3 P RO PO SIT IONAL POL ITIC S Endre Dányi and Michaela Spencer, James Maguire, Hannah Knox, Andrea Ballestero I n t ro d u c t i o n A cenTrAl proMIse of deMocrATIc polITIcs HAs Been THAT All Issues, MATTers of concern, or problems relevant for a political community can be dealt with in a standardised way. If climate change can be conceptualised as an issue at all, it is an issue that radically challenges this promise. As varying groups, communities and nations around the globe attempt to respond, each in their own particular way, we suggest – based on the ethnographic examples assembled here – that their modes of engagement offer us some important insights. These insights shed light on how people are attempting to make their societies more liveable in tumultuous times – commonly, yet contentiously, referred to as the Anthropocene – and, more particularly, how their responses to the predicaments they face outline an emergent form of thinking and doing politics. This form, we claim, is propositional. While the term ‘propositional’ may at first strike a philosophical chord, the propositions that emerge from our four cases are not bound to the logical precepts of analytic philosophy, but are very much embedded within, and emerge from, specific material arrangements. The lineage of the term that we adopt is one coincident with the work of Bruno Latour. In his essay ‘A Well-Articulated Primatology’, Latour (2000) deploys ‘proposition’ as a countermetaphor to think through the practices of experimental scientific setups. One of the primary features of scientific work, Latour argues, is to make parts of the world visible through particular apparatuses. His intervention is to suggest a move away from the optical metaphor of the ‘gaze’ to one of propositions. The gaze metaphor, he argues, is what weds us to an understanding of scientific practice as detached or objective, leading to the suggestion that the varying perspectives, thoughts or opinions we have about the world are merely biases 66 proposITIonAl polITIcs that distort or colour our relationship to the object of study. With the optical metaphor, the only reasonable outcome one can strive for is to get rid of all these filters and see ‘things as they are’. The only good gaze is one that is interrupted by nothing. Latour asks what would happen to the subjects and objects of experimental scientific setups if, rather than understanding sets of ideas or opinions about the world as biases that distort, we understood them as resources with which to make new connections within and between parts of the world. What would happen, he muses, if we took, for example, ‘feminist antipathy towards passivity’ as a resource for world-making rather than as a force to be erased? Inspired by Donna Haraway’s work, Latour invokes feminist critiques of female passivity as a way to think about, and open up, the range of other actors that science has attempted to pacify. While experimental setups have a tendency to configure the world through a success versus failure mode of innovation, or through a fact versus fiction narrative of knowledge production, a propositional mode opens up the world – its objects and materials – to modes of description that take ‘Others’ into account. It is here that non-humans enter the stage as an important part of such propositions. A well-articulated proposition is an ‘occasion given to entities to enter into contact’, or an ‘interpretative offer’ for non-humans to act in ways that might surprise us. Latour draws upon primatologist Thelma Rowell’s work with sheep to emphasise the point. I tried to give my sheep the opportunity to behave like chimps, not that I believe that they would be like chimps, but because I am sure that if you take sheep for boring sheep by opposition to intelligent chimps, they would not have a chance. By placing them, quite deliberately and quite artificially, into the paradigm of intelligent chimps, I gave them a chance to express features of behaviour hitherto unknown. The more I work at it, the more autonomous my sheep may become. (Latour 2000: 372) The proposition creates, in this instance, an opportunity for sheep to act otherwise, while at the same time leaving their participation open-ended. This is not humans experimenting on the world but collaborating with it and responding to it. What would happen if we articulated propositions that gave, for example, sheep the ‘opportunity to behave like chimpanzees’? In this setup, the more work a scientist does in imagining alternative capacities for sheep, the more independent sheep become. This has much in common with recent work in the social sciences on the place of the ‘experiment’ as a contemporary method of social and political engagement (Morita and Jensen 2015; Karvonen and Heur 2014; Wilkie 2017; Corsín Jiménez 2017). We would like 67 energy worlds to suggest that a move from experiment to proposition might be one way of characterising analytically what we see occurring empirically in our respective ethnographic field sites. As uncertainty over the future becomes more pronounced, new modes of thinking and relating to one another, and to the varying and contested worlds we are part of, seem ever more urgent. As the more traditional dichotomies of the philosophy of scientific practice become irrevocably unsettled, and as other, non-Western modes of knowledge-making begin to gain more purchase, we are slowly seeing the emergence of more varied ‘arts of living on a damaged planet’ (Tsing et al. 2017). In line with these shifts, this chapter itself proposes a move from experiment to proposition as a less certain, more ambiguous, albeit more open and tentatively imaginative, mode of engaging with and relating to human/ non-human encounters. In this regard, we believe that thinking propositionally is a timely intervention Similar to Latour, who reflects upon the reconfiguration of the subjects and objects of experimental scientific setups through the metaphor of proposition, we would like to pose a similar question. What would happen to the subjects and objects of political arrangements if we took various approaches to politics as resources with which to make new, and varying, connections to the world? Rather than viewing the political practices of others – and here we define ‘others’ very broadly – as experiments that can succeed or fail in accordance with more traditional renderings of what count as political outputs, we want to propose that thinking about politics more propositionally opens up the world in ways that are both ambiguous and promising. As people continuously come into contact with a host of distressing environmental scenarios, they are being propelled into doing politics in ways that fall outside the more myopic definitions of what democratic politics is. A necessity to innovate, or do things differently, permeates multiple scales of society as traditional political remedies creak and groan under the weight of their standardised responses. But doing things differently contains risks; proposals to engage the world ‘otherwise’ are not always well received. Doing propositional politics is not a matter of explicating a set of political principles or ideas. It does not involve pedagogy in the traditional sense but is devised to set in motion materials, affects and processes. Latour’s move is to think experimental setups propositionally. Building on this, we want to propose a more experimental mode of doing politics that we refer to as propositional. In the four stories that follow – from Australia (Endre Dányi and Michaela Spencer), Iceland ( James Maguire), the UK (Hannah Knox) and Brazil (Andrea Ballestero) – we have shaped our narratives in the form of a proposition-in-emergence. The way in which we render 68 proposITIonAl polITIcs these stories supports the volume’s overall commitment to experiment. However, while the title of this collection pushes us to think and describe Energy Worlds in Experiment, we adopt the performative spirit of proposition in an attempt to open up the boundaries of these terms. While the middle stories by James and Hannah engage with energy experiments in more explicit terms (green energy production and energy monitoring devices), the first and last stories by Endre and Michaela, and Andrea, respectively, address energy somewhat more implicitly as they consider how water collaborations and water promises can re-energise political experiments in the Anthropocene. In moving from experiment to