forms of choreographically attending to materials.

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Image 3: Merce Cunningham Dance Company in RainForest.

Photography: © Oscar Bailey (1968), courtesy of the Merce Cunningham Trust and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library.

RainForest consists of choreographed movements which seem animal-like, plant-like, and sometimes even remotely machinic, performed to a score by David Tudor that evokes associations to bird songs and the mighty roars wild animals in the jungle. Yet, the most famous part of the performance might be its scenery of floating silver cushions filled with helium that hover above the ground, elegantly but somewhat uncontrollably. These cushions are Andy Warhol’s invention and go by the name of Silver Clouds. They were first presented in 1966, at the exact moment when Warhol declared that he was quitting painting altogether. 1 Merce Cunningham was apparently fascinated by their theatrical potential when he first saw them in an exhibition and decided to take them to the stage. The objects are highly sensitive to touch, air currents, temperature, or static electricity. A dancer touching a cushion, or cushions touching cushions, can easily create a chain reaction in which

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1966 is also the year in which Yvonne Rainer, famously wrote that she wanted to be moved ‘by some thing’ rather than herself (cf. Lepecki 2016: 34–35), thereby indicating an interest in more-than-human choreographies in which subject-object relations are undone.

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the constant movement of the objects blurs the line between activity and passivity, thereby creating the impression of a self-animated environment. The pillows apparently have their own will, an effect that is used for the overall sense of RainForest.2 The cushions’ free-floating movements seems to animate the stage with an energy that is not fully under human control, a state of emergency that can be associated with the forest and its more-than-human energies. Eyal Weizman has argued that the forest (both in Europe and its former colonies, including the US) and its inhabitants have historically marked an important limit line to humanity ever since modernity. Human civilization had to construct itself in opposition to the forest, which was conceived of as fantastical outside and wildly vegetated ‘state of nature’ (Weizman 2016: n.p.). It is interesting to note, then, how Cunningham’s RainForest is associated with wilderness3 in more than one account, but is also tied to the specific moment in the U.S.’s political history during which it was made. The New York Times dance critique Alastair Macaulay writes: “Its implication of free-wheeling anarchy through floating decor that cannot be controlled and choreography that does not play by conventional rules, its animal and nature imagery in both the score and the dancing – all these elements are what one would call 60’s material.” (Macaulay 2015: n.p.) Yet, while the aesthetic experiment that RainForest constitutes might have seemed somewhat anarchic and experimental at the time, all one really sees is tamed materials. The somewhat chaotic movement of the silver cushions might create the aesthetic effect of ‘wilderness’, while what happens on the actual level of handling materials is very conventional. In the piece, dancers and material meet by chance, whenever a Silver Cushion is in the way of the pre-set choreography. In my view, these meetings do not constitute any sort of encounter in which one of the two entities, or both, would be altered in any significant way. All the dancers do is push the cushions around at different moments. All the cushions do is sometimes hinder sight. They are tamed and aestheticized objects that, at best, represent ‘wilderness’ or the forest. Regarding the silver cushions, one can argue, just as I did above for The Artificial Nature Project by Mette Ingvartsen, that their material is cheap industrial plastic and that they will go to waste rather sooner than later. Something very different happens when similar objects make another appearance on the streets of major European capitals some 50 years later, this time in the context of, and not only in temporal proximity to, social protests against climate

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Dance critic Alistor Macaulay writes: “It’s not uncommon during the action for a cloud to float out into the auditorium” (Macaulay 2015). Apparently, it was Jasper Johns – the company’s artistic advisor at that time – who had to get up and bat it back onstage (cf. Macaulay 2015). It is important to keep in mind that Donna Haraway rightly calls attention to the “contaminated history of that term in racist settler colonialism“ (Haraway 2016b).

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change, police violence, state corruption, and other concerns. The artist collective ‘Tools for Action’, organized around the Berlin-based artist Artúr van Balen, is credited with the reinvention of the Warholian art object as what they term Inflatable Cobblestone, a somewhat bigger sister of the Silver Clouds that is not filled with helium, but is very much reminiscent of its artsy sibling. Since 2010, ‘Tools for Action’ and Artúr van Balen have been cooperating with activist groups around the world to make inflatable objects for social protest.4 They insist on a Do-It-Yourself aesthetics and practicality of their protest tools, and always share the construction manuals for their objects, so that they can be copied and used by others. Their wish is to make inflatables proliferate beyond control. In their work, the décor of Cunningham’s staged and domesticated ‘wilderness’ is, thus, set free as a tool to create lightness and chaos in the context of violent street battles. The Inflatable Cobblestone first appeared in 2012, on the streets of Berlin in the context of leftist May Day protests. Yet, I am most interested in the 2015 action named Barricade Ballet because it explicitly takes up the connection between choreography and thing that was already present in RainForest, but transposes it to the public sphere. After having fabricated about 200 inflatable silver cubes in Dortmund, a group of activists, pupils, and scholars would assemble all the cubes to learn a series of choreographies entitled Barricade Ballet on May 29, 2016.5 The ballet, as much action training as choreography, was conceived of as collective movement to intervene in a neoNazi march later that same week. On the day of protest: “[…] when more than 500 neo-Nazis gathered in Dortmund, counter-demonstrators connected the cubes together to form a barricade, to literally hold up a mirror to the extreme-right marchers. The Mirror Barricade also protected counter demonstrators by functioning as a shield against neo-Nazi violence and police repression” (Tools for Action 2017: n.p.).

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Tools for Action has not only produced Inflatable Cobblestones, but different inflatables such as saws or slippers. Their first creation, in 2010, was an inflatable hammer. Inspired by the Majakovskian quote: “Art is not a mirror held up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it”, the collective – still named Eclectic Electric back then – decided to create an unconventional symbol for climate justice: “We sewed a 12-meter silver inflatable hammer. It was then folded into a suitcase, and sent to a Mexican activist group protesting the ineffective policies of the United Nation Climate Conference in Cancún” (after Flood/Grindon 2014: n.p.). The hammer was a big success: Images of protesters trying to hammer down the fences of the climate conference in Cancún were broadcasted world-wide (Eclectic Electric 2012: n.p.). I have not been present at the site of action itself, a workshop in schools in cooperation with Schauspiel Dortmund theatre, and a protest against a Nazi-rally held on the so-called ‘Day of German Future’ on July 4, 2016; I therefore must rely on the video documentation available and on first-hand accounts of Artúr van Balen.

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In the video documentation of the action, you first see groups of activists forming geometrical figures on a central square in Dortmund.6 The collective movements of protesters and silver cushions is filmed from above so that the inflatable cobblestones almost look like Tetris cubes. These clear geometrical figures are punctuated by more chaotic moments: While protesters move around each other in close proximity in the middle of the square, they also throw the cushions into the air, thereby creating the impression of molecules mixing or chemical reactions of hybridization. Here is where a specific bodily affect becomes evident; namely, the pleasure of throwing the cushions up into the air like balloons at a birthday party.

Image 4: Barricade Ballet by Tools for Action.

Photography: screenshot of the video documentation of Barricade Ballet, published on the Vimeo account of Artúr van Balen

The possibility to shift from one state of matter to another, so to speak, from hard to liquid and even gas-like, is characteristic of the Inflatable Cobblestone. This becomes evident in footage from the protest, where you see silver cushions floating over the heads of police forces that are trying to push them away, where you witness small scenes in which the object is being thrown back and forth between protesters and police as if both were consumed in a balloon game, and where you see police forces hitting the inflatables, trying to violently but unsuccessfully destroy them with their

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The video can be accessed at https://vimeo.com/180476017 (last accessed on Dec 29, 2020).

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batons. The materiality of the object itself proposes play as much as it poses resistance. The inflatables, simply, are hard to handle. They are unruly; they are fun to throw around, but if you want to pack them into a police van, or whenever you try to pinch and deflate them with a needle (these are anecdotes from social protest situations, cf. Tools for Action 2017), they seem to be out of control. Their choreography may at times seem ordered and well aligned like a mass ornament of rather big, silver dancing dots,7 but, in reality, the Inflatable Cobblestones hold a potential for dancing chaotically grounded in their uncontrollable movement qualities. This inherent potential for dance really is what shifts and disturbs the agonist positions between protesters and police on the street, thereby enforcing an affect of exuberance and lightness. In this regard, the silver inflatables oppose what André Lepecki has defined as ‘choreopolice’. In his article from 2013, Lepecki describes the state force of the police as a choreographic technique of governance: “More or less persistently, more or less violently, the police appear wherever political protest is set in motion, to break down initiative and to determine ‘proper’ pathways for protesters. Facing a demonstration, the police functions first of all as a movement controller. They impose blockades, contain or channel demonstrators, disperse crowds, and sometimes even literally lift up and drag bodies around. Choreographically as well as conceptually, the police can thus be defined as that which, through its physical presence and skills, determines the space of circulation for protesters, and ensures that ‘everyone is in a permissible place’.” (Lepecki 2013a: 16) Lepecki elaborates on his concept of ‘choreopolice’ as more than the mere presence of police forces at a protest. In fact, the faculty of ‘choreopolice’ is active wherever clear pathways of movement and ‘spaces of circulation’ for bodies, as much as for their affective potentials, are enforced and prescribed within the public sphere (cf. Lepecki 2013a: 19). His notion of ‘choreopolice’ may then be translated as the efficient handling of bodies in urban space, whereby their disposability and channeled flow is secured by an external entity. In his definition of the term, Lepecki clearly things about choreography as a human affair, where human police forces exert control over human bodies of protesters. While he defines choreography as an external force that practically governs a specific ‘space of circulation’, to take up the Foucauldian notion,

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Kracauer’s notion highlights the linear geometrics of mass ornaments and can be useful employed here, especially in opposition to the more animated, gas-like state of throwing the balloons (cf. Kracauer 1927). The mass ornament, as I will elaborate below, may best be understood as a proto-logistical modality of choreography. Whenever it is broken, conversely, it releases a potential for alternative, more-than-human choreographies.

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he does not seem to take things into consideration. Yet, his notions can easily be adapted in this way: The Inflatable Cobblestones, in turn, can be described as an effective, pleasurable ‘choreopolitical’ counterforce. In their weird materiality – light, but big; a protest object, but shiny – they disorientate the movement patterns of both police and protesters, enhance a sense of lightness, experiment and dance, and allow for “a redistribution and reinvention of bodies, affects, and senses through which one may learn how to move politically, how to invent, activate, seek, or experiment with a movement whose only sense (meaning and direction) is the experimental exercise of freedom” (Lepecki 2013a: 20). It is the queering of material properties and orientations,8 and of their respective semiotic-affective qualities, that makes for the ‘choreopolitical’ quality of the Inflatable Cobblestone. Cobblestones are normally used as a medium for the prescribed and well-ordered circulation of bodies and vehicles in the urban fabric. Thereby, they function as a ‘choreopolicing’ agent themselves. In the case of social protests, cobblestones are sometimes used as a weapon for self-defense. As Inflatable Cobblestones, finally, the cobblestone is turned around once more: Instead of being something hard and dense, but relatively small, the object presents itself as quite something else: a bulky, yet very light, a soft, yet resistant thing that hovers above the heads and all around the affects of both protesters and police. These unusual physical properties of the Inflatable Cobblestones constitute its specific counter-power. It is, as if the material itself presented a “systematic and continual challenge to the right of authorities to define the situation” (Graeber 2014: 77).9 Warhol’s Silver Clouds had been aesthetic objects in so far as they were used as the décor of fabricated ‘wilderness’, tamed in the choreographer’s nostalgic re-territorialization of the RainForest as homeland. The Inflatable Cobblestones, on the other hand, carry the ‘choreopolitical’ counter-power to

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The notion of ‘queer’ was popularized by Judith Butler in her work ‘Bodies That Matter’ (Butler 1990). In relation to objects, Sara Ahmed has contributed a theory of queer orientation (Ahmed 2006). David Graeber, in an article on giant puppets and their role in protests, describes the intense and visceral hate that police officers seem to feel towards these objects – an affect that is not merely “strategic, but personal, even visceral” (Graeber 2014: 69). It seems that the cobblestone’s queer materiality is the embodiment and expression of a material and collectively composed counter-power that hints at how fragile “an urban landscape full of endless corporate facades and flashing imagery that seems immutable […] just really is” (Graeber 2014: 70). The affective, even visceral charge of this category of objects, as Graeber states, is most of all due to the fact that these objects, once they are on the street, simply refuse to take orders, but “transform and redefine situations of potential conflict” (Graeber 2014: 77). It is as if the material itself presented a “systematic and continual challenge to the right of authorities to define the situation” (Graeber 2014: 77).

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disorientate movement patterns in the public sphere and create chaotic and turbulent flow, even if they resemble their artsy siblings. This is, simply put, because their materiality takes no orders. As much as they are objects fabricated by protesters, it really is their thingly qualities that constitute an anarchist counter-power and resistance. Therefore, they remind us of the unruly counter-power of things that I want to explore in the following chapter. In order to do so, I will revisit a strand of theory that uses the notion of ‘thing’ in order to denote assembled compositions of humans and non-humans alike. Based on Latour’s proposal of a political ecology, I will formulate a notion of political collectivity that includes more than merely humans.

2.1 Things that gather and resist In daily language, the notion of thing can signify pretty much anything. It is often associated with the objects in one’s surrounding that are given in sensory perception. Via its Germanic etymology, the name carries an implicit link to legal affairs: In medieval German, ‘thing’ originally signified gathering or trial. Its etymology relates to the Latin term res which stands for legal affairs or case-matters when they become public (res publicae). It simultaneously denotes material states of affairs that are of public concern beyond established procedures. The Latin term res, in turn, is a translation of the earlier Greek term pragmata that originally signified concrete stuff in its overwhelming, but manifest, presence. There is a second Latin translation of pragmata: the notion of ens. As one can hear in its English name, this second Latin translation passes on the meaning of abstract entity and denotes stuff in is bare presence, especially where it is reflected in the mind (cf. Sandkühler 2010, Regenbogen/ Meyer 2013). It is to the etymological charge of the Latin term res, much rather than ens, that sociologist Bruno Latour refers when he claims an explicitly political dimension of things. In this section, I will reassess the main lines of argumentation of his conception of ‘thing’ and unravel how his use of the concept relates to the philosophical work of Martin Heidegger, before turning to Fred Moten’s philosophy of ‘black things’.10 I am especially interested in Latour’s notion of thing as an incubator of political conflict. In Latour’s conception the thing acts in a twofold manner: It both gathers a public and it escapes existing functional or managerial procedures. In other words: Things necessitate political debate because they do not let themselves be choreographed exclusively from the outside. Rather, ‘thing’ comes to stand for a

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I do so, even if one can – as philosopher Richard Rorty does, for example – critique uses of Heidegger’s notion of ‘thing’ because of his dubious political position (cf. Rorty 2005). It is important to also name the lineage of Dewey and Lippmann here, who were both influential for Latour’s formulation of ‘How To Make Things Political’ (cf. Marres 2005).

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political matter under contestation, a material issue that binds together a group of heterogeneous entities. Latour writes in ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik. Or How to Make Things Public’: “Thus, long before designating an object thrown out of the political sphere and standing there objectively and independently, the ‘Ding’ or ‘Thing’ has for many centuries meant the issue that brings people together because it divides them.” (Latour 2005b: 23) Latour names the following: That which creates social relations and provisional cohesion of elements within an assemblage, in the sense of a shared world, is always material. More-than-human choreography, is a process of exchange and co-habitation that immanently connects different forms of life and multiple bodies in that regard. Concurrently, the material world that we inhabit and that enables us to actualize capacities is always disputable, precarious, and ungraspable. Our interrelations, therefore, with the environment are opaque and need to constantly be revised or recomposed. As Latour writes within ‘The Politics of Nature’: “A common world, if there is going to be one, is something we will have to build, tooth and nail, together.” (Latour 2004a: 455) Politics, then, is a shifting corporate assembly (both in the sense of built structures and of debate) that gathers around things because they cannot be taken as given or manageable according to fixed procedures: “If politics can’t be identified with the public, or with institutions, it is because it is a kind of circulation that can happen whenever there is no management; in other words, politics is wherever there is no management”, as Latour states (Latour 2012: 75). Things are political is so far as they provoke open questions about the construction of the common and gather diverse actors; they do so because they are entangled with multiple, heterogeneous other bodies. At the same time, their inherent nature of withdrawal makes political debate necessary (cf. Latour 2005b: 14/15). If things escape managerial protocols as matters of concern, they necessitate a forum and debate in which they can be discussed and negotiated. In Latour’s text, this forum, the form, place, and time of representation given to the thing, also carries its very name. It is ‘thing’ as well: “As every reader of Heidegger knows, or as every glance at an English dictionary under the heading of ‘Thing’ will certify, the old world ‘Thing’ or ‘Ding’ designates originally a certain type of archaic assembly. Many parliaments in Nordic and Saxon nations still activate the old root of this etymology: Norwegian congressmen assemble in the Storting; Icelandic deputies called the equivalent of ‘thingmen’ gather in the Althing; Isle of Man seniors used to gather around the Ting.” (Latour 2005b: 23) Thing for Latour is twofold: The hard stuff that matters (i.e., the material issues themselves) and the debate around them, including their – more or less formalized and institutionalized – places and times, their rhythms and breaks, their forms

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of inclusion, deliberation, and protection. The thing is what gathers in two dimensions: It gathers, as it is the matter and material that both divides and binds together, and is the gathering itself. Latour thus states that: “Gathering is the translation that Heidegger used, to talk about those Things, those sites able to assemble mortals and gods, humans and non-humans” (Latour 2005b: 23). Still, the argument could also be turned around: There needs to be a sociality of things – public things, as Bonnie Honig terms them – for politics to emerge, for “without public things, we have nothing, or not much to deliberate about, to constellate around, or agonistically contest” (Honig 2017: 7).

2.2 Things at hand: relational, but concealed Latour does not really explain why exactly things have the power to open genuinely political questions. It is necessary, then, to reconsider one part of Heidegger’s thought in which he “places the thing at the centre of his questioning and (he) turns it into the subject of a suspended meditation, independent of the scope of its usability and objectivity” (Perniola 2004: 108) in order to assess the political potential of things more directly and to unfold why they have the power to gather and escape. Heidegger’s first contribution on the philosophy of objects takes place within his project of Sein und Zeit, in his famous ‘tool-analysis’.11 His notion of equipment (Zeug) carries three distinctive features that are important to my argument: Phenomenologically speaking, it is not as object of reflection or contemplation that we encounter things. Their qualifying feature is not an abstracted spatio-temporal presence (Vorhandenheit), but their ‘ready-at-handness’ (Zuhandenheit), which qualifies them as reliable.12 Things are being handled in daily practice and will be encountered most directly as we use them (cf. Heidegger 1977a: 92). Therefore, Heidegger’s tool-analysis (continued in the essay on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’) is often read as a “triumph of practical activity over theoretical abstraction” (Harman 2002: 1). Yet, in our daily encounters with them, things will often and necessarily pass unnoticed. In order to be ready-at-hand for their human partners, things do need to be ‘concealed’ (i.e., escape observational or reflective access). If one were to 11

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Heidegger here explicitly claims to reassess the question of things – of things in the world, natural things and ‘valuable’ things, basically everything (cf. Heidegger 1977a: 85). To do so means returning to the Greek notion of pragmata, which he links to practices of caring and handling. For Heidegger, things are what you care about in actual handling (cf. Heidegger 1977a: 92). In our handling encounters, we perceive of them as reliable, which is why Heidegger would later go on to state: “The repose of equipment resting within itself consists in its reliability. Only in this reliability do we discern what equipment in truth is” (Heidegger 1971a: 34, cf. also Ruhsam 2021: 184–186).

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constantly contemplate what they are, then any practical interaction would be impossible. Secondly, thus, Heidegger insists on the fact that a central feature of equipment is ‘concealedness’ (cf. Heidegger 1977a: 94–96).13 It is only in the form of accidents (i.e., of an interrupted functionality) that one becomes aware of things. Finally, things as equipment rarely exist as singular objects. They are always part of multiple functional relations. As Heidegger puts it, equipment forms a ‘functional totality’ (Zeugganzes) (cf. Heidegger 1977a: 92–94). We become aware of the specific quality of things only in as much as we think of them as part of multiple interdependencies, as entangled in practical, co-dependent set-ups.14 Things as equipment reveal important features that are connected to our question. They are best encountered not as singled-out objects or ‘epistemic things’, for if they were “bathed in the cold light of the laboratory” (Hahn 2015: 9), studio or stage, their inherent quality of entanglement within living environments would pass unnoticed. We best encounter them in our daily experience and practice (i.e., in the field, the surroundings, their living environment). As I will argue throughout this text, it is modes of practically handling things that constitute their choreopolitical dimension. In their reliability, things furthermore propose a surprising paradox of proximity and distance: In our daily use of things, we are hopelessly entangled with them, but if one ever tries to uncover and reflect objectively on what any single object of one’s life really is or means, then their inherent quality of mundane practicality and relationality withdraws.

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Prominently, Graham Harman has expanded this argument and made it one of the cornerstones of his variant of ‘Object-Oriented Philosophy’. He generalizes the ‘concealedness’ of objects and makes it the central and essential feature of objects. While Heidegger is still concerned mostly with human-object relations, in a Kantian lineage, Harman goes on to speculate about object-object relations that will always be marked by mediation and translation, where one object can never realize the full capacities of another: “When the things withdraw from presence into their dark subterranean reality, they distance themselves not only from human beings, but from each other as well. If the human perception of a house or tree is forever haunted by some hidden surplus in the things that never becomes present, the same is true of the sheer causal interaction between rocks or raindrops” (Harman 2002: 2). One possible way to read Heidegger is to make ‘concealedness’ the most generic feature of a definition of objects or things. Different authors have argued that it leads to a dangerous apoliticality of theories about things in which power hierarchies and relational inequalities cannot be accounted for. For a critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies, cf. Mezzadra/ Neilson 2013a: 10, Moten 2016. An early structuralist analysis of inter-dependent technological totalities and their referential and semantic resources and effects was conducted by Jean Baudrillard (cf. Baudrillard 1968). The functional and semantic relations of objects are analyzed by scholars of ‘material culture’ (mostly from the field of anthropology or human geography). Hans Peter Hahn, a.o., provides an excellent overview and introduction to the subject entitled ‘On the obstinacy of things’ (Hahn 2015).

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Two further points seem noteworthy regarding Sein und Zeit: In his tool-analysis, Heidegger insists that we uncover nature in our use of equipment, for it is necessarily from somewhat ‘natural’ materials (or at least from more ‘raw’ material) that tools or objects are being produced and manufactured (cf. Heidegger 1977a: 94). In the object produced, even in the manufactured consumer-good, some ‘raw’ or natural material subsists, thereby blurring any easy differentiation between nature and culture (a recurrent argument at present). Tools are not only part of functional totalities, but they are also expressive of the transformations that resources have undergone to take their form (cf. Heidegger 1997a: 94). Most often, though, and this is the second point, the things one encounters are products of human activity (as poiesis) that fulfill specific objectives (i.e., they are means in order to achieve certain ends, cf. Heidegger 1977a: 93–94). Yet, Heidegger insists that as long as they are intentionally produced and handled, they belong to a realm of functionality (i.e., they remain objects). Thus, it is the notion of objects’ functionality that one has to return to. Heidegger begins to doubt the mere instrumental character of things as early as 1935. Where equipment and tool are characterized by their close inter-relation with a human agent, the nature of the thing exceeds usefulness: “Only in this reliability do we discern what equipment in truth is. But we still know nothing of what we first sought: the thing’s thingly character”, Heidegger thus write (Heidegger 1971a: 34). In fact, many commentators notice a decisive shift in Heidegger’s post-war philosophy in terms of a somewhat more fundamentalist eco-metaphysics (cf. Harman 2005). In his text ‘The Thing’ from 1949, Heidegger returns to the question of things. Here, Heidegger confronts us with a jug, a bare container of liquids. For him, “the jug is a thing” in as much as it can hold itself together, and it is ‘self-supporting’ in the manner of: “[…] stand(ing) on its own” (Heidegger 1971b: 164). The essence of the jug is its capacity to contain something else. This quality, as Heidegger argues, is made possible by a process of self-perseverance or coherence as entity. In Heidegger’s terms, it is made possible by a process of gathering (i.e., the jug-thing “has to gather itself for the task of containing”, Heidegger 1971b: 166): Heidegger uncovers further features of the jug-thing by way of the excessive use of the word ‘pouring’ (in German: ‘einschenken, ausgießen, der Schank’) and by playing on the assonance of German words such as ‘to pour out’ (in German: ‘aus-schenken’), ‘to give/to bestow’ (in German: ‘schenken’), and ‘the gift/ bestowment’ (in German: ‘Geschenk’). On the one hand, it is the emptiness of the container, its being casted as empty, that allows for casting or pouring into it. The thing is conceived, first and foremost, as fillable. On the other hand, though, while containing whatever has been poured into it, the jug-

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container can also pour out, thereby presenting – as a gift – whatever it contains.15 Actually, the ‘being present’ of things is here defined as a fluid process – everything pours in and out – rather than as a defined spatio-temporal position, for it is the process of ‘holding fluids’ that constitutes it: The jug-container-thing comes to be itself the ongoing event of both ‘holding together’, but also the ‘containing’ of other things (cf. Heidegger 1971b: 175).16 Thus, things are constituted by a double power; they are self-preserving (i.e., they stand by themselves), but they also contain some part of their environment. In this relational definition of things, the jug-container is (a) ‘presencing’ or ‘containing’ (of) many other things, such as: the wine it may pour and give, the grapes and the earth it was made from, the sun, rain and the fertility of the ground that made the grapes ripen. Or, following a different track: water, the source from which it sprang, the processes of cleansing and purifying that happens in the earth, the rain that hits the ground. In fact, the jug-container-thing confronts us with a whole hydrologic cycle: “The spring stays on in the water of the gift. In the spring the rock dwells, and in the rock dwells the dark slumber of the earth, which receives the rain and dew of the sky. In the water of the spring dwells the marriage of sky and earth. It stays in the wine given by the fruit of the vine, the fruit in which the earth’s nourishment and the sky’s sun are betrothed to one another” (Heidegger 1971c: 170). I am not interested in following the technophobic tendencies of Heidegger’s late philosophy, which often seems to discard modern technology as such (cf. Heidegger 1977b), so I will stick to this decidedly relational definition of thing as incorporation of many things, as charged container of processes and flows. Heidegger, thus, gives a more specific sense to the notion of things as gathering (cf. Heidegger 1971b: 171): Things are, in surprising ways, expressive of the entangled environments and the often cyclical (re)productive processes by which they are constituted. Therefore, Heidegger also describes them as a folding and unfolding of their environment. Indeed, things come to be only in relational set-ups; this is why one cannot grasp them as single objects. In order to uncover the fluid, multi-functional whole of which they are part(s), one cannot single them out. Heidegger’s name for this open-ended whole is ‘world’ (cf. Heidegger 1971b: 183), a notion that fundamentally differs from the earlier notion of ‘functional totality’. Thus, rather than being part of a functional totality, things are expressive of an entangled world. In that sense, the fluid container

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Cf. Heidegger 1971b, 169/170: “Holding needs the void as that which holds. The nature of the holding void is gathered in the giving. But giving is richer than a mere pouring out. The giving, whereby the jug is a jug, gathers in the twofold holding – in the outpouring.” This idea is expressed in the infamous, often ridiculed quote: The thing things. Thinging gathers.” (Heidegger 1971b: 172)

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of the thing will always be more than a simple resource – a notion that Heidegger explicitly challenges in his most famous text on technology (cf. Heidegger 1971b).17 The thing is more than a resource, but it is expressive, in its simple presence, of the entangled world to which it belongs, it is also marked by a fundamental difference from the notion of object as something that is in the way of humans, or stands over and against them. The thing’s specific ontological quality does not consist of being represented or perceived as object in relation to a subject. Equally, it is not the process of production that marks the things as thing: “The making, it is true, lets the jug come into its own. But that which in the jug’s nature is its own is never brought about by its making” (Heidegger 1971b: 165/166). Furthermore, Heidegger clarifies that what shows itself in the aspect – here also linked to the Greek notions of eidos (image) and idea – “characterizes the thing solely in the respect in which it stands over against the maker” (Heidegger 1971b: 166). Rather, the thing is that which “stands forth” on its own: “standing forth into the unconcealedness of what is already present” (Heidegger 1971b: 166). The thing, then, is posited as what escapes a subjectobject relation, a relation that in any of its instrumental or rational modalities interferes with the thingliness of things, hence rendering it absent. As Mario Perniola notes, stringently: “[…] thingness has nothing to do with a cognitive relation that confirms the reality of the external world and its transcendence with respect to thinking” (Perniola 2004: 109). It then becomes clear how the argument is passed on from Heidegger to Latour. In Heidegger, the notion of thing is loaded with a heavy weight of refusal and withdrawal and, thereby somehow already, a proto-political dimension: The thing, even if and in as much it is expressive of and constituted by manifold relational set-ups, cannot be comprehended or managed completely. It does not show itself fully either in use or perception, it is beyond transparency. Rather, it marks a line of flight away from human usage, management, instrumentality, and attempts at designing, controlling, or governing the given material world. Yet, the thing in its reliability is always already at hand and emanates a call for use. In fact, we are conditioned by and dependent on things, as Heidegger explicitly states: “In the strict sense of the German word bedingt, we are the be-thinged, the conditioned ones” (Heidegger 1971b: 178–179). Thus, the notion of thing becomes the marker of never-ending and incontrollable withdrawal, which Latour also characterizes as fundamental resistance. By positing

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As Roberto Esposito reminds us: “The resource is positioned not in itself, but in view of its use. Thus, the coal that is used to fuel a power plant is not a thing in the same way as the jug on the table. While the jug does not produce anything other than its simple presence, coal is brought into being to generate heat” (Esposito 2015: 88).

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a certain ‘material recalcitrance’, the thing qualifies as a scandal that “suspends mastery” and “gets in the way of domination” (Latour 2004a: 82/83). It is a withdrawal as a paradoxical figure: Things are fundamentally ungraspable, yet their nearness, or ‘ready-at-handness’, already draws one into the environment, in daily encounters with things and one’s practices of using them. In as much as it stays oblique and unruly, the thing opens up a realm beyond the instrumental force of reason and human technological or logistical wit. What can never be apprehended fully, forces us to re-write existing protocols of ownership, usage and functionality ad infinitum. It is this surprising excess of potential capacities and relations that constitutes the ‘obstinacy’ of things. Their constitutive feature is an unending capacity to couple and adhere. Things therefore do not allow instrumental reason to fully define what they are: “This self-refusal of the mere thing, this self-contained independence belongs precisely to the nature of the thing” (Heidegger 1971a: 23). Therefore, as Fred Moten reminds us, things can never be merely realized as legal matters (cf. Moten 2008: 182). They are always different than what the Latin term res defined as juridical, phenomenological or scientific case, a procedure that begs for an existing protocol of administering its purpose or value. Within my argument, thing is also the name given to the most basic form of material entanglement. Speaking about things includes the idea that any object (i.e., any delimited entity we might perceive, grasp, or contemplate) is subliminally and invisibly related to many other bodies, both human and non-human. Entanglement, in turn, underscore the fact that things are related to one another before becoming separated or separable entities, even if we perceive them as such.18 The feminist physicist Karen Barad defines ‘entanglement’ as follows: “To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. Which is not to say that emergence happens once and for all, as an event or as a process that takes place according to some external measure of space and of time, but

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Martin Ruhsam points to the apparent proximity between this late text of Heidegger and the philosophy of Karen Barad, too. She writes: “For all the conservatism that resonates in Heidegger's thought – even in his turn to the practical, present, ordinary and simple thing – It is interesting how he insists on the entanglement of the existential being (human beings) with the non-existential being (among other things, things and nature), which is particularly evident in the startling parallels between Gendlin's interpretation of the thing essay and Barad's definition of intra-action, for the core thesis is similar in both cases: There are not antecedent human and non-human entities that then interact, but rather these entities only emerge in and through this interaction.” (Ruhsam 2021: 187)

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rather that time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future” (Barad 2007: ix). Barad’s performative definition of entanglement is informed and inspired by Quantum physics, especially in the formulation of Niels Bohr. Her notion of entanglement thus relates to the physical notion of ‘quantum entanglement’, in which particles will instantly react to one another across great distances and within time intervals that are faster than the speed of light. As is the case for the above citation, Barad herself opens up this strictly physical use of the notion to encompass all sorts of different relational dependencies. In his somewhat independent formulation of the notion, the archeologist Ian Hodder also uses the notion to speaks about intra-dependencies between humans and things, indicating that humans and things are “relationally produced” and reliant on one-another in ways that are both enabling and restrictive (Hodder 2014: 19–22). Thinking of things as entangled comes with a series of problems: Even if one only ever encounters things as objects (i.e., as singled-out entities opposed to oneself), then one may not forget that things really are only bundles of entangled relations. In fact, things are best conceived, as we have seen in relation to Heidegger above, as fluid processes of becoming.19 In as much as one agrees with the Hodder’s definition given above, one is confronted with multiple inter-dependencies. Therefore, it is impossible to name all co-agents that participate in any specific intra-action in the practical handling of things. More-than-human choreography, in that regard, is an attempt at formulating ethics for fields of distributed agency that contain innumerable co-agents. Before turning towards my own choreographic practice of Barricades and Dances, I want to return to Fred Moten’s and Stefano Harney’s philosophical reflections on thingliness. Moten and Harney add two central arguments to this reflection: Firstly, they insist on the fact, that one cannot speak about things without taking the history of the transatlantic slave trade, or slavery more broadly, in which people were reduced to the status of objects, into account. In their reflection, the notion of thing thus encompasses both humans and non-humans and will, in turn, be positively charged with the faculty of fugitivity. Here is where their second point of critique ties in: By using the example of a jug, Heidegger essentially conceives of things as

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To speak of things as fluid processes of becoming is to link the notion to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. This will be the topic of chapter 3. ‘Assemblages as more-than-human performances’.

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empty, fillable containers. Thus, he somewhat disregards the specificity of each singular thing, its historicity, locality, and specific charge. If the term thing only denoted a process of containment (and self-containment), then a practice of handling things would be allowed to disassemble and reassemble them as needed. Yet, this must not be the case.

2.3 Things that run and fly Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, in their essay entitled ‘Blackness and Governance’, make a strong statement about the interrelation of people and things, as when they write: “Some people want to run things, some things want to run. If they ask you, tell them we were flying. Knowledge of freedom is (in) the invention of escape, stealing away in the confines, in the form, of a break” (Harney/Moten 2013: 51). Theirs is a thinking that is very much in and about things that run and fly, that are on the fly, in flight, and escaping those who want to govern them. I here allow myself to draw on their notions of fugitivity, blackness, and escape, but want to mark the fact, that the social and material position from which this book is written differs, at least in many aspects, from the experience that they theorize.20 Yet, I am thankful that the notion of ‘thing’ elaborated thus far will be charged with their conceptual sharpness by way of relating thingness to the conditions of blackness. To withdraw or to conceal oneself – as in the thing concealing itself – is not the same as to escape: Fugitivity, I would argue, is a quality of things in so far as they are bodies, or: flesh. For the notion of thing – in their reading of the concept – is being formulated in relation to a colonial history in which people were massively commodified and were, thus, relegated to realm of objects. Fred Moten’s thoughts on things date back to his seminal book ‘In the Break’ (cf. Moten 2000). Speaking about objects that resist, Moten reminds us of the history of Afro-American lives that were turned into mere commodities within and by means of the capitalist-racist faculty of logistics. Their resistance, then, is one that expresses itself in sound and noise, in the margins of the master’s language and linguistics, and is transported, transcribed, and transmuted in Afro-American music and art. Moten seeks to critique a certain conception of subjectivity, one that is based 20

Moten and Harney write about things in relation to Afro-American lives after the Middle Passage (i.e., their massive and collective abduction as mere objects). Things escape by socialpolitical necessity, the authors insist, one that is inherent in the experience of the former ‘commodities that speak’ (Harney/Moten 2013: 92). Informed by the historical fact of their massive objectification, a history that in many ways continues today, and only in a fundamental agonistic debasement of its conditions and imperatives, one may understand, as the authors claim, how “blackness operates as the modality of life’s constant escape and takes the form, the held and errant pattern, of flight” (Harney/Moten 2013: 51).

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on ownership and disposition of objects, by way of thinking about this history. While subjects are defined by their apparent possession and control of themselves and the objects around them, these notions of (self-)possession and (self-) control come to be understood as fiction. As Moten writes: “[…] while subjectivity is defined by the subject’s possession of itself and its objects, it is troubled by a dispossessive force objects exert such that the subject seems to be possessed – infused, deformed – by the object it possesses” (Moten 2000: 1).21 In this early book, Moten criticizes what he terms ‘the Enlightenment linguist project’, bound up with the task of elevating a realm of rational thought and reason, while in reality always being interwoven, supported and generated from “the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise” (Moten 2000: 7) that surrounds it. Within the context of my current discussion, I am most interested in Moten’s essay ‘The Case of Blackness’ (Moten 2008) because it is a direct assessment of Heidegger’s text cited above. In fact, Moten’s reading of Heidegger is part of an attempt to tackle what he terms “the pervasive discourse on black pathology”, a discourse that is internalized, as he shows, by Afro-American identity itself and that he traces back to Frantz Fanon.22 His central question is: “How do we think the possibility and the law of outlawed, impossible things?” (Moten 2008: 178). While Moten, some 21

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The foundational fiction of sovereignty, mastery, and control over oneself and others that grounds (and, in turn, un-grounds) the subject has been criticized from many perspectives from psychoanalysis, post-structuralist and deconstructive linguistics to gender theory. Moten, conversely, focusses on the question of handling or ownership of objects, of mere things, that only ever seem to be operated and ruled in rational and efficient manners by the white male subject (who comes to stand for what is considered human). Moten clearly states that the idea of stable ownership of objects is a fiction, for objects both resist and exert dispossessive effects over their users. In that sense, then “[…] the animative materiality—the aesthetic, political, sexual and racial force—of the ensemble of objects that we might call black performances, black history, blackness, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy of human being (which would necessarily bear and be irreducible to what is called, or what somebody might hope someday to call, subjectivity)” (Moten 2000: 8). Working around passages from ‘Black Mask White Skin’ and ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, Moten shows how a whole body of knowledge formations from critical philosophy, empiricist human biology, (American) sociology to psychopathology is mobilized in order to relegate the black subject, and blackness more generally, to the realm of that which is overly vital, but will thus necessarily decay (cf. Moten 2008: 177). Faced with this condition of expulsion from reason, rationality, health, purity, and verticality, blackness strives in two directions. On the one hand, it wants to correct itself, in order to gain entry to the illuminated human zone of normal behavior, rational reasoning, instrumental wit and technical (but also technological) efficiency. Yet, on the other side of that movement, or in its interruption or break, blackness is actualized and expresses itself, beyond the imperative to correct oneself, in the everyday, mundane, or in the: “lived experience of blackness”. Moten calls this condition of black life: “a deathly or death-driven nonbeing” (Moten 2008: 178). Importantly, Moten thus positions his discussion not on the field of phenomenology, but writes about and in favor of the possibility

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eight years earlier, had stressed the fact that black lives, as objectified existence, have constantly resisted the very conditions of their objectification, he now furthers the problem: Blackness, in a manner similar to things, is the name for whatever is ontologically relegated to a place of non-existence, a realm “that comprise(s) the being that is neither for itself not for the other”, a being that is neither essential, nor relational (Moten 2008: 179). Moten then posits that the fundamental (non-)qualities of blackness are incompleteness and inattainability. What has been claimed for things already (i.e., their inescapable entanglement with other things and their fundamental ‘concealedness’ which makes it impossible to fixate, cognate, or rationalize them as singled-out or instrumental objects), is here linked to the lived experience of blackness in an ongoing condition of “ontological derangement”. Picking up the charge of Heidegger’s critique of technological modernity as based on an ‘enframing’ of world (Heidegger 1977b), Moten states: “Perhaps that non-completeness signals an originarily criminal refusal of the interplay of framing and grasping, taking and keeping – a certain resistance at the ongoing advent of the age of the world picture. Perhaps it is the reticence of the grasped, the enframed, the taken, the kept – or, more precisely, the reluctance that disrupts grasping and framing, taking and keeping – as epistemological stance as well as accumulative activity” (Moten 2008: 179). While bodies may be reduced to either phenomenological cases or commodities that accumulate wealth, their thingly and social nature of entanglement lets them escape whatever attempt at framing them or logistically choreographing their movement patterns and trajectories. While in many ways reformulating what has been claimed for things above, (i.e., their fundamental, never-ending, and incontrollable withdrawal) Moten adds a distinct feature to my notion of thing here. In the history of the slave-trade and racist control of Afro-American lives, it is evident that a specific comportment towards objects that merely and violently claims to own and master them is inherently linked to a strategic, logistical, and technical operation of governing populations of bodies: In fact, one could argue that it reveals the same principles of choreographically handling them, by relegating them to the status of resource which can be mobilized and transported according to capitalist-logistical principles of constant flow, continuous adaptation, vectorialization, containerization, and valorization, as I will show in the fourth chapter of this thesis. Yet, bodies, both human and non-human, constantly flee transversally in a “fugitive movement in and out of the frame” (Moten 2008: 179). Or, to reformulate the argument the other way around: The zone of inattainability that things ontologically constitute is not merely inhabited by stuff, but by multiple bodies, some of which of a black ontology, the possibility of “ontological resistance in the eyes of white man” (Moten 2008: 178), which is, as we will see, inherently linked to the ontological fugitivity of things.

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are living bodies. Their agency, though, before and beyond being captured and governed, lies in their fugitivity (i.e., their inherent potential to escape). In fact, fugitivity comes to be another name for life: “This fugitive moment is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression. Part of what can be attained in this zone of inattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable […]” (Moten 2008: 179). It is the ‘fugitive law of movement’ that makes things, as much as black social life, ungovernable. Here again – furthered, iterated, sharpened – we see another fundamental paradox of things: While things are fugitive and will not allow themselves to be governed (i.e., they are subjected to logistical choreographies), it seems as if subjectivity grounded itself on the futile attempt of doing so. Thus, subjectivity and its according faculty of socio-material choreography is built upon an illusionary belief in its own capacity to choreographically master and govern (itself, things, bodies, and whole populations of bodies) the very fundament on which it rests (i.e., the social life of things, their fundamental capacity to mingle, mix, adhere and coalesce, their antecedent, original desire and need to be(come) part of the mesh of life itself, their being in and of the world, fully entangled). The difference and borderline between who or what is held in that zone of thingly non-completeness and inattainability, and those who claim to be in control of it, is porous. This fragile logic, then, of claiming to choreographically handle the realm of things which it cannot control, marks the realm of the human. It erects itself on the basis of what it neglects as other, as black (or) thing. Yet, in reality, that relation of alleged control marks a fundamental dependency. The structure of mutual, violent, and precarious implication, rather than opposed positionality, is what Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito names the ‘dispositif of the person’. In his book ‘Persons and Things’, he goes back to Roman law, especially to the ‘Istitutes’ of Roman jurist Gaius, to show how persons and things are intertwined in a relation of constitutive violence: In Roman law – Esposito insists on the continuous history of the division and mutual implication that has been articulated there – persons and things form a dyad by which the “bios is variously sectioned into two areas that are valued differently, one of which is subordinated to the other” (Esposito 2015: 6). According to law, you were a person only in so far as you were: “[…] someone who, among other things, owned human beings who were also thrust into the realm of things” (Esposito 2015: 6).23 Ac23

In the history of Roman law, the possession of things is linked to an ethical dimension, even if heavily perverted: “We need things. Without them, people would be deprived of everything

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cording to Esposito, it is a sort of Marxian primary extraction, related to the hand, that constitutes both person and thing, for, as he writes: “[…] the thing belongs first and foremost to whoever grabs it. To be ‘on hand’ means, prior to being readily available, to be in the grip of whoever possesses it” (Esposito 2015: 18). Indeed, Esposito might not imply a choreographic dimension to that very relation, but he clearly describes the interrelation of person and thing as one predicated on actual, practical handling. Indeed, things are not qualified by their content in this patrimonial legal structure (which is enacted in practical handling) that, as Esposito insists, forms the basic pattern of modern thought and action, but rather by the fact of “being someone’s and no one else’s, in a form that could not be contested” (Esposito 2015: 19/20). Ownership of things, furthermore, is inherently connected to the act of taking possession of a given territory: “[…] on which one plants a flag that was different from the one that fluttered over it before” (Esposito 2015: 21). As Esposito insists, territorialization is always a variant of ownership of things, whereby the subject claims its own subjectivity in a violent act of primary extraction of land (i.e., of ‘grasping’ or ‘seizure’ of resources). Throughout the course of history, the constitutive violence on which the notion of person was founded became internalized, so that personhood, even today, comes to be defined by a relationship based on domination, either of other human beings that were placed in the realm of things, of non-human objects, or – finally – over parts of one’s own person (i.e., its body, its animality, its irrational side, the subconscious, and so on). Therefore, Esposito claims: “[…] the human being is considered to be a composite of rationality and animality, classifiable as a person only to the extent that it is able to dominate the animal that dwells inside it” (Esposito 2015: 7). The division of persons and things, thus, is continually slicing up humanity between the full personhood of the ‘pater’ and decreased personhood of the slave, between body and soul, or between the Cartesian res cognitans and res extensa. Subjectivity, Esposito argues, is not a fixed category, but is constantly embedded in processes of personalization and depersonalization in which personalization necessarily rests on the violent domination and possession of things and human beings – a relation that is both enacted in practice and codified in ideological and legal frameworks. they need to live, and, ultimately, of life itself. For this reason, the things that we possess are defined as ‘goods,’ the totality of which constitutes what today we still call ‘patrimony’ – with reference to pater.” (Esposito 2015: 18) A good is then, something that is possessed (i.e., grasped and handled) by someone else. A thing, in turn, is made a person by the very act of grasping that other thing. Therefore, things can never simply be, but are there to be grasped, owned, held: “There’s good reason to reflect on the fact that the idea of ‘good’ coincides with the idea of a thing that we possess: a good is not some positive entity, or even a way of being, but something that we possess. This testifies to the absolute primacy of having over being that has characterized our culture for some time now: a thing is not first and foremost what it is but rather what someone has” (Esposito 2015: 18).

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While things in their excessive reality and para-ontological fugitivity are that which grounds being, they become functionalized in order for the subject to negate its own status as thing. At the same time, it seems as though treating other humans as things is possible only in as far as one treats one’s own body as a thing too, something which has to be mastered and manipulated. Thus, grasping things is a foundational gesture of Man (cf. Wynter 2003) who always tries but never manages to control the fugitivity of things. It is ownership over and dominion of things, initiated by the hand that grabs or grasps, which turns things into objects, goods, territory, labor force, or possession that in turn constitutes the realm of subjectivity. The process, described by Moten as well as by Esposito, is indeed performative and reversely intertwined. As Esposito clarifies: “[…] as if by way of a sort of proportional inversion, the personalization of some invariably corresponds to the depersonalization of others who are subjugated to them. The more human beings that an individual manages to place on the sloping plane of the thing, the more solidly he or she acquires the title of person” (Esposito 2015: 27). But choreographically handling and objectifying things is only possible in so far as one conceives of them as essentially empty containers which do not possess agency, historicity, locality, or relationality. This is where Moten most fundamentally criticizes Heidegger. In his text ‘A Poetics of the Undercommons’, he insists that the thing is important for Heidegger: “insofar as it can bear content, but the reason it can bear content is because it is empty, fillable, manipulable, subject to external motive force” (Moten 2016: 14). Yet, instead of distancing personhood from thingliness, Moten contra-intuitively argues for a convergence of the two. He does so, for it is the subject’s act of differentiating oneself from things (i.e., the claim of being able to handle them) that founds the things’ inability and relegation to the realm of objects. As Moten writes: “[…] the attempt to distance personhood from thingliness is the philosophical condition of possibility of the brutality we imprecisely characterize as the reduction of personhood to things” (Moten 2016: 15). In turn, he argues for an appropriation of the notion of thing, which – implicitly – means not distancing oneself therefrom by means of choreographic handling. Thus, Moten “provisionally” (Moten 2016: 16) proposes to refuse the imperative of ownership of things (and oneself) that founds Western subjectivity; he proposes – consequentially – to refuse subjectivity. “[…] the right to refuse what has been refused to you” is a fundamental thought-figure of his philosophy, grounded in the ongoing trauma of the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, as Jack Halberstam explains (Halberstam 2013: 8). As I understand Moten, this right to refuse what has been refused to you may be grounded in the Afro-American experience, which was (and, to some degree, still is) refused the right to be a person (i.e., to belong to the realm of the fully human) or to become a

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citizen – a right, which as Moten insists, may be refused, in so far it constitutes a call to order, to policy, and a request “to call others to order” (Halberstam 2013: 8). Yet, while it is grounded in a specific socio-historical experience, the right to refuse the logistical governance of things may, in fact, be practiced by all bodies. It comes with the task of renouncing the fantasy of being a subject, of owning oneself and others. To formulate it differently: The question of the extent to which one conceives of oneself as part of an entangled, more-than-human world, as thing among other things, is decided within one’s own practical handling of things. Choreographic principles of handling things iteratively determine one’s own position as either part of entangled worlds or a master-subject that attempts to handle things efficiently, thereby reducing them to the status of knowable or profitable object. Thus, I can now state: Both realms – socio-material choreography (which will be exemplified in relation to the business field of logistics in chapter four) and entangled, more-thanhuman choreographies of thingliness – are intertwined in so far as the realm of subjectivity exists only as an impossible attempt at fully governing things in actual practices of handling. All the while, things do not fully let themselves be handled. In their entangled fugitivity, they constantly flee and withdraw. The thing, Moten claims, is that which sustains itself in absence, eclipse, or excess of instrumental handling, beyond recognition as a case of law or epistemology. Instead, the lived experience of this para-ontological realm is given, as Fred Moten argues: “[…] by way of a kind of failure or inadequacy—or, more precisely, by way of a history of exclusion, serial expulsion, presence's ongoing taking of leave—so that the non-attainment of meaning or ontology, of source or origin is the only way to approach the thing in its informal […] material totality” (Moten 2008: 181/182). In fact, then, thing as blackness, blackness as thing, gestures at the end of classical phenomenology itself and “the corollary emergence of expertise” (Moten 2008: 180) as its defining register. While phenomenology considered objects as mere cases (i.e., as the sum of the case-study vistas one acquires), the thing exceeds any specific modality of accessing it.24 In that respect, things and blackness, things as blackness, exceed any given ontology. They are to be understood as a “constant demand for an

24

Not only is Husserl’s project called into question here, for it remains bound to a procedural, positivist notion of case studies, but so too is the fundamental difference between ontic or ontological entities on which Heidegger bases his early project of Sein und Zeit, and, thus, his notion of Dasein as an exclusively human category of being. It is the thing that questions it, for – in its status as open container – it remains an ontological impurity. The Heideggerian jug, Moten thus claims, is perhaps best “understood as filled with an always already mixed capacity for content that is not made” (Moten 2008: 184).

