Postcollectivity
Situated Knowledge and Practice
Edited by
Agnieszka Jelewska
Michał Krawczak
Julian Reid
LEIDEN | BOSTON
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Figures viii
Notes on Contributors ix
Postcollectivity
New Ways of Gathering and Practicing in Times of Crises 1
Agnieszka Jelewska, Michał Krawczak and Julian Reid
Part 1
Resistivity
1 Resistance 15
Julian Reid
2 Carnivalesque Postcollectivity
Reenactment as Decolonial Subversion 27
Adela Goldbard
3 Collecting Crumbs of Lost Knowledge
Learning from Postindustrial and Postsocialist Disruptions 45
Andrzej W. Nowak
4 Borderforms 68
Grant Leuning and Pepe Rojo
5 The Networked Public Sphere and the Sectarian Public
Stephen Dersley
86
Part 2
Co-existence
6 Collective Co-existence, Climate Apocalypse, and a Nature-Relational
Way Forward 111
Peter H. Kahn, Jr., Sarena Sabine and Carly E. Gray
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
vi Contents
7 As I Sit Down to Write a Monsoon Story without Cloud Bands
Harshavardhan Bhat
8 A Meteorology of Media
Brett Zehner
128
137
9 Not-Only-Human-Habitat, or Pedagogies of Vulnerable Collectives
in the Age of Extractivist Fantasies 148
Anna Nacher
10 Media Warfare
The Coercive Coexistence of Radiation and Memory 165
Agnieszka Jelewska
Part 3
Transversality
11 The Right to Breathe Is the Right to Speak
The Transversality of Environmental Pollution and Postdigital
Infrastructures 187
Michał Krawczak
12 Transversal Physiognomies and the Postcollective Self
Jan Stasieńko
206
13 The Silicon Gender
Technological Species and the Transgression of Model Sexes
Ania Malinowska
14 Towards a Postmonetary Collectivity
Jens Schröter
Index
224
236
249
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
c hapter 1
Resistance
Julian Reid
Resistance, today, has an image problem. What is it, where is it, who does it,
to whom and what and how? How do we know what is resistance and what is
not? Each of these questions is a question of the image of resistance. Research
in the social sciences on resistance commonly points to the limits of our imaginaries when it comes to the question of resistance, and the ways in which
those limits lead us to the issue of form.
A recent article by the geographer Sarah Hughes provides a classic example. She complains of the “predetermination of form that particular actions or
actors must assume” to be considered as resistance (Hughes 2020, 1). She points
out what it is we risk missing or ignoring in having succumbed to such “predeterminations of form”, and then proceeds to revisit fundamental assumptions
at work in concepts and practices of resistance, before making an argument for
an engagement with a wider understanding of resistance, one that does away
with traditional images of resistance, as linear, intentional, oppositional forms
of agency, to focus instead on new, different and better ones, such as incoherence, multiplicity, becoming and emergence. The basic idea is that the emergence of alternative forms of life are held back by resistance once resistance
is shut off from these alternatives on account of the limits of the imaginaries
framing it (Povinelli 2011, 14). “Traditional framings” of resistance are seen as
problematic in these literatures, as new “intersectional” framings are championed (Taylor 2017, 20–21). The struggle over the image, form, and frame of
resistance is all about making it more “accessible” to its own potentials (Taylor
2017, 14), as theorists of resistance call for a mobilisation of the imagination to
release images of resistance from the confines of the myths which condition it.
