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LIQUIDITY, FLOWS, CIRCULATION THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF ENVIRONMENTALIZATION EDITED BY MATHIAS DENECKE, HOLGER KUHN, MILAN STÜRMER DIAPHANES GEFÖRDERT DURCH DIE DEUTSCHE FORSCHUNGSGEMEINSCHAFT (DFG)—PROJEKTNUMMERN 2114 UND 2252—UND MIT FREUNDLICHER UNTERSTÜTZUNG DER UNIVERSITÄT BIELEFELD FUNDED BY THE DEUTSCHE FORSCHUNGSGEMEINSCHAFT (DFG, GERMAN RESEARCH FOUNDATION) —PROJECTNUMBERS 2114 AND 2252—AND SUPPORTED BY BIELEFELD UNIVERSITY © DIAPHANES, ZURICH 2022 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ISBN 978-3-0358-0481-2 LAYOUT AND PREPRESS: 2EDIT, ZURICH PRINTED IN GERMANY WWW.DIAPHANES.COM Contents 7 Mathias Denecke, Holger Kuhn, Milan Stürmer Introduction: The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization Ecologies and Elements 41 Ursula Biemann Devenir Universidad: Art, Indigenous Science and the Biocultural Reconstruction of Amazonian Knowledges 57 Maryse Ouellet A Realist Aesthetic of the Sublime: Art, Environment and The Cultural Logic of the Anthropocene 79 Katerina Genidogan The Cultural Logic of Green Capitalism: A New Coalition of Geo- and Chronopolitics Genealogies of Circulation 99 Martin Doll Utopias of Flow and Circulation in the Nineteenth Century: Phalansteries by Charles Fourier and Others 119 Sebastian Kirsch “Where the Sun Does Not Reach, There the Doctor Will Appear”: Environmentalization in Gerhart Hauptmann’s Before Daybreak 141 Malte Fabian Rauch Critique de la Circulation: Remarks on the Design of Environments Flows of the Living 165 Esther Leslie In Turbid Environments 181 Christian Schwinghammer Besides One Flow: Quantum Virtuality, Entangled Becomings, and the De-coherence of Ontology 203 Beny Wagner Plasmaticness and the Boundaries of Human Perception Unruly Liquids 221 Yvonne Volkart Flowing, Flooding, Fibbing: From Fluid Subjects to Environmental Becoming 241 Hannah Schmedes The Im:permeable Sieve: Following Gendered Imaginaries of Containers and Leaks 259 Yannick Schütte Lead Fish Story: On the Cultural Logic of Fluidity in Architecture Logistical Circulation 279 Jacob Soule Circulation and the City Novel 295 Stefan Yong The Sublime and the Logistical: Containment Strategies in the Aesthetics of Circulation 313 Annie McClanahan Essential Workers: Gigwork, Logistics, and the Sweated Labor of Circulation 333 List of Illustrations 335 List of Color Plates 337 Contributors 345 Color Plates Mathias Denecke, Holger Kuhn, Milan Stürmer Introduction The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization Today, it has become a truism that capital circulates, that data, populations and materials flow, that money offers liquidity. These terms appear crucial for any descrip- tion of our contemporary situation, whether in economics, media studies, or contemporary art. This book asks whether the preponderance of talk of flow, liquidity, and circulation is an expression of the cultural logic of today’s environmental capitalism. In the context of financial economics, flow and liquidity primarily function as technical terms, having mostly lost their status as a metaphor: flows—as opposed to stocks—are those economic variables that have a time dimension (income, debt repayment, exports...) and liquidity is a property of an asset describing how easy it is to turn it into money. Yet, occasionally their metaphori- cal qualities are revitalized in order to, for example, focus our attention away from the lofty descriptions of market processes to the complex ecologies of mundane payment infrastructures. Focusing on the infrastructure for financial flows foregrounds a fee-based model of the economy where those in control of the financial infrastructure can charge transaction fees and penalties.1 For the last few decades, as Bill Maurer puts it, “the money in money, so to speak, has been in fees.”2 Instead of focusing on spec- ulation, preemption and financial p erformativity, those 1 See Michael Hudson, The Bubble and Beyond: Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and the Global Crisis (Dresden: Islet-Verlag, 2012). 2 Bill Maurer, “Late to the Party: Debt and Data,” Social Anthropology 20, no. 4 (2012), pp. 474–481, here p. 475. 7 MATHIAS DENECKE, HOLGER KUHN, MILAN STÜRMER liquid metaphors constantly remind us that nothing flows without being regulated. It is no coincidence that “payment professionals name these [payment] infrastructures ‘pipes’” as “private and public entities have built a series of channels complete with portals, locks, sieves and dams.”3 In cultural and media studies, the vocabulary of flow, circulation, and liquidity grasps the specificity of our technologically conditioned world. The unanimous use of those words serves to describe the processual charac- ter of a networked globe connected through unimpeded flows of data.4 For cultural scholar Antoinette Rouvroy, computational media essentially condition today’s capitalism. Especially “digital and capitalistic flows,” Rouv- roy contends, produce “the fluidity of our techno-capi- talist reality.”5 Such fluidity designates a mode of control exerted through media environments which is charac- terized by the totalizing logic of binary code. A world in flow, then, is synonymous with the indifference of always calculable and controllable persons, objects, and goods. In this “numerical, calculable reality,”6 we have lost contact with a solid ground which provided us with 3 Ibid., p. 476. 