Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2012, volume 30, pages 971 988

doi:10.1068/d3006pan
Geopower: a panel on Elizabeth Groszs Chaos,
Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth
Kathryn Yusoff 971
Elizabeth Grosz 973
Nigel Clark 975
Arun Saldanha 978
Kathryn Yusoff 981
Catherine Nash 983
Elizabeth Grosz 986
Abstract. Rather than understand art as cultural accomplishment, Elizabeth Grosz argues
that it is born from the intensities of chaos and disruptive forms of sexual selectiona
corporeality that vibrates to the hum of the universe. Grosz contends that it is precisely
this excessive, nonproductive expenditure of sexual attraction that is the condition for
arts work. This intimate corporeality, composed of nonhuman forces, is what draws
and transforms the cosmos, prompting experimentation with materiality, sensation, and
life. In the book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008, Duke
University Press, Durham, NC), that is the subject of this panel discussion, Grosz sets
out an ontology of art, looking at its forms of emergence as territorialising force, sexual
selection, and nonhuman power. In Groszs terms, art is an art of existence. This is not
a narrow understanding of art as a practice that is about taste, cultural accomplishment,
or a refection of society, but an art that isat its most provocativean extraction from
the universe and an elaboration on it. This geoaesthetics which is both biospheric and
biopolitical, presents a formable challenge to geographers interested in art, sexuality, time,
and the territorialisation of the earth. How might we understand this distinctly diferent
kind of biopolitics? And what might Groszs concept of geopower ofer in terms of a
renegotiation of a more active geo in geopolitics? Grosz argues that art is not tied to the
reproduction of the known, but to the possibility of the new, overcoming the containment
of the present to elaborate on futures yet to come. In this rethinking of sexual selection
Grosz suggests an intensely political role for art as a bioaesthetics that is charged with the
creation of new worlds and forms of life. Grosz makes a radical argument for a feminist
philosophy of the biosphere and for our thinking the world otherwise.
Introduction
Kathryn Yusoff
Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YQ, England;
e-mail: k.yusoff@lancaster.ac.uk
If a monument was planted at the edge of the universe as a reminder to a future people of
an art of existence,
(1)
it might do well to actualise Elizabeth Groszs (2008) edict to enlarge
the universe by making it otherwise (page 22). In Groszs work aesthetics is not conclusion,
cultural accomplishment, or reection and reication of preexisting conditions into artistic
forms, but a form of existence charged with the work of activating the perceptions and
sensations of the lived body (page 22). Contracting and elaborating on imperceptible cosmic,
biological, and geologic forces of the universe, art is the materialisation of these forces on
(1)
Grosz explicitly states that her aim is to develop a nonaesthetic philosophy for art (Grosz, 2008,
page 2), dening her approach from an understanding of aesthetics that have their origins in culture
(and thus representation), rather than in the inhuman forces of the universe (and thus affect).
972 Geopower: a panel discussion
the body: sensations that allow our becoming-otherwise. Such an art-full elaboration is
inherent, Grosz argues, in territorial and sexual forces that capitalise on and are provoked by
inhuman qualities. In the book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth
that is the subject of this paper,
(2)
Grosz sets out an ontology of art, looking at its forms of
emergence as (de)territorialising force, sexual selection, and nonhuman power.
Art, says Grosz, is where intensity is most at home, where matter is most attenuated
without being nullied matter as most dilated (Grosz, 2008, page 76). The dual themes
of contraction and elaboration of cosmic forces emerge throughout this book as arts work
and achievement across human and nonhuman worlds: as a form of communication with
the material world and a transformation of immaterial forces. For Grosz art names the acts
that transform chaos (that is, natures profusion) into sensation, so that it can have a life of
its own, what Grosz calls sensation as nonorganic life (Grosz, 2008, page 9). She says,
it is cultures most direct mode of enhancement or intensication of bodies, cultures
mode for the elaboration of sensations, and thus cultures most intense debt to the chaotic
forces it characterizes as nature (Grosz, 2008, page 23). Whereas other philosophers of
aesthetics have understood art as a distribution of the sensible or dialectic of the visible,
the contribution of this book is to look at the very forces that are antecedent to sensible
afliations, from which art draws its power. In this way Grosz ties art to the nonhuman power
of the animal and to the geopower of the earth. Thus art is neither cultural achievement nor
dening characteristic of hominids, but is the opening up of material and immaterial forces
of the universe to elaboration and experimentation. In this way art taps into the substrata of
the earth, its geography and its time, to unearth and repurpose its forces.
This will to art is understood in friendship with philosophy: art as a producer of
sensation (becoming other) and philosophy as a producer of concepts (thought-becoming)
one vibratory, the other machinic. And, as such, art takes on the role of displacing and
reinventing for its own purpose fragments of the universe that are sonorous, ephemeral, and
geologic. Working at the intersection of art and philosophy, Grosz captures the exchange
of material and immaterial forces to argue for an art that is this opening up between forces,
where something of chaos crosses intact into sensibility. Unlike many of her contemporary
philosophers in feminist, materialist, and nonhuman theory, Grosz is not solely a materialist
thinker. And, it is precisely this articulation of the immaterial and virtual quality of forces
and their material expression (as entities become the developers for those forces) that makes
her work important for geographers (particularly those interested in aesthetics, nonhuman
and materialist geographies). Such forces are not relational as such (begetting objects and
entities), but are superabundant, overowing the visible contract of relationsan excess
that entities capitalise upon to generate new sensations.
Although geographers may have developed a number of ways to begin to understand the
productive force and social bonds of relations, this understanding has been determined largely
by their material manifestations (and has yet to signicantly grapple with indeterminacy
and processes of differentiation). Groszs work alerts us to that which precedes and exceeds
relations (and is often latent or interior to them), not just as surplus to be added to the ledger but
as an excess that is an open-ended refrain through the dynamic mutability of forms (which is
often called evolution): forces beyond the control of life that animate and extend life beyond
itself (Grosz, 2008, page 23). This excess has always challenged social science models
that graft their political projects onto the possibility of a progressive utilityone that is
made conveniently available through a relational diagnosis. Although the impetus to account
(2)
This paper is informed by a panel discussion, Elizabeth Groszs Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze
and the Framing of the EarthAuthor meets Critics Association of American Geographers Annual
Meeting, New York, February 2012. The audio recording of this session can be found at: http://
societyandspace.com/2012/04/19/elizabeth-grosz-discussion-at-the-aag-audio-recording/
Geopower: a panel discussion 973
through relations is an admirable goal, it tends to ignore that which is not quantiable in social
relationsthe virtual, incorporeal, and indeterminate qualities of matter. And importantly,
how these virtual qualities have material effects and possibilities [that is the being of sense
towards the possibilities of worlds; (see Yusoff, 2013)]. Art allows us to accompany these
indeterminate forces to their incalculable destination. Grosz argues that art gives us this
conversation as sensation: the incorporeal becoming corporeal, the insensible becoming
sensible. Such a conversation speaks to the covered-over tendency that skews knowledge
practices towards the quantiable, while neglecting the very forces that sustain, provoke,
and transform life. In human geography we have perhaps forgotten to ask: what forms of
geopower make territorialisation possible in the rst place? How are these forces subducted
in political geographys terrain? And what forces underpin the very possibility of life forms
and forms of life? These are not small questions, but pertinent ones to ask if we are to begin
to understand the (in)corporealities of fossil fuels and their geomorphic (and geopolitical)
transformations, or the capitalisation of affects in the service of neoliberal economies.