This kind of problematisation of form is not confined to resistance. Much
has been made in recent years of how ‘the West’ in its entirety has been shaped
by a certain understanding of the origins of forms. The anthropologist, Philippe
Descola, has argued that what defines the West, and what distinguishes it from
other civilizations, is its belief in what he calls “the heroic model of creation”;
the idea, that is, of “production as the imposition of form upon inert matter”
(Descola 2014, 323). Descola demonstrates the peculiarity and cultural specificity of this idea, discussing how foreign it is to, for example, Chinese culture,
but more especially to that of the Indians of Amazonia, for who there is no
© Julian Reid, 2024 | DOI:10.1163/9789004694880_003
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
16 Reid
heroic imposition of forms onto anything, but simply reciprocal processes of
co-creation (Descola 2014, 321–325). Another anthropologist, Tim Ingold, has
made a similar kind of critique of such ‘hylomorphism’, the theory according
to which form is that which is simply imposed onto matter by practitioners
(Ingold 2010, 20–21). Indeed, Ingold’s work is a classic example of an attempt to
make us think differently about the processes through which forms themselves
are engendered. Practices of deformation, themselves emergent through the
agency of the matter acted upon, are today seen as intrinsic to the processes by
which form evolves. Arguing for exactly this, Ingold drew significantly on the
work of Deleuze and Guattari, for whom the resistance of matter was key to the
processes by which form develops (Ingold 2010, 25; Deleuze and Guattari 1999).
In terms of the political theory of resistance, the question of the connections between form and image is doubtless an essential one. The theorist and
historian of Black radicalism, Cedric Robinson, makes this point very well. In
his now classic text, Black Marxism, he describes how the Europeans who bore
historical witness to the resistances of African peoples to enslavement were
perfectly able to understand why those peoples would rebel, and yet, how they
could not comprehend the forms which African resistance took (Robinson
2021, 309). The limits of European imaginaries when it came to resistance
meant those forms were dismissed, not as resistance, but as the expressions
of madness, of insanity, of savagery, and satanism (Robinson 2021, 309). Yet,
as Robinson well maintains, the invention of those forms were themselves the
expression of the combination of a power of imagination with an ability to
conserve what was most fundamental to a culture, that of black African culture (Robinson 2021, 309). Within western scholarship on slavery a mythic and
false image of the docility of slaves has been perpetrated at the cost of a real
understanding of the multiplicity of forms which resistance took (Owens 1976,
70–105).
The argument as to the importance of form and the peculiar limits of
European abilities to comprehend and enable its plasticities can be applied to
every possible kind of resistance. There would seem to be something intrinsic
to the limits of the European imagination when it comes to resistance which
has made it difficult to see resistance for what it is, whenever a given act of
resistance has not complied with those limits. Imagination and form are, in
this sense, highly interrelated when it comes to the question of resistance.
Resistance requires imagination to be inventive, yet it easily runs up against
the limits of dominant imaginaries in the forms it takes. And those limits have
racial determinations. White thought is inflexible while Black thought is eminently elastic. Robinson’s argument continues to reverberate in contemporary
literatures on resistance.
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
Resistance
17
The argument goes that we have been taught to imagine resistance in
highly particular ways, and that these ways are no longer adequate for our
present. In short, we are told that we need to make new images of resistance,
as well as learn to deploy the imagination in ways that can change practices
of resistances, killing off those mythic, tired and clichéd images of resistance
as merely linear, intentional opposition to power, devised by autonomous
agents, with preconceived plans as to ‘what is to be done’, which lead to the
same tired and mythic forms of politics. We also, it is said, need to contribute to the creation of new intersectional subjects of resistance endowed with
the abilities to free us from those now outdated practices. This is a line of
argument about the relations between imagination, resistance, form and
myth that is fairly ubiquitous today. Numerous works express these kinds of
sentiments –the need to recover the imagination, as a source for resistance,
and in the process, reimagine what resistance is and how it takes place, in
order to free it from the limitations of imaginaries which would otherwise
stifle it.
This task is often foregrounded in relation to issues of the fight against neoliberalism. Mark Fisher, for one, argued it very well. The problem for Fisher
was that resistance today, and for some time, has been reduced to the limits
imposed by an imaginary of ‘anti-capitalism’. Shaped so, it has no alternative
vision to offer, or ‘positive political project’. All of which means it possesses
no better image of how society might be organized to that of its opponent.
Which is why, as he argued at least, it has become such a subdued hostage to
neoliberalism and its peculiar yet deeply naturalized image of the human as
a competitive, self-preserving and endlessly enterprising entity (Fisher 2018).
