10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17496
This article hosts a vivid discussion on Papadopoulos’ book Experimental Practice. Technoscience, Alterontologies and More-Than-Social Movements (Duke University Press, 2018). This is a speculative and politically engaged book. It crosses the boundaries of social theory, science and technology studies, feminist theory and autonomist thought. The following contributions explore and critically discuss an essential topic of the book: the role of movements and everyday practices in transforming eco-societies from below. Andrea Ghelfi situates the book in an historical contingency in which social transformation is primarily driven by material, ontological transformation. Luigi Pellizzoni offers an analysis of the ambivalences of experimentalism in a context marked by neoliberal governmentality. Roberta Raffaetà brings attention to three interrelated themes: practice, theory and the role of institutional power. Finally, Dimitris Papadopoulos’ response focuses on the complicate relation between practice and politics in more-than-social movements.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17496
1
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Roberta Raffaetà
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
practice
When Experimental Practice Comes First
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
12
Crossing Boundaries
2021-11-01
2023-06-27
2021-11-01
2023-10-19
63-97
TS
Roberta Raffaetà
2021/11/01
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17496
63
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
2038-3460
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practice
en
97
When Experimental Practice Comes First
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17496/16341
12
                                                                          Crossing Boundaries

When Experimental Practice Comes First

   Andrea Ghelfi                             Dimitris                     Luigi Pellizzoni
University of Nottingham (UK)              Papadopoulos                   University of Pisa (Italy)
                                       University of Nottingham (UK)

                                        Roberta Raffaetà
                                       Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
                                                    (Italy)


    Abstract: This article hosts a vivid discussion on Papadopoulos’ book Expe-
    rimental Practice. Technoscience, Alterontologies and More-Than-Social Movements
    (Duke University Press, 2018). This is a speculative and politically engaged
    book. It crosses the boundaries of social theory, science and technology
    studies, feminist theory and autonomist thought. The following contributions
    explore and critically discuss an essential topic of the book: the role of
    movements and everyday practices in transforming eco-societies from be-
    low. Andrea Ghelfi situates the book in an historical contingency in which
    social transformation is primarily driven by material, ontological transfor-
    mation. Luigi Pellizzoni offers an analysis of the ambivalences of experimen-
    talism in a context marked by neoliberal governmentality. Roberta Raffaetà
    brings attention to three interrelated themes: practice, theory and the role
    of institutional power. Finally, Dimitris Papadopoulos’ response focuses on
    the complicate relation between practice and politics in more-than-social
    movements.

    Keywords: social movements; ontological politics; technoscience; posthu-
    manism; practice.

     Submitted: November 25, 2020 – Accepted: April 25, 2021

    Corresponding author: Andrea Ghelfi, School of Sociology and Social
    Policy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham (UK). Email: Andrea.ghelfi@
    nottingham.ac.uk




TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
12 (1) pp. 63-97 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                     2021
64                                                          Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

Introduction

Andrea Ghelfi

   Experimental Practice. Technoscience, Alterontologies and More-
Than-Social Movements is a book that explores the many links between
technoscience and movements. The author, my friend and teacher Dimi-
tris Papadopoulos, takes seriously the multitude of implications in think-
ing politics, or better a politics of justice, in a historical context marked
by the deployment of technoscience. The first implication of this phe-
nomenon is the decentring of the humanistic subject: Papadopoulos situ-
ates his book within the wider understanding of the human-nonhuman
continuum that characterises the culture of the early twenty-first century.
The continuous folding of everyday life, science and technology into each
other – something that we learnt to call technoscience – here is seen as
the main drive of the posthuman culture. But instead of mapping the
multitude of theoretical approaches that in various academic fields are
offering different versions of this ‘more than human’ turn, Papadopoulos
accumulates in this precious book a significant series of concepts, ideas
and practical examples for mapping and imagining radical politics within
the posthuman condition.
    Papadopoulos’ work resonates strongly with Haraway’s concept of
technoscience. In her words in fact technoscience disarticulates the imag-
inary time called modernity, signifying a mutation in historical narrative,
“similar to the mutations that mark the difference between the sense of
time in European medieval chronicles and the secular, cumulative salva-
tion histories of modernity.”(Haraway 1997, 4). Technoscience exceeds
the ‘modern’ distinctions between nature and society, subject and object,
the natural and the artefactual. New configurations of knowledge and
practices emerge in the midst of this implosion of boundaries, included
new human-nonhuman assemblages grounded on the experimentation of
alternative forms of life. Papadopoulos sees in the end of humanist cul-
ture and in the decentring of the human in relation to the material world,
technologies and other species, a condition of possibility supported also
by the desire of escaping humanity in favour of richer forms of socio-
material composition and multispecies Earthly cohabitation.
    In the Italian context we had a few occasions – I am thinking,
amongst others, to Pellizzoni’s book The New Mastery of Nature. Onto-
logical Politics in a Disposable World and to the seminars organised by
the group Politics Ontologies Ecologies in Pisa in the last three years –
for discussing the multiple relations between technoscience, ontologies
and politics. This book can offer a significant contribution to this discus-
sion starting from three central ideas that crisscross it:
      1. Technoscience regards practices as human-nonhuman activities
    that shape the material configuration of worlds and constitutes an his-
Crossing Boundary                                                         65
   torical contingency in which social transformation is primarily driven
   by material, ontological transformation.
     2. Alterontologies constitutes the key field of experimentation for
   organizing a political posthumanism.
     3. Insurgent posthumanism configurates an intelligibility of move-
   ments irreducible to the categories of modern politics.
   In the next sections I am going to highlight, albeit in a rough way,
these three key hypotheses emerging from Experimental Practice.

Ontological Politics
    A central thesis of the book consists in the idea that in our technosci-
entific era production has a double meaning: the construction of new on-
tologies and the insertion of them inside scales of value. The term ‘biofi-
nancialisation’ here designates not only an economic strategy or a new re-
gime of accumulation that emerged in the Global North after the crisis of
Fordism, but also a culture of permanent valuation pervading society and
the everyday life: any aspect of sociomaterial life and the environment en-
ter into this indeterminate and unstable process of evaluation that feeds
the movements of financial markets and financialised societies. The uni-
versalising matrix of financial value is a logic in which the future is uni-
versal and exploitable. Biofinancialisation is the financialisation of life
and matter. Following Papadopoulos’ argument, the characteristic core of
biofinancial accumulation consists in the very fact that “biofinancializa-
tion becomes molecularized in flesh, in code, in matter. It alters the com-
position, the material infrastructure, of bodies and forms of life […] bio-
financialization becomes the ecology of terraformed existence more so
than just a system for accelerating accumulation” (2018, 41). In the global
economy not only every resource and service provider will be counted,
but as HSBC Bank analysts remember us “food chain and the supply
chain will merge” (2018,42). We are witnessing at the becoming rent of
Earth beings, animals, plants and ecosystems. A disposable world, saying
it with Pellizzoni, is the outcome of a process of biofinancialisation that
transforms the material tissues of everyday life since the ecobody of Earth
is not separable from the current architecture of accumulation. The fron-
tiers of productionism and the frontiers of matter merge in natureculture:
here lies the actuality of ontological politics in technoscience. Ontological
politics are the specific practices that perform the inclusion of new for-
mations of matter into the accumulation regime of current economies. In
a historical contingency in which technoscience and the processes of bio-
financialisation are making worlds and rearticulating forms of living and
dying in natureculture, politics becomes ontological politics. At the same
time, as we will see, the ontological terrain constitutes for Papadopoulos
the key field of experimentation of other ways of being and for organizing
alternative possibilities of world making, alternative materialisations.
66                                                               Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

    Ontological politics, or better alternative forms of ontological politics,
doesn’t require primary new forms of representative politics, but new
practices of making; other forms of life bringing certains humans and cer-
tains non-humans together in more sustainable ways. Alternative material-
isations, not alternative representations: on this terrain of intelligibility, it
is possible rethinking a constituent politics in technoscience. But what
does constituent mean in a present characterised by the proliferation of
the sprawling net of natural-social-technical associations and by the im-
plosion of the ‘modern’ chronotope? How can we think politics beyond
the categories of modern political thought? And, what kind of intelligibil-
ity of politics emerges from the idea of ‘alternative materialisations’? Pa-
padopoulos proposes a reading of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts based on a definition of political activism grounded in an
understanding of materiality: all that exists is matter and each transforma-
tive activity is material. Which means that matter itself cannot be con-
ceived as an outside or an object of human practice: matter is humanity’s
body too. Matter is a vital force and inorganic as well as organic life are
movements of matter. In this context, activism and matter are conceived
simultaneously and a collective activism is defined by its capacity to affect
material change. If the several trajectories of technoscience create new
ontologies, new worlds and new forms of life, a politics of alternative ma-
terialisation refers to the plurality of possible engagement in a specific so-
cio-material arrangement. Following Papadopoulos ‘politics here means
that by performing only one of the existing options rather than any other
we change the very constitution of being in a very specific direction’
(2014, 71), materialising certain ontological possibilities rather than oth-
ers, certain forms of life rather than others. In the middle of the current
technoscientific transformations, Wittgenstein’s maxim ‘what has to be
accepted, the given is – so one could say – forms of life’ (1958) is, more
than ever, useful for thinking the ontological consistence of a radical poli-
tics.
    If a constituent politics refers, first of all, to the material capacity to af-
fect material change, we can think, with Papadopoulos, a politics of
worlding in technoscience as a capacity of crafting matter: a capacity to
act that does not designate a ‘substance’, a ‘human agency’ or a ‘universal
wholeness’, but a ‘capacity to act with’ (Haraway 2003) enacted from sit-
uated practices. In a politics of worlding in fact acting means always act-
ing with. The concept of worlding comes from the work of Chris Connery
and Rob Wilson (2005), where this term designates the making of social
worlds that crisscross global space in variable and divergent trajectories.
This notion has been created in order to put in question an abstract and
universalistic reading of globalisation, valorising the plurality of tensions
and routes that populated the global dimension. Their work constitutes
an invitation for thinking the proliferation of differences in our contem-
poraneity and the notion of worlding suggests an attitude for opening our
thinking and practices to other ways of being, ideas, everyday practices
Crossing Boundary                                                           67
and narrations. Papadopoulos extends the meaning of this term ‘from so-
ciety to matter’. As such: ‘I want to think of worlding as an opening to
material processes and practices and as a possibility for crafting – literally
– common, alternative forms of life’ (Papadopoulos 2018, 94). Along this
perspective, a politics of worlding in technoscience is synonymous with a
form of politics and a style of activism which engages directly with ‘the
materialisation of worlds’: a politics immanent to the processes of relating
and crafting that directly affects the materialisation of the forms of life
that inhabit the world. What I am calling, with Papadopoulos, a politics
of matter is, in fact, a way of thinking activism as a direct engagement
with matter: it regards forms of human and non-human compositions,
modalities of collective assembling and everyday experiences of making
ecologies of living. Here politics, rather than designating an external and
a sort of second temporality that impacts life and material existences from
outside – as it is in representative politics and in policy – or a terrain of
struggle around the big signifier of ‘social power’, is conceived as a con-
stituent politics that refers directly to the conditions of possibility through
which different modes of existence can live together in ecologies of living
thick enough, rich enough and responsible enough for cultivating livable
words and eco-social justice.