Although the subject of this book is art and the territorialisation of the earth, the argument
is made through a specic understanding of capitalisation of the forces of the earth, and in
this sense Grosz points the way towards a counter capitalisation of sensation. What she makes
clear in Chaos, Territory, and Art is that art makes explicit this tendency of life to capitalise
upon the forces of the earth, and through this capitalisation (that is a human and nonhuman
condition) to intensify life. This elaboration through capitalisation of earth forces that Grosz
argues is so evident in art, is not about utilityin the service of some end or goalbut is a
profusion that exists for its own sake, for its own elaboration and differentiation. That is, the
being of sensation exists for the possibilities of that sensation, to create its own excess as an
alternative economy of surplus that is counter to commodication (though not immune to it).
For example, Grosz argues that sensation is that which subject and object share, but not
reducible to either subject/object nor their relation. Sensation is the extraction of qualities
how art maintains a connection with the innite/inhuman origins of the earth (Grosz, 2008,
page 8). In this connection to the innite there is the production of the new, and thus the
possibility of survival beyond mere survival. And the book itself does not escape the wider
purpose of the argument, as Groszs writing cracks open relative blocs of sensation in and of
itself, in delity to its subject: the counter capitalisation of the earth.
Geopower
Elizabeth Grosz
Womens Studies Program, Duke University, 208C East Duke Building, Campus Box 90760,
Durham, NC 27708, USA; e-mail: elizabeth.grosz@duke.edu
I would like to use this opportunity to discuss some of the concepts from my 2008 book,
Chaos, Territory, Art, that I think may be of interest to geographers. I want to be as compressed
as I can, so let me proceed with a point-form breakdown of some concepts and claims that
may be relevant to thinking about geography in its most open sense. Let me also be as bold,
unnuanced, and provocative as I can.
(1) The earth, the world, the universe is made up not only of objects but above all of
forces, forces that interact, clash, and coexist, creating both stable, predictable orders
of organisationobjects and their relationsand zones of indeterminabilityevents and
their singularities.
(2) These forces, while they must be considered material, must also be understood as
incorporeal, as having a dimension of sense, ideas, or conceptuality. Before life emerges
as such, before it has even the possibility of emergence, matter must already contain the
immaterial, the capacities to make sense or to have meaning.
974 Geopower: a panel discussion
(3) If and when life emerges from the forces of the earth, forces that cannot be separated
into different categories, life carries with it this excess over corporeality that the material
has always contained, a virtuality that enables it to transform itself or to emerge as life. Life
capitalises on the two-faced orientation of the earth and its forces, erupting into materiality as
a bounded and self-producing cohesion that is also always thinking, that is to say, is always
oriented by the senses of the earth inherent in its materiality. Life is the provisional binding
of an order of conceptuality with an order of organic cohesion, the temporary protraction and
delaying of the forces of the universe itself.
(4) The emergence of animal life, life suited to its particular part of the earth by natural
selection, enables new orders of emergence, new modes of actualisation of the virtual
forces of the earth itself. Life enables the production of forces that reframe and reorganises
materiality/conceptualityeven, beginning with the human intervention in early Greek
philosophy, to divide these forces into mutually exclusive categories, matter and ideality
bringing about new combinations, new forms of intermingling, new modes of organisation
of matter-thought. These powers of rearrangement, the very powers that life must utilise to
transform the world into its world, both bring new orders of virtuality, new forces to bear on
those that preexist it, but also bring out the latent possibilities or potentialities that the earth
and its forces already contain.
(5) Life in its vegetative and animal forms, as attuned to a milieu or environment as it might
be, brings new forces into existence that harness the forces of the earth. These new forces are
ways of living, modes of framing and organising the earths spatial and temporal qualities so
that they intensify and transform living formsa kind of diversion of these imperceptible
terrestrial forces through the delays and transformations life elaborates. Art in its most general
sense is a way of experiencing the singularities, the particular qualities of the earth and its
living and unlivable forces, as bodily intensities. Art, even human art, is a derivation of the
animals and plants capacities to harness the forces of the earth not only to live but also to
intensify itself, to maximise its sensations. Plants not only live: they require the interaction
of insects whose engagements ensure plants reproduce with variation. Plants intensify the
sensation they may generate in those living forms they require to ensure fertilisation: they
become vivid and intense, not for themselves as a way of addressing their environment but as
a form of provocation to the insects that fertilise them. The brighter the colour, the stronger
the aroma, the more lush the leaves, the more likely the plant is to proliferate offspring
through its symbiotic connections with other living forms. Art is the capitalisation of these
intensities.
(6) Life is thus not only caused and framed by an inorganic or geographical environment but
also by other forms of life. Life is attracted to and engages with other forms of life to the
extent that these engagements provide opportunities to maximise its capacities, including
its sensory capacities. Sexuality, the attraction and sexual/pleasurable engagement of living
and nonliving forces, is not just the mode of reproduction, but is more an expression of
living bodies capacities for intensication. This capacity for intensication is the condition
for art, which at its most elementary level involves the capacity to reframe, to move, to
decontextualise qualities, properties, and forces that come from a particular place. The
condition of art, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear, is deterritorialisation, the movement
from a given location to any other, a fundamental spatial and geographical concept. This
movement is the unleashing of some of the virtualities in objects that intensify, attract, and
appeal to living forces. Art is thus geographical (rather than psychological): it involves the
earth and the movement of its qualities so that they may intensify the sensations of living
beings with otherwise imperceptible forces.
Geopower: a panel discussion 975
(7) Life is thus not a special force, a vital energy that must distinguish itself from materiality,
considered as inert and given. If matter, the materiality of the earth, is also ideal, carrying
a thin lm of ideality on the surface of all events and in parallel with all objects, then life
can only be distinguished from the inorganic forces that make up the larval, tectonic, and
earth-forming order that constitute the earth by a difference of degree rather than a difference
in kind. Equally, the emergence of animal from plant forms, and of human from animal
forms, if there is such an emergence, is a matter of degree rather than a difference in kind.
Life partakes of the earth, requiring its forces to survive; but in turn, life elaborates the
forces of the earth in ways that would and could not occur otherwise, developing certain
potentialities in one direction or another, converting the qualities of the earth and its products
into other qualities useful to or enhancing life. It is a temporary detour of the forces of the
earth through the forces of a body, making them an endless openness.