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi makes a similar kind of argument. For Berardi, Europe has
become a dogmatic project of reassuming and reinforcing neoliberal ideology,
of a neoliberal regulation that leads to the impoverishment of European societies: to the slashing of salaries, to the postponement of retirement, but most
crucially, to the project of colonizing the imagination itself (Berardi 2012, 38–
9). The future where Europe is concerned has become unimaginable as anything other than the further extension of this project. This is all testimony to
the power and success of neoliberal strategies that depend not simply on the
application of a set of economic rules and functions but “the internalization
of a certain set of limitations, of psychic automatism, of rules for compliance”
(Berardi 2012, 58).
Traditionally we have been taught also to see resistance as a peculiarly
human capacity. However, images of humans achieving forms of sovereignty
and security dependent on their distinction from, and exploitation of, other
life forms are no longer particularly in vogue today within critical theories
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
18 Reid
of resistance, as research into resistance chases after other more posthuman
commodities; vulnerability, perseverance, adaptation and resilience, for example. Discourses of resistance which involve recourse to ideas and concepts of
independence are dismissed as ableist, romanticized and anthropocentric, as
much as dependence becomes a capacity to be valorized (Taylor 2017, 205–
218). Much of this has, of course, to do with the racial underpinnings of humanist discourses on resistance. The human which has claimed sovereignty over
nature is the same white human which has dominated and exploited other
races of humanity on the basis of the understanding that whites are more
human than others; others whose lesser humanity renders them closer to a
nature which it is the right and responsibility of a white race to lord over. As we
have become more aware of the ways in which racism has shaped discourses
on the political left as much as on the right, so the humanism of leftism has
been brought further into question, as the construction of a posthuman subject has become an ever more urgent task for leftist critique on racial grounds.
As Rosi Braidotti puts it:
not all humans are equal and the human is not at all a neutral category. It
is rather a normative category that indexes access to privileges and entitlements. Appeals to the “human” are always discriminatory: they create
structural distinctions and inequalities among different categories of
humans. Humanity is a quality that is distributed according to a hierarchical scale centred on a humanistic idea of Man as the measure of all
things. This dominant idea is based on a simple assumption of superiority by a subject that is: masculine, white, Eurocentric, practicing compulsory heterosexuality and reproduction, able-bodied, urbanized, speaking
a standard language. This subject is the Man of reason that feminists,
anti-racists, black, indigenous postcolonial and ecological activists have
been criticizing for decades.
braidotti 2020
The task of the political imagination when it comes to imaginaries of resistance is quite clear then. Resistance must be deformed and re-imagined. The
limits of its dominant imaginary must be exploded; the image, that is, of its
subject, the white urban hetero able-bodied European man, and his servile
politics, his anti-capitalism, his economistic diagnosis of the limits of neoliberalism. In its place a new kind of subject must emerge, one that can reconcile
the differences between the trans feminists, the anti-racists, the blacks and the
indigenous, and the ecologically minded, and fight for the creation of a new
politics, one formed upon a different kind of image, capable of birthing a world
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
Resistance
19
beyond and outside of capitalism, neoliberalism, but also colonialism, racism,
sexism, anthropocentrism, and so on.
The indigenous tend to play particularly specious roles in these kinds of prescriptions. Indigenous peoples have been crucial to the narratives, mythologies
and ideologies of western states and their societies since the discovery of the
New World. We know much by now about the ways in which the indigenous
have been deployed to create the myth of a contrast between the old and the
new, the primitive and the developed, past and future. However, it is a fact, as
one of the great chroniclers of that mythology described, that the ideological
needs of western regimes have undergone significant changes since that discovery, and that the functions of the indigenous in practices of western myth-
making have changed much too. Their function in the 20th century was not
that which it was in the 19th, nor the latter that which it was in the 18th century,
and so on (Slotkin 1998, xvi–x vii). To understand how colonialism continues
to operate today we need to attend and be wise to the narrative adaptation
strategies of these regimes and changes in their operative languages, in ways
that Slotkin’s research was historically, and which we can see affecting the new
science and theory of resistance.