Insurgent Posthumanism

    The book has two beginnings. I already mentioned the first one – the
emergent material culture of posthumanism. The second beginning re-
gards social movements, or better the political impasse of social move-
ments in times of biofinancialisation. Following Papadopoulos, neoliber-
alism, the architecture of the financial system and the culture of valuation,
imposes a significant impasse to strategies and tactics of social move-
ments. Even post 2008 movements, such as the global cycle of struggles of
‘Occupy’ have not been capable of disarticulating the neoliberal govern-
ance. The condensation of segments of the state with specific private in-
terests leading the current phase of neoliberal accumulation resisted to
the impact of the socio-political consequences of the 2008 economic cri-
sis. Even worst, the emersion of a global wave of regressive nationalism
risks to redetermine the composition of these postliberal aggregates mix-
ing up the ferocity of neoliberal regime with the resurgence of traditional
conservative ideologies. We are in a political impasse in which the word
Left is day by day an empty signifier and the capacity of movements to
constitute a democratic counterpower – as it was for example in the
Fordist phase – is getting weaker and weaker. This impasse demands a
radical rethinking of the role of movements in eco-social transformation
and what autonomy could mean in post-liberalism. From this perspective,
Papadopoulos’ book contributes to think the structural reasons of a crisis
of democratic negotiation. At the same time, it instigates the exploration
of new political intensities and fields of experimentation inside and
68                                                           Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

against the ontological configuration of politics. More than social move-
ment is the concept that Papadopoulos offers in order to start thinking
autonomy differently.
    More than social movements are movements that are transforming the
ontological conditions of everyday existence by experimenting alternative
politics of matter. This is a form of activism that reclaims the creation of
new material modes of existence through collective practices. As we have
seen earlier, in this historical contingency production has a double sense:
the construction of new cosmograms and ontologies and the insertion of
these ontologies into scales of value. The imageries and the practices of
geo-engineering exhibit Earth as a disposable world (Pellizzoni 2015) and
the narrative of the Anthropocene reinforce the modern idea that the des-
tiny of Earth is in the hands of humanity. Contemporary the financialisa-
tion of the ecological limits (Leonardi 2017) inserts the ecological value
inside the financial measurement. The underlying logic of the culture of
valuation is that the worth of goods, things, activities, spaces, environ-
mental conditions and other species can be essentially translated into fi-
nancial evaluation. In times in which the pervasiveness of the technosci-
entific apparatuses has a direct ontological impact on ecosystems and the
extension of financialisation includes life and death of animals, plants and
ecosystems inside his multiple logics of economical valorisation, ontology
returns to politics. In these conditions the central strategy of movements
consists in something less and something more than simply contesting
and addressing existent institutions. Emergent socio-ecological move-
ments are reclaiming everyday materiality by actively recomposing and
rearticulating it. When ontology comes to politics autonomy is mainly
about crafting new everyday political ecologies: alterontologies.
    One of the key issues of the tradition of class struggle and social
movements in general consists in thinking human society and nonhuman
world as two different and separated spheres. Politics, consequently, per-
tain to the sphere of society and the principal avenue for social transfor-
mation passes through seizing the centres of social and political power.
The many entanglements between politics and ontology are often erased,
and the state risks to become a sort of political universal to be contested,
conquered and transformed. Forms of life and modes of existence, so
what makes irrelevant every essential distinction between human society
and material world, are often erased from what matters as politics. I feel
that the necessity to think politics in more than human worlds emerging
from this book comes from a demand of life experimentation that is not
anymore disposed to separate justice from everyday life, nature from cul-
ture, human from nonhuman world and action from care. Papadopoulos
captures in his writing a political intensity of our times, an absolute veloc-
ity as Deleuze would say, an electric zone in which life and politics are
inseparable: an insurgent posthumanism as an active tension living inside
the constituent conatus of contemporary and noncontemporary move-
ments. The notion of insurgent posthumanism has multiple descriptions
Crossing Boundary                                                         69
and it designates in the book three strategic escape routes. The first one is
about the transition from a highly regulated relation to the material, tech-
nological and biologic realms by making a multiplicity of experimental
and self-organised common worlds, a plurality of ecological spaces. The
second one consists in a move from representational politics to the reha-
bilitation of politics as an embodied everyday practice. The third one is a
move toward a post-anthropocentric history, in which history is not only
made by human subjects.

Justice and More-Than-Social Movements
    The volume explores the practices and the imaginaries of a series of
movements: amongst others autonomy of migration, permaculture and
other practices of eco-commoning, hackers and makers material culture,
indigenous resistance and AIDS activism. These movements are under-
stood and described as more than social movements, movements that
starting from situated practices, are constructing other ways of inhabiting
our planet. In relation to the case of AIDS activism, Papadopoulos anal-
yses a coagulation of practices that have been going on since the start of
the epidemic in 1981 in the USA. AIDS activism became possible because
of the everyday alterontological practices that allowed the community in
the making to sustain itself and it is thanks to the diffusion of these prac-
tices of justice that the foundation of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash
Power (ACT UP) has been possible in 1987. These practices include,
amongst others, the development of alternative research, the creation of
alternative service provision, an extensive experimenting with one’s own
body and (not officially approved) drugs, the development of new forms
of affection, intimacy, and reciprocity, the construction of buyers’ clubs
of illegally manufactured or illegally imported drugs, the invention of new
sexual practices and sexual expressions, the making of new community
spaces and community organizations to engage with the new challenges of
the crisis.
    AIDS activism in not readable without taking into account the exper-
imentation with alternative politics of matter: social change and move-
ments cannot be thought independently from ontological change, in fact
there is no social transformation without alterontological practice. In
more than social movements the everyday and the ontological is one, be-
cause justice is in the ordinary and concrete making of justice. Following
Papadopoulos, the question of justice comes with the emergence of the
invisibilised and the imperceptible, of those who have no place within ex-
isting normalizing political institutions. Or better justice comes when
those who have no part (Rancière 1998) change the material conditions of
existence in a way that cannot be overheard or simply included in existing
political institutions. Papadopoulos focuses on how actors create alterna-
tive ecologies of existence that become inhabited by these silenced and
absent others, by those who have been rendered residual and invisible.
70                                                          Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

This is a politics of matter not because humans are in charge of matter
but because certain groups of humans and nonhumans can continue to
exist only to the extent that they develop alternative entanglements with
matter. For this reason, in more than social movements justice is restored
materially. And at the same time without ordinary justice there are no
more than social movements. This is a mundane material and generative
justice. The autonomous politics of more-than-social movements are rela-
tional, ontological struggles to create alternative material articulations,
autonomous spaces and communities of justice.

Beyond the Book

    A key feature of insurgent posthumanism consists in disconnecting
experimental practices from a highly regulated and often alienated rela-
tion to the material world. Reading the book, I was wondering about the
relation between biofinancialisation and the increasing securitisation of
grassroots technoscience. As Dimitris knows, I am actually conducting a
participatory research on farmers and peasants’ movements in Italy. One
focus is on agroecology, understood simultaneously as a science, a prac-
tice, an eco-social movement and a form of life. Food and agriculture are
key vectors for experimenting alternative practices of ecological transi-
tion, and the everyday practice of agroecology implies a disconnection to
the standards of food production and circulation, simply because these
standards are thought in relation to the infrastructures of industrial pro-
duction. Not surprisingly the movement of Genuino Clandestino, a
movement in which agroecology is deeply connected with the reinvention
of rural forms of life, took its first steps ten years ago with a campaign of
civil disobedience reclaiming the legitimacy of a series of peasant practic-
es, such as the exchange and distribution of genuine agricultural prod-
ucts, mutual work aid and the reproduction and exchange of seeds,
among others. Moreover, in the last years peasants and farmers move-
ments promoted a series of proposals and public discussions around the
need to build a ‘peasant right’ in order to obtain a political recognition of
these practices. If the autonomy of migrations teaches us to see move-
ments before capital and mobility before control, something similar could
be said in relation to grassroots technoscience: everyday material justice
comes before capital and experimental practice comes before securitisa-
tion. Two issues stay in the background in this very valuable and rich
book and it would be worth using this and other occasions to debate
them: what kind of relationship there is between biofinancialisation and
securitisation and which practical tactics can open political spaces within
and against the law in postliberal times.