(8) The relations between the earth and its various forces, and living beings and their not always
distinguishable forces, are forms of geopower, if power is to be conceived as the engagement
of clashing, competing forces. This means that before there can be relations of oppression,
that is relations between humans categorised according to the criteria that privilege particular
groups, there must be relations of force that exist in an impersonal, preindividual form that are
sometimes transformed into modes of ordering the human. What we understand as the history
of politicsthe regulations, actions and movements of individuals and collectives relative to
other individuals and collectivesis possible only because geopower has already elaborated
an encounter between forms of life and forms of the earth. Our everyday understanding of
power both draws on and yet brackets out this primordial interface that sustains it in its ever-
changing forms. It is because local and global forms of power are elaborated on a plane of
forces that they can generate their very real effects on particular categories of bodies. But we
must be careful to distinguish these different orders of force, or violence, that structure life
at its very eruption and its subsequent elaboration: geopower, the relations between the earth
and its life forms, runs underneath and through power relations, immanent in them, as their
conditions of existence. Powerthe relations between humans, or perhaps even between
living thingsis a certain, historically locatable capitalisation on the forces of geopower.
These are perhaps some of the key points developed in the book that may be of some
interest to those working in geography.
The time of difference
Nigel Clark
Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YQ, England;
e-mail: n.clark2@lancaster.ac.uk
In New Zealand, back in the 1980s and 1990s, we had a strange relationship to Elizabeth
Groszs work and that of other philosophers of her generation writing from Australia. On the
one hand we were hugely grateful that something exciting was happening on our side of
the planet; and on the other, it was somewhat disconcerting that Sydney or Melbournejust a
few hours awayfelt like they were decades ahead of us. If only in a minor key, this opens
up a theme prompted by Chaos, Territory, Art that I want to talk toabout where we are
located spatially, but also where we might nd ourselves positioned temporally.
First, I want to note a certain irony about Groszarriving from philosophy, from the
humanitiestalking to us about earth processes and this intriguing concept of geopower.
Why didnt we think of that one? In the dozen years since I moved from a neighbouring
discipline into geography I have heard a lot of talk of power and politics, but only rarely
have I encountered human geographers talking in a sustained way about the forces of the
earth. And almost never together, unless it is to point out that those with least power tend to
976 Geopower: a panel discussion
be most exposed to environmental extremes. We even embrace a version of geopolitics that
characteristically treats the earths surface as little more than the stage as it were for the
political dramas to unfold (Dalby 2007, page 105). So as Grosz generously offers us these
themes and concepts which ought to play to our strengths, it might be timely to ask where our
disciplinewe who have nominated ourselves with the geocurrently stands in relation to
the powers of the earth and cosmos.
I suspect that critical human geographys current orientation to earth processes has much
to do with the disciplines turn away from its earlier imperial embroilments and toward a
vision of space, place, and territory as interminably contested. When geography, along with
other progressive elds, regrouped around the imperative of the political, it tended to
imagine the contents of politics in predominantly agonistic or adversarial terms (see Barnett,
2004). From here on in spatial forms and processes were reimagined as being constitutively
open to struggles of collective making and remaking. But one of the consequences of this
manner of politicisation has been a gently descending silence around domains of existence
that are not so amenable to contestation. In order to gain an intrinsically negotiable spatiality,
it might be said, we traded in the more intractable forces of the earth and cosmos. This
is why Groszs double move offers such a timely prompting. It is no coincidence that her
(re)assertion of the generative power of earth or elemental processes comes with a spatial
imaginary that refuses the primacy of antagonism and conict: the idea that Territory is
artistic, the consequence of love not war, of seduction not defense (Grosz, 2008, page 69).
By treating the geo as a power, an incitement, a generative force, Grosz offers an
alternative to those critical modes of geopolitics whose investments in contested terrains
and struggles over scarce resources often partake of the same restricted economies as their
adversaries. One of the provocations of this approach for me is the way that it opens our
concern with the trajectories of human life into the very long dure, expanding the temporal
registers of the political, the ethical, the erotic, and the aesthetic to take in movements and
transformations that recede abysmally into the depths of time. I am especially interested in
how Groszs binding together of the thematic of an ex-orbitant earth and erotic-expressive
exuberance might help us think about the ways in which our ancestors and relatives
encountered the upheavals of a dynamic planetand the part that sex and art may have
played in negotiating critical thresholds in earth systems.
Whereas conventional geopolitics tends to restrict itself to human inscriptions on the
earths surface, Groszs notion of geopower permits the dynamics of the earth to leave their
mark on human and other bodies. Her work has always been characterised by its boldness
in evoking differencewithin and beyond that which we designate as our own species.
As Grosz approvingly cited Duclos some years ago: renegotiating feminist identity starts
by learning to accept some humbling truths: namely that everybody wants difference but
nobody wants anybody to be really different (cited in Grosz and Cheah, 1996, page 8). Her
developing fusion of Darwin and feminism has deepened conceptions of corporeal difference
to encompass not only the differential forces of the sociocultural and the biological but also
the enduring impression of earth processes on living esh, which includes both incremental
and more rapid impacts:
Where variation tends to occur through small, slow accretion, that is, where variation
and inheritance tend to function slowly, over a large timescale requiring many successive
generations, natural selection, which generally functions with a certain regularity and
predictability, may, at times, function through catastrophic leaps, major climatalogical,
geological, or population changes, sudden and unpredictable upheavals (Grosz, 2005,
page 25).
Geopower: a panel discussion 977
In this way bodies are impinged upon, shaped, and propelled along different pathways.
What interests me here in particular is the way that humans and other life forms are exposed
to elements and processes with their own differing durations. There are, then, numerous
times: a duration for each thing or movement (Grosz, 1999, page 17). And in this sense,
in our capacity as living creatures to be transformed and set on divergent trajectories by
variously temporised forces, it might be said that we too come to inhabit or embody different
times.
Over recent decades much work on issues of identity in critical, social, or cultural thought
has hinged on the question of where do I belong? (see Rogoff, 2000, page 14). Such queries
usually invite responses which play across the assumed borderlines that separate here from
there, us from them, inside from outside. For me Groszs work supplements these inquiries
with the question of the when of belonging and becoming: a timely interrogation for
a historical juncture at which climatic tipping points and extinction events loom, and the
very denition of the current geological era is up for grabs. Rather than evoking a uniform
I or we, her inquiries suggest the possibility that interhumanor interspeciesencounters
are also, inevitably, diachronic: meetings across radically different durations or time zones.
(As we antipodeans know, on a smaller scale, when you phone home from abroad you are
invariably asked, what time is it there? rather than where are you?)