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ontology of disorder, of dehiscence, a para-ontology” (Moten 2008: 187) that is in excess of given categories or taxonomies. By traveling from Latour to Moten, it should be clear what my position is: I am not interested in any facile ‘symmetrical approach’ that fantastically positions things and humans on equal terms, and claims for a design-based approach to politics to emancipate technical objects (such as doors or subway-trains) from their ‘subaltern position’ (cf. Latour 2004a). In my view, thing is the name for the entangled realm of matter that human bodies are part of, upon which we are fully dependent, and which constitutes a meshwork too complex to disentangle. In fact, it is the name for what we ourselves are. Our lives, indeed, depend on manifold and complex compositions of materials that human hands nonetheless have the tendency to disentangle and to subject to their will-power. This, conversely, is what I have and will henceforth term objectification and it is a constitutive part of our Western lifestyle: In our capitalist-imperialist world, objects (both human and non-human) are seized in primary accumulation, extraction, or exploitation in order to generate value, thereby becoming relegated to the realm of the less-than-human. Moreover, it is often human life that is treated as this kind of object, in ways that differentially repeat themselves throughout history. Thus, the question of things is not primarily an epistemic or ontological one (it is not even a philosophical one); it remains, first and foremost, a political one. The notion of objectification may, thus, also become the name of a specific way of choreographically executing power that involves grabbing some entangled thing, seizing upon it, claiming a territory and ownership over land, its resources and its people, extracting it from a living environment, making it work for one self, and so on… From my argument thus far, it seems reasonable that a different approach to things needs to be as much practice-based as it would need to ground itself in a different aisthesis. This double task’s name (i.e., to both practically handle and to aesthetically relate to things differently) is ‘composition’, I propose, in so far as the notion entails both the spatio-temporal assemblage of different materialities, as well as the aesthetic-affective potential of that composite body. As a specific form of composition, a possibly more-than-human choreography needs to encounter things as both aesthetic as well as ethical problems if it wants to take the historical charge of protocols of “inter-subjection” (Moten 2008: 186) that usually enframe the encounter of humans and things into account. At the same time, with Heidegger and Moten, I claim: Neither science, nor the political, in so far as it is concerned with sovereign subject positions only, are capable of meeting that challenge alone. Living and moving alongside, with, or as thing is a form of art, grounded first of all in practice and perception, or even in practices of perception. My question, therefore, remains: How can choreography contribute to this challenge? This is where the challenge lies that Moten’s formulations of things as blackness poses to us: In fact, he circumscribes a choreopolitical position, that of becoming thing oneself, without giving up agency

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fully. To make oneself a thing is to question the ideology of self-presence, self-efficacy, and independence that subject philosophy and its according theoretical armada of notions, such as citizenship, freedom and so on relies upon. What does that mean in practice? In relation to the theoretical questions proposed here, I will now present my own dance-performance Barricade and Dances. While I do not claim that a becoming-thing is successfully practiced within the performance, I do want to unfold the choreographic principles which the performance employs in order to practice morethan-human choreography. These principles are: understanding things as choreopolitical operators that interrupt and create ‘turbulent flow’, a modality of composition based on hesitation and instability, and the attempt to become corporally attuned to the materials that we use within the performance.

Image 5: Barricades and Dances (2015).

Photography: © Mathias Holländer

Barricades and Dances (Moritz Frischkorn) A woman is rolling a car tire onto the stage. She carefully observes the meandering movement of the tire as it is rolling, she is highly concentrated. When she makes the tire roll, it is as if she is softly petting it. Somewhere on center stage, a second

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performer is balancing a wooden pallet on one of its four corners, as though he is testing its physical properties, trying to find the one impossible point at which it would stand on its tip all by itself. When she arrives next to him, the women takes the car tire and, very carefully and slowly, lifts it on top of the wooden pallet, as if it was the pallet’s crown. The moment when tire and pallet meet seems to take several seconds. Both performers almost seem to not notice one another, because they are fully consumed in the handling of their respective partner objects which now touch each-other. Then, the first performer leaves, peacefully. A little later, he will carry another wooden pallet onto the stage. The composite construction is now in the hands of the female performer who is holding it via the tire-crown. Yet, the balancing continues; even if there is a composite body now, it still does not stand on its own. She is concentrating, slowly turning the thing. In fact, it seems as if she has become part of the moving build-up. Then, a third performer enters, carrying a cobblestone in his hands. While walking, he tests its weight. When arriving at the small barricadelike composition, the female performer makes the whole construction lean towards him. He, in turn, tries to receive the weight of it by pressing the cobblestone against the tire on top of the wooden pallet that still only stands on one of its four corners. He has to work hard for the construction not to fall, but eventually it does. There is the noise of the pallet hitting the floor. The audience exhales. The tire bumps onto the floor, turns a little pirouette, rolls to the left, then falls as well. After a while, the construction process continues… Barricades and Dances is a dance performance that was produced in 2015 (i.e., within my first year at the graduate school ‘Performing Citizenship’).25 The basic premise of the performance is to allow for sensual approaches to everyday objects and to question the potential of dance as a means to attune to things. The performance is about 50 minutes in length and was performed by Verena Brakonier, Jonas Woltemate, and myself. The performance’s main material is a score (described briefly above), in which the three performers build fragile, unstable structures from four different material: cobblestones, wooden pallets, car tires, and an umbrella. A number of other performance materials are grouped around that score: movement sequences, which seem to reflect and translate the objects themselves, and text about them.

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The performance Barricades and Dances has been created together with dancers Verena Brakonier and Jonas Woltemate, dramaturge Heike Bröckerhoff, stage designer Lars Unger, costume designer Luisa Wandschneider, and outside eye Harriet von Froreich. The performance was produced in collaboration with ‘K3 – Center for Choreography I Tanzplan Hamburg’ in Hamburg, and premiered on June 19, 2015. It was presented again on June 20, 2015, and, as part of artistic presentations of the graduate school ‘Performing Citizenship’, on April 21, 2016. On that occasion, it was framed by a lecture and a work-shop.

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In the following, I will reflect on the socio-material consistency of the performance, trying to unfold its own logisticality. After shortly describing the group of people and the place where it was made, I mainly report on the process of choosing the material objects with which we interact on stage and of actually acquiring them. Afterwards, I unfold the choreographic logics that the performance probes and practices: the construction of barricades as instigator of turbulent flow, the principles of instability and hesitation which guides our process of composition, and, finally, our attempts at physically attuning to the objects present on stage.

CONSISTENCY OF THE ASSEMBLAGE (BARRICADES AND DANCES): Group of human participants Barricades and Dances was produced and performed within the usual setting of a freelance dance production. The budget was relatively small, as it was my first professional dance production. This notwithstanding, the performance and production did not distinguish itself much from other free-lance dance production in terms of its production context or work conditions. The project was produced with a cast of three dancers, one of whom had a specific relation to the objects we handled within the performance: Verena Brakonier grew up in a tire shop. She thus carries both a practical knowledge and affective ties to car tires, as she also recalls within the performance.

Place of production/performance Barricades and Dances was rehearsed and performed at ‘K3 – Center for Choreography, Tanzplan Hamburg’ which is part of the larger facility of Kampnagel. At first glance, there is no specific relation between the performance and its surroundings. Yet, it might be worthwhile to note that Kampnagel has a history related to logistics; it used to be a factory for the production of cranes for the Hamburg port. The steel factory Kamp&Nagel produced technical object for harbor handling that can still be found all over the world today, as the venue’s website claims.26 I thus merely indicate that one might draw a thin and speculative link between the practices of handling objects that we practice on stage and the history of Kampnagel itself. A more explicit consideration within our process was the idea to keep all doors (even security doors) open during the actual performance. Our desire was, therein, to make the actual space in which the performance took place as present as possible. This has more to do with capturing the ‘landscape’-like mode of performance that we developed, which I will unfold in greater detail below.

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Cf. https://www.kampnagel.de/de/service/kontakt/historie/ (last accessed on Jan 7, 2021).

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Use of matter The rehearsal process for Barricades and Dances was prefigured by a longer research process, conducted in collaboration with dramaturge Heike Bröckerhoff. In order to address the political dimension of things, as relational meshes and conjunctions, we decided to focus our research on objects that are or have been used within the context of social protests. Inspired by an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London entitled ‘Disobedient Objects’,27 which dealt with the use of objects within social protests, we began to look for those objects, specifically, which have changed or change function within social protest.28 At that time, our main hypothesis was: It is not only human relations and affairs that are unsettled within social protest, but also objects are often used in unforeseen manners, thereby allowing for alternative more-than-human choreographies to appear. In as much as the context of street protests necessitates quick responses and improvisation, conventional objects are freed from their usual functionality and referentiality (i.e., present new and unforeseen affordances) which in turn lead to new modalities of interaction between humans and non-humans. This consideration became the main motor for our choreographic engagement with the entangled thing of the barricade. We chose four different objects from our research for the rehearsal process and performance (i.e., wooden pallets, cobblestones, car tires, and umbrellas) which were to become our companion movement partners on stage. In terms of its history and meaning within social protest, the umbrella was especially important for us, as it most clearly indicates the process of the re-functioning of objects within social protest that we were interested in: Within protests in Hong Kong in 2014, in which students and citizens protested against the Chinese state for undermining democratic procedures in Hong Kong, the umbrella played a crucial role as unforeseen tool for passive resistance.29 The protests erupted on September 26, 2014, when the so-called ‘Standing-Committee of the National People’s Congress’, a central Chinese institution directed by the Chinese Communist Party, decided to reform Hong Kong’s electoral system. This was seen as a restrictive act of intruding into Hong Kong’s political system with the aim of more clearly directing the course of the city by choosing candidates for the position of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive. Students 27 28

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Cf. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/disobedient-objects/ (last accessed on Jan 7, 2020). For a more detailed introduction to the research, as well as a presentation of all objects and contexts of social protests that we researched, cf. ‘Barricades and dances: one possible journey through The Book of All Things’ (http://performingcitizenship.de/data/wp-content/ uploads/2015/02/Barricades-and-Dances_One-possible-journey-through-the-Book-of-All-T hings.pdf, last accessed on Apr 24, 2023). Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Hong_Kong_protests (last accessed on Jan 7, 2020).

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and other members of the public started to demonstrate in front of government buildings and blocking streets, driven by the ‘Occupy Central with Love and Peace’ movement. As a reaction, police forces started to excessively use tear-gas against protesters. Conventional umbrellas, that protesters carried as a protection against the sun (i.e., against ‘natural’ forces) were re-used as makeshift passive weapon against tear-gas and police violence. The change in the umbrella’s function was effectuated by merely turning the object ninety degrees to the front. Thus, it took on the function of a fragile shield. In turn, the umbrella became an iconic object of the protests and for the protesters. Not only its function, but also its iconography was completely altered; no longer was it perceived as a bourgeois accessory, but it became a symbol of civic unrest. In terms of the socio-material consistency of Barricades and Dances, the relations I was able to forge with two specific institutions are notable (i.e., to ‘Reifen-ServiceKontor Pohle GmbH & Co. KG’, a tire repair shop on the island of Veddel, south of the inner-city of Hamburg, and to ‘PALLETTEN-SERVICE Hamburg AG’, a small logistics company specialized in renting and trading wooden pallets). As we were working with car tires and wooden pallets on stage, my aim was to borrow these objects rather than buy them, so that they could return to their respective spheres of circulation after having performed with us. Eventually, both institutions supported the performance for free, as a kind of sponsoring. In the case of the tire repair shop, that was not much of an investment, for we would simply scour their storage for old, discarded tires. Nonetheless, all tires that were used within rehearsals and on stage were later transported back to the tire shop on Veddel island. Wooden pallets, conversely, are a logistical carrier medium that are usually rented by logistics companies. rather than being bought and owned. In that case, ‘PALLETTEN-SERVICE Hamburg AG’, as the owner of the wooden pallets, rented them to us for the time of rehearsals and performances for free. We did not use new pallets within the production, but fifteen used ones, each of them worth about 11 Euros, which also had to be returned after being used on stage. Cobblestones were bought form a local hardware store. Rather than being returned to their respective owners, they were stored in my cellar after the performances in June 2015. When it was clear that we would no longer perform the piece, they were laid out at a local park. The one item that we actually destroyed repeatedly was a cheap plastic umbrella that did not usually withstand the heavy physical pressure of the pallets or tires. While it is clear that we chose objects for the performance because of their iconic quality and change of functionality within contexts of social protest, the logistics of acquiring them for the production created new entanglements and made me discover the city of Hamburg in unforeseen ways. To some degree, it opened a reflection on logistics and Hamburg as a port city long before I actually started to work in the port as part of the African Terminal (my third case-study, which will be described in detail in chapter 4). Also, both performance practices are connected on a very con-

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crete level: When looking for used goods that could be transported to Gambia for the African Terminal, I reconnected with my contacts at ‘Reifen-Service-Kontor Pohle GmbH & Co. KG’, and asked them for support. It may be, thus, that some of the tires that were part of Barricades and Dances in 2015 or 2016 travelled onwards to Gambia the following year (cf. chapter 4).

Image 6: Barricades and Dances (2015).

Photography: © Mathias Holländer

Within our rehearsal process, then, we spent as much time as possible with the different objects that we wanted to perform with and developed a series of exercises of how to attune to them physically and in language. A score arose while experimenting and playing with the objects and which basically consisted of building fragile structures with them that were, ideally, not allowed to stand and, therefore, to acquire stability on their own; they had to be kept in imbalance. We did not allow ourselves to speak while working on these structures and had to add one object at a time. In as much as the structure had to stay imbalanced, it needed a human performer to be in interaction with it or else it would fall. Therefore, the composite structure would allow for a kind of material process of negotiation: As the materiality of the objects we used was quite different for each of them, we would physically learn about their properties in the process. As the composite structures became bigger, heavier and more complex, they also became increasingly dangerous

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and affective to us as human movement partners. They would, thus, physically affect our mood and behavior. Finally, this very score – of building fragile structures – led to strong emotions and affects within the group of human performers, too. It allowed us to physically negotiate and attune our intentions, desires, and motivations via and alongside the composite material construction that we were building. What came up, within the process, was a specific quality of concentration, a concentration on the physicality and materiality of the objects themselves, but also on the actual physical negotiation with the objects and the other human performers. In the following two chapters, I will thus try to unfold some of the aspects and principles that we uncovered within the production and rehearsal process. I will start by reflecting on the barricade more broadly and will characterize it as a choreopolitical operator that interrupts and redirects flow within the urban fabric.

2.4 Turbulent flow: barricades as choreopolitical operators Within the performance Barricades and Dances, a score of constructing fragile structures that are faintly reminiscent of barricades opens up a space for renegotiating our relation to specific everyday objects (i.e., wooden pallets, tires, cobblestones, and umbrellas). While me and my dancer colleagues may sometimes use umbrellas, the other objects are not ones that we usually handle in our daily lives. In a way, the score of constructing unstable structures was a pretext that makes space for us to thoroughly test and to experience the physical properties of these material objects. Evidently, we do not use them according to how they were designed. We also did not use them as one would do within social protest. The structures that we built during the performance (and that we built in the rehearsal process) would not efficiently protect us against police force, water, or tear gas. Rather, they establish an open-ended space of encounter between humans and non-humans. It is within this space that we tell stories about our relations to the objects, that we practice physical attunement to their materialities, and that we negotiate relations among ourselves. Yet, to what extent can these activities and the structures that evolve, relate to the history of barricades beyond mere visual resemblance? Do they not pre-suppose a certain understanding of this structure of insurgent civic action as ‘choreopolitical’ operator? In order to answer these questions, I will briefly revisit the history of the barricade in what follows. The barricade was most probably invented in southern France in the 16th century. Like most prominent collaborations between humans and materials, its origin and the detailed history of its invention are controversial. Some say it initially appeared during the first ‘Day of the Barricade’ in Paris on May 12, 1588, when the supporters of the Duke of Guise and the Catholic Holy League successfully challenged the authority of the French King Henry III. Other sources – namely the nearly forgot-

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ten Blaise de Monluc – claim that the barricade technique was already used in 1569, in religion-based conflicts in southwestern France. Others still believe that similar types of mobile blockade had already been deployed in antiquity. (cf. Traugott 2014: 27) In any case, its name derives from the Old French term ‘barrique’ that refers to hogsheads or barrels. In the 16th century, insurgent citizens used barrique barrels (filled with sand or paving stones) that were ready at hand and found everywhere in early-modern cities to swiftly improvise an effective form of protective barrier against governmental forces (cf. Traugott 2014). Most often, in the early days of the barricade, the barrels were filled with earth, manure, and paving stones in order to function as a heavy obstacle and effective protection shield: “The granite or sandstone blocks were even more ubiquitous that the barrels, for urban street fighters of that day could be sure to find them right beneath their feet. Once aggregated and contained within the upright barrel, a heap of individual paving stones became an all but unmovable mass” (Traugott 2014: 27). Thus, it is objects of daily use that usually functioned as carrier media for everyday logistics (i.e., the transportation of goods in and out of the city) that were repurposed within these early barricades.30 The question then is: In what sense can barricades be considered more than merely an object? To answer this question, I will quickly return to the 19th century when constructing barricades became a classic practice of insurgent action, most prominently in Paris. At that moment in time, barricades most clearly reveal their ‘choreopolitical’ potential as thingly agents who actively work against the stratified circulation of bodies and things within the city. This is what Walter Benjamin has argued: In his text ‘Haussmann, or the Barricades’, both Haussmann (as the personification of state power) and the barricades are conceived of as operators that intervene into urban space, albeit from opposed positions. Haussmann wanted to restructure the city in order to be able to efficiently control circulation (i.e., to ensure ‘choreopoliced’ movement and logistical circulation). Barricades, conversely, have been used to oppose a stratified, logistical structuring of urban space. Historically, the improvised action of building barricades against state forces comes before the statist intervention of efficiently regulating movement. Thus, it is only as an answer to the barricade that Haussmann’s urban policies make sense, as Walter Benjamin 30

As I have noted above, the Berlin-based activist collective ‘Tools for Action’ explicitly relates their post-Warholian Inflatable Cobblestone to the history of the barricade. In their leaflet, Fabriqué à Paris they write: “The first barricades were hollow barrels rolled out into the 16th century streets, filled with stones and secured with metal chains. In November 2015, Tools for Action, a Berlin-based arts collective, developed a similar construction principle. Modular lightweight sculptures made of insulation foil are filled with air and attached together with Velcro. A set of cube-shaped units (like cobblestones) can be quickly inflated at different locations, forming a line that hinders sight and movement when brought together en masse. They can be more than walls though – when people throw the individual cobblestones into the air, they turn the street into a spontaneous playground.” (Tools for Action 2017)

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notes in the above-mentioned text: “The real aim of Haussmann’s works was the securing of the city against civil war. He wished to make the erection of barricades in Paris impossible for all time” (Benjamin 1969: 170). In an interview entitled ‘Space, Knowledge, and Power’ from 1982, Michel Foucault sheds light on the historic situation in which these antagonistic operations reshape the material outlines and choreographic structure of urban public space: “[…] in the eighteenth century one sees the development of reflection upon architecture as a function of the aims and techniques of government of societies. One begins to see a political literature that addresses what the order of society should be, what a city should look like, given the requirements of the maintenance of order, given that one should avoid epidemics, avoid revolts […]” (Foucault 1984: 239). In as much as the city became a model for the state as such, its architectural and socio-material governance became the object of specialized epistemic practices linked to the installation of the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and a new corps of: “[…] engineers and builders of bridges, roads, viaducts, railways, as well as polytechnicians” (Foucault 1984: 244). For Foucault, the efficient steering of flows of bodies and things within the city is linked to the installation of the police as “program of governmental rationality” and “system of regulation on the general conduct of individuals” (Foucault 1984: 241). The notion of conduct has a double meaning, signifying both behavior or good manners, and the act of directing. As outlined above, it may be read choreographically, as André Lepecki does. One can, thus, conceive of both barricades and boulevards, Haussmann’s main architectural-logistic tool, as “conflicting regimes of materials, spaces and performances” (Douglas 2007: 33), as spatial designer and architectural theorist Carl Douglas does in an article entitled ‘Barricades and Boulevards. Material transformations of Paris, 1795–1871’. Douglas claims that an agonistic ‘debate’ between barricades and boulevards, taking place in Paris between 1795 and 1871, fundamentally transformed the city. Whereas boulevards were tools to maintain constant and efficient flow, barricades acted as interventions and created turbulent and vortical flow. The struggles over these choreopolitical transformations of urban space can then be described as both a disruption and subsequent policing of what Rancière has termed the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (cf. Rancière 2004: 12, after Douglas 2007: 34). Drawing on Rancière and Lefebvre (Lefebvre 1991 in Douglas 2007: 33), Douglas charts “ways in which the material configurations of barricades and boulevards produce certain kinds of perception; and how perception renders subjectivity” (Douglas 2007: 35). In his account, the barricade is a performative and choreographed intervention that reshapes the flow of people and things within the urban fabric. By doing so, it concurrently reconfigures daily perceptions of the city, movement behavior, and the felt sense of urban space. As a performative intervention, barricading is built on repe-

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tition. Therefore, Douglas insists that “each new instance of barricading was also a re-enactment of previous barricades” (Douglas 2007: 36).

CHOREOGRAPHIC LOGIC (BARRICADES AND DANCES): Turbulent flow Within the performance Barricade and Dances, the principle of ‘turbulent flow’ is captured within a specific dance sequence that starts at around minute twenty. Within this short (about two and a half minutes long) sequence of scored dance improvisation, we – as human dancers – take up the residue and tension of the whole construction process that had taken place previously. All three bodies move close to each-other, so that the image of vortical flow arises. This moment does not last long, though; after the little dance sequence, the structures on space are left on their own, becoming a monument almost to the ‘choreopolitical’ operator that barricades may at times be. It is as though the audience was invited to imagine the movement, action, and screams that might arise around them within the context of social protest. The performance then returns to a quieter modality, a mode of performing we have often compared to a landscape. Indeed, the barricade may best be conceived of as a performative act of disorienting and redirecting movement patterns within the city. Its modality of countering socio-material governance as choreography rest, I claim, on the distributed agency of both humans and non-humans. Importantly, building a barricade has always been closely linked to the act of displacing and repurposing, if not weaponized by mundane everyday objects.31 This may become more vividly clear in the following account about the construction of a barricade in a text by historian Mark Traugott: “Insurgents would scour nearby construction sites in search of beams or planks that could add solidity to the emerging structure. They would appropriate the gates and fences of public gardens, the metal grates from the base of trees that lined the streets, the trees themselves, lamp posts and even the wroughtiron banisters of interior stairways, for such components collectively formed a basis around which looser materials could be knitted together. Sympathetic neighbours (or those that could be easily intimidated) might donate household furnishings, often thrown from upper-storey windows in the streets below. All such contributions were welcome: chairs and tables, bedsteads and dressers, 31

Douglas writes, referring to Victor Hugo, that: “Barricades disrupt the proper relations of the city. Things are displaced and repurposed, weaponised and, as Hugo puts it, hurled at the head of society. Engravings of the fighting in the region of Saint-Antoine show the air filled with cabinets, tables, chairs and paving stones. On the second and third floors of buildings overlooking the barricade, armed insurgents took up position and fired or threw material down onto the heads of advancing troops” (Douglas 2007: 38).

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doors and mouldings, even the occasional armoire or sink. They sometimes found a place alongside the more exotic items mentioned in contemporary sources: a piano, a blacksmith’s anvil, public urinals, or in one case, the body of a dead horse” (Mark Traugott 2014: 28/29). One may then argue, that as much as the barricade is an obstacle that intervenes into the smooth, policed circulations of bodies in the urban fabric, as much as it is a stage that allows for the expression of differing political opinions, it is – maybe most of all – also a gigantic rubbish heap that undoes the subjection of things into their instrumentalized mundane form of objects. In fact, it presents itself as a space for inventing different modalities of handling things and of practicing other choreographic principles of relating to material. As part of a barricade, the upper-story ‘household furnishing’, which one may well imagine was part of a bourgeois interior, is freed from both the ‘functional totality’ to which it used to belong, but also from the ideological force-field of which it was an expression and materialization. In Latour’s terms: Everyday objects are here recomposed as a political issue, marking their status as ‘matters of concern’. Moreover, though: As long as objects are part of the barricade, they are beyond their usual instrumental and functional ties. Things are, in Moten’s terms, on the fly, ready to escape in the ever-social, ever-material composition of the barricade.

Image 7: Barricades and Dances (2015).

Photography: (c) Mathias Holländer

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Barricades, thus, performatively act as ‘choreopolitical operators’ on two levels: Firstly, they operate against a certain ‘choreopoliced’ circulation of bodies and affects within the city. Secondly, while they disrupt established protocols of subjecting and handling material, they also open up a space of possible alternative encounters with material. As Carl Douglas puts it: “Under the regime of the barricades, the city became visible as a continuous field of material: a landscape” (Douglas 2007: 38). This mode of landscape is agonistically opposed to the striated space of imperial coordinates that is imposed upon the city as a circulatory matrix, held in place by a set of monuments placed at the vanishing-points of its axes. Instead, barricades produce something else: opacity and mutual implication, if not entanglement. They render visible, as Douglas argues, “[…] a collective subject, as a communal construction” (Douglas 2007: 39) and they displace and re-purpose objects, cracking open the always ideological ‘functional totalities’ of which they were a part; in this, things become set free into their para-ontological, immanently social state of debris. A potentially turbulent, alternative space of more-than-human choreography is opened around the barricade in which specific forms of objectification of matter are suspended, at least momentarily. It is to this potential that Barricade and Dances wants to pay tribute to. In a way, the performance proposes taking what has been described here further. In as much as building barricades makes space, albeit momentarily, for undoing objectified relations to material, for re-encountering matter as things rather than objects, the performance tries to elongate and tease out this potential. It can do so only, I will claim in the following, because the process of construction is never ending.

2.5 Composing things as barricade: hesitation A central quality of the score that guides our (human) relation to material within the performance is the obligation to construct structures that need to remain unstable. Bit by bit, as performers, we add material to the unstable, shaky structure that evolves on stage, yet never in such a fashion as to stabilize what has been constructed to that point. Whatever is being composed on stage, therefore, is at risk of breaking down at any moment. Moments of collapse (of the fragile structures that are reminiscent of barricades) happen throughout the open score performed on stage. They are moments of great affect, both for the performers and for the audience, and signal the necessary unfinishedness of the process of composition that the performance presents. It is the risk of provoking collapse that necessitates a second choreographic principle guiding our relation to material: ‘hesitation’. In fact, any act of handling material on stage will always be performed in a hesitant manner, as if carefully testing positions, materiality, and the arrangement of humans and non-

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humans in a probing manner. Thus, the performance takes on an almost meditative quality, at times. Both the notions of composition and of hesitation connect the performative practice of Barricades and Dances to Bruno Latour’s work on ecology from the middle period of his oeuvre.32 In what follows, I want to link my own practice of constructing fragile barricades to his proposal of a ‘compositionist manifesto’. While Latour’s philosophy of political things may be deemed a scientific and elitist project of world-making as design, I here propose a friendly confrontation with his notion of ‘compositionism’. Some aspects of his procedural approach – namely the slow pace of his endeavor, its hesitation, and open-endedness – shall be retained within my argument, while the more scientistic, design-, and expertise-based aspects of his theory are jettisoned. My task will be to translate his methodology to the field of choreographic handling and to show how it may have been applied within Barricades and Dances. In so doing, I will formulate some ideas about what Jane Bennett names a “countercultural kind of perceiving” (Bennett 2010: xiv), one that attends to what she terms ‘thing-power’, a force intrinsic to material as a “some-thing that is not an object of knowledge, that is detached and radically free from representation” and that “refuses to dissolve completely into the milieu of human knowledge” (Bennett 2010: 3).33 32

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Reading Latour’s texts from this period, one encounters the foundational arguments for an affirmative political ecology defined, in Isabelle Stenger’s words, as “the politicization of ‘positive’ knowledge-related issues or practices concerning ‘things’” (Stengers 2005: 994). Indeed, the politics of Latour’s arguments always rests on a firm belief in the procedural power of sciences (in plural). In his texts from that period, there is a slightly pedagogical, often idealistically charged understanding that we all are part of one interconnected world (cosmos or Gaia, later on) that needs to be (re-)constructed collectively, slowly, and cautiously in order to become the livable place it is not yet, or rather will not always be (but in which Western intellectuals such as Latour, in fact, today still live perfectly safely while so many other bodies on this planet live in brutal conditions of dispossession). One might concede that his proposal, as it is issued in the big and heavy catalogue of ‘Making Things Public’ as well as in ‘The Politics of Nature’, is characterized by a mild imperialist naiveté that stems from a bourgeois Catholic background, an intellectual upbringing in French elitist educational system, and a pragmatist enthusiasm that may not always reflect its own privileges. Indeed, Latour’s conception of human-non-human collectives in ‘The Politics of Nature’ has been widely criticized as unspecific and generalist (cf. Wieser 2012). Gesa Lindemann, for example, criticizes Latour for developing an expertocracy that is not compatible with concepts of human rights (Lindemann 2008). In a more affirmative tone, Henning Schmidgen detects a critical dimension in Latour’s insistence on processuality and the need to slow down political negotiation. He stresses the necessity of diplomacy and an inquiry into new forms of collaboration with unknown parties (cf. Schmidgen 2011: 168). There are several contemporary theoretical positions that attend to things as political and aesthetic problems first and foremost and that demand other modes of encountering them. I will limit myself here to a short discussion of only those approaches that seem most closely

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Latour claims that in order for political science to be an art-form, similar to astrology, it must deal with uniquely specified and surprising zones of affect around things (cf. Latour 2005b: 4). For Latour, both the task of assembling the concerned parties around ‘matters of concern’, and the task of articulating their importance and relevance, are somewhat artistic operations. In fact, he explicitly names the artistic operation that he envisions to fulfill the task outlined above: It is the act of composing a collective around political action per se.34 The composition of a common world as entangled environment “to be built from utterly heterogeneous parts that will never make a whole but at best, a fragile, reversible, and diverse composite material” (Latour 2010: 474) is envisioned as a ‘debate’. In so far as Latour understands the act of collective composition as predicated upon forms of articulation, he insists that participation be based on being “capable of speaking” (Latour 2004a: 62), thereby allowing people and things to raise their voice to be heard. As he insists, things, just as humans, are always confronted with a number of constitutive speech impedimenta.35 Whenever articulated in debate, any thing has to rely on other entities

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linked to an aesthetic-creative practice leaving out other important authors and ideas whose focus is more on a technical, technological, or scientific access to things (cf. Hodder 2012; Rheinberger 1997). As he writes in ‘The Politics of Nature’, politics itself can be “conceived as the progressive composition of the common world” (Latour 2004a: 18). Composition entails two parallel actions; that of representing the thing in question (for which he uses the name ‘matter of concern’) and that of assembling the relevant parties (those who are concerned). Latour’s notion of composition is a composed one already and binds two components together: A constructivist understanding of composition as a productive activity of world-building in the sense of spatially arranging, articulating, and assembling human and non-human participants, and a rhetoric-semiotic activity of formulating a shifting, ever-provisional understanding of the ‘matter of concerns’ to that particular collective. Latour insists on the difficulty of the second part (i.e., of representing things as ‘matters of concern’) which means trying not to reduce them to knowable objects or bare cases. The operation that grounds composition is characterized as something similar to a speech act. In so far as speaking about things cannot rely on scientific mastery, objective knowledge, or expert competence, it necessarily includes persuasion and rhetoric and is connect to eloquence and even sophistry: “Why should we suddenly imagine an eloquence devoid of means, tools, tropes, tricks and knacks that it would bring the facts into the arenas through some uniquely magical transparent idiom?” (cf. Latour 2005b: 8–12). In order to become articulate, they rely on different forms of mediation – just as human expression is necessarily placed within the medium of language that can never be owned by an individual subject. Speech impedimenta is Latour’s notion to designate: “not the speech itself but the difficulties one has in speaking and the devices one needs for the articulation of the common world […] – (in order) to avoid taking logocentristic words […] as facile expressions of meanings that would not need any particular mediation to manifest themselves” (Latour 2004a: 249/250). Latour here takes up an inherently post-modern idea, expressed most explicitly in the work of Derrida perhaps (cf. Derrida 1988), who has always insisted on the inherent mediatedness of linguistic expression throughout his work. Extending that argument,

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to mediate it – be it in expression or in action: “I do not claim that things speak ‘on their own’, since no being, not even humans, speak on their own, but always through something or someone else” (Latour 2004a: 68). This act of mediation is embodied in the figure of the ‘spokesperson’ and the corresponding conceptual structure of delegation. The concept of delegation indicates that any expression always has to take “the whole gamut of intermediaries between someone who speaks and someone else who speaks for it” (Latour 2004a: 64) into account. Thus, Latour proclaims an ethics and practice of advocacy for things. Advocacy has to happen in fidelity and loyalty to them, while still being in function of assembling (i.e., composing a common world). This is, logically, an impossible task because it wants to be loyal to something that necessarily withdraws from objective knowledge and that cannot be encountered, as we have learnt, without transposing or manipulating it.36 Indeed, while we might be able to convince other human beings of the necessity of this and that construction, how we might convince things remains an open question. Latour clearly imagines scientists acting as delegates for things within the ‘Politics of Nature’. His interest is in fostering the role of sciences within democracy. Yet,

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without quite crediting its origins, any relation to things is generalized as: “translation, betrayal, falsification, invention, synthesis, or transposition” (Latour 2004a: 68). Ontologically, this model of encounter as transposition is explicated most clearly by Levi R. Bryant, who describes entities that always necessarily translate and transform each other in their meetings (cf. Bryant 2011). This ontological stance is accounted for in Latour’s model of mediators. On the other hand, Latour is able to re-assess the different forces at play. He relies on a vectorial ontology that claims the ontological primacy of relation and forces, in which forces cannot be communicated without translation or mediation: “To distribute poles from the outset between controllable and obedient objects on the one hand and the free and rebellious human on the other is to preclude searching for the condition under which […] one can, one must, make these entities exchange among themselves their formidable capacity to appear on the scene as full-fledged actors, that is, as those who forbid any indisputable transfer (of force or reason), as mediators with whom it is necessary to reckon, as active agents whose potential is still unknown” (Latour 2004a: 81/82). Latour’s solution to the problem, really, is to consider just about any thing a ‘proposition’ only, a notion he takes from Whitehead, for it indicates provisionality and uncertainty: “I am going to say that a river, a troop of elephants, a climate, El Niño, a mayor, a town, a park, have to be taken as propositions to the collective” (Latour 2004a: 83). Propositions function as a way of assuming a position that can still be revised. They really are associations of humans and things, but in a state that has not been fully institutionalized yet. In ‘The Politics of Nature’, Latour devises a complex systematics of how to evaluate the relevance of propositions to the collective, which is, in itself, a different procedure of hierarchizing and institutionalizing types of associations between and practices of encountering things while remaining attentive to their inherent perplexity and their power to escape (cf. Latour 2004a: 91–121). All the same, I will not elaborate on his model of ‘separation of powers’ in ‘The Politics of Nature’ here because it seems a highly abstract involvement with scientific practice.

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might one not also think of choreography as a potential tool to mediate and articulate things? After all, most of what we do within Barricades and Dances is to literally articulate things with one another – and by things, I mean both persons and materials. The process of composition that we envision and probe remains unfinished, yet it involves the continuous attempt at physically negotiating properties and capacities and attuning to the materiality of the other. In more general terms, I have spoken of modes of handling things as any form of practical encounter with them. Scientific practice is but one of the modalities in which one can handle things. In Barricades and Dances, conversely, we developed choreographic modes of encountering specific objects. Within our interaction with them, these things will necessarily be somewhat mediated (i.e., both altered in terms of their form and shape): They sometimes objects fall and break, or bend (and we humans build muscles as we carry heavy wooden pallets). Nonetheless, the performance manages to transport some of their physical properties and some of their relational ties beyond the stage and to the audience. Latour’s most elaborate definition of the notion of composition is presented in his ‘Compositionist Manifesto’. The text is relevant because it lists possible definitions of what one might call a proto-choreographic advocacy for things. Latour is explicit, first of all, about the fact that composition has: “[…] clear roots in art, painting, music, theater, dance, and is associated with choreography and scenography” (Latour 2010: 474).37 Secondly, Latour repeats an old rhetorical conceit: In composition, things have to be put together (from Latin componere) while retaining their heterogeneity (Latour 2010: 474). While composition is a form of arranging things, the totality that is formed remains provisional and fluid; it is an association in constant movement and transformation. Thirdly, the notion of composition carries etymological links to the French and English term composure, which may indicate that it is always linked to a specific style, an aesthetic position or school, or at least to a heritage and history of doing composition to which it necessarily relates. This seems to posit composition as social and historic operation. Political and ethical modalities of arranging things express themselves as a specific style. The operation of compositing things, according to Latour, is “not too far” from the action of compromising and the notion of compromise, thereby indicating that there are no universal laws of composition. Rather, some “diplomatic or prudential” competences are always needed to compose (Latour 2010: 474). Thus, composition is marked as an action that has to take different desires and necessities into account. The fact that compositions imply compromise also hints at the fact that Latour’s notion of composi-

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Here, the notion of choreography is explicitly related to the prospect of political encounters with things. If things are entangled, fluid, and shifting, then an expertise in movement seems valuable. Nonetheless, Latour probably thinks of composition first of all as a spatial practice of assembling pieces, which is why he summons up the art of scenography alongside the practice of choreography.

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tion is a collective one, and is not bound to a single author. Latour, finally, links the term to ‘compost’ and ‘composting’, thereby indicating that compositions are always reversible. The term is Donna Haraway’s, who repeatedly uses it to indicate the entanglement of human practices with their environment, in which human capacities are literally grounded in the biological processes that surround and ground it. In her text ‘Tentacular Thinking’, Haraway proclaims to use the notion of “compost instead of posthuman(ism), as well as humusities instead of humanities” (Haraway 2016b: n.p.). To sum up, Latour insists on the fact that compositions can fail, that they are provisional (yet collective) attempts at creating a form of togetherness, or sympathy of parts (cf. Deleuze/Pernet 2002: 69), that, for lack of more conceptual clarity, he terms well or badly composed composition: “Above all, a composition can fail and this retains what is most important in the notion of constructivism (a label which I could have used as well, had it not been already been taken by art-history). It thus draws our attention away from the irrelevant difference between what is constructed and what is not constructed, toward the crucial difference between what is well or badly constructed, well or badly composed” (Latour 2011: 474). I want to suggest that compositions are expressive of specific modes of handling things, are bound by specific styles, come to be collective efforts, relate to practical knowledge of articulating things, and try to retain the heterogeneity of their components. These modes of handling things may be framed as choreography, in so far as they produce shifting arrangements of both humans and non-humans, and distribute agency (at least partly) as degrees of mobility. Thus, Barricades and Dances literally proposes a specific style of choreographically handling things. In that regard, it seems important to highlight the processual and provisional connotations that Latour gives to his notion of ‘compositionism’. Generally, Latour’s approach is characterized by a constitutive hesitation and a firm belief in complicated, risky procedures of advocacy and diplomacy. In Isabelle Stenger’s words, who uses ‘construction’ instead of ‘composition’: “The idea is precisely to slow down the construction of this common world, to create a space for hesitation regarding what it means to say ‘good’” (Stengers 2015: 995). Thus, the process of composition does not allow any recourse to a higher arbiter, someone outside of the collective composition of bodies and things who would be able to judge either its consistency or quality. As Latour insists: “[…] there is no world of beyond. It is all about immanence” (Latour 2010: 475). Therefore, composing is not a critical act, because “what performs a critique cannot compose” (Latour 2010: 475). Generally, his notion of ‘compositionism’ is an attempt to move beyond what he sees as the pitfalls and drawbacks of a Marxist and post-modern notion of critique (cf. Latour 2004b). Nonetheless, Latour speaks of closure. He insists on provisional ends

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to any act of composing.38 On the one hand, Latour emphasizes the inherent provisionality and open-endedness of encounters with things; on the other hand, as a science- and design-based pragmatist, he opts for a pragmatic closure to the thing as locus of debate. While things were expressive of a relational world for Heidegger, and while they are as fugitive as the movement of life itself for Moten, Latour somehow charges the act of composing with the task of definitely holding a common world together. Indeed, he insists on the necessity “to finally take seriously the political task of establishing the continuity of all entities that make up the common world” (Latour 2010: 485). It seems as if now, somewhat magically, a relation has been turned around. Where things had already been expressive of the world to which they belong and are entangled with, they now, after what Latour often terms ‘the Modern parenthesis’, need to be re-matched and re-arranged according to some principle of continuity. How come, we might ask? What is deficient in the thing that it needs to be rearranged? Does Latour really propose an alternative model of handling things that would allow the apparently sovereign subject to get attuned more acutely to what it is encountering in its hands, actions, gestures, its communication, working, dwelling, walking, talking – that black thing which marks its limit line of competence? It seems as if Latour himself is split between trying to account for the inherent fugitivity of ‘matters of concern’ and a pragmatist need to fixate them in function of a, rather negligently vague, definition of a ‘livable world’. Still, it seems possible to retain from his argument a hint of what I am looking for: Encountering things asks for the utmost hesitation of which one is capable. It seems to ask for an aesthetic-artistic operation and investment in practices that relate to things as fugitive and moving forces who are necessarily altered and translated when seized by human hands. Indeed, it may well be choreography and scenography – among a plethora of other practices – that carry competence in impossibly accounting for queer and fugitive encounters with stuff. Let me be clear: Composing as the operation of constructing a collective that is expressive and inclusive of both its human and non-human components, in Latour, is a vaguely defined operation of spatial arrangement of components plus an infinite and finally impossible act of rhetoric-semiotic representation (in the linguistic and political sense of the notion) of the position and value of entangled parts (what he terms ‘proposition’). The alternative seems to be a more receptive approach, one that inhibits human activity a little more stringently than Latour, even if it remains caught up in similar paradoxes. In this line of thought, Jane Bennett’s attempt was to instill (by means of writing a book) a different perceptual attention to things in her 2010 work Vibrant Matter. The opposition of humans and things, she claims, is perceptually grounded 38

“For a compositionist, nothing is beyond dispute. And yet, closure has to be achieved.” (Latour 2010: 478)

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but culturally reproduced. While it may be due to a form of “action-oriented perception on which our survival depends” (Bennett 2010: xiv), the division of sovereign and active subject vs. immobile object, she decides, is a perceptual habit that is reproduced and strengthened by discourse and design. In fact, with Rancière, she insists that “the habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life is a ‘partition of the sensible’” (Bennett 2010: vii, cf. also Rancière 2004). The politicality of encountering things, thus, lies on the level of the sensual and the aesthetic (i.e., on the level of perception itself) because it structures our relation to the environment. Interestingly, when Lepecki defines ‘choreopolice’ as the power “to de-mobilize political action by means of implementing a certain kind of movement that prevents any formation and expression of the political” (Lepecki 2013a: 9), it is in reference to Rancière as well: “The essence of the police lies in a partition of the sensible that is characterized by the absence of void and of supplement: society here is made up of groups tied to specific modes of doing, to places in which these occupations are exercised, and to modes of being corresponding to these occupations and these places” (Rancière 2010: 36, in Lepecki 2013a: 9). Thus, the task involves imagining a different partition of the sensible, one that is not based on the immobility and incapacity of the object vis-à-vis its sovereign human owner holding it in his manipulative hands. It may well be that alternative modes of practically encountering things opens up a different choreographic imaginary of how things move, thereby reclaiming spaces of deviant mobilization. To formulate carefully: How we compose with things (i.e., how we physically, architecturally, but also choreographically distribute the possibility to move one another) decides whether we act as subjects that seize objects, or if we are capable of opening another space of mobilization in which protocols of inter-subjection are suspended. Latour’s proposal of ‘compositionism’ is interesting because it seems to indicate the necessity of sensorial hesitation and open-endedness. If we conceive of it as a proposal for ever-unfinished, infinite processes of negotiations that can only ever find provisional (limited) moments of closure, then we might get closer to practices of handling things that actually produce (or continue to attain, even if they know they will fail) a humble, non-binary, (a)position in the midst of manifold, entangled morethan-human ecologies.

CHOREOGRAPHIC LOGIC (BARRICADES AND DANCES): Hesitation The performance Barricades and Dances, within the limited frame of a dance performance of about one hour, attempts to shift the audiences perception so as to allow them to attune to both humans and non-humans on stage as potentially active,

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agentic entities. Time, and the choreographic principle of ‘hesitation’, play a central role. The first image that arises is of three bodies that stand and sit alongside three things, trying to allow for the perception of the audience to settle and relate to them as differentiated material forms of differing complexity that nonetheless exist on the same plane of immanence, or the modality with which we handle the objects on stage – slowly, carefully, yet pragmatically; our attempt is always to induce a sense of wonder about who is handling what, and what is handling whom. Importantly, we conceive of the construction process that we present as an open score, as a potentially infinite attempt to relate to material others. While this is a fantasy, at least pragmatically, it guides our choice of how to end the performance: At the end of Barricade and Dances, the dancer Verena Brakonier starts to build a tower from cobble stones, an exercise for which she needs to finely attune to the differing surfaces of the stones while taking care of her own body that might be hurt as the growing tower falls. Collapses happens, but it only means that she will start all over again. Before leaving the stage as the last performer, she hands the tower over to an audience member; composition continues.

2.6 Barricades as spaces of attunement My own dance-work Barricades and Dances attempts to allude to the material indeterminacy of things in as much as they are composed as barricades. The body is understood as a choreographic partner of all things on stage and becomes implied and entangled with their different materialities. This produces an almost meditative slowness in which failed attempts at building something like a barricade are part of the performance score as much as the improbable event of a composition actually ‘holding together’, becoming self-contained, and standing erectly for a moment. It produces what we have termed a ‘landscaped’ mode of performance.