In the modern era at least, ideologies have tended to emerge from and as
a response and resistance to the oppressions of myth. As Slotkin put it, ideology is the product of a discontent with a world dominated by myth, and the
expression of a desire to free that world from myth (Slotkin 1998, 25). Problems
persist however with the ways in which ideologies tend to end up generating
their own myths based on their own narrative formulas (Slotkin 1989, 25–31).
Going beyond the kind of deconstruction of classic and nationalist structures
of myths which Slotkin’s research achieved, has to mean, however, examining
how ideologies mask themselves in a narrative of the deconstruction of myth
itself, and the deployment of new and old myths in discourses of resistance.
A classic example of this kind of paradox can be found in the work of
Braidotti, whose work Posthuman Knowledge entails significant references to
what she calls the “creative imagination” (Braidotti 2019, 132) as well as the
struggles of indigenous peoples, those “people who live closest to the earth”
(Braidotti 2019, 164), the alternatives which indigenous peoples supposedly
offer to critical imaginaries today, and the need of resistance movements to
learn from them about their ways of thinking and living (Braidotti 2019, 7).
The indigenous are, Braidotti argues, peoples that are or have been missing;
“subjects whose knowledge never made it into any of the official cartographies
or genealogies” (Braidotti 2019, 162) and she situates their struggles “for visibility and emergence” as the driver of what she calls a “radical politics of immanence, aimed at actualizing minority-driven knowledges through transversal
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
20 Reid
alliances” (Braidotti 2019, 162). Similar demands to make indigenous peoples
and their indigeneity more visible, learn from them, and build alliances with
them, have been made by a host of other thinkers concerned with resistance,
including Judith Butler (Butler and Athanasiou 2013), Elizabeth Povinelli
(2011), Bruno Latour (2017), Donna Haraway (2016), Timothy Morton (2017),
and Anna Tsing (2015).
Are the indigenous of these discourses on resistance the people who were
missing and are now being given presence by such authors, or do they remain,
simply, a figment of western myth-making? A point well made by Slotkin was
that myths are never simply tools of conservative ideologies, but also of radically critical ideologies too. Indeed, the same myths tend to reinforce both
kinds of ideology simultaneously. In the 1960s, to give an example which
Slotkin dwells on, “counter-cultural radicalism” deployed the myth of the frontier, and that of the “Noble Savage” to critique a form of society which had
“gone wrong” (Slotkin 1998, 17).
The iconography of beads and headbands, the adoption of “tribal” life-styles
as a form of communalism untainted by political association with communism,
the rationalization of drug use as a form of mystic religiosity, the linkage of
political and ecological concerns, the withdrawal to wilderness refuges and the
adoption of an “outlaw” or “renegade” stance towards the larger society –all of
these phenomena so special to the sixties were acted out as if they were not
innovative at all, but merely repetitions of an older pattern (Slotkin 1998, 17).
It is a fiction to assert, as Braidotti does, that the knowledge of the indigenous never entered into official cartographies of power. By contrast it had a
very crucial function in the construction of western myth making, as a weak
and negative counterpart to positive and superior western forms. The problem
is that the counter-cultures of today are simply trying to reverse the structures
of western mythologies in much the same ways that those movements of the
1960s did which Slotkin well describes.
Much of this latest turn to indigeneity is motivated by the underlying
desire of thinkers including Braidotti to advance what they call “posthumanism”. Indigenous peoples are said to possess a radically different cosmology to
peoples in the West, one that does not support the human/non-human distinction supposedly so central to Western political imaginaries since at least
the Enlightenment, and which is held to blame for a great deal of historical
damage (Braidotti 2019, 7; Descola 2014). Indigenous peoples never bought
human exceptionalism, it is argued; they understand intrinsically the depths
of human vulnerability, the need to build caring relationships with each other
as well as other species, and act as custodians for the environments on which
they depend for survival.