Needless to say, the idea that different human populations might inhabit or encapsulate
substantially different blocs of time has a blighted history. It conjures up environmental
determinisms, moral climatologies, all those associations of other races with a temporal
and developmental anteriorityfrom which geography and other progressive disciplines
have quite rightly distanced themselves. In this regard we should note the care Grosz has
taken in proposing an art history and geography in which the culturalmaterial expressions
of Australian Aboriginal artists of the Western desert coinhabit with those of their Parisian,
New York, or Sydney counterparts on a developmentally even playing eld, where each
is equally open to learning from the other. But at the same time, once we have thoroughly
dispensed with any notion of a unilinear developmental trajectory, the very idea of artwork
that channels the geographically variable forces and energies of the earth permits us to think
of diachronies with radically different implications. And in this way it potentially offers new
angles on the understanding of our encounterspast, present, and futureon a chronically
unstable planet.
Sexual selection, Grosz argues, plays a major part in choosing, elaborating upon, and
extrapolating minor somatic variations (Grosz, 2011). Sex is the engine of difference, the
medium through which bodies join forces with the earth to enter into new intensities and
durations. But I am also interested in the role that sex and art play in weaving divergent
temporalities into proximity, into a common ow. Alongside her reections on the multiplicity
of time, Grosz also points to the ongoing conuence of variegated tempos, in which distinct
durations meld with a global or collective time such that [a]s a whole, time is braided,
intertwined, a unity of strands layered over each other (Grosz, 1999, page 17). Taken
together with the thematising of an intemperate and nonteleological desire, this interlacing of
temporalities offers insights for thinking through the extensive mobilisations of our human
ancestors and their relatives.
For hundreds of thousands of years different waves of the genus Homo have radiated
across continentsdiverging into different populations or even species, but also frequently
reweaving themselves (or as evolutionary theorists say, introgressing) back into shared
lineages (see Gunaratnam and Clark, 2012). Though we (in all our mixity) are now the
sole surviving hominid species, this toing and froing between divergence and intermixture
continues. The exuberance of sexual display and desire reignites intimacies between peoples
978 Geopower: a panel discussion
who may have taken different pathways 50 000 years ago and ended up on continents that
have been drifting apart for 200 million years. Art too, as Groszs work has us speculating,
may have played its part in suturing populations and landmasses back together: the capacity
to share music, images, dance, gesture, or humour serving to bridge, in the blink of an eye,
the rifts of evolutionary and geological time.
So too might we ponder the role of artas a pool of potentiality and experimental
possibilityin helping us across the destratications of the earth. Our planets upheavals are
more often associated with the winnowing effects of natural selection, the sudden return to
brute necessity or survivalism. But artistic expression, too, involves drawing materials and
bodies across critical thresholdsas well as the passing on of stories and experiences of
worlds that have been and might yet be otherwise. In Groszs example, Western desert art
teaches us of the forces that will overrun us, that made us and will unmake us. It teaches us how
to live with imponderable and unmasterable forces and to make them sources of afrmation
(Grosz, 2011, page 190). It is perhaps here, taking cues from Art, Chaos, Territory and other
of Groszs recent works, that we might detect an alternative to the way art is now being
tasked with the transmission of stern warnings about climate changeand a counterpoint to
our own disciplinary investments in agonistic and parsimonious geopoliticking. In place of
admonitions of caution and restraint, we catch a glimpse of art as a reservoir of a gratuitous
geopowerbeckoning us to squander and seduce our way through catastrophes still to come.
Deleuze/art/earth/Marx
Arun Saldanha
Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota, 414 Social Sciences,
267 19th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA; e-mail: saldanha@umn.edu
Elizabeth Grosz has been very fundamental to my thinking about human difference. She has
worked a lot on sexual difference. I have been trying to elaborate on her uptake of Deleuze
into the territory of critical race theory and especially her unique turn towards a philosophy of
biology, I think it is unique in feminist theory and critical continental philosophy in general,
and to make that move, I think, is really exciting and makes for a perfect overarching addition
to what geographers think about.
What Ill be doing is just to talk a little bit about the relationship between Deleuze and
Marx. And Ill end with a few words on the concept of a people to come.
So just as a quick reminder, the innovation of this book, which everyone should read,
is that Grosz talks about our discipline, geography, as something that is inherent to aesthetic
practice. And aesthetic practice not being something that is uniquely human, not something
that ruptures the animal kingdom into those animals that can actually taste the sublime and
those animals that cannot. She actually turns the whole thing around, and she says: well
actually artistic practice is something inherent in life itself, and then gets most intense in the
species that is us.
So why she talks about Australiaapart from being herself an Australianis, I think,
because, as many people know, the way that Aboriginal cultures have inhabited the landscape
is, again, through, again, a very creative imagination, of traversing the landscape, and then
representing those traversions in various forms of art. And because of the isolation of these
cultures, relative isolation for tens of thousands of years, from the rest of humanity, I think
anthropological investigations have quickly seen that the kind of art, especially in the concept
of dream-time, was uniquely geographical. And she says at one point, an attempt to map
out in spatial and gural terms the geography of their dreaming country, a cartography of the
events, the topography, and the animal beings that link to the artists own bodily and clan
history (2008, page 92); this is what she sees in every form of Aboriginal art.
Geopower: a panel discussion 979
So what you see in the trajectory of Groszs work, I think, is a movement away from
psychoanalysisthese are really pedagogical momentsbut I think its fair to say Grosz
took a distance from psychoanalytical theory in explaining and politicising sexual difference,
and sexual difference became more and more (especially since her article Darwin and
feminism: preliminary notes towards a mutual engagement, or something along those lines,
I think its from 1999); so what shes been doing, I think, is grounding the theory of sexual
difference in a very robust legacy, namely, that of Darwinyou cant get much more robust
than Darwinbut doing that in a very unique way in the line of a Deleuzian reading, which
focuses on deterritorialisation, and forces with their eventual shadow, something which very
few Darwinians actually do themselves.
Also, while she keeps the focus on the body, or bodies, what has been interesting from
the vantage point of our discipline is that she has been looking more and more into the sort
of biophysical contextualisation and feeding into those bodies or forcesespecially from
Space, Time, and Perversion (1995), Architecture from the Outside (2001), which is a very
spatial book, and in this book [Chaos, Territory, Art] in which Grosz makes it very clear that
the environment is what allows a body to be.
Lastly, on the political levelthis is something we could discussbut I think that from
when she talks about subversion in Sexual Subversions (1989) on Kristeva, Irigaray, and
eh is it Cixous? ... [Grosz: Michele LeDoeuff] LeDoeuff ! Yes. Sorry. I think from an
antagonistic sort of perspective, nding out how knowledge can be subverted from below,
I think her politics has become more a politics of afrmation, in terms of seeing where
newness is already happening and afrm that in more creative ways.
Right. I want to bring Marx into the discussion, in an ungrumpy way. Because its very
easy to say: why does Grosz talk about Aboriginal art without talking about colonialism as
a sort of backdrop, without talking about the fact Aboriginals are biopolitically contained by
the Australian nation-state. And I think its still relevant to talk about Marxism in relation to
Deleuze, as a growing number of Deleuzians do, for three reasons. The empirical reason is just
that we live in a time of crisiscapitalist crisis, environmental crisis, political crisis, etc. The
theoretical reason is to gure out why the two main books written by Deleuze and Guattari
are subtitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983 [1972]), why is it that we have to take into
account the present predicament in a way that rehearses and revises some of Marxs legacy?