References
Crossing Boundary                                                             71
Haraway, D.J. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_-
    Meets_OncoMouse™: feminism and technoscience, New York, Routledge.
Haraway, D. J. (2003) The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and signif-
    icant otherness, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press.
Leonardi, E. (2017) Carbon trading dogma: Theoretical assumptions and practi-
    cal implications of global carbon markets, in "Ephemera: Theory & Politics in
    Organization" 17(1) pp. 61-87.
Papadopoulos, D. (2014) Generation M. Matter, Makers, Microbiomes: in
    "Teknokultura", 11(3), 637-645.
Papadopoulos, D. (2018) Experimental Practice. Technoscience, Alterontologies,
    and More Than Social Movements, Durham, Duke University Press.
Pellizzoni, L. (2015) Ontological Politics in a Disposable World: The New Mas-
    tery of Nature, Farnham, Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Rancière, J. (1998) Disagreement: politics and philosophy, Minneapolis, Universi-
    ty of Minnesota Press.
Wilson, R., Connery, C. eds. (2005) Worldings: World literature, field imagi-
    naries, future practices. Doing cultural studies inside the U.S. war-machine,
    Santa Cruz, New Pacific Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958) Philosophical investigations, New York, Prentice Hall.



                                      ***

Alterontologies and the Art of Being One Step Ahead

Luigi Pellizzoni

     Once a highly effective political intervention, identity politics was re-
cycled in the 1990s as advertising script for Benetton or MTV. None of
this makes the political struggle for women’s rights, class politics, queer
politics, or struggles against racism obsolete, far from it; but it does sug-
gest that we always need to be several steps ahead of the capitalist mulch-
ing machine, reinventing these struggles, devising new language, new po-
litical strategies, new ideas, new forms of activism (Smith 2005, 891).
     Experimental Practice is one of those not-so-frequent books that are
as rich and dense in content as they are smooth and engaging in reading.
Papadopoulos manages to integrate in a consistent, effective narrative a
number of issues and perspectives, not only from STS but also from an-
thropology, social movements studies, political and practice theory, femi-
nist and postcolonial thinking, putting in conversation concepts and em-
pirical evidence drawn from a range of fields, from AIDS activism to
hacker communities.
72                                                           Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

    As the author makes clear from the outset, the book sits at the cross-
roads of two main concerns: on one side “the decentring of the human in
its relations to other species, machines and the material world”; on the
other “a feeling of urgency to grasp the incapacity of the extraordinary
social mobilizations that took place in countries across the North Atlantic
and beyond since 2006 to instil social change” (p. 1). The result is an in-
quiry into the connection “between the limited range of transformations
that these movements have achieved and the displacement of the human
and of human politics in posthuman culture” (p. 2). Key driver of reflec-
tion are the notions of ontology, understood as “the shared, durable,
open material spaces – tangible and virtual – that can be inherited auton-
omously by communities”, with special reference to those “drawn in the
vortex of privatization and intense neoliberal disintegration” (p. 2), and
of ontological politics, understood as “the simultaneous production of
society and ontology”, in the sense that “by performing ontology in a sin-
gle concrete way rather than any other, we change the very constitution of
being and its material organization in a specific direction” (p. 11). Onto-
logical politics, thus, “conceives matter as a frontier” (p. 13). One can say,
in this sense, that it is as old as humans’ engagement with materiality in
their struggle for survival and for structuring social life. Yet, Papadopou-
los argues that in modernity – late modernity in particular – ontological
politics takes a special relevance. Matter is “modernity’s ultimate fron-
tier” in an “epistemic territory that is constituted by its coloniality” (p.
15).
    Readers familiar with the various manifestations of the “ontological
turn” in the social sciences and humanities (Dolphijn and van der Tuin,
2012; Coole and Frost 2010) – STS playing a prominent role therein with
authors like Bruno Latour, John Law, Annemarie Mol and Isabelle Sten-
gers – will be easy in enrolling the book in this intellectual strand. Yet,
there are significant differences in Papadopoulos’s approach, compared
with mainstream ones.
    One is his genuine, concrete interest in emergent social movements,
which “new materialist” standpoints often address in a sketchy, specula-
tive way. As he notes, “from actor-network theory, object-oriented ontol-
ogies, neomaterialism, and neovitalism all preserve key theoretical tenets
from activist materialism but drop in one way or another its activist di-
mension” (p. 93). On the contrary, readers familiar with literature on
“prefigurative mobilizations” – broadly defined as a type of political ac-
tion aimed at realizing the desired future in the here and now, through
means “deemed to embody or ‘mirror’ the ends one strives to realise”
(van de Sande 2013, 230) – will recognise in Papadopoulos’s book well-
known tropes, beginning with the claim that contentious politics should
withdraw from traditional protest aimed at the state or other power hold-
ers, as political institutions have lost traction over global flows of capital
and as the distinction between labour and life, production and reproduc-
tion, workplace and home, blurs in new arrangements of value extraction.
Crossing Boundary                                                        73
Resistance and opposition, so the case for prefigurative politics goes,
should be based on, and can actually be found in, the doings and makings
that people carry out individually and collectively all over the world. Do-
ings and makings which, crucially, involve a close engagement with the
materiality of things, a (re)consideration of the reciprocal affection and
effection between humans and other-than-humans: from “alternative”
forms of agriculture and energy production (community supported farm-
ing, open source seeds communities, participatory plant breeding, com-
munity energy initiatives, etc.) to self-organized healthcare, education and
child-rearing, or occupation and self-management of factories, housing
and other spaces.
    Papadopoulos agrees with scholars who see in material engagements
the distinctive trait providing prefigurative mobilizations with a major po-
tential for change. The difference with comparable arguments, such as
those developed by David Schlosberg (Schlosberg and Craven 2019) or
John Meyer (2015), lies in his strong STS sensitivity to the role of tech-
nology as artefacts and processes. At the same time he is careful in avoid-
ing the claims about the emancipatory force with which technology or
materiality in general would be provided – if and when freed from the
cage of Cartesian naturalism and humanist substantialism – that one
meets in much new materialist literature (see e.g. Bennett 2010; Braidotti
2013). Namely, the postcolonial inflection of Papadopoulos’s take on
post-humanism, with the awareness of historicity and positionality that
such inflection entails, makes him wary of an ontological monism com-
mitted to celebrating the liberating character of the acknowledgment of
the (alleged) full contingency and fluidity of reality; a monism which, in
his eyes, becomes a non-humanist version of traditional universalism, and
which results in a “weak materialism” (p. 81), in the sense of being mort-
gaged by an epistemic, rather than practical, embodied, relation with the
world. Making, Papadopoulos contends, “cannot be approached as an
epistemological issue; it is a practical one. Making is a material move-
ment; it is about ontological practice rather than about an abstract repre-
sentation of a practice of material engagement. And as such this move-
ment is embedded in other previously existing ontologies. Each of these
ontologies involves different environments, materialities, digitalities,
groups of people, and more-than-human actors. Marisol de la Cadena,
Mario Blaser, Arturo Escobar, Walter Mignolo, and others refer to this
multi-ontological organization of the world as a pluriverse” (p.175).
    I am fully in tune with this statement and with the book’s standpoint
in general. What I say below, therefore, is not so much a critique aimed at
pointing out weaknesses, as an indication of issues which, to my eyes and
according to Papadopoulos’s own argument, are of major relevance in the
case for a new, effective, political activism, and which therefore call to
further elaboration anyone committed to this case.
    I put in the opening of this commentary an excerpt from the much
missed Marxist geographer Neil Smith. Smith warns social critics – as
74                                                            Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

