Liquidity, Flows, Circulation: The Cultural Logic of Environmentalization

360 Pages·2023·21.312 MB·English

by  Mathias Denecke, Holger Kuhn, Milan Stürmer

LIQUIDITY, FLOWS, CIRCULATION
THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF ENVIRONMENTALIZATION

EDITED BY
MATHIAS DENECKE, HOLGER KUHN, MILAN STÜRMER

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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 econom-
ics, 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 liquid-
ity 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 finan-
cial 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] infra-
structures ‘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 capi-
talism. 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 fol-
lowing 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 liquid-
ity 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 envi-
ronments 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-ausstel-
lung-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 cri-
tique 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