But I think the most important reason to look at the relationship between Deleuze and
Marx is on the transcendental level, on the conceptual level. The concepts that Deleuze
(and Grosz) uses, such as production, desire, earth, have been formed more or less in
conversation with Marx as well. Of course, not just Marx, theres a whole array of philosophers
that Deleuze got his resources for thinking from, but I think that when it comes to the social,
when it comes to human societies and human history, Marx is fairly central.
So it is true that neither Groszs work nor Deleuzes work can be reduced to materialism.
But at least I think as a starting point what Deleuze does is to go against the idealist
philosophies of Hegel and Kant, mainly, at least to rework and to push the envelope in that
regard. And we can see a sort of continuation of Darwinism in Marx and then in Deleuze. So
life, living matter, the vital forces that Grosz was talking about in her introduction just now
are the basis from which we actually think of human society. Marx says in his critique of
German idealism,
In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we
ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine,
conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at
men in the esh (Marx and Engels, 1970 [1932/1845], page 47),
but we start out from the notion of humans in their eshly and spatialised being.
980 Geopower: a panel discussion
The way that Deleuze of course goes beyond Marx is the fact that he privileges excess.
And this is also very clearly developed in Groszs work. And so chaos is always more than
territory, to take two words of her title. It is not just food that is important, but art that enables
the foraging and hunting that provide for subsistence.
When it comes to the contact between Aboriginals and white people, of course we have to
talk about the violence. But the violence was of such a nature that you could notand you still
cannotreduce the contact zone just to utilitarian methods of exploitation and adaptation.
And nally Deleuze and Guattari actually go further than Marx in saying that capitalism
was always this transcendental limit of human history, so that in a very crazy way you
could say that Aboriginal Australians were for tens of thousands of years already inhabiting
a sort of precapitalist universe. This sounds teleological, but the way Deleuze and Guattari
talk about it is that capital actually mobilises the desires and affects in such a way that is
uniquely human. So theres nothing inhuman about capitalism. This is Engelss speech.
Lastly, the people to come. This is a very interesting concept in Deleuze, its not worked
out fully, it just pops up here and there in his work. On the blurb of Groszs book, it says,
Its animal afliations ensure that art is intensely political and charged with the creation of
new worlds and new forms of living. So this political side of art is where Ill ask a couple
of questions of Groszs work.
So its obvious that what art enables is to sense the future outside of identities, outside
of biopower. So, a people to comeor people to come without the ameans that art
goes beyond what we traditionally conceive of as Aboriginal culture, European culture,
or white culture. Now, what I want to ask Grosz is about the relationship between forces
and abstraction. What is clear is that Aboriginal art actually allows for new imaginations,
but also commodication by virtue of its abstraction. So we have at the same time a very
unique form of art that then becomes highly abstract, but this is precisely what allows for its
commodication on the art markets of Paris, Tokyo, and New York.
So this is the diagram Ill end with (gure 1). So you have the cosmic forces which are
contracted and condensed, rst through sexual selection and then through art which is a
sort of superstructure, almost, of sexual selection, into an imagining of a people to come or
people to come. But then capitalism is also this abstraction that clashes with it. And Ive been
working for days on this last question, and its very difcult to formulate a question on the
relationship between Deleuze and Marx, because you always do end up sounding grumpy.
But I guess it revolves around this notion of abstraction and whether abstraction makes it
more difcult or makes it easier for commodication to happen to Aboriginal art.
COSMIC FORCES

abstraction

SEXUAL SELECTION

abstraction CAPITAL

ART
PEOPLE TO COME
Figure 1. Abstraction.
Geopower: a panel discussion 981
Temporal dislocation and the time of the earth
Kathryn Yusoff
Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YQ, England;
e-mail: k.yusoff@lancaster.ac.uk
As one of the rst feminist thinkers to take inhuman forces seriouslyto write a feminist
philosophy that included dynamic earth processes within its scopeGrosz asked: what
would a feminist geology, biology, and earth history look like? And in doing so, she shifted
the politics of difference from the sociological to the ontological sphere, articulating an
ontological analysis that had clear implications for reconguring how we understand social
and subjective relations. I have been trying to think (with Groszs writing never far away)
about what a feminist earth science might look like ever since. As recent explorations in
geography that are trying to think a more dynamic geo have confronted, there are considerable
difculties in bringing the earth into politics in a way that pays sufcient attention to the
openness of matter and the indeterminacy of forces, which are both anterior and interior to
the human. Often the inhuman is invoked in a gestural way, to signal the limits of the social
and a possible beyond, but rarely are the full implications of thinking with inhuman forces
allowed to disrupt the designation of a fully actionable social sphere.
What Grosz concentrates our sensibilities towards is an understanding of the actualisation
and temporalities of inhuman forces through art: that is, what it is to be in time with
becoming, while recognising its untimely qualities; to apprehend predictable orders of
organisationobjects and their relationsand zones of indeterminabilityevents and their
singularities. (Yusoff et al, 2012, page 973) It is thinking these two things together, without
erring on the side of that which is most easily apprehended, that is the real achievement of
this work, because it proffers a way to comprehend this fundamental indeterminacy and
work with it. Grosz reminds us what this zone of indetermination does to the possibilities
of apprehension and to the possibilities of knowledge, but she also asks how the virtualities
and potentialities within biological existence enable cultural, social, and historical forces to
work with and actively transform that existence? (Grosz, 2004, page 14). This examination
of indeterminacy becomes particularly salient in the realm of nonhuman geographies and the
ways in which forms of apprehension secure (or not) modes of inclusion and recognition that
often underpin the very possibility of existenceand has been particularly helpful for me in
thinking through the conguration of biodiversity.
In a parallel move, rather than seeing the work of feminist thought as being conned
to a particular kind of social body that speaks to the forces that condition and restrict its
past arrangements, Grosz suggested that feminism needed a future which surpassed the
containment inherent in these histories, to be more and other to those histories. And, that this
necessitated feminist futures that spoke to ontological and not just sociological questions:
that is, those forces that pulled the social body into being and provoked its afliations.
This move offered a radical new conceptualisation of the spaces of feminist thought and its
possibilities, and it is the generosity of these proffered futures that moves me most about
Groszs work: a movement that is inspired by a hopeful and worldly politics that stretches
into the possibilities of other worlds and is open to and directed by otherness (Grosz, 2004,
page 42), and a politics that risks itself for that possibility. As Grosz argues about the concept
of indetermination that she sees as Darwins legacy to thought: The task ahead is to utilize
such an invigorated concept of life to rethink power, politics, and struggle in new terms
(Grosz, 2004, page 42).