scholars and/or activists – to be careful about how they move on. They
should not be like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of history, whose gaze is
turned backwards. Namely, they should not linger with critical categories
forged on and effective against certain power relations and conditions of
domination, failing to realize that such relations and conditions are of
lessening relevance, and that power is applying their own categories to its
own purposes. This warning is of course not only Smith’s own. Boltanski
and Chiapello (2005) and Autonomist Marxists (e.g. Virno 1996) have
raised similar remarks concerning post-Fordist capitalism’s capture of so-
cial movement and intellectual “libertarian” critique of Fordism and em-
bedded liberalism, refashioned in terms of flexibility, lifelong learning
and creative self-engagement (= job insecurity). A comparable sort of
warning, concerning the more recent evolution of neoliberal rule, has re-
cently gained momentum in the debate over “post-truth” and the alleged
responsibilities of STS for its rise (see e.g. the debate in the 2017 issues of
Social Studies of Science; see also Fuller 2018), the point being this time
how the lesson of science deconstruction has been learned and is increas-
ingly applied by “right-wing postmodernism” (McIntyre 2018) to under-
mine unwelcome scientific evidence (see e.g. Michaels 2006; Oreskes and
Conway 2011). The issue of the perverse effects of science deconstruction
had been famously raised by Latour (2004a) some years earlier, though, as
usual with him, with no reference to capitalism or neoliberalism. I also
have tried to work out a reflection over the limits of a scholarly and activ-
ist, theoretical and embodied, critique that dwells in the same problem-
atization (to borrow Foucault’s term: namely, the same ontology, the
same sense-making of reality) of its target (Pellizzoni 2016). On this basis,
I think that among the topics deserving attention in order to get critique
“several steps” – or at least one – ahead of its subject matter there are the
following: the issue of scale; the issue of representation; the issue of ex-
perimentation. I choose these because they are both cornerstones of Pa-
padopoulos’s argument and hot spots in the never-ending chase between
power and its opponents; between subjection and emancipation.
     Papadopoulos agrees with Anna Tsing that scale is a major issue for
both scholarly analysis and oppositional practice. Indeed, a frequent ob-
jection against prefigurative mobilizations concerns their inability to scale
up to a level comparable to the forces they are tackling. By no means new
(anarchist predilection for direct action, self-organization, mutual aid and
in general for behaving as if the state and other institutionalised powers
did not exist anymore, has been traditionally challenged on this basis), the
limited efficacy of prefigurative politics – up to becoming instrumental to
the continuation of the rule from which it seeks to disentangle, by offer-
ing goods and services that the market and the state are unable or unwill-
ing to provide (Bosi and Zamponi 2019) – is a typical workhorse of critics
(see e.g. Mouffe 2013).
     Papadopoulos acknowledges this objection, asking “how can alteron-
tologies contribute to a decolonial politics of matter” (p. 22); how can
Crossing Boundary                                                          75
major infrastructural changes or large technoscientific projects be chal-
lenged by a politics of crafting from below and on the ground. His reply
is again in tune with Tsing, namely, with her call for paying attention to
the ideologies of scale as integral and crucial to capitalist projects, under-
stood as “relatively coherent bundles of ideas and practices as realized in
particular times and places” (Tsing 2000, 347). So, crafting alterontolo-
gies is also, and crucially, about scale-making, and more precisely about
“rescaling the geographies of technoscience in ways that matter” (Papa-
dapoulos, p. 22). Rescaling (mainly in terms of downscaling) is actually a
core point of degrowth theory and activism, and a distinctive trait of new
materialist mobilizations in general. Additionally, various scholars warn
about the declining returns on energy and research investment, the for-
mer being related to the growing difficulty in extracting resources, the
latter to a R&D scenario characterized by growing organizational com-
plexity to get marginal gains in innovation (Fizaine and Court 2016;
Tainter 2006). So, it may well be that ever-expanding technoscientific in-
frastructures are bound to collapse under their own weight and that sur-
viving capacities will be downsized by necessity. This, however, confirms
that scale is not just a matter of will.
    Precisely because, as Papadopoulos claims, matter is not infinitely
manipulable and plastic, getting certain outcomes by downscaled means
may result impossible. True, to some extent scale-making and goal-
seeking are implied in one another. Alterontological experiments do not
pursue the same goals of the ruling interests. Participatory plant breeding
or community energy initiatives have different aims to those of Big Phar-
ma or oil companies. Additionally, one may argue that large-scale tech-
nologies and infrastructures address issues which they themselves have
created. For example, by reversing the growing extension and intensifica-
tion of farming one may expect that pandemics will be less likely to de-
velop. Yet, can this lead to giving up research on vaccines or stockpiling
medical equipment such as ventilators? Can this lead to saying goodbye
to anything requiring complex organizations or to complex, high-tech de-
vices? Should one just come to accept, in one’s own redefinition of goals,
that a shorter life than the one assured by this means for some decades in
affluent countries (but increasingly also elsewhere) is in the order of the
day? My feeling, in brief, is that the issue of scale has till now only been
scratched, and that the idea of a frontal opposition between the ontologi-
cal politics of global capitalism, with its big technoscientific programs and
worldwide infrastructures, and downscaled, off the ground alterontolo-
gies is too schematic; and this not only for the proverbial risk of throwing
the baby out with the bathwater, but because the very notion of alteron-
tology, the way it is conceived and performed, is in itself an effect of
globalization, being conceivable only against the backdrop of the latter’s
fuzzy universalism.
    A crucial performance of alterontologies is, anyway, its capacity of re-
sisting the politics of inclusion in the global capitalist system. Papadopou-
76                                                          Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

los – in my view rightly – emphasises that such politics offers a poisoned
fruit, as its goal is not recognition and respect but control of alterity
through its reduction to manageable formats. Inclusion is crucial to the
universalising project of capitalist production, understood as both “the
construction of new ontologies and the insertion of these ontologies into
scales of value” (p. 28); a project that reaches a full-fledged expression in
the financialization of everyday life – “biofinancialization” is the author’s
appropriate expression. Inclusion entails the provision of rights yet, he
notes, “only through representation are rights possible” (p. 55), as rights
are assigned to subjects defined according to given criteria. To be
acknowledged, in other words, you need to fit a certain description, con-
form to a certain framework. More to the point, to be included you have
to accept to be valued as capital. So, representation appears crucial to the
universalizing design of biofinancialization. “When matter becomes a
frontier, the attempt is to make it productive… [and] compatible with the
existing mode of production” (p. 15); with the ruling accumulation re-
gime. Alterontologies, in this sense, are those socio-material assemblages
which resist representation, remaining irrepresentable, irreducible to
manageable formats.
    In this way Papadopoulos parts company with the politics of repre-
sentation of the non-human that is key not only to capitalist politics but
also to environmental theory and activism and new materialist thinking,
having found in Latour the most accomplished and well-known STS ad-
vocate. On one hand, representing “nature’s interests” has always been a
weak point in the environmentalist case, for the shaky basis of any (self-
)appointment – usually grounded on scientific expertise, less frequently
on moral authority, aesthetic sensitivity, contextual acquaintance, and so
on – as spokespersons of entities which cannot give their authorisation.
On the other hand, Latour’s (2004b) account of a more-than-human par-
liament composed of two powers of representation – of taking into ac-
count and of ordering and stabilizing – has met with a number of criti-
cisms, including about his explicitly Hobbesian understanding of repre-
sentation, as “a matter of assembling disparate individuals into a unified
whole with a single will” (Brown 2017, 39). As already noted, universalis-
ing thrusts are a main concern for Papadopoulos, as quintessentially dom-
inative. In his view, any politics of inclusion of matter, as its frontier
moves on, turns out at best in an exercise in weak materialism, a failed
attempt to grasp and describe alterity, to subsume the ontic into the epis-
temic; at worst in a neutralisation of any potential for change. Against
this, Papadopoulos takes sides with the non-representative turn in politi-
cal theory and the social sciences. “Post-foundational” (Marchart 2007)
political and social theory, committed to questioning metaphysical figures
of totality, universality, ground, essence, community, nature, has found a
cornerstone in non-representative ontologies building on affect, emotion,
desire, care, and the immediacy of embodied practices (Connolly 2002;
Gibson-Graham 2006; Thrift 2007; Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Puig de la
Crossing Boundary                                                         77
Bellacasa 2017). Concerns, however, have been raised about the implica-
tions of withdrawing from an account of democracy as based on exchange
of reasons (Barnett 2008). Indeed, how to give room to both rational and
affective aspects of political life remains an open question. Yet, my point
here is another: namely, that affect, emotion, desire and care not only are
key to alterontologies but are the bread and butter of neoliberal govern-
mentality (Rose 2007) and populism (in this case combined with tropes of
identity, belonging and authenticity: see e.g. Caiani and Padoan 2020).
    So, a non-representational politics is hardly per se provided with
emancipatory import. By the same token, Adorno warns that one is to re-
sist the lure of immediacy, of a “shortcut to practical action” (Adorno
2001, 2) which does without conceptual mediations. Against Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1987) claim that actual pluralism resides only in an accom-
plished monism, Adorno’s monism is dialectical, in the sense that thought
and thing, theory and practice, are enmeshed from the outset, reciprocally
necessary and never reducible to one another, the emancipatory opening
lying not in their blurring and coincidence (which for him correspond to
identity-thinking, hence to domination), but precisely in their friction, the
remainder of any attempt to match them. In accord with Adorno I think
that a “weak materialism” is avoided only by acknowledging such friction.
How to build on this is, again, an open question. However, for example,
Mark Brown’s notion of “representation by fiction” – the type of repre-
sentation legal systems admit for organizations, children or deeply im-
paired people – may capture to some extent the spirit of Adorno’s dialec-
tical monism, as any such representation can never claim to express a full
delegation or a consistent reporting, being always open to contestation
“as an ongoing process in which citizen witnesses, as the audience of rep-
resentation, imaginatively construct a relationship between representa-
tives and those they represent” (Brown 2017, 44), including nonhumans
such as animals, species, habitats, or ecosystems.
    As anticipated, my last point concerns experimentation. Beginning
with the title and throughout the book Papadopoulos stresses that alter-
ontologies consist of experimental practices, as the only viable reply to a
power that has increasingly taken the shape of a technocratic (attempt at)
control of the entire reality, from individual everyday life to worldwide
social and more-than-social processes. I subscribe to this standpoint but I
think it important to acknowledge and address the ambivalence of exper-
imental politics. I propose here two considerations. First, as plenty of re-
search has documented, experimentalism is central to neoliberal govern-
mentality. Since the early 1980s, building on the assumption that there
are fundamental limits to prediction and planning faced with intricate so-
cial, technical, and ecological dynamics and interactions (an assumption
supported by emergent theories of complexity, from chemistry to the life
and computing sciences, and by an influential managerial literature), the
ruling vision of uncertainty, insecurity, volatility, disorder and non-
predictive decision-making has turned upside down, from limit to pur-
78                                                             Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

