Footnotes

1. “When the night itself is there, there is no longer anything to see […] Though there is no longer anything to see, we see and do not see nothingness. We see the darkness. […] When we close our doors to forces that may prey on us under the cover of darkness, we redouble the visible night with an auditory night, an olfactory night, a tactile night.” - Alfonso Lingis, “Nightwatch”. ↩

2. “The elementary human unity is not the body (the individual) but the form-of-life […] To latecomer’s eyes like ours, the conjuring away of every form-of-life seems to be the West’s peculiar destiny.” Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War. ↩

3. “A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne’s thread. Or the song of Orpheus.” - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. ↩

4. What I have begun to stammer is not my own signal, but transmission I will mangle as I repeat it. I most recently received this transmission from the Fyrthyr Institute for Unsettling Technologies, who seek to think, feel, and work at the scale of 500 years to transform 500 years of brutal colonial violence and extraction. ↩

5. “All knowledge, human and nonhuman, is now stammering, and the question asked in each zone is how to share a concerned perplexity, how not to dream of a solution, but to learn, as Donna Haraway put it, to ‘stay with the trouble.’” - Isabelle Stengers. “The Earth Won’t Let Itself be Watched.” ↩

6. “It’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking.” - Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. ↩

7. “The earth rotates; and we move with it, experiencing the routine of day and night as the prime necessity in our lives. The first Roman to mention the report of the midnight sun disbelieved it. He was an educated man well aware of the necessities of nature. In this way, the necessities of nature can be exaggerated. But all the same, in some sense or another, they are there.” Alfred North Whitehead. Modes of Thought. ↩

8. “For Brin the true lesson of 9/11 was given by the passengers of flight 93, ordinary people who were able to act and make a difference without waiting for an authority to tell them. They were able to do so because they had the means to know, understand and think the situation they were in. This is what Brin casts his lot with. Messy, chaotic, undependable as people may be, he will resist any nostalgia or wish for a wise authority which would lead them back to a trusting, obedient position. Only they can make the difference we need.” - Isabelle Stengers, “Gaia, The Urgency to Think and Feel”. ↩

9. Non–Euclidian geometries such as Riemannian geometry and topological manifolds are distinguished from Euclidian geometry by what is important to each about the transformations of shapes. In Euclidian geometry, transformations such as rotation, translation, and scaling of a shape such as a triangle preserve the “identity” of the shape. If you translate one vertex of a triangle, however, the identity of the shape may be changed, and such a transformation is no longer invariant. In Riemannian geometry, by contrast, the identity of a shape (or a space) is not contingent on its position, scale, or rotation. Punctures and discontinuities are important variances for these non–Euclidian geometries. Take a ball of dough and roll it out into a disk. Same shape. Fold the the disk into a cylindrical cannoli, and now you have made an important transformation because you have generated new modes of traversing across the surface of a shape. There is now a way through; the shape has meaningfully changed. Cut the cannoli into two; you have again altered the set of possible ways in which you may trace your finger across the dough. Pierce the top of the cannoli with a decorative dowel, and you have transformed the shape again. In the space of politics, we might think carefully about whether such transformations are reversible. ↩

10. In ecology, niche construction refers to the way in which organisms transform environments and hence transform the conditions for the proliferation and diversification of life and experience. By pairing this ecological term with the vocabulary of transformations native to Riemannian geometry in the context of politics, I am suggesting to think of the political-social sphere of life as a space which may be transformed in many ways, including local foldings over which do not necessarily affect the global. ↩

11. “When I say “Alice becomes larger,” I mean that she becomes larger than she was. By the same token, however, she becomes smaller than she is now. Certainly, she is not bigger and smaller at the same time. She is larger now; she was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and smaller than one becomes.” - Gilles Deleuze. “First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming”. Logic of Sense. ↩

12. “Everybody knows, no one can deny, is the form of representation and the discourse of the representative.” - Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. ↩

13. “Actually, to assume a form-of-life is a letting-go, an abandonment. It is at once fall and elevation, a movement and a staying-within-oneself.” - Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War. ↩

14. See the Winkie’s Diner scene from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. ↩

15. “Above all it is the quality of the laughter that interests me. I do not want a mocking laughter, or a laughter of derision, an irony that always and without risk recognizes the same thing beyond the differences. I would like to make possible the laughter of humor, which comprehends and appreciates without waiting for salvation, and can refuse without letting itself terrorize.” + “Irony opposes power to power.” + “Humor, by contrast, is an art of immanence.” - Isabelle Stengers. The Invention of Modern Science. ↩