So, we might ask, why are earth forces such a challenge to thinking? Why do they nd
such mean accommodation in social and political thought? And how might these earth forces
be realised in a way that does not invoke a common ground (ie, in a way that maintains the
982 Geopower: a panel discussion
productive engine of difference)? As the designation of the anthropocene is embraced as
concept and political world geology, Groszs work suggests to me that we be cautious about
what we choose to inhere in the geomorphic nomination of the Age of Man. Grosz shows
that the human is always bifurcated in ways that are sexuate,
(3)
but also supplemented and
superseding. And perhaps this gives us a better way to understand the legacy of hominid
evolution and its transformations of the earth, in ways that distinguish between gratuitous
and artful geographies.
In Time Travels (2005) and The Nick of Time (2004) Grosz argued for nature and
evolution as powerful forces that provide resources for cultural life and differentiated
forms of becoming, with careful attention to the role of time and, more specically, ideas
of duration in the works of Darwin and Nietzsche:
(4)
the productive reading of both these
thinkers blind spots against one another
(5)
to elaborate on a distinctly new theory of life
that was not restricted (in the sense of it being determined by neither the qualities of the
environment nor entities per se, but through the qualitative transformation of matter and
immaterial forces). Rather, Grosz argues that the very restriction of life is the point, because it
provokes lifes invention. That it is this temporal dislocation (that is also a spatial dislocation)
is what generates life, its particular forms, methods of resourcefulness, and survival (and
Grosz talks about survival as Derrida talks about survival as more than life).
(6)
That is, life is
not argued as a special kind of category, but one that enfolds matter and forces and becomes
other through that incorporation: Cosmological imponderables are among the invisible,
unheard, imperceptible forces of the earth, forces beyond the control of life that animate and
extend life beyond itself (Grosz, 2008, page 23).
Grosz suggests that, Art could not function without this disruption (2008, page 9) and
asks, How does the work of art bring about sensations, not sensations of what we know and
recognize, but of what is unknown, unexperienced, traces not of the past but of the future,
not of the human and its recognized features, but of the inhuman? (2008, page 60). Cave
art seems a perfect example of this bringing about of sensation, how it grabs us by the throat
with a power that is undiminished by 40 000 years. It is a power that outlives everything
visible. So, the question here is, what is the nature of this more and less than life, life as
nonrelational to itself, but less than simply an exposure to chance? What kinds of attunements
are possible to this more than life? Sensation is one way, are there others?
(3)
Grosz makes clear that art is not the result of an excess of sexual forces, but that sexuality itself
needs to function artistically to be adequately sexual.
(4)
It is the insertion of duration into matter that produces movement; it is the confrontation of duration
with matter as its obstacle that produces innovation and change, evolution and development (Grosz,
2005, page 111). In terms of duration, then, evolution is not the unfolding of an already worked out
blueprint or simply the gradual accretion of qualities, which progress stage by stage it is evolution
through division, bifurcation, dissociationby difference, through sudden and unpredictable change,
change which takes us with its surprise (Grosz, 2005, page 111).
(5)
Groszs reading of the incompletion of thought as an opening in the extension of thought is
characteristic of her attention to evolution in Chaos, Territory, Art. Darwin is never read alone, rather,
in productive and sometimes antagonistic relation to Deleuze, von Uexkll, and the Aboriginal Utopia
Womens collective. What Grosz brings to this constellation of thinkers (and makers) is, again, the
productive thinking of differences in thought to generate a theory of forces that extrapolates and
pollinates the very possibility of life and its modes of territorialisation.
(6)
Operating at a faster or slower rate of speed than much of the universe, life is always challenged
to overcome itself, to invent new methods, regions, resources, to differ from itself . Life is never
stable, because it makes a difference to the universe, because it transforms its world, creates for itself
new worlds, devises concepts, practices, skills that change it in the process of changing the universe
(Grosz, 2004, pages 3940).
Geopower: a panel discussion 983
What is distinctly pronounced within Groszs work, that is absent in so much scholarship
on materiality, is the attention to time, and not just the particularities of different temporal
arrangements, but its interiority, the push to futurity (Grosz, 2004, page 38)a kind
of excess within bodies that is generated out of the aforementioned lack of t. Taking up
Nietzsches call to see The future: not a prolonging of the self through time but the occurrence
of surpassing, going further than the limits reached (Bataille, 2004, page 5, emphasis in
original), Grosz argues that this untimely nature is present in art and its gesture of time. That
is the way in which art can still the forces of chaos, so that we can see them as if for the rst
time, and the way in which art is a gift to/and of the future in the containment of those forces,
and thus there is an implicit framing of art as a biological and political imperative.
(7)
Blanchot (talking about Chars poetry) says that the future is rare (2007, pages 4243).
What I think he meant is that the future is rarely given, in the sense of it being a place in
which writing comes from or goes to, rather, it is often invoked as a space of utility, for
deferment, anticipation, conquest of the present, or its displacement. Yet, I nd something
of an answer in Groszs writingit is not enough to invoke the future, to speak of the future
as a possible tomorrow, nor as an actionable space, but to join that speaking to the future, to
speak from this place and afrm the future in advance as a kind of promise. This is the gift
of this work, in its refusal to privilege a regressive critique that is congured by the past.
Yet this stress on the dislocation of the present is clearly antagonistic to much feminist and
certainly sociological thought. While there is clearly a need for practical philosophy that
can be taken up as progressive politics, this is not necessarily to be found in a malleable
methodology (that relationality seems to offer), but, more radically, might be located in a
mode of thinking such as Groszs, which loosens the demands of the present so that we
might be more readily open to the possibility of imagining a different tomorrow. Without this
politics of speaking from the future, speaking the future into being, we are poor in the world.
And yet, this is one of the hardest things to do, to avoid the auto-affection of thought. What
Groszs work achieves, which is a rare thing, is the mobilisation of thought beyond itself to
give of the future. This gift is realised through her writing and its openings and through her
continued examination of how time moves through the corporeal and incorporeal dimensions
of materiality. So a question might be raised about how writing can be turned towards the
future and its actualisationa sensibility of the future as an aesthetic categoryand the politics
of this orientation, and its demands.
Sexual selection and Darwin
Catherine Nash
School of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS,
England; e-mail: c.nash@qmul.ac.uk
The panel has been a very welcome imperative to make time to read and think about such
stimulating and challenging work. I want to begin by talking briey about the account of
sexual selection that is fundamental to the human and nonhuman world of creativity in Chaos,
Territory, Art. My focus is more on the Darwinian rather than Deleuzian.
In Chaos, Territory, Art sex and art are together a glorication of intensity for its own
sakeabout the excessive, nonstrategic, nonadaptive, about extravagance, allure, pleasure,
and sensations that are not reduced to any mechanistic model of natural selection. This is
a vision of the world in which sexual rather than asexual reproduction of living things is
(7)
I think here of the twin discovery of the cave art at Lascaux and Auschwitz (what Bataille called,
two signs of man, one about the poverty of poetry, the other its excess). And, how such gifts have an
untimely quality, arriving unexpectedly amidst chaos to suggest other possible futures and sensations.