proposition, and energy to Anthropocene, our aim is not to work against the grain of the collection’s theme, but to treat it as an ‘occasion to enter into contact’ (Latour 2000). The stories assembled here build upon one another, each bringing into view a new place and a new set of concerns about politics and experiment. After each author’s contribution, we provide a transition commentary in a collective voice, designed to act as a bridge that connects the stories and reflects upon the move from experiment to proposition. In the first story, Endre Dányi and Michaela Spencer interrogate the politics of water in Australia. While in the context of the Anthropocene it is often assumed that different kinds of knowledges ought to be brought together, our first story problematises the politics occurring in the meeting between scientific experiments and other knowledge forms. In the process, the authors question the limitation of ‘experiment’ as a way of engaging with a world undergoing dramatic environmental change. This first story acts as a hinge upon which our other stories pivot, as we go on to explore other, more propositional, ways of world-making. In our second story, James Maguire gives an account of how experimenting with volcanic landscapes in Iceland is triggering anthropogenic earthquakes, and risky propositions. This story makes explicit how the ongoing politics of experiment in the Anthropocene triggers non-human agencies that play an important part in propositional politics. As such, the story acts as a transition, or threshold, between the notions of experiment and proposition. In our third story, Hannah Knox introduces us to home energy devices in the UK, and the data traces they produce. Here the author treats data propositionally. Reflecting on the various gaps that data produce – what data do not say but nonetheless force us to think about – generates the need for a response to the complex relationship between material energies and the social imaginaries they seem to reveal. The story extends our understanding of the role non-humans play in propositional politics, raising interesting questions about the relationship between knowledge and politics. In our final story, Andrea Ballestero turns our attention to promise-making in the form of water pacts in Ceará, Brazil. Analysed as experiments, it is possible to see such pacts 69 energy worlds as failures. However, focusing on the potential of the pacts’ form – as an aggregation of promises – allows the author to re-conceptualise them propositionally. As propositions, such aggregates cut the politics of difference differently, engendering alternate collectivities beyond more classic tropes of regional or national belonging. Now let us turn to Milingimbi Island, off the coast of Australia’s Arnhem Land, where Endre and Michaela introduce us to a politics of collaborative experiments. P ow e r a n d wat e r o n a n A b o r i g i n a l i s l a n d Endre Dányi and Michaela Spencer In recent years water has become a pressing issue for the Yolngu people living on Milingimbi Island off Australia’s northern coast. Here, questions of water management are increasingly entangled with questions of how, and in what ways, anthropocenic futures might be enacted. A central claim of the Anthropocene is that the world has changed. This assertion often comes with the understanding that we (humans) are now experiencing an unprecedented era in global history, where science is charged with the responsibility of studying a thoroughly socialised nature. When, in 2016, both authors visited a water management workshop on Milimgimbi Island, the claim that ‘the world has changed’ was also strongly asserted.1 However, we found that what followed from this claim was not at all straightforward or predictable. Fig. 3.1 Power and Water Corporation banner, Milingimbi Island, East Arnhem Land 70 proposITIonAl polITIcs Yolngu recall earlier times in Milingimbi when family groups used to move from place to place between their homeland areas. When fresh water supplies began to turn salty, it was time to pack up and move to another place. Since then, responsibility for managing water supplies has been handed over to a utility company, Power & Water Corporation (PAWC). Under its management, the ability to access both electricity and water has become a central concern for many of the Yolngu on the island, as well as a political game for politicians who have promised to manage the issue in various ways leading into an upcoming election. Our attention was drawn to the issue of Milingimbi’s water when we, two ethnographers, attended a workshop that brought together Yolngu rangers, Traditional Owners (TOs) and a number of visiting scientists. The purpose of the meeting was to enable visiting scientists (mostly German hydro-geologists) to engage with relevant Yolngu authorities and outline a collaborative research project in Milingimbi. The workshop started inside the office of the Crocodile Islands Rangers, an independent Yolngu ranger group working on land and sea management in Milingimbi and surrounding homeland areas. The participants then moved to a series of important locations dotted across the island – the water tower which held the community domestic water supply, a billabong located a little way out of town, and a proposed site for several aluminium measuring towers, each around five meters tall. Only a few days before this workshop, there had been other visitors to the island, including a local Member of Parliament (MP). This MP was on the campaign trail, and had talked a lot about building new houses and housing extensions for local people who for several years had had new developments halted because of restrictions to water supplies. As the workshop in the rangers’ office began, the conversation turned almost immediately to questions about housing. How much water was in the aquifer? Could new houses be built soon? How could the scientists help? Questions were thrown forward by Yolngu workshop participants, who hoped that the scientists could assist them with pressing issues around housing and overcrowding. However, the scientists were clear from the outset that their project was about research alone – water quality, salinity and transpiration rates – not about politics. They were on the island because climate change had radically altered the available water on Milingimbi. New – scientific – data were needed to understand the island’s hydrological flows and assess water management problems before beginning to think about what to do next. Following this statement there was some tension in the room, which remained unresolved as we packed our bags and drove out to various field sites. The first stop was a water tower – a 71 energy worlds large, elevated tank supplying the Milingimbi township. The scientists began talking to the rangers about the levels of water in the tower, the frequency of Milingimbi’s rainfall and the transpiration rates of the surrounding vegetation. As this group of men – scientists and Yolngu rangers – stood in the hot sun, looking up at the tower, the two of us found some relief in the shade, sitting with a group of TO women, who were likewise marvelling at the willingness of the scientists to come here, stand in the sun and get things done the hard way. If they wanted to know about water, these women suggested, all they had to do was ask. They would have been happy to show them. Fig. 3.2 Yolngu Traditional Owners and Rangers meet with scientists near the water tower, Milingimbi Island, East Arnhem Land When we moved down the road to a billabong, the scientists were interested in the salinity of Milingimbi’s surface water. There, as the scientists were getting to work, the Yolngu stood at the water’s edge telling stories. To us, as interested bystanders, these differing sets of practices seemed to coexist quite easily, but they also revealed some tensions. While the head scientist threw in a salinity meter, one of the Yolngu present suggested that she could have taken a reading much more quickly – simply by dipping in a finger and tasting the water. As the scientists talked about how the water was too salty for fish, another woman at the edge of the group pointed to the remnant ashes of a fire where her son had caught a barramundi fish, cooked and eaten it just a few days earlier. By the end of the day we arrived at our final stop: a swampy area where many paperbark trees were growing. The discussion centred on one of the measuring towers that the scientists wanted to erect, and about how it might be kept safe from fires and local children. 