poseful action to enhancing condition of indeterminacy. Hence a growing
celebration of foresight, flexibility, adaptability, resilience, “anti-fragility”
(Taleb 2012), preparedness to surprise, and so on (see O’Malley, 2010;
Walker and Cooper 2011; Pellizzoni 2020a). In the early 1970s Alvin
Weinberg (1972) talked of “trans-science” to convey the idea of a science
increasingly confronted with “unbounded” issues, engaged in experi-
ments outside the lab, as in the case of the management of radioactive
waste. Twenty years later, Krohn and Weyer (1994) comparably talked of
“real life experiments”, simultaneously physical and social and with out-
comes often barely imaginable, while Funtowicz and Ravetz (1993) talked
of “post-normal science” referring to the ever-more frequent situations
where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions ur-
gent. All these accounts depicted indeterminacy as problematic. Yet, for
example, geoengineering (in both its two main variants: carbon capture
and storage and solar radiation management) is today increasingly advo-
cated as a solution to global warming, or at least as a way to buy time,
which testifies to a burgeoning rationale whereby it is sound to let com-
plexity unfold, even to “incite” it by adding further turbulence to unpre-
dictable dynamics, the strategy being one of surfing the crest of the wave,
reacting and adjusting on the spot to its swerves (Pellizzoni 2020a). Simi-
larly, the way the insurgence or resurgence of pandemics is addressed, in
academic and governmental quarters as well as in the media, is by taking
for granted that this is bound to intensify, the only sensible option being
to increase preparedness rather than trying to address its root causes
(Lakoff 2017; Pellizzoni 2020b).
    This leads to my second consideration about experimentalism. In the
social sciences and humanities a growing concern can be registered for
geological processes, understood as including not only climate but also
biodiversity shifts and viral and bacterial dynamics, testifying to the
prominence of an “inhuman” nature (Clark 2011), in the sense of a mate-
riality overarching and indifferent to human issues. The change in focus
from biopower to geopower (Grosz 2011) or “geological politics” (Clark
and Yusoff 2017) has been accompanied by a marked change in attitude.
Consider once more Latour. Twenty years after Politics of Nature, Down
to Earth shows how he has given up any call to diplomacy and interest
composition with the other-than-human world. The “intrusion of Gaia”
in human affairs (Latour 2017; Stengers 2017) is described in the same
terms once attributed to sovereign power and later to market forces – su-
preme, indifferent, unwarranted, unaccountable. Gaia represents “a form
of sovereignty, […], a power that dominates the heads of state” (Latour
2018, 84). Faced with it, the only sensible way to go is – guess what – ap-
plying the neoliberal recipe: surfing the unpredictable, cultivating prepar-
edness, resilience, flexibility and “ongoing creative experimentation”
(Clark and Yusoff 2017, 18). So, in Latour’s latest narrative, the unifying
inclusiveness of a more-than-human diplomacy and interest composition
is replaced by a differently but no less dominative approach: the
Crossing Boundary                                                                79
acknowledged necessity of bowing to an overarching entity, under the as-
sumption that “there is no other politics than that of humans and to their
own benefit”, and there is no possibility of living “in harmony with so
called ‘natural agents’” (2018, 86-87). By any evidence we are here at the
opposite of the case for the pluriverse as made by Papadopoulos and
many others (see e.g. Blaser and de la Cadena 2018; Kothari et al. 2019).
    In short, experimental politics, like scale-(re)making and representa-
tion, is a double-edged issue, in need of careful analysis and discrimina-
tion. Papadopoulos masterfully highlights its relevance for conceiving and
pursuing possibilities of change grounded in the pluriversal practices of
more-than-social movements. The anything but easy task for anyone who
cares about such possibilities is to disentangle emancipatory, progressive
ways of experimenting from dominative and reactionary ones.


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                                       ***

Have We ever Been Posthuman?

Roberta Raffaetà


    ‘Experimental Practice’ is not simply the intriguing title of this book:
the book is in itself an experimental practice. Papadopoulos successfully
connects through the lens of social movements a number of topics that
are seemingly unrelated: health governance, transnational journeys of mi-
grants and refugees, extractive practices of finance, and communities of
craft and design. The book is an example of the generative potential of
82                                                         Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

working at the interfaces between sub-disciplines and themes. While it
remains productive to conduct in-depth research within one specific sub-
field, this book is an example of how working at the interfaces makes it
easier to see the emergence of new socio-political phenomena.
    This book therefore is not about science, even if it has a strong STS
footprint. Technoscience is not its focus but “the stage of which its argu-
ments are played out” (p. 1). This, according to the Author, is more a ne-
cessity than a choice, given that recent times are marked by a “continuous
folding of science, technology, and the everyday into each other”. Papa-
dopoulos portrays technoscience as part of the everyday, something ines-
capable, something to work both within and against, thus contributing to
the deprovincialization of STS. Technoscience is described not only as a
more than human endeavour but also as more than scientific, giving em-
phasis to its entanglements with the public sector, the private sphere and
the commons. It is clear, from reading this book, that neat and stark di-
chotomies such as the public/private sphere, humans/non-humans,
emancipation/control, freedom/exploitation are not tenable anymore and
that there is a need for a more nuanced understanding of what is happen-
ing across these extremes. The proposed contribution of the book is to
bring specificity to these kinds of interactions and analyse how, in their
unfolding, a new politics and new ontologies may emerge.
    At the convergence between novel ontologies and politics Papadopou-
los posits “alterontologies” and “compositional politics” that happen
when “actors emerge in the political scene by changing the very constitu-
tion of being”. These emerge by acting both against and within institu-
tional powers, forging a relationship that is neither of mimesis nor of con-
flict. Compositional politics is needed, according to the Author, in order
to be able to escape the “biofinanzialization” of life. Papadopoulos in Ch.
2 analyses the post-industrial assetization of the whole planet, made pos-
sible by the translation of everything into one logic of financial value. In
this framework, every aspect of life – from human non-work time to hu-
man and nonhuman reproduction and matter – has become a financial
asset. This process has been made possible by separating the product of
work from the process of work and treating the embodied and emplaced
dimension of value creation as external to social and material dimensions.
Papadopoulos describes finance not as a discrete cultural phenomenon
among many others, but as culture, a culture that has colonized all the
other spheres of existence, and from which is therefore impossible to es-
cape.
    Starting from the recognition of the impossibility to escape the bio-
finanzialization of life – what seems to me a Foucaldian framework of
control and exploitation brought to its extremes - the Author proposes to
let go of impossible dreams of independence and autonomy. Rather, to
search emancipation through the creative recombination and composition
of matter. The subsequent chapters give examples of how this and theo-
retically explore compositional politics.
Crossing Boundary                                                         83
     Ch. 3 narrates of a “World 2” that exists beyond -and overlaps with
traditional politics and social movements. This other world is made by
migration activists and migration movements that seek to realize their as-
pirations of transnational paths and life by ontologically (re)configuring
their ways of being. Papadopoulos puts forward his best effort to illus-
trate how this can be possible despite and along all the legislative, politi-
cal and social obstacles. Ch. 4 and Ch. 5 constitute the theoretical core of
the book, those in which the Author shares with his readers his intellectu-
al journey.
     Ch. 4 is an historical-political narration of matter, proceeding from
the rereading of the first Marx to Deleuze e Guattari, to finally advance a
materialism cum activism. This position is developed in Ch. 5 by retracing
first insurgent forms of posthumanism in communities of individuals es-
caping institutional power. But exactly in this historical emergence, Pa-
padopoulos identifies the very beginning of the mutual relationship of
both freedom and exploitation, emancipation and control. A dialectic
that lays the ground for the current one between the individual and the
State. The Author indeed shows how the condition of individual freedom
enjoyed by those early communities offered energy to the nascent indus-
trial state. The only antidotes to avoid remaining captured in the toxic
aspects of this dialectic is, for the Author, pursuing – as in those early
communities - an ethos of practice. The other is to leave behind universal-
izing and anthropocentric aspirations of humanism. The Authro’s warns,
however, that this approach should not take for granted the kinds of poli-
tics that grounds a postanthropocentric posture (see, for example Bena-
dusi et al. 2016; Blaser & de la Cadena 2017). He rejects a simple “eco-
logical egalitarianism that considers the value of all nonhuman beings as
equal” (Puig de la Bellacasa in note 69, 235). I appreciate this disconnec-
tion from those uses of posthumanism more as a fashionable mode than a
theoretical program toward posthumanist politics. Humans’ entangle-
ments with nonhumans are not free from conflicts and ambiguities, as any
kind of relationality, as recently forcefully emphasized by Marylin
Strathern (2014, 2020) to counter the mounting fetishization of the con-
cept of ‘relation’ as a an inherently good thing. Relationality is not some-
thing positive by itself but a particular artefact of Euro-North-American
knowledge-making which also implies cuts and breaks and cannot stand
outside of analysis or critique. Papadopoulos is -I think appropriately -
aware of this, concluding the chapter by affirming that “The aim is to po-
liticize posthumanism and simultaneously to posthumanize politics by de-
colonizing both of them.” (p. 114).
     Ch. 6 and 7 explore how a compositional politics may realize in pre-
sent times and which are the tensions and ambiguities, taking brain mat-
ter and AIDS activism as examples. Ch. 6 illustrates how neuroplasticity
opens new horizons for emancipation but also for control, a plasticity that
derives from a common brain while being fully privatized at the same
time. Ch. 7 challenges the conventional ways in which politics has been
84                                                           Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