984 Geopower: a panel discussion
fundamentalthe coming together of genetically unique individuals to create genetically
unique offspringthat it requires sexual diamorphism is, to quote from the introduction,
undoubtedly the most momentus invention that life has brought forth, the very machinery
for guaranteeing the endless generation of morphological and genetic variation, the very
mechanism of biological difference itself [but] is also, by this fact, the opening up of life
to the indeterminacy of taste, pleasure, and sensation (Grosz, 2011, page 6).
The distinction between natural selection and sexual selection is crucial to this argument.
For while natural selection is about the evolutionary reproduction of features that help the
survival of the species, sexual selection is a process in which features that are attractive
to sexual partners and which differentiate between male and female members of a species,
for example, are reproduced as the accidental result of the reproduction that may follow
responses to attraction, seduction, allure, and desire. Quoting better conveys the meaning
here:
Sexual selection magnies and highlights these morphological differences and
transformationsthose differences that attract and appeal are more likely to be selected
and incorporated into successive generations, which are more likely to differ further from
each otherthat enhance the bodys sexual appeal. This calling to attention, this making
of ones own body into a spectacle, this highly elaborate display of attractors, involves
intensication. Not only are the organs on display engorged, intensied, puffed up, but
the organs that perceive themears, eyes, noseare also lled with intensity, resonating
with color, sounds, smells, shapes, rhythms (Grosz, 2008, pages 6566).
And so the artistic emerges through and is intrinsic to the excessiveness of sexual selection.
While sociobiologists reduce sexual selection to natural selectionto territorial struggles
between the more and less t and to attractiveness as a sign of fertilitysexual selection is
also about excessiveness, unpredictability, and vagaries of taste, and sexual attractiveness that
has no evolutionary advantage can indeed be a risky conspicuousness attracting predators as
well as partners. Attraction is largely but not only heterosexual, between as well as within
species. This is a radically nonreductive model of beauty and attraction that is beyond the
economies of natural selection, especially its elaborations in sociobiology and evolutionary
psychology.
So far I have avoided specifying female and male parts in this play of seduction and allure,
but it is these specics which probably elicit most concern even in those, like me, seeking
incisive alternatives to the depressing dreadfulness of evolutionary psychology and other
popular accounts of sex at the heart of human social life, while avoiding a humanist insistence
on the difference between human and other animals. For even if as Grosz argues, Darwin was
much more interested in not only male competition for females and the effects of female
discernment and selection, but also female competition for males and male discernment
and selection, which is more common in insects, birds, and some species of sh than it
is in mammals (Grosz, 2011, page 122), sexual selection is still a matter of showy males
competing to secure their choice of female. Evolutionary psychologists tie this to the logic
of violent male sexual desire ensuring the survival of the ttest and radically differentiated
reproductive strategies for men and women. Darwin again provides an antidote to the claims
made in his name:
For him, the activity of males and the passivity of females is not a given but an emergent
and potentially changeable phenomenon. And [for Grosz] to suggest male eagerness and
female reluctance are aligned with activity and passivity, respectively, is to render binary
a range of qualities and behaviours that run through a series of gradations not adequately
represented by only negative and positive terms (Grosz, 2011, page 122).
Geopower: a panel discussion 985
Yet, running through the discussion of sexual selection as the excessive, extravagant,
artistic, and intensifying twin of natural selection is still the language of competition and
struggle, an arms war on aesthetic terms. I wonder if sexual selection can be understood
less competitivelyan effort to get together with the object of desire and attraction, but not
necessarily in a struggle between competitors. Does sexual selection need to interpret the
existence of male showiness in some but not all birds and mammals through models of male
competition? Does diamorphism have to be mapped onto contrasting practices of competition
and choice? Does the account of the intensifying nature of sexual selection depend on the
energy of seduction as struggle? Can sexual selection be understood in ways that are even
further from the sociobiologicalmore excessive, multidirectional, multivariousto disrupt
the binaries of differentiated sexual roles in a feminism of sexual difference? More broadly,
does a Darwinian inspired feminism of difference have to imagine evolution and life as
struggle?
Sexual selection, race, and beauty
Secondly, reading Chaos, Territory, Art lead me to read some of Groszs more recent book,
Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reections on Life, Politics, and Art (2011), and back to The
Nick of Time (2004), to follow her work on sexual selection where it is elaborated at more
length. In both books there is a particular argument made about sexual selection that does not
feature in Chaos, Territory, Art, but is particularly provocative and worth pursuing. It is about
Darwin on sexual selection, race, and beauty. As she makes very clear, looking to Darwin
for explanations of the origins of human physical diversity is shadowed by the history of
Darwinian justications for deeply racist models of human difference. But these Darwinian
justications are not Darwins who, as she recounts, insisted on humanity as a single species
that cannot be understood in terms of hierarchies of races at different stages of progression or
in terms of gradations between the human and animal. As she writes:
Racial differenceswhich he takes to be visible differences regarding skin, facial
features, hair, and body types, as well as historically and economically different modes
of social and cultural organisationare those differences produced, not by the direct
effects of the environment (as sociobiology suggests), but through the operations of ideals
of beauty and taste. Aesthetics more than any other factor once served to distinguish
different types of human body from each other and enables these differences over vast
numbers of generations to form systematic typologies of resemblance and difference that
we call race today. It is taste that has served to differentiate into categories and types the
systematic features that entice and appeal (Grosz, 2011, page 137).
The operations of ideals of beauty and taste produce races through sexual selection. To
quote again:
This phenomenon coupled with the possibilities of geographical separation or dispersion
and thus long term isolation are the necessary conditions for the constitution of
a subcategory or for incipient new races being created . It is primarily sexual not
natural selection that is capable of explaining the non-functional, excessive appeal of the
preservation of racially particular characteristics (pages 138139).
This is a particularly provocative account of groupness not only in terms of racial
groupings but also in terms of communities of taste that produce these systematic typologies
of resemblance and difference (page 137). For it is shared taste that makes race the product of
sexual selection. Grosz directs our attention to Darwins
claim about culturally specic standards of beauty. Different groups of men and women
nd different characteristics beautiful or attractive, and these tastes may be inherited. If
this is the case, then sexual selection may work upon the manifest or visible elements that
distinguish one race from another, such as skin color (Grosz, 2011, page 140).
986 Geopower: a panel discussion
This strand of Darwins work is not developed into a feminist politics of racial difference
in the way sexual selection is elaborated as a feminist politics of difference, and so raises
questions that might be pursued further. What is the relationship between racial characteristics
shared by men and women and sexual diamorphism? For me the language of typologies,
systematic features, of clearly distinguished categories of taste and bodily types jars with
an understanding of human difference that is continuous, never clear cut, never neatly
categorisable. Leaving aside the fundamental and perhaps unanswerable question of how
shared tastes ariseunless in some attraction to shared characteristics rather than the excess
of difference with sexual selectionwhat are the boundaries between these communities of
inherited taste and aesthetics? Geographical isolation seems to offer some logic of difference
here, but true isolation is rare.