72 proposITIonAl polITIcs Fig. 3.3 Meeting at Nilatjirriwa (billabong/waterhole), Milingimbi Island, East Arnhem Land Fig. 3.4 Yolngu Traditional Owners and Rangers meet with scientists at the proposed site for one of the measuring towers, Milingimbi Island, East Arnhem Land 73 energy worlds The towers offer a way of measuring transpiration from vegetation across the island. They are sensitive pieces of equipment that need careful monitoring. After significant rainfall, their collection buckets would have to be emptied to preserve the integrity of further measurements, and data would have to be collected and recorded continuously. The lead scientist had the components of a tower with him, and talked about installing it soon. At this point, however, conversation suddenly came to a halt. Permission for such installations was not something that the Yolngu ranger group, who the scientists had been speaking to all day, could give alone. It would also depend on the outcome of negotiations between TOs regarding the character and boundaries of their lands. While the scientists had been focused on the sampling practices and locations required for their transpiration measurements, they had failed to notice that the day’s events were a series of meetings and negotiations where the local authorities were not the Yolngu rangers – almost exclusively men – but the TO women, who were careful to stay in the shade all day. At the beginning of this meeting of scientists, Indigenous rangers and TOs, the assertion was made that the world had changed, and new data were needed to record these changes. To us, as visiting ethnographers, the invocation of climate change as a means to seemingly disregard or reset the knowledges of the Yolngu TOs was perplexing. By tracing the day’s events through this empirical story, we do not seek to question the existence of climate change but suggest that what follows from it is far from straightforward. By abiding with the apolitical assumptions accompanying their climate change research, the scientists and the utility company missed much of what was at stake in the journey we took out ‘on country’, and the politics on display throughout the workshop. It is exactly this political work that our telling of this story seeks to bring to the fore, highlighting these negotiations in the face of claims being made under the banner of the Anthropocene, both here, and in places far removed from Milingimbi Island. Ot h e r i n g e x p e r i m e n tat i o n Peeking out from behind obvious modes of doing politics dependent on the production of ‘objective scientific data’, another can be seen lurking within these events in Milingimbi: a mode of doing politics that becomes visible as the Yolngu elder women sit quietly in the shade. As the sun beats down, and scientists and Yolngu rangers stand in a huddle, talking about water quality and the future of Milingimbi community, the women’s comments on the unfolding events seem to point to other possible practices and forms of expertise. 74 proposITIonAl polITIcs Reading the events of the water workshop at Milingimbi through an STS lens attentive to difference in knowledge practices, certain political and epistemic practices come into focus (Blaser 2009; Law and Ruppert 2016; Stengers 2011; Verran 1998). Clearly, the hydro-geologists visiting the island brought with them an assumed set of arrangements for doing knowledge and politics. This was a familiar set of arrangements, which emerged with modern experimental science and which has, for a long time, enjoyed a priority position in democratic politics (Ezrahi 2012; Thorpe 2016). The hydro-geologists recognised there was considerable uncertainty associated with the quality and quantity of groundwater on Milingimbi Island. For this reason, they thought it was necessary to carry out very specific measurements, associated with a very specific regime of scientific testing. Testing the salinity of surface water (at the billabong) and the rate of transpiration of groundwater (through the island vegetation) were all part of this regime. In establishing the bounds and practices of experimental science as a means to engage with the potential futures of Milingimbi water, however, the scientists encountered some problems. The ground, where they were working, was not simply part of one uniform globe, which implicitly locates and legitimates the conduct of modern Western science and democratic decision-making. Here, ownership and the work of legitimating the foundations of knowledge was far more complicated, ambiguous and contested. Within the practices of the workshop, the claim that ‘the world has changed’ failed to reference, in any straightforward manner, a given or accepted state of affairs. Rather, the claim emerged as a contested proposition – an attempt to produce a new baseline legitimating the maintenance of old sets of modern knowledge-making practices and reinforcing a version of democratic politics where decisions always happen elsewhere (in the city, a committee meeting, in Parliament, in conversations that render the difficulties discussed above invisible). By drawing attention to this fraught and problematic move, which asserts an anthropocenic reality as the new grounding for scientific inquiry and future-making on a global scale, this opening ethnographic story sets the scene for an inquiry into a different – propositional – mode of politics, which is to follow. Asserting ‘the world has changed’ as a new condition initially seemed to ground and legitimate further rounds of experimental enquiry in a modern and familiar mode. However, it was this move that the women by the water tower quietly resisted, as they subtly hinted at a broader political forum that existed in and around the water tower discussions. That forum became fully fledged at the final site visit of the day, as the TOs resisted the unproblematic imposition of a measuring tower and scientific apparatus without proper negotiation over the ownership of the land and the responsibilities for remuneration and care that it entailed. 75 energy worlds By opening with this story, our suggestion is that the invocation and inhabitation of Anthropocene worlds is beginning to provoke not only the maintenance of particular epistemic problems and practices, but also new forms of epistemo-political action and resistance – forms of politics that show up and slow down the conduct of business as usual (de la Cadena 2010). This is a politics that calls out the blind spots of existing mainstream epistemic practices and offers opportunities for more generous and appropriate imbroglios of action, which hold in tension questions of who knows, what is known and how we know it, so as to enable different answers to questions about where, how and through what diverse sets of relations we might continue to live. To explore these issues further, the next story turns to a rather different kind of encounter – this time between geothermal energy and the town of Hveragerði in Iceland. This shift in geographical and empirical focus helps to deepen our appreciation of the variety of ways in which such imbroglios might become manifest, and the kinds of issues and concerns that might surface. S h a k y m at t e r s : P o l i t i c s at t h e t h r e s h o l d James Maguire Over the course of its history, Iceland has been plagued with various forms of instability: topographic, climatic, and more recently, financial. In an effort to move beyond these vicissitudes, the Icelandic state has turned towards the landscape, converting the topographic instability of some of the country’s vast and powerful volcanic zones into economically productive sites of geothermal energy. This is done mainly for the provision of electricity for the aluminium industry. Proponents argue that coupling one of modernity’s primary metals with one of the world’s greenest energy forms is a sign of planetary, as well as industrial, progress. However, the conversion of volcanic forces into energy resources is having some disturbing effects. Making geothermal energy is a risky affair. As drills penetrate deep underground in search of volcanically heated fluids hot enough to drive electricity turbines, they have begun to produce troubling collateral effects. Anthropogenic earthquakes have emerged as a feature of life for the residents of Hveragerði, a small town on the outskirts of the volcanic area. A friend and town resident characterised the situation to me one day as a ‘shaky matter’, a term that could refer both to the physical disturbances the town has to endure as the earth continues to tremble, and also the instability of the ethical and political assumptions that underly the project. 