CHOREOGRAPHIC LOGIC (BARRICADES AND DANCES): Attunement Trying to create situations in which mobility, or range of movement, is re-distributed between body and thing, as well as opening a different mode of perception towards stuff, a specific moment of the performance might be central in which one of the performers, Verena Brakonier, attempts to become stone. After the dance moment that creates turbulent flow and the passage in which all human performers have left the stage that I have described above, she walks onto the empty stage to stand on a single cobblestone somewhere right of the center. Legs slightly rotated outwards, her heels elevated as if she was in relevé position, she adjusts her shoulders and starts her process of attuning herself to the materiality of the stone. As much

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an impersonation of a statue as the performative act of impossibly transfiguring herself into stone, she sheds all her evident potential for movement – seemingly and allegedly so superior to that of the stone – in order to perform a creative involution in which she momentarily turns into stone herself. Here, our practice of handling stones, looking at them and touching them carefully throughout the rehearsal process, becomes a resource for empathy towards non-humans. All intensity is directed inwards and towards that meeting of flesh and stone at the bottom of that statue – an intensity of muscular tension as well as of sensibility towards the otherness of stony material that becomes evident in her face. Verena petrifies, slowly but surely, in a dancerly act of trans-material empathy.39 Interestingly, the notion of becoming stone is a recurrent figure when speaking about attunement, maybe even of a solidarity for things. Timothy Morton analyzes these notions in his recent book ‘Being Ecological’ (cf. Morton 2018). I will sum up my own arguments about attunement, as well as Morton’s notion in light of older theoretic formulations, within this work’s final chapter. For now, I can say this: What is at stake when attuning to stones is the very opposition at the base our perceptual understanding of agency and the environment (i.e., the opposition of activity and passivity). Interestingly, it is small stones as well as the big ones – mountains in fact, for Latour has a whole chapter on the mode of existence named ‘reproduction’ that Mont Aiguille in the French alps needs to perform in order to withstand the passage of time (Latour 2013: 75–90) – that often serve as vehicles for that blurring of perceptual unambiguousness between who or what is active and what is passive. In his book ‘The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic’ Mario Perniola describes such a state of perceptual conditioning, a blurring of activity and passivity that he entitles as ‘giving oneself as thing’. Perniola is mainly interested in sexuality as a mode of sensing, as a coming together of the “mode of being of the thing and human sensibility”. His interest is in naming an experience that asserts itself on contemporary feeling: “To give oneself as a thing that feels and to take a thing that feels” (Perniola 2004: 1). The foundational fugitivity of the thing and the capacities and demands of sentient beings are no longer in conflict with each-other as Perniola posits a neuter sexuality that, in his words, “entails a suspension of feeling” (Perniola 2004: 2), but is not an annulment of sensibility. To ‘feel like a thing’ (sensing) is the act of emancipation from an instrumental, purpose-oriented conception of excitement, be it through sexual excitement or any other form. If we take perception as an act of receiving external stimuli, as a system that is thus in different states of excitation as it is being impressed upon by the environment, then Perniola is looking for a de-hierarchized

39

Verena always told me that, for her, this moment of encountering the stone was the most exhausting part of the whole performance, despite her apparent immobility. Petrifying seems to cost energy, even if it is an apparent ‘still-act’ (cf. Lepecki 2006).

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perception that relates to its environment in the most non-intentional or non-instrumental way possible. Perniola describes this form of relating to other entities as: “an entrance into displaced, decentered experience, freed from intention of reaching a purpose” (Perniola 2004: 2). Yet, sensing is not an under-tensed release, but a mode of explicit concentration, of “drastic sensitive reductionism”, focusing on events as if they existed on a flat non-hierarchical plane, thus “making feeling similar to a point, to a needle, to a sword” (Perniola 2004: 12). Sensing is an attempt to depersonalize perception and to make it an occurrence between entities rather than belonging to an ‘I’ as subject. The perception of ‘it feels’ and ‘it perceives and is perceived’ belongs to a meeting of two materials that medially encounter each-other, thereby becoming medium, delegate, or translator for one another. In the becoming stone that is a part of Barricades and Dances, the barricade (that already functions as ‘choreopolitical operator’ on the two levels described above) becomes a place to redistribute mobility, at least provisionally and only within the frame of the theatre. It allows for the paradoxical act of blurring activity and passivity, which might work towards an albeit impossible mode of encountering stuff as mere entanglement of things, to be practiced. In order for this substitution of mobility to be possible, it is necessary to think of the barricade not only as an obstacle, not only as the provisional and indeterminate breaking point of instrumental and functional relations between human hands and the stuff they seize, but also as the place of an encounter of different materialities that do not inter-subject or overpower one another, but where one creatively translates and transposes the other, never fully loyal, never without transfiguration, but as the place of an anti-foundational, ante-foundational para-ontological meeting, as the speculative becoming of the socio-materiality of life itself. This is what composing things as barricade might come to mean one day. I have, thus, posited the barricade as a blockage to efficiently managed flows through the urban fabric, as a space that allows for ‘turbulent flow’ (i.e., as a space that escapes socio-material governance, that blurs the divisions of subject and thing, and allows for their encounter). In order to do so, it also operates by the choreographic logic of ‘hesitation’, which I have spelled out in relation to Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘compositionism’. Both principles, or logics, I have argued, are part of a more general principle entitled ‘attunement’ that shall be spelled out in detail at the end of this book. I will now proceed by reconsidering the theory of assemblages by Deleuze and Guattari. What I propose, by means of this argument, is to unfold the extent to which different logics of choreographically handling things constitute spaces of circulation and fields of action. While I am still looking for alternative logics of handling matter – such as the principles of ‘turbulent flow’ and ‘hesitation’ which were analyzed with regards to my case-study Barricades and Dances – I want to further my understanding of how these principles performatively enact and shape more-thanhuman worlds.

3. Assemblages as more-than-human performances

Homage to New York (Jean Tinguely) The constant of movement, of disintegration, of change and of construction is static. Be constant! Get used to seeing things, ideas and works in their state of ceaseless change. You will live longer. Be permanent by being static! Be part of movement! Only in movement do we find the true essence of things. Tinguely 2016 (1961): 284, my emphasis. On March 17, 1960 – six years before Andy Warhol presented his Silver Clouds and Yvonne Rainer famously claimed that she wanted to be moved by ‘some thing’ (cf. Rainer 1968) rather than herself, and eight years before Merce Cunningham took Warhol’s Clouds to the stage within his performance RainForest – Swiss artist Jean Tinguely realized his own idiosyncratic more-than-human performance in the garden of the Modern Museum of Art in New York. It carries the title Homage to New York, and can best be described as an entity at the interface between sculpture and performance. Tinguely had been invited by Peter Selz, who was the curator for painting and sculpture at the MOMA at the time, to create an event in the museum’s garden. He thus presented a machine-like sculpture, made from several hundred scrap objects,1 including a piano, 80 bicycles, several motors, a metal box that would eject coins 1

Robert Rauschenberg and Jean Tinguely, apparently, both liked to go to scrap-yards (cf. Gampert 2009). In so far as they also handle discarded consumer objects, one could compare their artistic practice to the African Terminal described in chapter 4. ‘Logistics as socio-material choreography’. But from the perspective of migrant workers, it might indeed be a futile act to build a gigantic machine that destroys itself.

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contributed to the action by Robert Rauschenberg, clocks, a painting machine from Tinguely’s own series of Méta-Matics, tin cans, wooden and rubber tires, and so on (cf. Graser 2016: n.p.) that would, throughout the course of its activation, destroy itself.2 For that purpose, Tinguely and Billy Klüver, who had been working on the machine with Tinguely, had included inflammables and fire-works into the machinic sculpture. As art historian and curator Jenny Graser writes in her article on Homage to New York, about 200 to 250 people attended the event, among them John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper John, and Barrett Newman (cf. Graser 2016: n.p.). Tinguely gave a little speech before the machine began to do its work in which he, importantly, described it as both an artefact and a performance. Billy Klüver, his construction partner, has described the action as follows: “An involved gear system would slowly turn the piano on. After a few minutes, a bucket of gasoline would be overturned onto the burning candle, so that the piano would catch fire. Another mechanical arrangement in the first Méta-Matic turned three beer cans filled with paint onto the paper rolling down toward the audience. On the very top of the first structure was a trough into which gallonsized bottles would slide down as they were pushed by a lever, and crash to the ground spreading nauseating smells. A child’s go-cart would be pushed back and forth in the front of the structure. There must have been about a hundred different operations in the machine” (in Graser 2016: n.p.). Apparently, Tinguely himself pushed parts of the sculpture so that it would fall in and, finally, collapse. Police had to come and contain the fire. Overall, a strong element of chance was involved in how the self-destruction of the machine evolved.3 Yet, in so far as it destroyed itself, Tinguely’s Homage to New York perfected the concept of a sculpture being both an object and an event, or ‘happening.’ Its intensity, therefore, lies in its auto-destructive nature. Taking place in immediate temporal proximity to the beginning of Performance Art, conventionally dated to Allan Kaprow’s 1959 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, and the beginning of post-modern dance (i.e., to the important interdisciplinary dance events at Judson Church, which started to

2 3

In order to create more visual harmony, Tinguely had painted most of the found object in white (cf. Graser 2016: n.p.). Even if there are some video documentations of the action (i.e., by experimental filmmakers Donn Alan Pennebaker and artist Robert Breer), the action has become famous mostly because of the photographic documentation, which cemented its iconographic character. As art historian Henry M. Sayre has remarked: “The importance of the photographic document was probably first established by Jean Tinguely’s famous Homage to New York, the wonderful machine sculpture which destroyed itself in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art […]” (Sayre 1989: 2).

3. Assemblages as more-than-human performances

take place in 1962, cf. Sayre 1989: 13), the art-work is important to the aims of this work for two reasons: Firstly, Tinguely’s work has been described as an important inspiration for the formulation of the notion of assemblage in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1987). Notably, Brian Holmes claims that: “Tinguely’s selfdestroying machines […] influence the overall flow of Anti-Oedipus probably more than any philosophical or scientific source” (Bradley 2018: 197). Ian Buchanan, conversely, refers to the exhibition entitled ‘The Art of Assemblage’ curated by William Seitz, in which Tinguely’s work figured prominently, when reflecting about the English translation of the notion of ‘agencement’ as assemblage in the 1987 English translation of ‘Mille Plateaux’ by Brian Massumi (cf. Buchanan 2015: 127). In relation to Tinguely’s Homage to New York, one of the following chapter’s central conceptual claims can, thus, intuitively be supported: Assemblages, such as Homage to New York, are a machinic set of components that momentarily work together, even though their mode of working resembles a performance or performative event. In fact, this is how I imagine an assemblage: as made from the many intra-actions of its components (i.e., small performances in which parts meet, reinforce, or alter their capacities within the encounter with other parts, and go on to meet other parts). Overall, then, the assemblage sustains itself performatively. I will elaborate on this model below. In any case, the collaboration, or sympathy of parts, as Deleuze states,4 is but a momentary, provisional (i.e., historic) instance. It may, nonetheless, stabilize its working mechanism and gain coherence and stability, for a while at least. Yet, as the founders of the philosophical notion of agencement, which would later be translated as assemblage, would propose, it then loses its de-territorializing edge. In fact, too much stability, too much coherence will make the assemblage lose its improvisational quality and turn it into a ‘stratum’, as Deleuze and Guattari claim, an opposition that I will outline in the following. This leads to a second idea. I claim that, broadly speaking, there are two different notions of assemblage: One is a merely descriptive concept that tries to account for arrangements (societal, institutional, or smaller) that comprise human, animal, and non-human components (cf. DeLanda 2016). The other one, originally formulated by Deleuze and Guattari, is politically charged. It highlights the agency of material, it prefers improvised and provisional modes of collaboration between humans and non-humans, and argues for the centrality of machinic desire as a fuel for more-than-choreography. The self-destructive quality of Tinguely’s machine and its evocative title may then function as a cautious reminder with regards to the hypothesis outlined above: Indeed, in their formulation of the notion of assemblage, it is clear that Deleuze and Guattari follow a preference for machines that do not 4

As Deleuze states within an interview: “Thus, the assemblage's only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’” (Deleuze/Pernet 2002: 69).

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work harmonically, that are imbalanced, and that can hardly be kept together; which are, in their own parlance, at the edge of de-territorialization (i.e., in danger of disintegration). How does one link that to Tinguely? In fact, Tinguely’s act of naming his sculpture Homage to New York has been read as a form of criticism towards the auto-destructive quality of American capitalism. Art historian Christina Chau, for example, summarizes that: “Tinguely’s early kinetic performances […] are often addressed as critiques of capitalist production and consumption” (Chau 2014: 395). One might also claim, as journalist Christian Gampert does, that Homage to New York gathers remnants of industrial culture (i.e., scrap material) in order to turn them into a melancholic, auto-destructive spectacle (cf. Gampert 2009: n.p.). Yet, I wonder, if the “the self-orchestrated suicide of the machine” (Bradley 2018: 200), to which Deleuze and Guattari immanently link their theoretical notion, is not also a form of celebration and desire for “creative destruction” (cf. Schumpeter 1942). If New York, the center of American capitalist domination, the center of finance capital so dominant in the second half of the 20th century, is here celebrated as a kind of self-destructive, de-territorializing assemblage or machine,5 then this should serve as a kind of cautious reminder against destructive or auto-destructive tendencies that are inherently linked to the notion of assemblage. A vector of de-territorialization may then, on the one hand, have the function of criticizing ossified institutional set-ups that establish functional totalities in which things and people are forced to repeat the self-same gestures, pathways, and movement patterns. Yet, it also begs the question: To what extent can functional ties and institutionalized relations between humans and non-humans provide for the necessary stability to allow for the establishment of alternative relations built on care? I will, thus, in the following chapter, make the artistic research environment Polyset by Vladimir Miller enter in subterranean conversation with Homage to New York. Both territorializing and de-territorializing tendencies within performative assemblages can be experienced and discussed in Miller’s work. One may, therefore, become attuned to both vectors of assembled spaces of intra-acting with material. I thus propose that more-than-human choreography cannot rely on facile understandings of change, mobilization, or transformation as positively connoted, even if it wants to undo processes of objectification and attune to its non-human movement partners beyond efficient principles of choreographic governance. In order to make this argument, I will first introduce the notion of assemblage more thoroughly, reflect on

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For Tinguely, New York itself, the city of the skyscrapers, may be considered a machine: “The skyscraper itself is a kind of machine. The American house is a machine. I saw in my mind’s eye all those skyscrapers, those monster buildings, all that magnificent accumulation of human power and vitality, all that uneasiness, as though everyone were living on the edge of a precipice, and I thought how nice it would be to make a little machine there that would be conceived, like Chinese fireworks, in total anarchy and freedom” (Bradley 2018: 200).

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its usage within performance theory, and then develop my own understanding of assemblages as performances which I will apply to Miller’s practice of Polyset.

3.1 Territorialization and deterritorialization: degrees of cohesion The notion of assemblage was coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their seminal book ‘Mille Plateaux’, published in 1980 as the second volume of the larger project of ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ which the authors conducted together. It is directly linked to the 1972 volume of ‘Anti-Oedipus’ in which Deleuze and Guattari develop their notion of desiring-machines, the most direct and important predecessor of assemblages. The notion’s original French name is agencement. As Australian Deleuze-scholar Ian Buchanan notes, the notion of assemblage, therefore: “[…] is Brian Massumi’s translation of agencement which, as John Law has noted, encompasses a range of meanings that include ‘to arrange, to dispose, to fit up, to combine, to order’. It could therefore just as appropriately be translated as arrangement, in the sense of a ‘working arrangement’ provided it was kept clear that it described an ongoing process rather than a static situation” (Buchanan 2015: 383). Importantly, the term agencement (via the notion of desiring-machines) is itself a translation (i.e., of the German term Komplex) in the work of Sigmund Freud (cf. Buchanan 2015: 383). Assemblages are characterized in various, cyclical ways by the two authors within ‘Mille Plateaux’. Even if Deleuze, in an interview with Catherine Clément in 1980, claims that the notion constitutes the ‘general logic’ at play within the work (cf. Nail 2017: 21), there is no coherent definition of what an assemblage is; instead, the concept re-appears within different arguments, linking them subterraneously. Contrary to the notion of subjectivity, the notion of assemblage is based on exteriority, difference, conductivity, and contamination as modes of communicating forces. Assemblages account for both material and expressive processes and the multiple ways in which material states and meaningful utterances, conventionally subsumed under the rubric of the sovereign subject, are being constituted by one another.6 Meanwhile, the notion wants to replace the concept of behavior, especially as it is convened by ethology and behavioral psychology (cf. Deleuze 2006b: 177). Instead

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Assemblages are the milieu from which utterances are generated as Deleuze explains in a letter to their translator Kuniichi Uno, two years after the publication of ‘Mille Plateaux’. He writes: “There is no expressing subject (i.e., no subject of utterance), but only assemblages. This means that, in any assemblage, there exist ‘processes of subjectivation’ which assign various subjects: some are images, and some are signs” (Deleuze 2006c: 201).

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of individual agents maximizing benefits and minimizing costs, it presumes collectively assembled modes of desiring that bring about, and exist within, material worlds. Indeed, for Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages are always desiring; they are fueled by desire, where desire is defined as a collective force that actualizes the shapeless, fugitive flow of matter-energy into concrete forms. In order to develop my argument further, I will first unfold assemblage theory in the formulation by Manuel DeLanda, before returning to the original formulation of the concept by Deleuze and Guattari, mostly within the project of ‘Mille Plateaux’. Linked to my reading of their ‘Nomadology’-chapter within the same book, I develop several key concepts related to assemblage theory: I will highlight how assemblages need to be achieved iteratively, by looking at the way in which they are installed and sustained performatively. Thereby, I propose thinking of assemblages as fields of action or spaces of circulation. Finally, I will go back to the materialist ethics with which Deleuze and Guattari have charged the notion. These steps will allow me to both develop a performative model of assemblages and to retain their constitutive political edge. For, as Ian Buchanan notices, while the concept generated a variety of “interesting and important ways of thinking about the complex nature of social reality”, it “also drifted a long way from its origins” (Buchanan 2015: 382). My intention, therefore, is to differentiate a descriptive notion of assemblages from a political or normative formulation of the term. Manuel DeLanda claims to have formulated a general theory of assemblages (i.e., a comprising socio-material systematics based on the notion of assemblage). On a general level, DeLanda does two things: He systematizes the work of Deleuze and Guattari, taking the notion of assemblage as his main anchor while also relating it to other works of Deleuze, particularly ‘Difference and Repetition’. Meanwhile, he depoliticizes the notion within his attempt to generalize the concept of assemblages.7 For DeLanda, assemblages are a conceptualization of whole-part relationships. Indeed, his theory of assemblages aims at describing a variety of wholes “ranging from atoms to molecules to biological organisms, species and ecosystems” as constructed from heterogeneous parts. In so far, as they “may be usefully treated as 7

While he explicitly claims to be ‘a Leftist thinker’, most of the explicitly anti-statist and Anarchist-Marxist drive of ‘Mille Plateaux’ is lost in his account. Most explicitly, DeLanda argues against the Marxist rationale of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking, for he “prefers to Marx the analysis of capitalism found in Fernand Braudel’s masterful three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, with its attention to different scales of markets and its crucial difference between markets and monopoly capitalism” (Harman 2016: ix). Indeed, DeLanda strongly argues against social ontologies that operate either on a micro- or macro-scale and believes to find in Marx, and sometimes also in Deleuze and Guattari, proponents of such thinking who repeatedly refer to entities such as ‘the state’ or ‘society’ as such. In DeLanda’s all-encompassing socio-material ontology, these entities do not exist. Rather, society itself is an assemblage made of numerous smaller assemblages.

3. Assemblages as more-than-human performances

assemblages”, DeLanda asserts that they have to be viewed as products of historical processes. This implies, in DeLanda’s model, that one uses the term ‘historical’ to include cosmological and evolutionary history, not only human history (cf. DeLanda 2006a: 3). Assemblages are made from heterogeneous components that are defined by ‘relations of exteriority’ (rather than interiority). This means that components of an assemblage can leave it without necessarily losing their relative coherence and functionality.8 Elements can be de-plugged from the assemblage without losing their identity, while, conversely, the properties of component parts can never fully explain the capacities of a whole (cf. DeLanda 2006a: 11). As Jane Bennett stresses, within an assemblage “no one materiality or type of material has sufficient capacity to determine consistently the trajectory of impact of the group” (Bennett 2010: 24). Rather, like in a mechanism or machine, parts of the entity in question can be de-coupled from the assemblage. Meanwhile, the assemblage, in its emergent quality, only exists in so far as its elements are coordinated. According to DeLanda, assemblages are marked by two central parameters. One of them is the degree of territorialization that he conceptualizes as a continuous scale that can be applied to all composite socio-material bodies.9 In DeLanda’s version of assemblage theory, ‘deterritorialization’ then comes to stand for the degree of heterogeneity allowed to the elements of the assemblage and its porosity as a whole, while ‘territorialization’ is the degree of outward boundedness and of coherence imposed onto its elements by the assemblage (cf. DeLanda 2016: 22). Indeed, here is where some of the concept’s political potential is lost, in so far as the terms now indicates a state of the assemblage only, rather than its tendency or vectorial energies. DeLanda, one may claim, gives up the political vector of Deleuze and Guattari’s work: While their notion of deterritorialization is constituted as a movement through which a socio-material and political desire embodies itself as transformation, here it becomes a measure for the momentary state of an aggregate only. Conversely, all different arrangements of bodies and materials can be described as assemblages in this way. The second parameter of assemblages, according to DeLanda, is their degree of coding and decoding. In his own formulation: “[…] coding refers to the role played by 8

9

DeLanda also reminds us that Deleuze derives his notion of ‘relations of exteriority’ from Hume, given that “his most extensive discussion of relations of exteriority occurs, in effect, in his discussion of the empiricists” (DeLanda 2016: 26). Cf. DeLanda 2016: 19: “Adding these control knobs to the concept of assemblage would allow us to eliminate their opposition to strata, with the result that strata and assemblages (in the original sense) would become phases, like the solid and fluid phase of matter. Unlike mutually exclusive binary categories, phases can be transformed into one another, and even coexist as mixtures, like a gel that is a mixture of the solid and liquid phases of different materials. In the case of social wholes, an important parameter, or variable coefficient, is its degree of ‘territorialization’ or ‘deterritorialization’.”

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special expressive components in an assemblage in fixing the identity of the whole” (DeLanda 2016: 22). DeLanda identifies two main expressive agents that have the capacity to code aggregates (i.e., chromosomes and languages) because they have the power to determine the behavior of assemblages.10 He furthermore enumerates a number of central qualities of his notion: Firstly, assemblages are always individual entities that come to be themselves by a contingent historic process (cf. DeLanda 2016: 19). Like individuals, all assemblages, whether they are relatively small like an atom, medium sized like the human body, or meta-local like an international corporation, exists on the same plane of immanence and can, thus, interact with one another. Furthermore, they exist as nested sets, which means that smaller assemblages become part of larger assemblages, while any larger assemblage – like a multinational corporation – will themselves be made from smaller assemblages. As a theoretic model, DeLanda insists, assemblages can account for any biological or social process. In his book ‘1000 Years of History’, DeLanda tries to account for the history of human settlement form 1000AD until today, based on the vocabulary established here. His theoretic framework is impressive, but it carries a number of problems that have affected most assemblage theories within urbanism and the social sciences, too (cf. Sassen 2006, Ong/Collier 2007): In his case, the notion of ‘assemblage’ becomes a descriptive one only. DeLanda reformulates the concept so that it no longer carries politicality, but can, as he says, describe a variety of wholes “ranging from atoms to molecules to biological organisms, species and ecosystems” (DeLanda 2006: 3) as constructed from heterogeneous parts. Yet if the notion can be applied to any complex material system, then we might ask: To what extent can it still activate a critique of the political and historic conditions that make for the generation of these systems? Does assemblage theory actually want to account for systematic processes, or is it not, conversely, a notion that was forged in order to account for the most precarious, the most improbable, and improvised practices of handling material? Nonetheless, DeLanda firmly insists on the agency of materials; for him, material always carries the potential to unfold creatively on its own. I will, thus, return to the original formulation of the notion within Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, a chapter of ‘Mille Plateaux’ (cf. Deleuze/ Guattari 1987), in order to challenge DeLanda’s formulations. Throughout the chapter, 10

One of his examples is a despotic state apparatus, in which “everything becomes coded: dress, food, manners, property, trade.” (DeLanda 2016: 2013). If we translate DeLanda’s terminology back into Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, strata or state apparatuses are then assemblages that have ‘high values’ for territorialization and coding, for they possess clear borders, and they homogenize their components by written laws, informal norms and the respective practices of governmentality. Indeed, what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as an ‘assemblage’, DeLanda writes, often “is a stratum that has become decoded, that is, one in which the value of the coding parameter is low, as when animal behaviour stops being determined by genes, or when human behaviour ceases to be fully specified by written norms” (DeLanda 2016: 23).

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Deleuze and Guattari develop a series of oppositions, between the games of Chess and Go, between minor and major sciences, between the movement logics of work and weapons systems, between the war machine and the state apparatus, and – importantly – between agricultural-sedentary and nomadic lifestyles that circumscribe the notion of assemblage. It is in relation to these notions that Deleuze and Guattari charge their notion politically. The most prominent example of the nomads’ inventiveness, the two authors claim, may well be the confederation of a rider, a horse, and a weapon, an assemblage that Deleuze and Guattari term (among other names) the ‘man-horse assemblage’. It was invented, as they claim, by the nomads of the Eurasian steppe in the Middle Ages. Generally, then, the notion of ‘assemblage’ is used to denote (nomadic) confederations “of human, animal and thing” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 399) that allow for a passional passage, a movement transversal to the rigid, binary oppositions implemented by the state apparatus, which Deleuze and Guattari often also link to the notion of ‘stratum’ as structuring ground or substrate. Yet, while the notion of assemblage is directly linked to nomadic lifestyles, and carries with it the potential to destroy the state apparatus, the authors concede that the opposition between nomadism/war machine and sedentary conditions/state apparatuses is only a relative one, at least historically. Both war-machine and state-apparatus rarely exist in their pure form in history, where they always mix, alloy, and contaminate one another. Thus, nomadic assemblages as well as sedentary strata indicate extremes, and may be best considered names or directions for vectorial energies which complex social configurations may take up and embody (cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 410). These two vectorial tendencies directly correspond to the notions of ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘territorialization’ that appear throughout the book. Still, the basic premises of assemblages and strata are fundamentally opposed to one another: For Deleuze and Guattari, the state and its strata are “defined by the perpetuation or conservation of organs of power” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 357). Its primarily function is to conserve, and its internal relations are of the well-ordered, arborescent type. The state-form does not just have the tendency to reproduce itself and to remain identical across variations; its basic composition stays the same across history: “States always have the same essential composition. If there is even one truth in the political philosophy of Hegel, it is that every state carries within itself the essential moments of its existence”, the authors write (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 385). The war-machine, conversely, has the capacity to confront the state: “[…] it scatters into thinking, loving, dying, or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging the conquering state” (Deleuze/ Guattari 1987: 356). Contrary to the nested set of organizational forms that compose the state, which tends to homogenize and immobilize its components, the war-machine exists only in transformation: “[…] the war machine’s form of exteriority is such that it exists only in its metamorphoses” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 360), as Deleuze

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and Guattari claim. Thus, theoretically, the war-machine can and has to be conceived as “pure form of exteriority” that opposes the form of interiority according to which we are used to think, even if, historically, neither state nor war-machine exist in their pure form (cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 356).11 A fundamental difference is delineated: Whereas the state apparatus forces us to identify with it, demands us to internalize our relation to it, wanting to constitutively mark our identity, the nomad war-machine, and its assemblages, is constituted by couplings and de-couplings where any of the single elements follows a line of desire that allows for momentary alliances without fixating them. The war-machine is here conceived of as ‘motor of change’, so to speak, and is structurally irreducible to administrative or governmental actions. Interestingly, its transformative power resides not only in nomad warfare, but “it exists in an industrial innovation as well as in a technological invention, in a commercial circuit as well as in a religious creation, in all flows and currents that only secondarily allow themselves to be appropriated by the State” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 360). By analogy, then, what is constitutive for the state-apparatus and the nomadic war-machine holds for its components, too: strata and assemblages. Where strata are made of homogeneous elements and possess clear boundaries, assemblages are made of heterogeneous elements, are much more porous, and do not create clearly delimited territorial or internal boundaries. I want to propose that the relation between state and war-machine, and between strata and assemblages, is a choreographic one, in which the state constantly tries to channel and incorporate the excessive vectorial energies of the nomad war machine, a process that I have begun to analyze in terms of the ‘turbulent flow’ of social and material protest that interrupts the ‘choreopoliced’ circulation of bodies within the urban fabric. The state always

11

There is no total state, in so far as there exists the war-machine and its assemblages (logically and historically), which are inherently characterized by exteriority, fluidity, and transformability. As Deleuze and Guattari insist: “[…] the state has always been in relation with an outside and it is inconceivable independent of that outside” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 360). There is, thus, no universal statist (or institutional) politics, in which politics is delimited to either national or foreign affairs. As Deleuze and Guattari insist, next to the state there are (at least since the 14th century, but ever since its installation) both “huge worldwide machines branched out over the whole ecumenon” – more-than-national associations – and there is always local bands, margins, minorities, activists, and warriors in various alliances. Both multinational commercial institutions, or large ideological or religious formations such as Christianity, and more local associations always exist next to, within, and outside of the state, who both feeds itself from their ante-organizational genius and tries to incorporate and thus assimilate them. What is named ‘war-machine’ is, thus, conceived of not as a war itself, but rather as a social state that prevents the smooth functioning of the state order, in so far as it proliferates exchange and maintains a framework of alliances in which groups can change position and will not be fused with one another (cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 360).

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striates space in order to control and administer the speed of both the war-machine, but also of all component elements it is built from: “It is a vital concern of every state not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and more generally to establish a zone of right over an entire ‘exterior’, over all the flows traversing the ecumenon” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 385). Thus, state-apparatus and nomadic war-machine are opposed vectors that define the material and choreographic fields of political ideology, where more conservative, security-driven institutional bodies try to control, incorporate, and to administer the vectorial energies of nomadic, transformative forces that reside in more de-hierarchized, anarchic group structures, in commercial exchange over great distances or may, for that matter, exist in practice-based, intuitive research. In this respect “the state never ceases to decompose, recompose or to regulate speed” (Deleuze/ Guattari 1987: 386). Not only does the state want to control the movement of its components, the bodies, animals, and things which it is made out of, but it also wants to gain control over the intensive movements of its component materials and their incorporeal transformations from one state to another. Assemblages, on the other hand, are more conductive to affective energies, Deleuze and Guattari claim, because their structure itself, one of constant flux and metamorphosis, resembles the structure of passional (i.e., vectorial) energies. Yet, to repeat the argument: The opposition of assemblages and strata is complex and is at least twofold. While assemblages are structurally opposed to the state, because they are the expression of a transformational desire that is contradictory to the conservative energies of the state or institutions, in historical reality, the passional, vectorial energies of assemblages will always be incorporated by institutional structures to a certain degree. Historically, assemblages, and strata only exist in mixture and conglomeration. To summarize: If anything can be described as an assemblage, as Manuel DeLanda proposes, then one loses part of the notion’s political charge. Therefore, I want to keep their tendency towards de-territorialization in mind (i.e., the provisional nature of their associative power). Meanwhile, thinking of them as free of internal power hierarchies, as pure form of exteriority, is not productive either for a theory of practical, choreographic handling of things. From DeLanda, I thus want to keep the idea that there is internal energies and processes within the assemblage, which, as Jane Bennett formulates “confound them from within” (Bennett 2010: 23). Their degree of cohesion may vary, so that they break apart at some point, freeing their components into the ‘body without organs’ of the surrounding. Yet, as long as they do not do so, one therefore needs to account for the way in which assemblages distribute agency among many parts, but do so – importantly – in an a-symmetrical way. As Jane Bennett argues, assemblages should be described as “uneven topographies” in which “power is not distributed equally across its surface” (Bennett 2010: 24).

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Moreover, there exist systems of handling material which are themselves based on the principles of vectoriality and might itself carry some of the nomad war-machine’s qualities. One such system named logistics will be analyzed in detail in the following chapter. For me, the conclusion remains: To conceive of socio-material assemblages as de-stratified, or potentially transformative, does not necessarily say much about the internal composition of the assemblage or the materialist ‘ethics’ of how it sustains itself. It might still be built on enormous internal asymmetries. My proposal, throughout this chapter, thus, is to focus on the actual principles of how materials interact, in order to formulate alternatively assembled fields of action. In the following, I will thus switch between both modes of using the notion of assemblage: On the one hand, I will make more generic statements about the choreographic and performative nature of assemblages, in so far as they concern the practical handling of material. On the other hand, throughout the course of the argument, I will sharpen the notion by linking it to its origins. In the end, assemblage will come to mean a momentary collaboration of different materials that questions – just as it is enabled by Miller’s Polyset – modes of property, territoriality, and clear protocols of use, or interaction, while taking into account that they reproduce striations and hierarchies. In fact, the notion then characterizes protocols of handing material as both precarious and in danger of subjugating material, but also formulates a critical ethics and choreographic principle of handing things itself: to be ‘following the flow of matter’.

3.2 The performative enactment of assemblages I am interested in the concept of assemblage because it provides a model of thinking about ways in which handling materials and being handled by them gives rise to spaces of potential and transformation. Importantly, the model of assemblage developed by Deleuze and Guattari presumes a) an agency of materials themselves, and b) a distributed mode of agency. It can be regarded as an “open-ended collective” (Bennett 2010: 24) which owes “its capacity to the vitality of materialities that constitute it” (Bennett 2010: 34). Assemblages are spontaneous collaborations of materials or, as Jane Bennett puts it: “[…] ad hoc groupings of diverse elements” (Bennett 2010: 23). They are “not centrally governed” (Bennett 2010: 24), which in turn means that “power is not distributed equally across (their) surface” (Bennett 2010: 24). Thus, an assemblage’s task is to coordinate an open range of elements for a limited time. Therein, the coordination may not be achieved from the outside (i.e., from some central point of view which allowed for the assemblage to be steered in a topdown manner). Thus, Anna Tsing proposes that within an assemblage “patterns of unintentional coordination develop” or emerge, based on the “interplay of temporal rhythms and scales in the divergent lifeways they gather” (Tsing 2015: 23). If, as Ben-

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nett claims in relation to Deleuze and Guattari “agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces” (Bennett 2010: 21), then the question is: How does this provisional coordination emerge? And to what extent can it be described as a choreographic mode of different materials collaborating? How do bodies actually “enhance their power in and as a heterogeneous assemblage” (Bennett 2010: 23)? What are the hierarchies and in-stabilities established with an assembled collaborative situation? The mode of spontaneous (self-)coordination of elements within assemblages has, indeed, sometimes been likened to an artistic process. The compositional, musical, or potentially choreographic dimension of assemblages is often linked to stage metaphors, but also to the concepts of performativity and performance. As processual formations of provisional coherence, assemblages seem to have an intrinsic proximity to theories of performance. Jane Bennett, for example, speaks of actants as ‘performance’ (cf. Bennett 2010: viii). In her conception of assemblages, Anna Tsing, conversely, uses the same term. She proposes a notion of ‘polyphonic’ assemblages, thereby highlighting the different temporalities that intertwine and need to be coordinated within an assemblage (cf. Tsing 2015: 23). Just like a musical arrangement or jazz improvisation, as Ian Buchanan formulates, assemblages seem to function by “adapting an abstract plan of music to a particular performer or performance” (Buchanan 2015: 126). One of the earliest theoretic endeavors at the crossroads of performance and materiality is Annemarie Mol’s thoughts on ‘The Body Multiple’. In her 2005 book, Mol accounts for practices in which a patient’s body is enacted within medical contexts. The book is based on fieldwork in a Dutch hospital and is part of the then emergent field of Science and Technology Studies. In as much as the patient’s body is not conceived of as sovereign or active, it is termed an object by Mol. Her interest is in the ways in which this object comes to be enacted as a ‘body multiple’ in and by medical practices, and, importantly, how these enactments are coordinated (cf. Mol 2005: vii). As I have claimed in the previous chapter of this work, things only reveal themselves partially, most commonly in practical ways of handling them (cf. Heidegger 1977). Mol thus claims that “ontology is not given in the order of things, but that, instead, ontologies are brought into being, sustained or allowed to wither away, in common, day-to-day sociomaterial practices” (Mol 2005: 6). She proceeds by investigating medical knowledge and protocols in so far as they are located in “activities, events, buildings, instruments, procedures, and so on” (Mol 2005: 32). Indeed, objects are not first constructed and then sustained, but their subsistence is instead a process that requires continuous efforts. For Mol, objects are realized in relational assemblages, a process that is named enactment, but could as well

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have been termed performance by Mol.12 When describing the coordination efforts that are needed to secure the compatibility of multiple enactments of objects, Mol references the notion of ‘ontological choreography’ by Charins Cussins. According to Cussins, it describes the processes “of forging functional trails of compatibility that create and maintain the referentiality between things of different kinds” (cf. Cussins 1996). It seems, thus, as if a certain kind of choreography gets the task of ensuring continuity between the diverse performances or enactments of elements within a transformative assemblage (cf. Mol 2005: 43). As prefigured by Mol, my own model of assemblages relates them to an expanded understanding of both performance and choreography.13 More specifically, I am using the notion performance as a way of conceptualizing the social and material sustenance of assemblages over time. In fact, I will propose that assemblages are achieved performatively, where performativity includes non-human networks and technology. At the same time, I claim that assemblage theory radically calls into question any facile understanding of performance, in as much as the notion of performance 12

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Mol forges her notion of ‘enactment’ of objects in very close (almost all too close) relation to Erving Goffman’s conception of performance in ‘The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life’ from 1956 (Goffman 1956), one of the foundational texts of Performance Studies. She argues that the identity of both subjects and objects is indeed not simply given and expressed, but performed, so that: “performances are not only social, they are material as well.” (Mol 2005: 40) The way partial objects come to be themselves in historic processes of assembling is logically similar to the way subjects come to identify with and embody normative behavior and speech in and via performance. Yet, Mol chooses another term to describe the way in which objects sustain themselves over time, by analogy or parallelism with, yet without taking up the challenge of handling, the ‘overburdened’ references of the notion of performance, she remarks: “In the literature there has been a lot of discussion about the term performance – a term that does not only resonate with the state but also success after difficult work and practical effects of words being spoken. I do not want these resonances; not do I want this text to be burdened with discussions that it seeks no part in. […] it may be helpful [thus] to avoid the buzzword. To look for another term. A word that is relatively innocent […]. I have found one. And, even if I have been using the term performance elsewhere in the past, I have carefully banned it from the present text. I use another verb instead, enact, for which I give no reference, precisely because I would like you to read it in as fresh a way as possible. In practice, objects are enacted” (Mol 2005: 41). Without analyzing Mol’s desire for an impossible purity of theoretic language, it is important to highlight the extreme proximity produced between the two concepts within her argumentation. Mol might believe to use a much more technical term when speaking about ‘enactment’ but, contrary to her belief, not really an ‘innocent’ one, for it appears centrally in Butler’s early texts on performativity. The most direct link between Deleuze and Guattari and Austin’s notion of ‘performativity’ is often drawn by reference to the concept of ‘order word’ within ‘Mille Plateaux’, and the ‘incorporeal transformations’ it implies. Deleuze and Guattari claim that all semantic attributions have bodily effects. In fact, they go so far as to say: “Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 76). Yet, it is not the semantic, coded, or social dimension of assemblages only that interests me here.

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is still based on a reduced understanding of the performing ‘subject’ and, thus, on the idea of self-presence of the body of the performer to some degree at least. There is neither a clearly shaped object or product of performance nor, really, is there a temporally delimited event of its execution; there is not even a clearly ‘bounded’ agent of performance. Instead, the effectiveness of physical co-presence and the sovereignty of the performing body are, to a large degree at least, a misconception based in phenomenological understandings of the self and the philosophy of the subject. Formulating a model of assemblages as performance will allow me to then formulate my own model of more-than-human choreography as iterative reconfiguration of more-than-human worlds. In what follows, I turn towards the theory of performativity on a tangential line, taking from the extensive body of literature and theory on the notion only those small portions that are relevant to my argument. As elaborated above, what I need to conceptually account for are processes that constitute and sustain a precarious, albeit momentarily coordinated, arrangement of material bodies and expressions by way of their iterated encounters and intra-actions. Those processes will be named ‘performative’ with regard to the history of the notion as coined by John L. Austin. Generically speaking, Austin developed a model for the world-making, poietic dimension of language (i.e., the real-worldly effect of speech acts).14 In her update of Austin’s work, Judith Butler analyzes how the oper14

Austin developed his famous model of speech acts based on his finding of performative utterances in the various lectures that he gave at Harvard in the 1950s – summarily published in 1962 as ‘How To Do Things With Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955.’ In Austin’s lectures, performative utterances are opposed to the constative (i.e., representational dimension of language). Contrary to descriptive statements that represent, and therefore double an existing situation and can be evaluated in terms of their truth value, performatives are acts of speech that directly effect change in the social fabric they are part of, or, even more accurately, regularly create the situation that they name. In as much as performatives are acts that produce the (social) situation they name, they thus serve a register of effectivity rather than truth. This dimension of efficiency that is inherent in the more general term ‘performance’ – performance being the concept that evaluates the extent to which a task has been accomplished – will later be spelled out by Jon McKenzie in his book ‘Perform or Else’. All practical knowledge, especially in so far it is the basis for decision-making or action, not only language therefore, can hence be: “evaluated in terms of operational efficiency” (McKenzie 2001: 14). Austin presumes a number of conditions that have to be fulfilled for the effective or ‘happy’ functioning of a performative. The two main conditions are the existence of: “an accepted conventional procedure having a conventional effect”, wherein: “the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure” (Austin 1982: 14). A performative, is, thus, directly bound by its context. Secondly, performatives – through their conventional procedurality – are necessarily linked to forms of “authority”, as Austin notes (Austin 1982: 28). Only in so far as an actor has the authority or legitimation to issue a performative will it arrive at creating the situation it performatively names. Therefore, performatives are compared to rituals because they are not foundational to new procedures or practices of how elements

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ation of a discursive or symbolic matrix of behavior, namely gender, is enacted not only in language, but even more so on a bodily level (cf. Butler 1988, Butler 1993). In this context, the notion of ‘performative’ not only names the constitutive or productive dimension of language, but it also comes to name a process through which a whole cluster of organizational rules for behavior becomes efficient in and through these very acts of behavior themselves (cf. Butler 1988: 522). The normative regulatory scheme (i.e., the code that governs bodily movement or gestural expression), thus coordinating the complex assemblage that affords and regulates these modes of behavior, therefore has a complicated double status: It exists only in as much as it is enacted, realized or, indeed, performed by the social or material actors themselves; at the same time, in its temporal, historic dimension, it functions almost like a prescription to the single actor.15 Performatives, as Austin already argues, become effective only through repetition, which is what Butler indicates by stating that the enactment of a gendered matrix of behavior needs to be ‘rehearsed’, thereby alluding to repeated training of one’s role. One can argue that there is thus a historicity of ‘performatives’ in as much as the repeated protocols that performatives necessarily reproduce and exceed the present moment of the performance of the act. They are linked to a temporal dimension that can be described and analyzed by means of a genealogy that tries to account for the processes that are foundational for specific procedures of performative agency.16

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within any assemblage relate to one another, but rather repeat conventional ones. We also need to note that Austin clearly deems performatives intentional acts, for example, when he states that the procedure of a given performative “is designed for the use by persons having certain thoughts, feelings, or intentions, or for the inauguration of certain consequential conduct” (Austin 1982: 39). Consequentiality or effectiveness is here predicated on self-conscious intentionality. This intentional dimension is what Austin will, thus, term the ‘illocutionary force’ of a speech act, which is opposed both to the mere physical, phonetic or rhetoric act of uttering a statement or sentence (‘locutionary’ dimension) and the manifold effects and consequences any utterance may have through time (its ‘perlocutionary’ dimension) (cf. Austin 1982: 94–100). This condition has to on be called into question in order to include non-human and material components into performative processes of assembly. In fact, this was already done in some of Derrida’s and Butler’s contributions to an extended notion of performativity. Cf. Butler 1988, 525: “The act that one does, the act that one performs, is, in a sense, an act that has been going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence, gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script survives the particular actor who makes use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again.” This is made explicit by Butler in several of her central texts, such as for example in the introduction to her book ‘Excitable Speech’ in which she states that illocutionary utterances, for “they are given in the form of ritual, that is, repeated in time, […] maintain a sphere of operation that is not restricted to the moment of the utterance itself. The illocutionary speech act performs its deed at the moment of the utterance, and yet to the extent that the moment is ritualized, it is never merely a single moment” (Butler 1997: 3). Rituals, as a form of ‘condensed historicity’, extend themselves both into the past and the future. It may well be

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In the development of her theory of performativity in ‘Bodies That Matter’, Butler then links their analysis of embodied performatives to Derrida’s reflections in ‘Signature Event Context’ (Derrida 1988), his own detailed explication and critique of Austin’s theory. In relation to the notion of citation developed by Derrida, Butler describes the formation of a sexed body “as citational accumulation and dissimulation that produces material effects” (Butler 1993: xxi). Performativity is here even more clearly distributed over time. A performative’s agentic power is affected by a citational, temporal dimension that carries the regulatory matrix through which it becomes effective further.17 Butler therefore claims that, in so far as the performative is a form of citation, its effective power “is not the function of an originating will, but is always derivative” (Butler 1993: xxi). If, as they concede, the act of doing one’s gender is actually fundamentally bound by a regulatory scheme that has to be repeated, and thereby carried further through time, then the intentional dimension of the ‘performative’ becomes questionable. It is no longer the single actor that willfully and intentionally brings about the very conditions in which any discursive or gestural action can shape reality.18 Thus, two questions arise: If performatives are, in their executive dimension, (i.e., on the perlocutionary level of effects and consequences), implied in the unfaithful and citational repetition of conventional procedures, thus temporally extended beyond any concrete moment of execution, then are they not also spatially much more extended, which is to say predicated on fields or networks of humans and non-humans, on material vectors, and technological components, a

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indicative to note, again, the importance that the notions of ritual and convention gain in this context, linking the debate directly to the field of Performance Studies, which, in its foundational moments, has been an in-depth inquiry into the implications and modes of operations of social rituals in their diverse forms, most notably in the work of Victor Turner and Richard Schechner. In fact, Butler directly links her ongoing reflection to those two theoreticians already in her most early text on gender performativity (cf. Butler 1988: 525). Cf. Butler 1993, xxi: “Performativity is not a single ‘act’, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals and dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition.” In an extended reflection on the old Sanskrit term ‘iter’, Jacques Derrida has highlighted how any form of repetition of a code or coded scheme necessarily implies a form of infidelity or difference. Because contexts can never fully be saturated (i.e., are not completely transparent and knowable) any (linguistic or discursive) code, if applied to a new context (i.e., if it is therein executed or enacted), will therefore lead to slightly different effects (semantic, or, also, agentic) however (cf. Derrida 1988). Any intention – that seemed obligatory for the performance of an illocutionary speech act for Austin – is thereby necessarily displaced or deferred, in so far as it, firstly, takes the form of a citation, thereby repeating an authoritative and heteronomous semantic or discursive procedure of producing meaning or enacting a performative, and, secondly, will never be in full control of the new and differently furnished or construed situation in which the performative is iteratively repeated (i.e., into which the coded procedure is citationally inserted).

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general form of logisticality, even? How do things themselves then actively take part in producing or composing situations performatively? Indeed, in a later text of theirs on the performativity of economics, Butler seems to include non-humans in their reflection on performativity. In their essay ‘Performative Agency’ from 2010, Judith Butler sums up discourses on the performative dimension of economics and presents arguments that question the separability of economics and socio-political domains. Moreover, they seem to reevaluate and broaden some of their earlier arguments on performativity. Performativity, here, is not merely defined as a form of activity located or even simply constituting a human, intentional subject. By stating that “[…] performativity has become a way to think about ‘effects’, in particular to supply an alternative to causal frameworks for thinking about effects” (Butler 2010: 147), Butler takes up an argument that we have outlined above by delineating how the effectivity of a given assemblage cannot be tied back to single actors. They thereby affirm the anti-essentialist impulse of theories of performativity and highlight how specific, historically bound practices generate larger-order social entities and their processual efficiency, rather than taking them as pre-existing and already delimited entities: “In other words, it is not possible simply to situate certain processes and activities within a state, or indeed, an economy, as if ‘state’ or ‘economy’ were pre-given entities, already bound, identifiable, and knowable” (Butler 2010: 147). Performativity, thereby, is a concept that is put to use in order to describe processes “that produce ontological effects, that is, that work to bring into being certain kinds of realities” (Butler 2010: 147). Now, in doing so, the subject as autonomous, intentional creator of its environment, as the agentic locus of performativity, becomes dubious. As Butler highlights: “[…] the model of the speaking subject fails to provide an adequate way of understanding how performativity works” (Butler 2010: 150). In evaluating the performativity of price-setting mechanisms, Butler seems to employ – as if for testing purposes – the vocabulary of Actor-Network-Theory: “It is not only the explicit speech act that exercises performative power; other exercises include (a) the mundane and repeated acts of delimitation that seek to maintain a separation among economic, social and political spheres, (b) modes of prediction and anticipation that constitute part of economic activity itself, and (c) organizations of human and non-human networks, including technology, that enter into specific economic activities such as price-setting” (Butler 2010: 150). In this enumeration, performativity is, firstly, predicated on a faculty to articulate (i.e., to partition or striate differently enabled domains and regulate their movement relative to one another) – the repeated acts of delimiting the economic, social, and political sphere – including any act of cutting apart and together of materiality within assemblages. Secondly, the exercise of its agentic potential is predicated on human and non-human networks or assemblages within which it is actualized.