conceived in science and technology studies by comparing the politics
sustaining AIDS activism. This one is a situated and compositional poli-
tics.
    Ch.8 ends the volume by pulling the strings of the various insights
through a reflection about ontology and technoscience. First of all, ac-
cording to the Author, ontology is a movement rather than a structure.
This move mitigates the excesses and determinism of certain materialist
thinking (for this critique see Abrahamsson et al. 2015; Paxson &
Helmreich 2014). This movement is described by the Author as deploy-
ing in a circular (indigenous) temporality rather than in a linear one, and
this helps decolonize “the Western domination of our imaginaries of what
will come”. Within this multiplicity, however, Papadopoulos portrays a
world made of multiple but at the same time connected and interdepend-
ent ontologies because all “they belong to the same shared earthly world”.
With this, I think, he saves us from the centrifugal and desegregating
tendencies of certain extreme threads within the ontological turn (for
some critiques see Heywood 2012; Laidlaw & Heywood 2013).
    Secondly, in this multiple, but yet connected world, technoscience
remains for Papadopoulos a tool of advocacy and emancipation. Against
the conventionality of an asphyxiated and asphyxiating social sciences’
critique of technoscience (see also Seaver 2017, 2018), he emphasizes how
technoscience is indeed not only in the hands of projects of domination
and control. According to the Author, this is only “the peak of an hetero-
genous movement” that uses technoscience creatively in ways that can
emancipate them because the “possibility for uncomputability is always
inherent in computation itself” (p. 179). Therefore, a compositional poli-
tics of the present is, for Papadopoulos, always and already digital and
material at the same time. The Author takes social movements of hackers
and crafters as his references, movements that attempt at “changing the
conditions of knowledge production by changing the ontological fabric of
life” (p. 206). Drawing from his participant observation in those move-
ments, the Author delineates a possible ethics informing compositional
politics. This is made of commensality, rather than exchange and rela-
tions, a concept that I found saves us from a superficial understanding of
relationality as something valuable in itself, despite its grounding politics.
Commensality also emphasizes the fact that invention is always something
mediated and anticipated in a human and more-than-human collective,
against conventional laws and understandings of intellectual property as
bound to human individuals. Yet, commensality is not the same as indif-
ference, there is an affective engagement in which ‘care’ remains the
“ethopoietical compass” (p. 201).
    As is clear from my comments above, I found this book particularly
interesting and full of profound insights. Yet I am happy to share some
further comments in the hope they may help to enhance engagements
with matters with which we care. I will bring attention to three interrelat-
ed themes: practice, theory and the role of institutional power.
Crossing Boundary                                                              85
    First, the book’s title (Experimental Practice) leads attention toward
the concept of ‘practice’. The book indeed proposes an “ethos of prac-
tice”, with practice itself as the means toward emancipation and the com-
position of alternative ontologies and politics. The idea is that practice is
what may change things, much more than words can do. The prominence
given to practice somehow strikes, I think, with the limited space given to
its narration. In the book, ‘practice’ is dealt with mainly as a conceptual
construct, but it is not particularly narrated as situated events, happen-
ings, encounters, strategies, profiles, biographies, spatial-historical details
and the likes. Doing so would have had enriched the book, I think. I
would have liked to see more ethnography, more ‘thick description’ of
how alterontologies may become politics.
    And this is not to invoke ethnography for the sake of ethnography.
The definition of ethnography is an open question, especially in recent
years in which there is an intense debated about what ethnography is, is
not or should be (e.g., Ingold 2017). I would like to leave these anxieties
of purity behind for now, allowing space for the most varied and creative
appropriations of what ethnography can be. I am also aware that every
book has its own character and in the present case it seems to me that the
impetus for the writing have originated more in the will to share some re-
flections sparked by long-term ethnographic experience in different
fields, rather than from reconstructing one single history in depth. An ex-
ample of the latter can be found, for example, in the book ‘War on peo-
ple’ by anthropologist Jarret Zigon (2019). Zigon advances reflections
similar to the one dealt with in this book but that work displays more
ethnographic texture, focusing on one single case study, that of AIDS so-
cial movements. Papadopoulos, however, is immediately very clear about
his approach, emphasizing that his is a “deeply speculative undertaking”
and that one of the beginnings for his book is “an affect rather than a
phenomenon” (p. 2.). This is all fine, because the Author’s capacity to see
within but also across and beyond specific case studies is one of the posi-
tive aspects of the book.
    Yet, my plea for more ethnography is inspired precisely by the capaci-
ty of the Author to convince me that practices may change things and
have a political role. In this light, to call for ethnography is to call for poli-
tics. Ethnography before being a genre has, for me, a political commit-
ment to play in showing how alterontologies may compose themselves
and change things, which are the constraints, the timelines, the opportu-
nities. To know this would amplify other communities’ awareness of the
opportunities for alterontologies to exist and how to make them emerge
within the particularities of their own context. The recognition of the
emergence of new political actors who are able (in synergy with other
humans and nonhumans) to change the very constitution of the contexts
in which they live is so important that we all would benefit from a more
fine-grained description.
    My desire for more ethnography stems from a desire for more details
86                                                           Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

about the multiplicity of daily practices and interactions that enable a so-
cial actor “to emerge” within and against a status quo. These details
would be useful because it is not so simple nor automatic to apply the
ideas outlined in this volume. It is not easy to reverse the biofinanzializa-
tion of life, this gigantic hegemonic machine, by displacing it. It is not ba-
nal to compose a form of life able to constitute itself before recognition,
“a form of life that cannot be bypassed – not because it defines in a de-
terministic fashion the outcome of actions, but because it creates new on-
tologies that allow specific actors to become actors and to intervene and
interrupt or alter the constituted order of a region of objectivity.” (p.
154). The world is full of “dispersed, everyday, imperceptible politics” (p.
157) but, from my experience as an anthropologist, many of them cannot
arrive to occupy a place in history or change any constituted order or re-
gion of objectivity. They remain dispersed and imperceptible because
cannot make of their diversity “a diversity that makes a difference”
(Bateson 1972, p.453). In other words, a difference that is accepted, visi-
ble and generative for many others. The issue, to me, is not just in being
‘alter’ but of being able to make this alterity something ontological not
only within small and marginal worlds but to enlarge this marginality to
broader worlds.
    Papadopoulos gives us hope about the fact that emancipation can
happen and in his book he reviews some examples but it remains unclear
to me how this transformation can happen for others, and I long for in-
structive details of how this happens on the everyday, micro interactions
within the resistances and cracks of institutional powers. I write in my po-
sition as anthropologist, who works together with communities and col-
lectives to whom I want to bring something useful to make our shared
world a better place, helping in fostering the link between a ‘potential’
and a ‘possible’ (Zigon, 2019) world. Therefore, I am not claiming details
for the sake of details, nor I am attempting at policing a form of writing
(ethnography), requesting adherence to an imagined disciplinary canon.
Instead, my plea for more ethnography has been stimulated by the gener-
ous and thought-provoking content of the book, a plenitude that requests
for more of it to became real for the highest number of communities that
are trying to compose other worlds. I am aware that a receipt does not
exist, and I am not calling for scalable solutions in neoliberal terms (for
alternative meaning of scalability see Clark 2012; Olson 2018; Raffaetà
2020, p. 238-241), but telling detailed stories may help. I think the prob-
lem does lies not in scalability itself but in the capacity to allow different
scales to enter into dialogue without eliminating the indeterminacies and
diversity that happen at encounter of different scales (for this concern see
Tsing 2012, 2015). I think ethnography can help because its multiscale
sensibility enables people to “give meaning” and "inhabit” the “interfaces
among scales” (Bougleux 2015).
    The second point I would like to raise is specular to the first. The
space given in the book to theoretical speculation strikes with how little
Crossing Boundary                                                                   87
theory is valued as a conceptual category and a means for emancipation.
The Author gives primacy to practice and derives from it an ethos that he
delineates as open-ended because practice “by definition is undecidable”.
But how then are decisions taken? Which ethics grounds an ethos of
practice? Papadopoulos tells us that the ethos of practice is oriented by
“maintaining a commitment to justice that addresses radical asymmetries”
and by a culture of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011). I agree that care and
ethics may be open-ended and are affective, embodied capacities. How-
ever, care and the capacity to recognize asymmetries are not something
innate (even if embodied) or automatic but come “from a reflexivity that
has to be trained”, as observed by Laura Centemeri, one of the discus-
sants of the book during the POE1 symposia held on November 2020 (see
also Centemeri, 2019). Care is linked to the “arts of noticing” (Tsing
2017, p.37) and this implies a pedagogy, an education to attention. Prac-
tice, alone, does not offer an entry point to understand reality: “praxis
tout seul explique pas, est pas transparente” (Descola 2011, p. 73). The
same practice can be observed and perceived in very different ways, de-
pending from the positionality of the observer (see, for example the de-
bate in anthropology between Sahlins e Obeyesekere in Borofsky, 1997).
    With this, I certainly do not wish to reintroduce a dichotomy or a hi-
erarchy between theory and practice, yet I am doubtful that obscuring the
value of critical reflection in favour of practice may be generative. Han-
nah Arendt has clearly stated the importance of integrating vita contem-
plativa and vita activa because is not possible to know in passivity but on-
ly by experimenting (Arendt, 1998, 290). But when vita activa assimilates
vita contemplativa in itself, it seems to me that the ethic-political dimen-
sion of practice remains silent and implicit. In this silence, practice as a
means toward ethics risks being either something for a cultural elite or
something ambiguous and prone to be recaptured within different pro-
jects, that may have very different political visions. For example, the
crafters’ motto ‘Start even if you do not know how’ (p. 185), taken by the
Author as a model, expresses the inventive and emancipatory framework
of crafters but resounds the too familiar Nike’s ‘Just do it’.
    It is not always the case that practices are careful. Too much emphasis
on ‘practice’ as epistemology may also, inadvertently, be in line with a
certain productionist mode that values life and experience for what it can
produce, for its tangible outcomes. What critical reflection can offer, I
think, is qualitatively different to simple production, yet not without on-
tological consequences. In the anxiety to emancipate from the na-
ture/culture dualism, we risk that shared representations, interpretations,
common sense2 and values get sacrificed. But these configure and are part