76 proposITIonAl polITIcs Fig. 3.5 View of the Hellisheiði Geothermal Power Plant within the Hengill Volcanic Landscape. This ‘shaky’ matter has generated its own unique political arrangement, as the residents of Hveragerði try to come to terms with the municipal energy company producing these anthropogenic earthquakes. Part of this arrangement was the implementation of a predictive seismic warning system. This system – designed and operated by the Icelandic Meteorological Office – was intended to predict the possibility of increased seismic activity in the area, as well as notify the town council in the event of potentially dangerous levels. The town’s mayor suggested to me that warnings are a residual issue of a larger political discussion going back to the establishment of the geothermal power plant. While Hveragerði is the closest residential area to the power plant, the town is not the lease holder of the land on which the power plant operates. As a result, it has almost no formal political remedies at its disposal. Warnings, it seems, are the best it can get in shaky circumstances. One of the first warnings to be issued became a highly public affair: the prediction of a possible 5.2mw earthquake within a seventy-two-hour timeframe. While only very minor tremors were felt over the course of the next week, the negative media attention generated by the warning, not to mention the uncertainty and anxiety it caused the residents, prompted the town to rethink its approach. 77 energy worlds Today, such warnings consist of a simple electronic communication between the power plant and Hveragerði’s town council. While these warnings are subsequently posted onto the town’s website, residents and media outlets have only a vague awareness of their existence. But what type of political arrangement is this, in a situation of ongoing earthquake production? Town council members and residents talk of being in ‘an awkward situation’, and of ‘needing to dance on a line’ while ‘not shouting too loud or attracting too much attention to the warnings’. On the one hand, there is the political necessity to publicise these warnings – public safety – while on the other, there is the political fear that drawing too much attention to them could also be damaging for the town. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is the shadow cast over the town by the 2008 financial crisis. For many years Hveragerði used the bountiful supply of steam and hot water emanating from the fractured earth to develop a large horticulture industry, and was known for many decades as the ‘greenhouse capital of Iceland’. However, the property crash that followed the crisis brought this industry to a grinding halt. In the wake of the crash, the town survives from a few main businesses, two of which are a care home for the elderly and a rehabilitation centre for people with chronic illness. Publicising seismic warnings is highly problematic for a town with such health-based industries. While earthquake warnings emerge from geological instability, they also have the potential to generate other forms of instability, which although beyond the seismic are nonetheless bound up with it. Making too much of an issue out of these warnings can bring about effects equally, if not more, destabilising than the seismic instabilities surrounding them. Dwindling investment and property prices, as well as increased unemployment, are realities that such a town cannot sustain. My geologist friends at the municipal energy company describe anthropogenic earthquakes through the language of thresholds: geothermal activity is accelerating longstanding seismic rhythms, triggering earthquakes through the production of new thresholds. Etymologically, ‘threshold’ comes through Greek, meaning ‘at the door’. Being a portal through which we move between places, a door is a helpful way to think of a threshold as a transition. Here the many metaphors that invoke the crossing of a threshold as a symbolic transition come to mind. But the thresholds being triggered in these volcanic landscapes are more than crossings though symbolic space: they are akin to phase shifts, moments of critical and sudden change through which new states emerge. Much as geothermal activity triggers seismic thresholds, warnings trigger political ones; these are moments when warnings change state and become potentially more destabilising 78 proposITIonAl polITIcs than that which they warn against. Maybe we can think of these warnings propositionally. As mediated earth signals they are a way of understanding the shaky earth as a risk proposition. They are in some sense ‘interpretative offers’, made through human-earth arrangements to relate to the geological, politically (Latour 2000: 15). But what they propose is ambiguous; their language is one of probabilities and likelihoods, with no clearly delineated course of action. In this sense, they remain open, even underdetermined. Relating to this proposition – either making an issue out of anthropogenic earthquakes (publicise the warnings widely and suffer the likely economic consequences) or not making an issue out of them (render them next to invisible on the website and take the consequences of inaction) – is a tricky political dilemma. In fact, it opens up more explicitly the paradox of not making an issue out of something as a legitimate political response. Maybe this is one of the conundrums of living on, and with, a damaged planet, as options for change increasingly come with their own set of unpalatable dilemmas. T h e e n e rg e t i c e a rt h a s c o n s t i t u t i v e Ot h e r James’s story, akin to Endre and Michaela’s, also engages the relationship between experiments and politics. In this instance, we get a glimpse of the ambiguous politics at stake when green energy dreams are materialised through infrastructural experiments in volcanic landscapes. While our first story questions the limitation of experiment as a way of engaging with the world under conditions of environmental distress, this story makes more explicit how experiments in volcanic landscapes trigger risky propositions. But such propositions are not an entirely human affair. The move made here tentatively points towards the earth as also having a say in how propositions emerge and take form. While Latour suggests that the ways in which scientists configure their propositions – either as ‘well’ or ‘badly’ articulated – is what affords nonhumans a more, or less, extensive role in how they come to participate in our world, this piece offers a slightly different reading. Here, nonhuman participation arises through human interventions, while also shaping the configuration of human modes of political engagement (Latour 2000; Lovelock 2000; Latour 2017). In this rendering, the articulations of non-humans can also impact upon the configuration of human modes of political engagement. As seismic thresholds are triggered, warnings, as mediators, trigger political thresholds that put this small town in south Iceland in a difficult bind. As unsavoury as this bind is, the town has to decide how to contend with the propositions emerging from geo-political arrangements. 