16. The Great Law of Peace was a decision making and consensus building framework for the Iroquois Confederacy made up of the Haudensaunee peoples of Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tucarora. The Great Law of Peace may have originated as early as the 1190. The Seven Generation’s principle in the footnote which follows is taken from the document of the Great Law of Peace. ↩

17. “24. The Lords of the Confederacy of the Five Nations shall be mentors of the people for all time. The thickness of their skin shall be seven spans—which is to say that they shall be proof against anger, offensive actions and criticism. Their hearts shall be full of peace and good will and their minds filled with a yearning for the welfare of the people of the Confederacy. With endless patience they shall carry out their duty and their firmness shall be tempered with a tenderness for their people. Neither anger nor fury shall find lodgment in their minds and all their words and actions shall be marked by calm deliberation.” - The Constitution of the Iroquois Nations: The Great Binding Law, Gayanashagowa. ↩

18. ??? (sic).³⁵ ↩

19. “Real communism consists in creating the conditions for human renewal: activities in which people can develop themselves as they produce, organizations in which the individual is valuable rather than functional. Accomplishing this requires a movement - to change the character of work itself. And redefining work as creative activity can only happen as individuals emerge from stifled, emotionally blocked rhythms of constraint. It will take more than the will to change, in the current situation; to resist neutralization itself demands desire.” - Felix Guattari and Tony Negri. Communists Like Us. ↩

20. “God is only a spell cast upon existence. He comes along like hail, sometimes dew or a storm. Belief, in turn, puts on airs of freedom; ups the stakes; imposes itself; stretches itself out over the socius.” - Felix Guattari. “I am God Most of the Time.” Chaosophy. ↩

21. “Thunderbolts explode between different intensities, but they are preceded by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines their path in advance but in reverse, as though intagliated.” - Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. ↩

22. “Isabelle Stengers wrote me one day to ask on which conditions and at what price I could do without God. The answer is not speculative; it is a thorn in the flesh. All of that costs a great deal. It’s inconceivable! Unbearable! Sauve qui peut (trans.: “may they who can, save themselves”)! And God for all.” - Felix Guattari. “I am God Most of the Time”. ↩

23. “The magical universe is made of a network of access points to each domain of reality: thresholds, summits, limits, and crossing points, attached to one another through their singularity and their exceptional character.” + “We suppose that technicity results from a phase shift of a unique, central, and original mode of being in the world: the magical mode; the phase that balances out technicity is the religious mode of being. Aesthetic thought appears at the neutral point, between technics and religion, at the moment of the splitting of the primitive magical unity: it is not a phase, but rather a permanent reminder of the rupture of unity of the magical mode of being, as well as a reminder of the search for its future unity.” - Gilbert Simondon. “The Genesis of Technicity.” ↩

24. “[…] connections may also be needed to heal and to learn. […] In order to honor the making of connections, to protect it against models and norms, a name may be required. Animism could be the name for this rhizomatic art [… One is an animist in] terms of assemblages that generate metamorphic transformation in our capacity to affect and be affected—and also to feel, think, and imagine. Animism may, however, be a name for reclaiming these assemblages, since it lures us into feeling that their efficacy is not ours to claim. Against the insistent poisoned passion of dismembering and demystifying, it affirms that which they all require in order not to enslave us: that we are not alone in the world.” - Isabelle Stengers. “Reclaiming Animism”. ↩

25. “There is danger soon as there are dreams of the other. At the moment that people’s dreams are devouring, it risks to engulf us; the other’s dream is dangerous. Dreams have a terrible will to power and each one of us is a victim of the others’ dreams. Even when it is the most gracious of young girls, her dreams are terrible devourers, not of her soul but by her dreams. Beware of the other’s dream, because if you are caught in the other’s dream, you are fucked.” Gilles Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act?”. ↩

26. “Come open up your heart / Come on and open up your heart / Come on and open up your heart / Come on dream on, dream baby dream” - Suicide. “Dream Baby Dream”. ↩

27. “The reclaiming movement of the neo-pagan witches, which survived the attack together with other activists, has learned a lot since, but it was certainly not helped by frowning and pouting academics. The witch Starhawk had some reason to write that “The smoke of the burned witches still hangs in our nostrils”. In our academic nostrils it hangs with the obsessive fear to be accused of being dupe, of having forgotten that the academic first duty is to debunk belief, that is, to honour a truth the first attribute of which is to hurt.” - Isabelle Stengers. “Gaia, on the Urgency to Think and Feel”. ↩