1
  Politics, Ontology, Ecology is the name of a group of Italian scholars with different
disciplinary background discussing at the intersection between the three themes, see
http://www.poeweb.eu/
2
  For a heartfelt defence of ‘common sense’ as culture see Clifford Geertz (1975)
88                                                           Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

of affective dispositions, attitudes and affordances. Critical reflection is
not a task opposed to practice, as ethnography – to link with my previous
comment – is not a simple description but a theoretical practice (Raffaetà
2020b) or a “theoretically oriented practice” (Matera & Biscaldi 2020).
Critical reflection is an embodied and affective practice that enables us
“to think what we are doing” (Arendt, 1998) and this is especially vital in
a technoscientific era, if we wish to keep our ability of being “acting men”
(sic) and not simply “performing robots” (Arendt, 1998, 178-179). I see
activism as the outcome of a theoretical practice, more than its premise.
At times, reading the book, I wondered which was the Author’s ap-
proach.
     Finally, I pose a third comment about the book’s main hypothesis.
Papadopoulos in the opening of the book writes that “there is a connec-
tion between the limited range of transformations that these movements
[traditional social movements] have achieved and the displacement of the
human and of human politics in posthuman culture” (p.2) because “In
posthuman conditions, traditional politics and the corresponding social
movements can support us in this endeavour [compositional politics] on-
ly to a limited extent.” (p.10). But the impression that is left to the reader
– at least to me – is the classical problem of the chicken or the egg: what
came first? The emergence of political actors seems to be possible be-
cause a certain human institutional power has supported that emergence
(see also Dei 2017; Murphy 2017; Povinelli 2016) in a manner that ex-
ceeds “a limited extent”. This may have happened intentionally (within
its scope) or not (in the cracks of the system). For example, the migration
activists and migration movements described in Ch. 3 can compose their
alterontologies and ‘emerge’ as political actors in Calais also because – as
explained by the Author - the State accepts migration as a temporal gov-
ernance of labour. The Author seems to acknowledge at times the inter-
dependencies and ambiguous tension with institutional powers (and this
is one of the merits of the book), while at times it looks to me that these
problematics are underestimated. Probably this derives from the Author’s
connection with the posthumanist debate. To creatively experiment ways
of composing new ontological configurations with nonhumans (e.g.,
Hayward 2010; Hustak & Meyers 2012; Meyers 2017) may been healthy,
enlightening and generative. But to translate these alternative ways of so-
cial-political coordination in the politics of social movements seems to me
a too brave step, at least for the time being. Anyway, some bravery is
needed to bring change; more ethnographic details would help to realize
how this may be possible.
     To assign an essentially ‘alter’, posthuman ontological dimension to
some social actors, different to that of traditional politics that let them
emerge, may risk being a gesture with more harmful than emancipating
consequences, such as constraining the potential for change and dialogue,
uncritically reproducing the system, or allowing people to be caught prey
of the capture in other frameworks. For example, in the book, communi-
Crossing Boundary                                                              89
ty technoscience is often opposed to institutional technoscience. In my
own experience (Raffaetà 2020a), institutional technoscience (if analysed
ethnographically) may be as much as creative, dissenting, iconoclastic and
activist as community technoscience. That’s why I emphasize the im-
portance of not considering human institutional powers as being at the
margins of a posthuman compositional politics: if we’ll be attentive listen-
ers and observers, and critical allies, the potential for collective ontologi-
cal reconfiguring will be greatly enhanced.
     To conclude, I have greatly appreciated the political, ethical and activ-
ist tone of the book, able to maintain - at the same time - the capacity to
not fell prey of many of the shortcomings that are very common in the
current posthuman/ontological debate. And I have also appreciated the
associated posthuman aspiration. The title of my contribution is of course
provocative: yes, we have been, and we are, posthuman because our being
human is based on more than human worlds. I feel totally aligned and I
am grateful to generous attempts, as that of Papadopoulos, that try to ad-
vance ways of being in the world that are caring for other humans and
nonhumans, and I share the Author’s genuine and profound desire to
help compose more just ontologies. At the same time, I think that to un-
derestimate how much human we still are - how much we need to share
stories, reflect about them and about our constitutive entanglement with
human institutional powers - at times may risk being not careful enough.


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Crossing Boundary                                                           91
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                                     ***

Rewilding Practice
Dimitris Papadopoulos

    Practice is one of these concepts that has endured the regular change
of theoretical fashions in the history of Western social thought primarily
because of its mellow nature, its pragmatic disposition and its remarkable
adaptability. Practice complicates the dichotomy between structuralist
views of social organisation and micro-social views of individual action.
Many of these complications have been nurtured by the work of people
such as—not an exhaustive list, of course, and in no particular order—
Dorothy Smith, Michel de Certeau, Sherry Ortner, Pierre Bourdieu, Tim
Ingold, Elizabeth Shove, Anthony Giddens, Sylvia Scribner, Theodore
Schatzki, Ian Hacking, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Marilyn Strathern, Martin
Heidegger, Jean Lave, Michel Foucault, Michel Polanyi and many others.
Practice has been also a catalyst in the make-up of my intentional aca-
demic community, Science and Technology Studies (STS), where Exper-
imental Practice is primarily and unorthodoxly located: see for example
the works of Karin Knorr Cetina, Isabelle Stengers, Susan Leigh Star,
Thomas Kuhn, Andrew Pickering, Joseph Rouse, Sharon Traweek, Sal
Restivo, Karen Barad, Harry Collins, Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, Mar-
garet Lock, Michel Lynch—practice travels and transcends, connects and
differentiates.
    But practice complicates another established binarism, this of the hu-
man and the nonhuman. Practice is embodied, material, a-subjective, it is
often indifferent, engaging, uneventful, it is always present, and it is often
imperceptible. Practice is an ordinary concept. And this is important for
me. The accompanying anecdote is that Experimental Practice’s original
work in progress title was Experimental Politics. While writing the book,
especially the later parts, politics seemed a bit too heavy for depicting all
these extraordinary everyday …well practices of so many humans and
nonhumans that populate the baroque, polyphonic, eclectic, and, admit-
tedly, not-so-ethnographic ethnographies of the book. I felt that that poli-
tics was a reductive word for what Experimental Practice was trying to
92                                                            Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

do: there is a lot of politics in practice, but practice is not only about poli-
tics.

Practice or Politics?
    I am grateful to Andrea Ghelfi, Luigi Pellizzoni, and Roberta Raffaetà
for their generous and thought-provoking comments on Experimental
Practice. They raise many important questions, and I can only address a
few within the limited space of this short essay. All three of them in some
way or another touch upon the relation between practice and politics:
Why is practice political? Can practice, especially experimental practice,
offer alternatives? And to what extent can practice give birth to some pol-
itics of empowerment? What drives practice? As much as practice is cru-
cial for the project of the book, my aim nonetheless is not to defend the
concept as such. There is always so much that you can project onto a con-
cept. My aim is not to defend (or challenge) concepts but to interrogate
ways of life that are associated or even entangled with these concepts.
And, precisely, practice is connected with ways of life that allow me to
explore possible escape routes from the current spell of environmental
doom and “capitalocentric” gloom, and the sense that “nothing really
changes.”
    So, how much practice do we need to change things? If there would
be millions of people experimenting with practices such as those de-
scribed in Experimental Practice and in so many other books that laid the
foundations for understanding alternative forms of material social trans-
formation and social movements, the world would look very different
now. Pellizzoni raises this critical issue and points towards possible limi-
tations of practice: what if all this wealth of practices never coalesces to
change the world? Even worse, what if the concept of practice is already
appropriated in the value production systems of contemporary Global
North “I-do-not-know-how-to-call-them” societies (and I do not know
because they are not postmodern and they are not late modern and ne-
oliberal and they are not postindustrial and postnational and it is not plat-
form or cognitive or affective capitalism and they are not financialised
and they are not postliberal …phew societies, but they, of course, blend
many aspects that constitute these descriptors)? So, what if practice is al-
ready co-opted and captured? Experimental Practice describes many in-
stances that would support this argument: creativity, which is the engine
of many different practices in contemporary Global North societies, has
also become the driving force of current forms of production in “I-do-
not-know-how-to-call-them” societies. Creativity, which in the 1960s and
1970s looked like a force of liberation against the oppressive nature of
labour, has become today the dominant form of subjectivation in Global
North societies. For example, situationists, and in particular Raoul
Vaneigem, have promoted an emancipatory vision of creativity. They ar-
gued that creativity—and not labour—is the driving force of human his-
Crossing Boundary                                                           93
tory in order to find that we are today under the spell of the imperative to
be creative, to innovate and invent. Instead of being the only force that
can “rid us of work”, creativity has become the heart of contemporary
value creation in the Global North.
    However, the conclusion that Experimental Practice draws from the
fact that practice drives value creation, and even becomes an asset in it-
self, is not that practice is co-opted but rather that practice implicates.
Practice implicates us because it is never just one thing but transversally
positioned across power divides, social asymmetries, political injustices,
ecological imbalances, and material conflicts. And it is not only practice
that implicates us but even more so experimental practice. There is a lot
of important scholarship, including the work of Pellizzoni, that has
shown the entanglement not only of practice but also of experimentalism
with neoliberal governmentality through capitalising on uncertainty, inse-
curity, volatility by compelling us to become inventive and experimental.
However, as much as experimental practice is the engine of the produc-
tive regime of contemporary Global North societies, it is also the source
of an excess that cannot be easily channelled and organised within the
pressures of current forms of value creation.
    What Experimental Practice argues for is that practice cannot be easi-
ly separated to good practice which is liberating and damaging practice
which is enclosing. Liberating and damaging practice are concurrent, they
are inextricable; every practice incorporates both sides. Practice impli-
cates us and we need to keep redoing it in order to escape it. In a sense
the antidote to practice is practice itself. Again, the antidote to damaging
and enclosing practice is not liberating practice—this is a false dichoto-
my; we are implicated, we do good and we cause damage. Practice is re-
lentless and unyielding in “I-do-not-know-how-to-call-them” societies. In
order to repair the damaging practice, one cannot just bet on its other
side only, one needs to change practice, to experiment with it, to rewild
it. Experimentalism in Experimental Practice is not about uncertainly,
flexibility, risk, unpredictability, preparedness. It is about searching for
minor resources in the material make up of our worlds that allow us to
rewild practice and to activate novel practices in motion. Practice is al-
ways material and technoscientific (as it is social of course) but it is exper-
imentalism that allows practice to reconceive itself and to recreate itself.
Until of course it is captured again. There is no ultimate form of liberat-
ing practice.