And if this theory of the origins of racial difference in sexual selection relies on the
idea of each race possessing its own innate ideal standard of beauty(Grosz, 2011,
page 140), does it also imply the unappealing nature of physical dissimilarity between races,
so that sexual selection underpins the derogation of physical difference in many forms of
racism too. I am pushing the argument beyond its elaboration by Grosz here, because it
deserves attention as a provocative alternative to accounts of human diversity as the product
of natural selection in varied environmentswhat Grosz aligns with sociobiology but also
works as a popular antiracist explanation of human difference. An environmental explanation
of patterns of human diversity may only partially work, but the turn to sexual selection is
an underdeveloped alternative. Finally, to return to the focus of the session, is there a more
explicit place for this account of sexual selection and race in Chaos, Territory, Art ?
Response
Elizabeth Grosz
Womens Studies Program, Duke University, 208C East Duke Building, Campus Box 90760,
Durham, NC 27708, USA; e-mail: elizabeth.grosz@duke.edu
A lot of questions. Im not going to be able to answer them all, or pretend to answer them all. I
thank you all for the thought and complexity, especially political complexity you have added
to my work. Darwin may be a central gure in how we rethink geopower, how we rethink
living economies and political forces, something for which he is not commonly recognised.
Darwin is so fascinating because I think hardly anyone reads him, I never read him, and
reading his texts was a remarkable eye opener, because his work is so intimately connected to
the political questions that dominated the 19th century and are still pressing today, questions
addressed by on the one hand liberalism and the work of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor
(Mill was Darwins best friend), which has become the cornerstone for the justication of
various forms of egalitarianism, whether linked to class, race, or gender, and on the other
hand, Marx and Engels, who at times worked nearby (Marx writes to Darwin and says that he
wants to dedicate the second volume of Capital to him, and Darwin says no thank you, Im
in enough trouble already please dont!). So the most radical, cutting-edge thinking at the
time that Darwin was writing provides a kind of intellectual context for his work and for our
understanding of his potential relevance today, not simply as a theorist of biological life but
also as a theorist of the movements of space, time, and the forces of the earth itself: that is, as
an ontologist as well. This may be why questions like labour and the function of capitalism
in its regulation are inherent, not in what he is saying, but in the logical implications of his
understanding. The question of capitalism and of its correlate geopowers, those regulating
colonialism and empire as well as patriarchy in its myriad forces, remain central, because
Darwin shows how lifes modes of differentiation and distribution, through random diversity,
natural selection, and sexual selection, are the very materials that modes of power attempt to
Geopower: a panel discussion 987
utilise for their own purposes. Ive sort of been thinking about Deleuze and capitalism, and
Marx, but I think one of the things that is really interesting about capitalism is that it cannot
work unless it nds some desire that makes us want to accumulate something. So, part of
the logic of consumerism is the capitalisation of what we call pleasure, but could also be
called something like sexual intensity. Now, weve come to a moment, I think, beyond what
Marx had envisaged as the logic of the end of capitalism, because what we are seeing now
is nothing that is no longer a commodity, the supercession of the commodity itself. Instead
of the saturation of markets with commodities, capitalism has very recently discovered a
way to make affects themselves commodiable. Sensations, feelings, abilities, privileges are
becoming commodities beyond the form of the commodity.
There was an article in the paper yesterday about how banks are creating mortgages
for people who want in vitro fertilisation: the yearning for a child is now something that is
bankable. And in a way this is the logic of art as well. I want to suggest that there is no art that
is not capitalisable in the long run. The moment the art market nds selling Aboriginal art is
the only thing of interest, then something in Aboriginal art also kind of dies. But capitalism
itself doesnt ever produce the intensity that formulates these desires, it markets itself by
extracting them from a body that produces them spontaneously. Whats fascinating about life
if we look at it in nonhuman forms is the intensity and joy of things that havent yet been
capitalised on (or at least not yet). Let me give you an example thats so fantastic for this
panel: a 30 000 year old plant was reactivated, or rather it was germinated, by the Russians
last week. Well, some artistic squirrel buried that nut, because he/she liked the look of it, and
30 000 years later a scientist brings it to life, because there was something beautiful in it. So,
theres something about intensity and feeling and sensation that is arousing and intensifying
in every living thing. Capitalism is so clever, because it has found a way of using that to sell
products. The most striking example of that at the moment is the ubiquity of music in places
trying to sell clothes, because they want to associate clothes with sexiness, and music is the
easiest way to do it without sounding ridiculous (get your sexy clothes here is not going
to work!). Capitalism has found a way of utilising these pleasures to produce a circulation
of predigested sensations. Now, art at its best does produce sensations that we have never
had before and in a wayand this is why I feel so optimistic even amongst the political
pessimism of the moment, because theres always going to be this residue of excess that may
be capitalised on or marketed next, but hasnt been capitalised on yet. I was lled with joy
at the organisation of occupy Wall Street, a lot of people were probably lled with joy, not
because it operated as a new set of strategies, which it didnt, but it said: theres another kind
of desire at work other than the desire to borrow money, to get a mortgage, to accumulate
more objects . This too is part of an excess that capitalism will end up trying to spiral into
sooner or later.
The encounter of life with a world produces an intensity that leads to attraction, pleasure,
art, which themselves are capitalisable by other kinds of forces, religious forces and economic
forces in particular. One doesnt plan an economic system, nor a religious system, but these
systems work and maintain themselves, because they link into something to do with the
structure of our pleasures and desires by directing them in other ways. What is there to do to
resist? I dont know what the answer is except that theres always going to be a space of
encounter between these potentials and forces and the surprising-ness of the body. Now, this
is a feminist politics, I think, in so much as these bodies are sexualised, and the sexuality of
these bodies is something we dont adequately understand at present. What sex could mean
for us, beyond capitalism and colonialism, we dont know yet given that sex is the most direct
mechanism for selling commodities. So I feel optimistic, not optimistic about next week,
or next year, and I dont feel optimistic about the future of our species, but I feel incredibly
988 Geopower: a panel discussion
optimistic about the openness of life, for however self- and other-destructive in one area, it
renews itself in another, whether at the level of cockroaches and insects, who may of course
inherit the earth. Now, I havent really answered everyones questions at all, but I think for
me this is about politics, but its about politics three steps before we can really think about
politics, so its about the raw material, the forces, of politics and the ontological conditions
under which politics can emerge, forces of the earth, forces of things, forces of living beings.
Acknowledgements. The panel would like to sincerely thank Elizabeth Grosz for her generosity in
this exchange at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting (AAG) and in the
subsequent development of this paper. Thanks are due also to Stuart Elden, Deborah Cowen, and
Jamie Lorimer who chaired the event at the AAG.
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2012 Pion and its Licensors