Abstract
Experimental Practice: Technoscience, Alterontologies, and More-Than-Social-Movements is a complex look at the ways in which people and social movements have changed historically, particularly in the past 10 years. As a result, people in social movements have created new knowledge productions where they are the architects, and adjusted changes in control centred behaviours, especially as it relates to sociopolitical, ecopolitical and cultural political forces. In this book, Dimitris Papadopoulos seeks to understand three primary goals. The first is how migrants can use citizenship as a way to mobilise political power. The second is how it is in fact practised not just gained. The third is perhaps the most intricate part, and this is not reached until the third section of the book. The final goal is to understand how collectivity can work beyond traditional confines of institutional power struggles to promote new spaces of collective action.
The book is divided into three parts. The introduction details the author’s concepts of ontologies and various definitions, including but not limited to the ways in which ontological politics is described, created, and potentially practised. The first section of the book then looks at politics from the perspectives of the means of financial production and the creation of matter, not just of things but also of the valuation of people. This section also examines migration and mobility as a form of power. Papadopoulos is interested not just in mobility ‘as a movement through space’ (p. 52) as it has been in the past, but one of a movement through time as this is the current state of affairs in many parts of the world, particularly as it has to do with labour, production on a larger scale and social integration. The book continues in Part 2 with a look at historical movements with first a strong examination of past movements and how these movements have changed the conditions through which they operate, and then a look at more recent movements. He focuses on two major points here. The first is on materialism and its growth throughout several decades and movements, specifically the ways in which materialism is intertwined with activism and how the meanings of each have changed. The second point focuses on the posthuman and the ways it might be integrated with social movements. Section 3, titled Alterontologies, is perhaps the most difficult section of the three. Papadopoulos continues his discussion of politics but as it relates to technoscience, more specifically exploring and arguing that the brain is not a controllable device, rather is plastic, malleable and belongs to no one. This idea is further explored later in the third section when he goes on to argue that technoscience is actually open to all and social movements help to open the channels of creativity. In his final chapter, ‘Crafting Ontologies’, he presents maker culture, that is, a potential answer to singular movements by creating spaces for what he calls more-than-social-movements. These new movements ‘create generous infrastructures: infrastructures that allow for communities to maintain and defend the ontological conditions of their forms of life’ (p. 204). In other words, communities and the people involved have the power to create their own ontologies without the need for participation from outside overly politicized, institutions.
This book is interesting, multifaceted, and yet, hard to follow. The first two sections make sense, but perhaps not in the order they have been presented. The last three chapters have connections to the first but will constantly have you returning to the previous chapters to find them. There are not enough moments where the book returns to the introductory chapters – Chapters 1–5, to help bring the final three chapters to fruition. Papadopoulos’ efforts should not be ignored however, as the material and the argument presented is not an easy one.