The Ecotechnical Community: Hospitality and the Organisation of Locality
Project: Dissertation project
Project participants
- Stewart, Donovan (Project manager, academic)
Description
My project asks: How must the organisation of political place be rethought in the wake of contemporary theories of ecological and technical existence? I first analyse two hegemonic understandings of the organisation of political place that continue to orientate political theory today––one concerning ‘locality’ (Heidegger 1982, Stiegler 2018), the other, ‘community’ (Blanchot 1988, Nancy 1991). I then introduce contemporary ecotechnical thought (Hörl 2020, Lindberg 2022) and argue that its insights demand for these understandings of political place to be reconsidered. Finally, I offer a theoretical foundation for ecotechnical community and demonstrate how artistic experimentation has, and will continue to be, central to actualise this thinking.
The need to provide an ecotechnical critique of the organisation of political place comes as the concept of organisation itself undergoes a transformation. Rather than being solely an activity of human life, organisation is increasingly understood to be an ontologically ambivalent operation that gives form to beings in ways made possible by specific eco-techno-historical conditions. Such organisation demands for us to acknowledge an organisational a priori (Beyes, 2021) at the basis of existence, experience, and any possible critique. Furthermore, this return to the problem of the (re)organisation of political place follows preliminary moments in the deconstruction of the oppositions of polis-physis, bios–zoē, society-nature, that intensifies today, not only due to recent appropriations of Derrida’s thinking of archi-writing as the general history of life (Derrida 1982, Lynes 2018, Vitale 2019), but most forcefully because of the material immanent critiques that surround us today, the different forms of revenge from the ‘things themselves’ (Latour 2017, Haraway 2017), that necessitate an aggressive reformulation of the basic concepts of philosophy and politics––a necessity that highlights the (re)organisation of political place as one of the foremost objects for contemporary critique.
The need to provide an ecotechnical critique of the organisation of political place comes as the concept of organisation itself undergoes a transformation. Rather than being solely an activity of human life, organisation is increasingly understood to be an ontologically ambivalent operation that gives form to beings in ways made possible by specific eco-techno-historical conditions. Such organisation demands for us to acknowledge an organisational a priori (Beyes, 2021) at the basis of existence, experience, and any possible critique. Furthermore, this return to the problem of the (re)organisation of political place follows preliminary moments in the deconstruction of the oppositions of polis-physis, bios–zoē, society-nature, that intensifies today, not only due to recent appropriations of Derrida’s thinking of archi-writing as the general history of life (Derrida 1982, Lynes 2018, Vitale 2019), but most forcefully because of the material immanent critiques that surround us today, the different forms of revenge from the ‘things themselves’ (Latour 2017, Haraway 2017), that necessitate an aggressive reformulation of the basic concepts of philosophy and politics––a necessity that highlights the (re)organisation of political place as one of the foremost objects for contemporary critique.
| Short title | The Ecotechnical Community |
|---|---|
| Status | Active |
| Period | 01.10.22 → … |