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One can therefore state, as Butler does: “[…] it is not simply that a subject performs a speech act; rather, a set of relations and practices is constantly renewed, and agency traverses humans and non-humans” (Butler 2010:150). A broad spectrum of entities are included into the field of operation of a performative: Rather than sticking to “the Austinian presumption that there is always someone who is delegated to speak or that discourse has to take the form of a discrete verbal enunciation” (Butler 2010: 150), in the case of pricing patterns, to which Butler refers, they argue that their performative power relies: “[…] on broad networks of social relations, institutionalized practices, including technological instruments. So, the assumption of a ‘sovereign’ speaker is lost, and whatever conception of agency takes its place presumes that agency is itself dispersed” (Butler 2010: 151). We might, therefore, formulate a provisional summary of what performativity might mean, within the context of assemblages, as follows: Performativity delineates the process and modality through which a set of relations and practices, including non-humans, repeatedly and effectively re-generates itself. Within this process of precarious sustenance, there is no authoritative position that would allow a singular subject, by means of a discursive or bodily act, or a set of those acts, to performatively generate or impact the situation it describes, names, or enacts. Performance may thus be the name for how assemblages continuously, and as repeated protocols of encountering, both re-actualize and exercise their agentic potential. In fact, this more detailed model resembles Laermans’ definition of assemblages, cited previously, as “constantly shifting force-field(s) producing an emergent total performativity” (Learmans 2008: 12). Any assemblage’s potential, in turn, is fueled by the vibrant materiality of its elements, yet, it may become effective only in so far as those components are momentarily and provisionally coordinated. It is only by and via their iterated encounter that they exist, while – as an emergent whole – they form a milieu that procedurally and historically allocates and distributes positions and agentic resources to its components because assemblages are built from the relations and interactions of their components. Within the machinic production and distribution of agency, thus, the assemblage concurrently articulates its parts (i.e., positions them relative to one another). It thereby re-creates unequal, inclined hierarchies of positions. The “set of relations and practices” of which Butler speaks, are always based on a-symmetrical positions, given that they constitute an uneven space of circulation as I will argue later. In fact, speaking of a distributed notion of agency always also means evoking an unequal field of distribution of agency. This claim will be elaborated further within the next chapter. Nonetheless, it is important to re-state and forcefully acknowledge the agency of all of its parts, because an assemblage does not exist without the repeated performances of encounter and intra-action between its components. The assemblage is, ontologically, but the mere and iterated ‘sympathy’ of and between parts (to cite

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Deleuze again, cf. Deleuze/Pernet 2002: 69). Thus, agency is articulated twice, as both restraint and resource (i.e., an articulated position allocated by the assemblage, but always also as re-iterated execution and, thus, precarious preservation of the assemblage by and as the sympathetic, provisionally coordinated relations and practices of its components).19 It may, then, not always be possible to predict which encounters or interactions of its components will make the assemblage undergo a full deterritorialization. There are always virtual encounters that may make the system go to pieces, disintegrate, lose coherence, and thus make it return to the ‘body without organs’ on which it appeared in the first place.20 While I have described assemblages as the iterated, performative sustenance of specific arrangements or networks of both human and non-human components that momentarily cooperate, I now want to use the notion of assemblage to criticize an understanding of performances as mere live events bound to autonomous subjects and their poietic power. I will therefore rephrase a lecture given by Fred Moten 19

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As Manuel DeLanda argues, assemblages are constituted by both bottom-up and downward causality. While an assemblage exists only in so far as its elements come together as a precarious, yet momentarily coherent composition, once it is in place: “it immediately starts acting as a source of limitation and opportunities for its components” (DeLanda 2016a: 19). This can easily be explicated in relation to institutions. Indeed, an institution exists only in so far as it is generated by repeated interactions of its elements – think of a jour-fix that repeats itself from week to week, the repeated social and linguistic interaction between the members of the institution, but also of the material resources that have to constantly flow into it, like electricity, water or food. All the while, whenever it is in place and functions as an institution, it will affect its elements or members: It both offers them possibilities, for example, to influence other institutions in a more concerted, effective way, but will also set limitation, like working hours or other regulations. The assemblage acts both as a source of limitation and as resource for its components: “[…] the whole both constrains and enables the parts” (cf. DeLanda 2006a). In another text of mine, I have tried to think of performance not as self-legitimate action of a subject, but as being premised on a structure of delegation (cf. Frischkorn 2018). Delegated performance is a term coined by British art historian Claire Bishop in her book ‘Artificial Hells’ (cf. Bishop 2012: 219–240) in which she describes performances whose main characteristic “is the hiring of non-professional performers, rather than these events being undertaken by the artists themselves” (Bishop 2012: 219). While the body art of the 1960s to ‘80s: “valorised live presence and immediacy via the artist’s own body, in the last decade”, Bishop claims that: “this presence is no longer attached to the single performer but instead to the collective body of a social group” (Ibid.). André Lepecki takes up the notion in his 2013 talk at the Museum for Contemporary Art in Warsaw (Lepecki 2013b), linking it both to performance art of the ‘60s, especially to Bruce Naumann, but also referencing the work of Santiago Sierra that is also present in Bishop’s account. In Lepecki’s talk, performance is then also defined as a temporally and spatially extended social and material force-field that prescribes behavior and forms of embodiment. In that respect, I claim that assemblage theory is indeed a potent tool to question the idea of self-presence, or bodily co-presence which are often assumed to be central preconditions for performance (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2004: 32).

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entitled ‘Blackness and Nonperformance’. In this lecture, later partly republished as an article entitled ‘Erotics of Fugitivity’ (cf. Moten 2018a), the author, by way of his reading of an article by legal scholar Sora Han entitled ‘Slavery as Contract: Betty’s Case and the Question of Freedom’ recalls the 1857 legal case of the same name in which a slave woman named Betty was declare freed by the Massachusetts Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, but decided to return to Tennessee with her owners, thereby renouncing her freedom to contract for a renewed status of slavery. In close relation to different accounts of this court case that, according to Moten, all emanate the “lower frequencies” of a Black woman’s “homeless, stateless imperative” which speaks “against the grain of a metaphysical presumption of a right to perform or not perform” (Moten 2018a: 246), he uses the account of Sora Han as a motor to question some of the fundamental paradigms of Performance Studies (i.e., the liveness of the action of performance as much as the self-presence and social, political and legal authority of the ‘agent’ of performance). Indeed, for Moten “blackness insists that we prefer a displacement of liveness” (Moten 2015: n.p.) or of the alleged here and now of the event-performance and “the particular and sclerotic notion of presence that liveness is supposed to instantiate” (Moten 2018a: 242). At stake, rather, is the presence of the flesh, one entangled in many lines of becoming. Moten, therefore, describes Betty’s case as a highly ambivalent act of “withholding consent to be a subject”, which radically questions the basis for a rationalist, modernist understanding of subjectivity. Indeed, for Moten, subjectivity is no more than the effects of desiring a subjectivity that is but the brutal, exclusive, and racializing fantasy and imperative of governing one’s own as much as others bodies and desires (thereby rendering them thing, as I have argued in the previous chapter); this is an imperative, as Moten insists “[…] which we must keep on learning not to want, which we have to keep on practicing not wanting” (Moten 2018a: 244). Moten’s notion of ‘nonperformance’ is thus circumscribed by more than one reference point. On the one hand, nonperformance is (in) Betty’s gesture when she renounces the status of subject and its according legal apparatuses such as ‘the law of contract’. Yet, Betty’s disavowals of individual freedom should not be read “as some transcendent achievement or enactment of absolute freedom but rather […] as refusal of any such transcendences or abstraction or formalism in the interest of immanence, materiality, and what we might call a certain illegal surrealism” (Moten 2018a: 251). Nonperformance is, thus, marked as “a highly political refusal to perform under the normative (ir)rationalities […] under which performances can take place, are allowed to take place, and in taking place, are validated as being (the only) valid performances” (Lepecki 2016: 14). It radically calls into question the premise of authority and sovereignty, on which any philosophy of the subject as bodily, psychological, social and legal entity relies, thereby also radically questioning the premise of a conventional understanding of performance itself. Moten proposes a positive understanding of non-individuality, which he repeatedly terms ‘consent to not be

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a single being’ in relation to the work of Denise Ferreira de Silva, who coined the term ‘difference without separability’ in an essay of the same title (cf. Ferreira de Silva 2016) and Édouard Glissant, who, in his ‘Poetics of Relation’ speaks of the ‘consent not to be a single being’ (cf. Glissant 1997). Therein, consent is not understood as an original act that instantiates relationality, but as a general field that provides the ground for calling into question any metaphysics of individuality and individuation (cf. Moten 2018: 266). Just as Deleuze and Guattari claim that lines of flight are primary, that they are before the state and its institutions, Moten insists that flesh is before the body “as empathy, as general and prior consent, as consistent precariousness” (Moten 2015: n.p.), that the deviant is thus before the norm, and that there is a social and material realm of (non-)performances which exists before and beyond any individuated performance. Indeed, the notion of performance, thus, always speaks of an ethical and political dilemma: We seem to encounter performances at specific places and times. We, thus, want to both record and prescribe their place and time in order to mark them extraordinary events; events that take place in the abstracted light of the scene, on which clearly bounded bodies appear, acts and thus becomes self- and alter-effective, or -affective. Meanwhile, bodies and their performances appear and disappear. In reality, they come from and go back to a more general realm of materiality, from which they only surface momentarily. Their momentary, in-between presence on the stage of performance should be understood, Moten claims, as a surreal, ghostly presence, haunted by the assembled forces which they carry, express, and actualize. Betty’s act of submergence to Tennessee, as Moten does not stop reminding us, is as beautiful as it is terrible, thus issues a call to imagine something “on the other side of either the freedom to perform, or the freedom not to perform” (Moten 2015: n.p.). It is the consent to what, at the end of this work, I will call a more-than-human choreography of attunement. Claiming that it is a complex, entangled field of assembled and assembling desire that provides the charge and force of any performative act, which allows for any appearance on the stage of performance, does not imply that the social and material ‘field’ from which performances emanate is structured non-hierarchically. On the contrary, it is the mechanism of performance itself that singles out an agent, place, and time of the event of appearance, action, and effectiveness that is at once an expression and motor of the problematic logic of selfpresence, self-effectiveness, and self-possession which could be said to participate in the governmental imperative according to which human and things are always sorted and kept apart. I will, thus, momentarily conclude: Conventionally, performative means transformative. However, any action, any way of handling material, of material inter-acting with itself, is performative in so far as it partakes in the sustenance or making of assemblages within the model presented here. Performative action may then always be either territorializing or de-territorializing (i.e., have stabilizing or destabilizing

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effects on the surroundings). If, as I argue, the mode of sustenance of assemblages is performative, then our actions co-shape their choreographic diagram, a notion that I will develop further. As I want to outline and specify, the mode of making assemblages is determined by choreographic principles of handling that we execute. In short, our handling of materials brings about different worlds. Modes of handling material are always already social, material, and manifold, but become transformative in an ecological sense if we alter our mode of handling things on the level of choreographic principles. How and when the effects of the application of different choreographic principles of handling material accumulate and become visible has not yet been determined. It needs to be practiced over and over again. This is what I want to outline in relation to Vladimir Miller’s practice of Polyset.

Polyset (Vladimir Miller) There are no tables, no chairs, and the materials and objects resist easy categorization and usability. The have to be mis-used, adapted, they have a will on their own. The built environment has to be negotiated (with) on the level of the object. There is a potential in a thing being one thing one day, and a totally different thing the day after. There is also potential in that thing changing hands. Miller 2017: n.p. This is how Vladimir Miller describes an important aspect of his artistic research environment entitled Polyset. Its focus is on the precarious handling of things – things that resist easy categorization and straight-forward usability, things that want to be handled by many hands, in many hands, and will still be either used or instrumentalized. The potential of Polyset, Miller claims, lies in the possibility of a thing being something else the next day, in the potential of a thing changing hands, in them being entangled in many practices, thereby changing functionality, offering new affordances, and actualizing different capacities. Polyset is about handling materials and about the social protocols and choreographic principles that are established in the process of doing so. In a way, it is about a basic form of logisticality because it is a space in which artists reformulate their own artistic practice in a constant interplay with an environment that tries hard not to fall back onto the social-material princi-

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ples of property, disposability, or all too efficient modes of mobilizing material – a space in which functionality (of objects or tools) has to be established over time and in which territories are shifting.

Image 8: a.pass Polyset 2020W38-40, a.pass, Brussels (2020).

Photography: © Vladimir Miller

Polyset is a collectively used space that hosts artistic practices and evolves with them. As a pedagogical project, which takes place within arts institutions, it offers space and time for the process of embodying different artistic practices within a collectively shared exoskeleton. It may also be an experiment in an itinerant, ambulant ethics of handling material. It seems as though Miller’s project was implicitly taking up some of the problems analyzed above. It starts as a setting in which (at least ideally) no protocols of property or functionality have been established as yet. Over time, one can observe how easily it happens that material is subjected by the seizing power of the hand of human participants, thereby claiming ownership (albeit only provisionally), and disabling it into the status of functional tool or knowable object; how hard it is, conversely, to suspend those protocols of grasping, seizure, and the establishment of territory, even in an artistic and experimental space which is built on the ideas of commoning and fragility, becomes clear. Yet, the desired ra-

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tionale of Miller’s spatial proposal is to become a place in which things, at least for a time, escape conventional functionality and in which they are allowed to resist at least some of the habitual protocols of using them. Polyset, while not naively claiming to completely undo territory, functionality, or property, is a space that, as Miller states “tries very hard not to settle”. It wants to allow for a collective experience of and experiment with “unsettled feeling, the feeling of a thing that unsettles with others” (Harney/Moten 2013: 97). The emphasis here is on the experiment (i.e., the impossible attempt not to settle) while knowing that some form of settling (i.e., acts of framing and choreographically cutting apart materiality), allocating fixed positions, and prescribing functionality onto things will necessarily already have taken place prior to the initiation of the practice and will continue while it is going on. To follow this experimental attempt will help me to better understand how it necessarily fails (i.e., how handling material will, to some degree, always establish organicity, territoriality, functionality, and reified principles of use, while simultaneously probing strategies of suspending these processes of hierarchization or allocation of fixed positions as much as possible).

CONSISTENCY OF THE ASSEMBLAGE (POLYSET): Group of human participants Polyset is a pedagogical project that was and is being hosted by different arts universities and institutions.21 Thus, the group of people coming together within the Polyset is determined by the institutional framework. Normally, Miller invites all of an institution’s artists, professors, and students to come and work on their respective artistic or research practices within Polyset for a specific amount of time. The group’s size shifts, according to the needs of the participants, yet, ideally all of the space’s stakeholders (from the director of the institution to the people doing the care-work of cleaning or cooking) would be involved in the ongoing process of commoning. Meanwhile, all social processes within the group are negotiated as spatial protocols.

Place of production/performance Describing his project, Miller speaks of an “artistic research environment” or “open shared practice environment” that uses fragility as its central architectural principle (Miller 2018)22 . Polyset, ideally, aims at establishing a fluid sociality of collaboration; it wants to be “a poly-central gathering” (Miller 2018) which is self-structured, self-

21 22

For more information, cf. https://apass.be/a-pass-polyset-2023w18-20/ (last accessed on April 26, 2023). Most of the citations about Polyset that follow stem from interviews that I have conducted with Miller himself in April and May 2018.

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organized, and is open to contributions from anyone. As Miller explains, the project is built upon the idea that an institution moves in within itself, starts from scratch, and collectively rehearses the process of establishing a shared exoskeleton. By temporarily collapsing institutional protocols, they can be renegotiated over time (cf. Miller 2018). It is the process of constructing the space together, from a collection of haphazard materials, that initiates a negotiation about protocols of handling material, about social protocols of using space, and about their respective relations to the institutional framework that hosts the gathering (or thing, to speak in Latourian terms). In order to do so, Polyset is about establishing a space of work and encounter in which the architectural fragility of the space, Miller hopes, allows for more social, organizational, and ideological fragility (cf. Miller 2018). Equally important is a firm insistence on the priority of practice and process over product, and an attention for the moment of individuation of single or collective practices with, in, and as their material exoskeleton. Indeed, Miller believes that practices are “bound by space, and if space gets shaky, unstable, shareable, so does the practice.” Polyset thus wants to be: “[…] a place where our individual ideas and processes have not yet achieved a solid state and flow into each other” (Miller 2018). To be concrete: Within Polyset, it is in principle always permitted to unbuild or re-purpose all of the materials that are present. Meanwhile, a respectful sense of attending to each-others practices and their exoskeletons evolves very quickly, so that the participants do not actually ‘steal’ from one-another or destroy established structures. Often, one instead starts to attach oneself spatially to places that have been established by others. As much as the material exoskeleton of a practice is like an “extension of one’s body that renders it porous at the same time” (Miller 2018), it becomes an interface for others: “If someone uses something that I built, it is exactly this extension of my body that forges these links” (Miller 2018). In that respect, Miller also speaks of a ‘literality’ of the space. For him, the space “through its inherent changeability”, allows for: “[…] a certain immediacy in embodying existing social protocols.”23 Polyset, therefore, is built on the idea that material, territorial,

23

An example that we discussed was the spatial modality of our collaboration during my visit to one of his Polyset projects at the University of Giessen in May 2018. Miller recalls: “Let’s say, we started working together, so it feels kind of natural or supportive that you move your space of work next to mine, and that you build the structure that supports your work – whatever it is, it’s a bunch of sticks that make you feel comfortable somehow in that space, essentially a little cave but nevertheless it’s thereby defined as your space – close to mine. But if that action has a kind of supportive, enhancing settling-function towards the work-relationship that we have established through the interviews, I think that’s quite interesting to see how those kinds of minimal gravitational pulls come together and that they, by some kind of magnetism, can host or embody our collective practice in a nice way” (Miller 2018). At the same time, spatial proximity does not necessarily lead to a collaboration or exchange between practices. As Miller states: “Just because two actants are close to each-other, it doesn’t necessarily mean

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and ideological aspects of artistic practice, and of space in general, are linked to one another.

Image 9: a.pass Polyset 2013W40-42, Tanzfabrik Berlin (2013).

Photography: © Vladimir Miller

It is this strong focus on the co-dependence and co-emergence of social codes and architectural or spatial structures and their territorial dimension, as well as the special attention given to the handling of material, which links Miller’s practice to the notion of assemblage as formulated by Deleuze and Guattari. In and via his ‘practice environment’, Miller is able to address, analyze, and question the interdependency of materials components and infrastructure, social use, and the ideological coding of shared spaces. In that respect, his practice does not distinguish between artistic practices and their exoskeleton. Rather, they are always inherently linked and expressive in and of one another, in ways that Manuel DeLanda has formulated for the notion of assemblage: “The identity of an assemblage is not only embodied in its materiality but also expressed by it” (DeLanda 2011: 200).

that there is meaningful intra-action between them, or any kind of encounter. Things can be in absolute proximity to each-other without ever interacting” (Miller 2018).

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Use of matter Polyset is conceived as an experimental, collective commoning process. It is, therefore, built on several key rules that also characterize the specific logisticality that it generates: Firstly, the space is built from a collection of haphazard materials. Often, this includes materials that are present in the institution, but which are somewhat ‘underused’ as Miller highlights (cf. Miller 2018); these are not exactly waste, so to speak, but residual and forgotten things, remainders, ghosts, and leftovers. He and the group of participants of Polyset always spend an entire day trying to look for materials that the institution (which hosts the proposal) owns, but does not actively use. These materials are collected, sorted, and taken to the Polyset. Other materials are then added to the mix, as I will explain in what follows. Secondly, no ownership of materials is allowed in the space. Or, better: Ownership is not a given principle of the space; it can only be established (or deferred) over time and by practice. The same holds, in many ways, for repetition. Miller states: “It is about creating an environment where simple repetition is made complicated. Yes, you are perfectly allowed to repeat yourself, but it takes an effort. And since things flow from effortless to effortless and not from effort to effort, somehow the environment nurtures you towards reinvention. That is its kind of primary function. I think, this is about difference in the repetition where the difference takes over” (Miller 2018). The participants are invited to reinvent their practice in relation to a relatively scarce collection of materials because materials for working are brought in haphazardly. Indeed, the scarcity of both materials at hand and the porousness of the space’s internal spatial borders make for its productive and transformative potential. They are the defining material criteria that also distinguish Polyset from other co-working or shared atelier spaces. Miller often speaks about the partiality of the space because it does not allow a totalizing grip or seizure. It is poly-centric because it is used by heterogeneous parties at the same time who are organized on a non-hierarchical plane: “You have to content yourself with what is there, and follow the path which the materials that are available in the space propose to you. This is the big difference to a kind of atelier-sharing: where you start from the fantasy of total availably; where you start by dreaming of full disposability of resources; where you work on the question of ‘what exactly do I need?’ until that thing that you needed will be available and comply to your artistic intentions” (Miller 2018, translation mine). The fact, that there is no total availability of material, thirdly, nourishes a different sense of negotiation: Polyset inclines participants to relate to materials in a rather

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improvised manner. They often need to use materials in unconventional ways, stitching them together and repurposing them beyond their designed functionality. In that regard, Miller speaks of a “widening of the margin of applicability” (Miller 2018). Here is where he also differentiates between material and object: Material is the name for unspecified components that become objects when they are used in a specific way for and within artistic practices: “When materials enter practice spaces they become objects, but as the space is somehow unclear and very fast in its temporality, the object can very quickly become material again” (Miller 2018). Yet, at the same time, the border between material and object is never quite clear: “I see these notions – object and material – more as a continuum. They are not so clearly separated. The idea of a continuum allows us to put an emphasis on how things travel between spaces, or how material travels towards object. Can it be in this grey zone in between material and object, and what does this grey zone actually allow for?” (Miller 2018).24 I will, in what follows, describe Miller’s proposal as an assemblage because its socio-material consistency highlights both the heterogeneity of materials and affects brought into play and the precarious and temporally limited nature of collaboration between materials, both human and non-human. I am interested in Miller’s proposal because it, on the one hand, tries to insists on the fact that established functionalities and relations of both human and non-human participants can be challenged and altered (i.e., it insists on an unstable, fragile – read transformative – quality of the space), while not claiming to completely eschew the making of territory, function, hierarchy, or power-relations on the other. The assemblage of Polyset itself always consists of bottom-up processes initiated by the participants and the material layout of the space, and top-down processes which are initiated either by Miller, who also calls himself a bounded authority within a partial hierarchy, or by the institutional framework that hosts Polyset. Analyzing his practice will help me to better understand the extent to which nomadic practices of ‘following the material’, which open up potentially disturbing or challenging lines of transformation in the space, are constantly intertwined and captured by stabilizing, striating operations that provide the spatial infrastructure’s stability and reliability. In order to articulate those interlinked, entangled vectors of

24

Miller also states that he often brings industrial materials to space that have been designed for a very specific purpose. Here, he says, it is as if the design process had drawn a clear border around specific functionalities of the objects that then allowed for unending ways of repurposing them as soon as one crosses the line of what they had been initially designed for. A strong stratification of design objects apparently allows for ever more and prolific encounters with the object once it has been circumvented.

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the space, I will describe Polyset as a field of action and space of circulation in which handling of material takes place, thus performatively establishing positions, capacities, and agentic potentials for all of the elements (human and non-human) that are part of it. The establishment and sustenance of these positions and relations is always marked by micro-dynamics and -hierarchies of power which I will, in relation to Stuart Hall and Alexander Weheliye, call ‘preferential articulations’. By returning to the original texts by Deleuze and Guattari, I will finally uncover an ethics of ‘following the material’, but I aim to concretize it with relation to the practice of Polyset.

3.3 Assemblages as fields of action and spaces of circulation: ‘preferred articulations’ Miller doubts that the notions of assemblage is productive for the description of the collective practice of Polyset. To him, the notion suggests a smooth leveling out of agentic capacities of different elements and the complete de-hierarchization of positions. It does not, to him, describe the actual making and unmaking of territory, the processes of objectification and de-objectification that always happen within a complex and entangled ecosystem of bodies, materialities, and practices such as Polyset. He insists: “[…] the idea of assemblage tends to simplify the space towards a smooth availability. But that is not the case [for Polyset, M.F.]. The topography of it is a very diverse landscape” (Miller 2018). I agree with Miller here, both with regards to Polyset and in relation to the notion of assemblage. I have already cited Jane Bennett, above, who proposes that assemblages should be described as “uneven topographies” in which “power is not distributed equally across its surface” (Bennett 2010: 24). I here want to use Miller’s artistic research environment to think about a nuanced version of assemblages as uneven spaces of circulation and fields of action. What the space of Polyset affords is to allow for all participants to redefine their respective artistic or theoretic practice in relation to a shifting array of materials and an uneven, transforming spatial surrounding. A central working hypothesis, therefore, is the following: Practices change and take form in relation to materials. In that regard, Miller often speaks of the ‘exoskeleton’ of artistic practice.25 The notion de25

The use of the notion of exoskeleton by Miller resembles Manuel DeLanda’s use of the notion, within his account of European history, as based on ‘assemblage theory’: “The human endoskeleton was one of the many products of that ancient mineralization. Yet that is not the only geological infiltration that the human species has undergone. About eight thousand years ago, human populations began mineralizing again when they developed an urban exoskeleton: bricks of sun-dried clay became the building materials for their homes, which in

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scribes the material partners, forms, or infrastructure that an artistic practice might take or relate to – its external life as a collection of objects, architectural structures, or material remainders. Materializing one’s artistic practice in a collectively shared space is Polyset’s central invocation or affordance. All participants are invited to do so, which means that they are invited to make their artistic practices take space by working with materials, by re-inventing them in relation to material. In a series of interviews that I conducted with Miller, he explains the idea as follows: “[…] the work with material allows you to produce a kind of embodied process of what you are thinking about. It enables this kind of sketchy production of some thing, because otherwise your ideas are just like voices in your head. And here, you give it some kind of a body, and that body starts talking back to you. Through touching the materials, you create those others that you can actually be in dialogue with, instead of being there only with yourself” (Miller 2018). Concurrently, the premise of externalizing one’s practice also allows for a different process of negotiation between the diverse practices that are present within Polyset. Miller insists on the idea that the built structures that one establishes in the space, or things that one leaves behind, are like material ‘surrogates’ of the practice which turn surrounded and were surrounded by stone monuments and defensive walls. This exoskeleton served a purpose similar to its internal counterpart: to control the movement of human flesh in and out of a town’s walls. The urban exoskeleton also regulated the motion of many other things: luxury objects, news, and food, for example. In particular, the weekly markets that have always existed at the heart of most cities and towns constituted veritable motors, periodically concentrating people and goods from near and faraway regions and then setting them into motion again, along a variety of trade circuits” (DeLanda 2010: 27/28, emphasis mine). Manuel DeLanda’s ‘1000 Years of Non-Linear History’ relates European history from around 1000 AD until today from the point of view of stones, bio-mass, genes, and semiotic material. Within that book, as the above citations indicates, DeLanda accounts for the history of urban settlement as a form of material exoskeleton of the human body. Similar to the history of mineralization that the human body underwent, in which bones were produced which in turn allowed for greater range of movement and more stability of the organism, the mineral exoskeleton which, at least to some degree, as part of the process of becoming sedentary (which provided one of the starting points for reflection for Deleuze and Guattari, as we will see), seemed to provide for more stability and safety. Interestingly, DeLanda here describes the exoskeleton basically as a choreographic score in which the motion and flux of objects is regulated and controlled: the periodic concentration of goods and people on a market, for example, which are then set off on a tangential vector into a ‘variety of trade circuits’, almost seems like a staged movement. In both cases, internal and external mineralization, in the becoming of an endoskeleton as much as of an exoskeleton, the process allows for new movement possibilities, while simultaneously excluding other: “Thus, the urban infrastructure may be said to perform, for tightly packed populations of humans, the same function of motion control that our bones do in relation to our fleshy parts” (DeLanda 2010: 28, emphasis mine).

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keep on influencing both the space itself and others in that space. At the same time, the different artistic practices start to converse with each-other via their respective exoskeletons because ownership of materials is not a given principle of the space. As the different artistic practices hosted by the Polyset start to build their respective exoskeletons in space (i.e., use the materials that are at hand) they are necessarily reformulated, as Miller insists: All the while, by using specific materials, they concurrently activate new affordances or capacities within the materials themselves. Both practice and exoskeleton develop together. In the meantime, then, they also give rise to different social configurations. The process in which practice and material exoskeleton (i.e., material moving partners) co-evolve, is central to the formulation of the notion of assemblage by Deleuze and Guattari, as well. Within ‘Mille Plateaux’, the authors prominently claim that it is the collaboration (i.e., the provisional choreographic coordination) with other materials, be they human or non-human, that determine what kind of capacities a specific element of an assemblage may actualize.26 As mentioned already above, one of their central examples is the assemblage of horse, rider, and projectile as it was invented by the nomad warriors of the steppe within the Middle Ages: By way of a new coordination of these entities – man, horse, and any sort of projectile – Deleuze and Guattari claim, two things happen: The capacities of the weapon change even while, concurrently, a whole new form of social practice comes to be, including courtly love.27 With relation to the enactment of capacities of material elements within an assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari write: “[…] a technical element remains abstract, entirely underdetermined, as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposes. It is the machine that is primary in the relation to the technical element: not the technical machine, itself

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In a later interview, Deleuze frames the interrelation of material and social components of an assemblage as follows: “In assemblages you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs. The relations between the two are pretty complex. For example, a society is defined not by productive forces and ideology, but by ‘hodgepodges’ and ‘verdicts’. Hodgepodges are combinations of interpenetrating bodies. These combinations are wellknown and accepted (incest, for example, is a forbidden combination). Verdicts are collective utterances, that is, instantaneous and incorporeal transformations which have currency in a society (for example, ‘from now on you are no longer a child’...)” (Deleuze 2006b: 177). Cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 339: “The lance and the sword came into being in the Bronze Age only by virtue of the man-horse assemblage, which caused a lengthening of the dagger and pike, and made the first infantry weapons, the morning star and the battle-ax, obsolete. The stirrup, in turn, occasioned a new figure of the man-horse assemblage, entailing a new type of lance and new weapons; and this man-horse constellation is itself variable, and has different effects depending on whether it is bound up with the general conditions of nomadism, or later readapted to the sedentary conditions of feudalism.”

3. Assemblages as more-than-human performances

a collection of elements, but the social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage that determines what is a technical element at a given moment, what is its usage, extension, comprehension, etc.” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 398). While assemblages are based on relations of exteriority, and therefore do not imprint essential identities onto their parts, they nevertheless exert influence on their components by allowing them to either actualize or enact specific affordances or capacities. In turn, elements come to exercise specific capacities only within complex, heterogeneous, and historically precarious assemblages, for example as either tool or weapon.28 All the while, human protocols of behavior and ways of relation to entangled, more-than-human worlds will also be altered in the process. Thus, it is the pattern of coordination that evolves between all of an assemblage’s elements that determines what kind of capacities elements are allowed to be displayed and how practices change over time. Patterns of coordination, in turn, come to be in repeated, iterated intra-action of the elements, guided by specific principles of handling. It is the modality of choreographic handling, established among and in-between all thingly components of an assemblage (both human and nonhuman), that influences how functionality and agency is distributed to diverse elements. In what follows, I propose thinking of these modalities as choreographic ones and, therefore, characterize the assemblage as a field of action or space of circulation. Different assemblages allow for different capacities to be actualized: A nomadic assemblage allows for the ‘absolute speed’ vector of the weapon to be actualized, whereas sedentary, agricultural assemblages are marked by a more gravitational energy in which solid bodies are rubbed against each other, thereby producing a higher degree of friction. While both tool and weapon belong to the same machinic phylum, they actualize different capacities within the concrete assemblages that they become part of, because their respective movement trajectories differ: If a dagger or hammer becomes part of a war-assemble as a projectile, then it gains speed (i.e., its energies multiply and accelerate). In fact, its choreographic potential is a wholly different one: Its movement trajectory is longer, the movement is faster, and its energetic vector is freed from possible friction while it traverses the air (cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 395/396). With respect to movement, the assemblage might then productively be described as a space of circulation, in so far as different movement trajectories, relative to one another, are prescribed or offered. Depending on the assemblage’s 28

In their analysis of tool and weapon, Deleuze and Guattari unfold a model of how an assemblage’s material components can be conceptualized: Weapons, the authors claim, have a privileged relation with projection. Anything, really, that is thrown (i.e., whose propulsion is ‘ballistic’) becomes a weapon. Tools, conversely, are both ‘introceptive’ and ‘introjective’ – they prepare “a matter from a distance, in order to bring it into a state of equilibrium or to appropriate it for a form of interiority” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 395).

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internal consistency it might allow for more or less chaotic, unpredictable, or more repetitive, clearly bound patterns of movement of its elements to arise. The notion of ‘space of circulation’, as I have shown in previous chapters, stems from Michel Foucault who uses it in the context of his analysis of the function of police within modern nation states (cf. Foucault 2007: 325). In relation to the barricade and André Lepecki’s notion of ‘choreopolice’ and ‘choreopolitics’, I have thus far differentiated between smooth spaces of circulation, in which elements flow constantly and within predictable channels or pathways, and more turbulent spaces of circulation, which do not allow for the movement pathways of elements to be predicted and controlled as easily. Therefore, new collisions and encounters may emerge. Thus, according to the notions that I have introduced, the assemblage may tend towards smooth flow in so far as it is territorialized and follows a model of organicity (such as the state, or strata), while it may also allow for more turbulent flow. Even if the use of a Foucauldian notion may seem unconventional with respect to the theory of assemblages, this model is implicit in Deleuze and Guattari’s model of assemblages itself. The authors, for example, write: “The State needs to subordinate hydraulic force to conduits, pipes, embankments, which prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point to another, and space itself to be striated and measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid, and flows proceed by parallel, laminar layers” (Deleuze/ Guattari 1987: 363). One may productively claim that it acts as a choreographic structure to its components in so far, then, as the assemblage performatively enacts and generates a specific space of circulation – a modality that is often subsumed and somewhat simplified under the rubric of striated vs. smooth space by the authors. By prescribing a certain space of circulation, the assemblage concurrently accords positions and relative degrees of movement and agency to its elements, thereby delineating what I refer to as a field of action. I take the notion of field and position from Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of societal sub-areas. In Bourdieu’s model, fields are delineated by positions that can then be used as places to take action from. In their study on ‘Bourdieu’s Theory of Social Fields’, Mathieu Hilgers and Eric Mangez explain the concept as follows: “A field is a structure of relative positions within which the actors and groups think, act and take positions. These relative positions are defined by the volume and structure of their capital. In their position-takings, persons and groups – sometimes unconsciously – pursue interests linked to their relative positions in the field, which may consist in preserving or transforming the position they occupy and the resources associated with it. The position of an actor or a group depends not only on the way in which it manages to renew itself but also on

3. Assemblages as more-than-human performances

the ways in which all the other actors in the field evolve or seek to evolve” (Hilgers/Mangez 2014: 10). Indeed, Bourdieu insists that fields are somewhat closed off to one another (i.e., reigned by internal laws that do not necessarily apply to other fields). They are, furthermore, governed by competitive energies, by “relations of force of a particular type” (Bourdieu 1993: 43). While the notion of field and assemblage cannot be fully mapped onto one another, I here propose taking two thoughts from Bourdieu’s conception of field: As a choreographically structured space of circulation, the assemblage, firstly, allocates positions. Evidently, these positions are not stable ones, but are always in movement. Yet, secondly, specific moving positions endow the elements of the assemblage with specific resources (i.e., agentic capacities). The degree to which they can influence other components, therefore, changes depending on the shifting position. As a field of action and space of circulation, the assemblage exercises effects on both material and social levels. The assemblage’s materiality and sociality, as outlined above, are deeply intertwined and cannot be divided. Now, the material effects of a specific structuration of the assemblage of Polyset, within the larger social space that hosts it, is what Miller calls ‘social boundedness’. Materials are commonly not only privately owned and thus monopolized within specific institutional pathways, but they also carry with themselves coded protocols of use that allow for certain interactions while disallowing others within our contemporary world. Thus, the notion of ‘boundedness’ is a central one for Miller, because it allows us to address material, social, and legal dimensions in which objects and materials are entangled: A wall, which one might want to use in order to attach stuff to or that one might want to paint, is not only architecturally bound up with adjacent walls, but it is also implied in diverse institutional contracts and codes that regulate how and for what purposes it can be used. Indeed, this entanglement of objects with institutional protocols and contracts makes for their conservation and sustenance over time. As Miller states: “So, if I break the wall here, I’m breaking some kind of contract, and the contract will eventually repair the wall. There is a way in which the architectural organism sustains itself in its form. There is a formal inertia to the architectural-social compound of the institution. It bounces back into its ‘status quo’. It’s an almost alive kind of quality to the thing” (Miller 2018). A notion such as boundedness or entanglement might then be applied not only to the material elements of the Polyset, but also to the social and semantic ones.29 Indeed, 29

Here is, thus, where Miller formulates a strong imperative for the entanglement of both practice and environment, but also for the material and expressive elements of practice: “In my research, I try to find out, what aspects can account for both polarities (human practice and non-human materials). What twist do we have to give linguistically so that we are able to ad-

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participants are bound up with one another on a social level, but are also bound up with the respective exoskeleton of their practice which they have invested in over time. In the vocabulary that I am here trying to establish, boundedness can then be translated as the establishment of relatively rigid, coherent spaces of circulation and fields of action. Boundedness speaks of a policed and clearly channeled modality in which both materials and social norms flow and are channeled, in so far as the assemblage of Polyset exists within other assemblages that affect its mode of functioning. In fact, it reveals how specific components within an assemblage are articulated with one another. How, then, can I account for ‘boundedness’ on the actual level of handling things within assemblages? Indeed, the uneven topology of assemblages as spaces of circulation and fields of action is sometimes also termed ‘preferred articulations’ (cf. Hall 1980).30 Within the assemblage, one may argue, an articulation always has a double function; its first function is one of cutting materials apart (i.e., of separating them and, thereby, allocating differentiated positions to them). Articulations also relate the entities that they cut apart to one another in the same manner that, anatomically, a joint separates two bones, but also connects them and delineates their respective movement. ‘Preferred articulations’, as I will outline, then suggests instituted protocols of use, channeled spaces of circulation, and differentially allocated positions. Indeed, as outlined above, the preference given to specific articulations within an assemblage constitutes its uneven topology. North American cultural theorist Alexander G. Weheliye further circumscribes this inherently hierarchical dimension of assemblages in his conception of ‘racializing assemblages’. In his book ‘Habeas Viscus’ he understands racialization not only “as biological or cultural descriptor but as a conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans […]” (Weheliye 2014: 12). By using the notion of assemblage, he calls into question any attempt to naturalize the expressiveness of matter, in his case what he terms ‘flesh’. Thus, even if it pretends to be grounded in ‘natural’ difference, racialization is an artificial process that produces differential effects within bodies. The production of these bodily effects is described

30

dress those aspects that go for all participants? Here, notions such as temporality, availability, and boundedness (in the sense of entanglement within an institution) are interesting for me. The latter one always goes for both sides: With the notion of entanglement, you can address both a wall and a social practice” (Miller 2018, translation mine). Stuart Hall has defined articulation as follows: “a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time”. Instead, he insists that: “[…] you have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made?” (Hall 1996: 141). As David Featherstone writes, Hall thereby “foregrounds the political constitution of relations through its focus on the on-going (re)articulation of relations, which emphasizes the ever-present possibility of articulating relations in different ways” (Featherstone 2011: 140).

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as a performative process that takes places within what Weheliye terms ‘racializing assemblages’, that is as sets of relations, spaces of circulation, and fields of action which is iteratively enacted “via institutions, discourses, practices, desires, infrastructures, languages, technologies, sciences, economies, dreams and cultural artefacts” and produces the onto-epistemic effect of “barring (of) nonwhite subjects from the category of the human” (Weheliye 2014: 38). As Weheliye claims, racializing assemblages exercise power by ascribing “‘corporeal transformations […] to bodies’, etching abstract forces of power onto human physiology and flesh in order to create appearances of a naturally expressive relationship between phenotype and sociopolitical status: the hieroglyphs of the flesh” (Weheliye 2014: 38). In order to grasp this inherently political dimension of racializing assemblages, Weheliye takes recourse to Stuart Hall and to his reconceptualization of the Marxist notion of articulation. In ‘Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance’, Stuart Hall states: “[…] tendential combinations, while not prescribed in the fully determinist sense, are the ‘preferred’ combinations, sedimented and solidified by real historical development over time” (Hall 1980: 44).31 In relation to Hall, Weheliye thus aims at describing the inherent violence of assemblages themselves and the way in which they prescribe certain combinations of elements, certain rhythms, and movement orders: “Preferred articulations insert historically sedimented power imbalances and ideological interests, which are crucial to understanding mobile structures of dominance such as race and gender, into the modus operandi of assemblages. Accordingly, a robust fusion of articulation and assemblage accents the productive ingredients of social formation while not silencing questions of power, reinstituting an innocent version of the subject, or neglecting the deterritorializing capabilities of power, ideology and so on. Articulated assemblages such as racialization materialize as sets of complex relations of articulations that constitute an open articulating principle – territorializing and deterritorializing, interested and asubjective – structured in political, social, racial and heteropatriarchal dominance” (Weheliye 2014: 37). Thus, the notion of ‘preferred articulations’ highlights how any assemblage prescribes highly different degrees of mobility, agency, and visibility, thereby prescribing a differentially structured space of circulation and circumscribing a field of action which distributes agency a-symmetrically. As such, assemblages create and

31

In his nominal ‘Race, Articulation, and Societies in Dominion’, Hall is busy with the articulation between the ‘economic’ (i.e., the realm of materiality) and the ‘sociological’ (i.e., the realm of semiotic relations) with relation to post-Marxist accounts of racism as structuring principles of society and international relations. This, at least provisionally, aligns with the basic premises of assemblage theory (cf. Hall 1980: 17).

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perpetuate (but sometimes also destabilize) ‘sedimented power imbalances’, even if one accentuates their potential transformability. Even if the concept of assemblage had originally been coined to be able to describe a microphysics of desire, where it is inherently linked to its lines of deterritorialization,32 assemblages also need to always be analyzed as complex socio-material structures of domination, both on their inside as well as towards their outside. Miller’s Polyset may prove as productive example.

CHOREOGRAPHIC LOGIC (POLYSET): In/Stability The preferred articulations and inherent imbalances of different spaces are here discussed based on the interdependent notions of institution and assemblage within Miller’s practice of Polyset. Indeed, Miller is very aware that the assemblage that he sets up is nested within other structures, for which he repeatedly uses the notion of institution. Therefore, rather than presuming that all elements (human and nonhuman), which are part of Polyset, exercise the same agentic capacities, Miller’s focus is on the way in which each element constantly re-configures itself in relation to other materials in space. Yet, as I have described above, Miller insists on clearing out some of the conventional procedures for assembling, in order to be able to trigger interesting and meaningful interactions and negotiation both with the institutional surroundings and within the assemblage of Polyset itself. There are no tables and chairs in the space, for example, as those are too entangled with certain protocols of gathering around them in a clearly set choreography or score. It is the space’s rationale to turn up the volume for the negotiations of new choreographic principles of handling things. This is because Polyset wants to allow for the participants to address and transgress what Miller terms the ‘social boundedness’ of materials, so that both material and associated practices can be transformed. I am now able to describe the first choreographic principle of handling of Polyset which I will, based on Miller, term ‘in/stability’. Miller’s artistic research environment operates on two levels at the same time: On the one hand, Miller proposes the principles of architectural fragility and collapse to ensure a modality of continuous potential transformation for his spatial offer. This includes the participants’ relations to material. Each of the participants is invited to re-define their artistic practice with regards to unusual materials because there is as few designed objects as possible, but rather ‘raw material’. Thus, when using material, both the practice and the protocol of using material literally become ‘unstable’. Participants, therefore, are 32

Cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 333: “The territorial assemblage is inseparable from lines or coefficients of deterritorialization, passages, and relays toward other assemblages.”

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invited to improvise and invent transformative, de-territorializing assemblages by means of externalizing their practice as a shifting exoskeleton.

Image 10: a.pass Polyset 2013W40-42, Tanzfabrik Berlin (2013).

Photography: © Vladimir Miller

Still, there is always territorializing or institutionalized process (i.e., ‘preferred articulations’) that will create stability, coherence, but also imbalances within the assemblage of Polyset and even in relation to the institution that hosts it. Thus, while material and objects can be re-used and re-purposed as many times as necessary (i.e., functional protocol that determine objects may be undone), the process of Polyset also allows for stabilizing, territorializing, and functionalizing vectors. Meanwhile, as Miller insists in the quote cited at the beginning of the chapter, it therein acknowledges its ‘uneven topography’. Polyset does not try to be an even space, necessarily. It acknowledges its inherent imbalances, its hierarchies and differential distribution of capacities and agencies. In short: It provides space both for deterritialization and for territorialization. This is what constitutes its ‘in/stability’. Rather than unseeing the violence or hierarchies it contains, it aims to make them negotiable. Therein, I want to propose that it also allows for both the integrity of objects while also retaining the fugitive quality of things.

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3.4 The choreographic diagram of assemblages: ‘to follow the flow of matter’ According to Manuel DeLanda, the structure of the space of circulation and field of action that the assemblage performatively generates (i.e., the properties and capacities of elements, their potential moving trajectories, and degrees of agentic freedom) can be mapped, at least ideally. The name for this map of forces and their interplay is ‘diagram’. Generally, diagrams are an attempt at a pragmatic cartography of forces that bypasses representation or linguistic semiotics. Rather than documenting linguistic effects and interpreting them hermeneutically, one attempts to map the forces and lines of transformation and morphology which characterize concrete force-fields (i.e., specific assemblages). The notion of diagram was first used in Guattari’s ‘Molecular Revolution’ (cf. Guattari 1984: 95, 170–71), and can be described as an attempt to hijack and re-appropriate the original formulations of Charles Sanders Peirce.33 The notion also appears in more detail in Deleuze’s book on Bacon from 1981 (cf. Deleuze 2003), in which it is defined as the “operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones, line-strokes and color-patches” (Deleuze 2003: 101). In order to understand the notion of diagram, DeLanda claims that it is necessary to confront the difference between intensive and extensive properties that is recurrent in the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari.34 In their work, as in physics and chemistry more generally, the term ‘extensive’ is used for properties such as length, area, or volume that can be added to each other only yielding quantitative change;

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Cf. Guattari 1984, 95: “Denotation disappears in the face of the process described by Peirce as ‘diagrammatization’. The function of re-territorializing images, indexes and concepts is replaced by the operation of signs as the foundation for abstract machines and the simulation of physical machinic processes. This operation of signs, this work of diagrammatization, has become the necessary condition for the de-territorializing mutations that affect the fluxes of reality; no longer is there representation, but simulation, pre-production, or what one might call ‘transduction’. The stratum of signification disappears; no longer are there two levels and a system of double articulation; there is only a constant return to the continuum of machinic intensities based on a pluralism of articulations.” DeLanda not only claims that Deleuze and Guattari are the only philosophers of the 20th century to have accounted for the difference between the intensive and the extensive philosophically, but he also reminds us that Deleuze established a generic relation between the extensive and the intensive in ‘Difference and Repetition’. He writes: “[…] the diversity of entities that we can perceive directly are entities bounded in extension, but they are generated by invisible processes governed by gradients of intensity. A good example is the diversity of entities that populate the atmosphere: hurricanes, thunderstorms, could formations, wind currents. These entities inhabit our consciousness as meteorological phenomena but we cannot normally perceive the gradients of temperature, pressure, or speed that are responsible for their genesis” (DeLanda 2016: 111).