79 energy worlds Highlighted here is the nature of the political in a world increasingly striving for greener energy infrastructures. In some ways, this story serves as a counter-narrative, a rejoinder perhaps, to the implicit complacency that can arise with so-called green energy innovations. While from the perspective of carbon metrics, geothermal energy is one of the greenest forms of energy on the planet, the extractive and financial logics at play in south Iceland are not dissimilar to those of the fossil fuel industry. Maybe, then, it should come as no surprise that the burden related to renewable energy transitions is delegated to those with limited power or influence. The question of who bears the political, economic and social brunt of the risks that come with energy transitions is one that clearly needs to be addressed. We see this with the politics of fracking in the US, as well as energy extraction for resource use around the globe. In this specific case, the small town finds itself located at the conjuncture of a municipal energy company (Reykjavik Energy) and a large multinational aluminium company (Century Aluminium). While both sides argue that coupling one of modernity’s primary metals with one of the world’s cleanest energy forms is a sign of progress, such progress looks slightly distorted from the situated perspective of the town. While warnings can show a shaky earth to be a proposition about risk, they are also a risky proposition that the town has to somehow respond to. Relating to this proposition – as the text outlines – opens up more explicitly the paradox of not making an issue out of something as a legitimate political response. Can we call this, contra Marres (2005), non-issue politics or a form of anti-politics? At a minimum, such a proposition puts the very question of politics at stake, as it opens the question of how much politics any given matter can bear. While Jacques Rancière suggests that the construction of the domains of the political and the non-political is, in essence, the definition of politics, the above form of propositional politics works to remind us of the complexity of our political configurations in the Anthropocene (Rancière, Bowlby, and Panagia 2001). In south Iceland, such propositions, like the energetic matter they emerge from, are shaky. They set in motion a series of dilemmas that are hard to contain within a more traditional definition of politics. As the propensities and forces of the earth are mobilised for greener futures, we might stop for a moment to ask how, as we re-energise our infrastructures, we might also re-energise our politics in a manner that offers ways out of risky propositions. 80 proposITIonAl polITIcs C l i m at e c h a n g e a n d t h e p o l i t i c i s at i o n o f t h e m u n da n e Hannah Knox Several of the political challenges of climate change derive from its identification as a global problem with anthropogenic causes. Climate change is generally framed as the problem of the impact that human beings, as a species, are having on the world climate system. Rendering the problem in this way implies that everyone in the world is equally responsible for, and equally affected by, climate change. Many have critiqued this view, for instance Donna Haraway and Dipesh Chakrabarty, but my aim here is not to dwell on whether it is right or wrong but to consider what we might call a material-semiotic rendering of the problem of climate change as an ‘ethnographic fact’, in order to think about what this manifestation of anthropogenic climate change does for the possibilities of political action (Haraway 2016; Chakrabarty 2017). As I have explored elsewhere, one consequence of identifying ‘human beings’ as the cause of climate change is that the question ‘What is a human effect?’ becomes open to scrutiny (Knox 2014). Far from singularising our understanding of humans as a species, I suggest that anthropogenic climate change prompts a cutting and splicing of the generic human into a social geography of proportional responsibility. Here the agents of environmental degradation proliferate across orders of being and scales of action – manifesting variously as the public, the individual, the food system, energy networks, oil corporations or the president of the United States. One central node around which this social geography of proportional responsibility revolves is the energy infrastructures that have led to global climate change. It is all well and good to call for an ‘energy transition’ from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, but those involved in activities to bring this about are clear that this requires more than utopian visions of a clean, green future. Even to know how to move towards this future requires work to understand and map the actually-existing relations that constitute the energy system within which people are entwined. Let us turn to an ethnographic account of one project that has been trying to use energy data to effect this kind of political intervention. The home energy monitor sits silently in the corner of the living room. There is a certain pride in having constructed something like it. We crafted it ourselves, at an energy workshop – a group of Manchester residents learning together about environmental monitoring, 81 energy worlds cooperative action, climate change and energy infrastructure. We started out with a small clear plastic bag of components: a circuit board, wires, LEDs, a soldering iron, a computer and a screen. People who had taught themselves, through trial and error, how to make an energy monitor told us how to solder the components to the circuit board to enable pulses of electricity to flow and be detected. We equipped our units with electrical pulse sensors, also soldering them in place. We fitted temperature sensors. We didn’t really know how these sensors worked. All we knew was that they came from manufacturers in China and that it was easier to source electricity sensors than sensors for gas. Fig. 3.6 Equipment for making an energy monitor It was hard to make the energy monitor work. Sometimes the connections that we soldered were not good. It takes skill to solder a board. But with some help from one another, sharing soldering irons, trying different kinds of solder, most of us got there. After eight hours of melting, aligning, sticking and programming, I took my monitor and receiver home and clamped them to the wire that goes into my electricity meter. There were two wires. I didn’t know if it mattered which wire I clamped them to. I turned on the monitor, but it remained blank. I followed the instructions on how to set up an online portal to see my energy flow – and there it was. Numbers appeared on the screen and I could see how much electricity was there. The energetic flows travelling along those wires were being translated into numbers. I never did get the actual screen of the energy monitor to work, but I could see my data online, and that meant I could begin to delve into what it meant. 82 proposITIonAl polITIcs In the next workshop, we began to look at our numbers. Stories proliferated. How were we to make sense of these data? Numbers were opening up cascades of relations. If we added the tariff that we were being charged (found on our energy bills), we could see how much money we were spending. But why did our energy cost this much? We could also calculate our carbon emissions. But how did the pulses of electricity moving through our meter link to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? We worked out that it partly depended on the energy mix. Many of us said that we had green energy suppliers, and wondered how this affected the carbon emissions of the energy we were using. But it turned out that the electricity pulsing through our wires was just the same electricity as that used by our less ecologically minded neighbours. Being a green energy company customer, we realised, was more about investment in the future of energy, rather than the consumption of a materially different product. In this energy experiment, data provided a way of opening up the complexity of energy infrastructure. The energy data made by our home-built energy monitors was not a fixed point, a direct representation of an already-known entity. It was rather, in Stengers’ (2014) terms, something that ‘forced thought’ and elicited a reaction. Data was good to think with. Not because it explained, but precisely because it often did not explain. Data here operated as a proposition, generating the need for a response to the complex relationship between material energies and social imaginaries that it seemed to reveal. The relations highlighted by the data provided by the home energy monitor were, in one respect, relations between materials. But they were also relations between materials and people. Once one becomes aware of a house’s energetic properties then one also realises that any change to the materiality of one’s home (insulation, triple-glazing) inevitably has unforeseen consequences, and that action, intervention and behaviour come to matter anew. Inadequate energy conservation work leads to condensation – hence the mantra among housing retrofit experts: ‘no insulation without ventilation’. But this condensation is not just the result of the house but also the people living in it. Even when energy-saving measures are installed properly, the conditions within which they exist are vulnerable