28. “And the smoke of lynched negros hangs in our nostrils ³⁶, betraying the sacrifices haunting the tabula rasas upon which Freud and Stanley rationalized their maps and legends of dark continents³⁷—their patriarchal fantasies of feminine sexuality, their supremacist fantasies of the bestiality of Blackest Africa. And the horror, the horror urges us to think and feel³⁸. What is being reminded is the imperative to dream—not to study The Interpretation of Dreams, but simply to have them, because to dream is itself an act of interpreting reality.” - Muindi Fanuel Muindi. ↩

29. “If you act on expressive material, then you will see the possibility of a new, trans-subjective form of human being. You will no longer see a controlled individual. You will see a complex and resistant multiplicity.” - Brian Holmes. “Count to Three”. ↩

30. ""My” form-of-life relates not to what I am, but to how I am what I am.” - Tiqqun. Introduction to Civil War. ↩

31. “Why have we all lost touch with this beauty? Maybe saving a forest starts with preserving some of the feelings that die inside us every day - those parts of ourselves that we deny. For if we cannot respect that interior land, then neither can we respect the land we walk. So let us, in walking gently upon the earth, leave behind a simple legacy: that we’re new warriors, mystic warriors, who love the earth, and try to save it.” - Annie Blackburn in Twin Peaks. ↩

32. “[Peace] is the feeling as to what would happen if right could triumph in a beautiful world, with discord routed.³⁹ It is the passionate desire for the beautiful result, in this instance. Such love is distracting, nerve-racking […] It involves deep feeling of an aim in the Universe, winning such triumph as is possible to it. It is the sense of Eros, hovering between Peace as the crown of Youth and Peace as the issue of Tragedy.” Alfred North Whitehead. Adventure of Ideas. ↩

33. “Is the mechanization and even robotization of our daily life the best that thousands of years of human labor can produce? Can we imagine reconstructing our lives around a commoning of our relations with others, including animals, waters, plants, and mountains—which the large-scale construction of robots will certainly destroy? This is the horizon that the discourse and the politics of the commons opens for us today, not the promise of an impossible return to the past but the possibility of recovering the power of collectively deciding our fate on this earth. This is what I call re-enchanting the world.” - Sylvia Federici. Re-enchanting the World: Reclaiming the Commons. ↩

34. “To this day, it does not appear possible for the two reticulations, that of technics within the geographical world and that of religions in the human world, to analogically encounter each other in a real, symbolic relation. And yet only in this way could the aesthetic impression state the rediscovery of the magical totality, by indicating that the forces of thought have once again found one another. Aesthetic feeling, common to both religious thought and technical thought, is the only bridge that could allow for the linking of these two halves of thought that result from the abandonment of magical thought.” - Gilbert Simondon. The Genesis of Technics. ↩

35. A temporary autonomous zone [TAZ] is a practice in anarchist circles theorized most notably by Hakim Bey. A TAZ may have a physical presence, as in an encampment or a renegade rave, but I suggest also emerges in the register of affect. The word autonomy resonates with the Italian Autonomia movement. Autonomy may be thought of as a signpost rather than a dictate, a horizon rather than a foreground, which helps us to better understand the circulation of power, affect, resource, and solidarity in modes of living. ↩

36. “It takes little imagination to understand, now, how the powerful—and for the children who were forced to watch, no doubt traumatic—experience of watching the torture, mutilation, and burning alive of the Afro-American victim would have become encoded forever, through the overwhelming odor of his roasting body, on the memories of all who participated [in the lynching].”- Orlando Patterson, Rituals Of Blood: The Consequences Of Slavery In Two American Centuries. ↩

37. “[T]he id is sutured to the Black woman as both “subjected to repression” in constructions of modern notions of gender and femininity, and the “dark continent” of Freud’s female sexuality.” - Selamawit D. Terrefe, Dissociative States: The Metaphysics of Blackness and the Psychic Afterlife of Slavery. ↩

38. “The left needs, in a vital manner, people to think, that is to say also to imagine, to feel, to formulate their own questions and their own demands, to determine the unknowns of their own situation.” - Isabelle Stengers. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. ↩

39. I would insist that the fabrication of peace-making propositions cannot be identified with peace as an experience. If indeed Whitehead’s philosophy may be characterized as the construction of a possibility for peace, this is because it can produce, through its applications what I would call, a bit paradoxically, “peace fighters, and not because 1t would be a path naturally or inevitably leading to the experience of peace. […] When I am teaching Whitehead, I feel the flickering of this experience. It happens, for instance, when students encounter and enjoy the possibility of acknowledging as harmonious experiences, interests and values that they initially deemed contradictory […] But it is also very important not to overestimate this flickering, lurking experience, that is, not to make it the aim of the scheme its final ‘application.’” – Isabelle Stengers. “Beyond Conversation: The Risks of Peace”. ↩