3. Assemblages as more-than-human performances

the term ‘intensive’, conversely, is applied to properties in which addition may result in qualitative change. Examples of intensive properties include speed, temperature, pressure, concentration, and voltage. While extensive qualities can be added or subtracted infinitely (i.e., be scaled up or down as desired) the same does not hold true for intensive properties; there exist thresholds at which the material suddenly undergoes a qualitative change with regards to intensive properties. A simple example of an intensive property is temperature. Water, for example, when it hits the threshold of either 0 or 100 degrees centigrade, changes phase and becomes either ice or steam. According to DeLanda, assemblages are constituted not by their extensive elements, but by their intensive properties and thresholds – named ‘singularities’ and ‘traits of expression’ by Deleuze and Guattari (two notions that I will explain below) that determine capacities and affective powers of the elements as well as their potential associations and articulation. The abstract and virtual representation of these singularities and their future tendencies is what the two authors name ‘abstract machine’ or diagram. As DeLanda explains: “The abstract machine is like the diagram of an assemblage. It draws lines of continuous variation, while the concrete assemblage treats variables and organizes their highly diverse relations as a function of these lines. The assemblage negotiates variables at this or that level of variations, according to this and that degree of deterritorialization, and determines which variables will enter into constant relations or obey obligatory rules and which will serve instead as a fluid matter for variation” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 100, in: DeLanda 2016: 108). DeLanda reminds us that in addition to actual properties, assemblages are always characterized by virtual dispositions, tendencies, and capacities – called ‘lines of continuous variation’ above (i.e., potential future states that are not actualized but define the possible futures of the assemblage) (cf. DeLanda 2016: 108). These dispositions, tendencies, and virtual capacities constitute its diagram (i.e., the structure of virtual possibilities of a given assemblage). In this sense, Deleuze also writes of painter’s diagrams: “They mark out possibilities of fact, but do not yet constitute a fact (the pictorial fact)” (Deleuze 2003: 101). As such “[…] diagrams are connected to a space of pure virtuality, a cosmic plane of consistency that exists as a limit of deterritorialisation” (DeLanda 2016: 109). The diagram, then, can be pictured as an intensity map (similar to a meteorological map of the weather): “capturing differences in intensity of properties as well as the dynamic phenomena driven by such differences” (DeLanda 2016: 110). Another mathematical name for such an intensity map is ‘phase diagram’ (cf. DeLanda 2016: 117). A stable state of the system is named an attractor within a phase diagram. Attractors, thus, are the mathematical expression of a meta-stable states of assemblages. Phase diagrams (including attractors) can be drawn for one of a system’s parameters (i.e., temperature) or for more than one,

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thereby making it a much more complex, multi-dimensional phase diagram. As an intensity map, the diagram thus “captures the structure of the space of possibilities associated with an assemblage’s variable components, as well as the structure of the space of possible parameter values” (DeLanda 2016: 130) (i.e., how much it will be coded or decoded, territorialized, or deterritorialized). Mathematically, the intensity map carries the structure of a possibility space, which means that all its components (variables, parameters, invariant structure, and differential relations) possess the ontological status of a virtuality. Indeed, these future possibilities have to be considered as real, but not actual (cf. DeLanda 2016: 122). In relation to the notion of diagram, I am now, finally, able to specify my own model of more-than-human choreography within performative assemblages: Thus, what I name more-than-human choreography is the always partial enactment of the virtual choreographic diagram that governs the assemblage as a space of circulation and field of action, including preferred articulations. This virtual choreographic diagram is enacted and actualized within iterated intra-actions of handling things, just like how a gendered matrix of behavior only comes to be effective within its iterated enactment in the model of Judith Butler (cf. Butler 1993). Each singular act of intra-acting with things, thus, re-actualizes and re-makes the more-than-human assemblage according to the virtual choreographic diagram. Thereby, each intra-action also participates in the ongoing, performative allocation of agencies and capacities within a shifting socio-material field of logisticality. These principles necessarily co-determine the future state of the assemblage, in so far as acts of intraacting with material are characterized by choreographic principles of handling. In fact, choreographic principles of handling can be named the determinative, actualizing parameters of more-than-human choreographies. These principles constitute and continually remake the agentic disposition of the many assemblages we are part of within our actions of handling material, in daily life, on stages, but also within larger societal structures of moving things such as logistics. In other words: What I want to propose is that we think of the diagram of a performative assemblage as a choreographic score that delineates the potential future positions, vectors, and encounters of all elements that participate in the constant, performative making of the assemblage. This diagram is neither an idealized structural plan, nor will it ever become fully tangible in itself. Rather, it structures and guides the evolution and sustenance of the assemblage over time. Conversely, we can think of the diagram as emerging in relation to the choreographic principles that are actualized in each action of handling things, in so far as the assemblage has to sustain itself performatively (i.e., by iterated moving encounters between its parts). Thus, each time in which handling things as intra-action takes place, there is – potentially – the possibility to alter the choreographic diagram of the assemblage, albeit only ever so little.

3. Assemblages as more-than-human performances

In this sense, the choreographic principles that I have outlined so far come to exercise their power only as the repeated, iterated actualization of specific articulations. Each articulation functions as a form of cut – cutting apart and together the many members of more-than-human ecologies. A specific ideological conception of how to place oneself within more-than-human ecologies is performatively (re-)activated within these acts of intra-action that with Miller, might be conceived as inscription into the space, or, alternatively, as actualization of a choreographic diagram of the assemblage. In turn, the choreographic diagram of an assemblage rests on specific principles (i.e., principles of how to handle material). These choreographic principles of how to handle material, and thus how to get attuned to it in everyday actions, are the site in which the ‘handle’ for a different placement of oneself within more-than-human ecologies resides. To formulate it differently once again: It is within pragmatic, felt acts of handling things that more-than-human choreography comes to be. It is here that one can work towards non-violent forms of moving things. This also implies a shift away from the opposition of territorial, stratified wholes versus provisional, de-territorializing assemblages. Rather, it moves our attention to the action of the concrete handling of things in which choreographic principles of how to establish and maintain interdependent relations with them are actualized and come to matter. Whether the emerging structures are of more or less stability may then no longer necessarily be the central aspect of an ethics of handling material. For their model of assemblages, Deleuze and Guattari describe the process as follows: At the outer limit of processes of becoming, as a fantastical state of nondifferentiatedness, lies the machinic phylum or ‘body without organs’ (for which the authors sometimes also use the notion ‘plane of consistency’) which they describe as follows: “[…] a single machinic phylum, ideally continuous: the flow of matter-movement, the flow of matter in continuous variation, conveying singularities and traits of expression. This operative and expressive flow is as much artificial as it is natural: it is like the unity of human beings with Nature. But at the same time, it is not realized in the here and now without dividing, differentiating” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 406). Here, the authors sketch the image of a continuous flow of matter-energy, which might be best imagined as the hot and powerful plasma of a giant star. There may be minor differences in temperature or density in the plasma, but it really is only made of flowing energy (cf. DeLanda 2016: 123). Not even atoms have crystallized. From this continuous flow of matter-energy, which is at the limit or ‘base’ of their materialist ontology, concrete objects come to be (i.e., historically in a shared history of nature and humans) by differentiation and division over time. The more complex the forms become, from atoms to molecules to living creatures, the more defined

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and less permeable their outer borders tend to be; this is a tendency named stratification.35 In so far as the virtual phylum (or plane of consistency) is actualized into increasingly distinct shapes, it becomes more segmented, but still traverses all forms and objects into which it has stratified. Assemblages play a crucial role within the process of further differentiation, where matter itself produces the most beautiful and surprising forms and capacities.36 It is always within confederations and alliances with other materials, be they alloys, symbiotic relationships, or institutional frameworks, that individual elements come to be differentiated (i.e., as unique combination of material singularities and affective traits of expression, cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 409). Assemblages cut the different phyla into distinct sub-phyla “at a given order, at a given level”, thereby “introducing selective discontinuities in the ideal continuity of matter-movement” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 406). Thus, assemblages exist only at a given time and level of observation. From the continuity of matter-energy-information as flow, the man-horse-bow assemblage, for example, selects and actualizes certain capacities of all elements involved, which only exist within this individual assemblage at a given point in history. Thus, elements get to exercise their unique affective powers, which previously existed only as virtual capacities, in a specific assemblage. The machinic phylum, as materiality in its virtual potentiality, will only come to be actualized within specific, individual assemblages through a historic and artificial process of becoming (i.e., in a process of actual differentiation into forms). These assemblages, as I have claimed above, are constituted by a virtual diagram and sustained by iterated acts of handling as intra-action. The process of being actualized (i.e., being further differentiated in properties and capacities) is what Deleuze and Guattari name lines. They distinguish two forms: phylogenetic and ontogenetic lines. Phylogenetic lines speak of the unfolding and development of bodily capacities and traits of expression across various generations of assemblages, as in the phylogenesis of the human body or the octopus. Ontogenetic lines, on the other hand, “are internal to the assemblage and link up various elements or else cause one element to pass, often after a delay, into another assemblage of a different nature” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 406). A third kind of line is termed a ‘line of flight’ and indicates a transformative movement of the 35

36

As Manuel DeLanda states: “The concept of ‘machinic phylum’ was created in an effort to conceive of the genesis of form (in geological, biological, and cultural structures) as related exclusively to immanent capabilities of the flows of matter-energy-information and not to any transcendent factor, whether platonic or divine (e.g., the hylomorphic schema)” (DeLanda 2006a). Deleuze and Guattari also define an assemblage as: “[…] every constellation of singularities and traits deduced from the flow of matter movement. The assemblages cut the phylum up into distinct, differentiated lineages, at the same time as the machinic phylum cuts across them all” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 406).

3. Assemblages as more-than-human performances

assemblage in which it loses all consistency and coherence; all of its elements are set free and a full-blown deterritorialization takes place, in which the segmentation that is inherent to stratification becomes undone. The question then remains about how to conceptualize and define the ‘base material’; “this matter-movement, this matter-energy, this matter-flow, this matter in variation that enters assemblages and leaves them”? For Deleuze and Guattari, the answer is: “[…] destratified, deterritorialized matter” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 407). It is that which passes through infinite metamorphosis, an unending process of becoming, in which it precariously inhabits different forms and assemblages, and in which it is composed into this or that shape with its corresponding properties and capacities.37 This may well be the place in which a material ethics comes to shape. At the ground of their model of assemblages, thus, there is a flux of energy that passes through different states and relations, an eternal modulation that cannot and will not be captured, choreographed, or held in place. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari describe their own choreographic principle of handling as follows: “[…] matter in movement, in flux, in variation, as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression […], this matter flow can only be followed” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 409). Whoever is able to ‘follow the flow of matter’, and the central example or proponent here is the artisan or craftsman, partakes in that ever-transformative movement of matter itself. The movement of following the fluid, flowing flux of matter then takes the name of itineration or ambulance: “The artisan is the itinerant, the ambulant. To follow the flow of matter is to itinerate, to ambulant” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987: 409). Their material ethics, then, is both an eternal stance of open-endedness and processuality, while it implies the task of attuning oneself over and over again, albeit differently and differentially, to the materiality that one is, that one carries, and that one encounters. If one does so, as the metallurgists do, then one may enter in contact

37

The model of materiality that Deleuze and Guattari propose is inspired by Simondon and his critique of the Aristotelian hylomorphic model of matter. The Platonic and Aristotelian models of matter, as substance to which form is added, is insufficient in so far as one must add, to their formable substance: “an entire energetic materiality in movement, carrying singularities and haecceities that are already like implicit forms that are topological rather than geometrical”. Hylomorphism forgets about the productive-genetic processes of the becoming of matter and it suppresses its “perpetually variable, continuous modulation”, thereby reifying objects into their essential shapes and forms. The example that Deleuze and Guattari use is the undulations and torsions of fiber of wood which speak of a morphogenetic process, and which guide the axe or tool when trying to split the wood: “at any rate, it is a question of surrendering to the wood […], to a materiality, instead of imposing form upon matter: what one addresses is less a matter submitted to laws that materiality possessing a nomos” (Deleuze/ Guattari 1987: 476).

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with the possibilities for both differentiation and deterritorialization that matter is pregnant with: “In short, what metal and metallurgists bring to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism that doubtlessly exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the hylomorphic model” (Deleuze/ Guattari 1987: 411). While I do subscribe to the notion of vital materialism and material agency that Deleuze and Guattari propose, I nonetheless ask myself: But what does it mean to be following the material? It seems to me as if the imperative of ‘following the material’ is indeed an abstraction of several, more pragmatic choreographic principles of handling things. In a way, the problem is more complicated than Deleuze and Guattari seem to admit: Within daily life, we are always already confronted with specific objects, assemblages, and institutions, in which striations and processes of territorialization have already taken place. To undo them all is neither possible nor, necessarily, desirable. One might at least ask: If it is desirable, then to whom is it desirable? If one wants to undo objectification and criticize coherent, stabilized, and stratified institutions, especially with regards to the perspective of those who have not been able to articulate themselves within these frameworks, then there need to be concrete practices and principles with which one can engage. If one wants to attend to ‘the movement of things’ and to their multiplicity of perspectives, in order to provisionally position oneself within more-than-human worlds in quest for an impossible ‘a-positionality’, then this needs to be practiced, somehow. While Deleuze and Guattari prefer examples of artisanal and metallurgist practices in their chapter ‘On Nomadism’, I have tried to account for some potential practices from the field of performance and choreography, which attempt to follow the flow of thingly matter rather than objectifying it, within this work. Let me then specify one more choreographic principle of handling material with regards to Polyset:

CHOREOGRAPHIC LOGIC (POLYSET): ‘Fumbling in the dark’ Instead of practicing a fantastical destratification, Miller’s artistic research proposal Polyset aims at practicing a sense of attuning to the concrete needs of different artistic practices, their very own rhythms of concretion and fluidity, of inter-relation, and of reclusion. What this requires, probably, is patience (a choreographic principle I have named ‘hesitation’ above): “Waiting for the next point where something can be opened up and talked about. For some people it takes a week. And for some people there is something to see every day. And this rhythm of process and production, let’s say, I think there is a

3. Assemblages as more-than-human performances

sense acutely attuned to that. A sense attuned to the variability and to the polyrhythmicality of that relation in the space” (Miller 2018). This is where the assemblage’s partiality is productive: It adapts to the current size and extension of practices. There is no need to take up the full space or to go for the full-blown establishment of territory. While there is always both striating and deterritorializing operations going on within the space, it is affected by the surrounding structures and by their institutionalized protocols of handling things. Yet, as Miller rightly insists, neither the assemblage of Polyset nor the institutional surround are ever fully present: “I do not know if the assemblage as such will ever become tangible. What becomes tangible are specific instantiations of the assemblage in a momentarily valid form. In any moment of action, it is never the whole institution that is available – available is only what effectively instantiates itself” (Miller 2018). Miller uses the notion of ‘instantiation’ (which could be traced back to music philosophy in which it delineates the actual performance of a piece of music in opposition to its virtual, scored form) and repeats an idea explained above: It is ever only partial capacities and relations that are actualized within assemblages, while many more exist as virtual potential. This holds for both the encounters with materials and for the social and artistic inter-relations that are established within Polyset, but also for the ever-fluctuating relations with the surrounding institutional landscape. Any action that one performs within Polyset will, thus, solidify certain protocols of handling things and destabilize others, which is why Miller also uses the notion of ‘inscription’. Any singular action of handling things, therefore, is an inscription into the assemblage as much as it performatively sustains and/or alters some of its texture and consistency. This performative mode of encountering and actualizing virtual possibilities and capacities within the assemblage marks the potential of Polyset as such. As Miller states: “[…] in the virtuality of this space of capacities lies the abstract potential of Polyset as such. As a specific productive machine (i.e., a space of possibilities), Polyset realizes itself in so far as describable agents with an indescribable potential of encountering one another repeatedly meet and actualize capacities” (Miller 2018, translation mine). Miller insists there will always be institutionalized codes of conducts within Polyset. These rules and regulations may not be fully present as such and all of the time, but instead actualize themselves at the moment when one enters into conflict with them. In this regard, Miller speaks of a “certain opacity of the landscape” in which the border, or code of conduct, becomes manifest only whenever one actually crosses or disregards it. “This blind fumbling in the dark”, Miller states “is how I would describe the freedom of institutional action. You walk in one direction until the institution will make itself felt. […] It is about navigating in that opaque darkness, in this in-visibility, this not-being-able to see the institution. I find that more interesting

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than this other intent of saying: I will now compile a complete map of you” (Miller 2018, translation mine). In fact, what Miller describes is a complex mode of relating to the performative dimension of handling material within assemblages. The principle of ‘fumbling in the dark’, to me, means being aware of the fact that the total choreographic structure of an assemblage will never show itself. It remains on the level of an ‘ideological unconscious’. Rather, by ‘fumbling in the dark’, one differentially and iteratively attunes to an assemblage’s virtual choreographic diagram, one probes the space of potential that it may become. Yet, insofar as the diagram never shows itself fully, it can only be accounted for, altered, and transformed in the ongoing, iterative act of handling things that constitutes more-than-human choreography. ‘Fumbling in the dark’ means: to risk oneself in the encounter with matter. On the level of practice: Positions, capacities, and agencies are actualized in each specific instance of handling things while ‘fumbling in the dark’, waiting for the institution to show itself, for the more-than-human choreographic diagram of the assemblage to manifest as border. Therein, each intra-action may either have a stabilizing or de-stabilizing character for the assemblage as a whole, but its effects remain, at least to some degree, unforeseeable. I have, thus far, described more-than-human choreography as the virtual diagram of assemblages that is actualized in iterated encounters with matter. In fact, the repeated act of handling matter determines whether we reduce it to the state of object, thereby reinforcing our own status as autonomous subject-master, or if we enact choreographic logics that account for the manifold agencies and potentialities of all elements that constitute the field of action from which certain acts, including so-called performances, emanate. Based on my case studies, I have identified four principles of handling matter that attempt at undermining hierarchical striations of performative assemblages: ‘turbulent flow’, ‘hesitation’, ‘in/stability’ and ‘fumbling in the dark’. Handling things based on these principles may allow for a constant renegotiation of agentic positions, modalities of circulation, and possible articulations of both human and non-human actors. Yet, in order to temporarily close my reflection on more-than-human choreography, I still need to thoroughly analyze the other possible vector of ‘expanded choreography’, as explained within the first chapter of this book, namely logistics, which will come to name the attempt at effectively governing all matter choreographically.

4. Logistics as socio-material choreography

We Love Logistics (UPS) and We are Maersk. We move mountains (Maersk) Our customers count on us to choreograph a ballet of infinite complexity played across skies, oceans and borders. Betsy Wilson (marketing manager of UPS), cited after Lecavalier 2012: 90 To Maersk this is obvious. Size matters. Hard proof that big is beautiful. Maersk 2018 The UPS campaign ‘We Love Logistics’ was launched in 2010. The short, approximately 1-minute-long marketing video1 shows brown parcels moving effortlessly between continents and places. The video depicts infrastructure and technology, such as container ports, a warehouse, and robots at an assembly line, but also delivery destinations as prominent as Venice, Paris, and New York. All throughout the film, a female voice sings along; Australian-born singer Nadia Ackermann performs an adapted version of Dean Martin’s ‘That’s amore’ from 1953 that illustrates a beautified self-image of the company: “When it’s planes in the sky form a chain of supply – that’s logistics. When the parts for the line come precisely on time – that’s logistics. A continuous link that is always in sync – that’s logistics. […] When technology knows right where everything goes – that’s logistics. […] There will be no more stress ‘cause you called UPS – that’s logistics” (UPS 2010, cited after Cowen 2014: 203).

1

The video can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCh6HnXHKRc (last accessed on June 3, 2020).

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The marketing campaign, developed by London-based marketing agency ‘Ogilvy & Mather’, wants to create new images and a new vocabulary for what logistics is, both for the wider public and for the company itself. An ‘Ogilvy&Mather’ official describes the motivation behind the campaign as follows: “A survey of customers had revealed that even the people that do logistics for a living all defined it differently. So, we defined it for them” (cited after Cowen 2014: 203). On the level of the lyrics, the UPS campaign defines logistics as continuous, smooth flow (“a continuous link”). The never-ending movements of raw material, components, and finished products are controlled by technology in completely frictionless and gentle ways, so that parts for the production process as much as delivery orders always “come precisely on time”. In order to so, logistics applies a rhythm of synchronicity (“always in sync”); it synchronizes different movements. The finished product, finally, arrives to the hands of the costumer almost magically and exactly when it is needed or desired. In the video, both workers and consumers smile all of the time. The video illustrates how production processes, which have largely been outsourced to sub-contractors all over the globe, are administered over great distances. Visually, logistics is thus represented as a gigantic fluid arrow, indicating a vectorial understanding of movement (in UPS brown). The arrow effortlessly connects all of the different infrastructures and places shown in the video. On the one hand, it seems to prescribe that things need to keep moving. Calculating and steering the trajectories of many different bits and parts, on the other hand, implies minute procedures of control. Indeed, in order to administer the complex and entangled movement pathways of components and products, technology needs to always know “right where everything goes”. Consequently, logistics is a matter of trust: You, as customer, need no longer worry because there is something else – UPS, the algorithm, logistics – that takes care of managing all of the different movements within the many supply chains that your life and well-being depends upon. On the whole, the video portrays the gigantic scale of logistical movements today as managed by technology and computational wit. Quick cuts between a wide range of locations, connected by the brown arrow that appears in many of the images, create the impression that logistics is able to link any place and any thing in the world to one another. But why is this? That is because, as a single UPS worker surrounded by an arrangement of delivery trucks forming a big heart explains at the very beginning of the video, “logistics makes the world a better place” (UPS 2010). Logistics, we are told, has to take firm control over myriad movement trajectories in order to ‘make the world a better place’. It has to draw, interface, overview, analyze, implement, and continuously monitor an almost infinite number of golden arrows – golden arrows (or vectors) that need to keep flowing smoothly, while components and materials are integrated and disintegrated within the movement. Movement control, the video suggests, becomes the central and most important faculty of logistical operations and in turn, for the creation of a better world.

4. Logistics as socio-material choreography

Contemporary logistics’ central task is not just the transportation of goods, but the coordination of movement processes as more and more goods, information, and people need to move in synchronicity, or at least in controlled, coordinated, and calibrated ways. The notion of choreography remains implicit within the film. Yet, Betsy Wilson, then marketing manager of the company, explicitly invokes the notion when talking about the ‘We Love Logistics’ campaign in 2010. Speaking of logistics, she claims: “We love its precision, its epic scale, its ability to make life better for billions of people. Each day, our customers count on us to choreograph a ballet of infinite complexity played across skies, oceans and borders. And we do. What’s not to love?” (cited in Lecavalier 2012: 90). Thus, movement control, labelled as choreography and linked to the historic form of ballet, becomes a central metaphor for the new self-image of one of the world’s biggest logistics companies.

Image 11: We Love Logistics by UPS (2010).

Photography: © Effie Awards

In the following, I will attend to some self-definitions of logistics companies – UPS, Maersk, and, briefly, DHL – in order to give an insight into the business context in which the notion of choreography, as cited in the epigraph, appears. Why does a logistics company represent its routines, its smart procedures and flowcharted working processes as a form of dance routine, and is an expanded notion of choreography being implied here? How might we conceive of choreography as an

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‘infinitely complex’ process, one that can no longer be written or implemented by human minds or hands? I claim that using choreography as a marketing metaphor means thinking of logistics as a totalizing, potentially infinitely expanded realm of capitalist movement control that can only be governed by an infinitely virtuosic, God-like choreographer. Capitalist mobilization of resources, labor, and information is thus portrayed as a sublime aesthetic act, transcending any situated, concrete point of view. Human scale or expertise become meaningless over and against this God-like faculty of infinitely expanded, socio-material choreographic wit and skill, based on endless computational power and the most advanced systems of movement control: logistical-algorithmic reason, UPS marketing video suggests, is able to administer, steer, and to control the movement of just about anything and anybody. It will always bring what is needed to where it is needed, just on time. In the following, I want to unpack this logic in order to understand if and in how far the movement of the aesthetic notion of choreography to the field of logistics is just an appropriation for marketing purposes, or if it is meaningful beyond that act of appropriation. How can the implicit choreographic principles that underly the way in which logistics manages movement be questioned? What are the violent effects and consequences of time-critical process management dubbed choreography? Importantly, when speaking of choreography in relation to logistics, Betsy Wilson takes ballet as its most important actualization, even in 2010. Choreography is here implicitly associated with precision, smooth flow, lightness, and grandeur. Most probably, the marketing experts that conceived of the campaign think of ballet as something beautiful, as positively connoted rather than as an extreme form of entrainment and subjugation of bodies. As architectural theorist Jesse Lecavalier, who has written about the UPS campaign, thus notes the reference to choreography may best be described as: “an effort to humanize what is largely a technologically driven field” (Lecavalier 2012: 90). Yet, what kind of ballet-like dance is implied when marketing experts appropriate the notion of choreography itself? An answer to this question may be given in relation to an actual dance number that was performed as part of the launch of the UPS campaign: “[…] in the atrium of Beijing’s Viva Shopping Mall, […] a group of thirty performers dressed as UPS drivers and customers spontaneously broke into a series of choreographed dance numbers” (Lecavalier 2012: 90). The UPS dance performance staged in Beijing was largely filmed from above, “allowing viewers to witness the dynamic forms produced by the assemblage of bodies.” Here, a strong visual link to “the more spectacular dance numbers in the musicals of Busby Berkeley, especially his work for Warner Brothers in the early 1930s” is implied, as Lecavalier notes (Lecavalier 2012: 91). These “kaleidoscopic displays of bodies” decenter the single body, in order to create aesthetically overwhelming, somewhat sublime, moving figures. The reference to Busby Berkeley may help us to understand how the aesthetic notion of choreography is used within logistics marketing. In Berkeley’s chore-

4. Logistics as socio-material choreography

ographies, and in other “mechanized movements of dance troupes such as the Tiller Girls”, one perceives a kind of “‘Taylorized’ body of the American production line”, as Andrew Hewitt has claimed (Hewitt 2005: 177). Siegfried Kracauer, on the other hand, has famously proposed that these bodies, who are both captured and produced by the machinic choreography itself, can no longer be perceived of as “individual girls, but (as) indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics” (Kracauer 1955: 75/76). Kracauer analyzes the de-personalizing effect of modernist-machinic choreographies, based on mathematical modes of modeling movement, to which the UPS dance number seems to allude: Where the single element becomes part of mathematically calculated, fully rationalized procedures, it loses individual expression. It is no longer ‘erotic’, as Kracauer would famously mourn (cf. Kracauer 1955: 77). All the while, the single element, be it a human body or a parcel, becomes part of a larger aesthetic object: the famous ‘mass ornament’ (cf. Kracauer 1955) which affects the viewer because of its rational, mathematic, or geometric structure. If the concept and practice of choreography moves from the field of modern mass choreography (that spans from the Tiller Girls to Leni Riefenstahl, indeed) to the field of logistics, then its aesthetic charge, I claim, relies on a shared understanding of the aesthetic effects of large numbers of entities being synchronized and choreographically structured on the base of rationalized (i.e., mathematical forms and models). Logistics’ affect lies in the techno-algorithmic coordination of more single moving elements than any human eye or mind could process.2 The choreography can neither be observed from a situated perspective nor enjoyed from a grounded point of view, but all movements seem animated by invisible, God-like hands. Thus, the socio-material choreography of logistics almost seems alive, in a machinated kind of way. One actually has to assume a techno-fantastic viewpoint in order to behold the whole choreography, as Kracauer notes, because: “the ornament resembles aerial photographs of landscapes and cities in that it does not emerge out of the interior of the given conditions, but rather appears above them” (Kracauer 1955: 77). Berkeley’s choreographies, like logistical systems of movement control more generally, only reveal their full aesthetic potential when either filmed from above or from great distance; this view occupies a standpoint, thus, that is already dehumanized in as much as it can only be produced technically. One might be reminded of the structuring of bodies along lines or more complex geometric figures, that can be recognized as modern mass choreography when looking at containers in the port, even if one is not able to physically attain the algorithmic choreographer’s technical viewpoint, 2

This affect may even take hold of the scientist. In her talk at the HKW, Laleh Khalili, for example, talks about the excitement and awe she feels when visiting modern ports (cf. Khalili 2015).

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but even more so when these movements are filmed from above and rendered to music.3 According to Kracauer, in these choreographies: “[…] the ornament, detached from its bearers, must be understood as rationality. It consists of lines and circles like those found in textbooks on Euclidean geometry, and also incorporates the elementary components of physics, such as waves and spirals. Both the proliferations of organic forms and the emanations of spiritual life remain excluded” (Kracauer 1955: 77/78). It is from this lifeless, yet strictly mathematical arrangement of bodies in space, based on movement principles such as synchronicity and smooth flow, that the socio-material choreography of logistics takes its aesthetic charge. In the case of logistics, it is technology itself that produces and controls the moving arrangement. Because the system is computational, it guarantees, purportedly, smoothness, total precision, and minute control. The enjoyment of choreography, in this case, lies in the knowledge and impression that all movement follows computational rules: Therefore, the lines, turns, angles, and turning points all look like a gigantically extended, visually updated, infinitely more complex game of ‘Snake’.4 The affect of this socio-material choreography is decidedly post-human. Two elements, then, are central to all forms of modernist-machinic choreography, be they human or applied to non-human elements (as is the case for logistics): extension, or scale, and speed.5 The more legs swing, the more parcels moved, at re3

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There is a whole genre of ‘logistics porn’ videos available on the internet, which all render and depict the movement of containers in artificially altered speed and from various ‘improbable’ perspectives. Within my research installation ‘On Choreologistics’ (www.choreologistics.com , last accessed on Nov 1, 2020) at ‘K3 I Center for Choreography’ in Hamburg between May 2–6, 2017 (within the context of the graduate school ‘Performing Citizenship’), I have, among other things, tried to analyze the filmic mechanisms that these videos share. Part of the installation was a video entitled ‘Choreologistics’ (made in collaboration with Janto Djassi Rössner) that tries to mimic and thereby reveal the iconographic and filmic logics that are at work behind these videos. It can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/474701835/071c04d3ab (last accessed on Nov 1, 2020). I refer to the game played on early Nokia mobile phones in the late 1990s, thereby highlighting that contemporary logistics no longer only choreographs straight lines; it has evolved to a point where the movement patterns it generates actually resemble more organic forms. Jesse Lecavalier, for example, describes algorithmic procedures as implemented by Kiva Robotics (now part of Amazon): “With an algorithmic logistics, certain constraints are determined but the process is allowed to unfold in unanticipated ways, perhaps even ways that exceed the intuition of the designers. In a Kiva warehouse, for example, what seems like a chaotic jumble makes total sense to the computer systems organizing it” (Lecavalier 2012: 97). This logic will have to be complicated in the following examination. As Mezzadra and Neilson claim: “Despite the elegant theorizations of Paul Virilio, logistics is not the fetishization of speed. Certainly, in many domains of current economic activity, the increased 24/7 pace of production and trade is legion. The instance of high-frequency trading, discussed in chapter

4. Logistics as socio-material choreography

spective higher speeds, the more virtuosic the choreography. Where Amazon talks about the speed of their conveyor belts in their new ‘fulfillment centers’ in their marketing videos, they do so in order to highlight their virtuosic skills as socio-material choreographers. Virtuosity here lies in the fantasy of being able to produce and enforce frictionless, efficient, and speedy movement of ever more parts, at ever greater scale. As Lecavalier notes, the choreographer is thus associated with a “regime of total awareness and control, a new kind of hyper-management” (Lecavalier 2012). Logistics is implicitly described as the master-science, the hyper-governance of all flows of matter (i.e., of people, things, information, and money). Logistics takes up the mission that was implicit, somehow, in an expansion of the notion of choreography beyond the human body, as potentially total governance of flows of both human and non-human material: Choreography, as analyzed above, from its origins in early modernity onwards, has always been a faculty that both tames and subjugates bodies by means of governing movement, which aligned with majoritarian formations of society such as the state and the church (cf. Lepecki 2007: 122; Spånberg 2017). Its contemporary update, expanded into the realm of non-human movement, powered as much by algorithms as by capitalist imperatives of efficiency and optimization, may simply be called logistics. Logistical choreographies administer, monitor, and execute the transport of myriad objects, mountains of consumer goods, and the components from which they are assembled. Moreover, though, they need to interface and co-ordinate flows of both financial capital and labor in order to produce these goods. The desire (and alleged necessity) to control the transport of so many bodies and things makes logistics think of itself as an invisible, subservient (for it ‘only’ supplies life), but nonetheless sovereign (for without it no survival is possible) master of the world.6 Logistics, thus, literally produces our world, it remakes the planet, and it updates our subjectivities. From the point of view of aesthetic theory, the image of an ‘infinitely complex choreography’ or of a single portal connecting everything – UPS’ ‘Worldport’ – pertains to the register of the sublime and, more precisely perhaps, to something one

6

1, is a particularly redolent example. Yet while HFT in many ways represents the becoming logistical of finance, the reduction of capital’s turn-over time also paradoxically commands strange forms of slowness. Perhaps this is most evident in that form of economic activity that we have identified as the most iconic of contemporary logistical practices: container shipping. In this field, the cutting edge of efficiency is so-called slow steaming. Container ships are becoming both larger (and thus capable of carrying more boxes) and slower in their cruising speeds (a factor that introduces savings and efficiencies due to reduced energy costs)” (Mezzadra/Neilson 2019: 150). UPS simply names their central distribution center at the airport in Louisville, Kentucky: ‘Worldport’ (cf. Wikipedia article about the Louisville Muhammad Ali Airport, last accessed Nov 2, 2020), which reads as if the whole world flowed in and out of their regulatory hands.

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could name the ‘computational sublime’.7 It is beyond what anybody – any situated thingly, animal, or human body – can imagine, understand, or comprehend. Interestingly, the notion of the sublime is also summoned in another marketing video: We Are Maersk – We Move Mountains, which is a filmic self-portrayal of Maersk, the biggest logistics company of the world that was produced in 2012.8 The film, directed by Danish director Christoffer Boe, is part of a series of four image films realized under the label of We Are Maersk9 which portray different aspects of the company. We Are Maersk – We Move Mountains focusses on the sheer scale of the company’s assets, as Senior Corporate Brand Manager Anja Andersen explained to me in an interview.10 The film is a collage of small video sequences, mostly of about two seconds, cut next to each other in high frequency. Starting with a glorious sun rising above the clouds, these sequences show actions of everyday live from all around the globe – a rooftop bar, prawns being fried at a street-food shop in Asia, people playing basketball presumably somewhere in Northern America – mixed with images that portray or illustrate logistics operations (i.e., traffic moving along highways at night, airplanes in the sky, a truck carrying a Maersk container trough a residential area, supplies being stored in a cooled truck or in a warehouse, transportation, container terminals, and so on). All sort of consumer goods – from food to sneakers to petroleum – are held in hands, packaged, transported in boxes, loaded and unloaded (Maersk 2012). Again, they move on water, on land, and in the air. They are being efficiently handled, by Maersk, for us. Life itself, the montage suggests, is dependent on logistics. Yet, no one needs to worry, for the silent companion faculty of logistics is at their service, working off stage, behind the curtain, and making production and consumption meet each other without any friction. In the case of the Maersk commercial, aesthetic affect lies in both montage techniques and the use of voiceover. None of the video material is shown at the speed at which it was recorded; it is always either de- or accelerated. Images that are edited to be shown in fast forward are often directly juxtaposed to highly decelerated images. The viewer, thus, gets the impression that the invisible author of these images, who could easily be associated to the deep male voice of the narrator (i.e., Maersk or logistics itself) has an almost omni-powerful grip over time. Here is what the malelogistical-time-operator-choreographer-voice says in the beginning of the approxi-

7 8 9 10

The notion of the computational sublime is used by several artists and theorists from the fields of media science and art. Cf., for example, McCormack/Dorin 2001. The video can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8u2ubaYzYt8 (last reference: June 3, 2020). Cf. ‘Copenhagen Film Company’, http://www.corp.cphfilmcompany.dk/portfolio/ we-aremaersk/ (last accessed on Nov 3, 2020). The interview took place on July 23, 2020 via Skype.

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mately four-minute-long image video (imagine a deep, fatherly voice, one that tries to suggest calm and control in an almost pervert way): “The world’s population is exploding, along with the demand for food, energy, and millions of other goods. The challenge is to satisfy this mountainous demand whilst leaving the smallest footprint. Ironically, the smallest footprint is often made by the biggest shoe. Size and scale are simply more efficient, both for business and for the environment. To Maersk, the whole difference is in the details, and this is how Maersk moves mountains” (Maersk 2012, my emphasis). It is by way of a suspension of oppositions – the small-big, huge scale-minute detail, great speed-profound slowness sublation – that Maersk excels at providing for whatever is needed for living, wherever it is needed, just at the right moment. The most expanded scale can and will be monitored at the level of minute detail, with utmost precision. Again, the video editing strongly adds to this impression, shifting between places and speeds light-heartedly. After giving several examples of innovation and investment undertaken by Maersk, the video ends on the following lines: “Maersk Line is the world’s largest shipping company, with more than 500 vessels, each day moving mountains of goods from one side of the globe to the other. With leadership comes a big responsibility. To make size and scale shrink the environmental food-print of the commercial world. […] To Maersk this is obvious. Size matters. Hard proof that big is beautiful.” (Maersk 2018, my emphasis). There is clearly a sexual undertone at play here,11 reminding us that the economic imperative of constant flux and the movement of mountains, glorified in the marketing videos of Maersk and UPS, is indeed based on a gendered, sexualized, as much as racialized ideology. The choreographer of logistics – by way of pronunciation, the sound of his voice and textual nuances – is here being characterized as male and white, his fantasies of scale, speed, and size are sexually connoted.12 At the same time, from its beginning lines, referencing the act of ‘moving mountains’, thereby satisfying ‘mountainous demands’, the video plays on other cultural registers: The notion of the sublime is summoned up when listening to the Arnold Schwarzenegger-cum-Anthony Hopkins type narrator while looking at huge containerships, seemingly unending lines of containers on trains, and the excessive

11

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What else would a punchline referring to the value and beauty of both size and hardness suggest? Interestingly, Anja Andersen, in the interview that I conducted with her, claims that neither the sexual undertone nor the reference to the notion of the sublime was intentionally written into the film. I was first made aware of this sexual undertone by Vladimir Miller. This goes along with the use of the notion of ballet as logistics prototype. There is too much literature about ballet and its patriarchal structure to be cited here. As one possible reflection of this nexus, cf. Foster 2011.

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scale of modern container ports, all images super-edited in terms of velocity and color. Indeed, “the sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peaks arise above the clouds”, is one of Kant’s examples for an aesthetic impression that triggers feelings of the sublime. Being touched by it is agreeable, Kant argues, but in very different ways than by the beautiful “prospect of meadows strewn”, an aspect that is more “joyful and smiling” (Kant 2011: 14).13 In fact, the relation between beauty and sublime (when talking about natural phenomena) was first introduced by British philosophers taking the Grand Tour in the 17th century. In order to travel to Italy, they had to cross the Alps. Notably, John Dennis, in a letter from 1693 published under the title of ‘Miscellanies’, writes of the Swiss mountains as “delightful horror, a terrible joy” (Dennis 1939). A little later, Kant differentiates between three forms of the sublime: the terrifying, the noble, and the beautiful sublime. Most probably, logistics is of the first kind because it creates the well-known ‘sensation of shudder’, a form of intuitive awe which to some is pleasurable (cf. Kant 2011). “So dizzying yet so great”, an anonymous YouTube-user states, commenting on a video in which images (also always either slowed down or accelerated) of one of the new so-called ‘Triple-E’ container ships of Maersk Line are being shown to ecstatic, forward-driving, neo-romantic electronic music.14 What the Maersk commercial’s text and video-editing tell us is the following: The processes of global transport administered by logistic companies are well beyond what humans can either imagine or understand. Just like Alpine mountains, they are too big to take in. Yet they might reveal human, technological wit and genius in so far as they have been erected, constructed, and programmed by some almost (super-)human hands and minds. Moreover, the aesthetic experience of seeing, perceiving, or of imagining logistical systems can, with Kant, be linked to the capacity of identifying and handling the sublime’s scale and associated horror, in which the mind proves its cognitive, rational, and thus super-sensible powers. Indeed, in his 1790 ‘Critique of Judgement’, Kant had identified the sublime as: “[…] the awakening of a feeling of a supersensible faculty within us; and it is the use to which judgement naturally puts particular objects on behalf of this latter feeling, and not the object of the senses, that is absolutely great, and every other

13

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Yet, mountains, not meadows, are everywhere in logistics marketing. Another marketing video, the DHL commercial entitled ‘The Speed of Yellow’, in which the golden arrow of UPS makes a return as yellow light beam, for example, uses a cover version of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Ain’t no mountain high enough’ (DHL 2011). The YouTube-video that I am here referring to was made by one of the crew members of a ‘Triple-E’ container ship of Maersk. The video, as Yaroslav Karetnikov writes, covers “preparation of the world’s largest container vessel for the Maiden Voyage, Maiden Port calls for the Major Far East and European Ports, Suez Canal Transit and of course tour round the vessel”, cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFOpYfop4h4 (last accessed on Nov 3, 2020).

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contrasted employment small. Consequently, it is the attunement of the spirit evoked by a particular representation engaging the attention of reflective judgement, and not the object, that is to be called sublime. The foregoing formulae defining the sublime may, therefore, be supplemented by yet another: The sublime is that, the mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of the senses” (Kant 2007: 81).15 Do I feel great when watching the Maersk commercial, or when imagining UPS’ choreographies, then, because I am overwhelmed by the scale and horrifying grandeur of the transport systems that drive and handle global trade, or is there more to it than that? Do I, as human subject, secretly identify with the invisible God-like faculty that is able to steer and administer those systems of transport, that attempts to rule the waves, the fluid conveyor belts of this planet, and all of its inter-modal interfaces? Kant, in the above citation, clearly insists that our experience of the sublime is self-referential. Thus, logistical choreographies allow for the subject’s mind to revel at its own faculty, that of overcoming the sensual chaos, the myriad movements of boxes, and containers with which it is confronted. While one is visually overwhelmed, one believes that order exists; a post-human, computational order, an order produced by algorithmic calculations. While it is beyond one’s understanding or ability to comprehend it, one, still, believes oneself to be able to control it. Applying Kant’s analysis of the sublime to logistics marketing videos indicates the following: In looking at logistical choreographies, an imagined spectator may revel at their sheer scale, precision, and speed, but more so even at the computational abilities of algorithmic systems made by humans that are able to handle them. Logistics, it seems, is a kind of double feat for instrumental reason, because a) it had put in place choreographic systems for potentially governing any kind of human or non-human movement and b) it reflected itself in their terrifying grandeur. Conversely, the actual objects that are being transported – the containers, packages, boxes, all of what they contain, the human labor that assists in making logistical flow happen, even the data items traveling fiber cables – all of them are completely neglected. Logistical choreography presents itself as a form of aesthetic, yet ‘operative reason’ that necessarily “transcends every standard of the senses” (Kant 2007: 81). On the whole, these marketing videos convey a world view in which everything, be it bodies or materials, can be transported and delivered to the right place at the

15

I want to indicate that the notion of ‘attunement’ is used within this citation in order to describe a process in which sensual data is subsumed under the faculty of reason. This is quite the opposite of how I will come to define attunement in the very last chapter of this work (i.e., as the renunciation of rational distance to the enchantment and magic that things exercise onto the mind), cf. chapter 5. ‘Attunement: a more-than-human choreography of care’.

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right moment. Choreography, thereby, comes to stand for the organizational faculty that needs to be in place for an almost infinite number of processes and movements to be coordinated – the perfect capitalist operative reason. There is a quasiDeleuzian ontology at the base of this idea of choreography, as vastly extended process management, in which “manufacture is merely one moment in a continuous, Heraclitean flux” (Berne 2015: 28/29). If life is understood as fluid process, in the vein of Heraclitus, then the modeling and governance of life (i.e., logistics) also needs to descend to the level of myriad, entangled flows. Hence, the use of the notion of choreography.16 But there is no competence or agency at all on the level of the performers; they are without will, without wit, and without skill. The aesthetic charge of logistics as choreography, conversely, lies in the faculty of moving any number of elements according to mathematical procedures and models. With reference to Hewitt’s notion of ‘social choreography’, I thus ask myself what the ‘political unconscious’ (cf. Jameson 1981, after Hewitt 2005: 6) of logistical choreographies is. The marketing videos that I analyze here provide us with a glimpse of it: Logistics’ ‘political unconscious’ is technologically controlled movement that is both monitored and produced at speeds and scales, degrees of precision and timing, that are algorithmic and are, thereby, decidedly post-human, not to be comprehended or taken in at human scale. Implicitly, one is supposed to revel at the fact that human-developed machines are able to choreograph at the global level. Above all, they are always right, in the sense not only of precision, but also of the right angle, of mathematic or of geographic modeling.17 To enjoy them is like seeing many computers making calculations. Choreography happens on the level of abstract information, not just on the level of embodied experience. One is both terrified and delighted by what cultural theorists Alberto Toscano and Jeffrey Kinkle describe as a kind of “psychosis that realises the dream of cybernetic domination” (Toscano/Kinkle 2015: 125). Yet, that does not exclude an analysis of the inherent structures and logics with which logistics controls and steers movement, and the violent partitions it thereby actualizes and maps onto the terrain; it actually makes this form of analysis all the more necessary. The metaphor of a choreography of logistics both covers and hides a plethora of relations, of hierarchies and of violence, ones that a viewer might feel seduced to enjoy or even be affected by. 16

17

This argument stems from Harney and Moten, in their essay ‘Fantasy in the Hold’. It will be unfolded in detail within chapter 4.2 ‘Colonial logistics and the onto-epistemic violence of transport’. A similar effect has been noted by Allan Sekula about the fascination for photographs of manmade, yet abstract logistical landscapes: “A landscape possessed of humanly made features can be translated into the realm of a nonreferential abstract geometry. The deployment of roads, trenches, city grids and cultivated fields over the rectangular space of the image is lifted into a universe of spiritualized affect or simple enjoyment” (Sekula 1975: 30, cited in Toscano/Kinkle 2015: 127).

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As an actual choreography to take in visually, logistics is always only partial; yet, as a specific form of organizing movement in space, it has the tendency to incorporate more and more movement processes. Logistics is, as Toscano and Kinkle, write “generalizing in tendency” (Toscano/Kinkle 2015: 126). Evidently, the notion of logistics as an infinitely complex and expanded form of ballet, which UPS employs, is a fantasy. On the ground, this choreography is always met by friction, obstacles, or chaotic circumstances. However, it is extremely powerful as an aesthetic model for fantastically expanded processes of governing matter: Businesses, transportation, and movement processes all over the planet are modeled on the choreographic ideology outlined in these commercials: “This fantasy, of minimizing or abolishing all obstacles to the turnover of money and goods, all costs of stockage and circulation, is a specifically capitalist fantasy, anchored in the real and inexorable imperatives of capital’s spatio-temporal logic”, as Toscano and Kinkle concede (Toscano/Kinkle 2015: 126). Thus, I need to understand more about the real and inexorable imperatives that govern this realm of mobilization. How is it structured and what are its principles and effects? Can a choreographic analysis of logistics help us to actually understand how it works and what it produces? I will, therefore, concentrate on several aspects concerning the choreographic nature of logistics. First, I will describe the rise of contemporary logistics as a central mechanism for capitalist expansion. In this description of contemporary logistics, I will specifically analyze the choreographic principles that are foundational for contemporary logistics. In order to understand their origins, I will shed light on the history of logistics and on the onto-epistemic violence founded within colonial logistics. I will thus analyze the extent to which this violence is both ongoing and how it is transformed within contemporary logistical assemblages. Finally, the notion of algorithmic governance, proposed by Luciana Paris, describes a mode of emergent choreography that no longer relies upon human choreographers. Importantly, logistical choreography, in that sense, is already post-human. After having analyzed the internal logic of logistical modes of mobilization, and their ongoing history of violence, I will introduce my third case study, the performative intervention and cultural initiative African Terminal, which was initiated by Hamburg based collective geheimagentur and of which I am a member. It addresses the colonial history of logistics and focusses on both highlighting and shifting some of the neo-colonial hierarchies and structures perpetuated by contemporary global trade. By using the supply chain as a means for creating relations beyond the frame of the theatrical stage, it puts forward several principles or propositions that will here be considered in their anti-logistical, ana-choreographic force. It focusses on the agency of migrants, thereby re-affirming their expertise and it seems to speculate about an attunement of both thingly and human movement patterns and trajectories, in which notions of (a)positionality (i.e., the “standpoint of no standpoint”, Harney/Moten 2013: 93) and improvisation are central. Finally, in doing so, it makes

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a strong case for the entanglement of distant publics and forces us to look at socioeconomic relations that far exceed the frame of a performance stage in a big Western city such as Hamburg.