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
Resistance
21
All of this is myth. There is plenty of more balanced and empirically
grounded research, both anthropological and otherwise, to demonstrate that
indigenous cultures are as complex in their constructions of the purpose of the
animal as their western counterparts (Reid 2020). One particularly dangerous
myth of indigeneity coshared by Left and Right today, is that of the resilience
of indigeneous peoples. Resilience has in fact already been widely exposed
across the social sciences as a key component of the ideology of neoliberalism
(Cretney 2014). And much of the discussion around the topic has headed in
the direction of the question of how precisely to resist resilience (Slater 2022).
Meanwhile however, fashionable works continue to treat resilience as if it
is some kind of partisan property of those working on the outside of power.
Marquis Bey’s recent book, Black Trans Feminism, which is another attempt to
articulate a politics of the multitude is a case in point. As Bey puts it, “(T)he
multitude carries with it a resilience via its plasticity, its ability to be more than
and excessive of the unitary. In black trans resilience, an embodied ‘antagonism of subjectivity’ … there is flexibility” (Bey 2022, 214).
Resilience is not the source of resistance. It is that which is to be resisted.
Resisting resilience, however, requires the indigenous turning on these oppressive sources of critique in which the resilience agenda is now advancing. And
a complication of doing that is that these sources of critique also come garbed
in a discourse of resistance, and a discourse of resistance itself cloaked as a
critique of existing and predetermined forms. As we are told, today we have to
be wary of pertaining to forms of resistance that do more damage than good.
Resistance is something but it’s not enough, to paraphrase Braidotti. “Politics”,
as she puts it, “requires not just resistance, but the effort to activate the generative force of virtual possibilities” (Braidotti 2019, 177). As such a politics of
resistance which does not simultaneously function to activate “the generative
force of virtual possibilities”, we have to assume, is a politics which is lacking: a
politics which is not enough, and indeed if it is a politics which connects with
and draws support from “the sovereign power of the master signifier which
means what it says and says what it means” (Braidotti 2019, 174–175) then it is a
politics which resistance itself has to be tasked with dismantling; the object of
opposition for the kinds of resistance Braidotti is calling for.
Thou shalt not speak in the language of the master signifier, is one of the
fundamental ‘do not’s’ of this present discourse on resistance, which seeks to
adapt us to the harsh realities of the Anthropocene, bend us to accommodate
the new forces emerging, which exceed anthropocentric perspectives, and rid
us of the white western humanisms which led to the Anthropocene in the first
place. The source of resistance, from now on, once the subject has swallowed
this message, and adapted itself to the new world and its conditions, will be
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
22 Reid
as Braidotti also informs us, not just the indigenous, but “the resilience of zoe”
(Braidotti 2019, 177).
That is an interesting turn of phrase; “the resilience of zoe”. Derrideans
might choose to dwell a while on that phrase and wonder at it. Does Braidotti
mean that zoe, in its infinite resilience, is the source of resistance? Or is it that
resilience is the subject here? That resilience, being always derivate of, and an
expression of, zoe, is the source of resistance? Is resistance another word, in a
way, for resilience, and vice versa? And what of the relationships of indigenous
peoples to zoe? Are they mere zoe? Or have they just digested their Agamben
better?
Braidotti’s philosophico-political alignment with the powers of Zoe goes
back some way in her work. In her relatively early book, Transpositions, for
example, she elaborated on Zoe as that which “marks the outside” of a “particular vision of the subject”; that is, the outside of “male, white, heterosexual,
Christian, property-owning, standard-language-speaking citizens” kinds of
of subjects (Braidotti 2006 37). Zoe is to bios “the poor half” in a couple, she
argues, wherein bios claims the mantle of intelligence and sociability while Zoe
is left at home to do the laundry (Braidotti 2006, 37). The struggle to free Zoe
from its subjection within its coupling to bios is akin to that which Deleuze and
Guattari theorized in terms of the nomad to the state (Deleuze and Guattari
1999). Resistance, in this vein of thought, is a practice which connects those
who find themselves, contemporarily, on this outside, being neither male,
white, heterosexual, christian, property-owning, standard language speaking,
with all those historical nomads of yore on which Deleuze and Guattari constructed their own theory of grand historical struggle. And indeed, this connection to the nomadic is not incidental to Braidotti’s thought either, going
back some way, and being essential to her contribution.