to change. People hang washing on radiators and mould-spores grow on the walls. Both numerical data and personal experience thus combine to make evident the relationships between these phenomena – dry washing, damp walls. Ethnographic methods teach us to follow relations across such divisions, but so do these propositional forms of data science, which produce new forms of description and with them the promise of a new politics. Washing, mould, insulation, ventilation, become a matter not just of dirt, discomfort or health, but of responsibility, morality and infrastructure. Treated ethnographically, data traces about energetic relations allow us to tell different stories about the world that we and 83 energy worlds others inhabit. Data traces – whether numerical or ethnographic – open up energy. They help us ‘learn more’ about the social geographies of proportional responsibility. If this is a form of propositional politics, it is propositional not because it proposes what the future should look like, but because it emerges out of the relationship between the articulation of what is desired and the destabilising potential of what might become apparent in the tracing of relations. Truths and politics Hannah’s vignette opens up our exploration of propositions in two key directions. The first is the way in which it addresses the crucial role that particular relations – which we might call nonhuman – play in propositional politics. The second is the way in which it raises questions about how politics is able to proceed when it is not based on agreed truths but on an attention to the stories that can be told about social formations. As James’s story began to explore and as Hannah’s elaborates, attention to physical matter is central to propositional politics. It is perhaps no coincidence that the propositional mode of ‘relating to’ comes into play exactly at that moment when understandings of the relationship between resources, natural processes and human needs are undergoing profound change. Latour, who also uses the language of proposition to describe possibilities for rearticulating the relationship between science and science studies, asserts that we need to better understand the crucial role played by nonhumans in world-making exercises. The question that follows is how do these non-humans ‘contribute to how we imagine stories that no one without some level of intimate familiarity could make up?’ (Latour 2000). For Latour, they contribute by participating in the creation of a proposition – a mode of description that necessarily emerges out of an intimate understanding of that which lies beyond ourselves. If in Latour’s paper that which lies beyond is the world of primates and hyena sex organs, in Hannah’s case it is a system of energetic relations which we can see enacted and represented through the building of an energy monitor and data visualisations. But while energetic relations, in Hannah’s case, are enacted and represented, the agency of such nonhumans is much harder to grasp than anything we might relate to through the concept of ‘the nonhuman actor’. This propositional way of relating to materials, objects, systems and representations raises the question of how our modes of knowing are transformed, and what is done to the relationship between politics and knowledge. Clearly, in this formulation, doing politics is not a matter of explicating a set of political principles or ideas. It resembles pedagogy, but 84 proposITIonAl polITIcs not in the traditional sense. It is devised to set in motion materials, affects and processes in ways that certainly involve learning but cannot be exactly understood as a form of didactic teaching. What we see in this story is the propensity of energy objects or techniques to open up and reveal certain things (and of course to obscure others). What is interesting is what these practices are expected to uncover. Indeed, what we find being addressed is not a field upon which predefined political agents might act (‘the state must close the polluting power stations’, ‘private corporations must be held accountable’), but rather a re-description of a technical terrain (the properties of building materials, chemical signals, regulatory frameworks) in newly politicised terms. There has been much talk recently of how we might be living in a ‘post-truth’ world, but the kind of political practice described here illustrates the ongoing centrality of evidence for what has been termed elsewhere as ‘post-political’ action. The difference is that the relationship between evidence and what is being evidenced now appears underdetermined. Inscription devices and infrastructures of knowing seem to have morphed into something quite other. The capacity of methods and ‘others’ (devices) to produce alternative forms of evidence as a way of reformulating political practice is the focus of our next story. P ro m i s e a s e x p e r i m e n t : T h e c u m u l at i v e e n e rg y o f a g g r e g at i o n Andrea Ballestero Between 2008 and 2013 more than ten thousand people participated, one way or another, in the making of Ceará’s Water Pact.2 Ceará is a state in Northeast Region, Brazil, with severe water scarcity issues. The Pact was imagined as an experiment, a way of bringing society together to engage with water as a transversal material and ethical substance that requires a thorough commitment to care. The Pact would create this engagement by seeking to involve the greatest number of citizens and inviting them to make a public promise to care for water, asking them to participate in an open ritual of committing to the future of water from their particular context. The promises people made were registered on coloured slips of paper, briefly exhibited on the walls of community halls, schools, universities and churches. Once collected, they were converted into all sorts of electronic documents that circulated throughout the state as evidence of people’s commitment to care. Ultimately, they were gathered into a series of Pacts at municipal, watershed and state levels. 85 energy worlds Fig. 3.7 Ceará’s semi-arid landscape during dry season The organisers of the Pact hoped to interrupt history, to disrupt the usual ways in which the state addressed water issues. Those familiar responses included constructing new concrete infrastructures, creating and allocating new forms of water rights, and charging for bulk water. Rebecca, one of the Pact organisers, and a seasoned professional involved in land reform and participatory water projects for more than two decades, saw the historical conjuncture the Pact responded to in this way: We did it all, we applied the pacotinho [little package] of policies [e.g., decentralisation, economic valuation, participatory allocation of water] just as the international establishment recommends. Our State is a textbook example and, what happened? Fifteen years later, we have more carros pipa (water trucks) than before. So we needed to do something different. And this is where the Pact emerged. What is new these days in Ceará is the Water Pact. Rebecca and her colleagues’ hopes of doing things differently aimed to gather people, places and substances that could not be merged into a singular entity. They wanted to create a 86 proposITIonAl polITIcs collective that not only tolerated, but asserted, the specificities and differences intrinsic to water issues throughout the state. They wanted to produce an intervention that kept alive, rather than flattened, the difference made by people’s contextual circumstances. Rather than promoting belonging, the Pact was designed following a logic of aggregation. It was an open and never-ending accumulation, designed to avoid any alchemy that would transform the hundreds of promises into a single entity. The Pact was, and is, nothing more than the aggregation of promises. Its purpose continues to be to break with well-established political genealogies, to produce something that familiar political tactics could not have anticipated. For many in Ceará, the Pact was a failure. Despite its magnitude – more than eight thousand participants made pledges to each other and to water – its results were not available for empirical verification. There was no Panopticon to oversee the enactment of the promises Pact participants made, no God’s eye view from which to document the results. It was a composite whose contours and boundaries could not be precisely defined. Paradoxically, the Pact was an effort to