4.1 Contemporary logistics and its choreographic logic Etymologically, the notion of logistics derives from the Greek logistikos, meaning “skilled in calculating” (cf. Cowen 2014: 26). For significant periods, logistics was a military science only, serving alongside strategy and tactics. Yet, while logistics may be born in the military, where it accompanies and supplements the art and practice of strategy and tactics, it has become a major field of management and business planning since World War II. In her detailed book ‘The Deadly Life of Logistics’, cultural geographer Deborah Cowen narrates the passage from military to business logistics, while insisting that the military and civilian dimensions of logistics are never clearly distinguishable. She writes: “Sneakers may still be easier to order online than smart bombs, but the industry that brings us both is making it increasingly difficult to discern the art of war from the science of business” (Cowen 2014: 1). One can situate the most important factors for a contemporary predominance of logistics as capitalist business innovation after World War II. Relevant literature from the field of Marxist economics, cultural geography, and cultural science have identified several reasons for the importance of contemporary logistics (cf. Mezzadra/Neilson 2019; Danyluk 2018; Chua/Danyluk/Cowen/Khalili 2018; Cowen 2014; Mezzadra/Neilson 2013a). I will reiterate some of these arguments, firstly, by concentrating on the technological and organizational conditions and, secondly, on the socio-historic factors that led to a rise of logistics, prior to attempting to describe the overall transformation of capitalist economies as portrayed by the aforementioned authors.18 One initial reason for the rise of business logistics is the invention of the shipping container at the end of the 1950s. Over the course of the last 50 years, the container has radically lowered the cost of transporting goods overseas. Notably, its establishment as a logistics tool is directly entangled with the US military actions in Korea and Vietnam (cf. Harney/Moten 2013: 89). Secondly, new telecommunication technologies allowed for data flow across great distances while new computer technologies made complex calculations of total costs along the full extension of supply

18

If, in the following, I spend some time analyzing these developments, it is because I reflect and name some of the socio-material conditions for an even greater acceleration of thingly movement around the globe within the last 60 years. I am attempting to unfold the socioeconomic conditions of contemporary regimes of mobility which in turn, as I claim, are the reason for the metaphoric appropriation of the notion of ‘choreography’ within other societal fields than just the performing arts.

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chains possible. In order to assess a production process’s total cost, including storage, transportation, and so on, an “incredible amount of data” needs to be processed, as Deborah Cowen notes (Cowen 2014: 36). The form of data-administration and calculation operations needed for modern logistics would indeed be unimaginable “without the advent of computers, nonlinear programming, and simulation modeling” (Cowen 2014: 37/38). These three factors, along with a new systems organization approach in management, brought about the rise of logistics, which came to occupy a central position within the field of business administration (cf. Danyluk 2018: 632–635). One might add other organizational or legal instruments to the necessary elements in the logistics mix: ‘Supply chain capitalism’, as Anna Tsing notes: “[…] depends on new financial arrangements that make it easy to move money around and on new regimes of property that guarantee global profits” (Tsing 2009: 140). Thus, contemporary logistics grounds itself upon the invention of the freight container, on new technologies of telecommunication, and computation, it is entangled with systems management approaches, and is dependent on financial instruments and specific property regulations. To these technological and organizational conditions of possibility for the rise of logistics, as listed above, geographer Martin Danyluk adds a number of socio-historic factors that made investment in logistics necessary for capital, especially from the 1970s onwards. While Taylorist management approaches had already optimized the production line from the 1920s onwards, it became necessary to optimize circulation and transportation after the 1970s recession, given that wages in the Western world had risen because of workers’ struggles, costs for warehousing rose steadily, and consumers developed more complex taste (cf. Danyluk 2018: 634). Importantly, all of these factors led to dynamics of outsourcing. From the 1980s onwards, companies started to produce in Asia, where labor was cheaper. The logic of outsourcing production was possible because the cost of transporting goods had lowered significantly, as harbor handling could be automatized due to the invention of intermodal trade and freight containers. Together, the technological factors that made large-scale movements of goods possible, and the socio-historic factors that made it necessary, summoned up a set of procedures that altered the structural logic of capitalism altogether. Today, the speed of circulation of goods and capital is maximized, for, as Marx would say, capital’s ‘turnover time’ is minimized (cf. Danyluk 2018: 635).19 Goods in storage can be 19

Cf. also Mezzadra/Neilson 2019: “Although Marx did not use the term ‘logistics’, its importance to capitalist enterprise was already specified in Capital, volume 2. According to the argument advanced in that volume, capitalist production needs to reduce the circulatory time of capital as much as possible, because during that interval the capitalist cannot convert surplus value into profit. Although the turnover time of capital consists of both production and circulation time, logistical processes tend to dissolve the heuristic division between these two” (Mezzadra/ Neilson 2019: 150). Mezzadra and Neilson, therefore, refer to Marx directly:

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viewed as capital that is bound uselessly, for it cannot be invested otherwise. Therefore, logistics speeds up the movement of capital via and through objects and labor respectively: “[…] a company that can manufacture, distribute, and sell a given quantity of products twice as quickly as its competitors stands to recoup its initial investment twice as often and thus to generate twice as much surplus value” (Danyluk 2018: 635), as Martin Danyluk remarks. Today, logistics is regarded as the central and most important field of business administration and innovation, and is concerned not only with the transport of commodities, but also with the management of flows of capital, labor, and things. Importantly, it not only shapes geographies, but fabricates social relations. As Mezzadra and Neilson write: “The logistical coordination of capital’s valorization and accumulation provides a framework not only for enterprises of transport and communication but also, more generally, for the reorganization of production and the social relations that enable production” (Mezzadra/Neilson 2019: 134). The advent of global logistics necessitated new paradigms for the organization of labor and it has reshaped large areas of the planet, mostly at the periphery of urban settlement. The movement ideology analyzed in relation to the marketing videos above is implemented in processes such as the organization of labor, transport, and marketing. Today, movement itself is considered a productive force. Thus, the rise of logistics, which I have characterized as a regime of hypermanagement or governance of circulation, has a number of socio-material and geopolitical effects. I will list three important aspects of a logistical “revolution” of capitalism (Danyluk 2018: 631) insofar they are relevant for my argument:

Liquefaction of space and valorization of time More and more extended and complex supply chains have been installed all over the globe over the last 30 years. Logistical processes constantly cross national borders, so that logistical space “collides and corrodes national territory” but “by no means marks the decline of territory” (Cowen 2014: 10). In terms of its spatial logics, logistics, therefore, is best understood as an: “[…] assemblage of practices and interventions that have as their aim the efficient and productive flow of commodities” (Hepworth 2014: 1121).20 The channels of flow that logistics have established are highly

20

“Transportation is distinguished by its appearance as the continuation of a production process within the circulation process and for the circulation process” (Marx 1978: 229). It is a recurrent hypothesis of critical discussions to think about logistical sites or logistics as a whole as an assemblage (cf. Hatzopolous/Kambouri 2018, Hepworth 2014). The use of the notion for the description of logistical sites and processes might be related to a current fashion of using the notion within discourses of political sciences more generally (cf. Ong/ Collier 2007, Sasken 2006). It may be argued that these uses of the notion of assemblage have already lost some of the political impetus of the original formulation of the notion by Deleuze and Guattari, but retain a focus on non-human components of the system.

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uneven. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have analyzed the proliferation of what they call ‘Border as Method’ (Mezzadra/Neilson 2013b), where borders are no longer understood as walls, but as complex interfaces that manage processes of inclusion and exclusion concurrently (i.e., that administer the porosity and density of flows of migration and commodities). The authors speak about the “global proliferation of multiple kinds of zones and corridors” (Mezzadra/ Neilson 2019: 151) that are differentially governed: “[…] where a multiplicity of normative orders […] interact and conflict in ways that firms and governments can manipulate to their advantage” (Mezzadra/Neilson 2019: 152). The ‘production of space’ (Lefebvre 1991) is both expanded and fragmented within logistical capitalism. In fact, one can speak of a liquefaction of space in which distances are considered elastic and in which space itself is conceived as flowing (cf. Lyster 2016). All the while, distances are always translated into time-measures. Jesse Lecavalier notes: “Distribution networks are measured in both miles and minutes” (Lecavalier 2012: 93). Time is the critical value for determining investment and it becomes the variable governing all movement. Mezzadra and Neilson emphasize “the making elastic of time and temporality mandated by logistical operations […] – the command to both speed up and slow down that is characteristic of current capitalist development and crisis” (Mezzadra/Neison 2019: 151). As the Maersk and UPS marketing videos suggest, logistics claims control over time. It maps movement trajectories and prescribes speed; and movement is always measured because the efficient management of time is necessary for the maximization of profits.

The performative dimension of logistics The necessary conditions for the efficient flow of goods and people need to constantly be enacted (i.e., put into place by a complex interplay of infrastructural and governmental measures). On the level of actual movement channels, global trade routes are secured such by administrative measures such as: “[…] new forms of transnational regulation, border management, data collection, surveillance, and labor discipline, as well as naval missions and aerial bombing” (Cowen 2014: 2). On the level of “the assembly of infrastructure and architecture”, the production of logistical space, as Deborah Cowen writes, is achieved through violent forms of “land grabs, military action, and dispossessions that are often the literal and figurative grounds for new logistics spaces” (Cowen 2014: 3). Thereby, logistics creates both landscapes and geographies. Logistical infrastructure, transportation tools, and technology (i.e., huge container-ships, ever newer distribution centers, automatized packaging procedures, complex data systems, highly securitized port areas, but also more and more distributed storage space, cf. Lyster 2016), are inserted into the suburban and urban fabric and span the globe. One may then characterize logistics as performative, because it can be characterized as a modality of governing

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movement that creates the very conditions that it needs in order to become effective: It continually recreates the conditions for optimizing movement control in and by means of mobilizing flows of matter (human and non-human).21 In order to do so, logistics operates on a logic of continuous adaptation. Therein, the “present state of the assemblage is always understood in relation to historical and potential future formations” (Hepworth 2014: 1124). Any specific assemblage is then characterized as a partial, yet violent, instance of how a complex logic of financial capital and extraction policies might come to be implemented in a complex environment of over-layering legislation and multiple stakeholders. In short, it is about how “capital hits the ground” (Mezzadra/ Neilson 2013a: 9) (i.e., how abstract choreographic principles of efficiency and flow come to be enacted in the shifting layout of infrastructure and in the governance of labor). Logistics can, thus, be described as a performative assemblage that operates on a logic of continuous optimization. On the ground, then, is where its choreographic logic of smooth flow, circulation, and adaptation needs to be enacted and in which it is met by friction and resistance. Here is where movement protocols come to be actualized, in a negotiation between virtual choreographic diagram and specific environment.

Production of subjectivity, or: the bio- and necropolitical nature of logistics While logistics, on the most apparent level, concerns the movement of consumer goods, it also implies the production of subjectivity by means of governance of human labor. Logistics essentially expands the same methods of performance measurement and constant movement control that it has established for transport, or for movement in general, and applies it to its labor force. All movement (be it within 21

For a more thorough discussion of performativity in the context of logistics, see Mezzadra and Neilson’s text on ‘Extraction, logistics, finance: Global crisis and the politics of operations’. Within this text, the authors first define their notion of ‘operations of capital’ as modality in which a complex meshwork of material and socially coded procedures comes to be effective (cf. Mezzadra/Neilson 2013a: 16.) Their notion of operation is both informed by discussions on performativity and also seeks to differentiate itself therefrom. The authors write: “We do not equate a causal notion of the operation with the moments of performance and event. The politics of performativity can never be correlated with the linearity of a cause; nor can the event be reduced to an effect. But once we begin to understand the workings of the operation beyond the mechanism of cause and effect, we enter an ontological and epistemological domain in which the questions of performativity and event become relevant” (Mezzadra/ Neilson 2013a: 16). Operations are not simply chains of effects. In the view of the authors, they differ from both performance and event in their temporal extension: “The interval of the operation not only separates it from the moments of performance and event; it also establishes a mesh of connections that challenge boundaries between ways of living, ways of earning a living and the fabricating of worlds” (Mezzadra/Neilson 2013a: 16). Gerko Egert has formulated a notion of ‘operational choreography’ (Egert 2022) that I have already cited above.

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an Amazon warehouse or within the urban fabric) has to be constantly monitored, controlled, and optimized. The body of the worker, thus, becomes a mere vehicle for the movement of capital itself (cf. Harney/Moten 2013: 90), a condition which has been described in relation to the notion of ‘human capital’ (cf. Feher 2009). In so far as labor is subjected to the same movement principles as consumer goods, it is, at least in tendency, not considered subject, but enslaved or automated labor (cf. Harney/Moten 2013: 92).22 As Deborah Cowen argues, logistical assemblages “calibrate an astonishing cast of characters […], and complex movements across great distances” (Cowen 2014: 1). In so doing, they differentially distribute agency, life chances, and mobility. In Western media, the great inequalities that come with global supply chains are often accounted for and often suppressed, which is why German sociologist Stephan Lessenich describes Western societies as characterized by mechanisms of externalizing their cost of living and unseeing the neo-imperial violence they enact in the process (cf. Lessenich 2016). What is more, establishing infrastructures and logistical movement channels is often the first step in subjugating foreign territories. Logistics, therein, operates beyond established political framework, as a form of ‘extrastatecraft’ (Easterling 2014) that complies with Western policies. The imperialist and neocolonial dimensions of ‘supply chain capitalism’ are one of the central reasons for a continued entanglement of logistics and the war-machine: “The threat of disruption to the circulation of stuff has become such a profound concern to governments and corporations in recent years that it has prompted the creation of an entire architecture of security that aims to govern global spaces of flow” (Cowen 2014: 2).23 To sum up: Logistics not only steers the movement of non-human objects, but also of humans that are, therefore and at least by tendency, stripped of their status as subjects. The socio-material choreographies of logistics can furthermore be regarded as the central mechanism for the continuous reproduction of neo-colonial inequalities. As a system of governing people and things, logistics keeps global geopolitical divisions and hierarchies in place, in so far as it differentially distributes 22

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The logic of sorting flesh (human and non-human) according to principles of valorization will be elaborated further in the next chapter, cf. chapter 4.2 ‘Colonial logistics and the onto-epistemic violence of transport’. Supply chain security is but one uncanny aspect of the military-civilian union of CIA and Apple or Facebook, of Hapag-Lloyd and FRONTEX, of Maersk and EU warships in the Gulf of Aden. Equally, one could claim that Chinese engagement in African infrastructure projects, or the takeover of Greek air- and seaport, such as Athens airport and the port of Piraeus, by Central European economic actors, e.g. Fraport or Maersk, are but neocolonial repetitions of means of colonial submission and economic warfare in which European empires would build centrally important infrastructure – think of the West Indian Trade Company and its infrastructure – in order to exploit their colonies (cf. Khalili 2015).

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agency, live chances, and mobility. As Deborah Cowen states: “Logistics is no simple story of securitization or of distribution; it is an industry and assemblage that is at once bio-, necro-, and antipolitical” (Cowen 2014: 4). Thereby, logistics enacts geographies; in this way, it continually creates and maintains the material and social conditions for its own efficacy. Finally, it subjects human labor to its principles of performance measurement, governance of speed, and continuous valorization of movement. In so doing, it continuously sorts living matter into either valuable or disposable resources. I thus argue that logistics, in its contemporary form, is a system of increasingly total mobilization of matter (human and non-human) for capitalist valorization. It can be viewed as a socio-material choreography, if one concedes, firstly, that the movements that it produces are rule-bound, and secondly, that it has a productive quality (i.e., it either generates or denies subjectivity, produces consumer goods, but, most importantly, redraws borders between active subject and passive object). The movement trajectories that logistics produces, as I will show in one of the following chapters, do not necessarily have to be generated from a central, authorial point of view, but may be emergent in nature. Furthermore, what one would conventionally call a witness to the choreography (cf. Lepecki 2019: 170–176) is replaced by the role and function of the consumer within logistics. As I have outlined above, there exists, between modalities of moving things on stage, in daily life, and within super-extended supply networks, what Hewitt names an ‘aesthetic continuum’ (cf. Hewitt 2005: 17–36), more specifically, an aesthetico-pragmatic continuum of handling things. Modalities of handling things, I have claimed, are constituted by choreographic logics of handling. How and what consequences result when one moves, and moves with things, is based on these principles. More importantly, principles of handling things within logistics and on stage co-inform and influence one another. Furthermore, I have within the previous chapter, characterize their mode of operation as performative (i.e., they performatively impact on the nature and consistency of the assemblage as such).. In order not to fall back into a discussion whether or not logistic actually is a choreography, or whether it is merely choreographic in nature, I will now extrapolate, from the field of literature about logistics cited above, different choreographic principles inherent in contemporary capitalist logistics. Understanding the choreographic principles of logistics, I claim, may help us to analyze the nature of mobilization as well as the procedures of movement control that it enacts. In a second step, I will then analyze what kind of affects are produced by the application of such principles. More importantly, uncovering these principles will allow me to highlight the extent to which the case studies that I present in the following can be marked off from the socio-material choreography of logistics as they enact different choreographic principles. I thus propose six choreographic principles for the analysis of contemporary logistics. These are: 1) constant flow, 2) continuous adaption, 3) disposability,

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4) vectorialization, 5) containerization, and 6) valorization, and these will be spelled out in what follows.

Constant flow This is a principle that has already been named and analyzed by Gerko Egert. He writes: “Logistics’ tendency is perfect flow and smoothness.” (Egert 2022: 100) Egert bases his notion of ‘operational choreogaphy’ of an analysis of logistics as socio-material system of choreography, that has as its goal the implementation of constant flow. One may also relate the principle of constant flow to ideas and an aesthetics of continuous flow within modern dance.24 For logistics, the reasons to apply this principle are obvious: As time is money, and passages and trajectories need to be optimized constantly, logistics aims at establishing smooth spaces of circulation and flow, in which movement is met with as little friction as possible. “Designing and coordinating systems of flow is the central task of logistics”, according to architectural theorist Claire Lyster (Lyster 2016: n.p.). Historically, the application of this principle was highly dependent on the invention of intermodal trade, which reduced the cost and time of changing the carrier medium for goods, from sea to land, or sea to air, thereby creating smooth interfaces and nodes that connect. Where space is regarded as a smooth, indiscriminate medium, the movement that it enables takes on the same quality. Ideally, flow is also conceived as potentially uninterrupted for logistics; nothing may ever stay still. Ihis includes storage (i.e., the momentary resting of objects, flows). As Clare Lyster writes: “In the logisticalization of contemporary supply chains, shelf life is planned to be as brief as possible—storage does not accumulate in one place; rather, it flows.” (Lyster 2016: n.p.) Even if material rests, stillness is conceived of as just a momentary interruption of flow, one that needs to be as brief as possible.

Continuous adaptation Continuous adaptation is a principle that is potentially known from different exercises of dance improvisation, within an exercise often termed ‘negative space’ for example, in which bodies move, but try not to touch each other. In terms of logistical choreographies, the actual trajectories of single items are always adapted according

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In respect to this first principle, logistics takes on a charge that is inherent in much of modern and contemporary dance, still. Within ‘Exhausting Dance’, André Lepecki, for example, begins his reflection on recent contemporary dance practices by criticizing and thus citing a prevalent imperative of modern dance “that ontologically associates dance with ‘flow and a continuum of movement’” (Lepecki 2006: 2).

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to the necessity of the overall situation and environmental factors. “On the busy Europa-Asia trade route”, the logistics company Maersk, for example, has established: “a floating conveyor belt carrying everything from cars to king prawns”, as one can learn from the image video analyzed above. What this means is that cargo: “can be redirected to another port whilst still in transit, without hesitation” (Maersk 2012). Indeed, the ability to change movement trajectories as they take place is one of the central principles that is being established in logistics at the moment.25 In this regard, Egert speaks of “continuously adaptive rhythms of production and delivery” (Egert 2022: 99). Furthermore, objects and bodies are supposed to adapt to the overall logics of the system. The principle of continuous adaptation of movement trajectories may then also be related to discussions both about the dancer’s versatility and of self-entrepreneurship within precarious, neoliberal working conditions. In fact, it is the principle of continuous adaptation that creates the aesthetic illusion of smooth flow. Indeed, logistics has to constantly adapt its plan to outer circumstances in order to create the illusion of continuous, frictionless movement.26

Disposability The choreographic principle of disposability implies that literally anything and anybody can be forced to become part of the choreography. Furthermore, the single element carries no agency, with regards to the overall choreographic system; it needs to move, even as it is told to be moving. Indeed, logistics is characterized by a logic of potentially total disposability, which involves disregarding historicity or material integrity of the elements that it transports. Its most important imperative is to move on, to keep in movement, and to evolve. Therefore, objects only ever exist to be coupled with other objects, or to be consumed and thrown away, so that they can then be reintegrated into the system once again. The logic of making matter disposable 25

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The principle of continuous adaptation also relates to the material environment in which movement takes place. As I have argued above, logistics is productive in as much as it performatively creates the conditions for the ever greater, near-total logic of mobilization to be enacted. So, while single parts can be redirected at any moment, logistics also violently enforces a flattening of space. In that regard, cultural geographer Martin Danyluk has also spoken of an ‘annihilation of space’ (cf. Danyluk 2018). Space is no longer a container for unique and singular forms; it is also not a meaningful, productive relation between entities and it is instead regarded as an empty, infinitely expanded system of coordinates, mathematically modeled only with respect to potential disturbances for transport. In fact, as Mezzadra and Neilson argue, the idea of continuous, smooth flow may be nothing but an illusion. They write: “The movement of people and things appears smooth, but this smoothness is an illusion created by the bursting of information and materials across diverse systems and locations that do not necessarily piece together seamlessly. Realizing that such seamlessness is an illusion is crucial to understanding the logic that animates contemporary logistical operations” (Mezzadra/Neilson 2019: 154).

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also means that objects remain disposable after they have been used, thereby being turned into waste all too easily. It is thus of no surprise, that artistic practices that challenge logistical choreographies often deal with waste.27

Vectorialization Not only do things and people need to stay in motion all of the time within logistics, but perhaps more importantly, they themselves are conceived of as fluid systems. Jasper Berne has described this tendency of contemporary logistics. He writes: “In the idealised world-picture of logistics, manufacture is merely one moment in a continuous, Heraclitean flux; the factory dissolves into planetary flows, chopped up into modular, component processes which, separated by thousands of miles, combine and recombine according to the changing whims of capital” (Berne 2015: 28/29). I agree with Bernes’ formulations: Logistics operates on the basis of an almost Deleuzian ontology of matter, with one minor, yet central difference; it is not about the spontaneous creative capacities of natural materials to fold and unfold, to couple and adhere, nor is it about the intrinsically choreographic-creative capacities of matter itself, but concerns a mimicking of nature on a second level. Logistics imitates natural cycles, constantly monitored and optimized, as Nature 4.0 in which: “in perfectly circular fashion, ‘nature’ is thus a metric for trade, which is already a metric for nature” (Cowen 2014: 15). In that respect, logistics is no longer only about sustaining or supplying our lives, but is instead conceptualized as a lively system in itself.28 Implicitly modeled on an understanding of life, or ‘the informal’29 as a con27

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Within this book, logistics of waste have been analyzed already with regards to Mette Ingvartsen’s The Artificial Nature Project and will be analyzed in greater detail in relation to the long-term artistic project named African Terminal. Martina Ruhsam, in her book on ‘Moving Matter’ includes reflections on waste (cf. Ruhsam 2021: 263–267, 271–280), and André Lepecki, in his essay on ‘Moving as Thing’, to which I will come back below, does the same (cf. Lepecki 2012). Deborah Cowen notes a recent thinking on the ‘resilience’ of logistical systems, in which: “threats to circulation are treated not only as criminal acts but as profound threats to the life of trade” (Cowen 2014: 3) itself. She also writes: “Logistics systems figure as natural systems rather than ‘things’, where nature is not just a metaphor but a metric. It is not just any nature at work here but a very distinct conception—a social Darwinism of circulation” (Cowen 2014: 15). As Harney and Moten write: “Today the field of logistics is in hot pursuit of the general intellect in its most concrete form, that is its potential form, its informality, when any time and any space and anything could happen, could be the next form, the new abstraction. Logistics is no longer content with diagrams or with flows, with calculations or with predictions. It wants to live in the concrete itself, in space at once, time at once, form at once” (Harney/Moten

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stant interplay and movement of forces and trajectories, logistics aims at emulating and imitating these myriad movements. I, therefore, speak of an inherent logic of vectorialization. Yet, in as much as logistics conceives of people and things as mere vectors of adaptation and transformation, it allows itself to dis- and reassembles parts (be they human or non-human) according to its own adaptive considerations. Harney and Moten, therefore, describe ‘logistical populations’ that “will be dismantled and disabled as bodies in the same way they are assembled” (Harney/ Moten 2013: 91). With regards to specific objects, the principle of vectorialization allows the choreographing instance to take them apart and to re-arrange them as it sees fit. Logistics disregards the integrity of things. Insofar as things are understood as mere bundles of components and vectorial flows, which may be disassembled when needed, they become empty containers that can be filled and emptied according the choreographing agent’s whims.

Containerization The principle of ‘containerization’ means two things: abstraction and immobilization. It is most prominently reflected in the invention of modern freight containers. Firstly, whatever travels within a container necessarily loses its specific materiality, its locality, and its manifold relations. Objects that travel within freight containers lose any relation to the world while being transported.30 In that regard, Toscano and Kinkle speak of a “choreography of invisibility” (Toscano/Kinkle 2015: 124), in which the elements that move are made invisible, so that eventually the whole choreography tends to become invisible as well. Invisibility is a central concern of logistics on more than one level: Firstly, logistics wants the movement that it produces to take place in invisibility, hidden from the eyes of a public or from the control of politics. Secondly, it renders anything it transports invisible because it is being hidden behind the steel door of freight containers. Movement happens all the time; it is happening in coordinated and interfaced manner, but it should and has to take place beyond the stage, off the record, and in spaces that are shielded from any public act of witnessing. Furthermore, while objects are being moved within (or as) a container, they are paradoxically, concurrently being immobilized. Within the principle

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2013: 88). As Harney and Moten insist, this drive towards the informal itself, an understanding of movement as generative force that can and has to be appropriated and channeled for capitalist production, needs to be thoroughly analyzed, especially with regards to the colonial history of logistics, cf. chapter 4.2 ‘Colonial logistics and the onto-epistemic violence of transport’. In his book ‘Digitalschatten. Das Internet und die Dinge’, Christian Huck describes the logic of logistics as one that dematerializes anything that it either transports or moves: “Containers enact an independence of consumer goods from their medium of transport by subtracting their specific materiality; one could say: they digitalize” (Huck 2020: 12, my translation).

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of ‘containerization’, logistical mobilization reveals itself as paradox: what is moved, is also held in place (i.e., it cannot move). Therein lies a fundamental disregard for the objects’ capacities for movement.

Valorization The principle of economic efficiency is not merely about reducing costs within a supply chain approach; instead, value needs to be added at every step of the chain. Thus, transportation and movement itself become valuable and prized goods and are measured with respect to how much time it takes to execute them. Via the measurement of time, movement itself is therefore valorized in term of investment rates. Time becomes the standard bearer of value and can no longer flow freely, but must be put to use efficiently. Movement, conversely, is no longer defined as “the imperceptible as such” (Alsopp/Lepecki 2008: 1), or enjoyed in terms of personal or collective expression; rather, it always needs to be measured, monitored, and return interest. In one way or another, all five principles outlined above converge or depend upon this last one (i.e., the principle of valorization of movement). Because movement needs to generate value, logistics enforces all other principles (i.e., constant flow, continuous adaptation, disposability, vectorialization, and containerization). Thus, the principle of the valorization of movement most clearly differentiates logistical choreography more-than-human choreographies within the performing arts or within daily life. Yet, even if movement is not valorized in the same manner as within logistical supply chains, all five other principles that are enacted within logistics may influence our relation to and practical handling of materials. This is where the aesthetic continuum of handling things is actualized. The six choreographic principles outlined here both reinforce and stabilize one another. Taken together, they describe how choreographic decisions about the movement of people and things are taken within logistical systems of movement control. All of these principles constitute logistics as a realm of mobilization. While logistics operates with the aim of mobilizing ever more bodies (human and non-human), in the name of valorization and capitalization, it does not do so with regard to the integrity, historicity, or independent, albeit entangled, movement impulses of any of its moving elements. Rather, the single elements that are moved by logistics are themselves immobilized during the passage. Their agentic potential for self-mobilization (in concert with others) is dis-enabled. In tendency, thus, logistics is a totally objectifying system of mobilizing matter. Taken together, these principles also explain the extent to which logistics may become another name for a potentially total expansion of choreography. As I have unfolded above, choreography may be defined as the necessary act of interfering with more-than-human worlds by handling things. Yet, where socio-material

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choreographies are concerned, they are strongly identified with capitalist logistics of accumulation and acceleration today and are, as I have argued, driven by a logic of constant valorization, disposability of matter (both human and non-human), a tendency towards full mobilization and total flow, and a disregard for any local relationalities. Where choreography had previously commanded human bodies (i.e., subjected them to imperatives of lightness, flow, adaptation, and thus enforced mobility), now logistics does so with both people and things. While I have proposed that these tendencies are new to a certain degree, they are also constitutive of choreography from its beginnings on. In fact, as I will outline subsequently, the choreographic principles outlined above determine and constitute the modality in which subjects and objects have been divided from one another within colonial logistics. Schematically, whoever or whatever is subjected to these principles will also be considered inhuman or object. Whoever is not, or is allowed to apply these principles to other beings, may consider him- or herself to be a subject. To sum up: I have, until now, analyzed the aesthetic charge of choreography as a marketing metaphor for logistics. It lies in the sublime horror and delight that computational movement control, a kind of post-human operative reason of perfect machinic rationality, may operate at speed and scales incomprehensible to human eyes or minds. From there, I proceeded to describe contemporary logistics as an ideology of establishing smooth spaces of flow and circulation in which things, people, information, and money constantly move and are being moved at various, interfacing speeds. Over the past 30 years, capitalist production has been thoroughly reformed, based on new technologies, the practice of outsourcing production to places in which labor costs are lower, and driven by the imperative of reducing capital’s turn-over time. Global trade and super-extended supply chains, thus, form a complex choreographic system based on the constant movement of things and people which is governed from a perspective of efficient valorization. While the equation of logistics and choreography is somewhat dubious – its function is to gloss over the ecological and social costs of the business field in the context of marketing videos – one can nevertheless deduce several choreographic principles that determine how logistical systems enforce and govern movement from the description of the contemporary field of logistics. These principles are the practical guidelines of logistics as operative reason. They are: an adaptive mode of steering movement in order to create the illusion of smooth, frictionless movement processes that constantly flow; the principle of vectorialization of matter, linked to the ideology of total disposability of matter as resource; and the principle of containerization. Within logistical choreographies, objects are dematerialized, in so far as they are cut from their relations with one another and their environment. They seem to no longer exist within containers (i.e., during the process of being transported) because they have no relation with the outside. As they move, they are immobilized and disappear; their entanglement with the world is undone. Logistical mobilization, thus, is paradoxical

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in nature and always both transports and affixes, moves and immobilizes. It is not simply speed or movement that is crucial to logistics, but the governance of movement and speed. Logistics operates with different respective speeds that are made to interface and coalesce in ways attractive to capital investment and by capturing and channeling flows. Whenever logistics is engaged in moving something, it concurrently cuts or suppresses other movements (i.e., the movement of things).

4.2 Colonial logistics and the onto-epistemic violence of transport In this section, I will focus on the actual effects that logistics both enacts and produces. By moving things and people according to the principles outlined above, I claim that logistics produces onto-epistemic effects. Thus, it constantly reshapes the socio-material realm that it attempts to both mobilize and capitalize from. In order to understand these mechanisms, it will become necessary to take the history of logistics into account, namely its colonial past: In their essay ‘Fantasy in the Hold’, performance theoretician Fred Moten and the critical management scholar Stefano Harney claim that colonial logistics should be regarded as capitalism’s “first wave of regulatory innovation” (Harney/Moten 2013: 89), thereby establishing logics that are both continued and altered within contemporary logistics. In that regard, an analysis of choreographic principles and effects internal to logistics may be incomplete without consideration of its foundational moments; as Moten and Harney claim, “modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave trade, founded against the Atlantic slave” (Harney/ Moten 2013: 92). The repercussions of this claim are wide-ranging. Under review here, I propose, is a form of onto-epistemic violence that is both enacted and produced by and in the very act of moving something. In other words: Logistics produces and enforces what the feminist physicist Karen Barad names diverse ‘agential cuts’ (Barad 2007: 140–142) within the socio-material realm. Within colonial logistics, the very act of transport produces the racialized categories of subject and object, of crew and cargo. Understanding how that act of choreographic violence functioned will help me to better understand the extent to which the categorical, onto-epistemic violence of colonial logistics continues today, but also the ways in which it is altered. Harney and Moten propose the following hypothesis: A current resurgence of the faculty of logistics, as potentially totalizing governance of movement, is a historical update of processes that early capitalism established within the transatlantic slave trade. Their hypothesis is based on two arguments: The first one is more general, and serves as a base for the following discussion (cf. Harney/Moten 2013: 89–95): A logistical desire to govern movement on all levels (human and non-human), or to control and to generate movement on the level of the informality of things, is based upon

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and can therefore best be understood in relation to the colonial violence that was enacted within the transport of slaves. Within the transatlantic slave trade, transport (i.e., logistics itself) repeatedly performed acts of sorting matter by violently turning human bodies into inhuman commodities. It did so because it allowed capital to profit from the enslaved labor of these bodies turned objects, a process often termed primitive accumulation. In the name of further accumulation, logistics today also wants to administer matter even on the level of potential movement tendencies. As I have shown above, it aims at governing the movement of matter (i.e., of all things in their ever-changing, improvisatory, and generative entanglements). Yet, by moving material according to the principles outlined above, it turns things into containerized objects which may, in turn, be handled efficiently. Thus, in some way, it repeats the violent gesture that was practiced, in unimaginable brutality, within the so-called ‘Middle Passage’ in which human bodies were stored and arranged like pieces of goods within the holds of slave ships. It is the gesture that is repeated: Taking hold of living matter and turning it into an object (cf. Harney/Moten 2013: 89–95). As I have analyzed above, the act of grasping and subjecting things is foundational for our understanding of subjectivity, too. And as I will explicate within this chapter, the nature of this form of violence is choreographic. The second argument of the two authors is of a socio-historic nature: Both the transatlantic slave trade, as the first wave of capitalist innovation, as well as contemporary logistics, whose becoming-dominant since the 1980s I have unfolded above, as second wave of innovation, move in concert with practices of financialization and securitization. As the authors write: “Indeed, logistics and financialization worked together in both phases of innovation, with, roughly speaking, the first working on production across bodies, the second renovating the subject of production. Financialization is perhaps the better known of the two strategies of resistance to rebellion, with a first phase selling of factories and state assets, and the second selling of homes and banks, only in both instances to rent them back on credit in a kind of global pawn-broking” (Harney/Moten 2013: 89); The logics of financialization have been thoroughly analyzed for today’s capitalist economy by, among others, Sandro Mezzadra, Brett Neilson, and Randy Martin (cf. Mezzadra/Neilson 2019; Mezzadra/Neilson 2013a; Martin 2014). Yet, it is within the triangular slave trade that financial means such as derivates and modern forms of insurance were first innovated. As I have argued elsewhere, colonial logistics always needed to insure against the risk of turning bodies into objects (cf. Frischkorn 2018). Harney and Moten’s argument may, thus, be directly related to an event in 1871, in which the captain of a slave ship named ‘Zong’ ordered at least 133 slaves to be thrown overboard, allegedly for a lack of drinking water. In the following years, the brutal violence of this act of murder became public within a legal case entitled Gregson vs.

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Gilbert, in which a British court had to determine whether the enslaved people were to be considered cargo and, therefore, to properly insured. In short: At the times, and in the eyes of the owners of the ‘Zong’, it was not the relegation of human bodies to the category of cargo that was legally problematic. In their eyes, the relegation was considered appropriate and legitimate. In question was an insurance claim, for the enslaved bodies were insured only as cargo, not as people. Even though not a single name of the 440 slaves on board the ‘Zong’ were recorded – their names were not deemed important information (cf. Baucom 2005: 11) – the case of the ‘Zong’ is relatively well-known today. It has been the object of different reflections, among them the long prose poem Zong! By M. NourbeSe Philips (Philips 2008) and a theoretical elaboration on the relations between the trial, the transatlantic slave trade, and the financial instruments of risk management and speculation by Ian Baucom entitled ‘Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History’ (Baucom 2005). Within my argument, one focal point of my reflection on transport concerns the form of racialized onto-epistemic violence that becomes apparent in this case, because it shows how colonial logistics enacted and produced the opposing categories of crew and cargo (i.e., of subject and object). As American Marxist historians Peter Linebaugh and Markus Rediker argue (cf. Linebaugh/Rediker 2000: 144/145), the slave ship, this “strange and potent combination of war machine, mobile prison, and factory” (Rediker 2007: 7), played a central role in the establishment of colonial logistics as means of imprisonment, racial sorting, value creation, and – centrally – transportation. In his 2007 book ‘The Slave Ship’, Marcus Rediker gives a detailed account of how the slave ship produced notions of race, in and via transportation: “Sailors also ‘produced’ slaves with the ship as factory, doubling their economic value as they moved them from a market on the eastern Atlantic to one on the west and helping to create the labor power that animated a growing world economy in the eighteenth century and after. In producing workers for the plantation, the ship-factory also produced ‘race’. At the beginning of the voyage, captains hired a motley crew of sailors, who would, on the coast of Africa, become ‘white men’. At the beginning of the Middle Passage, captains loaded on board the vessel a multiethnic collection of Africans who would, in the American port, become ‘black people’ or a ‘negro race’. The voyage thus transformed those who made it. War making, imprisonment and the factory production of labor power and race all depended on violence” (Rediker 2007: 7, my emphasis). If the voyage transformed those who made it – a claim that is often repeated within post-colonial and Afro-American discourses – then there is a form of choreographic violence at play here: The racial sorting that took place, which allowed European merchants to abduct and sell human bodies as commodities, was linked to philosophical

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or legal discourses, to other practices, and tools. Yet, it was enacted and it produced effects within the voyage itself (i.e., within the act of abduction and transport). As Rediker argues above, it was the act of moving and being moved that created the categories of ‘white men’ and ‘a negro race’, of subject and object. While that may be regarded as an ontological act of sorting, there were also epistemic questions linked to the transatlantic slave-trade. Re-narrating the history of the 1781 incidents on board the ‘Zong’, historian Ian Baucom unpacks how the transatlantic slave-trade conceptualized of human bodies as, essentially, pieces of typified, commodified cargo, which had to be insured at a specific value. In the case of the ‘Zong’, each of the enslaved bodies was priced and valuated at and as a limit number of 30 pounds: “Four hundred forty slaves. Four hundred forty items of property valued at 30 pounds each. Thirteen thousand two hundred pounds. Four hundred forty human beings. We know almost nothing of them, almost nothing of Captain Collingwood’s conduct in ‘acquiring’ them, almost nothing of their entry, as individuals, into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Not as individuals. As ‘types’ they are at least partially knowable, or imaginable. Indeed, what we know of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is that among the other violence it inflicted on millions of human beings was the violence of becoming a ‘type’: a type of person, or, terribly, not even that, a type of nonperson, a type of property, a type of commodity, a type of money” (Baucom 2005: 11). Here, an epistemic cut is being enacted, is being administered, and being practiced within the transport; a cut that differentiates between typified cargo and subjects who are allowed to individuate. Thus, Ian Baucom unfolds how the transatlantic slave trade (i.e., the systems of governing movement that was established within it) constituted a severe epistemological shock. He places this shock at the beginning of what he calls the long 18th century, here borrowing terminology from Italian economist and sociologist Giovanni Arrighi (cf. Baucom 2005: 23). Beginning around 1660, the long 18th century entailed the development of new financial instruments, the birth of insurance companies (first for fire incidents, but also for shipping soon after), but also a new theory of value. As Baucom writes: “[…] as mobile property displaced ‘real’ property, and the imaginary value of stocks, bonds, billsof-exchange, and insured property of all kinds increasingly trumped the ‘real’ value of land, bullion, and other tangibles, the concepts of what was knowable, credible, valuable, and real were themselves transformed” (Baucom 2005: 16). A speculative mindset that operated with probabilities, rates of interest, and return, all based on imaginary values, had to be put in place because of the extendedness and expansion of the movement processes that constituted this new dimension of early capitalist trade:

4. Logistics as socio-material choreography

“The time it took to complete the vast triangular circuit of the trade dictated that merchants must conduct much of their business on credit. But for such a system of credit to operate both a theory of knowledge and a form of value which would secure the credibility of the system itself had to be in place. Central to that theory was a mutual and system-wide determination to credit the existence of imaginary values” (Baucom 2015: 17). As a literary scholar, Baucom also links this form of knowledge to the birth of a new literary format, the novel, in which “abstract, or ‘exchangeable’ types of character, object, and social encounter” (Baucom 2005: 32) were mediated. Next to Baucom, to Harney and Moten, and may others, I claim that this form of violent sorting of flesh is inherently connected to the modern birth of another aesthetic faculty, that of choreography. For it is, to some degree at least, the practical transportation itself which inscribed ‘abstract’ categories of black and white, cargo and crew, onto the bodies of those that it forced into movement. In a way, the case of the ‘Zong’ reinforces Harney and Moten’s general argument, summarized above. Reformulating it based on the idea that logistics can be described as socio-material choreography, one may thus claim: Colonial logistics, ruled by certain choreographic principles, was a system of governing movement that practically enacted onto-epistemic cuts. As a colonial, racialized “space of circulation” (Lepecki 2013a: 16), it divided those who moved and those who were forced to move within in, into the categories of subject vs. object, crew vs. cargo, and white vs. black. As a system of transport, colonial logistics thereby allocated positions and agencies by violently cutting life and the material world into opposing poles. At the same time, it was connected to logics of speculation and insurance, which regarded the human bodies turned object as exchangeable types with an abstract, quantifiable (i.e., monetary) value. This onto-epistemic force of sorting bodies that colonial logistics enacted is still exercised today, Harney and Moten claim (cf. Harney/Moten 2013: 93), albeit in different ways: Logistics still enacts divisions of agency, competence, and degrees of mobility in the practice of transporting objectified matter, and imposes this division onto the objects it transports. It thus performatively reproduces what I have above called its ongoing bio- and necropolitical dimensions. Logistics captures, transports, and therein differentially sorts matter into epistemic categories. It allocates and denies capacities within the movement that it produces and prescribes. As such, it is an assemblage that makes and unmakes affordances, produces and denies capacities, and administers the potency of bodies. As Harney and Moten claim, this form of structural violence, which logistics enacts as choreographic governance of matter, is constitutive of modernity as such. It informs both colonial logistics and contemporary logistics. They write:

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“Modernity is sutured by this hold. This movement of things, unformed objects, deformed subjects, nothing yet and already. This movement of nothing is not just the origin of modern logistics, but the annunciation of modernity itself, and not just the annunciation of modernity itself but the insurgent prophesy that all of modernity will have at its heart […]” (Harney/Moten 2013: 93). The notion of a hold refers to the belly of slave-ships in which African bodies were transported and thereby turned into cargo, to be calculated and insured. Within the hold (i.e., within the act of transport), logistics as a system of mobilizing matter for capital (while concurrently immobilizing it), produced – by means of choreographic force – the division of the living world into subjects and objects. As Harney and Moten claim, this act of ‘suture’, of cutting open and cutting apart, is foundational to an understanding of modernity. It continues today, albeit in different ways. In the case of the transatlantic slave trade, the sorting that takes place is obvious, even if its violent and traumatic effects that haunt our lives today are manifold, partly suppressed, and are impossible to enumerate (cf. Sharpe 2016). It may not always be as obvious, but similar choreographic mechanisms are still in place today. The onto-epistemic force of logistical choreography (i.e., the power to allocate and enforce positions, agentic abilities, and degrees of freedom in the very act of choreographically forcing bodies and things into motion and prescribing pathways or movement trajectories) is very much present in the field of the management of migration, but also within societal institutions such as prisons, camps, and schools, as Afro-American theorist Christina Sharpe concedes: “In the wake, the semiotics of the slave ship continue: from the forced movements of the enslaved to the forced movements of the migrant and the refugee, to the regulation of Black people in North American streets and neighborhoods, to those ongoing crossings of and drownings in the Mediterranean Sea, to the brutal colonial reimaginings of the slave ship and the ark; to the reappearances of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the school” (Sharpe 2016: 21). Further examples, albeit in another register, may be accounts of working conditions within Amazon distribution centers: In a similar vein as described above, Amazon distribution centers produce corporealities, that is inscribed, enacted ways of fleshly existence that move outside of normative repertoires of subjectivity. Workers in the distribution centers say that they feel constantly surveyed and increasingly have the impression of becoming robots themselves. The actions that they perform, but crucially also the way that their actions are being administrated and surveyed by algorithms, makes them feel like the ‘mere hands and feet’ of computers. Importantly, Amazon does not pay great attention to the identities and biographies of the human robots it hires at all. Instead, Amazon aggressively markets its capacity to hire dis-

4. Logistics as socio-material choreography

enfranchised portions of populations vis-à-vis local politicians. It uses and abuses bodies that were never integrated into liberal citizenship and sovereign self-expression (migrant labor, long term unemployed, and minorities), thereby iteratively depriving them of their potential to enact, enjoy, and to incur debts within entangled, more-than-human ecologies. Today, logistics as choreography plugs diverse capacities, affects, and identities. It is the faculty that assembles and disassembles objects, identities, and subjectivities within its continuously moving chains of value production. It allocates and denies resources, positions, capacities, and affective potentials. As the contemporary assemblage of assemblages, logistics as socio-material choreography determines and sorts all matter, it gives or takes away agency. As a potentially totalizing apparatus (or more accurately as an apparatus that imagines itself as total), it wants to governs all possible space and time. Significantly, logistics turns things into objects it turns bodies into objects; and it produces consumer goods. It assembles things, many of which we use every day. All the while, this ever-expanding choreography has to be understood as a force that also shapes workers experiences, that impacts upon, and even constitutes subjectivities. Anthropologist Anna Tsing insists that one take the differential production of identities within supply chains into account by questioning a unifying notion of the ‘flexible subject’ that is often assumed within discourses on neoliberalism. According to her “supply chains are only possible because of the conflicts of interest and identity that segregate race, gender, and national status niches” (Tsing 2009: 166). Tsing speaks of super-exploitation by describing “new figures of labor and labor power” along the supply-chain “in which making a living appears as management, consumption, or entrepreneurship”. She then claims that super-exploitation is constantly blurred with self-exploitation, defined as: “[…] exploitation that depends on so-called noneconomic factors such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality, age, and citizenship status”, but also as aggrieved exploitation, as exploitation that is: “[…] greater than might be expected from general economic principles” (Tsing 2009: 158); this is the recurrent form of subjectivity associated with artists-entrepreneurs and self-invested management-subjects. While most authors on the subject agree that logistics has severe effects on the organization of labor, and therefore on their self-experience, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten go one step further. In their assessment of logistics, they argue that its main principle is one that is always violent: whatever it moves or sets in motion, whatever it captures in the hold of the ship, or places into containers, or moves with assemblages of controlling migration, is always objectified, is always rendered mere object.31 Thus, Harney and Moten analyze and formulate logistics’ most central 31

Cf. Harney/Moten 2013, 92: “From the motley crew who followed in the red wakes of these slave ships, to the prisoners shipped to the settler colonies, to the mass migrations of indus-

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structural feature as a totalized managerial fantasy of infinity (i.e., god-like choreographic power): Logistics wants to control and manage all movement, thereby objectifying whatever it choreographs. It is powered by the fantasy of hooking onto and into the chaotic, self-organizing flow of life itself, the morphogenetic becoming of matter that I have above described, in relation to Deleuze and Guattari, as a ‘body without organs’. Thus, the socio-material choreography of logistics presents itself as an apparatus that enacts agential cuts. The notion was forged by Karen Barad, to whom I will only briefly return here. Throughout the last 15 years, the physicist and feminist scholar has formulated what she calls a “posthumanist performative model” of material bodies and their agentic capacities in which agency is allocated within and according to the mode of operation of fundamentally relational meshworks (cf. Barad 2007: 139).32 According to Barad, it is only within relational set-ups, or as relationality, that “boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted” (Barad 2007: 139) and materialized. The concept of apparatus (developed in relation to the philosophy of physicist Niels Bohr) is central to her argument because it signifies both micro- and macroscopic experimental set-ups, but also any exercise of power that re-configures the realm of matter. In fact, an apparatus (one can hear both the physical reference to measuring devices, and the Foucauldian reference to a system of power that delineates modes of knowing and behaving)33 is characterized as a “boundary-drawing practice” (Barad 2007: 140) that enacts specific “material (re)configurings of the world” (Barad 2007: 140). An apparatus is more than a mere assemblage of human and non-human matter, Barad insists, because it also includes a mode of processual enactment of reality as materiality. Therefore, she writes, apparatuses “iteratively reconfigure spacetimematter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming” (Barad 2007: 142).