For Braidotti, the nomad has long been precisely the answer to the problem
of “the poverty of the social imaginary”, when it comes to resistance (Braidotti
2002, 5). The nomad is also a way to bring the outside in, at least in terms of
her inhabitation of philosophy itself (Braidotti 2002, 7), and a way of avoiding the customary separation of reason from imagination which has so held
back philosophy when it has come to the task of the apprehension of forms
which break with established ideologies of resistance. An admittedly “iconoclastic, mythic figure”, the nomadic subject is nevertheless the subject capable
of rescuing us from the conventions of established imaginaries of resistance
(Braidotti 2002, 7).
What if this mythic and iconoclastic figure is not the liberator it is claimed
to be, and itself a force for the colonization of imaginaries? Let us recall that
Deleuze wrote not only of the people who are missing, in the present, but of
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
Resistance
23
the people which are to come, in the future, so to say (Deleuze,1989). The task
of the people to come, Deleuze argued, was precisely to destroy dominant
imaginaries. It is a community of iconoclasts which seeks to destroy icons
in order to create a space for the consistution of a new regime of images. It
imposes its own images with as ruthless a power as it destroys those of its enemies. Any serious theorist of resistance and power today has to engage with
Deleuze (and Guattari), and yet soon runs up against the issue that Deleuze’s
work has become so iconic that it demands being destroyed itself, being so
overwrought in its influence. One is not at the margins if reading and citing
Deleuze, one is at the centre, and there to be attacked. Still, there are better and
worse readings of Deleuze; those which are nuanced and allow for complex
interpretation, and those which reduce him to one side in a binary struggle,
between the nomad and the state, for example, or the imagination and reason.
When it comes to theorizing resistance today the imperative which governs
thought is that of the necessity to be suspicious of forms, to work for deformation, to see and empower the materials within the forms, the emergent properties of which are only ever contained by form itself. Form has become in itself
a conceit, an imposition of sovereigns, an expression of power, and a problem
for resistance. Yet it bears remembering that we have known since at least,
Foucault, that power itself incites resistance, and that it needs resistance, in
order to be, and moreover that it knows this (Foucault 1990).
Foucault’s thesis, so radical for its time, and so abstract in its formulation, is
confirmed in the work of Ingold, which works through the problem of form via
practices. Ingold describes, for example, how in learning to make a basket, the
novice runs up against the resistance of the willow, only to discover that it is
that very resistance which makes willow such a conducive material for basket
making (Ingold 2010, 22). In the drive to make a theory of resistance which
would exceed the limits of hylomorphic models the work is already complete,
and there is little more to be done. As with the making of baskets, it is left up
to the artisan to decide when to finish. It would be possible to go on forever,
yet at some point, if only for the maker to go home and sleep, it is necessary to
stop (Ingold 2010, 23).
There is a paradoxical problem with regards to the roles of imagination in
resistance here. It is wrong, we learn, to attempt to impose an image onto resistance. This is what we Europeans have done historically, following the hylomorphic model, and it is this error of image-imposition which accounts for
the many failures to recognize and comprehend practices of resistance which
confounded the images we had made for it. Instead, imagination is supposed
to follow the morphogenetic model which Ingold and others have developed.
Adhering to this latter model means the image of resistance has to ally with
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
24 Reid
whatever the practices of resistance produce. Images are, at most, participants
in a field of forces combined with other tools and practices, working towards
the production of emergent forms. They must not be allowed to become dominant or legislative in this process, as this would be to miscomprehend the ways
through which resistance works (Ingold 2010, 126–127). However, on the other
hand, imagination is needed, we are told, if resistance is to be truly creative
(Robinson 2021; Braidotti 2019), and critics of the failures of resistance to neoliberalism berate the weakness of the imaginaries shaping it, and call for more
imagination, and better, more potent images (Fisher 2018; Berardi 2012).