produce difference, without having any way of verifying whether distinctions were systematically produced. This open-ended experimental character was its promise and its flaw – the Pact’s source of hope and its historical fault. Fig. 3.8 Participant documenting the Ceará’s Water Pact negotiations for colleagues at his municipality 87 energy worlds Fig. 3.9 Organising municipal Water Pact meetings where local promises would be made In this ambitious effort, one humble participant carried an inordinate amount of weight. That nonhuman participant was a required piece, a necessary element for any aggregation to be accomplished. I found this participant at the core of the method that the consultants who led the Pact used. That participant is the coloured piece of paper. Yellow, blue, green and pink, these slips played different roles at different times. As people held them in their hands, quietly pondering what they could offer to the collective, the slips became the material embodiment of future care, the evidence of a form of collective energy. They were also evidence of past events, piled up as proof that this process had involved more citizens than any other dealing with water politics. They were exemplars of what a promise is, and also pedagogical aids necessary to disseminate the idea of a Pact and secure the ‘right’ kind of response from participants. The slips were records of promises to be, documents of a future that had not yet arrived. But besides those multiple lives, all slips shared two characteristics. Firstly, each slip embodied one promise only. If any participant wrote more than one promise on a slip, it was returned and the author was asked to split it into two. Secondly, their material form, their dimensions and portability, allowed the coloured slips to be placed and displaced in 88 proposITIonAl polITIcs different columns, on different walls, under different headings, in different stacks, at different community centres, on different desks. These coloured slips of paper were open to interconnections and tentative allocations; they were subject to correction during afternoon workshops or later reassigned to new scales as the Pact organisers ‘systematically processed’ the results of the four years of work they had invested in the Pact. If ‘practices and concepts come packaged together’, what were the concepts packaged in the coloured slips of paper that hung from innumerable walls across dozens of locations in Ceará? (Rheinberger 1998) The promise/slip of paper brings practices and concepts together; it enables aggregation, a social form whose quantitative nature demands a qualitative reconsideration.3 As a gathering of moral commitments, the Pact does not claim any form of unity. It is a plural construction, without any aspiration to singularity (Burge 1977; Link 2002). Merging promises into a tight, cohesive entity is intrinsically impossible. The aggregate is a practice, a concept, that adds without claiming to achieve unity. It selectively enrols something that is shared by all of its participants: the willingness to make a promise to care for water, without claiming to incorporate selves, subjects or citizens. The coloured slip of paper makes all of this possible. With the Pact, I want to think about aggregates as a political proposition that can handle the proliferation of difference. The aggregate can be a social form that does not demand belonging. It sidesteps the problem of contradictory allegiances by not limiting the collective formations that people can be part of, but, on the contrary, allowing more loose and temporary groupings to be made and unmade according to different political, affective or epistemic affinities. For example, through endless databases built on dimensions (traits) of our social experience, we have become always already aggregated entities, regardless of our intention.4 How can we re-examine the aggregate as a political form open to the ethics of promise-making? What kinds of experiments might become possible if, rather than attempting to produce new holisms, we recuperated the world-making possibilities of aggregations (in their material specificities)? What kind of political energy might this unruly form yield? The Water Pact had a peculiar affective charge, one that is shared by many of the political experiments being put together around the world to address complex and difficult issues such as climate change, energy transitions and securing universal access to water. That affective charge is at once experimental and melancholic. It entails an attempt to innovate, to propose a new way of dealing with things that are grounded in disappointment with previous modernist interventions and their claims around causality and certitude. 89 energy worlds In the Pact, the slip of paper was a new experimental participant, something like a homemade Post-It. That piece of paper carried the weight of the promises each participant made. It standardised them very much in the way that liberal imaginaries of citizenship standardise different bodies. But what was standardised in the Pact was not a citizen; it was the pledge to do something in the future, to react to the legacy of the past. The slip of paper universalised that commitment to act, allowing a process of selective aggregation. The slip of paper made plucking a dimension of human experience, a promise, possible. This plucking procedure generated a flock of pledges, a multiplicity irreducible to a single unit because the promises were never intended to become cohesive. Unlike more conventional liberal political forms, the Pact was a grouping built upon units connected in precarious ways. In this sense, the Pact shares more with the imaginary of digital relations and mobilisations than with forms of belonging to a kin group, community or nation. Despite its seemingly artisanal computational methods (it was all put together using Excel sheets and Word tables), the Pact operates following a digital imaginary of aggregation. It follows a propositional tactic that recuperates the value of what scholars tend to consider precarious social relations – ties that do not depend on a deep sense of embodied interpersonal responsibility. Maybe the Pact suggests that rather than pursuing robust social ties, strong connections and deep commitments, we need to reimagine what is possible when we mobilise fragile pledges, precarious ties and tenuous connections. Maybe the answers to many of the anthropocenic challenges we face lie less in heartfelt commitments and more in the potential of light promises. In Ceará, but also elsewhere, people grow melancholy as they process their disappointment with previous modernist interventions and their causal claims. People long for the certainty of ‘solving’ problems that modernism promised. In the absence of that certitude, people seem open to departing from well-trodden roads into new territories, and to engaging in novel experiments. In this contradictory double affective state, simultaneously melancholic and experimental, people address what Dimitris Dalakoglou has called ‘infrastructural gaps’; that is, the failures of the material interface between the state and the private sector (Dalakoglou and Kallianos 2014). These gaps are clearly material. They record the inability of pipes, bridges and grids to deliver as they used to, or at least as it was promised they would. But such infrastructural gaps are also, and most profoundly, about the failure of the political imagination. They reveal the failure of the ‘social contract’ to organise matter, affect and will in the Anthropocene. The Water Pact emerges as a proposition within that gap. It is an experiment that requires huge amounts of money, time, energy and effort to be organised and 90 proposITIonAl polITIcs enacted, yet it is not conceived as ‘the most appropriate solution’. Its relation to certitude is radically different. The Pact grows out of the need ‘to do something different’ without guaranteeing results with any precision. This is where the politics of experiment and openness show their potentially detrimental side. By renouncing any causal claims or certitudes, the Pact avoids fixing the ontology of water in any particular way – as a commodity, a spiritual substance, part of nature, or as a legal object. This ontological fluidity makes it difficult to allocate responsibility in any conventional way. For instance, given the absence of any central assessment or verification mechanism, the Pact