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trialisation in the Americas, to the indentured slaves from India, China, and Java, to the trucks and boats leading north across the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande, to one-way tickets from the Philippines to the Gulf States or Bangladesh to Singapore, logistics was always the transport of slavery, not ‘free’ labor.” For a model of choreography as intra-action based on Barad’s philosophy, cf. Ruhsam 2021. Barad writes: “What is an apparatus? Is it the set of instruments needed to perform an experiment? Is it a meditating device that allows the object world to give us a sign of its nature? Is it a prosthetic extension of our sensing abilities? Shall we understand an apparatus in terms of Kantian grids of intelligibility? Aristotelian schemata? Heideggerian background practices? Althusserian apparatuses? In Foucault’s sense of discursive practices or dispositif (apparatus)? In Butler’s sense of the performative?” (Barad 2007: 141) A little later on, she likens her own notion of apparatus to Foucault’s notion: “Foucault’s account of discursive practices has some provocative resonances (and some fruitful dissonances) with Bohr’s account of apparatuses and the role they play in the material production of bodies and meanings” (Barad 2007: 147).

4. Logistics as socio-material choreography

The apparatus has to enact what she terms ‘agential cuts’ in order to be able to tell cause and effects apart and to assign them to separate physical object – a condition that Barad names “agential separability” (Barad 2007: 142). As Barad claims, an agential cut both “produce(s) determinate boundaries and properties of ‘entities’” (Barad 2007: 148) and enacts “a causal structure among components of a phenomenon in the marking of the ‘measuring agencies’ (‘effect’) by the ‘measured object’ (‘cause’)” (Barad 2007: 148). In short, an agential cut performed by an apparatus allocates positions, capacities, and agential potentials to the elements that it cuts apart and together.34 Thus, as Barad repeatedly insists, it resolves the constitutive indeterminacy of relational entanglement of matter within ecologies. In her own words: “the agential cut enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy” (Barad 2007: 334). Evidently, we are not looking at an experimental apparatus that cuts and divides matter on a sub-atomic level with regards to colonial logistics. However, I want to propose that the hold of the ship, in which human bodies were turned into commodities within colonial logistics, may be regarded as an apparatus in the sense that Barad gives to the notion. It sorted bodies, it allocated different positions onto them, thereby drawing and violently enforcing boundaries between different realms. I want to suggest that what Barad conceptualizes as ‘agential cut’ may then also be present within the choreographic handling of matter as logistics. Generalizing Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’, Barad writes: “the notion of position cannot be presumed to be a well-defined abstract concept; nor can it be presumed to be an individually determinate attribute of independently existing objects. Rather, position has meaning only when an apparatus with an appropriate set of fixed parts is used” (Barad 2007: 139). Thus, the transatlantic slave trade (i.e., the transportation and abduction of bodies as commodities) is that specific apparatus which produced the oppositional positions of white, sovereign subject and black, enslaved object. In many ways, then, logistics includes a racist ideology of differently sorting flesh. The actual position – in terms of capacities, agency, and physical place – of the moving elements that logistics transports will only be determined by the very apparatus of movement itself that sets them into motion, even while, let us not forget, immobilizing them at the same time (i.e., by and within its choreographic structure). In this regard, ‘agential cuts’ are both descriptive and causal, as Barad insists. Most importantly, they produce material effects: “Either way, what is important about causal intra-actions is that ‘marks are left on bodies’: bodies differentially materialize as particular patterns of

34

Cf. Barad 2007, 178: “Cuts cut ‘things’ together and apart. Cuts are not enacted from the outside, nor are they ever enacted for once and for all.”

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the world as a result of the specific cuts and reconfigurings that are enacted” (Barad 2007: 176). The apparatus reveals its conceptual preconditions, its ideological nature, within the act of cutting apart and of momentarily interrupting relational entanglement (cf. Barad 2007: 147). In the terminology developed here, the apparatus governs matter based on certain choreographic principles that, in turn, reveal their ‘ideological unconscious’. By allowing for specific movements and prohibiting others (i.e., as a choreographic scheme or diagram), the choreographic system thus enacts both the sorting and division of matter and the allocation of differential capacities to that sorted matter. At the same time, it becomes effective in and as a system of governing movement. I have referred to this dimension of choreographic systems as its operative or performative dimension above. Within systems of movement control such as logistics, and based on choreographic principles of handling matter, one, thus, enacts a certain conception of materiality, and thereby re-produces the very categories and positions that may have seemed foundational for these very practices of handling themselves from the start. In short: Ideologies of how one positions oneself within ecologies or more-than-human worlds emanate and evolve from the very choreographic principles that govern and structure one’s practices of handling matter. The apparatus, or the choreographic structure, and the capacities, positions and trajectories endowed to all elements come to be at the same time. As Barad explains: “Cuts are enacted not by willful individuals but by the larger material arrangements of which ‘we’ are a ‘part’” (Barad 2007: 178). Therefore, the choreographic diagram (i.e., the modality of handling things) produces the apparatus, which at the same time produces the moving elements. Both come to be within one process of becoming, or individuation, of the choreographic system as such.35 This process is ideological. As Barad insists, our responsibility then lies in the acute analysis of the movement systems that we participate in, voluntarily but also involuntarily: “We are responsible for the cuts that we help enact not because we do the choosing (neither do we escape responsibility because ‘we’ are ‘chosen’ by them), but because we are an agential part of the material becoming of the universe. Cuts are agentially enacted not by willful individuals but by the larger material arrangement of which ‘we’ are a ‘part’. The cuts that we participate in enacting matter” (Barad 2007: 178).

35

Cf. Barad 2007, 176/177: “Agential separability […] rejects the geometries of absolute exteriority or absolute interiority and opens up a much larger space that is more appropriately thought of as a dynamic and ever-changing topology. More specifically, agential separability is a matter of exteriority within phenomena.” The expanded choreographic systems’ mode of operation that I try to characterize here have been specified in greater detail within this book’s third chapter.

4. Logistics as socio-material choreography

Based on Barad, we can say: We are responsible for the extent to which we participate within logistical modes of handling matter. This responsibility may not be assumed easily, given that we are dependent on the products and goods it delivers to our lives. Nonetheless, as I propose within this book, one can try to undo and to unlearn the choreographic principles of handling matter that logistic enacts and enforces. This is possible, because the totalizing tendencies of logistics as socio-material choreography that I have outlined here will necessarily remain a fantasy. Logistics will always fail to capture and govern all matter. As Harney and Moten claim: “[…] the transport of things remains, as ever, logistics’ unrealizable ambition” (Harney/ Moten 2013: 92). Indeed, their historical-philosophical proposal, which exposes the scandal at the heart of contemporary logistics by way of an analysis of colonial logistics, may also be formulated as a potential trajectory for other modes of handling and being handled by things. If, as they claim, logistics is an arena of movement that “wants to dispense with the subject altogether” (Harney/Moten 2013: 87), then their reflection may open vectors for thinking modes of intra-action with things beyond those choreographic principles of constant flow, continuous adaptation, disposability, vectorialization, and containerization described above. Furthermore, the realm of informality that logistics wants to administer is described as a locus of social poiesis, of “generativity without reserve” (Moten/Harney 2013: 90). As such, it cannot be governed fully, held captive, or even channeled smoothly. Just as things, it will always be fugitive. In this section, I have formulated a notion of socio-material choreography as ‘operative reason’ based on specific modes of handling matter that formulates and implements adaptive, emergent procedures for mobilizing human and non-human bodies within capitalist circuits of production. I have described socio-material choreography as a form of governance that tries to capture all matter and tried to feed it into processes of subjectivation and objectification. Historically, choreography aligns with majoritarian formations in society, such as the state and capital, and enacts fantasies of total motility. Lepecki is also the author who has already indicated that logistics may be considered the faculty and practice that extends and develops these imperatives into the non-human realm (cf. Lepecki 2016: 5). I am now able to spell out what Lepecki, in his reference to logistics, had only implicitly suggested: Choreography, if expanded to the non-human realm, not only produces subjectivity or allocate subject position; choreography, in so far as it aligns with capitalist systems of mobilization, has always also included the production of objects as much as the implementation of subject-objects relations. It wants to govern the movement of matter as such, and – by mobilizing matter and prescribing its movement trajectories – sorts it into differently enabled, distinct bodies. Logistical choreography, as a practical, ongoing activity of objectifying the world, is based on the choreographic principles analyzed above. These principles are ideological themselves (i.e., reveal

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specific norms, ideas, and preconception about matter). Logistics, thus, iteratively produces and enforces divisions within the fabric of matter itself by executing these principles, namely constant flow, continuous adaptation, disposability of materials, vectorialization, and containerization, which are applied in the name of valorization of movement and the accumulation of capital. This ability and power, the power of onto-epistemic division and suture, is what I have elsewhere called ‘choreologistics’: “[…] the modernist imperative of continuous acceleration and seamless flow – that in its capitalist form takes the name of logistics – subjects both materials and flesh, cutting and dividing it into the oppositional realms of sovereign white subject (the navigators, administrators, citizens, or persons) and everything else, there as resource, there to extract, to throw out of their homes, to be transported, immobilized, exploited (the realm of things)” (Frischkorn 2019: 125). Thus, logistics as choreography can best be described as that ‘system of command’ to which bodies have to subject themselves – from now on referring to both human and non-human bodies – which not only trains them in order to “carrying out certain movement imperatives” (Lepecki 2006: 3), but which also aims to take control of life itself by intervening directly into the informal realm of things, of all matter, and thereby differentially sorting it into more or less active, more or less sovereign parts. In the following, I will conclude my argument on contemporary logistics by assessing its algorithmic nature. If one thinks of logistics as computational rationality, then it is necessary to analyze its mode of functioning while also speculating about the non-human nature of its controlling agent. Thinking about algorithmic governance may eventually open up a pathway for imagining modes of handling one another that are not based on the presumption of either subject or object positions. I will then unfold my third case study, the artistic intervention named African Terminal. Describing the project’s specific logisticality will allow me to uncover its very own choreographic principles. With regard to the project, I want to speculate about the potential for supply chains to become motors of relationality, making and fostering ‘spooky actions at a distance’ (i.e., bringing apparently separate socio-material realms into contact with one another). In specific instances, by hacking supply chains, agency might thus be shifted to agents that have hitherto been structurally excluded from shaping and making relations. What is a perspective on logistics, I want to ask, of those that have been denied agency within the proto-choreographic circuits of logistics, of those that were only ever objectified and passively mobilized by logistics?

4. Logistics as socio-material choreography

4.3 Algorithmic governance: emergent choreography Today, logistics almost total capacity for mobilization heavily relies on automation and algorithmic computation. Its task is to move things as quickly and efficiently as possible. Therein lies the uncanny, brutal virtuosity that logistical choreographies want to achieve. In the following section, I want to analyze the technical conditions and logics behind algorithmic movement coordination within logistics. Two points are crucial to this section: On the one hand, algorithmic logistics no longer necessarily work based on a central vantage point or controlling instance. It may be emergent in nature (i.e., assembled from single trajectories without more-than-local information). On the other hand, even if algorithmic steering is but one instance of a logic of rendering movement control even more efficient for capital valorization, it concurrently opens up – albeit on an abstract level – the possibility to think of choreography as a system of mobilization that no longer relies on the modernist categories of subject and object. To replace that binary may be a dangerous, dystopic, and posthuman scenario, but it might also serve as a place from which to speculate about more-thanhuman forms of entangled, inter-dependent moving-together – one that will, in the following, be called logisticality. Let me, then, quickly name some of the technical elements that comprise the virtuosity of logistics automation. One is the bar-code. As theorist Jesse Lecavalier notes: “[…] the bar code is one of the first symbols designed for computers to by read by computers” (Lecavalier 2012: 91). As an important technical feature in the automation of movement control within logistical assemblages, allowing elements to be tracked and determining their identity, the bar-code was invented in order: “to increase the speed of the transaction(s)” (Lecavalier 2012: 91). Scanning happens at any point in the chain. It is the easiest and fastest way to determine the identity of elements, and therefore their position and trajectory. No logistical choreography is possible without scanning and without bar-codes. Concurrently, the bar code serves as the interface for constant monitoring, for constant control. Another important technical element that conditions the smooth and automated operation of logistical transport is the floor. Where the dance floor was meant to simply receive the weight of the dancer, thereby allowing them to re-bounce by pressing against the earth, it now appears as carrier of crucial information in an automated choreography led by algorithmic calculations: “In container ports, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and automated stacking cranes (ASCs) take direction from GPS, lasers, and magnetic transponders in the pavement. In a driverless ballet, they glide along at eleven miles per hour, receiving containers from ships and then stacking them into automated fields—gigantic reflections of the materials-handling software that directs it” (Easterling 2012: 98, my emphasis).

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Keller Easterling here describes how the “choreography of storage and retrieval that also extends to warehouses and fulfillment centers” becomes a central concern for the non-human performers implied in an effort to maximize efficiency and speed within the reading of signals, magnets, and graphic patterns, which are applied to the “slick and clean” dance-floors of these facilities. More than anything, it is the information that the floor carries that makes them faster: “The ground or floor, more than merely the durable surface underfoot, has become the brains of an intelligent navigation system.” (Easterling 2012: 98) Yet, while one can describe two central technical conditions of how automated movement control and transport are executed, I might then ask: How is the virtuosity of great numbers of elements, moving at ever greater speed, actually managed? While it is clearly dependent on multiple technical assemblages, and while its aesthetic charge relates to moving bodies in lines or circles, as I have outlined above, where does the choreographic core of logistics lie? Who is in charge? Jesse Lecavalier has analyzed an important shift in logistical choreographies within recent years. Where bar-codes, and a constant monitoring of moving elements, can still be termed ‘notational’ (i.e., implying a choreographic order that is concerned with “controlling the exact paths of things through space and time”), a routinized routing of moving elements “where objects follow the same path over and over again”, logistics has today moved on to more complex modes of choreographing: “Notational logistics follows a deductive top-down route in which a plan is designed and executed repeatedly. With an algorithmic logistics, certain constraints are determined but the process is allowed to unfold in unanticipated ways, perhaps even ways that exceed the intuition of designers. In a Kiva warehouse, for example, what seems like a chaotic jumble makes total sense to the computer systems organizing it” (Lecavalier 2012: 97). As Lecavalier explains, Kiva has invented ways in which conveyor belts are replaced by small robotic driving units, so-called ‘inventory-pods’, that move along a warehouse’s floor based on its own movement logics (cf. Lecavalier 2012: 96). Here, movement steering works on a strictly bottom-up, anticipatory logic. The robotic units communicate with one another, thereby preventing accidents or collisions. In that case, the overall choreography is no longer written from a total point of view that prescribes all pathways. Rather, the robots work on a task-based level, negotiating their pathways with all of the other robots on the floor. A top-down approach has been replaced by a form of bottom-up improvisatory score. A central viewpoint is no longer necessary, at least for some of the movement processes involved in logistics. While the goals and measures for these choreographic scores are still obviously determined from the outside (i.e., the choreography is not emergent to the degree

4. Logistics as socio-material choreography

that it can set its own rules), this nonetheless implies a certain denouncement of the sovereign subject as central choreographic instance. This sort of score is made possible by computational processes. In a talk at the above-mentioned conference entitled ‘Expanded Choreography. Movements, Situation, Objects...’ organized by Mårten Spånberg, cultural theorist Luciana Parisi developed a model of ‘expanded choreography’ as an anticipatory algorithmic apparatus or logistical assemblage. In line with Lecavalier, Parisi argues that algorithms no longer simply work on the level of prescribing pathways, modeling action, or in terms of punishing deviant behavior. Rather, they more and more operate on the level of fluidly reading the movement tendencies of singular elements, thereby overviewing their total future behavior as topological model. Algorithms choreograph from the viewpoint of the whole system’s future symphonic integrity. Today, Parisi claims, algorithmic governance, based on more and more impressive computational power, works as a system of governance that manages the concrete arrangement of relations between objects by both specifying their actual locations, but also eventually even more so by steering the spatio-temporalities in which their movements take place. “I would like to suggest”, she says, “that there is a contemporary convergence between choreography and governance that is catalyzed by the computational power that is now able to compress, relate, order, and process data infinitely” (Parisi 2012: n.p.). This newly powerful computational potency is the basis of ‘algorithmic governance’ in Parisi’s terms, “whereby algorithmic objects now subtend the infrastructural architecture of everyday life” (Parisi 2012: n.p.). In fact, the data objects processed by algorithms “reveals a new form of reason” that coincides with the computational power described above. More specifically, Parisi is interested in those topological models of calculation that govern a relational data-base, in which user-interfaces do not significantly alter the structure of data or procedure of calculation, but in which the interface’s mediating power is “not meant to include but further preclude access from the enterprise” (Parisi 2012: n.p.). Parisi analyzes conditions in which user behavior does not significantly alter the algorithm’s mechanism which governs and works with the data that it produces. This may be the case for social media, such as Facebook, where user behavior seems to alter the structure of the medium significantly while, in reality, never actually influencing the data-collecting and -analyzing mechanisms behind the interface. The choreographic governance of data works by setting up scenes from which to invisibly predict behavior. In short: The performer (i.e., the user) has no agency; it falls prey to the algorithmic device. The program or choreography, meanwhile, is more than can be experienced by any single element. This does not, conversely, mean that the program is simply reactionary (i.e., an invisible mechanical calculation of input data). Rather, “a veritable computational understanding of choreography” does not imply that the choreographic score is restricted to mechani-

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cal procedures in which “pre-programmed probabilities of response” determine how the movement of elements will be administered (cf. Parisi 2012: n.p.). Parisi states: “On the contrary, the Foucauldian understanding of governance as defined by concrete relations may help us to argue that the computational enterprise is itself an access, to quote Whitehead again, to algorithmic objects that exist autonomously from the way they are performed, used, danced, or experienced.” (Parisi 2012: n.p.) Therefore, Parisi is interested in the structure of the computational operation itself: Today, computational governance can no longer be described as notational program; rather, it functions as a pre-emption of the data that it collects, (i.e., the algorithmic program calculates the potential effects of data while it is being processed). Parisi, thus, concedes a shift from reactionary to pre-emptive, anticipatory modes of choreographic governance. Models no longer account only for the mere arrangement of bodies in space (static compositions) within this shift, but also compute vectorial trajectories and what Parisi terms spatio-temporalities (i.e., ways in which complex systems create spatial and temporal patterns as they unfold). As such, it is no longer the rehearsal of scenes or the prediction of behavior merely that can be calculated; what is in question is: “the algorithmic rendering of connectedness, i.e., the potentiality to connect” (Parisi 2012: n.p.). Examples include the British health system NHS, models of governing urban traffic, and parametric architecture (cf. Parisi 2013). The technical object analyzed by Parisi is software. Evidently, software exists as part of a “sociotechnical assemblage which includes, not just algorithms, but also the computational networks in which they function, the people who design and operate them, the data (and users) on which they act, and the institutions that provide these services, all connected to a broader social endeavor and constituting part of a family of authoritative systems for knowledge production” (Yeung 2017: 4), as information theorist Karen Yeung remind us. Those assemblages, driven by software as much as by seemingly technical imperatives of efficiency or optimization, are concerned with movement tendencies (i.e., potential future positions, velocities, connections), rather than with actual position or variables. They intervene into vectorial fields of forces and populations, in which accounting for single points in space-time becomes secondary. Their task is to govern change on the basis of non-linear, topologic calculations; they administer logistical ‘spaces of circulation’ based on real-time variances and future tendencies. Such an algorithmic choreography may be understood as part of systems of algorithmic regulation that have been described, for example, by Karen Yeung. She defines algorithmic regulation as decision processes based on algorithmically generated knowledge systems. Yeung writes:

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“Accordingly, I refer to algorithmic regulation as decision-making systems that regulate a domain of activity in order to manage risk or alter behaviour through continual computational generation of knowledge from data emitted and directly collected (in real time on a continuous basis) from numerous dynamic components pertaining to the regulated environment in order to identify and, if necessary, automatically refine (or prompt refinement of) the system’s operations to attain a pre-specified goal” (Yeung 2017: 6). Modes of algorithmic regulation are used both by non-state actors and entities, but may also be a part of statist control of trade or populations: “Just as a public transport authority may regulate vehicle movement to optimise traffic flow, likewise a social media company such as Facebook might regulate the posting and viewing behaviour of users to optimise its financial returns” (Yeung 2017: 6). Algorithmic regulation always works in order to attain pre-specified goals and, therefore, demands some sort of higher arbiter. As such, it does not equal organic adaptive systems. Yet, these procedures adapt to changing environmental frames and are able to work with differing actions and agencies of their performing entities in their internal mode of functioning. When Clare Lyster, for example, describes the flow of packages and goods through the city as ‘urban choreography’, it is clear that the individual picking up a package from a station next to the metro line in Shanghai does so of their own accord; yet, concurrently, they become part of an abstracted choreographic scheme that aims to significantly reduce storage time by interfacing different flows through the urban fabric; namely, that of packages and that of human bodies traveling to or from work (cf. Lyster 2017). While the single moving element might perceive of its choices as autonomous, it is, indeed, being nudged into specific behaviors or movement patterns by the overarching algorithmic movement dispositive (i.e., the virtual choreographic diagram of the assemblage to which it has no access). Freedom is clearly not the central category to take into account in algorithmically steered logistical choreographies. In the ideal of logistical movement’s seamless efficiency, there is, thus, a second-order type of virtuosity implied in which each element might feel as if it was following its own inclination, without ever getting in the way of anybody else; in reality, though, it is steered, either centrally or de-centrally, in accordance to overall choreographic schemes of governance and which try to predict all of its movement. To criticize those algorithmic choreographies might involve understanding the internal in/consistency of the algorithmic procedure itself, as Parisi insists (cf. Parisi 2012: n.p.). I have, thus, been able to shed light on yet another dimension of logistical mobilization and movement control. Today, it is no longer managed from a human, subjective point of view. Instead, its governance is left to algorithms that set parameters for systems that develop an emergent movement score (i.e., they define their choreographic diagram). Single elements may make choices themselves, thereby adapting

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their patterns and trajectories. Meanwhile, the algorithm is constantly monitoring the movement tendencies of the system as a whole, thereby becoming able to adapt its structure to potential future states. Single elements are endowed with what seem like an active choice while, in reality, they are either nudged or programmed to comply with the overall logic of the system as such. It is to these forms of movement control and steering that Harney and Moten refer when they claim: “And anyway, for capital the subject has become too cumbersome, too slow, too prone to error, too controlling, to say nothing of too rarified, too specialized a form of life. Yet it is not we who ask this question. It is the automatic, insistent, driving question of the field of logistics. Logistics wants to dispense with the subject altogether” (Harney/Moten 2013: 87). While I have previously described colonial logistics as that very system of paradoxical mobilization and movement control that divides and sutures the material realm into subject and object, into more-or-less-human entities – based on choreographic principles such as disposability, constant flow, and vectorialization – today logistics is post-human in form and is a techno-fantastic model of ‘expanded choreography’ that seeks to ‘dispense with the subject altogether’ in order to get rid of what the authors term ‘human time’ and ‘human error’ (cf. Harney/Moten 2013: 91). Meanwhile, the same choreographic principles remain in place. Harney and Moten rightly denounce this totalized formality of governing and regulating movement at the level of concrete materiality itself. Yet one may ask: Does a post-humanist version of ‘expanded choreography’ – one that gives up on the opposing categories of human subject and less-than-human object – carry an ethical potential, if one allowed for different choreographic principles of handling material to govern it? Before returning to this question, at the very end of my reflection on logistics, I will first unfold the working of my third case-study, the performative intervention and cultural cooperative African Terminal.

African Terminal (geheimagentur) In his essay ‘Moving as Thing’, mentioned above, dance scholar André Lepecki describes a performance entitled Rubbish City by artist Yingmei Duan. Rubbish City was performed at the 2009 IN TRANSIT festival that Lepecki himself curated. He writes that the work mainly consists of a “labyrinth of rubbish” piled up within a large gallery space at ‘Haus der Kulturen der Welt’ in Berlin through which the audience walks on a: “narrow winding path” (Lepecki 2012: 78). As Lepecki lists, the rubbish staged by Duan is made up of:

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“[…] battered washing machines, torn curtains and rugs, hundreds of cardboard boxes, piles of paper, half-broken or miraculously intact plates, cups, and glasses, a stove, TV sets and electronics, a door, mattresses, planks of wood, old toys, rags, books—all in different states of preservation and decay” (Lepecki 2012: 78). He explains that there are five performers within this anti-paradisiac garden of waste: “ghostly presences” mumbling, silently singing “half-broken melodies” or simply standing around (Lepecki 2012: 78/79). While watching the performance, Lepecki realizes that the trash in the gallery space is actually ‘contemporary’ to his life and “not relics of a distant past” (Lepecki 2012: 79). It pertains to his lifestyle, as it does to mine. Rubbish City, Lepecki thus claims: “[…] offers a kinetic-political, as well as affective-political, epiphany about our own condition as participants, accomplices, witnesses, and makers of a catastrophic, yet apparently unstoppable, culture of mass production that necessitates (and is predicated upon) a symmetrical, also catastrophic, mass rejection” (Lepecki 2012: 79). I here want to describe another performance practice, whose outer appearance might remind of Rubbish City but whose mode of functioning is rather more pragmatic, even though Lepecki wonders about the aesthetic operation performed by Rubbish City in which ‘utilitarian commodities’ are presented as “useless stuff”, thereby transgressing from the realm of object into that of thing (cf. Lepecki 2012: 79). Instead of simply performing the act of being ‘alongside’ discarded consumer goods, it actually reuses them, it practically handles them, in order to shift agency. In that respect, my third case study (i.e., the performative initiative African Terminal) is an attempt to highlight, but also partially to undo, what Lepecki calls ‘a mass rejection’– which, as I have claimed above, is a mass rejection both of people and things. We are situated on a small peninsula called ‘Baakenhöft’ in Hamburg’s ‘HafenCity’, an urban mega-project in which large parts of the city’s old docklands are renovated as a neoliberal investors’ paradise. The performative intervention that takes place is part of the 2017 Summer Festival of ‘Kampnagel’, Hamburg, but had already been initiated during the international ‘Theater der Welt’ festival which took place earlier that same year. It goes by the name of African Terminal and is part of a larger intervention entitled FREE PORT BAAKENHÖFT by Hamburgbased performance group ‘geheimagentur’.36 The collective has built parts of the infrastructure on the Baakenhöft for what they term an ‘alternative port’ for the citizens of Hamburg (i.e., a bar, a so-called ‘ship-welcoming station’, some offices, 36

For more information about the African Terminal, visit its website at http://www.africantermi nal.com/en (last accessed on Nov 4, 2020). More information about the performance project FREE PORT BAAKENHÖFT can also be found at https://www.geheimagentur.net/free-port-ba akenhoeft/ (only in German, last accessed on Nov 4, 2020) or at https://www.kampnagel.de /en/program/free-port-baakenhoeft/ (last accessed on Nov 4, 2020).

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and a jetty which allows for access to the water). From August 17 to 24, 2017, the alternative port came alive as an ongoing participatory performance. Its aim was to allow for Hamburg citizens to develop a different relation to ‘their’ port (i.e., to cure what the performers repeatedly call a certain Western ‘sea-blindness’, therein citing the journalist Rose George who in turn cites a British navy general, cf. George 2013). Geheimagentur, thus, performatively enacts an alternative relation to the port based on the observation that the advent of modern logistics has fundamentally altered the relation between port and city (i.e., one of civic participation), a condition that Arturo Toscano and Jeff Kinkle describe as “the separation of the harbour from the social life of the city” (Toscano/Kinkle 2015: 120). Different modules enable audience members to practice a more active role vis-à-vis the port of Hamburg, which is usually a highly securitized area clearly demarcated from the city. Within the infrastructure of the alternative port, there is a setting that is reminiscent of the description of Rubbish City, given above. Here, you also find old mattresses, several TV sets, clothes, pots, pans, cups, and cutlery. An old car is even part of the scenery. These objects are scattered onto the pier. Where Lepecki describes “hundreds of cardboard boxes” (Lepecki 2012: 79), here you see an actual shipping container with open doors. In fact, the discarded consumer objects lying on the pier, presumably considered waste by Hamburg citizens, are waiting to be packed into the container and shipped to Banjul, Gambia. This is the explicit ambition of the cultural initiative called African Terminal. The members of the initiative have been asking for donations (of objects only) via the media, but have also organized the transportation of used goods to the Terminal themselves. I have, for example, talked to dozens of tire repair shops, asking for old tires.37 My colleague, Sibylle, has organized the purchase of the old car that can be found next to the container and which will be completely filled with used goods before being loaded into the container. At the end of the eight days of public performative intervention, the shipping container (which at this point is filled to the rim with used goods) will then be collected by ‘OverseasForwarding’, a Hamburg-based logistics company specialized in used-goods logistics between Hamburg and West Africa. It arrives in Banjul about three months later where the used goods are sold by an agent who is a friend of several Hamburg members of the African Terminal. All the money made from selling the used goods travels back to Hamburg where it is distributed among the traders of the Terminal. In this case, the performance project FREE PORT BAAKENHÖFT thus acts as a framework for a form of citizen logistics, or – as I will outline below – rather, a form of noncitizen logistics. The Terminal started a second transition – this time in collaboration with the ‘Museum for Arts and Crafts in Hamburg’ – in the summer of 2018. Used goods were 37

In fact, I talked to the same tire shops that I had contacted one year previously, when working on the project of Barricades and Dances.

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collected for a second time. This time they were stored within an exhibition set-up (i.e., a project entitled Mobile Worlds), curated by Roger M. Buergel (cf. Frischkorn/ Peters et al. 2021). Mobile Worlds, temporarily situated on the ground floor of the museum in Hamburg, is a conceptual curatorial attempt at criticizing Western categories of sorting and narrating objects within the framework of museums that store and exhibit artisanal objects. The exhibition tries to account for the social and material entanglements of specific objects and against a logic of categorization, according to time periods and continents. As a host institution, it allows for the African Terminal to use part of the exhibition space as storage space. Again, the used goods collected here were later sent to Banjul and sold there.

Image 12: FREE PORT BAAKENHÖFT by geheimagentur (2017).

Photography: © geheimagentur

On the very first level, then, the African Terminal may simply be described as a form of business school in which cultural workers from Hamburg collaborate with refugees from West-Africa in order to collectively learn more about trading in used goods. My interest in the project was the following: While logistics operates behind closed gates and in the confines of highly securitized and shielded port or warehouse zones, used goods logistics still is a business field largely driven by single actors. In fact, as we found out during the project, anybody is allowed to send up to four shipping containers full of goods from Hamburg to West Africa every year. In as much

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as the used goods’ sector of logistics is less regulated than standard operations, and offers the chance to actually do shipping oneself, it might thus be seen as a possible civic entrance to an actual experience of logistical choreographies. In order to ship used goods, we needed to negotiate with logistics companies in Hamburg such as ‘Overseas Forwarding’. Within the project’s first installment, we decided to send one 40ft-container full of used goods to Banjul in Gambia. The container was delivered free of charge to the performance location at the Baakenhöft, and could be loaded there between August 15 and 28, 2017. Yet, to what extent is this operation artistic? How does it shift agency from citizens to non-citizens, from humans to things? In order to describe the logisticality of African Terminal, I will, in the following, first describe the social and material dimensions of the performance practice before uncovering its principles of handling matter.

Image 13: African Terminal by geheimagentur (2017).

Photography: © geheimagentur

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CONSISTENCY OF THE ASSEMBLAGE (AFRICAN TERMINAL): Group of human participants The performative intervention African Terminal involved a mixed group of Hamburg artists and cultural workers, including myself, and a group of people from Ghana, Gambia, and Nigeria who had just arrived in Hamburg.38 The cultural workers and artists that were part of African Terminal included sound-artist Katharina Pelosi and cultural-producer Julia Lerch-Zajączkowska, as well as members of the ‘geheimagentur’. Together, we collaborated with an all-male group of people from Gambia, Ghana, and Nigeria of shifting size; the total number of members mostly shifted between 10 and 20. Structurally, most of the refugee-traders that were part of the Terminal did not possess a stable civic status. They were regarded as undesired by the German state who merely abstained from deporting them, a civic status bluntly called ‘Duldung’ (English: ‘toleration’) in German. Furthermore, many of the WestAfrican members of the African Terminal were not supposed to reside in Hamburg. They illegally lived in St. Pauli, an alternative part of Hamburg that has a long history of resistance against state power, to which they were initially welcomed openheartedly. While they live in Hamburg, they are legally supposed to stay at their respective ‘refugee hostels’, many of them in rural areas in Eastern Germany, where living conditions are poor. As many of the West African members were not allowed to work legally, their only other alternative to make money, then, was to enter the used-goods trade between Hamburg and West-Africa. Since the 1980s, many former refugees sent used goods from Northern Europe to their respective home countries, where things that are considered waste in Europe will be amended and still carry value. It is their expertise in logistics that formed the basis for our collaboration. Yet, while they carry practical expertise on logistics, the West-African members of the Terminal have also been objectified by logistical choreographies: In fact, all of the non-white members of the African Terminal came to Europe via the Mediterranean. As part of what Harney and Moten name ‘logistical populations’ (Harney/Moten 2013: 90), they themselves have been objectified by the regulatory violence of the logistical choreographic principles of handling human bodies as objects. They were immobilized and have been immobilized ever since.39 My col38

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I have been part of the performance described in the following in the role of a co-author and -organizer. My account of the actions and relations forged will, thus, necessarily (as is the case for all the descriptions of performance work within this thesis) be tainted by personal involvement. During the time of our collaboration, from 2017 to 2019, the police in Hamburg – in an alleged war on drugs that concurrently criminalized non-white people – had intensified police patrols, especially in St. Pauli, in which some of the traders of the African Terminal used to work as small-scale drug dealers, which meant that they were no longer able to leave their houses.

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leagues, thus, travel ‘In the Wake’ of a historic trauma, as Christina Sharpe would say, initiated by the violent logistical governance of bodies installed in transatlantic slavery (cf. Sharpe 2006). Thus, the Mediterranean Sea is what Christina Sharpe calls the ‘Black Mediterranean’ for (probably) all of the African members of our cultural initiative.40 In her reflection on the ongoing aftermath of chattel slavery, Sharpe describes an event in October 2013 in which an overcrowded boat: “[…] filled with 500 African migrants caught fire, capsized and sank one half-mile off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa. […] Like the Zong, the ship was built to carry at most 200 people but was packed with over 440 captive Africans.” Over 300 men, women, and children were killed on board. In her reflection on the event, Sharpe concedes an uncanny trans-historic repetition in so far as some of the newspaper clippings that described the event referred to the Africans on board as “‘human cargo’, that we learn for the smugglers was ‘worth almost €500,000’” (Sharp 2016: 53–55). Sharpe refers to the notion of the Black Mediterranean, forged by P. Khalil Saucier and Tyron Woods, defined as a “constituent unit of analysis for understanding contemporary forms of policing Europe’s borders” (Sharpe 2016: 58). Within the passage across the Black Mediterranean, the transport of migrant labor, in ways that are not unequal to those practiced several hundred years ago, sorts the people that it transports according to the color of their skin: Sharpe here references an article by Lizzie Dearden that appeared in The Independent on April 22, 2015, in which the author collected first-hand experiences from African refugees that had to travel across the Mediterranean. The journalist cites an interview with a spokesperson for ‘Save the Children’: “A spokesperson for Save the Children said that many migrants helped by their workers had told similar stories of different races being split up, with the lighterskinned appearing to receive marginally better treatment. ‘What we hear from numerous migrants arriving in Italy is that migrants from African countries are often treated worse than Middle Eastern or Asian passengers,’ she said. ‘They are often forced to stay in the hold, where they are at greater risk of drowning if the boat capsizes and can become ill from breathing in the petrol fumes. Partly this 40

I have not directly spoken about the passage via the Mediterranean with any of my colleagues. Yet, in an interview that I conducted with Bakary Camara, one of my colleagues from Gambia, in preparation for a performance at the Museum for Arts and Crafts in Hamburg on October 8, 2018, when being asked about the port in Hamburg, he answered the following: “Looking at the harbor like this, any time I see the harbor, my mind only reflects on my journey from Libya to Italy, and the difficulties I faced on the river. And I think of all my friends who died on the river. It always reminds me about them. Sometimes I go around in the Park Fiction, onto the bridge, and I just stand there and watch the harbor, and I ask myself: You risked your life to come to Europe just because of the life you are living right now?! So, it always reminds me of my journey and the friends I lost.” (Bakary Camara in an unpublished interview, 2018).

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is because African migrants—from countries like Eritrea and Somalia often—are not able to pay as much as others, and partly we think simply because of racism on the part of the people smugglers’” (Dearden 2015). It is evident, in these horrific reports of witnesses, that the onto-epistemic violence of sorting flesh according to a racist, capitalist logic that was established within the logistical governance of the transatlantic slave trade, continues today. I cannot determine the degree to which my colleagues have experienced similar violence on the sea. Yet, I know that they face severe police violence in Hamburg, where they are not allowed to either work or educate themselves. At the same time, many of them carry practical expertise of logistics that most of Hamburg’s citizens do not have. While most of my artist colleagues and myself have been blind to the vastly extended choreographies that sustain our lives, my refugee colleagues not only know about ‘crossing the river’, as they say, but they also know how to pack containers. By intervening in logistical networks, and highlighting their expertise as traders within the project, we explicitly tried to shift and to undo some of the neo-colonial violence that is still so prevalent with logistical choreographies.

Image 14: African Terminal at the Museum for Arts and Crafts, Hamburg (2018).

Photography: © Robin Hinsch

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Place of production/performance It is worth noting, then, that the performative intervention entitled African Terminal tries to explicitly engage with Germany’s colonial history: Taking place at the so-called Baakenhöft in Hamburg, the performative intervention revisits an important part of the history of the city of Hamburg. The renowned Hamburg shipping merchant Adolph Woermann sent colonial troupes to Namibia from 1904 onwards from the Baakenhöft. In the following years, the troops sent on Woermann’s ships – Woermann had a monopoly on the shipment of military troops and gained money from them – were responsible for the massacre of tens of thousands of Nama and Herero in Namibia. His ‘Woermann Shipping’ line, at that point already named ‘German East-Africa Line’, was responsible, thus, for the logistics of the first German genocide in the 20th century (cf. Schwarzer 2015). The episode is yet another example of the uncanny public-private partnerships driving the business fields of both military and logistics. Placing the participatory performance of African Terminal at that very location was an attempt, on the one hand, to tackle a colonial heritage, one that has not yet been fully acknowledged by either the German state or by the city of Hamburg.41 No memorial or sign reminds of the colonial crimes logistically administered at the Baakenhöft. On the other hand, the performance implicitly asks about the extent to which Western publics are complicit in the ongoing onto-epistemic violence (i.e., the sorting of lives according to necropolitical imperatives) that is executed at the borders of Europe under the euphemistic rubric of the management of migration. Reminding ourselves and the Hamburg public of our own (neo-)colonial history, while taking responsibility for its continuation today, was one of the major imperatives of our collaboration. By addressing our colleagues from West-Africa as logistics experts rather than as unskilled migrant labor, we furthermore tried to shift the way they are regarded by a German public who – to large degrees – are still unaware of the country’s colonial past.

Use of matter Concerning the status of objects that were handled within the performative intervention, it was all considered waste by a Western public. In similar ways to what has been described by Lepecki above, they thus speak of conditions of over-consumption and of highly privileged German lifestyles. Many of the objects that the Terminal

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It is important to note that Hamburg has begun to explicitly tackle its colonial history by, among other actions, installing a position for the scientific reprocessing of the city’s colonial past at the historic faculty of the University of Hamburg. Cf. https://www.geschichte.uni-ha mburg.de/arbeitsbereiche/globalgeschichte/forschung/forschungsstelle-hamburgs-postko loniales-erbe.html (last accessed on December 29, 2020).

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handled were not actually broken; they were simply too old to be considered valuable any longer. Thus, these objects belonged to the realm of disposable matter on at least two levels: they had been fabricated and used as consumer goods and were now thrown away as rubbish by Western consumers. This was true, regardless of their actual use value. Yet, most of them may have been amended and re-used, an act of recycling that is not considered worthwhile within a largely progress-driven consumer society, such as that of Germany. Importantly, what is considered waste in the Global North is not necessarily considered as such in other places around the globe. This distinction between functional object and discarded waste, one that is heavily influenced by class, race, wealth, as much as manual skills, ultimately speaks of differentiated modes of intra-action with material, thereby revealing an ideological as well as a socio-political framing. The situation was paradoxical: I, as a Western citizen, carry no practical knowledge concerning the technical items that I use within my daily life. At the same time, they are brought to me within extended networks based on the extraction of natural resources (such as, for example, oil, rare earths, copper, and so on) as well as through the neocolonial exploitation of a work-force which is neither well-paid nor sufficiently protected. Meanwhile, people from regions where oil and rare earths are heavily extracted, who have travelled to Europe within shipping networks that have reduced them to the state of objects, know much more about the actual working of those technical objects. More importantly, they know that they are in demand and that – as my colleagues would say – ‘they are moving’. Even if questionable on the level of geo-politics, we therefore insisted on the fact that as used-goods logisticians, we were able to endow discarded consumer objects with a second life-cycle.42 Our attempt was to build an alternative supply chain, one that connected different publics in an unforeseen way, by entangling discarded consumer objects, a former place of colonial logistics, and a collaboration between West-African migrants and German cultural workers. The idea behind this gesture was to think of logistical connections as pathways that can be hacked and re-appropriated. On a more global scale, what the project does, therefore, is connect dead-ends of supply lines. Indeed, one could then understand “African Terminal as an exploration of supply chain capitalism, but starting from the dead ends of supply chains, starting from the outside, 42

In that regard, it is important to also shed a critical gaze at the logistics of used goods: While the EU strictly shields its internal market, the export of used goods is supervised in negligent and problematic ways. In many cases, discarded consumer objects arrive on gigantic dump sites all around the Southern hemisphere (in Ghana, for example), where broken electronics get to be dumped because it is cheaper to ship them there than to recycle them in Europe. Furthermore, the fact that used goods get exported to West Africa often inhibits the development of a productive sector in these countries, which is the case for apparel industries, for example. These economic imbalances, which imply political and ecological entanglements on many levels, are often neglected or suppressed by Western publics.

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literally from those places where supply chains never make it” (Frischkorn/Peters 2021: n.p.). In that regard, it connected publics to one another that would have been totally unaware of one another otherwise. By handling used goods, who speak of entangled histories of people and things in their history of production and use, the performative intervention African Terminal was able to practice different choreographic modalities of handling things than those of logistics, albeit provisionally. By intervening into global trade cycles on a limited, situated basis, the performance practices developed by the group did three things at the same time: Firstly, they widened the frame of investigation beyond the theatrical set-up in which they are nominally placed. Handling things for ‘paralogistical’ purposes (cf. Peters 2018), they turned the focus towards global supply chains and their ongoing neocolonial structuring. Secondly, by focusing on the logistical expertise of migrants, the performative intervention shifted agency towards its nonwhite members. Finally, the intervention may also be read as a form of attunement, albeit speculatively: The movements of people and things were realigned and calibrated in different ways than usually.

4.4 Unframing the stage, shifting agency, recalibrating the movement of people and things In the following sub-chapter, I will describe three specific choreographic principles of handling things, as developed and practiced within the frame of the African Terminal: Firstly, the performative intervention into used goods logistics delimits the stage both on the level of theatrical performance, but even more so on the level of civic engagement. By making the audience aware of logistical networks, it allows them to focus on an ‘expanded choreography’ that takes place beyond the theatrical space of either appearance or of voluntary civic performances. Thus, African Terminal can productively be described as a form of (non)performance, in the vein of Fred Moten (cf. Moten 2018a), given that it fundamentally calls into question the illogical mechanisms that structurally delimit the stage as a liberal space of the appearance of autonomous, free subjects (cf. Lepecki 2016: 14). Furthermore, it thereby also positions itself towards Hamburg’s largely repressed colonial history and, by extension, the German nation as whole. Secondly, the performance attempts to shift agency towards its non-white members, and endows discarded consumer objects with another life-cycle. In as much as the African Terminal conceives of the supply chain as a mechanism to relate and enmesh people and things with each other and one another over great distances, therein it, finally, begins to practice an alternative form of attunement to different movement trajectories, those of people and things. As a situated practice, it produces minor attunements (i.e., small recalibrations within

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the heavily organized and stratified logistical space of circulation that it intervenes within).

CHOREOGRAPHIC LOGIC (AFRICAN TERMINAL): Unframing the stage By intervening into used-goods logistics, African Terminal both highlights and renders an expanded socio-material choreography of logistics visible. Generally, the performative intervention thus enables reflections about the fact that there is always other, more expanded choreographies (i.e., logistical choreographies) that need to be in place for theatrical performances, or any act of appearance on a stage, to be possible; this is a principle I call ‘unframing’. ’Unframing’ may be seen as a principle of choreographically handling material that counters the logistical principle of ‘containerization’. On the first level, African Terminal seems to address its audience as mere consumers, in so far as it solicits and allows for donations of consumer goods. Basically, by merely handling them, the performance emphasizes the fact that these consumer goods (be it clothes, electrical appliances, mattresses, bicycles, or even cars) which consumers buy in the super-market, in the hardware store, or at their car dealer, do not magically appear from nothing; instead, these are being produced today within expanded supply chains based on algorithmic movement control. More importantly, these myriad consumer goods do not simply disappear either after they become no longer useful to a Western public. Instead, they need to be recycled or disposed of – and in the case of used goods trade, they enter yet another supply line. Thus, the audience is implicitly asked to reflect on themselves as participants and accomplices of globalized trade cycles that, as I have tried to outline above, are based on further acceleration, the disposability of resources, an ideology of constant flow, and ongoing racist, sexist, and patriarchal structures of violence. The violence implied in logistics has been characterized as a form of onto-epistemic violence because it sorts matter (human and non-human) into categories of crew and cargo, valuable or disposable resource, and so on. It governs movement, and its moving entities, from the point of view of possible capitalization. Looking at the disposed consumer goods that lie on the pier at Baakenhöft, one might reflect upon the ongoing violence of logistical mobilization of matter in which one invisibly participates. Yet, the performance also tackles a more generic level of performance by turning our eyes towards the cycles of production and disposal that consumer goods undergo. After all, many of those who handle consumer objects within the African Terminal do not possess civic rights in Germany. For them to appear on a theatrical stage, as they do on the Baakenhöft, is already a transgression of civic protocols. All the while, our shared act of handling discarded consumer goods, allows for reflections not only on the economic sustenance of consumer markets in Germany, but

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also on the civic and political capacities that are dependent on specific economic relations. Indeed, one may argue, as I have done in an article concerning logistics and citizenship, that a specific performance of citizenship within liberal civic society is always predicated on externalizing costs. The stage, as civic ‘space of appearance’ (cf. Arendt 1958: 199) of autonomous Western subjects is supported and underwritten by logistical processes of supply and invisible work that need to be suppressed for those liberal subjects to articulate themselves ‘freely’. Summing up literature around the entangled establishment of specific performances of citizenship (at the famous Habermasian coffee-house, for example), the transatlantic slave trade, and the insurance business, which I subsume under the name of ‘Lloyd’s assemblage’, I claim that: “[…] citizenship is always situated in multiple assemblages that include divergent sets of invisible – often exploitative – infrastructures and choreologistic modes of abduction. In as much as any act of citizenship can only exist based on these infrastructures, it employs modes of delegation that, voluntarily and involuntarily, stay invisible. Citizenship is then necessarily based on other delegated performances” (Frischkorn 2018: 179). Within the article, I argue for an understanding of performance as delegation, in which two forms of delegation happen simultaneously: On the one hand, invisible work is delegated to bodies (both human and non-human) that exist in epistemological and ontological realms which are often not taken into account (i.e., the realm of the less-than-human, the inhuman, the animal, or the object). On the other hand, anybody that is performing, that is entering the stage (as is the case for African Terminal, as well), will necessarily become the delegate of an entangled field of morethan-human actors: “As agency is always predicated on the activation of manifold sets of relations and comprises material, technological, animal and human entities, in as much as I perform, I thus become the delegate of a distributed field of agency without necessarily having been legitimized to do so and beyond being fully accountable” (Frischkorn 2018: 183). Within the African Terminal, we had to find ways to work around the implicit and explicit hierarchies and a very unequal distribution of agency and privileges between German and West African members. Yet, in the practical act of handling things, that very difference in position is called into question, at least momentarily. To claim, as the act of handling discarded consumer goods on a theatrical stage implicitly does, that “modern citizenship has always comprised multiple and international infrastructures of domination and a largely invisible and exploitative choreography of logistics” (Frischkorn 2018: 185), is to expose the logistical mechanisms which create and continuously reproduce neocolonial inequalities at the very base of the scene or

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‘stage of appearance’ of autonomous Western subjects, be that within an art-project or civic discourse. The argument that I have presented here can be generalized to some degree. By highlighting and intervening into logistical processes, African Terminal points to socio-material choreographies of logistics that need to be in place for Western civil society and art production to function as they do. In that regard, the performance highlights a form of ‘expanded choreography’ – that of logistics – which necessarily and always takes place either alongside or outside the frame of performance practices. In so far as choreographic or performative work is produced, it – either implicitly or explicitly – positions itself within these socio-material, often exploitative choreographic systems of handling material. As I have outlined in detail within the introduction to this text, and within my reflection on the colonial history of logistics, modern choreographies of material are always implicated with a colonial dimension, one in which some human beings were relegated to the status of object.

