to make progress in reworking the background by producing new and more
productive entanglements. The intent is to produce a political genre in much the
same manner that, in the history of painting, the work of the assistants who carried
out the painting of the background gradually comes into the light. What was
formerly understood as the cheap stuff to be inserted by the apprentices is gradually
foregrounded as the genre of landscape painting. The side panels take to centre
stage.
Of course, all of this is very easy to misread, especially if you want – even need –
to do so. Surely we should all be concentrating our attention on the millions
without food or water, the terrible wars, the multiple oppressions that characterize
so many people’s lives. But this kind of linearization of intent, classically associated
with those who want to configure a centre that thinks radical practices (Colectivo
Situaciones 2005), too often elides the complex, emergent world in which we
live, in which it is by no means clear that everyone could or should suddenly reach
a point of clarity and unanimity about means and ends, yet alone a state of com-
passion. This is a world that is simultaneously monstrous and wonderful, banal and
bizarre, ordered and chaotic, a world that is continually adding new hybrid
inhabitants, and a world in which the human is consequently up for grabs as ‘human
nature (the phrase already innocent, nostalgically distant) is melting, running off
in unpredictable directions’ (Rotman 2000: 59).^1
Those involved in the kinds of projects that I have mentioned certainly see the
imprints of power but they do not believe that everything enters the machine: for
example, there can be moments of relation of which no residue remains upon which
therefore we may not easily be able to reflect but which can still have grip. Nor do
they believe that everyone enters into a contract as an ‘individual’ with her own
body and can therefore easily manifest intention. Rather there are flows of what is
and is not subjectivity (Wall 1999) making their ways across fields of flesh, touching
some parts and not others, and it has become clear that these flows of subjectivity
need to and do involve more and more actors – various kinds of things, various other
biological beings, even the heft of a particular landscape – in a continuous undertow
of matterings that cannot be reduced to simple transactions but can become part
of new capacities to empower.^2
viii Preface