challenges our expectations of causality and our desire to identify who is responsible for which consequence – who has responsibly fulfilled their promise and who has not. As a political proposition, the Pact does not definitively apportion responsibility to the state, the private sector or the individual. In fact, we could say it does the opposite. The Pact seems to disseminate responsibility vaguely among all sorts of familiar and new political actors. Ultimately, perhaps this openness makes the Pact a proposition that reflects the depoliticising effects of dominant political and economic schemes of the second half of the twentieth century (i.e. schemes we could call neoliberal). But isn’t openness and dissemination of responsibility something we desire when we attempt to reinvent what counts as political action? Aren’t these open propositions particular ‘arrangements of existence’ that bring about their own possibilities for deranging and rearranging our worlds? (Povinelli 2016). The promises at the core of the Pact can be literally arranged and deranged. They can be moved across scales, pulled out, brought in, repeated. They can also be ignored or set aside, since there is no centralised body that could impose penalties for breaking them. This potential for radical reinvention and for inaction, for politicising and for depoliticising, seems inherent to propositional politics. Thinking the world otherwise, and venturing to rearrange our worlds, is never a clean task. It always risks mobilising unsavoury consequences. Politicising and de-politicising are not completely distinguishable from each other. C o n c l u s i o n : Ag g r e g at i n g a p ro p o s i t i o n - i n - t h e - m a k i n g All four pieces in this palimpsest of stories speak to the propensities of ‘others’ to re-energise our politics, the formation of new collectivities and the possibility of modes of description that relate the material and the imaginative. But these propositions, being open enough to 91 energy worlds treat the world as otherwise to the way we know it, are also risky; they hold promise, but are flawed, as the potential for failure resides in how they are arranged. Inaction, even irrelevance, are clear risks associated with doing things ‘otherwise’ in a political configuration that continues to motor along the highways of modernism. If propositional politics allows for failings and ambiguities, then it might be just the political form equivalent to the needed hypo-subjects of a new era.5 At this point, we can suggest something in a propositional spirit. We might entertain the possibility that rather than search for rearrangements that generate ontological clarity and unambiguous responsibility, we need more awareness of the inherently contradictory consequences of our political projects. Maybe we need propositions that are more self-conscious of their deranging potential – not as modernist risks to be avoided, but as constitutive turbulences that need to be embraced. Maybe it is worth staying in the shade, as Aboriginal women have taught us. Maybe we should commit to weak ties rather than searching for deep identifications. N ot e s For a detailed account see Spencer et al. 2019. For an extended analysis of this case see Ballestero 2017. 3 For two different ways of engaging with quantitative forms as qualitatively rich entities see Verran 2001 and Ballestero 2015. 4 For a discussion on the aggregate logic of the database as a governmental technology see Ruppert 2012: 126. 5 The hypo-subject – as opposed to the hyper-subject of the modern era – is a term that attempts to describe the human subject of a new climate generation; less masculinist and arrogant, more modest and humble. See Boyer and Morton 2016. 1 2 References Ballestero, A., ‘The Ethics of a Formula: Calculating a Financial-Humanitarian Price for Water’, American Ethnologist, 42.1 (2015): 262–278. — ‘Capacity as Aggregation: Promises, Water and a Form of Collective Care in Northeast Brazil’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 35.1 (2017): 31–48. Boyer, D., and T. Morton, ‘Hyposubjects. Lexicon for an Anthropocene Yet Unseen’, in C. Howe, and A. Pandian, eds, Theorizing the Contemporary, 1 January 2016 <https://culanth.org/fieldsights/ hyposubjects> [accessed 7 November 2019]. 92 proposITIonAl polITIcs — ‘Hyposubjects.’ Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, 21 January 2016 <https://culanth.org/ fieldsights/hyposubjects>. Blaser, M., ‘The Threat of the Yrmo: The Political Ontology of a Sustainable Hunting Program’, American Anthropologist, 111.1 (2009): 10–20. Burge, T., ‘A Theory of Aggregates’, Nous, 11 (1997): 97–117. Chakrabarty, D., ‘The Politics of Climate Change is More Than the Politics of Capitalism’, Theory, Culture & Society, 34.2–3 (2017): 25–37. Corsín Jiménez, A., ‘The Prototype: More Than Many and Less Than One’, in A. Corsín Jiménez, ed., Prototyping Cultures, Art, Science, and Politics in Beta (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 1–18. Dalakoglou, D., and Y. Kallianos, ‘Infrastructural Flows, Interruptions and Stasis in Athens of the Crisis’, City, 18.4–5 (2014): 526–532. la Cadena, de, Marisol., Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond ‘Politics’, Cultural Anthropology, 25.2 (2010): 334–370. Ezrahi, Y., Imagined Democracies: Necessary Political Fictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Haraway, D., Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Karvonen, A., and B. van Heur, ‘Urban Laboratories: Experiments in Reworking Cities’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38.2 (2014): 379–392. Knox, H., ‘Footprints in the City: Models, Materiality, and the Cultural Politics of Climate Change’, Anthropological Quarterly, 87.2 (2014): 405–429. Latour, B., ‘A Well-Articulated Primatology. Reflexions of a Fellow-Traveller’, in S. C. Strum and L. M. Fedigan, eds, Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 358–381. — Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (London: Wiley, 2017). Law, J., and E. Ruppert, Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque (Manchester: Mattering Press, 2016). Link, G., ‘The Logical Analysis of Plurals and Mass Terms: A Lattice-Theoretical Approach’, in P. Portner, and B. H. Partree, eds, Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 127–147. Lovelock, J., Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Marres, N., ‘Issues Spark a Public into Being: A Key but Often Forgotten Point of the LippmannDewey Debate’, in B. Latour and P. Weibel, eds, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 208–217. Morita, A., and C. B. Jensen, ‘Delta Ontologies: Infrastructural Transformations in Southeast Asia’, Social Analysis, 61.2 (2015): 118–133. Povinelli, E. A., Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Rancière, J., R. Bowlby, and D. Panagia, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, Theory & Event, 5.3 (2001): n.p. Rheinberger, H., ‘Experimental Systems, Graphematic Spaces’, in T. Lenoir, ed., Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 285–303. Ruppert, E., ‘The Governmental Topologies of Database Devices’, Theory, Culture & Society, 29.4–5 (2012): 116–136. 93 energy worlds Spencer, M., E. Dányi, and Y. Hayashi, ‘Asymmetries and Climate Futures: Working with Waters in an Indigenous Australian Settlement’, Science, Technology & Human Values, 44.5 (2019): 786–813. Stengers, I., ‘Comparison as a Matter of Concern’, Common Knowledge, 17.1 (2011): 48–63. — ‘Gaia, the Urgency to Think (and Feel). The Thousand Names of Gaia’ [from the Anthropocene to the Age of the Earth conference, Rio de Janeiro, 15–19 September 2014]. Thorpe, R. U., ‘Democratic Politics in an Age of Mass Incarceration’, in A. W. Dzur, I. Loader, and R. Sparks, eds, Democratic Theory and Mass Incarceration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 18–32. Tsing, A. L., N. Bubandt, E. Gan, and H. A. Swanson, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). Verran, H. ‘Re-Imagining Land Ownership in Australia’, Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy, 1.2 (1998): 237–254. Verran, H., ‘Number as an Inventive Frontier in Knowing and Working Australia’s Water Resources’, Anthropological Theory, 10.1–2 (2001): 171–178. Wilkie, A., ‘Prototyping as Event: Designing the Future of Obesity’, in A. Corsín Jiménez, ed., Prototyping Cultures, Art, Science, and Politics in Beta (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 95–111. 94