Which is it to be then? Does the image problem which besets resistance
demand more imagination or less? The imaginaries which govern resistance
produce a limitation of forms of resistance. Dominant and prescriptive images
of resistance are held accountable for forms which fail us strategically, as well
as for failures of apprehension when it comes to the encounter with truly
imaginative forms of resistance. It is obvious, therefore, that one answer to
the problematic has to be an expansion of the imagination in order to produce
better images strategically, and as a means to increase the powers of apprehension by which we recognize resistance in all its multiplicities. Is there, then, a
nomadic imagining, akin to what Maggie Nelson describes, after Braidotti, as
“nomadic remembering” (Nelson 2021, 214), which would perform this work of
reconciliation between strategy and ethics in the field of resistance? And yet,
it is as obvious that this problematization of resistance, dominated by forms
which function to limit and exclude, is itself today a legislative one, formative of an industry of critique, which functions to police images of resistance.
Perhaps, therefore, it is time to revisit the supposedly Deleuzian critique of
the hylomorphism on which so much of this problem seems to hang. Of all
the authors, makers, figures who so inspired Deleuze to think about resistance, as well as about images, we might consider what he had to say about T.E.
Lawrence, who defined himself “solely in relation to the force through which
he projects images into the real”, images he drew from himself and his friends
(Deleuze 1998, 118). Yes, resistance requires images and imagination, if it is
to escape being dragged into this quagmire of impotence where it now finds
itself, deformed beyond all recognition, wedded to political power. But we also
need to recognise the depths of the problem, when it comes to the functions of
images and imagination in the strategies of the forms of political power which
resistance is tasked with undoing. Too often what comes declared as resistance, and too often arguments and analyses claiming to be aimed at freeing
up resistance from what it is not, reveal themselves too easily as dependent on
myths and forms deriving from regimes of representation that are themselves
already dominant and subjugating.
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
Resistance
25
References
Berardi, Franco B. (2012) The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. New York: Semiotext.
Bey, Marquis (2022) Black Trans Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Braidotti, Rosi (2020) ‘We’ are in this Together, But We are not One and the Same.
Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 17: 465–469.
Braidotti, Rosi (2019) Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Braidotti, Rosi (2006) Transpositionsi. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Braidotti, Rosi (2002) Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Butler, Judith and Athanasiou Athena (2013) Dispossession: The Performance in the
Political. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cretney, Raven (2014) Resilience for Whom? Emerging Critical Geographies of Socio-
ecological Resilience. Geography Compass 8(9): 627–640.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1999) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism &
Schizophrenia. Volume 2. London: Athlone Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1998) Essays Critical and Clinical. London: Verso.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Athlone Press.
Descola, Philippe (2014) Beyond Nature & Culture. Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press.
Fisher, Mark (2018) Foreword. In: Davies W (ed.) Economic Science Fictions. London:
Goldsmiths Press.
Foucault, Michel (1990) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. London: Penguin.
Haraway, Donna (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Hughes, Sara M. (2020) On Resistance in Human Geography. Progress in Human
Geography 44(6): 1–20.
Ingold, Tim (2010) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London
and New York: Routledge.
Latour, Bruno (2017) Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime. Cambridge:
Polity.
Morton, Timothy (2017) Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People. London and
New York: Verso.
Nelson, Maggie (2021) On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Owens, Leslie H. (1976) This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Povinelli, Elisabeth (2011) Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance
in Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid
26 Reid
Reid, Julian (2020) Constructing Human versus Non-human Climate Migration in the
Anthropocene: The Case of Migrating Polar Bears in Nunavut. Anthropocenes –
Human, Inhuman, Posthuman 1(1): 2.
Robinson, Cedric J. (2021) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.
London: Penguin.
Slater, Graham B. (2022) Terms of Endurance: Resilience, Grit, and the Cultural Politics
of Neoliberal Education. Critical Education 13(1): 1–16.
Slotkin, Richard (1998) The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of
Industrialization 1800–1890. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Taylor, Sunaura (2017) Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. New York and
London: The New Press.
Tsing, Anna L. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in
Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
For use by the Author only | © 2024 Julian Reid