4 See for example Mark B.N. Hansen, “Living (with) Technical Time: From Media Surrogacy to Distributed Cognition,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 2–3 (2009), pp. 294–315; Katherine Hayles, “RFID: Human Agency and Meaning in Information-Intensive Environ- ments,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 2–3 (2009), pp. 47–72; Anna Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013); compare also Wolfgang Ernst, Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media (London and New York: Rowman & Little- field International, 2016); Timothy Scott Barker, Time and the Digi tal: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2012). 5 Antoinette Rouvroy, “The End(s) of Critique: Data Behaviourism ver- sus Due Process,” in Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn. The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology, ed. Mireille Hildebrandt and Katja de Vries (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 143– 167, here p. 160. 6 Ibid., p. 162. 8 INTRODUCTION the means to critique the contemporary environmental control regime. In Hito Steyerl’s video Liquidity Inc. from 2014 the following words recur, almost as the motto for the whole video: “Be formless, shapeless, like water. […]. Be water, my friend.” In Steyerl’s video, those words, originating from a short clip featuring Bruce Lee, simultaneously address martial arts fighters, the subjects of financial trad- ers, financialization, or a financialized art world. By link- ing and translating those diverse worlds into each other, and by diffusing their differences, her video itself becomes “like water,” and it remains impossible to decide whether it was an affirmative or a critical appropriation of the talk about a financialized world in flux. Very recently liquidity has gained affirmative interest in the art world, cer- tainly due to the fact that it is no longer just applied to financialization, but also to ecologization. In 2021, the Videonale.18 at Kunstmuseum Bonn staged its festival for video and time-based arts under the headline Fluid States. Solid Matter with the aim of not only leaving behind the idea of a solid subject but of thinking about a “fluid body engaged in a constant exchange with other bodies and its human, natural and more-than-human surroundings.”7 What is at stake here is finding a common language for conceptualizing the relations between beings and environments in terms of liquidity and flow. These brief examples provide us with a point of depar- ture to enquire into the shared ground between all those conceptualizations: far from being arbitrary, liquidity, flow, and circulation exert an irresistible lure on scholars and artists engaged in depicting the p rinciples that under- gird the workings of our contemporary world. Drawing 7 https://v18.videonale.org/en/v18-ausstellung/ueber-die-ausstellung-kopie2 (accessed February 7, 2022). The thirteenth Shanghai Biennale Bodies of Water (2020/21) addresses very similar issues. See https://www.biennialfoundation.org/2020/05/bodies-of-water- the-13th-shanghai-biennale/ (accessed February 7, 2022). Both bien- nales refer to the thinking of feminist writer Astrida Neimanis. See the contribution by Yvonne Volkart in this volume. 9 MATHIAS DENECKE, HOLGER KUHN, MILAN STÜRMER on Fredric Jameson’s work, we asked the authors contrib- uting to this volume whether the concepts of liquidity, flow, and circulation might provide a useful means to grasp the cultural logic of today’s capitalism. We com- prehend this stage of capitalism as Environmentaliza- tion, a historical periodization which serves as a heuris- tic rather than as a totalizing claim. Without a doubt, concepts of the environment signifi- cantly structure our contemporary endeavors to make sense of our world. Recent decades have witnessed a real hype around the concept of the environment, encom- passing the terms ecology, milieu, and Umwelt.8 The media philosopher Erich Hörl, who has traced this far reaching theoretical movement, attests that there are “thousands of ecologies today: ecologies of sensation, perception, cognition, desire, attention, power, values, information, participation, media, the mind, relations, practices, behavior, belonging, the social, the political— to name only a selection of possible examples.”9 With this broadening of the semantic scope of the concept of ecology, it loses its historical connection to nature as it becomes increasingly denaturalized.10 The turn towards the concept of ecology is part of a larger critique of anthropocentrism, both in the analytical pri- macy it affords to the human/nonhuman distinction and in its implication in anthropogenic effects of indus- trialization and global warming. These concerns are no longer limited to research in a specific academic field, but articulated and analyzed in such different realms as the arts, architecture, design, philosophy, psychology, 8 Florian Sprenger, “Zwischen Umwelt und Milieu – Zur Begriffsge- schichte von Environment in der Evolutionstheorie,” Forum Inter disziplinäre Begriffsgeschichte. Herausgegeben von Ernst Müller. Zent rum Für Literatur und Kulturforschung Berlin 3, no. 2 (2014), pp. 7–18. 9 Erich Hörl, “Introduction to General Ecology: The Ecologization of Thinking,” in General Ecology. The New Ecological Paradigm, ed. Erich Hörl (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 1–73, here p. 1. 10 See Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmen tal Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). 10