The Scale of Practice
    So again, what is then practice that is emancipatory, liberating, trans-
formative? Or perhaps the right way to ask the question is how much
practice do we need to change things? What is the scale of practice?
What scale of practice do we need if practice always implicates us? Prac-
tice always evokes scale and scale is about modifying practice to become
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transformational across large parts of “I-do-not-know-how-to-call-them-
societies.” This is a topic that is raised by Pellizzoni and Raffaetà: “How
can major infrastructural changes or large technoscientific projects be
challenged by the [practice] of crafting from below and on the ground?”
How can we scale up alternative and community technoscience? How can
we radically democratise technoscience? The problem with scale is that it
is an ambivalent concept, we need scale to encounter the depth and width
of socio-ecological destruction and simultaneously we know that scale is
the engine of productionism and productionism is the tool of growth
which is a major cause of ecological destruction. In a shortcut, scale is
linked to destruction. And yet, there is something plausible about scale:
we feel that without scale there is very limited scope for meaningful eco-
logical change. Scale is an ordinary concept as it speaks to our sense of
planetary belonging. Different humans are situated in many different
niches that make them ontologically diverse, but diversity coincides with
the everyday sense of belonging to the ground I stand on and for many,
increasingly, this is Earth. We need a significant change of scale to reduce
carbon emissions, reverse biodiversity loss, eliminate pollution and toxici-
ty, and instigate transformative societal programmes. Scale is not only
tightly connected to environmental destruction but is also a plausible af-
fective ingredient that many humans feel is necessary for avoiding cata-
strophic futures.
    It is this ambivalence of scale that makes it so valuable for political
strategists of every kind and taste: those who use scale as a proxy to revo-
lution, overcoming capitalist productionism; those ultra-neoliberals who
use scale to intensify and invent new modes of value creation; those stat-
ists who need scale to preserve the elitist make-up of liberal Global North
societies (in a moment of turbulent decline); and those autocrats who use
scale to consolidate and expand their power. The ambivalence of scale is
easily compatible with so divergent approaches: the revolutionaries, the
neoliberals, the liberals, the autocrats. In Experimental Practice the im-
mediate feeling that without scale there is no viable way to encounter eco-
logical destruction is a strong motivation for opening up technoscience to
other constituencies, communities and social groups. Simultaneously,
Experimental Practice recognises that scale is often deployed for some-
thing else as it is just attached to political strategies, perpetuating the
problem that scale would ideally try to overcome. The problem with scale
is that you need it but when you have it, it undermines transformational
socio-ecological change.
    Experimental Practice is inspired by the practices of many different
social movements with, within and occasionally against technoscience in
engaging with the double bind of scale: for many of these movements
scale is not about replicating the same type of action in order to create
change. Rather, it is about engaging with the direct conditions and devel-
oping alternative ontological conditions of existence, alterontologies, on
the terrain on which each one of these movements and communities live.
Crossing Boundary                                                             95
Rather than copying and repeating the same practice to scale it and attach
it to one or another of the political strategies described above, alterontol-
ogies proliferate in intensive ways on the everyday life of communities.
Experimentalism is not about replication (something already discussed
extensively in STS, see for example, the work of Harry Collins, Trevor
Pinch, Karin Knorr Cetina, Ian Hacking, Thomas Gieryn and others).
This because, in order for replication to create the scale, another process
is underway: delocalization. Operationalise, purify and leave behind many
of the actual conditions that made the experiment possible. Scale gener-
ates the one model that dominates many locales.
    Experimental Practice promotes an alternative approach to scale: dif-
ferent experiments emerge in different communities and many of these,
despite their significant differences, align with each other to create alter-
natives on the ground (and there are many historical as well as contempo-
rary examples mentioned in Experimental Practice that I do not have the
space to discuss here). Are these alterontological practices enough to cre-
ate sweeping societal change? Perhaps at some point, but possibly not.
They are enough though to defend and maintain the life of communities
facing social-ecological conflict and destruction. Alterontologies are not
prefigurative politics. They do not point towards some short of other
global politics of transformation to come. There is no “post” in alteronto-
logical politics. Their intensive material engagements is all there is. But a
proliferation of such radical transformative practices through community
specificity, material singularity and practical concreteness is what creates
change: many alterontological practices. Many immediate involvements in
creating alternative ways of existence. Rather than replication we have
many intensive and concrete involvements. The political significance of
alterontological practice is not emanating from an alignment with the pol-
itics of revolutionaries, neoliberals, state liberals or autocrats; their politi-
cal significance emerges from the immediate fact that they engage techno-
science and other traditional forms of knowledge to secure communal life
in midst of socio-ecological conflict. They create alternatives on the
ground. Perhaps, as Ghelfi says in his commentary we can learn from the
autonomy of migration thesis which teaches us to see movements before
the order of capital production and mobility before the imposition of
control. In a similar trajectory, we can say that experimental practice
comes before value production and alterontologies before the securitisa-
tion and enclosure of technoscientific knowledge.

The Songlines of Justice
   Therefore, if there is no overarching politics, then what drives exper-
imental practice? Which ethics does the ethos of experimental practice
entail? Experimental Practice argues that the ethos of practice rests on a
sense of justice. There is no experimental alterontological practice with-
out such sense of justice. Of course, there is then the question where this
96                                                          Tecnoscienza - 12 (1)

sense of justice is grounded. This is something that in different ways
seems to be a concern in all three comments, in particular about the
grounding of the ethos of practice in a sense of immediate justice without
the mediation of a larger political project or a normative framework for
justice. All comments ask, and rightly so, where does this sense of justice
come from. They also highlight that an ethos of practice can be easily ap-
propriated by mainstream political projects. It is of course true, as dis-
cussed earlier, that alterontological practices are often appropriated in the
accumulation regime of Global North “I-do-not-know-how-to-call-them-
societies” especially when they are “offering goods and services that the
market and the state are unable or unwilling to provide” as Pellizzoni
emphasizes. Even more so as many alterontological experimental practic-
es come later to become the engine of the economy and to become fully
embedded (although it is also important to mention here that many do
remain autonomous). But what is crucial for Experimental Practice is not
whether alterontologies eventually are appropriated or not but, whether
while they are enacted, they maintain the life of communities which are
under threat through social and ecological conflict. It is a form of etho-
poiesis and care ethics as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa has developed it. Al-
terontologies are driven by an ethos of practice and a sense of justice that
are grounded in moving communal experience.
    The justice in practice comes in tracks that are handed over from
movement to movement, from generation to generation, from community
to community (be it actual or virtual communities) rather in a universal
code of practice; it comes in transversal paths and imperceptible routes
rather in the monolingual political ideologies and visions. Inspired by oral
traditional knowledges, the Aboriginal people’s songlines and everyday
storytelling, one could say that justice comes in practical tales and in
songlines rather than in normative scripts. Songline is the mode of (prac-
tical) justice. A moral economy in E.P. Thompson’s sense that is experi-
enced and enacted and is given in the actual practices of doing and mak-
ing. The songlines of justice involve place and are recorded in matter.
Every community, every movement, every alterontological experimental
practice relies on such songlines to exist. This is their moral compass. No
movement, no community, no experimental practice operates in vacuum.
We are used to think that practice is not grounded on an ethics and poli-
tics if this does not revert to normative and contractual principles or to
large ideological political projects (as those mentioned earlier). But most
of practice, especially experimental alterontological practice, is grounded
on an ethos that is given from previous movements and communities, an
ethos that travels through experience. As songlines criss-cross each other,
their meeting points produce singular forms of practice and experience
enacted within the concrete conditions of existence of each experimental
community. Practice operates in a densely populated terrain where the
experience of one community or movement becomes continuous with the
experience of others (an idea the Niamh Stephenson and I have devel-
Crossing Boundary                                                         97
oped in a previous book on Analysing Everyday Experience).
    I am here interested in rewilding practice by approaching it through
the experiences of movements and communities. Rewilding as an ecologi-
cal practice in conservation biology requires scale in order to counteract
species extinction and the loss of habitats and diversity in ecologies.
Without scale rewilding is not possible, as animals travel long distances
and material flows cross over isolated locales to other ecologies. The
rhythms and cycles of animal and material movements, in ecological re-
wilding, is more than a metaphor or an inspiration for practice. Re-
wilding, as a conservation method, is not only about helping declining
ecosystems to regenerate: it is also about redefining the position of hu-
mans in these ecologies. Practice (that is experimental and alterontologi-
cal practice) exists in scale, but on a scale of many intensive singular ex-
perimentations across different movements and communities. Such ex-
perimental practices materialise long path of justice given through previ-
ous movements and communal organisation. The songlines of justice exist
and are handed over as they are enacted through experimental practices,
that are all held in common. Songlines need to be nurtured, cared for,
and practised. “Omnia sunt communia.” Rather than taming practice as
representation of a normative form of justice, or as an activity that aims to
materialise some dominant political ideology, the experimental practice of
alterontologies is linked to songlines sustained by the experiences of pre-
vious social movements and struggling communities. These long experi-
ential tracks of social empowerment and ecological care revive and rewild
practice again and again.