Shifting agency Logistics, as a system of governing movement, is always also about handling objects, therein constantly rewriting the line between subject and object, between steering agent and steered element, and about determining what is fully disposable, what is considered resource, or trash, both on the level of people and things. To that end, rendering these processes visible and questionable on the level of a practical collaboration between Hamburg artists and West African refugees was both an important and risky practical endeavor. Therein, the African Terminal opened up manifold questions about agency: One of the project’s aims was clearly to give agency to the West-African members of the African Terminal. Taking their expertise as logisticians seriously, it addressed them not only as unskilled and unwanted labor, but also tried to empower them as a skilled workforce, one that could operate within the tactical frame of small-scale business. Furthermore, the goal of the performative intervention was also to shift the way that a public might look at migrant workers from West-Africa: Understanding ourselves as drivers of alternative supply chains, thereby merely allowing for expertise and strategic faculties to be exercises which had been previously neglected by the German state, our shared attempt was to create different representations of refugees and migrant workers than often repeated within German media or the public sphere more generally. We were able to shift agency within our cultural initiative most clearly with regards to the operations in Banjul. After all, none of the Hamburg artists participating in the performance knew all that much about what goods are in demand in Gambia or even how to sell them there. In regard to the sales market that we targeted, we were thus not only partly, but fully dependent upon the expertise and connections of the West-African mem-

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bers of the Terminal. In the following, I wish to describe the shifting of agency that took place as a form of ‘recalibration’.

‘Recalibration’: Attuning people and things to one another Two points are central to me regarding my experience within the cultural initiative African Terminal. On the one hand, we have tried to use supply chains (i.e., logistical mechanics of moving used consumer goods from Hamburg to West Africa) as a means of shifting agency within our group to our West-African colleagues, people form Gambia and Nigeria who have come to Hamburg as skilled logisticians in order to make a livable life for themselves. Empowering them as businessmen has created bonds, both within the group of collaborating cultural and logistical workers, but also with places and people that were previously unfamiliar to many of us, such as the port of Tin Can Island in Lagos (Nigeria) or correspondences with harbor agents in Banjul (Gambia). Secondly, in so far as the performance rewrites frames – most notably by shedding light on the afterlife of discarded consumer objects from Europe in West-African countries – it asks potent questions about ongoing neocolonial patterns of violence that govern both the movement of things and people within contemporary logistical networks. The mechanism of sorting the material world according to racial, gendered ideologies rooted both in racist philosophy, but even more so in the imperatives of valorization of capitalism, continues in many ways today. Escaping from these mechanisms necessitates acts of practical solidarity, one that we were, to some degree, able to perform within the African Terminal. In order to do so, our attempt was to take what is usually hidden from sight into our own hands (i.e., both the actual organization of container transport and the way material is being sorted and packed into the container). This was a practical act of handling material. One, as described above, happened in full view and with the direct participation of audience members. Rather that exposing those material objects discarded by Western consumer culture, the performance exposed the logistical mechanisms by which they become moved onwards to places seemingly at the periphery of Western vision. In so doing, it exposed some of the onto-epistemic violence that governs both the movement of people and things, even today, while drawing connections to the colonial past of the city of Hamburg itself. If the performance tried to expose violent structures within the governance of matter as logistics, then it made some steps beyond that gesture of critique or disillusionment, albeit tentatively. In a way, the performative intervention may be described as a minor act of recalibration of a heterogeneous set of components (i.e., people, things, places, and relations). Therein, it allowed us to perform an act of ‘re-attuning’ agencies and trajectories that are nominally excluded from the space of Western liberal subjecthood and self-present, autonomous performance. My colleague Sibylle Peters and I have tried to formulate this as follows:

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“Our supply chain therefore does not start with the extraction or production of things; it tries to attune the migratory movement of people and things to one another. Practically, therefore, it starts with bringing migrants into position to access supplies, i.e., things that have become stuck within our wealthy Western lives. Based on their own expertise on mobility, they can thus make things, which were stuck and out of use, move again – transporting them to places to where they might still be useful. Therein, their migrational expertise becomes productive in two ways: They carry knowledge of sales markets that are beyond the scope of Western publics. More generally, thus, their own experience of a-positionality, i.e., the ‘standpoint of no standpoint’, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write, allows them to attune to the movement of things more easily” (Frischkorn/Peters forthcoming). If the performance is a minor act of recalibrating agencies, then it is one that is based on constant improvisation and the perspective of people and things that were never admitted to or which were thrown out of Western cycles of performance, personhood, citizenship, and their according infrastructures. In that regard, the performance does not attempt to occupy a position of overview, from which its overall geopolitical effects or costs could be assessed. Instead, it forces itself to operate from a limited, situated perspective, and a position of instability. This position is what Harney and Moten, in their essay ‘Fantasy in the hold’, call ‘the standpoint of no standpoint’ (Moten/Harney 2013: 93) (i.e., an (a)-positionality of people and things who are moved ‘in the hold’ of logistics, who are not allowed to stabilize their status, and who are positioned within frameworks of private property or Western citizenship). A-positionality, the standpoint of no standpoint, which the authors also describe using the notion of ‘logisticality’, might give rise to specific sets of handling things and practical expertise, of improvisatory, non-subjective, undercommon conviviality, and mutual un-owning. It operates within this other realm of handling things in so far as the performance attunes movement trajectories to one another that are, differently, marked by the exclusionary power of logistical governance of movement. Meanwhile, this other form of mutual help, of inter-relation with material worlds, does not show itself. It is a realm that exists beyond a representation of itself. As such, it does not let itself be grasped or viewed directly within the performative intervention of African Terminal. It exists, necessarily, beyond the limits of the stage. I have, within this chapter, described logistics as a field of business innovation that has regained prominence within the last 30 years. It conceives of itself as a potentially total form of governing matter, as controlling the movement of all people, things, money, and information. Handling matter is operated based on principles of constant flow, continuous adaptation, the disposability of resources, the vectorialization of components, and on containerization. This is because movement is

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always both valorized and priced. The onto-epistemic violence of logistics, exercised within the act of transport, becomes visible with reference to the colonial history of logistics: Logistics, as governance of movement, enacts and iteratively reproduces onto-epistemic cuts by applying the choreographic principles outlined above. Thus, it produces what Karen Barad terms ‘agential cuts’ that separate matter according to the categories of subject and object, agent and material, crew and cargo, and handler and handled. Today, logistical choreographies are no longer driven by strategic (i.e., subjective-rational) agents. Instead, the governance of movement (i.e., of potential trajectories and future pathways) is handed over to algorithms. The future emergent choreographies of logistics are driven by non-human agents. While logistics, therefore, takes on the look of a dangerously disembodied, fully rationalized, and post-human system of total governance of life itself, it also signals a possibility of attuning to more-than-human choreographies beyond, before, or without the modern division of capacities and agencies between active subject and passive objects. My third case-study, the performative intervention African Terminal, was a cooperation of West-African migrants and German cultural workers. Within the frame of theatre festivals and museum contexts, this group of people intervened in the field of used-goods logistics by using and misappropriating frameworks of artistic production for their own purposes. It highlights and questions modalities of producing these objects within globalized supply chains built on the exploitation of resources and labor beyond the frame of Western publics simply by making discarded consumer goods, which the audience knows will be transported to West-Africa, present within theatrical and museum spaces. More generally, it thus unfolds how logistics, as a socio-material choreography beyond the stage, both supports and enables artistic practice and liberal acts of citizenship while externalizing some of its cost. It asks about the extent to which artists and citizens, thus, become accomplices of logistical choreographies. I have argued that this opens up a realm of ‘logisticality’, meanwhile, in so far as the performance, as a kind of minor gesture, attunes people and things to one another that exist beyond the scope of Western publics (i.e., by shifting agency towards migrants without Western citizenship) addressing them as logistics experts and connecting publics to one another that are usually remain largely ignorant of one another, the performance. That ‘undercommon’ space, informed by improvisational knowledge and a fundamental critique of established protocols of personhood, citizenship, autonomy, and property rights, may be a fertile ground for investigating other attempts at more-than-human choreographies beyond the efficiency-driven, objectifying, and rationalized protocols of handling matter that I have tried to outline with regards to the business field of logistics in this chapter. In the following chapter, I review the concept of ‘logisticality’ which was only briefly mentioned here. After all, ‘logisticality’, as Harney and Moten claim, is but “the movement of things” (Harney/Moten 2013: 93). In a kind of cyclical motion, I,

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thus, come back to this notion which I have already brought up at the very beginning of this book. I want to provisionally end my argument as follows: More-thanhuman choreography means, in all simplicity and complexity, to turn one’s focus towards the ‘logisticality’ of choreography. Instead of making choreography logistical (i.e., activating its socio-material, potentially totalizing vector), let us try to make it ‘logisticality’, (i.e., by activating its more-than-human vector).

4.5 A general realm of ‘logisticality’ In their essay ‘Fantasy in the Hold’, Harney and Moten paint a bleak picture of logistics. They insist on its violent, brutal logic, one that regards material as disposable, as a mere resource to be mobilized, organized, moved, and exploited according to automated procedures and an abstract logic of profit maximization. Its main principles have been analyzed above as constant valorization of movement, vectorialization, disposability, total, albeit paradoxical mobilization, and containerization. Logistics, in their account, is based on the premise of handling material as a mere resource, thereby constantly objectifying it. Harney and Moten insist on the colonial history of logistics as logistics’ central point of innovation because a racist, capitalist logic of objectification (reification would be the corresponding Marxist term) was established and spelled out within the transatlantic slave trade. Concurrently, as we have seen, logistics becomes a complex socio-material choreographic scheme in which onto-epistemic boundaries are both made and iterated. Yet, there might also lie a potential in their insistence on the more-than-subjective logic of logistics, which they characterize as a system of movement control no longer based on the simple opposition of subject vs. object. Logistics’ attempts to mobilize ever increasing material for capitalist valorization concurrently unearths, as the authors claim, an “insurgent prophesy” (i.e., a counter-logistical imperative) which they name and circumscribe as the “movement of things” and as “interdicted, outlawed social life of nothing” (Harney/Moten 2013: 93). This movement of things is what they also term ‘logisticality’ (cf. Harney/Moten 2013: 94). Thus, they circumscribe a realm in which things move by themselves, or at least in which they do so without being objectified – a realm that lies beyond or underneath historic forms of logistics, either colonial or contemporary ones. There must be other ways of handling material and being handled by them, of using material and being used by them, than those that have been established within the modern history of colonialism, capitalism, and choreography as we know it. I here collect descriptions of this alternative, more-than-human realm or choreographic space that Harney and Moten circumscribed with their notion of ‘logisticality’. At the same time, I have tried to describe choreographic logics of ‘logisticality’ all throughout this book. They are based on the choreographic principles of handling

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things that my three case-studies propose. Let me then, finally, try to understand, if they match the theoretical formulations of Harney and Moten: Firstly, the authors insist on the continuous unmaking of fixed standpoints (cf. Harney/Moten 2013: 93). Indeed, their account of ‘logisticality’ is developed from the point of view of the ones that were relegated to the hold of the ship (i.e., from the perspective of those bodies (human and non-human) that have been both mobilized and objectified by logistics). The authors encounter and bespeak what they describe within the hold as follows: “The standpoint of no standpoint, everywhere and nowhere, of never and to come, of thing and nothing” (Harney/Moten 2013: 93). In that regard, they propose a concept of (impossible) a-positionality, indicating that no standpoint may attain more importance or relevance than any other. There is no centrality in their choreographic scheme, so to speak; it is a moving organization that reconfigures itself according to many viewpoints, interests, and impulses. Put differently: common impulses or shared propensity are preferred over clear positions; no individual movement impulse may overtake any other for longer periods of time. More importantly, though, Harney and Moten substitute a visual regime of movement production (be it based on human eyes or technological seeing) with one that is based on touch. Hapticality is the central principle of relation that they propose for the realm of ‘logisticality’, also described as: “[…] the touch of the undercommons, the interiority of sentiment, the feel that what is to come is here” (Harney/Moten 2013: 98). They insist that touch, or more accurately hapticality, is a “a way of feeling through others, a feel for feeling others feeling you” (Harney/Moten 2013: 98), thereby indicating a strong reciprocity between elements of the moving system. In the mobilization of others and by others, Harney and Moten insist on modes of feeling oneself via the other. Furthermore, a future-oriented, eschatological promise of justice is then folded into the haptic relation to others that resemble oneself, and to oneself as other. If “what is to come” is already here, then it may be provided by a relation to other material entities that do not presume one was separated therefrom at the outset. Hapticality, I suggest, may be presumed as an initial potential choreographic principle of relating to things without assuming the standpoint of the subject. Furthermore, the realm of logisticality is described as an “an unsettled feeling, the feeling of a thing that unsettles with others” (Harney/Moten 2013: 97). Unsettling might be translated as a continuous process of unmaking either imperatives or rules for how the overall choreographic system should look or be organized. It is a common activity, one produced in close entanglement, dependency, and inter-relation with others. Mutual dependency’s generative dimension is what the authors also term “a social poesis, running through logisticality” (Harney/Moten 2013: 97). In that regard, their proposition might be close to what Donna Haraway, in her recent book, calls ‘sympoiesis’:

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“Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making-with.’ Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. In the words of the Inupiat computer ‘world game’, earthlings are never alone. That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it” (Haraway 2016a: 58). Clearly, the authors disable a central standpoint (i.e., a techno-fantastical overview from which the emergent moving order could be assessed). Furthermore, they question and want to disable any outside telos or finality of the moving system. Rather, they are interested in the constant interplay of different bodies’ needs, desires, and modes in which they coordinate themselves based on situated, constricted, and inter-dependent impulses or trajectories. It is important, thus, to clearly demarcate their proposal from the emergent, adaptive models of choreographic steering based on algorithmic computation that we analyzed above. The moving system is also generated from individual trajectories, without the need to refer to a higher arbiter or a central viewpoint. Yet, there is both a clear telos and a measure of valorization for any of the trajectories that are produced within algorithmic choreographies: shorter, more time-efficient passages are preferred because time is money. The overall goal of efficient movement organization is evident in any contemporary choreography of logistics. Efficiency, conversely, is not what Harney and Moten look for in their model of ‘logisticality’. Therefore, ‘logisticality’ also seems to organize time differently than logistics. Stefano Harney describes contemporary logistics as the establishment of a specific rhythm, a ‘rhythm of work’ that extends well beyond the Taylorist assembly line, one driven by the constant valorization and measurement of time. Today, by means of logistical thinking, Harney claims that we are all interfaced and sucked up by that very rhythm of improvement, production, and consumption. The ‘rhythm of work’, implemented by the science of operations management and logistics, is based on a clear metric and efficiency; this is because, as Harney insists: “management science, this is what a factory is: a line, a process, a procession, a movement, a rhythm through from inputs to outputs” (Harney 2015: 176). Logistics plugs different capacities and materials into its unifying, yet differentiated rhythm. As Harney writes: “with logistics and reverse logistics this line is expanding exponentially, or rather, algorithmically. Logistics and supply chain management extend the metrics of line in both directions, toward inputs and outputs which now have their own work rhythms” (Harney 2015: 176). The task is to look for different rhythms of handling things, according to Harney; this is something that he briefly exemplifies, but does not really specify in relation to artworks of South-African performance artist AthiPatra Ruga and British-Indian filmmaker Zarina Bhimji (cf. Harney 2015: 178). I can now clarify and expand his reflections. As I have tried to argue above, both the

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choreographic principles of ‘hesitation’ (with regards to how one handles things) and ‘in/stability’ (of the choreographic systems, spaces, or institution that thus evolve) may allow for other rhythms to emerge. Finally, a certain notion of using one another, which may be differentiated from instrumentality, plays a central role in the conception of logisticality proposed by Harney and Moten. Using and being used by others, if it is not based on logics of efficiency or profit maximization, are central principles of ‘logisticality’. One early clue as to what the authors actually mean might be discerned by reference to another of Fred Moten’s works, entitled ‘Knowledge of Freedom’, in which he poses the following question: “What remains is the task of studying the richness of the relation between instrumentality and uselessness, where being-instrument is profoundly other than being-for-others” (Moten 2018b: 14). What, then, is a form of being-for-other, in which one becomes neither their instrument nor an object for their ends? For Moten and Harney, the idea of property and ownership is the central point of critique. In a Western understanding of the notion, ownership, the authors claim, is always tied up with improvement (i.e., tied to an imperative of efficiency and optimization). The authors set a notion of fundamental dispossession against these notions of efficiency and disposability and ask: “What if ability and need were in constant play and we found someone who dispossessed us so that this movement was our inheritance” (Harney/Moten 2013: 99). The feeling of being dispossessed by others, in a constant re-negotiation of ability and the need, in fundamental dependency on others, is how the authors, finally, define their concept of logisticality. Logisticality, in that regard, could be described as the act of mobilizing oneself and others (human and non-human) in a constant interplay of what one needs and what one offers with what others need and have to offer. Furthermore, as I want to suggest, each act of moving oneself is understood as creating agentic debts with other entities that support and enable it (cf. Frischkorn 2018). This may be done without attaining either pre-set goals or abstract principles of efficiency provided that one concedes that one does not own oneself and disables any outer telos. If logistics has taken different historic forms within capitalism, which I have tried to account for in this chapter, its opposite, namely ‘logisticality’, may not be based on either subject roles or as a notion of property or efficient choreographic steering. In Harney and Moten’s notion of ‘logisticality’, no moving entity belongs to another or even to oneself. However, all things are constantly indebted toward one another, on the level of agentic capacities, movement possibility, but also at other levels. As they write: “[…] debts stay bad. We keep buying another song, another round. It is not credit we seek nor even debt but bad debt which is to say real debt, the debt that cannot be repaid, the debt at a distance, the debt without creditor, the black debt, the queer debt, the criminal debt. Excessive debt, incalculable debt, debt for no

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reason, debt broken from credit, debt as its own principle” (Harney/Moten 2013: 61). Let me thus summarize: Logisticality is the generic name given to the inter-mobilization of people and things in which divisions of capacities and positions between human and non-human, between subject and object, do not become fixed, but are allowed to constantly shift. It circumscribes modes of handling one another in which one constantly and necessarily overtakes others’ potentials and capacities. Things get handled within that non-separated realm of co-becoming, but they get handled differently. Throughout this book, I have outlined the extent to which the performative intervention of more-than-human choreography relies on principles of handling things (differently), namely ‘hesitation’, ‘turbulent flow’, ‘in/stability’, ‘fumbling in the dark’, ‘unframing the stage’, and ‘shifting or re-calibrating agency’. Yet, with the advent of modernity, systems of mobilizing matter have been established that govern, control, and prescribe the movement of matter by turning it into clearly bounded, disposable objects. In fact, logistics enacts forms of onto-epistemic violence in which both things and human bodies are relegated to the status of objects (i.e., mobilized for further accumulation of capital). The category of subject founds itself by violently applying and enacting choreographic principles, such as efficiency and disposability, onto the realm of what is considered ‘inhuman’ within the establishment of colonial logistics. These principles still govern contemporary logistics, even though it is driven by algorithms today, often in adaptive, emergent manners. Generally, logistical choreographies’ central mechanisms are objectification and reification: These modes of mobilizing material relate to any single object as potentially disposable. Meanwhile, the choreographic principles inherent in colonial and contemporary logistics also become manifest within other social-material relations. They determine, for example, the way that labor is often managed, today. Logisticality (i.e., the general realm of the choreographic handling of matter), on the other hand, is central to any more-than-human definition of choreography in so far as it helps us to understand how any so-called human act of choreography implies non-human partners or components. The way in which matter is conceptualized and practically handled, thus, reveals certain choreographic principles. Those principles decide how we position ourselves within more-than-human ecologies: As subjectmasters of total, logistical socio-material choreography, or as thingly co-movers, fumbling in the dark, hesitantly searching for in/stability, trying to recalibrating agency by unframing whatever stage we dance on, enjoying the turbulent flows of all matter. This is, I imagine, what ‘logisticality’ – or, simply: more-than-human choreography – might come to mean once we try to practice it.

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5. Attunement: a more-than-human choreography of care

In this book, by moving from the Barricades outwards, through Miller’s Polyset and onto the ‘logisticality’ of African Terminal, I have argued that choreography may well be a privileged place for studying the practical handling of things, the ways in which one – by moving (with) them – (re)creates and continuously re-makes more-thanhuman worlds and defines one’s position within more-than-human ecologies. The act of handling things, be it on or off stage, reveals a choreographic diagram that, in turn (i.e., in the actual doing), repeatedly defines our position within more-thanhuman assemblages. It defines our relation to matter (i.e., it reveals our ideological stance towards the non-human realm). My argument proposes that choreographically handling things is one prominent area of practicing other modes of living with matter, both that of one’s own body and that of other non-human bodies. It is the field of pragmatically probing or working towards a more decent, entangled (a)positionality of haptic love and care for the myriad relations that make and unmake the assembled worlds in which we live our lives and by which we are continually shaped and affected. It is the realm from which performances come, that carries their effects, and where they go to. In order to make this argument, I have analyzed choreographic principles of displacing and disposing of material within the realm of contemporary logistics, namely valorization, constant flow, continuous adaptation, disposability, vectorialization, and containerization, while highlighting the historic links to the transatlantic slave trade, in which people were reduced to the status of objects. Colonial logistics establishes and constitutes modes of handling things that continue to exist at and as the basis of modernity. In relation to the socio-material choreographies of logistics, I have also proposed that it carries the power of enacting what Karen Barad names ‘agential cuts’ (i.e., cutting matter apart and allocating different positions and agentic capacities thereto). In so doing, I have revised a notion of choreography as an ‘apparatus of capture’ (Lepecki 2007) of movement, that only focuses on the human body and its movement. As a modern invention of governing movement, I here propose that choreography is a socio-material formation that always includes moving things, thereby continually redrawing the line between subject and object

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and between human and thing. Many questions remain: How can this proposition by supported by further empirical material? Can one uncover further choreographic principles of handling material? What would a sociological perspective on ‘choreographic principles of handling’ be, possibly from the field of ‘mobility studies’? To what extent are the choreographic principles that I propose applied within regimes of managing migration, for example? In order to develop my own notion of more-than-human choreography, I have, at the same time, speculated about the barricade as both a form of disruption of modern ideologies of efficient, seamless flow and as a potential space for a continuous re-negotiation of human to non-human relations. In relation to Karen Barad, the act of continuously and practically handling things has been defined as intra-action. Furthermore, I have reformulated the notion of assemblage as a performative modality of reconfiguring positions, agencies, and relations between things within practices of intra-acting. Performative assemblages always recreate and uphold inequalities and hierarchies in the form of differentiated fields of distributed agency. More-than-human choreography, then, comes to name the process in which performative assemblages sustain themselves in and by repeated intra-action (i.e., repeated acts of handling things and being handled by them). Therein, each act of handling both reproduces the choreographic diagram of the performative assemblage, but may also alter the consistency of the whole. Acts of handling things are described and predicated on choreographic principles of handling. It is by establishing different principles of handling things than those governing the field of logistics, thus, that one generates different relations to matter. In relation to my three-case studies, I have centrally invoked the notion of ‘attunement’ as a choreographic principle of handling things as intra-action. In relation to Barricades and Dances, I have narrated the process in which Verena Brakonier, one of the dancers, turns into stone herself (i.e., tries to physically identify with the material that she handles). I have, secondly, unfolded a notion of attunement as iterative enactment of the choreographic diagram of an assemblage based on the artistic research environment Polyset. In relation to the performative intervention African Terminal, I have finally described a process in which the global movement of people and things is recalibrated, albeit on a minor level. It seems, therefore, as if the notion and practice of attunement connected all three of these case studies. I will, thus, center my final reflections on this term. Most generally, attunement can be described as the process of making oneself available for a co-becoming with others across species borders or a, henceforth obsolete, subject-object divide. A process of attunement is, importantly, not initiated by one or the other of the two parties involved in that process – attunement always happens ‘sympoietically’ (cf. Haraway 2016b). More precisely still, it is a relation of mutual transformation that exists only in so far as agency or activity is divided between both partners, and cannot be ascribed to one of the two alone. Originally, at-

5. Attunement: a more-than-human choreography of care

tunement was a philosophical notion (cf. Kant 2007: 81), but it was first reformulated within Animal Studies in relation to non-humans. The most important formulation of the notion, to my knowledge, was presented by Belgian philosopher of science Vinciane Despret in her 2004 article ‘The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropozoo-genesis’:1 In order to formulate her own notion of attunement, Despret references the famous case of Hans, ‘the clever horse’ (cf. Despret 2004). Hans, a horse owned by the mathematics teacher and amateur horse rider Wilhelm von Osten, was believed to perform mathematical and other intellectual tasks such as adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, working with fractions, telling time, keeping track of the calendar, reading, spelling, and in fact understanding German. It was a miracle: whenever confronted with a task (that someone would pose to him in spoken language), Hans would indicate the answer by tapping his foot as often as the result of the calculation demanded. As Hans was believed to be able to solve mathematical problems and to count, he became a cause célèbre for inquiring human-animal relations at the beginning of the 20th century. By studying the case, psychologist Oskar Pfungst, thus revealed the following: Whoever questioned Hans (i.e., asked him to add numbers and so on) unconsciously gave bodily signs to the animal. Without noticing themselves that this is what they were doing, the questioners would very slightly bend their head while the horse was tapping. Yet, as soon as the horse had tapped often enough, they would release the slight tension they had built up in their neck, albeit unconsciously. As Despret notes, in “doing so, no one among them noticed that their bodies were talking to the horse” (Despret 2004: 113). Yet, in her reading of the case, she insists that Hans is doing more than merely reading these signs. In order for the successful performance of his calculation skills, he needed to actually train his different questioners, so that they would unconsciously learn the pattern of behavior described above. Hans, as Despret writes, was

1

Within continental philosophy, there is a longer history of the term that is prominently used both in the aesthetic philosophy of Kant and in Heidegger’s reflection on affective relations to the world. The notion has, therefore, been criticized for its Western, Euro-enlightened history that I believe is important to take into account. The basic question at the heart of discussions about the history of the term within Western philosophy is about whether or not it inherently presupposes, as geologist Mark Jackson argues, a division between perceiving subject and perceived environment, so that the subject has to actually attune to the environment as a kind of an active doing, or – as Kant would argue – has to attune imagination and reason in order to make sense of the world (cf. Jackson 2016). What this critique asks about is a pertinent question, in my opinion: If attunement happens all of the time, for we are already tuned and tuning to the environment with which we are fundamentally entangled with, then is there an attunement to the process of attunement? Is there an activity that is part of attuning that we can practice, however paradoxical that might sound? These are the questions that interest me.

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not only able “to read bodies”, but more than that: “[…] he could make human bodies be moved and be affected” (Despret 2004: 113). Her argument rests on the fact that, as Pfungst has recorded, Hans had differently abled questioners. Some of them were able to collaborate better, while others could not eventually unearth his calculation skills (cf. Despret 2004: 114). In fact, for Hans’ performance to be successful, there needed to be, as Despret insists, a form of ‘isopraxis’, in which horse and human became more alike one another (cf. Despret 2004: 115). Tolstoy, in ‘Anna Karenina’, has famously described how horses read a riders’ muscles before s/he her/himself becomes aware of her/his decisions. In order for this attunement of horse and rider to work successfully, Despret notes: “[…] talented riders behave and move like horses” (Despret 2004: 115). Therefore, she theorizes a process of co-influencing that takes place between horse and man, in which the animal teaches its partner “without their knowledge, the right gestures to (involuntarily) perform” (Despret 2004: 115). Attunement, in her definition of the term, is a process, therefore, in which agency is distributed. No one of the partners can be said to initiate or guide the process solely. What arises from a successful process of attunement is a form of ‘preference of agreement’ (Despret 2004: 119); this is a sense of collaboration, therefore, that makes a co-becoming possible. Attunement, importantly, is not an intentionally steered process, but rests instead on the intuitive or emotional capacity to make oneself ready to be affected by the non-human other, of giving oneself over to their influence. If that bodily state of readiness for affecting and being-affected is achieved, then one allows the human or non-human other to enact agentic capacities that might otherwise go unnoticed. The researcher gives, as Despret formulates “the object the chance to be activated as subject” (Despret 2004: 128). In fact, subject-object relations are turned around or become superfluous. In his most recent book ‘Being Ecological’, philosopher Timothy Morton explicitly reformulates the notion of attunement in relation to things more generally, thereby delimiting the notion from its original use within Animal Studies. Within the book at large, Morton looks for modes of “how to live ecological knowledge” (Morton 2018: xx). His main task, he claims, is to conceptualize and highlight modes of awareness and attention that are already parts of our daily life (cf. Morton 2018: xxi). Central to his argument is the practice of attunement to non-humans, which Morton partly models on the theory of aesthetic judgement formulated by Immanuel Kant. In reference to Kant, Morton argues that beauty is an experience, that: “[…] just happens, without our ego cooking it up” (Morton 2018: 65). So, while taste may be acquired and learned, it is, in fact, beyond rational choice. Beauty is an experience that is, fundamentally, brought into being by the object (of art) itself. The form of care that comes with finding something beautiful is not intentional. As Morton writes: “The truth is, the choice to be able to care or not care is always an illusion anyway” (Morton 2018: 65). Based on this model of the aesthetic, Morton

5. Attunement: a more-than-human choreography of care

conceptualizes a quality of human existence, of existence as such, that he names “alreadiness” (Morton 2018: 70); this is a form of implication or entanglement with things in which attunement always already takes place: “Alreadiness hints at our tuning to something else, which is a dance in which that something else is also, already, tuning to us. Indeed, there are some experiences in which it simply can’t be said which attunement takes priority; which comes first, logically and chronologically. One of these is the common experience of beauty” (Morton 2018: 70). More generally, Morton defines attunement as the act of “building meaningful relations with non-humans” (Morton 2018: 59), in order to find modes of co-existing non-violently. While non-violence is the main criteria for an ecological ethics, it is fraught with ambivalence, as Morton insists: Nonviolence is “uneasy and shifting” (Morton 2018: 60). In interacting with the non-human world, one seems to give prevalence either to systematic or individual entities or to ecosystems or singular lifeforms. Instead, Morton proposes that we think of environments as the entangled exoskeletons of lifeforms or as their extended expressive traces (i.e., as assemblages). What is most important to my argument here is the following: Attunement is not exactly an activity, for that would presume the passivity of the entity with which one interacts. Rather, attunement is of the order of being ‘captured’ by something else, a non-human other – or, for that matter, a more-than-human choreographic diagram. Morton’s main example of attunement is an artistic work by Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson entitled Ice Watch which was presented in 2015 in Paris. It consisted of around 80 tons of ice from Greenland that were installed in twelve large blocks in circular form, thereby forming something like a clock-face. While there is, evidently, a symbolic meaning to the placement of ice blocks in a clock-like fashion – time is running out for humans to bring global warming to a halt – what struck Morton most, according to his own account, was the way in which the ice captivated viewers and passers-by. They were, he claims, under a spell, a weird call to let go of their respective intentions and interact with the ice in various manners: “[…] the ice was accessing us. It seemed to send out waves of cold, or suck our heat, whichever way around. This kind of access was how Eliasson was thinking about it – the encounter with Ice Watch is in a way a dialogue with ice blocks, not a one-way human conversation in a mirror that happens to be made of ice” (Morton 2018: 72). Affect here is conceived of as a form of captivation that literally accesses and penetrates bodies, which is why Morton thinks of it in the vein of eating or incorporating something. It is a form of enchantment or ‘animal magnetism’ (a term coined originally by Franz Anton Mesmer in the 18th century) that, as Morton claims, both

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surrounds and penetrates us (cf. Morton 2018: 80). Attunement, in that regard, is not an active doing; it is the ‘act’ of letting oneself be charmed by an entangled nonhuman other, of feeling its power over yourself. As Morton states: “Attunement is the feeling of an object’s power over me – I am being dragged by its tractor beam into its orbit” (Morton 2018: 114). At the same moment, the kind of encounter with non-humans that Morton subsumes under the rubric of attunement or mutual tuning cannot ever exhaust or fully grasp the other. Just like an artwork, the thing’s capacities to affect are infinite (cf. Morton 2018: 78/79). Being fundamentally unable to ever fully grasp or know a thing (i.e., their constitutive quality of fugitivity described above) is the reason why attunement seems to be the only possible way of ever interacting with them in ecological manners: “Since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it, with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy” (Morton 2018: 89). Attunement, then, is conceived as a “living, dynamic relation with another being” (Morton 2018: 89), a process that is without end and without definite purpose. Oppositions between activity and passivity become obsolete within attunement. There is constant motion as both partners – and, in reality, there is always more than two – attune to one another. Attunement will necessarily be an imperfect process that creates a common space of affection (what Morton names “attunement space”, cf. Morton 2018, 94) rather than simple chains of cause and effect. Like Despret, Morton insists that attunement brings forth a causal effect. Actually, he goes so far as to claim: “[…] attunement is the mode in which causality happens” (Morton 2018: 90). Morton thereby presumes a realm of intimacy between humans and non-humans in which both always already affect and are affected by one-another. This space of ecological intimacy is one of constant ‘veering’, as Morton claims (cf. Morton 2018: 89), of pulling and being pulled in different directions at the same time. The state of mind that he circumscribes is not one of willful intervention into these entanglements and relations. This is because attunement cannot be intentional – intention being a mode of relating to non-humans which necessarily renders them objects of external purpose. Rather, one has to undo intention and not direct one’s attention. In fact, as Morton claims, we have always fled our intimacy with non-humans, our being affected by and intimate with them – a process, he terms “agrilogistics” (Morton 2018: 10), thereby hinting at logistical modes of handling things. As Morton argues: “When we study attunement, we study something that has always been there: ecological intimacy, which is to say, intimacy, between humans and non-humans, violently repressed with violent results. To begin to track this flight, then, is to veer towards a veering” (Morton, 2019: 95). Yet, how might we unlearn ‘agrilogistics’, how might we unlearn a modality of relating to things that conceives of them as disposable, available, and there to handle? What is the purpose of attunement within the context of choreography? Vinciane Despret, in her recollection of the experiments and experiences with Clever Hans,

5. Attunement: a more-than-human choreography of care

seems to give at least some hints at predispositions for attunement. Referencing Pfungst’s reports on Clever Hans and his questioners, Despret indicates that attunement can in one way or another be trained or activated from within the (a)position of the human body. A number of skills seem to be important in order to become a good questioner of the horse (i.e., a good partner for the co-becoming of attunement). What is needed, on the side of the human questioner, apart from a general “ability and tact in dealing with animals”, is the capacity for “intense concentration in expectation” and a “facility for motor discharges”. As Despret states: Good questioners (i.e., talented bodies for attunement) “are gesturally inclined” and “have the power to distribute tension, to sustain it long enough and to relax it at the same moment” (Despret 2004: 114). On the whole, then, there seem to be certain bodily capacities that make attunement possible, or easier at the very least. In addition to the central aspects of trust and interest in the relation to the non-human other – the most important basis for attunement to take place – there is, or at least Despret seems to indicate, a choreographic set of skills that might help such processes. On the other hand, she claims that “long dealings with abstract thought, for example, weaken this capacity” (Despret 2004: 114). If there is, thus, a form of training or entrainment at play, then Despret herself does not spell it out. While she claims that one needs to establish new modalities of “‘disposing’ both body and world” (Despret 2004: 114), she does not say how. If attunement, as Morton claims, is an ongoing process, but one that cannot be felt, then what we actually have to do is a form of unlearning. We need to unlearn the specific numbness and disregard for the constant affections, the constant charm, that things exercise on us. This numbness, Morton claims, has to do with specific figures of thought, a specific form of using language (which uses nouns to categorize and inventory items that one claims property of), and specific practices and ways of dealing with material that we have practiced for a long time. Attunement, in that regard, might be the weirdest kind of training – one in which one does not actually train all that much (for is not training always based on intention, planning, the will to master), but gives oneself over to affective forces that one cannot control or master. But how do we practice that non-doing? I want to claim that this is achieved by giving oneself over to different practices of handling. It is, first of all, by unlearning logistical principles of handling things. One place to practice that unlearning is in experimental art practice. In fact, as I will now outline, all six principles of logistical choreographies can be replaced. Let me then finish the puzzle: Within this work, I have described logistics as potentially totalizing socio-material choreography-based, first of all, concerning the principle of valorization. From this first principle spring five others; namely, constant flow, continuous adaptation, containerization, disposability, and vectorialization. As choreographic principles of handling, they characterize the socio-material choreography of logistics, but may also – based on my use of Hewitt’s notion of ‘aes-

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thetic continuum’ – be applied in every-day life and on stage. Based on the three artistic case-studies, which form the main practical epistemic motor of this work, I can now replace these six principles with more-than-human principles of handling, albeit provisionally. The principle of ‘constant flow’ may be replaced by the principle of ‘turbulent flow’ as articulated in relation to Barricades and Dances. Turbulent flow marks the making of assemblages in which vortices of rest and acceleration co-exist. We can also characterize turbulent flow as the making of spaces of play and lightness in relation to the Inflatable Cobblestones of Tools for Action. The principle of ‘continuous adaptation’, characteristic of logistical choreography, can be replaced by the principle of ‘hesitation’, as elaborated with regards to both Barricades and Dances and Bruno Latour’s ‘Compositionist Manifesto’. ‘Hesitation’ allows for attunement, for the careful composition of more-than-human worlds, and for encounters beyond efficiency. As Timothy Morton states: “Hesitation is a quantum of veering” (Morton 2018: 98). Thirdly, the principle of ‘containerization’, analyzed in relation to logistics and as a general mechanism of closing objects onto themselves, may be countered by the principle of ‘unframing’, which I uncovered in my work with the performative intervention African Terminal. Whereas containers close things onto themselves, make them disappear, and cut their entanglement, ‘unframing’ is an open principle that seeks, albeit impossibly, to enumerate the infinite co-agents that participate in any action of handling things. Without ever being able to do so, it tries to enact what Denise Ferreira de Silva claims when she states that “everything that exists is a singular expression of each and every actual-virtual other existant” (Denise Ferreira da Silva 2016: 65). The logistical principle of ‘disposability’, then, is also counter-effectuated by the principle of ‘shifting agency’ as elaborated within my reading of African Terminal. Although a risky and precarious endeavor, ‘shifting agency’ to members of a collective, who have not been as empowered as oneself, is a central principle of more-than-human choreography. Finally, I want to propose that the logistical principle of ‘vectorialization’ can be displaced by the principle of ‘in/stability’ that was established in my conversation with the artistic research environment Polyset. While disposability takes objects as givens, ‘in/stability’ asks about the processes in which they come to be within assemblages – assemblages that open up vectors of transformation, while, concurrently, being marked by ‘preferred articulation’ (i.e., by microhierarchies and inequalities). ‘To fumble in the dark’, as a process of infinite re-actualization and queering of the choreographic diagram of assemblages, may be a synonym for ‘in/stability’. Together, these five principles – turbulent flow, hesitation, unframing, shifting agency, and in/stability – delimit the practical space of more-than-human choreography that I have tried to unfold within this work. All of them constitute minor interventions, careful experiments in another, more-than-human ethics of handling material. I propose that they may re-enforce each-other in similar ways that logistical principles of handling do. They are held and summarized by the principle of

5. Attunement: a more-than-human choreography of care

‘attunement’ which I have tried to characterize in greater detail here. Contrary to ‘valorization’, attunement does not propose any finality to the choreographic handling of things. Furthermore, attunement does not presuppose either a sense of individuality or subjectivity, in which individuals were, however freely, deciding to open themselves up to the affection of one another. What this means for the notion of performance – how attunement and a thinking of the laws of (non)performance problematizes presuppositions of self-presence and efficacy tied to a single author or source – has been spelled out in detail above. An aesthetics of attunement would no longer rely on single authorship. Rather it is an effect of logisticality, as I have argued throughout this work. Attunement is not an intentional act and, therefore, it presupposes an act of consent (i.e., the consent to be part of a field of interwoven, entangled, and distributed agencies). Giving that consent, as Fred Moten has spelled out within his text ‘Erotics of Fugitivity’ (Moten 2018a) cited above, means undermining most of the presuppositions that we normally relate to consent. To logisticality, one does not consent on the basis of self-possession, free will, or the autonomy of the subject. One consents, as Moten puts it so clearly, ‘not to be a single being’, that is, by: “[…] belonging to a nonperformance that neither exercises self-possessive freedom nor confirms being possessed” (Moten 2018a: 264). I want to claim that to attune oneself to attunement, thus, is to consent not to be a single being (not to be able to consent, thus) and is, finally, a process of care. The feminist Spanish scholar of Science and Technology Studies María Puig de la Bellacasa has recently made an important contribution to the field of feminist materialist thinking around the notion of care, proposing that we think about care as a mode of both relating to and intervening in more-than-human worlds. Puig de la Bellacasa positions her argument within an ongoing feminist reflection of the notion of care, which she characterizes, in relation to feminist scholars Joan Tronto and Bernice Fischer, as “a ‘generic’ doing of ontological significance, as a ‘species activity’ with ethical, social, political and cultural implications” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 3). From Joan Tronto’s reflection of care within her book ‘Moral Boundaries’, Puig de la Bellacasa adopts a threefold definition of care: Its first aspect is the concrete and hands-on work of maintenance that is traditionally referred to as ‘care work’. Secondly, it carries the meaning of being affected and assuming an affective, ethical charge for socio-material affairs such as “the affective and ethical disposition involved in concern, worry, and taking responsibility for other’s well-being” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 4). Thirdly, it circumscribes a situated political position within entangled, interdependent more-than-human worlds. Here, the focus on agencies and voices which are often excluded from liberal spaces of political expression and participation, is central (cf. Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 4–5). Importantly, Puig de la Bellacasa highlights the ambivalence of care and carework. She writes: “To care can feel good; it can also feel awful. I can do good; it can oppress. Its essential character to humans and countless living beings makes it all

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the most susceptible to convey control” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 1). Importantly, while care is the central ingredient for meaningful, implied relations with others, it also carries the danger of paternalistic authority and unnoticed modalities of influence. Now, while she insists on an extended definition of care, as everything that we do in order to reclaim liveable worlds (cf. Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 3), her interest is in a reflection of care within more-than-human worlds specifically, thereby linking feminist discourses on care to posthumanist thinking and reflections from the field of Science and Technology Studies. While care is “a human trouble”, she insists: “[…] this does not make of care a human-only matter” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 2). Within her argument, she opens up a set of potent questions: How can a situated human (i.e., species-specific practice such as care) encompass non-human others? How might we practice forms of care for non-humans in such a way that one does not impose meaning, composition, or human-centered ideologies onto them? Importantly, Puig de la Bellacasa, therein defines the project of care within more-thanhuman worlds as one of speculative ethics (i.e., a project which cannot base itself on fixed normative frameworks). She insists: “[…] an ethics of care cannot be about a realm of normative moral obligations but rather about thick, impure involvement in a world where the question of how to care needs to be posed” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 6). Therein, care is: “[…] unthinkable as something abstracted from situatedness” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 6). Notably, her intervention into discourses from the field of Science and Technology Studies consists in thoroughly reworking Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘matters of concern’, which I have dealt with at length previously, turning it into what she names ‘matters of care’. She adopts two central arguments from Latour: His argument for an inherent agency and liveliness of materials and notions of distributed agency, and his interest in de-objectifying and politicizing scientific discourse (cf. Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 31).2 Most importantly, Puig de la Bellacasa supports Latour’s attempt to replace the older political notion of ‘interest’ that is so prevalent in so-called ‘rational’ discourses on political deliberation: “By contrast with ‘interest’ – a previously prevalent notion in the staging of forces, desires, and the politics of sustaining the ‘fabrication’ and ‘stabilization’ of matters of fact – concern alters the affective charge of the thinking and presentation of things with connotations of trouble, worry and care” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 35).

2

Puig de la Bellacasa also criticizes Latour for the still-too-liberal and pragmatic onset of his theory that often neglects agencies and positions that, from the very beginning of any debate (language-based or not), have difficulties being admitted to his proposal of a ‘Parliament of Things’ as a pragmatist deliberation of a political ecology. In short, according to her, Latour and his theoretical endeavor are not attentive enough to: “struggles of minoritarian oppositional views” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 47).

5. Attunement: a more-than-human choreography of care

Her own notion, ‘matters of care’, is about attempting to listen to both human and non-human positions and voices that are not represented and are often neglected: In that regard, both maintenance and mediation – human and more-thanhuman practices that are often associated with care-work – cannot be taken as evident or neglectable, but should be conceived as active and as: “generative doings that support livable relationalities across technoscientific assemblages” (Puig de la Bellacasa: 54). Any more-than-human assemblage, even the technical and machinic setups that secure the functioning of everyday life and work, be it a hospital, the postal service, public housing, or technical infrastructures such as telecommunication networks, can then be conceived of as a ‘matter of care’. To argue this way involves highlighting the work of maintenance that has to constantly be fed into these architectures for them to continue functioning, in terms of care for both human and nonhuman participants, while at the same time taking the generative and productive agency of both their human and non-human members who are often neglected into account. Therein, similar to the reflection of Alexander Weheliye on ‘Racializing Assemblages’ cited above, Puig de la Bellacasa rightly insists on the asymmetric relations that these more-than-human assemblages often produce. She writes: “In the world as we know it, paying attention to care as necessary doing still directs attention to neglected things and devalued doings that are accomplished in every context by the most marginalized—not necessarily women—and to logics of domination that are reproduced or intensified in the name of care. Caring, from this perspective, is a doing that most often involves asymmetry: someone is paid for doing the care that others can pay off to forget how much they need it; someone is measure of caring for somebody who needs care. To represent things as MoCa (matters of care, M.F.) is an aesthetic and political move in the way of representing things that problematize the neglect of caring relationalities in the assemblage” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 56). To think about ‘matters of care’ thus implies not only uncovering and crediting these layers of invisible work, but also generating an affective charge and ethical bond with whomever is tasked to do this work (cf. Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 57). Again, doing so is a situated, ambivalent, and thus always a political intervention. It cannot assume knowledge of what the more disenfranchised member or participants (human and non-human) of assemblages need, want, or desire. It cannot assume to formulate general claims about how the overall mode of working of the more-than-human assemblage in question should be altered. In turn, it means to practicing an ethically charged form of listening to others with which one is always already entangled, be they human or non-human. This practice comes with a sense of de-objectifying procedures of generating knowledge about things, thereby conceiving of them as affective and affecting agents in their own right. Indeed, doing so, Puig de la Bellacasa argues, may be linked to practices of attunement (cf. Puig de la Bellacasa 2016: 64).

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In fact, attunement might be one possible way of re-conceiving action and practice that allows for modes of caring beyond a mere intentional, subjective access to the world. More specifically, as I have argued previously, it can be the choreographic contribution to practices of care in a more-than-human world. Attunement as more-than-human choreography opens a space that is beyond the opposition of functionality vs. autonomy, instrumentality vs. being an end in itself. In that space, the difference between human and non-human, person and thing, subject and object, become obsolete. Things, in so far as they cannot be exhausted and have the power to affect us, are, as Morton writes “virtually indistinguishable” from people: “A person is a being that veers in just this way” (Morton 2018: 110). In that regard, one must become thing oneself, always already implied in relations of affection and dependency, beyond the fantasy of autonomy or subjecthood. Attunement, in that sense, is a process based on the constant interplay of treating the non-human or human other as an end in itself or as a means to use and, in turn, of making oneself the means of another. Therein exists a dance of dissolution, of giving oneself up to becoming meaningful for the other. Functionality and radical alterity exist alongside one another in ways that produce indefinite responsibility for any of the elements with which one intra-acts. Within this space, any other (human or non-human) is uncanny in so far as it is both familiar and strange at the same time, both means and end in itself (cf. Morton 2018: 199–122). It is a space in which me and the other no longer exist, for I am part of the attunement space of the other always already, and I cannot take our differences for granted. More-than-human choreography provisionally circumscribes the realm of modes of handling matter that subscribe to these terms and conditions. It looks for modalities of handling things and being handled by them based on the ‘consent not to be a single being’, of always already being entangled, affected, and being attuned to, by, and within more-than-human-worlds. It is a realm based on choreographic principles, as we have seen, of turbulent flow, of hesitation, of unframing, of shifting agency, an in/stable space of logisticality, of continuous collapse and re-assessment of (a)positionality, of undoing and, in turn, redoing territoriality, functionality, and instrumentality. Therein, the opposition of either giving up on choreography altogether or turning it into the totalized governance of all matter is undone. One is, always already, a thing among many things. One will, therefore, continue to handle things. For one is (being) choreographed/ing (matter) as much as one does so oneself, in the practical handling of things – things that will keep on moving, no matter what we do.

Literature

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